The Overton Window by Glenn Beck

Author:Glenn Beck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Agent Kearns had retired to the kitchenette of his double-wide mobile home to make breakfast. This left Danny Bailey sitting by himself in the parlor in his borrowed pajamas with a wicked sleep hangover, an ugly off-white cat, and a full-scale model of a small atomic bomb.

The Sunday news from some distant city lay folded at the far end of the couch. It would have been nice to see some headlines but the paper was a little too close to the cat to be safely retrieved.

“So you’ve never been to Winnemucca, you said?” Kearns called through the narrow doorway.

Again with the frickin small talk.

“No, can you believe that?” Danny said. He was looking over the elaborate cylindrical device in its heavy wooden cradle on the coffee table. “Never knew what I was missing.”

“If you think this burg is dead, wait until you see where we’re going to meet these guys tonight. This whole part of Nevada was voted the official armpit of America by the Washington Post a couple of years ago.”

“Sounds like a hoot. Hey, Stuart?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to come off like a puss, but is this bomb-looking thing, like, radioactive?”

“Nah, not too much.” Kearns returned with their coffee and sat in a nearby chair. “The core’s inert; it’s just a big ball of lead. There’s some depleted uranium under the lining, so it’ll set off a Geiger counter in case anybody checks. Here, look.” He flipped a switch on a boxy yellow gadget on the table and brought its wand closer to an open access panel at the fore end of the model. The meter on the instrument twitched and a rapid clicking from its speaker ramped up to a loud, raspy buzz as the tip of the wand touched an inner metal housing. “Sure sounds hot enough though, doesn’t it?”

“But it’s not dangerous.”

“No, but I wouldn’t keep it under my bed at night.”

“And these dudes we’re going to see, the boys who want to buy this thing, why would they ever believe that a private citizen could get his hands on a working nuclear weapon?”

“Okay, good, we should talk about this. Do you remember about a year ago, there was a story in the news about a live cruise missile that went missing?”

“Of course I do. The Barksdale thing—I did a whole week of shows on that. Somebody screwed up and loaded real warheads instead of dummies onto a B-52 in North Dakota. Six nukes left the base, but only five showed up in Louisiana.”

“Right,” Kearns said. “Now we both know that something like that can’t just happen, not as an accident anyway. It’s like the Secret Service accidentally putting the president into the wrong car and then nobody missing him until noon the next day. It’s impossible; there are way too many safeguards in place. Unless, of course, it was an inside job.

“So my online personality is a guy with tons of deep connections from my years with the FBI. About seven years ago I

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