My words trailed away as my mind conjured a picture of Violin. I glanced away from Junie, not wanting her to read anything in my eyes.
“Time’s flying away from us,” I said. “No more talk. Get down and hide. I’ll leave Ghost with you. If there’s something he can’t handle he’ll make some noise and I’ll come running.”
“Where are you going?”
“It’s hunting season, right?” I asked, and left it there. “Now come on, hide.”
She did as directed, vanishing completely in the dense undergrowth. All Ghost had to do was lay down and he became invisible in the tall grass. I moved off, veering away from our back trail and then heading upwind of the sounds.
I tried my earbud again, but got only dead air. Bug and Church had to know I was off the grid by now, even if the Coast Guard call didn’t go anywhere; but what was the best-case scenario for a rescue? Half an hour? An hour?
That was not encouraging. I didn’t know how many of the Closers were out in these woods. They had helicopters, too. Maybe thermal imaging.
I regretted not grabbing one of the long guns, but when the lighthouse blew up my mind was more focused on not burning to death than on arming for a prolonged war. Now I wondered if I should have circled around and made a smarter choice. I had my Beretta and a couple of full magazines, and I had my rapid-release folding knife, a lifetime’s study of jujutsu, and a lot of years camping in these woods. How did that stack up against the Closers? We’d have to see.
Best-case scenario was that the Coast Guard took our call seriously and a fleet of choppers and half a dozen Zodiacs crammed with sailors were about to bring down six kinds of hell on these Closers. Sure, I told myself, and the charge would led by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
Inside my head a debate was raging. The Modern Man aspect of my personality was yelling at me to Run, run, run.
The Cop wanted answers and he was losing patience. When he did that he tended to act more like the Warrior. And that part of me, the Killer, wanted to turn this reconnaissance run into a hunt. He was telling me that if you run then you’re prey. That’s weak, that’s vulnerable, and it would probably get Junie killed as well as me.
Hunt the hunters, whispered that merciless voice.
I slowed from a light run to a crouching walk and then to stillness. Shallowing my breathing. Listening to the woods.
At least one of the helicopters was up there, but it was far away. North and west of where I crouched. Searching down near the main part of the campground, blocking the most natural exit from the park.
When you hunt like this you learn to tune things out. It’s not that you don’t hear them, but once a sound is cataloged you allow it to fade into the background so that other sounds can present themselves for identification. The same goes with movement. The forest is a living thing, it’s always moving, it’s always making sound, even in the very depths of winter. Here, in this freakish holdover of a summer that did not want to relinquish its grasp on these Maryland woods, there were a thousand sounds. Birds and animals moving through the leaves, the creak of trees in the breeze, the exhalation of the forest as its breath passed between and through the millions of intertwined branches.
There were no more voices.
I waited, letting the Closers hunt Junie so I could hunt them.
The Closers.
Over the last hour that name had already been burned into my private lexicon. I thought of them as “Closers,” but on another level I had a different word for them.
Prey.
I heard a man’s voice, speaking low and quiet. Just two words.
“This way.”
Inside my head, the Warrior grinned.
Yes, he whispered, come this way.
Chapter Seventy-eight
VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 12:04 p.m.
Yuina Hoshino called a few minutes after noon.
Howard and Mr. Bones sat down at the Ghost Box console to take the call and immediately they could tell that the nervous little scientist had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and there was some white paste at the corners of her mouth.
“I can’t stand it!” she wailed. Almost wailed; her voice broke in the middle. “General Croft called our business office five minutes ago. He’s canceling the air show. Not just for now, but maybe or as long as six months. Between the cyber-attacks and now what happened at Dugway — he said that in the face of a concerted terrorist attack on the industrial-military complex we must exercise prudence and bullshit like that. He kept going on and on about how we had to protect what we have and consider our options.”
“Yuina—” began Howard, but she wasn’t listening.
“I tried to tell him that we had some solutions, that Shelton Aeronautics was ready to respond to these threats, but he didn’t hear me. It was like he was locked into a speech and he couldn’t shake loose. I think he’s really rattled. I think he’s scared because of what happened at Dugway. He’s freaked out and now they’ve canceled the air show. How are we going to get them to listen? It’s all ruined! All this work, it’s over, it’s ruined. The Chinese have—”
“Shut up!” bellowed Howard in a bull voice that struck the weeping scientist into a shocked and sniffling silence. Howard jabbed a finger at her hologram as if it could feel his emphatic pokes. “Listen to me, you silly bitch. We are not beaten and this is definitely not over. Pull yourself together. You’re a governor of Majestic Three for Christ’s sake. Act like it for a change. So the Chinese outplayed us on this round. We are far from done, honey.”
“But … I don’t understand … we are done. They clearly built a working Device and we’re years away from that! Our top-of-the-line is Specter 101, and that can’t do what that ship did at Dugway…”
Howard smiled at her. “It doesn’t have to.”
