 
# INTEL 1 Omnibus

## Books 1-4

## Erec Stebbins

_Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.—_ Mark Twain

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

_INTEL 1 Omnibus_. Copyright © 2016 Erec Stebbins

Published 2016 by Twice Pi Press, erecstebbinsbooks.com

Unless otherwise indicated, all materials on these pages are copyrighted by Erec Stebbins. All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image, may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission.

Cover design by Erec Stebbins © 2016.

ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-942360-24-7

Kindle ISBN-13:978-1-942360-25-4

# Contents

Content Guide

Book 1: THE RAGNARÖK CONSPIRACY

Book 2: EXTRAORDINARY RETRIBUTION

Book 3: THE ANONYMOUS SIGNAL

Book 4: THE NASH CRITERION

Get Book 5: ANDROCIDE

INTEL 1 Audiobooks

About the Author

Daughter of Time SCIFI Trilogy
**Content Guide**

This novel contains depictions and references to events and ideas that some will find disturbing, including, but not limited to, sexual assault, battery, murder, imprisonment, captivity, severe illness, pain, fear, medical procedures, torture, and war. There is also profanity and strong language, the challenging of some accepted norms, and the questioning of different kinds of authority, religious and secular. It could be rated PG-13, R, or even NC-17 in the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system. The book also contains religion, partisan politics, Oxford commas, and an unnecessary number of tpyos and, grammer misteaks. Readers are asked to prepare accordingly.

> _In today's wars, there are no morals. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets. If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists._
> 
> Osama bin Laden

> _Choose your enemy with wisdom, for him do you become._
> 
> ancient proverb

Part I

# Targets of Vengeance

The significance of myth is not to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. —J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"
1

# Monsters

Near the back of a rank dive in the Bronx, in one of the deeper recesses and darkest corners, FBI agent John Savas hunched over a shot glass, a caramel-colored liquid halfway to the rim. His slumped posture and navy fisherman's cap obscured most of his features. Dark hair flecked with gray spilled out from under the cap and melded with the rough layer of stubble on his face.

The smoke in the bar created a tangible fog, infiltrating every crevice, staining curtains and nearly obscuring the obligatory "No Smoking" sign. A jazz band played its heart out against a side wall.

A select group of patrons ignored the music. Huddled in black corners, their faces turned to the walls, obscured figures whispered into the shadows.

Savas clenched his jaw. He'd been waiting too long, and this was a dangerous game. His recent injuries tore at his concentration, and fatigue began to set in. He shouldn't be here; he knew that. His choices hadn't pleased the physicians.

_But they don't understand._

He glared at the whiskey in front of him- a prop, but once a poisonous balm. Beginning one rain-drenched night at the Church of the Holy Trinity in 2001, he'd nearly drowned in that sea, losing his job, his home, his wife. After his son's death, John Savas had lost himself.

He hadn't touched a drop for nearly a decade. Not since the day he'd made a life-changing visit to the FBI. God worked in mysterious ways. _Or at least friends do._ Friends in high places, who had connected him to a new and experimental division at the FBI seeking unusually motivated recruits. Friends who had brought his file to the attention of Larry Kanter, a new branch chief, a man determined to rewrite the rules of national security, beginning with unorthodox methods and staff. Kanter had seen something in Savas, his record at the NYPD, the spark in his eyes at the mention of counterterrorism. Kanter had taken a chance on John Savas and been amply rewarded. But Savas had won that exchange, grasping a new lease on life— _and a mission_.

A moaning door hinge snapped him to the present. He glanced up discreetly, his slovenly posture belying an inner intensity.

A large man stepped inside, his appearance clashing with the interior of the bar. A battered coat poorly disguised his tailored clothes. His skin was a sandy brown, his features Arabic but obscured by the fat deposited over many years of high living. His stance indicated a man of power, but his eyes flashed fear. As the door closed behind him, two hulking bodyguards took positions outside. The man nodded toward a lone drinker near the door, a clone of the two hulks outside. _A scout_.

Savas returned his gaze to the drink. His contact was anxious, and frightened men were far easier to manipulate. _Now the trap will be set._

The Arab walked slowly toward Savas at the back of the room. His eyes darted in several directions, and he approached the booth like a hunted animal. He slid into the opposite seat, placing his hands on the table.

"This place is not safe."

Savas squinted above the whiskey and nodded, his olive skin blending into the stained wood around him. He scratched the three-day growth of beard.

"What place is _safe?"_ he replied, a false Greek accent, modeled on his immigrant grandfather's, inflecting the words. He opened his palms upward. "You want _safe_ , sell smartphones. You want to bring in your _shipments_ , talk to me."

Again, the Arab glanced around the room.

_He's very frightened._

"Dimitris," said the Arab, "I have my connections. We must know _who_ we deal with. Your name is not in _any_ shipping records. Your prints match _nothing_ in any database. You don't seem to _exist_."

Savas mulled this newfound paranoia. He glanced at the latex false-skin over his fingertips. _Bless my own paranoia._ He only hoped they didn't have access to DNA analysis. "Ambassador Hamid," he said with his most crooked smile, "I have been a disservice?"

The ambassador rumbled deeply over the music. "No. But we need to know more."

Savas shook his head. _Is my cover blown?_ He felt the bulge from his pistol and tried not to glance toward the bodyguards. "If you know more, it's not so good for me, _katalaves_?" He held up his hands. "No one knows these hands, Ambassador. My business is better with shadows. Not you, not the Americans, no one knows Dimitris."

"Is that your real name?"

Savas only smiled. "I have boats. Good boats, also shadows. Never traced. We pay good money and they stay shadows. If you change your mind, then find other boats." He paused dramatically. "If you can."

The ambassador squirmed. Savas didn't envy the two-faced game Hamid played at the UN. That position gave him tremendous opportunities to exploit weaknesses in U.S. security. But he risked much to play the role of a terrorist pawn, whatever they paid him. Hamid wasn't any kind of idealist. He was simply greedy scum that enabled the monsters.

The ambassador whispered tensely, "We would have been less uncertain if you hadn't _disappeared_ for a month!"

Savas had anticipated this. His injuries from the Indian Point insanity had pulled him off the street. Hamid had asked for meetings he could not honor. Dimitris the smuggler had simply disappeared. "It was, as the Americans say, too _hot_ , Ambassador. Dimitris was in danger."

The ambassador's eyes widened. "Danger? From where? Who knows about you? Can they connect you to me?"

Savas waved his hand dismissively. "No danger, no discovery. After those bombs at Indian Point, the FBI was busy. Nuclear power plants make them very nervous, no? Everyone was quiet."

" _FBI_?" the frightened man asked, desperately.

"Yes, FBI. Who else?"

The man relaxed. _Relaxed!_ Whatever had put the fear of God into Ambassador Hamid, it wasn't U.S. law enforcement. His cover wasn't blown. He still had a hook in this big fish. But the ambassador's reaction disturbed him. What would frighten him so much that arrest seemed a relief in comparison?

"Who, indeed?" said the ambassador, an awkward smile across his wide face. He scanned the room again and checked his watch. "Then we are still good. If you do not disappear again! But we must meet in more protected locations." Hamid seemed to have finished an internal argument of some kind. "Captain Dimitris, we will have our deal."

Savas put on his greediest grin, but he was also smiling internally. _Swallow the bait whole, Ambassador._ Soon the FBI would have an unprecedented catch, one they'd exploit to uncover a web of underground contacts. Then they'd toss him in jail until he was too old to remember his lucrative moonlighting. _Diplomatic immunity be damned._

The ambassador continued. "We will contact you soon. You will come to a place we designate." Savas groaned inwardly; the ambassador was introducing complications.

"Of course, _Ambassador_. But, after Indian Point, business is much more difficult. More _expensive_. You understand?"

The ambassador hardly frowned. "Yes, of course. This was anticipated. What are your terms?"

Savas suppressed a laugh. _Predictable_. He would drive a hard bargain to cement his character. "Double, Mr. Ambassador, and a quarter in advance."

"That's outrageous!"

"So is whatever you want to put on my boats."

The man nodded. "We will consider it and be in contact."

Hamid rose, having never ordered a drink, and checked again with the bodyguard by the door. He walked to the exit, throwing nervous glances across the bar. The seated goon followed him outside. Savas watched them through the window as they waited for their driver.

He pushed the drink away. He'd return to the FBI and talk to Kanter. They'd need enormous resources to bring in Hamid. After two years of tedious work, slowly bringing to life the Greek smuggler, luring several interested parties into the net, Savas had hit the jackpot. The monsters needed gremlins to enable their crimes, and there were always greedy men like Hamid to play the part. Relying on them was a weakness, a trail back to the hive. _And I will follow it._

A sharp sound tore through his consciousness—a slap from outside. Images of weapons danced through his mind, but he lurched away from the details and stood, staring forward.

The music stumbled to an awkward halt. People in the bar screamed and backed away from the window. Like the first stages of a Jackson Pollock commission, red paint was flung wildly across the glass—thick, languid drops tracing slow paths toward the sidewalk from a central bull's-eye. Crumpled on the cement was a figure in a trench coat, three large forms dancing over it, screaming into cell phones. A fist-sized hole ruptured from the coat, crimson rivulets spilling to the ground.

Dumbfounded, Savas stared. Years of work collapsed along with that body. Openings into terrorist cells slammed shut in his face. As chaos erupted and patrons scrambled for the exits, Savas stood still, glaring at the downed shape outside, knowing too well that it wouldn't rise. A perfect shot, through the heart, the bullet fired by a professional.

Ambassador Hamid had been assassinated.
2

# Special Ordnance

Through the window of the bistro, Savas watched an elegant woman in a gray pantsuit step out of a cab. Her highlighted hair shone a rich gold in the May sunlight, and she darted with a confident stride across the sidewalk to the restaurant entrance. She spoke politely to the maître d', who directed her toward a table at the back. He waited as she surveyed the establishment—tables well separated, sounds absorbed by the old woods and carpets—approving of his careful choice. They were ensured a private and comfortable conversation. Savas smiled when several heads turned as she made her way to his table.

"Dr. Wilson, your medical training's paying off."

She sat and rolled her eyes. "Okay, John, the punch line?"

"Well, three men looked your way. At forty-eight, that's a serious anti-aging formula."

She smiled. "Requisite flattery: check. Quotation of age: Uncheck. Decent digs for lunch: check. And the check?"

"Check," nodded Savas.

"You owe me dinner for this one."

"Lorrie, this case is three years, five agents, several hundred thousand dollars . . ."

"And one dead diplomat."

Savas frowned. "He was plugged into terrorist networks I'd give my right arm for!"

"He was plugged, all right."

"Somebody wanted him out of the way. I don't know if it's a competitor, another government, or what. But he was taken out for a reason. I want to know who and why."

A waiter stopped by the table, and they ordered, resuming their conversation when he was out of earshot. Wilson pulled out a manila folder and slid it across the table. Savas put his hand on it.

"This is everything?" he asked.

"Jeez, you're one greedy bastard. My husband's alive because of you, but there have to be _limits_ , John."

Savas was already flipping through the pages. "How is Mike?" he asked.

"Fine. Look, John, everything you need is there. They recovered the bullet—high caliber—damn thing blew right through him. Traced the angle of fire to a rooftop a block away. A distance shot. The shooter was thorough—not a print, not a shell, not so much as a hair anywhere up there. The diplomatic turbulence on this pushed them to work overtime. Top forensics team. Several people flown in from other crime labs. I wouldn't be surprised if they brought in a board-certified psychic. _Nothing._ "

"Mmmmm," said Savas, reading.

"But you _are_ right about something."

He glanced up from the papers. "Yes?"

"The ballistics report's eyebrow raising."

"Go on," said Savas. He'd forgotten how she liked the stage.

"7.62 × 51 millimeter, .308-caliber hole and bullet."

"Wait. Sniper rounds?"

"Standard issue U.S. Army and civilian law enforcement. With a twist," she said, sipping her water, her attractive face angled slightly. Savas just stared at her. "Slight variant on the ammo. Ballistics had to call in help. Turns out it's limited production used at the beginning of the Iraq War. Definitely _not_ civilian ammo."

Savas leaned back in his chair and squinted at the physician. "You're telling me that my contact was gunned down by a limited-edition military bullet from a high-powered rifle?"

"Fired over a block away with enough accuracy to strike the man's heart." She flashed him a winning smile. "That's it, Johnny-boy. It's a weird one."

"How the hell did _that_ end up in New York?"

"I don't know. That's _your_ job. This CSI shit isn't what I went to med school for. Now, the rest is there for you to read at your considerable leisure." She glanced purposefully around the restaurant. "I'm hungry—for food and a drastic change in the topic of conversation."

Savas nodded, still fixated on this absurd piece of information. Sniper rifles with obscure military rounds. The assassination of a dirty diplomat in the pocket of international terrorists. Blown apart outside a Bronx dive by a mysterious and highly skilled sniper.

_What the hell is going on?_
3

# Hit Men

CIA agent Brad Thompson squinted at the monitor, watching a large crowd gathered restlessly around the mosque on the outskirts of London. The onlookers strained to hear the words from loudspeakers drowned out by surrounding noise and distance. He didn't know what worried him more—Imam Wahid's rhetoric or the number of people the extremist could draw salivating to hear it.

He approved of the heavy presence of British military to keep the peace. The task was underscored by the boiling unease and anger simmering beneath the surface of the youthful and mostly male crowd.

Agent Thompson cursed the faint rain that misted over the people, the streets, and the rows of cars lining the curbs, making their surveillance that much harder. At least they were hidden. He imagined how it looked from outside: a few hundred feet from the edge of the crowd, a wet and rusted white van parked roughly between two cars. Everything about the vehicle said that it was in disrepair, neglected, and on its last legs. Only a thick black antenna on the side of the van might give any hint of the reality within.

Inside, it was a different story. Behind the deeply tinted glass, several computer monitors displayed video feeds from many angles around the mosque. Members of Thompson's team sat in front of these monitors, earpieces relaying audio, microphones over their mouths.

He glanced back at the feed, shaking his head at Wahid's angry words, his youthful charm. _Your charity fronts don't fool us, buddy._ The man was a powder keg of Islamic radicalism. They'd stop him, but not before getting the bigger picture.

"The United States wants to control your world," rang out a strong voice. One video feed showed the passionate gesticulations of the imam; another, the rapt attention of the young men in the crowd. "Yes, with the dollar and the sword, they subdue every nation, every people, every religion. But what chance does an empire, however grand, have next to the power of God? God will channel great power through each of you. Each of you is a soldier of Heaven against the armies of Satan. The world will be Islam!"

An agent in the van whistled softly. "The bastard's really on. Goddamned towel-head revival." Thompson leaned over one of the monitors, staring at a pan of the crowd near the speaker. "Keep an eye on those—the ones he acknowledges, singles out, greets, walks with. Let's get face shots, front and side. We need to ID these people."

A woman's scream wailed over the speaker system, and everyone in the van stiffened. A man monitoring the speaker focused intently on his screen and shouted to the others present.

"Wahid's down!"

"What?" Thompson gasped.

"Switching to stage views."

All the monitors lit up with images at various angles of the platform. The podium was empty, the crumbled body of the imam near its base. Figures leapt onto the stage and raced to the body, turning it over as panicked screams rose from the crowd.

"Oh, shit," whispered Thompson. The images made it clear that the imam would not return to the podium. Figures around him were tearing at their beards, several covered in Wahid's blood. One cradled the man in his arms, the body limp, a large bloodstain over the left breast. The rain washed over their forms, diluting the red.

Thompson mobilized his team. "Move people! We've got a hit on Wahid! Long range, rifle shot, and from high ground, I'd put money. Sync with the Redcoats! Rooftops, exits—we need it all covered! I need agents moving _now_!"

The van erupted in an uproar of sound and activity, voices over the speakers in ears, commands shouted into microphones. The crowd outside seethed. Men began chanting angrily, fists raised in the air. Several pummeled the car next to the van, smashing its windows.

_Holy hell._ "Radio British police that we've got a riot brewing. Let our people know where the violence is and how to avoid it."

The van began to shake, fists impacting loudly against its sides and the dark glass. Several shouts announced the arrival of the mob.

"Don't panic! The glass is strong." Thompson removed his gun, dark metal gleaming in the lights of the computers. Except in training, he had never used it. "Michelson, let's try to get this piece of junk moving!"

He checked the cartridge, released the safety, and moved to the front seat of the van. Daylight spilled into the dark vehicle as several angry arms forced open the door. The CIA man aimed the weapon and fired.
4

# Death List

An awkward man with a bearded grin turned away from a computer monitor, a blue glow painting one side of his face.

"John, I think I might have something."

Savas leapt over to the console. The man's face turned back to the screen and was partly obscured by the enormous beard and long, disheveled hair curled below his shoulders. The sounds of keys clacking burst from underneath the hair.

Savas suppressed a laugh. _Manuel Hernandez. Our very own Jesus. Except for the porn._ He tried to decipher the multiple open windows, filled with database output, open web pages, and photographs of crime scenes.

"I don't see it, Manuel. We're looking for known hit men with MOs that might match what we've got on the Hamid assassination."

Hernandez nodded. "That's how I started. But it's a long shot, like you said. I've been in front of these databanks for _three days_ cross-correlating materials and methods from every known killer against the forensics. Larry's got us drawing from FBI _and_ CIA records. If there's a known assassin with any consistency in style, it'd show up. Three days and nothing. Gets boring, John. I always get in trouble when I'm bored."

"That why they tossed you out of grad school?" Savas asked, still squinting at the screen, trying to see the pattern.

"No one believes I quit! Honestly, John, there were weirder people there than me."

"Yeah, but not so much trouble."

"Can't a man just want to serve his nation in the war on terror?"

Savas waved his hand at the screen. "Explain."

Hernandez indicated windows from online news organizations. All were dated reports, weeks to months old, from diverse locations across the globe. Each had an image of a dead body and police. The headlines in every case contained the word _assassinated._

"Since I wasn't getting anywhere looking for a _who_ , I started looking for a _what_. What unsolved crimes in the last two years might have matched the MO? Honestly, after drawing a big zero in the database, my feeling's that our killer, or _killers_ , aren't in there—that we're looking for something new. Our fancy intel databases are useless. What's left but the papers?"

Savas nodded. "And?"

"It's thin, John, but there's something. Remember the Al Jazeera reporter killed in Atlanta, right as he left the airport?"

"Mohammed Aref? Of course. Larry reassigned the case while I was in the hospital. _Lighten my workload_ , he said. Aref was a real tap dancer. He'd been fingered by the Sheikh—money laundering through some of the East Coast mosques."

"The _Sheikh_?"

Savas smiled. "My double-agent friend."

"Right. The one whose real name not even Larry knows?"

"That one."

"So, he ratted out Aref?"

"And several others, as he collected from them, too, no doubt. The Sheikh's a real charmer. Second-generation Syrian street punk. Broke away from his conservative parents, but not before he picked up enough Arabic to make him very valuable to certain underground scum. Kid's addicted to gold and adrenaline, thinks he's smarter than everyone he's conned."

" _That's_ what you call charming?"

"Anyway, the Al Jazeera job was a cover for Aref, for his real work. He had a good scheme going. Charity dollars from many uncharitable sources. We used Aref to trace an assassination plot against a diplomat from Pakistan. We're still planning to move on the entire operation, as far as I know." Savas glanced at the computer scientist. "The connection?"

Hernandez gestured toward the screen. "Aref was gunned down by a high-powered sniper rifle. Single shot. Right through the heart. Sound familiar?"

Savas furrowed his brows. "Coincidence?"

"And so's this, I suppose," said Hernandez as he enlarged another window. Savas read aloud from the web page.

"Raahil Hossain, a lawyer and lobbyist for a Saudi construction conglomerate, was gunned down today in Egypt on a business trip. Known for his outspoken stance on Arab rights of ownership of oil and gas sites developed by foreign powers, he had become a controversial figure in the international community. Condemned by many Western governments for alleged ties to jihadist movements in several countries, he had found his ability to travel outside the Middle East increasingly restricted."

"Skip to the end."

Savas paused and scrolled the text up on the monitor. "Reports claim that Mr. Hossain was struck by a bullet as he exited his hotel in Cairo and that he died instantly, suffering a direct hit to the chest. The gunman was never found. Police speculated that the killer had fired from a distance and escaped in the ensuing panic."

Savas was quiet for a moment. Hernandez used the silence to bring up a list of names, dates, and locations. He rolled his chair backward and let Savas lean in closer.

"All killed by snipers," mumbled Savas as he read through the list. "All taking direct hits that killed them instantly. Each a player in the underground terrorist network. There must be twenty names here, Manuel. You think they're all linked?"

"Beats me. Some don't exactly fit—head-shots, for example, even though the bullets were military grade. Not the special ordnance you discovered, but we don't know how careful the ballistics teams were. Half these kills were in parts of the world where they likely don't even do a full workup, let alone release the data."

Savas put on his best Larry Kanter voice. "This is _really_ thin, Manuel."

Hernandez nodded dejectedly. "Yeah, I know. But it's all I've got."

"I didn't say I thought it was wrong." Savas sat in a chair beside the IT specialist and breathed out slowly, lost in thought. "Remember those Army studies on soldiers in Iraq, the ones who survived multiple IEDs?"

"Not really, John."

"They all had strong emotional responses to environments, _hunches_ and _gut feelings_ about danger. The studies showed that these guys had hyperactive attention to detail, keen sight and other senses, noticing details others missed. They weren't consciously aware of it."

"Right, now I remember. The guy who thought 'the concrete slab didn't look right' and inside was an IED waiting to blow them apart."

"Exactly. He'd processed a lot of data subconsciously about the slab—imperfections, mismatches in colors, location—and without knowing why, his brain sent an alert. All he knew was it _looked wrong_."

Hernandez shrugged his shoulders. "So what's that got to do with this?"

Savas looked back at the list of names. "After that article, I started believing in intuition, that it's more than flighty emotion. Sure, for some it _is_ flighty, useless stuff, and that's why we get nut-jobs paranoid about things that aren't there, conspiracy theories, and people afraid of their own shadows. But for those with a history of survival, or solving mysteries, let's say, I think it's real. Represents a lot of neurological processing we aren't aware of. Something like that."

Hernandez simply stared at Savas.

"What I'm trying to say, Manuel, is that I know it's thin," he said, gesturing to the list. "I can't justify it logically, but my gut tells me there's something here. I think yours did, too. Like that cement block, something just doesn't _look right._ "

"But what?"

"I wish I knew. There are a lot of dead men on that list."
5

# Modus Operandi

Kanter stood and leaned over the table. " _This_ is what makes sense?"

Standing was the first sign things weren't going well for Savas. Once Kanter began running fingers through his graying hair, it was over, only a matter of time before the lecture began.

"A special meeting of Intel 1 you called me in for? You _do_ realize that I manage other groups in this division?"

"It _does_ make sense, Larry! They're using guerilla-style methods. Removing those who are the key links in the international terrorist web! What else could unify all these attacks?"

Kanter threw up his hands. "John, that's the point—I don't see that they _are_ unified. That's your task, to prove it to me. This isn't very persuasive."

The rest of Intel 1 was silent. The group was fully assembled, torn from different tasks and assignments, interrupting their work of digging out international terrorists. _Because I called this meeting with high priority._ With their eyes on him and Kanter's tone, he felt like an idiot.

They'd listened intently to Savas as he presented the information. A list of assassination-style killings, each connected to the international terrorist underground. Some were middlemen, some were spokesmen, and some were fundraisers. But all were significant players, and all had met untimely deaths in similar ways. The same MOs. _It was so clear!_

"Someone's moving systematically and ruthlessly, crushing the pressure points. They're crippling the ability of terrorist groups to function." The silence he received was maddening.

He glanced around the room for support. _Any_ hint of support. JP Rideout and Matt King had their eyes cast down. The dark-haired Rideout, trim and stylishly dressed, had been Kanter's steal from Wall Street and Bloomberg monitors. Rideout retained a residual superiority passed down from his French forebears, his style sharply counterbalanced by the analytical bookworm named Matt King. King, a former energy lawyer for oil firms, had turned do-gooder after witnessing the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon from his hotel window. Both Rideout and King clearly thought he was nuts. Across from them at the round table frowned Frank Miller, a hulking ex-marine. Miller held his gaze with a thoughtful expression as he parsed what Savas said.

Last of all he looked to Rebecca Cohen. She sat on his right, dwarfed by the solid wall of marine next to her, brown eyes troubled and nearly lost in the thick mane of chestnut hair that swept down her shoulders. Cohen had risen through FBI counterterrorism for a number of years and was snagged by Kanter because she was so bright. She had come to the states as a small child, her father immigrating after several family members were killed in a bus bombing in Tel Aviv. Her motivation was keen, and her analytical skills had made her his "right hand" at Intel 1. And she wouldn't meet his gaze.

"Mad John." A voice from the back of the room.

_Cue uncomfortable silence_. Savas smiled as he glimpsed a young elfin woman in her mid-twenties, ironed orange hair to her waist framing a needle-thin body. She stood apart from the group seated at the table, staring absentmindedly out the window, caught in a trance of some kind. A plain dark-blue dress from an Amish catalog hung from her pale shoulders, complemented by bright orange sneakers with flashing lights built into the bottoms. _Children's shoes_.

"Greetings, Kemo Sabe." The young woman spoke, never taking her eyes from the window.

_Angel Lightfoote_. _Damn mind-reader pulling out important connections in data no one else could see._ _Larry's latest find._

"Don't everyone act so shocked," said Savas. "I've heard the name. _Mad John_ Savas. Nice ring to it."

"You're out to earn it?" grumbled Kanter. "You might have gotten a call from POTUS for your recent heroics, John, but back here we need you to _make sense_."

Miller interrupted. "A series of coordinated hits—what about organized crime?"

Savas shook his head. "Not mob. I saw my fair share of mob hits on the force, Frank. They're brutal, but blunt. _These_ hits were surgical. The methods all the same: single shot, high-powered rifle, military grade, professional work— _beyond_ mob. Assassination style."

"You'd be talking about an organization with enormous resources," Cohen interjected. "These aren't a series of isolated murders. If they're linked, the killers would have international reach, skilled personnel, an ability to conduct intelligence and mission planning that would rival the best government agencies of the world."

"How do we know it _isn't_ governmental?" asked JP Rideout.

"Not possible," scoffed Matt King. "You're talking about a series of coordinated assassinations. No reputable nation would dare."

"Maybe one _not_ so reputable," grunted Miller, his broad frame tense.

"Which of the disreputable nations do you think cares enough to undertake an effort to _stop_ terrorism?" quipped King.

Rideout turned toward him. "What makes _any_ nation reputable? What about us? Didn't we have a vice-presidential CIA hit squad trained for this very purpose?"

Another silence fell over the room. Kanter sat and looked sharply at the former Wall Streeter.

"Well, _didn't_ we?" Rideout echoed.

Kanter squeezed the bridge of his nose. "If you're talking about Cheney's death squads, that's all documented. So is the fact that they were _never_ activated. That entire idea was only a _hypothetical_."

JP Rideout laughed. "Sure! For eight years of the Bush presidency, these guys were being prepped—that much is on the record, too. Larry, that's a hell of a long training program. _Eight years_ readying themselves to kill terrorist leaders and never once going on the job? Must have been a frustrated bunch of dudes."

Kanter's face was stern. "You can speculate all you want, JP, but at FBI, in _my_ division, we deal in _facts_. And let me tell you, that kind of speculation is a serious matter."

"It would surely make a good framework for hanging John's linked assassinations, though, wouldn't it?" added King.

Cohen shook her head. "Come on, guys, this doesn't make sense. It would mean that the current administration put into motion the clandestine murder of numerous U.S. and foreign targets."

"Bin Laden. That's all I have to say," broke in Rideout.

Cohen rolled her eyes. "Damn it, JP, that's _completely_ different! _Bin Laden_? These are kills on U.S. soil, some of them _American_ citizens. The CIA killing Americans _in America_? That's 1984 material, folks, really scary stuff."

Rideout wasn't fazed. "2011 Defense Appropriations Bill. Authorized the _indefinite_ detainment of American citizens arrested on American soil for _suspicion_ of terrorist activities. Next year Obama has his Attorney General justify killing Americans _suspected_ of terrorist activities. And this is what's fucking _public_."

"That authority has never been used," said Cohen animatedly. "Now you're going from hypotheticals to documented murders?"

"With absolutely _no_ evidence!" banged out Kanter. The others began to speak out of turn as the argument escalated.

Savas shouted over the bickering. "Enough!" He held his palms up, lowering his voice. "They're right. Larry and Rebecca are right. It's too outlandish. It doesn't feel right."

" _Feel_ right?" asked Rideout.

"Let's just say these death squads were still around, _activated_. Hits on foreign soil, maybe, but not _here_. Even the craziest antiterrorist zealots wouldn't dare. For God's sake, we don't have to shoot them here! Just pick them up, extraordinary rendition and all that. We've done it before: grab a suspected terrorist, take him someplace far away, interrogate. Maybe worse. But not like this. No way."

Cohen picked up his thoughts. "And not with this frequency, this thoroughness. A hit here or there, take out a particularly important target. But the list of possible kills John is showing is too long. It's _absurdly_ long. It would begin to call attention to the murders. That's the last thing some covert death squad would want. Bad for the US, bad for them, bad for their long-term goals."

Savas refused to let go. "I still think these deaths are linked, but it's not governmental. It's something else; something else is driving it forward."

"What the hell are you talking about? Something else _what_?" asked Kanter. "How do they magically appear in the span of half a year in ten or twenty different places around the world, bringing down the target—often a highly protected target, by the way—without leaving any trace? Are these _ninja_ snipers? What's the unifying motive for your imaginary marksmen with the special bullets?"

Savas was silent. He didn't have the words, only thoughts and feelings linking his own experience and the pattern he was seeing in these murders. He wasn't even sure it made sense to him. Then the word just came to his lips.

"Vengeance."

"Vengeance, John? _Who?_ " asked Kanter.

"I don't _know_ , Larry! But if _I_ struck back for everything they've done to us, it might look something like this. Hell, it might be worse."

As the words left his mouth, he knew it was over. He'd blown it, shot to hell any hope of objectivity, any chance of persuading a group of analysts that he was onto something. Their expressions confirmed his fears, the downward glances, avoiding eye contact. Kanter intervened.

"John, we all know how you feel, what you've lost. It's true for many here and we use that every day to motivate us. _But we can't let it cloud our judgment._ I don't like to go over this in front of everyone, but too much has been said. We're in a no man's land of speculation. There's a beginning of a coherent linkage between these murders, but only a beginning. I'm torn about how we proceed. Good detective work is shot to hell by emotion."

Kanter seemed to mull something over in his mind. He stood. "John and Manuel will continue looking into this idea of a link between the murders, at least for the time being. But we'll hear no more of international death squads and the like. I've got to fly to Washington for another one of our interagency summits this weekend, and the last thing I want on my mind is wondering if my agents are out trying to prove the CIA or whoever is involved in an international assassination program. Honestly, folks, I'm too young for forced retirement."

There were nervous smiles around the room, but Savas merely stared forward, unable to focus on Kanter's words. "Let's call it a day. I'm late for a twelve o'clock. Get back to your posts and saving the country."

The members of Intel 1 left their seats and headed for the door. Lightfoote brushed past Savas and whispered in his ear.

"It's okay. _I_ think you're right." She smiled blissfully at him and danced out of the meeting room. The irony was total—his main support came from the most eccentric member of this team.

He glanced up. The room was empty but for Kanter, who closed the door.

"Is there anything we should talk about?" Kanter began.

"No, Larry. Maybe I _am_ biased, but you might consider that I also have an advantage."

"Which is?"

"If I'm right, I'm the one who'd understand the motives best."

"Vengeance?"

"More. A removal of the threat, cleansing of the world." _Hunting the monsters._ _Showing no mercy._

"John, you're basically telling me that if you're right, you'll be _very_ right. That sort of tautology doesn't really give me much to go on."

"I know that, Larry."

"Besides, even if you are right, our hands are tied."

Savas looked up, his brows furrowed. "Why?"

"Jurisdiction. If this has the scope you think it does, it's way beyond FBI. Thirty plus agencies are involved in criminal activities outside the country. Then there are the international ones."

"Well, we'd have our part to play."

"But to break this case, you'll need access to places and people we can't go to."

"Well, we pound the beat we know, Larry."

Kanter nodded. "Okay, John. That's all I'm saying. Stay in your boundaries on this case. If there's something to this, you'll dig it up."

Savas watched his boss leave the room. The message was clear. He felt exhausted. In half a workday, he'd run a roller coaster from elated certainty to embarrassed rejection. He glared at the presentation on his computer, closed the laptop, and dropped it into his bag. As he left the table and walked to the door, Rebecca Cohen entered. Her eyes told him too clearly what was on her mind.

"Is this a therapy session?" he asked.

"John, please. It's not like that."

"Isn't it? I saw all your faces: _Mad John_. Useful in a pinch, but a little too wacko at times." He barked a laugh. "I've had five required agency therapists. I've read the assessments. _Consumed with his own grief and anger. Unreliable when it comes to certain topics. Ready to see in others all the things churning inside himself._ " He marveled that all this spilled out to her. "Doesn't that about capture it?"

Her shoulders slumped. "Yes, John, it does. But I didn't come here for that."

"Then what?"

"I came to tell you that, whatever doubts we have, we've all gone too far with you not to back your play."

Savas was moved. "And you're speaking for the others?"

"I'm sure I am, but it wasn't put to a vote or anything. I know I speak for me."

Her earnest eyes burned into him, and, not for the first time, he felt them pierce through so many layers of armor and anger. It was a place that couldn't be touched. Not now. Not anymore. _Not after Thanos._ He was shaken by it, by the _goodness_ of that touch. It made him recoil all the more.

Her face tightened as she watched his eyes.

"Thanks, Rebecca. It's good to know." He turned and left the room.
6

# Valkyries

Across the world in the mountains of Afghanistan, darkness had fallen, and the one called Kamir felt a chill descend. His group of mujahideen sat quietly around a small fire, several smoking, weapons at their sides. He was exhausted from a long day of drills, scrambling to keep ahead of American squads tracking them through the rough terrain. Their leader had posted guards at two positions around their camp, and three others at high and low points more distant. He grunted. They would see no Americans tonight.

He sneered. They lacked high-tech equipment—motion detectors, night vision, satellite surveillance—expensive toys used lethally by their spoiled and arrogant American hunters. Instead, they used an older set of tools: their eyes, ears, nose, and skin. Truer tools given from God, each a more finely tuned instrument than anything assembled to take their place. They learned the land and memorized its pulse: the night sounds, the scents that belonged, and those that did not. His troop remained several steps ahead of their pursuers, mocking the grand collection of technology arrayed against them.

Tonight, his senses were charged. No, they would not see the American army tonight. The last few days, a nervous tension had grown among them. Grown within him. Normal banter was replaced with sharp whispers. Movements were made with unusual caution. No one spoke of it. There was no evidence of danger. Yet all felt it, a sense of encroaching violence. Kamir felt like the prey when the predator was near.

Guerrilla cells had disappeared. Months ago, theirs was the most promising training center, praised by terrorist groups seeking their fighters. But everything had changed. Men stopped returning from missions. Fools explained it as American interceptions, until they became too numerous, too frequent, and often occurred in locations not patrolled by United States forces. Not once had they recovered the bodies of their slain brothers. The mystery fueled a growing superstition: of dark forces, demons, spirits sent out by the Evil One to undermine the jihad.

Today, they had slipped past a second American patrol just that morning, and the sense of threat had only grown. The American army was not the threat. His mujahideen brothers began to mutter old nonsense from grandmothers and pagan times to ward off the evil. _Fools!_ They did not even understand the words.

Kamir signaled to a haggard man stirring the fire. "Jawad, see that there is little smoke." Jawad grunted but showed no other sign of having heard him. Kamir stood and approached the fire, crouching low.

Jawad spoke. "I don't like it. We haven't heard from the outer scouts. We should wake the others. Something is wrong."

Kamir nodded and muttered a curse. He glanced anxiously around the campsite. "Not even the insects speak."

The men around him stirred restlessly, and several rose from their pallets and fingered their guns. Whatever it was, whatever had been following them like a wraith, it was here now. He felt it.

A harsh cry sounded out from one end of the camp. Kamir turned his weapon toward the sound. He jumped back as a mujahideen warrior staggered into the light of the fire, his hands covered in blood, his neck sliced open. He fell into the blaze, scattering the logs and tossing sparks into the air, his dry clothing bursting into flames.

Muffled shots erupted from all directions. One by one, the trained guerrilla fighters around him fell. Kamir spun in circles, unable to identify the attackers. Next to him, Jawad cried out, hit simultaneously in the chest and head, falling backward. Kamir dropped to a prone position and scanned the camp for a target. A blur to his right! A metallic gleam of a broad blade glinting. He aimed and fired wildly but was too late. He felt a fire in his chest, and several gunshots thumped against his shoulders and abdomen. He passed out.

Opening his eyes to a fog of sound and pain, he could not move. He watched helplessly as others fired wildly into the darkness at blurred shadows and motions. Each man fell, brought down by weapons unseen, controlled by hands unknown.

The camp fell silent. A body continued to burn, now in the center of a circle of corpses, the stink of charred flesh carried on the soft breeze. His vision receding, he heard shuffling from the darkness. Man-shapes darted into the camp. The fire was doused, all light extinguished. Only the stars remained, and the shadows that drifted above the bodies, dragging the dead forms away. They clamped his ankles tightly.

He knew no more.
7

# Lucifer's Liturgy

Savas struggled in a dream like a man drowning in water. The same nightmare, a part of him recognized, but his unconscious was in control and doomed him to walk through it again.

Late September 2001. A storm raging over New York City. From above, he watched a depression, born in the Gulf, clouds crouched over the Atlantic like an obscene octopus stretching over the eastern coast. Slowly rotating, its counter-clockwise motion drew in the airs of the north, devouring the cold winds, mixing them with the moist, warmer energy from the southern seas. Savas's omniscient perspective plunged from the heavens to the streets, his stomach churning as he fell. Rain and thunder battered the concrete landscape as he came to rest near a small church in the Greek American enclave of Astoria.

A blue-and-white car was parked in front of the building. On the dash, he saw the metallic finish of a handgun reflecting the orange streetlights, facets blinking underneath the rain-swept window, pouring water blurring the lighted icon of Christ on the church door. Worshippers trailed in, crossing themselves, dropping coins or bills to pick up candles, lighting them with short prayers, kissing the icons before entering. Inside, incense and chanting filled the air. Warmth and the smell of wet bodies and clothes mingled. Outside, the rain drummed, swallowing all else, blurring all vision within the dark NYPD vehicle. He followed a figure as it stepped out of the car and entered the church.

The church doors opened beside an old woman, barely five feet tall, draped in widow's weeds as she hunched over candles, harvesting them, pruning those that had burned too low in the supporting sand beside the icons. She turned arthritically toward the door and the blast of cold air. Savas followed the shadowy man, the soaked and disheveled outline of his police uniform hardly recognizable.

As the nightmare progressed, Savas approached the form, merged with it, until he was striding with a mad purpose, drenched and chilled in his ruined uniform. He marched past the icons and candles, stepping through the narthex onto the red carpet that ran alongside rows of parishioners. He focused on the iconostasis and the altar, gripping a slick gun in his hand.

A priest was bent over the altar, hands cupped before him. He chanted the prayers before the Eucharist in a soft drone.

> _Behold I approach for Divine Communion._ _O Creator, burn me not as I partake,_ _for Thou art Fire which burns the unworthy._ _Wherefore purify me from every stain._

Savas walked past the Royal Doors into the nave of the church, leaving a wet trail behind him. He looked neither left nor right, focused on the altar and the figure of Father Timothy bent in prayer.

> _Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God,_ _accept me today as a communicant;_ _for I will not speak of thy Mystery to Thine enemies;_ _I will not give Thee a kiss as did Judas;_ _but like the Thief do I confess Thee._ _Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom._

Several heads turned in Savas's direction as he moved toward the altar. Eyes glanced up from prayer books like the wake of a boat, a flowing distraction from the climax of the liturgical service.

> _Tremble, O man, when you see the divine Blood,_ _For it is a fire that burns the unworthy. The Body of God both deifies and nourishes;_ _It deifies the spirit and nourishes the mind._

Savas passed three-quarters of the pews, walking underneath the high dome painted with the icon of Christ Pantocrator, the Almighty. The low prayers of the priest were increasingly disturbed by a surge of murmurs from the faithful, a slowly cresting wave of chaos drowned by the thunder rumbling outside.

> _Into the splendor of Thy Saints, how shall I who am unworthy enter?_ _For if I dare to enter the bridal_ _chamber, my vesture betrays me;_ _for it is not a wedding garment, and as an imposter_ _I shall be cast out by the Angels._ _Cleanse my soul from pollution_ _and save me, O Lord, in Thy love for men._

By the time shouts rose to warn the priest, John Savas had scaled the four steps to stand within the Sanctuary itself. Chanters and front-row worshippers who had moved forward to take action froze and backed away. A gun was raised, aimed at the back of Father Timothy. The priest paused in the sudden swell of sound. Hands still raised in supplication, he turned slowly, his eyes scanning the faces in the pews and coming to rest on the barrel of a gun not five feet in front of him.

The inside of the church was utterly still, silent, rocked softly by the receding thunder outside, lit brightly in slaps of lightning over the soft candle flames. Water dripped from the policeman's cap and began to form small pools on the white marble in front of him. Savas spoke, the gun trembling in his outstretched hand.

"He can't have my son."

The priest stared down into the dark tunnel of the weapon, water beading around the slick metal. His eyes began to glow a deep red, and a demonic grin spread across his face. Savas screamed, pulling the trigger repeatedly as the robed figure laughed manically before him.

Savas jerked upward, shaken from sleep by a crack of lightning. A long roll of thunder followed.

_Where am I?_

The room was dark. Fists hammered something outside. His watch displayed 10 p.m. _I'm in the office._ He'd fallen asleep at his desk, the fatigue of nearly constant late evenings catching up with him. _Someone's pounding on the door._

He rubbed his temples as he stood, stepping to his office door. He'd barely turned the handle when Larry Kanter burst into the room and slumped into the chair beside the desk. He was dressed in his travel clothes—gray suit and briefcase, computer bag in hand. His thinning hair was in disarray. He sighed loudly, slightly out of breath.

"Sit down, John, please."

Savas complied. "Not a social visit?"

"I'm off to DC a little earlier than I expected," he said. "You want to know why, John?"

Savas merely waited for him to continue.

"Because I was foolish enough to take you seriously. Crazy enough to call up some friends at Langley and mention these assassinations."

His pulse quickened. "Yes? And they said?"

Kanter laughed. "First, they said they'd get back to me. Then my friend called back and told me to get a good lawyer. The next thing I know, there's the head of the CTD oversight committee telling me to get my ass up to DC on a special flight chartered out of LaGuardia. Before the JTTF meeting this weekend, I get a special one-on-one with the entire Counterterrorism Task Division overlords. All because I _speculated_ on your cracked idea."

"Did you mention anything about internal hit squads?"

" _Hell_ , no, John! I'm not suicidal. But I don't really need to raise the issue, anymore, do I?" said Kanter.

"What do you mean?"

"Isn't it obvious? A few minutes on the phone linking these attacks and I'm in the principal's office. What on earth could have them that jumpy?"

"You can't believe it's possible, Larry," said Savas, his smile fading before Kanter's set jaw. "But it's _crazy_!"

"I don't know what to think. But if there _were_ assassination teams behind these killings, this is _exactly_ the kind of response I would expect. That, and my upcoming reassignment to the Alaska division office."

"Calm down, Larry. We all know this doesn't make sense. There has to be another explanation."

"There sure as hell better be another explanation, John, or we've just opened a can of Texas-sized worms."
8

# Not of this Earth

The door closed behind Kanter, leaving him to face six stern expressions. _They couldn't wait until morning? Who has meetings at midnight?_

He was tired from the last-minute sprint to the airport, flight, and rush to the meeting. Now he stood before a table of officials overseeing the antiterrorism activities of the United States, inquisition-style with a single, lonely seat surrounded by a semicircle of polished wood.

His knees buckled as he scanned the faces around the table. Not even the phone summons had prepared him. One next to the other, he saw high-ranking representatives from critical U.S. agencies, many exclusively counterterrorism. He ticked off the offices associated with the faces: the CIA Counterterrorist Center, the Office of National Security, Homeland Security, and his own superiors at the National Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was surprised to see a representative of the National Security Agency—he couldn't imagine why they'd need a communications angle on this story. If he was perplexed to see an NSA representative, he was stunned at the final face present—the deputy secretary of state. Her presence raised the stakes to feverish levels.

"Please sit down, Mr. Kanter," began his FBI superior.

Kanter noticed that he had been standing in front of the chair, nearly at attention. He smiled and sat. He was too damn old to be acting like a freshman.

The FBI representative continued. "We apologize for calling you out here on such short notice, but we understand that you'll be attending the Task Force meeting this weekend anyway."

"That's correct."

"You're here to answer some questions about comments to CIA counterterrorism personnel and, if possible, to aid us in solving some frankly disturbing mysteries."

Kanter suppressed a sigh. "I'll help in any way I can."

The NSA man cut in. "We have printouts and digital samples of your conversations earlier today. However, as I understand it, CIA wishes to proceed without an in-depth analysis."

"Not necessary; there's nothing complicated," said the director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, her voice strained. She turned from the NSA officer toward Kanter. "Your special-ops division has come to a startling conclusion, Agent Kanter."

"No conclusions—nowhere near that level. Purely speculation. Some of my agents stumbled on a possible link between assassination-style murders of Islamic extremists in the U.S. and abroad."

"Yes, we've seen the transcripts," cut in the CIA woman. "Why did you feel it necessary to contact CIA agents if these _links_ were purely at the speculative stage?"

Kanter frowned. "That seems the best time to me."

"Wouldn't you have preferred to obtain some real evidence before making such accusations?"

"Accusations?" asked Kanter.

The FBI man swooped in. "I don't think Mr. Kanter's making any accusations, Susan, only asking questions."

Kanter had a bad feeling about where this was headed, and he wished they would just open up the black hole and get it over with. The deputy secretary of state obliged him.

"Before we go any further, Agent Kanter, these members of your staff—how would you characterize their relationship to this hypothesis?"

Kanter gave her a knowing look. "Extremely committed, perhaps emotionally so. That's why I called this in. One of my best agents, John Savas, is convinced. Others aren't. Frankly, I've been skeptical myself, but Agent Savas has a track record that's anomalously productive. I felt I should follow up on his hunch."

The deputy secretary smiled. "You say you've _been_ skeptical. Has this changed?"

Kanter looked her in the eye. "The moment you all jerked me up here."

Several faces at the table darkened, but the woman from the state department laughed. "After all the doublespeak I hear every day, it's nice to hear someone speak his mind. John Savas has been well known to many over the years, and the recent events at Indian Point have refreshed any poor memories. Your division—as unorthodox as it's been—is unmatched in counterterrorism. The White House has decided to make you aware of some highly classified information."

_Wonderful._ "I don't suppose I might have the opportunity to decline?"

The FBI man laughed. "Wise man."

"You can, of course," continued the deputy secretary of state. "But we'd have to make sure that in your ignorance, you didn't make this classified information known—you or your group at FBI."

Kanter felt his stomach drop. There was no misinterpreting those words. Either he was in, or he and his "unorthodox" group, including Intel 1, was toast.

"You can be persuasive."

"I have to be; this is too important," she said. "Susan, this belongs to you for the next few minutes. Your mess."

Kanter turned his attention to the Counterterrorist Center director. She had the look of someone who had recently learned of a relative's death. Her words sounded rehearsed.

"While it's well-known that the CIA—along with numerous U.S. agencies—undertook extraordinary anti-terrorist measures in the years following 9/11, it was only recently appreciated that some of these efforts took on the form of targeted elimination teams."

"Assassins," corrected Kanter. _Here it comes._

"Yes. I'm not here to examine the ethics or policy wisdom of such actions—they've been a part of covert operations for decades. And vetted by several agencies, congressional oversight, answerable to the American public."

"Until Cheney," whispered Kanter.

"Yes, I can see that you know where this is going. During his tenure as vice president, Dick Cheney instructed the CIA to form an elite core of assassins, specifically designed to go after high-level targets in al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He took the unusual step of concealing this plan not only from Congress but also from nearly every other agency and governmental branch. These men and women were trained for years, awaiting orders that never came."

"Never?" asked Kanter.

"The records have been made public, Agent Kanter. Not a single kill was ordered. The program was terminated." She paused and removed her glasses. "Or so we believed." She sighed and continued. "These killings of Islamic radicals have come to the attention of the CIA and other agencies. We're particularly concerned because the methods used are right out of this assassin training program."

"Certainly other assassins could employ similar methods?" asked Kanter.

"Yes, of course. But there's more, beyond the killings you know about. The growing success in Pakistan and Afghanistan against terrorist training camps has been ascribed to many things—tactics, troop buildup, and most recently, improved design of drone robotic combat units—but these factors aren't sufficient. We now know from Army Intelligence that there have been substantial, at times crippling, attacks on terrorist camps in these regions that aren't due to any known military or covert activity. We're talking about major strikes against groups that have eluded our capture for years and yet, in a matter of barely a year, have been erased."

"I don't understand," said Kanter. "If not us . . ."

"Then _who?_ " said the state department woman. "Haven't you guessed?"

Kanter shook his head in disbelief. "I'm sorry, but you're trying to tell me that you've got a group of _rogue_ CIA hit squads that aren't only bringing down Islamic radicals around the world but are also out-gunning our best marines in the mountains of Asia?"

The woman from the state department spoke. "Currently, we have no proof of this, but analysis from the CIA and other agencies places this scenario as the most probable."

"Any _other_ scenarios?" Kanter asked.

"Several, including foreign involvement and, of course, the null hypothesis that these are indeed _not_ related events. But the potential geopolitical ramifications of our working hypothesis are dire; we must focus on this possibility."

"Don't you know where these people are? Haven't you kept track of them?"

The CIA woman raised her voice. "There hasn't been any clear need for constant surveillance of these trainees! You can rest assured that we're ascertaining the whereabouts of as many of these personnel as we can."

Kanter shook his head. "We'll help any way we can, but let me be frank here—this is above our heads."

"That's exactly what I hoped to hear from you, Agent Kanter," stated the deputy secretary of state. "I want you to make it clear to your people that this is a matter best left to other agencies. We do _not_ want an obscure branch of FBI stirring things up accidentally and dumping this to the public. We're assigning liaisons from CIA to coordinate any investigative work you perform in this area."

"You're not asking us to drop it?"

"No."

Kanter nodded. "I'll take the compliment."

"Along those lines, we've got a request," the NSA man spoke up. He pulled out a memory stick and tossed it across the table to Kanter. "That drive stores a series of audio files recorded by U.S. Marines in Afghanistan several weeks ago. They were tracking a terrorist training cell, not having too much luck, as it was. One night, their communications team picked up an encoded series of transmissions. Definitely not hostiles—they were using modifications of U.S. military codes."

He let this sink in. To hammer the point home, the CIA woman spoke. "This only further convinced us that we had rogue U.S. forces involved."

"The modifications were clever, but we've enough computer firepower to break down just about any code. We did that, with enormous confidence statistically, and generated the audio file I've given you. Drop it in your favorite audio player."

"I don't understand," said Kanter. "How can we help?"

"This is a bit embarrassing. The audio file contains a series of sharp command-like phrases spoken by a male voice. The problem's that we can't make heads or tails of what's being said. We've got a formidable army of linguists at our disposal, Agent Kanter. We've got translators covering hundreds of known tongues. And we've gotten nowhere. A brick wall. It's definitely not a common Arabic, Semitic, European, or Asian language. Whatever's being said over those coded transmissions is in a language no one speaks on this earth. Might as well be from Mars."

"That doesn't make sense," said Kanter.

"Not one damn bit," said the NSA man. "The linguists have failed. You've got a reputation for solving puzzles, Agent Kanter. There's a puzzle here, something we aren't seeing. Have your go at it."

The meeting ended sharply on that note. Kanter was thanked, charged with maintaining confidentiality, and dismissed. He stumbled out of the building into the bright and warm moonlight of June, dizzy and exhausted from the last hour. More than anything, Kanter was deeply troubled. Rogue agents on the loose, assassinations, commando raids on terrorist centers, alien languages, and a political ball of radioactive waste. This was a mountain of a mess.

He was going to kill Savas.
9

# Bait and Switch

Disturbed, Savas watched the uproar from the members of Intel 1. Only Angel Lightfoote sat apart from the heated discussion, staring out the window, seemingly oblivious to the turmoil.

Kanter threw up his arms in surrender and thundered over the rest. "That's _all_ I've got!"

Savas glanced around at the group, at the frustration evident in their faces. He couldn't blame them. Kanter was holding back key information, and everyone knew it. He hadn't said a word about the CIA death squads except to stonewall that all the information was classified. _Classified!_ Of course it was classified. What were they, preschoolers? They had obtained classified information before. That Kanter was implying it was anything except an obstacle spoke volumes. After everything they had all been through, it felt a little like betrayal.

"Larry," said Frank Miller after some moments, "this smells of cover-up. What is the threat level in this hunt?"

"Very high, so we take this seriously. We've made important connections. We need to start from there and work our way out." Kanter sighed. "Then there are the audio recordings—the NSA believes they're from some very bad guys. The language isn't known to any translators in the agency. They're likely farming this out to several places. One of those is Intel 1."

Rideout just shook his head. "This is a weird one, Larry. I mean, what the _hell_?"

"Look, JP, it's complicated, more than I can, am _allowed_ to, explain. But it's real. We need to put to the side everything else—however absurd the pieces handed to us appear to be."

A harsh vibration sounded on the table. Savas reached over and grabbed his cell phone as it rotated on the smooth surface. He glanced at the display, and his eyes widened. He held up a hand and took the call. Kanter and the others waited.

"Rasheed? This better be an emergency." Savas exclaimed into the phone, " _What_? Tonight? That was _not_ part of the deal, Rasheed! You break that deal, and three felony counts will instantly reappear and net you half a lifetime in jail!" A voice yelled over the speaker, and Savas responded firmly. "You bet your ass I can! And it _will_ be your ass. What? You don't _care_? Rasheed, this is crazy!"

Savas swiveled his chair and bent over the phone. "Where are you?" The voice barked out words. "We'll meet there. In an hour—I'll be there! If you value your freedom, you'll give me that hour to talk."

Savas closed the phone and cursed.

"Mother-in-law?" asked Rideout.

"The Sheikh. I don't believe this. He's rabbiting. Spooked to high heaven. I've got to stop him. He's crucial to several operations."

Kanter studied Savas for a moment. "What's gotten into him?"

"Seen a ghost," said Lightfoote, staring seriously at the group.

Savas ignored her. "I don't know. Even the threat of jail wasn't touching him. I've got to get up to East Harlem before he changes his mind and decides to skip our little chat."

Kanter nodded. "Go, John."

Rain began to pellet the window of the conference room. Savas stood and rushed to the door. As he passed Lightfoote, she grabbed his arm, gazing into his eyes. Her words seemed to emanate from a halo of red.

"Seen his own ghost."

Water pounded the New York streets as Savas slammed the door of the cab and sprinted into the park. Mothers with strollers dashed madly searching for shelter, and large puddles began to form on street corners with failing drainage. Savas dodged several strollers and unperturbed jogging fanatics as he aimed for the center of the park. He spotted the pedestrian bridge and danced down the steps along its side, finding himself in a circular garden, complete with vacated benches and a central flower bed morphed into a pond by the rain. To the side, a short tunnel ran under the bridge. He headed for it and the dark shape waiting inside.

The Sheikh had looked better. He normally sported a strange combination of tailored clothes that clashed with the reversed baseball cap and multiple earring studs. Today the hat and clothes were soaked, the heavy gold necklace and wrist chains spotted with water yet still bright in the dim light against his dark skin. The white shirt he wore was nearly transparent, soaked through, and Savas could see the blurred shape of a tattoo on his right forearm. What worried Savas the most was the disarray in his face. The Sheikh was always a cool customer, arrogant in his confidence, his ability to play all sides to his advantage. Today, he looked like a frightened punk.

"You'll have me in my grave, G-man."

"You've been watching too many old films, Rasheed." Savas shook the water from his face. "You're too important to be disappearing on me. What's going on?"

"You need to know, yeah? You always need to know," said the Sheikh. "What's _going on_ is that the network's gone rabid, man. There's a purge on."

"It's not us, Rasheed. You're tagged as mine. No one will touch you as long as you're working with us."

The Sheikh laughed. " _Damn_ , man, no one's scared of _you_. You Feds are always three steps behind."

"Caught you, didn't I?"

The Sheikh smiled. "You got lucky. But I mean _going down_. They're _dead_. No one's fingered, everybody's denying. Everybody's getting hit. No one wants to talk about it. Like the fucking boogeyman."

His heart raced. _More killings? Purgings in the terrorist underground?_ This was potentially even bigger than he thought. He _needed_ the Sheikh to stay where he was! "Rasheed, you don't have to run. We've got protection teams. We can watch your back, undercover. If it gets too hot, we can take you into protective custody."

The Sheikh shook his head. "This ain't the usual. Boys aren't scared for nothing. Someone's coming after us, G-man, and they ain't interested in business. They interested in dead men. Networks are wrecked. There ain't no credit, no trail, nothing we can see."

He looked around anxiously, water dripping from his cap. The rain continued its downpour, periodic flashes following rolls of thunder and echoing against the concrete and stone walls of the tunnel. A small river began to flow through the tunnel under the bridge, soaking through their shoes.

The Sheikh grinned diabolically. "Doing your job for you."

"This is important, _damn_ _it_!" Savas had to convince him to work from within. "We _know_ this is happening. We've got to figure out who is behind it!"

"That ain't no interest to me. I done well in this business. No one's wise to me. But money ain't no good if you're six feet under."

Savas used the only tool he had left: _fear._ "Do you really think you can hide from them, Rasheed?" The Sheikh's eyes widened. "Whoever's behind this, they've taken out imams in England and diplomats in New York. They're all over the globe, invisible, _professional_. Like you said, they don't seem to be familiar with the word _mercy._ They're not interested in money or negotiation. You're a _player_ , Rasheed, who makes the network hum. _You're_ one of those important links. It's not a question of whether you've got a price on your head—it's how much, and when they'll cash in."

"Fuck you, man!" he shouted, backing away.

"You run, and you'll be on your own, unprotected, no closer to knowing who's after you. Work with us! We can come down hard on these people, and that'll go a lot farther toward saving your ass than trying to hide in a hole. They'll dig you out, Rasheed. Then they'll pull the trigger."

The Sheikh looked like he was near panic; the truth of Savas's words burrowing inside him. He'd either run in alarm or see that the FBI was throwing him a lifeline—a tenuous one, perhaps, but without it, he was helpless in the water as the sharks circled.

The man inched back toward Savas. He grasped the line.

"What do you want? I don't have much time. They're on to me."

_Instinct._ Savas exhaled softly. "Keep your eyes open. We'll assign a team of undercover agents to shadow you. If what you say's true, you'll be the trap."

"I'll be the fucking _bait_ , man."

Savas leveled his gaze at the man. Honesty was essential. "Yes, Rasheed. You will be."
10

# No Disposal

Pants Henry lay in an alcohol-induced daze on a hard park bench.

A cool breeze stirred through the darkness surrounding him, rustling leaves and pieces of litter along the sidewalk. The boiling New York summer hadn't set in, and the city had still to warm to its deep tissue of concrete and metal. A rare and soft stillness rested over Manhattan. A good time to sleep it off.

A beige orb hung over the East River, and a winking handful of stars forced their way through the moonlight and the orange haze of streetlamps. Pants snored. A brown paper bag rested on his bench in Dag Hammarskjold Park in Midtown, an overflowing pushcart of junk to the side. He was a fixture along with his one pants leg, tolerated by the locals, outlasting many careers in the city.

The moonlight darted through the metal grid of a park sculpture that rose from the middle of the plaza, alighting on Pants's haggard face, beard, and the thin wire running from ear to mouth. Static bursts escaped from the device as he quietly responded.

"Eagle 7, this is Alpha center." The language was guttural, vaguely Germanic, uninterpretable to anyone who might have overheard.

"Copy," Pants whispered in the same tongue, his eyes cracked open.

"Report."

"Plaza is clean."

"Hold position. Delta team exiting the target zone. Surveillance redirected. The gardeners are planting. Less than ten minutes. Situation nominal but critical. Execute extreme caution. This is it, Eagle 7."

"Roger, Alpha center."

Ten minutes was more than enough. The city block at Second Avenue had been re-created in the deserts of the Southwest, the operation rehearsed more times than he wished to remember, with too many different scenarios, too many failures and unexpected events encountered. Nothing could go wrong tonight.

That was why, when he saw motion at the far end of the park, training took over, and the outcome was never in doubt.

Two young men stepped into the plaza. Their voices were loud for the hour, alcohol the likely culprit. They appeared to be fair-skinned blacks or Latinos, with loose-fitting jeans, sharply cut shirts revealing strong muscles, and not a few thin-edged scars. Unmoving on the park bench, Pants wasn't surprised to see the black-and-gold tattoos. _Latin Kings_. Fallen from their heyday, their members were still feared. He'd need to be focused.

"Alpha center, two unidentifieds, moving toward the garden. Latin Kings. Moving to intercept."

"Roger that, Eagle 7. Mission critical. Sanitize the plaza."

"Roger, Alpha Center. In progress."

He tottered from the bench, an old bum both drunk and hungover. He grabbed his paper bag and shuffled toward the middle of the plaza, beneath the iron dome, grasping bars to steady himself. The two Kings slowed, still laughing, but suspicious. There was nothing unusual about the wino in front of them—Pants had made sure of that—but still they slowed. Pants understood: that place of unreason that senses danger whispered deep within them.

He made himself appear oblivious to their motions, stumbling forward and talking to the brown stone-tiled walkway at his feet. Approaching within ten yards, he raised his head, babbling nonsense and quickening his gait. The young men slowed and stared at each other. They relaxed, an initial sense of caution replaced with a smirking mischief.

"Late for a walk, gramps."

The youth's smile faded. _Can't hide the eyes._

Pants spun. From underneath his shabby coat, he removed a handgun, a silencer protruding from the barrel. He aimed and squeezed the trigger twice. Two spits melted into the soft June wind blowing through the park, followed by the wet impact of a human form dropping to the ground. As the first figure began its descent to the pavement, Pants rotated and fired again. The head of the other man arched backward. Both bodies lay crumbled on the ground.

Pants paused, listening, the gun still and upright, his body tense, head cocked at an angle. From one of the bodies came a soft moaning. The first target placed his hands on the ground in front of him as he tried vainly to rise. Blood covered his chest and hands; his face looked pale. Posture erect, motions sure and controlled, Pants stepped toward the prone man and aimed the weapon.

"No . . ." the man whispered, seeing the barrel pointed at his head. He dropped heavily as a shot blew apart the upper right corner of his forehead, spraying blood and bone across the cobbled walkway. Pants knelt and checked the other body. Satisfied, he examined the plaza carefully, eyeing the windows of surrounding buildings. He spoke into his microphone.

"Alpha center, this is Eagle 7. Plaza is sanitized. Repeat, plaza is sanitized."

"Roger that, Eagle 7. Gardeners have seeded the area. Exit plaza and proceed to rendezvous."

"Any disposal, Alpha center?"

"Negative, Eagle 7. Unnecessary, and there's no time. After tomorrow, your little mess will be the least of their worries."

"Roger that. Eagle 7, out." Pants resumed a stumbling gait down the plaza walkway toward First Avenue. There, he turned left, uptown, glancing back only momentarily at the dancing currents of the East River. Somewhere, he knew, those currents were carrying the body of the real Pants Henry, who was finally at rest.

More intently, he followed the lights alongside the river, staring up at the towering form of the United Nations building at the river's edge.
11

# Late for Work

Traffic rushed like swarms of locusts across Second Avenue. _Swarms of large, cheap, ugly metallic locusts_ , thought Fahd Shobokshi, aide to the Saudi Counselor, as he stepped over a fresh pile of dog excrement left by some undoubtedly charming member of this filthy city of infidels. Fahd Shobokshi hated his job. He hated being away from his homeland. He hated having to fawn over the pompous and idiotic head of the Saudi Consulate in Manhattan. He hated the small and poorly furnished hole they called an apartment in this city. He hated living in this nation of sinners and in this chief city of Satan, where a righteous man could not walk two blocks without having to turn away from pornography. He hated the dinners overflowing with Western dishes, the long hours of tedious paperwork. Most of all, he hated the mornings when he knew he would be dressed down by the counselor for being late. Today, he was late again.

The street sign blinked to "walk," and Fahd dodged a rushing cab as he stepped across the street. There was one thing he did like about the city, and that was the—what did they call it in Urdu? _The kulfiwala_. Yes, he liked the kulfiwala, he thought pleasantly, as a stinking and sweating American jogger bumped into him. If stopping by made him even later, then he would gain much and lose little. His dressing down was already assured. At the corner of the plaza, the cart was there, as it was every working summer day. The short little Pakistani would be there too, with his terrible but wonderful kulfi. Fahd had come to love the mornings and his kulfi—so superior to the dripping cream these Americans preferred. A day felt incomplete without it.

He stepped to the cart and smiled at the man. These Pakistanis were good people, but they were barely Muslims. An inferior race still tainted by their roots in paganism. _But Allah is merciful, and he offers his mercy to all who follow his precepts._ He paid and took his plastic bowl and spoon and began to eat, tasting the cool of the ice milk in the warming June sun, pausing long enough outside of 866 Second Avenue for a final moment of peace before the day began. He glanced over toward the plaza. _Police._ There were several, and they had begun to fence off a region of the park. _More crime in this murderous city_.

He glanced at the tall building, its black-glass windows filled with floor after floor of United Nations' representatives. It was a rather imposing building, sucking the light out of the nice little corner between the tree-lined plaza and the small park across the street. He'd rather wait outside, especially on a nice day like today. But he could not. He took a deep breath. He was late already, and pausing outside would not avert what awaited.

And then the door to hell opened at his feet.

Turned inside-out in the middle of a fire, pummeled by stones and bathed in rushing air, he flew. Light, darkness, heat, smoke. His ears ached, sounds muffled as submerged in water. He reached to touch them, then pulled his hands down. With blurred vision, he saw that they were covered in blood. His back erupted in a spasm of pain, and his eyes focused. He was lying on the street surrounded by broken glass, nearly underneath a large truck parked on the west side of Second Avenue.

_I am across the street?_ Through the wetness of the blood in his injured ears, he began to filter sounds. Alarms, many of them. Building alarms, car alarms; he could not tell. Voices screaming—commands, exclamations. Cries for help. His eyes could see only a brown haze, a thick cloud of dust like a choking fog surrounding the block. Cars were overturned or crushed by enormous slabs of concrete. Glass was everywhere, and flakes like confetti rained from above.

He tried to stand. The pain in his back was paralyzing. He tried again, groaning from the effort, and finally made it to his feet. His left arm was not working; it hung limply at his side. _I cannot feel it._ His body was covered in bloody ash. One shoe was missing. _Merciful God, what has happened?_

He limped forward over the once busy street. Nothing moved except the smoke and dust. A million shards of glass covered the roadway. He heard sirens, choruses of sirens blaring from all directions. Glancing forward, across the street, he gasped. The cloud of dust was still thick, a sharp rain descending like sand. But it had cleared enough to leave no doubt. A gaping hole was carved out of the earth. Fires ranged along the crater, in nearby vehicles, in the trees of Dag Hammarskjold Park. The corner of Second Avenue and 46th Street was a burning hole, a black pit of nothingness opening its maw to drink the dust above it. The building, _his building_ , that tower of polished black glass and steel, filled with workers from twenty different nations, was gone. Blown and dispersed into the air of New York.

For several seconds, he could not move. Police cars and fire trucks arrived at the scene, and the sounds of chaos flowed over his shattered ears like water in a sea cave. A hulking fireman in a mask rushed toward Fahd, shouting at him and pointing across the road, telling him something he could not decipher. Fahd nodded dumbly, turning left to retreat back across the street. He glimpsed the pushcart he had visited this morning, in a place and time far away, in another world. Next to the overturned cart lay a body. A small dark form. His Pakistani friend.

Fahd stumbled over debris in the road. He looked down to right himself and noticed an irregular object. He stared in horror. He began to shake. Below him was the face of a woman. _Not her head, dear Allah, not her head._ Three-quarters of her face was removed from the rest of her body, an eye along with distorted and grotesque lips and cartilage from the nose, tattered bits of a forehead, all soaked in blood. _Horror._

He heard it finally, crashing against his bleeding eardrums. Screams and screams and screams of terror. He looked around, turning in every direction, dancing madly away from the demonic mask of death near his feet. The screams grew louder and louder in his head, and he turned to look but could not find the voices. Only as he began to limp maniacally across the road, no longer caring what he stepped on, glass or flesh, did he realize that the screams were his own.
12

# Surgical Strikes

Savas stepped up the curb onto the sidewalk in front of 26 Federal Plaza. He wore a dark suit and sunglasses, carrying a coffee in one hand, the _New York Times_ and his briefcase in the other. The tension of the last few weeks had begun to extract a toll. His shoulders sagged, his gait was slower, and behind the sunglasses, his eyes were a sleepless bloodshot.

He swung into the main entrance of the FBI building, keeping his coffee level while dodging exiting and entering figures, rarely taking his eyes off the page he was reading. He glanced up at security, nodded toward the well-known faces, handed off his items, went through the required checks, grabbed his items, and found his place back in the article as he approached the elevators.

Several figures were waiting in line. He smiled, glimpsing a young woman with waist-length red hair. Today she wore a bright-green dress complemented by red sneakers, standing apart from the crowd waiting for the elevators. She stared straight up at the wall to her left, caught in a trance of some kind. Savas glanced back at his article and slowed to a stop behind her.

"Greetings, Kemo Sabe," the young woman spoke.

"Someday I'm going to learn how to sneak up on you, Angel."

"I doubt that, John."

"Yeah, so do I."

"You look like shit."

Savas laughed. "Thanks. I'm looking forward to the weekend and a little rest."

"Sorry to hear that," said Lightfoote, moving toward the elevator. Savas shook his head. The bell rang and the doors opened.

As Savas stepped out of the elevator, he knew something was wrong. The normal rhythms of work were completely out-of-whack as agents darted from place to place among a din of rising voices. He could see Kanter in the back pointing and shouting commands like some mad orchestral conductor. He spotted Savas, summoning him with an imperious wave of his hand.

"See you soon, Captain Overlord, sir," Lightfoote said sweetly.

"What?" he asked, staring ahead at the chaos, but by the time he turned to look, she was already flitting across the room. Savas spilled his coffee over his _New York Times_ , cursed, and marched forward, dropping both in the trash.

Kanter was in prime form. Already his tie was askew and his receding gray hair hung in growing disarray. A fire burned in his eyes, and his jaw jutted forward, signaling that he was in the crazed problem-solving mode that made him so skilled as an administrator and such a pain in the ass. Kanter didn't waste any time getting to the point.

"This is it, John!" he said, grabbing the ex-cop's arm in a viselike grip and dragging him across the room. "No drill. We have a bona fide event right now in New York City."

"What?" said Savas. "An attack? Today?"

"That's right. Looks like it's down by the UN—not the UN proper, thank goodness. We've some confirmation on that, at least. But in the immediate area. Set your team up now, John. I want everything you can get on this pouring in ASAP." Kanter left his side and stormed off toward another team.

Savas headed toward the Operation Room for Intel 1. On his way he banged on the office doors of his group members. "Let's go! We need to move right now to the OR!" Of his six team members, only the angular form of Matt King emerged.

"I supposed from all this chaos that we must—"

"Shut it, Matt. Mail me the essay. This is real. Let's move." Savas turned and nearly crashed into the hairy form of Hernandez.

"Manuel, please, to the Operation Room. This one looks real, and we might just burn through all the wires you duct-taped together. I need you in there making sure we fly straight; you got it?"

"I'm on it."

"Please don't tell me we're running any beta versions of anything."

"I live by a don't-ask-don't-tell policy for software, John."

Savas stared harshly at the ceiling for a moment. "The system better not crash." He pushed past Hernandez and felt him following behind as they headed to the Operation Room. Along the way, they were joined by JP Rideout and Frank Miller. The four strode into the OR.

"Okay, where's Rebecca?" asked Savas, glancing around the room with some anxiety. Over the last few years, he'd come to count more on Rebecca Cohen than on anyone in the group. Her sharp mind, grounded personality, and holistic way of thinking kept the team focused with the right perspective. She was also a whiz with the crisis system Hernandez had set up. Today would be a bad day for her to call in sick.

"I'm here, John," she said, dashing into the OR. He breathed easier.

"All right, now if we can only get Angel in here, we can start to break this thing down."

Hernandez tugged on his arm and pointed across the room. Savas followed his hand to the end of the half-moon desk. Lightfoote sat there; somehow she had entered before they had come in, or perhaps she had floated in like some ghost without anyone noticing. As he looked at her, she paused her furious typing to raise a hand, eyes still on the screen, giving Savas the thumbs-up.

Aside from Savas and Hernandez, the remaining members of Intel 1 were busy logging in and bringing up the system. Awaiting commands from Savas, some were already running the analysis software.

"All I've got for the present is that there was an attack Midtown East by the UN. Rebecca, let's bring up the police and fire data. Angel, can you get a live satellite view up?"

An enormous projection screen was draped over the far wall, some ten feet in front of the table. It flashed to life, showing five smaller subdivisions superimposed over a larger background. One screen, corresponding to Lightfoote's terminal, blinked and came to life, displaying a view from space. It zoomed into the island of Manhattan just south of the Queensboro Bridge. Smoke obscured a region of several blocks near the United Nations building. Other screens flashed and showed a stream of text—emergency bulletins from several New York City agencies.

"Excellent. Rebecca, why don't you run the link to Larry's office and dump the live feed. What do we have folks?"

In the time it took him to say these things, several of the other screens flashed on, revealing varied scenes. One was cutting between local and national coverage of the event on television. Another was funneling information from internet search engines through one of Manuel's algorithms.

"Explosive device, John," Cohen called out, processing the information and integrating it faster than anyone. Lightfoote cut in, "Second Avenue, near the plaza. Can't see through the smoke."

An altered image of the scene displayed in false color revealed no obscuring smoke but rather illuminating solid structures—buildings, cars, and rubble—in an eerie green.

"Filtering it through the IATIA satellite, looks like a hole . . . there!" King called out. Several intakes of breath were heard over the clacking of keyboards.

"Damn," said Savas. "Something was blown to hell and back."

Immediately, another image of the area occupied the screen controlled by Rideout. It showed the same region, in real color and without the hole.

"SAT photo before the bombing, sometime last week," Rideout chimed in. "It's the corner of Second and Forty-Sixth Street."

"Okay, people, what is it? Let's find out what was in that hole."

Cohen leaned back. "John, fire department chatter confirms what we're seeing. There was a massive explosion. There's some severe damage, and there are reports of many injuries and secondary carnage from car fires and falling debris."

"Well, they've come back to visit again, folks, that much is clear. Anyone know what the hell they hit yet?"

"Got it! It's a UN office building. 866 Second Avenue," said Rideout. An image flashed showing a tall, black-glass building. "Damn. I'm getting one international office located there after another: representatives from Ecuador, Greece, Guyana, Honduras, even the Saudi General Consulate. They're spread out on different floors and offices."

Miller muttered, "I don't think it's gonna matter what floor those poor bastards were on."

"No," echoed Savas. "Okay, so, we have an attack on UN personnel, a UN building for all practical purposes, with enough shit to take the entire building down."

"Structural damage to neighboring buildings is minimal from both the SAT and chatter, John," said Cohen.

"Okay. Point?"

"Well, they didn't use airplanes this time, that's for sure," said Miller.

Cohen nodded. "This was a surgical strike, John. Whoever did this managed to obliterate an entire building in midtown Manhattan without much collateral damage. Unless they got supremely lucky, we're looking at some very highly skilled munitions work."

"I guess they've been busy in those caves all these years," said Savas, turning toward the screen. "Manuel, what do we have in terms of munitions analysis?"

"Ah, John, beyond my pay grade. We'll need to farm this out to forensics."

"Yeah, figured. But that means we're waiting as usual to shift through the aftermath. This is in real-time, folks. What else can we pull out of this?"

"CNN, Fearless Leader," said Lightfoote.

Her terminal cut to a live broadcast from the news organization. A reporter stood before a mob of people kept at a distance by police and fire department personnel, who themselves were partially obscured by pouring smoke. The reporter's words were barely audible over the sound of sirens and voices.

" . . . about half an hour ago, Brian. This is as close as our crew was able to get. As you can see, there's simply an incredible amount of smoke, and the building lies in complete ruins. Onlookers report an enormous explosion or series of explosions. One elderly woman said the ground shook and she nearly fell."

"Doesn't look like Second Avenue to me . . ." started King.

"It's not," said Savas. "It's not New York. Go to full screen, Rebecca."

The image grew to fill the entire projection screen. People were running in all directions while the reporter continued speaking. Savas grabbed a chair, flipped it around so that its back faced him, and sat as he listened to the footage. His hands gripped the chair back tightly.

"I'm sorry, Brian, it's just chaos here; I can't hear you. Let me repeat, there's been a major explosion at the Saudi Arabian Embassy here in Washington, DC. None of us can get close enough to see what's going on, but from what we can see, it seems that the embassy's been severely damaged . . . of considerable power. . . . Police and fire crews . . . uncertain . . . injuries. . ." The transmission was breaking up slightly. King used this moment to speak.

"John, I've got this on the SAT."

"Put it up."

The green-colored image occluded a portion of the news feed. Next to it, King superimposed a photograph of the Saudi Embassy from space. In the false-color image that cut through the smoke and clouds, the results of the explosion were obvious to all.

"My _God_ , the whole thing's gone," said Rideout. "Just like here. Is this some 9/11 replay? They're hitting us in New York and Washington at the same time."

Rideout's words were like blows to the stomach. Savas felt himself become unhinged in time. _Towers like sand crumbling in the wind._ _Falling, falling slowly, a million tons of concrete and metal_ _. . ._ _and flesh and bone._ _Police beneath, young officers, daughters_ _. . ._ _sons._ _Beneath a mountain falling_ _. . ._

Cohen's voice became a lifeline.

"John, you're not going to believe this."

Savas's eyes, unfocused and in another time, turned toward her and became completely alert. She was holding a cell phone.

"One of the agents guarding the Sheikh is on the phone. They lost him. Two of them are down. Somebody took them out, and the Sheikh bolted. Our man is wounded. He doesn't know if the Sheikh is alive or dead."
13

# Quarry

The group sat still in the dim lighting and bright screens of the Intel 1 crisis center, listening silently to a cell phone message play over the speaker in the room. They heard a strained voice, winded, the man obviously hurt and struggling to speak.

"They knew we were there," he panted. "Shots came—Jones and Richards went down. I think they're dead." He coughed, a harsh and grating sound. "I'm hit, but I can move. The rat ran. I tried to follow," he paused, out of breath, requiring several seconds to speak again. "Couldn't keep up. Trace my cell. I need help. Losing blood."

Cohen stopped the playback. Her voice was soft and flat. "We have an ambulance on the way, but they're closing down the bridges and tunnels."

All eyes in Intel 1 turned to Savas. On the screens were the continuing images of the terror attacks: flashing lights of emergency vehicles, smoke, and statements to the press from U.S. and foreign government officials. A voice called out that Kanter was on his way down.

"All right, people, we literally have the world blowing up around us. Let's think carefully but quickly." Savas paced the room, talking as much toward the floor and ceiling as to the members of his team. "We have major attacks in New York and Washington, coordinated attacks, unlike anything since 9/11. FBI, the White House, the nation will demand that the majority of our resources be focused on these attacks—and they're right. So, unless Larry countermands me on this, I want most of you busting your asses to get everything you can on these bombings. But this ambush on our protection squad convinces me that we are onto something. It may be too late—the Sheikh may be dead. But we don't know that. I'll work with Frank to try to locate him, intercept him, and bring him in if he's not already flower food. Any objections?"

"Damn inconvenient timing!" barked Kanter, who was standing in the doorway listening. "Your contact surely excels in planning, orchestrating his near murder right as we scramble to cover this nightmare!"

"Someone has a sense of timing, Larry, but I don't think it's the Sheikh."

Kanter waved off Savas's anger. "You and Miller go, and try like hell not to get yourselves killed if you find him—some boys out there are _not_ playing around. Meanwhile, Intel 1 will be a little short-staffed but will sacrifice increasing amounts of their lives, or at least sleep, to make up the difference." Kanter turned toward the group, focusing on Rebecca. "Agent Cohen, I assume that you have no objections if I elevate you to temporary group leader in John's absence?"

"No, Larry, of course—"

"Good. Because I've got more calls than I've got call-waiting circuits, and I don't have time to babysit you people. Your job is to figure out what the hell happened, who's responsible, and, if possible, have them in custody this evening."

"We'll do our best . . . sir," said Cohen.

Kanter frowned and stormed out of the room.

Savas looked at the ex-marine and sighed. "You and I will carve out a little corner of the OR. The rest of you—Rebecca has the wheel."

Cohen nodded but instead walked over toward Savas and pulled him aside. He blinked. _Is she angry?_

"John, you were unconscious after Indian Point for _two days_ with radiation sickness and a broken rib. Do you think you need to be chasing this street punk and those assassins while all the rest of this is going on? Is this mission really that critical?"

"Yes, I think so. Something important is tied into this." He tried to calm her. "Look, we'll be careful, like Larry said. We know there are some nasties buzzing around."

She just stared at him. "Sure, zero to sixty in 5.4 seconds, crashing explosives with a forklift in a radioactive death cell. Was your monster truck trick careful, too?"

Savas was taken aback. "Rebecca, I did what I had to there! Those explosives were rigged to blow. The cooling rods were completely exposed!"

Cohen nodded but with a frown on her face, her eyes distant. "John, it's not the details. It's the pattern. This is becoming a habit, don't you think?"

"What is?"

"You nearly getting yourself killed on every case."

Savas looked away. This was a direction he didn't want any conversation to go. Not now, with buildings coming down and contacts on the run. Not with Rebecca.

Miller delivered him. The muscled agent strode up to the pair. "John, let's move. Manuel let me have the keys to the car, and I'm bringing up the tracking system. Let's see where he's running."

Savas avoided Cohen's gaze and followed the ex-marine. _Maybe the Sheikh isn't the only one running._

There was a counterpoint of activity in the room as the majority of Intel 1 continued to focus on the unfolding terrorist attacks. Savas and Miller commandeered a terminal and went to work tracking down his contact.

"Manuel has transferred control of our communications software, John," Miller announced, typing furiously on the keyboard. "I _think_ I know what I'm doing with it. Look— _here_! His phone has a GPS, and we can track him. He's in Queens, apparently not moving—assuming, of course, that it's him alive with the phone."

"Try the cell. If he's stopped running, he might answer."

"Punching it, using your number as the caller," said Miller. "I'll run a general scan on the phone as well."

The digital tones of the dialed number played over the small computer speakers. There was a click, and a voice answered.

" _Fuck you_ , G-man!" came the welcome. "A lot of good your muscle did me."

"Shut up, Rasheed!" yelled Savas into the computer microphone. "We've got agents dead who were covering your ass! We need to come in and get you."

"You'd better!"

"We will!"

"They know; it all started after I talked to you."

"What started? Who's _they_ , Rasheed?"

"Fuck that! No time! I need protection! Your men are down, useless. I need to come in!"

"Okay, Rasheed, we know where you are."

Miller covered the microphone and whispered to Savas "John, so does someone else. His cell's being tracked."

Savas felt a surge of adrenaline. "Who?"

"Checking . . . no one legit!"

_Christ!_ "Rasheed, you've got to hang up and call me from another cell, a new cell, prepaid, or a pay phone. Your cell is tagged. They're tracking you."

" _Fuck!_ " The phone went dead.

Savas turned to Miller. "He'll move from there; he's smart. He'll call us when he's got another phone."

Miller nodded. "I hope so. Meanwhile, we know where he is, so let's get there."

"Yes," said Savas, "before someone else does."
14

# Golden Raven

The drive to Queens became an exercise in patience in the face of panic. Law enforcement had locked down all of Manhattan—bridges, tunnels, airports. Getting on or off the island required long waits through the stalled traffic and repeated discussions with police and National Guard personnel to achieve clearance. Miller drove, and Savas could only boil inside as he played through multiple scenarios—most ending up with the Sheikh dead before they could get to him. He also did not forget that they were heading into a covert war zone, where unknown ciphers were playing a deadly game of cat and mouse. He had two dead agents, and a growing list of downed assassination targets, to remind him.

He removed his pistol, placing it on his lap. He lifted the weapon, pressed the magazine catch, and let the cartridge drop onto his legs. He pulled the slide back and inspected the chamber to ensure it was empty then allowed the slide to spring forward. He pointed the gun toward the right side of the car and pulled the trigger. The click was clear, smart, and drowned by the sound of tires over the Queensboro Bridge.

"You planning on breaking it down on the way over?" asked Miller wryly, his eyes on the road, the speedometer approaching sixty.

Savas shook his head. "Figured we may be reloading today, Frank. Wanted to have a peek at things inside."

Miller nodded. "Shot placement is everything. I've seen guys unload and hit an assailant with more than ten rounds in the wrong places. The man just kept firing. Even without drugs, a determined man can take a lot of incidental damage and fight through the pain. Got to unplug the battery—heart, lungs, major organs."

"I know, Frank," said Savas, but the ex-marine continued.

"In the war, in Afghanistan, I saw shit you wouldn't believe. I've seen a two-twenty-pound pile of Special Forces muscle drop dead from a piece of shrapnel no bigger than a needle. I've seen men drag themselves with half a leg blown off, still firing, screaming obscenities, until they dropped from blood loss. The worst are the religious nuts, the jihadists who believe every dead American is another virgin in paradise. I've seen those bastards filled with ammo, and they keep coming. Human, of course—just got to hit them in the right place." He shook his head sharply. "Seen the opposite, of course—young Arab kids who take a shot in the leg and learn the hard way that their faith was bullshit. Those fall fast. Bunch of bawling kids on the side while you deal with the maniacs."

"Sounds like hell, Frank."

Miller frowned. "So they call it. When you're there, it's just what it is."

Savas's cell rang out, and he picked up.

"Rasheed? Where are you?" Beside him, Miller tried to make out the words spoken on the other end. Savas continued. "Okay, we're almost there. We're going to pull up near the Astoria line. You'll see a black town car, FBI written all over it. Yes, I know! But it's all we had access to! In case you didn't realize, all hell's broken out in the city today!"

Savas continued after the voice spoke for several seconds. "If you _are_ being followed, we'll have you covered. Come up Thirtieth Avenue toward the subway line. We'll be hidden close to the station, near the car, but we'll see down the street for a long way. Anything suspicious and we'll move on it."

Savas closed the phone.

"One of the subway stations, John? Kinda public for this."

Savas paused a moment, deep in thought. "I know, but I needed a place he could identify and get to fast, without confusion. Also, it'll be harder to pull anything off in a crowded place."

Miller raised his eyebrows. "If they do, we could get some collateral damage."

Savas nodded, his face troubled. He had accepted the risk but was burdened by it anyway. _The location—so close to the church._ _Why did I choose to meet him there?_

"He was clean?"

"Said he was using a pay phone." He turned toward Miller. "I can't believe his cell's being tracked. Who's got that kind of access, Frank?"

"Phone companies and select government agencies, John. You know that."

"The CIA hit squads? Damn it, I don't believe that, Frank."

"Well, someone's tapped into U.S. communication networks, all to track down this one guy. Either they really want him, or they've got a kind of casual access that's frightening."

"He's not that important."

"Then we ought to be worried about who we're dealing with, John."

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

The Sheikh was due to be on foot, moving up the street toward the station from the west. After checking the platform, Savas and Miller descended from the elevated tracks above Thirty-First Street. Miller sat at an outdoor café and was the perfect model of a relaxed two-hundred-and-thirty-pound marine enjoying the fine June weather. Savas took a more awkward position, slowly gazing over the newspaper stand in front of a deli. Soon, he had run out of papers to stare at and began to examine the produce on display when he noticed a movement from Miller's direction.

The marine had spotted their quarry first and rose from his seat, heading toward the street crossing. Savas's cell vibrated as Miller sent an alert to his phone. Across the street and halfway down the block, weaving erratically, was the harried figure of the Sheikh. _Oh,_ _Christ!_ Savas tensed instinctively as he realized that the man was nearly running. He and Miller locked eyes for a moment, the communication enough, then both began to cross the street in the direction of their informant. Savas felt for the gun in the side holster hidden by his jacket. He zeroed in on the Sheikh, scanning the sea of people behind him.

The hunter was hard to miss. A tall man rounded the corner at the far end of the block. Like the Sheikh, he moved too fast, counter to the normal flow of pedestrians. Savas heard Miller shout from the right. Both men pulled their guns and began sprinting toward the Sheikh, who had nearly reached the corner. Several people began to scream, and Savas waved them out of their way.

"FBI! Everyone clear the way! Clear the way!"

The pedestrian traffic parted like the Red Sea. Savas gestured to the ground.

"Drop! Drop down!"

The Sheikh dropped. His action, and the parting crowd, exposed the figure pursuing him. A gun was in the assassin's hand. As the killer sprinted, he steadied the weapon, aiming it at the Sheikh.

Savas braced himself against a lamppost and fired. Gunshots exploded from his and Miller's weapons. People screamed. Bullets whizzed past him, sending shards of shattered concrete into the air.

The battle was brief, the assassin caught in an unexpected crossfire. Savas watched him stumble and fall backward. His weapon arm struck the sidewalk, sending the gun rattling behind him.

"Frank, the Sheikh!" screamed Savas. Miller dashed forward to the prone figure of their contact. Savas approached the downed killer, gun steadied in his hands and aimed forward. Four shots had found their mark: two in the chest, one to the gun shoulder, and the last either a graze or partial-penetration head wound. Savas knew the wounds were life threatening. But the man was _alive_! Miller came up to his side with the Sheikh in tow, who spat out curses.

"Shut it!" yelled Savas, as he pulled out his cell, mashing several buttons. "Getting medical help here as soon as possible. We're _not_ losing this bastard! He's our key, Frank. I promise you, one way or the other, he'll lead us to the truth."

The man mumbled, cracking his lids. For a moment his eyes swam, then he placed himself. Even seriously wounded, he attempted to attack. Savas was more than ready, and he forced the man back down with his foot. The killer collapsed, his energy spent. Savas grabbed him by the shirt collar.

"Nice try, asshole. While you're awake, you should know that you've got the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you can't afford an attorney, one'll be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?" The man whispered something Savas couldn't understand. "I'll take that as a _yes_."

Before he released his grip, an impact blew open the man's forehead, showering the three of them with blood. Savas spun toward Miller.

_"Get him down!_ Get him—" Miller grabbed for the Sheikh, but it was too late. A loud slap echoed. Their contact arched his neck, a shot blasting through his spine and brainstem. He dropped to the ground, dead.

"No, _damn_ _it!"_ shouted Savas. He drew his fists up sharply and pounded the concrete. _They reversed the trap!_

"Shot _him_ first," said Miller. The ex-marine looked up from the body of the dead assassin, scanning around them. "As much as they wanted your contact dead, they made sure we didn't take that killer."

Savas nodded, the implications dawning on him. He stood, his hands numb and clenched, one pricked and smarting. He turned his hand over and opened the palm. Gleaming in the sunlight was a golden necklace, torn unintentionally from the dead assassin's neck. Fresh blood stained the links. At the bottom hung a pendant, shaped like an anchor, and unlike anything Savas had ever seen.

The harsh face of a bird was carved in its side.
15

# Prodigal Son

In the fading light of the June evening, John Savas watched the old women file out of the church in Astoria. A sea of black with gray caps, some limping down the steps toward the streets. The nimble steps of the young danced in the black tide, small islands lit with brighter colors. Vespers was over, the last prayers of the day read. The cantor exited last. Gazing up at the gold-painted dome and the neon-white cross, he lit a cigarette, crossed himself, and stepped into the night. In seconds he was lost in the swirling currents of New Yorkers flowing across the busy streets.

When it was clear that the church had emptied, Savas stepped out of a black Crown Victoria. His polished shoes slapped the pavement as he made his way toward the steps. He wore a black suit, formal yet modest. Functional. His shoes clacked up the stairs to bring him before the entrance, where he crossed himself and pushed one of the doors open slowly, peering inside. Satisfied, he entered and let the door close softly behind him.

Inside the church, a palpable stillness hung in the air with the remaining incense. Savas remembered that stillness, that period after the service without chatter and bustle, yet _full_ with what he once imagined as the essence of angels lingering. The space held a thoughtful, prayerful silence more pregnant than the chanting itself. He dropped several coins into the slot underneath beeswax candles beside the icons at the front of the narthex. He took two candles and lit them from those already placed in the sand, thinking first of his son, then of his ex-wife. He crossed himself again, kissed the icon of Christ, and stepped into the nave.

The lights were low, and the candles around the body of the church shone with halos through the fragrant smoke. Father Timothy folded his vestments and squinted at the visitor in the pews.

"John?" His voice echoed against the marble. "John Savas?"

"Hello, Father."

The priest smiled. "John! It's good to see you after all these years."

"I wasn't sure that it would be," he replied.

The priest frowned. "Of course it is! Let's not have any such nonsense from you about this." The priest came forward. Savas took his hand, kissed it, and crossed himself. The priest tried to wave the traditional gesture away but finally submitted.

"Father Timothy, I've come for confession. That is, if you have the time tonight."

The priest stood, still and serious. He gave Savas a long look. "All right, John, give me a second. I was just putting everything away. Please, wait for me in the corner, by the icon of St. Nicholas."

Savas nodded and walked over to the left side of the nave. From just above the floor to more than fifteen feet up the side of the wall, the icon of the great ascetic from Anatolia, now western Turkey, glinted, his brown robes flowing from sandaled feet to the receding hairline at the top of his head. Savas always found it amusing how Western Christians had taken this harsh monk and dressed him up in a red suit, strapped him to a sleigh with reindeer out of the pagan Northern myths, and made him so fat it was hard to imagine him ever fasting. This was the man who had slapped a heretical bishop at the First Council of Nicea, after all. As a child, Savas never told his friends that underneath the icon in his church, in a golden case about the size of a breadbox, were the bones of Santa Claus himself. It was likely that any explanations of the veneration of relics would have failed to bridge this cultural divide.

Father Timothy bustled over and laid a prayer book on a marble handrail. He gestured to a chair, but Savas shook his head. He'd been sitting too much, analyzing too much, until his eyes were blurry. He'd stand for this.

"Behold, my child, Christ stands here invisibly receiving your confession. Do not be ashamed and do not fear, and do not withhold anything from me; but without doubt, tell all you have done and receive forgiveness from the Lord Jesus Christ. Lo, He is before us, and I am only a witness, bearing testimony before Him of all things which you say to me. But if you conceal anything from me, you shall have the greater sin. Take heed, therefore, lest having come to the physician, you depart unhealed."

It was a routine Savas had known since his days as an altar boy. Yet now it was alien, because he was alien, because he had come and gone through a place that had changed him.

The priest sat in the chair. He had aged significantly since Savas was a boy, and it showed in his movements and in his stamina.

"I'll make this short, Father. Not that I'm happy with myself or anything. But there are things that are real and important, and I need to say them. Most important, I suppose, is that I don't know anymore if I believe in God."

The priest showed no outward sign of surprise or dismay at this admission. He merely replied after Savas's long pause, "Go on, John."

John Savas looked up at the icon of Saint Nicholas. _Who was he?_ _Who am I?_

"I don't disbelieve, but I don't know what it means anymore to believe. The idea of God I had in my mind couldn't be real. I mean, the idea from my parents, priests, Sunday school teachers, friends, and family—the myth we were all accepting, I just can't believe in that anymore. Whatever God is, it's not this simple, orderly, Father Christmas idea. I really don't know if there's a God. I certainly don't know the nature of God. And I don't know how to trust any man to tell me what the truth is."

Father Timothy gazed at him in silence, impassively. After a few more moments went by, during which time Savas had not spoken, the priest nodded slowly, as if to himself.

"John, I'm not going to tell you to make a pilgrimage to the island of Tinos and crawl up the hill on your knees to the Church of the Megalohari. I will say that you're at a most dangerous, and yet promising place. Dangerous, because your soul stands on the edge of nothingness into which it might fall, forever to be lost. Promising because only there can you truly reach out to the Mystery that is God."

"Father, I don't feel like I'm reaching out to anything. I can't see anything leading me anywhere. If there's a cliff, I won't know it."

"John, you _are_ reaching out, or you wouldn't be here tonight. I would ask you not to turn away from prayer, if you can do that. That is your link to God."

"Sure, Father. I'll try. But I don't know who or what I'm praying to."

The old priest smiled. "None of us truly do. When we do, we are either entering sainthood or staring at a false idol."

Father Timothy stood and opened the small leather-bound book. Savas was surprised. He hadn't expected the priest to accept his confession. But old habit was in him, and he knelt before the priest, who placed the stole over his head.

"O God, our Savior, Who by Thy prophet Nathan granted unto repented David pardon of his transgressions, and has accepted the Manasses' prayer of penitence, do Thou, in Thy love toward mankind, accept also Thy servant John who repents of his sins which he has committed, overlooking all that he has done, pardoning his offenses and passing by his iniquities. Unto Thee we ascribe glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen."

The priest finished reading the prayers. John Savas stood and crossed himself. Father Timothy walked him to the door of the church.

"This week's events have brought you here, haven't they?" he asked.

Savas stared up into the night sky, hearing the rushing sounds of the subway line behind them. "The trigger, I guess. But my life has brought me here. I just don't know where it's taking me."
16

# Runes

"Special Forces, served in Afghanistan and Iraq for a number of years," said Rebecca Cohen, reading off the screen. "And get this: discharge code 28B/HKA— Discreditable Incidents — Civilian or Military. What does that mean?"

Savas turned to Miller. "Frank, any idea?"

Miller shook his head. "It's not good, but it can cover a lot of ground. You could sweep almost anything under that. One thing is sure; he was out of control in some way."

"So, we have an out-of-control former special-ops soldier functioning as an assassin who was chasing down a player in the underground terrorist network. Doesn't sound like a trained CIA operative."

"Not sure he was the assassin," said Rideout. "Sure, he was muscle hired to kill the guy, but he was _sloppy_. Looks like they needed someone fast and had to settle for poor quality control. When the Sheikh caused them problems, they brought in a second, an _expert_ , who got the job done seriously."

Savas sighed. They were back to the death squad idea. The growing mystique behind these kills was becoming superstition. "Look, he was part of something. If these are CIA death squads running around the world murdering people, why hire a flaky ex-SEAL who could blow the entire thing? There aren't enough super-assassins in the world to cover all the territory these guys are covering. It's like a little army. Some soldiers perform better than others."

"Army?" asked Matt King, his eyebrows raised.

"Honestly, people! These aren't superheroes! For the kind of impact they've had—"

" _If_ you're right that they are all linked," interrupted King.

"Yes, if I'm right, that kind of impact on several continents has to be associated with a large personnel base. There's no other way. When your operation gets too big, you always make recruitment mistakes. I think this is one of them. Besides, rogue CIA assassin teams don't suddenly get all organized and vengeful! This is a group, a _large_ group, with a purpose behind it."

There was silence in the room. _No one's buying it. Drop it, John._

"What else do we have?" he asked.

Cohen swiveled away from the computer screen and sighed. "That's it. Hardly any background. He was discharged four years ago, disappeared off the map, and showed up two thousand miles from home brandishing a weapon in Queens."

"There's got to be more. This is our only link!" he said in frustration. "Anything on that pendant?"

"No. Why?"

"Not many men wear jewelry. If they do, it's usually a cross, Star of David, St. Christopher's medal, dog tags. They tend to wear pendants that have specific meaning. That pendant is unusual. Anything unusual can potentially tell us something."

"All we have is an anchor with a bird's face," said Rideout. "Not sure where we go with that."

Savas was ready to call the meeting to an end when Hernandez burst into the room.

"John, you're going to love this," he said, dropping a printout on the countertop beside the computer.

The other members of the group drew closer and strained to see the paper. Savas picked it up. His brows furrowed as he stared at the strange collection of figures running across the page. After a few moments, he looked toward Hernandez expectantly.

"Okay, Manuel, I'm stumped. What is this?"

Hernandez shrugged. "No idea. It was encoded in the mysterious audiotapes you gave me."

"They're runes." It was Lightfoote. She had wiggled her way in between several bodies, her head almost on Savas's forearm, orange hair spilling everywhere, her gaze full on the page.

" _Runes_?" asked Hernandez, perplexed.

Lightfoote cocked her head at him. "Yeah, roooones," she dragged out the vowel, mocking his question. "Letters. Old. _Magical_."

"Oh, brother," said Rideout under his breath.

"She's right," said Cohen, staring closely at the paper. "Not sure of the writing system, but look—clearly letters of some kind, with broad strokes and simple forms. Designed for carving, not writing."

Savas turned toward the former programmer. "Manuel, where did these letters come from?"

" _Runes_ ," piped Lightfoote. Savas ignored her.

"That's the craziest part, John. The audio transmission, with the weird language no one understands, it was double-coded."

"Meaning?"

"There was a second message overlaid at high frequencies. I found it by running the message through a Fourier analysis. In general, you would need to know to look for it, or you'd never extract it. The second message is coded, but it's clearly bitmapped imaging. I had to try a few permutations, but once I got the encoding right, out popped this. It's like a page worth of text and a diagram of what looks like a geographical region. These are instructions for the receiver."

He handed Savas another printout, diagrams of a site.

"Looks like an assault plan," said Miller.

"How can you be sure?" asked Savas.

"Style, points of entry, defense lines, observation points—here, and here. I've seen a lot of them. I'd wager this is a plan of attack."

"This is crazy," said Savas.

"Yeah, _totally_ FUBAR," said Hernandez. "Secret language, layered codes—commando hit teams?" He looked at Miller, who merely shrugged. " _Really_ out there, man."

"John," Cohen began, "where did this audio come from?"

Savas frowned. "Larry's mum on that. Super-spy material, I assume. We're not going to find out."

"Think again," said Hernandez. "The map's laid out down to the friggin' coordinates. Convert to longitude and latitude, and _bang_ , instant top-secret information."

"So _where_ is it?" asked Savas.

"Afghan-Paki border, dudes. Deep in the mountains. No-man's-land of terrorists and drug lords. Nice spot for a military assault plan."

"Oh, my God," said Cohen, her eyes flashing toward Savas. "It's all linked."

"What's linked?" asked King.

Savas whistled. "Larry, that _bastard._ He should have told us."

King raised his palms up. "Told us what?"

Cohen tapped her finger on the runes. "The assassinations. These military-style missions. The brass tipped their hand." She shook her head. "Somebody's _very_ serious about their pursuit of Islamic baddies."

"Right," said King as Hernandez nodded vigorously. "Why else would they have dropped this on Larry at that meeting? Holy shit."

Savas checked his watch. "That's great work, Manuel, even if I don't know where the hell this is all leading." He stepped back from the table, the printout in his hand. "Folks, this has been fun, but it's been assigned to Miller and me, if you remember. In ten minutes, we're all due in Larry's office. Maybe these guys are purging their ranks, but we still have some serious terrorist activity right on our front lawn. Get me and Frank up to speed on the latest that you have."

The members of Intel 1 scrambled. Savas stared at the screen, hardly seeing the ex-soldier's file. In his right hand was a page of archaic runes with an attack map. Running through his mind—the face and pendant of a dead assassin. Did it all fit together? He was sure it did. Somewhere was the key to linking these strange pieces of evidence and the progression of killings across the globe. In the chaos surrounding them, he hoped they could find it.
17

# Thor's Hammer

The FBI vehicle crossed over the George Washington Bridge, en route to the New Jersey distribution offices of a military weapons manufacturer. The company representatives sounded shell-shocked. They were also in full denial mode. _Their_ explosives? _Impossible._ Well, the analysis had shown it was all _too_ possible. These guys had some serious explaining to do, and Savas was going to be there to hear it.

"John, are you listening?"

He refocused. "Yes, Rebecca, sorry. Thinking ahead to the meeting."

"And?"

Savas sighed. "Hard to focus. We have two massive bombings targeting foreign embassies in separate cities. We've got the UN screaming their lungs out at us, and half of their reps booking flights out of the country. We've got the president on TV trying to calm the nation down, trying to calm the whole world down, offering our jobs to the meat grinder if we don't find out what in the name of God is going on here. Still no group has claimed responsibility."

The Hudson flowed two hundred feet below them. Savas could sense their driver trying to listen in on the conversation. He couldn't blame the man. The world seemed to be burning down.

"It's crazy," said Cohen, shaking her head. "There was nothing, no terrorist chatter, which doesn't add up. Since when do terrorists coordinate multi-city attacks of this magnitude, pull them off, and all without a sound? In 2001, we had NSA and even German intelligence intercepts of al-Qaeda chatter on the attacks. This time, it's like the vacuum of space."

"And they're not a bunch of fanatics who learned how to fly planes into buildings or rig IEDs," said Savas. "Surgical strikes, surgical bombings that were carried out under our noses, under security, and set up to take out single buildings and no more."

Cohen nodded and completed his thought. "Professional expertise with munitions. We've got a group of terrorists with a talent base we've never seen before."

The vehicle rattled roughly as they transitioned from the bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike. Savas felt his stomach lurch.

"You brought the forensics report?" he asked as the car entered the Palisades Parkway. The monotonous gray of turnpike transitioned to the greens of the New Jersey forests.

"Right here. FBI-CIA teams fast-tracked some results to us. It fits our preliminary assessment."

"Mira got them to turn it over so fast?"

"Who else? She's forwarding the files to our secure accounts."

_Mirjana Vujanac_. Vujanac came from Serbian grandparents, Savas's own Balkan ancestry provided a connection between them. Ironically, her job as head of the Joint Offices group was to help de-Balkanize the intelligence organizations in the U.S. government, serving as a focal point for interactions between FBI and CIA. It was a highly sensitive position, unpopular with both agencies, but Mira was the perfect person to balance the mutual paranoia and ego with her patient and winning personality. This case looked like it would require extended work with the CIA and other organizations. They were going to need Vujanac on this one.

"The initial analysis is solid?"

"Definitely." Cohen had put on her angular, Euro-style eyeglasses. Her expression was serious as she looked over the report, giving her the appearance of a graduate student presenting a paper.

"Looks like a recent derivative of the explosive Semtex was used," she said. "Mass spectroscopic analysis of numerous samples now confirms this. Same as the prelim report: judging from the molecular weight of the compounds, it's almost certainly homegrown. Only two plants in the world make this stuff, both run by the Heward Corporation. Made in the USA all the way."

Savas glanced out the window as the vehicle slowed and headed off the ramp. The green of the parkway surrendered to the landscaped parking lot that boxed in a six-floor office building.

"Well, we're here. Let's see what they have to say about that."

It was a frustrating half-hour before they sat in the stale-smelling office. The two had run an obstacle course of security checkpoints for the vehicle and at the front door, temporary ID badges, full-body scanners, and finally a walk down a long corridor to the office of a local divisions manager. It was a tranquil space, softly lit and shadowed by tall trees covering the window at one end of a rectangular room. A quiet space for the distributors of the world's most advanced explosives.

As they entered and shook hands, Savas noted the presence of two other men, open briefcases at their sides. The lawyers had arrived. Savas smiled. One lawyer meant denial. Two, limited accountability. The company must have gotten the new report from Vujanac this morning as well.

"Agent Savas, Fred Reynolds," began the manager, the firmness of his handshake doing little to conceal the perspiration on his palm. "Welcome. Please, won't you sit down?"

"This is my colleague, Rebecca Cohen, also from the NYC branch."

The man shook Cohen's hand as well. "Michael Ivy and Brian Colbert." The two lawyers stood. "They're here to help advise me in any legal ramifications of our discussions."

Savas and Cohen exchanged greetings with the men.

"I'm sorry you two found it necessary to come all the way out here," said Reynolds, as they all sat around the conference table. "As we said over the phone, we were happy to come into the city tomorrow."

_And give your legal eagles twenty-four more hours to coach you into admitting even less than you will today._ "Couldn't wait, Mr. Reynolds. This is as red alert as it gets. National security priority."

The man's face tightened. "Yes, of course."

Savas nodded to Cohen. She opened her briefcase across from the lawyers and placed several documents on the table. "Mr. Reynolds, I assume you've had a chance to examine our forensics reports."

"Yes," he said. "Yes, we have." He glanced at the other two men. "We're prepared to acknowledge that the material used in the bombings came from our nearby factory."

Cohen glanced briefly at Savas. At least they wouldn't have to fight that battle. She made sure. "To confirm our results, this is your newest high-tech explosive, S-47, that matches the chemical analysis?"

"That's correct."

"And, to make sure I understand correctly, you consistently ID each batch of explosive?"

Reynolds nodded. "There are records for every gram we produce. Each lot's infused with a chemical called DMDNB for identification. Variations in the ion ratios ID each lot—a molecular barcode. We've completed an emergency review of all S-47 produced in the last year. There's nothing unaccounted for. Everything we've made is either onsite or shipped to reputable governmental sources."

Savas interrupted. "Then how did S-47 residue end up dusting the New York landscape last month?"

Reynolds glanced at the lawyers again. "Agent Savas, we really can't speculate."

"What about material produced further back?" asked Cohen.

"We're continuing to review our records," said Reynolds. "However, I can assure you, we have _exacting_ standards. We've never lost material, and our customers are limited to United States military and allied governments."

"Could this be an inside job?" Savas pressed. "I mean, could we be looking at _American_ terrorists?"

"Again, Agent Savas, I think it's imprudent to speculate at this time."

Savas felt his temper rising. " _Imprudent_? You fellows do realize that we've just had two terrorist bombings on U.S. soil, one of them right across the river from here? _Your_ explosives were involved in both of those attacks. Your high-tech, _military-only_ S-47 leveled one New York City building and the entire Saudi Embassy in DC."

"Yes, Agent Savas, but, as I stated—"

"You don't see navy mines being used to sink U.S. ships, or army surplus surface-to-air missiles shooting down aircraft in this nation."

"If you will just—"

"If you don't know how your explosives got there, then I think it's high time you started speculating and testing some hypotheses! At the very least, you're going to need some good cover stories for when the press gets hold of this."

Reynolds's face turned white. "If you're trying to threaten me, Agent Savas, I can assure you, we'll respond strongly to such harassment."

Savas laughed. "Please, Mr. Reynolds. If you think the fact that an American company's the supplier for the bombs that hit us last month is something FBI, CIA, or G.O.D. could keep secret for long, you're more naive than I could have imagined."

"We've supplied no terrorists!" Reynolds practically shrieked. "All our material is accounted for. All sales legitimate, to verified U.S. government sources!"

Savas leaned forward and locked eyes with the company man. "Then why don't you go explain that to the families of the victims vaporized by your product, Mr. Reynolds."

There was an icy silence as the man broke eye contact with Savas. The lawyer beside Reynolds leaned over and whispered into his ear. Reynolds made an effort to control himself, and his face drained of emotion. _Screw this tap dance_. He'd had enough. He apologized to Cohen, rose, and walked out of the room without another word.

Cohen's voice echoed strangely as he stormed down the hallway. "As you can see, Mr. Reynolds, my role is _good_ cop. We'll need to set up some very open channels between your company and the FBI for the next few weeks as we work through this."

The sounds inside the building faded as Savas stepped out into the bright sunlight. He exhaled slowly. He knew his fuse was too short. He knew he had to rein in his emotions, even as the events around him pushed every button. He knew these company men were just following orders.

And he knew he wanted to deck one of them.

Arriving back at FBI offices, Savas stepped into the Operations Room of Intel 1. He flung his briefcase onto a chair and removed his jacket. Perspiration stained his shirt. He exhaled and loosened his tie.

"Bad day at the office?" came the words of Hernandez, whose fingers clacked across a keyboard nearby. JP Rideout, Mark King, and Frank Miller stood around the computer geek in a semicircle, staring at the screen.

"I'm at the office _now_ , Manuel."

"Suits stiff you?"

"Of course. But they seem to sink to new levels of corporate cowardice on a yearly basis." Savas stared at the small gathering across from him. "So, what's the party about?"

"Well, we've got something interesting you might want to see."

Savas walked over to the group. At that moment, Kanter stepped into the room as well.

"John, you're back. I need—"

"Hang on, Larry," said Savas. "Manuel's reeling in some new fish."

Kanter joined the group. Savas stared at the screen; numerous time-stamped video images of buildings flitted across his field of view.

"We've had a look at the security cams in a large radius around the site," began Manuel.

"How did you get those?" asked Savas.

"We don't have to go to the sites for the newer ones. Patriot Act II—we're already plugged in, 24/7. We just need to access the relevant minutes from DTO . . ."

"Domestic Terrorism Operations," Rideout whispered to Savas, who rolled his eyes. The acronyms never ended.

". . . and in a few hours we've got the footage from thirty local cameras downloaded."

Miller turned toward Savas and Kanter, a serious expression on his face. "Every camera with a clear shot at 866 Second Avenue showed static from the hours of three to four a.m. the night before the bombing."

"What?" said Kanter incredulously.

"I want to make this clear, Larry," said Miller. "Every camera that could possibly have had a shot at recording what happened around the building that early morning had a similar malfunction for the same duration. _Every_ one of them."

"Some serious hacking, dudes," noted Hernandez.

"Wait, no security firm noticed this? No one looked into it?" asked Kanter.

Rideout shook his head. "Most of the cameras don't have flesh and blood babysitting them. We get the feeds, but they're automatically routed and stored. Our analysis probably wasn't the first time they'd been viewed, but when each individual firm saw the static for their equipment, they just assumed their cameras were on the fritz. Happens all the time. But pool together all the local cameras, you see the pattern. No way that's coincidence."

Miller finished. "We're talking about some real pros here, Larry, really careful ones, at that."

"So, what do they want?" asked Matt King in frustration. "This doesn't seem to be some 9/11 replay."

"Exactly, and it's these differences we need to focus more on," cut in Savas. "In 2001, American targets, American symbols were attacked by mostly Saudi suicide bombers. This time, the cities may be the same, but it looks like foreign targets, and, as far as I can tell, primarily _Saudi_ targets were hit. I don't know about you, but this seems to put a different spin on the whole thing."

Kanter cast a harsh look toward Savas. "Okay, we have, as usual, more questions than answers. Who are these people? How and where were they trained? What motivates them?"

Savas turned angrily to Kanter, his simmering frustrations from the day boiling over. "I'll tell you what is motivating them, Larry. _Hatred_. Feelings that cross beyond Islamophobic into Islamopathic. You're tap dancing around the real issue because of warnings from above, but we know about the mystery commando raids in Afghanistan."

Kanter sat up stiffly. "How do you know?"

"Thanks for confirming it." Savas wasn't done. He looked around at the eyes focused on him. "Isn't it obvious? We're sitting here acting like we have two cases—a string of assassinations of Islamic radicals, and now a major terrorist attack on Islamic targets. It's the _same_ group, Larry! They're just upping the ante!"

"Hold on a minute!" shouted Kanter. "John, you're completely going wild here. These attacks are on _American_ soil, terrorist attacks in New York, in the _capital_ , for God's sake! Your vengeful furies wouldn't strike here, would they?"

"Why not? To them, the enemy's as much here as there."

Kanter stared coldly at Savas. "To _them_ , John? Or to _you_?"

Savas felt anger surge through him, but he held his temper. _They had to listen!_

"Larry, I've done myself no favors over the last few years; I know that. But _think!_ If you saw the Islamic nations as the enemy, as a threat, their presence here might be one of the _first_ places to strike! Purge America of them. If they're homegrown, well, hitting at home would be a hell of a lot easier than doing a job like this overseas, especially in Islamic nations where they'd stick out like sore thumbs."

"We haven't even established that there _is_ a definite connection between the assassinations, John. It's _all_ circumstantial. Now you want to throw this into the mix? How big a conspiracy?" Kanter waved his hands back and forth. "This isn't Dr. No. At least the murder conspiracy had a consistency in targets. These bombings aren't of Islamic radicals. They're the damn official _government_ representatives."

"To some, it might be hard to tell the difference."

" _Jesus_ , John." Kanter threw up his hands in frustration.

"Damn it, Larry, I'm not justifying this. I'm saying it's a nasty but understandable motive."

"Perhaps you understand this better than I do."

Savas clenched his jaw. He was going to come off as some sort of fanatic no matter what he said. Kanter was right about one thing—they had absolutely no hard evidence to link any of this. His hypothesis was emotional, not fact based.

Miller glanced at Savas and cleared his throat. "I'd like to speak freely on something."

Kanter barked a laugh. "Frank, you aren't in the marines anymore. Shoot. Take a cue from John."

"Well, as John notes, even if it's not connected to the murders we're investigating, evidence points toward a homegrown terrorist group, one that might be targeting Islamic sites."

"Yes?" said Kanter.

"I mean, we're mobilizing all the forces of the U.S. government to help protect a bunch of nations that have been quietly, under the table, supporting the bastards who bombed us in the first place." He looked around the room. "I've had friends die at my side in Afghan caves looking for that son of a bitch who was financed by Saudi money, and whose organization was run by Saudi personnel. I'm not sure my heart's in the right place."

A silence fell across the room. Savas saw the fury in Miller's eyes. He knew that anger. It was what had brought him to the FBI in the first place. He felt it every time he looked at a picture of his son.

"Frank," said Kanter thoughtfully but firmly, "these attacks are going to test all of us in some way. I think we need to try to focus on what we're about, and that's law and order. We shouldn't forget that Americans also died in these attacks. And I don't think any of us believe that all the Saudis and other workers in those buildings are necessarily hostile to us, or were involved in anything that had to do with supporting terrorist causes. I'm not saying all of them are clean, but I've been around in this world long enough to know that good and evil are found in every corner. That's my belief, and if I didn't believe that, I don't think I'd care much for law or order. On top of all that, we've got an international incident here, and the repercussions are international. This is serious stuff." Kanter looked directly at Miller, but Savas knew he was speaking as much or more to him. "Frank, I hear where you're coming from, but around here, we work to enforce the laws of this nation. You understand that, I hope?"

Miller pursed his lips and looked at his hands. "Yeah, Larry," he said glancing back up, "I do. It's just that things are a bit mixed up inside, is all."

Kanter shook his head. "Ain't that the truth of it."

Savas closed his notebook as he walked down the hallway from the Operations Room. He and Kanter had stayed for another hour after dismissing the others. Savas was tired and at the stage of fatigue when he knew his thoughts were slow, his logic weak, and his emotions unstable. These last few weeks had drained him—and it was much more than just the work and long hours. Terror attacks on American soil were too raw, _too personal_.

Cohen was waiting for him outside his office. She sat at a desk next to a phone, a mischievous smile tugging on her lips. Her long hair was disheveled, and she leaned back in the chair, a fire burning in her eyes.

_So attractive._ Savas thrust the thought from his mind as he often had the last few years. _I'm damaged goods._ And he wasn't ready to face anything so complicated as feelings.

"John, about damn time," she said.

"Glad to see you too, Rebecca," he responded.

"While you were undoubtedly figuring all this out with Larry, we got a call in about those symbols."

"Runes," corrected Savas.

"Runes. Yes, exactly. That's _exactly_ right."

He raised his eyebrows at her tone. "What call?"

"A professor from the English Department at Columbia."

"You cast a wide net."

"Yes. I'm thorough, remember? The poor old man was very excited, and I had a heck of a time calming him down enough to understand what he was talking about."

Savas dropped into a chair across from her. "So what _was_ he talking about?"

"He knows what the runes are. Get ready for this, okay? He says they're Norse."

" _Norse_? Like Valhalla and pretentious Wagnerian opera?"

"Precisely. I sent him everything we had, including images of that pendant you're so interested in. And we hit the jackpot, John." She smiled and tilted her head at a slight angle, triumphant.

"Go on."

"It's _also_ Norse, an artifact central to those beliefs: the hammer of the god of thunder, Thor. The symbol and the runes _match_ , John. You've been right all along—there _is_ a connection! The bombings, the killings, the Afghan strikes. Everything!"

Savas blinked. "Thor's hammer?"

"Yes. The professor sounds really anxious to talk to you." Cohen smiled at his disbelief, her tongue touching the bottom edge of her front teeth. "I've arranged a meeting. I'm coming, too."
18

# Caracas

Fernando Martinez, just twelve years old, weaved and dodged his way through traffic on his small bicycle. The front and back of the bike sagged with large wire-caged baskets, loaded with bagged delivery items. The boy was well tanned from countless journeys through the streets of Caracas; the Venezuelan sun was strong enough even in the winter months to deeply brown anyone spending their hours under its rays. The skies were partly cloudy, the streets full of water and mud splashing against Fernando's legs from recent rainstorms. He could hear the chatter of street vendors and haggling customers as he rode past. He smiled. It was hard work, but it was good to be out, away from a troubled home, feeling the wind on his face and glimpsing the sun through the clouds.

His mother would not approve, but he rode against traffic to cut his trip time, dodging cars and trucks with pitch-changing horns blaring behind him. Señor Moreno would not pay him if he was late. He might not even pay him if he was on time, Fernando reminded himself. His family needed the money; since his father had died, Fernando was the man of the house. So he pedaled fast and did not think about dangers.

He climbed a hill, panting, sweat glistening on his face, arms, and legs. The road leveled off as he crossed through a nice strip of Caracas. Fancier shops, cars, and people lined the sides of the street. Taller buildings, skyscrapers of glass and metal rose around him. This was a place of importance and power. A place of money and oil. Fernando did not know much about the world, but he knew his country was powerful. It had oil, and the Arab princes from across the seas visited often. His country could talk back to the United States like an equal. He was proud of this, proud of his country's strength to look the bully in the eye.

Ahead were the embassies and banks of the foreign nations that did business with Venezuela and its oil. Fernando liked riding by their protected gates, seeing their guards and security cameras. It was like an American movie. There were embassies and banks from Europe and Asia and the Middle East. He had ridden past them countless times. China and India, and up ahead, the other oil countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Fernando screamed.

A blast of heated air picked him up along with his bike and sprawled them on the sidewalk next to an upscale clothing store. The store's front window exploded inward. Screams and wailing car alarms filled the air around him. The boy laid for several moments on the sidewalk, stunned, his left arm and leg badly skinned and bleeding. He felt a small trickle of blood from his scalp. He shook his head, trying to focus and clear the blood from his eyes. Slowly, he raised himself to his feet. Swiping again at the blood, he stared down the road. Smoke and dust billowed toward him. Fires burned in several places. Ahead, he thought he could make out the remains of two buildings, now wreckages on either side of the road.

Sirens grew louder from all directions. _Police_. Frightened, he found his bike several feet from him. It was damaged—the handlebars bent awkwardly, the baskets with the food wrecked. He did not care. He was going home. Señor Moreno could keep his money today. As he turned and rode down the street toward the growing sounds of vehicles and sirens, he heard voices behind him. Screams and cries for help.
19

# Old Norse

It was a long ride to Philosophy Hall at the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Traffic was snarled along the West Side Highway from a seven-car pileup, and the driver was forced to cut through Midtown. Savas glanced outside his tinted windows at the shoppers crossing the streets at 57th and Madison. The crowds were thinner than normal this time of year, ruining summer tourism and sending more than one business under—one of many repercussions of an urban bombing.

The car lurched forward and shook him out of his reverie. It was challenging to keep his eyes focused outside the car, thanks to the mid-thigh-length skirt Rebecca Cohen was wearing. Glance for a moment, and he'd linger too long.

Her hair was pulled up and fastened Japanese style with two things that looked like chopsticks. _Do women use chopsticks in their hair?_ She wore a white shirt that looked to be 1950s FBI standard issue, and, sure enough, as if to prevent him from getting any useful thinking done during the ride, she had left the first two buttons open. _Well, it's a hot day._ One hundred and two degrees. She was writing in her characteristically broad script, large, flowing letters that would have taken him hours to form but that she spat out like a typewriter. Savas preferred typing.

He forced his mind back to the case. Rideout and King had compiled information on the professor at Columbia. Fred Styer, Ph.D. in Philology from Harvard, expert in proto-Germanic languages and Germanic literature, Alfred L. Hutchinson Chair of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University—the titles ran on. A prolific scholar in the 1970s with more than two hundred journal articles and ten books, he was now "mostly" retired, serving as professor emeritus and haunting the hallways of Philosophy Hall at Columbia. He was once considered the greatest scholar on the East Coast in the ancient languages and literature of the Germanic family. Savas just hoped he had a key to unlock this mystery.

After an eternity slogging through traffic, the driver finally pulled them up to the building at Columbia University. The entrance to Philosophy Hall was shaded by the underbelly of a plaza built directly over Amsterdam Avenue. Above was a small green park; below, the street plunged into a short, dim tunnel after 116th Street, only to emerge into light again half a block later at 117th, right in front of the university's Casa Italiana. Instead of pulling up to the entrance of the building, they followed the old professor's instructions to avoid the construction at the main door and turned the corner in front of the Kent building. They were not sure how they would recognize the old man (photos they had on file were certainly outdated), but it became clear that both he and they were easy marks.

The professor did indeed resemble the photo they had in their files, only older and slightly wider in the waist. He still possessed an enormous beard that spilled over his chest, now much whiter than in the photograph, and, if Savas could bring himself to believe it, perhaps longer. His bald head and thick glasses were also the same, but today he sported a pipe that gave him the air of an awkward Oxford don. To prove the point, when they stepped out of the car, he waved to them like he was trying to flag down a 737 at Kennedy Airport. Savas waved back, and Cohen stifled a laugh, radiant in her amusement. At that point, Savas realized that they looked as ridiculous as the professor did. In the middle of this casual and unconstrained academic campus, their appearance had _Feds_ written all over it.

"Hello, hello, Agent Savas. Welcome, welcome!" Styer repeated gleefully, shaking Savas's hand in a hyper fashion. The old man looked over to Cohen, and his eyes grew large. He smiled and motioned toward her with his head. "Please, and you must be that lovely young woman I spoke with on the phone yesterday . . . Agent Cohen?"

Cohen smiled broadly. "Rebecca, please, Professor." Savas suppressed an initial desire to not like the man.

"Please, both of you, we'll go to my office. Not directly, mind you. They're tearing up the Hall these days, and it's easier to go through another building. Follow me."

He led them into Kent, through that building and into a charming green garden abutting Kent and Philosophy Hall. Using a back entrance to the Hall, he took them up a flight of stairs and down a corridor to his office in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. By the time they were all seated, the old professor was winded and coughing.

"Excuse me," he apologized. "Age shows no mercy."

Savas looked around the office. It was small, dusty, and filled with stacks of papers, journals, and books. Behind the stacks were either more stacks or, if one could make it that far, wall-to-wall bookshelves with yet more books. The professor's desk was old and chipped from years of use. It also was littered with books and papers, a magnifying glass, and a computer that was likely the dustiest thing in the room. Professor Styer was clearly a man of another age. Among the papers, Savas noticed quite a few that showed runes like those decoded from the mysterious communications.

The professor held his thick glasses in one hand and a cloth to wipe them clean in the other. This close, Savas saw how old the man was—clearly in his seventies, perhaps late seventies. His skin was sagging and marked with age spots. His hands trembled as he wiped the lenses of his glasses. An ancient man to tell them about ancient runes. _Let's hope he lasts long enough to give us something._

Glasses back on, the professor stared at them, gravitated toward Cohen, smiled delightedly, and asked, "So, my Federal friends, how can I help you?"

Savas flashed a look of concern toward Cohen. _Is he senile?_ "Professor Styer, we came here at your request to discuss some runes and symbols that were found in a criminal case, perhaps linked to a series of murders here and abroad."

"I'm not _that_ far gone, young man!" he barked. "I was merely opening conversation. I think society has forgotten how to be polite," he said.

Savas chuckled. "Yes, Professor Styer. My apologies." He pulled out a piece of paper and passed it to the professor. "This is a reproduction of the coded messages we obtained, and this," he said, placing the necklace and pendant in front of him, "is what we found on one of the killers."

Professor Styer glanced briefly at the paper and set it down. "Yes, yes. I've seen it. Agent Cohen sent me all this, you know." He smiled impishly at Cohen. "I told your assistant here what I thought." Cohen smiled.

Savas continued. "So, these symbols we have—you say they are pagan, about pagan gods?"

"Norse gods, to be precise." He removed a pouch of tobacco from a desk drawer, dumping the ash from his pipe. He filled it while speaking. "The runes—they're ancient, predating the Christianization of northern Europe, some of the earliest artifacts dating from a hundred years after the death of Christ. The writing systems are older than that, used by the Germanic tribes before the Latin alphabet replaced them. This printout, identical, I think, to the one faxed to me, is written in the runic alphabet called the Elder Futhark. This is the oldest version of this alphabet, used for early forms of the Norse language and other dialects from the second to the eighth centuries. It's found on jewelry, amulets, tools, weapons, rune stones, you name it."

Styer placed his pipe between his teeth and lit it, puffing several times to ignite the tobacco. "Horrible habit, I know," he apologized. "But, to paraphrase George Burns, no one under seventy's allowed to smoke in here." He turned back toward Savas and continued.

"The pendant—one might say _amulet_ in ancient times—is probably the most widespread and best-known symbol in all of Norse mythology. Curiously, it also appears in the writings you sent—see, here," he noted, indicating a region of the page with several letters unintelligible to Savas. "It'd be pronounced 'mee-YOLL-neer', spelled m-j-o-l-n-i-r. This is the Norse name for the thunder god Thor's hammer, the greatest weapon of all the gods in Asgard. It was made for Thor by the dwarves underground—one of their greatest creations. Its name means 'crusher', and Thor would use the hammer in all his battles against the enemies of the gods, the monsters and giants that sought to throw down the ordered reign of Thor's father, Odin, and return the world to chaos."

Savas looked over at Cohen. _We've definitely come to the right place_. The old man picked up the necklace Savas had handed him and pointed to the pendant with the bird face.

"Mjolnir, my friends. The hammer of Thor. Often rendered by the Norse artisans in a shape like this, decorated with the face of a raven."

"Can you decipher the rest of the writing, or the audio?" asked Cohen.

"I've made partial transcripts," Styer said, passing them a sheet of paper, "but I don't know how much use it'll be to you. The audio is Old Norse, a valiant attempt to speak it, I must say. One could quibble with the pronunciations and some of the grammar, but it's quite impressive. College level, you might say, which, it would seem to me, is strange coming from the sources you mention. There's much I couldn't make out, vocabulary that's modern in origin, I believe, adapted to Norse. There's little doubt, however—these are military instructions of some kind." The knowing look passed between the two FBI agents wasn't lost on the professor. "I see that I'm not too far off the mark."

Savas shifted the conversation. "So, what does this mean, Professor? We've some sort of cult of assassins like the Hashshashin?"

"The Islamic killers from the Middle Ages?"

Savas nodded in response.

"No, Agent Savas, I wouldn't suspect that. These are, if anything you told me is true, anti-Muslim assassins."

Savas continued to press the point. "But perhaps still some modern cult based on Norse religion? Fueled by a fanatical devotion?"

The professor shook his head. "Most modern pagans—unlike ancient pagans, by the way—are fairly Gaian, Mother Earth, peace-loving aftershocks of the nineteen sixties. This group you're hypothesizing—well, they would be something else entirely. Something, in fact, perhaps much more loyal to the character of the Norse legends."

"Could you explain that?" asked Savas.

The professor looked thoughtful. "The Northern peoples developed near the poles, Agent Savas, where for half the year, even light was scarce. The ground was often ice. Life was hard. Their mythology reflected that in many ways. This group you're hunting seems an efficient and terrible organization. I will suggest that these killers are attracted to the Norse culture for two reasons. First, and most obvious, is the contrast to the Middle Eastern monotheistic religion of Islam. Their targets are Muslims. What better contrast to Islamic monotheists than Germanic pagans? The second reason, and perhaps the more significant one, might be the character of the Northern myths themselves."

The professor leaned back in his chair and chewed on his pipe. His eyes closed momentarily. "The Norse myths share many common aspects with the Indo-European mythologies. There's a pantheon of gods and goddesses, many representing similar themes—the sun and moon, of course, the underworld or death, beauty and fertility, strength, the sea, and so forth. They all share a common basis in the creation of order out of chaos, with the gods descending from more primitive elemental forces of nature, the monsters and giants, which were chaotic to societies bereft of the miracles of our modern scientific mythos." He smiled mischievously, opening his eyes. "The gods seize power and bring order to the world, vanquishing the Titans, or giants, or whatever embodies the forces of chaos in a given mythology. But, of course, as every fragile human being knows, the forces of chaos still strike; our world is swept by powerful events beyond us. In such mythologies, this is explained as a constant battle between the gods and the elemental, chaotic forces. For the Northern myths, all this reaches a climax at Ragnarök, the Armageddon of the Norse legends, a final battle between good and evil to settle the stewardship of the world."

Savas suppressed a sigh. "How does that help us stop them?"

"Honestly, Agent Savas, I'm not sure. But it's telling you something about who these people are."

"How?"

"Ragnarök, my friends, is the end of the world, as I told you. But it's got a special _Norse_ quality that makes it contrast sharply with your typical religious end-of-the-world event. In short, all the Norse gods, including Thor and his allies, the heroes waiting in Valhalla for the final battle, what we'd call the "good guys" in our Western lexicon—they _lose_. They all die. They are annihilated." He took the pipe out of his mouth and leaned forward for emphasis. "In the Norse mythos, the gods lose, civilization's destroyed, and chaos reigns supreme. From the broth of chaos, it's prophesied that a new creation will arise. But to be enjoyed by others! This organization, whatever they're planning, chose a most curious mythology as a symbol. If they take the mythology seriously, and everything you've shown me convinces me that they do, they don't believe their side is necessarily going to triumph and be welcomed into Heaven. No virgins, no pearly gates and harps. Nothing."

"I don't understand," said Savas. "Why do all this, go through all this, without a final expectation of victory?"

"Because it's right," said Cohen, looking thoughtful. "It's like Frodo going into Mordor. There was little hope that he had the strength to finish the quest. But it was _right_ that he tried."

"Exactly, young lady. Top of the class," Styer said and winked at her. He then leaned back and stared out the window, looking over the small garden they had recently passed. "They do this because they believe it's the _right_ thing to do. The gods and heroes of the Northern legends did not despair or, following a more modern sentiment, switch sides, even though through prophecy they knew they were going to be destroyed, that chaos would triumph. No, they fought anyway, not to win, but because fighting for good even in the face of defeat was the right thing."

Cohen raised a question. "Even if that's true, how can we be so sure it applies to this organization?"

The old man leaned back toward the desk and looked shrewdly at Cohen. "A good question, and, of course, the answer is that we can't be sure. This level of sophistication, to organize in this way and then choose these symbols, correctly using the writing system and language of an ancient people—they are extremely invested in this symbolism. Anyone with that level of knowledge of Norse mythology would understand its curious nature. This theme of Northern courage, a hard courage, grounded not in any hope of victory but only in standing for what is right, has been a powerful force in Western culture, for good and evil. This _character_ influenced generations who knew the Norse legends, from Tolkien's archetypal _Lord of the Rings_ heroes you just mentioned to Hitler's perversion of those ideals during the Third Reich." Professor Styer focused sharply on the FBI agents. "Courage to fight no matter what, requiring no hope of reward, only _conviction_. My friends, that makes them a group of a most dangerous kind."

Professor Styer insisted on walking them back to their car. He moved with more difficulty than when he had first greeted them, the efforts of the day had clearly drained him. When they reached the vehicle, Cohen thanked him with a smile and got into the backseat. As Savas moved to follow, the old man grasped his arm.

"Agent Savas, I hope you know what you've got there," he said in a low voice, motioning with his eyes toward the car. "Keep her close to you."

Taken aback, Savas started stammering something unintelligible. The professor interrupted him. "Oh, I don't mean that! Although, let me tell you, at seventy-eight, there are many more things I regret _not_ doing in life than I regret doing. A lady like that doesn't come around often. But that's not what I meant. She's smarter than you, in case you didn't notice. Don't take that personally. I've taught generations of students, and I know a good mind when I see it. She's got one. You'll need her in this. Keep her close." The professor smiled, winked at Savas, then bent toward the car and waved once more at Cohen before turning back toward the building.

Savas gazed forward at the intersection for a moment. _I knew I didn't like that guy._
20

# Enemy Within

"Rebecca, do you buy all that?" asked Savas, his gaze outside the car as the vehicle began its trek downtown, his mind wrapped in the words of the last half-hour. Cohen was thoughtful as well, but she answered confidently.

"I'm sure everything we heard about the language and writing was accurate. What you're really asking me concerns the speculative portions, the extrapolation of the symbolism to the psychology of the group."

"Yes."

She exhaled. "It sounded very reasonable. You called it a cult at first, but that's unlikely—who would believe in Norse gods in the twenty-first century? Especially a group as sophisticated and practical as the one you're proposing—a group that has orchestrated the assassinations of more than ten radical Islamic leaders in the last six to nine months."

"And the bombings."

Cohen paused. "Maybe the bombings, too—I think it's worth seriously considering. But let's just limit it to the assassinations for the moment."

Savas nodded. "Thanks."

"For what?"

"Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. Everyone else is dismissing it."

She frowned. "I've watched you struggle with this for many years now. Everyone knows your anger, Mad John. Some of us also see the struggle. And the pain."

He looked outside the car again, not daring to meet her gaze.

"Anyway, what I was saying is that we have ruthless professionals, not religious fanatics. These guys way outclass al-Qaeda operatives. So, if they aren't religiously invested in this Norse stuff, then they must be invested in another way. Who learns a dead language and appropriates its culture's symbols? Someone who sees something in it, has extracted something from it, and needs that symbolism in their lives."

He glanced back toward her. "Northern courage?"

"Who knows? Styer seemed to think so. But I think he's spot-on with the other thing—the contrast to Islam. Whoever started this, there's something driving them. I think you're right. There's a deep hatred of Islam."

"Then who? People of Western European descent, almost certainly, or why all the Norse stuff? The killer we encountered was American, so I assume many others are as well. But not the crazy idea of death squads from the CIA."

"Not crazy. They existed. But you're right. This symbolism, this _crusade_ nearly, doesn't smell of a government plan that spun out of control." She placed a hand on his arm. "But it does smell of money."

"Sorry?"

"How on earth do you get the skilled personnel, equip them, train them, send them out all over the world for orchestrated assassination work, without enormous capital resources?"

Savas nodded. "You can't."

"No, you can't. If you aren't government, you've got to have access to amazing resources—financial, military."

"Yes, the commando training, the coded messages—it's military."

Cohen turned to Savas. "Just imagine the logistics. I don't think we're looking for a cult leader, John, not in the normal sense, anyway. I just wish I knew _what_ we were looking for."

He understood her frustration. It was the sense when the puzzle had started to take on some kind of pattern, definition, and yet its overall shape still eluded the mind. As he processed these thoughts, his phone rang. He reached into his pocket and answered it. The adrenaline flowed back into his body. Cohen stared at him. The voice from the speaker was shouting.

"John, this is Larry! Where the hell have you been?"

"Larry, sorry, switched off for this interview. What wrong?"

"Get back here now! There's been another attack."

Even with the sirens on, it was more than half an hour before they reached the FBI offices. People and equipment filled the buzzing operation rooms. Images flowed across giant monitors. Low-level staff darted from office to office with urgent messages. By the time Savas reached the floor, the main story had been fleshed out. He called a meeting of his staff. They convened in a conference room adjacent to the OR.

"Fearless Leader, we have been lost without you," chirped Lightfoote as he and Cohen filed into the room.

"Damn it, Angel." This was all he needed.

"I am a celestial being, and I will forgive your profane words."

_I'm going to have to have a talk with that girl._ Savas took off his jacket, his shirt soaked in sweat from both the heat and stress. Miller and Hernandez were the last to arrive. _Rambo and Jesus_ , thought Savas, _and a nutcase named Angel_.

"All right, Larry's called a meeting in an hour. Fill me in, people."

Matt King donned his glasses and read from notes. After Rebecca, he was the de facto information center for the team. His legal training always showed in his attention to detail.

"At 2:35 p.m. today, two explosions occurred in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. The explosions occurred at the Saudi and Iranian Embassies, apparently completely destroying both buildings. Initial reports have the death toll in the high hundreds, and it is expected to go higher. Injuries are worse, and the hospitals are overflowing with wounded. Caracas fire and police responders have the secondary blazes under control. The Venezuelan president has already gone on television to calm the populace. The Islamic nations have not failed to notice that there's a connection between the attacks here and in Caracas today."

Miller clarified. "Basically, they're screaming bloody murder about it."

Savas looked around the concerned faces at the table. Only Lightfoote seemed unfazed, drawing odd sketches on her notepad. "So, in the span of less than a month, we've got a new terrorist group from nowhere blowing up buildings in three different cities, upsetting the global balance."

Rideout chimed in. "Sure has, John. The UN Security Council's called a special meeting. The Arab nations are blaming the U.S. and allies. Stocks are plunging. Good times."

"We've got to keep our heads and not get sucked into this mind job they're working. Terrorism's most powerful when it creates fear. That's the point. Fear is death to the thinking mind. So let's take a deep breath and start looking at what we know."

"Not much. That's the problem," said Miller.

"The bomb site is on foreign soil, so at best it's going to be CIA, and that'll be slow. The Venezuelans aren't going to be too keen on letting us get our hands dirty down there. The explosives—those are our only lead, and we'll need to make sure we get samples for analysis. You can bet I'll take this up with Larry first thing. JP, I want you and Matt all-nighting this one and monitoring every channel for information from Caracas. Tomorrow morning you get to hand me a report and then find a cot. Angel, I want you . . . Angel?"

Lightfoote stared at the door behind him.

"Leaving on a jet plane, O Captain, my Captain," she said.

"Christ, Angel, what . . ." he turned around and stopped. Just inside the door stood Larry Kanter, along with three other people. One was Mira Vujanac, and where Mira was, so usually was CIA. Standing next to her was a tall man, thin and bespectacled, stiff and awkward in his formality. He had _spook-bureaucrat_ written all over him. Next to him stood a man Savas couldn't believe he was seeing.

"John, I'm sorry to interrupt. Could you please step outside for a minute?" Kanter asked, motioning with his eyes that Savas should follow.

Rising slowly from his chair, Savas apologized to his team, who tracked him silently as he walked outside. Kanter closed the door, leading him halfway down the hall away from the conference room and out of earshot.

Kanter stood not five feet from a black man dressed in white robes with a long and thick beard trimmed Islamic style. On his head was a white kufi, the overall impression of some African imam touring the offices of the FBI. He had a stern face, scarred on one side from what could have been a knife wound, and yet a strange cheerfulness imbued his expression. He was stocky, and a thick musculature gave him the look of a boxer. He nodded toward Savas.

Savas looked between Kanter and Vujanac. "What the hell is this?"
21

# Proverbs from the Quran

"T _hese_ are Agents Husaam Jordan and Richard Michelson—CIA," said Kanter. "Mira's been in high-level coordination with Langley concerning the recent attacks. Our analysis of the bomb residue picked up an important connection. Agent Jordan's been tracking a series of arms dealers. They play shell games with foreign governments and commercial U.S. military goods sold overseas. There's an entire black market for military goods that we sell legitimately to other nations, which then turn around illegitimately and resell them for a substantial profit to centralized mafia, weapons dealers who themselves sell the goods to the highest bidder."

Savas looked unimpressed. He could hardly take his eyes off Agent Jordan. "Yeah, Larry, I've read about all this. What does this have to do with our bombings?"

Kanter drew a breath. "Agent Jordan's infiltrated one of the largest of these groups, formerly run by Viktor Bout—you've probably read about him, too."

He had. Viktor Bout was a legendary arms dealer, former KGB agent, who had run one of the largest and most profitable organizations in the world. His arrest in 2008 had slowed the trade only momentarily, as others rushed into the void, including new leadership in the organization he founded.

Kanter continued. "They sell many items on the black market—weapons, body armor, vehicles, and several forms of plastic explosives. That includes some of the newer, and extremely expensive, derivatives. Explosives with several times the power of previous forms of Semtex or C-4, and with a very high velocity of detonation."

"Perfect for demolitions work," rumbled the deep baritone of Agent Jordan, speaking for the first time.

Kanter nodded. "These items are very hard to get, and it's highly likely that our bombers went through these dealers to get it."

This was a potentially critical link to the terrorists. If Kanter was right. _If_ there was a way to discover the buyers for these materials.

"Agent Jordan and his superior, Agent Michelson, here from the CIA Crime and Narcotics Center, have agreed to work directly with the FBI on this. I've assigned him to your team. Agent Jordan will work independently of our chain of command, reporting directly to Agent Michelson, but day-to-day he'll be an additional member of Intel 1."

_Just great_ , thought Savas. Kanter looked Savas in the eye and spoke gravely. "I don't have to tell you how important it is that we make some headway on this, John. We'll need all the help we can get from _every_ agency. We all need to make this work."

"Larry, can I speak to you privately?" asked Savas, needing an outlet soon lest he jettison all professionalism.

Kanter exhaled. "Of course. Why don't you introduce Husaam to your group and then meet me in my office."

Savas suppressed his rage. "Sure, Larry. Agent Jordan, come this way, please."

He led the CIA man back to the conference room. As he grabbed the doorknob to open it, the baritone spoke. "When we are greeted with a salutation, one should offer a better welcome, or at least return the same, for God taketh an account of all things." Jordan smiled and extended his hand.

_Ah,_ _hell._ Savas grasped the offered hand and shook it _very_ firmly.

"Nice words," said Savas, turning back to the door.

"From the Holy Quran," replied Jordan.

Savas, doorknob clasped tightly in his hand, stopped and turned slowly toward the Muslim. "Agent Jordan, let's get something clear, so we both know where we stand. I don't like CIA meddling with my group, and no disrespect, but I don't know a damn thing about you. My group works well, and we're one of the best in the business. We've been together a while, and we're a well-oiled machine. You coming here, it's grit thrown in the engine." Savas let go of the doorknob a second time and pulled up to face Jordan. "You don't know me either, but I don't take it lightly when someone quotes from a book that inspired men to fly airplanes into buildings in my city. Finally, in case the intelligence is fading from CIA, you might also know that those bastards took the life of my son. So, do we understand each other, Agent Jordan?"

The joyful buoyancy had left the face of Husaam Jordan, but he did not flinch. "No, Agent Savas, not completely. Because you need to know two things about me. The first is that I will always do my best to respect every man I meet, but I will never hide or be ashamed of my religion. Second, I ask you not to judge how much I'm grit until you give me a little time to integrate into your team. One thing about me that you will learn—I'm a man of justice, as well as a Muslim. For me, they go together. Those who died in September of 2001 were victims of murder, led by extremists that I work every day to bring to justice. It's also said in the Holy Quran, 'Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.' I believe that, John Savas. I will work to see that it is so."

For several moments, they stood staring at each other, eye-to-eye, nearly toe-to-toe. Savas clenched his jaw, turned, and opened the door to the conference room.
22

# The Convert

"Damn it, Larry, you can't do this!"

_I'm officially throwing a tantrum._ He had felt it coming, building up, and had decided to just get out of its way. There were a lot of things you had to put up with in life. A lot of them you didn't. _And some you have to yell about._

"John, calm down. This isn't going to help the situation," said Kanter as calmly as he could. Standing next to Kanter behind his desk, Mira Vujanac appeared uneasy as she watched the emotional outburst.

"I'm not going to calm down! Do you know what this guy was doing? Quoting me proverbs from the Quran! Do you think I need to hear anything from _that_ book? You told me when I came here, Larry, that you hired me because I'd be motivated for this job. You knew why I would be. That motivation makes it unacceptable that a damned Muslim is forced on me and my team! I'm not going to allow it!"

"That's the last time I want to hear about what you will and won't allow, or, I swear, you'll be finding yourself another place to work!" The veins stood out on Kanter's forehead, and he anchored his hands on his desk, standing and leaning forward. He brought one hand to his face and rubbed his temples. "John, please, sit down a moment."

Savas looked between the two of them and reluctantly took the closest seat. Vujanac sighed softly and adjusted her blouse. She sat on the side of the desk farthest from Savas.

Kanter continued. "This guy comes with amazing recommendations. He's single-handedly begun what has turned into an enormous operation against these international arms dealers. He's used his religion as a screen to work the entire thing, to pose as a radicalized leader of a group seeking to purchase weapons for terrorist activity in the United States. He's just a few steps from setting up a sting operation, and these events have compromised all his efforts. He's willing to work for less than that original goal, to infiltrate the network, trace the path of the explosives. He's willing to work with us to coordinate domestic and international efforts."

"I don't like it." Savas knew he was being obstinate, but it didn't matter.

"Damn it, John, I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to make it work."

"John," said Vujanac softly, "Agent Jordan is an extraordinary man. He's taken a hard route to come to where he is."

"He sure as hell has," fired back Kanter. He picked up a large folder filled with papers and tossed it on his desk in front of Savas. "His file. Read it if you want. The guy grew up on the streets of LA. His mother was a crack addict, his father was gone before he was potty-trained. He joined a gang before he could likely write, rose through the ranks to a high position as an adolescent. Got tossed in jail at one point, found an imam and religion in prison."

Savas rolled his eyes. The last thing he wanted was a feel-good Disney story. "So CIA's recruiting ex-cons now? They that desperate?"

"He was a juvenile."

"Larry, CIA doesn't hire convicts!"

"Somebody made an exception!"

"They sure did." Savas shook his head. "He doesn't sound like some ex-gang member to me. Speaks like he's Ivy League."

"He is," Mira interjected. "Columbia. His spiritual father was highly educated and insisted Jordan be as well. He was bright enough to master that culture, too."

"Great, now a Muslim elitist spook."

Kanter pressed on. "Lots of these young black kids find religion in jail. They either get radicalized, or they join social movements for the poor or push civil rights agendas. Well, Jordan felt a call to serve justice, something you don't see too many ex-gang members lean toward. Can you imagine how hard it must have been to get even a single serious look at a job like this? Can you imagine the interviews? He worked hard to erase his past. Some imam funded his college education. He prettied up his speech. He cut all ties with his old life. He knocked on every door until one opened. It looks like nothing stops this guy. He's on a mission, and he's made a serious mark at CIA."

"John, please," said Vujanac. "We need you to put aside your personal issues. It's hard enough trying to get FBI and CIA to play nice. I know this is painful, but we need you to rise above this."

Savas looked out the window at the city. Inside, he felt a war of emotions. Outside, through the glass in Kanter's office, it was utterly still, row upon row of buildings stretching until he could not see beyond them. He closed his eyes and tried to think. He knew they were right. He knew he was being childish, unprofessional. But they did _not_ understand how hard this was. It was something he had never expected. The son of a bitch even _dressed_ like an Arab! He shook his head and laughed bitterly.

"Okay, you two. I can give you this. I have one goal, and that is to bring justice to murderers of innocents, those terrorists that kill our children and hope to see Heaven for it. I'll work with anyone who shares that goal. If he does, I'll make it work."

"Thank you, John," Kanter said with evident relief.

Savas rose from his chair and walked to the door. He stopped and turned around. "Just don't expect me to be friends with the man. He does _his_ job, I'll do mine." With that, he walked through the door and shut it behind him.
23

# What God Writes

The next morning, Husaam Jordan briefed the team on his long-standing operation. The CIA man had integrated into the group as if he'd always belonged. Muslim or Tibetan monk, he was serious and knowledgeable, and held an intense focus for his work that reminded Savas of the pursuit of a predator of its prey. He also had a strangely winning side to his personality, which worked best with the women in his group. It was clear that the ex-marine Miller wasn't going to warm easily to the man, and Matt King never warmed easily to anyone.

Cohen was a supporter early on and often came to his side when some of the more hostile members of the group were expressing that hostility. Savas had to admit he was one of those. Lightfoote was positively stuck to the man, showing specific and real interest in another human for the first time in her tenure at Intel 1. She hadn't called Savas "Ruthless Overlord" once today.

Despite his mixed feelings, Savas was fascinated with what this man had done at the CIA. In the span of three years, he had built an undercover operation to infiltrate some of the most powerful and profitable arms dealerships in the world. For each of them, he used the front of an African American radical Muslim who was arming his organization for terrorist attacks in the United States. Whether or not the arms dealers knew or cared anything about this, or believed his intent, was likely irrelevant. They believed that the man wanted to buy, and did buy, and paid promptly in a way that established him and his false group with a strong reputation. It didn't hurt that several major arrests, including that of Viktor Bout himself, had been made in the last few years, disrupting organizations and forcing them to lower standards in chaotic rushes to claim client bases when they restructured. Jordan had taken advantage of this and promised his clients much larger buys in the near future.

For more than two hours, he detailed the organization, its members, foreign bases of operation and contacts, and difficult-to-trace money transfers. It was impressive, Savas had to admit. Impressive and frightening. A black Muslim seeking to become a domestic terrorist through international arms acquisition. The ruse was too plausible for comfort.

The presentation finished, Jordan turned on the lights and sat. He appeared a bit drained and drank from a glass of water at his side. The room was quiet for a moment.

"Why do you think that this is the source of the explosives?" asked Cohen.

Jordan downed the remainder of the glass and spoke. "We can't know for sure, but there aren't many ways to obtain that grade of explosive. The U.S. government won't sell this stuff to just anyone. It stays with the military or, in some cases, is sold to other nations. That's where the real black market in these things starts, and how our weapons mafia gets its sources. So there may be other ways, but I'm willing to bet that our new terrorist organization used one of these groups as its supplier. Bout's old organization is the biggest and still the best. It's a good place to start poking around."

He looked around the table, studying the faces of Intel 1. "I'm actually curious to know who these people are that went to all the trouble to go for such top-of-the-line materials—really overkill for what they wanted to do."

Savas had known this would come. Jordan had shown his hand from CIA, down to the last PowerPoint slide. He expected a full briefing in return. Savas wanted to send him back to Langley with a _thank you very much!_ and use this potential new lead. But they needed the international reach of the CIA and Jordan's operation to have any hope of getting close to these dealers. Besides, it was the professional thing to do, and if he didn't, Kanter would cart someone else in to do the job.

"Rebecca Cohen will give you a briefing on what we know."

Cohen stood, dimmed the lights, and spent the next hour going over everything they had gleaned from the events to date. The forensics reports and details on the bombings were familiar to Jordan, likely from previous briefings given by Vujanac or Kanter. She concluded with the speculation that it might be an internal, American group but was careful to note that there was little solid evidence for that conjecture.

"There are also other, wilder theories," said Savas. He felt the eyes of the group bore in on him. _What the hell am I doing? Trying to rattle him?_

"Yes? What other theories?" asked Jordan after several moments of silence.

"His rogue Valkyries," said Lightfoote.

Savas stared at her. _Did she talk to Rebecca?_ "It's a possible connection between two cases we've been working on."

He summarized the worldwide string of assassinations, the use of the Sheikh as bait in a plan gone horribly wrong, and the connection between the attacks in the Afghan mountains and the murders. When he came to the subject of Norse mythology, and the speculation about the group's motivations, Jordan sat upright and still. The information on the more obscure point of the group's unusual name and symbolism interested him deeply, and he asked a number of intense questions on this matter.

"This Columbia professor," Jordan said, "I think he might be right. His analysis makes for a very dark view of what we're up against." Jordan nodded thoughtfully toward Savas. "Now I see where you're headed, Agent Savas. You believe this group's responsible for both the assassinations _and_ these bombings, and that the motivation is the same—a desire to wage a war against Muslims the world over. By this symbolism, an unending war until Judgment Day."

Rideout cut in. "Come on, people! Look, you've got a terrorist group that's playing to fears in a very effective way. You've got a set of assassinations. The only thing connecting them? Scary mythology and some strange occult symbols."

"Pagan," interrupted Lightfoote.

Rideout flashed her an annoyed look.

"Well, trader-man, they're _pagan_ , not _occult_ ," she countered. "There's, like, a _huge_ difference."

"Fine. _Pagan_ symbols," said Rideout. "This is all Wizard of Oz, if you want my opinion. Some real bombs and guns, and a lot of some ivory tower magician's hocus-pocus to rattle all the cages."

"Rattling the cages is only scary when you're in a cage," said Lightfoote.

Rideout rolled his eyes, his fatigue showing through. "This is what I left seven figures for? What the hell does that mean?"

"Look, enough!" said Miller, steering things back to the topic at hand. "The question is, what do we do now?"

Matt King answered in his nasal twang. "We track down all the shipments of this material, try to ID the lot used. Mira told us that each lot gets a different ratio of the additives that tag the explosives; we just need to get this material more thoroughly analyzed and figure out where this stuff went."

"Forensics is on it, Matt," said Savas. "But we don't have the equipment for that here. We need some really top-flight mass spectrometry to ID these batches, and that's got to be farmed out. That takes time."

Rideout sighed and threw his pen onto the notepad before him. "Look, what's the pattern here? I know it's embassies and Middle Eastern oil countries but specifically New York, Washington—I get that. That's front-page material. But Venezuela? I mean, what's that all about? Why not Europe, or China, or the Middle East itself? What's the pattern in these attacks?"

"Well, with only these three bombings, that may be a hard thing to identify," rumbled Jordan.

"Yeah, maybe," said Rideout, "but I think we need to spend some time looking at this. The embassies, the people, do they share something that we are missing? They must have chosen these targets for a reason."

Savas agreed. "JP, why don't you work with Manuel on that? Let's compile all the data we can on these places, cross-referencing everything."

"We're missing the point here, my friends," boomed Jordan. He looked tired, frustrated, and deadly serious. "We have a good lead that could bring us to contacts that could be one or two steps away from the men we are looking for. This should be our priority."

Savas suppressed an urge to tell the man that, as group leader, he would decide what Intel 1 should and shouldn't be doing. "So, what would you do, Agent Jordan?"

"This is where my position in the CIA allows me freedoms you don't have. I've reached a decision, Agent Savas. It's a hard one and will ruin years of work, cost taxpayers millions of dollars, perhaps some agents their lives. I'm going back to Sharjah."

"Sharjah?" asked Savas over the silence. "Why?"

Jordan stared forward, as if glimpsing something in the distance. "You can remember from my presentation—we've established inroads into two of Viktor Bout's primary centers of operation: Belgium and the United Arab Emirates. Bout was pressured out of Belgium in the late 1990s as the press uncovered his shady dealings. His organization never closed up shop there, but the heart of it moved with him to Sharjah in the UAE. There he was coddled by many members of the royal family, developed deep connections to international companies playing with money laundering and terrorism, civil war, and murder. He left behind a powerful cartel."

Cohen took her glasses off and stared at the CIA operative. "Husaam, what do you plan on doing there?"

Jordan paused a moment and took a deep breath. "I may be in the minority, but I take quite seriously the intentions of this terrorist organization and the hypothesis put forward by Agent Savas. Perhaps I have to—after all, it could be a declaration of war against my faith. I believe we must take whatever action we can in order to find out who these people are and how to get to them. I'm going to take my team undercover into Sharjah, as we have before, but this time to set up a major arms purchase. We'll use that opportunity to break into their organization and seize any records they have on the sale and distribution of Semtex-like explosives."

A heavy silence fell over the group. Rebecca's eyes flashed upward toward Savas. Rideout whistled, adding, "You're likely to end up buried in the sands out there. That's either really damn brave or really damn stupid."

Jordan smiled grimly. "It is written, 'What God writes on your forehead, you will become.'"
Part II

# Merchants of Death

May he lament forever who thinks now to turn from this war-play. —"The Battle of Maldon," Old English poem
24

# Algiers

A dusty American stared across a wooden table at the three Berbers. The day blistered, and the sands from the northern Sahara that invaded much of Algeria dug into every crevice of his body. His face was bronzed from the sun, from time spent coaxing, bribing, and leading these barbarians along the path required. It was one thing to work an act of public violence in a Western nation, or even in a South American nation like Venezuela, where freedom to travel and the mixed-race nature of the population made planning and executing a mission far simpler. But here, in Northern Africa, surrounded by Berber Arabs in a strongly Islamic nation, where custom and language differed far more markedly, he could not work alone.

_What one could always count on with these people_ _was that they were as murderous toward_ _each other as toward_ _the West._ He had been patient and resourceful. The young Ibadi radicals they had primed were perfect for achieving the mission. Better yet, this splinter group was so ignorant and detached from the rest of the world that the events of the last two months were hardly known to them, and the plan he proposed had not aroused their suspicions.

A minority sect of Islam, the Ibadi were centered in Oman with pockets in Algeria, holding radically different interpretations of Heaven and Hell. They thought of themselves as the only true Muslims. All others were, as he had come to learn with amusement, _kuffar_ , "unbelievers." In the last ten years, increasingly radical groups had found inspiration from terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, and now they desired to exert their violent influence over the world, to establish Ibadi rule. That this meant executing terrorist acts against other Muslims was exactly what he required.

"You'll have the trucks ready on the night of the fifteenth," said the American in his poor Arabic.

The older of the three men laughed and smiled broadly, revealing several missing teeth. "My friend, you must learn to speak the language. Without us, you would get not five steps. Yes, we will have them to transport your men. We will provide real clothes for you," and he laughed again, "not these womanly things you have tried to wear and hide yourself under."

"Then we are agreed, Aziri?" he pressed.

Another spoke. "We do not like that the Ibadi Peoples Army is to be kept so far from the attack. We are not to be considered children who cannot fight!"

"Aban, I've explained this as clearly as I can. My team works alone. You'll bring us into the site. We'll complete the mission. Then you'll get us out. We're providing the funds, the expertise, and risking our lives for this. We won't do it another way. It's our way or no way."

The three men looked at each other. Aban was angry, but his older brother put his hand on his shoulder. He spoke softly in a local Berber dialect. A back-and-forth ensued, but the older brother held the day. Over a reproachful look, Aziri continued. "We will accept your offer. The materials you will provide for us. With these things, we will strike again and again into the heart of the kuffar abomination. It will begin with what you will do. You are ignorant, but you do the work of Allah, unbeliever."

"Then make sure it's settled," he said standing, eyeing the three men. "Because we'll inflict a lesson on anyone who tries to interfere with what we do." The three men nodded, convinced by what they had seen of his team that he meant what he said.

The American walked out of the small building and into the blazing summer sun. The fools would comply. They were young and filled with fire to strike at the majority Sunni population. This was a chance to do so in a way they could never have imagined before: in the heart of Algeria, at their great mosque in Algiers, Jemaa Kebir, built more than one thousand years ago. They dreamed of establishing their Berber culture and small sect of Islam, and thereby opened their nation to a worse strike from within. He was happy indeed to hit the mosque, but his goal was greater, and the Ibadi People's Army would soon find that they had exposed Algiers to an attack on another landmark, one dear to all Algerians as a symbol of the defeat of the West. As such a symbol, Mjolnir would hammer it and crush it to the ground. He'd see to that. He knew how much was being entrusted to him. He would not fail.

The winds blew, sand grains scratching his face. He looked across the desert into the distance, seeing beyond it to the greatest target ahead. _Another step._ _Each step brings us closer._ It was all coming together, despite setbacks and delays. He dropped sunglasses over his eyes, turned toward the main road, and began walking.
25

# Black Panthers

The flight to Sharjah was rough, far more turbulent than usual, so much so that Jordan had passed on a recent offer of a meal. He wondered grimly whether it was a sign of things to come. The trip was long, more than twelve hours in the air from New York to Dubai City, then a car ride from Dubai to Sharjah, and that was assuming nothing went wrong in between.

Right now, his main concern was his men. It had taken him weeks to secure permission for this risky venture, putting his reputation on the line at the CIA. As July ended, he had finally gotten the needed approvals, and he prepared his team for what was to come. _As much as they can be prepared._

They were men from every walk of life, from the streets to the Ivy League, each a trained CIA operative. All were black; all dressed in Arab garb, white robes, and a white African kufi with Muslim-style beards. They looked out of place alongside the Arabs on board, some of whom were in traditional clothing, many in Western-style business attire; all very different than the African American men clustered together. These were the men he had trained and honed for the last three years, who had traveled overseas countless times, risking their lives, leaving their families, to build piece by piece, deal by deal, a reputation as trusted customers in a black market world where there truly was no trust. But where trust could not be found, money and arms were found in their stead.

In the facade presented to the arms world, he was Yusuf Abdul-Rauf, leader of a new Muslim extremist group centered in the United States and composed solely of African American members. "A Muslim Black Panthers," he had explained on several occasions, focused on the liberation of the black people from the oppression of the white Christian power structure "by any means necessary." He sought arms and explosives through deals untraceable by investigative agencies in the United States. He planned to build an army, make a mark with terrorist attacks across the nation.

Of course, the dealers cared little why he wanted their merchandise, only that he paid in full and on time. Jordan doubted they believed his organization would do much anyway. They were impressed, however, with his cash and clearly wondered who was bankrolling his purchases. He only hoped none of them had begun to guess that it was the U.S. government behind him.

He traveled with six others. Four of them were muscle, necessary for the danger as well as for maintaining the facade. His bodyguards in both worlds, these were operatives expertly trained in combat and defense, and Jordan was always glad to have them around on these missions. All but one were former gang members he had personally recruited. Two others were his "Harvard Men," operatives trained in finance who had studied the international arms market thoroughly. Jordan, or Yusuf, was the visionary, the leader who brought them, and the imaginary hundreds back in the States who followed him, together under a unifying purpose and will.

This team had patiently worked to build respectability as a client in the illegal arms markets, focusing on the one led by the now imprisoned ex-KGB agent Viktor Bout. His team had played a crucial role in the capture of the Merchant of Death, although he had not mentioned this to John Savas and others at the FBI. It was the greatest success of his young career and had earned him respect and capital at CIA. His infiltration of these networks promised to deliver much more than that over the coming years.

Now he was asking his team to travel again and risk destroying years of work, placing all their lives in danger on a hunch that this new terrorist organization was something so threatening that it required drastic action. For all that he was doing, he had better be right. The sura Maryam came unbidden to his mind: _My Lord! Surely my bones are weakened and my head flares with hoariness, and, my Lord! I have never been unsuccessful in my prayer to Thee._ He hoped Allah would hear his prayer now.

The final descent toward Dubai was always spectacular, as the golden-brown of the desert and the blue of the sea established a strong contrast, punctuated by the amazing sights of the Palm Islands. These enormous, man-made islands of filigreed projections of sand were visible from the cruising altitude of the plane, carving out a magnificent decoration in the Gulf nearly three miles in diameter. Close by were hundreds of small sandy islands comprising "The World," an artificial archipelago that re-created the shape of the continents, and on which vacation homes, resorts, estates, and communal lands were still being built—a product of endless oil money, some imagination, and what Jordan considered entirely too much time on the hands of the populace.

Jordan and his team disembarked, jet-lagged, a strange troop of black Muslims walking like a pack through Dubai International Airport to grab a rental car for the drive to Sharjah. It amused him to see the familiar names and icons of Hertz, Avis, and Thrifty rentals amid all the flowing and ornate Arabic script. This last leg of the trip would be short, at least—Jordan knew that he and his team needed sleep soon. Tomorrow they would begin a most dangerous gambit.

They were mostly silent driving through Dubai City, each cocooned in his own thoughts and fatigued from the trip. Within half an hour, they had crossed into Sharjah proper and were approaching the Millennium Hotel on Corniche Road, its blue-glass face reflecting the bright Middle Eastern sun and the waves of the sea. Check-in was quick. Jordan's Arabic was fluent and practiced on foreign soil.

In the hotel room, he dialed a number he kept security-locked in his smartphone. After three rings, he heard a tone and then entered a long eight-digit code. A second set of rings was heard, and another tone prompted a second code. A third set of rings was interrupted by a woman's voice speaking Russian.

"Yusuf Abdul-Rauf calling for Mikhail Kharitonov," he replied in the same language.

"A moment, _Puzhalsta_ ," said the voice. Jordan glanced over at the clock on the wall. It was eleven in the morning. He had called ahead of schedule.

"My American friend," said a strong male voice in heavily accented English. "Happy you to arrive very good."

"Thank you, Mika. We're glad to be here. I hope things are on schedule for our meeting tomorrow."

"Yes, yes," said the man, sounding amused. "We have all you request. Is very big order, my friend, means Mika work very hard to see all delivered."

"We understand, Mika. This is important for us. Don't worry."

The voice on the other end of the line laughed. "Yusuf, Mika always worry. That why Mika still alive. Tomorrow, as planned, time and place. You bring and I bring. All then good, no?"

"Yes, Mika. All's good."

Jordan closed the connection and took a deep breath. The madness would soon begin.
26

# Crazy Ivan

The ride down to the port was silent. Jordan and his team had prepared for this moment for several weeks—in truth, for several years, considering all that had brought them here. After sleeping off the journey, they were up in the early morning considering plans and backup plans, countermeasures and options. Now everything came down to execution, and, Jordan knew in his heart, a certain amount of randomness, what others called luck. _But luck favors the prepared._

Part of their preparation was a visit last night from the CIA safe house in Dubai. Their visitors were kind enough to supply them with weapons smuggled into the country, as well as a set of disks, memory sticks, flash drives, and adaptors for the mission to come.

From Corniche Road, which ran through the sands by the Millennium Hotel in Sharjah, it had been a short hop on one of the area's main thoroughfares, Al Ittihad Road, a sparkling modern highway. Then across a new fourteen-lane, sixteen-thousand-vehicle-capacity bridge, onto the Sheikh Zayed Road, which twisted its way southeast around the center of Dubai, soon to run parallel with the coastline southwest toward the harbor. They passed the World Archipelago on their right, which hardly made an impression at sea level. The second and much larger Palm Island loomed somewhere northwest of them as they approached the main port, Jebel Ali.

As they exited E11 and drove on 520th Street, Jordan was again struck by the scale of things in Dubai. With sixty-seven berths and a span of over fifty square miles, Jebel Ali was the world's largest artificial harbor, built over many years in the 1970s. More than five thousand companies from over one hundred and twenty nations made use of this port. A frequent user was in fact the United States Navy. There was hardly a sailor who served in the region who had not visited the port sometime during his tour. The great depth of the harbor and overall width allowed American aircraft carriers to dock, and it wasn't unusual to find a Nimitz Class carrier with several of its companion boats pier side. Jordan suppressed a laugh. How the arms dealers like Kharitonov loved to do business right under the noses of the United States military forces! How their pride blinded them to the fact that Uncle Sam was aware of what they were doing, and was using them for the purpose of catching bigger fish—the clients on the other ends of their deals.

Jordan and his men pulled up to the dock number they had been sent and stepped out into the desert furnace. Three vehicles were waiting, and Jordan could see the tall, lanky form of Mika Kharitonov standing beside an open car door, several bodyguards flanking him and positioned in the nearby vehicles. The cargo boat behind them was dotted with several shapes toting automatic weapons. He knew the other guards would also be carrying weapons, concealed, just as Kharitonov knew that Jordan's men were packing. It was like a well-choreographed dance, only with less sexual tension and more potential for chaos and death. Jordan pretended to be blinded by the bright sunlight, taking that time to scope the scene. He spoke quietly out of the side of his mouth to several members of his team.

"Trouble perched high on the boats. We'll need to contain those."

The man next to him smiled tightly. "Looks like we got trouble everywhere we look. We're going to get bloody on this one, Husaam."

"Yeah, we might," he said, feeling a sudden heaviness. The wind gusted and blew grains of sand across their faces. _I'm responsible for these men._

"Mika, my friend!" Jordan boomed over the sounds of machinery, waves, and vehicles at the port, laughing in his deep bass as he jogged to greet the Russian. Kharitonov stepped slightly forward, enough to put his guards a few steps behind him—about the same distance that existed between Jordan and his men. They extended hands and shook.

"Good see you, Yusuf. I think you and your men bigger every year. Like Barry Bonds, no?"

"My brothers on the street don't have an easy life. We work hard for what is ours. It shows. You will help us do that."

"Mika happy to help. But Mika more happy when paid. You understand?" he said with a smile that would give a serial killer pause.

"Of course, my friend. Friendship doesn't put food, or vodka, on the table. Kareem!" he shouted over his shoulder. A thin black man with a goatee stepped up beside Jordan. He carried a slim briefcase, much too slender to contain any significant amount of money. He unlocked the case, opened it, and held it up to show the Russian its contents. Inside was a small thumb drive.

"Codes and executable," Kareem said flatly, an accountant presenting data. "You have your connection established?"

"Of course, of course," said Kharitonov.

Jordan interjected. "Then why don't we have a look at the merchandise, and as soon as that's done, we'll go digital, my friend."

Kharitonov nodded and signaled to his bodyguards. Kareem closed the case and stepped behind the troop accompanying Jordan. The Russian led them toward the ramp to board the vessel. As they passed underneath, the men holding automatic weapons tracked their motion onto the ship.

The ship was enormous, a "box boat" that allowed for the highly efficient transfer of enormous amounts of cargo across the planet. Eighteen million containers journeyed over two hundred million trips a year—and this counted only the legal, registered material. This one flew the Greek flag, a "flag of convenience" that allowed for easier and cheaper passage. The Greeks sheltered numerous such vessels, but it could have come from anywhere, belonged to anyone, and only the arcane records of the companies using the ships could give any idea as to the source of the materials onboard. Those records were why Jordan stood now in Sharjah, and why today's deal was headed for trouble.

While the boat looked big, Jordan knew that it was one of the smaller container vessels. Docked away from the enormous land-based cranes, it was able to load and off-load with its own machinery. Kharitonov had his trade down to a science. The forty-foot boxes were rigged with "quick-entry" latches that opened a specially designed section of the box, allowing rapid examination of contents. Kharitonov brought them to one such entry point, unlocked the container, and had his men pull out a large wooden crate. As they pried it open with crowbars, the submachine-gun-toting guards closed in behind Jordan's men, sandwiching them between Mika's gunmen and the large crate. The men pulled off the packing insulation, revealing rows of neatly stacked automatic weapons and magazine cartridges. Jordan approached the crate, reached in, and pulled out one of the guns. It was a sleek, black micro-Uzi submachine gun. He turned it over, played with the safety, gripped it in his hands to feel the weight and balance of the thing. Kharitonov and his subordinates watched in silence as their customer examined the product.

"The suppressors fit?" he asked himself out loud, removing a silencer from his robes and attaching it to the barrel of the gun. He again turned it around and examined it for several moments.

Jordan laughed and tossed the gun to one of his bodyguards, who caught it cleanly in the air and, as everyone watched, examined the gun himself, also breaking out into a smile. _Boys and their toys_ , thought Jordan grimly, as he nimbly pocketed two ammo magazines and stashed them in his robes. One advantage of robes over pants—far easier to hide things in those inner pockets. Kharitonov glanced over at him as he turned away from the weapons container and motioned to Kareem. Kareem stepped forward and opened the case again. Kharitonov's men had forged a satellite link to a bank account thousands of miles away.

"The executable runs automatically. You give it your routing numbers and account, and the money is transferred. As before, no strings and untraceable. You should be able to see it immediately. Half now, and half on delivery."

Kharitonov nodded and handed the drive over to the man who set up his connection. He seemed relaxed. Jordan had groomed this man and his organization for four long years, and this wasn't their first deal. Jordan had been an exemplary customer, never missing a payment or canceling a deal. Kharitonov had grown complacent with him, as much as an international arms dealer could, and Jordan was counting on this. That was why the Russian did not watch Jordan carefully at this moment as he moved slowly along the open crate of weapons, and why the Russian didn't recognize his peril.

"Yusuf," Kharitonov said, staring at the screen, "transfer not going through." Jordan looked at him, unconcerned, his arms behind his back as he stood at attention. The Russian looked at the screen, and as he did so, Jordan made quick eye contact with his team. "Not understanding. Yusuf—there is problem?" he asked.

Jordan looked at the Russian grimly. "Yes, Mika, there is."

Several things happened at the same time. Jordan whipped a loaded Uzi out from behind him. He opened fire at the bodyguards flanking Kharitonov. One dropped as red blisters erupted across this chest. The second dove to his right, pulling a weapon out from his belt and aiming at Jordan. Before he could pull the trigger, his neck snapped back as flesh and blood ripped apart, a barrage of bullets fired by one of Jordan's bodyguards. Simultaneously, the other members of his team pulled out handguns and turned toward the guards behind them. Although the Russians held the advantage in firepower, they were too slow to realize what was happening, and Jordan's combat-trained operatives pounced on them like tigers.

The rear members of his team, nearest the guards, had chosen hand-to-hand combat. One had dropped to a push-up position and swung his leg around like a helicopter blade, catching the guard behind the knees and dropping him to the ground. The operative behind him fired four quick shots into the prone man, who did not move again. The second guard found his weapon kicked from his arms as the CIA man drew his right leg in an arc like a mace. The guard stood there stunned as he watched the man pivot on the foot that had just disarmed him, spinning to bring his left leg like a battering ram straight into his face. A jawbone cracked loudly, and the man went down on his back, smacking his head against the boat deck. He did not get up.

Kareem had incapacitated the computer man with several blows, then had frozen Kharitonov by placing a gun to the base of his skull. Kharitonov, who had drawn a gun on Jordan, relaxed and dropped it. The four remaining bodyguards, poorly positioned in the crowded region around the boat box, had all been either overpowered or killed by Jordan's team. It was over in a matter of seconds.

Jordan grabbed Kharitonov's computer, placed it in the briefcase, and handed it to Kareem.

"You _insane_ American!" Kharitonov spat as his hands were tied with wire behind him. "What is for? You get nothing from this!"

Jordan put the barrel of his Uzi under Kharitonov's chin. The Russian pulled up his head in pain from the hot cylinder. _That got his attention_. "Mika, what I get is my problem. But if you don't do exactly what I say, I can tell you exactly what you're gonna get." He stared at the Russian coldly. "You understand?" Kharitonov nodded, fear in his eyes. "Right now, that means you make a sound we don't like, I fill you with holes. You try to escape, I, or one of my men, will fill you with holes. And if you don't do as directed, right now, you get filled with holes. Got that?" Mika nodded again, sweat pouring over his face.

"Good." Jordan turned to his men. "Take his cell phone. Get him to the car, grab several of these guns and mags. Load up. We're likely going to need them." Jordan strode through the piles of bodies on the ship deck, and his team led Kharitonov at gunpoint down the ramp and to their vehicles. The two drivers were prone beside the Russian's cars, incapacitated by other members of Jordan's team.

"We go in these three cars to lessen the suspicion." Jordan designated his two Harvard Men to ditch the rentals. The rest of his team stepped into the dealer's vehicles. Jordan sat in the back of one, his Uzi trained on the Russian as they pulled out.

"Let's pay a visit to a little building in Sharjah," said Jordan. The eyes of the Russian grew large as he understood.

"You have no place to hide. You never make deal again! We hunt you down, to America. You are _dead_ man."

Jordan looked through the window of the speeding car over the bright sands and sighed. "So aren't we all, Mika." He slapped a new cartridge into the Uzi. "What's important is what you do while it lasts."
27

# The Martyrs Monument

Three thousand miles away, the August night was cool in Algiers. Despite its nearness to the desert, the Tell Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea dominated the coastal city, giving it a temperate climate that in the hottest months was still bearable. The day's heat had abated by the predawn hours, and the wind that blew from the mountains dropped the temperature into the high sixties.

The temperature drop was a welcome relief to the American and his team, dressed in bulky Arab clothing over their combat attire. They had ridden into the city disguised as migrant workers, sheltered in several trucks provided and driven by their helpful friends of the Ibadi People's Army. Of course, no one had ever heard of the IPA, and they likely never would. But the American humored its young and naive founders. They were a ticket through the Arab and Berber landscape in Algiers, a landscape that too easily could become problematic. But no one had paid any attention to yet another group of workers trucked into the city to do its heavy lifting.

They left the Ibadi drivers with the vehicles beside the foul-smelling piers. His team headed under cover of what darkness remained toward the Great Mosque of Algiers, Jemaa Kebir, a structure over one thousand years old. Two members of his team were posted to keep watch on their collaborators. The IPA members wanted credit for the destruction of this landmark of Sunni Islam. They had fought to be a part of tonight's efforts on several occasions in his presence. He would not have them interfering with what he and his men had to do.

Five commandos from his team were dispatched to the mosque. Among them were two weapons specialists, a communications officer, and two demolition men. They carried enough S-47 to take down five buildings this size. The explosion would ensure a level of carnage that would make a statement the world would notice. The men checked off with their leader and sprinted toward the historical shrine.

The rest had another plan. The American turned and gathered together the remaining seven of his team. This small group would engineer an act of terrorism greater than that at the mosque, an act targeting an Algerian symbol of independence from Western powers that even the Ibadi held in high regard. They would never have allowed such an action. Had they known of his plans, they would have tried to kill him.

His team searched along the roadway hugging the coastline. Several blocks from the Great Mosque, they found what had been left for them: a van with keys inside, left by "tourists" that evening. They loaded into the van, each man with large packs of S-47, gripping automatic weapons. A driver started the engine and pulled out, heading nearly due south along the road. After a few minutes, they took a southeasterly turn through the nearly empty streets of the city and, within five minutes, pulled up several streets short of the monument.

At night the structure was an awesome sight. Bright lights bathed the curving concrete arches, inverted so they turned inward, giving the imposing structure a solid and yet otherworldly presence. _Maquam E'chahid_ , the Martyrs Monument, was constructed in 1982 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Algeria's independence from France. It took the abstract interpretation of three standing palm leaves, forming in their center a shelter beneath which the "eternal flame" burned. Statues of soldiers adorned the front of each leaf that plunged into the ground.

He checked his watch. They were nearly late. In two minutes, team Beta would kill the power to the Algiers grid, darkening the lights across a portion of town for a short period of time. Before technicians had located the problem and dispatched crews, their job would be done and the power restored, leaving nothing to trigger suspicion at the site.

Right on cue, the powerful searchlights went dark, and the lights in buildings and streetlamps for many blocks around them went out. The site was nearly totally black but for the light leaking its way over from other portions of the city. The team strapped on their night-vision goggles and sprinted to the monument.

* * *

With five minutes to spare on their tight schedule, they piled into the van, backpacks empty, magazines full, the job a silent success. They drove north, back toward the site of the Great Mosque, where they parked the car and left the keys. Sprinting back up to the rendezvous point, they were met by the remaining members of team Alpha. The news was good from both groups, and they returned to find their Ibadi friends waiting impatiently for them.

"This took too long!" whispered Aziri, his eyes flashing. "You are lucky no police came!"

"Relax, Aziri. The job went well. It's best to be sure about these things and take your time."

The Berber grunted and started the truck as the rest of the team settled into the back of the flatbed. He pulled out along the road, taking the American and his men to the airport for the first flight of the morning. Dawn broke on the horizon.

"Yes," he noted, "you are right. It is written: 'Haste is of the Devil.'"

"Indeed, my friend," replied the American, removing his robes and glancing over at the towering form of the monument silhouetted against the pale sky.
28

# Black Bag Job

Three gray BMWs pulled into a parking lot behind a row of small sheds, which resembled the sort of structures that an army would throw up—cheap, easy to raise, easy to break down, and yet highly functional with amenities, electricity, heat, cooling, running water, and, in this case, thick bundles of internet cables. The small buildings were in a fairly undeveloped region of Sharjah, on-going construction surrounding the lot, the ground dirty and paved only with gravel. Little traffic came in or out. It was a perfect location to escape notice and yet to be as completely connected to the world as any high-rise in Dubai.

Jordan marveled at the arrogance, or ignorance, of these dealers. Did they really believe that Viktor Bout had been apprehended at random, through some stroke of luck by the international community? Did they never consider that their entire operation may have been compromised? Yet they maintained their same base of operations, known for years now to the CIA through Jordan's efforts, and now also known to several international agencies when the CIA worked with them to apprehend their former boss.

He stepped out onto the gravel, hearing it crunch beneath his shoes. On the other side of the car, Kharitonov rose slowly, a pistol pointed at his head, and maneuvered awkwardly with his hands wired together behind his back. Two black men in white robes shepherded him toward the back entrance of one of the small structures. He glared at Jordan.

"I cannot feel my hands, you _bastard_!" he spat.

A gun tapped against his temple reminded him to speak more quietly, and more politely.

"Mika, let's go over this to make sure you don't make us have to kill you," said Jordan, looking around the area. Thankfully, the building had few windows, and the back entrance wasn't easily visible from within. He stared at the Russian coldly. "You will enter as if nothing whatsoever is out of the ordinary. You will speak to us as clients, making up whatever excuse you have to as to why we are here. You will then take us to where you keep your records."

Kharitonov squinted and eyed him darkly as Jordan's men untied the Russian's wrists. "You are police?" he asked.

Jordan nodded his head to one side, and a large man next to the Russian punched him in his right kidney. Kharitonov groaned but kept quiet as Jordan put his finger to his lips. " _Shhhhh_. No, we're much worse, my _friend._ And that's the last I expect to hear from you except for what I've explained. If you alert anyone, if you take any action, or if the air in there doesn't smell right to me, I'll paint the walls with your brain. Understood?"

Kharitonov grunted between painful gasps of air. Jordan gave him a minute to regain his composure, then issued instructions for his team to conceal their weapons. The additional time allowed for the return of his Harvard Men, who had ditched the rentals, bringing Jordan's team up to full strength.

They all made eye contact, and Jordan turned toward Kharitonov. "The guns are out of sight, but don't let them be out of your mind. You saw what we did to your men. We'll do it again. Remember, my Russian's better than your English, so don't get stupid."

He nodded toward the door, and Kharitonov removed a security card and held it to a reader. It beeped with a metallic click as the lock opened. He stepped inside, followed closely by Jordan and the other men.

For his part, Mika Kharitonov acted well. No Oscar, but the show and threat, and action he'd witnessed, brought out his inner coward. He led them through ordinary-looking offices, filled with clerks, mostly female, typing into computers and taking calls. Guns were good business, and like any modern business, there was a lot of administration. Workers were surprised to see him, more so the entourage that followed to a room storing thousands of optical disks. Kharitonov put on a pleasant, professional, if somewhat strained face, and told the archivist to leave them alone.

Jordan's team went to work. Within minutes, they isolated the records for all transactions within the last five years. These were no longer stored on the computer, so they pulled and pocketed the CDs from storage cabinets. A USB memory stick was used to copy all the records that were present on hard drives. Kharitonov was clearly as intrigued as he was frightened, but he was forced to swallow his questions as the operatives worked in silence.

"Move it! The clock's running, and we don't know when time runs out," Jordan said, pushing his team.

Within half an hour they had finished. Jordan rounded up his men, the precious data in his own backpack. They headed back the way they had entered, through what looked suspiciously like a call center, and out the back door. Kharitonov opened the door to the outside, stood straight as a plank of wood, and dove outside the door.

_Ambush!_ Jordan lunged to the left, pulling the Uzi out as he slid to the floor. The thin walls of the building exploded as bullets tore through the siding and whizzed in through the open door. Two of his team fell with multiple bullet wounds, as did several operators near the door. Screams filled the room. Women dropped to the floor or dashed out toward the front of the building, sending papers flying through the office. Still the bullets blasted against the walls, one shattering the single window in the wall above Jordan, showering him with glass.

He knew things had been too easy.
29

# God is Great

The day was going to be hot, and the tourists squirmed awkwardly under backpacks, cameras, and overloaded shopping bags along the streets of Algiers. Street vendors hocked their overpriced items as locals smirked at the naive Westerners spending more money than could possibly be justified for the goods. Business was particularly good around the Great Mosque. The combination of history and its nearness to the sea made the landmark a must-see on the tourist run.

" _Allahu Akbar!_ " A loud, static-filled call rose over the loudspeaker near the mosque. Heads of tourists turned toward the sound, despite having heard it several times in the day already, and five times every day of their stay; it was still an unusual sound to their ears. In contrast, the Algiers citizens gave a calm and familiar response, the pious slowly stopping their activities, pulling out prayer mats and laying them on the ground. A tight group of American tourists listened as their guide explained and translated.

"The muezzin is making the _adhan_ , the call to prayer," he said.

_Allaahu Akbar!_

"God is great!" he echoed in English to the wondering faces.

_Ashhadu Allah ilaaha illa-Lah; Ash Hadu anna Muhamadar rasuulullah._

"I bear witness that there is no other god but Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God!"

_Hayya'_ _alas Salaah; Hayya'_ _ala Falaah._

"Come to prayer! Come to Success."

_Allaahu Akbar!_ _Laa ilaaha illa-Lah._

"God is great! There is no god but Allah."

The echoes of the haunting Arabic chant rebounded over the streets and cement buildings, reaching the harbor and incoming ships, fading and absorbed into the waters of the Mediterranean.

After a moment of silence, as if in answer, the mosque exploded.

The sound was deafening, the shock wave injurious and stunning, citizens and tourists alike thrown to the ground as rock and metal hurled through the air at lethal velocity. The loudspeaker from the minaret arched high above the road as debris flew underneath it, then reached an apex and took its parabolic dive toward the street below, crushing a street vendor and his cart. The muezzin making the call to prayer, and all the worshippers within the mosque, were never identified in what remained.

Chaos landed along with the loudspeaker, as the able-bodied fled from the scene in panic, abandoning hundreds of injured and dying to their screams for aid. Time froze as a false evening fell from the smoke and dust, obscuring the sun. Wounded shadows limped through the choking fog of grit, like undead creatures risen from the grave, the horror real and more terrible than any film director's vision.

Muffled sirens were heard as emergency vehicles and military personnel arrived on the scene and worked to impose order over the chaotic remains. Just as they had begun to attend to the wounded and put out the fires, staring with wide eyes toward what was minutes ago the Great Mosque, a strong breeze from the sea sliced the cloud of dust blocking the view, providing a tunnel of vision southward to reveal the majesty and brutal artistry of the Martyrs Monument.

Under the shadow of the monument, a group of French tourists was gathered for a final photograph before returning home from their vacation. What had been a tightly pressed form with twenty smiles facing the camera became a dissolving clump looking toward the northern part of town as a thunderous sound buffeted their ears and a pillar of smoke began to rise several miles away. The photographer turned to face the chaos, the sounds of her shutter clicking in the growing silence. All conversation ceased for several moments, then rose to a higher level as concerned voices sought the meaning of the events. Many were running toward the northern edges of the park that rose up on a small hill above the port, seeking a closer and clearer view of the source of the smoke and noise. Smartphones were pulled out, photos and video taken, and many left the monument site to head home or elsewhere.

The French tourists remained close to the monument. They were expecting their tour guide to return and meet them there, under the monument, and lead them to a bus for the airport. None of them would make the return trip.

Three massive explosions erupted around them, the blast ejecting building debris radially from the structure, flaying the tourists to death in milliseconds. Each explosion was centered on one of the three legs of the Martyr's Monument, placed strategically like a giant's scalpel to sever the supports of the tower from its body. Those watching at a distance stared transfixed as time crawled and the great tower appeared to shudder above the disk of debris beneath it, then plunge toward the ground like a spear. The concrete column crumbled as it smashed into the surface underneath, dissolving like dust and throwing a circular plume outward and upward. Within seconds, the great symbol of Algerian pride for independence from foreign rule was gone.

"Anything from Husaam?" Cohen asked as she poked her head into Savas's office.

"No," he replied, sipping his morning coffee. "CIA's slow to update us, and they never released his precise schedule. He should have made contact with the Russian dealer by now. I guess we'll hear soon how that went."

Cohen stepped into his office, partially closing the door. "John, I think morale is beginning to slip. It's two weeks into August, and we aren't any closer to finding out who's behind this. Frankly, we aren't sure where to look anymore. Manuel's down to ten percent confidence in his database associations—that's all that's left, and let me tell you, when you're at ten percent, it's pretty random. JP and Matt are bickering for the most part, and Angel's completely withdrawn."

"Well, we need to keep focused on what this is about. They need to see beyond their own frustrations."

Cohen frowned. "John, it's not that they don't. It's that they want this so badly. Larry picked us all because we've got a commitment, an emotional one, to fighting terrorism. In the last two months, it's two horrific attacks, one right under our noses, in our own city! The strain's coming because they want to bag these guys. But right now, that goal is out of reach."

Savas winced. He understood. He felt the same frustration. Besides a few small leads, they had nothing to go on. Nothing at all. What few leads they did have were being pursued thousands of miles away by the CIA, leaving the FBI to await information, search databases, conduct late-night brainstorming sessions over stale coffee. _Twiddling our thumbs!_ It was time for a mind clearing for all of them, a pep talk of some kind. Savas realized he needed a reboot as much as anyone.

A loud knock came at the door, and it swung open. Startled, Savas looked up. It was Rideout. His face was ashen and yet his eyes burned with fury. He spoke, slightly out of breath, clearly having raced over to the office.

"John, Rebecca—you'd better come. There's been another one."
30

# Desert Guns

Cubicle dividers and desks continued to explode around him. Jordan crawled toward the side of the building and away from the doorway. He placed his back against the wall and brought his Uzi forward, gazing through the room. Women were still running to the far end of the building. Dust and sparks filled the air from the massive assault. He saw two of his men on the ground, riddled with bullet holes, likely dead. Others crouched, weapons drawn, looking over to him for guidance. His mind raced. To follow the women out the front seemed the easy solution and also provided the advantage of cover. He and his remaining team could race into that crowd and seek to escape during the chaos, perhaps commandeering one of their vehicles and heading straight for the safe house.

He rejected that strategy. He knew if he were leading the assault from outside, it would be the obvious response, and Jordan could expect welcoming gunfire should he take that route. Less obvious would be to face head-on the devastating firepower that had just wreaked havoc in the building. He motioned to the back door. His men did not hesitate, he was proud to see. They moved forward with bursts of speed and crouched on either side of the doorway. The firing had stopped. The targets were out of sight, and no doubt an ambush was being readied at the front of the building. Jordan prepared to give the signal to rush through the door.

A man toting a submachine gun darted through the doorway, weapon aimed over their heads, scanning the room. An operative to his left rolled to his back into the line of sight of the door, less than a foot in front of the man, and opened fire from the floor. Three shots struck the man in the chest; he staggered backward in retreat and fell onto the ground outside the building. Jordan and his team then leapt through the doorway, weapons firing.

Shots rained around them. Several gunmen had taken cover behind vehicles parked directly in front of the entrance. _Another trap!_ And his men paid a high price. Skill was their only advantage. Jordan sprayed fire with his Uzi toward three gunmen behind one of the cars. Each fell back, one wounded and disoriented, spinning around and firing rounds into the air.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a hostile movement and dove to the ground for cover, a sharp, searing pain ripping into his right leg. Crimson darkened his robes. Someone cackled behind him.

"You stupid man," screamed Kharitonov, standing near the entrance with a pistol in his hand. "You think I can't send message?" Jordan tried to spin around to aim the Uzi, but his right leg was badly wounded, and he knew he wouldn't make it in time. The Russian raised his weapon and fired. Jordan's shoulder exploded in pain as he twisted sideways. Still conscious, he turned in time to see Kharitonov arch his back with red bursting from his abdomen. The Russian dropped to his knees, cradling his stomach and rolling over. The CIA operative who had shot him was pinned by machine gunfire against the wall of the building, shaking violently as multiple bullets wracked his body. All Jordan's men were down.

He grabbed the Uzi with his left arm and fired on the last of the men behind the cars. His aim was poor, but the Uzi compensated with spray for what he lacked in precision. The man fell backward, moaning, crawled several feet, then did not move.

Jordan guessed he had less than a minute. The noise must have alerted the team placed at the front of the building, and they would be racing back at this moment. The bullet-strewn car of the hitmen was twenty feet away. He raised himself to his feet using all his strength and willpower, the pain in his leg flaring like a nova, eclipsing that of his shoulder as he staggered toward the vehicle. It seemed to sway and tilt as he moved. _Stay awake!_ He turned toward the other two cars and opened fire on them, rupturing the tires.

Reaching the open door, he dropped his weapon, stepped over a dead body, and clasped the frame with his hands, pulling himself around and into the driver's seat. He grimaced, realizing that his right leg was useless. He grasped it with his left hand and screamed in pain as he awkwardly shoved his right foot over into the floorboard of the passenger side.

He was lucky it was an automatic. He turned the ignition and the car started. He closed the door and shifted into reverse, then gunned the car backward with his left foot, smashing closed the door of another car and, after about thirty feet, turning the wheel sharply to the left. The car spun around, and he shifted into gear and hammered the accelerator. Shots shattered the rear window, but he wasn't hit, and within seconds, he was shielded by parked cars and other buildings on the left side.

With his left hand steering, he headed toward the highway. Blood covered his clothing, the steering wheel, the seats, and the gear shift. _Too much._ _Where is the safe house?_ His mind blanked, his memory blurry and threatening to fail him.

_The backpack._ He stiffened, remembering nothing of taking it or what had become of it. He glanced around the front seat of the car and gasped in relief. Somehow he had looped it over his left shoulder, and it was wedged in the car against the door. He had the records. The records that would show them the trail to those who had purchased the S-47, their only lead, their only hope to discover the identity of this new terrorist group. He tried to focus. The data in the backpack. It was everything.

He had only to reach the safe house before he was run down or bled to death on the highways of Dubai.
31

# Closer to God

In New York, a crowd circled a large flat-screen monitor hanging from a wall in Larry Kanter's division. The news station played over and over the footage of the collapse of the Martyrs Monument, narrated by a panel of talking heads. All watched in silence, memories of the Twin Towers close in their thoughts. The video was grainy and shook in a jarring fashion, shot from a tourist's smartphone, and yet all the more powerful for it. The footage cut from the tower collapse to the afternoon rescue efforts at the Great Mosque and around the monument. People who appeared to have been bathed in ash shuffled past the camera. Some fell to their knees with arms outstretched, crying up to the heavens. Bodies could be seen lining the roadway.

"Dear God," said Kanter to the hushed room.

"It's them," said Cohen flatly, not taking her eyes off the scene. Tears welled in her eyes. "I don't think there can be any doubt anymore."

"Yes," said Savas. "Same MO."

"Yeah, I'd say," said Miller. "Blow the shit out of some important Muslim building and leave bodies all over the place."

"Someone's got to stop this, Larry," said Rideout. "These are major, major hits, one after the other in a span of months. There's never been anything like this before. Al-Qaeda at their best needed years between each major terrorist attack. These guys are like the fucking Four Horseman or something."

Kanter shook his head. "It's unprecedented." The screen showed the wounded being loaded on stretchers, or, more commonly, carried by hand. The footage turned to showing angry crowds filling the streets in Algiers, chanting "Death to the infidels."

"If this keeps up, it will turn into World War III," said Savas.

Kanter turned to face his division members. "All right, everyone. If we all needed any reminders about what we're up against, or why we get up every morning, well," he said, pointing back to the screen, "it's right up there for you to see in full color. Now, I want to call . . ."

A woman shouted his name. Everyone turned to see Mira Vujanac dashing across the room, dodging personnel and desks in her black pumps. Breathless, she stopped near Kanter and Savas.

"Larry, I'm sorry," she gasped. Remembering herself, she straightened her blouse and hair. "It's Agent Jordan. CIA just phoned me. Their base in Dubai left a message. He's critically injured, shot up pretty badly. They don't know if he'll survive. He's being flown to an army hospital in Germany." She paused and caught her breath. "They also said he got the records."

"Mira, come with me to my office. Everyone, back to your groups and back to work. Intel teams, we'll update you as soon as we can." He took Mira's arm and led her toward his office.

King looked over at Savas. "What the hell did he get into?"

Savas could only shake his head.

"I hope he's all right," said Cohen. Savas turned to her and saw the real anxiety in her eyes. He realized with some annoyance that he shared her concern.

"He's being taken to some of the best military doctors around. He'll be in good hands."

Angel Lightfoote swept beside them and spoke in a distracted tone, "He's closer to God now. Much closer."

She walked off toward her desk.
32

# Storms

Late that evening, Savas fought to stop the reeling of his mind. Rain poured against his office windows, the darkness outside impenetrable. As the night dragged by, a weight settled on him, one he could not simply dismiss as related to the cloud fronts rolling in, plunging the city into blackness hours before sunset. The offices had emptied, and a loneliness descended that he had not felt for some time. There were just too many reminders, too many conflicts stirring long-constrained emotions within him.

Jordan's heroics, his very existence, was like a stone kicked off a ledge, leading to an avalanche below. It triggered so many clashing thoughts in Savas' mind that it forced him inward, toward his own demons, monsters he had thrown into a pit and covered but that now stirred inside. _My own private Tartarus_.

He wanted to hate this man. He _did_ hate this man in many ways. He could not wrap his mind around how an American citizen could embrace a religion whose practitioners around the world likened his nation to the Devil, burned American symbols, and supported and carried out murder against its citizens. Yet, here he was, this Muslim CIA agent, having risked his life _on a lead_. It was like an immovable object of prejudice was meeting the unstoppable force of a real man's character. In the middle of it was Savas' dead son and what had happened at the World Trade Center.

The rain worked in earnest like some maniacal typist. Savas pulled out a desk drawer, removing a fraying envelope. He opened its contents. Addressed to Thanos Savas from the NYPD—his son's letter of acceptance to the force. Savas wasn't sure who had been prouder the day that letter arrived. Not one year later, he was sitting next to his ashen-faced wife at the memorial service. He felt his eyes well up with tears.

A soft knock sounded on his door. His lights were off, the lightning like a strobe flashing through his room. He rose awkwardly, rubbed his eyes on his sleeve, and stepped over to the cracked door.

It was Cohen. In the darkness he couldn't be sure whether she had seen his face, seen the pain etched across his features, but her expression told him that if she had not, she was clairvoyant. "John, are you okay?" she asked.

"Yes, Rebecca. Just tired is all," he said with difficulty. Crazily, he felt his defenses dissolving, and his emotions, rather than demanding to be further suppressed, were raging all the more to be freed. "Not feeling well. I think I'll head home."

She placed her fingers to his mouth. Her soft skin brushed his lips, and a shudder ran through his body, a great wave rising from the sea. With her other hand, she took off her glasses and laid them on a shelf. Her eyes held an endless sea of compassion, and it took all his strength to hold back the tears that fought to pour out. He could smell her breath, the scent of her body, its warmth like fingers stroking his skin. Her hair curled over her shoulders, spilling across her chest as she cupped his cheek in her hand and brought his lips to hers. He felt a life force rush through him—overwhelming, _other_ —a force that promised magic and miracles.

Savas jerked back, stumbling. Cohen looked into his eyes, her own wide and filled with longing. He yanked his coat off the door and brushed past her, rushing down the corridor. "John, please!" she called out behind him, but he didn't turn or respond as he cut past the elevators to the stairway and sprinted recklessly down the steps. When he reached the ground floor, his chest heaving, out of breath, he opened the door and stepped into the alley behind the FBI building. Rain rushed over him, and he lifted his face to the sky to receive it.

The icon of Saint Nicholas glittered, reflecting the candle flames that lit it from below. A thousand shards of light from hand-placed mosaic pieces, each no bigger than the nails on Savas's fingers, glinted in the smoky darkness. Each stone was a different color and had been collected by monks and shipped across the seas to churches during the Greek Diaspora: deep reds and blues, turquoise, magenta, gold-plated stones, white marble. Shaped and placed, up close resembling a pixilated image on a computer screen, merging from a distance into a unified whole. _A window to the soul._

Father Timothy sat across from him, troubled yet purposeful. His eyes were like the mosaic stones reflecting the dancing candlelight, and his face was lit harshly by the flashes of lightning outside.

"John, I'm not going to quote you verses on loving your enemies or forgiving your brother seventy times seven. You've read them or heard them so many times that you can't hear them anymore. But there's one thing I know—that hatred eats from within. It burns mercilessly. You've carried a hatred within you for too long. Inside, you know this; you can feel it. You're being asked now to make a choice, the most important in your life. Put down the sword! Face the pain. Let love be born."

Savas lowered his head to stare at the floor between his feet. He couldn't accept a sermon, but knew the priest was right about something—he did burn, and choices loomed. He wondered whether it wasn't, after all, as simple as it sounded. Tonight, he'd turned his back on a woman who had opened herself to him, even for a short moment. It was the most beautiful moment he had known for many years, and yet the fire inside of him wouldn't let him embrace it. The fire demanded something different, something harder, where tears did not flow, where vengeance ruled, where pain was given for pain.

He felt the church walls closing in on him, felt that God Himself was probing with a scalpel from the burning eyes of Saint Nicholas above. Savas stood, surprising the priest in mid-sentence, rushing through the church and into the rain.

The downpour only intensified. He walked through the pelting drops and slumped into his car. Ten minutes later, he stood at the entrance of his apartment building, the rain so thick he couldn't see across the street. Water pooled in his shoes, seeping into every surface of his body. A car door closed, muffled in the storm. He removed his keys, fitting them into the lock, turning at the slap of rushing footsteps. The light above the door spilled directly over him, and he strained to see into the shadows. A dark form approached, and he tensed instinctively, expecting the worse.

She was soaked, her brown hair turned black by the pouring water and the darkness of the night. Her clothing was heavy, her white shirt transparent, revealing the pink of her skin, the swell of her breasts taut against the rain-washed fabric. She stood inches from him, a desperation cut into her face.

"Rebecca, please, you didn't—" and again she placed her hand to his mouth.

"Let me talk, before I lose the courage. You've suffered. You've tried to find your way back. I've watched you. From the first day I came to the Bureau, I watched you try to turn it into something good. And I tried to give you time." She swallowed, her eyes briefly closing. "But I can't wait anymore. There's too much madness. Too much _horror._ I've got to ask, make you choose and not run away." She stood inches from his face, her eyelashes wet. "I love you, John Savas. Will you love me?"

Savas felt her warmth cut through him like a blade. In that instant, he understood. From deep within, he answered fully, without hesitation. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and with his other hand cupped the back of her head, pulling her to him.

They embraced. The water poured over and between them, and he held her so tightly he could feel her breath escape through her lips. For a short moment, every barrier that he had built around him collapsed, and his shoulders shook.

