“I seriously doubt if it would reach the reflecting pool,” said Sara blandly.
Mike ignored all of it—the copter, the crowd sounds, Tim’s exclamations of amusement—and swung the crane back toward the monument a second time. Tim got his wish—the gunship opened fire on the empty crane cab, though only with machine guns. As might be expected, the bullets merely ricocheted from the metal surfaces and sent those closest to the crane into full retreat.
The capstone struck the northern face of the monument a second time, ripping away more scaffolding and bringing down an avalanche of stone. The topmost part of the tower seemed to shift slightly.
“That’s it,” murmured Sara.
The helicopter gunship had not given up, though. It circled the crane, angling south and changing its orientation, looking for a clear shot. Even Mike suspected the thing carried Hellfire missiles, but it was hard to imagine the pilot might be persuaded to use them. What could he possibly do that would not cause even more damage than Mike could?
A shot of adrenaline coursed down Mike’s spine. What if the idiot pilot did fire a missile at the crane from that oblique angle? What would happen to the people clustered around the fire trucks and police cruisers on the avenue just to the east?
Mike did the only thing he could think of: he reversed the crane and cranked it into as swift a 360 as he could. The capstone, beginning to slip from its damaged sling, flew around, centrifugal force pulling it away from the center of the spin. At the end of its pivot, the crane’s long arm collided with the second crane in a scream of metal on metal. Its flight interrupted, the capstone tumbled erratically at the end of its cables. Now, finally, it slipped from the sling and hurtled toward the monument’s southern flank. The cables and sling, freed of the capstone’s weight, backlashed like a flail and clipped the hovering copter.
The capstone smashed into the monument, crushing the scaffolding on its northern side and loosing another cascade of stone. The copter slewed wildly, its missile systems belching flame as it attempted one last Hail Mary against the rogue cranes.
It didn’t have a prayer.
The Hellfire missile instead glanced off the roof of the crane’s cab, skipping like a stone on a pond before it was fully armed and striking the monument roughly thirty feet above the base and exploding. The cranes were enveloped in a cloud of debris and smoke amid the cacophonous sounds of shredding metal and shattering stone. The top of the obelisk shuddered and settled and then, like a great tree felled by Paul Bunyan’s axe, it began to topple . . . toward the road behind it.
Mike reflexively reached out with his increasingly developed sense of the atoms that made up the world and applied as much force as he could to check the fall. He exceeded beyond his wildest expectations. As if a giant’s hand had slapped it aside, the towering structure shuddered again and swayed back away from the crowds and the emergency vehicles and the media crews. It even missed the helicopter as it fell due west.
“It’s pointing right at the Lincoln Memorial!” crowed Tim. “Dammit, but you’re good, Micky! Man, you can plan my castle assault any time.” The programmer jumped out of his chair and did a celebratory jig. Mike put his head down on his console and tried not to notice that when Tim danced, something in the shadows danced with him.
Chapter 3
Spin
“This is amazing footage, Cos. It’s damned hard to edit it, though.”
Regina Price was on her second pass through the destruction of the Washington Monument and she was still shaking. They’d gone live with the feed on WHUT, as had every other station serving D.C., but she already knew she and Cosmo had something special—something few if any other teams had. Now she was trying to get it into a format suitable for their evening news programming.
“I wish I could take credit for it,” Cos murmured.
She shot the cameraman a weird glance. “Cosmo Hernandez, in the five years we’ve worked together, I have never known you to exhibit false modesty.”
“I’m not being modest, falsely or otherwise.”
“Yeah, right.” Regina followed the camera eye practically into the empty cab of the crane. “Oh, I’ve got to use this zoom here. You bored right in on the cab. It’s killer.”
Cos was silent, but she heard him shift away from the door of the editing suite. “I mean, that showed great instinct,” she told him. “I bet everyone else was panning back for the big picture, but I think you got the money shot. Hell, I think you got all the money shots. It still freaks me out that the cab was empty. They’re already speculating about that online. You know, was it robotics, or RC, or just whacked machinery?”
