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

by Lars Emmerich

  Hawk Nose’s VOIP phone rang. Oh shit. Very few people had that telephone number. In fact, to his knowledge, only one person had that number.

  Hawk Nose answered quickly. “Yes, sir?”

  His eyes widened as he listened. He had never heard his boss’s voice sound so strained. The Intermediary usually sounded flat, emotionless, and even-keeled. This time, however, the old man sounded anything but together. His voice wavered, and he sounded like he was in pain.

  But it was definitely the Intermediary. Hawk Nose listened closely as the old man issued terse instructions.

  The instructions were very puzzling. Hawk Nose was confused. He asked for clarification.

  The Intermediary repeated his instructions, louder and with less patience. Then the old man hung up.

  Hawk Nose shook his head. This gets stranger by the minute.

  He picked up the radio and pressed the talk button. “Boss called. Change in plans,” he said. “Come inside.”

  “See, Erwin. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Sam said from the driver’s seat. Then she spoke into her own phone: “Dan, did you get all of that?”

  “Every word,” he told her. “I got a solid location, and it matches the address they gave us before.”

  Sam jerked the big Bentley over onto the left shoulder of the highway to dodge a minivan puttering along in the left lane. Graves moaned in the backseat.

  “Dan, call Alfonse Archer, and let’s go ahead with the rest of the plan.”

  “Two steps ahead of you, boss,” Dan said. “Big-A’s holding on the other line. Talk soon.” Dan hung up.

  Sam turned around and smiled at Graves. “You did great, Mr. Intermediary. But don’t die of shock just yet. You have another call to make, this time to your stooge inside DHS. We’re going to get the hostage rescue team back on track.”

  Erwin Graves began to shake his head back and forth, but stopped as soon as Sam raised the pistol back into his view.

  Brock James was lying in the fetal position on the filthy mattress, delirious with fever, when the door to his dank concrete cell flew open.

  It seemed as if the large man was interested in having Brock stand up, but Brock was having none of it. “Nowaybuddy. Feellikeshit,” he stammered, slurring his sentences into single words.

  Brock heard the big man curse, then felt himself being lifted up off of the mattress and carried up the stairs leading away from his dungeon. The motion jostled his wound. He moaned with each of the giant’s steps.

  Brock felt the large man stop walking. “One more photo, movie star,” the man said. “Boss’s orders.” Brock squinted as a camera’s flash temporarily blinded him.

  “Got it,” said Hawk Nose.

  “You’d better be right about this,” the large man said menacingly. “They’re not paying me enough to take a bullet.”

  “Me neither. But I had him repeat the instructions to be sure. The boss said to send proof the guy’s alive. And you already know the rest. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s definitely what he told me.”

  The assassin shook his head, thinking. “I guess we don’t have much choice but to play along.”

  The assassin started moving again, with Brock’s 200-pound frame still suspended in his arms as if it were nothing more than a sack of potatoes.

  Before long, Brock felt the big guy kick a door open. Several steps later, Brock felt the moist night air on his face. “Crazybastard . . . putmedown.”

  A dozen steps further, Brock got his wish. The assassin set him down unceremoniously on the pavement, then walked away out of sight.

  Brock lay on his back on the asphalt, staring up at the stars in the night sky. “Craziness,” he repeated over and over in a dreamy voice.

  After a few seconds, a distant noise distracted Brock from his feverish musing.

  The noise grew in intensity until he could feel the familiar whop-whop-whop in his chest.

  Sam took the phone from Erwin Graves’s good hand and looked at the picture that had just appeared on its screen. Brock, baby, I’m almost there. It’s almost over!

  Her eyes filled as she saw his face, eyes sunken, framed by matted hair. What have they done to you?

  She clenched her teeth, drew a deep breath, and punched the accelerator once again. She was traveling at nearly a hundred miles an hour, now with the benefit of a police escort to clear traffic out of the way, but the cop leading the entourage wasn’t going fast enough for her taste.

  She glared at Erwin Graves. “You have my permission to bleed to death now, Mr. Intermediary. I think your work is quite done.”

  Hawk Nose fell first.

  He felt a sharp sting in his shoulder, then another one in his chest. He felt a strange urge to laugh, but he didn’t stay awake long enough for the smile to cross his lips. He crumpled into a heap next to Brock.

  Traveling at over six hundred feet per second, the tranquilizer darts closed the seventy yards between the Hostage Rescue Team helicopter’s open bay door and Hawk Nose’s position in the parking lot in an instant.

  The wild-eyed assassin saw the smaller man fall, and his well-honed survival instinct kicked in. He moved with surprising speed, running at a dead sprint, heading toward the shelter of the small storage shed.

  Driven by pure adrenaline, he didn’t feel the darts enter his buttocks, back, and shoulder. The tranquilizer acted with lightning speed, aided by the assassin’s rapid heart rate.

  He was unconscious within two seconds, but the momentum of his sprint kept him barreling forward.

  He fell head first and full-speed into a cement parking block.

  His skull and neck fractured at the same time. The assassin with wolf’s eyes was dead before his large body came to rest on the pavement.

