The Oracle's Message

by Alex Archer

  “That’s harsh,” George said. “If it wasn’t for me, you guys wouldn’t even know where to begin. You’d be home wondering where they were when this thing goes boom. You owe me and you know it. And I’m here and ready to go.”

  Vic looked at Annja and shrugged. “He says he wants in. I’m fine with it.” He looked back out of the windshield. “Besides, I’ve got a few more friends scattered about the island. And a few others making their way here right now.”

  “Operators?”

  Vic nodded. “Surgeons, as it were.”

  Annja noticed the rifle in between Vic’s legs and wondered if he had brought additional snipers in to help. If they could engage the targets from a distance, that would be all the better. Plus, it would mean that George wouldn’t have to be exposed to fire up close.

  George steered them through traffic, occasionally flashing the red-and-blue lights on the war wagon. People got out of his way and they left the town behind and got on the road heading out toward the residential areas.

  “The German chancellor is staying in Gayhead,” Vic said. “It’s the same home that the president stayed in when he was here last summer. It’s got a commanding view of the Atlantic and it’s fairly well isolated. Not as much as we’d like obviously, given the nature of the island, but enough for us to put some hides in and make sure we don’t let those guys get close.”

  “How did the Secret Service take to your briefing?” Roux asked. “I imagine they wanted to spearhead the operation.”

  Vic shrugged. “I had to juggle the State Department with them, but fortunately, I’m with an agency that overrules those guys on a routine basis. They’ll cooperate as long as things don’t get too hairy for their taste. If they think their principals are in danger, they’ll evacuate immediately. The Secret Service has moved a chopper onto the property and the pilot’s on a five-minute standby at all times.”

  “Fun for him,” Annja said. “Has the chancellor been briefed?”

  “I don’t know if State passed along the intel,” Vic said. “I imagine they will, because if anything does happen, the Germans will want to know why they weren’t told their leader was in grave danger. State will go to all lengths to avoid that kind of diplomatic faux pas.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Annja said. “The last thing we’d want is the same situation to unfold on foreign soil around our president.”

  Vic nodded. “Exactly.” He pointed ahead to where they were approaching a vehicle checkpoint. “You guys stay cool back there and let me do the talking as we get through this. Once we’re on the grounds, we’ll have a bit more freedom to do our thing.”

  George slowed the car and slid the window down as two agents stepped forward with guns ready to bear on the SUV. One of the agents leaned forward but kept his distance. “Identification?”

  Vic leaned over George and showed a laminated ID card. “Day word is Cherokee.”

  The agent looked at the card and then nodded. “Have a good day.”

  Two more agents by the roadblock raised the barrier and let them pass through. Annja looked back as they drove past. “Is that normal security for something like this?”

  Vic shrugged. “It’s a little tighter. I had to compromise somewhat with the Service. But it’s not overboard as yet. If our hit team does surveillance, it shouldn’t alert them that we’re on to them. Remember, we want them thinking that they’ve left you far behind in the Philippines and no one knows they’re coming. The last thing we want is for them to get spooked and vanish with that nuclear whatever-it-is.”

  Annja watched as the main compound came into view. The Secret Service and State Department had obviously tried their best to blend in, but concealing two dozen agents, plus the German chancellor’s own security detail, was a little difficult in the bucolic estate setting. Annja could see the war wagons—SUVs packed with all sorts of high-powered weaponry for repelling an assault—and the escape cars, as well.

  Across a field sat a gray shingled weathered barn that had probably stood for a hundred years. And yet now, she could clearly see the rotor blades of a helicopter sticking out of it. All it would take was two men to shove it clear of the roof and they could be airborne within five minutes.

  She knew there’d be other precautions, too. Looking out at the sea, she spotted a few boats. One was a Coast Guard cutter, and the others were apparently civilian sailboats and yachts. Annja didn’t believe they were all civilian, however.

  Vic confirmed it. “Some of my people will be offshore. They’ll have eyes on the grounds here all the time. Staggered shifts, that sort of thing.”

  Annja was impressed. “So where do we fit into all of this? I mean, it looks like you’ve got this entire place sealed up tight as a drum.”

  Vic nodded. “We do. But there’s always the chance that they’ll get through. We have no way of knowing what type of assault this will be. Frontal? Suicidal? There are too many variables at this point. So we try to cover as many possibilities as we can. But we can’t outthink these guys because they’re the only ones who know what they’ll do.”

  “So we’re here to help you think of any possibilities that you haven’t covered, is that it?” Annja asked.

  “Yep.”

  Annja nodded. “Well, I’m glad you could make all of this happen so quickly, Vic. And you, too, George. I hope you weren’t too offended by what I said back in Edgartown.”

  “I was,” George said. “But I understand why you said it.” The small grin that played across his face told Annja that he was only fooling around, but she decided not to pursue it any further.

  Vic pointed over near the barn. “Put it there, George, and then we’ll get you all suited up.”

  George wheeled the war wagon in close to the barn and Vic led them around to the trunk. He smiled as they approached. “Ever seen what the Service carries in these things when they’re trailing the president around?”

  Annja shook her head. “Nope.”

