She stared back at him, her face pale. “You killed the others.”
Chapter 32
HAYES HEARD IT first, the softest crunch of gravel. His eyes went to one side. Someone was coming. No one but Claire knew they were here.
An ambush? Then what the hell was this whole performance? A mind game? An attempt to get information out of him?
His eyes met Claire’s. He saw them narrow, saw her shoulders tense. She was going for the gun.
He launched forward, driving the table into her arm as she drew. The pistol discharged into the floor, and the table’s edge struck her in the bottom of the jaw. She fell back in the chair, and Hayes reached her as she hit the ground. He stepped on her arm with the toe of his boot, then kicked her pistol out of her fingers with his other foot. He stood over her, his gun aimed at her head.
“How could you, John?” she asked.
The glass blew out to his right. The cheap vinyl-over-gypsum siding exploded in clouds of white. He saw flares of red outside, through the window. Shooters were closing in from the north and east.
He ducked, turned, and started to sprint. He had to assume they were covering the door. He had to hit it fast.
He dropped his shoulder and charged the front door near the knob. The frame splintered out and he kept moving. It was a kill funnel but at the speed he was going, it would take anyone outside a second to target him.
He brought his leg forward, stumbling slightly after the impact with the door, and felt bone slam into bone as he crashed into someone just outside. The two of them tumbled, and as Hayes put his hand down to brace the fall, a powerful grip seized his wrist and chicken-winged his arm behind his back. His wrist was bent backward, and the ligaments in his shoulder sang out in pain. He tried to rise, but the armlock drove him forward. The man was behind him and slightly to his left.
Hayes saw movement ahead, another shooter, closing in at fifty yards. He had held on to the gun with his right hand, and now he stood tall, ignoring the pain. He brought the pistol across his body, as if hugging himself, to shoot the man wrenching his arm.
Click. Christ. He might have knocked the slide during the tumble and unseated the round in the chamber. He was wide open as the other gunman closed for an easy shot.
The reaction to get his gun working was almost instinct: Tap. Rack. Bang. You hit the magazine to make sure it’s all the way in, racked the slide back to eject the misfed round, and then pulled the trigger and fired. It was the standard drill for clearing a malfunction in a pistol. Easy enough with two hands.
Hayes slammed the grip of the pistol against his thigh, then hooked his rear sights on his belt and shoved it down, cycling the slide. The unseated round spun glinting through the air as Hayes, leaning forward, brought the pistol back across his body, aimed up, and fired two bullets into the upper belly and sternum of the man on his back.
The grip on his wrist relaxed as the rounds blew through the man’s chest, and he stumbled back. Hayes moved at the other shooter now, coming around a tree. The gun barked twice in Hayes’s hand as he dropped the man with a double-tap.
Hayes sidestepped to the corner of the trailer, searching out other gunmen. As he rounded the door, he saw that Claire was gone.
Two shots blew out the corner, and splinters scratched the side of his face. He saw red flare out from behind one of the pillars near the wood line.
Claire.
Hayes fired back but heard only the zip of bullets on stone. He took cover next to the foundation, then circled the trailer and came out on the far side. The night had cleared, and moonlight cast long shadows. Beside one of the pillars, the air wavered like smoke.
It was the hot vapors leaving a gun barrel just out of view behind the pillar. He crossed closer, then saw the black silhouette of the shooter, unsuspecting, looking for him where he had first taken cover. He centered his sights on the figure’s head and eased the trigger back twice.
Crack-crack.
The figure dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, and he heard it thud against the ground.
Hayes closed on the position, sprinting now. He moved through the gap between the pillars and saw the small hand, the gun. The face wasn’t something he particularly wanted to see, but he had to be sure.
It was a young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen.
A two-stroke ripped through the night. A dirt bike, up the ridge. He heard it tear toward the deeper forest.
He started running straight to his truck, but even then he knew. There were ten thousand routes out of those woods. She was gone.
Chapter 33
HYND PACED ACROSS the warehouse floor with the phone pressed to his ear, waiting for an update from his hit team in the mountains.
His footsteps echoed between the tanks of the old brewery. He had sent three men to follow Claire to the wilderness where she had met with someone from Cold Harvest. His team had identified him as the same man they had spotted at Burke’s funeral: John Hayes.
When they had asked what to do, Hynd took his time answering. “Kill him,” he said finally, “and let the woman live.”
That was thirty minutes ago, and all he had gotten since was a panicked emergency message from the youngest shooter: Claire had escaped, and Hynd’s other two men were dead. He hadn’t heard anything further from that man and could only assume that Hayes had taken him down as well.
Vera came toward him, carrying a laptop with a map of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states open on the screen.
“I think they’re all dead,” Hynd said.
“And the targets?”
“The Cold Harvest man escaped, and so did Claire.”
“We have a signal. We’re tracking her.”
“Good,” Hynd said.
There had been so much violence in such a short period, barely more than a day. Even the most willfully blind politicians wouldn’t be able to deny it.
