The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  “Then we have those ten NASDAQ floors at the Liberty Plaza, which shouldn’t take long. Should be back on the road by one a.m.”

  Scraggly mustache adjusted his earplugs, pulled his cap over his eyes, and did his best to fall asleep.

  Yarmulke continued to watch the Senior Quantum device. He wanted to be sure there were no glitches. He also wanted to beat the Chicago team, sent to destroy the Chicago Board of Trade. Mullah had offered an attractive incentive to finish first: the winning team would spend a luxurious month at the Ranch, relaxing in the mountains while the world economy melted down.

  100

  Near Washington, DC. Monday, 9:33 p.m. ET.

  Dan Gable triple-checked his data, but it came back the same way every time.

  Holy shit. Unbelievable. It couldn’t be right.

  The second telephone number, involved in the earlier flurry of calls incited by Gable’s call for a Hostage Rescue Team response, resolved to a location inside the office of the Vice President of the United States.

  Not just the building in which the vice president’s staff was temporarily housed, but the office of the Vice President.

  As in, the man himself.

  It was an earth-shattering development. If the VP wasn’t involved personally with the Intermediary, he certainly knew who was.

  The only other alternative was that someone had broken into the vice president’s office and made a phone call while trespassing in one of the most secure offices on the planet. Not very freaking likely.

  Dan sat in stunned silence. He checked his data one last time, hoping it would show him something different.

  When it didn’t, he took a deep breath and dialed Sam for what felt like the thousandth time in three very long days.

  He heard the now-familiar whine of Sam’s Porsche engine when she picked up. “Get ready for a game-changer,” he said.

  Dan told her the news.

  Sam knew that the earth had shifted beneath her. The Vice President of the United States was somehow involved with the Intermediary—the same Intermediary who was ultimately behind Brock’s kidnapping and torture.

  She knew she faced perhaps the most important decision of her life, probably with permanent consequences.

  She didn’t hesitate for a second. “He can go fuck himself. I’m getting Brock back.”

  Dan was silent for a long moment on the other end of the call. Then took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “OK, Sam,” he finally said. “I’m with you. Mostly out of morbid curiosity, but I’m with you.”

  She smiled. “I thought you’d want to hang around for the fireworks. While I’ve got you, why don’t you pass me a location update.”

  Dan did. Then he wished her luck. They both knew she would need it.

  Sam drove on, horn blaring and portable police light flashing atop her Porsche as she blazed around traffic.

  She pulled her Kimber .45-caliber pistol from its holster beneath her left shoulder, pulled back the slide to chamber a round, and set the safety.

  She pulled her hair into a ball on the top of her head and tucked it under a dark ball cap, which she tugged low on her forehead.

  Her hands shook with adrenaline, and she felt a storm of butterflies raging in her stomach.

  Ten minutes.

  “Ten minutes out,” the assassin heard Hawk Nose say over the radio.

  It’s about time. The man with wolf’s eyes turned on his rifle’s holographic sight, and double-checked the chambered round in his silenced pistol as well, just in case.

  Ten minutes. Two bodies. That was it. He would be done after that. He was anxious to end this job and disappear for a very long time.

  It had been one hell of a long week.

  He trained his rifle’s sights on the only paved ingress route to the warehouse. He would have a solid twenty seconds to line up his shot as the redhead drove toward the parking lot entry.

  Child’s play.

  101

  Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, VA. Monday, 9:33 p.m. ET.

  Art Levitow and his team of four technicians heard a knock on the door leading out of the wind tunnel building and into the Virginia night.

  Levitow’s heart thudded in his chest. He wasn’t expecting any more help completing final assembly of the Senior Quantum anti-satellite device. A visitor of any kind could only spell trouble.

  He drew a deep breath. “Keep working,” he told his crew. “Act like you belong here. We’ve got to get that almanac data working. We’ll never find the satellites otherwise.”

  Levitow paused to gather himself, then strode across the filthy floor to the door. He opened it swiftly, finding a young man in an Air Force Security uniform with a sidearm and a Taser strapped to his belt.

  Sonuvabitch.

  “Evening, sir,” the young policeman said. “Everything OK here?”

  Levitow felt his heart pounding. Adrenaline slammed through his veins, and his mind scrambled for something to say.

  One mistake away from a life sentence for espionage.

  “Er . . . yeah. Everything’s fine here,” he said. “Why? Is something the matter? We put those cones out like you guys wanted.” When in doubt, bluff and bluster.

  The young cop eyeballed him, squinting slightly, a look of suspicion crossing his face. “Isn’t it a bit late to still be on the job? It’s almost ten.”

  Levitow felt perspiration drip down his back. “Shit, is it ten already?” He turned his head inside and yelled, “Boys, hurry up! It’s almost ten! Our contract is about to expire!”

  He turned back to the young policeman and shook his head. “I told my foreman that this was the last goddamn time I take it in the shorts. It ain’t my problem the boss can’t figure out how to schedule properly!” Levitow felt himself getting into the role. “He does this all the time. Signs up for contracts he knows we can’t finish on time, then expects us to bust our butts to make it work. Screw that guy. Him and his fancy BMW! Let him come out here and bust his knuckles turning wrenches all night.”

