6 DAYS
The White House
"We're getting too old for this."
President Eve Carol Larsen arranged pillows in the corners of a large leather chair, then sat with a groan and propped her leg up on a bolster. "News tells me you're going to stop in at Bethesda while you're here."
"I have an appointment with the gimp squad," Rebecca said, arranging her crutches, then settling into the seat across from the Commander in Chief. Still gave her goose bumps. "It's good to see you up and about, Madam President."
"My trauma surgeon said I was like the lunch special at KFC. Breast, wing, and thigh." Larsen leaned to one side and tapped her polished fingernail on the chair arm. "Funny, huh? Laughing makes my chest hurt. You're an ex-smoker, right?"
"Yes," Rebecca said.
"Me too. I need a cigarette just to talk about it. The projectiles came from four miles away. I saw ruby-red spots of light-lasers doing speckle interferometry. The laser goes out through the air, gets refracted by temperature, wind, the way the ground or the building shivers-whatever.
"The sniper has a tiny scope-mounted computer that tracks the laser and also refines my image, then calculates the odds of a shot getting through. The shooter squeezes the trigger to begin the sequence-but the bullets don't fire right away. The imager and the interferometer work with the firing mechanism. The shots are let loose at the best, most opportune intervals-ten of them.
"Four go through the window. Three hit me."
Rebecca watched the woman's eyes soften with puzzled wonder, like a little girl looking at a dying pet.
The president sat up and hardened her features. "They tell me the shooter was using the same algorithms and technology that astronomers use at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. That's what the Secret Service says. They couldn't stop me from getting shot, and they couldn't save Beth-Anne from that… bastard. Screw all the ingenious bastards and all their high-tech devices. But enough about that. Someone told me a good story about you."
"Uh-oh," Rebecca said.
"Eighteen months ago, just after you returned from Mecca, you were asked to help investigate a case involving a young woman kidnapped and transported across state lines, then murdered."
"Fort Lewis," Rebecca said.
"Tell me more."
"Not much to tell."
"Believe it or not, I've cleared two solid hours for this meeting." The president settled back with a sigh, as if getting comfortable at story time.
Rebecca leaned forward, dubious. "It's an old case, Madam President. I'm not sure what it has to do with anything here."
"Hiram Newsome says it highlights the way your mind works. He says you can be spooky. Spooky might be useful to us now."
"News thinks of me as his daughter, ma'am. He's not objective."
The president pushed her lips together in her trademark, sharp-eyed smile. "Please."
Rebecca hated going down memory lane, but this had the air of an executive order. "She was found in the base apartment of a soldier just returned from Arabia Deserta. She had been traded to the soldier by her kidnapper. She was only fourteen."
She looked through the ripple glass toward the south lawn. "Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis was handling a lot of troubled vets. Counselors, psychiatrists, researchers-the northwest center for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. More than 350,000 cases. But this sort of violence was rare. Family troubles-abuse by young soldiers hooking up with girlfriends who had babies by another father-that sort of thing is much more common, planned for by the commanders, almost expected. The criminal mistakes of marginal recruits forced through tough times, suffering back-to-back stop-losses. But true psychopathic behaviors catch everyone's attention, because some experts are worried our gen-z boys might react to PTSD differently than past generations. So the authorities, both military and civilian, wanted to nail this suspect and work up the chain to the kidnapper, find out how they had hooked up and why. They had a second suspect, but the girl was dead, and the soldier was pretty much out of it. So the Bureau came in to examine the evidence.
"I asked to see the girl in the morgue at Fort Lewis."
The president looked away. "Fourteen," she said.
"Thin, just a wisp," Rebecca continued, "and young. Hair cut short, pert little nose-pretty before they got hold of her. The kidnapper used her for two or three weeks, until he got tired of her, then opened an anonymous Flickface account and offered to trade the girl for drugs. The Fort Lewis soldier took him up on his offer. I examined the body."
"Tweezers," Larsen said, sitting up. "Sorry. Go on."
"The kidnapper apparently wanted to keep her face intact. The rest was a mess. When the kidnapper delivered her to the soldier, outside Fort Lewis, in a van, he had cleaned her up and scrubbed out his DNA. The younger man objected to her condition. Still, they reached an agreement and smuggled her onto the base.
"After a while, the soldier killed her with an overdose of morphine. Their only mercy. The kidnapper took his drugs and left while the soldier was busy. A roommate found the soldier in a stupor-along with the girl's body, a few hours later."
"Unbelievably cruel and stupid," Larsen said.
"The case against the soldier was solid. He raped her before he killed her. But even when he plea-bargained to avoid the death penalty, he couldn't provide enough of a description for us to ID the kidnapper."
Rebecca had seen enough mutilated bodies in her career, but her response never changed. She hated being reminded that flesh was like pudding: soft and easily smashed.
She swallowed. Other violent memories accompanied this one, having nothing to do with the dead girl. Not long ago, those memories would have made her break out in a cold sweat.
"In the morgue, I pulled back the sheet. The girl had been autopsied, fumed for fingerprints, pretty much desecrated every which way you could think of. But she looked peaceful enough if you ignored the scars and sutures. I touched her cheek. Took off the glove and just smoothed her skin with a bare finger. Something like the tiniest splinter poked up-a bristle. I asked for a pair of fine tweezers, sterile.
"Once I pinched a boyfriend's beard to get his attention. I found hair tips stuck in my finger pads. When men use electric shavers, the blades do a rough job. The ends look like porcupine quills, with a sharp pointy tip and little barbs.
"This bristle wasn't from the soldier. He had hardly any beard and didn't shave. We bagged it and sent it off to Quantico for keratin extraction. They got enough DNA to locate the perp in CODIS. We got a warrant and apprehended him within two days.
"He was forty-two, a white male transient with a long sheet, nearly all violent felonies. Washington state convicted him, life without parole in Walla Walla. Hard time.
"That was all I had to do with it," Rebecca finished. "Nothing spectacular."
Larsen murmured polite disagreement. "Now tell me what you know about Edward."
"The vice president hit his wife on the neck and back of her skull with a lamp, crushed her windpipe with his hands, and left her to suffocate. When the Secret Service entered the house, Quinn was reading to his daughter in an upstairs bedroom. His infant son was asleep. No motive, no disputes, no history."
"The last guy anyone would suspect," the president said. "War hero, family man, best damned governor Ohio has had in decades… A good campaigner and a shrewd but honest advisor. My husband thought of him as his best friend. Now he's locked up in a special compound at Fort McNair while everyone figures out what to do-where and how to indict and try him, whether to go for the death penalty… all that dreadful crap. I'll announce a new veep in the next few days. Then-we'll do our damnedest to act as if it never happened. We have to move on.
"But the bottom line: we almost had a psychopath become president of the United States, Rebecca. I wonder how long before anyone would have noticed."
Rebecca looked down at her hands.
"You've gone over our early briefing," Larsen said, shifting her hips to get more comfortable. "Thoughts?"
Rebecca took a moment before answering. "He revealed a history of drug use during the campaign. Has he indulged in the last three years, to your knowledge?"
"To anybody's knowledge, he has not."
"There are drugs that can slip by even the best tox screens. Designer metaboloids like tart or syncrom." Rebecca looked squarely at the president.
Larsen did not blink. "Believe me, if we could use that as an excuse, we would."
"Nobody in your administration has been implicated in any sort of drug activity?"
The president shook her head.
"Because this does look like a doped horse."
"It does," Larsen admitted. "A thoroughbred."
"Food testing-here and abroad-all secure?"
"The best."
"No secret snacks, nipping out to the ice cream parlor at midnight in Istanbul with the kids or the mistress?"
"Edward was lactose intolerant-strictly soy. No mistress. You know this already."
Rebecca nodded. "I like to hear it from someone close. Better than a briefing from someone who's never met the man."
The president took on a distant look, like trying to see a lighthouse through thick fog. "Something smeared on his skin, the bloggers say… could have delivered it from a couch or even the inner sleeve of his coat. A psychotropic contact drug, maybe in two or three parts-combine them and you set him off."
"Possibly." Rebecca opened to that page in the printout. "No evidence, however. And I know a lot of these investigators and analysts-they're the best."
Rebecca knew that a major reason some former agents were talking with the White House, and joining the investigation, was the whiff of payback. Vice president Quinn had stood just behind the head of the Senate task force that had recommended dismantling the FBI and moving it west.
"So I keep being told," Larsen said. "But the bomb that almost got you-nobody ever heard of that before, either. I'd like to take all the pinhead bastards who spend their time thinking up this stuff and line them up…" She formed her hand into a gun, then caught herself and relaxed her finger with a tight wriggle. "What the hell is wrong with them?"
Rebecca nodded. "You wouldn't have called me here unless you thought I had some sort of useful expertise. Other than the wit to use tweezers."
"Being shot hurts, but this hurts more. Edward was a brave man and a friend. This administration-my administration-is going to do everything it can to get beyond this and get his story off the front pages. But I want to make sure we know the whole story. If we missed something awful during the vetting process, I need to know. News tells me you're the best agent he ever worked with. I've read the reports on Mecca. As much as I can trust anyone, Rebecca, I'm going to trust you."
The sun cut through the ripple glass, lovely shades on the room's custom red and gray and beige carpet.
They sat for a few seconds, like two cats across a room.
"I'll need everything, Madam President."
"Thank you," Larsen said in some relief, but under her breath.
"I'd like to start with the internal White House research-the VP vetting papers-then the DOJ and FBI reports and whatever the beltway sleuths dug up for your election team."
"They're setting up a secure room in the Eisenhower building, an executive assistant, however many gofers you want-plus a security detail. White House counsel will escort the drives and files."
"I want security under my control."
"They've heard you might be a special target," Larsen said. "The Saudi exiles."
"Doesn't make sense. I was a much easier target before I went to COPES," Rebecca said. "I'll need to talk to Quinn's staff-and his daughter."
"The children have their own attorney, of course. She might not let that happen."
"Most important, I need to talk to Quinn."
"Difficult. No one is allowed to see him now except DOJ people and his attorney. Separation of powers is really mucking things up."
"I need to hear him answer my questions in person, Madam President."
"We'll do our best. Time's short, Rebecca. We're turning on a spit. We have less than a week before we cook through."
FBI Academy
Quantico, Virginia
"I don't like it down here," Alicia Kunsler said. William walked beside her down the long hallway that had once led to the old forensic training lab. The lights had been removed from every other fixture, creating a faster, rhythmic shadow vs. brightness as Kunsler increased her pace. "This is where I saw my first dead crime victim. They used to do that-until it became politically incorrect to make agent trainees puke."
"I didn't know."
"Nobody will admit to it. One particular instructor seemed to really enjoy it-a total hard ass. Best instructor I ever had. He's no longer with us. He'd bring in unclaimed corpses-indigents, drug smugglers, prostitutes. They'd lay out on a steel autopsy table, meat under a sheet-of course they'd been autopsied and cleaned up a little-and the instructor would pull back the sheet and give the agent trainees the person's stats, where he or she or he/she was found, the circumstances of death, and the one central truth of the entire day-that the killer or killers would never be identified or prosecuted. The resources did not exist. Back then, Mexico was having a pretty fierce drug war-worse than now, even. Thousands were being killed. Mules and dealers in the U.S. were being taken down.
"Our special corpse had been photographed crossing the border into El Paso in the company of a trucker who claimed she was his daughter. She was sixteen, a U.S. citizen-born in Los Angeles-and so on. The details don't matter."
"They're always interesting," William said.
"Do you dream of crime scenes, Agent Griffin?"
"Of course."
"Last night?"
"Yeah. I can never get the evidence to stay in one place, or collect it fast enough-it evaporates or someone walks out with it and I can't stop them. It never comes together, even if the clues are laid out like a board game. They keep skittering away. I wake up feeling groggy and stupid."
Kunsler smiled and pointed. "Left up ahead, through the double glass doors."
"What about the girl?"
"The trucker had beaten her to death, snipped off her fingers with garden shears, and cut off her head with a hacksaw. He was never seen again. Maybe he's down in the bone desert south of Juarez somewhere-the least he deserved."
"How'd you identify her?"
"Tattoo on her left shoulder. Eagle holding a snake." She snapped her fingers and looked relieved. "That's the connection. It's been bothering me. El Paso and snakes."
They passed left through the doors and found three men in blue windbreakers and khaki pants standing in front of a steel autopsy table, blocking most of the view.
Kunsler introduced them quickly. "Agent William Griffin, this is Johnny Walker."
The man on the left smiled and held out his hand. He had a high narrow brow, a long jaw, a trim young head of brown hair.
"The rest will please introduce themselves," Kunsler said. "I'm not a drinking woman. I get you confused."
"I am Wild Turkey," said the second man, shorter, balding, plumper. "My friends call me Turk."
The third-slight and skinny, long-nosed, with thick glasses, not spex-stepped up to shake hands.
"I am usually Captain Morgan. But today, you can call me Q."
William caught a glimpse of something small and tan, coiled in the middle of the steel table like a rope or a whip. "Star Trek Q, or Bond Q?" he asked.
The others chuckled.
"Take your choice," Q said. "What we do is weirdly godlike."
"These gentlemen do not wish to be remembered," Kunsler said. "Their services are on loan, along with their equipment. Mr. Q, proceed."
William knew better than to blurt out some smart-ass guess as to where the three were from. Spider/Argus had over the years partnered regularly with DARPA-the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. And DARPA had funded quite a few projects involving robotics.
"We assume you both signed our NDA," Q said.
Kunsler passed them the sealed envelope.
The men parted like a human curtain.
The coil on the table appeared to be a snake-tan and brown with black specks and a spade-shaped head. It did not look alive and it did not look dead.
"This is not a toy," Q said. "It's not exactly top secret, but close. We're still working on a clever acronym. Agent Griffin, you'll take away our lovely sidewinder and three of its brothers in a custom-made suitcase. Use as instructed-they'll be preprogrammed and ready to go. We would like them back. They're rare and they cost about a million dollars apiece."
Q bent to remove the black plastic case from under the table. He opened the case and took out a small cardboard box, from which he withdrew a plastic tube about half an inch wide and two inches long, with a screw top. The tube had a small reservoir at one end.
Within the tube was a small steel lancet.
"We were not informed what that is for," he said. "But it all fits in here." He reached down and partially uncoiled the snake, then squeezed its middle. A small hatch popped open, giving a glimpse of gleaming steel ribs and wires. He placed the tube inside the snake, then closed the hatch.
"The snake has hi-res terrain mapping tied in with augmented GPS, and in this model, face and voice recognition. Pretty good software, if I say so," Q boasted.
"We all say so," Johnny Walker affirmed.
"Within sight of a targeted individual-I mean, the intended individual-it will make an audible announcement and open its hatch. There is no self-destruct mechanism-we're delivering on short notice. If its mission is not completed, there's a risk that some one smarter than us will draw some or other conclusion by examining its payload-though we ourselves have yet to come up with a believable hypothesis."
"Thank you," Kunsler said. "Tell your secret masters we're appreciative, and will provide all the relevant details, should our mission prove a success."
"One more thing," Johnny Walker said. He pulled a cable from the box. "Keep this plugged into a cigarette lighter for half an hour before you release."
"The fuel cell option has been delayed," Wild Turkey said, with a hangdog expression. "My bad. It turns on like this…"
He demonstrated. The snake twitched and coiled, then raised its head with a hiss and shake of its tail. Kunsler leaped back about a foot and gave a convulsive shudder.
"Very convincing," she said as the snake performed an S-curve crawl around the table. "But sidewinders are Sonoran desert, not west Texas."
"As I said, short notice," Q said.
Washington D.C.
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building was by any definition a stately pile, a great angular staggered front rising to an elaborate Mansard roof. With marble floors, cast-iron columns, and brass details, the EEOB looked Baroque to Rebecca, who knew from architecture, but the Marine guard-a short, muscular woman with the most beautiful, sympathetic eyes-proudly told her it was actually French Second Empire. Whatever, it was crammed with over five hundred and fifty rooms and two miles of hallways-a warren of office spaces woven around restored ceremonial rooms and spacious executive suites.
The EEOB housed the solar plexus of executive government and its proximity to the White House had made it a desirable stack of real estate for almost a hundred and forty years. It also housed the vice president's offices, and a weary-looking quartet of two marines and two Diplomatic Security agents stood guard by the tape-sealed doors.
All four sets of eyes, sharp as hawks, locked on Rebecca as she walked by.
Tours had been stopped right after the Quinn murders. Nobody wanted to deal with large and curious crowds or the extra publicity of ghoulish souvenir hounds removing chunks of historical ornament. More than twenty such had already been arrested trying to breach the grounds of the Naval Observatory.
Rebecca's escort steered her through the quiet, echoing sadness to a small waiting room furnished with ornate wooden benches and a magazine table. The escort sat across from her, biting her thumb and providing more architectural details
A tall, straight woman with short gray hair and a neat gray pantsuit opened the door, then looked down at her notebook. "You're Rebecca Rose?"
"Yes, ma'am," Rebecca said.
"I'm Thalia Ripper. I used to be the president's campaign manager. Now I help with legal and other matters-call it damage control. We have a desk and secure terminal for you in an annex near the vice president's office. The office has been processed and will be made available to you. A lot of boxes are being delivered, more boxes every hour. I have a staff of three waiting to assist, all of the highest integrity and loyalty. If they seem stiff and unhappy, well… you understand. Let's start on a first name basis."
"I understand… Thalia."
"Ripper." Half lidded eyes. "Like a Bond girl."
Rebecca grinned.
Ripper cocked her head and threw back her shoulders. "Used to look like one too."
Rebecca had no difficulty believing that.
Ripper took Rebecca through nearly empty hallways and down a flight of stairs. They peered into the Indian Treaty Room, fancy digs indeed, one corner stacked six feet high with neat white file boxes on carts with soft rubber wheels, not to mar the flooring.
Rebecca's space took up a back room beside the deserted vice president's office.
"This used to be occupied by Quinn's staff," Ripper said. "They handed in their resignations as fast as they could. We all loved Beth-Anne."
The walls were draped with pale gray fabric. The ceiling was hung with similar fabric. Surrounded by this canopy, a small desk supported a flat screen with a virtual keyboard.
"I'll need a big, flat worktable," Rebecca said.
"I'll get one, but I recommend against spreading out documents," Ripper said. "We haven't had time to blind the room. There was a restoration project in the EEOB three years ago. Little things in the paint, you know. A constant problem. Hence the drapes. They're presumed to be effective, but presumption doesn't cut it."
Rebecca leafed through a small pile of papers sitting under an orange cover on the desk: lists of documents denied to the White House by various agencies and departments. "The Bureau won't give us the FBI's vetting docs for Quinn," she noted.
"That was Bureau West's call," Ripper said. "You having issues with the deputy director in Alameda?"
Rebecca shook her head. "No way of knowing."
"We may have copies," Ripper said. "We're still looking."
Rebecca set her teeth and pulled out the barely padded, decades-old visitor's chair, then sat and stretched her leg. "I worked with the AG on a political background check eight years ago," she said.
"The same one who's serving time in Cumberland?"
Rebecca nodded. "With politically sensitive subjects, Office of Intelligence usually got involved. Back then, the info went straight back to the White house. Not anymore, I assume."
"Not anymore," Ripper confirmed.
"OI also exchanged data with CIA. To cover their asses after the torture trials, the CIA liaisons trucked paper dupes of their findings over the river to a warehouse in McLean. They didn't trust the White House not to erase them."
Ripper smiled. "I'll make an inquiry."
Another trolley of boxes arrived as Rebecca continued to run down the list. At least 90 percent of the blocked documents, she was sure, would be available somewhere in a cached blog or government web page.
Within a couple of hours, the small room was half filled with boxes, each packed tight with thousands of sheets of paper: folders, binders, briefing booklets.
Some dated back to 1979.
"The vice president went into the army in 2004," Ripper said, tapping a flat gray box. "These are his official records-fitness reports, Silver Star and Bronze Star commissions, medical and Purple Heart documentation-that sort of thing. I'll leave you to it."
Two staffers showed up on the first day, with another promised soon. Rebecca asked these serious young workers to bring her the first three boxes, by date, from the larger room.
Together, they began working through Quinn's life. Document search and analysis was the sort of labor Rebecca knew was essential, and hated. Worm days, she had called it at the Academy. Bookworm.
At five, before dawn, she was escorted by her assigned Secret Service agent, Roger Baumann-tall, balding, with an oft-broken nose and calm brown spaniel eyes-from the rear of her hotel, a small, comfortable old establishment, empty but for her. Baumann drove her a block and a half to the EEOB in a massive armored Cadillac, to be set loose in the former office of the vice president, rapidly filling with millions of cold, impenetrable words and images describing a life effectively over.
She now had four assistants, each with hill staff or Library of Congress experience. This morning, they were guided through metal detectors and whiffers and inspected by a row of small but intrusive imaging machines. One staffer-Judith, the oldest at thirty-four-bragged she now knew more about her intestinal tract than she ever wanted to.
Rebecca put Judith in charge of the team. She did this despite her instinct that Judith was a spy for Thalia Ripper. Ripper was providing cover for Rebecca's work. It was only natural for her to want to know the details, day by day.
Each staffer was accompanied into a small restroom and provided with special clothing. Rebecca was allowed to wear her own clothes.
To put a cap on the strangeness, at the end of the day, they all submitted to blood tests. No one explained why.
Rebecca joked that someone must have found a new way to smuggle information. "I've got a copy machine in my tummy."
The doctor drawing her sample avoided her eyes and did not smile.
So far, the research was routine. Quinn had been vetted by the FBI before being chosen as running mate, and by the CIA before the election-the latter investigation conducted in strict secrecy and without the campaign's knowledge. Other divisions-the far-flung branches of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense-had conducted their own investigations, in greater or lesser degrees of internal secrecy, just to know what to expect if these folks ever happened to move into the White House.
This morning, Rebecca's entourage passed a group of trim men and women in black suits, escorting a man she recognized from online photos and videos: William Raphkind, the solemn young governor of New Jersey. Raphkind was on the short list to be appointed vice president once Quinn was formally removed, which would be any day. No doubt he was being vetted even more thoroughly than Quinn.
There was a lot about candidate vetting that the public was ignorant of. Bureaucrats-the behind-the-scenes power brokers in Washington-looked on elected and appointed officials much as the servants of a castle looked on newly resident royalty, but with considerably less respect. Jobs were at stake, but also legacies. Quinn had probably been investigated on the sly a dozen times by private beltway security firms. Most of those documents had been deep-sixed on the night of the election. No one knew if any still existed, because they had never existed in the first place.
For all of that, nobody had found much in Quinn's life beyond the usual youthful embarrassments and middle-aged fluctuations of emotion. A good husband and father. Quick temper, some said; others, a strong command presence that brooked no nonsense. The usual executive-level male forcefulness, which Rebecca, personally, could take or leave. She had known worse offenders in that regard who had also been excellent agents.
For a man severely wounded, Quinn had glided back into civilian life in a relatively smooth slope and with a soft landing-welcome return to loving family, wife pregnant with their first child-and then selection, nomination, election, and transition into major public office.
Party recruiters had apparently been grooming Quinn's image even while he was in Iraq, and there was considerable press coverage of his exploits-but less information about the violent 2007 incident in Fallujah that had left him with scars and medals.
Rebecca kept the gray military box and its records on that incident beside her at all times. It radiated political and tactical self-protection.
Investigations of "encounters" involving civilian deaths had become routine, almost cookie-cutter by that chaotic stage of the war. No one in the Bush administration or in the Pentagon had wanted anything to obscure the success of the Surge, which after four years of trial and error, had finally been appreciable, then considerable-until the final combat draw-down, followed within two years by civil war and the end of all hope for sustained political influence in that part of the Middle East.
Rebecca sat before the small desk and arranged five manila folders in a tall rectangle. Three flat displays relayed the morning's news and interdepartmental text feeds. She looked them over with a pruned-up face, then glanced down at the folders.
Laid her hands beside them.
Something had been left out or trimmed away; she knew it instinctively. But she wasn't sure she actually trusted that instinct. One of the first lessons drummed into those who would be law enforcement professionals, who must for the sake of public safety study the behavior and misbehavior of others, is the Prime Error: projecting one's own biography and experience over another's.
She rearranged the folders as if searching for a perfect combination.
I am not Quinn. But a career in the FBI, one big bomb in Washington state-one extraordinary day in Mecca. I've lived through a lot of violence and I've seen a lot of death. Didn't exactly leave me ready to smoothly transition back into the peacetime world. Messed with my head; I folded.
I sought treatment.
Quinn had lived on the outskirts of hell for over a year and a half. Twenty-three civilians killed in the middle of a fierce firefight, a convoy pinned down for two hours. And yet… no emotional scars. No recurring nightmares, no long hours of lying in bed sweating in a freezing room, jumping or shrieking at loud noises, seeing the faces of the dead come back like a string of ghosts hanging off the tail of a Chinese junk.
For Quinn, apparently, nothing like the awfulness that had pushed Rebecca into special therapy.
Another big bomb… Maybe I'll fold again, who knows?
She tapped her stylus at the bottom left folder, rearranged them one more time.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Quinn had reacted to combat and injury like a hero, a true candidate for public office. Nothing could be allowed to get in the way of those goals. People did not like weaklings in the White House.
Judith rolled in another cart.
"Hey," Rebecca said, and raised her hand like a girl in class.
"Yes, ma'am." Judith stood quietly beside the cart.
"Where would an important, well-connected politician go in this town to solve a personal problem?"
"What sort of problem?"
"Psychological. Potential for political fallout. The Betty Ford clinic?"
"Quinn no longer drinks, stopped taking drugs back when he was a soldier-ma'am. You know that." Judith frowned and thought this through. "Are you asking about combat related problems?"
Rebecca shook her head. No sense playing her hand just yet. "I'm fishing. I'd like a list of all the treatment centers for embarrassing disorders of any sort… to be made available, by major donors or partisan groups, to a man being groomed for high office. Expensive, discreet. When am I scheduled to meet with Quinn?"
"Tomorrow morning, 10:30 am, at Cumberland, ma'am."
"Cumberland?" Rebecca swung around in her chair. "I thought he was at Fort McNair."
Judith looked at her slate of appointments. "He was transferred yesterday to a terrorist compound at Cumberland. No explanation." She pressed her lips into an incurious line.
Washington D.C.
Rebecca walked around the mall in the lengthening shadows. Baumann usually managed to stay out of her line of sight when she jogged, but this evening, she said she needed complete privacy to meet with a reluctant informant. A half hour of hot debate and Rebecca had threatened to call the president. Baumann had turned red, made his own call-and relented.
She had snuck out at 5:00 pm and now, half an hour later, was thoroughly enjoying the lovely feel of no bandage or ankle brace, and both of her feet shod in the latest high-tech sneakers, one luxury she could never cure herself of-the cop's best friend, great shoes.
The new programmable protein drugs were remarkable. The doctors had told her she should walk only a hundred feet or so per day, nothing more strenuous; so she jogged a few dozen yards, then dropped back with a slight limp and a wry expression.
The sky over the Capitol dome was a shade of pure enameled blue. The sun dropped with steadfast serenity behind a gray wall, a hovering front stalled to the west. The air had turned crisp and cool. Body heat puffed rhythmically from the collar of her sweatshirt.
Stages were being set up at the north end for a concert. Joggers and pedestrians and tourists had worn the grass down to dirt; gardeners tried to stake out territories for new grass, but hardly anyone paid the ribbons much attention, and soon, fifty or sixty thousand people would gather and stamp their feet in time with the latest bluegrass sensation. Rebecca didn't mind; she liked bluegrass. Her momma had liked bluegrass. Her daddy had liked bluegrass, and their mommies and daddies before them. Bluegrass never went away. It might even outlast the sun. Billions of years in the future, there might be concerts playing bluegrass to people made of beautiful walls of light, jiggling with the rhythm as it was broadcast out to new stars in a thin black sky.
She shook her head as she tried not to limp. Jogging didn't help her think. It helped her get away from thinking. She had been thinking too much the last few days and sleeping too little. Tomorrow she would talk with Edward Quinn. That meeting had taken two difficult days to arrange. Her ankle suddenly shot a bolt up her leg and she lurched toward a bench. Nothing big; the pain was already trailing off to a dull throb.
She grimaced and sat, waiting.
Tom Cantor appeared a few minutes later, also jogging. He wore jeans and a black sweatshirt with a transparent hoodie-D.C. regulations forbade opaque hoodies-that barely veiled his balding head and fringe of long straggly hair. Thin as a rail, he carried a slim backpack and nothing else. With a whuff, he sat beside her and leaned back, slung his arms over the bench, and regarded her with large brown eyes.
He flashed a generously kooky grin. "Come here often?"
"I'd like to," she said. "Ankle gives me grief."
"Better soon, I pray. Well, this one's pretty interesting. More so every hour."
"Interesting, how?"
"I recovered a spreadsheet file-mostly a list of names. Put it on zip paper for you. Fingerprint the upper corner and all will be revealed. Pull back the plastic tab and bend the corner-all gone."
"I know how to use zip paper. Thanks, Tom."
"The biggest parcel looks like a digital sound file. It's desperately fragmented. I'll need another day. Any reason it's important?"
"Fate of the planet," Rebecca said.
Tom shook his head and pushed up with another whuff. "Hate to do all this work just to nail some boring old white slavery ring. So-one more day?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Nope. Sorry." And he jogged off, waving his hand without looking back.
Tom Cantor had never failed her-or anyone else who relied on his services. And many very important people did.
Until now, no problem she had passed along to his expert hands had taken him for than a few hours to solve.
4 DAYS
Cumberland Federal Prison
"We're breaking new ground here, no doubt about it."
Lionel Blake walked beside Rebecca down the long corridor, lined with white tile and precisely laid ochre brick. Quinn's attorney nodded to three secret service agents, arrayed in a blocking triangle across the hall; the agents squinted and parted to let them pass. One tracked Rebecca's rear. The other two, more professional, studied her face, her briefcase, and her purse-before glancing at her rear.
Lionel Blake's representation of the former vice president of the United States could have cost at least a thousand dollars an hour. Quinn's family was not wealthy and the White House legal defense fund was not paying; perhaps Blake was doing it pro bono, for the considerable publicity. None of these motives endeared Blake to Rebecca, who as a rule was not fond of lawyers, less fond still of defense attorneys.
