by Steve Alten
At precisely 5:19, we stopped at the station in Delray Beach, the tracking device still embedded in my left butt cheek. I disembarked, searching for Professor Patel. He waved to me from his silver Mercedes-Benz sedan parked in the lot.
I waved back, then hurried down the platform steps to the lot, weaving my way around parked cars. “Professor, thank you.”
He was standing by the driver’s side door, his back against the open window—a gun pressed to his neck.
Jeff Elrod stepped out of the car, his 9mm Glock in his left hand, his right wrist in a cast. Within seconds we were joined by four more of his black ops assassins.
“Well, if it isn’t my old pal, Kwan. We’ll keep this simple—you do exactly as I say, or I put a bullet in your friend’s brain.”
A tear rolled down Professor Patel’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Kwan. They have Anya.”
“Drop the bag and put your hands behind your back, Sharkman.”
One of Elrod’s goons bound my wrists with three nylon wrist cuffs. Another took his superior’s place, pressing his handgun to Anya’s father’s lower spine as Elrod opened the brown leather bag.
“What the hell is this?” He removed the object inside—a leather basketball with a brick duct-taped to one side.
I smiled as he shoved the barrel of his gun against the side of my neck. “Where is it?”
“I can’t remember. Did I drop it in the ocean after I escaped from the Malchut or did it fall out of the bag while I was tanning on the nude beach?”
“Don’t play me for a fool; you had it when you left FBI headquarters!” Elrod stepped back to the car, forced to holster his weapon to use his cell phone. “It’s me. He’s here, but he lost his luggage. We’re on the way.”
The black ops assassin nodded to his team. Professor Patel was shoved into the backseat of his Mercedes while I was led at gunpoint to a Ford Explorer where I was made to sit on my knees on the floor of the backseat.
We drove for only three minutes before we parked.
Dragged out of the car, I found myself at Seacrest High School.
We entered through the rear delivery door that accessed the cafeteria. My father was inside the kitchen, standing by the immense aluminum door of a walk-in refrigerator, a scowl on his weathered face.
“We don’t have a lot of time, son, so I’ll make this brief. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world because of our economy—an economy upheld by the energy sector and the military-industrial complex. It’s a reality that dates back to the days of Eisenhower, and it’s a reality that’s going to continue whether you give us the SADM or not. Now let me share another reality with you.”
My father opened the door of the walk-in refrigerator. Seated on the floor inside, their wrists and ankles bound, their mouths duct-taped, were Anya, Mrs. Solomon, and Principal Lockhart.
The Admiral pointed to a small explosive device mounted to the interior wall—a brick of C-4 attached to a cell phone. “You recognize this? It’s essentially Dr. Gibbons’s bomb without the enriched uranium. You have until seven o’clock—roughly ninety-six minutes—to retrieve the SADM and deliver it to Pier One at Port Everglades. If the SADM does not arrive by seven, then I’ll detonate the nuke wherever it may be. Then, at precisely seven-oh-two, I’ll place a second call—this one to the cell phone rigged inside this walk-in refrigerator and we’ll add three more casualties to today’s world-changing events.”
“You expect me to just deliver a bomb that will kill hundreds of thousands of people?”
“Now see, you’re thinking about this all wrong. What’s done is done. You already delivered the bomb. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, regardless of whether the SADM detonates in Port Everglades or Miami. I’m simply giving you the option to save your friends.”
“You think I trust you? Even if I deliver the bomb, you’ll kill them anyway.”
“I won’t, and here’s why. The school’s security cameras recorded our group entering the principal’s office. If the refrigerator bomb detonates, I’m implicated. If it doesn’t, I simply make a call to one of my team, who removes the explosive and frees your friends. They won’t talk, because if they do, I’ll send out a hit squad to execute their families.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
“How about you let me worry about that; you’ve got enough on your plate. All things considered, you really do want that SADM to be in Port Everglades when it detonates. See, there are three al Qaeda red herrings arriving by ship in about forty-five minutes who will be implicated in the event. If the SADM detonates anywhere else, then the FBI’s security tapes will implicate you as the terrorist.”
