by Jack Mars
“First, I just need to confirm your relation to our guest, Sara Lawson. You are her sister, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You’re listed as the second point of contact for Sara. The first contact person, Reid Lawson, wasn’t available, so we’ve contacted you—”
“What’s. Happened?” Maya demanded again, punching each word from her mouth.
“Well. Um…” This Penelope paused. “Sara has, uh, left our facility.”
“Left,” Maya repeated blandly. The rehab center had made it perfectly clear that their program was voluntary; Sara could walk out the door any time she wanted.
“Yes. To be more specific, she, uh… well, it appears that she climbed out of a second-story window.”
Maya let out a deflating sigh. “When?”
“Sometime during the night? We’re not sure. She wasn’t in her room, and had disguised it to appear that she was still asleep…”
Penelope kept talking, saying something about a shower curtain and a twenty-foot drop, but Maya’s mind was racing. Sara was not held there against her will. She could have walked right out the front door. But if she climbed out of a window in the middle of the night, that meant she didn’t want to be seen. She didn’t want anyone knowing she had left. Maya had left her some money, a meager sum of cash, but still possibly enough…
A knot of panic gripped Maya’s stomach.
“Ms. Lawson?” said Penelope.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I said, we don’t ordinarily involve law enforcement unless the family believes that the guest may be harmful to themselves or others.”
“Yes. Do that.” Maya hung up. Maybe the police would find her. But she wasn’t about to leave it to chance. Maya scrolled through her contacts until she found the number labeled as “Third Street Garage.”
“’Lo,” answered a grunting male voice. “Third Street.”
“Alan. It’s Maya.”
“Oh. Hey, kiddo!” The guttural, monosyllabic persona of Mitch the mechanic fell away, replaced by the affable Alan Reidigger. “How are you? You okay?”
“Not really. Long story. Can you track Sara?”
“Sara?” he repeated with some alarm. “What’s going on?”
“She fled rehab. Climbed out a window and scaled a wall or something in the middle of the night.”
“Christ. Okay. Uh, if she has her phone and didn’t turn it off, yeah. I can find her. But I think we both know your sister is a bit smarter than that. If she doesn’t want to be found…”
“You know I hate to ask it,” Maya said cautiously.
“I’m already putting on my jacket. Text me the address of the place she was at, I’ll track her down myself.”
“Thank you, Alan.” Maya breathed a short sigh of relief.
Then she glanced around. The gray sky. The empty track. The academy, still and silent with the long holiday weekend. The sweat was cooling on her brow. She shivered.
“Do you know someone who can get me to Virginia Beach?” she asked. “I want to help.”
“Of course,” Alan told her. “Do you want fast, or do you want legal?”
“Fast as possible.”
“I’ll text you where to be.” Alan ended the call.
Less than fifteen seconds later, her phone chimed. A text from Alan with an address not far from West Point property. Maya jogged toward the dorms, intending to change clothes quickly. She wouldn’t have time to scrub the dried blood from her fingernails.
Her life, as far as she knew, was in shambles. Her head was a mess. Her fate was in the hands of administrators. But she’d be damned if anything was going to happen to her sister.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
More than a billion devices in the continental United States alone.
Those were the words that were stuck in Zero’s head as the dark-suited driver drove them back to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Bixby had said that just yesterday, though it felt like it might have been a month ago.
He could tell that Maria wanted to ask questions by the way she fidgeted in her seat. But she didn’t dare ask, not when they didn’t know the identity or affiliation of their driver. So she remained quiet, squirming, for sixteen minutes until they arrived back at the airstrip. The Gulfstream was there, the pilot lingering nearby, talking on his cell phone and smoking a thin brown-wrapped cigar.
As soon as they were out of the car Maria whirled on him. “Why are we back at the jet? We’re already within spitting distance of home, and our last lead.”
“We’re going somewhere,” Zero answered vaguely.
“Where?” Strickland asked.
“I don’t know yet,” he said candidly. Zero motioned to the pilot, whirling one finger in small circles. “Wheels up, ASAP.”
The pilot frowned. “Destination?”
“Not sure,” Zero called back as he ascended the ramp. “For now? Just up.”
Inside the cabin, he pulled out his cell phone, made a call, and put it on speaker.
I really hope I’m right about this.
“Bixby,” answered the engineer.
“It’s Zero.”
“Zero! Oh, man. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to give the Feds those sonic meters. Shaw made me do it. Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to know we’re dealing with a sonic weapon…”
“Bixby,” Zero snapped. “Shut up a second. Calm down. I have an idea.” He was keenly aware that Maria’s and Strickland’s eyes were upon him. That Bixby was listening intently. The caffeine pills that Todd had given him earlier were working, maybe too well. He felt wired, almost jittery. Zero rubbed his face, trying to organize his thoughts in a coherent way that didn’t make him sound like a madman.
“Okay,” he said. “Here it is. This group we’re after, they don’t know what we know. They don’t know that the president authorized a small CIA team to pursue them. For all they know, every cop and FBI agent in the country is looking for them. That means they have to operate completely under the radar. They’re being careful. They attacked during a holiday; they’re staying off of phones and radios.”
