City of Secrets by Stewart O’Nan Read Free Book Online Page A

One wall was lined with glass cabinets ranked with flasks and beakers.
    â€œWhat better place,” Asher said, turning on the lights.
    At the head of the room stood a long altar of a table with a sink at one end and several gas jets for demonstrations. Like a teacher,Asher hung up his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, opened the valise and began setting out its contents: a large dry cell battery, an alarm clock, a coil of black-coated wire, a coil of copper wire, a pair of tin snips, an awl, a screwdriver, some pliers, two jelly jars full of nuts and bolts, an oblong of a gray, clay-like compound wrapped like a fish in butcher paper, a tool like a conductor’s ticket punch, and what appeared to be a stick of dynamite.
    â€œDynamite?” Brand guessed.
    â€œAnd this is TNT. You’re going to learn the difference between the two. Go ahead, you can touch it.”
    Brand gingerly picked up the stick and set it back down. It was surprisingly light, like a dry branch.
    â€œDon’t be afraid of it. You can drop it on the ground and set it on fire and it won’t go off. Without a primary charge of some kind, it’s harmless.”
    Brand, a fan of Hollywood Westerns in his youth, had assumed all you needed was a match.
    â€œThis,”
Asher said, gently setting a silver tube the size of a fountain pen on the counter, “is what you need to be afraid of.”
    It was a blasting cap. One end of the tube was open to receive a fuse, the other packed with a small charge. Asher cut a short length of black-coated wire from the coil and picked up the ticket punch.
    â€œYou stick the fuse in all the way, then crimp the tube around it to keep it in place. The danger is, if you crimp it too close to the charge, it can go off. You just want to do the very end like this.” He clamped the jaws of the crimper around the tube. “These things can be tricky. To be safe you want to holdit behind you and down, so if it goes off it gets your ass instead of your face.”
    He held it there a second as if he was going to squeeze it, and Brand braced for an explosion.
    â€œWe don’t want to put the fuse in until we’re ready to use it, so let’s put this back. Just the end. In the old days, miners used to crimp them with their teeth, and every once in a while, boom. Look at the dynamite. See the hole there? That’s for the blasting cap. Now this fuse I cut is way too short. Normally you want at least two feet. Safety fuse burns around thirty seconds a foot, sometimes a little longer or shorter depending on the weather. You don’t want to go more than six feet, it’s not practical. Anything longer than three minutes, you want to use an electrical charge, which is easier to use but harder to get. All of this stuff is hard to get, so we don’t waste anything.”
    As Asher fixed wires to the dry cell and the alarm clock, Brand watched, frowning, trying to remember everything. Crimp the end, hold it behind you and below the waist, thirty seconds a foot, no more than six feet. Not knowing the difference between dynamite and TNT, he was sure he would blow his hand off on his first try.
    â€œWhere did you learn all this?”
    â€œIn the old days we had actual training. Now everything’s rush-rush. Here, make yourself useful and wind this up.”
    He showed Brand how to rig a timer and how to booby-trap a door, how to poke a knot down the neck of a Molotov cocktail so the rag wouldn’t come out when you threw it. The nuts and bolts were shrapnel for homemade grenades. Again and againthey went back to the blasting cap and crimping the fuse, fitting it into the TNT, until Brand was convinced this was how they were doing the substation. Asher kept checking his watch, and after a last demonstration on pressure mines, began packing everything into the valise.
    â€œAny questions?”
    â€œSo, what’s the difference between dynamite and TNT?”
    â€œAh,