They kissed. With the thunder reverberating around them, they kissed deeply like two starved things, oblivious to the storm's rage, feeling a shelter, a space protected from all that assailed them. Entwined, hands exploring, lips uncovering, breathing in gasps, in pain and in ecstasy, with joy and sorrow, swirling wildly in the evening gusts.
33

# Voices

Savas awoke to sunlight and a cool breeze blowing through an open window. He lay on his back; Rebecca's head nestled into his chest, her arm draped over his right shoulder. Her breathing was soft, a rising and falling cadence that stirred him deeply. He raised himself slowly, carefully, afraid to wake her. He wanted to see her face, see that haunting beauty that he now let himself admit he had desired and fought against for years, see it as she slept and in the morning's fresh light.

"Finally awake?" she said, one eye half open like a cat, a playful smile on her face. She rolled off his chest and snuggled into the pillow behind her. He rolled onto his stomach toward her, gazing up into her brandy eyes.

"Yeah, getting old, I'm afraid."

Savas looked at her face, beautiful and sad, a distant look in her eyes. He thought back over the years and realized that he had been blind to so much. _Blinded_ , he corrected himself. _Consumed._

Cohen turned and tried to laugh. "Now, if you were rich, my inner _shadchan_ would be pleased, but I'll have to quiet her, as things stand."

"Shadchan?" he asked.

"Jewish matchmaker. Think Yente from _Fiddler on the Roof_."

"Ah, okay."

"But in the real world, it's just my Dad now. I think he'd be happy that I'm interested in any biped with a Y chromosome. Even you."

Savas smiled. " _Thanks_. Breakfast? I might have something you can stand."

She smiled. "How about coffee?"

Savas grabbed a shirt and went into the kitchen. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Cohen climbing out of bed. He pushed the button, the clashing sound of beans on metal filled the apartment with the fresh smell of ground coffee. _Always smells better than it tastes_. He caught another glimpse of her in the bed. By that point, she had started combing out her hair. _I could just watch her all day._

She left the comb on the dresser and stepped into the kitchen. The pot gurgled and filled with brew. She put her hands on his shoulders. Standing five-foot-five, she was nearly half a head shorter than he was, and as she kissed him, she rose up on her toes.

"Good morning," she said. "I forgot to tell you."

"It's the best morning I've had in a long time, Rebecca. I mean that."

She squeezed his hand, and he embraced her. For several moments he held her close to him. "So," she said, her voice rough, "how's that coffee?"

"Ready." Savas grabbed two cups, scanned them to make sure they'd pass a minimal health inspection, and filled each about three-quarters.

"Black," she said.

"I know." He smiled back at her.

"Let me see what you have in this fridge."

_She might as well see that, too._ He sipped his coffee and walked over to the window, gazing outside toward the rising sun. The light was warm, the air fresh on his face. Something inside of him stirred, an emotion long forgotten, crushed by years at NYPD, banished by the loss of his son. A feeling he associated with his childhood, nearly excitement, washed through him now as it had not for long decades.

But inside, another voice arose from a darker place, a buried place, and for a moment it seemed that the light outside faded and chilled. He knew this voice. It had spoken to him for many years. There was anger in its cry, a hatred that refused any solace or sense of peace.

_Leave me alone. For today, let me be._

He placed the cup on the windowsill and turned to look at Cohen, bent over, head invisible behind the refrigerator door.

"Oh, wow, John. Looks like we need an intervention."

He smiled, and for that moment, the angry voice was silenced. The older feeling swelled within him— _hope_. That was the feeling. Simple hope. _Can it last?_ The thundercloud deep inside waited, and he knew it would not go easily. He ignored it. For one day at least, he would remember what it was to hope.
34

# Food and Oil

_I SLAMIC GROUPS THREATEN U.S._ _AND EUROPE OVER TERROR ATTACKS_

_By Thomas Fischetti, Associated Press_

_Arab nations and their organizations issued multiple statements today condemning the string of Muslim-targeted terrorist attacks and threatened Western nations with economic repercussions if these attacks did not end and the responsible parties were not apprehended._

_The Arab League issued a terse statement accusing Western governments of "complicity" and a "willing inaction" in stopping the attacks and finding those responsible. Two hours later, OPEC followed suit, threatening economic hardship to any nation "supporting Western terrorism against Muslims." One high-ranking official who spoke under conditions of anonymity said, "Muslims are furious. This has brought even sworn enemies together to fight their common foe. This will blow up in the faces of Western nations. This will make the oil crises of the last century seem like a celebration."_

_An EU advisor sought to quell the controversy, indicating that investigative organizations were working diligently to address Muslim safety in Europe and apprehend the terrorists. A White House spokesperson stated that it was counter-productive to threaten the United States when it was involved in efforts to solve these crimes. "These attacks have occurred on our own soil, and we wish justice done as much as anyone," said the press secretary._

_The Saudi ambassador responded to these remarks. "Words are not enough. It is time for the Western nations to practice what they tell Muslim nations—to stop terrorists. Unless these murderers and destroyers of Muslim holy sites are caught and executed, the West will be held responsible."_

Traffic on the FDR northbound was unusually bad. It was a constant stop-and-go, intermittent motion turning quickly into what looked like a frozen river of vehicles. Tugboats on the East River pushing box-laden barges overtook them on the right. A cabbie darted directly in front of Savas, pushing his way into the middle lane and forcing him either to slow down or to plow into the taxi. He felt the symptoms of road rage surfacing, but with Cohen riding shotgun, he sighed and let the cab have its pointless lane change.

After nearly forty-five minutes, they reached the 62nd Street exit and pulled off under the FDR, past a gas station, and onto York Avenue. They found a parking garage, then walked five blocks to New York Hospital. Passing the small green oasis of Rockefeller University on the right, the pair turned down 68th Street toward the hospital. Ten minutes later, they were in a recovery room staring down at Husaam Jordan.

Savas's first thought was that he looked well. He had clearly lost some weight from his hyper-muscular frame, and his right leg and shoulder were still bandaged, but he was alert. His eyes were bright, and he was reading a set of newspapers draped over his legs. As they walked in, he looked up and smiled. His basso profundo boomed throughout the small room.

"John. Rebecca," he said, sitting up straighter. "Here to rescue me?"

Cohen smiled. Savas just shook his head. "Agent Jordan, from what I've heard, you do a good enough job of that sort of thing yourself."

" _Good enough_ is a relative term." His smile faded. "It wasn't good enough for the men I took with me. Good men, who have served this nation well." Jordan gestured to his arm and shoulder with his left hand. "More personally, it wasn't enough from the point of view of my extremities. They've been reminding me frequently."

"I've heard you'll be released soon," Cohen said.

"Yes, next week if I have anything to do with it. I've got a very aggressive rehabilitation program planned, and I can't wait to start."

A nurse dashed into the room and took the lunch tray he had cast to the side. "Well, you won't be doing anything _aggressive_ as long as you're on my floor," she scolded, giving him a disapproving glare. She looked over at the two visitors. "He's been nothing but trouble since he got here."

Savas suppressed a laugh. "Yes, well, ma'am, he's been a load of trouble for a bunch of folks. But I think his heart is in the right place."

Jordan stared at Savas, who returned his gaze. It was the closest he'd ever get to admitting that he had changed his mind about the man. The nurse grunted and took the tray out of the room.

Jordan changed the subject. "I hope you have brought me some news finally. After two surgeries, three hospitals, and a week under sedation, I'm trying to figure out where the world is again." He held up a newspaper that showed schematics of the Martyrs' Monument and an analysis of how it had collapsed. "I don't suppose our friends from Valhalla have blown anything else up?"

Savas shook his head. "Thank goodness, no, but we're all waiting for this month's attack."

"Yes, so am I," said Jordan.

"So is the rest of the world," said Cohen. "The president' has called a special meeting with the Arab League at Camp David. The Muslim world is near riot, conspiracy theories running wild."

"Has anyone warmed to your crazy theory?" Jordan asked.

Savas shook his head. "No. But the CIA death squad idea is slowly dying. They've rounded up most of those who participated. You can count on one hand those remaining."

"Certainly they can begin to see the pattern? The similarities in the assassinations and the bombings?"

Cohen laughed. "Our bureaucracy might not, but the Muslim world sees the connection. They're blaming us. The major oil countries are calling for an embargo unless this terrorist group is found and caught. OPEC's likely on board. The world financial markets are in chaos."

Jordan folded the papers. "I guess I'll be trading in my Hummer for an electric."

Cohen frowned. "It's not just about gas. We're completely dependent on oil. You know that four out of every five calories we eat comes from petroleum?"

_Uh-oh_ , thought Savas, _she's in Berkeley mode_.

Cohen did not disappoint and launched into a lecture about the fragility of the modern fossil fuel economy. It amused him to see her take on the airs of a college protest leader. But her passion was always real, and he had learned to _never_ challenge her facts. He also had to admit, she often had a lot to teach him.

Savas was curious. "What's food got to do with oil?"

Cohen sighed. "Food _is_ oil, John. At least in this day and age. We have to plow the land to plant, water our crops, fertilize the ground, harvest the crops, process the food, package and distribute it all over the country. Oil's the energy source for all of this. It's the basis for the entire modern world. The U.S. and Europe won't let that be threatened. China and Russia are turning paranoid fast about this."

Savas nodded. "That's for sure. I've already heard talk about using military force to secure our supplies. We're still the biggest kid on the block, but things have changed."

Cohen looked at Jordan. "This is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous situations in international relations in a long time."

Jordan whistled. "So what are you two doing here visiting me? Don't you have some important work or meetings to be getting to downtown?"

Savas nodded. "Well, we did, but Rebecca insisted we come."

"I know your wife and sons were here," she said, "but I thought that it was shameful that no one from the FBI had visited a hero after his return home.

Jordan bowed his head. "A noble woman, John. Don't you forget that," he said, and Savas wondered if it meant more than it seemed.

"We have a big meeting with the CIA tomorrow," Savas spoke over his own thoughts. "They'll present their analysis of the records you got in Dubai. I'm hoping something useful will come of that."

Jordan gestured again to his wounded limbs. "You aren't the only one."

Savas was silent on the drive back from the hospital. As they crossed the Queensboro Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan offset the setting sun, intermittent flashes of light blinding him in the rearview mirror as the star danced between buildings. They were headed to a Greek seafood place he knew in Astoria, but he couldn't relax for an evening out. Too many things were burning in his mind as he drove.

Who was Husaam Jordan, who practiced, even celebrated a religion that had spawned such hatred and monstrosities? How could they stop this diabolic force that was shattering lives and peace across the world? How far would these terrorists go in the end?

Not realizing what he was doing, he found himself taking the well-known streets in Queens, but not in the direction of the restaurant. Instead, his car weaved its way to park beside the dome of the Church of the Holy Trinity. He stopped the vehicle and shut off the engine.

"We're walking from here?" Cohen asked.

"I thought we'd make a quick pit stop to see someone first, if it's all right."

She looked over at him quizzically. "Okay, who's that?"

Savas sighed. "Thought I'd see that priest I told you about. Father Timothy. You know, the one I almost shot during church service," he said.

Cohen stared at him. "I'd like to meet him. Anyone who can welcome you back after that is worth meeting."

He laughed. "I guess. But he's the only one from the congregation. I tend to make secretive visits to this place."

She nodded. "Wise."

They stepped out of the car, and Cohen followed him into the empty church. Candlelight barely dispelled the shadows. She held his hand, gazing at the large mosaics of saints and biblical stories spread across the walls. As they passed the icon of Saint Nicholas, Savas whispered, "Santa Claus."

"What?"

"I'll tell you another time."

He walked up to the left side of the iconostasis and knocked on the door. After several tries without an answer, he turned to Cohen.

"He must not be here."

"Home?" she asked.

"Maybe. But he might be around back, in the garden. Want to go check?" She took his arm and smiled up at him. "Sure."

He led her out of the church and around the building. At the back, a fence ran around the church, nearly eight feet high and made of metal. Apartment buildings stood on the other side. Planted at the base of the fence all the way around the church were rows of different kinds of plants—flowering bushes, grasses, and vegetables. Directly behind the building lay a large stone slab with a stone cross at its tip. In front of the slab, on his knees with head bowed, was Father Timothy.

Savas stopped as soon as he saw him, hoping to turn around and not disturb the priest. But the old man noticed them and stood, slowly and painfully, brushing the dirt off his cassock. He looked up and smiled, walking toward them.

"Father Timothy, I didn't mean to bother you . . . I can come back . . ." Savas began.

"Nonsense, John, good to see you," the priest said, putting a hand on Savas's shoulder. He looked at Cohen.

"Father Timothy, this is Rebecca Cohen. She's part of my team at the FBI."

"Pleased to meet you, Father," she said, smiling.

"You two working so late?" he asked, a twinkle in his eye.

"Ah, well, actually, we are done for the day, and Rebecca's heard me talk about this seafood place, Elijah's Corner, and . . ." He stumbled over the words.

"Well, I insisted that we go tonight to see if it's as good as he bragged about," she finished for him confidently. Savas looked gratefully toward her.

"Yes, yes. The best Greek food is in Astoria," said the priest.

"So, I don't want to bother you . . ." Savas began again.

"No, no. Just praying at the grave of an old friend," Father Timothy said. "Did you know Brother Elefterios?" Savas shook his head. "He was the priest of the church before I came here. He died nearly ten years ago. He was a monk, lived in that old shack there," he said, pointing over his shoulder.

Savas had always wondered about that small shack as a child. It hardly seemed able to keep the garden tools dry, let alone house a human being.

Father Timothy sighed. "Even after he got too old to run the church and I was brought in, he asked to continue to care for the garden. I said yes, of course. Over the years, this small old man would come out here every day, into his late eighties, tending this garden. I got to know him well. I miss him. When there were problems in the world, or inside the church, I would come and speak to him. He had this stunning peacefulness about him, born out of prayer or temperament, I'll never know."

The old priest smiled sadly. "So, I still come here to speak with him. These attacks . . ." He shook his head. "The world's ready for another terrible spiral of violence. I talk to my old friend. I just wish I could hear him now."

Savas and Cohen traded glances, unsure what to say. "That was why I came, Father. All this is weighing on me too. I wanted to ask you to pray for us, for what we are doing."

"John, if you're trying to bring an end to this madness, you have my prayers, certainly. But more importantly, I can also hear the host of saints praying for all the souls of the world as well."
35

# Gasoline

On the highest floor of a tower of glass and steel, a man gazed through a large window. His partial reflection displayed a tall and lean form with smooth gray hair and sharp-rimmed glasses, peering over the sprawling city below.

Behind him a grand office contrasted with the open expanse through the glass pane. The size of a tennis court, decorated and trimmed with the best that money could buy, it anchored him above the heart of the city.

He pulled on the cuff of an expensive suit, glancing at a timepiece of Swiss manufacture. With mild annoyance, he returned his arms behind his back, clasping them tightly, military-style. The lights were off in his office; he required time for contemplation. Staring into the sky, he counted more than twenty planes in the air at once, small dots like yellow stars moving across the night sky over the three local airspaces. The city resembled a pharaoh's tomb decorated with thousands of glowing jewels, the bridges like beaded necklaces across the waters.

His computer blinked and issued an alert tone. He turned around and stared at it. The screen displayed a security code algorithm, establishing an untraceable connection. Events were moving forward. He took several steps toward his desk and sat in his chair. He pressed ENTER and waited. The image of a chiseled face filled the screen, blond hair and crew cut etched like stone into the LCD.

"Connection is secure, sir," said the blond man.

"You're late, Rout," snapped the older man.

"I was delayed."

"You are ready to proceed, I assume?"

"Yes, sir. Phase One was maximally successful. All targets were destroyed without compromise of personnel or mission. World media and governments have panicked, with the intended effects. Training for the next several missions is nearly complete, and all resources and elements are in place. We await your word."

"Investigations?"

"Too many to keep track of—CIA, FBI, MI6, SIS, European groups, China and Russia. Some others. Everyone is scared shitless, and it's not clear if it's the Arabs, or the Western governments that need them, who are more worried. This is threatening to blow up into a real international situation."

"Then let's pour gasoline on this small fire we've kindled. Proceed to Phase Two."

"Yes, sir."

"A final item: the broken arrow in our quiver. We need to make sure there are no connections to us, no way to surmise how we plan to end this. He has gone his own way for too long."

Rout stared coldly into the screen, no movement betraying his inner thoughts. "He'll be missed, sir. He was a real soldier."

The gray-haired man nodded imperceptibly. "It's a link that must be severed. We can't afford to leave any bridges intact."

"Understood, sir. I'll see to it myself."

"As you see fit. We have to make hard choices, Patrick. Good-bye."

The man broke the secure connection, and the screen went dark. He pressed his fingertips together and spun his chair around to face the skyline once more. A thunderhead plowed in slowly from the west. The orange light pollution from the city seeped upward, giving the clouds the hideous pallor of poisoned flames descending.

It was appropriate, he thought. _Ragnarök is coming._
36

# Prometheus

The dawn broke with the night's storm trailing out to sea. The sun rose with a multifaceted spray of red and orange rays across the sky and water. Philip Jeffrey rolled up the mooring rope and pulled on the halyard, raising the mainsail. The white sheet climbed slowly, and he trimmed the sail to catch the wind, driving the boat forward as the airfoil and dagger boards produced the force of motion.

Jeffrey smiled as the spray of water caught him unprepared. _Thank God I bought this boat_. The irony was that he thought he'd never have time to use it. That was before Liam had called him one fateful night in 2003. He shook his head. Liam's nickname had come from his Irish mother, even though he resembled in appearance and character his father, a Swede; an immigrant family whose son had done more than well.

They had gone way back, to some of the early days of Liam's rise in business, when he still controlled half of the defense contracts for the air force in one way or another. It was more than just a profitable business relationship—the money to Liam, the promotions to Jeffrey—but a friendship had developed, based on a mutual connection that was rare for men of their ambition. How many nights along the Sound had he entertained Liam and Judy on his older vessel? And the long cruises to the Virgin Islands—those had been special times.

Then a Tuesday in September 2001 had changed everything. Nineteen terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Towers and brought those buildings down. Everyone changed after that day, but some more than others. Liam became estranged. He stopped calling and had hardly spoken to him at the memorial service. Rumors circled that he was retiring or had suffered a nervous breakdown. Jeffrey could only guess. After nearly a year and a half of silence, he began to wonder if the pain of that loss had forever separated him from his friend.

But a phone call in late February changed all that. Liam asked to visit Jeffrey at his beach house on Long Island. Like old times. But the Liam who appeared the next weekend was a creature wholly different from the man he had known before. This was a man lit with a fire from within that made a faint light of his previous ambition to succeed. That evening, Liam spoke passionately about the world, the evils of nations, and the need to fight, of not using the outdated strategies of the past. He scoffed at conventional war and diplomacy, convinced that radical efforts were what the moment demanded.

And Philip Jeffrey had been converted.

Truth be told, he was never a good fit at the Pentagon. His hard-line beliefs about the changing nature of conflict, so in harmony with Liam's own, did not buy him popularity within the changing power structure in Washington. The neocons had such a naïve faith in technology! Jeffrey knew that it was men's hearts, as much as their weapons that dictated the course of battle. What he and Liam saw brewing in the world was a conflict of men more than machines.

> _"Patrick believes he can lead the final mission, Philip. I think he may be right."_

Jeffrey winced hearing that voice again. The man haunted him, the force of his personality like some apparition scarring his memory. But he knew better than to fight it. It would have its due. For all that Jeffrey knew, all that he had done, his mind needed to wrestle with the past. His soul could find little peace.

> _"This will take some doing."_
> 
> _"Yes, it will, Philip," Liam said, rising and lifting a small object from his desk. He passed it between his hands, the metal glinting in the soft light. "Are you ready to put this in motion?"_
> 
> _"This won't be so easy, my friend. And in the end, my career, a long and honorable one, might I add, will be destroyed."_

Jeffrey closed his eyes, feeling the wind on his face, salt spray crusting his skin. He lost himself in time.

> _"Do you doubt our plans?"_
> 
> _Jeffrey laughed. "No, of course not. The top brass have all checked their minds at the door of the Pentagon. I don't belong anymore. Any day now they'll give that fool Texan his war."_
> 
> _Liam straightened and hurled the metal object against the wall. It struck the paneling and entered, splintering the wood and lodging deep like an arrow._
> 
> _"We have a cowboy for a president!" he spat. "A puppet advised by slow-minded and greedy fools. They can't even focus on the abomination that orchestrated these acts of murder! They chase and they chase after dreams inspired by their politics. And miss the larger target! The heart of evil of which this diabetic coward is only one foul seed." He walked over to the wall, grabbed the object, and pried it free with a single, swift tug. "No, my friend, we'll not aim so low as that."_
> 
> _Liam's eyes burned into Jeffrey's mind. His words reverberated. "It's said one should beware the vengeance of a patient man. Philip, we will be very patient. Our organization will be hidden, slowly established in every major target nation on earth—no matter how difficult to penetrate. Only when we're ready, when we've trained an elite force, acquired the weapons and tactics we require, and developed our plan thoroughly, will we strike. By then, it will be impossible to stop us. Then blood will be had for blood, and more. Then fire will rain from the skies."_
> 
> _Jeffrey stared grimly forward. "Yes, and like Prometheus, I'll bring you that fire. Hell, my liver's shot anyway. I'm ready, Liam. You will need patience. This will take time. But it will be done. You know my beliefs."_
> 
> _Liam nodded and returned to his desk, placing the metal object back on its stand. The light glittered off the glass bottom, serving to highlight the metallic arms on which the object rested. The arms came together at the top, forming a cup-like loop, from which the thinner end of the object hung. The metal of the tip thickened from the stem to a much wider girth near the end of the shape, flattening, forming a sharp point in an otherwise flat surface. Carved into the face of the metal was the head of a raven. Jeffrey looked at the object and felt vaguely troubled. From this angle, it did indeed resemble a hammer._

* * *

A seagull's cry started him, and he broke out of his reverie.

"I'll never be free of you, Liam," he spoke to the depths of the sea.

Liam's proposal was audacious, insane, and brilliant. Jeffrey was swept up by it and terrified at the same time. But when his friend left, he knew that he would help fulfill that plan. He had engineered his transfer to Ward County, North Dakota— _North Dakota!_ Minot Air Force Base was the perfect seat of operations for what he needed to do. Over four years he worked to engineer one of the greatest betrayals in the history of the United States. A betrayal of the country he had fought for, would die for, because to save it from itself, from its foolish citizens and leaders, drastic action must be taken. And he had pulled it off, an act that had cost him his job and his honor in the military community. Now he was a disgrace, the truth buried from the public. Were Jeffrey in medieval Japan, he would cast himself on his sword.

Instead, he sailed. At sea, the land faded and the world of men became something that seemed almost small. When the waves rolled on and on to the edge of sight, it was possible to forget the shame, the guilt, for what was done, and what was to come. Great deeds came with great costs. On the waters of the Atlantic, Philip Jeffrey was sailing to find his soul.

The wind was a strong ten knots north by northwest. He tacked his course northward, seeking the middle of the Long Island Sound. The July sun was already beginning to warm the boat and his skin considerably. _Damn the melanoma_ , he thought and steered his course.

He turned toward a noise disrupting the peace at sea—a boat at some distance, racing toward him. _Strange._ Powerboats didn't usually come this far, and rarely had he seen one moving at such high speed. As the boat approached, he could see it wasn't the coast guard but what looked like a dock-bound party boat, right down to the tinted windows. Whoever was piloting the thing was reckless as hell. While he couldn't imagine that his good-sized catamaran wasn't visible to the other boater, he wasn't taking any chances.

He went into the spacious cabin and sat at the two-way radio, powering up to contact the other skipper. The radio was malfunctioning, issuing only static. _Odd._ He'd checked it only last night. After several minutes of fiddling with the knobs, he gave up. Electronics weren't his strong suit.

The sound of the other engine rattled the windows. He exited the cabin and watched the boat approach portside of his own vessel, matching course and speed, much too close for comfort. A figure stood on the starboard deck, grasping something in his hands. _What in the world is he up to?_

Automatic fire erupted from the motorboat. Jeffrey arched, his face in shock, his chest and neck exploding in bursts of clothing and crimson. He fell backward, close to the cockpit, hitting the wheel and causing the boat to lurch. The powerboat pulled aside as the catamaran veered sharply into the wind and the sails began to luff. Jeffrey lay in a growing pool of his own blood, grasping at the railings. A searing pain across his midsection, chest, and neck clouded his vision, and he slipped and struck hard against the deck.

Time streamed at the surreal pace of a dream, sensations confused, as if he were cast into the sea itself, drowning and sinking, unable to stop falling. He opened his eyes, still clutching the railing, the open sea beneath him. The boat was still. Fighting a terrible nausea, he turned over on his back. Cyan light burned his eyes, the sun sweltering. A shape dimmed the light, broad shoulders blocking the sun. The figure raised his arm, pointing a dark object at Jeffrey's head. A gunshot rang out over the open sea.

The gray-haired man tapped his keyboard, and the screen in front of him went dark. He swiveled around in his chair and faced the window and the city once more. There were choices to be made, and only some were able to make them. With those choices came sacrifices. In the end, that was how wars were won.

"Good-bye, my friend," he whispered to the darkness.
37

# Means and Motive

The rising sun cast a harsh and unforgiving light. The three agents were exhausted. Coffee mugs and scattered boxes of Chinese food and donuts littered the desktop. Hernandez brushed his long hair out of his face to better see the screen. Savas thought his computer whiz looked like a disheveled tumbleweed after a windstorm. Cohen rested her head on her hands, her mouth pursed.

The eyes he saw reflected in the screen told a different story. Dark circles and bags hung under them, yet each pair burned with the intensity of a hunter on the chase. Their bodies were slung at angles showing fatigue, but they willed their minds into focus after an elusive target that was for the first time coming into view.

"I'll be damned," said Savas.

Hernandez whistled. "Yeah, man, crazy shit. I thought it was too much that those records connected the dealers to GI, but this . . ." He chuckled. "Husaam hit the jackpot."

Cohen nodded. "I'd say we now have motive with the means and opportunity."

Savas agreed. "One hell of a motive. I didn't think it would be like this. You two did some great work digging this out."

"Now what?" asked Cohen.

Savas straightened up and sighed. "It's time to bring this to Larry."

"He's got a big powwow with the CIA this morning, dude," said Manuel.

"I know. All the better." Savas stood, still staring at the photograph of a woman on the computer screen. "This changes everything."

"John, what's going on? I'm in the middle of a meeting!"

Kanter stood from his desk with a frown. At Kanter's right was Mira Vujanac, startled and concerned. Richard Michelson, the lanky and pale head of the CIA's Crime and Narcotics Center, sat across from her. Beside Michelson sat a thick black man in a white robe and kufi, Husaam Jordan. Jordan was fatigued, sporting a sling with a cane beside him.

"Larry, this can't wait, and it's for everyone present to hear," said Savas, casting his gaze across those gathered. He ushered in Cohen and a nervous Hernandez.

Kanter sighed. "This better be important, John."

Savas stared back. "It is. Manuel, pull up the data on Larry's screen."

The wall beside Kanter was essentially one large LCD monitor. Savas knew his boss was an information junkie, constantly monitoring the work of Intel 1, especially during a crisis. He hoped to fully engage him now. Hernandez activated the touch screen, and Kanter enabled access. Soon a list of cargo manifests and other shipping records were displayed, along with photographs: a man with silver hair and a stunning woman in her late forties.

"Let me just clarify this for you," began Savas, as the others in the room strained to decipher the details on the screen. "As you know, both of our agencies have been poring over the records obtained from the Dubai arms dealers."

Jordan rumbled, "CIA hasn't made very much progress." Savas saw Michelson's face tighten. "I'm glad Mira's efforts have helped distribute those files. I was beginning to think I'd taken metal in vain."

"No, not in vain at all. It's buried, but it's there. A clear connection. The S-47 was sold in bulk three times over the last five years. In each case, a maze of shell businesses and offshore bank accounts. All essentially untraceable, bearing the mark of a highly organized operation, but they transferred money to our recently deceased arms dealers."

Irritably, Michelson interrupted. "Yes, this is nothing new. CIA has identified these money-laundering fronts as well. They've buried their tracks in that labyrinth."

Savas smiled. "Not well enough, Mr. Michelson. Guess they didn't count on anyone turning Rebecca loose on the data."

Cohen smiled a little shyly as Savas continued. "It took some doing, but together with Manuel, they found their way through the false accounts and companies. The sales are linked to something very real. Bottom line: these explosives were moved to cargo ships flying various flags, but each and every one of them was sailing under the management of Operon Shipping."

Kanter frowned. "What's Operon?"

Savas walked to the screen beside Manuel. "That's where this case takes a big turn, Larry. Operon Shipping is a company wholly owned and managed as a subsidiary of GI, the single most powerful defense contracting corporation in the world." For emphasis he tapped his index finger next to the photo of the man on the screen.

"Gunn International?" asked Kanter, his eyebrows arched.

Savas nodded. "I think everyone's heard of GI. The company handles everything from weapons shipments to aircraft design. A multibillion-dollar enterprise headed by the reclusive William Gunn." Savas gave it a moment to sink in. Linking GI and William Gunn to the terrorist attacks was like shaking a can of nitroglycerin. The stunned expressions from everyone in the room reflected this.

"GI?" said Kanter again, as much to himself as to Savas. "Wait a second. John, that's a big jump from Operon to Gunn International."

Michelson nodded. "Based on circumstantial evidence."

"There's more. Manuel, pull up the construction site images."

The screen filled with satellite images of desert lands. Two photos, dated more than a year apart, were juxtaposed.

"These are images from the Nevada desert, taken of identical sites. Notice the buildup and subsequent erasure of structures?"

Kanter nodded. "Yes, and so? Why are you focusing on these? What led you to these images?"

"The phony shell companies. Once we had the link to Operon Shipping, we searched for any other activity from these entities. Turns out they outsourced several construction projects in the American Southwest, but the records are another wild goose chase. Nothing tied to anything concrete. Oh, to be sure, there's work that was done. Up pop buildings and landscaping a year or so ago, but now it's all gone. Erased. Like it never happened."

"What the hell, then?" asked Kanter, perplexed.

"Military exercises," said Jordan.

Savas smiled, exchanging a glance with Cohen. _The man was quick!_

Michelson stared at his employee. " _Military_ exercises?"

Jordan shifted his weight to reposition his healing leg. "What do you do before you rig international monuments with S-47? To pull those missions off—complicated, secret missions of high precision—you have to be prepared. You have to run simulations. These people are military-level precise in what they do, and I'll bet you that they train like Special Forces as well. For all we know, most of them _are_ ex-Special Forces troops."

"I'll be damned," Kanter whispered absentmindedly, staring at the images.

"What are you saying?" Michelson asked with poorly concealed irritation.

Savas turned to the CIA official. "That these 'construction jobs' are terrorist training sites. Like those in Afghanistan used by al-Qaeda, but right here at home, hidden in our own backyard, run by Americans, and at a far higher skill level."

"That's crazy," began Michelson.

Jordan decided to up the ante. "And funded to the hilt by none other than Gunn International. I think you'd find, if there were any trace left, which there won't be, that these construction companies were all assembled, equipped, and run by personnel from former GI subsidiaries."

"You don't have any evidence for this!" shouted Michelson, to everyone's surprise. He paused to collect himself. "As you are all aware, Agent Jordan is an excellent field man, but one that I and many of his superiors feel is too often overzealous in his nation's interests. We should all step back and realize that at present, there are no ties whatsoever with Gunn International or any illegality. There's no reason to believe there'd be any motive for one."

Mira cut in. "Exactly. What's the motive here? Why on earth would one of our biggest military contractors be transporting illegal explosives and training terrorists to attack Muslims?"

Savas stepped back to the board. "It turns out that there might be a motive." The image of the striking woman grew large on the screen. Savas swallowed. He felt vertigo descend on him again. Images of falling towers and the face of his son threatened to paralyze his thought processes. _Focus,_ _damn it!_

"On 9/11, an accountant with J. P. Morgan traveled to the former World Trade Center," he stammered, finding it difficult to get the words out in a professional manner. "She was in a meeting in 1 WTC on the 102nd floor when the plane hit. She made a series of calls to a cell phone number listed to an owner in New York City, and then to the police and fire departments. Due to volume, her calls were not answered at police or fire, and the private number she called did not pick up. At approximately 10:28 a.m., the time of the North Tower collapse, all calls from that number ceased. Her name was Judith Rosenberg. She was the wife of William Gunn."

There was a long silence.

Kanter shook his head, his expression sympathetic. "John, there are a lot of people in this city, and I'd wager at many international corporations, who lost someone they loved that day. Do they all have motive? Do you? We can't go all wild conspiracy theory here and tie rogue shipping companies to terrorist training camps for a vengeful CEO."

Savas felt crestfallen. _He's not buying it._

"Well, I say we can," boomed Jordan.

"Agent Jordan," began Michelson, "we have already—"

"I say we can and _should_ ," interrupted Jordan. "Something smells here. Whoever's bankrolling this thing has the pockets of a bin Laden, and his fanaticism, too. I think GI has something important to do with this, and I think William Gunn needs to be examined more closely than he has been."

"Nonsense!" shouted Michelson. "We're professional organizations—both the FBI and the CIA. We don't muscle powerful companies or individuals—companies and individuals, I should remind you, who have served their nation well and helped to protect us from these threats from abroad for years! Certainly not over some half-baked hunch!"

Mira tugged at her diamond pendant and glanced up. "John, I don't want to be difficult, but, assuming you're right about this, where'd we even start? And how? Gunn's a Howard Hughes—cagey, paranoid, and retaliatory. His ruthlessness is legendary. And GI's a giant octopus. It's like saying this case has something to do with China. How do you find a needle in that haystack, the proof you need? This haystack is a powerful force that isn't going to let itself be searched, especially if there's a chance for legal action and embarrassment."

Hernandez, quiet until now, fired back. "We have shipping records linking GI to an international arms dealership! _That's_ a place to start."

"Not realistically," said Kanter. "You have to see the legal angle, Manuel. So what if these gunrunners used an Operon ship? How much did Operon know? Was it a local smuggling problem or something broader? Nothing connects this in a way we can pursue right now, to GI or to anything else. Hell, I'm not convinced GI had _anything_ to do with it. Do you know how many boats they run at any given time? It must be huge. If we move now, we'll just make fools of ourselves."

Savas felt the moment slipping away. "We can at least follow up on the shipping leads! We know where these boats docked; we can try to trace the shipments from there."

Kanter nodded. "We can certainly do that, John. Our good friends at CIA can help us here, as this goes outside the country and our jurisdiction," he gestured with his eyes toward Michelson and Jordan. "From that we can get names and locations, hopefully trace these things back to the buyers. This will get us closer, maybe provide us with harder evidence, evidence we'll need to move on GI in a more serious manner. Whatever the circumstantial story you've put together," he said, gesturing to the flat screen, "there's _nothing_ , no reason to think GI was involved beyond being duped, and it'd be impossible to take that company on without a powerful case to give us powerful warrants."

Mira finished. "Besides, it's not like there are many options at our disposal."

Jordan smiled. "Sure there are. Walk up to the man and lay the cards on the table. Call him out. In that moment, you'll know from the eyes."

Michelson sneered and laughed. "A lot of good that'll do. Your antics in Dubai wrecked a decade of CIA operations and left a trail of bodies that we're still trying to smooth over with the UAE government."

"He got the records, didn't he?" Savas found himself speaking, to his own surprise. Jordan eyed Savas, more intrigued than grateful.

Richard Michelson flashed an angry glare at him. "Indeed he did, Agent Savas. So might have ten other plans he ignored in his rash pursuit of the mission. The CIA's not in the habit of inciting international incidents for small gains. Nor will anyone authorize any such actions on American soil, I'd wager."

Savas smiled. "But CIA doesn't have authorization on U.S. soil, if I remember correctly."

"No, it doesn't," said Kanter firmly, his tone imperial. "But I do. And I say this line of discussion has gone too far."
38

# Double Meanings

Savas paced silently in his office. They were moving through September without an incident, wondering when the next attack would hit. There were long hours poring over the shipping records, information on Operon and GI, William Gunn and several other executives, other CIA and FBI databases. Correlating, looking for patterns, finding curious hints but nothing solid.

Kanter had decided to take the conservative approach and continue to pursue the shipping leads. This was the rational move and would lead them eventually to the buyers and the source of the explosive orders. It was the "eventually" that had Savas worried. How much time and how many more attacks could the international community take before something cracked? Wars were often started for the stupidest reasons, when international tensions were high and mistakes in judgment were made. As Cohen had made clear, oil was the lifeblood of the modern world, and if its flow was impaired, nations would respond as they felt necessary to preserve it. If things did not resolve soon, Savas knew, there would be war.

Thinking about Cohen was the one comfort he had. She had left, keeping to their plan of schedule separation at work. Savas was pleased that no one had an inkling of their affair. While it rankled him to have to hide their relationship, the time wasn't right, and it was the last thing they or the group needed.

There was a knock, and he half expected to see Cohen's silhouette in the doorway. Instead, it was an exhausted Larry Kanter. "Mind if I come in?" he asked.

"Sure, Larry. Have a seat."

Kanter dropped into a chair. "This has been a real pain in the ass working with CIA, John," he began, tilting his head back and staring up at the ceiling. "It's an expensive deal, in terms of how much information we get and how many years of my life are lost."

Savas chuckled. "I'm glad it's you and not me."

"Pity Mira. She's the diplomat with that zombie Michelson nine to five. Only through men like him can bureaucracy prevail." Kanter grunted. "Although it's a kick to watch him and Jordan have their little disagreements. I tell you, if I were in a tight spot, I know who I'd want next to me."

Savas wondered what had really brought Kanter to his office. He didn't pay social visits, and he didn't need to talk to the crew to unwind.

"But a man like that," continued Kanter, "a good man, it should be noted, whatever you think, John—he can undo himself. Especially in a job like this. If he breaks too many unspoken or, in his case, even spoken rules, he can find himself moved to the agency equivalent of Siberia, or out of a job."

Kanter paused and leaned forward to look at Savas. "Take, for instance, that scandal a few years ago with that guy, what was his name? Herr. Dale Herr."

Savas stiffened. _Dale Herr? The man who scandalized the FBI with sex tapes with coworkers? Is this example a coincidence, or is he trying to tell me something?_

"Wow, did that thing ever blow up in our faces! Taxpayer money not catching bad guys, that was for sure. Since then, it's gotten worse than having the Bureau run by nuns as far as how forgiving they are of in-house romances." Kanter looked him in the eye. "You know what I mean, John?"

This was no coincidence. Kanter was sending him a message, a very strong one. _How did he know?_ _Who else knew?_ If the Bureau knew, Kanter wouldn't be here now: some random cog would be announcing to him a formal investigation of policy violations. He could take some comfort in that, at least. _But for how long?_ He brushed that aside; Kanter needed a clear response.

"Yes, Larry, I know exactly what you mean," he said, not taking his eyes off Kanter. "But a man like that, he's a free man, not a wheel in the machine here, like Michelson. He won't sacrifice who he is for the agency, for any agency, any government or any man. That can spell trouble sometimes. But, it's also the reason he's been so spectacularly successful. Like you said, he's the kind you want with you when it's bad."

Kanter looked at him for several moments, nodded his head, and stood. "Yeah, that's it, all right. I like the man, in all honesty. Reminds me of you a bit, if you don't mind me saying. I don't want him to change, either. The only thing I'd say to him, if I had the chance, is _be careful_ , and don't give the zombies any more reasons to take you down."

Kanter walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway out when he stopped and turned back. "Oh, I've been meaning to ask—how's Rebecca?"

"Rebecca?" said Savas. "She left some time ago, I think. She's a workhorse, been a real asset in everything we do. Why?"

"Oh, it's just I haven't seen her for a while. She used to work late a lot more often. I could always count on you and Rebecca being here late into the night trying to crack a case."

Savas smiled. "Well, she's been turning in earlier. I think the stress of this case is getting to her some."

"Well, I think that's true for all of us, John. Good night." Kanter stepped out into the hallway and walked down the corridor.
39

# Completing the Map

Headlights and the growl of an engine cut through the peaceful sounds of a forest in upstate New York. A dark Hummer bounced along a gravel roadway that hugged the shore of an expansive lake, the water black and silver as it reflected the moonlight. The large vehicle stopped, small rocks falling from the tire treads. At the edge of the roadway was an old wooden bridge, supported in part by metal girders underneath, sagging before the weight of the vehicle.

Inside the truck, behind dark tinted windows, a blond man frowned. His harsh features and short-cropped hair added a stern frame to the scowl. Rout hated playing dice with that bridge. It should be modernized, brought up to specs. But the man he had come to visit refused to do anything about it for sentimental reasons. That was the problem with Gunn, his great weakness and strength. His heart gave him the power of vision and steadfastness to do great things, but it also clouded his mind and made him vulnerable. The scowl became a sneer. _That's why I exist_. Patrick Rout suffered from no such vulnerability.

It was a spectacular property. The bridge led out over the water to a small island in the lake. Two houses, a main structure and guest lodge, had been built on the island over one hundred years ago. They sat surrounded by trees and well-manicured shrubbery. Several docks extended into the water for recreational activities, and the western end of the island had a small boathouse. This is where his commander had come with his wife on many occasions. It was her favorite retreat, and it was a special place for him still because of that. Isolated, unusual, pristine, and beautiful. Rout scoffed. _That's what you do when you've got more money than many nations._ _Buy your own damned island!_

He shifted, accelerated, and drove across the bridge. Thirty seconds later, he entered the circular driveway, passed a spraying fountain with live fish, and pulled up to a porch that framed the front entrance. A trim man with gray hair and glasses was already waiting for him at the bottom of the steps.

The CEO greeted him. "Thank you for coming. I know this is an inconvenience right now. But things are accelerating. I wanted to speak to you personally to consider these new developments." Rout nodded and let the man lead. "Why don't we talk outside?"

_Outside?_ Perhaps these new developments had spooked him more than he let on. _Is he really worried about surveillance?_ _Or is this part of his vacation home persona?_ It was better that his wife had died. The man needed the edge her death had given him to lead this battle.

They walked along the side of the small island, a path made for lazy excursions, the wooded regions stopping some twenty feet from the edge. The stars shone brightly this far from streetlights, the band of the Milky Way discernible. There were few sounds: a soft wind, the water lapping the rocks ringing the island, and the insects of the night.

The CEO continued. "Things were penetrated faster than I had expected. The probing of the Operon businesses—this was FBI?"

"As far as we can tell, but they're not the only ones."

"Meaning?"

"We aren't sure. Someone, not FBI, and not easily marked. Perhaps an international group, but it's not Interpol."

"Then who?"

"Maybe the CIA," he said. "Recent events point that way."

"Explain."

"The Russian dealers, the ones in Dubai, there was a major incident. We just learned of it. Many in the leadership are dead. Our contacts—and a lot of money between parties—uncovered evidence that their operation there was hit recently, very violently. If that's true, records may have been retrieved, connections revealed."

The CEO stopped near one of the rickety docks and turned to face Rout. "CIA?"

"There's an active field house nearby. Some think it was involved with the arrest of Viktor Bout. There's been a lot of chatter from sources about CIA involvement. But nothing solid. Even if they weren't involved, if the records were stolen, they could simply have been sold."

"Can they trace Operon back to us?" asked the CEO, staring out over the lake.

Rout frowned. "I don't believe so. The bank trails are all but impossible to follow: no connections to anything illegal. Operon is a subsidiary. Even they can't know all the smuggling that occurs inside their system."

The CEO glowered. "What worries me isn't the likelihood of exposure. We've controlled for that. What worries me are the people searching. We're insulated from lumbering bureaucracies. But individuals, _that's_ a different story. Just one firebrand and they can unravel the best defenses. We need to find out who is looking and why. We need their names, their histories, where they live, and what shoe size their children wear. Do you understand what I mean?"

Rout kept his smile in check. "Yes, sir, I do."

"Good. See to it. We need to contain this and not lose our focus on the next mission."

"Regarding the mission, sir, the Brits have begun guarding the site."

"How many?"

"Not sure yet, but it looks like a full Section—a small infantry unit of about eight soldiers."

"Soldiers?" he asked with interest. "They _are_ taking this seriously."

"Yes. It complicates the mission significantly to have to neutralize that many trained men. We're making plans to solve that problem and to do so without alerting their command structure, which, as you realize, is the complicated part of this."

The CEO's face hardened. "I don't care what it takes. I want that target hit, and hit hard."

"It will be, sir."

"New York?" he asked.

"No, sir. Nothing. Since when did Homeland Security anticipate anything real? The other sites show no suspicions."

He nodded curtly. "It would not do to lose even one. A harsh statement will be made. The map will continue to be drawn all the way to the desert sands."

He paused, looking out over the water, the soft breeze ruffling the gray hair that shone in the light of the rising moon. His more kindly smile returned. "Now, come inside, and have something to eat."

Rout suppressed a sigh. He'd rather get back to work.
40

# Shabbat Candles

For Savas and Cohen, things had become far more difficult in Intel 1. Their everyday interactions had always been somewhat restrained, a tension constantly between them, but it was one they both controlled within their separate and private shells. Intimacy had unleashed emotion that was freely expressed outside the office, but that was caged again each morning. She passed by and he smelled her, heard the fabric of her clothes rustle as her body shifted positions, caught a glimpse of her eyes, or saw her smiling and laughing with others. Each time it was a struggle to remain detached and distant. He longed to put his arms around her, both to relieve his need for her touch and also to claim her as his in front of others. It was as primitive as it was sublime.

Savas didn't know where this would lead. His life was complicated enough without a constant deception. They agreed to keep their affair secret until she could transfer to another department, and that would not be until this case had reached some kind of conclusion. For each of them, it was too important.

Staggering their departures from work, this night Savas had arrived an hour after Cohen. Her apartment was a mansion compared to his tiny studio in Queens. Breaking him out of his thoughts, she swooped out of the kitchen and into her bedroom. Savas heard the sound of her closet door opening, unmistakable rummaging noises, an object falling, a grunt, and the door closing once more.

She approached the dining table, her hair somewhat disheveled, grasping an old bronze candlestick holder. It was unusual, a style Savas had never seen before. There were two holders for candles, spread apart by about a foot and a half, each supported by a curved and decorated arm that arched up like the beginning of a heart-shaped form from the base. The base itself was also highly decorated, with prominent symbols carved into the bronze. They looked like Hebrew letters.

Cohen looked at him expectantly. "So? Do you like it?"

"It's pretty. Is it something special?"

"It's a Maurice Ascalon, an _original_." She took some candles she had shoved into her pocket and set them in place. She frowned at him. "Ascalon was one of Israel's most beloved sculptors. This was my mother's. She gave it to me a few years before she died." Her voice trailed off, and she stared into the distance for a few moments. "Anyway, they were packed up in the closet, and I haven't used them since. It's not that I would have had a reason anyway. I don't really hold to much tradition—something that always made her sad."

Savas could see the pain in her face but did not understand. "What do you mean?"

"These are Shabbat candles."

"Like Sabbath?"

She smiled. "Shabbat is _the_ Sabbath, John. The Jews invented it, so we get dibs on the word," she said in an amused voice. "It's nearly sunset, so I got it about right, even if I forgot the flowers. She always had flowers. Friday evening meals, my mother lit the candles. We would have a special meal, and, when we were little anyway, we couldn't do anything fun. All the electricity was off, no TV! My father, as man of the house, would say the prayers to welcome the day of rest after the candles were lit."

Savas looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Cohen laughed. "Don't worry! You have to get religion tonight, John." She lit the candles and whispered something he couldn't catch. She stood tall and recited.

" _Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha-olam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat_." She paused and closed her eyes.

"It means: Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the Shabbat candles."

She turned to the kitchen, returning with a tray holding the food she had been preparing. "And now, we eat."

Cohen placed the tray on the table and looked at him. He grasped her hand. There were tears rolling down her cheeks.
41

# Morden

The September night was cool and misty in Morden, a southwestern suburb of London, home to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. A cloud sat on the earth, the air was prickling vapor that obscured vision. Streetlights stood at attention with ghostly haloes.

Situated on more than five acres of land, the Baitul Futuh Mosque displayed a proud and powerful facade. Holding over ten thousand worshippers in three prayer halls—its interior filled with a gymnasium, multiple offices, a library, and television studios—it held claim to being the largest mosque in Western Europe. It was a statement to the people of London, and the world, that this Muslim community was to be taken seriously. The Ahmadiyya faithful represented a splinter sect of Islam, condemned by orthodox Muslims as heretical, and also by Western groups as harboring fanaticism and anti-Western sentiment. The Baitul Futuh, or House of Victories, was a defiant answer to all the doubters.

The parking lot in front of the mosque was deserted save for a single military-standard personnel truck, its color faded to gray in the darkness and fog. A minaret thrust skyward, lost as it plunged into the gray. The top of a silver dome blurred. Several weary-looking soldiers stood at positions around the structure, weapons or cigarettes in hand, cursing their foul duty to guard the property of a group many considered enemies of the state.

One soldier cupped his hand over a lighter and puffed. He glanced toward the parking lot as streetlights went dark, plunging the area into blackness. As the flame went out, a small red circle the size of a pencil eraser danced over his forehead. For a moment, the laser light hit his eyes, blinding him. Before he could understand, a soft pop came from the darkness. His head arched back and he dropped to the ground with a thud. His mates turned toward the sound, but before they could complete the motion, a near simultaneous group of muffled reports sounded around the mosque. Each of the soldiers fell.

Dark shapes seeped over the steps like a polluted tide. Black fatigues concealed their shapes, only their eyes showing through masks. They grabbed the downed soldiers and dragged them off the concrete around the mosque, washing the ground of blood and remains. Riflemen rose from the fields and parking lot around the mosque, shouldered their weapons, and approached.

Two soldiers stepped out from inside the mosque and froze before the ghostly forms around them. One grabbed for his weapon, but a shadow responded from the side. The dark shape seized the soldier's gun arm, extending it with the weapon grasped tightly, driving his palm into the back of the elbow and breaking the joint. The soldier screamed and dropped the weapon as the dark figure drew back his palm and struck the soldier in the neck, shattering his windpipe. The man dropped to the ground, choking and gasping for air, unable to scream further. Beside him lay the other soldier, an empty expression in his eyes, his neck twisted strangely to one side.

"Move these two out!" hissed one of the cloaked figures. Like the others, the two bodies were dragged away from the structure. A van pulled up next to the military vehicle, and the bodies were loaded into it. Black bags were taken off the van and distributed to several masked figures who busied themselves pulling out dark bundles and stripping off their clothes.

Others moved around the mosque, placing devices that they camouflaged in various ways—with mortar and tile that matched the surface of the mosque or as electronic devices, some resembling the cameras in place around the building.

Within thirty minutes, the scene had nearly returned to normal. The dark shapes were gone from the deep fog, like wraiths that crept back into the mists. A small group of false soldiers in uniform patrolled the site, glancing up only momentarily as streetlights winked back on, throwing a ghastly light over the building. Cameras mounted around the mosque turned on and began to transmit once again. At the end of the parking lot, a brown van turned out onto the road, its headlights off, only the red of its brake lights flashing momentarily like two grim eyes fading into the fog as the first light of dawn began to pale the evening sky.

Across the Atlantic, in Manhattan, the sidewalks were nearly empty after midnight, and the blocks around 97th Street contained only a handful of late-nighters. Few noticed that the streetlights along this side of the block up to Third Avenue had gone out. None noticed the darkly clad figures passing by a large structure, darting out of sight, one by one over a span of five minutes. Inside the high fences, a building at a twenty-degree angle from the Manhattan street grid loomed upward yet was still dwarfed by taller apartment buildings around it. The building was squat, broad at its base, with sheer walls and a modern style tapering to a large black dome. It had been said that the geometry of the structure, founded on a repeating pattern of square units, followed Islamic law, which forbade the representation of natural forms. Atop the dome, on a spire, rested a crescent moon. A minaret rose next to the building, nearly in the middle of the block of land but open and easily visible to 96th Street. A sign outside read "Islamic Cultural Center of New York," but the place was better known to many as the Manhattan Mosque.

Within the fences, no one from the streets could see the dark figures traversing the traditional exterior court that led to the entrance of the mosque, or the shapes gathered around the minaret, placing objects along its sides. Shapes entered the mosque carrying loaded backpacks that appeared much lighter on the way out. Within forty-five minutes, all activity ceased; the dark figures were gone, and the corner displayed nothing out of the ordinary. The streetlights shone.

Sunrise lit lands across Europe and Africa. In a suburb of London, a tired-looking troop of soldiers drove off early, a little before the arrival of the morning shift, and disappeared, never to be seen by any regiment in England again. In Finland, Friday worshippers prepared to make the long trek to one of the handful of mosques in this northern country, grateful for asylum and a chance to worship in this new land. In Nigeria, the spires at the tops of the four minarets of the Abuja National Mosque lifted majestically toward the heavens in the orange light. Approaching from the main highway, the sun rose behind the stunning building, casting it in a dark shadow, a silhouette of a giant dome and four spears. Morning sounds played over the capital of Abuja and mixed in with the sounds of the _adhan_ called out over the city by the muezzin.
42

# 9/11

Savas sat beside Cohen at the table and smiled. By the calendar, it was nearly a week since he had shared that special Sabbath meal with her, but in the growing madness around them, his sense of time had begun to blur.

However absurd, he knew she loved the way he looked in the mornings. His hair, flattened and disheveled from the night's sleep, had always resisted order. Coupled with his unruly hair, she noted impishly that he had the shell-shocked look of being half-asleep. She said it gave him the expression of a little boy just slightly lost. She kissed him as he grumbled and drank his coffee and stretched over to turn on the television.

Savas's face hardened. The boy and the lovable expression vanished, replaced by something hard and hurt.

The scenes on the television were horrific. The British police and military had carved out a zone beyond which the public and press were excluded. Inside this region, the remains of a large structure could be seen burning brightly and belching skyward a plume of black smoke. Emergency responders rushed back and forth, carrying body after body. The runoff water from the fire hoses was dyed black and red. Crumpled figures, blasted and burnt carcasses littered the site—men, women, children.

_Children_. Savas stared at the horror in front of his eyes as a reporter gasped out words in a British accent.

"Simply unimaginable carnage at the former site of the largest mosque in Western Europe. The mosque, the entire structure, is completely gone and burning as I speak to you. The death toll appears to easily be in the thousands. This attack happened on the holiest day of the week for Muslims, Friday, during the mosque's busiest time at noon prayers. Men, women, and many, many children lie dead behind me at this horrific, horrific site of England's, of Europe's, most terrible terrorist attack in history."

"Oh God . . . John?" Cohen took his hand. He held hers but didn't take his eyes off the screen. Savas turned up the volume.

The reporter continued. "Sources have reported that a section of British soldiers has been in place for several weeks guarding the mosque. Like several other Islamic sites in and around London, the government has acted proactively to try and protect them from the new and terrifying terrorist organization that's been targeting Muslims. Many are asking how anyone could have planted the enormous amount of explosives needed to destroy this building under the noses of the military."

Savas looked at Cohen. "You know what today is?"

A dawning of understanding lit her eyes.

"September 11." Savas looked back at the screen. "This isn't going to be the only one. They're going to make a statement."

As if responding to his terrible intuition, the coverage cut from the scene of devastation in England back to the station's main desk. A well-coiffed woman with blonde hair and a fashionable scarf spoke.

"Sorry to interrupt, Donald, but we have breaking news. Reports are pouring in that there have been two more bombings. I repeat, two more bombings of mosques in different parts of the world. Several reports are coming in from Nigeria, that there's been a bombing there. We also have word of a bombing in Finland. A mosque there has been attacked. We have a report live from the capital of Nigeria . . ."

"John . . ." Cohen looked at him, pain in her eyes.

"I'm going to get showered and dressed. We've got to get in. I won't be long."

Savas stood from the table and headed down the hall and into the bathroom. He shaved quickly, numb to the nicks and blood. He showered and was dressing before ten minutes had passed. As he buttoned his shirt, sounds invaded his swirling thoughts of past and present, death and destruction. _Sirens._ It sounded like ten or twenty police cars. He darted to the window but could see nothing. However, it was unmistakable—the well-known Doppler shift of a siren approaching, then drawing away as it passed. One after another after another.

"John," Cohen called. "You'd better get in here."

By the time he reached the kitchen, he did not need to see the scenes of destruction at the edge of Harlem to know what had happened. The target he did not guess. He had forgotten about the Manhattan Mosque—the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, thought by some to be a potential incubator for radical Islamic elements. No terrorists would be stepping forth from 96th and Third anytime soon.

A reporter spoke hurriedly, shouting over the sounds of a helicopter. "This is the Traffic Cam in the Sky over the Upper East Side of New York City." A camera sped over the geometric lines of Manhattan, stopping on a volcanic eruption of smoke pouring into the sky. Around the site like bugs circling honey, a flashing light show of emergency vehicles contrasted with the dark cloud climbing from the blaze below. A voice cut in over the reporter in the helicopter.

"We're going back to footage in Nigeria . . ." On the screen appeared a split image; on one side, the giant mosque as it had appeared before the explosion, with its four minarets intact. The other side showed the same building, live, now with a single minaret standing and the rest of the structure reduced to rubble, fire, and ash. More scenes of carnage followed from the capital city of Nigeria. Savas stood nearly breathless watching the wild, panicked expressions and motions of emergency workers tending the wounded, many beyond help, scattered over the field of vision provided by the camera. The news reports darted back and forth, from Africa, to Finland, to England, and back to New York. It all began to blur in his mind, rubble and smoke, sirens, hysteria, blood, and fire. _So much death._ Men and women struck down. The old and the young. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons.

_Sons._ The images before him began to merge with his own memory—two towers falling like sand to the earth, burying thousands, choking downtown Manhattan. _The death of sons._ The death of a young police officer who had made his father proud, giving the greatest sacrifice for his city and never knowing why.

His fists were balled tightly, and tears dropped from his eyes, yet held nothing soft in them. A wildness burned there, a primitive urge to strike at the creature attacking the young, stealing life from those who should never have been buried by their parents. A shout broke him out of his trance.

"John, please!" Cohen was standing next to him, shaking him. "John, stop this; come back!"

Savas fought through the nightmare in his mind. He turned to the counter and grabbed his wallet and keys. "I'm sorry, Rebecca, I've got to go."

"To work?" she asked, hesitantly, afraid of the look in his eyes.

"No, not to work." He looked forward, seeing something far off. "I'm going to Gunn International. I'm going to do what Jordan said we should do. I'm going to confront that bastard and look into his eyes. I have to know, Rebecca. I can't wait for the wheels to turn." He motioned toward the television. "I don't know if the world can wait for the damn machine to do its job. These guys are ten steps ahead of us. If we play by the rules we've set for ourselves, it'll stay that way."

"John, please, think about this," she said, grabbing his face in her hands, staring up toward those wild eyes. "You'll have no authority; you'll be potentially in violation of the law, vulnerable to charges of harassment. They might not even let you in. What are you going to do, break down the doors?"

"If I have to."

"John, even if you find something, these actions might sabotage any legal recourse we have against this man and whatever organization he might be running. You know this, John. You can't do this."

Savas smiled bitterly. "Rebecca, what I know is that we're losing badly, and while we lose, people are burning alive. I _can_ do this. I _have_ to do this. Someone has to." He stared at her silently for a moment. "Every time these bastards would take out some jihadist, I was cheering them on. They were doing what we could never do. But I've been blind. It's so obvious. I didn't want to know what I should have known. I didn't want to see it. I wanted blood."

"Didn't see what?"

He grabbed her shoulders firmly. "Jihadists took the lives of the innocent. _Of my son._ But God, Rebecca, look at this," he said, gesturing toward the television. "The streets are lined with _children_. They're not fighting the enemy. They _are_ the enemy." He let go of her shoulders. "Someone has to stop it."

She stared for a moment into his eyes, shaking her head, but she knew what she saw. "Then I'm coming with you."

Savas stared at her in disbelief. "Absolutely not! I'm Mad John, not you. You'll endanger yourself, ruin your career. No."

Cohen slipped on her shoes and grabbed her bag. "If you don't let me come, I'll call the FBI, NYPD, and Gunn International and warn them. They'll wall you out before you get into the building. Take me or forget going, John."

Savas blinked with his mouth half open. "Damn it, Rebecca! And they call me crazy!"

"Maybe. But I'm _your_ crazy woman, you stupid son of a bitch. Don't forget that."
43

# Gunn Tower

The ride through Midtown was eerily devoid of the usual traffic. Two terrorist attacks in four months in Manhattan had profoundly affected the city. Within ten minutes, Savas had parked his car in one of an unusual number of open spots along the side of the street, a block away from the fifty-five floors of steel and blue glass that was Gunn Tower.

He was curious to find himself putting money in the meter. The human mind was a mess of contradictions. He was about to enter without a warrant and confront one of the world's most powerful CEOs. Rationally, he knew that he might walk out under arrest and would no longer need his car, perhaps for a long time. But he found himself unable to let go of the old habit of tending the vehicle. He looked over at Cohen, who gave him a quizzical look as he paused, staring at the meter.

"Well, we don't want to get a ticket or anything," he said. She put on her sunglasses.

They entered the enormous lobby of Gunn Tower, passing through a revolving door set in a solid wall of glass. Inside, the ceiling was at least fifty feet above their heads, with stairways and escalators leading to multiple overhanging layers that held general social functions, including restaurants and stores. The floor was of polished blue-green marble. Light poured into the lobby from outside, filtered into a bluish hue. Savas felt like he was in a giant aquarium. On the open second floor, a small museum dedicated to the Gunn family and their accomplishments was advertised by a sign. Modesty wasn't on display.

One hundred feet in front of the entrance was a security checkpoint that screened those headed back toward the main elevators. Armed security guards flanked the metal detectors. Pleasant-looking women stood on each side, checking ID cards for personnel. Cohen looked over at Savas, her glasses hiding the anxiety he could feel emanating from her.

"Okay, now what?" she asked.

"We exploit the power of the federal government."

Savas walked up to the long marble counter beside the security checkpoint and addressed a young woman who smiled and welcomed him to Gunn Tower. Savas opened the leather case for his badge and showed her its contents.

"Agent John Savas from the FBI," he said curtly, pleased at the instant shift in demeanor from the woman behind the counter.

"Yes, sir, how can I help you?"

"I've been sent from the downtown division to follow up on a lead. It involves some international shipments by a company owned by Gunn International. This is a sensitive matter, and I'm instructed to speak only with Mr. Gunn himself. Could you please tell me how I can go about seeing him immediately?"

The woman stared dumbly, clearly out of her element. Her mouth hung open for a moment; then she closed it, shifting weight to one foot and pushing her hair back behind her head. She glanced at the unmoving, expressionless figure of Cohen in her sunglasses, then back at Savas.

"Sir, I really don't know how to help you. I just work for general Lower Floor Management. I can't connect you with Mr. Gunn or anyone on that floor. You'll have to make an appointment with him yourself, sir," she finished, her long nails playing with her buttons, her expression anxious.

"Ma'am," began Savas, "I hope I've made myself clear. I'm from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, here to chase a lead on a very important international crime case. My superiors here and in Washington believe that Gunn International can shed light on a series of heinous crimes, including those of murder and terrorism. I'm expecting full cooperation from Mr. Gunn and his company. Why am I not receiving it, Ms. . . . ?" Savas nodded toward Cohen, who reached into her purse, pulled out a small voice recorder and clicked it on. "Of course, you have the option to call a lawyer before speaking with us," Cohen added dramatically.

Whatever calm the woman had maintained shattered. Her job wasn't worth this sort of trouble. "Please wait a minute, sir," she said, staring at the voice recorder. "I'll get my superior."

Three minutes later, a harried-looking man stepped over with the young blonde and stared skeptically at the FBI agents. He took off a pair of glasses that then hung from his neck. "Marcia tells me that you're FBI? How can I help you?"

Savas again held out his badge, which the man examined, and repeated his story. The man shook his head. "Agent . . . Savas? Yes, well, certainly there are more formal ways to establish a meeting with Mr. Gunn rather than traipsing into his building and demanding an audience. Why don't you have your bureau chief call over and do this properly?"

Savas leaned forward and put on an irritated face. "I'm sorry. I didn't get your name." Cohen leaned forward slightly, pointing the voice recorder toward the man.

"Richard Carter, but I don't see how—"

"Mr. Carter, we're pursuing _time-sensitive_ leads in an international arms smuggling and terrorist case, linked to two here in New York City. One of those attacks happened today not forty blocks north of this grand tower. We have reason to believe that other attacks are planned, that they can be prevented only if we act _now_. So don't tell me that we need to waste the precious time we hardly have to follow a train of niceties to speak with your lofty CEO!"

The man paled. "Yes, yes, I apologize. Horrible, what's been happening. Please, this is unusual. Let me contact Mr. Gunn's department and convey your request."

"Mr. Carter, that's the right thing to do—what a true patriot would do."

The man nodded awkwardly and hustled over to a set of phones. The woman apparently felt more comfortable with her supervisor and followed him closely, leaving Savas and Cohen alone.

Cohen stared at him through her dark-brown shades. "What a true patriot would do?" He waved her off as Carter returned.

"Agent Savas. I've spoken with the floor administrative assistant in charge of general issues for several offices, including Mr. Gunn's, sir. She was most upset with this request, I must say," he continued, sweat now beading on his forehead. "But, I managed to impress upon her the seriousness of this matter. She's agreed to speak with you upstairs, although, regrettably, she can't offer you a meeting with Mr. Gunn today."

Savas smiled at the man. "Mr. Carter, you've done a service to your country. I'll remember your help in this matter." The man grinned anxiously, his smile fading under the relentless Cohen's gaze.

"Please, right this way." Carter stepped toward the security line. It was the express route through the line, up the elevators, and to the fiftieth floor of the building. The doors opened revealing a lower, standard-height ceiling, fluorescent lighting, and a large desk ten feet in front of the elevator doors. Behind the desk sat an older woman with a stern face, talking into a Bluetooth headset and typing on a computer. She motioned for them to wait.

Carter led them up to the large wraparound desk and waited quietly. Savas was in no mood to wait. He checked his watch and spoke to the woman.

"Ma'am, which way to Mr. Gunn's office?"

She continued talking and typing but held up one finger. Savas walked around the desk toward the hallway on the right. "It's all right, ma'am," he said, as her eyes widened. "I'll find it myself."

The assistant at the desk called after him. "Sir! You can't go back there! Sir! Stop! Mr. Gunn's busy! He can't see you now!" Carter stared with his mouth open.

Savas turned to Cohen. "Stall her."

The hound at the desk wouldn't be so easy to cow as Carter. She'd have security on him shortly. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Cohen moving to intervene as Carter spoke excitedly to the woman, waving his arms.

Savas strode purposefully down the hallway, passing offices and conference rooms. _Always appear confident._ A lesson he learned bluffing his way to buy booze as a teenager and as a cop in armed standoffs. The big man's office would be easy to find, likely at the end of the hallway, most likely protected by another guard dog.

_There._ The hall opened to an open space with another large desk. Behind it sat a young woman. Behind her and to the left was a magnificent door, cherry wood by the look of it, built thick and carved with adornments. The woman was on the phone, a concerned expression on her face. _Word's come from the front lines_.

She stood, the phone still to her ear. "Sir, I'm afraid I'll have to—"

Savas flashed his badge. "FBI, ma'am," he said pushing past her and her objections and opening the door.

It was a magnificent office. Larger by far than anything he had seen or imagined, decorated with luxurious furniture and paintings. The wall opposite the entrance wasn't a wall, but a room-length window peering over the city. Behind an enormous and beautiful wooden desk sat a man Savas had only seen in FBI photos and on the internet. Tall, thin, silver hair framing a hard and handsome face. Set in the middle were two burning gray eyes.

"Mr. William Gunn?" asked Savas, bursting into the room.

Gunn glanced up from his computer screen with an angry look. He hit a key sharply and rose to face Savas.

"What's the meaning of this?" he asked.

Savas heard a fluttering behind him, and the young woman from outside rushed in front of him and faced Gunn.

"Mr. Gunn, sir, I'm sorry!" she began breathlessly. "I tried to keep him out. He's come through Jennifer and from below and won't listen and . . ."

"Calm down, Marianne," he said, turning toward Savas. "Who are you, and what's going on here?"

"I'm Special Agent John Savas from the FBI," he said, displaying his ID. Gunn registered no distress and appeared, if anything, intrigued.

His assistant chirped behind Savas. "Security is on its way. They already have the other one."

"Marianne, please, a servant of the people is here. Call off security. Another agent?" The woman nodded. "Please go and bring him here as well. Something important must be on the minds of these agents to have gone through such trouble to speak to me." He turned toward Savas. "I wish you had contacted me first and avoided all this bother. I'm a rather insulated man. It helps me maintain my focus." He motioned toward the chairs in front of his desk. "Please, won't you have a seat?"

_This is one cool customer._ Savas nodded and sat as Gunn moved back around his desk, entered a few keystrokes into his computer, and took his seat.

"Please tell me how I can help you today."

Savas stared directly at him. "Today, in four locations around the world, terrorists struck mosques, blowing them to bits along with all the people in and around them. One of those attacks happened just uptown from here at the Manhattan Mosque."

Gunn nodded slowly, eyeing Savas coldly. "Yes, I've seen the footage. Terrible. The second attack in our city in just a few months."

"Yes, one of many since the first attack in June linked to a terrorist organization called Mjolnir."

Gunn stared silently. "I'm not familiar with the name."

"Few are."

"How have you traced this _Mjolnir_ to the bombings, Agent Savas?"

"Not only bombings but a series of assassinations of prominent Islamic radicals, as well. They're a very busy organization. We have linked the bombings to a plastic explosive called S-47."

Gunn shook his head and raised his eyebrows. "S-47? I'm sorry, Agent Savas, I don't know much about explosives."

"It's a very new form of Semtex, more powerful, more versatile. The details aren't important. Traces of this material were found at every bombing site associated with Mjolnir."

At that moment, Savas heard sounds at the door behind him. Gunn rose and addressed his secretary, "Marianne—this is the other agent?" Savas turned to see Cohen standing in the doorway, her hair disheveled, her blouse untucked and wrinkled. He winced to think of the security guards manhandling her.

"Yes, Mr. Gunn. She was in the custody of our guards, and I brought her back up as soon as you requested."

Gunn walked chivalrously toward Cohen and motioned to the seat beside Savas. Cohen, her glasses gone, straightened her clothes, and walked stiffly over and sat next to Savas, never glancing in his direction. He understood. She couldn't look into his eyes and maintain her composure.

Gunn returned to his seat in front of the enormous window. Savas motioned toward Cohen. "This is my colleague at the FBI, Rebecca Cohen."

"Pleased to meet you, Agent Cohen. I'm sorry about our security personnel. They're often overzealous in keeping the peace in my building."

Cohen scanned the room, settling on his desk. She focused momentarily on an object at his side, then looked into Gunn's eyes. "No need to apologize," she said. "We've been in a great hurry today, and our lack of standard protocol has created some problems."

"Yes," said Gunn, "Agent Savas here was explaining to me. Something about explosives?"

"This S-47 is easily traceable material in many ways because it's so rare. It's found only with U.S. military personnel or on the black market in the international arms arena."

Savas stared intently at Gunn, but the businessman showed no reaction. Savas continued. "Agents with the CIA recently ran a sting operation in the Middle East and identified the source of much of the black market S-47. This source was sold repeatedly to a single buyer, of unknown origin and identity, but the goods were always shipped in the same way, by boat—ships owned and operated by the Operon Company."

"Operon?" Gunn said, searching his memory. "That's one of ours. I see. You have connected the supply of this explosive to one of my companies, and you now want to trace it further to attempt to identify the buyers, and thus, presumably, the terrorists themselves." He glanced momentarily at each agent before continuing. "Of course, the FBI will have full cooperation from Gunn International on this. Unfortunately, I know little of the day-to-day operations of the many subsidiaries and contractors we have. But I'll personally see to it that those who do, will work with you to apprehend these killers."

Savas stared at the CEO. _What the hell?_ They were supposed to confront him and force the truth out, or at least an obvious lie. Instead, they'd navigated an obstacle course on adrenaline and street smarts, and hit the man with the facts, only to find a calm and cooperative citizen. _Was Husaam wrong?_ _Am I wrong?_

He looked into the eyes before him—cold, icy-gray, and unrevealing. _Eyes of a predator_. No, his intuition, his gut, whatever it was that had saved his life on many occasions told him otherwise. There was something profoundly unsettling about William Gunn, and Savas felt he was sitting only feet away from something calculating and murderous.

Cohen spoke up. "We're concerned that this connection to your company, Mr. Gunn, might go further than the use of a shipping company." The CEO turned slowly toward Cohen, and Savas felt his stomach tighten as the cold eyes fell on her.

"I'm sorry, Agent Cohen, could you be more specific?"

"Yes. Enormous financial transfers occurred in these arms purchases, machinations that made them difficult to trace, that could only have come from individuals with enormous capital and financial dexterity. We're concerned that perhaps someone within your company, at a much higher level than that of a shipping organization, might be involved."

_My God, this is bold, Rebecca!_ She faulted _him_ for being reckless today?

The CEO eyed her closely. "That's a very serious concern you've raised, Agent Cohen. Rest assured that we'll seek to root out any such person, should they exist, and work closely with you to do so." He looked at his watch, then back at the two FBI agents.

"I'm sorry to be rushing you, but I've got a very important meeting with the visiting ambassador from China. China's becoming an increasingly important business partner for much of the world, and Gunn International is no exception. I can't keep the ambassador waiting. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"One other thing," Cohen continued. "This terrorist organization is obsessed with Nordic myths. Do you know of any such people or organizations within your company who might be involved in neo-paganism?"

Savas stared at her in confusion. _Rebecca, where are you going with this?_

"I'd expect every sort of person from the wonderfully diverse city of New York to work under the umbrella of my organization. Their lifestyle choices don't concern me as long the job gets done."

"We understand that, Mr. Gunn," she continued, "only in this case, such individuals would be highly suspect. You come from a Northern European background, Scandinavian, I believe?

The CEO focused on her impassively. "Yes. My father was an immigrant from Stockholm."

"Do you know what the name of this organization, Mjolnir, means?"

Gunn shook his head. "No. I mainly studied the Greek myths in school."

"It's the name of the hammer used by the Norse god of thunder, Thor."

"Yes, I'm sorry. I do remember reading that somewhere."

"If you were to see or hear this name in any context, in the English translation, or as Mjolnir, or depicted in _any_ symbolic form, please let us know."

Savas wanted to jump over and shield Cohen, so hostile were the eyes that looked her over. "Yes, Agent Cohen, you can rest assured that I will."

As they walked out of the skyscraper and into the bright midmorning sunlight, Savas felt the adrenaline drain from of him. It felt like waking from a dream. He sat in the car next to Cohen and exhaled, not starting the engine.

"I can't believe we did that, and I can't believe we did it for nothing!"

She turned toward him, her sunglasses back on, and her shaking hands withdrawing from her face. "What do you mean, 'for nothing'?"

"We go there, risk our careers, potentially blowing the entire case if he's the one behind this, and for nothing! He's happy as a clam to work with us! So cooperative! He played us like fools. And, I swear, all the time I felt like I was sitting across from a serial killer."

Cohen stared forward, her face still ashen from the encounter. "We didn't fail, John. His cooperation _saved_ our careers, for one thing. For another, he _is_ the one behind all this. Trust your feelings."

Savas shook his head in confusion. "Well, that's something! How on earth do you conclude that? My feelings agree, but we came away empty-handed."

"Did you look at his desk?"

"Sure. Hard to miss. Big giant thing, expensive wood. Cost more than my car."

She shook her head, still gazing forward. "No, not the desk itself, but what was on it."

"Papers, a computer . . . a few executive playthings?"

"Like the little toy on his left in front of you?"

He shook his head. "No, I didn't see what it was."

Cohen paused. "Well, I did. Small little metal thing, hanging from two metal rods that almost meet. The small little metal thing, John—it was a hammer." She turned toward him. "It was Thor's hammer."

"Oh, my God."

William Gunn locked the door to his office and returned to his desk. He entered several keystrokes. The black screen lit up, revealing the familiar face of Patrick Rout.

"Mr. Gunn? What the hell was that all about?"

Gunn gazed sideways, away from the screen. "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You were right about the hit on the Russians. They discovered that connection. They suspect. We have our _firebrands_. You didn't see his eyes, but this John Savas is a driven man. And Cohen, well, she _knows_."

"They don't have proof! Nothing to go on!"

"No. Of course not, and they won't get that, not in time to stop us."

"We need to make sure."

Gunn turned toward the monitor, his expression grim. "Yes, we do. We need to find out who these agents are. We'll have to make some decisions about them very soon."
44

# The Black Stone

_O PEC OIL EMBARGO CUTS SUPPLY TO EUROPE AND UNITED STATES_

_By Thomas Fischetti, Associated Press_

_The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced today a partial embargo against the United States and the European Union._ _OPEC will reduce oil supply to these regions by 25%._

_An OPEC spokesman was quoted by Al-Jazeera as saying that,_ _"the recent bombings of Islamic Holy sites around the world have left us no choice"_ _but to enact the embargo. In the statement issued, OPEC demanded that Western nations end the terrorist attacks and apprehend those responsible._

_Last month, in an unprecedented attack on Muslim houses of worship, terrorist bombings destroyed four mosques in four nations—the U.K., the U.S., Finland, and Nigeria. These attacks led to more than four thousand deaths and followed on the heels of monthly attacks on Muslims, including attacks in Algiers, New York, and Venezuela._

_The White House press secretary issued a stern warning to OPEC. "The president condemns both the terror attacks and the response of OPEC and cautions OPEC that the United States will not allow its supply of oil to be threatened." Reports placed several U.S. warships en route to the Persian Gulf, and sources claim that the U.S. military has been placed on high alert. Analysts suggest that the president's words indicate a full-scale embargo would lead to massive military intervention._

_China and Russia have protested U.S. deployment in the Gulf, the Chinese representative to the UN calling the moves "reckless and destabilizing." Russia has vowed to prevent foreign occupation of oil-producing nations and has placed its own military on heightened alert, according to sources in Moscow. The president has canceled his long-planned trip to India and is returning to Washington. He is expected to address the nation tomorrow evening._

Savas stepped out of his office and nearly crashed into the muscled figure of Husaam Jordan standing outside his door. Jordan had made a rapid recovery. He still limped and favored his shoulder, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell that he had been through the ordeal in the desert.

"So, how is the investigation going?" asked Jordan.

"Which one?"

Jordan nodded. "Indeed. But I'm more interested in one than the other."

Savas could only agree, except that the FBI inquiry into his trip to Gunn Tower was occupying increasing amounts of his time. He had managed to convince all those involved that Cohen had been dragged along with him, and, for now at least, she had been spared the paperwork, meetings, and constant interruptions that an internal investigation entailed. He had also been spared any suspension of his duties or privileges—a rescue effort by Kanter. That was _after_ Kanter had first threatened to kill him.

Savas nodded toward Jordan. "You were right."

Jordan cocked his head to one side and half-smiled. "About which investigation is more important?"

"Yes," said Savas, "but more than that—about following the trail of Operon and the shell companies."

Jordan became serious. "That trail's getting cold as we speak. The CIA isn't going to listen to the ravings of two mad FBI agents who stormed the office of an American icon. Gunn practically ran a monopoly in the defense industry for two decades. He's owed more favors in Washington than we can guess. They've tied my hands, John. And it's been too long. Weeks and weeks have gone by. They aren't going to leave anything standing, or anyone connected alive."

"The FBI's twisted itself into a tangle of internal investigation," said Savas with obvious irritation. "Everyone is scared shitless now about moving on this guy. Larry's frustrated as hell, but he's protecting his division. Until this blows over, we're left doing research reports on the internet. Meanwhile, we wait for the next fall of the hammer."

"Don't give up hope, John," Jordan rumbled. "It is written in the Holy Quran, 'When a man dies, they who survive him ask what property he has left behind. The angel who bends over the dying man asks what good deed he has sent before him.' You have worked for justice."

Savas stared at the Quran-thumping Muslim. He had come to respect Husaam Jordan, even to feel a tug of affection for a man who had disregarded career and safety in the service of justice. He just couldn't reconcile the feelings inside.

"Husaam, I don't want this to go the wrong way, but there are some things I don't understand." Jordan stared straight into Savas's eyes, his expression unflinching yet knowing. Savas pressed forward anyway. "I like you. I didn't at first, I have to be honest. Well, I couldn't at first."

"You couldn't separate me from the Muslims who killed your son."

Savas winced. "You're a man who risks his life for what is right. You can't find one out of a thousand men like that. How can you be part of this religion giving birth to all these crazed murderers killing in the name of this damn book you keep quoting? I just don't understand it."

Jordan smiled, his white teeth set in his strong jaw, bright against the darkness of his face. "The Abuja National Mosque was a gift from the heavens. If you had seen it, with open eyes, John, not eyes colored with anger, you would have seen its majesty rising into the African sky, its four minarets reaching toward God. Its beautiful dome was a bright star in the daytime sun or a powerful silhouette in the setting orange light at day's end. Muslims have made some of the most beautiful religious houses in the world. For hundreds of years, they preserved knowledge while Europe sank into the Middle Ages and burned witches at the stake, tortured innocents with the Inquisition, and converted by the sword many of the pagans of central and northern Europe. Science, mathematics, and philosophy were preserved, developed, and passed on to an awakening Europe by _Muslims_."

Jordan opened his hands in a questioning gesture. "When you listen to the great composers of Germany—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—do you also see in their music the ashes of the Holocaust? When you gaze at the religious sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo, do you see in them the blood-soaked lands the Crusaders marched across? America was founded by people fleeing persecution at the hands of fellow Christians. For the centuries of Christians doing evil in the name of God, how can _you_ be one?"

Savas shook his head. "You're using this argument on the wrong man, Husaam. I'm not sure what I believe. I nearly shot the priest of the church where I was an altar boy, and this crazy man still hears my confessions. Confessions mostly about how much I don't know, and how I can't see God."

Jordan nodded. "But my point is that if we are to judge a belief system by the actions of any group that claims to act in its name, every creed that exists or has existed will fall. Just as great beauty and selfless service to humanity have come from Christianity, so, too, from Islam." He paused for a moment, considering his next words.

"Islam is very personal for me. I grew up in poverty, abandoned by my parents, rejected by society—both black and white. I joined a gang before I could shave. At least there I _mattered_ , I had a family. There was a code of honor and loyalty. The gang gave me a sense of worth and purpose society had denied me. But it was a life of sin. In prison as an adolescent, an imam who had emigrated from Africa was making the rounds. I was ready to hear what he had to say. I was ready to open myself to something larger and to find my place with God."

His eyes had a faraway look. He smiled softly.

"Do you know what the _al-Hajar-ul-Aswad_ is?"

Savas shook his head.

"It's more commonly known as the Black Stone."

"Yes," Savas dredged his memory. "The meteorite in Mecca. Where the pilgrims go every year."

"Yes. It's one of the Five Pillars of Islam to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in a Muslim's lifetime. There the pilgrims congregate at the al-Masjid al-Haram Mosque in Saudi Arabia, and in the center of this mosque is the holiest site in all of Islam—the Kaaba. The Kaaba is a cube carved out of granite from the hillsides, covered with a black silk curtain decorated with gold-embroidered calligraphy, its four corners pointing in the four directions of the compass. It's the site to which we Muslims pray five times a day."

Jordan's eyes appeared to gaze far off, as if trying to glimpse the site itself. "At the eastern-most corner of the Kaaba is the Black Stone. According to our tradition, it fell from Heaven during the time of Adam and Eve. After the Fall, it was hidden by the Angels until Abraham rebuilt the Kaaba, and then the Archangel Gabriel brought it to him from its keeping place."

Jordan paused for emphasis, then turned toward Savas. "Muslims believe that when the Kaaba fell to the earth from the heavens, the stone was _not_ black but a blinding _white_. It's since absorbed, year after year, the crimes, the lies, the pain, the torture, the murder, poverty, and starvation—in short, the sins of mankind. The white stone from above turned a solid black as the evening sky from our sins. So you see, Muslims don't turn away from this truth, that we're all both light and dark. Someday, I'll make the Pilgrimage, the _Hajj_ , and I'll walk around the Kaaba, find my way to the Black Stone, and kiss it as did the Prophet."

He recited. "'I believe that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is his Prophet.' Not despite any evils of Islam, but because of its beauties, and its call to submission to God in the face of the evils every nation, every creed, and every person has committed."

Savas held his gaze. "How do we know evil isn't built into these beliefs that claim to save us? All the talk of salvation—we keep repeating the same mistakes. If religion and faith are real, and change us, and heal us, and remake us, then why is this the case? I've called to God, and listened, but so far I haven't heard a damn thing."

Jordan smiled. "But you're honest! How much closer to God you are than so many who deceive themselves. When people do evil in the name of God, they listen not to God but only to themselves, their fears, their inadequacies. At least you won't create a false god to serve your own needs. I'll hope for you yet!"

"That's fine. Hope's good," said Savas with resignation. "But you and God haven't convinced me yet."

Before Jordan could reply, Manuel Hernandez came crashing down the hallway, his awkward gait nearly a full run. Too many long hours hunched over a computer screen had given him the doughboy physique of a programmer, and he panted, struggling for air as he leaned over to catch his breath, his long brown hair hanging over his face and covering it, his brushy beard the only part sticking out from under the hair. He gasped out anxious words.

"John, we've got a situation."
45

# Hacked

Savas rolled his eyes. He wasn't sure he knew what that meant anymore. "What, another one? Get back to me after the other twenty-three clear, Manuel."

"No, I mean a _situation_ ," he wheezed out the last word, trying hard to place emphasis.

Savas opened his palms toward him. "Okay, shoot."

"We've been hacked."

Jordan glanced toward him, his eyebrows raised. Savas stood there stunned for a moment, trying to come to terms with the implications. "What? I thought you said your security setup was like Fort Knox."

"No, not us directly. Someone hacked into Personnel, Accounting, perhaps a few other departments. I don't know the extent of it yet. Hell, _they_ don't even know it happened yet." Hernandez stood straight up now, hands off his knees, recovering from his sprint to John's office. He saw the confusion on the other two faces in front of him.

"See, they _did_ try to hack us, and then when they failed, they tried to go through other internal servers—hack into those, use FBI networks to find security holes, break into our stuff that way. Well, that didn't work either, as I've walled us off even from the FBI."

"You're one paranoid geek, Manuel."

"Yeah, thanks. So, we're not compromised. But just about everyone I've checked in the building is."

"How long have you known this?"

"Ten minutes. I ran over here as soon as I was sure and had some idea about the extent of it."

"Well, that's ten minutes too long. You get up to Larry's office. Tell that bulldog guarding outside I sent you _priority_. Get Larry to write you a get-out-of-Intel-Free pass, and get up to those departments and try to figure out what the hell is going on."

"Timing's what's worrying me," interrupted Hernandez. Jordan looked over at Savas and nodded. "I mean, right when we start to get a lock on this guy, this Gunn-dude, we get hacked. They were aiming for us, John, following the tracks, I mean, of all the offices and groups. These were black hats on a mission. They wanted _us_."

Savas nodded. "Get up to Larry and find out all you can. Track them through this if you can. Maybe we can find out who or where they are."

"I'm on it. But I'm done running for the day." Hernandez turned around and walked briskly back down the hallway.

"You think it's Gunn?" asked Savas.

Jordan nodded. "This sounds like a pro job, and if there's one thing we know about Mjolnir, it's that they are professionals. Only the connection with Gunn would lead a bunch of skilled hackers to focus on you and your people—more evidence we're on the right track."

"Not some random cyber-attack?"

"Sure, could be. How many of those do you get a month, and how many get this close?"

Savas nodded, then looked up in exasperation. "I was supposed to meet Frank and Matt downstairs—our last hot dog stand lunch before the new security regs force the carts a few blocks up. At least the food's fast and I can force march them back up here. Care to join me before I run back up into this insanity?"

"Sure," said Jordan. "But I'll go with the potato knish."

Savas groaned inwardly. _Pork and Muslims, oil and water_. He smiled to cover for his gaffe.

"Let's go. I've got to eat something before we go into red alert again."

It was a sunny, early-October day, crisp and slightly warm under the sun. Savas stepped out of the FBI building, squinting in the bright light. If it weren't for all the chaos, it would have been nice to be outside on such a beautiful fall afternoon. Jordan followed him down the stairs to the pavement, his eyes scanning the area, an old survival instinct that would never leave him, no matter how safe the neighborhood. Savas spotted Frank Miller first. That was always easy; the ex-marine was about as wide as a standard refrigerator. Matt King provided a striking contrast. His lanky form, slouched posture, and bookish demeanor set him apart. Both dug into their food, watching Savas with an air of feigned annoyance.

Miller waved them over, mouth half-full. "I thought you said you'd meet us here at noon, John," he said. "We've been here twenty minutes waiting for you. The hot dogs were getting old, I'm afraid."

"I thought they weren't biodegradable," mused King.

Savas smiled. "I'm sorry, guys, but we have a small situation upstairs."

Both rolled their eyes and groaned. King shook his head. "I think making partner would have been easier than this job. What now?"

"FBI was hacked." King nearly choked on his food as Savas continued. "From what Manuel says, half the building was compromised. We were spared thanks to Manuel's ultra-paranoid, super firewall. "

"Hallelujah," said King.

"But someone, according to him, someone good, got into several systems in the building, trying to use those to get to us."

"To us?" said Miller.

"Apparently, yes, we were the target. Manuel's running around up there trying to get a handle on it, and that's what we all get to go do as soon as we insert those indigestion tubes," he said, waving toward the hot dog stand. Jordan came toward them, holding a knish.

"Holy shit," said King. "This, and all the Gunn stuff, you think it's connected?"

"Yes," said Savas. "So does Agent Jordan."

"I don't think too much of coincidences in this business," Jordan said.

Miller nodded. "Well, that raises the stakes some. Cops chase robbers, but these guys are scary folk. They chase back."

Savas was momentarily aware of a flash of light, a movement of red across his chest. Miller, closest to him, focused intently on the red circle. He lunged toward Savas like a lineman about to pummel a quarterback. Time seemed to grind to a stop. Stunned, Savas watched the former marine become airborne as he dove toward him, his coffee and hot dog suspended in midair.

There was a soft whizz through the air and a simultaneous explosion of fabric over Miller's shoulder. A cloud of red mist burst into the air. Miller crashed into Savas's chest, smashing the wind out of him and sending them both plummeting toward the hard pavement below. Miller landed on top of him and rolled to the side, clutching his right shoulder. It was soaked red with blood. Savas struggled to catch his breath.

"Ahhh, _fuck_!" screamed Miller, raising himself to a crouch and motioning with his good arm. "Keep low, John! Sniper! Get behind that van! _Damn!_ "

The pavement exploded as several more rifle shots were fired. People were screaming and running in various directions. Jordan had pulled out a pistol and was crouched beside the FedEx van, looking up toward a building across the street.

Miller screamed out, "Damn it, John! Move!"

Savas came to himself and crawled over to the van. Miller and Jordan shouted back and forth.

"I think it's the roof of the corner building," Miller gasped.

"Yes," said Jordan, "I saw the gunman. Took two more shots, exposed him. He ran back from the roof after that. He's either going through the building or to the fire escapes. I think the last—too easy to get caught inside." Jordan looked over at King, who had also taken refuge behind the van and was shaking violently as he held out a weapon.

"Matt—stay with John, shoot anyone we don't know who gets close to him. He's the target. We don't know if there are other assassins. Call an ambulance for Frank, then your offices. Get people down here if they aren't already on the way. I'm going after this guy."

King had only a second to respond with "Okay, but . . ." when Jordan, gun still in hand, sprinted off across the street with his limp, leaped onto and across the hood of a taxi barring his way, and was out of sight.

Jordan crossed Broadway—not so broad this far south on the island and down to a one-way street. He ran across the opposite sidewalk, crossing Duane Street and heading toward the corner of Broadway and Reade. People jumped away from him, a sprinting black man dressed in Islamic garb, gun held aloft and pointed toward the skies. Who knew what was going through their minds? _I just hope the cops don't shoot me_ , he thought.

He darted around the corner and sprinted up Reade Street, his mending leg stiff and throbbing. Dropping from the fire escape halfway up the block, a man landed on the pavement, hitting hard and catching himself with his hands. As he regained balance, he looked down the street and saw Jordan. Their eyes locked. The man turned, drawing something dark from his belt, and sprinted up the street. _Lost the rifle, heading toward Church Street, armed with a handgun_. Jordan sprinted after him.

The figure crossed Duane on the east side of Church, then disappeared, hidden by a building. Jordan sprinted harder. Every second out of sight meant the suspect could be lost. Jordan nearly crashed into a couple pushing a stroller. The woman screamed, but he pivoted out of their way and continued. The alley was in shadow from the buildings, and Church was lit brightly from the sun in comparison. Instinct took over as he approached the corner. He raised his gun, and as he stepped into the light, he crouched and scanned around him.

The crouch saved his life. A retort from a gun sounded as he heard the bullet whiz over his head, a store window next to him shattering, screams and an alarm filling the air. The assassin had not adjusted his aim properly, missing Jordan by inches. He rolled across the pavement, shielding himself behind a parked car. _Fool!_ If the man had used his time getting away and not trying to kill him, he might have escaped easily. Jordan darted up, just in time to see a figure sprinting across the road and heading south. _Chambers and Church subway stop!_ If he made it there, he'd be lost in the underground labyrinth.

Jordan was nearly out of breath when he reached the subway station. He leapt down the stairs, sending one man flying and cursing behind him. At the turnstiles, his heart sank. A figure had jumped them and was racing down the steps. If a train was waiting or came soon, he'd be lost. Jordan darted forward, screaming at people and waving his weapon. It was very effective. He moved through the dividing masses, jumped over the turnstile to several angry cries, and flew down the steps at a reckless rate. His leg was on fire, the pain distracting. Jordan pushed it away, focusing on the chase.

The subway stop was a flood of humanity, like sardines in a can. He scanned the area, back and forth. He knew he wouldn't be able to see the man he was chasing, but if his quarry continued to panic, he would be doing the one thing he shouldn't in a crowd like this—he would be moving. _There!_ He saw first the ripples in the crowd as someone pushed his way forcefully through. The sniper was about halfway to the next stairway, but Jordan knew that this wasn't his goal. The tunnel wind had begun, indicating an approaching train. In this density of people, Jordan realized that he would never reach the killer in time, and if he got on the train, the odds of continuing the chase successfully would drop precipitously. So he did the only thing he could think of in the moment.

"Allah be praised!" he yelled, springing on top of a bench and brandishing his firearm. "Everyone down, _down_ or I'll kill all infidels!" He fired his weapon at the ceiling. People screamed, and a great horde of them dropped straight to the ground. The hit man continued to panic, and instead of dropping as well, concealing himself in the crowd, he reached behind his back to pull out his weapon. Jordan crouched on the bench, steadied, and aimed. The man raised his weapon. Jordan pulled the trigger twice in succession.

Both shots were true. They struck the man solidly in the chest, and he shuddered, disoriented, discharging his weapon into the air and crying out as he fell. Several more people screamed, as did the train brakes as the lead car blasted out of the tunnel and into the stop, a rush of air flowing into the chamber. Jordan leapt from the bench and raced across as people crouched in terror. He kept his weapon trained on the man but drew it up as he came close.

The gunman had collapsed and was sprawled on his back, blood soaking his chest and sputtering out of his mouth as he coughed. One of the bullets had hit a major artery. No longer a threat, his gun lay beside his hand on the ground. Jordan felt his stomach turn. The man was near death. His shot had done more damage than he had intended.

He kneeled and grabbed the man's denim jacket. "Who sent you?" he barked out.

The man looked up, his eyes swimming at first, then focusing for a brief moment. "You lose, _Muslim_ ," he whispered, the word a curse in his mouth. " _Ragnarök comes_. Burn now. Burn again in hell." His eyes rolled back, and he became heavy as his muscles completely relaxed. Jordan let go and clenched his fist. _No!_ He'd done all he could. But it hadn't been enough.

"NYPD— _freeze!_ " The shout was from behind him, the sounds of shoes running toward him unmistakable. "Hands up in the air! Now! Now! _Now!"_

Jordan placed his gun down and raised his hands slowly over his head. As the officer threw him on his face and cuffed him, he had a brief flashback to the many arrests he had endured as a young gang member, the last leading to his imprisonment—and to his salvation at the hands of a Muslim cleric. It didn't matter, he thought, as he felt blood leak from his nose. He had failed today. _What will tomorrow bring?_

"You terrorist _bastard_ ," said the officer standing over him, with his knee in his back. "We'll ship you somewhere nice, where I hope they electrocute your fucking balls off."

"I don't believe this! Right in our front yard!" said Larry Kanter, standing outside the FBI building, watching the ambulance pull out with a sedated Frank Miller inside. "Is he going to be okay?"

Savas followed the flashing lights. "Yeah, Larry. It ain't pretty, but it's only a shoulder injury. He's lost some blood, but Matt's the same type, and he insisted on riding with them just in case. The emergency responders gave Matt some flack, but took one look at him and his badge and eased up."

Kanter nodded. "Good. Let's get back up now and figure out what the hell is going on. We've got an assassination attempt at our front door, hackers breaking into FBI networks—this is going down as one of our really good days."

"You believe me now?"

Kanter scowled and looked away. "I guess I don't have much choice. These bastards pretty much made the argument for you. _Damn!_ I should have listened to you earlier, but I just couldn't swallow something that big, that impossible. I don't think the powers-that-be will either, not even after this. But we'll deal with it."

Savas looked to the ground. "The bullet was meant for me, Larry. Frank stuck his shoulder in the way, threw _himself_ in the way to get me out of the line of fire. He's bleeding now instead of my heart being blown out of my chest."

Kanter's jaw tightened. "John, the job brings dangers. We might think as analysts we're protected from the worst, but today you see differently. We're fellow soldiers in this war, and there are two kinds of soldiers: those who will take a bullet for the platoon and those who won't. You see which kind Frank is."

Savas nodded. Kanter motioned for him to walk in. "Now, we've got some responding to do. First, we've got to put a security team on you right way. More than ever it looks like Gunn must be behind this. You were the one to confront him. He's focusing on you."

Savas's stomach tightened. "Larry, I wasn't the only one there that day."

Kanter looked him in the eye. "I've got men heading over to her apartment as of fifteen minutes ago."
46

# Superstition

William Gunn switched off the television feed and glanced over a sea of clouds. The white ocean stretched to the edge of the horizon. Waves were embedded in the cloud blanket, giving it the appearance of some heavenly body of celestial water, frozen in the moment. He glanced above the plane, where the sky darkened, lost its blue, and one could make out the brightest stars.

A man approached Gunn's private section of the aircraft and knocked on the wall next to the curtain separating the compartments.

"Come in," said the CEO.

Rout spoke. "We're arriving in half an hour. Different limos will leave simultaneously. We'll switch vehicles three times, cars following behind to search for tails."

"Good. Have you seen the footage from today's missions?"

"I have, sir. Spectacular successes both in Sudan and on the airliner. The prelim is finished, every mission a success. The pattern is in place. We just have to add the final point."

"It's time we revealed ourselves, then. The press package?"

"Just give the signal."

"Today. Send it to all the major news organizations. It's time to prime the trap."

"It will be done."

Gunn nodded. "Have you been debriefed on the failure in New York last week?"

"Yes, sir. A poorly executed mission. The resource was apprehended, but he died of wounds before he could be brought into custody."

"We'll make another, more thorough effort soon."

"Sir?"

"The information we obtained from the FBI—a break into their computer security—has proven very useful. We couldn't penetrate his division, but we obtained extensive information from other computers about most personnel of relevance."

"He'll be a much harder target now, security on his person and place of residence, and he'll scramble his schedule."

The CEO nodded. "Yes, that's to be expected. A harder target but not unreachable. They still can't connect things to us, and our newfound friendliness with the FBI lets us steer the investigation. We'll slow them down considerably. Besides, the list of targets has expanded dramatically. I think another strategy is in order.

"We'll need more assets in New York," Rout added.

Gunn sipped from a glass of brandy. "It'd be better to bring in our mission units."

Rout nodded curtly. "Yes, but we can't bring them back for this mission without jeopardizing the other."

"I understand. We'll run New York with what we've got there. The primary teams need to be fully briefed on the details of Ragnarök."

"Yes, sir. You'll oversee the transfer to Mexico?"

Gunn smiled. "Personally. I will be there, close enough to touch the thing." He laughed. "Consider it the closest I get to superstition. A blessing, if you will."

Rout responded with little more than a raised eyebrow. "Understood, sir." He then spun around and walked through the curtains back to his seat.
47

# Dark Paths

_W ORLD MARKETS PLUNGE AS OPEC DECLARES FULL OIL EMBARGO_

_By Brandon Lewis and Thomas Fischetti, Associated Press_

_Stock markets in Asia and Europe fell dramatically as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced today a full embargo of oil to Europe and the United States. These actions followed the latest in a series of brazen terrorist strikes on Muslim targets. These attacks, more than one a month across four continents, include the Great Mosque in Khartoum and the downing of an Iranian Boeing 747 that killed more than 400 people en route to South America._

_In a dramatic turn of events, an organization calling itself Mjolnir claimed responsibility for these attacks against Islamic targets, releasing a statement and video announcing its intentions to escalate a war of terror against Islamic peoples and sites._

_The recently formed joint U.S. and EU Task Force on Oil (USETFO) issued a warning that oil supplies would be maintained by any necessary action, and called upon the OPEC nations to remove the embargo by the end of the month. The secretary of state and several high-ranking officers of NATO attended the press conference, indicating to many analysts that the full force of the U.S. and European military was behind the official statements._

_The Russian president, visiting China on an emergency trip many have speculated is related to the growing international crisis, issued a warning at a press conference in Beijing that foreign aggression in the oil-producing countries would not be tolerated and would be considered "an act of war" against all countries relying on oil supplies. Standing beside the Russian leader, the president of China noted that U.S. ships heading to the Persian Gulf were in violation of international law and posed a serious risk of "global destabilization."_

_Mjolnir is being described as a Western terrorist organization due to its use of Nordic religious symbols and its stated purpose of attacking Islamic nations and cultural institutions. Muslim nations have demanded the apprehension of the terrorists and the cessation of attacks before they halt the embargo. European and American antiterrorist organizations have said that they are working diligently to stop the group, but so far have been powerless in the face of escalating violence._

Savas finished cutting the tomatoes and cucumbers, tossing them together into the large wooden bowl. He diced an onion and sprinkled the bits over the growing salad. From the fridge he removed a large white tub of feta cheese and cut a medium-sized hunk. With his fingers, he crumbled the cheese into small morsels over the salad. Washing his hands, he grabbed the olive oil and spread it luxuriously over the contents of the bowl—country Greek salad with make-do, store-bought produce. Nothing would come close to his grandfather's garden in Thessaloniki, where the bright Greek sun, the earth, and the weathered hands of a man who cared would always yield crops far superior to the products of agribusiness. But it would have to do.

He gazed out the kitchen window, and, not for the first time, wondered when the coherent red light of a laser targeting scope would dart across his chest, the glass in the window exploding, and a bullet tearing through his flesh. But the night was silent except for the muffled roar of a motorcycle and the sounds of Cohen showering in the next room.

He placed the salad on the table and returned to the kitchen to check on the lamb. It had a bronzed texture, so he turned off the oven. The sound of the water faded, and he heard the shower curtain slide open. He resisted the urge to go see her. There was nothing sexier or more beautiful than a woman dripping wet from a shower. _Or from a rainstorm_ , he reminded himself.

Following the attempt on his life, much had changed—seemingly for the better. The investigation of his conduct toward William Gunn had ended, as enough of the decision makers at FBI had decided that perhaps all this wasn't so coincidental. The cyber attack on FBI had certainly helped his case. Once it was clear how much confidential information had been breached, an entirely new investigation into lax computer security had begun. By the time Jordan had obtained a governmental get-out-of-jail-free card, Savas was off the hook internally. But the relief was muted. He had a price on his head.

The FBI decided to keep a constant watch on both him and Cohen. This had at first panicked them both, as they thought it meant they would not be able to see each other for the duration. But it had turned out wonderfully once Kanter had suggested that it would conserve resources to keep them together at all times. This was something of a double-edged sword: they had a complete lack of freedom in their activities outside the apartment and the FBI, but a freedom from the constraints of hiding their relationship. Cohen had suggested that they hole up after work at her place. While the guards outside the room were a nuisance, they were finally afforded a strange sort of normalcy in their relationship. "Now we can finally go to work together, _darling_ ," she had joked one morning. Yes, with the caveat that they go together with the hulking shapes of Agents Robertson and Smith.

Breaking him out of thought, Cohen walked into the kitchen. He held his breath, once again reduced to a small singularity in her presence. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders, chestnut turned dark with water. She sported the "monkey shirt"—a tight number with a brightly-colored monkey undulating across her chest. She had worn the shirt in late August at the park, and he had asked whether she had intended it to get his attention. She laughed at him. "John, not everything revolves around sex." He tried to digest that one.

Cohen noticed his gaze and smiled. "All right, this time I _did_ wear it for you."

Savas smiled. "So, I've got permission?"

She laughed and kissed him. "Let's try some of that salad."

Cohen walked to the table as Savas brought out the salad and the lamb. "It's too much for the two of us, but I'd rather save some for tomorrow and not invite in our well-armed shadows."

They ate in silence, a mundane activity as deep as any world event. Cohen spoke through the stillness.

"Frank's going to be okay?"

Savas put down his fork and exhaled. "It looks like he will. There was a lot of deep-tissue damage, so his racquetball game is never going to be the same. But he'll get most of his range of motion back, or so the doctors tell me anyway. At least we got Husaam out of lockup without too much trouble. What a mess!"

"God, John, it still runs through my mind every day. If it weren't for Frank . . ."

He cut her off. "But he was there. Don't torture yourself. I'm here, and we just have to keep our wits about us now."

"Nothing more from the sniper?"

Savas shook his head. "No. Same pattern as the other one. Ex-military, served in an antiterrorism unit. There were reports of behavior toward enemy combatants that led to formal disciplinary action. Seems that lots of these Mjolnir soldiers have some strong hatred for Muslims. Gunn must have recruited such men."

"So we just play it cool with Gunn?"

"That's how they want it. Filtering it through Larry's evasions, it seems there's still enough debate higher up about messing with Gunn that they're moving slowly, which makes sense from another angle—he's still working with the FBI. The hope's to find enough about Operon, or get lucky and strike gold looking into Gunn International itself, that we'll find what we need to take this thing down and stop whatever they're planning next."

"John, something's troubling me about all these attacks."

"You mean besides all the death and destruction?"

She gave him a sharp look. "Yes. They don't make sense. Sure, they're all Muslim targets and Mjolnir is out to destroy Islam—motive's there. But why do you go out bombing random mosques across the world, or, come on, a civilian airliner? How's that going to bring down a religion of over a billion souls?"

"I don't know, but it's sure shaking up the world. The Islamic nations have gone ape-shit, embargoed us, and we've sent a bunch of ships toward the Gulf threatening them and scaring everyone that World War III is on the horizon."

"But why not hit more strategic targets? Government buildings? Leaders of nations? These targets are so random, so haphazard. Why not more professional-type targets for such a professional group? They began with assassinations that followed that kind of pattern. Then this."

"Maybe we don't know what their aims are."

Cohen put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands under her chin. "That's what I'm getting at, John. We're missing something! These guys are too smart, too careful, too _thoughtful_ to appear so scattershot."

"Sometimes revenge isn't logical, Rebecca. Sometimes it's just mean and crazy."

She shook her head. "I don't think so. You said it best—Gunn's like a serial killer. There's something cold and calculating alongside all that hatred. Some pattern, however demented. We're missing something that's pointing somewhere."

Savas heard the anxiety in her voice and took her hand. "Where then? What do you mean?"

Cohen stared out the window behind him. "I don't know. Somewhere dark. To something bigger, much bigger." She squeezed his hand so tightly it hurt. "John, I'm scared."
48

# Not Even the Gods

Michael Inherp watched the docked boats bob on the waves of the Gulf. Night fell on New Orleans. _But not the old New Orleans_ , he reminded himself, full of swagger and slum, of music and magic, Mardi Gras and murder, artists, pimps, and queens. It was a wounded shadow of a once great city, left alone to rot after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Lights danced on the sea stretching out before the dock like those in a van Gogh painting, the rigging of sailboats like muffled bells playing to the rhythm of the waves. _Calm before the storm._ He closed his eyes, thinking about the tempest to come.

A small freighter waited hungrily at the dock. It was an unusual vessel, thoroughly modernized, down to tinted black windows and highly sophisticated and expensive radar and communications equipment visible from the outside. Inherp had seen the inside and knew the outside told only a superficial tale. For several days, he and other soldiers of Mjolnir had passed on and off the boat—men with purpose and haste and intensity foreign to the rhythms of the port.

Inherp continued to scan the port as part of his guard duty. He watched an old fisherman prepare his boat for the night's expedition. This wasn't the first time the old man had worked his boat during Inherp's watch. Stooped, a gray beard visible from a distance, he had observed the unusual activity at the strange boat. Inherp doubted the fisherman thought long on the issue. This was New Orleans, after all. He displayed no real curiosity. He prepped his boat and cast out. Night after night. The old man moved to a different pace, a sense of the sea, its rhythm, its long heartbeat and toll of a lifetime. Inherp suppressed a bitter laugh. _Not like us, are you,_ _Gramps?_ _With our machines and power, flaunting our disrespect for the great waters of the world._

This night, the activity was particularly brisk, and Inherp knew the man had seen much, even inadvertently. _Seen too much._ The fisherman had been working when the very large crate was pulled along the dock on an extended trolley, perking up when the crate rolled by, its mass flanked on each side by armed men. He had cast a glance or two as the men wheeled the crate to the freighter, which was equipped with a small crane. The men had secured the crate to a harness, and the crane had pulled the crate upward, out of sight. The old man had worked late one night too many.

It happened before the fisherman could understand. A shadow rose at the old boat, the broad end of a silencer glinted as muffled spits sounded over the splashing of waves. A body lay on the deck of the trawler, nets tangled around its limbs, a pool of blood seeping into the aged wood.

Inherp bowed his head for a moment. The rigging of the sailboats rang like church bells in the thickening night.

Later, onboard, he was ordered to sequester the large crate below deck. He and his fellow soldiers had secured it tightly. Now they stood at attention. A tall, thin man descended a narrow set of stairs above him, bowed to fit under the low clearance, and straightened to full height when he reached the last step and entered the room. He wore a dark-gray suit, his silver hair set tight on his head. Money, power, and influence radiated from him, as well as something more feral, something that Inherp could feel and that kept him tightly at attention. _William Gunn._ Inherp felt stunned to be in his presence. Following behind, a powerfully built figure with blond hair emerged and stood a few feet to Gunn's left. This man had a sharp crew cut and the face of a tested warrior.

"Open it," said Gunn.

Inherp jumped to obey, and within moments, he and the others had revealed what lay within. Gunn stared at the long, black object inside with a terrible fascination that sickened Inherp. It ran twenty feet in length with a diameter of nearly three feet. Wings jutted outward from its midsection, spanning over ten feet. The design reeked of death, a predator like the earth had never seen. The CEO passed his hands along its smooth contours.

"AGM-129 advanced cruise missile," said the older soldier, matter-of-factly. "Average speed of a jet plane at five hundred miles per hour. Range—two thousand nautical miles. Payload—a W80-1 variable yield. She flies fast, she flies low and unseen, and delivers one hell of a punch at the end."

Inherp noticed that Gunn did not take his eyes off the black missile. The men around him looked distinctly uncomfortable as the CEO stepped back and addressed the soldiers.

"When you've delivered the package and it's secured, we'll begin training for our most important mission, one that will spill fire on our enemies and forever change the world. You will be part of that mission, a strike at the heart of fanaticism in the world with a weapon the gods themselves didn't possess."

Gunn glared across the faces and marched up the stairs. Inherp felt a massive tension leave his body. He and the other soldiers reassembled the crate. As the wood covered the black monstrosity within, Inherp hung back from the others, using the crate's sides to partially shield himself from their view. He held a small object, pointing it at the missile several times discreetly, ensuring that he remained hidden from the other soldiers. He pocketed the device and assisted in the final steps of securing the crate.

Ascending the narrow stairs, he looked across the bow. Dark waves lapped the hull below. Nauseated, he turned his face to the wind. Cool air swept over him as the ship motored out to sea. He touched the cell phone in his pocket. It held information that the world had to see—and had to see soon. He knew that somehow, he had to live long enough to make sure that they did.
49

# Not Vacationing

Savas entered the Operations Room at Intel 1. As always, there was an assault of visual information from the many monitors mounted on the walls—a strange FBI version of Times Square. JP Rideout called to him from across the room.

"John, we've got the specs on that plane and the initial analysis of the explosion. This came from U.S. Navy. They were right on the scene and recorded most of the useful data we've got on this." He called up several figures on one of the screens showing a large commercial jetliner, 747, and several incomprehensible schematics depicting the analysis of the blast.

"JP, can you give me the Cliffs Notes version?"

"Yeah, sorry. I don't understand half this stuff myself. Bottom line—this was no accident—a high-yield explosive device, likely contained in the baggage compartment. How it got past security is anyone's guess. S-47 isn't easy to detect, but they wouldn't have needed anything so sophisticated to bring that plane down."

"Any wreckage recovered?"

"That's still ongoing. There will be some, but that Boeing was blown to bits. There are some remains of the tail section, but it's sunk deep now. It'll take a few weeks before the Navy can get the equipment out there—that is, if they aren't diverted to the Persian Gulf."

Savas shook his head slowly. "Yeah. It's a magnet right now for large ships with big guns. This whole thing is starting to reach critical mass."

Rideout looked up from his terminal. "You think this is going to lead to war?" Several heads swiveled in their direction.

"I sure as hell hope not. If it does, it won't be some little police action like Nam or Iraq—no offense to you guys who saw blood spilled there. This is going to be something big, something where we can't even bring the bodies back. If Russia and China get involved, who knows where it'll go. Mjolnir's wet dream."

Matt King piped up. "The mosque in Sudan—same MO. Same results from forensics. Your little visit didn't dissuade them from using S-47, or from anything else, it seems. There were riots again in Khartoum, and the American Embassy was firebombed. Molotov cocktails and the like. Luckily, we evacuated our people last week. Definitely not a great time to travel with a U.S. passport."

"Or to live near any Muslim holy site of any significance," said Savas.

Frank Miller nodded, wincing from the pain in his shoulder, his arm in a sling. "That sure as hell is true. The question is: where will they strike next? We've been banging our heads against this for months, but there's no rhyme or reason, no pattern."

Savas and Cohen exchanged glances. "No," Savas said. "Nothing. No structure, pattern, nothing we can get our hands on to predict and prepare."

"There's something . . ." Angel Lightfoote whispered as much to herself as to anyone in the room.

"Angel?" asked Savas. "You think you see something?"

Lightfoote stared forward, shaking her head. "There's always something."

He sighed. They remained in the dark, powerless, while a panther stalked the world—and stalked him and Cohen. They kept waiting for the hammer to fall.

Husaam Jordan stepped into the room and approached Savas. "John, we think that Gunn has left the country, probably for Mexico or somewhere in Central America."

"What?" William Gunn leaving the country, and not flying to a big bank in China or Europe, made Savas very uneasy. "Field agents last had him in New Orleans!"

"He lost them quite effectively, it seems. He's been using a number of decoys. Our contacts at the ports place a man who fits his description, as well as an unusual amount of activity, at a cargo ship several days ago. Right around that time, there was a shooting at the same port that occurred the night that ship left harbor. We've been able to track the numbers on the boat back to an old discarded model once used by Operon several years back."

"We need a better team down there," Savas said dejectedly. "You spooks are doing our job for us. Okay, assuming this isn't a coincidence, why does that mean he's out of the country?"

"CIA contacts in Mexico. This boat docked several days after departure, south of the border. We've sent a team, and they'll check it out, but I bet all traces of Mjolnir will be gone."

"Assuming he was on the boat, what the hell is he doing there?"

"Not vacationing," the Muslim said flatly.
Part III

# Pillars of Islam

An axe age, a sword age, shields are riven. A wind age, a wolf age, before the world's ruin. —Prophecy of the Völva of the Poetic Edda
50

# Unwelcome Guests

That night Savas lay next to Cohen, unable to sleep. He glanced over at the clock—it was three in the morning. His mind was obsessing over the scant data and unproven hypotheses that characterized the investigation. There had to be a pattern to the attacks, something that would help them understand their structure and purpose, and from that, to know where Mjolnir would strike again. Did any of this have to do with Gunn's departure for Mexico? Why would he leave in such a clandestine fashion? How would they unearth the evidence required to link him to these crimes?

He rolled over on his side. If he stayed like that too long, his back, battered during his days on the force, would cramp, but he needed to look at her. She slept peacefully, her lips slightly parted, a slow and soft rhythm to her breath hardly disturbing the quiet of the night.

A noise broke the peace. His head darted toward the bedroom door. The sounds were muffled, shielded from the bedroom by a hallway and several thin walls, but unmistakable. Several harsh spits, an intake of breath, and the soft thud of a body falling against the wall. _Outside._

He pulled off the blanket, jumped out of bed, and ran to the chest of drawers. He pulled out his handgun and checked the magazine. The moonlight shone through the windows, bathing his naked form in a silvery sheen. Every muscle was tensed, and he listened a moment without moving. _Click._ The bolt lock. Every nightmare he had had in the last month was coming alive before him.

He jumped back to the bed and shook Cohen. She stirred, opened her eyes, and was about to speak when he placed his hand over her mouth, holding his gun hand to his own with an outstretched finger over his lips. She snapped to an alert state, her eyes large, instinctively pulling the sheet closer. He motioned for her to get behind the bed. She shook her head.

"Rebecca, _please_ ," he whispered. Cohen was an amazing analyst but hadn't seen violence like Savas, especially during his early years at NYPD. These were the trained assassins of Mjolnir, not common criminals. _I can't lose her._

She squinted, but nodded, climbing down and concealing herself. Savas turned to the door. Behind him Cohen reached toward the drawer of the nightstand.

The front door crashed open, the drag chain snapping and flying across the living room. Savas darted through the bedroom door, steadying his firearm on the frame. He saw two dim shapes entering the apartment, weapons in their hands. _Two!_ But he held the initiative.

He fired two shots at the closest form. The figure crumbled, let out a hoarse shout, and dropped to the ground shooting wildly, shattering a mirror on the wall over the couch. Instinctively, Savas spun across the hallway to the bathroom, the drywall exploding beside him. He nearly toppled over in his momentum, steadied himself, and prepared to move on the second assailant.

But his assailant found him first.

A dark shape appeared in the doorway. Savas swung his arm to divert the man's weapon hand, and several shots exploded against the tile of the bathtub. He brought his own gun forward, but the killer was both fast and strong. Savas's wrist was pinned and twisted backward. He cried out in pain and dropped his gun. The man swung his gun as a bludgeon and struck Savas in the jaw, crashing his head into the wall. Partially stunned, running on adrenaline, Savas brought his left arm down like a hammer, smashing the weapon out of the man's hand. The gun clanked heavily as it hit the floor tiles.

Savas felt the impact and deep swelling pain as the man crashed his knee into his testicles, and a flurry of fists impacted his abdomen and face, sending him crashing backward through the shower curtain and into the bathtub. His back was nicked by several broken shards of tile lying in the bottom, and he crumpled into the fetal position, wracked with pain. He watched helplessly as the man picked up the weapon and aimed it at him. _Rebecca, run_ _. . ._ _please, run._ His vision blurred as he bordered on the edge of consciousness.

Two loud explosions brought him back. He felt a spray of blood as the head of his assailant burst open, a bullet tearing through his skull and striking tile above the bathtub. The assassin fell to his knees with a heavy thud, pitching forward onto his mangled face. The body began to spasm. Savas gazed forward and saw another shape in the frame of the doorway, short and slender, arms outstretched and ending in a pistol.

"John?" came Cohen's voice. "Are you okay?"

An hour later, Savas put down the phone and placed the ice pack back on his jaw. _Ice_ _packs all over me_ , he thought ruefully. Cohen sat across from him, her eyes bloodshot with dark circles under them, her expression pained. He could guess what it was like to look at him right now.

"It's okay. It's just not going to be pretty for a while."

"What did Larry say?" Her voice was nearly devoid of emotion. _Shock._ Savas knew that she had never killed anyone. And there was no time to handle the trauma properly.

Savas motioned to the door. "The agents outside—it's the worst. Shot dead right next to the door."

"The assassins—who were they?"

"The same," said Savas. "Prints are in the Armed Forces' database. Professionals. _Mjolnir_."

Cohen nodded and pulled her robe around her more tightly. She looked cold, he thought. He felt too damn awful to get up and sit with her. _Give me a minute, Rebecca._

"Larry says we'll move to a safe house soon. You'll need to pack up. Maybe we should've done this earlier, after the cyber attack. They knew everything about us, where we lived. Protecting the apartment wasn't enough. These guys want us dead for real."

"John, I barely made it in time."

Savas rose, drawing a sharp breath. There were just places a man ought not to be hit. He took two steps and pivoted onto the couch next to Cohen. Glass shards from the mirror had been roughly cleared off, scattered across the Persian carpet she had bought only a month ago. He put his arm around her as her shoulders shook.

"You didn't hesitate. It happened in an eye-blink. You saved my ass. I'm here because of you, Rebecca." She looked over and nodded, and he brushed a tear from her eye. "But I think I'm going to have to remain celibate for at least a week."

She smiled softly at this. Savas fought to maintain his mask of nonchalance and smiled back. Inside, he shook with fear, fear that mere seconds had separated Cohen from death. He shook with the shame of the truth that he had failed to protect her. Only her presence next to him gave him any calm. _She's safe and will be safer soon._

William Gunn walked outside a small airfield in Mexico. Overgrown grass danced chaotically in the wind. The runways were barely within the specifications he required, but safety wasn't his primary concern. The looser regulations and minimal scrutiny from any regulatory bodies made this the perfect location. He spoke to the large man walking beside him.

"We were exposed with Operon. We've got to end our reliance on former elements of Gunn International."

Patrick Rout nodded. "I understand, sir. It was convenient in the beginning, and we couldn't anticipate the breach of the arms network, something we'll continue to have to rely on."

"I understand the rationale, but the CIA's efforts showed the flaw in that reliance. Sever those ties."

"Yes, sir."

"The cargo plane?"

"We've recruited damn well. The engineers did a remarkable job. The stealth tech is integrated. I've seen it in flight. Works beautifully. Too bulky to be invisible on radar, but the signal will be low. If they don't know precisely where to look, they won't see us."

Gunn paused and gazed out over the field of grass. They were so close! Everything had gone according to plan. The nations had reacted with more panic and fervor than he had anticipated, practically ensuring complete chaos and war after this mission. The final phase was in motion. Soon the Western armies would flow into the Middle East, and the hammer would strike the Arab nations soundly at their most sensitive point. A new era would begin. William Gunn needed to make sure nothing got in the way.

"Perhaps it's time to take a new tack in New York."

"Sir?"

"Our efforts have been unsuccessful."

Rout stiffened. "Pulling out all the stops now, as planned. Changing the operation now would be a mistake."

Gunn shook his head. "I refer to Savas. He's proven very elusive. A more indirect course may be required."

"Indirect, sir?"

"We're fairly sure now that there's a relationship between him and the Cohen woman. Our recon supports this conclusion strongly."

"Yes, sir. She'll be targeted for elimination."

"A mistake. With her death, we risk motivating him even more. But if we take her alive, she becomes a powerful deterrent to his continued involvement in the investigation."

"Perhaps."

Gunn stared over the wild grasses. "I know something about the man. He'll do anything to avoid losing someone else in his life. Bring her here."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Precautions, no more. Soon it won't matter what anyone does. The world will be consumed trying to contain the fire."
51

# Lost Souls

Dr. Anthony Russell entered his office at 8:30 a.m. precisely. Not a single item in the room could have been described as dusty, out of place, or in need of repair. The blinds had been cleaned for the third time that month only yesterday. The air filter systems were regularly replaced. The carpet needed looking at—he would see to that later today. If asked, he would have said that he was a classic obsessive-compulsive personality, kept in check by therapy and occasional medication, and that such business was his own, thanks very much.

Whatever his idiosyncrasies, Dr. Russell was a highly respected figure in psychiatry at Fort Marshall, and, in fact, among all of Army medicine. His attention to detail was exactly what was required in observing patients, as well as in prescribing medications and monitoring their effects. But what made Dr. Russell stand out was that he just plain cared about U.S. soldiers more than anyone else did.

In the early 1990s, he had begun several unique studies to examine the psychological trauma and syndromes afflicting veterans of the first Persian Gulf War. What he learned there had been invaluable, if insufficient, for treatment of the far-more-terrible trauma soldiers faced after the Iraq War. A combination of multiple tours of duty, guerrilla warfare with terrorist tactics, and shoddy commitment to veteran care post-duty had left one of the most damaged generations of U.S. military personnel since—well, since as long as he could remember—and that included Vietnam.

These things made Anthony Russell angry, but he was far too composed—some might say uptight—to voice such anger in a conventional manner. As the third generation of men in the Russell family to serve proudly, his loyalty to the military was absolute. He addressed the problem through his work. This helped explain the mountain of effort, the numerous programs and studies for veterans that came from his initiatives. He hoped in the end, he might make a difference.

He placed his briefcase in its precise location on the desk, wiped the computer screen with a dust cloth, and switched it on. First task in the morning was email, and there was usually lots of it. He scrolled through the lists—invitations for speaking engagements, pharmaceutical company offers that he knew amounted to little more than bribes for their products, and the occasional penis enlargement advertisement that slipped through spam filters. _How creative they could be with spelling_.

Near the end of the list, an email caught his eye. It took him several seconds to place the name and account—Michael Inherp. He had not heard from the boy since he had left therapy several years ago, simply disappearing, never giving explanation or motive or plans for his future. This had disturbed Dr. Russell. It was certainly a rash thing to do. Inherp had served two tours in Iraq, during which he had seen an IED turn his best friend inside out, stood by as a group of crazed soldiers sodomized a young Iraqi teen, and hidden his sexuality from the men around him who constituted his closest family during those traumatic periods. He wasn't accepted at home—gay men were still beaten in some parts of the country. All these things weighed heavily on a man who loved his country, who signed up to fight for it after 9/11. _Where was the boy now?_

He opened the email and scanned the contents. As he read, his face constricted, his eyes squinting behind his glasses. He pushed the lenses up and rubbed his eyes, the text of the message a ghostly afterimage on his lids.

> _Dear Dr. Russell,_
> 
> _I don't have much time,_ _and it is important that you believe me._ _Several years ago,_ _I joined the organization known as Mjolnir._ _I know you have read about them._ _They promised me a chance to protect America in a way the Army could never do._ _They have been smart, not like what we've wasted our money and blood for in Iraq, sir._ _They want to destroy our enemies._
> 
> _At first I believed along with them. But something happened to change that. It's important that you believe me. They are planning something terrible. They plan to use a stolen weapon, not conventional, in their next attack. I've seen it. It's real. I've attached photographs of the missile and the serial number._
> 
> _Please, you have to believe me. Show this to Army Command. To someone. Anyone. I'll do what I can, but I'm only one person. They are serious. They will do this. I don't know where or when, but it's a Muslim target, like all the others._
> 
> _You helped me when things were dark, and I'll always be thankful. I'm sorry to have let you down, but this is more important than me._
> 
> _Yours, M._ _Inherp_

The photographs showed what indeed looked like a missile inside a large crate, followed by several close-ups of the serial number. _A nuclear weapon?_ _Is he delusional?_ His mind raced. Certainly a lost nuclear weapon would have been front-page news! The military had exacting standards, and the press would eat this up as the country and world went into a panic. Could the U.S. government hide something like this? It was beyond credibility.

_It could be a delusional episode_ , he told himself, perhaps born from the boy's deep conflict in loving and hating the military. This could have generated a fantasy that he was correcting the mistakes of the military, his need to join the terrorists to "complete" his mission, and his human side taking over in warning him. _Could he have faked the images?_ Of course he could. It was easy in this day and age of image-editing software. _But not the serial numbers._ There was a way to address the veracity of his story. Russell shook his head. Dare he bring this up in a serious fashion to the Army? Some dent it would make in his reputation if this turned out to be the hoax of a disturbed soldier.

"Michael, what in God's name has happened to you?"
52

# Serial Numbers

Dr. Russell fingered the handle of his briefcase nervously. The secretary had told him the general was on an important conference call. Russell had no doubt about it, but the waiting was agonizing. He had known Lieutenant General Fred Marshall for twenty years. The general had become nearly a father figure to him, part of the community that had watched his career develop from a committed therapist to a full-blown researcher and advocate for combat veterans. Marshall was also instrumental in the progression of Russell's career, using his influence at various stages to secure funding and promotion through the ranks. Marshall had on more than one occasion referred patients who had failed all other treatments to Russell. He had gone so far as to solicit Russell's opinions and reviews of many of the army's pre-combat training procedures for soldiers, as well as for post-combat care. Russell drew a deep breath. The general had championed his causes, leading to many important changes in how the army handled the trauma of combat. There had been no way to repay him.

He didn't know how to prepare for the scheduled meeting. In a few minutes, he'd walk into the office and try to make a case for a stray nuclear weapon, the existence of which had been provided by an admittedly mentally unsound former patient. Russell knew the general would hear him out, but he also knew that the general could only believe this was a hoax. _The U.S. military lose a nuclear weapon?_ Unthinkable. And if the unthinkable had happened, it wouldn't be a secret. They'd have mounted the largest search imaginable. Russell couldn't defeat that logic either. All he had was his professional intuition developed over a span of several decades.

The door swung open, and the general ushered in the psychiatrist. Russell tried to put his emotions aside and focus on the issue at hand.

"General Marshall," Russell began formally.

"Anthony, it's good to see you again!" The general gave him a strong handshake and motioned him to sit.

Russell managed a smile. "I would agree, General. But, under the circumstances, I find myself mostly in an agitated state."

Marshall nodded and took a seat behind his desk. "I understand. Then let's get straight to business. Tell me what's going on again. To be honest, your phone call was a bit unsettling."

"I anticipated as much. But all I ask is that you hear me out—for my years of service. I dared not take this to anyone else. I needed someone I could trust."

Marshall nodded again while Russell continued. "I've told you about the email. I've brought it on a CD-ROM." Russell handed over a jewel case to the general. "I'd rather not spread it beyond my own email account—both for patient confidentiality and the sensitivity of the contents. I've removed any clear reference to the individual."

General Marshall stuck the disk into the tray of his computer. "I understand. So tell me, Anthony, you see this kid as sound enough mentally to trust these amazing statements?"

"Honestly, General, no. I worry about his mental state. But, I must be clear. He has never shown any sign of delusional psychosis. Moderate depression, anxiety, but nothing beyond that. I can't speak to what's happened over the last year, however. I came to you because of our long relationship, so if this is a product of a troubled mind, no damage is done. I hope." He smiled wanly. "But, if there's some truth to this incredible story, well, I had to reach out."

"Yes, of course" the general mumbled, somewhat distracted as he examined the images on the disk. "Well, if it's a hoax, Anthony, the missile looks very convincing. Air Force cruise missile, aircraft mounted." He squinted at the screen. "Oh, now that's interesting. Like you said, we can read the serial numbers. Not too bright if he's making this up. Easy to verify, although—that _is_ very interesting," he trailed off, staring at the screen. After a moment he glanced at Russell. "Remind me where he served."

"Iraq. Infantry."

"He's never worked with weapons systems, missiles, conventional or nuclear?"

Russell shook his head. "Not that I know of. He wasn't qualified. Why?"

The general looked back toward the screen and spoke. "For an untrained soldier, he knows a lot about serial number format. He's nailed the digit structure perfectly."

Russell felt his stomach tighten. As much as he would hate to ruin his reputation, the alternative—that he was right—was terrifying.

"He claims he's a member of this terrorist group, Mjolnir."

"Yes, so you mentioned." The general glanced once more at the computer screen, took off his glasses, and placed them on his desk. He turned again to Russell, his expression serious. "I think I need to make some phone calls."

Russell replied stiffly, a chill running through his body. "Yes, sir."
53

# Massacre

Blake Morrison walked to the mailbox and opened it. _The usual_ , he thought: several bills, a pile of catalogs seeking to burst the box, and an assortment of random junk mail. The sun arced over the surrounding hills on its way downward, half-concealed in clouds to create a complicated pattern of beams in the dimming sky. _Sunshine._ Something he might be able to enjoy if he weren't working so damn hard.

A gray VW Jetta pulled up the street and came to a stop in the driveway across from his house. _The Agent_. Everyone on the block knew The Agent. How anyone came to know he worked for the FBI had been forgotten, but everyone knew. The man didn't deny it if asked, but he didn't offer much either. _Keeps to himself_ would be the nicer way to put things. Morrison preferred _arrogant_ and _aloof_. The man never participated in block or neighborhood activities, rarely spoke with his neighbors. Always seemed to have important things to do, more important than the ordinary Joes he lived around. Morrison had spent a lot of time speculating on just what his neighbor did for a living. He had spent even more time speculating on what he did in his home. He never once had seen a woman go in or come out of that house. He had on occasion seen men. For Blake Morrison, that was enough. _Damn pervert's a homosexual_ , he told himself for the fiftieth time as he closed the mailbox. He watched The Agent step out of the Jetta, grab his briefcase, close the door, and try to avoid eye contact with him. _What do you have to hide, Agent_ _Man?_

Morrison shook his head and turned back around. If there was one thing he couldn't abide, it was those homosexuals. Invading all decent neighborhoods, television, schools, forcing their morals on the rest of America. He walked slowly back toward his house, looking over the Victoria's Secret catalog addressed to his wife.

His next sensation was of flying and darkness. When he regained consciousness, it was with the taste of hard concrete in his mouth. He opened his eyes and saw that he was facedown on his sidewalk, perhaps ten feet from his porch. A strange crackling sound filled the air behind him, and the ringing of numerous car alarms invaded his consciousness. _Or are those screams?_

He stumbled to his feet, blood covering his face, the left side of his head numb and feeling swollen. His left arm hurt. Yes, those were definitely screams. He turned around slowly and had trouble interpreting what he saw. Across the street, where a small ranch-style home had once stood, there was a raging fire. Smoke billowed into the air, and debris littered the weed-covered lawn, apparently raining down as far as his own manicured front yard. The VW Jetta was a shell, as if it, too, had been blown apart by some incredible force. People were pouring out of their homes, some screaming, some speaking on cell phones, many looking bewildered and shocked.

"Blake, what the _hell_ is going on?"

He turned around and saw his wife standing in the doorway, her initial expression of confusion replaced by one of shock. He simply stared at her.

"Blake? What happened to you? My _God_ , is that Mr. Kanter's _house_?"

Morrison said nothing, turning around slowly to look at the burning remains. The Agent. Fire. There was no way anyone was coming out of that alive.

Mira Vujanac got off the bus and walked briskly up the street toward a small brownstone. The light dimmed fast in the city once the sun had gotten behind the buildings, and Vujanac hated to be outside at night. Twenty years ago, when the city was much less safe, she had been mugged and raped at knifepoint near the park. Despite years of therapy and more money than it cost to send her children to college, she had never been freed from the fear of walking the streets after dark. She clutched her bag as every stranger passed by, focused maniacally on the small black gate that protected the tiny space in front of her door. _Still plenty of light,_ she reminded herself and yet accelerated her pace.

A dark shape sprung from one of the stairways on her right. Mira reacted instinctively, her past attack having given her a heightened sense of threat, so that she identified the hostile intent in the movements before she was conscious of it. She reached into her bag and pulled out her mace spray, turned and aimed as she had been taught in her self-defense classes, and sprayed.

The man was too fast. He had anticipated her movement and, with his left arm, swatted away her right, knocking the can of mace to the street. With his right, he brought up a dark object, a gun with a long and large barrel. _Oh,_ _God, not again_.

Angel Lightfoote walked along a bridge in Central Park, watching the slow passing of autumn leaves floating on the murky waters of the pond. She passed couples holding hands, wrapped in fall jackets, and shielding their faces from the wind. Many stopped to stare at her—a waterfall of orange hair, long white dress to her bare feet, and no jacket. She didn't mind, even if she did notice. There were more important things.

Lightfoote sighed, staring at the trees of the park, leaves turning, soon to become silent skeletons. Winter was a dark time for her, and she dreaded the sleeping of the plants and the sense that life was frozen, stilled, and hidden from view. In that winter bleakness, the concrete of the city no longer felt so sterile. In fact, she might prefer it to living things that had been silenced by the cold.

She turned to leave, to head home before night fell, but halted. She cocked her head to one side and stared, listening intently. _The animals are quiet_.

Years ago, _before_ , Lightfoote would not have noticed. Would not have heard. But she had changed. _Been changed_. Now she was only raw skin, feeling the slightest breeze, a minuscule temperature change, hearing things, seeing things, sensing things unavailable to others. After it happened, she struggled, pretending not to notice or risk alienating those around her. Joining the FBI, she found for the first time a purpose for her strange sensitivity. She didn't fool herself—everyone still thought of her as _different_ and kept a certain cautious distance. But for them, she was at least _useful_ , when she was able to intuit or connect facts to answers that others could not.

_Something's wrong._

She felt it in the air flowing over her and in the strange silence from the living heartbeats hidden from view. _They're afraid._ Lightfoote realized that she, too, was afraid and that she was beginning to feel the source of the fear. Something close, something hostile, something _murderous_ approached. _Looking for me._

She spun in several directions, but the bridge and surrounding park were empty, save the scattering leaves and the sound of wind.

_Run, Angel._ _Run._

Her body felt the urge to flee, and in a single instant, she gave way and raced across the bridge toward the park exit. Gunshots cracked from behind. Lightfoote ran faster. The voice called out harshly, _you cannot_ _run_ _away._

Her white dress billowed as she dashed, pieces of wood exploding inches behind her. _No more running._ She leapt onto the broad handrail of the bridge and dove through the air. She was weightless, a white leaf drifting on the wind. She plunged into the green mass of water below.

The phone calls rolled in mercilessly. Savas sat in his office, shocked and disbelieving. Across from him, Cohen sat in a chair overcome with grief. As he put down the receiver, he brought his hand to his forehead and squeezed, a headache pounding, crushing him like a vice. Unbidden, his mind scrolled through the names: _Larry,_ _Mira, Matt . . ._ _Manuel_. All confirmed killed, _murdered_ , one call after another bringing in horrific news, inducing nauseous baths of emotion and shock. The FBI scrambled to locate the remaining agents of Kanter's division and the parallel division chiefs. It was a nightmare of proportions he'd never imagined.

"That's Morgan from Johnson's division. Manuel's dead. Burned alive inside his car on I-80."

" _Oh,_ _God!_ " Cohen shrieked, anger and despair haunting her face. "It has to stop. _Please!_ "

Savas didn't care anymore who saw them together. He stepped across the room and held her.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, burying her head in his shoulder.

"I don't know, Rebecca. I don't know. Monsters—they're ripping us open today."

The door pushed open slowly, and they stared in shock at the stained and soaked white dress that draped the body of Angel Lightfoote. She smelled of a swamp, greens and browns polluting the once bright colors of the fabric. Her long hair was matted and snarled, hanging in tangled clumps from her head. Her hands were bloodied and bruised, suffering some blunt-force trauma. But she was alive.

Cohen leapt up, nearly knocking Savas over as she ran to embrace Lightfoote. "Angel, Angel, Angel!" she cried holding the battered woman in her arms. She pulled back and stared into her face, tears on her cheeks.

Lightfoote smiled faintly. "Hi, Rebecca."

Savas stood and walked to the women. "Angel—my God, what happened?"

Lightfoote cocked her head to one side and stared into the distance. "Evil," she said. "Something evil wanted to kill me. It shot at me. I jumped in the water and banged on a rock. I didn't get up until I'd swum far away."

Cohen stared mournfully at Lightfoote. "Angel, it's been horrible. Everyone . . ."

"Is dead," finished Lightfoote, her face expressionless.

"We don't know that!" Savas interrupted. "We have confirmed deaths. Larry's dead—killed by a bomb at his house. Several heads of other divisions that have been involved in the case. Matt and Manuel. My apartment and Rebecca's were broken into. But Frank overcame his assailant, who fled. JP's alive, but only because some drunk teen plowed into his car in the early morning, setting off the bomb underneath. We don't have any word about other targets."

"Two, at least, in CIA," rolled the booming voice of Husaam Jordan as he entered the room. He had a bruised face and an ice pack on his right eye. A fire burned in his left.

Cohen put her arm on his shoulder. "Husaam—my God. You're hurt."

"You should've seen the other guy," he said grimly. "Actually, I wouldn't recommend that. They're fishing him out of the Hudson as we speak."

Savas stepped toward the CIA agent. "They've hit CIA? How did they know?"

"Unsecured information in the bowels of FBI computing connecting our groups. That's my guess. Many at the CIA felt it was a mistake to work with you. I don't think even the worst critics could've imagined this." He stared intently at Savas. "John, the time has come to act and act quickly against Gunn. This should give us the ammunition we need."

Savas shook his head. "Husaam, we can make a strong case that Mjolnir is behind this. But we've got nothing, nothing at all directly linking Gunn. Now he's out of the country. We don't know where he is!"

"A warrant to search his office, his house, _anything._ "

"That takes time."

Jordan scowled. "As you see, time's running out."

"Yes, sir. That's affirmative, sir." Air Force Colonel Jim Cranston nodded vigorously, staring at his computer screen. "Only those two—General Marshall and an army doctor named Russell. We've punted this up to State, and they're going to bring those two in—to control this situation. All information flow outside of approved channels must be stemmed."

A distorted voice barked from the speaker. Cranston responded. "I can't answer that, sir. I know the consensus is to open this up to other agencies. With the possibility that it's in the hands of a terrorist group— _this_ terrorist group, in particular—I think that voice will become nearly unanimous."

The colonel listened intently and nodded. "I believe that's true, but it'll be beyond our influence at that point. They'll judge the possibility of leaks a necessary risk. I'm sure, but you know my long-standing position on this. It's been a mistake from the beginning to keep this buried."

The voice on the other end spoke again, and Cranston shook his head. "No, sir. It's a perfect match. There are no doubts. Serial numbers, make, appearance. 'Dial-a-yield,' five to one hundred and fifty kilotons. A blast up to ten Hiroshimas. It's our broken arrow, sir. In the hands of the devil's minions."

He spoke for several more minutes and hung up the phone, running his hand across his nearly bald head. He stared in front of him. His computer screen displayed the washed-out image taken from the cell phone of Michael Inherp, the long metallic tube of the missile dominating the screen, the numbers printed on its surface small, yet clear. The colonel rose and walked to his window, staring into the night.

_God help us._
54

# Breaking and Entering

Three dark shapes rested against the glass like spiders on a wall. Gunn Tower rose mercilessly into the Manhattan sky, the spider shapes dwarfed and vulnerable beside its might.

Jordan released his grip on a suction cup and removed a small disk-like object the size of a Frisbee from his belt. The suction cup remained firmly fastened to the glass, and he placed the device against the building to the right of him. A bright light shone as sparks flew, and within seconds, an ellipse could be seen in the once perfect glass surface. He leaned over, breathing heavily from the exertion, and pounded on the circle. After two strikes, the glass broke inward, leaving a hole in the building. This action was repeated several times as his men repositioned themselves around the growing hole in the glass surface. Jordan scaled with the suction cups to the metal above the hole and attached a much larger cup with a secured rope. The rope dangled beside the hole. He grasped it tightly and swung himself inside.

He landed in a dark office, followed by the others. He spoke in hushed tones. "We're on the fourth floor, east side of the building. Stairway is around the corner."

Around the corner they found the stairwell and began a long ascent, punctuated by intervals of deactivating security cams. Their labored breathing echoed as they passed more than forty floors. Jordan's legs burned, and he limped as they progressed, the wounds from Sharjah not completely erased. After forty floors, they felt as if their hearts would explode in their chests. He halted at the fiftieth floor. They caught their breath, legs shaking, sweat pouring over their faces, saturating the ski masks.

"We'll take a minute," he said. "The office is down the hall."

They walked stiffly but silently through the floor, stopping at an elaborate wooden door. The men spent several minutes closely examining the door and its frame.

"Look carefully," said Jordan. "We don't want to trigger any alarms."

One of the men motioned toward the bottom of the door. Using tools from his belt, he dug around the frame and into the drywall, eventually freeing several wires.

"Good work," said Jordan. "Let's deactivate this."

He examined the wires and cut one of them. Satisfied, he nodded to the others who picked the lock on the door. Inside was an enormous office. At the far end, along a wall of glass, was an oversized desk with a large flat-screen computer monitor. Jordan approached the monitor and knelt, removing a computer tower from underneath the desk.

He unplugged the machine from the power supply and removed the screws in the case, placing it to the side. The motherboard glinted in the moonlight streaming through the windows. He motioned to the other two.

"Search the room, photograph anything you can't take, search the files. We need to be out of here in twenty."

The others circulated through the room, examining desk drawers, closets, filing cabinets, and looking behind and under every object. Jordan meanwhile bent over the computer and got to work.

He grounded himself with a wrist strap to the chassis and disconnected the computer data ribbon from the hard drive. With a screwdriver, he slipped it off the metal rails and set it on the desk. He removed a device from his backpack. It had its own data ribbon connected to what looked like another hard drive. He connected the hard drive to the device, and the device to AC power. Immediately, a red light went on, and the sounds of drive access could be heard. He then joined the other two men in sweeping the room.

Fifteen minutes later, the device on the desk went from red to green, and he walked over and disconnected it. Reversing the previous procedure, he reinstalled the hard drive and closed the computer, placing it under the desk. He stuffed the items back inside the pack and shouldered it, stepping from behind the desk and toward the door. He motioned for the other two to follow him.

One of the men gestured to the door. "They'll know we were here."

Jordan smiled. "No avoiding that. But we got what we came for. Let's hope it leads us somewhere."

"We were never here, Husaam."

"I'm a lone wolf. Besides, who'd be foolish enough to come?"
55

# Taken

Cohen stared blankly at the rush hour traffic. The black limo carrying her was just one of thousands of cars trapped in a giant parking lot called Midtown Manhattan. The driver had discussed with her bodyguard whether to put on the flashing lights, but they had both laughed, realizing that in the current gridlock, they weren't going anywhere no matter what they did. She glanced over at the man assigned to guard her life. Who was he? Did he take seriously the task and risk placed in front of him? Could he really understand the ruthlessness of the organization that sought her life?

The guard traded macho banter with the driver, also an armed bodyguard. These two men gave her no sense of security, overconfident in their prowess. It had only been a week since the horror had descended on her life. Mjolnir had brutally taken people she had known and worked with, had come to care for and support. She fought back the tears as she thought of each one, murdered cruelly and coldly, only because they dared to try to investigate these killers.

Larry Kanter had died in his home. Matt King by a bullet to the head. Mira was never to share another crazy story from her days as a child in a Serbian village. Or Manuel. Sweet, clumsy Manuel. If he had been securing _all_ the FBI's computers, they would never have found his name, his place of residence, or known where to place the bomb that incinerated him inside his car.

Kanter's superiors had insisted on round-the-clock security now, and no one in the division could travel together in order to prevent multiple fatalities from a single attack. The coldness of the logic was unsettling. She hated being separated from John in this way. More than anything, she needed to be with him. FBI agents in the movies were like cardboard cutouts—always ready to rumble with the bad guys. The truth was, many were just like her—analysts, bookworms, and not expected to encounter violence, despite the general training they received at the academy. The last week had stunned her, shaken her life apart. Not even the power of the FBI could shield her from those hunters.

A front window exploded. Blood and glass shards sprayed across the seat as the driver's head ruptured, snapping to one side, crashing on the steering wheel. The horn blared. The car lurched forward and plowed softly into a cab, eliciting a set of expletives screamed from outside.

The agent next to her yelled and drew his gun, opening the door in a quick motion. He stepped outside and raised the weapon. Cohen watched in horror as his gun arm was pinned against the roof while a foot kicked him across the face. Several shots were fired into his frame, his body convulsing and dropping to the ground.

She reached into her purse for her gun, pressing back against the door next to her, as far away from the driver's side and open door as possible. As she raised the weapon and aimed, the door behind her opened. She fell backward, slamming her head against the asphalt. The world spun. Something struck her arm. Metal scraped against the road. _My gun._ People screamed and ran from the scene. A barrel was pressed against her temple as a firm hand raised her by the hair. She closed her eyes and prepared to die.

"Say nothing, do nothing but what we tell you. Do you understand?" an emotionless male voice hissed into her ear.

Cohen opened her eyes and nodded. It didn't make sense. He hadn't pulled the trigger. _I'm still alive._

"That alley. Quickly!" Cohen saw the gun gesture toward a dim alleyway on the right side of the street. She stood and walked with the man at her side. She dared not look at him or the other men busy around the car. Her captor kept his gun in his hand but lowered it, keeping it as hidden from view as possible.

As she stepped on the pavement, a muscular man blocked their way and shoved the killer walking beside her to a stop. He'd come out of a shop, a bag in one hand, and noticed Cohen's forced march. A knight in shining armor.

"You giving this lady trouble?"

Cohen closed her eyes. Shots blasted from behind her. She felt a push. Opening her eyes, she barely managed to avoid the prone figure on the sidewalk. More screams erupted from the streets. _Please, God, help us._

As they entered the alley, the man pressed her hard until she was practically running to the other side. They passed by trash bins and refuse, discarded machinery, blurred shapes she had no chance to process. They exited into the sunlight again, and the man waved her over to a beat-up white van. A loud explosion rocked the block. Pedestrians turned toward the sound in shock. Many raced over to the alley or down parallel streets to find out what had happened.

The back doors of the van swung open as two men jumped out. They were dressed in utility workers' uniforms and shoved her into the vehicle. Her kidnapper spoke into a mouthpiece, lost from view as the doors slammed shut, imprisoning Cohen. There would be no one to see her taken, no one to follow them from the scene that unfolded only moments ago. The men around the car had rigged it to blow, and the explosion, death, and chaos would make it simple for her abductors to make a clean escape.

The doors opened again, and the man entered, followed by others with weapons. She saw him clearly now, young, blond, with a military haircut, dressed in nondescript clothing. He carried rope and duct tape. The sounds of sirens and screams filled the air outside the van.

"Don't make a sound and you'll live," he said as he bound her hands behind her and tied her feet together. Tears trailed down her cheeks as he taped her mouth and pushed her onto her back on the padded floor. The van lurched forward into the streets of New York.
56

# Ticket to Mexico

Jordan was bleary-eyed from hunting through thousands of files—text files, emails, logs—trying to glean some hint of Gunn's whereabouts from the rip of his hard drive. He'd probably ended his career last night by breaking into that office, but the time for niceties had passed.

He'd begun to wonder whether the man was so paranoid that he left nothing behind, no trace, even on a computer that he must have assumed was utterly safe from prying eyes. More than once last night, he wished he had Manuel Hernandez from the Savas group with him now—that man knew a thing or two about computers. But William Gunn had ended his life.

In the end, the sleepless night paid dividends. Gunn hadn't been careful enough to delete all records. Jordan gazed at the failing afternoon light with a mixed feeling of dizziness and elation. _I know where you are now, you bastard._ What he was doing in Mexico was a mystery, but the secrecy of his trip and the ruthlessness with which he had sought to crush the investigation told Jordan that this wasn't an idle excursion. It had terrible purpose written all over it. Where Mjolnir had a strong purpose, there was horror waiting.

He swirled the coffee around in his cup but decided he'd had enough caffeine and cold bitterness for one night. He glanced over toward the bedroom door. Vonessa was asleep, exhausted from several days of caring for two sick boys. His grip tightened around the mug. Some would say he was a negligent father for taking the risks he did. Part of him agreed with them. But another part could not back down from his responsibility to the world, to all families, to himself. There were times that demanded risk and sacrifice for the greater good. This was one of those times. He knew what he had to do.

There was little point in going through the motions. After what had happened, the conservatives in the organizations would descend, locking up any fruitful or bold action, giving Gunn too much time. No doubt this was part of the CEO's plans. _Well, my friend, you have a surprise coming._ Jordan was tired of reacting. Time to bring the fight to Gunn.

He opened his laptop and typed the password. He called up a website and entered in the information. Soon he had a round-trip ticket to Mexico. He had some packing to do and arrangements to make once he was south of the border. Most of those plans involved acquiring weapons. He looked back toward the door. He'd call Vonessa's mother to come over. He'd apologize. He'd make it up to them when he got back.
57

# Broken Arrow

Savas winced at the people sitting around the table. It hurt to look. So many faces were not there. _And Rebecca is late_. Another recurring hassle from the new security protocols.

Andrew Bryant, the acting head of Kanter's division, struggled to hold authority, but confusion reigned. Superiors from both FBI and CIA were present. Structure, especially at the FBI, had been disrupted, and the hierarchy was in flux, all parties uncomfortable and unsure how to proceed. But most significantly, the presence of high-ranking officers from the Air Force gave a certain gravity and sense of expectation to the meeting. Something was happening, beyond the mess of the last few weeks. Savas waited and observed.

Bryant cleared his throat and gazed around the room. "I won't try to sugarcoat anything for you. We've been through fire since this entire investigation began. We've watched some damn good agents die, and we've worked our asses off to get to the core of this case, one that's part of something so big it's shaking up the world. What I'm here to tell you now, what these representatives from the Air Force are here to tell you, is that it's all about to get a good bit worse." He gestured toward the soldiers. "Gentlemen?"

The two officers sat together at one end of the table. They were in full uniform. _Dress uniform_ , Savas noted. They had a set of folders in front of them but spoke without consulting the papers within them.

"Thank you, Agent Bryant. We haven't had time to get to know all your staff, but what we have to say must be said quickly, and we're needed back at headquarters to continue our end of the investigation. We'll be available to any of you to work on this." The man looked over his audience and continued. "In August of last year, a highly irregular event took place at an Air Force base in North Dakota. Cruise missiles were loaded on a plane scheduled to fly to Louisiana. That is a common event, transferring weapons between bases. On this day, however, several critical protocols were not followed, and airmen unintentionally loaded missiles with nuclear payloads."

Murmurs erupted around the table. "Please," interjected the Air Force man, "let me continue. I'll answer questions afterward." He exhaled slowly. "For a period of thirty-six hours, these missiles were not reported as missing and weren't secured, as is customary for nuclear weapons. Some of you may remember a press conference last year about the incident."

"Sure," said Savas. "But they said that the weapons had been accounted for, never left the hands of U.S. airmen."

There was an uncomfortable silence. The soldier continued tensely, "That statement was not factual."

Miller sat forward. He had made a significant recovery since the shooting, but the damage to his shoulder had left him with residual pain. Miller in a gruff mood wasn't a pleasant thing. "Not _factual_? You mean a lie? Don't tell me that these missiles took a walk."

The soldier looked Miller directly in the eye. "That's exactly what I'm here to tell you."

Miller exhaled. " _Jesus._ "

"A decision was made to keep this information top secret, and, until recently, even our team investigating the incident was kept ignorant of this fact." The soldier glared around the room, revealing a poorly concealed anger "The operative term is _missile_ , in point of fact. Singular. One cruise missile was unaccounted for."

Savas felt sick. "And let me guess, or you wouldn't be here: those devils at Mjolnir have it?"

The military man glanced uncomfortably around the table. "Yes, it appears that is indeed the case. Major Rivers, would you like to take it from here?"

Miller practically exploded. "Hold on a minute! Let me get this straight. Whoever's ghosting this scandal, it never occurred to them over the last six months since Mjolnir began blowing things up that maybe, _just maybe_ , last year's fuck-up was their snatch?"

Major Rivers pursed his lips. "There were months of chaos and confusion over those bombings. The organization did not reveal itself until very recently, perhaps for this purpose, to prevent such speculation."

Miller continued. "Don't make excuses for them! Come on—even if these guys aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, somebody must have thought about the unthinkable."

"I don't know," said Rivers. " _Honestly._ I simply don't know what was going on above."

Bryant waved his hands and spoke over a growing din. "Look, let's stay focused. We _need_ this information, people. Major Rivers, please, the connection to Mjolnir?"

Rivers nodded. "Recently, we received a tip from a former U.S. Army soldier. He contacted an Army psychiatrist claiming to have photographs of the missile. He forwarded these images to him."

Savas couldn't help himself. "How in the hell did he get those?"

Major Rivers continued. "This soldier had joined Mjolnir and recently has had second thoughts."

"An attack of conscience?" said Miller.

"Apparently so," said Rivers. "The serial numbers were verified with the Air Force, and we know that it's our weapon. That's where we stand right now."

Miller leaned forward. "Surely you've tracked this man, know where the weapon is?"

The major shook his head. "There's been no further contact with the source. We have sent email messages, but he hasn't replied."

" _Email_?" asked Rideout incredulously.

"Back off, Rideout," said Bryant.

Rideout ignored him. "We've got a loose nuke in the hands of the most vicious terrorist group in history, and these chumps are trying to find it by _emailing_ someone? In case these fine gentlemen from the Air Force haven't been briefed, Mjolnir slaughtered half our division! A nuclear cruise missile? We're going to have a goddamned catastrophe!"

Major Rivers shot back. "That's all the information we've got! We have top men working on this problem as we speak. We'll find this man, and he'll lead us to Mjolnir and the bomb. You can help us. His name is Inherp, Michael R. Inherp. In these folders, we have his bio and contact information." He looked over at Rideout, who just shook his head. "These are serious times. We all need to work together."

_Top men_? Savas hung his head. He'd been ready for something bad, but this was worse than his worst nightmare. The horror of the possibilities shook him. He missed Cohen more than ever at that moment and cursed the new security protocols that FBI had forced on them. Randomized schedules for arrivals and departures. Restrictions on traveling together. _To prevent multiple hits._ If the worst happened, he'd rather be with her and share her fate. Savas blocked such thoughts from his mind. He couldn't wait to see her again.
58

# Blackmail

Savas returned to the Operations Room and sat alone in front of a computer screen. He wasn't sure where to go now with this investigation, one that had grown so large, so deadly, so _insane_ that he wondered how it could ever move forward. At least the Air Force had provided them with fairly detailed information. _Or so it seemed._ Savas had to check himself and remember that they had kept a missing nuke a secret from the entire country. He stared at the email from Michael Inherp, looking over the images again. _What am I missing?_

Nothing in the photo gave any indication where the missile might be located. No hint in the email. Why would this kid send this information and not explain how to get there and stop these madmen? Was he taking them on a false lead? The serial numbers checked out. The missile was real. He wouldn't have revealed that unless he was serious. _Maybe he isn't sending any messages because he's dead._ That last thought worried Savas the most. If Inherp were discovered, he would be gone, and so would be their only link to Mjolnir.

Savas rubbed his eyes and stretched. He turned absentmindedly toward a sound behind him, the approaching form of Frank Miller entering the room. The former marine looked unusually haggard.

"Hell of a day, Frank," he said.

"John—Rebecca never showed at the safe house. Her car was found on Madison and 68th."

Savas felt a numbing cold creep over his body. His stomach tightened.

"A bomb. The blast was enormous—killed forty people in the blast radius. We don't believe that there could be any survivors in the car."

Savas felt a blade slice through him as he gasped for breath. His vision clouded.

"John!" Miller caught him as he sank to his knees. "John, God, _I'm sorry_. I understand. We all knew, John. About Rebecca. We all were happy for you two. I'm so sorry."

The large marine held him in a bear hug, then sat him on the desk. Savas began to feel himself dissociate from his body. _This is not real._ _Nothing is real._ At that moment, he knew only that he wished to be no more.

The phone on the desk rang. Miller looked from the phone to Savas. He didn't know what to do with his boss, so he grabbed the receiver. "FBI. Agent Miller speaking."

Miller's face turned white. "John, it's for you. They say they have Rebecca."

Savas felt his stomach lurch as emotions flipped. A surge of adrenaline rushed through him, and he grabbed the phone from Miller.

"John Savas," he spoke hoarsely into the line.

"Agent Savas, Rebecca Cohen's life rests in our hands. You will not trace this call. You will stop pursuing your investigation of Mjolnir. If you wish to spare her a most horrible and degrading death, you will walk out of your office tonight and not return. Do these things, Agent Savas, and you will see her intact once again. She will be under the eye of one who is bringing a new order to the world, and you have his promise. We are watching."

The phone line went dead.

" _You bastards!_ " He hurled the phone across the room. First they let him think he had lost her. Now they forced him to choose between his commitment to his son, to every life stolen by terrorism, and the life of the woman he loved.

A phone rang on a nearby desk. Miller stared at it and at Savas, who leapt forward and grabbed the receiver off the handset. "Don't you hurt her! Or I swear I'll spend the rest of my life hunting you down until I drive you into the flames of _hell!"_

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. A deep voice spoke.

" _John?_ This is Husaam. Please, you _must_ listen to me."
59

# Raining Fire

Savas's face morphed from fury to confusion. Slowly he sat and stared forward blankly. "Husaam?"

Miller raced over to another desk and got on the line. "Agent Jordan? This is Frank Miller with the FBI. John Savas is also on the line."

"Is John okay?"

"We've had a shock. Rebecca Cohen's been kidnapped, her car incinerated by a bomb. There's been no contact with her or her bodyguards."

Savas interrupted, his mind raw but focusing. Hearing the Muslim's voice had brought him back. "It's Mjolnir—they've got Rebecca. I haven't spoken to her to . . . confirm, but I believe them. They have her, and they want to shut me and my investigation down. If I don't, they'll kill her."

Jordan rumbled on the other end. "You can't do that."

"I'm in a pretty tough spot, Husaam. I can't let them hurt her."

"John, I have to tell you something," Jordan began.

"Wait," interrupted Savas. "You need to hear this. Things are far worse than we ever feared." He sat up straight in the chair. There was no way to explain the insanity. He'd just say it. "Air Force representatives told us tonight that Mjolnir has a nuclear weapon." The silence lasted nearly ten seconds. "Husaam?"

"How'd they get this? How does the Air Force know?"

Savas nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all. "It's one of _ours_. One of our own damned weapons. Somehow the Air Force screwed up, didn't secure some cruise missiles."

"Cruise missiles?"

"Yes, only one was lost in the end but with a helluva payload," Savas continued. "They've buried this from everyone, if you can believe it.

Jordan practically growled. "I can. How did they find it?"

"They didn't. Some kid, former soldier, sent photos with the serial numbers. He joined Mjolnir several years ago, but I guess this caper was more than he could stomach. He hasn't returned any attempts at contact. We know the missile's out there, that it's ours, that it's real. We know Mjolnir has it. But we have no idea where or what they are planning."

Jordan grunted. "Well, I can't answer the last, but I know where they are, John. That's why I'm calling. Check your email. You'll find the location. Bit south of the border."

Savas glanced at his cell phone. "Tampico, Mexico? What the hell's there?"

"Humid summers, petroleum, and General Francisco Javier Mina International Airport, or, more relevantly, some of the subsidiary airfields for cargo planes. Most importantly, that's where William Gunn is right now."

Savas looked over at Miller and shook his head. "How do you know this?"

"I broke into Gunn's office. Ripped his hard drive. From what you've told me, something terrible is unfolding there. We've got to act, and act now."

"I can sound the alarm and bring in the Feds. Now we know where they are. They wouldn't act on Gunn before, but with the lost nuke, you can be sure as hell they will now."

"Not fast enough. If I had waited for the bureaucracy to function, I wouldn't have this info. And I'm not waiting anymore. I board a flight to Tampico tonight. I'm heading to that airfield."

Miller cut in. "Husaam, if you're right and Mjolnir's there, that's suicide. And you're going to be thrown in jail even if you survive."

"Too much is riding on this, my friends. I can't stay put, waiting until the signal is given. Besides, as you tell me, the call you got said Rebecca is on her way to Gunn."

"That's what I understood," said Savas, the pain returning in full force.

"What do you think's going to happen once the location of that nuke is made known to the military?"

Savas was silent a moment. "What do you mean?"

Jordan sighed. "Once they finally get the machine moving, it's a potent one. They won't risk that bird getting loose. They're going to rain fire. Massively. No one will survive that assault, John. No one."
60

# Insurance Policy

The private plane taxied from the runway. Cohen sat in the back, her hands no longer tied, her face and lips still raw from the removal of the duct tape. Two men had been assigned to her, meeting her captors at the airport in New York, loading her onto the private plane, and flying with her over the last five hours. They said nothing to her, and she kept to herself. Her thoughts raced between panic and despair. She had never felt so helpless. She was being used against John and the FBI, that much was obvious—her life in exchange for an end to the investigation. It was the only possible explanation for the fact that she was still alive. Her lease on life was good for as long as she was useful in this way.

_We've rattled them._ She took some comfort in the thought that they'd succeeded in driving them to this. But it had also driven these terrorists to murder—horrible murders of people she cared deeply for. That was something that destroyed any satisfaction, and an anger and hatred for these killers, like she had never known, began to boil inside. She had been horrified by the deaths around the world perpetrated by Mjolnir, but most had been far away, images on television, abstract in a way that Matt, Larry, Manuel, and Mira were not. Her colleagues were forces of personality, links in the web of her life. Now they were gone, and the men responsible were holding her captive.

The plane taxied to a stop, and the two brutes onboard stood, bending sharply from the low ceiling. They nodded to her. She understood and rose from her seat, moving to the front of the plane as the door opened. She stepped down several short steps to the tarmac. A moist breeze blew across her, and she squinted in the bright sunlight. The air smelled like a disorienting mixture of kerosene and jungle, and she wondered where on earth they had taken her. _Somewhere south, warmer, and wet._ As if reading her thoughts, a voice proclaimed the answer.

"Welcome to Mexico, Agent Cohen."

She turned to her right, shielding her eyes from the sun. But she didn't need to see the well-dressed, lithe, and gray-topped form of the panther. She'd never forget his voice, full of intelligence, nuance, and ice.

William Gunn walked forward and motioned her toward a set of black town cars parked beside the airplane. He wore expensively crafted aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses, the cold gray eyes hidden behind them. He acted friendly, almost charming. _Like a snake before the strike._

"Please, won't you step into the vehicle? We've only a short journey yet to go, but you must be tired from your trip." The two men stood on either side of them. Of course the invitation was a farce. She knew she had no choice in the matter. She wondered why he maintained this pretense.

A man she presumed to be the chauffeur held a car door open for her. She stepped forward and ducked into the backseat, sliding to the far end against the door. The interior was cream leather, detailed wood panels trimming the sides. To her dismay, Gunn entered as well and sat beside her. The door was shut from the outside, and the driver got in and started the engine.

"We've prepared a place for you," Gunn said over the sound of the car as it pulled away from the plane. "It's comfortable, unusually so, for this area."

"Interior decoration for prisons? Seems a bit off your normal enterprise."

Gunn sighed and took off his glasses, folding them into a leather case. He stared forward.

"Agent Cohen, there are always unpleasantries. We do what we must because we believe in our cause. It's your misfortune that we needed this means to end the FBI investigation. To do that, we've had to neutralize several of its members. Your relationship with John Savas makes you a valuable asset to us in this regard."

" _Neutralize?_ You _murdered_ good people who gave their lives to serving others! You sit on your gold throne self-righteously, but you're just another gangster ordering his henchmen around."

Gunn turned slowly toward her, the gray eyes sharp as knives. He smiled. "Your emotion doesn't disturb me, Agent Cohen. I don't expect you or anyone at the FBI to understand, or rather, to accept the logic and necessity of what we're trying to accomplish. I won't debate it with you. I've seen to your needs and will make your stay here as decent as I am able."

"Nobel of you."

He looked forward again as the car was jostled by several bumps on the road. "I don't seek harm for harm's sake. I don't enjoy the deaths I've caused, Ms. Cohen. But I understand something you don't seem to. I understand that we're fighting for our very survival as a culture, as a people, as a history. Lives must be lost in this fight. As in any war."

The car stopped, and the doors on both sides opened. More armed men waited outside. Gunn stepped out of the car, pressed his suit flat again, and leaned back in to speak.

"We'll be calling Agent Savas soon to convince him that you're still alive. Please don't do anything stupid that will prevent us from proving that to him."

He turned and walked off. Cohen looked at the hulking forms waiting for her. She closed her eyes, trying to keep herself together. After a few seconds, she gripped the door handle and stood, opening her eyes to a small aluminum shack. Around her were several warehouses and storage yards for equipment and parts, all associated with the airport. The sound of planes lifting off and landing could be heard from behind her. Several men were carting crates from place to place. She stared at them. In another context, they could be young soldiers on a tour of duty. One stared across at her, and she looked into his eyes. They seemed decent; one would never suspect that he was a man working to murder the innocent.

Cohen scanned the area around her. Barbed-wire fences encircled them. Between the razor blades and the weapons at the sides of the guards, she knew escape was suicide. With that thought, she walked forward to the shack that would be her own personal jailhouse.

_For as long as I remain useful._
61

# Red Sky at Morning

The Van Wyck Expressway was deserted. Savas had made the journey more times than he could remember to John F. Kennedy Airport, but it had always been in daylight when the Van Wyck was packed and slow. At one-thirty in the morning, it looked like some scene from an apocalyptic film, orange streetlights casting a ghastly hue over the road, the occasional red taillights of another vehicle staring back like demonic eyes waiting for them ahead. They veered right onto the roadway circling the airport, dashing to the far right side to hit the exit they needed. Miller took the ramp, and the dark van pulled up to the JFK Cargo Facilities. The white "FBI" lettering was painted boldly on the blue of the vehicle and shone brightly in the security lights at the entrance gate. Miller drove with Savas riding shotgun, and in the back were Lightfoote and Rideout. A crazy day, becoming a crazier night, would soon get crazier still.

Savas had called in what was left of his team and brought them up to speed on the situation. They had devised a plan as insane as the world was at the moment. Lightfoote had found that the fastest way to get to Tampico was to hop aboard a cargo flight leaving at three in the morning. The next best path was taking a passenger plane in the morning to the Mexico City airport, then to the General Francisco Javier Mina International Airport near Tampico, or to throw in a third stop in Texas. None of these paths would get them to Cohen before the evening of the next day. Besides, there would have to be a lot of explaining for all these agents and their firearms to make that journey. Calls were likely to be made to FBI headquarters. It could end before it began.

It was Miller who cut through to the simplest, if illegal, solution—stow away on the cargo flight. It was direct, from JFK to Tampico, leaving at 3 a.m. and arriving a little after eight in the morning. Jordan had left already and would likely be at the Tampico airfield around that time. They had agreed to meet up and figure out what to do when they got there. _Simple plan._

First, they had to get on the plane. Lightfoote and Rideout would lead an "inspection" of the cargo flight. Miller and Savas would stow away during this examination, and Lightfoote and Rideout would somehow convince the crew and guards that the other two FBI agents had already finished and returned to the van. The two would stay hidden in the cargo section for the duration of the flight, jump out secretly after landing, figure out where Cohen was being held, and stop Gunn and his plan. _A perfectly_ simple _plan._

Lightfoote and Rideout would return to their office and sound the alarms. Around that time, the guards assigned to them might be waking up from their drug-induced sleep. Savas had hated slipping them loaded drinks, but for one hell of a headache, and the wrath of their superiors, they would be fine. At that point, Lightfoote would "discover" an email from Savas that let his FBI coworkers know what he was up to. He said nothing about Jordan. It wasn't his place to nanny him for the CIA. By the time the FBI and CIA had notified the military and the president and his advisers had confirmed a course of action, they would have had their chance to end it themselves. He just hoped to God they could pull it off.

_You don't know what you're getting yourself into, Johnny-boy_ , the voice in his head chided him. _Whatever it is, Rebecca's in it already_ , he answered back. The voice shut up.

The van stopped at the gate, and a tired-looking guard approached. He held a clipboard in his hand and sluggishly scanned the side of the van as he approached, then looked through sheets of paper on his clipboard.

"You figure he's looking under 'F' for 'FBI'?" quipped Rideout as Miller cast him a sharp look. Indeed, it did seem to them that this was exactly what he was doing. A look of dawning understanding crept over his features, and he glanced up with a furrowed brow at Miller in the driver's seat.

"FBI?" the young man said, with no attempt to hide his confusion.

"That's right," said the former marine in a tone sure to command the most reluctant soldiers. "These are Agents Savas, Rideout, and Lightfoote with me," he said, gesturing vaguely toward the back. He flipped open his badge case and continued speaking as the bewildered gate guard stared at the ID. "Son, we have some inside information that the terrorists who hit the city last month are transporting munitions using cargo carriers. We've traced them to these JFK terminals. We need to get inside and see your superiors immediately. We've got to stop these guys while we still can."

The guard stood there thunderstruck. "Terrorists?"

"Clearly this isn't something you're used to dealing with, but we need your most efficient cooperation on this. Please, take my badge back to your station and phone this in. Wake them up if they fell asleep. We need to get in and inspect these planes an hour ago!"

The man stepped back at Miller's tone but looked subdued. "Ah, okay, let me call this in. Hell, I'm not even sure who's on call right now." He stumbled over to the small station. Within ten minutes, the van was rolling into the main section of the JFK cargo terminal.

Savas was amazed at what he saw. He knew JFK was big, but he had never seen a cargo-dedicated area of an airport before. Enormous warehouses extended one after the other, lit dimly by streetlights in the evening darkness. Aircraft after aircraft, narrow and wide-body, upper-deck and belly. Inspection sites and rows of eighteen-wheelers from long-haul trucking companies lined up to unload. As they sped by, he noted massive refrigeration units for shipping perishables. There was even a fairly good-sized animal shelter designed for creatures far beyond house pets, facilities that could easily handle many large zoo animals.

At one of the main complexes, a man was standing outside waving them over. Miller parked the van.

Savas spoke. "File out with me. Look professional. There's strength in numbers. At least intimidation. Give him your most dour looks."

He exited and strode confidently up to the man, and the rest followed. Miller and Rideout stood beside him, serious and silent. They tried to ignore Lightfoote, who glanced around the terminal in her space-cadet fashion. _We should have left her in the van_ , he thought.

The man introduced himself. "Hey—I'm Robert Coon, night manager for the facility. Gerry called in. What the hell—you're FBI? This for real?"

Savas paused a moment, staring at the man, then looked back to the van and its bright-white 'FBI' letters that stood out in the light.

"Yes, sir, this is absolutely for real. I don't know what your guard at the gate told you, but we're on a high-priority mission. We've received information that the same terrorist group that's bombed this city twice and hit places all around the world is using _your_ cargo terminal to ship explosives across the country and to Mexico, planning new attacks in several major cities."

"Holy shit!" gasped Coon.

"There's nothing holy about it," said Savas. "We've got word that one of these planes bound for Mexico tonight is loaded with such cargo. We need to search that plane."

The manager pulled out his clipboard and searched through it. _Do they all carry clipboards here?_ Savas thought with impatience. The manager flipped through several pages and stopped. "Yeah, there's the flight to Tampico, Mexico, hangar 12A. That the one you're looking for?"

"The very one," he said. "I can't impress upon you how important this is, Mr. Coon. We need immediate access to that plane. And we need your complete silence about the matter."

The manager looked worried. "Sir, I don't know. You need to have a warrant or something, don't you?"

Savas stared impatiently as he might at a confused child. "Son, you've heard of the Patriot Act, haven't you?"

"Uh, yes, sir."

"Do you know what it says?"

"I dunno—something about tapping phones to find terrorists and the like?"

"The Patriot Act gives law enforcement new powers to stop terrorists from attacking this country. Phone tapping's just one part of it. Section 3.4 of the act specifically states that federal agents can, upon immediate threat to the nation, perform search and seizure without warrant."

"It says that?" the man asked.

"Yes, son, it does. It also states that interference with antiterrorist activities can be prosecuted as criminal aiding and abetting. I know that's nothing you would have to worry about, Mr. Coon, but it's important that no wrong impressions are given."

The young manager looked positively terrified. He licked his lips and nodded. "No, sir, there's no reason to worry. I'll take you over to the plane myself."

"Thank you, Mr. Coon. Your aid in this matter is greatly appreciated."

The manager walked briskly ahead of them, and the FBI agents followed. Miller leaned forward and spoke in a whisper to Savas. "Section 3.4 of the Patriot Act, John?" Savas looked fleetingly over toward Miller. "Effective section, isn't it?"

They approached a wide-body aircraft. It had an image of an American and Mexican flag, crossed, with the words "TransMexico" emblazoned in fiery red underneath. Robert Coon stopped in front of the plane.

"This is it," said the manager. "It was loaded half an hour ago, or should've been, anyway. Scheduled to depart in an hour. If you look, the bay is open, and the lift's still there. You just need to get up in there and you'll see all the cargo."

Savas nodded. "We'll get right to it. We'll be done in half an hour or less, I'm sure. If it's clean, we won't hold things up, I promise." He turned to the others. "All right, let's move in."

One by one, they ascended the lift into the belly of the cargo plane. Inside were rows of stacked crates with hardly the width for a person to walk through. All were labeled in English and in Spanish, housing items from foods to equipment.

"He's not checking up on us," said Miller.

"Good," said Savas. "Let's find us a place to hide out. Once we're in place, the rest of you hang out a few more minutes, then head back and try to convince the man that we've already left the aircraft."

Rideout looked over at Savas. "And if he isn't buying it?"

"We'll just have to play it on the fly."

"Nice," grimaced Rideout.

Twenty minutes later, Robert Coon walked back out toward the plane. He was uneasy about this whole thing. Patriot Act or not, he wasn't in the habit of letting people wander onto the planes at night, FBI, CIA, or NYPD. He had gone back into this office to look through the manuals, but he couldn't find anything to help him figure out what to do in this situation. But he wasn't about to wake up Sammy for this. He'd tell him in the morning. _I'd_ _better not get into any trouble._

As he approached the plane, he saw two of the agents, the girl and the thin one, walking back from the aircraft. The man waved him down.

"Mr. Coon," said Rideout, "we've finished our search, and I'm happy to report that there are no items out of the ordinary that we can identify. It looks like our lead was wrong. I want to thank you for your help in this investigation. It's a dangerous world now, and we've all got to work together to protect our nation." He extended his hand toward the man.

The manager nodded, shaking hands with the FBI man. "Okay, no problem. I do what I can. Where are the other agents?"

Rideout gestured toward the van. "They already headed back. Now, Mr. Coon, I just need a little information from you before we leave, for our investigation. Agent Lightfoote, would you join the others in the van and wait for me?"

Lightfoote smiled and nodded, and practically skipped back to the van. Rideout wanted to scream but turned the attention of the manager away from her.

"Mr. Coon?" he began, removing a notepad. "Let's start with your full name." The two walked toward the office door. Rideout glanced briefly back toward the plane.

Fifteen minutes later, Rideout opened the door to the van. Lightfoote was in the front passenger side. He closed the door and exhaled.

"I don't know how, but we did it. Hopefully John and Frank will go undiscovered until they land in Mexico. Meanwhile, you and I need to head straight back and sound the alarms. If you think this was a hard act, convincing FBI and CIA and who knows who else that we weren't involved with this is going to be a wake-up call."

Lightfoote smiled and squeezed his arm. "Oh, I don't worry, JP. This is easy."

"Easy?" he said, staring at her incredulously. _Sure_ , he thought. _Skipping easy._

At 3:15 a.m., a wide-bodied cargo airliner, owned by TransMexico, lifted off the runway at JFK Airport. Inside, it carried an assortment of perishables, canned goods, liquor, farm equipment, and two stowaway FBI agents headed to confront the terrorist organization Mjolnir.

Several thousand miles away, three hours after the cargo plane had departed Kennedy Airport, a black SUV sped down a highway in eastern Mexico. The driver didn't care to read the speedometer, now pushing past one hundred. The large vehicle trembled at that velocity, and the heavy metallic objects on the passenger seat bounced continuously. Jordan glanced over and pushed the weapons toward the seat back, then refocused on the road. The paling sky began to turn a purple-red and slowly, a brighter and brighter orange. A great flaming orb erupted in front of him on the horizon, and he slipped on a pair of sunglasses. His vehicle aimed straight for the orb, and he followed its mark, like some demonic inversion of the shepherds being led to the Christ Child. Only he wasn't a shepherd, and he carried not gifts but automatic weapons, and what waited under the point of the star wasn't a Holy Mother and Child but the minions of the damned who sought to bathe the world in fire.
62

# Bird of Prey

Cohen stared out the window. The rising sun ran from a deep red to a yellow-orange as it climbed over the horizon. Men fueled a black aircraft under the morning rays. She was no aviation expert, but it was clear the plane was an altered version of some standard design, with several modifications built into the belly. A long tubular extension ran nearly the length of the body underneath, with a set of thin payload doors. The exterior was coated in an unusual material, and the sun was absorbed, its light unable to reflect from the surface.

A mist rose off the vegetation in the distance, and dew covered the surfaces of the aircraft and runway. A line of soldiers guided a long crate up a loading ramp and into the plane. They moved solemnly, like marching in a long funeral procession for a beloved statesman. Beside the ramp stood three men at attention. Two were stout and of military bearing, dressed in fatigues, one older than the other. Between them in an expensive suit, with reflective aviation sunglasses strapped to his grayed and angular head, was CEO William Gunn. He watched impassively, and yet every muscle in his body was taut with a hidden energy. The three watched the crate being loaded onto the plane and remained unmoving as the soldiers finished, returning down the ramp and entering formation behind the fuselage.

She pulled herself away from the window. _What was that all about?_ The entire scene felt ominous to her, and she wondered what they were loading onto the aircraft.

Cohen sat, exhausted, legs crossed and eyes bloodshot, staring at the door and window of her prison. She'd slept fitfully in the makeshift bed they'd rigged for her—not a cot exactly, but not a bed. Even if she possessed a king-sized mattress and springs it would have meant nothing last night. She'd tried all the possible escape routes—the windows on either side, the door—but each had been effectively barred and locked. After an hour of blistering her hands, she'd given up. A refrigerator held cheap foods and drinks inside. She hadn't touched it. She'd simply grown more subdued, waiting until her captors would call on her again.

At four in the morning, she'd decided to kill the guard when he returned.

The ferocity of the decision, its clarity and her deep commitment to it, shocked her. She'd struggled at the FBI to reconcile her innate analytic personality with the occasional needs of violence, carving out a space in the Bureau where her contributions had increasingly focused on detective work, shying from inflicting pain and bloodshed. It suited her best. But now the monsters had come calling.

Cohen stood and walked to the cot, emptying the last of the tomato sauce from the food provided onto the white pillow and sheets. She checked the shape of the materials placed under the blankets. _Close enough_. It appeared as though a head and body in the fetal position were buried under a blanket. She spattered sauce along the floor, letting it pool beside the cot.

She checked her watch. _Almost time._ The guard had come at regular four-hour intervals, sometimes with food, sometimes to check on her status. She overturned several more items in the room, the space looking like it had been ransacked, the items littering the floor up to the doorway. Cohen picked up a jagged pipe, the metal ripped painstakingly from the foldout cot. She positioned herself alongside the door, back against the thin walls of the shack, breathing in slowly to calm herself. _Back of the head. All your strength. Don't panic. Strike cleanly._

Footsteps thumped on the makeshift stairs outside. Locks disengaged. The door opened slowly, the clutter blocking the way, the space barely enough for him to fit the tray of food inside. His head followed, body tensing as his gaze swept the interior.

"What the hell?"

Cohen held her breath. _Not yet. One more step._

The soldier's eyes settled on the shape in the bed. They darted to the red stains on the sheets and pillow, the pool on the floor.

"Ah, no, no, no. _Shit!_ " He tossed the tray down and stepped in.

Cohen swung the pipe with everything she had. It struck the man's head, her determined follow-through adding considerable force from the twist of her hips and shoulders. The impact rang, both brittle and organic. The soldier fell face-first to the ground, his nose shattering, blood seeping into the cheap carpet. He didn't move.

_Not done yet, Rebecca._

Cohen continued to pace her breathing. She walked determinedly to the man and removed his sidearm. _SIG Sauer, no safety, double action trigger, locked breech short-recoil._ She reeled through the weapons training and popped out the mag, yanking the slide. _Nothing chambered, mag fully loaded._ All she had to do now was not get shot while finding a way to escape the airport.

The door burst open. Cohen turned and leveled the weapon at the sound. A young man entered, his eyes wide. He stared at the body on the floor, then back to Cohen. He didn't move. Her finger twitched on the trigger—she'd seen him. The one who'd stared so intently at her the other day. The one with decent eyes.

"Am I going to have to shoot you?" she asked.

"Ms. Cohen?" he asked.

"Yes. Who are you?"

He took off his hat. "My name's Michael Inherp, ma'am. I'm sorry for all this, but it's Mr. Gunn's doing, his plan's to keep you here and stop the FBI and others from trying to stop the mission."

Cohen furrowed her brow. "I don't have a lot of time, Mr. Inherp." _What is he doing?_

His eyes widened and they darted about the room. "I'm the one who wrote to the army to tell them about the missile."

"What missile?"

"You don't know?" He looked bewildered. "There's no _time_. Please, you need to come with me, now. FBI and CIA agents are almost here. There's no telling what they're going to do. The Air Force is going to bomb everything. We've got to get you _out._ "

Her stomach lurched. "Please!" she said. "What are you talking about!"

"Ms. Cohen, this is _Mjolnir_. They've got a nuclear missile they just loaded on a plane. I notified the military just before sunrise. They said FBI and CIA agents are already on their way, that I had to warn you and them that they're going to bomb the airport! The rest of the airport's evacuating already, and it's a miracle they haven't noticed yet. _Please_ , we've got to go, now!" He offered his hand.

_Decide, Rebecca!_

She lowered her gun and grasped his hand. Together, they fled the building, sprinting down the side of the fence and away from the airplane. She had no idea where they were going or how this soldier planned to get them out without Gunn or his troops stopping them. _And FBI coming here?_ _During a military strike?_ _My God, can he be right?_ _A nuclear weapon?_

As they ran, the earth shook and Cohen stumbled from the tremor. She looked behind her. A fireball climbed skyward a hundred yards on the other side of the plane. Both stared at the darkening flames.

"Well," said Inherp, the wind blowing the smoke across the airfield. "I guess your friends are here."
63

# Acceleration

Jordan stood by the storage building, shielding his eyes from the flames. What was left of the fuel truck lay scattered across the tarmac, tendrils of fire reaching in several directions, threatening buildings, other vehicles, and the airplane.

_Close, but not close enough._

It had been a wild idea. He had coordinated with Savas and Miller once they arrived, communicating over cell phones. They knew that they were hopelessly outnumbered, but their main goal had been to disable as many troops as possible, create a distraction, and damage the plane. _Well, at least I got the first two done._ Indeed, troops were running around in total confusion, and many had been killed instantly by the explosion as Jordan had announced his presence and drawn nearly a dozen in pursuit past the fuel truck. But the plane was the most important target, and it was out of the blast radius, still guarded by at least ten well-armed soldiers who were now on high alert.

New York had reached them on their phones. _Wonderful invention, the modern cell phone_. A brave new world that rendered half the old tactics obsolete. Inherp had contacted the army about the missile, the location, and the plans to load it on a plane. Whatever the FBI and CIA thought about their going AWOL, right now they were the only assets on the ground. The Air Force was scrambling fighters from nearby bases, but by the time they got airborne and made it to the site, the plane could be gone. Jordan had seen enough to know that it had been converted into a stealth craft. How Gunn had recruited the expertise, found the materials, and pulled it off, he had no idea. But the man was resourceful, with deep pockets, and obsessed, and it looked like he had forged his own private invisible bomber. This thing would fly low and be invisible to radar. It wouldn't exist in the air. They couldn't let it get off the ground.

He reloaded his weapon and opened his cell phone. He had to get Savas and Miller on the line. _Time is running out._

Gunn leapt out of the hangar. "What the hell's happening?"

Fire belched into the sky from the explosion, and the noise of automatic weapons echoed across the airfield. His second-in-command bolted to his side with a machine gun.

"Sir, we're under attack, the plane was nearly destroyed. Looks like a fuel truck. Haphazard ground assault—likely a small force. But they're determined to hit the plane. They _know_ , William!"

" _How can they know?_ It's crazy!"

"The main airport's evacuated. Pilots denied permission to fly. That means one thing—a strategic strike, airborne, no doubt. The mission's been compromised, sir. We may have only minutes."

"Get the plane in the air now! Fuck air traffic control. If they've shut the airport down, the skies will be empty. They can't track the plane once it's in the air. Tell them to go, _now_!"

"Yes, sir! But we have to get you out! I've called in the helicopter."

"Tell the pilots to go, but get over to the plane! Work with the soldiers, pin down whoever the hell's doing this!"

"Yes, sir, but you'll be exposed!"

"I'll loop around to the helipad. I'll be fine. That missile is what matters. We can't jeopardize this mission! _Go!_ Meet me at the chopper as soon as the plane's in the air!"

"On my way!" The soldier sprinted toward the billowing smoke and the sound of gunfire. Gunn turned and jogged toward a row of cars near the building, his jaw clenched.

_They were too close to fail now!_

Savas placed the cell phone in his pocket. He felt like he was going mad in the middle of this chaos, coordinating multiple phone calls with the FBI and this Mjolnir soldier turned ally. The fire was spreading, igniting flammables in the hangar near the fuel truck. _This could get completely out of control._ The heat was searing, and his eyes were watering from the smoke. He leaned against the metal siding of one of the storage buildings near the fence and yelled over to Miller.

"This Inherp—he's with Rebecca. Looks like we're on the wrong side of this inferno, and he's two buildings down waiting for us. We need to get across, past the soldiers guarding the aircraft."

Miller nodded. "We've got smoke for cover. You reach Husaam?"

"No!" shouted Savas. "He's not picking up. I don't know if he can't hear or if he's engaged. He said he'd bring that plane down, but the explosion failed. Once we find her, we need to regroup and stop them from getting that missile in the air."

Miller crouched, keeping his body low. "Through the worst of the smoke. We might asphyxiate, but it'll be nearly impossible to see us in all that shit."

They both sprinted forward into the smoke and fire, weapons raised and at the ready. Plunging into the black cloud, Savas held his breath as long as he could. Soon he had to inhale. He choked, his eyes watering, the fumes burning his lungs. _I'm coming, Rebecca!_
64

# Takeoff

The engines on the aircraft changed pitch and throttled up significantly. Jordan looked at the machine, watching men scramble on and off and around the thing, confused, uncertain what to do. _No._ _They're going to get it out while they can!_ He couldn't allow it to leave, but he saw no way to stop it. He sprinted with his automatic toward the aircraft.

Two men were removing the wheel stops from underneath the plane. Most of the soldiers sprinted away from the aircraft. He was fortunate. They were moving to engage in the firefight erupting around them. _John and Frank_. Jordan knew they would need help, but he also knew that far more people might depend on him getting to that plane. The loading ramp of the plane began to rise. He was perhaps twenty yards away. He could reach it before takeoff.

Two of the soldiers slowed, noticing his movement. They turned slowly, stunned to see this man shoot like an arrow toward the craft they had just abandoned. Jordan lowered his automatic and sprayed a line of fire across them as he ran past. The two men had begun to aim their weapons but were caught in the spray, each hit by multiple rounds. They pivoted following the impact, then fell toward the ground, one rolling in agony, the other still and unmoving.

Jordan turned his attention to the ramp, ignoring the screams of men now alerted to his presence. Ten yards, five . . . the plane made a slow pivot toward the main runway, and he closed the remaining distance and leapt onto the ramp. There was hardly room for him. He rolled into the body of the plane as the ramp slammed shut and locked.

Jordan raised himself on his stomach and aimed his weapon. There was no one there. He paused for a moment and caught his breath. His leg was throbbing. He must have smashed it in the leap onto the ramp. He rolled over as quietly as possible and looked down. Blood stained his thigh next to a large rip in his robes. Red spread slowly across the white of the clothes. He raised his leg to his chest and gasped in pain, but he saw that the laceration wasn't too deep. He could function for some time, but the leg had just recovered from previous injuries.

He got to his feet slowly, gingerly, keeping low. The aircraft picked up speed and taxied to the runway. _Takeoff any minute._ He needed to secure himself until they reached a more stable altitude. He crept into the main cargo chamber as silently as possible.

The cargo chamber was split into two sections, divided by a sealed wall with a door. _Is this for when the missile is lowered into the underbelly?_ He saw the large crate in the center of the hold. To the side was netting of some kind attached to the walls of the plane. He limped over to it and lowered himself into the netting, using the ropes as a set of straps to stabilize him during flight. Just in time—he felt the plane turn ninety degrees as the engines throttled up. The pilots had reached the runway.

Several dead soldiers lay between the two metal storage buildings behind the hangar. Miller and Savas raced across the area as gunfire erupted around them, the ground exploding as countless bullets rained. Crossfire raged from the point they sought, as Cohen and Inherp sprayed bullets toward the source of the gunfire. The shooting slowed considerably but continued. Miller cried out and stumbled forward, rolling behind the shed. Savas was right behind him, slamming into the wall beside Cohen. She grabbed and held him tightly. Both turned toward Miller, who crawled beside them.

"Frank!" she cried out.

Miller swore like a sailor. "Tell this shithead of yours that I'm _done_ saving his ass! _Fuck!_ John, you're a gift of holes for me." He pulled out a large Ka-Bar knife from his belt and ripped open his pants leg. An ugly rip ran along his calf, and blood poured out of it profusely. Miller grimaced and staunched the wound with torn fabric. "At least this time they won't be digging any damn metal out of me," he hissed. "A graze. A deep fucking graze, but a graze." He stared into the sky.

"What's wrong?" began Savas.

"Listen!"

Two distinct sounds became clear. The first was the roar of an airplane. The other was the unmistakable sound of a helicopter approaching.

"The missile!" Savas yelled in frustration.

"It's gone, John. Look!" Rebecca gestured toward the sky behind them, and Savas saw a black shadow climb into the air and begin a slow roll to the left. "There's nothing we can do now. We'll just have to wait and hope the Air Force intercepts."

Miller leaned against the metal wall, gasped in pain, and spoke through gritted teeth. "Something else just as important."

Savas glanced at Miller. "What?"

"Gunn. The helicopter's got to be for him. Plane's off the ground. They're compromised. They're getting him the hell out."

Inherp turned toward them. "He's right! There's a helipad at the far end of the cargo section—that way!" he gestured. "Maybe three minutes. If he gets away, the missile's just the beginning! Stop him! Before it's too late."

Savas looked at Miller's leg. "Frank, can you make it?"

Miller tried taking several steps, but he crouched, almost falling, and cried out in pain. "Damn bullet's cut through the muscle, John. I won't make it in time. You two go. I'll stay with Rebecca."

"No," said Savas. "I'll go alone."

Cohen raised her gun. "I'm coming with you."

"No! Frank's wounded and you need to make sure that damn platoon doesn't come this way. Slow them down or I won't have a chance." She clenched her jaw but nodded.

Miller pushed Savas forward. "Move, John! The damn bird's almost here!"

Savas could hear the approaching craft much more clearly now. He gave one more look to Cohen and sprinted off toward the landing pad.

Miller's cell phone rang. "Yes?!" he called loudly into the microphone. As he listened, his eyes grew large. "What? Yes, I can, but, wait!" He looked increasingly shocked, and he called out, "Wait! Husaam? Are you there?"

Cohen and Inherp looked toward him. He stared at them with a stunned expression. "Well, I'll be damned. Husaam—he's _on_ the plane."

"How did he get on the plane?" Cohen asked.

"No damn clue," answered Miller. "We need to get the Air Force to call him now. He says he needs to deactivate a nuclear warhead."
65

# Hammer Strike

The takeoff was rocky, and the netting didn't offer the smoothest ride. The plane began to level off as he ended the call with Miller. Until he got the required expertise, he had a lot to do. First, he had to get to the missile. The crate was large and the wood thick. He'd need tools. He shook his head. He'd _really_ need tools once he got it open.

The tools would have to be onboard, somewhere. Jordan stood, disentangled himself from the netting, and scanned the cargo hold. _There_. In the corner, near the dividing wall in the cargo hold, was a metallic box on four wheels. _A tool case._ He limped up to the case and confirmed his suspicion—an elaborate tool set, with equipment he knew and much he had never seen and couldn't guess its use. As a gift, lying on top of the box, were several sets of large iron crowbars. He grabbed one and struggled over to the missile.

Despite the pain in his leg and the fatigue he was beginning to feel from the wound, in five minutes he had the top and side panel off the crate—enough to access the missile. _With the right tools._ Holding the crowbar in one hand, he limped back toward the metallic box and was about to open some of its top drawers when the door to the chamber opened. Jordan and a Mjolnir soldier stood face to face, not more than five feet apart. Both froze, but Jordan reacted faster and swung the crowbar upward, striking the man underneath his chin. His head snapped backward, and he fell to the ground unconscious. Jordan almost fell over, the stress the movement put on his wounded leg nearly too much. He righted himself and limped over to the door and closed it. There was no lock or doorknob, just a rectangular handle jutting toward him; the door itself opened outward. He grabbed several crowbars and wedged them inside the metal handle and across the divider beside the door. It worked like a barricade in an old castle. It wouldn't hold long. _But perhaps long enough._

He wheeled the tool cart over to the missile and parked it next to the warhead. _Now, how on earth did one open this thing?_

Andrew Bryant paced in the Operations Room at FBI headquarters. Angel Lightfoote and JP Rideout were there with him, as were several other members from Larry Kanter's former division, as well as representatives from the CIA and the U.S. Air Force. Everything was happening so quickly, _too quickly_. For better or worse, it was now centered at the FBI—Savas and Miller, and Mjolnir kidnapping Cohen, had seen to that. This made Kanter's Operations Room as good a congregation point as any. Live feeds to similar crises management teams at the CIA, the Air Force, and the Pentagon had been established.

Two monitors showed live satellite feeds from the airport. What had been much easier to see a little while before was now mostly obscured by smoke pouring from a large fuel fire. The dark plane identified by Inherp was nowhere to be seen.

The phone rang and Rideout answered. "It's Cohen," he said with a shout.

"Audio!" snapped Bryant. The call went live to speakers in the room.

"This is Special Agent Rebecca Cohen." The sounds of automatic weapons could be heard over the sound system. "We're under heavy fire from Mjolnir troops. I'm with Frank Miller and Michael Inherp. Miller's wounded and John Savas left to intercept William Gunn."

An Air Force major looked at Bryant. "Fifteen minutes until the fighters can engage."

Bryant nodded and spoke into a microphone around his neck. "Rebecca, this is Andrew Bryant, FBI. I need to know—"

"Wait!" interrupted Cohen. "The plane's taken off. I repeat, the plane has taken off. It's loaded with the missile. Husaam Jordan is on the plane."

Heads turned and voices mumbled beneath the background sounds over the speakers. The Air Force major spoke. "Rebecca—are you sure? The missile is onboard?"

"Yes! I saw it loaded myself."

"Do you know where they're headed? What's the target?"

"No, but something important. Something game-changing. Inherp believes it's intended to cause a world war."

" _Damn_ _it_ , Rebecca!" yelled Bryant, "we need to know where this plane's headed."

"Listen to me! Agent Jordan is _on the plane_. He just called Frank. He needs experts to tell him how to disarm the weapon! If we can't shoot the plane down, we can deactivate the missile!"

Chaos erupted as voices shouted over each other in the room and phone links. Bryant spun in a half circle, trying to quiet the babble, finding himself powerless.

"Everyone, shut up!" shouted Cohen, static erupting over the line. "We need someone from the Air Force to find an engineer _right now_ and connect him to Jordan. We're under attack. We have to move! He's the one you need to speak with. Get someone on the phone to him, now!"

The line went dead. A rough voice came over the speakers. "This is General Jim Richards. I'm instructing all Air Force personnel hearing this to get me a weapons engineer _yesterday!"_

The Air Force officers grabbed their phones and exited the room to make calls. Bryant placed his fingers to his temple. This was all getting out of his control. From of the corner of his eye, he saw the large monitors flash. He looked up. The satellite feeds were gone, replaced with a flat map of the world. Red dots were appearing in several places across the globe.

"Where's the feed?" called one of the CIA agents. Bryant looked around with irritation. _What the hell?_

Rideout glanced over toward Lightfoote, who was furiously working her keyboard. "Angel, that you?" She continued work but nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off the screen. "Angel, we need to focus on Mexico. Can you switch it back over?"

An Air Force officer back in the room shouted over him. "Tell her to get that satellite video back! What the hell's she doing?" Red dots were popping up in several places, and red lines were being drawn between them. Lightfoote appeared oblivious to the rancor around her. Rideout looked at the screen and understood.

"She's marking out the locations of all the attacks," he said.

Bryant shouted, "How's that relevant now? Damn it, Rideout, I've had just about enough of that little freak! Override her! Get the damned feed up _this instant_!"

Rideout spoke in a measured tone. "Andrew, I've learned to trust Angel's strange but often very important contributions. That's why Larry brought her in." He turned to his new boss. "I'm going to give this a few minutes. The satellite feed isn't going anywhere." Bryant glared at Rideout, who stared right back.

Across the world map, red marks appeared. New York, Caracas, London, Sudan, over the South Atlantic—digital thumbtacks at each of the sites of Mjolnir bombings. Red lines were now connecting nearly all of them, creating a shape with a clear structure, but one that wasn't identifiable to anyone in the room.

Bryant shook his head. "I don't see anything here, Rideout. This cartoon is wasting our time. Cut back to the feed, or I'll have someone remove her."

"Wait!" Lightfoote shouted, holding up one hand while working the computer with the other.

Bryant was about walk over and remove her himself when a digital image appeared on the screen, superimposed over the world map and the web of lines linking the attacks. The image was by now familiar to all in the room—an anchor shaped emblem, but flat at one end and curved to a point, a long shaft sticking out from that end. It was clearly a relic, old metal carved and weathered, the end of the shaft broadening out like the hilt of a sword, the face of a bird carved into the end. It was Thor's hammer.

Lightfoote manipulated the image, first turning it partially transparent to reveal the map underneath it. She then rotated it ninety degrees counterclockwise, resized it, and distorted it in each dimension slightly until the handle of the hammer rested on North and South America, the shaft extending across the Atlantic Ocean into Africa, and the head of the hammer landing on the Arabian Peninsula, with the sharp tip like a pointer centered on Saudi Arabia.

"What the hell?" said Bryant.

"It's pointing where, Angel, Mecca?" said Rideout.

Lightfoote rotated around, the large monitors behind her glowing with the image of a god's hammer laid across the earth. Her eyes were large and bright.

"Not pointing, JP." She looked across all the faces. "Smashing. The hammer is smashing."

The Air Force major was back in the room. "You mean they mapped out the shape of that thing in their attacks? Pointing to Saudi Arabia? Why on earth?"

Lightfoote shook her head again. " _Not_ pointing. _Smashing_." She looked over at Rideout for help.

" _Oh, my God_ ," he said. He turned to Bryant. "Get me Husaam on the line. _Now!_ "

Bryant looked stunned. "What's going on?"

Rideout looked at Lightfoote, and she nodded with her eyes wide. He spoke flatly. "I know what this attack is all about, Andrew."
66

# First Pillar of Islam

Jordan shook his head. He was glad he'd learned from his gang-years how to take apart cars—a skill used mostly for stealing them. To his astonishment, he'd managed to open up the missile housing and expose the warhead without incident. The missile was long, aerodynamic like an arrow. The warhead was fat and dull, a huge bullet the size of a laundry basket, housing the radioactive materials in a manner that would lead to the optimal explosion. The "physics package" was connected to the rest of the missile by numerous wires and circuits, and now Jordan knew he was completely out of his element. He was also nearly out of time.

"Where the hell's the engineer?" the gravelly voice of their mission leader called out near the cockpit, his eyes darting around in annoyance. He prided himself on an optimum of organization. The engineer had gone back to make sure all systems were normal on the missile. Not a trivial issue with what they had onboard.

They had all sat through the long briefings prior to the mission. Mjolnir engineers had employed a number of workarounds to defeat the multilayered safety systems on the missile and warhead. The military had become very good at making nuclear weapons impossible to detonate accidentally. Safety systems prevented fire, external explosion, or impact from triggering detonation. Safety codes and environmental detection systems ensured no warhead would go off unless it had been properly programmed with secret codes _and_ had been delivered in the way intended—in this case, fired within a cruise missile. Unless the proper acceleration, altitude, and pressure readings were in place, the bomb would not detonate.

Of course, they planned to use the cruise missile as the delivery system—it was perfect, and engineers had easily programmed it for the desired coordinates. Defeating the arming safety measures had proven far more difficult. Stealing the missile was one thing, nearly impossible. But stealing the codes _was_ impossible. The "permissive action link," or PAL lock, was a real bastard: multiple-code, six-digit switch, limited-try followed by lockout. Their cryptologists didn't have the luxury to get it wrong. But Gunn had recruited some extremely talented people. The engineers had rigged something that had bypassed the PAL lock. He didn't care to understand how. They said it worked; the missile was armed, although now in a fairly unprotected state, he had been told. Many of the key safety systems were no longer operational. _Best not to drop the thing_ , he thought with a smile.

The engineer was to keep babysitting it. _So where the hell was he?_

"I'll go have a look, sir," said a soldier next to him.

"He should have reported by now." The leader released his belts and headed to the dividing door.

Rideout yelled over to Bryant. "We've got him conferenced in from Minot. The line's not secure."

Bryant waved his hand dismissively. "That's been cleared. Put him on."

Rideout nodded toward them. "Captain Edwards, can you hear me?"

A voice spoke with a moderate static component. "Yes, sir. Loud and clear."

"This is Andrew Bryant with the FBI. We've got senior officers at the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Air Force listening in from several locations. You've been briefed?"

"Uh, yes, sir. I'm to talk a man through the disarming of a W80 warhead mounted on a cruise missile."

"That's it."

"Sir, is this a drill?"

Bryant looked over toward the Air Force men. They exchanged looks but remained silent. A familiar voice was heard over the line.