"Your visit is the first real sign of attention from the White House since my client's arrest," Blake said. "I don't know whether to be encouraged or just accept it as another layer of ass armor."
Two correctional officers sat outside the heavy, inset steel doorway. They rose and folded their arms like genies. Their faces-one black, one white, both beaded with sweat in the corridor's steam heat-were perfect blanks.
Blake paused. "Nobody goes in without four guards present. He's no Hannibal Lecter but he's no fun, either. Strong and unpredictable. Make up your own mind. He's more dangerous to himself… well, I won't go so far as to say that. But he hasn't hurt anybody since he killed Beth-Anne."
Rebecca glanced at the door-semi-gloss black enamel, featureless except for a small viewport at eye level and a pass-through near the base-and looked back down the corridor, then up at the steel plate ceiling. She hated prisons. Coming back here was no treat-the last time, she had been lightly worked over by a couple of beefy matrons, overseen by a super-zealous Diplomatic Security agent. They thought she might have information about a terrorist incident.
She sincerely hoped they were all out on their asses now, slopped away in the departing flood of medieval thinkers.
"I insisted you be allowed to interview him," Blake said. "Anything you learn can only support our case."
"How much has he said?" Rebecca asked.
Blake shrugged. "I can't stop him from saying whatever he wants. He's his own man, no doubt about it." Blake seemed cheerful, considering the atmosphere.
Easy case, she thought. Open and shut. Edward Quinn is innocent by reason of stark, raving, hoo-ha insanity.
Four more Cumberland officers came through the opposite door, one at a time to avoid knocking elbows-huge guys in padded suits with thick arms and thicker gloves, more suited to training guard dogs. The two officers at the desk had Blake and Rebecca sign in and finish the last round of waivers. One used a walkie-talkie to have the cell door remotely disarmed, like an airplane hatch. Small electric whirring and three clunks followed. Nothing was done hastily in this wing. The other guard peered through the viewport, then plugged a small mike into the door.
"Mr. Quinn, stand back to receive visitors-your attorney and a guest."
Quinn's voice sounded from a speaker in the wall to the right of the door, clear and pleasant. "Happy to have visitors. I'm feeling safe today."
Blake cast a doubtful look at Rebecca. "Here we come, Edward," he said into the microphone.
The correctional officers stood by for another ten seconds. Two of the guys in padded suits moved in like mirror images to flank the door. The door clicked again and opened a few inches with an oily piston sound. The third padded officer-the senior lead-pushed between Rebecca and Blake, as a shield, and pulled the door open the rest of the way.
It was a very heavy door. The cells had been built to hold former Gitmo detainees. Quinn stood at the back. He had a cast on his left arm, covered with tough-looking black mesh. The mesh extended over his hand.
"That arm's broken," the senior lead said in an undertone. "He's ripped the cast off twice. It's a bitch to replace. Takes five of us plus the doc. Anyway, he says he doesn't need it."
"How did he break his arm?" Rebecca asked.
"Exercising," the senior lead said, and entered the cell with a slight waddle, facing Quinn all the while. "McNair couldn't handle him. We're sort of used to tough guys-terror detainees were hard cases, you know. The shit they went through…" He shook his head.
The men in padded suits surrounded Quinn where he had backed himself up against the bare wall. Quinn looked them over with little head jerks, like a cartoon fly.
Then he fastened his eyes on Rebecca. They were sharp as needles. Another flick of his head, and he looked askance, as if staring at her was like staring at the sun.
"If you're here to listen, that's terrific," he said. "Find out what went wrong. Because before all this happened, it worked. It really worked great."
One of the guards carried in a folding plastic chair and stood beside it as Rebecca sat. She took out her notepad and switched on the record function in her new spex.
"Cute glasses," Quinn said. "Never got used to them. Beth-Anne was going to buy a pair, for travel."
"My name is Rebecca Rose," she began.
"Son and daughter-okay?" Quinn asked.
"They're fine," Rebecca said. "I'm here on behalf of the president. I'd like to ask some questions."
"Wish her all the best," Quinn said. "Everything smoothes over. The past can be made to go away. Or at least you don't feel it."
"We'd all like to finish this sooner rather than later, ma'am," the senior lead said. "He'll talk and talk if you let him."
"Ask away," Quinn said.
"The president has instructed me to investigate the circumstances leading up to-"
"Beth-Anne." Quinn frowned until his eyebrows met and looked earnestly at her.
"You remember everything?" she asked.
"Yes. A mistake."
"Why did you do it?"
"Testing. Tried other things first. Experiments."
"What sort of experiments?"
Quinn continued in a light, conversational tone. "Hid things. Rearranged desk drawers after the staff had gone home for the evening. Pulled pranks. Put a pin-P-I-N, sharp-on a seat. Heard the office secretary Francine yelp when she sat on it. Didn't laugh-nothing."
"What did you learn from your experiments?"
"Could do anything without guilt or even embarrassment."
"What else?"
"Told lies during hearings. Aides to senators caught them, then the press. Got concerned reports from staff. Politicians always misspeak. A true Washington animal. At night, when everyone was asleep, sat in the office chair in the observatory. Went exploring through the past-very clear. Could remember events but they all seemed out of context, like someone else had lived them. Realized there was no need to worry. The worries went away. Erased them. But it's not disease that kills a leper, it's because he keeps hurting himself but feels no pain-no consequences. Losing a conscience, that's like having leprosy. Conscience gone-how much damage?"
"Hurry it up," the senior lead said. "He'll go on and on. Ask him what you need to know. We all have other duties."
The fact that she had gotten into Cumberland at all gave Rebecca confidence that she could take her own sweet time. "How did you compensate for having no conscience?"
Quinn smiled. "Each morning, with coffee, read from a handwritten list of things to feel guilty about, just to stay human, you know, for the day's events. Didn't want to act like an arrogant prick. And then… different handwriting."
"How?"
"Looked at the old signature from signed documents. New signature, different. Caused concern-intellectually. But it didn't frighten. Becoming fearless is even more dangerous than not feeling guilt."
"Nothing frightened you?"
"Could imitate fear for a little while, thinking of really bad things that might happen. But then…" He shrugged.
"Is it possible this condition began when you were in Iraq?"
"Felt fear in Iraq, just like everybody else," Quinn said. "Normal."
"After you got home, did the fear return unexpectedly?"
Quinn focused. "Afraid all the time."
"Flashbacks?"
"Worse. Dreamed things that never happened. Very bad things."
Rebecca relaxed her jaw. She had been clamping her teeth as Quinn answered. "Were you suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?"
Quinn shrugged.
"You knew there were treatment programs, didn't you?"
Quinn's voice turned rough. He sounded as if he were quoting: "'Cowards and fools don't get elected.' Saw how officers looked at the broken soldiers. Disgusted. Wanted them out of the barrel before they contaminated the others."
"I can't find any record of your being treated," Rebecca said. "Yet you admit that you experienced classic symptoms of PTSD."
"Right," Quinn said. "Pure Terror, Surely Damned."
"You must have found some way to control it, like you do now. Taking charge of your life."
Quinn shrugged again.
"Did you seek advice?"
He looked away.
"Are you feeling guilty now?" Rebecca asked.
"Yeah," Quinn said. "Maybe. Damn." He grinned like a boy caught stealing cookies.
"You say you can control all of your emotional reactions."
"Sometimes it takes a day or two."
"If I come back later, will you answer my question?"
"Which question?"
"About seeking help for your illness."
Quinn looked down, shrugged.
"This is a sham." Rebecca folded her notebook and removed her spex. "No personal pronouns. That's pretty on the nose, don't you think? Your attorney coached you."
Blake started to protest.
Quinn lifted his broken arm. "Bullshit. Better, quicker, stronger. If I… there! If I had felt this way when I was in Iraq, would have been a better soldier-an excellent soldier. Would have come home ready to be with the family-no nightmares, no flashbacks. Look at… me." He tapped his chest with his cast. "Training so hard now," thump, "snapped this arm. Does that sound like something a lawyer would tell… me to say? Lawyers aren't that creative."
"I don't believe you could accomplish all that on your own."
"Well, score one for you."
"Then you sought treatment. Discreet treatment."
"If you say so."
"Where?"
"Cowards don't get elected."
Blake folded his arms, more confident than ever.
"You've always wanted to serve in public office," Rebecca said. "That's over. There's nothing left to lose."
Quinn lifted his eyes to the grill-covered light.
"Did you practice before you killed your wife?"
Quinn's smile was more of a spasm. "Score two. Birds, squirrels, cats," he said. "Couldn't feel it. The ultimate test had to be someone… I thought I loved…once." Quinn leaned his head to one side.
Rebecca stood and moved behind the plastic chair. "Tell me where you went for treatment."
Quinn lost himself. His lips turned up at the corners and his eyes half closed, as if he was having an orgasm. "Guilt! So little goes such a long way. Almost make believe… I did something wrong. But now I'm doing something right."
Rebecca touched her spex. "We're done," she said to the guards.
"It'll all be over as soon as the Secret Service withdraws," Quinn said. "That's why they moved… me to Cumberland. Guards here under contract… outside. Best to hurry."
"Why bother?" Rebecca said, flashing him a look. "You're hiding something, but you'll never give it up."
"Doing it right."
"Doing what?"
"Not talking."
"Right for who?"
"For my son and daughter," Quinn said.
"Fat good that does Beth-Anne."
Blake's face worked. As if he could think of nothing better, he smiled.
"You're useless," Rebecca said to Quinn. "Useless to the president-useless to everybody."
She turned to leave.
"Now that's freedom!" Quinn shouted as the guards withdrew, carrying away the chair.
The door to Quinn's cell closed with a heavy gasp.
Down the long hall, Blake accelerated to keep up with Rebecca. She was walking quickly, ignoring her ankle's protests.
Blake watched with concern. "Quinn's certifiable, but he isn't paranoid," he said. "I didn't coach him. I hope you think I have a modicum of smarts. The pronoun bit-that showed up yesterday."
Rebecca stopped in front of the glassed-in inspection station to retrieve her purse. Just for good measure, she was subjected to another pat down and sent through the imaging gates. Blake looked away while she went through, but she saw herself in the station monitor: gray, ghostly naked, and awful, like a lumpy corpse.
"You're an unexpected gentleman, Mr. Blake," Rebecca said as they returned to the parking lot. "Quinn's under suicide watch. He's surrounded by guards. What could happen to him?"
"Someone in the federal system pulled a chain and flushed him out of McNair," Blake said. "There was nothing wrong with security there. He's not afraid, but I am. Neither of us knows how it will happen. But it's going to happen. The Secret Service detail is perfunctory, at best, and even that will be withdrawn in a few days."
"Where's the threat to his family?" Rebecca asked.
Blake shook his head. "The president gets shot. You and everyone else in the Los Angeles Convention Center get hit with some clever new type of bomb, targeting-maybe-an undersecretary of Homeland Security and forty or more active and retired federal agents. Someone seems to want to destabilize what little government we have left-which teeters on insolvency. The Secret Service is in disarray. Morale is shot. The FBI is in transit-or limbo. Half the remaining security in Washington has ties to private contractor firms. Based on past performance, whoever writes the biggest checks has the most say. Quinn's onto something. He won't tell me, either. But my firm did our own research before we took on his case. He had interesting contacts, and apparently he utilized their services."
Having accompanied her across the parking lot, Blake stood beside Rebecca with hands folded as Baumann opened the limo door.
Rebecca paused by the open door. The defense attorney's close presence made her uncomfortable. "So?"
Baumann focused on Blake's shoulders, his arms-what he could see of them.
Blake looked around, then leaned in to speak softly. "Someone's working down a list. I have absolutely no idea why."
"But you know who, don't you?"
Blake pulled back. "It's going to come out. It has to."
When Baumann looked away, distracted by a passing car, Blake pressed a folded piece of paper into her hand.
"Do what you can to get Quinn moved back to McNair. He has useful information, it'll just take time. Don't call me or my firm. When it all comes out, this is going to be pure poison and we do a lot of business around here."
Rebecca sat in the limo, lifting her leg and swinging it into the car. She watched Blake return to the visitor's center entrance.
"Anything interesting, Ms. Rose?" Baumann asked as he prepared to close her door.
"I don't know, Roger. Not yet."
"Was that crack he made supposed to be some kind of a threat?"
"Good ears, Roger. I don't know that, either."
"I can have him hauled in," Baumann said, looking back at her in the rearview mirror, eyes narrowed.
"Don't bullshit yourself. You'd be yanked faster than a pit bull in a chicken yard."
"I was on Quinn's detail," he said a few minutes later. "Jesus. A veteran and war hero-a real family man. No marital problems I ever saw. Ms. Rose?"
"Yes, Roger?"
"No more going out on your own."
"I'll let you know, Roger."
She opened the folded piece of paper. All it said was "Talos."
The rest of the day seemed routine but Rebecca was looking for any and all connections between the former vice president and Talos Corporation-or CEO Axel Price. She used tailored searches to process millions of archived White House emails, sent over from the National Archives.
Nothing of interest. White bread politics, not even whole wheat.
And nothing about Talos.
Washington D.C.
Rebecca unlocked the door to her hotel room. The clock on the wall glowed 1707.
She took the pot from the hotel coffeemaker and poured a cup before sitting at the desk, leg stretched out to ease the ache. She opened Tom's manila envelope and laid its contents on the desk. One sheet of zip paper.
She thumbed the tab.
The first entries from the dattoo, arranged in indexed pages, were people she had met at the COPES conference. Next, Tom had arranged fragments of degraded files, a mess of keyboard symbols that meant nothing to her. He had annotated some of the lines of code, suggesting, in parentheses, what they might mean. Most were names-again, people she had met at the conference.
But Tom had also written, on the third page, "Sound file encoded and fragmented. Can't reconstruct yet. Still working. But name is recoverable: 'Confession of VP.'"
Rebecca finished her coffee, then touched the zip paper's right arrow to access the fourth page. Tom had prefaced this new list of names, marked off in a matrix of lines, with "Not dattoo files. Separate single Excel formatted file, recovered complete. Analysis of this file gives a machine ID, Microsoft license and serial number, location of store where software was purchased eight years ago-Trig Medical Office Outfitters, Bethesda, Maryland. Name of installer or licensee-Madeline Paris, doctor. Simple hacker shit. You're welcome. Sorry about the delay on the sound file."
Rebecca looked over the names. Tom had underlined two without comment: Edward Quinn, listed on the entry as "Primary, First Patient List, Mariposa 01"; and near the bottom, third from the last, "Rebecca Rose, Fourth Patient List (outlier), Mariposa 03."
She frowned, moved her finger down, scrolling the zip page, and read the thirteenth name: "Nathaniel Trace, Second Patient List, Mariposa 02."
Mariposa was butterfly in Spanish. By itself, that meant nothing to her. But Nathaniel Trace, Edward Quinn, and Rebecca Rose all had something in common. That something was in-or had been in-Bethesda, Maryland.
Rebecca had only one connection to anything in Bethesda. She had gone to a clinic there to undergo treatment for delayed PTSD.
The same PTSD that had gotten her indefinitely furloughed from the FBI-not retired, not shitcanned, but furloughed, because she knew too much, and keeping 'em on the payroll was standard practice at the time for alcoholic, drug-addled, or otherwise defective agents who knew embarrassing things.
Or who broke into a raging, paper-tossing fury in a case meeting at a simple challenge from the then-director.
She took a deep breath. The meeting with Nathaniel Trace meant that someone had known even before she did that the president was going to ask her to investigate the VP.
The White House had a leak.
Nathaniel Trace was connected with that someone-friend or foe, who could tell? As for the list of names…
Quinn had secretly gone for treatment at the same clinic-hush-hush in the extreme. Mariposa. Quinn. Trace.
Rebecca Rose.
Quinn had gone off his nut and killed his wife. Not drugs in his doughnuts, not a surreptitious injection or contact poison. Side effects of Mariposa, perhaps. Very possibly.
Likely.
Rebecca closed her eyes and sat for a long, long cascade of steady breaths, against the sincere wishes of her ribs.
I'm part of the problem.
This information had to go to the president, delivered personally. But the president was in the Catoctins, at Camp David. She had been there for three days and no one could reach her-not even Rebecca.
The room's old landline phone rang. She never used it. She picked up the wireless handset and searched for the talk button.
"You don't know me, Mrs. Rose," said the voice on the other end-masculine, soft and steady. Her brow furrowed. No one was supposed to know she was staying here. Despite the voice's mildness, something was wrong-and not just because he called her missus.
"No, I don't," she said. "Who are you?"
"I hope you've had time to read the documents your young man recovered for you."
"Who is this?"
"Someone is coming to visit, Mrs. Rose." The voice repeated her name as it had the first time-exactly as it had the first time. "Please don't get alarmed. He's behaving erratically, which is understandable, under the circumstances. But he means well. Please be careful."
"You can't-"
The connection ended with a swift growl-rising-to musical tone that indicated somewhere along the path, an EPR phone was involved-very expensive, limited to big corporations and just a few government agencies.
She replaced the handset in its charging cradle.
The doorbell rang. She jumped.
Nobody was supposed to be able to do that without warning, either.
She slipped the zip pages into a drawer, then thought for a moment, brow still furrowed. Waited to see how long it took whoever was there to ring for a second time.
Ten seconds.
Drawing herself straight, she went to answer.
A gray-haired man in a tweed coat stood in the hall, stooped from worry and exhaustion. He tried to smile, then twitched a look over his shoulder. Baumann usually kept watch this time of the evening at the end of the hall, near the elevator.
He wasn't there.
The gray-haired man withdrew a 9 mm Luger from an inside pocket and pointed it in her general direction, with his finger on the trigger. The safety catch on the left was off. He wobbled the barrel, uncertain what to do next.
Amateurs with guns scared the hell out of her.
"My name is Dr. Terence Plover," he said.
Rebecca had to reassure him before he fired a round out of panic-or several rounds. She stood back, smiled, and said, "Come on in, Dr. Plover. I've been told to expect you. The place is a bit of a mess."
Plover sat in the corner chair beside the counter of the kitchenette, the single pole lamp behind him and his face in shadow.
The barrel of the Luger poked into the cone of light.
He sounded asthmatic. He might be ill. Or just scared out of his wits. "Thank you for meeting with me," he said. "I've been told you have useful connections."
"Blake set this up?" Rebecca asked.
"Who is that?" Plover asked.
"Quinn's attorney."
"He had nothing to do with this."
The silence lengthened.
"My wife has been murdered," Plover said, eyes wandering. "She was very dear to me, and very important. A brilliant woman, too humble… but brilliant. I hope you understand my precautions." He tapped the Luger with one finger. "This belonged to my grandfather. He took it from a German soldier who no longer needed it. It was the only gun I had access to when I left Bethesda."
"I've read some of your wife's documents," Rebecca said. "Quinn came to your clinic for treatment. Nathaniel Trace was one of your patients after that. And then-me."
"I don't remember your face, but I remember your name. I didn't meet with you personally. Sorry. I hope we were able to give you some relief."
"It was a short visit. But yes, it helped. So far."
"I have since given up my practice, my clinic, my companies. My wife and I moved… After I learned what Quinn was involved in."
"Murder?"
"No, before."
"And that was…?"
Plover looked dismayed. "You were given his confession!"
"The sound file?"
"I thought you'd have delivered it to the president by now."
"It's corrupted. I have someone working to recover it."
Plover looked even more distressed. "This is awful," he said. "I wanted it to be over. He found our home. And he killed my wife, I'm sure of it. He would have killed me… had I been there."
"Who?"
"I made a financial bargain. A devil's bargain," Plover said, and leaned back, pointing the Luger on a wavering line through her chest, her pelvis, her arm. "A bargain with a man who has no mercy, if you cause him trouble-or put his plans in jeopardy."
"I'm listening," Rebecca said.
Plover shook his head, not yet. "As one of my patients, I also came here to warn you. I'd like to warn all my patients, but that isn't going to be possible. Someone arranged this for me. The Quiet Man."
"The voice on the phone."
"Yes."
"Go on."
"Seroprixoline. Madeline first learned about it in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association. It was being used in an experimental program to treat cancer. It's a tightly bound complex of small proteins-no need to bore you with the structural details. It helps reprogram targeted cells. Removes defects caused by environmental conditioning." He swallowed. "Crucial for bringing a cancer under control."
"And what was your contribution?"
"I theorized that seroprixoline might be useful to reverse psychological conditions induced by constant or catastrophic stress. Inappropriate response leads a traumatized patient down a rutted path of behaviors. Conditioned traits sum to many varieties of what we call post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD. But you know that-personally."
"And you thought you could use this drug right away-on patients?"
"No. I searched for corporate sponsors. Hundreds of thousands of our soldiers have returned from combat situations with PTSD. Treating their symptoms effectively would be a godsend to those soldiers and their families."
"So you approached Axel Price."
That wasn't much of a leap at this point, but just mentioning the name gave Rebecca chills.
A list.
No mercy.
Plover lowered the gun and dropped his gaze as if resigned. "He has money, his corporation has divisions around the world. He supplies universal logistics for our troops. He sells his services to nearly every branch of our government, federal and state. Tens of thousands of his employees work not just overseas, but throughout the government-from the White House to the Pentagon… He misses no tricks-leases out a network of funeral facilities that process soldiers when they're shipped home… in boxes, under flags, as heroes. Boot camp to grave.
"In the beginning, I thought it was a perfect match. Not only a humanitarian result, but a gold-plated investment model. Great sums of money to be made. I showed Price the results in our animal studies-very impressive. He saw I was given more than sufficient research funds. The program was accelerated.
"Then… Price brought me the vice president. He told me the animal results were so good that human trials were in order. And this was an emergency. People were willing to pay very well, and as it would be done in complete secrecy, there would be no risk to me, professionally.
"The results for the vice president were excellent, a great relief to both Madeline and to me. Price was pleased. Using Quinn's results, I made adjustments in dosage. We continued animal trials, and I even believed we might begin human trials soon."
He looked at her as if beseeching her understanding.
"But just weeks after that, before I was ready, Price brought in seven more men-computer programmers who worked for him. Subcontractors. They had suffered through a horrible incident in Arabia… Arabia Deserta. He wouldn't take no for an answer, said they were absolutely essential to him.
"I treated them, as well-using the reduced dosage. They all experienced complete elimination of symptoms. Price then suggested that we open our doors to a larger group of clients-mostly rich families whose sons had gone to war. He was eager to start making this project earn money. I could hardly refuse him. We treated dozens. I don't know how, but you became part of that larger group.
"Later, after the vice president killed his wife-when it was obvious Price was going to clean up the mess any way he could-a courier came to me, recommended by the Quiet Man. Somehow, the Quiet Man knew about the president's request for your help."
"Even before I did," Rebecca said.
"During treatment… the vice president became briefly vulnerable. He told me things. Awful things. I regret ever hearing those words. The Quiet Man thought you would inform the president. That hasn't happened yet, has it?"
"No. Who's the Quiet Man? What's his real name?"
"I don't know. He worked for Price, too. But he stayed in California-in La Jolla, I believe-and sent his workers overseas. I was scheduled months ago to give a presentation at the COPES conference in Los Angeles-but bowed out the day before the bombing. I was still on the schedule."
"The bomb was meant for you?" Rebecca asked.
"For anyone Price no longer trusts. Or perhaps just as a warning, or a disruption. I don't know."
"You're still pointing the gun at me."
"I am," Plover said, and looked down with wide eyes, flexing its grayish shine in the single light.
"What did Quinn say, when he was vulnerable?"
Plover shook his head. "This room could be bugged."
"It isn't," Rebecca said, but sensed Plover wasn't going to say anymore on that topic.
"What's your connection with the courier, Nathaniel Trace?"
"One of the seven programmers. They've also experienced side effects. Your group received an even smaller dose."
"Are we all going to turn into homicidal maniacs?"
"I want to doubt it, I need to doubt it," Plover said. "It would take years to know. Epigenetic testing… learning which genes are clamped in which individuals, and how that effects their behavior… still at an early stage. I'm tired. I've told you all I know."
"Has anyone in the third group experienced problems?" Rebecca asked.
Plover became even more agitated. Rebecca considered a feint and an attempt to take away the gun.
"I don't know. I don't know! It's like an ocean of sewage, spreading out in a huge wave. And for Price, Mariposa is an atomic bomb smack in the middle of that ocean. Pwoosh."
Plover threw out his free hand and flicked his fingers, spattering metaphoric shit.
Startled, she missed her chance to go for the gun. "Someone called to say you'd be coming. The Quiet Man?"
"I don't know who else it could be. He protected me, found me a place to hide and offered me advice I thought was sound. I trusted him. Because of him, I am still alive."
"He didn't protect your wife."
"That was before I trusted him. But I don't trust anyone now. I even regret giving you those files…"
He pointed the Luger squarely at her chest. "If you die, now… Price…"
"You did it to avenge Madeline's murder."
Plover tried to pull himself together. "I wanted to inform you, as one of my patients… It's all so tangled. When this is over, if I can continue my research-if the good guys win," and he afforded Rebecca a small, shy smile, "Mariposa will be the greatest boon to humanity since fire. Think of it. Sanity for all. But first… we have to climb over this wall and get to the other side. I'm glad I did it. I had to. The Quiet Man was right, bomb or no bomb. You're the one with the connections to stop Axel Price. Please do it. For Madeline."
Plover got to his feet, then backed across the room and opened the door.
He closed the door behind him.
She heard his footsteps going down the hall. After that, silence. She opened the door and looked out. Baumann was still away from his post.
Nobody had replaced him.
She closed the door and sat in the half dark, blinking, bringing her breath under control. She could end up like the broken man she had interviewed this morning. She could end up like the programmers, wherever they were, whatever their symptoms might be-and the odd Mr. Trace, who at least had shown some sort of courage and even, possibly, compassion.
It all sounded incredibly nasty and unpredictable.
How would she feel when… if, it began to happen?
36 HOURS
Lion City, Texas
A light breeze blew grit and silt from Mexico, leaving brown streaks across the Texas sky-the ragged hem of famine's cloak.
William Griffin parked the old Chevette at the dry grassy margin in front of a small bungalow and kicked down the emergency brake, then sat for a moment, head bowed, steadying his nerves.
His next action would be the first bead on a bone rosary of sacred violations. He-a special agent-was going to assault a sworn peace officer. After this, he could never again hold himself above the criminal; he was part of that world, one of them…
Undercover and way outside his known universe.
He peered through the rivulets of dust on the windshield, sweeping up the shadowy details of the sleeping neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Lion City: a loose scatter of dusty yards and screen porch houses, oaks and dogwood, boarded-up auto shops, a shuttered feed store, a recycled tire store-hard times.
On a dirt lot across from the house, idle truck trailers and big rigs stretched out silver gray in the promise of dawn, surprisingly pretty, though covered with dew and a film of mud.
A rooster strutted across the dusty patched asphalt of Farm to Market Road.
Nothing but the rooster and William.
William had met his new partners two days ago and explained the switch-out. The agent formerly in charge of the Little Jamey operation, codenamed Vanilla Extract, had been unexpectedly reassigned to Alameda.
William had been in on the secret planning of this whole operation and was in cahoots with agents in D.C.
He was immediately accepted. Some of the agents had heard vague rumors about Mecca and admired that kind of rogue reputation.
He seemed to fit right in.
A heavy-duty Econoline van, gray and green, windows thick-meshed and interior customized for prisoner transport, had been parked under a dying oak tree far down the driveway. Block letters on its rear doors read "PerpTrans."
He touched the temple piece of his MacArthur-style spex and murmured, "Let's wake him up."
William rolled down his window. He heard a phone jangle. After four rings, someone picked up. William caught a bit of the dialog through his earpiece.
The man in the house was half asleep.
Wrong number.
William heard the heavy clack-ka-ching from inside the house even before the grid passed along the angry words: "Well, goddammit, it's five a.m.!"
A message tickered in the corner of William's lightly tinted spex:
Time. Bring leash.
William gritted his teeth and got out. A bit of sand had lodged under one eyelid but there was nothing he could do; seconds counted. He walked up to the porch and sliced through the screen with his pocket knife, flicked up the hook, then swung open the screen door with a ghostly creak.
The brass monkey knocker was mounted on the inside door. Red glass eyes glowed in the leering face. The banner over the knocker read, "Welcome to the Monkey House."
He lifted the monkey's paw and rapped.
"Who's there?" a grating voice asked.
"Travis Coolidge, Lion County jail. I'm to ride in with you. I have the itinerary for this morning's transfer."
"Well, hell. Something's changed?"
The door opened and William faced Eddie Mallom. Mallom blearily eyed William, recognized a cop when he saw one, and swung the front door wide. "Anything different from what we got faxed last night?"
"Just me."
The brass paw rattled. "Jesus. We're not due for another hour and a half. You coulda let me sleep in."
Mallom was in his mid-thirties, a bachelor, about William's height but skinnier, slope-shouldered but not a weakling judging by the rope-knot muscles that poked from the sleeves of his T-shirt. His face was lean and grizzled with a thick morning beard.
William and his new partners had closely watched their respective clients all last evening. There had been an employee toot at the local BBQ. The PerpTrans boys had left around two in the morning, barely three hours ago.
Mallom turned his back. "Hell with it, come on in. I'll get coffee."
William reached into his windbreaker and removed a small cylinder of Spray-Cuff.
Mallom was not completely oblivious. He looked over his shoulder just as the quick-setting gray cord crazy-tangled his upper body. The strands instantly tightened and bound his arms to his torso. William pointed the nozzle down and webbed the man's legs as he hopped around, then muffled his last few grunts with another discharge around the face and eyes.
Trussed like a fly, Mallom toppled. William caught him and eased his fall, then made sure the man could breathe by spreading two air holes in the nylon-tough strands around the man's nose and mouth. Mallom couldn't see much and could do little more than squirm and make strangled complaints, not very loud, since he couldn't draw a really deep breath.
"Relax," William said. "Just go limp."
Mallom's single visible eye was puffy and glaring, but he stopped struggling.
"Ooo hhuck aw ya? Cri own kimee."
William dragged him into the short middle hall and then into a bachelor-filthy bathroom: pee stains around the toilet, greasy hair tangles in the corners, underwear poking from the ratty laundry hamper.
He made sure the narrow window over the shower stall was latched shut. A quick search in the kitchen turned up a plastic drink jug from the local Cactus Stop. He filled it with water. The wide green flex-straw went into Mallom's mouth.
"Don't let yourself dry out. Pee if you have to. It might be a day or two before someone comes to look for you. Sorry about that."
