“Okay,” said Bug almost at once, “the signal’s clearing up.”
“Copy that.” Beneath my balaclava and helmet I was sweating like a pig. “I’m going to want to have Huckleberry explain how a piece of quartz with no wires in it can do this to our gear. She said her new stuff was top of the line, and this is a perfect ‘put up or shut up’ opportunity.”
“Huckleberry” was Doc Holliday’s call sign.
“Um, you know she’s actually in the TOC, Cowboy,” said Bug nervously. “Standing right next to me. She can actually hear you.”
“Good,” I growled, and I thought I heard a female voice in the background say something very specific about me getting frisky with livestock.
“You’re good to go. Everything’s in the green,” Bug said, then he quickly added, “Not that crystal green, I mean, I—”
“Yeah, yeah, got it,” I said.
I clicked my tongue for Ghost and we began moving along the empty second-floor hallway. We paused near the top of the steps and I touched a dial to send some houseflies up there and then along the hall. The lights were low and the tiny drones would be virtually invisible. They whipped down the hall to a T-junction and cut left and right. The left side was empty, but on the right I saw a guy dressed in a drab gray security company uniform standing guard outside of a locked room. The logo stitched onto his jacket read: Sluzhby Zashchity, which translates as “Protection Services.” Appropriately nondescript. Ghost ran to the end of our hall and stopped out of sight of the guard, crouching, waiting for me to give the word. I ran to catch up.
Ghost looked at me as if to say, I’m good to kill this guy, boss.
I winked at him. Not really sure if dogs get the whole winking thing, but Ghost shifted and tensed for a rush. I gave him a hand sign to signal him to be ready, but not attack. He gave me a mildly disapproving look. I holstered my pistol, drew the Snellig dart gun, leaned around the corner, and shot the faux guard in the thigh.
Horsey works on everyone. Even brutes as big as this guy. I ran and caught the guard before he hit the floor, then stretched him out. A quick pat-down produced nothing of use. A packet of tissues, a roll of mints, and that was it. No ID of any kind and no cell phone. However, he wore what looked like a high school ring—you know, the kind with the big, fake jewel. Except that there was a metal cap over it. Something about the ring bothered me, so I jiggered around and finally forced a hidden release and the cap flipped open to reveal a stone that shone with a very familiar green radiance.
“Cowboy,” said Bug, “I’m beginning to get more of that interference.”
I angled my bodycam to show the ring. “Check it out.”
“If you take it,” said Bug, “Huckleberry wants you to put it in the Faraday bag.” I did that, and was told that the interference was now gone.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I murmured, then dragged the guard around the corner and into a women’s bathroom. That hurt my back, but I ate the pain because now was not a time to go all whiny.
I went to the security door and bypassed the locks. Inside, there were rows of computer workstations, each with a desk-model computer. Everything looked new, and all of the hardware I saw was state of the art.
“Bug…?” I asked quietly.
“Seeing it, Cowboy,” he said. “This is all high-end stuff. Mostly Russian manufacture, but there are some Chinese and Japanese computers, too. Hey, the one on the end of the left-hand row. See it? The one with three monitors? That’s probably a supervisor’s desk. Find a USB port and plug me in.”
I hurried over and did as he suggested, socketing an uplink device into the side of the central monitor. “Done.”
“Okay,” said Bug after a moment, “couple things. First, there’s a command log-in program installed on that computer. Looks like everyone has to log in through the supervisor and get the day code.”
“Shit. Can you bypass it?”
Bug’s snort of derision was eloquent.
“Sorry,” I said.
“They are definitely using intranet instead of Internet. Nothing goes outside of this room. Computer access here isn’t even connected to the rest of the building. I see a link to a multi-disc DVD burner, so they must use that when they need to take bulk data to another site. Otherwise, just the twenty-three computers in that room. I’m not detecting any landline or Wi-Fi at all.”
“Got you covered,” I said, and produced a compact but very powerful portable router and attached it to the uplink. Screens all through the room suddenly winked on.
“Perfect,” said Bug. “Let me see what I can—” He stopped. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” I demanded.
“I just pulled up a building floor plan from their internal computers, and it doesn’t match at all with the one I already gave you. They totally redesigned the place, and they didn’t build out or up, they went down. I’m seeing three levels of subbasement. Looks like they installed some of the most sophisticated security equipment I’ve ever seen. The second subbasement ceiling is titanium-sheathed lead with a ceramic core. Nothing on Earth can scan through that. There could be a hundred people down there for all we know. Makes me think more about those buses, you know? There are also delivery receipts for tons of materials and sixteen big-ass generators.”
“What the hell are they building down there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Bug, “but Doc wants you to go down there and find out.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
Tracy Cole loved watching Top Sims move. Not for any sexual or romantic reasons—he was too old for her and she was too professional—but because he moved like a cat. Quick, quiet, efficient; able to go from stillness into rapid motion and then freeze on a dime and vanish into the background.