"Captain Edwards. This is General Richards, Pentagon. Listen to me well, son—this is _not_ a drill. We have an AWOL nuke in the hands of some very bad men, and we have a few minutes to walk a CIA agent through disarming it. We don't have time for more background. I need your very best, young man."

There was a short silence on the other end of the line. "Understood, sir. You've got it."

Bryant continued. "We're connecting with the agent now. Everyone, hold on."

Jordan heard a commotion outside the door. _How long do I have?_ He figured five minutes at best before they forced it open. His phone buzzed, and he pulled it from his pocket.

"Husaam Jordan, this is Andrew Bryant with the FBI—"

"Just tell me—do you have someone to walk me through this?"

"Yes, but wait! You need to know something first. We have determined the target for the missile. It's the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca."

Jordan was stunned. _Mecca?_ The holiest site in all of Islam. His stomach turned as a realization dawned on him. "The Hajj," he whispered. There could be more than two million visiting Muslims in Mecca performing the pilgrimage at this moment, plus another two million from the city itself. A massacre in fire of four million souls, a destruction of the center of Islam. A horror without precedent that would spawn horrors of retaliation across the world. "Tell me how to disarm this thing, then. Now!" he shouted.

Bryant continued. "Air Force Engineer Al Edwards on the line. Go, Edwards."

"Agent Jordan?"

"Listen, I don't have time to tell you everything. I've taken several photos with my cell and sent them to Rideout at FBI. Put them up and you can see what I've done."

Rideout cut in on the line. "Husaam—that's not going to work. He's in Minot, North Dakota. He can't see the monitors. Edwards, you by a computer?"

"Yes!"

"Your email, I need it now!" shouted Rideout. The captain told him. "Log into your account, I'm forwarding the images."

Jordan spoke through the pain in his leg. "I don't have a lot of time."

"Got them, sir. Let me have a look."

Jordan was startled by a loud crashing sound. He turned to the door. Someone on the other side was repeatedly yanking on the handle, and the crowbars were being smashed into the door and the wall. Already one was about to fall loose from the handle. He knew it was only a matter of time before the vibrations knocked them all out.

"Edwards—I'm here with the missile near a bunch of hostiles, and in about two minutes they're going to be through the door and on me."

"You opened it up well. Wow. They've run around or rewired nearly all the PAL circuitry, but the way they've done it, all the strong and weak safety systems around the exclusion zone have been bypassed. What a mess!"

"Speak English!" shouted Jordan. One of the crowbars made a clanking noise as it fell to the floor. He could hear shouts on the other side.

"Sir, it means that the warhead is sensitive to detonation by impact, even electrical surge. That's one unstable nuke you have there."

"Just tell me how to disarm the thing!"

"It's not going to be easy with what they've rigged. You need to ground yourself. Even a static charge and that thing will blow. Okay, first, you'll need—"

There was a loud noise from the speakers—first a crashing sound with metallic elements, then several staccato bursts.

"That's gunfire," whispered Rideout.

The Air Force major rose from his chair. "Oh, God."

Jordan fell backward, his shoulder and chest covered in blood, his hand barely holding him upright next to the missile. _Not enough time._ The pain was nearly overwhelming. The door had been yanked open, and two men had jumped into the chamber. Jordan had the advantage, initially. They had to negotiate the door, climb over the body of the soldier, and scan the area for him. He shot both but not before taking fire from a third soldier on the other side who had ducked back. Jordan thought he had hit him, but how seriously, he didn't know.

"Husaam!" shouted Rideout. "Are you there?"

Jordan righted himself and grabbed the tool cart with both hands. The front of his white robes was soaked red, and he felt dizzy from the loss of blood. He leaned on his elbows, aimed his weapon at the door, and spoke into the phone.

"Not much time now. I'm shot, badly. More coming." He gasped. "No time."

"Agent Jordan!" shouted Bryant. "You must disarm that weapon!"

Jordan's voice was barely a whisper. "No time. The Hajj . . . the Fifth Pillar . . . I wanted to go . . . God be merciful for my failure . . . tell Vonessa, good-bye."

"He's not going to make it," whispered Rideout.

Jordan reached into the tool crate drawers and pulled out a voltmeter. He ripped the wires out of the device and stumbled to the missile, crashing against the side of the crate, his blood smearing the porous wood.

A new round of gunfire broke out. The Mjolnir mission leader had leapt through the door and over the bodies of the other soldiers. His left arm was bloodied, as was his stomach, but he willed himself back into combat. He took aim and fired a burst into the Muslim's back. Jordan arched in pain and cried out. Miraculously, he held himself upright for another moment and inserted the wiring onto the circuit board as the soldier labored over to stop him.

"Get off the weapon!" he roared.

"I bear witness that there is no god but Allah," Jordan whispered to the circuitry, his legs buckling, sweat pouring over his face, "and Mohammed . . . is his Prophet."

He connected two regions of the circuit board with the leads. There was a small spark, then a terrible light.

"We've lost the signal," said Rideout.

"Damn it, get him back on the phone!" shouted Bryant.

Lightfoote was crying, staring up at the ceiling. Rideout held her. People spoke over each other, and Bryant simply roared again.

"Get him on the phone!"

Lightfoote looked at him and shook her head. Bryant was about to shout again when he was interrupted by a voice over the speakers.

"This is General Richards. Military satellites report the detection of a nuclear detonation signal in the air above the Gulf of Mexico. I'm told that the location is within the cone of probability for the aircraft that took off from Tampico airport. The explosion's almost certainly the stolen weapon. We'll end this crisis call now and work within our individual organizations. The president's been informed at every stage and is aware of its resolution. We've a brave man to thank for saving millions of lives."

The line went dead. Lightfoote wept in Rideout's arms. Everyone in the room sat in stunned silence. Recovering his composure, Bryant tried to mobilize his team.

"All right, people, it's over now. Let's get back to work."

Lightfoot wiped her eyes, staring at the screen in front of them, the image of Tampico airport back online from the satellite feed.

She whispered. "No, it's not over yet."
67

# Last Temptation

Savas stepped out from behind stacks of crates. His face was blackened with smoke and sweat. He panted, nearly out of breath, having sprinted from the firefight beside Cohen and Miller. The acrid reek of petroleum and fire left his throat raw, but every muscle was primed, alert for what lay before him. He drew his weapon.

Gunn was walking confidently toward the approaching helicopter, not more than one hundred yards in front of them both. A distance of fifty feet separated the two men. Savas aimed his firearm and shouted over the cacophony.

"Far enough, Gunn!" The CEO paused and turned to face Savas. "Don't get any closer to the helicopter. I'll kill you if you do."

Gunn didn't blink. "I highly doubt that, Agent Savas."

Savas held the gun steady. "And why is that?"

"Because you're an honorable man, and I'm unarmed, soon to turn my back on you. Will you discharge your weapon into my back?"

Savas stared into the cold, expressionless eyes before him and took several steps forward. "You've got millions of people in front of your weapon. You aren't unarmed, and I promise you, I'll shoot you in the back, in the front, or in the ass, if I have to."

"Effective and crude point, Agent Savas. But you really should put the gun down. Your son, Thanos, would want you to."

Savas felt his stomach tighten. "Leave him out of this, Gunn, or I'll kill you for sport."

William Gunn did not flinch. "But that's the truth, isn't it? Your son's death drove you to fight the madmen and their beliefs. My wife died that day, Agent Savas. She died someplace near your son, having fallen one hundred floors, doubtless in terror, pain, and panic, to be smashed and crushed, her body so broken that only fragments remained to be identified by DNA analysis. I, too, resolved to fight the monsters that caused this, and fight them we both have."

"You murder the innocent, you bastard! You're no better than they are."

Gunn displayed the first mild hint of anger. His nostrils flared, and his jaw set tightly. "In war, we don't blame the defenders for killing the aggressors. In war, it becomes necessary to take innocent lives at to protect many more lives. Bombs leveled Germany to bring down a madman, too late for six million Jews. Taking a hundred thousand more German innocents would have been justified to prevent that. The madmen of 9/11, their revolting organization, they're not rightly our focus. They're only a single branch of a tree with deep and strong roots. That tree is the barbaric religion of Islam, a religion that marched by the sword across the deserts of Arabia and the sands of Africa, to the very doorstep of Europe."

Gunn shouted over the helicopter, his words growing in volume as he spoke. "Now this beast stirs after centuries of sleep, threatening to devour the world! Europe and America will wait until thousands, millions, entire civilizations fall before to Mohammed's armies. _I will not._ I will strike back—not at a leaf, or a branch, but at the heart of this vile plant and wound it to its core. I _owe_ her that. You owe that to your son."

Savas felt dizzy, standing on the precipice of his own thoughts and soul, looking into an abyss that called and tempted him even now.

"That's why I'm here. You should be here with me, instead of holding a gun to my face, torturing yourself with the delusion that protecting Muslims from me is the same as protecting us from them! That can't be more wrong. We are the _defenders,_ John Savas. We wage a war of survival against a many-headed beast. But we're not chasing the heads stupidly. We're bringing fire to purge the creature from the world."

Savas shook his head, keeping his gun raised and aimed. "You can't set fire to the world to rid it of weeds."

Gunn took another step toward Savas, his eyes earnest, his tone nearly pleading. "Join me in this fight! There won't be any real change in your design, only in your means. We must change our means for any hope that order can finally defeat chaos."

"This isn't a Norse myth, Gunn! This is real! With real nations, real people, real chaos and death you're bringing. If you do this thing, it'll burn out of control."

Gunn stepped forward. "The first step, Agent Savas. Do you think we've built this organization only to blow up a few mosques and deliver one bomb, however potent? Our attacks, together with the world war to come, will ensure the total destruction of the Islamic threat."

Savas could hardly believe what he was hearing. "You _are_ mad."

Gunn clenched his jaw. "I can't waste more time with you. You won't stop me. My plan is too important, too close to your own desires. Kill me and you take from the world the hope for the deliverance that I bring. You'll betray your nation, yourself, and everyone who died at the hands of these murderers. Put the gun down, John Savas. You won't shoot me." Gunn turned and walked briskly toward the helicopter.

Savas shouted. "Don't make me do this!"

The CEO did not stop. Savas danced around the trigger, seeing himself in the retreating shape, knowing the man's pain, the knife's edge that separated their choices. But that edge had turned into a chasm. Savas had found himself in that darkness, grasped a hand that had pulled him from the abyss.

And he wasn't going back. He aimed the weapon carefully.

A black town car flew recklessly across his field of vision, coming to a screeching halt between him and Gunn. A blond man leapt out, and Savas reacted instinctively to what he saw by diving toward the ground. The older soldier landed sure-footed on the asphalt with a machine gun in his right hand and opened fire.

Shots erupted around Savas as he rolled desperately. To his amazement, weapons discharge came also from behind him. The bullets ceased and he pulled himself into a crouch, aiming forward. The assailant had fallen against the hood of the car, clutching his chest, sliding down the curve of the hood. He dropped to the concrete surface with a slap.

Rebecca Cohen walked slowly onto the scene, her face covered in soot, an automatic weapon in her hand. Smoke rose from the barrel. She was followed by Miller and Inherp, the former Mjolnir soldier nearly carrying the wounded marine. They stood, discombobulated, staring back and forth between Savas and the retreating figure of Gunn, not understanding the dynamic.

Savas rose, aimed his weapon, and pulled the trigger.

The single gunshot was nearly swallowed in the noise of the helicopter. William Gunn arched his back, paused a split second, then crumpled to his knees on the tarmac, rolling slowly to his side. The helicopter pilot panicked, throttling up and away from the site, leaving a blast of air and heavy silence behind. Savas approached the figure of Gunn and knelt beside him.

Blood pooled beneath the CEO. The bullet had been well aimed, entering near the heart. Gunn gazed upward at Savas, his eyes glazed, life draining from his body. His mouth trembled, his voice soft on the air.

" _Why?"_ he gasped.

Savas stared at the dying man. "Because we've got enough monsters in this damn world."

William Gunn slowly released a final breath, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he spoke no more. Savas looked up to see the others approach. He stood and embraced Cohen tightly.

She looked at the body. "He's dead?"

Savas nodded, pulling her away from the lifeless form, and turned to face the sea. "But he died a long time ago."

They held each other, gazing up into the blue as the sun reached higher into the sky. In the distance, another light grew in intensity, until it became a bright star vainly trying to rival the sun. The four stood there in the blowing wind, the sounds of flames and sirens ringing, smoke pouring across the airfield, watching the display of two stars rising in the eastern sky.

"Well, looks like something went wrong with their plan," said Savas. "Detonated a little too soon." He smiled at the others. His grin faded at their somber faces.

Cohen spoke. "Husaam was on the plane, John. He jumped on as it left for takeoff."

At that moment, several fighter planes blasted low over the airfield, shaking the ground with their sonic vibrations. They darted from the west heading over the sea, pulling into the sky between the two suns. The smaller star dimmed and surrendered its pretenses to the brighter light.

Savas closed his eyes. _So many deaths._ _Yet, so many deaths prevented._ He looked at the body of William Gunn—mastermind, wounded titan, madman. He thought of Husaam Jordan—Muslim, once an object of his hatred, who sacrificed his life for so many. He glanced over toward the car where another deluded soul, misled by William Gunn, like so many others, had just lost his life.

But the ground was empty. Savas drew his weapon. Cohen looked over cautiously. But there was nothing to be seen. The body of Patrick Rout wasn't there.
68

# No Kind of Fair

_T ENSIONS EASE AFTER TERRORIST PLOT FOILED_

_By Brandon Lewis and Thomas Fischetti_

_Associated Press_

_The_ _new month began_ _with hopeful signs across much of the world._ _The U.S. government's dramatic thwarting of the terrorist plot to use a nuclear weapon helped to restore relations between Western nations and the OPEC countries._ _With the lifting of the oil embargo, stocks around the world recovered dramatically, and military buildup in the Persian Gulf was reversed, decreasing tensions in what had become a highly volatile situation._

_Anger still boils underneath the surface in many countries, however, as leaders express dismay that the United States could allow a nuclear weapon to be stolen and not report the incident._ _With the explosion above the Gulf of Mexico, the current administration has been left scrambling to explain its silence, and congressional leaders of both parties have called for a thorough investigation._

_Meanwhile, questions still remain about the mysterious terrorist organization called Mjolnir. The revelation that the terror group was headed by the international tycoon William Gunn has stunned people across the globe._ _His death at the hands of FBI agents has not calmed fears, however, that the organization has been defeated._

_"There are too many loose ends, too many unknowns,"_ _said Senator Deborah Cholon, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee._ _"Gunn kept the governments of the world in the dark._ _He's dead, but is Mjolnir?"_

_The_ _FBI has issued no comment on this topic, but anonymous sources report that there is concern that the terrorist organization will re-form, and perhaps begin again its campaign against the Muslim nations._

_For the moment, most nations breathed a sigh of relief that the attacks have stopped, and that the escalating crisis has been defused._ _Even Cholon expressed optimism._ _"For now, because of the brave sacrifices of so many, we have reason for optimism in the coming year."_

A cold December wind whipped through the coats and scarves of the onlookers gathered outside a mosque in Queens. The fading light cast a grayish pall as the sun plunged behind the cityscape. Several hundred people stood before a symbolic _kafan_ , the ritual cloth folded neatly, the body of the deceased never to be recovered, vaporized by an atomic blast. An imam led the prayers, with the deceased's family, his wife and two sons, brothers and sisters and parents behind him, and friends and other relations behind them.

Savas stood close to Cohen in the sharp wind. For them, the service was also a remembrance of all those friends and coworkers who had died. Near them were Rideout, Lightfoote, and Miller, along with several others from the FBI and CIA who had known Jordan and had come to pay their respects.

They were not so far from Father Timothy's church in Astoria. Savas thought about the people around him—Muslim, Christian, Jew, black, and white—and he closed his eyes and said a prayer that this society might be given a chance to continue its mad experiment in tolerance. He opened them and listened to the words of the imam.

"It is said in the Quran: _Every man shall taste death, but only on the day of resurrection shall he be paid his wages in full._ No one knows what it is that he will earn tomorrow: Nor does anyone know in what land he is to die. Only God has full knowledge and is acquainted with all things. When the angels take the lives of the righteous, they say to them: ' _Salaamun Alikum_ , Enter Paradise! because of the good deeds that you have done.' Today we pray for a man who has done great deeds and who offered his life for the lives of many—our brother, Husaam Jordan."

There were muffled sobs and tears all around. Savas looked over and saw the two young boys, perhaps three and five. The older of the two was weeping; the younger appeared dazed and confused, afraid in this mass of strangers—his father nowhere to be found. _Sons taken from fathers, and fathers taken from sons._ He whispered something to Cohen; she nodded, and he quietly stepped away from the ceremony. He had yet to make his peace with God.

After the crowds had dispersed, Savas stood alone beside a rocky drop-off looking over the East River. _Not really a river_ , he thought, _but the sea._ He had always been drawn to the sea. _My Greek blood._ His eyes squinted against the sun and the salty gusts as he gazed over the snow-crested waves. The imam stepped to his side.

Savas looked him over—a tall and thin black man in his late sixties, trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, proud of bearing yet bookish, rectangular glasses on his face. Like Jordan, he wore the flowing white robes and the African kufi on his head. This was the man who had found Jordan in prison, then a violent gang member lost in a world of crime and death. He had shown him the light of Islam and had changed a young man's life forever. The imam had sponsored Jordan's education in prison and his college tuition when he was released. He was more a father to Jordan than the man who abandoned him when he was a child.

"Husaam told me that you are Greek, yes? Christian?" he asked. He still spoke with the accent of his native Nigeria.

Savas shook his head. "Holding on by my fingernails. Father Timothy might be the only reason I still go to church."

The imam nodded. "Yes, Husaam also told me this. Go to your priest, Agent Savas. Go to your Book. At such times, we must seek the will of God."

"I'm not so sure I like God's will. Whatever it might be."

The imam bowed his head. "You lost your son. There can be no greater loss for a father. Madmen of Islam took him from you." Savas tightened his jaw yet said nothing. "But now these Western madmen have taken a son of Islam, a son to me as much as my own son, one I pulled from the fire of his lost youth. A son for a son. Some would say a debt has been paid."

"They would," Savas echoed, gazing out over the water, his eyes fixed far to the horizon, as if seeing into a great distance. He spoke quietly but firmly. "But I can't look at it that way. Not anymore. Not after all this. That's the sort of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Husaam and my son, they were good men. Good men taken by those who didn't deserve to breathe the same air. Two sons were taken."

He looked over to Jordan's widow, Vonessa, and the two boys standing in the grass, then turned back to the imam. "But I see those two boys in the grass. Two sons were given. I don't know what kind of _fair_ that is, and it's not one that satisfies me very much, but right now, it's all I've got."

Savas turned from the edge and walked back across the field toward his car and the silhouetted form of Rebecca Cohen in the failing light.

# Epilogue

The freighter cut through the waves with tremendous momentum. The craft was weighed down by its stacks of cargo, giving it a heavy sail en route but a respectable profit at harbor. The captain of the craft looked down from the piloting room at the tourists who paid money for a "freighter cruise," a relatively new and low-thrills way to take to the seas. More and more captains were entering this market, and it allowed them to pocket substantial extra cash.

The cruise passengers were usually the very young, lots of college kids, low on cash but high on adventure, eschewing fancy and expensive cruise boats for container packing freighters. He was glad to see them. Not only did they bring him money he wouldn't have had otherwise; they brought some youth and vitality to a job that was as monotonous as any he could imagine. Besides, the young girls were something to look at in their miniskirts and shorts.

The captain's gaze paused and lingered over the group. He focused on the one passenger that did not fit the pattern. The man was older, in his fifties and traveling alone. He came onboard with a limp, and he seemed in poor health. But he was imposing, built like a tank, with a blond crew cut and a hard face. It made the captain uneasy to look at him for very long. He had asked the strangest questions, insisting that he had to know whether the boat would take a certain route, underneath the site where that plane with the bomb had exploded. The captain told him there was no debris to see, but the man had waved him off, saying he knew that.

The captain shook his head. There was no point in concerning himself too much with any one passenger. In all his travels, he had come to know clearly that there were all kinds of strangeness in human beings. The wind picked up strongly, cold even for the January Gulf weather. Many of the others went inside for shelter. The blond man did not stir. He simply gazed into the sky as the boat motored on.

_Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become one._

_For as you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you._

> Friedrich Nietzsche

_Where the offense is, let the great axe fall._

> Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Part I

# The Wraith

"Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice." —Samuel Johnson
1

# The Last Shall Be First

By the time he reached the razor-wire, the Syrian landscape had shrugged off the delusion of the irrigated greenery around Damascus. Here, the Old Man, the desert, could not be hidden and refused to be banished. Cold even in the oppressive heat, crueler than the scalped links fencing out trespassers, the sands smiled sadistically, remembering centuries of slaughter and dreaming of future screams of anguish.

For the man in the truck, gazing across the landscape, the screams returned to him now. Howling, gasped, panicked. His own and many around him. Images of dank stone, blood and waste-soiled cells. _Eyes. Faces_. Tormentors and their hideous tools. The weeping of grown men echoed inside his mind as the winds stirred the dry sands around his vehicle. He squeezed the steering wheel tightly, refusing their summons, determined more than ever to rise above their damage and demons. He had come too far to be defeated now.

He stepped out of the dusty pickup truck and slammed the door. Glancing over the barren land, he followed the fence line to the horizon. The entrance was at a large distance around the perimeter of the compound, hidden in part by an outcropping of desert rocks. His well-paid sources had been accurate: an entrance from the rear would likely go unnoticed. _And what madman would ever break into this place?_ He did not expect vigilance.

He moved around to the back of the truck and untied a dusty canvas covering the bed. Underneath were several heavy crates. He opened each, removing weapons and explosives, strapping them to his body, and moved to the passenger side of the vehicle. From the glove compartment, he removed a map, glanced at it fleetingly, and pocketed the ruffled pages. It was memorized.

Night fell quickly in the deserts of Syria. In the darkness and desolation, short metallic clips sounded and fell mute on the empty sands. As a shadow, he passed through an opening cut into the gray outlines of the fence and vanished into the blackness.

Through the sandy winds sweeping across the compound, lights twinkled from a handful of incandescent bulbs. Near the gated entrance, he left a guard inside a small shed, seeming to doze peacefully, the unnatural angle of his neck observable only at close range. Before him, a desolate stone structure was dimly outlined by the band of the Milky Way, a single window of light visible in the darkness. Voices could be heard, at times loud and rude, spilling clumsily from the room. Harsh, staccato bursts of laughter confirmed the presence of the prison guards inside. He darted past the window and pressed himself flat against the compound walls. He slid along the rough surface toward the door, arm raised, his hand ending in an extended, metallic cylinder. He made no sound until he spun and kicked in the flimsy wooden door.

He saw four men around a small table, cigarettes in their mouths, pornography and cards strewn haphazardly across the stained wood. As the door swung madly on its hinges and smashed into the wall, they jumped, confused, turning toward him. Even that small pause meant death.

He fired several shots in the confined space. The explosions were amplified and echoed throughout the stone chamber, spilling down the poorly lit hallway opposite to the gunman. Two of the men arched, their heads snapping backward as the bullets blew open their skulls. The whitewashed walls were sprayed red. As the other two men lurched upward and towards him, he spun, his right foot arcing like a sledgehammer coming down, whipping the nearest man backward onto the table. Glasses shattered, and cards dispersed as the guard rolled roughly and fell hard on the stone floor. The intruder channeled the momentum of the spinning motion, and his gun hand came whirling around toward the second man, who now stood unprepared, barely having obtained a fighting stance. His attempted blow was smashed aside, and his jaw shattered as the man's gun arm brought the metal crashing downward. All four guards now lay still around the table, two dead, two unconscious.

The assailant aimed his weapon at the guard near his feet, firing directly into his head. He then turned and aimed at the other prone figure, rendering a similar judgment. He studied the faces carefully. " _At night, five remain once the others leave for the day. And Mahjub works late."_ He didn't need to be told this by his informant. Yes, he knew Mahjub worked late. He would never forget. Nor would he forget his face. Mahjub was not in this room. He must be....below. _He had been busy, perhaps._ But not now. By now, he would have heard the shots. He would be afraid.

The assassin smiled.

Two floors below, buried deeply in the Syrian sands, a long hallway with numerous cells ran its soiled course. Broken men were locked behind stone-walled enclosures with iron doors. The cells were like graves: shallow pits scraped into the rock, devoid of light or even the space to stand. At the far end of the hallway, opposite the stairs, was a small room without a door. Inside Mahjub Samhan clutched a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. Both hands shook as he cowered behind an upturned table in the middle of the room. He cried out in a high-pitched voice.

"Kamil? Saif?" There was only silence. "Bassam? Nadeem!" He wiped the dripping sweat from his eyebrows and tried to focus toward the stairs. A solitary bulb dangled limply from exposed wires in the middle of the hallway. His left leg began to shake. "Answer me! Who is there? What is _happening?_ "

Before he could focus, a shadow sprang, an explosion slapped his ears, and the bulb burst. Shards of glass rained on the stone floor like small bells. A terrible darkness blotted out his vision. In panic, Mahjub screamed, firing shots wildly into the blackness.

A bright light leapt from across the darkness, blinding him. A sizzling rod landed only a foot away from the table. Momentarily confused and distracted by the fire, Mahjub stared down at the stick burning beside him. _Explosive?_ Too late, he turned his weapon toward the sound of rushing footsteps from the hallway, the searing afterimage of the flame obscuring his sight.

A gunshot rang. His right shoulder exploded in agony. His knees buckled, and he fell backward against the wall, releasing a howl of pain as he slid to the floor. He dropped the knife from his left hand and reached over to hold his injured shoulder, grimacing as he felt the warm blood coat his arm and fingers.

He squinted against the light as it was raised above his head. He saw a tall, dark shape behind the flare, a gun in one hand aimed at him. In a swift motion, the table was righted and the flare violently wedged into the rotting boards like a candlestick. The figure crouched beside him.

"You always were a coward, Mahjub," spoke the voice in accented Arabic. Trying to block the pain, Mahjub strained to place the origin. _Saudi? Pakistani?_ He stared at the face partially concealed in shadow. He had never seen it before. Light hair, blue eyes... _American?_ Nothing made sense. Had the Americans turned on them after all this time? Did they need to bury this operation so completely? With all the chaos in the nation, did they care so much now?

"You don't recognize me, do you, Mahjub?" the figure asked, almost with amusement. "How fitting, to lie here in pain, your death awaiting you, and not know the first thing about your tormenter."

Mahjub felt the panic well within him again. "Sir, please, don't kill me. Whatever we have done wrong, we can fix. We will not speak. We will disappear. Please, not like this."

Mahjub's eyes widened at the sound he heard. The man with the gun laughed. _Laughed at him!_ "Mahjub, how do you live outside this place?" The Syrian only looked at the gunman in distress.

"I mean, when you buy fruit at the market, mixing with decent people, or entertain your mother-in-law, do you think about breaking men's fingers? Sodomizing them? Do you think of blood and vomit when you stir her coffee? Do their screams, their pleas for mercy keep you awake at night?"

"Sir, no, please, I don't know..."

"You know," said the man, his blue eyes seemingly glazed over, frosted, utterly cold. The shadowed form whispered ominously, "See, I _know_ what you do, what you _are_." Mahjub felt his blood run cold.

"These poor men here," said the pale man, gesturing toward the hallway, "they don't know _who_ you are, but they know _what you are_." The man spoke with such venom, a snake's hiss. "It took some time to track you down."

Mahjub began to cry, clutching his blasted shoulder, grime and blood on his hands and face. A man with such power over others, now powerless, weeping like a child. "Please...."

There was no pity in the cold blue eyes before him. "Consider me more merciful than you ever were."

The man stood and aimed the weapon.

"No!" Mahjub began to scream, but a final gunshot ripped through his throat, silencing his cry as he fell against the wall. He gasped vainly for breath, his healthy arm at the gurgling wound, his eyes swimming, his feet kicking madly as he drowned in his own blood. It was over in less than a minute.

The assassin spat on the dead man, turned, and carried a set of keys from the room. One by one, he unlocked the doors along the hallway as he walked toward the stairs. He spoke loudly. "They're all dead! Leave now, if you can. God soon brings fire to this place!"

Soft sounds of bodies stirring could be heard within the cells. The hinges of one door ground behind him. When he reached the first step, he dropped the large keychain and ascended to the upper floors.

The truck made a startling sound in the desert night as he turned the key. _Twenty minutes_. That was enough. If they had not escaped yet, they were as good as dead anyway. He stared down at a small radio transmitter on the seat next to him. A red light blinked at the upper-right corner. He pressed the button underneath, and a bright orange glow flashed before him in the darkness. Several seconds later, the sound arrived, the rumbling blast from an explosion as the compound was blown into the sky, rubble and embers raining down on the dark sands.

_The last shall be first, and the first shall be last._

He doubted Jesus had meant it that way. He shifted gears and raced away from the inferno.

It had begun.
2

# Stay Alive

"Are we online?"

The voice was impatient, clipped, and embedded in the background white noise escaping from the small speaker. A young, athletic man was hunched over a monitor, the screen showing as much visual static as emanated from the incorporeal voice. He was seated in the cramped interior of a van, the windows covered with thick, polarized glass that rendered the stale space as dark as early evening.

"I want to have visuals on this," came an impatient voice over the speakers.

The young man suppressed a sigh and glanced to his right at the woman seated in front of the other monitor. She shook her head and gestured to her shadowed clothes.

"Almost there, Nexus. Mantis getting dressed and the camera's on her broach."

"The old bastard's not done yet? Didn't know he could keep it up that long. Mantis should get overtime for this job."

A status window appeared on the monitor, a blue bar marching across the screen. "She's activated the camera. Connection's coming up."

Lights and numbers flashed across the monitor, and a poor color image appeared of the inside of an expensive-looking hotel room. Centered on the screen was a tall, thin man with a crown of full, white hair like a lamp atop his dark business attire. He was straightening his red tie in front of a mirror, his words just discernible through the transmission.

"I'm sorry I can't stay longer, darling," he said, turning towards the camera, smiling. "This is an important meeting and then I'm off to LA."

The camera approached the figure, and two slender, tanned arms reached outward and hung around his neck. A feminine voice lilted coyly.

"Yes, George, first an important meeting, and then your other mistress in LA. I think we're competing more with each other than with Mrs. Sapos."

At the mention of his wife, the man's face tensed. "That wouldn't be a lie," he said, stepping backward, running a hand through his hair. His hand shook slightly. "I need a cigarette. Where are those damn patches the bitch makes me wear?"

"I'll get them," came the warm voice. The camera turned abruptly away from the figure and entered the bathroom. The hourglass figure of a long-haired brunette appeared in the mirror, a ruby broach affixed to her tight black dress. Her hand reached up to a box labeled "NicoDerm" and pulled out a packet, somewhat larger in size than the others.

Nexus spoke over the transmission. "She has the right one?"

"Yes, that's it," said the woman in the van. "It's as close in appearance to the real thing as we could manage, but it had to be modified for the desired dosage, which—"

"Yes! Quiet!" barked Nexus over their speakers. "Let it play."

The camera view had by now re-entered the room, and the white-haired man opened the plastic around the dermal patch, his eyes hungry. "Couldn't find the stupid box last night." He yanked his shirt over his upper arm and applied the white circle. Seconds later, he had rolled down the sleeve, slipped on his coat, and was at the door with his briefcase. He paused in the frame. "I've got to run. Think about Paris next month, Roberta. I know some special hotels. There's no one quite like you." The door closed behind him.

The young man at the terminal spoke. "The meeting is on the third floor of the hotel. He's late already. We'll switch to the monitors we have set up."

"This crazy idea better work. I told you I want to see this."

The young man wiped beads of sweat from his brow. "Yes, sir. It _should_ work. It's a modified version of FLAME with the surveillance modules installed. We infected his laptop as well as the smartphone of the lawyer from the ACLU."

"What damn good will the phone do?"

"We can at least get audio if we can't commandeer the laptop. But the laptop should be ours. FLAME reported back; it's there. The hardware is nothing weird, so we should be able to control the camera and microphone. Should be easier than what they were able to do in the Iranian enrichment plants."

"Should, should, should is all I hear! This bastard has done nothing but work to ruin everything we've struggled for. There are too many variables in this operation!"

"Lophius wanted it that way!"

There was a short period of static over the speakers. The woman gazed straight ahead with a shocked expression. Nexus finally spoke. "Careful using that name at any time, Sentry. He gets it his way, of course. He wanted this to be an accident, so _it will be_. Nothing to trace back to us. Especially not with what we've been hearing about recently."

The young man swallowed. _So, it was true_. _We're being hunted._

The woman waved her arm. "FLAME signal! We've got the laptop. Feeding the video stream. Now!"

The screen lit up with the familiar image of the older executive, the hotel trimmings replaced with a well-equipped conference room. A smart screen was embedded in the wall behind him, and it displayed an image of a prisoner in orange clothing surrounded by armed soldiers. He stood with his back to the image, staring down at the laptop, a perplexed look on his face. "Odd, the camera light's activated." He smiled with an embarrassed expression, looking past the camera. "Sorry, gentlemen. And gentlewoman! Damn technology isn't my forte. You can be assured I'm not recording you, and the camera will be on me the entire time."

The executive paused a moment, putting his fingers up to his neck, as if checking his pulse. He looked almost seasick.

"He's showing signs of poisoning," came the woman's voice.

"Explain," said Nexus.

As if forgetting that she interacted with someone located elsewhere, she leaned forward and gestured to the monitor, tapping places as she spoke. "Discoloration around the fingers, his breathing is labored, and he is sweating. There is a beginning of pallor. Disorientation will set in next."

"Will it be _enough_?"

"Without a doubt," she said clinically. "Nicotine is one of the most poisonous pharmacological substances known. It's ten times more toxic per unit mass than arsenic. We've given him a dose of two hundred milligrams of the modified compound. One hundred cigarettes worth. It will enter his bloodstream very quickly with the transdermal penetrants we've spiked it with."

"Does the modification reduce toxicity?"

"No, as long as it's fresh. It severely decreases the half-life in the blood. But Mantis would have prepared it this morning. She was well briefed. The compound is maximally active right now, entering his system. In four hours, it will have broken down into smaller compounds, none of which are tested for. He'll be dead way before that. There will be an elevated nicotine score in the lab results from what hasn't hydrolyzed, but nothing high enough to cause suspicion."

On the screen, Sapos resumed speaking, sounding as if he had just come up a flight of stairs. "As you know, we've been working to use our money for some good in this country. I personally have had enough of these rights violations in the name of national security." He paused, wiping his brow and catching his breath. He swayed slightly in place. "Invasion of privacy, indefinite detention, enhanced interrogation—they are practices for North Korea, not the United States of America."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, dragging it across his wet brow. A voice from behind the camera came through. "Mr. Sapos, are you feeling OK?"

Sapos smiled wanly. "Must be coming down with something. Feeling a little under the weather all of a sudden."

"He's still standing!" clipped Nexus. "It's not going to be enough!"

"Wait!" said the woman. "It takes a few minutes for the levels to reach the lethal dose. He's panting. His respiratory functions are severely compromised."

The executive continued, his words beginning to sound slurred. "So, I have gathered you here—representatives of the ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch—to make an announcement. A generous gift."

He stumbled, steadying himself on the chair in front of him, his eyes beginning to swim in their sockets. "A gift for you....to continue.... the fight. Dear God, what's wrong with me?"

The figure disappeared from the screen, a dark blur plummeting to the floor. A loud thud sounded, along with gasps and anxious chatter erupting from others in the room. Several figures swarmed the region in front of the camera, bending down to the floor.

"He's going into convulsions!" yelled one.

"Damn it! Someone get paramedics here right now!"

One set of eyes focused in on the camera, the head cocked to one side. The face drew in closer.

"We might be blown, Nexus!" said the man in the van.

"I see it. Trigger the FLAME erasure module. Burn it from the hard drive and the smartphone!"

There was a flurry of keys clacking and an emphatic smack as Sentry struck the "enter" key. "Command sent! Protocol engaged."

The screen flickered and went dark. All the commotion and sound from the conference room ceased. The interior of the van fell still and silent.

"You're sure he's dead?" asked the voice over the speakers, the static pops jarring in the new quiet.

The woman nodded. "Very high probability. We'll know for sure soon. He's too important for this not to get out quickly."

"Not important anymore," said Nexus triumphantly. "Top-flight work, both of you."

"And Mantis," said the woman. "She played him like an artist."

Nexus laughed. "And she'll be well paid. As will the chemists."

A cell phone buzzed, and the young man pulled it out of his suit pocket. He scanned the number and then stared at it, horror-stricken. "Jesus. _He_ 's calling." His voice quavered.

"Who?" hissed Nexus. The woman in the room looked over confused.

" _Him_ ," whispered the man, as if the unanswered phone could hear. " _Lophius_."

"Answer it!" cried the woman, her eyes large.

The young man pressed the touch screen and entered a code. He cleared his throat. "Sentry speaking."

A faint mumbling sound could be heard from the phone, and the woman leaned slightly forward, her body tense as a rod.

The man looked up and spoke to the microphone. "Nexus, he wants to know why you aren't picking up."

"The secure connection doesn't allow it from this device! Tell him that, and tell him the mission was a success."

"He says he hears you." The man's eyes widened. "He also says to break everything down. Immediately."

" _Everything?_ " came a surprised voice over the speakers.

The young man looked terrified as he recited. "Yes, everything! All queued missions are aborted. All assets to go underground. _Maximal threat_. He's says you'll know what to do." He stared at the phone and put it on the desk in front of him. He pulled his hand back like the device might burn him. "He hung up."

"What else did he say?" asked Nexus.

"That it's the worst. More confirmed kills. And...and that the program may be terminated."

There was a long silence in the van broken only by the tense breathing of the occupants. The woman leaned over to the microphone. "Nexus?"

"Lophius is the boss. We're no longer on offense, people. Time to circle the wagons and hope to God we weather this storm." Neither person in the van spoke. "Do as he says! Break it down and disappear. You're on your own until we contact you again."

"What do we do until then?" asked the man, a bewildered look in his eyes.

"See if you can manage to stay alive."

Static broke out over the speakers. The voice did not speak again.
3

# Bringing Guns

Miguel Lopez tossed clothes and other items into a duffle bag almost violently, tearing shirts and pants out of the closet, ignoring his wife's pleading.

"Miguel, please!" she shouted, following behind him as he darted to the drawers, continuing to throw things into the two bags open on the bed.

"What's going on? Dear God, Miguel, talk to me!"

He bent over and zipped one of the bags, his athletic frame moving in a fluid motion. He paused and turned his head toward her, speaking softly. "There isn't time, Maria."

"Isn't time?" she asked incredulously. He resumed his frenzied packing. "Isn't time to tell me why you've suddenly gone crazy on me? Packing up like you're leaving me? Is that it, Miguel? Are you leaving me? Is there someone else?" Tears flowed over her cheeks as she began to cry.

"I wish it were that simple."

She stared at him, half crazed. "Simple as leaving me for another woman? What on Earth are you talking about, Miguel? _You can't do this_!"

"Yes!" he shouted, silencing her with a look of such intensity that she felt estranged from him, as if another, far more threatening man than her husband occupied the same flesh. "Yes, Maria, I _can_. I must. I'm sorry. God knows, I'm sorry for so much."

Shaking her head slowly, she backed out of the room. Crossing the threshold of the doorway, she turned and ran down the hall. _She's flooded_ , thought Lopez as he multitasked, zipping shut the second bag, turning, and closing his bedroom door. Quickly, he stepped into the closet, reached above the upper shelf, and removed a wooden panel in the wall. Reaching into the open space, he pulled out an unusually wide briefcase, rotated it, and dropped it on the bed.

Kneeling down, he entered a combination and popped the case open. Inside, metallic surfaces glinted, reflecting the lights of the room. Two weapons occupied the lower portion of the briefcase, gleaming in the black velvet. On the right was a standard government-issue Glock .40 caliber: a lightweight, polymer-framed, workhorse firearm. On the left, occupying fully two-thirds of the case, was an MP5K submachine gun, less than five pounds, able to fire fifteen rounds a second up to twenty-five yards. Ammunition magazines were embedded in the upper side of the briefcase. He pulled out each weapon, checked them over quickly, and returned them to the case. They would have to do until he reached the safe house, until he was better equipped.

He stood and turned back to the closet, reached again into the recessed hole in the wall, and removed a black shoulder holster. Behind it, sheathed in leather scabbards, were several large hunting knives. One would be enough.

"Oh, my God."

His wife stood in the doorframe, her tear-stained face frozen as she stared at the open briefcase. Her lower lip trembled, and she sought his gaze. Their eyes locked, but he said nothing. Slinging the holster on, he fastened it tightly, removed the Glock, slapped a magazine into place, and holstered the weapon.

"Miguel, who were those men?" Her voice was flat, emotionless.

He turned back toward the briefcase and closed it. He picked up a light jacket from the bed and slipped it on, concealing his firearm.

"Those men you were reading about yesterday, Miguel. _In the paper!_ " Her voice jumped in pitch and tone. "I _saw_ you reading the article. You just froze on the photograph. And then– _this!_ Who were they, Miguel? Oh _God!_ Why are you taking _guns?_ "

He slung one bag over his shoulder, grabbed the other in his right hand, and took the briefcase in his left. Moving toward the door, she stood in front of him, blocking the way.

"Not like this, Miguel. You can't just leave like this." Again tears were forming in her eyes. "What will I tell the girls? _Please!_ They'll be back from school in an hour!"

"I love you, Maria," he said, his eyes toward the ground. "Tell the girls I love them, too."

Grimacing, he brushed her aside and moved quickly down the hallway.

" _Miguel!_ " came her low and agonizing cry. The primitive call dragged on as he walked out of the house, scratching into his mind as he approached a black four-wheel drive SUV.

The door squeaked open and then slammed shut, and Maria Lopez sank slowly to the floor against the wall, weeping uncontrollably. Outside, the SUV coughed, the engine turned, and her husband screeched out of their driveway and down the road.
4

# Black Ops

Father Francisco Lopez placed the chalk down by the blackboard and dusted off his hands. Diagrams of regular three-dimensional solids decorated the board, along with several neatly written equations. He placed his hands on the back of the desk chair and looked out toward the students in his class.

"Make sure that you have the right limits on these – remember, the idea is that the volume of the solid will be swept out by the two-dimensional surface that runs through its length. In this example, of course, it's a circle running through the length of the cylinder. Some of the other shapes might be a little more tricky."

Students shifted restlessly in their seats. Few eyes were turned toward him.

"Any questions?" He scanned the young faces of his classroom. There was only silence. "Fine." No questions either meant he was a rare genius lecturer or they were tuned out. With a suppressed sigh, he assumed the latter—surfing the net on their smartphones under the desks, text messaging, or just daydreaming. _Did students simply daydream these days?_ He hoped so.

"Finish the practice set for chapter seven, and I want you to read once through chapter eight before the next class. All of this is AP test material, folks. It's important."

Students began to stuff their backpacks, engage each other in conversation, and generally begin the hustle to their next class.

"These integrals will be on the final, too!" Lopez shouted over growing din. "Math Team practice has been moved to _Wednesdays!_ Don't forget!"

He gave up and let the tide sweep through the room as he began to erase the board. As the diagrams disappeared, he felt his own energy drain as well, the distraction of teaching now giving way to the host of concerns swirling through his mind.

It had been a difficult week – his usual teaching load, a marriage, two funerals, and tonight's coming mass. He had already met twice with the local city council, pleading a case for Hispanic families who felt terrified by the new Alabama anti-immigration laws. _US citizens_ , he thought bitterly, who already were becoming second-class citizens because of the fears of immigrant workers. And the laws were achieving their goals. Fields were full of rotting harvests because no Americans wanted the jobs, schools with dropping enrollments, and businesses sucker-punched in a recession as the workers took their pay to other states. Meanwhile, he had to physically restrain a third-generation Mexican-American mother of four who practically attacked the mayor after her sons were picked up for "driving while spic." _Papers, please._

Hanging over everything was the constant reminder that his Catholic school was bankrupt. The Church had decided to close it down. _They protect pedophiles in their ranks and turn children out on the street!_ He felt like a heretic once again, crossing himself as he stacked his lecture notes. _Have we failed you, Lord?_

He tugged absentmindedly at his thick salt-and-pepper beard, then rubbed his eyes. In his early forties, he felt older, even if he didn't look it. He still had a full head of lush black hair from his Aztec ancestors, but his beard had begun to gray. His broad shoulders were hunched as if from the emotional weight he carried. These days, his eyes were often bloodshot, a product of sleepless nights worrying about his school and parish. His body was exhausted from serving as the parish janitor, maintenance man, and, recently, construction worker as he had rebuilt substantial portions of the aging dome. By himself. Budgets cuts, one after the other, had forced him to shoulder more each year. Stamina was at an all-time low.

He held out his hands, the muscled forearms accentuated by his dark skin, his palms broad and fingers thick. He knew he looked more like the stereotyped Mexican laborers than an ordained priest and mathematics teacher. He could see it in the mirror after a shower, his naturally thick musculature broadened additionally from years of performing a majority of the manual labor around the church. He could also see it in the eyes of his white neighbors, the double takes when people realized that he wasn't the hired help. He wondered how many more years he would be able to rebuild the parish when it fell into decay, and, when he could no longer, if there would be anyone left in the church to replace him.

He tried to shake off these worries as a midlife crisis, a product of seeing half his life gone by and the second half perhaps filled with a litany of sorrowful events. The Catholic Church was struggling. He was struggling. Sometimes, he wasn't sure who he was anymore. He felt his hand playing with the rosary in his pocket. _Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen._

His cell phone rang, startling him. Exhaling, he disentangled it from the rosary beads and entered the passcode. "Father Lopez."

His adrenaline spiked. "Maria?" he said, trying to speak over the shrill shouts coming through his small speaker. "Wait, wait! Slow down a minute. He's gone? Gone where?"

His eyes narrowed as the voice continued, hardly less shrill.

"What do you mean you don't know? I don't understand."

Again the shouts over the phone, and Father Lopez could only shake his head. "Maria, hold on. You're home? Can you wait? I'll be there in ten minutes."

The drive felt surreal. He had raced out of his office to the raised eyebrows of several nuns, threw his bag and disheveled stacks of papers into the backseat of his rundown Toyota Corolla, and likely gave the impression of a drag race start as he flew out of the parking lot.

The Catholic Church does not have the presence in Alabama that it does in other parts of the country, but his parochial school in Huntsville was still sequestered on a large parcel of land. He was driving quickly, however, and it didn't take him very long to be out on the parkway, then to the interstate, flying toward Madison ten miles an hour over the limit, hoping he wouldn't fall afoul of some particularly exuberant state trooper. _They love to nail a priest._ The early spring greenery of the countryside flashed unheeded in his peripheral vision.

He tried hard to focus on the road but was assaulted instead by the words of his brother's wife, her panicked voice and unbelievable narrative. Miguel fleeing home? Armed? It was crazy. His older brother was the hero of the Lopez family. Football star, soldier, consultant for the government. _Superman_ , Lopez thought, experiencing again the ever-present sense of failure. _Always in your shadow, Miguel._

When his brother had returned home from Washington, he had left the power and intrigue of the Northeast Corridors to settle back into the slower rhythms of the South. Father Lopez had hoped other things could be left behind as well. He had hoped it might mean a new start for his brother, for the family. _A new start for both of us._ Even if Miguel had avoided speaking with him, at least both Lopez sons could be present at family gatherings. It had been a start, one Father Lopez had hoped would lead to reconciliation. Perhaps a slow one, but time did heal many wounds.

One panicked phone call threatened all that, and he prayed to God that something terrible hadn't happened to Miguel. Time had been forced into a wild overdrive, like the wailing engine of his rundown car racing down I-65. _We always stumble and stall, and then stand shocked when the bell tolls._ Horns blared as he roughly steered to the right lane and took the turnoff toward Madison and his brother's house.

Maria came running across the lawn even before he had set the emergency brake. Even after several children, her stunning figure was intact. Lopez had watched men of all colors and stations follow her as she walked: tall, statuesque; a refined Basque face accented with long black hair and a Flamenco dancer's stride. The glances were often envious toward his brother when the two were together.

Today, she was a wreck, her normally well-coiffed hair was in disarray, her face was pale. Her eyes were red and raw. She crashed into him, holding him tightly, hot tears running into his shirt.

"Francisco, I'm sorry," she wept. "I didn't know who else to call. Something's terribly wrong."

"Maria, let's go inside."

They sat in the sunroom. The kids had been sent off to her mother's place. Maria Lopez sat still and composed, her emotional outburst now tightly under control. He watched her intently, listening to every word, as she recounted the events from earlier in the day.

"After he left, I didn't know what to do. I told the girls they would be spending the night at their grandmother's house. I came back, hoping to God I'd find him here again, that he'd say he had overreacted. Francisco, I'm _so_ scared."

"It's going to be okay, Maria. He's just likely working through something right now."

Her face hardened. "I know what you're thinking, Francisco. It's what I thought at first, too. But it's not that, it's not an affair. I'm sure of it."

Francisco Lopez only nodded, although the thought _had_ crossed his mind as well. He thought he knew his brother, whatever their past differences. The Miguel he knew was still very much in love with his wife and would never have abandoned his family. He was sure of that. But the Miguel he knew would not have packed up in a day with loaded weapons and left his wife in tears. He wasn't sure what to believe anymore.

"Has he talked about anything? Things bothering him?"

"No. Lately, he's been so strangely silent. But I'm his wife. I _notice_ things. He's been obsessed with the news, with the _obituaries_. He tried to hide it, but I'd catch him poring over the obituaries in the paper. I found hundreds of trips to papers' obituary sites in the web browser history."

"Was someone he knew sick?"

"I don't know," she said, throwing up her arms. "He never mentioned it. Why would he have to be scouting for deaths in thirty different papers across the country? But that's what did it, what set him off today."

Lopez merely raised his eyebrows in confusion.

She leaned in close to him, her face earnest. "He found a name, a death. After that, he started freaking out, packing! I went to his computer and looked it up. Nothing much, just a small notice of a pilot in Maine whose plane went down last week. _In Maine_. No one I've ever heard of. But that was it. He was searching for a name, or something, and found it. It's like it pushed some button. Francisco, we have to find him."

Lopez sighed. He didn't know what to do. "We should call the police, explain to them what happened, and see what they recommend." She only nodded, a desperate look in her eyes. "I'll stay with you until we got this a little more mapped out, but tonight I have the special evening Mass. I have to be there."

"Yes," she said sadly. "I always hated missing it. Miguel hasn't set foot in a church since we were married."

Father Lopez nodded but said nothing.

"I've never seen him quite like that. When he left. Hesitant. Uncertain. Questioning everything he was doing. I'm not sure how to describe it."

Father Lopez waited as she lost herself in thought.

"He was _scared_ , Francisco, I could see it. He tried to hide it, but I know him." She shook her head slowly, in disbelief. "Miguel _scared_. Francisco, when was the last time you remember him being afraid of _anything_?"

He sat quietly. It was hard to believe. Miguel Lopez was a man who had run over people on the gridiron, "that Mexican boy" who could bend a metal bar with the strength of his arms. He had likely killed many men in Kuwait and yet had come back from that conflict without a scar. No post-traumatic stress syndrome. _Nothing_. He had never even spoken of it. His brother had been a slab of granite. _Did he finally break? Was it all inside him for so long, and these deaths triggered it? Were those deaths soldiers he knew?_

It didn't seem to scan. Could he have been so deeply wounded while functioning so normally for years on end without some sign? There had to be another explanation.

_What in God's name could have scared you, Miguel?_
5

# No Mercy

The last tendrils of light faded as dusk blanketed the well-manicured lawns of an unremarkable suburb of Washington, DC. Children spilled by on bicycles or in small groups laughing and running across familiar lawns, the first insects beginning their chanting as the sky turned slowly from orange to deep red and purple.

A BMW pulled into the driveway in front of a medium-sized colonial on the corner of the block. The garage door in front of the vehicle opened automatically, and the car pulled inside. A trim man in a business suit stepped out and walked briskly onto the pavement leading to the front door of the house, clicking the remote, and closing the door to the garage. He approached the mailbox and reached in, removing a handful of catalogs and thumbing through several envelopes as he inserted the key to the door and stepped into his home.

As the door closed behind him, he paused for a second, staring straight ahead, then placed the pile of mail on a small table. Inside the house, it was nearly dark, the outside illumination faded, but he did not turn on any lights. For several seconds, he stood immobile, only a raw tension in his body indicating that he was alive.

With a sudden motion, he lurched to his right, removing a firearm concealed in his suit. A shadowed blur from the left caught his arm before it could aim, and a knee from the darkness was driven into the man's stomach. With an expulsion of air, he dropped the pistol, bringing a fist up in a blinding jab toward his assailant. The shadow pivoted and moved closer to the man so that the strike missed just behind the head, the arm deflected by the free hand of the attacker. The shadow twisted the man's arm downward, tearing ligaments and inducing a gasp, and then pushed the man backward. Shaken from the damage to his arm, the man stumbled but quickly planted his back leg and assumed a fighting stance.

The living room was filled with a blur of hand motions, as if hundreds of bats had materialized, noisily flapping their skinned wings. Fists and open-hand attacks darted and jutted forward and from the side, each assailant parrying and countering, the blocked blows sounding short but crisp slaps. Panting breath and gasps accompanied the sounds of impact.

But the injured man was handicapped, his damaged arm slow in both attack and defense. Soon he was overwhelmed, and the intruder penetrated his defenses with a sharp jab of fingers to the neck followed by a kick to the side of the knee as the injured man grabbed his throat, emitting choking sounds. The kick to the knee was solid, the joint popping. Instinctively, the choking man took most of his weight off the injured leg to preserve balance. The intruder dropped like a weight to the floor, catching himself on his hands, and then brought his leg around like a propeller. He kicked out the good leg from under his opponent, and the man flipped backward, losing his balance completely and plummeting to the ground with arms flailing toward the ceiling. He crashed loudly through a glass coffee table in the middle of his living room.

As his assailant advanced, the man rolled over the shards of glass towards his kitchen, cutting his forearms, and climbed quickly to his one good knee. He reached toward a set of large knives hanging over the counter.

A powerful kick caught him in the ribs, several snapping from the impact, and he was thrown onto his back, stunned as his head hit the floor. In the seconds it took for him to regain focus, the shadow had moved over him. A weapon was aimed at his head.

The shadowy figure pushed a chair between them, simultaneously drawing the shades in the window and glancing outside. Satisfied, he sat, his face only partially visible in the darkness. He kept his attention sharply focused on the bloodied man groaning on the floor.

"You didn't run like the others."

"What good would it do?" grunted the man, trying to prop himself up on the nearby wall, partially succeeding, then sliding down toward the floor again, his battered arm and broken ribs making it impossible to support himself for long. Giving up, he lay there with his head at an angle against the wall, appraising his assailant.

He saw the outline of a man of medium height and enormous strength – wiry like a martial artist, yet sizable and imposing, broad shoulders perched above a solid chest and narrow waist. His facial features appeared almost delicate in the poor light, high cheekbones prominent, the elfin features belying the muscular form below. His hair was very light, perhaps blond. His eyes, so visible in the close-quarters combat, were a strange blue of a hue he had never seen before. In this darkness, they almost appeared to shine like those of a cat.

"You didn't call for help."

"We're all alone now. Isolated. No one would come." His breathing came in short spurts, the pain of his broken ribs constricting his efforts. "We don't exist. Nothing we did ever happened."

"But it did. And this time, there are consequences." The wounded man stared in bewilderment. "You don't know who I am."

From the floor, he strained in the dim light, staring at the fine features, the light hair, cat's eyes, and shook his head. "No. They're calling you the _wraith_. Whispering about you in the halls at Langley, and much more among us outside. _The shadow that kills_." He coughed again, a rattling in the airway that indicated a serious injury. "But now that I see you," he managed at last, "you are only a man."

"A man once, really a boy, who did not know you, or why you took him in the dark of night, or where he was going. _Hangar No. 3_. That boy saw the sign, right before you placed a bag over his head. That boy didn't know what would happen to him, and when it did, why. A journey that changes a person, Agent Stone."

The man looked again at the shadow behind the gun. "It doesn't make sense," he said. "I would have remembered you. You don't even fit the profile."

The blond man smiled. "Not anymore."

"I'm not going to know who sent you, am I? Or why."

The response was cold. "No."

The assassin's words struck him like another blow. He had at least expected to know why his life would end.

"The others were more afraid."

The man on the floor coughed roughly, a trickle of blood on the side of his mouth. A lung had been punctured.

"I'm plenty afraid. But it's been too long in this business. I've done too many things. I figure I've got it coming."

The blond man stood from the chair and aimed the weapon. The enormous silencer on the end gave the gun an almost obscene appearance.

"Yes, Agent Stone, you do."

Three sharp spits sounded in the small kitchen, and the form slouching against the wall slid heavily to the floor. The blond man stepped away from the body and walked into the dead man's study. On the desk was an open case into which he placed the weapon. He turned to the man's computer and powered it up. As the machine booted, he quickly removed the outer casing, his progress rapid despite the black gloves he wore. Within seconds, he had access to the motherboard, and he returned to the case and removed a small device alongside the weapon nearly the size of a portable hard drive. With a set of connectors, he linked the device to the board and returned to the monitor.

As the login prompt waited for input, he flicked a switch on the device. For several minutes, the small machine sat perched like a tick on the motherboard of the dead man's computer, while a blur of characters swept through the login and password fields. A green light appeared on the tick, and the assassin had access to his victim's files.

In a short period of time, he had what he was looking for. Two addresses appeared on the screen, and he checked them against information on a smartphone he carried.

_Lopez, Miguel. 1904 Westmore Ave, Huntsville, AL. 14 Mountain Brook Rd, Gatlinburg, TN._

The wraith's targets had been particularly close. He had done his research. Stone would be his friend's undoing.

He closed all applications on the computer, shut it down, removed his device, and replaced the cover. He returned to the kitchen and stepped over the pooling blood on the floor, flipping the light switch on his way out.

Everything was moving according to plan.
6

# Confession

The last of the parishioners exited St. Joseph's, and Father Lopez released a suppressed sigh. _Lord, forgive me, but I'm tired today._ _My heart isn't in it._ Switching off the main lamps, he left only the dim candlelight near the altar to illuminate the marble statues. Whatever confusions were boiling inside him, he did love his parish church. An unusual design, harkening back to ancient times, perhaps, with a more curvilinear shape and few windows or open spaces. _Now it feels like a catacomb_. He tried to imagine the early Christians worshiping, hiding from Roman and Jewish persecution. _Those were saints._ He put away some of the prayer books that some parishioners had discarded haphazardly and inhaled deeply. _What have we become?_

His eyes were caught by something across the pews. In another tribute to older ways, he saw that the stone by the confessional had been moved. He stood straight. _At this hour?_ But there was no denying it. He saw a shadow within.

Father Lopez left the prayer books for later and walked over to the booth. He entered the side reserved for the priest and sat. "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." He awaited the petitioner.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty years since my last confession."

Father Lopez gasped. "Miguel? What—"

"Francisco, just do it."

Lopez paused a moment, shocked at the turn of events. His missing brother, _here?_ His brother hadn't been to church since they were children. _Why was he here?_

"Miguel, I think another priest would be a better choice. Talk to me outside as your brother. Maria's worried sick."

"I can't go to anyone else, Francisco. That's impossible."

His brows furrowing, Father Lopez leaned forward. "Why can't you go anywhere else?"

The shadowy figure on the other side let out a sigh. "Look Francisco, I know I gave you hell for your choices in life. I know this is hard for you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all that. I really am. I was young, and I thought you were a fool." A grim laugh coughed through the divider. "Lessons are often taught harshly."

"Miguel, I don't understand."

"I can't go anywhere else, Francisco. I can't talk to _anyone_ about this. I shouldn't even be here. I'm probably putting you in danger."

_Danger?_ What in the world was his brother talking about?

"Some things should never have been done, Francisco. Whatever the fear." His brother paused, and Father Lopez could almost feel the weight under which the words were spoken. "The world seemed to be falling apart. _I just wanted to protect us all, Francisco_ ," came an intense whisper and then a deep breath. "We crossed lines."

Confession wasn't supposed to be a transference of guilt, but it felt as if he had always absorbed the transgressions of others. He felt part of the confession and shared in the torment of their soul. Perhaps it was a small taste of what the Lord had known on the Cross. Father Lopez felt the weight of his brother's sin descend upon him.

"I can say we were following instructions, because we were, but I know that's a cop-out."

Father Lopez had always wondered what his brother did working for those contractors in Washington. Everything was _top secret_ ; at family gatherings the older Lopez child was the source of constant guessing games. Some thought Miguel simply played the security-clearance card because of ego. Father Lopez had disagreed. He had grown up with his brother. He knew when he was lying, when he was honest. Before seminary, when Father Lopez had been an idealistic young man unsure of his path, the brothers had fought vehemently. They had polarized themselves and mocked each other's pursuits, almost defining themselves in carving out opposing lives. _The priest. The soldier._ God or country. On so many issues, the two seemed in conflict.

At this moment, he felt no triumph at what his brother was confessing. _Miguel, what have you done?_

Miguel Lopez shook his head. "We had choices. Like anyone. I can't run away from that." He laughed grimly. "Looks like there is no running away now. At least I drew one line in the sand."

"What choices, Miguel? What actions? What line in the sand?"

"There's not much time left, Francisco. I had to come. To tell you—you as a priest, in case there can be some forgiveness for me. And, finally, to tell you as my brother."

"To tell me _what_ , Miguel?"

The shadowy figure coughed the words out, forcing through pride or tears, Father Lopez couldn't tell. "That you were _right_ , Francisco. In the end, after everything, you were right."

The door to the confessional swung open abruptly, and footsteps rapidly moved away. Father Lopez rose and exited, but not quickly enough. His older brother was too fast. A dim shape shrouded in a flowing coat was all he could see exiting the church. By the time he reached the church doors panting, the lot was empty, and his brother was gone.

The stars shone coldly. He felt a chill, like a cold voice whispering, telling him that the figure would not be coming back, telling him that what his brother had really come to say this evening was _goodbye_.
7

# Gatlinburg

Miguel Lopez noted that the air was thinner and that the vegetation had begun its subtle change from pure deciduous to a mixed pine character. The mountains around Gatlinburg, Tennessee were not very high, but even at this altitude, he could sense the changes – changes in the air, the smells, the soil and rock, trees and game. Miguel Lopez was unusually good at sensing his environment. It was what had kept him alive for so many years when others had died. In street fights, in war, and in many dangerous circumstances ruthlessly concealed from public knowledge.

His shiny SUV rested in front of a dilapidated gas station. Two young attendants waited on him. They flashed him hostile looks as they filled the tank and cleaned the windshield, telling him more than the camouflage pants and Confederate flag on their caps. For men like this, his Central American good looks were anything but welcome. _For them, I should be pumping_ their _gas,_ he thought with a chuckle. That's why he always insisted on full service.

His professional eye had already canvased the station. The men were armed, but the shotguns were racked inside the building, foolishly displayed like trophies. Given the overall disarray of the place, he doubted they were loaded. It would likely take them five minutes to find the shells if they needed them. _Clueless boys who fancy themselves hunters._ Miguel Lopez had often been a hunter, and at times, prey. _But never fleeing such a deadly predator._

Closing the door, he cranked the ignition, shifted and pulled quickly out of the station. He had been on I-75 for most of the day, then taking short skips on small roads to US-441, which had brought him into Gatlinburg. Normally, it would have taken him only four or five hours to make the journey from northern Alabama. But he had definitely not traveled anything like the crow flies.

Yesterday had been spent in a long diversion, countless back roads, quick turnoffs, constant observation. He had to make sure he hadn't been followed. If he had been, he might have attempted to lose them, or better, turned the tables and set an ambush. Become the predator. But he had seen nothing. He was alone.

Turning northeast, he finally began the drive toward the old cabin. It had been in the family since before he was born, and as very small children, he and Francisco had spent many vacations there. His father, an immigrant engineer who had been recruited right out of Mexico City to fill the growing staff of Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center during NASA's heyday, had done well in his adoptive country. He had loved America so much, disregarding the prejudice and difficulties everyone of his heritage faced. Lopez did not fool himself. His father had been an elite, a near genius who had helped build the space shuttle orbiter engines, working with international teams of physicists and engineers from Europe, Asia, and America. He was well paid. And he had done all he could to fit his young family into the strangeness of American life. He had even bought a cabin in the Tennessee mountains.

But it had been abandoned – too old, too far, and too much trouble once his sons had grown. His father had never even bothered to sell it. _Or maintain it,_ he thought and smiled. It had cost him a lot of work and money to bring the cabin to the condition he required of it. He had told no one. Why he thought there was a need for a safe house had no rational answer. It was that part of his mind that had kept him alive, the part that sensed vulnerability and constantly sought ways to reduce it.

The large vehicle strained as the grade of the road steepened. He reflexively glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nothing, and returned his gaze to the road in front of him. The family's mountain cabin was the perfect solution. He had nearly rebuilt the entire structure, to a different set of specifications. The walls were reinforced with thick steel, the windows of bullet-proof glass. Security systems spread like a web from the cabin into the neighboring woods: cameras, microphones, and motion detectors, all feeding back into a centralized control module in the cabin itself. Underneath the floor, he had built a storage room that housed an armament of weapons from high-powered assault rifles to grenades. Somehow, some part of him sensed that it would all be needed someday. That day was now.

He didn't know why this was happening. That it _was_ could not be denied. The victims, one after the other, were all known to him. They had run the secret operations together. They had handled the cargo as a team. They had followed orders. Orders from above that told them that this was necessary, that this would save the lives of potentially thousands of Americans. This was a war, even if the form and manner of its execution was unlike anything ever seen before. In war, you followed orders; that much he knew from the battlefield. _But sometimes, things went wrong_.

He knew "Why?" was a dangerous question. There were often no clear answers in the land of shadows, where programs hidden from the rest of the government, devoid of accountability to the American public, were formulated, established, and put into motion. He knew better than to seek any help. He was alone.

But he was not ready to die, not with a family he loved and that depended on him. Not now.

_Let them find me in the mountains. Let them come to the cabin._

He stepped more firmly on the accelerator, the SUV shifted into an angry overdrive, and jumped forward along the road as it climbed into the forest of pines.
8

# Pale Rider

The ride back from Huntsville was mostly quiet. Father Lopez piloted the vehicle through the rush-hour traffic. His brother's wife sat in the front passenger seat, her face a valiant effort to conceal the weariness she felt. For two days, they had called friends and relatives, followed up on every contact in their address book, and fired emails to Miguel Lopez's several accounts at work, Google, and Yahoo, hoping that he would check. If he did, he did not respond. No one had seen or heard from him. He had simply vanished.

Maria Lopez had pulled the young girls from school for the remainder of the year. With only a few weeks left, it didn't matter anyway. Not in the context of her husband disappearing. Not when she felt her family was falling apart. Her daughters were staying with her mother once again. There were questions – so many questions. Questions she didn't have any answers for.

Today they had made the rounds of several police stations in the local towns. They had even made a trip over to the FBI Resident Agency in Huntsville. The story was the same there, as well. They couldn't file a missing person report, couldn't launch an investigation on an adult unless there was a clear indication that he was a danger to himself or others, or that he'd gone missing under conditions that indicated a danger to himself. It didn't matter that this was completely out of character or that Miguel had loaded himself with weapons. He had gone voluntarily, and they weren't going to be able to make a case that a Southern man who had taken firearms with him was in a dangerous mental state. One of the police officers had laughed it off, said that maybe her husband needed some "man" time in the woods hunting. It was ludicrous. They were on their own, completely dependent on Miguel himself contacting them.

"He's being cruel," Maria said almost to herself.

Father Lopez grimaced. He didn't know what to say. But he had to admit, his brother seemed to be acting with little regard for his family. "We don't know what's going on, Maria. Miguel's always done his best for you and the girls. Maybe he's messed up right now, I don't know. But I'm sure whatever state he's in, he thinks that he's doing what he can for you." He didn't sound convinced of that even to himself. "You should go up and stay with your mother. Being alone in the house is going to drive you nuts."

"I can't, Francisco! What if he comes back and I miss him? I've got to wait there."

He didn't want to tell her that he thought very much that Miguel would not be coming back until this was completely sorted out. _Whatever this was_.

"Where would he go, Francisco? I mean, let's assume he's not running out on me, or something. What if he _were_ afraid of something, of someone, maybe. What if he went into hiding? Where would be safe for him?"

"I've been asking myself that for the last few days," he said, pulling off the highway, and entering the manicured suburban sprawl of Madison. His brother had few friends. He never spoke of favorite locales, vacation spots, or hideaways. Miguel Lopez was not one to dream out loud.

"Wait a second." The priest pulled the car to a stop in front of a large field. "Vacation spots."

"What was that?" asked Maria.

Father Lopez felt far away in thought as he spoke. "When he was a kid, Miguel just loved this old cabin my family used to go to."

"The one in Tennessee?" she asked. He nodded in agreement. "He mentioned it a few times."

"We haven't been back there in over twenty years. I don't know if the place is still standing. I don't think Dad ever sold that off, though." He shook his head. "It's crazy. Why would he go there?"

His brother's wife looked out over the field. "It's the only idea we have, Francisco."

"Yeah, and a five-hour drive up into the Smoky Mountains on a wild goose chase." She turned to him, and he could see the desperation in her eyes. "But, maybe one I should make, just to check it out."

"Would you, Francisco?"

He smiled and patted her on the arm. "Of course."

Two hundred miles away, sequestered in the green mountain massifs of Tennessee, a decrepit Ford Mustang pulled up to the Pine Ridge Motel. The vehicle matched the run-down establishment, its rusted metallic contours blending with the unpainted wood and corroded iron structure, the busted taillights a cousin of the broken-down "No Vacancy" sign that hung at an angle from the side of the building. The door of the Ford opened slowly, and a blond man in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt stepped onto the gravel lot. He was broad enough to be a lumberjack from one of the local logging companies, and he ambled into the reception area like a fatigued veteran of long hours with a chainsaw and heavy pines.

Impatiently, he rang a small bell on the counter. A middle-aged man of about the same height but twice his weight ambled into the room and placed himself on the other side of the counter.

"Can I hep ya?" he said with a powerful drawl.

"Got any rooms?"

"Jist you?" he said, looking behind the man, expecting to see someone else, hoping to see something as well built as this man, but of the other gender.

"Yup."

"All right. It'll be forty a night, an' we don't 'quire no credit cards."

The blond man smiled. "That's good. Ain't got any."

The visitor pulled out a fifty and dropped it on the counter. The clerk threw him back a ten with the room key, staring a moment as the visitor grabbed the keys and money.

"Looks like ya burned yer arm good."

The man looked down to where his sleeve had moved up on his arm, revealing a brown region of skin above his wrist. It looked like a burn of some kind or a severely discolored birthmark.

"Fixin' my engine."

The man behind the counter nodded. "Number 8. Cable's out, so there ain't no TV. We got hot water in the mornin's. You want breakfast, there's Mary-Lu's up the road."

"Thanks."

The visitor walked back outside to his car. He opened the trunk and removed what appeared to be a heavy suitcase, as well as a large tool case. Closing the trunk, he carried the cases to room eight, unlocked the door and stepped inside.

It was what he expected—filthy, broken down, and bug infested. An ugly sore and contrast to the beautiful vacation resorts that dotted the area. The mirror in the bathroom was cracked, and the toilet looked ready to be condemned by the health inspectors. But it was out of the way. Invisible. It would do.

He shut the door. His shuffling gait altered dramatically and took on an intensity and quickness uncharacteristic of the role he had just been playing. Leaving the cases on the bed, he opened the suitcase and removed a small leather satchel. He carried it into the bathroom and placed it on the stained sink. Reaching inside, he grabbed several bottles, as well as a large white tube. Uncapping the tube, he squeezed a toothpaste-like cream onto the discolored region of his arm, and rubbed the material over the brown spot until it was full covered. He then washed his hand. Removing a spool of plastic wrap from the bag, he cut off a clear square and taped it over the treated region of his arm. He then returned the materials to the satchel. Rolling up his sleeves and unbuttoning his shirt, he examined his skin carefully. After several minutes, he shook his head nearly imperceptibly and buttoned his shirt. He had waited too long this time.

_I've been busy_.

Bending his head to the mirror, he examined his scalp. He combed through with his fingers, eyeing the roots carefully. There was no discoloration. His hair grew slowly.

He grabbed the bag and returned to the bed, leaving it beside the large suitcase. Reaching inside again, he removed a large plastic box, resembling those that fishermen use to carry tackle, and placed it on a table by the window. He pulled the shades together, sat, and opened the case, revealing an assortment of devices and tools, as well as what appeared to be white putty wrapped in clear plastic. He looked over the detonators, counting them, and estimated the quantity of Semtex. _More than enough_.

He took the large box from the table and placed it back on the bed. Reaching into the suitcase again, he removed a laptop computer and a box about a foot wide in each dimension. He powered up the laptop, connected it to the box, and tapped into a classified satellite linkup. On the web browser appeared a screen for logging into a secure site of the Central Intelligence Agency. He smiled.

Passing through their security, he was soon interfacing with operations software. A real-time satellite image of the Gatlinburg area appeared on the screen, the data fed to him through the CIA surveillance network. He zoomed in on a cabin in the mountains. Once again, he was impressed with the resolution of the images. Good enough to read the nearly faded and damaged name on the mailbox – LOPEZ.

Over the next two hours, he mapped out the area around the cabin, noting the telltale signs of security cameras and motion detectors. The cabin itself looked ordinary, but he did not fool himself. Miguel Lopez had gone to a lot of trouble to secure this location, and he doubted that anything except for armor-piercing ammunition would make its way into the inside. He would have to get close, get through the security and defenses arrayed. It would require significantly more reconnaissance than this crude satellite feed before he would be ready. Up close and in the flesh, which carried its own risks.

There was much planning to do with a target this prepared. This would not be like the others. He might get bloody. He walked back to the brown satchel and removed a first aid kit. Bandages, sutures, disinfectants, needles, and more.

He'd likely need them.
9

# Safe House

Miguel Lopez scrolled through the news article online.

* * *

> _Billionaire Philanthropist Jorge Sapos Dead at 62_
> 
> _By Ben G. Scott, Associated Press_
> 
> _Shipping mogul and activist Jorge Sapos, who combined a life of big money, fast living, and passionate advocacy for political causes, died yesterday in Chicago of unspecified respiratory complications._
> 
> _Known throughout the business world in the 1980s for an iron-willed dominance of rare-earth metal shipping, he came to be a household name after a series of massive financial donations during the Iraq War to libertarian causes emphasizing isolationism and human rights. His political interventions earned him friends and enemies in high places, and many leaders of both parties acknowledge the strong influence of his money and personality on American legislation._
> 
> _Equally renown as an unrepentant playboy, Mr. Sapos had married four times, and was often photographed in the company of various high profile women. Frequently pilloried by conservatives and beloved by tabloids, his womanizing did not seem to adversely impact his business or activism. "He never apologized for being who he was," said Mitchell Sapos, a son of his second marriage. "I think people can respect a man who lives by his own rules, is honest about who he is, even if they don't like or approve of his lifestyle."_
> 
> _Sapos is survived by his wife Ziva Sapos, his fifteen children, and twenty-five grandchildren._

Miguel Lopez closed the browser window, and stared off into space. _Am I being paranoid?_ He assumed that the program born in CTC was still active, and still invisible. But with agents dying, would they have conducted an operation? Could it have been Sapos? The billionaire's name was on the list. He matched the criteria: powerful and disruptive of the Agency's covert plans. But Lopez had refused to participate in the broadening of the program. He did not learn what names had been kept for termination. Even if it was an assassination, they could not keep this up. They were likely all running for bunkers now. _Just like I am_.

It had been several days of preparation, stocking up on food and other supplies, and then enduring the long and tension-filled moments of waiting. Minute by minute, hour by hour, the light outside the polycarbonate-laminated glass weaved its slow way through the range of intensities from dawn to dusk. He longed to see his family again, to speak to his wife and daughters, but he dared not risk any communication. He knew himself to be the target. They were to be left out of this in all ways possible. He also sensed it was unlikely that he would wait for long. He and Miller were the last. A reckoning was coming.

He sat near the window without fear. The polarization was designed to render the glass nearly opaque when viewed from the outside. The composite material was four inches thick, and would likely stop, or at least slow, anything reasonable aimed at it. _But what was reasonable in all this?_ The hunters who had brought down so many of his colleagues appeared invincible. Who knew what they would bring with them? Who _were_ they?

The events refused to be suppressed and played constantly through his mind. The pattern was unmistakable. The deaths were centered on personnel from the missions out of No. 3. _But why? Who?_ His first thought was that the possibility of discovery and scandal had turned rogue elements of the Agency against them. It was not so hard to imagine that they could resort to murder to hide their tracks. Lopez knew now too well what they could resort to.

_We crossed lines._ He had, and others had crossed still more. There were always _reasons_ at the moment. But afterward, when the trials had begun and newspaper articles were published, their judges would not always understand those reasons. He had even come to question those reasons himself. A scorched-earth policy would sterilize such messes.

Perhaps it was something else, something external. He wondered if terrorist networks in America could have gleaned information about their program and had sought to hamper their efforts, destroy the infrastructure. The CIA's successes over the last ten years had screened out all but the best terrorist cells. Those left had begun to raise their game considerably. _Natural selection._

But it still seemed too high a skill level for them. Lopez didn't believe much in that possibility. The hunters were professionals; that was clear. Highly trained at the level of their best operatives. Who had the depth and experience to produce such trainees? _The Russians? The Chinese?_ _With multiple hits in the US, risking international incidents?_ That didn't make sense either. It was an enigma.

A box attached to his phone emitted a low alarm, and a red light began to flash on the device. _They've targeted communications._ Lopez crossed the room to the phone and lifted the receiver. It was dead. He knew it was not a random failure; someone had cut the lines.

He pulled out his cell phone. There was no signal, although there had been an hour ago, and the area was well blanketed with cellular towers. _The signal's being jammed_. He smiled ruefully. Whoever they were, they were thorough. But he was not blind.

He walked into the study, sat in front of an enormous flat-screen monitor, and punched up the security program. Nine camera images of the surrounding forest were shown as separate squares that filled the screen. At night, the cameras would switch to the latest autogated night vision. He next called up a screen showing the crisscrossing grid of motion detectors. Between the camera images and the overlapping layers of motion sensors, he would know when they came, from where, and how many there were. Knowledge was power, but it wasn't everything. He would then have to stop them.

One of the motion detector grid points began blinking. _There you are._ It was near the edge of the grid, down the hill toward the stream that ran near the cabin. Lopez glanced at the cameras – few were set up in that difficult terrain. He would have to wait until they moved into range. It would not be far, as the camera positioning was such that very little of the grid was left uncovered.

Three of the squares feeding video footage went dark. _Goddamn! Not now!_ He had checked each device when he arrived.

The entire southeast quadrant of the motion detection grid failed, blinding him to the stretch running alongside the river and nearly to the cabin itself. An error message blinked repeatedly. A minute later, the video feeds, one by one, went dark, followed by a complete failure of the grid.

Lopez stared at the screen in disbelief. These were no equipment failures. Someone had systematically deactivated his entire security system. To do this in so short a time, to know to move up the stream where coverage would be minimized; it was as if they had studied blueprints of the entire setup. They had _known!_ The layout, the weak points, the blind spots. It was impossible to comprehend. _How could they have known?_

A chill ran through him. Now he _was_ completely blind. His opponents had outmaneuvered him, turned his safety system into a trap. The walls of the cabin lost their protective character. They began radiating hostility.

_To hell with them!_ He would not go down without a fight.

The lights flickered, but the deep hum of the backup generator clicked in, and the electricity held. _Didn't think of everything, did you?_ Lopez slid a floor panel to the side, opening a hole in the middle of the living room floor. He descended down a ladder, and a minute later climbed up decorated in combat gear: bullet-resistant vest, automatic weapons on each arm, large handguns holstered on his belt. He hung several grenades off his flak jacket and positioned himself some distance from the front door.

There was only one entrance they could use. The chimney was too tight, the bullet-proof glass too thick to break through. It would be the front door. He overturned the sofa and angled it to provide shelter from the door. Kneeling down, he checked the magazine on his machine gun and aimed it in the direction of the door, its barrel resting on the side of the overturned couch. He heard movement outside the cabin, sounds, scrapings, and dull thuds against the walls. They were here.

_Come on in, you bastards._
10

# Arrowhead

For Father Lopez, the drive into Tennessee was an unsettling one. Mixed in with the passing wilderness were the crazed events of the last few days and the dream-like memories from his childhood. As the miles raced by, he would see himself walking through the woods with his father, coming upon the small log cabin after an unsuccessful hunting expedition, smoke rising from the chimney and indicating that a warm fire and Mom's cooking waited within. But just as he began to smile, remembering wading across the small stream behind the cabin, he was jarred into the present by competing images of his brother's wife in tears and his own imaginings of Miguel carrying loaded weapons out of his home.

Could Miguel have headed to this old and forgotten house in the middle of nowhere? If so, what would drive him to such a place? There were too many questions and nothing in the way of answers.

As he approached the town of Gatlinburg, passing more signs than he could count advertising skiing, resort hotels, and restaurants for the vacation-minded, he fought to stave off a growing dread that was descending on him. This strange sense of urgency, this _irrational_ sense that something was wrong, that time was short, made him want to scream.

It wouldn't go away, no matter how much he fought. He struggled to remember the way to the cabin, pulling out maps and engaging his GPS, overcoming the frustrations of old southern roads that were poorly documented in the navigation systems. Despite all the activity, this feeling only grew, refusing to be ignored. He found himself pacing his breathing as he approached the turn to the driveway of the cabin. The stone walls marking the overgrown roadway stirred memories. They mixed roughly with the untamable adrenaline coursing through his veins.

The car hopped and skipped over the rocks and holes in the old roadway, the path badly neglected. _No one's been here for years_. He laughed out loud, almost nervously, as if part of him didn't believe his own reasoning. Of course, this was a stupid goose chase. There was no way Miguel would be here.

Except that he was. Lopez slowed the car as the road opened up, revealing a clearing. In the center of the clearing was his family's cabin, the layout and geometry suddenly meshing with the faded outlines of memory. But he saw immediately that this was not an abandoned cabin as he had supposed.

It was new looking, renovated, and maintained. After more than twenty years of supposed neglect, he expected to find a rundown home desperately in need of work. But work had been done. The cabin was clearly very well cared for and even modernized in many places. Recently. _Did it belong to someone else now?_

His question was quickly answered when he saw his brother's SUV parked off to the side of the cabin. Miguel Lopez _was_ here. He felt all the carefully constructed lines of deduction collapse in his mind as he stared at the sight. Miguel was here in a newly renovated and outfitted cabin. His brother had obviously put this work in motion some time ago, and yet had kept it secret. It was to this place that he had come when something frightened him enough to abandon his family.

The terrible anxiety in his stomach reached a fevered pitch now, and he looked down to find his hands shaking. _Damn!_ Couldn't he keep his feelings and fears under tighter control? So, Miguel had come here – so what? Perhaps it was an escape, a retreat he needed to rethink his life. There was no reason to think anything else. No reason to assume something dark and sinister was at work.

Lopez noticed that smoke was rising from the other side of the house. _The chimney_. The memory was warm and clashing badly with the anxious feelings coursing through him. He focused on the chimney. _A fire in the fireplace!_ Miguel was there and he was all right. He shook his head and smiled. _How I hate overreacting._ He stepped forward and began to walk around the cabin. Even in early May, it was cool as evening approached in the mountains. He wouldn't mind sitting by the fireplace. Talking to Miguel. Finding out what all this was about.

Turning around the corner of the house, Father Lopez walked into a nightmare.

He came slowly to a stop as the back side of the cabin came into view, his feet becoming rooted to the earth, his arms dangling at his sides. His mind struggled to make sense of the scene presented to him by his eyes, but the shock of it, the absurdity of it, defied him. The rosary he had subconsciously grasped fell onto the ground beside his shoes.

Roughly a third of the cabin wall—a wall made out of solid timbers, and, from what he could see, reinforced inside by thick steel rebar—was gone. Not removed. The charred and fragmented edges testified that something horrific and violent had ripped the wall apart. Part of his mind noted that the smoke he thought was from the chimney gushed from the smoldering remains of whatever had caused the explosion in the first place. It was amazing that the entire structure had not burned to the ground.

Shards of glass and splinters of wood littered the ground around him, crunching loudly under his shoes. As his eyes passed over these remains, he also noticed metallic pieces. Bright shells in the dirt and grass. Lopez had hunted with his father in his youth. He was familiar with ammunition casings from several rifles and some handguns. These were larger. He assumed military grade. _There are so many_. It was as if a war zone skirmish had been picked up from some other part of the world and dropped recklessly into Tennessee. At his parents' old cabin. Near his brother's car.

Some detached part of his mind signaled that he could be in danger, but at that moment, it didn't register with the rest of him. He moved deliberately into the cabin through the smoldering hole blown through the wall. The signs of violence were everywhere. The well-tended wooden interior was pocked with remnants from the explosion, as well as large imprints from the bullets that had been housed in the casings he saw outside. Furniture was overturned, lamps smashed. He followed the train of destruction from the entry area and living room into the kitchen and bedrooms. Blood was splattered on portions of the walls and floor, a red handprint on the side of a doorway. _Miguel's?_

He followed the trail of destruction along the floor, his eyes pausing on a shattered glass case, the shards piled around a small triangular object made of stone. _The Cherokee arrowhead_. The ancient markings of the Indian warrior were still visibly etched in the sharp rock. The arrowhead pointed forward to the back bedroom. To a human shape on the floor.

"Oh, God."

The glass crunched under his feet as he entered the death chamber. It looked as though his brother had fought off his assailants for some time, finally being pushed into this corner of the cabin. It was here that he had put up his last stand. Here that his time on Earth had ended.

"Oh, Miguel." Father Lopez fell to his knees beside his brother's body. He wept.
11

# Brother's Keeper

Lopez sat on an old stump near his car, blood clotted on the inside of his palm from the sharp edges of the flint rock. He still gripped the arrowhead tightly.

His mind was unable to settle between the past and the present. One moment he would be talking to the officer, the next, seeing his brother's body, and then the next, recalling the day long ago that as children they had found the Cherokee artifacts.

"I was too small, too scared to climb the cliff," he whispered, his gaze distanced. "Miguel brought it down to me. I'd forgotten we'd left it out here."

"I'm sorry, sir?" The officer looked perplexed.

Lopez shook his head. "Nothing. I'm sorry. What did you say?"

In the midst of his emotional fog, he was surprised at how fast the police arrived. Or was it that he could no longer track time properly, his brain misfiring, his body misfiring, just as his legs hardly seemed able to carry him? Yet, they were here, seemingly instantaneously after he called them, and he had to function, had to give logical facts and coherent statements. He had to be rational in hell.

The body of his older brother lay shattered on the floor of his parents' cabin. One look had been enough. The damage to the form was beyond what he would have imagined, even in a fight to the death. It took all the control he possessed to describe it to the police.

"Yes, I found him like that," he said after the officer repeated the question.

"Did you disturb the body? Move it? Check to see if he was alive?" the officer asked as his partner walked through the cabin. The light had almost faded outside, and the officer squinted at his notepad as he wrote.

"God, no," said Francisco, emphatically. He felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. "I didn't need to check him. I could see part of his face. The rest, his head, his torso— _God in heaven_ , it was all over the walls."

The police officer coughed uncomfortably. "I'm sorry, Mr. Lopez—ah, Father Lopez. I know this is difficult, but it is necessary. So, you saw nothing, no one on your drive up or afterward in this area, acting suspiciously?"

"Nothing. There was nothing. Just this," he said, gesturing toward the cabin.

"Did your brother have any enemies? Recent fights? Anyone who would want to harm him?"

Father Lopez paused. "No. No one."

The officer looked skeptical. "Are you sure?"

"He's been acting very strange of late."

"In what ways?" Father Lopez felt officer's eyes as sharp knives, inquisitive, cruelly intense in his concentration on the answers.

"It's hard to explain. Like he was worried about something, terribly anxious, almost hysterical at times. He was talking about strange things, what his life was amounting to, that sort of thing. His wife said he was obsessed with the obituaries, reading them online even from many different newspapers. Then, he left in a hurry one day, taking _weapons_ , and came up here. To a deathtrap."

"It sure doesn't seem like a robbery," agreed the officer. "Any history of mental illness?"

"No."

"Did he mention any names recently? Call anyone unusual?"

"No, not that I know of."

"OK, sir, that's really all we can do now. We'll have forensics up here very soon. This is an official crime scene, and we will have to ask you to vacate the premises until the investigation is complete."

Lopez shook his head. "I don't want to stay here anymore." He continued grimly, "When can we have the body, for the funeral?"

"That will depend on forensics, and an autopsy is mandatory in a homicide investigation, sir. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I want the monsters who did this caught," he said with a vehemence and anger that frightened and surprised him. Until now, he had felt devastation at his brother's death, shock and horror at its manner. When contemplating the murderers, there was now rage—powerful, irrational, and hot. What scared him the most was that he felt completely unrepentant about it.

"So do we, Father Lopez. This kinda thing doesn't happen around here. We'll get to the bottom of this, I promise you."

Lopez nodded, too consumed with his own emotions to reply. The officer's partner picked that moment to exit the cabin, and the two men spoke out of earshot. Lopez stared at them, not caring so much what they said, but that he felt they shared his desire for justice. They were in their mid-thirties. Old enough to have been around and young enough to carry on active duty. In fact, both were trim and athletic, in contrast to the many local and state troopers Lopez was used to encountering—Dunkin' Donuts shareholders. They were unusually intelligent, he was glad to see. These were probably the two best detectives in the area, and he felt fortunate that they would be handling the investigation.

The policeman who had taken down his testimony returned.

"Sir, I suggest that you get some rest. There's nothing you can do now except get in the way of the investigation. Go home to your family. I'm sure this will be difficult news, but it's better you are with family at this time. Believe me, I've seen this before."

Father Lopez nodded. _Family._ He had only an empty house to return to. And his brother's widow. _Dear God, how am I going to tell Maria?_

He looked toward the house a final time. The memories of childhood were blotted out, erased, burned away with fire. The cabin had transformed into an evil thing, a monster that had consumed his brother. It looked more like a mausoleum than a vacation home. The arrowhead was all that was left to him. It was an artifact of violence.

_I'm so sorry, Miguel. God have mercy on your soul._

Forty miles away a rundown Ford Mustang lurched recklessly into the parking lot of an emergency room in Knoxville. The driver had remembered that the University of Tennessee Medical Center had the only level one trauma center in the area. Somehow, he had remembered this, despite losing dangerous amounts of blood and struggling to maintain consciousness on the drive from the mountains. The Gatlinburg hospital might have done the job properly, or maybe not. He had stemmed the bleeding the best he could and taken a calculated risk to place expertise before expediency. He knew it might cost him his life.

Queued patients and family members stared in growing concern as the car rolled past the circular drive and onto the sidewalk, barely coming to a stop before plowing into the entrance of the ER. Their concern turned to dismay as the car door opened and a creature from a horror film stumbled forward. Covered in blood, perspiring fiercely as from a great fever, the zombie shuffled through the automatic doors. Several people screamed, and orderlies and nurses turned and darted toward the injured man. As the first staff reached him, he collapsed forward, barely caught by a stocky male nurse who struggled to break his fall.

"Martha! Katherine! Get a gurney over here now! Trauma patient, massive blood loss, severe injuries! Now!"

The patient groaned, and the nurse stared in surprise as a fist was raised near his face, the crumbled remains of a sheet of paper within it. He dislodged the paper, and the man's hand dropped. Unfolding it as the other physicians sped to help, he read out loud what he saw.

"Shrapnel leg and back. Potential spinal damage. Gunshot, right shoulder. Penicillin allergy. Blood type O+." Several faces stared at him and the paper.

"Cut the shirt open!" he yelled.

Another nurse slit open shirt along the back and pulled the fabric to the sides. She inhaled sharply. " _Jesus."_

"Sir, can you hear me?" the male nurse asked the man. There was no response. The bloodied figure was unconscious.
12

# Gravestones

Father Lopez stared forward, his dark hair matted and dripping, his thick eyebrows furrowed and beading with water. He took the incense from the altar boy, swinging it in the downpour, going through the motions with coals that were now extinguished and drowned. The censer weighed a thousand pounds. The earth itself pulled with greater intensity, the gravity belonging to a supergiant like the planet Jupiter, and even his priestly robes seemed to be made of lead. He glanced over at the casket they would soon lower into the mud. _How will they hoist that thing?_ He shook his head. _I'm going mad._

The weather decided to mirror his emotional state with four straight days of showers, including the day of the funeral. He had been rocked from one heartache to another, finding his murdered brother, breaking the news to his destroyed wife and children, and discovering himself as the organizational center for the family's grieving. His brother's wife was not capable of handling the arrangements, and his parents were too old. It fell on his shoulders, and the weight was a heavy one. It was one thing to carry the sorrows of others second hand. Now he had to be mourner and priest. Not for the first time, he questioned the Church's stance on celibacy. Not because of sex; he had learned years ago how to channel that drive into other actions. But because of something far more difficult to control. Each night he returned to an empty house, stale and still. He ached to have someone to go home to when the sun fell. _You can't hold prayer in your arms._

The funeral was well attended. His brother had been a local hero in the Hispanic community, and he had won admiration and friendship in all his endeavors. Besides the family, there were old high school classmates, war veterans, neighbors, and even the odd local politician. All were soaked in the downpour, struggling in the strong wind to hear the words of the service.

Father Lopez had called a priest friend to assist. He had given up trying to carry that load by himself. As the second priest spoke, he looked over the scene: his brother's casket, family, friends, and others. Lopez knew every face: Madison, Alabama was not a big place. Faces old and young. Many heads were bowed from grief or weather. Forms huddled together, playing out a ritual to the dead that archeologists had shown was shared even by humanity's Neanderthal cousins. Irrational. Emotional. Superstitious. _Pagan_ , thought Father Lopez. Did not the Church teach that death was only sleep? Did he not believe in the Resurrection? If so, why the grief? Why the black colors of mourning? _Damn the theology_ , it was _necessary_.

At the edge of the mourners, like a light in a sea of dark gray, a pair of bright eyes flashed toward him. _Such intensity._ There was a magnetic pull deep inside him, but all he could see at first were the eyes, the face and body shrouded under a raincoat and hood. He felt nearly in a trance, the eyes drawing him in like some spell.

Lopez struggled with himself and turned away, but before a minute had passed, he found himself drawn back toward the form. He looked over quickly to make sure he was not deceived. _Still there!_ _Still staring!_ He could see the shape a little better now, the hood slightly pulled back, a thinning in the clouds brightening the day subtly. It was a woman, young, pale in appearance, a cyan glint hopping across her burning gaze. This was a face he did _not_ know. And yet, her eyes engaged his, a personal space was violated across the distance separating them. She was seeking him! Sending a message.

_What message?_ It seemed so inappropriate, so out of place at this time, during this ceremony. But _still_ she stared, refusing to look away, pursuing him with her eyes. _Demanding._

He tore his gaze away and resolved this time to ignore this strange and disturbing woman. Whoever she was, he didn't know her, and a pair of haunting eyes was not going to make him try to change that. He wanted this dreadful ceremony over, the priest to shut up, and his brother's body to be given the rest it deserved. He wanted to go back home, pull out his thirty-year-old bottle of Springbank scotch, and get good and drunk. He'd just as soon kill a million brain cells and forget this day. Forget the emptiness. Forget the ghostly blue eyes.

The last stragglers were coming by and paying their respects. The rain had abated, now just a fine mist permeating everything. Father Lopez accompanied his parents to their car, along with his brother's widow. He forced himself to look at her daughters, his young nieces, to give both a faint smile and hug, and try not to fall apart in front of them. Relief swept over him as he closed the door and the car pulled out. The tires dropped into a pothole and splashed a wave of muddy water over his shoes. It didn't matter.

He walked slowly back to his car, the gravestones around him dotting his peripheral vision. In the midst of it was his brother's grave, the ground bare and the dirt fresh. The headstones gave him a chilling impression of a dead army, rising, closing in on him. Images of bone and flesh like the terrible prophecy of Ezekiel flooded his mind; he forced them away. Never again did he want to see what he had seen on the floor of the cabin in Tennessee. He reached into his pockets and retrieved car keys, fumbling with them in some growing, irrational panic. Trying hard to see only a warm bottle of eighty proof at home.

"Father Lopez!" cried a voice. He jumped, dropping his keys into the mud.

"Mother of God!" He spun around toward the voice, straightening up. It was the pale woman from the funeral.

"Who are you? What do you want?" he asked with visible irritation, scooping his spattered keys from the ground.

"Losing our Southern manners, Father?"

She _dared_ mock him now? "Look, I'm tired. I just buried my brother. You scared me half to death with that yell. How can I help you?"

"I want to help _you_." Her blue eyes were still very bright.

Father Lopez suppressed a sigh. "Why do you think I need any help?"

"Because you'll need answers soon. Answers to your brother's death that you won't find alone."

Francisco Lopez became very still. He didn't know whether to hit this woman or just walk away. "Heck of a time to be talking like this."

"I'm sorry. There isn't a good time."

" _I'm_ not going to need your help, because _I'm_ not going to be asking any questions. I'm an overworked parish priest, not a detective. The police are handling this. They can do much more than I ever could. Go talk to them if you want to help." He turned back to his vehicle. "Now, if you'll excuse me, if I can get this damned key in the slot, I'll be getting home."

"You can't trust the police."

He sighed, the key missing and scratching the paint. "They seemed competent enough to me."

"They're compromised."

"Oh for _God's sake_ , woman!" he found himself shouting. "Compromised? Are you some kind of nut?"

She stepped forward, her hood sliding down and revealing her high cheekbones and gleaming golden hair. Her blue eyes were intense, focused, and undisturbed by his shouting.

"My name is Sara Houston, Father Lopez. I worked with Miguel for many years, before he returned here. I know things that you don't. There is a larger context to his death."

She was standing very close to him, her face nearly touching his. Lopez was unnerved by the pulse of life in her. "Larger context? What on earth are you talking about? What does Miguel's work in Washington have to do with this?"

"Your brother was certainly murdered, but it was not a random crime. You can't trust the police; they're blind pawns in a much bigger game. Soon you'll understand that, and then we'll talk again. You'll need my help. Remember that, when the time comes."

She pulled the hood fully over her head again, concealing most of her features, and turned, striding away from the car. It was like a light had been turned off, her piercing, unusual gaze and bright hair snuffed out, her white face turned away, replaced by the dark gray of her hood.

"Wait a minute!" shouted Lopez. "You can't just say something like that and walk off!"

But she did not heed him or give any indication that she had heard. Lopez stood rooted in the mud for several moments, debating whether to pursue her or let her go. _Who was this strange woman? How could she be trusted?_

Lopez watched her silhouette merge with the mist and struggled to prevent himself from following her. _It was preposterous._ He wiped the rain from his face as if to clear his vision. He had seen the police take up the case aggressively before he left Gatlinburg. He had met the officers. He trusted them. What was he thinking to go after her? He shook his head and got into the car. He would not be talking with that woman again.

_Lord have mercy!_
13

# Down the Rabbit Hole

"A _robbery_? What are you talking about?"

Father Lopez sat dumbfounded in front of a Gatlinburg police detective. This wasn't one of the officers he had met at the cabin. This was a different breed entirely. The man's disorganized room – paperwork, half-filled coffee cups, litter – mirrored the confusion of his thoughts. The patronizing tone of the detective had begun to infuriate him.

"Detective Summers," Lopez began again, trying to keep his voice under control, "I discovered my brother's body. I walked through a giant hole blown into the wall of a mountain cabin with enough used shells on the floor and bullet holes in the wall to qualify as a war zone. My brother's body was riddled with holes, his upper torso half blown away by something. Robbers don't break into a cabin with dynamite. They don't pull out automatic weapons and spray bullets around. They don't blow people's heads off!"

"Mr. Lopez, please, you are hysterical."

"You are ridiculous!"

The man adjusted his eyeglasses and pulled on the knot of his tie below his neck. He looked like a man who felt he had been far more than patient with an unruly citizen, and it was beginning to try his nerves.

"Mr. Lopez— _Father_ Lopez, the Gatlinburg police are far from ridiculous. If you wish to see ridiculous, you need to look no further than yourself."

Lopez stared disbelievingly. "Is this fourth grade?"

"I am serious, _sir_. I've tried to be reasonable with you. Your brother was killed during a robbery. That has been the conclusion of this investigation. You were unfortunate enough to have discovered his body, and it appears to have clouded your judgment."

"Clouded my judgment? Detective, I didn't imagine a six-foot diameter blast hole in my family's cabin!"

"Are you so sure of that?" asked the detective.

Francisco Lopez laughed and leaned back in his chair. "Yes, I'm one hundred percent sure of that."

"Well, Father Lopez, I've seen the photographs of the cabin. There is no hole." The detective tossed several glossy prints toward Father Lopez, who leaned forward again and quickly scanned the images.

"There's some mistake," he said in disbelief. It was _impossible_. The photos showed no damage to the structure. The cabin was certainly his family's, the location and design easily recognized. But it looked untouched. Every angle showed a well-maintained house in the woods. "When were these taken?"

"The day after the report was filed. These were taken by forensics _officers_. There is no mistake." The detective sighed. "Father Lopez, there is counseling available for family members of victims. I suggest you look into this option. You are obviously traumatized by this incident."

"Traumatized...." Lopez stared, unable to comprehend the photographs.

"As for our department, the investigation is closed."

" _Closed?_ There are killers out there! Even if this _is_ a robbery, someone killed my brother. You can't just close a murder investigation a few weeks after the crime!"

"The decision's been made, Mr. Lopez. Lack of any significant leads, I'm afraid. It was my superior's choice. There is nothing I can do."

"I want to talk to him!"

"I'm afraid that's out of the question. I am your contact at the station. We can't let distraught family members harass those in charge."

"Then I would like to speak to the officers assigned to the case that day. _They_ were sure it wasn't a robbery."

The detective removed his glasses, his face grim. "I'm afraid that's impossible, Mr. Lopez."

"Why? I demand to speak with those officers!"

"You can demand all you want. It won't do any good. You can't see them." He sighed again, more heavily. "They're dead, Mr. Lopez. They were killed a few days ago when their patrol car went over the edge of one of the mountain roads. A terrible accident."

A cold numbness spread through Lopez.

He stepped out of the police station like a man drugged. He was not crazy, that much he knew. Those photos were fakes. He could prove it. He would return to the cabin and examine the scene of the crime himself. Take his own damn pictures. Confront these idiots with the truth. He forced himself to believe this, because he needed the sense that something could be done. He needed the sense that order could come of this chaos. Otherwise, this feeling would overtake him, that something darker and more evil even than his brother's murder was present. He could be swallowed up in that irrationality, where there was no clear path, only shadows and echoes of shadows.

Half-dazed, he stumbled down the stairs leading away from the station toward the street where his car waited. These new smartphones recorded everything about photos—date, time, location. _Perfect evidence._ He would document the damage and bring the photos back to these idiots. He could think of nothing else to do.

As he neared his vehicle, he glanced up the sidewalk and saw her. She stood with her arms folded across a dark car coat, a crisp spring breeze tossing her yellow hair about. Her expression was serious.

"We can talk here," she said, placing a small black box on the restaurant table. "This device will scramble directed microphones. Talk softly; you weren't followed, but we don't need to advertise anything at this stage."

The crowd at the Tennessee diner struggled to recover from seeing a black-clad Mexican priest enter with a young woman who seemed every bit the fitness model from her physique. The drone of conversation picked up again, eyes returned to their own tables. Two coffees were placed on the table.

"Ya'll orderin' anythin' _else_?" came the irritated voice of the waitress.

Houston answered assertively. "Not for now, thank you." The waitress rolled her eyes and turned to other customers.

Lopez shook his head, staring at the device Houston had placed on the table. "What on earth have I gotten into here?"

Houston eyed him carefully. "How much do you know about what your brother did with the government, Father Lopez?"

He felt unnerved again by her sharp eyes. "Not much, actually. Besides the troubled relationship we'd had for some time, he was pretty tight-lipped about it all. No one knew. He worked as some consultant on issues of national security he wasn't allowed to talk about. Had top-secret clearances. Seemed to pay well."

"What if I were to tell you that he was not a consultant."

Lopez squinted at her. "Not a consultant? What do you mean?"

She sighed. "Miguel never worked as a consultant in D.C. That was a cover."

"OK," began Lopez cautiously, "so what the hell _did_ he do? Did he even work for the government?"

"Yes, he did." She stared into his eyes. "He worked for the CIA."

"The CIA?" Lopez nearly spilled his coffee. "Miguel was some kind of secret agent?"

"Miguel was a CIA agent, Father Lopez. A highly trained specialist at CIA. He was under deep cover because he performed some extremely sensitive missions."

"I'm about to fall down the rabbit hole. I can feel it." Lopez shook his head. _Secret Agent Miguel Lopez. Under deep cover performing sensitive missions. What the hell?_ "And you're here because you think that his death had something to do with those missions."

Her expression was grim. "I don't know. But I _suspect_. What did the police tell you?"

He sighed, leaning back in his chair. "I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. They said it was a _robbery._ Let me tell you, Agent Houston -"

"Sara," she said, touching the top of his hand fleetingly with her finger, breaking his concentration, breaking through the normal protective barriers spacing strangers.

He corrected himself and tried to refocus his thoughts. "OK. Sara. Then you call me Francisco. So, Sara, I saw a hole big enough to drive a _car_ blown through the cabin wall. Enough bullets and casings for a combat zone. There is _no way_ that was a robbery. I don't know _what_ it was, besides murder."

"Elimination. Assassination."

He waved his hand dismissively. " _Murder_ , however you want to label it. And that detective showed me photos, _doctored_ photos, showing the cabin was _fine!_ Claiming I'd made the whole thing up!"

Houston shook her head. "They might not have been doctored."

He pushed away from the table. "Look, I know what I saw."

"I'm not questioning what you saw, Francisco. But I'd put money that if you return to the cabin today, you'll see some work has been done."

He sat very still. The implications were insane. _Paranoid_. Major conspiracy theory material. "Do you know what you are saying?"

She nodded. "I'm saying that someone wants what happened to your brother buried deeply and forgotten."

"Someone? _Who_?"

"We'll get to that later."

His fist slammed down on the table, spilling coffee and turning heads. "I need answers, now!" His anger and frustration shocked him. Eyes darted in their direction.

"I'm _sorry_ , I can't give them to you _now_. Not here," she whispered sharply. They were both silent for several minutes until the patrons turned away once more. She laughed softly. "Miguel said you had a temper. And a hell of a left hook."

Father Lopez closed his eyes. "Fights. Miguel was with me in many. As a teen, before I embraced the Church, it was the only thing I was good at. Two dark Mexican boys in junior high in Alabama? You can imagine. Once I got angry, it came naturally. Too easily." He sighed and opened his eyes. "Look, two cops saw the wreckage. Saw the body. Saw the scene. Now they're dead. Am I to think something suspicious about that?"

Houston leaned in closer. "What cops? When?"

"They came right after I called 911. Two young guys. They combed the scene, examined my brother's body. Asked me a bunch of questions. Wrote it _all_ down. They looked a hundred times more professional than anyone else around here I've dealt with."

"Oh God, Francisco. Those weren't police." She looked at him pityingly.

"What do you mean they weren't police? I _saw_ them! They had uniforms, badges, police vehicles."

"Police showing up instantly on a mountain road? Walking around a crime scene, potentially contaminating it? Ruining evidence?" She shook her head. "Whatever you saw was a carefully planned ruse to deceive you. They weren't police, Francisco. And they're not dead."

"The detective said the officers were dead, died in an accident."

"I'm sure the real officers are dead."

His expression was a shocked mask. He didn't know if he could absorb any more of this madness. "Who were they then? These killers?"

"I don't know, Francisco. They're part of this. Whatever _this_ is. There's a lot I need to explain, and a lot I can't, because I don't know myself. But your brother's death is not the first." She exhaled slowly. "I came here to warn your brother, Francisco. There have been a lot of deaths from my old division. I worked with many of them. I worked with Miguel." Her face tightened, and she looked away. "I'm here unofficially. The CIA will not _officially_ recognize what is happening. There is a web, of dirt and lies, and I don't know who is tangled in it. I just knew that Miguel was in danger."

"You cared a lot about him," said Father Lopez.

She glanced out the window, her face set. "Yes, Francisco, I did."

_Who is this Sara Houston?_ Lopez eyed her closely, a determined look on his face. "Then, maybe you want what I want. Maybe, you _can_ help me."

Her blue eyes locked with his. "To do what?"

Lopez worked hard to control his voice, his emotions. He fingered the arrowhead underneath his shirt, hung now as a pendant alongside his cross. "Find his killers. Bring them to justice."
14

# Shadows

Still and silent, three men sat at a table in a dimly lit and dusty room. The walls had the appearance of years of neglect, and a musty smell drifted upwards from the floorboards. A fine mist of particles hung in the air like a fog, screening out the faint light from a cracked window across from the door. The men stirred, turning their heads toward the doorway as a fourth man entered, a look of suspicion on his anxious face.

"I was followed, but I lost the tail before entering the packing district." He was lanky, in his mid-fifties, with gray, thinning hair trimmed close to his scalp. He wore an expensive suit completely at odds with his surroundings, a contrast echoed in the dress and mannerisms of the other conspirators. Looking across their faces, he could barely make them out in the dim light. _Better that way_ , he thought cynically. _We're only ciphers now._

"You're sure, Farnell?" asked the shadow on his right.

He glared at the man. "I know what I'm doing, Phoenix. _And no names_. We're in the middle of nowhere, in this godforsaken dump, but we must never slacken protocol. Handles only."

The shadow nodded, chastened. "Yes, Nexus. Play the spy games to the end."

"That's why we're alive, you fool."

Nexus removed three thumb drives. "The latest reports, gentlemen. It's not pretty."

A nasal voice came from a dim form on his left. "Stone?"

"Dead," said Nexus. "Lopez, too. Our men were too late."

A third man with a baritone spoke. "Lopez was our best."

Nexus sighed. "Yes, he was, Bravo. Too idealistic for what we really needed him for, but unmatched. We didn't know about his safe house, or we could have been there sooner."

There was a silence in the room until Bravo added flatly. "Our _wraith._ "

Nexus simply nodded. "Assets posing as police were there just after his brother arrived at the scene."

"The priest?" asked Bravo.

"Yes. He had no useful information. Said Lopez had acted strangely, left his family in a panic. Nothing we didn't know or couldn't guess."

"Who's left?" asked Phoenix.

"From the Removal Unit? Only Miller. He's gone into hiding, we can't locate him."

Bravo sounded grim. "The wraith will. There is no hiding."

Nexus stood and paced the small room. "We're trapped, gentlemen. This was our baby, and it's come back to eat us. We can't call for help. No backup, no reinforcements. Our program was black, buried, and must stay that way. It goes much too high and is much too hot. We're alone."

The nasal-voiced man coughed. "Do you think it will end with these deaths?"

Nexus chuckled. "Afraid for your own skin, are you, Zulu? Well, we all ought to be. This _isn't_ over. Whatever this is, _who_ ever is behind it, they have eliminated nearly all the operatives of that SRU mission. They have been systematic. They clearly have resources. _They know_. No, gentlemen, I don't think this is over at all."

The man on the right sounded panicked. "Langley isn't going to help us?"

"We've been over that," clipped Bravo, dismissively.

Nexus paused. "Lophius has other resources. He'll make them available."

"The assets? Who are they?" asked Zulu plaintively, looking between Bravo and Nexus.

"They are well-trained. All of them are former employees. Decommissioned when the pansies came into office. We'll trap the _wraith_ , you can be assured of that. Our biggest worry is keeping this from the light of day. There are more important things than our hides to protect."

"There are complications." It was the baritone.

Nexus raised an eyebrow. "Continue, Bravo."

"The Houston woman. It's confirmed. She has spoken with the priest."

" _Damn!_ " Nexus ran his fingers through his wispy hair. "She could blow this entire thing open."

"Or lead us to the wraith," added Bravo.

Nexus eyed the shadow and nodded. "We'll assign two assets full-time to her, and this priest, if he gets involved. Watch for now." The lanky man glanced out the cracked window, the weak light giving his face an unearthly paleness. "But if this gets out of hand, we'll have to terminate them both."
15

# Escape

The time had come. Leaving now was risky. He wasn't close to fully healed, and an escape could end before it really began. But he had to go underground again. He could not remain so exposed and vulnerable. Too much time had passed.

The physicians had _seen_. It would be in the reports. Nurses, too. _Too many_. He sighed. He would not eliminate them: his was a pursuit of justice, and he would not taint his quest by killing innocents unnecessarily. But it would not be long before they were questioned. Even the slow minds at the CIA would figure it out, eventually.

_I'm running out of time._

He had accumulated an extraordinary stash of items from the hospital: gauges, first aid kits, antibiotics, steroids, plasma, needles, supplemented protein powder, stimulants. He would need them all. Feigning far more disability than was real, he had distracted the medical staff. Besides, they were too busy with endless trauma to check the many recesses, drawer bottoms, and other hidden places that existed in a hospital room. Eventually, they would.

_I'm running out of time._

He raised himself from the bed, his back screaming in pain, reminding him that the injuries were very real. He had slipped the painkillers under his tongue and spat them out later. He needed to be fully alert. The pain would be suppressed.

The lights were out, the hospital staffed minimally in the predawn hours. He had memorized this trauma center's rhythms, its personnel. He knew the guard was flirting with the late-shift nurse about now, both often breaking the rules and smoking outside by the emergency stairway. He would need to be quiet when he passed the exit door to the parking garage underground.

He donned the surgical scrubs he had lifted the night before from the laundry cart—his pants and shirt were ruined. He filled a laundry bag with thousands of dollars of medical items, put on his shoes, and limped slowly out of the room.

Each night, he had walked repeatedly to build stamina, but such efforts could only go so far. He felt dizzy after a few flights of stairs. He set the bag down and caught his breath. _My hematocrit is absurdly low._ He would have to eat dramatically over the coming months to build his body back to performance level. Then there would be the hours of torturous rehabilitation. He grunted as he picked up the bag and continued to the lower level.

The parking garage was utterly deserted and still. His footsteps softly reverberated as he stumbled across the concrete towards a beige four-by-four. He smiled to see a shotgun in the back and hoped there were shells in the glove compartment. He drew a deep breath. This would take a lot out of him.

Ten minutes later, covered in sweat, he pulled out of the garage in the hot-wired vehicle. He came to a stop by his car in the outside lot. He would take what he needed and keep the truck. Where he was going, it would prove useful, and no one would look for it deep in the mountains. He opened the door and stumbled out of the truck.

"And just look at you."

The voice came from behind him. He turned around quickly, preparing to engage, but his efforts demanded too much of his damaged body, and he tottered, stumbling forward into the solid shape in front of him. A pair of muscled arms caught him, and lowered him slowly to the ground. _Why isn't he attacking me?_

"Who are you?" he croaked out.

"Who am I?" scoffed the voice. "I see your appearance, what you have done to yourself, what others have done. _I_ should ask, who are _you?!_ "

The voice was deep, gruff, full of command. It reminded him of desert sands. _And combat_. He felt his consciousness fading.

A hand slapped his cheeks and his eyes refocused. The voice boomed. "Not yet, you fool! I have to get you out of here. This is your car, I know from the transmitter inside that called me."

"Called you?" Everything was a blur.

"Yes! We had agreed. _You_ arranged it. I knew you must have been in trouble to activate the rescue call. I told you in Israel that you wouldn't survive this madness."

"Rescue call. _Israel_. " It sounded familiar. Plans and counter-options spun in his mind.

" _Derrmo!_ You are delirious. First, we get you up and into that nice truck you have stolen. Then, some of these nice American discount stores dotting the roadways. You need clothes, food, other useful things." The shape dug a hand through the hospital bag. "You have quite a collection, you thief. We will need all of this and more. You have to heal."

_Heal_. Yes, he had to heal, and rebuild his shattered body. He knew that hard road. He had done it before— _that_ he remembered. When he had healed, then he would remember who this man was and why he was helping.

The shape pulled him to his feet and helped him into the vehicle. He felt himself dissolve into a rough sea of consciousness, dreams weaving the real with the imagined. He saw before him an extended plain, a battlefield divided in two. Like an eagle, he swooped in front of an army and planted his claws in the trodden grass. Across the divide, there screamed a legion of monsters, demons risen from the depths of hell, but their grotesque bodies possessed the faces of men! His winged arms held a broadsword and a shield. Blood dripped from the tattered flesh of his back.

He would finish this war. Those who had orchestrated the great injustice would pay dearly. He raised the sword in defiance of his enemy's howls.

_I am your death!_
Part II

# The Priest and the Whore

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." —Former CIA Director William Casey
16

# Wraith Hunters

The CIA woman ignored the speed limit. Father Lopez unconsciously checked his seatbelt again. _95mph!_ And she had not stopped talking the entire drive. He had at least confiscated her cell phone and offered to check the messages for her. _Mother of God._

They were headed to Knoxville, following TN-71 through the mountains. After scouting several local hospitals around the Gatlinburg area, they had set off to the bigger city in hopes of striking gold at one of the larger trauma centers. Sara Houston seemed sure of herself.

"This could turn into a wild goose chase," Lopez muttered in frustration.

Houston parried immediately. "We won't let that happen. If we strike out in Knoxville, we go to Plan B."

"CIA headquarters." He couldn't believe he'd just said that.

"That's right," she said. Even Houston paused as she considered the implications. "Our offices, Francisco. Something is buried there. Something that will explain this madness."

"So you keep saying."

"Things don't happen without a cause! Multiple killings and coverups are _always_ the tip of the iceberg."

Lopez threw up his hands in frustration. "But you were _there_ for years working next to him. If you didn't know, how can you find out now?"

"I was a good soldier, Francisco. I did my job, and I did it well. I didn't gossip. I ignored rumors. I believed in serving my country, not in dirtying it up." Lopez saw a pained look on her face and decided not to press the argument.

She changed the subject. "Your bishop was cooperative?"

"Barely. This did not go down well. I'm a local priest with a parish. I am faculty at a Catholic school. Running off suddenly with poor explanations about it being related to my brother's death raised a lot of eyebrows." Lopez sighed. "If they weren't going to close the school anyway, it wouldn't have flown."

Houston nodded. "Well, soon we'll either have hit a wall or discovered something that will make you take a sabbatical. We'll find the answers, either at CIA or, just maybe, in Knoxville."

"The hospitals." Lopez was still skeptical.

She turned to face him, taking her eyes off the road and sending a new round of adrenaline through the priest. "Miguel was a hell of an agent. A bit of a legend at Langley, actually." She returned her gaze ahead. "Judging from your description of the cabin, he put up one hell of a fight before he was killed. Whoever did this, they weren't supermen. Somebody, likely several people, got hurt. I bet at least one of them seriously. They would have needed a hospital."

"Why? Don't these guys have some sort of secret lair or the like? Special hideouts? Paid docs who don't talk?"

Houston laughed. It was a pleasant sound, free from the tension and cynicism of so many of her words. "Francisco, these are dirty players, so far underground that they live with worms. They clearly have resources, but not enough to staff trauma care in any old backwoods skiing resort in the South."

"It makes about as much sense as everything else I've seen going on."

"You're right. I'm sorry," she said. "You're totally green in all this. _Jesus_ , you're a damn _priest_. But you're learning. I'm afraid you're going to be learning a lot of harsh lessons, Francisco."

"Whatever I have to do to find out what happened to my brother."

She glanced briefly into his eyes. "We'll check all the local emergency-room records in Knoxville, focusing on the day of Miguel's death. There aren't too many grenade wounds that come through the Tennessee ERs each month. Knoxville is about all they'd have left. If they needed help, they went there. And we'll find them."
17

# New Phantoms

"This is _highly_ irregular."

They sat in a pleasant if mundane office at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, confronted with the frowning face of a middle-level VP. VP of what, Lopez had lost track. The bureaucracy even in a Tennessee hospital was awe-inspiring.

They had hardly paused for breath since Gatlinburg. Lopez wasn't used to this. His rhythms were the Catholic school, the parish council, and religious services. He felt he had been strapped into a roller coaster. The weight in his stomach was his sense that it was only just now nearing the top of the first hill.

After the mad drive to Knoxville, they pulled up to the redbrick-and-glass trauma center, raised several sets of eyebrows flashing government ID, and demanded to see patient records in a murder investigation. One after the other, they had been transferred to higher-ranked hospital staff. The bureaucracy was all a blur to Lopez, and he shifted uneasily in his chair as he watched Houston scowl at the hospital administrator. The CIA agent recovered quickly and morphed her face into a pleasant smile.

"Ma'am," began Houston, "we're sorry to take so much of your time, but this is an extremely urgent matter. There have been criminal actions in the state of Tennessee that involve government employees." She paused for effect. " _Murders_."

The administrator was nonplused. "Yes, yes. That's what the others said, too." _Others?_ Lopez and Houston exchanged glances. "You know, it's always a murder or a mafia boss or some damned matter of national security and you Feds barge in here and think that you have access to any old thing that you want. We have other _important_ business, you know."

The priest leaned forward. "You said others were asking similar questions?"

The woman rolled her eyes. "FBI, CIA, KPD, whatever, I don't know." She looked the priest up and down. "Seems maybe Vatican too, now. No wonder all our tax money is wasted. Don't you clowns ever talk to each other?"

Houston probed further. "This does seem wasteful, I know, but there are hundreds of investigative branches in US law enforcement, not to mention governmental agencies. This case is so important that it might have brought in unrelated groups. I'm sorry for any repetition, but a man has been murdered and we need to make sure nothing was missed. Can you tell me what they asked and what you told them?"

The woman sat in the center of a wrap-around desk. She spun around in her plush office chair, stopped when she faced a counter behind her desk, and grabbed a manila folder. She dropped it sharply on the surface in front of Lopez and Houston as she rotated back. Her tone was increasingly irritated.

"Look, it's all in here, what we actually _do_ have on this guy. The man came in with massive trauma injuries. _Shrapnel_ if you can believe it— _combat injuries_. Former army surgeon was called in to have a look. There was no ID on him. He refused to talk to the police." She shook her head. "He was here in the ICU, critically wounded, monitored around the clock, and then, one day, _poof!_ He was gone. Stole a bunch of supplies, hot-wired a truck in the parking lot. Damnedest thing we ever saw. Police came again and saw the file, and more of you Feds were here the other day. Maybe I should put this whole thing online and you all can just let me get back to my work."

Houston began, "If we can just get a look—"

The woman waved them off. "First door on your right's a conference room. Have a look in there and drop this back off with my secretary."

"Thank you very much! We'll be out of your hair soon."

"Sure, honey, until the next bozo shows up." She spun around and took a call, turning her back on them.

The two made their way to the small conference room and closed the door. The air inside was stale, and there was dust on the table. A small window overlooking the forested hills surrounding the hospital let in some light at the far end of the space, but the room was dim. Father Lopez flicked on the light, and they sat together to look over the file.

The administrator had summarized accurately; the details were stark on the page. The same day Miguel Lopez had been murdered, a John Doe had entered the ER with extensive injuries, pulling up delirious in a car, bleeding profusely, handing the medics a list of information: a summary of his wounds, his allergies to medicine, blood type. Everything the hospital staff might need to know except his name or any other personal information. The man described in the file was a combination of detailed data and gaping mystery.

"Shrapnel?" asked Lopez. "Could that be from the grenades?"

"Not much else," said Houston. "She didn't mention anyone else with him. How did he get here on his own?"

"She said he drove in."

"In this condition? By himself? Why would his team allow that? How could he drive across the mountains from Gatlinburg so badly wounded?"

"Maybe they got him as far as the hospital and let him get the rest of the way. Hiding out?"

"Yeah, maybe." She shook her head. "So many holes in this. Nothing adds up. But this is it, Francisco. No way this is a coincidence. This man was injured fighting Miguel. We found one of them."

Lopez sighed, throwing up his hands. "And lost him."

She ignored him, flipping through the pages. "There is some weird shit here."

Lopez leaned closer, trying to decipher the medical jargon. There were the usual physical stats—height, weight, appearance. The staff described a physically imposing man of moderate height, bulked like a martial arts champion. Caucasian, blond hair, blue eyes. There was a description of injuries, treatment, and patient response. A lot of doctor talk. Lopez paused, confused by the next section. "Skin discoloration?"

Houston nodded. "Seems they weren't sure what to make of it. They ruled out burns or any diseases. Look, here, underlined with a question mark: _pharmacological_."

"What do drugs have to do with skin?"

The CIA agent stared off into space for a moment, her eyes narrowing in focus. "Anything about his eyes?" She flipped through the pages. "Here— _contacts_!"

Her exclamation caught him off guard. "Contacts?" Lopez felt like a slow pupil.

Houston read from the page. "Patient was prepped for surgery. Clothes cut from his body, contacts removed." She flipped back and forth intensely through the file. "Damn, no more on the contacts."

"Sara, what is it? What's so important about contact lenses?"

"You can use them for purposes other than eyesight, Francisco."

Lopez thought about this. "You mean decorative? Colored lenses?"

"Exactly."

"Why would this lunatic want fashion contact lenses?"

"I'm not sure, Francisco." She began snapping photos of the pages with her smartphone camera, careful to make sure no staff looked in through the window in the door. "But I think our killer might be a chameleon."

" _Chameleon?"_

"Yes, hiding his appearance, changing it depending on his mission. It's rare, and it's reserved for ultra-elite ciphers. It usually goes with plastic surgery and serious, black-ops-type work. James Bond material. Honestly, stuff only _rumored_ from anything I've seen at the Agency."

That word again. _Black ops_. "This killer can't be governmental!"

Houston closed the folder and put her phone away. "I wouldn't have thought so, but now, I don't know what's going on. I don't know anyone else who would have the resources to take things this far." She stood, and Lopez followed her to the door, once again reeling from the revelations that arose from this search. "Miguel's killer was here, Francisco, and he's something very nasty. I knew this was bad, but I'm getting a chill about where this is headed. We need to get up to CIA _now_. Something is _really_ being buried. I'm convinced after seeing this."

Lopez nodded. "Yes. So am I. And it seems that some others are as well."

The agent nodded. "You heard the woman. Inquiries were already made. I doubt they were who she thought they were."

Lopez exhaled. "We aren't the only ones looking."
18

# From the Dead

_H e stood at the fence and called the old soldier's name. The second day. The desert winds were blowing harshly from the south, the sand stinging exposed skin. The ground this far out from the major centers was cracked and nearly bone dry. The heat pounded down from an evil eye staring cruelly on them._

_He repeated the call. The door of the rundown ex-army cabin banged open, and a stocky form approached the barbed wire cautiously. Even in his sixties, the man was imposing, his sagging muscles still considerable, the vasculature thick and prominent. He wore a tank top, exposing his mottled and dark skin, burnt from years under the sun. Scars from battles pocked his form. He limped slightly on the left side._

_"You again?"_

_"Train me!"_

_The old soldier shook his head in disbelief and pulled on the faded American baseball cap shielding his eyes. "For God's sake, boy! Why me?"_

_"You are the best. I have searched."_

_"You're not army. You're not even Israeli."_

_"You are hardly Israeli."_

_The old man waved his hand at the youth. "Why should I train you?"_

_The dust swirled around the old man's home, forming mini-tornados. The dark-skinned boy leaned into the fence, grasping the links almost desperately in his hands. He looked deeply into the soldier's eyes._

_"For justice!"_

There were crickets.

For some unquantifiable time, that is all he knew. That droning, rhythmic chirping, swirling, pounding his consciousness, rising over him like water.

He swam. Swam in a sea of insect sounds, the patterns forming shapes in his mind, colors that danced. The colors slowly bled across his vision, fading to white like a fog.

He opened his eyes. There was only blurred light and the sense of crusted glue sticking his eyelids together. He raised his arm to rub his eyes. _Pain._ The pain kicked him to a higher level of awareness as he inhaled sharply. The cabin walls came into focus.

_In the mountains_. He began to remember. Remember the hell of the last few days, and remember that this was not the first time he had awakened so disoriented. _Still feverish_. He summoned a burst of strength and pushed up from his chest to turn slightly to the side. The pain from his back nearly made him cry out.

He glanced through a small window on the wall parallel to his bed. The first pale daylight fell on the pines outside. He had slept dusk to dawn. He noticed the sheets were soaked with sweat and, in some places, pink with blood. _But it is less. The bleeding is nearly over._ He noticed that the bandages were applied well, even over his back which he could hardly reach. The sound of wood groaning under weight distracted him.

"You are finally awake," came the voice from the dream. He glanced across the room to a shape against the wall. _The soldier_. Each day, his mind cleared faster, his memory returned more quickly. The rough voice spoke again. "They're calling you the _wraith._ "

"Yes," he spoke through a parched mouth, grabbing a full canteen strapped to the bedpost. "How do you know?" He drank greedily.

The old man laughed and shifted in a creaking chair by the door. "You spoke in your delirium. Sometimes, nonsense. Sometimes, cold facts. Sometimes, a mixture." The soldier gestured beside the bed. "Fresh formula for a growing infant."

The wraith groaned and pushed himself to a seated position. He reached over to a stained nightstand for a syringe and bottle by the edge. Inside the glass was a cocktail of three antibiotics mixed with anabolic and anti-inflammatory steroids. He inserted the needle into the bottle, drew the liquid, and plunged it into his arm. He could barely feel the shot. Compared to the hurricane in his back, it did not register.

He stood, and the old man watched him in silence. It felt like a Herculean effort, but he knew the extreme pain and stiffness would gradually wear off. It had done so each morning, afternoon, and evening when he awakened from sleep to impose drugs, feeding, and exercise on his protesting frame. He stepped on a scale acquired from a drugstore and watched the numbers settle to one hundred and sixty-five pounds. At five foot, eleven inches, this was thin for him. Of far greater concern was that he weighed nearly thirty pounds less than before the bloody encounter with Lopez. He picked up a notebook from the floor and logged the number. Focusing intensely to even do simple math, he grunted with satisfaction as he looked at the growing list. The numbers were still low, but they had slowed their decrease dramatically. Tomorrow, he was certain, the trend would reverse.

To make sure that happened, he walked over to the sink. He pulled three different protein powders from the shelf. One canister contained egg albumin mixed with numerous branched chained amino acids and vitamins. Twenty-five grams of protein per scoop; he added two. A second was casein protein from milk—hard to digest, but providing hours of nutrients as it made its way through the digestive tract. One scoop. Finally, hydrolyzed whey protein, the most biologically available protein known. A staple in cancer wards. Used quickly, it went straight to the tissues starving for nitrogen. To the mixture, he added water, three different unsaturated oils, maltodextrin for the insulin spike to shuttle the nutrients to cells, and creatine. He punched the button on the blender and let it scream for a minute. He downed the nasty concoction and rinsed the container.

_Now for the real test of will._

He began with mild stretching exercises. Excruciating, yet his continued progress encouraged him. Then, resistance training, limited at present to body weight exercises. Through a pained grimace, he smiled that he could do ten squats without holding onto the chair for support. He lowered himself for pushups, careful not to wrench his back. Sweat poured down over his body and pooled on the floor below his face. He nearly collapsed with exhaustion, holding onto the side of the bed for several minutes, unable to move.

The soldier finally spoke again. "Javed, what will be left of your body when all this is over? Steroids, growth hormone, grenades?"

The wraith did not look up, his breath coming in gasps. "Those thoughts are a weakness. _There is no long term._ There is only the mission, and I must be ready soon _._ "

The soldier nodded his head. "You sound like troops preparing to continue some war."

"There is a war!"

"Yes, I know. _Your_ war."

Slowly, the wraith collected himself. The workout had gone well. Now he had to clean the wounds.

"Are you having second thoughts, Avram?" he asked the soldier.

"I _began_ with second thoughts, you young ass. But your pain was bigger than my wisdom. Your vengeance would not be ignored."

"Then get in here and help me wash."

The old man laughed and rose with a grunt, his broad legs bowed but his gait sure. The wraith shuffled into the bathroom, fatigue heavy on his frame. Dark splotches of skin appeared randomly across his body like advanced vitiligo.

"You look like a burn victim," said the soldier, gesturing across the young man's frame. "These chemicals you had me retrieve—they will fix this?"

"They will. But it needs constant attention. Now is not the time. Appearances will come later."

The old man nodded. "Yes. It's the back that worries me. The shrapnel went deep in many places. I've seen it before. You would have died from an infection without me."

The wraith grasped the edges of the sink as the soldier removed the bandages and worked over the wounds. The pain decreased each day as he healed, but it was still very raw.

"It is much better today. You have the health of a young ox." He laughed sharply. "Plus the horse steroids!"

The wraith winced from the pain. He looked into the mirror, trying to catch the soldier's eyes. "Why did you come?"

The old man did not stop working on the wounds and didn't return the gaze. "We had an agreement. You paid me much to train you and even more for a _contingency_ —yes, the right term?"

"So? You were halfway around the world. You knew if you got that signal I was probably dead."

The soldier grunted. "Yes, I thought you were dead. You _should_ be dead."

"Then why?"

The old man sighed loudly and paused his work. "What you do is the most basic of the acts of war. And you do it against the gods themselves. This is bigger than me."

"That's all? Poetic nonsense?"

"No!" the soldier pressed firmly with a gauze pad on the wound, the wraith nearly gasping.

"Then what, old man?"

"Where I come from, you don't leave a soldier to die on the battlefield alone."
19

# New Confessions

Several days had passed since they left the South and the horror of what had transpired. Lopez felt disoriented. Following a bizarre trip to the Knoxville trauma center, he was now far from home, absent from his school on a wild hunt for his brother's killers: a celibate priest rooming with a female CIA agent, watching her sift through data online for hours in the dim confines of a Virginia motel.

He felt like an intern at a law firm. He brought in food, got her coffee, ran other errands as she worked, and asked her questions that she usually had no answers to. But she did work, often late into the night, her hair like a golden veil over her face and the computer, her athletic form splayed at odd angles from hours hunched over the laptop. Two or three times a day, she would stop her work, take to the middle of the floor, and perform a set of unbelievable stretches that looked to be of some martial arts origin. Lopez could only wonder how she never tore any muscles.

Perhaps she did it to release emotional tension as much as physical. Even though Houston felt that the answer lay within the CIA, without hard evidence, she didn't think they could bring a case to her superiors. Lopez sensed that something lay underneath her reluctance, some past conflict she was not articulating. _Was she pursuing Miguel's killers without the approval of the CIA?_ Maybe they didn't believe her intuition. But would they now?

He couldn't imagine how they would present a case. They didn't even have a clear hypothesis themselves, only a train of strange coincidences, hints in medical records, and a hunch that something much bigger was underlying it all.

It was all growing increasingly frustrating. While she used Agency devices to log in securely and comb through accessible files, he paced. Sometimes, he prayed the rosary. At others, he simply stared into space recalling the nightmare at his family house in the mountains. And he was running out of time. The deadline his bishop had given him was approaching in a week, and they were no closer to discovering the identity or location of his brother's killer, or to understanding the mystery behind the events of the last month and a half. The hotel room was fast becoming a prison. He fiddled with the arrowhead underneath his shirt. _My new nervous habit._

Lopez stood and opened the blinds.

"Hey, can you keep those closed?" Houston sniped. "The glare, remember? Computer screen?"

Familiarity was breeding contempt. _Or maybe it's the murders and stress_ , he told himself. Nothing was remotely normal about what was happening.

"Sara, I'm tired of the dark. I'm tired of this dark room. There has been nothing but darkness of late. Dark deeds, shrouded mysteries we can't penetrate. Black ops."

"Poetic." The CIA agent arched her back in front of the laptop, pushing her chest outward and stretching her arms over her head. Lopez tried not to stare, but he found it difficult not to. She relaxed. "But that's _exactly_ what it seems to be."

The priest raised an eyebrow. Whatever his frustrations, he had come to know Sara Houston much better, and he quickly picked up on her tone. "You think you have something?"

"I wanted to be sure, but, yes, there's a clear pattern here. Buried, but here. I'm sorry it took me so long to find it."

Lopez walked over to the desk. Their hotel room was claustrophobic, two twin beds and a small working desk crammed beside them. He sat at the foot of one bed and looked at the screen. "So?"

She sighed, her fingers resting gently underneath her chin. "I looked through what files I had on all the agents who have died this last year. Gerald Stone, John Fuller, Jack Conover. And Miguel." Again he saw the flash of pain on her face. "There is something connecting them, but the records at CIA border on incomprehensible."

"They're covering it up?" asked Lopez, the growing cynicism with this business directing his thoughts.

"It seems so. Look here." She ran her finger across a list of dates and locations. "I pulled these from all their records. These days here, often several in a row, they did not report into the office. That wouldn't be so weird except for the fact that they all shared _the same_ windows of absence. Like a buddy trip or something."

"Wouldn't you have noticed?"

"Not really, Francisco." She breathed out heavily, resting her head momentarily on her hands. "Although maybe I should have. Our staff was very active, often traveling. Some months there would be more days I _didn't_ see agents than those I did. I never worked directly with Miguel or any of the others. Besides, it could always have been a conference or retreat or something specific for some of their projects. They were the elite. _Special_. Everything top secret."

Lopez gave her a sidelong glance. "So, you're not one of the elite?"

"I'm a woman, Francisco," she said testily. "We may have come a long way, baby, but in many circles, especially government and military, there are certain kinds of missions and activities that are still thought to be the providence of men. Men especially think that, and they still tend to run things."

"I see," he replied. "So, these extended absences, you don't think these are unrelated."

She shook her head. "No, not now. The coincidences are piling up too high."

Lopez was getting more curious. "So, what did these _elite_ agents work on that didn't involve you?"

Houston shrugged. "Many things, most of which were classified even from the bulk of the staff. Almost always related to the war on terror."

Lopez grunted and stood, pacing the small room. "How do you wage war on an emotion?"

"OK, bad name from the politicians. But the _terrorists_ are very real. So are their organizations, and their desire to penetrate and infiltrate America."

Lopez could hear the echo of his brother in her words. It annoyed him. "You sound paranoid."

Her eyes flashed. "And you sound like a naive priest!" She glared at him. "I know too many good people who have risked their lives, _lost_ their lives, because they know this threat is very real!"

Lopez stopped still in his pacing. "I'm sorry, Sara. I have a distrust of the government. Too many misguided wars and actions. Too many lies. Sometimes, hearing 'war on terror' sounds like another excuse to fund Halliburton and other businesses that make money on conflict."

Houston lowered her fiery gaze. "Yeah, well, I'm not saying all that doesn't happen. But I'm tired of seeing bleeding hearts pretend there isn't an enemy to fight."

Her words stung. He knew it was his ego that was hurt, but it still stirred him up. "Maybe the real enemy isn't what we think, Sara. Maybe the true war isn't being fought with guns or bombs, or against human armies."

"Is it sermon time?"

Lopez planted his feet. "You can scoff, but maybe our best weapons in that war are love and forgiveness. Jesus was the ultimate bleeding heart, Sara. He was wrongly accused, unfairly tried, horrifically tortured, and did not strike back. Turn the other cheek."

Houston laughed harshly. "I hate to say it, Francisco, but you're gonna need retraining soon. You don't understand what's around you."

"That's my ethos. That's where Miguel and I parted ways."

She looked away quickly, but not before Lopez could catch tears beginning to fill her eyes. For several seconds she would not look at or speak to him, and her hurt struck him like an undefended blow to the stomach. He was usually more sensitive, more empathetic. It had been his gift as a priest. How had he missed her pain?

_Because I'm fighting with Miguel, again. Because I'm seeing him in her words._ Lopez felt slapped with the reality of their situation—the dim room real again, Sara Houston real, their loss all too real. The battles of his youth receded into a fog of past hurts.

"Sara, I—"

"Shut it." She wiped her eyes almost violently and stood, her arms folded across her chest. Her hair surrounded her face like halo of yellow, extending down to the freckled skin of her arms. "I'm tired of bottling this up. I don't care if you're a priest and he's your brother."

"Sara, you don't have to—" he stammered, sensing the direction of her conversation.

"I was in love with your brother, Francisco," she announced firmly. Lopez made no response, and the room was silent for a moment. Her voiced softened. "And he loved me, as much as he allowed himself to."

Lopez lowered his head. He didn't know if he was up for more confessions. He was tired. _Please, no more transferal of sin_.

"A deadly sin, I'm afraid, with married Miguel. Isn't coveting a sin, priest?"

"Sara, look, that's not fair. Judgment is not mine, God knows. I don't judge you."

"Save it. I knew he had a family. Had he let himself stray, I would have been there, with open arms." She looked down toward the floor. Without warning, her downcast head snapped up, and she practically yelled. "Do you know what he'd been through?" The tears were back, filling her eyes, acting as distorting lenses magnifying her blue irises. "No, none of you did, because he had been taught to be _strong_ for the _family_. For the _community_. Your football star. Soldier. Hero. Did you ever ask him if he was okay, Francisco? Did you?"

Lopez felt ashamed. Her words burned within him. His brother had come back from war. Many soldiers he had counseled never got their lives together after they returned. They turned to alcohol. Their marriages collapsed. They couldn't hold jobs. They slept with their guns, committed crimes, committed suicide. Miguel had come back with them. What nightmares did he struggle with? Lopez knew he had not reached out to his brother. He'd been too damn busy protecting his own ego from their disagreements. He rested on the far bed. _My ethos?_ How could he love his enemies when he couldn't even care enough about his own brother to ask?

"No, you know you didn't. Don't take it too hard; nobody else did, either. He _saw_ things in war, Francisco. And they didn't just bounce off him like linebackers. He _saw_ things, _did_ things in CIA that ate at him. No one knew. No one did so much as ask." She tossed her hair back defiantly. "Not even his wife. He tried to talk to her, but he never got far. She ran from it. She didn't want to see anything except the hero she had married. But I _did_ ask, Francisco, because I could see in his eyes what no one else seemed to— _pain_. I was the only one who held his heart, even if only for a little while."

Her face was pained, but her posture was erect and strong. "He would not have left his family for me. I knew that. He knew I knew that. He made that clear; he was fair. But I loved him, Francisco, and I've missed him terribly since he left the Agency." She stared a moment at Lopez. He didn't know what to say.

"Ah, fuck it." She walked briskly over to the counter and picked up her mobile, punching in several numbers. There was a moment of stillness as she waited for someone to pick up.

"Counterproliferation Division? Yes, Fred Simon, please. Extension 3378."

"What are you doing?" Lopez rasped out, hardly able to speak.

"Calling in a favor. A former division chief. He lives nearby."

"Why are you calling him?"

"Because we've hit a wall. I know there's something there, but they've buried it. We need help." Her attention returned to the phone. "Yes, I'll hold."

Lopez approached her hesitantly. "You still want me around for this?"

Her shoulders slumped. "My God, Francisco, of course. Show some backbone!" She walked over and grabbed him by the hair of his beard. His eyes opened in shock. "You'd better not bail on me! You're ivory tower material, damn ridiculous, but we share one thing: we both loved Miguel. I can see it in you. In your face when you talk about him, in your eyes." She paused, a sad expression on her face as she stared at him. "It's weird. You have his eyes—those dark, haunting Aztec eyes. And more of him inside you than you want to admit. Basically, that's your main flaw."

"What flaw?" Lopez felt disoriented.

Houston turned from him and spoke into the phone again. "All right, please take a message. No, I don't want to use his voice mail. He never checks it. Tell him Sara Houston called. He knows my number. Tell him that it's highest priority— _urgent_. Yes, that's right. Thanks." She hung up.

"Your problem, Francisco, is that you are trying too hard to be something you aren't. Just like Miguel was." She pursed her lips. "It doesn't matter right now. If we're going to get through this, you'll have to figure that part of it out. Meanwhile, now that I have this confession off my chest, my head is cleared. I know what I have to do."

She walked over to her bag and pulled out a large handgun. Lopez straightened, a surge of anxiety running through his body at the site of the weapon. The agent pulled off the safety, checked the magazine, sighted the weapon through the window, and spoke coldly.

"We've got business to take care of. I want these killers. And we're going to find them."
20

# Stone Walled

Fred Simon walked into the IMO branch of his division. After the requisite ID checks, he was ushered to an office with a senior information management specialist. He didn't fool himself that these bookkeepers had any special training that warranted such fancy bureaucratic titles. He mainly thought of them as a glorified records department with experienced librarians. But at least they still remembered who he was after many years and had not assigned him some rookie at a cubicle. The specialist extended his hand.

"I'm Robert Conway, Agent Simon. How can I be of service?"

Simon shook his hand, and they both sat across from each other over Conway's desk, the record agent's face partially hidden behind his computer monitor.

"I need information on several agents from the Darst division over at the Counterterrorism Center."

"Why not contact CTC directly?" asked Conway.

"It'd be out of my way, and all the databases are under the new system umbrella, anyway, so I thought I'd save myself the trouble." He smiled innocently and hoped that would do it.

Sara Houston had sounded paranoid, talking about a cover-up in her division and the deaths of numerous agents. He usually trusted her judgment, but he had to admit that this sounded far-fetched. On the other hand, the CTC was one of the more shadowy divisions at the CIA, and rumors swirled around the place. The CTC had put into practice many extreme methods after 9/11, which had led to a near revolt in the CIA over agency ethics.

For Simon, the pain still felt fresh. The executive branch had spent eight years turning the CIA into a parody of itself. _It takes so little time to destroy, and so long to build._ They had dismantled the careful information vetting systems established over decades in favor of their "stove-piping" approach: where low-level information was no longer filtered through layers of analysis to ascertain its quality but could percolate straight to the top. It was part of that administration's paranoia and distrust of the intelligence community. What it got them was egg all over their faces, phantom WMDs, and a decade-long war that had nothing to do with 9/11. Of course, the CIA was the scapegoat.

"Understandable," smiled Conway right back. "Which agents?"

"Three in particular: Miguel Lopez, John Fuller, and Gerald Stone."

Keys clacked as Conway entered data into the computer. Simon slipped back into his memories as the IMO searched the system records.

He fully blamed the former vice president for the disasters—the true force of personality over those eight long years. He had almost single-handedly hacked apart the US intelligence community and then rebuilt it toward the darker purposes he had in mind. Many of Simon's colleagues had left the agency demoralized. High-level conflicts between national security administrators, even the secretary of state, had raged over the VP's actions and the directions he was moving the US counterterrorism programs. The madman had created a CIA assassination program that reported only to him, that ran independently of any congressional or judicial oversight! He was the main architect, achieving the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions by the United States, strong-arming a vacillating president and CIA administration into the use of torture, by sheer force of personality overruling objections in the Cabinet.

What was left was a tattered and disorganized agency, one Simon and a few of the old guard were trying to piece together again—with the sole exception of the CTC. It was not disorganized. It was not in tatters. It seemed to function as an Agency unto itself, even now. Simon knew better than to go there directly.

"Just a second," said Conway. "OK, here they are." He looked over from his monitor at Simon. "These three are recently deceased?"

"Yes," said Simon. "That's partly why I'm here. I wanted to correlate their assignments with some data I have in order to determine if there's a pattern in the deaths."

"A pattern? You mean targeted kills?"

This one wasn't an idiot. "Possibly with such a pattern."

The records specialist looked troubled. He returned his attention to the screen. The clacking continued. Simon watched the man's face transform from concern to a perplexed scowl.

"Agent Simon, I'm afraid I may not be able to help you with this."

Simon's stomach dropped. _Is he part of this?_ "Why is that?"

Conway shook his head, continuing to type. "It's just—no matter how I try, I'm locked out of the system when I try to access any of the mission reports on these agents."

Simon breathed a sigh of relief. "That's okay. It's likely a security clearance issue."

"I don't know," he said, looking confused. "I'm embarrassed to say this, but I've never seen the system behave this way before. Normally, if it were a clearance issue, it would let me know, especially so it would be clear what was required."

Simon leaned forward. "And this doesn't flag it as security?"

"No. It doesn't flag it as anything. I'm just booted out of the system whenever I type in my credentials."

"It might just be an issue with the implementation. I've got pretty high access—comes from having run this division a decade or so ago. Why don't you use my clearance codes."

"Sir, I don't think I'm allowed to—"

"Just let me sit back there and enter the information." Simon tried to appear calm, even as adrenaline rushed through his veins. Whatever he had said a moment ago to the man, this was _not_ normal. Now he really wanted to see those files. But Conway was right—it was against protocol for him to enter the clearances directly. In fact, access in this manner would be against protocol altogether. He had to be careful not to spook him, or he'd lose this opportunity.

"Yes, well, okay then. I'm interested to see what happens now," said the records agent standing to the side of the chair.

_Curiosity killed the cat_ , thought Simon as he rose and walked around the desk, sitting in the vacated seat in front of the computer. He scanned his entry card and entered his security code. There was a pause, and then the screen disappeared, reloading the main menu.

"Exact same thing that happened to me," said Conway.

"I'm locked out of these files?"

"Looks like it, Agent Simon. I would've thought someone at your level would have access."

_That makes two of us_. Simon thought back to the strange phone call from Houston. She didn't seem so paranoid, anymore. _What are you boys hiding at CTC?_

"There must be some software bug. Conway, what do you think my options are now?"

"I don't know, sir. I think the best bet is to go to CTC itself."

_Like hell._ The last thing he wanted to do now was telegraph that he was looking into this. "And if that doesn't work?"

"There's the more centralized records division. Maybe there is something quirky about the data sharing." The man didn't look like he believed in that hypothesis very much.

Simon nodded and stood. "You're probably right. Thanks. I'll look into these options. You've been a great help. I'm sure it's just a glitch."

Several miles away, an office was dark except for a small desk lamp and the glow of a computer screen. An alert tone beeped, and a red icon with an exclamation point flashed in the middle of the monitor. From the shadows on the side, an arm reached out and moved the mouse pointer over the icon and clicked. A window opened on the screen enclosing a video transmission. A man's face appeared.

"Director Darst?"

"Speaking. You realize that you are contacting me on a trigger alert."

"Yes," said the man, swallowing.

"And that this alert is only to be triggered under certain very specific conditions."

"Yes, sir," he continued, his tone slightly more confident. "Those conditions have been met. Several attempts were made to access restricted files at CTC."

"Continue."

"They occurred today at 5:30pm from the Counterproliferation Records terminals. One access was a top-level security clearance."

"Whose?"

"Former director Fred Simon." The face on the screen appeared very concerned.

"And was this access granted?"

"No. No, sir! As instructed, only Angler Security codes apply to these files. But, sir, I'm not sure this is standard—"

"That will do," cut in the voice sharply. "You have properly followed instructions. Your reassignment will begin immediately tomorrow."

"Reassignment, sir?" The young man's face constricted.

"Details in the morning, to be delivered to you at Reagan Airport at zero eight-hundred. Be there on time. Good-night."

A finger tapped the mouse again, and the video window disappeared, the confused face of the young agent contracting to a point. The hand from the shadows picked up a smartphone and entered a long series of digits. After several seconds, a beeping tone was heard. There was a click, and the shadow spoke.

"This is Loyal. We have a problem, Lophius."
21

# Nightmares

_D isorientation. Bright lights. Strapped to the chair. A knife beneath him, impaling him. Blind agony. His own screams._

Sweat soaked his shirt and dripped into his eyes. His legs ached, blisters on his feet. He was approaching the top of the hill, the terrain uneven, the ascent steep along this direction. He had chosen it for this very reason. It was near the edge of his stamina, but he had learned to calibrate his body like a precision instrument. The physical exertion was manageable. _Discipline_. Of mind more than anything. The greatest threat was emotional.

As if on cue, another flashback assailed him. Visions flooded his consciousness.

_More disorientation. Lines of people, waiting. Tellers. Marbled columns. A gun was in his hand, a frightened woman at the other end of it, shoveling money into a sack. More lights. A computer terminal, passwords hacked, access granted, information stolen. Blood. A gloating face, floating before flames, the laughter of a tormenter beneath the sands._

Sunlight blinded him. He stumbled across the tree line, breaking into a more barren landscape. He paused a moment, doubled over more from memory than fatigue, his breath in gasps. He clicked the bottom on the stopwatch and glanced at the time. _Better_. _I'm nearly ready for the next stage._

He removed the backpack and dropped it on the ground in front of him. Crouching down beside it, he grabbed a water canister and drank. Replacing the bottle, he turned over on his back, lying down on the rough soil and rocks. A slight intake of air was all that revealed the residual pain that this action elicited. As it faded, he closed his eyes and instantly fell into a dream. A repeating dream, one that he knew his psyche needed to relive as much as his body required the continued input of steroids and nutrients to rebuild itself. The old man waited far below, and he waited deep in memory.

_"No!" the solid form corrected. "Your stance is key. It doesn't matter how many fancy moves you have if with one quick motion I can unbalance you!"_

_With that, the old man showed just how deadly he was, or must have been in his youth. The youth saw the move coming and countered it, but in doing so lost his footing. Instantly, the old soldier was standing over him, the bright desert sun blinding him from above, a knife in his hand and held to the throat of his defeated student._

_"Again you are dead!" The old soldier reverted to Russian, issuing a stream of curses. "We are wasting our time. You are too old to unlearn so much. We can't go forward because your past holds you back!"_

_He stepped away from the youth, the exertion clearly having tired him, straining his aging body so that his step carried a more pronounced limp. The youth knew the old man by now. Knew his strength of will. He must be in great pain._

_"How many have you trained?"_

_"What?" said the soldier, sitting on a rusted barrel._

_"For the army, how many have you trained?"_

_The old man laughed. "Not just for the army, boy. Once they knew my value, my skills were used for more elite forces."_

_"These were grown men. Like me."_

_"Yes, but men with years of prior training! What you wish to do, it is crazy. I am crazy to help you. You must become superman."_

_"Then why do you help me?"_

_The old soldier scowled. "You said it. Justice."_

_"Maybe." The youth rose and brushed the dust from his clothes. "But it's more."_

_The soldier nodded. "Yes, maybe it is."_

_"You want to see if you can do it. You want to make superman."_

_The man sighed. "No, it is hopeless."_

_"Then you must try more. Push harder."_

_The soldier eyed the youth warily. "You are mad, boy. You know this?"_

_"And why not? What do you know of it? I've seen things you can't imagine!"_

_The old man stood slowly and set his shoulders. "Don't lecture me on the horrors of war, child. Or I will teach you a lesson you will not forget."_

_The youth suppressed a smile. "Then teach it to me, old man."_

The alert tone from his smartphone broke through his meditation. He detached the phone from his belt and answered the call.

"I'm at the top." The reception was poor here, but he could make out the old soldier's words.

"You are progressing too fast."

"Good. I will rest here half an hour and then return."

There was an exhalation on the other end. " _Da_. If you are so determined, then we commence limited combat exercises today."

The wraith smiled. "We already have."

"What do you mean?"

He lay back down on the rock and closed his eyes. "Never mind. I will be ready. Were you able to arrange the shipments?"

There was a bitter-sounding laugh on the other end. "Barely. It is only your obscene money supply that greased these wheels. The Americans are so stupid, so terribly afraid of immigrants. They should not fear hard workers but fear the other things that can be smuggled across their borders."

"As long as the arms and equipment arrive—the money is not important. I have more than enough."

"Someday, I will need to study your investment habits."

The wraith smiled. "Only if you are not risk averse."

Another laugh from the phone. "Enough talk. I am waiting."

The wraith closed the connection. _Yes, much is waiting to be done._
22

# Foxhole

A black Lincoln town car pulled to a stop alongside the rusted hulk of a long-abandoned John Deere harvester. Pebbles and dust rained briefly behind the tires, but silence returned quickly to the countryside, punctuated only by the cough of the engine shutdown and the intermittent pinging of metal as the car cooled. The untended wild grass and wheat behind the harvester whispered softly in the evening breeze, the shafts painted in a bright golden hue as the sun plunged behind a farmhouse across the road.

The back doors of the town car opened, and two older men in dark, pressed suits emerged from opposite sides of the car, closing the doors and walking together to a gate in front of the yard. One of the men resembled the slumping electrical posts near the house, his wiry, long frame bent slightly from age and use, a slight limp in his walk. The second was stockier, bordering on overweight, yet with an unmistakable presence of strength that belied his age. He walked upright, casting quick glances across the landscape.

Upon more careful inspection, the farmhouse appeared anomalous. The rusted wrought-iron gate was far more stable and secure than it appeared from a distance. It inserted into what appeared to be a broken-down, and yet unusually high, cobblestone wall that ran a perimeter completely around the farmhouse. At close quarters, a discerning eye could see that the stone was a facade and that the wall was composed of reinforced concrete. A series of micro-wires connected the gate to the wall and ran along the wall, inside and above, leading to miniature cameras and motion detectors disguised as stone defects. Even at this distance from the house, like the whine of a nearby mosquito, the telltale buzz of a powerful underground generator could be heard purring.

The larger man laughed. "They don't make country homes like they used to, Nexus."

"It's not perfect," began his companion, "but it's the best we could do given time and resources. We had to pull in a lot of favors, Bravo. A lot. I think we've cashed in all our chips. Close to state-of-the-art security, power. And inside it's, shall we say, _weaponized._ "

"And isolated."

"Yes," said Nexus, removing a thumb-sized keypad from his jacket. "From hostile as well as friendly fire." He pressed several closely spaced buttons on the device. A whirring and clicking sound followed, and the gate parted in the middle, splitting into two segments, each portion moving at opposing angles inward. The opening allowed each man to enter single file. Smiling, Nexus placed the controller back in his jacket. "Let me show you around. We're all going to be here for a while, it seems."

"One less now, with Phoenix gone."

Nexus shook his head from side to side. "He was always weak, but I didn't think he would so completely collapse. I hope he fitted the barrel correctly. The death is longer if you miss the brain stem. Things may be bad, but I plan on weathering this storm."

As they passed through, the motion sensors noted their position, and soon the gate clanged shut. Walking to the middle of the lawn, Nexus gestured toward the wall.

"We can see every approach angle and several around the gate. A monitoring station is located inside. A second set of cameras tracks with the motion sensors, covering eighty percent of the surface area within the perimeter. Pressure sensors underneath the fake lawn cover the rest. No one gets in without us knowing."

Bravo grunted. "All the King's horses and men didn't help Lopez. You saw the paranoid safe house he had. The wraith walks through security walls, Nexus."

The taller man sighed. "We'll see. _If_ he finds us."

"He'll find us."

"If he's still alive."

"He walked out of that hospital, Nexus. He's alive."

"Yes, likely alive." Nexus looked up into the night sky. As the daylight faded utterly, the stars began to filter through. "He's a shape-shifter."

Bravo turned toward his companion and arched an eyebrow. "From the medical reports?"

Nexus lowered his gaze and nodded. "It looks like his ancestry is not quite so Northern European as we had assumed from the initial descriptions."

"Extreme measures," began Bravo, "but this begins to complete the puzzle."

"Indeed. It's becoming all the more certain that this is connected to the removal units."

"Certain?" came the irritated response from Bravo. "There's more you're not telling me."

"We have the confirmation about the Syrian black site."

"Gone?"

"It is nearly impossible to get anything out of that tinderbox now. All connections are cut. Well, nearly all." Nexus sighed. "But yes, it's gone. Burned to the ground. I saw the photos. No survivors that we can locate, although we can't locate much in that nation right now."

There was a long silence and a soft moan as the wind gathered strength. Bravo looked east, as if gazing across the world to the sands of the Middle East.

"That's where it began."

"No, Bravo, it began before that, in the plans we made after 9/11, in the choices we made and the actions we took. It began with contracts to Boeing, flights out of North Carolina. It began when we crossed lines."

"Don't lecture me, Nexus. I don't hold your insecurities. I'd do it again in a moment."

Nexus laughed, shaking his head. "It was always helpful to have your unwavering presence during those years, Bravo. But I expected nothing less from the man that practically ran Guantanamo for half a decade."

The large man turned to face his companion, a hard expression on his face. "What this new information means is that we have a route to identifying this wraith. There can only be a limited number of candidates who would match the missions and personnel. The teams are identified by the body trail. The black site by its destruction."

"Yes, yes," Nexus said, waving away the stern stare. "The research is underway."

"What about our meddlers? The woman?"

"She and the priest were at the hospital. Presumably, they got a look at the records."

Bravo exhaled. "This should have been prevented!"

"Too many assets were already involved! Those present were concentrating on finding the wraith." Nexus drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to regain his authority. "There is little reason to suspect that either Houston or the priest could understand the significance of the records."

"That is not the only thing that worries me," said the large man, yielding no ground. "Now they will know others are also looking."

"Perhaps they already knew, Bravo. The Houston woman is considered a good agent."

Bravo stared briefly at the taller man and then looked away. "Yes, perhaps."

"But I believe their usefulness is now outweighed by the dangers to us that they pose."

"I agree."

"We'll encourage them to abandon this effort."

"And if they do not take to _encouragement_?"

Nexus sighed. He was tiring of this verbal chess game. He pulled out the small device, turned his back on Bravo, and walked to the farmhouse.

_Let him figure it out._
23

# First Dominoes

The pounding on the door startled them both.

Houston checked the spy hole and opened the door quickly, and a heavyset man stumbled into the room panting. "Jesus, Fred, what the hell happened? You look like shit."

Lopez had to agree with Houston. Fred Simon looked like he had been through a forced march. In his mid-sixties, overweight, and sporting an ill-fitting and disheveled suit, his full shock of gray hair appeared violently windswept, as did his loosened tie.

"Fred, what's going on?" Houston asked, her initial shock transitioning to an analytical concern.

"Quiet, Sara! Close the door!" Simon whispered harshly. He sprang to the window and looked outside for several seconds, his eyes scanning the parking lot outside their room. Lopez startled to see a gun in his right hand. He glanced nervously over to Houston who bolted the door. Her eyes followed Simon.

Finally satisfied, the CIA man placed his gun inside his suit and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead.

"I think I've lost them."

Houston brought him a bottle of water, which he accepted thankfully. "You're too old to be playing cops and robbers, Fred."

"Tell me about it." He sat on a chair across the room from the desk and exhaled deeply. "What the hell have you gotten me into, Sara?"

Houston shook her head. "I don't know, Fred. You got my messages and the encrypted emails. You know as much as I do now. Can you tell us what happened?"

Simon nodded and glanced at Lopez. "I guess you'd be the priest. Forgive me, Father, if I sin and don't properly introduce myself. Jesus, I've had a hell of a day."

Lopez nodded. "I understand. Things seem to be getting crazier by the day."

Simon turned back to Houston. "Well, it happened quickly. The timing was unsettling. I had just pushed for access to some of the files from Sara's division. I'm not a director anymore, but I've got residual clout and a lot of favors owed. Despite all that, I was stonewalled and punted from office to office."

"That's incredible," blurted Houston.

"Yeah, real slap in the face. No way the CTC was going to bend any rules, even for me. I don't know what your boys were involved with, but they don't want those details out. So, just as I was getting a handle on my new position in the food chain, things got real interesting. About five minutes after pulling out of the CIA parking lot for home, there's a gray Honda Civic in my rearview. One of the most common cars on the road. Asphalt-gray Civic—hard to notice in general, and if I weren't already primed from the shock earlier, maybe I wouldn't have. But I did. It was mirroring my moves, speed, turns. Subtle at first, then as I did stupider things, the driver was forced to be more obvious."

"A tail?" asked Lopez.

"Yes," answered the CIA agent. "But these guys weren't fooling around. They realized I was on to them, and suddenly the car accelerated and was drawing up on my side of the car."

"Oh, my God," whispered Houston.

Lopez was confused. Simon noticed and explained.

"Might be paranoia, Father, but there are only two reasons to tail someone and then pull up violently along the driver's side—to positively ID the driver and, upon positive ID, to execute an action related to that person."

"Execute?" Lopez lowered himself to a chair.

"Not necessarily a hit, Francisco," said Houston. "Sometimes, as with the paparazzi, to get photographs."

"But, as you can see, I'm not paparazzi material," said Simon. "They weren't looking for photographs."

There was a brief silence. Simon gulped down more of the water. He continued.

"So, there I was on the G.W. Parkway doing near one hundred, dodging cars and looking for an exit. That crazy Civic was on my ass the whole time, and it's damn lucky we didn't get ourselves or someone else killed in that madness. I honestly don't remember how I got here. Once off the highway, it was fifty different roads, wild turns, lights run, and the suspension on my Taurus banged to hell and back. They were better drivers. I could see that. But I had a lifetime of driving through Virginia on my side. Thank God. They didn't know the roads. If they had, well, I don't want to think about what might have happened."

"But this is insane!" exclaimed Lopez, standing up. "We aren't in a movie! We're less than an hour from the White House! Shadowy men don't chase a high-ranking CIA official through suburban Virginia because he asked some questions about a group at another division!"

"They didn't use to." Simon coughed a tired laugh. "Could've handled them maybe in my younger days."

"This doesn't make sense!" Lopez looked over to Houston for some sort of clarification. She didn't have any.

"Did you get a look at the occupants?" she asked.

Simon shook his head. "Too busy practicing for the Indy 500."

"I think Francisco is right, Fred. You get a hit put on you for _asking questions_? No way. CIA's done stupid stuff, but this doesn't add up."

"Maybe it's not CIA." Simon's words hung in the air.

Lopez furrowed his brows. "Then who?"

The CIA man eyed the priest and turned his attention back to Houston. "You said it yourself in what you wrote me, Sara. We have possibly linked assassinations of connected members of your division. The killers are highly trained and bent on some crazed mission. Maybe they didn't want anyone getting in the way of their plans."

Houston shook her head. "How would they know who you were? That you were investigating? How could they have a team on you that fast? The response time, the _knowledge_ of events, suggests CIA involvement."

"Well, they sure do their research," said Lopez, who was staring off into space. "They do their damned research." His entire body flexed, his broad back and shoulders stretching the fabric of his vestments.

Houston stood and walked toward the priest. "What do you mean, Francisco?"

Lopez clenched his fists. "Nobody knew about our family home in Gatlinburg. I _barely_ remembered. Yet within days of his arrival, they were on Miguel. They defeated his security systems. They found out, planned, and executed their... _mission_. Executed my brother." Lopez whirled around to face the agents, nearly striking Houston as he spun recklessly. "If they can do that, they can get to you."

"Francisco," began Houston softly, "They might have followed Miguel from Madison to the mountain home."

"No way. He was too careful."

Simon interrupted, standing up. "These are professionals, Francisco."

"So was Miguel! I don't think they had him followed. _Think_ about it! All your best agents, downed one by one. Maybe the reason these killers know so much is that they have the information to start with."

"So, now you believe it _is_ the CIA?" asked Simon.

"No, I don't think our government is that crazy, whatever I've thought about its actions over the years."

"Then what?" asked Simon, his arms raised in the air.

"I don't know. Bad agents, rogue agents, who have a grudge or want to bury the past by removing all involved."

Simon nodded. "Maybe."

"Or someone who has covertly gained access to CIA information: records, names, locations," broke in Houston.

Simon sighed. "A lot of possibilities. Basically, we have potential killers out there looking for us, and we don't have the faintest clue who they are, where they are, why they're hunting us, or when they'll show up on our doorstep." He seemed to make a decision. "Too little information, too much heat. I'm going to phone in a vacation month, and I'm going to disappear for a little while. I don't think I'm the main target. After what I've seen today, I would assume these hostiles are looking for the both of you. Sara, you've worked out of this room, from that connection, for much too long. I know you're careful, but anyone can hack their way to the information given enough time. You need to move, and move now."

Houston nodded. "You're right."

"I'll be in touch, Sara," said the CIA man. "I'm down, but not out. Let me hole-up, circle some wagons, and call in some favors that _will_ be repaid. Meanwhile, be very careful."

With that, he opened the door and exited the hotel room, and was soon out of sight in the failing light. Houston bolted the door shut again and looked through the curtains for several minutes.

"OK, he's gone. Doesn't look like anyone followed him or took note." She turned back to face Lopez and crossed her arms across her chest.

_Uh-oh._ Lopez didn't like that stance.

"Good thing you got that extension from your Bishop today, Francisco."

He'd almost forgotten. In all the insanity of Simon's story, the one good piece of news had seemed insignificant. But her tone spoke to something else.

"What do you mean?"

"Because we need the extra time to plan a mission."

_Mother of God._ "What mission?"

Houston flashed him a wicked smile. "We're going to break into the CIA. We're going to steal those files."

Father Lopez crossed himself. "Lord, have mercy."
24

# Biometrics

It was nearly forty-five minutes of driving through early-morning rush-hour traffic to reach the CIA building. Unconsciously, he looked across the car and stared down at her left leg. This morning she had bought a large air cast from a local pharmacy and strapped it on. When he had asked what she was doing, she had dismissed his question: "It will take too long to explain, Francisco. If things go like I predict, you'll find out soon enough." _More secrets_. He was tiring of them but becoming accustomed to accepting deliberate unknowns in this new world that he had entered.

All along the way, Houston had explained that the building was a very high-tech experiment. She went on and on about it, describing its top-secret ring-decoder setup, designed by a new contractor specializing in ultra-high security for government installations. A "fourth-generation building, with two extra toppings of paranoia" she had added. Lopez had not listened very carefully. He had always been skeptical about the spy business idol worship in American culture. He'd seen enough American screw-ups at home and abroad to be forever jaded about the myth of the omniscient and omnipotent Intelligence Machinery of the United States. He wondered why she was going on so much about it.

He didn't have to wait long to find out. The building was set several miles into the Virginia countryside, isolated within an undeveloped rural landscape. Houston informed him that the US government held the deeds to all the land around the building and leased it to large agribusiness companies. The nice contracts meant the businesses asked no questions and kept to themselves. The government stranglehold on the land meant that the CIA building would remain relatively isolated.

His first impressions of the location were of a sudden and jarring contrast. With little transition, they exited the shaded, tree-lined, two-lane road they had been on for twenty minutes and entered a bright, open area devoid of trees, the forest forming a broad perimeter around the entire complex like a tall, green belt. Several hundred feet from the trees was a solid wall of concrete perhaps twelve to sixteen feet high. Lopez nearly laughed out loud— _it was like a castle wall!_ Only less scalable.

An unusually large band of razor wire was spiraling across the top of the wall, giving the CIA building the look of a maximum-security prison. As they drew near the gate, Lopez was shocked to see how far they had taken the idea of sharp metal and walls: embedded like a lattice into the concrete itself were steel blades as long as his hand, thousands of them covering the wall and turning it into a giant cheese grater. _Or human grater_ , he thought grimly. It was insane. Nobody was ever going to climb that wall, he was sure of that. What a giant slab of complete paranoia. _Did Congress see how the taxpayers' money was being spent?_

At the gate, Houston handled the most significant problem facing them today: Lopez himself. As an unannounced visitor, without security clearance or federal ID outside of his social security number, there were a lot of problems. He estimated that it took them thirty minutes outside the gate as Houston negotiated his entrance. In the end she managed, but Lopez was forced to go through a series of high- and very low-tech screenings. He had done TSA screenings before, but he had seen nothing like this. In size, the "gatehouse" was more like a starter home in Alabama. Two different body scanners stripped him with electromagnetic radiation. A man roughly cavity-searched him as well. Then the really weird stuff started. He was asked to provide several voice samples, to undergo a thermal body scan, and—strangest of all—he was asked to walk four times down a carpeted strip lined with cameras and what he guessed were motion sensors.

At the end of it, he was forced to leave all electronics behind, especially his smartphone. He signed paperwork linking his name to the serial number and a barcode, and the phone was taken away and placed in storage. At least they let him keep the cross around his neck! Finally, he met up with Houston, and they returned to her car. She limped with her fake cast the entire way.

"So, I don't even get a fancy Visitor ID badge?" Lopez asked ironically.

"No need here," she answered, unlocking the car.

Lopez opened the door and ducked his head in. "So how will they know I'm a visitor, or who I am? This is your fourth-generation security?"

"They'll know," she said. The car rocked slightly as they closed their doors, and Houston started the engine and shifted into reverse. "And not just because you're wearing a collar. It's a smart building, Francisco. A very smart one, actually. All that silly stuff they had you do that you were complaining about—they were taking your biometric ID."

"You're kidding, right?" Lopez's smile faded as she evened the car with the road to the gate, shaking her head. "Biometric ID?"

"Short version: your height, weight, temperature distribution, face, and voice all are highly specific to your person, like a fingerprint. They took scans of your face for facial recognition, weighed you, measured you in three dimensions, recorded your voice and breathing patterns. They had you walk up and down a pressure-sensitive carpet that recorded information about your gait, the way you walk."

"Seriously?"

"It gets better." Houston idled in front of the thick steel gate as it slowly opened to let them through. "The individual measurements are nice, but the power comes in the integration of them all. It's like when you surf the web—any individual website or search term, online purchase or download, they tell you something. But the privacy advocates are worried about the so-called "aggregators," the sites that have access to multiple aspects of your behavior online. When they can create multidimensional databases of your behavior, they develop a highly precise portrait of your virtual self. And they sell it to advertisers, of course."

The gate had opened, and Houston shifted and accelerated through it. "Of course," said Lopez, fascinated.

"It's similar with biometrics identification. Combine your body measurements, face recognition, temperature patterns, and patterns of motion, and, really, they can ID you better than your mother could. The entire main building is carpeted in this pressure-sensitive material—one big sensor, essentially, measuring every step taken. Motion sensors, cameras, and direction mics crisscross every cubic inch of the place. All of them feed into highly optimized pattern-recognition software. Now that your biometric ID is uploaded, once inside, they know everything about you."

"Scary."

"Well, Francisco, this is the CIA. We deal routinely in classified material, often of a significant national-security concern. You can't be too careful."

"How'd they let me in, then?"

"Walk-ins. Despite all the high-tech magic, some of our biggest hooks come from people who literally just walk into CIA offices and tell us something they couldn't bring themselves to tell anyone else. You've got to keep that channel open. Always."

As they pulled through the gate and out from under the shadow of the wall, a pyramid rose out of the ground. As inaccessible and hostile as the outer razor-studded concrete wall had been, the main offices were inviting. Combining the old and very new, the building was shaped like a pyramid yet constructed of steel and glass. Perhaps three-fourths of the outer walls were glass, supported by steel grids. The tip of the structure reached about five stories high; reflecting the morning sunlight, it looked like something out of _Star Trek_. A parking lot surrounded the square base.

"Wow," was all he could think to say.

"Yeah, I tried to warn you about this. All that contractor money seeded by 9/11 has done a lot for the intelligence services over the last decade. But don't be wide-eyed too long. We've got to see my boss, Jesse Darst. I'm going to tell him what I've found, and what I've concluded. He's not going to like it."

Lopez sighed as Houston pulled to a stop in a free parking spot. "And then you'll ask him for the complete mission records?"

She nodded. "And believe me, he's _really_ not going to like that. We'll give it a try before we do anything else." She undid her seatbelt and looked over at Lopez seriously. "Just so you know Francisco, everything we say is picked up by mics in that building. Likely, everything we say in this car. No privacy debates here."

Lopez raised his brows unconsciously.

"I just thought you should keep that in mind."
25

# Denied

The new CIA building was everything she said it would be and more. Lopez felt like he had stepped into a scene from a science-fiction film depicting the American future. The funds from the War on Terror may have been wasted in many instances—the giant razor wall outside came to mind. But whoever ran this show—the design, building, implementation of security, modern office spaces, communications—had been gifted.

Because she had prepped him, he was able to notice the unusual spring in the carpets that revealed the presence of pressure sensors, devices also integrated into a mechanical system that converted the force of impact into electrical energy, charging batteries. Many of the "windows" he had seen coming in were actually large solar panels, the entire building functioning as an extended photovoltaic array. It was a spy building that was also a cutting-edge _green_ building.

He looked carefully around and was able to pick up clues about the placement of cameras and motion detectors, but the mental rethink in the design was startling. Instead of the usual small collection of cameras, or line of sensors at various heights, the walls and ceiling were like the compound eyes of an insect. An array of very small embedded cameras and sensors, likely thousands, covered the surfaces. Whether they were hardline or wireless, how they were powered, and what software ran and integrated it all, he didn't dare guess. It seemed like overkill, until he remembered what Houston said they could do: track and identify every person in every location in the building in an automated fashion. In this structure devoted to preserving the secrets of America and uncovering those of hostile nations, there would be no secrets. After a second round of milder security checks, including one to recalibrate the system for Houston and her limp, they were off to the third floor of the pyramid and the office of her supervisor.

Associate Director Jesse Darst was a thin and angled man, suit immaculately pressed, thinning hair shorn close to the scalp, the large bald spot gleaming under the bright lights overhead. He fidgeted constantly, appearing to Lopez like some stretched rubber band ready to snap. It was obvious immediately that things were not going to be friendly. After very brief introductions, they took a seat, and Darst launched into an interrogation.

"No disrespect to you, Mr. Lopez," he began with a nod in the direction of the priest, his eyes focused on Houston, "but Sara, where the hell do you get off bringing in a civilian without prior authorization or contact?"

"Jesse, there are damn good reasons."

Darst waved her away dismissively. "There had better be. Unless the civilian has _mission-critical_ information, _value_ to bring to our operations, they bring only a security risk. Basic agent training 101, Sara. You should know better than this."

"Jesse, we have multiple dead agents who were parts of _your_ _operations_. The agents here might not talk to you openly, but people are scared. For a reason, Jesse. Something organized is going on."

" _Jesus_ ," whispered Darst. He leaned back in his chair, his expression incredulous. "I let you have your little, paid vacation, Sara, because you started talking like this before. I thought with some time off you'd clear your head. Instead, you've double-down with this conspiracy theory! The kicker is that you then involve outsiders!"

"He's involved because his brother was killed only days after I took that leave! Before I could warn him! You _remember_ Miguel, don't you Jesse?"

Darst leaned forward and pointed a finger at Houston. Father Lopez tensed instinctively, sensing a hostility in the CIA man. Houston looked vulnerable in this place.

"Don't you patronize me, Sara!" Her boss relaxed momentarily and ran his palm across his sparse hair. "You don't think I've gotten enough heat with the deaths of so many agents? A conspiracy to hunt down and kill CIA agents has a nice, satisfactory _Jason Bourne_ feel to it. It gives meaning and makes sense out of what are, from all the facts, unrelated, coincidental deaths."

"Coincidental?" Houston laughed bitterly. "Two brutally murdered. Others dead in mysterious accidents. What are the odds on that?"

"That's what coincidences are, Sara, low-odds events together without a pattern."

"That they all worked here under you?"

"That's the low odds, that's not a pattern."

"That they all were involved in covert missions together, hidden from the rest of us, going on for years? That this topic is so hot-button that information on these missions is denied to most CIA employees?"

"It was _you_ that brought in Simon?" He looked outraged.

Lopez was stunned. How did he know about Simon?

Houston did not pause for breath. "And that his going to records led to his pursuit by unidentified persons as soon as he left CIA headquarters?"

Lopez watched the eyes of her boss seem to frost over. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Houston held his gaze. "Simon was nearly run down on the highway after being stonewalled on these missions. He came to see me. He's scared, Jesse. Something really bad is going down around here."

Darst stood, his hands resting stiffly on his desk. "Sara, you have really gone too far on this. Let's get everything very clear. There were _no_ secret missions. This is no conspiracy to murder CIA agents. And I am sure that no one chased down an ex-division director on the highways of Virginia. There is nothing here!"

"Jesse, don't play dumb with me. You think they're all buried, but it doesn't take a genius to comb through records and notice patterns."

"You've taken to covertly investigating your own division?"

"Damn it, Jesse, it's not covert! I'm here telling you! And there is a damn good reason I'm checking things—agents are dying! Agents I care about! And if you don't want more heat, then you'd better stop covering this up and get to the bottom of it. Because from what I've seen, this is not close to over!"

"That's enough, Sara. I'm warning you."

"I want the records, Jesse." Lopez held his breath. She was playing this full to the end.

"What records?" His expression was cold.

"The records of those missions. Agents Lopez, Fuller, Conover, and Miller—more than twenty times were traveling off-site— _simultaneously_. Always these same agents. Always together. The same agents who are being killed. God . . . only Miller is still alive."

Lopez cut in without intending to. " _If_ he's still alive."

Houston nodded. "I want the records of the missions they were running, Jesse. I want you to open this up to me, let me be part of an investigation into this mess. I'm good, Jesse. You know that. I care deeply about these men. Give me the records and let me work with you."

Darst appeared to hesitate for a moment, a flash of indecision blinking across his features. But it was gone so fast, Lopez wondered if he had imagined it.

"You have lost perspective, Sara. And that is a danger to everyone here." His expression turned very hard. "I'm recommending indefinite leave for you pending the results of a battery of psychiatric tests that will begin tomorrow, or as soon as I can have this arranged."

"You've got to be kidding me."

Darst slammed his fist down on the table, startling them both. "I've had enough of this! You will be evaluated, and then we will reconsider your role within the agency."

Her face was frozen in disbelief. "I'll be God-damned. You're going to terminate my position."

"Based on what I've heard today, I would not be surprised if that is the conclusion of the Agency on this. But we'll do this by the book. When you arrive in the morning, you will surrender your ID, firearms, and any other Agency property. You'll surrender yourself to agents from Division Six. I can't get this through today, or I'd have you there now."

Darst looked at Lopez for the first time, acknowledging his existence. His words were full of scorn.

"Now, get this civilian out of my office. I never want to see him here again."

Houston was shell-shocked on the way to the car. She hardly noticed the wind blowing blonde strands across her face like a net. "I knew this would go badly, but, Francisco, I promise you, I never suspected it would go _this_ badly." She reached over instinctively and grabbed his arm, staring straight ahead. "I think for the first time I'm really scared about what's going on." She reached into her purse, pulled out the little scrambling device she had used in the diner in Tennessee, and switched it on. "They could fire me for using this here, but, well, that'd be redundant now, wouldn't it?"

"So we can talk freely?" She nodded as they walked. Lopez continued. "What do we do now? We're completely locked out."

She shook her head. "I need to think right now, Francisco. Hell will freeze over before I abandon this investigation, abandon Miguel and the others because that prick gets my ass booted out of the Agency. That jerk should have taken my ID and revoked my clearance right then and there."

Lopez felt her hand tighten on his arm. "Why didn't he?" he asked.

"He's a chicken-shit bureaucrat at heart, that's why. He'll do this stepwise according to the manual, so that I'll have no recourse. The psych-eval will be just what he needs, I'm sure. He'll make it so I see the right people. That's all you need in this business. The last thing anyone wants is a mentally unstable agent with access to the nation's secrets."

"But what does it matter if he confiscates your stuff and revokes your status today or tomorrow? Either way, we're still out. I don't know how we'll get to the bottom of this when we're shut out by the CIA. We _need_ those records!"

They reached the car, and Houston nodded. "We'll get them. But I need some time to think." Lopez was startled as she jingled her keys in his face. "You drive, Francisco."

"Me? Why?" _Would he ever keep up with her?_

She held her arm out toward him, the keys dangling in front of his nose. "I need to get inside my head, plan things fast. I can't do that while driving. We'll hit a tree, or worse."

Lopez had the unsettling feeling in his gut again, but he took the keys and unlocked the doors. "Plan what, Sara?"

"Tonight's break-in, of course." He froze outside the open door as she jumped in, slamming hers shut. "Let's go, we're running out of time. We've got a lot to do."

Feeling dizzy, he got in the car, reset the seat and mirrors, and pulled out toward the gate, leaving the pyramid behind. _Tonight's break-in?_ The roller coaster was cresting at the top of the hill.

As they passed the high walls, several cars were entering in the other direction, and he steered clear of a few parked along their side of the road. With a sharp intake of breath, Houston stiffened on his right.

"Oh, my God," she whispered.

He followed her gaze behind them. He felt his heart race as cold adrenaline poured through his veins. One car pulled out behind them as they passed.

It was a gray Civic.
26

# Pursuit

Lopez instinctively pressed the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. He continued to increase speed down the two-lane road, and soon the trees on either side were a blur. Glances in the rearview mirror told him a grim story: the Civic was gaining on them. Houston drove a deep-blue, 3.6-liter, 280-horsepower VW Passat. Lopez had never driven a Passat, but he knew it should easily out-muscle a Civic.

Houston interrupted his thoughts. "No time to be a daydreaming priest, Francisco! Faster! Don't let them pull up beside you!"

"I'm already at sixty!"

"Forget the damn speedometer! Increase the distance, now!"

He hammered the pedal, and the German car screamed into overdrive with a kick. Still the Honda kept pace. _What the hell?_

"We have to make it to the highway," yelled Houston over the din of the engine. "There we have a real chance to lose them."

As if hearing her voice, the Civic appeared to accelerate even more, and the distance closed to less than thirty feet between the cars as Lopez pushed the Passat beyond eighty.

"This is insane!" he cried.

"Francisco, the car ahead!"

A white Ford Taurus rapidly approached in front of them. Lopez checked the opposite lane—another car was coming! He had to hurry.

"Hold on!" he cried, bringing the car to over ninety and swerving into the left lane. The Passat tore past the Ford. With several seconds to spare the priest cut back into the right lane as a red blur and Doppler-shifted horn blared from the oncoming car.

"That was close!" cried Houston.

"Yes, it was! What do I do now?" He checked the mirror, and the gray of the Civic swept back into view as it passed the Taurus behind them. They had gained a little distance on their pursuers in the maneuver.

"Reach the turnoff. Don't slow down! Whatever happens."

"What do you mean, 'whatever happens'?"

He was about to ask again, but Houston blurted out. "Hold tight to the wheel!" His hands instinctively gripped harder, and there was a jolt to the car as the Civic smashed into their back end. Lopez fought roughly to stabilize the machine. At one hundred miles an hour, even minor nudges could send a car spinning out of control.

"Jesus!" cried Houston.

Staccato bursts of sound erupted from behind, and metal on metal pinged as a barrage of bullets impacted the trunk and right side of their vehicle. It was unbelievable. _They're shooting at us! With machine guns!_

"Faster, Francisco! Faster, damn it!" screamed Houston. She reached down into her bag.

He gunned the car harder. They were at one hundred and twenty, and everything not directly ahead was a blur. Another hit from behind at this speed, and he doubted he could hold it straight. He felt the engine strain as they began to ask heavily of it. _How far to the damn turnoff?_

Again the eruption of bullets. The first few embedded in metal again. Then the back windshield exploded. _Mother of God!_ Fragments of supposedly shatter-proof material sprayed over them from the back. _Dear God, help us!_ Francisco could see in the rearview mirror that an entire middle portion of the glass was gone.

Without warning, Houston released her belt and spun backward toward the Civic. Loud explosions burst near Lopez's ear as she fired several shots. He glanced behind. Bullets were embedded in the front windshield of the Civic but did not seem to penetrate. The impacts momentarily slowed the pursuing car. Lopez accelerated to gain ground.

_One hundred and forty!_ Nothing was real now. They would both die instantly if he lost control.

"Look out, Francisco. Ahead!" she cried.

"I see them!" To his dismay, there was a line of three cars in front, and they were rocketing toward them at reckless speed.

"You can't slow down, Francisco," she said, swinging back to look behind them. "They're almost on us again!"

Lopez didn't have to be told. His reflexes were amplified, his senses, sharper. He noticed everything and yet it was all unreal. The Civic was gaining again. _Gaining!_ And he had only seconds until they crashed into the cars that approached.

"Oh, shit!" cursed Houston.

Approaching in the opposite lane was the long form of an eighteen-wheeler. The timing was perfect. There was no way to pass now. It was too close. But there was no way to slow down either with these madmen behind them. As if to emphasize the point, the machine gun fired again.

"Hold on!" he cried.

He pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The engine screamed maniacally.

" _Hail Mary, full of grace_ ," he whispered.

The booming horn of the eighteen-wheeler flooded his ears as the angry grillwork approached faster than he could measure. The cars to his right blurred past.

" _Blessed art thou amongst women_."

A head-on collision with the truck was seconds away. A second to finish passing. Which fraction of a second would be the lesser?

" _And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus_."

Houston screamed. He ripped the wheel clockwise, and the car swerved rightward violently. They felt the air pressure pound them as the rushing blur of the truck blasted past on the left. A loud impact could be heard from behind.

Lopez looked in the mirror. The truck had begun to swerve at the last minute, the cabin twisting slightly, clipping the back bumper of the Civic as it passed. The Civic was knocked sideways, the momentum causing the car to enter a death tumble. In horror, he watched the vehicle roll end-to-end and then flip up violently. He returned his gaze to the road in front of him, bringing the car to a less crazed speed. An orange light bathed them from behind. A moment later, the sound of an explosion.

_It was over! Dear Lord, it was over._

Lopez felt a soft touch on his hands. Houston stroked the snow-white tops of his knuckles on the wheel. "Calm down, Francisco. Ease up. We made it." She touched his arm. "You did good."

Lopez tried to relax his fingers. As soon as he did, he felt his entire body begin to shake.
27

# Assault Plan

They checked into a hotel under assumed names, paying cash. He dropped on the bed and felt the room spin above him. Houston commandeered the desk and opened her laptop, typing in the Wi-Fi password given to her by the motel staff. Lopez didn't know how she was still functioning. He decided he needed to raise his game. But so much had happened.

After they had left the scene of the accident and reached the highway, Houston had them pull over at a gas station. The first reason was to get Lopez out of the driver's seat. He didn't stop shaking for half an hour. The second was so that she could monitor police bandwidth. "I need to know if they ID'd us, Francisco." Reports of the accident and eyewitness accounts about a blue sedan filled the police airways. Fire trucks, ambulances, and possible CIA involvement were mixed into the chatter. Everything was well described, except the mysterious blue sedan.

"Thank God," she whispered, once satisfied that she had heard enough. "It all happened so fast. We got lucky."

Lopez could only agree. Lucky they were not charred bones right now in the place of their pursuers.

She had put them back on the road, and for some time Lopez had drifted in thought and lost track of time and place. _I'm in shock._ Suddenly, they were pulling to a stop in a driveway of a suburban home. He had no idea where they were.

"Wait here," she ordered. He was happy to wait.

After some time, Houston returned from the house accompanied by a large man. They went into his garage and several minutes later were wheeling out on a dolly a large object wrapped in an olive-green canvas bag. For whatever reason, this odd site helped snap him out of his delirium, and he exited the car to offer help. And ask questions.

"Julio, this is Father Francisco Lopez, the priest I told you about."

The heavily muscled man smiled. "Your blessings, Father." Lopez instinctively made the sign of the cross over him as he bowed to the priest.

"Julio has been a close friend and an asset hired by the Agency for certain needs." Houston said nothing more.

Lopez indicated the large object on the dolly. "So, what is this?"

Julio looked over at Houston. She smiled. "He's got some extreme hobbies that will come in very handy for us. I'll tell you later. We need to go."

And so they had returned to the road, eventually finding the motel. Along the drive, Houston began to outline the plan she had been developing for obtaining the hidden records. With each mile, Lopez found himself increasingly in disbelief. Now, as he lay on the bed, the thoughts returned to his mind. He sat up, focusing.

"Sara, this isn't going to work. This is nuts. That pyramid is insane. You can't hope to succeed!"

She laughed. "Yes. And it's worse than what I had time to tell you on the drive. Come here and look. I've got the rough schematics of the building here. Feast on the over-design!"

Lopez looked at the screen. It was an aerial type view of the CIA compound. How she had gotten it, he didn't ask. The pyramid looked like a square from above, and the parking lot, high wall, and gate were drawn to scale.

"OK. I see it. How in the world are we going to get in?"

"You see difficulties?" she asked mockingly.

The priest glanced sideways at her. "To start, at night— _tonight_ , the gate will be closed. There is no way we're going to get in that place by scaling the walls, unless we want to be filleted first." He shuddered thinking about the embedded blades.

"That's right. No climbing."

"And no way you're going to pick the lock to that gate."

"No lock to pick. It's all controlled mechanically. Pressure-sensitive alarms will ring if we so much as lean on it. Coded sequences, changed hourly, are required to activate it."

"It's impossible," he concluded.

"Let's say, hypothetically, that you get past the gate."

"Let me guess, killer-dogs?"

"Low tech, Francisco. You can do better."

"Twelve-foot-tall robots with plasma rifles."

Houston laughed. A pure laugh devoid of sarcasm or bitterness. It seemed out of place in the demented amusement park they had entered. "Francisco, I wish I had known you as a little boy. Bet you were cute." He smiled and Houston continued. "Not quite right, but it's bad. More of the bee-eyed camera setup, but not near as dense, so they can't ID us outside. But plenty to coordinate a series of automatic weapons systems that engage. If you're within fifteen feet of the gate or walls at night, you'll be swiss cheese from three or four weapons that will triangulate on your position with automatic fire."

"God in heaven."

"More like hell on campus." She pointed to the schematics. "So, you have to pole vault over the wall and land at least twenty feet away from the walls."

"Pole vault? Is that what the green bag's about?"

"No!" she laughed again. "But close. We'll get to that."

"So, you get past the auto-weapons fire, and then what? Land mines?"

"No, that's all there is for external security. Then it's straight to the building. The problem is, ID cards don't work after ten o'clock unless specifically activated."

"So, wait—your ID's no good? I thought you said he was dumb not to take it earlier!"

"Not good to get in, but useful _inside_. We'll get to that later, too."

Lopez frowned. He didn't like how many things were piling up to be considered later. Come to think of it, he didn't like the things they were considering _now_. "Then, how do we get in the building?"

"This will sound ridiculous." She walked over to her bag and removed a tablet computer. "They have recently been testing a new facial-recognition security system. It's pretty slick, actually. With that system, you don't need ID cards. Kind of cool—great security and there is no risk of someone stealing a card and trying to use it to break in."

"Break in after getting filleted and blown apart by ammo."

"Right. This new system takes a 3D scan of your face and stores it. Then a series of three cameras mounted above the door scans people seeking entrance. If you match, and you have clearance, the doors open. One of these is located in the back entrance. We've been testing it for a few months."

"I see, so you'll walk up, it will open for you, and then I rush in behind you."

"Sorry, no." She shook her head. "It's a tall turnstile embedded in a fence, not a door. One at a time." She picked up the tablet. "That's where this comes in. Look!"

He looked at the screen of the device. Houston had loaded a very blurry photo of herself.

"So, I'm supposed to believe that this system that has a 3D scan of your face and multiple cameras will be fooled by a lousy 2D photo?"

Houston eyed him approvingly. "You said you taught math, right? Not too dumb."

"Thanks."

"This is not a normal photo. Look again. It's several photos together at slightly different angles. A friend of mine who works to defeat embassy security worked out a hack for the face-recognition system. He couldn't resist. I don't understand it—some sort superposition of eigenfaces or other technobabble. Point is that it fools the camera system. He played with it a little until his concocted images could be processed as my face—any face—by the software. I've tried it. It actually works."

Lopez was amazed. "So, you go in with your real face. Then I walk by holding this up like the Book of the Gospels, and it lets me in?"

"Yes! It will think I simply tried to get access again. Sometimes the turnstile catches, whatever. You have to go through again. It's designed not to freak out at that."

Lopez pulled up a chair and sat. She followed suit. "Now the real crazy begins. You know the system inside. It will ID us instantly or within a few seconds. For tonight, at least, I still have clearance. You don't."

"Sara," began Lopez, "I'm starting to wonder why I need to be there at all."

She sighed. "It's a two-person operation, Francisco. There's too much heavy lifting and too much material we'll need to bring with us if there is going to be a prayer of this working. I can't fly this ship mono."

"Really? You're the secret agent woman. You fire the guns. You should have been driving today. I'll just get in the way."

"You did a hell of a lot better than most would today." She looked down at the ground. "Francisco, I appreciate your confidence in me. But not everything is strategic, either." He eyed her with confusion. "Some things are emotional, Francisco. I need you there."

Startled, he didn't know what to say. She continued. "I need someone there, okay? You might think of me as some super-agent. I'm not. Right now, I'm really damn tired, and I'm feeling anything but super. I've lost people I loved. My career is over, and to send it off in style, I'm about to break into my own government building and steal information. I could end up in jail until I'm old and gray. You're the brother of someone I cared for deeply, and you want to find justice for him as much as I do. Besides you, I've got no one. You're coming."

Lopez nodded in accord, but he was again surprised. Her vulnerability lurked inside of a shell of adamant and caught him unprepared.

"Okay, Sara, but what happens when this system sees I'm not supposed to be there?"

"All hell breaks loose." She pointed to the building plans. "The doors lock so that no ID will get them open until an external command code is given."

"Great."

"Even better. They electrify. Lethal voltage. No lock picking or control panel hacking. Touch anything around the door and you're dead."

Lopez just stared at her.

"Once the alarm triggers, security is called, as well. And, to make sure you're docile when they deactivate things and enter, they gas the building."

" _Gas the building?_ Nerve gas? Poison?"

"Non-lethal incapacitating agent. Some derivative of BZ that has better clean up and more drowsiness."

"BZ?"

"Ever heard of Agent 15? No? Well, Saddam Hussein used to love using that stuff. The walls of the building are filled with a much more sophisticated version."

Lopez shook his head. "So they make it as hard to get out as to get in."

"Maybe harder. They don't think anyone is dumb enough to break in. But if they do, then they want to prevent anything getting out. No bodies out. No information, either—so once the alarms go off, Wi-Fi dies, extra-strong cellular jamming goes into effect. You're gassed and left for pickup."

"Sara, then we are back to me staying. This is crazy."

"Or," she said, interrupting, "you outwit it."

"How?"

"We don't have time for everything here. It's already eight o'clock, and we need supplies. I'll explain on the way. Besides, if I tell you now, you won't come."

_That's encouraging_. It was suddenly too real. Talking and planning had a certain safe abstraction to it. Lopez watched Houston as she packed a duffle bag with numerous items. He noted that among them were several firearms.

She paused staring at the weapons. "Don't have time to train you with these, or I'd give you several."

_Give me several guns?_ He played over what was coming. Razored walls. Robotic machine guns. Intelligent buildings with electrified doors and spy-film knockout gas. A priest with guns.

_She's insane._
28

# Cloudhopping

Houston parked next to a darkened light pole, the large parking lot of the discount warehouse shut down and empty. Although it was one in the morning, Lopez had never felt more awake in his life. He buzzed from some sort of electric charge running through him, the looming madness they were planning just a few steps away. Their ticket awaited in the trunk of her car.

"Help me get this out of here," she grunted, pulling on the green canvas. The incredible weight of it shocked Lopez as he helped her heave it onto the asphalt. She began unlacing the sides. He shook his head. This was completely mad.

"Newest model of the Bervedine Cloud-hopper," she smiled as the canvas dropped away. "We'll need the inflation fan from the back seat. Julio could manage it; I can't lift the thing by myself." She eyed his frame mischievously. "But I bet you can, Francisco."

As she set up the metal harness and propane tank, Lopez headed to the backseat. The inflation fan would sit outside of the nylon envelope, which when unfolded would be much larger. He glanced back toward Houston—she was unfolding it now. The fan was big and heavy, but he managed to extract it without too much trouble. Fortunately, it was built with an attached set of wheels. He lowered it with a grunt onto the ground and wheeled it forward. Soon he had the device alongside the burner.

"Julio had this one specially designed. He's a big guy, as you saw." She spoke through clenched teeth, pulling hard on the straps and ropes tying the envelope to the seat.

Lopez noticed that the gas tank was bolted into the back of the makeshift chair. "Have you ever done this before?" he asked, expecting a negative.

"Of course!" she said, finishing off the assembly and firing the flame. The blast of air from the heat hit Lopez in the face, and he instinctively backed off. "Twice, for your information. Julio had several of us out once. The Agency loves to have everyone tightly knit. Friends, lovers. One big paranoid family."

"Twice."

"With one unassisted landing!" She positioned the fan behind the flame and started the engine. It sputtered once, then took, and a loud humming filled his ears, followed by the white noise of rushing air. The balloon slowly began to inflate. "These small one-man balloons are actually kind of fun. Better than parasailing, unless you like the greater risk of that. These guys are very maneuverable, relatively cheap, and, important for tonight, allow you to take off and land in very small areas."

Lopez shook his head. "You know, after all this high-tech biometric auto-fire face-recognition spook-talk, you'd think you'd have a less primitive way to defeat their security."

Houston laughed. "See, Francisco, that's why it's going to work. They planned for all kinds of brutal and sophisticated assaults on their security system. But it was all two-dimensional thinking. All we need is a tank of propane, a metal harness, a big patch of nylon, and a fan, and we're in!" She smiled broadly. Lopez thought she looked like an excited little girl about to get on a roller coaster.

He took several steps back. The balloon was nearly inflated. Personal balloon or not, it was _big_. "We aren't in there yet, Sara," he said grimly, looking at the towering shape. He hoped no random police patrol car would pass by. "And you said _one-man_ balloon—will it support one man and one woman?"

"Like I said," she began, strapping herself into the harness and motioning Francisco over. "Julio had it made for him. Two hundred and seventy-five pounds of former linebacker, with over-design for safety. You're about one hundred and eighty pounds, if I can guess. I'm one hundred forty. Should work." That smile again.

Already she was beginning to lift off the ground. He stood next to her, and she strapped a second harness onto him. This was not going to be comfortable.

"The only issue is navigation with all this priest deadweight underneath me," she said musingly as she fired the tank, driving hot air into the balloon. Lopez felt his weight lessen dramatically, and he rose up without effort on his toes. "And, of course, landing."

_Landing_. Landing with _him_ underneath. "I've got a bad feeling about this, Sara."

Instead of replying, she burned the flame harder, and instantly his feet were no longer on the ground. The balloon gained altitude at a frightening rate, and within seconds the food warehouse and her car were small below them, twisting out of his field of vision as she piloted the cloud-hopper over the forest nearby. As they increased their altitude, Lopez gained a greater eye-line to the horizon, the orange necklaces of street lights radiating outward underneath them, a reflection of the full moon shining back at him from a small lake on his left. The wind rushed over his face.

He surprised himself with a laugh as the euphoria of the moment swept over him.

_I'm flying._
29

# Break-In

The landing was rough, and he skinned his right leg enough to draw blood. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be broken, and after a split-second look, Houston anchored the balloon to a drain grating and unhitched the two backpacks she had brought. They hoisted one apiece.

They left the balloon "parked," fully inflated, right in the middle of the CIA lot. She had landed in what she called a security camera blind spot, the largest of four around the property. Even so, "largest" meant that they had a very narrow landing pad in which they could work, but somehow, she had done it, even with him underneath to complicate the touchdown. He assumed that the tradeoff was bouncing him off the asphalt.

Lopez carried the tablet, checking once more that the app was running correctly, displaying the strangely out-of-focus image of Houston that was supposed to defeat the face-recognition algorithms. Houston pulled out four small containers marked with several warning labels: _ultrahigh pressure_ , _explosive_ , _extremely cold gas._ She had briefly explained that it was highly compressed nitrogen that when released in the small spaces they would enter, would momentarily lower the temperature in the room by tens of degrees. While not much, it was enough to decrease the sensitivity of the tracking equipment. Exactly why this was the case, he didn't have time to pursue. Because of this, they were to don oxygen-supplied gas masks immediately after entry, both for the volume of released nitrogen and for the moment the security system would detect Lopez as an intruder and release the neuro-suppressant sleeping gas.

In addition, she had packed electronic equipment, several small firearms, and a bag full of gray bricks, which he assumed were plastic explosives. As they ran from the balloon toward the glass pyramid, he suppressed a bitter laugh as he gazed toward the razor walls and robotic weaponry they had skipped over. _Down the rabbit hole, I go._ A parish priest only recently teaching bored students was now sprinting through what should have been an adolescent's video game. _Except that the deaths are real. The bullets real. The pain real. My brother's death, real._ His smile faded, and he focused ahead as they approached the entrance.

At the facial-recognition device, there was the turnstile she had mentioned, after which was a short ten-foot walk to a stairway leading downward, ending at a heavy-looking door. Houston indicated that through the door was a short tunnel, embedded in the ground next to the building, which would lead upward to the main floor.

She motioned for him to keep at a distance. "Don't get close enough for it to scan you until you have the tablet positioned right against your face."

"How will I see to walk?" Lopez had not thought of this until now.

"You won't. Eyeball a line, look down at your feet, and walk straight. When you get close to the turnstile, quickly align yourself—it spins counterclockwise—and just push your way in. You should be able to lower the tablet once it engages."

Lopez nodded, and she turned and walked toward the turnstile and invisible camera system. "Walk slowly to this spot," she said, coming to a stop, "and stand still until you hear the mechanism."

At that moment, a green light appeared next to the door, and he heard a metallic clanking sound. Houston walked forward and pushed her way through the turnstile. As she did so, a loud click came from the far door, and it opened automatically, pivoting on its hinges slowly. She motioned for him to approach.

Taking a deep breath, he verified again that the image was showing, and walked forward with the device pressed closely to his face. As he neared the location she had indicated, she called out, "Stop!" Lopez halted. There was a pause. He was sure that it was longer than it had been for her. He felt sweat trickle down the side of his face, but he did not move the tablet or change position. Just when he began to panic, he heard the same metallic sound he had a moment ago. "Francisco, move!" He lowered the tablet. Houston was motioning animatedly. He walked forward quickly, pressing against the turnstile bars. They moved! He pushed through and felt his knees nearly buckle.

"Damn it, Francisco! Don't get shaky on me now! This is just starting." As she spoke, she removed one of the slabs of gray plastique and attached it to the turnstile. Embedded in the putty was an electronic device. _Radio receiver?_ He didn't ask.

Lopez placed the tablet back into the backpack and followed her through the second door. He had hardly entered a foot when she held up her hand and stopped him again.

"Okay, beyond this point and we're in the range of the tracking system. Help me with these." She removed her pack and knelt down, yanking on the large zipper. She reached in and removed four small gas tanks. "Get the masks."

Lopez mirrored her position and opened his pack. He removed the two masks with their small oxygen canister. Houston grabbed one and strapped it on. "Like this." She showed him how. Clumsily, he mimicked her motions, and with some help, soon had his on.

"Wow, this is heavy." His voice sounded strangely resonant.

