were stealing nuclear warheads, the fallout—all puns intended—would be catastrophic. Reluctantly, the engineer set out alone.
God, how he hated this little country! Its dingy people with their dark rums and noxious cigars stuffed in their mouths like amputated darky dicks. Alcohol, like skin, should be colorless—odorless, too, for that matter—and if you had to smoke, the only dignified way to do it was with a pipe. But what he really hated about these dusky peasants was their naive belief in the Communist bullshit spouted by their ridiculous leader with his ridiculous beard of an Orthodox priest, along with his sidekicks: worshipful younger brother Raul and swashbuckling Argentino midget Che. Together the three of them were like some Dostoyevskian version of the Marxist Brothers, all of them pretending to be half saint Alyosha and half rational Ivan, when the truth was they were all 100 percent Mitya: drunken vainglorious blowhards fighting for a Caribbean atoll only slightly larger than Vasilevsky Island in Leningrad. They could have it as far as he was concerned.
Sergei Vladimirovich was a Tolstoy man. He hated Dostoyevsky. Hated Gogol even more.
When he finally reached the outpost Pavel Semyonovitch had sent him to—even village was too grand a word for the dozen stuccoed huts squatting along the edges of a pair of muddy crosshaired lanes—he had to drive around for two hours on the rutted cart paths that passed for roads before he found the spot on the map. The locals stared at his truck as though it were some variety of medieval monster (or perhaps they were just staring at his bald scalp, pink and blistered like a snake shedding its skin), and everyone seemed to him to be sick or crippled, though whether this was poverty or
The building was on the outskirts of town, shielded by a ten-foot-high cinder-block wall whose stucco had all but washed off, but whose glass-sharded heights looked recently installed. The key Pavel Semyonovitch had sent him opened the gate and he drove the truck through. Inside was the hull of yet another burned-down hacienda and a few intact outbuildings.
Sergei Vladimirovich donned his hazard suit before entering the old stables, which, though missing a roof, had their doors and windows solidly bricked up; the only working door was, like the glass shards embedded in the top of the wall, an obvious recent addition. Steel over wood. Probably stronger than the walls themselves. The same key that had opened the gate opened its lock. By the time he got the door open, he could feel the sweat coursing down his back and soaking into his underpants. The sweat was due to the heat, not nerves. Sergei Vladimirovich was made nervous by all animals larger than carpenter ants, food that hadn’t been cooked to a tasteless, colorless pulp, anyone in a uniform, and women—especially women—but he thought of nuclear bombs the way a pastry chef thinks of a chocolate souffle: a concatenation of ingredients that need only be put together in the proper way to produce the most splendid effects. Only nuclear bombs were better than souffles, because you could take them apart after you’d made them, put them back together again better than they’d been the first time around.
But not this one. The warhead sat in a bed of straw like a giant metal egg—a cracked egg, its olive plates dented and coming apart at their seams, which oozed a powdery ocher albumen. Someone had ripped open the bomb’s housing and soldered it back together as though it were a cast-iron tub. They’d really done a number on it. It looked more like they’d tried to dismantle it than steal it.
Condensation fogged the inside of Sergei Vladimirovich’s visor, and his drawers were so wet it felt like he’d pissed himself, but there was nothing he could do about that now. It took more than an hour to uncover the explosive assembly, at which point he saw what was really going on.
“Son of a whore,” he said, and his visor completely fogged over, and he had to wait five more minutes before it cleared. But when it did, the problem was still there, staring him in the face. Well, not his problem. Pavel Semyonovitch’s. Sergei Vladimirovich had only to render what was here safe for transport. Working carefully, he stitched, soldered, and glued the whole thing together, then welded the external plate back on. When he was finished, he removed the sodden hazard suit and stowed it in a radiation-proof bag. He’d just finished when he felt a pair of eyes on him. He looked up to see a young man standing in the open doorway of the barn. He leaned heavily on a cane and carried a gun in his free hand.
“Pavel Semyonovitch wanted me to thank you for plugging our leak,” he said in perfect American English. “Unfortunately, now I have to plug a leak of my own.”
Two shots rang out, and the last thing Sergei Vladimirovich saw as he fell to the ground was the legend on the bag, written in Russian and English.
warning:
hazardous materials
do not open
Dallas, TX
November 21, 1963
He was disoriented when he opened his eyes. His senses were cloudy: vision blurry, hearing muffled, skin floating a fraction of an inch off his body. His limbs were so sluggish that he thought he was tied up again, and he thrashed to free himself.
“Easy there,” a voice came to him. “You’re okay.”
He sat up quickly, his head whipping from side to side. A bed. A sour-smelling room. Grimy green walls, cigarette-scarred furniture. A strange man sitting in a straight-backed chair with a glass in his hand, his delicate- boned face full of concern—first for the man on the bed, but then, when he realized what the man was going to do, for himself.
“Chandler, no! It’s BC! I’m your friend!”
The man on the bed launched himself into the air. His hands shot from his sides like striking snakes. A blow to the chin, the gut, the chin, the gut. The man in the chair toppled to the floor and his assailant ran for the door.
“Chandler, wait! I can help you find Naz.”
The man paused.
Naz.
He turned.
“BC?”
BC daubed at the blood on his lip. “Chandler? Are you back?”
For a moment Chandler just stood there, wavering slightly. Then his nose wrinkled. “Since when do you drink whiskey?”
BC retrieved his glass, poured a fresh round for himself and
