Free Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham

there in psychological profiling. He was the kind of teacher who was more feared than liked, his great failing being that he was too doctrinaire for someone who was, after all, in the guessing-game business. He did not like to be questioned, and if you forgot that, he would use all his logical and rhetorical skill to flay you alive, Only a stubborn Texan would come back for a second or third helping of that piccalilli.
    But the field, not the classroom, was where things really went sour between them. Lee was the mastermind behind the HDS Final Practical Exam, a simulated render-safe procedure at a mock drug lab in a trailer in the woods. Each examinee went out there solo, knowing that every square inch of the site was booby-trapped. One slip-up, and he’d get his face splattered with red ink from one of those little dye packs that bank tellers sneak into the loot during a holdup. It took days to wash the stuff off. During exam week, as Harry waited his turn, he noticed how the barracks began to fill up with a lot of very red-faced young men. It seemed that no one came back from that Practical Exam unscathed. It was said, in fact, that no one had ever beaten it—that it could not be beaten, that it was designed to be unbeatable, so as to give you a sense of your own mortality when going up against something as cold and capricious as a bomb.
    Which meant nothing to Harry. He still remembered the day of his exam, down to the smell of the dew-damp honeysuckle on the edge of the clearing. The mission was to bring back a briefcase full of “evidence” from inside the trailer. Harry had already officiated at busts at real drug labs in the woods, so it was a cakewalk for him to evade the pathetically obvious trip wires and step fuses along the path to the site. He knew by instinct, too, that there would be a pressure-plate waiting for him outside the door, and contact switches under every window sash. These things were all fair game. But what incensed him was that, when he peered into the windows, he could see that the door and windows had also been booby-trapped from the inside, completely out of reach. In laying out the exam, Lee must have exited the trailer from a small skylight—but even there, traces of red paint in the overhanging branches told the story of the last poor bastard smart enough to figure that out. It was a sadistic setup. And in those days, when he was still young and cocky, Harry’s favorite pastime was teaching bullies a lesson.
    So Harry bribed a groundskeeper to open a tool shed, borrowed a chainsaw and used it to cut a two-by-two foot hole through the side of the trailer. When he marched into Lee’s office and triumphantly presented him with that briefcase full of fake cocaine, Lee scoffed at first. Not believing his own eyes, he dragged Harry back to the trailer for a look. There was the hole, like a humongous mouth laughing at Lee to his face. Words cannot describe the shade of red he turned. He had a security officer escort Harry to the school administrator’s office, and demanded that he be prosecuted for destruction of Federal property. The administrator, fortunately, was a more cool-headed sort. Harry just cocked his head and gave a redneck grin, like it was nothing but an overgrown schoolboy prank. And the administrator of the school let it go at that.
    But from the look on Lee’s face today, Harry could tell that Lee had not let it go.
    Just then, the green-suited bomb tech stepped into the hallway, holding a silver laptop computer. He walked toward Avery with a wide-straddling Frankenstein gait.
    “How bad is it?” asked Avery.
    The tech ripped away the velcro flaps that held his helmet and visor in place. He seemed relieved to be breathing room air.
    “It’s not a working bomb.”
    “You mean it’s a hoax?”
    “Not exactly. The bag has all the components of a bomb—timer, detonator, even a mercury switch for a motion sensor. There’s a block of something that’s almost certainly