"Bad for the neck, but it beats having to lug a back-mounted cylinder. Especially if you're traveling by personal balloon." She didn't smile. Her voice was substantially muffled, but she spoke loudly enough for him to understand easily. "Second drawback is that the small tank means we only have clean air for twenty minutes. Enough time for us to get to where we need to go before the nitrogen will have dispersed. I don't think we'll get close to fooling the system that long. We'll be lucky to make it to Jesse's office before all hell breaks loose."

Houston transferred most of the remaining items to one pack and indicated that Francisco should take it. She kept the two guns, strapping them tightly to her waist with a utility belt, and then reached up and touched Lopez's mask on the side. It was nearly as if she had placed her hand on his cheek, and it felt like an oddly intimate gesture. He felt and heard a click.

"Opening your supply."

He felt a pressure change in his ears, and there was a strange taste tainting the air. Houston affixed another large charge to the doors and then handed him two of the canisters.

"Do what I do."

With a firm motion, she twisted a valve-like object at the top of the canister, and like the pin in a grenade, it came off. She then rolled the canister along the floor, and it immediately started spewing a dense cloud of white vapor into the air, spinning in circles as it did so. Together they repeated the procedure with the other canisters. Soon the room was noticeably colder, the air becoming slightly foggy.

"Care to dance?"

Lopez frowned. Here was perhaps the craziest part of the entire plan, and he felt that this was saying a lot. He stepped up to her, and she grasped him around the waist and pulled him closely in. She placed a leg along each of his, and as instructed, he crouched down slightly to match her height. His body was charged with an old instinctual reaction. He had not been so close to a woman since high school. Before seminary. But the body had a program of its own, independent of a priest's vows. _I am not going to have an erection..._

"Why, Francisco," she said coyly, "I didn't know you cared."

_Damn._

"We walk to my count, down the hallway, up the elevator, third floor. If the alarms go off, we break off and move as fast as we can."

The entire idea was based on an attempt to fool the tracking system. Now her strange behavior the day before was to bear fruit. She had worn a cast, faked a strange and lumbering walk, all so that she and Lopez could walk as one person to the rhythms she had reprogrammed the system for. _There is no way this is going to work._

It worked. Whether because of the cold gas or the strange walk that simulated a single person with a limp, they made it all the way down the hallway to the elevators without incident. Lopez couldn't believe it.

"Okay, pushing the elevator button." She reached across him, brushing his chest and shoulder, his body now primed to react to her touch. He was having trouble concentrating on the break-in. It was ridiculous! "Blind spot in the elevators." She smiled.

The doors opened. They entered. She pressed the button for the third floor, and they remained in their odd embrace for five or six seconds as the elevator climbed and then stopped. The doors opened.

"Second door on the right."

They lumbered out, and their luck ended. Houston's phone began to issue a repeating electronic tone.

"Shit! We're blown."

At that moment, Lopez heard metallic sounds from several floors down, and the elevator lights went dark. Then total silence. A hissing sound filled his ears, along with a high-frequency buzz. _Gas and electricity._

She let go of him and scanned her phone briefly before stowing it. "The Wi-Fi cut. The building alarms have tripped. The place is locked down now. Don't take off your mask and don't touch the exit doors! We'll need to work fast."

She sprinted down the hall and stopped in front of the office door. Removing two charges from her bag, she placed a small amount of gray putty capped with a tiny circuit board on each door hinge. She waved Lopez back. "Don't have time to play lock picker." She pressed a button on the cap, rushed back, and turned her face away from the charge. Lopez did the same. A second later, a small explosion blasted the door. Houston sprinted back down the hallway and kicked the door inward. It was ripped out of the frame and crashed onto the floor.

By the time Lopez had caught up, she was already inside, crouched down by a computer. It was the office of Jesse Darst. He remembered its layout clearly, the hostile encounter seared in his mind. Houston had already removed the casing, and was disconnecting the hard drive.

"We don't have time for much of a search, damn it," she cursed, lifting the drive and dropping it into the backpack. "Security is already en route. I hope to God that what we need is on this damn drive."

Houston strapped on the pack and walked past Lopez to the doors. "Let's get the hell out of here." They sprinted down the hallway. Surprising Lopez, the doors to the stairs were not locked. _Didn't think of everything, did they?_ They flew down the spiraling stairway, leaping multiple steps at a time. When they reached the bottom floor, Houston stopped him with her arm. "Wait!" She removed a transmitter and pressed one of the four buttons on it.

The explosion was enormous. At the far end of the hall, there was a small fireball and a blast of dust and metal that nearly reached them. Lopez looked at her quizzically. "Another." She pressed the second button. Outside, a more muffled explosion could be heard. _The turnstile. "_ Let's go! _"_

They sprinted down the hallway, leaping over debris. Lopez heard his own breath like a thundering elephant in his ears, the gas mask amplifying the sounds. Plunging through a thick cloud of smoke from the blast, they were soon outside the building. What remained of the twisted wreck of the turnstile smoldered in front of them. They leapt across the passage through the mangled security door and began racing to the looming mass of the balloon. Lopez felt a great swell of relief to see the thing, however strange a mode of transportation it was. It was their only way out. They pulled off their masks as they reached the cloud-hopper, Houston strapping the backpack to the metal harness.

The sounds of screeching tires pulled their attention to the gate. Four black cars had come to a sharp stop by the entrance. Several men leaped out of the vehicles. Even at this distance, Lopez could see that they were armed.

"Francisco!" screamed Houston. "Get over here!" He snapped himself out of his stare and turned to the balloon. Houston had already strapped herself in, released the anchor, and was triggering the flame. The balloon had begun to rise. Lopez darted over and strapped on his own harness, hardly buckling the straps when he felt his feet lifted off the ground. He glanced up at Houston. She was staring like a hawk toward the gate while working the balloon.

Lopez looked back over at the CIA security forces. They had already activated the gate and were streaming in through a narrow opening. They had, of course, seen the balloon. Two of the agents sprinted toward the climbing cloud-hopper, weapons upraised.

"Hold on, Francisco!"

Already the building and trees were receding beneath them, but Lopez could not accurately gauge the height. _Can they shoot us from this far?_

The CIA agents began firing, and it took a moment for Lopez to understand their intent. Several shots were close enough that he heard a bullet whiz, but he and Houston were unscathed. _The balloon!_ It was so obvious. They were small targets, hard to hit at their increasing altitude in the dark. The balloon was huge.

_Oh, my God._

Two shots fell against the fabric above him, and he could see the envelope dent inward from the impact. It was too high and too dark for him to see the damage.

"Sara?" he yelled upward.

"I know!" she responded, directing the balloon away from the CIA compound and over the trees. "I just hope it holds together long enough for us to get to the car!" Her words were shouted out loudly over the din of the wind and flame.

It was perhaps five minutes into their escape flight that Francisco knew they were in trouble. The envelope began to flap broadly near the location of the shots. He could almost make out what appeared to be a line across the balloon, a tear that was growing by the minute.

"Francisco, I've got to put it down! We'll lose envelope integrity any second now!"

Houston yanked at the cord to the parachute valve, and Lopez thought he could hear the hot air escaping from the top. _Or is that the air rushing out of the gaping tear?_ The balloon was now definitely careening downward, and Houston fought as if with a maniacal puppet, yanking on the burn, the valve cord, back and forth, trying to stabilize their trajectory. The wild movements started to nauseate him.

Then he saw it. _The parking lot!_ They were nearly clear of the trees! He roughly gauged the distance and their angle of descent. _They could make it!_

"Francisco! Brace yourself! This is going to be a crash landing!"

And he was on the _bottom_.

Lopez looked down and drew his legs up, cupping them with his arms. His feet clipped the tops of the last trees as the pavement of the parking lot appeared below them. _Oh, God, too fast._ The parking lanes were a blur, and the ground was rushing up like a rocket. He pulled up his legs as much as he could, balled up, and closed his eyes.

The impact was jarring. His right leg slammed into the cement, and instantly they were up again, the harness launched this way and that. Again, a crash into the hard concrete, and he felt the harness detach and a terrible lightness.

There was a rolling and bumping as Lopez was turned upside down and pitched. Flashes of light and buffeting. Somewhere nearby, he heard Houston scream.

Darkness swallowed him.
30

# Boot Camp

"Now you will become beautiful! Like Michael Jackson, no?" The soldier laughed heartily as the wraith placed bottle after bottle and vial after vial on the shelves of the medicine cabinet.

"Something similar. More sophisticated. More dangerous."

" _More_ dangerous? Did you see his face in the end? Melted wax."

"He spent decades modifying his appearance. The mistakes accumulated." The bottles were labeled with different abbreviations, and he sorted them into groups. "I need to begin far enough in advance to achieve the desired effect. Lucky for me, there are armies of chemists in Asia working without sleep to make the skin whiteners for their fashion-conscious women."

The soldier nodded. "The madness of women! In the West they wish to become brown, in the East, white! In my grandmother's time, in _old_ Russia, it was better to be fat to catch a man. Now, they must starve like an Ethiopian!" He thumped his chest with his thumb and grinned. "What man wants a woman with a flatter chest than his own?" The wraith did not respond. The old man frowned. "But you have no interest in lying over a woman, do you, Javed? Your concern is not on the energies of life. For you, there is only death."

The wraith held up several vials. "The first step is the inhibition of my own natural melanin production, a cocktail of several compounds. They are inhibitors of the enzyme _tyrosinase_."

"You have become a biochemist, as well." He shook his head.

"I have to be many things. See, here: polyphenols, benzoate derivatives, kojic acid, and others. They poison a key chemical step in the production of melanin, the pigmenting compound in human skin." For emphasis, he pointed out the contrast in the discolored regions of his arm. "They produce a gradual lightening of the pigment and maintain lightness. But it is not enough for my skin."

"You try to cross a wide chasm."

The wraith held up several creams and other vials. "I need depigmenting agents, bleaching agents to remove what is naturally there."

The soldier took one in his broad hand and turned it around, staring at the scrawl on the label. "Hg. This is mercury, no?"

"Mercury."

"Poison! This is collecting in your tissues, you fool. Someday, it will kill you."

The wraith took the containers back. "There is only today and what must be done."

The old man stared in silence, a troubled expression on his face. He waved his hand toward the cabinet and strode away from it. "I do not know why I help you kill yourself."

"You saved my life."

The soldier stopped and turned. " _Da._ But for what? So you can die by steel or poison another day?"

"No, so that I can purge the earth of those who would torture us like animals."

The old man grunted and sat on his chair by the door. He looked weary. "The rest of our program is beyond expectation. Your progress is not understandable. _Dangerous_ progress, I have said. The human body is not meant for such changes. But you are becoming again a lethal force."

It was true. Using extreme methods in pharmacology, training, and psychological motivation, pushed and aided by the help of one of the deadliest experts in the history of modern combat training, he was returning to form. The scars were ugly, but the tissue solid again. Seventy-five percent of his muscle strength had been regained, and flexibility was returning. He had cut the recovery to one-third the normal duration.

In addition to dramatically increased endurance training, he had instituted and pushed resistance exercises. At first, isometrics and body weight programs. Then, he moved to makeshift weight lifting, fashioning bars from thick branches, hanging heavy water jugs from them. Lower body training first: squats and dead-lifts to shore up his back—the steroids, growth hormone, and high-protein diet stimulating spectacular growth. Next, weighted dips and pull-ups, upper-body presses and rows. His strength grew miraculously by the day.

Combat training was then resumed. A lengthy practice each morning in several martial arts, culminating in an evening session with weapons drills. Blunt trauma weapons such as sticks and staves. Knife work. The old man honed his skills, corrected any weaknesses, and helped him fight around his injuries.

Finally, firearms training: handguns and rifles. He quickly learned to compensate for the damaged musculature and neurons, adapting his motions, his aim and stance, his trigger finger to the new realities of his body after injury and rehabilitation.

The old man nodded, pleased. "You are highly adaptable. There is no ego in you, only the task at hand. No student has ever shown such devotion to mastering my teachings. I believe the devil has possessed you."
31

# Deadly Sins

Francisco Lopez moaned as he opened his eyes.

Even after several days, waking up hurt like hell. While he had regained movement and lost the initial dizziness from the concussion, his body was still sore from having his butt kicked by a rogue balloon. The foot-long scabs along his legs and arms had mostly stopped oozing, the antibiotic ointment and washings by Houston preventing serious infection. The bruising had gone from the look of gangrene to an ugly purple and yellow mixture that turned his stomach. But it was fading.

Houston was mostly concerned about his head. They could not go to a hospital. Not after that night. The Feds, or worse, would be on them the second their IDs were entered into the system. Without the option for X-rays, the extent of his head injury could only be guessed at. The first day he had vomited, and he felt a wash of guilt flow over him at what the CIA woman must have had to deal with. Along with his dizziness, and the clear bruising and gash on the right side of this head, a concussion was guaranteed. The question was the severity. Any swelling inside the skull, and he could be permanently brain-damaged. She had monitored him closely. With each passing hour, it seemed the worst had been avoided.

"How do you feel today?" he heard her ask from across the hotel room.

Lopez grunted. "Next time, you fly the low harness for any balloon break-ins."

Houston laughed. He welcomed it, despite the headache that even moderate noise induced. Her voice raised his spirits. "Well, your humor is back, and I'm glad." Her tone turned more serious. "You were going zombie on me the first few days. It was scary, Francisco."

"I'm better, Sara. It's just that every morning I wake up feeling like I just got out of a boxing ring."

Lopez stumbled into the bathroom and showered. By now, he was growing used to the sting on his injured flesh, and his limp was improving. It was a miracle that he hadn't broken anything. After he dried off and dressed, he walked back into the room and approached Houston, who was working at the desk.

The computer was on, as always. Her access to CIA networks was disabled; her one and only attempt at a login triggered an alert, and the attempted Trojan malware from CIA inserted onto her computer. She had barely stopped the process and cleaned things up. It was a clear sign that the Agency had ID'd them from the break-in and were in pursuit. Because of this, after he had stabilized, they had moved motels on a nightly basis.

All her Internet work was run through a nested web of proxy servers to camouflage her presence from governmental tracking. She had wiped and then tossed her cell phone to avoid being tracked by it. But they would need the functionality of a smartphone, so she bought a new one anonymously at a retail location. She paid for the service with cash on a pay-as-you-go plan. As long as they used web services anonymously, it would be nearly impossible for the government web monitors to identify and track them. She also relied on online voice-over IP run through her anonymizing protocol to communicate. Even with all these precautions, she contacted others rarely, and only when it was necessary.

"Did you write to Fred?" he asked, pulling up a chair and sipping coffee from the small pot provided by the motel.

"Yes," she said, turning to face him. "Haven't heard anything."

"You told him what we came across last night?"

"Yes, Francisco. And while you were sleeping this morning, I found a little more."

"Oh?" Lopez was intrigued. "More than their visiting a half-dozen Islamic countries three to four times a year? I'd love to know what secret little deals Uncle Sam was running with these guys."

"No, you wouldn't, Francisco," she said, frowning. "At least if it were just more money and guns for friendly dictators, I could digest it as part of a long-term geopolitical strategy. That depersonalizes things. Makes it more academic."

Lopez saw the hurt look in her eyes. "And this isn't? This gets personal somehow?"

Houston sighed. "They had really encrypted this stuff. Nothing I had, no codes were going to crack it and let me get a peek at those last files." She shook her head, as if surprised "Funny what you can't get from your CIA training you can find some arrogant sixteen-year-old on the right message board to do."

"Sorry?" Lopez felt lost.

"I started lurking on a bunch of hacker groups, online. They're slippery as fish to get hold of, and I don't trust any of them. But I was desperate. I basically followed my intuition to a group calling themselves 'FKAN'—maturely for _fuck anonymous_ to display their dismissive attitude towards other hacker groups like Anonymous."

"Nice."

"Well, their Emotional Quotient is low, but they seem to be the feared group of late. FKAN this, FKAN that. Break-ins, especially into governmental sites, showing some serious cryptological muscle."

"That's what we need."

"Right. But it's a huge risk dealing with these wildcards. Basically, I tried to entice them to do it without much direct interaction. I dared them to hack one of the files."

"You released the files to these anarchists?"

Houston looked crestfallen, but her tone was firm. "Awful, I know. Just one, and I hoped it wouldn't reveal much to the world. Because believe me, when these guys get hold of it, nothing will stop them from sharing it and bragging."

Lopez whistled. "So, they did it, I assume?"

"Less than two hours, Francisco. It was scary. They wouldn't tell me how if I asked, but to show they did it, they had to release the file contents on the board. Hang the animal's head on the wall for all to see. That was my ticket. I could compare the encrypted file to the unlocked file with some software I have on my computer from the CIA, and reverse-compute the encryption. It worked. I got access to all the files."

"So what did these hackers also get access to?"

Houston smiled wanly. "I was lucky. A series of flight manifests from a CIA hangar in North Carolina that means nothing to them without the other files. Of course, they were happy as clams, as the document clearly showed CIA fingerprints all over it, and they get another notch in their belt. This will be out everywhere soon, and the Agency will know it came from me."

"You're going to be very unpopular," he said, the sense of her vulnerability stabbing at him.

"I don't want to think about that right now, Francisco," she said, swiping the air with her hand, as if pushing the topic to the side. "Let me tell you what I found out."

She opened several documents, and Lopez began to scan them. Along with the flight manifests, all to nations of ill-repute that they had discovered through other, more accessible documents, the highly protected files also had lists of names and locations, sets of dates in pairs, along with brief descriptions that seemed to be of a criminal nature.

"What are these dates? Who are these people?"

"Terrorist suspects," she began. "All the descriptions are of links to known networks inside and outside the US. A kind of _threat-score_ is listed, and all the ones with the paired dates have scores over 100."

Lopez shook his head. "What does all this mean?"

"Their snatch dates, Francisco." She sighed when he shrugged his shoulders in confusion. "The first date is when the CIA teams grabbed these guys, and the second, the delivery. _Drop off_."

An awareness dawned over Lopez. He felt cold. "Let me guess, the dates in between correspond to the absences of the CIA personnel who have been dying. To the dates Miguel was gone."

"Yes, Francisco." Her expression was anguished.

"Extraordinary rendition," he said flatly. The term felt heavy, like _cancer_. "It was in the papers. Secret CIA teams snatch terrorist suspects, literally _bag_ them, dope them, wrap a diaper on them, and ship them in the dead of night to torture chambers around the world. They even made a couple of movies about it. One had Meryl Streep. Nice bleeding heart, Hollywood script."

Houston nodded. "But these acts went further, much further than anything I've ever known about. All the targets they rendered were US _citizens_. Every one of them. This was a special operation that was under the radar. Outside of congressional oversight. Unknown to the judiciary. It seems it was known only to a small group at the CTC."

"CTC?"

"Counterterrorism center."

"Right." Lopez felt an old cynicism. "What would it matter? In the end, the Obama administration okays not only snatching American citizens but _killing_ them on the mere _suspicion_ of terrorist links. Without trial. Remember the Attorney General, Holder? He said it _publicly_. No due process. Secret decisions. _Baseball cards._ Bang, bang. You're gone."

She shook her head. "That was much later, years after these missions. Initially, there was some strong pushback. Even talk of legal action. Remember Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar? These were rendered and tortured innocents who stirred up what public outrage there was. There was genuine disquiet inside of the CIA, too, Francisco. It was a house divided."

Lopez gazed out, lost in the past. "My father, Ricardo Lopez, was a real genius. Cold war—everybody wanted him. But Cuba or Russia wasn't for him, whatever they offered. He always spoke so passionately about American liberties. He could quote the founders of the nation better than a historian. He was so proud to become a citizen, that his sons would be Americans. I wonder what he would think now."

She sighed. "We all fall on different sides of this divide, Francisco. And there is a hell of a lot of gray. I mean, we are talking about protecting our people!" Her intensity drew his gaze, and she looked into his eyes. "But if we surrender our deepest values to win this war, we've already lost before a single shot's been fired."

The earnest flame in her blue eyes told him something he needed to know. Whatever his prejudices about government intelligence, the covert work of the CIA and others, whatever they might have done that turned his stomach, Sara Houston's hands were clean. No wonder they kept her and others like her in the dark.

She continued. "And these cases were scandalous at the time. Obama's attorney general may have justified assassination of suspects, even US citizens, but it was a long time, over ten years in the making. Whatever you think of those policies, they came stepwise, piece by piece."

"Yeah, the old slippery slope," he added.

Houston soldiered on. "Before things were legitimized, this was all _illegal_. Ethics is one thing, and many in the CIA don't care whether you _approve_ of what they do. But _illegal_ is another story, because it can get your ass tossed in jail. That's why this elaborate cover-up. That's why they buried it so deep."

Lopez stood, suppressing a groan. When he stopped moving or stretching, even for a few minutes, the next movement was always stiff, painful. He stared outside the window into the drab parking lot. "I don't know, Sara. I think I'm falling on the side of things where you don't deliver people without trial into the hands of butchers, whatever safety you think it buys you." He reached his hand through the opening of his shirt and pulled out the arrowhead. With his other hand, he looped the leather strip holding it over his head, and held the artifact in his palm. "It's a pact with the Devil."

Houston rose and walked over toward him, stopping behind his right shoulder and staring down at the pendant. "I've been meaning to ask you since you were hurt, Francisco. What is that? You were a little delirious, I think, but you wouldn't let me take it off you, even for a sponge bath." Lopez grimaced. "I'm sorry for the breach of privacy, but you needed a nurse."

"No, it's not that." He held up the pendant as if it were some magical amulet. "Miguel and I found this in the Tennessee mountains as kids. A bunch of other things, too—some pottery, bones, things we couldn't identify. A crime to keep it from the archeologists, but it was our secret. Indian _mojo_. We didn't have many links to our ancestors. The North American Indians, well, they were the closest we could get. We imagined ourselves warriors."

Houston moved closer to him. "Yes, that was almost my thought when I was tending to you." He arched an eyebrow. "Well, Francisco, you're a _solid_ man. If I didn't know you were a priest, I would have guessed heavyweight boxer. You didn't wake for hours, and you lay there like some statue of an ancient warrior, strong, with this war pendant resting on your chest." Her eyes looked him over. "Made me wonder about it."

Lopez felt his breathing deepen. He had never felt the admiration of a woman like this, so close, so real. He wasn't sure how to respond.

He returned his attention to the arrowhead. "When I found his body, found Miguel, it was lying on the ground close by."

"And you've been wearing it since then?"

Lopez nodded. "Seemed like a sign to me. Now I feel like throwing it out the window. Sara, how could he have done these things?" _I'm a priest! Miguel, how do I forgive you?_

Houston reached over his arm, her skin brushing against his. It felt warm and alive, the milky whiteness contrasting strongly with his dark copper. She touched the arrowhead with her fingertips but said nothing. Tears were in her eyes, and seeing them, he felt an overwhelming need to comfort her. They had both lost Miguel and now, in some less tangible way, had lost something else of him with these revelations.

But he saw that her pain was deeper. She was losing part of the America that she had devoted herself to, that she loved and served with all her heart. Her agency directed these atrocities. Her entire belief system was collapsing.

"I'm sorry, Sara," he said, reaching over to put a hand on her shoulder.

She embraced him tightly, holding on for dear life, like a shipwreck victim to a life preserver. The arrowhead was pressed between them, Lopez still clutching the leather loop and unsure how to react. Her body shook with silent sobs. She seemed to be suppressing as much as she could, trying to stay in control. Lopez simply held her. Her pain seemed to burn inside of him as well, tearing at his heart, and he wished he could pour himself into her, fill the terrible emptiness her tears revealed.

After half a minute, an alert tone rang on her computer. She let go, wiped her eyes, and turned away from him to stare at the screen.

"Finally, Fred deigns to reply," she said hoarsely. Lopez could see her scanning the message, communicated, he knew, through a labyrinth of security walls and cloaked identities. Fred Simon was no rookie, and he took his own precautions. "He wants to set up a video conference call. In an hour."

"That's great!" said Lopez. Finally, they could involve someone else in this awful discovery. _And we need some help._ It was obvious to Lopez that they were getting in way over their heads.

Houston grunted. "Not all is great. According to Fred, the CIA now has me listed as a top-priority catch. And if you can believe it, I'm coded 'GADAHN.' You're listed as a possible accomplice, if that makes you feel less left out."

"What's 'Gadahn'? Accomplice to what?"

"Adam Gadahn, the first American indicted for treason in more than half a century."

Lopez was stunned. "Accomplice to _treason_?"

Houston shook her head bitterly. "Fred says we're fucked."
32

# Fucked

"Basically, you're fucked," said the floating head of Fred Simon on the monitor.

His pixelated image showed little emotion. Lopez and Houston sat close together in front of the screen listening to the parade of bad news. It was worse than Lopez could ever have imagined, even given what they had done. Their theft of CIA documents had crossed a line in the Agency neither Houston nor Simon knew existed.

"They've mobilized a manhunt locally and internationally. Civilian law enforcement has been involved, and APBs are out for both of you in the area. Meanwhile, they've labeled you radioactive, Sara. It's a hell of a smear job—basically you're a double agent who slept her way across one hundred bedrooms at CIA, grabbing a stash of secrets each time. They've released a bunch of compromising photos and recordings. The story is starting to pop up on the national news and online rags. It's damn ugly."

"Jesus," said Houston, her face tightening. "I'll check them out. I've been focused on other things."

"They can't make a charge of treason stick, of course, but that won't matter for the manhunt. That charge has multiple government agencies prowling around for you. My sources even sounded frightened. The Agency wants you locked up and silenced."

"What are our options, Fred? Realistically."

Simon laughed bitterly. "Surrender."

"Like _hell_ ," barked Houston.

"Sara, these guys aren't playing around. You can't expect to evade this dragnet for long. Turn yourself in before some wild chase ends up with both of you dead."

Lopez leaned forward and spoke into the camera. "We aren't going to give up, Fred. We've come too far in this search for my brother's killers, the killers of many of those in your organization. Sara and I now know what the CIA has been hiding. Secretive missions of an illegal nature that connect all the murders."

Simon looked concerned. "Sara, what is he talking about?"

"Rendition, Fred," she answered.

"Rendition? So the hell what? That's not news."

"Rendition of American citizens. Snatched over the last ten years in multiple missions. Snatched on American soil."

"You're shitting me."

Lopez interrupted. "No, we're not! The records we got from the CIA computers—that have us now in hot water—prove it without any doubts. My brother was part of more than twenty of those missions."

"Black-ops snatch missions targeting _citizens?_ Grabbed here? Oh, Lordy, what a toxic barrel of waste that is. Who the hell was crazy enough to authorize this?"

Houston shook her head. "I don't know. The superiors are only identified with code words: Bravo, Phoenix, Nexus, and the like. It was all set up post-9/11, extreme measures. After 2007, all references to the program disappear."

Simon nodded. "They killed it, I guess. Still, though, evidence of numerous such events—toxic waste, Sara. No wonder they're trying to quarantine you two." He waved his hands at the screen, lecturing them. "From what you've told me, I think all the more you need to go in _ASAP_. Cut a deal with them. Promise to shut the hell up. You can't change the past. Justice in this business is a pipe dream. Cut your losses, Sara. Turn yourself in."

"I don't think you're paying attention!" said Lopez, his voice rising in volume. "The killers are still out there. They aren't going to turn themselves in. We now have information that can begin to tie everything together. Whatever these murders are about, they have something to do with these missions. We've picked up a trail!"

Houston finished for him. "This could lead us to the identity of the killers, Fred. Besides, who says they are finished? How many more agents will die? We're not going to surrender and duct tape our mouths shut! We're going to find them."

"Before the Agency finds you? It's just a matter of time!"

"Then we'll use our time as best we can," said Houston defiantly.

Simon stared at the screen in silence for a few seconds. He sighed. "It's a fool's quest, Sara, but if you're determined to do this, I'll do what I can to help. But my hands are mostly tied." Simon ran his fingers roughly through his white hair. "We've been connected long enough. We have to be careful or we'll end up leading them straight to you. My advice is to lay low, move constantly, don't do anything that can lead to identification through any databases. All communications must be proxy and anonymous. Your banks, credit cards, online accounts are all off limits."

"We know all this."

Simon continued, ignoring her. "If you were just going to disappear, you just might be able to pull it off. But you want to push to reveal the killers. You want to _investigate_. You will have to make yourselves visible and vulnerable to do this."

"We know, Fred. But it's something we have to do."

Simon shook his head in resignation. "You Scottish girls are always so damn stubborn! Fine. I'll reach you again within the week. I'm not idle, Sara. You do have friends left in the Agency. More friends than that, even. There is a network of some like-minded old farts like me not only at CIA, but at FBI, NSA, some others. We're our own secret society, but we're sadly outgunned. We've been pushing since after 9/11 to change the course internally, but we're trying to stay _honorable_. It's hard to compete with _dishonorable_ , let me tell you _._ "

Houston looked stunned. "How can we reach this group, Fred?"

Simon smiled shyly. "Watchmen. That's our name for ourselves, from the comic. Sorry, _graphic novel_. It wasn't my idea."

"How do we reach these _Watchmen_ , then?"

"Right now, through me. That may change, we'll see. Things are moving quickly, you've made sure of that. We're doing all we can, but the machine is bigger than us. We'll talk soon. Be smart. Be safe."

The connection was broken, and the screen went dark. Neither Lopez nor Houston moved or spoke for a moment. The silence weighed a ton.

Lopez spoke first. "At least there is a team fighting on our side."

"The Watchmen," chuckled Houston. "I always wondered why Fred seemed so determined to keep up these interagency meetings. I thought it was for better intelligence coordination. But maybe it was more."

"I don't think they were preparing for this."

"No. I don't think they were either. And it sounds like there aren't many of them. Still, any help is welcome right now." Houston turned toward Lopez and looked deeply into his eyes. "Thanks for risking so much with me, Francisco. I know it's not just about Miguel for you either. I've seen it in your face. Whatever happens, it means a lot to me to have a friend in this." She placed her hand on his.

Lopez was moved and embarrassed at the same time. _Or am I afraid of her?_ Sometimes she felt like a powerful force that might just consume him in ten different ways. What unnerved him the most was how attractive that idea had become.

He tried to redirect the conversation. "I have an idea, Sara." She looked at him quizzically. "The Church," he said. "We're surrounded on all sides by powerful forces, numbers and reach we can't fight or can't control. But the Catholic Church is a big organization, as well. With deep pockets and a reach that goes around the world. And it is a _moral_ organization, whatever its faults and the tarnishing by the press. It is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Lies, shadows, torture, murder—these are the works of the Devil and must be opposed."

Houston looked doubtful. "Francisco, what can the Church do?"

Lopez stood, feeling empowered for the first time in this madness that had descended on them. "I don't know, Sara. But I know they have the power to shelter us, shield us. Once upon a time, often in history, the Church would shelter those persecuted by the governments of nations. Maybe it's time to call on that again."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Go see my bishop in Alabama. He's the first point of contact, the doorway to the ecclesiastical power structure. I'll tell him what we have found out. I'll show him the evil that is stirring."

"And if he refuses to help?"

Lopez's eyes flashed, and he straightened. "I believe in my Church, Sara. The bishop won't refuse to help. God cannot abandon us at this hour."
33

# The Trap is Set

The lights were dim in the farmhouse, the only illumination the flat computer screens lining the faux stone walls. The bluish hue cast a death mask on the shadowy figures seated around a table in the middle of the room, their features pale, ghostly, and inhuman. Even their speech took on whispered tones, as if spoken by the wind.

They stared at a computer monitor, the face of CIA Agent Jesse Darst filling it. He spoke in a grave voice, his face lined and strained.

"They got my hard drive, and through it, access to a lot of stuff before we could shut it down, lock them out completely. All the files were there, _the entire program_!"

"This was unexpected," said Nexus, "and we need to move fast to contain it. That will do for now. You weren't directly involved in the operations. You shouldn't be overly concerned."

"Indirectly will destroy me too, if this ever gets out!"

Nexus held up his hand. "I know that, but you must not panic. We need you to stay focused and continue to report to us. We _need_ your information. We'll be in contact soon." Darst nodded, and the screen went black.

"Then they know." It was the baritone voice of Bravo.

"There is no doubt," answered Nexus. "It was unthinkable that they would dare such a thing. That they could _accomplish_ such a thing. Building 448 was considered impregnable; its security unassailable. The documents were hyper-encrypted, NSA-certified algorithms."

"That a pimply hacker online could crack in an hour!" spat Zulu.

Bravo laughed and gestured around them. "Nothing is impregnable, gentlemen. Nowhere is completely safe. It's best we keep that in mind."

Nexus interrupted. "The wraith we'll consider soon, but we must deal with the pair. Even at this juncture, they have begun to destabilize things beyond acceptability. We thought to use them to solve our problems, but they have created new ones. Their raid on CIA, their cracking of the code is beginning to set in motion our worst nightmares."

"Not our worst," interrupted Zulu.

Bravo spoke. "The release of the document to the hacker community is an embarrassment to the CIA and will further isolate us in their panic to prevent discovery of this program. However, in and of itself, the document is benign."

"That document, yes," finished Nexus. "But there are more, and our assets have intercepted several of their communications, as mentioned. There is no doubt that they have discovered the truth. If they have all the documents on the missions—and we must assume that they do, or will soon—it is only a matter of time before they have the proof in hand."

"And the connection to us?" asked Zulu.

"There for all to see," spat out Nexus.

Bravo leaned forward, his thick brow prominent in the ghostly light. "The black-ops snatches are damaging enough and with the connection to our names, will mean we will be wanted men. But they are bright. They will dig deeper. They will connect the _other_ names."

Nexus nodded. "It is inevitable."

Zulu looked panicked. "If they see how we used the program, who we targeted, even a few—it will be ruin!"

"It will destabilize the entire political structure," said Bravo.

A red light flashed on a conference call system in the middle of the table. All eyes settled uncomfortably on the blinking LCD, and Bravo's words hung in the air. Nexus sighed and reached over to the device.

"He's been listening in, of course." Nexus pressed a button. "Lophius?"

"You fools have nearly brought everything down on us." The voice was imperial. Several around the table sat up in their chairs instinctively. "Bravo is correct. Everything we have done is at risk now. The _future_ of our cause is at risk! Extreme measures are required."

"Your plan?" asked Nexus.

The voice spoke harshly over the speakers. "When your quarry attempts to go to ground, render the ground inhospitable. I promise you, gentlemen, we will have them between a hammer and an anvil. There will be no escape."
34

# Poisons

The old soldier had left for the US-Mexico border. He would be gone for several weeks, his mission to acquire the illegal items bought and paid for, shipped and delivered through networks of international arms dealers and smugglers. It was a task not without its own danger, but the wraith knew criminals would sense their peril in dealing with the former special forces officer. Thirty seconds in his presence was enough to sense the possibility of death.

The mad program of rehabilitation was nearly complete. His training approached the minimum goals required to continue his mission. The time had come for the external guise to be fine-tuned.

The creams brought back painful memories. Perhaps it was the high mercury content in the whiteners. Neurotoxins that shook loose the thoughts. Perhaps it was simply the process of camouflage, the psychological discipline and pain it required that stimulated recall.

First to return and torment him were the surgeries. Most were for injuries sustained in his often violent quest: bullet wounds, knife damage, shrapnel. But the worst were the cosmetic surgeries. At least battle wounds made sense. Erasing his natural appearance bordered on mutilation.

As he applied the cream to his face, part of his mind was transported to an operating room table, his head locked in a metallic cage. His eyes were held open by hard rings. He saw the nurse on the left, her gown filthy in this makeshift ward in forgotten alleyways. The doctor was a disbarred and disgraced plastic surgeon, whose crimes were matched only by his skills. The underground said he was the best, if you had the money. If you would brave the risk.

He had found the money. He had hacked his way into the Dubai banking computers and created a well-filled coffer of an account. He had found the black market arms dealers, passport distributors, and medical practitioners. He had paid them all well for their services, always promising a large cash reward as a bonus for a job well done.

_Murder_. Now he remembered. The surgeon had a propensity for killing certain patients after torturing them on the operating table. The cutter was on death row when given a new lease on life from a riot and prison break. He rarely indulged in such behavior now, however, knowing that the death of some of the criminal elements he saw might bring a hellish retribution from organizations who were as depraved as he was.

In the present, high in the Tennessee mountains, the splotched-skinned man continued to apply a white cream to his body, rubbing it in circular patterns over every square inch of skin. It burned like an acid. Trapped in the visions from the past, his mind flinched at the operating room light, the knife blade that descended, the fire of the blade ripping into his face.

The old monster rarely indulged. But sometimes, it was too hard to restrain his impulses. Sometimes, when the patient seemed less connected to an organized outfit, there was the hope of escaping retribution. _Sometimes_ , he would only torture and not kill. Perform the job yet extract his pleasure from the pain of another. All it took was an operation on an immobilized patient without anesthetic. He could then disappear for a time, hide from immediate revenge, and then resurface in another location. It would not be the first time.

In the present, the man in front of the mirror screamed. The birds outside were silent in confusion. After his cry, he grasped the sink, his arms shaking, his breath in wheezes.

_I must control my emotions._ He was angry with himself. Such losses of control would doom his efforts. He brought his heart rate down and slowed his breathing. He reached back in his mind and confronted the horror.

There was the surgeon, helpless on the floor. Bullet wounds in his legs and shoulder. His death near. The surgeon had made two mistakes. The first was believing that the boy's isolation reduced any threat. The second, that he had not killed the boy on the table. The price was his life.

That death had been a detour, the killing of this doctor, but his quest was nothing less than to erase monsters such as this. He finished applying the last of the cream, the enormous surface area of skin covering him like a raw wound. He would take all the pain. More monsters awaited his judgment. There would be no failure.
35

# Fugitives

They were exhausted from the last few days of travel. It had taken them nearly three times any reasonable travel time by car. But they had not traveled reasonably.

Houston had discovered that their hotel room was bugged, and as if this were not shocking enough for Lopez, she had immediately concluded that the CIA was not involved.

"If not the CIA, then who?" he had asked. "It has to be the CIA! What are you talking about, Sara?"

"Francisco, we're targeted fugitives at the CIA. The Agency has me especially marked for extreme containment. If they knew we were here, if they had bugged our room, they would be on us already. Whoever did this has been following us for days, perhaps weeks. We have moved constantly. We have been careful. They would have known our whereabouts and behaviors so well—which only comes from extended observation—that they could get in under our noses and wire this place up."

"This is crazy!" But he couldn't find any holes in her logic.

"Francisco, we know there are other forces out there in this thing. I don't know if it's the group of killers or if it's something else, but it's _not_ the CIA. But whoever they are, they may just as easily turn us over to the law or try to kill us themselves."

"The gray Civic?"

"If it's the same group." She shook her head, and Lopez thought he'd never seen her so tired looking. "The farther we go on in this, the deeper the swamp seems to get."

So, they had run. Houston had insisted on a headache-inducing, convoluted path out of the area and toward the South. Although he knew she was skeptical about his plan to meet the bishop, she agreed to give it a try. What other recourse did they have at this point? The long trip, constant driving, doubling back, sleeping in the car —it all had left them spent. Finally, they had traversed the distance from Virginia to Alabama, their fractaled route a mockery of efficient driving, their journey hidden from the eyes of pursuers.

Lopez rested his head against the steering wheel in front of Maria Lopez's house in Madison, Alabama. It was crazy to come here. He knew that, and Houston had argued against it. While the manhunt was concentrated in the Northeast, their pursuers would begin to stake out any place they might head to. Family, even his dead brother's wife, could be a watched site. On the other hand, he had to tell Maria _something_ , and since they were in Madison to see the bishop, he felt he had to do it in person. It was a risk, but one he had to take.

_My brother's house._ He raised his head from the steering wheel. Houston was splayed out against the passenger-side door, breathing deeply. She had fallen asleep only thirty minutes ago after sleeping less than five hours a day for nearly a week. Lopez was struck by how peaceful she looked. _Beautiful_. Her waterfall of blonde hair in disarray, yet shrouding her head like an aura. Looking at her was stirring and at the same time calming. He needed that calm to quench the acid burning inside.

He closed his eyes. Now he had to face his brother's wife again after so long, after disappearing for months on a quest to find the truth. What would she say? Would she believe what he had to say? He steeled himself and opened the door, closing it softly so as not to wake Houston. He walked toward the front door of the house.

"How _dare_ you come back here?"

Lopez stood shocked and unmoving on the porch in the early-morning light, his tired legs nearly buckling from fatigue. Not understanding, he stared at the horrified face of Maria Lopez.

"After everything I've been through!" she choked, reaching her hand up to her mouth, a sob suppressed. "I _trusted_ you, Francisco. I trusted you with my _family_. To be there, to help us and put Miguel to rest!" She screamed out the last words like a sword thrust. Lopez was deeply pierced by her anger yet remained uncomprehending. _Maria, have I failed you so badly?_

Instinctively, he reached toward her. "Maria, please, I've been looking for the answers. You have to hear what we've found."

"We?" she stared at the car. "My God, Francisco, you brought that _whore_ with you?" Her words slapped him in the face. Too many thoughts and questions flooded his mind for him to know how to respond. "Have you no _shame_?"

"I don't understand."

" _You_ don't understand? You _monster_! All those young boys, Francisco. How could you? _How could you_?"

To his amazement, she began hysterically flailing at him, pummeling his chest and face with her fists, screaming and crying out words Lopez could not understand. He pushed her back reflexively and stumbled toward the steps.

"Maria, what is this about? Please, stop! Let me come in and explain."

"Explain? How could you possibly explain this?" Maria Lopez reached to the side and grabbed something, wound her arm behind her, and threw it at him. A thick wad of newsprint struck him in the face. As he looked down at the day's paper, he felt a warm run of liquid from inside his nostrils spill down, red droplets sprinkling the front page.

"It's all over the news today. TV! Papers!" She shook her head with unfocused eyes. "First this, this abuse! Then, you and this.... _woman_. This _traitor_! Soldiers dead because of missions compromised! How could you? _Miguel_ was a soldier!" Her arms were flailing outward, her body nearly spasming, bent at the waist as she yelled. "Betraying your own brother! And the sleaze! Photographs. I never, ever imagined. The _phone calls_ I've gotten! Do you know what it's been like?" She started at him with a wildness in her eyes. "Get out of here, Francisco! Go! Never come back!" She screamed the last words with a terrible intensity. He flinched more from that awful tone than he had from the impact of the paper.

The door slammed shut with an ominous finality. Lopez raised his sleeve to his nose and tried to stem the flow of blood. He reached down and scooped up the paper, his eye drawn to the headline. _That's my name._

His peripheral vision caught a movement, and he glanced up to see a child's face in the window. His youngest niece, Miranda. She was five. She waved simply at Father Francisco, seeming to reckon nothing of the mad events around. Lopez waved dumbly back, blood staining his hands and shirt, a newspaper tucked under his arm. A hand appeared and jerked the child away from the window, and the shutters slammed shut.

Lopez heard a car door open as he stumbled into the yard, one arm stemming the flow of blood, the other holding up the paper. He read in astonishment. Unbelieving. In horror.

Houston approached him anxiously. "Francisco, what happened? Are you OK?"

He simply handed her the paper and walked as a dazed man into the street, staring into empty space. Houston looked between him and the paper, and then began to read out loud, her tone incredulous.

"Local dragnet begun to locate priest accused of raping parish boys," she trailed off, her eyes darting over toward Lopez. "Oh, my God."
36

# Unholy Orders

_U nholy Orders: Rapist Priest and CIA Traitor Subject of National Dragnet_

_By Lewis Oppenheimer_

_Nashville Gazette_

_She was a CIA operative, with access to the nation's top secrets in the war on terror. And she allegedly had access to the bedrooms of top agents and terrorist leaders alike._

_Sara Houston stands accused of the most treasonous crimes: functioning as a double agent on the pay of international terror groups, stealing and selling CIA missions reports, troop movements, and security weakness of America's most vulnerable locations._

_"First they were bed, then they were dead," said Phil Johnson, spokesman for the CIA domestic press relations. "She knew how to play the men who worked around her, sleeping her way to national secrets, and delivering them to the most bloodthirsty killers in the world. Now there is a growing list of dead agents and missing files."_

_He was a seemingly ideal Hispanic citizen, a child of immigrant parents, priest of the local Catholic Church, teacher at a parochial school, but Father Francisco Lopez hid a dark secret. The local diocese released pages of material this week documenting a decade of abuse that had been covered up. "It was a mistake," said the local bishop, "we thought that we could rehabilitate him. Now it's blown up in our faces."_

_It did as no one could have predicted. Following the murder of the priest's brother, Miguel Lopez, whose body was first discovered under mysterious circumstances by Father Lopez, Houston and Lopez have been spotted together in numerous locations. After demanding additional secret files from the CIA last week, they went on a rampage, breaking into CIA buildings and stealing classified documents._

_"She refused to take no for an answer," said CTC director Jesse Darst. "But nothing shocked me so much as seeing her face in the security videos. Those two destroyed millions of dollars of government property, and worse, stole information that will severely compromise our efforts in the war on terror. Because of them, the lives of American soldiers will almost certainly be at risk."_

_What could have brought these two together? What is their ultimate goal? And how long can they evade a national dragnet involving every known law enforcement agency from state to federal?_

_"They should be considered armed and extremely dangerous," said FBI assistant director Gordon Howard. "They are now top of the Most Wanted list. I urge anyone with any information about these two fugitives to report it immediately."_
37

# Excommunication

"Frankly, Father Lopez, I did not expect to ever see you again."

The bishop looked distinctly unhappy. He had always been a large man, even in his youth, but now in middle age he had become profoundly stout. Lopez had only interacted with his bishop on few occasions, one of those being the blessing for his ordination. The power structure of his church was very hierarchical and linear, and the bishop surrounded himself with a set of loyal assistants who blocked most efforts toward direct contact. Today had been different. When Lopez and Houston had walked into the office of the regional archdiocese, conversation had come to a standstill. Heads had turned and locked. It seemed that the Red Sea had parted in the room, opening up a pathway for the two fugitives. Lopez did not have the time or the concern for protocol today. He had marched straight into the bishop's office.

"Why not?" asked Lopez, frustrated. "I have been in contact. I asked for additional time that you granted personally. You knew my schedule and activities."

The bishop's eyes widened. "I daresay I have _not_ known of your activities." He glanced disapprovingly at Houston. "I reluctantly granted you extra time to pursue matters that, frankly, this office considered to be unwise and a sign of emotional instability."

"What?" Lopez asked incredulously.

"After which you not only find yourself in criminal matters threatening national security but risk your vows in a carnal relationship with this rogue governmental agent."

"Risk my vows? What are you talking about?"

"As if your past transgressions were not enough!" The bishop threw a newspaper toward him. He instinctively flinched, remembering the morning's events. On the front page were photos of him and Houston in an embrace, kissing beside a vehicle. The likenesses were perfect. Whoever had doctored the images was a professional. The headline read, "Bond or Lopez? Priest and CIA fugitive spotted in Tennessee."

"These are fakes," he said flatly.

"Yes, we assumed you would deny them. Deny what you have done. Just as you have denied the abuse we have too long hidden from the world."

Lopez sat upright. "What are you talking about? Those charges are utterly false, and you know it!"

The bishop shook his head sadly. "You need help, Lopez. If you can come in here so incensed and deny before me and this Office the truth we are all familiar with, you have become completely delusional." The bishop reached to the side, picked up a large folder, and dropped it in front of the priest. "Your file. One we have with great sadness been filling over the years with accusation after accusation. Ten years of sewage!"

Lopez flipped through several pages in a daze. "No, this is not possible."

The bishop's words seemed to come from a great distance. "We once held hope for you, Lopez, that you could find through the grace of God and the Church a cure for your perversions. But the demon of lust has you. After your criminal and sinful escapades with this whore from CIA, we woke up to the reality. No more little boys will be harmed, Lopez!"

The bishop rose behind his desk, his ponderous mass lending an authority to his tone. "As of today, you are by degree of the Office of the Bishop, laicized—defrocked." Lopez inhaled sharply. The bishop continued without pause. "You are forbidden to exercise ministerial functions of any kind, debarred from celebrating the Sacraments. Formal inquiry into these events, as an inquisition for excommunication, are underway, and I can say with some confidence that the result of this inquiry is not difficult to predict. Your vile actions, dishonoring the Bride of Christ, which is His Church, have rendered you anathema! Take yourself and your whore elsewhere!" He practically spat out the last words.

It was too much. Lopez felt the room spinning, his entire sense of reality becoming unglued. _Defrocked? Excommunicated? Accused of child molestation, with evidence over a decade?_ He felt he was going mad.

There was a metallic click to his right. The sharp reality of that sound broke him out of his mental spiral, and he jerked his head toward the sound. Houston sat with a stern expression on her face, her eyes like glowing sapphires in her head. Her elbow rested on the arm of a chair, the forearm extended in front of her. In her hand was a large gun, the barrel pointed directly at the hulking form of the bishop.

"Bishop Ivy, do you know what this is?" she asked in a hard voice.

The bishop's eyes were wide, but his tone was still authoritative. "A gun of some kind. Don't think that you can threaten me! The police are already on their way, a phone call made the minute you arrived."

Lopez felt his pulse quicken. _It was a trap!_

"A _gun_?" she asked derisively. "You are so dismissive. Because of firearms like this, you and the rest of the people in this nation are still free to act like assholes. This _gun_ is a Browning 1911, single-action, forty-five caliber semiautomatic. This one was issued to my father in the Korean War. Powerful son of a bitch."

There was an ear-rupturing explosion, and the bishop screamed. Behind him, to his left, a portion of the wall had been blasted away, dust and flakes falling from the air around them. Sweat began to bead on the bishop's forehead, and his hands shook. He looked back at Houston and the Browning. Smoke trailed upward from the barrel. Screams, followed seconds later by doors slamming, could be heard from elsewhere in the building.

"See what I mean?" she said. "Halfway through your little monolog I figured you'd called the police. But this is Madison, Alabama. We're at least thirty minutes from the nearest station or likely patrol car. _If_ they aren't engaged at the moment. Plenty of time to find out what you're up to."

"What I'm up to?" The bishop slid to the seat, his eyes terrified.

"The second time you called me a whore, I thought to shoot you then and there, you pig. But I realized that, as much as I would like to put a hole in you, I'd be losing out on some important information. So, let's get to the point." She leaned forward, pointing the gun right at the bishop's face. "Who got to you?"

"I don't know what you mean," he sputtered, his words sounding false even to Lopez.

Houston sighed and pulled the trigger. The loud blast was followed by a howl of pain from the bishop, as blood splattered the wall behind his shoulder.

"You spawn of Satan!" he gasped angrily, his eyes then turning desperate. He grasped his injured arm, sobbing. "Please. Leave me be. Torment me not for my sins."

Houston grunted. "Now we're getting somewhere. Your _sins_. No doubt that was the key, no?" The flash of his eyes, even in the mask of pain on his face, answered her question. "I don't care what sins you or your church think you've committed. For all I care, this entire place can burn down. Right now, we've got the CIA, likely now the FBI, and something even worse hunting us down like animals, cutting off all our paths. I need some answers." The gun was pointed back at him.

"No, I can't," he moaned, his hand sticky and red.

Lopez winced seeing the quantity of blood. _Did she hit an artery?_ He knew Houston was a trained agent and had seen her toughness before. But he was frightened by what he now saw. She was predatory. Cruel. _Or in a corner and fighting for her life._

"The next shot is going hurt more," she said, her tone ominous.

The bishop wept openly now. It was a pathetic sight. His huge mass shook as he pleaded for mercy. "Please, I can't! You don't know, don't understand. They are everywhere. _They know everything!_ It's not just me! Even if you kill me, they have cornered too many in the Church, in law enforcement. _Please!_ I don't know who they are. They come from nowhere, like shadows. They speak terrible things, reveal terrible knowledge!" His breaths came in gasps, his face pale. "Whatever you do, you cannot do worse than to reveal that knowledge. Some of us will die before we allow that to happen."

Lopez saw the truth in the frightened man's eyes. Whatever "they" had on him, it was bad. So bad he would accept death rather than the shame of revelation. It turned his stomach. Dark forces had reached the Church and turned the Church against him. His last hope! The one source of truth and trust he had left in the world.

_They have taken everything from us._ Lopez felt a wild anger erupting from inside him, born of hurt and pain and betrayal. It rose like a solar flare. Before he realized what he was doing, he had stood, grabbed the bishop's collar, and was screaming at him.

"Why? How could you do this, you coward? How could you destroy my name, turn my family and friends against me? Bring down a false judgment on me for _your own sins_!"

"I'm sorry, I'm—"

Lopez struck him across the jaw with his fist. It hurt his hand, but that pain was a minor flash in the inferno of torment searing his mind. "Shut up! Tell me now, damn you! Where did you contact these people? How can we reach them?"

"Francisco." It was Houston, but he ignored her.

"I told you, I don't know," said the bishop, blood dripping from his mouth, his eyes groggy.

"You liar!" Lopez swept his arm like a hatchet swinging and smashed his fist across the bishop's face again. The large man crumpled downward, but Lopez miraculously held the three hundred pounds upright with one arm, again striking the man in the face, his rage completely consuming him. As he was to hit him again, he felt his arm restrained from behind and heard a shout from Houston.

"Francisco! Enough! He's _out_!"

Her shout shook him out of his madness, and he dropped the form. The body of the bishop crashed onto his desk and then bounced and rolled to the side and out of the chair. The entire building shook from the impact as he hit the floor.

She sighed. "It doesn't matter anyway. He doesn't know any facts that will help us. He was a blind, manipulated without information. He wouldn't clear your name anyway. He'd die before he risks the skeletons coming out of his closet."

Lopez stared at her blankly. She grabbed his shoulders and looked into his eyes.

"Francisco, look at me! I didn't shoot him for fun. I had to find out what he knew. We're one step away from jail, or worse, and we don't know who's chasing us. This man's lies are part of the noose tightening around our necks. I _had_ to push him! But we need to back off now, cool down, use our heads. We don't have much time. The police are coming."

Lopez tried to slow his breathing. He felt a dull pain radiating from his knuckles.

"Better," she said. "Now let's get the hell out of here."

They ran. Houston led the way. Keeping her gun on display, she darted down the hallway, through the now-empty lobby of the building, and into the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone, and there were no signs of police. The workers had fled at the gunshot, Lopez assumed. Houston ran straight for their car, and he followed, the wind whipping his face helping to bring him back into the moment. But things were only going from bad to worse.

"The tires are slashed," she said, squatting down near one of the rear wheels. Lopez crouched and looked with her. The tire was completely flat, a long, thin gash running along the rubber. "Someone didn't want us going too far."

"Indeed, we didn't!" came a male voice directly behind them.

Houston spun around, but was too late. As Lopez turned to look, a blur rushed past his head, and a foot kicked the gun out of her hand, the body continuing a rotation that ended in the other leg striking Houston in the face. She flew backward, smashing into the car, her head striking the edge of the door. Knocked unconscious by the impact, she sank straight to the ground.

Lopez began to rise but felt metal against his temple.

"No, no, priest," said another male voice. "Best that you don't try anything. I'm not a fat and clumsy bishop."

There was laughter as Lopez felt his stomach turn. He looked down at Houston, who lay sprawled on the asphalt of the parking lot. He tightened and instinctively wished to reach down and see if she was okay.

Instead, he felt a wet cloth placed over his mouth and inhaled a strange, burning smell. Everything went dark.
38

# The Other Cheek

The room smelled like dust and mold.

As Lopez came to, the room spun around him, his sense of smell overpowering his mind. His head felt swollen, and he felt heavy, unable to move. _The hotel room?_ No. That was before. But the same sickness in his stomach. The crushing headache. The spinning slowed, the dim browns and blacks of blurry shapes wobbled, and like a coin finishing a spin on a table, everything dropped into place.

It was a cabin. Some nineteenth-century log structure that had rotted nearly beyond usefulness. Bright light streamed in from a filthy window, and it appeared that they were in some forested area. Turning his head was painful, and the right side felt huge, like a massive tumor had grown out of his brain. His bleary vision began to clear.

Houston was on his right, tied to an old, rickety chair, her mouth covered with duct tape. Her eyes were open and they locked with his. Lopez tried to speak, but there were only muffled sounds, and he realized that his mouth was taped, as well. There was laughter to the left and behind them, its source out of sight.

"Missed talking to your squeeze, priest?" came the male voice. Lopez recognized it as speaking the last words he had heard before blacking out. "Too bad. You're not ever going to get the chance to say anything else to her. But you'll get to watch her scream. Oh, you're gonna get to watch a lot." The voice sounded demonic.

Lopez instinctively tried to raise his arms but was unable to move. He understood at last the heaviness he felt: he was also tied to a chair. He looked down, saw the rotten wood and moldy rope lashed around his arms and legs. The smell of mildew and decay reached his nostrils and turned his stomach. The knots were well formed, tight, painful to press against.

The voice laughed again, and a second male spoke through it. "Come on, Tom. Let's get this over with."

The one called Tom stepped from behind Lopez into his field of vision, his face a mask of hatred. "Like hell I will, Billy. Because of these two, Ryan and Marshall are fucking grilled meat."

"They're marked for immediate termination, Tom. No fucking around!"

"Shut up!" Tom shouted behind them as the figure of Billy came alongside.

Billy shook his head. "You're goddamned crazy, Tom. I always said it."

"I said, shut up!" But Tom grinned. He pulled out a large Ka-Bar knife and twirled the blade around its long axis as he approached Lopez. "I'll get to you in a minute, _altar boy_. But first!" he jumped and landed hard on Houston's lap, the chair underneath nearly buckling, groaning horribly under the sudden impact. Her eyes widened, and Lopez could see her attempt to struggle out of her constraints. The wood groaned in anguish, but the ropes didn't budge.

He placed the knife between her legs, the tip pressed against her groin. "See, Billy, I'm going to teach this traitor a lesson, what happens to you when you betray your country." Lopez could hear Houston breathing quickly, a panicked look on her face. Tom seemed very happy to see it. "See, I _hate_ betrayal. Hate it. When my wife betrayed me, when she started fucking that lawyer up the road every mission I was sent on, that made the bitch a whore. When you betray your country, whore, it's worse!"

Keeping the knife where it was, he placed his hand up her shirt from below and felt up her breasts. Lopez saw Houston close her eyes and tighten her face. He felt a charged coldness run through him. _This isn't happening. This can't be happening._ He pulled harder on the ropes but only managed to make the chair squeak more loudly.

"Oh, yeah, baby, you have a _nice_ rack. I'm gonna have me all of this," he said, pressing his left hand against her sternum and flicking the knife upward in a flash with his right. The duct tape muffled a scream from Houston, but she was uninjured. The knife work was highly skilled, her shirt and bra severed in a single stroke, her large breasts springing forward from the released tension. Lopez stared at them, pale like her skin, the nipples bright red and taut. He closed his eyes and felt ashamed.

Tom slapped the knife against one of her breasts, the handle near the nipple, the long blade running up the gland to the striated pectoral muscle in the upper portion of her chest. "Got this during my Iraq tours." He ran his finger from the nape of her neck slowly down to her navel. Houston twitched. "One of these can open you up like a piñata."

Lopez opened his eyes, his blood pressure mounting. _No!_

"We'll get to that, don't worry, darling." With his free hand, he stood and unclasped his belt. "But first things first." Keeping the knife near her neck, he snapped open his pants and yanked them and his underwear down to his thighs, revealing a throbbing erection.

"Jesus, Tom! We don't have _time_ for this! Just do them!" pleaded Billy, not a foot away from Lopez.

"We'll do them, don't worry. First, I'll do her _right_. I've got to teach this bitch-whore a lesson." Flushed in the moment, he bent forward and drew the knife quickly across each of her legs and waist, tearing her jeans and underwear away from her in seconds, nicking her thighs and drawing blood. He yanked the tape violently from her mouth, and Lopez heard her groan. "Scream for me, won't you, bitch?"

Lopez felt himself shaking, rocking in the chair, uttering muffled screams. Houston only closed her eyes. Her powerlessness and acquiescence sent him into a frenzy.

" _Shut up_ , priest, or I'll do you _now_ ," spat Billy, who quickly returned a hungry gaze toward what happening in front of him. He licked his lips.

Tom reached a muscled arm underneath Houston, and in a single fluid motion, lifted her enough against the restraints to fit himself under her, his penis slapping against her stomach and pubic hair. "You're gonna ride this, girl!"

" _No!"_ Lopez screamed the word through the tape. He felt a primitive force rushing through him like he had never felt before. Far more than anger, he was filled with a desperate sense of violated ownership and a need to protect that he had no time to analyze. Every muscle fiber in his body tensed, and he even rose up slightly against the constraints, partially standing with the chair lashed to him. Maniacally, he screamed to God in his mind, a vision of Samson struggling against the marble pillars dancing before him as he strained against the ropes.

His arm broke loose.

In the sickly sound of rotten wood cracking, the arm of the chair snapped, the rope slackened, no longer properly tied, and his hand sprang upward, released. In a split second, he watched the event, his mind racing at a superhuman rate, the glint of rusted steel flashing from an embedded nail ripped out of the chair body. In his peripheral vision, he saw Billy turning as if in slow motion toward him, reaching to pull out a weapon from his belt. Lopez did not pause but reversed the direction of his arm and swung it down with all his strength toward his captor. The nail punctured the man's neck and drove straight into his body without resistance, the flat wood of the chair arm then smashing the man's jaw. An artery was pierced, and blood like a geyser spurted sideways. Billy dropped like a stone, yanking his body away from the crude weapon, hard enough that Lopez—tied awkwardly to the chair by torso and legs—lost his balance and fell on top of the man. Below him, blood continued to spray out in pulses to the dying man's heartbeat. Lopez instinctively turned to look behind.

Tom was already reacting, turning his body and lifting a leg off Houston, his large knife in a tightened grip. Lopez could hardly move. One of his legs had been freed from the impact when he crashed to the floor, but he could do little except kick it up and down. He could not stand. He could not swing it over to even try to feebly engage the man. There was no hope that he could defend himself.

Houston smashed her forehead into Tom's face. A loud cracking sound followed the impact, like a branch broken over a knee. She had shattered his nose. The blow was astounding, professional, practiced. The man's head snapped to the side, blood pouring out of his nostrils, and he fell hard against the side of a table, overturning it. Lopez instinctively looked back to Houston, half expecting to see her forehead split open from the impact, but she looked unharmed, her blue eyes wide and staring toward the floor and the figure of the man.

Lopez could hardly see Tom now. Their captor was near his feet. He strained his neck upward and looked down his body toward his legs. Tom shook his head, the blow disorienting him, his face a horror film of blood and a disfigured nose. But he was conscious enough to pull out his gun. Like a drunk, his arm weaved, and he tried to aim the firearm at Houston. The first shot blew out a window on the other side of the room. The second splintered a wooden column inches from Houston's head. Lopez did not let him fire a third.

Pumping his leg like a piston, he kicked the man in the head. The impact was solid, and Tom slumped forward. Lopez did not hesitate to examine his foe. The piston pumped again and again, impact after impact, blow after blow making extreme contact with the man's skull. He lost himself, the rage, the purging of primal anger and fear overcoming his consciousness. He only knew reaction, action, destruction and striking back. Again and again and again.

Finally, in complete exhaustion, he went limp and stopped kicking, his breath bursting from his nostrils. Underneath him, the form of Billy had stopped twitching, the blood no longer spurting. The entire cabin was suddenly still and quiet.

After what seemed like an eon, he became aware of his surroundings once more. He lay on his side, strapped to a chair, on top of a dead man he had just killed with a nail. At his feet was another victim of his violence. In front of that corpse was a beautiful woman, violated, nearly raped and murdered. Lopez felt tears in his eyes. Everything was a horrible nightmare.

"Holy shit, Francisco," she said, staring at him. "I knew when you held that ox of a bishop up in the air you were strong, but _what the fuck_? What do they put in that communion wine?"

She looked down at her restraints, back at him, and then around the room, frowning. " _Jesus_. Okay, now what?"
39

# Holy Orders

"Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee."

A mournful light bled through the window of the motel room, the darkness of the thunderstorm drinking the last of the day's light. A subsonic rumbling shook through the air as a heavy rain rushed madly against the glass.

" _Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus._ "

Former priest Francisco Lopez rocked back and forth on his knees beside a radiator, his left hand on the metal stabilizing himself, clutching a wooden rosary. In his right hand was an ornate wooden cross, its designs obscured and buried in the tight grip. Tears ran down his face. Sobs shook his body.

" _Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen._ "

Through the flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, he continued the prayer. He rocked like an institutionalized patient, interspersing the motion with full prostrations to the floor, pressing his forehead firmly against the rough carpet, an abrasion beginning to form beneath his hairline. In several places, patches of hair were missing from his beard, torn in fits of emotion.

"Francisco."

The muttering continued, the sobs and rocking. Houston stepped closer to Lopez and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Francisco."

The words ceased, but the sobs increased, and she bent forward and embraced the weeping man from behind. Her hair was wet, hanging very low and taking a rich, honeyed hue from the moisture, the strands splayed over a white bathrobe. Her skin glistened with water.

"It's OK, Francisco."

Lopez shook his head. "I've betrayed everything I vowed to be today."

She did not argue with him but walked around to face him, kneeling down beside the radiator. Lopez watched her in disbelief. She began to unbutton his shirt, looking up to his face and staring into his eyes.

"I'm glad you did, because if you vowed to let a woman get raped by murderers in front of you, those were bad vows."

"Sara, please..."

Houston sighed and smiled sadly. "You _do_ have his eyes. Miguel's eyes. But something he didn't have. A gentleness. A deep decency."

Lopez felt sick. "I killed two men today, Sara. I butchered one and kicked the other to death."

"And saved my life." She reached her hand up to his face, her touch sending involuntary shudders through his body. Lopez could not keep track of the emotions or the physiological reactions. The anger, violence, fear, shame, sadness, physical attraction. Love.

Lopez clasped her hand and kissed it, and then pushed it away from him.

"Sara, please. There are so many things right now that I would like to say to you. I don't want you to misunderstand. Thank you for what you are offering me. You don't know what it means to me when I am this broken, how much I want it. But right now, I can't. They've taken everything from me. But whatever the bishop said, whatever the Church decrees now about me, I'm still a priest in my heart. I'm not ready to lose that, too." He felt new tears rolling down his cheeks. "I'm not ready to give up my vow to God. Don't take that from me now, because if you insist, you can. I can't stop you. I'm not sure I want to. But it's all I have left."

Houston stared at him silently for a moment, her expression unreadable. She cocked her head to one side.

"Wow, when they get you boys, they really get you." She rocked back to sit on her heels, never taking her eyes off him. "I've seen a lot of shit in this job, Francisco, so it may seem strange to you when I say that there _are_ some sacred things to me. So when that monster was going to violate me, it was the worst thing I could imagine. Worse than him simply killing me, because with death, it's over at least. With rape, I get the hell of reliving that violation until the day I finally do die."

Lopez shook his head, not understanding. "Then why..."

"Why did I come on to you? Because, you dolt, I _know_ that you have feelings for me. And after nearly having that fuck violate me like that, the thing I wanted most was to erase it, to have a man I trusted and who loved me share his body with me in a sacred way."

Understanding finally dawned on Lopez. He nodded his head. _Had he hurt her by pushing her away?_

She smiled, reading his thoughts. "It's OK. I can see where you're coming from too, even if I think it's a bit messed up. Seriously, after the Church betrayed you, what loyalty do you have to them?"

Lopez didn't have the energy, or the words, to explain. "It's complicated."

Houston stood. "Yeah, I see that. So, for both our sakes, let's turn to other things, like how the hell we're going to get out of this alive."

Lopez pocketed his rosary. He felt childish. She was right—while he was crying in a corner, sinister forces were sweeping the area looking for them. They had barely escaped with their lives today.

"We still don't know who these killers are," he wondered out loud.

"There's more than one set, Francisco. The men today—they were former Agency operatives. Trust me on that one. One had combat experience, the other, I don't know. But their methods, their talk, their connection to this process as it has spun out of control—I'd bet on it."

"But there was no ID. No papers. Nothing to mark them as CIA."

"I don't think they're CIA anymore." She crossed her arms over her chest and fiddled with her hair. Lopez noticed that it had begun to form curled locks again as it dried. "They're too cut off and working so blatantly inside the US like this. Whatever program they had, whatever is officially legal now, this was pushing it. And they were sloppy, not the best agents I've ever seen. We've been vulnerable as hell, Francisco, and that should have been enough to end us. They had us, but they fucked it up."

"Then what are they?"

Houston flashed him a confident look. "Rogue. There's a rogue group playing dark games. My guess is that it's the architects of these black-ops snatches in the US. I think they're hiding and trying to shred the documents."

"Except we aren't paper, Sara."

"It's the same to them." She whirled around toward the desk. "I'm going to contact Fred."

Lopez stood and walked beside her as she flipped open her laptop. "Wait. So, we have this rogue group of CIA agents trying to kill us, but we're also chasing Miguel's killers. They're different, but how do we know who is who?"

Running through the usual gamut of anonymous servers to disguise her digital identity and location, she was soon checking for messages in an encrypted email account. She seemed distracted by the effort, responding in a distant way.

"Yeah, Miguel's killers are something else, something different. I think they're the reason this rogue group has gone as far as it has." She stopped typing and looked up at him. Her blue eyes were sharp and nearly sparkling. "Miguel's killers are hunting _them_ , Francisco. They're panicking and fighting for more than just their reputations and avoiding jail time. They're fighting to stay alive."

A computer tone startled him, and Houston spun around. "Seems that Fred already left a message." She opened a new window on the screen, and it filled quickly with text. Lopez read silently beside her.

_Hope that you can get this, girl. They've released the Kraken on you two, if you haven't noticed yet. You're beyond salvage now, toxic. You're cut off, and they're tightening the screws on all of us here that would try to help you. But they're royally pissing me off. I don't think I've been this mad in decades. This stinks to high heaven. Something very dirty is at the bottom of it. Hang in there, baby. I've got some loyal assets, and they're on the lookout. You fell off all the maps today, or I'd have them down to you tomorrow. I hope you're ok. When you surface—and you better—we'll get them to you. Attached is an encrypted file: codes to several bank accounts they don't know about. You'll need the resources. Might not be enough, but it's all I can do at this juncture. But they'll have me pushing up daisies before I let this one go. Cancer's got to be cut out. —FS_

"He really cares about you," Lopez said.

"Yeah. He's got a daughter complex. Always wants to protect us young girls in the Agency."

"Well, I'm glad for that. _Someone_ on our side."

Houston turned away from her computer and stared at Lopez. Her face was lined, tense, today's trauma still breaking through. "We're totally isolated. _Radioactive_. Moral support, even material support, is nice. But I don't know if it's going to be enough on this one, Francisco."

Lopez nodded and walked to the window, staring out at the storm. The rain was angry, beating wildly against the glass, the blurred forms of swaying trees lit like dancers at a rave to a strobe light. The events of the last few months raced through his mind, ending violently today in the Alabama woods.

_The bastards_. How dare they ruin so many lives, break so many laws, and seek in the end only to protect their own hides? He burned to do more than merely survive. These monsters had to be stopped, and the world had to know what crimes had been committed. Fred Simon was right: the cancer had to be cut out. In an instant, a firm resolution settled deep within him.

He spun around and faced Houston, a cold tone in his voice. "I'm sick of running. Let's take the fight to them."

Her left eyebrow arched. "What are you thinking?"

Lopez strode over purposefully to the laptop and gestured at the screen. "The names. We know who was involved now."

"We only have the agent's names, remember, Francisco? The other names are codes. From the agents, only Jason Miller was listed as still living. He could be dead by now."

"Then Miller! The records list an address. We go there first."

"Good plan, I agree. Only we'll have to get to upstate New York through a national dragnet with our names on it."

Lopez tugged at his beard, the skin in the ripped patches painful. Unlike his brother's masculine jaw, he had never developed a mature face, a _man's face_. Without the beard, he looked ten years younger. That was why he had grown it in the first place more than a decade ago. To gain authority and respect. He shook his head. It was simple vanity.

_Wait a minute! Without the beard!_ "You said he was a chameleon, this killer," Lopez mused, his tone leading.

Houston rose and stretched like a yoga instructor, her curved form seductive in the dim light. "So it seems. Surgery, contact lenses to alter eye color, perhaps even skin color alteration. Paranoid."

"Well, I'm feeling pretty paranoid right now, after all this."

"Ah," she said, smiling. "So, time to play them at the same game?"

"Time to change _our_ colors."
40

# Three Chameleons

They woke up together in the same bed.

The breaking light of dawn streamed over her ivory skin, and Lopez listened to the soft rise and fall of her breath. He was surprised to find her hand in his, to feel the warmth of her body pressed close to his own; it rose as an ache inside him. He knew his body longed for greater intimacy than he allowed, and it was a form of torture to be so close to her and yet refrain.

He turned his head to see her more clearly and was momentarily shocked by her appearance. The long locks of gold were gone, shorn the evening before, decorating the bathroom tiles like curled necklaces. Instead, she had a short mop of black hair, the smell of the dye still lingering in the room. The remodeling of her features with this simple change was stunning. The addition of sunglasses and a wardrobe switch literally made her look like a different woman.

He realized that his appearance had drastically altered as well. Without the beard, he had lost a decade, his youthful face dominating any impression of his features. He had cut his longish hair nearly military style, the combination making him seem better suited for a recruitment poster than a confessional. They had thrown out his priestly garments—modern-style black pants, shirts, and the collars. He now would sport unremarkable clothes from second-hand stores. Side by side in the mirror last night, they appeared to be anything except the CIA agent and priest the country was now looking for.

"Well, we slept together after all." Her voice lilted.

Lopez snapped out of his daydream and focused on her across from him on the bed. Houston was smiling softly, her sapphire eyes staring into his own. He felt her hand tighten on his.

"Well, it's a good thing we wore protection," she said, gesturing to their fully clothed forms. "You never know what you priests might have caught."

For a moment, her banter was like a warm light, but a tension ran back into his body as thoughts rushed forward. "So now what, Sara?"

Houston leaned up and scratched her fingers energetically through her short hair. "God, this feels weird." She hopped out of bed and began packing. Lopez noticed that her collection of firearms had tripled since yesterday: she had picked their captors clean on the way out. "What now? We use Fred's accounts at several banks, load up on cash. Then we buy a car from someone around here—smartphone will map us some 'for-sales.' Then some local gun stores and express our Second Amendment rights to arm ourselves to the teeth. Find ourselves some loose dealers to get us all the good stuff, including police scanners and the like. Next, map out the most convoluted way to get back northeast, monitor every police band known to man, coordinate with Fred if possible, and find Jason Miller."

Lopez chuckled. "Sounds simple. When do we get food in all this?"

Houston laughed. "What do you need food for when you've got bullets? They're high in iron. Some in uranium."

"Some grits on the way?" he offered.

"Sounds good." Her expression turned serious. "But what _are_ grits, exactly?"

They packed quickly and were out of the motel within thirty minutes, the air still cool near daybreak. They couldn't keep the dead agents' car for long, but they'd need it to find another one. Houston drove again, the speedometer spinning clockwise. Lopez noticed that it didn't unnerve him anymore. The roads were poorly patched, and they rocked back and forth as they sped toward the Tennessee border. His stomach lurched.

_Maybe better to wait for food._

The wraith steered the pickup truck roughly as it rattled down the mountain road in Tennessee. His back still hurt, and it was especially noticeable on such a rough route that pounded the vehicle mercilessly. After another fifteen miles, he would leave the mountains and cross onto the interstate. He needed to make up time. He needed to plan the next mission. His quarry had been given months to prepare, to flee, to investigate. How much did they know? What precautions had they taken? How much harder would it be to dig them out of their holes?

A large wooden case bounced up and down next to him, metallic clanks sounding. He reached over and repositioned the box. It was a minor arsenal, and he would equip himself better in the coming days. He panned the GPS system out from the state of Tennessee, revealing the entire eastern shoreline up to Maine. A bright line indicating his route ran from his current location into the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

A man was waiting for him there. A man he would see and force to talk. _Jason Miller_. Miller would be broken, the key information that only he held taken from him. Then, Jason Miller would die.

After that, the last stage. The architects. The masters of war that hid behind their desks, pushing paper, and men's lives, into the fire. When men play with fire too long, eventually they are burned.
Part III

# The Angel and The Dragon

"Justly we rid the earth of human fiends Who carry hell for pattern in their souls." —George Eliot
41

# Hypocritic Oath

A soft breeze danced through the pines in the Catskill Mountains, ruffling the green needles and whispering gently over the bubbling noises of a meandering creek. A small bird hopped across exposed rocks in the stream, its head sharply angling one way and then the next, its feathers beaded with moisture. The sunlight refracted through the drops and scattered as from a jewel. After skipping over several stones, the bird took flight over the moss-covered bank and climbed sharply. Gliding over the pine-tops, it oriented toward an opening in the trees ahead of it, attracted by a plume of black smoke rising from the clearing.

As it neared the hole in the forest, flames could be seen licking upward from an overturned vehicle next to a house. The metal was warped and scattered across a yard, and the house itself appeared damaged. The bird hesitated, then entered a circling pattern over the structure, gazing down for possible sources of food. Above the sounds of the wind, and the crackling of fire and popping of heated metal, another set of sounds jutted into the sky. Screams.

Inside the wrecked home, a naked man was strapped to a chair. His body was bloodied, a deep gash across his upper chest and right shoulder. Soot and dirt coated his skin. Urine and feces coated the seat. The room stank of waste, blood, and charred flesh.

Standing beside him was another man, uninjured, blond and lean, a bamboo branch in his hand. As he paced around the seated figure, he broke splinters from the stick. His gait was irregular, evincing signs of a recent injury barely healed. As he came around to the front of the chair, he glanced down at the immobilized, clamped hands of his prisoner, then jammed a sharp splinter underneath the man's bloodied fingernails.

The man screamed, then cursed his tormenter.

"Go _fuck_ yourself!" He spit blood and saliva as he slurred his words, his mouth bruised and swollen, showing signs of further brutality. Burn marks were on his face and in one of his eyes. From the burned eye, a constant stream of tears fell. "Go ahead, use all that shit," he said, gesturing with his head toward a tray filled with knives, electric props, and other implements of pain. "It won't do any good. You won't get their location from me."

"Why are you so loyal?" the blond man asked as he fingered a curved hook. "I don't want to do this. Torture is why I'm here, why you will die today. I would rather kill you quickly. But I have to finish this. Others must pay the price." He flipped the hook to the other hand, and the tortured man flinched. "You were the liaison, Miller. You have the records. You know where they are hiding. I've searched the known locations. They aren't there." He leaned the hook close to the man's penis, touching its tip. " _Where_ are they hiding, Miller?"

"Fuck you!"

A car could be heard pulling up outside the house. The blond man tossed the hook on the table, removed a gun from his belt, and moved stealthily to investigate. Miller closed his eyes, panting, and then called out madly.

"Help me! I'm back here! He's killing me!" His cries fell flatly to silence.

A few seconds later, a car trunk slammed shut, and the blond man was back. The sounds of a heavy cart rumbling across the wooden floors of the cabin could be heard. Miller glanced up at his torturer, his eyes having acquired a yellowed hue. The blond man spoke.

"This isn't working. We'll have to try something different."

A thin and sickly man stepped into the room. He pushed a rattling cart piled with multiple objects. Miller's eyes gravitated to several drills and syringes, and paused over a box that looked like some sort of power supply. The emaciated form pulled a lab coat from a box on the side and slipped into it. He nodded at the blond man, who stepped back and slightly out of Miller's range of sight.

"I'll need your services after all," said the wraith.

"Excellent. It's good to be paid in full," said the new arrival. He stepped closer to Miller and bent his head to the prisoner. "Mr. Miller, I believe? I'm Doctor Driesman," began the thin man.

"Fuck you, too."

The doctor nodded. "I can see why pain has failed. His defiance is heavily fueled by an innate hostility. Gives him strength." The doctor grabbed what looked like a helmet from the cart, along with a heavily weighted stand. In a series of quick and sure movements, he affixed the helmet to the stand, wheeled it behind Miller, lowered the metal cap over Miller's head, and latched the cap securely to his head. Miller sought to avoid the device, but he was restrained too well, and the doctor too practiced in his movements.

"This place is not sterile," said the doctor absentmindedly. He brought the cart alongside the chair and adjusted a floor lamp to shine on Miller's head.

"An infection won't matter," said the wraith. "He will be dead soon."

"Yes, I assumed." He released two plates from the cranial cap, leaving behind straps of metal that encircled Miller's skull but that exposed large regions of his head. He began to press firmly through the hair to the bone underneath, probing.

"What the hell are you doing to me?" said Miller, trying to shake his body away from the man and his fingers.

The doctor spoke flatly as he examined the skull. "Please stop struggling. The only sensory neurons are in the scalp, not below. The pain will be minimal if you cooperate."

"What pain?"

"From the holes I'll drill in your skull."

Miller began a spasmodic thrashing. Even with his subject so tightly restrained, the doctor had to step slightly to the side to avoid being inadvertently jostled. He pulled out several metallic clamps and affixed them to Miller's arms, legs, and neck. Once he had tightened the screws on the plates, Miller was completely immobilized.

"There, now you're in nice and tight."

"You sick fucks!" Miller spat out.

"Please, I'm a specialist, hired at a premium for extractions." The doctor began to remove items from the cart: scissors, a razor, a drill.

"Do you think you'll scare me with this? He's going to kill me anyway. I can take the pain. I'm not talking, so fuck you."

"The intention is not to inflict pain, Mr. Miller," said the doctor, as he began to snip away at the hair poking through the openings in the cap. "My client clearly has examined that route to no avail. But, in the end, you _will_ talk. There is no doubt about that."

"Like hell I will."

The doctor sighed as he snipped down close to the skin. "It's the same every time. Everyone believes that they have free will." He replaced the scissors on the table and removed a large razor and shaving cream. "The brain is a machine, Mr. Miller. We often have trouble grasping the true significance of this because we arrogantly ascribe cosmic significance to our thoughts, our sense of self." Applying the cream, he began to shave the skull. "But our thoughts come from cells surrounded by vessels, bathed in nutrients. They are networks of electrochemical signals. They follow the laws of biochemistry and physics. I give you a pharmacological compound—LSD, say—and suddenly your sense of the world and yourself is very, very different. The universe hasn't changed, only the functioning of the machine called your brain. Like the heart, the stomach, the eye, the liver—an _organic_ machine. It's all really quite amazing, actually. We know a lot about how these organs work. We have learned a lot about the brain."

The doctor placed the razor on the cart and picked up a syringe. He began short injections into the exposed scalp. Miller hardly winced.

"Some anesthetic, Mr. Miller, so that you don't go into shock from the boring. We need you conscious."

"He'll be able to answer questions directly?" asked the blond man.

The doctor nodded. "Nothing fancy. Conversational. You ask, and he'll answer."

"You'll get nothing!" screamed Miller.

The doctor smiled. "Given all the personality and perceptual changes from drugs and brain injuries studied in the medical literature, it's amazing it took as long as it did, but finally, people tried to manipulate the thoughts and feelings of a living mind. Pioneering studies at MIT showed that even weak, externally applied magnetic fields could change the electrochemical signaling in portions of the brain. These foundational studies showed that the application of simple magnets could completely change the _moral_ judgments that people would make about identical situations! Beautiful, amazing work!"

He stared off into the distance, a childlike smile on his face. Shaking his head, he picked up a drill and plugged it in. "Of course, the intelligence community and the military have taken these studies much, much further. Less red tape and advisory committee oversight! Specialists like me are still rare, and still suspect by many in the government. Old fashioned methods, blunt, often ineffective, are still the norm. But times are changing. And with the booming privatization of all things military and intelligence related, well, let's just say that I believe in the free market. They demand, I supply."

He began drilling. Miller screamed, terror in his eyes, every muscle in his body tensing. But he could not move. He could only scream helplessly as the bit bored into his bone. The drilling drew a lot of blood, but the doctor was fast to staunch the bleeding and patch-off the area. Three times he drilled into three different regions of the front of Miller's head. At the end, he set the smoking drill on the cart with a clattering sound. He picked up in its place several long, gleaming needles ending in wires that he inserted into his portable power supply.

"There. Through to the soft tissue. We'll be able to insert these deeply—you'll feel nothing—and reach the right temporoparietal junction, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex from each of these holes. When the brain is stimulated directly with electrodes, Mr. Miller, we can do so much more than the MIT scientists did outside the body with magnetic fields. I now have access to several critical areas of your brain that control your sense of conscious will, trust, and threat evaluation. Stimulated properly, as countless animal and secret human studies have shown, it is trivial to remove all resistance to questioning, all the while leaving the rest of your higher-order cortical function intact. Basically, in the next five minutes, my paying customer will be able to ask you anything he wants, and you'll tell him without reservations."

"Goddamn you both!"

The doctor smiled. "There is no God, Mr. Miller. Don't you know that?"

He inserted the needles.

The questioning was finished, and the doctor began to stow his equipment. He spoke as he worked, his attention on the items on the cart, responses from his client emanating from behind him. Miller slumped forward in the chair against the restraints, his eyes open, fixed and staring, mouthing the word "no" over and over as he sat, his body and skull still lashed to steel.

"He told you all he knows," the doctor spoke.

"It's not enough!" came the blond man's voice.

The doctor continued to rack objects on the cart. He shook his head. "He gave you names, addresses. What more?"

"The names I knew. The addresses are home and work addresses. He mentioned a _farm house_. _That_ is where they are, at that safe house. He gave no address for it!"

"Then he doesn't know." The doctor paused, his brow wrinkled. "What is this 'safe house'?"

There was no response, only the sound of footsteps walking slowly. The doctor stood and turned around, an anxious look in his eyes. "This term I have only heard—" He stopped. The barrel of a gun was pointed at his head. "But it is none of my business. I only want there to be payment."

"What you do disgusts me, _Doctor_. And there will be payment."

Before the physician could move or protest, there was a loud explosion, and his body dropped to the floor. The wraith lowered his weapon.

"You are a filthy hypocrite," came the hoarse voice of CIA agent Miller. His eyes glanced to the side at his tormenter, his expression hateful. The blond man turned slowly to the chair, his expression neutral. "You want justice, but you torture me, rape my mind and body, the same way they did you! Now you kill that Nazi doctor because his methods _offend_ you? You should be on that floor. If there were any justice, I would have that gun, and your time would come!" The grown man wept again, his head limp against the steel cage around his head.

"Of course, I deserve to be there," said the wraith flatly. "I have no delusions of purity. And I will be there, or somewhere similar, when my mission is complete."

At the last phrase, Miller looked up quizzically, a dawning understanding on his ravaged face. "You're not going to stop with the Agency."

The blond man smiled and raised the weapon. "I want the _Grail_ , Agent Miller. An _unholy_ Grail. And I will have it. Then it will be my time." He aimed. "But now, it is yours."

He pulled the trigger.
42

# Dark Puzzle

"We can leave the car here, hidden under these trees," said Houston, parking and undoing her seatbelt.

Lopez rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. He was dirty. He stank. They had traveled another two thousand miles by a frustratingly circuitous path, constantly monitoring the police transmissions, using GPS navigation and traffic updates on their smartphones to find any hints of roadblocks or increased police surveillance, limiting their travel to late hours when law enforcement numbers were lower on the roadways.

It seemed to him that they had left the world he knew before and entered something surreal and dark. Gone was the simple and necessary circadian rhythm of sleeping at night and waking in the daylight. Human interaction had to be shunned. Anxiety was a constant emotion as every turn, every stoplight, every new town became another chance for them to be identified and caught. They maintained their disguises. They used the accounts provided by Fred Simon. They spent only cash. The accounts on their smartphones were aliases. They could confide in no one, not even the friends and family who had rejected them. They were erasing themselves from society. _From existence_.

"This should be fine," said Lopez, eyeing the GPS map on his smartphone. "It's about a mile up the road. If we can come in through the forest, he might not see us."

She laughed. "I wouldn't count on that. These guys tend to be a paranoid lot. Miller will have cameras, likely motion detectors, too. We'll look out for them, of course, but we might take fire. I just hope he hasn't laid a minefield anywhere." She did not smile.

Those sobering thoughts settled heavily on Lopez. They were going from one danger to the next, each subsequent encounter seemingly worse than the last. _Land mines? Motion detectors in the Catskills?_ Perhaps it was nothing more than par for the course. _My new normal._

They left the Tennessee car well hidden, its dark-green paint blending well with the greens and browns of the forest, roughly half of it obscured completely by the broad ditch on the roadside Houston had navigated the vehicle into. They added to the camouflage with broken branches, pine needles, and leaves.

They oriented with the smartphone, then stowed it and jogged across the road and into the forest. Houston led the way, her pace brisk, but her motions cautious. She constantly scanned in front of her, often pausing and holding up a hand to stop Lopez, then waving him forward as she picked up her pace again. Her pattern was not straight, he noticed, but a strange zigzag that was very deliberate.

"Stop!" she hissed curtly, holding up her hand. "Look. _There!_ " At first Lopez saw nothing. He scanned the area in front of her hand but saw only a thick cluster of trees and wild shrubs. "The middle tree. Near the _ground_."

He saw it. A manmade object, plastic or metallic, embedded in the tree trunk. Houston sprinted forward, keeping to one side of the tree line, giving the impression that she was sneaking up on the object. Lopez followed anxiously.

As they neared the tree, she knelt down. "Motion detector. It cuts a line across there," she indicated, waving her arm in an imaginary plane across the forest. She began to examine the object. "The question is how many there are, where they are positioned. This one was easy, but others?"

"Are they all at ground level?"

"Doubtful. Many will be at human height, to avoid animal alerts. Well, he might score a bear or two, but it might be interesting to know when they're around," she said in an amused tone.

"Right."

After a minute, she stood, her expression perplexed. "Sloppy. This one's dead. The electronics seem fine. It's routed to a main power line, buried under the ground. No batteries to replace."

"So?"

"Just strange. He went through all the trouble to wire this thing up solidly, then let it fall into disrepair? Doesn't fit."

"He can't possibly be on top of all of them. Especially now. He will be holed up, no?"

She nodded. "Maybe. Let's go, and keep your eyes open for more."

There were many more. As they picked their way through the woods, they came across one sensor after another. Each time Houston navigated around them, examined them. Each time, the sensor was dead. Soon, they came across cameras, even some trip mines she identified. All were controlled by connections to a central location, wired through lines unseen underground. All were dead. Miller's high-tech security system was completely inoperative.

Houston rose from her crouch to a standing position, looking ahead, a troubled expression on her face. "Francisco, we better get to that cabin."

"What's wrong?"

"I think we're too late."

Houston sprinted. After the revelation of land mines, the haste was unnerving to Lopez, but he followed. They didn't have to go very much farther. Soon, he saw why she rushed.

It was like a replay of the nightmare in Gatlinburg. Acrid smoke from an incompletely doused gasoline fire hung like a filmy cloud over the clearing they entered. A pickup truck lay on its side, the vehicle literally blown apart by some force. The cabin itself also smoldered, the fire extinguished, but the charred portions vented a last remnant of combustion into the atmosphere. The door was exploded inward.

Houston had her gun out, and she tossed a second one to Lopez. "I've really got to teach you how to shoot one of these. Flick the safety—good. Don't hesitate, Francisco. I mean it." She turned to the cabin and walked through the shattered entrance.

Keeping the weapon pointed at the ground, afraid he might accidentally shoot Houston, Lopez followed her into the structure. It was like entering some level of hell in Dante's _Inferno_. Carnage, destruction of material objects. The smell of gunpowder and burning plastic. Shells. But the true horror was in the center of the room.

"Mother of God."

Two corpses were before them. One lay sprawled on the ground, blood pooled around his head. He wore the white coat of a doctor. The second was strapped to a chair. Lopez barely managed to recognize him from photos he had been shown: it was Jason Miller. Houston approached his body slowly.

He was naked and disfigured. Signs of torment visible in his flesh. A gunshot wound opened his face like some macabre medical school display. The blood had hardly clotted.

Houston whispered. "Be careful. This is recent. The killers could still be here." She circled the body, examining the scene, yet she seemed acutely aware of her surroundings.

Lopez glanced around the cabin but could see no signs of others. His gaze returned compulsively to the horror scene in the center. Houston approached the corpse and began to examine a strange helmet-like steel cap into which the head was locked.

"They drilled into his skull." Her voice was expressionless.

Lopez was sure he had misheard. He came closer and followed her gesture toward the scalp of the victim. Through openings in the head cap, he saw the shaved scalp and blood. And the holes.

He looked at Houston. "In the name of God, why?"

She shook her head, a sad disgust on her face. "I don't know, Francisco. I've never seen anything like this before. _Jesus_ , look what they did to him."

Lopez stopped looking. It was too much. Beyond the physical horror, it was the sadistic evil that ate at him the most when he stared at that figure. Houston seemed to feel the same.

"He was the last," she whispered hoarsely. "The last of the rendition teams. They're all dead now." She walked away from the body, having spotted a computer at the side of the room. "Let's see if we can find anything useful here."

Lopez accompanied her to a desk. Houston sat and moved the mouse, activating the screen. "So, it's over now?" he asked hopefully, against his better judgment.

Houston was silent for a moment, scanning an open file on the screen. "I don't think so, Francisco," she said. "I definitely don't think so. Look at this."

He pulled up a chair. "What is it?"

"Judging from the numerical key codes, these are CIA records. Looks like from the black-ops teams. The codes match those on the document we stole from the hard drive."

Lopez looked at the list of names on the monitor. All were men who by now he knew too well. Stone. Miller. Fuller. Conover. The secret rendition teams. CIA agents who had taken suspects illegally, without trial, without due process, and transported them to torture chambers around the world. _Where are you on this list, Miguel?_

"Miguel's not here," said Houston, again seeming to be a half-step ahead of him.

"I don't see his name, either. Why?"

"I don't know. But look— _this_ is new. Alongside the agents, another set of names we didn't see from the CIA records. We didn't have these files." They both scanned the document in silence. Houston inhaled sharply and tapped on the screen at one of the lines of data. "The operations dates are much more recent, Francisco. Fred was wrong—they didn't end the program in 2007."

"Then why aren't there records at CIA?"

"Because it's extra-governmental. It's outside of CIA, even if it looks like they maintained connections."

Lopez felt his stomach drop. "This doesn't sound very good. Why would they pull it out of CIA?" He continued to read through the names. "Wait. Sara—I know some of these names." He pointed to one of them. "Mitchell Longman, marked April 2010."

"Who?"

"He was an activist for HRW."

"That crazy lobbyist for Human Rights Watch? The Sapos guy?"

Lopez nodded. "Yes. I donated to HRW. Have a card."

"He was a giant pain in the side of the counterterrorist movement." Houston looked up at him. "So what happened in April 2010?"

"He killed himself. Jumped off his New York City balcony."

Houston sat upright stiffly, looking between Lopez and the screen. " _Holy shit_. Francisco, there are a lot of _well-known_ names here."

Lopez looked again, trying to make associations. Several names were meaningless to him. But as he looked over the list, too many were not. Prominent Muslim activists. A CEO. Political lobbyists. A colonel. He felt dizzy.

Houston sounded hyper. "This is Alicia Whitley—the first-term Tea Party candidate from Iowa. You know, the one who went nuts about violations of the Constitution with the 2012 Defense Authorization Act." Lopez nodded. "She died in a car crash six months after it was passed. And this! Brian Nurse, _Colonel_ Brian Nurse, who testified against indefinite detention and torture in 2009, riling the new Obama administration. Francisco, he had a heart attack a year later."

Lopez pointed to another name. "Charles Kenneth Thorington Gunter, the Third. Can't forget a name like that."

"The CEO of that solar company?"

"Yes! He was a big deal. One of the few American companies that matched Chinese panels in prices. New England blue blood do-gooder—your type."

"Yeah, he was in the papers a lot. Investigated by Congress and the FBI for fraud. Big brouhaha."

Lopez nodded. "But _only_ after he started his charity, HabeasNow."

Houston nodded vigorously. "I remember! HabeasNow—they raised millions for litigation of terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo. They were flooding the courts with writs of habeas corpus. Public enemy number-one in several CIA divisions and the DOJ."

"He's dead, too, Sara. His private jet went down six months ago in New Jersey. Look at the date next to his name!"

Houston put her fingers to her forehead, pressing firmly. "I don't want to look." She closed her eyes. Her hand over the computer mouse tightened into a fist. "Oh, my God, Francisco. This isn't real. This _can't_ be real."

Lopez pulled up a chair and sat. It was too much, the surreal nightmare swirling around him. In front of them was the earth-shaking evidence that these rogue CIA teams had gone far beyond mere efforts to stop terrorism. In front of them was evidence of the murders of political and cultural figures. _Assassinations_ , he forced himself to acknowledge. Assassinations of figures who had exerted influence in attempting to end controversial CIA and military practices like torture and extraordinary rendition. Figures who were silenced, their causes thrown into disarray, their impact erased.

"This finally all comes together," said Lopez, the satisfaction of the jigsaw fitting together not dispelling the full horror of the image revealed. "They had to bury this, and now, they have to bury us, and anyone who gets too close to the truth. If this gets out, it wouldn't just lead to a scandal and jail. It could lead to a damn revolt."

Houston nodded, scrolling through the pages of the document. "The killers wanted us to see this, Francisco. Not us, but whoever discovered this.... scene," she trailed off, gesturing around her. "Miller wouldn't have just left this file open."

"Maybe he didn't have time to close it."

"Maybe. But it feels like more. Feels like ruination."

Lopez turned toward Houston and put his hand on her arm. "But at least one name isn't with the other agents on this list."

"No," answered Houston. "Miguel isn't here."

"Does that mean he didn't go along with it? Wasn't involved?"

Houston shook her head. "I don't know for sure. How could he not have known? All those years as part of the rendition teams?"

"Assassination teams, you mean."

"Yes," she said, swallowing. "It _couldn't_ have started out that way. I can't believe that. Miguel wouldn't have signed on—that much I know about him. He had a different vision of America."

Lopez sighed. "After 9/11, no one knew what to do. Extraordinary events seemed to require extraordinary actions. That's what Miguel said in the church that night. He said he only wanted to protect us all. It was the last time I saw him." Houston leaned her head against his shoulder. Lopez reached his hand up and stroked her head. It seemed like the only sane action in the middle of this madness.

"But not Miguel. _He's not here_. Whether or not he knew about the assassinations, we may never know. But he's not part of the team. Thank God for that."

"Amen," said the former priest. He uttered a silent prayer for his brother's soul. _Be at peace, Miguel. We know not what we do._

Houston had straightened up and was scrolling through the document. "Page two," she said. Lopez read a new set of names, several of them well-known senior officials formerly at the CIA. "Here are the directors, the organizers of this nightmare. Miguel's killer has served them up on a silver platter."

"Then we need to pay these men a visit," said Lopez, his voice strained. He was angry again. "But we can't go public! They've taken away all our options. They'll just throw us in a cell and lose the key. No one will believe our rantings."

"Even if they did, I think we're beyond due process now, Francisco. We're in a game where people disappear their political opponents and kill them. We'll be dead."

Lopez exhaled. "The rules are different."

Houston raised her gun and stared at it. "There are no rules, and we're running out of time." She stood and put her weapon away, a fiery look in her eyes. "We have to find these leaders. What we've discovered is bigger than the murders of CIA agents. It's bigger than extraordinary rendition of American citizens. It's fucking _Orwellian_. Time to locate the architects of this death squad. These men have to be put away for life; they're more dangerous than Miguel's killers. They're a cancer inside the body of our government."

"But how do we find them? These are big names," he said, looking over the document pages again. "Their addresses are here, amazingly enough. But if they've been keeping up with current events, I bet they're in their own private foxholes by now."

"No doubt. But we have Fred Simon," she said, removing the smartphone and photographing the screen. She panned through all the data they had discovered on Miller's computer, uploading the photographs to a secure and anonymous server they used for private storage. "We'll be asking everything from him, but I know him, Francisco. This will break his heart. Make him sick. And after a few minutes, make him very angry. He's got contacts, remember? _The Watchmen_. He'll do everything he can to dredge this muck up and get it out of the Agency. He'll find where they're hiding."

"OK then, we talk to Simon. And, once—" he stopped, a sound catching his attention.

_Sirens_.

Both spun to the door. The pitch-changing calls wailed from a distance, increasing in volume.

The police were approaching.
43

# Manhunt

"To the car, Francisco! Through the woods, the way we came!"

They dashed out the door and sprinted across the yard to the trees. Lopez felt like the criminal everyone now believed him to be—in disguise, running from the scene of a horrific murder, the police seconds away. They passed the smoldering wreckage of the truck, and Houston pulled out her gun once again. _Will we be killing police officers next?_ He couldn't imagine such an action. _Who am I now?_

As they approached the woods, the sirens increased sharply in intensity, and they heard the sounds of a vehicle braking over a pebbled drive. A car door opened, and Lopez glanced behind him and saw two officers outside their vehicle. One was running into the ruined cabin. _A fine surprise he is going to find._ The other held a microphone in his hand. A voice called over a loudspeaker.

"This is the Delaware County Police! Stop and return! I said stop and come back to the dwelling! This is the county police! Stop and return immediately!"

They did not stop. Instead they plunged into the trees, Lopez praying to God that Miller's security system was truly dead. An active mine could end their journey very quickly. A gunshot was fired behind them. Lopez instinctively looked behind but could see no one following them.

"Faster!" yelled Houston.

Lopez ran faster. Branches slapped against his face and nicked his cheeks, and he stumbled several times over exposed roots, but he managed to increase his pace. His breath began to come in ragged gasps, his chest feeling like it was going to explode.

The loudspeaker voice called again but much more faintly. "Return to the property! If you do not, you will be considered hostile and subject to arms fire."

Houston slowed him for a moment. "They're not in pursuit, or they wouldn't have called out." She paused, her breathing labored. "They must be calling for backup. They'll find the body soon. It will be a giant manhunt."

"They don't know what our car looks like or what we look like."

"It won't matter if we don't get out of the roadblock radius. Let's go!"

They continued their sprint. Soon they were back to the main road and located their car quickly. They cleared some of the fallen branches and leaves that they had used to conceal it and then rushed into the vehicle, Houston driving again. She gunned the engine, rocketing the car out of the ditch and onto the road. Within seconds, they were out of sight of the cabin and headed south, back to the DC area and the lair of the killers. Headed for the mouth of the dragon. Lopez closed his eyes tightly.

_Mother of God!_

A blond man lay prone on a hill overlooking the Miller property. Through a targeting scope, he followed the movement of the green sedan as it made its escape. He pivoted the scope toward the cabin he had partially destroyed and saw one of the young officers run out of the structure, waving his arms and screaming at the other, who had gone to the edge of the woods.

He rolled onto his back, the rifle held up and away from his body, and sat up. His scope was attached by a thin wire to a small black box. Pressing a button on the box, a credit-card sized LCD screen lit up, and he shuffled through several photos of the man and woman, selecting the best head shots for identification.

Moving to a crouch, he placed the rifle down into a case and removed a smartphone. A Bluetooth transmitter was hooked around his ear, and he toggled a smartphone app to increase the volume from the recording equipment he had left in the cabin. He picked up the officers' conversation as they entered the structure. Their loud tones cut through the poor audio quality.

"Jesus, Danny! God, I'm going to be sick!"

The unmistakable sounds of retching could be heard. A second voice spoke.

"You okay? You all right, Joe? Okay. Okay," came an anxious voice. A deep breath followed. "Okay—we call this in. Don't touch anything! _Damn!_ We call this in, and we get the right people here for this. We put out an APB, block all the roads out of the area, as soon as they can set it up. I should have _shot_ those bastards!"

He had heard enough. The officers were acting predictably. By tomorrow, the place would become a forensics laboratory, and the chaos would begin soon after. He tapped the screen, and the app displayed a list of recordings and dates. He picked the most recent, and pressed 'play.' A woman's voice could be heard speaking over considerable white noise and static.

" _He's got contacts, remember? The Watchmen. He'll do everything he can to dredge this muck up and get it out of the Agency. He'll find where they're hiding._ "

He smiled, closing the app, and opened another on the phone. A map appeared of the area with crisscrossing lines for roads and county demarcations. A blue circle pulsed at his current location. Moving away from the blue circle was a red dot. He tapped it, and a small window opened on the map displaying distance and speed. The transmitter he had placed on their car was functioning optimally.

He disconnected the camera from the scope, stowed it in the case next to the rifle, and closed the case. Rising from his prone position on the incline, he jogged down the road to his truck toting his equipment. Opening the door, he stowed the rifle on the rear window rack and jumped inside, slamming the door. He paused for a moment, then removed a handgun from the glove compartment, placing it next to him in the drink rack. He hoped that the local police would not complicate his mission.

Mounting the phone and its map display on the dashboard, he started the engine, turning onto the road along the direction of the red dot. He accelerated, observing their speed and distance, calculating a matching speed to approach them before any major highway intersections. All he had to do was follow them, track them for however many days it took, concealing himself. Their conversation was clear. They were motivated and skilled, especially the woman.

They would lead him where he needed to go.
44

# Netted

The police scanners were in chaos. Lopez could not keep track of all the different conversations back and forth, coded terms, and local roadways that erupted in sound from the device. His smartphone told a grim story, as well. One after another, red cones on his traffic app indicated blocked roads. One after another, they switched roads, frantically mapping new ways around the closing net. They were running out of options.

"Oh, shit." Houston stared ahead.

They were on a two-lane country road, surrounded by forest on each side. Lopez looked ahead and saw something in the road. As they approached, he began to make out police cars lengthwise across the concrete. The lights were flashing on the tops of the cars.

"What do we do? Turn around?" he asked.

"We can't! This was the last open road, remember? We'll be cut off for sure if we turn around." She began to slow the car as they neared. "They just set this up. If we can get past this, the highway is just a few miles ahead. Right? That's what you said?"

"Yes!" he said, confirming on the map. "But how do we get by?" A growing desperation was seizing him.

"I don't know. They don't know us. They might not recognize us. We bluff." She nodded towards the scanner. "Glove compartment with that!" Lopez hid the device.

She brought the car to a full stop in front of the roadblock. Two trooper cars were pointed at each other in front of them, their bulk filling the length of the road. Lopez imagined there was likely room to make it around the vehicles, alongside the road and practically in the forest. But how they would do that and get past armed police he didn't know.

Houston rolled down the window and smiled. "Hi, officers! What's the problem?"

Two troopers approached the vehicle cautiously, as two others stood at attention, eyeing them suspiciously. Their hands were on their holsters.

"License and registration, please."

Lopez nearly gasped. He hadn't thought of this obvious problem! He tried to seem calm as he watched Houston pull out a driver's license and hand it to him. She also reached up and removed a registration card from the sun visor. She smiled as peacefully as a Buddhist monk.

"Names don't match, Miss...Gorden?" said the officer, eyeing the cards.

"We just bought the car last week. The new registration hasn't come in."

He gazed into the car and at Lopez. "Your name, sir?"

Lopez's mind raced. He used a friend's name. "Enrique Velazquez."

"ID please."

_Damn._ "I'm sorry, officer, I don't have it. I wasn't planning on driving today. My wallet's at the house." Lopez felt a knot tightening in his stomach.

"Didn't plan on any roadblocks up here, either," said Houston, laughing easily. Lopez was amazed at her performance. "What's going on?"

The policeman continued to stare at Lopez. "Can't go into details, ma'am. Please wait in the car while we check out your license."

The officer walked back to one of the patrol cars and entered, likely interfacing with a computer connected to state and federal databases. Lopez spoke softly as he stared ahead.

"You have a fake ID?"

"Yes! I have enough simulated identification to fill a trunk. But this is crunch time. If the Agency has been thorough, they will have marked the license and all the other IDs I had generated with them."

"Marked?"

"Yes, likely flagging it badly. The reaction of the police will tell us."

Lopez felt his adrenaline spike as he saw the trooper inside the car look startled and glance quickly in their direction.

"And if it _is_ flagged?" he asked, his pitch rising.

The officer quickly got out of the car, simultaneously reaching for his belt and calling out to the other troopers.

Houston gunned the accelerator. "We smash through! Head down, Francisco!"

It all happened so quickly, Lopez could barely process it. The car leapt forward, immediately striking the front ends of the two cars parked before them. Houston had built up enough momentum, however, that the two police vehicles were rotated and knocked sideways, and their green sedan crashed through the makeshift blockade and hurtled down the road as she continued accelerating wildly. A scraping sound of metal on pavement indicated that they had smashed their front end badly. Lopez saw sparks flying up by the right-side wheel, and then a blur as a piece of the car broke off and sailed behind them.

He heard gunshots fired behind them, and a second later the back window shattered.

"Hold on!" she shouted.

His stomach lurched, and they were airborne. The car launched over a small but steep hill, catching air, and then landed with a bone-rattling crash back onto the roadway. His head was bounced on the seat. The glass from the broken windshield scattered across the car.

Lopez leaned back up, sure that for the moment they were beyond the range of the officers' pistols. "What now?"

"I-87!" she said, screaming over the road and air noise. "We can get lost on the interstate, pull off quickly, ditch this car, and steal another one."

_Lord have mercy._

"How far to the turnoff, Francisco?"

Lopez frantically tried to call up the mapping app on his phone. His fingers darted over the touchscreen, the sounds of sirens growing behind them.

"Mile and a half," he yelled over the roaring of the car's engines. The speedometer read one hundred and twenty.

Houston glanced in the mirror. "We'll make it, if there are no more surprises."

They made it. Flying past cars at outrageous speeds, they caught the turnoff, Houston nearly losing control of the vehicle on the curve, and then plunged headlong into the traffic of the New York State Thruway. She quickly accelerated and began weaving in and out of lanes passing cars.

"We don't have much time," she said. "They'll have all of the New York State police pouring out of their holes in minutes. Everything will be shut down and we'll be trapped in molasses. Find me an exit!"

Lopez mapped out their current location. "The GPS is lost!"

"Fix it!"

"I'm trying! It's back. Damn!"

The car swerved back and forth, horns blared, and Lopez began to feel sick. "OK! Ten miles, nearest exit!"

"Ten miles?!"

"Don't blame me! It's ten miles!"

Houston thought quickly as she maneuvered. "I can't do much more than one hundred in this traffic," she said, narrowly missing the back end of an eighteen-wheeler as she threaded a needle into the left lane. "So, a little more than five minutes. Say a prayer for good traffic, Francisco."

Lopez felt too stunned to pray. But what else could save them now? He looked out the window, up to the sky, recalling the words of a psalm.

That's when he saw the helicopter.

"Sara...."

"I know, I know! I hear it!" she said as the beating of the blades became thunderous. "He's flying really low!"

Outside the window, swooping down to less than thirty feet above the ground, the police helicopter shadowed their movements. For the third time today, they heard the words of law enforcement blasted out of a loudspeaker, this time from the sky.

"Green Camry: slow your speed and pull over to the shoulder! I repeat, pull over to the shoulder or lethal force will be used!"

"Police cars are gaining on us, Sara!"

"I know! I see them!" she yelled, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror. "They've got too much horsepower!"

Lopez realized that the road directly in front of them was clearing. It looked like the chase was spooking everyone off to the side in the slow lane. The flashing lights and sirens grew stronger. Patrol cars were nearly tailing them now.

"I don't know how we're going to get out of this one, Francisco."

One of the police vehicles accelerated dramatically, revealing even more power under the hood. It approached alongside Houston on the right, almost carefully.

"Shit!" She gunned the accelerator and swerved to the left.

"Will they shoot?"

"That's not their plan."

Now there were two police cars behind them, one on each side. Houston gripped the wheel tightly. "Hang on, Francisco. They've boxed us in."

"The exit is half a mile ahead!"

"We might not make it!"

The car on the left was now alongside them, just as the rightward car dropped back. Houston tried to move into the right lane, but she was too slow. The police vehicle nudged their car near the trunk, the impact not even loud, but the results chaotic. They began to spin. The back end of the car rotated counterclockwise, and the momentum accrued from their speed made it impossible for Houston to stop the motion. Soon they were spinning like a top, and before he could figure out what happened, the car began to roll.

The world inverted and crashed, and he was thrown several directions at once. It ended just as quickly, the car righting itself, airbags deploying, and his face smashing into one. He blacked out.

When he came to, there was the sound of sirens and wind. He opened his eyes, glanced over at Houston, who was awake, her nose bleeding, the airbag smeared red, crimson over her face and white shirt. He checked his face—he was uninjured. Glass from the windows lay like a tossed jigsaw puzzle over them. A loud voice came from his right.

"Sara Houston and Francisco Lopez, you have the right to remain silent!"

His mind blocked out the remainder of the words. Outside his window was a highway patrol officer, aiming a black pump-action shotgun two feet from his face. He stared straight into the barrel.
45

# Partners in Crime

A cell phone rang.

The room was dark, shadowed, lit only by the rows of computer monitors along the walls displaying the security system readouts. A group of older men sat around a table in the middle, matched in number by a group of younger men busy in front of the terminals, monitoring the system. The guards were heavily armed with submachine guns.

A thin man pulled a blinking mobile phone out of his shirt pocket. He spoke.

"Nexus."

The other men turned and strained to hear a garbled voice spilling out from the speaker.

"That is very good news," said Nexus, holding up a finger as one of the men at the table motioned to speak. "Yes, of course. We will move quickly. What assets do we have in the area? Only Lars? How far? Good. Then we use what we have. We can't wait—they could be transferred to a higher-security location. Activate him. Now. Termination with extreme prejudice." He closed the phone.

Bravo spoke. "State or federal?"

"State," said Nexus. "Highway patrol, New York. They are in a pen upstate, near the Catskills. We don't have many resources there, except for the German. But we need to move on this. It won't be long before they move them somewhere much tighter, complicating our efforts. This is a national hunt, they're marked as dangerous fugitives. We need to target them now, while the security is poor."

"Agreed," said Bravo.

"This is very good news!" said Zulu, nearly shouting. Several heads turned from the monitors at the sound of his voice. "It gives us a breather, some space."

"Hardly," growled Bravo. He turned to Nexus. "You have more complete reports on Miller?" asked Bravo.

"Not yet, only what our sources in the state police could transfer to us. But it wasn't pretty."

"Even if Miller broke, he didn't know this location."

"No," said Nexus. "But he could have all our names and home addresses, as well as contacts who _do_ know where we are. It might just be a matter of time now."

Bravo nodded. "Maybe it's always been. Whatever influence we could have still, Lophius is right: it's time to shut the program down. Things are out of control."

"But first we have to put out this fire," said Nexus. "Then, we don't just clean house. We burn it to the ground."

Three hundred miles away, a shadow sat in front of a laptop screen. Several juxtaposed photos appeared and disappeared as keys were struck. The figure sat back and sighed.

_The images matched._

They had gone to a lot of effort to change their appearances, that was certain, and the blond man smiled in approval. Of course, all efforts were relative, and theirs paled next to his. With some image enhancement and facial-recognition software, it was only a few minutes to reveal a very high-probability association.

Sara Katherine Houston. 33. Former CIA operative, now a national fugitive, FBI most wanted. Suspicion of treasonous activities. Considered armed and extremely dangerous.

The wraith smiled. The smear job was admirable. The architects were exploiting whatever resources and influence they had left to ensure this cover-up. Perhaps only rivaled with the extreme hatchet job done on the priest.

The Reverend Father Francisco Morales Lopez. 43. M.Div. from St. Vincent de Paul Seminary. Ordained 2002, Diocese of Birmingham, Alabama. Teacher of mathematics, Holy Spirit Regional Catholic School, pastor of the Church of Saint Joseph.

He was also the brother of Miguel Lopez, who now lay under the soil in Madison, Alabama. Lopez—a black-ops agent who had run the mission that sent a young and confused Pakistani-American to a hellhole in Syria, never to see his family again. Never to find himself again.

He had no fight with this brother, the priest, or the CIA woman. She was clean. He had combed the CIA databases again. From what he could tell from the data and from his own recordings, they were actually outraged. That was good. Let them be outraged. He needed them, this agent and priest.

_Former_ priest. The wraith looked over the news reports online. From out of nowhere, horrific accusations of child abuse, church records surfacing over a decade old. A bishop was attacked and wounded, the weapon traced to the registered firearm of Sara Houston, the assault pinned to the woman. The photo on the screen was a splice of the priest in formal wear, serving mass, alongside a bikini shot of the Houston woman, dredged up from unknown sources.

_The priest and the whore_. The tabloids had enjoyed a lot of traffic with this. They couldn't resist the usual temptation to sully a woman with sexuality, nor to combine that with the person of a former celibate clergyman. Making them fugitives from the law, a danger to national security—it was big money. And a highly professional character assassination job by ruthless parties, a prelude to the coming physical assassinations no doubt authorized and set in motion.

The wraith parted the blinds of his hotel room window and glanced across the street. The state police station appeared formidable, a recent and imposing construction. But appearances could be deceiving. To his well-trained eye, the security walls were rotten with holes. _All the more reason to move soon._ Not much happened this far upstate. The architects would not need much—only a moderately well-trained asset. The two fugitives were literally sitting ducks in there. It might even happen tonight. _No_ , he corrected himself, _it_ would _happen tonight_. This was their chance. They would not hesitate.

He closed the blinds and rose from the chair, walking over to his bed. He opened a large metallic case and removed several weapons and explosives: grenades, bars of Semtex, fuses, and timers. He glanced at his watch—three hours until sunset. He would wait until all solar light had faded, then blow the local transformer, cutting power to the block and the station. No doubt they had an emergency generator, but at the least it would cause havoc and plunge the surrounding area into total darkness. He'd follow the power lines and sounds to the generator and disable it as well.

Removing his phone, he pressed a button, and a number was dialed. A tone sounded, then a sharp click, and a rough voice spoke on the other end.

"You are in position?"

"Yes," said the wraith. "I will strike tonight."

"Good. They are your best lead. As we have discussed." There was static over the speaker or significant background noise. "I am bringing the items. The dealers were what was to be expected, but they were not stupid, and fortunately I had to kill no one. They were happy for the money."

"How long?"

"A few more days. I will not take interstates. We cannot have any inspections."

"Contact me if there are any problems, and I will come."

"Yes. Now, fit this arrow and send it into the heart of your enemies." The connection closed.

He did not put away the phone, however, and instead opened an audio app, replaying the message recorded in the cabin. Together with the voices, he now had two faces, two identities, to put next to them in his mind. The woman's voice spilled out over the small speaker.

" _We have to find these leaders. What we've discovered is bigger than the murders of CIA agents. It's bigger than extraordinary rendition of American citizens. It's fucking Orwellian. Time to locate the architects of this death squad. These men have to be put away for life; they're more dangerous than Miguel's killers. They're a cancer inside the body of our government._ "

That was it. The old soldier was right. Their anger and passion were critical. Once they were freed tonight, he would enhance and direct that outrage. He would drive them forward to use all their connections and energies. They would uncover the rats hiding underground and pursue them.

And he would be following.
46

# Jail Broken

Houston rested next to Lopez in the cell. The motion was awkward, their arms and legs chained. They were isolated from all the other detainees in the small police station, the guards giving them a wide berth. It was like they had the plague or were considered otherwise extremely dangerous. It was almost comical, the reality ruining any jest at the absurdity.

Others arrested in nearby cells stared over at them with a macabre interest. Already they could hear whispers. The most common phrase was _the priest and the whore_. Tabloid trash. Their new identities. Houston sighed.

"Our one phone call—for nothing. I couldn't reach him. No answer. I don't know where he is."

_Fred Simon._ Their only hope. "I'm sorry, Sara. We were close."

"It can't end like this, Francisco!" Her blue eyes pleaded and then closed tightly. She seemed to instill a forced calm over her emotions. "After what we know, what we've _seen_ , the Agency will send someone. They'll disappear us, _render_ us, to a place that the light of day won't reach. From what we know now of their program, they could even try to have us killed. The truth will be buried with us. These monsters will get away with it."

Lopez hung his head. He saw no counterargument. Rationally, there was no way out. No hope. No reasonable way to end this nightmare.

_For it is by faith that we walk and not by sight._

He heard the words of St. Paul, as clear as if the apostle had spoken them himself. _Or is it just my mind, playing tricks on me?_ He could give a sermon on faith, but he didn't seem to live it. He had told Houston that God would not abandon them, right before he was slandered and tossed out by the Church. It might have fit her expectations, but it was a deep challenge to his. _Do I trust in God, or not?_ It wasn't perhaps what Houston wanted to hear, but he couldn't think of anything else to do.

"Then I'll pray, Sara."

Houston stared at him blankly.

The arresting officers had taken nearly everything when they booked them. The arrowhead pendant was gone. His cross, his rosary, both gone. It didn't matter. He wasn't sure he needed the strength of his older brother anymore, and God sure as hell didn't need a string of beads. _We_ _need the beads, the pendants, the talismans_.

He struggled off the bench and knelt down on the floor. The other prisoners stopped their chatter for a moment. Heads turned and glanced over in their direction. Some gathered along their bars as he prayed.

Lopez crossed himself. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Maria, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day He arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen."

There was some laughter in adjoining cells. "Hey, man, it _is_ the fucking Priest!" Another voice called, "You can _have_ the priest! What I want is the whore! Yeah, _baby_ , your turn next!" There were several hisses for quiet and more howls of laughter.

Lopez ignored them. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil."

The lights went off. There was a distant sound of rumbling, almost like thunder, but not as expansive. "Damn!" called one voice in a neighboring cell, and then there was total silence. All the chatter ceased.

He paused a moment but decided to continue anyway. He crossed himself again, the chains rattling in the dark, preventing significant motion in his Sign of the Cross. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Emergency lights kicked in, bathing the room in a deep red. Lopez heard shouts and then gunfire. The prisoners around them began to panic, talking, then shouting in fear. Loud commands from officers could be heard over the din and on top of it all, more gunfire. Chaos was erupting throughout the station. He felt the building shudder and rock, the movement capped by the thunderous sound of an explosion.

He was about to begin the next prayer, when he felt a soft touch on his shoulder, accompanied by the rattling of chains.

"Francisco..." It was Houston.

Lopez opened his eyes, a shape in front of them coming into focus. A man stood outside their cell, silhouetted in the dim red of the emergency lighting. In his right hand was a gun.

Houston crouched next to him and put his hand in hers. "Sounds corny, but I'd rather die next to you, Francisco. Not alone over there."

He held her hand, touching his forehead to hers. He resumed his prayer. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit."

The man raised the gun and aimed at them.

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

A firearm discharged, and Lopez tensed instinctively. The head of the silhouette jerked to the left. The body dropped to the floor. Another shadow ran in from the right. Lopez could tell immediately that it was not a police uniform, but he could make out little of the shooter's appearance.

"Francisco Lopez and Sara Houston?" the voice shouted earnestly.

Houston answered first. "Yes!"

"I was sent by Fred Simon! I'm here to get you out of this! We have to hurry—the entire station is under some kind of assault!"

He removed a set of keys and unlocked the cell, rushing beside them. Lopez saw a youngish man, perhaps in his thirties, well-built with short-cropped hair. Within seconds, he had freed them of the chains.

"Quickly, let's go! I have a vehicle waiting for you outside!"

They didn't need to be encouraged. Together, the three of them raced out of the detention floor and out a back exit as directed by Simon's man. As they ran, they caught a glimpse of the carnage at the station. Fires were burning and spreading everywhere. They did not see a single officer standing. All were dead, splayed out at desks, on floors, many riddled with bullets. It was like a war zone.

"Through there!"

They crashed through an emergency exit door and found themselves in a parking lot behind the station. A black SUV was idling in front of the door.

"Take it, get the hell out of here before there is a response. This is the nerve center for law enforcement in the area, so it will be some time before they get more troops. Looks like all electrical and phone lines are out, except for emergency backup."

A large explosion rocked the area, and a fireball climbed skyward from one end of the station. Even the emergency lights went off.

"Scrap that. Even better for us—they've hit the diesel generator. This place is dead. No word in or out. But fire responders will be here soon, and after that, likely the damn National Guard!"

Houston took the keys he held up for them. "Where do we go? What does Fred say?"

The man looked at her intensely. "He knows what happened to Miller. He knows what you found. That's why I'm here. You have to get back to DC, you have to stop the maniacs before it's too late! Finish what you started. Go, now!"

He pushed them toward the SUV, and Lopez grabbed Houston's hand as they sprinted. They leapt into the vehicle and sped off onto the road, leaving the inferno that was the police station behind them.

Standing next to the flames, near the spot where the SUV had been parked, a blond man watched them pull out. It had been close. _Too damn close._ He was furious at himself for nearly allowing the CIA asset the chance to kill the pair. Had he arrived only seconds later, he would have lost his best lead to the mission architects.

_But it worked._ He had seen their eyes. He had reached them, pushed the buttons that needed to be pushed. They were on their way. Once again, he checked his phone. The transmitter on the SUV was active, showing their position. He began to sprint to his own vehicle.

It was time to head south.
47

# The Priest and the Whore

_T he Priest and the Whore: When Will This National Nightmare End?_

_An Op-Ed, by William Notti_

_New York Daily News_

_Abused children. Murdered government agents. A break-in at a CIA ultra-secure site, followed by its near destruction and the theft of critical documents. Counterterrorism agents murdered in their homes, tortured, their skulls drilled into. A wild chase on the New York highways, ending in arrest and mayhem as the two killer fugitives blow up a police station, killing dozens of officers._

_Is this the United States?_

_The president finally has begun to take this seriously and called in the National Guard. But it's too little, too late._

_What we have is another example of a weak commander in chief who has staffed his "intelligence" communities with dangerous liberals more in tune with his own politics._

_The Central Intelligence Agency has been warped into a Liberal think tank and is in danger of utterly failing in its function as our nation's most important intelligence agency. It is now overly politicized, used to leak key facts to the mainstream media in order to alter the political landscape._

_The sharp tools developed and put in place by conservative administrations have all been blunted. And now we are all suffering for these mistakes._

_It really doesn't matter who Lopez and Houston really are or even what they've done. Of course, their sex crimes, murder, and treasonous espionage will go down infamously in the history books. They deserve the full force of our justice system: treason is a capital offense, as is murder._

_But they are just the symptom, the pus of a vile infection of multiple branches of government by people who at best dislike American exceptionalism, and, as in this case, at worst secretly aim to undermine it._

_We need a return to the strength of patriotism, to a counterterrorism that will harshly pursue and punish those who wish ill to the United States of America. We had that in the years after 9/11, but the success of those patriots in stopping more attacks has made us soft and forgetful._

_In my view, we still haven't gone far enough in bringing the fight to our enemies. The terrorists certainly aren't constrained by the Geneva Conventions, so why should we be? We need to clean house and muscle up, or they'll be back._

_The American people demand it, and come November, this president may find a rude awakening at the ballot box._
48

# Deadly Mistakes

Three days!

The one called Zulu pressed his fingertips tightly to his temple. Three days had passed since the pair had escaped the New York State police station, blowing the entire thing up in the process, creating a national sensation unparalleled since Bonnie and Clyde. The ever-rising toll was astonishing. Twenty dead cops, millions in damages, and a nightly news bonanza. Calls for the use of the National Guard. The president on national TV calming the country.

Meanwhile, their asset had never surfaced from the wreckage and was presumed dead. _The two had been trapped!_ And they had let them escape. Houston and Lopez had disappeared, carrying deadly information about them all, doing who knows what with it. _By now, anything could have happened._

He had been a fool to let this simmer so long. Now his mistake was courting disaster. He had to act, he had to destroy the files before they were discovered. He did not think to broach the topic with the others. He did not have to guess their reaction. He did not want to face it. He would do this alone.

The one called Zulu walked down to the control room. It was late, and only one man was monitoring the security system. The guard glanced up at him and nodded, and Zulu moved behind him, turning quietly to the unmanned monitor directly across on the opposite side of the room.

"Everything looks clean?" he asked, sitting down in front of the screen, speaking over his shoulder to the other guard. His presence did not arouse any suspicion. On many occasions, each of the occupants had wandered the hallways of the converted country home. Sleep was frequently denied to anxious minds.

"Yeah, quiet as a baby," came the fatigued words. Zulu softly pressed a series of keys, opening windows to the security system. The monitor in front of him jumped from camera image to camera image. He pressed another key, and the image locked, a camera ceasing its back-and-forth panning. He then opened a control panel window for the motion detectors and quietly entered a series of commands. He cleared the screen of windows. Satisfied, he stood.

"OK, good. Stay alert. Things could happen when we least expect. Scratch that. They _will_ happen when we least expect." The guard nodded, straightening in his seat slightly.

Zulu walked to an unused portion of the large farmhouse and approached a door leading to the outside. Hesitantly, he placed his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed outward, closing his eyes. He waited. There were no alarms. He had done it right.

He walked outside, pulled out a remote control, and deactivated the gate security. He checked the inside of his suit jacket, felt the weight of the weapon, and walked toward the car parked by the road.

It was dangerous. _Crazy_. But he had to do it, whatever the risk. He'd screwed up, he knew that. A sign that he was getting old, probably, or that things were happening too quickly, too insanely for anyone to do everything right. It would have taken him only five minutes to start the erasure of the hard drive! But he'd been too busy running out of the house.

_Cowardice_. It wasn't age. Or carelessness. That was the truth, and he knew it. He had simply been _afraid_. He'd bolted to the safe house. He'd left the secrets on the drive.

Well, he'd fix that now.
49

# Zulu

It was midnight, and Lopez found himself summoning the stamina to once again plow his energies through another long night of breaking and entering. But compared to the more recent activities he had been involved with, this felt almost saintly.

They had left the black SUV parked alongside the other large and luxurious vehicles in this upscale neighborhood. Quickly exiting the vehicle, they moved across the back lots, out of the streetlights to approach the target residence of the evening.

This was their last chance. It was the fourth break-in over the three days since their insane escape from the police station in the Catskill Mountains. They had tried to lay as low as possible, and fortunately, the destruction of the police station had prevented the distribution of any photographs of their new appearances. These they maintained, enhanced, even as they were always careful never to stay in one place too long or expose any form of real identification in anything they did.

They still could not reach Fred Simon, but the man he had sent to free them from capture had provided a set of useful items. ATM cards linked to unknown bank accounts. Credit cards with false names that issued no alerts. Firearms and ammunition. It was nearly a fugitive survival kit.

At an out-of-the-way motel in New Jersey the first night after their escape, they had begun a systematic search through the names they found in the documents on Miller's computer. One after another, they had held stakeouts of the residences. When no one showed, they would break into the houses, canvas every square inch for panic rooms, information, anything they could find.

They consistently found nothing. No one was ever home. No secret rooms concealed frightened men. No information on computers or in filing cabinets. The houses showed all the appearance of being abandoned. Dust collected on the furniture, food rotted in the refrigerators, and mail piled in the boxes. The occupants had fled and were not coming back. Lopez couldn't blame them. They were being hunted by a fierce creature that showed no mercy.

Houston broke their enforced silence as they approached an iron fence ringing the property they sought. "This is it, Francisco. We've done the alphabet. _Zulu._ "

Lopez found it ridiculous, these spy codes. Once an enemy had obtained the key, it was all for nothing. Miller's computer had been compromised. Now all the players and their little codes were open to them. _Assuming you can find them._

He raised the pistol she had given him from the SUV stash and checked the safety as she had instructed. Houston watched him with disapproval. "You need proper firearms training. One of these nights you're going to trip and shoot me in the back."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," said Lopez. "Have you identified the security system yet?" It was their pattern. Houston would spend some time finding and then disabling the home security systems while Lopez kept watch. _And I try not to shoot her in the back._

"No, let's move along the fence to the front of the house."

"We'll be exposed."

"I know that!" she snapped. "But I'm guessing that the main circuitry runs through the gate up there in this place. I don't know where else it could be. We've nearly been around the entire perimeter."

Lopez nodded and followed her forward as they crouched low along the six-foot-high fencing. The fatigue and stress were draining their patience. Houston always found some clever way to bypass security systems—he didn't doubt her tonight. But he remembered the past failures. They would spend hours searching through the home, only to decide half an hour before sunrise that it was for nothing. Then they would steal out, careful not to alert any neighbors, and drive back to whatever motel they were staying at for the day. There they would crash, sleeping off the long hours, to rise the following evening for the next house.

The sudden appearance of a pair of headlights signaled that tonight would be different. A lone car pulled into the cul-de-sac and stopped almost violently in front of the gate. Lopez and Houston instinctively crouched lower, their dark clothing and the black of the metal fencing camouflaging them. A lithe, middle-aged man exited the vehicle, quietly closing the door. He looked around anxiously but did not spot them. Satisfied, he held up a remote control, tapped a code into it, and the gate began to open slowly.

"Jackpot," whispered Houston, the first smile in days flashing across her face. They watched him enter and then quickly sprinted to the front of the property. Just as they reached the entrance and stepped through the gate, they saw him push open the front door and move quickly inside. The gate had not even completely opened yet.

Near the entrance, Houston located a signal box for the security system inside the fencing. Within seconds, she had the casing off and was inspecting the circuit board with a set of makeshift tools. "Careless," she said, smiling. "He deactivated it when he entered and hasn't toggled back. He must be in a hurry."

"And anxious," said Lopez. Their eyes locked.

"Zulu," said Houston, turning her attention back to the box. "It's a brittle serial architecture. Now that I'm inside, I can kill the entire thing from here."

"Well, do it! We're in the stage lights here!" said Lopez, feeling like the eyes of the community were boring down on them.

"It's done," she said, her eyes darting toward the house. "Let's find another way in."

They raced around house and found a back door. Without the security system to contend with, Houston simply picked the lock, and they were inside in seconds. Drawing her weapon, she moved carefully and quietly through a large kitchen. A bluish light could be seen faintly emanating from a room down a hallway on the right. Frantic sounds of objects moving and a clacking on a computer keyboard broke through the stillness of the home. Houston nodded toward the hall and the door, and Lopez nodded back. They moved slowly toward the sounds, Houston sliding with her back along the wall until she came to a stop beside the door. Lopez copied her movements and followed.

With a sudden spin and jump, Houston was straddling the doorway, her firearm aimed inwardly. There was a scream from inside and the sound of glass shattering. Lopez leapt into the room behind her.

"Don't move!" she yelled, walking slowly forward.

Lopez saw a frightened-looking man standing awkwardly next to a computer terminal. A gun was on the desktop a few feet from him, and a shattered picture frame lay between his outstretched hand and the weapon. He looked back and forth between the two intruders and gasped.

" _You!_ "

Houston motioned with her weapon for him to step away from the desk. "Who were you expecting?" The man didn't answer, but he moved as she commanded. "Oh, I know! The _killers_. The wolves hunting you and your dirty little program down."

Lopez stared in shock. He _knew_ that man, that face. He had seen it on too many television reports, in too many magazines. _Mark Blobel_. The director of the CIA Renditions Branch for a number of years. It was surreal that he stood in the same room with this man, even stranger that they were pointing a gun at him.

"You don't understand!" yelled the former branch director.

"Oh, but we do, _Zulu_ ," she said, smiling at his second gasp.

"How do you know that name?"

"Sit down!" she barked, and Zulu sat on a faded brown couch. His hands twitched as she moved in front of him. "Not to sound too dramatic, _Zulu_ , but you might say we know almost everything."

"You think you know everything," he said with a sneer. "But you don't. Who do you think you _are_?"

Houston waved Lopez over. "Francisco, see what's on that monitor. He came back here for something on that machine. I'll keep my eyes on the little panther here. What were you in your younger days, Zulu? Some sort of martial arts legend, right?"

Zulu ground his teeth, his entire body tensed, but he said nothing. Lopez wedged the pistol into the space between his belt and pants and walked to the computer. The screen was empty but for standard program icons. As he had learned from Houston, Lopez opened a terminal window and entered system commands displaying recent activity. It was as he feared.

"We're too late, Sara," he said resting his knuckles in frustration on the desk. "He's run a broad system erasure of all documents. It's an encrypted hard-erase. I don't think the information's recoverable."

Zulu seemed to suppress a smile.

Houston didn't remove her gaze from the man. "We'll just have to use what we have, then. We have _you_ , Zulu. And we have a lot on you. We know about the black-ops rendition operations. We know that the agents and leaders of those are being hunted down, killed one after the other. We also know you used these snatch teams on _American_ suspects, right here in this country, Zulu."

"You'll never prove it," he spat bitterly.

"Maybe not. But what else we know will make that irrelevant," she said, stepping between him and the computer, aiming the weapon at his face.

Lopez stepped out from behind Houston to the other side of the room nearer the door. He wanted to have his eyes on this Zulu. There was something unsettling about the man.

Houston continued. "You turned the special powers you were given right back on your own people. You killed American terrorist suspects with your private little renditions squad." Zulu stiffened sharply. "You actually began to kill the opponents of your politics, Zulu! You killed _Americans_ who fought the tactics you and other groups at the Agency were employing. You murdered our _citizens_ on our soil!" Zulu's eyes widened, and his lip began to curl. "We have the names. The mission leaders. _Your_ name linked directly to them. They're going to burn you all at the stake for this."

Zulu roared. He leapt forward with a frightening and unexpected speed for a man his age, like a wild and cornered beast. Houston fired, the shot blasting his left shoulder, but his momentum carried him through the air. He crashed into her violently. They tumbled onto the desk, the computer monitor smashed against the wall, a loud pop and sparks bursting into the air. Before Lopez could react, they fell hard to the floor. Zulu landed on top of Houston, the impact knocking the wind out of her, her gun rattling across the floor and hitting the wall. Lopez rushed forward.

"Stop! Or she's dead!" yelled Zulu. A small gun was in his hand, pointed directly at her face, inches from her forehead. Lopez was close, but not close enough. _I'm so stupid! Why didn't I take my gun back out?_ If he risked an attack, he could probably disarm Zulu, but not before he had killed Houston. He couldn't think of an option. He froze.

"Move against the wall, _priest_ ," Zulu screamed. Lopez moved, now completely out of striking distance. Blood trickled down Zulu's left arm and dripped to the floor. "You _fools!_ Do you know what you've done? How _dare_ you judge us? How dare you threaten our program? We prevented attacks on the nation! We saved _lives!_ Now you want to shame us for our service and send us to rot the rest of our lives away!"

Houston glared at him and spoke strongly despite the gun to her face. "You didn't serve your nation, you betrayed it! How is killing people who disagree with you part of our Constitution? Our founding principles?"

"Shut up!" He pressed the barrel forcefully into the skin of her forehead. Lopez took a step forward. "Stop, priest! I mean it. Or she's dead." Zulu looked around the room quickly, his breath becoming more and more ragged. He spoke seemingly as much to himself as to them. "Now you've complicated things! I had to erase that hard drive, but what to do with you? How to cover this up? How to get out of here fast enough, before the wraith comes?"

_The wraith._ So that's what they called them. _Him?_ Was there only one? Lopez's mind raced. "Why is he hunting you?"

The older man laughed bitterly. "What difference does it make to you? Perhaps you're afraid he'll kill you, too."

Houston looked at him sharply. "No, I don't think so. It's because of what you've done, isn't it? He's seeking justice, just like we are. What did you do to him? Did you kill someone he loved as well?"

Zulu licked his lips, sweat pouring down. With a grunt from the pain in his arm, he pulled backward and distanced himself from the two, keeping his weapon pointed toward them. Lopez saw their odds falling fast. _Now he can shoot us both before we can get to him._ The look in the man's eyes confirmed his thoughts.

Houston propped herself up on her elbows. "He won't stop, will he, this _wraith_? He won't stop until you are all dead. Our goal isn't your deaths, Zulu. We're not assassins. But we won't stop until you and the others are brought to justice!"

"There is really only one solution then," he said, raising the gun and aiming.

Houston rolled rapidly to her right, her reflexes faster than those of the injured Zulu. His shots drilled holes in the wooden floor where she had been an instant before. Splinters and dust blasted upward. She flipped to her feet like a gymnast, and she and Lopez moved rapidly toward the CIA man. But he had too much time. Zulu swung his weapon toward them. Lopez lunged at him. _We won't make it!_

The window behind Zulu exploded, and a misted spray of crimson burst from around the man's head. For a split second, he stood there, his eyes suddenly blank, blood beginning to pour from his nose and mouth. Then he fell heavily to the floor.

Lopez's momentum carried him past the falling figure, and he ended up sprawled across the floor, the impact jarring. Before he could even collect his thoughts, Houston had crouched down, grabbed her weapon, and started toward the door. "Francisco! _The wraith_!" She raced out of the room, and Lopez pushed himself up and followed close behind.

As they approached the front door, the sounds of a car starting could be heard. They crashed through the door, Houston springing down the porch steps with her gun raised. Across the street, near their own SUV, a pickup truck accelerated rapidly down the road. They crossed the lawn, and Houston chased after the vehicle, racing full-speed down the road. Lopez knew it was pointless. The truck was already pulling out of sight.

As quickly as she had begun, Houston stopped, pausing a moment hunched over to catch her breath. Lopez finally caught up with her.

"Let him go, Sara," he gasped out. "He's gone."

"Wait. Not the wraith." She waved with her gun to a car ten feet behind them. "Look."

She recovered slightly and walked over with him to a dark-blue van. The windows were shattered. Two dead men were inside, shot in the head. Lopez stood stunned. The madness never seemed to end.

Houston opened the door, looking through their pockets and the glove compartment. She pulled out a smartphone from one, flipped it open. It had a face-recognition security feature. She held it up to the dead man's face. The phone opened with a click.

"Damn. The worst." She held the phone up to Lopez. There were two photos on the small screen: one of him and one of her. "Assassins. More of the same like at the police station. Or like in Alabama." She shuddered at the memory. "They must have figured we'd stake out the houses. They guessed we knew a lot, or that we had put things together. They were waiting."

Lopez felt completely helpless. He was losing track of how many times they had narrowly escaped death. "The wraith?"

She nodded. "Good name they gave him. Saved our asses, though. And got the kill on Zulu. He gets my Jason Bourne award nomination."

Nothing made sense. "Why, Sara? Why is he helping us?"

"I doubt he's helping us, Francisco. He came here to kill Zulu. For all he knew, these assets were here to protect Blobel. He ID'd them and took them out."

"But why didn't he kill us, too?"

Houston paused. "Good question. I don't know, Francisco. Maybe he's got his list of targets, and we aren't on it, for obvious reasons. And I don't think he's worried about the cops or anything two people like us could say to them."

Lopez nodded. House lights were starting to come on. There was too much disturbance in the neighborhood. Perhaps someone had heard something, noticed them running, or seen Zulu's door open. "Let's get out of here. I don't want to be caught by the police again."

There was a metallic click behind them. "Sara Houston and Francisco Lopez?"

They turned around. Lopez couldn't believe it, and nearly laughed. Someone else was pointing a gun at them.
50

# Simon Says

They sat around the bed in a cheap, nowhere motel off a highway in Virginia. Simon's man, Jim Fields, had led them here, telling them that he'd explain all he could once they were more hidden. After Lopez and Houston had checked in under false names provided by Simon's other agent, Fields had gone and bought a bunch of Chinese food, refusing to let them out of the room. He didn't want any risks that unnecessary exposure might bring.

"Fred has been under siege," Fields said, looping a mass of noodles into his mouth with chopsticks. He spoke as he chewed. "Whoever ran this operation, they're still a force, even out of the CIA. They have assets, money, and influence. And there were two attempts on his life. He's moving place to place constantly. That's why you couldn't reach him in the station after you were caught. Hell of an escape, by the way! How on earth did you get out of there?"

Lopez and Houston stared at each other. "Another one of your men came, sent by Fred Simon. He got us out," said Lopez.

The man looked shocked. " _Jesus_. Communication has totally broken down. I was completely unaware of this. Where is he now? Why isn't he with you?"

They looked at each other again, confused. Houston spoke. "I don't know, Jim. Until you asked, I hadn't thought about it. God, we had just run out of a shooting gallery. The place blew up, and he pointed us to that SUV out there and screamed for us to go. We didn't ask any questions. We got our asses out of there."

Fields nodded but looked troubled. "Still, you could have used some help. I was told to be looking for you, but I had no idea how to find you. I couldn't reach Fred either, and everyone was cut off."

Lopez furrowed his brows. "How _did_ you know where to find us?"

Fields laughed. "Luck. Sources with the police radioed that they had discovered some pretty explosive stuff. We debriefed them, got a list of names. Wow—pretty high-level names, too. That shook some people up. Fred was stunned."

"Francisco and I have been looking over the list of kills we copied from Miller's computer," said Houston. "At first, we could only identify those that matched names we could immediately recognize. These were powerful, important players in law, politics, and activism."

"Yes," grumbled Francisco, "assassinations that removed all obstacles to the program of black-ops rendition and torture."

"And the others on the list?" asked Fields.

"It took more work, but we were able to associate the initials with a number of high-profile Arabs in America. Some were almost certainly dirty players in the underground terrorist networks. But others—it isn't so clear."

Francisco cut in angrily. "They didn't care. Circumstantial evidence was all they needed. Close enough for government work. They killed anyone they thought was a threat."

Fields looked stunned. "How could something like this happen?"

"It's the logical step, from a certain set of assumptions," said Francisco. "First, they rendered terrorist suspects without due process. Then, they justified holding them in secret, indefinitely. No rights. What's next? Well, if they don't have rights, and you think you can get information from them, why not hurt them until they talk? Well, why limit that to noncitizens? Why limit kills of suspects to foreign lands? If you want to protect America, you have to get them wherever they are, whoever they are. That includes even the deluded do-gooders who are fighting to stop your programs. They began with terrorist suspects and ended up with congressmen; they went from Arabs to WASPs with money. One step after another until you are a secret murder squad without oversight, reporting only to shadows."

Fields spoke coldly. "It has to be stopped, and Fred will be on-board one hundred percent, I can tell you. The last communication I received from him told me to make sure nothing happened to you two, that this mess had to be cleaned up. From what you've told me now, he'll be even more committed."

Lopez felt relieved. _So the word will get out. Maybe even to the press soon._ He was tired of the story being about the two fugitives and their flight. Today's local paper had dramatic photos of the charred wreckage: "Terrorist fugitives blow up police station." It was just getting better and better. _Or worse and worse._

Houston spoke with a frustrated tone. "But Mark Blobel, _Zulu_ , was the last on the list, Jim. All the others are gone. Hiding out, no doubt. We have nothing to go on now!"

The CIA man smiled. "Well, Fred hasn't been idle, Sara." He pulled out his cell phone, punched in several numbers, and showed Lopez and Houston the screen.

"An address?" asked Lopez.

"Yes. A high-security, recently outfitted, militarized farmhouse."

"How'd he get this information?" asked Houston.

"It wasn't easy. They have buried so much, killed so many, to hide these missions—and they've done a good job covering it up. But it's hard to hide the money trail. With a good dog—and Fred has some very good hunting dogs—the trail is there to read. In short: the mission leaders are tied to Agency-associated money transfers involving this site. _Recent_ money transfers, all in the last year. Transfers that began shortly after agents started dying."

"Oh, my God," said Houston. She hugged Lopez. "Fred's done it! This _has_ to be where they're laying low. We've got them pinned down!"

"Where is it?" asked Lopez.

"Here are the satellite photos. Rural nowhere in Virginia," said Fields.

"He's sure about this?" asked Lopez.

"Absolutely. One hundred percent." He looked at them solemnly. "Fred knew you'd want to go, and he _wants_ you to go. But it will be dangerous. For obvious reasons, we can't go to the police. The fireball in upstate New York is just one of several items on the list law enforcement has on you two. So, they're out. So's FBI. Or, God forbid, the CIA. No one can help. So he insisted that I come with you."

Lopez smiled. "No problems from me on that part! I wish we had an army of Fred Simon's men! Seems like he knows how to pick them."

Houston nodded. "Of course, as long as you know the dangers too, Jim. These are some really scary folks. Dark side of the force material."

Fields nodded, holding up his gun. "Yeah, I know. But someone has to stop them, make them face justice. Fred Simon isn't the only one who has been sickened by what you two have found."

Lopez felt elated. For the first time in months, they were not alone. Justice was coming to a farmhouse in Virginia.
51

# Judas

The drive through the rural counties was mostly silent. Conversation was limited to coordinating travel, following maps, and planning an approach that would not reveal their presence. Lopez and Houston drove together in the SUV, and Fields led the way in his black sedan. They had left late in the evening, the calculated travel time about an hour over narrow country roads. They approached the location roughly around midnight.

They found a wide shoulder on the side of the road a mile and a half before the farmhouse, and they left their vehicles there. Unsecured fields surrounded them, and they agreed that it was wiser to approach unseen through the fields and patchy forests between them than to take to the road. With cellular tower signals and modern GPS navigation, the strategy was simple to follow.

The moon was full, directly overhead, casting clear shadows to their night-adjusted eyes as they walked. Conversation continued to be minimal, task oriented, the tension building within all of them. After everything that had happened, Lopez felt a mixture of hope and dread. Ahead of them lay the lair of some of the most ruthless and desperate men he could imagine, men who had killed and destroyed the lives of so many. But they had uncovered the root of this evil program that had led to the death of his brother, the architects of which he and Houston had vowed to bring to justice for their crimes.

_Justice? Or vengeance?_ The priest in him required that he face the need for vengeance buried inside. He knew that it was partially a transferal of blame from the man they called _the wraith_. These architects had not killed Miguel Lopez. The wraith had. But these men had created, and their crimes had given birth to, the vengeance that now hunted them down. Who was this wraith? What pain drove him to pursue these men to the death? Could it be that as much as he loved his brother, Miguel's crimes demanded recompense? Perhaps his death had its own justice associated with it.

He would have to leave these conflicting emotions to the psychologists. All he knew was that now his anger, his sense of right and wrong, and his need to act were focused on a group of men that had betrayed so many and so much. Men who had gotten away with clandestine crimes against humanity and could not be let free to continue their twisted pursuit of security. Perhaps a time for the wraith would come. Tonight, it was time for others.

They had entered a narrow strip of forest between two properties, and Fields held up his hand. They consulted the GPS map. From the satellite imagery, as soon as they crossed through these trees, they would be on the land of the farmhouse they were seeking.

"Okay, if there's any security, which I assume there will be, it will start soon." Fields pointed to the area just in front of them, where the trees ended. A cobblestone wall ran around the perimeter of the property and hardly had the appearance of a high-tech security system. Houston walked forward to the forest's edge, crouched down, and examined the wall.

"The stone is a facade," she said almost immediately. "My bet is concrete behind, likely wired. If we try to go over this, they'll know it." She pointed to a rod sticking up from the wall 30 feet away. "That's likely a camera, wide-angle lens. I think we're hidden by the tree line and the wall, but if we somehow get over the wall and move beyond its edge, we'll be visible."

Fields walked up with a small device hooked up to his smartphone. "Swiss Army knife of signal detectors," he said, smiling. He ran an app on his phone that opened several graphs. He pressed a switch on the device, and the graphs jumped, showing curves like an oscilloscope. "It can sense electromagnetic fields, infrared, heat emission, high-frequency sound, several other things."

"Nice," said Houston. "Not standard issue."

"No," he said, running the device along the false-stone wall. "Homemade. Friend of mine in R&D put the app together. Convenient as hell." He backed away from the wall. "OK, this is weird. There are clearly power lines in there. That wall is juiced. Not electrified—the signal's too low. They're not looking to fry us. My guess is it's power for sensors. Very mild heat signal as well."

Lopez glanced at the graphics display as well, trying to absorb all he could. Houston nodded looking at the readouts. "So, like I said, problem."

"Except for this," he noted, pointing to a second page of graphs. All the graphs were flatlined. "Unless they have pressure sensors on the walls, which, hell, maybe they do, they'll be using a form of motion detection. That means acoustic sensors, optical and infrared sensors, magnetometers, infrared laser radar, ultrasonic sensors, inductive-loop detectors, or vibration detectors."

"Whew," said Lopez. "Sounds like an ad for a store closing."

"The _point_ is that all of these technologies have a fingerprint—acoustic, electromagnetic, and so on. You know the technology, you know the fingerprint, you can design a detector to determine what's being used."

"A detector for the detectors," said Lopez, fascinated with the spy-tech games these people played.

"Exactly," said Fields. "So, unless they have some new, cutting-edge technology I don't know about, there's nothing here. No signals. No fingerprints."

"That doesn't make sense," said Houston.

"Not much," said Fields. "But who knows? Maybe a malfunction. Maybe they needed to disable something for a reason. But it's our lucky night."

Houston looked skeptical. "Too easy, Jim. Doesn't feel right."

He nodded. "That's why I'll go first. If there's something we're missing, they'll train the dogs, or bullets, on me. You two scramble away from this site, and you'll have to find another way in—to rescue me."

Houston laughed. "Fred knows how to pick the loyal ones, let me tell you. But you forgot the camera. Once you're over the wall, it will pick you up."

Fields smiled. "Not if I stick close to the wall. We can slide against it, and then under the camera, and try to find a way to disable it from there." Houston shook her head in disbelief. Fields stood and put away his equipment. "OK, then. It's a plan. You two hang back. I'll call your cell number when I'm over."

Lopez was amazed that it actually worked. Fields went over the wall without incident. No alarms, no rushing of guards, no CIA automatic robotic controlled weaponry. Only silence. A vibration on Houston's cell phone let them know he was safely on the other side. Soon after, they scaled the wall, followed his advice to the camera, and discovered that it, too, was not functioning.

"I'm getting a very bad feeling about this," said Lopez. "The last time we came across a dead security system, the occupants were not doing so well. Maybe the wraith discovered where they are. Maybe he's already been here."

"Doubt it, Francisco," said Houston. "Miller's system was completely shut down. The wraith must have hit his command and control center or blown the power. This one's active; we just seem to have a weak spot here. I wouldn't count on too many of those."

They soon found out she was right. As they crossed through a waist-high field of grass, crouched low to the ground, Fields began to detect more signals on his scanner. He motioned again for them to stop.

"Weak, but definitely growing as we move forward. There is a grassy lawn right ahead, let's slow down and get a sense of things before we cross that."

It was a prescient decision. As they stopped at the edge of the lawn, examining the signals, it became clear that the signal strength peaked as the device was brought closer to the grass in front of them. When the sensor was raised upward or pulled back into the wilder grassy field, they crouched in, and the signal dropped. It was a small drop, but it was real.

"Pressure sensors," said Houston.

"Pressure sensors?" Lopez asked.

Fields nodded. "Yes, in the ground. They sense weight and trigger at a cutoff. Usually, in a place like this, you'll set it above that of local wild animals so that you don't get a wolf or possum tripping your system ten times a night. But any weight approaching human averages, and it trips. If we walk across this grass, we're blown."

_Great,_ thought Lopez. "Now what? We didn't bring our balloon on this one."

"Balloon?" asked Fields.

"Never mind," said Houston. "Well, what do you do when you can't walk?"

Fields grinned. "You crawl."

"Right," she said. "So, we start out here, on our bellies, and worm our way in."

The absurdity apparently had no limit. Here they were, breaking into a rural Virginia farmhouse to confront rogue CIA killers, crawling on their stomachs along the way. _Not what they prepared us for in seminary._

The pace was slow. Paranoid, they tried not to place too much weight on any one portion of their body—knee, palm, or foot. It made crawling very difficult and exhausting. They nearly had to slither like snakes. After ten minutes, they had crossed most of the distance.

"The signal's dropped to nothing," grunted Fields, as they neared the house itself. "I think we're past the sensors." Testing his conclusion, he stood. Nothing happened. Lopez and Houston followed suit, and the three moved quickly alongside the walls of the building.

Fields scanned several windows and doors. All showed signs of multiple security mechanisms in place. Houston suggested that they move on and keep looking in the hope of finding another hole in the system.

They did. A single door near the back of the house was dead to the scanners. The security systems seemed deactivated. Fields smiled.

"Good to have a second set of eyes," Houston noted, nodding toward his device. "I need to get me one of those." She removed a pistol and handed it to Lopez. He recognized it as coming from the men he had killed in Alabama. "Taxpayer-funded Glock, safe action. Make sure you have a full grip on the trigger to engage the mechanism," she said, shaking her head. "Still no chance to teach you anything about firearms." She raised her Browning and cocked it, glancing at Fields. "This time, I'll lead."

She flattened herself against the wall next to the door and placed her hand on the doorknob. Lopez stood in place beside her, adrenaline spiking and sending a rush of energy through his frame. The gun in his hand felt like a living creature, ready to attack. The moment was now.

"Drop your weapons!"

The command came from above. Lopez looked upward quickly, dismayed at what he saw. From several second-floor windows, on their right and left, guns were pointed at them. The door opened, nearly knocking Houston over as the doorknob was yanked from her hand violently. Standing in the doorway was a young man with a shotgun aimed at her.

Houston darted like a cobra to the right, angling her upper torso to the side of the gun. Grabbing the barrel with her left hand, with her right she struck the butt of her gun sideways into the face of the man by the door. The blow smashed him in the right temple, disorienting him, and he unconsciously loosened his grip on the weapon. Houston yanked it out of his arms and slung it to the ground away from the house.

Two more barrels were pointed at her from inside, and to prove a point, a rifle shot blasted a hole in the ground next to her feet. Houston instinctively spun around, seeking another route to escape, and Lopez turned with her. They froze, Lopez unbelieving. Houston sighed and finally dropped her weapon. Jim Fields was aiming his gun at them. They were surrounded.

"I knew something smelled wrong about all this," she said bitterly. "You bastard, using Fred Simon's name like this."

"Hello, Judas," came a voice rounding the corner of the building. The voice belonged to a tall, thin older man whose gray hair reflected the moonlight brightly as he approached. He tipped his head toward the false Agent Fields. "Judas specialized in double-agent missions. Agency-assessed sociopath by the shrinks. Very convincing actor. And he gets a lot more than thirty pieces of silver." Judas said nothing but continued to train his weapon on them.

Houston eyed the approaching man coldly. "Well, I'll be damned. James Farnell, former deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center. From what I've read recently, now going by the handle _Nexus._ Good name. Dramatic. Egomaniacal. I thought you'd joined your pals at Blackwater after the admin change. I guess you had other plans beyond golf with Cofer."

Nexus eyed her with amusement. "Agent Houston. We've been looking for you a _long_ time. Father Lopez, please, put the weapon down." Lopez hadn't realized he was still holding the gun, his shock so complete at this betrayal. With a disgusted glance at Judas, he tossed it to the ground. Nexus bent down and picked up the firearm, smiling back at them. He motioned to the door, where several men with automatic weapons flanked the path. "Won't you come in?"
52

# Javed

"You both have made our lives very difficult. The consensus is that I should have had you killed at the beginning. A miscalculation on our part."

Lopez and Houston sat in the center of a living room in the farmhouse. They were separated by a small coffee table, each at opposite ends, several guards pointing automatic weapons at them. On one side, next to a large window, two older men stood. Nexus was one of them, and he led all the discussions. On his right was a man who looked mildly familiar to Lopez, one he assumed was a mid-level CIA manager. He just couldn't place the face with a name.

"You bastards haven't exactly made life easy for us," spat Houston. "Did you know Francisco's a documented pedophile now? That was a nice touch. I'm a national security threat and known the world over now as the whore of CIA! After all my years serving my country, you bastards have turned it against me!"

"Whether you understand it or not, Houston, you _are_ a threat to the nation," hissed Nexus, his tone threatening. "In your efforts to assuage your emotional pain from your unrequited love, you are threatening a very important program that has protected the United States for over a decade!"

"How low will you go, Farnell? Do you have wiretaps of our conversations? Is nothing sacred to you people? Privacy? Right to free speech? Right to life?"

"All rights are subject to constraint in times of war! And what people like you don't understand is that we are _at war_!" Nexus paced back and forth, gesturing angrily.

Houston didn't back down. "And a soldier can fight honorably or dishonorably, Farnell! You have betrayed the nation, the principles it was founded on. You have dishonored the flag! You have shamed America. _You_ are the traitor, not me!"

Nexus held a gun out, pointed at Houston. "Let me explain the nature of your situation, _former_ CIA Agent Sara Houston. We have complete power over you and your new consort. By the way, seducing a priest—Eve would have been proud. Maybe you _are_ a whore. We _will_ kill you tonight. We can do so quickly, or we can do so less quickly." His eyes burned with a crimson light.

Lopez interrupted. "Then why haven't you killed us already? Why this whole melodramatic Judas betrayal to get us here? You must want something. So what is it?" _Time. I need to find time for us to get out of this!_

The larger man beside Nexus laughed. "The priest is shrewd."

Nexus lowered the gun and regained some of his lost composure. "We have reason to believe that you have encountered someone of interest. Someone we need to identify, locate, and neutralize."

Lopez laughed. These men were unbelievable! "Oh, you mean the _wraith_." The use of the name jolted their captors. "He's really got you spooked. So, what is it that you think we can tell you about him?" _I'm fencing with these ruthless killers._ Lopez's mind raced, trying to find a way to turn the desperate need of these men into an advantage. Or to buy time for him or Houston to devise some plan of escape.

"Talking with our man, Judas—your Jim Fields—we have learned that you had some help along your destructive journey. In particular, you met someone at that smoldering police station. Judas had your trust, had isolated you. He was to question you first and then terminate you both. But that information led to a change in our plans."

Judas cut in. "They don't understand the significance. They thought it was one of Simon's men, but we know that isn't the case. Simon's been too busy running from us to organize anything. It had to be _him_. The _wraith._ They saw him. Spoke with him. He got them out of jail."

Nexus leaned forward. "See, we find this _most_ interesting."

Lopez cut him off sharply. "Before we tell you anything, I want some questions answered."

"You are in no position to negotiate, priest," said Nexus, a sharp edge to his voice.

"This wraith of yours killed my brother, you bastard. That's why I was dragged into your toxic swamp. That's why I'm here. I was willing to risk my life to find this killer, and I'm willing to lose it still. Kill me now, and you'll lose the information we have about him. Answer _my_ questions, and you'll hear what we know."

Houston stared at him intensely. Lopez understood her surprise. In this wild world of shadowed struggles, this was the first time he had taken the lead. _I have to know, Sara. And we need the time!_

Nexus hesitated, glancing at Bravo. The stockier man shrugged. "It won't matter that they know more. They're dead, anyway."

"Who is the wraith?" asked Lopez pointedly.

"A mistake," said Nexus as he turned around to face the window. He sighed. "His name is Javed Ahmad. Born in Pakistan in the mid-nineteen-eighties, his family, his _extended_ family, emigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. By all accounts, he assimilated quickly to the American culture, finding a niche in high school in the counterculture hip-hop world. Fancied himself a _rapper_."

_Keep talking, Farnell._ Lopez looked around the room as Nexus spoke. Two guards stood behind Houston, one beside him. He also knew that Nexus and the one called Bravo were armed, although their weapons were currently out of sight. _How to engage them without being immediately shot? Lunge for the leaders?_

Nexus continued. "Our mistake occurred because of his uncle, Rehman. Rehman was a significant player in the underground money transfer business from Islamic charities to militant terrorist groups. Enriched himself with a big slice off the top of every transaction, too. We weren't so much interested in Rehman as we were his contacts, his knowledge of personnel in the terrorist organizations. From all our clandestine investigations and cooperation with the FBI, we knew that many of the Ahmadi family were involved in the business. We had circumstantial evidence that Javed was as well."

"So, you rendered the poor kid." It was Houston.

"The entire family," said Nexus. "It was one of the most extensive and complicated missions we undertook. It required two planes out of North Carolina, numerous agents, including Miguel Lopez. Including all the agents who are now dead. It was one of our biggest operations, pushed strongly from above. And it was spectacularly successful. Rehman sang like a fucking bird when they squeezed him."

"You sent a teenager into a torture pit. A kid. You guys are something." Houston looked furious.

"Collateral damage!" shot back Nexus, spinning around to glare at her.

"Yeah, seems like you have caused a lot of that," she retorted.

Lopez cut back in. "But how do you know the wraith is this kid looking for payback?"

"We didn't at first. It took time, and a lucky break that your brother injured him."

Lopez understood. "The hospital in Tennessee."

Nexus smiled. "Yes. Not only did we get the physician notes that there was likely extensive modification to his appearance—plastic surgery, even skin discoloration—but we were finally able to obtain tissue samples and employ DNA analysis."

"DNA analysis?" Lopez was amazed.

"It's not that high-tech anymore," said Nexus, returning his gaze outside the window. "All our pickups in the rendition missions were sampled, their DNA analyzed and filed. Useful on many occasions, especially if a body had to be identified post-interrogation."

"Dear God," whispered Lopez. Nexus ignored him.

"The Knoxville tissue samples matched the database on Javed. When put together with all the other data, it was obvious. A hell of a story, really. He disappeared after he was released. Off the map for _ten years_."

"You must feel pretty stupid letting him go," mocked Houston.

Nexus scowled at her. "This was in the early days, before Masri and Arar caused us so much trouble. Before we shut out the bleeding hearts who interfered with our efforts. But Ahmad turned out to be much more than all the others. Seems he spent a decade preparing just for this slaughter. Some psychologist should get hold of him and make a career! Where and how he trained, received his surgeries, obtained the substantial financial resources needed, we can only guess. Perhaps criminally. Perhaps with the help of organizations hostile to our interests. But however he did it, he became a lethal weapon, as skilled, _more skilled_ , than our top operatives."

Nexus turned from the window and walked toward the coffee table. Lopez estimated the distance. _He's close. Can I reach him before they shoot me? Sara, will you be ready?_

"He's hunted down every person in the chain of that mission. He began with the Syrian prison—he killed all the staff and blew the damn place up. He killed the pilots who flew the missions, the Boeing reps who managed the airplanes, the staff who manned the hangars. As you know, he's hunted down and killed all the agents who were involved, including your brother. Now, he's after us, the organizers, the leaders of this program. You watched Zulu die. The pressure drove another to suicide. Now, Bravo and I are all who remain."

"He did all this for revenge," stated Lopez, speaking to himself as much as anyone. It was mind-boggling.

Nexus nodded. "And he's still out there, priest. Hunting."

Bravo spoke, turning to the window himself, looking out over the rural fields. "It will end soon. Either we'll kill this wraith, or he'll finish his mad quest and bury us."

A flash of insight struck Lopez, and he shook his head. "No. You're wrong. It won't end if he kills you."

Nexus looked at him dismissively. "Especially if he kills us, you fool! Haven't you been listening? He's out to destroy everything at CIA involved in what happened to him. We are the last point. The architects. Once we're gone, it's over."

Lopez shook his head again, more strongly. "But your dark program wasn't just born inside the CIA, was it, _Nexus?_ You've been so worried about your own hides that you haven't thought through things completely. You _aren't_ the last point, and that maniac will have figured that out. I'm just an outcast priest, and I have. Your little death squads are the product of a much greater mind." Bravo turned around, his expression alarmed. "Just look how obsessive this is. How complete in its tortured fury. He wants to cut out this cancer all the way to the root. He wants total vengeance!"

Nexus stood frozen in thought. "Total vengeance?" repeated the leader. His eyes widened. "Oh, my God."

The lights went off, and the background hum of a generator ceased. The farmhouse was plunged into an eerie silence and shadow. The guards stiffened, their weapons trained off Houston and himself. They turned them to the doors and window. Lopez could feel their panic. _The time is now!_

Bravo rumbled. "He saved them from the police to _use_ them. You fools, you've led him straight to us."

Lopez lunged at Nexus and saw Houston leap out of her chair. The guards shouted, and the two leaders reached for their weapons.

Simultaneously, the room exploded.
53

# Apparition

There was a bright orange and yellow light, a thunderous sound and wind, and Lopez was thrown against the wooden table and bounced onto the floor. He was vaguely aware of shards of glass and stone hurtling over his head and the screams of people around him. He lay there stunned for a moment, in shock, and he began to choke on the dust and smoke that filled the air. The sounds of automatic gunfire erupted around him.

Opening his eyes, he saw the bright flashes from a weapon. A shape was in the smoke, standing where the door had been, now a giant smoldering hole in the wall. Two bodies fell next to him, one inches from his face. It was the guard who had stood next to Houston. Groaning from a sharp pain in his shoulder, he rolled off his stomach to his side to be presented with a gruesome sight: the man called Bravo was hanging against the empty frame of the shattered window, the rebar from the wall eviscerating him and holding him in the air like a fishhook. Blood was everywhere, and his eyes were blank. He was dead.

A scuffle broke out behind him. Slowly, he raised himself to his knees and turned around. In a series of lightning-fast moves, he saw a shadow disarm one of the guards, strike him with several blows to the face and neck. The assailant then reached to his leg and pulled up a knife. The blade flew along a horizontal plane propelled by the arm and sliced open the guard's throat. A drowning scream was the last sound the dying man made as he fell to the floor.

Lopez felt dizzy, his head throbbed from the impact he received in the explosion, and the smoke was making it hard to breathe. He tried to rise to his feet, but his knees buckled. He fought to steady himself as he sank back to the floor, catching himself with his hands. Taking several breaths of acrid air, he regained his sense of balance and looked up again.

He saw a shadow bend down across from him. Showing incredible strength, the wraith raised the bloodied form of Nexus from the floor and slammed him against the wall. Lopez could see that the former Counterterrorism Center chief was mortally wounded. His face and chest were embedded with shards of glass. A huge wound was visible along his right side, bleeding profusely. His eyes swam.

"Look at me, Farnell!" The wraith screamed like a banshee, his voice wild and harsh. The eyes of Nexus slowly focused. They morphed from delirium to fear.

"You..."

"Now you will taste justice. With my own hand, I will avenge a young boy that you sent to hell. Now I will send you along with all your djinn to the fire of hell to burn for all eternity."

Nexus writhed feebly, trying to escape the powerful grasp of his executioner. "No, no..."

"Yes," spat the wraith, his voice as much of a weapon as anything else. Nexus flinched and moaned, his body too broken to scream. The wraith brought up his knife. "Know pain, and then death!"

Now Nexus did scream. It was blood-curdling. The knife ripped into him, across his stomach, cutting through his abdominal wall. His body spasmed but was held fast to the wall by a powerful left arm. The wraith continued to drive the knife upward, slashing violently through the chest cavity, sawing through the sternum as Nexus's eyes rolled into his head. His body slid slowly to the floor, and the wraith leapt on top of it like a panther, sawing and sawing toward the heart. Blood spurted everywhere as the wraith drew the knife back and forth maniacally.

Lopez stared transfixed, unable to move, the sheer horror almost beyond the ability of his mind to absorb in his weakened state. Then the body of Nexus shuddered violently and stopped moving. This only infuriated the wraith, and he violently threw down the knife, the hard bone too great an obstacle for the tool. Finally, he uttered a wild sound that ended in crazed laughter. Standing abruptly, he grabbed the automatic weapon slung across his shoulder, opening fire at the floor. For nearly ten seconds of cacophony, he unloaded a hailstorm of bullets into a dead body.

Lopez rose, the madness overwhelming. He had to find Houston. He looked over the room and spotted her on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and her shirt was soaked in crimson. He couldn't tell if she was breathing.

"Sara!" he shouted and moved toward her.

A blur approached him from the right. Before he could respond, a forearm struck him in the chin, driving him downward onto the coffee table. The impact nearly knocked the wind out of him. He stared up into the eyes of madness. Lopez prepared to die.

"You are the priest." The eyes were still wild, but the voice was controlled.

"Yes," came his weak answer, hoarse from the smoke and exhaustion.

"I have no fight with you. Your brother deserved to die. I think you know that," he said, eyeing Lopez carefully. "If you interfere with what I have to do, I will kill you." To emphasize his point, he pressed the barrel of the gun to Lopez's forehead.

The pain was intense. The barrel was still smoking from the flood of shots the wraith had put into the dead body of Nexus. There was a sizzling sound, and Lopez nearly screamed, a half-moan, half-scream still escaping his mouth despite his efforts to control it. He smelled his own burnt flesh.

Lopez hissed through the pain. "If you hurt her, killing me won't save you. I'll climb out of the mouth of hell to drag you down."

"Unnecessary," said the wraith. He removed the gun, tearing a thin circle of flesh from Lopez's forehead, the skin stuck to the rim of the barrel. "I know she's clean. You both are alive only because you are clean."

Lopez closed his eyes and prayed that this crazed monster meant what he said. There was the sound of someone moving through the room, and then the voice of the wraith came from a distance.

"If you wish her to live, take her to a hospital, soon."

Lopez tensed and opened his eyes. He looked around the room. The wraith had vanished.
54

# Final Chase

Lopez rushed over to Houston. She was still unconscious, but she was breathing. He cradled her head in his arms and tapped her cheeks with his palm, calling her name.

"Sara. Sara! Please, it's Francisco. Wake up, Sara. Please, wake up."

She began to breathe faster, and her eyelids fluttered open. Lopez felt tears in his eyes. He kissed her forehead, drops spilling onto her face.

"Francisco," she said weakly, staring at his face. "You're hurt. What happened?"

"Shut up," he said, nearly choking up. "You're hurt much worse. Don't move, Okay?"

She didn't listen. Pushing against him as much as gravity, she raised herself up on her elbows, gasping slightly. She looked down at her stomach. "Roll up my shirt, Francisco. Let's see how bad the damage is."

It wasn't pretty. There were several pieces of metal embedded deeply in her side, like shrapnel from a grenade. The wound was swollen around the metal, the bleeding slowed but not stopped.

"You've got to bandage this up. Find some supplies." She motioned with her head to the room.

"We've got to get you to a hospital!"

"There isn't time, Francisco. I understood. What you said before the explosion. We have to stop him."

"Like hell," said Francisco. He didn't care about anything but her right now.

"Listen to me, Francisco!" Her breaths were raspy as she nearly shouted. "He's not done, is he? This isn't it. He'll take it to the top. He'll kill the president."

Lopez shook his head. "No, not the president. Not this one, or even the last, Sara. He has a strange honor code, or we'd be dead. He wants only those who orchestrated the program."

"The _vice president_?"

"Yes! He ran the program. It was his idea. Like his CIA death squads. The ex-VP is responsible for it all, and _he's_ the target. But I don't care. Let it happen. I'm getting you to a hospital!"

"Francisco, no! We can't let this madman assassinate the former VP. Maybe justice hasn't been served, but Francisco, _not like this!_ " She coughed out the last words.

Lopez paused, conflicted. _Damn it! She's right._ How could they let something so terrible happen if they could prevent it? And he immediately realized that no one else could intervene. They were cut off from everyone. They could not turn to any law enforcement or governmental agency that would believe them. If someone was to stop this, it had to be them. _But she's dying!_

"Francisco, look: it's not a mortal wound. Not yet, anyway. The danger is blood loss. Bandage this damn thing up, stop the flow of blood. It will buy us some time."

Lopez nodded, his mind racing. "The VP's Maryland home is less than an hour from here across the border. Famous place, rumored bunker underneath. The old bastard's been holed up there because of his heart problems for the last six months. The VP's the last target. It will happen tonight. The wraith won't risk us blowing his chance."

"Please, Francisco. Stop talking and do something!"

Lopez rushed through the farmhouse, looking for medical supplies. They were there in abundance. The dead men sprawled around the living room had planned for the worst and had stocked several closets with medical kits. He returned quickly to Houston's side and followed her instructions. She knew a lot more about wound management than he did. And she was tough as nails. Several times she asked him to do things that she knew would be painful but necessary, and she gritted her teeth as he followed through.

It was exhausting. He was hurting her, watching her suffer, and the emotional toll was severe. In the end, her entire abdomen was wrapped in gauze and taped. With his help, she was able to stand and walk.

"Now let's get out of here," she gasped.

"The car is nearly two miles away! You can't walk that far."

"Then find keys on these men. They had cars out front."

She was right. He searched the men and found one of the guards with car keys. Gingerly, but as quickly as he could, he escorted her across the lawn to the front gate. The wraith had deactivated the security system, and the iron doors were opened. A black town car was parked across the street.

He helped her into the front passenger-side seat. He could see that she was in tremendous pain. _Lord God, Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us._ He closed her door and rushed around to the driver's side, opened the door, and leapt in. The car started with a scream as he overturned the ignition in haste.

"Francisco, you have to be calm. Iced. You need to be mission-oriented, or we won't make it." She began to cough, and it was several seconds before she could speak again. "Drive. Drive fast."

He tried to slow his breathing as he pulled out. He tried to become a machine, to focus on the task that needed to be done. _While this woman I love is dying._ He reached into his pocket and handed her his cell phone.

"Call Simon again, Sara. If you can't reach him, send texts, emails, secure, unsecured, to every address and contact we have for him. He won't make it in time, but he's the only other resource we have. The only one that can help."

Houston nodded. "You're right, Francisco. My God, I didn't think to try."

Lopez sped down the bumpy dirt road, every impact on the road jarring them, bringing gasps from Houston. He tried to focus. He tried to control his feelings.

_Don't die on me, Sara. Hold on._
55

# Angler Fishing

The wraith drove with a maniacal purpose through the Virginia back roads.

The last mission would be the most rushed, the least prepared, and the most important. He should have killed the agent and the priest. He knew that. It would ensure that the final stage of his mission could not be discovered and would not be countered. Leaving them alive risked much, even if the dead leaders of the Renditions Branch had made them nearly powerless. _Nearly_ was not the same as _completely_. Right now, the former vice president was unaware of the threat he faced. If those two got word to the right people, that could change. He should have killed them. That was pragmatic.

_But not necessary._ It was a calculated risk, and their blood was innocent. Whatever the consequence, he would not have that on his hands. _As long as they stay out of my way._

His last target presented unique challenges. The vice president was not _officially_ in hiding, but his public existence was coupled with lifelong Secret Service protection. Beyond that, this vice president was unique in all of history. With suspicions beyond even the legendary paranoia of Nixon, he was a man who saw threats everywhere and considered no response to those threats as too extreme. His attitudes made him a polarizing figure, a lightning rod for liberals and human rights criticisms.

These character traits also evinced themselves in the security he demanded after leaving office. He possessed an unusually extensive Secret Service assignment. He had wiped his place of residence from publicly accessible online mapping software. He had developed home security systems of an unparalleled nature for a residential, nonmilitary site. Those would likely have only been augmented given the events of the last few weeks. And by tomorrow, he would know that his dark forces had been routed. He would completely lock down.

These were obstacles in the path of the wraith's mission. Locating the residence was the easiest—his hacking skills had already afforded him extensive access to secret CIA databases and computer networks. Early on he had located the home, obtained all the details of its security systems, and the standard force of Secret Service agents on-site.

The plan he had settled on for defeating these personnel and infrastructural barriers was his simplest to date: shock and awe. While stealth mode, followed by overwhelming power, had served best in previous engagements, paradoxically, the wraith had concluded that the most secure location, the most highly protected of all the targets, required the most blunt and brutal assault possible. And he would bring it. A Russian-born Israeli soldier returning from Mexico was his ace in the hole.

He pulled to the side of the road in the middle of nowhere Virginia, the GPS coordinates agreed upon in advance. A large vehicle awaited him, and a shadowed form stood beside it. He shut the truck down and exited, approaching the solid shape rapidly.

"You are rushing this," said the shadow. "Even with all I bring you, you need more time to prepare such an assault."

"There is no more time. I have explained it."

"Yes, in war, there is never enough time."

He approached the customized military-grade Humvee. The truck was army surplus, retrofitted with inch-thick steel armor plating, including a set of plates across the windshield that practically turned the vehicle into a light tank. The roof opened for engagement with large weaponry, and he came equipped.

The wraith surveyed the bounty before him. "You managed to avoid having it all confiscated."

The soldier grunted. "On the backroads of this country, there are many who are not suspicious of such things. There is a great fear and discontent in this nation. They build bunkers and hoard ammunition. They came to speak with me, at gas stations and along the road. When they learn I am a Jew, it confirms their prophecies. The Christians: either they put us on a pedestal, or they gas us off them! One fool asked if I believed that the End Times were coming."

"And what did you say?" asked the wraith, pulling the crates onto the road and opening them with a crowbar.

He waved an arm. "I told him they were already here—for ten thousand years!" He laughed heartily. "Civilization has the memory of a pickled alcoholic. All these wars, these empires: the Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, British, Americans. Always noise and anger, _purpose_ , mad pursuit. And where are they now? What has become of their greatness? For what purpose?"

He reached down to the dirt road and scraped his thick fingernails into the ground, digging up a handful of rocks and dust. He raised his fist and stuck it in the face of the wraith, his palm squeezing tightly as the grains spilled back to the earth.

"For _nothing_ , Javed. For ruins and dust. Foggy myths erased in time." The soldier turned sharply and hoisted a squat, cylindrical device from a crate. He presented it to the wraith. "Your contacts are very impressive. A Predator missile launcher. I suppose with enough money the black market dealers in Dubai will oblige nearly anything. And the Sinaloa Cartel has the right tunnels through the borders. How great is this global economy?" He laughed, tossing the weapon to the wraith, who placed it in the Humvee. "They even found some warheads for this old model. There will be fireworks tonight."

The wraith opened several more crates alongside the truck and removed a large machine gun. "This is the Browning?"

The soldier nodded. "M2. As you specified, it's to be secured with a weapons platform on the roof. Surrounded by welded plates of one-inch thick steel. Ha! I don't think that even the American Secret Service has the rounds to pierce this." He whistled. "But what this will throw at them is something very different."

The wraith nodded, and with considerable effort, he managed to mount it on top of the Humvee. The M2 was steel lethality. Fifty-caliber rounds that could even serve in an anti-aircraft capacity. Sustained rate of fire of forty rounds per minute, with a maximal, barrel-melting five hundred rounds per minute if needed. After it was secured, he cleaned out the remainder of the crate contents, his supply list topped off with two grenade launchers, a pump-action shotgun, and several handguns.

Despite everything that had happened, his crazed anger of the last few hours, the wraith smiled. The vice president had always feared assassination and had prepared himself. But the wraith had prepared as well, and he knew that chaos would always defeat attempts to preserve order. _Or life_. He would bring a war to the Maryland mansion the likes of which had never been imagined. It would be an assault that could not possibly be anticipated or prepared for. It would be overwhelming and absurd. And that was why it would work.

"This is where I leave you." The old man put a hand on the wraith's shoulder and stared down the road. He exhaled sharply and set his jaw. "It is time for a revelation. I have lied to you twice, Javed." The wraith turned to look at the soldier, but said nothing. "Twice you have asked me why I have helped you. Once, many years ago, I said 'to make _superman.'_ This was a lie."

The soldier stepped away and walked forward alone, staring into the black sky. The night was dark, no stars visible under cloud cover. The moon was hidden.

The wraith spoke. "And the second, Avram?"

"When you asked the same question. Why did I come back? I lied and told you because I am an honorable soldier and would not leave a warrior to die alone in such a hopeless quest!" He laughed strangely, the sound staccato.

"Then, _why_ did you help me? Why are you here?"

"Perhaps you will not understand," he said, sounding unsure. "Thirty years ago, I saw a film about the Hindu prophet, the Mahatma. Such a fool, but a real man. I will take a fool who is real before a wise man who is only shadows."

"Yes?"

"I have forgotten much of it. But one scene I always remembered. In this scene, the Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering each other once again, and the fool begins to starve himself. He will die unless the people stop killing each other! And then a Hindu man comes, begging the prophet to eat, throwing bread at him. He cries out: 'I have killed a young Muslim child, smashed his head into the wall! I will go to hell!' "

The old soldier laughed again, the sound now high-pitched. The wraith simply stared without understanding.

"So, the prophet tells him he knows how to get out of hell. Prophets know such things, apparently. He tells him to find a young Muslim boy, whose parents have been killed, and to adopt him, raise him as his own, but, of course, raise him as a _Muslim_."

Time was racing by. The wraith felt a growing impatience. "And how does this explain why you helped me?"

The old man turned toward the wraith. "Because _I_ am that man, Javed. Maybe thousands others are that man." Pain was etched in his face. "I had been in Israel less than a year. My brigade leveled a building with Palestinian soldiers. But they had used children as shields to stop our attack. _Hundreds_ from a local school. We did not know, or we weren't told by our commanders. We only knew the truth when we took the block, and the mangled bodies were strewn across the road. Black dust sticky with the blood of innocents. Small bodies everywhere."

The wraith understood. "And then I came."

He nodded. "Yes. There you were, a child victim of the horrors of war. An innocent. I remembered this movie. I remembered this scene. It was like God had brought you to me. And I hoped perhaps there was a way out of hell." He spoke almost to himself, staring down at his hands. "You see, hell is not a thing that comes when we die. What mankind has failed to understand is that we are always there."

"And have you been freed?"

The old man walked back to his car. "I have done what I could, but tonight your journey will end."

The wraith set his jaw. "You fear that I will fail."

The soldier stared long at the wraith and shook his head. "No, Javed, what I fear for you most is that you will succeed."
56

# Racing an Assassin

Lopez drove as fast as he could through the night. In the beginning, Houston had helped with the directions, finding the fastest routes to the Maryland home of the former vice president. They disregarded the back roads, took to the main arteries, casting aside caution. The wraith had a large head start on them, and there was little chance they could catch him. But they had to try.

"Still no answer?" cried Lopez, speeding down the highway, praying no police were along their path.

"No," said Houston, her voice barely audible over the sounds of the engine and the roadway speeding underneath.

She was weakening. The blood loss had slowed but had not stopped. _She needs a doctor_. Every minute that went by was a trial by fire for Lopez, every exit a temptation to turn the car around and head to the nearest emergency room. If it were not for her own powerful will, her absolute desire that they intervene in the coming attempted assassination, Lopez knew that he would have succumbed and let the wraith do whatever he would.

"I tried all the numbers he gave me," she continued, "even others for his residence, office. Too long on the phone, too many unsecured numbers. The CIA is likely tracking us by now. If the wraith doesn't get us tonight, they likely will."

"Messages?"

"You heard the voicemails. Text and emails: left them, too. If he's out there, if he's still alive, he'll get them."

" _If_ he's still alive?" Lopez had never considered this possibility.

Houston was seized by another coughing fit. Her entire body heaved, her face turned red. It was terrible to see and hear. The fit drained her significantly, and she rested a full minute before responding. "After seeing Farnell," she gasped out, her voice rough, "I don't think anything is too low for those guys. They knew about Fred, that's how they used this Judas against us. Fitting name." She sighed. "So, they knew he was helping us. The logical step is to remove that help. I hope he's okay."

Lopez felt the weight on them increase. Without Simon, they literally had no one in the world to turn to. He pushed that out of his mind for the time being. _Compartmentalize._

"It's up to us anyway, Sara, whatever happened to Fred. He couldn't get help to us in time. But that raises the question: what do we do when we get there? If the wraith's not there yet, how do we convince them to listen to us and not throw us in jail, or worse?"

"I don't know, Francisco. The one thing we have going for us is that the VP is a paranoid motherfucker. We might be able to spook him enough so that, _after_ they throw us to the wolves, he'll take precautions."

"And we're going to risk our lives, our freedom, for the guy some say masterminded all of this? We've got to be the world's dumbest idealists!"

"Coming from you, Francisco, that's something," she said, starting to laugh but falling into another protracted coughing fit. She leaned against the window, pressing her face to the glass. "Cold. That feels wonderful. I'm not sure I'll even make it as far as all that."

"Sara, then we turn around and let fate take its course with him!"

"No, Francisco! Whatever he might or might not have done, he has rights, to life, liberty, and all that shit. After all this, I need to know that there is something that separates us from them. Courage of our convictions." Her breathing was ragged. "That's why we're going."

"Okay, shut up then, before you kill yourself talking. I need you."

Houston smiled and reached for his hand on the wheel. "To help you with the wraith or more generally?"

"Both, damn it! And you know it. Now shut up."

Her smiled broadened, and she closed her eyes for a time. The roadway blurred in Lopez's mind, the speed high and reckless, features along the way lost in the motion. Her words reached deeply inside him.

_I do need her_. This foul-mouthed, highly skilled, intelligent, resourceful, unbelieving, at times brutal woman had become what no one else had been allowed to be in his life: the object of his love.

_I love her._ The words in his mind flowed over him with energy and warmth. He had finally let himself admit the truth. He knew it must be the crazed and traumatic experiences they had shared, the near-death escapes, the horrors and salvations. But the _reasons_ didn't change the _reality_. That he could explain it away with a Psychology 101 model didn't undo what had happened. He loved her, and he needed her, and nothing was going to change that.

_And I don't want to go back to what was._

The thought struck him like a blow, and his hands grabbed the steering wheel tightly. He had never once since his ordination considered breaking his vows, leaving the Church, deserting his position. He simply could not have done it. Now, in one moment of clarity, he knew that he could. That he had been stripped of all position, been dishonored unjustly, and been rejected in his greatest moment of need by the Church did not assuage his pain at this truth. God had left Christ alone at the hour of his Passion: _Eli Eli lama sabachthani?_ His current sufferings were nothing in comparison! _Where is your faith, Francisco?_

But what should be and what was were two different things. As Houston slept and the dark evening flashed by incomprehensibly alongside the racing vehicle, the new world he had entered, _been forced into_ , crystallized before Francisco Lopez. He understood that his former life was over. Born from its ashes a new life would begin in the next few hours—or it would be tragically cut short.

Whichever way, he was _Father_ Lopez no more.
57

# Shock and Awe

The Secret Service guard at the gate struck a match, the flash partly blinding him in the blackness of the night. He brought the flame to a cigarette pinched between his lips and repositioned himself in the chair. Sucking on the filter, he ensured that the tobacco had caught, then shook the match out. He dropped it to the floor and crushed it beneath his shoe. Suppressing a yawn, he rubbed his eyes.

_I'm too damn old to be doing this anymore._ Images of Baton Rouge came back to him, and his days on the LSU basketball team. _College girls_. He'd been a star. After school, military service, and too many decades putting his ass on the line for others, it was time to quit.

His six-foot-eight-inch frame hardly fit in the little hut they had built for the gate guards, and his back was stiff from bending. He was tired, and it was another long night at an assignment that too easy to pass up, but that had turned out to be a real pain in his ass. First, there was the boredom. Night shift after night shift, in rain, cold, summer heat—for two years he had manned this small gatehouse. He was sick of it and of the growing feeling that he was wasting his life away. Then there was the man he protected. The vice president was insanely demanding, moody, and liable to fire anyone for reasons only his paranoia could justify. He'd seen too many decent agents sent packing, always with the rumors of poor recommendation letters that followed them for years. The guard didn't want to get fired, but he sure as hell needed to get another assignment.

He took a long drag on the cancer stick, holding the smoke deep in his lungs, and exhaled toward the moonless sky. Even the stars were hidden by a low blanket of clouds. With hardly any streetlights around this isolated property, it was about as dark as ink.

A deep rumbling from an engine focused his attention. Now, _that_ was something new. He turned his gaze up the road, following its path up the small hill that sat in front of the property. Two o'clock in the morning didn't bring too much traffic around these parts. His eyes squinted slightly—the motor sounded powerful, large, likely diesel. A shadow congealed at the top of the hill, the broad outlines of what almost appeared to be a military-issue truck just discernible in the darkness. It almost looked like an old Humvee. _What the hell?_

The agent stood and walked out of his small enclosure on the right of the thick metal gate. He called out to the symmetrically placed gatehouse on the other side. "Yo! Johnson! Get your ass over here right now!"

There was a crashing sound, and a young man stumbled out of the other gatehouse looking half asleep. "Bridges? What is it? Damn! It's two in the morning!"

"And that's our _shift_ , Johnson. Can't you stay awake just one night?"

The younger man looked up the hill. He'd heard the sounds of the vehicle. "What's going on?"

The tall black man rubbed his chin. "I don't know. Truck just pulled up. Just _sitting_ there. I don't like this. I'm going to call it in, you keep your eyes open and holler if anything happens."

The older guard walked back to the enclosure. _First time I've called in anything in two years!_ He didn't even remember the number. He flicked on a desk light and scanned the list taped to the side of the wall.

"Bridges?" came the young man's call from outside. "Hey, somebody's moving around up there. Looks like he's on top of the truck."

Holding the phone in one hand, he glanced up through the window. Sure enough, it looked like someone had climbed onto the roof. He pulled out his binoculars from a drawer and rushed back outside.

"Some drunk kids?" he said, planting his feet near the gate opening.

"Dunno, man. Weird."

He trained the binoculars on the blurred shaped and focused. It was a man, not standing on top of the truck but _inside_ with half his torso visible above the roof. _Like in Desert Storm._ He found his mind momentarily frozen, images flooding back and paralyzing his thoughts. The man shouldered something large and tubular. A bright orange light flashed.

"Johnson! Get down! Get—"

From the hilltop, the wraith reloaded the missile launcher. The left-side gatehouse and wall were gone, bright flames licking the remaining structures. A cloud of smoke, backlit from the fire underneath, rose aggressively, blending quickly into the dark sky. He aimed the Predator toward the right side, engaged the targeting electronics, locked onto the structure, and fired.

The result was similarly devastating. The warhead detonated on impact, the explosion thunderous. Stone, glass, and wood from the wall and houses mixed into a short-lived fireball and rained onto the earth beneath. He lifted a high-powered sniper rifle and looked through the scope toward the gate. The gate was gone, the metal warped and broken, the bars torn from the sides of the wall by the explosion. Two burning bodies lay on the ground in front of the gate.

He placed the weapon back inside the vehicle and then dropped into the driver's seat, shifting forward and barreling down the hill. His frequency scanner buzzed around several common bands, indicating significant activity. Others in the compound or residence were aware that something had happened. Guards would be mobilized. Soon, video transmissions would show the damage, and the vice president would be moved to his underground bunker. _That won't protect you._

The Humvee roared past the burning entrance, crushing underneath it the bodies he had seen from the hill. He did not slow. The house was about one hundred yards from the gate. Already he could see Secret Service agents streaming out of the home and an adjacent guesthouse. At this speed, they would intercept the Humvee in about thirty seconds. But he would not slow down. He would drive straight in front of the building, just feet from the porch and entrance, running down anyone who tried to get in his way. Then he would have to engage them. They likely didn't have the firepower to pierce the reinforced plating. But individually, they could enter the vehicle and go hand to hand. He couldn't let them get that close. Their single advantage was in numbers.

Bullets began striking the armor plating from several directions. He could now see about twenty agents converging on him rapidly. It was the perfect lure to the trap.

Just as it seemed that he would crash headfirst into the building, he braked hard and flipped a switch. The front headlights shot their beams outward, but several bright spotlights he had installed around the sides of the vehicle also engaged. The men rushing him were blinded, and they were revealed to him in harsh beams. _Deer in the headlights._

He leapt through the roof opening and grabbed the M2. It was affixed to a ring mount, allowing him to spin nearly three hundred and sixty degrees, the barrel extending through a slot cut into the thick cylindrical plating that surrounded him. He could fire at will against those outside. They saw only the end of his weapon protruding from the wall of steel. He opened fire.

It was a shooting gallery. The M2 rounds were devastating and were pouring quickly from the machine gun. The agents fired wildly, bullets flying past the truck, some hitting it, one shattering a spotlight, others careening off the protective armor plating surrounding him atop the Humvee. It was bloody carnage below. He slowly rotated the gun, men dropping as if under a weed-whacker, screams and dust and blood overwhelming the senses. The remaining agents began to run, realizing they could not overcome the assault. He showed no mercy and gunned them down from behind. The gunfire stopped. None were left standing.

He reached down and heaved up the missile launcher. He had two more missiles, both blast-fragmentation warheads, and turned toward the house. As if on cue, there was movement at the windows and front door of the residence, and he began to take fire from the few agents remaining—likely the staff assigned to protect the building proper. _The last line of defense._ Several were stationing themselves near the entrance and surrounding windows, and some on the second floor. Rounds clanked around him, one even striking his chest causing intense pain, but the body armor prevented major damage. The fire was coming from the second floor; that shooter had the best angle on him. He aimed the Predator upward and fired. The missile rushed forward, and an entire side of the house exploded. It was as if a propane tank had blown up inside the home. Wood paneling, drywall, and glass showered downward with smoke and flames. All firing from the house ceased, the agents below likely frozen in shock from what had happened.

_Time for the awe._ He mounted the last missile, aimed the weapon toward the front door, and launched. The explosion blew the porch apart, white colonial support columns flying outward, the second floor partially collapsing above the entrance. Dust and small debris rained down even as far as his Humvee. There was no further gunfire from within.

He lowered himself into the truck, strapped himself into the seat, and gunned the vehicle forward. It rode up the blasted stairs and porch, where the devastated timbers of the house were no match for the weight and momentum of the truck. Anything in his way shattered and splintered. He crashed through the hole in the house, smashing into the lobby and living room, and brought the vehicle to a stop.

Quickly he exited, grabbing a portable grenade launcher, a shotgun, and a small submachine gun. Into the slots of a back holster he placed the shotgun and grenade launcher. He strapped several bars of Semtex plastic explosive around his waist, along with a timer and fuses. Opening his smartphone, he called up the schematics of the house he had obtained from CIA computers and verified the location of the bunker. It was directly below him, the walls hardened and reinforced with steel and concrete, a circular hub of an enclosed living space with its own power system, battery banks, water wells, air filtration systems, sewage disposal, security system, and medical supplies. An OCD paranoid's fantasy panic room.

The easiest entry would be above the air ventilation system, the weakest point in the structure. From the walls that remained standing, the wraith measured off several intersecting lines. Wreckage and bodies were strewn across the floor of the entrance and rooms, making his efforts problematic, but he calibrated everything carefully with a phone app that combined GPS location and distance measurements. With chalk, he marked off the locations of the ventilation ducts based on the blueprints he had obtained. He then placed several small explosive charges around these points, attached fuses and timers, and removed himself to the other side of the Humvee for shielding. Using a remote control, he detonated the charges.

The explosions were loud but minimal. He returned to the area, saw that the charges had opened gaping holes in the concrete of the bunker below but had not come close to penetrating it. He then placed several large blocks of Semtex into the holes and repeated the procedure, this time driving the Humvee out of the house and back onto the driveway. Crouching on the side of the vehicle away from the house, he activated the explosives.

These explosions were enormous, and for a moment, he feared he had miscalculated the safe distance and might be injured by the blast. Large chunks of the house fell around him, but he remained unscathed. He leapt up and ran into the decimated living space, the center without roof or walls, having become an open observatory of the blank heavens. The smoke and dust were thick, but he saw what he needed to see: light radiating upward from the enormous hole in the middle of the floor. He had blasted through. Shouts sounded from below.

He ran back out and drove the Humvee up close to the hole and set the brake. Tying a rope around the grilling in the front of the car, he then approached the edge of the hole cautiously. He reached over his shoulder, unslung the grenade launcher, and pumped five into the bunker below. He stepped backward out of the possible blast radius and waited. Seconds later the explosions erupted, along with the sounds of shattering glass and other materials below. The alarmed shouts from before turned to screams.

He grabbed the submachine gun in one hand, the rope in the other, and pushed off from the edge of the blast hole, rapidly rappelling downward.
58

# Convergence

"Fred? _Jesus Christ,_ we thought you were dead!" said Houston, relief evident in her wearied tone. Lopez motioned for her to plug the phone into the stolen car's sophisticated dashboard system. She did so, the sounds from Simon's end coming over an impressive speaker system, a microphone attached to each visor filtering background noise and conveying their words.

Simon spoke. "It's been a hell of a time, Sara. There's a lot to tell you."

"Fred? This is Francisco Lopez. Please listen a moment—we don't have much time. This is a matter of life and death for a prominent national figure." They were near their turnoff, soon to be on the residential roads in a Maryland suburb. Luck had ridden with them. No construction detours, no police. He estimated ten minutes until they arrived at the home of the former vice president. "We're in Maryland, chasing the wraith."

"Wraith?" interrupted Simon.

"The killer of my brother and the other CIA agents. We're coming from a farmhouse in Virginia where he killed several former high-ranking members of the CIA Renditions Branch, including James Farnell."

"Farnell? _Dead_? What are you talking about? He's the one who's been trying to _kill me!_ That's why I couldn't reach you. I've been on the run!"

Lopez looked over at Houston. "We didn't know, Fred, but it makes sense. Listen to me, please! Farnell and his group are not the last target. The wraith is a former _rendered_ suspect, a kid dragged into a net along with some dirty family members. He was tortured in Syria, had some kind of mental breakdown, and has plotted a vengeance like you've never seen before. We were also at the home of Agent Miller, who was tortured and killed. We found out there from his records that Farnell was using the Renditions Branch to do much more than illegally render Americans overseas. He was using it as his own assassination squad to silence anyone who threatened his program! Politicians, rights activists. There is a list of targets. You won't believe it."

"Dear God! No wonder this has become so insane. That's why he wanted all of us dead. That crazy fuck!"

"Yes! We went to confront him, but the wraith arrived and slaughtered them all, leaving us alive."

"Alive? Why?"

"I don't know! But listen! His last target, we've sent the address to your email and as a text message. You need to get whatever assets you can there. Call the police, FBI. The damn National Guard!"

There was a silence on the other end. "Checking. Lopez, are you sure about this? The vice president? Sara, is this right?"

Houston had drifted off. "Fred, she's wounded, hurt badly, lost a lot of blood. She insisted we go straight to stop this maniac, but she's in trouble! Send medical help there, too! An ambulance. Please!"

Houston came back to consciousness and spoke weakly. "I'm still here, Fred. Just fading. Fading slowly." She sounded drunk.

Lopez saw the turnoff ahead and slammed the brakes, squealing over to the right lane. The car scraped cacophonously against the left railing, and he swerved to gain control, sparks flying outside his window. He barely negotiated the ramp and centered the vehicle again. They were off the highway.

"Come again, Fred? I didn't catch that. I'm playing Road Warrior out here right now!"

"I said, I'll have everything out there that I can. I'll mobilize every last damn favor in my account! But Sara's right, Francisco. We can't let anything happen to the vice president. All of this, it's a mess that stinks to high heaven, but the only thing worse will be if this becomes a national and international incident. We've got to stop this attack! I'm closing. Get your ass over there, and I pray you can take over for Sara and play a trained operative. Good luck!"

The connection was broken.

Houston smiled and looked up at Lopez. "You'll do fine. You kicked the shit out of that bastard in Alabama." Her eyelids drooped. "Just never got you firearms training. Never enough time."

"It's OK, Sara. We will."

"Promise?" she asked dreamily.

_She's dying_. _Her one wish? That I'll shoot guns with her!_ "Yes, Sara, I promise."

Her breathing was soft. She did not respond.
59

# Bunker Buster

He landed roughly in the bunker. Ruined remains of the ceiling and walls were scattered around his feet, mixed in with the blood and tattered flesh of four or five Secret Service agents who paid for their service to America with their lives. The former vice president was not among the bodies.

In addition to the plastic explosives, the barrage of grenades had wreaked havoc, killing men and blasting walls and furniture. A thick dust hung in the air, and small fires burned sporadically throughout the underground structure. Gripping his machine gun tightly, he released the rope and scanned the area. He did not have an exact count, but there were likely a few agents still alive. But no more than a few. They were undoubtedly extremely cautious now, having barely escaped the carnage, desperate to come out of this invasion alive. They would be primed to kill him if he gave them the chance. He wouldn't.

The bunker was a circular design, rooms like pie wedges, separated by thin interior walls and connected near the center by doors placed around a smaller, concentric circle. He stood in the center of the bunker, the walls and doorways partially to completely destroyed. Rubble was piled in haphazard ways, the dusty fog irritating his lungs. Even among the disorder, it was clear that the surroundings were designed with high-quality materials, the space and decor intended as a pleasing accommodation and not simply as a survival location. The vice president hunkered down in style.

He scanned in a circular motion. At the twelve o'clock position, spanning an angle from eleven o'clock to one o'clock, was a doorless opening toward stairs and a room to the left housing storage lockers. The stairs were the accessibility point for the bunker—unless one used the method of blowing a hole through the ceiling and rappelling down. The area seemed empty.

Leading with his gun in a crouched position, he turned to a closed door at the two o'clock position. Continuing his spin, next was an empty corridor, dim and backlit by reddish emergency lighting, extending for perhaps thirty feet. At five o'clock and seven o'clock positions in the circular wall, there were doors, both closed. Finally, at nine o'clock, a corridor parallel with the other, running radially outward. It, too, was empty.

_Inside one of these three rooms._ He moved toward the closed door at five o'clock. Crouching low and along the wall, he tested the door handle. It was unlocked, and he turned the handle enough to disengage the mechanism, pushing the door very slightly open. Nothing happened. With a blinding spin, he rotated to face the door, maintaining a crouch on one foot and bringing his right leg like a battering ram against the wood and kicking the door open. His weapon was trained on the interior.

The room was empty of personnel. To his right and left, furniture: couches, chairs, and a table. Along the circumference of the wall radially out from him, a series of four doors, all open and revealing very small bedrooms, like one might expect on a submarine. _Crew's quarters_. The VP wasn't here.

He turned next to the closed door at the two o'clock position. He again made the same approach and tried the handle. This time it was locked, and he thought he picked up faint noises of motion within the room. He place the machine gun on the floor and unslung his shotgun. He loaded a special breaching round into the chamber, then stood far enough back to minimize pellet ricochet. He aimed at the top hinge, turned his face away from the door, and pulled the trigger.

The blast opened a large hole in the door, obliterating the hinge. He received several pellet fragments across his Kevlar armor, and a few nicked his neck. He felt blood trickle and the acidic pain from the wound, but he knew it was minor. Without pausing, he kicked the lower hinge of the door forcefully. It was enough. The door crashed inward from the damaged side.

Immediately he spun to the side, out of the way of the entrance, just as someone within the room repeatedly discharged a firearm. He removed a fragmentation grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and reached around the doorframe. He flung the grenade into the room inches above the floor, like a stone over a pond. The grenade skipped several times, struck the far wall, and exploded. There was a cry from inside, and the wraith spun into the doorway with his shotgun.

He saw a man stumbling toward the center of the room, shrapnel embedded in his face and arms, his clothes already a bloody mess. Still the agent tried to raise his weapon, tried to see through the blood pouring over his eyes from his head wound. The wraith unloaded two rounds from his shotgun into the chest and face of the man, blowing him to pieces.

He quickly scanned the room. Its purpose was mechanical: air filtration, water heaters, and banks of batteries. It was the heart and lungs of the underground bunker, impressive in its design and robustness. No one else was there. The vice president was behind the last door.

He walked up to the twitching body in front of him and searched it. From the man's pocket, he removed an earpiece and transmitter. Fitting them on, he activated the device and pressed the button to call out. Several seconds later, a voice came through.

