Death Angel

by David Jacobs

  Through Marta she’d had Torreon Blanco liquidate Rhodes Morrow. Kling and Rhee had pursued the investigation even after their boss’s death, marking them for demolition. Jack Bauer’s advent on the scene had added urgency to the agenda. The past never really dies. He’d been a dangerous antagonist in Brussels years ago; she would not underestimate him. Helen Veitch had drawn the assignment to kill Bauer but he’d been too quick and clever for her. Rhee had died—she’d seen to that. Blanco guns had purged Kling and the Parkhursts, but Bauer had survived the Blancos’ best attempts to cross him off the board.

  Certain that Nordquist was the mole, Jane Miller had directed the Blancos to kidnap his wife and daughter, hostages to give her the whip hand over him. She knew the intimate details of the Nordquist house and had fingered the inside information about its disposition to Torreon, who’d passed it on to Pardee, and through him to the kidnap team. Bauer had foiled that plan.

  At the same time, she’d faked her own kidnapping. It removed her from the scene and the surveillance that ensued, buying her freedom of movement. She had some idea in the back of her mind that she’d be able to parlay the “threat” to her safety into a lever with which to pry some atomic secrets from her husband.

  Her master plan had come apart due to one fatal flaw: not Nordquist but her husband, Hugh Carlson, was the mole. She’d never seen that coming in a million years. It could have resulted in total disaster except for her ace in the hole: Lassiter.

  She didn’t know him except by reputation and had never met him. Marta Blanco was Lassiter’s handler. At virtually the last minute this morning Lassiter had learned about the meeting between Scourby, Carlson, and Adam Zane and passed the information along to Marta. There’d been time to engineer a double cross, allowing the Blanco gang to massacre the Scourby/Varrin coalition and secure Carlson and Zane.

  For icing on the cake, Jack Bauer had been killed at the scene. Of course, Lassiter had to die, too. He’d served his purpose, and besides, he knew too much.

  So here she was, in possession of the field.

  Adam Zane would deal, the PALO codes were priceless; he’d jump at the chance to acquire them. The leopard doesn’t change its spots; he was the same as always and would react according to the predictable tropes of greed and power.

  She was the same, too—Annihilax lives again.

  And the mole, the master spy of this century, the atomic secret stealer supreme, was the one man she’d never suspected:

  Her husband, Hugh Carlson.

  23

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 A.M. AND 10 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

  * * *

  9:23 A.M. MDT

  Mission Hill, Los Alamos County

  “This family reunion is all very touching, but what about the demo?” Adam Zane asked.

  He was right, of course. The purveyor of stolen secrets had seen clear to the heart of the matter as far as he was concerned; he had to be sure that he had secrets to purvey.

  Dr. Hugh Carlson had gotten some of his guts back. “Without me you’ve got no demonstration. You’ve got the PALO codes, sure. What of it? Eventually you can peddle them to some foreign power. But it’ll take a platoon of their best brains hundreds of man-hours to make them work properly. The data is there. The words but not the music. They’re the building blocks, the bricks. But my brain’s the mortar, the cement binding them all together.

  “I know all the tricks and shortcuts and shades of interpretation. I can make them work now and later. Another thing, Zane—I know exactly what they’re worth, what they can do. Invaluable for you in a negotiation. I can make sure you’re getting full value and that the other side isn’t trying to drag down the price with double talk.”

  “Prove it,” Adam Zane said.

  “I will—for the right payday.”

  “You’re in no position to make demands,” Jane Miller said.

  “No? What are you going to do, kill me? Torture me?”

  “Two very attractive options, husband dear.”

  “Bull. You’re not going to throw money away. I’m worth it—big money. With or without the codes. Get rough with me, and I might get so nervous as to miss a vital keystroke and glitch out the process.

  “That’s not counting what I know about Perseus and Argus, too. A treasure trove of classified secrets. Use your heads. Stop thinking of me as a prisoner and start thinking of me as a partner. Then let’s get the show on the road.”

  “There may be something to what you say, Carlson,” Zane said thoughtfully.