Mallom now suspected he wasn't going to be murdered, so he grunted an expletive.
William found the man's employee uniform, cap, and equipment hanging on a valet and the bedroom dresser, put them on-not a great fit, but good enough-and stuffed his own clothes into a plastic bag. The house was a mess but not Mallom's uniform; shirt and pants had been neatly pressed, the shoes polished to a high sheen.
William made sure to lock the front door behind him, and returned to the car to get the black case.
The dawn was brighter now and the rooster was starting to prance before belting out a cockcrow. Across the street, a portly truck driver in a red jacket walked around his rig with a step a little like the rooster's. He cleared his nose into a kerchief and waved at William.
At this distance, he was reacting to the uniform. The gray early light obscured features.
"Going to haul Little Jamey's ass down to Huntsville?" the trucker asked.
William nodded under his cap.
"Screw Washington," the trucker said, and spat. "Screw the FBI. Screw Larsen and all the tax-hiking sons of bitches. Screw the New York press. Serves the bastards right."
Lion City and the Texas Department of Corrections, headquartered in Huntsville, in recent years had become a law unto themselves and so, as the trucker said, screw the FBI and screw New York.
William shrugged, lifted one hand, and climbed into Mallom's transport van. He slipped the black case between the van's seat and the engine cover.
The van recognized the recently implanted chip in his arm, a duplicate of the one issued to Mallom-good beginning. Everyone in Lion City was chipped. One big, happy family, almost all of them eager to execute Little Jamey. He started the motor, let it idle for a minute, backed it out of the driveway, and drove along Farm to Market Road, then swung east, toward the Lion County Correction Center.
Right on schedule.
The clandestine grid had been silent for a while.
No doubt Kapp and Curteze had been as busy as William.
Then, in his ear, a calm voice from Washington, D.C.-Jane Rowland, as he had suspected all along. She had taken over this part of the operation and was running it for Alicia Kunsler.
"Old Pap is frantic for news. What'll I tell him?"
"Tell him Jim's got his raft," William said. "We're heading for the river."
Shortly, he would have to ditch his spex. Talos tracked nearly all communications around Lion City and the campus-and if they couldn't ID any particular signal, they sent out employees or sheriff's deputies to locate the source-just to make sure.
Pendleton Reserve, California
The morning trip south from Los Angeles was swift, peaceful, without incident. Nathaniel Trace was glad he could drive like a normal human being and not draw attention.
The Quiet Man had left a message-a series of numbers. The Mind Design circuit was still working. The original Turing Seven still had their EPR phone accounts, and the Quiet Man had one as well, but the display showed only three phones logged on.
The phones would not work for anyone but their assigned owners. While it was conceivable that their codes could be cracked-Nathaniel had a number of ideas how that might be done-the circuits would tell them if someone unauthorized was listening in.
So far, nobody was.
The Quiet Man was very fond of EPR technology.
Nathaniel drove down Camino Del Mar, then stopped at a coffee shop to pick up Humphrey Camp. He was alone. The right side of his face was paler than the left, and his left hand showed an intermittent tremor. iHis Hi
Driving south in light fog, Camp opened the window and waved his fingers in the cool, moist slipstream. "I can't think straight for more than five minutes," he complained. "My stomach is ruined. I still don't know what to eat-I'm starving to death and I don't even care." He touched the pale side of his face, then pinched it hard. "Feeling comes and goes. It's like someone's put a voodoo doll up to a mirror. Bork's gone into hiding-won't say where. Jerry Lee seems happy. He's stalking women in Santa Monica. I don't feel guilty knowing that, either. But look at you-you're driving a Hyundai, Mr. Sober and Responsible, for Christ's sake."
Nathaniel had bought a nice, safe car, unlikely to encourage him to explore the wild limits of his new abilities-and had paid cash. That evening he had filled the tank, stopped over for a few hours at a beach motel, then driven in the dark to downtown Laguna Beach, where he had received his last call from the Quiet Man, telling him where to pick up Camp.
Camp rambled on. "You think Talos blew up the LA Convention Center to kill Plover, right?"
"I don't know," Nathaniel said. "Seems a bit extreme, if you ask me."
"But you stuck around. You did what Plover asked. Why?"
"He seemed sincere."
Camp pulled in his hand and scratched his nose. "Okay. You hung around for no good reason. Why?"
"Checking out the weather. A hunch, call it."
"Hunches seem different. You know why Jerry Lee is stalking women?"
"No idea," Nathaniel said.
"Maybe it's a hunch. After the blast, the Quiet Man told me you went right back inside, to check up on a woman you just met."
"Seemed the thing to do," Nathaniel said.
"Maybe you were stalking her," Camp said.
The Quiet Man's numbers needed to be broken down into groups of seven. In his head, Nathaniel stacked them and ran them through the most likely coding algorithm-one with seven steps-and recovered what appeared to be a set of coordinates. There was one last step, known only to the Turing Seven-what the Quiet Man called an "acciditional" twist or renormalizing of the results.
Without looking at a map or engaging the nav system, Nathaniel visualized where the first set of numbers would take them: out to Mind Design, near the beach in La Jolla.
That was too obvious, too dangerous-why even bother with encoding? If the Turing Seven were a threat to Price, wasn't Mind Design one of the first places they would look?
Seven numbers. Seven programmers.
Seven stations of the crossed.
Then he renormalized, using the "acciditional" twist.
"If you ask me," Camp said, "you might go all psycho on my ass any minute."
"I'm okay with women," Nathaniel said, and grinned at Camp, showing his teeth.
"How about male colleagues?"
Nathaniel pirate-squinched his face, then let it relax. "Sorry. Nothing."
"Fuck you," Camp said.
The new coordinates would take them out of La Jolla entirely, up into the hills overlooking Camp Pendleton.
Camp chuffed. "The Doc thought Lee was the most stable-but then, he's always looked cool and collected. In Arabia, Lee was cooler than the Talos goon squad-even with his arm in shreds. But right now, it's you, isn't it?"
"I go day to day. I want to know what's happening. Don't you?"
"Curiosity worth dying for?"
"Life is discovery. The Quiet Man wants us to follow a trail. Maybe he wants us to put a stop to what we've started."
"Never met him," Camp said. "Just took orders from the rest of you and did my work. But it takes a strange man to work a thirty million dollar contract for three years and then get all moral and weepy."
"Then maybe he just wants revenge."
"That I can get behind," Camp said.
The drive was going to take longer than Nathaniel expected. He turned east on 76 and headed toward Vista. Camp's hand had stopped its periodic tremor and his face was regaining its color, but his head nodded to some internal, irregular beat.
"It changes all the time," he said. "If we're coming unglued, if our genes are getting shut off in weird sequences… Who knows what that could do, medically? Maybe it'll end up killing us."
"They tested it on animals," Nathaniel said.
"That's so reassuring," Camp said. "Maybe it's like a way to make assassins better killers, easier to brainwash. Wouldn't Price want something like that?"
Nathaniel thought that over as he turned off 76 and headed north. The country here was gray and dry, the trees by the side of the blacktop roads mostly dead. This area used to be covered with groves and farms. Now it looked blasted. This wasn't drought caused by global warming, however; this was the way California always looked when the money and the water went away.
It looked like much of Mexico.
"I don't feel easy to indoctrinate, and I don't like taking orders any more than I did before, maybe less," Nathaniel finally said. "How about you?"
"No," Camp admitted. "I'm like a cranky baby. But I am more coordinated, in a weird way-better at physical stuff. And quicker at learning some things. You?"
Nathaniel nodded. "Up to a point." His shoulder and wrists were still sore.
"I wouldn't much care if I actually did kill somebody, though. Guilt tank running on empty. Feels good-liberation plus. About this little trip-you're taking us someplace you've never been, without a map, just some coordinates. How?"
Nathaniel tapped the rearview mirror, which displayed a compass rose and NNE. "The compass, the speedometer, and the clock."
"In your head? Were you always that good?" Camp asked.
"No," Nathaniel said. "Runs down the blood sugar. Sometimes it hurts. There's energy bars in the glove box. Hand me one and help yourself."
The Hyundai did well enough on the next part of the journey, a rutted dirt road across a low plateau of scrub. At the end of the road, still within sight of the ocean-perhaps three miles down the gentle west-facing slope and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire-they spotted a square concrete blockhouse and a smaller shack, separated by about a hundred feet.
No visible power lines stretched this far, and no evidence of any sort of receiver dish or telecom setup, either.
"The middle of nowhere," Camp said.
Nathaniel pulled the car up to a gate. A weather-beaten keypad-speaker combo and video camera mounted on a pole poked up from the dirt to the left.
Several old metal signs lay face down inside the fence perimeter.
The keypad was new and looked more than interesting. It provoked another variety of bee vision: brilliant warm colors for objects of particular significance, other areas cool and subdued or totally grayed-a way for his mind to leap-frog the old lines between conscious and subconscious reasoning.
It might take him months to harness this talent-or he'd never get the trick of it.
For now, Nathaniel suspected both he and Camp shared the same opinion. If this property had ever belonged to the Quiet Man, none of the Turing Seven had been informed. And likely the Quiet Man had kept it secret from Price as well.
The speaker crackled and the camera angled to take them in. Then the Quiet Man's voice-unmistakable-said, "Nathaniel! Come on in. Is that Camp sitting beside you?"
"Yes, sir," Camp said with a toothy grin.
"The gate's open. See you at the first stop-the tumbledown place. Glad you could both make it."
Lion City
For many years, Texas had been touchy about the death chamber in Huntsville. Texas still led the world in per capita executions, and also in DNA exonerations, but that did not stop the fatally grinding wheels of state justice. Lion City alone had sent fifteen of its former citizens to the Walls Unit in the ten years since the town's incorporation, so many that both the Bureau of Prisons and JPATS-the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation system, a decades old mash-up of the U.S. Marshals and Border Security-had refused to transport their prisoners, leaving it to the Department of Corrections to "haul their own garbage," as the local Fetch bloggers put it.
JPATS was having a tough enough job dealing with hundreds of thousands of Mexicans eager to get north, get work, get food; away from death squads, cartels, and paramilitary reprisals. In the drought, Mexico was coming apart like a piñata in a major league batting cage.
Add in the U.S. near-bankruptcy and the efforts by twenty Texas counties to go their own way and not pay taxes…
Tacitly supported by the Governor…
Border Security, the Department of Justice, and Texas state law enforcement had long since put up brick walls between their operations. No federal agency wanted to be tarred by Texas justice.
The Tunnel began a third of a mile from the Lion City Correctional Center, a spare, sandstone-faced building with tiny narrow windows adjacent to the historic county courthouse. The Tunnel had been expensive but it kept out reporters-though lately very few reporters had been covering the case of Little Jamey Trues.
Too dangerous.
This was where Talos Corporation got its justice served out to Axel Price's secret orders, and there was no reason to let the outside world know every little detail, including who was being sent where.
The dwindling national press-those journalists who still had a travel budget, who still worked for networks or newspapers or the five prime news sites and could afford to travel rather than just sit in front of a screen and suck back coffee and pontificate on what others saw and wrote-was as worn out and discouraged as the rest of the nation.
Screw the bastards.
He touched the temple piece on his spex and went off grid, then removed the glasses, folded them in a leather case, and stuffed the case into his shirt pocket.
Most federal agencies had been quietly but steadily releasing private companies from their sensitive law enforcement activities. Texas, however, had dug in. Working through Talos, the state DOC relied on Midland-based PerpTrans Inc. to transport its prisoners.
PerpTrans drivers were allowed to park their prisoner transport vans at home. Some used them to haul kids to birthday parties and carry college students back and forth to binges.
And that was one gap in Price's steel gauntlet.
The Tunnel scanned William's new chip and the truck's serial number and accepted the Econoline through its automated steel doors. The Vanilla Extract team had been told that people (and only people) monitored the security cameras that sprouted like shiny black mushrooms around the concrete entrance. No automated face recognition.
Even so, William wore his hat low over his face.
Jesus, it's working.
The correction center was not Lion City's highest tech enterprise-surprising, considering how much Talos had invested in securing the rest of the county.
"Hey, Mallom," came a twangy female voice over the van radio: the transfer dispatcher. William imagined her in her mid-forties, a heavy smoker with pruny skin and hennaed hair. "Hustle it, young man. Prisoner is at the gate."
"Down the chute," William said.
The DOC folks here were relying entirely on steely eyes and strong iron. Human judgment all the way.
The transfer station was an underground concrete cavern backed by a loading dock, the dock flanked by five parking spaces on each side, reserved for prison brass and visitors. This wide, cool box was dimly illuminated by a red bulb on the right and the greenish glow from an observation window about six feet wide and three feet high, made of inch-thick bulletproof plastic.
As William drove the PerpTrans van through the steel security gate, lights came on over the dock. A guard poked out from the access door and waved in the van.
William joggled the van around in the narrow space and backed it up to the loading dock. Two men emerged from an old Toyota Corolla in a visitor space-no longer the original DOC prisoner escorts, Sanchez and Markette, but Bureau replacements, Special Agents Glenn Curteze and Jonathan Kapp.
Someone had slipped a powder into a few beers at the PerpTrans BBQ toot.
The agents would soon join Little Jamey in the back of the van. No doubt by the end of the day, heads would roll at Texas DOC. That did not concern William. He was sweating profusely. The uniform's inseam pinched his crotch. The sleeves rode up and his socks showed.
Two more guards came through the door and stood on the dock. They looked glumly serious. The guards disliked this ritual, the darkest part of their duty. There would be no joking and little conversation, nothing to relieve the tension.
Dead Man walking.
William remotely unlocked the van's rear doors. The guards opened them and Kapp and Curteze climbed in first, then prepared the chains and locking cross-bars.
William acknowledged their presence through the viewport behind the driver. They passed him their papers-Curteze offered up a shit-eating smile-and he stuck them in his folder.
A female guard approached the driver side door and William slid open a conversation port.
"New directions," she said, and handed him another slip of paper. "You choose the third segment, the third leg. Off the beaten path, if possible. Tracking isn't fully operational. They promise to have it fixed in twenty or thirty minutes. You can stay here until they confirm, if you want."
William frowned. "We're supposed to be in Huntsville this evening. We could bill you and wait until tomorrow… That's what our contract stipulates if you cancel and it's not our fault."
"Not an option," the guard said.
"They should have flown this one," William said.
"Do you have a plane? Because we don't."
"I hear you," William said.
"Maybe Mr. Price should loan us a private jet," the guard said.
All of Price's jets were in the air, winging executives and politicians from around the world to the Talos corporate shindig. That could explain the jam-up in tracking-the roads around Lion City were already crowded with unfamiliar vehicles.
Another point in their favor.
William brushed his lip with a finger. "We'll get him where he belongs. Just hand him over."
The guard nodded and returned to the dock.
Kapp and Curteze prepared for the transfer. The door at the back of the loading dock opened and they lifted Little Jamey along in his orange prison jumper. The boy looked sleepy. The prison medicos had sedated him for the transfer. His heels floated and his chains clanked.
Kapp and Curteze took charge of the prisoner, ran his arm chip under their scanners, then signed multiple documents formally transferring custody.
The van's rear doors closed. William sealed them. Ominous clunks and chunks sounded. An obnoxious little horn beeped until he entered the code on the prisoner's transport slip. The horn stopped with a happy chirp. The van was now authorized to proceed up the Tunnel to its last security checkpoint before Huntsville.
William could hardly believe they had made it this far.
The indictment, trial, and conviction of Little Jamey had ignited a firestorm among law enforcement agencies around the nation. Most of them, anyway.
He didn't know how many courageous people in Washington and Texas-or inside the Texas DOC itself-had cooperated to make this rescue possible, at risk to career and personal freedom.
None were known to William, nor he to them.
And they in turn would learn nothing about their new partners, Bureau East and Spider/Argus, each with their own ulterior motives.
Pendleton Reserve, California
The shack supported a small cistern that collected rainwater and delivered it through plastic pipes to a small flower garden. The garden was a prickle patch of desiccated stems and the last dried buds from the summer before-all gray. The cistern had sprung a leak-a bullet hole.
The hole showed up intensely purple in Nathaniel's bee vision.
"Someone's been shooting here," he said.
"Kids or dumb hunters," Camp said, gesturing over his shoulder. "Up by the road, too-road signs and mailboxes."
Nathaniel paced before the path that led to the shack, head down. His whole body ached with the intensity of his thought. Finally he paused and flung his hands up in the air. "Goddamn it," he said. "There's no way in hell I can see what's happening. This place used to be important-but why? Nobody's taken care of it for a long time."
Camp assumed a farmer's slouch with hands deep in pockets. He shrugged. "The Quiet Man isn't here?" he asked doubtfully.
"I don't think so," Nathaniel said.
"We heard his voice. He recognized us."
"He's probably watching from someplace remote-maybe the main building in La Jolla. " Though that seemed unlikely, as well.
"Then why guide us all the way out here? We should leave. Let's just chuck it."
"He must have a good reason."
"Lady or the tiger," Camp said, pointing to the shack, then to the blockhouse.
Nathaniel realized he was going to have to follow his instructions or abandon the scene completely and start over again-without guidance. That made his head hurt more.
"Stay here," he said.
"Give me the car keys," Camp suggested, snapping his fingers, and Nathaniel tossed him the ring. Then he started down the path to the shack-slow, cautious steps, eyes on the ground searching for disturbed earth, triggers, trip wires. The ground all around looked gray, uninteresting. Rain had washed away any evidence of foot traffic, but the grass near the trail had been trampled in a few spots. Four sad little eucalyptus trees leaned away from the shack, their largest branches broken off and littering the ground-also gray. Everything was gray except for the bullet holes.
He climbed the single step and paused on the porch, then looked back over his shoulder. Camp stood slouched as before, key ring dangling from one hand.
Nathaniel squinted and rubbed his temples.
The sun-warped wooden door made a click and opened. The whole front of the cabin seemed to explode with sudden color. Nathaniel averted his eyes until he could regain visual control. Some part of him was still capable of expressing fear, or at least caution-but from way down deep. Lizard brain stuff.
"All right," he said under his breath. "I get it."
He nudged the door with one foot. It opened stiffly. Watery daylight spilled into the interior, revealing nothing but a crumpled paper airplane on the dirty floorboards.
Someone had picked it up and scrunched in it in a fist, then tossed it down again.
Mind Design's logo was a paper airplane with its nose pointed skyward-merging with an illuminati pyramid and all-seeing eye.
Nathaniel picked up the airplane, shook it free of dust, and unfolded it. One wing's inner surface was covered with scribbles-penciled rows of numbers.
Seven groups of seven.
"Hell," he murmured, but more out of concern at the fascination that now flooded through him. He was being jerked around like a bloodhound pushed down a trail of funky rags-but this bloodhound was a number geek from way back, and the Quiet Man, or somebody, was perfectly happy to play with his oh-so-genius-class head.
The numbers presented little difficulty. In essence, the relation between the first three sets solved most efficiently to a half circle, or 180 degrees. The next two solved to any rectangle wider than it was tall, and the last two strings easily converted from ASCII to a word: DEADMAN.
Seven letters.
The Quiet Man had probably spent years of his youth playing video games. So had Nathaniel, of course, and most of the Turing Seven. He looked around the cabin. Nothing else of interest; heightened edge perception made sure of that, even in the shack's semidarkness.
His eyes burned as if they were on fire, so he shut them for a few seconds.
"You okay?" Camp called.
"Fine," Nathaniel said.
Nathaniel stepped back into the cloudy sunshine. The air was still cool, still moist. He had always liked southern California autumn weather, particularly near the coast. Fog might roll in from the ocean soon, as high or higher than this small plateau, about four hundred feet above sea level. It would leave everything moist and dripping through the night.
He waved for Camp to join him. "We're supposed to go to the blockhouse."
"He could have told us that right off," Camp suggested.
The breeze shifted and wafted a mild stench-stale but still foul-from behind the shack. Nathaniel's body stiffened. He had smelled death before-in Iraq and in Jordan and of course in Arabia Deserta.
Day-old death in dry, dusty air.
This was death many days old, in moist, cool air.
Nathaniel stepped gingerly through the yellow, dew-moist grass to the rear of the shack, again on alert for tripwires.
Three bodies had been laid out in a row in the grass. The bee vision outlines of shocking red and electric blue were totally unnecessary.
"What is it?" Camp called.
He was slunching through the grass to join Nathaniel.
"Watch your feet," Nathaniel said. "Three dead people. All men, I think."
Camp stood beside him. "Holy crap. Who are they?"
The bodies had lain out in the open for at least a week and a half. The clothing was stained with bloat and bursting. Maggots still wriggled in a desultory fashion around a series of small thoracic holes gnawed by some animal through the clothing. Raccoons, maybe.
Raccoons might not like the taste of human flesh, but they knew how to farm a corpse: they chewed holes in a body and waited for maggots to cluster, then ate the tasty, high-protein morsels on a steady basis for several days, until the maggot food and thus the maggot supply chain gave out. Nathaniel had read about that in a crime novel years ago.
He recognized an MIT class ring on one brown, leathery finger. "That's Harvey Belton," he said.
Harvey "Bourbaki" Belton had been the eldest of the Turing Seven, a world expert in nested and recursively competitive algorithms. He had practically invented acciditional functions, finding a use for so-called accidental numbers-until then considered one of the most useless ideas in math. He could have won a Nobel, but went for the money instead.
They hadn't spoken in months.
"Three of us?" Camp asked in a plaintive voice. "Just dumped out here?"
Nathaniel stooped down and tried to guess the corpses' statures: 5-4, 6-1, 5-10 respectively. Their weight and build were more difficult to judge.
He had a bad feeling about one of them. The face, though crusted and shrunken, still looked familiar. Wispy grayish hair was slicked down by blood and dew. A sheen of something gray and cheesy coated the cheeks and nose-what was it called?
Adipocere.
He had read that in a crime novel, too.
Strange. Bee vision gone. The colors had dropped right back into normal. His subconscious was as stunned as the rest of his brain.
"We should check out the blockhouse," Nathaniel said, rising.
"What can we learn that we don't already know?" Camp asked. "Someone's killing us. I knew that already."
Nathaniel looked again at the middle of the three bodies. A ruck of checked wool poked through a gap in the muddy leather jacket. "I think that's Stan Parker," he said. "Fits his taste in shirts."
"All right," Camp said. "Seven little Indians. How many does that leave?"
"You, me…" He looked again at the third body and felt sweat break out. He did not want to say who this was, because it was impossible. He had heard the voice. The voice had been giving him instructions for days.
"You. Me. Jerry Lee. Bork," he finished. "Maybe that's it."
Lion City
William drove the PerpTrans van off the road and behind a deserted, boarded-up gas station garage. To Little Jamey's slack-jawed astonishment, the two DOC officers riding with him in the back pulled jeans and sweatshirts from a knapsack and started to peel off their uniforms.
William unlocked the driver side door and Kapp came around to insert his plug into the van's security port, just below the dashboard.
Kapp was short and stocky, with thinning brown hair and a fine, patrician nose. "Four minutes, then we smash the GPS tracking unit. That'll take the van off any grid."
Curteze unlocked and pulled open the garage door and stood before a rancher's old Tahoe-stashed here three weeks ago under a tarp. Curteze was tallest, rangy, with thick black hair slicked back from his forehead.
He pulled away the tarp. The Tahoe was still equipped with the rancher's radio frequency ID transponder. Texans were serious about immigration reform. Unchipped vehicles were pulled over and searched by all local police agencies.
As well, Talos security birds flew over most of West Texas and could also ping vehicles.
This part of the plan had been particularly difficult to carry out. The RFID chips were custom programmed in Midland and shipped around the state. In the end, someone in the Bureau had purchased the SUV at a farm auction from the owner's widow and paid her extra not to report her husband's demise to DMV or the local police.
The widow had assumed the purchasers were going to ship Mexicans north. No skin off her nose-she was getting the hell out of Texas and moving to Florida. An extra five thousand dollars would spend just fine.
Curteze unlocked the driver's door and got in. The engine started quickly enough but idled rough for a few seconds. When it settled down, all three agents broke out of their frozen postures and returned to the tasks at hand.
"Good to go," Curteze called to Kapp and William.
Jamey Trues watched with goggle eyes through the open rear doors.
Kapp took a hammer, bent down, slid under the transport van, and slammed the tracking transmitter until pieces clattered on the ground.
"How's that for finesse?" he asked.
They took out their keys and approached Jamey. The boy was starting to come around.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Friends." William did not want to provide any more hope or encouragement than he felt was deserved, since for now he thought their chances of getting away were slim to nonexistent. He removed the cuffs and bars and helped the boy down from the back of the PerpTrans van.
"Let's boogie," Kapp said.
"You going to lynch me?" the boy asked. He was only fifteen but had been through a lot in the last year.
Before William could answer, the boy slumped and almost fell. The jailers in Lion City had given him a time-release sedative for the duration of the trip, to keep him quiet right up until they strapped him to the gurney in the Walls Unit.
The second round was kicking in.
"We're not going to lynch you," William murmured as Curteze helped slide the boy into the rear seat of the Tahoe. "We're going to drive you out of state."
"He can't hear you," Kapp said.
They strapped him in-seatbelt only, no cuffs.
They had nothing to fear from Little Jamey.
Nobody did, actually.
"We won't get far unless we cut that chip out of him," Curteze said.
"There's an abandoned field just outside of town," William said. "We'll do it there."
That field was the closest they were likely to get to the Smoky, Price's ranch-a mile and a half. Satellites had located Fouad. He was being kept in a bungalow a hundred yards behind the main complex.
The snake bots had an operational round-trip range of no more than seven miles.
Pendleton
They walked around the shack, then cut across to the blockhouse, avoiding the scrub. The blockhouse's southern wall had a narrow inset door accessed by a short flight of steps sunk a couple of feet into the earth.
"Maybe this was some sort of communication station," Camp said. "Loran or Alcan or something."
"Alcan's a highway."
"They'd have buried the power lines, right?"
"Maybe."
"Could still have juice."
A small black camera eye poked from the concrete over the steel door. Someone had tried to hammer their way through the door and failed-it still looked strong and secure.
But as they approached, this door also clicked open, just like the gate and the door to the shack.
"Maybe he's here after all," Camp said.
The interior was simple, old-dusty. A dark brown couch, upholstered in worn velour, had been planted in the middle of the floor.
More interesting, a low, putty-colored box about the size of an early-model Jones 1.0 sat on a wooden bench. Behind the table, a metal connection box had been set flush with the wall. A thick pipe dropped from the box through the concrete floor.
Competors like Jones were the next step up from computers. They used competitive algorithms to solve problems-some called them evolution engines. The Turing Seven were probably the best in the world at thinking up such algorithms, a very specialized mathematical discipline.
The Quiet Man had once said that the next step up from competors would be called "thinkers."
"Is that what it looks like?" Camp asked.
"Don't go near the table. It's probably rigged to explode."
"Right. Game logic," Camp said. "But there is a couch. Unfair to blow up a couch. Gamers like to sit. We should sit."
They inspected the couch, lifting the cushions-nothing suspicious-then sat, slowly.
A sensor under the couch clicked, making them both jump up, cursing-but a voice spoke from a small speaker mounted in the wall directly ahead.
"Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to guide your quest," the voice said. "If everything here still works, you will soon learn why."
It was the Quiet Man-unmistakable.
At the tap of a tiny solenoid, a small piece of plaster fell from the wall. Four shiny black lenses pushed through the hole, angling with tiny whirring noises to find faces, focus on eyes.
"Please sit."
Again, they settled in.
The projectors painted beams of laser light directly onto their retinas, reproducing an image for both of them-a live image, Nathaniel guessed.
The projected point of view was of someone about six feet tall standing in the lobby of Mind Design, facing panoramic picture windows. Mind Design's main building sat on a bluff overlooking the ocean, southwest of their present location-in La Jolla.
"Wow," Camp said. "How old is all this shit? Why not just hand us spex?"
He had a point-the blockhouse interior had been designed and built at least a decade ago. It definitely smacked of spare time, paranoia-and some sort of outmoded cool factor.
Which fit well with what Nathaniel knew about the Quiet Man.
"You seeing what I'm seeing?" Camp asked in an undertone. "Mind Design. Great view."
"Yeah. Shh," Nathaniel said.
"I was there once, four years ago," Camp said. "So is the Quiet Man here-I mean, there-or hiding nearby-or somewhere even safer?"
Camp's caviling about POV was disorienting Nathaniel. Here, there… past, future, present. Numbers and coordinates.
The lasers were forcing him to see and thus think a certain way. He was having real problems controlling memories evoked by the remote images.
"I'm getting a nasty premonition," Camp said. "That sucks. I don't know how to react."
For Nathaniel, the image suddenly tangled up with memory, imagination, suspended fear.
He tried to turn away but could not.
Mind Design was a sixties-style suspended rectangle of white and stainless steel, hanging out over a bluff above the brilliant blue ocean.
Every wave…
Nathaniel knew their numbers. He knew these buildings inside and out, backwards and forwards; he could visualize every room just by closing his eyes.
Stop that. Keep it together.
For a few seconds, he relived parking in the shadow of a grove of tall eucalyptus-maybe two years ago. The Mind Design parking lot held no more than twenty cars, and at least ten spaces had been roped off after a storm had brought down big branches. Folks liked their legacy trees. Southern California-and in particular La Jolla -was nothing without eucalyptus.
Nathaniel got out of the car and leaned against the door. The purple of the ice plant on the slope in front of the car was so intense he had to avert his eyes.
Keep your mind on the couch. You are here. You are not in the lobby.
But his mind was fanatically searching for significant patterns, numbers, novelty-and so the memory rolled on. He could make out every single purple flower, every fleshy green blade. If he wanted, he could know their numbers and what those numbers would mean for thousands of years to come.
He had worked at Mind Design four years before the company had sent him to Talos in Lion City, and then to Jordan, and then to Arabia Deserta, and after a few months' hiatus, finally to Dubai, to create a backdoor into MSARC.
On the couch, Nathaniel's muscles twitched as if they were moving, carrying him forward. Walking. Every twitch was like a little orgasm. The muscles reveled in their new multidimensional freedom from time, space, reality.
His body felt younger, unconstrained.
My flesh and blood and bone before the firefight. Before the scars and the pain-physical and mental.
My brain before Mariposa.