"Tony? Jesus, Tony what the hell is happening? Is anybody left? It's just me here, and the two in the back room. They're hysterical! Tony?"

The wraith threw the device to the floor and walked out of the room.
60

# Warzone

The black town car pulled up to the top of the hill. Immediately, Lopez knew that something terrible had happened. Even from this distance, even in the pale predawn light, the destruction was clear. Fires burned near the gate to the mansion, wreckage strewn about. He thought he could discern the shape of bodies in the middle of the roadway.

Even more ominous, the house itself was burning. Black smoke billowed into the sky. He rubbed his fatigued eyes—it almost looked like there was a giant hole in the front of the house.

He shifted gears and drove down the hill. Awkwardly, he tried to avoid the dead forms directly behind the gate, and continued this obstacle course all the way to the house itself. Bodies littered the driveway, the lawn, and were hanging out of destroyed portions of the blasted structure. Some had been shot. Some were burned beyond recognition. Armageddon had come to the quiet back-ways of Maryland.

He pulled to a stop near the entrance to the house, or at least what he assumed was the entrance. It was like looking into the gutted remains of some Roman amphitheater, most of the walls gone, the view to the sky utterly unobstructed. To cement the surreal nature of the scene, a large military truck was parked _inside_ the house. From what he could see, it looked like there was a giant pit in front of it. _The mouth of hell._

He stopped the engine. Houston was sleeping again. He put his hand close to her mouth and felt her soft breathing. He brushed some of her short, dyed-black hair away from her face. He preferred the river of gold before they had disguised themselves, but she was still beautiful. Her white skin especially contrasted with the dark hair she had adopted. At his touch, she opened her eyes. Two bright-blue sapphires shown out at him.

"Francisco," she said, her voice sounding dry. "Check the bandages. They feel really wet."

He got out of the car and moved quickly to her side. Opening the door, he carefully removed her seat belt and unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her side. The bandages were stained pink. It wasn't a tremendous loss of blood, but it was not minor. _We're running out of time._

"Take this." She held up her father's pistol. The weight quickly became too much for her, and her hand began to drop to her lap. He caught it in his left and took the firearm with his right. She looked weakly at him. "It's single action. Cock it once, and then you can empty the clip. Thumb safety. Activates only after you cock it." She paused to catch her breath, exhausted. "This is your show. It won't be hunting squirrels in Alabama, Francisco. You might not come back." She closed her eyes for a moment and then resumed. "If you don't come back, then I'll die here. That's fine with me. I feel so tired. I don't want anyone else coming for me but you. Okay, Francisco?"

He had tears in his eyes. He didn't know what to say. Her words should have sounded like nonsense, and yet in some primitive way, they were beautiful to him. "God willing, Sara, we'll stop him, and we'll get out of this. Here, let me lay this back for you."

Lopez worked the controls on the car seat, and slowly her chair reclined almost to a horizontal position. He reached in and stroked her hair. "That better?"

She nodded. "Cold. Thirsty."

_You idiot! Of course she was!_ But they had nothing to drink with them. "Wait here, Sara."

He ran to the house, leaping over the shattered stairway and into the ruined building. There was an acrid taste to the air and the heavy scent of diesel from the truck, all of it mixed in with the common chemical smells of a recently cleaned home. Running around the perimeter of the enormous hole blasted into the floor, he found a kitchen on the other side. Within seconds, he had filled a tall glass with water. He ripped a thick curtain from a window and draped it over his shoulder. As he exited the kitchen, he heard an explosion, the sound clearly coming from the large breach in the floor. He looked down into it as he passed. There was a fog of smoke, but he thought he could make out a floor plan below. Doors. _The VP's fortified shelter? Was it actually real?_

He returned to the car. Houston was eager to drink, but after a few swallows was too tired to continue. He placed the glass in the cup holder and covered her with the curtain. She reached up and grabbed his hand.

"Almost out of gas, Francisco. Hurry up."

He kissed her softly on the lips. They felt terribly dry. "I love you, Sara."

She closed her eyes, a half smile on her face. " _Ditto_."

Leaving the window open, he closed the door and sprinted into the house. There was a rope tied to the large truck, and it was dangling deep into the hole. He wedged the Browning between his pants and belt. Unsatisfied, he unclasped the belt and tightened it a notch, strapping the weapon closely to him. He tried to remember another age, when as a young teen he had rappelled off a cliff face at camp. _All I need now is to break my neck getting down there._

Approaching the edge, he stood over the rope, his back toward the smoking pit, his face staring into the angry grille of the vehicle. He grabbed the thick mass of fibers, draping it across his back, over his right shoulder, then bringing it down diagonally across his chest. _Like this, I think._ With his right hand, he led the rope between his legs, and leaned backward into it, turning his shoulder slightly to keep it taut.

"Here we go," he said out loud to no one. Feeding the rope from his trailing hand, he stepped over the edge.

_God save us._
61

# The First Shall Be Last

The wraith walked slowly toward the last door. As he approached, gunfire erupted from the other side, the wood splintering and several bullets penetrating through and barely missing him. _Interesting stratagem._ Whoever was inside wasn't going to wait helplessly to be attacked.

Standing to the side of the door, he raised his pump-action shotgun. With such a trigger-friendly opponent on the other side, he would not have the time to carefully unhinge the door. Instead, he began blasting it in the center. Shot after shot, pumping the empty shell out and mechanically loading the next, he opened up a gaping wound in the door the size of a beach ball. Whoever was on the other side would be ducking for cover, not firing back. Without taking a breath, he dropped the gun, removed a grenade, armed it, and threw it hard into the room. In these small spaces, there would be no escape for those inside.

There was a loud blast as some shrapnel flew out through the hole in the door. The wraith then threw his body weight into the barrier, the ruined wood giving way instantly. He crashed through, his momentum carrying him recklessly into the room. He careened toward the floor, turned the motion into a roll, and landed on his shoulder, springing up almost instantly, the machine gun in his hands.

He scanned the room. It seemed empty aside from a few comfortable leather chairs, a sofa, and the dead body of a Secret Service agent killed by the fragmentation grenade. Two doors were closed on the wall to the left of the door. He remained utterly still and quiet, listening.

Muffled sobs could be heard coming from the nearest door, and a harsh "Shut up!" from inside. The wraith rose, walked over to the door, and tried the handle from the side. It was unlocked. His prey had forgotten in his panic even that modicum of security. Bracing himself, he drew his leg back like a coiled spring and kicked the door open.

The door swung wildly on its hinges, revealing a medium-sized yet luxurious bedroom. Two figures were kneeling next to the bed. One was an older woman in a nightgown, bent over as if in prayer. Next to her was her husband, the former vice president of the United States. He was dressed in silk pajamas, and in his right hand he held a gun. The weapon shook as he tried to aim it toward the door.

The wraith moved like a striking snake. He dove into the room as a wild shot exploded over his head and hit the wall. He rolled into a crouch and flung his shotgun at the head of the vice president, who was caught midway as he stood and tried to aim the gun again. The move surprised the old man, and he flung his arms up to shield himself from the impact. In that time, the wraith sprung like a panther, and before the older man could regain his focus, his arm was grasped by a powerful hand, his wrist twisted painfully. With a scream, he dropped the gun to the floor, where it was kicked to the side by the wraith. The vice president, once perhaps the most powerful man on the planet, dropped helplessly to his bed. His wife continued to pray.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name."

The wraith ignored her and backed up several steps, drawing a large knife. The vice president's eyes widened and then formed angry slits. He rose and pointed his finger at his executioner.

"How _dare_ you?" he yelled. His face flushed from anger. "Who do you think you are, you son of a bitch?"

Faster than the old man could react, the wraith flashed forward and slapped the man across the face with the back of his hand. The vice president nearly fell over, caught himself on the bedstead, and put his hand to his mouth. When he drew it away, it was covered in blood.

"I am the angel of death who has come to claim his own. I am Lucifer, once a bright light, then fallen into the pit of hell and remade. I am here for your soul."

The praying woman shrieked, then continued the words, nearly screaming them to the heavens.

" _Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us!_ "

The vice president snarled through a nearly purple face, the blood in his mouth not concealing the white of his gnashing teeth. He took several steps toward the wraith.

"You come into _my_ home, kill _my_ men, frighten my wife and threaten _me!_ " His rage was nearly complete, his breathing ragged, the words choking in his mouth. "Kill me then, you bastard! Drive the knife! I'm not afraid of you! I've killed more of you than you ever will of decent people!"

The older man choked and grabbed at his throat. "You... You will..." Unable to get the words out, he doubled over, clawing maniacally at his chest. His color was a hideous purple, and he emitted a horrific gurgling sound as he fell to the floor. His face was constricted in a mask of pain, his eyes wild, his breathing erratic and forced.

Then silence. He stared blankly toward the ceiling. He did not move again.

There was an anguished cry from the woman, who stared over at the nightmarish sight of her dying husband. She rushed over. "No! No, God, no!" She grasped at his shirt, slapped his face, and when he did not respond, raised her hands to the sky in frantic prayer.

The wraith watched the scene as one stricken. Dumbfounded, he straightened from his tense fighting stance, the knife still clutched in his hand. He looked down at it. All possible usefulness had drained from the object. He let it drop to the ground.

"You've killed him!" the woman moaned. "You've killed my husband!" She screamed it out and sobbed at the same time, glaring at the wraith like a woman possessed and then collapsed onto the chest of her husband.

The wraith spoke flatly. "He killed me. And then he denied me the chance to repay him. So be it. It is finished."

The woman continued to weep loudly. The wraith moved away from her, turned his back on the couple, the knife, and the gun. Slowly, as one sleepwalking, he walked out of the bedroom. He moved deliberately through the debris in the interior room, stepping over the form of the dead agent. He walked through the blasted door and into the center ring.

A man stood there next to the rope, holding a gun to his face.

"Don't move," said the man. "Or I'll shoot you."
62

# Last Rites

Lopez tried to hold the gun steady. He was pointing it at a madman, a self-trained assassin highly skilled in all the arts of combat and war. The assassin appeared to be unarmed, was not yet within striking distance, and appeared by his movements to be injured or drugged. Lopez knew all this gave him certain advantages, but with such a devastating killer, he did not want to be too confident. He tried to keep his focus.

"Where is the vice president?" he asked in the most demanding tone he could muster.

"Dead," said the wraith.

Lopez felt crushed. _I've failed, Sara._ "So, you killed him, finally."

The man sat on the floor, crossing his legs. Lopez assumed it was some sort of trick. He stepped slightly to the side to make sure he kept the man at an angle, off balance, making a sudden attack harder to pull off.

"Not as I would have wished," said the assassin. "I brought a knife. I planned to plunge it into the weak heart of that monster and twist it. To look him in the eyes when I sent him on the long road to hell." Lopez stared at him, the bloodlust of his words contrasting with their tone. The wraith smiled bitterly. "But his heart was even weaker than I had expected. Too much stress for the evening, I suppose. He died before I could touch him. Acute myocardial infarction."

"Where is he?" said Lopez, struggling over whether to believe the killer or not.

"In that room, through the side door," said the wraith, motioning listlessly with his hand. "The wife is alive."

Lopez left the wraith. It was crazy. The killer would be gone when he returned or would come from behind him to strike. But he had to determine what had happened to the vice president. He ran through the destroyed portal, danced around the body of a slain agent, and entered the bedroom. He saw a woman on the floor, weeping over the body of her husband. It was a pathetic sight.

She looked up at him. "Too _late_. You're all _too late_. Now he's dead. Just go. Leave me." Lopez stood rooted to the spot, her pain and suffering tearing at his sense of empathy. She screamed at him. "I said _go!_ What good are you now? _Get out of here!_ "

The anguish in her eyes was too much for Lopez, his own sense of failure a weight around his neck. He left the room not knowing what would happen next. But the insanity was _over_. Whatever good or evil he had or had not done, the mad quest for vengeance had been completed. All that was left was the aftermath. Jail. Separation from Houston. Possible execution. All actions had their opposite reactions. _I'm coming back now, Sara. For as long as they let me stay with you._

Returning quickly into the center of the bunker structure, he was stunned to find that the wraith was _still there_ : unmoved, sitting cross-legged amid the rubble that he had created. Lopez had not even raised the gun or taken any precautions walking back, so certain had he been that the assassin would have fled. Instead, he sat in the same place, in the same position, a statue drained of life. All energy seemed to have been taken from his form.

Lopez walked around to face him, his sense of danger lessened. Above, from the blasted hole, he thought he could hear sirens. Whether they were police or firefighters, it didn't matter. Soon, every law enforcement and emergency response division at the local and federal level would converge on this location. With Houston incapacitated, there was no escaping them. It was better that they came so that she could be seen to, taken to a hospital.

"Don't let them take me." The wraith's words broke his concentration.

"What?" Lopez's thoughts had consumed him, and he did not understand.

"Your gun. Use it on me now. Have your justice."

Lopez stared at the shape in front of him. _What are you?_ A tortured child. A lunatic. A fire that had purged the CIA. _A killer._

Images from the Tennessee cabin hit him like a blow. _You killed my brother._ He raised the gun and cocked it. "Yes, I should kill you now, you bastard. Before they arrive and arrest all of us and take that opportunity away from me forever. You are a _murderer_. You took my only brother away from me. You _should_ die for it."

Francisco Lopez aimed the weapon, a terrible anger flowing through him, welling up like an explosion. He pulled the trigger.

A hole was blown into the wall beside the wraith, dust and paint flakes raining across the floor. The killer was unharmed. "But I can't kill you. Not anymore."

The man looked up from the floor, confusion on his face. "Why can't you kill me?" He seemed almost desperate.

Lopez sat as well, the sirens much louder and the sound of men's shouts ringing out above them. He pulled his knees up into his chest, fingering the weapon.

"I believed I would be a holy man by becoming a priest," said Lopez, a sad smile on his face. "I thought that the sacrament of ordination would fill me with the Holy Spirit, and I would then overcome myself and march toward righteousness." He laughed, pointing the barrel of the gun at his chest. "I always feared what was inside. _Terrible_ things. Violence. Murder. Things to be suppressed. _Confessed_. I ran from it all, praying that God would cure me. But God has not."

Lopez flipped the gun into the air and caught it. He repeated the process over and over as he spoke. "When I walked into that cabin in Gatlinburg and saw what you had done to my brother—things changed. I have chased you now for months. Not for justice. Justice is impartial. It is procedural. It is careful. I wanted none of those things. I wanted you dead. I wouldn't let myself see it, but I wanted to kill you. I chased after you for vengeance."

"So do it!" demanded the wraith. "Now you can! Take your vengeance!"

"Now I see you, see what others have done to you. _Good intentions pave the way to hell_. I see you are not a man. Not anymore. You are a warped and broken soul. You have already been to hell, and now you return carrying hell with you. Who am I to judge you after that?"

The wraith stood, the sounds of men around the opening above them clear. Lopez glanced upward, as well. It was only a matter of minutes.

The wraith pounced toward him, grasping him by the collar, shaking him violently. "If you know this," said the wraith, a wild light in his eyes, "if you have the eyes to see the truth, then you _must_ _kill me!_ "

Lopez struggled to free himself from the tight grip of the killer, but the man held on maniacally, his eyes wide. The wraith screamed at him. "You are right! Every waking moment is pain! Every conscious minute brings memories. Terrible memories. Only the hunt of my enemies gave me any relief, any distraction from the darkness that surrounds me, suffocates me, imprisons me! I killed my tormentors, but it's _not over!_ They will always torment me. Always break my fingers, violate me, burn me, drown me in water and in fear!"

Lopez leaned back stunned, the anguish and madness in the words nearly overwhelming. The veins stood out on the forehead of the crazed man. His teeth were bared like an animal's. "Please! They will take me, they will lock me away for years! _Years!_ Years and months and weeks and minutes of never-ending pain!"

The killer grabbed the priest's hand and placed the barrel of the gun to his temple. " _End it!_ I deserve death for the death I have brought, for the suffering of others, for the weeping of widows and children, for the torture of Miller. If you have risen above your hatred, kill me both for justice and for mercy's sake!" The wraith fell on his knees, his face pleading.

Lopez jumped backward, barely tearing loose, staring at the man's wild and haunted eyes. He looked down at him in horror, the full malignancy of the man's soul visible like a vision. As in confession, the guilt and pain of another washed over him, and he felt the poison of the man's sins. It was nearly incapacitating.

_Like confession._ Lopez closed his eyes, remembering his brother's last words to him in the confessional. Words spoken in anguish before he had bolted from the church. Lopez had never given him absolution.

The shouts above commingled with the sounds of feet rushing down the stairway across from them. Men were entering the bunker.

Lopez rose, dust and bits of rubble sliding off his clothes. He made the Sign of the Cross over the crumpled figure beneath him. He no longer had the authority to forgive sins; a corrupt bishop in Alabama had taken that from him. He was no longer a priest, and for all he knew, no longer even in Communion with the Church.

He didn't give a damn.

He placed his hand on the head of the wraith. " _Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti_." He stepped backward and raised the gun. " _Amen_." He aimed the weapon at the killer's head.

The wraith stared at him and then closed his eyes. He spoke his last words. "Thank you."

"You there!" came a shout from across the room. "Drop the weapon and place your hands above your head!"

Lopez pulled the trigger. The shot blasted open the face of the man, and the body rolled heavily over on its side. It spasmed for several seconds, and then remained still.

" _Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine_ ," he said, lowering the weapon to his side. " _Et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen_."

He felt a jarring impact from behind and was thrown to the floor. His hands were jerked behind his back, and he felt cuffs slapped onto them tightly.

"You have the right to remain silent," said a panting voice, "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

Lopez did not resist. Events had reached their ending point. The CIA agents were gone, their leaders slaughtered. The vice president was silenced. The wraith himself was dead at Lopez's own hand. He and Houston were caught.

_Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon us sinners._
63

# Extraordinary Rendition

"She's hurt, damn it! Be careful with her!" Lopez yelled.

The world was chaos. The dim morning was lit up like a carnival with six or seven police cars flashing their lights like strobes. The crackling of radio transmissions came from multiple directions, and spotlights were trained on him and the men escorting Houston out of the town car. The wailing call of fire trucks approaching brought an additional cacophony, and those firefighters who had already arrived were rushing around trying to quench the burning home. Behind him, the sounds of the popping wood and falling timbers blended into the ocean of noise.

The police officers shoved him forward, the movements wrenching his shoulders, his cuffed hands locked tightly behind him. They were treating Houston similarly, and she was barely staying on her feet. The sight of her abused this way drove him mad.

Exerting a wild force, Lopez yanked himself backward momentarily out of their grasp. The two officers holding him were thrown sideways, one stumbling to the ground. They scrambled to grab him and regain control, and he shouted at them as they approached.

"She's wounded!" He lowered his shoulder and blocked one officer to the side. "If you don't stop manhandling her, I'm going to resist arrest all the way to doomsday, and I'll bloody the hell out of anyone who tries to get near!" For emphasis, he kicked at the men approaching him. One raised a Taser.

"Don't make me use this on you!" came the frightened youthful voice from the uniformed man.

"Do it! And when I'm done pissing my pants, I'll kick you even harder!"

The young officer looked over to his superiors with a concerned expression. An older policeman marched over and shoved the younger man aside.

"Listen to me, _priest_ , we know who you two are. We've had the Feds on the line directing us here. We know what you and that woman can do, what you _have_ done! And there is no way in hell we're going to let you do here what you did up in New York. I suggest you cooperate, and then we'll have the murderess seen to by someone all the faster. There she can spend some of the good and honest taxpayers' money to treat her injuries."

The officer's face was hard like stone, and Lopez knew the man meant it. These troops were actually _afraid_ to be around Houston and himself. It was stunning. In the process of trying to destroy them, the CIA monsters had managed to create two legends. _Infamous legends_. _False legends._ But were any legends ever true? He lowered his head and let the officers secure him once more.

"Better," said the older officer. "Don't do anything else stupid."

They pushed them across the driveway, past their stolen town car, and toward the sea of police vehicles and arriving fire trucks. It was a scene out of a disaster film. Already numerous bodies on the ground had been covered with blankets, and yellow police tape was being pulled across nearly every available space. Heads turned with angry glares in their direction from officers and firemen alike. He and Houston were despised monsters.

There was a growing sound of engines approaching from the gate. Lopez looked out across the property and noticed four dark sedans with internal flashing sirens rushing up the driveway. Following closely behind was a black truck with white "FBI" lettering across its side. It looked like a special forces vehicle or one for prisoner transport.

Some policemen stopped the lead car midway, conversed with the driver briefly as Lopez was dragged forward, and then waved it on. It raced toward them, pulling to a stop right in front of Lopez and the men leading him. The truck pulled up seconds later behind the other cars. It looked like someone important had arrived.

A man and a woman leapt out of the lead vehicle and approached quickly. The male looked to be in his mid-forties, broad of build, with salt-and-pepper hair, olive skin. He was dressed in a dark suit. The woman was dressed formally as well, a black pantsuit and a white shirt that set off her long chestnut hair. A large badge hung from around her neck. Five uniformed agents in SWAT gear carrying shotguns and submachine guns leapt out of the van and converged behind the suits. Their weapons were held at the ready, and their eyes focused intently on Lopez and Houston.

"FBI Agent John Savas," called the man, flashing a badge to the officers. "Who's in command here?"

The older officer stepped forward. "That's me. Captain Dan Siggia of the Maryland State Police." He looked at their badges and the imposing mass of the Special Weapons and Tactics Team behind them. "You're Feds?"

"I'm Special Agent-in-Charge of the Intel 1 Division at CTD. This is Agent Rebecca Cohen, also of Intel 1." He nodded toward the woman.

"Counterterrorism? What brings you here? These terrorists now?"

"Unclear," said Savas. "But I was in DC and was called urgently to this address on actionable intelligence—the threat to the life of the former VPOTUS." He glanced up at the ruin around him. "It seems that call was accurate."

"He's dead," said the officer, his expression a scowl. "Murdered along with an army of Secret Service agents by these killers."

Lopez couldn't believe what he was hearing. "That's a lie! We came here to save the vice president! It was the wraith! A killer, a victim of the CIA renditions program! You have to call—"

Savas backhanded Lopez across the face. "You will keep your mouth shut, you vermin! We've got a pretty little limo waiting for you two, and we're going to put you in it and drive you to a place you don't want to go." The agent's eyes were furious.

The state policemen looked over shocked, and with some awe and admiration. Savas motioned to the armored SWAT team, and they approached, pointing weapons at Lopez and Houston.

Lopez just stared at the FBI man. It was insane. After everything, after all the lies and deaths, all their efforts to find the truth, that they would also be tarnished with this last murder! The demonization of their persons was complete. He wanted to scream. He wanted to curse at God for the injustice of it all. The words from the Book of Job came unbidden to his mind, even as he tried to push them away: _"Make me know my transgression and my sin. Why dost thou hide thy face, and count me as thy enemy?"_

"We have orders from on high, gentlemen," said Agent Savas loudly. "By federal authority these fugitives are to be placed into our custody, under our jurisdiction. We have intelligence that they are _not_ working alone, and there may be efforts to actualize their escape as early as tonight. We need to move them immediately to the most secure federal lockdown we can find."

Several officers around them murmured. Savas dismissed them with a wave.

"This is a _federal_ matter, involving the assassination of a former vice president of the United States. Maybe you don't realize who you are dealing with! We don't want a repeat of New York, where these two and accomplices blew up the entire local police station in their escape."

Officer Siggia nodded, his face relieved. "That's for damn sure, and I'll be sleeping easier knowing these two aren't in my locker. They're yours, agents. Get them the hell out of my sight. You men," he said, rounding up his troops and turning his back on the agents, "Let's get this cordoned off. More of these G-men and God knows who else are going to descend on us. Let's have it ready."

Savas motioned again. The SWAT team rushed forward, grabbed Lopez tightly, and placed additional constraints on his arms and legs. He was glad to see that they did not do so with Houston but instead placed her on a stretcher carried by two agents. At least these FBI agents had some brains. It was obvious to anyone that she wasn't escaping anywhere.

He was pushed into the truck and strapped into a harness that prevented any movement. To his amazement, there was an emergency response medic with a small station set up in the back. They quickly moved Houston to a gurney locked down to the van floor, and the medic began examining her. Before he could say anything, two large SWAT officers sat across from him, their faces concealed behind black masks and helmets. Their weapons were pointed casually toward him.

The front door opened, and Agent Savas stepped in himself. Lopez assumed the woman was outside with the state police. He watched Savas start the engine, back the van up carefully, and then accelerate down the driveway and onto the road.

Lopez didn't know where they were headed. He assumed the worst. Maybe _they_ would be rendered somewhere, tortured. Perhaps simply locked away without trial or chance of trial, labeled "enemy combatants" and disappeared to Guantanamo or some similar location. America was changing. Rights were being taken away. They could simply disappear some, without justification, in secret, for as long as they wanted.

And there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
64

# Reboot

"She's lost a lot of blood," said the medic, who hooked up a bag for transfusion. The truck bounced roughly along the road; Lopez marveled that the medic could do his job. "It's good we were warned. I have her type and allergies. We got her just in time."

_Warned? Who could have told them that she was injured?_

"Father Lopez," said Savas from the front. "In a minute, I will instruct my men to release your constraints. I don't want you doing anything stupid. At the least, think about Agent Houston and her need for assistance. It might also help to hear that we were sent by Fred Simon of the CIA. We know the story, the _real_ story. We're here to help."

Lopez felt dizzy. _From Simon? FBI agents? What the hell was going on?_

"Fred's a colleague of mine at Langley," Savas continued, guessing Lopez's thoughts. "We've worked together for years, and I know him personally. He's a good man. A trusted friend. Only because of that did I believe him."

"Then you can clear us?" asked Lopez, his hope desperate.

"Little hope of that, Father."

"It's not Father anymore, Agent Savas."

Savas sighed. "I'm here with the _unapproved_ authorization of Agent Simon. When this van is found destroyed, and I am unconscious, and these agents missing, he will take the heat for your escape, operating outside of protocol."

Lopez was stunned. "Our escape?" He glanced outside the window. They were in the middle of nowhere, fields rushing past in the golden light of sunrise. _Where will we escape to?_

"We are doing this because the forces that set this nightmare in motion knew their business, Father."

"Please," interrupted Lopez, the title distracting him. "Not anymore. Not _Father_. I am defrocked. Excommunicated."

Savas was silent a moment. "I am sorry for that. I really am. Your lives will never be the same after what they have done. Now, as I understand it, the leaders are all dead, murdered by this Pakistani-American nutcase. This _wraith_."

"We saw three of them die. We also saw the bodies of several agents, including my brother."

"But there are far too many still active at the CIA who will not allow the truth to come out. Jobs would be lost, programs endangered, the careers of the powerful jeopardized. The frame job on you two, completed tonight, would take a national investigation to uncover and undo. They won't allow it. Congress won't allow it. The Executive Branch won't allow it. Too much dirt on too many people. This will be buried, and you buried with it. You will be the sacrifice."

"Because of the crimes of a few that they don't want known."

"Yes. You are tarnished everywhere, from the Catholic Church to the murders of thirty to forty agents and police officers. You are now the assassins who murdered the former vice president. If you want to fight this, you have that option, but you will lose. And lose badly."

"What other option is there?" asked Lopez, completely demoralized.

"Disappear," said Savas.

" _Disappear?_ How? Where?"

"Simon is arranging it. He's preparing a back door for you. We will fake your escape tonight. The troops here are close associates and loyal to me—we've been through a lot together. They will keep this in confidence. Simon has set aside the CIA equivalent of a witness protection program for you. Only he will know, no one else at the CIA or FBI. You will be given new identities, a bank account that will let you retire for the rest of your lives, and a secret location. Not your old lives. You'll never get those back. But you'll get a chance to start new lives. A blank canvas."

"Hiding our past. Pretending to be people we aren't. Letting this injustice go unpunished."

"I would not say it went unpunished," said Savas grimly. "And I can tell you that many of us in the CIA and the FBI will do what we can to clean out the festering remainder of what this wraith nearly sterilized. Simon is a good man. He'll work within the system, and he's vowed to me that he'll see to it that there won't be a next time, not while he's on watch."

"I wish I had his confidence," said Lopez, wearily.

"I know," replied Savas. "So do I."

Houston stirred and called out. "Francisco? Are you there? Where are we?"

"Please, let me out of these!" he said, futilely gesturing with his shoulders. "I'm trusting you. I'm not going to do anything. I just want to be with her."

The men in the back looked toward Savas, who simply nodded. They released the restraints and freed Lopez from the wrist and ankle cuffs. He stood, wobbling from the stiffness in his legs and torso, and knelt down next to Houston. Her eyes were closed.

"Sara, it's me, Francisco. Can you hear me?"

Her color was already better. He had considered her skin very pale, but the last few hours had terrified him, as he had watched her fade to a vampiric white marble, the blue of her veins startling, her skin seemingly transparent. Now she looked almost normal. Maybe it was the warm morning light that spilled in from the front window. Or perhaps it was the fresh blood supply.

"Sara?" he repeated.

"Mmmmm," she hummed and opened her eyes. "I think I must be dreaming. I thought I heard some FBI agent babbling on about us living in the backwoods or something." She smiled. "Sounded nice."

Lopez grinned back, his vision blurred from tears. "Yeah, Sara, it sounds very nice." He placed his head next to hers and held her hand.

She whispered softly. "We'll get a log cabin, in the mountains. A fireplace. I want some rose creepers on the door. We can hunt. I'll take you out back, finally teach you how to shoot a damn gun."
65

# The Powers that Be

_F ugitive Pair Escapes Again: Future Mayhem Predicted_

_By Gerd Miller, Huntsville Times_

_Caught by law enforcement twice, Francisco Lopez and Sara Houston have escaped a second time._

_First, they scandalized a nation with their deviant behavior and treasonous actions. Then, they undertook one of the most startling and embarrassing penetrations of national security in a generation. Most recently, their murderous rampage brought them to the home of the former vice president of the United States, where they are accused of assassinating him along with killing an entire assignment of Secret Service agents._

_"There was a coordinated escape operation," said Special Agent John Savas, who was recovering from wounds sustained during the failed attempt to capture the two fugitives. "As we always suspected, they had outside help. Our SWAT caravan was hit just outside the VP's house in Virginia by overwhelming and unexpected force. The van was totaled, and in the ensuing firefight, the two fugitives escaped."_

_Now their whereabouts are unknown. After weeks of escalating violence from the pair, suddenly they have disappeared, and their wild spree has come to an end. Or has it?_

_"These two are dedicated to harming this nation," said CIA Division Chief Jesse Darst, Houston's former superior. "They are not finished. We will redouble our efforts to bring them to justice."_

_They had become known online and in the tabloids as "the priest and the whore," Houston accused of using sex as a tool and weapon in her double-agent spying, and Lopez a disgraced and defrocked former Catholic priest accused first of a host of sex crimes against young boys and then as the murderous liaison of Houston._

_The nation has been riveted by the story of the two, living in fear and wondering what would happen next. Even those who knew them well expressed shock._

_"We never expected Francisco of such horrible things," said Maria Lopez, resident of Madison, Alabama, and sister-in-law of the accused. "He seemed the pillar of the community. Now, after all this, after these deaths, these terrible crimes, we can only try to move on."_

# Epilogue

The shots rang out, one after the other. First, there was the blast: the ringing of metal hurled by gunpowder, the fast rush of air. Then, the slap and thud as the projectile struck its target. Finally, the resounding reverberations off the stones, hard ground, and sides of the encircling cliffs.

The air was crisp and the plant life mostly evergreen at this high altitude. Mosses grew on the rocky terrain, and the thin atmosphere gave a sharpened quality to all objects, to every sound. Sight, sound, and gunplay were all precise.

A male figure stood twenty-five yards in front of a row of targets, silhouetted against a reddening sunset. Black human-like shapes were depicted on the paper before him with the areas around the heart and brain marked with circles. After a number of shots, the figure drew his arm back and removed protective earplugs, looking down at the smoking weapon. A brunette with short-cropped hair walked briskly up to him.

"Damn, Francisco! Eight of ten in the kill zone. You missed your true calling! What the hell were you doing in seminary?"

"Studying, mostly." He smiled. "So, not bad?"

"Obscene natural talent. Not even Miguel was this good. You've barely been training, and you're a hell of a lot better shot than ninety-nine percent of the agents I know."

"Who'd have thought?" he said, shaking his head.

"I did. I _knew_. You're even better in hand-to-hand."

"I always could fight."

"Yes, like a wild boar. But now I'm training you _right_ for the first time. Most men your age couldn't learn this from scratch. You were born to do this."

"Natural-born killer?" he said, a sadness in his eyes.

"A natural warrior, Francisco. There is a difference."

"Not always."

"Well, there is in your case. I don't want to hear _any more_ self-doubt. You've been trying to be Jesus all your life because you couldn't accept who you really were!" She looked at him mischievously. "You saw the box?"

He nodded, glancing over his shoulder. In the midst of several handguns, rifles, ammo crates, and target sheets, buried nearly under their two backpacks, there was a large cardboard box.

"I saw you carrying it up earlier. Presents?"

Houston nodded in the affirmative. "Yes. From Russian monks."

"Russian monks?"

She laughed. It was a free laugh, a kind rarely heard in a world of people who were rarely themselves. Sara Houston was always beautifully, strongly, tenderly, frustratingly, uniquely herself. "I swear, you can find anything online these days. There's a monastery in northern Russia that has really done quite well for itself with a religious-themed web store. Icons, candles, censers, the like. Also, cassocks."

"Cassocks?" he asked, a perplexed look on his face.

"Ever since I was a young girl, I loved the look of those mysterious Russian priests. Long, flowing black cassocks. You Papists modernized so much in the Catholic Church—practically a business suit and tie. Not those crazy Eastern Orthodox. Wild beards and flowing robes." She rubbed her hand on his bare cheek. "Well, you lost the beard."

"And it's not coming back." He shook his head. "Sara, I'm done being a priest."

She smiled, a playful look in her eyes. "Different kind of Order. Try them on!"

He looked at her skeptically. "All right, here goes." He opened the box and removed the priestly robes. Then he stripped to his underwear. The air was slightly cool, and he felt the rush of adrenaline from the brisk breeze. It took him a few minutes of shivering to figure out the drapings, but finally he managed to get the robes properly in place. Houston had turned her back and closed her eyes. He called to her.

"How do I look?" She turned around, her hand immediately going to her mouth. "That bad?" he said, frowning. "Seriously, Sara, how do I _look_?"

"Like Neo in _The Matrix_. But scarier. Quite a look, Francisco, right down to the stigmata on your forehead."

Lopez reached up instinctively to touch the scar. While the wound had healed—the blackened skin and blisters, the secondary infection that resulted—it still was unusually sensitive, even for scar tissue. Every now and then, inexplicably, the scar felt like it was burning, even bleeding at times from the cruciform shape left behind from the gun sight perched over the half-circle. A mark from the wraith that would never leave him. A connection seeming to span life and death.

Lopez grunted. "Fitting. _Neo_ means _new_. New man. Either that, or with this mark of the beast, I'm the Antichrist."

Houston grabbed his robes and pulled him close to her, kissing him passionately. "To hell with the Antichrist and the Church, Francisco. We have us."

He looked out from the mountain view over the valley below them, staring toward the horizon. The green sea of the forest seemed infinite.

Lopez sighed. "Now what, Sara?"

She smirked. "We live happily ever after. It's nice up here."

Lopez nodded. "But is it enough? I feel lost. I became a priest to _serve_ , Sara, as much as anything else. To _do_. Now I'm permanently out of a job. I appreciate all the Special Forces training, but really, what are we going to do with that, outside of being our own personal security system? What do I do now? Model cassocks?"

She smiled. "Now that you mention it, I got a call from Fred Simon this morning. I've kept him informed of our little training sessions, your ridiculous progress. He might have something for us to do."

Lopez's brows furrowed, the stigmata creasing. "Like what?"

"Jobs that legit agents can't do. Jobs done by complete ciphers who do not exist. Jobs that need doing."

Lopez shook his head. "No black-ops, Sara. I don't want to go down that road. I don't want to become those things we fought against."

"We won't," she said confidently. "You're incorruptible, Francisco. I knew that the first time I met you. Something I didn't feel with Miguel, something I've never felt from anyone before. Fred knows it, too. That's why he trusts us to do the jobs no one else can, that no one else will. Because inside, you're pure."

Lopez turned away, shaking his head. "Pure? Hiding. Fighting. Likely killing, if I know anything of this business now. How is that pure?"

She grabbed his chin and turned his head toward her. "Don't the angels bring destruction on the forces of evil, my former priest?"

Lopez grunted, nodded his head. He recited: " _Then, I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous: seven angels having the seven last plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete. "_ He smiled at her. "The Book of Revelations. But angelology was always a messy field of study, Sara. Mystics and bad movies. But yes, the chief ministering spirits of God have been known to bring death and destruction. More like a cleansing fire to cancerous tissue, if you want my interpretation."

Houston nestled her head into his neck. "So, you're the avenging angel." She sighed and was silent a moment. "Wasn't Miguel named after an angel?"

Lopez paused. He flipped the gun in his hand back and forth, one side visible, then the other. His words were nearly lost in the wind that kicked up. "Yes. In the Hebrew, the name means _he who is like God_."

"Well, you're his brother. You're of the same stuff."

"There are only two holy angels named in the New Testament." He dropped the clip out of the handle to the ground and slapped a new one in, careful not to jostle the resting form of Houston on his shoulder. "There is the Archangel Michael. There is also the angel whose name means 'God's Strength.' He is the one who explained visions to Daniel the prophet, and of all the heavenly hosts, was sent to announce to Mary that she would be the Mother of God. Some have called him the angel of fire, who also will be sent to destroy sin on earth."

Houston held him tightly, staring forward toward the targets. "What was his name?"

Lopez raised the weapon and aimed across the field. "Gabriel."

He pulled the trigger, and the gunshot shattered the quiet around them. His sight was true, the impact in the center of the heart of the target scattering dust and shards of fabric. Echoes of the blast reverberated around them like distant thunder.

Houston whispered. "Then you are Gabriel."

> _" If it hadn't been for what we did - with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth - then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US. Protecting the country's security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek."_
> 
> * * *
> 
> —Former Vice President Dick Cheney, February 4, 2009

* * *

> _" Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment -- a few of them even unto death. But every one of us, every single one of us knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them. That faith was indispensable not only to our survival but to our attempts to return home with honor. Many of the men I served with would have preferred death to such dishonor."_
> 
> * * *
> 
> —Senator John McCain, PBS Newshour, Oct 6, 2005

_A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;_

* * *

_An hour may lay it in the dust._

> Lord Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II (1812), Stanza 84.

# Prologue

_T he baby pulled on a string and the toy's small disk chimed. A lion roared and birds tweeted. A dog barked, and the disk stopped spinning. The baby giggled and pulled again._

_The room was dark except for multicolored stars projected onto the ceiling. A window was cracked open, letting in crisp spring air. Across the room, a tired-looking woman rested, eyes half-closed, in a rocking chair, watching the child._

_The baby grew bored with his toy and turned to a mobile above. A panda-headed cord dangled there, and he could just reach it. Lights blinked and a tune played. The baby smiled._

_He pulled himself up awkwardly, legs wobbly. With one hand the baby grasped the panda, with the other the thick string hanging from the disk. With jerky movements, he pulled back and forth on each, nearly stumbling as each mechanism activated in succession. A light shone on the child's face, an obsessive gleam in his eyes as they darted between the two chiming toys._

_Jenny smiled and suppressed a laugh. Even so late at night, when really all she wanted to do was crawl back into bed with her husband, watching her son play was magical. She'd suffer tomorrow for another interrupted night, but it was worth it. He was so happy!_

_She rubbed her eyes and sat up stiffly in the chair, getting a better view into the crib. Her expression clouded as the toys continued to chime, her son now sitting again on the mattress, bouncing lightly as the racket continued._

_Shivering, Jenny draped a shawl around her shoulders and stood, stumbled to the window and closed it. She turned to the crib and yawned. "How you reaching them down there, pooh-bear?"_

_She stopped and stared as the baby pulled on the string to the animal disk again. The mechanism clicked and the heads began to rotate. At the same time, the mobile above lit up and played its little tune. The baby smiled and giggled._

_"How did you do that?"_

_The string with the panda was wrapped around one of the animal heads of the disk, so as the disk advanced slightly with each pull, the tug on the mobile activated the second toy, the mechanisms now linked. There wasn't any slack left in the mobile string, and she detached it from the lion head the string had looped behind._

_"There," she said. "You'll break it, silly boy."_

_The baby pulled on the animal disk string and it moved. He stared at the mobile expectantly. Nothing happened. He pulled on the string again. His lip quivered, and he began to cry._

_"Shh. Sorry, pooh-bear, but you got it all tangled." She smiled and cooed at him. He didn't seem to notice her and continued to tug on the string in frustration. The woman sighed. "We got to get some sleep, sweetie. Mommy's tired."_

_She walked back to the rocking chair. "Mommy's just going to close her eyes for a few minutes."_

_She slumped down and exhaled deeply, the chair swallowing her whole like an ocean pulling her down into slumber._

_And then the sounds again. Animal noises followed by the little tune. Dancing, dancing together in her mind one after the other. The patter of them landing on her like rain. Where had she heard them before? Oh, yes. But the string would break..._

_Jenny snapped awake and knuckled at her eyes. Sure enough, the baby had done it again. The string from the mobile was fixed to the other toy disk mounted on the side of the crib._

_She got up slowly and walked to the bed, reaching in to untangle the devices again. The baby began to cry._

_"Sweetie," she began and then stopped, staring quizzically at the child. She reached up and slowly detached the string, letting the panda head drop downward back under the mobile. She watched her son closely. His complaining slowed and then he toddled up, reaching deliberately over to the panda head to pull it to the side, and yanked the string clumsily to the disk. After several failures, the string latched around one of the animal heads. The baby squealed and dropped back down. He pulled the string and the two toys danced in unison._

_She repeated the process to the same effect._

_Then she ran from the room._

_"Look, Henry, just look!"_

_Jenny stood beside the crib, Henry, the boy's father, yawning. He watched his son._

_"See? He's hooked them together. They both play when he pulls one string!"_

_"Okay, Jenny? So he tangled them up. We just undo it and it'll be fine."_

_"No. Don't you get it? It's on purpose."_

_His forehead creased. "On purpose?"_

_"Yes! He likes it when they both play. He figured out a way to link them together."_

_"At nine months? Jenny, come on. You need sleep."_

_"No, listen! I undid it like three times. He keeps putting them back together."_

_"Honey, how about I take over tonight and you get some rest?"_

_She pushed forward, the wild look in her eyes causing him to backpedal unconsciously. "Henry, do you know what this means? Do you?"_

_The man shook his head._

_"It means he's a genius, Henry."_

_The father had reached the doorway, yet she pursued him, grasping the folds of his robe and pulling him toward her._

_"Our baby is a genius!"_
Part I

# Worm

Remember remember the fifth of November! Gunpowder, Treason and Plot! I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot! —English Folk Verse (c.1870)
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

DEPOSITION OF:

**Franklin Joseph Miller**

called for examination by Counsel for the Defendant, pursuant to Notice of Deposition, at the Independent Council Offices, located at

[REDACTED] Washington, D.C.,

when were present on behalf of the

respective parties: [REDACTED]

Counsel on Behalf of Defendant (CBD): Will you please identify yourself for the record?

MR. MILLER: Franklin J. Miller, Special Agent, Counterterrorism. Intel 1 division.

* * *

CBD: You have a service record?

MR. MILLER: Yes. Three tours in Afghanistan. Honorably discharged.

* * *

CBD: Honorably? I'd say that is an understatement. Medal of Honor, if I'm not mistaken? Second Battle of Fallujah, according to your records here.

MR. MILLER: That's correct.

CBD: Would you care to elaborate for the panel?

MR. MILLER: I would prefer not to.

* * *

CBD: Thank you, Mr. Miller. You understand that your testimony here is on the record, and your words might later be used to charge and try you as an enemy combatant of the United States?

MR. MILLER: No, I don't understand that.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Have you not been informed of your rights and requirements under the new Tribunal Act?

MR. MILLER: Yes, sir. But none of this makes any sense to me.

[REDACTED]: You have been informed of the law?

MR. Miller: Yes. Jesus.

* * *

CBD: Mr. Miller, how long have you worked with the defendant?

MR. MILLER: Nearly a decade.

* * *

CBD: And in what capacity?

MR. MILLER: First I was a special agent in the Intel 1 division under the umbrella of Larry Kanter's counter-terrorism branch. After the attacks on our division, I served under him in the restructured Intel 1.

* * *

CBD: And it was serving in this role during which the events in question occurred?

MR. MILLER: Yes.

* * *

CBD: And how did you and the Intel 1 division become involved?

MR. MILLER: John likely knows the chronology better. But-

* * *

CBD: You mean the defendant, former agent Savas?

MR. MILLER: Former?

CBD: Agent Savas.

MR. MILLER: Yes. Special agent in Charge, _John_ Savas.

* * *

CBD: Continue.

MR. MILLER: I mean for the rest of us it was a relatively normal day, if you can ever consider counterterrorism a normal job. We had our usual reports, chatter, kidnappings by more extremists, talks of retaliation for the French raid in Algeria. It was also the ceremony for John's medal, and that morning we were all in front of the Mayor and Attorney General.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And the Anonymous case? Please focus your responses to material relevant to this inquiry.

MR. MILLER: Right. It started with the bombing, obviously. As far as I know, NYPD was the first on the scene but they called us in fairly quickly.

[REDACTED]: You know this because?

MR. MILLER: John told us.

* * *

CBD: Can we just back up and get the events from you one step at a time. Tell us from what you remember what happened.

MR. MILLER: I wasn't there for a lot of it, but we were all briefed.

CBD: That's fine. Just your words, please.

MR. MILLER: All right. Like I said, it started just like any other day.
OCTOBER 17
1

# Bird of Prey

"Mr. Craig, sir."

A man in a chauffeur's uniform held a door open patiently. The CEO of Goldman Sachs stalked toward the car. Silver-haired, dressed in a tailored business suit with a golden watch that glinted in the sunlight, his thin-framed glasses gave his harsh features a predatory intelligence. The black leather handle of his briefcase contrasted sharply with his golden wedding ring. Two bodyguards left his side and walked to a second car parked immediately behind.

Jack Craig nodded to the chauffeur and stepped into the limo. He dropped his briefcase onto the leather seat, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed as his driver shut the door. The interior was spartan compared to the cars kept by many of his equals at the top echelons of corporate power. But Craig had never taken to the ostentatious bravado that infected so many of his peers. To his mind, there was no surer sign of dominance than the refusal to flaunt it.

The driver entered and started the engine. "World Financial Center, Miles." The driver nodded and pulled the car out into midday Manhattan traffic. Craig engaged the auditory dampening system, sealing him off from the driver. " _Yes_ , Heidi. I understand that there are midterms coming, but this bill cannot come up for a vote. It's got Warren's dirty paw prints all over it and it's a step in the wrong direction." He paused, listening. "No, it doesn't matter. You won't lose your position on the committee. Hell, given how much you lot have gerrymandered things I doubt I'll be alive the next time you lose the House. We've got you more than covered with the advertising, believe me. Kill this vote. You've got nothing to fear." He pulled the phone away from his head to mitigate the shouting on the other end of the line. "For fuck's sake, Heidi! Least of all the press! Not even the _Times_ has anyone off the payroll now."

Craig nodded several times, satisfied. He ended the call and sighed. _No one in Congress has any balls except that damn bitch Warren!_ And they hadn't been able to find a price for her. He doubted there was one, but they still had many years to find out. Especially if they could couple it with some dirty laundry and rattle her cage a little. He swiped across the phone and hit an entry, placing a call.

"Hi, sweetheart!" For the first time that day, Jack Craig smiled. "No, I can't make your show today, I'm sorry. Daddy's got a very important meeting with the _President_. Tell that to your friends!" He frowned as a whining pitch escaped from the speaker. "I know, I know, honey. I'll bring you something special tonight, from that new toy store they opened, what's it called? The one with the giant bear?" There was a sound on the other end. "Right. That one. A surprise, okay?"

The vehicle pulled out onto FDR Drive and sped south beneath the Hospital for Special Surgery, the sun glinting off the East River on his left. Craig cracked the window open a wedge, gazing toward the looming mass of the Queensboro Bridge and the white sailboats bobbing along the currents.

"Now, Daddy's got to go. You give him a kiss." A pop sounded on the speaker. "Thanks, honey. Talk to you later." He closed the connection.

Continuing to stare outside his window, Craig felt a weariness descend. Soon, he knew, they would reach their exit and the nasty courting ritual would begin at the hotel. A presidential speech on financial reform, dutiful agreements from the top managers, handshakes, TV moments, and reporters' questions. Too much money had changed hands for there to be any real concern. They owned the committees. The damn politicians had to trot them out every few years, give them a public tongue-lashing, and then it was back to business as usual.

A black spot in the sky in front of them caught his eye. _What the hell?_ He disengaged the sound suppression.

"Miles, can you see that thing in front of us? I thought it was a plane, but it's something else."

While he was accustomed to the low-flying aircraft along this route—helicopters heading to the Hamptons and tourist planes lumbering overhead—something was wrong. The craft, whatever it was, seemed way too low. _Too small_.

"Look at it—it's off the river and over the damned FDR."

He could see his driver straining upward and nodding. "Some kid's remote control helicopter or something, Mr. Craig."

Craig shook his head. "Maybe. Damn if it's not going to hit us."

The object careened straight for them, slowing its approach until it paced the car. He could see it better now: four helicopter-like blades spun equidistant from each other separated like the points on a square. A mass of spidery arms underneath held what looked like a cylinder, the bottom shining like a large metallic disk. Craig felt a strange unease. _It's like some giant insect from Mars_.

"Miles, take the next exit. There. The sign that says 53rd. Take that exit."

"But sir, we'll get snarled in the local traffic."

"Just do it!"

Craig wasn't sure what was happening, but his instincts were never wrong. He had lived too long as a predator and master of the games of power. When soldiers around him died in Vietnam, he made it out alive. It was a sixth sense, background processing, _something_ that always alerted him to danger and opportunity. Right now, his alarms were ringing frantically.

The limo darted across lanes toward the exit to a chorus of horns. The small flying thing matched their motion and continued to close the distance.

Miles grumbled as the wheels hit the exit ramp. "This some new paparazzi thing?"

Then, the impossible! The small craft accelerated and slammed directly onto the roof of the car.

Craig jumped. _Shit!_ "Pull us over, Miles. Now!"

But there wasn't a place to stop the car. Still exiting the off-ramp, the driver accelerated and hurtled toward a curbside ahead.

"Goddamn thing is stuck to the rooftop," yelled Craig, grabbing the handle of his door. He prepared to leap out of the vehicle.

A large explosion rocked the corner of 53rd and Sutton Place. Windows of surrounding buildings shattered, facade stone fractured and fell, and debris from a black limo blasted outward with a fireball that set nearby trees and garbage on fire. Smoke surged upward from the demolished vehicle, only a chassis and partial skeleton remaining. Alarms sounded from cars parked near to the blast radius, and voices screamed over the din. Bodies were strewn motionless around the inferno. Wounded screamed for help.

Above the growing chaos, unseen by anyone below, a frenetic buzzing purred. An apple-sized object hovered hundreds of feet above the fire, a propeller whirling above an octagonal hardware collection ending with a downward-pointing lens. The mechanical insect observed the scene with a cold stillness. As the first sounds of sirens began to spill toward the carnage, it climbed above the buildings and disappeared into the sky.
2

# Storm Front

"So it is only fitting that today, five years after the events in New York and around the world that brought us to the brink of international conflict, we honor a man who was instrumental in bringing us back from that cliff."

Special agent John Savas squirmed in his metal fold-out chair and prayed that this horrific political pageantry would reach its inevitable and dreaded climax. His salt-and-pepper hair was trimmed similarly to that time five years back, a time when the home-grown terrorists of Mjolnir had aimed a nuclear warhead at the Muslim holy city of Mecca during the great Hajj pilgrimage. But no amount of self-delusion could hide the fact that it was considerably more _salty_ now than it had been. While he still worked to keep himself in shape, at fifty-five, age was beginning to finally have the upper hand, and his increased desk time as the director of Intel 1 hadn't helped.

But it was more than simply age. As for the nightmares—Savas was too mired in a dying male culture to do much about them. PTSD was what psychologists talked about on cable news, not what men had or admitted to. Only his wife of three years, agent Rebecca Cohen, truly knew the extent of the damage. And that because she shared the trauma as well.

Savas watched the new Attorney General of the United States bring the speech to a point of tension and transition. The former prosecutor looked in his direction and nodded.

"And without further delay, here to receive the Award for Exceptional Heroism, please welcome a true American hero and pride of New York City, John Savas!"

Savas surged to his feet, flashbulbs exploding around him, applause drowning his thoughts like a churning waterfall. He moved as confidently as he could toward the stage, remembering to paste a reserved smile on his face for the evening news. A row of officers from the NYPD and local FBI branches greeted him with handshakes and pats on the back. Nearing the podium, reporters' cameras pummeling him like strobe lights, and he shook hands with the Attorney General with one hand while grasping the medallion case and plaque in the other.

As they paused for the photographers, Savas instinctively searched among the front row of FBI agents for a diminutive brunette. Her long hair would be secured formally behind her. For events like this she usually wore her blue pantsuit. He would see her radiant smile beaming toward him, his desire to impress her flooding him with energy.

But she wasn't there. He knew she wouldn't be there, but looked anyway. She was hundreds of miles away in a secret location only a handful of people knew, checking up on two charges that Savas had personally assumed responsibility for. Deep in a forest, high in the mountains, Rebecca Cohen was at this very moment in the company of the nation's most wanted fugitives.

Savas shifted his focus back to the Attorney General. He smiled for the cameras.

Exhausted, Savas dropped into his office chair and stared forward blankly. The medal and certificate stared back at him from his desk. He didn't want them. He didn't join the FBI after his son's death on 9/11 for honors, and he hadn't risked everything, even Rebecca, to stop Mjolnir to get a damned medal. He could think of thousands of victims of terrorism who deserved much more than he did. Who would repay them and their families? He could think of one man, Husaam Jordan, who had stopped a nuclear holocaust by sacrificing his own life. But what good were medals to the dead?

He grasped the award materials and unlocked a key-coded drawer in his desk. He yanked it open and pulled out a thick file folder, dropped the medal into it, and closed the drawer. It clicked loudly as it locked. The label on the file, bold black ink on white, left an afterimage in his mind: _The Ragnarök Conspiracy_.

Savas loosened his tie and sighed deeply. Now for just five minutes of peace.

"Captain Overlord, sir, transitional paperwork is now one hundred percent completed."

He startled at a bald woman framed by his office door, her arms grasping the metal frame above her head. Savas tried not to gawk at her toned body, hammered and stretched by several years of intense combat training. Gone were the waist-length orange hair and the Amish dresses. Piercings ran up her ears, in her lips and eyebrows. Today she wore fatigues and a green tank revealing rippling muscles on a thin frame—some punk version of Sigourney Weaver in _Alien 3_ , but with orange eyebrows, green eyes, and a more spaced-out glare.

_Another casualty._ The meek girl he had known was gone, murdered just as surely as many in the ground. In her place stood something far more potent.

"Morning, Angel. Here to ruin my day?"

"It's part of my mission statement," she said.

"You know, agent Lightfoote, I've spent every favor I had left to let you parade around here like GI Jane. A little protocol every now and then would be nice."

"Stopping a madman and saving the world buys some unique capital, Fearless Leader." Her face darkened. "Steals other things though."

Savas absorbed her words silently. The losses could never be measured. Talented people, good people who could never be replaced.

"John, it's not your fault they died. Not your fault that you're the best to run Intel 1. Trial by fire," she said, nodding to herself. "They cut the fat. Axed all those 9/11 counter-terrorism toys or put them under you. Larry couldn't have done a better job."

Visions of a house bomb rushed through his mind.

"I don't know about that. He was a genius."

"And things are different now. Larry didn't know shit about cybercrimes. _You_ set up the Operations Center under Manuel, not Larry. After what happened, you knew where crime and national security were headed: _digital._ "

Savas shook his head. "Big picture only, Angel. I still can't figure out my email sometimes."

"Boss Man is supposed to be big picture."

"At least making you head of cybercrimes means someone can call you Captain Overlord or whatever for a change. How is your command and control center coming along?"

Lightfoote pouted. "John, there's no budget! We cannibalized the Operations Center, but it's not nearly enough. It's outdated. We need server farms to handle the loads of searches and to fend off digital attacks. DNS floods are _daily_. Everyone wants to bring down FBI or get in our systems."

Savas nodded. "I know, Angel. But times are tight. Budgets are bleeding. You're going to have to be creative. If the criminals can do it, so can you." He smiled.

"So Mr. Big Picture is telling me to emulate cybercriminals? You know blowing things up is a lot easier than building them."

"Angel, don't twist—" An alert tone rang on his phone. He scanned the message. "It's Rebecca."

"Yeah? How's her _special assignment_?"

Savas frowned. "It's very _special_. Now I need to take this." Lightfoote beamed at him. " _In private_." She grinned more broadly and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Savas sighed and opened the connection. A woman's face appeared on his smartphone, brown hair and eyes, a smile on her lips. _God, it's good to see her._

"Agent Cohen, it's been too long."

"Yes, I've been stuck with babysitting duty. _In the mountains_. Now, who was it that stuck me here?"

"A heartless boss."

"No doubt. If he hadn't, Agent Savas, I could be there now. Next to you. Much _closer_." Her eyes smoldered.

"Yeah, definitely way too long. I hope this call means you'll be coming home tonight?"

Her smile was mischievous. "Booked my flight. In by ten."

" _Good_. There's _a lot_ to catch up on." His face darkened. "And how is Gabriel?"

Cohen looked to her side. "Gone now. Back to the cabin. They're adapting, but getting restless. They've made it a home. But the world has made it a prison."

There was a long pause as he considered her words. "No one said this would be easy for either of them. It's wrong, but the setup was too good. A fight we couldn't win."

"I think they need to continue to fight, even a guerrilla war."

"It's on the agenda. We've finally put things back together over here and I'm coordinating with Fred Simon at CIA. We won't leave them hanging. There's a lot to be done."

The landline on his desk buzzed. _Now what?_

"Hang on, Rebecca. This is from NYPD, on my red line." He pressed the button to go to speaker. "Hi, Will. Don't hear from you often."

"John, we need you and a crime unit up to the East Side, Sutton Place. _ASAP._ "

"You sound rattled. Boys in blue don't want this?"

"It's a car bomb. A big one with some collateral damage."

_Car bomb?_ "Anyone killed?"

"Several bystanders and those in the car."

Savas furrowed his brows. "Your crews are about as good as ours. Why me?"

"This one's different."

"Might be a challenge to ID those in the car if the fire was bad."

"That's just it, John. We know who was in that car. Phone GPS confirms it."

Savas glanced to his smartphone. Cohen's face looked tense. He turned back to the speaker on his landline. "Well, who was it?"

"Jack Craig, CEO of Goldman Sachs."

"Ah, hell. Are you sure?"

"Unless someone else had his phone, it was him and the driver."

"Dammit. A car bomb?"

"So it looks. That's why we're calling you in. It's getting out already and it will stir all the hornets' nests. And a car bomb, Goldman CEO? Whatever it is, it's big. Mafia, some Unabomber type, or maybe one of these new terrorist groups. Too radioactive for us."

"Understood. Moving on it now. Where are we headed?"

"Sutton Place south, fifty-three. Or just follow the GPS coordinates on all the photos flooding the internet. There's no hiding this."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**Franklin Joseph Miller**

MR. MILLER: We sent a crime unit. I was there, too. Jesus, what a mess. I hadn't seen anything like that up-close since Afghanistan. I think without the GPS data we'd have spent a while trying to figure out just who the hell was hit.

* * *

CBD: And the target was confirmed by location data and DNA analysis to be Jack Craig, CEO of Goldman Sachs?

MR. MILLER: That's right. There was no question.

* * *

CBD: And how did the defendant react to this event and information?

MR. MILLER: Well, sir, John Savas is a good as they come. Everyone was shocked. John, too, but he was professional. Got the division primed and assigned several agents to the case. They-

* * *

CBD: The agents assigned would be you and Agent Cohen?

MR. MILLER: Yes, that's right.

* * *

[REDACTED]: What about the other members of Intel 1?

MR. MILLER: They were on other duties.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Why didn't Savas treat the bombing with the full attention of the division?

MR. MILLER: Well, we didn't know then what it was all linked to. I mean, it was a car bombing in Manhattan. That's pretty fucking serious but still isolated. Still with more unknowns than knowns. There were a lot of serious things with unknowns going on in the world and we were charged with keeping tabs on a lot of it. I mean, it wasn't long before the whole finance thing started to go FUBAR and that ate our cybercrimes subdivision.

* * *

CBD: We'll get to that. Let's focus on how this began and what you remember. So, how did Intel 1 respond at this point?

MR. MILLER: Well, John—Agent Savas—personally got involved with the footwork.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Why?

MR. MILLER: He's like that. I mean he can't do it in every case, but he's very hands on. Goldman CEO? This had PR nightmare all over it. John went personally.

* * *

CBD: Went where?

MR. MILLER: To talk to the employees at Goldman about our investigation. To try and find out if they could shed any light on the situation.

* * *

CBD: He went alone?

MR. MILLER: No, he and Agent Cohen.

* * *

[REDACTED]: For the record, let it be noted that Agent Rebecca Cohen is the defendant's spouse. Mr. Miller, can you comment on FBI policy with respect to employees and nepotism laws? Romantic associations?

MR. MILLER: I don't much read the regs, sir.

[REDACTED]: Can you or can you not tell us if you know that it is against Bureau policy to have superiors and those under their authority in personal relationships?

MR. MILLER: No. That stuff never mattered to me. Besides, we always did everything a little different at Intel 1.

[REDACTED]: Yes, that is becoming more and more clear.

* * *

CBD: Let's return to the events immediately after the bombing. You say Savas and Cohen went to Goldman.

MR. MILLER: Yes. The morning after. We had already pulled a late night and put together some interesting information we had to run by them.
OCTOBER 18
3

# Vampire Squid

Savas and Cohen stepped out of the Crown Victoria in front of 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan. A towering glass skyscraper rose into the sky before them. Known as the Goldman Sachs Tower, the new forty-four story structure gleamed in the morning sun as it looked down from the northernmost end of Battery Park toward the World Financial Center. Savas could almost feel the power radiating from the monolith.

He closed the door and stared upward. "No logo. Not a letter or word on it. World's most influential financial institution, and it's basically anonymous."

Cohen stepped beside him. "It is kind of eerie, that's for sure. But I'll take it over yesterday's carnage, thank you. Forensics was picking things up with tweezers. I've had enough bombings for one lifetime."

"Hits too close to home." He turned to look behind them. "Look at those playing fields. Still brand new. This whole area was rubble and soot."

Cohen looped her hand under his arm. "It's hard to take, I know."

"Thanos died a few blocks from here. A lot of people did. Sometimes I think they should have left it like that. Broken. Raw." Kids squealed as they kicked a soccer ball across the field. "World moves on, and somehow we're all supposed to be okay with that."

"John, here they come."

Representatives from the bank rushed out to greet them. Two men and a woman, they wore appropriately moderate smiles for an occasion that consisted of their CEO having been blown up the day before, ushering them politely inside. Savas paused momentarily as they entered the lobby.

"That's impressive."

It was spectacularly cavernous, the ceiling higher than an opera house, works of modern art draped thirty feet in the air above them. It reminded him of standing in some of the newer airport terminals, only that everything was fashioned at several notches above the quality required for mass transportation hubs.

The woman nodded. "We're very proud of our new building and contributions to the revitalized financial center," she began, the delivery so perfect it seemed long rehearsed. "There are twenty-one million square feet and six trading floors, each larger than a football field. It's a very environmentally friendly building with floor ventilation, cooled by a hundred storage tanks containing nearly two million pounds of ice. Views of the Hudson River and New York Harbor are available for our most senior members."

"Like CEO Craig," said Savas.

The woman's faced paled. "Yes. Please, follow me."

The building spanned two city blocks, and to Savas it felt like the walk to the elevator took them across the length of it. No one followed them inside, and the three Goldman employees were silent as the elevator sped upwards and stopped on the eleventh floor. Stepping out, they found themselves in a second, less gargantuan lobby, which required yet another trek to a second bank of elevators. Windows covered the walls and portions of the ceiling, bathing their path in light.

They passed the second bank of elevators and stopped in front of a doorway. The woman swiped a card over a reader and then keyed in a passcode. The door opened, revealing a short corridor to a smaller, lone elevator door.

"For our top executives," she began as the elevator opened, "we have implemented enhanced privacy and security protocols. This elevator leads to the offices of the CEO and other top Goldman Sachs staff." Her eyes darted away. "Unfortunately, we do not control the security outside of Goldman."

Savas could see pain in the woman's face. "You seem to have known Jack Craig well, Ms.?"

"Greenwald. Susan Greenwald. Yes, I was his personal administrator. His right-hand woman, you might say. Geoffrey and Kendall here are my assistants." She nodded toward the two men. "As we discussed on the phone, you will be meeting with our interim CEO Donald Freiheit."

The elevator doors opened. Before them an expansive conference room ran across the floor, centered on an enormous table of cherry wood. A man at the end of a polished, wooden table rose and ambled over in their direction.

Susan Greenwald reached over and tugged on Savas' jacket, whispering to him. "I don't care what you hear about us in the press, but Jack was a good man. He's done more for this country, for this city than anyone I know. Find his killer." With that she turned on her sharp heels and entered the elevator, the doors closing quickly as she vanished from view.

"Agents Savas and Cohen," came the voice of Donald Freiheit. "Two names that need no introduction."

Freiheit shook their hands, an expression of genuine interest on his face. He was a short man, bordering on stout, with thick glasses and a mass of gray and black curls that gave him more the look of an elder artist at a poetry slam than a new CEO. He led them to the table and poured water for each, sitting next to them like a professor before two students at office hours.

"We've had several rounds with the NYPD and FBI since yesterday. All of Jack's scheduling data, emails, phone logs—they're now in your hands one way or the other, either from us or your national databases. I'm not sure what else I can tell you, but I'm honored by the visit."

Savas nodded to Cohen and she got immediately to the point, removing several photographs from her briefcase and placing them before Freiheit. "Surveillance footage from a handful of operating CCTV cameras identified some very unusual elements in the bombing."

Freiheit glanced at the images. They were grainy, the black limo blurred in the still shot, even the street signs hard to read at the resolution afforded. However, his eyes immediately gravitated to the anomalies she referred to.

"What is this black thing on the top of the car?"

"That's what we're trying to find out, Mr. Freiheit," she said. "Look at this image, taken from another camera closer to the exit ramp from FDR Drive."

"It looks like some giant bird or something. What's it doing?"

Cohen shook her head. "We don't know, and we were hoping that you might could shed some light on it."

The CEO adjusted his glasses. "Me? How?"

Savas bent forward motioning between the images. "Between the time when the vehicle containing Mr. Craig took the exit ramp and the time the bomb exploded, something descended onto the roof of the car. Our analysts are still conferring with the military, but our best hypothesis is that we're looking at some sort of remotely piloted aircraft, an unmanned aerial vehicle that was tracking the CEO's position and then moved to intercept the car immediately before the explosion."

"Unmanned aerial vehicle?" Freiheit seemed stunned. "You mean a drone?"

"Yes," said Cohen, "a drone."

"Doesn't look like a drone."

"Not like the military aircraft shown on TV," said Cohen, "but there are hundreds of other military and civilian models of more designs than you could imagine out there. We can't get enough information from these low-quality images to positively ID the model, or even establish that it is a drone, but it's our best working model right now."

Savas focused intently on the new CEO. "Is there any way this could have been Goldman surveillance? Your Ms. Greenwald was extremely protective of Mr. Craig. Does your company use drones to monitor or keep tabs on Goldman execs?"

Freiheit shook his head vigorously. "Absolutely not. I've never even heard it floated as an idea. I'm not sure it would even be legal."

"It wouldn't," said Savas. "Not yet anyway, but the laws on domestic drone use are in dramatic flux. Some honest mistakes could have been made."

"Not by us, I can assure you. We've never had such a security effort and currently have no plans for one. I find these images very disturbing."

"So do we, Mr. Freiheit. But before we went on any wild-drone chases, the obvious step would be to see if Goldman was in the business. The topic is sensitive, and, I hope I don't need to emphasize, confidential. So we did need your time today."

He nodded. "I understand."

Cohen placed the images back in a folder. "A final item. FBI analysis of phone logs indicates that Mr. Craig made a series of calls to Washington the morning he died. The numbers were resolved to those used by Heidi Moss, the Utah Senator. Since these calls were only minutes before he died, they are of special interest to us. Do you know his relationship with the Senator?"

Freiheit licked his lips quickly and shook his head. "No. I mean, Goldman has many supporters, as well as enemies, on Capitol Hill. It's not unusual for some of our most important lobbying efforts to come straight from the top, as it were. Business, you understand?" He smiled wanly. "Beyond that, I really have no idea what those conversations might be about."

The interim CEO walked the agents to the elevator. "Susan will meet you on the Sky Lobby, the eleventh-floor lobby. You should take some time there if you can. It's quite a view." Freiheit smiled as the doors closed.

Cohen smirked as the elevator descended. "Bad actor."

"Yeah, he's lying," said Savas. "Not about the drones—I think he was honest there. But there's something going on with the senator."

She began typing into her phone. "Next shuttle to DC?"

"Think so. Have the team give Moss the heads up that we'll need to speak with her today."

"You going to run it through the Washington branch?"

Savas grimaced. "I should. But that will delay everything. I'm so used to the autonomy at Intel 1. I can't stand the bureaucratic dances, anymore. It's likely a dead end, so no harm, no foul. Right?"

"Okay," said Cohen raising her eyebrows. "You know best."

Savas frowned at her.
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**Franklin Joeseph Miller**

[REDACTED]: Why did Savas purposefully keep other FBI divisions in the dark?

MR. MILLER: I'm not sure. That was a judgment call, maybe the wrong one. But it would have cost time and John felt he was on the scent.

* * *

CBD: And that's why the two agents immediately flew to D.C.?

MR. MILLER: Yes. At that point we didn't know what was happening. Just got a text message that they were following up on a lead that led them there. Ring the senator's office and let them know.

* * *

CBD: That would be Senator Moss?

MR. MILLER: Yes.

* * *

CBD: What did the senator say?

MR. MILLER: I wasn't there, but we were briefed when they returned.

* * *

CBD: And what were you told in that briefing?
4

# Terror on the Hill

Dusk had arrived in Washington. Street lamps engaged, drivers switched their headlights on, and the buildings took on a checkerboard pattern of light and dark. The large window before the FBI agents looked down to the busy streets, the view blocked by the form of an older woman before them.

"This is highly irregular and very short notice, but I understand the circumstances are unusual," said Senator Moss.

Savas and Cohen had rushed to meet with the congresswoman as fast as possible, but extracting themselves from New York and navigating the D.C. rush-hour traffic had put them in much later than they would have preferred. They were lucky to catch Moss before she left for the day. High-level phone calls had helped constrain the situation—when the CEO of Goldman Sachs is blown up in Manhattan, normal etiquette is suspended.

"Indeed they are, Senator," said Savas as they took seats around her desk. Moss was nearing sixty, yet still carried the grace and self-assured mannerisms of the opera singer she had been a lifetime ago. Cohen had quickly filled out her resume for them on the way over. A fourth-term Republican from Utah, she had been a vocal critic of internet freedoms because of cyber-threats to national security and had worked to enact laws to bring the wild online world under increasing surveillance and regulation. As chair of the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation, she now exercised enormous influence on national telecommunications.

Cohen leaned forward toward the senator. "Only minutes before he was killed, Goldman Sachs CEO Jack Craig made several phone calls to your office number, Senator. Can you tell us what these calls were about?"

"Those are privileged communications. Unless we want to get very messy with the lawyers, I can't divulge what was discussed. However, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Issues of business and telecom, with Mr. Craig arguing for certain approaches that he felt would be beneficial to the country and his business."

She smiled. For far too long. Savas picked up the thread.

"Could it perhaps have something to do with the highly unusual series of votes that have come from you the last month, Senator?" Moss' smiled faltered. "My colleague here has tallied not only a surprising reversal of several positions on the congressional floor, but also an increasing number of articles in the press trying to figure out just what exactly is going on."

"I'm not sure what you are talking about. The press is always looking for a critical angle, you know that. My positions have always been clear. Certainly, different pieces of legislation can embody my positions to different degrees of satisfaction, and voting for or against a bill is often complicated by the sausage-like production methods of these laws, where the good and bad can be mixed together."

Cohen didn't mask her annoyance. "I'm sure that's true. But there are bills that hardly changed where your votes have flipped. For example, Murdock-Holsen. A bill that would have denied the NSA certain access to internet communications. You initially opposed that bill, gave speeches against it, opposing the very nature of limited access by our surveillance branches." Cohen read from her tablet. "To quote from your speech, you called it 'A dangerous bill that would tie the hands of our law enforcement agencies and aid the work of criminals and terrorists.' Yet three weeks ago you stopped speaking against it and have voted twice to move the bill through committee to a vote."

"I believe that the concerns I had were adequately addressed in the revised version."

Savas could see the woman's lip trembling, the tightness in her hand grasping the side of her desk. Cohen seemed to notice as well. This topic had put Senator Moss under tremendous stress, and his instincts told him she was lying to them. _What are you so afraid of, Senator Moss?_

"Has the topic of domestic drones ever been part of your conversations with Goldman Sachs?" asked Cohen.

The terrified look intensified, and the senator glanced quickly toward photo frames on her desk. She seemed to half-whisper the next words. "No. Never. Why do you ask?" The false smile almost seemed macabre, now.

Cohen ignored her question. "You are on the record as supporting their use."

"Yes," she said distractedly, seeming not to see the FBI agents anymore and gazing behind them. "They are needed for homeland security. To make us safe. That's what I thought."

Savas furrowed his brows. "What you _thought?_ "

She blinked quickly and regained focus. "What I _think_ , yes, agent Savas. Law enforcement can make great use of drones to pursue criminals when vehicle chases would be impossible or dangerous, take surveillance without endangering officers, many things."

"And what of arming them?"

She cocked her head to the side. "That has been discussed in closed-door sessions, but I don't see that as necessary or likely in the near future."

Savas sensed her resolve returning and saw that they were losing the advantage. He spoke on a hunch. "Are those your daughters?"

Instantly, an anxiety seemed to spread over her features. She smiled stiffly. "Why, yes, yes. Margaret and Sophia. Twins. They're in college now, opposite sides of the country." Her fingers curled inward toward her palm, the nails digging slightly into the wood. "Identical twins and so different. Isn't that strange?"

"How are they doing?" he continued.

"Well!" she nearly shouted. Cohen leaned backward, and the senator adjusted her tone instantly. "Sophia's pre-med, 4.0. Margaret's still finding her way, but she's doing great. Absolutely great." That smile again.

"Well, try to appreciate every minute, senator," said Savas earnestly. "I can tell you, you never know what you have until it's gone."

Her face blanched. "Yes. You know all too well, agent Savas. I will. I promise you."

They stepped out of the Russell Senate Office Building into the brisk October evening, a black town car before them, waiting by the curb. Savas pulled his collar up and turned to Cohen.

"Well, what do you make of _that?_ "

She shook her head, a cool breeze tossing brown hair about her face. "She's been compromised, John. Did you see the terror in her eyes? You pushed a very bad button with her kids."

"But who? And what? And why with fear? Don't the players just buy their way to influence these days? Corporations are people, all that?"

She nodded. "This doesn't make sense, and it feels very dark. Moss is a believer, John. You can see it all over her record. I'm not saying she's above lobbying or influence, but nothing in her twenty years in the Senate compares with what's happened the last few weeks. She's either had a mental breakdown, a stroke or something, or what we saw means somebody has her in a very bad vice."

"Her kids?"

"We should look into them. Check on their whereabouts, status. Start tonight with social media, get some shoes on the ground at their schools."

"If they were snatched, we'd know."

"True. But maybe something will come out of it if there has been some kind of threat."

"Political? Dirty laundry?"

"Always in play with these folks."

They arrived at the vehicle, and Savas opened the back door for Cohen. They got in and he slammed it shut distractedly.

"Reagan National," he told the driver. He whispered to Cohen. "A CEO car bombed. A US senator looking blackmailed and changing her votes. What's going on?"

She stared out the window. "Nothing good, that's for sure."
5

# Worm

Halfway around the world, off the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the city-state of Singapore was an engine churning into morning overdrive. Businesses hummed, planes were launched around the world, financial transactions from hundreds of nations sped through the computer systems of their exchanges.

In a gleaming new building of blue and gray, on a wide and open floor lit by a bank of windows facing toward the front of the structure, rows of digital detectives sat in front of their computers. Near the middle of the floor, a short, gray-haired man of European descent hunched arthritically beside the desk of a young Asian woman. He wore a stunned expression as he stared at her screen.

"Are you sure about this?"

Yi Ling nodded to her superior. The thin fingers of her right hand drummed nervously on her keyboard. She reflexively tugged at her chest-length hair with her left. She could not afford to be wrong about this.

It was only two months ago that she had landed this job at the newly opened INTERPOL Digital Crime Centre in Singapore. The DCC was a dream job, letting her use her computer skills in her home country under the auspices of one of the largest and most respected law enforcement agencies in the world. Her friends were all impressed. It paid very well. But now, everything was threatened by the discoveries she had made over the last two days. It had taken her all of yesterday to convince herself that should risk raising the issue with her superiors.

"Yes, Mr. Rosenfeld," her perfect English hardly accented by her native Mandarin. "It's always on the derivative bets. All off-market."

The older man coughed and adjusted his glasses. "Nothing from the exchanges?"

"No," she said, wetting her lips with her tongue. "See these modifications to the contracts? They occur after the parties have established the contract terms but before the instrument is finalized."

Rosenfeld nodded. "That's incredible. How are they not noticing the modifications?"

"I don't know, sir, except that few check the source code anymore. Everything is automated these days, everything comes out of code. Maybe that's why nothing was tried on the exchanges since there'd be too many eyes on the trades. There's a code injection into the contract scripts here." She indicated a row of text on one side of the display. "The siphoning is minimal and scaled to the return on the instrument. They'd have to dig through the layers of fees and clauses to root it out."

"God damned penny shaving. But these are pretty big pennies. How on earth are these modifications getting in there?"

"I'm not sure, but look at this. The losses don't show except for hundredths of a second because an equal amount of money comes into the account."

"From where?"

"It's random. Shell-accounts, investment banks, everywhere. And that's what happens in every instance. There is a loss and nearly immediate plug of the deficit." She didn't want to say more and hoped Rosenfeld would reach the conclusion she had.

"I'll be damned. It's some sort of light-speed Ponzi-scheme."

_Yes._ "I think so, sir. And I think it works because of the epic nature of the worm infection. There are so many compromised accounts, tens of thousands, that the code left on the systems can continuously shuffle money, even in these increased amounts, so that for no length of time does any one account report much of a loss. It's fantastically complicated, but there is so much unregulated and unmonitored in these dark markets. I think that explains how it's gotten away with this for so long and with so much money involved."

"Just how bad is the spread?"

"I don't know for sure, but unprecedented. I couldn't believe how systematic it is. I've been using the NSA share-data on the known financial OTC trading, and I haven't found any derivative contracts of significance in the last six months that haven't been modified. It's got to total in the trillions."

"Incredible."

"And as long as the contract is viable, it's funneling the money. Untraceable. The money trail disappears in one offshore account after another."

"Like some damn invisible parasite. Thank God we have access to the OTC bids. We'd never have known. Chalk up a success story to the NSA octopus."

The woman swallowed. "Well, that may be part of the problem, sir."

The old man looked at her face and pulled a chair over. He sighed, sitting down. "I'm not going to like this, am I? Go on."

"I'm not sure yet, but there seems to be an association with the NSA data hacks and the timing of the code penetration." God, she hoped she wasn't making a fool of herself. She was prodding a dragon. She knew that.

Rosenfeld removed his glasses. "Wait. You mean that whoever is behind this might be piggy-backing on the NSA worms and backdoors?"

"I think so, sir."

" _Oy vey_." He put a hand to his head. "This is going to explode."

Yi Ling felt her stomach churn.

After a silent moment, the old man replaced his glasses and patted her on the back. "This is incredible work. I'm going straight to Richards with this, getting this off my plate as fast as possible. We'll see how the bigwigs are going to handle it. I need you to prepare a presentation. I'm going to put you as point. This is going to bring in all the agencies and spooks. Governments are going to freak out, especially the US. We're looking at a game-changer here."

The slight Asian woman trembled with excitement. "Yes, sir. Immediately."

The old man stared grimly forward. "You might just have uncovered the biggest financial cybercrime in history."
6

# Formative Years

"J _en, what the hell is your son doing at my computer?"_

_The black hair of a young boy popped up from behind a monitor, his eyes wide behind oversized glasses. Several books were positioned around him on the desk, and his hand clutched a computer mouse in an iron grip._

_A red-faced man stood in the doorway to the home office, his teeth bared, high-end casual clothing draping an athletic form. A woman rushed past him into the room, placing herself between the boy and the man, hands up as if to ward off a blow._

_"Now, Richard, he just wanted to try some programming. It's for his class presentation." She smiled wildly. "His will be so much better than all the other children's! He's a genius, you know!"_

_"A genius. Am I hearing this right?" He stepped into the room deliberately. The woman's smile faded. "Your second-grade brat is fucking up my workstation for a goddamned school project? I have trades on that machine, client information, our taxes! Important documents! Where do you think all this comes from, lady?" He gestured dramatically around the room. "Your nice clothes? Your car? That bitch therapist? Or those ritzy lunches you have with your girlfriends?"_

_Her shoulders slumped and she backed away from him. 'Richard, it's only—"_

_"How many times have we talked about this? I don't know what his father let him get away with, but the little prince has got to learn the rules around here! My desk and my things are off limits! They're not toys! Do you understand that, kid?"_

_"He_ is _doing serious work, Richard!" The wild smile returned. "See? He wants to be like you. He's got your books out and he's learning to write those programs like you do! I'm so proud of him!"_

_"So you're defending him in spite of what I just said?"_

_"Yes?" she said, her face falling._

_Richard lurched forward, left arm whipping across his body to backhand Jenny across the face. Her head snapped back with a crunch, and she dropped to the ground, catching herself on her palms._

_"Mom!" The boy leapt up from the chair, then froze. Without turning his face away from his mother, his wide eyes darted toward the broad shape in the middle of the room. He began to shake._

_Richard stared down at the crumpled form of the woman, drops of blood falling to the floor from the back of her hand, the overturned palm already filled like a bowl with a thick, crimson fluid. The anger drained from his face._

_"Fuck!" he said, turning to the boy. "This is your fault, you know, you little brat. I don't want to see you touching anything of mine again without my permission, or I'll beat the shit out of you, too." He spun and stormed out of the room. "I won't be back till late. Try to clean that mess up."_

_There was a jangle of keys and then a door slam. The house fell silent._

_"Mom," said the boy again, moving away from the desk. His hands reached out hesitantly toward her._

_"No, no!" she said loudly, keeping her face angled away from him, her voice distorted, mouth full. "It's okay, pooh-bear. Don't come closer. Mommy's okay."_

_"Mom, your nose—"_

_The woman tried to stand, swayed and steadied herself on a chair nearby. Her face and shirt were stained red, her nose bent gruesomely._

_"Can't get blood on his chairs," she mumbled, stumbling sideways with her hands cupped under her face. She reached the bathroom just off the office and closed the door behind her. The boy heard her retching._

_For several moments he didn't move. Just faced the door of the bathroom, breathing labored, body shaking. He closed his eyes. Water ran behind the door and the sounds of muffled sobs leaked into the office space. His breathing slowed._

_Exhaling, he opened his eyes. His upper lip twitched. He turned to the computer and rested in the chair, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose._

_Richard was too big. He knew that. He couldn't punch him the way Richard had hit his mother, not unless he wanted a worse beating. He couldn't hurt him that way. But if he didn't do something, he would hate himself forever. He knew that. He couldn't just let him get away with it. His mind raced._

_His stepfather didn't like anyone to use his things. His stepfather's computer was_ important _. The things on the computer were_ serious work _. Maybe it was true, maybe he didn't know how to code like a grown up yet. He wasn't sure. No one would teach him at school and his programs didn't always work like he wanted. He knew he needed to learn more._

_But he could delete files. He knew how to do that._

_He could delete ALL his stepfather's files._

_He opened a terminal window and began typing._
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

DEPOSITION OF:

**Rebecca Ruth Cohen**

called for examination by Counsel for the Defendant, pursuant to Notice of Deposition, at the Independent Council Offices, located at

[REDACTED] Washington, D.C.,

when were present on behalf of the

respective parties: [REDACTED]

CBD: Will you please identify yourself for the record?

MS. COHEN: Rebecca Cohen, FBI special agent, Intel 1.

* * *

CBD: You understand that your testimony here is on the record, and your words might later be used to charge and try you as an enemy combatant of the United States?

MS. COHEN: I want to petition for a civilian lawyer and habeas corpus.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Your requests have already been noted and processed. Until such a time as they are ruled upon, please focus on the inquiry at hand. Do you understand the law as it applies to you?

MS. COHEN: I was told that this is a deposition. Isn't it a bit unusual to have [REDACTED] with my counsel? Cross-examination?

[REDACTED]: Please answer the question. Do you understand the law as it applies to you?

MS. COHEN: Oh, I understand, all right. This is a damned inquisition.

* * *

CBD: To the matter at hand, Ms. Cohen.

MS. COHEN: Do I have a choice?

* * *

CBD: There is some discrepancy about when and how the Washington FBI divisions were informed of your suspicions concerning Senator Heidi Moss.

MS. COHEN: Clarification. By "your" you mean Agent Savas and myself?

CBD: That is correct. Can you shed light on this?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Enough! Damn the protocol issues. Agent Cohen, it seems pretty clear that Intel 1 kept this information to itself for some time. Now, when you and Savas returned from D.C., what were his actions at Intel 1?

MS. COHEN: We didn't have any time to do much. All hell was starting to break loose. The virus was already eating through the world financial system, and the first big break on that, hell, the discovery of it, was made in Singapore.

* * *

CBD: You knew this then?

MS. COHEN: No. But that's the timeline.

CBD: Let's stick with what you knew at the time and how the defendant behaved.

MS. COHEN: How did he behave? We were both exhausted from racing around trying to piece together what the hell was happening with the car bombing, when bam! A VIP kidnapping spree and a fucking boat-bomb!

* * *

CBD: Wait, one thing at a-

MS. COHEN: We were hardly given a moment's rest and then I'm racing to midtown while John and Frank are landing back in D.C. to interface with the local FBI divisions on the snatches there. My work cell is firing like a receptionist's and our division is split across the city and between cities. Then, the next thing you know it's the NSA on the line and-

* * *

CBD: Ms. Cohen, please! One thing at a time. We need things to be clear.

MS. COHEN: You want clarity? You have us isolated and jailed under military law, asking all sorts of questions about our protocol during those days! Protocol! You want clarity? Try following protocol when VIPs are disappearing and blowing up in real time around you, when you get informed that a cyberworm is chewing through the modern monetary system!

* * *

CBD: We understand that this was a difficult time, Ms. Cohen, but-

MS. COHEN: You don't understand anything!

CBD: Please. I'm his counsel, I'm on your side, here.

MS. COHEN: Are you?

* * *

CBD: All right, let's calm this down and try again. After your return from D.C., what happened?

MS. COHEN: What happened? Everything happened.
OCTOBER 19
7

# Snatched

Citigroup CEO Mitchell O'Kelly glared across his desk at his chief of security. He couldn't believe they were wasting his time on this, but the directors had insisted and there was one thing even the CEO couldn't ignore, and that was the Board.

He had known Jack Craig personally, of course. They'd been sparring frenemies for their entire careers across a slew of different corporate locations. O'Kelly had always found Craig an uptight puritan who couldn't help but judge everyone else around him. But he had respected Jack. The man was a fucking genius with the nose of a shark, and you were a fool to bet against him unless you were holding one hell of a hand.

What had happened last week was indeed disturbing. Certainly O'Kelly was worried for his own safety, but the odds that this was something corporate CEOs in general were going to have to be concerned about were very low. He still didn't have a working model for who could have committed such an act—nor had law enforcement as far as he could tell—but it was most likely related to specifics of Craig's business dealings, his personal life, or a random nut job like John Hinckley or Mark Chapman. Sure, beef up the security, scramble the schedules, and then get on with business.

_If only._

"Mr. O'Kelly, we have contacted a private security firm that was active in Iraq for VIPs."

"Active in _Iraq_?" This was getting ridiculous!

"Yes, sir. They have a lot of experience dealing with threats of violence against vulnerable and important targets. They are mostly former military, highly trained, experienced with this sort of thing."

"This is _Manhattan_ , gentlemen, not Kabul or Baghdad. We're not going to be driving around in bombproof Humvees. Let's get a grip."

"Sir, we've been personally contacted by the Chairman. He supports our recommendations. With threats of this nature—bombings, IEDs, whatever—we need people who have clocked hours with this sort of thing. The landscape changes."

_Holy shit._ "What does this mean? Armored vehicles? SWAT escorts? Can I go to my son's soccer games without a parent shakedown?"

The two security men glanced at each other anxiously. The older man spoke. "We don't know yet what they will recommend, but we have scheduled a meeting with them tomorrow, first thing in the morning. They're eager to find work in the States, sir."

"I'm sure they are."

"We'll get recommendations and then brief you and schedule a second meeting all together to iron out a course of action."

_Ah, to hell with it._ "Fine. Do what you need to do. Now, out. This nonsense has taken enough of my time today."

The two men excused themselves with apologies and quickly exited the CEO's office. O'Kelly swiveled his chair away from the closing door and glared up at the dim ceiling of the executive suite. The second floor design hadn't been renovated for years and still possessed the wood and metal, mirrors and leather sensibility of a previous era of financial power. He found the stately atmosphere helped clear his mind, focus his thoughts on the tasks at hand.

His cell phone rang. He scanned the caller ID.

_Franklin?_

His son had grown up with a special rule in the house: Dad isn't to be bothered during the work day unless it's an emergency. In sixteen years he had never called. Not once. Not during his parents divorce. Not even when he had smashed his first BMW on the Long Island Expressway. Why was he calling now?

"Franklin, what's going on?"

A harsh voice cut through the speaker. "We have your son, O'Kelly. Don't do anything rash, anything stupid, or we will not hesitate to kill him."

O'Kelly jerked upward and stood at attention, his gaze wild. "Who is this?"

"You know what we did to your partner in crime, Jack Craig. We blew him to bits. His bones litter the streets of this city, one of many he robbed for so many years. We will do much worse to your brat if you do not follow our instructions to the letter."

His pulse racing, sweat building on his brow, O'Kelly paced the plush floors of the executive suite in panic. "How do I know—"

"Dad?"

It was Franklin. O'Kelly closed his eyes.

"Dad, God, please. They're not kidding." He seemed to be choking up. "They _killed_ Coach Larsen. Shot him. _Dead!_ It's my fault, Dad! He was just trying to—"

Abruptly his son's voice was cut off.

"Convincing enough for you?"

"Yes," he whispered, his mind racing for solutions. He walked to his desk and the red panic button.

"You have two choices, O'Kelly. The first is that you kill you son by calling the cops, the Feds, your new military men," said the harsh voice.

"How do you know—"

" _Or_ , you act normally, alert no one, and do exactly what we say. You have no guarantees from us except that we will kill him. I think you know we are willing. But we don't give a damn about your son. Only about _you_."

A voice cried from the background.

"Dad! No, don't—"

O'Kelly heard a slap, then silence.

"We are more than willing to let your spawn escape to gain increased cooperation from you. Because we have a special use for you. And you will be helpful to us because you know that your son will never be safe."

"What do you want?"

"There will be no ransom. There will be no stalling. There is a black SUV waiting below on Park Avenue. If you are not in that vehicle in five minutes, your son dies. You are to come down from your second-floor perch. Do not bring your armed muscle."

"They will follow me once they see I'm leaving."

"Make sure you get outside. Then whatever happens, do not pause, do not stop, do not seek to do anything except find your way to that vehicle. Do you understand?"

Thoughts and scenarios flew through his mind, options and risks and assessments that could not be made with any confidence without data, without time.

"This is not something the both of you are going to get out of, O'Kelly. Make your choice: your life or your son's. In four minutes, a decision will be made one way or the other."

The connection was broken.

Mitchell O'Kelly did not hesitate. He had been presented with an impossible choice, and he didn't need any more deliberation to make his decision.

Outwardly calm, he walked quickly out of his office and down the hall. Luckily the ground floor was only two flights down, otherwise there would be no chance to escape without being closely followed. Completely contrary to habit, he entered the stairway to the surprised expressions of the secretaries and leapt down the steps in painful bounds. His aging frame wasn't up to this sort of shock, but it seemed likely he would soon have more serious concerns.

The CEO of Citigroup burst out from the lobby stairwell and walked like a man possessed toward the main entrance. He was not spotted until he had crossed nearly two-thirds of the distance. Shouts came from the voices of his security team, and his peripheral vision sensed several shapes converging from behind. They would reach him in seconds.

He was through the doorway, the sunlight of the clear October day blinding him momentarily, his eyes squinting desperately to find the black SUV.

_There._ Blackened windows hid the occupants. O'Kelly surrendered all pretense of casualness and sprinted toward the truck.

"Mr. O'Kelly!"

His bodyguards cried behind him. The men were under the strictest orders. They would have him in their arms within seconds for this dangerous breach of protocol, especially after recent events. The black vehicle was still fifty yards away. He'd never make it.

Hornets buzzed past his head. There were screams. He heard bodies fall heavily to the ground. He didn't look back. He ran harder, the back door of the SUV opening, arms grabbing his, pulling him in violently. The vehicle lurched forward with screeching tires and he was thrown backward into a seat.

But he had seen. In a split second upon entering the truck and turning his head toward the plaza in front of the building, it was all too clear.

The fiends had shot and killed the men that had been charged to protect him. Their bodies were strewn across the cement and steps, people racing in panic away from the scene.

O'Kelly closed his eyes. God only knew what they were going to do to him.
8

# Vanished

Rebecca Cohen sat in the back of the FBI vehicle, nearly sick from the lurching dash through traffic. Staring at the choppy video feed on her phone was surely not helping the situation. They should have just called. But they needed to see each other.

"On the tarmac, Rebecca," said a pixelated Savas, his phrases peppered with staccato pauses. "This is getting a bit insane."

They had not been back a day before the next crisis had pulled them apart again. This time it was sudden disappearances of important people both in New York and in Washington. Congressman, aides, more CEOs, workers at the Federal Reserve Board. Whatever theories they had before were jettisoned. Whatever was going on, it was highly coordinated and professionally implemented.

"Feels like we're back under siege from Mjolnir," she said to the frozen face of Savas. "John?"

There was a pause, and then the connection reestablished. "Lost most of that except for Thor's Hammer. But I think I know what you were saying."

They had split their team at Intel 1. Savas had taken ex-Marine Frank Miller with him to DC. They would soon be on their way to the Capitol. Cohen had called another agent on their team, JP Rideout, and they were going to meet at the headquarters of Citigroup. The other cases were reported disappearances, no shows and quiet vanishings. But not at Citi. There were witnesses. There were bodies. There had been a failed pursuit by NYPD.

The sedan jerked to a stop and Cohen dropped the phone, the connection with Savas lost. She quickly texted him that she had arrived and would talk to him later. He would soon be busy as well.

The driver opened the door for her and she stepped out quickly, heading for the crowd of police and decorations of yellow tape in front of the building. The glass and steel structure towered above her. Horns blared like a strong wind from the snarled traffic of rubberneckers. _Here to see the bloodbath_. She counted four bodies. Two were near the exits, and two had moved toward Park Avenue before they were cut down. A black NYPD detective met her.

"Agent Cohen?" he asked. "I'm Tyrell Sacker. You're it for the Feds?"

"No, we have a crime group en route and another special agent from my division."

"Which is?"

"Intel 1."

The cops eyes opened wider. "Well, we need the best. Reports are coming in from all over the city. The radio's total chaos."

"I know. Look, we're going to go through this thoroughly, but can you tell me what you've put together? Is there enough for a summary?"

Sacker nodded. "A crowd of witnesses, and security cams to go back to and verify. But it still doesn't make sense, even if the testimony agrees so far. Their CEO literally comes sprinting out of the building, ignoring the calls of his security team, running straight for a van or SUV. He was scheduled for meetings all day and was already late for one in the building. It's like he went nuts. His team bolted after him, and, well, you can see what happened to them."

"Shots came from the vehicle?"

"Doesn't seem so. None of the witnesses reported seeing anything in the truck but some dark figures pulling O'Kelly inside. The shots were professional, agent Cohen," Sacker said, looking back toward the bodies. "No evidence of misses. I mean, how often does that happen? I'd bet there were gunman positioned and waiting."

"We'll have our ballistics teams here soon, and we'll need to get all the CCTV footage from all security cameras in the area."

"On that. I'm point for this scene, so you'll be talking to me."

Cohen smiled. She liked Sacker immediately. He was gritty yet polite, sharp with an underlying empathic feel. She hoped that she could trust him.

"All right, we'll work out the coordination of this investigation soon. For now, take me up to the crime scene. I want to get a look at the victims."

The Capitol Police officers glared at the hulking form of Frank Miller with suspicion. Savas stood with him before the grand entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building. The stately marble, lofted steps, and the presence of twenty to thirty uniformed officers in combat gear sporting military-grade automatic weapons made an undeniable impression. He was as polite as possible.

"Yes, special agents Savas and Miller. These are our IDs. We're en route from New York because of an apparent coordinated abduction connected to those here."

A nervous officer stood several steps above them. "We have explicit instructions not to allow anyone except approved law enforcement officers into the building."

"We _are_ approved law enforcement officers!" growled Miller. "We're here _by request_ of the agency acting on orders from the fucking president! The little headsets you're wearing with mics—try them out and contact your damn superiors."

Several weapons were pointed their way.

Miller was losing his temper, as he tended to do. A decorated former soldier, he had been shot twice saving Savas' life in the line of duty as an FBI agent. He didn't suffer fools well, and there wasn't much that scared the man. Which is what frightened Savas.

"Okay, Frank, let's just back off and wait for the red tape to unspool. There's a lot of tension right now. We're all on the same side."

They returned to their car and waited out the next half hour. Evening began to fall, and the streets were a ghost town. The Capitol had been completely locked down.

The wall of police opened and a figure in a suit shuffled down the steps. Savas immediately recognized him—Tim Cox, Assistant Director in Charge, a lanky, bespectacled man and former Secret Service agent. The local branch had brought in the big guns on this scene. People were shook up.

"Agent Savas," said Cox extending his hand with a surprisingly strong grip. "Your reputation precedes you of course, but you're a long way from home."

"Things are moving very fast, sir, and there hasn't been time to coordinate investigations. But the murder of Goldman CEO Jack Craig may be tied in some fashion to Senator Heidi Moss."

The Assistant Director squinted. "How so?"

"His last phone calls, minutes before his death, were to her. We paid her a visit and while nothing concrete came up, it was clear that she was under some sort of threat of some kind."

"And you did not bring this to the attention of my office, because?"

_Great._ Miller glanced at him and Savas tried hard to ignore it. "It was a hunch, sir. And if not for the kidnappings of other CEOs and members of Congress today, it would have remained a completely unsubstantiated hunch. We can't bother you with every possible idea."

"Still, Savas, this is our turf. Let us decide what is worthy of our attention."

"Point taken, Assistant Director." Savas hoped they would be cooperative. "As you know, we have multiple events in New York, some still coming in as people are reported missing. I'm back here to begin coordinating with you on this seemingly related set of disappearances."

Cox nodded. "It's unprecedented. We have three missing Congressman, a high-level official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and just as of ten minutes ago, it seems that the head of the Federal Reserve did not get off her plane at Reagan National."

"Louise Lelann?"

Cox sighed. "So now you see the magnitude of this. Homeland Security is descending like a storm cloud, as if they didn't eat up enough of our departments already. We're on lockdown, the president's day has been scrambled. I'm not sure who knows where he is. It feels like a terrorist attack."

"I think it is," said Miller.

"Well, then you folks are the right ones for the job."

"There's no one claiming responsibility? No ransom demands? Anything?"

Cox shook his head. "Nothing. But the game is still early. It's certainly different than anything before. The murder of Craig—it could have been anything. But it was _murder_. A car bomb. A terrorist-y thing. Abductions of state officials? Corporate CEOs? What the hell is the play here?"

Savas looked at Miller and back to Cox, the cold night air bringing more of a chill than was warranted.

"I'm sorry to say, Assistant Director, I have no idea."
9

# Under the Radar

"Senator, Mr. Avram's yacht is probably the _safest_ place you can be today," said a gorgeous blonde hanging on the old man's arm. She turned toward him conspiratorially, whispering in his ear. "They say it even has a radar system to detect missiles." The senator reddened as her ruby lips brushed his earlobe.

The boat carved its way through New York harbor like a titan. Nebula was the world's most expensive privately owned yacht, three years in the making and boasting a pool studded with Havana bars, a helipad, five water jets, a cinema, and a four thousand square foot master suite. Nine decks, each with entry and exit points, rose from the waterline and gave the vessel more the appearance of an aerodynamic condo than a private cruise boat.

"Truly," came the deep voice of Robert Avram, "she's the safest boat in the waters today."

They stood on the upper deck, lower Manhattan a frozen collection of ten thousand Will-o'-the-wisps of skyscrapers, apartments, and bridge lights. A full moon rose into the night sky and painted the gleaming surfaces on the yacht in luminescent hues. The blonde escort smiled broadly at the CEO, her sequined dress a light show reflecting the moonlight, the plunge of her neckline scandalous. Soft jazz floated on the crisp air from below.

"I hope so," said the senator, vacillating between the seduction hanging on his arm and a set of internal worries that he could not completely dismiss. "I'm actually scared to go home tonight. People have disappeared from their own houses!"

The woman purred. "Maybe you don't have to go home tonight."

Avram smirked and left the pair to their courting dance. He had no doubts the woman would be in the old fool's bed this evening. He had hired the cream of the crop. And he had made sure that useful photos would be taken discretely at opportune moments. Robert Avram ran his business like an old Mafia boss, and he was proud of that fact.

Stepping down the stairway toward the floor below, he felt a buzz in his shirt pocket. He removed his phone and answered. Almost immediately his face turned ashen.

"You can't be serious?" He closed his mouth quickly, glancing around the harbor in panic. "Yes, I'm listening." His eyes widened as a man's voice spoke on the other end. "You want me to what? This is crazy! Why should I—"

At that moment, a light flashed above him. A second later the event repeated. "Yes, I see it. No, you're right. Our radar can't detect objects that small. Yes. I see. Yes, of course you are." He looked down to the guests mingling below. "Can I at least warn the others?"

His face grimaced as he placed the phone in his shirt pocket again. His hands gripped the railing tightly, and he breathed in and out slowly several times. _This is not happening._

But it was. And he had been told he had little time. He rushed down the stairway. Several people approached him, but he ignored them, darting into the heart of the vessel. Forgoing the crowded stairways, he would avoid being seen this way. No one would bother him, ask questions. He would not have to think about what was happening. He pressed his thumb to the scanner by the elevator.

The doors opened immediately. He entered and hit the button to the sea-level floor. The elevator descended, the doors opened, and he dashed toward the back of the vessel.

The area was empty, all the guests and staff concentrated on decks above with better views of the harbor. Avram removed his jacket and tie, kicking off his shoes and socks as well. He dropped his phone and Rolex on the deck beside a railing at the stern of the Nebula, the engines below softly churning the dark waters.

He gazed back at the boat. He had never been in love. He appreciated women, their beauty, enjoyed sex. But _love?_ He hadn't been raised on love. But the Nebula—that was a beauty to be loved. His design, his testament to everything he had accomplished and would do. He stared at it as a man would a lover on her death bed.

Then he climbed the railing, standing unbalanced at the corner of the stern, as far from the engines as possible. The lights of New Jersey and Manhattan formed a dizzying panorama of radiance around him. Placing his hands out to the sides, he leapt forcefully into the darkness.

The harbor was frigid, and he gasped for air as he struggled to tread water. Fortunately he had been a talented swimmer at Harvard, and despite the numbness creeping over his limbs, he was able to orient himself onto his back, his feet pointed back toward the Nebula, its music and soft lights fading as it sped away from him. A minute passed. Then two, and he worked to keep his arms and legs moving, the circulation flowing, retarding the hypothermia that had begun to freeze his muscles.

What sounded like a series of humming hornets' nests streaked over his head and toward the boat. He spied small shadows cross over the lights of lower Manhattan, but he could not be sure it was anything more than his imagination.

But then the Nebula erupted in flame. A series of fireballs ignited around the boat, consuming his lady in a hideous light. The sound rushed over him, one-two-three punches of compressed air and ear-splitting detonations. Burning debris flew into the sky, then rained back down on the dimming skeleton of the boat.

Robert Avram wept. He knew in that explosion he had lost not only the symbol of his greatness, but everything. Confirmation arrived with little delay as he felt hands grasp his shoulders and lift him out of the water, dumping him harshly onto the deck of a small motorboat. Burly shadows manhandled him like livestock, binding his arms and legs, toting him to one end of the vessel, and casting him painfully into a corner. His captors revved the engine, and turned the boat southward toward Staten Island, racing into the darkness.
OCTOBER 20
10

# Wreckage

Savas watched the faint light of the morning grow over the East River. He sped down the FDR en route from La Guardia airport in an FBI vehicle, retracing part of the path Goldman CEO Craig had taken right before he died. The lights of the Queensboro Bridge were still bright enough to be easily seen in the creeping dawn, the tram lifting sleepy commuters into Manhattan from Roosevelt Island like a floating cabin in the sky. To his right, the concrete redwoods of the city flew by him with trails of light.

He was hardly awake himself. Last night an explosion had occurred in New York Harbor, before the eyes of Lady Liberty herself. Another CEO of a powerful multinational financial company was dead, his luxury liner blown to pieces where the fresh water of the Hudson mixed with the sea. The agency branches in Washington could work on their disappearing governmental employee problem themselves. New York, _his_ city, was under siege again.

He had spent the better part of a night arranging his travel and for Frank Miller to stay in DC to coordinate between the coupled investigations. An early plane landed him in New York with the first businessmen. His driver flew down the East Side highway, traffic still minimal at this hour, their destination lower Manhattan. Cohen was waiting for him there.

The thin tower of the UN building darted past on the right, the reddening sky casting an infernal hue across its glass facade. For Savas, it seemed prescient, foreboding. His instincts told him that something subterranean and evil was brewing. He only hoped that they could find a break in their endless game of catchup with these dark forces and find a way to prevent further attacks.

The car passed NYU Medical Center and soon entered lower Manhattan. Lost in his own ruminations, he failed to notice as they darted into the Battery Park Underpass and emerged on the western tip of the island. He was surprised to sense the car slowing as it pulled into North Cove Marina.

Cohen was immediately at his side as he stepped out of the vehicle.

"God, John, you look like crap."

He laughed and fingered the lapel of her coat. "Always good to be home." They walked toward the dock and the Coast Guard boat waiting there. "We've lost three CEOs in a week."

"There's still no claim for the attacks or abductions. The JP Morgan CEO, Robert Avram, is presumed dead, although his body hasn't been found. Most of the bodies on the ship manifest haven't been found."

"But Senator McDougal?" He asked. "I heard that he was found."

"Confirmed an hour ago at the morgue."

" _Jesus_. I've heard talk of the National Guard, although I can't imagine what good it would do outside of giving the public and news shows some sense that we aren't sitting here helpless."

"But we are, John."

They neared the boat and several members of the Coast Guard approached them. He gritted his teeth. "Let's see if we can change that. Gentlemen!" They walked forward and shook hands. "Agents Savas and Cohen."

"You're the man who took down Gunn," said one of the sailors. "Honored to meet you, sir. I know about your son. I was here on 9/11, evacuating folks trapped on the south end after the towers fell."

Savas swallowed. "Then _I'm_ honored. You guys moved more than half a million, if I remember right."

"Maybe more. Papers said it was bigger than Dunkirk in WWII. Somehow feels like we're always at war."

Savas understood completely. "Let's get out there and see what we can see."

They stepped onto the boat, the sailor gave instructions, and they pushed off from shore. "We towed it to Governors Island. Used to be a Coast Guard base. Boat was sinking, even with all the technology built into it to prevent that. I read up on it. The owner was a paranoid son-of-a-bitch."

Within minutes they had arrived on the small island. The wreckage of what had once been a luxury yacht was awkwardly tethered to the dock, wisps of smoke still trailing upwards from her, the smell of melted plastic overpowering. It was obvious why no one had survived.

Police and fire crews worked with investigators combing the remainder of the vessel. A sharply dressed man, attired in a suit, with black hair and a French nose walked up to the FBI agents.

"JP," said Savas. "What do we have?"

Rideout squinted in the light of the rising sun. "Well, this is big league forensics. Half the evidence is at the bottom of the harbor. But from what we've found and working with witnesses on shore and in other boats who saw the explosion, we're talking about multiple detonations spaced a few seconds apart. Odd for a bomb planted on the boat, but there you go. The fireball was hot enough that we can assume synthetics and a big payload. But it will take some time to analyze the residue and debris." He indicated a small boat pulling out nearby. "We're still relocating the bodies, the remains. It will take some time to identify them all. In some cases DNA matching might be the only way—there isn't much left to go on. NYPD and several university labs with the required equipment are pitching in. Avram threw a big party."

Savas shook his head. "Grim work."

Cohen shuddered and rubbed her hands together in the morning chill. "You said multiple blasts. Could it have been explosives delivered externally?"

Rideout nodded. "Drone idea again? I think it's likely. Missiles are out, as crazy as it is to even say something like that. Avram had a pretty sophisticated radar system that not only detected incoming birds but automatically would send the data out encrypted on military and police frequencies. I guess he had some issues, but the fact is that the boat didn't squeak last night. But I don't think it could pick up fliers as small as many drones. They'd be invisible to the radar."

"I guess he didn't modernize his paranoia," said Cohen. "Who would have thought to protect their assets from drone strikes?"

"Why aren't there more agents here?" asked Savas, glancing around the dock.

"It's a bit chaotic," said Rideout, "and you've been in transit for the last two days. Commands from on high have all agencies scrambling to put bodies on people and places. The Bureau is like a ghost ship, if you'll excuse the juxtaposition."

Cohen turned to Savas. "It's all been in the last twelve hours. The kidnappings and killings have a lot of powerful people very frightened. Pressure is being put on all governmental and state agencies to secure them. Favors are being called in. People are starting to panic."

Savas nodded. "Should have seen it coming. You'll have to excuse me—I'm running on about negative three hours of sleep. Hopefully I can get some shuteye soon, that is if nothing else goes FUBAR in the next few hours."

His cell rang.

Rideout and Cohen stared at him. He just sighed. "Here we go." He tapped the screen and placed the phone to his ear. "Hi, Angel. What blew up now?"
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

Continued DEPOSITION OF:

**Jean Paul Rideout**

MR. RIDEOUT: John had just flown back. He and Rebecca met me at the dock and we got our first look at the boat. What remained of it.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Is this when Agent Lightfoote became involved in the investigation?

MR. RIDEOUT: Angel? No.

[REDACTED]: Statements from other members of your division state that she was.

MR. RIDEOUT: Why would she be involved in the bombing case? She was cybercrimes.

* * *

CBD: But she called at the dock? We have cell phone records and the testimony of Agent Cohen.

MR. RIDEOUT: Yeah, she called. So what? The virus was completely unknown to us at that point. Angel didn't know why they were calling. She took the call and passed the message on to John.

* * *

CBD: Is that normal?

MR. RIDEOUT: NSA called. She's cybercrimes. What's the mystery?

* * *

CBD: But Savas took her along with him to the meeting?

MR. RIDEOUT: Of course. Again, she's _cybercrimes_. Why wouldn't she go?

* * *

[REDACTED]: But you said you didn't know about the virus.

MR. RIDEOUT: That's what the NSA meeting was about! So, no!

[REDACTED]: So, why bring your cybercrimes leader?

MR. RIDEOUT: Because NSA, duh? Angel is our digital guru. We're retreading this thing like you've never heard of a circle.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And now she's AWOL.

MR. RIDEOUT: AWOL? What the hell? She's not conscripted! She doesn't owe you guys anything. Just because your goons failed to grab her doesn't mean she's up to anything bad. If I hadn't been shot, I might be out there with her, deep in hiding from this mess.

[REDACTED]: She's breaking the law.

MR. RIDEOUT: Not any laws I know about. But you all have new laws now, don't you? Just making them up as you go. Christ, I had a bad feeling when martial law was declared. Little did I know!

* * *

[REDACTED]: There have been extraordinary events. Unprecedented threats to the nation. We are doing what we can to preserve order.

MR. RIDEOUT: Don't you think I know that? But you're shooting at friendlies, dammit!

* * *

CBD: Then you can understand our need to get to the bottom of things. Tell us about Lightfoote.

MR. RIDEOUT: Why are you so obsessed with her? Don't you have one hundred dossiers and film surveillance and case records? What the hell am I going to tell you that you don't know?

* * *

[REDACTED]: How about where she is?

MR. RIDEOUT: If I knew, that'd be the last thing I'd tell you.
11

# Epidemic

"Joe, Jesus, it's the middle of the trading day. What the hell is this about?"

Two men huddled underneath a pedestrian walkway in a quiet London park. They had both approached the location independently, secretively, without informing anyone of their destination. Both had exercised extreme vigilance in their journey, checking for pursuit or other surveillance, doubling back and changing routes several times, increasing by three-fold the amount of time it would take to reach the rendezvous. One man was dressed in a suit and sported closely cropped gray hair. The other, a younger man by two decades, wore slacks and a button down shirt as well as sunglasses. Both appeared anxious, their British accents cutting like daggers through the conversation.

"I'm taking a huge risk even showing up here," said the young man.

"And I'm not? Spit it out. Is it this virus you've been talking about?"

"Worm," he corrected.

"Whatever."

"The difference is important."

"That's because you're a computer programmer."

He shook his head. "It _matters_. Look, a virus is a file, you have to execute it, infect your computer with it. A worm digs in by itself, and can lay a lot of viral eggs and do other things. But it spreads itself. This worm is spreading _everywhere_."

"What's everywhere?"

The programmer's arms danced through the air. "By now, half the machines on the London exchange are likely infected. By next week, nearly all of them will be."

The older man straightened slightly. "What will it do?"

"We don't know!" he shouted, quickly catching himself and lowering his voice. "Look, my division at Interpol got the first information from Singapore a few days ago. Since then, all hell's broken loose. We're finding it everywhere, chasing it everywhere. No one has a handle on it, not the Americans, the Chinese, or the Russians. Hell, if the Russians can't take it down, we're in a fucking boatload of trouble!"

"Brilliant. Let's calm down. What do you know?"

The Interpol programmer wiped his brow, sweat glistening and beginning to pool in his eyebrows despite the cool autumn day. "It's global. Initially we thought that it was only a finance worm, now we're finding it other places. It actually seems to have used NSA backdoors and code as gateways to infiltrate the machines the damn Americans were already spying on. It hides well. We mainly find what it leaves behind."

"Which is?"

"Lots of really nasty code. The thing is injecting subroutines and entire programs into existing software or between two pieces of software and handshaking them. Gave itself away when large sums of money started to funnel through the infected systems into offshore accounts."

"How much money?"

"I don't know. Billions. Maybe more. But that's one thing. Billions from the derivative market isn't going to be missed, really. But recent findings are looking a lot more scary. Your machines, your trading algorithms that run the damn exchanges, they are all compromised."

The older man narrowed his eyes harshly. "Compromised? How?"

"We're still trying to figure that out! We'd need full access to your machines, _today_ , to get to the meat of it quickly. We can't lock this down with you running the programs. You're going to have to halt trading."

"Out of the question! We aren't going to shut down the London Exchange so Interpol can go rummaging through our systems."

"You don't get it! This is preliminary, but if it's verified, if what we're seeing is real or even looks like it might harm the exchanges, Downing will pull the plug on the exchanges anyway! A stop in trading on purpose is better than a system meltdown."

"There isn't going to be a system meltdown!"

"We don't know _what's_ going to happen."

"Every few years you fools cry wolf over some Millennium bug, Heartbleed this, or Shellshock that, and all manner of bloody apocalypse is about to descend on us. Every time the markets kept going just fine and the only thing hurt has been your reputations."

"You know, most of the time the money you guys send my way is all I need for motivation to talk to you. And I've more than paid for myself in the information I've delivered. But this is _different!_ I'm scared shitless right now by this thing, and so are half the people in my division. The Americans are scrambling and the Asian markets as well."

"And I don't see them shutting down in panic, do you?" The programmer said nothing, but stared toward the other end of the tunnel, exhaling a cloud of vapor. "Look, we'll do a complete IT sweep, antivirus everything. We've handled these types of things before."

"I'm telling you, this isn't like—"

"Bring me back something _concrete_ , with concrete effects and predictions, and then I can make a financial assessment of how much is to be lost from the thing as compared to the absolutely huge losses that we'll be _sure_ to take for shutting down the exchange. _Shut down_ is the panic button. The fail-safe. Bring me real data, not doomsday maybes. Understand?" He fired a harsh gaze toward the programmer and stormed off into the park.

The man remaining in the tunnel shook his head and lit a cigarette. He smoked it under the walkway for several minutes before leaving, spacing his exit with that of his contact at the exchange. He also needed to clear his head and calm down. It was always like this, he told himself. Investors had profit on the brain and a foresight of a goldfish. All that mattered were next quarter's returns.

_I could be wrong._ The truth was that they really didn't know what this thing was yet or what it would do. He _hoped_ they were all wrong about the dangers. He dropped the bud on the concrete and crushed it out with his shoe, turning up his lapels and entering the chaos of children's shouts.

A boy stared toward the man as he exited, his gaze focused slightly above him and the bridge under which he had stood for the last half hour. He tugged on his mother's arm and pointed into the sky. A small, blurred ball danced in the air above the park.

"Look, mummy. It's a helicopter! It's remote control!"

His mother nodded her head and tapped onto her smartphone. "Yes, dear, that's nice."

The boy continued tracking the object as it moved away from the bridge. "Herman has one. It's wicked. It can do anything and...oh no!"

"What is it, dear?" his mother asked, her eyes never leaving the screen in her hand.

"It's just going up and up. It's too high!" He looked frantically around the park for the child who was trying to control it. His face dropped. "It's going to be lost."

And soon enough it was. The small object disappeared from view as it ascended into the sky. It did not return. The boy continued to look around the park, but there were no children in distress or racing after an out-of-control toy. His shoulders sank and he dug into the soil with his shoe.

The woman looked up from her phone. "What was that you said, dear?"
12

# Virtual Money

"So it seems the internet is going to blow up."

Savas sat in front of a table in the computer science department at NYU. The academic setting was made all the more surreal by the presence of NSA staff, Interpol officers, and members of the Secret Service alongside several professors and students.

The NSA man tried again to assume command of the conversation. "That's a rather dramatic way to put it, Agent Savas." The representative of the agency was stiff in his gray suit, looking down his nose at the students and especially Lightfoote. However galling, Savas had to admit, she looked the part of a freedom fighter from some post-apocalyptic dystopian teen film. Eyes tended to wander toward her.

Savas was still trying to parse the odd collection of people around him. The NYU students had stumbled upon something. Fine. They had called, of all places, specific _NSA branches_. Why? Because along with Homeland Security, the NSA was funding their research. They were a "National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense." _Information Assurance._ He liked that.

Then there was the presence of the Secret Service which had been explained by the financial end of this story. Yes, Agent Savas _was_ aware that the Secret Service was responsible for investigations into financial fraud, in addition to its protective function for governmental VIPs. _But still_.

Finally, _Interpol!_ But that is where things really got interesting and expanded from a local to a distinctly global problem. In fact, it was the Interpol officer who cut in on the NSA suit.

"Drama, Mr. Teller, may in fact be warranted here." His thick Scottish brogue worked as an aural spotlight. "Our offices in Singapore have this worm penetrating systems all over the world, including major financial institutions and governmental entities. We believe upwards of ninety percent of machines exposed to it are vulnerable."

The NSA man cut in quickly. "There hasn't been time to ascertain how widespread it is."

"With all due respect, I think the NSA has a lot of reasons to minimize the threat of this code." The Interpol and NSA representatives stared each other down.

Savas leaned forward toward the European. "Why is that?"

"Because the worm has gotten the most mileage out of piggy-backing on the NSA's own spyware— _their_ worms—used for hacking and stealing the secrets of everyone from the UN to foreign leaders. And don't even try to deny your agency's actions," he said, cutting off an attempted protest by Teller. "Snowden let that cat out of the bag a while ago."

The Secret Service agent spoke. "It's a financial instrument," she said. "Once into the system, there are a set of specific programs it looks for. When it finds them, it adds modules of code that relate to options trading on the derivative market."

"What does this code do?" asked Savas.

The Interpol officer spoke. "From what we can tell, it's funneling enormous sums of money from the off-market derivatives trading."

"Off-market?"

"Yes," he continued. "Contracts, _bets_ if you will, that do not show up on any exchanges and are poorly regulated. In fact, we don't even know how much money is tied up in those deals. But it dwarfs the imagination. Estimates are in the hundreds of trillions of dollars."

Savas tried not to let his jaw drop. "I didn't know that much money even existed in the world."

"It's all in bits and bytes, not in gold or cash," said Lightfoote.

"Virtual money that isn't so virtual." Savas leaned back in his chair. "And how much money is being stolen?"

A white-haired professor from the computer science group flipped pages on a notepad. "We've been following the thing for three days now. There's no way to know how much was siphoned before that, but our estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars."

"That's a hell of a lot."

"Per _day_."

A silence filled the room. Savas looked at Lightfoote, who just laughed.

"Does you intern think something is funny, agent Savas?" asked Teller.

Lightfoote spoke for herself. "You _idiots_. Did you ever stop to think that if it was so easy for you to tear through the world's firewalls that others couldn't? Did you stop to think how fragile everything is now, everything online, everything in bytes—money, electricity, nuclear power systems? And now someone is using your own black hat code to leech from an underground financial market that should have been shut down after 2008? You're like a bunch of fucking twelve-year-olds wandering around an arms factory and pushing buttons."

"Your division has been included in this briefing because of your track record, Agent Savas," said the NSA official, "but the disrespect and frankly treasonous attitude of your staff cannot be tolerated."

"Are you insane?" asked the Interpol officer. "This is not a US governmental matter only. You aren't in authority here, whatever God-complex your organization has developed. The lady is right. This is _big_. This is a disaster!"

"Look, people," said Savas, standing up. "I'm inclined to agree with that assessment, and I thank you for including us in this briefing. Our team will get to it immediately. Anything we find with we'll pass your way. But, you may have noticed that we have our plate full right now. Matters of life and death, not just money and taxes. Our resources are stretched to the breaking point." He turned to the Scot. "This is a big threat. We'll help, but we're going put out the fire in our house, first." He turned to leave.

"We need countermeasures," said Lightfoote. Eyes turned toward her. "This is something new. Something truly dangerous. You can't just rely on the software companies to develop and issue patches. There isn't time."

"What do you mean there isn't time?" said Teller.

"I mean that whoever is behind this is not playing for a criminal unit or nation-state. Those groups have long-term ends in mind, stability of the system. You can't make a living off the system as a criminal if you bring it down."

"The _system_ , whatever that might be, isn't going down!" Teller looked incredulous.

"That's where you're wrong." Her green eyes burned. "This is major artery damage. You can't wait to patch it. The patient will bleed to death. Organ systems will malfunction. You've got to go in aggressively and root the damn thing out. If you don't, at the rates the professor mentions, come November you're going to have an economic _catastrophe_ on your hands."
13

# Watching the World Burn

A four-by-five panel of giant flat-screen monitors covered a wall in a dark room. News stations spanning the content of the major networks to cable providers flashed a diversity of images. One by one, sound was associated with a given monitor and channel, large speakers on the sides of the array of screens projecting audio, the brightness on the other nineteen monitors dropping dramatically to emphasize the featured screen. Centered before the dizzying display was a lone chair containing a shadowed figure.

"This is Monica Grayford from CNN," began the short-haired brunette standing before the Capitol building in Washington, DC. "Chaos has swept over the House of Representatives as a rebellion in the GOP threatens to bring the legislative branch to a standstill. Key members of House committees have suddenly switched their votes on multiple issues central to several pressing pieces of legislation. Among them are a host of financial reform bills including raising the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, legislation to remove corporate tax loopholes, and challenges to overturn the Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance reform and the personhood of corporations. In addition, numerous laws aiming to regulate the internet have found their support shifting dramatically, with numerous Democratic and Republican Congressman now supporting net neutrality and opposing governmental regulation and internet monitoring. For more on this developing story, we go to—"

The screen dimmed and the audio cutoff. A monitor on the upper right brightened, and a panel of men and women on Fox News were yelling at each other across a common table. A stout man in a suit centered in the middle screamed over the group.

"None of these theories makes sense! With elections nearly here, you aren't going to see members of both parties suddenly reversing their long-held positions on important issues! I think that we need to step back and ask what is really going on here. What backroom deals are being made and has the White House been involved to try and throw the results in November into chaos? We all know the polls show that the midterms are not going to go their way, so they have to be involved!"

A woman near the end of the table on the left cut in. "Based on what? Why do you always have to turn everything into a conspiracy of foul play by this administration?"

A black man near the center raised his hands in the air. "This is all speculation at this point. We don't know what is going on. Neither do the leaders of _either_ party. Until we can get explanations from the members of Congress themselves, all this is just hot air."

The viewpoint shifted, jumping to a monitor on the lower level in the middle of the array. A heavyset man in a suit with gray hair paced about a television stage, waving his arms and gesticulating. Behind him was an enormous chalkboard, names of important political figures and organizations written and boxed in various locations, numerous arrows studded with short phrases and comments connecting the various names. The commentator was shouting.

"A Democratic Super PAC with ties to a billionaire is suddenly bankrupt? Why? Where did all that money go? A week later, we find one member of Congress after another switching their votes, always in the direction of the liberal agenda. Always decreasing our ability to monitor communications for terrorist activity and attacking the earnings of the job-creating class. Am I the only one seeing this? I mean, could it be more obvious? My fellow Americans, we are poised on the edge of a terrible cliff, where the terrorist sympathizing, Marxist left-wing agenda has put our very freedoms in the crosshairs." His voice caught, and he wiped his eyes. "There might not be much more time. I don't know how many times I'll be allowed to address you when the new world order is imposed. I've never said this before, but I'm scared. Scared for America. Scared for the world. Because, in the end, it is we Americans that stand between order and chaos on this planet."

The image and sound jumped to the upper left of the screens, a dour, bald man centered in the camera before a microphone. A woman's voice spoke over the images.

"The Russian president has just begun a press conference. This is Russia Today with an exclusive video feed of the event called in response to reported violations of international treaties this week by the US Congress."

The sound switched to the figure behind the podium. An angry voice speaking in Russian, muffled beneath the words of a man translating the speech into English.

"...are extremely destabilizing and foolish. We urge party leaders in US House of Representatives to stop extremist wings and put stop to many bills now on floor. We call to United States President to veto laws passing. Russia will not tolerate more US imperialism over regions and resources international law has divided."

The focus point shifted to a monitor in the middle of the array, a young woman of Middle Eastern appearance interviewing a cabbie on the streets of New York.

"Miss, what's to say? It's open season on the one percent. It's bombs and guns in New York. All the VIPs are disappearing or going nuts in Congress. You know what I think? I think it's the antichrist. I think it's the goddamned end of the fucking world. First we're gonna eat each other and everything's gonna fall apart. Then all those angels with fire and lightning are gonna come down and fry us. You know what I'm gonna do tonight? I'm gonna go to church. I'm gonna light some goddamned candles and pray my ass off that God's got a place for me in heaven."

The man rolled up his window and the cab sped off. The reporter turned to the camera, her face troubled, her words stuttered.

"This is Maryam Tavazoie, Al Jazeera America, in New York."

All the monitors went dark and the figure in the chair brooded in silence for several moments. From the faint afterglow of the screens, a weak line reflected off a hard surface.

A toothless smirk.
OCTOBER 21
14

# Eye in the Sky

Angel Lightfoote poked her head around the doorframe. "John, the kids—they're not all right."

Savas sat behind his desk and held up his index finger with one hand and cradled the landline receiver in the other. The digits of his free hand also tapped onto a cell phone as he texted.

"Right. Ronald, look, I have to go. Thanks for the report and I'll share it with the group." He hung up the phone.

"Forensics?"

Savas nodded. "Yes. Residues found at the car and boat bombings match. Synthetics. Nothing special that we can trace."

She nodded, the fluorescent lighting reflecting brightly off her scalp. "Come with me. We need to talk."

Five minutes later they were exiting an elevator and stepping onto the basement floor. Savas smiled as he looked around the maze of monitors and racks of computers.

"Love what you're doing with the place, Angel. Looks more and more like the Bat Cave."

Lightfoote gestured toward several rows of servers. "That's the Hernandez pile, all Manuel's machines that can still keep up. Most of the connections to law enforcement and other agencies—not to mention the satellite uplinks—are now ported to the Great Wall." Her hand swept toward a much large bank of computers racked in metallic girders, floor to ceiling.

"Glad to see the money's well spent."

Lightfoote shook her head. "Everything's been augmented, enhanced. More aggressive than the old crises center. _Militarized_. It's cyberwarfare out there now." Lightfoote sat at a long table with several monitors. "We've been stalking both of Senator Moss' girls. One is at UCSF, the other Georgetown."

He sat next to her, watching windows displaying two young women's faces. Video footage streamed and maps and other surveillance software recorded locations and other information. "So there's a problem, or I wouldn't be down here. Disappearance?"

"No, it's a lot more subtle. The women are fine. So far. No sign of anything on their social media, personal emails, or phone conversations. We correlated their routines to video surveillance footage over the last few months. Nothing to indicate that they are functioning under duress." She turned toward Savas and winked, the piercings running across her face inches from him. "But we're playing with some inside information."

She cleared the active windows and opened several CCTV montages displaying footage from numerous cameras. There seemed little relationship between the locations, angles, or time the video was captured. Lightfoote stared at one intensely and then hit a key, freezing the playback.

"There. See, that's Anna Moss, right there, backpack, ponytail. She usually takes this route on Wednesdays. This is footage from two weeks ago. Look there," she indicated on the screen.

Savas squinted. A dark blur was above and behind the student, but he could not make out what it was. "What is it?"

She stared at him with her eyes angled upward, nearly rolling them. "Watch." Frame by frame, she advanced the footage. The Moss daughter moved jerkily as if caught by a strobe light, pedestrians and cars around her as well.

_And so did the blur._ Savas felt his pulse quicken. "It's tracking her," he whispered. "It's a drone."

Lightfoote smiled. "He can be taught! Watch closely. It shadows her up the street and then, _there_ , lifts off into the air and is gone. We've got hundreds of hours of footage of the sisters. That let us catch the drones in ten or fifteen events. No doubts, John. We've tried to use image enhancement but didn't get much. We're also taking known drone models and creating cross-sections at different angles and using image recognition software to score similarity. But whatever the models, these women are being stalked. By drones."

"That's it, then," he said. "Imagine the kinds of photos you could get with these things. The kind of photos that when sent to a parent with the right note attached would petrify them."

Lightfoote nodded. "And you don't even have to put organic assets in play or touch the ground around the targets."

"Wouldn't someone notice these things?"

"Probably, but what would they think? There are kids' toys as big as some of these, and in several states law enforcement groups are beginning to use drones. And whoever is behind this isn't stupid. They don't hang around long. So, somebody sees one? Then what? Before they can do much it's gone. Not much to report without sounding like a UFO nut."

"No wonder she jumped when I asked about drones. She's a smart woman. She would have connected the bombing and these drones shadowing her daughters. And it's almost a certainty that Craig from Goldman was calling her about her vote flip-flops. If it hadn't been for the other CEO murders and kidnappings, I might have thought he was killed for that."

He stood and placed his hands on his hips. "That's great work, Angel. You've linked the killing to the threats on Congress. With the meltdown there yesterday, it looks like she was the canary in the coal mine. We can use this to pressure the rest, make them open up about the blackmail."

"You'd think that the victims would have noticed their peers' behavior. Teamed up. Gotten some crowd bravery and brought the blackmail to the attention of someone by now."

Savas nodded. "Maybe. But it just happened. They probably thought they were the only ones, working in a panic, tunnel visioned and focused on whatever personal nightmare was threatening to consume their life."

Lightfoote stood as well, continuing to stare at the blurry drone images on her monitors. "Drones of all sizes exist. Some able to handle large payloads. Some able to be mounted with weapons. And they're invisible to radar. They could fly right up to the president with a bar of Semtex strapped to them. Or pop over to the Indian Point nuclear plant. They can go anywhere, John. They can photograph people's bedroom windows, follow their kids, spy on the routes of world leaders. I'd be worried if I were you."

A chill ran through him. "I am, Angel. I think we need to find out who is making drones in this country, what they're making, and who the hell they are selling them to. Look for patterns in purchase and shipment. _Anything_."

"Already beginning that search. What I'm worried about is that our drone-master is too smart for that. He wouldn't have left such an easy trail, but would likely buy them in small amounts and change shipping locations, payment methods. Or under the table purchases from dealers who aren't listed in the Better Business Bureau. That's what I would do."

"You know what Angel," said Savas, eyeing her suspiciously. "You are frighteningly good at thinking like a psychopath."

Her face darkened in a manner that unsettled Savas. She spoke hoarsely. "Thanks, John. It's good to be noticed."

"Well, I want you to keep doing that. In fact, you have my explicit permission to go full madwoman down here and follow any idea you think might be interesting. Don't tell me when you fail. Don't tell me missteps. Just do it. Find out what in the name of all that's holy is happening."
15

# Coup d'etat

"No fucking _way_ , man."

Two young men sat in the middle of a nearly empty warehouse, a dense clustering of high-tech equipment forming an isolated island in the middle of the space. Three to four rows of nested black towers formed a maze around them, the cabinets housing shelf upon shelf of computer banks. A thick series of cables and power cords snaked across the dusty cement floor like an obscene vasculature bringing nutrients to a gestating embryo. In the center of the maze was a set of tables holding five or six large flat screen monitors.

"No way, Chen."

The contrasting pair sat in front of the monitors, typing on keyboards, staring at a scrolling data stream. Chen was dressed in fatigues, close-cropped hair topping off a thin and angular frame, a tight tank-top revealing tattoos painted across his arms and back. He sat upright, tense, tapping the screen in front of him.

"I'm not shitting you, Dave, these are _his_ accounts! Offshore, unregulated. It took me this whole week to get to them."

Dave swept his long, unruly hair out of his face, a tangled mass of brown and blond, greasy and unwashed. His general appearance was slovenly, and he slouched forward gazing at the screen. He shook his head in disbelief.

"Can't believe Fawkes left a security hole."

"Well, he's not running the bank servers, now is he?" said Chen, his voice defiant.

"Five hundred million? I mean, _what the fuck?_ "

Chen shook his head. "I dunno, man. Something's up with this. Something really not cool."

"Yeah, how does Fawkes get half a billion dollars? You think it's related to all this shit going down?"

"Look at the withdrawals!" Chen scrolled through the banking records. "It's like five million here, ten million here. Restore Our Future. American Crossroads. Strong America Now."

"Sounds like student council assholes," Dave said, upturning a bag of chips into his mouth, his words garbled.

"They're conservative SuperPacs, you fuck."

"SuperPacs?"

Chen rolled his eyes. "You're such a fucking pothead, Dave."

"Amen and praise Jesus, you bet!" said Dave, smiling.

"Whatever. Look, there are transfers to Europe, China, India. It's like he's some multinational! These transfers are totally laundered. No transaction codes, no IDs, nothing!"

"Ain't no money for nothing, dude."

Chen nodded. "Something is _really_ not cool here."

A loud scraping noise startled the pair. They spun in their chairs and looked behind them, through an opening in the maze of the server farm. The large door of the warehouse had been yanked open, and three men walked into the cavernous space. In the middle was a young man, thin, nearly gaunt, dressed casually in a black T-shirt and jeans. His short-cropped black hair and pencil-thin goatee were offset by a pair of shaded smart glasses. He constantly fiddled with a smartphone affixed to his belt. Flanking him on either side were two much larger, muscled men. They wore nondescript business attire, their eyes hidden behind black sunglasses. Their expressions were indecipherable.

"Shit," said Chen under his breath, spinning slightly to position his hand over the keyboard and enter several strokes. The windows on the screen disappeared. He turned back quickly to the approaching men as they neared. The three stopped a few feet in front of the hacker pair, silence lingering for several moments.

"Yo, Fawkes!" said Dave awkwardly. "What's this? Fucking Terminator Ten?" His smiled floundered against the stony gazes of the three men.

Hands continuously tapping the smartphone, Fawkes appeared to stare straight ahead at something outside the room. "You were always such a fucking waste, Dave. You could've been the best black hat to ever crawl out of 4chan. You know, when that shit-hole was actually worth something."

Dave flipped him the bird. "Up yours. I still am."

Fawkes ignored him. "Chen. It's too bad you had to be so curious. Killed a lot of cats. I thought you'd be more grateful after I gifted you this little playground."

Chen licked his lips, glancing between Fawkes and the two men on his sides. "What's up, Fawkes? We're just hanging."

Fawkes finally took off his glasses, his gray eyes burning into Chen. "I've had a tick on you for weeks, Chen. I know you've been poking around the offshore accounts."

Chen sat utterly still. The large room was silent except for the constant hum of the server farm around them. Dave broke the eerie stillness.

"So the fuck what, man? It's not like you haven't hacked your way through a hundred accounts."

"But those are _my_ accounts, Dave. Accounts that are too important to be messed with. Or for anyone to know about."

"Fawkes, what's going on?" asked Chen, his face grave. "Hundreds of millions? What are you up to? What's with the bodyguards?"

Fawkes laughed. "You stupid fucks still don't get it. You actually think a hundred million is a lot! Try seven-hundred _trillion_ —that's the size of the derivative market. Did you know that? And it's _all_ virtual money." He gestured vaguely to the walls of computers around them. "It doesn't exist except inside investment bank computers and people's very active imaginations. When things are bytes in compiled data structures, they are _meant_ to be hacked. It's fucking righteous deeds." He laughed. "I've got _trillions_ of dollars, you clueless ass. Those accounts you stumbled on were early, poorly secured penetration tests."

Chen blinked. "Trillions? That's not possible. What's the game, Fawkes? This doesn't make sense. We were against all this stuff!"

Fawkes fit his glasses back on, his voice growing slightly distanced. "I don't have the time to explain to you losers. You never had the balls, Chen. None of you did. We hacked our way to the truth, but it didn't set us free. We found out their dirty little secrets, and all of you panicked. _Pissed your fucking pants!_ You wouldn't dare do what had to be done. You hit _MasterCard_ or outed bad cops."

Dave and Chen looked at each other anxiously. Chen spoke again. "What has to be done?"

Fawkes began fiddling with his smartphone, staring off into space. With his other hand, he lifted a black and white object, a tight string hanging off the back. Placing it on his head, he pulled downward, the elastic string tightening around the back of his head, the object fitting tightly over his face: a mask of a smirking man stared back at them.

"What the fuck?" whispered Dave.

Fawkes motioned toward the two men beside him, who nodded. His voice was muffled. "Core dump, bros. The system software is too corrupted. Time for a reboot." He turned his back on them and began to walk away.

Chen shifted nervously in his chair as the large forms of the bodyguards approached the two hackers. "My God, it _is_ you! All of this!" His voice rose dramatically in pitch. "Are you insane? Do you understand what will happen?" Silence. "That's not what we were about! No one reboots the fucking world!"

Fawkes stopped and sighed, his fiddling paused. The mask turned back toward them. "I do. And nothing is going to get in the way of that, not even Anonymous. _I'm_ Anonymous now—what you all should have been." He laughed. "You'd be amazed what you can do with a trillion dollars."

Fawkes resumed his distracted gait and headed for the exit. The bodyguards who had entered with him reached into their jackets and removed pistols. Bulging suppressors were attached to the ends.

"Ah, man, no way, no way, no way! This isn't happening!" cried Dave, his eyes large. He rose, trembling in his chair, peering around the wall of computer cabinets hemming them in. Chen didn't move, but simply closed his eyes.

A sudden scream ripped through the warehouse, punctuated by a series of sharp spits. The following silence was disrupted only by the echoing clap of shoes on hard concrete.
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

Continued DEPOSITION OF:

**Jean Paul Rideout**

CBD: And so this was the first hard evidence that drones were being used?

MR. RIDEOUT: Right. But we all believed it was drones from the start. Nothing else fit.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And yet your division, led by Savas, still refused to share this information with other FBI divisions and national agencies.

MR. RIDEOUT: Refused? We didn't refuse anything. This was all unfolding in real time. Do you understand how that works? We'd barely get a chance to breathe before the next shock wave hit. We had barely just put this together. And the evidence wasn't going to win any court cases. I'm sure John would have been happy to share more. In fact that's what we did!

CBD: When he contacted NSA?

MR. RIDEOUT: Exactly. Angel made a breakthrough.

* * *

[REDACTED]: This is when Lightfoote broke numerous cybercrimes laws and released dangerous viral codes into the internet?

Mr. RIDEOUT: Worms. They were worms. Yeah, damn. She sure as hell did. And it worked! But the damned NSA just blew us off, right when the whole thing went to shit.
OCTOBER 22
16

# Madwoman

It was past midnight, and the basement at the FBI building was staffed only by three people. Two women and a man hunched over monitors as the steady buzz of computer servers churned around them. The bald woman stared across at the other two, her expression grave.

"Well, John, there was something about 'explicit permission to go full madwoman.'"

"I didn't know you were going to turn everything back on us!"

"It's a logical byproduct of the search algorithms."

Cohen placed her hand on Savas' shoulder and yawned. "Can we just have one night without another crisis?"

Lightfoote stood, a short tank exposing her midriff and rows of chiseled abdominal muscles. She walked over to the banks of servers and ran her hands over them like a nurse would a sick child.

"That meeting at the NYU computer science department spooked me. They weren't coming clean with how bad things were, and what was said was bad enough. I knew then we couldn't trust any of the other agencies to handle this. Worst of all was the NSA. They know the most and share the least." She patted the metal shelving holding the individual units of the server farm. "So, assuming the worst, I let loose some worms of my own."

"What?" said Savas, his eyes wide.

She turned her green eyes toward them. " _Full_ madwoman, remember?"

"Yeah, breaking Federal law?"

"Well, that's all not going to matter much longer anyway if we don't get this under control soon."

Savas swiveled in his chair to face Lightfoote. "Angel, what are you talking about?"

"My little wigglies reported back. It's _everywhere_ , John. Gone fucking viral is the phrase. All my babies," she leaned her head against the machines, "they're all infected. We're infected—FBI is infected."

"Damn." Savas rubbed his temples. "Okay, so what—"

"The whole goddamned world is infected! This thing has simultaneously exploited every known security hole in the underlying operating systems. It's like a MIRV missile for the internet with multiple warheads. Each one hits something, somewhere, in every system. And that's all it needs. One weakness. Then the worm is in."

Cohen whispered softly. "What is it doing?"

"Nothing yet. Nothing active. Or, whatever it's done was done before we began monitoring it and it has covered its tracks. There's a bunch of encrypted code that comes along with the thing in every infestation. That's got to be the heart of it. Whatever it's up to, I'd bet it's contained there."

"Can you get into it?" asked Cohen.

"Not yet. But I'm worried that when I do, it won't be straightforward. Whoever did this has made an attack that is sophisticated beyond anything the internet has ever seen. The code isn't complete or standardized."

"I don't understand," said Savas.

"Those encrypted modules? They're really diverse. Not one the same size on each system. I think it's distributed. It's like a P2P system where pieces of the file to be shared are stored all over the internet in different places. When you download your pirated film, the software at the end assembles a composite file from hundreds, sometimes thousands of independent file elements. _That's_ what's going on here. The worm has spread to tens of thousands, probably millions of computers. Each infection is one of a large set of different worms—let's call them strains like for viruses. Each strain carries a different piece of the code."

"Then if we can kill some of the strains, it can't put the full program back together and we stop it?" asked Savas.

Cohen shook her head. "If I understand this, then each strain will have thousands of copies of itself all around the world. We'd have to hunt every one of them down."

Lightfoote nodded. "Exactly. It's too distributed. It's like having a million backups on different servers where literally every computer is a potential backup system once infected. We'll never stop it that way."

"Then how?" asked Savas.

Lightfoote shook her head. "I don't know."

"Okay, then what does that code do when assembled?"

"I don't know that either. I haven't cracked any of the encryptions, and there are already hundreds of different packages I've found with the worms. We need the NSA computers to be working full time on this."

"You think they know?"

"Yes. Definitely. They're poking around infected systems, just like I did. So many computers are poorly secured, it's easy to get into them and find things out. They _have_ to know by now, or they shouldn't have the keys to their computer arsenal."

Savas rose. "Then it's about damn time they opened up and worked with us. Tomorrow morning we'll get this moving."

Cohen grabbed his arm. "Are you sure about that? I think you might be overestimating the influence the FBI has on the NSA. They're so frighteningly close to Big Brother, we're not going to have much pull."

Lightfoote nodded. "And they aren't going to look at my little enterprise as anything remotely useful compared to the fleet of processors they have. From a certain perspective, they're right."

"So, what then? We wait here helplessly for the NSA to formulate a cure and perhaps share it with us? If this thing shuts us down, we're crippled to investigate the killings and abductions, anything at all really. We can't remain that vulnerable!"

"Try the NSA, John," said Cohen, walking up to Lightfoote. "Meanwhile, I suggest that you leave the leash off Angel. Don't rescind your madwoman decree." Cohen took Lightfoote's shoulders in her hands, squaring up to face her. "Angel, why don't you see what you can do about this thing. Assume we're on our own. Assume it's a matter of life and death."

Savas nodded. Lightfoote stared between them and then back at her server.

"Okay. But be careful what you ask for."
17

# Headline News

CHAOS ROILS WALL STREET AS WORLD MARKETS SHUTTERED

By Christina Patrikia, _Washington Post_

In an unprecedented turn of events, the major world stock exchanges were forced to suspend trading as markets oscillated wildly and company fortunes were obliterated and made in instants.

Beginning almost immediately after the opening bell was rung at the New York Stock Exchange, and despite normal after-hours trading the night before, chaos hit the floor as share prices of everything from Fortune 500 companies to bundled options on the futures market dropped or increased thousands of percentage points in seconds. The changes swung back and forth, even on individual stocks, at the speed of the electronic trading computers.

"The system went haywire," said Brian Gunter, an analyst from Brookmans. "It was faster than the human mind could follow. All in electronic trading, across the board stock dumps and purchases, seemingly at random."

It appears that automated trade-halting safeguards designed to prevent massive stock fluctuations either did not function as expected or were unable to handle the volume and nature of the spurious trades.

"We are assuming a major malfunction," said Gordon Jones, a technical support specialist working for the NASDAQ exchange. "Either the safeguards to prevent market meltdowns failed or something more systematic occurred. With current software, trades are executed in less than a half a millionth of a second. Feedback loops at those speeds can lead to major problems on time scales human beings can't react to. It's a very nonlinear system."

While there had been previous scares such as the rogue program from Knight Capital that nearly halted trading in 2012, no glitch in the now-ubiquitous trading computers had caused anything approaching what took place today. Representatives from the world exchanges have been in conference calls since trading was halted in the early morning.

_Washington Post_ financial correspondent Angela Kong explained: "World leaders are involved. It is an unusual crisis. You have a majority of the largest companies in the world now worth pennies on paper, or rather, worth nothing in the digital systems storing their valuations. We're talking IBM, Apple, Google, GE—you name it. They're wiped out. Meanwhile, there are a host of nothing companies, green energy, solar, drug companies in India that have instantly grown to the size of Google. It's economic chaos. There is talk of a market reset."

Kong quoted several sources within the administration stating that, once the market software had been fixed, there were plans to resume trading at the prices on shares at which the exchanges had opened this morning. The move would be unprecedented, and is not without vocal critics in the government and private sector. However, consensus seemed to be building that only through such action could an unparalleled market collapse be staved off.

In an ominous repeat, the malfunction of the trading software that led to the trading halt in the US markets spread to every exchange across the world. One by one, as each of the major exchanges opened, chaos ensued and trading was stopped. Markets in Asia have not yet opened, but already the Nikkei and Shanghai Stock Exchange are being prepared for an unscheduled shut down to prevent further chaos in the world financial system.

First term senator and political firebrand Nathan Schelot—who rose to power on an election in California rocked by accusations of fraud—was vocal on Capitol Hill following the Press Secretary's minimal statement on the crisis at noon.

"And is this the leadership we need in a time of turmoil? Now you see the product of a runaway, capitalistic system. When will we regulate the bidding bots, the electronic microsecond trading that has turned our once human economy into a cyborg market? Robots take our jobs and now they are taking over our corporate structures. We are not in control anymore, and if something isn't done soon, everything this nation has built will come crashing down."

* * *

BUGS IN AUTOMATED WRITING SYSTEMS FLOOD ONLINE NEWS

By Anna Zeabee, _Wired_

* * *

They have been heralded for years as the next wave in machine displacement of human workers. They are the programs that have been written to produce news articles, financial reports, sports summaries, even law briefs. Light years ahead of the clumsy text and speech generators of a generation ago, they are now increasingly used by all the major media outlets to fill the seemingly insatiable appetite for online content.

They are even the seeds of new businesses, as Image Council's Jeff Philips has deluged the publishing industry with manuals and fact guides created only by computer algorithms that write books based on the contents of databases and fact lists.

But today a major bug has turned these time-saving tools into seemingly independent intelligences as thousands of unapproved and propagandistic news stories swamped online publishing sites, hijacking a significant fraction of the news reported.

While the chaos on Wall Street was the story of the day, for several hours the _New York Times_ sported a headline criticizing income inequality in a thousand-word manifesto.

"It's clear that we have some hackers playing with our system," said Executive editor Jerry Wilbur. "The writing seems to be similar to taking a fourth grader's dictionary and throwing it into a dishwasher. Nevertheless, it took some time to pull it."

Despite the high profile nature of the breach, the _Times_ was hardly alone. Most of the major news feeds and even news flagship websites were drowned in a cascade of articles focused on financial statistics and world economic problems. The automated systems adopted a Marxist bent that seemed funny to many except for the problems caused.

"Income inequality? Corporate welfare? Lobbying and money? All very interesting to some left-wingers and it was cute to see the _Wall Street Journal_ 's editorial page moaning about the evils of capitalism," said a source at a competing publication. "But this shut down our news systems as well. This was a global problem that cost man-hours and will total in the millions to fix. We're still flushing these bot-articles out. They haven't stopped. Only when the companies running them shut things down will it end. Meanwhile, we're unplugging from their services. Right now, they're drowning us."
18

# Masked Executions

Evening had fallen on the crowds in Times Square, but the streets were bathed in electric hues from multiple monitors displaying ads and streaming video from numerous locations. Horns blared as cars piled along curbs waiting for an opportunity to turn into adjacent streets through the flood of pedestrians. Some walked in groups. Many seemed tuned out and into their digital devices. All were dressed in jackets to ward off the late October chill.

One by one, those walking the streets began to slow down, staring at their phones or tablets. Others began to crane their necks upward, interrupting their conversations, staring puzzled at the glowing behemoths of dancing images around them. Within a minute, nearly all the motion in the square had come to a halt, and the blaring of horns increased ten-fold as roadways were completely blocked.

Like dominoes, all the monitors in the square flipped jerkily to the same static image: a circle with a globe depicted in grid lines, leaves of a plant along the sides, the figure of a headless man in a black and white suit with a question mark over him.

Out of a window, a taxi driver stuck his head and gazed up at the bizarre tiling of images across the buildings around him. He tugged on a baseball cap.

"What the hell?"

"John, you'd better come with me."

Cohen stood in his doorway, a sharp glint in her eyes. Savas prepared for the worst. "Another attack?"

She shook her head. "Something different. But I think related. Media across the country, maybe worldwide, is being hijacked. It's cable, network, online streaming sites like YouTube and Hulu. It's systematic."

"Systematic? The worm?"

"Don't know. But this sure sounds like something it could be up to."

Savas sprang from his chair and followed her into the floor's common room. Normally a place for coffee and a break from work, the small space was packed as agents and staff stared up at a flat-panel screen. A strange black-and-white image of a headless man in a suit took the place of all programming on nearly all stations. Savas and Cohen stood outside the door looking in.

A man's voice came up over the din of buzzing conversation. "That's Anonymous!"

Cohen turned to Savas. "He's right! I knew I had seen it before."

"Anonymous? Those kids who do social justice hacking?"

The voice of Lightfoote startled them from behind. "Kids, maybe. No one really knows who they are, how they organize, where they are. A few caught were high schoolers. Others older. Some established, even corporate. They're everyone and no one. The name really does mean something. Unknown, distributed anarchy. Probably why they never achieved anything really big."

"Until now, maybe," said Savas as he started at the disconcerting image.

"Uh oh, there it goes," said Lightfoote.

The screen pixelated horribly, and then locked onto another video feed. The crowds at FBI, in Times Square, and in millions of homes across the nation stared at two rows of chairs in a dark room. Harsh lighting fell directly on those seated in the chairs, the space behind them and to their sides too dark for any details to be made out. The men and women were tied to the seats, their arms and legs lashed with rope, gags in their mouths, and terrified expressions on their faces as their eyes darted.

"Oh, my God," whispered Cohen. "The abductions."

Savas felt his stomach drop as he began to recognize faces. The CEO of GE. Congressmen. The Chair of the Federal Reserve. Luminaries in business, finance, and politics. What the hell was happening?

Lightfoote spoke. "I'm going to the basement. They've compromised major digital distribution hubs. I bet it's the worm. We might be able to catch it in action and see what it looks like!" She darted from the crowd and headed toward the stairway.

A mask appeared in front of the screen. Black-and-white, smirking, a thin goatee etched across the upper lip and chin. Savas had seen it before. It was a symbol of underground resistance to established powers—the mask of Guy Fawkes.

"Greetings sheeple of America, Europe, and beyond," came a digitally distorted voice. "We are Anonymous and today is a day of judgment."

The masked speaker stepped back from the camera. The figure was of indeterminate frame and size, dressed in a black suit and tie. It walked confidently toward the double row of hostages. Their eyes looked hopeless and panicked.

"Already we have targeted some of the worst criminals in our malignant society. Robber barons, plutocrats who pull the strings of the drugged masses. The architects of a feudal world increasingly of a few elements of royalty standing on the backs of millions of slaves."

"Jesus," said Savas. He picked up his mobile phone and dialed. "Yeah, Angel. You got _anything_ on this? Location?" He grimaced. "I _know_ there hasn't been time! But what I'm seeing—it's _not_ good. I think these people are in danger."

The masked man continued. "Today, as a taste of things to come, we again pass judgment on a group of criminals whose status in society is the only thing separating them from the mafia. Because in their greed they have killed like common thugs."

He slapped the face of a man next to him. Savas recognized the captive as CEO O'Kelly.

The masked man continued. "They have poisoned our world, our rivers, our air, our very bodies as they profit. They have drilled and dug and burned and buried. They have denied health and home and peace to billions so they could luxuriate in ten thousand times more than they could ever require."

Several shapes in dark clothing moved into the view frame of the camera. They wore Guy Fawkes masks. They carried automatic weapons.

"Oh, Christ," whispered Savas. Murmurs ran through the crowd at FBI.

Several of the hostages in the chairs let loose gagged screams, twisting and wrenching their arms and legs in attempts to free themselves. Others seemed resigned, staring forward blankly.

"Today, we reject the weakness of fools. Of the failed Occupy Movement. Of the false Anonymous. Of corrupt nation-states who claim to serve the people but serve only their masters. Today we reject the foul words of the pundits, the professors, the activists, and the politicians who spout lies about change as they bathe in the status quo. Today, a real change comes. Today, we begin to put down a sick and broken system."

There was a pause. He nodded toward the gunmen. "Remember! Remember the fifth of November. This time there will be no providence of God."

The men raised their weapons. Shouts came from some of the FBI onlookers.

Cohen turned to Savas. "John, tell me he isn't—"

Bursts of light erupted from the muzzles of the automatic weapons, blurs of static from the flatscreen. Puffs of fabric and blood exploded outward from the clothes of the hostages, their forms shaking from the projectile impacts and reflex action, muffled screams bursting from their gagged lips.

Then silence.

The murderers with guns were gone. Only the bodies of the dead stared back into the camera with vacant eyes or tortured final expressions. The grinning plastic of the man with the Guy Fawkes mask approached the camera, until the mocking face filled the entire screen.

"We are the _real_ Anonymous. We are indeed Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. _"_

The video feed switched to a set of multiple views arranged in an array across the screen. In each case, the camera floated above the ground at what seemed to be disparate locations, darkness punctured by the lights of cars and buildings in the cities below.

The viewpoints descended. With increasing speed the ground dashed upward toward the viewer as the land sped by underneath, buildings whipping past. A disorienting collection of sub-screens careened wildly together.

But there was guided purpose to the movements. A zeroing in towards defined goals. Familiar and famous objects swam into view. The Capitol. The New York Stock Exchange. The Citibank building.

Savas gasped. "Oh, my God, Rebecca. They're drones. They're drones flying in for the kill."

The screens went black. Outside the FBI windows, light pierced the darkness. The crowd turned toward the flash, an orange fireball climbing in the evening sky from Midtown. An explosion rattled the windows of their building.
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

[REDACTED]: Again we remind you that you are under oath, Mr. Savas. You understand that this is not a Federal or Civilian court, that the jurisdiction of this case is considered outside the Constitution and to be part of the armed forces in a service in time of war and public danger?

Mr. SAVAS: I have been made to understand that all too clearly, [REDACTED].

* * *

[REDACTED]: Please answer the question posed. Do you understand the law as it pertains to you in this tribunal?

MR. SAVAS: I forfeit my rights to the 5th Amendment and others. No grand jury or due process. And I can be compelled to be a witness against myself.

[REDACTED]: Counsel may continue the questioning.

* * *

CBD: Mr. Savas, let's pick up where we left off yesterday, shall we?

MR. SAVAS: Or why don't you go fuck yourself, instead?

* * *

CBD: Cooperation will save you time and mitigate further inquiry.

MR. SAVAS: Inquiry? Is that the latest term? I thought it was enhanced interrogation.

* * *

CBD: [Inaudible] Would you please just continue your account from yesterday?

MR. SAVAS: Remind me. My brain is a mush. Isolation for a month, sleep dep. Just staring at gray walls. Messes with your mind. So will near drowning.

* * *

CBD: The executions.

MR. SAVAS: Right. Jesus, yes. The executions. [Inaudible] Live and HDTV for all to see. Well, as horrible as that all was, it was our first real break.

CBD: How so?

MR. SAVAS: The worm. Angel's spyware reported back. The television hijack was tied directly to it. So, there it was. What we had been pursuing as unrelated cases, the murders, the kidnappings, and the financial meltdown. It was all tied together by the worm. By Anonymous. It was part of the same thing. And it all made sense.

* * *

CBD: What made sense?

MR. SAVAS: I mean it all fit together. Anonymous had set its eyes on bringing down the world financial system. It was fighting on several fronts from the virus wrecking the markets to the drones killing financial tycoons. The blackmail of congressmen changing laws was another front. It was incredible, really. Amazingly orchestrated. Diabolical genius.

* * *

[REDACTED]: You sound inspired.

MR. SAVAS: You sound like a goddamned Nazi. Inspired? Well, we all had to be. The world had been caught with its pants down and effectively castrated. Anonymous had played us like fools.

* * *

CBD: And you are so sure it was the hacker group Anonymous? Who was their leader again?

MR. SAVAS: I've told you already, there isn't one Anonymous. There are legions. It's more an idea than an organization. And Fawkes, well, he was the inevitable, the instability that takes over any distributed authority.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Fawkes. This is the one found in your office. That you claim you caught and who single-handedly masterminded the Event?

MR. SAVAS: Yes. It was his worm. His plan. His signal that was to bring it all down once and for all. But I didn't know that then, when he murdered them all.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And that is when you contacted Lopez?

MR. SAVAS: That is correct.

[REDACTED]: Can you tell us why you thought it prudent, let alone legal, to search for and enlist the aid of the nation's most notorious outlaws? Murderers of hundreds, including some of the most important persons in our nation?

MR. SAVAS: Because I knew they weren't murderers. I knew that they had been framed.

[REDACTED]: This is ridiculous. You only reveal your own involvement with these terrorists!

CBD: This is not a trial, [REDACTED]!

[REDACTED]: There isn't going to be a trial.

CBD: This is a deposition and we are instructed to take it. [Inaudible] May I continue? Thank you.

* * *

CBD: We will ascertain how you knew the pair later. For now, can you tell us please how they got involved?

MR. SAVAS: We had setup a safe house for them.

[REDACTED]: Who is we?

MR. SAVAS: You'll have to waterboard me some more to get near that. Let's just say there are many forces at work here that you don't know about. Forces that believe in this nation. What it used to be, anyway.

* * *

CBD: Mr. Savas, look. As your counsel I am trying to help you, but you are making that a challenging assignment. Can you help this panel understand why you would bring in two wanted terrorists and murderers?

MR. SAVAS: After we put together the bigger picture, when I saw where Anonymous was headed, I knew then what was at stake. So did my team.

* * *

CBD: And what was at stake, Mr. Savas?

MR. SAVAS: Civilization itself.
OCTOBER 23
19

# Martial Law

Chaos stormed through New York and the world.

After the feed from Anonymous, network programming returned to something quite different than normal. Broadcasters replayed the carnage over and over, whipping themselves and the public into a frenzy.

At FBI, Savas had steered his people back to work. They would be slogging through the night. Schedules, family, _health_ would suffer, but until the crisis could be controlled, he didn't see any other choice. His phone rang constantly. From his superiors came a barrage of commands. Most of these came from above as the governmental apparatus went into war mode. Contacts and numerous agencies checked in with him, provided small pieces of useless information, and asked for favors of investigation and protection in return. He had nothing to give. His staff was already depleted even before the televised mass assassination.

In the middle of the chaos, he received a message on his private cell. He stared at the number. It made sense. In all that was happening, now was one of the greater periods of danger from a government eating itself, going too far, forgetting its principles. Now would be a time for the Watchmen to call.

The group had formed during the Bush years when some in the FBI and CIA had grown concerned about the powers the executive branch and other governmental agencies had begun to assume under antiterrorism laws. Under the increasingly paranoid Obama administration, they had only redoubled their efforts to exert a more sane response to threats. Indefinite detention and torture were one thing, but secretive decisions for assassination of Americans without trial, endless spying on citizens by governmental organizations—for some of them, it had gone too far. With the national scandal of the Priest and Whore last year, they had finally pooled their meager resources and acted. And thus had Gabriel been created.

"Alice. To what do I owe the pleasure?" His smile faded. "What? Are you sure? _When?_ " Savas looked around the floor. "Jesus. What will that mean? How far is the decree?" He nodded scribbling on a notepad. "Understood. Right. Thank you."

He put the phone away and stared forward, seeing nothing except images of the city in his mind. A New York surrounded by military vehicles.

Savas jumped from his chair and exited his office, finding Cohen on the floor. She was coordinating with several agents on the requests—or rather _demands_ —for even more of his staff to be reassigned to protective functions for VIPs. Very soon, they would be running Intel 1 on pure air.

"Everybody listen up," he said, cutting into the middle of their conversation. "Very serious newsflash. I just got a call in from some sources, reliable ones. The president is going to declare martial law."

Cohen blinked. " _Martial law?_ "

Savas nodded. "Within the hour. In the city for sure, maybe the whole tri-state area. They're panicking. I guess I understand that, although I don't know how locking down the city is going to help much. They must know about the worm, and now with additional threats of terrorist bombings and killings, they needed to act. They decided to lock everything down."

"Anonymous isn't stuck walking the streets of New York, John!" shouted Cohen. "This won't achieve anything except to cause a real panic. People are going to start bolting from the city."

"They won't be able to."

"And you know how that's going to turn out, right?"

"God, I hope not. We can't let this panic us, too, okay? At the root of this is a core organization, people orchestrating everything. If we can find that core, flush out or corner those people, we can put a stop to this. And for that we need—"

"Here, Commander," said Lightfoote, panting from a run.

"We need Angel."

"It's probably going to be both New York and DC," said Lightfoote, catching her breath. "I'm intercepting a lot of chatter. People aren't using secure lines. They're freaking. They've also got a lot of the Cabinet and Congress going underground, presuming continual threats."

"Word on the Capitol?"

Lightfoote nodded. "You've seen the footage on the news. Main entrance and steps are blown to hell and back. Few were hurt at this time of night, but the point sure was made. The building is structurally sound, however. It would take a lot more firepower than these little drones can carry to seriously damage it."

"And what if they have bigger drones?" asked Cohen.

Angel bit her lip. "Then it could be a lot worse. But the scurrying of governmental staff is creating power vacuums. Basically, we're moving to a crisis mode unlike anything except during the Cold War. Not even 9/11 approached this. The apparatus is gearing up for siege."

"This is not going to end well," muttered Savas. "Update me on the worm."

"It had to get visible, and wow, what a beauty." Cohen arched her eyebrow. "Seriously, Rebecca, this is the Michelangelo of hackers. The damn thing _self-assembled_ from thousands of computers around the world on some mysterious signal."

"Self-assembled?" asked Savas.

"Yes! We thought that it was hiding on various computers. Only _parts_ of it were. Like the distributed code I mentioned? I didn't realize that the _entire worm_ was networked. In other words, it doesn't exist as a single piece of code on _any_ computer, but like a neural network that's the sum of a bunch of minor worms on millions of computers. It's incredible. Powerful. Unstoppable."

"Unstoppable?" said Cohen.

"Well, _I_ don't know how to stop it. I don't think anybody would. It's unprecedented. It's a distributed AI that's taking over the distributed brain we call the internet."

"But it was activated with the Anonymous broadcast?" asked Savas.

"It _ran_ the damn broadcast, John! I tried to get inside the code that activated, but it quickly detected my efforts and erased itself from my computer and shut down the computer's internet access. Wiped the hard drive. I'm reinstalling from backups."

"Wouldn't that cutoff part of itself, if it's some distributed thing over computers?" asked Cohen.

"Yes, but it's like killing some of your brain cells by a night of heavy drinking. The brain overall isn't hurt much by that afterward. And the thing is everywhere from finance to military computers. We can thank God that the nuclear arsenal is still mainly run off five-and-a-quarter inch floppies and machines from the 1970's. But every other damn thing is infested. We don't control the digital world, anymore. The worm does."

Savas felt his head pounding. He needed something concrete, something practical. "Tell me what the threat is."

Lightfoote looked at him in shock. "John, it can do anything. Write any code, erase data, create data, shut systems down, modulate system function. Turn off the water and lights. Open the Hoover Dam. Drop half the airplanes from the sky. Delete the world's money supply. _Anything_. What's the threat? It's fucking digital Armageddon."

Cohen turned to Savas. "John, this is too big for us."

He nodded. "I'll call in every contact I have at the CIA and NSA with what we have. We'll run a shadow agency. Meanwhile, let's see what's left here."

"We're down to the core group and a few extra hands," said Cohen. "They've pulled all the assistant agents and trainees. It's mostly us. We're the boutique group. Expendable in this crisis."

His mind raced. "Let's break this down into tasks. Overall, we need to provide some kind of quick break into the worm and who is behind it. We're a small team, a talented team. We can move quickly whereas other agencies will just be reactive. We need to go after the worm first." He nodded to Lightfoote. "We'll get JP down with Angel in the basement, and they'll try to trace the origins of this thing, find out its weaknesses. Rebecca, you, me, and Frank will find everything we can on this Anonymous group. But Intel 1 doesn't have much firepower right now."

"We do have an ace-in-the-hole," said Cohen.

"Yes," said Savas wearily. He rubbed his hand across his brow. "I'm not sure they're ready to wade back into things—they're still radioactive. But we don't have a choice. Once they defied an entire nation. Maybe now they can help us save it."
20

# Gabriel and Mary

Sara Houston, wrapped in a dark coat, trudged across a white field carrying a pile of firewood. The pines behind her circled a small cabin, smoke rising from its chimney, a warm yellow glow spilling through the windows, reflected on the snow crunching under her boots. Clouds of vapor escaped her lips as she marched forward, a serene expression on her face, crisp blue eyes peering outward from a face framed in brown hair.

She climbed onto the porch and dropped the wood into a bin. She ran a gloved finger across the door, tracing the vines that trailed up the wood. The leaves had fallen, and only cordons and trunk remained, hardly more than thin stems. But Houston had planted them only a year ago and was satisfied with the progress.

Dusting off her boots and coat, she opened the door and stepped into the warmth of the small cabin—a single room with bed, table, and miniature kitchen. A sofa beside the window overlooked the porch, and the fireplace crackled loudly on her right, casting red and orange light across her chiseled features. She lowered her hood, chin-length brown hair dancing in a disheveled mess about her face. She smiled at Francisco Lopez walking toward her with a pair of tumblers holding caramel liquid.

The light showed the breadth of him, muscles filling out a black sweater, short and curled black hair and a dark beard masking much of his face. His features were a sharp contrast to hers, his skin a rich copper, features Aztec. He held a glass toward Houston and smiled back at her. She brought the drink to her lips.

"Mmmmm, Francisco," she said, downing a quarter of the two inches in the tumbler. "Cask strength?" He nodded. "Nice and warm. That shed is going to get further and further away as the winter comes."

Lopez grunted. "I think we'll spend a lot of time just clearing a path to it. I didn't realize the snows came so early here. The mountains in Alabama weren't all that high or cold."

"How's the buck?" she said, walking into the small kitchen. "Biggest one we've bagged. You've got your work cut out for you to top that one."

"You're one competitive girl, Sara," he said, laughing and shaking his head. "But he's coming along well. Should be dinner for two weeks with the last veggie run."

She nodded. "Runs are going to get harder with the weather. We need a strategy for supplies. I don't think the Outback can handle what might be coming on these lousy roads. Next trip into town we need to make sure we have enough fuel for the generator."

"By then we'll have natural refrigeration and drain less power. We can fill the shelter with things. We're remote, Sara, but not that remote."

Houston placed her tumbler on the table and walked up to Lopez, draping her arms around his neck. "I'm getting used to a certain rustic luxury up here, Francisco. Nothing ruins rustic luxury like a few weeks of rationing."

They kissed. Houston wasn't sure what felt warmer, his lips or the whiskey. As his hands moved over her waist, she realized that both could spin her head around in the most delicious ways.

A device buzzed from a table beside the sofa.

Both Lopez and Houston turned quickly to the sound, the warmth draining from their faces, softer expressions replaced with intense eyes and set jaws.

Lopez rumbled deeply. "My guess is that it's for you."

Houston smirked and walked toward the landline. It looked like a receptionist's business phone, rows of buttons and an LCD display glowing back at her. The phone cable ran through a black box with a pair of lights. The red light glowed. "They sure know how to ruin a girl's evening."

Lopez downed the rest of this whiskey and followed her to the phone, ignoring the device and staring out the window. He seemed to focus on objects thousands of miles away.

"Mary here," said Houston, using the false identities they had been given. "Gabriel's fine." She pushed a button and the device went to speaker. A woman's voice spoke from the other end.

"It is said: 'Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.'"

Houston replied. "And it is also said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'" She watched a series of numbers changing across the LCD. They locked in a particular sequence, and she continued. "Handshake completed. Hi, Rebecca."

"Hello, Sara," said Cohen, her voice strained.

"This isn't going to be a good call, is it? Are we blown?"

"No. Nothing like that. Something much worse."

Lopez turned his head and met Houston's eyes. His voice was curt. "What's going on?"

There was a sigh and long pause on the line. "Be glad you're in the mountains. Down here, it's chaos. Short story is that there seems to be a hacker group called Anonymous that has suddenly mutated into a full-bore terrorist group. Attacks have ripped through the virtual world and bombings and assassinations in the real world."

Houston crossed her arms over her chest. "What's that got to do with us?"

"Sara, this is a national security threat. We've had major figures in business and finance and in the US Congress blown up or gunned down in the last week. At the same time, some kind of Armageddon worm has been secretly eating its way through world networks, siphoning off huge sums of money, controlling international media, and insinuating itself on every computer from academia to the Pentagon. It's already caused havoc and we're pretty sure it's just getting warmed up."

Lopez leaned over toward the phone. "That doesn't answer the question. Why on earth are you calling us? What could we do? If we show our faces down there, we'll just end up in a cell. More likely just dead."

"The President has declared a state of martial law in New York and Washington."

"What the fuck?" said Houston. "Are you kidding me? It's that bad?"

Cohen sounded tense. "They've used drones to bomb the Pentagon, Wall Street. They took over the networks to televise the execution of business and political leaders. Military units are already moving into the city. Curfew is in place. So yeah, it's pretty damn bad."

Houston shook her head. "How does the world go to hell in a week's time? You were just here!"

Lopez pressed her. "Look, if what you say is true, then what could we possibly do? Seems better that two hunted fugitives wait it out in hiding. Law enforcement will be looking suspiciously at everyone. That's some attention we don't need."

"Most of our staff has been annexed by Homeland Security and put into bodyguard roles for the powerful. It's the same all over NYPD and other FBI divisions. All kinds of 9/11 laws are getting dusted off and put into use. HS is calling all the shots. It's ludicrous!" Cohen barked a laugh. "Right now, all we've got is the core of Intel 1: me, John, Angel, JP, and Frank. The other agencies seem paralyzed. We need you. The _country_ needs you."

"The country needs us," said Lopez. "Would that be the same country that wants us dead? The same government that slandered our names and has us on _your_ most wanted list?"

"Francisco, today's not the day to seek justice for what happened to you. You know there are plenty of good people who deserve our best. Some of those risked their lives so that you and Sara could find a new life up there."

"And now you want to take that away from us."

Cohen sighed. "If we don't stop Anonymous—I don't know how far they'll go. I'm _afraid_ , Francisco. Soon, there might not even be a country to establish your innocence in!"

"This is crazy," said Houston.

"I know it is, but aren't most disasters as they unfold? 9/11? The attack on Mecca with one of our own nukes? Please. You two have unique skills. Highly valuable skills. And you're ghosts. You have no obligation to the US government or anyone else. You can do what we can't. Even Anonymous can't find out who you are. Tools we can use to turn this around."

"Tools," said Lopez.

"Dammit, Francisco, you know what I'm saying! You've been screwed, yes. But don't you feel the least bit of obligation to the people of this nation?"

Houston looked painfully toward Lopez, who turned his head away as he spoke. "You know I do. I was a priest once."

"Then help us! We need everything we can get right now!"

Lopez looked at Houston. He nodded and closed his eyes.

"The activation protocol?" Houston asked.

They could almost hear the relief in Cohen's voice. "Yes. I'll rendezvous with you at the specified location. Thank you. Both of you."

"You're welcome," said Houston.

"And Sara, make sure you come prepared."

The light on the phone switched to green and the LCD went blank.

Lopez grabbed his coat and walked to the door. Houston followed suit and took an LED lantern from the mantle. Together they walked outside and around to the back of the cabin. Lopez approached the cabin wall and knelt down. He brushed away several inches of snow, revealing a set of padlocked doors embedded in the ground. Houston removed the key from a chain around her neck and inserted it into the lock. They pulled together on the doors, the sound of them swinging on their hinges muffled by the deep snow around them.

A short flight of steps ended at the bottom of what appeared to be a surprisingly large wine cellar for a mountain getaway. Houston stepped from behind him and held up the lantern, pressing a button to intensify the light. Sharp shadows were cast across the room. The light spilled over crates and suitcases, canisters and body armor.

Lopez flipped open one case. Dark vestments, black gloves, and masks were folded neatly into sections. Houston ran her fingers over one of the masks and sighed.

"Never thought I'd be wearing these in the States. Never dreamed we'd be activated here."

"Well, it'll shoot facial recognition to all hell and back. We have to assume the targets will all be wired with a hundred cameras, and half of them might be governmental for all we know."

"Blended in better in Islamic countries. That's where all the action is these days. Or used to be."

"From Rebecca's tone, disguise will be the least of our issues. We'll need something more serious than clothes."

They both turned to an open wooden box, the top of the crate slightly off position. Houston tossed the lid to the ground and they stared inside. The light of the lantern glinted off black metal.

The interior was filled with guns.
Part II

# Fawkes

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent to blow up the King and the Parliament. Three score barrels of powder below, poor old England to overthrow —English Folk Verse (c.1870)
21

# Coming of Age

"W _hy do we have to call you Fawkes, anyway?"_

_Three teenagers crouched in a dark hallway, whispering sharply to each other. Mark and Violetta slunk behind the third, a lanky boy with unkempt hair. He turned back to them with his finger on his lips._

_"Because I said so," he whispered. "Now, be quiet. Boot camp library is around the corner."_

_"But it's locked," said Violetta. Fawkes reached into the back pocket of his jeans and removed several small, metal rods. "You're gonna pick it?" Her eyes widened._

_"Come on."_

_The three moved quickly down the hallway. The building was still and silent, only the emergency exit signs providing light in the corridor. At the end of the hallway a set of double doors framed by windows on each side awaited, a soft glow from computer monitors in screen-saver mode spilling through._

_Fawkes knelt down beside the lock and quickly worked the tools as the other two watched in awe. Less than a minute and the mechanism clicked. He reached up and pulled the handle down and the door opened._

_"Inside."_

_The three rushed in, Fawkes closing the door quietly behind them. He motioned with his hand for them to follow, and he led them away from the windows toward the recessed counter where the librarian worked. He went behind a computer monitor at the book checkout and wiggled the mouse. A login screen appeared._

_"What are you going to do?" asked Violetta._

_"I told you. Get us all out of here," he said with a smirk._

_"With the computer? Come on."_

_He used one of his tools to open the chassis of the machine as he spoke. "These old junkyard machines have BIOS holes you can drive a truck through." He toggled from working on the circuit board to typing at the login prompt and back again._

_"I hate this place," said Mark, looking around the dark room. "All I did was one joint. I didn't even want it. Then it's undercover cops and detention and mom sending me to this stupid place to save me, or whatever. It's all my brother's fault."_

_"It seriously sucks," Violetta agreed. "Caught me with a boy in the attic. Shamed the family, you know. I'm fifteen! They think I'm a baby."_

_Mark swept his eyes over her body. "You're not a baby."_

_She ignored him. "So, Fawkes, why are you here? You never said."_

_The computer beeped and he typed furiously at a prompt on a black background. "Stepdad. Got tired of beating on me. Decided the ex-marine who runs this place would get my ass straightened out." He clacked the enter key and the screen went dark. A second later it lit up with a bright image of a field of green grass. "We're in."_

_His companions crowded around the screen. Fawkes worked quickly, searching through file systems and applications._

_Violetta continued questioning. "How can you do anything from the library computer?"_

_"It connects to the others. See, look. I'm using this terminal window to remote login on the other system. They're so stupid. All the passwords are related. So I'm in there, too. Admin office computer. And these," he said smiling as text scrolled through the window, "are files on all of us. What's your last name, Violetta?"_

_"Rayon," she said._

_"There you are. Born in Mexico City? What, you illegal?"_

_"Shut up."_

_"Maybe you were born in LA."_

_The girl gasped as the text changed at his keystrokes._

_"You can do that?"_

_"And, looks like you're here for the month program. That's a long time."_

_"Yeah." Her face fell._

_"But since the last day is tomorrow, you'll be going home."_

_She squinted at the screen. "You changed the dates!"_

_Fawkes opened another window and keyed in lines of code._

_"Take too long to do this by hand," he said. "This little script—wait, gotta save it—it will do them all." He typed the name of the new file into the other command window._

_"What's it doing?" asked the boy._

_"Reading all the files in this directory, looking for the dates, and changing them. There, all done. Everyone goes home tomorrow."_

_"Fucking awesome!" The boy shouted._

_"They'll figure it out, dumbshit," said Fawkes. "Don't get too excited. But we'll have a few days of chaos. I wonder how many parents will get calls and show up?" They laughed._

_"What else can you do? Can you like put naked pictures on the screens or something?"_

_"Yeah, sure. We'll need to download some. And—wait, what's this?" Fawkes stared at the screen and the file he just opened. "Oh, this is good. See the dollar signs? This is budget stuff! Financials! Same format my stepdad uses for his accounts. Okay. We can do some serious damage here."_

_The girl's eyes darted. "Fawkes, maybe we should leave. We could really get in big trouble for this."_

_"Hold on, hold on." He tuned her out, opening other files, scanning the numbers and accounts at light speed. "What the hell? Ah, no, no, no, no, no. Ah, man. Tonight's fucking lotto. Oh, Mr. Harrison, you've been a very bad man!"_

_Mark backed away slightly. "Mr. Harrison? Don't mess with him, Fawkes. Scares the shit out of me."_

_Fawkes laughed. "Boot camp marine man? Yeah, but right now, I got his balls in a vice. Oh, man. My stepdad's gonna love seeing where his money went! The tuition? All the fees? It's all transferred. It goes from the school account to this one. And look whose it is!"_

_"Wait," said Violetta. "Mr. Harrison is stealing?"_

_"What's stealing? Dumbass parents send them the money. Fix us and all that. He already stole it. But that's not how the world works. I've seen my stepdad with his money. Taxes and shit. You have to do it right or the FEDs come down on you. You can go to jail, even. Mr. Harrison's gonna be in a world of hurt if this gets out—which it's going to!"_

_"Don't!" said Violetta. "Fawkes, don't. He'll do something. The man is messed up or something."_

_"Yeah," said Mark. "Look man, this was fun, but I don't want to end up somewhere worse than this. You get him in trouble, then what's he gonna to do?"_

_Fawkes froze a moment in thought, a half-smirk on his face._

_"Excellent points, friends. But it's a crime to let this go. So, there's only one option left. And I think it's a much, much better option."_

_"Get the hell out of here?" said Mark._

_"No. Blackmail."_
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

DEPOSITION OF:

**Tyrell Sacker**

called for examination by Counsel for the Defendant, pursuant to Notice of Deposition, at the Independent Council Offices, located at

[REDACTED] Washington, D.C.,

when were present on behalf of the

respective parties: [REDACTED]

CBD: Will you please identify yourself for the record?

MR. SACKER: Tyrell Sacker, Detective, NYPD.

* * *

CBD: And your background? How long have you been with the NYPD?

MR. SACKER: Four years. I signed up after my Iraq tour. Promoted to detective two years ago, detective second-grade this year. Military service and cracking cases clear a lot of paperwork.

* * *

CBD: Congratulations to you, Mr. Sacker. Can you tell us how you came to know the defendant, Mr. Savas?

MR. SACKER: Professional interactions. I served as the point of contact between FBI and the NYPD on the kidnappings and murders by Anonymous.

* * *

CBD: How did that come to be?

MR. SACKER: I was on site at the bank kidnapping of Mitchell O'Kelly. Agent Cohen from Intel 1 led the FBI team. I worked with her and her division from that point on.

* * *

CBD: You worked exclusively with Intel 1? No other agencies at FBI?

MR. SACKER: That's right.

* * *

CBD: Why is this? Why only Intel 1?

MR. SACKER: I'm not sure. With all the chaos, it was just easier to set up a clear protocol to pipe information back and forth between the agencies. Things seemed to fall into place. You know, it was all getting crazy and manpower was being sucked up for a hundred security cases and events. Ladner, my captain, barely had time to go for a piss. The setup was working, so why fix it?

* * *

CBD: So you were exclusively shuttling information from NYPD on the events to Intel 1?

MR. SACKER: That's right.

* * *

CBD: Do you know whether they shared this information with other divisions?

MR. SACKER: I assume so.

* * *

CBD: But you have no evidence for that?

MR. SACKER: No. But why wouldn't they?

* * *

CBD: Please take a look at these photographs. In your interactions with the FBI, did you ever come across either this man or this woman?

MR. SACKER: No. I don't think so. Who are they?

* * *

CBD: Known terrorists. Francisco Lopez and Sara Houston. You might know them better as the Priest and the Whore.

MR. SACKER: [INAUDIBLE] Why would they be with the FBI?

* * *

[REDACTED]: I'll be frank with you, Detective. You have been summoned to this tribunal to help us figure out some highly irregular actions on the part of the Intel 1 division led by Mr. Savas. It is for some of these actions that he is the subject of this inquiry.

MR. SACKER: Irregular?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Illegal. Treasonous.

MR. SACKER: No. I don't believe that. These were good people. I didn't work day-to-day with them, but I interacted with them enough to see their dedication. Look, I don't know what was going on, but they aren't traitors.

* * *

[REDACTED]: But as you noted, you were not closely involved with them. You need to understand the seriousness of this inquiry, and the consequences for not being completely forthcoming.

MR. SACKER: What does that mean?

* * *

CBD: The site in Connecticut—how was NYPD involved?

MR. SACKER: That was a coordination between New York and local police, as well as FBI. Most of the victims were from the city financial district. We had been filling our offices with new case files on their disappearances. We had a pretty big stake in it. FBI helped bring some of us on board in Bridgeport.

* * *

[REDACTED]: But neither you nor the local police handled any evidence?

MR. SACKER: No, it was local and NYC FBI forensics teams. Mostly the New York guys, I think. They were much better equipped to do the work.

* * *

[REDACTED]: So NYPD never saw any of the alleged evidence?

MR. SACKER: Alleged?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Can you answer the question, please.

MR. SACKER: No. Like I said, the evidence was all handled by FBI. They kept us updated on the results.

* * *

CBD: You mean the Intel 1 division?

MR. SACKER: I don't know whose forensics team was involved. I think the results were handled by that division, yes.

* * *

CBD: But Cohen kept you informed?

MR. SACKER: She did. I mean, with everything going down, it wasn't like I had her piping information to me on an hourly basis! But all things considered, they were pretty good about keeping us in the loop.

* * *

[REDACTED]: But you knew nothing about the fugitives Lopez and Houston?

MR. SACKER: No, I didn't.

[REDACTED]: Or about the Intel 1 division hacking into governmental agencies?

MR. SACKER: Sorry, what?

[REDACTED]: Or about the disappearances of the fugitives and the head of their cybercrimes division after these hacking events?

MR. SACKER: No! What are you talking about?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Would you characterize all the NYPD interactions with FBI in this case in a similar fashion?

MR. SACKER: I'm not following you.

* * *

[REDACTED]: The raid on the Anonymous group. The capture of the hackers. The hit on the warehouses and ship. NYPD had involvement, but is it not true that all evidence, all prisoners, all aspects of the case were tightly control by Intel 1?

MR. SACKER: Yes, but—

* * *

[REDACTED]: And in all of this, you would describe John Savas as masterminding all the activities at FBI during this crisis?

MR. SACKER: He was head of the division. I don't think masterminding is a good word, but he—

* * *

[REDACTED]: Thank you, Mr. Sacker. We appreciate your time in this inquiry.

* * *

CBD: [REDACTED], there are still several questions—

[REDACTED]: That will be all, Mr. Sacker.

* * *

MR. SACKER: But wait a minute! What's this all about? What hacking? What treason? You can't just drag me in here and ask me questions without telling me anything!

* * *

[REDACTED]: The tribunal reminds you that the entire proceeding is classified under past and more recent national security laws: The Patriot Acts, the Terrorist Surveillance Order, the Obama Doctrines. You are to be reminded that we are at war and under martial law. You may not speak to anyone about any of this or even acknowledge that you have been here or that this tribunal exists. The recent NSA authorizations for tracking and recording citizens means that you will be monitored via your new nation identity card through all electronic devices, both public and private. Failure to abide by these instructions will be discovered and may be construed as action hostile to the United States of America. Do you understand?

* * *

MR. SACKER: Jesus.

[REDACTED]: Do you understand?

MR. SACKER: Yes.

* * *

CBD: You are free to go.
OCTOBER 24
22

# Scene of Death

Miller blasted through the left-most toll lane with lights flashing as he and Savas raced down Interstate 95 on their way to Bridgeport, Connecticut. The NSA finally seemed to be playing nice with the other agencies and had come through in a big way. With their eyes nearly everywhere in the digital world, they had been able to trace the feed for the streaming video of the assassinations to a boardwalk section of the port town.

"Near Captain's Cove," said Savas, mapping the location on his phone. "Seems to be some minor touristy location by a marina. Move a bit out from it and things deteriorate quickly. A lot of abandoned buildings."

"Buildings with serious bandwidth, it seems," said Miller. He cast a sharp look toward Savas. "Rebecca's where again? We could use her today."

Savas sighed. "Tell me about it. Look, I know I've been keeping this in a black box, Frank, but there are some very good reasons. Things will be clearer soon. Current events have complicated things, but she's tending to something important."

"Your call, John. But I can't say there hasn't been a lot of interest and speculation."

"Answers are coming. Meanwhile, we focus on today."

Miller stared a moment more at Savas, then turned his eyes back to the road. "Sure."

Savas continued. "We're going to have local and state police at the scene, and some agents from the New Haven Division. But they've saved the crime scene for us, and I've got a forensics unit en route. This is our first real physical connection to Anonymous."

"Well, let's hope these digital ghosts leave real-world footprints."

They stepped out of the car in front of a faded orange building. Sandwiched between several dilapidated and shuttered structures, it hardly seemed the location for the broadcast of the most devastating video in the history of the internet. They were met by representatives of the local FBI division and surrounded by police. Bystanders stood behind police tape, gawking at the uniformed presence, cell phones raised like torches, beaming images around the world.

"Assistant Special Agents in Charge Jimmy Onda and Maggie Linven," said a tall woman wrapped in a coat and indicating a wiry man with thinning hair. Both of the New Haven agents appeared anxious and fearful.

Savas shook their hands. "John Savas and Frank Miller, Intel 1. I take it you've been inside?"

Their wide-eyed expressions gave Savas his answer.

"Yes, agent Savas. The bodies are still there. They haven't been disturbed. I was told your New York crime units are coming."

He nodded. "Yes. They should be here any minute. Mind if we have a look ourselves?"

"No. But it's pretty grim."

The four of them entered the building, a narrow hallway leading back to what might have been a storage room for a small business decades ago. Photographers continued to take pictures, and the strobing of the flashes in the dark space created a strange, discontinuous visual effect as he and Miller snapped on nitrile gloves.

Even walking in the space was hazardous. Clotted pools of blood had seeped from the center of the room outward, coating the floor in an expanse of red goo. The staging was as it had been in the video: two rows of ten chairs, corpses tied to them, stage lights affixed to stands around the massacred, and a dark cloth framing the nightmare in a semicircle of black.

"There seems to be some rigor mortis remaining in the bodies," said agent Liven. "That's consistent with the timing of the broadcast last night."

"So it was live," mumbled Miller, a scowl on his face. "Like to tie down the bastard that did this and see how he likes the treatment."

The accompanying agents eyed Miller cautiously. Savas turned the conversation back to Anonymous.

"That speech on TV sounded like talking points from a manifesto. They truly hated the people here, saw them as criminals and murderers that deserved their punishment."

"Sounds like you're empathizing with them," growled agent Onda.

"Not at all," said Savas. "But we can't sit here getting off on righteous indignation. We need to understand them, get in their heads. We need to anticipate them. And we can't do that if we can't think like they do. Basic criminal psychology 101."

A glint of light caught his attention. Moving in a wide arc around the crime scene to avoid the blood, he approached the left side of the chairs and crouched beside a white object on the ground. One side of it was dyed red from blood that had run alongside the plastic.

"The Guy Fawkes mask," said Savas.

The head of the New Haven division stared between Savas and the mask. "I wondered what that was all about in the video. Who's Guy Fawkes?"

Savas shook his head. "Too much FBI training is still in the analog years." He stood and continued to move parallel to the chair rows, examining the layout. "Historically, he's a figure from British religious wars in the sixteenth century. Led a failed Catholic rebellion against the English. Fast forward. Now, amazingly, he's become a general symbol of resistance to oppressive systems. Started with a graphic novel. The hacker community in particular has adopted him as a symbol. Anonymous often uses iconography of him—the mask in particular—when putting a public face on their activities. It literally keeps them anonymous and gives them some kind of mythic power."

The New Haven agent shook her head. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah, well, since when do sociopathic revolutionaries have to make sense?" asked Miller. "But the idiot left the mask here."

"Exactly," said Savas, a glint in his eye. "And look, behind the chairs," he pointed with a blue finger. "Some masks from the shooters. They wore them for the entire video." He smiled. "Maybe Anonymous is made up of geniuses, but their intelligence is limited to the digital realm. They're rookies here."

At that moment, several additional agents entered the room carrying equipment and evidence bags. One waved to Savas as he approached.

"Just in time," said Savas. "Our NYC crime unit. And it looks like Anonymous has left some interesting Easter eggs for us to open."
OCTOBER25
23

# Fugitives Return

An unremarkable blue sedan pulled up to a tollbooth on the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side. The booth officer watched as a man with blond hair and a youngish face shoved a fist out the window, offering a ten and a five from inside. The officer could see her face reflected in his mirrored glasses. She glanced inside at his companion as she took the bills, glimpsing a woman with short black hair and dark sunglasses. The man looked away as the gate swung upward, and the car dashed off, lost in the traffic swarming onto the bridge.

Lopez rubbed his hand across his face as he steered the vehicle toward the right lanes, glancing upward to a sign for the Harlem River Drive.

Houston smiled. "Miss the beard?"

"Not sure. Just getting used to it. Nervous habits and all." He took the offramp from the bridge and forced his way into the gaggle of vehicles queuing up for the East Side Highway. "I'm sure we got our photos taken back there."

Houston stared outside the window at the merging traffic. "The image-recognition solutions still struggle with facial hair, so I'm the bigger danger. We _are_ number one on the most-wanted list. Anyone would want to make their career bringing us in." She looked behind them and studied the vehicles. "These giant sunglasses should mask my forehead and cheekbones some. I kept the visor down as well as we approached the toll booth. Which reminds me: fifteen bucks for a car?"

"Getting a bit ridiculous. Cheaper with EZ-Pass, but we have to stay off the grid." Lopez grunted. "So how do we fight a digital terrorist group when we stay off the grid?"

"First, they stopped being digital. Rebecca's encrypted data was informative: Bombings, shootings—nothing virtual there. Second, there are ways to get online without alerting the world to your presence. We've done it."

" _You've_ done it. But these guys put the Feds to shame. It's different."

"They aren't omniscient. They don't know what to look for. We don't exist for them. Not yet, anyway. We'll be targeted later."

"They seem pretty good at that."

Houston turned her body toward Lopez, swinging a leg onto the seat to stabilize herself. "I've been thinking about that, Francisco. How the hell did these guys remotely pilot these things so skillfully? They aren't drone operators."

"Maybe they recruited some. Besides, it's not like people don't know where the Capitol is. Just punch in the GPS coordinates and off you go."

"And how do you explain hitting a moving vehicle like the CEO's car?"

Lopez nodded. "Got me there. They'd have to steer it. In real time."

"Pretty tough with an evasive target. I doubt the best drone pilots in the CIA could do that."

"Then how?"

"Same thing you said. GPS coordinates."

Lopez furrowed his brows. "I see. Mobile devices."

"Right. Even CEOs have their damn smartphones these days. If they could hack into one or more of the Big Brother databases out there, they might be able to get the target's phone GPS feed. It's like shining a laser beam for a missile. Even a _moving_ target. Individualized. It's perfect. They were using this in Pakistan and other locations for al-Qaeda honchos. But it should work even better in Western nations."

"You're right. It's perfect for assassinations: auto-piloted drones coupled to the real-time coordinates of the target."

Houston spun back around as Lopez exited the Harlem River Drive and entered the streets of Harlem itself. "For now. If this is what is happening, you can bet every figure of importance will ditch their GPS-enabled tech."

"By then, it might be too late."

Rebecca Cohen was standing outside the rundown brownstone as they pulled up. Lopez and Houston exited the car quickly and scaled the steps to meet her at the doorway.

Houston glanced around them. "You're on a burner cell? No GPS?"

Cohen nodded. "As you asked. It's a cheap model, but it makes calls. You might be right about how the hits were made. It's so simple it's frightening." She motioned them to the entrance. "Let's get in and I'll let John know you're here." Cohen unlocked the door and the three entered rapidly.

"What a dump," said Houston. Cohen shut the door behind them.

The wreckage of the former living room was strewn with broken furniture, blankets, and litter. Grime coated the walls and floor. It stank.

"Former crack house that was shut down and left to die," said Cohen as she handed Lopez the keys. "Gentrification hasn't made it this far north yet."

He nodded. "It's perfect. I'll be right back."

The ex-priest returned quickly with a heavy suitcase in each hand and a backpack strapped over his shoulders. Cohen glanced briefly at the bags as she dialed. She didn't need any guesses as to what they held within. She punched a key on her phone.

"John? It's Rebecca. They're here. Yes, okay. Go ahead."

She was silent for a few moments as muffled sounds came from the speaker. Meanwhile, Lopez and Houston opened one of the suitcases, removing body armor and firearms. They stripped to their underwear, Houston with a tight sports bra, Lopez's rippling musculature distracting the FBI woman. They donned tight black tanks and black pants, strapping on shoulder harnesses with holsters for handguns and knives. Cohen thought she saw stun grenades as well in the suitcase, but it was closed before she could be sure.

She hung up the phone and approached the pair. "Some interesting news."

Houston slipped a loose black shirt on, the rough fabric concealing all evidence of the weaponry within. "The crime scene?" Lopez seemed to be tying together a long robe or coat of some kind.

"Yes," said Cohen. "The executions. Looks like our hackers left considerable physical evidence behind in their getaway. The crime unit just went through things and it's preliminary, but there are prints and hair."

Houston's face was set. "Well, it's a start. How soon until we have something?"

"This is priority one. John and Frank are on their way back with them. They'll do this right. Best people, best labs. Everything is nearby. Bottlenecks should be travel time to the labs and lab work. We'll get the fingerprints first. DNA tests in some hours plus time to search databases."

"If things go well," said Lopez. He stepped beside her.

His demeanor had changed completely. Outwardly, he was covered in black vestments, modified and tightened so as not to restrict his movements. Along with the monastic garb came a stern expression on his face, one Cohen had never seen before. For the first time, she noticed clearly the scar on his forehead, branded there by the hot barrel of a weapon held by a vengeful madman, a circle of white tissue with a cross from the site at the top. It almost seemed to glow.

Cohen cleared her throat "Yes, if things go well. Listen, I want to thank you both for coming. I know you didn't have to."

Lopez slammed a magazine into the butt of a gun and holstered the weapon within the folds of the vestments. Even his gloves and boots were black. As Houston unconsciously moved to his side, Cohen noted how similar they seemed, how coordinated their motions, like two black cats stalking prey.

"Let's get to work," Houston said. "When do we get to meet the gang?"
24

# Rendezvous

The location was ideal. The overpass was large, the tunnel and space underneath deep and shadowed. They were concealed from nearby residential windows by the thundering highway above and from other eyes by the East River at their backs. The dark evening created numerous pockets of gloom away from any direct lighting. There had been a contingent of homeless, but at the sight of the figures entering the dark underpass, they seemed to sense danger, and one by one they filed out and seemed to dissolve into the flow of the city.

Savas had used Intel 1's access to city camera systems and determined that the area was poorly covered, a patchwork of lenses crossing nearby but leaving considerable holes, including the space underneath. It was not difficult to arrange for separate approaches that would avoid nearly all surveillance.

Miller, Lightfoote, and Rideout stood like statues in the cool air and watched three shadows approach from the opposite side of the tunnel. The distance was only fifty yards, and it was easy to identify one of the shapes. Cohen walked at a brisk pace several paces in front of the two other figures, her eyes locked on Savas. Behind her glided a lithe woman with a confident, feline gait, her body remaining shrouded in black even as she approached close enough for light to spill over her form. Her face was covered completely by a veil or mask. A slit in the dark fabric revealed a pair of intense, blue eyes. Beside her strode a powerfully built man, also black-clad but with his face uncovered, dark eyes and raven hair blending into the night. He seemed to possess an underlying tension that caught on the air like static.

Miller spoke quietly to Savas as the three neared. "Is that a cassock?"

"Maybe," Savas growled.

Rideout cut in. "If you mean the one next to the hot burqa-ninja, I would say yes. Definitely a cassock."

Miller shook his head. "John's mystery project. Who are these ghosts?"

Lightfoote laughed, tipping her head to Miller's. "Avenging spirits, Frank."

The pair behind her stopped several feet in front of the others. Cohen stepped up to Savas and placed her hand gently on his shoulder. She glanced backward.

"They weren't happy to come, John. But they're here. They're ready." She slipped alongside him and turned to face the ciphers.

Savas spoke to his team. "I'm sorry for this secrecy, but it was necessary for reasons I can't go into. But they're here to help." He gestured toward the pair. "Gabriel and Mary. You're to know them by these names. They're professionals. They are off the radar. They have no ties or allegiances to anyone. But they're allies."

Savas saw Miller and Rideout appraising the pair. Lightfoote only smiled.

Cohen continued the introductions. "Mary is an experienced field operative. She's smart and can handle herself in just about any situation. Gabriel has a unique history, but he is unparalleled in combat and crisis."

Rideout cut in. "Gabriel and Mary? What's next, the Holy Spirit? Christ child?"

Lopez walked up to Rideout, who could not suppress an instinct to step backward. As Gabriel, he offered his hand. "We'll need all the help from God we can get, if what Rebecca has told us is true. You can trust us."

Rideout extended his hand cautiously. The two men shook. There followed a repeat of the ritual with the other members of the team. Houston paused a moment looking Lightfoote up and down.

"This the one? Your white hat hacker?"

Savas nodded. "I don't know what color she is. Red, by the color of her butchered hair." He gestured toward Houston. "Angel, meet Mary. You and JP will be paired with her and Gabriel to form a team to look into the drones and computer end of this case. The rest of us will pursue the human angle and try to dig out the members of Anonymous."

The two women shook hands.

Houston stared quietly a moment longer. The fabric around her mouth pulled tightly from a smirk. "I like this one. She's hardcore."

Lightfoote looked deeply into Houston's eyes. "We all have to be. Now the nightmare really begins."

Lopez moved between Savas and Lightfoote. "You said she was special."

Savas shook his head. "You have no idea."

"Now that we're one big, happy family," said Lightfoote, "Let's get the hell out of here. Meeting together is a bad idea. For all of us, because of Anonymous. For you," she said, indicating Lopez and Houston, "because of, well, everyone else. Right, Fearless Leader?"

Miller and Rideout looked over sharply, but Savas ignored them. "As usual, Angel is correct. But I felt to get us through this email wouldn't cut it. Sometimes face-to-face is required. So, the drone data?"

Lightfoote pulled out a black binder filled with paper and handed it to Houston. "Mary, your homework for tonight."

"What is it?" Houston asked.

Savas answered. "Angel's been digging into the drones. Records of the sales and trades of the major manufactures in the country. Hardcopy in case we'd transfer the worm to your computers. You said yours are scrubbed?"

Houston nodded. "Re-virginized."

"I think you'll find this interesting," said Angel, a sly look on her face, indicating the binder.

"Once you've had a chance to digest it, we can plan the next steps," said Savas. "Meanwhile, we split up again, contact only through burner cells without GPS. Anonymous may have compromised telecommunications, and we can't afford to tip our hands."

Miller grunted. "Or you may find a drone up your ass with an unfriendly payload."

"Who's our contact point?" Lopez asked.

"You'll have all our numbers, and should we need to dump a phone we'll update as we go. But you'll funnel all communications through Angel. The rest of you, outside of an emergency, straight to me. We believe Anonymous is using the NSA-developed snooping tools, piggy-backing on US surveillance. That means anything and everything is possibly an eye or ear for them. Angel is monitoring those tools for any hint that we've been compromised. Unlikely given our precautions, but we need to be careful, so let's keep communication minimal."

"See, you aren't the only ones hiding from Big Brother," said Lightfoote, smiling toward Lopez and Houston.

Lopez arched an eyebrow and Savas cut in. "Frighteningly intuitive, as I mentioned. I'm still calling it a feature, not a bug."

Houston half turned to leave. "Okay then. Let's break and communicate when we're ready to move."

Savas nodded, and with a last look across the members of Intel 1, Lopez and Houston walked back through the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness.

Rideout let out a long breath that condensed in the air. "Well, that was intense!"

"Trusting your judgment on this, John," Miller said. "But I know death when I see it. And it was just standing in front of me."

"They've been through hell and back," said Savas. "Believe me, you wouldn't want to walk in their shoes."

They turned to exit the tunnel in different directions, each to take a different path and avoid detection. Before leaving, Lightfoote dropped alongside Savas and pecked his cheek with a kiss.

"Explanation?" Savas had known her for too long to hope to guess.

"The Priest and the Whore." She nodded approvingly. "Good catch, Aging Overlord."

Savas sighed. "Damn, Angel, sometimes I don't know whether you're our only hope or our doom. How the hell did—"

"And it's really something that you did for them." Her expression turned serious. "But don't forget—I'm the only Angel."
25

# Finding the Trail

It was three in the morning, and a bleary-eyed Sara Houston lay back against the filthy wall of the abandoned brownstone. Small lamps were placed on the floor around a crouched figure in front of her. Cords ran to outlets in the wall at her left. Lopez sat cross-legged in the middle of the circle of light, his dark features giving him the appearance of some ancient priest petitioning the gods. Instead he bowed over reams of paper and rubbed his eyes.

"It's so obvious if anyone had been looking." His voice was deeper than usual, rough from lack of sleep.

