Chapter 6: A Shipment That Can Still Be Stopped

The plan was Jenson’s, and it was simple, which seemed to be how he liked them.

“Nobody invents anything,” he said. They were in the engineering office with the door shut: Jenson, Rita, Robert, Green, and a sergeant from the cargo unit. “No bait load, no pretend customer. That transfer’s already on the schedule and we didn’t put it there. We let it run exactly as far as the gate. The freight doesn’t leave this property. I’ll have two cars outside and my people at the weighbridge. Mr. Green, your gate man tonight?”

“Redmond.”

“Then I’ll talk to Mr. Redmond myself. He checks the pass the way he always does, and he takes his time about it.”

“Why would he run it tonight?” Green asked. He didn’t say who he meant, and nobody supplied a name. “With you people in the building?”

“Because of what he’s seen us do,” Rita said. “I’ve spent the day in the control room asking for reconciled reports and saying thank you. Robert’s been down here with a copy. Your order preserved a copy of the configuration and prohibited deleting anything from the live one. It didn’t lock the gateway. The docks have to run, so operating settings can still be changed, and the changes are logged. Whoever owns that rule left it where it was, because deleting a block hours after a preservation order is the loudest thing he could do. Setting a time window is the kind of thing that room does every night. Nothing he can see says anyone has opened it. From that room we’re still checking the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the part he’s sure of.”

“And somebody’s expecting a truck,” Jenson said. “A no-show has to be explained to people who don’t take it well. He’ll run it.”