by David Wong
“Squatterville. You’re familiar with it? The unfinished condos the poor people have moved into, a couple of blocks down from where Livingston Tower, uh, was?”
“Yeah.”
“They need protection. If Molech goes on his rampage, I need someone to get those people out of there, and to a safe place. Even if the chaos doesn’t come to their block, you can help make sure the food and diapers and all that arrives safely.”
“Miss Ashe, this entire city is a target. Molech could go after the hospital, the art galleries, even the nuke plant. We’re not going to sit back and let him do it.”
“Right, but those targets all have security because the people who own them have money. There’s nobody left to protect Squatterville. You do that, without accidentally murdering everyone there, you get five hundred grand. Then after that, maybe we’ll talk.”
“But if we take out Molech, then those people will be safe.”
“People like that are never safe. Take it or leave it, but here’s where you get to decide if your fantasy is to actually be a hero, or to just murder people you don’t like. Because in my mind, if you were true heroes, you’d already be down there, making sure all those poor kids don’t have to go to bed scared every night.”
Lee clearly hated this plan, but not as much as he hated having to openly say no.
“I … need to discuss it with my team.”
“Zoey,” said Will. “Tell him the truth.”
“What?”
Will said to Lee, “Molech will almost certainly go to Squatterville. And we need it protected. But not because of the people there. We need it because of the coins.”
Zoey thought, “The what?” at the exact same time Lee spoke it out loud.
“Two hundred million dollars in rare gold and silver coins, recovered from a Spanish galleon off the coast of Florida about fifteen years ago. They were buried there by Molech’s father, when it was still a vacant lot. Now they’re under the concrete of the lobby—you can actually see cracks in the floor over the burial site, on account of the loose soil underneath. It’s the real reason the building was never finished. Molech found out about it, and I have a feeling that’s going to be his first stop. You keep Molech away, you get half.”
Lee gave no answer, but his gaze had kind of disconnected, focusing into the middle distance where a fantasy of unspeakable riches was playing out before him.
Will straightened his tie and said, “Now, if you don’t mind, we have a lot of work to do.”
Will headed for the door, and no one stopped him.
FORTY-EIGHT
Andre was focused on his phone as they took the elevator up to the library. Will asked, “Anything?” and Andre shook his head.
Zoey asked, “What are we looking for?”
Will said, “The assault on the Fire Palace.”
“By who?”
“Everyone? I’d bet on the Co-Op first, though.”
“Maybe you convinced them to stay away.”
“I convinced them to go in. I told them we were moving in at dawn, there’s no way in hell they’d let us steal their hero moment. I basically set a deadline for them.”
“Wait, you wanted them to go after Molech?”
“They were going to do it either way, I wanted to make sure they did it tonight.”
“Holy crap, you’re diabolical.”
He shrugged. “The key is that Blake probably assumed I was lying about the timeline, meaning he thinks we’re planning to go in much sooner, and that the dawn reference was a ruse specifically to prevent him from getting a jump on us. So he likely went back to his people and told them they needed to be ready to roll … pretty much now.”
“So, what do we do?”
“For the moment? We watch.”
Andre said, “Well, I for one need coffee.”
They all headed down to the kitchen, because that’s where the coffee was, and Zoey flitted around the bar making drinks. Nobody had ordered anything, she just made some pretty ones and lined them up on the counter. The one she was working on at the moment had four shots of espresso, a mixture of coconut milk and whole milk, and was sweetened with bergamot syrup. She drew a “Z” in an old English font in the foam, and sprinkled it with chocolate shavings. Then she grabbed another mug and started again.
Andre said, “I could watch you do that all day. It’s like a dance.”
“I can do any of these with my eyes closed. Java Lodge only had one barista at a time, it was a one-woman show. I liked it when it was busy, though, felt like a challenge. But now … I’m just trying to keep moving. If I stop and think about all this I’ll have a panic attack.”
