“Adorable,” I agreed.
“Sitting there all tied up and shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Hair mussed up. Cuffed and scuffed and still full of stuff. Bet her parents would be so proud of her.”
Harrald stared pure unfiltered death at him. “Fuck you.”
“Such language. I’m shocked,” said Top, looking aghast. “Shocked, I do declare.”
Ghost made a sound that I swear to God was a doggy laugh.
I looked at Harrald’s ID, then stuffed it in a pocket. The other agents were Kurt Krieg, Thomas Hurley, Christopher Jablonski, and John Smallwood. I pocketed all of their IDs. No need to call it in, because the American flag pin I wore on my lapel was a high-res video camera that was feeding everything to MindReader in real time. Calpurnia had run facial recognition on each of them and one of Bug’s team was happily tearing through their entire lives via deep and unfiltered Net searches.
“Okay, kids,” I said to the unsmiling faces glaring at us, “I know it’s tough losing the big game, but we can take it as a learning experience. If you try real hard, make every practice, one day maybe—maybe—you’ll be able to play with the big kids.”
“Fuck you,” repeated Harrald.
“Okay, that’s a valid argument,” I conceded. “Or … how about you five are already fucked. Deeply and comprehensively fucked. None of you are carrying warrants. No warrants have, in fact, been issued for me. I checked.”
That put some doubt in the faces of the four men. They tried not to cut looks at Harrald, but mostly failed. Which confirmed that she was the foreman of this little crew.
“You guys know what happened to the three bozos who came at me at the cemetery this morning?”
“These pricks probably killed them,” said one of the other agents. Krieg.
“Maybe they should have come after me with a warrant,” I said, and for a moment I actually enjoyed the fear that flashed in their eyes. Then a second later I felt like a jackass and a bully. I caught Top looking at me, one eyebrow slightly raised in mild reproof. But he had a trace of a smile, too. Top is always the grown-up in the room. I seldom aspire to that role.
“We don’t need a warrant,” said Krieg.
“If you’re going to try and play the ‘national security’ card, son,” said Top, “maybe you’d better go reread the rules. We are national security. More than you know. More than you’ll ever be. So, don’t embarrass yourself here. Be a man, Agent Krieg.”
I had to fight to keep the wince off my face. Krieg didn’t. Ghost made that snarky sound again.
“Okay,” I said, squatting down in front of Harrald, “let’s cut right to it. Why were you following me? What were your orders? Who cut them?”
She tried to burn holes through me with her eyes.
“I didn’t kill the first three agents,” I said, “but they’re having a bad day. You’re having a bad day, too.”
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Shoot us?”
“No, dumbass. I’m hoping to reason with you. One federal employee to another.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“That would be sexual harassment, and besides … ewww. No.”
Harrald turned a very nice shade of tomato red.
“What I want here is for you to act like a professional. If you have a legal reason to attempt an arrest, then you need to tell me. And I don’t want to hear ‘Patriot Act,’ because that is what I use to wipe my dog’s ass. We both know that I’m with the Department of Military Sciences, which means I’m operating according to a precisely worded executive order. It is an irrevocable order, too. If you haven’t read it, then maybe you should. Oh, that’s right, it’s about a zillion steps above your pay grade. Ask your boss’s boss’s boss to read it. We don’t get arrested by the benchwarmers. If we somehow step on our own dicks, there are proper channels to address it and we would get spanked pretty damn hard. So, whatever you’re doing is, literally, illegal. I can arrest all of you. I would, in fact, have been within my legal right to shoot the shit out of you when you came after me with guns drawn. Be real happy I didn’t toss a fragmentation grenade in your face. I have some with me.”
Her ferocity was showing cracks at the edges, and I knew that she knew I was telling the truth. Maybe if we were alone she might have opened up, but her crew was with her. From what I know about the current state of the Secret Service, there was a lot of backstabbing and cliquishness polluting an organization that used to be known for its deep integrity. That made me sad and, let’s face it, a bit cranky.
But Harrald didn’t say anything else. None of them did. They bit down on their humiliation, fear, and anger and sat like defeated lumps.
There was a huge temptation bubbling in my chest to threaten them with what I could do to their lives with MindReader. It would have felt good for about three seconds. It might even have crowbarred one of them open … but it would have been small. And I knew Top would disapprove. Adult in the room, blah blah blah. Moral decency can occasionally be a pain in the ass.
So instead, I straightened and said, “When you get back to the office, tell your boss to pass a message up the line. You’ve come at me twice today, and both times you fucked up. Both times you also got lucky. If I was some kind of bad guy, as you cats seem to think, then I’d put bullets in your heads and burn this building down on top of you. However, I think you’re a bunch of misinformed idiots and not actual villains. Stay on that side of the line. Don’t come after me again. Make sure no one else comes after me. I just used up the very last of my give-a-fuck. Got no fucks left to give.”
“Hooah,” breathed Top.
We turned to go. Ghost shot me a seriously, no biting? look, then snuffed and followed us up the stairs. Top paused at the top step and yelled over his shoulder.