Houston spoke over the wailing of an ambulance siren as the flashing lights played across the windows. "So, we've got records for six major drone manufacturers in the US. Every single one of them has seen a marked increase in sales over the last six months. No wonder Angel thought we'd find it 'interesting.'"

Lopez nodded, stood, and stretched. "But we could be jumping to conclusions. Maybe the market has picked up for drones? More and more police and news stations want to get their hands on these things. Doesn't mean it's Anonymous-related. Would they even shop local? Leave that kind of trail?"

"I don't know, but they haven't shown the same talents in real world crime as they have online. Anyway, we can't visit all these places across the country. Not in time to hope to contribute meaningfully to this case. But from what I can see, four of the six plants only ship smaller scale drones. I think we can forget those. The drones carrying explosives—they'd have to be much larger."

"Agreed."

"There are only two providing models of that size in any number in the US. And guess what? One of them happens to be across the Hudson in New Jersey."

Lopez stared down at her. "I suppose you're interested in paying that place a visit?"

Houston smiled. "And there's no time like the present. What do you say we make a little excursion to Jersey?"

Lopez began to pace. "We're not ready. We need to do recon. Find out what this place is, try to determine the security, what we'll be up against. And what's our target? We won't have access to the guided tour."

"We'll need to be in and out in under half an hour to be sure the police don't arrive. We need their records. What they've been selling and to whom. Hopefully, we can use that to trace the drones to Anonymous. In the real world, you always leave footprints."

"So we need to identify their offices, determine how to penetrate their perimeter and security, how to get into the records, all from outside with no computer access."

"We can't do it without online access."

Lopez raised his hands. "But that opens our computers to the worm. Right now they're wiped. Pristine. Who knows how long before we're infected online."

"From what Angel said, not long."

"Then we might as well be televising what we're doing. At some point we risk opening ourselves to discovery by that thing. Best case they blow our data. Worst case they send assassins."

"So we don't use our computers."

"Then what?"

Houston rose, stretching slowly in different yoga positions as she spoke. "Public library. We'll disable some of their safe-browsing settings, install TOR for anonymity, and get what we need and hope for the best."

"All those computers are infected."

"Yes, but the worm isn't omniscient. It's also latent until activated. Is there a trigger keyword in every strain on every computer about everything that might be a threat to them? Anonymous can't anticipate all the threats."

"And if they have anticipated that one?"

"We'll lose the computer and connection as the worm is activated. Then we go back to the drawing board, or head into the plant blind."

"With somebody alerted to our interest."

She sighed. "A risk we have to take."

Lopez nodded. "We need building specs. Satellite info. How do we get that from the library computer connections?"

Houston laughed. "More than you think is publicly available. But for the details, we need governmental access." She picked up her phone. "Angel must not be getting much sleep these days." She dialed.

Lopez walked to the window and stared out into the night. The streetlights took on a hazy blur from the soiled glass. The occasional passing car was enveloped in a glowing fog that seemed to give it a phantasmal quality. Sleep deprived and anxious, the images stirred his primitive emotions. To add to the suspense, a whistle rose and fell from a wind picking up and blowing through the alleyways.

"Hi Angel. Mary here." Houston made her way to their weapons cache. "We have a lead on a manufacturing plant in Jersey. No, not far. South of Newark. Yes. Look, we need to do some serious recon before we hit that place. We need access to FBI databases, satellite scans, building schematics. Anything on the site." She paused, listening. "We don't have time to wait until John's back. Yeah, I know you'd like his approval, but he's not my daddy. You're point for us, remember? And don't tell me permission from the boss ever got in your way!" Houston picked up a large handgun, a Browning 1911, and sighed. "Look, can you do this, give us access or not? Okay, then just do it." She nodded and checked the magazine on the weapon. "Thanks. And tell John we'll be careful."

She closed and pocketed the phone as Lopez approached. He glanced down at the weapon in her hand.

"Tell your dad to watch over us."

She smiled at the .45 caliber, semiautomatic. "He always does. Believe that."

Lopez checked his watch. "So, what time does the library open?"
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**Rebecca Ruth Cohen**

CBD: And it was at this point that you began to question the individual members of Anonymous.

MS. COHEN: Yes. We had compiled a list of known and suspected members that were in custody, serving time for hacking-related crimes. Other offenses. We could get immediate access to those.

* * *

CBD: How many were in custody?

MS. COHEN: In the tristate area? At that time, four. Three were minor hackers. One was a central figure in the underground community, Laurens Hanert, who had just been transferred from FCI Manchester in Kentucky. We focused on him.

* * *

CBD: Who is Hanert?

MS COHEN: An online activist, mainly. Started a hacker site open to the public. Criminal record consisted of a few Mary Jane possessions and participation in protests. Riled up a bunch of people by working with Wikileaks. Then in 2012 he was busted by the FBI in a sting operation using an informant who was a former member of Anonymous. Basically, he was set up for a hack of an intelligence company. Borderline entrapment but it worked. Pleaded guilty and got fifteen years. Longer than most murder sentences.

* * *

CBD: Did you speak to the other hackers in custody?

MS. COHEN: No. We were low on personnel. We didn't have the manpower to question them all. We thought that Hanert was our best bet.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And so the other members of Anonymous remained free.

MS. COHEN: Free? Those we knew anything about were in lockup! Free from our rushed and crazy inquiry as the world fell apart, sure. But Hanert was important. We were right to zero in on him.

* * *

CBD: How so?

MS. COHEN: He led us to some of the local hacker cells, cells that were unknown, underground. And he was the first to clue us in to Fawkes.

* * *

[REDACTED]: The mythical Fawkes, again.

MS. COHEN: I don't know what this witch hunt is about, but you're missing the elephant in the room. It's not John! Fawkes was real and nearly got us all killed as we hunted him down. If you want to understand this thing, you'd better start taking that seriously.

* * *

CBD: And where did you meet this Hanert?

MS. COHEN: FCI Ray Brook, up in the Adirondacks. Long five-hour drive from the city.

* * *

CBD: Why drive? Why not fly?

MS. COHEN: We considered it, but with the risks of the worm to air traffic and guidance systems, if we were blown it seemed an easy way to get us out of the picture to bring an aircraft down. Paranoid, sure, but staying off the grid as much as possible, that was our plan. We tried hard to stick to it. Which makes the end result so ironic. But Hanert was worth it, even if it almost cost us our lives.
OCTOBER 26
26

# Questioning Masks

The guard sat the prisoner down across from them on the other side of the plexiglass. There was a voice activated speaker that did away with the antiquated two-phone system of the past. Cameras were perched on the ceiling in multiple locations. The armed guards did not leave.

Savas and Cohen had driven north from the city into the heart of Upstate New York, the scenic Adirondack mountains. Miller remained at Intel 1, serving to coordinate the division's activities in their absence as they waited for the results of the forensics. On the way up, Lightfoote had informed them of the progress on the drones and Lopez and Houston's plans to infiltrate the New Jersey plant. It was reckless, but Savas had to concede that it was necessary. The finer points of legality and admissibility seemed to matter little when the city was locked down by the National Guard. It had taken them an hour simply to get permission to leave Manhattan.

The prisoner stared across the composite glass with apparent bemusement. He was lanky and his posture slovenly, body nearly vanishing in the folds of his overlarge gray and tan uniform. A baby face aged by a short growth of beard grinned at them as his fingers drummed incessantly.

"Laurens Hanert?" began Savas as the pair of FBI agents settled into chairs. Cohen swiped across her tablet and opened several files.

Hanert smiled. "Who wants to know?"

"FBI Special agents Savas and Cohen. New York."

Hanert leaned forward with a smile. "Federal special agents. Well, well, well. What brings you two all the way up here? Don't you have a national crisis to solve?"

Cohen scowled. "I'm sure you can imagine why."

"An-on-y-mous." He broke out each syllable in slow motion, seeming to relish every moment. "Remind me why I'm locked up in here?"

Cohen set her lips in a line. "Hanert, the judge slammed you, no doubt. But you weren't a nihilist. You were an activist. You can't tell me you approve of what has happened."

"FBI girl with a heart. I like that. You must be good cop. In fact, you remind me of the lady that cuffed me when they flash-bombed my bong-session at home. America is lucky to have you folks on the job."

Savas cut in. "Why do you have any loyalty to Anonymous? They ratted you out."

"Please, at least pretend you're not as stupid as you sound. It's a distributed group, Einstein. Anarchist. There isn't _an Anonymous_. There are as many as there are people and groups within it. I was sold out by one motherfucker who decided to protect his own ass when he fucked up. He set me up to cut time served. _You folks_ gave him that deal. I don't blame Anonymous for this," he said, rapping on the glass and gesturing around him. "And you shouldn't blame them for what's happening now."

Cohen tilted her head to one side. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, pretty agent girl, that you need to take that bloodbath broadcast seriously. One very disturbed dude with an _I'm-the-real-Anonymous_ delusion of grandeur. The rest of us are as _Oh Shit!_ as you FEDs are."

"Do you know who he is?" asked Savas.

"We all know who he is. Those of us who were in deep. There is only one nut job with the chops to pull this off."

Savas leaned forward. "And who is that?"

Hanert smiled. "What's Batman say? 'If you make yourself more than just a man'?"

"That was Ducard," said Cohen. "And it's _a legend_."

"No fake geek girl here!" Hanert paused and looked between them. "Interesting. There's some chemistry between you two! Tell me, gramps, you banging this one? You getting some? 'Cause she's hot."

"What legend?" asked Savas, his voice strained.

The prisoner's smile fell. "Right now I should be asking for early parole or something. But honestly, I think this damn place might be safer than being on the outside from here on out." He leaned forward, his expression serious for the first time. "You know why communism never worked?"

Savas blinked. "I don't see what—"

"Because it's based on perching society at the top of an unstable equilibrium. I mean, forget all that 'give to those in need from what you have' Marxist ivory tower bullshit. Sounds nice. Would be a good Sunday school lesson if people understood a fucking thing in the Bible. But it's a god-damned local maxima!"

"I'm not following," said Savas, who looked to Cohen. She was staring intently at Hanert.

"Jesus, don't they teach even basic math to you _special agents_? How are you going to understand the economy or cybercrime? Look, for an economic system you want stability. Communism ain't it, because all it takes is one person—a single fucking non-saint—to start being a selfish asshole and the whole thing collapses. Of course, usually you get groups of selfish assholes that form parties and blocks and structures to protect their power. But I digress. It's inherently unstable! Like a car perched at the top of a hill. Release the brakes and zoom! That's Anonymous."

"How's that?" asked Cohen.

"It's a leaderless, structureless anarchy. That's nice for flexibility and isolating different cells when you Feds come knocking. But its weakness is in the Selfish Asshole. One person can assume control of it before it can be stopped. This new _real_ _Anonymous_ of live televised massacre notoriety. And that person is Fawkes."

"Fawkes?" asked Savas. "As in Guy Fawkes?"

Hanert slumped back in his chair. "Yeah. I mean who takes that handle? Mt. Everest ego. But this wacko was like Mozart. He could play the hell out of the code."

Savas shook his head. "You're telling me that there is a single individual—this Fawkes—who is responsible for what is happening? I don't believe you."

"Look man, I don't care what you believe."

Savas continued. "Who is he, then?"

"Hell if I know. It's not like we all got around and passed the hash pipe. It's called _Anonymous_ for a reason, you know."

Cohen pressed. "Doesn't this Fawkes need other members of Anonymous to help? An infrastructure? You can't orchestrate multiple bombings, kidnappings, and hackings without money and people. A small army."

"No doubt."

"And so?"

"So, it isn't Anonymous. None of the main players anyway."

"And how would you know that?" asked Savas.

Hanert smirked. "I have my ways of knowing. Even in here. Believe me when I tell you that the main hacker groups aren't involved. It's a ridiculous idea, anyway. They aren't terrorists. Most wouldn't know which way to point a fucking gun."

"I want contact information on all of these groups."

"Fuck you, man."

Cohen spoke. "Hanert, one of them might know something that can lead us to this Fawkes. We're not interested in them right now. They may have broken one hundred federal statutes, but in the larger context that's background noise. You can see how serious this is. You know about the worm, I assume?"

He nodded. "Yeah. We all do now."

"Then you know what's at stake. _Please._ You have to trust us. And we need to trust you to tell us what we need to know. Anonymous was about changing a corrupt system. But right now the entire system is about to be blown up."

"That's Fawkes. His conclusion. Some agreed with him."

"Do you?" Cohen locked eyes with him.

"No. Far more damage than gain. We could go back to the Stone Age."

"Then you'll give us names?" asked Savas.

Hanert looked at him and back to Cohen. "Yeah, but only because she's so damn pretty. I wouldn't give grandfather here jack."

"Go to hell, Hanert," said Savas.

The hacker smiled, tapping his index finger, nail to vinyl on the short shelf between him and the glass. "I said we didn't know each other. That was mostly true. But there's online and there's the real world. Some of us did pass the hash pipe. Maybe more."

Cohen tapped on her tablet and looked up. "Well, I'm ready when you are."
27

# Never Safe

Cohen sped down I-87 toward New York City, the black Dodge Charger clearing one hundred without seeming to break a sweat. She glanced from the speedometer over to the impressive LCD screen flashing information on the cellular signal as Savas continued to speak through the hands-free system. The hidden flashing lights had been activated, but she had left the siren off—she'd have a migraine by the time they entered the City otherwise.

"Several of the prints returned with hits." It was Miller's voice. "They're all over the place—security firms, prison guards. One was ex-military, then worked for a contractor that provided muscle in Iraq and Syria for VIPs."

"I'm smelling mercenary," said Savas, his expression grim.

"Possible. But it's not very helpful. No recent addresses. We'll fish with relatives and last known residences, but—"

"But we don't have the time for that. What else?"

"The mask was better."

"How so?"

"Hair. They got DNA sequence—likely the mask ripped out some strands with roots."

"A match?"

"No, and that's the interesting part. Doesn't match the prints. The DNA sequence is an unknown. But some genotyping gives us a first sketch of the leader: Caucasian male, brown eyes, black hair that matched the hair color found, so a good control."

"Fawkes," whispered Cohen, staring ahead at the blurred road. The dash display flickered oddly. She hoped that she wasn't pushing the car too hard.

"Sorry?" asked Miller.

Savas answered. "We'll fill you in soon, Frank. Thanks. I'm getting an alert of an incoming call from Angel. We'll get more details in an hour when we arrive."

"Right. Out for now."

The connection was severed and Savas punched the touch screen on the dash to take the call from Lightfoote.

"Shoot, Angel."

"John, pull the damn car over!"

"Sorry—repeat that, Angel?"

The dash screen pixelated and froze. Cohen spoke coldly.

"John, the steering wheel is locked."

Lightfoote's voice still came in over the speakers. "The worm! You're on a system with an online connection. Your car cell is tracked. Worm activity lit up on my monitors and it's you two!"

Savas felt his stomach clench. "The car?"

Cohen gasped. "Oh God."

Savas didn't have to see the needle on the speedometer begin to spin clockwise, he could feel the acceleration in his gut. Cohen frantically stomped on the brake.

"Nothing's responding!"

The speed climbed toward one-hundred and twenty. Cohen flipped the switch to engage the sirens. They were not part of the car's system, installed independently, and they blared out. Cars in front began to swerve to the side as the blue and red lights bore down on them.

"Disconnect the motherboard!" came Lightfoote's voice. "Under the steering wheel, wires lead to the circuitry. Yank them! You'll get manual, maybe. Or the car will shut down. I don't know! But disconnect, now!"

There was a loud pop from the speakers. The control panel went dark.

"Angel?" called Savas. There was no response.

"No time, John. Connection's severed. Do what she said. Get over here."

The car shuddered and Cohen gasped. Her hands were white with pressure and her shoulders hunched as she struggled with the wheel.

"John, hurry! It's trying to turn!"

_Turn?_ At that speed, they'd flip over and roll to their deaths.

There was no time for finesse. He removed his sidearm and fired several shots into the casing of the dash near Cohen's legs. He saw her flinch as the plastic exploded only inches from her knees. His ears rang. He released his seatbelt and fell onto his back toward the driver's seat. His feet worked their way up the window and he pushed himself between the steering wheel and the floor board, body crushed into the tight space.

"One forty! It keeps trying to turn! John, hurry!"

_Jesus_. Grasping the smoking and shattered plastic, he ripped with all his strength. Toxic fumes from melted insulation choked him, but he reached in and grasped elements of the circuitry and wires, praying that he wouldn't electrocute himself.

Cohen screamed and he felt the car lurch back and forth and barely remain under her control. He felt sick from the motion and stench, but forced himself to focus. He ripped backward from the electronics, snapping wires and yanking pieces of the computer boards out with them, static pops exploding beside his face.

The car stalled.

"John, no control. No brakes, no wheel. Key is locked! I can't start it!"

"Is the computer control dead?"

"I don't know!"

Ahead of them construction arrows indicated a merge of traffic. Cohen could see a small bottleneck approaching and a single-file line of cars. The car continued to slow down, but it wouldn't be enough.

"John, hotwire it. Now. Construction!"

"Shit! Can you hotwire these cars?"

"Try!"

In his wild efforts to disconnect the computers of the dash, he had smashed part of the paneling around the steering column. He reached up and beat on the loosed parts, crushing several elements and the ignition cover. By now his hands were bloody, but he hardly noticed, running on pure adrenaline.

Three wire pairs. "Battery, lights, ignition," he spoke numbly as his slick fingers worked to strip the wiring, bring the leads to this mouth where his teeth ripped at the insulation.

"John, now!"

He didn't have time to figure it. He'd have to guess. He grasped two wires which he prayed were the power to the car. He disconnected them from the cylinder, twisting them together.

Cohen cried out. "We've got the dash and lights. Start it, John!"

He took the two remaining wires and touched them together. There was a spark and the engine roared. Cohen slammed on the brakes and steered the Charger. The car shuddered and leapt into the air. From his vantage point he could see nothing, only imagining her veering away from the obstacles ahead and likely off road. If the shoulder was not forgiving, they were likely dead.

A machine gun sound beside his ear announced the engagement of the antilock brakes, and the car began to spin. Cohen screamed. They wrenched sideways, glass shattered, and everything went dark.
28

# Latency

"John, can you hear me?"

A woman's voice. Probably his mother's.

He was at the seaside. A strong wind was blowing, waves crashing, muffling sound. No, he was in the water, floating on his back, incoming waves smashing against him, up and down, right and left. Dizzy.

His whole body hurt.

"John?"

"Please, ma'am." A male. "You shouldn't even be here." That would be dad.

Sirens. Why were there sirens at the sea?

Another jolt and his eyes opened. He was staring up at a ceiling, a blurry sphere above him condensing slowly into a fluid-filled bag. A tube ran from it to his right arm. Across from him was a shape on a gurney. A woman with brown hair. Her leg was immobilized with a metal shell of some kind. Blood soaked bandages on her head and shoulder.

"Rebecca."

He tried to sit up but found himself unable to move.

"Hold still, Captain Overlord," came the woman's voice again. "You're strapped down or you would have bounced all over the place. Highway infrastructure deterioration and all that."

"Angel?" he turned his head painfully to the side. The motion was restricted and stiff. There was something fitted around his neck.

"Rebecca's banged up, but she's okay. Well, broken leg, I think. Maybe a concussion. We're inbound to the hospital and will be there in twenty if the traffic opens some. Frank will meet us there. I was lucky to catch a ride. Not policy you know, but with the world going to shit the plumbers get some perks."

Savas looked down at his body on the gurney. A few bandages. Ripped clothing. Otherwise, he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. He let himself settle back into the padding of the gurney. He closed his eyes. "What the hell happened?"

"You don't remember?"

"They hacked the damn car. Nearly killed us. We spun out and crashed."

"That's about it," she said. "You were lucky she steered into a row of construction barriers and attenuators. Course you were going nearly seventy at that point, so it was still a mess."

"Yeah, that part I don't remember."

"Frank and I followed the last known GPS pinging from your car and alerted local emergency responders. We got up here as they were extracting you from the car. A really twisted cage you two were stuck in."

"Jesus." He looked toward Lightfoote, her bald and pierced image surreal in the sounds of the siren. "And the worm?"

She smiled. "Well, it was likely not your plan, but that act of crazy on the highway may be a breakthrough."

"How?"

"The worm in the car's system—it never got a chance to go into hiding again, to erase itself from memory and go latent. Bang, you cut the power and froze everything in place. We've got a crew extracting the computer elements from the Charger. We might get lucky."

"What does latent mean?" He just wanted to sleep.

"It's like Herpes."

"Herpes."

"Yes. Cold sores come out every now and then. Not from new virus you get exposed to, but from virus hiding out in your cells. The genetic material is dormant, _latent_. Waiting to be activated. Usually for herpes it's stress of some kind. For the worm—well, we don't know all the things that might wake it. But the programmers have established some flags. Apparently investigating Anonymous members like Hanert was one of them."

"Wake it up?"

"Well, not really wake. It's not sleeping. That's just scientific vernacular. For viruses, there are proteins that react to signals or stresses and then go and start making the virus again from the genetic code hiding out in the cells. That's waking up."

"Uh-huh."

"For the worm, the signals are detected by smaller pieces of code floating about, placed there by the initial infection, and they wake up the worm, which then assembles, like the parts of a mature virus particle, from various pieces of code across the net."

This would have given him a headache on a good day. Now it was torture.

She continued. "Usually, after that, the worm disintegrates, so the active, fully functional copy is lost, and the encrypted genome hides out latent. That's the problem getting at it. I couldn't get my hands on anything functional. Until now. Just maybe your automotive catastrophe trapped our little monster in a cage."

"So you can study it." His voice was hoarse.

"It's going to be tricky. As soon as I try to connect a live computer with functioning operating system to the thing, the worm is going to try and go active. Like melting the ice off _The Thing_. Look out. I've got to prevent that, prevent it from taking over whatever system I'm using to study it. And prevent it from erasing itself before I can look inside."

"Can you?"

Lightfoote stared into space. "I don't know." She turned her intense eyes on Savas. "But I'm going to try."

He was beginning to drift off. He fought the currents dragging him under.

"Lopez, I mean Gabriel and Mary. Have you heard anything?"

Lightfoote shook her head. "They've gone dark since we gave them the keys to the databases. My guess is they're prepping."

He nodded. "How's the world doing?"

"A few days of martial law sure has an effect on a town. It's like some apocalyptic thriller. But no zombies, sadly. The worm's been quiet since the massacre. Well, quiet is a relative word. It's still spreading, penetrating more and more systems. No one has a solution to that yet. But so far no direct attacks. No other mischief."

Her voice seemed to fade. He was staring up a deep well, trying to communicate. "That's good. That's good."

"But I think everyone knows it's a calm before the next storm. Someone has a grand scheme. Phase one is done. Phase two will be worse, I bet."

She looked down at Savas, but he was already back under. Her hand found his. "Goodnight, John. Rest up. We're going to need it."
29

# Cognitive Dissonance

_A lanky adolescent male slouched in a baroque chair, the office around him out of a seventeenth-century painting. He sported shoulder length black hair and rumpled denim attire, square prescription sunglasses masking his eyes. Across from him, a young woman with a shawl over her bare shoulders scribbled notes and nodded her head. The boy hardly looked at her._

_"I will have to submit my evaluation next week, Tony," she said._

_"That's not my name."_

_The woman nodded. "And I will continue to use it as per the juvenile privacy laws. Tony. I will not know your real identity. We protect those under custody."_

_"Jesus Christ. How long do we play this game?"_

_The therapist sighed. "You do want me to write you a good report, I assume? You want to go home?"_

_"Home? You've got to be kidding. Don't you read the files they send you?"_

_"Foster home. You ran away from home and your mother is a recovering alcoholic. Yes, I know. I meant, don't you want out of here?"_

_The boy completely repositioned his frame in the chair, whipping a leg across the other and folding his arms across his chest._

_"It doesn't matter. I'll be out very soon no matter what you write. I've made sure of it."_

_"Hacking the city council's computers is a serious offense. Hasn't this experience humbled you at all?"_

_The boy laughed. "It was an experiment. Not for the hack. That was all too easy. For the effects. Learned a lot about cybercrime investigations and protocol. I'll follow up on the outside. But I've gotten all the data I can from this, so there isn't much of point in continuing here. And, you know, what I found on their servers was a thousand times worse than anything I've done. And they know it. I squirreled it all away where they can't touch it. They're not going to fuck with me."_

_The woman stopped writing. "I'm worried about you, Tony. You manifest a collection of antisocial behaviors and extreme, nearly delusional idealizations."_

_"Don't forget boundary issues. I think you still show too much cleavage for a doc. Go with the more discrete pushups from Victoria's. I like small and well-made. You don't have to look like you have implants, you know."_

_The woman buttoned the top of her blouse and angled her body to the boy. "Yes, that is what I mean. You are alienating. Hostile. Even to those you know mean you well. Psych profiles place you in the top percentiles for intelligence. If you would have cooperated on the examinations we could have placed you more accurately. But you don't use that intelligence wisely. You purposefully lash out and degrade those around you."_

_"Or, you could just be more honest and say that people want to maintain the facade of comfortable lies and masks they use. Jesus, don't you all get tired of it? Or is it that you're all just so fucking scared all the time? Fuck all your boxes. Fuck all your strata and rules and cages. Look at you! Borderline anorexic, overly made-up, over-slutted, and probably thinking to get a boob job. Honestly, did you sign up for this shit when God handed out the double X's?"_

_The woman looked away from him. "Is that why the girl left you? Did you treat her like this?"_

_The boy turned to face her for the first time. "Seriously? You know my fuck-buddies? Is that why they picked you?"_

_"We receive detailed dossiers on our patients. Personal relationships are often part of that. All anonymous. We try to understand and we need backgrounds to see the big picture."_

_He laughed, throwing his head back. "You lying motherfuckers. You're a goddamned Fed! I should have known it. All this therapy for juvenile offenders! You're profiling me!"_

_The woman froze slack-jawed but said nothing._

_"I can't believe I didn't see through it sooner. I guess they picked you for that. I kinda trusted you. It was like instinct. All those pheromones and those boobs and the neural pathways—zap! They fuck you up. You really want to know? Zap! That's what the girl was. Lots of research you can read online. It's like heroin, you know? Same brain pathways. Same high. Same addiction and withdrawal. Except it also plugs into all these emotional pathways. So it's a hundred times worse than heroin. Hormones and receptors and neural pathways designed over ten million years to get chunks of meat to fuck and make more chunks of meat."_

_The woman paled and pulled back slightly in her chair._

_"These thoughts, Tony, I am concerned—"_

_"You are_ concerned _," he barked, chuckling. "You don't give a fuck except for what kind of checklist of personality traits you can enter into a database for your puppet masters. Fingerprints, blood type, you likely got my DNA. Now it's gonna be some kind of brain-print. You need a pattern, profiles, data for the algorithms to train on. Not really there yet, are you, though? But let me help. I can tell you all about our relationship." He leaned forward toward the woman. "I think you like talking about sex. I think it arouses you." He held his face steady in front of hers. "Maybe that's why you do this."_

_The woman licked her lips._

_The teen pivoted his body again and looked away from her. "Anyway, that fucking girl. I can tell you, heaven and hell, love and loss. All that. Damn, that panic. Lost, lost, lost." He replaced his glasses. "But that's the withdrawal. You're sick, all the hormones fucked to hell. Then, you finally come out of it. Then you_ see _. You finally know the truth."_

_"Which is?" Her voice was hoarse and dry_

_"That there is no love. No destiny. No meaning to these stupid feelings._ That's _the delusional thinking, doc. Then you understand that emotion is the problem."_

_She shook her head vigorously. "Don't you see, Tony? This is just another form of extreme idealization. You went from an extreme belief in transcendent love to an extreme disbelief in all love, a rejection of all meaning in human emotion."_

_His voice turned cold. "Look, dogs love us. Cats nurture their young. Birds have emotions. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals is a small first step in abstract thought. That's it. With emotion, we're puppets to our dicks, our ovaries, some asshole with a shiny car or a promise that you'll live forever. Cut the emotion! Engage the fucking homunculus."_

_He stood and pressed his jacket flat, buttoning it closed._

_"We're done here," he said. "You go write your report. Like I said, they're not going to do anything with me. They wouldn't dare. File it. It won't matter. In ten years, it won't even exist."_

_The woman's eyebrows arched upward, but he didn't pause to consider her confusion. With confident steps, he walked to the door of the office and left._
OCTOBER 27
30

# Vulnerability

It was one of the largest water filtration plants in the United States. Twelve acres, drilled through bedrock to a depth of over four stories in the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park, it sat over one of the main supply lines feeding water from the Croton Reservoir into New York City. Water flowed from the force of gravity upstate through two eight-thousand-foot-long tunnels into the plant, where particulates were removed, solids dewatered by centrifuges, and the filtered water disinfected with ultraviolet light and chlorine. Chemical alterations were then made to control corrosion and add fluoride.

The entire process utilized several networked controllers, twelve workstations, five separate operator interfaces and numerous 'intelligent' devices, including flow meters, pressure and temperature sensors, transmitters, and automated chlorination analyzers. Everything was networked, highly modernized, automatic, and requiring far less human oversight than anything else like it ever produced.

On the evening of October 27th, the first sign of problems was detected by a skeleton crew manning the equipment to analyze the quality of the final water to leave the facility. A young woman with Indian features and lush black hair gazed at the readings from a dilapidated sensor, a relic from the early testing of the computer systems. Her body was tense, the white of her lab coat contrasting with the deep caramel of her skin. The readings from the other sensors were normal. She felt that she shouldn't care about this artifact of older tech, one that management had never given the order to remove. While it had never acted up before, common sense told you that someday it would fail. It shouldn't bother her when all else appeared normal.

But it did. She spoke into a mobile phone.

"No, Larry. Everything reports nominal. It's only the older ovation monitor. It's screaming on the chlorine and fluorine levels. Look, I didn't want to get you out of bed for this. Probably just the old unit has finally gone senile on us."

There was a pause in her speech as she listened intently. "No, really, no need to come in. Look, I know you're close, it's just I...Okay. All right. Fine. I'm happy just to log it, but if you want...Okay. Yeah, I'll call the chemists on three."

She approached the bank of computer monitors to check once more the readings from the chemical sensors. Satisfied that all was within normal parameters, she opened a video call with the staff upstairs.

"What the hell?"

The computer was unresponsive. She moved to a nearby terminal, but it too had completely locked up. The unease that had buzzed in the background of her mind at the anomalous readings came much more strongly to the fore. _Is there a computer problem?_ In all the years she had worked here, there had never been a glitch affecting more than one unit. Multiple computers down alongside the dangerous readings coming from the other unit—she whipped out her cell phone and called the upstairs number directly.

"This is Deepta from Analysis. Look, are you guys having any computer problems?" Her brow furrowed and she listened. "Yeah, me too. Look, I need to ask you a favor. I'm getting some ridiculous readings on an older sensor. It's not networked with the others; it's probably just failing. But all this has me nervous. Is there a way you can monitor your additive levels? Yeah? Sure, I'll wait. I'll put you on speaker while I recheck that damn unit."

She pressed a button on the mobile phone as she walked to the far wall and crouched in front of the older equipment again.

A voice erupted with distortion from the small speaker of the phone. "Okay, Deepta. Give us a few minutes here. There is a panel of sensors directly on the additive pipes. They _should_ be read by the main software—and all that looks good—but they also display the values on the sensor units themselves. We can read them off directly. Hang on."

"I'll be right here."

She shook her head. The anomalous readings had not normalized. In fact, they were shooting up. It was like they were unloading their entire store of toxic chemicals into the New York City drinking water!

The door to the operations center burst open. A middle-aged man with a crop of silver hair dashed into the room. He was roughly dressed, clothes obviously thrown on in a hurry, hair uncombed. He rushed straight to the computer monitors as he put on his glasses.

"Mike, wait that's no good. There—"

"Deepta! What the hell's wrong with the interface?"

"It's down! I'm trying to tell you. All the machines! And not only here, but on other floors."

"But the software's still running. I just can't access anything. God, we'll have to reboot everything!"

"Mike, come look at these readings." Her superior shuffled over and bent down to examine the older unit. "Please tell me this is malfunctioning."

His face paled. "I grew up on these things, Deepta. When they fail, they don't give readings like this. The checks are too thorough in the logic. This is not failure behavior. We need to find out what's going on with the treatment chemicals."

"Right. I'm on the line with—"

The phone popped. "Deepta? Mike? This is Herman Richards upstairs. We have several people double-checking, but your aberrant sensor is _not_ , I repeat _not_ malfunctioning. Our pipe sensors are screaming. The valves are completely open. We're dumping everything into the supply!"

"Can you shut things down from there?"

"So far no! All computer control is locked. We can't get into the system. We're force rebooting a few to see if that clears the problem. Meanwhile we're poisoning the water supply for millions in the city! We've got to get a public health message out. Get this on the news. Something!"

"Calm down! We follow protocol. Deepta, get the manual open and let's go by the book on this."

"We went paperless three months ago, Mike. The hard copies were recycled."

"Jesus!" He shook his head. "Then go from memory! Meanwhile, we've got to shut it down before too much gets out there."

The voice on the phone sounded panicked. "I know! What if we can't?"

"Then we're going to have a hell of a lot of sick people come tomorrow."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

CBD: And what was the result of the filtration plant failure?

MR. SAVAS: Minor. New York only got about 10% of its water from the Croton pipeline. They manually shut off the flow before much of the tainted water got into the main supply into the City. What did was diluted out. We got lucky.

* * *

CBD: And this was the worm?

MR. SAVAS: Yes. The computers running the plant were all infected, of course. They lost control of them. Like with our car. Everything is plugged in now, even things that are life and death. Something as basic and driving, as basic as water.

* * *

CBD: So, it's your belief that Anonymous tried to murder you by hacking your car?

MR. SAVAS: Not Anonymous. We were learning better than that. Fawkes.

* * *

CBD: But you have said that he called himself Anonymous.

MR. SAVAS: I could call myself the Pope, but it wouldn't mean I could lead services at the Vatican.

* * *

CBD: You claim you were nearly killed by this Fawkes. How could he hack your car?

MR. SAVAS: Turns out it's not that hard. We were in a brand-spanking new Dodge Charger model outfitted for police work. One of the most powerful engines in a production model—seemed some great wheels to make time upstate. What a bunch of idiots we were. Like the civilian models, it came standard with a new high-tech digital interface. Everything from GPS navigation and mobile apps to handsfree phone calls. Probably would do your dishes if you asked nicely. Used the latest mobile phone tech to connect to the internet. Ran one of several operating systems vulnerable to the worm. QED. Infected.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And how would you know all this?

MR. SAVAS: You do remember I have a cybercrimes group? Angel filled us in once we got back, as luck would have it in one piece. We went back to older Crown Vics from the garage after that. They weren't networked and so were isolated from infection.

* * *

CBD: How would Anonymous know to target you?

MR. SAVAS: _Fawkes_ , not Anonymous. And that one is a bit of a mystery. Maybe by pairing our FBI origin coordinates with the prison destination. Hanert could have been a trigger, a flag, and once raised, they could monitor our phone calls made from the car system. We were really stupid. So much for off-grid. We ignored the OS backdoor in the car we were sitting in. And we knew that wasn't going to be the end. The clock was ticking. Fawkes knew we were poking around. It was just a matter of time before they tried something else to slow us down.

* * *

CBD: Wouldn't the break-in at the drone factory have had the same result?

MR. SAVAS: No. Lopez and Houston, they were ciphers. No ties to anything. Sure, it would have given Fawkes a jolt, but nothing to bring FBI, and our division in particular, into the cross-hairs. They were in and out like ghosts. And thank God Houston took the paper copies.

* * *

CBD: Please elaborate.

MR. SAVAS: On what? The break-in?

CBD: Yes.

* * *

MR. SAVAS: This is second-hand, but they had the same problem we were facing, this dependence on digital technology for nearly everything, and now behind it all, the worm, of course. So, they worked off public computers, I think the library. Angel gave them temporary codes to the federal databases, access to names, locations, sat imagery, and more. Down to the positions of the guards on an hourly basis as I understand it. They even had the specs on the security system. Not sure what happened, if anything, to the computer systems they used to do all this research on.

* * *

CBD: And they used this information to break into the factory?

MR. SAVAS: Yes. They had schematics for the buildings, and Angel had put a trace on orders coming in and out to verify the likely center of operations and data storage at the facility.

* * *

CBD: Which was your target?

MR. SAVAS: If we could get the buyer info, we might find leads. Those drones had to go somewhere. Someone had to get them at a specific address. All this would leave a trail. It was worth a shot.

* * *

[REDACTED]: So you ordered a commando-style hit on a civilian manufacturer without authorization of any kind?

MR. SAVAS: I did. But since the fugitives didn't work under me or anyone else, you might say that they acted on their own recognizance.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Are you saying you had no authority in this? Didn't you lead the investigation and bring these criminals into this?

MR. SAVAS: Lopez and Houston helped bust this case open. They were instrumental then and later in bringing Fawkes to justice. Just who do you think the criminals were in all this?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Well, that indeed, Mr. Savas, is why you are here. And until you give us what we want, we have no option but to assume that you are implicated in a bigger conspiracy.

MR. SAVAS: What is this nonsense? I've told you—you've made me tell you over and over—I don't know where Angel is. I don't know where Houston and Lopez are. When you sent the cavalry to pry us out of our own offices, by the time the smoke cleared they were gone.

* * *

[REDACTED]: We want the file.

MR. SAVAS: You have it! It was on her damn computer! I don't understand any of this!

* * *

[REDACTED]: A copy was made. A thumb drive was connected to that computer and the file was copied.

MR. SAVAS: I can't help you with that. You have your copy, you can try to decrypt it as well as they could. Unless. Wait a minute. [INAUDIBLE] This isn't about trying to figure out what Fawkes was trying to tell her, is it?

* * *

CBD: Let's proceed to the next set of questions, Mr. Savas.

MR. SAVAS: I'll be damned. It's about the file! You don't want that file in her hands. In anyone's hands! You're trying to bury the information!

* * *

CBD: Let's take up what you have said Houston found in the factory records. First—

MR. SAVAS: That's it, isn't it? What the hell is going on here? What are you trying to cover up?
OCTOBER 28
31

# Hardcopy

A heavy cold front had rolled in a thick layer of clouds, and the evening was without moon or starlight. Lopez and Houston lay prone at the top of a small hill overlooking a factory. Inside, thousands of drone unmanned aerial vehicles were assembled for governmental and civilian buyers, loaded at a wide dock, to be shipped across the country. The factory was isolated in a relatively undeveloped region in New Jersey east of Newark, nestled in a minor valley. The small facility was surrounded by tall fences and wire, imaged by numerous cameras, and protected by a small crew of five security guards at several stations scattered around the compound.

The two fugitives wore dark clothing and gazed down through night vision scopes mounted on rifles. Houston pulled her head back from the lens and whispered.

"I think we've got shots at three guards from here."

"Should be four," grumbled Lopez. "The info is outdated, so our guard count is wrong. Other things could be off."

"You didn't expect a briefing from them, did you?" she smirked. "Three down is a big win. I doubt they'll have added many more guards. Maybe one is out to piss."

"Things could get messy. These guys are naive hires. They don't deserve a grave for this gig."

Houston sighed. "So we'll do our best, Francisco. Right now the big game is threatening many more lives. Even theirs."

"I know. So, let's bring them down. One should do it. Two for sure with plenty of margin for safety on the overdose."

They bent to the rifles, aiming down the hillside. The sounds were soft, muffled expulsions of pressured gas. Each of the guards jerked when hit, twitching again from a second impact. Within seconds, each fell to the ground, unmoving.

Houston pressed a button on her wristwatch. "Clocks running."

Lopez donned a ski mask and they sprinted down the hill, arriving at a central transformer near the fence line. Houston removed a small pack, placed it on the metal casing with a clang as the magnet took. They dashed away from the location as a red light blinked on and off behind them, putting several hundred feet between themselves and the pack when it blew. A small explosion lit the dark night orange with a shower of sparks. The facility lost power, and they quickly cut through the fence and raced toward the central office building.

The structure was the size of a residential home, lined with corporate dark glass, dwarfed by the manufacturing buildings and warehouses around it. They passed two guards on their way in. Large darts in their thighs left them unconscious, drugged. As they neared the entrance, the door opened and two figures stepped out.

The two guards were disoriented, the blast and light drawing their attention. The blurred motion of their assailants was glimpsed too late, part of a distraction of violence and prone figures, two shadows blending into the night.

The intruders engaged without weapons. In a flurry of hands and feet, the guards were disarmed, their weapons sent flying, sudden blows to the abdomen and head stunning them. Before they could even cry out, both were down, unconscious in front of the doors of the office. Lopez emptied the guards' weapons, slinging the ammunition into the night. Removing wires from their belts, the two shadows secured the guards, tying their arms and roping their ankles together. Duct tape sealed their mouths. Houston grabbed a keycard from one of the men and tried it on the front door. It opened.

"Emergency power's up," Lopez noted.

They headed inside. Weak illumination spilled from corners in the room and green lights from some of the older cameras.

"Smile pretty. Just keep your mask on," said Houston.

Passing the reception desk and moving down a hallway, they stopped in front of a door labeled 'Records.' An alphanumeric keypad was embedded in the door beside the handle.

"I don't recall any of the files mentioning a code for this, do you?" she asked. Lopez shook his head. "Didn't think so. Hinges?"

Lopez reached behind his back and unslung a short-barreled pump-action shotgun. Houston stepped backward as he aimed. He fired blasts near the top, middle, and bottom of the door across from the handle. Wood splintered and metallic fragments rained around them. He spun and kicked the door inward, the wood hanging to the frame weakly from the keypad and lock mechanism, then ripping free and thudding to the floor.

Inside were a set of computers and floor to ceiling filing cabinets. They moved quickly.

"Grab all the hard drives," said Houston, pulling out what looked like a large pocketbook. She unzipped the leather and removed several tools. "We'll deal with them later. I'm going to go for paper."

Lopez knelt down and pulled the chassis off one of the computers. "That wasn't part of the plan."

Houston went to work with several microtools on the locks of the cabinets. "Neither was the fact that they still had paper records."

"The disks will be fast! It will take you forever to get the records."

"We've got twenty minutes. A little more if they're out for donuts."

The shell popped off one of the units as Lopez reached inside to disconnect the wires to the hard drive. "Cutting it close, Sara!"

There was a click, and the large cabinet door was slung open. Houston shone a small flashlight on the folders and began scanning their content. "Paper, Francisco. No bytes. No worms. No worries. I'll be done before you."

Grunting, he dropped one drive into a bag and moved to the next computer. Within ten minutes, Lopez had removed all the drives and placed them in the bag. Houston called him over, showing him regions in three cabinets where purchase orders over the last six months were filed.

"That's three full boxes!"

"So, a transport!" she said, pointing to the far end of the narrow room.

Lopez rushed over and wheeled a wobbly cart to her side. Together they hefted three large boxes full of files onto the slight metal surface.

"This is definitely not my idea of stealth. I hope this doesn't collapse."

They sped out of the building as fast as possible, Houston with one hand stabilizing the boxes, Lopez pushing the cart from behind as they navigated prone bodies, ramps, and the sharp rise of the hill. They were forced to remove the boxes and fit them through the hole in the fence one by one, bringing the cart awkwardly through at the end.

"It's no good. We can't get that thing up the hill," said Lopez.

"Okay, bring the car around. Tape the plate, but we'll have to lose it tonight."

He nodded and sprinted up the hill. Houston waited in the cold night air, her fogged breaths coming quickly. She heard the engine cough.

Lopez rounded the corner of the hill and braked hard beside her, popping the trunk. They worked quickly, flinging the boxes in, the car bouncing with each impact. Houston slammed the trunk and ran to the passenger side, Lopez already seated. He gunned the engine.

Red and blue lights flickered in the distance, reflecting off the low lying clouds.

"Wait, Francisco! We'll need a back road. Listen!"

_Sirens_. The police were converging on their position from the main route. Lopez spun the car in a one-eighty and tore down the road in the opposite direction.

He laughed ruefully. "Well, this sure feels familiar."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

CBD: And so the computer records led you to the warehouse on Long Island?

MR. SAVAS: No. The hard drives melted down.

* * *

CBD: I'm sorry?

MR. SAVAS: Well, not literally. But all the facility's computers were infected. Turns out, the worm was indeed monitoring the records of the drone sales, so Fawkes at least saw that as a potential vulnerability.

* * *

CBD: The worm erased the files?

MR. SAVAS: Nuked all the drives. One after the other as they tried to access them. Maybe Angel could have prevented it, although I doubt it. But Lopez and Houston didn't have the digital chops to even try.

* * *

CBD: Then it was the paper records you mentioned.

MR. SAVAS: Yes. Can you imagine? Two burglars with the police bearing down on them toting six months of paperwork out of a secured facility? I don't know if Sara guessed there might be a problem or it was just instinct to get everything they could get, but it saved our investigation. They must have spent hours going through that crap. But they knew what they were looking for: shipments of large drone models, likely in quantity. And they found them.

* * *

CBD: So, all of them went to the Long Island facility.

MR. SAVAS: No, they weren't that reckless. In the end we'd find that they ordered multiple drones from several facilities, using a series of aliases for each order, often multiple orders under different names from the same facility. Then they'd ship them to one of five or ten storage locations, then re-mail them.

* * *

CBD: How did you discover this?

MR. SAVAS: You'll have to ask Lopez and Houston. Too bad they aren't here.
OCTOBER 29
32

# Anonymous Remailers

A misting rain partially solubilized the grime on the gray Ford Taurus that pulled alongside a nondescript brick warehouse in Long Island City. Lopez and Houston exited, both dressed in dark trench coats and shades. Passing underneath the "Your Storage!" sign and the security cameras, they entered the small business.

The office was more a glorified hallway outfitted with a narrow countertop and secretarial equipment on the right side. Behind the counter was a receptionist, a slight African American woman, with thick glasses and makeup obscuring much of her face. She spoke into a microphone on a headpiece as she motioned for them to sit. Houston turned to look behind her at a small and uncomfortable looking bench. She shook her head at Lopez.

Reaching over the counter, Lopez removed the headset in one quick motion, tossing it to the side. The receptionist looked stunned.

"Hey! Just what do you think you're doing?"

Houston placed a hundred dollar bill on the counter. "We'd like to purchase the expedited service."

"The expedited...?"

"Just get your manager out here now and you'll get another one."

Grabbing the bill in her hand, she rose slowly, her eyes ludicrously exaggerated in the strong lenses, her bright purple eyeshadow giving her features a slightly alien quality. "Just a second." She stepped out from behind the counter and clicked to the end of the room in impossible heels. She opened a flimsy door. "Hey, Ryan. A man and a woman need to speak with you."

"What do I pay you for, bitch? You deal with it!"

The receptionist startled as Houston handed her another hundred. "Go on back to the call. We've got it from here." The woman took the bill and scampered away.

Lopez opened the door and stepped into a crowded room. Likely an addition to the hallway, the walls were a temporary attachment, the flooring added over part of the cement below it. He canvassed the ceiling and corners, the desk surface and walls. There were no cameras.

A bald man sat over a terminal and flashed them a puzzled expression.

"Who the hell are you?"

He gasped as Houston pointed her Browning at him. Lopez closed the door.

"We're the ones with the guns. Don't scream. Keep your hands over the desk."

"Oh God, oh God, oh God. Please. Take what you want. I have a safe, there!"

"Shut up," said Houston, ignoring his gesture. "I'm going to ask you a few questions. You are going to answer them truthfully and quickly. Or I'll let my partner deal with you." Lopez held a hunting knife in his hand.

The man swallowed, struggling to speak. "Yes."

"So, Ryan," she began. "What do you do here?"

"We, ah, store things."

"What things?"

"We don't ask. It's like a remailing service. People ship here, we get another address for the item and ship it there. Keeps buyers and sellers separate. Anonymous."

"Anonymous?" said Lopez.

The man stared at the knife, terrified. "Yeah. Private. That's why we don't ask what's in the boxes. It's all perfectly legal."

"So you don't know where the boxes come from. How do you know where to send them?"

"Paired codes. The sender has a code that has to match the buyer's code before we ship to the buyer's address. They get those from whatever exchanges they make their deals on. That way nothing can be traced."

"But you put the items in the mail. In their original boxes?"

"Oh, yes. We never open a box."

"Then you must know the weight of the items. For postage."

He nodded. "Yes."

"And you have records of that?" Houston asked.

"Of course. That's our main expense. Why are you asking this?"

"The people with guns ask the questions, Ryan."

The man shrank into his chair. Houston removed a set of folded papers from inside her coat and looked them over. As the seconds ticked by the manager began to sweat. Beads of perspiration dripped down his forehead, and his underarms stained.

Houston grabbed a pen and circled several regions on the paper. "Ryan, I need you to find shipments that match these weight specifications."

"Now?"

"Yes, now."

The manager typed furiously on his computer keyboard. Within seconds, his face relaxed. "Yes, I have a bunch of them. Lots of orders match those specs exactly."

"Where are they shipped to?"

"Um. That's interesting. All shipped to the same place. Some address in Jersey."

"We would like you to print out one of those records, Ryan, with the address."

"Yeah, okay." He clicked several times with his mouse. A small printer behind Houston whirred to life.

She grabbed the printout and stared at it. Nodding to Lopez, she grabbed the papers she had given the manager and then pocketed all of them. A wad of cash thudded on his desktop.

"You wouldn't lie to us, would you, Ryan?"

He looked at the knife again. "No way." He licked his lips.

"We were never here, and you can enjoy the fee for this priority service." The man nodded dumbly, taking the money. "But this is a discrete service, right?" She glanced at Lopez, who twirled the knife slowly, staring at the serrated edges. "There isn't going to be any need for us to come back and register a complaint that our privacy has been violated, is there? Nobody would like that."

Again the man swallowed. "No. I never saw you. I never want to see you again."

"That's good," she said smiling, opening the door.

Lopez sheathed the knife, staring fixedly at the bewildered man. "It was a pleasure doing business with you."
33

# Raid on Anonymous

"You sure you're up to this, John?"

Savas shifted his position in the car once again. It didn't help. He was bruised all over his body, several lacerations still quite painful to the touch. He stared at Miller and ground his teeth. Of course he was _up to it_.

"Frank, I'd have to lose a leg or worse to have an excuse not to be on the ground in this crisis. Are you going to tell me otherwise?"

"You are literally the boss, so okay." The ex-Marine continued to focus ahead as he drove. "And Rebecca?"

"Tibia was snapped. Soft tissue damage from the bone as well. It's set, she's stitched up. But it's going to be a serious cast and crutches for a couple months. She'll heal. She's tough."

Miller nodded. "It always seems to get personal with us, doesn't it?"

Images of a gray-haired man swept through Savas' mind. They came with explosions and collapsing buildings, a sniper round buried in the shoulder of the man driving next to him. A massacre of an FBI division. A threat to Rebecca's life.

"Yeah, and I'm getting kinda tired of it."

"We sure know how to make friends." Miller's smiled faded as they pulled alongside a black van in an abandoned parking lot. "Don't think this club is going to be very taken with us today. I hope this intel is worth it."

"Highest level contact in Anonymous we have. Rebecca seems to trust him. Let's see if she's right."

A commuter train rumbled overhead along the Queens subway line. Nestled underneath, a rusted warehouse waited before them. Heavily armed FBI agents in body armor stepped out of the dark van and grouped around them.

Savas limped toward the group. "I'm sorry to pull you from every which division, but you know what we're up against. FBI—now the damn Federal Bodyguard Institute." The men laughed. "Thank you for coming on such short notice. We might already be too late, but we have to try. Police are inbound, but we'll be without their backup for the dangerous parts. I'll let our vet from Kabul fill you in."

Miller stepped forward. "There was no time and no data to recon this right. I don't know what we'll find in there. Might well be empty. Might be an armed engagement with as many as ten hostiles. But if our intelligence is right, it's going to be a bunch of hackers scared shitless about what's going down. We don't need them dead—understood? We need information. They need to be able to talk, and dead men don't. Defend yourselves but keep a level head. We'll go in through the main door with a volley of flash bangs and tear gas. Unless they're trained militia, that ought to have most of them rolling on the ground crying for mommy. Bag them and into the van. Make sure you canvas the interior and clear it. We don't want any surprises. Questions?"

"Yes, sir," came a voice of a young blond to the right. "Is this Anonymous? Are these the guys?"

"We don't know, but not likely. But we think they can get us to the real criminals. So remember— _alive_. Understood?"

The men nodded. Along with Savas and Miller, they donned gas masks. Savas drew his weapon. "Okay, boys, your show."

The SWAT team filed off in a quick jog, splitting into two groups on either side of the door, weapons at the ready, quickly reaching the wall of the warehouse and using it as cover from the building windows. They slid along the sides, Miller and Savas at the far end of the lines. An officer nearest the door pulled slightly on the handle near the ground. The roll-up door moved slightly, and he gave the thumbs up. Miller nodded, the other officers set, and the door was raised.

The men dashed inside and out of sight. Savas ran forward and could just discern the arc of canisters being lobbed into the air and over a set of dark obstacles inside the building. The flash bangs flashed and banged. It was nearly stunning even from their position. Several canisters of tear gas filled the space inside with a cloud of burning vapor.

For a moment, there was no other sound. Then the screams began.

The SWAT team pulled out the last member of Anonymous just as their police backup finally arrived. They had never been in any danger. The disoriented and snot dripping youth that were dragged out of the warehouse were never going to put up any kind of a fight. Some of the SWAT team administered first aid to those who had suffered most from the chemicals and shock. It looked to Savas that the agents felt sorry for them.

The blond leader of the SWAT team came out of the warehouse, mask in hand.

"Secured?" asked Miller.

"Yeah," he said, coughing. "Most of the gas is gone. And you need to come and see this."

Savas arched an eyebrow. "Right behind you."

He led the special agents into the warehouse. The dark obstacles Savas had seen were revealed to be rows of computer hardware stacked six feet high in places. The SWAT officer zig-zagged through it like a maze and brought them to the center, a space occupied with several large monitors. And two decomposing bodies.

"Jesus, that ruins your lunch," said Miller, scowling.

Savas stepped forward and stared at the bodies. Flies danced around the forms and maggots were slithering over the decayed faces. "They've been here a while. Likely rules out a killing by our friends."

"Today, anyway," said the SWAT officer.

"I doubt they'd have come back here," said Miller. "Division in the ranks?"

Savas nodded. "Looks like a hacking bunker. I'd say these poor jerks pissed somebody off."

"Fawkes," said Miller. "He's turning out to be one ruthless bastard."

"Okay, let's get a forensics team in here and see what we can find. My guess is the computers are all wiped. But we need to check them all. Meanwhile," he said, turning toward the door, "I've got a few questions for our hogtied friends outside."

He strode back out the door, Miller close behind. The members of Anonymous were placed in a circle in front of the FBI van facing outwards. Their eyes were red, faces flushed, one with bandages over his head. Groups of NYPD and SWAT officers mingled in haphazard groups around them. He stopped in front of the circle.

"I think you know that all of you are fucking screwed," he began. "Basically anyone connected to Anonymous right now likely goes straight to jail without their $200. Not to mention, as you surely saw inside, the real problem is still out there on the loose turning you folks into corpses."

He could tell the last remark struck a raw nerve as several bodies jerked and heads turned toward him. He hoped to God he could reach the sane part of someone in the group.

"Now, we have a global catastrophe looming. We know about the worm." More heads turned. "We know about Fawkes. But we don't know where he is or what the endgame is. But I think it's clear it's going to be ugly. As in civilization-ending ugly. We're going to get you all back to lockup to question you there, but time is not our friend. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to talk right here, right now. Right now there's no Miranda. There's just me and you and getting us all out of this mess."

"Fuck you, pigs!" yelled one of the group, a long-haired man across the circle. He spat at Savas.

"Anyone else? Anyone else with parents? Friends? Kids? Anyone who wants to help us stop this before it's too late? Right now I couldn't give a rat's ass about you, your amateur cybercrimes, or the Anonymous Manifesto, or whatever you have. I need answers now! I need to stop this. Help me."

There was only silence. Police red and blue flickered over them like washed out club lights, the setting sun beginning to dip below the taller buildings in midtown across the river. Officers in heavy gear shifted weight, the friction of thick Kevlar on rubber popping around them. Savas looked up into the sky with his hands on his hips. A crimson scab ran down the left side of his face.

"No one?" He shook his head and turned to the SWAT team. "Okay. Load them up. We'll try again back home."

"Wait!" A female voice. Savas turned to his right. A black-haired woman with deep black eyeliner stared back at him, the goth makeup running down her face as her eyes watered.

"Yes?"

"Shut up, Poison! Don't make this personal!" said the long-haired man.

"Up yours, Protos. Fawkes is into some fucked up shit. Pig's right. Somebody has to end this."

Savas crouched down beside her, several agents stepping forward with weapons at the ready.

"You know Fawkes?"

She laughed. "Yeah, you might say. Better than all these losers here, anyway. Better than you Protos and your group of ass-wipes."

"Fuck you, Poison. We'll remember this."

She laughed. "Remember this? You gonna remember Dave and Chen? Yeah? You don't get it. He's burning everything to the ground. Us, too! There ain't gonna be nothing to remember, you dumb fuck!"

Savas tried to control his voice. "How do you know Fawkes? What can you tell me about him?"

She looked Savas in the eye and smiled. "What do you need to know? His favorite food? Fetishes? Size of his dick?"

Several members of Anonymous laughed. Some of the police officers smirked as well.

"Look, if you want to help, I need you to be serious. What can you tell me about his whereabouts? How do you know him?"

"Whereabouts? I don't know jack. He's too careful. But how do I know him? That I can tell you. I was his lover."

"His lover?"

"Yeah, you know, Anonymous cock. Hackers do it through the back door. Fawkes' fuck buddy. On top, underneath, sideways." She angled her head to the side and ran her tongue over her teeth, leering at him. "Fucking yoga position. I was his right-hand girl, you know what I mean? That answer your question?"

Savas stood. "Yeah."

"Then let them go, and I'll tell you more than you want to know."
34

# Poison

Lightfoote and Poison were hitting it off charmingly.

Savas had agreed to release the other prisoners if and when she responded to their questions back in Manhattan. They had carted the entire crew back into the city, once again subjected to the delays and authority conflicts from the declaration of martial law. However, having claimed to have bagged key members of Anonymous opened the gates more quickly, and they soon had Poison isolated in an interrogation room. The rest were being held in lockup.

Poison was actually Tabitha Ivy, 'Poison' her own hacker handle used from the time she was fourteen. A quick database search revealed that she was now nineteen, a repeat offender having been busted for several hacks of corporate websites, having served nine months behind bars for one job on Pepsi. There was an additional list of minor infractions from possession to vandalizing a parking meter.

It was no wonder she hit it off so well with Angel.

"From what I can tell," said Lightfoote, "about half the code is just to execute this biological like replication and camouflage system." She sat next to Poison at the table, Savas and Miller across in a more standard adversarial position. "Another quarter is still just a black box. Finally about another quarter for ending the world as we know it."

Poison sounded impressed. "How the hell did you get all that? We couldn't even get near the thing."

Lightfoote looked at the battered visage of Savas and smiled. "Mr. I-tried-to- shave-during-an-earthquake over there trapped a live worm for me."

Poison's eyes grew wide. "How the fuck did he do that? I'm surprised he can log into his own computer."

"An unusual technique, but it worked. I have an activated worm trapped on a hard drive. The hardest part was dissecting it without it sending everything to hell and back. That's when I thought, oh, _VMS_."

"VMS? Like your great-grandfather's OS?" The hacker looked confused.

"It's 1970s stuff, for sure, but it kicks serious ass. It's a hacker's worst nightmare. Amazon uses it for shipping. Some stock exchanges. Pretty rare and pretty secure."

"And the worm wasn't designed to hack those machines?"

"Bingo!" Lightfoote beamed.

The two men stared at each other in confusion.

"I don't get it," said Miller.

Poison scowled at him as Lightfoote elaborated. "Fawkes found hacks into a bunch of the world's computer operating systems: Microsoft, all the flavors of UNIX including Apple. The worm bundles all the tools to hit each of them. But he didn't waste his time finding security holes in something so rare and hard to hack as VMS."

Miller shrugged his shoulders. "And?"

"So it's fucking _immune_ , you thug," spat Poison.

"Wait," said Savas. "So you could use it to look at the worm? The worm can't operate in this VMS machine?"

Lightfoote clapped her hands together. "Correct! But interfacing with the hard drive was a nightmare. We only had a few 1990s era VMS machines left around here. They weren't designed to handle modern hard drives. I practically had to solder half the spare parts we owned, and cannibalize several perfectly functional computers, to rig something to read the data. Piece by piece. The older machine doesn't have a lot of memory. But we're doing it. JP is down there now with some of the rest of the unit. Active worm, but frozen on my lab table!"

"What else have you learned from it?"

Lightfoote's face fell. "Nothing good. Names. Important names. Politicians. More CEOs. I think they're targets."

"Jesus, here we go," said Miller.

"We need those names now, Angel," said Savas.

"JP's getting the list. But just wait. This is only one active worm, and every worm is different, remember? These were the names we were lucky to get. And we don't have dates or other information. Just names."

"There could be other targets?" asked Miller.

"Almost certainly. But there's more. I don't think the main course has even been served."

"And that means?" asked Savas.

"That last 25%. The really bad part? It does a lot of things. It infiltrates, copies, and reports out to address that are relays to relays: I can't track them, but it's pooling information somewhere, likely ending at his terminal. But the weird part is that this region _always_ has empty space. In the code, nonsense. It's filler. But no way this guy would write junk code. That code is something else. I think it's a marker for new code. The virus is waiting for new command modules, something that is going to come down the road."

"Why?" asked Savas. "Why not just hide it all around like the rest of the code?"

Lightfoote shook her head. "I don't know."

Poison rested her head on the table and spoke through a mumble. "Fawkes. It's Fawkes. He's paranoid. A total douche about it, too. Never get involved with a paranoid. Fucking misery."

"What do you mean?" Savas asked her.

"It must be the kill shot," she said, her eyes closed. "He's too paranoid to ever trust his code. He thinks he can hack anything—that anything can be hacked. So he's worried he'll get hacked."

Miller looked at Lightfoote and chuckled. "He was right."

Poison's eyes flashed open. "So, he's saving the best for last, just in case."

Lightfoote nodded. "Now I see. The relay system to the worm. He's going to use it to upload a final code sequence."

Poison slammed her hand on the table, causing the others to jump. "And then we're fucked. Once he sends that signal, it's over. You can't let him send that signal. You've got to stop him or the worm will carry out his final instructions."

"And what might those be?" asked Savas.

"Who the hell knows?" said Poison, her arms out to her sides. "But seriously, Einstein, after all this shit, how do you think his kill shot is going to go down?"

Savas looked toward Lightfoote. "I hope you have some good news about stopping it."

"Sorry, John—no. That's a whole other story. But, I've sent out my little spies to find out as much as they can."

"Little spies?" asked Miller.

Lightfoote beamed at Savas. "The virus I used to discover we'd been hacked? Well, I'm a few generations down the road with it and it's spreading across the net. The worm gave me a few ideas of using NSA backdoors and we're using them. They're looking for worm activations and taking what snapshots they can, sending them back to me. Real time. You should come down and see the data. Like some war going on out there."

Poison stared at her. "Beautiful."

Miller held his hands up. "You're infecting computers now? That makes us hackers, too?"

"You're amateurs compared to the NSA," said Poison. "As American as apple pie."

"Too true," said Lightfoote. "But we're not looking for stealth or long term stability. We're going in full bore. But don't worry, Frank. It's a good virus. A pet virus. It's on God's side." She smiled.

Miller stared incredulously at her. "Jesus. John? What do you say to this?"

Savas appeared not to have heard him. He stared intently at Poison, his eyes focused, seemingly both near and far away.

"John?"

He glanced toward Miller. "Yeah. I've green-lighted Angel's shenanigans. Paying off, I'd say." Then he turned back to the hacker. "You stopped seeing him?"

Poison frowned. "Fawkes? Yeah. Look, I told you, I don't know his real identity. He only trusted me with his dick."

"But you said he pursued you."

"Jeez, yeah. And you know, when you have the world's best hacker stalking you online, it's a fucking nightmare. I spent months shaking him off. I mean, he said it was over, so get the fuck out of my life, right? I think he finally gave up."

Savas held up a small cylinder. "Are you sure?"

She reached over and grabbed it from his hand. "What's that?"

"GPS tracking device. An agent pulled it off your car at the warehouse. It's not in our records. Not a model we use." Savas stared intently at her. "Anyone else you think might be interested in following your every move?"

"Oh, Christ, that fuck!" She stared furiously at it.

"He likely knows you're here by now."

"Yeah, well, so what? He won't be tracking me anymore."

"He might try to get you out."

Poison laughed. "You're kidding right? Why would he do that?"

Miller leaned forward. "Because he's obsessed with you. Maybe he thinks it's love. But it's obsession for sure."

Savas nodded. "And that makes me wonder just what we're going to do with you."

Poison shook her head. "You really think he'll come after me?"

Savas smiled for the first time. "I'm counting on it."
OCTOBER 30
35

# Prayer Before Battle

A deep voice chanted in the darkness beside the candle flames.

"God of power and mercy, maker and lover of peace, to know you is to live, and to serve you is to reign."

Houston observed the flickering light from a distance, giving Lopez space as he dressed. Body armor under vestments, belts and holsters for guns, magazines, knives, and grenades. All the while he chanted. She would never understand. He reached out to a God who had rejected him. He sang the song of a priest when the Church had cast him out. It was his way.

"Through the intercession of St. Michael, the archangel, be our protection in battle against all evil."

_Michael_. The older Lopez brother. The man whose death had brought her together with Francisco. The man whose life had upturned theirs and so many others. The man whose actions had created a monster of terrible vengeance that had burned like acid through the Central Intelligence Agency. T _he wraith_. A killer whose life ended before the barrel of the man before her.

_Michael_. An archangel. Like his brother, _Gabriel_.

"May our cause be just. May we have clear vision. May our courage not falter. May our efforts bring lasting peace. Should we perish in the struggle, may God embrace us and find for us a place in His Kingdom. Amen."

Crossing himself in front of an icon of St. George slaying the dragon, he blew out the votives and turned toward her, his black cassock a flowing shroud over layers of death. She waited as he approached, a shadow herself in dark camouflage, an energy anticipating the coming violence burning within her.

Lopez spoke softly, staring into her eyes, black to blue. "Everything will depend on removing the sentries on the roof. Those snipers will pick us off if we try to enter. We'll have to be fast and accurate. The diversion will buy us only moments."

She smiled beneath the covering of the mask. "Amen."

Lopez frowned. "Let's hope our recon remains accurate, that they don't change anything."

"Lord hear our prayer."

He watched her silently for a moment and then pulled down the fabric of the mask covering her mouth. He kissed her, lingering until they pulled away for breath.

"In case it's the last kiss," he said. "I want to make it count."

She reached her hand up to his face and cupped his cheek. "Every mission you do that. And every time I want you to. Because one day, we won't come back, Francisco."

He nodded, turning with her toward the door. "But let it not be this night, O Lord."
36

# Without Mercy

They called him simply Alpha. He was the point man, the de facto leader of this group of men wrapped around and above, guarding the warehouse. The building was a squat little thing, about half a city block. Isolated in the northern New Jersey countryside, it attracted little attention, was not easily accessed, and unregistered in any business directories. It was a ghost.

Like they were. All their real names were scrubbed. They adopted spy thriller handles. Former soldiers and contractors, all of them, hired secretively by a company many in his team began to suspect was involved in some of the attacks occurring around the country. That suspicion led some to leave. But most stayed. The company had done its homework. Like Alpha, most of them would point the gun for whoever paid them the most.

But tensions had escalated dramatically. Five additional guards had been added bringing the total to fifteen. Powers that be were getting rattled about what was inside the metallic walls of the structure. Alpha didn't know what was in there, and he didn't want to know. A few times each month, a small convoy of trucks would show up and pull into what he presumed was an enclosed loading dock, the doors closing and sealing off everything from view. Shortly afterward, the trucks would drive off, whether having unloaded or loaded a mystery that was not part of his job description. A job that paid ridiculous money for guard duty in the states. Iraq had been one thing, but Jersey? Retirement gig.

Until things started blowing up. Until more and more trucks had come. Until more former soldiers had been brought on to fortify a rural building like something in the green zone. Just the presence of that many guns raised the temperature.

"Main gate, clear," came a voice through static on his headset.

"Roger that."

It was Delta. There was only one way by vehicle into the building, through a gate lodged in the electrified fence, then down a broad, truck-friendly road to the loading dock. Three guards patrolled the gate, two at the dock entrance, four moving about the perimeter fence. Six took to the roof, four at the corners and two on the longer sides of the building. Those on the roof were trained snipers. Alpha was one of them, positioned at the front on the right-hand side facing the gate.

"Perimeter report."

Several voices spoke in order of established protocol. The roof snipers followed suit. The space was clear. As it was half an hour ago. As it was at dusk. As it was every night for the last six months that he had worked this job.

That's why when he spotted the headlights at the top of the hill in front of the gate, he didn't quite believe his eyes.

"Delta, check scheduled arrivals."

It looked like a smaller delivery truck, not the massive eighteen wheelers that they tended to get. He zoomed his night-vision goggles. The truck was nondescript, no insignia, the plate damaged and unreadable. The windows seemed opaque or blacked out. Something was wrong.

The vehicle began to accelerate down the hill. Alpha didn't hear the telltale sounds of torque in the engine, the changing pitch as the rpms increased. The steering was odd. His alarm bells were ringing

"Log's empty, Alpha. Nothing due until tomorrow afternoon."

He powered up his scope and set his transmission signal to maximum. "Unidentified vehicle approaching from the road. Treat as hostile. Repeat, treat as hostile!"

Automatic gunfire erupted from the gate. The flashes lit the dark night, strobing the gatehouse, glinting off the chain-links in the fence, reflecting back from the glass in the truck that was now barrelling down the hill. The windshield of the truck exploded, glass spraying inwards, the metal of the hood pocketed with bullet holes. It only accelerated.

"Perimeter guards move forward to engage. Anyone up top with a view, take a shot if you have one. Gamma and Omega, hold the dock!"

_The maniacs!_ Whatever crazed assault this was, it was only going to end one way, and that was with the occupants filled with holes. A foregone conclusion that didn't give him any comfort—madmen always maimed and killed. How many men would he lose tonight?

He settled into a crouch on the roof's ledge, stabilizing his rifle, knowing that the snipers around him were doing the same. The night-vision scope zoomed in on the rushing vehicle. Alpha focused on the cabin, determined to take out the driver himself.

The cabin was empty.

_Shit!_ "Delta, all crews, break off! Repeat, break off!"

But it was too late. His eyes were seared by a bright light and a blast of air that nearly knocked him backward. Stunned, he shielded his eyes as an orange fireball climbed into the sky, quickly darkening in a blanket of smoke and falling embers. The screams hit him now. Just like he remembered. Just like in Mosul when the trucks came and the bombs blew and men and pieces of men lay strewn in the street.

The afterimage of the blast partially blinded him, but he strained to see the gate below. It was gone. The metal ripped and melted like cotton candy, flaming chunks of truck and gatehouse scattered radially around the scene of destruction. Only those bodies that were not close to the explosion were visible, but all of the men he had sent to converge on the intruders were now corpses, or as good as. Three at the gate, four wrecked forms from the perimeter guards. It was a slaughter.

"Roof report." His voice was strained and husked.

Silence.

He spun around the rooftop, dropping the goggles over his eyes again. Motionless forms were draped in various positions across the asphalt. They were all dead. Sniped themselves while distracted by the commotion and chaos at the gate.

Alpha stood fully now, heedless of the danger, removing his goggles. It was just a matter of time now. Light flickered from the burning debris behind him. He stared up into the sky, looking for some heavenly object, the moon, even a single star to glimpse before the final darkness came.

But it came without mercy. His head snapped backward, a bullet tearing through the soft flesh of his face, a clean hit to the brain stem that unplugged his basic physiological functions in an instant. For a second, his eyes empty, he stood staring stupidly forward. Then the electrochemical signals ceased completely, and he dropped straight to the rooftop with a thud.

Then, only silence.
37

# Motherlode

Lopez and Houston entered the burning compound. Their forms wrapped in black, packs strapped to their backs, and pistols in their hands as they jogged cautiously among the scrap and human remains scattered before them. They paused over several bodies, checked them, and moved on toward the compound's entrance.

With weapons raised they approached, stairs on either side leading to a loading platform in front of the enormous roll-up shutter door. Two bodies lay on either side of the stairway, blood pooling underneath them. Houston sprinted up the right-hand steps and examined the large locks barring entrance. Lopez continuously scanned around them with his weapon raised.

"Francisco, it's no good!" she cried. "We're going to have to blow it."

"I counted fifteen. They can't have had more, could they?"

Houston sprinted down the steps, unstrapping her pack. "I don't know. Paranoid as all fuck, so I won't put anything past them. We need the charges from your pack."

Lopez slung his bag to the ground and removed several gray blocks with detonators. He handed them to Houston who returned to the door as he resumed his scanning. Placing the explosive on the locks, she set the charge and sprinted down the steps. They grabbed their bags and rounded the corner of the building, constantly alert for hostile movements or sounds. Houston raised a controller.

"Three, two, one..."

She pressed the bottom and a blast shook the building. After several seconds, they came back around the wall and ran to the loading platform. Twisted steel and smoke greeted them, as did an enormous hole in the shutter door the width of a small car.

Houston laughed. "Just meant to break the locks. I need a course on explosive yields."

She removed a flashlight and they stepped into the building through the hole, careful to avoid the sharp and smoking edges. The air inside the place was stale, almost metallic tasting, the acrid smoke from the blast mingling with the stored smells of machines and dust. The echoing of their footsteps made it clear that the space was vast and open, but it was too dark to see much beyond the direct beam of the light, which only revealed the reflective hulls of large shapes.

Lopez led her arm. "Try the wall. Lights."

Houston scanned the beam across the nearby wall and located a set of switches. Lopez faced away from her with his gun raised in anticipation. She flipped the switches together in one motion.

Ceiling-high bulbs winked to life with a buzz. Dim at first, the bulbs slowly waxed to full brightness, their combined numbers across the length of the warehouse causing the pair to squint as their eyes adjusted.

"Holy shit, Francisco."

They stared down rows and rows of enormous bladed aircraft. The machines were variable, all devoid of a cockpit or other indication of a pilot's chair. Some of the smaller units sported large cameras. The larger drones were outfitted with an array of cargo, all of it dangerous.

Lopez walked up to one of the larger ones, bulbous, metallic shapes strapped to its underside. "Bombs."

"Looks like," said Houston. "And those are aircraft sized machine guns on that one. Can you imagine the bullets?" She swung her gaze across the interior. "There's got to be forty or fifty in here. It's the drone motherlode."

Lopez got to one knee and crossed himself. "At least it wasn't for nothing." Houston placed her hand on his shoulder.

"It had to be done," she said, staring across the warehouse, seeming to see beyond it.

"It makes us as much murderers as them."

"And the alternative?" She knelt down beside him. "We knew the moment we canvased this place that the drones were here. Stupid to put the place surrounded by hills, but it was muscled up. We weren't going to be able to convert them to our cause. It was either more drone attacks or we fight this war."

"Killing in war only makes it necessary, not moral." He stood, his composure returning. "It's still killing, and we just left the biggest body count we ever have."

She placed her hand on his face and looked into his eyes. "I know. I know it hurts you. And I know you do this only because you see that we had to. You'll ask your God for forgiveness. And I know you'll mean it. But, meanwhile, we need to bring in the cavalry."

"FBI?"

"Yes. This changes everything." She held up a plastic bag with several phones. "And we got these."

"You don't think they'd be stupid enough to leave a trail?"

Houston shook her head. "Not Fawkes, but he's got an army now. You're only as secure as your weakest link." She looked back outside toward the carnage. "Lots of bodies. Lots of hires. Lots of potential weak links." She pulled out her phone.

"How much time do we have?"

"I don't think the local police or fire will be out here quickly. It's the middle of nowhere, and these guys weren't plugged into their systems with a burglar alarm. No, just the opposite. I bet this place is off the grid completely." She punched a number. "I think our Intel 1 pals will be the first on the scene."

A voice crackled on the other end.

"Angel? This is Mary. We hit the jackpot. Tell John and the others to get to the address we sent you. And bring fire and a cleanup crew. And body bags. Lots of body bags."

Hours later an army of police cars, FBI vehicles, SWAT vans, and emergency response crews were stationed around the smoldering scene. Spotlights were trained around the compound, and forensics teams darted around the bodies like fireflies with their flashlights and cameras.

Cohen slowly exited one of the black Crown Victorias. She hopped beside the door, removing a pair of crutches, and then proceeded to swing herself toward the stairways. Refusing the aid of several agents and police, she forced her way clumsily up the steps and into the warehouse.

Inside, a group of men stood marveling at the building's inventory. Flashbulbs exploded around them, documenting the scene.

"John. Frank. Sorry I'm late."

Savas turned around and the lines of his mouth tightened. It was hard to see her like this. The bruises had only begun to leave her face, the hideous black and green fading to a sickening yellow, scabs slowly being absorbed, hair lost from her left side where stitches ran over her scalp like laces on a game ball. Cohen limped toward them, her breath ragged, her eyes fatigued, yet a light burning within them.

"You didn't miss anything," said Savas, taking her arm. She relented and let him help her. "Or rather, we all missed the same thing. Hell of a fireworks display. And just look what Pandora's box has inside it."

Cohen whistled. "And no one noticed that someone was piling up large drone orders like this?"

Miller shook his head. "It didn't look that way on paper. Our two shadows tracked it all down, like tributaries piling into a big river. Then they came here and did this," he said, gesturing outside. "Who did you say those folks were?"

"I didn't," said Savas.

"Mmmm."

"We've counted twenty-five of the largest models," said Savas, "most equipped to bomb or shoot anything to smithereens. The rest are reconnaissance setups, smaller models with different imaging equipment ranging from cameras to infrared, audio—you name it."

"The bodies outside?"

Savas nodded. "Need to confirm, but facial recognition from snapshots IDed two of them. Former contractors that worked in the Middle East, one ex-army."

"More mercenaries," growled Miller. "Fifteen of them, it seems. Your ghosts are better than Jason Bourne."

"Moving on," said Savas. "We'll ID all we can and see what we can find from it."

"Meanwhile, we've put a dent in their attack plans," said Cohen.

"I hope so."

"What do you mean?"

Savas sighed. "Fawkes used a bunch of shell companies, crisscrossing aliased orders to stock this place. It was to hide his tracks, hide this place from prying eyes. But I'm starting to think that he's not the kind of guy to put all his eggs in one basket."

Miller looked gravely at him. "You think he has more drones."

"I know he does."

Savas didn't want to believe his own words. He needed a win, the kind of win that would let him believe he had declawed this nebulous monster. But the truth was too obvious.

Cohen changed tact. "You said there was a call from Gabriel?"

"Yes. They have a bag of phones. You can guess from where. Angel's on it now, but it's beyond her resources. I'm going to go long on this and bring in Simon."

"Fred Simon of CIA?" she asked. "We haven't contacted him since—" She caught herself. "Not for a while."

Miller smiled. "Who's he?"

"Someone who might can help," said Savas. "We might also need the NSA to work those phones."

"More Watchmen?" asked Cohen.

He nodded to her and stared at Miller a moment. "Why don't you fill in Frank a bit on the group while I get this show wrapped up here. I think the usefulness of certain secrets has diminished greatly given the current circumstances."

"About damn time," whispered Miller under his breath.

Savas smiled wanly. "Be careful what you ask for, Frank. Ignorance can be bliss."
OCTOBER 31
38

# Weakest Link

Savas and Cohen sat in the back of one of the old Crown Vics as it sped toward Manhattan on I-80. The sun arced over the factories and former swamplands, pouring a bronze coating over the buildings and waterways. Savas found it increasingly difficult to keep track of the days, one rolling into another on minimal sleep and maximal stress. But now, finally, there were some real breaks in the case.

They had insisted that the car be swept for digital technology, and screened their drivers, allowing only those who agreed to leave their smartphones and similar equipment behind. There was no point in spending the time to explain why. The turn to Luddites had hampered them severely, however, as the attempt to establish a conference call with Fred Simon had demonstrated. They had tried to have two phones on speaker, Lightfoote on Cohen's phone, Simon on Savas' cheap model. But it had proved unworkable, the sound quality rendering much of the dialogue incomprehensible. They had settled on speaking to Simon alone.

The CIA agent's voice was energized. "Our mutual contact at the NSA has managed to make rapid progress. All the calls and texts from the numbers you gave were grabbed over the last week. There wasn't much to go on. They were careful, but not careful enough. Two of the phones had sent text messages to the same number. I don't think it was because they were brothers and contacting mom."

"What was that number?" asked Savas.

"An unregistered phone. Likely a burner. But we don't need a name to track it."

"GPS?"

"No. They weren't that careless. But with enough activity, we can triangulate from the cell towers. They didn't check the fine print on this model. It checks with the home company a lot for service performance. Pinging back on an hourly basis. They might as well be flashing a light."

Savas sat up in the seat. He turned to Cohen. "Do you think it could be Fawkes?"

"I doubt it, John." She swept the crutches from between them and leaned them against the window. "You never know, but my guess is a mid-level operator. But he could lead us to the boss."

The speaker crackled. "My thoughts exactly."

Savas nodded. "So where is this phone?"

"Long Island Sound near Glen Cove."

"In the water? They ditched it?"

"Unlikely," said Simon. "It's moving. Speed and direction consistent with a maritime vessel following the coastline."

Savas and Cohen exchanged glances as she spoke. "Well, that isn't likely for some low-level grunt. Maybe we have something interesting."

"Want real-time footage?"

"Are you serious?"

"Soon as we had the coordinates, we dispatched a chopper."

"An agency chopper in the US? Where from?"

"Need-to-know basis, John."

"I thought the CIA didn't operate within US borders."

"Clinton said it best: it all depends on the definitions of words like 'is' or 'operate'."

"Mmm-hmmm. You bet your ass I want footage, but we're pre-smartphone era here, Fred. When the AI in our car tried to kill us, we decided to go Amish."

Simon barked a laugh. "I understand. NSA has found a way to firewall the damn worm. Slowing them the hell down to fence everything off, but they've got server farms now with serious prophylactics. I'm watching real time. It's a nice boat."

"I bet it is."

"With a bunch of folks on it. Hard to make out high-res detail—the bird is at a distance and altitude that won't give it away. But I can tell you they aren't milling about socially. Positioned strategically."

"Bodyguards," said Cohen.

"Who needs a ship full of muscle?" chipped Simon.

Savas felt the adrenaline kick in. "Fawkes." He turned to Cohen. "We need a rapid response team. They'll lose that phone or the owner soon."

She nodded. "That means air. We're out of choppers. Too busy flying the VIPs out of the city still."

"Dammit!"

Simon cut in. "Well, remember those contractors that the CIA doesn't hire under aliases for work inside the country? Well, why have one chopper when you can have three for ten times the price? The fact that they don't exist creates some budget magic."

"You've got a spare bird?"

"Already routed toward you."

Savas punched the seat in front of him, startling the driver. "I owe you big, Fred."

"Don't think so, John. I've got a ways to go on that other debt I owe you. Speaking of which, how are my kids?"

"They're good. Spooking my team with their ninja-assassin program. Even Frank was impressed. But they're delivering big time." He glanced at Cohen. "We're a bit busted up and we've got a full plate of hackers in the City. I think I know who I'd send for a rendezvous with the boat."

"I agree," said Simon, "but we're pushing them. They're human, whatever they seem to accomplish."

Savas sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. "I know, Fred. But right now we all need to be a little superhuman. There's a monster to fight. I don't have the manpower to do this. Maybe Frank, but he's one. And there are some important people we need to question as of several hours ago."

"I'm with you. Tell them the chopper's been loaded with some useful gear. But getting on that boat and surviving isn't going to be as easy as the warehouse."

"Easy. Right. I'll tell them. I'm glad you're with us, Fred."

"I'm not the only one, John. The Watchmen still have some kick left. Until soon."

The connection was closed. Savas dialed and held the phone to his ear.

"Yeah, Mary? This is John. That bag of phones? Well, they might have bagged some big game. The guards called a number. Fred Simon traced it. It's zipping along the Long Island Sound as we talk. We need you two to intercept a boat."

A muffled voice sounded through the other end. Savas nodded.

"Not to worry. Give me your current position. We've got that covered."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

Continued DEPOSITION OF:

**Jean Paul Rideout**

CBD: I want to read for you some documentation from the archives of the NSA. Prepared specifically for this inquiry.

MR. RIDEOUT: This should be fun.

* * *

CBD: As of 30 October, more than a third of the agency's computers were wiped and placed behind a newly designed firewall, code-named ROUNDUP. This firewall successfully prevented further infections and those machines took on the bulk of NSA computing tasks, both internally and externally. This was not a "cure" of any kind. It served as a preventive measure for infection and allowed the agency to resume increasingly normal levels of operations. However, due to national security concerns, it was decided not to share this information with outside agencies, private or public institutions, or the personal computing world for fear that release of the code would allow Anonymous to develop countermeasures.

* * *

MR. RIDEOUT: Hang on! So they had a block—they could fence it out—but kept it to themselves? Genius! How did the asses there feel when the Boeing plants blew themselves to bits? Robots slinging parts every which way, killing hundreds of workers, crippling aircraft construction for years? Jesus! Or the General Dynamics tanks and trucks? So sophisticated with their fully wired innards! The worm had them turning on their operators and blowing holes in the army bases! Bet those guys would have liked a peek at that firewall!

* * *

CBD: There was debate. For example, it says here—

* * *

MR. RIDEOUT: Debate! I love it. How about the farm belt catastrophes? Irrigation and treatment systems poisoning tens of millions of acres? Chinese air traffic control going to shit and nearly leading to a launch of missiles? Taiwan is lucky to still be here, honestly. And of course, who can forget the digital money supply of the world banks literally disappearing before our eyes?

* * *

CBD: The NSA isn't the focus of this inquiry!

MR. RIDEOUT: Then why bring them up at all?

* * *

CBD: I was getting to this point. The document continues.

* * *

CBD: Debate on this topic intensified during the next few days as the worm caused accelerating damage to civilian and governmental infrastructure. However, increasing concern developed over a second, and unrelated series of malicious code attacks that were eventually determined to have originated from offices of the FBI in New York City.

* * *

MR. RIDEOUT: Oh, here it is! Angel. Now I see what this is about. So the NSA began to spy on the FBI as well.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Because your division had gone rogue and was releasing viral code into the internet!

MR. RIDEOUT: Because it was the only way to fight the damn thing! Fight, well, that came later. At this point, we'd only begun to see the worm's activity through Angel's code. We didn't have time to get permissions or test the friendliness of this stuff! As you read so eloquently, the damn world was falling apart around us!

* * *

[REDACTED]: Many find it intriguing that at the same time as Anonymous was bringing down the world's digital economy, military, even food and water production, your group at FBI was engaging in a simultaneous release of hostile code.

MR. RIDEOUT: It wasn't hostile to—

* * *

[REDACTED]: And that it was your small division in an obscure branch of the FBI that managed to bring in the leader of Anonymous. A hacker who personally communicated with your chief programmer before and after the arrest—

MR. RIDEOUT: Communicated? He fucking wiped our server farm!

[REDACTED]: leaving her, and her only, encrypted messages and files.

* * *

MR. RIDEOUT: You're serious? You think we're in league with that fuck? He tried to kill us multiple times! We were trying to save the nation!

* * *

[REDACTED]: Did saving the nation require you to provide aid and comfort to enemies of the state?

MR. RIDEOUT: Aid and comfort? That's treason. What the hell are you talking about?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Francisco Lopez. Sara Houston. The Priest and the Whore. Surely you have heard of them?

MR. RIDEOUT: The Priest and Whore? [Inaudible] Oh, my God. Gabriel and Mary! Are you telling me those ciphers were Lopez and Houston?

* * *

[REDACTED]: It's charming that you are so ignorant of this.

MR. RIDEOUT: I didn't know who they were and I don't believe anything coming out of your mouth! All I know is that those two risked their lives over and over to bring Fawkes in. And they did! You should pin a fucking medal to their chests.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Perhaps they'll receive what's coming to them if you would tell us where they and Angel Lightfoote are hiding.

MR. RIDEOUT: I have no idea! Neither does anyone else in Intel 1. For all I know they're dead in the chaos. The city was on fire when you took us underground, when your thugs knocked our doors down and grabbed us. They were already gone into that mayhem. From what I'm seeing here, I'm thinking that was maybe the best outcome.

* * *

CBD: You say this Mary and Gabriel risked their lives several times. Can you elaborate?

MR. RIDEOUT: I've told you about the warehouse raid. Jesus, that was straight out of Call of Duty. That's where we found the drone stash. They took down a bunch of armed guards to get into that place. Of course, that fuck had more than one location. But I can at least say that there is no way their raid didn't save lives and infrastructure. Some bridges are still standing and some people still walking around because of that raid.

* * *

CBD: Who else was in on it?

MR. RIDEOUT: No one. Two on like fifty, I don't know. Bodies were everywhere. I saw the photos. Of course, the craziest was the boat.

* * *

CBD: Boat?

MR. RIDEOUT: Yeah, the very next day. Airlifted them like battle bots and dropped them in. And we almost had him, dammit. We could have prevented so much if they had caught him. So many deaths. But it wasn't to be.

* * *

CBD: Fawkes? How did you know he was there?

MR. RIDEOUT: We tracked some phones. Dead guards had contacted people. Led to the boat.

* * *

[REDACTED]: How was the FBI able to track this boat without computers, without the technology? Where did you get the vehicles to airlift the fugitives?

MR. RIDEOUT: John had connections. In fact, I think some were in your vaunted NSA. Some good guys. I don't know. But they made it happen, tracked the calls, got Mary and Gabriel in there. Would have been something to see in the flesh, I have no doubt.
39

# Boat Party

A dark-haired man handed Lopez a tablet and swiped through several photos. Although dimmed, the glow of the screen was nearly blinding in the dark interior of the aircraft, the thundering sound of the blades and engine suffocating auditory senses as well. They were flying just over the low cloud cover on a moonless night, shadowing the boat by matching speed and direction, remaining well out of earshot.

The two men were young, barely out of their twenties, and Lopez wondered where Fred Simon had found them. Breaking agency protocol, even in this crisis environment, likely meant they were not mere tools, but a part of the loose network united by Savas and Simon. _The Watchmen_. Lopez didn't know whether to respect their efforts or consider them hopeless idealists.

He turned his attention to the tablet. The images showed increasing zooms toward an unusual-looking boat. Lopez strained to hear the CIA man over the sounds of the helicopter and the strong headwind that rocked the craft mercilessly. Even with the headphones, he found himself using hand signals to get Houston's attention as he handed her the device.

The CIA man repeated what he had said. "It looks like one of the newer anti-pirating vessels. Aluminum hulls and cabins designed to withstand small-arms fire. Dual-engines to bring top speeds of around sixty miles per hour. They can turn on a dime and chase down anything that isn't a speed boat. Or outrun it."

"Good thing we're in a helicopter," said Houston, smiling.

The CIA man wasn't amused. "Look, I don't know who you are and what strings you pulled, but this isn't a day trip. Look at these."

He scrolled past several photos that centered on the boat and its hull, pausing over a pair that focused on the deck.

Houston interrupted. "We see them. Guards fore and aft, automatic weapons, even a fairly large machine gun mounted there," she pointed. "If I were you, I wouldn't bring this bird in too close. The gun might almost qualify as anti-aircraft depending on the rounds."

"But if we are going to have you near enough that thing, the approach is going to have to be close," he scowled. "They'll make us for sure by sight as well as sound. There's nothing identifying on the outside, especially at night, but that in itself will likely send up flags."

Lopez nodded to the side door. "What is this thing? I assume it's for us?"

"The best we could manage on extremely short notice. We aren't the Navy Seals, and to be quite honest, this is our first and I hope only sky-to-sea assault mission. Usually we do things with a bit more stealth."

The man edged over and unzipped one of the bags. Black fiberglass gleamed back at them, reflecting the light of the tablet and cockpit instrument panel.

"But this will get some points for that."

"It's a jet ski?" asked Houston.

"Yes," said the CIA agent. "Electric. Good for the environment."

Houston nodded. " _Silent_ , in other words."

"Next to the motors on the boat, most definitely. It's pitch out there on the open sea and they're not running all that dark, so you should almost be invisible. We disabled the safety lights. It's a two-seater, so you'll both fit with some minimal gear. You stay in their wake and you should be able to grapple on before they know you're there."

"Except for the thundering helicopter drop-off, of course," said Lopez.

"We'll try to keep as far out as possible, so there will be some distance. You can hit 50 on this thing. Boat tops off at 60 and they aren't pushing it that hard right now. Nowhere close. You can close the gap." He looked Houston up-and-down. "It's not us I'm worried about. Getting on the boat is one thing. Then what? I hope Simon hasn't lost his mind."

Houston used the silence to loudly slap a fresh clip into her browning. "Just get us on the water and watch your own ass. We aren't outfitted for a sea mission. Put us low to avoid a bath and we'll preserve more function in the gear."

The CIA man motioned to a rope and pulley. "Thirty feet already laid out. In this blackness, well, that's pushing it, and the downwash is going to be a problem."

"We'll make do," she answered, wrapping a tactical vest around her.

The pilot spoke through the noise. "Target has decelerated. Down to 30 miles per hour."

"We do it now," said Lopez.

The CIA man nodded. "Drop us down, Charlie."

They felt a tug inside and the helicopter buried itself in the cloud layer, additional turbulence rocking the small craft back and forth violently. The pilot was flying dark except for instrumentation. They plunged below the clouds and the sea swelled into view. Light from the boat ahead bobbed like a beacon.

Houston and Lopez removed the remainder of the tarp on the jet ski. Without a combustion engine, it was surprisingly light, and they positioned it in front of the door. They were dressed in black with protective vests, ski masks and dark gloves, packs on their backs and weapons strapped to utility belts. Night vision goggles dangled from their necks.

The helicopter plunged toward the sea, the pilot speaking in their headsets. "Wind's a bitch! Be quick."

They lurched to a hover. The pair removed the headphones and fastened the rope to the jet ski. The CIA man opened the side door and they lowered the watercraft quickly. The gears on the pulley hummed as the rope flew through the mechanism, the smell of burnt leaves filling the small space. Far below, they watched the water splash outward from the impact on the surface.

"Go, go, go!" cried the pilot.

Houston leapt onto the rope and wrapped her feet around it. She descended swiftly down its length and vanished below. Lopez paused a split second to give her space to clear, then dropped straight into the wind and night.

It was all completed in less than a minute. The pilot was skilled and held the helicopter in position. Feet firmly planted on the jet ski, they detached the rope as Houston slipped into the driver's seat and fired it up, the engine purring softly.

The craft leapt forward toward the dancing lights of the yacht. Lopez removed a high-powered assault weapon and focused ahead as the helicopter darted upward, heading back toward the cloud bank and safety.

Only it would not make it. Operators on the boat had seen the craft. Through the washed-out green of the night-vision, Lopez saw a volley of infrared tracers converge on the aircraft. He remembered the large weapon in the recon photos. He removed his goggles and stared helplessly.

A bright light erupted above them, painting the ceiling of cloud-cover in orange and white, the water reflecting the growing fireball. The sound shook them as they sped forward, the rending of metal and air pressure from the ignited fuel. In the dimming fireball the wreckage could be seen to careen toward the open sea and slam into the water like the surface was made of concrete, the helicopter crushed and sinking. It vanished below the waves.

Lopez felt all ambivalence evaporate.

"Let's get these bastards."
40

# Getaway

Their target accelerated. Houston gunned the jet ski and pushed it to the breaking point. The boat took no evasive action and even angled toward them to narrow the distance somewhat of their approach.

"They haven't spotted us," screamed Lopez behind her. "Running from the crash site!"

Houston nodded vigorously and continued to push the ski full out. The high waves gut-punched them as they sliced through the water, but they gained on the yacht. Lopez began to see just how fortified it was. _Anti-pirate, indeed_. While it possessed a superficial resemblance to the luxury powerboats decorating many docks, the fiberglass was replaced with thick aluminum, the windows black and refracting light unnaturally, the bullet-resistant composition altering the optical properties. And of course the guards and their weapons, in addition to the churning motors kicking a spray like a comet's tail behind the craft.

They were within ten yards and still gaining on the starboard side. Now came the true insanity: The boat had accelerated beyond fifty miles per hour and the jet ski was barely holding together. The angle had decreased, reducing their relative velocity, but also affording the only way to try to board. Lopez shouldered the automatic rifle and removed two stun grenades.

"Flash bangs ready!" he called to Houston. They were nearly alongside the yacht.

She nodded and he flung the bombs one at a time toward the bow of the ship. Both landed and rattled across the surface, ricocheting off the gunwale, then exploding. Even from the side of the ship, the sound and light were startling.

Lopez heaved a grappling ladder against the side and it caught, the roped steps unfurling against the hull. Just then the boat lurched starboard slamming into the jet ski. Instinctively, both of them leapt off the doomed craft and grabbed the sides of the ladder, one on each side, their legs half-submerged in the sea. The friction of the water threatened to pull the grapple from the boat and deposit them into the propeller blades.

Lopez placed a foot on the roped ladder and violently swung himself toward the gunwale, grasping the side of the boat with his hands. He tucked his legs underneath his torso like a gymnast and planted his boots on the uppermost portion of the hull, a powerful thrust of his legs propelling him over the side to land in the stern on top of the engine box.

Two men were positioned near the cabin looking ahead at the commotion caused by the still smoking flash grenades. At the sound of his awkward landing, they turned too slowly, the shock of the unexpected attack leaving them off guard.

The distance was only a few feet, and Lopez placed his hands on the engine box and swept his leg through the air like a switchblade. His boot connected with the head of the leftmost guard, the neck snapping to the side, teeth raining sideways against the metal. The man fell with a crash and didn't move.

But it left Lopez open for a strike from the second guard. He prepared for the worst, hoping Houston would be there in time to engage.

And she was. As he spun away from the guard and onto his feet, he crouched and pulled a handgun from his belt. In front of him there was a blur of hands and feet as Houston's lithe form pummeled the thick hulk of the other guard. The results were devastating. Blows to the neck and groin incapacitated him while she drew a knife. Using the momentum of his failing retreat, she toppled him onto the prone form of the other guard and plunged the blade into his neck, wrenching it several inches, sidestepping a jet of blood that bathed the floor of the boat.

It was over in seconds. In the cacophony surrounding the boat, the melee had barely risen above the chaos.

"I'll take the cabin," she said, twitching her head toward the interior. "There are two guards at the bow. I doubt the flash bangs did much more than knock them sideways."

"Be careful, Sara," said Lopez. "I don't want to lose you now."

"Move, priest," she said and darted toward the door.

Their actions played in counterpoint. Lopez sprang forward, his weapon raised, back sliding along the wall of the cabin. The acrid smell of smoke from the lingering grenades burned in his nose as he approached the front of the ship. He turned the corner of the cabin and crouched to one knee, steadying the pistol with his left hand as he scanned the deck.

One of the guards remained positioned on the gun turret, checking the skies as if awaiting another attack. The other had tossed one of the smoking remains of the grenades over the side of the boat, aiming his weapon downward, anticipating an assault from the water.

The assault came from behind. Lopez fired two shots before the man could turn. Both connected. The guard slipped over the railing and disappeared into darkness.

The other guard heard the shots. Lopez walked casually toward the turret, his weapon aimed at the man, the guard releasing the controls of the large machine gun, realizing it couldn't be used at close range. He desperately tried to draw a pistol.

Lopez blasted his right shoulder, the man's obvious gun arm. The guard screamed and clutched the wound, terror in his eyes as the masked assailant approached.

Lopez grabbed the wrist of his uninjured arm and twisted. Again the man screamed, his body paralyzed in pain, eyes shut harshly.

"How many guards?" yelled Lopez. "Don't think! Tell me! How many guards?"

Like a programmed machine, the man stuttered his answers: "Two here. Two in the back. Two in the cabin with Fawkes." Tears streamed down his face.

_Fawkes?_ It wasn't to be believed. The architect of Anonymous was _on the boat_. "Sara's in the cabin with him," he whispered, the frightened man looking on in distress.

Lopez brought the handle of the pistol down on the man's temple, the body collapsing into the turret. He sprinted back to the stern of the boat.

At the same time, Houston stood over the bodies of two men.

She had entered the cabin forcefully, kicking in the flimsy door to find three men looking through the front window at the aftermath of the flash bangs. Two were obviously hired protection—broad in the back, towering over the middle figure who could otherwise have been mistaken for a scrawny teen. They turned at the sound of her entrance.

_Fawkes_. It was the glasses that sealed the identification. The female hacker's words—her _lover_ —the lanky body, the darting motions, the smart glasses: it was Fawkes. But she had no time to consider the implications.

The men held guns in their hands. They turned to engage, but she held the advantage. She fired twice, each shot aimed quickly at the moving targets across from her. The first shot hit true to rip through the forehead of the bodyguard on her left, his blood splattering the window and ceiling. The second shot drifted right from her momentum. The bullet hit the man in the chest, too high for the heart, but he cried out, dropped his weapon, and careened toward the window.

But he wasn't down. As Fawkes screamed and darted left, the guard faced her and rushed, the crazed look of a wounded animal on his face.

She pivoted, side-stepping, and grasped his outstretched arm, using his momentum against him. He missed, and she thrust him toward the window in the back of the cabin. His face smashed the glass, a spiderweb of fractures erupting from the bullet-resistant material. Leaving nothing to chance, Houston fired once into the back of his head. She turned quickly to subdue Fawkes.

But he was gone. Wind and a salty mist poured in from an opening in the roof. A short ladder led from the cabin upward. Fawkes had gone up.

She ejected the magazine and pulled another from her belt. Slamming it in place, she darted to the stairway, weapon raised to the ceiling. She could see no one. At the same time, the whirring of an engine could be heard, changing in pitch from low to high.

"No!" she whispered under her breath and sprinted up the ladder.

A loud voice exploded throughout the cabin as Lopez charged inside.

"Sara!"

She was climbing a ladder across the room and didn't hear him. Her feet lifted from the steps and out of sight. Ignoring the bodies around him, he dashed to the ladder and ascended. Houston was there, firing her gun madly as she aimed out over the open water.

He followed the barrel of her gun. In the distance, a form was suspended over the ocean, legs dangling and kicking, arms grasping desperately above him. Overhead, a shadow hummed, a black object the size of a bed, the pitch dropping as the man accelerated away and faded into the blackness.

" _Fuck!_ " cried Houston as the object disappeared, her mag emptied.

They both stood there in silence, spindrift coating the dead bodies scattered below them, the boat hurled back and forth in the wind.

_All for nothing!_

Fawkes had escaped by drone into the night.
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**Rebecca Ruth Cohen**

MS. COHEN: We almost had him. It could all have ended right there. But we had the boat. And a lot of bodies to examine. Also one survivor to question.

* * *

CBD: They killed the others?

MS. COHEN: Yes.

* * *

CBD: You don't look okay with that.

MS. COHEN: [INAUDIBLE] Not really. Violence isn't really my thing, you know? But sometimes there isn't another choice. Those were hired guns that would have killed them—tried to kill them—without a second thought. God! Why am I explaining this?

* * *

CBD: I'm interested in understanding the motivations behind each member of your team.

MS. COHEN: The motivation was the same: to stop what Fawkes was doing!

* * *

CBD: Did the survivor provide any useful intel?

MS. COHEN: Not much, but some. Once isolated, it was clear to him that the money he had received wasn't worth what he was going to get. We didn't even have to lean on him.

* * *

CBD: And?

MS. COHEN: Unfortunately, most of it was what we had guessed, but confirmation was nice. Hired mercenaries. Paid ridiculously well. Never privy to anything important—Fawkes kept them completely in the dark. They were there to follow his direct orders and serve as protection. He was one paranoid monster. Anyway, we learned that Fawkes was spending more and more time at sea.

* * *

CBD: Why was that?

MS. COHEN: The bodyguard thought it was to avoid law enforcement. I think it was more than that. I think Fawkes was planning to ride out offshore the societal chaos he was inducing. With everything Angel began to put together, it was clear that he was planning some big event, and it would go down soon.

* * *

CBD: What else?

MS. COHEN: Print and DNA samples linked two of the men onboard to the public assassinations. And we matched Fawkes' DNA as well—same as in the mask in the Bridgeport scene.

* * *

CBD: Where the shootings occurred?

MS. COHEN: Right.

* * *

CBD: But you still hadn't found him in any database?

MS. COHEN: No. Might be he was off the radar. He was young, maybe never caught in criminal activity. Another possibility we considered is that he scrubbed his files.

* * *

CBD: Scrubbed them?

MS. COHEN: Fawkes was a master hacker. Databases are often too easily accessible online. Really—do you know of a single major private or governmental organization that _hasn't_ been hacked in the last ten years? If he knew he was in certain systems, he might have found his way into them and deleted all information about himself. He could do it, I don't doubt that. Either way, we had nothing. And now we had stirred the hornet's nest.

* * *

CBD: Meaning?

MS. COHEN: Until that point, we had been only a blip on his radar. Someone probing too much in the wrong places. Even that was enough to try and kill us. But now—we'd entered his space, killed his bodyguards, nearly grabbed him off that damn boat. If he didn't have that escape drone on the roof, we would have. Now he was pissed, and he came after us.

* * *

CBD: First with Angel?

MS. COHEN: Well, she was the thorn in his side that kept getting worse. But everything just began to escalate at that point. Within the next few days we'd be hit, and absolutely devastating attacks happened across the world. And if it hadn't been for the information Angel obtained from the worm dissection, we would have lost even more.

* * *

CBD: So she was key.

MS. COHEN: [INAUDIBLE] Here we go again. Yes, she was key. So were John, and Frank, and JP. And certainly Gabriel and Mary.

* * *

CBD: The aliases—

MS. COHEN: Just stop. I'm not going there. Look, we worked as a team. A damn good team. What happened next just motivated us more. That's when John's idea took root, when we agreed to try it. Fawkes was hitting the world where it hurt. This time, we were going to hit _him_ where it hurt.
NOVEMBER 1
41

# Man in the Mask

He spoke to them on five different encrypted video conferencing calls. They were hired guns and bombers, assassins trained under diverse conditions spanning the military to organized crime. He'd baited them through the underground online marketplaces with money few could refuse. He'd filtered through information searches, background checks, and video chat interviews. He'd tested each of them with small-scale operations, sifting the wheat from the chaff, identifying the unreliable, the unstable, the less competent, and those who reported back to others and revealed themselves as informants. Sometimes he was forced to erase those who could pose a threat.

The few who survived the process were moved like chess pieces, directed remotely so that groups were formed, hierarchies established, rules set and punished harshly when broken. And always there was money. Hard to comprehend amounts of money, accounts protected from the worm scattered across the world. Houses and lands were purchased. Protected lives and identities created and promised. All for the taking should a final set of missions be accomplished. And all to be snatched away once the missions completed. He was fighting against the plutocracy and he was sure as hell not going to create another one.

Fawkes adjusted the mask over his face. A mask of a smiling, goateed madman from another age, always in place, his identity revealed only to those bodyguards who worked directly with him. He prepared a final address. Now he would move the strikes forward quickly in time. Now he would give a last set of instructions for the beginning stages of the end. Dangerous people at the FBI and other agencies had forced his hand sooner than he would have liked. He preferred careful probing of systems and weakness, test shots and stress tests that allowed him to screen his people as much as the target systems. He liked to thoroughly debug the code.

But the time for precise experimentation was gone. The time for drastic action had revealed itself. He could not afford another near disaster like that on the boat. How had they found him so quickly? Attacked him so easily? He had taken every precaution! Every trace erased from the digital world. But he was clearly not careful enough. Which meant he had to hurry. There was no telling from what direction they were coming, what flaws in the program were still lurking, waiting to collapse like poorly designed walls under siege.

Chaos was his ally. The more dysfunctional the world became around them, the less the governmental apparatus could use its considerable firepower to find and kill him. The attacks would begin there with the heads of the hydra in Washington. They thought they _had_ been attacked! But they had seen only the weak pieces, a feint to test the strength of their defenses. And those defenses had been found lacking.

But the hydra's handlers were not in Washington, but Europe and Asia. And so he would begin the dismantling of the European society and destabilization of China and the lesser economies. There could be war. These disturbances might be enough.

Otherwise, he would bring the final direct attack. He would darken America and plunge the nation into complete anarchy. Moments before the lights went off in the centers of power in the United States, the signal would be given for the worm to complete its final function. The digital mind of the planet, on which all the modern societies rested, that calculated trade and commerce, that built buildings and cars, that became nearly a higher order organism of parsing ideas and thoughts in a fiber-optic neural network, a brain beyond anything the solar system had likely ever seen—it would die. Erased. Unmade in a cascade of deletion that would render them beyond salvage. Once the signal was given, the mad mind of Earth would die.

Only then might there be a chance for something more worthy, more pure to rise from the ashes. Fawkes didn't care if it was Humans 2.0 or the dolphin beta release. It had to be something new. Utterly new. The corrupt, cancerous, and insane thing called modern culture, what the deluded called modern civilization, had to be sterilized. Every cell wiped to prevent reinfection.

The worm would do that. The final cargo to be uploaded was designed and long perfected. It would exploit the enormous security and logical holes in the neuronal system of the world mind and scramble it, then like an acid eat away at the fibers and proteins until even the very DNA was digested.

Fawkes smiled behind the mask as he spoke to his blind tools. The FBI group had nearly ended it, but had only accelerated the date of doom.

He would start with them. He would pay that bitch in the bowels of Manhattan a short visit. Then he would show her who really ran things in cyberspace.

"Knock, knock, Angel."
42

# Meltdown

The names unfurled across the screen like entries in some doomsday book.

It was the new month, November first at three in the morning, and Angel had spent it deep in the basement of the FBI building. She rubbed her eyes. The holes across her left ear were swollen and red from the piercings that had been squashed as she slept during the last worm decryption job. Running one hand over the orange stubble of hair on her scalp, she clicked with the other to silence the alert tone from the computer that had called her out of some murky dream—only to stare at another nightmare.

She read through it again. The list was a who's who of the power brokers in Congress and business.

"Oh, look—there's the president herself!"

_Of course._ If you're going to bring down the US in one blitzkrieg, you ought to have her on the list. That made sense.

But did any of it really make sense? Angel knew her brain was close to oatmeal at this point, but were these really hit lists? What madman would try to off that many high-profile people? What lunatic could ever think something like that was even possible? And to what end?

_Chaos_. She shook her head. It all seemed to point in that direction. The banking meltdown. The attacks. This list of powerful names. Fawkes had made no demands. He hadn't tried to leverage the threats into anything. He seemed to be running by a playbook no one had ever seen before. No one could anticipate his moves.

Until now. Her virus was functioning, reporting on the worm's activities. And her little digital operating room had revealed more and more of the inner workings of the worm. Like any code, it was a series of instructions, fragile logic and loops calling out to be hacked. All she needed was time. But there was precious little of that left.

Angel sat upright and gulped down a wash of cold coffee. She'd bring this directly to Savas in the morning. Those names had serious protection, especially after events of the last two weeks. But was it enough? Could the secret service, the military, private contractors, could any of them anticipate what attacks might come from a man that was as diabolical as he was creative? Could anyone?

Her screen went dark.

"What the hell?"

She clicked on keys and the mouse, but there was no response. _Wonderful_. It was a very bad time for a device failure. She began to reach around for the power switch to forcibly reboot the machine when a line of green text ran across her screen.

"HELLO, ANGEL."

It was like some old mainframe terminal, letters appearing left to right revealing words, then phrases. Carriage returns advancing text. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach. Someone else had hijacked her computer, and she had no doubts about who that was.

The GUI was gone, but she found that she could type.

"HI, FAWKES."

She jumped and disconnected the VMS machine from the internal network. She hoped to God he didn't have any inkling of what she was doing with it.

More text appeared.

"LIKE THE MATRIX, RIGHT? IT'S BEEN INTERESTING WATCHING YOU WORK. BUT I'VE GOT THINGS TO DO AND YOU'RE CRAMPING MY STYLE."

A green light appeared on the upper lip of the screen indicating that the camera was on. She ignored it and the video image that appeared on the screen. She raced toward the bank of computers along the wall.

A mocking voice came over the speakers.

"No use, Angel, baby. I've turned all the drives to goo already. You don't think I'd give you the chance to shut them down first, do you?"

She reached the first machines and scanned for the main power connector.

"Thorough, aren't you? Look at your pretty little ass wiggle! Here, I'll just put a stop to all this unnecessary work so we can chat a little bit."

The cluster of computers switched off. Machine-gun like clicks of the system shutting down, the lowering pitch of hundreds of disk drives spinning to a stop—it was like some sonic rush of wind through the room.

"There. That's better."

She turned to face the only active monitor left. A masked figure stared back at her, smile frozen in place. She walked up to the terminal and placed one knee on the seat.

"Practical. I like that," came the distorted voice. "Butch, too. You swing both ways?"

"I'll be swinging at you."

He laughed, the sound crackling as the distorted audio maxed out the dynamic range of the electronics.

"Feisty! I should'a known that, though. I knew right off that those bugs crawling up my ass weren't NSA. Not close to their style. Crude, self-taught. More clever. You weren't raised in some dot gov hacking camp."

Angel resisted the urge to look at the VMS machine. Everything might depend on whether he had discovered it. It loomed like a presence behind her, some spirit that waited for her attention that she had to ignore. Until this asshole had his gloat and finished the wipe.

"It's not over, Fawkes."

"That's where you're wrong, Angel Lightfoote, special agent Intel 1. Angel Lightfoote of the scrubbed records."

She bit her lip and tried to keep her composure.

"What? You thought I wouldn't do my homework? You got _history_ , girl! Most of it wiped. Somebody wanted you cleaned up and made presentable. Would that be this Savas guy? No? Probably the other one, Kanter, the one blown up a while back?"

"Fuck you," she hissed.

"Oh, emotions, Angel. Not a girl's best friend in this game. Don't get attached. Don't feel bad for Blown-Up Man. Slows you down. Blinds you."

"Makes you human. He was a hundred times the man you are."

"A man who was into other men, huh? Hundreds of times, I bet."

She flipped him off.

"Well, good old _Larry_ must have gone the extra mile. I was scraping the digital basements. _Nothing_. But then I found all that stuff on dear old _dad_."

Tears welled in her eyes as she ground her teeth.

"That all had to suck, yeah? Tell me, were you really there, in that cage when he bit it? Yeah? I thought so. Fucked you up good, didn't it? Did dear old dad have to watch what they did to you? Every little thing? I can imagine the next few years. No wonder they had to bleach your record! Is that what they did upstairs in that shiny little head of yours, too?"

The sly face on the mask, the smirk of Guy Fawkes, the tormenting knowledge this sociopath had about her life, it was too much. Angel reached down and picked up a metallic wastebasket from the ground.

"Angel, darling, let's not fight."

"It's not over, you bastard. I promise you. _Never_ make it personal? Well, you just sure as hell did! And I'm coming for you!"

She swung the basket at the monitor. Again and again she pummeled the screen, plastic cracking, pixels shattering. The monitor fell to the ground, a black circle from the impact in the middle of the masked face, blocking it out. Still she smashed it. Over and over on the ground, a fissure opening in the screen, the dark circle expanding like some black hole to swallow the entire image.

All the while, laughter.

Fawkes' wild laughter spilled like acid from the speakers into her ears. Finally, she turned to the power cord and grabbed it with both hands, yanking it from the socket, releasing a tormented scream.

The sound ceased. What little was still glowing on the screen went black. The room was plunged into near darkness, the glow of the EXIT sign over the side door painting the room dimly in an infernal red.

She wiped sweat and tears from her face and stumbled over to the VMS machine. Her right hand was bloodied. She crouched and touched the surface of the old computer with her left, resting her head against the cold metal.

Her head nodded rhythmically as she began to rock back and forth on the ground. She repeated words over and over, her voice much higher, nearly that of a child's.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

She wept.
43

# Bilderberg Calling

The marine contingency posted around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had swelled beyond anything Elaine York had ever experienced. A former army field officer, one of the few women to be deployed into live hostilities in the first Iraq War, she didn't shrink from conflict, armed or not. But to see the White House nearly obscured by flak jackets and fatigues was to enter into the kind of nightmare reserved for over-the-top Hollywood blockbusters. That it could become real had never truly entered into her imagination.

President York stepped away from the window and turned back to her desk. Her last images of a figure sprinting down the circular roadway in front of the main doors—George Tooze, her Secretary of Homeland Security. She sat and tried to compose herself. Her head throbbed from two straight days without sleep. Her mind still reeled from continuous updates, each more alarming than the last, from every corner of the globe. And now Tooze racing over like a high school sprinter, his sixty-five-year old body likely straining under the duress. This was not going to be good.

And yet, what had been? The latest report from the NSA couldn't have been worse. The damned worm had begun to disrupt vital elements of the world's infrastructure. Haphazardly, to be sure, but her advisors, and her own gut, spoke to the possibility that what they had seen so far had only been feints. _Tests_ to optimize the monster running through the cortex of the modern world and yet which had, even on their own, produced planetary chaos.

Food and oil supply chains were disrupted from agribusiness farms to the international shipping systems on which a hungry world depended. Sea and air systems were scrambled, systems that transported the world's goods, including the ever-critical supply of oil. Hospitals were running out of supplies. Telecoms were unreliable. The world was losing its collective mind.

She half-expected red lights to be flashing around her and sirens wailing. The National Terrorism Advisory System threat assessment was at "IMMINENT." All branches of the military were at DEFCON 2 or higher, the birds in international airspace with different flags buzzing around each other nearly an invitation to a catastrophic mistake. The Force Protection Condition was DELTA nearly everywhere. INFOCON was at 1 and might as well have just put up a white flag and shut down.

And here was Tooze.

The flushed face of her trusted adviser burst into the Oval Office. He held an envelope in one hand that he brandished before him like a radioactive substance.

"A number," he gasped, resting a hand on the other side of her desk. He held up the letter again. "Limited lifespan. It's from Bilderberg."

Time seemed to stop and she felt her mind disengage. She remembered the first time that she had experienced death. Her mother had been braiding her hair one morning, and by afternoon she had been a seven-year-old raised by a single-parent father. The moment had been just as immediate as the rush of Tooze into the room. One minute, she could hear the sounds of her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen while she played in the living room. The next, a crash and house-jolting thud. She had run in to find her mother unconscious on the floor. She would never wake. A brain aneurysm, or a big balloon that popped in her head as one of the doctors had tried to explain it to her. She had feared balloons ever since. It could happen so fast. Pressure. Weakness. Then—pop.

She rose, turned away from Tooze, and walked back to the window to stare at the troops outside. So much firepower. Such an apparatus in the nation's military. And, in the face of the forces that truly controlled the world, so powerless.

Had it come to this? This new land and new dream of not even three centuries, of miracle cures, trips to the moon, supercomputers in your pocket—had its time come so soon? All because of this terrorist and his devil worm?

Pop.

"Ms. President? Elaine?"

She turned back to Tooze and felt the room sway, barely keeping her balance. "Thank you, George," she said, pulling the paper from his hand and trying to remove a tear discreetly. "I will need to be alone for this call."

He nodded, his face telling her all she needed to know, that he too understood the significance of what she was about to do.

"I'll be outside," he said. "Don't lose hope."

He turned and walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Sighing, she approached the grand desk and pressed her thumb against a fingerprint-reader on a drawer, then entered a code into a keypad next to it. There was a clear click, and she pulled the drawer open. Inside was what looked to be a bulked up cellular phone from decades past. She knew it to be a special device, engineered to work through a covert collection of satellites, encrypting transmissions through means not even the worm could break. At least some things were beyond its reach. In the realm of monsters, the worm was just another fiend.

_Bilderberg_. So it had finally come to this. Like ghosts, powers that many felt but never saw, sometimes they became incarnate. Like the beginning of her presidency, they had come and impressed upon her their reality. Sometimes the phantoms moved objects around a haunted home. Or a nation. Sometimes they killed.

She read the number off the paper in the envelope and keyed it in. A series of strange sounds of static and digital processing harshly burbled from the speaker. Then a loud click.

She exhaled slowly.

"This is Elaine York calling from the White House."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

CBD: And it was at this point that you put your trap in motion?

MR. SAVAS: Yes.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Why did you trust this criminal?

MR. SAVAS: To be quite honest, I didn't. Maybe the trap was going to be reversed and sprung on us. I was flying on instinct, and something resonated as truthful about her dislike of Fawkes and what he was doing. Anyway, I didn't feel I had much of a choice. We had to act fast or things might get beyond the point of fixing. The disaster with Angel just confirmed how vulnerable we and the entire world were to this maniac.

* * *

[REDACTED]: The purported accident with your computers.

MR. SAVAS: Not accident, sabotage. It was a cyberattack.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Conveniently timed to cripple you at a moment, to use your words, where things were so serious that they might not be fixed.

MR. SAVAS: Which is exactly what Fawkes would have wanted. We'd shaken him. He responded to protect his plans.

* * *

[REDACTED]: But no one else was with agent Lightfoote when the alleged hacking attack occurred?

MR. SAVAS: Alleged?

* * *

CBD: Why don't you tell us about Angel Lightfoote, Mr. Savas.

MR. SAVAS: Can you be a little more vague, please.

* * *

CBD: Why did you put her in charge of your cybercrimes unit? Her records do not indicate any experience in digital technology or training of any kind.

MR. SAVAS: She showed an aptitude. After we lost Manuel—agent Manuel Hernandez—we needed someone in the chaos of the time to handle the system he had set up, our operations room at Intel 1. Angel was one of those to step up. After a short time she was running things by herself.

* * *

CBD: Is it common practice at FBI to promote people into positions for which they clearly have no training, no experience?

MR. SAVAS: Of course not. But it wasn't common occurrence to lose half your people to a vengeful tycoon plotting a global genocide. John Gunn and Mjolnir massacred half our division. The regs didn't mean a hell of a lot in those moments. We were battered. We survived as a team. More than a team. As a family. Screw the fucking protocol.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Again, we are to understand that you were able to _ignore_ policies and procedures because of your division's vaunted status at FBI and elsewhere?

MR. SAVAS: We were cut a lot of slack.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Which you used to promote an unstable personality into the prime position overseeing your cybercrime investigations just as the world was to suffer an unprecedented digital terrorist attack.

MR. SAVAS: Unstable? Look, Angel was weird, but she was a damn fine agent. Became a better one after Mjolnir. The trial by fire chars some, brings out the gold in others. She was gold.

* * *

[REDACTED]: These photos, Mr. Savas. This is Lightfoote?

MR. SAVAS: Yes.

* * *

[REDACTED]: How can you possibly justify this?

MR. SAVAS: So she's got short hair and some piercings. She saved the damned world, you idiots! You want to turn that back so you can dress her like a Stepford girl?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Saved the world. Only she could do it. Only she had the power to stop the virus, a virus she was instrumental in discovering, that she claims wiped her computers and all previous records of cyber-activity in your division. A woman contacted by the very man you assert was the prime terrorist in the events last fall. A woman with a diagnosed mental illness, hired and promoted without following basic FBI protocols.

MR. SAVAS: What do you mean a diagnosed mental illness?

* * *

[REDACTED]: Don't play ignorant with us now.

MR. SAVAS: What diagnosed mental illness? There's nothing like that in her file.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Of course not, because as our research has uncovered, FBI computers were used to wipe national databases, medical records destroyed. Or so it was thought. But you were not thorough enough.

MR. SAVAS: Deleted records? [INAUDIBLE] Larry. Dammit, Larry, you should have told me.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Now you wish to pass the buck to a dead boss, is that it?

MR. SAVAS: Never mind. You're going to twist and fit everything into your preconceived notions in this witch hunt. I can tell you I didn't know, but I don't much care even knowing now. Larry made some unorthodox hires, including yours truly. Those choices wouldn't look good on paper in front of a committee like yours. And those choices put together a group of damaged yet exceptional people that have saved all your asses on more occasions than we have time for!

* * *

[REDACTED]: So you would justify this?

MR. SAVAS: I'll justify it with our record.

* * *

[REDACTED]: That is exactly what we are here to examine. Not the fantasy you put forth as you actions, but what really happened.

MR. SAVAS: What really happened.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Yes. And we know that Angel Lightfoote is at the center of this. Placed at the center of digital operations immediately before the chaos by you, escaping from custody with two known terrorists and enemies of the state that you sheltered and aided.

MR. SAVAS: Oh, good God.

* * *

[REDACTED]: You might ought to pray to your God, Mr. Savas, because as things are shaping up, that is the only place you can expect to find any mercy.

* * *

CBD: Can we turn this back to the so-called trap?

MR. SAVAS: [INAUDIBLE]

* * *

CBD: So, this "Poison", real name Tabitha Ivy, she agreed to serve as bait for Fawkes?

MR. SAVAS: Yes. She was bait. We'd make it clear we were holding her, that we would extract information by any means necessary, threatening to expose Fawkes, to harm someone he possessed an emotional attachment to.

* * *

CBD: And by any means you mean torture?

MR. SAVAS: We faked interrogation scenes, placed them on poorly secured servers. Sent unencrypted emails revealing that we held her, provided information that we could possess only if we did. We believed this would get back to him and he would respond.

* * *

CBD: Which you claim he did?

MR. SAVAS: With a vengeance. We weren't actually prepared for how swift and devastating the response would be. We were naive about just how much manpower he had amassed and how obsessed he was with Poison. But afterward, we knew the plan would work. He gave us the confidence to set it up by those actions.

* * *

CBD: And so that was the next event in the chronology, the warehouse in Brooklyn?

MR. SAVAS: The plans for that were set in motion, but everything was exploding at that point. Lopez and Houston were sent to D.C. You know, your two terrorist enemies of the state? They _volunteered_ to try and stop the assassinations we deduced were coming. They saved the president.

* * *

[CBD]: Let the record show that Mr. Savas refers to former president Elaine York.

MR. SAVAS: Former?

* * *

[CBD]: She has been charged with treason and is a most wanted fugitive under the current authorities.

MR. SAVAS: Current authorities? What does that mean? Who is running the damn country?

* * *

[CBD]: We are not at liberty to convey such information to you.

MR. SAVAS: Jesus Christ! What the hell is happening topside? What have you people done?
Part III

# Angel

By God's providence he was catched With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King! Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring! —English Folk Verse (c.1870)
44

# Do No Evil

"L _ook, you need to understand. This comes from way up—from Sergei. We need those users in China. If we don't expand into those markets, we're going to end up on the wrong side of history in tech."_

_The bald suit behind the desk looked down at his desk as he spoke. Across from him, a dark-haired man with smart glasses stared forward with intense eyes. His fingers drummed on the armrests of the chair._

_"Wrong side of history? What the fuck is 'Don't be evil' then? We censor and keep information from people? Information should be free for everyone! You know, even the Chinese! I thought that's what this company was about!"_

_"We have to make compromises. Find the right balance."_

_The young man stood, his voice seemingly focused on the conversation, but his fingers on a smartphone and tapping furiously. He began to pace the small office space._

_"And what about the backdoors to NSA and others?"_

_The superior finally did look at the younger man. "What are you talking about?"_

_"Don't play dumb with me. I've got enough access to source that I can recognize a backdoor when I meet it. Fucking sloppy code too, if you asked me. Some Russian mobster is going to rape you up the ass for it someday if you don't clean it up."_

_"I think you're definitely poking around in places you don't need to be," he said, swiveling around in his chair to fully face the young man._

_The pacing continued. "Oh, look at that. Suddenly we're all serious like. Well, I'm into free information. Nothing is off limits."_

_"Then you're going to have to find yourself another job. I don't know why we tolerated you as long as we did."_

_"Because I can code circles around anyone here."_

_"No one is irreplaceable."_

_His step uninterrupted, the youth laughed. "Oh, a threat. From the internet's biggest, baddest company."_

_"You should take that seriously. We can make you. Or break you. Don't fuck with us or you'll never work in the valley again."_

_Finally the pacing stopped and the man stood over the desk, facing his superior. "Make me? What, move up the ladder? To what? Chief of sucking China's dick? You dumb ass, I can make more money hacking clueless banks than you pay me here. I thought maybe there was something good in the corporate cesspool. Man, you guys have let me down."_

_The man behind the desk looked stunned. "There will be no more talk of illegal activity in my office."_

_"'Cause the NSA is on the line, you mean. How much of your soul did you sell for this shit?" He laughed and shook his head. "Let's get this straight. You're actually upset about me tapping the_ evaporation _off these big companies while you prostitute yourselves to a dictatorship? Keeping information from its own people? Allowing our government to spy on its own citizens? Okay, this place is actually_ seriously _evil. God, I didn't see it. I didn't want to see it. I mean, what's left? I can be a legal criminal here or a black hat out there? This whole tech industry is in deep with the devil." He threw a chair across the room. "Fuck you! And fuck the slave masters. The entire system's corrupt."_

_The bald man stood behind his desk and pointed to the door of his office. "Get out of here. You're fired! No, as of today, I can promise you, you're finished in this industry."_

_The youth laughed again. "You fucking moron. I'm just getting started."_
NOVEMBER 2
45

# Washington Burns

Sara Houston stared through the window of the helicopter at Washington, D.C. The familiar landmarks were gone. The bejeweled arteries of transportation dark, the lights extinguished by a city-wide blackout. Along with the loss of the grid, the monuments vanished as the spotlights winked out—the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the pillar of the Washington Monument. Gone.

But there was light—orange, glowing in a primitive anger rising from the ground. _Fires_.

The pilot's voice rang in her headphones.

"I'm going to put you down as close to 1600 as I can. I'm broadcasting on all frequencies—if anyone is listening we've got the codes to prove we're friendlies."

"Maybe they're shooting first and asking for ID later," mumbled Lopez beside her, his words barely discernible in the thunder of the blades above them.

"Might be," said the former Blackhawk pilot. "But the rest of the city is chaos. The food riots from the lockdown last week exploded earlier tonight when the power cut. It's like something out of a zombie flick. You'll never make it through the streets."

Houston shouted over the noise, "The President is still there? Are we sure?"

"As of twenty ago, yes. They've had a marine contingent keeping the mobs at bay."

"Why hasn't she been evac'ed?" asked Lopez.

"Got me. Word was filtering through that they were going to. They were flying missions in. Marine One should have choppered her out, but something happened."

Lopez looked at Houston and mouthed, "The Worm." She nodded staring back down to the patches of red and orange flickering below.

The pilot continued. "But I don't know why they haven't been able to get a military mission in there. Someone must be running interference."

Houston gasped, pointing vigorously below. "Maybe those?"

Lopez and the pilot glanced downward. Over the dark city, underneath and in front of them, structured like a migrating flock, small objects reflecting the moonlight sped along their vector. The outlines of the White House could be made out, approaching quickly, the building still illuminated by emergency power. The objects raced straight for it.

"Look!" cried Lopez. "The ones in the back—they're carrying people."

"Drones," said Houston. "They're dropping in a hit squad. Can you outrun them?"

The pilot shook his head. "We're too close. This old shit heap you forced me to fly can't compete with the new birds. It's too slow."

"Gun it!" she yelled, releasing her safety harness and grabbing a machine gun from the back. "Just gun it. Bring us into firing range."

The pilot accelerated sickeningly. Houston was nearly thrown against the back of the cabin. Lopez leapt up and steadied her, pulling her forward beside him near the side door. They mounted one of the weapons on a makeshift turret, Lopez slinging the other weapon against him.

The helicopter darted forward, closing the gap between it and the flock of drones. They approached the back rows, human forms dangling from the larger machines, a strike team of nearly ten black shapes descending with the flock toward the growing form of the President's house.

Houston slung the door open. "Keep it steady!"

They fired. At their distance accuracy was poor, but they compensated with a full spray of bullets. Houston worked the larger, mounted gun, the ordnance dramatically blowing apart machines and men. Between them, they managed to take down more than half the team before the killers realized their peril. The rest dove straight to the ground and out of range.

The remaining drones ignored the helicopter and accelerated downward. Houston and Lopez fired maniacally at them, but only managed to down a handful more. The remaining plunged like kamikazes toward the White House.

"Aerial strike!" said the pilot.

Around the property, explosions erupted. The fireballs lit the drone's targets—military trucks, fortified gunners, the power generators. The building was plunged into total darkness.

"Setting you two down!" came the pilot's frantic words.

The chopper dropped like a brick, the lurch in their stomachs only matched by the strength of the crush to the ceiling. They held on for dear life. The aircraft came to a bone-shaking stop as the landing skid struck the grass on the front lawn, hopped, and slammed down again.

"Go!"

They leapt out of the helicopter and crouched, automatic weapons at the ready. The chopper climbed quickly to an altitude the pilot hoped would be safe from the madness below, prepared to return and retrieve them once Houston and Lopez had located the President.

They'd taken no friendly fire on landing, and it was quickly obvious why. Flames raged around them and smoke filled the air. The initial wave of explosive drones had more than neutralized the military defenses, leaving no one to guard the nation's First House.

Lopez pointed to the blasted remains of the fence in front of the building. Bodies of rioters were strewn everywhere. It was unclear whether they had been killed by the deceased marines or by the blast that had torn the barrier down. He screamed over the cacophony around them: "The assassins landed back there! They'll be coming through the front gate."

Houston nodded, motioning for him to follow. They sprinted forward, and she made a beeline for the blasted remains of a military barricade. Soldiers and their remains littered the makeshift rampart. Houston heaved one off a mounted machine gun, pointing the weapon toward the street.

"They wanted shock and awe," she said, looking around. "They got it, but we punched a hole in their plan. We can stop them."

Lopez crouched beside her and removed pieces of a weapon from a backpack. He quickly assembled a rifle and attached a night-vision scope. Placing it on the cement barricade in front of him, he aimed through it.

"They're here!" he said. "Four. No, five! I can get several before they react."

"Wait!" said Houston scanning around them. "Let them get through the fence."

"That's too close, Sara!" he said. "Less than a hundred feet. Anything could happen!"

"But if some rabbit and come at us from other directions, we might be sitting ducks hunting for York. Draw them in," she said, pulling out two grenades. "Pick off as many as you can. The others will hunker down for a few seconds before making a run for shelter."

He nodded. "Throw deep, girl."

They didn't have to wait long. In the dancing light of the flames, Houston was soon able to spot the shadows approaching. They were moving swiftly, in a tight formation, cautious yet still seemingly confident of the outcome. _Overconfident_.

Lopez squeezed the trigger. One of the five arched backward, paused a second frozen, then tipped like a bowling pin to the ground. Before he'd hit the asphalt the man beside him took a shot to the head as well.

The others dropped quickly to the ground. Houston hurled one grenade after another at their location. Her motion drew the attention of the attackers, but she continued to throw, even as shots whizzed by. She'd launched four grenades in quick succession when Lopez tackled her before she could remove more. As they fell, the explosions began.

"Dammit, Francisco!" she screamed over the series of detonations.

He ignored her and aimed the rifle again, staring through the scope. "All five down, you crazy fool!" he said, removing the weapon from the barricade and planting the butt on the ground beside him. He sighed. "What a mess."

She smiled and grabbed him roughly by the cassock. "No more foreplay. Need to find POTUS."

They turned to the entrance, preparing to run into the damaged building. A rapid fluttering sound whipped over their heads and two shadows dropped to the ground in front of them, catching them unprepared. They stared into gun barrels.

"Sara, down!"

Automatic fire erupted as they dove for cover. Houston felt two rounds slam into her stomach, the flak jacket absorbing the most dangerous energies. She rolled desperately away and then sprang to her feet, leveling her weapon. She expected to die.

A pair of women stood in front of them, the bodies of the assassins at their feet, smoke trailing upward from their weapons. One was a female Marine, bloodied, and with a fire burning in her eyes. Houston moved her finger off the trigger and raised her gun skyward. She stared at the other figure, an older woman in a dark suit, short gray hair in disarray, a gun in her hands.

"Well, I'll be goddamned."

It was the president.
46

# Madam President

"Madam President," said Houston as she stood, grass stains and soot plastering her face. "You look like you know your way around a war zone."

Elaine York scowled and handed the weapon to the marine. " _Ms._ , please. I don't run a brothel. Your friend's hurt."

Houston's eyes darted across to Lopez. He sat on the ground holding his left arm. "Shit!" She dashed over to him.

"It's okay, Sara," he said, seeing her wild eyes. "Just a graze. Not even my gun arm." Blood soaked his shoulder and dripped through the cuff of his sleeve.

"Dammit, Francisco, you're too much a linebacker to dodge!" Houston ripped open the fabric of the cassock and revealed an ugly laceration across his upper arm. "Graze or not, you're going to bleed out if we don't close this up."

"Get York out," said Lopez, glancing up as the president stood over him. "Call the pilot. We'll deal with it after."

A pained look in her eye, Houston pulled out a handheld radio. It cracked with static. "Extraction 1. Target is acquired. Retrieve immediately. There are wounded."

There was a short silence, then: "Roger that. On your position. On the ground in half a minute."

Houston thrust the handheld to the president who took it with stern eyes. Pulling the dark mask off her head, she ripped it lengthwise and wrapped it into a tight mass, pressing it to Lopez's shoulder wound.

The marine beside the President looked grimly over the field of battle. "Let's hope to God that's the last of those fucking deathbots."

The deep throb of the helicopter blades grew quickly. Lopez rose as the craft hovered above the building, kicking up debris and nearly blinding them. It set down on the lawn fifty feet from their position. The pilot waved them over frantically.

They ran. There were no more surprise landings. No shots fired or bombs detonated. As Houston slammed the door, the four of them still moving to take seats, the bird rocketed up, the sound of the rushing air muted as the latches sealed. She reached over and pulled a first aid kit from underneath the seat. Within seconds it was open and she was dressing Lopez's wound.

"I was going to offer some help," said the marine, eyeing her carefully. "I'm certified as a medic. But it looks like you know what you're doing."

Houston didn't take her attention from Lopez, who grimaced unmoving as she worked the torn flesh. "We've had some experience."

The President spoke. "Okay, so who the hell are you people? I don't usually jump into moving aircraft with just any pair of armed personnel, but today has been a bit unusual."

Houston continued working on Lopez's shoulder. "The pilot will drop you off at Mount Weather. Plans were likely for NAOC or something, but given the buzzing drone armies, I think feet on the ground is the place to be."

The President furrowed her brow. "You aren't coming? What's going on here? Who are you?"

Houston paused a moment and turned her head toward York, expression strained. "We don't exist, Madam—Ms.—President."

"Let's not get cheeky, darling. Out with it. There are no government ciphers to me."

"We aren't government. We don't exist. Friends called us in. But we're out before the light of day." Houston returned to treating the bullet wound, hands covered in Lopez's blood.

York eyed her silently for several seconds. "Friends called you in, huh?" She shook her head. "Damn prescient friends you have and I'm not going to second guess them. Not after what just happened. I assume you're legit or I'd be dead by now."

Houston chuckled. "I wouldn't go so far as to say we're legit."

Lopez opened his eyes and fought to smile. "I'm Gabriel," he hissed between clenched teeth. He twitched his head at Houston. "This is Mary."

York nodded. "Praise the Lord. Whoever you really are, I'm pleased to meet you." She shuddered. "I thought we were goners down there. I hope to be able to thank you properly someday. Consider me very intrigued."

Houston spoke flatly. "Who else is left?"

York closed her eyes and sighed, the fatigue apparent on her face. "A few staff. I hope to God they retreat to the bunker. We were cut off from escape by the explosions. Caved in a good part of the White House. Killed most of the soldiers. Nearly killed us." She looked to the bruised and bloodied face of the marine. "We're barely standing up again and it's gunfire, more explosions, your helicopter in the mix. I thought you were the bad guys until the drones dropped off the last two." She looked at Lopez. "Saved your life right before we mowed them down. Anyway, I judged you were friendlies. The Vatican look might have helped."

"I meant, who's left in the government?"

York's face hardened. "It's not good. Confirmed killed are the VP and the most of the leaders of Congress. The cabinet is MIA." She opened her eyes and stared out at the receding flames below. "Damn. Look at her burn. Should take a photo for my presidential library." The others stared at her in silence. "Meanwhile, Mount Weather makes a lot of sense. It's close enough, secured like all hell, puts me in contact with all the governmental emergency systems. Better than airborne right now. Speaking of which, how safe are we?"

The helicopter began to descend. Houston finished taping off Lopez's shoulder and slumped next to him on the chair, drenched in sweat.

"We're not Air Force One, Ms. President," said Houston. "Just another helicopter flying around on doomsday. Who's to care?"

Lopez steeled himself and sat up as the craft neared the ground. "This is our drop off, Ms. York," he said with difficulty. "The pilot is in our circle of _friends_. He'll get you to the emergency operations center, assuming the little flying demons don't pick you off."

"Reassuring," muttered York.

Lopez smiled. "Oh ye of little faith."

The helicopter touched down and the pilot called out to them. Houston opened the door and prepared to jump. York grabbed her arm.

"Good luck," said the president, holding Houston's eyes in an intense stare.

She returned the gaze. "We're all going to need a lot of that."
47

# Evac

They watched the helicopter disappear into the evening sky. Tall grasses spread over the remains of an abandoned farm and a dilapidated barn rose behind them, the property encircled with trees.

"Let's get moving, Francisco."

He nodded and they turned toward the barn, moving as quickly as the former priest's fatiguing body would allow. There wasn't a door to secure the building, the remains having fallen off and laying rotted to the side. Much of the ceiling had collapsed as well. The rank smell of rotting wood was overpowering.

In the center of the barn was a jeep, a canvas thrown over the vehicle hastily, barely covering the sides. Houston walked up to the driver's side and yanked it off, tossing the fabric behind the truck. She helped Lopez remove his backpack and stripped his body armor.

"Don't worry about it," she said as he began to protest. "We should be done with commando activity for the night. You need to conserve energy."

He acquiesced and entered the jeep, stowing the gear in the back. Keys were sitting in the ignition. "Savas has some connections," said Lopez, staring ahead of them as Houston started the vehicle.

"I don't think anyone is keeping score on favors right now," said Houston, gunning the engine and racing out of the structure.

She felt conspicuous with the lights on, the clandestine and dangerous mission still locking her mind into a paranoid state. But it was too dark to drive without them, too dangerous on this poorly kept country road to risk ending their efforts for something so irrational. The jeep leapt and shuddered over holes and mounds in the dirt road. With each impact, Lopez gasped, his face a mask of pain.

Near the rusted gate to the field, Houston pulled the jeep to a stop. She removed a mobile phone from her shirt pocket and switched it on.

"No signal," she said.

"Location bad?"

"No, this area was supposed to be blanketed, remember?"

"So the towers are dark. What's even functioning, do you think?"

She shook her head. "Not much. Washington's completely dark." She released the belt and turned to the back, digging through one of the packs. She spun back in her seat holding a large handheld device. "At least we have this. Unless the damn worm fried the satellites, it should work."

She switched on the device and let it power up. Within a minute she had punched in a call and was waiting for a response. A low click sounded as she put it on external speaker.

Savas' voice burst into the crisp, Virginia air. "Gabriel? Where the hell are you two? What happened? It looks like an invasion in DC!"

"Mary here, John. Gabriel's close, nursing a blasted shoulder."

"Jesus! The president?"

"POTUS is secured. En route to the agreed upon location. She's shook up, but okay. The lady can take care of herself."

"You should see the footage on the city."

"We were _there_ , John. It's worse. Look, I'm heading to the landing strip. We need immediate evac for Gabriel. I'm not going to wander into a local hospital, I hope you'll understand. He needs stitches. Maybe some blood."

"Roger that. We'll get you two back here, however we can. It'll be a bitch, though. You think the lockdown was serious before? Right now it's not clear to anyone who's running the damn country. The Guard is not ready for this. Folks are going to get killed."

Lopez motioned to Houston for the phone and grabbed it with his good hand.

"John, Gabriel here. Look, we need to regroup. This is moving too fast. You need to circle the wagons and get that crazy idea of yours in motion. Something. _Anything_. I don't think there's much time left."

"Agreed. Damn! We need to get her out of here to a different location, one where they'll feel confident to make a move. FBI headquarters is likely not going to encourage them. We're scouting some places, but it's hard to imagine how to get around the way things are."

Houston took the phone back.

"Look, John. We'll figure that out soon enough. I'm closing this call and beelining to the strip. Please tell me something is waiting for us there and it has airfoils."

"Fueled and ready. Go. There's no way to say it right, but thanks to both of you. And I'm sorry. The worst is still coming."

The line went silent. Houston flung the device into the bag behind her, released the brake, and hammered the accelerator. The jeep jumped forward onto the main road, tires screaming as Houston veered sharply right. Within a minute the vehicle was lost from view, red tail lights winking like mad eyes in the dark, leaving the pastoral hills of Virginia to cricket song and the glow of distant fires.
48

# Irreconcilable Differences

_A morning glow seeped through the filthy window and spilled onto two naked forms entwined on a bed. The woman lay with her head on the chest of the man, short-cropped hair like a sea-urchin next to his long, black strands. Both rested unmoving, eyes half-lidded. The man spoke._

_"You know, Poison, it's finally hit me."_

_The woman frowned, her brow creasing, and sat upright in the bed, small breasts decorating the sculpted ribs of a thin body. She moved her hand down the man's torso._

_"What's hitting you?"_

_The man grabbed her hand and sat up as well._

_"I'm serious."_

_"Yeah, that's obvious." She turned away, to stare out the window._

_"I finally realized something about us." Poison didn't say anything, just watched the growing light. "You want to know what that is?"_

_"Fuck you, Fawkes," she said rising from the bed and wrapping a tattered robe around her. "No games."_

_"Not a game." His eyes were intense. Almost wild. "I finally realized that something incredible has happened. Something I never, ever expected. Something that should be impossible for me. Really, man, if you knew. Should just be impossible now."_

_"What, dammit?"_

_"I realize that sometime over the last month I've fucking fallen in love with you."_

_Her face froze and then a smile crept outward, shyly._

_"Yeah?"_

_"Yeah. I mean, it's happened once before. But I thought that was it, never again. I'm pretty much all fucked to hell and back, you know. Emotionally retarded and all that. Psych-ward material. But whatever. I'm fucking nuts about you. Suddenly, I don't care anymore about all that shit, all these damn plans our stupid groups have been putting together. I don't care. Right now, I realized all I want to do is just take off with you. Disappear. Live in some trailer somewhere and forget the goddamned world."_

_She moved toward him with her hand extended, but he stood and turned away from her, slipping tight underpants on, grabbing a t-shirt from the floor._

_"It came into focus and explained so much. Why I couldn't concentrate. Why I was losing motivation."_

_Her hand dropped to the side, her smile fading._

_"And then I realized what I had to do."_

_He turned toward her, the shirt pulled down over his thin frame, yanking on a pair of jeans._

_"So what do you have to do?"_

_He sighed, snapping his fly closed. "It's over, Poison. I'm leaving and not coming back. It's been fun." He held her eyes._

_"I don't understand. Her tone rose, the pitch quavering, her eyes large. "Why?"_

_"Don't make it any harder. For either of us. Just let it hurt and die." He threw things into a duffle bag. "This is the hardest thing I've ever done."_

_"Then why are you doing it?" she shouted, tears in her eyes._

_"Because it is so hard! Because I know! I know that all our feelings, this love and joy and soaring hope and wonder is all a lie!" He looked at her as some despised thing. "Bubbling broth of chemicals in our minds that will lead us astray. That will end in hurt." He zipped the bag and walked to the door as she stood rooted, turning her head stiffly to follow his motions. "Worse. It'll wreck my plans, erase my desire to achieve my goals, to impact a lasting change. And why? For_ love _. For limbic lies. I will destroy everything I've worked so hard on, only to lie dazed and happy with you under some tree somewhere. Justice demands so much more."_

_"Justice?" her face was a mask of confusion._

_"It will not be stopped. Not even by you, Poison. I will go, our love will die, and I can finish what I started. I'm sorry for the pain. But it's just withdrawal. Just your brain missing its biochemical fix. It'll be over soon."_

_With that he stormed out of the room, leaving Poison to sit on the bedside, her eyes red and wet, a snarl on her lips._
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**Franklin Joseph Miller**

CBD: So then, these fugitives were sent to rescue the nation's president?

MR. MILLER: Which they did. Poke any holes in your dumbfuck theory?

* * *

CBD: And what were you doing during these hours of chaos in Washington?

MR. MILLER: If only it was just Washington! You seem to be forgetting the hand basket Europe went to hell in.

* * *

CBD: Yes, the nuclear plants.

MR. MILLER: You want chaos? There you go! Chinese party leaders blasted, too. When the TV news wasn't streaming video of DC on fire, it was showing ten different reactors smoldering in France. All from aerial reconnaissance photographs, of course, because it was a radioactive clusterfuck on the ground. Did you know that the Germans were nearly nuclear free?

* * *

CBD: I'm sorry, I don't see the relevance of—

MR. MILLER: They had made it a fucking law that they'd end nuclear power in Germany by 2020 or something. You know those Krauts, damned if they didn't figure out how to do it! Nuclear free. Fossil fuel free. Sustainable energy. In five years they'd be there. No worries for meltdowns. Unless, of course, some psychopath flies a bunch of drones into your neighboring country's reactors, blowing that shit into the atmosphere. Ain't nuclear free no more.

* * *

CBD: Mr. Miller, let's get back to—

MR. MILLER: So, when you say 'what were you doing?', try to remember that, first of all we were all trying to stay sane. Stay focused. On task. Every single one of us was struggling not to lose his shit as the world literally burned right in front of our eyes.

* * *

CBD: Yes, as I said, it was chaotic.

MR. MILLER: And in our own backyard. The food riots were spreading. No deliveries into or out of the city for days. Even if the worm hadn't FUBARed the distribution economy, the lockdown of the city made things ten thousand times slower. People were hungry. What's that saying, even a good man is nine meals away from murder? It was getting scary just to go outside. Everyone was panicking about a blackout like in DC. But we didn't have time for that shit. John's plan. That's what was on our minds. We spent sleepless nights setting it up. Filming interrogation scenes worthy of a goddamned Oscar. Feeding it out through Angel's digital feints.

* * *

CBD: I thought her system had been sabotaged by Anonymous.

MR. MILLER: Yeah, that set us back. She quarantined the computers from the internet and wiped them to make sure all traces of the worm were gone.

* * *

CBD: How?

MR. MILLER: I don't know. She's the code-head. I just shoot stuff.

* * *

CBD: Her system was brought back online?

MR. MILLER: A part of it. Enough to hook back up to the net. By then John had gotten some of the code for the firewall from NSA, and Angel fortified our position, whatever that means. She had more space now to breathe, but we didn't seem to have much time.

* * *

CBD: These feints?

MR. MILLER: Right. So, she put the interrogation videos on some unsecured boxes, other shit. To piss Fawkes off. The idea was to find a location offsite that looked vulnerable, move the girl there, leak that we moved the girl there, then wait with the bait for that fuck to show up.

* * *

CBD: Sounds like a good plan.

MR. MILLER: Yeah, you try to find a way to net that ghost in a few days while everything went to shit. But it _was_ a good plan. The only problem was that Fawkes had his own plans. And we hadn't anticipated them.
NOVEMBER 3
49

# Baiting the Trap

The elevator opened and Savas saw the broad form of Frank Miller filling the space between the doors. The ex-marine's suit bulged on each side and his shirt strained from the pressure of body armor underneath.

"Suiting up for a rough game, Frank?"

"Time to move," Miller said.

Savas stood beside Cohen and the woman who called herself Poison. No one moved for a moment, the air charged with the potential of what was to come. They were crossing a threshold, setting events into motion that could not be recalled.

"FEDs first," said Poison, grasping a USB disk hanging around her neck like a talisman.

Savas followed as Cohen limped into the car and turned around, watching the hacker intently. Poison continued to face them as Miller pressed a button to hold the doors open.

"It has to be done," said Cohen. "You know that."

Poison nodded, looking sideways around the room as if for an escape. "Yeah, but when it comes to it, leading the prick to the net seems low even for slamming your ex." She looked at them harshly. "Try not to hurt him."

With that she walked into the elevator and turned her back on them as the door closed. Savas felt it better to leave her last request unanswered.

"Gabriel and Mary?" he whispered to Cohen.

"On their way. He's okay, patched up."

"Once we're outbound, I'd like to talk to them."

Cohen nodded. Miller was silent, and the remaining ride to the basement garage was eerily quiet.

The doors separated to reveal an underground parking lot—gray walls, flickering fluorescents, and row upon row of vehicles blurring into monotony. Standing out dramatically from that background was a black FBI van. It was built for undercover work, devoid of any insignia or lettering, the communications equipment inside visible through the open side door. Only the telltale bulge of the black antenna by the back doors would announce an investigative presence to the trained eye.

Alongside the van was a row of four uniformed SWAT officers. They were fitted in black uniforms and external body armor with weapons at their sides. Poison looked them up and down with a scowl.

"I'm part of the matrix now," she said bitterly. "Is this all you could get?"

"You think Fawkes will throw worse at us?" asked Miller.

"I don't know what he might do anymore," she said. "I hope these Storm Troopers know what the fuck they're doing. He won't mind wasting any of them."

Cohen handed Savas her crutches and faced Poison, her brown hair like a shawl offsetting the angry fire in her eyes. Cohen startled the hacker by reaching up to her shirt collar and straightening it.

"Look, Ms. Ivy— _Poison_ —whatever you want to imagine yourself to be _in the matrix_. A little appreciation for putting ourselves in harm's way would do you well. Appreciation for dedication, duty, public good and all that. Inside the suits are human beings, just like you. Try to remember that."

Poison stepped back from the intensity in Cohen's glare, but the agent had turned away. Savas tried to rescue the moment.

"We were lucky to find anyone. Fawkes has pressed all the panic buttons. Washington's on fire and New York might be next. We have what we have. Most importantly, we have you. I just hope Fawkes wants you badly enough to do something stupid."

Miller motioned to the SWAT personnel. "Poison will go in the van with the team. There shouldn't be any issues along the way, but if there are, they'll need a small army to get to her out."

"Assuming they want me alive," she said.

"That's the basis of the entire plan," said Cohen. "Otherwise, he'll just drop a drone on you when he gets your position."

Poison looked terrified.

Miller continued. "The rest of us will follow in the car. I've put through all the channels we can for clearance, without revealing exactly what we're doing of course. Hopefully we'll make it through the checkpoints without issues. There are a lot of ways to get to Brooklyn. If we're held up at one bridge or tunnel, we'll try another. Hopefully we won't waste too much time."

Savas nodded. "What this means, of course, is that we're on our own. No backup. This entire operation would never fly with the brass if they knew what we were trying. It's too unorthodox, too poorly planned, too risky."

Poison laughed. "You're giving me a whole lot of confidence."

Miller scowled. "You should worry about the warehouse. You'll be dug in with no place to go there. Like I said, I don't anticipate any issues in transit today. Fawkes doesn't know what we're up to, he won't know where you are without his GPS device. Angel will leak the location once we're ready."

"Unless he knows a lot more than you think he does," said Poison.

Tires screeched. The group turned toward the sound. From the exit ramp two white vans rushed recklessly into their level and came screaming to a halt. Savas cried out as the doors of the vans swung open and dark shadows leapt out, weapons drawn. Cohen grabbed onto Poison and fell with her to the ground behind a car as the FBI SWAT team faced the oncoming figures.

Miller drew his gun and concealed himself behind the back of the van. Savas rushed forward beside him, pulling out his Glock and crouching. The SWAT team remained exposed, flanking their right.

In the sudden chaos, the sounds of automatic gunfire echoed madly through the underground chamber.
50

# Firefight

The haphazard positioning of the participants ensured that the firefight would be quick. The SWAT team was exposed and took the brunt of the initial offensive, unable to find cover. They responded by advancing into the fray and opening fire. Despite their protective gear and powerful weapons, they were outnumbered, and the attackers cut them down mercilessly.

But not without cost. Savas had kept the van between him and the assailants. He swung his gun arm into the line of fire just as the last SWAT man fell in front of them. Multiple bodies of their attackers lay on the asphalt as well, shell casings littering the ground beside him and in front of the vans. Gunshots exploded above his head as Miller fired, and Savas saw a shape fall as it ran, a body striking the concrete only feet from the shelter of parked cars.

His peripheral vision caught other forms dashing for cover on his left and right. A magazine dropped to the ground beside him as Miller reloaded, sliding down the side of the van.

"How many?" Savas asked.

"Four or five more," Miller panted. "They're spread across."

Savas spotted movement behind a blue pickup. He blasted its windshield for effect more than any hope to strike a target.

"Right idea," Miller said. "But it won't stop them for long. They've got the firepower on us. And still the numbers. How the hell did they know?"

Savas shook his head. "No time for that. Take point."

Miller swung into position and fired several shots. He ducked back and a barrage of gunfire chased him, blowing out the tires on the far side of the van, the windows exploding. Glass rained down on them.

"So much for an escape," Savas muttered.

He had turned back toward Cohen. She was propped on one knee and the car, poised with a pistol, head barely over the hood. Poison crawled behind the Crown Vic, terrified. Savas wondered if she could be the target. Was Fawkes there to terminate her?

Harsh words disabused him of the notion.

"Send the girl!" a man's voice cried. "All we want is the girl!"

Savas saw Cohen shake her head vigorously in the negative. Miller sighed.

"We _might_ bring them down, John," he said, "but not before we're bloodied up good."

"Any ideas?"

"If I had a few minutes, maybe."

Their assailants wouldn't give them thirty seconds.

"We've got one of your men!" came the voice. "He's wounded but not dead. Send the girl or we waste him!"

There was a scream and Savas thought he heard the word "name". A rattled voice could barely be heard.

"Agent Longwell. Special Weapons and Tactics."

The voice was gasped, in pain, heavy breaths between the words.

Savas dropped to the ground and slightly forward. For a moment he was able to see ahead, the presence of an armed intruder pointing a gun at the slumping body of a SWAT officer, a trail of blood across the floor from where he'd been dragged. He rolled back behind the van just as shots ripped open the asphalt where he'd been. "Hurt bad but still alive," he said to Miller. " _Damn!_ "

"You got ten seconds!"

"John, whatever you do, don't negotiate with these killers!" Miller looked furious.

Savas looked back. Cohen had dropped her head, defeated. He had a second to make a decision weighing a man's life and a possible stop to a world terrorist event. He closed his eyes.

"Frank, take my gun and—"

"I'm coming!"

He opened his eyes and saw Poison standing up behind Cohen. The hacker moved her hands upward and danced around Cohen's clumsy attempt to grab her, trotting forward awkwardly with arms raised.

"Anyone else move and this pig is dead!" cried the voice.

Savas cursed. The girl had taken things into her own hands. They hadn't killed her, which ruled her out as a target. It looked like Fawkes had sent a retrieval team to get her out of FBI custody, that he wanted her alive and was willing to invest significant resources into saving her. _Dammit!_ The plan would have worked!

Poison was now just in front of the van, walking slowly, eyes wide and face frozen. She was beyond the team's reach now, any actions they might take could be countered devastatingly.

"They've got her," Savas said to Miller, hand clenched into a fist.

Miller nodded. "She made the call. Damage control, John. We need to create a distraction."

"A distraction?" he asked, the truth dawning on him.

"To get Rebecca out," said Miller grimly. "No way we all walk. Not after those videos. Not after this bloodbath. We need to draw fire and get her the hell out of here. Somebody has to walk away and try to get assets on that van."

Savas nodded, the implications hitting him like a sledgehammer. "Maybe we can take enough of them down, damage the van. Trap them, slow them down."

"Good a plan as any," shrugged Miller.

"But she can barely walk."

Savas looked back toward Cohen. Her attention was focused on him. He motioned with his eyes to the stairwell, a bright EXIT sign over the door. She followed his gaze and nodded, grabbing the crutches beside her.

They heard a scream and thump. Savas assumed it was Poison being thrown into the van. They had only seconds now.

"Go!" he hissed to Miller, and the two spun toward the attackers, weapons drawn.

They opened fire.
51

# Bugged

Weapons discharge filled the reverberant chamber. It was several seconds before Savas could fully process what was happening. He'd locked on the shapes in front of the white van, the form of Poison glimpsed momentarily within as he took aim. From both sides figures were rushing toward the van in a blur of motion.

But something was wrong. The mass of figures was too large, and the flow of bodies counter to what would be expected of their attackers. Shapes were moving down from the access ramp, black fabric fluttering as they dashed.

They were firing on Fawkes' team.

"Friendlies!" screamed Miller beside him, his combat vision parsing the chaos more quickly than anyone.

_Lopez and Houston_. Savas didn't have time to consider how they had arrived and found their way to the conflict. That would come later.

"Sideways, John," Miller yelled. "Watch the cross-fire!"

They darted away from the center. The team sent to snatch Poison was caught between hailstorms of bullets. Lopez and Houston had drawn their attention, wounding several, just as Savas and Miller opened fire. In less than a minute, the firearms were silent. Shell casings tinkled to a stop on the hard surface below. The charred reek of gunpowder burned in their nostrils.

A mass of bodies was scattered around the white vans. Two of the forms jerked helplessly, one screaming in agony. The rest were silent and still. It was over.

"Poison!" cried Cohen. She hobbled on her crutches straight to the van.

Miller and Savas moved cautiously, training their weapons on the bodies below them while Cohen disappeared inside the transport. Lopez and Houston rounded the right side of the vehicle, the former priest's left arm in a sling, his right clutching a submachine gun. Houston holstered a large Browning.

"Fuck, Savas!" she said, out of breath. "This was supposed to be where we recuperated!"

He frowned at them. "Thanks for saving our asses. Now get topside and check that we aren't going to get another surprise. Call Angel when you get back and let's try to figure this out."

"Francisco can wait it out here," she said. "Doc isn't going to be happy with his recent exertions." She sprinted away and up the ramp, weapon drawn again.

Lopez looked toward the fallen men around them. "I'll see what's left here. Go check on our bait."

Savas nodded and ducked into the vehicle. Inside, Poison cowered at the far end, shaking, wedged into a corner by the back doors with her legs pulled up and her arms around them. Cohen crouched next to her, one hand resting on the hacker's arm.

"Poison," Cohen said. There was no response, just a wide-eyed and distant look on her face. "Tabitha." She turned to Cohen, still not speaking, and Cohen continued gently. "It's over. We need to get you out of here, now, in case more are on the way."

"He knew," Poison whispered, clutching her necklace. She grabbed Cohen's vest. "How did he know?"

Cohen shook her head. "I don't know, but we need to move."

"We aren't safe anywhere! He'll know. He'll follow." Her eyes were wild. "How could he know?"

Savas' baritone rumbled from the front of the van. "Maybe I can shed some light on it." He spun from the front seat to the pair in the back, holding up a smartphone. "Look. GPS app."

He held the device toward them. On the screen a bright sphere blinked on their position.

"You're bugged, Poison," Savas said grimly.

"Bugged?" Poison looked perplexed. Then a light flared in her eyes. She jerked her necklace hard enough to break the clasp, leaving two ribbons dangling from her hand. Inside her palm was the USB stick.

"The drive?" asked Savas.

She laughed bitterly. "My first hack. Backed up. Like a trophy for luck. He knew. The prick! He knew. He must have switched it with a tracking device. _Jesus!_ "

With a wild motion, she flung herself through the van, forcing her way past Savas and outside. The two agents followed her out and watched her fling the device to the ground. She picked up one of the assault rifles beside a dead man and aimed the butt of the gun toward the USB stick.

Cohen extended one of her crutches and stopped her. "We want him to know where we are, remember?"

"You want another bloodbath?" Poison said, indicating the bodies at their feet. "He'll come again. Can't you see that?"

"No," Cohen said. "We'll shield it, jam it until we arrive at the warehouse."

Poison nodded. "Yeah. All right." Her breathing slowed. Her eyes flashed downward. "I still want to smash the damn thing."

The edges of Cohen's mouth twitched upward. "I'm sure you do."

Cohen reached down awkwardly and scooped the stick from the ground, her face momentarily lost in a cascade of brown hair. Houston came jogging around the two vans.

"All clear," she panted. "The guards at the front are dead and the gate mechanism's smashed to hell and back. I used the phone there to call for some backup. This building must be ghosted. There hasn't been any response!"

Savas nodded. "We're spread so thin across the city that we're losing function."

"I also got Angel on the phone. She says she's got some interesting news."

Savas turned his head. "What news?"

Houston shrugged. "Something about immune code or something for the virus? I have no idea. I turned the conversation to our little problem down here. She'll get some reinforcements to us soon. "

"No need for a medkit, though," said Lopez, stepping back into their circle. There was blood on his hands. "Too much iron, too many holes. They're all dead. Your men and those from Fawkes. The last just bled out."

They all turned to look out over the bodies scattered around them. Savas grimaced at the sight of the downed FBI agents, and the pools of blood clotting underneath them.

"This bastard is building one hell of a body count."

Cohen held up the USB stick. "Yeah, and he still thinks he holds all the cards. But not this one. Not anymore. We make it go dark, move to the location, and set up. Then we switch it back on. After all this, is there any doubt?"

Houston smiled. "Moth to the flame."
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

MR. SAVAS: Everything was happening at once. We worked to clear the parking level. There wasn't much point in turning it into a crime scene. The whole planet already was one. The bodies were moved, some of the mess fire-hosed away. Found another van, but that was it for a SWAT presence. We were on our own.

* * *

CBD: Who then headed to the warehouse?

MR. SAVAS: Me, agents Cohen and Miller. Lopez and Houston. Finally, the woman. Poison.

* * *

CBD: The convicted hacker?

MR. SAVAS: That's the one. Agents Rideout and Lightfoote stayed behind to handle the digital angle of this.

* * *

CBD: How did you prevent Fawkes from tracking you?

MR. SAVAS: Simple. We bagged the stick in a shielding case—no signal in or out. For good measure we brought onboard a jammer. We checked it carefully. It was gagged. We sent out three vans in different directions in case any of his drones were watching. Janitors drove them around the city for a while. Not sure what was the key element, but it worked. We weren't followed.

* * *

CBD: And you know that because?

MR. SAVAS: We're still alive.

* * *

CBD: So it was during this time that agent Lightfoote designed the prototype code that infected the entire internet?

MR. SAVAS: Her immune cells. Yes.

* * *

CBD: What does that mean?

MR. SAVAS: Go ask a biologist. I don't know. [INAUDIBLE] All right, look, the idea is simple, at least. Our bodies have immune cells that recognize different bugs and kill them, right? These cells float around inside us waiting for an infection then do their business. The way Angel explained it, she couldn't attack the worm directly. It was too distributed or something. All over the place. A hundred million computers. If you don't get all of them, all the parts, it reinfects and spreads like wildfire again. So, her idea was to mimic the immune system. Design programs that would spread themselves like the worm, copying themselves, hacking into computers. But their purpose wasn't going to be to fuck things up like Fawkes. Her worms were single-minded in going after his worm. She called them immune cells.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Then let me get this straight. Your agent created viral, self-replicating code that would break into computers all around the world, including classified networks, including governmental systems?

MR. SAVAS: It was the only way. Like an infection where you only kill 99% of the bugs with an antibiotic, it can come roaring back. We had to get close to sterilization.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And you gave her permission to release this code?

MR. SAVAS: You bet your ass, I did. I had no idea if it would work. I'm not sure she was confident it could work. But it was sure worth a shot. What was the downside? It fails? Back where we were. We accidentally blow up the internet with her code? Well, that's _where_ we were _already_!

* * *

CBD: Why did she think it could work?

MR. SAVAS: You know, I'm not a programmer or a biologist. She used the worm she had trapped in-house and some other bits of it she had captured across the net, used that code as some sort of matching-recognition system. All of her immune cells, her worms, were randomized with different bits of the code. They would search for matching elements, worm signatures, on any computer her code infected. Match meant two things. Her code would copy itself like crazy and spread the recognition element, amplifying it. It would also erase the worm on that computer, but not before copying the code of _that_ worm for identification elements to spread. The idea was to find new bits of all the different, variable worms around. Over time it should recognize them all and erase them all. Fawkes' worms had to sit around and wait for his signal. It wasn't designed to fight off something like Angel was making. If she did it right, and if we had enough time—if it spread fast enough—we might sterilize enough computers so that whatever final action he was planning would fail.

* * *

CBD: Sterilize. How can the computers be sterilized if they are infected with her code?

MR. SAVAS: Okay, sterile as far as the Anonymous signal was concerned.

* * *

CBD: The Anonymous signal?

MR. SAVAS: Yeah, what we were calling it, the activation Fawkes was going to send to take down civilization.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Sounds very far-fetched.

MR. SAVAS: Does it? You saw what was happening. All the attacks on online systems from finance to manufacturing—did all that not happen? And those were test runs! Used to assess and refine the hammer stroke. It was just a matter of time.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Yet now all that remains is a wrecked computer infrastructure the world is trying to patch together again. And your agent's code is the only thing on every computer! No other malware. Nothing from some imaginary mask-wearing global vigilante named Fawkes. No Anonymous Signal.

MR. SAVAS: So now you're going to condemn her because she made the damned thing work?

* * *

[REDACTED]: She isn't here, Mr. Savas. Which is damning enough. Last seen in the company of the two most wanted fugitives in this nation, murderous terrorists the likes of which we have never seen before. You are the one who has orchestrated every element of this. It is not Angel Lightfoote who is on trial now. But you.

* * *

MR. SAVAS: Unless I tell you where she is, right? If I hand her and her damn file from Fawkes over to you, then you'll cut me some deal and I walk.

* * *

[REDACTED]: You won't be walking, Mr. Savas. Not from this. But there are sentences and there are sentences.

MR. SAVAS: You idiots. If she took the file, it could be copied a million times by now and in a million hands. The horse is out of the barn. Closing the door won't matter now.

* * *

[REDACTED]: One fire at a time, Mr. Savas. One fire at a time.
52

# Revenging Angel

"Well, hi there, Fawkes!"

Angel stared at the computer screen and smiled. Once again buried in the basement of the Javits Federal Building late in the night. Again the mask of Guy Fawkes stared back at her, floating on the screen in front of her.

But this time, the gloating was gone.

"You fucking cunt!"

She laughed. "Don't you swing that way, Fawkes? Or can I call you Guy? I thought you liked cunts. I _know_ you liked Poison's cunt. She says you visited all the time."

"Fuck you!"

"And your pathetic attempt to grab her was as clumsy as your code, which, by the way, my programs are eating through right now. You notice?"

"You think you're safe behind the firewalls of your NSA overlords, but you aren't. I can't reach you right now, but it's just a matter of time before I'm back in and burn your fucking house down."

Angel nodded as she typed. "Not before I hunt down every last one of your worms, you mean. Dissect the motherfuckers. I know you've been keeping score out there. See that tide rising?"

"You're interfering in things you don't understand!"

"Really?" She shook her head. "You going to mansplain the situation to this poor, clueless little cunt?"

"Damn you! You don't know what I know. The power isn't where you think it is. It hasn't been for hundreds of years! I've hacked my way to it."

She put her chin on her hand. "Fawkes, seriously. Is this where you try to tell me how we can rule the galaxy together if I'll just embrace the dark side?"

The masked face in the video stream turned to the side. A scream sounded over the monitors.

Angel clicked her tongue. "You have major anger management issues."

The face was back.

"Every nation, every corporation, every standing army is marching to hidden orders. Events—they're all part of a big game board! Pieces—disposable pieces—moved by the few that really hold the power. We can't change it from within. We can't defeat them on their terms!" The face panted. "But they've made themselves dependent on the modern information system—and they can't control it. For the first time in hundreds of years, they've made a fatal mistake!"

Angel stared silently for a moment. "You're really a mental case, aren't you?"

The scream again. "No! I can show you. Prove it! Your fucking code—it's threatening everything! You have to listen to me!"

"Listen to you go full tin-foil-hat on me as you try to destroy the world? This crap's not even up to the bottom suckers of the worst chat room. If you wanted to make a good first impression, you lost the chance big time when you screwed over my servers, when you brought my dad into this!"

"I will bring your shitty code down!"

She was standing now, palms down on the table. The light of the monitor reflected off her scalp and the metal in her face. "And we still got your girl! She's singing, singing, singing like a fucking bird. Well, really, it's a bit more like screaming. Honestly, so far—it's just screaming. But we know we'll get enough out of her to come after you in the real world."

The mask hovered in the center of the monitor without speaking. Angel could hear his labored breathing. She twisted the knife.

"I can send you a live feed the next time we go at her. But do you really want to be there when we break her? Might fuck you up good, yeah? Watching what we do to her? Every little thing? Believe me, I can imagine how that'd make you feel."

His next words were slurred—hissing. "You're not the only one who can reach out in the real world."

She laughed again. "You hit us with everything you had and I'm back. It's worse for you than before. Really, Fawkes, you were an inspiration to write this code! Thank you for that."

"I will make you hurt for this."

"Oh, Guy," she said dismissively, "I'm not scared of you. And neither is my code. Expect it, fucker."

Lightfoote hit ENTER and sent a video feed through the connection. She watched a mirrored window on her monitor display the content—a young woman strapped to a table, men beating her, blood on her face and pouring from her nose. _Poison_.

She closed the connection and walled Fawkes out with the NSA module. The monitor went dark. She dropped into the seat and leaned back in the chair, disgusted with the lies they were sending him.

"But you made me get dirty, you fuck," she whispered. "Now, come get her."
NOVEMBER 4
53

# Mount Weather

For Elaine York, the "SF" was as comforting as it was alarming.

The acronym-smiths of the bureaucracy had called the Mount Weather retreat the High Point Special Facility, HPSF, but the human beings it was designed for had digested that down to something more manageable. _High_ in the Virginia mountains to be sure, it was _special_ in ways only a self-contained, doomsday hideout could be. Replete with self-sustaining environmental processes for waste and water, military grade rations lining underground storage silos to feed hundreds for weeks to months of isolation—its soldiers, weaponry, and communications systems were rivaled only by NORAD. Prime vacation estate for the nation's leaders when the world went to shit.

And the world was definitely going to shit.

The Colonel— _which one was he?_ She'd lost track in the chaos—droned importantly about the precariousness of their plight.

"Without the logistics software, Madam President, we risk an entire breakdown of the supply chain. Our recommendations are to secure all of the major air, land, and sea routes immediately for governmental use only."

President York stared outside the reinforced glass window at the color explosion of the surrounding forest. The morning sunrise crested over the mountains and flooded the compound with light. Waves of flaming red and orange, bright yellow and dim browns blurred in her mind with impressionistic artists' canvases. Patches within the tapestry, like flaking paint in a poorly maintained van Gogh, revealed the skeletal tree branches buttressing the display and hinted at the coming hardness of winter. York knew that this winter would be one of the hardest in memory.

The bald man behind her continued, his ghostly reflection in the glass distracting her. "It's not just food and fuel anymore. We're looking at a prolonged deficit in nearly every category needed to maintain defense functionality."

She now presided over a nation teetering toward dissolution. The major neural networks controlling the modern world were misfiring, clogged with corrupt code like amyloid plaques, rendering the body of the nation as disoriented and confused as an Alzheimer's patient. Beyond the psychological damage of losing most of the modern computer infrastructure—a loss utterly traumatizing to generations now raised on its presence and dependent on the very idea of a world entirely connected, ubiquitously digitized—the very tangible losses of computer regulated transport, manufacturing, scheduling, communications, and medical care had left increasingly large swaths of the country reeling.

"As per NSA analysis, the projections from the last few days, the attacks are intensifying, likely to reach a climax very soon."

_Remember, remember the fifth of November_.

It was November fourth, and York dreaded the passage of time like the helpless descent of a sleeper into a nightmare. "What about this anti-worm virus they were talking about?" she asked, turning around momentarily to face the officer.

"There's too much contradictory data, Ma'am. No one knows where it's coming from, who's behind it, if it even _is_ working against the worm. Some are convinced of it, but others aren't. It might even be a feint by Anonymous to distract us. It is spreading, though. Pretty rapidly."

"And the drone attacks?"

"Those have tapered off. The worm is a replicating resource, but the drones are finite. Anonymous is running out of them."

"They seem to have done enough damage. And what of the reports of a lone mastermind—this _Fawkes_ from the FBI data?"

The man shook his head. "Unconfirmed and isolated reports to a single division of FBI. Analysis casts a lot of doubt on the hypothesis."

"Intel 1, if I'm not mistaken."

The soldier nodded. "That is correct. But the consensus—"

"They trumped the consensus five years ago. You might remember." She rubbed her temples. "I wish we had more time to consult with them."

The lights flickered momentarily, then steadied. York glanced around the ceiling and then back at the Colonel.

"They're still working out some kinks in the new electrical regulators," he said.

York shook her head and turned back to the window. "Decades of prep time and what do we do? Repeat the same mistake the world over! The pretty digital magic, all wired up here, the Pentagon, White House! Look at the damn walls! Everything gutted now! 1970s wiring is our salvation! Sophisticated environmental, solar-powered-what-have-you duct-taped to rusted generators. I'm starting to think that when it's all said and done we're going to blow it all up and the damned forests out there are going to swallow what's left of us."

She tried to focus, but the crushing weight of the crisis and the lack of sleep was breaking down her will.

"It's not just us," the Colonel answered. "Every country is struggling with this. Some have it easier: North Korea was so damn paranoid that even the worm is slowed there. And the third world doesn't have enough of a modern architecture that they're relatively intact from the direct effects. But the indirect effects are equally crippling, Madam President."

"Yes, yes," she said, waving him off. "The world is _flat_ as the pundits like to say. A sneeze in Beijing or Washington gives a cold to the world. You know what it feels like now? Not like a cold, but like that plague Ebola is eating its way through the arteries of civilization! It's like the world were a giant hive, and now it's degenerating into thousands of isolated and panicked islands." She tried again to focus. "Market report?"

"Securities trading restrictions have effectively brought them to a standstill. The viral bidding is completely out of control. Destabilizing. The evaporating monetary base, huge capital movements into and out of banks by the worm—they've frozen lending and shut down more and more banks. Liquidity is gone. Commerce has come to a standstill. The food riots are growing and taking root in some of the most populous regions of the globe. Hell, right here in America."

"More reports?"

"New York. Chicago. Atlanta." The Colonel paused. "We're losing control."

_Remember, remember the fifth of November_.

When York didn't answer, the Colonel coughed. "It is the consensus of the Joint Chiefs and what remains of the military advisement panel that we should implement Directive 51."

York glanced sharply over her shoulder to glare at the Colonel. The rest of her body followed and she walked deliberately to her desk. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees, the scarred walls of hanging circuits and controllers feeling like violated strips of her own body.

"So it's come to that."

The Colonel spoke quickly. "The situation is critical. Standard Constitutional protocols are hampering our ability to respond to this crisis. It's urgent that we temporarily suspend the government and act under the emergency directive."

York nodded. "It's frightening how well prepared the United States government is to abolish the United States government."

"You would be overseeing all the branches, Madam President. Nothing is abolished. Power is only concentrated."

"Yes, with the executive. With _me_ , as you note. That is exactly what frightens me." She sat behind the desk and sighed. "I know about REX84, Colonel. You remember the Readiness Exercise of 1984? My father served on the Senate panel that authorized and buried it."

The military man stiffened. "That was an important first step, Ma'am, the first real plan to cover something outside of nuclear war. It was needed! We weren't ready for every contingency."

She nodded, her fingertips pressed against each other. "I know. We'd seen it happen to other nations. Well, after REX84, all a president had to do was declare a _State of National Emergency_ and bang! The machine would kick into full gear. Martial law. Military control of state and local governments. Detention of citizens who were scored as national security threats."

"Simulations were run. It's the best way to contain such crises. Maybe the _only_ way."

"But Directive 51 goes one step further, doesn't it? Bush and Cheney made sure of that. At least with 84 we had a Constitutional structure, a president answerable, in theory anyway, to Congress and the Judiciary. But here comes 51, _paying respects_ to the three branches of government, to separation of powers. But bottom line? The president has unlimited power." She coughed. "At least I won't be called _chancellor_. But we don't kid ourselves, do we, Colonel? Not when survival is on the line."

_Concentration camps. Military rule. Dictatorship._

"Everything's temporary. Reversible once the crisis is resolved. Meanwhile, we can have some breathing room. We can act without the delays of Congress and the fiscal limitations! The only other option is to invite collapse of this government!"

The man was red-faced. York arched an eyebrow.

"So the analysts predict," he said, passing his hand over his scalp.

"Here's a mouthful for you, Colonel: _Ermächtigungsgesetz_. German for Enabling Act. You heard of it?"

"No." His face appeared strained.

"Passed by the Nazi-controlled parliament in 1933. They called it the 'Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the State.' My father also taught about it in law school. It suspended constitutional authority and placed absolute power in the hands of the Chancellor, whom you may have heard of."

"Ma'am, we aren't Nazi Germany."

"Neither was Rome, but it was easier for them, too. In hard times just turn over power to a strong leader. Doesn't usually end well." She laughed, closing her eyes. "Here we were the last twenty years, repeating the mistakes of the Weimar and serving as a script for George Lucas and Alan Moore. Do I make a better Susan or Palpatine, do you think?"

"This isn't fantasy. This is serious. Look what's happening! There's a lot of concern about how to maintain order and preserve the nation through this catastrophe, Madam President. There are growing and serious divisions in the military."

Her head cocked to one side. "Is that a threat, Colonel?"

He paled. "No, Madam President, what I mean is—"

She stood from her desk, gripping its edge. "What you mean is that order—more to the point, _loyalty_ to this office _—_ is being lost. Whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, Colonel, what you're telling me is that the military no longer has confidence in civilian rule. I see the beginnings of a coup."

"You misunderstand—"

"Out!" she shouted, walking around the desk. "Go back to your handlers and tell them that they had better not underestimate my support. We're at a precipice, Colonel, both externally and internally. And I'll be damned if I'm going to bow to any pressure to burn our Constitution. Go back and tell them that I will ignore Directive 51. Tell them that they need to make their choices, and that those choices will define them for the rest of their lives!"

After a final, panicked stare, the man dashed out of the room. York stood in front of the door, trembling, pressing her fingertips to her temples again.

NORAD. The command structure there was solid, loyal. At least she _hoped_ it still was _._ The location was even more secure. She would make arrangements to relocate the principle elements of government. But she had to move quickly. They were at a tipping point. _The irony._ She was as vulnerable here in this doomsday locker as anywhere.

_Remember, remember the fifth of November_.

The second line of the old song danced rebelliously in her mind.

_Gunpowder, treason, and plot!_
54

# End Game

The bright light of the sunrise was smothered by thick shutters that plunged the room into complete darkness. In the center of the space was a lone figure in dark robes, a shining Guy Fawkes mask reflecting the artificial light in front of him. The wall-panel of flat-screen monitors displayed multiple locations, scenes dim and sequestered. Figures stared back through the screens, their eyes wary and unsure, weapons and military-issue equipment surrounding them.

"What good is all your money if there ain't nowhere left to spend it?" came one voice.

The mask spoke. "Have you forgotten the plan? When power is taken from the forces controlling our world, my software will orchestrate a new order. An order where each of you will preside like kings over lands and treasure and people. Kingdoms for kings, if you want. Or whatever you want. There will be no interference. I hold the keys to this new order. Have you become such terrified children at the destruction we have spread that you long for the safe chains of your former lives?"

The groups could be heard talking in a cacophony amongst themselves. The mask waited patiently. Several screens clicked off, the images gone, the fearful opting out of this terrible and all too real multiplayer game. The mask keyed in codes. A few remaining solo drones switched on in their hidden hangars. They were preserved for just this contingency, this betrayal and danger to his efforts. Along with a sortie to finish the game, they were all that was left of a once impressive fleet. Images flashed on the darkened screens, a God's eye view of a takeoff and flight. The man behind the mask smiled. _Once in, never out_. They would be dead within minutes.

One by one, the remaining groups committed to the final missions or were similarly dispatched. The final plans were rehashed. Ports and landing strips. More nuclear power plants. Dams and oil rigs. And finally, a team recommissioned to the US electric grid. The mask closed all the connections save this last one.

"You have your new target?" it said.

A bearded man with a green army cap nodded. "I thought your damn worm was going to shut the grid down."

"It was, but the anti-worm code has substantially weakened our capabilities. I can't risk failure. The grid must fall and never rise again. America must be plunged into a final night."

"Some speech you gave," said the man, an automatic weapon in his hands.

"You are my most trusted allies. We have shared goals from the beginning. We do not hope to live as kings or queens. We know how vile and rotten the system is, how deeply the roots of the octopus dig. There is only one way to burn it out—wither the thing to the core."

"You like to talk," laughed the man. "We don't give a fuck about your politics. For us, it's just the high! Mutilation. Dissection. Destruction!" There was a loud cry in unison from the group. "You are the Dark Angel, masked man. You're the power to bring Hell to earth! See you in the flames!"

The figure pressed a button and a screeching recording of death metal thundered in the room. The masked man switched it off and sat silently in the darkness.

The gore-grinders weren't wrong. If all went according to plan, the nations would eat themselves. The violence would consume all power structures. Modern civilization would be laid waste by the very wires it used to hoist itself.

But it was of course not enough. True anarchy could not be achieved until they had erased the heart of corruption. And only his worm could achieve that. Only by completely liquidating all the modern elements of control could there be true freedom.

It was this very goal that was now in doubt. The FBI woman was tweaked, that was for sure. Only a deeply twisted mind could conceive of such a violent cure for the dying human enterprise. It broke all their laws. It was off leash and could possible turn on healthy systems. It was reckless and wild.

And it was winning. He had not counted on anyone with the talent or audacity to unleash the monsters that she had. She had his respect. He would not turn from the truth of it. Truth was the only thing left. _The truth of human corruption._ The truth of what needed to be done.

A screen opened revealing a set of black-clad men.

"Are you prepared?"

A man with intense eyes nodded onscreen. "It's a small unit. There isn't much left now. But it should be enough. We've been watching the building for days via the surveillance drone you spared us. Some boots on the ground, too. We could walk into the place without a problem. They're decimated."

"It must be done right. They have proven far more resilient than we imagined."

"We aren't taking this lightly after what happened to Bravo team."

"You're sure that several members of Intel 1 left the building?"

"Yes. Immediately after our extraction team failed. They sent decoys and used multiple evasive strategies. We didn't have the manpower to follow everything. We lost them."

"And Poison?"

"Signal was lost. They could have discovered the device. Or maybe they're underground too deep. There are mazes of old tunnels on this island. Rumor has it there's some kind of Fed bunker, too."

The mask nodded. "One they will need soon. I have other plans for dealing with Poison. Stay on mission. You have the blueprints."

The man laid out a building plan on a table, pointing to the lower portion of the paper. "Lower basement. These three rooms."

"Your priorities?" asked the mask.

"Seize the mainframes," he said, holding up a UBS stick, "and inject this code."

"And the personnel?"

"We're to kill them all, especially the bald woman."

"Then go. There isn't much time."

The screen went dark. Fawkes removed the mask and exhaled, his features hidden in the darkness. Everything was coming to its final iteration. His ammunition was nearly spent. Ten years of preparation, weeks of assault on the world, and now the final activation. A signal to be sent to every active computer on the planet, one that would induce a final and unstoppable chaos.

He smiled. He _did_ respect the girl. That's why when he silenced her, insured her talented hands would not continue to wreak havoc on his plans, he would broadcast the signal from her very machines, thwarting her counter-code and symbolically triumphing over her impressive resistance.

He twirled the mask in his hands.

He was, after all, quite taken with the dramatic.
55

# Racing to Position

"Attacks on the power grid?" Cohen shouted into the phone as the car sped along the Shore Parkway, the waters of the Lower Bay tinted orange by the rising sun. Savas had engaged the switch boxes, running quietly unless hitting traffic, the red and blue flashing lights beginning to give Cohen a headache. Poison sat in the back of the vehicle with Miller, in silence. Behind them a second Crown Vic with Lopez and Houston followed closely.

"What's happening?" asked Savas.

"Okay, Angel, hold on. Let me tell John." She turned toward him and sighed. "Looks like the November fifth theory is right. Angel says all hell is breaking loose and major manufacturing and resource systems are under attack by the worm. The scariest is the power grid. You remember the briefings after 9/11?"

He nodded. "Yeah, craziest situation. What, ten critical power stations stand between us and the Stone Age? Six month black out?"

"Pretty much," said Cohen. "It was nine of them. Out of fifty thousand. Which ones were classified of course, so no terrorists could get them. Unless—"

"Unless you've hacked into every computer on the planet and gotten your paws on the files."

"Right. It would likely be down by now just from software attacks, but her crazy code seems to be slowing it. Maybe even turning the tide, she says."

"That's good, right?" He wove in and out of traffic, switching on the sirens to prompt cars out of their path.

Muffled sounds from the phone mixed with the wailing pitches. "Hold on, Angel. Yes, John, that's good. And a lot of good news on that front. Angel says she's working on a new iteration of her immune code, one she thinks will erase the worm once and for all. It can spread anywhere the worm has gone, using the worm to do so, and sterilize any machine that's infected."

"In time?"

Cohen shrugged. "She not done with it and Fawkes is putting things in overdrive." There was more screaming from the phone as Cohen held it away from her ear. "Right! So, the _bad_ news is that she's convinced there'll be a physical attack on the power grid, at what she's calling a weak node."

"And she knows this how?"

"She's intercepting more and more information from Fawkes' data stream, hacking more worm strains. She found blueprints, schematics for an assault strike on the power plant. It's in Jersey, routes huge amounts of power from the US and Canada." Angel called out loudly over the phone again. "And like Angel says, it was one of the weak links in the 2003 Northeast blackout. Caused by a software bug at a power plant, she reminds my battered ears."

"Great," said Savas, accelerating unconsciously. "They could already be there."

"And at who knows what other _weak nodes_ across the country," said Miller from the back.

Savas shook his head. "No. I don't understand how he built up the resources to do as much as he did, but they're finite. It's clear his supply chain is gone. I don't think he planned to strike every weak grid point with a commando team. He couldn't. Angel's code might have just saved the lights."

The ex-marine shook his head. "Nothing is certain, John."

"We'll see. But I do think this is because of Angel. I think he meant for the worm to throw wrenches into all the electrical machinery like the industrial plants. Machinery tearing itself apart, transformers exploding. But now he's not _sure_ anymore. His code might not be there or at enough locations. So he has to make sure, and the East Coast is the seat of government, finance. He's sending all his assets to make sure."

Holding the phone away from her ear again, Cohen nodded. "Angel agrees. She says you need to get Bonnie and Clyde on it."

"Bonnie and—right. Okay, tell Angel we'll call her back after we've explained things."

Cohen smiled, closing the phone. "No need. She called them first. They've agreed and were waiting for your instructions." The headlights of the car behind them blinked repeatedly. "I think she just informed them of your consent."

Savas shook his head. "She'll be running the damn place soon."

The car behind pulled right and exited at an approaching turn-off, the black vehicle disappearing behind an overpass. Lopez and Houston were gone.

Poison spoke from the back of the car. "So, wait. Now it's just us? I'm the bait for your trap and you three are going to face down all his killers?"

Cohen looked back in the review mirror at the frightened woman. "That's right."

"Well, fuck! Can't you call in some cops or army or something?"

Cohen turned around and placed her arm on the chair. "In case you haven't been paying attention, we're in a war zone. There _isn't_ anyone who's going to hand over troops or police to some obscure FBI division because they have some unsubstantiated theory about a crazed madman and are unilaterally going to test it by playing a dangerous trap-the-terrorist game with his ex-girlfriend."

Poison simply gawked at her.

Cohen sighed. "We're betting that he's about out of muscle, and that most of it is headed to a power plant in Jersey."

"Betting with our _lives_ ," stressed Poison.

"Well, probably not yours, dear. He's trying to rescue you from the monsters at the FBI, remember? You'll be fine as long as some stray bullets don't find you." Her tone was impatient. "We'll be the ones filled with steel."

"Not if I can help it," said Savas. "We're going to set up carefully before we let that beacon out of the box. We'll make them come to us and take heavy damage. If he's as weak as we're hoping, that might be enough."

"Fawkes might not even come," said Poison. "Could all be for nothing."

"He'll come," said Savas.

"Why? He didn't last time. He sent people, but he didn't come. Why now?"

"Because you're off site. Because of the last failure he won't want to repeat. Because it's almost over: The fifth of November is tomorrow. I don't think he had much of a plan after that. Besides watching the world burn."

Savas hammered the accelerator, Coney Island and the New York Aquarium flying past them. The engine howled.

"He'll come."
56

# Powergrid

The electrical substation was located on the outskirts of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Houston had raced across Staten Island through a surreal apocalyptic landscape. Fires were raging around the ports, and Lopez thought he had seen Blackhawk helicopters launching missiles at boats and opening fire at the docks. Military vehicles from the National Guard were positioned at gateways—toll booths, tunnel and bridge entrances, certain exit ramps—but eerily, all were abandoned. News on their radio confirmed that rioting had spread through the tri-state area as essential functions continued to break down in the public and private sector. Law enforcement was completely overwhelmed.

They had crossed two bridges without incident and were now speeding past Elizabeth and into a decayed urban wasteland of rusted warehouses and closed factories. The power lines around them were beginning to converge. The substation was near.

Lightfoote's voice came over the speaker. Houston had wedged her phone inside a cup holder, the conical shape funneling the sound upwards and acting as a small megaphone.

"Power's still up, so they haven't hit it yet. Latest military data indicates a contingent of Guardsman are assigned there, maybe ten. The site was on a list to lock down in a national emergency. I don't know if they made it or are still there, but if so, you have to warn them, prepare them."

"And how do we do that without getting arrested?" asked Lopez. "They won't let us get near, and if anyone tries to get our story verified, too many questions will be raised. We'll be in a cell before nightfall."

"I don't know how!" cried Angel, "But we need all the help we can get. We don't know how large Fawkes' strike team is."

"Mother of God," whispered Lopez. "How many enemies do we have to fight?"

"Look, we'll improvise," Houston said. "Meanwhile, you were saying they would hit the transformers?"

"I've given myself a crash course in this the last few hours," said Lightfoote. "Power from several coal and gas plants, and the nuke plant south of you, are funneled through the substation. To handle it, they have these enormous transformers that link up the lines coming into the lines going out. Match up the power on them. For the size of the loads they're dealing with here, these are giant things. We're talking hundreds of tons, tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. This is one of the biggest in the country."

"Fuel?" asked Lopez. "Why does it need fuel?"

"To run all the coolant systems," said Lightfoote. "Ever had your outlet or computer heat up?"

"I think this phone is about to explode," said Houston.

"Well, just imagine this transformer that's bigger than a house and all the current running through it. Fawkes could take it out just by blowing the cooling units and waiting for the thing to burst into flames."

"Jesus," said Houston. "So, big as a house. Lots of big wires going in. We can't miss it."

"No, it will be obvious. And, from what I could find out, relatively unsecured. A chain link fence and some concrete barriers to stop suicide trucks."

"Wait," said Lopez, shaking his head. "Our electrical grid is dependent on a few of these behemoths and all we've done to keep modern civilization running is slap some cheap wire around it?"

"Pretty much, Holy Man," said Lightfoote. "Lots of congressional hearings after 9/11. Not much done. It's a sitting duck. If we lose it, it could be the entire Northeast and parts of Canada."

"That's unbelievable," Lopez said.

"They _did_ fortify the transformer in 2015. Says here it's bullet resistant."

"Bullet _resistant_? What, to protect from transformer snipers?"

"In part," Angel continued. "There have been several incidents of lone wackos shooting at them. One guy caused an explosion that blacked out part of Texas for hours. Anyway, this one has reinforced concrete around it."

Lopez pointed ahead of the car. "That's it, Sara. Take that road."

The substation opened up in front of them. Several football fields in surface area, it looked like something from a dystopian film. Wires sprouted from it like tentacles, only to be contrasted by the harsh steel and Frankenstein-esque electrical devices that neither of them had names for.

The transformer was obvious. Enormous. It dominated the other structures within the compound. Thick, metallic arms erupted above a sloppy concrete girdle around the thing, giving the object the appearance of a colossal robot design project gone terribly wrong. Thick wires connected to the transformer through the ends of the arms to the chaos of wiring overhead that linked the substation to the rest of the grid.

"You found it?" called out Lightfoote.

"Yes," said Houston flatly.

"And the transformer? You see it?"

"Oh yes," she said.

"Great!" Lightfoote's relief was palpable.

"Not so great," said Lopez as Houston slowed the car in front of the twisted and mangled remains of a chain length fence.

"Why? What's wrong?"

Two National Guardsman lay by the wrecked gate, their bodies riddle with bullets. The gatehouse windows were shattered and the wood pocked with holes.

Lopez spoke in a rough baritone. "It's on fire."

Black smoke poured into the air in front them.
57

# Target Practice

"The transformer's burning?"

Lightfoote's voice rang out desperately over the phone. Lopez exited the car and stared forward, shielding his eyes from low-lying morning sun. Houston shut off the engine, grabbed the phone, and followed.

"I'm not sure," said Houston. "Lots of fires and smoke. Some around the transformer. But, no, it doesn't seem hit."

"Then there's still time!" cried Lightfoote. "We still have power. You still have a transformer. I need power to get the last code out! Hang up, get in there, and stop them!"

"Yes, ma'am." Houston closed the phone. "She's right. There's still a chance. They haven't managed to bring it down yet."

"Could happen any moment," said Lopez. "We don't know their numbers or how they're armed."

Houston removed her Browning and pulled the mask over her smile. "I'm a lady who loves surprises." She jogged down the small road from the gate, toward the flames.

Lopez reached inside his vestments and grabbed the submachine gun. His left shoulder was screaming, useless to help him aim his pistol. The submachine gun would blanket his targets and help compensate. He ran forward, chasing Houston.

They passed grassy lawns on both sides of the road. Ahead, rows of wired equipment intersected above them. In the middle of it all lay the concrete slab with the transformer inside. Keeping alongside a row of utility sheds, they remained concealed from anyone around the object. Apparently, the idea had occurred to others. The bodies of three men—not Guardsman—were strewn along the path of the sheds, gunned down while moving toward the transformer. The bodies of several soldiers were across from them, near the far corner of the sheds.

"They must have used the shelter of the sheds for a last stand."

Houston pressed her back against the cold metal, stepping over the body of one, and peered cautiously around the corner.

Her head snapped back and her eyes locked with Lopez. "More dead guards. Looks like grenades."

"The strike team?"

"They're there. Alive. Right next to the concrete around the transformer. One had his hands on the wall, fiddling with something. The other seemed to be yelling at him. That's all I got."

"Bomb," Lopez said.

"Likely they're wiring it up now. From the argument, we can only hope some of the dead bodies were their demolitions experts."

"Assuming those two are the last."

She nodded and spun around again, keeping her sights forward for several seconds before whipping back around.

"You think you can get me on top of that shed?"

Lopez frowned. "It's over fifty yards, Sara. That's a good shot, even for you."

"You have better ideas? It's all open field from here to the transformer. No way to sneak up on them. We could go in blazing and hope for the best, but odds are not good for a clean win. I'll stabilize on the roof edge. Three shots or less and you owe me a drink."

Lopez frowned and got on one knee. "Just don't step on the left shoulder, or you forfeit any winnings. I'll be ready for a sprint."

She holstered the weapon and he hoisted her toward the roof. She grabbed the edge, swinging herself over. Lopez couldn't follow with his bad arm, so he returned to the corner and crouched, weapon readied.

Houston kept low and crawled to the end of the shed overlooking the transformer. She could see the two men facing the concrete wall, oblivious to her actions as they worked on the explosives. She removed her Browning. The edge of the roof rose several inches from the base and she used it to steady her weapon. She sighted the two dark shapes, focusing on the one who seemed to be taking the lead. She calmed, steadied her breathing. His torso fused into an extension of the barrel. She felt the metal tube reach outward towards him, connecting, closing the space between them. She stopped breathing and pulled the trigger.

There was an explosion. The figure before them shuddered, hands jerking outward and away from the bomb. He fell to his knees, then onto his side. She repositioned the gun.

The man next to him froze for an instant and then wheeled in their direction, weapon raised. He scanned a small arc across the sheds, then centered on the roof, and Houston. He dropped to one knee and aimed his gun in her direction.

Two more shots burst in the compound, the sounds reverberating off the concrete and metal, echoing and blending in a dispersing chaos of noise. The man in front of them buckled but did not fall. He began to turn toward the wall slowly, gait lumbering, face toward the device fixed to the transformer.

A fourth shot rang, a third bullet embedding itself in his torso. This time he fell, his weapon dropped. His legs jerked as he tried vainly to rise. Houston saw the broad form of Lopez race toward the shape.

"Four," she said, sitting up and scanning around them for hostiles. The place was empty but for the dead and Lopez, who now stood beside the explosive device, waving her over. "Perfectly good glass of whiskey shot to hell."
58

# Have Bomb, Will Travel

Houston sprinted across the lot toward the concrete security barrier. Two bodies lay beside the house-sized transformer, unmoving. Lopez had laid out several of their items: firearms, cell phones, and, most crucially, detonators and radio-controllers. He was studying an array of what looked like beige clay blocks taped across the concrete. Detonators and wires ran down from the blocks to a metal box.

"C-4?" Houston said, catching her breath.

"That, or something similar. Twelve blocks."

She examined them closely. "I'm guessing M112—military issue. Uncle Sam needs to keep his shit off the arms markets."

She crouched and examined the wiring. Above her, the huge expanse of two transformer arms cast a long shadow in the early light. The hum of the electricity flowing through the area was almost nauseating. Thick wires like oak limbs sprouted from the arms many tens of feet away.

"Look at this shape," she said, turning back to the molded plastique. "It's going to funnel the blast inward and up. Twelve blocks? Shit, this concrete wall will be turned into a weapon. Those humming arms are coming down, probably the whole thing will take major damage. No way this thing survives. Game over. Power gone."

"No timer, so we don't have to deal with that," said Lopez, eyeing the metallic box.

"Is it trapped?"

He shook his head. "Doesn't seem so. They didn't have time and weren't planning to leave it here long. Set it up, reach safe distance, maybe behind those sheds, radio the signal into this control box. Boom."

"Should be easy to disarm then." Houston frowned. "Why does that make me nervous?"

"Because nothing is ever for free."

Houston centered on the far-left block and placed her hand around the blasting cap wires. "Let's make sure and remove the detonators from each."

Lopez mirrored her actions. "Here goes."

They pulled on the wires. Thin metal tubes resembling smoothed hinge bolts came out of the soft material. As the end of the tube was cleared from the explosive, they paused and locked eyes.

"No boom," she said.

They repeated the process until all the detonators were removed, and tossed the blasting caps onto the ground beside the dead men. Lopez removed a large knife and cut through the thick tape sticking the blocks to the barrier. Soon there was a stack of clay blocks on the ground as well.

"All right," he said, wiping sweat from his face. "Always exciting. Let's call this in to Angel. We did our bit to preserve the lights."

Houston punched her contact number for Lightfoote's burner cell. She frowned and looked at the phone.

"Zero bars. No signal."

Lopez looked around. "This place should be blanketed. We had signal when we arrived."

"Check yours. Maybe this cheap thing's failing."

He removed his phone. "Nothing. No signal."

"Shit." Houston folded her arms over her chest. "No coincidences. The towers are down. Probably the worm."

"Or more of these guys," he said, nodding toward the bodies.

"I doubt it. No way he has an army. This was a strategic target. Too many towers for physical strikes on the cellular system. That's got to be the worm."

Lopez nodded. "Maybe it's just some of the carriers." He reached down beside the corpses and grabbed two phones.

"Everything's down. AT&T. Verizon. This guy had T-Mobile."

Houston scanned the horizon back toward New York City. "Everyone's cut off now. No voice, no data. I think this will trigger a real panic. After a few hours, it's going to be mayhem."

"There's more here," said Lopez working on one of the phones. "Messages. All about this raid. Has to be from Fawkes."

Houston stepped beside him and looked at the screen. "With those kind of details? Fawkes for sure. They were getting sloppy." She took the other man's phone and examined it as well.

"Well, tomorrow's the fifth, right?" said Lopez. "The end of the world as we know it. Security is so pre-apocalypse."

Houston continued scrolling intensely through the phone's messages. "Or maybe not. _Fuck_. Francisco, tell me you don't recognize this address."

The former priest stared at the small screen, brow furrowing. "That's the warehouse in Brooklyn. Where they're taking Poison. How—"

His eyes widened.

"They know, dammit!" said Houston. "Look at this message. 'Heading to the site. When finished double back there for backup.' They've known for a while!"

Lopez glanced up toward the car. A line of dark clouds was moving in from the south, promising to bring showers and possibly thunderstorms.

"Savas isn't setting the trap. Fawkes is."

"Jesus! No cell phones. We can't reach them. We have to get over to that warehouse!"

"We took out their strike team. That helps."

"Judging from the message, he wasn't counting on them. They're backup. He's got others."

"But what do we do with this mess? Dead men? Bombs?"

Houston stared down at the bodies with disgust. "Leave these assholes to rot." She began stuffing the plastique inside a bag lying on the ground beside them. "But we take the bomb. Could prove useful."
59

# Mutagenesis

Lightfoote stared at hundreds of lines of code on her screen. She spoke in a distracted monotone. "All the carriers are down?"

Rideout nodded, tossing his phone on the table next to five others. "I checked them all. He's nuked the cellular system."

"Damn," she said. "Cut off from everyone. Power's still up so our Dynamic Duo hasn't let us down. But we need the coast power up or we'll never get this new worm out there with enough time to spread."

He grabbed two of the phones and held them up. "You guys want your phones back?"

Across the room three men were arguing animatedly over the scrolling text of a computer screen. They waved him away to continue their heated debate.

Rideout leaned over the computer desk and whispered into Lightfoote's ear. "I don't trust those yahoos."

She smiled, never removing her gaze from the screen. "John does. The older one, anyway. _Simon_. They have some kind of history. And to be honest, the coders from the NSA are really good. I'd never have gotten this finished in time without them."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," said Rideout. "And _are_ you finished, anyway?"

