Inside a large storage unit in Fairfax, Virginia, the man calling himself Pablo Cruz smiled when a bell dinged. He reached into an Ultimaker 2+ desktop 3-D printer and retrieved an appliance made of translucent high-detail resin that looked like a spider’s web that was about nine inches long and six wide.
The long edges of the appliance were turned toward each other, forming a shape that failed to connect by two inches. The resin was warm to the touch, and as he flexed the web he found it strong but malleable in all directions.
When it had cooled more, he squeezed open the edges and slipped the entire web onto his right forearm. It extended from just below his elbow over and around his wrist and fit snug, as if it had been crafted specifically for him, which it had.
Cruz slipped it off and set it beside its twin on a workbench he’d brought in to the storage unit the week before. There were two small, translucent brackets on the bench that were made of Kevlar-reinforced nylon, a material stronger than block aluminum and neutral when scanned with a metal detector.
The underside of the brackets held swivel balls in sockets attached to tiny, T-shaped valves. The brackets fitted to the underside of the forearm appliances.
Cruz put on reading glasses to attach small hoses made of translucent carbon fiber to the T-valve. An inch long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter, the hose was designed to handle sudden and extreme pressure.
He picked up a piece of clear Kevlar-reinforced nylon the shape and size of a .25-caliber bullet. Cruz placed the projectile in the head chamber of a clear three-inch barrel, then screwed the barrel into the free end of the T-valve. To the other end of the hoses, he attached Kevlar-reinforced nylon canisters the size of small cigarette lighters that fit snugly in the webbed appliance as well.
His burn phone rang. He answered.
The man he knew as Piotr spoke Russian. “We are good, Gabriel?” he asked.
Cruz replied in Russian. “Actually, there is a problem with compensation.”
A cold silence followed. Cruz waited him out.
“We had a deal,” Piotr said at last.
“Until I knew the subject.”
“I thought you were the best.”
“I am the best. It’s why you came to me.”
There was another long pause.
“How much?”
“Thirty-five million. Ten now, twenty-five when the job’s done.”
“I can’t authorize that.”
“Then get it authorized. Now.”
Piotr, sounding furious, said, “Hold on.”
Cruz switched the phone to speaker and set it on the bench. While he waited for a reply, he squeezed the appliances onto his forearms and fitted the crowned ends of the barrels through loops on the webbing below his wrists.
Piotr came back on the line. “Deal,” he said. “Final payment upon deed accomplished.”
Cruz hung up the phone, put it on the bench, and took a deep breath before picking up a hammer and crushing the device.
Only then did he turn his attention to the fashion mannequin he’d set up at the other end of the storage unit. He walked to within ten feet, raised his right hand, and flicked his hand sharply back, arching his fingers toward his upper forearm.
He felt the webbed appliance stretch. The ball pivoted in its socket and tripped a trigger in the valve that, with a thud, released a powerful burst of highly pressurized helium from the carbon canister.
The gas drove the nylon bullet out of the barrel at fourteen hundred feet per second. It hit the mannequin in the chest, blew through the foam, and disintegrated into shards that hit the steel back wall of the unit.
Cruz smiled, raised his left arm, and flicked that hand back, triggering the second of his hybrid, undetectable derringers. This bullet struck the mannequin on the bridge of the nose and blew out the back of its head.