He had studied the Americans for a long time, probed them at their most honest moments, in the face of death, to understand how the others would react, where they would go, how their beliefs would move them.
They would probably at least shut down Cold Harvest. That was the history of American interventions. The slightest real pain and they fled home and hid.
That would be a victory, of course. He was paid to eliminate the program. The Americans had become too reliant on it.
The armed groups and intelligence services who’d hired him had been frustrated for years. With Cold Harvest gone, they would be able to proceed with their plans. There were dozens of plots waiting for Cold Harvest to go down before they could be launched. It would be a time of freedom.
But Hynd knew he could do more than simply close down the program. He knew these people better than they knew themselves. The men in Cold Harvest thought they were individuals. It was one of the great myths of this country. Maybe they would stay out in the field as singletons, and he would hunt them one by one.
But he didn’t think so. They were sheep. And in danger, they would herd together, and then he could take them all at once. He had hoped for this, planned for this. It’s why he had shot Gray, the father of the program. By killing their master, he hoped to draw them all into one place.
He had started with a few names from inside the program, and the funerals had led him to more. It was slow, painstaking work, and he knew it couldn’t last. At some point, the fight would move into open war. If the Americans were on guard, he would need a vastly more powerful weapon to overcome their defenses: explosives.
He had studied all the Homeland Security guidelines, all the building manuals. It was all public. He knew the formulas. There were regulation standoff distances to keep secure buildings safe.
But there was no way to be safe in an open society. The first calculations after 9/11 suggested that the four blocks around the White House should be shut down, like a giant hole punched in downtown DC. There was no will, so they just closed off Pennsylvania Ave. and then seemed to forget. It happened everywhe
re, a brief clear-eyed view of the threat and then a lot of talking and little action.
There were so many exotic plots out there, the underwear and shoe bombs, but there was nothing more proven and more lethal than a truck bomb. Nothing fancy, just ammonium nitrate—fertilizer—and fuel, easy to make in bulk, the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used. That attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City was put together by just two men, killed a hundred and sixty-eight, and leveled three downtown blocks.
Yet the Americans still refused to acknowledge their vulnerability. The standoff guidelines went only so high, and then they fell back on prayer and willful blindness. He would simply go higher.
As they drove back to the brewery that afternoon, he had seen the firework stands on the side of the highway getting ready for the Fourth of July. It brought a smile to his face. His plan was so American in a way. There was no subtlety to it; he would just go bigger and bigger. Eventually no target would be safe. There was nowhere they could hide.
The truck was ready, but they still needed more explosive. He had a source in mind. He wished he had more time to perfect his plans, but he knew his one chance to take them all out was coming, and he had to be ready.
“Where’s the cargo?” Hynd asked.
Vera scrolled on the laptop’s trackpad and then pointed to the screen. “The target truck stopped for the night. Timur is following him about a half mile back.”
The United States had few facilities for parking dangerous loads overnight along the highway. It was a known flaw, but nothing had been done about it.
“Take it now,” Hynd said.
Chapter 34
THE TRACTOR-TRAILER was parked along the side of a two-lane Pennsylvania highway. Its driver, a man named Colin Raynaud, woke up drenched in sweat on top of a sleeping bag. He lay on an air mattress on the floor of the truck’s cab in a cramped area behind the seats.
The mayflies were humming like a boat engine outside. It sounded way too loud. Usually the air conditioner’s fan and compressor drowned them out.
He felt above his head near the vent. Nothing. The AC was dead. The soft glow of lights in the cab was gone. Moonlight filtered around the curtains. He sat up.
The electrical must have gone out. He cursed and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, the drenched, close-cropped hair.
He stood up, slipped his bare feet into his boots, and tied them loosely around the ankles. The truck was holding up well, especially considering he’d been on the road six weeks. He liked to listen to lectures and audiobooks and had gone through three college courses this month. He was in the middle of one on the American Revolution.
Condensation clung to the windows. It was like a hot bath in there. He needed some air. He stepped outside, down onto the broken-up asphalt. He was the only truck in the small lot. The moonlight reflected and arced along his silver trailer. He kept it spotless.
A creek wandered through the tall grass to his right. He couldn’t see any lights in the countryside ahead. He liked working hazmat rides because they kept to these rural routes. No cities. No schools. They were strict on the sleep requirements. He had a folder full of credentials and clearances and could drive the nastiest loads out to the mining and demolition companies.
There was a yellow square with a four in it on his hazmat diamond: readily capable of detonation or explosive reaction at normal temperatures and pressures. Not just anyone could haul that.
He liked sticking to the boondocks, the old two-lanes that had been abandoned for the interstates. The quiet soothed him.
It reminded him of early mornings in Natchitoches Parish, camping with his father before the hunt. His father would still be sleeping away, sawing logs from the moment he shut his eyes, and Colin never understood how he could make it that long. Colin would always have to go to the bathroom at some point, would have to find his shoes and glasses and stumble, freezing, in his underwear and his loose boots through the silvery night. Another planet. Ghosts everywhere. Animals on the move. Magic.
