“They’re here!” shouted a man at the church doors, bellowing at the top of his lungs. “I see one!”
She threw herself down as a gunshot split the wooden wall. Then she sprinted toward the darkened doorway, more bullets tracing her path. She and Jessie broke for the cellar stairs. They pounded down the steps, picked their way across the clutter, and emerged through the storm doors on the opposite side.
A villager ran up, screaming, swinging a machete. Jessie’s fist was a blur. She punched him in the throat and as he fell back, choking, she ripped the blade from his hand. She flipped it in her hand and reversed her grip; then she drove it like a spear into his stomach. Another villager rounded the back of the church and charged with his pitchfork held high. Harmony’s pistol cleared its holster as she dropped under the thrusting tines. She pulled the trigger twice and both rounds punched through the lunatic’s chin, blasting out the top of his skull.
The gunshots were as good as a church bell, drawing the faithful to the killing grounds. No time to catch their breaths. Harmony and Jessie ran, angling for the shoreline, feet pounding as they sprinted between dots of dangerous lamplight along a lonely, darkened street. Even the moon was their enemy now; they needed absolute darkness to survive.
They almost found it through the open barn doors of the old boathouse. The moon still chased them, silver light streaming down through the rupture in the sagging roof, but the straw-littered floor muffled their footsteps. Shouts split the night air, the mob on the hunt, and they heard a pair of distant gunshots as the villagers fired at phantoms.
Jessie grabbed Harmony’s hand and yanked her between a pair of tarp-shrouded boats. Then down to the ground, as her heightened senses picked up a threat. They squirmed under one of the propped-up boats, Harmony’s face dangerously close to its sleeping propeller, and waited.
Five men, their hands bristling with shotguns and knives, moved in a tight pack down the center aisle of the boathouse. A halogen lantern cast a slow and dazzling white beam across the rusting vessels.
“Jeb says he saw ’em over on Clamoth Street,” one insisted.
“Jeb’s half-blind,” the man with the lantern growled. “I saw ’em run this way, swear I did.”
Harmony held her breath, lying on her belly with her gun braced in her hands.
They could wait until they passed and ambush them from behind, but the noise would bring a hundred more hunters down on their heads. Jessie read her mind. Next to Harmony in the dark, she held up one hand. Wait.
The lantern beam crawled in their direction.
“We’re wasting our time—”
The lantern jerked in the leader’s irritated hand. Dipping, for one stomach-clenching moment, a few feet from Harmony’s and Jessie’s faces.
“You wanna kiss Jeb’s ass so bad, go on then, go do it in person. We’ll see who comes back empty-handed.”
“Both of you, knock it off,” said a third villager. “Remember why we’re here.”
The beam moved on. The pack walked past them, still hunting.
“I know they came through here,” the man with the lantern said.
“Well, they’re gone now. Let’s circle back around.”
Harmony and Jessie waited, frozen, until the last of the footsteps faded. Then they squirmed out from under the boat, got back on their feet, and left by the other doorway.
The sea was angry tonight. The rocks along the shore were flecked with white-spittle foam, waves slapping down like open hands as the water roared. Harmony’s foot slipped on a wet clump of stone and she barely caught herself. Jessie scrambled along at her side, making it look effortless. The lighthouse up ahead was hot. Its beam carved a burning arc across the night sky, swinging its eye from the ocean to the village and back again in an endless revolution.
The keeper’s boat was right where they’d left it. Behind them, not far off, more flashlights and lantern beams glowed and shook, hounding their trail. All they had to do was sail off, but Harmony’s footsteps faltered. She thought about Dominguez and his lethal cargo.
Jessie looked from her to the lighthouse door. No words necessary.
No time for the sound suppressors. A search party was coming this way, and in less than two minutes an angry mob would be right on top of them. They took up positions on the low stone stoop. Jessie rapped on the door. Then again.