  “There is. And don’t try any of the old soft soap. Take a good look around you at each other. I’m the only nonexpendable person here. I’m the creator. You others are just hijackers, brokers, and middlemen. I’m the one person you have to keep alive.”

  “What’s your pitch?” Jane Miller asked.

  “Equal shares,” Carlson said. “I’m not greedy—unlike the rest of you. Equal shares all around. Of course, that number may dwindle if you decide to thin your ranks to up your shares, but that’s your business.”

  Zane’s jaws firmed. “Don’t press your luck, Carlson. Live goods are a headache. They’re a lot more difficult to transport than a case full of codes, so—don’t overplay your hand.”

  Carlson was almost cheerful, or perhaps hysterical. “I won’t ask you to give your word. Word of honor? What good’s the word of a bunch of thieves and killers? No, I’m appealing to something a lot more solid. Good common sense. You know what I say is true. That’s my insurance policy and it’s better than all the solemn vows in Creation.”

  “It is if you can do what you say you can do. Otherwise…Well, get to it.”

  “Done. We’re powered up so let’s start inputting the codes.”

  The electronic arena was alive. Outside, in its protective housing, the generator was humming. Inside, green on lights glimmered on the faces of instrument boards and panels. Electronic machinery clicked, buzzed, droned.

  Dr. Hugh Carlson sat at the main computer console like a virtuoso instrumentalist getting set at the keyboard of a concert piano. He selected a coded desk from the metal box and fed it into a slot. The machine’s plastic tongue retracted.

  “Takes time to input the correct coded disks,” he said. “Just the purely mechanical act of feeding them in one at a time. Luckily we’ve got the right hardware with the proper specs. Well, luck has nothing to do with it. I selected the machines myself and Scourby followed my orders to the letter.”

  He input another disk. “It’s all a matter of proportion. With these codes I could launch an ICBM and hit Moscow or Beijing. Impressive, but we don’t want that. We don’t want to start World War III. No money in Armageddon. What we want is an incident. Something to show we can do what we say we can do, convincing all buyers of its potential worth.

  “We want to sell these codes to the highest bidder. It’s possible that that might be Uncle Sam. Not entirely likely, considering the state of the dollar and the national debt, but possible. So we want deniability. In case Uncle wants to pay to hush up the whole mess.

  “So—we want an incident. Something that’s too big to ignore but not so big that it triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust. What we do, we light up a candle someplace far away from here. A nuclear missile silo somewhere up north. I was thinking Montana first but I decided on North Dakota. It’s a wasteland anyway and nobody’s going to miss a few hundred square miles of it if they go boom. Of course they’ll stay hot for the next several hundred years or so.

  “What I’m going to do, I’ll detonate the atomic warheads of a Minuteman missile in a silo in North Dakota. I’ll touch it off so it blows in the silo. The blast will create an electromagnetic pulse that will screw up communications and everything else for that part of the country and Canada, too, but that won’t be so bad. The confusion will aid our getaway. Just make sure we go south.

  “There’ll be several thousand people dead from the blast, tens of thousands m
ore from the radiation, fallout, and related phenomenon. The whole north Midwestern tier will probably go dark from the EMP. No power, TV, cell phones, computers, nothing. Back to the Stone Age. Washington will claim it’s a terrible accident. To save face. If they can pay, fine. If not, the codes—and my services—go to the highest bidder.

  “Once the codes are loaded into the computer, they’ll be uploaded through our satellite transceiver to an orbiting communications satellite. The comsat will download them into the preselected missile silo. The override will negate all their controls, rendering them useless. I’ll be controlling them from here. I’ll arm the warheads and detonate them on the ground in the silo. After that, it’s all over but the getaway and the payday.”

  9:59 A.M. MDT

  Minuteman Missile Silo, Moosejaw, North Dakota

  Being a missile man is a study in futility. It takes on much of the aspects of being a night watchman. There’s an inherent contradiction. The silo is loaded with one of the most potent and deadly weapons in the world, an instrument of awesome megadeath potential. The other side of the coin is that nothing ever happens.

