Free Trust Me by Jeff Abbott

picked up the duffel bag, measured the weight. Heavy but manageable.
    ‘I do good work,’ Snow said. Mouser thought the nickname fit her; her hair was dyed a stark white, cut short. Her gray eyes were like flecks of ice. Her body was muscled, not afraid of hard work. There was a thin crinkle of scar on her jaw and her neck; she’d been burned once. Maybe one of the bombs had backfired on her. She watched him with crossed arms. ‘Assuming your people provided the correct specifications.’
    ‘They did.’
    Snow raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re wrong about the tank thickness, we’ll have a problem. Or rather, you will.’
     
    ‘It’s been double-checked. Three-fourths of an inch thick, non-normalized steel. More brittle. The cars are old.’ Mouser didn’t much like his facts being called in question. ‘You put in too much explosive, we’ll have more burn than drift.’
    ‘I guarantee my work.’ Snow sipped orange juice. ‘You don’t look like how I pictured you.’
    She was not at all what Mouser expected in a bomb maker. He knew a few and they were foreigners, often older guys (he suspected incompetent bomb makers died early), and frequently missing fingers. But she was supposed to be one of the best.
    ‘How did you picture me?’
    ‘Arab.’
    Mouser cracked a grin with no humor in it. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
    ‘I’m not disappointed,’ Snow said. ‘If you were an Arab I wouldn’t have let you have the bomb. I don’t much like Arabs. They’re worse than the government.’
    Mouser said, ‘Nothing’s worse than the Beast.’
    ‘The what?’ A light hit her eyes; she tilted her head to look at him.
    ‘The Beast - that’s what I call the government. I’m curious as to how you could have gotten the bomb away from me if you didn’t like the look of me.’
    ‘Oh, I would have just detonated it once you were about three miles away,’ she said lightly.
    ‘Ah.’ Mouser raised an eyebrow.
    ‘Joking,’ she said.
    Mouser was careful to keep his neutral expression on his face. ‘I’m not much for jokes.’
    ‘No. You shouldn’t be. This is important work. Take good care of my baby’ - she put a proprietary hand on the duffel bag - ‘and she’ll take good care of you.’
    It creeped him out a bit to hear her call a bomb a baby. ‘And the rest?’
     
    ‘Ready when you are.’ She watched him with a bright interest. Maybe making bombs, living on the constant edge of disaster, made her eager for physical sensations, for release. He had no interest in complicating his life with a woman. He had the mission he had appointed himself in life; to him, the mission was everything. The government had to be shown for the Beast incarnate that it was, the ravager of liberty, the ruination of hope, the devil that destroyed what made America great. That was all that mattered.
    ‘I’ll call you when it’s done,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll watch it on the news.’
    ‘And then the next stage.’
    She nodded, but she didn’t seem to care so much about the money. She watched him with an intensity that made his stomach twist. Strange woman, he thought, but useful.
    He got into his car and drove through the quiet streets. Spring break was this week. Freed from the mind-numbing indoctrination of government schools, lots of kids played on the lawns, riding bikes with those dorky helmets that the Beast insisted they wear for their protection, another emblem of its constant meddling. One girl waved at him and he raised his hand in a brief wave.
    Honey, I’m going to set you free, he thought. Bring you a different world where the Beast has broken legs and dulled claws.
    Mouser drove through Houston, the bomb sitting on the passenger seat, the duffel bag wrapped in a cloth cover. He listened to speeches he had written for himself on his cassette player and thought he needed to polish his metaphors a bit; he spoke too much of purpose, not enough of war. He was firing the first, carefully considered shot in a long war