Killing Trade by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises
Published: 2008-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

12

As the first gray-yellow streaks of dawn greeted Camden, New Jersey’s residents, one of them regarded the sunrise through a grime-streaked window overlooking the crumbling waterfront district.

Donald Stevens sat behind a cheap particleboard desk laden with computer equipment. Three flat-screen monitors stared back at him, their displays covered in three-dimensional rotating drawings of various weapons and cartridges. A small window in the corner of one monitor showed the status of the warehouse’s elaborate security systems, each one armed and ready. Before him, on the only space on the desk not cluttered with printouts, reference books or other pieces of machinery, was a Colt Gold Cup .45 automatic pistol. It had a brushed chrome finish and was loaded with his latest and most powerful explosive-tipped depleted uranium rounds.

It annoyed Stevens no end to have to contemplate taking up arms himself. Theoretically he was not opposed to it, of course. He could hardly be North America’s preeminent arms designer if he suffered from an irrational fear of or disdain for weapons. He was not, however, a hands-on person. The dirty work was for those who did not, who simply could not, aspire to higher goals.

Still, there was self-preservation to consider.

Stevens had no trouble acknowledging his own brilliance. Recruited by Norris Labs straight out of college, he had always known he was destined for great things. He was a born engineer with a penchant for designing implements of destruction. He built his first primitive but potentially lethal catapult, albeit on a small scale, at the age of ten. By his teens, he was experimenting with rockets and homemade explosives. Before he graduated high school, he had used the equipment in the school’s auto shop to manufacture his first crude—and quite illegal—handgun. No one ever knew of that. He had that weapon to this day, locked in his safe with his more secret designs.

In college he had excelled in chemistry, physics and mechanical design, focusing all his projects on weapons theory and warfare. One of his professors, a man retired from Norris Labs himself, spotted Stevens’s talent early on. He watched the young student until he was sure, then contacted NLI. The company’s recruiters made Stevens an offer that seemed impossible to refuse, at the time. As he reflected on those early, eager days, his memories were bitter.

At first, it all seemed to be going as he’d hoped. He was Norris Labs’ prodigy, the favored son of NLI’s board of directors. Immediately after his arrival, he developed a streamlined manufacturing process that saved NLI millions of dollars per year in processing its conventional rifle ammunition on contract for the U.S. military. Stevens had followed that success by redesigning the specifications for the rifle rounds NLI was contracted to produce—specifications that were in turn adopted by the military as preferable to those they’d been using.

Those projects were nothing, however, compared to the secret “black bag” specifications to which Stevens was designing. He knew, from the beginning, that some of the materials he was asked to

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