Dead Six by Larry Correia

Author:Larry Correia
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15:

Pancakes

LORENZO

May 4

For some reason, despite massive setbacks, Dead Six boning me at every turn, being half a million dollars poorer, getting shot the day before, and still unable to get Adar’s box, I felt better today than I had in quite a while. I had gone out onto the balcony and was staring at the sun just beginning to light the morning fog. Carl joined me a few minutes later, leaned on the balcony, and regarded me suspiciously. As usual, we were the first up. “You kids get that out of the way finally? Been sniffing around each other like horny teenagers since she got here.”

The call to prayer began to resonate across the city. “Why, Carl, my good man. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He grunted. “Sure. So, what now, genius?”

I had been thinking about that. “You’ve seen the e-mails to Al Falah. The big meeting is on for June eighteenth. So we’ve got just over a month to get ready for the Phase Three.”

“So we go in, but without Adar’s box, we just die? Good plan.”

“I might be able to pick it.”

Carl nodded. “It’s like a thousand years old and has something like two hundred tumblers, and if Reaper’s numbers are right, you’ve got ten minutes maybe to get through before a couple hundred pissed off Saudis start shooting at you.”

We had been through all this before, but it never hurt to go over the options again. “Explosives.”

Carl knew his bombs better than I did. “That much reinforced material.” He held up a stubby finger. “First, too loud. Pissed Saudis, remember?” Then another. “Second, you won’t be able to smuggle enough in to make a shaped charge that can punch through.”

“What if I were to find explosives inside the palace?”

“Ten minutes,” Carl said. “Good luck. It’s true what they say.” He took a swig of his beer, breakfast of champions. “Getting laid makes you dumb.”

“There are four other keys in existence. Adar only had one. We’ve got a month. We could steal one of the others,” I suggested. Carl started to count on his fingers again. “I know, I know. One’s been missing since the Third Crusade. The others are well guarded, and any attempt to take them would cause the vault’s security to triple and probably get the meeting canceled.” Adar, the exiled heir, had been our only hope.

“Maybe we try something different,” Carl said.

“Find Big Eddie and kill him before he kills us? I’d love to. Since nobody knows who he really is, if he’s really even one man at all, and he works through layer after of layer of anonymous intermediaries, how do you suggest we do that?” I had been Big Eddie’s single most effective thief for years, and I had never met the man. The intermediaries I had worked for had never met the man, either, and the second I started looking, he’d somehow know. “It’d be like catching the devil.”

“I was just sayin’. I suppose I could just lay around in my underwear, get drunk, and watch TV until we run out of time.

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