Sweat poured down my face, my muscles shaking in rage. I looked at Anya, who was deathly pale, her blue eyes filled with tears.
“I’ll need a car.”
“Take Professor Patel’s; he won’t be needing it. Oh, and if you try to double back after we leave, you should know I have men posted outside of the school. They see you, I make a call.”
The Admiral slammed the refrigerator door, locking it from the outside. “Jeffrey, free Kwan’s bonds, then give my son the professor’s car keys. We’ll take Patel with us . . . as added insurance.”
Elrod produced a switchblade. He cut the nylon restraints, then spit on the car keys and slapped them into the palm of my hand. “Have a good ride, fish face.”
I grabbed his left wrist, taking his knife. “I may need this. But don’t worry, Jeff, I’ll be bringing it back—to shove up your ass.”
I sprinted past Professor Patel and out the backdoor to where the Mercedes was parked. Pressing the control switch, I unlocked the car and gunned the engine.
The dashboard clock read 5:38.
At precisely 5:19, the train I was on had stopped at the station in Delray Beach.
Nineteen minutes earlier, we had arrived at the station in Pompano Beach. Among those who boarded the train was a guy my age, with uncombed long dark brown hair and a thin, prominent nose set on a narrow face. He was lanky and thin, and draped over his shoulder was a vintage Doors backpack.
Jesse Gordon flopped down in the seat next to me. “You have fourteen minutes to convince me.”
I handed him the leather carry-on, tugging open the zipper. “See for yourself.”
He took a thirty-second look. “Okay, I’m convinced. Now what?”
“Did you bring the basketball?”
“And the brick.”
“Empty the Doors bag so I can put the you-know-what inside. Did your dad agree to everything?”
“He said he’d meet us and listen to your plan.”
“There’s no time. Show him the you-know-what; then tell him it’s essential I have something that’s fast.”
“I’ll tell him; you sell him.”
We stuffed the SADM into the Doors backpack, the basketball and brick into the brown leather bag. At 5:14 the train stopped at the station in Boca Raton where Jesse disembarked carrying a nuclear bomb, his father waiting for him in his BMW.
Five minutes later, I stepped off the train in Delray Beach.
* * *
It was 6:08 by the time I arrived at Marine One boat rentals in Deerfield Beach. Jesse and his father were on the pier, standing by a thirty-two-foot-long Sunsation Dominator powerboat, its stern equipped with dual 502 horsepower engines—exactly what the doctor ordered.
“Mr. Gordon, thank you.”
“This isn’t a rental; it belongs to my brother, Rick. Just use it to get that thing into deep water, then bring it back.”
“I will, but first you need to help me with one last thing: there’s a homing device embedded in my left butt cheek—I need you to cut it out.”
“What?”
“It’s how they keep tabs on you before they disappear you,” Jesse explained. “Kwan, have you got a
knife?”
I handed Jesse the switchblade. “Let’s do this on board the boat.”
We climbed down into the vessel’s cockpit. Dropping my sweat pants, I laid on my stomach across one of the bucket seats, pointing to a tiny bump on my left buttocks. “Cut it out, but don’t throw it out, we’ll need it.”
Jesse held the knife over my exposed flesh, his hand trembling. “I . . . I can’t do it.”
Jeff Gordon took the knife from his son. “This is insane. I’m a senior partner in a law firm, not a member of Homeland Security . . . and I’m definitely not a proctologist!” With that, he punctured my butt cheek with the tip of the knife, prying loose a tracking device no larger than a splinter.
“Jesse, hand me that plastic cup. Kwan, I’m putting the tracking device in the cup. Are you okay?”
I sat up. “Fine. Where’s my backpack?”