  The policeman stared at Levitow, not sure what to say. Levitow pressed his advantage: “I’m sorry, did you ask me something?”

  The Security Forces sergeant smiled and shook his head. “No, thanks, and I’m sorry to slow you down. Hope you get your work done. Have a safe night.”

  Levitow thanked him and shut the door. He leaned against the wall, knees and hands suddenly shaking. He felt slightly nauseous.

  “Thanks for playing along,” he said to the crew of four tired technicians, who were still working busily on the ASAT device. “Let’s get this damn thing done, shall we? I don’t know if my nerves can handle another close call like that one.”

  102

  Somewhere near Washington, DC. Monday, 9:42 p.m. ET.

  Erwin Graves, the Intermediary, looked up from his report, glaring at his driver from his position in the back seat. “Why are you slowing down?”

  His driver motioned toward the back window.

  Graves turned his head, his eyes immediately assaulted by flashing police lights. “I don’t have time for this. Were you speeding again?”

  “No, sir. I had the cruise control on.” The driver pulled over.

  Seconds later, the driver rolled down the window of the Bentley. What he saw made his blood turn to ice.

  He slammed against the seatbelt as he jumped with alarm. He was looking through the open window and down the barrel of a gun, inches away from his face and pointed at his left eye.

  “Unlock the doors,” a husky voice commanded from the darkness.

  After a long moment of silence and indecision, the driver made a move to put the car in gear.

  It was a mistake. Pain instantly shot through his skull.

  The door flew open. Strong hands gripped him by the lapel and hauled him from the seat. He landed with a thud on the gravel beside the road.

  Already a giant welt had begun forming on the driver’s forehead, roughly the same dimensions as the butt of the pistol he had been
staring at just seconds before.

  The carjacker jumped into the front seat, put the car in gear, and stood on the accelerator.

  The Intermediary fumed in the back seat, as frightened as he was indignant.

  He had just witnessed his driver being pistol-whipped and thrown from Bentley, and he was now a hostage in his own car, racing north toward the city. “You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life,” he growled to the carjacker. “You’ll beg to be arrested before I’m done with you.”

  Without a word, the carjacker twisted in the driver’s seat, aimed the pistol at the Intermediary’s right knee, and pulled the trigger.

  A deafening roar filled the car’s posh interior, and Erwin Graves howled in pain, clasping his shattered leg and writhing in agony.

  Hawk Nose refreshed the cell-phone locating service’s web page, then spoke into the radio. “Three minutes.”

  The assassin’s succinct reply came a second later: “Copy.”

  Hawk Nose wound his way down the stairs in the corner of the warehouse to the dank cell containing his prisoner. He unbolted the latch on the heavy door and swung it open, revealing the feeble glow of the single light bulb suspended from the low ceiling. His nose curled at the stench of piss, feces, and the rotting flesh of an infected wound.

  Feverish and delirious, Brock James stirred in the semi-darkness. He stayed curled in the fetal position, shivering despite the oppressive, muggy warmth.

  “On your feet. Be ready to move,” Hawk Nose said. Without waiting for Brock to comply, the man slammed the door, locked the bolt, and padded back up the stairs.

  Back at his computer, Hawk Nose zoomed in on the map on his computer screen, and switched it from “street map” to “aerial view.” The warehouse appeared, as did the adjacent utility shed.

  The red dot representing Sam Jameson’s position moved steadily toward them, roughly two blocks away on the paved road.

  “Quarter mile,” he breathed into the radio, as if speaking quietly would aid his counterpart in remaining undetected.

  “I see no headlights,” the assassin replied.

  Strange. The girl’s car should be visible by now. Hawk Nose refreshed the display, hoping for a more accurate position reading.

  When the spinning circle on his web browser disappeared, the red dot remained in the same spot on the map, still moving slowly but steadily toward the warehouse.

  After a few seconds, the dot had moved to within a block of their position. “Turning left onto the access road now.”

  The radio crackled. “Nothing. No headlights, no sounds, no car, no people.” The assassin’s voice contained equal parts annoyance and confusion.

  “She should be 200 meters in front of you, driving right toward you,” Hawk Nose said, his face inches from the computer screen.

  “I’m telling you, there’s nobody here,” the assassin said. .”

  103

  Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, VA. Monday, 9:59 p.m. ET.

  “The almanac data unit’s good to go now,” said the technician to Art Levitow’s left. “It just passed its self-test.” The man’s voice echoed in the yawning mouth of the dilapidated wind tunnel.

  Levitow breathed a sigh of relief. We’ve done it.

  It was nothing short of a miracle that they’d only had one serious snag during the final assembly of the anti-satellite weapon, and it was an even bigger miracle that it was a problem they were able to solve in just a couple of hours.

  “OK, guys. Great work. Let’s roll this kludge out the door and flip the switch.” Levitow patted the machine affectionately. It truly was a marvel of technology and engineering.