Maria nodded slowly. “With you so far.”
“It also means they won’t leave,” Zero continued. “They have to assume that every airport, seaport, train station, bus terminal, and land border is going to be crawling with cops. They know we have video of Kansas. They know I saw the Russian woman’s face. They got their weapon in here, and they got the element of surprise, but now they’re here. They’re not leaving. They’re stuck here.”
Strickland frowned. “I think you’re losing me.”
Zero let out an exasperated sigh. How could he elucidate what was going through his head when his pulse was pounding and his thoughts came jumbled? “I thought this was about panic and chaos. And it is, at least somewhat. But that’s ancillary. You don’t send that kind of weapon and a crew into a foreign state on what will ultimately be a suicide mission without a masterstroke. They haven’t gotten there yet, but I think they will. So far we’ve been seeing an attack a day—Havana, Kansas…”
“But nothing yet today,” Strickland noted.
“Right. There will be. I’m sure of it. The Capitol didn’t fit because it was obvious. Wherever they’re going to hit won’t be.”
“But we don’t know where that might be,” Maria argued. “And if it won’t be obvious, we have no way of knowing until it happens.”
“Exactly!” Zero said. “We have the sonic detection meter to give us a location, but it’s too short-range. We’d have to be in the thick of it for that to work. But again, they don’t know what we know. They don’t know what we have.”
One of Maria’s thin blonde eyebrows arched precipitously. “And what do we have?”
“We have OMNI.”
“Oh no.” Bixby’s murmured sigh through the phone told Zero that the engineer had already picked up on what he was suggesting.
But Maria shook her head. “OMNI failed us.”
“It didn’t fail,” Zero insisted. “It just led us to the wrong place. The parameters were too wide.” He looked at the phone in his hand. “Bixby, you said it yourself: OMNI is like a search engine for sound.”
“Uh-huh.” Bixby sounded defeated. “I did say that.”
“And currently there are more than a billion devices in the continental United States alone that OMNI could pick up on—because it’s tuned to a frequency range. But tuned to the right frequency, there’s only one device in the whole country that will match what we’re after.”
Maria’s eyes widened as she came to understand what he was suggesting. Strickland touched his chin and nodded.
“So?” Zero asked the phone. “Can it be done? Can OMNI be calibrated to pick up on the ultrasonic weapon’s frequency, like you did with the sonic detection meters?”
There was silence from the phone, for an uncomfortably long moment.
“Bixby?”
The engineer cleared his throat. “Zero, look. I want to help in any way I can. You know I do. But we’re talking about a machine that cost tens of millions just to create, let alone network appropriately. A machine whose very existence is not only objectionable, but objectively immoral. Security clearance on this thing goes higher than yours, a covert CIA operative. Not to mention that any alterations made to it can be immediately traced to me—”
“But can it be done?” Zero interrupted.
“I mean… theoretically? Yeah. I don’t know if it can be reversed, though. It might cause permanent damage to OMNI’s central processing unit—”
“Bixby,” Maria said sternly. “As deputy director, I’m authorizing you to recalibrate OMNI to the frequency of the ultrasonic weapon.”
“No offense, Johansson,” Bixby said quietly. “But we both know you don’t have that authority.”
Maria set her jaw angrily, but held her tongue.
The plane’s engines whirred to life. The pilot lifted the ramp and secured the door as Zero chose his next words carefully.
“I know you,” he said into the phone. “You’re a good man. But you’re not in the field. You don’t see this kind of stuff firsthand. Sometimes good men turn on the news, and they see that a bunch of people were hurt or died because of this or that. It happens every day. I bet in your long career, there have been a few times that you’ve turned on the news and saw that some people suffered at the hands of something you knew about. Maybe something you were tangentially involved in. But right now, I’m telling you that you could have a direct impact. You can choose to help, or you can choose to stand by. And if you stand by, and then you turn on the news, and you see that some people were hurt or died because of something that you could have had an active hand in stopping… how is that going to feel, Bixby? Are you going to sleep soundly that night? Because I’ll tell you. I don’t sleep soundly much these days.”
The silence over the phone stretched long enough for Zero to think that the call had dropped.
“Aw, hell,” Bixby said in a half-whisper. “Okay, Zero. I’ll… I’ll do it.”
Zero held back his sigh of relief.
“I’ll have to take it offline briefly—which means that if anyone is paying attention, Shaw and the NSA might be clued in that something is up. I’ll route the results to Johansson’s tablet. But after that, I’m gone. I’m not going to be of any more help to you. I’m not going to stick around and wait for them to come for me.”
Zero wasn’t sure what Bixby meant, if he would just leave the lab or actually leave. OMNI was a dangerous thing just to know about, let alone use or tamper with. But he decided not to ask for clarification.
“Thank you, Bixby.”
“Give me fifteen minutes. Godspeed.” The engineer ended the call.
“Tell the pilot to get us in the air but not to log a flight plan,” Zero told Maria. “Keep us close until we know something.” The jet’s CIA clearance allowed them to circumvent FAA regulations during a crisis. They didn’t need to tell anyone where they were going.