They had brought up a feed on the wall behind the bar, and Andre was flipping through locations. The Fire and Ice towers, the Co-Op’s headquarters, the neighborhood around the Casa.
He glanced at Will and said, “Pirate treasure? That was the lie you came up with. You told them that there was pirate treasure buried under Squatterville?”
“Seemed like the sort of thing they’d believe. At least it gives them a reason to be on site.”
Budd and Echo walked in.
Budd said, “We got one.”
Echo said, “I smell coffee.”
Zoey said, “It’s right there, drink it or it goes down the drain, I’m brewing as a coping mechanism. And we got one of what?”
Before Budd could answer, Andre said, “It’s starting.”
The Co-Op hadn’t waited long after nightfall to launch their assault. A pair of massive black helicopters sawed their way through the frigid evening air toward the Fire Palace, filmed by a swarm of following drones. When the view switched to ground level, a convoy of six hulking black trucks were shown rumbling down Fairfax Avenue, three from each direction. Planning to hit the tower from the ground and the air, simultaneously.
Zoey looked around. “Where’s Wu?”
Andre said, “Outside. He found a spider in the hall. He scooped it up in a paper cup and said he was taking it out to the courtyard so it could go find its family.”
The feed cut back to the Fire Palace, which seemed completely dormant from the outside—if the building had any lights, they were enshrouded by the black tarp. It was just a dark void in the skyline. If bionic supervillains were scrambling into position, they certainly weren’t making a public show of it.
But then, Echo said, “There. At street level.”
The Blink feeds noticed a moment after she did—they all started focusing down at the circular paved walk at the base of the tower. Blue lights lit up, one by one, forming a ring. The lights were eminating from waist-high objects rising from the sidewalk, which Zoey was pretty sure were shaped like extended middle fingers.
The trucks plowed forward, their rough tires making a high-pitched buzz on the pavement like a kicked beehive, approaching from the north and south. The first trucks were still two blocks away when the circle of the blue glowing hands pulsed in unison, like a row of camera flashbulbs all going off at once, making a noise like a giant cracking a bullwhip. The Blink cameras all switched toward the trucks, as if expecting explosions. None occurred. Still, the trucks slowed at the sight of the lights, as if the drivers were suddenly unsure of what they were barreling into.
Or rather, most of them did.
The first trucks—the ones that had been closest to the blast in each direction—continued to plow forward, unabated. The first started to swerve off to the left, away from the Fire Palace, toward the Ice Palace across the street. The next rolled on toward the Fire Palace, but weaved, as if the driver was steering the vehicle with his knees. Eventually both trucks rumbled lazily to a stop, one bumping gently into one of the glowing hands outside the Fire Palace, the other rolling up onto the sidewalk across the street. The rest of the trucks skidded to a halt, uncertain, keeping their distance.
For a moment, there was nothing. No SWAT teams came spilling out of the trucks, nothing exploded, no enhanced horrors came sprinting out of the tower.
Instead, after a few minutes a dozen or so shirtless Molech henchmen came strolling out toward the vehicles, calmly. One of them was eating a sandwich. They walked up to both vehicles and opened the rear doors. Zoey gasped as a bundle of charred limbs tumbled out. The henchmen rooted around inside the trucks, gathering up the weapons and gear from within and hauling it all back into the Fire Palace. One of the henchmen pulled out a can of spray paint, and in glow-in-the-dark blue paint, tagged both of the vehicles with a drawing of a hand giving the middle finger.
Next to Zoey, Andre gave a tired sigh. Zoey kept her eyes on the feed as she started grinding another batch of espresso beans.
The collective gaze of Blink switched to the roof of the Fire Palace, where the two choppers had already dropped ziplines onto a rooftop that was still smoldering from the aftermath of Armando’s battle with Rodzilla earlier in the day.
Another ring of blue hands glowed to life around the rim of the circular rooftop.
