Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

14

  Thomas Richards:

  Fifty seven minutes. That’s how long it takes to get the civilian police commander onsite to make the calls I have to insist six times that he make, and then for him to get his men to pull the barricade strips and let us move out. In the meanwhile, Grayman is long gone. Stupidly. Needlessly.

  “All we had to do was clue the locals better. Just a picture of him—attach anything to it you want. They had more than enough manpower scrambling. He wouldn’t have gotten three blocks.”

  “Attach what, Colonel?” Henderson goes for the old defense. “What would you suggest we tell them that would make them go running for this guy without ‘raqing the whole thing?”

  “It didn’t have to be a detain order. I’d be happy with a follow-but-do-not-engage. Plus, involving them might have gotten us out of there faster. As it was, I can’t even explain why I’m in such a hurry…”

  “They can’t know about Grayman, Colonel,” he pushes, his face in my heads-up getting tighter and redder even with the fuzzy resolution. “Not even a picture. They’d scan it and connect it to the passport—somebody would, especially after this—and his paper is already flagged as stolen in Germany. His name would be in every union cop’s flashfeed in five minutes. Then we’d have no way to maintain the Press blackout. Worse: the enemy has contacts in law enforcement—they’d find out his name.”

  “And this is better?” I have to stop and breathe. Tired. But I can’t and won’t just lose it here in front of my teams. “Losing Gray is one thing. But now we’ve got angry cops and onsite press, and a very visible blasted building. And me with two squads worth of mostly American special operators, still present when the cameras roll. We could have been out in five minutes if I could have at least admitted that we were still pursuing our target.”

  “You really think you had a shot at re-establishing?” He’s being aggravatingly cool. “Five minutes? Gray was well-gone within two—he knew we were on his ass. You were better to sit bushy and make it look like your target had bitten it when the deli went up. We can still call that an accident, blame it on the Wabs for getting sloppy and doing a premature, pat ourselves on the back for ‘containing’ them—zero civilian casualties. And we have a good idea where he’s going from here.”

  He’s right. That’s the problem: He’s right and I’m tired. Once the deli blew, there was nothing we could have done that wouldn’t have made a bigger mess. Henderson picked the lesser evil: make it look like we ‘raqed a routine tail on a minor Wab, who ran and sent his bretheren to Allah with an unfortunate equipment malfunction, and call ourselves lucky that there was no civilian collateral. If any hint of Grayman gets out to the Net or the Press or even just the Union cops’ shared-intel—well… things are bound to connect.

  “Are we done?” Henderson wants to know.

  “What about your Hal?” I push it. “I thought it could see ‘every contingency.’”

  “Which is why we’re playing catch-up at the next high-potential.”

  “Athens…” And all I’m thinking about is how much more high profile this is going to be if Gray makes messy noise in such a symbolic venue. Or we just ‘raq it by ourselves. “Am I going to get better intel this run?”

  “You’ll get what we’ve got.”

  “Unfiltered?”

  He pretends he doesn’t hear me and logs out.

  I fall back in the seat of the Vee and rub my eyes, trying to make it look like it’s just the rez of the heads-up blood-shotting me.

  I close my eyes as we roll out of town, shutting out the tourist-friendly scenery. But if I keep them shut too long, my mind starts rolling its own sims, rerunning every bloody sick thing Grayman’s done. Trying to make sense of this.

  But I can’t. Grayman doesn’t sum—especially now that we’ve seen him up close enough to confirm his ID. And neither does Henderson’s line regarding him. If Gray really is some poor American tourist who lost it and managed to take out his Wab kidnappers, the urgency should be to scoop him up and secure him. He’d be a headline hero, if he’d made less of a vindictive mess in the process. Hell, he still could be, even despite how far he’s fallen: If he is a civilian, then he has no rules of engagement and a good run at an extreme circumstances/temporary insanity defense to shake off any bureaucrat who wants to take issue with his methods—who hasn’t sat through one of those Wab head-videos they ram down our nets and not wanted to do exactly what he did back to them with that fucking sword?

  I have to stop and focus, because here I am getting cathartic with him, even cheering for the fucker—I can’t let myself go there, not ever. But if he is a civilian—operant word being if, because if he isn’t then he’s pro and he’s fucking us and he’s meat—then my duty is to bring him home. Assuming he’ll let me.

