Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  * * *

  “I need you to copilot for takeoff,” Alexander told him, once they were on board the Citation. “I need you, Michael, and you need to focus. I just scheduled the flight plan, but we haven’t been cleared for departure.”

  Michael saw why once he was seated in the cockpit. The storm was pounding the Citation so hard he could barely make out the airport buildings around him. The flashing red beacon atop the air traffic control tower cast an occasional pinkish haze through a narrow break in the relentless rain that the jet’s windshield wipers were having even less luck clearing than the Alfa Romeo’s.

  “Whatever you say. Just get us out of here, Alexander,” he called, feeling for his seat belt.

  “I’ll lay in the course back for London.”

  “No,” Michael told him, “not London. Not yet.”

  “Where then?”

  “Sicily,” he told Alexander. “Catania, the nearest airport to Caltagirone.”

  * * *

  Alexander had switched on the engines while Michael completed the more mundane preflight protocols. Then Alexander hailed the tower over the radio.

  “This is Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie. Again requesting immediate clearance for takeoff.”

  “Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie,” an air traffic controller blurted in heavily accented English, “you do not have clearance for takeoff. The airport is closed to all departures. Repeat, the airport is closed to all departures due to extreme weather conditions.”

  “What do you want me to do, Michael?” Alexander said, as heavy winds shook the Citation in its perch on the tarmac.

  “Get us the fuck out of here.”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  And with that Alexander eased the throttle forward and turned the Citation’s nose for the nearest runway, the small jet bucking as he pushed it straight into the wind.

  “Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie,” came the air traffic controller’s harried voice again, “I say again, you do not have clearance.”

  “Tower, we have an emergency on board and are contravening your instructions. Please clear approach traffic from our course.”

  “Negative, Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie. You are not cleared for takeoff.”

  “The responsibility is ours. Wind speed and the potential for shear are increasing. We have a brief window to takeoff now. Please clear heading…”

  Alexander completed plugging in their coordinates from memory and eased the Citation into motion without waiting for confirmation. The jet picked up speed in blinding fashion, so quick Michael could feel the G-forces seeming to contract his chest. Crosswinds from the storm caught the Citation in their grasp and shook it about once they were airborne, Alexander struggling to level the jet off. The controls vibrated madly in his grasp, then slowed to a tremble, as the small jet clung to a steady climb through the choppy air and driving rain. Climbing felt like swimming against a riptide to the point where Michael began to wonder if they might stall out or even roll. Suddenly cockpit lights started to flash, warning buzzers sounding as their air speed reached dangerously low levels. The small jet pitched downward suddenly; then, just as suddenly, it managed to regain altitude with the engines still screaming in protest. Finally, it found a gap in the storm, both Michael and Alexander able to breathe again.

  “You okay back there?” Michael called to Scarlett in the cabin.

  “Oh, just fine,” she said to him, her voice broken by fear. “At least you’re consistent.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You always know how to keep things interesting.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  BUNĂ ZIUA, ROMANIA

  Dracu smelled the aftermath of the battle in the first light of dawn blocks from turning onto the street housing the decimated Securitate building. He had his convoy park well down from the chaos of rescue and police vehicles surrounding it and sent a pair of his most trusted captains on ahead.

  They returned through the haze of smoke and confusion, toting a man with char, ash, and grime all over his face and uniform with an adhesive wrapping fastened over his clearly swollen right hand. His men shoved the colonel into the back of the Range Rover to join Dracu and Armura.

  “How many men were there?” Dracu asked, resuming when the man seated next to him remained silent. “I’m giving you a chance to talk and stay alive.”

  The colonel seemed unable to take his eyes off first Armura, and then Dracu’s veil. “I only saw two,” he said finally. “Two men.”

  “Did you recognize them?”

  “They wore masks and goggles,” the colonel said, passing a hand before his own face. “Spoke English.”

  “Anything else?”

  “One of them took a file.”

  “What file?”

  * * *

  Dracu handed him his phone after Colonel Gastman explained its contents.

  “Call your men at the airport. Find out if any foreigners have made it past security in the past hour.”

  Gastman did just that as the man in the veil looked on, hoping to learn enough information to stay alive.

  “They boarded a Citation,” he reported finally. “Its originating point was listed as London. It took off from Napoca despite the storm against the tower’s instructions not long ago.”

  “Bound back for London?”

  “Originally. But the flight plan was switched in flight to Catania in Sicily.”

  “Sicily,” Dracu repeated.

  “My man at the airport isolated their pictures from Customs. They’ve been sent to the number you gave me.”

  Dracu checked his pocket-size tablet and found the pictures waiting. But none of the three faces were recognizable or could be identified, as if all three had been schooled to avoid looking directly at the cameras. Two men and one woman, obviously disguised, was all he could tell.

  And that was enough.

  “One more thing,” he said to Colonel Gastman, still staring at one of the two men pictured. “Tell your man at the airport to have my jet readied for takeoff.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  “It wasn’t an explosion that caused the rupture,” Gregory John Markham told Naomi, as they viewed the footage picturing the aftermath of the destruction of Edward Devereaux’s Daring Sea suite yet again.

