Free Ghostman by Roger Hobbs Page B

inside would be dated at best or irrelevant at worst. Still, it was worth a shot. Ribbons had to be somewhere, and any little thing could help.
    Opening the container doors was like scraping a knife across a chalkboard. I pulled from the center with both arms. The unit let out a blast of hot air like a hair dryer. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and the stench of rust and old stains.
    It was empty.
    Mostly.
    An intermodal shipping container varies in size depending on the originally intended cargo. They’re measured in something called TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units, one of which could hold about thirteen hundred cubic feet of material. The common ones you see in the shipping yard are two TEUs, or about twenty-seven-hundred cubic feet. Forty feet long, eight and a half feet tall and eight feet wide. They were designed by the military during World War II to move huge quantities of goods easily between ships, trains and trucks. They’re universal now. This one was almost completely empty. No backup car. No makeshift hideout. No ditched equipment. No plans tacked to the walls, no sleeping bags, no maps with lines drawn all over them. I checked twice for any sign that any of that stuff had ever been there, and I couldn’t see any.
    In the twenty-seven-hundred cubic feet of storage space, there was only a small backpack, more like a rucksack, that sat against the left wall.
    I looked around. Left, right. Nothing. Nobody.
    I entertained the thought for a moment that the rucksack might contain something dangerous, like Moreno’s used needle sharps or some sort of trap he and Ribbons had set up just in case. I also considered for a second the odds that it could be the money, but I’m not that lucky. Or that stupid.
    I untied the backpack.
    No needle sharps. Not a trap, either.
    Something else entirely.

11
    A gun.
    Not just a gun. At the top of the bag was a goddamn Uzi the size of a pistol, with crude iron foresights and a cut-down folding stock. The action didn’t smell like gunpowder and the barrel was still shiny, inside and out. It hadn’t been fired in a while, if ever. It was fully assembled and still in the manufacturer’s plastic carrying case. There were three spare mags and a box of cheap ammunition underneath. Under that was a strap of twenty-dollar bills, a small Ziploc bag full of pills, a cell phone, a couple brochures and a lighter. Those were the only supplies. I rooted around at the bottom and in the side pockets for anything else, but that was it.
    This was a getaway pack.
    A getaway pack is a criminal’s first precaution. I have more than a few myself hidden around the world. Just in case everything goes completely to hell, the getaway pack is there as a backup. You secure yourself a hiding place and stock it with the bare essentials. That way, when the shit hits the fan you don’t have to scramble for anything. The best ones are minimal. The closest one I had was on the roof of a building on the west side of Manhattan, hanging from a wire on the inside of anold chimney that had been bricked up for decades. It had ten thousand dollars, a few credit cards, a clean passport and a Beretta. The pack here contained a fifth of the money and twice the firepower, plus some drug I couldn’t identify. Nobody ever packs a change of clothes.
    I laid the machine gun out on the floor. It was an old model Micro-Uzi, probably left over from before one of the assault-weapons bans. The ammunition was some Russian import. Nine-millimeter parabellum. I put the box of it on top of the gun. The cash at the bottom of the sack was faded and crisp from the heat. I flipped through the strap. The bills all were dated a few years ago. I took one out and felt the paper. Ones that look that old are more likely to be counterfeit. No watermark. No color printing. No security strip. That’s why the Treasury changes the design so often. The counterfeiters try to keep up, but it takes them a few years.