“In the storage bin.”
“This is important. I need you guys to take that tracking device down to Port Everglades in Patel’s Benz. You have to leave it as close to Pier One as you can before seven o’clock.”
Mr. Gordon looked at his watch. “It’s already 6:14; with rush hour we may not make it.”
“You have to!”
“I’ll drive!” Jesse said, leaping off the boat to the dock.
Mr. Gordon turned to me. “You know what you have to do. Do it and get back home safe.”
“Yes, sir.” I watched him run after Jesse to Patel’s Mercedes; then I freed the bow and stern lines before starting the powerboat’s engines.
The twins rumbled to life.
I observed the No Wake Zone signs for about a minute before accelerating out of the marina and into the intracoastal. I followed the signs north that led me out of the maze of waterways to the Boca Inlet, gunning the boat’s engines as I hit the Atlantic Ocean.
The dashboard clock read 6:23.
The bow raised high out of the water as I pushed my speed past seventy knots, heading southeast. Gibbons had told me the SADM would incinerate everything on land within a five-mile radius—two and a half miles from ground zero. Ground zero would now be at least a hundred feet underwater, severely limiting its range, but I wanted to be a good ten miles from land just to be safe.
Hitting a smooth patch of sea, I accelerated to eighty knots, the shoreline disappearing rapidly on my right. Checking my GPS, I realized I had already passed the entrance channel into Port Everglades.
It was 6:39.
The Sikorsky helicopter landed on the Malchut’s deck with a bone-jarring thud, nearly knocking loose Professor Patel’s mercury fillings.
Admiral Wilson helped him from the backseat. “You okay?”
“A bit queasy.”
“Let’s get an update, maybe you’ll feel a little better.” My father and Jeff Elrod led the professor up to the bridge, where four crewmen were huddled around a sonar tech.
“Well? Where is he?”
“He stopped in Deerfield for about six minutes, presumably to get the package. He’s back in the car, heading south on I-95 doing eighty miles an hour.”
Admiral Wilson slapped Professor Patel on the back. “See that? You had nothing to worry about. Kwan will deliver the package and my men will release your daughter. She’ll come out of this with nothing worse than a cold.”
I was twelve miles from shore when I spotted the fishing trawler to the southeast in deeper water, less than a mile away.
I shut down the engines, my heart racing.
6:46 . . .
Stripping off my clothes, I secured the Doors backpack around my shoulders and jumped into the ocean, expelling the air from my lungs as I sank beneath the SADM’s weight. Within seconds I was pumping water through my gills, my caudal feet churning the sea as I homed in on the trawler doing twenty knots.
41
By 6:50 p.m., the crew of the Malchut had joined the members of Black Widow standing along the portside rail of the fishing trawler, counting down the minutes until the anticipated mushroom cloud would be unleashed over Fort Lauderdale.
Moving beneath the keel, I located the outer wheel of the sealed diving bell. Grasping it with both hands, I inverted my body so my feet were pressed against the steel plates of the hull and forcibly wrenched the device open, snapping the interior lock.
Pushing the diving bell inward, I entered the ship, sealing my gills but maintaining my denticle skin.
The lab remained devastated from my last visit. Wrapping my body against the nearest steel bulkhead, I searched through a hundred vibrations, seeking clues to Professor Patel’s whereabouts.
Instead, I found my father . . .
“Whiskey, Professor?”
“Douglas, you know I don’t toast victory prematurely. Rumsfeld and Cheney made that mistake back in Iraq.”
“You don’t entrust a civilian to make military decisions. Had General Garner been left in charge, the outcome would have been far different. Bremer’s decision to ostracize Saddam’s army led to a decade of chaos.”
“I am not a military leader—do you trust me?”
“War is not always waged on the battlefield, my friend. You have the instincts of a four-star general. The way you handled your daughter and my son—it was as if you saw the outcome three moves ahead of the game.”