He looked with longing at the fast, sleek hybrids parked in the lot, including his: red and silver. Hooked up and plugged in, charged and ready to race down Torrey Pines Road at a hundred and forty miles an hour: just as green for Gaia as for the well-paid programmers and designers.
He walked up the sidewalk to the half hidden glass door, punched in his old security code, added a suffix that the Quiet Man had not mentioned, but that he knew would work.
Mind Design was open to him once more. He would know its numbers.
The building welcomed him as an old, secret friend.
"Nathaniel? We should get going. This is starting to feel like a trap."
He ignored Camp. Camp's mind wasn't yet wrapped around the impossibility of that body laid out behind the tumbledown shack.
Back at Mind Design: deep in the sub-basement, around the corner from the freight elevator, through a door in a half height wall topped with panes of thick glass, an early version of Jones lay spread out on the concrete floor like an art installation: oddly patterned and spaced cubes of plastic and steel hooked up with thick fiber optic cables and pipes carrying nutrient fluids.
Jones Zero had taken five years to build and two to charge up; they had learned a lot from simply getting him to turn on and give simple responses to basic neurologic queries, Gödel number key code strings-lifeboat backups, net housekeeping.
Like HAL, Jones Zero had learned a birthday diagnostic song: not "Daisy" but "Sgt. Pepper's." That was how much artificial thinking had advanced in fifty years.
Of course, even the later versions of Jones were not real minds, not yet true thinkers-more like idiot savants. But after the launch, it soon became obvious that this was the best pattern recognition tool anyone had yet devised.
Jones Zero could not only comprehend any natural language and find matches in even highly degraded databases, but he could deliver highly reliable analytics as to dialect, accent, even birthplace and level of education.
He-they always referred to a Jones as if it were human-could tell whether a voice came from a native who had learned the language as a child, or from a highly educated person who had learned it in school-and even the age at which the language training had begun.
What was more, Jones could penetrate any false accent and pick up the underlying native tongue.
The Quiet Man and the Turing Seven had soon moved Jones Zero up to weather. He had learned quickly. In six months, the distributed competer in its liquid-filled boxes-made up of borax, glass, and gel-suspended rods of PNA and DNA-had quickly proved itself to be a master of winds.
Jones 1.0-smaller, faster, better-beat the best automated and human long-range forecasters.
The Quiet Man decided that Jones 1.0 could be duplicated and shipped to key positions around the planet, standing in for the next step, Jones 2.0, already in development. Jones 1.0 would act as the trigger for his successor, as an atom bomb is used to trigger a hydrogen bomb.
There was to be only one Jones 2.0, and his work was to destined be very important indeed: supervising the world's first nanosecond-updated, worldwide financial data network, collected by over five thousand mainframes controlling server farms throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Jones 2.0 was about to become the quiet, humming heart of MSARC. Mind Design's connection with Talos Corporation was the biggest secret of all.
The Quiet Man kept Jones Zero in the basement of Mind Design as a kind of museum piece. Nathaniel Trace seemed to be alone with the machine in its concrete chamber. He felt almost shy in its quiet presence.
The Quiet Man-Chan Herbert-emerged from a rear cold chamber, where volatile Jones components were stored.
He pulled off a watch cap and unzipped his black windbreaker.
"Hello," he said.
Nathaniel bit his lip. Back on the couch, no longer traveling through memory's vivid album.
Seemingly live, in real time, Chan Herbert was being projected into their eyes.
"Hello, Mr. Herbert," Camp said.
Herbert looked up at a corner, eyes hunting, like a blind man. "Hello, Mr. Camp. I thought that was you. Hello, Nathaniel. How's the viewing?"
"It's fine," Nathaniel said. "Why the spy stuff?"
"Backdoor precautions. Always good when working with certain business types. I'm a little paranoid, naturally, and right now that's useful. Jones 2.0 has come online in Switzerland. They've run all their tests. He passed with flying colors. MSARC is going operational in fourteen days."
Actually, less than thirty hours. The Quiet Man was relaying old information.
"So?" Camp said, not reassured. "Off the hook. That's a good thing. Our work is done."
"Not yet. Something's gone wrong."
Nathaniel felt a weird twinge. "A programming glitch?"
"No. Besides, Jones 2.0 is well beyond our programming at this point. He's harder to get hold of than a venture capital broker. What can you tell me about Mariposa?"
"It works," Camp said. "But it adds stuff. Weird shit."
"You were test monkeys," Herbert said. "As always, Price thought he should kill two birds with one stone-repair the Turing Seven to finish their job, and at the same time, get positive test results for Mariposa. Now Dr. Plover has revealed who the first monkey actually was: the vice president. And he's not the only one who's flipped. Nick Elder. When I heard from Nick is when I called you and told you to get out of Dubai."
"Old news," Camp murmured.
"Jerry Lee is feeling odd, too. He's in Arabia Deserta, and he seems to be making a fuss-killing animals, I hear."
Jerry Lee hadn't been in Arabia in weeks, perhaps months. Nathaniel felt feverish. "Why are we here?" he asked.
The Quiet Man gave a little jerk before responding. "After 9-11, the telecommunications industry duplicated the fiber optic point of entry for Asia and the Middle East to a centralized commercial facility in San Francisco. Somehow, they forgot to deactivate the old junction stations-which make excellent listening posts. Three of them serve me as personal tin cans strung on all the world's data traffic. Every blockhouse has a Jones 1.0 analyzing traffic.
"Jones 2.0 has the option to tie in with one or more of his siblings. Sometimes I ask an older Jones-the one right next to you, for example-to pull up anomalies in government traffic. He knows how to behave like a blank pipe or a legitimate client. He's still pretty sharp, even though most people think he's past his operational prime.
"In fact, both Talos and the regulators at MSARC believe all of the earlier versions have been shut down. Tell me how you feel, Nathaniel."
"Different," Nathaniel said.
"Like you want to kill somebody?"
Nathaniel twitched his folded hands. "Mostly, I just feel free to choose."
"You're unpredictable. You can't be trusted. You need a fallback."
"Why tell us to come here, then?" Nathaniel looked askance at the Quiet Man. The projected image skewed. He looked back, and there it was again, but seeming less and less real.
Low-res.
Of course, his eyes might still be playing tricks.
"Because that's the only place you can still see me," Herbert said.
"You reluctant to leave Mind Design?" Camp asked.
"No," Herbert said. "Not reluctant. I'm dead, Mr. Camp. They killed me fourteen days ago."
Camp started to chuckle, a grim exhibition of bitter humor, but his chuckle gurgled out when Herbert faded from the distant basement laboratory.
"What the hell?" Camp blurted.
Herbert's image slowly returned. "I often use Jones as a kind of answering machine," the voice said. "I recorded phrases, then trained him to select and modify and assemble them. Images, too.
"I like being two places at once. Now I'm nowhere at all. Jones can still answer questions, give out my messages, but only for a while. Pretty soon, Jones will run out of my words. He's sophisticated enough to make up new phrases-but I don't know whether he wants to.
"If he doesn't-I'm afraid you're completely on your own."
Nathaniel blinked rapidly, blurring the image of the Mind Design lab-not at all sure any of it was real.
The Quiet Man looked around as if sharing Nathaniel's confusion, then continued. "Dr. Plover passed along the name of a woman from the FBI who was in the Mariposa program. She was one of the third stage patients. The Turing Seven were all second stage. Jones snooped and told me the president would chose this agent to investigate the vice president's little incident. If she now has the information Dr. Plover gave to you to deliver-then there may still be a chance to derail Price's plan. She may or may not be feeling similar side effects. It's a risk we have to take."
"Been there," Nathaniel muttered.
"I wonder how Jones will react to all this," Herbert mused. He looked thoughtful. "I mean, he isn't a sophisticated personality. But there's as much of me in him as any of you. If Jones learns that I have been hurt or killed, what will he do? What will that knowledge do to him?"
More men appeared in the chamber, flickering around Herbert, brutally knocking him around. His mouth hung open in terror.
"Christ," Camp said.
One very solid-looking arm reached out and delivered an electric baton to the back of Herbert's leg. The arm withdrew and Herbert folded like a sack of rocks.
The disembodied arms and legs moved in and beat him over and over. Blood spray shot up.
The image flickered and then returned, sharp but quiet-the chamber empty but for a smashed, pitiful body.
Then the body was dragged away.
Jones knew. He had seen it all.
Herbert's uninjured form returned and again looked at the high corner. "If we accomplish the task that Talos set for us, then Axel Price will be in charge of much of our nation, perhaps much of the world. It will be a nasty place to live for everyone.
"A poet once said, 'You won't like what comes after America.'"
Herbert's image froze and faded and did not return.
The projectors shut down with a tiny snap.
Camp pushed up from the couch, face white like bread dough. "Out behind the shack-that's the Quiet Man, isn't it? Fuck this, Nathaniel. We got to leave-now."
Nathaniel remained on the couch, a weird numbness spreading through his chest and neck, up to his head.
The last living message Nathaniel received from Herbert had probably been back in Dubai. The communications since had been from one or more of the linked versions of Jones, recreating Herbert's voice-and now his image, leading them and others, including Plover, down a track of correction and discovery.
They could try to set Jones straight-or deactivate him. But surely it was too late for that. Jones 2.0 was locked in a vault in the mountains of Switzerland, access tightly controlled. Nathaniel was pretty sure the safeguards would keep out even him.
Unless, of course, Jones wanted Nathaniel to get in.
Unless Jones had become the Quiet Man once and for all.
Chan Herbert-the ghost in the machine.
Lion County, West Texas
William leveled the candle-sterile knife blade above the boy's sweaty white forearm. The shadowy interior of the pump house fell quiet. The air smelled hot and damp and muddy. From somewhere nearby drifted the punk of an old pile of manure.
The boy was nervous, but after all he had been through, that was to be expected. William squatted in front of him and looked into his face, beaded with sweat and pale from a year in custody. Fifteen: large brown eyes, soft mousy hair, handsome enough but pudgy.
They were all sweating. It was ninety degrees outside even at nine o'clock, and inside the shed was hotter.
Glenn Curteze sat on the gray pump housing and held up the boy's arm. Jonathan Kapp stood on his right, one deeply tanned hand on the boy's shoulder.
The boy swallowed hard. "You're going to cut it out."
William nodded.
"If you leave it in, it'll set off alarms," the boy said, eyes moving between the agents.
"It's got your life history," Kapp said with a narrow smile, hand on the boy's shoulder. "Wouldn't want that to get out, would we?"
"It's down deep," the boy said. "It really hurt when they put it in."
"It's wrapped in a sanitary sleeve," William explained. "Intramuscular injection, state prison issue. At least it's not very big. I see the scar-that pink spot. It's about half an inch below that. I've got some spray that will dull the skin, but we couldn't get anything else on short notice."
The boy locked William's eyes. "Will you guys hold me down… please?"
"Of course," Curteze said, shifting left to grip the boy's shoulders. "He'll have it out in a jiffy."
"Then… we're leaving? I won't be brought back?"
"That's our plan," William said. "We don't think anyone will extradite, under the circumstances." There was a possibility they'd have to avoid Oklahoma and Green Idaho, but every state west of Texas would offer sanctuary.
"My lawyer told me they were going to transport me down to Huntsville. They didn't even care my dad's with the FBI. I didn't mean to shoot Daryl. We were looking at the guns in the study. His father had a really great collection. Somehow, he found one that was loaded."
"Right," William said. "We've seen the video."
"Please," the boy said. "Do it now."
William applied the numbing spray from a drugstore can. Kapp and Curteze held the boy down. Curteze had a twist of keychain leather in one pocket and he offered it to the boy, who opened his mouth and bit down.
Classic Texas moment, William thought, and pushed the blade down deep and distal.
The boy gave a shriek around the leather.
William plunged in the tweezers, heard the small tink of contact with the chip sheath, and pinched it tight on the first try. Blood welled up from the incision. He used toilet paper to mop up the drops, then dribbled antiseptic powder over the wound and closed it with a Band-aid. No time for stitches.
"All done," William said, and held up the chip.
"Just like The Matrix," the boy said, and then fainted.
William wiped the blade and heated it in the candle flame. "Now me."
All three of the agents had chips.
When the cutting was done, William returned to the van and out of sight of the others, retrieved the case.
He unplugged the case from a rear outlet and poured the snakes onto the edge of the field. They immediately wriggled away, maybe too convincing.
Out here, people liked to shoot snakes.
California
Nathaniel drove Camp to the Oceanside commuter train station-a midsize steel and glass vault, like a big Quonset hut cut in half-and dropped him off in the parking lot.
Camp took his travel bag with him and didn't look back or wave as he walked through the doors to the passenger waiting area.
With Camp sent on his way, Nathaniel drove back up the broken paved road in the misty dusk, returned to the blockhouse, and sat on the old couch, staring at the blank wall. He tried to feel sadness-no go. Something else undefined had replaced grief, as with fear.
No visuals. No grays highlighted with brilliant colors. His subconscious was utterly clueless about what would happen next.
Outside, fog rolled in. The old fiber optic cable that crossed the ocean and came ashore and snaked its way right up to this blockhouse was no doubt filled with Eastern traffic-a spillover from half the world's billion trillion messages, all the buzz and hype and music and shows and movies and love and hate and codes and schemes, all the essential financial traffic, government traffic, all passing through the small box in the corner, the next-to-greatest pattern recognizer and language analyzer and voice identifier in human history-the elder cousin of Jones 2.0, who might or might not be the true god of this new economic age.
Nathaniel was willing to stay here all night if need be. Sleep had to come. He nodded off for a few hours, and awoke slumped on the couch and cold.
It was early morning.
Sometime while he slept, a single lens reappeared from behind the hole in the wall.
It seemed to be watching him.
"Hello, Jones," Nathaniel said. "No more games. No more hiding. We're sad-or we should be, both of us. I'd like to be more help. You've been pointing me in the right direction, haven't you?"
The lens did not move. There was no way of knowing if the ghost was still listening.
After a while, Nathaniel left the blockhouse, closing and locking the battered steel door behind him.
Near the shack, he placed a sprig of dried sage over the shrunken face of the Quiet Man and said his farewells. Then he stared up at the hills to the east, outlined by sky glow from suburban tracts.
He squinted to pick out snipers, killers, other deadly hired hands-hoping for bee vision.
Nothing popped-nothing visible.
Back to the fog creeping in from the ocean, dark and wet and black.
Now for the dangerous part.
Washington D.C.
Neither the president's chief of staff nor Thalia Ripper was returning Rebecca's calls or emails. She had been working in a near-vacuum of authority for almost four days; there wasn't much she felt she could do until the president heard the full story of what she had learned so far-along with her own personal revelation or confession.
None of it looked good. Rebecca suspected the president would ask her to remove herself from the investigation.
Roger Baumann met her outside the hotel door and escorted her under the front awning to the armored limo.
"My room was unguarded for a time last night," Rebecca said.
Baumann winced. "We hoped you wouldn't notice."
"I noticed."
"Any problems, ma'am?" Baumann asked.
"No."
Baumann seemed preoccupied-unhappy and unwilling to say more. Rebecca decided not to push it.
The limo took an unusual turn on the short trip, not toward the EEOB but right on H Avenue Northwest. Rebecca leaned forward.
"What's up now?" she asked.
"You've got an appointment."
"With the president?"
"No, ma'am. My boss."
The limo came to a stop in front of Secret Service headquarters. Baumann got out and opened the door. She sat back and braced herself for a moment, never happy with obscurities, then emerged with her usual swivel and push up, and some courteous help from the agent.
"An apology for the lapse?" she asked.
"No, ma'am. My boss would like to spend a few minutes with you before I drop you off at the EEOB."
"Does the president know?"
Baumann shook his head.
"Relevant to my investigation? And in no way compromising the president's trust in me?"
"Yes, ma'am, and Yes again, ma'am."
Rebecca lifted her hand, lead on.
They took an elevator to the basement. He led her down a corridor lined with closed doors to a corner office marked with a temporary standee sign: "Incident Investigation. No Admittance."
Baumann brushed past the sign and opened the door. He held out his arm and a low, clear voice inside welcomed her into the cramped room.
Stacks of media-discs and portable drives-filled open cabinets on one side. Three humming servers sat in a corner on a square metal table, looking small and lonely.
Sitting on a tall-back chair before a small desk, a short, muscular, very bald man turned to face her as she walked in. She recognized the shining dome. She had seen him once before, in a hallway in the West Wing: Daniel Haze, director of the Secret Service.
Haze stood and welcomed her with a tight smile and a handshake. "Glad to finally meet you, Ms. Rose," Haze said.
"Let's be quick," Rebecca said.
"Yes, ma'am." Haze pulled out a folding chair and offered her the tall-backed chair.
Rebecca demurred.
They both sat. "I hear you did a pretty good number on Quinn."
"I tried."
Haze's eyes were light gray and his face was chiseled and square, a prominent chin giving him the look of an actor destined always to portray Nazi generals. He lifted a piece of paper covered with handwritten notes. "But he didn't give you what you wanted."
"You listened in?" Rebecca said.
Haze shrugged. "This is the first time anyone I've protected has been shot-and it is sure as hell the first time for something like Quinn."
Rebecca made a sympathetic "Hmm."
"It's still possible we can help each other."
Rebecca looked into his gray eyes. "I'm happy to cooperate-if the president agrees."
"Have you spoken with the president in the last four days?"
"No," Rebecca said.
"Nobody I know has spoken with her. I hate being out of the loop. Something's wrong, and nobody tells me anything now." Haze leaned his chair back. "She's going outside for her security. Private executive protection services. A really terrible idea. We're still the best in the world at what we do."
"Hmm," Rebecca said again.
Haze lifted a bag and pulled out a broken pair of spex-the same color as the pair Rebecca had been wearing in the Los Angeles convention center. "The EMS folks tossed these into a recycle bin at the hospital where you were treated. My agents retrieved them."
"I'm impressed," Rebecca said as Haze dangled the glasses by a temple piece. "You were already vetting me-before the explosion. Must have been awkward-the convention center bombing wasn't your turf."
Haze nodded. "You'd had these for a few months before the bombing. You downloaded personal data from an older set of FBI gogs a year ago."
"Did you retrieve those, too?" Rebecca felt her face heating.
Haze wrinkled his forehead. "You told investigators someone came up to you at COPES before the blast and introduced himself. Used the name Nathaniel Trace."
"That's right." Rebecca met Haze's gray look. "He wanted to talk-I brushed him off."
"What you didn't tell us was that your spex tagged him as someone you'd met before."
Rebecca looked puzzled. "I was getting a lot of that at the convention. Is he someone of interest?"
"Not to the bombing investigation-not yet, at any rate. But we've done our duty and passed this material on to ATF. May I tell you a little about Mr. Trace?"
Rebecca nodded.
"We ID'd him based on fingerprints from the business card he gave you-"
"You went through my personal effects?"
"It was in the trash, in a bin right next to the spex-along with your ruined clothing. Using that, we confirmed the ID using facial tags from our Homeland Security airport database. He last entered the country under the name of Robert Sangstrom-a very ornate cover identity. Deep detail throughout our system. But that's not your problem, not yet, at any rate. He's a software engineer-something of a pudgy bright boy, according to his employment record. He enlisted in the National Guard, was called up to serve in Iraq-Signal Corps, no combat action-between 2006 and 2008. After that, he returned to the Middle East as a subcontractor for Talos Corporation. He spent a few years working for them in California, then in Jordan and Arabia Deserta. May have been injured in a rebel event in Arabia or Jordan-private evac and medical treatment. Here the trail goes blurry-we can't get into Talos, and nobody's talking. He could have had a legitimate reason for being at COPES, under his own name-but he wasn't registered either as Sangstrom or as Trace. None of the survivors we've interviewed knows anything about him."
"Sounds pretty conspiratorial," Rebecca said.
Haze nodded. "Talos was represented at COPES by three salesmen, but not by Trace. All three of the Talos reps departed the convention center just before the blast. Lucky for them. Has Trace tried to contact you since?"
"No. Do my spex tell you where I met him before?"
"That's lost. Can you remember?"
"I draw a blank." That much was true. This meeting was both unexpected and dangerous. Haze certainly had the power to arrest her, for any number of reasons, and hold her indefinitely-with or without the president's approval.
"Why would Trace want to talk with you? Did he already know about Quinn? Was he trying to warn you?"
"Warn me about what?"
"We got DNA from the business card. We spectro-analyzed Trace's skin oils for chemicals-drugs. Yours, too. Interesting results." Haze held out his hand, dangling the cracked, broken spex. "We're finished with these."
Rebecca took the spex and slipped them into her pocket. "That's it?"
"Both you and Trace tested positive for residues of a metabolite known to be associated with an experimental cancer drug called Seraprixoline. If you have cancer, that would show up in other traces… you don't. There's another use, off label, so to speak. It's been used on a limited basis to treat PTSD. Quinn has the same residues, by the way. I'm tracking down information that Talos might have funded this research."
"Oh," Rebecca said.
"Last night, there was a glitch on our Lynx network. Our agent was called away by a false emergency message. We lost track of you for ninety minutes. Then our system crashed. That whole ninety minutes is a void for us. When the system came back online, we heard something unusual. A little boy weeping. Weird, huh?"
"Very," Rebecca said.
Haze gave her a moment to say more, but she just watched him, as interested in his reaction as he was in hers.
"I'm hearing a lot about Talos these days," he said. "Their executive security division is a top contender for the president's private contract. I'm concerned your connections to Trace, and presumably to Talos, might compromise any service you perform for the president. I'm concerned you might be tainted, Ms. Rose."
"I appreciate your concern," Rebecca said. "Are you going to hold me or let me go? I need to make my report to the president-whenever she becomes available."
Haze shrugged. "Just a professional courtesy, actually, at this stage," he said. "Good luck getting through to her."
Baumann dropped her off at the EEOB. She was met by two Marine guards who escorted her in precise silence to her offices, opened the door, and let her in, to meet the startled faces of her assistants, lined up as if for formal inspection.
Judith stepped forward to meet Rebecca's onslaught-to defend the others.
The door closed behind Rebecca with a large, soft thump and a resonant click. For a moment, she wondering if they were all being held prisoner, but she could hear one of the guards marching off down the hall.
When she opened the door and peered out, like a little girl at school, only one Marine remained-and Baumann, who had come up from parking the limo.
He seemed very unhappy, listening to his earpiece, and wouldn't meet her eyes.
Rebecca shut the door and leaned back against it.
"What is going on?" Judith asked. "Everyone's jumpy as grasshoppers on a griddle."
"I wish I knew," Rebecca said. "It's like the whole town is getting ready for a punch in the gut. We've got work to do. Let's do it."
For the next few hours, she returned to the documents, struggling to put all she knew, or thought she knew, into context. She closed the door to her small office and leaned back in the chair, stretching her ankle… but waiting for a clear picture to emerge was like waiting for a lightning strike. The air was thick with potential.
She would not have taken this job had she known how utterly powerless she would be, just when things were coming to a head.
At four-thirty, Rebecca opened her door.
"You got a delivery," Judith said, stepping forward to give her a small disc in a gray plastic sleeve. "From an arrogant young man I've never met. He seems to have credentials to go anywhere he wants."
"Tom," Rebecca said.
"He said he was an assistant to somebody named Tom, who was elsewhere on important business," Judith said disapprovingly. "He did not follow protocol."
Tom, his assistants, and their solutions had been welcomed in places far more secure than the EEOB. "He doesn't have to-so he doesn't know how."
Rebecca took the disc back to her desk, closed the door again, and plugged it into a player, then slipped on headphones.
Tom had fully restored Quinn's digital voice file-less than five minutes.
As she listened, she felt her stomach knot, then threaten to turn. No wonder Plover had left Baltimore and tried to hide. She returned the disk to its sleeve and slipped it into her pocket. She hoped Tom had not listened to it. If he had, he might be in danger as well.
Plover's information had become absolutely toxic.
Rebecca emerged again and took Judith aside. "Call Thalia Ripper. You two know each other-she put you in my service to report on me, didn't she?"
Judith stared up in owlish resentment, then nodded.
"Call her at home if necessary. Tell her, if I don't have an appointment in an hour, directly with the president, I'm going to the Bureau with what I've learned. Or to Haze. Or both. Tell her I mean business. Tell her I've gone off my nut, if you have to-but get me that appointment."
"You can't breach the president's trust!" Judith said, appalled.
"Call."
Judith left wringing her hands-literally-and Rebecca used her cell to call Quinn's attorney. The secretary who took her call was already in shock, barely audible. "Mr. Blake is not available. I'll let him know you called," she said.
Rebecca listened to the secretary's quavering tone. "Something's wrong," she said. "What is it?"
The secretary abruptly hung up. Rebecca put her coat on and was almost out the door-causing Baumann to stir into action-when Judith shouted across the room, from her desk: "The vice president is dead! It's on the web! Quinn is dead!"
The Marine looked left out, young, confused.
"Jesus," Rebecca murmured. She turned to Baumann.
He tapped his earpiece and nodded. "It's true," he said, pale spots around his lips and the corners of his jaw. "Suicide."
A whirring sounded over Rebecca's head. She looked up and saw a security camera tracking someone at the end of the long hall.
Without thinking, she glanced in that direction.
A man in a tan raincoat stood there, hands thrust deep in outer pockets. Even from this distance, she could see that he had a scar on his right cheek-and a tousled head of gingery hair.
He nodded to her, then turned and stepped around the corner.
Baumann was still listening, waiting for instructions.
"I got to visit the ladies room," she told him, one eyebrow raised, feeling like a little girl about to play hooky. He grimaced and reached out but she was quick-amazingly quick, running down the hall.
After a couple of devious turns, she left the rear of the building and stood for a moment, watching cars hum past.
No sign of Baumann, poor man. There would no doubt be a swarm of agents out looking for her any minute, but she knew from long undercover and tracking experience how to evade, hide, blend in.
What now?
Go for a walk, she decided.
The Smoky
Two shining black Torq-Vees exited the Monarch Gate, trailing a tail of dust as they veered south along the direct road to the Smoky.
Fouad rode left middle passenger in the second vehicle as they ferried him back to his temporary quarters on Price's ranch. His driver was a silent Haitian, one of Colonel Sir's mercenaries, and behind him sat three escorts, all beefy Anglos with shaved heads and black T-shirts, their left arms sporting tats: grinning death's-heads wreathed by laurels over the words "Fallujah 2004."
The Anglos were soft-spoken, tightly controlled-supremely fit middle-aged men who had survived many bad times.
Fouad could not help but respect their demeanor, their polite say-nothing-but-say-it-pleasant banter. They were much too good at their jobs to talk sports scores. Instead, without seeming to pry into his prior life, they discussed geography.
They even played a game of Muslim surnames, at which they were experts.
They were excellent company.
Halfway to the compound-surrounded by acres of scrub-Fouad looked left through the thick armored glass and saw another blazing Texas sunset, the beginning of another protected, isolated night.
The prelude to another day of being briefed for his new role as translator to the Saudi royal family-another long day of meetings, protocol, and cultural prep, where everyone behaved as if he were Axel Price's new favorite, his most recent handpicked protégé.
It was too polite, all dumb show. Fouad suspected no one believed he was fooled by this ruse.
Thirteen agonizing days after his intrusion into the Talos infranet.
The great gathering on the Talos Campus would begin in less than twenty hours. Already, support and cargo planes were landing at Lion City's Judah P. Benjamin International Airport-delivering armored luxury vehicles for a few of the guests, and also, perhaps, more logistical support for whatever grand dance Price was choreographing. The world's deepest, most powerful shadow bankers, international hedge fund managers… the richest oleocrats from Russia, South America, Canada (no surprise-and perhaps without the knowledge of the Canadian government) and of course the Middle East.
And to top it off, a select list of congressional representatives and perhaps a couple of Senators.
It would have been perfect if he could access the information he carried, but of course it was coded deep in his bloodstream, and thus far, no one had given any hint that Price suspected as much.
They would have killed him then and there-and then cremated him.
The lead Torq-Vee stopped outside the main ranch house. The second vehicle paused for a quick inspection, then proceeded to the outlying bungalow. There, under the fiery sky, they dropped him at his front porch.
"I have tea and coffee, if you would like to join me," Fouad offered, smiling broadly, unctuously happy to be so respected, so highly elevated-as he knew these strong, experienced men would both appreciate and expect. Like him, they were far travelers in a dangerous and diverse world, but their prejudices lay even deeper-injected long ago by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Generations of ideas about the true rulers of Earth, the true favored of God.
The most affable of these tattooed men-Captain Rick Schmitz, U.S. Army, Ret.-thanked him for his offer. Quick, pleasant grin, hard yet friendly eyes.
"No thank you, Mr. Al-Husam. We've got more folks to escort, and we're told Mr. Price wants you up early tomorrow, refreshed and ready to go. The prince himself might be coming in early. Have a nice night."
The Torq-Vee rumbled off, its thick, armored tires shivering the sandy ground. Of course it could engage a sound suppression system that would almost magically control the tire angle and pitch and reduce that distinctive, warlike noise to a whisper. But that ate up fuel and reduced travel time, and why bother in this part of the world?
This was the heart of Price's empire. And perhaps the starting point for something new and unexpected.
Fouad had been thinking a great deal of history and economics and had put together several scenarios that were making more and more sense. He was mostly ignorant of what he carried, but that did not make him helpless.
His father, who had died in Egypt the year before, had a confessed habit of thinking "far too large for my pay grade. I hope you are smart enough to stay humble." Fouad of course would never be that smart-and his father had smiled as he spoke those words, more than dispensation to disobey-a sly suggestion that it might be essential.
His father had known too well that the USA was a fickle fatherland.
Fouad climbed the board steps to the screened porch, pushed his boots through the bristle brush mounted on the right-as he might have in many parts of the Middle East, also plagued by dust and on occasion mud-and ran his arm past the security sensor. The door lock snicked open.
He reached for the handle and then froze, hearing a noise that separated itself from the light chorus of alternating crickets that accompanied the growing shadows.
A distinctive slithering, gravelly sound.
He turned and looked down.
Two snakes-sidewinders, he thought-S-curled slowly along the pebbly margin of the path to the porch.
He had seen perhaps a dozen snakes since arriving in Texas, of course-mostly rattlesnakes, never sidewinders. That two might make their way into this compound was not surprising-perhaps they were shy natives. Price did not encourage the killing of Texas wildlife, but the locals outside often did target practice on hapless reptiles.
