Free Tsar by Ted Bell

Noack broke in all excited and said there was breaking news coming out of Bismarck, and they were going live to their man Willis Lowry, standing with the press corps just outside the governor’s office on the capitol steps.
    Lowry said, “In an amazing turn of events, Channel Five News has just learned that the governor has issued a last-minute stay of execution for Charles Edward Stump. Everyone here at the capitol is stunned at the news, because as late as eight o’clock this evening, the governor’s office was insisting there was no chance of a pardon. But now we’ve learned that—”
    “Fuck me,” Strelnikov said, and turned off the radio. He reached over and grabbed his cell phone from the seat beside him. Flipping it open, he speed-dialed a number in New York.
    “You watching TV? You believe this shit?” he asked Ruko, the guy who answered. “The asshole governor just pardoned the Stump. Hello?”
    “Tell me you made the warden’s delivery,” the voice at the other end said.
    “Done.”
    “Good. Do what you gotta do, Beef.”
    Because of his size and muscular build, all the boys in the old neighborhood had nicknamed him All-Beef Paddy. Pretty funny, right? Not.
    The line went dead.
    Paddy looked in his rearview. He could still see the prison back there, searchlights lighting up the sky. He pulled over onto the shoulder and set the emergency brake.
    From his inside pocket, Strelnikov withdrew a small black radio transmitter. A tiny green light was illuminated. Paddy pushed one button, and the light turned red. Then he pushed a second button and held it down for three seconds. A signal went from his black box to a company Comsat satellite orbiting high above central North America.
    The whole world lit up behind him, and a second or two later, the shockwave of the massive explosion rocked his rented Mustang nearly off its wheels.
    Wing Block D, the toady warden, and all of the other illustrious doomed inhabitants no longer existed. It had been reduced to a pile of rubble by eight extraordinarily powerful ounces of Hexagon-based explosives carefully molded inside the hard drive of the Wizard computer Paddy had recently placed on Warden Garmadge’s desk.
    “Pop goes the weasel,” Strelnikov said to himself, smiling.
    Hexagon was another of the Wiz’s inventions, discovered when he was experimenting with the molecular structures of nonnuclear explosives. It was bright blue, had the consistency of putty, and one ounce packed a wallop one thousand times that of nitroglycerine. By sheer accident, the man had discovered the most powerful nonnuclear explosive on the planet.
    To prevent discovery of the Hexagon bomb hidden inside every Zeta machine, the case arrived from the factory permanently sealed. Should hardware problems arise, the machines were simply replaced free of charge. Should someone try to force the computers open, the presence of air would immediately reduce the Hexagon inside to an inert powder.
    Genius.
    He pulled back out onto the highway and accelerated rapidly up the snaky black road. He had a plane to catch. He was going to L.A. and from there to some godforsaken burg in Alaska to get briefed on his next assignment. Something to do with fish, he’d heard. But first, and he’d put money on it, he’d be paying a little surprise visit to the governor of North Dakota. Sometime in the next hour, his cellphone would ring, and he’d be headed for the governor’s mansion. Can you say dead governor?
    Fishing? In Alaska? What did he know from fishing? He was from Brooklyn, f’crissakes! But hey, a job was a job, right? Maybe he’d learn something.
    Paddy smiled and turned the radio back on, looking for an oldies station. Life was pretty good, he had to admit. Yeah, his job kept him on the road a lot, but it was never, ever boring.
    You kill three, four, maybe five hundred people over the course of a long and illustrious career, you think, well, it’s maybe going to get boring at some point,