Read Online Unlucky 13 by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro - Free Book Online Page B

and confident that she and Brady were meant to be together.

PART TWO
LOOK OUT. OL’ MACKIE’S BACK.

CHAPTER 23
    I WAS ALREADY awake when Clapper called.
    He said into my ear, “Glad I got you, Boxer. We’ve got breaking news on the belly bombs.”
    At 7:15 or so, I texted Claire, and within an hour she and I were high on caffeine and optimism, on our way out to San Francisco’s Police Department Crime Lab at Hunters Point.
    We met Clapper on the ground floor of the 13,500-square-foot lab. In answerto our questions, he said, “Keep your lids on. You’ll hear all about it in another couple minutes. And better from her than from me.”
    Clapper walked us through the lab’s labyrinthine corridors and between rows of cubicles until we reached a corner office at the back of the building that was prettymuch crammed with lab furniture and shiny high-tech equipment.
    At the center of it all was Dr.Damaris Cortes, lab manager and point person working with the FBI on the belly bomb case. Cortes was a radiant forty, with short blue hair, large diamond studs, and a tattoo of an atom in the cleft between thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
    She almost shimmered with energy.
    Cortes offered us small chairs in her cramped office, while Clapper stood in the doorway, saying, “I’m pretty surethe three of you could speed up the rotation of the earth.”
    Cortes said, “Fasten your seat belt, Clapper. Buckle up.”
    Clapper laughed and said, “Copy that,” then disappeared down the hallway.
    Cortes fixed her big gray eyes on us and said, “Claire, Lindsay, you understand this belly bomb is impossible, right? And yet—it was done. The FBI gave me a few cc’s of stomach contents—about one tablespoon.And, guess what? I found something.”
    Cortes spun her chair around and began clicking open files on her computer.
    “Nope, nope, nope—there you are, you little stinker,” she said. “Come look at this.”
    Claire and I peered over the doctor’s shoulders and looked at the screen, but I had no idea
what
I was supposed to be looking at within this splotchy pinkish smear.
    “Is that it?” Claire said. “Thatlittle oblong shape there?”
    I squinted and said, “Why don’t you tell us ordinary folks what you’ve got?”
    Cortes had a wild, untethered laugh that totally suited her mad-scientist personality.
    “That, my friends, is your smoking gun.”

CHAPTER 24
    DR. DAMARIS CORTES looked luminous and had a pleased
ta-dah
look on her face, as though she’d just discovered the eighth wonder of the world.
    “Smoking gun?” I said. “How so?”
    She was happy to explain—at length—which only told me how much work had gone into finding what was revealed to be a miniature gel cap. And, most important, it was
intact
.
    Dr. Cortes’s explanation, translatedinto everyday English, came down to this.
    A small soluble capsule had been filled with three ingredients: magnesium, which we’d already known about; RDX, which we had known
nothing
about; and oil to keep the two ingredients apart until stomach acid dissolved the capsule.
    Cortes refreshed my understanding of RDX, a stableexplosive in granular form that was developed for the military. RDX packsa huge bang more powerful than TNT, and to this moment, had only been detonated in conventional ways.
    Now there was a new method.
    Cortes theorized that when the capsule dissolved, stomach acid activated the magnesium, which created a
flare
. That flare ignited the RDX, causing a secondary explosion with enough power to blow through muscle tissue and seat belts and windshield glass.
    Cortes wenton, “The execution was brilliant. The capsule was evidently folded into top-grade hamburger meat, which could be preformed into patties, frozen, and cooked whenever.”
    I asked, “And the person eating the encapsulated explosive wouldn’t notice it?”
    “Not really,” said Cortes. “The gel cap is flexible and small. And now it’s embedded in this thick meat sandwich, maybe