by Dale Brown
Blake intended on setting him down, but Johnny had had enough: he took a deep breath and let go, falling a good fifteen feet. His legs saved him—the high-tech prosthetics absorbed most of the energy from the fall, leaving him balanced on his feet.
It was his first step that felled him. His head was still dizzy and his stomach reeling. He threw his arms out, cushioning his fall.
Then he threw up.
“You OK?” asked Blake in his ear.
“Ugh.”
“Telakus has directions for you. We think we have Chelsea’s room.”
“Good.”
The man at the door pounded, but the door held.
Chelsea heard a scream, then realized it was hers.
I’m losing control!
The door cracked; the lock was giving way.
Desperate, she looked for any cover, any barrier that would slow the demon down, cause him pain or delay or anything—anything was better than surrender.
She reached across to the bed, grabbed the covers, grabbed the top mattress. She pulled it across, over her, as she heard the lock snap off its mounts.
Johnny had come equipped with a small pry bar in his backpack, as well as a set of lock picks. He needed neither—the roof door was ajar. He dropped to his knee to sling the pack off; opening it, he took out his AR-15 and what looked like a Spalding rubber ball.
Like the assault rifles the police were equipped with, Johnny’s gun had a telescoping stock and a laser dot, along with a thirty-round magazine and a spare taped to its side; there were two more in his pack. He checked the gun quickly, made sure he was ready, then tossed the ball into the stairwell.
“It’s clear,” said Telakus. The “ball” was actually a video-and-audio array ordinarily used for recording experiments, which was now transmitting a signal back to Smart Metal. Software stabilized the images and analyzed them in about a tenth of the time it would have taken a human to simply scan a still picture.
“Johnny, we think there’s somebody on her floor,” said Telakus. “He’s got a gun.”
“Right or left off the stairs?”
“Your right.”
There was an explosion below. The building shook.
“What the hell?” asked Johnny as he started down.
“One of the bastards in the ballroom blew himself up.”
Massina leaned over the console in the Box, watching intently as the first wave of SWAT officers followed one of his robots into the building. The bot, equipped with a chemical sniffer as well as a video camera, was looking for explosives, but apparently the terrorists hadn’t had time to rig them in that part of the hotel.
Suddenly the screen shook—there had been another explosion offscreen.
“Where?” said Massina.
“The kitchen,” said Telakus. “That’s number two. They had him cornered. There are only three of them left.”
“That’s three too many,” said Massina.
As an FBI agent, Johnny had been trained to deal with hostage situations and had in fact gone through two simulations very similar to this actual situation. But they were buried somewhere deep in his consciousness, pushed away by the adrenaline rocking through his body. He knew he should stop and clear at each landing, but that was impractical now—he needed to get to Chelsea right away; he needed to be there. He really ought to have an entire team behind him; he should have more intelligence, more firepower, more of everything. But the reality was that if he didn’t get there now, if he didn’t kill the terrorist on her floor, she was going to die.
The ball had bounced against a doorjamb and come to rest on the eighth floor. Johnny grabbed it and went down one more floor, throwing himself against the closed door.
“She still to the right?” he asked Telakus.
“Radar has her there. We can’t see the hall. We lost the video from the security camera when the SWAT team went in,” added Telakus. “They killed the backup power.”
“I’m throwing the ball.”
Johnny slipped open the door and tossed the gadget, then, without waiting for Telakus to tell him if it was clear or not, he threw himself out into the hallway, rolling on the floor and then leaping up, an easy target had the terrorist been watching.
“You’re clear,” said Telakus. “Jesus, wait for me.”
Johnny kept moving, scrambling forward. “Where’s the room?”
“Fifty feet, on your right, down that little hall—he’s going into the room!”
Desperate, Johnny lifted his gun and fired down the empty hall.
Chelsea felt the beast entering the room, plunging past the door, stumbling. She had pulled the mattress over her, and even if there had been light in the room she couldn’t have seen him. Yet she knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, what he looked like—five-eight, on the lighter side, scraggly beard, fanatical eyes.
There was gunfire, a burst in the hallway.
Then a boom louder than any she had ever heard before.
A blast of hot wind shot from the room as if a door had opened on hell. Still in the main hall, Johnny fell against the wall, more from shock than anything. He bounced, fell, got back on his feet, and then ran to the hall with Chelsea’s room.
Too late. Too damn late.
The corridor smelled of ammonia and steel and blood and something burning. Johnny started to cough. He covered his mouth with his arm, thinking it would make it easier to breathe.
“Johnny? Johnny?”
Telakus called to him from far away. The blast had dulled his hearing.
Rather than answering, Johnny pulled the headset from his ear and unclipped the mic. He stuffed the unit into his pocket: he didn’t want anyone to hear.
The door to Chelsea’s room had been blown off its hinges. It sat on a slant, propped against mangled furniture. Johnny pushed it to the side, but he couldn’t get it entirely out of the way. Squeezing through, he stared at the destruction.
