But before Rita Rodriguez could pose that question, there was a commotion in the crowd directly behind her. Papa Jim watched as a man thrust himself forward. A man in a running suit.
Tefflon.
“Allah akhbar,” shouted Tefflon, reaching for the sonic grenade strapped to his arm.
But before he could trigger the device, a shot rang out, and Tefflon crumpled, a look of utter shock on his face.
Oh shit . . . ! came Denny’s voice.
Papa Jim was on his feet without being aware of having stood. Tefflon was down, shot. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was the identity of the shooter.
A munchie. One standing no more than ten feet away from Ethan.
As Papa Jim watched in horror, the munchie swung his weapon toward Ethan. “Take him down!” he screamed.
On screen, Papa Jim saw Denny raising his own weapon. But he seemed to be moving in slow motion. Everyone was moving in slow motion.
Except the shooter.
A Congregation plant.
It had to be.
Papa Jim had known they had infiltrated the Department of Homeland Security. Known that they had their moles planted amid his lower-level munchies. But never had he suspected that they would be capable of something like this. Denny had picked the personnel for this mission personally. That meant the highest echelons of the organization had been breached. There was no one Papa Jim could trust now. Maybe not even Denny himself. He clenched his fists in impotent fury. Someone was going to pay.
I underestimated them, Papa Jim realized, even as the munchie fired.
Ethan didn’t flinch. Just stood there with tears running down his cheeks.
From his side, in a blur, Lisa moved, throwing herself forward, into the path of the burst from the munchie’s weapon.
Even as she fell in a shower of blood, Denny and the other munchies opened up on the shooter, who went down in turn, his white armor chewed to bits under the concentrated fire.
Meanwhile, pandemonium reigned. The crowd had transformed into a panic-stricken mob. People were screaming hysterically, flinging themselves blindly away from the gunfire, desperate to escape whatever was happening. They sounded like animals, bleating and screaming—at least until Papa Jim stabbed the mute button, cutting them off.
“Goddamn it, Denny,” he shouted. “Where’s Ethan? What the fuck is going on? Talk to me, damn it!”
I’m here, Boss, came Denny’s voice, buzzing in his head. The kid looks okay. I’m trying to get to him now!
The camera swept off the terrorized crowd and back to the front stoop of the Brown home. There Ethan was on his knees, cradling Lisa in his arms, tears running down his cheeks as Peter stood nearby, pale as a ghost, his shirt and face spattered with blood. There was blood on Ethan too, though whether his own or Lisa’s, Papa Jim couldn’t tell.
He knew he had to act fast. “Denny, go to plan B.”
Roger that, Boss.
As Papa Jim heard his implant go dead with a hollow click, static blanked the TV screen. Plan B called for the munchies to trigger an electromagnetic pulse, something their armor was equipped to do as a kind of last-ditch defensive maneuver, since the pulse would fry all electronics in the area, including their own. This would be followed by the use of multiple sonic grenades; no doubt that was occurring even now, though Papa Jim could see and hear nothing of it, cut off as he was from the action. But his isolation was only temporary. Since Denny was the one giving the order for the EM pulse, he had shut down his own implant first. That would enable him to turn it back on within a minute or so.
While he was waiting, Papa Jim righted the spilled glass, refilled it from the bottle of Aberlour, and tossed down the contents in a single gulp. Then, throat burning, he relit his cigar and puffed furiously.
At last his implant crackled to life.
“Report,” he croaked through a gray haze of cigar smoke.
Everybody’s incapacitated, including the kid, came Denny’s voice. We’re securing him as planned. His mom is dead, and so is Tefflon.
“What about the shooter?”
Dead. I looked under his visor, Boss. I don’t recognize the guy. He wasn’t part of the team.
“Goddamn it,” Papa Jim said. “Any civilian casualties?”
Doesn’t look like it.
“Finally, a bit of luck.”
We’re bagging up the casualties and the kid and getting the fuck out of here, said Denny.
“I’ll see you in Phoenix,” Papa Jim said.
Kate had just disembarked from her flight and was wending her way slowly through the line at JFK customs when she noticed the wall-screen TV broadcasting some kind of press conference from the front lawn of a house in a town called Olathe.
A town in Kansas.
The sound was too low for Kate to hear, but what caught her attention were the words emblazoned across the top of the screen: The Son of God?
As the line inched forward, she watched, mesmerized. When the first boy came out the front door of the house, she gasped, wondering if this beefy young man could really be Ethan, but then the transcript scrolling along the bottom of the screen identified him as Peter Wiggan, a friend of Ethan Brown.
Brown!
Where had that name come from?
Then Ethan appeared, and all Kate’s questions were swept away in the joy of seeing him for only the second time in her life. But she knew immediately that it was really him. Knew it absolutely, unquestionably, by some maternal instinct, blood calling to blood.
Her son.
God’s son.
Ethan.
More and more people watched the press conference as it continued, and even the customs officers and the security personnel—white-armored guards that she heard some of her fellow travelers refer to as “munchies”— became engrossed. Someone turned up the sound, and progress in every line ceased, and the lines themselves disintegrated as American citizens and visitors alike surrendered their places and gathered in groups in front of the wall screens, where they looked on avidly, almost hungrily, as Ethan spoke.
