The Burning Wire

repeated, “We going to keep going here?”
    Brent stared at the elm tree for a long, long fifteen seconds. “We’ll keep going. Give me some deets and I’ll see if it’s worth my time and the risk. To both of us.”
    To both of us? Dellray wondered. Then continued, “We don’t have many details. But there’s maybe a terror group called Justice For we don’t know what. The leader might be somebody named Rahman.”
    “They were behind it, the bus stop?”
    “Possibly. And somebody who might be connected with the company. No ID yet. Man, woman, we don’t know.”
    “What exactly happened that they aren’t saying? A bomb?”
    “No. The perp manipulated the grid.”
    Brent’s eyebrow rose behind the archaic glasses. “The grid. Electricity . . . think about it. That’s worse than an IED. . . . With the grid, the explosive’s already there, in everybody’s house, in everybody’s office. All he has to do is pull a few switches. I’m dead, you’re dead. And not a pretty way to go.”
    “Why I’m here.”
    “Justice For something . . . Any idea what’s on their to-do list?”
    “No. Islamic, Aryan, political, domestic, foreign, eco. We don’t know.”
    “Where’d the name come from? Translated?”
    “No. Was intercepted that way. ‘Justice.’ And ‘For.’ In English. Other words too. But they didn’t get ’em.”
    “ ‘They.’ ” Brent gave a furrow of a smile, and Dellray wondered if he knew exactly what Dellraywas doing here, that he’d been tweaked aside by the brave new world of electronics. SIGINT. “Anybody take credit?” the man asked in his soft voice.
    “Not yet.”
    Brent was thinking, hard. “And it would take a whole lot of planning to put something like this together. Lot of strands to get woven.”
    “Would, sure.”
    And a flutter of muscles in Brent’s face told Dellray that some pieces were falling together. He was thrilled to see this. But of course revealed nothing.
    Brent confirmed in a whisper, “I have heard something, yes. About somebody doing some mischief.”
    “Tell me.” Trying not to sound too eager.
    “There’s not enough to tell. It’s smoke.” He added, “And the people who can tell me? I can’t let you contact them directly.”
    “Could it be terror related?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Which means you can’t say it isn’t.”
    “True.”
    Dellray felt an uneasy clicking in his chest. He’d run snitches for years and he knew he was close to something important. “If this group or whoever it is keeps going . . . a lot of people could be hurt. Hurt really bad.”
    William Brent made a faint, candle-extinguishing noise. Which meant that he didn’t care one bit, and that appeals to patriotism and what was right were a waste of breath.
    Wall Street should take a lesson. . .  .
    Dellray nodded. Meaning the negotiation was under way.
    Brent continued, “I’ll give you names and locations. Whatever I find, you get it. But I do the work.”
    Unlike Jeep, Brent had himself displayed several qualities of dharmic enlightenment when Dellray had been running him. Self-control. Cleanliness of spirit—well, body at least.
    And the all-important honesty.
    Dellray believed he could trust him. He snared him in a tight gaze. “Here it is. I can live with you doing the work. I can live with being cut out. What I can’t live with is slow.”
    Brent said, “That’s one of the things you’d be paying for. Fast answers.”
    “Which brings us to . . .” Dellray had no problem paying his snitches. He preferred to bargain favors—reducing sentences, cutting deals with parole board case officers, dropping charges. But money worked too.
    Paying value, getting value.
    William Brent said, “The world’s changing, Fred.”
    Oh, we’re back to that? Dellray mused to himself.
    “And I’ve got some new prospects I need to pursue. But what’s the problem? What’s always the problem?”
    Money, of course.
    Dellray asked, “How much?”
    “One hundred thousand. Up front. And you have a guarantee. I will get you something.”
    Dellray coughed a laugh. He’d never paid more than five large to a snitch in all his years running them. And that princely sum had bought them indictments in a major dockside corruption case.
    One hundred thousand dollars?
    “It’s just not there, William,” he said, not thinking about the name, which Brent probably hadn’t used in years. “That’s more than our entire snitch bag put together.