The blast had scorched the far corner of the room and broken the window and drapes, leaving a jagged hole. It had also torn the terrorist into pieces. His legs and the bottom half of his torso lay near the debris at the door. The rest of him had largely disintegrated.
Except for his head. Johnny saw it as he walked into the room. It lay wedged in the corner, red, unrecognizable as anything human, yet somehow obvious.
He went and kicked it. It was like kicking a rotted pumpkin.
Except . . . it moaned.
Johnny jumped back, horrified.
“Help me out of here.”
Johnny whirled around. The mattress was moving. Chelsea Goodman emerged from underneath it, face blank, eyes wide, staring up at him.
“Johnny?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“I’m alive,” Chelsea told him. “Oh, my God, I’m alive.”
A Need to Avenge
Flash forward
Boston—two weeks after the attacks
Massina felt a sudden attack of nerves as he was called to the podium. He hadn’t expected the President to be here.
Not that he was intimidated, exactly. Just that he was suddenly aware that this was a very big deal. There were news cameras all over the place; what he said would be broadcast live to the entire world.
Which he wouldn’t have minded, except that he hadn’t prepared a speech; he hadn’t considered what to say. No one had said it would be this important.
Massina took a breath and forced a smile. He remembered the rule one his grammar-school teachers had given him about speaking before an audience: Talk from the heart and you won’t go wrong.
“Mr. President, Governor, Mayor, thank you for coming.” Massina tilted the microphone down, making sure it was directly in line with his mouth. “Everyone else has spoken about how we’ll rebuild,” said Massina. “We will. And we’ll do more than that. Much more.”
He stopped talking. It was as if his mind had emptied.
What did he feel?
Something lofty, inspirational?
Hell, no. He felt a need for justice.
Revenge.
Right this wrong.
“I tell you something, from the bottom of my heart, speaking for everyone from Boston, whether you live in town or not,” he said. “We’re going to get those bastards. We’re going to wipe them from the face of the earth. We will. And no one will mess with us again.”
The crowd hesitated, then broke into a thunderous applause as he left the microphone.
17
Real time
Six days earlier
Boston, Massachusetts
One hundred and seventy-three people were killed in Boston during the Easter Sunday attacks. Seventeen terrorists also died, but they didn’t count as people, at least not to Louis Massina.
Massina attended most of the funerals. The first convinced him to go to them all. It was a service for a young man named Joseph Achmoody.
Massina had met the teenager when he received a limb crafted by Massina’s company a year before. He remembered their conversation before the operation: seeking to reassure him, Massina had showed him his own prosthetic arm, removing the plastic “skin” to let him have a good look at the titanium “bones.”
“Yours will be even better than this,” he promised. “Lighter, stronger, and it can grow.”
“Grow?”
That always got the kids. How could a fake arm grow?
But that part was easy—a simple operation extended the skeleton. Assuming the patient wasn’t squeamish—about half were—he or she could even watch.
No, the real art and science were in the way the devices worked seamlessly, or almost seamlessly, with the brain. Translating nerve impulses into actual movement—you could set that out in a formula, and not a particularly complicated one either. But to make it work in the real world, to make it work without a hitch, despite fatigue or something as bizarre as magnetic interference—there was the difficulty. The fact that Massina’s scientists and doctors had managed to do it only increased Massina’s genuine admiration for the original workings of the human body. To do this all on the fly as it were—to construct life in “real time”—now, there was the magnificence of Nature, and through Nature, God.
As he stood at the back of the church watching Joseph Achmoody’s funeral mass conclude, Massina couldn’t help but feel immense loss. The unfairness of his death ate at him. The kid had barely entered his teens; most likely he hadn’t even had a real kiss yet.
And somehow, the fact that the church was less than a quarter full bothered Massina even more. The kid was a martyr, yet only a handful of people had taken the time to honor him and comfort the family. That, too, seemed wrong. Massina, in a rare and uncharacteristic show of emotion, made a point to go to the mother and father and directly express his condolences.
Walking away, he decided he would go to as many of the others as his schedule permitted, to bear witness, to honor the dead. And he made sure that his schedule permitted the absolute maximum possible.
Today, Benjamin Fallow was being buried in his hometown of Southbridge, Massachusetts. It was in the southern part of the state, a bit far from Boston, and very likely Massina would not have attended this service had it not been for the fact that he had a meeting in Hartford. This was on the way.
Massina stood at the edge of the crowd in the cemetery where Benjamin was being buried. He was forty-five, the father of two children, both in college. There was an article in the local paper giving some brief details about his life; he’d been an insurance salesman. It wasn’t clear why he’d gone to Boston that day; the paper only said that he was survived by his wife and sons.
The minister began by reciting Psalm 103, a verse Massina had heard often over the past several days:
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.
He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities . . .
Halfway through the prayer, Massina decided he’d had enough—enough funerals, enough sorrow. It was time to move on.
