by Dowell, Trey
“Lyla told me about the mind reading. She says you can barely do it because of the pain. Maybe that’s your lock.”
“I’m fine. You’re starting to sound like the scientists, by the way.”
Diego lifted his hands from the table in surrender. Making me feel like a lab rat was the worst sin he could commit in our superexclusive club. We’d all spent too much time having our heads examined already.
“I apologize. That was not my intention.”
“Besides, you didn’t need help. You evolved just fine without any assistance.”
His expression sagged as though he carried a burden that had just doubled in weight. “I have issues of my own.”
I’d never seen Diego so sapped. His reluctance to elaborate was scary, too. “C’mon, man, talk to me.”
He finished his glass in three deep gulps and brought the empty down hard. “If we survive tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Fair enough.”
I motioned for the check. Diego’s ideas weren’t crazy, but I didn’t want to consider them. All the philosophy was meaningless anyway. I’d asked “why” ever since I was sixteen, but the only answer “why” ever brought was more questions. Along with confusion and anger, and I certainly didn’t need more of either.
Right now, I had to focus on the big goal—an assault that would be the difference between living in peace and living on the run. Nothing else mattered. Besides, if what Diego said was actually true . . .
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
I threw down a twenty for the beers. “If you’re right, and I fixed Lyla, then Carsten was supposed to fix you or me. Which means . . .”
“One of us is fucked,” he finished. “The thought had occurred to me.”
My glass had one more swallow. I saluted Diego with it. “Here’s hoping it’s you,” I said.
He laughed and did the same with his empty.
“You’re all right, Mendoza. Sorry I’ve been such a dick.”
“When?”
“Um, forever.”
Diego laughed. “But we’re oldest, dearest friends . . .” He slid out of the booth. “No need to apologize, honest. Let’s go. I’ll have no problem falling asleep with three beers in me.”
I wished I could say the same.
—
Final preparations took most of the following day. As zero hour approached, Diego pored over the documents again, Lyla made a few last-minute phone calls to her newest minions, and I did some sewing. Yeah, sewing.
Lyla came to the bedroom at 7 p.m. to tell me it was time. Seeing me hard at work, she said, “I don’t know which is more of a surprise—that the troll actually had a needle and thread in this house, or that you know how to sew.”
“Don’t hate.” I tied off my last knot and held the shirt up for inspection.
“Where did you get the fabric?”
“The curtains.” I motioned to the bedroom window, now with a large chunk missing from the drapes. I stood and slipped the black shirt over my torso. Didn’t have to look at a mirror, because Lyla gave me all the feedback I needed.
“You look wonderful.” She came close, running her fingertips over the golden P reinstalled on my chest.
“Check out the belt,” I said. A couple of minutes under hot water had removed the black marker. The bright KO letters now stood out from the background.
“Knockout. Leader of the Protectors. You look like a comic-book hero.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t feel like one. Superman never took out the CIA.”
Lyla smiled. “He didn’t have to. The American government loved him. In case you forgot, we’re not in a comic. And you are certainly not Superman.” To demonstrate, she threw a half-speed punch to my stomach. I wheezed for effect.
“My man of steel.” She kissed me. I thought it would be a brief throwaway, but it blossomed into the kind of kiss you remember for a lifetime. When our lips parted, I felt dizzy and weak.
“If there really is an Aphrodite, she’s envious of the way you kiss,” I whispered.
She reached up and gently tilted my face until our foreheads touched. “Promise me it will not be the last one,” she said, her eyes unwilling to meet mine. I hadn’t realized how scared she was until that moment.
“I promise.” I pulled her to me and we embraced, so hard I was worried I’d hurt her. She didn’t complain. When I finally let her go, tears welled in her eyes.
“I love you,” she said. The words washed over me like warm ocean water. All I gave in return was a dreamy smile. My first reaction was that she’d turned on the juice accidentally—her emotions kicked in and her power leaked out enough to bathe me with those waves of happiness. A great rationalization, but the truth was so much better: I was happy for the oldest, best reason in the book. The woman I loved . . . loved me back.
“I’ll take your stupefied silence as a sign you love me, too,” she finally said.
“Since the day I saw you in your scrubs in the mess hall, smart-ass. I’ll say it every day of our lives from here on out. And there will be lots of them, I swear. See you at the rendezvous.”
She touched the side of my face without saying another word.
I kissed the Goddess of Love one final time and went downstairs to meet Diego. You’d think I’d have a jumble of thoughts and emotions in my head at that moment: strategies, tactics, possibilities, danger, even fear. As I climbed into the passenger seat of the Porsche, though, only two mental bullets ricocheted inside my skull.
One: Lyla Ravzi had ruined me for all other women.
Two: I really should have put her to sleep.
Both were true.
CHAPTER 48
Diego and I stood on a bluff overlooking our target. The George Bush Center for Intelligence—fancy name for CIA headquarters—loomed in the darkness below the Potomac River bluff, spread out over 250 acres of Virginia farmland. The complex radiated a ghostly green hue through the night-vision binoculars, one of many gifts from Lyla’s minions. Our location was another: a field agent pointed out the perfect vantage point—just outside the security grid and the perimeter fence that waited in the woods less than a hundred feet ahead.