Listening, Kate was filled with pride. And gratitude to God for saving her son and giving her the blessing of this second chance to know him, to become a part of his life. Even just seeing him like this, hearing his voice, was like a miracle to her.
Then the jogger rushed forward, a shot rang out, and chaos erupted even as the shooter turned and calmly trained his weapon on Ethan.
And fired.
Stunned, Kate fell to the floor as if the burst had come right through the TV screen and slammed into her belly.
Meanwhile, the shooter went down in a hail of bullets.
But what about Ethan? The camera was sweeping the crowd, as if searching for something . . . or avoiding something. Around Kate, people were screaming, weeping, praying. She, however, remained silent, wrapped in a shell of shock and disbelief. She sat on the floor where she had fallen, clutching her knees to her chin and rocking back and forth as she sent her prayers Heavenward.
He can’t be dead. Not after everything that’s happened. God, you can’t let it end like this! Do you hear me? You can’t!
Then Kate saw him.
Ethan.
He was alive. He knelt on the stoop of the house, spattered in blood, the body of the woman he’d identified as his mother in his arms. She looked dead.
Kate understood at that moment how much this woman had loved her son. And felt not the slightest hint of jealousy. Rather, she felt grateful beyond all expression to this stranger who had given her life for her son. And thankful that Ethan had known such love.
That too seemed like a miracle to her.
Then the screen went blank. The audio vanished.
When the broadcast resumed moments later, Ethan and his mother were gone.
It was then that two of the white-armored guards came to Kate. She barely registered what they said to her. Barely understood what was happening as they hustled her away, through
a door, down a corridor, through another door, and into a darkness as all-embracing and inescapable as the terrible mercy of God.
CHAPTER 17
Papa Jim paused in the empty hallway, hesitating midway between the two doors. Which to enter first? He supposed he could just flip a coin, let chance dictate the decision, but Papa Jim was no great believer in chance. Or fate, for that matter. He preferred to make his own luck. Always had, and he wasn’t about to stop now. Besides, he had a gut feeling that his choice might matter more than he consciously realized, and despite his usual scorn for anything that smacked of intuition, a quality he was generally happy to leave, as he put it, “to fags and females,” he’d learned over the course of his career in business and politics to pay attention to his gut feelings. So despite his impatience, he forced himself to wait, to think things through one more time. What’s it going to be? he mused, taking the opportunity to light a fresh cigar with hands that shook slightly despite his efforts to keep them still. The lady or the tiger?
He’d just come from a third room. A room that, like these two, was soundproofed and shielded against all known electronic infiltration technologies and which, again like them, was situated hundreds of feet below the Conversatio compound located outside Phoenix, Arizona; the very compound where, ten years ago, he’d first witnessed, then almost immediately forgotten, what Ethan was capable of.
It said a lot that Papa Jim had opted for the Phoenix compound over any of the U.S. government military bases or domestic security facilities to which he had access, but he knew that those sites had almost certainly been hacked into by Grand Inquisitor, if not physically infiltrated by Congregation agents. Conversatio, on the other hand, had centuries of experience in successfully evading the Congregation, and Papa Jim had employed the financial resources of Oz Corp to augment that hard-won, if low-tech, experience. The result was AEGIS, or Artificially Engineered Global Intelligence System, a software program specifically designed to anticipate and frustrate the efforts of Grand Inquisitor and the Congregation. This had been attempted many times over the years, never successfully, but now, bankrolled by Papa Jim’s deep pockets, Conversatio’s computer scientists and engineers had finally achieved their goal of creating a massively parallel, quantum-computing network of their own. AEGIS was not the equal of GI in terms of sheer processing power, but it came closer than anything else on the planet, and its firewalls were considered to be all but impregnable.
Papa Jim was putting them to the test now. There was no doubt that Grand Inquisitor and its human masters in the Vatican would give a lot to know what was going on in this compound, and in three rooms in particular.
In the room he’d just left, a corpse was waiting to be disposed of. But it hadn’t been a corpse when Papa Jim had entered the room. It had still been a living human being, albeit a critically injured one.
Papa Jim had stood for a while inside the door, just looking at the man who lay in the hospital bed, hooked up to the machines that were keeping him alive. The lower half of his face was wrapped in white bandages, leaving only his eyes exposed. These were closed, as if the man were asleep or unconscious. A breathing tube had been inserted into his throat, and tubes carrying blood and other liquids were connected to his arms and chest.
A young doctor was bent over one of the machines, adjusting its dials with care, while a fully armed and armored munchie stood guard, although the man in the bed was strapped down and didn’t seem capable of much even if he’d been free to move.
It was something of a miracle that he was even alive, although “miracle” was a word that Papa Jim used advisedly these days. Still, he’d been struck by seven bullets. Two in his left arm, one in the right, two in the chest, one in the stomach, and one that had shattered his jaw. That usually added up to dead.
“How’s he doing, Doc?” Papa Jim demanded, gesturing with an unlit cigar.
The doctor straightened up, rolling his shoulders wearily. “A lot depends on the next few hours.” Then, focusing on the cigar, “You can’t light that in here.” He nodded toward the machine whose dials he’d been adjusting. “The oxygen.”
Papa Jim nodded. “Get out,” he said.
The doctor didn’t reply but instead glanced questioningly at the guard.
“Sir?” The voice issuing from behind the dark visor was female.
“You heard me,” said Papa Jim. “Out. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” said the munchie and complied at once.
The doctor remained behind. “But the patient—”
Papa Jim cut him off. “I’ll take care of the patient.”
“He’s not fit for interrogation,” the doctor said. “He can’t even talk.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Papa Jim said. Then, before the man could protest any further, “Son, this is one pissing match you’re not going to win. Just put your pecker back in your pants and go.”
An angry flush appeared on the young man’s cheeks at that, but upon reflection he seemed to see the wisdom of Papa Jim’s advice; at any rate, he turned abruptly and stalked out of the room.
As soon as the door slammed behind him, Papa Jim walked over to the bed. The patient lay silent and still. The doctors had said he was in his thirties, but that was all the information they had about him. He had not been carrying any ID, and neither his fingerprints nor his retinal scans had shown up in the public and private databases accessible to Papa Jim and Conversatio. Which was pretty much all of them.
With one glaring exception: the Congregation database maintained by Grand Inquisitor.
“Are you awake?” Papa Jim asked now, leaning over the bed, his voice soft, even gentle. “Can you hear me?”
There was no response from the recumbent figure. His eyelids did not so much as flicker. The only sounds in the room were the steady hiss of oxygen and the varied beeps and clicks of the machines as they performed their mindless tasks.
Papa Jim straightened up and began to circle the bed, letting the hand that held the cigar trail along the metal restraining rail. “Maybe you think that if you pretend to be unconscious, I’ll just give up and go away. Or maybe you think I won’t do anything to you because you haven’t been interrogated yet, and I wouldn’t risk losing a valuable source of intelligence. Just in case you’re laboring under these misconceptions, or any others, let me assure you of two things. First, I’m a pretty stubborn guy, and I don’t give up easily.” Having reached the opposite side of the bed, Papa Jim reversed course, unhurriedly retracing his steps. “And second, I’ve supervised the interrogation of Congregation agents before, and I’ve never heard a single one of you bastards spill anything we didn’t know already. I don’t imagine you’d be any different.”
By this time, Papa Jim had returned to his starting point. Now he reached out to the machine the young doctor had been adjusting and switched it off. Two things occurred immediately. The first was that the hiss of rushing air vanished from its place among the room’s ambient sounds. The second was that the eyes in that bandaged face sprung wide open. They held a look of terror.
“Awake, eh?” said Papa Jim with satisfaction. “I thought so.” He detached the end of the air tube that was hooked into the machine. At the same time, deprived of oxygen, the figure on the bed began to buck and struggle within its restraints, but Papa Jim seemed to take no notice of the drama playing out on the bed beside him.
“Now that that’s taken care of, do you mind if I smoke? I didn’t think so.” He lit the cigar, drew on it deeply, then exhaled into the end of the breathing tube he had just detached from the oxygen machine. A thick, gray cloud went roiling up the tube and into the lungs of the patient, who began to cough. Deep, wracking coughs that seemed to be tearing something loose inside him. His eyes bugged out as if they might pop free of his skull.
“Genuine Cubans,” Papa Jim said, admiring the cigar before taking another pull and exhaling into the tube, with a result that, if anything, surpassed the violence of the previous effort. “Hard to get, eve
n now. But don’t bother to thank me. I’m happy to share.” And to prove it, he blew another lungful of smoke into the breathing tube.
The patient had almost ceased to struggle. His movements were more like feeble twitches than anything else. A glazed, fixed look had settled over his eyes.
Papa Jim leaned close. “I don’t mind that you tried to get in my way. It goes with the territory. I don’t even mind so much that you managed to breach my security and pass yourself off as one of my munchies. That shows initiative, and I admire the hell out of initiative, even in my enemies. No, son, what pisses me off about this whole affair, where you and your Congregation bosses stepped over the line, is that Ethan is my great-grandson, you see? My flesh and blood. My family. And nobody, but nobody, touches my family.”
Even as he spoke these words quite calmly, in a measured tone of voice perfectly suited to a visit to a hospital bedside, Papa Jim was ripping away the other end of the air tube, the end that was lodged in the patient’s throat. It came out with a gushing of blood and smoke, accompanied by a groan that was as full of weariness as of pain. Papa Jim stood well back from the mess, puffing furiously on his cigar. Then he took the glowing end and ground it down into the open wound left when he’d torn out the tube. Smells of burning flesh and tobacco mingled in the air.
“Nobody,” he repeated. He stepped back, and only then noticed that his hands were spattered with blood. He went to the sink and washed them thoroughly, drying them on paper towels. Then, after another look at the bed, he activated his implant and called for Denny.
Yeah, Boss?
“You better get down here,” he said. “There’s a mess needs cleaning up.”
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