When he didn’t comment—something so un-Cosmo-like that it was cause for alarm—she glanced back over her shoulder at him. He looked . . . uneasy. Spooked, even.
“What is it, Cos? What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t shoot that footage—exactly.”
Now he had her entire attention. “What are you talking about? Of course you shot it. It came out of your camera.”
“Reggie, when that whole thing started, I was just getting set up. I had the camera pointed roughly at the grandstand—yards away from the monument—and I was noodling with the focus.” He paused, looking even more deeply uncomfortable than he had before.
“Cos . . .”
“I didn’t swivel the camera to the crane, Reg. It swiveled itself. I know it sounds weird and crazy and delusional, but the camera moved of its own accord and it executed that zoom without my intervention.”
Reg turned back to the computer on which she was editing the raw footage. “That’s impossible . . . isn’t it?”
“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But then you’d think a crane going all rogue like that on its own would be impossible, too.”
Reggie was used to the cameraman pulling jokes on her, but she didn’t think this was the case now—she’d never seen him this solemn. Besides, it was nowhere near April Fools’ Day and the situation was far from humorous.
“Look, Cos, if this is some attempt on your part to inject humor into an otherwise terrifying situation—”
“No. And I have evidence that’s not what I’m doing if you need something beyond my word. When I stepped out a minute ago I called a buddy of mine at WETA. He says the same thing happened to him. He finally ended up pulling the camera off its stand and hand-holding it.”
Reg was struck by that. “You didn’t do that—why?”
“After we pulled back, I—I guess I wanted to know what my ghostly cameraman was after. So I set the stand down and just watched. And that may be why I got all the money shots. Because whoever was really driving my rig—”
“Knew what they were aiming at,” Reg finished with him.
The two were silent for a moment in which Reggie felt as if many tiny ants with very cold feet were hiking across her shoulder blades. She finally got her numb lips to move.
“Who do we call? And don’t say Ghostbusters,” she warned, raising a fist in mock threat when he opened his mouth.
He smiled wanly, running a shaky hand through his hair. “Now who’s trying to inject humor into an otherwise terrifying situation? Maybe we—I dunno—maybe we call the State Department?”
“Hey, guys?” One of their interns—a long-haired blonde Cos referred to as Galadriel—popped her head through the door. “Um, the station manager needs to see you, pronto. He just got a call from the State Department.”
“Madam President, they’re ready for you in the Sit Room.”
Margaret Ellis was out of her chair before her chief of staff had even finished the sentence. She was more than ready for the Situation Room. She would go in and pull her close advisors around her like a blanket, like armor—both. She knew that many of the presidents who had faced crises before her had been skeptical of the people who met them in the Sit Room—distrustful, impatient, disrespectful. She was none of those things. These people were her best defense against partisan crap, self-interest (enlightened or oth
erwise), and hubris. Her eleven-year-old son called them her Wizard Council. They were like that at times. She hoped this was one of them.
“Did we get all the pertinent video from the media?” she asked her chief as they walked.
“Yes, ma’am. Everything we could find.” He seemed about to say more, but didn’t.
She glanced at him sharply. “What is it, Curtis?”
“There was one video feed that surpassed all the others for sheer . . . effectiveness. I watched it as it streamed down. This is not your garden-variety terrorist action.”
That raised Margaret’s eyebrows. “Is there such a thing as ‘garden-variety’ terrorism?”
“I mean terrorism in which you can actually see the terrorists.”
That sentence made her cheeks feel as if they’d been touched by an icy wind. “I heard the early reports . . . which is not to say I believed them.”
“Believe them.”