  The Seven Sins had hired Markham away from Perini Building Company after he proved to be the only engineer neither intimidated nor overwhelmed by the challenges involved in constructing the Daring Sea and its underwater suites. Far from it. Instead, he embraced the project as the challenge of a lifetime and didn’t quit even after dozens of failures with models and various composites.

  “At least, not the kind of explosion you’d expect,” Markham continued.

  Markham was all of thirty-four now, but had been barely twenty-six when he was hired during the construction of the Daring Sea environment. It was the crowning achievement of his young career, enhancing his reputation to the point where he had gained more work than he could handle. Not about to forget who’d entrusted him with such an opportunity, Markham dropped everything as soon as Naomi called.

  Markham’s knowledge and foresight had led him to conclude that glass, no matter how sturdy and stable, was prone to rupture. In fact, the stronger it was, the higher the likelihood of a catastrophic event in what he called an ascending arithmetic scale. The solution was to create “softer,” more malleable sections of glass that displaced energy and absorbed a force strong enough to rupture the glass-like polymer before the rapid chain of events, better known as cracking, could even begin.

  Not surprisingly, then, Markham looked at investigating the circumstances of Deveraux/Faustin’s death as a matter of personal pride. He was convinced from the start what happened was in no way an accident or a random occurrence under any circumstances. Proving that meant not only exonerating himself from some level of responsibility, but also providing further validation of his theories on building large-scale underwater habitats that co
uld potentially house thousands, even tens of thousands.

  “What do you mean by not the kind of explosion I’d expect?” Naomi asked him in the sprawling Seven Sins command center that offered every conceivable view of the entire resort, including the Daring Sea.

  “Well,” Markham started to explain, having to remind himself not to sound too academic, “explosives are normally incendiary, relying on a combination of a blast wave, heat displacement, and shrapnel spread to do their damage. But the fragments of the glass I examined that were recovered from the victim’s suite showed no signs whatsoever of any of those, no scoring or searing at all.” With that, Markham slid an anomalously smooth fragment of the glass from Devereaux’s suite atop a lab tray in front of her. “See, no scorching, no external rupture. The cracking you see exemplified here that ultimately compromised the glass polymer’s integrity happened from the inside out, not the outside in.”

  “How is that possible?” Naomi asked.

  “Only one way,” Markham told her and proceeded to emit a high-pitched wail that forced Naomi, and any technician on duty around them, to squeeze her hands over her ears.

  “There was a point to that, I assume,” she said when the sound finally waned.

  “You’ve seen demonstrations of opera singers capable of shattering glass with their voice.”

  “I never believed they were real.”

  “Oh, they most certainly are. Not common, mind you, but very much real. Sound travels in waves and when those waves reach a certain pitch or modulation, they have the capacity to damage any object. Glass is far more molecularly fragile than, say, wood or steel, and that makes it much more subject to the effects of these waves that are better described as ultrasonic frequencies.”

  “Wait a minute, are you saying sound is what killed Edward Devereaux?”

  “A sonic bomb would be a more apt description,” confirmed Gregory John Markham. “But, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  “I’ve reviewed footage of the great whites in the moments during the blackout,” Markham continued. “What you need to understand is that sharks use sound to locate food; in fact, it’s often the first sense they rely on because sound travels faster and farther underwater than on land. They key on low-frequency pulsed sounds. So the kind of disruption in sonic waves that bomb caused to their scanning field would have thrown all their systems out of whack, essentially driving them crazy. I’ve isolated the footage of them both before and during the blackout so you can review my findings. The difference is drastic, undeniable.”

  Naomi nodded, trying to process Markham’s conclusions. “I’ve heard of sonic weapons being deployed before, but never anything like a sonic bomb.”

  “That’s because the research on them is flimsy and unproven at best, purely theoretical but still based on some fairly well-established principles,” Markham explained. “Those sonic weapons you just mentioned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, extremely high-power sound waves can disrupt and/or destroy the eardrums of a target and cause severe pain or disorientation. This is usually sufficient to incapacitate a person. Less powerful sound waves can cause humans to experience nausea or discomfort. The use of these frequencies to incapacitate persons has occurred both in counterterrorist and crowd control scenarios—in ships at sea seeking to defend themselves against terrorists, for example. Something called a long-range acoustic device was used by a cruise ship to chase off pirates not too long ago. A similar system called a magnetic acoustic device has been used successfully, especially in Europe, to even break up riots. So the technology’s definitely there.”

  “But how did it get here?” Naomi asked him.

  “The first challenge is size. The kind of long-range acoustic devices being deployed on ships at sea is the size of a small tire.”

  “Nothing like that was recovered from Edward Devereaux’s suite or anywhere else in the Daring Sea.”

  “You mean, nothing that anyone noticed. That only means the weapon was likely deployed within something already present inside the suite. But a sonic bomb wouldn’t work under the same principles as acoustic weapons do. They deploy ultrasonic waves; a sonic bomb, instead, would utilize something called infrasound.”