He turned and started walking back to his car. Johnny Givens, who’d accompanied him as an aide and bodyguard, swung around and walked with him.
“Touching service,” said a woman near the parking lot. She’d ducked out to smoke; the cigarette dangled from her fingers.
Massina nodded.
“Did you agree?” she added.
The question was so odd, he stopped.
“The choice of the Psalm,” she prompted. “Almost like, turn the other cheek. I don’t think that’s right.”
“Neither do I,” answered Massina, heading for the car.
18
Libya–a few hours later
Five years before, Samir Abdubin had given up his family name in favor of Ghadab min Allah—roughly, “God’s wrath.” In the time since, he had endeavored to live up fully to that name.
He’d done well.
Starting as an apprentice bomb maker, Ghadab had participated in the planning and preparation for no less than twelve “missions” against targets in European cities. Only three of those missions had actually come off, and only one—in Paris, where he had minimal involvement—had resulted in clear victories against the infidels.
Nonetheless, Ghadab was seen as one of the movement’s brightest lights, and after fleeing France for Libya, he had planned two attacks, both more spectacular than anything the Caliphate had undertaken before. One was in Rome, the other Boston.
The leadership council vetoed Rome, for reasons Ghadab couldn’t fathom. But Boston—Boston had been approved.
It was a grand plan, a simultaneous attack at six carefully chosen locations, each with its own peculiar circumstance. A bombing on the subway, hostage taking in a hotel, a mass shooting in a restaurant—it was the very variety that tormented the nonbelievers. The idea that any place, big or small, might be hit—that was what unnerved them.
And the body count. Over a hundred. The one true God and His holy messenger, praise be his name, would surely be pleased. He’d even managed to keep his contingency strikes on reserve; he could activate them in the future for an even bigger attack if events proved favorable.
Ghadab had one disappointment: he had not been allowed to travel to America to coordinate and witness the attacks. The council had told him flatly that he could not go and had in fact placed him under guard to make sure that he would not disobey. It wasn’t a matter of security; they wanted him to plan more attacks and strongly suspected that if he was there he would participate, which necessarily would lead to martyrdom. Instead, one of his lieutenants had been selected to coordinate the operation on the ground. The man, a second cousin of Ghadab’s, was now enjoying the fruits of Paradise.
Ghadab did not begrudge him his just reward. He himself had no desire to enter Paradise quite yet. If martyrdom came—and it would—so be it. But before that time, he wanted more than anything to hasten the coming of the end time. The prophecy had to be fulfilled. When the barbarians arrived in force in the Levant, with their armies of devils and the serpents flying above all, then and only then would he be truly comfortable with martyrdom. For that would be the moment of glorious apocalypse. That was the moment the Caliphate was aiming at; that was the goal of the true believers who had pledged themselves to the new order. The new age would be born in that cauldron of fire.
Ghadab’s cell phone buzzed with an alarm: it was two minutes before Isha’a, the night prayer. He retrieved his rug and walked out of his room, passing down the long corridor of the ancient building. Built as a castle, it had been converted to an administrative building in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and completely refurbished and expanded by the old dictator, Gadhafi. Now it was a headquarters for the Caliphate’s troops outside of the Levant.
Ghadab had just reached the roof and turned toward Mecca when the first flash appeared on the horizon. He stared at it for a moment, thinking at first that it was a defect in his vision, the product of spending long hours
in the desert without proper eyeglasses.
The second flash disabused him of that.
They’ve come for their revenge.
He threw the rug down quickly, falling on top of it and praying so quickly that he was done even as the formal call to prayers began blaring from the mosque across the way. Ghadab ran to his room and grabbed his small suitcase, then ran to the tunnel as he had rehearsed.
Three of his underlings were already there. Two more followed, and then the bombproof door was closed.
The ground began to shake; the infidels had launched a barrage of Tomahawk missiles at them. They were useless against the massive stones of the castle, and an empty gesture given the depth of the reinforced shelter.
If any of the others thought it strange that Ghadab laughed as the explosions continued, they didn’t have the courage to mention it.
19
Boston–a short time later
Chelsea had gone to work the day right after the attacks, and every day since. Massina himself had told her she was welcome to take time off; in fact, he practically ordered her to do so. But time off wasn’t what she needed. She needed something to occupy her mind, to challenge her thoughts, to keep them busy.
Because without that, without something difficult and intricate and knotted to focus on, she thought about what had happened. How close she’d come, first to being raped, then to being killed.
Chelsea had grown up in a suburb of San Diego, the daughter of a white mother and a black father himself of mixed background. Light-skinned, her ethnicity was hard to pin down—she could plausibly pass for Hispanic, Middle Eastern, even Asian and Sicilian as well as black. Like anyone of African descent in America, she had experienced prejudice and to some degree discrimination, but Chelsea would have been the first person to say she’d had a very easy childhood, and had found far more acceptance and encouragement than most kids, whatever their ethnicity.