Then, as she stepped back to Dgarra’s side, her gaze settled on Emperor Goltat as he rose from his dais and raised his right hand. Immediately, the long notes of two conchlike instruments blared, bringing another silence upon the crowd. Without hesitation, the emperor descended the steps and walked forward to where Dgarra waited.
As the emperor came to a stop, Dgarra lowered himself to one knee, head held high . . . a move that Jennifer copied precisely. Reaching out, the emperor placed his right hand on Dgarra’s shoulder and bade him stand. Then, he turned back to the crowd, his hand still resting on Dgarra’s shoulder, and spoke.
“As your emperor, it gives me great joy to present to you . . . the Champion of the Northern Front.”
What had taken some urging from Jennifer only a minute earlier took none this time. And as the crowd’s explosion of approval rose to a new crescendo, Jennifer allowed herself a smile, knowing full well it was an expression that Dgarra’s rivals wouldn’t be sharing.
CHAPTER 22
Alexandr Prokorov terminated the encrypted call, tempted to hurl his sat-phone into the wall of his hotel suite. The U.S.-based system that had given him the lead that the Smythes were now operating out of Lima had just been taken down in a massive cyber-attack that had the NSA director at a loss to explain. Even worse, whenever they tried to bring up a backup of the system, that was immediately taken down as well despite the NSA super-hackers’ attempts to defeat the intrusions.
After consulting with his Russian FSB counterparts and with the East Asian People’s Alliance Ministry of State Security, the NSA confirmed that this appeared to be the work of an advanced piece of artificial intelligence acting at the direction of Mark and Heather Smythe. Left unchecked, this AI posed a major threat not only to the Federation Security Service but to the security of the entire UFNS or any other government that tried to stand in its way.
He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window with its beautiful view of the snow-covered Red Square and Kremlin. Two hours remained before the cold light of dawn. The square was beautifully lit, a scene that recalled the glory days of the old Soviet Union. With war raging all along the country’s southern border, a consequence of the Islamic Alliance’s refusal to see the promise of the new alien technologies, mankind had one chance to restore order to this world and to avert the nuclear war that could end it.
The UFNS represented that chance. The new project to rebuild the Stephenson Gateway would break ground just outside of Frankfurt in the coming month. Prokorov was firm in his belief that the alien benefactors who had provided these wonderful technologies to mankind could be called upon to help guide humanity’s path to a more stable world.
He found himself grinding his teeth and took a deep breath, forcing the muscles in his jaw to relax. To have peace threatened by the secret technologies the Smythes had developed was something he would not tolerate, but a significant adjustment to his strategy was required. This new threat was much too great to be dealt with covertly. He had to think bigger if he was to be certain of the kill. And that meant he would need buy-in from the leaders of the New Soviet Union, the East Asian People’s Alliance, the European Union, and the United States. His aides would require several hours to coordinate the top-secret videoconference, but there was no getting around it.
In the meantime, he would let Daniil Alkaev and the forces he had already placed at the operative’s disposal try to disrupt the Smythe operation in Lima. After all, Daniil might get lucky, making the upcoming videoconference moot.
But if Daniil failed, there was always plan B.
The trip to Lima had been an all-nighter, requiring several out-of-the-way stops as Heather used her savant visions to identify and bypass checkpoints that could have resulted in violent confrontations. As Janet drove, Mark sat in the back of the SUV, resting the AR-15 between his legs and watching Heather dive deep into that mental place where only she could go. With Jack in the passenger seat, Mark felt like he could relax, confident that between the two of them they would spot trouble in time to ready a response.
Things had a way of spinning out of control no matter how well you planned for contingencies. And this South American trip had certainly proven that rule. What had intended to be a short stop to solidify allies had devolved into its own special form of trouble.
Mark had no illusions that finding Robby would be easy. The kid was just too talented, and with Eos blocking their attempts to track him by hijacking surveillance systems, that meant they would be relying heavily on Jack’s strange intuition.
Lima was a big city with massive slums and a huge indigenous population. For a highly trained and enhanced person such as Robby, the locale offered an abundance of opportunities to disappear, even if he was technically still a child. There would, of course, be lots of people who would want to take advantage of him. Mark pitied them. The assumptions they would make would only get them killed.
But Tall Bear, through his extensive connections to the Native People’s Alliance, was their ace in the hole. He’d put out the word that he was looking for a boy matching Robby’s description, complete with his indigenous disguise and probable location. That request would be disseminated throughout native communities over the course of the next few days. If someone in that network saw Robby, Tall Bear would be notified.
Heather’s voice brought her husband back to the present.
“Uh-oh.”
“What?” Janet asked. “Have you got a lead on Robby?”
“No. But something big is going on. I’m detecting unscheduled movement of several Spetsnaz and U.S. Special Operations Command units that have been alerted within the last few hours.”
“Where are they headed?” asked Jack.
“I don’t know yet. Checking.”
Mark put on his SRT headset, gently touching his mind to Heather’s.
“Can I help?”
He felt a mixture of her mental exhaustion and relief.
