“So he doesn’t get away with it.”
“Get away with what? Hunting us down? Man, if we tell anyone about the hack, we’re toast. After some of the stuff we’ve done together, we’ll be the bad guys. Don’t even think about telling anyone about all this, Ani.”
Something about Ani’s expression must have given him an inkling that that particular ship had already sailed because his face turned red.
“You’ve already told someone, haven’t you? Of all the stupid …”
He moved toward her, and Joe picked that moment to come around the corner.
Joe saw Jack make a move toward Ani, and stepped in to make sure it didn’t turn violent. It seemed unlikely—the guy was about forty pounds overweight and looked like the closest he came to fighting was playing World of Warcraft online—but Joe felt protective toward Ani and didn’t want to take a chance.
Jack saw him immediately and ran.
Down the alley, away from Joe, not particularly fast but pretty determined.
Joe didn’t think he looked scary enough for that kind of overreaction, but then he saw that Ani was still looking past him, and he turned to see two guys coming into the alley, reaching into their jackets. Joe recognized them from the security footage that Klein had shown him back at Pabody/Reich just before he went all extraterrestrial on them, and the thought of the guns they were drawing sent him right back to the moment that Glenn Tavernier pulled out his own weapon. This was a moment that would pretty much define the rest of his life.
He guessed he’d felt it raising its ugly head back when he’d first seen the bulge in the first guy’s jacket on-screen in Klein’s security room, but he’d squashed it down and kept it away from the forefront of his mind, put it back in the darker parts of his memory where he hid his failures, like the red chamber where Andy died again and again and he was unable to prevent it every time.
Freezing was out of the question.
Doing nothing was not an option.
He had a new partner now, and he wasn’t going to let her suffer the fate of his last one.
The two guys already had their weapons half drawn, and if they drew them fully, Joe and Ani were at their mercy. He couldn’t say for certain that they had murder in mind, but Joe believed that a man didn’t pull a gun unless he was prepared to use it, and he didn’t use it unless he was prepared to kill with it.
Joe readied himself, closed his eyes, accessed his chip—the way he wished he’d accessed it on the night Andy died—and turned on its eidetic reflexes function.
The basics of every type of physical combat, from bare knuckle brawling through to jujitsu, were stored there, ready for activation.
He thought about Andy, and Ani, and did something he had always avoided.
He turned off the safety switch, just by imagining it as a physical switch and mentally flipping it.
Now he welcomed the anger he’d always tried to suppress, feeling it flooding through him like a red tide.
He opened his eyes.
Ani realized that they were in big trouble and looked at Joe for guidance, a strategy, reassurance, anything.
She was shocked to see him close his eyes and just stand there, immobile.
Great time to freeze, she thought and turned to the first of the incoming goons. His gun was in his hand and he was bringing it around to point at her. She felt sick and alone and afraid.
She steeled herself, made her body into a shape that seemed similar to a fighting stance she’d seen on TV, and thought, Well, this is stupid.
She looked over at Joe again, fear and sickness growing within her, and saw his eyes flick open, his face get gravely serious, then determined, then slightly insane.
He took a few paces forward and the first guy stopped the arc that would bring his gun to rest upon her and swung it around until it was pointing at Joe.
He settled into his aim.
Ani saw Joe grin.
And then things went kind of crazy.
The guy was pointing the SIG at Joe’s body, playing the averages. The torso was a better bet than a limb, or even the head, simply because of its greater area. And there was plenty inside the torso that would be messed up enough by a bullet to end any resistance.
It was the easy play.
It was also flawed.
Because the guy had his stance locked down, and it would take time to readjust. Oh, it would only take milliseconds, sure, but they were milliseconds that Joe simply wasn’t going to give him.
He knew that the longer he drew this out, the less likely it was that he could emerge victorious. Two adult targets with about equal strength, stamina, training, intelligence, and guns, against Joe and Ani who were unarmed, had teenage strength, moderate stamina, Ani with no training, they both had unpolished intelligence, and no guns.
Speed and surprise were the only weapons in their favor.
That, and a catalogue of digital files full of violence, and the righteous rage that was already filling Joe with increased adrenaline.
With the chip engaged, time passed in a very different way for Joe. The Shuttleworths called it the edge, while Abernathy preferred the quick because of something he’d read in a thriller once. But whatever you called it, it was like Joe was moving at full speed, while the people he fought looked like they were at half.
Joe swerved out of the guy’s line of sight, then ducked and wheeled around as he cut down the distance between them. The guy tried to track him, but Joe’s path was random, and it brought him within striking distance of the guy in less than two seconds.
Up that close, a gun didn’t need to be accurately aimed to do fatal damage, but it did need to be pointing in Joe’s direction. He bobbed underneath its firing line and came up fast and hard, pushing off the ground, straightening bent legs and concentrating the force of all that energy into the flat of his right hand. The hand hit the guy’s gun arm midway between his wrist and his elbow and it pushed the arm upward. Joe stood up to his full height while the arm was still traveling and windmilled his left hand—curled into a fist—so that it came from high up and hit the topside of the guy’s arm at the junction of his hand and his wrist.