“Sit tight,” he said. “We’ll call someone.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Eventually,” he amended.
We left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CITADEL OF SALAH ED-DIN
SEVEN KILOMETERS EAST OF AL-HAFFAH, SYRIA
TWO DAYS AGO
The men had no idea they were in danger.
They had no idea that death was falling toward them. They stood with their eyes fixed on the green glow that swirled up from below the castle floor. They stood transfixed. All of them.
And then Violin was among them.
The first hint any of them had of her presence was when one of the biggest men seemed to collapse beneath the improbable weight of shadow. Out of the corners of their eyes they saw a cloud of darkness strike him on the shoulders with such force that it bent him backward, broke him, crushed him down to the unforgiving stone. The scientists screamed in shock and sudden terror. The soldiers whirled, cursing, torn from one impossible thing to another.
And then the shadow rose from the twisted, dying man and coalesced into something else. Tall, slim, sheathed in black, with matched kukri knives in her gloved fists. Silver flashed and then the air was filled with rubies.
The closest man reeled backward, clutching at his throat, unable to process why it felt so hot and so wrong. Another soldier swung his Kalashnikov around with the speed of years of combat, but then it tilted and fell, held only by one hand. The other, still clutching the wooden handguard, no longer belonged to him. He gaped at it for a moment and then saw a line of silver moving toward him too fast for him to evade. He did not even have time to cry out.
* * *
Far above, Harry Bolt watched the carnage as he fought the release control on the silver wire that suspended him from the ceiling. It was supposed to operate with a gentle pressure of his thumb, but the goddamn thing would not move. He cursed and squeezed it with all his strength, hissing as his struggles made the harness cut even harder into his tortured scrotum.
“Come on, you goddamn cock-sucking son of a bitch,” he snarled as he shook the stubborn release. “Come on … please!”
Below, Violin was in the center
of a storm of violence. Guns fired but she was never there. Men lunged at her and grabbed nothing. But there were so many of them and she was alone. Harry had a sidearm, but he did not trust his accuracy enough to risk a shot. Even though he’d become more skilled under her tutelage, he seldom scored more than one shot in ten in the kill zone. Violin seemed to be everywhere, dancing like she did, performing a ballet of slaughter. He was absolutely certain that if he tried to shoot from up there he’d probably kill her.
So, in desperation, he held the release in one hand and punched it with the other.
It did, in fact, release.
But his blow bent the speed-belaying device out of alignment.
He did not descend.
He plummeted.
* * *
Violin heard the caterwauling wail as Harry Bolt dropped like a rock from the ceiling, but she could not do anything about it. Ghul and two of his men were chopping at her with knives and trying to bring pistols to bear, and she was forced to take the fight to ultraclose range, using speed and her natural athleticism to evade and engage at the same time.
Behind her there was a heavy, ugly whump as Harry crashed down, and an accompanying double scream of pain; proof that he’d landed on one of the invaders instead of the unyielding ground. Violin could not spare the time to look, because everything around her was blood and fury, rage and death.
She spun and twisted, danced and leapt, her heavy, curved blades cleaving through bone as easily as they parted flesh. The Kevlar body armor some of the men wore offered no defense. It was made to stop bullets but was of little use against the scalpel sharpness of her knives. A few shots rang out, but her first kills had been the men with the flashlights. The melee proceeded in a boiling darkness in which she could see very well, while they saw nothing that would help them.
* * *
Harry groaned and rolled over onto his knees. Pain exploded along his back and in his shoulders and legs. He heard a nearby rattling breath and he turned to see one of the guards crushed up against the base of the pillar, legs twisted and hanging over the edge of the stairway, gasping and trembling. The man’s head was angled weirdly on his neck, and Harry realized with a sick jolt that his fall had broken the guard’s neck but hadn’t killed him.
“Sorry,” mumbled Harry, which was an absurd thing to say in the middle of a bloodbath like this. He fumbled for his pistol, found it, drew it too fast, and instantly lost it. The gun went bumpity-bumping its way down the stone steps into the green glow.
“Shit,” he growled, and cast around to see if he could find the AK-47 the guard had been carrying. It was ten feet away and he lunged for it, caught the stock, clawed it to him, sat up with it in his hands, looked for a target, and stared straight into the horrified, stricken face of Professor Nasser. The man was blind in the dark and nearly mad with fear. However, he had a gun in his hand.
“Drop it!” yelled Harry.
The professor flinched at the sound and his finger involuntarily twitched on the trigger. Harry felt himself falling backward as white-hot pain detonated in the exact center of his chest. As he fell, his hands both clenched and the rifle chattered out a ragged speech of death.
INTERLUDE FOUR
EMIRATES PALACE ABU DHABI
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
SIX YEARS AGO
Gadyuka made another of her nighttime visits. What the Americans referred to as a booty call. Valen still hadn’t decided if he was appalled or enchanted.
However, as before, the sex was a prelude to talking business. She came at it in a roundabout way, talking politics first and sharing a few exciting details about the New Soviet. Then she hit him with a very strange request and encouraged him to bring Ari Kostas in on it. The mad Greek’s connections were crucial.