  Vic opened the tailgate and threw back the tarp. “Behold.”

  A dizzying arsenal greeted their eyes. Annja saw several LAWS rocket launchers, two M60 machine guns, two SAW machine guns, three sniper rifles and an assortment of close-quarters submachine guns like the MP5 and the LRWC PSD. A dozen pistols and ammunition of varying kinds rounded out that part of the truck. Vic showed them where the body armor was stored and the medical trauma packs.

  When he was finished giving them the guided tour, he stepped back. “Pretty incredible stuff, huh?”

  Roux looked like a child at Christmas. “So many fun toys to play with in here.”

  George grinned. “That’s a helluva lot of firepower.”

  “They take their job seriously,” Vic said. “They protect the most powerful man on the planet and have to be able to repel an invasion force, if necessary. They’ve got my respect, that’s for sure.”

  He reached back in and came out with several duffel bags. “Gear for you guys to change into. We’re a little short on accommodations around here, so duck into the barn and get into the coveralls. Meet me back here and we’ll arm up.”

  The three of them walked into the barn past the chopper and dropped their bags. Annja frowned. “George, would you mind turning around?”

  The disappointment on his face was clear. Roux chuckled to himself, but then Annja looked at him. “You’re turning around, too. I don’t want to be responsible for resurrecting your libido.”

  31

  “We’ve got agents everywhere all over the island. Plus a whole ton of them back on the mainland. If they take a ferry over here, we’ll know it.” Vic shrugged. “At least, that’s the plan.”

  “The odds of you catching them are pretty slim,” Annja said. “These guys aren’t amateurs.”

  Vic nodded. “I know. But I have to set it up so that everyone back in D.C. is happy. And who knows? We might get lucky.”

  Roux frowned. “You would have to be extraordinarily lucky. Something tells me that Spier has somehow thought th
is entire matter through.”

  Vic eyed Roux. “Who exactly are you again? I mean, I realize Annja vouched for you and everything, but I don’t know you from Adam. How do you know Annja?”

  Roux crossed his arms and simply stared at Vic. “If not for me, Annja would be less of a woman than she is today.”

  “What the hell does that mean? You were her first lover or something?” Vic shook his head. “Seriously, what the hell?”

  Annja held up her hand. “It’s okay, Roux. He knows about the sword. We go back a ways.”

  Roux shrugged. “Fine.”

  Annja looked at Vic. “Roux was with me when the sword chose to become a part of me.”

  George stood nearby with a look of confusion crisscrossing his face. “Sword? Excuse me?”

  Annja sighed and looked around. Seeing no one nearby, she quickly manifested the sword in front of George. His eyes went wide and Annja quickly made it vanish.

  George looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “How the heck did you do that?”

  Vic chuckled. “That never gets old.”

  Annja looked at George. “I don’t know how to explain it, so please don’t bother asking me all these detailed questions. It’s part of me—I can draw it out and use it to defend myself. But other than that, I’m still figuring things out, okay?”

  George nodded his head quickly. “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Annja rolled her eyes. As if George had needed another reason to pine over her, she’d just given him one.

  Vic nodded at Roux. “So he was with you when that whole thing went down?”

  “You might say,” Roux said, “that if it wasn’t for me, Annja would never have had the sword become part of her.”

  “Not like I was asking for it,” Annja said. “It just seemed to happen. Rather unexpectedly, I might add.”

  Vic took out a stick of gum and bit into it. “All right. Fair enough. You’ve got history, I can dig that. And I’m assuming you were involved with this Spier guy, too?”

  Roux nodded. “I accompanied them on the dives, yes.”

  Vic chewed thoughtfully. “All right, then. So you think this guy is too smart for us?”

  “He’s very smart,” Roux said, “but he’s not infallible. You may indeed get lucky, as you say. But I wouldn’t bank on it. What bothers me is that Spier seems to have known a lot more about the pearl—that is to say, the nuclear device—than any of us knew about. Strange, too, considering I make a hobby out of studying such things.”

  Annja smirked. “Admitting he pulled one over on you, Roux? That’s got to be a first for you.”

  “I can admit when I’ve been bettered,” Roux said. “The job now is to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  IN THE HIGH GRASS overlooking the bluff that the main estate house sat on, Annja lay next to Vic. Vic scanned the area of the beach with his binoculars. On the horizon, the sun had started to set, staining the sky with a crimson hue that bled into the sea.

  “Anything?”

  Vic set the binoculars down. “Not a damned thing.” He glanced at Annja. “You’re sure about this target, right? I’d hate to think we were sitting on the wrong target here, you know?”

  Annja nodded. “George assured me this was the only one that makes sense. There’s no other reason for them to be in Massachusetts.”

  “I’m still foggy on motive,” Vic said. “So, what—they get revenge for a KSK mission gone awry or something?”

  “Either that or because they all got the boot from the KSK for harboring radical beliefs.”

  Vic snorted. “That’s not exactly a rare occurrence. I know plenty of special-ops guys who have some serious political leanings. For the most part, they can separate their personal beliefs from the jobs they’re tasked to do, but every once in a while one of those guys will go bat-shit crazy. Not a good scene to be a part of.”