Joe’s right hand remained flat beneath, and the guy’s arm hit it as Joe’s left fist drove the arm down with devastating force.
The gun flew out of the guy’s hand, and the bones inside his arm made a horrible noise—somewhere between a pop and a crack. Joe moved fluidly aside, spinning around the guy until he was behind him, and delivered a flat-foot kick to the back of the guy’s left calf. A stamping kick that focused all of Joe’s power, rage, and digitally enhanced skill into a single spot, all delivered at lightning speed.
Joe checked the position of the other guy—three yards out and gun aimed, but the barrel wavering because things were happening too fast for him to be able to risk letting off a shot without hitting his associate—before watching the first guy take a heavy, headfirst fall onto the pavement.
Joe gauged his resting place, turned to face the second guy, and set off for him, kicking off hard and making sure that his spring forward used the back of the first guy’s head as a starting place.
Joe figured that was one down, one to go.
The second guy tracked Joe with his gun and his finger was tightening on the trigger, so Joe feinted right, feinted left, and then dived to the ground, hitting a forward roll and coming to a stop at the guy’s left, seated on the ground, legs drawn back, hands splayed.
The guy tried to adjust, but it was far too late.
Joe braced himself with his hands and he kicked out with both feet, hitting the guy’s knees, knocking him backward. Then Joe was up and flashing two quick punches into the man’s solar plexus. Joe took a quick count: two knees screaming in pain, and the blows to the abdomen would have thrown the guy’s diaphragm into spasm, causing a momentary, but total, loss of air.
Keeping the gun in his sight line, and keeping his body away from it, he reached up with two stiff arms and clapped them tog
ether—hard—on both of the guy’s ears.
The fight went out of him. The rule of three. Deliver three agonizing strikes and let overload do the rest. Joe stuck his leg behind the guy’s legs, pushed him backward, and he tripped and fell. Joe stamped on his chest and kicked the gun from his hand. Then he ran to Ani, grabbed her by the arm, and together they raced out of the alley and back onto Baker Street.
Not a shot had been fired.
Not a blow landed on him.
Joe shut his eyes, checked the combat log, and saw that the fight had lasted thirteen seconds, then switched the safety mechanism back to “on,” powered down the eidetic reflexes part of his chip, and he and Ani made their escape.
“That was, like, that was … I mean … wow!” Ani said when they were clear. “You took them both out … I mean … how? What was that you were using? Ninja skills?”
“A few things I picked up. But, truthfully, I’m a little disappointed.”
“Disappointed?” Ani asked, bewildered.
“It took thirteen seconds to take them both down.”
“Yeah, to take down two armed mercenaries. With guns. What’s there to be disappointed about?”
“I was aiming for under twelve.”
Ani noticed that he was only half joking.
He knew that he’d probably come across as arrogant, or unnecessarily glib, but it was a strange feeling, all that fighting skill and expertise just fading away back into his chipset. Turning off the anger control made it even more difficult to adjust, because all the rage that came out—and that was responsible for at least two of the blows that he landed—wasn’t augmented at all. It was his natural state without the chip. And it scared him. It always had.
Then he’d joined YETI and the same neurological disorder that made his anger uncontrollable turned out to be the precise thing that made the Shuttleworths’ chipset work in his head, and the anger had disappeared.
But taking off the suppressor, or switching off the chip, always reminded him that it was only YETI technology that kept him from losing his temper. He saw his propensity for violence as a weakness, and—even though it had just helped him dispatch two armed men in thirteen seconds—it was also a source of shame.
Shame that hid its vulnerability beneath defensive statements like I was aiming for under twelve.
Better Ani thought that he was cocky than ashamed.
He contacted Abernathy and told him what they had confirmed about Palgrave’s position at the head of the conspiracy they were steadily unraveling.
“It would help if Mr. McVitie could provide indisputable proof of Palgrave’s involvement.”
“Yeah, well, he took off. Paranoia multiplied by the arrival of two guys with guns.”
“Thirteen seconds? You disarmed them and took them down in thirteen seconds?”
“Had to. So what are we doing now?”
“Well, Dr. Ghoti is hard at work on your friend Lennie, but it’s difficult to know exactly what we’re dealing with. And we’ve got a lot more questions than answers. I mean this must all be leading up to something, but I can’t figure out Palgrave’s strategy. The taking of YETI HQ must mean that we’re very close to his endgame. You can’t take out a government task force without some kind of blowback. He must have something in play. We must be missing something.”
“What?”
“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?” Abernathy sounded frustrated. “All I know is that you don’t make a play like Palgrave did last night unless you think that no one is going to notice in time. That means there must be something happening now that is going to make an armed takeover irrelevant.”
“Have you checked Palgrave’s calendar for the day? I mean there should be some public record of an MP’s movements, shouldn’t there?”
“There’s nothing there,” Abernathy said. “We checked.”
Ani was listening to Joe’s side of the conversation. She’d started looking up something on her tablet, then raised her eyes from the screen and said, “Uh-oh.”
Joe asked Abernathy to wait and turned to Ani.
“What’s ‘uh-oh’?”