“All right, all right,” groused a man’s raspy voice on the other side. “I’m comi—”
The second he turned the knob, Jessie hit the door with a full-force kick. The door slammed back and took him with it, knocking him to the floor. She was first in, breaking right, with Harmony weaving left on her heels. Cranston’s maid was already gone. Two of the locals were by the foot of the circular stairs, poking through Dominguez’s backpack, while another was peering up through his rifle’s sight like it was a telescope.
Jessie’s heel slammed down on the fallen doorman’s skull as she and Harmony opened fire. One of the men by the pack jerked backward, a stream of bullets punching into his chest. The other dropped like a rock as a precision shot tore his throat out. The rifleman was struggling to take aim with Dominguez’s gun, fumbling for the safety. Harmony had already squared her sights. One bullet snapped his head back and a second sent shrapnel tearing through his heart. She raced across the room and scooped up the backpack while Jessie delivered a kill shot to the man under her foot.
They’d kicked the hornet’s nest. The lights were stampeding this way, furious shouts echoing over the roar of the waves, calling the entire village to finish the hunt. Harmony and Jessie ran to the dock. Jessie untied the keeper’s boat while Harmony reached under the back seat. A moment of terror hit her when her fingers touched nothing but wet vinyl. Then she found the strip of tape and ripped the spare key loose. Her hands worked their mechanical mantra—propeller down, throttle neutral, turn key—and pressed the ignition.
The engine revved to life and the boat skimmed on a rough wave, rising up and dropping down hard. Harmony slammed the propeller left, spinning them around. Gunshots whistled through the air. Bullets punched the foam all around them, another crackling as it dug a rent in the aluminum hull.
Then they were flying, down the coast and out to sea, the murderous village fading into the distance until not even the beam of the lighthouse could chase them down.
* * *
It was dawn when they made it back to the airstrip. Harmony and Jessie walked up the cargo ramp side by side, bone-tired and barely standing, but momentum carried them on. Jessie had called ahead, waking April up at the motel, and she’d gathered the team.
“Cranston’s getting his doomsday weapon prepped and ready,” Jessie said, “and after last night, he knows the clock is ticking.”
Harmony took a bleary-eyed glance at her phone, checking the time.
“We mobilize at dusk,” Harmony said. “In one night, we have to clear the board. Cranston, his bioweapon, his cult, and the monsters they’ve been keeping offshore. All of it. Which means we have…just around fourteen hours to make a plan, get the resources we need, and prepare to execute.”
Jessie put her hand on Harmony’s shoulder.
“Somebody put on a pot of coffee. It’s going to be one hell of a long day.”
35.
The belly of the plane became a tempest as everyone broke off in their own directions, tasked and focused with no time to lose. Harmony stood with April at one of the terminals, reading the fruits of her research on a screen.
“As for your wayward minister,” April was saying, “I checked the records. Liam Ess was sent to Graykettle First Presbyterian in 1983. No missing-persons report was filed.”
“He’s not missing?”
“He wasn’t reported missing. As far as anyone knows, he’s doing just fine in his happy village home.”
“But,” Harmony said.
April clicked her mouse and highlighted a chunk of a fuzzy bank statement.
“But he hasn’t filed income taxes since 198
5. Or made a cash deposit that I can find, or paid a utility bill, or anything else to prove he didn’t vanish off the face of the earth.”
“A minister doesn’t disappear from the only church in a small town without anybody noticing.”
“Nor does the mayor, or the entire city council,” April said. “And yet that’s exactly what they did, right around the same time.”
Harmony clasped her hands behind her back and stared up at the screen. Aselia brushed past her, phone to her ear, her other hand clenched into an irritated fist.
“—so shake off the hangover, kick her ass out of bed, and get yours over here, Wexler. I’m a cash customer. Show some respect. Got a pen? Okay, first, I need a boat. Yes, I said a boat—”
“The ‘public works director’ told us the mayor was on vacation,” Harmony said to April. “It was a coup. A very quiet coup.”
“Cranston’s people?”
Harmony kept her focus on the screens. The names, the positions, the dates, all coming together to draw a bigger picture.