“Sun Tzu once said, ‘Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness . . . be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of your opponent’s fate.’ Arranging Anya’s internship at ANGEL served a dual purpose; it allowed me to keep tabs on Becker’s work without being intrusive while contemplating how we could one day use the incredible mutations generated by her stem cell experiments. The day I met Kwan in the hospital, I saw a potential outcome. And here we are.”
“You’re the chess master. For me, that kid’s been nothing but trouble since the day he was conceived.”
“‘Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys.’ Instead of looking at your son as a potential asset, you’ve ostracized him just as Bremer did with Saddam’s Republican Guard.”
“You don’t get it. Kwan was an accident. I met his mother while I was stationed at the Chinhae naval base in South Korea. Back then, young Korean tail buzzed the base like bees to honey; every native girl out to find herself an American soldier. The difference between Mi Yung and the hundreds of other Asian sluts hanging around the base was that her father was a powerful businessman whose companies supplied the military. Mi Yung was gorgeous and knew how to flaunt her sexuality; she was probably sleeping with a dozen other sailors. When she found out she was pregnant, she named her highest-ranking partner as the baby’s father—me! My superiors gave me a choice; either I marry her or receive a dishonorable discharge and face the wrath of the Korean government. See, it turns out Mi Yung was a lot younger than she looked in bed.”
“And so you impregnated a minor and inflicted your wrath upon an innocent child.”
“Could have been worse. I brought them to the States; I gave them a better life than they would have ever experienced in South Korea. Anyway, that burden was relieved the morning the kid crashed the car and killed his mother. That day was the best day of my life, to be surpassed only by the moment that’s about to take place right now. Are you ready to make a phone call that will change history?”
“As the Buddhists say, Douglas, it’s your karma. You make the call.”
The Admiral placed the call, beginning a thirty-second power surge that would ignite the SADM’s blasting cap, setting off the C-4 charge and a nuclear chain reaction.
The deed done, my father and the man known as Amalek to his neocon cronies left the stateroom to watch the fireworks from up on deck—only to find a surprise waiting for them in the corridor: my Doors backpack.
“Kwan . . . you sonuva—”
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42
I see your hair is burning, hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar
Driving down your freeways, midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars, never saw a woman so alone
So alone, so alone . . .
—The Doors, “L.A. Woman”
I am fury.
Naked in the cockpit of the speedboat, the cold wind pasting brine to my flesh, I watched the bow rise to greet the northern horizon as my fiberglass steed violated the sea doing eighty-five knots.
I am revenge.
Cold-blooded, my back faced a searing hot wind that blasted a hole in the sea, igniting a flame as brilliant as the sun—my enemies’ ashes inhaled into the upper atmosphere.
I am destiny’s offspring.
Conceived twice; birthed once. A dual existence condemned by my genes.
Orphaned by fate. Predator by design.
Alone.
Epilogue
Another Diver Devoured by “Virgin Mary”
KEY LARGO, FL (Associated Press). Two weeks ago, scuba divers had dubbed her the “Virgin Mary of the Deep,” describing her as a black tiger shark with gray stripes, bearing an angelic face, fore-fins resembling human arms, and black animated eyes. Now they’re just calling her the Devil.
She was first sighted by divers visiting Christ of the Abyss, a two-ton, eight-foot-high bronze statue of Jesus Christ that was submerged back in 1965 in twenty-five feet of water in Key Largo’s protected Marine Sanctuary. The “Virgin” began appearing at dusk, perhaps attracted to the electrical field produced by the statue’s metal surface. Word of the mysterious creature’s presence created a surge of night dives in the area—and multiple fatalities.
The first victim was Lou Foster, a senior software developer at Studio-332. The shark-like creature targeted the silver-haired diver from a group of seventeen, repeatedly biting his neck until he was literally decapitated before horrified eyewitnesses. Two more attacks occurred over the last week—all bites to the neck.