“Twitter. Palgrave’s setting off for a gig in Hyde Park. Some free entertainment he’s organized …”
“Did you hear that, Abernathy?” There was no answer. A few seconds later he got a reply.
“How did we miss this? A sophisticated intelligence gathering network at my fingertips, and I find out through Twitter and Google? There’s a free concert in Hyde Park for the city’s youth, and it’s starting in about thirty minutes. It’s being webcast. Around the world.”
“Don’t tell me. Precision Image is playing?” Joe said.
“Could be. ‘Up-and-coming London bands’ is all the information I can find. Joe, we have to stop this. We’re under-resourced, understaffed, and way behind the curve on this one, but if that sound is anywhere near as dangerous as it seems, then we can’t let it go global.”
“We’ll stop it. We have to.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN: DOWN IN THE PARK
Joe and Ani grabbed a cab and it crawled through London traffic toward Hyde Park. They had no plan, no strategy, no ideas, and Joe had a terrifying feeling that they were too late and Victor Palgrave’s scheme was about to reach a terrible fruition.
Ani took out her phone and made a call: a cryptic conversation during which she muttered about sound waves and antinoise—whatever the heck that was—and she refused to speak about it, other than to say it might not come to anything, and if it did it was their “very last fallback plan.”
Joe was too wired to argue.
He willed the traffic to break, to allow their cab through, but it seemed resistant to his mental commands and they made slow progress. They took a right at Selfridges, then a left onto Park Lane, and then traffic stalled. Joe paid the driver and they took off on foot.
The area was in chaos with throngs of teens heading for the park.
“Social media has gone insane,” Abernathy came back to tell them. “The concert has been set up for weeks, but its organizers have been holding back the bulk of the publicity until now. Suddenly it’s a secret gig made public, and everyone wants to go. I can’t tell you how many people are heading there…”
“I can. Freaking thousands. Lambs to the slaughter. Can’t you call in the army?”
“I’ve called in everyone I can think of. This is as short a notice as I’ve ever had to organize anything meaningful for a situation so grave. Get in there, Joe. Shut it down. And most of all: make sure that .wav file doesn’t play!”
Hyde Park was one of the places where London’s urban and commercial sprawl tried on countryside clothes, and the city was better for it. Ani had been here before, for a gig with a band that she now could not believe she had ever thought was cool, and she had marveled then at the park’s size, the beauty of its landscaping, and its sheer capacity for human audiences.
Now, though, she felt sick.
The crowds of young people filling up the park were completely unprepared for the sound from space, or the modified version of it. She had no doubts now who had modified the .wav file: Victor Palgrave. And when it played, everyone in the park would be subjected to its devastating effects.
Thousands of kids would become just like Lennie Palgrave—normal on the surface, but inside, hosts for those electric impulses that would make them no longer completely human.
Had Lennie been used as a lab rat for the experiments his father would have needed to run in harnessing the .wav for his own dark purposes? Ani wondered what kind of father it was who could be that cold and manipulative. Still, maybe it was lucky that he had gotten Lennie involved. If he hadn’t, MI5 wouldn’t have set YETI on Lennie’s trail. That was Palgrave’s big mistake.
She was starting to see the sequence of events that had brought them all here: Palgrave obviously hadn’t been expecting MI5 to start investigating his son, and when YETI was asked to infiltrate the weird world of X-Core just days before this “free c
oncert” that would provided Palgrave with an army, he must have gotten spooked and thought he’d take YETI out of the equation.
Jack’s discovery of the .wav file must have thrown Palgrave into a panic, too, so he’d sent mercenaries to shut Jack up. And anyone he’d been in contact with.
Ani supposed she shouldn’t be surprised, but she was.
First contact had been made with an alien life-form—of which Professor Klein was probably the purest terrestrial manifestation—and Palgrave had quickly seen a way to turn it to his advantage. That was the way humanity seemed to operate.
Humans couldn’t help but exploit everything.
There were still a few things that Ani couldn’t figure, though.
First, what was Imogen Bell’s role in all of this? It seemed certain that she had heard the sound from space, recorded it, played it to Professor Klein, and then she or Klein had substituted it for another sound. Did that mean that Imogen Bell was, like Klein, a recipient of the real creature’s essence? How, then, had Victor Palgrave gotten his hands on it? How had he figured out the route to power that was to be gained by adding his own messages to the creature’s code?
Still, there was no time to waste on endless questions and speculative answers.
They were entering the park.
They had to stop Palgrave taking over the minds of everyone gathered here, and then they could hunt him down and just ask him.
The crowd was converging on an area that had rapidly been turned over to a stage and a huge public address system. Joe didn’t know how powerful the speakers were, but he was sure they would be more than sufficient to convey Victor Palgrave’s terrifying sound with devastating efficiency.
The area around the stage was already thick with spectators, and there was a tangible buzz in the air. As far as the crowd was concerned, they were here for free entertainment. They had no idea about the terrible things hidden beneath the music.
Technicians were busying themselves on the stage, connecting instruments and checking microphones. Joe felt futility wash through him, a tidal wave of doubts and fears. But he had to concentrate on making sure that his fears stopped before the band took the stage.
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