“How do you keep a remote village a secret from the rest of the world? You can’t, not perfectly—the number of ‘missing persons’ in the area is proof of that—but it helps if you can stop time. Cranston’s cult took over the place. They killed outsiders, like the minister, and anyone who might want to change and modernize things, like the mayor.”
“Putting the village in stasis,” April said. “No residents but the cult itself, and I expect if anyone did try to move in from out of town, they’d land on the dinner menu within a week. What about the claims Cranston made at the church? This business about their ancestors and this ‘Old Man Below’?”
Harmony tapped the knot of her necktie. She felt the cool hard metal of the Greek coin under her collar.
“You know my family coin? It gets weird in the presence of things from other worlds. The mermaid set it off. Cranston and his people? Nothing. I think they’re as human as you and me, and Cranston’s the only one who even knows any magic.”
“But they believe it,” April said.
“Right. Just a cult, but Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple was just a cult. Aum Shinrikyo was just a cult, and they unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo Metro. You don’t need magic for mass casualties; you just need highly motivated believers who aren’t afraid to die. And if you can convince them that they’ve been persecuted, that they’re good and the world is evil, so much the better.”
A few feet to their left, Jessie leaned in with both hands pressed flat to the console, craning her neck to study a travel map and trace a blue line from Maryland to Maine. She turned a knob on her headset, adjusting the volume.
“No, looks like you’ve got a twelve-hour drive from Bethesda, so round up your team, load the SUVs, and run a convoy. That’s twelve hours in a civilian ride, so hit the sirens and lights and you can shave at least a couple off. Beach Cell is flying in from Texas; they were on a recon job before we pulled them off mission. They’re not carrying weapons, so I need you to crack the storage vault and bring gear for both teams. Body armor, too. Everybody is wearing a vest, no arguments.”
Harmony took a step back. Her fingertip tapped her pursed lips.
“Here’s our biggest unknown. Somewhere in Graykettle, Cranston is running a chemical-weapons refinery. Taking him down isn’t enough: we need to erase his formula and destroy every last trace of Clean Slate. If just one of his followers escapes the village with a supply of that gas and a working delivery system, the casualties could be…” Harmony shook her head. “We can’t let that happen.”
“On it, boss.” Kevin hustled over, fingers dancing on a tablet as he flicked satellite maps left and right, quarantining them to the corners of the screen. “I’m tearing the place apart, digitally speaking. Obviously, on-the-ground data is hard to come by, so I’m cross-referencing aerial imagery, shipping records, anything I can find with Graykettle’s name on it. If I scrape together enough bits and pieces of stray data, with any luck it’ll paint a picture for us.”
“Luck won’t cut it. Not today. Think big. He talked about all the attacks happening on a ‘day of reckoning.’ That means Cranston needs a lab large enough to process enough Clean Slate for a hundred budding terrorists.”
“What about underground?” he asked. “Didn’t bootleggers use those islets during Prohibition? Maybe they’ve got tunnels in town, too.”
April swiveled her chair around. “Kevin, continue sifting through the modern records. I’ll run background on the village’s past lives, and we’ll see if anything overlaps.”
Jessie was at Harmony’s elbow, carrying two mugs of steaming black coffee. She pressed one into Harmony’s hand.
“Here. Fuel up.”
“Cheers,” Harmony said.
They clinked mugs. The coffee tasted burnt, bitter and hard at the edges, kicking her brain to keep it awake.
“I went through Dominguez’s pack,” Jessie told her. “Those butter sticks? Semtex. Asshole brought enough with him to level the entire village.”
“Which is probably exactly what Bobby ordered him to do,” Harmony said. “Crazy recognizes crazy. He didn’t want Cranston or his cult coming after him down the line.”
“It’s not a bad plan. We could use those explosives ourselves. There’s just one hitch.”
Jessie held up a tiny gadget, about as big around as her thumbnail. It had two short copper plugs on one side and a nest of tangled circuitry and the miniature dome of a turned-off light on the other.
“He didn’t bring conventional det cord. Near as I can tell, these are remote detonators, and I have no idea how they’re triggered.”