There was another flash.
A rain of flaming corpses tumbled out of the helicopters.
The choppers swerved and lurched and then tumbled down onto Fairfax Avenue, joining the dead trucks nearby. The comment bar alongside the feed went wild with Team Molech cheers.
Zoey whispered, “We should have stopped them. We should have talked them out of it.”
Will said, “You still have much to learn about this world.”
The rest of the Co-Op’s armored column was now backing up, slowly enough to make it appear to be a strategic repositioning rather than a full-on retreat. The world waited to see what else the hired guns of Tabula Ra$a would throw at Molech, but the feeds for each of the major security services were full of stunned professionals trying to hide their terror in detached discussion of strategy. Suggestions were made about cutting off power to the building to shut down the energy weapons, but someone noted that the Co-Op had actually already done that—the buildings apparently had their own power source. Analysts tried to study and identify the defenses, and quickly came to the conclusion that they were nothing currently known to science.
But then the feed switched to a group of men surrounding a single olive green truck, parked outside of town, in the desert. It had a ramp on the back aimed toward the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, covered in a green tarp. When they yanked the tarp aside, it revealed what looked to Zoey like a miniature fighter jet, about the size of one you’d make for a baby or a small dog to fly. She assumed it was neither of those things.
At the sight of it, Andre choked on his drink.
Zoey said, “What is that?”
Echo said, “Remote control heavy ordinance drone. Basically a cruise missile. Looks Russian.”
Will said, “They’re going to try to bring down the building.” He seemed mildly annoyed, as if frustrated by the amateurs’ unsubtle technique.
Budd said, “Those crazy sons of bitches. That’s the Black Dawn militia. Guess we know who hijacked that convoy last year—”
The missile blasted into the night sky on a pillar of yellow fire, as the men on the ground hooted and yelped, several of them drinking beers. The missile had a nose camera that was patched in to Blink, because of course it was, and the feed showed the landscape whipping by underneath, the glimmering skyline of downtown Tabula Ra$a just ahead. The radio voice of the guy controlling the device narrated its trip, announcing altitude and wind direction, a red box on the screen hovering over its target in the distance.
Zoey said, “Am I supposed to be terrified that weapons like that exist out in the wild, or rooting for it to work?”
No one answered. Everyone was riveted, eyes locked on the feed as the missile ate up the distance between it and the Fire Palace.
The pilot said, “One kilometer to target. Nine hundred meters. Eight hundred. Seven hu—Whoa, what the—?”
Suddenly, the skyline jerked to the right, as if the missile had taken a hard left turn.
“Veering off course, thirty-two degrees, trying to correct.” A pause of a few seconds, and then, “Controls unresponsive.”
The view turned and turned, then the horizon froze in the view screen and the missile screamed forward.
“Initiating self-destruct,” said the pilot. Then a few seconds later, “No response. We’ve lost control of the unit. Damn it, Daryl, I told you this was a bad idea.”
Zoey said, “Oh my god, is that thing just flying wildly into the city somewhere?”
Echo shook her head. “Worse. I think Molech’s men took control of it.”
Zoey went cold. “Where are they sending it?” The real question she wanted answered was, Are they sending it here?
Blink switched to exterior shots of the missile, hopping from one feed to the next as it streaked past random drones in the night and flashed in between skyscrapers. It turned once more, then arced down toward its destination.
Budd said, “Jesus.”
Will said, “It’s heading for the hospital.”
Zoey thought that somewhere she could hear Molech laughing.
The missile screamed down, leaving a yellow gash in the night sky, the massive white building filling its view screen.
It impacted the parking lot in front of the hospital, erupting in a towering ball of blooming orange fire that could probably be seen from Fort Drayton. They heard the explosion first on Blink, then a second later it echoed in from the distance outside the kitchen window. Zoey jumped both times. She had no idea if Molech landed it in the parking lot out of mercy, or just misjudged the approach.
