I finally figured out how to move forward on this one.
“We sure nothing got smuggled in?” Jack asked as we broke for lunch, a nervous quaver in his voice. I wasn’t bothered by that, though. Somebody smuggling things in is one of our nightmares, because there’s no reason for anybody to do that unless they want to put a serious hurt on the US of A. I can think of six ways to do that — what? No, Agent Dunning, I’m not going to tell you any of them. Jesus!
Anyway, I had to consider the question seriously. “Maybe,” I allowed, “and maybe not. There might just be a hole in a wall, somewhere.”
“‘Just’ a hole? That’s bad.”
“Sure, but it’s better than smugglers. There’s always cracks opening up in the caves, and some of the critters out there can smell the Site. Back before you got here, we had a redcap sneak in, tried to take over the place.”
“Really? Why?”
“A question we asked, after I nailed it up on the wall,” I said after swigging my coffee. “From what I heard, it caught a good whiff of the Site, and didn’t know anything about us except there were a bunch of humans around. Guess it thought it could wet its hat in peace and quiet here, the dumbass.”
The conceit that he’s telling this story to someone else in real-time, and also getting all of the quotes exactly right just struck me as a little jarring. I’m not sure what to do about it, or if anything *should* be done about it, but it seemed like the sort fo thing that might be worth a bit of a think.
There’s a reason for that.
Heh. Fair enough. I trust you.
Might not actually work, mind you. 🙂