  For the United States Air Force missile technicians serving out their duty shift, there are things to do. Routine maintenance programs. Drills. Occasional exercises.

  Above ground is the flat, steppelike appearance of barren North Dakota flats, a sprawling emptiness of vast grasslands stretching out to all corners of the globe.

  Below ground, beneath a hinged sealed camouflaged hatch cover, lies the silo, a concrete-lined, steel-reinforced vertical pipe sunk deep in the ground. It’s well-named, this silo. Like an aboveground grain silo, only inverted. A sheath for an atomic-warheaded dart.

  The vehicle, a Minuteman missile topped with an MIRV warhead. Multiple (targeted) independent reentry vehicles. Based on the principle of “bigger bang for a buck.” Containing not one but several atomic warheads, each programmed to strike a different target in the area.

  Today, like all the other days, all the other duty shifts, the USAF missile techs—a two-man crew—face another dreary round of exquisite boredom. Atomic war? Not a chance, brother. The superpowers have grown up. They stay away from no-win nuclear showdowns. The real threat today comes from nuclear “suitcase” bombs and dirty bombs made by rogue states and disseminated into the hands of terrorists.

  The missile techs on duty in Silo 14 go through the motions by routine turned near robotized.

  Suddenly—

  Things started happening. Red lights flashed. Buzzers sounded. Somnolent, lazy readouts were suddenly goosed into spitting out masses of digits. Machinery switched on.

  After a moment’s disbelieving paralysis of mind and body, the techs started throwing switches, pressing buttons, trying to regain control of the system. To arm an atomic weapon is a two-man operation. Both missile techs must simultaneously insert their keys and use the day’s PAL codes to arm the warheads.

  Now, while they have done nothing at all to initiate a launching sequence, a phantom force has reached in, punching past their fail-safes and switched on the system, arming the atomics.

  The nuclear warheads are alive and counting down.

  Ignition is only minutes away. There is nothing they can do to stop it.

  24

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

  * * *

  10:13 A.M. MDT

  Mission Hill, Los Alamos County

  Mission Hill was a fortress. Max Scourby made it so. Torreon and Marta Blanco, its new masters, have reinforced it. The boundary wall was already a foot thick, its ten-foot height hardened with rows of black iron spikes with spear blade points. The main gate, made of motorized wrought-iron grillwork, has been reinforced by the simple expedient of parking a rented delivery truck inside the gates, blocking them lengthwise.

  The grounds are patrolled by a small army of Blanco gunmen armed with assault rifles, machine guns, and shotguns. A smaller but equally well-armed cadre guards the inside of the mansion on every floor.

  There was a flaw in the hardened defense system, however, a failure to think in dimension. Jack Bauer launched his assault by air. A long, slim, needlelike yellow helicopter with black trim hovered over the roof of the Mission Hill mansion. Pilot Ron Galvez was at the controls. In the cockpit were Jack Bauer and Tony Almeida. They’d armed themselves with weapons from the top of Bluecoat Bluff. The heaviest firepower they could find.

  Earlier, Jack Bauer had used the cell phone to contact Ron Galvez at his home base at Black Eagle Airfield. Galvez had been dozing off on a cot in the hangar, where he’d set up station the night before, standing ready to respond to Jack Bauer’s summons.

  The helicopter had been serviced and fueled, and stood ready to go.

  When Jack’s call came, Galvez rose from the cot, gulped a paper cup of cold coffee that had been standing for hours on a nearby desk, and hustled out to the helicopter. After a preflight check, he’d lofted the copter into the sky, arrowing toward Bluecoat Bluff.

  Jack and Tony had descended to the ground at the base of the hill. The copter touched down in an open field. The CTU agents climbed aboard and the copter soared upward.

  A short time later the aircraft was hovering over the Mission Hill mansion. The fenced-in grounds below were a scene of frantic action. Like an overturned anthill. Blanco guards were running this way and that along the paths. They didn’t know what to do or where to go first. Their confusion was compounded by the fact that they were under siege, not just from above, but also on the ground.