Will turned away from the feed and said, “Like Zulus swarming a tank.”
Zoey said, “What do we do, Will? What the hell do we do?”
Will thought for a moment and then said, “I guess now would be a good time to tell you what we were doing before we met your father.”
FORTY-NINE
Will said, “Do you know what PSYOPS are?”
Zoey made herself take her eyes off of the feed and said, “It’s some kind of secret military thing, right? I think I saw a movie about it once but I fell asleep during a romance subplot.”
“It’s psychological operations. Mind games, with the enemy, to try to win the war without firing a shot. Andre, Budd, and I all did work with the Eighth Military Information Support Group. On the private side—we were contractors, no official connection to the U.S. government, so it’d be easy to disown us if we ever got caught. Fifteen years ago, we were all in North Korea, during the insurgency that our government was not supporting in any official capacity, while pulling every unofficial trick in the book.”
“And Arthur was in on this?”
“No, Arthur was there, for … business.”
“Right, I don’t want to know.” She looked at Echo. “What was your job?”
“Well, I was in fourth grade at the time, so…”
“At the time,” interrupted Will, “the insurgency was falling apart, but the regime didn’t know that. Our objective was to try to convince the North Korean government that the rebels were much stronger than they actually were, to try to force them to the negotiating table. We knew they were paranoid that the rebels had gained the support of the Chinese, which if true would have spelled doom for the regime. It wasn’t true, but our job was to convince them it was. You follow so far?”
It occurred to Zoey that you could really get Will talking if you turned the subject to how much smarter he was than everybody else. Andre took two of the coffee drinks from the bar, and sat down next to Will. On the feed, fire trucks were swarming the hospital parking lot.
Zoey said, “Yeah. You want something to drink?”
“Can you make hot tea? I want the simplest possible cup of hot tea you can make. Nothing fancy.”
“Coming right up.”
“Now,” Will continued, “I don’t know how familiar you are with the war or international politics in general, but the leaders of North Korea were a succession of increasingly insane and paranoid despots with a swarm of angry wasps where t
heir brains should have been. That was our advantage—if we dropped the right hints, the regime would believe anything. So, the first step was to just allow a large cache of insurgent weapons to get captured. Gear left out in the rain, unguarded, so the regime could sweep in and seize it all without firing a shot. Can you think of why we would do that?”
Zoey said, “It’s creating the impression you didn’t need it, right? Like a poor dude blowing his whole paycheck on a date, so the girl thinks he’s richer than he is?”
“Exactly. If the insurgents can afford to leave this just lying around, imagine what they must have elsewhere.”
“But that’s a huge waste if the bad guys didn’t happen to notice it.”
“Always assume your enemies are more clever than you give them credit for—even an animal can think several steps ahead. Which means if you want them to believe a lie, you don’t need to jam it down their throat. You just leave them a trail of bread crumbs, and let them believe they arrived at the conclusion against your will. But it all starts with this one fundamental principle: find out what the enemy is most afraid of, and you’ll also find what they’re the most eager to believe.”
Zoey slid the tea over to Will. It was a cup of her Cthulhu Tea—a clear mug displaying three layers of different-colored hot tea flavors with gold at the bottom, fading to blood-red, and then into midnight blue at the top, like a sunset. A few drops of Baileys cream were dabbed onto the surface with a thin straw, where it dripped down into the tea, hanging in the dark blue liquid like the white, dangling tentacles of an unholy creature reaching down from the heavens. It was the single most elaborate drink Zoey knew how to make.
Will said, “Thank you. I think.”
Andre piped up. “Now, my favorite part of that whole operation, or rather, what would have been my favorite part had it worked—”
Will held up a hand. “We don’t need to go over this part—”
Budd said, “I reckon we do.”
“This is all still technically classified, I’ve already said too much—”
“My favorite part,” said Andre, talking over him, “was Will came up with this idea to make a death ray.”