  Annja sighed. “George said that Spier espouses a far right-wing political ideology. Maybe they’re after the chancellor because she’s too liberal? I’m not up on my German politics, so I can’t say for certain.”

  Vic shook his head. “So, get rid of the current chancellor and then what—establish yourself as the new leader of Germany? These guys are already off the deep end, huh?”

  “They certainly seem to be, although at the time, they struck me as being perfectly normal.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem with psychotics. They look normal at first. And then once you get to know them…look out.”

  “Where’d you position George and Roux?”

  Vic nodded toward the house. “Closer to the rest of the protection detail. I hope you don’t mind but I wanted George a little bit closer to the professionals.”

  “I thought you said—”

  Vic nodded. “Yeah, I know what I said. But I wasn’t going to tear the guy down in front of you. I mean, it’s obvious he’s crazy about you. Wouldn’t do his ego any good if he knew I thought he was a detriment to the operation.”

  “You old softie.”

  Vic eyed her. “Hey, don’t let that get out, okay? I might not be in the Marines anymore, but I’ve still got a rep.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” Annja said. She scanned the beach, but it was becoming too dark to see much of anything.

  “Here,” Vic said. “Use these.”

  He handed Annja a pair of night-vision binoculars and she turned them on. There was a brief burst of a high-pitched whine and then it settled into nothingness. Annja brought them up to her eyes and the beach stood out in brilliant lime-green luminescence. She scanned up and down the beach, but didn’t see anything but crashing waves as the tide rolled in.

  She sniffed the air. “Nothing out there, Vic.”

  He nodded. “That’s what’s got me worried. I can’t sense anything. They could be anywhere. But we wouldn’t know it until it’s too late. And no offense or anything, but I don’t feel like dying on Martha’s Vineyard. Kinda not the cool death I’d always envisioned for myself.”

  Annja grinned. “I take it back, you’re still the same old Vic.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  Annja shook her head. “No, thank you for coming up here like this. I’m happy to see you again.”

  The waves continued to crash on the shore. Annja and Vic continued to lie amid the high grass, watching the surrounding area.

  And night fell.

  VIC’S PHONE PURRED an hour later. He opened it up and spoke for a few seconds to someone on the other end. When he snapped it shut, he seemed annoyed.

  “What is it?” Annja asked.

  “Field report from the agents looking for these guys. Seems they had one guy matching a description who took an earlier ferry. Gottlieb. But then he disappeared.”

  “What about the others?”

  Vic shook his head. “That’s just it. No one seems to know where they might have vanished to.”

  “Well, that’s not good.”

  “No,” Vic said. “It’s not.”

  “If Gottlieb came over to the island, then he must still be here somewhere.”

  “Unless he’s meant to be bait to see if we know they’re coming,” Vic said. “Send him in advance, test the waters, so to speak, and if we snatch him they know we’re on to their plan.”

  “And then they can regroup and plan another attack.”

  “Right, and we get nothing.”

  Annja took another look through the night-vision binoculars, scanned up and down the beach and then back toward the main house. “I wish I knew how many ways there were to get to this island.”

  Vic sighed. “Probably more than we could count. I mean, you can take the ferry, the plane, a chopper—”

  Annja shook her head. “No, I mean how many other ways could you get here if you really wanted to.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Boats, Vic. What’s to stop Spier and his team from traveling down the southern coast of anywhere in New England, rentin
g a boat—hell, they could buy one if they wanted—and simply sailing over here? It’s not like we’re out in the middle of the ocean. It’s a pretty accessible place if you’ve got the equipment to get here.”

  Vic frowned. “That’s true. But we’ve got boats out monitoring the maritime traffic.”

  “Yeah, but how many boats can they check out? There will always be some that slip through.”

  Vic took the binoculars from Annja. “So, you think we might be staging this wrong? That they’ll come in by boat?”

  “It’s a possibility, right?”

  “Anything is at this point. We’re flying blind.”

  “The only thing we have working for us is that they don’t know we’re on to them.”

  Vic shrugged. “Yeah, but any team worth its salt will always assume that the opposition knows about them. Otherwise, you get sloppy. Take things for granted. And that’s when things go to hell.”

  “I wish we knew,” Annja said. “I wish we knew for absolute certain where they were.”

  Vic’s phone buzzed again. He took it out and listened for a moment. “Okay, thanks.”

  “What?”

  Vic stood and brushed the dirt off his coveralls. “We just picked up Gottlieb in a bar downtown.”

  Annja frowned. “Bait?”

  Vic nodded. “Almost certainly. But I’ve got to take a crack at him. We don’t have anything else to go on.”

  Annja stood. “Let me go with you.”

  “You sure?”

  Annja nodded. “He knows me. I might get him to reveal something that he wouldn’t say otherwise.”

  “He might not.”

  Annja grinned. “Like you said—what choice do we have?”

  32

  Vic drove the SUV like a madman over the quiet roads of Martha’s Vineyard, skirting disaster at every moment. Annja fought to hold on while he navigated the winding roads. “Where’d they grab him?”

  “Having a drink in a bar.” Vic shrugged. “What do you make of that?”