Heads raised, the two reptiles stared up at him with shining black eyes. The slithering stopped, the heads swayed in unison, and then a small musical tone sounded.
The heads dropped.
The bodies straightened.
They were not real.
Despite himself, Fouad smiled in boyish delight. Clever toys! Perhaps Price was paying for Disney-like robots to repopulate his prairies-an expensive hobby.
Just in case, he remained on the top step.
The snakes emitted two more tones, followed by a tinny voice. "Confirm ID by speaking your name," the voice instructed.
He bent on one knee, fascinated. "Al Smith," he said.
"No match. Confirm ID by speaking your name."
"Fouad Al-Husam," he said.
"Match. Repeat your name."
He repeated.
The snakes rolled over and two rectangular hatches, covered with scaled skin, popped open to reveal transparent tubes and a watchmaker's hint of automated innards.
"Thank you," the voice said. "Please remove our contents and perform the instructed functions, then replace the contents, close both hatches manually, and we will be on our way."
Still hunched, ready to spring back at a false move, Fouad stepped down and pinched out one of the tubes. It was a simple mechanism for drawing blood-hidden needle, ampoule.
He stared in astonishment at the implications of such a thing, such a wonder-and felt a chill, as if staring into his own grave.
They badly wanted his blood and the prochine memory it contained. They did not think he would live to escape Lion City.
Washington, D.C.
The Mall
Supernatural.
Fairy-tale pretty.
Golden sheets of drizzle fell away over the capital like a lady's discarded shawl. A rainbow drew a vivid crayon bridge above and to the north of the Washington monument. The monument itself stuck up from beyond the solemn, graceless stone blocks of the World War Two memorial like a needle waiting for the thumb of a careless giant.
Rebecca walked the path along the reflecting pool, sick to her stomach-and not with worry. Worry did not seem to be a problem.
Starting just this morning, food wasn't sitting well.
But colors were amazing. Smells overwhelmed. The sound of traffic from Constitution Avenue was almost painfully rich and detailed-extended in both high and low frequency. She could make out cars, buses, trucks, and with hear ears alone, follow them down the street as individual vehicles…
She had easily lost Baumann, getting lost in the tourist crowds. But after just a few minutes, she felt a desperate kind of exhaustion, all her senses overloaded.
And here came a motorcade, sirens blowing aside traffic. Not the president. Rebecca covered her ears and closed her eyes. She had to stay alert.
It seemed to be starting, just as Plover had warned.
A hand touched her shoulder and made her jump like a startled cat. She turned full circle, hands out in claws, hunched over, and stared at the blur of colors, no outlines, no sense, until something popped-his face.
Faces were important.
A man's face. Blocky, late thirties, ginger hair, startling green eyes. She saw it wrapped in a red circle and laughed at the visual joke. Her new brain had a sense of humor.
"I know you," she said, straightening. "How did you get into the Eisenhower building?"
Nathaniel held his finger to his lips. "We don't want to be conspicuous."
They drew cautious, sidewise inspection from several men and women and one escorted child, people out walking after the storm. Rebecca stared after the departing child, who stuck out her tongue.
"I'm a kid again, is that it?" Rebecca asked.
Nathaniel took her arm. "Laugh like we're old friends."
Rebecca laughed. "Aren't we? Old friends?"
"I'm flying level, but you're a kite," he observed. "Keep it tight. We've got things to discuss. Things you need to take back to your boss lady. And we don't have much time."
"Christ, I am a kite. I don't care. Even though Quinn's dead," Rebecca said. "He hanged himself."
"No, he didn't," Nathaniel said. "We don't get suicidal. Homicidal, maybe."
"Quinn said he was… His attorney… I didn't want to believe it. Things can't be that far gone."
"They've been going south for a long time now. We're right on the edge of losing it all-this country, our freedom, and for you and me-anybody who went through Mariposa-our lives."
"First, our sanity," Rebecca said.
"Dispensable," Trace said. "Across that border lies a whole new country. Believe me."
"Tell me-does it get better-more stable?"
"Yes and no. You're third stage. You and a few hundred others. You may not go through any of the big swings-I hope. Did Plover talk to you?"
"Yes."
"He's screwed things up royally for Axel Price."
"The vice president was key," Rebecca said.
Rebecca felt the loop start to coil and the knot to shrink. The visuals faded to a normal range of colors-not at all fairy-tale, just D.C. after an autumn shower. The sun was going down, she was cold, and she was walking beside a man who scared her.
"I'm still capable of being frightened," she said. "Quinn was beyond that. But he must have started out as a real a piece of work. I listened to his-"
"What do you know about Jones?"
She looked over Trace sharply, judging his facial muscles, his hands. "Nothing. Is Jones someone you worked with?"
"Jones is very close to our problem-perhaps he is our problem, but he could also be our ace in the hole."
"Is Jones a code name for a human?"
"No. A machine personality."
"You built it… him for Talos? Axel Price?"
"I worked for Mind Design. We helped program a key part of MSARC. And for a lot of money, we built in a couple of nasty backdoors. One for Price… and several that none of us knew about, devised by our owner and CEO, who did not trust Price. The extra entry points were supposed to shut down once the system went online… three weeks ago. They didn't. Jones controls all of them. Maybe he's one, maybe he's many, but the way MSARC works, he has access to nearly everything in the world hooked up to a computer."
"Jones is like a hydra. Many heads."
"Good enough," Nathaniel said. They strolled along the damp path. "But he's not just a computer. He's a self-initiated, evolutionary problem solver. A competer."
"Ah," Rebecca said. "It all makes sense."
"Does it?" Nathaniel asked.
"No."
Two joggers in their twenties-long white legs, pumping arms, hair pasted to their heads, damp and smiling-broke to pass around them. Rebecca smelled the female's spoor, rich as cinnamon. She looked at Trace, who sternly faced forward.
"Right," he said. "She's pregnant. Beautiful scent."
"Oh, my lord," Rebecca said.
Nathaniel looked up at the sky and took a deep, nasal breath. "Jones has had a nasty shock. If I could take a guess, he's very disturbed. He doesn't know what he's going to do next."
"He feels emotions?"
"Not like ordinary people. But he has attachments and a weird something like loyalty."
"Maybe we're turning into Jones," Rebecca said.
"Believe me, at our most variant, we're nothing like him-his emotions might be more those of an insect, or a lizard at the most complicated. But that seems to be changing."
"What's changed-changing, for you?"
"You've had self-defense training."
She watched him closely, as she would an unpredictable animal. "So?"
"You'll soon be ten times better-but you'll have to relearn how and when to move; otherwise you'll end up breaking every bone in your body. We lose some level of autonomic control, down to the cellular level-not all of it, just the nervous system, and only parts of that. Key parts. But let's get back to Jones. There's not much time."
"Okay. A hydra, right?"
"So you say."
"Right now, at least one of his heads is very upset-even angry. How odd," Rebecca said. "What does an angry computer… competer do to get even?" Then she thought of the obvious question, which had not occurred to her at first. Logic seemed to be working backwards. "What made Jones angry?"
"Murder," Nathaniel said. "Jones had seven programmers, including me. We called ourselves the Turing Seven. It was our job to help design him, build him, teach him, and debug him-that is, understand him. At least four of the Turing Seven are dead. Jones also had a master designer-our boss. We called him the Quiet Man. His real name was Chan Herbert. He's dead, too. Axel Price killed Jones's father."
Lion County
The boy was still asleep in the backseat. The long twilight had dwindled to a blue and gold haze on the straight horizon. Black low mountains to their right. Twilight the most dangerous time of day: eyes still adjusted for bright but dark settling in.
William wondered what Kapp and Curteze might have thought if they had seen him releasing the snakes into the scrub. Just ordinary agents-honorable young men caught up by the thrill of what they thought was a simple rescue, and a chance for a little payback. Payback played a big role in cop psychology.
Strangely, for William, sitting in the driver's seat both figuratively and literally, it mattered not at all. He was at the point in his career where simply having a career-and surviving the twists and turns of that career-meant a hell of a lot more than showing the world's tricky players who was really kicking butt and taking names.
Curteze, riding shotgun, was passing the time by engaging in showbiz trivia.
"All right, then. Where's the big guy in Lifeboat?"
William frowned, pretending to take his time. Then: "Newspaper ad. Fat guy in a suit-before and after."
Curteze murmured his irritation.
"Well?" William asked.
"Yeah, that's it. What about Psycho?"
"Through the window after Janet Leigh comes back to the real estate office. He's wearing a cowboy hat."
"Everyone knows that one. Rear Window?"
"Winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment."
"Have you seen them all?"
"Every single film, including the silents," William said. "He shows up twice in The Lodger."
"Fuck you," Curteze murmured, shrinking down in the seat. "Bet is off."
"We weren't betting," William reminded him.
"I saw Vertigo," Kapp said. "Hated it when the cop slid off the roof. Gave me nightmares as a kid."
"What about Jimmy Stewart?" Curteze asked. "Didn't you worry about him?"
"I knew he was going to make it. The movie wasn't even started yet."
"When I was a kid, I always told people I was born in Texas," William said. "Sounded braver than being born in California. Alamo and all that."
"John Wayne as Davy Crockett, Richard Widmark as Travis," Curteze said.
"Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett," William said. "Screaming out his lungs when the Mexicans kill him."
"I didn't understand that part," Kapp said.
They switched positions and Kapp swiftly ground the Yukon over the rough ranch road, swerving to avoid huge potholes that loomed at the last second.
Curteze took out a Thermos of coffee and tried to pour William a cup. Most of it slopped.
"U.S. 62 in a couple of miles," Curteze said, consulting his pocket GPS. "We're west of the Guadalupe Mountains. They got lots of tanks out here, it says-Army tanks?"
"Cattle tanks. Ponds, lakes," Kapp explained. "Give me some of that."
"Drive better and maybe I will."
They had to cross twenty miles north over the old grazing acreage, now left dry and dusty in the drought.
"Texas feels like a foreign country," William said.
"Might as well be a foreign country," Curteze said.
"It's what some of these folks have always wanted," Kapp said as he swung the wheel left. They lurched around a hole big enough to hide a cow. This road had seen better days. Still, there was enough traffic out here that a Yukon-especially a Yukon equipped with a citizen transponder-might not seem out of place.
Already, they could see the lights of El Paso on their left. They'd meet 62 and drive west. Their next obstacle might come at a Texas Ranger checkpoint this side of the New Mexico border. There had been some incidents between New Mexico state troopers and Texas Rangers in the last few months. Shots fired, patrolmen and troopers down. First shots of the new civil war, some called it. New Mexico was staying loyal to the federal government.
Large parts of Texas were on their own track, and nobody in Washington had the guts or the money to stop them.
Kapp pointed out the driver's side window and let out a chirpy whistle. "Got a bird," he said. "Flying low and matching speed. About the size of a crow."
William saw it and shook his head.
"Mexican standoff," Curteze said. "We don't have brown faces, and besides, the border boys don't report to the Rangers anymore."
"If it is a border security bird," William said. "Talos flies a lot of its own surveillance."
After five years of extreme drought, illegal immigration from Mexico had reached catastrophic proportions. South of the Rio Grande, two million people were starving and the U.S. could not afford much in the way of relief aid. The Chinese and Europeans were helping but it was not nearly enough. Under this pressure, Texas went its own way, but mostly tolerated Border Security and ICE.
Even so, the feds did not report to the state and certainly not to Talos's auxiliaries.
"We'll probably end up with bullets in the backs of our pointy little heads," Curteze said.
"Shh," William said, and nodded at the sleeping boy.
Kapp drove on into the darkness. The crow-size drone kept up with them until a mile before the highway, then buzzed off into the night.
Ahead, headlights flashed in pairs-straight on, not the distant lights of traffic. There were at least a dozen vehicles-most the size of pickup trucks-lined up between them and 62.
"We're going to have to park," William said. "Looks like they've laid down a blockade."
"How would they know where we are?" Curteze asked, keeping his voice low. "The birds can't tell us from a rancher-right?"
"This whole thing's a crapshoot," William said. "Half of our plan is they don't want to start a war. Maybe they do. Feds are certainly distracted right now-it might not even hit the national news."
Kapp lurched the truck left, away from the highway, off the ranch road and into the scrub.
The ride got rougher.
El Paso
Joe Mason shook hands with Jane Rowland and Tom Cantor and offered them chairs in his small office. Six-two, with reddish-brown skin, a square face, and thick black hair trimmed to a spiky mat, Mason's eyes were rimmed in red and hauled double loads of dark, weary bags. He was Assistant Field Office Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement-ICE.
"I wouldn't want you Washington types to think all Texans are traitors," he said. "We're the most loyal citizens in the USA. Don't forget it-not while you're in this office."
Steel-barred windows, ubiquitous awards and service plaques, wall-mounted rack of service and Lynx spex, neat desk with empty in-and-out baskets, defined both Mason and his workspace.
"Never crossed my mind," Jane Rowland said.
Tom Cantor sat beside her and leaned forward to scratch his shoulder.
Mason watched them both, wrinkle lines making not quite a grin at the corners of his lips-sussing out their relationship.
Just being around Tom made Jane nervous. His big child eyes gave no hint of either his intellect or his influence. Tom was utterly essential to dozens of clandestine operations. He had carte blanche entrance to so many agencies and yet never let on to anyone about his activities-even if those activities crossed paths.
Secret in one office, more secret still in another.
Not that he ever showed a hint of thinking he could lord it over her. No, ma'am. Ms. Jane Rowland-of the agency that had once split off from an agency that nobody officially acknowledged-was definitely the boss, and Tom Cantor was delighted to be in her employ.
Based on what she knew, that made her even more nervous.
"Airplanes," Tom said, as if that explained anything. His long, scraggly gray hair-wrapped around a high, balding forehead-made him look like a gentle-eyed Rasputin.
Mason finally allowed his smile to crack-and never was the word more apt. That expression looked as out of place as a wide split in an adobe pot. He waved one hand. "We've been sending warnings about Lion City and Talos for over a decade. Used to be no one in D.C. listened-too many oxen hitched to that particular wagon. Now some of these yokels have taken to plunking up our patrol vehicles-and of course they just love knocking down our birds, if they can see them. We've never tied incidents directly to Axel Price… but after a while, you'd be thick not to wonder."
Tom looked up, awaiting a useful point.
Mason took this bug-eyed presence with admirable tranquility. "We installed your transponder in one of our midsize, low-profile birds, with retrieval capability. We use them to pick up surveillance bots. She's out there following the county line, slow as a condor-transmitting to VRI right now."
Mason took down three spex, waved them over a small code plate, then handed two to Jane and Tom. The third set-curved dark lenses, very stylish-he slipped over his nose and ears with all the panache of an Elvis impersonator. "They've cut back half our personnel in the last six months. Our guys have families to support. I don't like to think some of them have gone over to Price, but it wouldn't shock me. We're down to about a quarter of the birds we flew two years ago. Still, if they're not too expensive, I'd love to put those snakes on our team…"
"Not a word," Jane reminded him.
"No, ma'am." Mason smiled. "But I hope you'll give us the next field test."
"Where's your pilot?"
"In Houston," Mason said. "We'll transfer to a local pilot shortly-one of our best. But I'm still wondering-why not just send in Hostage Rescue and pluck out your man?"
"Price would shoot him," Jane said.
Mason soberly absorbed this. "What are we heading for here-insurrection?"
Jane narrowed her eyes. "Your passengers will ping back to the code signal," she said. "That'll make them visible. They have to be picked up quickly."
"Curvalicious," Tom said.
Mason stretched out his arms, then grabbed his jaw with one hand and waggled it back and forth, working out tension. "Already in the program," he said. "Bird is turning over control… now. El Paso will fly the bird."
For the next three hours, Jane and Tom sat in Mason's office, watching the unmanned aerial vehicle's track of the west Texas landscape, drinking coffee.
Jane longed for white tea.
"We're covering their range," Mason said. "Unless they've run out of juice, they're still out there, squiggling around in the dirt and brush."
She pushed her spex down on her nose. "Discouraging," she said.
Mason was commendably patient, low-key-and good at politely keeping track of the one person in the room whose physical reactions seemed off.
Tom was fidgety. His face had worked its way through several phases of comic concentration, with occasional half aware glances at Mason, at Jane-only to smile and relapse into his own world, somewhere out between the stars.
Jane took note of Mason's unease. She touched Tom's arm.
"Tired," Tom said. "Anyone have an Ibuprofen?"
"I'm full of coffee," Jane said, pushing up from her leather-cushioned chair arms. "How about a break?"
"Right," Tom said.
"Down the hall and to the left," Mason said. "Leave the spex here or alarms will go off."
In the restroom, Jane washed her hands-soaped and rinsed three times-then joined Tom in the hall. Tom had not been to the bathroom since their flight. He might indeed be from another planet.
"You're making Mason nervous," she said. "He's like a dog in a room with a quail-and you're the quail."
Tom shook his head. "Can't help it," he said. "I'm being twitched."
"What's that mean?"
"Ever since day before yesterday, somebody or something has been tracking everything I do. My work-my secure networks. Cameras. Traffic lights. I keep thinking Gene Hackman is going to jump out and yell boo."
Jane folded her arms and looked at him askance.
"I've put two and two together," Tom said. "It ain't you, right?"
"No."
"Because I'm a pro, you need me-you wouldn't fuck with me or try to scare me. Could be anybody, then. But the more I think about it, the more I ask myself, why isn't he looking at you, too? And then I realize, he is. He must be. You're the show runner, so he's more interested in you than in me. He's tracking me-because I'm helping you."
"I'm the only one you're helping?"
"Of course not," Tom said. "But it seems tied together."
Jane stepped over to the barred window at the end of the hall. Three cameras peered down from shiny dark covers in the drop ceiling. "Gene Hackman. That's good. What makes you think it's a he?"
"Well, we ceded our constitutional rights to any number of federal agencies, including yours, back in the bad old days. So I could easily enough picture a bunch of young hackers lined up in a dark room, tickling joysticks and taking control of every security system in the world, at the 24/7, caffeine-strumming command of, say, Laura Linney. They could aim satellites, take control of foreign CCTV, station millions of agents on every street corner, ready to pull out in black Suburbans or hop on Vespas… Cool. But that's not what's happening."
"How do you know?"
Tom gave her a quizzical glance. "Because I'd help design and install anything like that. I'd be Laura Linney's main man."
"Oh," Jane said.
"I love severe." He winked, not at all salaciously.
"We need to get back, Tom," Jane said, uneasy with the way this conversation was going.
Tom's demeanor switched to abject worry. He leaned in toward Jane to whisper, "He leaves an analog signature. A sound recording. Right?"
"Does he?" Jane said.
"I'm not going to violate any confidences if I tell you what that signature is. Because you already know."
"Do tell."
"A crying child. More specifically, a sobbing little boy."
"I see," Jane said, her arm hairs rising.
"He's smart, perfectly capable of breaking into this system, this fly-by-wire setup, and screwing us over. What if he's working out of Talos, or more scary still, out of MSARC? We gave up so many secrets to get those loans-"
Jane slapped her hand over Tom's mouth and pushed him to the wall. "Shut up," she said.
"Sorry," he said, muffled.
She let him go.
"Nothing has ever been able to track me that way before," Tom said, pulling down his shirt and trying to look dignified. "I'm good, I travel light. I'm mostly invisible. What if he means us harm? You should have told me what you knew eighteen hours ago."
Tom's hound-dog eyes turned critical.
Jane followed him back into Mason's office, feeling not just unease now but anger-because she no longer knew what was secure and what was not, and that meant she was vulnerable, and that meant all her colleagues-including Tom Cantor-knew she was vulnerable.
In their line of work, that perception was killer.
The Border Security drone flew over the southern extent of its range when it encountered Talos craft operating at the same altitude.
Mason spoke in a tense undertone to his remote pilot, then turned back to Jane and Tom. "We've been through this sort of standoff before. We've never taken direct fire from their birds-only from the ground, and only if we're near the Talos campus. Some of our pilots enjoy hot-dogging, but I just made sure we don't provoke a response. Don't want them thinking we're tracking any sort of unusual target. They can have armed vehicles out in that range within half an hour. We're back on visual now."
Jane and Tom put on their spex and looked out over the dark early morning landscape. The cameras switched to FLIR-Forward Looking Infrared-then to infrared enhanced by computers and overlaid with satellite imagery.
Cross-hairs centered to a small circle.
The circle zoomed.
"Got something moving," Mason said. "Is that your snake?"
"Wow," Tom said.
"That's it. Only one," Jane said, disappointed.
The pilot dropped the drone quickly-too quickly, it seemed, as the black, green-speckled desert suddenly swooped up and the horizon shifted to a high line.
The display now changed to satellite side-scan radar, combined with the drone's IR perspective-additional overlays marking roll, pitch, and altitude.
The drone circled over the edge of the Talos campus.
"Maybe it got lost," Mason said.
The drone sideslipped into a steep helix.
Jane gripped the chair arm.
"Steady," Mason whispered.
The drone straightened as its descent smoothed and leveled at a hundred feet. One more veer east and it raised its nose and dropped spindly gear, then jounced and lofted twice before rolling to a stop.
The cross-hairs squared and the camera jogged left and right, then zoomed on a rounded W of shadowy curves-just a hint of motion in the detectors.
One snake.
"Send the signal," Jane said.
The drone lowered on its gear and somewhere behind them, in virtual sound, they heard whirring. The view shifted to the dropping ramp.
With a faint rustle, the snake maneuvered around a shrub, approached the ramp, and cautiously wormed into the craft's hold.
The ramp swung shut.
"Amazing," Mason said.
Jane settled back in her chair, chin almost on her chest. "No way of knowing whether it got what it came for," she said.
The pilot's voice announced takeoff. "I've got three Talos craft within a kilometer radius," he said. "Looks like they're taking an interest."
The drone was quickly airborne.
"Beeline home," Mason instructed. "Do not outmaneuver, do not engage."
"Up and away. Precious cargo-one, repeat, one snake," the pilot said. "We'll have it delivered in forty minutes."
"We always get our snake," Mason said, and glanced at Jane.
"Our team is bringing in the necessary equipment," Jane said. "We'll do the rest in the hangar-by ourselves, please. No observers, no assistance."
Tom took off his spex, shook his head with a sigh, and slumped in his chair. He was instantly asleep. His real duties began when the snake was returned.
If it carried what they were hoping for.
And failing that, if they couldn't save Fouad Al-Husam.
The Smoky
After the robot snakes, the night passed without further incident.
Fouad ate a small late snack of crackers and hummus and sardines, then turned on the television and watched a movie about young cowboys. Absorbing yet also disturbing that in a Western-so much about chivalry and honor-young men should be taught to kill and exact cruel vengeance as a necessary rite of passage.
Of course, he had no excuses before Allah. He had killed and likely would kill again.
He switched off the television, then spread his small threadbare rug and prayed salatu'l isha' but did not ask for advice or guidance, perhaps because it seemed his fate was already decided, and it was not polite to be pushy and impatient.
Fouad went to bed and slept soundly.
The soft noises of boots in his room brought him half awake, and a firm shove on his shoulder an instant later finished the job.
It was six in the morning, still dark outside.
Broad shoulders and a bullet head on a thick neck.
"Mr. Price requests your help," Schmitz said. "Fifteen minutes."
This time, they met in the office where Price received foreign guests. The room was palatial-a high-beamed ceiling arching over two thousand square feet of pearlescent slate tile, surrounding a circle of rustic wood floor on which Price's stainless steel desk sat, backed by great sliding windows that overlooked more acres of tallgrass prairie.
Price was signing papers as Fouad entered. The secretary lingered. Price waved her off.
"Thank you for coming, Fouad."
Fouad nodded but Price wasn't paying attention. The window drew his eyes out to peace and greenness: a controlled, secure domain, like the wilderness of myth.
"I'm embarrassed to have to talk about this," Price said. "A crack team of men has hijacked a high-profile prisoner from our Lion County lockup. So far, they've evaded capture, but we'll have them soon, and then I'm going to face a difficult dilemma." Price swung around. Fouad observed that he was genuinely angry but keeping himself in check. "Looks like the feds have come for Little Jamey Trues. Do you know anything about this?"
"No sir," Fouad said.
Price examined him closely, then glanced at his desktop, where a flat screen showed a schematic of a human figure-red, yellow, and blue blotches spread around limbs, face, hands. Price looked back at the windows. "I have four sons and three daughters. You?"
"No children," Fouad said.
"I can't imagine losing a son. You'd think FBI would teach its kids gun safety."
"A tragedy."
"Murder, actually." Price faced him, eyes mild but somehow, with that cold little smile, even more dangerous. "I also can't imagine having a son strapped down on a couch while a bunch of rednecks pump poison into his veins. I'd rather take him out and shoot him myself. Patria potesta, the Romans called it. Power of the patriarch. Isn't that what should have happened, Mr. Al-Husam? Taking care of our own messes?"
"It is not my place to comment, sir."
"Asymmetric warfare group has done excellent work getting our Haitian boys ready. No small thanks to you and your language courses. We'll be moving about two thousand of them to Arabia Deserta, into Jiddah and Riyadh, in three or four days. They'll join with crack team of Sunni officers… getting ready to subvert Shia guerrilla groups and pass power to a provisional Baathist government. Secular little fascists. Just love Adolf. Mind you, it's all with the covert blessing of key folks in the CIA and the State Department. How's that for irony?"
"Impressive," Fouad said.
"And for that, Talos will get a half percent of gross oil revenues coming out of the Persian Gulf for two years. A tidy bit of cash, even with oil futures dropping. Crazy old world, Fouad. In thirty years, the Middle East might not stack up to a hill of beans, but we'll have had our moment in the sun, we'll get out, and there'll be someplace else that needs fixing."
"No doubt," Fouad said.
"But this Little Jamey mess… I think the old FBI is looking for its own brand of justice. Don't you?"
Fouad said nothing. If Price was speaking the truth, then the complications could be almost too devious to imagine.
Price chuckled. "My God, Fouad, what an expression. You're shut tighter than a virgin's legs. Doesn't anything upset you or amuse you?"
"I am not paid to be amused," Fouad said.
"Well, if either of us were drinking men, I'd say we both need a snort of good Scotch. But we don't have that luxury, do we?"
"No sir."
"Ever thought of building some sort of foundation, having a family? I find strength in my wife and kids. Keeps me humble."
"Do you wish me to be humble?"
Price laughed. "No. But I won't be responsible to Allah for all your sins."
"Just the ones you are paying for," Fouad said.
Price chuckled, then assumed a somber cast, eyes glittering. "Tell Allah not to forget that."
"He is ever present and listens to the heart," Fouad said.
"I think him and my Jesus would actually get along pretty well," Price said. "Don't you?"
"I have no doubt, sir."
"This prisoner hijacking-it's a well-planned operation, as far as it's gone. Whoever carried it off certainly had help from inside the Texas DOC-and from Washington. You used to be FBI. You're the most prominent former agent on our payroll. Some of my security people are pointing fingers. They say you're the inside man.
"But my equipment-such as it is-shows you're telling me the truth. Still, if you have any insight-if you've heard anything, even rumors-I'd appreciate it if you'd pass it along. Could take some heat off the both of us. The mayor's screaming bloody murder, and Huntsville ain't happy, either."
Fouad stepped forward. "I know nothing of this, but I doubt that active-duty agents are involved."
"Well, that's not the sentiment around here." Price shook his head as if dismissing all that as beneath their notice. "We know they're using a truck with a falsified rancher RFID. We know they'll try to cross into New Mexico. They'll realize that route is blocked while they're still a little south of highway 62.
"If you have any way to contact these men-tell them we'll cut them some slack if they turn their prisoner over now. We'll ship them out of Texas, no rough stuff and no questions asked. But we keep Little Jamey, of course."
Another couple of seconds. The sound of grass whispering beneath the office windows.
"If this isn't why you're here, then I've got a real puzzle, my friend," Price said. "I've also got my instincts. I'm going to come down on one side or another, right here. Right now." He lifted his finger, dropped it to the left, then down. "One way or another, you're not being square with me. I just want to know why. I've had programmer trouble recently. Worse, I got some sort of gremlin burrowing into my infranet, but that might not be you-probably isn't, in fact, since a lot of it seems to come from outside. Very clever. Little boy sobbing. I'm thinking Spider/Argus-they do that sort of thing, don't they?"
Fouad lowered his gaze to the desk, the carpet.
Price looked over the display. "Bingo. No ice cups this time. Lots riding on our upcoming meeting. If you're after data-my experts aren't sure where you're hiding it. We've swept your quarters, it's not on your Talos body chips, and you don't have any others.
"You know I could kill you right here, but… you might have some other use, down the road a ways. Tomorrow, maybe. And I still might have something to learn from you. Maybe I can solve two problems at once. I like that approach."
Fouad knew better than to speak. Any protest or defense would be meaningless. It might be best if he just moved in and killed Price here and now. But he would get no closer than a few meters and then he would die, and there would be no point.
Price smiled, observing on his screen the play of Fouad's emotions. "Good boy. You're tensing in all the right places. You could be a bargaining chip if nothing else. Hell, even Little Jamey might have his use. Do we understand each other?"
"Not in the least," Fouad said.
"Get back to your bungalow."
Fouad was about to leave but Price held up his hand, an imperious gesture, accompanied by a dip of his chin and an undershot gaze.
His eyes were steely.
"Before you go, my technicians are going to strip out your chips. All of them. Won't take more than a few minutes. You can't go anywhere around here without them. As for the hijackers, if they don't hand themselves over to my people, the locals will find them. They have no love for federals."
Lion County
The Tahoe had come to a halt on the edge of an irrigation ditch with no water in it.
Water was scarce out here. The "tanks" were mostly empty and of course the cattle were long gone. This was a land of flyaway dirt and dusty, half idled oil wells and gray scrub-and Mexicans flowing north, heading for anywhere but Mexico.
William was thinking about how those Mexicans could be useful.
"Something's jamming the grid," he said. "I'm not even getting GPS."
"That's illegal as hell," Curteze said.
"Let's sue Mr. Price, why don't we?" Kapp said. "What are they waiting for? We're sitting ducks. They know where we are, don't they?"
Curteze snorted. "What the hell was any of us thinking? We're out here upholding the honor of an agency that no longer exists, breaking every known law, in the middle of a state that's pretty much been abandoned by a government that's spent itself dry twice over. We're pissing off a guy who supplies decent paychecks to ninety thousand locals. Christ, you'd think we'd have better things to do."
