Persuader

down?"
    "The same as we saw before. But with Samsonites, not Halliburtons. We got empty cases from a Lebanese guy and an Iranian. Then we hit the motherlode with the Iraqi guy. The actual blueprint."
    "You sure?"
    "Totally certain," she said. "I called Gorowski and he authenticated it by the drafting number in the bottom corner."
    "Who witnessed the transfer?"
    "Both of us. Me and Frasconi. Plus some students and faculty. They did it in a university coffee shop."
    "What faculty?"
    "We got a law professor."
    "What did he see?"
    "The whole thing. But he can't swear to the actual transfer. They were real slick, like a shell game. The briefcases were identical. Is it enough?" Questions I wish I had answered differently. It was possible Quinn could claim the Iraqi already had the blueprint, from sources unknown. Possible he could suggest the guy just liked to carry it around with him. Possible he could deny there was any exchange at all.
    But then I thought about the Syrian, and the Lebanese guy, and the Iranian. And all the money in Quinn's bank. The rip-off victims would be smarting. They might be willing to testify in closed session. The State Department might be able to offer them some kind of a quid pro quo. And Quinn's fingerprints would be on the briefcase in the Iraqi's possession. He wouldn't have worn gloves to the rendezvous. Too suspicious. Altogether I thought we had enough. We had a clear pattern, we had inexplicable dollars in Quinn's bank account, we had a top-secret U.S. Army blueprint in an Iraqi agent's possession, and we had two MPs and a law professor to say how it got there, and we had fingerprints on a briefcase handle.
    "It's plenty," I said. "Go make the arrest."
    "Where do I go?" Duffy said.
    "I'll show you," I said.
    I moved past her through the open area. Into the back office. Through the door into the warehouse cubicle. Angel Doll's computer was still there on the desk. His chair was still leaking its stuffing all over the place. I found the right switch and lit up the warehouse floor. I could see everything through the glass partition. The racks of carpets were still there. The forklift was still there. But in the middle of the floor were five head-high stacks of crates. They were piled into two groups. Farthest from the roller door were three piles of battered wooden boxes all stenciled with markings in unfamiliar foreign alphabets, mostly Cyrillic, overlaid with right-to-left scrawls in some kind of Arabic language. I guessed those were Bizarre Bazaar's imports. Nearer the door were two piles of new crates printed in English: Mossberg Connecticut. Those would be the Xavier Export Company's outgoing shipment. Import-export, barter at its purest. Fair exchange is no robbery, as Leon Garber might have said.
    "It's not huge, is it?" Duffy said. "I mean, five stacks of boxes? A hundred and forty thousand dollars? I thought it was supposed to be a big deal."
    "I think it is big," I said. "In importance, maybe, rather than quantity."
    "Let's take a look," Villanueva said.
    We moved out onto the warehouse floor. He and I lifted the top Mossberg crate down. It was heavy. My left arm was still a little weak. And the center of my chest still hurt. It made my smashed mouth feel like nothing at all.
    Villanueva found a claw hammer on a table. Used it to pull the nails out of the crate's lid.
    Then he lifted the lid off and laid it on the floor. The crate was full of foam peanuts. I plunged my hands in and came out with a long gun wrapped in waxed paper. I tore the paper off. It was an M500 Persuader. It was the Cruiser model. No shoulder stock. Just a pistol grip. 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half - inch barrel, three-inch chamber, six shot capacity, blued metal, black synthetic front grip, no sights. It was a nasty, brutal, close-up street weapon. I pumped the action, crunch crunch. It moved like silk on skin. I pulled the trigger. It clicked like a Nikon.
    "See any ammunition?" I said.
    "Here," Villanueva called. He had a box of Brenneke Magnum slugs in his hand. Behind him was an open carton full of dozens of identical packages. I broke open two boxes and loaded six shells and jacked one into the chamber and loaded a seventh. Then I clicked the safety, because the Brennekes were not birdshot. They were one-ounce solid copper slugs that would leave the Persuader at nearly eleven hundred miles an hour. They would punch a hole in a cinder block wall big enough to crawl through. I put the weapon on the table