“You bet. Focus on the Spetsnaz. I’ll take SOCOM.”
“On it.”
Mark felt his pulse increase and focused on dropping it back to a steady forty-three beats per minute. He and Heather hadn’t been on a mission this important in a long time and, odd as it seemed, it felt pretty damn good. In this life or the next, there was nobody he’d rather have at his side.
Robby felt Eos come to alert as she spoke in his mind.
“The FSS has just ordered the covert deployment of special operations forces from the New Soviet Union and from the United States to separate staging areas just outside of Lima. The Americans will be in place within the next several hours. The Spetsnaz shortly thereafter.”
Feeling his adrenaline spike, Robby channeled the memory of a deep alpha meditation and felt the river of relaxation flow through him.
“That’s fine. Monitor them but don’t interfere. Let’s not give away the fact that we know they’re coming.”
“Strategically sound decision. Agreed.”
Robby smiled. Even when Eos deferred to him, she couldn’t help but pass judgment, good or bad. The memory of what his dad had said came forth. A yes-man only reinforces bad decisions. Eos was no yes-man.
He stood up and walked to the window that looked out over the busy street below. After the bars closed, the traffic died out in Lima. His special talent told him that this night was deader than usual, an omen. Fortunately Robby was above such superstition.
Eos had made all the arrangements for this two-story house, including pantry stocking instructions and the designated key drop. Payment had been made by direct transfer into the owner’s bank account, three thousand dollars for the month plus an additional two thousand as a deposit against possible damages.
Not that Robby cared about either amount. Eos could make electronic money more easily than the U.S. Federal Reserve. Robby merely needed a secure base of operations, and thought it even more advantageous that he was in a cartel safe house. The owner wouldn’t raise any questions.
“Also,” Eos said,
“Jack Gregory, Janet Price, Heather Smythe, and Mark Smythe are inbound to Lima. How they found us is an unanswered question.”
“Probably the same way the FSS did.”
“Are you implying that they detected my signature?”
Was there a bit of annoyance in the tone of Eos’s question? If so, it did Robby a world of good.
“No. Just saying that there are a lot of folks headed this way right now.”
“Would you like me to have your parents and the Smythes arrested?”
“No. Just throw them off track. I don’t want them involved in the fight that’s coming.”
Robby felt a nice warm glow enter his core. As badly as he wanted to prevent his parents from riding to his rescue, the knowledge of how badly they wanted to find him made him feel really good.
He tagged the feeling in his eidetic memory. That warmth was worthy of replay on a semiregular basis.
The fine steel blade of the Ka-Bar made a soft whisking sound as it slid across the oiled surface of the whetstone. Daniil Alkaev knew that Prokorov’s focus was the Smythes, but they were just the icing on the cake. Jack “The Ripper” Gregory was his target.
Galina sensed it. Of course she did. The woman read him like a book. After all, she was a creature of like disposition. At some point he might have to do something about that, but at the moment, he would continue to enjoy her provocative edges. His love of the edge was what made life worth living.
No target was more dangerous than The Ripper. For years, the American operative turned private contractor had dominated Daniil’s thoughts. Daniil had studied his classified FSB case file . . . even gaining access to the non-redacted CIA file on the man’s early career. But Daniil was fascinated by the years after The Ripper had left the CIA.
They weren’t easy years to reconstruct but, with a few significant gaps, Daniil had managed to do it. The man’s kill list included some very dangerous targets, among them the head of the Russian Mafia, Vladimir Roskov, and the EAPA Ministry of State Security’s top assassin, Qiang Chu.
And The Ripper was married to a woman who was every bit as dangerous as Galina. Fortunately Daniil could get to both of them at the same time, through their eight-year-old son, Robert Brice Gregory, named after The Ripper’s long-dead brother. With a trap baited for the boy, The Ripper and Janet Price would be drawn into a kill zone of Daniil’s making.
But first Daniil had to find them, and that was proving difficult. Hugo Mendez, his contact within the Shining Path guerilla group, had assured him that if The Ripper and company were in Lima, he would soon learn where in the city they were hiding. Apparently, “soon” had a different meaning in this part of the world.
Daniil wiped the blade on a soft cloth and then placed the sharp edge on his thumb. He didn’t feel the cut, but a drop of blood welled from the skin. With a nod of satisfaction, he wiped the blade clean and returned it to its sheath.
Patience was one of a hunter’s best weapons. Even though it was Daniil’s least favorite, he was a disciplined apex predator and would wait for his prey to reveal itself. In the meantime, he would prepare for the kill of all kills.
“Whatever is about to happen is going down in Peru,” Jamal said, his voice tight with excitement.
Eileen understood that. The things she was seeing through their shared satellite link was showing heightened NSA activity focused in and around Lima. Special Operations Command networks were also spun up, indicative of an ongoing operation. All of these were using some of the latest encryption algorithms that were, for all practical purposes, unbreakable. Fortunately, she and Jamal didn’t need to decipher the encryption. They just needed to penetrate a single device on each of those networks.