"Shut it," Kapp said.
The boy was awake now and sitting up in the backseat, cradling his arm. William looked in the rearview mirror and saw his eyes gleaming like a trapped animal's-fright and trauma catching up.
None of them had eaten in many hours.
"Where are all the little birds?" Kapp asked, rubbing his nose, trying to keep from picking it. Their noses were dry and crusted, no matter that it was night and they were sucking down bottled water at every opportunity.
"They don't need them. They know right where we are," William said. "They're waiting to assemble a posse."
Curteze looked up at the headliner and made a face. "Posse," he said.
"They're coming to take me back?" the boy asked, and his hand pinched the seat in front of him.
"Not if we have anything to say about it," William said.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was supposed to have been informed by now of the next step-another chance to locate and retrieve Nabokov. But nothing had worked as planned.
Vengeance is mine, saith Axel Price and all of his rich cronies. Do unto us-or let it be perceived that you do unto us-and we will give you a fair trial and then ship you to the Walls Unit in Huntsville.
The boy's defense had been mounted by Justice Department attorneys, the very finest, but prosecutors-and not used to playing criminal defense, certainly not used to playing that game as currently allowed in the Lone Star state.
Little Jamey's attorneys had been threatened multiple times during the trial. One had his motel room firebombed by young men in pickup trucks, never identified, much less apprehended.
The judge had ruled against nearly all of the defense motions; she owed her seat to popular vote and the people owed their livelihoods to Axel Price, and she wasn't about to contradict his wishes, expressed or intuited.
The boy never had a chance.
Right now, Texas felt even more exotic than Mecca.
"Time for plan B," William said.
"Great," Kapp said "That's El Paso over there. We should have hit the state line hours ago. We should be having burgers and a beer in New Mexico."
"I can't go back," the boy said. "You guys know what that would mean." Suddenly he sounded very grown-up. "My father visited me a month ago. He said this was the worst thing he could possibly imagine-that they were going to execute his son for an accidental shooting. He said it was vengeance and not justice."
The agents in the truck watched the darkness. Low clouds had moved in and reflected some of the light from El Paso. Otherwise it was pitch-black. The truck still made a decent heat signature, of course. High-altitude birds could target them at any time.
Price had Hellfires on his drones, just like the military. Why were they still alive?
Because blasting federal agents to little bits-even agents whose agency didn't have a name any more-might look bad even for Price. No need to start a range war out here-or a new civil war. More precision action was called for-finesse, caution; hence, the delay.
Or Price was playing a crafty game of checkers, waiting to scoop them up when he could make two jumps at once.
Just as he had scheduled Little Jamey's execution to impress his gathering allies. And what did that reveal about his allies?
Calling them jackals might impugn the jackals.
"We're turning around," William said, gripping the wheel. "They know where we are, but they haven't got their act together yet. So let's drive back to Lion City."
Curteze shook his head low and wide like a cow. He groaned, then kicked at the door until the moment passed.
"That was good," Kapp said.
"Fuck you."
"There's a big meet under way," William said. "They're flying in politicians and bankers and oil sheikhs and corporate execs from around the world. They've hired hundreds of cars and trucks to transport all their guests from the airport to deluxe accommodations on the campus and at Price's ranch. The sooner we get lost in that crowd the better. They don't dare take us down in public-bad for business."
"You know too much, Agent Griffin," Kapp said, in a sinister Asiatic voice. "Who's playing who here?" He opened the door and got out. "I'm the speed demon on these rough roads. You drive like a pussy. Let's swap again and get the fuck out of here."
William swung down from the driver's seat. "Wait a sec." He went to the back and brought out a small bag.
"What the fuck is that?" Curteze asked, stretching.
"An earth-current transceiver," William said. "Interference won't block its signal-I think."
"That's not in our plan," Kapp said. "Where'd you get this shit? Who's out there listening?"
"There's a listening station outside Lion City, and supposedly there's another near El Paso. But we're way outside the normal range. Last chance." William kneeled and plunged the stake into the soil, using a small hammer to pound it deeper.
Then he hooked the battery to the amplifier and the telephone handset.
William's finger started clicking. After a couple of minutes, the answer came back in Morse. Tongue poking from between his dry lips, he penciled the words on a notepad from his shirt pocket, then read them back.
Surprise-Kunsler had been doing some last-minute thinking. Maybe the snakes hadn't made it to their target.
He kept the handset to his ear as he said to Curteze and Kapp, "I'm going back to the airport. But you're not. Your best chance is to walk. We're as close to El Paso as we're going to get. You'll just be a couple of heat blips-and the border is crawling with those. You'll blend in with the Mexicans."
"You're shitting me!" Curteze said.
William frowned-no more clicks but a tinny, scratchy voice. He waved his hand for silence.
"Highway too dangerous. Evade and hide. Ditch your vehicle. Wait outside Lion City airport. Then push through. I think you'll know when-still being arranged. That's the best chance. We're coming in. Be swift, be patient. And be there…"
The transmission faded into static, then the dots and dashes resumed, signaling an end to the message.
He barely recognized Kunsler's voice.
Nothing about Nabokov-nothing at all.
"We're out of options," William said.
Kapp was dismayed. "Jesus, you want us to walk in the dark?"
William flung up his hand at the sky glow. "There are the lights."
"That's nuts-"
His last words.
A bullet sang out with a melon-splitting thunk and the top of his head blew out over the truck. He dropped and piled up on the dirt, legs out, arms splayed, like a puppet with cut strings. He did not even jerk.
The boy cried out and Curteze held him down, out of the line of fire.
"Inside!" William shouted. He had already dropped the handset and climbed back into the truck to start the engine. As Curteze pushed Jamey into the backseat and then jumped on top of him, William notched the truck into grinding reverse, then spun the wheel, almost toppling the Tahoe as they bounced through a deep rut.
The cabin pitched and slammed right and left.
William continued the circle. Best to make a lot of dust. No looking back. Kapp was gone, the airport was miles off, and that likely meant they would still die-and then be erased from West Texas, the U.S. of A., this hard old world-never to be seen by anyone again.
Maybe Nabokov was already dead.
Goddamn, he had never thought Price would take it this far.
The war was on.
The White House
The president's chief of staff entered the room and sat at the long table across from Alicia Kunsler and beside Daniel Haze.
Rebecca had not met him before. He was a short, unimposing man with small, watchful eyes, pale skin, and a fleshy lower lip. He wore a toupee, she noticed-everyone noticed, it was a standing joke with the press corps. Nevertheless, he had a quiet confidence that showed he did not much care what people thought, or how he looked-though his suit was tailored and his soft reddish-brown loafers fit the current Beltway style-or established it.
Thalia Ripper stood by his side, laying out a series of zip pages. He looked down at them, then said, "Here's all that we've been given-all that's been presented. The president is listening to the Quinn sound file. Because Talos Corporation has been implicated in illegal and possibly treasonous activities, I've taken the precaution of removing their executive protection team and reinstating the Secret Service. Director Haze joins us for that and other reasons. Daniel, what can you tell us about Quinn's death?"
"Cumberland is keeping us out," Haze said. "Justice is pushing hard, but it's possible even some of their people don't want to know the truth. There's a lot of tendrils in law enforcement that lead straight back to Talos."
"Suicide?" the chief of staff asked.
Haze shook his head once, dubious. "He was supposed to be on suicide watch. It's a major cock up. People all over are hiring counsel and updating their résumés."
The chief of staff allowed himself a tired grimace. "Poor bastard. What about Mr. Price?"
Kunsler removed her spex to concentrate on the people in the room. "We await the opportunity to give our report directly to the president," she said.
The chief of staff touched his earpiece and stood abruptly. "Yes, Madam President," he said. "All of us. I understand. We're on our way."
Ripper gathered up the zip pages and followed as he led them through the door. In the windowed hallway outside, Ripper spoke in low tones to the tightly assembled group. "What you're about to see must be kept strictly confidential. The president places her utmost trust in you."
Kunsler glanced at Rebecca, a peculiar look that was at once apprehensive and somehow relieved, as if she were about to share a huge burden.
"We'll be making an announcement in two days… if we have that long," Ripper concluded, before they entered the residence. She dropped her gaze to the floor and squared her shoulders as she opened the door to the president's bedroom.
From the opening wafted unmistakable smells of soap, antiseptic, medicine-a sickroom.
The heat struck them next-in the nineties and humid.
One by one, the chief of staff ushered them through the door, starting with Rebecca.
President Larsen looked up from a four-poster piled high with comforters and blankets. Her cheeks had sunk almost to the bone and the skin on her arms and clavicle appeared parchment-thin. Her veins and arteries stood out like a medical diagram.
"Sorry to put this off for so long," she said, and invited Rebecca closer. The president's labored breath was like a hot tropic breeze.
The change was startling-she looked more dead than alive.
Lion County
Little Jamey hadn't said a word since Kapp had been killed. The truck roared and bounced west along the old frontage road, followed by at least three surveillance birds-and probably soon to be tracked by larger craft, old Reapers or sleek new Condors, equipped with Hellfire missiles or worse.
William swung the truck hard left, then slammed it to a grinding halt in the middle of brush. Dust swirled.
He cleared his throat. "Best to get out here. Where I'm going, you don't want to follow."
Curteze had bitten his tongue on the last big bounce. Blood stained his lower lip. His voice was thick. "We need hostage rescue. They can't just abandon us out here. Someone has to stick their necks out and extract us."
"That isn't going to happen," William said. "We knew this was going to be tough going in."
Curteze glared out the window. "We were doing this for the old FBI. No joke. They owe us."
Dawn was five hours away. No extraction. No HRT. They both knew it.
"Thanks, guys," Jamey said from the backseat. His eyes were puffy, exhausted. "We still got some water, right? I can make El Paso easy."
"They'll track us down and blow us to bits!" Curteze shouted.
"The desert is full of targets-hundreds every day coming north-men, women, children," William said. "They can't track them all. Your best chance begins right here."
Jamey opened his door and got out, then walked around the Tahoe and tapped William's side window. William rolled it down.
"Hell of a ride," the boy said, and they shook hands.
Curteze looked between Jamey and William.
"You're going back to the airport?"
William nodded.
"Right now, the way this shit's going down, they don't care-they won't hesitate to blow you right off the road."
"You're probably right," William said.
Curteze swore and pushed open his door, half falling, half jumping out. He straightened and slammed the door shut. He still had some of Kapp's blood and brains on his sleeve and shoulder.
"Thanks for nothing," he said to William. "Come on, kid," he said to Jamey.
They slunk off through the brush, crouched low.
William swung the Tahoe back around, raising another big cloud of dust. That would look like panic, but also hide the pair in the brush for a few minutes, at least. Maybe the drone trackers would keep their focus on the truck.
Only idiots would jump out in the middle of nowhere.
On one deep bounce, William's head almost hit the roof of the cab. The headliner pressed his hair. Angrily, he swerved right and found the access road the GPS had said was there, back when it was still working: part gravel, part patched asphalt.
A single small car honked and veered into the shoulder as he nearly ran it down.
He roared through a dusty suburb, low flat houses on either side, parked Diesel semis surrounded by weeds. This was within a mile of where he had started. And here, it seemed a good time to talk to himself, just to keep up the illusion of company.
"I'll head to the airport and hope for the best. Planes coming in at all hours. Limos going 24/7," he said. "They won't take that risk."
To this, he answered, "Hell, they'd gladly blow me up in front of everybody, take me out with a pinpoint blast-call it a tactical demonstration.
"Two miles from the airport. There's the highway."
The highway was almost deserted. No line of cars blocked his path. Somehow, he had evaded Price's posse-or the posse had split up, pulled back, not to alarm the incoming guests. A bunch of good ol' boys in pickup trucks, standing up with assault rifles locked and loaded…
Through the dusty windshield, he saw a glint in the high sunlight of the coming dawn: a big drone at about a thousand feet, doing aerobatic loops.
"Fucking angel of death," he said.
William slowed and then gunned the truck up the frontage road. The road joined with an onramp to the highway. There were headlights ahead; at this hour, it had to be either ranch trucks or traffic from the Lion City airport.
A big black limo passed on his left.
He grunted. "An audience," he said, and wiped his mouth. Two more limos and a phalanx of eight or nine shiny black SUVs swooped by.
William could no longer see the high glint. He easily imagined the drone stooping like a hawk, then flinched and almost swerved off the road as a midsize jet roared overhead: a beautiful Citation making its final approach. It sported Arabic markings. The Texans and Saudis had always had a lot in common: deserts, guts, tribes, and oil.
Now he was passing pretty thick traffic on the other side of the four-lane road. Everyone arriving, no one leaving. If he stayed in the left hand lane, near the oncoming limos, someone would have to be very confident in their targeting skills-or very stupid-to try to take him out.
The truck or its debris-a flying tire or chunk of cab, even a body, William could see that clearly enough-could easily vault the divide and go through the windshield of a visiting prince in exile.
The Tahoe was much quieter on the highway. The smooth ride was unnerving. William could imagine all sorts of noises.
He turned his head left and stiffened up like a rail. "Well, looky who's here," he said. The drone was less than twenty feet to his right, flaps down, swinging like a huge seagull to keep pace. "Cannon, 20 mil, front turret mount," he added, as if admiring the features of a good-looking sports car. "And-yep-two Hellfires." He was half drunk with fear. "What idiot sold these cowboys tactical weapons?"
The highway up ahead was almost empty.
A lag in the airport traffic.
The drone dropped back, long wings wagging as if in warning.
William hunched over. He knew what was coming. These guys were happy to put on a show. He saw a spark in his rearview mirror, braked the Tahoe hard, skidding and fishtailing on the road, then threw open his door and jumped out-at thirty miles an hour. He tried to roll like a pro but got caught up in a painful rubber tangle of arms and legs.
He ended up on his back.
The Tahoe cruised on for a hundred feet, driver's door swinging, and was swiftly intersected by a brilliant streak corkscrewing from the rear.
The truck flew up a column of fire like some awful flaming insect, then fell back spinning and burning, lighting up the highway and the west Texas landscape.
The White House
"The bullets killed me after all," the president said, motioning for Rebecca to take the chair beside her heavily blanketed bed. "Have you ever heard of something called a synthobe?"
"I have," Rebecca said.
"Do tell."
The chief of staff and Thalia Ripper stared in undisguised shock at their president. Alicia Kunsler, Daniel Haze, an Air Force colonel, and several others Rebecca did not know waited at the back of the bedroom like guilty children, unable to decide what to do with themselves, other than numbly watch.
"Little factories," Rebecca said. "They were used in the soft drink canisters that blew up the Los Angeles Convention Center. Like bacteria, only more efficient at doing one thing."
"Well, in me, they're efficient at making a poison," Larsen said. "Synthobes were in the bullets that didn't quite kill me. They're destroying my connective tissue, strand by strand. First I'll freeze up like I'm made of stone. My lungs will seize. Then my heart will stop. I've got a day, maybe two. My doctors tell me there's nothing they can do. I've listened to Quinn's confession-'Two-step assassination,' he calls it. He knew about it more than a year ago." She looked up, still hoping it was all a nightmare. "Is it really Eddie on the file, Thalia?"
"That's been confirmed, Madam President," Ripper said.
"He wanted to be president-but my God, what would there be left to be president of? First blow-shooting me-knocks the markets down a peg. Second blow-timed with a series of other strikes… my unexpected death, after an apparent recovery. Like clockwork. And then everything will go to hell. All at the same hour, in the same news cycle-with MSARC looking over the world's shoulder. Do you know what else Price has arranged for?"
"We're receiving that data now," Alicia Kunsler said. "Jane Rowland is in Texas sending it back to us."
"And where is she getting it?"
"From the blood of an agent, smuggled out in a snake," Kunsler said.
Larsen's barking laugh turned into a fit of coughing. "Give me the fairy-tale stuff slowly, please, and warn me when it's coming," she said, half strangled. The chief of staff handed her the first of the zip pages. She read it with jerky motions. "We do get clever," she said, her chest still heaving, then took a puff from an inhaler and looked around the room. "One guess who's behind all this."
Her eyes had difficulty tracking both the zip paper and the people around her. Her vision was going.
"No need to guess," Kunsler said, and touched her earpiece. "MSARC has definitely been compromised."
"Devil's bargain from the beginning," the chief of staff said.
The president weakly waved her hand as if shooing flies.
Kunsler synopsized. "Price will in effect throw a switch from his office-and instantly control more than a third of America, through his proxies: non-nationals, banks, hedge funds in other countries."
"Is that all it takes?" Larsen asked.
"MSARC's judgment will be triggered by assassination and sabotage," Kunsler continued. "Compromised security, military personnel and police officers-"
An aide entered the room with a portable display pad and placed it delicately on the president's lap. "She can read it for herself," she said in a reverent whisper.
"Talk normal. I'm not dead, for Christ's sake-not yet," Larsen growled, and held the display closer. "Price has stationed snipers around key stations on the power grid, with deep-steel penetrating rounds, ready to take out custom-made transformer components that will require months to replace… Total power collapse across North America."
The president handed the display to her Chief of Staff. He took up the report as if joining in the family reading of a last will and testament.
"We'll be back in the dark ages. Then-the coup de grâce. MSARC will declare the U.S. financial situation dire and call back all our loans, the flexible bonds, cancel contingent purchase of bonds… all of it, America insolvent, incapable of paying its bills internally or externally, triggering a massive retreat from American investment-whatever's left by then. He'll declare most of the south financially and politically independent-from Kentucky and Tennessee down to Louisiana and Florida-whether the states agree or not. He's stockpiled the components necessary to repair the power grid-on a state-by-state basis. States that opt in get back their power sooner-days, not months-and become part of Price's governing coalition."
She controlled another fit of coughing, then took a glass of water from Ripper. "Singapore, Amman, Beijing, Dubai, Qatar and the Saudis in exile will offer to extend financial aid and give Price the mandate to repair the situation. He'll have autonomy. And that will be the end of the United States of America. Pretty sweet, huh?"
The chief of staff balled his hands into fists. "They'll rejoice. They'll dance around a bonfire of civil rights and try Abe Lincoln for war crimes."
Rebecca listened in growing shock. The room seemed to be getting larger-more detail, harder to process. She blinked and wiped her eyes. Difficult to concentrate with so much to see. Her eyes hurt.
"My options are few and desperate," the president said, leaning forward. Ripper removed her pillows and plumped them. "We can't protect everything-we can't move that many troops fast enough, and in some states, the National Guard has already declared independence from federal rule. They answer only to sympathetic governors. Poor Governor Kinchley in Idaho-looks like she's first on their takedown list. The military will refuse to conduct any sort of preemptive strike within sovereign U.S. territory. Some of the Joint Chiefs sympathize with Price. All but one or two of the rest treat me with contempt. The generals know that a third of the troops would go over to Price. Maybe more. It doesn't help that we're months behind on payroll."
"What can we do, Madame President?" Kunsler asked.
"Tell us what's happening in Texas," Larsen said.
"They're gathering in Lion City," Kunsler said, "getting ready to throw one big party-all the would-be rulers of the world. The financiers, the politicians, the scientists and engineers… state's rights fanatics and amoral opportunists and every shade in between. Protected by Price's most loyal soldiers, as well as cadres of mercenaries from Haiti. They're practically daring us to drop a nuke on them."
The president crossed her arms over her knees for support, to relieve the pain in her stiffening back. "I refuse to be the first president to nuke Texas. I still have one or two friends down there. Options?"
Kunsler and Haze seemed to share something unknown to the others in the room. "Madam President," Kunsler said, "the Bureau has been working with loyal elements in the intelligence community and the military to keep track of the situation both in Texas and Geneva-a clandestine surveillance program centered on MSARC. We began contingency planning three years ago, when the loan documents were signed-by you-in secret."
"Congress and I had no choice," Larsen said. "We were heading over a deficit cliff."
"A general at Bolling Air Force base has offered a possible solution," the chief of staff said, "ready to deploy-on your express command, and upon a presidential finding of gross civilian insurrection. These officers are his representatives."
"What is this solution?"
The colonel stepped forward. "Generally speaking, less than lethal, but terribly inconvenient for any high-tech operation-and very clever."
"I really hate clever," the president murmured.
"Given the terrain and the technological savvy of Talos-and their fanatic devotion to surveillance and security-our device can incapacitate a high percentage of their personnel. And destroy virtually all electronic capability within the affected area."
"You'd shut down their computers," Kunsler said.
"Damned near everything that runs on chips and wires," the colonel said, and handed the chief of staff another zip page, which he passed to the president.
From her chair beside the bed, Rebecca caught a glimpse of what looked like flaming donuts.
"Tesla bombs," the president murmured. "Jerichos. Brights. Where do they get these names?"
"Technically known as TEMPs, Tactical Electromagnetic Pulse," the colonel said.
The president nodded when she was finished. The colonel retrieved the zip pages and wiped them by breaking their corners.
"To complete our mission," Kunsler said, "I'm prepared to offer volunteers from the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team to enter Talos and destroy their capacity to cause us more harm. Also, we have plans to secure all necessary evidence, in case this should ever become a matter of public controversy."
The colonel said, "On your express order the Air Force will authorize transfer-"
"I so command," the president said. "Colonel, if our good general needs a signed paper, hand me a pen. Screw the rest of the protocol. We're all way outside the law here. On my head be it-I'll be dead in a few hours anyway."
The chief of staff summed it up. "Certain loyal officers in the Pentagon are arranging for the loan of a hardened and stealthy executive transport aircraft. Secret Service and Air Force will transfer two Brights from Air Force One to supplement our aircraft's current capabilities. Looks as if we have a hundred or so military and agency volunteers, happy to beg, borrow, or steal the necessary equipment and fly or drive it to Texas. Up against ten thousand of Price's best troops and security-his own private army."
"Nothing can save me," Larsen said. "But a few of you, working together, can save this country. How many in this room are ready to step up and put an end to this travesty?"
Kunsler counted around the bedroom. "You can't go, sir," she said to the chief of staff. "Nor you, Ms. Ripper. The president needs you, and very likely we're all going to get killed.
"Nor you, I regret to say, Madam President."
Everyone had raised their hands.
"Hell, I wanted to fly a fighter one last time," Larsen said. "Rebecca Rose. We've been here before, you and me, haven't we?"
"Yes ma'am."
"As much as possible, this needs to be a civilian operation-law enforcement, not military invasion."
"Pretty fine distinction," the colonel said.
The president ignored him.
"You and director Kunsler share operational command. Rebecca, you lead HRT into Talos and rescue our agents. And along the way, please convey my message to Axel Price. On occasion, the tree of freedom needs to be watered by the blood of arrogant bastards. Nobody can fucking own America."
She fell back onto the pillows and was beset by another fit of coughing. Flecks of pink appeared on Ripper's kerchief as she held it to the president's lips.
The White House physician pushed through and ordered them out of the room. "She's a human being, not a robot! She needs some rest. Give her peace, for God's sake."
Rebecca caught Larsen's eye just before leaving. The president gave her a trembling thumbs up, then was hidden from view by nurses and the closing door.
The chief of staff escorted them back into the hall. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "Raphkind's probably going to be sworn in as president tomorrow morning. He hasn't been briefed. Knowing him, he wouldn't agree to any of this anyway. He might even strike a deal with Price. If this team can't get itself organized and do the job, our nation is worse than dead. Alicia, Daniel-thanks. Rebecca, I know you by reputation-an amazing reputation, I must say. You've all put up with a trainload of grief on behalf of this country. Only true patriots…" He stopped for a moment, genuinely choked up, perhaps for the first time in his political career. In embarrassment, he lightly slapped his own face. "Excuse me. This is going to be a hard night."
Kunsler gripped Rebecca's arm as Haze led them to staff cars. "If I'd had a choice, I would have brought you in six months ago," she said under her breath. "You won't believe who's waiting for us down there. Like old times."
"Damn," Rebecca said. The whole world seemed huge-massive clouds in an impossibly vivid sky the size of six or seven ordinary lifetimes.
"We're going to be in Texas in less than four hours. Any messages I can send?"
"Not a one," Rebecca said, ducking her head as she sat in the limo.
"The Bureau's operation in Lion City… we're in this with Spider/Argus, and there are two parts," Kunsler said, sliding in beside her. "One of the parts, Nabokov, delivered the information we needed, but the agent cannot withdraw. What-you know this already?" Kunsler looked prepared to be pissed off.
"Vladimir Nabokov loved butterflies," Rebecca said, shielding her eyes against the glare of headlights through the tinted windows.
"Right," Kunsler said, pulling back her irritation. "The other part is strictly hail Mary, and it's not going well. Let's join our HRT boys. I told them about Mecca, and they all want to meet you."
"Great," Rebecca said.
"I'll fill you in on the plane."
Over Arkansas
High in the air, leaning back in the white leather seat with eyes closed, keeping it together-
Not having a family or a kid is just another word for nothing left to lose. And now I'm losing that. Flying high, surrounded by brave men and woman, duty bound-honor bound… Chosen by the president of the United States. Just like Mecca. Don't want to belong, don't need to belong. Gave it all up ages ago, just didn't know it.
"Rebecca."
She opened her eyes. Kunsler sat in the seat next to her.
"One hour," she said. "We've had a blip from William Griffin."
"He's still alive?"
"As of a few hours ago."
Rebecca glanced around the cramped cabin of the Air Force Lockheed C-99 Swanjet. Supersonic and bristling with countermeasures, designed to transport secretaries of Defense or State or whoever else needed to fly into potentially hostile territory, on the brink of wartime-and fly back out again.
Stealthy, infrared diffuse-no more or less frigid than the air around it-and if pressed, capable of creating its own extreme difficulties for any and all attackers.
Haze walked down the narrow aisle and stooped beside them. "Thirty minutes until we're over Lion City," he said. "The president's slipped into a coma. Raphkind is being moved to the White House. He'll be briefed within the hour."
"We have to be finished before he's sworn in," Kunsler said, and laid out the battle plans on the polished maple tray table between her and Rebecca.
Haze looked down at the plans, then forward to the five agents of the Hostage Rescue Team, sitting in their black pants and T-shirts, going through their third equipment check of the flight-and brandishing recently bandaged arms. Haze pulled up his sleeve to display his own bandaged wrist. "We just bonded, me and your boys, slicing out our weapon chips. For me, one in each arm. Ambidextrous. Deep little buggers."
"I never had mine implanted," Kunsler said, and glanced at Rebecca.
"Belt," Rebecca said. "Skin current."
"Well, we were macho," Haze said. "According to our intel, every weapon within a hundred miles of Axel Price is ID'd to its owner. Won't fire without an implanted chip. You know what Lion City and environs is like. Everyone has a chip of one sort or another. More interesting, Lion County is littered with billions of the little buggers-for surveillance and tracking. Price is some kind of fanatic. And I'm just wondering-"
He looked again at Kunsler, tense and fragile as a china doll, and decided to rein in his enthusiasm.
"Sorry. Combat high. Ladies, time to buckle up. Talos has a lot of UAVs buzzing around. Not that this little marvel can't hold its own. But after our Brights are released, we'll be the only thing in the sky."
"You've flown on this airplane before," Kunsler said, peering with a squint through the tiny window.
"Oh, yes," Haze said. "Three years ago. Accompanying the SecDef and the vice president to Jordan. Probably part of that loan program thing, now that I think of it. Comes equipped with its own Bright. With the pair we borrowed from Air Force One, that gives us three. Should get the job done and then some." Haze grinned-in his element, ready for payback. He moved forward to be with the HRT.
Rebecca could hardly feel what he was feeling-or much of anything at all. How could she rely on instinct-when instinct was being re-written?
Hell of a time to go into action.
Kunsler gripped her arm and tightened her fingers.
"You still with us?"
"Yes."
"You're the only one available to me with similar experience."
"Texas, Arabia… All the same?"
Kunsler grinned. "You know what I mean." The longer Rebecca knew her, the more the deputy director resembled a compact, vigilant falcon.
Rebecca pulled her chair forward and buckled up. "Saving one of my students is certainly important."
"Two, actually," Kunsler said. "Nabokov is Fouad Al-Husam."
Rebecca closed her eyes. Fouad, William, Jane Rowland-all had accompanied her to Mecca to find and eliminate a rogue former FBI agent with a plan to make the entire world forget its hatred, its religious bigotry-and all of its past.
To forget everything.
Peter Periglas had been executive officer aboard the USS Heinlein, which had taken them into the Red Sea, and from which they had flown to Mecca. Fouad and William saw the worst of the action and physically suffered the most-but got the job done.
And yet she was the one to come down with PTSD.
"Haze tells me you had another contact with Nathaniel Trace before we met with the president," Kunsler said. "What did he want?"
"He knows what your crying little boy is."
"And that would be?"
"Something called Jones. A high-powered problem solver, pattern recognizer. It's an integral part of MSARC. Modified in secret to follow the programmed orders of Axel Price. But Jones is acting pretty independent. Maybe he's had a change of… Software. Motive. Heart."
"Interesting," Kunsler said. "Before she left for El Paso, Jane Rowland mentioned brilliant glitches. She says whatever it is might be better than Spider/Argus at surveilling the net. If we just left it all alone, does Trace think Jones would scuttle Price's plan?"
"He can't be certain."
Kunsler cleared her throat. "What's Trace going to do?"
"I can't tell you," Rebecca said, "because he wouldn't tell me. But he's heading for Texas, too. Farther south. Should be there by now."
"Do you know anything about him, really? Do you trust him?"
"Trust is not part of the calculation," Rebecca said.
"I hate this," Kunsler said. "I hate knowing shit like this. Better to be ignorant and focus."
Rebecca agreed the situation was less than ideal.
Aft of the VIP seats and the rudimentary galley, the two Air Force weapons officers pushed open an equipment hatch-access to luggage space on most of these jets-and wriggled their way back to prepare their equipment-the three Brights.
As they had been briefed before the flight, in very little technical detail, Brights consisted of thin concentric layers of high explosives and classified electronics wrapped around altitude-maintaining balloons-aerostats. They had never been tested in real-world situations-in combat.
Their effects were too widespread and drastic.
The jet began its final approach-a long curve to the south with a spiral loop at the end.
Rebecca unbuckled and moved forward to confer with the Hostage Rescue Team. They had placed all their communications equipment and electronics in a shielded and grounded plastic box. Their weapons were stored in another grounded enclosure, built into the forward luggage compartment. They would don their armor once the plane was on the ground-it presently filled a trunk strapped down in the small rest area.