Tracy had read about soldiers who were like that, but she’d never met one. Not really. Not even during her time in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria with a U.S. Army detail attached working as United Nations peacekeepers. She’d met SEALs who moved with less grace, and even Delta shooters who were younger and stronger but who didn’t have the same gift. It reinforced why Top was Captain Ledger’s right hand; and why he was the one who trained the top fighters in the DMS.
She wondered if there was anyone other than the captain who could take Top in a fight. Sure, Duffy was a better shot and Bunny was stronger than the Hulk, but …
Top reached the door and dropped down onto one knee, his weapon and eyes moving to cover the area around him. Then he gave her a single wave and covered her as she broke from cover and dashed across the parking lot, trying to mimic the sleek grace of the older man. Cole knew she was good, but she never accepted good as enough. Not when she was in the army, not as a cop in South Carolina, and sure as hell not now that she was running with the big dogs.
She reached the wall and crouched down on the opposite side of the loading bay doors. There were four big roll-down doors and one smaller service entrance. Top gave her the nod and she slung her rifle and dug out the high-tech equipment that allowed her to bypass the locks. A device the size and shape of a nickel was pressed to the underside of the keycard reader and gave her a soft go-ahead ping in her earbud. Cole swiped a blank card through the slot once, waited for two seconds, and then again. The second time the red light on the security card reader flicked from red to green. It took MindReader only two seconds to hack the system, own it, and add the right code to the blank card. The same codes would be sent to identical cards carried by everyone. Each time they encountered a similar lock, two swipes would share the right codes with everyone. Smooth. Almost scary, but comforting, too.
“Go,” murmured Top, and Cole pulled the door open. He rose and moved past her as she covered, and then he faded to one side and covered for her as she followed.
The loading bay was huge, with mountains of crates stacked nearly to the ceiling. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, each coded with diff
erent symbols. They moved together to clear the room first, making sure there were no guards. When it was clear they were alone, they went along the fronts of several rows, making sure their bodycams recorded the data stenciled on each. Bug was Captain Ledger’s live intel guy, so they had Zero, one of the other field support specialists.
“Are those bar codes?” asked Zero. “Scan one for me.”
Each crate had a lot of numerical codes written either in black, red, or green ink, but every crate had a similar black bar code on the bottom front. Cole slipped a hand scanner over her glove. It was about as thick as a pencil though half as long, and fitted over the glove with an elastic band. Ultra-high-res lasers scanned the data and her combat suit’s telemetry uploaded it to the drones, which in turn relayed it to a MindReader burst-transfer substation in the car they’d come in. All of that happened in a microsecond as Cole waved her hand over a dozen different crates, making sure to get some of each of the three color codes.
“These are destination codes,” said Zero.
“Where are they going?” asked Cole, and Top nodded his approval.
“A lot of places. Scan more of them.”
As Cole did that, Zero began reading off the destinations. The crates marked in red seemed to be going to cities all over the world, without any immediate pattern.
“Got to be something in common,” said Top.
“I’ll find it,” promised Zero. Prior to becoming a field support specialist, he’d worked for two years with Nikki’s pattern recognition group.
“What about the others?”
“All the green boxes so far seem to be addressed to Ukraine—that’s weird. Since when are they engaging in friendly commerce? And Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia…”
“All Europe?” asked Cole.
Zero took a moment on that. “No. Those last two you did, do more in that stack. Yeah … looks like they’re all for China. No, I’m wrong. There’s a couple for … hey, that’s really weird. North Korea?”
Another voice came on the line. The stern voice of Doc Holliday. “When y’all are done pulling your puds, maybe you could open some of those darn crates.”
Top and Cole removed small pry bars from their packs and jimmied open a lid, then sifted through foam popcorn. Top lifted out two identical parcels, set one down, and removed plastic wrapping from the other.
“Some kind of machine part,” he said, turning it over in his hands. The object was lightweight, silver in color, and wrapped with coils of copper wire. “Think it’s aluminum or magnesium. Weighs hardly anything.”
Cole went fishing through the crate. “All the same thing. Identical. But what is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Zero. “We need to find a shipping manifest.”
“Open some of the other boxes,” directed Doc.
They did, moving quickly from one stack to another. It soon became apparent that there were forty different pieces in the various crates on each stack. The same forty pieces in each stack.
“Okay,” said Cole, “but what do these things assemble into?”
Zero said, “I got a bad feeling we already know the answer to that, guys.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
The new schematics Bug pulled from the hard drives gave me a clear route to a concealed set of stairs leading down into the basement. The entrance was behind a large set of double file drawers that slid sideways on concealed tracks. Behind that was a handprint and retina scanner, but Bug owned the system now, so he accessed the records tied to the security office and transferred a high-density overlay to my right contact lens and a pattern to the pads of my gloves. Suddenly I was Sergei Alexandrovich, deputy director of research. The door opened as if happy to see me.
Ghost and I crept inside. I had an Anteater bug detector attached to each sleeve, so as I stepped inside I gave it time to search for secondary security. All clean. Stairs zigzagged down, so down we went. There was an elevator, too, but they come with all sorts of possible complications, and there are plenty of very nasty security systems that can turn an elevator car into a temporary prison or a gas chamber. No thanks.