  Jack Bauer had also put in a call to Vince Sabito. A torrent of obscene abuse directed at Jack poured out of the phone. Vince Sabito vented until he paused for breath. Jack managed to get a few words in edgewise—enough to get Sabito listening.

  “This is the showdown. The Blancos and Carlson are forted up at Mission Hill,” Jack said.

  “Mission Hill? That’s Scourby’s place,” Sabito growled.

  “Not anymore. Scourby’s dead and so is the Varrin gang, massacred by the Blancos. Torreon and company—and Carlson—are at Mission Hill. If you move fast you can bag them all.

  “Unless I get there first,” Jack said. He broke the connection, cutting off Sabito in mid-squawk. He’d thrown in that last crack about getting there first just to irritate Sabito and goose him into moving out fast.

  Jack had also contacted Deputy Wallace Ross. “This is the big one. Bring out the big guns. You’ve been waiting to clean up on the Blancos—now’s the time.”

  The results were plain to see from way up in the middle of the air. FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies were besieging Mission Hill. Their vehicles surrounded it on all sides.

  Sabito had apparently gotten those reinforcements he’d requested from Albuquerque, including an entire FBI Tac Squad in an armored war wagon.

  Mission Hill was the scene of a battle royal. From above, gun smoke clouds bobbed around inside and outside the walls like floating cotton balls.

  Ron Galvez brought the helicopter close to the central bell tower whose flat roof was topped by the satellite dish aimed at a forty-five-degree angle at the sky. A couple of Blanco riflemen were in the bell tower shooting at the helicopter.

  The passenger side door of the cockpit was open and Jack Bauer hung by a safety harness half out of the cockpit, wielding an M–16. Tony Almeida crouched behind him and to the side, working an M–4 carbine.

  Jack snapped a succession of three-shot bursts through the open arches into the bell tower, spraying the riflemen with gunfire. They spun and whirled under the fusillade.

  One dropped to the floor, inert. Another flopped sideways out of an open arch, falling off the tower to come crashing down on the orange ceramic-tiled scaled roof. He broke some tiles and sent them skittering down the side of the slanted roof. He rolled, following the same trajectory. He fell off the edge of the roof and dropped three stories to land flat on the ground-level patio.

&nb
sp; “Take out that satellite dish,” Jack shouted. He and Tony unloaded on the transceiver, sieving it. Here was where he could have used a grenade launcher, Jack thought.

  Bullets raked the flat roof and sides of the bell tower, stitching them. Jack poured more slugs at the base where a bundle of black cables fed upward into a box at the hub of the rear of the dish. His clip emptied. He ejected and slapped in a new clip, locked and loaded, and resumed firing.

  Tony Almeida was a sharpshooter. He squeezed off tight bursts into the base of the dish where neat little framework steel feet helped anchor the dish into place. The dish wobbled shakily.

  A prolonged burst from Jack’s weapons severed the bundle of cables loose from where they fed into the hub box. Tony shot off the foot he’d been working on. The dish swayed, off-balance. It leaned backward, teetering precariously for an instant.

  Jack and Tony sprayed some more slugs into the dish, ventilating it, shoving it backward by main force.

  That did it. The dish leaned farther backward and tipped over, falling downward. It broke free from its remaining stanchions and pitched off the side of the bell tower, plummeting to the ground.

  In Moosejaw, North Dakota, Silo 14, the phantom force from outside that had taken control of the control panel suddenly loosed its iron grip of control and ceased to exist.

  As soon as they realized that the big board was once again under their control, the two missile techs went to work disarming the bomb.

  The red lights on the board turned green, alarms fell silent. The danger was ended.

  The FBI Tac Squad commandeered a fire truck and charged the Mission Hill main gate, using it as a battering ram. The wrought-iron grille gates flew apart with little resistance. The front of the fire truck plowed into the delivery truck parked on the other side of the gate, hitting it broadside. The fire truck’s progress slowed.