Despite the wondrous night vision, the binoculars revealed little activity. No foot patrols. No men on the roof. The vast parking lots surrounding the two main buildings were mostly empty.
“Time?”
“Almost eleven,” Diego answered.
“Perfect. Shift change at the local police stations. CIA security will be full strength but operations are a skeleton crew this late. Don’t need to worry about a couple thousand nine-to-five workers.”
“Are Lyla’s boys in place?”
I turned to look at the access road from Highway 123. The four-lane divided street was the only avenue leading to the campus. The first rule of a truly secure installation: limited access. Only problem—if your secure site comes under attack, there’s only one direction help can come from.
A caravan of tractor-trailers made the turn off 123. Twelve in all, each driver the recipient of special instructions from Aphrodite. They came up the road and fanned out, each driver moving their rig perpendicular to the flow of traffic. The first four trailers blocked the road itself, while the remaining eight came to rest along the sides of the road, all the way to the tree line. Twelve drivers calmly got out of their trucks and walked back toward 123, keys tucked safely in their pockets.
“Road’s blocked. Anybody coming to the rescue better have excellent cardio, ’cause they’ll be walking.” I scanned the sky above. “No planes overhead, either.”
Diego blew out a deep breath. “Time to start the party, then. Put your toy in the safety box.”
I slipped the binoculars into the shielded container at my feet. When Diego heard me throw the latch, he stepped a few paces down the bluff. He
crossed his arms in front of his chest in an X and concentrated. I knew better than to wait for the hum or an explosion of light—this part of Diego’s repertoire was more subtle, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t just as destructive.
When he exhaled, the lights of the entire CIA complex went out. Power grids beyond the campus also went dark; everything within a five-mile radius, including the nearest police station and two mobile-phone towers.
Diego turned back, grinning in the dark. “So much easier than throwing lightning bolts.”
He’d emulated one of the odder effects of a nuclear bomb: the electromagnetic pulse. The pulse supercharged the atmosphere with high-energy electrons, emanating from the nuke (or in this case, Diego, the human atomic bomb). The pulse overloaded any device carrying an electric current, which in a metropolitan area meant . . . damn near everything. Power lines weren’t the only things knocked out: car electronics, smartphones, computers, solid-state circuitry. Anything with power flowing through it saw that power spike until the circuits burnt up.
An EMP was the ultimate techie’s nightmare, with almost unlimited range if you generated one high enough in the air so the pulse had room to spread. Explode a twenty-megaton whopper in the upper atmosphere and the Amish would become America’s technological elite. Use Diego from ground level, though, and you don’t affect much more than the immediate area. Still, the immediate area was all we needed.
Five seconds after the pulse shredded the Agency’s power system, half the complex’s lights came back on. I knew they would, because I’d studied the building specs. Almost no one bothers to shield electronics against an EMP, for a simple reason: who cares about posting to Facebook when you can see a mushroom cloud from your back porch? The CIA, however, is one of the few installations built to function in the aftermath of catastrophe. Shielding every electric line was impossible, so the government did the next-best thing—they built a second set of electrical relays, turned off completely with no electricity running through the lines. An EMP doesn’t affect circuits with zero power in them, so in the event of a nuclear attack, the main switches reroute power to the secondary lines, and bam! Back in business.
Course, this brilliant backup plan clings to a single assumption: nobody would bother to nuke a site twice, right?
“Diego, if you please—hit ’em again.”
The second pulse killed most of what was left, and this time lights miles beyond the perimeter of the first EMP winked out, too.
“Oops. Got a little carried away on that one. Sorry.”
“C’mon, man . . . we’re not trying to send D.C. to the Stone Age. Be a little more cautious, would ya?” I removed the binoculars from the shielded case and powered them on. The rooftops of the buildings were easier to see with no glare from regular light sources. Before long, I saw dark figures scurry along the roofline. “All right, they’re following emergency protocol. I’ve got snipers on top of both buildings. They’ll have a bead on us before we make it out of the woods.”
Diego tapped his foot on the ground. “So . . .”
“Discourage them.”
Like he did in Iran, he summoned strikes from the clouds above the installation. Mammoth lightning bolts split the sky apart above the roofs of the two structures, so many I lost count. He hit the corners, the center, the helipad, the AC units . . . you name it, Diego fried it.
“Honey, don’t forget to do the dishes,” I told him between salvos.
He nodded and pulled down two quick strikes into the middle of the massive collection of satellite dishes huddled at the far side of the old administration building. Explosions rocked the entire communications platform. The big dishes burnt out and the smaller ones went flying—burning metal Frisbees no one wanted to catch. If the Agency’s comm systems still had any power, it wasn’t going to matter.
When the cacophony died down, I scanned the roof again. Several fires, a lot of smoke, but most important, no moving shadows with rifles. The fires were a bonus; at least a portion of the CIA’s internal police force, the Security Protective Service, would be tasked to put them out, especially since no one could contact the fire department. Every SPS officer fighting fire meant one fewer gun shooting at us, and one less bodyguard for Tucker.