  Seconds later, still lying on his back in the center of the parking lot, Brock James felt something sting his arm. He vaguely registered the noise of the helicopter growing louder and closer as he drifted off to sleep.

  107

  Somewhere over Ohio. Tuesday, 3:14 a.m. ET.

  The pilot leveled Archive’s private Gulfstream jet at their cruising altitude of 48,000 feet above sea level. Three hours of flying time lay ahead of them.

  Protégé and his flight attendant consort, Allison, reclined their seats and curled up together beneath a blanket.

  Archive sat slouched in an armchair further forward in the fuselage, fingers absently stroking his trademark goatee, mind whirring.

  Each of them knew when the plane landed in Aspen, they would disembark into a completely changed reality. They hoped the Lost Man Lake Ranch was remote enough to survive the social upheaval that would undoubtedly result from the evening’s events, and that the ranch was sufficiently provisioned to keep them from starving to death while they waited for things to settle down in the cities.

  It was liable to get messy, and that knowledge already weighed on Archive’s mind even as the news of his ultimate success reached his ears.

  Mullah’s report to Archive, delivered via encrypted shortwave radio just prior to liftoff from the Newport News airport, had been unambiguous. The field teams had succeeded in Chicago, New York, Maine, and California.

  And Art Levitow had done the impossible, successfully disabling a small fleet of communications satellites — from inside an Air Force base in Virginia, no less.

  The plan had been extraordinarily complicated — hopelessly so, some of Archive’s co-conspirators had feared — but it had somehow come together in the end. The best code-breaking algorithm on Earth had been successfully wrapped in an ingenious computer virus, which Archive’s team of spies had managed to set loose on several hundred million personal computers with the unwitting help of the server farm at the National Security Agency.

  Vaneesh’s decryption code had broken into the Federal Reserve’s computer system, and Trojan’s virus had utterly destroyed the banking records.

  There were big, official-looking buildings still standing in the heart of twelve American cities, but t
hey sure as hell weren’t functioning Fed banks any longer.

  And because every private bank in the country kept enough cash on hand for no more than a few hours of operation, the collapse of the banking industry, and hence of the US dollar, was already a foregone conclusion.

  It was going to be much more than a wakeup call to the oligarchs. It was going to be the real deal.

  The end of the road.

  And it was going to be permanent. Art Levitow’s anti-electronics weapon technology, stolen from one of the most secure government facilities on the planet and mated with a hunk of hardware liberated from the Langston Marlin manufacturing plant, had taken out the right satellites and internet relay stations to ensure that no overseas backups of the data could be used to restore things to normal.

  And smaller versions of Art’s weapon had also fried every computer in every important American stock and commodities exchange.

  Fiscal gridlock was the only possible outcome.

  The planet had tilted. The oligarchy’s jugular had been severed. It was all over, and nothing remained but death the bleeding.

  The Almighty Dollar was soon to be extinct.

  It had been one hell of a successful evening.

  Archive shook his head, marveling again at the size and complexity of the operation. Twelve hours earlier, he would have placed their odds at no higher than twenty percent. The operation involved so many disparate disciplines, so many people, and there was always the worry of a leak. But they had somehow pulled it off.

  He thought of the people who had risked everything to follow their conscience.

  True patriots. True citizens of the planet.

  Heroes.

  Archive felt a fatherly pride for their courage and tenacity.

  And he worried for their future. Depending on how things broke, every one of them could face a death sentence. He hoped they would all make it to their prearranged safe locations in time. Most of all, he hoped the field operatives had covered their tracks.

  Another prominent worry burdened the old man’s mind. Mullah, eminently capable though he was, had failed in an important responsibility. While the cleric and his men had learned the Facilitator’s identity, they had failed to find the elusive puppeteer.

  The newfound knowledge had merely confirmed what Archive had feared: the leader of the clandestine Consultancy, master of presidents, tycoons, and monarchs, was as untouchable as any human alive.

  And as long as the Facilitator lived, so did the Consultancy.

  There was much work still to be done, and grave danger remained.

  But the old mastermind didn’t have the energy to ponder the implications. The Consultancy was a problem for another day, he decided. For now, he would rest.

  He had earned it, after all.

  He and his small group of distinguished friends had just ended the American Empire.

  108

  Washington, DC. Tuesday, 11:24 a.m. ET.

  Brock James awoke slowly. He was in an unfamiliar room that smelled of antiseptics and pharmaceuticals. He was lying in a bed, and clean linens enveloped him.

  As his eyes began to focus, he saw a metal railing on the side of the bed. Must be in a hospital. He felt groggy, but right away he could tell that the reeking, angry wound in his leg was on the mend. It didn’t throb nearly as much as he last remembered, and he was happy to discover a clean bandage wrapped around his thigh. Best of all, he didn’t feel delirious.

  He noticed movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned his head to view the television screen mounted on the wall in the corner of the room. The sound was off, but Brock could see talking heads speaking with grave facial expressions.

  It took Brock’s eyes a moment to focus on the words streaming across the bottom of the screen: US dollar in free-fall after cyber attack halts US economy.

  Banking and financial networks crippled.

  NYSE, NASDAQ, CBOT, banks closed indefinitely.

