The Merchant’s War полностью

"Have I?" The sense of grinding gears was back: Mike forced himself to translate. "Uh, yes." He nodded, stupidly. "I have a cellular phone for you. It's off the official record. There's a preprogrammed number in if that goes direct to my boss's boss. He's authorized to negotiate, and if necessary he can talk to the top. Office of the Vice President. But it's all deniable, as I understand things." He pointed at the paper bag on the side table. "It's in there."

Olga didn't move. "What guarantee have we that as soon as we dial the number, you assassins won't locate the caller? Or that there isn't a bomb in the earpiece?"

"That's- " Mike swallowed. "Don't be silly."

"I'm not being silly. Just prudent." She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. "We'll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however."

"There are certain requirements," Mike added.

"What?" She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.

"The sample that Matthias provided." He watched her minutely. "I'm told they're willing to negotiate with you. But there's an absolute precondition. Matt told us he'd planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there's no deal-not now, not ever."

Olga's expression shifted slightly. Ship's not a poker player, Mike realized. "A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it's no more than a minor..." She trailed off. "What kind of bomb?"

Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

"Why would he plant a bomb?" she persisted. "I don't see what he could possibly hope to achieve."

Too much subtlety, maybe. "He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked."

"A sample of ploo-what?" Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.

"Oh, come on! What world did you-" Mike slopped dead. Whoops. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"I don't understand what you're talking about," she said coolly.

He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She's not from around these parts, is she? "Do you know what an atom bomb is?"

"An atom bomb?" She looked interested. "I've seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought." Pause. "Are you telling me they're real?"

"Uh." You're really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. "They're real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium." No sign of recognition. "That's the, the explosive they run on. It's very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there's no more missing. That's a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks."

"Huh." She frowned. "You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful-"

"The real thing is worse than that." Mike swallowed. He'd spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Mall's threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they'd found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn't helping him get to sleep.

"Assuming Matthias wasn't bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now." He gestured at the window. "It's miles away, but it'd still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You'd feel the heal on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that's all the way out here." If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline-but multi-megaton H-bombs weren't likely to go world-walking and were in any ease unlikely to explode if they weren't maintained properly. "We don't want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don't want us to lose Boston. Because if we do -"he noticed that she was looking pale "-you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn't you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse."

"I- I don't know." The Russian princess was clearly rattled: "I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to-I don't know about it." She shook her head. "I will have to tell Patricia. We'll have to investigate."

"You will? No shit." Mike didn't even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "This other faction in your clan-if it's theirs, they're playing with lire. Maybe they don't understand that."