Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Ferrari Delguessimo: The Cleaners

When we walked into Mirabelle's room, I was somewhat surprised to see it had been cleaned so thoroughly. I went to check for anything hidden, just in case they'd managed to miss something. There were pictures on the walls, the standard prints that virtually every room in the building would have. I felt around the edges, but they didn't come away. The frames were molded, built into the wall, and there was no way they could be moved. Nothing resting on the top of them either, though I found an intermittent trail of dust that confirmed in my mind the search hadn't been conducted by the agency that had trained me. They would have been more thorough.

"What do you think's in the Box?" Marco asked after a few moments. He was still pacing around the room kind of aimlessly, poking at that bin full of papers again and again. "I mean, what's so important that all these people with guns want to be the ones to open it?"

"I heard that..." I started, and then paused to think. I'd decided to be honest with my friends, they didn't deserve to be caught up in all this mess. But that didn't mean telling them secrets that would just put them in danger. I was sure I could tell him what was going on without having to mention Trev, or the CIA, or my own background. "I heard it's a bomb. Some crazy religious guy gave it to the college as a kind of sick joke. How well do you follow instructions, kind of thing, how good are you at resisting temptation. Someone gives in and opens it, no more campus. No more town, maybe."

"That's heavy," he carried on staring at the window, "That's not what I heard. Why would they want it, then?"

"Scientists?" I guessed, "If they can get someone else to open it, maybe they could get something from the data they'd collect. Assuming the person responsible wasn't within the blast radius themselves, of course. Or maybe Spenser or whoever he's working for is planning to cut it open, dismantle it carefully without touching the trigger. The parts to make a nuke are probably worth a fortune on the black market."

"We don't want it to be opened then," he whispered, half to himself.

"No. That much, I think everyone sane is sure of."

He didn't say anything else, but I saw him reach into his back pocket. They must have decided that it would be easier to pass on the key when they met up, rather than leave the same guy holding it all day.

I was feeling along the top of the door, double checking for any kind of surveillance devices, so I wasn't sure if Marco intended me to see or not. Maybe he never realised I was watching. He dug through the coils of shredded paper in the waste paper basket, and thrust the key right into the middle. Then he pressed a huge weight of paper pieces on top of it, leaving the bin looking just as overflowing as it had before.

I wasn't going to argue. Trevor hadn't given me a full story, but from the part he'd told me, the important thing here was to ensure that the Box wasn't opened. And anyone looking for the key was unlikely to search the bare room that had already been searched, especially if the occupant had no prior contact with any of us. I'd always thought Marco wasn't that good at larger-scale strategies, but this plan was pretty much genius, by anyone's standards. I was sure he'd done the right thing.