They reached the Sit Room and Curtis carded the door open. Margaret entered, feeling as if she actually did enter a congregation of wizards. These were intensely bright and expert people—each with his or her own realm of expertise. Mostly, they had learned, during the first term of Margaret Ellis’s presidency, to work well within those realms without trespassing on each other’s goodwill, while avoiding the age-old problem of empire building. Now, well into her first term, they normally functioned like a well-oiled machine. She noted a problem with that dynamic immediately:
Whatever this situation was, it wasn’t normal.
Everyone at the long, oval table stood. Margaret seated herself next to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Navy Admiral Joan Hand.
Hand nodded. “Madam President. Mr. Chamberlin. We have the video from WHUT cued. This first piece is the one that is the most troubling.”
It was and it wasn’t. Yes, certainly, the sight of the empty crane as the construction crew fled the area was disturbing. So was the seemingly purposeful movement of the huge machine. As much as she wanted to, Margaret could not make herself believe that there was not deliberate intent behind its behavior—that this was not just a malfunction. Yes, all that was “troubling”—to use Joan’s completely inadequate word. But the image that Margaret knew would be seared into her mind was the sight of the Washington Monument—a national fixture since the 1800s, a symbol of the greatness of America—toppling, headless, amid a billow of smoke from a U.S. missile.
Friendly fire.
She closed her eyes and still saw the fall of the obelisk. She suspected she’d see it every time she closed her eyes from now until the day she died.
“We were damn lucky,” Curtis murmured.
Margaret opened her eyes and turned to look at her chief of staff. He looked approximately as shaken as she felt.
He met her gaze. “We’re damn lucky that we got the warning in time and no one was killed. If it had happened during the ceremony . . .”
On Margaret’s opposite side, Joan Hand leaned forward, frowning. “Yet it didn’t happen during the ceremony. And we received a warning. Which makes the new video that just surfaced a bit anomalous.”
Margaret swung around to face the other woman. “What video?”
Joan Hand nodded at the media technician seated at the far end of the table before a large LED display. The display came to life again, this time with an interior view of a dimly lit room in which a man in the flowing garments common in the Middle East addressed the camera. The voice-over claimed, in stilted, deadpan English, that the strike on the “heart of the beast” was the work of Al Sabbah, the terrorist group known as The Morning, and that there would be more such events in the near future.
“Who’s the speaker?” Margaret asked when the screen had gone black again.
Joan slid an iPad toward her. “He’s an Al Sabbah lieutenant who calls himself al Hajj Mahmoud abd-al Qadir. He rose to prominence about four years ago in Iraq and served as mouthpiece for the Iraqi Al Sabbah affiliate. He’s a Sunni. A scholar of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence. But he’s also Western educated. Attended the London School of Economics. He hasn’t been heard from for several years. In fact, there was some speculation that he was dead.”
Margaret gave the man’s dossier displayed on Joan’s iPad a quick once-over.
“Is that why you say this is anomalous?” Curtis asked. “Because he’s been lying low for so long?”
“No, because of what I said before: we were warned of the attack in advance and it didn’t happen during the ceremony. If it had, hundreds of people might have been killed or injured. It’s not like Al Sabbah to pull their punches. We have a team of experts going over this video right now to verify its legitimacy and check the provenance of the accompanying Facebook and Twitter posts.”
Margaret nodded. “I’d like to speak to the journalists who captured the footage of the incident. Curtis, if you’d arrange that . . .”
“Of course.”
“So we don’t think it’s Al Sabbah, correct?”
“No, ma’am,” said Admiral Hand.
“Well, if it’s not Al Sabbah, then who is it?” Margaret asked. She expected no answer and got none.
“Holy shit!” Eugene sat up straight at his workstation, barely able to comprehend what he had just seen. He had headphones on; his exclamation was significantly louder than he’d intended.
Dice, Joey, and Lanfen looked up from their work on Pippin, and Chuck, who had been working in his office that morning, got up at once and came to the open door. “Euge, what is it?” he asked.