“That clearance will only last until someone decides to check in with the agency and confirm it,” Maria pointed out.
“Even if there’s a deputy director of Special Operations aboard?” Strickland asked.
“We’re not supposed to be on this op or this jet.” She shrugged. “But we’re also not supposed to tamper with top-secret computers that are capable of spying on the entire country, so hey.” She maneuvered toward the cockpit to talk to the pilot.
Strickland lowered himself into a seat and buckled up. “If this works, we’ll get a location, just like we did with the Russians in Vegas. Right?”
Zero nodded. “Right.”
“But what if it’s on the other side of the country? What if they’re in California or something by now?”
“We’ll still have their location,” Zero said. “We can alert local authorities, let them know exactly where they are. And we’ll be in an advantageous position to get there quickly if we’re already in the air.”
Strickland nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
A plan. It was a plan, but not the one that Zero wanted. Earlier he’d had the harrowing thought that a new attack would be their best way to find these people and their weapon.
But now, another attack was their only way of finding it.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Samara adjusted the baseball cap over her head, pulling her red hair into a ponytail behind it. She smirked to herself, imagining that she looked like a… what was the term? Ah, right—“soccer mom.” With Mischa in tow, she probably looked like an American soccer mom.
Just a woman and a girl and their team of elite black-clad commandos.
Samara stretched her arms in the morning sun. The air here was fresh and invigorating with just a hint of salinity from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. They were nearly there. But first, they had to introduce a bit of chaos.
This place, this town, had an amusing name. Prince Frederick, it was called. Samara had never been here before, but she knew it well, very well—perhaps better than most of the twenty-five hundred or so people that called the small town home. It was established in 1734 and named after the then–Prince of Wales. It was the county seat of Calvert County, situated on a peninsular stretch of rural Maryland that jutted downward into the Chesapeake.
It was just under forty miles from Washington, DC. And it was less than eight miles from their destination.
Mischa stood nearby, leaning against the side of the brown delivery truck, wearing the oversized green sweater and craning her neck slightly upward. The girl’s eyes were closed, her features passive, face bathed in sunlight. After hours hiding in garbage cans and driving through the night in the rear of the boxy delivery truck, the girl seemed to enjoy being out of doors.
She was a weapon. A spy. An operative. But in some ways, still very much a child.
Samara checked the internet on her phone. She was well aware that the chaos in New York was still continuing. The evacuation measures had ceased and the government had given an all-clear on the potential threat, but people were not resting easy. There had been much damage, panic, chaos. Even a few deaths. It would take weeks to return to what passed as normal in such a place.
And then there was DC. The capital of the United States. Samara could have laughed at how well that had gone—she, in fact, had done nothing to facilitate it. She and her team had had no idea of any special session of Congress and frankly could not care less. But the powers-that-be had determined it a possible target, and hoped to catch them there.
Their current location, forty miles from the Capitol Building, was the closest Samara would ever dare to get to the lion’s den. They had another destination in mind.
She glanced around the parking lot of the strip mall. The delivery truck was parked in a rear row of what passed for a commercial hub in Prince Frederick. There was a grocery store, a Chinese food restaurant, a post office, a deli, and a mattress store. Morning shoppers came and went without any idea wha
t was about to happen. The power of the sonic weapon would ensure that even those inside, perusing produce or selecting breakfast cereals, would feel its effects.
“Mischa,” she called.
The girl opened her eyes and dutifully rounded to the rear of the truck. One man was up front, posing as the driver. Five more were in the rear with the weapon. Samara glanced about casually, making sure that no one was watching, and then she tugged the rolling metal door upward about halfway.
Four black-masked faces turned to her. The fifth was pale with dark hair. His almond-shaped eyes widened in alert at Samara’s sudden presence. He reached quickly for the black mask he had removed, the mask they had been ordered to not take off, not ever. Not until they were dead or done.
“What are you doing?” Samara asked calmly in Russian as she stepped up into the back of the truck.
“Nothing,” the man said rapidly. “Fixing. That is all.”
Samara was fairly certain he meant “adjusting,” but the word in Russian must have alluded him. He pulled the mask over his face as Mischa joined them and pulled the rolling door back down again.
There was something about the features of these men that Samara found interesting. The Russians of her native land, the land that she had turned her back on, were typically hard and unyielding. They looked as if they were hewn from wood, or perhaps carved from stone. These men, the men in the truck, these commandos that had been awarded to her for this purpose, were soldiers. They followed orders explicitly. Each and every one had at least eight confirmed kills in their careers. They knew that this was most likely a one-way trip. Yet she found their features to be softer, as if they had been molded from clay. It was not a fault or shortcoming; quite the opposite. It was an attractive quality, if Samara was being honest. She had long ago disposed herself of “the Russian way,” and the thought of associating herself with them in any way other than heritage was sickening.
With the man’s mask secured again and the door closed behind them, Samara tapped twice on the metal frame just behind the driver’s seat. “Get into position,” she instructed. The truck’s engine rumbled to life.