  It contained tracking technology from Langston Marlin’s Fort Worth facility, which stabilized the tracking solution enough to train a beam of energy on a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

  Levitow’s Senior Quantum team, laboring in secrecy in the Nevada desert, had invented the energy beam technology that was far more efficient than pure laser energy, making it ideal for taking out satellites in orbit. Amazingly, the brains of the technology fit inside a device no larger than a shoebox.

  The HDET transmitter from Protégé’s GE Government Services Division delivered a highly concentrated pencil beam of energy, making it one of the few transmitters in the world with sufficient power and focus to work as an anti-satellite weapon.

  The assembled device represented technology that had required hundreds of thousands of man-years to develop and produce, yet Art’s hand-picked team of technicians had mated the disparate components in a matter of hours.

  Levitow looked at his watch. It was time. He opened the large garage door, and his team carefully wheeled the device out into the humid Chesapeake darkness.

  104

  Somewhere on the East Coast. Monday, 10:02 p.m. ET.

  “Where the hell is the car?” The wolf-eyed assassin’s anger came through crystal clear despite the radio’s static.

  Hawk Nose stared incredulously at his computer monitor, which had been tracking Sam Jameson’s cell phone signal for the past half hour.

  The red dot sat dead still, pulsating in the parking lot of the warehouse. “She’s right in front of you! Right there! Been stopped for almost a minute!”

  “Really? Come have a look.” The assassin continued to train his sniper rifle down the paved approach to the warehouse parking lot, but there was no sign of movement.

  Come on, Sam. It’s all up to you now. Dan Gable looked at his computer screen.

  Sam had disassembled her government cell phone over half an hour ago. It wasn’t reporting to the cell network, but Gable had artificially manipulated the phone’s position readout in the system by using a government trapdoor built in to the carrier’s network.

  Dan had used the trapdoor to make it appear that Sam was driving to the Severna Park address that Brock’s captors had sent earlier.

  In fact, Sam had been doing something quite different.

  Erwin Graves’s hands clutched his ruined knee, his body writhing in agony.

  In between waves of nauseating pain, he stopped thrashing and howling long enough to look up at the person who had just shot him.

  He saw a long lock of red hair spilling out from beneath a black ball cap.

  A vague flicker of recognition crossed his mind, then resolved completely as the carjacker turned to face him. It was a familiar face, one he’d studied in photos several times over the past week.

  Special Agent Sam Jameson.

  “Erwin Graves,” Sam said from the driver’s seat of the Intermediary’s Bentley. “I’m extremely pleased to meet you.”

  105

  Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, VA. Monday, 10:09 p.m. ET.

  “Targeting?” Art Levitow’s deep voice reverberated inside the moving van. Communications cords snaked through the vehicle and out to the device, located in the parking lot several meters away.

  “Ready, Art. Geostat One, acquired and locked,” came the first technician’s reply.

  “Thanks. Waveform?”

  “Senior Quantum’s in the green.”

  “Great. Energetics?” Levitow continued his verbal poll.

  “HDET’s also in the green.”

  “OK. Guess it’s time.”

  Levitow took a deep breath. Then he pushed a button on the controller, which brought his device to life.

  It destroyed a three-hundred million dollar communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

  And then another. And one more.

  In the span of five minutes, Art Levitow and his team had cut off the US banking industry’s satellite connections with the outside world.

  There were still two land-based cable relay stations—one in Maine and the other in Southern California—but they would be handled by two more groups of Mullah’s men wielding scaled-down versions of the Senior Quantum device.

  As dawn broke, the world’s largest financial power would be crippled and thoroughly isolated from the rest of the world.
r />   “Let’s load up and haul ass before the cops come back,” he said.

  106

  South of Washington, DC. Monday, 10:11 p.m. ET.

  “Here’s my idea, Erwin. Tell me what you think.” Sam looked intermittently between the dark road ahead of her and the writhing Intermediary in the backseat of the Bentley.

  Graves looked up at, hatred in his eyes.

  “Here goes,” Sam said. “My idea is this: You will deliver Brock James to me unharmed, and I will stop shooting you.”

  The Intermediary grimaced. “You’ll never find him, you bitch.”

  Sam shook her head. “Erwin, that’s no way to talk to a lady,” she said. “But I think I won’t have to find him. I think you’ll be kind enough to do that for me.”

  She aimed the big handgun at the Intermediary’s left wrist and pulled the trigger.

  The old man let out an animal shriek of pain and anger. The hollow-point .45 slug destroyed most of the bones in his wrist, leaving his hand hanging by skin and sinew. A steady stream of blood soaked the seat.

  “You might consider using your belt as a tourniquet, Mr. Intermediary. It wouldn’t be polite of you to bleed out while we’re negotiating.”

  Sam wove in and out of traffic in the powerful Bentley.

  She gave the old man a moment to gather himself and stem the bleeding from his wrist as she sped north into the city.

  The old man rocked back and forth, his face a mask of pain and suffering. He struggled to remove his belt and wrap it around his wrecked wrist to slow the bleeding. There was significant danger that the old man would lapse into shock, so she didn’t wait long.

  She pointed the pistol at his remaining knee then asked, “Should we keep having fun together, or are you ready to cooperate with me?”

  He saw Sam’s pistol pointed at him again, and nodded his head up and down.