Eugene turned to look at him, blinking as if he’d just surfaced from sleep. He pulled his headphones down around his neck and pointed at his computer screen. “This news report. Someone just blew up the Washington Monument.”
That brought Chuck out of his office, and pulled Dice, Joey, and Lanfen away from the new robot and lured Mini from a painting she was working on—applying color without brushes and sometimes without pigment. They all moved toward Eugene.
“Blew it up?” repeated Dice. “As in terrorists?”
“Well, no—actually it looks like one of our own attack copters blew it up but . . . wait—watch this.” With the others forming a tight knot around his chair, Eugene reran the video, which he’d found as the result of a Reuters news flash.
They watched. When the camera zoomed in on the rogue crane, revealing that the cab was completely empty, Mini gasped and Dice murmured, “Oh my God. It’s them. It’s gotta be the Alphas.”
“What are they saying this was?” Chuck asked. “Is there anything beyond the news flash?”
“Let me see if I can find anything,” Euge said, and attacked his keyboard, wildly tapping search terms into the address bar of his browser. He hit enter and got a 404. “What the hell? I lost the Internet!”
“What seems to be the problem?”
They all looked up to see Kristian Lorstad watching from the open door of the lab—his face, as always, inscrutable and placid.
“The problem is,” said Eugene, “I just lost my Internet connection!”
“The problem is,” said Chuck, “the Alphas are going public.”
“What makes you say that?” Kristian asked.
Eugene just gawped. Is this guy as cut off from reality as their location implied?
He pointed at his computer screen. “Rogue machinery taking out the Washington Monument? Haven’t you seen this?”
“We are . . . looking into it. Please, Dr. Pozniaki, don’t let yourself be distracted by outside events. The Alphas—as you call them—cannot be allowed to deflect us from our purpose.”
“‘Deflect us from our purpose’?” echoed Chuck. “I thought our purpose was to rein them in. Neutralize them—and I don’t mean that in the military sense. Keeping this sort of thing from happening is our purpose.”
Lorstad glanced down at the pale quartz flooring, his lips pursed thoughtfully. After a moment, he looked up again, meeting Chuck’s gaze. “Our purpose, Charles, is to evolve. To correc
t the flaws in humanity by transcending them. In that context, the loss of a national monument is a minor development. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Chuck shot Eugene a frowning glance, then rounded the workstation to stand toe to toe with their host. “No, I do not agree. The Alphas are clearly exercising an unprecedented level of direct control over mechanisms far beyond their base of operations. If they can reach the Washington Monument, they can reach into the White House, into the halls of Congress, into the Pentagon. And not just by following available electronic pathways. I doubt that crane was on any computer grid. Do you even understand the implications of that?”
Lorstad’s face registered mild comprehension. “Of course. Trust me, Charles. The Center is completely off the grid. The Alphas cannot reach you here. They don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
“Neither do we,” mumbled Dice.
Lorstad glanced at him over Chuck’s shoulder. “Which is for your own safety and well-being, Dr. Kobayashi.” He changed the subject. “How close are you to having a workable machine for me to learn with?”
“We’re ready anytime you are, Dr. Lorstad,” Dice told him. “We have a simple drive bot for your first steps and a human analogue ready to go into testing for when you’ve mastered the simple mechanics.”
Lorstad nodded. “I’m pleased. May I assume I can start my journey as early as tomorrow?”
He looked to Chuck, who nodded mutely, his face set in an expression Euge recognized as a cover for frustration.
“Wonderful. Now, I need to borrow Mini from you for a bit, if I may.”
Euge started to ask what he wanted to borrow her for, but realized that would only make him look like an overprotective boyfriend. That was an impression he wanted to avoid; he didn’t want either Lorstad or Mini to see him in that light.
I don’t have to like it, though.
Mini, being Mini, simply asked, “Oh? What for?”
“First,” said Lorstad, smiling at her amiably, “I’d love to see what you’re working on in your studio . . . if I may, that is.”
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