Free Touchstone by Laurie R. King

are always a pain in the ass, but lately it’s more than that. You get to know your enemy, don’t you? How they think, what they can and can’t do. But recently our home-grown troublemakers have been coming up with things they’ve never thought of before, clever and politically savvy and ruthless—terrorism, planned and targeted, not just their usual outburst, hitting out at authority.”
    “For example?”
    “Okay, for example. Two months ago last week we just happened to foil a bomb plot. Absolute blind luck, checking a hotel room that’d already been gone over when the lead guy happened to notice one of the bottles on the drink stand was in a different place from the night before. And very fortunately, he used his eyes before he used his hands, and saw a tiny stub of freshly cut copper wire sticking out from under the edge of that bottle. If he’d picked it up, several ounces of gelignite—you know what that is? Nice, stable, simple-to-use form of nitroglycerine?—anyway, quite a wad of it, packed inside a couple pounds of roofing nails that might’ve gone off at knee level. If he hadn’t spotted it, the bottle would have been picked up about an hour later, when a Senator offered a drink to a couple of bank presidents, three Congressmen, two other Senators, and the Bureau Director.”
    No need to mention that when the bomb squad had gotten there, they’d found the device was a dud, that with the last push of the wires into their housing, one small connection had come awry. The bomb was real, the gelignite active: so what if later it was anticlimactic?
    “They were there to discuss ways to infiltrate Bolshevik groups in factories. The meeting had been written about in the papers, but the hotel they were meeting in was only announced three days before. That’s damned fast work.”
    “Lucky man, to spot the bomb.”
    “Boy, you’re right there.”
    “That was you, wasn’t it?”
    Stuyvesant’s jaw dropped. “How’d you guess that?”
    “Did you find who put it there?”
    “The Bureau is hunting for one of the hotel maids who didn’t show up for work the next day and—” Stuyvesant broke off, realizing that, chatter or not, he had gotten enormously sidetracked here. “You don’t really want to know all this, do you?”
    “Not particularly. Although I think you want to tell me.”
    It was such an odd thing to say, Stuyvesant could only stare at him. But damn it, the man was right. It was dead stupid to dump the whole story on a perfect stranger, but yes, he did want to talk. He’d always found it easier to see the details of a case when he’d hashed it over with someone. But the nearest thing to a partner was on the other side of a lot of ocean, and who was this guy going to blab to, anyway, the pigs? Simpleton Robbie?
    Not that he was here because of anything resembling a case. This trip Carstairs pushed him into was going to be a complete waste of time anyway, he knew it. Hell, the whole English venture was nuts; he’d have been better off setting a match to so many dollar bills and waiting for The Bastard to return to New York, when he could just plant some evidence on him like any sane man would. But instead he’d done it right and he’d played along, and now he was stuck with four hours to kill until Carstairs came back. Why not throw up his hands and talk about it? It might help him think, and it was better than sitting here staring at the walls.
    “Okay. Well, like I said, the maid had vamoosed—packed her bags and left her apartment, and the Bureau has a call out for her across the country.”
    “They think she did it?”
    “No—for one thing, she’d worked there over a year, too long just to set this up. It looked like the girl was only a maid, with nothing about her to suggest she could build a thing like that—the device was a real work of art: well thought out as to the timing, enough gelignite to make sure nobody in that room walked away. But the girl had been seen at one