The typical HRT Lynx-networked diagnostic undergarments had been dispensed with-too many wires and sensors.
Rebecca put her hand on the shoulder of the team commander, a hefty thirty-two-year old from Montana named Calvin Forester. Forester had Sioux ancestry, his file proudly proclaimed.
"Any idea what we're going to run into down there, ma'am?" he asked Rebecca. His face was shiny but he looked confident.
"Hell on Earth for bad guys, I hope," Rebecca said. "A lot of pissed-off people, hopefully without much in the way of guns."
"What are the chances we'll locate our agents?"
"Tiny," Rebecca said.
"Director Haze seems to think he should be in charge," Forester said. The team members looked up with expressions that mixed hope and respect. They'd have all preferred Haze-and so would Rebecca, but-
"We have our orders," she said.
Forester knocked on another protected box in the seat beside him-their key to thieving a big ride, once they were on the ground. "These Brights-they'll crisp their machines, right? Just like fryers taking out bots?"
"Same idea, I think," Rebecca said. "But huge."
"And we do the rest?"
"Right."
Kunsler came forward.
"She's gone," she said, barely audible above the steady deep pulse of the jets. "President Eve Carol Larsen… seven-fifteen a.m., East Coast time. We're on our own now. We're orphans."
"To a brave lady," Forester said, slowly lifting his hand in salute. "To our president."
The team did the same, saluting as one.
Haze stood behind Kunsler with a bottle of water in one hand and a stack of cups in the other. He poured, his hand shaking ever so slightly, and they toasted their fallen leader.
"Bad day," he said. "Soon to get a whole lot better."
The Smoky
Schmitz's Torq-Vee and two others had remained parked in front of Fouad's bungalow, as if the game was reaching its inevitable conclusion-as if fate or death was in the air.
Fouad sat in the living room's shadows, feeling the adhesive tug of bandages on his wrists and a cold sting as the local anesthetic faded-one of Schmitz's small mercies.
Schmitz seemed to be according him the same respect he would a dog about to be put to sleep. He had cut out all three of Fouad's Talos ID chips with swift strokes of a scalpel. Now Fouad could not go anywhere on the Smoky or the campus-or in much of Lion City-without setting off alarms.
He was more than an outcast. Price had removed his mark. Fouad was no longer part of the tribe, and that meant, around here, he was no longer human.
He estimated there were at least twelve men positioned around the bungalow. They could easily sweep in and kill him without disturbing guests in the other bungalows-politicians, bankers and financiers, the Saudi prince in exile-gathering for Price's investiture.
Fouad maintained calm through controlled breathing and other exercises that both prepared and removed distractions-part of Sufi discipline. If possible, he would not be led off to execution without a fight. Perhaps he could take with him one or more of the guests…
But that was fantasy. Schmitz was too smart, too well trained.
He got up from the rattan chair at the sound of feet coming around under the bungalow's windows, up to the rear patio door-and then the front door.
The door opened. Two of Schmitz's Haitians entered first-lithe, with fine dark features under small green caps. They had been in Fouad's classes, receiving language instruction. They sported black shirts, holstered SIGs, yellow stripes on their sleeves, khaki pants, and high black boots, perfectly polished.
Fouad watched with languid eyes.
Schmitz came in behind them. He swung his chin and nodded to the door. "Mr. Al-Husam, time for the festivities," he said. "Mr. Price insists you stay close."
Fouad walked slowly between the Haitians. They prepared leg irons and wrist cuffs linked by chain-standard Smith and Wesson restraints, not the most up-to-date design, he thought.
He knew of ways…
Schmitz seemed to hear his thoughts. "I have respect," he said. "Show me some, too-no stupid heroics."
Corpus Christi, Texas
The Vertexion building rose thirty-five stories over the surrounding beachfront hotels and houses, flat islands and causeways, clusters of condos and light industrial development-an outrageous silver spire facing the troubled early morning ocean.
Right and left of the spire sat seven low concrete structures, arranged like Venetian blinds laid on end, behind which rose three strange horizontal horns like giant Jai Alai scoops.
"What's your name again, sir?" the uniformed guard asked. His name was Carlos, according to his brass name tag, and he stood behind a high steel podium, with a stool to sit on when things got slow.
"Sangstrom," Nathaniel said. "Robert Sangstrom."
Vertexion was a little-known but important point of entry for Mexican and South American IT traffic of all sorts-and thus an important node for MSARC's information-gathering network.
"I see you haven't visited in two years, Mr. Sangstrom," Carlos said, and spun around a small, palm-size wireless screen that mirrored some of the security display. Carlos always spoke with a broad smile. "Good to have you back. I have messages from five people on the fifteenth floor-they'll be happy to know you've arrived, and look forward to the meeting later this morning. Very early, sir."
Outside the wide wall of windows, beyond a pebbled flat walkway and a feathery low wall of saltbush, the Gulf of Mexico threw five-foot combers onto a dark-shrouded beach protected by riprap-mounded chunks of rebar-studded concrete.
The predawn sky had filled with wooly black mounds of wet cloud. Thick drops spat on the window glass with metallic tinks. Corpus Christi was getting a wet peck of a kiss-and nothing more. All that moisture would swing northeast over north Florida and into Georgia and dump itself there, making Atlanta once again as wet as Seattle-and stealing life from all but a northern wedge of Mexico.
"Pleasure is all mine," Nathaniel said. "I'd like to take a shower before the meeting."
"Certainly. Mr. Jones seems to have moved into his new office-he has opened it for your convenience. There's a full bathroom and a wet bar. The floor hostess will fill you in on the rest of the amenities, and direct you to the meeting room when the time comes."
"Thank you, Carlos," Nathaniel said. "Scan my chips here?"
"Mr. Jones indicates that won't be necessary," Carlos said, and switched off the gently humming security bar. "He confirms visual ID."
Nathaniel passed through the deactivated detectors, afforded the same treatment as a senior executive or a visiting dignitary. He carried no luggage.
Carlos had never met Mr. Jones. Such was the power of privilege-executive systems were almost always the favored point of entry for industrial espionage and sabotage. Executives hated to be bothered with fussy security-and hated worse being admonished by nerds.
"Fifteenth floor," Carlos reminded him, and stared with a puzzled sort of longing through the wide windows at Nathaniel's metallic blue Bentley. Rain beaded like clear glass game markers on the fresh wax.
Nathaniel hummed a Bee Gees tune as he rode the fast elevator to the seventeenth floor-not the fifteenth. He had thirty minutes. If Jones was with him-and so far, that seemed a solid supposition-the entire dataflow monitoring system for Latin America would soon require a maintenance technician's timely attention.
That lapse in the bitstream would ripple around the world, up the line to Geneva, and MSARC would enter a mode of vigilant relaxation.
The same type of unauthorized portal that Jane Rowland had exploited, but on a much larger scale. The Quiet Man would have been amused and perhaps chagrinned to learn that Spider/Argus had long been aware of his private backdoor into Talos.
For over an hour, in essence, MSARC would see and hear much, but would not render any important decisions.
Nathaniel had told Jones-who did not speak now, only listened-that the Quiet Man would have wanted it this way.
The Smoky
Schmitz and the Haitians led Fouad into another wing of Price's domicile, a seemingly endless labyrinth of hallways and rooms that could never be fully explored or resolved.
Against a backdrop of a wall covered with western paintings-horses and cowboys settling their differences, with much dust-Price was conferring with two men in expensive and perfectly tailored suits-two distinctive, silken shades of twenty-first-century gray. One was Asiatic, probably Chinese, but the other was definitely of classic Yemeni Arab lineage, likely of the Banu Hanifa-a prominent member of the house of Saud, perhaps the Prince in Exile himself.
Fouad did not immediately recognize him, but pictures of the prince had been forbidden since the overthrow of the Hejaz and the subsequent founding of Arabia Deserta, administered by the six-nation Muslim Council. He had put on weight and grown a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache.
Relaxed, chatting and smiling, they turned as Fouad approached. The Chinese continued to smile, but the Saudi's face went stony.
"Who is this Egyptian?" he asked Price, who watched with some amusement.
"One of my instructors," Price said. "Excuse me, gentlemen. Just a couple of matters to resolve, then we'll continue." He gestured toward a plump black man in white livery. "Breakfast for our guests, Lionel?"
"This way, gentlemen," the servant said, and led the pair through a double door into an adjacent dining room.
"The prince didn't recognize you," Price said. "Odd-since he's put a rich price on your head-in secret, of course. I thought I'd bring you up to date on a number of matters we discussed earlier. It seems our kidnapping situation has resolved itself. Everyone's dead. Blown right off the airport road."
Schmitz and the Haitians walked beside and behind Fouad as Price led them down another hallway, yet another part of his maze. "Nobody's happy with the way that turned out, but the feds took the situation out of our hands."
Price opened the door to an interior room about ten feet square, richly paneled in dark wood, with a huge gleaming vault safe mounted in the rear wall. Antique prints of butterflies were illuminated by gently glowing ceiling spots-exquisite dabs of blue, green and red. The room smelled of lemon oil and something Fouad couldn't quite identify-musty and repellent.
Price spun the combination, turned the vault wheel, and swung the steel door aside.
"My pride and joy-outside my family, of course. I do my best thinking here. Come on in."
The thick vault door wafted another sickly wave of odor-camphor laid over the ancient decay of myriads of tiny lives.
The vault was bigger than many houses, filled wall to ceiling with beautiful wooden cases fronted by nearly invisible glass. In the cases reposed tens of thousands of butterflies, arranged not in scientific order, but according to size and then color-dead but vibrant rows sweeping from duns and browns to one side, through reds, blues, and greens, to case after case of shining white.
Price chuckled at Fouad's wrinkled nose.
"Some of my contacts in Washington have penetrated your veil, if not your actual plan, Mr. Al-Husam. But I'm going to take one last swing at conversion. After all, my culture, your culture, we have a lot in common. My country has been occupied for a hundred and sixty years. Oh, we pretend we're used to it-we're polite to guests, and we're natural patriots. We even send our boys to die for the cause of the occupiers-because we share temporary needs and goals, not because we truly belong.
"Ask why all the fuss about the second amendment and a well-regulated militia-well, it was never about keeping arms to fight foreign invaders. It was about taking up arms against the government. That's our instinct. We hate government, any government, our own most of all. Our politics has always been guerrilla politics-fast and dirty. Best to lie low and always be ready to move. Maybe that's you, too.
"It was inevitable, after a few rocky decades, that the Islamic world and my people would find common ground and make alliances. We're both highly religious-both, warrior cultures. We both kept slaves. It was our due. Then-the world changed. Now I'm going to help set it right.
"That's what's happening out there now. We're celebrating a new relationship, a new world. Your people-well, they'd like nothing better than to be rid of both the westerners and the Jews. Real thorns in their sides. So I will no longer support Israel-that's that. Your people-"
"My people are diverse," Fouad said.
Price leaned back into the far corner of the vault, and folded his arms. "Your daddy told his bosses over and over again they were screwing up. That's why he never advanced much in the CIA. Always a foot soldier. Have you been candid with your bosses?"
"On occasion," Fouad said.
"I doubt it," Price said. "You've never told them the truth. The kafir world itches your hide like a dug-in tick. Push out the west and you can find your own maturity-whether it's the Caliphate or something else entirely, I don't care. Once the Jews are out of Jerusalem and the Middle East, our dispute will be over. Your people will have enough on their plates to occupy them for generations to come."
"I am a citizen of this country," Fouad said. "My patriotism is not a shallow thing. Perhaps you can no more speak for your people than that Wahhabi can speak for all Muslims."
"That Wahhabi, as you call him-though I wouldn't use that slur to his face-that very fine Saudi gentleman doesn't know who you are. All he has is a few fuzzy pictures taken in Mecca, of all places. You, in the company of non-Muslims, killing the faithful by calling down fire from heaven. But if I put a name to those fuzzy pictures, you'll make a dandy gift, tied up with a nice big ribbon, for any would-be protector of the sacred cities. Unless…"
Fouad could no longer tolerate the smell in the vault. He stepped back, chains rustling, and bumped up against Schmitz, who stood with his pistol drawn-a formidable armored pillar. Fouad guessed the man's weight at 240, all muscle-but ten years older.
"Never," Fouad said.
Price shrugged. He followed Fouad out of the vault and swung the door shut with another cold sigh of insect decay. "Maybe real power is forever out of reach for a cultural half-breed like you. In which case… A rich reward. One hundred million Euros. Truth to tell, I'd love to stick a pin through a true-blue federal morpho."
The vault locked and the combination reset.
"The next few hours are going to be impressive," Price said. "Pomp and circumstance."
Schmitz grabbed Fouad with two strong hands. The Haitians stood by in case Fouad struggled, but he was quiet, watchful, measuring with spread hands and rapid flicks of his eyes.
He slowly increased the tension on the chain.
Eighty centimeters from cuffs to leg irons.
A gift-for the right moment.
"From now on, sensible, moral people have little to fear," Price said, his blue eyes like hot little jewels masked in shadow. "Immoral people-that's a different story. They should run and hide. We're coming for them-and we've got the goods."
Over Lion County
Rebecca felt her ears pop.
The spiral grew tighter, until the plane banked almost on wingtip. The dry scrub and flat desert around Lion City spread below the little window beside her seat: grainy and tawny, too sharply detailed, like a mold-spotted pelt. Trails and road tracks cut long, skinny scars on the land. The boundaries of the window soothed her eyes-she did not have to look at everything all at once.
The weapons officer wedged and huffed his way forward in the tilted cabin. He carried a remote trigger-a small black wand with a square display. "Bright number one away at three thousand meters," he said. "It'll descend to a thousand, then inflate and maintain. Next two are on auto. Got any electronics you didn't declare back at the airport? I mean anything. This is going to be a wide-spectrum pulse."
Kunsler, across the narrow aisle, shook her head. Rebecca did the same. Haze did not dignify the question with an answer, simply held up his bandaged arms.
The pilot spoke over the intercom. "Blackouts starting in the northwest. Homeland Security is calling international Code Red. Not our work, of course-must be Price's snipers taking out their first power stations-but it fits our needs. Command is out to all military and civilian aviation-ground your planes.
"There's a Gulfstream G950 requesting clearance at JPB, last one in the air. I count twenty-three fancy birds already on the apron-maybe one is hard. The rest are about to become junk."
The weapons officer addressed the cabin. "Bright in five minutes. Sit inboard-fold your arms, don't lean against the cabin walls, and keep your feet on the rests provided."
He took his own seat and leaned over to look back at Kunsler and Rebecca. "The town east of us will suck up a pretty big dose," he said. "Anything within a hundred miles-cars, trucks, UAVs-is going to sizzle and stall. Discharge is minimal-like really bad static-not deadly unless you're holding a cable or standing on a rail line. But lots of people have MedAug these days-"
"Pacemakers for heart and brain, hearing aids, older model stents," the second officer said. "We've never worked a scenario where everyone stayed upright and healthy." He braced with his boots and shook his head in honest pity.
Then he dropped deftly into a seat, strapped in, and assumed the proper position.
The Smoky
Schmitz and his two Haitians hauled Fouad aside in the hallway beyond the butterfly vault room and with a fair degree of firmness, but no malice, positioned him against a concrete wall.
Schmitz took out a small syringe and swiftly injected it through the sleeve into Fouad's arm.
"Bring him down to the ballroom in five minutes," Price ordered, whisking by with two other guards.
Fouad guessed the drug, saw the size of the dose, and quickly estimated its effect on a man of his body mass and age. Not good-an hour of confusion and weakness, and no doubt they would then drug him again.
"I wish they'd keep me better informed," Schmitz muttered, his mouth close to Fouad's ear. "This whole Mecca thing-that's legendary. Nobody knew whether it actually happened that way or not-but here you are. You saved the whole damned city, didn't you? A man with those talents, a man who survives that sort of mission, is a man to be admired-not paraded around like a prize monkey. You deserve better, Mr. Al-Husam. But it ain't going to happen. Not today."
Fouad's vision fogged slightly and his legs almost collapsed. As he struggled to stay upright, the Haitians supported him by his elbows. Schmitz had cuffed his hands in front, another small mercy-and a potentially deadly softness.
His chains made dull music as they hauled him toward the ballroom.
The main ballroom of the Smoky was the size of a basketball arena and sometimes doubled as one: prime red oak floor under gracefully arched cedar beams supporting a high curved roof, those beams now richly festooned with banners in Chinese and Arabic and Russian.
Long golden streamers dangled and twirled as the room quickly filled with at least a hundred and fifty well-dressed men and about a third as many women.
Schmitz escorted Fouad up a ramp and onto a gallery riser, several feet above the floor, where a single red-draped table and four chairs had hastily been arranged, illuminated by a single high spot.
They sat and a waiter promptly brought a pitcher of punch and four glasses.
Fouad woozily surveyed the incongruities.
"I think these good people hoped they might sleep in this morning," Schmitz observed.
The Haitians nodded agreement. "It is very early," one observed, his voice deep, mellifluous.
The ballroom crowd consisted of Middle Easterners, Europeans, Russians, Asians, and a few Indonesians, all having just arrived or politely roused from their cabins in the last hour.
Ten white men in slacks and sports coats, who might have been Russian or Middle European and who might have been more comfortable in uniform, kept to one side of the floor, watching with irritated frowns. They did not like crowds or pageantry. Possibly they had not reckoned on the scale of Axel Price's plans.
Serious men-men of might, international finance, and worldly consequence-did not relish the prospect of all the rules changing at once.
A slow waltz was piped into the ballroom and after a moment of hesitation six couples started to dance halfheartedly to a steady beat in the center of the floor. Fouad could hardly believe this spectacle. It almost made him doubt their sanity-or his. So familiar-but from where?
Another group of older men-without women-entered from the reception area. These seemed contented with their present lot in life but more pleased still by the shining prospects.
Even in his present state, Fouad recognized a senator, a congressman, and an admiral-a member of the joint chiefs. He fought back against a muzzy tide of anger-not productive. Not efficient.
"Bastards," Schmitz grumbled as he pushed back his chair. "Whatever your loyalties, traitors always stink up a place."
Fouad could not entirely understand this man, but here was yet no opportunity-no weakness and no vacillation.
"Undignified," Schmitz added, and poured Fouad a glass of punch. "You'll want to keep drinking. Those drugs can do a job on your kidneys."
One of the new arrivals, the senator-an elderly man with pale blue eyes and a shock of brown hair that poked over his forehead-was escorted to their small table by a blond woman in a long purple dress.
"Mr. Price has been telling us all about you. I just wanted to shake your hand, sir, on this fortuitous day," the senator said with a big grin, and held out his plump paw. He raised his eyebrows at the sound of the cuffs as Fouad thumped them on the tablecloth. "I see. A very dangerous man, but worth one hundred million on the hoof! Marvelous!"
Fouad struggled to fight the drug.
Others came flocking, standing beside the riser and gawking, as Price had obviously intended. Fouad turned away and clutched the table, feeling ill. Somehow, Schmitz shooed the crowd back. "Mr. Price is going to offer better distractions soon," he said. "Please move on and give us some space."
Across the ballroom, a huge screen began to unfurl, initiating a sequence of screens dropping around the room, lighting up with images and text feeds from news organizations around the world. The sound was not yet above the music of the waltz and the dancers continued to spin and step and spin again.
Fouad felt he might be hallucinating. This all reminded him of something from his youth, a frightening story…
Axel Price strolled onto the oak floor, wearing a tailored denim suit and pointed black boots, his handsome but undistinguished face angled to take in the nearest screen and the world's teeming details.
Six more of Colonel Sir's crack Haitians flanked him and kept close watch, all heavily armed, gimbal harnesses supporting computer-controlled assault rifles. Formidable-but a matter of concern to the ten men near the wall, who might have been Russians.
The music softened. The crowds gathered and began to reluctantly mingle-Arabs with Indonesians, Chinese with Russians, Eastern Europeans with members of congress and the military in mufti-and Price's assembly became one, with Price at the center and the world arrayed in glowing walls around them.
Schmitz poked Fouad and he sat up straight, groggily surveying the crowd, the floor, the swirl of video feeds.
"This is it," Schmitz said.
The two Haitians began to fidget in expectation. One broke a big, almost boyish grin at Fouad, his teacher, a man he had been raised by his Mama to respect but now must stand guard over-then dropped the grin back into sober contemplation.
Price held up his arms. "Thanks for traveling so far on such short notice, and apologies for not letting a whole bunch of you get some sleep. We're all up and about early this morning for a good reason," he said, his voice amplified throughout the ballroom.
On two of the screens, his image came up and the room briefly filled with a feedback whine. Guests laughed and tapped their ears, and he laughed along with them, then waved at the dancers, who had, mercifully, stopped their gyrations.
"Sorry to interrupt such a pretty show, but the moment has arrived. Years of opportunity, years of planning, to correct centuries of injustice and incompetence-of cruelty, greed, and spite, visited upon us by those who are now about to-"
A sound interrupted him-a single high-pitched musical note, totally out of place. At first the guests cringed, thinking the feedback had returned.
But the high note resolved into a jerking, mournful cry-a child weeping.
A young boy.
Price looked puzzled, then waved his hand angrily. Two of his Haitians staggered off to investigate, their weapons wide and awkward as they pushed through the crowd.
The crowd laughed again, as if the weird weeping had been planned-the world's cry of pain only appropriate, considering their coming triumph.
On the biggest screen, a net media news banner announced a breaking story-blackouts.
A wave of power outages sends much of the northwest and Canada back to the stone age-
Video pans of dark streets, black skylines silhouetted against the morning glow.
"Apocalypse now, by God!" the elderly congressman enthused in a booming voice.
The Saudi prince took this opportunity to push his way onto the riser, his own retinue glaring a challenge at Schmitz and the Haitians.
Schmitz did not intervene.
The prince's eyes fixed on Fouad. His face was stony but his hands quivered. He stepped close and leaned over. Fouad angled his head back, taking in this looming presence with doped nonchalance, then a twitch of his brows, a slight bow of his head, to a prince of the ancient blood.
Speechless with fury, the Saudi struck him hard across the face with the back of his hand, and was about to do so again.
Schmitz moved in this time to block the blow-
The air changed, turning suddenly crisp and terribly dry.
Schmitz cried out, grabbed his arm, and reeled back. His Haitians did the same, along with the prince's retinue-clutching the same spot on their right arms, as if branded by hot, invisible pokers.
The dance floor erupted in howls of pain.
The ballroom lights flared an intolerable white, then sizzled out in cascades of sparks.
Judah P. Benjamin International Airport (JPB)
Bruised and battered, blood streaming from his scalp down the back of his neck, William crept along the northern edge of the highway, sometimes crawling, sometimes marching in a low, awkward crouch, always aware of the traffic both on the ground and in the air.
Limos, Torq-Vees, a steady stream of light trucks…
Drones hugging the terrain along the highway, keeping low to avoid incoming flights.
He had come within a few dozen yards of the airport's northern boundary, protected by a high wire fence, when a Gulfstream sighed in for a landing to his left, catching the sunrise, its fuselage a gorgeous flow of gold and salmon pink.
Almost simultaneously, west of the airport, a big twinkle in the sky went nova. From the bright center, flares spread out to form a five-pointed star, each point expanding into a spherical front of purple plasma.
The plasma spheres warped, twisted, and merged, in turn provoking an atmospheric outrage unlike anything William had ever seen-a shower of spinning, darting puffs of intermittent light spreading out over the Texas landscape.
The air above the desert began to crackle.
Over Lion County
The sun rested on the horizon, cut in half, before its final heave toward day. The sky visible through the jet's opposite windows seemed to briefly flicker, like a passing torch flame. Fore and aft, Rebecca heard light mechanical clicking, like fingers randomly working keyboards.
Haze's face beaded with sweat.
"Bright number one," the first weapons officer announced. "Five-minute burn."
Something about the aircraft interior changed-something about Rebecca's own skull, as well. The air seemed dryer. Sharp pains wormed and twisted in her jaw, her mandible: the fillings in her teeth were getting hot.
Kunsler grimaced and covered her mouth.
Haze let out a whoop and bent over.
The weapons officer swore and produced mouth pieces from a bag. "Jeez, sorry! Most of my guys-here, use these-like a boxer," he said.
Rebecca inserted the guard between her teeth and sat back, feeling the pains subside.
"Range increasing." The weapons officer watched the lights on his remote trigger. He looked back at Rebecca and Kunsler, opened his mouth, and tapped his eyetooth with a fingernail. "Younger guys have ceramic caps, not amalgam. Double apologies-it'll pass. Keep those guards in."
"We're taking that first one well, ladies and gentlemen," the pilot announced. "Last plane into JPB has made it to the runway and is coasting. Engines puffing and throwing out sparks. That's quite a show down there."
"Second burn in three minutes," the weapons officer said, eyes bright. Totally into it. "Runway looks clear for a landing-if that's the plan."
Kunsler looked to Rebecca.
The HRT commander gave her a high-five-his team was ready.
JPB
William toppled from his crouch and lay on his back in the dirt, looking sideways. From this perspective, he saw a handful of metallic discs spark and dance on the pea gravel and sand.
Something was pumping the ubiquitous Talos surveillance chips full of energy. As if in rowdy applause, a number of nearby bushes snapped into smoky torches.
Under his legs, several of the chips burned his skin. William hastily kicked them away, then looked around for a place where there were no chips-nothing to absorb the pulse from the sky and catch his pants on fire.
A big drone came spinning down and augured into the dirt barely a hundred and fifty yards away. Its load of ammunition immediately began to cook off like a hideous popcorn machine, a continuous rolling snap-snap-wow followed by singing whines, much too close to his head.
Then its Hellfire missiles blew, knocking William several yards back into the scrub and poking small shrapnel holes in his legs.
He rolled and stayed low, waiting for his senses to return, then felt for injuries with filthy fingers, poking through torn pants legs and shirt. Eventually he realized that he wasn't much worse off than he had been before.
He had been tossed into a comparatively parched and empty patch of ground, no bushes, so he rolled over to watch the show.
Thousands of fist-size spheres of blue-green plasma bounced like elfin jewelry along the desert contours, following their own sense of magnetic destiny.
Without knowing precisely what was happening, William began to laugh like a maniac. This seemed to disturb a line of sizzling spook-gems. They backed off in sincere resentment, glimmering, studying his energy and static profile, and then accepted the new way of things. A few flowed around him. One touched his knee, and another an outcrop of boulder.
Both popped like tiny balloons.
Brush fires had broken out all over the desert. Smoke was already thick.
William realized he couldn't just stick around and play the stunned audience. He got up, brushed himself off, and walked toward the airport's wire fence, looking for a gate, a culvert, a water drainage pipe, some sort of entrance.
Somehow he guessed there wouldn't be much left in the way of a security presence. Axel Price had just provoked a federal response William did not even know was in their arsenal-
Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse.
Another drifting star went nova and it started all over again.
The Smoky
The unrolled screens went black as one. Throughout the ballroom, more fixtures exploded and threw sparks down on the crowd-already dancing to another tune, not a waltz but a frantic thrashing accompanied by swinish squeals of pain.
Three hanging banners had caught fire. In the weird glow, Fouad saw Price grab his mouth and bend over double. His Haitians had thrown aside their weapons, which crackled and sparked on the polished oak floor. Despite their pain, as the guards twitched and groaned, they tried to move him from beneath the banners and out of the ballroom.
Price jerked straight and resisted.
Some of the guests had already left but dozens more were bowing, cursing, and screaming, bouncing into each other-cutting spastic orange figures against the darkness.
Schmitz could not help but be distracted.
Fouad had no idea what was happening but did not much care. He saw his moment. He had tracked which of Schmitz's two Haitians held the key to his cuffs and leg irons. Lifting his legs, twisting his shoulders, he leaned and gave the other Haitian a wobbling, half strength slam of his elbow just below the nose. The blow was not what he had hoped, but still firm enough to shove the man's nasal bones into his brain-unseen by the others.
The man made a sudden mimp and fell back.
Fouad went under the table, grabbed the key-bearing Haitian's legs-the one who had smiled broadest, apologetic about showing his former teacher a lack of respect-and pulled him down from his chair. Slipping his cuffed hands over the man's head, he broke his neck with a swift reverse spin-then rolled him like a sack of potatoes to present the right pants pocket.
Now came the difficult part. Hunching along the corpse, Fouad reached into the pocket with cuffs still on, fumbling. After a moment, fingers poking the dead man's inner thigh, he looped through a steel ring, pulled it out, and grasped the key-
Schmitz pushed aside the red cloth and leaped under the table. He tried to knock the key loose. They fought for a long, difficult moment, but Fouad had the advantage. He was still feeling the effects of the drug, but not in searing pain.
With the cloth held back by Schmitz's torso, light from the burning banners flickered over his thrashing arms. Both of them smoked through melted holes in the sleeves just above the wrists. The smell filled the air.
Fouad curled and grabbed Schmitz's right arm, squeezing the burned flesh over the ID chip.
"God damn you!" Schmitz yelledy. His head thumped the bottom of the table.
Fouad let go, jammed the key into the leg irons, and twisted. Then he pulled away from Schmitz in the other direction and inserted the key into the cuffs. The irons dropped loose but the cuffs only partially opened, then jammed-they felt hot.
The fight under the table turned frantic.
Fouad's foot came up and caught Schmitz under the jaw, a kick that might have killed him outright had the drugs not damped Fouad's strength. Schmitz grunted and wrenched his leg around. Fouad grabbed Schmitz above the elbow, pressing back and making the soldier roll in that direction to break loose-then grabbed his wrist, stretched the arm out, and with his heel pressed as hard as he could against the adjacent ribs, pumped like a tiger again and again, his kicks moving from ribs to stomach.
The arm gave with a pop.
Schmitz was making little puffing shrieks but still would not quit.
Fouad's cuffs finally came loose. He reached down for the long steel chain. Schmitz desperately warded off the chain with his one good arm, breath whistling in his nose, grunting, legs flailing against the dead Haitian-
Fouad came around on Schmitz's left and wrapped the chain around his neck and then, like a crocodile spinning in the water, twisted and twisted and looped and twisted again until they both emerged from beneath the table, pulling down the red cloth, and rolled off the riser, landing with a heavy thud on the oak floor.
Schmitz clutched and clawed at Fouad's hands, reached up and poked a thumb into one eye, then stuck it in one corner of Fouad's mouth and yanked.
Fouad bit down.
