J.B. nodded at the door.
“Blow it. Door doesn’t quite fit. Opens outward, too. Makes it easier.”
“Old Eagle-eye,” said Hunaker to Koll.
J.B. smiled faintly. He did not mind being teased by people he trusted, and he
trusted these people and knew that they trusted him and relied on him. That was
all that mattered.
He stopped what he was doing—which was peeling back the inner sole of her boot
to reveal a hollow cavity, long and narrow, carved out of the specially built-up
thick-soled footwear—and gazed around the room.
As he understood it, this lower level of the bank building had once contained
the main vault and safe-deposit rooms. In their stead, thick-walled cells had
been erected, all with steel doors containing glassless but steel-barred viewing
windows. The doors were not as thick as the walls but were solid enough,
although the whole construction had been done by builders who had clearly
skimped and saved, probably in a hurry, probably with Jordan Teague’s goons
cracking the whip over them.
This cell was an end room, one of a number in a long corridor that led back to
the stairway. That was useful, being at the end of the passage, the farthest
from the stairs. Nevertheless, sound carried. J.B. was going to have to be
careful, was going to have to judge this one to a nicety, as accurately as
possible.
The room was bare walled and bare floored, an oblong roughly one and a half
times square. There was no furniture of any kind, no bunks, tables, chairs,
anything. It was a cold concrete box, lit by a low-watt bulb high out of reach
in the ceiling. The door was at one end of a long wall. That, too, was useful.
It meant that when J.B. blew the door, none of them need be directly opposite
it. It was good that the door opened outward, though lousy planning for what was
supposed to be a secure cell. With a door that opened outward there was always
the chance, during that brief time when the door was being opened and the opener
was not sighting the entire cell, that the occupant might be able to jump his
warder. But then, J.B. suspected, most of the prisoners held down here by
Strasser’s sec men would probably be in no fit state to jump a mouse.
He began picking out from his boot equipment what looked like tools for a
dollhouse: match-stick detonators, plastic wafers no bigger than a fingernail,
miniscule screws, a tiny screwdriver. He sat cross-legged and began humming
softly and tunelessly to himself as he opened his brown leather jacket and slid
down the lining with his thumbnail beside the zipper tracks on the left. Sewn
inside the lining was a long leather pouch, very slightly fatter than the
average cheroot. J.B. extracted and emptied it. The contents were long rods of
cobweb-thin wire. He selected more bits and pieces from his other boot and
settled down to work.
Hunaker stepped over to the door and peered at it.
“Hmm. See what you mean. We can stuff a hell of a lot of explosive down along
here. Shit, in some places the door doesn’t even touch the frame. Great
workmanship!”
“Not too much explosive,” said J.B., not looking up, his lean fingers
dexterously coiling wire, fitting the tiny screws to the power pack he was
creating. “Too much plastique, we get too much noise. Could damage us, too.”
“Yeah,” said Koll dryly, “and too little and all we get’s a big spark and a fart
and the door stays put.”
Hunaker began to roll the plastic explosive into stringy tails between her
hands. She held one piece up.
“Too fat?”
J.B. stared at it critically, looked at the door, made some mental calculations.
“Roll it some more, then slap it in.”
When Hunaker started to stuff the material down the right-hand side of the door,
thumbing it down, then along the lintel at the top, J.B. got up and jabbed a
finger at a spot about halfway down the door.
“More in there. Three times what you have already. That’s where the locking
device is.”
He went back to the center of the room, sat down cross-legged again and