No structural damage, flames eventually contained by the SPS and shielded fire-prevention circuits, and the satellite dishes can be replaced within forty-eight hours, but for right now . . .
“They’re blind, deaf, and on fire. Won’t get any easier,” I said. We walked down the bluff through the woods until we reached the fence, eight feet tall and monitored by now-unpowered video cameras. I preferred wire cutters to setting the forest on fire, so I handled the dirty work while Diego peeked through the remaining trees with the binoculars. When I finished clipping a slot big enough for us to crawl through, he said, “Still don’t see anybody on the roof. Looks clear.”
The relative protection of the thick trees only ran for another twenty yards. After that, the approach was wide open: a driveway followed by three hundred feet of empty VIP parking, right in front of the entrance to the old administration building. I’d never been so afraid of a parking lot in my life. “Looks clear” isn’t the same as “clear,” and three hundred feet is a long way to run when you’re sniper bait. Luckily, body armor wasn’t my only protection.
Diego said, “Remember, stay behind me. But not too close.”
“What’s too close?”
He grinned. “If your hair stands on end, you’re too close.”
He walked beyond cover and extended his left hand to the side, palm up. A bubble of shimmering air surrounded him, almost fifty feet in diameter. A breeze carried the low-level hum back through the trees to me. With slow, deliberate steps, Diego moved toward the administration building in the dark. He took fewer than ten of those steps before the shooting started.
A sniper from the roof fired first—he’d been hiding below the lip—and he ducked back under cover before Diego could target him. What the shooter didn’t realize was Diego wasn’t concerned about him. He only cared about the bullets.
The hardiest sniper rounds are made of tungsten, one of the densest, strongest metals in existence. Although I’m confident our rooftop shooter was well versed in the metal’s ballistic properties, weight, and penetration stats, I was pretty sure he didn’t know the one statistic that mattered: tungsten has a melting point of 6,000 degrees.
When the bullet reached the boundary of the energy bubble, a 30,000-degree bolt of lightning exploded from Diego’s outstretched palm, automatically drawn to anything more conductive than air. The electrified plasma intercepted the round in midflight. A few droplets of molten tungsten penetrated the bubble, but they fell harmlessly to the pavement, not even close enough to make Diego flinch.
He continued his slow march toward the entrance until two SPS guys came out the front doors, barrels of their M-16s leveled at him. At first I thought they’d waste time ordering Diego to stand down and surrender, but they didn’t bother. Both men opened up with the M-16s on full auto, spraying their entire thirty-round magazines in seconds. Lightning bolts danced out of Diego’s left palm in response, one for every piece of metal that approached his sphere of supercharged air. The effect was dazzling, like touching one of those plasma globes from the 1980s—with magical arcs of current reaching out to sizzle against the glass under your fingertips—except this was a helluva lot bigger.
A spatter of glowing slag came through the bullet shield, but nothing else.
Diego was far enough away from the tree line that I could safely follow, keeping my distance but still enjoying the fifty-foot-high cover his bubble provided. The guy on the roof popped up to fire again, and this time took a bead on me. His round dissolved like before but this time he stuck around long enough to see the effect. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to sprint down the roofline until he found an angle that worked, so I yelled, “
Guy on the roof !”
Diego’s head rotated in the sniper’s direction. He maintained the bubble with his left palm and pointed his right fist at the roof’s edge. While the bullet-shield bolts were thin and relatively quiet, the one Diego fired at the roof was neither.
The sniper didn’t pop up again.
The two slack-jawed idiots with empty M-16s witnessed the earthshaking blast from less than one hundred feet. Once they got off the ground, they ran. Didn’t blame them; shooting at Diego was as effective as spitting at God, and Diego wasn’t full of loving grace like the Big Guy.
He walked another twenty paces and stopped. The right fist came up again, pointed at the main entrance; bulletproof glass doors, security barriers, and X-ray checkpoints were beyond. I covered my ears this time.
Shit. This is gonna be bad.
The thunderous sustained volley blew apart doors, columns, metal, glass . . . anything in the way. When the blinding arcs of bluish white electricity faded, the door to Tucker was wide open. I sprinted through as soon as Diego dropped the shield.
CHAPTER 49
Once inside, I was responsible for the heavy lifting. Diego’s shield was useless indoors—he’d never learned how to alter the size of the bubble, and fifty feet of supercharged air would have touched everything around him. The bolts would have fried it all, electrifying floors, walls, anything mildly conductive. Including me.
I didn’t plan on needing a shield, though.
Battery-powered emergency lights cast a yellow glow over the ruined entrance. The main foyer behind them was the biggest room in the building, but it wasn’t large enough for someone to take a shot at us without being in my range. The first responder to the foyer destruction was an SPS officer wandering around with a flashlight. I dropped the guy before Diego even noticed him. The officer’s gun never made it out of his holster. Once we cleared the rubble of the security stations, I didn’t bother with constantly scanning ahead. Speed was more important. I blanket wiped a hundred feet in front of us, over and over, every few steps. Tiring, but effective.