Her face clouded. "Getting there." She returned her gaze to the screen and typed furiously.

A stout man, near sixty, ambled over toward them and dropped heavily into a wheeled chair. He looked at Rideout.

"Ah, John-David?"

"Jean-Paul. Just call me JP. And you're who again?"

"Fred will do," said Simon, rubbing his eyes. " _Angel_ I do remember. I'm getting too old for this shit." Lightfoote ignored both of them as Simon continued. "Look, Dietrich at NSA lent us these two programmers. Technically, they're not under our authority. I'm CIA. You're FBI. But with our connections, and dangling your project in front of them, they ate it up. But they're stuck on something now."

"Can't keep up?" asked Rideout.

"It's not a pissing contest, son. It's the new bit, the code randomizing thing."

"The mutagenesis," cut in Angel absentmindedly.

"Whatever you call it."

She turned to him. "It's important! It's key. I call it mutagenesis because the whole thing is based on mimicking biology."

"Is this going to be a graduate school lecture?" asked Simon, his face weary.

Lightfoote continued. "Look, we have code that hunts and recognizes Fawkes' worm like a white blood cell. In the body, one thing those cells do is _mutate_ the parts of them that recognize the foreign invader. For some mutants it screws them up. They don't work anymore. But for a few, the mutations make them better or create variant cells that recognize mutant pathogens. And when you combine that with recognition-based replication, you quickly select for optimized cells and make lots of them. It's evolution!"

"I think I'm gonna fail this test, professor," said Simon.

The two NSA men stood behind him. One interjected. "Yeah, but you know what happens when you get a lot of mutants in a population? You get cancer. Or autoimmunity. _Bad_ changes with the good. Things go south, you know?"

"Sometimes," admitted Lightfoote.

"And so what are we doing?" continued the man. "Unleashing rogue code, independent of any controls, that's designed to replicate and mutate? We could lose control over it."

The other coder chimed in. "We probably _will_ lose control over it."

Rideout waved his arms animatedly. "Does what is happening now look like an abundance of _control_? Sounds like you're scared this thing might actually work, take down the worm. How about we put that fire out first, before it burns everything to the ground? We can worry about Angel's mutants afterward."

Simon nodded. "That's about how I see it. We either fire the new weapon and hope the collateral damage is low, or we watch as that thing out there tears our world apart." He stared at the two men. "But we need you two on this. Angel's nearly done, but she needs those modules from you. You in?"

They looked at each other. One sighed. "Yeah, I guess so. We have to do something."

The other nodded. "Okay. But we are literally letting a genie out of the bottle here. Remember that a year from now."

Lightfoote nodded. "If there still is a digital world left over for this code to haunt, we'll work on it."

"How close are you two?" asked Simon.

The men were back at their terminals. One called over. "We're done. That's the fight. We built a bomb, we're just pissing our pants about arming it."

Simon turned to Lightfoote. "Angel?"

"I'm debugging the mutation code. I don't have the time to fine-tune it, and that worries me. Too much and it will fuck itself to oblivion. Too little and it won't adapt fast enough to identify all Fawkes' worms. But I'm almost there! Then I just need to assemble the modules and fire it out."

An explosion rocked the building and the lights flickered.

"What the hell?" cried Rideout.

Dust filtered down from the ceiling and the lights completely cut out. Emergency lighting clicked on while the computers continued to hum. Shouts from floors above erupted, followed by gunfire.

"Fawkes," said Lightfoote, her face grim. "He's going to shut us down the old fashioned way."

"Jesus," mumbled Simon, rising stiffly to his feet.

Rideout unholstered his pistol and checked the magazine. "Thank God you put the servers on generator power. That explosion blew the main lines."

"But not the hard lines. They're buried too deep. We still have time!"

More gunfire. More screams above.

"Not much!" cried Rideout. "You two, you're done, right? So get your asses over here! Move those cabinets to the door—quickly!"

The NSA programmers shoved the two waist-high cabinets, computer paraphernalia spilling out of the poorly closed doors, to block the entry. Rideout overturned a long table, spilling workstations and monitors to the floor.

Lightfoote tossed him a holstered firearm. "Mine. Give it to them." She returned to the code.

"Spread this out!" said Rideout, waving his arms across the room. He frowned. "Either of you ever fired a weapon?"

Both shook their heads.

"Either of you ever _want_ to fire a weapon?"

One put out his hand. Rideout gave him the black pistol.

"Safety's in the trigger, so don't point unless you mean to kill. Got it? Pull the trigger with follow-through, you'll feel the safety release and then the shot. Slow, steady, pull. No panic. Aim and pull slowly, even if Godzilla comes through." The NSA coder nodded frantically. "You," he yelled at the unarmed coder, "grab that large wrench over there. Hide behind the server wall. If the guns fail, beat the shit out of the first person who comes in range."

Simon braced himself on the wall beside the door, gun pointed at the entrance. "I'll have the first. They won't know what hit them."

Rideout crouched behind the overturned table and motioned the NSA man with the gun over. "They'll have to get past us to get to Angel, then get around the server farm between the door and her desk. We need to buy her all the time we can. Even if that means our lives, you understand? Her code has to get out!"

The programmer simply stared at him.

"What about the servers?" asked Simon.

Lightfoote called back. "I just need this computer, this one connection to send it out through the NSA backdoors. It's the end game now."

The door shuddered from a heavy blow. Rideout and the NSA man concealed themselves behind the table, positioning their weapons forward. Heavy objects slammed repeatedly into the door, rattling the metal cabinets. The drumming was offset by the maniacal clacking of Lightfoote's keys, the two percussions accompanied by the ever present hum of the server farm between them.

The thudding stopped. Dust continued to drift down from the ceiling. The sounds of muted shouts outside could be heard, along with muffled shuffling and scrapes. Several seconds of silence followed. Rideout and Simon aimed their weapons.

Then the door exploded.
60

# Warehouse

The pouring rain clattered angrily on the metal roof, the storm winds shaking the thin walls of the warehouse. Daylight faded, dimmed further by the clouds, still just managing to illuminate the interior through the high windows. The air tasted of mildew and rot, chased by a metallic tang. A low rumble shook the long structure, momentarily interrupting conversation within. Two figures stood perched atop a large, moveable platform.

"I can't reach anyone," Cohen said, flipping her phone closed with a snap. "Looks like we've lost all cellular. We're blind here."

Savas nodded, examining the readout on a small control unit. "Not completely blind," he muttered. "As long as the power holds."

Cohen limped over to Savas and wrapped an arm over his shoulders. "Frank got the motion sensors up?"

"Yeah," Savas said, turning toward her. There was another roll of thunder. "We'll at least get some advance notice."

"Crunch time, Johnny-boy." She ran her fingers through his hair. "I'm starting to get a little tired of the world ending around us."

He kissed her, cupping his hand behind her head. Her breath was warm in the frigid air of the unheated warehouse. A cloud escaped his mouth as he pulled away. "Don't ever say I didn't show you an exciting time, girl."

"Just don't make me climb any more ladders until this damned leg is healed."

A shout from across the expanse of the building brought them back to their surroundings. Their eyes caught sight of a figure slamming shut the main door, water dripping from his muscular form. Miller jogged back toward their position, an automatic rifle in one arm.

"Motion detectors mounted and signaling," he called.

The space within was long abandoned. Decaying, discarded crates the size of trucks littered the floor. The ex-marine dodged back and forth, zig-zagging as he approached. The detritus provided the perfect cover for their needs. Fawkes and his mercenaries would need to expose themselves several times in order to get near.

Savas and Cohen looked down from a raised, metallic platform. Once used by a supervisor directing the traffic in the warehouse during better years, it now served an unintended strategic purpose. They had positioned several crates facing the entrance. Together with the advantage of height, the cover would ensure that only an elite commando force of some number would make it through. Whatever they would face, they were sure to do it much hurt.

Miller finished scaling the ladder and dropped heavily onto the platform, water scattering and dripping through the metallic mesh of the platform floor. He scanned the interior of the building and grunted.

"Of course, they could try blasting or cutting their way through any number of weak points in this flimsy structure. But I think that's giving them too much credit and time to plan. And only if they had the numbers." He pointed to the main entrance. "My money is on the front door. John and I can take positions on opposite sides of this platform—there and there. Rebecca, we could use your gun, but we can't trust that hacker. Keep it trained on her the entire time. We're vulnerable from behind."

Cohen smiled. "Good plan. I refuse to move this leg again." She turned behind them, looking down on the bound form of Poison. The hacker glared back. "Sorry about the cuffs."

"Fuck you Feds. Maybe I should help him kill you."

Savas crouched down beside her. "We don't know that you won't, Poison. Try to see it from our angle. There isn't much trust going around when it comes to Fawkes and Anonymous."

"He's not Anonymous. Not anymore."

"Who's to say? He claims he is. He's sprung several traps on us, tried to kill us. We can't assume you're on our side."

"Why would I be here?"

"Maybe the bait is to hook _us_."

She scowled at him but remained silent. At that moment, the monitor on the floor of the platform began to beep. Miller scooped it into his hands, glaring downward.

"They're here. Barely time to prepare. Ten yards in front of the door. We've got seconds."

Cohen leaned into one of the crutches, holding her firearm pointed at the platform near Poison's feet. She stared intensely at the other woman. Miller and Savas shook the platform as they rushed to the opposite corners, crouching behind wooden crates and aiming their weapons toward the door.

Miller called to Savas. "If they throw frags, look away until the blast. Then back and focus."

His anticipation proved correct. The door to the warehouse was slung open, the rusted metal screaming like something dying. Several black shapes outside hurled objects into the warehouse. Savas and Miller turned their heads as the grenades exploded, the sound rivaling the thunder outside. They recovered quickly and reoriented, training their guns on the men rushing inside. And opened fire.
61

# Mask Behind the Mask

The incoming soldiers were dropped quickly, their position impossible to defend. They barely had time to size up their enemy and the layout before rounds from one or both of the FBI men cut them down. Their lack of strategy made it clear they hadn't expected this sort of resistance.

Four bodies lay within a twenty-foot radius of the main door. There was no further motion from outside. The smoke of spent ammunition rose as a fog around the top of the platform. Savas started to rise, but Miller held up his hand.

"Not yet!"

"You think there are more?"

"Maybe this was a feint. Stay low."

"But Fawkes isn't there!" hissed Savas.

"We don't know that. Can't see their faces."

"He's not there," said Poison, looking down on the corpses. "He's no Johnny Rambo."

"Don't shoot!"

A cry rang across the warehouse.

" _That's_ Fawkes," said Poison.

Miller peered over the crate in the failing light. He strapped on a set of night vision goggles and adjusted them.

"I don't see anything, John. He's still outside."

"Fawkes!" cried Savas. "If that's you, come in with both hands high in the air!"

There was a pause. "No way! You'll shoot me!"

"Paranoid to the end," whispered Poison.

"That's not our plan!" yelled Savas again. "You're useless dead. We need you to fix this shit!"

Another pause. "Is she there? Poison?"

Savas made to speak again but was cut off by the girl.

"Fuck yeah, you piece of shit! All this is because of you! And you _bugged_ me, you fucktard? Seriously?"

A dark form ambled into the warehouse from the door, his head covered by a hood. His hands raised above him.

"Turn around," called Savas. Fawkes obeyed. "Now close the door. All the way."

Fawkes grasped the handle of the sliding door and yanked. At first it didn't move and he lost his balance. After several hard pulls and better planting his feet, he managed to scrape it across the floor to the staccato bursts of metal on cement. A fifth jerk slammed it shut.

"Now back around with your hands high." Fawkes complied and Savas stood slowly and turned to Miller. "I'm going to bring him up. He tries anything, end him."

Cohen turned to Poison as Savas descended. "Will he try something?"

The hacker shook her head. "Are you kidding? He wasn't even good at first person shooters. Your man's safe."

Miller watched tensely as Savas reached the hacker. Fawkes offered no resistance, walking slowly in front of the FBI man. Savas pushed him forward with his gun, and the pair navigated the obstacle course toward the platform. Finally, Fawkes scaled the ladder as Miller trained his weapon downward. The pair reached the platform without incident.

Poison laughed. "You still have the fucking mask. _Seriously_."

Fawkes stood shivering in a wet trench coat, water beading and running along its contours. Contrasting the black of the fabric was a white mask—the goateed, smirking visage that had come to haunt too many of their nightmares.

"Fawkes," Savas said, stepping forward. "Miller, the extra set of cuffs?"

Miller handed Savas the restraints and he bound Fawkes' hands behind him.

Fawkes looked to Poison. His voice was heavily muffled. "Looks like they're still treating you well."

"So that's it? That's all you had left to come rescue me?" The masked man said nothing. "What a sad way to go out, Fawkes."

"It doesn't matter anymore. They can't stop things now."

Cohen kept her weapon at the ready, her eyes on Poison as she spoke. "I wouldn't count on that, Fawkes. We have a plan to stop you."

"You mean the little bald girl in the cellar?" The mask laughed. "I have a larger team taking care of her now. That's over."

"You son of a bitch," Miller said, advancing on the man.

Savas held him back with his arm. "It will be hard on you if something happens to them."

"Gonna be hard on all of us soon, Special Agent. But really it was the only way."

"Only way to what, you sick bastard!" hissed Miller, a fire in his eyes.

"Can't tell you or you'd just laugh. But really, it's for the best. The things you don't know and can't believe—well, it's like a mountain. The lies you live, the truths you hold that really hold you mockingly. Your ideals and systems. _All lies_. You are slaves to masters that count on your good intentions and low intelligence. There is a world order you don't understand and can't perceive."

Savas looked at Poison. "Is this the genius you mentioned? This nutcase?"

"Low intelligence?" Poison scoffed. "You know, they played you from the start, you dumb ass. And you bought it! You took it all in your little shark mouth and they reeled you in! All those torture videos? Interrogation scripts? They were faked!"

"I know."

"What do you mean, you know?"

"Players play the players because the play demands it."

"John—" began Cohen.

"Okay, enough of this crap," said Savas. "Let's see what you really look like."

Cohen furrowed her brows. "John, wait a minute. Something's not right."

He ignored her and grasped the bottom of the mask. Looking through the eye-slits, he stared inside. "Anonymous no more, Fawkes."

He pulled. The mask didn't move.

"What the hell?"

Reaching around, he yanked the hood back, revealing a head covered in black leather straps. The Guy Fawkes mask was fixed tightly to it, concealing a bulk beneath it.

"Gas mask!" cried Miller.

But it was too late. Fawkes squeezed his shoulder blades together and there was a click, followed by the sound of two metal canisters crashing and ringing on the platform surface.

They exploded.
62

# Injection

Fred Simon was blown backward and slammed into a wall, dropping to the ground unconscious. Debris flew across the room, smashing into the racks of computers, pocketing the overturned table, and coating everything with a thick layer of dust. Within seconds, several armed men stormed through the hole breached in the doorway, crawling over the pile of rubble from the collapsed wall, trying to get their bearings in an enclosed space choked with smoke.

Gunshots blasted from behind the table and one of the men staggered, grabbing his chest. He fell to the ground. The second began a spray of automatic fire aimed wildly in the direction of the table, but a series of shots by two weapons behind it struck him four, five, and six times. He lurched forward, falling to his knees with a scream, and rolled over on his side moaning.

As two more men burst through the opening a chaos of weapons' discharge erupted. The NSA man beside Rideout screamed and clutched his face, blood squirting from between his fingers. He rolled on the ground, howling. Rideout slumped behind the table, blood flowing from the right side of his chest, eyes swimming. His gun dropped to the ground with a clank.

Another mercenary had fallen, but two more stepped in to take his place. The invaders advanced slowly, unimpeded. The NSA man with the wrench shook behind the server racks, his pants moist around the crotch. Several feet from him Lightfoote worked like a woman possessed, ignoring the chaos.

The three soldiers stepped forward cautiously, converging on the table and the forms of the bodies behind it. Rideout glanced upward but didn't move his head, energy evanescing from his body. They looked down on him and the flailing NSA man. Two returned their attention to the rest of the room, hunting for targets. The other fired several shots into the screaming figure. The cries ceased. He turned toward Rideout and aimed.

A series of shots roared from behind them, bullets bursting through the man's mouth and throat. As Rideout watched him fall, the two beside him spun around, firing at the bloodied shape of Simon. The old CIA man managed to empty his weapon, wounding one in the stomach, even as the assailants killed him. Simon fell against the wall, bullet holes and blood decorating the surface behind him. He slid slowly to the ground, his chest a mass of wounds, his eyes blank. He lay still.

The other NSA man dropped the wrench and walked out, falling to his knees.

"Don't shoot! I surrender! I'm not part of this group! I'm from the NSA! Please, don't kill me!" Tears stained his face as he trembled before the soldiers.

"Where's the girl?" rasped one.

"She's here. Right behind me! At the terminal!"

The soldier fired into his head, and the programmer fell. The mercenary raced forward, his companion stumbling behind, bent nearly double with his wound soaking his clothes.

The first soldier leapt around the stacks of computers and opened fire at the terminal against the wall. The chassis exploded into fragments, the continued discharge blowing it and the monitor to pieces. He ejected the magazine and reached for another.

A pair of feet swung down from the piping above, catching him square in the face. The impact snapped his head back sharply, and his arms and legs went slack before he dropped to the ground.

Lightfoote landed like a cougar, crouched low to absorb the momentum, her arm splayed to the side along the floor. The remaining soldier staggered toward her, movements sluggish and jerky, gunshots blasting wildly from the barrel of his weapon to pock the walls harmlessly.

Bright silver flashed through the air and the soldier's head snapped to the side as the wrench slammed into his jaw with a heavy crunch of bone. His body continued to the side and toppled over. Both soldiers now unconscious.

Lightfoote leaped beside them and bludgeoned each in the head. Satisfied, she raced beside Rideout, her gaze lingering a moment on the body of Simon across the room. "JP! You there?" She slapped his face.

His eyes struggled to open, a gasp escaping his mouth. "Oh, God, Angel. Shit, this hurts!"

Lightfoote pulled off her shirt, revealing a tight sports bra. She pressed the shirt against the wound, eliciting a scream from Rideout.

She shouted over him. "JP! Listen. Here, this arm works." She pulled one of his hands to the shirt. "Stay with me! Keep some pressure there. I'm running up to get a medkit. Slow the bleeding!"

He nodded and his arm tensed against his chest. He inhaled sharply. "Angel, wait," he gasped as she turned to leave.

"What?"

Rideout stared at the blasted computers. Every terminal was destroyed. "The worm?" he managed.

She crouched beside him and kissed him on the cheek. Sweat dripped from her shoulders and arms. His blood glimmered in streaks across her scalp.

"Launched. Gone!" She smiled. "You did good. Now shut up and don't die on me."
63

# Aces in the Hole

The white vapor had nearly dissipated. The faint aroma of gunpowder and ash mixed with a sickly sweetness still lingering in the air. Hulking shapes breathed resonantly from within gas masks on the platform.

The FBI team was concentrated at one end of the structure, all of them handcuffed, soldiers in masks pointing guns in their direction. The captives were still coughing badly, tears and mucus running from their eyes and noses. Their weapons were in a pile at the feet of their captors.

The mask spoke. "So easy. Don't you guys ever play chess?"

Poison stood beside Fawkes, a gas mask around her head. She looked down at the FBI team. "What are you going to do with them?"

Fawkes cocked the smirking visage to one side. "Kill them, of course."

"Please, don't," said Poison, eyes large.

"Be grateful you aren't there with them. I should kill you as well for betraying me. But I don't have the emotional fortitude. You get to live because of my weakness. But not them. Not after what they've done."

"I told you!" she cried. "It was all fake! They didn't torture me!"

"Perhaps," said Fawkes, "or perhaps this is some demented state of Stockholm Syndrome. Did they promise you amnesty? Immunity? Do you think any of that matters now?" The mask studied her coldly.

"No!"

He turned to the FBI team. "Even if it was all a ruse, it was a very painful ruse for me. Until I figured it out, before I realized that it was all _too_ easy, perfectly engineered to elicit an emotional response, get me to put myself in terrible danger—before all that came into focus I really went through the agony of watching her suffer." He extended his hand and received a gun from one of the soldiers. "And that will not be forgiven."

"Stop, Fawkes!" cried Poison, moving toward him. A towering soldier grabbed her from behind and lifted her off the ground as she flailed.

Fawkes motioned to the warehouse floor. "Get her out of here. She doesn't need to see this."

Screaming, Poison was taken by two guards awkwardly down the ladder. Fawkes and the remaining guard stepped in front of the FBI team. The mask turned to Savas.

"It has been an interesting game, one still with several pieces in play. But here I have the King, and, I suppose, his Queen, even if by abilities I think the real Queen is lying in a pool of blood in a basement in New York City."

"Just a video game to you, Fawkes?" spat Savas. "Our lives. The nation. The world. Millions, billions of people who will wake up tomorrow back in the Dark Ages. Most of them to die."

There was a flash of lightning and a loud explosion. A deep rumble followed, shaking their bones.

"Fittingly dramatic. A sign from God do you think?" The masked man laughed. " _Live free or die_. I think New Hampshire's motto? One of those tiny states. But a slogan that is central to the value of our short existence."

He turned the weapon in his hands, removing the magazine, checking the chamber, and reinserting the box.

"Imagine a prison so intricately constructed that the inmates believe themselves free. The slaves cannot see their chains. When you're one of the few to see through the deceptions to the heart of this darkness, most of the time you go mad, or cynical, or do something stupid and get the forces in control to erase you. That was nearly my fate."

Cohen leaned against Savas and rested her head on his shoulder. Miller squirmed vainly in his restraints.

"But knowing what I know, it's clear that the infection _must_ be sterilized. Like cancer, the treatment will be horrific. It may kill the patient. Indeed, humanity may never rise again. And that might just be for the better, you know? Anyway, it won't be for any of us to see, but for those a thousand years down the road. If any civilization rises from these ashes." Fawkes motioned to the guard beside him, who stepped forward and raised his weapon. "Sorry for the pain, but it will all be over quickly."

He raised his weapon and aimed at Savas. "Goodbye."

There was another bright flash and deafening sound. But this wasn't the storm.

The platform swayed from the force of a blast, the entire warehouse shuddering violently. Unlike thunder the rumbling was short lived, and debris rained across the interior, pieces of wood and metal thrown as far as the platform surface. The front of the warehouse had been torn apart, crates and other discarded elements shattered and burning. Black smoke filled the room, its turbulent structure illuminated by the raging flames.

Fawkes and the soldier were hurled to the floor of the platform. The soldier's weapon discharged wildly as he fell, but his impact momentarily stunned him and he lost his grip. The gun skipped toward Miller and the back edge of the platform, plunging into darkness below.

Miller used the chaos and struck outward with a blinding kick, catching the man's face full on. There was a cracking sound and the man screamed, rolling to his side as blood streamed into his hands.

Fawkes had stumbled forward and smashed into the railing beside Cohen, his mask shattered, jagged white pieces hanging loosely from the gas mask. Cohen smashed her shoulder into his gun hand, the impact dislodging the weapon and sending it plummeting out of sight.

Fawkes leapt backward, dodging wild kicks from Savas, stumbling into the railing on the other side of the platform. The soldier beside him pulled out a handgun and wiped blood from his broken nose.

"Kill them!" Fawkes cried.

But the soldier didn't even raise his weapon. Two shots exploded from behind them, and the man's head erupted in a soup of blood and flesh. His limp body dropped like a stone, shaking the platform.

A woman's voice called from below. "Don't twitch, masked-boy, or we'll liquefy your big brain, too!"

"Houston!" Cohen cried.

Savas closed his eyes in relief.

There was a clattering from the ladder. A soot-covered woman sprang upward, a pistol in one hand trained on Fawkes' slumped form.

"Got you covered from two angles, asshole, so think before you act." Her eyes darted from the shattered mask in front of her. "You three okay?"

"Yes!" Savas said angrily. "What about the other guards?"

"Killed in the explosion."

The jigsaw face spun toward her. "And Poison?"

"She's gone," said Houston.

Fawkes screamed and lunged at her wildly, his hands a pair of claws aiming for her face. With a pivot, she sidestepped his motion and used her gun arm to bring the butt of the weapon viciously down on the back of his head. He collapsed and didn't move.

Heavy steps sounded as Lopez awkwardly climbed the ladder with his one good arm. He landed roughly and glanced down at the two bodies. He exhaled slowly and smiled at the FBI team. "Better late than never, right?"
NOVEMBER 5
64

# Rome Burns

Armed men ushered President York down a dimly lit flight of stairs. On each side, soldiers took positions with weapons aimed upward, speaking quietly into headsets. Beside her was a lanky, gray-haired man, his face flushed, a sling around his arm. The group reached the bottom, the claustrophobic stairwell opening on a dank tunnel receding into darkness. Its opening was broad, wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. Water leaked out from it to pool at their feet.

"Madam President," said one of the soldiers, "this shaft will take you to the helicopter. Sergeants Holmes and Nesic will accompany you." Two uniformed men stepped beside the president. "We're going to stay here and blow the tunnel if we have to."

"And then what?" asked York.

"We'll hide out. No one knows these emergency tunnels like we do. Everyone made fun of the upkeep. Well, who's laughing now?"

"Be safe, Captain. And thank you. It's good to know I have supporters even in the military."

She grabbed her companion by his good arm and turned to the tunnel. The two other soldiers flanked the civilians and they moved forward, the neon green of glow sticks lighting their way.

"Elaine, how far do you think this is going to go?" asked Tooze.

"The coup?" she asked, pulling out a small handgun. "General Hastings isn't a halfway kinda guy, George. Unless someone puts a stop to him—and I'm not going to dress up what that means—unless someone either arrests or kills the man, we're heading for a full-blown military takeover."

"What will that mean?"

"God only knows," said York, shaking her head. "Kind of in unknown territory there. A centralized command for sure. Suspension of the Constitution and a streamlined civilian authority headed by military personnel. Either they'll get the governors on board or they'll install puppets to run the states—state militias and law enforcement. Once they have the guns under control everything else will fall into place. They're going to marshal the entire national machinery to their power structure beyond the military—NSA, FBI, banks."

"It's really headed toward a dictatorship?"

"It's a rare military coup that ends with a vote."

They continued walking, their shoes muddied and soaked from the brown sludge coating the bottom of the tunnel. "Until this all gets cleared up—and who knows how long that will take—they'll want an iron fist to hold the nation together. I see their point. I really do. I just don't think all of them see how things can go very wrong, very quickly. You walk down some paths and you can't go back."

"Do you think Hastings knows?"

Her eyes flashed intensely toward him. "My greatest fear is that he does, indeed. _Temporary_ may be something only those around him believe. He always had a run of the crazy in him."

The tunnel opened into another cramped chamber, a dull light above revealing a rusted spiral staircase. The walls and metal throbbed from a disturbance above.

"Bird's here," said one of the soldiers.

They scaled the steps, Tooze awkward and often requiring assistance as they climbed, his wounded arm useless. The light grew rapidly near the top.

They exited the emergency tunnels through a hole at the corner of a helipad. The blades of a powerful helicopter thundered overhead, kicking dust and forest foliage into their path. The green and beige camouflage of the machine rose like a wall before them.

"Damn, that's a big one," gasped Tooze.

A soldier smiled. "Sea Stallion, sir. Big mother. She's loaded with an armored transport inside for when we drop you two off the mountain. Entrance in the rear."

The president and the Homeland Security director followed the soldiers around the churning aircraft, heads bowed, hands over their faces to mask the debris. They rushed up a ramp lowered from the back. Several officers and two civilians greeted them inside.

"Ms. President," said a boyish face in a mud-splattered suit. "Let's get you strapped in and get the hell out of here."

York quickly embraced him. "Daniel. So the Secretary of Defense is still with us. With Treasury I think we might just be able to field a government in exile." She smiled toward a statuesque blond in a badly torn white dress

"Ms. President, please," said the Treasury Secretary. "We're sitting ducks."

They made their way around an eight-wheeled armored vehicle with an enormous machine gun. Foldout seats were fixed to the sides of the aircraft. Civilians and soldiers took their places, buckling the belts. The rear door slammed shut.

The Defense Secretary spoke loudly over the growing din of the engines. "We were planning for an off-shore base, but they've seized control of the important carriers. They've got a version of events painting us in a bad light and we won't get safe passage."

"NORAD?" asked York.

"That's the goal. The military and civilian leadership is resisting Hastings there. But it's a ways and we're going to have to regroup with some of the armed forces loyal to you."

"Should I call them all Loyalists, now?"

The Defense Secretary didn't smile. "It's chaos out there, Elaine. The whole system is coming unglued. We've got anarchy in the streets and a governmental split. We need numbers and weapons to make it to Colorado."

York felt the tug on her stomach as the giant bird went airborne. "No arguments from me, Daniel. This is going to be ugly and long."

One of the soldiers gazed out of a window beside him and whistled. "Goddamn. The admin building's blown! I can see fires across Mount Weather!"

The president released her belt and steadied herself beside the young man, staring grimly through the glass. "Fighting has started."

Tooze shook his head. "I can't believe it's come to this! We're turning on each other. First the riots in Washington. New York by now, I guess. And now this."

York continued to look down at the retreat site, her words cold.

"Rome burns."
65

# The Nash Criterion

How they had made it back to Intel 1 was as much by miracle as by the muscle they were forced to use. Between National Guard roadblocks and bands of rioters roaming the city streets, they'd had to rely on force on three occasions. In one engagement, they'd killing several armed gang members who'd tried to carjack them. It was a scene Savas had never imagined living through, firing weapons in the middle of the day on mobs swarming them in the heart of the city. The relative safety of the Javits building suddenly seemed like a haven in a growing storm.

The staff left at the FBI building were frazzled and leaderless. The brass had fled, either called to other duties or frightened for their own skins in the anarchy spreading across the island. Savas pulled the remaining personnel from normal functions and organized them into guards at all entrances to the building. The last thing he was going to let happen was for some random group of thugs to undo all that they had accomplished.

They had Fawkes. _Alive_. And now they were going to make him stop this unfolding catastrophe, or show them how to.

"He looks like a damn kid," said Miller, glaring at the man slumped handcuffed on the couch in Savas' office.

The masks were gone. A dark-haired cipher rested calmly before them, his eyes closed behind cracked smart glasses, his voice strangely controlled given his situation.

"How's the battle out there, agents?"

Cohen stared through the large window in the office down to the streets of New York. She spoke sadly. "People are dying. Many suffering. Some accomplishments you've racked up."

"Simon's gone," Savas said. "JP's critical. Good people you're not worthy of, Fawkes."

"I meant in the matrix. Where's that Angel girl?"

Lightfoote sat clacking over a laptop. "Here, boy-genius. Look for yourself."

She turned the screen around toward him furiously as he opened his eyes. With a groan he raised his head slightly, blood still coating the back of his neck from the blow Houston had landed.

"Nice shoulders," he said. "Drop that bikini top and we're in business."

"The red lines are my immune worms. The blue yours. Fucking kicking your sorry ass."

He lay back and smirked. "Going to go twelve rounds, I think. Fuck, that's beautiful, you bitch. Never imagined anyone would be that crazy."

Houston and Lopez entered the crowded office in a rush. "Okay, we've got people at the main entry points. But it's a weak job. Some are just secretaries, for God's sake! They'll fold quickly under any real assault."

Savas nodded. "Hopefully there won't be one. In the meantime, Fawkes, or whoever the hell you really are, we need to make sure Angel's code wins. We need you to shut your worms down or tell us how to do so." He pulled a chair up and placed a foot on it, leaning toward the hacker. "No good cop, bad cop. It's all bad, today. You don't look like you'd last five minutes with Frank."

"He wouldn't make it through one," growled Miller.

"So you're going to talk to us."

Fawkes laughed. "You think I built an off switch? You _fools_. This was _it_. This was meant to go the distance. You can kick me, drown me, get me to do whatever or say whatever. I'll even pretend two plus two is five for you. I'll get on a terminal and tell you I'm fixing everything. If you hurt me enough, I might even believe it myself. But it will be for nothing. _A lie_. Because I didn't build that worm to come home. No one can call it back."

"Son of a bitch," said Miller.

Fawkes continued. "You should _thank_ me. You all should thank me for finally driving a stake into the world's vampires. You—"

"Shut up!" yelled Savas. "I'm not in the mood for more of your crazy."

"But I didn't even tell you the best part," said Fawkes, grin wide. "Paranoid? The best part is that I can _show_ you."

"Show us what?" asked Savas.

"The truth. The truth I discovered hacking through the financial systems. The truth that they couldn't conceal from me. I know _who_ they are. I know where they're working from!"

Savas narrowed his eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Bilderberg." Fawkes sighed.

Cohen spun around. "What did you say?"

"Bilderberg."

Savas turned to Cohen. "What's that?"

Cohen approached Fawkes, removing her glasses. "The Bilderberg Group. It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream. The biggest economic conference in the world. Center of Europe. Centuries old. Private. Secretive. No transcripts. No records. World leaders, industry magnates, academic powerhouses, media moguls. Bipartisan support in the nutcase-community that they are the real force running the world."

"That's the _nexus_ ," said Fawkes, eyes alight. He pushed himself up and stood before them, postured stooped. "But it's like an octopus. And it's real. Let me show you! Take these cuffs off. The next part is what is really—"

There was a pop and tinkling of glass. Fawkes froze, the top half of his head blown apart, a crimson spray painting the wall behind him. His mouth hung ajar, his finger raised to make a point. Instead he dropped to the floor.

"Down! Everyone down!" yelled Savas.

Miller had moved alongside the wall, weapon held beside his head. He approached the window.

"Sniper round," he said, examining the hole. "Long distance shot. A professional." He lowered his gun. "He got his man."

Houston came alongside him to get her own look, keeping her body away from the window. "Now I'm feeling a bit paranoid, myself."

"He's dead." Cohen was bent down beside the body, sidestepping the blood seeping into the carpet. "You don't think—?"

Lopez cut in. "That someone from a mysterious organization running the world killed him so he wouldn't spill their secrets?"

She exhaled. "If you put it like that—"

Lightfoote stared at her laptop screen, speaking slowly. "No, you'd need enormous resources. You'd really have to be an octopus in every major corner of the civilized world. Perhaps eavesdropping on our conversations to know how close we had come. In the middle of all this chaos."

Savas turned to his cybercrimes head. "Angel?"

"But maybe if you were a truly paranoid anarchist, you might do something strange. You might know this phantom group was after you. You might build in a contingency in case they got to you. Some kind of Armageddon fail-safe."

"What are you talking about, Angel?" asked Cohen.

Lightfoote looked up from her computer. "Got an email as few seconds after the shot," she said, glancing down at the body of Fawkes. "From him."

Savas shook his head. "How could Fawkes send you an email? He's dead."

"Read it. You'll see."

Savas took the laptop and held it up to his face. He read out loud.

> " _Hi Angel baby, if you got this, well, I'm toast. Linked to my heart rate, so I must be dead. I hate it when that happens! Sorry for trying to kill you, but don't take it personally: just the business of rebooting the world, you know? You're one annoying bitch. That's why this is for you. Things are much worse than you think. Only a few of us know the truth, and if you're reading this, we're all likely dead by now. Attached is an encrypted file: you might be able to crack it. If so, you've earned a shot at glory. Good luck. You'll need it._ "

Savas looked at Lightfoote. "Where's the file?"

"Scroll down to the end of the email."

Savas swiped his fingers on the trackpad.

"The Nash Criterion. What the hell does that mean?"

The office phone rang.

"I thought phones were down," said Lopez, removing his gun.

"This is an internal line. From the front desk. I'll put it on speaker."

A loud rasping sounded from the phone. Someone on the other end wheezed and spoke with a death's rattle: "They're coming. The stairways. Get out. They've shot everyone."

Explosions sounded and the line went dead.

"Let's move!" cried Lopez. He and Houston sprang through the doorway.

They left the body of Fawkes behind, Lightfoote pulling a USB stick out of the computer but leaving the laptop on the desk. She pocketed the stick and drew a gun.

The six moved down the hallway, passing empty offices and abandoned desks, Cohen lumbering on her crutches. They reached the center of the floor just as the elevator doors opened. A group of men in combat gear stepped out.

"Behind the cubicles!" hissed Savas.

They crouched low, Miller and Savas pointing weapons forward, Cohen looking behind them with a puzzled expression on her face.

"Where—" she began but was cut off by the blaring of a bullhorn.

"FBI Intel 1 division! We are United States forces here to apprehend you and the fugitives! Come out with your hands raised or we will be forced to engage!"

A deep stillness settled over the room. Miller touched Savas on the shoulder. "We're not going to overpower these guys, John," he whispered, his expression grave. "Whoever they really are, we're outgunned and outnumbered."

Thoughts racing, Savas considered his options. He was given little time.

"Last warning, Agent Savas. We know you have the terrorist. Hand him over, come out with your hands over your head and you might live!"

"He's dead!" cried Savas. "The hacker is dead in my office. We're coming out." He placed his hands on the weapons of Cohen and Miller beside him. "Put the weapons down. We'll figure a way out of this later."

_Lopez and Houston!_ He had to keep them calm, stop them from doing anything stupid. He spun around, but they were gone.

His eyes met Cohen's. "Where?"

"Angel, too," she whispered. "I don't know where."

"Agent Savas, come forward with your hands in the air!"

Savas placed his weapon on the ground and stood. He faced a group of ten men. Miller and Cohen followed suit. The soldiers aimed weapons in their direction. One called out loudly as several approached them from the sides.

"Under the authority of Directive 51 and the Military Commissions Act, you are under arrest as unlawful combatants, subject to indefinite detention and a hearing before a tribunal. You are hereby stripped of your Constitutional rights and all rank and privilege. Follow all instructions precisely and rapidly or risk the use of force."

They were cuffed and led into the elevators. Frantically, Savas scanned the room a last time, desperately trying to locate Lightfoote and the others. But it was empty. He saw no sign of them.

The doors closed.
BEFORE:

THE ANONYMOUS EVENT COMMISSION

* * *

DEPOSITION IN THE MATTER OF:

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES SPECIAL TRIBUNAL, Plaintiff,

versus

JOHN SAVAS, Defendant

Case No. M120039E-007X

* * *

CONTINUED DEPOSITION OF:

**John Savas**

CBD: And this was the last you saw of agent Lightfoote or of the two fugitives?

MR. SAVAS: That's correct.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And so we are really intended to believe that these three simply vanished before a group of trained soldiers? That you were so caught up in the moment of your arrest that you even failed to notice their departure?

MR. SAVAS: That's how it happened.

* * *

CBD: But why would they leave?

MR. SAVAS: Lopez and Houston had some good reasons. They were framed for crimes they did not commit. I think they must have thought of a way out.

* * *

CBD: How could these two know a way out of your building?

MR. SAVAS: I assume Angel told them. Probably it was her idea in the first place. There wasn't much time for decisions. And she always had a sixth sense about outcomes.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And now the explanation is that your cybercrimes head, after releasing a rogue virus through the world's computer systems, after taking secret documents with her, documents sent by the hacker Fawkes—your claim is that her escape with the fugitives was due to her magical ability to see the future! That the reason she helped the terrorists escape is due to some kind of a _vision_. A vision _,_ agent Savas!

MR. SAVAS: I don't know about a vision. What I do know is she makes spontaneous and intuitive choices. They are usually the right choices.

* * *

[REDACTED]: This is absurd!

MR. SAVAS: So what is the Tribunal's theory?

* * *

CBD: This isn't the time, Mr. Savas for—

* * *

[REDACTED]: Our theory is quite simple. And like Occam's Razor, is what is likely true. It doesn't involve fortune telling or wishing away the documented crimes of outlaws. It doesn't require an imaginary hacker-boogieman who single-handedly brought the world to its knees. The Tribunal believes that you and your collaborators in the NSA and CIA, along with the nation's most wanted terrorists, orchestrated an attempt to overthrow the United States government, a plan carried out under the guise of this _Anonymous_ organization, but masterminded by you and your cybercrime head, Angel Lightfoote. This Fawkes was only a mask, not worn by some invented hacker, but masking your crimes, Mr. Savas. When your attempt at sedition was finally stopped by our soldiers, you allowed your fugitives and computer mastermind to escape, stalling our team while they made their getaway.

MR. SAVAS: You really can't be serious.

* * *

[REDACTED]: And now the time has come for you to confess and work to bring these traitors in, or to meet yourself the swift hand of justice.

* * *

CBD: Mr. Savas, please. Is there nothing that you can provide for this tribunal about their whereabouts? Their intentions? Their plans?

MR. SAVAS: You know as much as I do.

CBD: Anything at all?

MR. SAVAS: No.

* * *

CBD: And what about this message from the hacker, this file. What is in it? What does it mean, the _Nash Criterion_?

MR. SAVAS: I have absolutely no idea. And that is the God's honest truth.

* * *

[REDACTED]: Enough. This session is concluded. The depositions are over. We will move to the next phase of this process. And may God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Savas.

(THE DEPOSITION WAS CONCLUDED AT 2:19 P.M. SIGNATURE OF THE WITNESS WAS NOT REQUESTED BY COUNSEL FOR THE RESPECTIVE PARTIES HERETO.)

* * *

CERTIFICATE OF NOTARY

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

* * *

I, [REDACTED], CERTIFY THAT THIS DEPOSITION WAS TAKEN BEFORE ME ON THE DATE HEREINBEFORE SET FORTH; THAT THE FOREGOING QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WERE RECORDED BY ME STENOGRAPHICALLY AND REDUCED TO COMPUTER TRANSCRIPTION; THAT THIS IS A TRUE, FULL AND CORRECT TRANSCRIPT OF MY STENOGRAPHIC NOTES SO TAKEN; AND THAT I AM NOT RELATED TO, NOR OF COUNSEL TO, EITHER PARTY NOR INTERESTED IN THE EVENT OF THIS CAUSE.

A penny loaf to feed ol' Pope

A farthing cheese to choke him

A pint of beer to rinse it down

A faggot of sticks to burn him

* * *

Burn him in a tub of tar

Burn him like a blazing star

Burn his body from his head

Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.

* * *

—English Folk Verse (c.1870)

_O Conspiracy,_

_Sham'st thou to show thy dang'rous brow by night,_

_When evils are most free?_

> William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar
Part I

# Old World Order

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." -Theodore Roosevelt
1

# Hotline

"W _ill there be anything else, Elaine?"_

_Tipping her bifocals down, President York looked up from the mass of papers on her desk in the Oval Office. Before her stood a lanky man in a formal business suit, white hair and blue eyes staring back._

_"No, George," she said, rubbing her eyes. "A crazy week. I'm sorry about the Senate vote. It's a slap in the face to me that they held it up as long as they did. In the end it wasn't even close. You deserved better."_

_George Tooze nodded. "Homeland Security is a macho position. They don't want some academic heading it. But it's done. Onward."_

_"Onward indeed, George," she said, gesturing to her desk._

_Tooze motioned to leave but caught himself, turning back to the president._

_"It was something today, Elaine. I remember when Obama was sworn in. First African-American president. Now this. No one will forget your speech. It will be in the history books."_

_"We've come a long way, baby. But if I hadn't been in boots and fatigues? Wouldn't have scratched that glass ceiling. So much fear out there. They don't care if you've got a law degree from Harvard, served in the Senate ten years, hell, even that your daddy was in that chamber. People need_ Daddy _in the White House. Richard was a genius to use my military photos so much in the campaign. I think I ran mostly as a soldier!"_

_"You have a large base. A strong one. And we'll use that, don't you worry. We just had to convince enough fence sitters. And we did. Congratulations, Ms. President. You've earned it."_

_He smiled and closed the door behind him as he left. York watched him exit the White House and step toward a black town car idling in the driveway. It was good to have such loyal supporters early on. If you didn't, when things got rough, you were in trouble. And Elaine York didn't fool herself—in this business, sooner or later, things always got rough._

_A large phone at the far end of the desk vibrated._

_"You're kidding me."_

_York stared dumbfounded. The device was a military-grade smartphone, a one-of-a-kind custom gadget with cutting-edge voice and data encryption, designed specifically for one job: to serve as the President's communication device of convenience for hotline calls._

Hotline calls.

_More than twenty bilateral hotlines existed between the United States and other nations. The famous Russian hotline was complimented with many spanning allies in Europe to frenemies in Asia and the Middle East. The phone was not supposed to buzz except when the White House Communications Agency had received and was routing a call from one of these nations' leaders. York felt the weight of her office descend like a mountain on her shoulders._

_She grabbed the device and keyed in her unique code. "President Elaine York on Direct Link."_

_Static only. York engaged several additional security clearance codes. Nothing. Her heart began to pound. They checked this line every hour of every day! How could it be malfunctioning?_

_A pop of static startled her. A man's voice spoke._

_"President York. It is so good to finally be able to speak with you."_

_York felt cold. She had run simulations with the hotline communication system. Procedures were followed, protocols in place. She should be speaking with White House Communications. She should be briefed and transferred to the incoming hotline call. What the hell was happening?_

_"Please don't be alarmed."_

_"Who is this? You aren't WHCA."_

_"No, we are not. We are not a formal part of the US government. Or any government."_

_York stared slack-jawed for a moment. "How the hell did you get this number? Who are you?"_

_"The answers to both questions are intertwined. You need to discover those answers before your presidency continues much further."_

_"Look, I don't know what this—"_

_"There is someone waiting for you underground. At the new Cogcon Line. I think that he will peak your curiosity."_

_"How do you know—"_

_"We know and we have access. Which should tell you all you need to know."_

_York blinked. "You have access to the train line?"_

_"Rest assured, Ms. York, your gleaming new railway is still a secret, known only to the proper governmental agencies. And our group."_

_"Who are you?"_

_"It is best we explain in a different setting."_

_"Why should I trust this? You could be luring me into a trap. I'm going to call—"_

_"Friendly fire, Ms. President!"_

_Her face paled. Elaine York stared forward wildly and swallowed. "What did you say?"_

_"Battle of Khafji. Terrible accident. Was it eleven servicemen died? You were assigned to that unit, weren't you?"_

_"In a non-combat role. Everyone knows that! Women weren't allowed to serve in combat roles then."_

_"But we both know the truth, don't we, Ms. York? Your actions were noble, truly. But of course it's not me you would have to convince. You and several other soldiers resisted some men in uniform who were out of control. The ensuing firefight was a tragedy." He paused. "And easily misconstrued. It would be terrible for your presidency if certain information were released to the public."_

_She squeezed her fingertips to her temple. This wasn't happening!_

_"The Cogcon line, Ms. President. Try at least that far. Someone will be waiting for you."_

_The connection closed._

_In a near panic, York opened the trap door underneath her desk and descended into the Horsepower command post. It was empty. She searched for the Secret Service staff who manned the post, but found no one. Monitors around her displayed camera footage from inside and outside the building. Communications equipment crackled and blinked. A filled coffee pot steamed beside several unopened sandwiches._

_"What the hell?"_

_Continuing was insane. This was an attack on the Presidency. Only an idiot would follow the directions from that cipher on the hotline._

Friendly fire.

_She couldn't escape it. It would ruin her, strip her presidency of all moral authority and hand her opponents the perfect weapon to discredit her. Whoever had been on the other end of the line, they had terrible knowledge—dangerous knowledge, and the power that came with it. She had nowhere to go but forward, into the trap they had set for her._

_She made her way through several of the hidden passageways leading to the classified rail line. Outside the deepest military and governmental circles, the new train was only a distorted rumor. The line served to secrete the president and staff deep underground, away from the White House in the event of a national catastrophe. As she opened the final doorway with a retinal scan, she saw the gleaming metallic surface of the presidential car in front of her, the hum of the electric motor purring softly._

_A tall black man in a sweater looked down at her solemnly._

_"Hello, Elaine," came his deep voice._

_York stared up at the former community organizer, his hair completely grayed, his shoulders stooped and his gait limping. He looked old. He looked defeated. He looked mournful._

_"Barack?"_
2

# Sewers

"Those were _soldiers!"_ said Houston. "We need to go back!"

The three stood in a stairwell, two flights down from Intel 1. The hacker Fawkes had just been killed in the office of John Savas—his head blown open from a sniper shot through the window. Sara Houston and Francisco Lopez had fled along with the remaining FBI agents, only to have Angel Lightfoote pull them to the side and toward a glowing EXIT sign.

_"Trust me!_ " she had whispered without further explanation.

For reasons Houston would never fully understand, she had. In a split second decision, she had followed the bald woman into the stairwell, Lopez behind them. They glimpsed at the last moment a group of soldiers pour from the elevators with weapons drawn.

Browning in hand, Houston began to climb the stairs. The muscled arm of Lightfoote held her back.

"We can't!" she said. "There isn't time! They'll be looking for us. They'll know soon we're not with them."

Houston nodded. "We're wanted fugitives, I get it. But they've risked everything with us. I'm not going to abandon them now."

Lightfoote shook her head. "Not for you. For me!" She removed a thumb drive from her pocket and brandished it at Houston. "Fawkes's email and attachment. They want this! We can't let them have it. Not until we know what it is." Houston's pause was all the assent Lightfoote required. "Now, let's move!"

The FBI agent bounded down the stairs like a spider. Houston glared at Lopez who shrugged, and they followed after her, both struggling to keep up.

"Subbasement?" rasped Houston, glancing at the signs over the doorways.

Lightfoote landed heavily from a jump. "Yes."

A door was ajar, the stairway ending in a dank and musty corner. The smell of rotten eggs assaulted them. Lopez grabbed Lightfoote with his good arm, the sling on the other soaked in sweat.

"Where are we going?"

Houston scowled at the dimly lit passageway in front of them. "The goddam sewers. That's where."

Lightfoote nodded. "These huge buildings produce a lot of shit. There's got to be a connection to New York's underground rivers. If we can get access, we can follow it to some of the manhole connections—maybe find one they haven't welded shut. Come up on street level somewhere a little downstream." She turned on the flashlight app of her smartphone. "There has to be an access door down here somewhere."

There was. After several tense minutes of searching around pumps and other machinery, they found an iron hatch opening to the main sewer line. It required all the strength Lopez had left to pry it open, but soon they scrambled into the dark bowels of the city. A knee-high river of waste greeted them.

"Glad we skipped lunch," said Lopez, holding his hand to his mouth.

Houston stopped Lightfoote with her hand.

"Okay, before we go any further, hacker girl, what the hell is going on? Who were those soldiers? What do you know?"

Lightfoote cocked her head to the side. "I don't know. I feel it. Fawkes opened up Pandora's Box, Sara. Bad things came out. The soldiers came out. They're part of it. We have to see what's in this file. That's what they want. That's why he was killed."

"But you don't even know what's in that file!"

"Fawkes was a crazy bastard. That's what I know. But we had a kind of sick relationship." Lightfoote stared down into the darkness of the tunnel. "Whatever's in this, it was everything to him. It's why he did it all, brought the fucking world to its knees. He was trying to kill something. Something in this file."

"This Bilderberg?"

"Maybe," said Lightfoote.

Lopez shook his head. "And you think he's right? You think his death and those soldiers are somehow related to this?"

"Yes," she said. "Let's just give ourselves the chance to find out, get a look at this, okay? Before they whisk us off to some dungeon somewhere."

Houston stared into the green eyes before her. "Some dungeon? So that's what's going to happen to them? We left them to that?"

"I don't know for sure."

"But you feel it." Lopez crossed himself. "God be with them. I know what the monsters do in those dungeons. I've seen the product up close." He passed his finger over the stigmata on his forehead.

"All right," said Houston. "Let's get out of here. Get back to the apartment in Harlem. We've got computers. Internet access—to whatever's left of it. We'll see what we can find out there. And we better find something. Or we abandoned them for nothing."

An old Chinese couple crossing the street jumped backward and scampered away as a manhole cover rocketed into the air and landed several feet away from the dark hole. The iron disk wobbled like a giant coin to a ringing stop.

A bald woman in combat fatigues leapt out of the manhole, landing heavily on her feet. She drew a pistol and scanned around her, body in a tense crouch. Two others followed: a second woman covered in black, giving a hand to a large man in a flowing coat nursing his left shoulder.

Chinatown was empty, the old couple having thought better of continuing their walk. Shops around them were boarded up, many looted, debris and trash littering the roads and sidewalks. As the sun began to dip below the ridge of buildings in lower Manhattan, the three of them raced out of the road and into the alleyways, disappearing like silent shadows into the falling night.
3

# Rendered

The nightmare began as soon as they exited the FBI Jarvits building. Savas glimpsed several black vans and military issue trucks parked outside, armed men lining the perimeter. Soldiers marched them in file to the convoy like prisoners of war, hostile eyes tracking their movements, weapons in plain sight and at the ready.

As they approached the vans they were separated, each directed to a different vehicle. Savas had only an instant to stare into Cohen's eyes before the men jerked fabric over his head, leaving him in claustrophobic darkness. They cuffed his arms behind him, then roughly shoved him forward. He stumbled into the vehicle, smashing his forehead. A foot thrust him tightly into the corner and knocked the wind out of him.

"Shut up and don't move, and I won't have to use this."

Savas could hear the static crackle of a Taser inches from his face.

Several heavy bodies dropped into seats around him before the door slammed shut. The engine turned over and the vehicle lurched forward into the streets of New York.

With no visual input his brain had nothing to offset the choppy movements of the drive. Growing nausea churned his stomach into a painful knot. He tried visualizing images with the movements, always a step behind, the effort hardly compensating. _God help me from getting sick in this bag._

He tried to guess their direction, the streets taken, hoping to learn where these men were taking them. But he failed. Within minutes, the vehicle's jerky maneuvers had scrambled his sense of direction.

He guessed it had been half an hour when the van stopped abruptly, throwing his face into the chair in front of him. The impact gave him a black eye, and he tasted copper from a busted lip. Unable to wipe his face, the blood dripped through the hood.

"He's a bleeder!" cried a man standing over him.

Laughter erupted. Arms hoisted him roughly to his feet and flung him out of the van. He forced himself not to gasp as his shoulder smacked the concrete. Pulling up slowly, he spit blood. _Focus, John._ He tried to slow his heart rate. He breathed deeply.

_The sea._

The thick taste of brine and marine life penetrated the hood. The gull cries and sounds of waves told him all he needed to know. He'd been taken to a port, likely in lower Manhattan given the travel time. Boots rang on thin metal as a massive object thudded gently into the space before him.

_A boat._

His other senses were primed, hearing and touch sharpened. He sensed the vessel and its weight rocking on the waves, knocking against the dock.

_They're taking me out to sea._

They stowed him roughly below deck, his wrists chained to the wall, the pitch of the boat sending another wave of nausea through him. They still hadn't removed the hood, the fabric now glued to his face from clotted blood. He didn't dare show any weakness or ask for aid. Whoever these men worked for, they had been instructed to treat him like the worst terrorist suspect. The implications sent a chill through him as he thought about Cohen and Miller, and what fate awaited them all.

At least he knew they would be together. The three had been split up, either for security or psychological warfare. Perhaps both. But their captors weren't careful enough. He'd heard the high-pitched sounds of a woman's voice— _Rebecca's voice_ —as she cried out, an impact sounding from her hitting the deck heavily. _She's on board._ But he couldn't let himself dwell on what had happened to her. He had to focus, keep his wits about him, and discover all he could that might aid in an escape.

But he wasn't fooling himself. He'd known too many rendered terrorists, read too many reports, and could appraise professionally their situation. Statistically, escape was all but impossible. Only a handful had been recorded. As he fought off the bile climbing in his throat, he forced himself to face the truth—any attempts to escape, should they ever present themselves, would almost certainly end in failure. Probably in death.

_We'll have to work with them._ A recipe for Stockholm Syndrome. But the only hope for freedom, for survival, lay with their captors. Hope depended on meeting the desires of those now controlling their lives. Part of him wanted simply to resist, to find an opportunity to make a last stand and take down as many of them with him as he could.

_But I'm not alone. Rebecca's here._ Such a selfish death would not only break her heart, but would seriously endanger her life. He had to swallow his pride, his anger, suppress the desire to strike out. He had to act calmly. Shrewdly. He had to find a way to bring his captors to his side and convince them to release them. But without knowing who had taken him or why, it was impossible to know what to do, or how likely such efforts were to succeed.

The boat moved. He felt the random vectors of pitch, roll, and yaw from the waves give way to a clear direction. The sounds of powerful engines vibrated through the walls of the vessel. Kerosene fumes began to choke him.

The ship left the dock, but headed where, or why, he couldn't guess.
4

# Pandora's Box

"Holy shit! Look at this!"

Lightfoote leapt across the cluttered floor of the dilapidated brownstone, holding a laptop in the air as she approached Houston and Lopez.

"A second, fly-girl," said Houston, eyes focused on the deep wound in Lopez's shoulder.

Lightfoote stared at the hulking form of the former priest, shaking her head. _Damn._ Even in the middle of everything else, he _was_ distracting. His shirt removed, he resembled a bodybuilder more than a former math teacher. His pecs flared and his lats striated as he tensed from the pain. She watched Houston finish applying ointment and seal the wound with taped gauze.

"Healing?" she asked, impressed with the CIA agent's field dressing.

Lopez grabbed his shirt and stood. Houston exhaled. "Yeah, he heals fast. But it was an ugly gash. High caliber round ran like a spear through the muscle. But it's closing well. Just need to keep it from infection. Couple weeks and he'll be back in the ring."

"Well, if blowing up bad guys gets boring, he's got a career modeling for the Priest Calendar."

Lopez smirked and turned away, slipping his shirt slowly over his head. Lightfoote's gaze followed him as he walked to the window and stared outside.

"So, where's the fire," said Houston.

Lightfoote crouched and placed her laptop on the floor, turning the screen toward Houston. A series of colored strands ran across a map of the world in a diabolically complicated web. _More and more,_ my _web._

"Remember this map?"

Houston nodded. "Yeah, your worm versus Fawkes's. Yours were red? Looks like you've turned the tide."

"Right?" Lightfoote grinned softly. "At this rate, just a few weeks and the danger's gone. Well, millions of computers may still be infected. But my code isn't going anywhere. It'll take down any further attempts of his to spread. Best case scenario: we'll just have a few years of flare ups before we can hunt down the last copies."

"Congratulations, Angel," said Houston, rubbing her temples. "You need a medal or something."

Lightfoote breathed deeply. "Well, that's the good news."

Lopez turned around and walked over to the pair. "Sounded much too positive given current events. What else?"

"World's gone to shit. Communication's spotty from overseas. Media's mostly down and what's up is just broadcasting propaganda."

"Propaganda?" said Lopez, crouching down and looking at the screen.

Lightfoote opened a series of windows. Headlines from newspapers appeared online alongside video from ashen-faced newscasters.

"A presidential _coup?"_ said Houston.

Lopez touched a window filled with text. "York claimed emergency powers and dismissed Congress? Nation-wide martial law?"

"I told you it was Pandora's Box," said Lightfoote. "Times article has the most details. York annulled the constitution and suspended civilian courts. Half the military's gone over with her, claiming extraordinary wartime powers. The other half is protecting members of Congress and attempting to end the coup." She leaned back on her hands and looked between the pair. "Basically we're in civil war, if you believe this."

Lopez eyed her sharply. "Do you?"

"There's a war on, that's for sure." She gestured at the screen. "The public opinion damage control is in full swing. But York, a dictator?"

Houston nodded, locking eyes with Lightfoote. "We met her. Only for a few minutes, but you learn a lot about someone when bullets and bombs are blasting around you. I didn't see dictator in her."

"I agree," said Lopez. "But if we're right, how do we explain this?"

"Assume there is a coup," said Lightfoote, "but not led by York. What if in the chaos Fawkes unleashed someone else decided to play Beautiful Leader?"

"Right," said Houston. "They'd need to sell their narrative. Slander York as the rebel, turn the population against her."

"Which means they don't have her," said Lopez.

"Not yet, anyway," said Lightfoote, pleased her new companions were so quick on the uptake. "But one thing's for sure, we're in a bad zone."

Lopez cocked his head at her. "The press slant?"

"If they're being fed this shit, we're in hostile territory." Lightfoote put her hands in her lap. "You said you left York at Mount Weather. That's Virginia?"

Houston nodded. "Seemed safe at the time. Didn't count on our government eating itself."

Lopez laughed. "Maybe it shouldn't surprise us. They sure have been quick to eat their own to cover dirty laundry. We know about that." Houston winced, and he reached out, stroking her hair. Houston cupped his hand.

Lightfoote looked between the two, her voice raw. "Let's hope the battle lines are drawn there."

"And if they aren't?" asked Houston. "If York's inside enemy territory?"

"Then we'd better hope she got the hell out."

The three sat in silence for several minutes. Videos of carnage and chaos looped on the laptop screen. Lightfoote fought to suppress the vague visions percolating within her. What had Savas called it? _Intuition_. Something Kanter and Savas had found useful to the Bureau. For Lightfoote, it was something else entirely. _Hypersensitive_. As painful as it was protective. Once burned, one detected even the slightest heat. And right now, the world was on fire.

"All right, been avoiding this one. There's even more bad news," Lightfoote paused. "I've tracked our friends."

"How?" asked Houston. "Not their phones. We made sure to use phones without GPS."

"Lots of ways to triangulate if enough towers are up. They're coming back online." Lightfoote entered several keystrokes, closed other windows and opened a map of the Eastern seaboard. A white circle blinked in the Atlantic, centered in a triangle of dots. "That's Rebecca's phone. John's and Frank's aren't responding. I assume they were taken, probably destroyed. Maybe Rebecca managed to hide hers, stow it somewhere."

"A bit of luck in a sea of disaster," said Lopez. "And speaking of _sea_ —what the hell is her phone signal doing there?"

"Remember Fawkes?" said Houston. "He wanted to base his operations at sea to avoid the chaos he produced. Maybe our coup leader had the same idea."

Lopez leaned back and grunted. "But if they're out there, it's not on an armored yacht. If this is a military coup, our friends are likely secured on a naval destroyer."

"Complicates a rescue mission," said Lightfoote. Her stomach churned.

Houston shook her head. "Makes it _impossible_ , Angel." She placed a hand on Lightfoote's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

Lightfoote stood and removed the thumb drive from her pocket, pushing the conversation from her mind. "So we deal with this, what we can. Maybe it's the key to solving our crises, and finding our friends."

"Assuming you can get into it," said Houston. "Didn't Fawkes taunt you that it was encrypted?"

"I've tried. It's not going to be easy." Lightfoote set her jaw. "But I've got some ideas. In fact, a bunch of people have a bunch of ideas."
5

# The Brig

The engines shifted to different pitch, the powerful thrust easing as the ship slowed to a stop in the dead of night. Savas remained handcuffed to the wall in the bowels of the boat. He'd seen no one in the hours since they left him there and heard no sounds but the machines churning around him.

The nausea had passed, his body having adapted to the ship's rocking. Exhausted, unable to sleep or relax with his hands chained high on the wall, he swayed upright, muscles ceaselessly contracting to keep his balance, his body unable to rest a moment during the journey. His wrists bled from the repeated trauma of rubbing against the cuffs, blood trickling down his arms. Classic protocols designed to strip him of any power to resist.

_And it's working._

For the first time in many hours, he heard human sounds. Footsteps clanged along a metal stairwell somewhere near his cell, boots banging down the outside corridor. A door opened with a grating wail. His hood was yanked off, the clotted blood ripping like weak glue. Light assaulted him.

"That's the one," came a voice from the blinding radiance.

Before he could discern more than the blurred outlines of bulky forms in front of him, they slipped the hood tightly over his head again. Strong arms grasped his wrists, unlocked the shackles, and twisted his hands painfully behind his back, cuffing him again.

"Move!"

They shoved him forward harshly through the doorway. And kept shoving him forward until he ran his shoulder into a metal bar. His ankle felt a platform. _A stairway?_

"Climb!"

Awkwardly, blind, he stretched out his foot and planted on the first step. He ascended by sense of touch alone, slipping on several occasions only to find himself shoved upward from behind, once with the barrel of a weapon placed against his neck.

"Stop!"

He'd reached the top of the stairwell. Heavy vibrations on metal accompanied the sounds of more soldiers approaching.

"What the fuck, Harrison? Haven't you ever taken prisoners before? Cuff the hands in front, dumb-ass! How the hell are we going to link the chain?"

They freed his hands and moved them around to his belt buckle, cuffing him again with a heavy chain latched to the restraints. The first tug nearly sent him sprawling, but he stumbled forward, trying to keep slack in the chain.

"Keep up, traitor! Or you're going overboard to the sharks."

The roar of the sea overpowered him—the crash of waves against the hull of the boat. Wind kicked up wildly, spraying sea across his hood. They'd reached the deck.

Denied vision for so long, his other senses began to paint phantom portraits. He sensed something looming over them as they dragged him forward, images of high walls and cliffs forming in his mind. The wind blew from the opposite direction, blocked completely by something massive and tall, a thing so large it seemed to block the sounds of the waves and reflect it back into their faces. He began to perceive a deep throbbing as if building from within his bones themselves—a gigantic motor churning beneath the waves.

A loud crash startled him, and the deck shook.

"Walk!"

Pushed forward, he stepped off the deck of the ship and onto another metallic platform, a gangplank of some sort. It bridged the gap between the boat and something far larger, a sea-going island of metal approaching like the mouth of a cave.

He toppled down, the plank ending without warning and an empty space swallowing his foot. He stumbled onto a much more solid surface, the sound of movement and laughter above him.

"Enough!" came a commanding voice. "Get him to the brig!"

Arms hoisted Savas, then pushed him forward down a secession of stairwells, through a series of heavy doors sealing like airlocks, and finally into a tight space with grill-work for walls.

_The brig._

Again they left him cuffed to the wall, the chain hanging heavily along his arms, hood still cloaking his vision and nearly suffocating him. He wondered if the others would be brought here as well, but he knew it unlikely. Protocol isolated terrorist leaders, interrogations conducted without the opportunity to communicate. Standard operating procedure for these types of renditions.

A creaking metal hatch groaned and several pairs of boots tromped toward his cell. Keys unlocked the door in front of him and someone yanked the hood off. He had to turn his face from the light and shut his eyes.

"Well, you son of a bitch, you look about as fucked up as you ought to right now."

A hand grasped his chin and jerked his face forward. Savas squinted into the painful glow, a chiseled jaw and cold blue eyes staring at him.

"And I can tell you right here, right now—it's going to get a hell of a lot worse. Real soon. We're gonna make you wish you'd never been born, never dreamed up in that diseased head of yours to betray your nation. And before we kill you, kill your scumbag friends as well, you're going to tell us every goddamned thing you know about this cybercriminal."

"Fawkes?" muttered Savas.

The man struck him with the back of his hand.

"Fawkes? Who the hell is that? _Lightfoote_ , you bastard. Your cyberterrorist whore! The one who let that damn worm loose!"

_Lightfoote_? It didn't make sense. These men had it all wrong. But he knew better than to try to explain. The tribunal had made it clear—someone had engineered a witch-hunt. He spit blood and ground his teeth.

"Go to hell."

"Oh, sweet Mary Sue, we got ourselves a tough guy." The man snorted. "Well, boys, we're gonna have us a good time breaking this bronco." He leaned in and whispered to Savas. "And we got all the time in the world to explain things to you."
6

# Ambush

"Three cars have pulled up outside, Francisco!" Houston held the Browning beside her temple, parting the yellowed curtains as she stared through the window. _Things are moving too fast!_ Already a noose was closing on them. "Two vans. A black town car. They're pouring out like roaches, heading for the steps." She darted away from the window and ran to the center of the room.

They'd killed the lights. The musty brownstone in Harlem was strobed by headlight beams darting through the windows. She saw the broad form of Lopez drop a laptop into a backpack and drape it stiffly over his shoulders. _He's still in pain_. He picked up a pump-action shotgun from the floor, catching and holding her eyes for an instant. A sheen of pale skin gleamed as it moved through the light streaming through the window. Lightfoote stood beside him with a drawn pistol, bald head and piercings flashing.

"They'll send a few round the back, coordinate the entry," said Houston. "We've got thirty seconds."

Lightfoote checked the display on a smartphone. "Getting a signal from the sensors—back and front. Right on the money, Sara. Let's see if they're ready for this."

"Watch for debris!" cried Houston. _I never get the damn yields right!_

The three crouched behind overturned boxes and furniture. Dust from the long-abandoned building filled the air with fine snow. The front doors rattled violently from a sudden blow. Lopez raised a metallic box in one hand.

"Now!" cried Houston. She ducked as he pressed the button.

Two explosions rocked the building. The front door erupted in a fireball, launching wood and metal in all directions. Several windows near the entrance shattered, exploding outward. Poorly maintained sprinkler systems sputtered, rusty water haphazardly raining across the interior, smoke-stained rivulets running across the floor.

"Go!" yelled Houston. She leapt forward.

The three sprinted, weapons pointed toward the shattered doorway. Mangled bodies were strewn across the brownstone steps, blood black with soot, dripping like molasses to the street below. A driver gawked at them from one of the vans, the door half open, his body tense and frozen in shock.

_Use it._ Houston set herself, firing two shots before he could react, and he toppled to the ground. The door slammed in the other van. The engine coughed and raced as the driver gunned the accelerator, the gears popping loudly as he shifted. The van lurched forward.

A shotgun blast from Lopez burst the back tire. The van pitched as the driver tried to turn sharply. The right side elevated off the ground and the van flipped violently onto its roof. It landed with a shattering of window glass and crunching metal on the left side. The front end plowed into a lamppost. With a single beat of silence, a fire ignited in the engine.

An empty car waited beside the entrance. Either the driver had fled or been killed in the explosions. Houston waved them to the vehicle. _Did any survive the rear blast?_ If so, they had only seconds. "I'll drive. Move!"

The three dashed down the steps and into the car. Houston in the driver's seat, Lopez and Lightfoote aiming their weapons out the rear windows. The car jumped forward with a squeal and raced into the streets of Harlem.

"Damn that was fast!" Houston gunned the engine and aimed for Harlem River Drive. "Backtrace said an hour?"

Lightfoote shouted from the back, the air rushing through the windows mangling her words. "Barely! The NSA is back. Their fingerprints are all over the trace. But that fast? That wasn't a general scan. We're their target—they _know!"_ The waterfall of sound stopped as the back windows were shut.

"Jesus!"

Lopez grimaced and placed the shotgun on the floorboard. "That was a strike team. Serious players."

"But not after _you_ ," said Lightfoote. "They don't even know you two exist."

Houston nodded, steering roughly, the tires screeching as she ran a red light. The relative quiet felt unnatural, adrenaline still coursing through her veins. "I'm getting a little tired of running like this."

Lightfoote swung away from the window and set down her gun. "We're going to have to be a lot more careful. They _really_ want this damn file."

"Then it's important," said Houston, darting onto the highway. Taillights flashed past her, horns blaring.

"Whatever's in it," said Lopez, "must be bigger than we can imagine. They've taken the FBI team captive. They're tracking us with the full power of the NSA, sending professionals after us. We need to figure out what it is we have."

Lightfoote sighed. "That's what I was trying to do, dammit!"

"Well, your hacker friends are going to have to work faster," said Lopez. "We barely got out of that."

Houston turned toward the Willis Avenue bridge. _I have to think clearly._ "I'm going to avoid the toll stations. Take us on I-87 into the Bronx. Disappear this car as soon as we can. Steal another one. Angel, we need to get you online again. You need to find this hacker collective."

"I've got to warn them," said Lightfoote. "If they tracked us, they can track them. They've got to take measures to prepare. Disappear and arm themselves. They're going to be risking their lives to do this."

"But will they?" asked Lopez.

Houston cursed as a delivery truck weaved in front of them. "Francisco, she's a hero in the hacker underground. You saw those chat rooms, the messages she got."

"People worship a hero from a distance. Not many want to be heroes when the bullets fly."

"We'll see," said Lightfoote. "Maybe not for the good of it, or for me. Maybe for the challenge of Fawkes's encryption. Something Big Brother wants us _not_ to see. Maybe they want to see it as much as we do. Maybe they want to be the ones to spill the secret."

"Maybe," Lopez muttered.

"Either way," continued Lightfoote, "we need to come up with a new plan. Digital security for sure. We'll need every anonymous protocol around. We'll need to move frequently. No more than a few hours at any connection. We need decoy stations to mimic our profile, lock those down and have them waste manpower checking them out."

"And we need to distribute the file."

"Yes, get it out to every hacker with a functioning processor. Parallel processing. Together, we can crack it."

"You sound confident," said Houston. "How can you be so sure?"

Lightfoote stared forward into the red taillights in front of them.

"Because we have to."
7

# Enhanced Interrogation

Savas felt himself scream again, but his body had been pushed far beyond conscious control. He could only react to the waves of torment and panic. The survival machine encasing his consciousness performed desperate actions shaped by millions of years of evolution.

The cry exploded from his lips without volition, drowned in the waterfall pouring into his lungs. Strapped to a wooden board, a partially permeable fabric tight over his mouth, only a fraction of the liquid penetrated, but it triggered thrashing and an adrenaline response. The rest spilled over his face, completing the illusion of submersion, dying, suffocating, and strangling to a final end. His muscles convulsed as he struggled against the restraints.

It ended and a boot plunged into his left side to cast him face first onto the wet metal. The impact registered as a small gnat in a hurricane of agony. Fabric fell from his mouth and he coughed violently, puttering out small sprays of water. Too little to have actually killed him, the volume still set all his physiology of imminent death into motion. He gasped for air.

"You're just making it harder on yourself. As well as the others," came the cold voice that had begun to haunt his dreams.

Savas coughed roughly. "Others. No. What—"

"How long will you make us work her over, Savas? Just tell us the truth and her pain can stop."

"I've told you everything!" He didn't recognize his own voice. The words were the cries of an asylum inmate.

" _Where_ is Angel Lightfoote? Tell us and you can go. She can go. It's that easy."

Savas struggled to hold back tears.

" _Please_. I don't _know_."

"What was in the email? Tell us that then. Was it another worm you would use to attack the country?"

"We didn't _attack_."

Savas cried out as a boot toe speared him in the side. The kick lifted him off the floor, and he moaned.

"Stop insulting us. Do you think that mock tribunal is going to get you out of this? You'll be convicted, I have no doubt. But even if you aren't, there's no way— _no_ way—you traitorous scum, that I'll let you leave this place alive. Do you understand? You aren't going to walk out of here after what you've done. Maybe, just maybe if you play ball, and help us track down these terrorists, your precious Rebecca might live."

"Please, don't hurt her. I've told you everything I know."

A hand reached down and pulled his head back by the hair.

"What is the Nash Criterion? What does it _mean?"_

"Don't. Know." He gasped. "Fawkes. Last email. Death trigger. No time."

The hand smashed his head into the metal grating. The room spun. He couldn't focus on the words. Strong arms dragged him from the room and down a short hallway, grated metal cages lining each side. Faceless forms slung him into one and he landed heavily on his shoulder, a stab of pain jolting him conscious.

A broad shape stood silhouetted in the doorway, the outlines of the man's face barely discernible. But the Voice—everything had mutated into a voice now. No eyes, no face, no person. Just a hateful Voice that meant pain and impossible requests. The Voice dragged him and others through hell and back, teasing them with relief that came in the form of unscalable mountains, nonexistent answers, locks that could never be opened, and pain that would never end.

"This is really going nowhere," said the Voice. "It's time you thought carefully about giving us some of those answers, agent Savas. And soon. Your friends don't have much time left."

"I told you _everything."_

"You can do more. And I know just the ticket. We'll resume our discussions soon and we'll let you in on some of our work with the others. Maybe we'll let you sit in and watch as we work on your sweet Rebecca? Would you like to see her?"

"No, please—"

"I can see it would mean a lot to you. We don't usually have an option like this for difficult prisoners. Can you imagine all the work we put in only to have some motherfucker like you die on us? What a waste of our time! But bring in a child, or lover, and these tough men break like china. I think you're one of those men, Savas. I think when you've seen enough of what we'll do to her, you'll shatter like a plate and tell us what we want to know."

"No, please! I'll tell you now! Everything, I promise. Whatever you want to know." He would lie. He would make up any story. Find one they could accept. Anything to stop them.

"Now, that's very helpful of you, John. But it's just lying desperation. I've seen that, too. No, no—only when you're truly broken will you skip the lies and get to the truth. I just hope that point comes before your dear Rebecca is too damaged to be worth anything to you anymore."

_"No!"_

Another kick to the face cut short his scream. The door slammed shut as he rolled away from it, nauseous and dizzy.

Footsteps and laughter poured like acid over his fading consciousness.
8

# Miller

Frank Miller was shackled upright by the wrists, his shirt removed to reveal enormous musculature. Wires were taped to heaving pectorals that dripped with sweat. His arms were pulled out to the sides, clamped tightly. His pants stained with sweat and urine, blood dripping from his lips, teeth marks in the torn flesh. He panted with his head cast down.

A man beside him turned a knob, generating a throbbing hum. Miller screamed, his entire body convulsing. His eyes rolled back involuntarily in his head. The electrical jolt ended quickly, but it demanded a high price. Miller slumped forward heavily, the restraints on his broad arms groaning.

The blue-eyed man stepped beside him and pulled his head back by the hair.

"We've got juice to do this every day for the rest of your life. Right now the damage is minimal, whatever the pain. But the more we fry you, the more cells will burst in your tissues, the more nerves will be damaged. First, you'll lose feeling in your extremities, your fingers and hands. Coordination. Then eyesight. Brain damage is next. Agent Miller, after all you've done, this is hardly the way to end your life."

Miller drooled to the floor, his mouth twitching. Words slurred with spit and blood escaped as a whisper: _"Fuck_ you."

The inquisitor sighed and rubbed his temples. He looked toward the man at the controller.

"Call it a day, Rice. The specialist arrived an hour ago. Tell him he's up."

"Yes, sir," said the man, exiting the room quickly.

"I don't have time for heroes, Miller. I need results, and I need them now. Fortunately, technology is on my side."

The soldier Rice returned, the door groaning as he opened it. A bald, thin man followed him with two large duffel bags, his expression detached.

"Ah, here he is. Dr. Kuriyan." The blue-eyed man examined the bags. "That's all you need?"

"Yes," Kuriyan said, removing wires and electrodes, drills, scalpels, and power sources. "Designed for any environment. You already have him immobilized, so I'll just add this."

He removed a metallic skull cap encased in a cage. Sizing up Miller, he nodded.

"He's big, but it will fit."

"You've come highly recommended."

The visitor plugged in power supplies and set his tools along a small table. "I'll need ten minutes to prep him, once he's properly restrained. Once I've located the brain regions and tested the voltages in the tissue, you can proceed. He'll answer truthfully anything you ask. Cognitive function will be minimally impaired." He looked over the wires connected to the prisoner. "Assuming it hasn't already been. I'll need all that disconnected."

"Rice—do what he says."

The soldier nodded, eyes wide. He rushed to remove the wires from Miller's chest and arms, ripping the tape, tearing hair and skin in the process. Miller didn't flinch.

"He's nearly unconscious," muttered Kuriyan as he fiddled with the skull cap. "My technique is far more useful with a prisoner in his right mind."

"Your technique is here to get a job done. We need information yesterday. We expect you to get it."

Kuriyan frowned and continued to adjust the equipment. "All right. I'll need you to hold his head against the board," he said, indicating the metal stand on which Miller was strapped.

The blue-eyed man nodded and the soldier grasped Miller's head and pushed it backward.

"Easy, his muscles are slack. Don't want to break his neck. Keep him facing forward—yes, like that. Good. Now," he stepped forward with the caged skull cap. "I'm going to fit this over his head, clamp it to the metal behind, and then tighten it over his skull." He scanned the room. "I'll need that chair to stand on."

The blue-eyed man pushed a metal chair loudly across the floor. Kuriyan stepped on it, ducking slightly under the low ceiling, and raised the cage over Miller's head.

"Hold him steady. _There._ "

Miller's eyes flashed and his head darted to the right. His forehead smashed Rice, who stumbled against the wall, holding his eye and cursing.

The leather clamp on Miller's right arm groaned and popped, the material failing as he brought his arm around and struck the visitor in the mouth, sending him careening from the chair. Rice had regained his footing and charged, but Miller swung his arm again, connecting violently with the soldier's head. Rice's head jerked backward, eyes empty and unfocused, before he plunged downward. His head struck the side of the metal table, wrenching his neck to the side and he lay unmoving on the ground.

Miller reached out for the blue-eyed man, fighting against the remaining restraints, fingers clawing the air in front of him.

Three shots roared off the small room's metal walls as the interrogator fell away from Miller's grasp, gun in hand. The first shot sent sparks and metal shards flying behind Miller. The other two buried themselves deep in Miller's chest. Blood misted into the air and spilled down Miller's torso.

"Shit!" cried the blue-eyed man.

He moved quickly to the fallen soldier, keeping a careful eye on Miller. He placed his hand at Rice's throat, checking for a pulse. He pulled it away scowling and glared at Miller.

"He's dead, you son of a bitch. Broke his damn neck."

Miller gasped and choked, blood frothing at his mouth, eyes swimming.

"You better not fucking die on me yet."

He kept his weapon trained on Miller and circled around him to the crumpled form of the doctor.

"Doctor Kuriyan," he said. "Are you all right?"

The doctor groaned and stumbled against the wall, bracing one arm against the corner. The other cradled his jaw. He pulled his hand away, tissue and teeth floating in a red pool.

"Jesus," said the interrogator. "Go get cleaned up, and send a medical crew in here." The hatch clanged open, and several soldiers with raised weapons entered.

"Sir, we heard shots!"

The blue-eyed man waved them away. "Get our visitor some attention. And send a crew down here to save this motherfucker." Miller continued to thrash weakly before them. "Tell them I want him alive and conscious long enough so the doc can drill into that stupid skull of his and place his wires."

He turned to them, holstering his gun, eyes frigid.

"I want some fucking answers, goddammit!"
9

# Hacker Army

A rusted sun set through the clouds over vandalized cars and buses littering the streets of Queens. A lone figure stepped around a corner, a swollen backpack over his shoulders, two heavy bags in each hand. Dark sunglasses and a newsboy hat concealed his features.

Lopez scanned the deserted street in front of him and placed the bags on the ground. Reaching around his oddly flowing robes, he removed a handgun and checked it, replacing the firearm quickly. He took up the heavy duffels again and made his way cautiously across the street.

As he approached a towering apartment complex, he made his way down a tight alley filled with piles of rotting garbage, the reek potent even in the cold December air. Near an overflowing dumpster he walked up to a small door that angled sideways, the hinges ripped from the wall. He kicked softly and it swung from a remaining hinge near the top. He entered.

He moved directly to a dim stairway and descended quickly, breath strained and broad shoulders bowed by the weight he carried. Three flights down the stairwell ended at a door with a shattered EXIT sign, one bulb still flickering. Glass crunched on the ground under his feet. He placed the bags down again and removed the pistol, opened the door quickly, and spun toward a dark hallway with the firearm aimed in front of him.

He saw no one in the corridor. Grabbing the two bags with one hand, he grunted from the pain to his shoulder, but kept his weapon ready, shuffling awkwardly forward. He passed a janitor's closet, the door smashed open, broken items inside strewn haphazardly. He dropped the bags in front of a small door with a faded label reading: TELCOM CLOSET.

He rapped a brief pattern on the door and it opened to reveal Houston's piercing blue eyes.

"Damn, Francisco," Houston said. _"Three hours._ You had me scared. We need to find chargers for these phones."

"Tomorrow." He entered quickly, dragged the bags inside, and dropped the backpack on the ground with a loud impact. Houston locked the door behind him.

The three of them repositioned awkwardly in the cramped room, the space hardly larger than a suburban wardrobe closet. A single incandescent bulb lit the space in a soft yellow, revealing a spaghetti of wires spilling from opened pipes above them. Many of the wires ended at several computers placed in a row along a rusted table. Lightfoote danced around the laptops like a grandmaster playing simultaneous games of chess.

"She getting anywhere?" Lopez asked.

"Angel is in the room and can hear gossip about her," said Lightfoote, not taking her eyes from the screens or fingers from the keyboards.

Houston smiled. "Yes. Brief you in a minute. She did get a message out to York. Had to hack through a bunch of defense computers. If she's picking up, York will get the last coordinates from Cohen's phone. A brief message about what we saw."

"She owes us one."

"She does. Meanwhile—what's the loot?"

Lopez grunted. "Just about everything is gone out there. People fled and took out almost every shop. I'll be damned if I know where they all went, or when they're coming back." He opened the duffel bags. Metal disks glinted softly in the dim light. "Cans. Mostly vegetables. Some fruits. Guess people don't like to eat healthy when civilization is collapsing around them."

"It'll do," she said. "I'm famished."

He dragged the backpack beside her.

"But there is _this_."

He unzipped it, and a pile of boxes spilled out of the bursting fabric and slapped heavily on the ground. One opened and numerous bullets rolled across the floor.

"Now we're talking." Houston kissed him and smiled. "How the hell did you find it?"

"They've cleaned out the gun shops—I wonder how many of those idiots end up shooting each other? But they didn't think to look for storage. Or maybe they couldn't get through the locks. Big megastores have shelves of ammunition and some firearms. No weapons we don't have. Lots we wouldn't care for. But the ammunition—we're low after that raid."

Houston pulled a box out of the bag. "Holy shit, Francisco—.45 ACP?"

He smiled. "Yeah, I figured you'd be glad to see those."

"You bet your ass." She removed her Browning. "Mama's got some milk for you, baby boy. Thank God. Now I won't have to be shooting one of those plastic toys people insist on calling guns."

"Hey, Glock's a good friend," muttered Lightfoote, clacking the return key emphatically and looking in their direction. "Might save your life someday."

Houston shook her head. "Maybe. What now, FBI girl?"

"Now, we wait. I've done all I can. We've got more bandwidth here than we can use. The entire complex seems abandoned."

"Those gangs didn't count?" said Lopez.

"Not in my book. Not enough fight. Anyway, no traffic on the inbound cables. So, I've routed the main lines to the laptops. The data is out, the hacker groups have it. I sent it through a maze of servers and TOR networks. The NSA will track it down eventually, but maybe not before we get what we need and can get the hell out of here."

"What we need is that file decrypted," said Lopez.

"Right. Whatever Fawkes did, it's good but not unbreakable. Patronizing bastard wanted it just tough enough to test us. Make sure we're _worthy_."

"What about the NSA? They've got the file presumably?" asked Houston.

Lightfoote nodded. And collapsed on a plastic chair. "Definitely. They just needed to raid my accounts. I didn't have time to wipe anything. And there are ways around that, too."

Houston stared at the rows of numbers running wildly across the screens in front of them. "So how the hell is some group of distributed hackers going to out-muscle the computational power of the NSA?"

"They can't," said Lightfoote. "Our only hope is to be smarter. More clever."

"And if we aren't?"

"Then they're going to get the information first," answered Lightfoote. "It's clear they want it. They're willing to kill for it. Even if we do break the encryption before them, they'll still get there eventually. So, if we get lucky, we're going to have a small window. We'll need to act fast."

Lopez exhaled. "And do what? We have no idea what's in that file. Maybe it's a final, insane joke from Fawkes to troll us once and for all."

Lightfoote shook her head. "I don't think so. I told you: I think I knew him in a way few did, even if we only spoke a few times. His personality stains his code, his worm. He's much too serious about all this. That file has something radioactive. Fawkes was killed for it. Our friends were snatched for it."

Houston smirked. "And we were almost killed for it, too, Francisco. She's right."

Lopez looked over to the computer screens.

"Then I hope these hackers know what they're doing."
10

# Cohen

The hatch opened and a figure plunged onto the floor. Long brown hair spilled in clumped knots to conceal her face. Her hands were splayed out in front of her and bound, and she struggled to use them to prop herself up. Soiled clothes hung from her frame.

"Get up, Agent Cohen," came a cold voice from behind her.

Several men entered the room alongside a short-cropped older man with ice-blue eyes. He gestured to the floor and the men stooped down and dragged Cohen to her feet. Two women stood in front of her in lab coats, a large flat-screen monitor hanging from the wall to their left. Numerous sharp objects glinted on a table beside them. They looked like surgical tools.

"Put her on the table."

The men did as instructed and tossed her harshly onto a metal slab mounted in the center of the room. Cohen groaned from the impact, hair still obscuring her face.

"We're reaching the limits of our tolerance with you and your people, Agent Cohen," said the cold voice. "We need you to understand that you don't have much more time. The tribunals have been a circus act, a show to convince you and your husband that cooperation is mandated. Those sessions failed. So, you've forced our hand. We can't let your seditious plans continue."

"We aren't traitors." She leaned forward weakly. Her eyes burned through the matted strands of her hair. "We aren't terrorists, either!"

The interrogator nodded and one of the men beside her struck her in the mouth. Cohen rolled hard on the table away from the blow, moaning. The man on the other side shoved her back in position.

"Your tired refrain angers me."

"You're monsters," she gasped.

"Do you think you're being mistreated?"

Fearful eyes stared back from the table.

"Perhaps you don't understand just how serious we are."

He nodded to a man standing guard by the door, who opened the hatch and called down the hallway. A rough scraping echoed outside. Someone was dragging a heavy object across the floor. Two burly men wedged themselves and a third figure through the hatch. They tossed a body to the floor.

Cohen screamed.

" _Oh, God_. No!"

The naked body of Frank Miller lay prone on the metal floor. Clotted and dried blood caked his torso and head. The hair had been shaved from a portion of the scalp, and three large holes had been drilled into the skull. A coating of frost melted along the grayed skin.

"No, Frank. I'm so sorry."

"Agent Miller was most uncooperative. Attacked and killed a good soldier, in fact." The cruel eyes leaned toward her. "This will be your fate soon. It will be the fate of your dear husband, Agent Savas, if we do not learn the whereabouts of your accomplices. There isn't going to be any escape. Your trick with the phone was clever. But it's over. The device destroyed. No one is coming to save you."

Tears ran down and smeared the dirt on her face.

"No. Please. I've told you everything. I'll tell you anything. I'm not holding anything back."

"That may well be true, Agent Cohen. Perhaps you were not privy to all the information. But I can't take that chance. Instead, I have found a way to make you most useful to our efforts."

Cohen blinked as the monitor across from her lit up. "John?" A guttural sound escaped her lips. "What have they done to you?"

The battered visage of Savas blinked in stunned silence, an eye swollen shut, the same side of his face cut and covered with blood. His slurred words poured from split lips.

"Oh God, _no_ ," came the voice from the screen. "You bastards—no! Don't do this! Please!"

The men alongside Cohen strapped her arms and legs tightly to the table.

" _Stop!_ "

"Two bodies, Agent Savas, as you can see from your cell monitor. One dead." He walked up to Cohen and held up a large hunting knife, laying the edge near her throat. "The other still alive for now." He ran the edge slowly down her torso, over her breasts, to her crotch. He smiled at the camera mounted in the flat screen. "And still mostly unsullied."

"They're in Harlem!" screamed Savas, weeping. "It's a safe house. They're hiding out there!"

"John, no. Don't." Tears fell from her eyes.

"Oh, but he has to, Agent Cohen. That's what I'm counting on."

Savas continued in a high pitch. "Please. I'll tell you where it is. Where they're hiding. Everything you need to know. Let her go!"

The man spun the knife in his hand.

"Sadly, Agent Savas, that is not enough."

" _What?_ Why?"

"You're too late with that information. We already discovered that lurking place. We nearly had them, but they escaped. Killing, you might want to know, several of our people. We will need more from you. Where else would they go? How can we track them?"

"That's all I know! It's the only place! There isn't any other way to track them! We used burner phones. They'll be in hiding!"

"Oh, this is terribly unfortunate." He shook his head sadly. "I am inclined to believe you. I think the china has shattered. What a tragedy you had not told me this earlier, before they could escape." He frowned. "But you had to be a tough guy."

He nodded to a man next to him, who moved toward Cohen's feet.

"These men are not soldiers, Agent Savas. Do you know why?"

Savas only stared in panic at the man.

"Most of the soldiers aren't good at this. They follow orders, but only up to a point."

"No, wait!"

"But these men," he said, "have no such qualms. They are most useful when we need to go beyond certain points." His blue eyes shown as he rolled the words off his tongue.

"I can work with you. I can help you locate them, serve as bait. _Anything._ Please!"

"Yes, Agent Savas. I'm sure you will. Once you are convinced. When you have watched us hurt her day after day, it will seal your _honest_ cooperation."

"I told you already about Harlem! I'll cooperate!"

"A sudden break. Emotional with no time to override." He shook his head. "But tracking them will take time. Weeks, perhaps. During that time, in the hours at night when you can't sleep? When you remember what has happened to you, your friend Miller here, your wife? No, you will devise some trick. We will lose time and more men." He walked up to the screen and stared coldly at it. "No, agent Savas. Too much time for you to plot. Unless you are utterly broken."

The other man reached the top of the table.

Cohen spoke firmly through tears.

"John, just close your eyes. Don't watch. _Please."_

The blue-eyed man smiled.

"Even the blind can hear."
11

# Tooth Fairy

"I _didn't want to be here," said the rich baritone. "Usually the last president has to make this important transition, but with that unexpected death, well, I'll have to do." He nodded to his reflection in the window. "This way you'll trust them. They've found it smooths things significantly."_

_The train sped through the underground tunnel, the absence of Secret Service officers only one of many factors unnerving York. She turned toward the former president, his frame slouched and angled in the plush chairs, his gaze unfocused through the window at the blurred stone walls speeding past._

_"Trust who, Barack? What the hell is going on?"_

_"I think we're almost there," said Obama, standing awkwardly as the car swayed. The train decelerated rapidly. He motioned to York. "You'll get off here."_

_She stared through the window as the brakes hissed, the cabin coming to a complete stop. "Here? We aren't at the terminal point. We're in the middle of the damn tunnel! How do we get off here?"_

_Obama smiled wanly. "You'll see. Come on."_

_The doors opened, and she followed him out of the car numbly. A small ledge rose over the tracks, a set of steps rising from it. A metal door gleamed at the top of the stairway._

_"This isn't in the maps."_

_"Retinal scan will get you in," Obama said. "You're lucky—you should've seen the digs they had when I was sworn in. This is Madison Avenue." Again the weak smile. "It's going to seem impossible, Elaine," he said, looking down the length of the train as it curved around the tunnel. "It's like growing up, except doing it again later in life. You have to give up a lot of childish ideas that aren't true. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. Of, by, and for the People. You have to accept the adult world and work with what it is, or—well, or you won't make it in that world." He put a hand on her shoulder. "The train won't leave until you go in. Good luck."_

_She watched in shock as he turned around and boarded the train, the automatic doors closing behind him. York glanced down the tunnel walls, along the tracks and train cars, and finally back to the doorway before her. She half-believed she was dreaming._

_"Maybe it's a stroke," she whispered, slowly ascending the stairs to the gray metal door._

_A lens with a red light glinted down at her._

_"So, Star Chamber—all this and you weren't prepared for a short woman?"_

_She rose on her toes and stared into the glass circle in front of her. Seconds later bolts disengaged with clangs and the door swung inward. York stepped forward into a dim chamber that turned pitch as the outer door slammed shut behind her. The locks sealed loudly._

_The walls shuddered, she felt her stomach drop, and the floor plunged downward. As she fell, her eyes adjusted to the chamber, noting metallic walls devoid of instrumentation or insignia. Void of information._

_Gravity tugged heavily on her as the lift came to a stop. The door behind her hissed, and she spun around to see an opening into a room glowing with blue light._

_Straightening her blouse, she exhaled sharply, staring forward with determination._

_She walked through the doorway._
12

# Commando Raid

"N _o!"_

Savas lunged forward with all his strength, but the two guards on his right and left held his shoulders down. His arms were tied harshly behind him, lashed to the chair. His feet were bound at the ankles. He could not stop the events in the other room. Forcing him to watch, the men beside him held his chin up to the screen.

Blackness. The screen popped and fell dark. A deep hum dropped through the ship in pitch until it fell out of human detection. Bass notes shook through him.

"What the fuck?" One of the guards beside him cursed, stumbling in the darkness, tripping on a leg of the chair, his body impacting the unseen wall.

"That was the reactor, Burton."

"Nuclear powered ships don't lose power, dumbass! And we've got rows of batteries. Power's cut somewhere."

"Where's the backup?"

"I don't know! Shit! Can't find the damn door. Here!"

A metallic grating screeched and a rush of air entered the room. Savas still could see nothing except the faint afterglow of the monitor. No light entered from the outside corridor. He heard muffled shouts and explosions from above.

"Holy shit! We're under attack!"

A light leapt forward highlighting the barrel of a gun.

"Burton, mount your weapon-light! It's all we have!"

The other soldier followed suit and both rushed down the hallway.

Savas closed his eyes and strained to hear. The sounds of fighting intensified. He felt the boat slowing, yawing clockwise as the engines remained quiet. He yanked at the restraints but got nowhere, and slumped in the chair in frustration. Their one chance of escape and he couldn't take advantage of it!

A thunderous blast shook him. Metal shards flew through the hallway, clanging and slamming against the walls. Acrid smoke spilled into his room, followed by the sound of rushing boots.

A bright light shone into his eyes from the doorway. Completely blinded, Savas turned his face away, squinting.

"They're here! I've got Savas!" cried the voice with the light.

"Found the others!" came a muted voice down the corridor.

The man pulled out a stick and cracked it, and a bright blue light filled the room. He tossed it on the floor in front of Savas and switched off his flashlight.

"What the hell?" asked Savas.

The man dropped to his knee behind the chair. "We're a rescue team. Seal assault squad. We're here to get you _out!"_ Savas felt a hard tug on his wrists and heard the restraints tear. His hands were loose. The man bent over to his ankles and cut the ties with a large blade, freeing him.

Savas rose and slumped, his knees buckling. The man caught him from behind.

"Can you walk?"

"Hell yes."

He willed himself forward. His muscles screamed, but he forced them to move, the motion and adrenaline quickly loosening the tightness.

Cold metal touched his hand. The soldier had placed a gun there.

"We might be shooting our way out, Agent."

He stumbled into the hallway. Above, the chaos continued: explosions and the sounds of aircraft and heavy guns firing. Two more soldiers stood in front of them. They were dressing a woman.

"Rebecca!"

Her head turned as he limped forward. They embraced and he wept, holding her tightly to him.

"John, no time," she said, pulling back, tears in her eyes. "We've got to move fast."

"FBI man," came the clipped voice of one of the Seals. "Off with the shoes and pull these over you. Now!"

He didn't have time to think or understand. The man handed him an oversized suit. It felt synthetic. A similar dark material covered Cohen and she held swimming flippers under her arm. The men pushed them forward as she zipped up the suit.

"You're going to go straight up the ladders. If we still have it secured, it will take you to a lower deck, near water. SDVs are there waiting with drivers. Don't hesitate. Jump in. We've got only minutes."

Another set of explosions rocked the ship. The soldier speaking to him smiled.

"At least air support is giving them something to chew on."

They reached the ladders. Cohen climbed above him, racing for the top. Savas followed closely behind.

"Rebecca, the men—"

"Not now, John. Please. They're dead."

He heard the strain in her voice. He closed his eyes and climbed.

They stepped onto the deck as salt water sprayed over them. Rough waves battered the hull, the ship no longer under power to steer. Fires flicked above as wounded men screamed over the gunfire.

"My God," Savas whispered. "It's an aircraft carrier."

The enormous expanse of a flight deck loomed several stories above him. A Seal shoved a mask into his hand and helped him fit it over his head, another strapping flippers on his feet. The man shouted through the turmoil.

"Dive in toward the SDV!" he screamed, pointing below at a dark shape. "They'll hook you up. Do what they say! Stay calm!"

The man pushed Savas forward. He saw Cohen leap into the night air and plunge into the water below. Grinding his teeth, he stepped off the deck. The sounds of battle funneled into a point over his head, and a great, wet maw opened below him, wind and waves drowning out the battle above.

His feet smacked the surface and the cold water enveloped him. Arms pulled him against a black hull and he felt someone grab his head and attach something to the back of the mask. Stale air began to flow into it.

A hand pointed to the hull, and Savas saw an opening to a hollow interior. Brown hair billowed from within as Cohen moved inside, out of his sight. He kicked with the powerful flippers and approached what looked like an oversized torpedo. Seals helped him inside and followed behind him.

He floated to the back of the chamber alongside Cohen. Bubbles erupted from behind her as she breathed, her eyes focused intensely into his. He grasped her outstretched hand.

The door lumbered shut, but the water remained, along with two Navy Seals accompanying them. Not a submarine, the interior remained flooded for the duration, air supplied by the tanks hooked up to their masks. The craft's acceleration pushed them backward. Cohen leaned her mask against his and closed her eyes.
13

# The Underworld

He lost all track of time and sense of direction in the cramped submersible. But he didn't care at that moment. Just to be next to Cohen again, to have escaped that hell-hole—he couldn't process the miracle. He felt grateful. Delivered. They held onto each other.

Part of his mind continued to race. Who had sent these soldiers? Why had they turned on their countrymen? And who had kidnapped them in the first place, whisking them out to sea on an island-sized aircraft carrier?

He had no answers. He began to obsess about pursuit, a panic building that somehow the cold man with the voice would return, strap him down, make him scream. The carrier had seemed badly damaged and incapacitated. Had it remained so? Were small ships sent to hunt them down? He doubted this submersible could stay underwater for prolonged periods of time. Where were they headed? He stumbled from dreamscape to dreamscape.

A soldier in front of him spoke into his mask. The soldier beside him answered silently and looked in their direction, motioning with his hand to the door. Savas glimpsed a communications setup in his suit, but surrendered to fatigue and ignored it. He simply nodded back.

The other Seal engaged the mechanism and the side door opened to blackness. Savas and Cohen followed the two men outside the craft, swimming awkwardly and trying to keep up, beams from their helmet lamps strobing the water. The soldiers often doubled back to help them along.

Above, Savas began to catch a faint glow. A diffuse radiation supplemented the helmet lamps. Perhaps the moon or artificial lights. He couldn't be sure. He began to make out shapes in the water around him.

_A wall_.

In front of the two soldiers, a sheer rock face loomed. The men took no heed and swam straight for it. Savas and Cohen flailed forward, a dark circle growing in the surface before them.

_A tunnel_. Broad enough to allow them to swim inside, but too narrow for the submersible. Savas looked behind them. The craft had disappeared. They were on their own and headed into the bowels of a cliff.

As they passed within the opening, Savas saw that it was manmade. Too round, devoid of the growths and imperfections of natural formations, his headlamp revealed telltale evidence of boring machines. Someone had dug these tunnels. For what purpose he could not guess.

The Seals ahead turned in their direction. A flash of light from their headlamps pierced the darkness. The FBI agents had lagged behind, and the soldiers waved them on. A current pushed outward from the tunnel like a tide, dragging like gravity as they tried to continue inward. Their pace was slowing. They were tiring. Savas prayed they did not have far to go.

After some minutes, the soldiers stopped ahead. As Cohen and Savas caught up, he saw that the passage split four-ways. The two men discussed the different tunnels animatedly, gesturing in each direction. _Wonderful._ He saw a blue light flash from each of their helmets and what appeared to be a screen superimposed on the glass. _A frogman's heads-up display?_ He hoped they had a map for these tunnels to reference. _How much oxygen is left?_

After several minutes of watching the back and forth, Savas saw them come to an agreement, settling on the rightmost tunnel. Again the soldiers waved them forward. The marathon swim continued, exhaustion beginning to take a severe toll. Cohen struggled, her eyes downcast and unfocused. His own breath filled the inside of his mask like some elephant's gasping. They couldn't go on much more.

Ahead, a shaft of light dove into the water. The soldiers aimed right for it, their pace accelerating. Savas felt his heart leap, adrenaline coursing through his veins. _The last push_.

The tunnel opened into a wide chamber, multiple other passageways underwater embedded around them. But the soldiers ignored the other tunnels and began to swim upward, toward the light. Savas grabbed Cohen's hand. Her face was pale, but her eyes glowed with hope. They kicked upward together, the current gone, the final burst of energy giving them the power to keep pace with the Seals.

The four of them broke through to the surface, artificial light reflecting off the ripples and partially blinding them. An enormous domed roof arched above them. Around the pool of water ran a stone walkway. Doors and passageways opened in different directions away from the chamber.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw figures lining the pool—soldiers, weapons in their hands, aimed in their direction. In the middle of the group of men stood a short woman, her silver hair contrasting with the black body armor she wore.

The Seals urged them forward. They covered the short distance to the water's edge, and with the help of several soldiers above managed to drag their bodies and equipment out of the water. Feeble and nearly helpless on land, others helped them out of the wetsuits, two female soldiers covering Cohen's naked form in a robe. Savas stood with trembling legs, his soiled clothes, suit, mask, and air tank at his feet. Soaked and dripping, he shivered in the crisp air.

The gray-haired woman walked forward, her gaze stern as it assessed them. She placed a hand on Cohen's shoulder as she spoke:

"Agents Savas and Cohen. I'm honored to meet you. I only wish the circumstances had been different."

"Ms. President," whispered Savas, his fatigue nearly overwhelming.

Cohen smiled wanly. "Thank you. I thought we were lost. Worse than lost. How did you find us?"

"We'll explain more soon. Right now let's get you two looked at and off your feet." She paused. "Looks like you missed the luxury accommodations."

Savas stared dumbfounded at the subterranean space, the military men, and the woman before them. _Could I be hallucinating?_

"Ms. President, please. Where are we? What is this?"

She smiled from one side of her mouth.

"Welcome to the Presidency in Exile." Her eyebrows arched. "Seven stories below the streets of New York City."

"Below New York?" he said, his eyes straying upward to the arching supports of the towering ceiling.

"Welcome to the underworld."
14

# Enlisting

Savas rested next to Cohen outside the medical facility. They were dressed in borrowed fatigues, soldiers donating whatever they had available. For the first time in what felt like years, they were left alone. He stared at her in awe. The quiet and stillness transfigured her familiar form. She dimmed the world around him, infinitely valuable. He reached out and squeezed her hand.

"Always thought you'd look good in gear," she said, smiling.

Self-consciously, he examined the camouflage patterning, the baggy shirt sagging around his midsection. He rubbed the thick stubble on his cheeks.

"I don't get the luxury of making everything I wear look good," he said, raising his eyebrows toward her. "But thanks."

She inhaled sharply, staring into space. "We just left him there."

Savas closed his eyes. He wasn't ready to face the losses. _More losses_. A price for service that now rose beyond anything he could justify. "Yeah. I know."

"Did you see what they did? I mean, why?"

He opened his eyes but was unable to make eye contact. "I don't know, Rebecca."

"And JP? He was wounded in the firefight at the Bureau. Anything?"

"Still no word. Not sure he was even taken to the ship. He would have needed serious medical attention."

Cohen shuddered. "Just so they could torture him later?" She glanced over his bruised and swollen face. "What did they do to you?"

He squeezed her hand again. The guilt that he'd betrayed good people burned inside. _In the end, I was weak._ "Nothing good. But I'm okay. Docs say no lasting damage. The bastards knew how to work it slowly."

She stared off into the distance. "Is there nothing they wouldn't do? How can they be soldiers?"

"I'm not sure all of them were. Some were contractors. That blue-eyed monster, for one." Cohen inhaled sharply. Savas wrapped his arm around her. "What they did to Frank, his head—well, Sara had told me about something like that."

"I remember," Cohen shivered. "The CIA agent. They used some kind of brain stimulation to get him to talk."

"Yeah," said Savas, rolling his pained shoulder. "They found a dead doc. Traced him to some shady military contractors. Apparently it's the new thing. Electrodes in the brain. Turn off free will. Get answers. Less blood."

"Didn't seem like less blood to me. They _butchered_ him, John. Threw him down for us to see. To hurt us. Break us. Before they—" She stopped and held her hand to her mouth.

"Stop. Slowly. Not all at once."

She nodded, holding back tears. "Right." She looked around the room. " _Jesus_. Now what?"

A firm voice answered from behind them.

"Now you get to choose." York walked in with several aides and military men.

"Choose what?" asked Cohen.

"Whose side you want to be on in this conflict, and what you want to do about it."

They stood around a map of the United States. It was displayed on a table in the middle of the subterranean lair's enormous operations center. Soldiers manned computers and communication equipment, tracked troops and intel, and spoke into headsets to contacts unknown. Along the sides of what looked to be a retrofitted subways station, wall-sized flatscreen monitors surrounded them, displaying a bewildering series of images from satellite downlinks to war-game simulations.

On the LCD screen before them, the nation glowed in blue and gray. The East Coast and parts of the Deep South shown with a gray hue. The map was colored blue in the center, a bright star flashing in the state of Colorado.

"General Hastings has most of the Navy under his thumb, except for several contingents of Special Forces that stayed loyal to my office. Fortunately, almost no one knows about this facility. It was scheduled to be decommissioned, a relic of the Cold War."

Savas shook his head. "What is this place then?"

"A local Mount Weather or NORAD. Was once intended as a governmental bunker in case of nuclear attack. A huge network of abandoned tunnels and water stations were converted to the purpose. Telecommunications, arms, food stores. You name it. It's in disrepair, as I said, headed for the chopping block, but we've gotten it up and running. Thank God the air filtration systems still worked or it would have been over before it began."

"Why won't Hastings look for you here?"

"He might eventually. That's why we can't stay long. But it's obscure and buried in archives. All but forgotten. Except for us old timers. Not high on the military priority list either, deemed too vulnerable to attack. Which it is."

"Comforting."

She looked him in the eye. "We're on a knife's edge. Every day we stay here brings the noose closer. But every day rallies more to our cause. We've managed to muster a good part of the 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Lewis. Those that didn't join Hastings's ranks, that is. I have a small army at my disposal."

"Can we trust them? How do we know loyalties?"

York frowned. "We don't. That's the hard truth. But we're doing all the PR we can. Trying to win hearts and minds. But we don't have any problems Hastings doesn't. Going to be brother against brother."

"It doesn't sound real," muttered Savas.

"The fight is up there, too," she said, gesturing toward the ceiling. "Propaganda wars before the blood is shed in earnest. People are taking sides. But the real battle will be somewhere in the middle," she said, indicating the map. "We have the Rockies, NORAD. They have the coast. Someday soon, we're going to meet up between these points. Before that, we need to get to NORAD. We need to run our campaign from there. And that's where we're headed if we can make it."

"Why risk it?" asked Cohen.

Savas saw that she was in analytical mode, but his mind refused to function when he stared at her. She still wore a blanket from the medical center. Small in the cavernous space, a petite brunette wrapped in layers of fabric, her form called to him. _Vulnerable_. He struggled to process the conversation.

"Because here, I'm just as much a prisoner as you were on that ship. It's a matter of time before they find us. Maybe days. We've secured a lot of machinery, troops. We have air attack options from several locations. We'll move soon."

"Air options," said Cohen. "I heard jets over the ship."

"Not jets. Cruise missiles. Immune to the worm. A great irony—modernizing our aircraft, we left them vulnerable. The best attack and transport craft are either grounded or too unreliable in the air. Each side is racing to fix that, but we don't have the time to wait."

Savas turned to York, the president's words focusing his attention. "Wait? For what?"

"My best strategy would be to hop a transport and fly to Colorado. But my advisors say it's too risky. Too few working planes, too few air traffic systems. There'd be no escort. Some surface-to-air missiles and it's over. Since we can't wait for the air, we move on the ground."

Cohen stared sharply at the President. "Why did you come?"

"Here? I told you. It was the only—"

"No," she interrupted. "The boat. _Us."_ Savas heard the restrained emotions in Cohen's voice as she continued. "You're running for your life while the nation crumbles. Why did you come? How did you find us?"

York smiled and put her arm around Cohen. "Because you have some friends in high places. Actually, I don't know where they are, but they reached me. Hacked into our damn servers." York laughed, moving back to the map. "Hastings's men can't find us yet but your computer girl sure as hell did."

"Angel," said Cohen.

"Don't know her name—or maybe you're being figurative? Anyway, she was with two people that cashed in a debt I owed them—my life."

"Mary and Gabriel," said Savas, using their codenames.

"So _you_ sent them? I'd guessed. No coincidences in this game. But it's good to know. And you two have my thanks as well."

"We can call it even, then," said Savas.

"Where are they now?" Cohen asked.

"Don't know. They got into our servers, routed messages directly to me, identified themselves. Sent me your profiles and GPS coordinates. Seals did the rest. Honestly, I didn't think we had a prayer. But Hastings is too confident, didn't count on a lot of things."

"Like what? How did they pull it off?" said Savas, shaking his head. Images of the titanic carrier rushed through his thoughts.

"Wasn't that hard in the end. We had some air _options_ , but that wouldn't have done much with the firepower they could have launched our way. But the US military hadn't seriously considered an internal war—same team, suddenly at each other's throats, with all the codes and perfect intel on our targets."

Cohen nodded. "You knew where to hit them."

"Not only, darling," winked York, "but we also knew how to get into their onboard systems and shut everything the hell down. Turned that thing into a hundred-thousand-ton floating hunk of iron."

"They tortured us," said Cohen flatly. "Murdered our friend. They drilled holes in his head."

The President's upper lip twitched. "I've been briefed. I wish I could act surprised. This country's wrestled with some monsters, about how to deal with evil people. Hastings belongs to a wing that sees no road as too dark, no line that can't be crossed. All the more reason we need to find a way to stop him. Which brings me to your choices."

Savas barked a laugh. "I don't think we want to go back to the Hastings side, Ms. President."

"I'm sure. But you don't have to help me. You can flee. Hunker down with your families. I'd understand that. But I know who you are. I know what you've done for this country and what those you sent to help me can do. And if I understand things, it was your department at the FBI that stopped the worm that started this mess. The nation needs you. And I want you by my side."

"By your side?" asked Savas. Cohen's eyes squinted.

"Personal bodyguards and problem solvers. Heavy, I know. But there is one more piece to this puzzle you don't know about. Something that makes everything in this coup secondary."

Cohen shook her head. "What could do that?"

York exhaled. " _Bilderberg_."
15

# Star Chamber

_A spartan room devoid of furniture or decoration. Twelve enormous flat screens mounted from the ceiling, forming a circle. In the circle's center stood Elaine York, marveling at the design efficiency, the brutal and humbling focus that centered the occupant in front of twelve titanic faces._

_She rotated slowly, examining each of them, feeling dizzy in the process. Eyes bored into her from every direction. God-sized faces. All strangers._

_It was impossible. Here she stood, Elaine York, President of the United States, two-time US Senator, political player for most of her adult life and observer before that during her father's career—and she didn't recognize even one of the faces staring back at her. All her connections developed over a lifetime meant nothing in this dark room. People more powerful than she could have imagined surrounded her, making her question the entire world order she had taken for granted. And she knew nothing about any of them._

_The door closed behind her._

_"Thank you for coming, Elaine," said a voice she remembered._

_York stared ahead at an ancient visage, a face from another age with blue eyes and pocked skin._

_"You're the one on the phone," she whispered,_

_The man smiled, revealing yellowed teeth. "Yes."_

_"Who are you?"_

_"There won't be any names here, Elaine. Only yours."_

_A female voice. York turned to her right. Two enormous pools of brandy confronted her, keen eyes of a beautiful woman with dark hair and vaguely Middle Eastern features. Her accented English reflected her appearance._

_York scanned once more the ring of faces gazing down on her. Faces from all over the world. Dark and light, old and young, men and women. She returned her eyes to the older man._

_"Why am I here?"_

_He smiled again. "You've read some science fiction in your youth, have you not, Ms. York?"_

_"Yes," she said, bewildered._

_"Your brother's books, I believe. Wasn't so fashionable for a young woman to have such boyish hobbies, no?"_

_"I'm glad to say things have changed."_

_"Indeed. But some things do not change. And that is why you are here." He held up a dog-eared paperback. The book on the screen loomed at twice her height. "Isaac Asimov—Foundation. Do you remember this book, Elaine?"_

_"Yes. One of the first science fiction books I really loved."_

_"Stilted, clumsy language. But it had a very interesting idea. A brilliant idea. Do you remember it? It was what the series was based on."_

_York felt lost. "Scientific prediction of society, of the future. Shaping society with mathematical sociology."_

_"Exactly!" The old man smacked the paperback with his hand. "What if I told you it wasn't science fiction? What if I told you it is possible to predict, and therefore shape, human societies and civilization through quantitative modeling?"_

_"That's absurd."_

_"Is it?" said the woman to her right. "Economists use mathematics to predict recessions, bubbles, and investments. Traders do the same to play the markets. Epidemiologists can predict the course of disease and optimal quarantine and vaccination strategies to prevent epidemic spread of pathogens. Are we not shaping our world with mathematical predictions on a constant basis? What could one achieve by integrating all these models, especially if one had the capital resources to alter the inputs?"_

_"That's different than Asimov's idea."_

_"Only in a matter of degree," said the older man, pulling her attention forward. "In fact, that's why you're here. Because the course of human events is being shaped toward a brighter future by such methods. And we are those carrying out this noble task."_

_York glanced around at the faces. No one smiled. No one laughed. These people appeared utterly serious, spouting nonsense._

_"Looks like you're dropping the ball a bit. The world seems pretty FUBAR to me."_

_"A deceptive illusion, Ms. President. Scored as a percentage of population and cultural dynamics, human civilization has achieved the highest stability ever measured in the historical record."_

_"How's that possible? We have four major wars ongoing, political chaos in several nations, resource and environmental problems—you name it!"_

_"It's a matter of perception, Elaine," he said. "Ten billion people with lightning fast tech is very different than one billion and snail mail. Most chaos is minor, blown out of proportion by crisis-driven content in the news media. Local chaos notwithstanding, as a planetary average, we exert unprecedented control."_

_"Unprecedented?"_

_The woman spoke again. "Ours is not a new organization. Faces may change over the decades. Tools modernized. But not the purpose. That remains constant. With ultrafast computers, more robust theory and modeling, we can now predict and shape the world to a degree of precision our predecessors could only have dreamed of."_

_"Predecessors. What the hell is going on here?"_

_"Very simple," said the man again, "You must accept that your assumptions about the world, how it is governed, where the power lies—they are all wrong. Power does not rest with nations or the individuals leading them. It rests with us. We have held this power for centuries, controlling economies, making kings and presidents, directing conflicts and religions. Clumsily at first, to be sure. Almost to our own extinction at several points. But no longer. The modern age has advanced the modeling of social groups to a point that, like the weather, we are increasingly accurate over longer and longer stretches of time. We have consolidated our power and influence."_

_York squinted at the screen. "So, you're telling me that behind all the world governments, there's a super group of individuals"—she gestured around her—"these same individuals glaring down at me, who run the world? In secret? Without anyone knowing?"_

_A man's voice behind her spoke. "I wouldn't say no one knows. It's a question of how_ much _they know and what they might do about it. Rumors of us persist no matter what steps we take to erase them. Sometimes we're Jewish bankers or cultist Illuminati. Hidden extraterrestrials or demonic forces. Vampires." The god-like faces chuckled. "Strange and inaccurate myths concocted to explain anomalies and pieces of data recalcitrant individuals obtain. Sometimes we encourage certain wild ideas to cast doubt on the real truth."_

_York shook her head. "How do you expect me to believe this?"_

_"You've seen what we can do. The power we have over your national system to bring you here. Your own former president playing the role we specified for him."_

_She felt like crying. It was madness. "Then what do the masters of our universe want with Elaine York?"_

_"Probably nothing," said the man._

_"Nothing?"_

_"Truly, we do not wish to interfere in your service to your nation. It is likely our direct intervention will be extremely rare. It is increasingly so these days. In fact, you may never hear from us again. Our efforts are so pervasive and thorough, so long-planned, often we can allow the models of behavior for you and your political parties to play out without, shall we say, adjustments. However, should there come a time when reality and our models diverge, should our goals be threatened, we may be required to contact you. It is imperative that you then do as we ask."_

_"Or what?"_

_"You risk far more instability and harm by rebelling."_

_"And if I still refuse?"_

_The woman spoke. "The consequences will be harsh. We will be forced to remove you from office and replace you with a more cooperative politician."_

_"Replace me? How?"_

_The old man frowned. "Consider the fates of presidents throughout history who have rebelled against our requests. Lincoln and Kennedy. William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, William McKinley, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt."_

_The room felt cold and hostile. York swallowed. "These are all presidents who died in office. Several assassinated."_

_"Indeed, President York," he said, leaning back in his chair. "As you can see, our reach is centuries old, and we do, as they say, play for keeps."_
16

# Coming War

_I 'm ranting._

Cohen paced back and forth in the President's private office. Her mind burned. Her arms gesticulating of their own accord. She flicked glances at Savas, desperate for him to intervene, to exorcise this demon in their midst. _Say something, John!_ But he sat quietly, looking too stunned by York's revelations to do anything but nurse a cup of steaming coffee.

"Then, _everything,_ it's been a lie!" she cried. "For generations! Democracy's been a facade! We took marching orders from these shadows? World events, wars, millions of deaths—all controlled by these ghosts?"

York nodded from behind her desk, her fingertips pressed against each other.

"Why, Ms. President? _Why?_ How could you go along with this?"

"They threatened me. They could have ruined me and others. They tried to confuse me with that bullshit about building the perfect world. But the truth was all too clear. They were dictators brutally enforcing their control. I couldn't see a way out."

Cohen swallowed bile. Anger coursed through her, but also pity. This strong woman, _a soldier_ , someone Cohen had admired for years, reduced to a lackey for other powers. _Not only York_. Every president for centuries. The image of former president Obama standing in front of a train made her dizzy. Nothing seemed real. _Who can we trust?_

Cohen placed her fingers to her eyes. "Obama really met you in a secret underground railway station and brought you to them?"

York nodded. "Yes, Rebecca. And it was every bit as devastating to me as it is to you right now. But try to look beyond it. See something important. Whatever damage this Fawkes did, he provided a golden opportunity."

"Which is?" she asked.

York stood and walked to an American flag tacked to the wall behind her.

"The country's divided. At war. But what we're _really_ fighting is an enemy we've never seen before. One that's covertly controlled us for hundreds of years. Presidents cowered before them. Because we believed it was the only option." She spun back around to face them. "But Anonymous changed the ground rules, ripped the carpet out from under all our feet. They've blown the support structures and stripped them of their armor." She walked back to her desk and dropped into the chair, closing her eyes. "But they won't go down without a fight. Right now, the US command structure's in chaos. They've infiltrated every level, all the way to the Joint Chiefs. Military contractors at their right hand. Hastings their current puppet. But we have a loyal core, tough and smart. They've taken Cheyenne Mountain and set up our headquarters for the war."

"War?" asked Cohen.

The president's eyes flashed open. "The war to win our country back. Since you've been imprisoned, I've fanned the chaos created by Anonymous. It's spread. I saw an opportunity. I've rebelled against our _masters_. The first chance in hundreds of years to free the world of their control, to create truly independent nations."

York keyed in several strokes at her computer, and a flatscreen monitor on the wall to their left flashed to the blue-gray image of the US. She drew her finger across it from New York to the Rockies.

"We're not going to hide. We're going to muscle our way straight across interstate 70, and our forces are going to blow out of the sky, water, and into the earth anyone who tries to get in our way. We won't get another chance. We have to get to that mountain."

"But how can we stop Bilderberg?" asked Cohen. "Let's say you make it to the mountain, even end the coup. We're no closer to doing anything about them, knowing who or where they are. What happens after Cheyenne, Ms. President?"

" _Elaine_. Please." York put her hands on her hips. "Look, if I'm going to be first naming you two, I want it reciprocated. I need you as real advisors. People who'll speak their minds, tell me hard truths. I've got enough people to salute me."

"Going to take some getting used to," said Cohen. Discordant images of York fought inside her. Authority figure. Savior. Coward. Revolutionary. _Friend?_ "Okay, _Elaine_ , how can we do anything about them?"

"Right now, we can't," said York. "My first priority is to get me, what's left of the Constitutional government—the members of Congress, the Judiciary, all we've managed to round up with us—get us all to NORAD. From there we stage a war of ideas and bullets until we crush this coup once and for all. Afterward, we go after the Bilderberg Group."

"Won't it be too late?" Cohen asked, her frustration building. "Isn't it the same chaos that led to the coup that makes them vulnerable? If you win, if you start normalizing things, their power will return. They'll assassinate you like Kennedy."

"Yes, a distinct problem," York said coldly.

Savas stood, pacing before the map. Cohen sensed his mood before he spoke, felt the rhythm of his movement, smelled the testosterone fomenting action. _Please be back, John, we need you. I need you._ He had seemed so broken.

"You said Angel was following up on the message from Fawkes?" he asked.

York sighed. "She didn't say much, but it sounded like they had discovered something important."

He turned to York. "You said you wanted advice. Well, let's start now. You've got a solid game plan for fighting this coup. God willing, you'll get to Cheyenne Mountain. But we need something else for Bilderberg. Maybe Angel and our other friends are our secret weapon. Can you get us in contact with them? We need to find out what they've discovered."

York nodded. "I can try. We have less than half the satellite networks functioning, but at least we control most of those."

Cohen shook her head. "I can't believe it. He's dead, but Fawkes is still jerking our chain."

"Yeah, maybe," said Savas staring at York. "But until today, I'd never thought to ask where the chains came from."

"Fawkes saw them," said Cohen. The mysterious hacker came into focus for the first time. "He was willing to burn down the world, cause the deaths of billions of people to break them. But no—not like that. We aren't terrorists or mass murderers. There has to be another way." She turned her gaze to York. "We have to find another way."

"Then let's start by finding out what the lunatic was trying to tell us," said York. "We'll reach out to your people. I'll make this a priority."

Cohen exhaled slowly. "And let's hope they escape the net a little longer."
17

# Alien Hieroglyphics

"I'm hearing more from upstairs. Looks like the neighbors moving back." Houston pressed her ear against the door of the telecommunications closet, straining to filter the muffled sounds. "Someone's bound to come down here at some point. It'll be soon."

"Doesn't matter," said Lightfoote, glancing back from her laptop. "We have to leave anyway. I'm getting hits on my sentries—NSA is poking around. I give us a few more hours before they zero in."

"Packing," said Lopez, dropping food and firearms into bags. "No need to convince me. They aren't messing around. Not another Harlem raid."

Houston walked away from the door and stood over Lightfoote, gazing at the laptop screen. A strange image glowed before her. "Well, at least we got what we came for."

Lopez barked a laugh as he zipped closed one of the duffels. "Sure. And _still_ we are no closer to understanding what the Nash Criterion is all about." He gestured toward the screen. "Just look at that chaos!"

Houston frowned. _He has a point._ "Angel, nothing in that image makes sense. Are you sure it's decoded correctly?"

"Sara, if it weren't it would be gibberish."

"It _is_ gibberish," said Lopez.

"No! It's an _image._ A clear image. The encryption was broken correctly or it would be total junk—no image, no text, just incomprehensible bytes. We have the contents. It's a very high-resolution TIFF file. That just doesn't pop out randomly. The decoding is correct. We just don't know what it means."

Houston pointed to several regions of the screen. "An image of an image. What is this? Some lunatic's cork artwork? What are these chicken-scratch labels on all these graphs?" She read out loud. "Epsilon-equilibrium, evolutionarily stable strategy, subgame perfect equilibrium, perfect Bayesian, Riemannian manifolds, catenary formulas, n-person games, C1-isometric embeddings—what the hell? What does it all mean?"

Lightfoote looked at the ground. "I don't know."

Houston continued. "And this thing on the edge—gold color, half a circle, a line—looks like alien hieroglyphics."

"No idea."

"I thought you were the genius here," muttered Lopez, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes. "Two days, no sleep. A hacker underworld. A thousand computers processing and what? This _nonsense_. This is what people want to kill us for?"

"I'm not a mathematician," snapped Lightfoote. "I don't know what this is about. Neither did any of the hacker groups."

"I taught high school math once upon a time," said Lopez. "These aren't any topics I've heard of. We're wasting time we don't have."

_We're getting run down, turning on each other._ Houston tried to diffuse the tension. "Maybe higher level stuff, Francisco. It reads like a graduate school math course book scribbled all over some wild cork board." She wasn't even convincing herself.

Lightfoote cocked her head to one side, staring at the screen. "Sara's right."

"I am?"

"This _is_ a board. Look—the edge, _here_. That golden alien symbol—it's cut off, only part of it shown. Thumb tacks, tape. It's like something out of _A Beautiful Mind_." She began to type furiously.

"A beautiful mind?" asked Lopez.

_Yes!_ Houston remembered—vague images of Russell Crowe, Princeton, and equations. "The movie? With the crazy economist?"

"John Nash. It was about John _Nash_. Not an economist. A _mathematician_ who did economic work. Got a Nobel Prize. The file, remember? The _Nash_ Criterion? __ Look!" Several biographical pages opened in her browser with photos of a gaunt, gray-haired man.

Lopez had joined them, staring at the screen. "That one of your cork boards?"

He indicated an image of hundreds of pieces of paper taped to a board and adjacent wall. Riotous handwriting and equations covered the scraps. Houston knew immediately they were on to something.

"My God, he _was_ crazy," she said.

Lightfoote nodded, furiously scanning text. "Schizophrenia. Says here he thought aliens were talking in code to him through the newspapers."

"That qualifies," said Lopez.

Lightfoote continued. "See this timeline of his life? He was a new star in the '50s, went nuts, disappeared for _forty years_ , then resurfaces half-sane to claim a Nobel prize." She read in silence down the page. "Says he's still crazy but—get this—he can recognize _patterns_ of thought, split them into _crazy_ and _not crazy_ from observing other's reactions. Statistical analysis of sanity."

Houston was stunned. "Is that possible?"

"Hard to believe," said Lightfoote. "But this handwriting—look familiar?"

"Definitely," said Houston.

Lopez laughed. "Well, it looks like the same decorator was involved, that's for sure." Houston's head was hurting. "I don't get it. What would some insane university professor have to do with Fawkes or Bilderberg?"

Lightfoote continued to type at a mad pace. "That's what we need to find out, right?"

The haunting mask of Guy Fawkes danced in Houston's mind, along with the bloodied head of the hacker Fawkes lying face down in Savas's office. "Maybe this really is just all for the _lolz_ , Angel—Fawkes with a final, last laugh at us."

An image appeared on the screen of an open space within a building, a large display surrounded by onlookers in the middle of the frame. Houston squinted. _Was that_ —

"Look at this," said Lightfoote. "Maybe Fawkes _was_ trolling us. But this board is _real._ "

Lightfoote zoomed into the image, centering on the display. A large cork board with numerous scraps of handwritten notes filled the screen. The extreme pixelation obscured the finer detail.

Houston felt a chill. "My God, it's the same. Where is this?"

"Nash Museum, Princeton University." Lightfoote rested her forehead on the top of her hand. "It's an exhibit—elements from his life, artifacts from his crazy time, too."

"Why would Fawkes send us a picture from a museum dedicated to the ramblings of a nutcase?" asked Lopez, his arms raised in frustration.

"A Nobel Prize-winning nutcase," said Lightfoote. "Prize in _economics_."

Houston nodded. "Fawkes was all about the world financial system, taking it down. His Bilderberg paranoia was tied up in that. Cohen's words, remember? Right before the soldiers descended. Maybe Nash knew something, wrote it down in his crazy period. No one understood."

"But only Fawkes did? Really?" said Lopez.

"He was a crazy genius too, Francisco. Maybe that's why he only gave us half the photo."

"Or maybe he wanted to make it difficult for just anyone to figure this out," said Lightfoote. "He's pushing us to go there. I can't get anything else online. Image searches only give the low res photo—can't do much with that. We need to see this thing. The whole poster board." She looked over her shoulder at Houston and Lopez. "We need to go to Princeton."

"I was afraid this was coming," said Lopez. "A dangerous journey. And, even if there is something in this, what if we can't figure it out? Maybe it's hidden in the crazy of this Nash? You're asking us to travel across a war zone—with military forces hunting us down—to try and decipher the ravings of a lunatic!" He stared at Lightfoote.

"Even Angel admits it's a strange mission," she said.

Houston reached over and touched Lopez on the cheek. "We're tired. We're fried from this and people trying to turn us into Swiss cheese. But it looks _real._ We have to figure it out." His face softened as she held his eyes.

"We might get some tutoring," said Lightfoote.

"From someone at Princeton?" asked Houston. "John Nash? He's still there?"

"Unfortunately, no. Says here he died in a car crash in 2015. Taxi."

"An eighty-six year old dies in a taxi crash?" said Houston.

Lightfoote nodded. "It's a strange one. But I meant this guy—Avi Kaplan. He runs the museum. Some ex-Nash student who was close to him for decades. Worked on many of his important papers. Helped Nash's wife during his crazy years."

"I see this is destiny," said Lopez. "When do we leave?"

Lightfoote bit her lower lip. "Tonight. Angel needs one more hack. To send a message."

Houston raised an eyebrow. "To who?"

"President York. We need to talk to her."
18

# Tactical Strike

"You've made contact?" asked Savas.

They stood in the operations center beneath Manhattan, the labyrinth of tunnels snaking away from them in multiple directions. Military personnel and civilian staff continued to work close by, frantically orchestrating the coming journey westward. Savas could hear them debating the logistics, tactics, and threats. He tried to tune out the coming storm and focus on their communication effort.

"We think so," said York. She deferred to a boyish soldier in front of a terminal. "Specialist Turner?"

"Yes, ma'am! It's a Tor-scrambled secure chat—as secure as we can make it. Your friends, if these are your friends, have an extra serving of paranoid and all the software to work this with me."

"What do you mean, 'if' these are our friends?" asked Savas.

"That's just it, sir, how do we verify? We put out the codes and information you mentioned. They must have been monitoring a lot of information, and they took the bait. They reached out to us. But could be NSA or someone else."

York interrupted. "Hastings has control of the NSA servers. They have tremendous computational firepower and are spying on every internet and cellular network. Landlines too, of course."

Turner continued. "We need something specific, something that could distinguish friendlies from hostiles. Once that's done, we can risk more channels open."

Savas shook his head. "NSA a hostile. Half the US military a hostile. What the hell has happened?"

"Let me try," said Cohen.

The soldier nodded and rose from the chair. "It's chat. Just type. They'll respond."

She sat and typed.

"Gabriel's brother?"

Text appeared after a short pause.

"Archangel Michael."

"Who killed the wraith?"

"Gabriel."

"Cabin. What grows on the doors?"

"Rose creepers."

Cohen leaned back and sighed. "It's them."

Savas agreed. "Definitely."

Turner's eyebrows arched, and looked at York. She nodded and he resumed his position in the chair. "Okay, then let's initiate video."

A window opened on the screen. Pixelated blurs moved as if in a strobe light. The video improved, the resolution increased and movement smoothed. A bald woman with piercings across her face stared back intensely at them. Cohen leaned down to the screen.

"Angel! Are you okay? Where are Gabriel and Mary?"

Behind Lightfoote, two faces appeared.

"Right here, Rebecca," came Houston's voice. "We're fine."

"Where the hell are you?" asked Savas

She shook her head. "Can't tell you. Can't be sure who's listening or if you're okay. Not compromised. They're after us."

"We know," he said. "We were taken. Interrogated. They were very interested in finding you. You saved our asses, tracking us. We escaped and are in hiding with the President." He inhaled deeply. _Just say it, John._ "There's bad news. Frank's dead."

Lightfoote balled her hands into fists. "How?" She glared at Savas.

Cohen spoke. "We're not sure. They—" She couldn't finish.

"They tortured him to death," finished Lightfoote. "I get it. And from the look of his face, it looks like John was next. JP? He was dying when we left him."

"I don't know, Angel," said Savas. "My guess is they would see to him, give him medical attention."

"So they could torture him later," said Lightfoote. The silence answered her question. Her green eyes flared. "Who's doing all this?"

"Bilderberg," said York, pushing her way into the line of the camera.

"Then it's real?" came the deep voice of Lopez. "What is it?"

"Something impossible to believe. I've arranged to have some files sent to you. Look them over when you get a chance. But the bottom line: Bilderberg is a set of powerful puppet masters pulling strings across governments the world over. Anonymous nearly brought their system crashing down. I'm running for my life because I'm fighting it. There's been a military coup run by a high ranking soldier—Gerald Hastings. But he's only a front. The Bilderberg Group is behind everything."

"Who's in this group? Where are they?" asked Lightfoote.

"We don't know," said York. "We don't know one name or where they're located. For all we know they're distributed, all over the world. But their goal is to return the nation and the world to a pre-Anonymous status quo. In that world, they shape and guide the nations to their own ends."

Lopez spoke. "We're getting the files now. This is a little hard to believe. Tin-foil hat stuff."

"I know," said the President, "but I think the materials in those files and recent events will help things fall into place. If it helps any, I've _spoken_ to them. After my election. They secretly contacted me, impressed upon me in ways I could not dismiss who was really in control of our world. For years I went along with it. Like other presidents. Like leaders across the world. I'm not proud of it, but there's no time to explain everything, what they threatened if I didn't. The consequences to me and others. But now—well, maybe we can stop them."

"Because of Fawkes," said Lightfoote. "And he's not done. He left us the file."

"Yes, John and Rebecca mentioned it."

"We've broken the encryption."

York leaned forward. "What does it say?"

"It doesn't say anything. It's an image file. One that doesn't tell us much right now. But it leads us in a clear direction."

"You won't say more?" asked Savas.

"Sorry, John. This is too important. Especially now after hearing the president."

"Angel's right," said Houston. "It's a long shot, but we need to follow up on it. We need to travel to unravel this. But we need to do it alone. We're a small group. We can hide."

"We can afford you the protection of a powerful contingent of the US military," said York. "We're going to NORAD. We'll fight our way there if we have to. Loyalists to this nation are waiting for us there. Come with us! Seek safety at Cheyenne Mountain to understand this puzzle."

Lightfoote shook her head. "Not putting the eggs in one basket. The file is leading us in another direction. We have someplace to go, and it's not the Rockies."

York frowned. "I can't spare anyone to help you, I'm sorry. And without knowing more about what you're doing, it doesn't seem wise even if I could. You won't reconsider? We can help you!"

Houston spoke firmly. "We think Fawkes gave us a key to Bilderberg, something we can use against them. But it's buried in an enigma we have to solve. We can't come with you. Not yet. Not until we know if it's useful. We have to commit to it."

Savas spoke to the screen. "Angel, you're sure about this? You really think Fawkes was on to something?"

"Definitely," she said. "Saying more might tip off our enemies. I'm sorry."

"My gut says you should be here," said York. "But there's no denying what you've done. I just wish you hadn't been so successful at stopping the worm. The one thing Bilderberg needs now is a return to normalcy. We have to prevent it at all costs."

"So now what?" asked Cohen.

"We turn these three loose," said the president. "And hope to hell they give us something to help fight this menace. Meanwhile, we muster out." She turned back to the screen. "You three stay alive and contact us when you can. The offer still stands. If you need us, if you can make it to us, we'll protect you."

"As best _you_ can," said Lightfoote. "I assume Hastings isn't going to let you stroll over to NORAD without incident."

"No, he won't," said York. "But we'll be ready for him."

"Then maybe you're ready to hit him for us, too," said Lightfoote.

York arched an eyebrow. "Hastings?"

"His intel arm. The NSA. They're like ticks all over the internet, sucking info and tracking us. We were almost killed in Harlem because they tracked us. We need them off our backs, and away from the hackers that are working with us."

"You're working with hackers?" asked York.

"Parallel processing. That's how we cracked the encryption. We're counting on them. Right now, they're organizing. But it's all going to get bloody if the NSA spies keeping crashing the party."

"What do you want us to do?" asked York.

"Hit their data centers. Take them out. Fort Meade and Utah for sure."

"Isn't Utah on _our_ side?" asked Savas.

York shook her head. "Not so clean cut, John. It's in our supposed range of control, but nobody has troops there and no one can commit them now. It's sided with Hastings. He's got the full power of the agency. Lots of cyberwarfare going on between NORAD and the NSA right now."

"Take them out," said Lightfoote. "Give us a chance to breathe. You don't even need to kill people. Those server farms live and die on cooling and electricity. Take out the water supply, local power stations."

"We've got the cruise missiles, but we're going to need them, too. I'll put together a team to analyze the most efficient attack, see what we can spare." York nodded, coming to a conclusion. "Actually, it will likely help our journey. Should of thought of this before. The NSA gets satellite information, monitors a lot of communications. Hastings can track us, get useful intel, just from whatever goes out from the areas our convoy passes. But not if their server farms are down. That'd jab a stick in his eye." She smiled. "Yes, Angel. I'm starting to take a real liking to your idea."
19

# Gangrene

"General Hastings, your first priority is to neutralize York."

The Director's rough voice spoke toward an enormous flat screen monitor, the deep bags under his eyes melding with his lined face to create the appearance of a melted landscape. The face of a heavyset man in a decorated uniform stared back, eyes darting left and right.

The general licked his lips. "We're looking at a full-fledged _war_ if we continue. We risk fracturing the entire nation!"

"Let me explain the dynamics to you once again," said the Director, his voice cold. "We are at crisis point. If York solidifies her power base, and if the fugitives with the terrorist's documents survive, we risk the formation of a permanent front against our long-term interests. This would be unprecedented in recent history and could unravel decades-long efforts. We will not allow this. If you can't put an end to this rebellion, we'll find someone who can."

The general spoke through clenched teeth.

"I understand. We won't fail. But I warn you, there's going to be one hell of a mess to clean up."

"We will deal with it later. Find her, General. Kill her and her enablers."

The old man closed the connection and the general's face vanished. In its place, an array of faces appeared and tiled the screen. A woman with an Iranian accent spoke from the center of the screen.

"He is right. The simulations are in chaos. We are quickly oscillating outside our bands of prediction."

"I know!" shouted the old man, slamming his fist onto the table in front of him. "The hacker has disrupted everything. Hopefully, we can put this fire out soon and push things back into line."

"It may be difficult to do so within the models we have developed," came the clipped Germanic accent of a silver-haired man on the lower left tile. "Those models are statistically based. They rely on the _average_ properties of large numbers of individuals, or, at worst, a few very well defined pressure points. The hacker was a completely random and extreme element. A _black swan_. His efforts are like a volcano erupting, scrambling all the weather forecasting. We might be basically starting over."

A man with Chinese features spoke from the wall of faces.

"We are at an inflection point. Those worst-case scenarios may not occur. Not if we end the social ripples of this _Anonymous_ now. If we can bring the previous financial and political systems back online quickly, strongly suppress any deviations from it and any predictions of the past models, we may enter a quasi-stable tangent path. It will be different, but manageable. The simulations are still in flux. Nothing is fixed."

"All the more reason we must act forcefully," said the Director to the screens. "We must center our efforts on the anomaly in the United States. The other nations appear to be returning rapidly to previous trajectories in the forecasts. But not America. York is now in open rebellion against us. America is still the world's most powerful nation. Should she prevail, one hundred years of effort will be burned to the ground. She could undermine everything."

"If she prevails, we will also be hunted," said the woman.

The Director raised his voice. "I'm not worried about that! Eventually we can take her down and those who support her. Quench any investigations or covert efforts. They have nothing on us. No solid information, only the crumbs we gave her and the myths of the lunatic fringe. They will get nowhere. It is the damage to the _system_ we have so carefully developed that will be devastating."

"Hastings may win," said the German. "York is vulnerable now. Unless she can regroup with her supporters at NORAD. But there is a lot of land to cross in that nation."

"We will not rely only on him. Our assassins will infiltrate the military and every local population center along her path. We are flying in teams from across the world. Some will also be diverted to hunting down the FBI specialist, Lightfoote, and the fugitives aiding her."

"Still no progress with the file contents?" asked the woman.

"No. But there is little doubt as to its contents. The mention of Nash is clear."

The woman sighed. "The social engineering. It will be spelled out."

"Yes, and in the right hands, it will be understood for what it is. Our hidden plans laid bare. Countermeasures obvious. They will be able to undo nearly everything."

The German spoke. "They are as big a threat as York."

"Yes," said the Director.

The woman leaned back in her chair, long black hair cascading behind her head. "And if York or these fugitives elude us? Or do so long enough that they begin to capitalize on their threat? What then?"

The Director sighed. "It's one thing to be set back centuries. It is another to be made vulnerable to a death blow. If Hastings and our teams do not stop this soon, if the simulations show we are losing the ability to contain this catastrophe, then we will have only one choice left."

Silence descended, broken by the Chinese man at the upper corner of the screen.

"We have rarely used a failsafe. I had hoped we were beyond such measures."

The old man scowled. "Your weakness, Yigong, has always disturbed me."

Yigong continued. "Tens of millions will die. It's not 1945! With these kinds of numbers, the ends don't justify the means. The _ends_ change as well."

"As a percentage of the human population, it is little different from the series of world wars we orchestrated in the 20th century."

A man with a Spanish accent interrupted. "Percentages tell one thing to statisticians. But absolute numbers—these are human beings, Director."

The Director held his hands up at his sides. "Are we forgetting our purpose, and what we have achieved? We've raised billions out of poverty, reduced death and suffering from infectious disease, raised the world lifespan to unprecedented levels. Only because of _our_ guiding hand has human civilization not torn itself to pieces, blown itself up, undoing all the progress in science and government, crashing back to another dark age!" He sighed and wiped his brow, sweat glistening on his face. "Sometimes, to maintain this historical arc of progress, thousands, even millions had to die. Those deaths improved the lives of a thousand times as many!" He scanned the faces, his expression stern. "And now we have the science to do it with clarity, to know whether the lives lost will mean something down the road. Humanity _requires_ guidance. _You know this!_ But our ward requires harsh treatment when ill. And right now, the world is very ill."

"And so, if the criterion is reached, amputation?" said the Spaniard.

The Director took a deep breath. "Let's hope it does not come to that. But make no mistake, we will do what is required."
Part II

# Civil War

"The biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." -Woodrow Wilson
20

# Bugging Out

Savas stared across the ranks of soldiers and military vehicles. Part of his mind wouldn't believe it, couldn't accept the reality around him. Rows of drab transports, jeeps and trucks, lighter armored vehicles like Humvees—some mounted with rocket launchers—churned behind them as they rode up a steep tunnel incline.

They were inside a heavily armored vehicle, one supposedly resistant to major arms fire and explosive devices, disguised as a troop transport on the outside. Marines lined the interior beside Cohen and York, along with her advisers. It looked like something from a science fiction film with digital displays and operators monitoring troop movements and communications, speaking into headsets.

He turned to the President. "How has all this remained hidden?"

"It wasn't exactly hidden," said York. "New York City crews and administrations knew of it. They had to maintain the tunnels and concealed exits. Prevent anyone from breaking in and discovering it. What likely kept the secret was that it was on its way out. Something everyone knew about but didn't talk of because, well, it was over. A historical relic. Until we set up camp, it was mostly empty."

Ahead of them an enormous doorway opened in the rock. A stone wall split in the center along a vertical axis and continued to widen, orange light from outside pouring into the shaft. The doors themselves were made of steel more than three feet thick, the outer stone a facade textured to match the bedrock.

"This exit opens on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, right in a wall of rock concealed with hazard signs and fake debris. Traffic, your odd onlooker, won't see it. Undercover soldiers have been guarding it for decades."

"Wait, we just went under the Hudson?" asked Cohen. "There's another tunnel?"

"Yes," said York. "There aren't too many ways off this island, you know. You didn't think Uncle Sam would build a secret underground shelter and not have an equally secret way to get the hell out of it?"

"Are there others?" Cohen's eyes widened.

"Two," said York. "By the Lincoln and Midtown tunnels. These emergency passages piggyback off the infrastructure of the others, lying alongside like leeches. We've got decoys exiting both of those right now. Hastings will be watching. If he has hard intel where we were holed up, he might be bringing fire to some or all of them. This way we'll spin their heads a little, hopefully give us time and space to get out. But we've hedged our bets in several ways."

"How many troops does he have? Equipment?"

"We don't know. The good thing is he doesn't know what we have. Anonymous took the satellite systems down completely. Including military and governmental. They're coming back online slowly, although we've lost a few probably forever due to orbit problems. But NORAD controls most of the birds up there. And we control NORAD. We've all been blind the last few weeks, but Hastings is going to stay that way except for a few inconsequential Navy sats, thanks to Angel's idea. While our vision slowly clears."

"The NSA attack? It's set?" asked Savas.

"Timed to our exit. Missiles are on their way now."

Ahead, the light intensified as the caravan approached. Savas could see the opening clearly now. Larger than he expected, the diameter surpassed all the tunnels he knew. Of course, the Abrams tanks and other large vehicles escorting them were wider and much heavier than even the biggest civilian transports.

"We're using their blindness to our advantage as much as we can," she said. "Have a look."

The convoy burst out of the tunnel and into a sea of military vehicles. The parade pouring out behind them was dwarfed by rows of tanks, highly mobile artillery, and massive numbers of troop transports. Soldiers lined the area. Vietnam-era helicopters thundered and he glimpsed their shadowed forms overhead. Cohen gasped.

"We've been positioning our forces nearby," said York, "They've been distributed for a few days, but tonight a large contingent moved to this exit. We've got a few birds for recon, but they're old and not suitable for combat. The ground vehicles and equipment are another matter."

They joined a group of heavily armored escorts and the convoy rushed onto the lined asphalt of an interstate. Savas could see the rest of the vehicles lining up to follow behind them.

"There were some minor skirmishes, but Hastings didn't have much in place. But soon he'll know we came through here and have some sense of our strength when his forces report back to him." She closed her eyes and exhaled. "Then we'll see what he does. For now, we need to get to the interstate and rendezvous with the main bulk of our forces."

"There's more?" Cohen asked.

"A lot more," said York. "We're fifteen thousand strong. Transports. Supplies—food, fuel, ammunition—enough for the journey and several major battles. It's nearly two thousand miles to the mountain. We can run most of these vehicles at thirty, maybe forty miles per hour. Three days minimum if we give ourselves six hours per camp. Lots of time and lots of land for Hastings to mount several offensives. Thankfully, all this Armageddon solves any traffic problems."

"Jesus," whispered Savas.

"Two thousand miles," said Cohen. "One long convoy. We'll be out in the open, exposed."

"Yes," said York. "Our asses hanging in the breeze. But with both sides' air power still reeling, it's feasible. And they aren't looking for a military victory. They just want slow us down. If they can stop us long enough to find me—well, that's the goal."

"Assassination," said Savas.

"NORAD can fight this war without me," she said. "But not the war for the people. If I'm not around to put a visible face—the democratically elected face of the people—against the forces of Hastings and Bilderberg, they win."

Bright light screamed overhead, a roar rattling the air around them.

"That was low," said Savas.

Thunder rumbled from the distance.

"Missile strikes. Clearing our way. Casualties are just going to climb from this point."

Cohen grimaced, her voice rough. "Sibling against sibling. The second Civil War."
21

# Thunder

Sara Houston stared out over New York Harbor, a cold December wind raking harshly across the bow of the boat. Darkness shrouded Lady Liberty, the post-Anonymous breakdown of order along the East Coast leaving the statue untended. Her upraised torch only a silhouette against the setting moon. The churning water along the hull of the craft began to lull Houston, ease her seasickness, and for a moment she wished she could simply let go of the madness around them, close her eyes, and lose herself to the sounds of the sea.

Instead, she looked toward the retreating lights of lower Manhattan and the enclosed cockpit of the vessel. The windows of the stolen pleasure yacht were tinted black, and she couldn't see Lopez and Lightfoote inside. She assumed the FBI woman still stood at the wheel, Lopez struggling to come up to speed with the navigational systems to help pilot them in the right direction.

Their plan was straightforward. They would continue south through the Upper Bay, passing alongside the Bayonne peninsula. Near its tip, they would change course with a sharp westerly turn into the Kill van Kull, the three mile stretch of tidal strait between Staten Island and Bayonne. It would get them out of New York by avoiding the major land bottlenecks of bridges and tunnels. The more open sea would make it far harder to monitor and control. If all went well, they should enter Newark Bay within the hour, pass Shooters Island, and turn south toward the Goethals Bridge. They hoped to find a place to dock somewhere near Port Newark, steal a vehicle, and slip onto I-95 south towards Princeton. What could go wrong?

"Helicopter!"

She heard Lopez before she saw him emerging from the cockpit. He rushed alongside her.

"You were right about monitoring the police bands," he said, expression serious. "The NYPD and National Guard are working together. Mostly just trying to restore order, it seems. I didn't hear anything about us. But the curfew is still in force—still martial law. They'll bring us in if we're spotted and we can't let that happen."

"Not sure we have the firepower to bring that down, Francisco," she said. "Not sure I want to unless I have to. Probably some kid's dad trying to do his job."

He sighed. "Agreed. Angel says we should go dark. It's a big pond out here. Unlikely they'll spot us in the middle of it."

She nodded and followed him back inside. As they entered the cabin, the boat shuddered as the motor cut off. Lightfoote moved quickly. One by one, the lights on the boat went dark—green LEDs marking the starboard and port sides, a white stern light, and a bright lamp on the masthead.

"Glad they modernized this one," she said. "Can you imagine trying to pilot this boat without a manual? All hail the touch screen and auto mode."

Houston gazed out the window. "Moon's nearly set."

Lightfoote followed her gaze outside. "Good thing. White fiberglass is a bad color to hide in under moonlight. Okay—she's dead in the water now. No need to drop anchor, should be a quick pass. Besides, if we're made we'll need to move fast."

Lopez stood halfway in and out of the cabin. "I can hear it." He motioned for them to follow.

The telltale rumble and thwack of the helicopter's motor and blades were carried over the water by the wind. The winking red lights on the craft were nearly lost in the blaze from a spotlight.

"Checking up on our girl," said Houston.

The helicopter approached Liberty Island and arced around it, the spotlight trained along its shores. They watched the bird do a complete revolution around the island, the light moving off the shores and onto the statue itself. Another full rotation had the craft's pulse coupled with a strobe effect from the spotlight, almost giving the towering figure the illusion of motion. Finally, the helicopter accelerated toward the Jersey shore. The light faded as it pulled away.

"Likely first of many flybys tonight," said Houston.

Lightfoote returned to the control panel and started the engine. "We need to get to the highway before sunrise. Great to hide out here at night, but we can't go dark in the day." The vessel shook to life, but she didn't turn the lights back on. "And I vote we stay dark tonight as well."

Lopez returned to the navigation system and switched the police scanner back on. "I don't know how many they have out patrolling, and there is no way to cover all the coastline. But some of this journey puts us in pretty narrow straits. We could get trapped there without many options."

Lightfoote nodded as the boat lurched forward. "Let's just hope their plate's full already."

"Going to go back out," said Houston.

"Still nauseous?" Lopez asked.

"Yeah. It's a hundred times worse in this cabin."

She opened the door and stepped back into the cold air. Immediately the wind and temperature drop began to relieve her symptoms. She walked back to the bow and leaned on the railing. Lady Liberty disappeared behind them in the blackness, lower Manhattan a foggy glow in the growing mist. Ahead, she began to see the outlines of the narrow opening to the Kill van Kull, traffic nonexistent. _Who would dare sail now, after all this_?

She hoped Lopez could get his head around the navigation. She didn't see much room to maneuver within the strait, and the sides were decorated with docks and moorings. They weren't even amateurs, and a collision could be ruinous. Ending their journey at the bottom of the New York harbor estuary was definitely not part of the plan. They had too much to do: A mystery to unravel. A shadowy organization and military coup in the United States to help thwart. And if a crazed terrorist's last words were right, in southern New Jersey an answer awaited them.

A glow flickered northeast of their position. The light revealed an approaching cloud front, dull orange reflecting off the low clouds rolling in from the northwest. The night rumbled and the light winked out.

And returned, the position slightly different, a trio of will-o-the-wisps in the far distance like someone had switched on and off several giant street lamps. An ensemble of rolling bass notes shook around them. Houston heard the cabin door open. Lopez and Lightfoote approached the bow and stood beside her, gazing north as the light and sound show continued.

"What is that?" asked Lightfoote. "Thunder?"

"It's not like any thunder I've ever heard," said Lopez.

Houston gritted her teeth. "Not thunder. Those aren't storm clouds."

"Then what?" asked Lopez.

A turbulent growl grew from the south and crackled, flashing through the air from port to starboard side. A flaming light screamed past them northwards, the rocket's burner searing streaks into their eyes. Its rumbling faded into the low throb of explosive detonations as it disappeared into the distance.

"Explosions," she answered. "From bombing runs."

Lopez placed his hand on her shoulder, squeezing firmly. "God help us."
22

# Greeting Party

Houston squinted through the sunglasses as the morning sun glinted off the wet road in front of them. The mists had begun to clear but left a thin layer of water on the highway. It would evaporate quickly, but the surface blinded them for the moment.

"How's the glare, Francisco?"

Lopez grunted, his eyes behind shades heavy and dark from the sleepless night. He still favored his left shoulder, but it functioned better each day, the wound closed and shrinking. Houston knew the muscle damage would take longer to heal, and one hundred percent was months away. Dominantly right handed for most activities, it would have to do.

And they would need him. She had no doubts. Desperate men hunted them, assassins who stopped at nothing to prevent them from piecing together the mystery waiting in Princeton. The priest would have to become a killer again. His inner conflict would continue.

For now, she clung to the relative peace. The remainder of their voyage through the harbor and subsequent ride down the interstate had been uneventful—if one could call wrecking a cruise boat while trying to dock it, scampering to safety as it sunk beside a mooring, and hot-wiring an SUV _uneventful_. But by the standards of the last few weeks, it was almost relaxing.

Lightfoote slept soundly in the back of the black SUV, her body splayed out across the rear-most seat like an unruly teenager. She'd pushed herself more than anyone. Houston turned her head and stared at the strange woman—hacker, FBI agent, shaved and pierced cyberpunk, as much a mystery to her as whatever waited for them in Princeton. Houston sensed a darkness hidden within her.

_Within each of us_.

She returned her gaze to the road. "Two more lights and it's a right on Washington Road."

"I remember," he said gruffly. "We've gone over the route ten times."

Houston leaned across the seat and placed her head on his shoulder. "I'm tired too, Francisco. But we can't get down now. Everything is on the line."

"I know. Just on edge."

"Still, when we're together—it's a shield. Makes me feel we can do anything. I hold on to that."

He kissed her forehead, returning his eyes quickly to the road.

A groan and voice came from behind them. "God, and I thought working for my boss was a Hallmark card."

The rustling of fabric against the back seats was followed by a thud and vibration in the car. Behind them, Lightfoote leaned against the door, her feet flat on the floorboard.

Houston laughed. "Up already?"

She yawned. "So, where'd you two meet? Assassin school?"

"At a funeral," said Lopez.

"Touché," she said.

"He's serious," said Houston.

"Wouldn't surprise me. What funeral?"

Lopez sighed. "My brother's. Murdered by a madman who nearly brought down the CIA."

Houston cut in. "But that was before we were paraded across the front of the tabloids as some murderous, sex-crazed Bonnie and Clyde. Before we uncovered the CIA dirty laundry that got us smeared and on the most wanted list. Before your boss helped save our asses when we were caught hunting down the _real_ killer of the former VP. The same man who killed his brother."

Lightfoote whistled. "Well _damn_ , girl. John never said anything. He and Rebecca were unmovable. We all knew something was going on, but this? I've got to hear this story."

"Better story to hear than live through," Houston whispered.

"No time for stories," said Lopez, the car slowing. "Washington Road. Princeton University on the right."

Lopez swung the car off NJ 1 and onto Washington Road. The car sped through a short forested region, opening into extended fields of green as they approached a stony bridge. They passed over a body of water and into a tree-lined and well-manicured region.

Lightfoote mumbled. "Einstein. Woodrow Wilson. John Nash. Up ahead."

"On the left, actually. Faculty Road," said Houston.

Lopez turned at the junction and followed the road deeper into a forested patch. Just as they were getting used to the broken light and shadows, the environment shifted violently from pastoral to industrial and back again as they crossed railroad tracks. Lopez slowed at a sign reading Alexander Street.

"Right here, and then left on College, yes?"

"That's it," said Houston, staring at the campus buildings around them.

Ahead, a tower rose into the air. Stunted by Manhattan standards, in this rural enclave it rose majestically skyward, gothic spires and the gray stone facade giving the impression of medieval England more than southern New Jersey.

"Cleveland Tower," said Lightfoote, following Houston's gaze. "Built as a memorial for President Cleveland in 1913. Sixty-seven bells in a carillon at the top. Center of the Graduate College of Princeton University. Where John Nash got his Ph.D."

Lopez pulled the car into a circular drive in front of a row of stony buildings. He switched the engine off and got out of the car. The two women followed.

"It's completely deserted," he said. "We haven't seen a car or human being the whole way in. Where the hell is everyone?"

"A few weeks of Last Days events likely had everyone scrambling for home or the hills," said Houston. She turned to Lightfoote. "Looks like you've done your research. Where now?"

Lightfoote scanned the area. "Inside is the main quad. Tower's there on our right. The Nash Museum is directly behind it, built right beside a golf course."

Houston laughed, "So, after a hard day of schizophrenic econ, you can go tee off with the boys."

Lopez shook his head. "All right, let's go get the rest of that image."

"Don't move!" A man's voice shouted.

Footsteps sounded from behind them. They turned to see four men approaching, one with a raised handgun. Two of them seemed hardly out of high school, fear in their eyes. They dropped several bulging sacks to the ground.

A blond man walked slightly forward, the gun in his hand. A thin smile crept across his face.

"Well, what have we got here?"
23

# Angels and Panthers

"You boys from around here?" asked Houston with a smile. "We're a bit lost."

The two groups were separated by about ten yards, the car to the side. The men looked ragged, unkempt, and their thin leader stared with a wild glare. He kept moving the weapon from Lopez to Houston to Lightfoote, settling longest on the large form of the former priest.

"None of your business!" he yelled. "Who are you? Why are _you_ here?"

"We're looking for someone," said Lopez. "We'll stay out of your way."

"Well, you found someone, asshole!" he barked, spittle coating the fuzz of blond hair on his chin. He inched forward, pointing the weapon at Lopez.

"Come on, Henry, we ain't got time!" cried another. "Those fucking soldiers are _here!_ We got what we came for. Let's go."

Henry licked his lips. "Shut the fuck up, Nick! We're going. Yeah, we're going. We're just not going empty handed." He motioned with his gun. "Wallets. Purses. Any fucking gold or jewelry, you throw it over here."

Lopez looked at Houston. She nodded. Lightfoote said nothing.

"No problem. We don't want any trouble," said Lopez, carefully fishing his wallet out from his robes and tossing it to the feet of the man.

"You bitches, yours! Now!"

"I have to get my purse from the car," Houston said.

"No, no, no, no. Don't go near the fucking car! Got your little 22 in the glove compartment, am I right?"

"Henry, fuck it! Let's go. We got more than we can carry."

"Yeah, yeah," said Henry, a smile on his face. "We don't need no more money. But it's a long trip. Lonely trip." He waved the pistol. "You girls are coming with us."

The other three men looked at each other. Two of them smiled while Nick continued to protest.

"Dammit, no! We can't take more. We got too many already!"

Henry spoke coldly. "That's for sure."

He turned toward Nick and pulled the trigger. The weapon cracked crisply in the cold air. The teen grabbed at his throat as his legs gave way. His screams turned to gurgles as he convulsed on the ground.

" _Jesus_ , man," said a man behind him, his eyes wide as he gaped at the twitching form of the dying man.

"Shut up or you're next!" Henry stepped toward Lopez. "World's gone to shit. Ain't no rules, not no more. We do what we want." He glared at Lopez. "You, wetback! You want to be next?"

With a final glance at Houston, Lopez shook his head.

" _No mas, señor_. I don't know these girls. After all the crazy, I was just carpooling with them. Not my problem."

"Down on your face!"

Lopez kneeled and fell prostrate on the manicured grass in front of the graduate college building. Houston began to cry as Lightfoote placed her hands over her eyes.

"Now, you two, this way. You run, I shoot you. You try anything, I shoot you. Look at that!" He pointed to the corpse beside him. " _See?_ I will. I'll blow your fucking brains out!"

The women moved slowly forward, their bodies shaking in fear.

Henry turned to his remaining companions. "I did all the work here for you pussies. I get a go at each before either of you. You understand?"

One on his right nodded. "Yeah, man. Whatever you say. Jesus Christ. I can't believe you shot Nick."

"No rules but my rules. I make the rules." He turned to the other on this left. "You got that, Bill?"

"Yeah. You make the rules."

He looked Lightfoote up and down. "You, metal face." She stopped. "Put your hands down. Come here. I want to get a look at you."

Lightfoote walked up slowly, Houston following a pace behind.

He smiled. "Green eyes. Cool. You looked _fucked up_ girl. I bet you can do some shit. Twisted, huh? Fuck me good?"

Lightfoote smiled and looked into his eyes. "Yeah. I'll fuck you up good."

Her hands shot forward and grasped the gun as she sidestepped. Using her body weight in a continuous motion, she twisted the wrist, bones snapping audibly. Henry screamed, staring down at his arm in shock, the hand wrenched at a grotesque angle to his forearm. Lightfoote crouched on one knee, his gun in her hand, the barrel pointed forward.

Stunned, the other two men barely reacted. Like a drunk, the one on the right began feeling around the middle of his lower back for the weapon tucked in his belt. His head snapped backward as a gunshot reverberated off the stone. At the same moment, Houston sprang like a panther toward the man on the left. He swung his arm in a haymaker from the side, only to find himself in her embrace as she redirected his unbalanced attack into a twist and flung him onto the grass. He landed heavily, the wind knocked out of him. He wheezed as he looked up into the massive barrel of a Browning 1911.

Henry fell to his knees. He cradled his wrecked hand.

"What the _fuck?_ You broke my fucking arm!" Tears streaked his face from the pain.

Lightfoote dropped his weapon on the roof of the car with a clank. She nodded to Lopez as he stood. "We can keep theirs as backup."

Lopez examined the gun. "Only when we're desperate. What a piece of crap. Guy's lucky this thing didn't blow up in his hand."

"He's got other hand problems," said Lightfoote.

"Who _are_ you?" asked Henry.

Lopez checked the chamber and removed the magazine, continuing to examine the weapon. "We need to question them about the soldiers."

Henry's face reddened. "Always get girls to do your dirty work, Spic?"

Lopez smiled grimly and walked to the trunk with the weapon.

"Hey, I'm talking to you!"

Lightfoote struck the man in the chest with her foot. He crashed to the ground with a groan.

"You bitch, I'm going to—"

"Shut up," said Houston, kicking him lightly in the head. He shut up. Her weapon remained aimed at Bill.

Lightfoote stared down at Henry. "Your dead friend said _soldiers_. What soldiers?"

"You'll find out. Not telling you shit!"

Lightfoote sprang forward to land on his abdomen, her right hand like a claw smashing into his crotch. He screamed, began to struggle but froze, a high-pitched squeal tearing from his lips.

"Yeah, I can do all kinds of shit with your junk." Her hand pinched like a vice on his pants. He screamed. "Two little balls. So much pain." She squeezed tighter and the man's face reddened, the scream cut off, his body paralyzed. "I'm going to ask this one more time. And you're going to answer, or you're going to learn about a pain you never knew could exist."
24

# Digging Graves

"There's a shed over by those trees," said Lopez, moving in its direction. "Likely for the grounds crew. I'll be right back."

"Where is he going?" moaned Henry.

Billy and Henry were tied with hands behind their backs and set against the car. The bodies of their companions lay in the grass directly in front of them.

"Ah, God! My arm! It hurts!"

Lightfoote scowled. "Maybe we should just shoot the ass and put him out of our misery?"

"No, I like to hear him whine," said Houston, a dark look in her eyes. "Reminds me of what he was planning to do with us." She walked up to the man and crouched down. "Karma's a bitch, ain't it, asshole? If your friend hadn't sung like a bird, things might be much worse for you."

"Bad song," said Lightfoote. "Sounds like it's a scouting party. They're sweeping through Princeton, but my bet is they're headed here. I think the NSA mainframes cracked the encryption before York got to them."

"You're sure she hit them?"

Lightfoote lit up. "Oh, yeah. It's like a thousand digital gnats suddenly disappeared. I'd love to see them scrambling to get back up and running. But right now, we have our own problems."

Houston stood back up and nodded. "Yeah. We don't have much time. More will come even if we can take these out."

A strained voice came from behind them. "Let's divide this up."

They turned to see Lopez laden with a pregnant tarp over his shoulders. He bent his neck and tossed it to the ground with a heavy thud and rattle.

"You two go to the museum. Take photos of the giant cork board. We can analyze them later when we've found a place to hide out."

"What about you?" asked Houston, looking toward the bulging tarp.

He bent down and unfurled the stained fabric, revealing shovels and gardening equipment. His head turned toward the two men.

"We're going to dig two graves. Better than leaving them out to rot."

"We?" asked Houston.

"Dumb and dumber there," he said. "They'll dig."

"I'm not digging nothing," said Henry.

Lopez straightened and his arm pointed toward them in a fluid motion. A dark barrel gleamed at the end of it. He screwed a long silencer to the end.

"You're going to dig those graves. Or I'm going to dig all your graves. Your choice."

"You broke my fucking hand! I can't dig!"

He kicked a spade forward from the open tarp. "You've still got one good arm. Use it. Your friend will use the shovels, and I'll be keeping both of you in my sights."

The ground in front of Henry exploded, dust and rocks coating his face, snow and mud stuck to his blond locks. He screamed and turned his head from Lopez's gun, coughing as tears ran from his spattered eyes.

"And you'll do it quickly. We don't have much time."

The men nodded.

"Wise move," said Houston. She reached down with a blade and cut their bonds. Both flinched from the knife. Lopez kept his weapon trained on them. She moved around the car and opened the trunk, ducking under the lid and back out holding a red canister.

Lopez squinted. "You're going to torch it?"

"Not going to leave any clues in that place once we leave. Let those bastards spin their wheels and wonder what we found out. Bring the bodies. Save the digging."

"The older Catholic rites die hard," he said cryptically. He nodded to the canister. "That's our reserve. Hope the fuel pumps are working around here."

"I'll use sparingly," she said. "Place is full of paper. Should go up like a straw man." She jerked her head toward the tower and looked at Lightfoote. "Ready?"

The pair set off at a jog to the museum.

Lopez never took his eyes off the two men as they winced, bringing their hands around.

"Now, both of you—dig."

The two men were dripping with sweat when the women returned. Henry whimpered against a nearby tree, clutching his hand to his chest. Two shallow and uneven holes had been dug and the bodies dragged into them, the dirt placed on top barely covering the corpses. A light snow had begun to fall, coating the ground in a patchwork of white.

"Got the photos, several angles to make sure," said Houston breathing heavily, bursts of fog coming out of her mouth. "It's the same board from the file photo, but we have the rest of it. Still more than half the gas in this thing," she said, shaking the canister.

"Good, give me five minutes here."

Lopez held a flat black box and removed a folded red item from within. He placed the box on the thickening layer of snow and as he stood back up, unfurled a crimson stole trimmed along the sides with golden embroidery. He placed it over his head, the two tracks of red and gold offset strongly by his black robes.

"Blessed is God, Who poureth out His grace upon His priests, like the oil of myrrh upon the head, which runneth down to the fringe of his raiment."

Lightfoote leaned over to Houston and whispered in her ear: "What is he doing?"

"Giving them a funeral."

"Why _these_ guys?"

Houston shrugged. "Not running for our lives right now. Got a little time."

Lightfoote smirked. "The Priest and the Whore."

Houston didn't reply. Her eyes didn't leave Lopez. The snow had begun to fall heavily, the day darkening from the heavy clouds.

"Lord God, by the power of your Word you stilled the chaos of the primeval seas, you made the raging waters of the Flood subside, and calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. As we commit the body of our brothers to the deep, grant all peace and tranquility. You promised paradise to the repentant thief; here also bring us to the joys of heaven. Gracious Lord, forgive the sins of those who have perished."

The two men looked on in shock at the proceedings. Henry had even stopped his whimpering.

"Lord God, whose days are without end and whose mercies beyond counting, keep us mindful that life is short and the hour of death unknown. Let your Spirit guide our days on earth in the ways of holiness and justice, that we may serve you, sure in faith, strong in hope, perfected in love. And when our earthly journey is ended, lead us rejoicing into your kingdom, where you reign for ever and ever. Amen."

He made the Sign of the Cross over the graves.

"All a waste, you stupid priest. They wasn't even Catholic."

"That's all right. I'm not a priest." He folded the stole and replaced it in the black box. "And I'm not Catholic. Not anymore."

An orange light flickered off the low-lying clouds. The brightness intensified near the peak of the tower and cut through the heavy snowfall. Lopez approached the men.

"Now, you two are going to get the hell out of here. I don't think I need to explain that if you try anything, or if we catch wind you have given the soldiers or anyone else information about us, we will not pause to plant you in the ground along with your friends." He fit his hands one by one into a pair of black gloves. "I might not even give you last rites."
25

# Screams

Again he woke to the sound of his own screams.

Savas sat up violently in bed, arm raised to ward off a blow. Daylight had barely begun to remove the shadows of night, but a chorus of birds piped in the surrounding forests. Muffled shouts and heavy crashing swirled around him. His breath exhaled in ragged clouds from his chapped lips as a hand reached over from his left, and pressed gently down on his arm.

"It's okay, John," said Cohen, her voice pained. She leaned up against him, tugging on the army issue blanket, brown hair tangled and strewn haphazardly about her shoulders. "Just another dream."

Savas stared blankly forward. "Where are we?"

"Mmmm. Tent on I-76, just outside of Harrisburg."

He closed his eyes. "The convoy. Right. We started to see mountains." He shook his head. "Damn. Sorry, Rebecca."

"Want to talk about it?"

"And say what?" He coughed. "Variations on the usual. Thanos died. Right in my arms. You were almost—the towers were falling on us. Cinder blocks, metal and glass pounding you and him. I tried to shield you, but I couldn't. And they kept hitting and hitting until the stones turned to fists and I was in that damned boat and strapped to that table. And you were screaming on the monitor."

"John—"

His hand made a fist. "I can't protect the people I love. No matter what I do."

She took his head in her hands and turned it to her. "No, John. You can't. Look at me!" He grimaced, the muscles tensing across his chest. "You have to accept it. You aren't Superman. You aren't a hero out of a book or a movie. We fight monsters. Someday something bad might happen to me. You have to look it in the face and accept it. Like I have for you, for a long time." Her eyes glistened. "Someday, time is going to take away as much dignity, inflict as much damage and pain, as any of these monsters could. I need you to be there and be strong, now _and_ then. Knowing what will happen. I will be for you."

"You're stronger than me," he whispered. "It's easier to get angry, strike out at a threat with adrenaline coursing through you. Fighting the incoming sea without end? I don't know how to do that."

"You don't fight it," she said. "You ride it out as best you can. That's all anyone can do."

"And hope for something transcendent afterward? That this isn't it, this screwed-up world and decaying flesh?"

"I don't know, John," she said, shaking her head. "My mother always said the b'rakhot. After she died, we didn't hear many prayers. My father wasn't much for ritual."

"Yeah, me either. I wish I had Father Timothy's confidence."

Cohen ran her fingers through his hair. "No time for crises of faith. Let's see what the soldiers have us eating this morning. We're going to be moving soon."

They dressed quickly in the frigid air and stepped out into the blinding light of the sun rising over the highway. Savas marveled as he stared down an endless line of military vehicles and troops, metal gleaming, engines coughing and spewing soot into the crisp air, chatter and the sounds of mundane activities giving lie to the absurdity before them.

"They've laid out some tables over there," said Cohen.

Savas followed her lead and they made their way over to a line of soldiers waiting beside a makeshift kitchen. The smell of burnt protein and fat mixed with the cold air and stirred deep feelings within him. He put his arm around Cohen and pressed her to his side.

"FBI!" came the bark of a well-known voice.

They turned, straining to see around the jockeying soldiers scrambling for a meal. A mop of disheveled gray hair sitting at a long table waved them over. The president and her advisors were shoveling food into their mouths as they spoke over a large map.

York glared in their direction. "You two aren't good enough for the regular mess. Over here with the civilians."

Savas saw Cohen smile. He was still too shaken for such a display. They picked their way around the bustling troops and up a short hill to the president's table. A paper map was spread out over the surface. Bowls and trays of food weighed it down in the cold wind, and various items from rocks to condiment containers were arrayed along the colored lines marking interstates and cities.

"I'm a dinosaur and prefer a hardcopy," said York, spooning a heap of eggs. "About to gouge my eyes out looking at those blinking digital displays in the command vehicle. Here, grab some _grub,_ I think is the technical term. Plate of eggs and bacon and something I'm not sure what it is, but it's runny as snot."

They quickly raked the food onto a free plate and took seats across from York at the table, several aides looking askance at them. York ignored the looks and gestured over the chaos on the table.

"So, what do you think?"

Savas chewed on a burnt piece of toast and shook his head.

"I'm not sure I can make out what you're representing here."

Cohen pointed at several aggregates of items.

"Major cities on the map. These must be troop gatherings. Enemy troops, if I can say that about other Americans."

"You bet your sweet ass you can, daughter," said York. "And they have gone off and picked the wrong goddamned side of this war." The president bent over the map. "This line of rocks, that's us, this convoy. We're just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We made pretty good time once we got rolling. Luckily, Hastings's damn hit-and-runs have been poorly executed. We're on schedule to make Mount Cheyenne in three more days. Considering the slow start out of the gate, it's not bad. So far, so good."

Cohen pointed to a dense collection of salt and pepper shakers.

"What's that ahead?"

"The bad," said York. "We've got partial satellite coverage and some imagery, also some scouting drones. That right there is Columbus, Ohio, capital of the state and fifteenth largest city in America. Right now, Hastings is fortifying it with some serious strength: infantry, heavy arms from the recon images. West of the city," she said, tapping an overturned coffee tin, "is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The base is his, and they are quickly turning it into a center of operations for this campaign."

"Why there?" asked Cohen. "I thought air force was useless."

"So did we," she answered. "But reports show increasing numbers of Hastings-controlled aircraft going into use."

"They've solved the worm problem," Cohen whispered.

"Yes," said the President grimly. "We believe they have. It will take them some time to get their planes online, but more and more, the longer we're out here, the worse it will be. We're likely to see some heavy assault coming from the land _and_ air when we get into Ohio."

"Jesus," said Savas. "What can we counter with?"

York frowned. "Superior numbers on the ground, especially with the break-away troops from Fort Bragg that managed to rendezvous with us last night. Meanwhile, our side is working overtime to crack the digital problem with the advanced aircraft, but Hastings has the aerial advantage until we're closer to NORAD."

"So there's going to be a battle?" asked Cohen.

"Outside of Columbus it looks like."

"I hoped it wouldn't come to this."

Savas squinted down at the map. "And this tactical advantage in the air. What does that mean, practically?"

"It means," said York, glancing grimly upward, "that come this evening in Ohio, the skies are going to be raining fire."
26

# Battle Front

The convoy commandeered the entire highway.

Before sequestering within the command vehicle, Savas had stared out at the troop transports, tanks, armored trucks with antiaircraft missiles, and an assortment of different medical and more mundane vehicles pouring down one of America's most traveled civilian roadways.

The giant convoy was divided into several staggered contingents. In the far lead were a set of soldiers tasked with keeping the roadway clear. This involved engaging what foolish civilian drivers would brave the coming military force and getting them off-road as well as clearing obstacles—construction or hazards often the product of sabotage from opposing forces. More than one bridge had come under fire from Hastings, and repairs or complete detours slowed everything. Instead of the consistent jog at thirty miles an hour modeled in the underground Manhattan base of operations, they found themselves oscillating between crawling and all out sprints. The strain began to show on equipment as increasing numbers of vehicles failed and were left on the side of the roadway.

Despite the challenges, their progress managed to be significant, if in spurts. Small raids by worm-resistant, Vietnam-era aircraft or troop ambushes were countered effectively, although the intensity of some of the assaults stunned even a street-hardened, antiterrorist agent like Savas. After a particularly close explosion rocked their truck, leaving a prolonged ringing in his ears, he turned to Cohen in disbelief.

"This is what Frank dealt with for years in Afghanistan."

Cohen nodded, her face a mask of tension. "Probably worse. Fine way he was repaid for his service."

"I think worse is coming," said Savas. "Gunshots, even the explosions at the airfield in Mexico when we tracked Mjolnir—nothing like these bombs and missiles. My brain is still rattling around, I think."

"That last one was very close," said Cohen, glancing nervously toward York. "It's a dangerous shell game."

"There were what, five decoys? Five command vehicles spread around out there?"

She nodded. "I think so. And I heard the communications guy up front say one was hit earlier."

"Jesus."

"They're going to target those preferentially. And the drivers know," she continued in a stunned monotone. "Who does that? Who salutes and gets behind a wheel of a decoy knowing they're just bait to hide someone else?"

"While we sit safe in here," he said.

"Not completely. Everyone's in the line of fire. Shell game is an odds game. But our odds are better than theirs."

Savas shook his head. "An amazing job—this truck looks like any normal troop transport on the outside. But in here," he said, gesturing to the banks of military communications, computer monitors, and other high-tech yet hardened technology, "it's a different story. Thick armor cloaked by the false vehicle wall on the outside. I didn't know the army could be so clandestine."

"Thick or not, I don't think anything would stop a direct hit," said Cohen.

"Well, let's hope we don't get one of those."

They were nestled in the back corner of the truck, strapped to wall-mounted seats and staring down at the military dance of soldiers and equipment. Stiff and sore from over twelve hours of travel, they were cold even in their coats, the interior unheated to conserve fuel. York sat alongside several soldiers who manned the equipment, their fogged breath like a cloud around them. Her face was grim. She rose and headed in their direction. He guessed what she might say.

A series of blasts outside explained the situation forcefully. The vehicle heaved and rocked violently, and sent the president crashing to the floor on her hands and knees before the FBI agents. A flurry of curses sounded as Savas and Cohen helped her to her feet. A soldier leapt to her side.

"Ms. President," he said, "are you okay?"

She sat beside Cohen and regained her bearings.

"Yes," she said hoarsely. "Getting a little old for combat, I think." She blinked repeatedly. "Get the plan in motion and I'll brief our passengers."

The soldier nodded and turned toward the front of the truck.

"Plan?" asked Savas.

"We're three hundred and fifty miles past Harrisburg, around twenty outside of Columbus. We've been positioning our forces in anticipation of what's ahead."

A whistle overhead presaged an earthshaking explosion.

"That bastard Hastings has let the dogs out," she growled. "His troops are advancing. Heavy artillery is first in line. We've also detected incoming aircraft and a few missiles already, although a last-minute sabotage of his naval assets has grounded most of his cruise missiles for the time being. "

"Cruise missiles." Savas could hardly take it in.

"The modern military is something to behold," said York. "This is not going to be easy or pretty."

Sonic booms shook the air above them as the sound of jet engines ripped through the sky. More explosions followed as did the screaming of men outside.

"What's going on out there?" asked Cohen.

"War," said York. "Better you don't see. Better none of us sees unless we have to. We need to keep our heads and stick with the plan. We stay low. We remain covert. Meanwhile, many good men are going to engage that son-of-a-bitch and die today so we can continue this journey."

She rose and dusted herself off.

"It's going to get ugly fast. Hold on and hope for the best. If you have a god to pray to, now is a good time."
27

# Whiskey

"Princeton's finest, and the best they had was Jack?"

Houston slurred her words, her grin asymmetric and comical. She leaned heavily against the bulk of Lopez, his dark hair spilling underneath his cap and brushing her pale cheek. The three sat huddled together in a crowded dorm basement, clouds of water vapor escaping their lips, ice surrounding a nearby water fountain from a burst pipe.

Lopez took the bottle from her and shook his head. "This was supposed to help us forget the cold, not blast us to nirvana." He smiled at Lightfoote. "There's nothing in the world this little lady can't do better than me, unless it's hold her liquor."

"Not fair," snorted Houston. "You're three times my weight."

"And you're heavier than Angel, but I wouldn't put money on me to out-drink her."

Lightfoote smiled. "Cyborg. Hyper-metabolism."

"See?" said Houston. "Explains everything." Her eyes lingered on the FBI agent. "You're some mystery girl."

Lightfoote removed a woolen watch cap and rubbed her fingers vigorously over her scalp. A red film of hair had begun to grow out. "So are you two. Tell me," she said, replacing the hat and nearly pulling it over her eyes, "what's the story on the Browning? You don't shoot anything else."

Houston sat up clumsily. "What makes you think there's a story?"

"That's not just a gun, girl. That's _your_ gun. There's a story."

Houston laughed. "Fucking cyborgs. Well, my dad gave it to me. Trained me on it. Brought it back from the Korean War."

"Korean war? How old is he?"

"He would have been eighty. Died ten years ago."

Lightfoote nodded. "But he gave you his issued sidearm?"

"War changed him. Sucked a lot of the life out of him. He never talked about it. _Never_." She grabbed the bottle and swept it away from a frowning Lopez. "They didn't have things like PTSD or therapy back in those days. He put away his uniform— _pluke_ —and everything he took back from the war. Shut it all up in a trunk. _Click_. Never opened it again. I never saw it anyway, even all those years later."

"Except for the gun," said Lightfoote, staring intensely at her. "So he robbed the cradle? To have you, your mom must have been a lot younger."

"Mom. Ha. Now there are _problems._ She hunted him down, daddy figure or something she thought she needed. I don't know. Course it didn't last. She was gone like a wild butterfly." Houston watched the liquid swirl as she shook the bottle. "He was a good father. Don't get me wrong. You know, back then there weren't too many single dads. He never remarried. Never dated as far as I know. I think the only thing keeping him alive was me." She opened the bottle. "Until I left home." Her eyes flashed toward Lightfoote. "So! What's _your_ story, fly girl? And don't even bother. I know there's one, too."

Lightfoote didn't smile. "Dad was a cop. Followed in his footsteps."

"No son to do it?" asked Houston, wiping her chin as whiskey dripped.

"It's more complicated."

"He teach you how to shoot, too?"

"No. Never got the chance." Lightfoote paused. "He was killed in the line of duty. Until then, I didn't want to be a cop. I had other interests. Dancing mostly. But everything changed when he died."

"Why'd that change things?" asked Houston.

"It's complicated."

Lightfoote reached for the bottle. Houston nodded and handed it over, watching her take a swig.

"Gotcha. We don't have to—"

"I saw him die," she said. "I was just a few feet away. I couldn't do anything." She took another gulp. "I knew then there were monsters in the world. I think I was a bit lost afterward." She laughed. "Make that a lot lost. But I couldn't just _dance_ anymore." Lightfoote stared off into space, the whiskey bottle dangling over her raised knees, wobbling back and forth as she swung her wrist. Her eyes moved to Lopez. "So, big guy, you do the _follow dad_ thing, too?"

A deep laughter rolled in the room. His dark brown eyes looked at his feet. "I wish I could have. Not remotely smart enough. My father was a NASA engineer, recruited from polytechnic school in Mexico City. Test scores off the charts. Helped build rockets in Alabama during the Cold War and Space Race."

"A literal rocket scientist!" barked Houston, nudging Lopez with her shoulder.

"I guess I did try. Ended up teaching intro calculus at a Catholic school. But that was as smart as I was going to get. No rocket science for me."

Lightfoote put the whiskey down and hugged her knees. "So why the priesthood? Visions? Voice of God?"

Lopez smiled. "I wish that as well. But, no. My motives were earthly. Rebelling against my neocon brother." He reached over and stroked Houston's cheek. "And denial of something similar inside me."

"So who taught _you_ to shoot? You're the best I've seen."

"He had the best teacher," said Houston.

"You?" Lightfoote smiled. "Really? Blind date activities?"

Lopez put an arm around Houston. "When we first met, in the middle of all that crazy, it was the one thing she wouldn't shut up about. _Going to teach you how to shoot_. Drove me nuts. I'd rarely held a gun. Certainly not a man killer. I didn't want to! Violence, killing—I'd turned my back on it. I was a peacemaker, turning the other cheek." He laughed. "Before the priesthood, I'd used my fists a lot. I tried to turn it around, suppress it, have God's word my sword and shield and all the St. Paul Ephesians _Armor of God_ stuff."

Houston kissed his cheek and shook her head. "Poor bastard. He had to learn the hard way to use some other armor and weapons. Bad guys out there."

"Monsters," said Lightfoote, her expression distant again.

Lopez squinted slightly at her but said nothing.

Lightfoote continued. "So, what's the plan for you two, assuming the world doesn't end soon?"

Lopez shrugged. Houston leaned back into his chest. "No idea. We're FBI most wanted, and Savas can't change that. Nobody can. Dead or alive kind of pariahs. We killed the former VP! Hundreds of government agents. Blew up a fucking police station. He's a pedophile. I don't think you come back from all that."

"So, John really put you in deep witness protection? He kept it all under wraps."

Houston nodded. "With help from CIA. Fred Simon." She looked away and closed her eyes, nuzzling into Lopez.

"I'm sorry about what happened," said Lightfoote. "We were overrun with Fawkes's mercenaries. I was lucky to get the code out. They almost won."

"Don't apologize. You stopped a madman," said Lopez. "We'll see when all this is done what kind of world is waiting. But I'm not hopeful. We've resigned ourselves to new lives, new identities. Always hiding. Always running."

"Priest and whore. Gabriel and Mary."

"Something like that, right Sara?" Houston didn't answer. Lopez looked down and sighed, brushing his hand over her head.

She was asleep.
28

# Blood and Ash

Savas gritted his teeth as he trudged through the new-fallen snow. No longer snow, but a black slush from fires and exhaust that tainted the purity. Flames continued to lick at the metallic skeletons of blasted vehicles, chemical fumes from rubber and burnt machinery choking him.

His shoulders burned from carrying the stretcher. The medic at the other end of it walked with his head bowed in silence. Savas had lost track of the number of bodies he'd carried like this. _Less than one hundred?_ It felt like more, but he knew he couldn't have managed so many. Perhaps much less. All clarity had disappeared and his mind reeled.

Savas had killed men. Had watched them die in numerous ways. He'd seen small skirmishes with terrorist groups, suffered wounds on several occasions. Had watched the towers fall in New York, mosques obliterated around the world, and witnessed a nuclear detonation over the Gulf of Mexico.

But nothing had prepared him for true war.

Bodies still littered the roadway and sides of the road. To his right he caught a glimpse of the burning hulk of a fighter jet, the shape only barely discernible from the mangled wreckage. Far in the distance, he could make out the skyline of Columbus, a small handful of skyscrapers like desolate redwoods in a devastated forest veiled in smoke.

_Columbus burned._

They reached a medical tent. He knew they were close before they entered from the smell and the screaming. Hundreds of wounded soldiers produced an environmental-level impact. The snow around them was crimson as well as black.

They placed the stretcher outside the tent alongside rows of corpses. The woman they carried had died along the way. Savas had seen her injuries and known that nothing in modern medicine could have changed the outcome.

"I'm going to take a minute," he told the medic, who just nodded and went about his duties.

Savas collapsed on a set of wooden boxes outside the tent. For the first time in many years, he felt an old craving, a desperate thirst for a drink that would burn and numb. It frightened and fascinated him to watch this old specter rise so many years after exorcism. _I'm more shaken than I realize._

He turned his mind to the ear-splitting and grating sounds of metal scraping on rock, watching the engineering corps clearing the road of debris and smashed vehicles. He hadn't counted on the obstacles war would put in their way. They needed to deal with the human toll of battle, but the logistical nightmare—opening the path for what remained of the convoy—demanded attention.

He scanned the road behind them. He could not comprehend the carnage. It distorted his reasoning. He would have sworn truthfully that the overnight battle had obliterated the president's force. But as he took appraisal of what remained in the morning light, he saw it was much the reverse. The bulk of the convoy remained intact. Perhaps one in ten vehicles had been successfully targeted by weapons fire. Craning his neck, he could see that the human toll, especially on the part of Hastings's men who had recklessly assaulted their position, increased as one approached Columbus. Bodies carpeted the stretch toward the damaged city. A nightmare might surround him, but the lower levels of the hellscape awaited them ahead.

In the initial hours of the assault, he had absorbed some of the military strategy unfolding. Not a ground commander, Hastings had led his soldiers into a slaughter. Yet that assault had taken the lives of many in the presidential convoy. The air and artillery attacks had been devastating, as missiles and explosives strafed them along the highway. But the air advantage proved too weak to turn the tide on the ground. York's advisors claimed their superior numbers and far superior battlefield strategy had won the day decisively.

_Abstractions_. On the ground around him, a decisive victory looked more like a meat-grinder. The cries and weeping of the wounded had become a haunted chant from the plains of Gehenna in his mind, tearing at his awareness even when he was alone. Images of bodies broken, shredded, inverted in manners hard to imagine, trespassed before his open eyes. Young faces turned to cold cadavers. Voices silenced. _And voices crying out._

As the sun crept over the fog of smoke clinging to the ground, he saw a silhouetted form ambling slowly toward him. The rhythm, the stride, the body motions— _Rebecca._ The vapors slowly revealed her sooty face as she came to take a seat on the boxes beside him. She leaned back against a tent support and closed her eyes.

"The president?" Savas managed to ask after a few minutes.

"Safe. On overdrive. She can't be human. We're going to move soon, John. I came to tell you."

"We aren't done."

"Doesn't matter. We can't wait to take care of everything."

"These are men and women here. We can wait."

She sighed. "If we do, we'll have more deaths on our hands. Every minute we delay keeps us from Mount Cheyenne. Every minute means Hastings has more time to plan another assault."

"Another?" Savas couldn't process it.

"I've been in the command module. I've seen the new recon. He fucked up here, but he's already regrouping. York says he's not stupid and he'll learn. Next time will be worse, and there's no telling how much more tech he'll have online by then."

"Where next? I mean, where are we headed? Where's the next battle?"

"Kansas City for both, unless Hastings gets a lot more creative." She placed her hand on the back of his head. "We've got to move."

Savas nodded and stood, Cohen behind him. He looked over the battlefield once more.

"Kansas City. Another battle. _Worse_."

She stared out toward the smoldering skyline of Columbus.

"Looks to be. Yes."

"My God, Rebecca. This is America. What are we doing?"
29

# Madman's Primer

"There's a code here," came Lightfoote's weary tones.

The three remained in the basement of a Princeton University dorm room. A wave of soldiers had come by the building, loudly thundering through several of the upper floors, but abandoned the search as they moved toward the smoldering remains of the Nash Museum. They'd ignored the lower floors.

Houston moaned and drank from a cup of cold water. Her eyes were closed. "God I need an aspirin. I'm breaking up with Jack for real this time."

"There's a primer," continued Lightfoote. "I know it. I just can't figure it out. There's a measuring stick in this mess!"

Lopez sighed. "So you've been saying since dawn. But it's a quarter to five and there hasn't been anything more. Don't you get hangovers?"

"Cyborg."

"Right. I'd forgotten."

They'd been staring at the reconstructed image for hours, assembled on the computer from several photos Houston had taken, completing the half obtained from Fawkes's file.

"What do you make of it, Francisco?" Houston had asked after they stitched the images together.

"Nothing," he'd sighed. "Just more crazy."

But from early on Lightfoote had disagreed. As the night had limped by, she continued staring at the news clippings, scrap paper, words and diagrams, equations and images John Nash had taped and pinned together across the giant poster board.

"Look. This isn't coincidence. Numbers!" she gestured to the image. "These number strings always appear over words or math symbols. It's like they're labeling them."

"But what's the significance? What does it mean?" asked Houston.

Lopez shook his head and yawned. "Modern art from a madman."

"We don't have time to sleep, priest!" Lightfoote jumped from the computer and came within inches of his face. "You're a mathematician."

"Math _teacher_. Remember? _High school._ "

"Do any of these equations mean anything?"

He rubbed his eyes and stared again at the image. "It's a chaotic patchwork. These are mathematical symbols, no doubt. But no true equations. Pieces of them, computational instruments without substrates. Incomplete. Might as well be random."

"They're _not_ random."

Lopez shook his head again. "I can't see the pattern."

She turned back to the image on the computer, tapping with her index finger on the screen.

"This then. In the center. It looks like some weird symbolism. It's huge, colored strangely."

"Everything here is strange," Lopez added.

Lightfoote ignored him. "We only had half the image from the file, split down the middle. But look, here we can see it's a gold circle with a long black line underneath, and underneath that, a short gold line. _That_ has to mean something!"

"Yeah, to aliens on Stargate."

Her eyes flashed. "Try, dammit! There's something here, I just can't see the pattern. Find the primer to interpret it. This thing stands out the most. In the middle. Gold on black. It _means_ something."

Lopez sighed and squinted at the screen. "I've been staring at the image for hours, Angel. Yes, it stands out. A golden circle over a golden line. I don't—"

His words stopped abruptly.

"You don't what?" asked Houston, opening her eyes. They were bloodshot.

Lopez leaned in closely. "A golden circle over a golden line. A golden ratio." He laughed. "Holy shit."

"Well, coming from a priest," said Lightfoote, "that sounds promising."

"Former priest. But, yeah, maybe. Look, the gold line underneath is the perfect length to be the diameter of the circle above."

Lightfoote shook her head. "Okay?"

"The length around a circle, the circumference, divided by the diameter! It's the most famous number of all!"

"Pi," Lightfoote said.

"Yes, Pi."

Houston frowned. "Okay, so what? How does that help, even if that's what it's about? Who cares about Pi?"

Lopez continued to scan the image, tapping his fingers in several places. "Look, _here_ —a large golden three over this word in a newspaper article: _External_. And, here, another golden number, 14, over this scribbled word, what is it— _Equilibration_."

"And here," said Lightfoote, "a golden 159 over the word _in_."

"You two have lost me," said Houston.

"Three point one-four-one-five-nine-two-six-five-three-five-eight...well, that's all I have memorized," said Lightfoote.

"Memorized?" Houston asked.

"Pi!" said Lopez. "The decimal expansion of the number Pi. My God, it's so simple."

Houston put her hand over the image. "Okay, geeks. Explain."

Lightfoote moved her hand and grinned broadly. "The numbers. Over the words. It's a code! The primer was the image of the circle and line. Telling us the code is centered on Pi. The decimal expansion of Pi is a series of numbers. Infinite. Doesn't repeat. Nash put pieces of the numbers over words."

"Not just single numbers," added Lopez, "those will show up again, over and over in an infinite expansion. He's used the _groupings_. The first few colored in gold to make it obvious. See, a golden three here over _External._ Three is the first digit of Pi, in the one's place. Then the next two digits, 14, again gold, here over the word _Equilibration_. We get two more gold numbers: 26535 and 89793238."

Lightfoote held up her smartphone, a list of digits running across a calculator app.

"The decimal expansion of Pi out to nineteen places. Divided into five groups of numbers. Colored gold."

"What does it say?"

"If we're right, the first four words of something: External Equilibration in Non-cooperative," said Lopez.

"So, nonsense?" Houston asked.

"Maybe not," said Lopez. "Sounds almost mathematical."

Lightfoote spoke rapidly. "Nash specialized in an area called Non-cooperative Game Theory. It's math meets economics. This sounds right!"

"So where is the rest of the code?"

Lightfoote frowned. "A few more golden numbers, then just...numbers. Lots of numbers. Different sized number strings."

"How do we know which clusters of numbers are next?" asked Lopez.

"Pi, of course."

He shook his head. "Yes, but which pieces of Pi. This could take forever. Unless..." He shook his head. "Golden ratio. I said it in the beginning but didn't make the connection. Nash was brutally literal in his symbolism."

" _The_ Golden ratio?" asked Lightfoote. "Artistic ratio the Greeks loved?"

"Yes," he said. "But not only. It shows up in many early cultures, in nature, in snail shells, flowers. Weird Catholic and Jewish numerology. And it shows up in a series called the Fibonacci numbers."

Lightfoote nodded. "I remember. Take the last number and add it to the number before last to get the next number."

"Exactly! One, two, three, five, eight..."

"Thirteen and twenty-one!" said Houston. "Look! Here and here. Two more golden numbers, thirteen and twenty-one digits long."

"You're catching on," said Lopez. He turned to Lightfoote. "They match the next sequences in Pi?"

"Yes!" She showed them the numbers on the calculator.

"Then it all repeats, I would bet, starting the Fibonacci numbers from the beginning again. Seven golden numbers, the first seven Fibonacci numbers giving the length of the string of digits from Pi," said Lopez. "The sequence lengths would get too big, otherwise, but this way we know quickly how to order the search and compare to Pi."

"Good grief," said Houston. "I thought you said this was simple!"

Lightfoote nodded. "It _is_ simple for a code. A little messy for humans but not for any cryptographic analysis by computer. But we're going to need a lot of digits from Pi."

"But the first seven, all golden numbers. What does it say, Angel?" said Lopez.

She wrote down words and read aloud. "External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games. John Nash." She looked between her companions.

"Oh, my God. This is it."
30

# Outsourcing

A fine dust circled the room. Part chalk from the nearby blackboard, part disintegration of the rows of cardboard boxes lining the walls and filled with decaying books, the floating remains testified that the Princeton study room was evaporating like so much of an older world.

Lightfoote and Houston sat together beside a laptop plugged into a nearby outlet. Both were disheveled, their clothes matted and filthy, Houston's dyed-brown hair showing her natural blond at the roots. Several of Lightfoote's many piercings showed inflammation around the holes.

"Let me get this straight," said Lightfoote, her green eyes intense. "You two chased down this lunatic to the VP's house, where he'd basically taken on a legion of secret service agents, blown a hole in a fortified bunker, rappelled down and taken on more agents, killing them all, and then killed the VP? This guy superman?"

"I got this all second hand. I was basically bleeding to death outside from the shrapnel from said lunatic's bombing of the CIA safe house. And he didn't directly kill the VP. Heart attack." Houston took a sip from a bottle of Jack Daniels.

"Thought you'd dumped Jack."

"I always forgive him." She laughed and drank from the bottle again. "But can you believe it? Ten years of revenge planned out and executed like James Bond and he's about to kill the VP, but the fuck drops over from a heart attack. Irony's a bitch."

"You realize that story is not remotely believable."

"I suppose not," said Houston nodding. "But if you'd told me back in 2000 that a bunch of Arabs trained in caves in Afghanistan by a diabetic Saudi prince would sneak unnoticed into America, train on small engine aircraft, hijack planes with fucking box-cutters and steer two goddamned jumbo jets precisely enough to hit each of the World Trade Towers and bring them both down—I'd have said you were full of shit, too."

"Point taken."

Houston offered the bottle to Lightfoote, but the FBI agent shook her head.

"I know my limits. Besides, tastes awful."

"Really? Old Jack ain't half bad, though I'm not a bourbon woman myself. Texas whiskey, now _that_ 's another story."

"So the priest kills the wraith."

"Sort of." Houston pulled up from her slouch and placed the bottle on the table. "More like suicide by fugitive. Guy was fucked up good. All his targets were dead. Mission accomplished, but the demons were still inside or whatever. Basically begged Francisco to shoot him. I'm glad it was so easy. The wraith would have killed him under different circumstances."

"Your man seems a hell of a fighter."

"He is. But he's been trained up good. Five years ago, he was just a priest with a lot of untapped potential." Houston grabbed the bottle and took another swig. "We were toxic waste by then. Fingered for the veep attack and ten other things. If Savas and Simon—poor bastard—hadn't pulled us out of that war zone in Virginia, we'd be on death row or worse. Instead, we got a pretty little cabin in the mountains. Far from everything. I trained him there."

"Yeah, bet it would be fun _training_ him," said Lightfoote. "You must have hated every minute of it."

"Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do." Houston closed her eyes. "Little stir crazy. Fucking cold as hell in the winter. And we kept switching cabins on different peaks. But better than this shit we're swimming in now."

"How'd you end up in the CIA?"

"Oh, that's a random one. I was looking at law enforcement. Never thought to be a spook, but the Agency's got eyes in a lot of places. Learned all this later. They identify possible recruits early, track them over a few months, few years. You've got to do well enough in school, show the right kinds of interest, have a clean security history—your family, too. A man came up to me at an ROTC session in college. Said he had a job proposition. Handed me a card. Happened pretty fast."

"How'd your dad handle it?"

"Same as with everything. Quiet. Supportive. Mom was something else. Hippy-firebrand-alcoholic on her fifth husband by then. She was in and out of rehab and other men's trailers." She swished the whiskey around in the bottle and looked between it and Lightfoote. "I like to live on the edge."

"She disapproved?"

"Said I was going to work for the empire and all that. Baby killers and hegemony. 'Bout sealed the deal for me. Everything that bitch said I did the opposite. And flipped her the bird." Houston sighed and stared at Lightfoote. "I'm tired of me. Your turn. Who were these monsters that killed your dad?"

Lightfoote held her gaze for a moment and turned away. "Not worth telling."

"Come on, that's not how this works, girl. My cards are on the table. Let's see your hand."

Heavy footsteps tromped outside the cramped room. Houston placed a finger over her lips, grabbed her Browning, and moved quickly to the side of the door. Lightfoote drew her gun from a hip holster and crouched behind an overturned study cubical. The footsteps grew louder.

"It's Francisco," came a deep baritone from outside the door.

Houston twisted a knob on the bolt lock and opened the door. Lopez shuffled inside and placed a gun on the top of a filing cabinet. Sighing, he dropped a large plastic garbage bag to the floor.

"No sign of the soldiers or our burglar friends. No sign of anyone." He motioned to the bag. "I raided several pantries and a few functioning refrigerators. Anything that could spoil has. What's left is mummified bread and a lot of cans."

He glanced across the study room, his eyes lingering on a blackboard full of incomprehensible physics equations.

"I wish the graduate students were still here. Maybe one of them could figure this out." He bent toward the computer screen. "Anything?"

Houston sat in front of the laptop.

"This is it," she said, scrolling through pages of text and figures on Lightfoote's computer. "This is the entire paper, but we're no closer to understanding what the hell Fawkes was trying to tell us."

"Fawkes? We're not even sure what Nash is trying to tell us," said Lightfoote. "Five hours of decoding and transcription and we have a Nobel Laureate economics paper we can't understand."

Lopez stared at the pages. "I recognize some of the math, but I don't know the theory, why it's being used. And a lot of the math I've never seen before. Way beyond my pay grade."

"We do have this note," said Lightfoote. She zoomed in on an image with scrawled text.

"What's this?" Lopez asked.

"We found it while you were out," said Houston. "I'm still not sure it's part of the encoded message.