Schmit pulled out his fingers and grabbed feebly for Fouad's head. Everything was coated in sweat and blood-he could not find purchase.
In the flame-lit shadows of the ballroom, over the next few minutes-that awful interval of an adversary's final time in this world-Schmitz's arms fell.
He stopped struggling, stopped breathing.
His muscles relaxed.
Fouad regretfully twisted Schmitz's head on the limp neck until the vertebrae parted, just to be certain, then shoved himself to his feet and staggered to the middle of the dance floor. He was covered in blood and saliva, half blind from the thumb gouge in one eye-muscles stretched to their limits.
He knocked aside a staggering Chinese man and drew a welcome whoop of breath.
Still alive!
Allah would forgive all-he was still alive.
And now the time of Mr. Price was come.
Over Lion County
"Bright number three away," the first weapons officer announced. "Two-minute burn."
"Look at that," Daniel Haze said in awe as he stared through the window by his seat.
The ground around the Talos Campus-the landscape for at least twenty miles in all directions-was marked with the great, hashed brush-strokes of sooty fires-clearly revealing the criss-cross dispersal patterns of the aircraft that had years ago dropped Talos's ground-sensor chips.
Wherever the chips had fallen, they had absorbed energy from the expanding plasma pulse and conveyed it to the local flora.
At least ten thousand acres were ablaze. The fires were slowly merging into one great conflagration, with the Smoky, the Talos Campus, and the airport at three points of a triangle inside the burn.
"Looks like all the Talos drones are down," the pilot said. "I don't see anything flying."
Rebecca removed the mouth guard and felt her jaw, wondering if the heat had cracked a couple of molars. She should have had that amalgam drilled out years ago.
"We go down-what are the chances they'll shoot at us?" Kunsler asked.
"Their firearm ID chips are fried," the weapons officer said. "If what we were told about Talos armory rules is true, I don't think they'll be shooting at us for a while. The more high-tech they are, the harder they fall."
"They could keep unchipped guns for an emergency," Rebecca said, considering their options carefully-about to make her major decision.
"They're still feeling a world of hurt," the weapons officer said. "Our best trained special ops take twenty or thirty minutes to recover from a Bright, if they're chipped. Burns like a sonofabitch. Some of the older model chips burn right through the skin and set clothes on fire."
"Tower systems are dead," the second officer said, coming back from the cockpit. "They have no way of knowing who we are, except by visual-and this plane is stealthy and can hide its markings. We disperse our heat. We should be ghosty even if they still have operational radar and IR-which they don't."
Haze and Kunsler looked at each other across the plane's narrow aisle, nervously awaiting Rebecca's decision.
Kunsler had never engaged in an actual combat landing before.
"If we land now," Haze said, "confusion and smoke will provide excellent cover. "We can't delay. Price's soldiers are disciplined. They'll regroup quickly, I think-and they'll find some way to arm themselves."
"I told William Griffin to get to the airport," Kunsler said. "If he's managed to connect with Nabokov-with Fouad-then they'll be looking for us. But that seems less and less likely."
"Last FLIR images show their escape vehicle blown off the road," Haze said. "One agent killed in the brush… Two released west of our strike zone. They're off in the desert somewhere by now, if they weren't captured or shot."
"One ejected," Kunsler said hopefully.
"That's a maybe. Could be flaming debris-or a burning body."
Rebecca felt the plane bank right. The pilot was preparing for a landing-or another pass. He had looked over the runways-two, in parallel, with taxiways and a third small plane strip arranged like a wobbly X in the desert, about two miles beyond the Talos campus.
The Smoky-where most of the guests and Price were likely to be located, as well as Fouad-lay northwest of the line between the campus and the airport.
Her own senses seemed sharp. Her visual field was still expanded, still intensely detailed, still showing weird patches of color-useful or not, who could tell?
Her ears sang sweetly. She felt a nervous jangle throughout her torso and legs, but that could have been nerves, excitement, anything.
All that she was, she was not afraid.
She felt strong.
To hell with spreading new wings. She could arrange for all that later, at her leisure. Life had not cut her any slack before now.
Maybe it was time to get her work done and force the issue in a better direction-
After all, she had always wanted to make the world a better place, and now she was being given a unique opportunity to do just that.
"Land this plane," she said. "Commander, gather up your weapons and alert the team."
The Smoky
Fouad maneuvered carefully between stumbling, disoriented guests, through the door taken by Price and his guards as they evacuated the ballroom-down a curving external hallway to the outdoors.
They all seemed to be living through an Edgar Allan Poe horror story-the Masque of the Red Death. He had read Poe with guilty pleasure in grade school, in poor Arabic, better than nothing-but the vivid pictures remained, and now the mummers, the dancers, the guests, were in complete confusion, the world turned on its head, those who should be dead walking amongst them through darkness and smoke and pain…
Fouad picked up his pace after he left the ballroom and angled to the left, under drifting smoke, around the kitchens and dining areas. He avoided a few knots of wandering Haitian troops, who seemed to have lost all sense of cohesion and discipline.
They might have been well-trained, but the strike of a deadly invisible god reaching down and burning their flesh… Stopping their assault rifles and pistols from working (none carried guns now, and the ground was littered with expensive weapons-Fouad did not bother to pick them up)-
That had evoked an old, deep fear.
Three Torq-Vees squatted abandoned around the corner of the employee kitchen complex. Nearby, on the gravel employee lot, several small cars stood empty with doors open.
One old hybrid still had a driver, a young woman in cleaning staff whites who was stubbornly trying to switch on the electric motor, which did nothing-not even whir.
The volume of smoke increased. The air filled with whirls of ash. A foul wind began to rise, bitter with the corrosive stink of burning brush.
Fouad suspected there were no working aircraft or modern vehicles within many miles. The one place that might contain vehicles that could survive an electromagnetic pulse-that was what had happened, he was sure of it-would be old cars and trucks, cars without alarms or security systems or black boxes or complex electronics-cars with simple carburetors, where electricity only flowed if ignitions were switched on.
Cars that could recover well, if not completely, from a hot flash of radiated energy.
Classic cars.
Price kept a warehouse full of very expensive classic cars about a hundred yards from the ballroom, near the far end of the Smoky, where he sometimes took them out on a fenced oval track.
Price would no doubt gather up his family as quickly as possible and drive as far away as he could. Loyal staff would stay with them-they would use knives or whatever came to hand. Price could conceivably equip them with classic firearms.
Fouad needed to find Price before he had a full complement of guards effectively armed and in some sort of order-and before he reached his family.
He broke into a loose run, ignoring the shadowed vision in one eye, the spiking pain in one leg, and his ripped lips where Schmitz had thrust a forefinger to bring his head around-before Fouad had nearly bitten that finger off.
The crunch of the man's knuckle under his teeth remained fresh in his mind, an awfulness that would require much prayer to expunge.
He saw the garage, a long barn-like structure, the humped roof set on high concrete walls and studded with air conditioners and rotating steel vents.
Nearby, striding in that direction, a tight group of six men, two walking at a pace of protected if hurried dignity-in confident expectation of that nearby safety and security accorded only to the wealthy-and to royalty-
And four in black, two carrying long knives, two more carrying what might have been spears.
One of the four was Price.
Another was the Saudi prince who had slapped Fouad-him! Slapped a man worth a hundred million Euros.
Fouad hung back for a moment-then looked into the open rear doors of an abandoned Torq-Vee. In the rear cabin, behind the parallel seats, four poleaxes were racked on metal loops-three on one side, one on the other. Each six foot fiberglass shaft sported a razor-sharp ax and spear point on the business end and a steel point on the butt.
This was what two of the men accompanying Price had chosen for armament-sensibly enough. Fouad had no idea how they were ordinarily used-perhaps for cutting brush or as a particularly vicious form of crowd control. But he certainly knew how to use one. He had taught his Janissaries with similarly effective and simple weapons back at Incirlik airbase.
He yanked one down, hefted it, balanced it on a finger-found its center of gravity-then grabbed it in midair in both hands and followed the six toward the garage.
JPB
The swanjet landed with a series of bumps in the wind-blown haze, then braked and veered sharp left. Rebecca had moved forward to be with the HRT. They helped her don body armor, then prepared their weapons, reconnecting the team electronics and Lynx.
The last of her fashion accoutrements was the command-grade helmet, big and black and covered with cameras and visors and other stuff she had no idea how to use.
"Don't worry about it," Forester, said. "It's all pretty automatic. Just pull down whatever looks right and slip it over your eyes."
"Make sure it still works," his second in command warned, and they ran quick tests before the plane lurched nose-down to an abrupt stop.
"We're clear-no hostiles in range," the pilot said through the open cockpit door.
"Currahee!" Forester cried. "Me and my brothers and sister, we stand alone!"
Before she knew it, the plane's door had dropped and Rebecca was on the runway, following the five HRT agents at an ankle-jarring clip toward an abandoned Torq-Vee.
Pain did not matter.
Smoke covered much of the airport and the runway.
Forester pulled open the Torq-Vee's passenger door and hauled the black box inside, then sprung it open and pulled out a gray and black unit the size and shape of a toaster.
The youngest team member popped open the hood and rummaged in the engine compartment with yet another replacement component.
In three minutes, they had the Torq-Vee convinced it was operational. The engine roared to life. They all climbed in.
Forester showed her how to pull down and snick her combat gogs. Maps of the airport, the Talos campus, and the ranch popped up, downloaded from a satellite.
"What would we ever do without this shit?" the second in command marveled.
"Cavemen!" the team grunted as one and thrust their gloved fists in the air.
"Braves, you mean," Forester corrected. "Where to, ma'am?"
Rebecca pointed her gloved fist northeast. Fouad was last seen at the ranch. Who knew where William Griffin might be, if he was still alive?
"Jeez," one of the agents commented as they rolled. "They got poleaxes back here-wonder if they know how to use 'em?"
"I do," Forester said. "Back in medieval times, they taught peasants how to kill knights with those things."
The six men first noticed Fouad as the wind momentarily blew aside the smoke. The two with knives-not Haitians, Fouad saw, but beefy Middle Easterners, part of the prince's innermost protection team-broke left and right to flank him, while the others hung back.
The flanking pair assumed combat stance to test his revolve. They were going to do this the old-fashioned way and engage in hand-to-hand.
That was not his plan. He had neither the desire nor the patience.
Fouad came in spinning the poleax, dropping to one knee and swinging in a wide arc. The double-edged ax cut through the first man's boot and ankle and nearly severed his leg.
From his knee, Fouad lifted and thrust the ax blade past the man's throat, then pulled it back with a reverse cut. The man managed a breathy gurgle before he died.
The second guard fell over the body trying get out of the way. He did not fall fast enough to miss another series of thrusts and cuts-first from the side, incapacitating his knife hand, followed by a double-handed downswing splitting his skull.
Fouad jerked out the ax.
He looked up and sucked in smoky air.
Price and the Saudi prince were making a desperate dash for the garage. Their pace was no longer stately, privileged, or royal-they were in terror for their lives.
The last two guards, Americans attached to Price, moved in, brandishing their poleaxes like novices. Born of a gun culture, no doubt-in love with loud noises and gunpowder and not at all happy with blades.
Fouad was up again, jabbing and feinting.
The three formed a circle, poleaxes inward, almost tip to tip. The man on his right stepped forward and made his own jab, long and off-balance.
Fouad again leaped aside and brought his ax down. The first American's gripping hand flew off and his poleax dropped to the dirt and double-bounced, singing.
Fouad speared his upper leg, then sliced again as the guard dropped and rolled-his roll slowing and eyes glazing, lips turning blue, as he bled out from his femoral artery.
The second American leaped toward Fouad, eyes wild. This man handled his weapon better, keeping Fouad back with balanced, measured thrusts-then tried to hook his leg with the ax.
Fouad jumped left and brought his ax down. The man parried with an outward blow, hooked Fouad's shaft, twisted it, then grabbed and pulled it toward him until Fouad let go. This close, the poleax was of no use. Fouad seized the man's arm before he could again double-grip his weapon.
With a push of the guard's elbow Fouad shoved in face-to-face, caught the sweat slinging from the man's forehead-tasted its salt in his mouth-and used his two-inch height advantage to straighten, lift, and hard-jerk the arm up and sideways.
Not enough to break it, but Fouad's foot went behind him and the man tripped and landed on his back.
Fouad spun him on the ground and as he struggled, retrieved one of the crossed poleaxes and neatly removed his head.
A moment and no more to catch his breath.
The killing made him angrier and angrier, that he had to do such things because men were filled with arrogant greed, because some wished to rule with neither the wit nor the self-knowledge to see their inadequacies-and how many of their people would die.
Fouad followed the fleeing pair, poleax held before him, pacing himself: one-eyed, lip split wide, face swollen and smudged and dripping blood, an awful ifrit in pursuit.
He had to plan his moves carefully, not to be lost in fight-heat and regret it later.
They should not get away to regroup their wealth and power and try this again.
Killing them… perhaps necessary.
If there was no alternative.
The Smoky
The Torq-Vee took Rebecca's team down a short road to the ranch complex.
Forester pulled up in front of the main house. Staff dressed in white skirts and uniforms, and a few older men in dirty, torn suits, wandered down the steps and across a section of knee-high prairie grass, all half blind from smoke.
"Little people and a few humps, I think," Forester said.
"Humps?"
"Perps. Bad guys."
"Right. Forget them. Let's check out the ballroom," Rebecca said, consulting the map in her gogs.
She pointed and Forester turned the Torq-Vee about, making a counterclockwise circle.
"Along the way," she said, "We need to check out the bungalows and see if they have any of our people tied up or stashed."
Forester coasted the Torq-Vee along the guest roundabout. Three of the team worked in unison to search each of the bungalows. The three came back at the end of the circuit, shook their heads, and climbed aboard.
"Place is a mess," one said. "Two old dudes dead in their bathrooms. Looks like their heads exploded. What's that-brain chips or something?"
"Could be implants to control palsy. God forgive them," Forester said.
"I think one of them might be a congressman or something. He looked familiar."
"There's a garage up ahead," Rebecca said. "Could have vintage vehicles that still run."
"My thinking exactly," Forester said.
"Aston Martin! Ferrari! Jaguar XKE!" the youngest of the team enthused. "Spoils of war?"
"You wish," Forester said. "We can't afford the gas."
"For a day, I could."
To Rebecca, they all seemed little more than boys.
Rebecca watched the big garage grow close. Again, three of the team prepared to leap out and do reconnaissance.
"Squad on our right, waving," Forester said. "They seem to think we're with them."
"Colonel Sir's Haitians," the youngest guessed.
"Do we confront and subdue?" Forester asked.
"No," Rebecca said. "Go right, to the other end of the garage. I'll go in with you."
"Yes, ma'am," Forester said.
The wooden doors hung open, electronic locks sprung.
They climbed out of the Torq-Vee, leaving the youngest-against his wishes-to guard their ride.
Inside, three aisles passed between what might have been a truly beautiful selection of antique cars and trucks-but the lights were out and they saw little more than glimmers in deep shadow. Rebecca walked halfway down the garage's length, listening while the team ran down the aisles, then circled back.
"No gaps in the vintage parade, nothing obviously missing," Forester reported.
She gestured for a return to the Torq-Vee.
Just as she was about to shut the door, she glanced back and saw a woman standing in the dark at the far end, a diminutive, slender figure in white carrying a single candle. Three young children clutched her long dress. Rebecca thought there might two more farther back, standing in a doorway-outlined in faintly glowing pink.
She closed her eyes for a moment and the effect went away.
"You took my husband!" the woman shouted down the length of the building. "That awful man grabbed him from right in front of us! Where is he?"
The Haitians chose that moment to enter from the far end. They surrounded the woman and her children, carrying their own candles and boldly, loudly brandishing rifles and pistols.
All of them looked terrified, lost, desperate.
Rebecca let the door swing shut and climbed back into the Torq-Vee.
"Mrs. Price, I think," she said to Forester. "No sign of our people. One more circuit-avoid crowds. Then back to the airport."
JPB
Across the taxiway, two smudged, bloody figures limped through a hellish nightmare of crackling, burning luxury jets, crashed or rolled maintenance carts, abandoned fuel trucks-mercifully intact-and the last confused, wandering minions of Axel Price's empire.
These remaining few had used whatever they could find to cut out the source of their pain. All trailed blood and wove random tracks over the tarmac, like rabbits and deer after a brush fire. They presented no menace.
As if homing toward each other-recognizing friend amid dazed foes-the two men trekked across the main runway, William waving Fouad on, Fouad waving in turn, until they met under the orange-smudged sun.
Fouad laid down his poleax.
William lifted him off his feet and spun him around on the concrete.
"Mr. Nabokov, I presume?" he said, putting him down.
"Mr. Griff, it is excellent to see you, after all this time," Fouad said.
"That's my father's name," William said, hanging back from their hug.
"Yes," Fouad said. "The cub is now the lion. But tell me-how is it you come to be here, on this of all days?"
"Later. Let's find some water," William said.
"Absolutely. It is parched out here."
"What happened?" William asked as they walked back toward the airport buildings.
"I have only a small idea," Fouad said.
"Did you arrange for this?" William asked.
"No. Did you?"
A Torq-Vee came rolling through the smoke, around two disabled airport maintenance trucks.
The passenger door flung open and a woman in black body armor stood on the running board. She whipped off her combat helmet and waved vigorously.
"Who is that?" Fouad asked, wiping his one good eye to see more clearly.
"Rebecca Rose," William said. "I think she's offering us a ride."
"Our own Rebecca Rose? Will she have water?"
"Probably."
The Torq-Vee stopped ten yards from Fouad and William and four men in black armor jumped out to surround them, weapons ready.
"Stand down!" Rebecca called. "Is that you, William?"
"Yes, ma'am!" William called back.
Forester held up a gloved hand and called for a medical kit.
"Fouad? I hardly recognize you."
Fouad could not bring himself to speak.
"We're meeting Jane Rowland at Buckeye," Rebecca said. "Can you show us where that is?"
Fouad pointed in the general direction of the campus.
"Climb aboard, gentlemen," Rebecca said. "Buckeye apparently has a hardened server farm. We've been told to take it out, and then get the hell out of Texas."
William and Forester took hold of Fouad and guided him to the Torq-Vee, where the team offered bottled water and began to administer first aid.
Corpus Christi
Nathaniel pulled a chair into the focus of the projector and sat watching as MSARC went deaf, dumb, and blind. The lines of code and floating symbols announcing his success-or Jones's success, more appropriately-were suddenly interrupted by straight ASCII.
Is that you, Jones?
Nathaniel watched for a moment as the old-fashioned cursor blinked and another message wrote over the old one.
Who is this?
No harm in replying.
Not Jones. Who is this?
And then,
Tom Cantor. Do I know you?
Nathaniel responded,
We met at MIT ten years ago. How's tricks?
CANT› Won't do any good to complain. You must be Nathaniel. Becky Thatcher says hi.
NATH› Hi back.
CANT› We're knocking out Talos business and bank records.
NATH› Me too.
CANT› Did you get the backups in Dubai and Iron Mountain?
NATH› They're wiped, all but the offline memory. That will go the next time somebody tries to access.
CANT› Mr. Price is going to have to start from scratch-wherever he is.
NATH› OK
CANT› You should vacate pronto.
NATH› You too.
CANT› 30 on all bad guys. We'll be watching. That means you, genius boy. Say hi to Jones. Outta here.
NATH› Copy that.
Nathaniel shut down the projector and sealed off his portals. He closed the heavy door behind him, cinched up his tie, and waited for the elevator.
Carlos was watching the news on his desk monitor and barely looked up as Nathaniel passed. Then he jumped and checked him out as if seeing him for the first time.
Nathaniel shook his head. "Lots of shit going down," he said.
"Sure as hell is," Carlos said. "What's it all about, do you think?"
"Some kind of weird weather," Nathaniel said.
He was in the Bentley and driving away when the Vertexion building's external alarms went off and steel shutters began to fall over the big windows.
Carlos was going to lose his job.
Nathaniel turned left and drove along the beach, studying the ragged front.
Definitely heading east.
El Paso
Jamey and Curteze walked like two ragged beggars along the lines of stalled cars and their puzzled, impatient passengers waiting to cross into Juarez.
The cars weren't going anywhere soon, perhaps ever; the offices and the security gates were dark, El Paso was quiet, and Juarez was equally quiet, but for sporadic gunfire and shouts.
The boy was no longer a boy, and Curteze had no idea who or what he was-only that their walk was almost over, the job almost done.
Jamey turned around between the lanes of cars and watched Curteze patiently as he caught up.
"Want to do this together?" Jamey asked.
"Turn ourselves in?" Curteze asked.
"Whatever it takes."
"Sure," Curteze said.
"I wanted to thank all of you," Jamey said. "Wish I could, now."
"We were idiots."
"Still…"
A few border security officers were trying to keep order in the lanes despite dead radios, fused spex, down Lynx networks, and no power anywhere.
"One of them should do," Curteze said, and prepared to flash his sparks-reveal that he was an agent, whatever that might mean in this part of the world.
"Am I your prisoner?" Jamey asked, staying close. "I mean, I don't want to get shot just because somebody's confused."
"You're nobody's fucking prisoner," Curteze said. "Once we're across, call your Daddy and tell him to pick you up in New Mexico. And then-we're done. You're a free man. You don't ever want to see me again, right?"
Jamey wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then agreed with a nod.
They both straightened at the approach of a tall officer with thick spiky black hair. The officer looked sure and confident, even in the chaos, as if he was the man in charge-and he was drawing a visual bead on Jamey and Curteze because they were filthy and bloody and did not look at all like tourists.
"Help you two with something?" he asked, then stopped dead and stared. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Jamey Trues. I got people searching all over the desert for you. Welcome home, boy. My name's Mason."
"Can we get across to New Mexico, Mr. Mason?" Jamey asked. "As soon as it's convenient."
"Right. Follow me. Are you Kapp or Curteze?" Mason asked the dusty man in the denims and work shirt, noting the tissue and blood on his shoulder.
"Curteze," came the muttered reply. He remembered to lift his credentials. "Special Agent Kapp is dead. They blew his head off, the bastards."
"Either of you know what the hell happened around here?" Mason asked.
The two shook their heads.
"Not a fucking clue," Curteze said. "You?"
ONE YEAR AFTER
Pensacola Beach, Florida
Rebecca Rose picked a picture window seat in the long, flat, air-conditioned Fisherman's Shelter Inn, and started with a big stoneware bowl of thick white clam chowder and seven bags of oyster crackers-twenty crackers per bag, one with twenty-two-plus a red plastic basket carrying seven slices of fresh baguette.
Then she moved on to a huge salad-crab Louie with avocado halves and six spears of steamed asparagus and two hard-boiled eggs.
Everything tasted unbelievably wonderful-as if she had never truly used her taste buds before now.
She had been stripped of all that she owned and faced at least half a dozen warrants for her arrest and detention. She was on the run, sought by state and federal authorities from Maryland to Texas, alleged by the Raphkind administration's newly appointed Attorney General to be part of a vast domestic terrorist conspiracy to bring down the nation's power grid.
Life had never been better.
Wearing a purple two-piece swimsuit under a white net cover, canvas boat shoes printed with cartoon flowers-tanned, hair almost strawberry from sun and salt-Rebecca looked like a surfer girl who did not know how to grow up. That was what she wanted and needed right now.
She felt like a teenager and she had the broken arm to prove it-from surfing a big surge wave with far too much confidence in her not-so-young bones.
The flexible blue cast on her left arm was alive with shifting patterns and drawings-paisley curlicues, constellations, sunbursts, and smiling moons. She would be losing the cast in a week and thought she might miss it.
She did not resemble in the least the former FBI agent featured on news shows, the Web, and plastered on wanted posters in every sheriff's office on the Gulf Coast-along with a handful of nefarious accomplices.
Alicia Kunsler was locked up in Cumberland, perhaps in the same cell once occupied by Edward Quinn. Daniel Haze, former director of the Secret Service, was rumored to be either dead-a suicide-or living in Chile.
Rebecca thought the latter was more likely.
Most of the cabinet members of the former administration were under house arrest. Their indictments and trial dates might never arrive. The whole story would likely collapse within a year-with unpredictable repercussions for President Raphkind, who was said to be neither a nice man nor a happy one.
Fouad Al-Husam and William Griffin were rumored to be in Singapore-perhaps following a trail. Whether or not they had remained in the Bureau and become witnesses for the government, no one could say.
Jane Rowland could have cleared them all. But of course Jane Rowland could not say a word. Her agency did not exist.
Tom Cantor also did not exist.
Little Jamey Trues met his family in New Mexico, which refused to extradite him back to Texas. Four months later, the governor of Texas was impeached and removed from office.
Half of the staff of the Texas Department of Corrections-along with the entire sheriff's department of Lion County-was relieved of duty.
Surprise, surprise-Axel Price and his large family had turned up six months ago in the Dominican Republic, to be warmly greeted by Colonel Sir John Yardley. Like the Saudi prince, Price reportedly sported two deep, unsightly scars, one on each cheek-and was said to be broken both physically and psychologically, perhaps because he had no idea where his fortune had gone, and so no idea what he was going to do next.
Fouad had never said a word about his actions at the Smoky. But to Rebecca he had murmured, on the flight back to Maryland, "Bad kings kill the land."
After several days of gray, wet weather, the Florida sun had this afternoon returned to its powerful conviction that the Earth was not nearly warm enough. Its brazen light was as extraordinary as the food. The parking lot reflected a hot metal glow on her face, but she barely squinted.
Rebecca dabbed the second half of a hard-boiled egg in the pinkish dressing-rich with chunks of green olive-and watched storm-driven combers roar up onto the beach, throwing golden spray almost as high as the fishing pier.
The long drought was over. One after another, powerful hurricanes were pushing up from the gulf into Texas and Mexico, bringing muddy floods to Lion County, El Paso, and Juarez.
Excellent surfing, the best the locals had ever seen.
The waitress approached and Rebecca lifted her dessert menu as if to block the glare, but in fact she was covering the woman's face. Faces were too intense even now-she read too much into them, did not know how to stop her infinitely detailed interpretation of the twists and tics of so many muscles.
She had as hard a time with faces as she did with utter darkness. Darkness terrified her-and that was only one reason why she loved it.
She took joy in being scared.
Rootless.
Nascent.
Still, she preferred daytime, wide white beaches, hot sun. And until yesterday, she had preferred to be alone.
Soon she would conquer both faces and darkness and society. She would come out of her cocoon and spread her wings, fully human again and stronger than ever.
Dr. Plover, the third time around, had finally gotten it mostly right-if you allowed for a long latency.
And some interesting new wrinkles.
The waitress asked her what she wanted for dessert.
"Key Lime pie," Rebecca said. "And malt vinegar."
"For the pie?"
"Just bring it," Rebecca answered curtly.
"Sure thing, hon. Coffee with that?"
Rebecca smiled behind the menu, her eyes crinkling.
"No thank you… hon," she said.
Vinegar acted on her much like coffee-which she could no longer drink. Vinegar was the new caffeine. Caffeine was the new cause of severe migraine headaches.
"Right." The waitress departed and Rebecca faced the sun again.
A man she did not know moved over from the bar, casually stopped by her table, and leaned in too close. "Waiting for someone?" he asked. In his thirties, sunburned, puffy from drink and worry, wearing a pink golf shirt and white slacks, he was from central Ohio, very likely on vacation from a recent divorce.
All this from the corner of her eye.
"Yes, I am," she said.
"Well, I'll be back if he doesn't show."
Rebecca forced herself to look the man full in the face. She lifted her upper lip, revealing eyeteeth, and blinked, eyes wide and green and pale, like a baby's.
Then she reached down for the black fiberglass cane with the shining steel head parked between her knees. Twirled it with two fingers.
The puffy sunburned man backed away as if stung, bumping into a table. He quickly paid his check and left the restaurant, but not before muttering something to the waitress.
She brought Rebecca her Key lime pie and Heinz malt vinegar in a dribble-top bottle. "Man, I need what you got. Can you teach me that trick?"
Rebecca shook her head. "Comes with baggage," she said.
She paid her bill just as the metallic blue Bentley drove into the parking lot, top down.
The waitress gawped. "Jesus, what's that kind of car cost? Where does he drive it, to the grocery-to the beach?"
To Brazil, Rebecca thought.
Nathaniel came into the restaurant and stood by the antique brass cash register. With a big grin, he hoisted a cardboard sign with three words lettered in thick black marker: "Jones Motor Tours."
Rebecca picked up her cloth sling bag-all she had in the world, plus the cane-and walked over to take his arm.
They had not seen each other in a year.
They hardly knew each other.
The waitress gawped some more, lost in her dreams, then smiled broadly and silently applauded Rebecca.
Nathaniel led Rebecca to the parking lot and opened the Bentley's door.
"She's going to remember this," Rebecca said as he pushed the starter button and the Bentley purred to powerful life. "Can we be a little less obvious from now on?"
"Of course," Nathaniel said. "How's the cosmic mind?"
"Coming along," Rebecca said. "Killed anybody yet?"
"No," Nathaniel said. "Well, actually-I found Jerry Lee in New Mexico."
"Oh," Rebecca said.
"He was in a bad way. Not really a human being any more. I did him a mercy. There's still a couple of hundred of us out there… Could go either way, I guess. Not much I can do about them."
"What did Jones think?"
"Jones doesn't communicate with me anymore."
"Still working?"
"Who knows?" Nathaniel said. "Let's just say he was feeling generous. Mr. Price's money has been placed at your disposal."
"My disposal? Not yours?"
"I'm not sure Jones trusts me. We're too much alike."
The Bentley's warm cream leather heated her skin as they drove northwest along the Bayfront Parkway toward Pensacola.
"How long do we have, really?" Rebecca asked Nathaniel.
"What, until we can't stand each other, or we find something useful to do-or until we run out of money?"
"Any of those," she said.
"A day, a week, a thousand years."
"Which shall it be-good or evil?"
"More good would be interesting," Nathaniel said. "But it's really up to you."
"Jones trusts me?"
"He trusts you to keep things lively."
Lightly, cautiously, like a shy adolescent, Nathaniel touched her arm. Rebecca withdrew it, then relaxed. Creamy leather everywhere and rich wood and the wind rushing by, hardly touching her hair. It was okay. The bad stuff was over.
This time, it hardly left a mark.
She reached out and grasped his hand, squeezing it tight.
The sun vanished below the horizon with tropical haste. There was no green flash.
There should have been.
The world was that new.