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Hewitt, if that was his name, got it, and led them inside the building. The front of the place had a counter that something might once have been sold over, and a door that went into the back. The only thing on the counter was a mostly used roll of 3M packaging tape.
They disarmed Hewitt, and Letty said, “You are going to turn around and put your hands behind your back and I’m going to tape them together. Think about that. If we wanted to kill you, we could, and though my friend would really like to do that, I won’t let her—as long as you cooperate. So put your hands back, and let me tape them...”
It took two minutes and the rest of the roll of tape, but Letty eventually got both his hands and feet taped up, along with a few wraps around his knees and a few more that pinned his arms to his side. When it was done, Letty turned to Cartwright and asked, “Where’d you get that giggle?”
Cartwright said, “With a lot of practice. Sounds exactly insane, doesn’t it? Scares the shit out of everybody.”
Letty nodded. “Scared me,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s in here.”
They opened the door into the pitch-dark back room, though Hewitt said, “You girls don’t want to go there, nothing you can use.”
They found a light switch and turned on the banks of fluorescent lights. The room, probably forty feet by forty feet, showed an island of cardboard boxes in the middle of the floor: ordinary large-sized moving boxes, sealed with transparent tape. An ill-used kitchen table sat to one side, with a pile of transparent 3M packaging tape on red spools, a couple of box cutters.
“Let’s see what we don’t want to do,” Letty said. She picked up a box cutter, wrestled one of the boxes off the nearest stack—it wasn’t especially heavy—and cut the taped top. The box was tightly packed with more, smaller boxes, also ordinary cardboard.
“What the hell?” Cartwright said.
Letty opened one of the smaller boxes and inside found even more boxes, dark blue plastic. “It’s like one of those nested Russian doll things.” She pulled one of the plastic boxes out and turned it over in her hands.
“Computer chips.” She looked at printing on the package. “Intel computer chips, it says... 5.5GHz i9-12900KS, whatever that means.”
“Think... Paul... would know?”
Letty shrugged. “I’ll call him. Find out.”
She did that and Baxter did know: “Holy shit. You say there’s a lot of them?”
“Yeah. If all the boxes are like the one I opened... maybe... thousands?”
“Wow. I mean, wow! Grab a few boxes. I’ll come get you.”
“What are they?”
“They’re Intel’s fastest chip. Right now, anyway. Maybe for the next year. I don’t think you can export them... I think, I don’t know, that the Russians wouldn’t be allowed to have them at all. Not yet, anyway.”
“You think they might be smuggling them?”
“Nowak might know the answer to that,” Baxter said. “I’d bet they were stolen, somehow. Look, you say there are thousands of them?”
“At least,” Letty said, looking around. “Really, there could be a million.”
“They’re worth six or seven hundred dollars each, moreoverseas. If there’s a million of them... that would be more than half a billion dollars on the open market.”
“Okay, probably not a million,” Letty said. “Give us five minutes, then come and get us.”
“Five minutes,” Baxter confirmed. “Bring some boxes.”
When Baxter had rung off, Cartwright asked: “What?”
“We gotta talk to Nowak,” Letty said. “I do want to take some of these boxes.”
From the floor, where the taped-up Hewitt was listening, he said, “You girls really don’t know what you’re messin’ with here.”
Letty said, “Yes, we do. Do you know whatyou’remessin’ with?”
“Some pretty mean guys...”
“Russian spies. They are going to cut your head off if you tell them that we were here, that we got past you,” Letty said. “They might cut it off just to keep your mouth shut, even if you don’t tell them.”
