THE TRADE OF QUEENS
Northwoods
Morning, July sixteenth.
In a locked store room on the eighth—topfloor of a department store off Pennsylvania Avenue, a timer counted down towards zero.
Another timer matched its progress—in a janitor's store on the top floor of a museum building near the Mall, behind a door jammed by cyanoacrylate glue in the lock and hinges.
And unfathomably far away, on a scaffold by the swampy banks of a slow-moving river, two men labored over a third timer, readying it for delivery to a target in the looking-glass world of the United States of America.
Nobody understood yet, but the worlds were about to change.
Four hundred miles from D.C., in a quiet residential street in Boston, the first bomb of the day detonated.
It wasn't a very large bomb—just a repurposed concussion grenade—but it was right under the driver's seat of the parked Saturn it was attached to. There was a bright flash; every window shattered as the car heaved on its suspension. Mike Fleming, standing in his doorway with keyfob remote raised, had no time to blink; the pressure wave shoved him backward and he stumbled, falling against the doorframe. In the ringing moment of silence after the blast, car alarms went off up and down the street and panicking dogs added their voices to the chorus. The hot yellow light of burning plastic and seat cushions filtered through the empty windows of the car, warmth beating on Mike's face as he struggled to work out why he was sitting down with his legs askew, why the back of his head hurt—
They want me dead,
he realized, coldly. Then:
Dr. James screwed up.
It was an easy mistake to make. The technician who'd planted the bomb had meant to wire it to the ignition circuit, but they'd got the central locking instead. The fine art of car bombing had gotten positively esoteric in the past few years, with the proliferation of in-car electronics, remote-control engine starters, and other bells and whistles; and US government agents were more used to defusing the things than planting them. Then: