Overwatch

by Riley Flynn

  Overwatch

  Collapse: New Republic Book Three

  Riley Flynn

  Mike Wolfe

  Contents

  Overwatch

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Thank you from the Author

  Preview of Perfect Storm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Overwatch

  Prologue

  WASHINGTON, D.C., SIX MONTHS EARLIER

  Marcus Chase couldn’t help but laugh. It was a bitter laugh, to be sure, but not entirely without humor, and it shook his lanky frame. Clearly, Dr. Halloran didn’t know how to take it, because he pretended it wasn’t happening.

  “You’re likely one in a million,” the doctor said, adjusting his glasses. “We don’t have a lot to go on yet, but all evidence so far indicates the infection rate of the virus will be catastrophically high.”

  That was enough to rob the humor from the moment. Chase took a breath and composed himself, motioning for the doctor to take a seat across from him. They were in the back room of a barber shop in downtown Washington that was owned and operated by one Johnny Pinetti. Johnny rarely had customers—as a retired Cold War spy, he wasn’t very good at cutting hair—and kept odd hours, mainly because he enjoyed a monthly check, funneled from a CIA slush fund through a bank in the Cayman Islands that was more than enough to cover his needs.

  Chase was one of only three people with a key to the building. It had been his personal safe house for some eighteen years, since he first arrived in Washington with a freshly minted fourth star on his shoulder. Even then, he’d known the value of black ops, but over the last four years as Secretary of Defense, he found it had practically become a second home.

  “I’m sorry, Ed,” he sighed. “But you have to admit, it’s ironic as hell.”

  Halloran’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”

  “I’ve got an inoperable tumor in my skull that’s going to kill me, and yet when I get exposed to a weaponized virus designed to wipe out most of the human race, I’m one of the statistically insignificant percentage of people who are naturally immune to it.”

  The look on Halloran’s old Irish face said he still didn’t get it; Chase just shook his head. The CDC hired doctors for their medical knowledge, not their sense of humor.

  “What I meant was God’s making fun of me,” he said. “Anyway, I appreciate you expediting the results.”

  “Just for the record, these were initial tests. You haven’t shown any signs of infection after twenty days, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t contract it in the future. It’s unlikely, yes, but not impossible.”

  Chase laced his big fingers behind his head and leaned back in the chair. The doctor’s warning was even more ironic: if Marcus Chase had learned anything in the three weeks since returning from the demilitarized zone in North Korea, it was not to waste time thinking too far into the future.

  “Duly noted,” he said. “Where are we on the vaccine?”

  Halloran’s arthritic fingers pulled his mobile from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and called up the screen. He examined it for a few moments before answering.

  “Nothing new from the lab, but we’ve only had it a day,” he said testily. “It will take some time.”

  “Ed, we hand-delivered the cure to you. How hard can it be to replicate it?”

  “It’s not a document to be photocopied!” Halloran snapped. “We need to reverse engineer it, and that’s going to take time, and trial. And there’s no guarantee we’ll get it right the first time. Or the fifth.”

  Chase sat up and leaned forward in his chair. He was quite tall and serious-looking, which he knew could be intimidating, and he used it to his advantage often.

  “I’m not sure you understand the urgency,” he said gravely. “The Eko virus is here, in America, right now. Thousands of people are going to die in the coming weeks; there’s nothing we can do about that. But if you people can’t get a vaccine out the door on a large scale in a matter of days, that number will turn into millions.”

  The broken capillaries in Halloran’s nose and cheeks glowed red. “You think I don’t know that?” he growled. “They’re doing everything they can!”

  “I’ve spoken to the president,” said Chase. “I asked for an executive order to give the CDC the authority to draft personnel, at gunpoint if need be. He didn’t agree.”

  “Draft personnel?” Halloran was incredulous. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t force people to do what you want!”

  Chase flashed him a cold look. “As Secretary of Defense, I will do whatever is necessary to preserve these United States of America, Ed. And I will do it with or without official White House sanction. The sooner everyone gets that through their heads, the better off we’ll all be.”

  Halloran opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Chase frowned and leaned close enough that he could smell the old man’s breath.

  “What, Ed?” he asked. “If you’ve got something to say, you need to say it now. The stakes are too high to fuck around. I was hoping you’d realize that.”

  “The CDC doesn’t answer to you.” There was an edge to Halloran’s voice now. “I have a lot of respect for you, Marcus, but until Fletcher invokes the Insurrection Act, it’s business as usual. You of all people should know that.”

  “God damn it, Ed!” Chase barked. “I told you, I’ve been trying to get him on board and he just keeps putting me off! He’s not going to do anything until it’s too late!”

  Halloran pushed himself up from his chair and straightened his tie. “This conversation is over.”

  “There’s no time for fucking around, man! You know how serious the situation is!”

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I’m going to put a call in to the Oval Office as soon as I can. We need to do this by the book, Marcus.”

  Chase leaned back in his chair and sighed. “That’s your last word?”

  “It is,” Halloran said with a nod.

  “All right, Ed. I wish it could have been different.”

  He raised a knobby hand and knocked on the hidden panel that led from the secret room into the barber shop. Halloran’s eyes widened as he saw a dark-haired man in street clothes emerge from the other side. He was muscular but plain-looking, his face expressionless. And he was wearing gloves.

  “Who the hell is this?” Halloran demanded, blood rushing into his face. “What’s going on?”

  Chase nodded and the man reached forward and grabbed the doctor’s head in both hands. He pulled the older man towards him and down, until he was bent at the waist, and wrapped his right arm around the doctor’s neck. Then he pulled up and backwards with a mighty heave. After an audible crack, he gently lowered Halloran’s body to the dusty floor.

  It was t
he first time Chase had actually witnessed a murder since he retired from the military years earlier. He’d ordered people killed many times, but never those in the same room with him. It prompted a tiny wave of nausea, but it was nothing he couldn’t fend off.

  Best get used to it, he told himself. This is just the beginning.

  “What happens now, sir?” the dark-haired man asked.

  “Tell Johnny to get the body into the Potomac.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. What the hell was he thinking? “Scratch that. Johnny’s too old these days, and in a couple of weeks, another dead body isn’t going to mean a fucking thing. Besides, I doubt we’ll ever be here again.”

  An odd wave of nostalgia washed over him at the thought of this being his last time at Johnny’s. Things used to make sense in the old days. It was a rough world, sure, but there were rules. Then things changed, and suddenly America was scrambling for cover. Now there were no rules at all, just a desperate last-ditch effort to save whatever could be saved.

  And a lot of that was his fault.

  “I need you to get to work on something new, ASAP,” he said, willing away the thought.

  “Ready and able.”

  “Get some fatigues and get your ass to Atlanta. I need you to knock some heads at CDC HQ and get people there shaking in their boots. Let them know in no uncertain terms that the military is running the show. I’ll text you a list of the people you’ll need to meet with.”

  The man nodded. “Who am I supposed to be, sir?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Chase sighed. “We don’t have time to fuck around with a back story. Make it a major; that’s enough authority to swing your dick but not enough for people to wonder why they don’t recognize you. And make it Special Forces.”

  “Yes sir. What should I call myself?”

  “Jesus, I told you, it doesn’t matter!” Chase pinched the bridge of his nose. “Call yourself John Smith, for all I care, just get it done!”

  The man nodded and disappeared through the door. Marcus Chase would never lay eyes on him again.

  He looked down at the body slumped on the floor and let out a shaky breath. This would be the first in what would soon become a tidal wave of corpses. A single drop in the ocean. One more either way didn’t matter. All that mattered was the future of the republic.

  He pulled a bottle of bourbon from the lower drawer of the desk in the middle of the room. It was an old mahogany masterpiece, used by Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. himself during Operation Ajax, the CIA-backed coup of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. One could draw a straight line from that seminal event all the way to the current situation with America in the Middle East, some seventy-five years later.

  Chase had liberated it from a storage room in Langley when he was the agency’s director. It was meant to remind him that working in the shadows was a constant temptation to cross the line, and also to make him constantly aware of what happened when you gave in and did it anyway.

  He didn’t need a reminder anymore. It was all he could think about.

  The tumbler on the desk was dusty, so he simply took a pull straight from the bottle. It reminded him of sneaking his first drink at thirteen, behind Henry Hudson Middle School back in the Bronx. Even then, teachers were starting to notice the intelligence of this poor kid from the projects. The scholarships that followed would send him to West Point and then Harvard. His keen mind would help him win countless battles across the Middle East in the aftermath of 9-11, then later navigate the world of politics and finally the dark labyrinth of international covert operations.

  His old man had wailed the tar out of him when he found out about that drink, but it had been worth it. It had made young Marcus feel like a man, the kind of serious man he knew he would eventually become. The kind of man who didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, didn’t compromise. The kind of man who got shit done, as his father would say.

  The rest of the bourbon disappeared over the space of the next twenty minutes, as Chase reflected on all the shit that had gotten done up to this point, and all the shit that still needed to get done.

  It occurred to him as he pitched the empty bottle into the trash can that the common denominator in all of it was shit.

  1

  The world had gone completely, totally, utterly white around them, and Elwood Hutchinson had finally begun to worry.

  The highway had disappeared two hours earlier, which was why they were currently stuck in the ditch. But now the blizzard had gotten so thick that the gray sky had turned white and it was impossible to make out the horizon, even now, at high noon. All Hutchinson could see through the windshield of the Foton four-by-four was the truck’s hood, as if the blizzard had simply erased the rest of the world and replaced it with a cold, blank void.

  “All right,” he said with mock anger, “whose middle name is Job? Come on, fess up.”

  A couple of his fellow passengers chuckled bravely in the backseat. Hutchinson thought that, under different circumstances, the group would look almost comical: Four men and two women, ranging in age from early twenties to early sixties, all dressed in brand new outerwear bearing brand names such as North Face and Arc’teryx and High Sierra, sitting in the king cab of an electric Chinese pick-up truck, stuck in the snow. Strangers who had been brought together in this situation by outrageous fortune in the form of the end of the world.

  Jai, a young East Indian man who sat in the front between Hutchinson and the driver, looked confused.

  “What does my middle name have to do with it?” he asked.

  “The Bible, kid,” said Ed, the driver, a beefy man in his forties. “Book of Job.”

  That didn’t seem to help. “I’ve never read it,” said Jai. “My major was engineering.”

  Hutchinson grinned. “‘Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?’”

  He could see that was of no help to his new friend.

  “Job is a character in the Old Testament,” he said. “He endures much suffering at the hands of good old Yahweh. The big guy decides that the only way he can win an argument with the devil is to rain down misfortune and suffering on poor Job.”

  Jai blinked behind his black-rimmed glasses. “Why would God do that?”

  “I don’t pretend to know the mind of God.” Hutchinson shrugged. The Gore-Tex of his coat made a shooshing sound as it slid against itself. “Which, most scholars agree, is precisely why God decided to kick Job in the nuts in the first place. Our man had the audacity to doubt God during this time of adversity, which God took as pride, for some reason.”

  “I don’t understand. God did bad stuff to Job, and Job thought that was unfair, so God said Job was too proud?”

  “That’s the essential gist of it, yes.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  Hutchinson scratched his silver-white beard. “Indeed it doesn’t,” he said. “But then, neither do the Hindu Upanishads, or the Koran, or any of the other ancient texts I had to slog through on the journey to my now-useless doctorate. The only philosopher I still respect is the late, great Monty Python, who it turns out was the one who had it all figured out: life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it.”

  “God’ll get you for that, Hutch,” Ed said with mock gravity.

  “I’d say that’s already happening, wouldn’t you?” Hutchinson pointed at the blankness beyond the windshield. “One might assume that sending the scourge of the Eko virus would be enough to test humanity’s faith. But no, God decided to screw up the electronic gizmos we’d all been enslaved by, too. And even that wasn’t good enough for Him. To reward us for surviving the first two plagues, He felt the need to bless us with the worst winter Colorado has seen in the better part of a century.”

  The silence and uncomfortable looks of the others confirmed that yes, that actually did sound as bitter as he thought it had. He sat there, uncomfortable, wishing he could take th
e rest of Monty Python’s advice and look on the bright side of life. But nothing today had gone as planned—they had set out from Denver at first light to take Highway 25 south to Colorado Springs. They knew the snow that had already accumulated on the parkway would make for slow going, and they were prepared for the sixty-mile drive to take as much as six hours.

  What they hadn’t expected was that the mother of all blizzards would set in before they’d even reached Castle Rock, and that the whiteout conditions would lead Ed to put them firmly, inexorably in the ditch somewhere near Larkspur. At least, Hutchinson assumed it was the ditch—they couldn’t tell where the road was. All they knew was the doors of the Foton were jammed shut by the snow and that the truck wasn’t going anywhere. Their only hope was to wait out the storm, crawl through the windows—which, at six-foot-three, would be quite difficult for Hutchinson—and try to walk to shelter. In hip-deep snow.

  Give a whistle, Monty Python would say. It was the last thing in the world Hutchinson wanted to do right now, but he’d come too far to give in to their current circumstances without a fight.

  He reached into his coat and pulled out a handkerchief, which he threw on the Foton’s dash. “Flag on the play,” he intoned. “Penalty, unnecessary roughness. Repeat first down.” He grinned widely. “My deepest apologies; I neglected to take my Xanax this morning. So: anybody got any good jokes?”