  “Infrasound?”

  Markham nodded, clearly enjoying himself. “The low frequency of infrasonic sound and its corresponding long wavelength makes it much more capable of bending around or penetrating your body, creating an oscillating pressure system. Depending on the frequency, different parts of your body will resonate, which can have very unusual non-auditory effects. Almost any part of your body, based on its volume and makeup, will vibrate at specific frequencies with enough power. Human eyeballs are fluid-filled ovoids, lungs are gas-filled membranes, and the human abdomen contains a variety of liquid, solid, and gas-filled pockets. All of these structures have limits to how much they can stretch when subjected to force, so if you provide enough power behind a vibration, they will stretch and shrink in time with the low-frequency vibrations of the air molecules around them.”

  “Would an autopsy reveal evidence of that?”

  “It would reveal evidence of something normal forensics would be unable to explain, that is if the great whites hadn’t pretty much ravaged the victim’s remains. I’m not sure if there’s enough left of our victim to come up with anything definitive. So my conclusions are based on the infrasound’s effects on the glass. It wasn’t the harder portions of the pane that were struck first, it was the softer layers that ruptured from the inside out, like I said before, creating a chain reaction that destroyed the structural integrity of the glass wall. An infrasound weapon that powerful would have killed the victim, even if the wall hadn’t ruptured, as an autopsy on whatever’s left of him might yet reveal.”

  “What about the means of delivery?”

  “An infrasound weapon doesn’t rely on a focused beam the way an acoustic weapon does. It dispenses waves instead, and the actual device could have been disguised as practically anything.”

  “Dispensed how, Greg?” Naomi asked him.

  “I’ve been reviewing an inventory of all Daring Sea suites, and I’m guessing through something electronic. If it were me, I’d go with this,” he said, freezing the screen on a high-end Bose clock radio that was among the objects recovered from Devereaux’s suite.

  “Why?”

  “Because it already has a fairly sophisticated sound system built in. Means less of a chore to modify it into a sonic bomb. And the clock radios in the Daring Sea suites also have automatic battery backup power, meaning—”

  “They’d work in the event of a blackout,” Naomi interrupted.

  Markham nodded. “Unfortunately, the police took the clock radio as evidence, so I can’t examine it myself and I can’t be absolutely sure until I do. Right now, though, I’m sure enough.” He paused. “And I’m also sure you’re dealing with one brilliant, and exceptionally dangerous, mind here.”

  “Brilliant enough to cause the blackout, too?”

  “Not in my realm of expertise, I’m afraid.”

  “Then find me somebody whose realm it is in. How soon can you get him … or her on the job?”

  “It’s a him. Give me until tomorrow. He’ll want to be paid in cash, quite a bit I should add. He doesn’t work cheap.”

  “Not a problem, so long as you’re willing to vouch for him,” Naomi said, realizing she sounded like Michael. “My boss isn’t the kind of man who takes being betrayed well.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend someone unless I was sure you could trust him. This guy’s the best hacker in the business, wanted by companies and countries alike who have absolutely no idea who he is. You want to find out how somebody staged this blackout, he’s your man.”

  Naomi’s cell phone rang, her private number known only to a select few.

  “I have to take this,” she told Markham, turning away to answer.

  “Hell
o, Counselor,” greeted the voice of Del Slocumb.

  “How’d you get this number, Agent?”

  “We’re the FBI. You’d be surprised what we can pull off when we put our minds to it,” he said, sounding almost jovial.

  “You’re right, I would.”

  “Then let me prove it to you another way,” Slocumb said. “I’ve got some more news about your boss I think you’ll want to hear.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SICILY

  “The truth, Ismael. Now.”

  And the truth Saltuk shared with her had taken Raven Khan to Sicily where a private jet arranged via her myriad of trusted contacts landed at Vincenzo Bellini Airport. A rental car was waiting for her at the private terminal.

  A cloudless sky and full moon as dawn approached made for an easy ride through countryside she had never once traveled, but somehow seemed familiar. The directions took her along the A19 to a destination located at the near halfway point between Catania and Palermo. Even with those directions, she thought she’d missed her target, finding herself in the middle of a town that seemed lifted from another century.

  The light wood and stone buildings were uniformly ancient, most dating back hundreds of years and many remaining frozen in time. Like much of Italy, the town claimed churches as its most cherished landmarks along, in this case, with a castle-like town hall in the piazza municipio that, according to a historic plaque aglow in a ground-mounted spotlight, was registered among official Italian landmarks. Soft rolling hills bracketed the town on either side, layered with more graveyards than she’d ever seen in her life, something that seemed oddly appropriate right now.

  Raven slid down the window and smelled the air, refreshingly cool for summer and laced with a pleasant aroma of the flora that suddenly seemed strangely familiar.

  Oranges, she realized, I can smell oranges.

  Just then she came to a sign featuring the name of the town in reflective letters that caught the moonlight:

  Caltagirone.

  For Raven, though, it smelled oddly like something else entirely.