She frowned, forgetting her tears for a moment. “What?”
“Trust me,” he said.
Chapter Seventy-nine
Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:05 p.m.
I waited behind a tree.
Okay, I lurked behind a tree.
The forest quieted itself out of my consciousness; I focused less on what sounds should be there and more on which sounds shouldn’t.
They were pretty stealthy, I’ll give them that, but inside my head the Warrior grinned. This is the kind of thing he lives for. It’s why he exists at all. Which meant that to some degree I lived for this, too.
The hunt.
The ache to confront and engage and overcome. The desire to prove through the ugly and uncivilized filter of violence that I belonged here, that I deserved to live and to continue. And to an equal degree that they no longer owned the right to survive because they were lesser predators.
This is not the territory of logic, and it’s miles and years away from any justification in civilized behavior. This is the lizard brain whispering survival secrets to the most primitive centers of the primate mind. Because they hunted me, because Junie was in my protection, these woods had become mine. The boundaries were marked with blood rather than piss, and the killer within me would defend my territory in any way necessary.
Painted by dappled leaf shadows, I waited. My rapid-release folding knife was open, the blade down at my side where the steel wouldn’t catch stray sunlight.
They came in single file and I let them pass.
Three tall men in black BDUs, black boots, black weapons and gear. Pale faces, clean shaven, with buzz-cut hair, square jaws. Powerful men who carried no body fat at all, and who walked with cat grace, eyes tracking left and right, seeing the forest but not seeing me. They were armed. Pistols in belt holsters, knives. Two of them carried M4s, the leader had a combat shotgun with pistol grips on the handle and pump.
These, I knew, were different from the other men. Vastly different from the four men in cars I’d met this morning —
God, was it only this morning? — and tougher even than the men who had invaded Junie’s cottage. These were prime soldiers. They were the elite. These were the kind of soldiers you could drop into a war zone or a hot LZ or a jungle at night and expect them to get the job done and come back alive. That they were all killers I had no doubt. This wasn’t work for missionaries. These were the true Closers, the men sent to shut Junie down and erase any threat she might ever pose. If they had their way, Junie Flynn would disappear off the face of the earth. Her house and all of its contents would be reduced to smoking rubble.
They did not know that I was here.
All they could know is that the ground team had met armed resistance. They knew that someone in the house had fired on them, hitting two, probably killing at least one.
That was not enough knowledge. I knew more about them than they knew about me.
If they knew that I was out here — not me specifically but someone like me — they would be doing this a different way.
That was a mistake. And at this level of the game the rules only allow for one mistake.
As the third man passed I stepped out from my hiding spot and moved behind him very quickly. The technique was one that these men probably knew. The surprise wasn’t in the selection of skill but in its application. In the timing.
Three limbs moved at once. My left hand whipped around and clamped over his nose and mouth, pinching everything closed, shutting off breath and sound. At the same time my right foot chopped out, knee and toes pointing outward at an angle as I stepped on the back of his knee. Bending the leg, toppling the weight backward into the inexorable pull of gravity, aided by the pull of the hand clamped over his mouth. My right hand was already in play, already darting forward and around, pressing the wickedly sharp edge of the blade deep into the skin under his left ear. As he fell, I pulled his chin to the left and cut his throat from ear to ear.
All of it in less than a second.
We all know this one fact, that we are only ever one step ahead of the darkness. It can reach out to tap us on the shoulder at any time.
The man died in an instant.
If he had been a sentry the death would have been solitary and unheard. But he was with others and I wanted his death to be heard. Not loud. Just a whisper from the darkness behind.
The second man whirled at the sound and I jerked back on the dead man’s head at the moment of my cut so that the hydrostatic pressure of heart hosed outward in a red geyser. The second man took it in the face.
I was already moving, body-checking the dead man into the second Closer. Blind, encumbered by dead weight falling against him, he had no chance, no time, no distance to use his M4. I thrust the knife into his throat, drilling it, giving the blade a half turn as it entered and a half turn to clear the path for a fast withdraw.
Two seconds, two dead men.
The man with the shotgun was the one who had the only real chance.
If he’d jumped forward before he turned, he might have been able to use that chance. That might have given him the time to bring the shotgun barrel to bear, to at least clip me with a blast before I took him. If the darkness was riding copilot for him, he might have been able to blast me back into the shadows.
He did not jump forward.
He merely whirled in place instead.
I leaped over two dead men, my left hand slapping the shotgun barrel down, my right going for the long reach to slash. Biceps, face, chest, wrist. The shotgun fell, I tackled him and bore him to the ground, straddling him, pinning his bleeding arms, pressing my forearm across his throat, stopping the red tip of the knife a millimeter from his eye.
“Shhhh,” I said.
Chapter Eighty
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:06 p.m.