He craned his head back and traced the Big Dipper and a few other constellations he couldn’t remember the names of. They’d stopped hunting once he was eleven. His dad’s body wasn’t up for it. And they just fell out of the habit.
Hopefully it was only the battery. He took a last look over the fields, then stepped toward the truck and noticed the glint of copper. The wires were cut. He went to inspect them, but then he heard the rustling behind him and turned.
A young man clamped his hand over Raynaud’s mouth and slid a knife into his lower back, then dragged him into the moon shadow beside the truck.
The pain paralyzed him, and Timur looked on as the man put Raynaud on his face in the dirt and handcuffed his wrists, taking care to keep the back of the hands together, thumbs pointed to the sky. Blood flowed freely, pooling and dripping from his white T-shirt, but it wasn’t the pump of an arterial wound. Timur rolled a bandage around his finger, put it through the tear in the shirt, and felt around until he could drive it into the cut in Raynaud’s back. The clotting agent in the gauze stopped the blood flow. The young man gagged him, bound his ankles, and dragged him into the cab of the truck.
It took a moment for Timur to find Raynaud’s papers, the clearances that allowed him to haul high explosives and toxic inhalation hazards.
They would notice the missing shipment at some point, of course, even after Timur spoofed the GPS, but by then he would be long gone, and the truck would be swapped out and its cargo taken. Companies were always reluctant to report missing explosives because it might cost them their licenses. The full response would take almost a week to begin, if it got going at all.
Chapter 35
RAYNAUD CAME TO in a tiled room. He shouted for help several times, louder and louder, but the only response was his own voice echoing back. He felt weak and groggy, and as he tried to stand he could hear his restraints jingling behind his back. He was chained to the rail that ran along the gang shower. He couldn’t feel his hands.
The door opened. A man entered and sat on the bench across from him. He looked like he was in his forties, but there was something youthful about him. He was smiling, an expression so out of place in the midst of this terror that it didn’t seem real.
“What’s going on?” Raynaud said. “Just let me go.”
“It’s okay,” Hynd said in a soothing voice. “It’s okay.”
“Please, just—”
“Be quiet,” Hynd said with a sudden bite in his voice.
Raynaud stopped talking.
“You want me to let you go?”
“Yes.”
“You want another day alive? Another look at the sun?”
“Yes, man. Please. What’s going on? I’m not going to tell anyone anything. Just let me go—”
“So yes.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You know why someone would steal your truck?”
“No. I don’t know anything about you or what’s up.” He looked at the ground. “Please, man. I’ve got a kid.”
“I know. Don’t be stupid. Were those your tapes? In the truck? The lectures? The courses?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Those are good things to learn about. You’re smart. You know what we’re doing, why we would take your cargo.”
“I won’t call it in.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Hynd said. “Help us.”
“I don’t want anything to do with it, but you let me go, and I won’t say anything.”
“Help us and you’ll live one more day. It’s your choice.”
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“You won’t say anything?”
“No.”
“You know we’re going to kill people with your cargo? You’ll let us do that?”
“I won’t talk.”
“If they’re going to die anyway, why not help us? People you don’t know. Would never meet. You would never even be able to tell they’re gone. In your life, they d
on’t exist anyway. And then you get to see your daughter again. How many would you kill for that? What’s it worth to you?”
Raynaud began to cry and dropped his head. Hynd crouched near him and looked in his eyes.
“Would you kill one man? Twelve?”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.”
Hynd stood and put his hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man. That’s the right answer.”
Hynd held his hand out to the side and Timur passed him a knife with the blade carefully pinched between his fingers so Hynd could take the handle. It was long and thin and double-edged.
“Wait!” Raynaud said. “Wait. What do you want me to do!”
Hynd watched him beg. The man hadn’t known he was a killer. No one does. Not until he has to make the choice.
Hynd nodded to Timur, who held Raynaud still by the shoulders against the wall. Then Hynd put the tip of the blade to his chest and slid it home.
Chapter 36
HYND RAN THE cleaning solution over his palms and then washed away the last traces of red. His hands smelled faintly of bleach. They might call him a terrorist, but that was bullshit. He was finishing what the Americans and Israelis had started, a war he’d been caught in the middle of from the day he was born. He’d seen them kill firsthand as a child. His father had been a German engineer who went to work for the Egyptians on their nuclear program.
The Mossad led the kill teams that took down his father, and the Americans gave them their tacit approval. He knew how the Israeli assassins did their work. They believed there was a certain mercy in terror. They would first try to frighten the scientists into quitting. It began with threatening notes and calls, and then an empty car would explode.
Hynd had found one of the first notes when he was ten, a letter on the front door of their house in Cairo along with photos of himself, his father, and his mother that had been taken with a telephoto lens. His father was a proud man, and he ignored the threats. He wouldn’t be coerced by violence. He had fled his homeland rather than bend to the Fascists’ will.
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