There was one central flaw that made all networks vulnerable to the best hackers on the planet: humans. Whether it was humans who took shortcuts in their programming or human operators who failed to follow approved procedures, there was always a way in for those good enough to find it.
For Eileen, the opportunity came through President Benton’s cell phone, a device that he carried wherever he went. Though it had been secure when issued, he’d added several apps, one of which enabled him to browse social media and organize photos from his two teenage daughters.
“There’s definitely Delta Force involvement,” Eileen said over the rapid clicking of their two keyboards. “They’re already inbound, with orders to occupy a staging area just outside of Lima and wait for the go order.”
Seated in front of his laptop across the table from her, Jamal glanced up. “A Spetsnaz unit is also on the way, but it’s going to take them longer to get there. There’s also a lot of Shining Path chatter. How’s your Spanish?”
“Not bad.”
“That’s good. Una cerveza por favor is about my limit. Give me a sec to push this over to you.”
“I’ll take a look.”
When Jamal sent her the link, Eileen opened it and began scanning for anything that seemed relevant.
“It’s not just Shining Path. Looks like the Native People’s Alliance is involved as well. I’m even seeing some cartel activity that looks suspicious.”
Eileen paused. Several e-mails contained the same attached photograph, the picture of a handsome, dark-skinned boy wearing clothing popular with the indigenous people of the area. But there was something about his face, something vaguely familiar. What was it?
Turning her attention from the NPA’s communications back to the Shining Path’s, she hit pay dirt.
“Okay. The Shining Path is looking for the Smythe group. Specifically Mark and Heather Smythe, Jack Gregory, Janet Price, and their son Robert.”
The mention of Jack’s son triggered a memory that pulled an exclamation from her lips. “Wait!”
She returned to the picture, zooming in on the boy’s fine features. His skin color looked authentic, but his facial features definitely looked Anglo. Eileen pulled up a recent photograph of Jack Gregory, tiling the two images side by side on her display. Jesus. The kid was going to be a dead ringer for his dad when he got older. But he damn sure looked a lot older than eight. And why was the NPA hunting the boy while everyone else seemed to be after his mom and dad or the Smythes?
Pushing back from her laptop, Eileen tapped her knuckles on the table to catch Jamal’s attention. He looked up, his left eyebrow arching.
“Yes?”
Eileen took a deep breath and, for the first time since she and Jamal had started hacking their way through these highly classified networks, noticed Denise watching them from the couch.
“Well,” she said, “I think it’s time we reconnected with Freddy Hagerman.”
Jack felt the adrenaline rush that Khal Teth had just triggered like he’d been kicked in the gut. Instinctively he reached across from the passenger seat to grab the steering wheel, jerking it hard right, throwing the car into a slide that took them off the road and between a pair of thick trees.
In the driver’s seat, Janet reacted as only someone with her level of training and trust in her partner could have done. She removed both hands from the wheel and concentrated on manipulating the gas pedal and brake of the old-school Subaru, drawing her Glock from its holster in the same motion. And behind her, Mark and Heather’s weapons came up at the same time, each seeking a target.
From the highway, a huge explosion split the night from the location they would now be crossing had they not veered into the forest. As the car skidded to a halt in a tangle of brush, Jack forced open his door and sprinted into the dark, pulled forward by the tug of danger that drifted through the night.
There was no moon. It didn’t matter. The night misted red all around him. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d last felt this Anchanchu-powered adrenaline rush. He’d missed the addiction.
Janet felt Jack grab the steering wheel and glanced right, startled by the brightness of the red glint in his eyes.
Shit!
She reacted automatically, releasing the wheel to this man who was mo
re than a man, doing her part to keep them all from dying.
As trees whisked past the car left and right, she patted the brake in a rapid motion that roughly approximated antilock braking, which the old Subaru didn’t have. The Glock filled her hand automatically. She searched for targets in the woods illuminated by the bouncing headlight beams of the automobile.
The explosion on the highway wiped her vision and frosted the safety glass in the driver’s side windows. The car lurched to a stop. She switched off the lights, turned off the car, threw open the door, and dived out as gunfire crackled through the night.
Bullets whizzed past, chopping the brush and trees to his right. Jack sprinted on a course parallel to the line of fire, flanking the people who were blindly spraying their automatic weapons into the night. He knew precisely how Janet, Mark, and Heather would assault this ambush. They had rehearsed this drill a thousand times. Each of them would do their job and Jack would do his.
Jack sensed the man at the far end of the ragged line before he saw him. Apparently he was some kind of leader of this guerilla band, yelling instructions in Spanish that sent several men forward through the thick woods toward the spot where the car had come to a stop. Jack let him finish and then cut his throat from behind. Shifting the blade, he jammed it up behind the man’s chin and into his brain, and then silently lowered the body to the ground.
From the direction where the guerillas had disappeared he heard several individual shots, followed by the staccato burst of automatic weapons fire that came to a sudden end. Yells from Jack’s right confirmed that the remaining guerillas knew the meaning of the preceding sequence of gunfire. They’d just lost several comrades.
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 27