  No. He won’t. That’s the point: he can’t go home, because if we send him home, one way or another his story will go public. And he can’t go public. If the Rads ID him, they’ll fatwa him, his family, anyone he’s ever known. He knows that—of course he knows that—but he also has to know the more noise he makes, the more likely he’ll get caught or killed or ID’ed. He can’t be thinking that he’s just going to wipe them all out by himself, even if he has a full directory. The Rads don’t die—they just keep farming the angry disenfranchised for more marts. Anybody who’s been conscious the last fifteen years knows that. The more we kill, the more they inspire. Grayman doesn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance in Wahabi hell.

  He knows that, too.

  So what is he doing?

  Athens…

  “Where’s Captain Burke?”

  “Almost an hour ahead of us,” Samuels tells me fast enough to let me know he’s been keeping an eye on the GPS.

  “Linked?”

  “Here, Colonel,” Burke’s voice cuts through the throbbing stars behind my eyelids. “Surprised you’re not in the air…”

  “No hurry, Captain.” Or so Henderson insisted. “Timeframes are still gelling and we need to get our visibility back down—don’t want anybody seeing our helos flying into Athens right now. We can detail our operational plan and send orders to the teams from the road. I take it you received the briefs?” Something else Henderson insisted. But I’m not counter to it—I’m going to need as many pro guns in the fight as I can get, if this is what it the intel we’ve got says it is.

  “Yes, sir.” The attitude isn’t there right now—tells me he’s already read the brief—tells me he can indeed pull it together when he knows he needs to. “And sent back some flashware he’d conveniently left in the car. It gave us some details we didn’t have before on this ‘Jericho’ thing, including a pretty current list of the players. We’ll know who we’re looking for when we get there—or quite a few of them, anyway—but then, so does he.” He pauses a moment. I can feel him hesitate with the discomfort I’d expect, given what he’s been reading up on. “Is this really a biological?”

  “It looks that way, if the intel’s good.” And I have to open my eyes and look at the members of my team in the vehicle with me: Samuels, Ransom, Carlin. They stay pro and don’t show what they’re feeling. But I know at least Ransom and Samuels have seen bio attacks before. Just not this potentially big. “At least it may not go off as written—something we can actually thank Grayman for. AI doesn’t think they could have cultured and loaded for what they originally wanted, given the time crunch he’s putting on them.”

  “So you think that’s what he’s doing: scaring them into going too early?”

  “They know he’s coming—he made sure of that when he uploaded his little ninja movie. Just replay the feed from when he walked into the deli: he was recognized. Not expected, but they know what he looks like—at least that silly costume of his. Now with the big bang he just made in Larissa, they’ll figure he’s in-country and headed for Athens—even a backwater rockpile Rad can connect-the-dots and follow the carnage. And they’ll figure he’s finding them because he’s hacked their ware, which means he al
so knows what they’re planning, and they’ll assume he’s sharing it with us. So they know they’re blown and running out of time. They won’t waste what they have. Spite, if nothing else. Datascan’s already picked up the ID’ed targets moving through the city’s security grid. They’re in motion, probably for tomorrow. Morning rush is likely—they’ll want the highest exposure. Lunch, at the latest. I’d even go dinner—all those locals heading home to family—but they have to know he’ll be all over them by then.”

  “They could still hit the evening rush today,” Samuels considers tensely—I can see sweat starting to shimmer on his upper lip.

  “Datascan insists that’s too soon—they need to expose and incubate their carriers for at least twelve to eighteen hours,” Becker tries to be reassuring, but sounds very clearly like he can’t even sell it to himself—and he programmed the thing.

  “Despite the time crunch, they’ve still likely got enough for it to get away from us fast.” Burke considers correctly.

  “We’ll have support, Captain,” I do the reassuring now. “All we need. Snipers. Bio-teams. Containment. We’ve got a good shot at this, and we will not miss. We just can’t let the Wabs see what we’ve got on them until they roll past the no-return.”

  I can hear him thinking about it for half a mile. Then:

  “I understand, Colonel.”

  He says it solemnly enough to make me trust he’ll do his job, even though he knows I’ll be asking him—and the rest of my team—to face-to-face it with engineered biologicals.

  “Funny name…” I hear him mumble.

  “What’s that, Captain?”

  “From the Wab flashdrive. The lame little codename they picked for their divine bioterror mission. I don’t get it…”

  “What?”

  “If it’s a bio… Why ‘Jericho’?”

  “…’and the walls come tumblin’ down’…” Samuels sings to no one in particular.