Kevin held out his hand as he passed by. “May I?”
She dropped it into his palm. April pulled her headphones on, responding to a crackle of static from her screen. She paused, listening, then looked over her shoulder. “Harmony? Dr. Joy is reporting in from the safe house.”
“Patch her in,” Harmony said.
One of the wall screens flickered to life. A tripod-mounted camera aimed its lens at the heart of a makeshift morgue, where the dead mermaid lay upon a stainless-steel gurney. Neptune wore a plastic visor, spattered with droplets of gore, and her scrubs and long latex gloves were soaked with dark stains. She gave a cheery wave to the camera.
“Harmony, hey. So, I dug in like you wanted—I mean literally—and I don’t have a lot to share yet, and I don’t know if it’s useful at all—”
“Anything you can tell us,” Harmony said. “We appreciate it.”
“Well, okay. Turns out, insofar as I can determine, mermaids are mammals.”
“What does that tell us?” Harmony asked.
“They look like the classical legends of mermaids—at least until they shed their facial camouflage—so I thought at first that they might reproduce by parthenogenesis. In other words, asexually.”
“A race of nothing but mermaids.”
“Exactly,” Neptune said. “But I was wrong. There’s an ovarian system present, a womb…mermaids give live birth. And if they can be impregnated, well…”
“Mermans,” Jessie said. “Mermen?”
“Can we infer anything about the males?” Harmony asked. She decided not to mention the colony they’d found just off the coast.
“This is where we go into pure speculation. It could be that the species is like humankind, tending toward a one-to-one breeding ratio. But these structures I’m studying—” Neptune frowned at the open corpse, moving organs aside with a long-tipped steel probe. “I’m having flashbacks to my zoology classes.”
“What are you seeing?”
Neptune looked up to the camera. “Cows. It reminds me of a cow. Now, when it comes to cattle, a single bull can impregnate up to fifty cows in a single season of estrus. Accordingly, you see fewer bull births, a much smaller ratio in an average herd.”
It was good data. And that was all it was. Nothing they could use for the challenge at hand, nothing to help them survive tonight. All the same,
she wanted to encourage Neptune as much as she could.
“This is really helpful,” Harmony told her. “Please, keep going, find out anything you can.”
“Just…one thing?” Neptune added. “Probably goes without saying, but if that analogy is right, and if it holds, well…bulls are a lot stronger and meaner than cows. And if you mess with a bull’s harem, you’d better be ready for the fallout. Be careful out there, okay?”
* * *
Kevin was hunched over his console. One of the remote detonators had sacrificed its life for science, disassembled into tiny squiggly bits under a standing magnifying glass. Another sat nestled in a bright blue circuit board.
“This is an Arduino board,” Kevin explained. “It’s great for prototyping, and you can do some crazy-cool robotics stuff with ’em. Anyway, I’m using this to help test my theory.”
“Theory being?” Harmony asked.
“I think Bobby set his boy up with a custom phone app. Hit the button, it transmits a detonation signal—encrypted with a hashed password, for safety. I think I can reverse-engineer these things, figure out what the transmission code was, and cobble together a duplicate app so you can use the explosives yourselves.”
“You think,” Jessie asked, “or you know?”
“I think. Give me two hours with no interruptions, and then I’ll know.”
* * *
Aselia’s local contact showed up a little after one in the afternoon, driving a mud-spattered Bronco and hauling a rickety boat trailer that jolted in the rocky grass alongside the airstrip. Wexler looked like he’d been marooned in the seventies, smoothing down his untucked bowling shirt as he stepped down from the cab. He had a blond bristle-brush mustache, and his chunky white oversized sunglasses would have made Elton John envious.
“This was not easy,” were the first words out of his mouth as he pointed to his cargo. A night-black inflatable boat was lashed to the trailer, a sleek two-seater with a halogen light mounted on the prow and an outboard motor.
“Not like I was asking for heavy firepower,” Aselia told him.
“I brought that too. That I have on hand. Finding a Zodiac Bayrunner first thing in the morning is a taller order.”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 24