Down and down we went, passing through more security. Apparently Dr. Alexandrovich had a free pass everywhere. Nice. With each flight downward, though, I could tell that Ghost was becoming more uneasy. His fur rippled with tension and he often paused to bare his teeth at empty corners. I didn’t scold him or tell him that there was nothing to be afraid of. He had sharper senses than I did, and I’ve learned from experience that electronics aren’t always superior to a dog’s perceptions. When Ghost reacted to something, I respected that, and made sure I always looked, my hand ready on my weapon.
Always.
The schematics indicated that the subbasements had high ceilings, and from the number of flights of stairs that was true enough. It felt like we were descending into the underworld.
Ghost stopped again at the bottom of the second-to-last landing and he stood with tail straight out behind him and head lowered, the way he does when he perceives a human presence. I took a horsefly from my pocket and sent it buzzing. It landed on the wall and crawled the rest of the way as I watched its video feed on my wrist computer. There was a last—and damned impressive—airlock, guarded by two sentries who looked tough, fit, and competent. These men were not dressed in the same security company uniform as the one upstairs; they were actual soldiers. However, they wore no unit insignia or rank, but they were in steel gray and mist white fatigues and gear. They were armed with SR-2 Veresk submachine guns. Very nasty guns that fired proprietary 9×21mm SP-10 rounds designed to penetrate most body armor. Maybe even the spider-silk-and-carbon-fiber stuff I was wearing. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to find out.
My Anteater flashed at me, and when I checked the screen it told me that the bottom six steps had all kinds of motion and pressure sensors. No way I could sneak close enough to fire the Snellig.
It was a crisis moment. If I did nothing and just spooked my way out of there, then the mystery of the earthquake and the suicides might never be solved. If I moved forward there was no way to do it without killing them. The gas dart gun just wasn’t reliable enough if I had to move fast. If the arms race shifted to weapons that could drive people crazy and induce earthquakes, how could we compete? We’d either have to throw nukes at Russia to make a statement, or get shaken and stirred into rubble.
On one hand, if I forced my way in and they were making something totally benign and unrelated to what happened in Washington, then that would make me a murderer. On the other hand, if I shot my way in and there was proof that Valen Oruraka’s devices were tied to an official Russian agenda, then Washington was an indisputable act of war. And there would be a war. Some kind of war. Cold or hot. My pulse was racing and I felt trapped by colliding realities and possibilities. And I couldn’t really fall back and ask for advice. I was the director of the Special Projects office. I was the guy who any other DMS field agent would contact to make his call.
I looked down at Ghost and he looked up for the pack leader to actually lead.
The two guards stood between me and some kind of answer. The Modern Man inside of me pleaded for mercy. The Cop told me that we needed those answers, and I could feel that part of me hardening his heart. The Killer’s heart was already hardened. Not against feeling, but against failing to act because of those feelings. It reminded me of a Navajo guy I knew in college. We’d go deer hunting and before he even loaded his gun he would pray to the deer, honoring it, thanking it, becoming somehow in alignment with it. There was never disrespect, even when, later, he sighted and pulled the trigger. There was never a loss of his compassion and humanity, even as he dressed his kill. That is the difference between a warrior and a soldier. The warrior never loses sight of his humanity and his place in the completeness of the natural world.
So I said a silent prayer in my own head, then ran down the l
ast steps and killed both of them.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
Bunny and Tate moved quietly through several rooms filled with machinery for manufacturing sound equipment.
They were the two biggest men on the team, but each knew how to work within the skin of silence, leaving no mark on the air to signal their presence. Twice guards strolled by within easy arm’s reach of them. Bunny could have reached out of the shadows and taken the men, ended them right there; but this wasn’t that kind of day, and he was glad of it. Like all good soldiers he could kill with professional efficiency and natural diligence, but never for fun. He never got a thrill from it, even when taking down the worst of the worst. To give in to that kind of pleasure was a long step down a very bad road.
Tate, he suspected, was much the same. And Bunny was wise enough to know that it was more typical with large men to be brutal at need but gentle by nature. Rudy had explained it to him once, saying that since they did not have the fears of being physically inadequate because of size and strength, they felt no juvenile desire to demonstrate their strength.
He was curious to see how Tate would be if this went south on them. Top had given his nod, but Bunny had his own standards. He looked for the emotional connection between soldier and action. Between the person and what that person was called upon to do; and how that manifested in the visible emotions. He’d given red cards to a few shooters over the years, sending them off the field if they looked like they were getting high from spilling blood.
Tate was cool, though. There was no flicker in his eye, no twitch in his fingers as if he wanted to grab and hurt. Bunny nodded to himself.
The second guard reached the far side of the room they were in and then used a keycard to exit. When the door closed, Bunny and Tate stepped out from their places of concealment between hulking machines. They moved off, staying close but maximizing their time by looking at different machines, opening different cabinets and desks. Tate understood technology better than Bunny and he took point when giving details to the TOC, and occasionally directed Bunny’s bodycam to help him get a full picture of each large machine, which Doc Holliday quickly identified. Machines to shape and mold plastic or metal; machines to attach component parts; machines to weld and seal.
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