Paranoia ✓

XXVIII: Rashad - Unction (Part 2)

"I hope yer ready to kill many Shrikes with one stone," Richard taunted as he held out a book in front of him. "This will allow ya to take good old sweet revenge on those bloody Shrikes for taking ya mum and sis."

Rashad stared down at the "Revolutionary device that will deliver Islam from its chains," as Raj put it. "The mother of all devices. Those Westerners won't see this one coming."

Rashad couldn't help but blurt out. "It's just a book."

Richard corrected. "Not just any book ya little turd. It's the Holy fucking Bible, and I would appreciate it if ya didn't treat it like it's a piece of trash fished from the Thames. This right here is gonna make ya a bloody fucking legend."

"Does your vocabulary expand beyond "bloody," "expletives," and "Shrikes?" Rashad taunted.

"Go to Hell ya damn strumpet."

"Love you too," Rashad laughed.

"Alright, you two always trash each other every time you guys get together. Come on Rich, it's the boy's last day. Cut him some slack. And Rashad, give us the proper respect we deserve. It took months to built this here device."

"Device?" Rashad laughed. "It's a fucking book."

"I see Rich is having a mighty influence on you," Raj rolled his eyes towards Richard. "Anyway, if you think we spent months acquiring a single book, then you're wrong. This here book is a device—more specifically a weapon, one that makes giant explosions."

Richard clapped his hands like a giddy little schoolgirl. "I love giant explosions, especially when they exterminate those pesky Shrikes."

"And how does this thing cause a giant explosion?" Rashad wondered.

"Glad you asked!" Richard chimed in. "In the center of this 'Holy Book' is a bomb. Ya know, yer typical big kaboomy bad boy. Except we created a special material that allows the bomb to go undetected through the typical x-ray machines."
"What material is that?"

Raj jumped-in, cutting off Richard. "That's classified. We can't have any situation come up where you get captured and you start spilling the beans. Then we would have worked months for something that would only work once. We need to at least get a couple of good outcomes out of this."

Rashad chuckled a bit on the inside—depends on who you ask with regards to those 'good outcomes.' So he asked a different question. "Can you at least explain how it allows the bomb to go undetected?"

Raj thought about it for a second and then conceded. "Alright sure. The book's 'pages' are basically the material we developed to look like paper and feel almost like coffee stained paper. What the material does is reflect the x-ray spectrum of light back towards its source rendering the object practically invisible. Thus, it allows the bomb to remain concealed within the book and get through security with ease."

"That's great and all, but how do I activate the bomb?"

Raj continued. "Well they're two ways to activate it. You can activate it to explode immediately by flipping all the pages of the book. This triggers the detonation within the binding of the book. The second way to set it off is the more preferable option of a timed explosion. To do this, you flip the amount of pages to signify the amount of minutes you want the bomb to countdown to until it detonates. This book has about 1,500 pages, so you can set a timer for the bomb to dentate about a day in advance. But avoid doing this, because if you set a time for the maximum capacity of 25 hours, it will simply read it as a command to 'detonate immediately,' and then..."

Richard mocked. "Bye-bye Rashad."

"You're an ass you know that?" Rashad added.

"And proud of it," Richard laughed. "It'd be great to have ya back in one piece so I can continue screwing with ya."