  Foreign markets plummet.

  Looks like I missed one hell of a party, Brock thought.

  He heard a soft snore coming from beside him. He turned his head to find its source. A long lock of flaming red hair framed Sam’s face as she slept in the recliner next to Brock’s bed. God, she’s gorgeous.

  She stirred, opened her eyes, and met his gaze. A tired smile shined from her eyes and spread to the rest of her face. “Good morning,” she said.

  “Baby, you have no idea how good it is.” He reached for her hand.

  “Oh, but I do.” She crawled in bed beside him, wrapped herself around him, held his face in her hands, drank in his scent.

  “This was all your fault, wasn’t it?” Brock asked with a chuckle.

  Sam nodded as she stroked his face. “They were after me.”

  “Why?”

  “The senator,” Sam said. “And they remembered me from an earlier case. That conspiracy thing a few years ago.”

  Brock shook his head. “I hate your job.”

  “Horrible as it was, we were lucky. It could have been much worse. Big A told me they tortured and killed the cop in charge of that murder investigation.”

  “The same people who shot up that parking garage?”

  Sam nodded. “And murdered the priest. Same assholes, trying to solve the same problem.”

  “Must have been one hell of a problem.”

  Sam shook her head. “It’s always the same thing. Turf and secrets.”

  “But a priest and a senator?”

  “They were both spies,” Sam said. “They became loose ends somehow.”

  “Did they kill the senator?”

  Sam shook her head. “Somebody dropped him off at a hospital, drugged and dazed. He’s now in FBI custody awaiting espionage and corruption charges.”

  Brock shook his head. He chuckled. “What a weekend.”

  He sighed, smelled her hair, tightened his embrace. “How the hell did you end up in this line of work?”

  “Born lucky,” Sam said.

  “What am I doing tangled up with you?”

  Sam kissed him long and hard. “Making my days worth living.”

  Brock smiled, his body responding. “No pressure.”

  “None at all,” Sam said, wrapping her legs around him and pulling the bedcovers over them. “Now shut up and do what you do best.”

  Meltdown

  Part I

  1

  Seattle, Washington

  Nobody leaves this life unscathed. There are plenty of scars to go around. That’s what Domingo Mondragon’s grandmother told him on the day he went to prison. Federal penitentiary. Three years ago, courtesy of the FBI. As in Freaking Bastards International, or Federal Bureau of I-hope-you-rot-in-hell.

  Also, FBI as in Domingo Mondragon’s current employer.

  It’s complicated.

  Most people knew him as Sabot. Which is to say, most people didn’t know him at all. Sabot was his hacker handle. If he’d been a little less prideful and a little more prudent, he’d never have done time. But Sabot wanted the world to know what he’d done, because he was proud of it.

  He shut down a government. Just for a day, just for fun. It was a rat-bastard kind of government, one of those bullshit Middle Eastern places, long on oil and backwards religious dogma but tragically short on moral compunction and social responsibility.

  Sabot fancied himself as comeuppance personified. From his Queens apartment, working at his kitchen table within earshot of his four live-in siblings and that infernal rattling refrigerator, Sabot organized the cyber attack that crashed every server they owned.

  Practically, it meant very little. The servers were back up again in a day or so. There wasn’t much lingering damage, except for a few exhausted techs who’d worked overtime in the bowels of the server farm to restore service.

  But it sent a message. Screw The Man. Fight the power. Thinking about the attack still gave Sabot a charge.

  And he’d had a lot of time to think about it. A little over a year, af
ter the judge suspended most of his sentence to account for all of his cooperation.

  It was the cooperation that took the biggest toll. In exchange for years of his own life, Sabot turned rat. The conviction count stood at seventeen, with four more trials in various stages of completion.

  Twenty-one in all. It was a lot of friends to sell down the river. Enough to make Sabot look over his shoulder every once in a while. Most of those people were nerdy high school kids and twenty-something maladroits. But Sabot figured at least one or two had friends who knew how to fire a gun. So he kept his eyes open.

  The betrayals had been easy enough. “Just be yourself and do what you do,” Special Agent Adkins had told him as soon as he signed the plea bargain. “Just pretend we never met. And if you warn anybody of what you’re doing, the deal’s off. Not to be dramatic, but without a deal, you’ll probably die in prison. Just so you know where we’re coming from.”

  Compelling.

  Sabot behaved.

  While the FBI action hadn’t exactly devastated the ranks of the loosely-affiliated quasi-network of hackers known as Anonymous, the arrests had certainly sent a message. One might have the power to shut down an entire country’s computer network while watching old Tom and Jerry reruns, but karma might just shove itself right up your ass.

  Sabot missed New York, missed the intensity of a rebel’s life, missed the seedy low-rent neighborhood that was home, and missed the camaraderie of being a digital outlaw.

  More than that, he hated being owned. And he especially hated being owned by the organization he used to publicly taunt. That was tough on his pride.

  But the pay was pretty freaking good, especially for a man from the projects. Relative affluence had softened Sabot a bit. The cash buffed a few rough edges off of his personality. He realized there was a reason the middle class rarely revolted. Life just wasn’t that bad.