Unintended Consequences

that why these people want her dead?”
    “No, Helga had a little social problem in Paris that offended certain people.”
    “Dare I ask?”
    “You dare not. Be careful who you let in the office door.”
    Joan looked over her shoulder. “Funny you should mention that.”
    “Something wrong?”
    “Federal Express just pulled up.”
    “I have it on good authority that they are harmless,” Stone said.
    “Trouble is, they delivered an hour ago. They’ve never shown up twice on the same morning.”
    Stone opened his desk drawer and rummaged around until he came up with his little Walther .380.
    “I guess it’s time to unearth my .45,” Joan said.
    “Don’t try firing through the window,” Stone said. “The glass is very thick and heavily armored.”
    “Well, I’m not opening the door,” Joan said, starting for her desk.
    Stone followed close behind.

43
    S tone stood in the doorway to Joan’s office, the Walther in his hand but out of sight. All that the man approaching the door would be able to see was the left side of Stone’s body. Joan took the .45 from her desk drawer, racked the slide, and flipped off the safety. The doorbell rang. “Yes?” Joan said over the intercom.
    “Federal Express,” the man replied.
    Stone could see that he was wearing dark trousers, a dark shirt, and a FedEx baseball cap—not a standard uniform.
    “Just leave it outside,” Joan said.
    “Can’t. I’ll need a signature.”
    Stone could see that he had a clipboard under his arm and a small FedEx box in the other hand.
    “I can’t come to the door right now,” Joan said. “Deliver it later.”
    “Can’t. I’m on my way back to my office.”
    “Then we’ll just have to live without it,” Joan said.
    “I can see a guy standing in there. He can sign for it.”
    “I’m sorry, he doesn’t know how to write his name.”
    Then Stone saw that the man was not holding the box in his hand; his hand was
inside
the box. He held it in front of him and the box exploded, but the paned door he was aiming at did not. Now a 9mm semiautomatic pistol could be seen in his hand. He fired twice more at the door, then stepped sideways and fired into Joan’s window with the same effect. Stone had time to think that he could hardly hear the gunfire.
    “Where the hell are the outside guards?” Stone asked.
    “Good question,” Joan said from under her desk.
    Then Stone heard other shots softly firing, and the fake FedEx man spun around and collapsed in a heap. The FedEx truck suddenly rocketed forward and out of Stone’s line of vision.
    Stone walked to the door and opened it. Two men in civilian clothes were making sure the deliveryman was dead. “His accomplice just drove away in the FedEx van,” Stone said to them. “Call it in.”
    “Yessir,” one of the men said, then raised a fist to his lips and spoke into it. When he had finished, he looked at Stone. “We’ve got this,” he said. “The body will be out of here in a minute and a half.”
    “I’ll time you,” Stone said, “and thanks for your help.” He closed the door and went back into Joan’s office. “You can come out now,” he said to her.
    Joan crawled out from under the desk and stood up, brushing her skirt with the hand that wasn’t holding her .45. “I see they’re on top of it,” she said, looking out the window. The two men were zipping the corpse into a body bag. A van outside opened its door, and they shoved the bag inside and watched it close. Then they returned to wherever their posts had been before the incident, and the van drove away. All was as before.
    “That was smart of you to notice that FedEx came twice,” he said to Joan.
    “Hard to miss,” she said, popping the magazine on her .45, then racking the slide and returning the ejected cartridge to the magazine before putting the weapon back into her desk drawer.
    Stone returned to his desk and put the Walther into a drawer containing less stuff to hide it from him. He sat down and reviewed the incident in his head. The windows had worked; the bullets had left nothing more than little scratches where they had struck, and everything was still intact. Not a bad morning, if you didn’t count the corpse.
    •   •   •
    A couple of hours later, as he was about to go to the kitchen for lunch, Joan buzzed him. “Holly on line one.”
    Stone picked up. “Hi,” he said. “Your men did an excellent job.”
    “Thank you. I thought you’d like to know that the dead