Gus Dietrich banged open the door to Joe Ledger’s office without knocking. Church and Rudy Sanchez looked up sharply at him.
“Got to get you out of here, boss,” said Gus breathlessly, “and I mean right now. We have every kind of federal agent at the gate right now waving warrants from the attorney general. Can’t stop ’em.”
“Warrants for what?” demanded Rudy.
“Joe. They have an arrest warrant for him and a search and seizure for his office. Don’t know what’s up their ass, but they want Joe in the worst way and that warrant is legit.”
“This is absurd,” said Rudy.
“How much time?” asked Church.
“I can stall them for a couple of minutes. I have your helo smoking on the roof.”
Without a word Church closed his laptop and began packing it away. Ledger’s laptop was locked in the top drawer of the file cabinet. Church touched a panel on the wall and the file cabinet sank into the floor with a soft hiss of hydraulics. A second file cabinet came down from the ceiling to replace it.
Rudy cocked an eyebrow. “That’s very clever.”
“Borrowed from a James Bond novel,” admitted Church, “but it was a smart idea.”
They exited the office and Church handed his laptop to Gus. “Put this in the vault. Cut all lines to MindReader and put the mainframe autodelete on standby. Make sure the staff cooperates in every way possible within the guidelines of their training. Then meet me at the Shop. Transfer all current case notes and records there. That’ll be our new war room.”
Gus nodded. The Shop was a secondary support location a few blocks away. It was run by Big Bob Faraday, a former Echo Team agent who had been permanently injured on a mission. It was also the home of Mike Harnick’s vehicle design department, logistical support, and a few other essential departments.
“What about the warrant?” asked Gus.
“Let them execute it. They are welcome to search Captain Ledger’s office.”
Rudy said, “What should I do?”
Church smiled. “Come with me, Doctor. No reason for you to be involved in this mess.”
“What about Joe? We can’t just leave him to the wolves…”
“Captain Ledger is a resourceful man, Doctor. I rather think it is the wolves who are in danger.”
Chapter Eighty-one
Hadley and Meyers Real Estate
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:09 p.m.
Erasmus Tull stepped out of the office and stood in the quiet of the empty parking lot behind the real estate office. From there he could see the distant corner of the Warehouse several blocks away.
He punched in a phone number that he had not called in a very long time.
It rang so many times that Tull didn’t think the other party was going to answer.
Then a voice said, “Hello, Erasmus.”
Tull said, “Hello, Deacon.”
Chapter Eighty-two
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:10 p.m.
Mr. Church held up a hand for silence. “I must admit that I’m surprised to hear from you again.”
“I know. This is kind of a whim,” said Tull. “Are you sorry to hear that I’m alive?”
“You’ve managed to stay off the radar quite well,” said Mr. Church.
“You taught me a lot about caution.”
“Apparently.”
“I know you looked for me. Hunted me.”
“What other option did you leave, Erasmus? You left quite a mess behind you.”
Tull sighed. “Story of my life.”
“And of mine,” agreed Mr. Church. “Some people are born in the storm lands.”
“Yes.”
“What can I do for you, Erasmus?” asked Church. “Do you want to come in? You know that I can guarantee your safety.”
“Until you put a bullet in me.”
“It doesn’t have to play out that way. You can buy a lot of goodwill by unburdening your soul.”
“And if I don’t have a soul?”
“I don’t have time for poetry, Erasmus. Or philosophical debates. I have
a lot going on at the moment.”
“I know.”
Church paused. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re calling me?”
“In part.” Tull paused. “You know, Deacon, you’re not as smart as you think you are. You always pretend to know what’s going on, but you don’t know. You think you know what’s going on right now, today — but you don’t.”
“I make no claims to understanding the current situation, Erasmus. I’ll admit to being totally at sea. Does that make you feel better?”
“Actually, it does. I’ve never heard you admit to being clueless. That’s worth a lot.”
“Care to tell me what is going on? You seem to have all the answers today.”
“You have no idea how true that is. I not only know the answers, I am the answer.”
There was an almost pleading note to that statement. Church filed it away.
“The world you know is about to change, Deacon. After tomorrow it’s never going to be the same again.”
“You’re involved in what’s happening today?” asked Church.
“Oh yes.”
“Are you looking to make a deal?”
“No,” said Tull, and Church thought he heard a note of regret in the man’s voice. “I wanted to clear the air about something, Deacon. Remember the conversation we had after the thing in Turkey? After I killed that entire Syrian strike team? You asked me if I needed to step down for a while, you asked if this was getting to be too much for me.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember what I said to you?” asked Tull.
“Yes,” said Church. “You said that killing didn’t hurt you. I tried to explain that it hurts everyone and that we have to address that. But you said that you weren’t like everyone else.”
“Yes.”
“You said that you were a monster and monsters loved to destroy.”
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