So, when he was alone, Valen called Ari.
“How are you at finding books?” asked Valen.
“What kind of books?” asked Ari, not particularly intrigued.
“These are books both sacred and profane. They are holy and unholy.”
“Are you quoting her?”
“Yes,” Valen admitted. “Though from what she’s told me, if we were not trying to save our country, I would burn them all.”
“Oh, please,” laughed Ari, “you must tell me more. These sound like books I should read.”
“Have you ever heard of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?”
“Valen,” said Ari slowly and with no lingering trace of humor, “you’re talking about the Pauline Index, yes?”
“I am, yes.” The Index was a list of books deemed heretical, lascivious, or anticlerical. The list had been created at the behest of Pope Paul IV in 1559, and many horrible and cruel things had been done in the name of the Church to suppress those works.
“Books of black magic,” mused Ari. “I will say this for you, Valen, you are never ever boring. Now, let me think about this. Some of those books are supposed to have been destroyed. Some aren’t even supposed to be real—they were added to the list because someone in the church thought they were real. I’m talking about books made up by horror writers. H. P. Lovecraft and that lot. Pulp writers. The Necronomicon and all that bullshit.”
“Yes.”
“And now Gadyuka wants us to find those books. Books that probably aren’t real.”
“Yes. Gadyuka believes they are real.”
“How many of these books does she want?”
“All of them, Ari. Can you find them?”
“Me?” laughed Ari. “No. Not a chance. But … I may know a guy.…”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE OVAL OFFICE
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
TWENTY-ONE MONTHS AGO
“What do you have for me, General?” asked the president. “Do you have the list of names I told you to prepare?”
General Frank Ballard felt like a big green bug on a plain white wall. Easy to spot, easy to swat. He’d been called to the Oval Office without the support of the other Joint Chiefs. The only other person in the room was Jennifer VanOwen.
“Well, Mr. President,” began Ballard, “let me first say that in terms of what Majestic Three accomplished … that all of the information related to the development, construction, and deployment of the T-craft has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” asked VanOwen.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ballard. “Destroying all of that material was the agreement when the, um, situation involving the former president was resolved.”
They sat with that. The situation in question was the abduction of the previous president by person or persons unknown. His safe return was conditional on the recovery of something called the Majestic Black Book, which was the repository for vast amounts of technical information supposedly reverse-engineered from a crashed vehicle of unknown origin.
“How can we recover that information?” demanded VanOwen.
“We can’t,” said Ballard. “And I think it would be a very dangerous thing to attempt.”
“Why?” asked the president.
“Sir, it was all in the briefing I gave prior to your taking office.”
“Little green men from outer space?” The president laughed. “My predecessor left a lot of that kind of stuff behind. Lies and misinformation left in the hopes of disrupting my presidency.”
“Sir, I was there when this happened. I was in the Situation Room when—”
“When you were fooled, General. Don’t embarrass yourself by saying that you believed that nonsense.”
“With respect, Mr. President…”
But the president waved it away with an annoyed flap of his hand. To VanOwen he said, “Put someone on recovering the Majestic Black Book.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Tell me, General, who was specifically responsible for destroying the T-craft data?”
“The, ah, physical records were stored at Howard Shelton’s estate—Van Meer Castle in Pennsylvania. The T-craft were also built and launched from there. After
one T-craft was deployed, an order was given to have a flight of Thunderbolts destroy the launch site with missiles. The entire facility was incinerated and the mountains above the hangars collapsed. Shelton’s mansion and labs were stripped of all remaining materials and everything was incinerated.”
“That’s a loss,” said the president, “and typical of my predecessor. He had no real patriotism and no vision.”
“The decision was made to protect the country from a threatened disaster.”
“So, we’re negotiating with terrorists, General?” asked VanOwen.
“Ms. VanOwen, excuse me, but you were not there.”
“Then tell me this, General,” said VanOwen, “what exactly happened to the computer records for the entire Majestic Three program? If they built T-craft, some of the information had to be in computers for the groups handling manufacture and assembly.”
Ballard made his face show nothing. “The disposal of all such records was handled by the Department of Military Sciences.”
VanOwen turned toward the president, whose lip curled as if he’d tasted something sour and foul.
“Then they probably still have them,” said the president.
Ballard shook his head. “Mr. Church gave his word that the records would be destroyed. He ordered his computer people to use tapeworms to track down all records and references.”
“Church gave his ‘word’?” murmured VanOwen in a way that suggested only a complete damn fool would be gullible enough to accept that.
“Mr. Church is a patriot,” said Ballard coldly. “He and his people have gone above and beyond more times than I can count. None of us would be here right now if—”
“Enough,” interrupted the president. “Church has fooled a lot of people for a long time, believe me. Everyone knows that. If he took the M3 records, then he has those records. I am going to make sure he turns them over to us.”
There was so much that Ballard wanted to say, but he forced himself to rely on forty years of military experience to simply reply, “Yes, sir.”
“General,” said the president, holding out a hand, “give me the list I asked for. The names of people who can serve as governors of my new Majestic Three.”
Deep Silence Page 6