Lightfoote shook her head. "Has to be, Sara. It's the last sequence of Pi on the board. The econ paper ends, one more piece of Pi sitting over this little note. Read it for Francisco."

Houston sighed. " _This is why we are not free. The puppet masters pull the strings._ There's this smudged part. Unreadable. Next, _their fingerprints are in the global numbers. Once the criterion is reached, they pull the trigger_."

"Very different than the rational content of the paper," said Lopez. "It sounds like mad ramblings. Angel said he oscillated between lucid and insane states over the years."

"He did," said Lightfoote, "although everything claims that in his later years he was more stable than not. Got better and better at _classifying_ and ignoring his crazy thoughts."

"But we don't know when this was written?" he asked.

"Well," said Lightfoote, "some of the clippings are over fifty years old. It's really old."

"He never published this? You're sure?"

"Yes, Francisco," said Houston. "Angel's gone through all the online databases. Enough are up again. We can be pretty sure this paper never saw the light of day."

He turned his palms upward. "But why? Okay, so it's old, from a time before he went nuts, right?"

"Right."

"But why not publish it later, when he recovered?"

Houston shrugged. "Maybe he'd forgotten about it. The illness and treatments erased it from his mind."

"Is that likely?" Lopez asked.

"No," Lightfoote responded. "He didn't lose the knowledge of his field in the later years. Continued to publish. I don't know why he shelved this one."

Lopez exhaled slowly. "How about this—he didn't just file it away. He _buried_ it in this encoded crazy. Here is a work discussing something about the global economy, with analysis of multiple nations we can't understand. Written at the height of his productivity, the height of his powers. He never publishes it. Instead, right around the time he goes insane, he builds this Crazy Wall where he embeds the entire paper in a geometrical and numerical code. Why would he do that?"

Houston shook her head. "Like you said, Francisco, he was crazy."

"I'm starting to doubt my conclusions. I think Angel may be right—there's something important here. He was trying to tell the world something, but he couldn't do it openly. He was _afraid._ "

"Afraid of what?" asked Houston.

"And what was he afraid to say?" said Lightfoote.

Lopez stood. "Back in New York, you said his student set up this museum. Maybe he knows something."

"Maybe it's no accident this poster board ended up where it did," said Houston.

Lopez paced, gesturing. "We decoded it and hoped we'd be able to get to the root of this message. But we can't. We need to outsource—speak to this guy if he's still here. Still alive. If he'll even help us."

Lightfoote closed the laptop and stuffed it into a backpack. " _Agreed._ Sara, you still have the last address?"

Houston nodded. "It's about ten minutes from here."

Lightfoote walked to the door. "Let's move the stuff to the car. If this doesn't give us an answer, we might as well ride out and meet John and Rebecca and the fucking Presidential Caravan. Nash's student is our last hope."
31

# Lion's Claw

No one spoke during the drive through the deserted township in New Jersey. Lightfoote piloted the car through tree-lined streets with the lights off. The night weighed heavily on them, each quiet and introspective, exhausted from the unending tension. Lost in thought, the address seemed to appear before them instantaneously, the time traveled like a vanishing dream. They exited the vehicle and walked up the short steps to a porch.

Lopez knocked on the creaking wood of an old door. No one answered. Houston and Lightfoote faced away from the house, weapons at the ready, scanning the dark street. He knocked again, each series of strikes against the wood harder. Frustration mounting, he struck vigorously, the knob vibrating and dancing back and forth past the frame.

"Any harder Conan and you might as well just knock the thing down," whispered Lightfoote.

"I know I saw some movement in the curtains," said Houston. "Someone's there. With everything that's happened, I can't blame them for laying low."

Lopez grasped the handle and set his shoulder against the panel. "There isn't time for norms. Angel's right—this old thing is ready to fall over."

"Got you," said Houston, pivoting and pointing her pistol at the door. "Angel, eyes on the road."

One try was enough. With a lunge his thick frame crashed into the door near the lock. The wood splintered and burst into shards, a cloud of dust following it inward.

Houston and Lopez moved in, followed quickly by Lightfoote. Creaking under their weight, a wooden floor extended down a dark corridor.

"We know you're in here!" shouted Houston. "There are three of us. We're armed. Don't do anything stupid. We're not here to hurt you. We need information."

They could hear their own breathing in the silence.

Lightfoote called out. "We're here to talk to Avi Kaplan. It's a matter of national security! Don't make us dig you out."

A muffled thump shook a doorway near the end of the hall. The three trained their weapons on the sound. The door creaked open and a trembling voice called out.

"Please, don't shoot. I'm unarmed."

As the door opened further a gaunt man in worn pajamas shuffled out with his hands in the air. He looked like an old image of Albert Einstein, complete with a shock of unruly hair and a mustache.

"Who else is here?" Lopez asked.

"No one. I live alone."

Houston walked toward the man cautiously. "I'll check him. Sweep the house."

"It's the truth," he said.

"Yeah, maybe."

Houston turned him against the wall and padded him down, glancing inside the closet and closing the door.

"Where is Avi Kaplan?"

"I'm Avi Kaplan."

"Nash's former student? The one who set up the museum and worked with him?"

"Yes, I cared for him for many years, off and on, since his, well, health problems."

"Health problems?" asked Houston.

He smiled wanly, his voice hoarse. "Who are you?"

"We'll get to that in a minute," said Houston, looking down the hallway. "That's a living room?"

"Yes."

"Okay, in there." She motioned with her Browning.

Kaplan's face tightened. "Yes, of course."

He walked in front of her, trembling. They entered a crowded room of chairs, a sofa, and boxes of papers. Houston had Kaplan take a seat on the couch, a cloud of dust rising as he sank into it. Lopez and Lightfoote returned.

"No sign of anyone," said Lopez.

"I closed the door and tied it shut with some wire," Lightfoote said. "It's busted all to hell. Won't slow anyone, but at least it's unlikely to attract the attention of an open door."

Houston turned to the old man. "Nash used to live here with you. Under nursing care."

"Yes." The old man hesitated. "That's what everyone was supposed to believe."

"Supposed to believe?" asked Lopez, holstering his weapon.

Kaplan nodded. "You said you were here for a national security concern. Regarding John Nash?"

"Yes," answered Lightfoote.

"Then surely you won't be surprised to learn that there have been forces interested in keeping John Nash under firm control."

Lopez loomed over the skeletal form on the couch. "What do you mean? The truth, and quickly."

He smiled and stared up at Lopez. "You don't scare me. I'm sure you could torture the information out of me, but this old heart would pop before you got enough pain going to open my mouth. I'm ancient, my friends. Had a long life. Seen a lot of things. Always John was with me. My last act in this world won't be to betray him. You'll have to find another way to persuade me to divulge his secrets."

"And what would that be?"

"You could start with your names. Tell me what important matter concerns my old friend. Convince me there's some reason I should trust you."

Lightfoote opened her backpack. "What if I told you we have a sixty-year-old, unpublished paper by John Nash?" She removed the laptop and opened it. "One that was encoded on the poster board in the Nash Museum."

"The fire in the news? That was _you?_ "

Lightfoote marched across the room and knelt beside the old man.

"What if we told you we were pointed in this direction by a terrorist who nearly brought down the world financial system last month?"

She held the screen up to him. He squinted and read aloud.

" _This is why we are not free. The puppet masters pull the strings._ "

The three stared intensely at him as he met their gazes, one by one.

"This is supposed to impress me? He saw conspiracies everywhere. Left delusional messages in code everywhere. He was a schizophrenic, you know."

"This isn't the paper. It's only a last comment he made at the end of it." She scrolled on the trackpad. " _This_ is the paper."

"External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games?" he read slowly.

Lopez rumbled. "Look carefully. The world outside is going to hell. Somehow, the terrorist who trigged this disaster knew about this paper, this coded message from six decades ago. It's never been published. Isn't available anywhere."

"Can you increase the font size? An old man's eyes," said Kaplan. Lightfoote obliged. He scanned the text and spoke in a distracted tone. "So, you're chasing after the work of one madman on the words of another?"

"Both geniuses," said Houston. "Something's going on. This may be a key to understanding it."

The old man slowly scrolled on the trackpad, furrowing his brow. He didn't speak for several minutes.

"Yes," he nodded his head at last. "Dear God, yes."

"Yes, what?" asked Lightfoote.

Kaplan leaned back against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. " _Tanquam ex ungue leonem_."

Lightfoote cocked her head. "Sorry?"

"The lion is known by his claw," said Lopez.

"Indeed," said Kaplan. "You have found something remarkable. It can be no one else. The wording, the logic. This is John Nash."

"Can you explain it to us?" asked Lopez.

"Probably. But not right away. I would need days to digest this. He was the genius, not me."

Houston exhaled. "We don't have days. We have a nation falling down around us."

"And the note?" asked Lightfoote. " _Their fingerprints are in the global numbers; once the criterion is reached, they pull the trigger_. What does this mean?"

"I don't know. It sounds like too much that came from his paranoia over the years."

Lightfoote put a hand on his shoulder. "What if it's not? What if he was on to something and this paper reveals something we just can't understand?"

"Then you'd need to speak with John."

Lopez growled. "No longer an option. As you know."

The old man nodded. "Inconvenient, isn't it? As soon as I set up that museum, which contained this encoded paper, poor John met with a strange death."

"What are you implying?" asked Houston, her eyes narrowed.

"I was planning the museum for a number of years. John had become quite the celebrity. Recovery from madness, like it was some sort of twelve step program. Nobel Prize. Hollywood film and Oscar. The money flowed in from it all. We hardly had to break a sweat fundraising." He coughed, the sound ragged and ominous. "Sorry. Bad lungs. We all used to smoke in those days. Now, John begged me to include this poster in the exhibit, you know? So strange. Not the most flattering of displays. But of course I said yes. Who was I to deny him something so small at this stage?" He shook his head. "Governmental delegation swept the museum several times. Removed several items citing national security. Always passed by the poster board."

"Governmental delegation?" said Houston.

He smiled. "It wasn't the first time they had micromanaged our lives. Always so interested in John, since his consulting years. Took him away to special retreats many times. A pact with the devil. Money and support during his illness. Some kind of favors I was never privy to."

Lopez sat on the coffee table in front of Kaplan. "You sound paranoid."

"Do I? What if I told you I could help you after all?"

Lopez growled. "Then help us!"

"First—who are you? Don't lie to me. Tell me who you are."

Lopez leaned forward and looked the old man in eyes. "Here is the truth. No lies. We're fugitives: Falsely accused and judged because we uncovered something dirty in the heart of Washington. We helped stop the digital worm that has brought so much destruction. We captured the man behind it. Before he was murdered, he claimed his actions were to stop something even worse. He pointed us here, to Nash, to this encoded paper. We're trying to discover what he was talking about, and we've been targeted for death for doing so. We need your help."

Kaplan held Lopez's gaze for several seconds. He nodded and closed his eyes again.

"Truth is always in the eyes. Let me change. We'll need my car."

Houston blinked. "Why? Where are we going?"

Kaplan laughed softly. "The car accident? _A lie._ Staged. Someone felt John Nash needed to disappear. But they still needed his mind."

"Wait," said Lightfoote, her eyes widening, "you mean—"

"John Nash is very much alive."

"Where?" she whispered, her voice hoarse.

"A care facility, nearly an hour away. But you won't find it on any maps or in any directories."

"John Nash, alive," repeated Houston, her eyes locking with Lopez.

Kaplan nodded, appraising each of them in turn. His eyes lingered on their weapons.

"And you may want to bring those guns along."
32

# John Nash

"How many guards?"

Houston stared from behind the wheel at the old man beside her. Lopez and Lightfoote were fully suited up with body armor, checking their weapons in the backseat. They'd been on back roads in New Jersey running northwest of Princeton for forty-five minutes. The ride had been mostly quiet, the directions given by Nash's former student punctuating the stillness as they drove across the rural landscape. As they approached, Kaplan had begun to describe the location.

"Not sure. More in the beginning after his death was announced. But less of late. John's weak. He actually needs a lot of the care of a nursing facility. There are many patients in case someone stumbled across the location. To keep up appearances." Kaplan pointed through the window. "Here. Left here."

"Why did they let you visit? Why let you know?" asked Lopez. "You could have blown the entire thing wide open."

"Their threats were all too clear. John's their prisoner. I'd be killing him if I spoke publicly."

"That he's in a special nursing facility is one thing," said Houston. "But why on earth is it under armed guards?"

"For reasons that only the US government knows. Likely the same reason they faked his death."

"It is starting to sound like the man's paranoia wasn't so delusional," muttered Lopez.

Kaplan sighed heavily. "It's been a world of shadows and mazes. I've only wanted to make sure John's cared for. I had to make certain compromises." He gazed out the window. "The age of the paper you brought to me tonight, it's part of this. That's when John began to lose touch with reality. It was the same time the government took such a fascination with his work. Everyone speculated as to why. That film even assumed it was part of his delusions. But no."

"No?" asked Lightfoote. She leaned forward over the seat.

"It was real. They came. John left with them on many occasions. He was never the same after that. I never knew why. But this? Maybe there's an answer now. Maybe it has something to do with this paper. Something he was trying to tell us through it. I brought you here to seek my own answers as much as for what you hope to accomplish. Answers to a lifetime of struggle with pain and uncertainty." Again he motioned toward the window. "Okay, slow down now. It's around that bend in the road."

Houston pulled the car to the side of the two-lane country road, trees of a forested patch surrounding them.

"If you don't want them to know you're coming, I recommend approaching through the forest, on foot."

Houston nodded. "We can't bring you with us, Dr. Kaplan."

"I suffer no delusions. I'm long past my clandestine spy years." He smiled.

"We'll let you know what he said."

"Thank you. I'll try to visit him tomorrow if they allow it on such short notice. I want to talk to him in person."

They exited the car quickly, leaving the economist in the front seat. Lopez opened the trunk and removed a duffel. He unzipped it and retrieved a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, along with several handguns. Popping open an aluminum case, he handed a large dart with a clear middle section to Houston. Liquid sloshed inside.

"Do you think the tranqs are still good?" she asked.

"I don't know. Not a biochemist. So, a test." Lopez walked to the passenger side and opened the door, brandishing a dart before Kaplan. "I'm sorry, professor, but we need to test these tranquilizers. And while your trust in us is refreshing, I'm too jaded."

"You're going to knock me out?"

Lopez nodded. "That way you don't cause us any unexpected trouble, and we find out if these things still work."

"You're going to drug the guards?" asked Lightfoote.

"Not going to kill them unless we have to," Lopez answered. "And there are a lot of variables in hand to hand. We'll see how many we spot outside, try to take them down quietly, and make our way inside."

Lightfoote shook her head. "Best laid plans."

"Yeah, I know."

The tranq worked.

Lopez lay the seat back as the old man dozed. He closed the trunk as quietly as he could. Then the three of them made their way through the forest in the direction of the nursing home, keeping the curve of the road in sight. They crested a hill that opened to a compound. A driveway off the main road ended in a circular path before a one-story building. It was surrounded by barbed-wire, several security cameras visible around the fencing even from that distance.

Houston gazed through a pair of binoculars. "Guards inside are going to spot us. Likely there's some kind of motion detection system as well. No prep on this one, Francisco. Going to be messy." She continued her reconnaissance. "Two guards at the gate, none along the perimeter. It's not much on the outside."

"Why don't you take those two down and blow the power lines?" said Lightfoote. "It will blind anyone inside."

"And signal reinforcements when the alarm system fails. Also, some of those inside might be on machines they need. Maybe Nash."

She nodded. "You're right. Not worth the risk."

"You two make a run around this hill," said Houston, "come along the right side wall by the main entrance. Try to stay clear of sensors if you can spot them. Send me an alert and I'll drop the two at the gate. You keep an eye on the main door while I get down to the gate and check them for access cards. Drop anyone who comes out. If we're lucky, one of them has a keyed access to the place and we're in without triggering any alarms."

"Good a plan as any," said Lopez.

"Okay, go!"

Lightfoote and Lopez left her side and sprinted through the trees. Houston dropped to the ground and rested the rifle on a bipod, angling herself to the scope. She rotated the butt plate and loaded the first dart, closing the housing. She peered down the barrel and adjusted the focus. An alert buzzed her cell phone and she raised the binoculars, training them on the building. Lopez and Lightfoote were positioned along the wall by the entrance.

"No alarms. No movement inside," she said, scanning the building. "Nice footwork."

Houston texted back and pocketed the phone, lowering herself again along the rifle. She checked the gas cartridge a final time and switched on the laser.

The guards were in heavy coats, pacing along the front fence on opposite sides of the driveway. Houston didn't envy them that duty in winter without a gatehouse, but the clothing complicated her mission. The dart might not penetrate the coat, depending on its composition and thickness. She would have to hit below the coat, in the leg or buttocks.

She angled the rifle slowly, bringing up the green circle of light along the leg of the nearest guard. She estimated the distance to be about 50 yards. He paused a moment, lighting a cigarette, providing her with the perfect shot. She exhaled, paused a second with the light on his thigh, and pulled the trigger.

The projectile launched with only a swift expulsion of air into the night. She switched off the laser and blinked, peering into the scope. The figure jerked backward and grabbed his leg. The dart dangled from his upper thigh.

_Reload_. She ignored the form of the other guard moving toward her first target and flipped the end of the rifle butt ninety degrees. Grabbing a second dart from the case, she inserted it in the mechanism and closed the butt. When she peered in the scope again, the second guard stood over the kneeling form of the guard she'd hit, trying to help him to his feet. She fired again.

This dart struck the second guard in the ass. He dropped the first guard, who tumbled limply to the ground. Houston watched him stagger as he grabbed his right butt cheek. He fell beside the first guard. She left the dart gun on the hill and sprinted down toward the prone men.

Five minutes, a guard's keycard, and several hallways later, they stood in front of room 117. No other guards were present in the building. A handful of elderly patients slept in rooms scattered haphazardly throughout the building. A frightened nurse had been locked in a closet. A front desk search revealed a chart of patients and locations. John Nash was near the back of the building.

"All right, here goes," said Lopez, pushing the door open.

A small desk lamp beside a window spilled frail light into the room. An empty bed rested against a wall on their left, a table and sofa on the right. The lamp cast a ghostly hue on a wizened form in a bathrobe, an angular face with sunken cheeks staring with empty eyes at the wall.

The three approached the figure, geometric doodles covering the surface of the desk beside him like some mad child's scribblings. Lightfoote passed her hand in front of his eyes. No reaction. She crouched down to match her eye-line to his.

"John Nash?" she said.

The face didn't move.

"Dr. Nash? We need your help. We need to ask you some questions about one of your papers. The one you never published. _External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games_. Please! Dr. Nash?"

The old man blinked and focused on her face. He studied the two beside her, nodding solemnly.

"Yes. Yes, I've been expecting you for a long time."
33

# Asimov's Mule

Lopez and Houston pulled up chairs as Lightfoote held her crouch in front of the Nobel Laureate.

"You've been expecting us?" she asked.

His lips moved in a silent mutter, his voice rising as from some dark depth.

"They said you would come. Well, of course they didn't. I know they don't exist. These creatures. So much knowledge they have! But it is suspect. Always suspect! It must always be examined, filtered. _Tested._ But they said you would come. I had to analyze. I had to distinguish the real and the misfirings of the mind. It wastes so much time, this madness. So much time. I could have done so much more."

Lightfoote looked desperately at Houston and Lopez. She continued to prod him.

"Dr. Nash, the paper?"

"Where's Alicia?"

Lopez mouthed toward Lightfoote. "Alicia?"

Nash continued without an answer. "They said she died in a car crash. I don't have enough data. Not enough to classify these voices. Lies? Truth? Is this place real? It is new. New walls. New voices. Too soon to know. Where is Alicia?"

Lightfoote continued. "Dr. Nash. The paper. _External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games_. Do you remember it?"

A sharp bark burst from the old man's lips. "Remember it? It's the only damned thing I did of any importance in my life." He reached out a trembling arm to Lightfoote and grasped her hand. "Murdered. Killed in the womb. They would never let it see the light of day. Did they kill her, too? Can you tell me?"

Lopez leaned forward. "Who's they?"

Nash leaned back in his chair, still holding Lightfoote's hand.

"They they they they. It is the delusional pronoun. Always a _they_ somewhere to do something and whisper nonsense and be the conspiratorial cause of this and that and the prime mover." He closed his eyes. "They keep me alive only for the hope of more material. I refused at first. Such a mistake." He leaned forward and stared wild-eyed. "Pain rules all things. Pain erases personality. Pain they brought and branded and cut and I could not hold. They needed predictions. I developed the theory. Never enough. They kept coming. It broke me. Into pieces. Each piece a voice. A thousand voices. From the stars and the pits of hell."

Lightfoote placed her other hand on his and looked into his eyes.

"Predictions?"

Tears dripped down his face as he stared into her eyes.

"Yes, yes. I see it in your eyes. I see it in your soul. Burnt soul. You have been to hell, too. Yes, poor child. The demons have branded you. And now I know it." He closed his eyes. "She is dead."

He sat shaking for several moments weeping silently. Coughing, he pushed Lightfoote away and wiped his eyes. "Social. Economic. Population. The numbers were available to us finally. Data had been collected for decades by that point, for the first time in human history. They saw my work. Saw the embryonic theories. They knew what I could give them and the devils made me do it."

"Dr. Nash, what did you do?"

"I gave them the key to total control! Centuries and centuries, they had lumbered clumsily. But now, in an age of god-like computation, they too would become gods. Thanks to John Nash." He growled like some frightened dog. "But I had a last ace up my sleeve. My _paper_. I knew I couldn't publish it openly. They would stop me. One way or the other. But it turned hard. The thousand voices were tearing at my soul. I was going quite mad from it. But I persevered. I put it down in a way they could not see. And the voices told me, 'One day, they will come. They will understand. They will come and end it.' And here they are." His mouth opened into a macabre grin.

"We don't understand it, Dr. Nash. What does the paper say?"

He startled upright, his expression incredulous. "But it's so obvious! Any mathematical analysis of the markets with anything remotely like my models would reveal it. How can it be no one has seen it? Perhaps, yes, perhaps they were taken. They could not allow it. Yes."

"Just tell us what it means," said Lopez.

"The models are predictive. Even I was amazed how well it all worked. Socio-economic movements of populations. Market cycles. Political movements. Predictive, except that they are not!" He laughed maniacally. "How could they predict accurately when unseen hands steered all from the darkness? Maxwell's demon moonlighting in socio-dynamics!" He bent forward, his index finger extending rigidly toward them. "But put in variables to model external modulation of the models—bang! There it was! The demon hand behind history. Controlling everything. Steering humanity to their purposes. Like a closed thermodynamic system, entropy, distribution of resources. To ensure control, predictability, they needed to preserve _low_ entropy. Funnel resources upwards. Vast income inequality, power imbalances."

Lightfoote furrowed her brow. "So, you are saying that—"

"Sorry! Yes. I must select the vocabulary carefully. I have to speak with the subsets of ideas that are rational. _Silence_ the voices." His gaze turned distant. "I proved _mathematically_ that the markets were being manipulated by a powerful influence. One outside of any of the known economic variables. Is _that_ simple enough for you? But more than this. Yes, so much more. More than they understood fully. There are cycles between nations and groups, statistical mechanics, the billions making it predictable. There is a turning point that recurs with temporal predictability, a phase transition of instability. An hour of revolution when a maximum in instability is reached."

Lightfoote gasped. "The Nash Criterion."

Nash laughed. "Yes. They should name it after me. That is as good a name as any. But no one will ever know."

"We know," she said. "And your paper, it shows how to calculate it? How to determine when these instability points will come?"

"Yes. That's the whole point."

She nodded, her words spilling out rapidly. "And they want this desperately. It will allow them to know when the revolutions will come and ride them out."

He shook his head. "Too naive. Much more than ride them out. To destroy them. Kill, and kill millions to maintain their course, their control. They only guessed I had this answer. They only had metrics for when the criterion neared. But not a predictive model. They never got it from me."

Lopez shook his head. "I don't understand. Why would you give in to their demands on all but this?"

"Because it is the key to their long-term survival, Francisco," said Lightfoote.

"A great weakness," finished Nash. "Social cycles they cannot avoid, but can control if they are predictable." He pointed with his finger. "But which their enemies could use against them if they held the predictive power."

"Are we in a cycle now?" asked Lightfoote. "The world is falling apart. They act threatened."

"No," said Nash, shaking his head. "What has happened—an anomaly. It's Asimov's Mule. _Unpredictable._ "

"What?"

"The predictions rely on statistical patterns, patterns that only exist, that are only predictable when there are very large numbers of people to smooth out the random noise. Like the thermodynamics of gasses. A few molecules and quantum chaos rules. But Avogadro's number? The gas laws are obeyed! Of course, there is always noise—individuals, small groups, doing unpredictable, random things. Random for the models. But if five billion do the predictable things, the world is predictable, the noise averaged out. Unless you have a Mule."

Lopez grumbled. "What the hell is a Mule?"

"No one reads anymore," Nash sighed. "An individual that introduces a systemic randomness. It rarely happens. So few have the ability, and they hunt them down ruthlessly now. But this Anonymous—it had to be a Mule. No other explanation. Now the system is off model. The curves of prediction diverge from events. They have to steer it back. But until they do, they are vulnerable. Discovery. Intervention. Assassination. This Mule has deliberately exposed and weakened them. Now is the time to act."

Houston shook her head. "But Fawkes didn't reveal where they are."

Nash exhaled, his posture slouched. "It's in the numbers. You can't hide the source of the external stimulus. Follow the numbers back to them. It can be computed. You will find them."

Lopez threw his hands up. "Dammit, who are _they_?"

Nash turned to him and grasped the priestly robes.

"Bilderberg."

With that word the room was plunged into darkness, the central air silenced, the power cut. Everything fell still.

Nash sighed.

"Too late. Too late. They're here."
34

# Grenades

"Down on the floor!" cried Houston.

They dove to the ground just as the windows exploded. Glass sprayed inward as bullets whizzed over their heads. Paneling splintered, fabric burst open, and dust filled the air as shards tinkled to the ground. They rolled away from the exposed wall, gunfire trailing them and pocking the floor with holes. Lightfoote and Houston dove behind a couch, Lopez rising behind a ventilation pipe jutting out from the wall. He reached into his robes and removed two grenades clipped to his body armor. And pulled the pins.

"Frag out!"

He hurled the grenades through the battered window and turned his head. Light flashed and two thunderous claps shook the building one after the other. Dust and debris spilled into the room through the shattered window. Then silence as the gunfire stopped.

Houston cried out from behind the couch. "They'll be in the building. We've got seconds until they can pin us at the door!"

"Nash!" cried Lightfoote. Her head popped over the couch. The professor lay dead on the ground, his head a gruesome impact zone of multiple rounds.

"Tell me you have more grenades, Francisco!" yelled Houston.

"One."

He didn't need instructions. Together he and Houston darted toward the door, both unleashing a hailstorm of bullets through the window into the night. No one returned fire. Lightfoote took up the suppressing fire as the pair reached the door.

Lopez pulled the pin and tucked the grenade to this chest. He motioned downward to Houston. They both crouched.

"Now," he whispered. She turned the knob, flinging the door wide.

Lopez rolled the grenade outward and Houston slammed the door shut. The pair dove face first to the ground. An eruption of gunfire punctured holes in the door above them, the discharge terminating with an explosion.

The door blasted inward in pieces, fragments of wood and metal embedding themselves in the walls. Houston screamed out and clutched her leg. Lightfoote leapt over her body, firing into the hallway. Short return fire followed, and a guttural cry.

In the sudden silence, Lopez pulled Houston away from the window and behind the couch. He tore open the black fabric of her pants to reveal a red gash in her thigh.

"It's a nick, Sara. Shrapnel sliced you open, but nothing inside." He sliced and ripped segments of his robes.

"How deep?" she gasped as he stuffed fabric in the wound and tied a band around her leg.

"Deep enough. But the bleeding is manageable. We need to get you out. Stitched. Up!"

She placed her arm around his shoulders and neck, hopping alongside him toward the door.

"We're sitting ducks," she muttered.

"Inside is clear," called Lightfoote as she darted into the room. She glanced at Houston's leg and at Lopez. "Can you carry her? Fireman's style? We need the speed." Lopez nodded.

"Shit," gasped Houston as Lightfoote helped hoist her onto the broad shoulders of the former priest.

"All right, let's move!" said Lightfoote, dashing quickly down the hallway. Lopez followed behind, awkwardly navigating the shattered doorway. The bodies of three soldiers in gear lay strewn around the entrance. Inexperienced, or underestimating their quarry, they had foolishly made a fatal close approach. They were a horror show.

Two more bodies lay prone on the ground as he sped down the hallway, his thick frame bowed under Houston's weight, footsteps sounding thunderous to his ears. He felt his breath coming in gasps, the muscles of his back beginning to burn.

Lightfoote held up a hand as he approached the entrance to the building. Stopping on a dime proved more strenuous than the run, and he nearly lost balance.

"Dammit, Francisco!" said Houston as he slammed her into the doorway. "I don't need more damage!"

Lightfoote scanned the area outside with night vision goggles. Satisfied, she nodded to the pair.

"Can't see any movement. There might be an ambush waiting, but I'm hoping they overcommitted in there. Anyway, we don't have much of a choice. We have to go before more arrive."

"Agreed," gasped Lopez. "I've got one shot up that hill and need to take it soon."

"Let's go. You first and if you draw fire at least I'll have a chance to counter."

They ran. Lopez lumbered up the grassy hill toward the forest with Lightfoote waiting several seconds before following. No one waited in ambush. No shots were fired. She exited at a full sprint and quickly overtook them, scampering up the hill into the trees. As he crested the top of the hill, she passed him again, the goggles strapped on, and scouted the facility below. Lopez lowered himself to one knee.

Lightfoote returned. "Clear. Nothing moving down there."

"I'll need a minute," said Lopez.

"No time," said Lightfoote. "We'll make a basket."

They grasped each other's wrists in a square pattern. Houston stood on one leg and dropped into the seat. The pair hoisted her, shuffling quickly through the underbrush. Five minutes later, they had reached the car.

It was clear even from a distance that they wouldn't find Kaplan alive. The vehicle had been damaged, the tires ruptured by gunfire. Blood covered the inside, coating the windows in crimson.

"Motherfuckers," whispered Houston as she rested against a tree beside Lightfoote. She watched Lopez remove several bags from the trunk and place them on the ground. "At least they were too much in a hurry to search the thing."

"We need a vehicle," he said flatly. "We could ditch the gear, but we'll need to put some space between us and this place soon."

Lightfoote exhaled. "Those soldiers didn't teleport. There'll be a car or truck at the facility."

"Go _back_ there?" asked Lopez.

"I'll run back. Either we finished them and the spoils are ours, or we didn't, in which case we're basically screwed anyway. I'll just find out before you do."

Lopez frowned. "Go. You better come back."

Lightfoote saluted and began a quick jog down the road.

"Meanwhile," groaned Houston, "get your ass over here and lower me to the ground. I'm not going to wait out our doom on one foot beside this damn oak tree."
35

# Kansas City

Miles of barren cornfields long-ago harvested surrounded them—mangled, yellowed stalks poking through a foot of snow. The convoy had halted fifty miles outside Kansas City, gleaming gray and camouflage spreading out for miles around them. In the cold December air, the president, her advisors, civilian and military, shivered around a long foldout table with a map. Beside it, a large flatscreen monitor had been erected, a lengthy power line running back to the command vehicle.

"What are the numbers this time, General Franks?" York asked.

"Double what we faced at Columbus," he said grimly, mouth drawn in a line. "Satellite data indicates they've cut off any reasonable routes this convoy could consider taking around their positions." He pointed to images on the flat screen. "You'll see they've learned from Ohio. It'll cost us to break through their lines. The only advantage I can see is that this time they've struggled to bring in the heavier artillery units. Half the number we saw before. Our guerrilla tactics and the weather have been very effective since we got some of the aircraft back online. But the increasing air power on their side might make up for it."

Savas spoke up for the first time. "So, we're looking at a longer battle, likely with far more casualties than Columbus?"

Several of the military men openly scowled in his direction. Savas knew many resented their presence at these strategy sessions, and he didn't know why York insisted they be there. But he would speak his mind while it lasted.

"Yes," said the General. "But nothing we can't take and remain fully capable of completing our journey. That's our hard assessment."

"With all the aircraft coming online," said Cohen, "is there a point in revisiting the option for the president's evacuation directly to NORAD?"

"No," cut in the General. Several of the aides and advisers nodded in agreement.

"Why not?" asked York, her sharp tone mollifying the hostile looks coming from her staff.

General Franks shifted to a more diplomatic tone. "Ms. President, while it's true the odds are better than they've been for such a mission, it is our opinion they are still far too risky, and the damage to our cause if you are lost, far too high."

"And what about the lives of the hundreds, probably thousands, of young men and women who will die at Kansas City? How high is the price on their lives?"

"It's not that we don't take into account the people serving—"

"Spare me, General. Taking their lives for granted has been a national pastime for decades." She gestured to the screen. "At this level, it's all abstract—marks on a map and numbers. And most of us here remain cocooned in our command bubble, even in this convoy placing us so close to those we're asking to die for us. To die for _me_."

The stout form of the General tightened. "We don't have the aircraft to give you a proper escort. If they were to get wind of the mission, we couldn't stop a determined sortie. Hell, some airborne or ground launched SAM could blow you out of the sky. And I don't even know what types of drone assets they have."

George Tooze, the Secretary of Homeland Security, leaned across the table, his gaunt frame trembling in the rising wind.

"Elaine, this is a hard choice. No doubt about it. But you'd be a fool to rely on a mad dash, vulnerable, exposed in an aircraft. The General and his staff say we can fight our way to NORAD. Many will die, yes, but it'll be much worse for the nation to lose you – for you to fall into Hastings's hands, and leave us without the force of your personality fighting his block. We're almost there! One more battle is all he has left in him."

York frowned and stared out over the vehicles. Savas didn't envy her. Every choice she made, even the right ones, would cost lives. Bad choices would cost more lives. He had never experienced such a burden of command.

"You're sure they can't mount another offensive?"

The General shook his head. "Not near enough time. They were stretched thin as it is here. Without compensating for the lost ground artillery with aerial power, even with their stronger positions, we're going to run roughshod over them. There's no way they manage to outflank us from here to Colorado. Not after two defeats. They can still snipe at us, but their stopping power's gone."

York nodded. She looked at Savas and Cohen. "God knows I want to spare our troops another battle. And I certainly don't want to be the reason for a single death. But we're in a war of hearts and minds as much as territory right now. I and what remains of the Constitutional government have to reach NORAD." She turned to the military men. "There'll be no evac. We face them. And goddammit, you better be sure we win this and win it big."

The meeting ended. The maps rolled up and the electronics rolled back into the vehicles. York turned to Savas and Cohen a final time, but said nothing. Then walked stiffly back to the truck.

"Looks like the weight of the world is on her shoulders," said Cohen.

"It is," said Savas. He shivered. "Let's get inside before we freeze."
36

# Convergence at Oosterbeek

A dark SUV sped through the New Jersey back roads. The license plate was damaged, impossible to read. A black antenna rose from the back, thick and unmoving even as the air rushed over the roof. Opaque windows reflected the night.

Inside, Lopez gripped the wheel tightly and tuned a scanner on the dash. Harsh voices barked out coded signals in military slang. He grunted and turned briefly to the back of the vehicle.

Behind him, in the place of standard passenger seats, flat screens lined the sides of the truck, stools bolted to the floor in front of them. Racks of weapons gleamed in the back, a makeshift cot beside them. Houston lay on it with her leg propped up and her upper thigh heavily bandaged.

"How's the leg, girl?" he asked.

"Hurts like hell. Thank God for the medkit. Best we can manage now."

Lightfoote spoke as she glared at a monitor. "Pretty damn lucky find, if you asked me. Mobile command vehicle, had their positions mapped out. We'd have been caught in a dragnet if our little commando team hadn't left us this baby."

" _Had_ their positions mapped out?" asked Lopez.

"Yeah," sighed Lightfoote. "We just lost the readout. Matter of time before they figured it out. Took them longer than I thought. Guess they were spread pretty thin."

Houston leaned up in the cot. "You're sure you killed our GPS?"

"Yes, or we'd already be dead," she said. "But I'm not complaining. Positions, thread the needle to get out of the net. Medkit. And now a small arms locker back there. My favorite's the grenade launcher."

"Rack of M249s looks good," said Houston. "Boxes of ammo underneath."

"We can't keep this rig," said Lopez. "They may not be able to track us, but they'll be looking for it at the major junctions. We'll have to take those soon."

"I agree," said Lightfoote. "I think we have a long trip ahead."

"Oh?"

"Results of the calculations coming in fast now. Nash knew what he was doing. I think we've found them."

"You're sure?" Houston asked. "You said it could take weeks."

"There are levels of precision." Lightfoote glanced at the laptop on her left. "Once you understand what the equations refer to, it's just a matter of number crunching. Nash couldn't do this in the day, but we have computers now in our pockets people like Nash could never have imagined. Code was easy to write. And this little baby," she said, patting the side of the SUV, "is one linked mother. Saved a lot of time. Grabbed numbers online for nation-state GDPs, population, trade—all the variables in his paper. For controls I did repeated analysis at various time points in history. Major world events—everything fit the curves of his models."

"So it means he could predict it. Like the weather?"

"Yes, but the key thing is the constraints on the system to match the curves."

"What does that mean?" asked Houston. "Constraints?"

"In this paper, Nash includes a set of equations that aren't about markets and populations and trade and all that. These equations are like some external force pushing on all these variables."

"This is Bilderberg, whatever it is?"

"Yes. That's the key. These predictions assume there's something _outside_ of our societies and economies, something actively shaping the course of history. To any rational person, it would seem like madness—some divine hand. Any sensible person would just set those weird variables to zero—concentrate on those that relate to real world aspects of trade and population—then crank out the numbers."

"Except the real world doesn't agree," said Houston. "It agrees with having the outside force?"

"Right! The numbers coming out for nations, economies, populations: they agree with the equations that _have_ the modifying external force. You need to tweak it, tweak the strength of those variables, but it's clear. _Something_ is out there, something pulling the strings and levers, pushing the pieces across the board."

"So, back to Bilderberg. It was the last thing Fawkes said before he died."

Lightfoote nodded. "And coincidentally the last thing Nash whispered before _he_ died. _Bilderberg_."

Houston sighed and lay back, repositioning her leg. "We need to find out what it is, then. Is it related to Cohen's Bilderberg group? Is that a front? Is it something else?"

Lopez spoke up from the front of the truck. "Whatever it is, whoever they are, Anonymous has them shaken. Fawkes nearly blew up the entire system they were using for—well, for whatever they are using it for. It's clear they have friends in the US government. They've taken out Fawkes, imprisoned our friends, hunted us down. This has pushed them into the open. Nash was right about that. This is our chance."

"And then there's the back-trace," said Lightfoote.

Lopez stiffened. "Did it finish? Did it work?"

"It's still computing, but it's converging on a single answer." Lightfoote shook her head. "It's amazing really. He said it could be done, and it can. Some of the variables in the external force equations are geographic. Money and power flow like a river that can be traced to its source."

"And where is it converging?" he asked.

"We need to wait a few days more to be sure, but looking at these confidence levels—I don't think the answer's going to change. It's centering on Europe. Maybe it's too obvious. Too simple. But it could end up focusing right on Bilderberg."

"But what _is_ the Bilderberg Group?" asked Houston.

"Not the name. The fucking place itself."

She turned her laptop to Houston, revealing a world map decorated with thousands of colored lines. They crisscrossed the globe from city to city, nation to nation. A million small tributaries, the lines flowed from a central point, converging into a dense web in northern Europe.

"Oosterbeek, the Netherlands," she said, tapping her finger on the focal point. "Home of the Bilderberg hotel. Location of the conspiracy theorists' meetings of doom. Travel stop of dignitaries, CEOs, Rockefellers, politicians. It's the goddamned nexus of it all."

Houston squinted at the FBI agent. "You mean it's real? The survivalist basement dwellers actually got this one right? There's really a shadowy organization running the world out of a hotel in Holland?"

"Bilderberg's looking like it might be the solution to the equations," said Lightfoote.

"Maybe so," grumbled Lopez, "but equations don't kill. Bilderberg does. We need a solution of our own."

"And a place to lay low," said Houston. "I've got a few weeks of recovery before I can be of any use. And it looks like we've got a long trip to make."

Lightfoote tapped frenetically on the laptop. "I've got something for that, too. There's a hacker underground, as you know. Well, I've been working with some of them to create something less abstract. Now there are a bunch of hackers _underground_. Outside of Newark. Abandoned fallout shelter. They've been setting up for a few weeks."

"What do you mean?" asked Lopez.

"Some who helped us with the decryption, some who believe in Fawkes's crazy quest," said Lightfoote. "Some are just anarchists who want to take down the system. They're expecting us." Lightfoote stood and walked toward the back of the van, steadying herself on the side walls. "There's shelter and what's more some serious computer firepower. We can tap into their system and increase our attack on this problem one hundred fold. Should be able to confirm what I've done and go beyond it, narrow down the location for certain."

"You trust these people?" asked Houston.

"No," said Lightfoote, eyeing the weapons racks coldly. "But we have a tactical advantage."
37

# Hacker Underground

They stood in front of the ruins of an abandoned factory, rusted fencing and untended wild grass waist high and swaying in the cold wind. Several inches of snowfall from the night before brought a peace alien to the turmoil around them. In the distance, the taller buildings of Newark could be glimpsed in the morning sunrise.

Lightfoote struck the butt of a rifle repeatedly against a convex metallic plate embedded in the ground. Clouds of vapor escaped her lips. Nearby, Houston leaned heavily Lopez's shoulder, her wounded leg suspended slightly above the ground, her face a mask of pain.

"You're sure this is it?" asked Lopez.

Again Lightfoote struck the disk. "Yes," she grunted.

"You sure they're _here?_ "

Before she could strike the plate again, a muffled impact rang several times from the object.

"Yes." Lightfoote smiled and lowered her weapon. A metal-on-metal screeching howled from the disk. "They're here."

The disk flipped sideways, revealing it to be a lid over a wide hole. They sprang back just in time as the barrels of multiple weapons pointed up through the opening, and one jerked back as it fired. A cloud of smoke induced a fit of coughing from inside the tunnel.

"Damn it, Morgoth!" someone choked. "Give me that gun!"

A head poked up quickly from the hole. It belonged to a heavily bearded, unkempt man in his twenties. He peered out from the hole, squinting in the morning light. He spun nearly a full circle before he saw them, eyes lingering on Lightfoote.

The beard smiled. "You Angel?"

Lopez exhaled. "Save us."

"Yeah, that's me," Lightfoote answered, stepping forward.

The man strapped a rifle over his shoulder and scampered up a ladder that extended from deep below. Behind him two men and a woman followed clumsily.

"I'm De-frag," he began, swallowing overgrown chunks of hair as he spoke. "Two dudes here are SixtyFour and Morgoth."

SixtyFour, baby-faced and gaunt, sported blond hair to his shoulders. He stooped and shuffled his feet incessantly, hiding a face pocked with acne, patches of unshaven hair scattered across his chin. Morgoth was older, graying hair trimmed to a millimeter in length contrasting with his deep black skin, a pair of smart glasses glinting in the rising sun.

"The little lady is Medea."

A heavyset woman squinted at them, hair dyed red. She wore a pair of taped glasses, a faded Wonder Woman shirt, and a suspicious expression.

De-frag continued. "We all use our handles here. We're the First Anarchists. Kinda the leaders but not really, 'cause you know there ain't supposed to be leaders in anarchy, right? But nothing was gettin' done, so we hadda come up with some kinda compromise, you see. Didn't go down great with everyone." He paused. "Sorry about the shot, yeah? No one's hurt, right?" He smiled awkwardly.

Lopez chanted under his breath. "Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee...."

"So," began Lightfoote loudly. "I'm Angel. It's good to meet you in the real world, De-frag. The big guy here is Gabriel," she said, nodding to Lopez.

Morgoth interrupted in a thick Kenyan accent. "And what's he supposed to be? Some priest? We don't need any priests here."

Lopez held the man's gaze. "Former priest," he growled. "Defrocked for sexually assaulting young boys and as an enemy of the state. Wanted by the FBI for multiple murders and acts of terrorism. But I am open to giving last rites over anyone I kill here. I also do weddings." The four hackers gaped. "Leaning on me and bleeding into her wound dressings is Mary. Now, are we going to stand out here, freezing and misfiring our weapons into the air, or can we get the hell inside and find her a place to rest?"

De-frag nodded spastically. "Oh, yeah, sure. Right, man! No problem."

Morgoth hissed, pointing at Lightfoote. "And that one, I don't care what you—"

"Morgoth, shut the fuck up and get SixtyFour down in the bunker." He glared at the black hacker who continued to eye Lightfoote. "Medea—how about you help Gabriel bring Mary over here and down the chute. _Now_ , guys! Come on!"

Faces still in shock, the hackers obeyed. The two men entered the large entrance and bolted down the stairs. Medea walked slowly over and continued to eye the new arrivals with suspicion. She allowed Houston to place an arm over her shoulders, however, and showed surprising strength in helping Lopez carry her to the entrance.

"Holy God-damned Angel!" piped De-frag, his face exploding into a boyish grin as he stepped alongside her, watching Lopez and Medea orchestrate lowering Houston down the three-foot wide metal tube. "You and Gabriel and Mary. It's like some backwoods revival!"

"Uh-huh."

"Everyone's psyched you were coming. I mean, holy shit, it's Angel! You fucking beat _Fawkes_ and let loose the most goddamned crazy code into the wild—from the fucking FBI servers! You an agent? What's your real name? You don't have to say."

"Angel," she said, her face strained as she watched Houston disappear from sight.

"Oh," he said with evident disappointment. "Anyway, like I said, you coming was _sweet!_ But you fucking brought presents! The priest, ah man. Murder, terrorism, FBI most wanted! _Really?_ Shit!"

"And child molestation."

His face clouded. "Uh, yeah. Um, okay that ain't so cool."

"Don't worry, that part's a lie. Big Brother. Framed."

"Really? That's even better! He must really be a bad ass!"

Lightfoote turned sharply to face him. "Look, De-frag, we're here for a reason. We need those servers you promised me. Tell me you have them."

He nodded vigorously. "Yeah, yeah. For _sure_. I mean _stability_ is still an issue in this old shit hole, but mostly, _yeah_."

She held his gaze. " _Mostly?_ You better not be jerking me around or that killer priest will be the least of your concerns."

He shook his head. "No way, man! But, ah, look, it's just, well—"

She grabbed his beard and yanked him toward her.

"It's just _what?_ "

De-frag's voice raised slightly in pitch. "It's just that not everyone gets _why_ , you know? We got all these people together—man, it wasn't easy, let me tell you—we promised them to fight for Fawkes. Help bring down the system. Dot gov, FBI, CIA, whatever, they get that. But what the heck's this Buildingburg?"

"Bilderberg."

"Yeah, that. You know, not everyone's on board. So, you know, maybe like you could smooth things over down there? Make it clear why we're all doing this? You got all kinda fans, Angel. And maybe some who'd like to take you down, too, you know? Hackers always gotta one up."

Lightfoote let go of his hair and scowled.

"Yeah, I'll make it clear all right. One way or another."

She marched off to the hole.
38

# Rockstar

Lightfoote released the ladder rungs and landed loudly on the metal floor at the bottom of the tube. De-frag swung the heavy lid shut with a grunt, cutting off the morning light above. Balancing on the wall-embedded ladder, he turned the wheel handle to lock the hatch shut, and the poorly oiled threads cried out and reverberated through the steel walls of the shelter. She tasted a staleness in the air as dust rained from above.

Lightfoote let her eyes adjust as De-frag climbed down slowly. Weak LEDs glowed along walls. Away from the chamber, a tunnel jutted into foggy light. Indistinct mumbling and chatter echoed down its length.

"It's down that way," said De-frag, wiping dirt from his hands on his checkered shirt. "Pretty damn big inside, actually, but this tunnel's a squeeze."

"Where's the electricity from?"

"Well, we got some big-ass batteries and a diesel generator. But we don't start it 'cause we all fucking suffocate. Morgoth wanted to put some solar panels topside, but I was all like, 'Dude, it's like an advertising sign saying we're here.'"

"You're not running this off batteries."

"Right, no. So, this thing's built close to an old transformer. Sewage line too, which helps some, you know. Some paranoid old boys back in the '50s. Russian nukes, bam! You know?" Lightfoote eyed him impatiently. "Yeah, so we got some electricians who rigged a connection. Course they're not really trained in grid-leeching, so we've had surge problems and whatnot. Lost some servers. Now we've got the boxes on layers of protectors. It's a bit ridiculous, but so far so good! Ready for the hacker-pocalypse!"

"Okay. Let's see what you've done here," said Lightfoote, and she crawled quickly down the tunnel. De-frag sighed and hefted his bulk into the tube and slowly wormed his way forward.

Lightfoote reached the end of the metal cylinder and rose to a crouch, her shaved head scraping the lip of the exit, her eyes parsing the expansive space in front of her. The entrance opened three feet above the floor of an extended corridor that ran forward for perhaps fifty yards. The height of the ellipsoidal shelter reached ten feet at its apex, but forced stooping near the sides as the ceiling tapered off. Along the length of the main hall, doorways opened to side rooms.

People milled about the space, congregating at makeshift computer tables hosting monitors and keyboards, or at a long, central table where meals were taken. The walls and floor were a hazard of cables and wires running in bundles or loose, duct-taped in place or left unsecured. Dark power cords slithered along the length of the shelter, daisy-chained with adapter cords.

De-frag thumped to a stop behind her, panting. "This is the common area. Business end's the rooms way in the back—hold our server farms, as much as we could stuff into this place. The rest are bedrooms and stuff. Have their own toilets. That's probably where they took your friend. Makeshift medical. We have a real doc, too!"

By now, the din inside had begun to taper off, all eyes turning to Lightfoote. People had stopped eating and turned from their computers as heads cocked her way.

De-frag chatted on, oblivious. "It's a functional hacker terrorist cell! We got some of the area's best. Well, and not so best, too, if you want to the truth. But man! Fawkes started it all and then you two duked it out in cyberspace for control! Country's down for a long count. This is it! Just look at it!"

A strange wind of whispers replaced the rowdy conversations, and Lightfoote could catch repeating instances of "Angel" and "Fawkes." A heavily pierced woman at the end of the table stood and faced her. She raised her hands and began an exaggerated and slow clapping. Other's joined in, some standing, some remaining seated, and the sound swelled and accelerated. Yells and whoops topped the ovation as stomping feet climaxed to the calls of "Angel, Angel, Angel!"

She turned her head back to De-frag. "Seriously?"

He beamed. "I told you you had fans!"
39

# No FEDS Allowed

"Well, let's get this over with."

Lightfoote coiled even tighter at the tube opening and sprang outward, the impact of her boots reverberating through the metal shelter like thunder. Hackers swarmed her as she moved toward the table in the center of the long room, back-slapping her, many with looks of awe. Behind her, De-frag lowered himself awkwardly from the tube and straightened his twisted shirt.

The crowd parted roughly. Annoyed cries were stifled, and people moved away to allow a group of men to march toward Lightfoote. At the head marched Morgoth, his expression fiery. Two brawny men stalked behind him. They held metal pipes.

Lightfoote watched them approach silently. People near her instinctively moved away, leaving her and the three men in a circle of onlookers.

Morgoth sneered. "She's a Fed. She's not one of us. _Come on,_ people! She sabotaged Fawkes's code. If it wasn't for her, he would have taken the system down once and for all. She's the enemy and shouldn't be here."

The chamber echoed with a chorus of boos. But some nodded their heads in agreement. Lightfoote stared impassively at the three men.

"Aw, shit!" came the voice of De-frag, and he pushed himself through the crowds. "Morgoth, fuck this, man! That's enough! We agreed to—"

One of the large men beside Morgoth stepped forward and came at the bearded hacker with a pipe. De-frag cursed and warded off blows with his arms, but he had little fight in him. The men drove him out of the circle.

Morgoth stepped closer to Lightfoote. "This is an anarchist commune, De-frag. You can't tell me what to do. And I'm not going to let this Fed stay here." He raised a gun and pointed it at her, inches from her face. Gasps erupted like steam leaks. "You're going to leave, or I'm—."

Before he could finish the sentence, Lightfoote's torso swept left and her hands darted in a blurred motion. There were two slaps barely separated, a snap and the gun was airborne, landing with a clank on the floor. Morgoth screamed and cradled his right hand.

"You fucking bitch!" He moaned. "You broke my finger!"

Lightfoote resumed her stance in front of him. "You were saying?"

An electric buzz spilled across the crowd. Morgoth backed up, doubled over, his mouth frothing. He turned to the pipe-wielding men. "Fuck her up!" he spat.

The two men approached her warily, their steps staccato, feinting to make a strike, hopping back, repelled by some unseen force as they approached within a given distance. Lightfoote balanced on the balls of her feet, never flinching. She rolled her eyes.

"You boys just do foreplay or are we gonna get it on?"

The man on her left growled and leapt toward her, drawing the pipe behind his head. He swung, but Lightfoote sprung into him, one arm locked and outward, her shoulder impacting his arm at the elbow, dissipating the strike. Simultaneously, the other hand assumed the shape of a slab, the fingers curled tightly, presenting the knuckles. They plunged into his windpipe, paralyzing him. She slung him into the onrushing form of his partner. The second attacker stumbled backward as the first assailant dropped to the ground clutching his neck, wheezed gasps erupting like barks.

Lightfoote had obtained a set stance again, eyeing the panicked man before her. "Time to quit, asshole."

But she only riled him up. With a yell he charged forward holding the pipe over his head. Lightfoote sidestepped as he swung wildly downward, thrusting her hand to his bent form and augmenting his twisting motion. Losing control, his upper torso overturned and he flipped onto the floor, the impact knocking the wind out of him. The pipe clattered and rolled across the floor. The other man gulped awkwardly beside him, still clutching his throat in pain.

Lightfoote scooped Morgoth's weapon off the floor. She stared at him as she held it up. "Not even competent street fighters. Let's see, no bullet chambered." She ejected the magazine and pocketed it. "I wonder if you even have another mag. Can you shoot lefty?" She tossed it at his feet, glaring at him. He turned away, his appetite for conflict vanished.

"Well, if that don't beat all the shit out of a horse." De-frag wandered back into the circle, nursing his bruised forearms.

Lightfoote turned her gaze around the gawking faces. She raised her voice.

"I could have killed this asshole! But my guess is he's not the only one to think like that—want me out. So I want him and any sympathizers to hear what I've got to say." All eyes were on her. "I don't give a damn if you don't agree with me. Between me and my friend," she cast a glance toward the back of the room, "we'll put anyone who tries to stop us six feet under." Heads turned. Lopez stood silently in his priestly robes, a shotgun held across his chest.

A low murmur spread. She stood on the table now, brandishing her own weapon. "You don't believe it? Try us. Right now." She cast a withering glance across the crowd.

Stunned silence greeted her.

"Now that that's clear, let me tell you why you're going to let me do what I came here to do. Morgoth said I'm a Fed. He's right."

More murmuring. Louder.

"I took down Fawkes's code because it was the wrong fucking way to fix a broken system! _I_ have the right way."

"She betrayed him! Betrayed us!" came a voice from the crowd.

"I watched Fawkes die, but I didn't kill him! It wasn't the Feds, or the CIA, or the police or government."

"Then who?" came another cry.

"They're called _Bilderberg._ An organization you need to help me stop. Fawkes's last words—given to me—gave us the key. He sent me an encrypted file that _you_ all helped me break. You've seen it. An image of a madman's poster board. I've seen the online discussion—none of you could figure what it's about. But we _did_. In that wall is the code to reveal the hiding place of a conspiracy that's been controlling our world for centuries."

"The Illuminati!" "Aliens!" "Fucking Jews!"

" _Bilderberg!_ " shouted Lightfoote over the growing bedlam, turning in a circle. "I'll distribute to you the proof. Make up your own minds. But I'm telling you it's _real_ , and it's everything the worst conspiracy theorists have feared and more. And we have a way to track them down. A mad Nobel prize-winning economist gave it to us: economic equations to trace their center of influence."

"What did De-frag promise you?" came a woman's voice.

"Your servers. I need your raw computing power. You've all been fighting a long time. You just didn't know the real target. Today, _here_ , I can give you that target. We're close to finding them. You can help me. And you can do it willingly. _Or_ ... we take control of this place until we're finished."

Several shouted protests.

"No, it's not fucking democratic of me! It's dictatorial. Right now we don't have time to form a parliament or play teenaged anarchist. In case you haven't noticed, the nation is tearing itself apart outside. Maybe that's what some of you want. But if so, you're gonna have Mad Max and worse. Or you can help us reboot this world, help kill a very real Big Brother, and stop people who've been secretly controlling all our destinies!" She shone with sweat, towering above the crowd. "There's no more time for debate. I've got to get to work. Who's with me?"

No one moved or spoke. Lightfoote scanned the room, jaw set, as Lopez stood silently in the back. And then, a slow chant.

_"Angel."_

A few softly repeated her name. Others joined a growing chorus.

_"Angel. Angel. Angel."_

The chant swelled and people stomped their feet or banged the table or walls. The chamber rattled and shook. Lightfoote glanced back at Lopez. He simply nodded.

Slowly, the applause died down. As the chanting stopped, Morgoth looked furiously at Lightfoote and cried out:

"She's not one of us. She's antithetical to the movement. You're making a terrible mistake!"

"Your objections are noted," said Lightfoote. "Gabriel, let's put him and his little gang into lockup."
40

# Hail Mary

Savas and Cohen sat atop an armored Humvee, its surface-to-air missiles spent, the soldiers inside asleep even as the thundering roll of explosions continued around them. He shook his head. The human mind adapted quickly, even to the insane—the foundation, Savas knew, of PTSD. After a day of intense assault, counterstrikes, endless violence and death, the men were exhausted. Far behind the main battle, they could now rest as the front of the conflict moved toward the urban center of Kansas City itself.

Savas couldn't sleep. Cohen breathed slowly, her head on his shoulder, her eyes closed. He tried not to disturb her as he stared into the interrupted blackness, waiting for morning. The stars were constantly dimmed by blinding explosions, weapons' flashes, and manmade clouds rising into the sky.

He could taste it in the air: a burnt, acrid cloud the wind could never fully dissipate. It sank into their clothing, formed a thin layer of dust in the vehicles, and induced bouts of asthma in the susceptible. As if on cue, one of the soldiers within startled from sleep into a coughing fit.

It had been over a week of fighting, ten days of push and retreat, artillery and blast, carnage, and a slow victory. Their opponents had learned from the last engagement. This one had been much costlier. But finally, they held the upper hand. The president's troops had pushed Hastings' force nearly inside the Kansas City limits. Soon, they'd been assured, it would be over.

The road ahead drew his attention. A man in fatigues sprinted toward them, the cap on his head marking him an aide to the command center. _This can't be good._ He shook Cohen gently.

"Morning already?" she rasped.

"Rebecca, we got company."

Her eyes flicked open, one hand rubbing the sleep out, and she focused on the approaching soldier. His pace didn't abate, and when he finally came to a stop in front of the vehicle, he doubled over for several seconds to catch his breath.

"Evening," began Savas. "All okay on the western fr—"

"Come with me now!" he gasped out. "No time to explain. The president wants you at her vehicle immediately."

"What's going on?" said Savas. Cohen sat upright.

"I'm not here to talk or take no for an answer. _Now,_ sir!"

The FBI agents exchanged glances and hopped down to the asphalt. The soldier turned and motioned for them to follow. "Double time!" He began to run.

The pair followed at a fast clip, wordless, dashing past sleeping soldiers and quiet vehicles toward the command vehicle. As they arrived, the tension spiked: high-ranking officials and military personnel were congregated around the president's war table. Soldiers inside spoke rapidly into headsets as they scanned computer screens. Faces were grim. Savas and Cohen edged closer to hear the dialogue, suppressing their gulps for air.

"If they're gonna launch," said a heavy-set general, "there's no way to clear the battlefield. It's a logistics nightmare. This many men, this much equipment, it's a day's bug out and you know it!"

"Then it has to be faster!" cried York.

"Impossible!"

Tooze leaned in. "Elaine, that's it. You've done what you could. It's time to leave. We can evac you and other VIPs on a few of the older choppers that still fly."

"It's a massacre! A slaughter!"

"If they follow through, it's already assured, Ms. President!" yelled the general.

York removed her glasses and squeezed the bridge of her nose. "Give me the assessment again."

An aide to the general suppressed a sigh. "NORAD detected SLBM activation. The boats are parked off the East Coast. For those missiles, we've got fifteen minutes after launch, less perhaps depending on trajectory."

The general spoke clinically. "They don't need precision accuracy, Ms. President. An air blast. We're not fortified. They'll umbrella the area. From the initial NORAD data, it's likely a Mark 4 type, fourteen warheads. Each is a hundred kilotons. They'll carpet bomb the convoy and surrounding area."

"We'd won, dammit!" she shouted, pounding the table, spilling small pieces marking positions across the map. "Nuke his own people? His own army?"

"It's _because_ we've won," said the general, wiping sweat from his brow. "Like I told you, this was their last stand. They know they've lost it. This is a Hail Mary."

"More like a Hail Satan," she said. "NORAD can't shut it down?"

"They're still trying," came the voice of another high-ranking officer. "But there isn't much of a chance."

"Tens of thousands of our troops, this _entire_ city, are going to die, gentleman. That's what you're telling me?"

"Yes, ma'am. And we can't stop it."

"Elaine," began Tooze softly, "We have—"

"Prep the aircraft," she interrupted, staring coldly at her military advisors. "Go with the Migrant protocol, worst case scenario. Get as many of the VIPs out as you can." She paused and sighed. "Don't say anything to the troops. Not yet. If Hastings steps back from the cliff, we need to hold this location. We can't afford to scatter—it could be a feint and Hastings trying to gain an edge here. But the second we have a confirmed launch—God forbid—I want everyone notified with details. Tell them the truth."

"It won't be enough to get them out."

"Maybe, maybe not. But they deserve a shot. God forgive us all for what we're doing." She looked them over. "All right. That's an order. Move!"

The military men saluted and raced off to enact her commands. Tooze remained beside her, and Savas and Cohen were slowly revealed to York as the crowd of soldiers dissipated.

"You catch all that?" she asked wearily, slumping into a foldout chair.

"I'm not sure I can believe it," said Cohen.

"I know I can't," said Savas.

"You'd damn well better believe it. What's more, you two are coming with me, part of my personal entourage when we fly like bats out of hell." They simply nodded. York closed her eyes. "Just like bats out of hell. Because hell's coming."
41

# Multiple Maxima

They sat together at the long table, the shelter's hackers giving them a respectful space, and dined on scavenged canned goods and a never ending soup of protein powders from a GNC store raid. Lightfoote scowled as beige goop dripped from her spoon.

"I don't know how many more artificially sweetened, vanilla-flavored amino acid blends I can slurp down." She turned to Houston. "How's the leg?"

"Wound's closed," she said. "I won't be running the one hundred anytime soon, but walking's good. Limited weight bearing drills: squats, lunges." The former CIA agent turned the bowl up and drank down the goo. "Thank God for these protein shakes. Good to rebuild the tissue."

Lightfoote frowned. "Tastes like liquid cardboard."

"Pretty much," laughed Houston. "Our prisoners won't stop whining about it."

"How secured are they?"

Houston chewed on stale crackers. "Physically, not very. We rigged some locks on the doors. But the best bars are psychological. I think you broke them. That and Francisco's silent shotgun-priest thing." She smiled. "Works every time."

Lopez cut in: "Nothing from Savas and Cohen?"

Lightfoote shook her head. "I've tried several times. I've left emails, texts, whatever I could. No response and I can't raise them on the emergency line."

"You sure you had a connection?" asked Houston.

"Not in here, but I went topside. Phone was ringing. No one home."

He exhaled. "Something's wrong. They've never gone dark so long. I'm worried."

Lightfoote nodded. "Me too. But it's getting pretty nasty out there if we're filtering the local Hastings propaganda accurately. The other hacker communities at least help with that."

"Let's see," began Houston, "after translating Pravda, what do we get? The president is leading an armed resistance. That's her trying to get to NORAD, of course. Hastings is unsurprisingly claiming she's trying to establish a dictatorship. The military is split between them. And fighting has begun. Huge battles reported Midwest, East Coast, West Cost, Philly. Our friends are likely caught up in all that insanity." She gestured around her. "Makes this shelter seem rather foresighted."

"Caught up, and how badly?" asked Lopez. "Battles like that—I don't care what your army, sometimes you don't walk away. Look at what happened in Princeton."

"Jesus," said Houston, closing her eyes. "They sterilized it. Couldn't find us, so why not burn the entire fucking place to the ground? I kind of liked the gothic look they had going on there."

"If something happened to York, we're toast," said Lightfoote. "The country will fall to this Hastings, or whoever is put in his place to pull the strings. No way out of that. And we _need_ York. Especially now, right when the numbers are converging."

"Any updates?" asked Houston.

"Good news, sister!" popped in De-frag. He landed heavily at the table, a tin plate piled with ketchup-plastered beans rattling and partially spilling its contents. He shoveled several plastic spoonfuls, speaking through a full mouth. "Cause we got ourselves an answer!"

"Well, we kinda got ourselves an answer," said De-frag, scrolling through lines of incomprehensible output. The group sat in one of the back rooms, centered around a group of monitors.

Lightfoote leaned in and examined the screen. "What do you mean? I see a clear peak, here, Northern Europe, right where—wait a second..."

"Exactly," finished De-frag.

"How can we have other maxima?"

"Don't ask me, sister. I'm just running your code. Them's Nobel Prize equations."

Lightfoote squinted. "The second maxima is far smaller, but the statistics are good. What the hell?"

"Lay-agent translation, please," barked Houston.

"Yeah," sighed Lightfoote. "Okay, first—we got the precision convergence in Europe. And what do you know, it's in the Netherlands. In a one hundred mile radius that includes the damned Bilderberg Hotel. That's the major convergence. Cross-checked and independently verified with control data removed. All the external manipulation of the economy and political trajectories center there."

"Well, yeah, except that they don't, really," added De-frag.

"Right, except that they don't," said Lightfoote. "There's a collection of nodes, weaker, but they look real. One stands out the most—some sort of major influence is tied into this one as well."

"Well, where is it?" asked Lopez.

Lightfoote reached over De-frag and keyed in several commands. A map of the world appeared, a wild crisscrossing of lines converging on Europe and the northern United States.

"Here," she said, pointing to North America. "New York City."

Lopez turned to her. "New York? Right under your noses?"

"It might not be anything like the Bilderberg center. It's a minor peak, and maybe tied to the fact that New York is a financial and world political center, an 'echo node' that reflects its influence, but isn't causal."

"Isn't causal?" repeated De-frag.

"It isn't a power center in and of itself."

"That makes sense," said Houston. "There are minor nodes at most of the main financial centers—London, Shanghai, Tokyo."

"Maybe New York is more important."

"How can we know?" asked Houston, grimacing as she repositioned her injured leg. "Do we have two fronts in this fight? More? Do we need to take out the others, too?"

Lightfoote shook her head. "There's no way to know, and everything we're doing here is experimental, anyway." She set her mouth. "I say we ignore the weaker nodes. Everything—history, the strong signal on the Bilderberg node—it all points to Europe."

"And we don't have the resources, or the time, to make ten pit-stops," said Lopez. "I agree. Let's take out the big dragon."

"Whoa," said De-frag, his eyes large. "Take out? What—ya'll are headed overseas to, you know, _kill_ people?"

Houston shot him a hard look. "We'll do what we have to. They have to be stopped."

Lightfoote stepped back from the monitors. "We've got to reach out. We need help."

"York again?" asked Houston.

"She's the only one with the resources. It will take us ages to get there. I'm not even sure _how_ right now. It's not like commercial airline traffic is back up."

"Go above ground to call out," said Lopez. "We'll come and provide cover, scout the area. Stay up there all day if you have to." He rose. "This is the endgame. If we can catch them unprepared, we might have a shot at stopping them. Once and for all."
42

# De-Frag

They exited the computer room and marched from the back of the shelter. Lightfoote toted a bag with her communications equipment. Houston limped behind at a slower pace, refusing any help from Lopez. De-frag trailed behind like a kid in a candy shop.

At the sight of their passing, conversation stalled and heads tracked them. SixtyFour sat in front of a makeshift security center, blond hair spilling around bulbous headphones that covered his ears. A grainy video image flickered jarringly on a monitor in front of him. It showed only static. He turned, sensing their presence, removing the earphones.

"Up?" he said softly.

Lightfoote nodded. "We're all going. Probably a long session."

SixtyFour shook his head. "Wait."

"We don't have time—" began Lightfoote.

"Hold on, hold on," De-frag cut in, his brows furrowed. "SixtyFour's quiet, so, you know, when he talks, you gotta listen. What's up, dude?"

The gaunt teen pointed at the screen. "Video's dead."

"Yeah, okay. Not the first time," said De-frag.

"Sounds," said SixtyFour, tapping the earphones. "Too much. Rustling. Impacts. Can't identify. Someone's up there. Sentry's silent."

"Sentry?" asked Houston.

De-frag looked pale. "Yeah. She's posted in the rubble, couple hundred yards out. Claustrophobic. Couldn't take this tank."

"She's actually a sentry?" asked Lopez.

"Right," said De-frag. "Chatty as hell, too. No way she went quiet. No way she wouldn't respond." He looked back at SixtyFour. "I think we got trouble."

A shout from the back of the shelter dropped all conversation to silence. Medea hustled toward them, waving her arms, a blur of dark clothing and a red streak from her dyed hair. She shouted again.

"We're blown!" Her heavy form came to a stop in front of them. "Damn they're good! Must be NSA or something. They've traced us, ID'd our location. I don't know how. We're getting penetration tests coming up our asses!"

"I thought York had bombed them!" said Houston.

"She did!" said Lightfoote. "Slowed them, just not enough."

"They know we're here?" Houston asked Medea.

She nodded. "No way they didn't geolocate us by now."

Lopez looked into the metal tube in front of them. He removed a handgun from his robes. "That means—"

A thundering clank turned heads in the room.

"That means those aren't friendlies upstairs," said Houston grimly.

"That means we're screwed!" cried De-frag, grabbing at his hair.

A deafening hammering began above them, the sound echoing through the tube.

"Ah, man, ah man, ah man," cried De-frag, spinning in circles. "The hatch won't last long. Then what?"

Lopez steadied him with a firm hand on his shoulder. "Then, if they don't drop a bunch of grenades down here, we fight them hand-to-hand."

"Hand-to-hand?"

"Do you have weapons? Firearms?" asked Houston.

De-frag nodded. "Yeah, sure. Some brought their guns and stuff. It ain't much. We pooled them all in a locker."

"Get them," said Lopez. "We're going to be facing trained special operatives. We're going to have to organize a front to prevent any significant penetration through the entrance—trap them in the tube. It's the only hope to fight them."

"Fight them," muttered De-frag. "We got guns, man, but, you know, I don't know if we got many who can shoot straight. You know what I mean?"

"What else is there?" said Lopez.

Medea leaned in and hissed at De-frag. "Or, dumbshit, we could use the escape tunnel in the back? Remember that?"

De-frag's eyes widened. "Fuck, yeah! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because you're too busy pissing your pants," said Medea. "We've got to get them out."

Lightfoote turned to Medea. "Take us there."

"Yeah, before half this place figures out what's going on. That's going to be a bottleneck, let me tell you."

Lopez stopped them with his arm. He glared at De-frag. "Get them armed."

De-frag looked at the blond kid. "That's SixtyFour. He's the only gun-nut here. You got this, buddy?"

SixtyFour nodded and raced off toward a row of storage lockers along the sidewall.

"Let's move!" said Lightfoote.

The group filed past. Frightened hackers staring toward the entrance tube, the hammering continuing. Medea ducked into a back room and single-handedly shoved aside a wall of servers, revealing a hatch in the wall.

"This is it," she said.

"You've tested it?" asked Houston.

"Ah, not exactly," said De-frag.

Lightfoote locked eyes with him. "Explain."

A loud explosion rocked the shelter. Screams came from the chamber outside.

De-frag shifted into a higher pitch. "Just schematics, man! It's a tunnel, leads out along the sewage line, then up and out, a couple football fields away."

"But you've never tried it?"

Medea shook her head. "Never even opened the damn hatch." Another explosion. More screams. She stepped up to the wheel and set her shoulder to it, her hands turning white as she pressed with all her strength. It didn't move.

"Damn," said De-frag. "She's stronger than all of us. What now?"

"Move," said Lopez. He grasped the wheel in his massive hands and angled his body sideways, his legs taking the brunt of the force. Nothing happened. His broad form tensed. A wrenching scream ripped through the room and the wheel inched counterclockwise.

"Help him!" yelled Lightfoote.

Medea grasped the other end of the wheel, and together they forced it across its shredded threads. Lopez yanked and the hatch spun inward.

"Ah, shit," said De-frag, his words muffled with his hand over his mouth.

"Near the sewage lines, huh?" said Houston. "Is this a thing with us now?"

The sounds of machine gun fire echoed through the shelter. Intermittent pops of smaller ordnance peppered back.

"Smells great to me," said Lightfoote, and she stepped through the hatch, her large bag of electronics clanging on the side of the opening.

Lopez guided Houston through the opening, turning back to the room. "Medea, come with us. De-frag, these are your people." He nodded to the chaos outside. "You can't save them all, but get as many as you can in here behind us."

De-frag looked crestfallen. "It'll lead them right to you. You won't have time. You got to stop this thing, right?"

"To hell with time!" cried Lopez. "You can't let them die." Houston called his name from within the passageway. "Go! Bring those you can here!" He ducked under the opening and disappeared. Medea followed immediately after.

De-frag stood frozen in the room, his head darting between the escape tunnel and the door to the main chamber of the shelter. Screams battered his ears. Gunfire. He looked down at the ground and exhaled slowly.

"Sorry, dudes."

He turned and grasped the hatch wheel and pushed the door until it slammed shut. The metal screamed once more as he turned the wheel several rotations. He heaved the tower of computers back against the doorway, the mainframes and metallic shelves obscuring the wall completely. Exhausted, he pulled up a chair and dropped, facing outward.

A soldier in battle armor pointed a weapon at him through the doorway.

"Where are the fugitives?" the man barked.

De-frag smiled like a terrified kid plunging over the edge of a rollercoaster for the first time. He extended the man his middle finger.

"Eat it, motherfucker."

Automatic discharge exploded in the room.
43

# Electromagnetic Pulse

The passengers were bounced roughly. Savas, Cohen, the president's close adviser Tooze, high-ranking military officers, and other governmental officials were strapped into red seats lining the interior of the large troop transport—a hulking Boeing CH-47 Chinook from another era. Missing were any high-tech digital elements, the cockpit stripped and rebuilt only weeks before to render it invulnerable to any remnants of the Anonymous worm. The modern gear was replaced by a set of instruments and controls dating to the Cold War. Alongside an escort of Blackhawks shadowed their movements. York crouched beside the cockpit and spoke to a military man seated in the co-pilot's chair.

"How much more time?" Her voice barely penetrated the rumbling of the helicopter's engines.

"Unknown!" he shouted over the din. "Estimated launch window says ten minutes, but we don't know the trajectory. We can't accurately predict. It's a navy missile for sure, fired off the East Coast, so it's loaded and fast."

"Are we clear?"

"It depends on where they detonate! If they stick to the convoy and city, yes, we're out of the blast radius. Supposedly."

"Supposedly?"

He shook his head. "We don't have the number crunching here to check. NORAD's estimates. And too many unknowns."

"She's opened up as much as I can," said the pilot. "I've vectored us radially West from the coordinates you gave. Kansas City is behind us." Turbulence bounced them viciously, and York was thrown hard against the ceiling. "Sorry, Ms. President," he said as she regained her footing. "I don't know what they did to this bird. She's flying rough, but I'll get us there. I recommend you strap in."

Savas reached out and grasped Cohen's hand next to him. Their eyes met, but they exchanged no words.

York exhaled, rotating to the single empty red chair beside the cockpit. She shouted as she worked the restraints. "Okay, assuming we get through this, what's your plan?"

The pilot answered. "Follow yours, ma'am. Six hundred miles to Cheyenne Mountain. Running this fast, we'll need a refuel somewhere along that line."

"We're working on it," she said.

"If the duct tape can hold this old lady together, it's five or six hours. Maybe less if all goes well."

York nodded. "The other evacuees?"

"Behind but in communication. We got seven birds loaded, most a lot more packed than this one. Some with vehicles. It will slow them down."

"Can't be helped," said the military advisor. "The president's the priority. We leave anyone else behind and take the escort with us."

York turned to him. "We're looking into a contingency for—"

Her words stopped. A god's lamp was lit and the landscape around them brightened like an overexposed photo. Before anyone could process or react to the radiance, a shower of sparks burst like popcorn from the control panel.

The engines made a terrible screeching noise, and the helicopter lurched to the side. Passengers screamed. The craft dropped sharply and flailed side-to-side as the pilot wrestled with the controls.

"Putting her down!" he cried.

A shadow darkened the craft. Through the windows, the bulk of a Blackhawk could be seen dropping downward, nearly careening into their Chinook. Then it was gone, the Chinook itself quickly losing altitude as well.

"Brace! Brace! Brace!"

Passengers assumed a variety of positions, confusion and fear on their faces. Savas and Cohen brought their knees close to their chests. They continued to hold hands.

The machine slammed against the ground tail-first, the helicopter crumpling from the back like a tin can. Screams and rending sounds ripped through the air. A stomach-lurching leap propelled them back into the air before gravity jerked the vehicle down again and hammered the craft into the earth. Momentum drove it shuddering like an earthquake across the ground, the cockpit mangled, dirt and rocks breaking through the front windows and flooding madly throughout the belly of the dying beast.

And then it was still.

Savas opened his eyes, his body taut and constricted, a thick dust and smoke choking his vision and breath. Cohen opened her eyes beside him, unharmed. His eyes darted forward. Upturned earth covered the president. Savas released the five-point restraints and dashed beside her.

"Ms. President?" He shoveled away handfuls of dirt from her body.

She opened her eyes. "Holy hell," she whispered. "I hope to God you're not an angel." He stared back at her. "Heaven's gotta have better-looking ones."

He smiled wanly. "Sorry, no heaven. We survived." He continued to free her from the mud and rocks.

Cohen placed an arm on his shoulder. "We're maybe the only ones."

Savas looked around in shock. At the front of the helicopter, the pilot and advisor were crushed into the control panel. Behind them—grass and plowed earth. The tail end of the Chinook was gone, and along with it the other passengers—judges, senators, and Tooze.

"George!" cried York, and maniacally tore at the restraints, freeing herself and rushing out.

Savas grabbed her. "No Elaine! It's too late!"

Fifty yards behind them, an inferno engulfed the massive engine powering the craft, charred and mangled forms within. Black smoke vomited into the sky and spilled fuel ignited the tall grass around the amputated section.

The president stared at the raging fire in horror. Her hands shook.

Cohen whispered. "John, look—"

Savas followed her gaze. Around them like campfires were the wrecked hulks of the Blackhawk escort, the machines having struck the ground much harder than their craft. There could be no survivors in the wreckage he saw.

But Savas was no longer looking at the remains of the aircraft, but eastward, behind them, high into the sky. "Dear God." A line of monstrous apparitions sprouted into the air, dwarfing the smoking fires at their feet. Dark mushrooms tainted the blue thousands of feet above the plains, casting long shadows across miles of fields. The prevailing winds had begun to chip away at their structure, eroding the rising titans into trails of smoke billowing slowly east.

"EMP," Cohen whispered. Savas and York stared at her uncomprehending. She looked away from the nuclear blasts. "Why we all went down. Electromagnetic pulse. Fried the circuitry. Pilot lost control. We dropped."

York continued to stare at the flaming tail section of the helicopter.

Savas nodded. His jaw set. "The convoy is gone. Kansas City—gone." He looked around the carnage before them. "Our evac group—gone."

Cohen shook her head. "We got lucky."

"Not just luck," said York, finally turning her back on the flames and the remains of her advisor. "Our lift was the most outfitted to resist the worm. Engineers went back decades. Tore out the damn guts and built it back. There just wasn't as much to fry inside." With a final quick glance behind, she turned back to Savas and Cohen. "But enough to do the damn job."

"What now?" asked Cohen hoarsely.

York walked back into the shorn half of the helicopter. She grabbed several bags and weapons. "Salvage what you can. We've got six hundred miles in front of us." She glanced up to the towering smoke giants. "And a madman on our tail."
44

# Worm-Girl Comes Calling

"Admiral Myers?"

The voice belonged to a young officer at the door of a chaotic office. A stout man with a gray shock of hair spun around in his chair, a landline to his ear, the cord wrapping taut around a desk lamp and bottle of scotch. Both crashed to the floor.

"Goddammit, son!" The young aide rushed over and began to mop up the spilled alcohol and glass. "Hendricks? Hold on, I'll call you back." He slammed the phone down. "That was a conference call to the Canadian air defense headquarters. I specified I was not to be bothered until we square out those damn false alarms on their infected computers! This better be good!"

The young man turned pale. Blood dripped from one hand as he cradled shards of glass. "Yes, sir!"

Admiral Myers sighed. "Benson, right?"

"Yes, sir! Jeremiah Benson. Deputy Commander Duval's aide, sir."

"They promote you Canadians quickly. Benson—spit it out."

"We've had contact with a flagged name from the York party. Part of the FBI team we were briefed on."

"Savas group?"

"Yes, sir. Lightfoote, Angel, Special Agent in Charge, Intel 1 Cybercrimes."

The admiral stood. "The worm-girl?" Benson nodded. "Team Hastings knows about her. You verify her identity?"

"She claims to know the president. She knows details of the worm."

Myers shook his head. "Not enough. It could be a phishing attempt. How the hell did she reach us?" The admiral bent down and pulled out a handkerchief. "You're a bloody mess, Benson. Wrap it off and put the damn glass down. We'll have custodial take care of this." He looked toward the ceiling. "Maybe someone's trying to tell me something about the bottle."

"God? Sir."

Myers laughed. "Or worse—internal affairs." He frowned. "Lightfoote—how did she contact you?"

"Yes, sir. Sorry. That's just it. She's _inside_ the system. She must have hacked in. We're getting contacts from internal email and instant messaging servers. It's a flood!"

"Hacked in? _Jesus_. Should've had that girl do our penetration tests. Well, that's probably better than a retinal scan. I don't think there are too many cyberwarriors at that level. It's got to be her with everything else."

"Yes, sir, that's what we figured."

"We'll make sure. York gave us some security questions. We'll use those. " Myers glanced down at the shattered bottle. "Damn I need a drink." He stood, Benson mirroring him, the aide's hand wrapped in bloody fabric. "Let's get to the floor."

A small crowd gathered around a cubicle in the Command Center inside of Cheyenne Mountain. An array of monitors tiled the walls around them showing maps of the nation and world, newscasts, and streams of data comprehensible only to analysts. Heads craned from other cubicles lining the floor space, trying to catch a glimpse or overhear what was transpiring.

Myers stared into the green eyes glowing from one of four monitors on a wide desk. The girl's face was streaked in grime and blood, her head shaved, piercings decorating her ears and nose. Beside her sat another woman, brunette with short hair showing blond at the roots. On the other side loomed a dark face, Mexican, a broad skeletal and muscular structure mostly in shadow.

Myers nodded. "So, Angel Lightfoote, and the two ciphers: Gabriel and Mary. Normally I'd call this a con-job, but, miraculously, you fit the exact profiles we were given."

"You've spoken to Savas? To York?"

"One thing at a time," he said. "You need to answer a few questions. We need to be sure you're who you say you are."

"Understood." Her gaze didn't waver.

"Uh, Gabriel," he began, looking at a piece of paper, reading glasses now sitting on his nose. His eyes wandered to Benson. "Is this some kind of joke?"

The aide shook his head. "No, sir. That's what they gave us."

"Well, how the hell am I supposed to read this? It looks like Latin!"

"Boys school, Montreal," said a lanky officer in a foreign uniform. He put his hand out for the paper.

"You know Latin, Pierre?" asked the Admiral.

Deputy Commander Duval nodded and took the paper. "But it's been a while, Jim. Let's see— _Comple in Sacerdote tuo ministerii tui summam_. And there is a final phrase Gabriel is supposed to provide."

The dark figure in the monitor nodded. " _Et ornamentis totius glorificationis instructum coelestis unguenti rore santifica._ "

Duval nodded, his eyebrows raised. "That's it. What the hell is it? Some Catholic prayer?"

Lopez rumbled over the speakers. "A blessing during the ordination of a priest."

Myers shook his head. "This one's for Mary. Javed Ahmad, otherwise known as?"

Houston replied instantly. "The wraith."

"Two-for-two. Now, Lightfoote. Five years ago you figured out a pattern. You drew it on a computer screen. It was an object pointing to a target. What was the object?"

Lightfoote's face tensed. "A hammer. _Thor's_ hammer. _Mjolnir_ in Old Norse."

Myers nodded. "It's them."

"Now, can we stop wasting time and get to business?" asked Lightfoote. "Where is York? Savas and Cohen? We haven't been able to reach them. We're on the run, Hastings troops on our asses. If you know about us, you must know about Bilderberg."

"We do," said Myers. "And your mission. You've found something then?"

"Yes. We have proof this group is behind everything. They've been orchestrating world events for decades, breaking international law, undermining national sovereignty. Most importantly—we now know where they are. We're going there."

"Going there?" asked Duval. "To do _what?_ "

"Stop them," said Lopez.

Duval squinted at the screen. "Who are you?"

Myers cut in. "We're going on the president's word here, Pierre. York claims they're as good as a Seal commando team, and she's put them on point for this. Not that we have any real options. We can't get anyone out from here with Hastings on our asses 24/7." He gestured to the monitor. "This crew is our shadow force."

"This is insane," said the Canadian.

Lightfoote nodded. "Every bit of it. Now, where the hell is York? We need her to authorize transportation for us."

Myers exhaled. "We don't know where she is."

Houston leaned in. "What do you mean? What happened? She should be there by now!"

"They were outside Kansas City, six hundred miles out from here. Hastings put up a last stand to stop her. He lost, or was losing. Then, the unthinkable. He launched a ballistic missile and dropped a bunch of warheads on the convoy and the city. It's been radio silence since."

Houston angled back in her chair. "Oh, my God."

"We had advanced warning from satellites, and York and the FBI agents were being bugged out on an emergency flight. But before they got far the bombs hit."

"They didn't make it?" asked Lightfoote.

"We don't know. But with the EMP, there's no telling what happened. They could be alive with fried communications equipment, charred in the blasts, or pulverized when their aircraft lost power."

"EMP?" said Lopez.

"Electromagnetic pulse," muttered Lightfoote. "Nukes cause them. Supposedly fries anything except the most hardened electronics."

"Does that explain the power outages?" Houston asked.

Myers cocked his head to one side. "There were outages?"

Lightfoote nodded. "Middle of the afternoon two days ago. It's still down here. We're running off a stolen generator."

Duval leaned toward the camera. "Timing is perfect. Our reports from the East Coast are minimal—Hastings controls your territory. But that's the best explanation. We're heavily shielded here, but the pulse must have damaged more civilian equipment than we anticipated."

Lightfoote slammed her hand down on a table in front of her. "We need her help! We need a transport to get us out of the country."

"Slow down," said Myers. "We've ID'd you to our satisfaction. She's left instructions, said if you called—and I guess hacked-in counts—you'd need help. And we're here to give what we can. You say a transport? To where?"

"Europe. The Netherlands. ASAP. Bilderberg is holed up there. We know exactly where. If we can get there, stop them, we can cut the head off this beast and Hastings will be a clean-up job."

"One hell of a clean-up, by the way things are going."

"Yes!" cried Lightfoote. "But he's a puppet. Take him down and Bilderberg will replace him. Take down Bilderberg—"

"Yes, yes. We ax the puppet masters," said Myers. "I have to say, this is one of the craziest conspiracy theories I've ever heard. But I serve the president, and she says to give you what you need."

"Can you?" asked Lopez.

Myers stroked his chin. "Honestly, I don't know. You need a plane. Hastings owns the seas. But air is still risky. Ridiculously risky. Commercial traffic is grounded. Since the worm and through this civil war. We'll have to get you a military transport. But how we do that without Hastings finding out ... I don't have a goddamned idea." Duval leaned over and whispered in Myer's ear for several seconds, and the admiral nodded. "Where are you?"

"Outside of Newark. Big ass airport right next door," said Lightfoote.

"Hold your position. Monitor this feed. We'll get back to you."

Lightfoote pressed. "Can you help us?"

Duval nodded. "We might just have an idea."
45

# Bosworth Homestead

Barric Bosworth stared at the flaming sunset, one hand on a rusted fence post, the other fingering the butt of his twelve-gauge pressed into the ground like a walking stick. The dust particles and debris from the atomic explosions scattered the low rays of the sun into the most spectacular color show he'd ever seen in his seventy-three years. It didn't even look real but reminded him of the artificial palettes modern filmmakers were so taken by.

He scowled. Something for poets and painters maybe, but not a farmer. Nothing could erase his fury over what had happened—the anger and shock of nuclear war in his own backyard. Not even when nature turned the monstrous into something miraculous.

His scowl deepened as his eyes were distracted from the sky to the grassy fields below his farmhouse. He squinted and turned his good eye toward three shapes moving toward him up the hill. _Three people_. Trespassing on his property, coming from the direction of the blasts. As they neared, he could see they were struggling. An older woman, a younger woman, and a man. Their clothes were filthy, sooted like they'd come out of a crop-burning, their faces sunburned even in the winter chill. They were ready to collapse.

Still he didn't move. Didn't raise his weapon. He let the trio approach within twenty feet of his fence.

"All right you three, that's far enough."

The older woman stumbled. Propped up by the other two, her head hung as breaths wheezing in clouds from her mouth. The man supporting her spoke.

"My name is John Savas. These are my friends. We need shelter. Food and water. A place to rest." He spoke hoarsely through cracked and bleeding lips.

Bosworth nodded. "You come from the blasts?"

Savas nodded. "Outside the city. We've walked for two days."

"Two days?" the farmer rubbed his chin. "At the rate you were walkin', that'd put you 'bout halfway from here to the city. But you ain't from 'round here."

"Our flight was knocked out of the air by the blast," said Savas, his voice weary. "We're the only survivors."

"Ain't no flights since the troubles started."

"It wasn't a normal flight."

Bosworth shifted his weight off the shotgun, his hand gripping the butt more tightly. "Well, that's what I was gettin' to. You're some VIPs, or I don't know nothin'. But what I'm wonderin' is _whose_ VIPs." Savas simply stared at him. "Some are sayin' we got ourselves a civil war. Some sayin' the president's trying to take over, like Hitler. Others the military. Other's the goddamned Iranians. Even _aliens_." He shook his head. "The three of you, _flyin'_. Nuclear bomb in my home state. Just _whose_ VIPs are you?"

"You gone plumb senile, Barric?" cried a nasal voice. A thin woman with wild gray hair scampered down the hillside from the house, kicking up a dust cloud, a heavily patched dress billowing around her.

"Irene! Get back in the house right now!"

She pushed past him with a grunt and bent nearly in two, squinting her eyes toward the three strangers, a clawed index finger indicating York. "I swear I'm gonna make you get that laser procedure. You're gonna give a sermon 'bout the president when she's a-standin' right there?"

Bosworth furrowed his brow and turned to York. The president looked him straight in the face. His eyes widened. "I'll be goddamned."

His hand grasped the weapon at his side firmly and he lifted it into the air, loudly racking the chamber and loading a shell. The barrel pointed above Savas's head.

His wife put her hands on her hips. "Put that damn gun down, Barric! You ain't shot it in twenty years!"

He ignored her, staring fixedly at the president. "They shot you down?" York nodded affirmatively. "Where were you headed?"

York sighed, beyond the point of disguise or deception. "To NORAD. The bunker in the mountains."

"Cheyenne Mountain?" he said, the weapon not moving.

"Yes," said York. "Government and military loyal to me are waiting. Holed up. We're trying to ride this out there. But I had to get there from Washington." She looked behind her. "It's not going so well."

"Barric—" his wife began.

"Hush, woman!" He licked his lips. "Who are these two?"

"FBI agents. Real heroes if you want to know. John Savas and Rebecca Cohen. Killed the terrorist who nearly caused a war a few years back."

Bosworth looked between the two agents. "I remember."

Savas spoke. "So, Mr. Bosworth, I think it's our turn to ask whose side _you_ are on? Because if it's with our nation's rebels, you might as well shoot us now. If you're loyal to this president, to our elected government, then we need your help. President York needs your help. We can't go on much farther."

Bosworth scanned around them again, weapon at the ready. "Sons-a-bitches dropped the bomb on their own country. In _my_ state." He glanced them up and down again. "You go much farther like that, they'll get you for sure." He looked at his wife. "Irene, put something on the stove. You all come on in. We ain't got much, but we got food, beds, some medicines. Maybe buy you a little time." He patted his shotgun. "And don't you worry, anyone coming after you is gonna have to get past me first."
46

# Blackbird

Night fell, and nothing moved at Newark airport. Planes slept along the shuttered terminals, the tower looming above as a shadow in the starlight, the runways invisible and dark. The blackness was punctuated haphazardly with the faint glow of exit signs and flickering emergency lights, the electric gasps of a region still reeling from the both the worm and the EMP.

Lopez, Houston, and Lightfoote huddled on the tarmac, three small shapes beside a broad runway racing alongside the central terminal. A blue glow blossomed as Lightfoote opened a laptop, the glare forcing the three to squint as their eyes adjusted from the darkness.

"This is the longest runway," she said, indicating a black line on a schematic of the airport. "They said it would put down here."

"They're late!" whispered Lopez through clenched teeth. "It's just a matter of time before they hem us in. We're sitting ducks."

Houston scanned the skies. "I don't know what we're looking for. They'll be flying low, trying to screw with any radar scans of the area. The airport is down, thank goodness. I don't know what else the military could have looking."

"I assume the lights will be off," Lopez said. "No runway lights. How are they going to put it down?"

"I have no idea," said Lightfoote, shaking her head and closing the computer.

The three sat in silence as the minutes dragged by. The sounds of a truck caused them to catch their breath and draw weapons, but the noise faded quickly, leaving them in the quiet of the open space.

"We ought to consider a defensive arrangement," said Houston. "If they search the airport, we—"

"Wait!" hushed Lopez, his eyes fixed on the sky. "Listen! Can you hear it?"

For a moment, the two women followed his gaze, silent, listening.

"An engine, air turbulence, something," said Lightfoote.

"There!" hissed Houston, pointing north-east and into the sky.

A hole in the band of the Milky Way yawned above them, a gap in the stars blurring its way across the sky. The sound grew more distinct, the churning of some machinery that was completely outside their experience.

"It's almost on us!" said Lopez, rising from his crouch. "It's about to land!"

The three stood back from the runway. At the far end, the shadow expanded dramatically, a shape with unfurled wings descending like a hawk on prey.

"Are the engines off?" asked Houston. "It hardly makes a sound."

Tires screeched with a quick burst of light as the plane touched down. They watched silently as the rending sound of brakes engaged and the aircraft rumbled past them, the plane slowly coming to a stop.

"It's the damn bat-plane," said Lightfoote.

The three jogged toward the craft as it circled around an end of the runway and aligned toward the other, preparing for takeoff. Drawing near, they could better make out the details of the thing. Pitch black, a coating drinking all light, sharp wings framing a blade, the plane slowed to a stop. The vertical cross section was small, the engines placed like two boxes over the wings. The sounds of a hatch opening rang in the night.

"It's a stealth bomber," said Houston, awe on her face.

"Not a bomber," came a man's voice from the vehicle. From around the nose stepped a pilot in dark gear, a broad helmet like a fighter pilot's in his hands. He marched quickly up to them.

"It's a stealth transport. A prototype from Northrop for cargo, strategic airlift capability. Bomber doesn't hold passengers." He looked at the bald head of Lightfoote. "You Angel?"

"Stealth cargo transport? What the hell is that for?"

The pilot shrugged. "They always think up uses. But never went into production. NORAD said you needed a bird and we had to get it in without being seen. And this prototype runs on some new military-grade OS. Worm-proof. There weren't too many options."

Lopez scanned the aircraft. "It will hold all of us? Doesn't look like much room."

"It's for cargo. More room than you'd imagine. It looks like a B2, but it ain't. Doesn't fly much like one either. Now, come on. Let's get you three the hell out of here."

They didn't need any persuasion. The pilot led them to the cargo entrance, and they jogged inside. Cramped and lacking much light, they stumbled to seats along the walls and strapped in.

The pilot reached the cockpit and sat next to a helmeted co-pilot. Their hands moved over the instrument panels and the cargo doors shut. The engines powered up, the interior going completely dark as the plane began to accelerate down the runway.

"Please fasten your seat belts and stow your tray tables," came the pilot's voice over speakers. "Next stop, Amsterdam."

A dark shadow leapt into the air.
47

# Surgical Intervention

"So, it's come to this at last."

The words were spoken by a harsh face over a computer screen, a middle-aged man in a business suit. The Director stared at the monitor from his seat underneath the Bilderberg Hotel, a panel of other monitors displaying an array of ashen faces.

"Yes, Alpha. We are in agreement," said the Director. "York has perturbed the models too much. The equations are diverging. America is lost. Europe now has a sixty percent chance of diverging from the planned curves as well. Asia will be next."

"But is York still alive?"

"We don't know. But it hardly matters now. Had we secured the nation, suppressed her message earlier, exhibited her alive or dead with the proper propaganda, it might have been contained. But through NORAD and their broadcasts, it went on for too long. The Nash Criterion has been reached."

"And you have confidence in the metrics of this madman?"

"This is what we do, Alpha. You have trusted us and been amply rewarded by our numerical simulations. The Nash Criterion was always a calculation for _in extremis_ , more to calibrate the models with a high bound. We never believed the model fluctuations could reach this point. The hacker has been a disaster. There is now no way to salvage the global trajectory without dealing with America."

"Amputation?"

"Surgical intervention. Enough to render its world influence minimal, to absorb its economy and government into that of nations to be appointed as guardians over what is left. Otherwise, the equations can't be balanced or normalized. We will lose control."

"And you estimate Europe and Asia will fall back on path even after this drastic event?"

"Yes." The Director wiped sweat from his brow. "The models show a strong attractor to the established trajectories. A high confidence for stabilization within the envelope of error. But only if America is neutralized. The parameters are tight. Too large a strike and we risk major secondary effects, climate the most significant. Such disturbances could also doom us. Too small, and the divergence will not be contained. We have a set of models for minimal, decapitation strikes of government and industry. Strong ripples are unavoidable, but we believe they can be managed while putting our past models back on track."

Alpha nodded on the screen. "Zero has decided. Do it."

The Director glanced at the screen in horror. "Of course."

"We remain in control over the required systems?" asked Alpha.

"We have verified several times over the last few days. Launch codes, missile command and control servers, and our personnel—everything is in place, as well as other nations' systems to avoid panicked responses."

"The university is on the target list."

Alpha frowned. "You don't need to explain the obvious. You aren't going to impact America without a strike here. We will dismantle everything in New York and evacuate. We need several days to manage the logistics."

The Director looked down to his desk and shook his head. "After so long. Such a perfect disguise. We won't find another like it for some time." He returned his gaze to the monitor. "What of the scientists?"

"Them? They are only a front. Mostly a pack of Nobel-chasing sheepdogs imagining themselves to be prima donnas. They are no longer needed."

"And Zero?"

"His plans will remain hidden, even to you, Director. When we've completed our transition, you may learn more. Now, prepare everything and wait for our final contact."

The screen turned black and Alpha disappeared. The Director placed his hand to his temples.

"God help us."
Part III

# Prometheus Bound

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." -Franklin D. Roosevelt
48

# Infrared

"I still can't get used to the quiet."

Lightfoote stood in the middle of the stealth transport cargo bay. A constant purr and muffled sound of wind filled the cramped space. A black SUV with tinted windows sat chained to the floor several yards behind them, the vehicle unusually long with a substantial bed. The glow of a laptop screen painted the dim interior in a ghostly sapphire. She stared up at the surrounding walls, her body still. Her computer rested on a makeshift table culled together from small boxes. Lopez and Houston sat on either side, watching her quietly. After several more seconds, she shook her head and took a seat with them.

"Invisible to radar and hardly makes a sound. Pretty amazing." She looked at Houston who grimaced while repositioning her leg. "How's the thigh?"

"Better, but crouching in this black box isn't doing wonders for it." Lightfoote continued to stare. "I'll kick plenty of ass when we get there, little girl. Don't worry."

Lightfoote half-smiled. "You better. Looks like we're going to be hitting a fortress."

Lopez pointed to images on the monitor. "So, these are aerial images that see underground?"

Lightfoote nodded. "They're brand new. NORAD moved fast on our request, using some of the newer imagining satellites. Infrared. Archeologists love them—found new pyramids buried in the sands in Egypt. Pretty powerful and high resolution."

"Looks it," he said. "More than one floor underneath, I think. It's at least three times the size of the above-ground structure."

"And it's not a parking lot," said Lightfoote. "I couldn't find anything about underground structures associated with the Bilderberg Hotel. As far as the internet is concerned, it's just a simple four-story structure in Oosterbeek."

"Can we get a sense of the security?" asked Houston.

"The resolution is good, but not miraculous," said Lightfoote. She switched to regular aerial photographs. "Nothing topside to raise any suspicions. But there has to be something serious given what we're dealing with. I assume it really starts near the entrance to the underground bunker."

"But we have no idea where that might be," said Houston. "We're going to be awfully exposed hunting around for that."

"Yes," said Lightfoote. She bent over, staring at the screen. "But maybe we can make some educated guesses."

"The power lines?" asked Houston.

Lightfoote nodded. "A hotel that size doesn't need so many cables. And look at the asymmetry here. A few lines to the main structure, and then what, _five_ running where? To this wing only. What the hell is going on there? Stadium lighting?"

"You're right," said Lopez. "The entrance is there." He pointed to the satellite imagery. "The forest comes close to the extended wing _here_. If we can make our way to this point, we can recon the wing. Maybe remain unseen until we move on it. I bet there's a network of cameras sweeping the place."

"I wouldn't assume the forest is safe, Francisco," said Houston.

His face darkened. "Haven't forgotten, Sara. We've seen a few examples of paranoids wiring nature to hell and back. Still, I think it's the best approach. Remember, it didn't save the occupants we came across."

Houston nodded, her eyes distant, remembering. She snapped back. "I agree. We conduct sweeps through this sector. If we identify surveillance, we avoid or deactivate."

"We might alert them," said Lightfoote.

"We might," replied Houston. "But we don't have too many options coming in this fast. Unprepared."

"I also had NORAD compile the satellite imagery over the last few weeks," said Lightfoote. "I've strung the frames together, run it several frames per second. Watch."

She double-clicked on a file and a video player opened, displaying a still frame of the top of a building surrounded by land and roads. She pressed play. Cars and trucks came and went at blinding speed, shadows running across the frames right to left, repeating over and over. "Their birds get several photos a day. Notice anything?"

"Deliveries?" asked Houston. "Guests arriving? What?"

"The number of trucks is pretty low. About enough to handle a hotel that size and not much more. Unless they have an underground railroad bringing in supplies, what you see is what they get."

"They're minimally staffed," said Lopez. "We're not going to hit an army."

Houston smiled. "You're right. It's the best news we've had yet."

"I'm not sure why it's so minimally guarded," said Lightfoote. "I sure as hell hope we aren't wrong."

"The Nash equations? A huge and secret underground bunker with a massive supply of electricity?" Lopez shook his head. " _Something_ highly unusual is being hidden there. We aren't wrong."

"Maybe they never feared discovery," said Houston. "Maybe automatic security systems with a few guards seemed enough. If they've been around as long as they have and never discovered, they might have gotten cocky."

"Maybe," said Lightfoote. "But let's keep our eyes open. I don't want any surprises."

Houston smiled. "I don't either, except the one we're going to drop on them."
49

# Shotguns

Bosworth opened the front door, using his foot to kick the scuffed wood at the bottom to force it through a sticking point. He lost control of the handle and the door swung wildly on its hinges, slamming into the wall behind it.

"For cryin' out loud, Barric! You 'bout gave me a heart attack." His wife stood in an apron over a gas stove. "I've told you to fix that damn door!"

"Have a seat," he said, ignoring her. He placed his shotgun beside the door, drawing the shades to the windows.

As Savas helped York through the entrance, he noticed the wall behind the doorknob had numerous indentations. Mr. Bosworth's kicks over the years had made their impression. The house was built of knotted planks of wood, stained a rich honey, the polish long worn away. A small fire crackled on the right side and helped to dispel the cold air invading from outside.

"We need to use your phone," said York. "I've got to contact NORAD and let them know where I am."

"Honey, the phones have been out since that interweb virus thingy shut everything down," said Mrs. Bosworth. "And look at this, my computer." An older model desktop PC sat with a dark monitor on a table by the wall. It appeared to be covered in dried foam. "Soon as the bomb went off, every damn thing with wires 'bout caught on fire. My computer did, sparks flying everywhere."

"Irene had to pull out that old extinguisher," laughed Bosworth. "Miracle it still worked."

"Laugh all you want, Barric, but it had all our records."

"I don't think Uncle Sam'll be feeling up to any audit right now," he replied

York looked between them. "So, no computers. No landlines. Cell phones?"

Mr. Bosworth shook his head. "We ain't got one, but I heard they're all down, too. Stuff takes longer to fix out here. That's why all the kids leave."

"So we're completely cut off," said Cohen.

"Welcome to the prairie," said Mrs. Bosworth. She looked at Cohen. "Your name again, honey? I can't remember my own, somedays."

"Rebecca."

"Rebecca. Nice church name."

"I'm Jewish."

"So was our Savior, honey. So was he. Can you hand me some of those candles on the shelf there? Night's gonna fall soon and there ain't been electricity for weeks."

Cohen reached behind her and grabbed a sack of candles, walking them to the old woman. "How do you keep warm?"

Mr. Bosworth grunted. "Battery back-up for the furnace helped, but course it wouldn't last. Couple of days we lost heat. That weren't no fun, let me tell you. I switched off the A.C. to the furnace and wired up a nine volt in place of the normal one. Fooled the damn thing. Gas valve opened and furnace started fine. To get things flowing, I popped the inspection cover. No fan running, but we got a good bit of heat. With the fireplace over there, everything was fine. Well, the blower safety switch kicks out and shuts things down every now and then and we got to let everything cool down. But it works. Until the gas supply quits."

Irene snorted. "That makes as much sense as government cheese. Just don't get him started."

"I was only answerin' her question."

Irene huffed and placed several candles on a long wooden table in the middle of the room. The light had begun to fail outside, and already the warm radiance of the fireplace and candlelight tinted the room orange. She placed a fat kettle of soup on the table.

"Haven't had guests for years." She looked at York. "Last gov'ment man we had was Jim Wilson from the local IRS in KC." Her face darkened. "I guess he's dead too now, 'long with that pretty family of his. I never was much for hostin', and we ain't got nothin' proper for a president. Anyways, come eat up. You look starved."

Eagerly, the three descended on the table, the first nourishment in days drawing them greedily. Conversation halted for several minutes as the famished visitors devoured the broth.

"Sorry to say, ma'am, I didn't vote for you," said Mr. Bosworth, opening conversation.

York laughed. "Well, that's quite all right, sir. I don't take opposition personally. Unless they're shooting at me."

"It weren't that I _opposed_ nothin'," he said.

Mrs. Bosworth shook her head. "He just don't want to say he thinks a man ought to be in the big chair."

"Now, Irene, I never said—"

"Never said! You don't have a thought in your head I don't know beforehand, Barric."

York helped herself to a second bowl. "You have no idea how nice it is to think about someone voting against me rather than trying to kill me. It's what all this is about, you know." She wiped her mouth with a napkin. "Some people want to take your say out of what the country does. They want to rewrite the rules, remove the people opposing them. As you see, they'll stop at nothing."

"I knew you were tough as any man for the job," said Mrs. Bosworth. "I kept telling Barric during the election. 'She's army! What else you want?' Pair of dangling ovaries I guess."

Mr. Bosworth didn't answer but shook his head, slurping loudly with a spoon to his mouth. Cohen turned to the president.

"How did you end up in Iraq? Can't have been too many women serving in combat areas back in the nineties."

"There weren't," said York. "It's a long story, starting with enlisting. And it never would have happened if my father hadn't been so damn pushy for me to enter politics." She laughed. "Try to imagine a young girl flipping her big name politician dad the finger and signing up for the army. Boy, was he pissed. Had the roadmap already laid out for me, probably when my mom was in labor. I was determined to blow it all to hell. Of course, he did spin it for the press and gained some points for his patriotic children."

"And yet," said Savas, "after it all ended, here you are. President of the United States. Dad would have been proud."

"Life's never short on irony. But right now my title is on the ropes." She placed her spoon down in the empty bowl. "And what about you, Agent Savas. Your father an officer of the law, like you?"

"He did clash with the mob," said Cohen, smiling.

"Sounds promising," said York.

Savas shook his head. "The last thing my father wanted was to be part of the law or crime. Now, my paternal _grandfather_ is another issue entirely. I really don't want to know what he had to do to become one of the biggest shipping magnates in Asia Minor."

"So, you're from money?" asked York.

"Could have been. But there was too much chaos in the Balkans those decades. My grandfather lost everything, every boat he owned during the Greek genocide a hundred years ago."

"Greek genocide?" asked Mr. Bosworth. "Ain't never heard of it."

"Yeah, not as well advertised. And like the Armenian genocide, the Turkish government would like to keep it that way." He stared off into the distance. "But more than a million perished, the entire Hellenic population in Asia Minor either killed or driven West into Greece. An entire culture perished. So did my grandfather's boats and our family's wealth."

"That's a horrible story," said Ms. Bosworth.

"Just one of thousands in Europe of the last century. Genocide after genocide. Ethnic cleansing—love that word. Like they gave all the Greeks a bath or something. Not as civilized as we like to pretend we are."

York exhaled. "No need to remind me."

"Afterward, my family settled in northern Greece. A piece of land belonging to three different countries off and on before my father was twelve. For the next Balkan wars, he was conveniently drafted into three different armies. My grandparents put him on an Italian boat to the New World."

"At twelve?" clucked Ms. Bosworth.

"He did pretty well. My father was a charmer and entrepreneur. By the time he reached New York, he was fluent in Italian and had a Sicilian girlfriend. Ran a restaurant under the Brooklyn Bridge for more than thirty years."

"And the mob connection?" asked York.

"Getting to it. He refused to pay the protection money."

"The money you pay the mob to protect yourself from them," said Cohen.

Savas continued. "They set fire to his restaurant three times. Three times he borrowed, built it back, and had better digs than before. I guess they finally just gave up."

"Amazing," said York. "But now I see why you joined the police. You were police before FBI, right?"

"Does it show?"

York smiled. "I've been around a lot of law enforcement. Got a good eye."

Mr. Bosworth nodded. "So how'd you get from the police to the FBI?"

Savas tensed but forced himself to relax. "My son followed in my footsteps. Joined the NYPD a little before the World Trade Center attacks. He died as a first responder." All eyes were fixed on him. "I joined FBI counterterrorism afterward."

Cohen reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. Savas drank down a glass of water quickly as she spoke.

"My story's similar," she said. "I had a lot of relations killed in Israel. Bombings. I remember as a kid my mom coming to me. 'Aunt Yael won't be coming to visit this year.' 'Cousin Ziva got hurt.' I was precocious: I watched the news. Looked things up in the papers. I loved detective stories. I decided before I was out of braces that I would be a detective."

York stared intently at the pair. "Your division has a lot of people familiar with trauma."

Savas nodded. "No accident, as you might have guessed. Intel 1 was set up by a man who had a dark but effective vision. He recruited some characters, including one who's now with the pair who rescued you in Washington. He felt we'd be highly motivated."

"If he could keep you sane," said York. "This was Larry Kanter?"

"Yes," said Savas. "Killed by Mjolnir five years ago. Blew his house up."

Mr. Bosworth stared at Savas with his mouth agape. "Well, goddamn, son. Sounds like you've gotten the tour of hell."

"More like he's been stationed at the turn off to hell, Mr. Bosworth," said York. "He and the others have had to stand in the heat and steer the rest of us away from it."

Savas put his spoon down. He smiled at Ms. Bosworth and changed the subject. "This meal has been as close to heaven as I could imagine food to be. And as thankful as we are for all of it, we need to consider soon what we're going to do next. The president can't stay here. Seeing what's happened, you shouldn't want her to stay here for long, unless you like a big bullseye painted over your house. We've got to get her to NORAD."

"I've been thinkin' on that," said Mr. Bosworth. "You need something you can hide out in. Car or truck, you're open on the road. You've got to find a place to sleep. You can't count on motels or anything. Most are closed. But I've got an idea."

"You don't mean that old camper?" asked Mrs. Bosworth.

"I surely do," he said. "I've got me a nineties Coachmen Leprechaun. She still runs."

"And smells like a swamp inside."

"She'll keep you on the road, out of sight, no need for doing much but driving—straight shot to Colorado on I-70 should run you a day, and if you need more, motel goes with you. I ain't got no more real use for it. You want it, she's yours."

Savas stared at him. "It will get us six hundred miles to Colorado?"

"No promises," he said. "But I've kept her in shape. I ain't no mechanic, but I can tinker the hell out of things. Like the heater. I wouldn't push her too hard: Keep an eye on the temperature. Stay under sixty. She should get you there."

"Beggars can't be choosy," said York. "We'll have a look. But we might just take you up on your offer, Mr. Bosworth. The nation doesn't have much more time. We have to end this conflict soon."

He nodded. "Nothin' truer said. We can fill you up with a few days' supplies. You shouldn't need more than that to get there." He rose and walked to a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, pulling a key from several on a chain. He unlocked it and swung the doors open. "And we can supply you with more."

The interior of the cabinet was lined with shotguns. Boxes of shells were stacked along the bottom.

"Barric's been a collector for years," said Mrs. Bosworth. "'Bout drove me nuts with guns all over the house. Different makes, special handles, all kinds of money thrown away. I always said: 'What are you buying all these for, a war?'"

Savas stood and walked alongside the cabinet, examining the interior.

"Well, Mrs. Bosworth, it looks like he was."
50

# Hard Landing

"Okay folks, time to take your positions," said the pilot. "Here comes the crazy part."

Houston and Lightfoote walked to the large SUV and opened the doors, entering the dark behemoth. Houston sat shotgun. Lightfoote took the back seat, spinning to look on the forms of two compact motorcycles strapped in the back, then turned back and belted herself in. Outside, Lopez looked over the vehicle, examining the chains and their attachments to the floor. He called up to the cockpit.

"These will release automatically?"

"Yes," said the pilot over the speakers. "Once the ramp is lowered. You follow it down, accelerating out and clear the aircraft. Then we're gone."

Lopez nodded and stepped into the driver's seat, slamming the door behind him. He pressed a button on the dash. "You picking us up?"

"Roger that," said the pilot through some static. "We're on approach, monitoring all frequencies. The airport is still shut down for all commercial flight, but they've started bringing in cargo planes and military aircraft. We've got some heavies around. Air traffic control can't see us, and as yet we've only had one pilot call in a UFO. It's getting dark, so—hold on. Make it two UFOs. Word's getting out."

"Jesus," said Houston. "How are we going to land in this mess?"

"Hold on!" cried the pilot.

The plane banked sharply, throwing them sideways. Lopez slammed into the glass, and nearly pitched to the other side of the SUV when the stealth craft leveled off, only his grip on the entry assist handle keeping him in position. He quickly buckled himself in.

"Looks like we land dangerously," said the pilot. "An Airbus Beluga super transport at takeoff. A flying whale for sure. Just missed it. _Jesus!_ Okay, hang on, coming behind another plane on approach. Prep for wake turbulence. This is it!"

Their stomachs dropped as the plane descended rapidly and the stealth aircraft was pummeled and shaken violently. Lopez grabbed the wheel instinctively as the SUV convulsed around them. He could hear the crates of weapons and ammunition rattling loudly from behind.

Then a kick in the gut as the plane slammed onto the ground. The landing gear miraculously held together as they were yanked mercilessly forward. The pilot decelerated the aircraft forcefully, and they felt him struggle to keep the plane from pitching. The brakes screamed, and the smell of burnt rubber filtered into the SUV.

"Prepare to detach!" cried the pilot.

"Roger!" called back Lopez.

He released the brake and put the vehicle in neutral. Despite slowing, the plane still moved quickly on the runway. The failing light of dusk streamed into the dark cargo hold, a slit in the floor growing in front of them. The ramp lowered, the tarmac below racing madly past.

"Go, go, go!"

There were several loud pops, followed by the rattling of heavy chains. The SUV pitched forward down the ramp.

"Brace!" Lopez cried out.

The vehicle slammed onto the asphalt as he gunned the engine and accelerated, sparks flying from the ramp behind them as it scraped the ground. He quickly angled away from the runway.

"Clear!" he yelled.

A strained voice came over the speaker in the SUV. "We see you. Accelerating for takeoff." They heard the black plane scream into full throttle. "We aren't coming back. Good luck! Always check your six."

"Thanks, and get the hell out of here."

He steered toward the main terminal as the stealth craft rose into the air. Lopez scanned the planes and crew around him, dodging obstacles and bewildered workers.

"Map's a bit blurry in my mind. We head for the main terminal, then west, and the highway?"

Houston nodded. "Right. No one seems to have picked us up yet. I'm sure they were a bit distracted by the unexpected landing and takeoff. But it won't last forever. There, Francisco! Ahead. Follow the green line."

Lopez flew past parked airplanes, approaching a gate surrounded by booths.

"Boom barrier ahead. Arm's down. We ram it?"

Lightfoote leaned up from the back, straining against her belt. "No choice. Look!"

Bright red and blue lights began to flash from outside the SUV. Sirens howled.

"Police," said Lopez. "Well, that didn't take long." He shifted and accelerated, grinding his teeth. "Okay, hold on!"

"Guards! Take cover!" cried Houston.

Lopez had a millisecond to process the scene in front of him before he aligned the car to the gate and ducked. Two dark figures stood at either side of the barrier. They opened fire.

Impacts struck the front window, the shatter-resistant glass forming circular craters around the bullets. Other projectiles banged across the hood and roof of the car. The passenger side mirror exploded.

They crashed through the barrier and the shots momentarily ceased. Lopez jerked up, desperately steering the SUV out of the oncoming lane and onto the right side of the road, narrowly missing several cars approaching the gate. Horns blared. Several shots chased them, two thumping against the rear doors. But they were through!

Lopez gunned the SUV down the road and approached a turnoff to the main highway. He glanced in the rearview mirror, flashing lights from police clearing the gate in the distance behind them.

"Anyone hurt?" he cried out. Sweated beaded on his forehead.

"I'm good," said Houston, exhaling slowly and leaning back into her seat.

"Ditto," said Lightfoote. She laughed. "Your man can drive, sister."

"That he can," said Houston. "We clocked a hundred before we kissed."

"Don't get too excited," said Lopez, the SUV screeching as it rounded the exit ramp. "We're going to have the entire Dutch SWAT brigade on our asses in ten minutes."
51

# Coach Force One

"Maybe travelin' by night might be more secret," said Bosworth, eyes squinting. Wisps of breath escaped from his mouth.

Savas shook his head, pulling the hood down behind him. "It might call attention. Typical RV is going to drive by day, stop at night. We'll leave as soon as we're packed, be out of here by sunrise. Should be in Colorado by nightfall."

"Don't think any vehicle on the road these days will look normal. Everyone's shut up. Fuel's mostly gone. I'd vote for night. At least then it's hard to see you."

"We'll need lights. It will stick out for sure."

Bosworth nodded. "There's that."

The two men stood beside the dingy sides of the old camper, its once-white paint chipped and yellowed, dents spread haphazardly across the vehicle. The garage was spacious yet crammed with tools and a small hydraulic lift. A rusted pickup truck was on the other side of the RV. The faint first light of morning began to glow through small windows in the structure.

Cohen and York stepped out of the camper, discussing what they had found inside. Mrs. Bosworth shuffled across the oil-stained floor loaded down with heavy bags. She set them down in front of the RV.

"You two look twenty years younger," she said, her eyes twinkling.

"Miracles of food and a shower," said York.

The old woman nodded toward the interior of the vehicle. "So?"

"You weren't wrong about the smell," said Cohen.

York smiled. "It's not Air Force One, but it'll do."

"Might lose your appetite, but here," she said, indicating the bags. "Some food and supplies. You won't be needing much for this trip. Maybe Barric's gun collection might prove more useful. But it's nothin' we can't spare."

"Thank you," said Cohen, grabbing the bags and heading back into the RV.

York stepped up to the two men. She pointed under the truck to a large metal box. "The auxiliary tank?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Bosworth. "It's not Department of Transportation approved, mind you. Set it up myself. But served well for a lot of trips. You got fifty-five gallons in the main tank and forty more there in the reserve. That's a good seven, eight hundred miles. Unless you do something stupid, you won't have to even stop."

"We don't plan to," said Savas. "Stop or do anything stupid."

"What we plan and what's happened haven't always been in perfect alignment," said Cohen, returning.

"You got that right, girl," said York. "But we'll go with the plan. Dawn to dusk, straight shot. I-70 is likely mostly clear. Hope for the best."

"Not much else you can ask for in life," said Mrs. Bosworth.

"I still think you're gonna be the only ones out on the road," said Mr. Bosworth. "If they're looking for you, it's got to call their attention."

"Maybe," said York. "But we can't wait. And most of Hasting's troops were at Kansas City. Don't know what he has left out here."

"Hastings," echoed Mr. Bosworth. "The general you mentioned?"

"That's the one."

Bosworth shook his head. "Bombed his own _troops_. His own _country_. What kinda man does that?"

"One we need to stop," said York.

The five of them stood silently before the large vehicle for several moments before Mr. Bosworth cleared his throat.

"I wasn't for your politics, Ms. President, but I have to say you make a good impression. My money's on you for this fight. God speed to you and I hope you make those bastards see justice."

Mrs. Bosworth flicked her hands at them. "Okay, get, all of you. Come back some day and see us. You're good company, and we want to find out how it all ended."

"And you two stay safe," said Cohen. "We don't know how long it will be until things return to normal."

"We'll do fine," said Mr. Bosworth. "Got supplies laid up through this winter. If'n things ain't better by the next, country's lost anyway. We've seen a lot of good. Feel bad for the young ones."

Savas slapped the old man's shoulder and grabbed a shotgun on the back bumper. "Thanks for everything." He glanced at Mrs. Bosworth. "We won't forget. Don't worry."

The three said their goodbyes and boarded the RV. York slid into a booth in the middle of the vehicle, unfolding a large map in front of her. Savas placed his hand on Cohen's shoulder.

"You sure you want to drive?"

She nodded. "If anything happens, you two are the gunslingers." She looked at his weapon. "Sit. You're shotgun."

"All right. Let's pray I don't have to chamber a single shell." He eased into the passenger seat, pointing the weapon to the floorboard.

Cohen started the RV, the old engine coughing loudly and catching, the entire vehicle shuddering. They'd agreed to leave off all climate control, both to save gas and not to risk overtaxing the engine. They sat in poorly fitting coats, Cohen's fingers poking up through finger holes in a set of frayed gloves, the winter gear supplied from the attic trunks of their hosts. She checked the mirrors, adjusting the rearview, and looked out the window. The garage door was opening, the pale light before sunrise spilling in. A light snow had begun to fall, the air dancing with ice crystals.

The Bosworths walked alongside the camper and stepped outside the garage as the door retracted. Standing motionless by the left side, their expressions were inscrutable. Cohen waved and shifted, the RV rumbling forward and onto the driveway, bouncing clumsily on its poor suspension. They left the farmhouse behind, the front lawn passing on the right, two stony protrusions marking the entrance to the property. She turned right and onto a local road.

"All right," she whispered, clouds escaping her lips. "Here we go."
52

# Always See the Body

Lopez accelerated to over ninety miles per hour. They passed the early morning traffic on the highway out of the Amsterdam airport like the cars were tied to the road. With five lanes and little congestion, he easily picked his way around smaller vehicles.

"What the hell does this thing have under the hood?" asked Houston. "It's as big as a bus with two cycles in the back!"

Lightfoote hung her arms over the two front seats. "And what was the military doing with it? Urban warfare?"

"Later," snapped Lopez, dodging a blaring commuter bus. The speedometer hit ninety-five. "Status of those blue lights?"

Lightfoote spun back around. "No visual, but you can bet they're in pursuit. They've likely radioed ahead. They're going to set up road blocks soon."

Houston laughed and glanced at Lopez. "Sound familiar?"

"Too familiar. Angel, the turnoff should be close! You have the maps?"

Lightfoote stared at her laptop, open on the seat beside her. "Saved by the bat-plane satellite internet. Take the next one. Puts us in some small town—not going to try to pronounce it. They sure like lots of letters here. Narrow streets. It's perfect." She paused to glance through the back window. "Update: We got company. Good half mile, but I can see the flashy lights. A lot of them."

Lopez growled. "This is going to be close."

"We need to be clear enough so they don't see the bikes," said Houston, "or else it's just another chase."

"I know," said Lopez. The speedometer read one hundred.

"That's it, _there!_ " cried Lightfoote, again leaning into the front space, her arm pointing to the right.

Several signs indicated an approaching exit ramp. The beginnings of a town could be seen along the roadside. Lopez swerved toward the rightmost lanes, accelerating even more to pass several vehicles lining up for the turn, horns protesting loudly behind them. Once he hit the exit lane, he floored the brake, pitching them forward in the cabin, cycles rattling loudly behind them.

They swerved into the turn far beyond the recommended off-ramp speed, Lopez fighting the wheel, G-forces slamming them toward the left side of the SUV as they whipped around the curve. Bags beside Lightfoote thudded into the left door as she clung to the headrests of the front seats. Exploding through the turn, Lopez raced through a stop sign, narrowly missing several cars crossing the intersection. Tires screeched in their wake.

"Awesome!" cried Lightfoote as they bounced through a narrow road, old buildings rising like walls on either side of the car.

Lopez continued to decelerate. Already the highway was lost to sight. As they approached a four-way, he turned left and brought the SUV to a stop on a deserted street.

"Move!" he yelled, opening the door and leaping out.

Houston followed, her limp nearly gone. Inside, Lightfoote bent over the back seat, reaching toward the flatbed. She worked frantically at the restraints on the cycles. The back doors opened, and Lopez slung several heavy bags to the ground.

"Sara, set the charges," he said as Houston caught up, then leaned into the SUV interior. "Angel, are they free?"

"Yes!"

"In three, two, one!"

Lightfoote grunted inside as Lopez pulled on one of the bikes. The motorcycle rolled backward and careened out of the truck. He steadied it as it hit, wheels bouncing on the cobblestone road inches from Houston's face as she crouched over a large, black bag, a detonator in her hand.

"Number two!" cried Lightfoote.

The second motorcycle bounced down onto the street, Lightfoote following it out. Both vehicles were pitch black, even the metallic elements covered in a dark matt material. Black helmets were snapped into holders near the back of the seats.

Lightfoote leapt on one cycle, quickly donning the helmet. "The bat-bike!" she called.

Lopez handed her a heavy backpack, and she strapped it on. He swung his leg over the other cycle, handing the second helmet to Houston as she exited the van.

"Ready?" he asked, motioning toward the SUV.

She nodded, strapping on a second backpack, and taking the helmet from him. "Where's yours?"

"They didn't plan for three. Don't worry—likely the safest thing we're doing this week."

Lightfoote laughed. "They're quiet too. Light. Stealth Harley's next."

Her engine was running, but the sound was minimal. Lopez pressed a button and started his cycle, hardly feeling the motor.

"Electric, remember? More than enough juice to get us to Oosterbeek." His head whipped to the side. "Listen!" The unmistakable sound of the Dutch sirens wailed from the distance.

"Let's go!" cried Lightfoote, gunning her cycle and ripping off down the street.

Houston wrapped an arm around Lopez, her other grasping a small metallic box. "Go, Francisco!"

Their bikes raced past the SUV and down the hill. As they approached an intersection, Lightfoote banked left and turned, soon lost from view. Houston held up her free hand, the other anchoring her to Lopez, a red light winking in her palm barely visible in the growing sunlight. As they turned the corner, she detonated the charge.

The SUV exploded. A fireball rose into the air, fragments of the vehicle raining around the ancient street along with smoke and ash. Blue flashing lights approached the raging fire from down the road, the police vehicles slowing to a stop. One officer opened his door some fifty meters away and gawked at the inferno in front of him.

Racing back onto the highway, the two motorcycles merged with the rest of the morning traffic. Houston turned her head and stared behind them. A cloud of smoke rose from the receding town and into the sky.

"Tracks covered," she said, flipping a black sun visor over her eyes.

They raced south.
53

# Pit Stop

"We're barely halfway through Kansas and the engine's overheating?"

York stood near the front of the RV, gazing down on the gauges. The engine light flashed while the thermometer danced in the red.

"We shouldn't have pushed it after we saw the helicopter," said Cohen, the RV's speed now dropped to fifty-five.

"It was definitely checking us out," said Savas. "I'm glad there's a little more traffic out here than Barric predicted."

"At least he got _something_ right," said York. "I think his opinion of his mechanical skill is a little inflated. This thing's held together with wire and string!" Her lips pursed. "We're going to have to pull over, check the engine coolant, radiator. We can't have the damn thing blow on us. We'll be stuck."

"Pull over?" said Cohen.

"I think so. Do we want to risk losing the RV?"

Cohen looked at Savas. "What was it I said about plans?"

He ignored her. "Last sign said there's a stop a few miles down the road. We do it like a pit stop. Off road to a garage, have someone look at it, assuming anyone's there. Otherwise we do our best. Anyone a grease monkey? No? Wonderful."

"We don't have a choice, I'm afraid," said York. "We'll risk exposure, but nothing like the exposure we'd get broken down on the side of the road."

Several miles later, the dilapidated RV exited on a curved ramp and spiraled to a red light, gas stations and restaurants surrounding them. Savas pointed to a large station with a visible garage, and Cohen steered the camper to the lot on the light change. To their great surprise, they saw a crowd of people there.

"I don't get it," said Savas as Cohen stopped the vehicle in front of the empty garage. "No cars. The pumps are out. Look—a sign says _No Gas_. What's going on?"

"Phone!" said York. "Inside, through the window. A woman is talking on the phone."

"The line is for the phone?" asked Savas.

Cohen nodded. "Of course. The Bosworths said everything was down. Cells, landlines. Looks like this place has one of the few working lines around. And everybody knows about it."

A rap on the window startled Cohen. She spun the handle and rolled down the glass to stare at an older man in a greased jumpsuit.

"Overheating?"

Cohen smile. "Yes, how'd—"

"These old campers are awful. Hundred dollars says it's a coolant hose."

"Can you fix it?"

"Well, I'll have to take a look. But likely, ma'am. We got a lot of rubber that will patch you for a while until you can get it looked at properly."

York leaned over and whispered to Cohen. "Get her fixed. I'm going to that phone."

Savas turned to her. "What?"

"A working phone, John. I can reach NORAD. If I can, I _have_ to. Tell them I'm alive. Where we are. That we're coming. To send _help_."

"You'll be recognized."

"Possibly. I don't have my TV crew to doll me up, and I've lost some weight from this adventure. But maybe. I'll have to risk it."

"Jesus." He looked at Cohen. "We're way off plan. All right then, Ms. President. You're the Commander in Chief. But I'm going with you."

The pair left Cohen with the mechanic, the hood already up and his torso obscured within the engine. The line stretched outside the convenience store and around the station, stragglers converging from random directions to extend the line on a regular basis. Ignoring hostile looks, Savas pushed his way through the store doors and walked past the line to the register. York held up her hand and he let her approach the counter.

"Excuse me, sir," she said, her voice ringing with an authority and grasping the clerk's attention.

A young man with several days' worth of stubble walked over. "Sorry, ma'am," he began, "no service. We're out of everything."

"I need your phone. It's an emergency."

The clerk's face darkened. Grumblings came from the line. "Well, ma'am, lots of folk got need of that phone. It's the only one east of Colby that's workin'. We got a line."

"It's a matter of national security," said Savas.

The grumbling became much louder.

"Yeah, right!" laughed one.

"Back of the line, grandma!" someone shouted.

"My son's sick!" came a woman's voice.

"It's York! It's President York!"

The room fell silent. All eyes centered on her, the clerk squinting and leaning forward.

"I'll be damned," he said.

Whispers ran like a wind hitting a wall of trees. York turned to face them, the oversized coat from the Bosworth attic swallowing her like a steal from a thrift shop. Savas instinctively backed away, giving her the spotlight.

"I _am_ President Elaine York."

Savas let out a soft whistle and turned away from the crowd. He angled his body to York and whispered. "Might as well throw up a sign that says 'Bomb here.'"

York ignored him. "I am your elected leader. I'm here right now because there's been a military coup, one you've likely heard something about. I fled Washington, chased by the same people who bombed Kansas City." People murmured. "I'm going to Cheyenne Mountain, to the NORAD bunker to lead a resistance. But I'm not there yet. I need your help. I need that phone to reach them. They need to know I'm alive, that I'm on my way. I need them to send help." She walked up to the landline, a brunette holding the receiver staring at her open-mouthed. "The fate of the country might just depend on me making that phone call."

"I'm sorry, Chief Kruger, but I'll call you back." The woman hung up the phone and stepped back.

"Thank you," said York. She removed the receiver and dialed.

The mechanic slammed the hood down and wiped his hands on a towel.

"And that, pretty lady, is how you do it. It's a patch, jerry-rigged, but anything's better than the leaky hose you had. You'd lost most of your coolant oil. You were lucky you got this far."

"She's good to go?" asked Cohen, a growing wind tossing her brown hair across her face.

"Yep. I topped it off. You got more gas than you ought'a be carryin', so don't think you need anything else." The mechanic turned his head to look behind Cohen, distracted. "What the hell?"

York and Savas walked toward them, a giant crowd following behind. Cohen stared back and squinted into the wind.

"Oh, lovely."

The clerk raced up and grabbed the mechanic's thick arm.

"It's _York_ ," he said, giddy. " _President_ York!"

The mechanic nodded as the crowd came to a stop in front of him. He extended his hand.

"Mighty honored to meet you, sir. Uh, ma'am."

"You get us straightened out?"

Momentarily star-struck, he tried to recover. "Um, yes ma'am. Busted hose like I thought. You're all set."

York turned to the crowd. "All of you, I'm going to repeat what I said. Don't follow us. Don't tell anyone you've seen us. I mean it. We have killers chasing us. The same killers who murdered half a million people in Kansas City. People some of you knew. If they find us, they will kill us. If you follow or speak about us, it will make it that much easier for them to track us down." The crowd remained silent, stunned. "Whether you like it or not, you've just been drafted into a war. In wars, loose lips sink ships. Help me get to NORAD. Pretend you never saw me. Go back to the line, call your loved ones. Take care of your emergencies. I promise you, I will fight to get this country back, and to bring justice to those monsters who have violated every decency."

The crowd applauded. Savas turned away and sighed.

"Great. Let's just send up a flare to attract more attention."

York waved quickly and stepped into the RV. Savas and Cohen followed. The crowd inched forward, unconsciously attracted to the vehicle.

"Try not to run them over, okay Rebecca?" said York.

"You reached NORAD?"

"Yes," York replied as she buckled in behind the booth. Savas lingered at the rear window, gazing outside. "They know the key details—what happened, where we are, where we're headed and how. I didn't dare stay on longer than to get a promise they'd pull out all the stops to help us."

Cohen nodded and started the engine. "Readings look good. Let's try to meet them halfway." She pulled out and turned onto the road, heading for the on-ramp to I-70. "I have to say, that was something. _Uplifting_. To find so many people behind you, supporting you."

"Not everyone," said Savas, his brows furrowed as he returned to the front.

"Trouble?" asked York.

"Several characters left soon after you were revealed to the crowd. They slunk out the back. Didn't look like their roots were in Kansas. When you were in the middle of that nice speech, an SUV with tinted windows pulled up across the street."

Cohen checked the rearview. "It's behind us!"

Savas grasped the handle of the shotgun by his side. "We've got company."
54

# On the Scent

The Director of the Bilderberg Group lay back in a plush chair, his head indenting the black leather, eyes closed. His heavy jowls hung slack, his mottled skin resembling some snake's hide in the dim light. Flashes of light splashed across his dark features as an alert tone sounded on the computer in front of him. Slowly, struggling to summon the energies of motion, his eyes opened, the gray eyebrows twitching, and for several seconds he simply stared at the blinking light. Then he leaned forward and pressed a key.

"Director," he rasped.

Static hissed over the speakers, and a snowy image of a man with a chiseled jaw appeared on the screen.

"Fox team beta, sir. We've found her."

The Director raised a pair of eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose with a shaking hand. "What? _York?_ She _survived?_ Are you sure?"

"We have two confirmed sightings by assets on the ground and we pulled the surveillance video from a gas station near Colby, Kansas. That's about an hour from the Colorado border. There's no doubt."

"My God."

"It's worse, sir." The snowy reception garbled the man's words and face. "There was a working landline, one of the first restored to service. We intercepted transmissions over the local network from your monitoring stations. She's contacted NORAD. They know she's coming."

"Dammit!" The Director pounded his armrest, falling back into his seat and closing his eyes.

"We have a vehicle in pursuit and several more en route. It's four hours to Cheyenne Mountain. That's a lot of time to handle the problem, sir."

His eyes remained closed. "Call in all available assets. Pull aircraft off anything else. If we have a fighter plane left I want her blown off the highway."

"Ahead of you, sir. The front is decimated. NORAD controls most of the airspace and we can't launch anything without them knowing."

"There must be something. We need something in the air."

"We're working on it. We might can commandeer local craft. It's our only option."

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. "Do whatever you have to do. Run her off the road. Firebomb her car. _Anything_. She can't be allowed to reach the mountain. Terminate with extreme prejudice."

"Understood, sir. Will keep you informed."

The image clicked off and the Director sighed. He initiated another video call, and the Middle Eastern woman appeared on the screen.

"Director," she said, her hair full and uncombed behind her, a silk evening gown on her shoulders.

"Maryam, the news is bad, it seems—"

"A moment." She stood, carrying the camera with her, the figure of a powerfully built man naked in the bed. A door closed behind her, cutting off the bedroom. "Good morning."

"Morning for you. It hasn't quite arrived here. And there isn't much good to be had." She remained expressionless. "They've found York. She's alive and making a run for Colorado."

Her dark face turned to the side and she cursed in a language he couldn't understand. "Is there no way to kill that bitch?"

"We have assets in pursuit. She's exposed."

"Yet nothing is certain."

He nodded. "The real danger is her reaching NORAD, sealing herself in the bunker, and surviving what's coming. Unless we find a way to kill her now, or cut off NORAD completely, she could wage a war of ideas against us."

"What good will it do? There will be nothing left of the nation. She can summon an army of rocks and the radiation-poisoned."

He shook his head. "That's not the danger. It's Europe and Asia. If she can reach them, she could disrupt the world with that megaphone."

"If the assets fail, can we accelerate the program? Initiate it before she reaches the bunker?"

"No," he said firmly. "Zero must be out. It takes time."

"Then we'd better hope your men finish the job on the ground today, Director. I will brief the others."

She smiled coldly as the connection closed. The old man exhaled and once again crashed backward into his chair.

_Damn these women._
55

# Warthog

"There's a second one!" shouted Savas from the back of the vehicle.

The RV screamed as Cohen pushed it past seventy. She glanced down at the gauges.

"We're running hot again!"

"How bad?" shouted Savas, moving to the front of the camper.

"Just in the red. But she can't take much more of this."

York loaded shells in a pearl-handled, double-barreled shotgun from the Bosworth collection. "No choice, sister. Those two trucks aren't looking to parlay." She slammed the barrels shut with a snap.

"Absolutely not!" said Savas to York. "Put the gun away. If they make a move, you're going to stay out of sight. You're the target. Don't be crazy!"

"We're not going to let them make a move," she said. "We're going to move on them first."

"Elaine—"

York looked sideways down the window along the side of the RV. "Your husband always have this problem with authority?"

"Pretty much," said Cohen.

"You want to let me drive, Rebecca?"

"I'm the analyst. He's Rambo."

"Then it's settled," said York. "This rig won't auto-pilot. We need as many guns as we can. I'm shooting."

Savas sighed. "Perfect."

"Second one is closing. It's going to be soon. Since you're worried I'm too delicate for combat, you take the rear window and I'll cover our flank."

"Back window is jammed, remember?"

York cocked her head to one side. "What do you think the shotgun is for? Bosworth will understand."

Savas moved quickly to the back as York rolled down the window beside her. The roar of rushing air thundered into the RV. He kept to the side of the window to avoid being seen by the SUV tailing them. Crouched beside it, he signaled to York with his fingers, and mouthed, "Three, two, one..."

He sprang backward, aiming the gun, and turned his head. A deafening explosion roared through the vehicle, dust and debris clouding the air. Most of the blast carried outward, slamming into the onrushing SUV. The truck stuttered and swerved, the driver nearly losing control. Savas pumped the action.

"The other's overtaking us!" cried York.

He pulled the trigger again, aiming the twelve-gauge through the window as the pursuing vehicle closed the gap. The front windshield of the SUV shattered directly in front of the driver, a hole the size of a fist punctured in the glass. A cloud of red burst inside and coated the windows, the truck veering violently to the right. It flipped, rolling wildly, and was quickly lost to sight as it smashed to a stop.

Two blasts in short succession followed from the front of the RV. Savas heard a tire explode, followed by the careening form of the second SUV veering into the median and plowing into the concrete separator.

"Good shooting, agent Savas!" cried York triumphantly.

"Two more trucks!" cried Savas. He dove to the floor and yelled to York: "Down, down, down!"

York dropped underneath the booth table. Bullets exploded through the camper. Windows shattered, glass fragments raining on the ancient carpet and upholstery. Cohen cried out as the rearview mirror popped. An engine roared and as the blade beats of a helicopter boomed from the left Cohen shouted again. Instinctively, she swerved to an approaching off ramp, trying to slow the RV and control the exit.

"Sorry!" she screamed. "I thought it would ram us!"

"Forcing us off the highway," cried Savas, rushing to the back of the camper. "Got a little distance, but the SUVs are following. Helicopter is banking for another pass."

"Can you get a shot at it?" cried York.

"Maybe," he said, "but they've got automatic weapons. I won't last long enough to aim."

York turned and looked ahead through the front window. "Where are they herding us?"

Cohen sounded defeated. "Local road. Two-lane. Nothing but farms and fields."

"Take the on-ramp?" called Savas. "Quickly!"

Cohen turned sharply right onto the two-lane road. "Can't! Black SUV at the bottom of it waiting!" She accelerated, the lumbering vehicle rocking back and forth.

"Our bird is back," said York, grimacing. "What the hell is it doing?"

The craft sped in front of them, passing overhead and down the road for some distance. It turned and banked sharply, half a circle until it had aligned itself with the road again.

"Oh, shit," said York. The helicopter dropped altitude and hovered just a few feet over the road. "John, those SUVs still behind?"

"Closing the gap. It's going be a shooting gallery in a few seconds!"

"What do I do?" cried Cohen, the bulk of the helicopter approaching quickly.

"Side road!" shouted York. "There!"

Cohen swerved. Dust clouded the air behind her as the RV skidded on the dirt and pebble road. She fought the wheel and centered the vehicle, catching her breath as the uneven surface flung them up and down.

"SUVs following!" cried Savas from behind. He hung on like some trapeze artist to the bunk beds as the vehicle lurched side to side.

"That house," said York, top of the hill. "If we can make it we can go to ground there. Fight them off."

"It's too far," whispered Cohen. "We're too slow on this road!"

"Hush, child! Don't think! Do!" York stepped up and strapped herself in beside Cohen. "Gun it! Make for the driveway. Ram the gate!"

The sounds of the helicopter had returned, higher but still in pursuit.

"They're almost on us," yelled Savas. A shotgun blast sounded from the back. It elicited return machine gun fire, strafing the top level of the camper.

York pointed forward. "Rebecca, look out—"

The camper pitched forward. Savas was thrown toward the front, his form flying through the corridor and slamming into the back of the passenger-side seat. The RV shuddered, the nose diving down, the windshield darkening and shattering like a spider web. They reeled sideways and the camper fell on its side, sliding to a rending stop in a fog of dust and raining pebbles.

"John!" cried Cohen as she fought with her seatbelt. She crawled along the left wall of the camper, coughing in the thick dust. He lay unmoving, blood covering his face. A strong reek of gasoline filled the air.

York called, "We've got to get out! The front glass—it's peeled half back. Help me out!"

Torn between the unconscious Savas and York, Cohen paused, paralyzed. She turned to the front. York was suspended sideways above her in the passenger seat, the belt the only thing keeping her from tumbling down. Cohen braced the president's form with her shoulder and wrapped her arms around her.

"Release the belt," she said.

The belt clicked and the full weight of York's body pushed Cohen downward. She cushioned the older woman's fall with a grunt. They turned and kicked violently the remaining sheet of shattered glass, peeling it further from the window.

Dirt continued to spill slowly into the camper, and they could see an abandoned, unplowed field in front of them. York grabbed her gun and turned to Cohen.

"Pull him out," she coughed, the fumes thick and pungent. "This thing could go up like a bomb any second. Those bastards are likely right outside by now. I'll do my best."

Cohen stared at her in disbelief but needed no prodding to turn back to Savas. The old woman groaned as she wedged herself out the empty window frame, the gun dragged behind her.

The air above brightened with a flash of orange, and a rending, ground-shaking explosion shook the RV. York squinted, adopting a bent crouch, the gun aimed as she pivoted to survey her surroundings. Off to her right, a fireball plunged from the sky and exploded a second time on impacting a neighboring field. A powerful engine rushed over her head, and the shadow of a muscular aircraft darkened the sun. The wreckage of the helicopter burned in front of her.

When the plane had passed, York turned to look behind the camper. The men were rushing back to the SUVs, planting themselves behind it for cover, aiming machine guns upward. They opened fire as the engine noise returned. York followed their aim. Swooping in over the field like some demonic crop duster, a plane rushed right toward them, heedless of their gunfire.

York gasped. The plane opened fire from the nose, a trail of light spewing from a hunting dragon. A deep grating sound battered her ears. The SUVs and men around it simply exploded.

Not from a bomb or missile, but from the impact of thousands of rounds of heavy ammunition. The bodies were blown apart in puffs of red, flesh and limbs spraying behind them. The vehicles similarly disintegrated, metal filleted off the chassis, the gas tanks igniting and torching the remainder.

The aircraft passed over the scene of destruction like a bird of prey, and banked once more, coming in low over the neighboring field with wheels visible. It was landing.

York lowered her shotgun and leaned against it, sweat and grime smearing her clothes. "About damn time."
56

# Hotel de Bilderberg

Three shadows crouched in the thick foliage at the forest's edge, a manicured expanse of green erupting before them and crashing into a white and gray chalet-style structure. Bright walls trimmed with dark balconies and rain gutters were offset by a purple-tinged shingled roof. Two prominent gables fought for attention along the front of the structure, one centered over the window-studded ground floor entrance, large words in cursive script decorating its center: _Hotel de Bilderberg_.

Lightfoote placed a hand on Houston's left shoulder. "And you're sure that's the last of the security?"

Houston nodded. "Key was taking out the central power line. We could have played peek-a-boo with those motion sensors and cameras all day and still been spotted. But they didn't wire it redundantly. So, _pop_ , find the main power line and cut it before it can branch out. Forest goes blind."

"I really need to hang out more with you two," said Lightfoote.

"We've seen a little more of this than we'd like," said Houston.

On Houston's right, Lopez scanned the grassy field in front of them through binoculars. "Any minute now they're going to notice the system's down. The security on the building is still doing fine, I'm sure."

"So we wait for them to come to us," said Houston.

"Then what?" asked Lightfoote.

"We'll see," said Lopez. "We'll either get a leg up or have to make a mad dash, and then all hope for surprise is gone. It'll be a first-person shooter at that point."

Houston took the binoculars from Lopez and made her own appraisal of the grounds. "Let's hope a leg up. And look, just in time." She offered Lightfoote the lens.

Lightfoote focused below. "Two redshirts."

"Redshirts?" asked Lopez.

Lightfoote looked over the binoculars at him. "Star Trek? Security guys that always beam down but don't beam up?" Lopez shook his head and shrugged. "Never mind." She turned her attention back to the approaching figures. "Two men. One's muscle. Well trained, fit, and he's packing. The other's not. He's clumsy. A technician I'd bet."

Lopez spoke to Houston. "Charges prepped?"

She nodded. "It's modified. More flash than bang."

"Assuming you got it right." He looked at Lightfoote. "She's our resident _untrained_ explosives operative."

Houston shoved him upright. "Not by choice. Now, let's get in position."

Each grabbed a bag from the ground. They moved quietly twenty yards to the right, hugging the forest edge and keeping the two guards in sight. As the men reached the woods, the three of them lowered to the ground behind a large bush and fallen log. The power line snaked into the forest in front of them.

The Bilderberg workers approached. A heavyset man kneeled before the main cable, shaking his head and gesturing to a frayed gap in the line. A short conversation followed, the features of the trim man clouding with concern. He nodded and reached into his pocket and retrieved a mobile phone.

"Now, Sara," whispered Lopez.

"Look away!" she hissed back.

They turned their faces and shut their eyes. A blinding flash and a sharp crack sent the two men falling to the ground, writhing and moaning.

The three figures in black pounced: leaping over the fallen tree, they fell on the prone figures like tigers. After a brief contest, the two Bilderberg agents lay incapacitated and unconscious, hog-tied and gagged with duct tape.

"Got his cell," said Houston, tossing a roll of tape onto a black bag beside her. "Any of you understand this?" She held the phone up.

Lightfoote shook her head. Lopez laughed. "This is our lucky day. Guess the unemployment rate is pushing people out of southern Europe." He took the phone from her. "It's Spanish."

Houston smiled. "I think what he was planning to write was _shut the outer security system down_. Power linkage, need to isolate systems. Sound believable?"

"Maybe," said Lopez. "Let's see how it works."

As Lopez texted, Lightfoote continued to search the men, pulling out IDs and weapons. She called up to Houston. "Cards are magnetized. Might get lucky with them inside." Houston nodded. Lightfoote held up a black gun. "Another pistol."

"Looks like a Walther," said Houston. "Standard issue police pistol in these parts. German made."

"Good," said Lightfoote removing a shoulder holster from the man and fitting it to herself. "Never know when you're going to need a good German pistol."

"And the ruse pays off," said Lopez, shaking his head. "They're dropping the system for five minutes. They're sending backup. Guess they're nervous."

Lightfoote stood and smiled. "A leg up."

"Maybe two," said Lopez. "Let's go."

They zipped up the backpacks and strapped them over their shoulders, leaping out of the woods and down the steep grass incline. Houston trailed behind, her leg slowing her pace. Pistols gleamed in their hands, eyes flashing between the ground and the door to the extended wing of the hotel to keep balance.

Lightfoote and Lopez reached the side of the building first, and the former priest reached into his black robes to remove a metallic canister, spraying black the lens of a camera mounted on the wall. Houston caught up with them, her face dripping with sweat. She placed her back along the wall, gun held to the side of her head, aimed up.

Lightfoote backed away from the hinges, hugging the wall as well. "Opens outward," she whispered. "I hear movement. They're coming."

At her last word, the door to the hotel swung toward her, and two men in suits exited. Each had a wired earpiece and showed a firearms bulge in their tailored jackets. They never got the opportunity to reach for them.

Lightfoote and Lopez caught them utterly flatfooted, a fury of disabling strikes bringing the pair down. The man beside Lightfoote had taken a heel to the back of his head and lay sprawled in front of her. Lopez followed a split second later, a powerful punch to the abdomen loudly cracking a rib, his target doubling over. He grabbed the man's head with his other hand and drove it into his knee. The body fell heavily to the ground.

Houston had already darted inside. "Clear!" she said, waving them in. "Francisco, get those bodies in here before we attract attention. Angel—"

"The transformer. On it." Lightfoote removed a gray block and set of wires from a bag and sprinted along the side of the hotel.

As Houston kept watch, Lopez dragged the unconscious bodies inside. The door opened to a small vestibule, revealing a second doorway. He tied up the pair and sealed their mouths with tape. His eyes darted sharply as the inner door clicked. Houston stood beside it, an ID card in her hand from one of the employees, the door open.

The building shook violently and a blast ruptured the air around them. The lights inside cut, the door making a loud and final metallic clip. The hallway behind it turned red from emergency lighting.

Houston tossed the ID to the floor. "Glad I tried this before Angel blew the thing."

Lightfoote bounded through the doorway panting. "Main transformer's down. Unless they've got a backup generator, power's dead for a good bit."

"Power looks out here," said Lopez, checking the mag on his sidearm, "but you can bet what's below has a redundant source. Question is how stable, and how long until it kicks in."

Houston moved down the hallway. "It won't matter if we don't find a way to get down there. This was the wired wing. The entrance is here, somewhere."

A sound of scraping metal screamed from the corridor, and they instinctively crouched and aimed. Two men bounded into the hallway space, weapons drawn, seeming to materialize out of the wall itself.

A storm of gunfire greeted them. The three invaders held the advantage, the Bilderberg guards shaken from the blast and orienting to the hallway. They were hit with multiple gunshots before they could even pinpoint the location of their attackers. One managed a wild shot into the ceiling. Their bodies fell heavily to the ground, groans escaping from one of them.

Three panthers bounded forward. One of their targets was clearly dead, two shots having struck him in the heart. Lightfoote crouched beside the other who moaned, crawling forward, a crimson soup pouring from his stomach and neck.

"He's bleeding out." She rose. "We move."

Blood splattered the corridor walls but for an opening in one panel, revealing a passageway down. A set of spiraling metallic stairs raced away from them into a red light that dimmed to a fog below. Shouts and the sounds of running feet echoed upward from the stone walls.

A door beside them opened, and the terrified countenance of a black woman stared at them. Houston pointed the barrel of her gun down the hallway. "Go," she said. The woman tore down the plush carpeting, dodging the bodies in front of her.

Lopez removed a pair of grenades. "Clear."

The two women stepped backward and away from the opening as he pulled the pins. He dropped them immediately along the sides of the stairwell, a two-foot buffer between the railing and the wall allowing them to fall without impediment nearly the entire depth of the shaft. He jumped away from the opening, placing his back against the wall.

Loud clanks followed, a cry of surprise from below, and two nearly simultaneous explosions vibrating the walls. Smoke poured up through the shaft and into the corridor. Screams of pain came with it.

"Leg up," said Lightfoote, stepping through the opening. She descended rapidly.
57

# Escort to the Mountains

"Bad time for a selfie?" mumbled Savas. Blood stained his face and clothes, gauze and tape in and around his swollen nose.

"You might say," said Cohen, her tone flat as she tossed aside several bloody tissues.

"Camper packs a hell of a right hook," he said.

He looked up to the crowd around him—Cohen, the president, and an Air Force pilot in heavy gear. An oak tree towered above him, the broad branches spreading over their heads like an umbrella. Behind them gleamed the hull of a powerful aircraft. Several hundred feet to his right, a foul smoke continued to poison the air from the flaming remains of the vehicles. A blue commercial helicopter thundered in from the west.

The Air Force pilot turned to face York. "We've got to get you out, ma'am."

"On that?" asked York.

"All we had," said the pilot. "Not much of a selection out there right now. They called us in from across the front. Mopping up any of Hastings forces that didn't surrender and survived the bombing. I was given your vehicle description and told to neutralize anything else."

"You sure as hell did that," said York.

He indicated the approaching helicopter. "That bird was the only thing near enough—my Hog's a single seater."

York nodded. "Too bad. Yours is the plane I want."

The pilot smiled. "Smart call. She's a fortress. But I'll be escorting you if that helps."

The noise from the helicopter became deafening as it touched down several hundred feet from their position.

"Can you get up?" Cohen asked Savas.

"Have to," he groaned, grasping the tree trunk and rising unsteadily to his feet. She helped steady him as he grabbed her shoulder. Savas nodded to the pilot. "Fire her up. I'm coming."

The pilot instead escorted York directly to the helicopter. Savas and Cohen passed the huge airplane, the rugged exterior impressing upon them a lethal practicality. The hull and cockpit were heavily armored with thick plates of metal. Two hulking engines were mounted just in front of the tail, disproportionate to the body. The wings themselves were unusually thick and extended, housing underneath five or six missiles. Several slots were empty, the pilot likely having launched some of his arsenal already. An enormous Gatling gun was embedded in the nose of the plane.

"What the hell is this thing?" said Savas.

York climbed into the helicopter. The pilot turned back toward Savas, following his gaze to the plane. "A-10 Warthog. Hell of a fighting machine."

"That's a big gun."

He smiled. "Yes, sir. Made confetti out of your friends over there."

Savas looked slowly toward the skeletal forms of the SUVs. "Damn," he said, grabbing his neck. "I'm all kinds of beat up."

"Let's get you in the air, sir." With the pilot's help, Cohen eased Savas into the helicopter and he took a seat beside York. They buckled in, the A-10 pilot slamming the door shut and waving. He turned to jog back to his plane.

York spoke to the FBI agents. "Some interesting news from the pilot while John was down. We have assets in the Netherlands."

"They reached you?" asked Cohen.

"Not me, NORAD. Same folks as called in our escort. Seems your hacker busted into their system and demanded to speak to the brass."

"Angel. Then they're okay?" asked Savas roughly.

"They were, but all bets are off now. They tracked Bilderberg down. Called in my directive to back them. Military and some remaining CIA support got them on the ground in Europe, flew them past Hastings. Now NORAD's lost contact. But they were headed to the hotel."

"Things move fast," said Cohen. "I hope they're right, and they can do something."

"We could use some victories right now," agreed York.

"Zhanna Mouradian, your pilot." A woman's voice came from the cockpit, her helmeted face briefly looking back into the cabin. "US Geological Survey, actually." She turned back to the controls and began to lift the craft off the ground. "Nothing to do with the pterodactyl over there. Called me in for my National Guard service. Proud to be carrying you, Ms. President."

"Just get me to the mountain," said York. "This bird can make it?"

"Yes, ma'am. We got about two hundred miles to travel and we're fully fueled. No problem."

York smirked. "Don't be so sure. There's been nothing but problems on this ride. Combat, nuclear weapons for God's sake. And firing shotguns out of an RV like it was some damned Old West wagon chase. Take _nothing_ for granted. Some nasty folks want us dead."

The ground receded behind them and the helicopter banked sharply west. The roar of the A-10 rumbled around them as the airplane managed a takeoff from the empty fields behind. They watched the armored bird of prey gain altitude and turn in their direction.

"Well, ma'am, we've got the flying Terminator behind us, if it counts for anything."

The helicopter continued to climb rapidly. As the ground receded, the trio squinted into the bright light of the setting sun ahead of them. In the distance, the horizon blurred, a smear rising from the ground. Peaks formed at the top of the blur, some dusted with a faint white cap.

The Rocky Mountains.
58

# Storming the Fortress

Weapons at the ready, they rushed down the spiral staircase, the smoke thickening as they descended. Fires flickered from where the blasts had ignited materials below. As they neared the bottom, Lightfoote stopped and held a hand up to stop Lopez and Houston.

"Ladder's disengaged."

The stairs stopped abruptly, exposing a ten-foot drop to the floor below. A ladder lay among the still forms of several bodies, its latch to the stairwell damaged by the explosions. A flashing red light from an alarm system strobed the walls around them.

"Watch the hallway."

Lightfoote holstered her pistol and turned her back to the passage. Bending and placing her hands near her feet, she grasped the edge of the last stair and swung down. Her hands anchored her to the stairwell for one swing before she let go to land a foot beyond one of the bodies on the ground. She drew her weapon and turned to the hallway, still crouched.

"Next!"

Lopez followed, his descent less acrobatic, his landing far heavier. While Lightfoote kept watch, he reached up and helped Houston down, softening the landing of her weak leg. Lightfoote moved toward a small booth. The window glass had been blown inward, a bloodied figure inside slumped over a security system. She reached in through the narrow doorway and pulled him off the chair, the corpse falling against the back wall.

The shattered remains of a panel of five monitors coated a long desk, only one still operating. It showed multiple camera views of the underground bunker. Lightfoote sat in the chair and put her pistol on the table surface, pulling a keyboard up from under the counter. Her hands flew over the keys, opening command line prompts, navigating her way through the system. A map of the structure's below-ground levels appeared, and Lightfoote had the video cameras zoom in on each room in succession.

"Only two floors," she said as Lopez and Houston looked on. "Look at this. It's like one giant server farm. Especially the second floor. Hundreds of computers stacked to the damn ceiling. The whole floor below is nothing but computers and this one room at the far end."

A plush office centered on the screen, three figures within it. A smaller shape moved arthritically but with authority. Beside him, two hulking men with wide stances stood at attention, one holding a weapon. The old man spoke on a telephone.

"If this were a video game," said Lightfoote, "he's the Big Boss."

Houston scoffed. "Camera's labeled _Director_."

"Other guards?" asked Lopez.

"Not finding any," said Lightfoote, racing through the feeds from different rooms. She paused on the stream from a large room, the space packed with office cubicles.

"Who are these guys?" asked Houston.

"Don't know," she said. "Room's right down the hall, though. We'll check it out." She squinted at the screen. "What are they doing?"

"Looks like they're hiding under their desks," said Lopez. "I don't think we'll need to worry about them."

"You were right about the security," said Houston as Lightfoote continued to roll through camera views of different rooms. "I don't think they had more than ten guards."

"For the seat of global power, this place is a little disappointing," said Lopez.

Lightfoote rose and grabbed her gun. "I guess it's white collar crime. Push the banks, pull the politicians. Throw money around. All the dirty stuff happened outside these walls."

"Not anymore," said Houston. "Time to visit _The Director_."

Lightfoote nodded. "The map shows a stairwell in the middle of the hallway. Let's sweep this floor and make sure there are no surprises, then down."

"We should hurry," said Lopez. "Didn't see any other exits on the map, but the longer we wait, the longer they can plan for us below."

"Or bring in reinforcements," said Houston.

The three stepped back into the corridor. They formed a staggered line, spaced apart and giving room for each to react and maneuver. Lightfoote ran point, swinging into rooms in succession, verifying they were empty. Lopez took the middle, prepared to back Lightfoote if confronted by a hostile. He carried a pistol in his right hand, and with his left continued to spray the cameras along the way, cutting off any surveillance the Director might have from below. Houston brought up the rear, spending half her time pivoting to defend against an attack from behind.

The largest room on the floor waited at the end of the corridor. A sheet of glass took the place of a wall from waist high, revealing workers inside. As the camera had shown, they cowered in a packed office space littered with cubicles and desktop computers. Whiteboards full of scribbled equations lined the walls inside.

"What the hell is this place?" asked Houston from the hallway. "Some economics crisis center?"

The workers would not have appeared out of place in a Silicon Valley programming company or a mathematics department at an Ivy League school. Behind their cubicles, many flinched as Lightfoote entered.

"Who's in charge?" she barked, her weapon aimed slightly over their heads. Lopez stood behind her to increase the show of force as Houston continued to watch the hallway. "No one?" She fired a shot into the ceiling. People screamed.

"Gelieve, ons niet doden! Wij zijn slechts werknemers hier!" cried a man on her right.

"English! Who's in charge?"

"The Director!" came his accented voice. "The Director is in charge!"

She leveled her gaze at him. "And in this room?"

The man swallowed. "Ah, I am."

"What do you do here? Tell me now or I'll fucking end you!" She aimed her weapon at him.

The man began a high-pitched info download. "We run models! Economic models, world politics, national power and resources for the Director! We predict the nations, world economy!"

"Stop!" cried Lightfoote. "You run simulations on the servers? Models for Bilderberg?" He nodded. Lightfoote turned her head to Lopez and Houston. "This is it. These are the fucking Nash equations incarnate."

Lopez shook his head. "You mean the world's being run by a bunch of nerds crunching numbers?"

Houston laughed softly. "Plus the money and mercenaries."

Lightfoote turned back to the room. "Access codes, to all your systems."

"We can't give those—"

Lightfoote's pistol blasted an empty terminal beside the man.

"Godverdomme!" He screamed, his khaki slacks darkening around his crotch.

"I'm not asking. Last chance."

He grabbed a sheet of paper and scrawled madly on it. As he wrote Lightfoote walked up to him, keeping her gaze across the rest of the room, coming to a stop with her gun inches from his head. "Show me."

"Show you?"

"I see the codes. Log in. Show me what I'm getting. They better not fail."

The man sat in front of a monitor and moused the screen saver away. He opened a series of windows, entering in usernames and passwords for each.

"The first is the modeling system, _ja?_ I have root access, I can access all inputs and results, all weights and fundamentals."

"The others?"

He swallowed, opening a window. "Bank access. National intelligence systems. Ah, other things." Sweat dripped from his face.

Lightfoote stared at the screen, her eyes wide. "Is there a terminal that gives me access below?"

"Yes, at the control desk for the farm."

"The backup power—how long will it last?"

The man looked like he wanted to cry. "I don't know. This has never happened."

Houston cried from the hallway. "Let's move, Angel. Seal them inside. I've rigged a little deterrent."

"One more thing," she called back to Houston. Lightfoote went to the main power strips, following several cables to sockets in the walls. She spoke over her shoulder to Lopez, "Watch them." Placing her gun on the ground, she removed a sharp knife from her belt. One by one, she removed the plugs and beheaded them, cutting off the pronged ends. A minute later all the monitors in the room were dark, the computers without power. She tossed the plugs out in the hallway.

"Your mobile devices. I want to see each of you bring me one. And I don't want to find out that even one was left out." She placed an empty box on a table and turned to the man in front of her. "Explain it to them."

He did. Eagerly, with terrified expressions, the workers brought smartphones and tablets and dropped them into the box. After the last, Lopez carried it into the hallway.

"We're going to go down this stairway, but I wouldn't recommend trying to follow us or go get help. Sara?"

Houston banged on the glass and the heads of those inside darted toward the window. Her muffled voice spoke from the hallway. "This is a _detonator_. It's tied to a block of explosives right there," she indicated, pointing behind the wall. "When we close the door, don't open it! It will trigger the bomb. _Boom._ " She paused for effect. "You'll all go home to mother in a bag."

"Now, under your desks! And stay there!"

The figures didn't need to be told twice. They scrambled to move chairs and fit themselves within the cubicles. Lightfoote closed the door and examined the wires Houston had rigged. The detonator didn't connect to anything.

"I thought so."

Houston raised an eyebrow. "You didn't think I'd risk sealing off our only exit?"

"And we might need the explosives below," said Lopez opening the door to the stairwell. "Here we go."
59

# Decapitation Strike

The stairs opened to a dark room punctuated by thousands of blinking lights and a heavy hum. Seeing the server farm on the cameras was one thing, but standing in the midst of it like Theseus in the labyrinth plunged them into an electronic sea. The individual servers, their fans and hard drives, the electrical coils and transformers used in power supplies and motherboards, even the vibrations of the metal chassis, multiplied by thousands of units created a strong, constant wind modulated by a droning heartbeat.

A clear corridor through the server racks led straight ahead and Lightfoote followed the path toward the center of the room. They passed numerous rows fanning sideways, the passageways lined with rack after rack of processors, resembling a cybernetic public library. Overhead, air conditioning vents blasted air into the frigid space, as if the units funneled the wintery chill outside directly into the building.

The canyons of computer racks stopped abruptly and they stepped into an open space. A large table with numerous monitors greeted them. Uneaten food and coffee mugs sat perched at the sides, one still steaming.

"Looks like the techies made for the hills," said Houston.

Lopez scanned around them and up to the ceiling, moving quickly to spray-paint a camera above them. "This place is an electricity black hole. They have to have other generators somewhere."

"I'm going into their system. Keep an eye out." Lightfoote sat in front of the keyboard. She placed the paper with the scrawled codes on her left and began to type furiously.

Lopez and Houston kept vigil, back-to-back with weapons out. In the white noise and hum, they began to lose their sense of time and space. Each found themselves anchoring their position on the other, the table beside them, and on the repetitive clacking of the keys.

"This is amazing," called out Lightfoote. "They have direct links to the major world financial centers, biggest banks, trading floors, the Federal Reserve. I mean superuser type privileges, complete access and control. Right here I could change money flow across continents, manipulate stocks and trading. It's all automated, the Nash equations steering everything to preset ends, but I could also go in manual, too."

"Chase Bank, account 5748395033. I'd like to be a billionaire please," said Houston, her eyes on the passageways in front of her.

Lopez mirrored her scanning. "Darling, don't you remember, Uncle Sam froze all your accounts last year?"

"Those bastards."

"Listen!" said Lightfoote. "It's not just the banks and exchanges. That neckbeard was right. They have access and control of intelligence, even _military_ systems. It's a click away—Homeland Security, DOD, CIA. Records, accounts, agents in the field." The clacking continued. "Oh my God." She pushed the chair back from the table.

Houston turned toward her, lowering her sidearm. "What, Angel?"

"Holy shit. They're plugged into the fucking nuclear arsenal. NORAD, submarines, satellites. They have the president's _access codes_ , complete targeting control. They could launch a nuclear war against anyone they wanted."

"That's about as bad as it gets," said Lopez.

"Actually, it isn't," said Lightfoote, back at the keyboard and squinting at the screen. "Because if I'm understanding this readout, they _are_ launching a nuclear war. Right now."

"What?" said Houston, her face incredulous.

Lightfoote continued to type. "There's access to multiple silos in the US, upload of target coordinates. Some kind of timer waiting for a signal."

"What signal?"

Lightfoote shook her head. "I don't know. It's not clear. Waiting for some kind of communication inbound."

"Trigger what, exactly?" asked Lopez, leaning toward the screen, his face grim.

A list of names and numbers scrolled before them. "Armageddon," said Lightfoote. "New York, Washington, Chicago, LA, Houston, Philly." The list continued to scroll. " _Jesus,_ it must be twenty or thirty sites. Key population centers, government, military targets, oil, gas, mineral deposits. It's a crippling strike. From within. With our _own_ missiles. USA cluster _fucked_. Gone."

"For God's sake, why?" asked Lopez.

Lightfoote shook her head. "I don't know. Only, look. Something here in the modeling programs. See? Two networks of lines in this global map. The gray web looks like what we calculated in the hacker bunker—Bilderberg at the center, nodes at major centers of power. But look—here in color, like some new world order, the web is broken. The New York node is gone. _Nothing_ connects to the US. The other nodes re-balance with different weights and connections."

"It's like they're cutting off the United States," said Houston. "Putting it in a coma."

"Which is exactly what you'd expect to happen if there were a nuclear decapitation strike," said Lightfoote.

Lopez looked around. "We don't have much time. We've got to get to the office and capture the Director, whoever he is."

"Agreed," said Houston. "We've given him too much time, already. And maybe he knows how to stop this. Come on!"

"No!" said Lightfoote glaring up at the pair. "You two go. This is too close. Once a signal is sent, whatever it is, there isn't much time to stop it. I've got to see what I can do here while I still have access. Before they lock me out or this server farm fails."

"Or before someone comes up and shoots you in the back of the head," said Houston.

"You think you can stop it?" asked Lopez.

"I don't know!" said Lightfoote.

Houston gestured around them. "You'll be blind here, Angel. Vulnerable."

"Gotta risk it," she said turning back to the screen, her fingers working the keyboard. "It really looks like these maniacs are serious."

Lopez stared at Houston, who reluctantly nodded. "If you think you've got a chance to interfere with an attack, do it," he said. "Sara and I will take care of the Director."

Lightfoote shot them a quick glance. "Be careful! I don't want to save the damn world again if you two aren't going to be in it."
60

# Charlie Foxtrot

"We've lost twenty-three silos!" came a voice from the back of the Command Center.

Admiral Myers' thick hair danced in disarray, the gray like an explosion from a geyser. To exacerbate the chaos, he repeatedly grabbed chunks and yanked them mercilessly, glaring down at the terminals in front of him. "I can't believe this is happening. Morris—anything on the subs?"

Another voice called out from behind him. "Negative, sir. All the boats are quiet."

"Any targeting info?"

"No, sir. Not yet. We're getting the data now, but so far, just the silo readings. And things are definitely powering up."

"Sir, we've got a live stream from Montana."

"Put it up."

Myers glanced up to the giant monitors in the front of the Command Center. A grainy video appeared on one of them, the image of two men in a small room furiously working the control panels. Some panels had been torn out, wires dangling.

"These boys trying to sabotage the thing?" asked Myers.

A man below him at the desk looked up. "Believe so, Admiral."

Deputy Commander Duval walked into the Command Center trailed by three others. He headed straight for Myers.

"Any pattern?" he asked the Admiral.

"Nothing. Seems random. Silos here, silos there. Most of the arsenal is still under our control. These others—Christ Almighty. _Charlie Foxtrot_."

Behind Duval were York, Savas, and Cohen. Filthy, clothes soiled and torn, scrapes and bruises covered their exposed arms and faces. Savas was the worst, a shattered nose red and swollen, dried blood caked around the nostrils, the entire middle of his face a violet patch. Myers turned to the trio and shook his head.

"You three look as bad as we feel. Sorry to welcome you here under these circumstances, Ms. President, but I'm glad you made it." He saluted.

York saluted back. "Duval tried to brief us on the way up. You've lost contact with several nuclear missile silos, I understand?"

"Not exactly," said Myers. "See there? We've still got video feeds and communications with the operators. But a lot of good it's doing us. The missiles are severed from their control. No presidential orders. No football bag with codes. No two-man rule. Someone else is running this show. The damn things are going into a pre-launch state, signals from the silos indicating they've been prepped and target coordinates uploaded."

"Impossible," whispered York, staring at the frantic efforts of the men on the screen.

"God knows I wish it were. It's spread all over our Minutemen locations, across multiple states simultaneously. Seemingly random except in each case the silos are also sealed off from the rest of the facility. We can't get anyone near, and we don't have the personnel to go after each one on the outside. Although we're putting it in motion."

"Hackers?" asked York.

"These systems are dinosaurs, Ms. President. Hell, they run off nine and a quarter inch disks. They're not even networked." He shook his head. "No, this has got to be far older."

Cohen whispered, "Bilderberg."

Myers and York turned to her, but a loud voice from in front interrupted.

"We've got coordinates on ten missiles! Going to the monitors."

Numbers rolled across the screen along with associated map names. Gasps vented across the Command Center.

"All the targets are internal," said York.

"All targets identified!" came the voice. The numbers and names continued to pass by on the screen.

"NORAD?" asked Myers as a map of the nation appeared, red circles indicating the missile targets.

The man at the station in front of him spoke. "No, sir. Doesn't seem so."

He shook his head. "I don't understand. If it's Bilderberg, why not us? We're the enemy, not the rest of the nation!"

Cohen spoke. "NORAD's a very hard target. Too buried. Too ready. The other targets are soft."

York turned to her. "It's _madness_. Why? And how?"

"I don't know how," said Cohen. She looked at Myers. "You said this wasn't hackers, it had to be something old. Probably something long in the planning and maintained. Think about what Bilderberg is, what they've been doing for decades: pulling all the strings at every level. Why would they leave control of the most powerful weapons on earth out of the equation?"

"And the why?" asked York. "This isn't Hastings trying to take me out. This is the end of the nation!"

"We need to reach Angel," said Cohen. "They're at Bilderberg. They might have found something out!"

"We've been trying to contact them for days," said Myers. "Nothing. Only static since they touched down." He turned back to the screen, staring at the soldiers in the silo. "Besides, it's not gonna matter much _why_ if we don't find a way to stop it soon."
61

# L-Pill

The Director screamed on the phone, his bodyguards flinching and tense, the air in the room stale and claustrophobic. He gestured to a computer screen in front of him, the emergency lights bathing the lush office in flashing bursts of red.

"There is no choice!" he screamed. "We're completely compromised, main power cut, security neutralized. Our computer system is infiltrated. I don't know how! But I'm locked out. They have access to everything. They could shut the entire program down!" A voice shouted indistinctly from the speaker. "Correct. We need to accelerate the launches. We need to amputate this node and transfer control to another. Yes, long term. Don't you understand? We're completely blown. Bilderberg is finished!"

One of the guards leaned toward the Director. "Sir, we've lost another camera." His gun was out, and he assumed a crouched position behind the desk. The other guard mirrored him.

"I've got invaders approaching as we speak, Alpha. We don't have time to argue. Yes, I _know_ you and Zero are not out! So we spare the New York node, at least for now. Damn the simulations! We don't have time to check the repercussions." More shouts from the speaker. "And we don't have time to confirm or debate. If we don't launch now, we could lose the opportunity forever!"

The Director glanced at his screen. The monitor was tiled with squares. All of them were black but one, a camera looking toward the server farm. Two dark shapes sprinted toward the lens, one reaching a hand toward it. The last video feed went black.

"Damn!" He pulled out an ancient looking revolver. "They're standing outside my office door. This is it, Alpha. Transfer control to Maryam. Abort the New York warhead. Then launch the rest."

The guards aimed toward the door as the Director placed the receiver down on the phone. He checked the bullets in his revolver.

"We don't know their numbers, but if—"

His voice was swamped by a thundering roar, the door blasting inwards, debris and dust slamming the three men backward and against the wall.

"Shit!" said Houston as the she turned toward the Director's office. The door was gone. Along with it a portion of the wall, an enormous dust-choked hole opening its maw toward them like a hungry beast. "I never get the damn yield right. We need him alive!"

The pair jogged forward cautiously, weapons raised in front of them. Darting into the wrecked room, they approached the three bodies behind the desk. It was as they had seen in the video feeds—the old man and two guards. Now coated in dust and pieces of rubble, their weapons flung against the wall and out of reach. The guards opened their eyes.

"Barrel on each of you!" yelled Houston. "Don't even—"

The men leapt at them, one throwing a large wooden plank at Lopez, forcing the former priest to deflect it, and preventing him from firing. Houston pulled the trigger twice as her target crashed into her and sent her sprawling. Dust kicked up in the scuffle. But her shots had flown true, and the assailant was badly wounded. The wind knocked out of her, she managed to pull herself to a crouch, gasping for air and steadying her aim as the guard in front of her rose clumsily. Her third shot struck him in the forehead, the body hanging in the air, paralyzed, then dropping like a rag doll.

Lopez had tried to reorient after deflecting the projectile, but he didn't have time to aim and the shot went wide. The guard slammed into him and they toppled backward. Lopez rolled with the motion, drawing his knees to his chest and propelling the attacker over his head and behind. The man's momentum did most of the work, hurling him against the wall, before crashing to the ground.

Lopez flipped to his feet and spun around, a fire in his eyes, his feet planted in a fighting stance. Disoriented, the man braced himself with one hand against the wall, and rose as well, turning with his fists raised to engage.

He never threw a punch.

Lopez darted forward, closing the distance with a step, nearly inside the reach of the guard. The first impact came from his knee into the man's groin. The guard's cry was stifled by the second blow, a double strike from each hand to the side of the head as Lopez swung his arms like a pair of short fighting sticks. The impacts were titanic. The man's jaw cracked loudly. He dropped to the floor unconscious.

"Leave the weapon!" cried Houston.

Lopez spun around. She pointed her gleaming Browning at the Director. The old man's arm was reaching up the desk to his handgun. Lopez walked toward him, bent and retrieved his own weapon, and took the revolver as well.

"What have you people done?" moaned the old man, silt crusting his lips and face, like macabre makeup for the dead.

Houston righted a fallen chair and sat across from him, careful to remain out of reach. Lopez trained his weapon on the Director.

"The question is what have _you_ done, you crazy fuck. Nuclear war?"

"You understand nothing, nothing of what we have accomplished, what your dear president York had gone along with for years."

"She didn't have much of a choice, I'd bet. You people had your hands in every pot, on all the dirty laundry. Did you think you could try to control us all forever?" She brandished her weapon. "Now, we're going to have a little chat. About the nuclear silos and how to shut that shit down."

The man said nothing but brought his hand to his mouth.

"Sara! Stop him!" cried Lopez.

But it was too late. The heavy jowls bit down and a liquid flowed out from the sides. The Director swallowed as Houston rose, a grim smile on his face.

"Poison," said Lopez, a disgusted scowl on his face. "You son-of-a-bitch."

"It's a special blend," choked the Director, foam beginning to burble in his mouth. "High dose. Very...fast. Acid adjuvant."

He doubled over wheezing, the foam more prodigious. His body convulsing. Lopez and Houston watched in horror, powerless to stop the inevitable biochemistry. The convulsions continued for several minutes, increasing in severity, and the old man toppled over on his side beside Houston's feet, unmoving.

"Well, fuck." She turned to Lopez. "Now what?"
62

# Hazard Bonus

A voice called out over the loudspeaker system in the NORAD Command Center.

"Repeat, all silos restored to base control. Ten are non-operational due to damage. The remainder are responding to operator commands."

NORAD staff dashed around the center, data flying over the giant monitors, those at desks on the phone or working their computers furiously. The room stank of tension, men visibly sweating even in the air-conditioned environment.

Admiral Myers eased into a chair and hung his head. "Jesus Christ. Thank God for deliverance."

York frowned at the screens. "You still don't know why we're back in control?"

Myers shook his head. "No idea. And _yes_ , it worries me. But right now, with those birds shutting down, I'm going to take five minutes and count this as a win."

Cohen turned to York, her brown eyes sharp. "It's got to be Angel and the others. Too much a coincidence."

York nodded. "We need to reach them as soon as possible."

"We're on it," said Myers. "Still reaching out. Still nothing. They're either really busy—or dead, sorry to say." The old man closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair.

"Keep trying," said York. She put one hand on Savas and the other on Cohen and led them forward. "Meanwhile, you two come along. They've set out a little office for me down the hall, and we need to talk."

York closed the door to the office, the noise and frenetic chaos of the crisis center muted behind the glass and wood. Photos of a man and his family decorated a desk in the center. Savas and Cohen rested in two chairs facing inward, and York moved behind the desk and took a seat, staring across the cluttered surface at the FBI agents.

"This may or may not be over," she began. "We may or may not contact your friends overseas. This war with Hastings might be ending or gearing up to another round. Either way, I've got to plan for our next steps." The pair watched her expectantly. "We need an anchor on the East Coast. The West is ours, and that won't change unless there's a dramatic shift in the balance of power or those nukes finally do fly. But the East is still enemy territory." She leaned forward, holding their gaze. "I've lost all my advisors, some also my close personal friends. After what you and I have gone through, after I've seen you in action, I trust you. I value your advice. Since Kansas City, you've been my road advisory council."

Cohen fidgeted uncomfortably. "An honor, Ms. President."

"What kind of anchor?" asked Savas.

York leaned back in the chair. "We need a second base of operations until this war is over. Something secure that's right in Hasting's side of the court, under his nose. A place we can store troops and equipment, launch guerrilla attacks. One that can be defended against anything but the most powerful assault."

"The Manhattan bunker," said Cohen.

"Exactly."

"But we abandoned it," said Savas. "It could be in Hastings's hands now."

"It could," agreed York, "but it isn't. You might remember we left a contingent to try and hold the base? Not many. They couldn't have held it if Hastings had gone after the bunker seriously. But he didn't. He figured the real war was out on the plains—and he was right. But he's been handed devastating losses and left himself open for an attack from within. We're going to be flying several secret missions to bring the fighting numbers up at the bunker. Personnel to make it a base of operations." She smiled. "What I need is someone to run the place. People who have shown the strength and character, creativity and courage under fire it will take to make that base work. People I trust."

Savas and Cohen glanced at each other, and back at the president.

"Elaine, if you're thinking to suggest—" began Savas.

"I'm not suggesting. This is an Executive Order. From this point, until I deem it no longer necessary, I hereby appoint both of you as the civilian heads of the Manhattan bunker. You will have authority over everyone there, including armed forces personnel. You will be charged with getting the location back up to speed, readied for an extended war campaign if necessary. I will of course provide you with military advisers, logistics support and a contingent of Special Forces troops."

"Ms. President!" began Cohen.

"Never interrupt the Commander in Chief," said York. "I know you both are tired. God knows, I am. Half the staff out there are ready for early retirement after this. But it's _not_ over. I, this nation, needs our best people and everything they have."

"We aren't qualified to serve in a military capacity," protested Savas. "Whatever you think of us, we aren't ready to be put in charge of such an important operation and given the power over soldier's lives."

"Let me be the judge of who is ready for such duty," she said. "Your command there will violate a hundred regs and piss off a lot of people. But that will all go on the back-burner. Because right _now_ we have a _Last Days_ problem on our hands." She stood and put her hands on the desk. "You'll leave within the hour."

"What?" said Cohen.

"Several Special Forces teams will accompany you. They're prepping a transport and fighter escort for you at Peterson right now. This can't wait. We have Hastings on the ropes. You're our left hook."

York walked to the door and opened it. The flood of noise swept over them again—calls on the loudspeakers, machinery, the incessant drone of the fans pumping air into the underground buildings.

"Take a few minutes to gather your thoughts. Then meet me back in the Command Center. Myers will have people ready for you." The president turned and strode down the hallway without looking back.

Cohen frowned at York's retreating back. "Well, John, I can't wait for the hazard bonus."
63

# Zero

"Don't you two know how to knock?"

Lightfoote stood inside the cavernous hole blown in the wall, her gaze tracking the circumference of it. She carried a black backpack with her.

Lopez stood over a body on the floor, wrapping the man's arms and legs in duct-tape. Houston sat on the edge of a damaged desk, padding her neck and chin with a bloody cloth. A long abrasion ran down her chest.

"The Director's dead," said Lopez. "Suicide. We'll get nothing from him to help stop the attacks."

Lightfoote walked in through the rubble and stared down at the crumpled body of the old man. She dropped the bag on the floor and turned to look behind Lopez. A soft moaning came from the floor beside him.

"You roped that calf?" she asked. Lopez nodded. "Okay, well, the good news is I managed to fry their controls on the silos. Irony! I used some of Fawkes's leftover code on their systems, subroutines my immune packets hadn't completely erased. I modified a few and set them loose on their command and control code. They're not going to be using it again for some time."

Houston cocked her head to one side. "I didn't think missile silos were networked like other things."

"They aren't," said Lightfoote. "Irony number two. To keep control of them, Bilderberg had to link them. So, Uncle Sam at NORAD was out of the loop and could do nothing while Bilderberg pulled the strings. But their links, on modern servers, exposed them to hacking."

Lopez clapped her on the back. Houston smiled broadly. "Damn, girl, you _did_ just save the world again. Or maybe a hundred million lives."

"I think it was definitely a team effort," she said. "So, now, the bad news."

"I'm looking for the mission when we stop hearing that," said Lopez.

"Bilderberg—whatever this place is, or was—it's not what we thought. Not the whole beast, but just one part of it."

What do you mean?" asked Houston.

"Bilderberg has been the nexus for decades. Maybe centuries. Who knows? But whatever this organization is, it's a hydra. Many heads in different parts of the world."

"The nodes in the computer simulations?" asked Lopez.

She nodded. "The Nash equations were incredibly predictive. They've locked me out of the system now, totally wiped it, probably amputating this node. But not before I found connections to the other locations. They're subservient, taking orders from here, but active, focal points for local manipulations of markets and politics. Each had a different name, its own contact, its own infrastructure and power base. I was going to save all the data, transfer it, so we could chase them down and figure it out, but they trashed the server before I could."

"So, the New York cluster is real?" asked Houston.

"More than that," said Lightfoote. "It's the heart of it all."

"I thought this place was," said Lopez.

"Bilderberg was a _front_. It's so devious. For the simulations and string pulling, this served as a focal point. If anyone came looking—really came looking like us—they'd be drawn here. But it's _not_ the puppet master. Bilderberg's strings, and the strings of the other nodes, are all being pulled from New York. By _Zero_."

Lopez furrowed his brow. "Zero?"

Lightfoote shrugged. "These guys like drama. But that's all I have. A name. _A handle_. The records didn't spell anything else out. Just Zero."

"What do we do with that?" asked Houston.

"Well, there _is_ more," said Lightfoote. "More on the location, anyway. They set up the perfect facade to hide him. While the conspiracy theorists of the world had their eyes on Bilderberg, the real puppet master was hidden away, completely unsuspected, in a green, intellectual oasis in Manhattan. A place standing unimpeachable, working for the 'benefit of humanity,' while it served in the shadows as the beautiful mask to hide the hydra. Whoever Zero is, he's there, at a biomedical center called the Ramsey University."

"The what?" asked Houston.

"I didn't have much time to look it up. Little I got said it was founded by the Ramsey family in 1901 along with some other oligarchs. People thought it was a tax shelter with some 'give back to the world' guilt down payments for the tycoons. But it looks like the story was just social camouflage. The place was set up to hide something very different, much darker."

Lopez shook his head. "You mean Bilderberg _isn't_ the center of power? But this Ramsey University is? How?"

"I don't know," said Lightfoote. "But that's where this Zero is. A place no one would think to examine, with Nobel Prize winners, disease cures, a research hospital. And it's been the center of power for over one hundred years."

"The name Ramsey raises some red flags," said Houston.

"More conspiracy theories," said Lightfoote. "But yes. It's all starting to feel very eerie." She shook her head as if to clear her thoughts. "Back to the nukes for a minute. We need to contact NORAD, get them to move on the silos to prevent this from happening again. I'll walk them through it."

"You can do that?" asked Houston.

"Should be able to. Their control system was all spelled out in the connections here. It's not magic. I think we can wall them out forever."

Lopez turned to the receiver on the old-style landline. Dust slid down the sides of the plastic handle as he raised it to his ear. A dial tone spilled from the speaker. "Still works."

"Good," said Lightfoote, retrieving her laptop from the bag and laying it beside the phone. "One more piece of critical intel. Zero is _still_ in NYC. The missile launch was only to be triggered by his command. The silos were prepping and on standby, firing once he bugged out."

"Wait, are you serious?" asked Houston.

Lightfoote nodded, opening her computer. "Probably who Mr. Cyanide here was talking to before he offed himself. We've wounded them terribly, but we didn't get the queen bee. But maybe we can. Zero is leaving NYC within the next twelve hours."

"What can we do about it?" asked Lopez "We're here. I doubt anyone has any available assets in the area after all the chaos. No one will get there in time."

"We have to try," said Lightfoote. "Another reason to get NORAD on the line." She scrolled her fingers on the trackpad. "Here's the protocol York gave us for calling in." She picked up the receiver and entered a sequence of numbers, followed by several pauses and three more number sequences. "This takes forever if I remember. They filter and trace the hell out of the calls."

Finally, there was an audible click.

"Yes, this is Angel Lightfoote. I'm here at the Bilderberg hotel with Gabriel, Mary, and a lot of dead guys. I need to speak to Admiral Myers."
64

# HALO

"Agent Savas? Agent Cohen?"

A soldier peered into the back cabin, pulling back a makeshift privacy screen to see inside. Savas opened his eyes, rising on an elbow from the seat. Cohen slept unmoving in the chair beside him.

"I'm sorry to wake you, but there's an urgent call."

Savas shook his head. "Can barely breathe through this damn nose. Can't sleep."

The soldier motioned to him. "It's the president on the secure line."

A minute later both he and Cohen were huddled together in the chilly transport, Cohen yawning and still half asleep. Savas spoke to York on a video screen.

"Slow down, Elaine. One thing at a time. My team, they're alive, unharmed?"

York nodded. "They're worse for wear, but no major injuries."

"They really did it. The missile aborts, the silo shutdowns."

"Yes," said the president. "Lightfoote's fingerprints all over it, of course. But their team had to infiltrate the hotel underground. We don't have time, and I'm not clear on all the details, but it looks like Bilderberg was running some sort of science fiction population simulation, shape world events by using computer models."

"And this all had to do with this Nash figure? Fawkes's file was about some econ genius and his work?"

"Yes," said York. "Frankly, I'm skeptical until I've learned more. Sounds ridiculous. But they're sure. They're meeting with local CIA and US military representatives in the area now to lock the site down. But they saved our asses."

Savas bowed his head. He couldn't help but feel both relieved and proud. "Okay, so how does this relate to New York and this university?"

York sighed. "It's all moving so fast we can't hope to verify everything. So we're going on trust, John. Do you trust your people?"

"With my life. Looks like we all did."

"Well, what your people are saying is there is more to this than simply Bilderberg. Bilderberg was only a center of operations, but the organization is spread around the world. Most importantly, a key figure, maybe _the_ key figure, is right in front of your plane in New York."

"At the Ramsey University," said Cohen.

"Yes. Angel Lightfoote was sure of it. She begged us to get someone there, to stop him."

"Stop who?"

"All they had was an alias. _Zero_."

"Someone in New York at a biomedical institute running the damn world named Zero?" said Savas. "You know how this sounds?"

"Of course I do! So I ask again—do you trust your people? And do you trust us? Because there's more. We've done some of our own digging based on Angel's data. We think we know who this Zero is—Luc Osomer-Levitt, the president of the university."

"Wait, I've heard of him," said Cohen. "Big time pharmaceutical player. A scientist I think. Was embroiled in several financial controversies but nothing ever stuck."

"That's him," said York, static partially garbling her words. "But a little digging into government databases reveals some very interesting coincidences. Like invitations to the annual Bilderberg conference, to begin."

"Gets my attention," said Savas.

"How about the funneling of huge amounts of money from some of the most powerful families in the world to the university? Charitable donations on paper but the numbers don't add up. Finally, NSA data on communications between his corporate offices and seven of the Bilderberg nodes identified by Angel."

"That's no coincidence," said Cohen.

"Unlikely. Angel claimed she had information that Zero's on the move, bugging out of New York in a matter of hours. He might already be gone."

"Leaving from Ramsey?" asked Savas.

"Best intel we have."

Cohen nodded. "All right. Send in a strike force. Take him into custody."

" _You_ are the strike force," said York, her expression grim. "We don't have the skill set in the staff left in the Manhattan bunker."

"Us?" said Savas incredulously.

"Your special ops teams are perfect for the job. This could be the kill shot to Bilderberg. You both _have_ to be there." Her face stared unblinkingly at them through the screen. "We've uploaded what known schematics of the place are available—campus map, entrances and exits, buildings. But there's likely to be a hidden layer, like at the Bilderberg Hotel. There may be levels and structures buried in the bedrock we know nothing about."

"And we have no sense of how fortified they are. We could be walking into a shooting gallery," said Savas.

"Yes, you could."

He placed his hand on his bandaged face. "Okay, how do we get there? I didn't even think this through when we boarded the damn plane. Are the airports open? LGA is close."

"Negative. Hastings controls it. Or did. It's chaos on the ground still. Airport isn't operational as far as we can tell."

"Then what?" asked Savas, holding his arms in the air.

"Sergeant Williams, would you introduce yourself?" called out York loudly.

"Yes, ma'am," came an authoritative voice behind them. A tall black woman stepped toward the screen. "HALO specialist Aisha Williams."

"HALO?" asked Cohen.

"High Altitude Low Opening."

Savas looked at the video feed. "You aren't serious?"

Williams continued. "We'll jump about thirty-five miles out from the island, sir. At forty thousand feet and this airspeed, we'll need a good distance to land on target. Give it three to four minutes for the drop. But it keeps the aircraft out of SAM range and minimizes possible flak."

"In case Hastings is watching," added York over the speakers.

"Jump?" Cohen asked, her eyes widening.

"Three teams," said Williams. "You'll both have chaperones. They'll steer you with the groups until we touch down." Savas and Cohen simply stared at her. "We've only got an hour to the drop point, and we need to get you both on oh-two as soon as possible."

"Oxygen? Why?" asked Savas.

"Purge the nitrogen from your blood, sir. You can't just jump at forty-K. Pressure's too low. You'll get the bends."

Cohen turned an incredulous look to Savas. "Nitrogen bubbles in the blood," she said, swallowing.

"Hurts like hell, sir, and could kill you."

Savas stared at the soldier. "And assuming we survive this madness, where are you intending to put us down?"

"Central Park," said Williams. "Lots of open space there."

"Surrounded by skyscrapers," he said.

"We've done worse, sir," said Williams.

Savas stared toward the ceiling. "You've got to be kidding me."

York smiled on the screen. "Good hunting, all of you. Bring us back a trophy."
65

# Terminal Velocity

The jumpsuits were ungainly, awkward for the untrained bodies of Cohen and Savas. They breathed deeply from the oxygen tanks, a helmet fitted over their heads and a fighter pilot style mask to their mouths. In theory, the enriched gas was slowly pushing the nitrogen out of their bloodstreams. A second tank of oxygen would accompany them on the way down. Savas struggled to breathe regularly through his bandages.

"Remember," said Williams, momentarily repositioning her own mouthpiece and shouting over the din in the aircraft, "you're jumping at commercial airline cruising altitude. It's minus sixty out there or worse. You can't breathe the air. Stay with your chaperone. Keep repeating the thumbs-up sign if all is good. Stay calm. They'll guide you through the jump at each step. The chutes will deploy toward the end of the jump, controlled by your chaperone. We'll steer you to the target site."

A sturdy Special Forces soldier crouched behind each agent, checking their suits and tanks. They were strapped lightly to their charge. Both reacted to the coming leap into the sky as a routine day at the office and treated the FBI agents as just another package they had to deliver. Savas couldn't decide if that was comforting or alarming.

A red light began to flash above them, signaling the approaching jump point. Williams motioned for them to stand, and together with their chaperone they moved to the back of the troop transport, the bay doors opening and the loading ramp pointing downward.

The early morning light spilled brightly into the aircraft, a waterfall of sound churning from the wind turbulence around the opening. An abstract patchwork of boxes and lines passed below, different colored shapes separated by highways and intermittent urban clusters. A deep red ball rose over the horizon.

Williams waved her arm several times. "Go, go, go!"

One by one the soldiers stepped to the edge of the ramp and toppled over calmly, performing a short somersault before zipping from view behind and below the aircraft. At the line's end, the FBI agents were positioned at the edge, Cohen briefly turning her helmet back to look at Savas, her eyes and face obscured by the tinted wind guard. The soldier pushed her forward, and she dropped, racing away toward the other members of the parachute team.

Soldiers guided Savas to the edge. He looked down, the height deceptive, the seven and one-half miles between him and the ground not registering to a mind utterly unused to such vertical distances. He felt a pat on the shoulder and gave the thumbs up. A push drove him forward into an explosion of white noise. He was flying.

Or falling. The sensations were overwhelming. First the noise hit him. The churning air racing against his plummeting form roared like an engine, nearly blocking out his ability to think. The vibrations were powerful, the air beating against the fabric of his suit and helmet, the invisible medium hardening into something powerful and tangible, slapping strongly across his body. The rising sun blinded him, even through the tinted visor. He could barely stare forward toward their destination and was forced to look straight to the onrushing earth.

He hardly noticed the soldier strapped to him above, his senses numb. Another series of hard pats on the shoulder reminded him he hadn't signaled. He put out his hand and did the thumbs-up. He felt no nausea, no dizziness, the pummeling he took from the battering wind and sound overpowering all other sensations.

A line of skydivers approached ahead. He had lost all sense of time. The divers maintained a separated distance. Williams had said it would create a low radar profile. An obese shape trailed the others ahead of him. He realized it must be Cohen and her chaperone, and that he likely presented a similar image. Considering the enemies lurking below, he hoped they were indeed as invisible as the soldier predicted.

Down they were yanked by earth's pull, their velocity now constant, the force from the air they pushed against equal to the force of gravity. _Terminal velocity_ , thought Savas. Williams had said it would take only minutes to complete the jump, but it felt like they'd been falling for hours before he finally saw the jagged landscape of Manhattan. They plunged through a layer of clouds, momentarily blinding him, but he saw the chutes in front of him deploy. A second later, the soldier above him pulled the chord, and Savas was yanked upward harshly.

Their fall slowed dramatically, but the approaching skyscrapers only intensified the sense of plunging recklessly forward. The group of jumpers passed over the lower tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty a flattened speck below, the Freedom Tower reaching upward toward their feet. Ahead the white, snow-covered rectangle of Central Park loomed, the chutes angling steadily toward it. Adrenaline coursed through him as they approached midtown, their height appearing to put them on a collision course for many of the taller buildings surrounding the park. But they skirted over them, the penthouse balconies a short drop below, the barren trees of the park rushing up to greet them.

The soldier slapped his shoulder three times. The signal for landing. Savas looked down and set his legs, the trees inches below. They exploded over a wide space, descending rapidly over a field of bright white. His feet slammed roughly into to the snow-covered grasses of the Great Lawn.

They maintained their balance, and the chute collapsed neatly behind them. Savas removed his helmet and exhaled deeply, relieved to be on the ground and to see Cohen disengaging from her chute. While cold, the air tasted fresh compared to the bottled gas from the tank. He squirmed out of the jumpsuit and let it fall to the ground. The Special Forces soldiers were grouping together. Savas and his chaperone jogged up and joined them.

Williams pulled out a GPS device. "We have the coordinates of the target here. We'll make as direct a course as possible through the park and city to that location."

"Don't bother," said Savas, interrupting her. The eyes of the other soldiers turned to him in surprise. "No need for GPS. This is my city. Follow me."
66

# Roknegy

They stood at the bottom of a large hill, a twenty-foot arch with the university's name and logo engraved on the side. Towering metal rods barred the entrance, the gate locked in place. A gleaming set of turnstiles occupied the space on the right and left, refusing entrance without an activated ID card.

The young man stared intensely at Savas, his eyes nervously darting to the crowd of armed soldiers behind him. He licked his lips and grasped the security badge on his uniform.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't let you in the university unless you have an invitation. Now, we can try to call—"

"Let me repeat," said Savas. "This is a matter of _national security_."

"You have no ID, you're armed. I'm sorry, sir. Now, I'm going to call the police if you don't move on."

Savas laughed. "Seen much of the police these last few months?" The man said nothing. Savas motioned to the soldiers who stepped closer, their weapons aimed slightly over the head of the guard. "Now, look. We can do this easy," he growled, "or we can do it _real_ easy."

The security guard stared at the soldiers, his eyes wide.

"Richard, what the hell is going on here?" A tall black man with a thick Jamaican accent rounded the security booth and stared through the gate's bars at the assembled teams. "Who the hell are you?"

The young gate guard spoke, wiping sweat from his forehead. "They claim they're sent from the _president_. President York. They don't have _any_ clearance. No invite. _Nothing_. They have guns."

The older black man nodded. "Yes, son, I see those guns. Do you know what they do with those guns?" The young man swallowed. "Those are Special Forces. Look at those insignias. Rangers, Seals, Green Berets." He looked at Savas. "Why are you here?"

"A matter of national security. We have to see the president of this institution. Immediately."

The older guard nodded, a last look at the weapons removing all doubt. "Good enough for me." He punched in a code inside the booth and the mechanism for the large gate engaged, the two halves swinging back and in. "But you better hurry. Something strange is happening. All the docs running to the tunnels, following the president."

Savas turned to Cohen and the others. "He's rabbiting." The doors opened and the troops moved in. Savas turned back to the guards as he headed up the hill. "You made the right call. You have access to the security system?"

"I do."

"Shut it down. Shut every camera in this place down."

"Yes, sir," said the guard. He pointed up the hillside. "To Patron's Hall. Building at the top. Left stairs down to the tunnels."

Savas nodded and turned to sprint up the hill, catching up to Williams.

"Heard him, agent Savas, but slow it down. We're going to treat this as hostile territory. Move smart."

"We might not have much time!" he seethed.

"Better late than dead, sir. We can't do nothing if we're dead."

Cohen grabbed his arm and stared at him. Savas exhaled. The soldier was right. Given what Hastings and Bilderberg had at their disposal, a squad of mercenaries wouldn't be out of the picture. This invasion could end before it began.

They reached the hilltop, the Special Forces group moving cautiously, examining vulnerable angles and approaches. A six-story building from another era rose before them, a set of marble stairs leading to a set of glass doors. Around them, the campus was utterly deserted.

A different welcome greeted them in the foyer. The armed team of soldiers burst through the doors in tactical formation, weapons aimed forward, their posture aggressive. In front of them stood a buzzing crowd of older men and women, many in ill-fitting suits or lab coats, pacing the marbled room. At the sight of the soldiers, they fell backward, eyes wide and fearful, conversation extinguished.

"Where is the president?" asked Savas, stepping forward and acting as the group's spokesman. No one responded. "This is a matter of national security. Where is your president?"

A rotund man with a beard, resembling some baron in an Armani suit, stepped toward them authoritatively. "I'm Joac Ratkvetch, Full Professor and Head of Laboratory. We need some answers. Are you with the police?"

Savas motioned to Williams. "The stairway. See if it leads to the tunnels." Williams and several soldiers moved to their left and a doorway to a set of steps leading down.

"Tunnels," said Ratkvetch. "Yes, it most certainly does. Our president went that way, but seems to have lost his mind."

"Explain," said Savas.

"First tell me who you are? You wouldn't believe how we have been treated these last days. Herded, shouted at! Can you imagine—"

" _Explain,_ " growled Savas.

The professor startled. "Well, he came here with _armed men_. They've destroyed the president's office, all the records. They've stolen important samples. The noise brought us all here. We know something terrible is happening. He's heading to the river campus access."

"And so?"

"To escape the island! The war is coming here, no? You have to get us out!"

Several heads nodded as the university professors crowded around Savas.

"We're important people!" cried one.

"I'm Michelle MacKinnon, Nobel Prize winner."

"Korgie Barfmour," cried a botoxed blonde.

Two men stepped forward. "Seth Burley and John Harrison. We need protection!"

Pandemonium erupted.

A burst of automatic gunfire exploded. Marble chips and dust rained from the ceiling. Williams stood at the stairwell, her weapon smoking. Savas nodded to her.

"Stairwell's clear," she said.

Savas motioned to the rest. "We move. To the tunnels."

The tall blonde grabbed his collar. "And what about _us?"_

Savas swiped her hand away and continued to the door. "Write your damn memoirs or something. Stay here and panic. I don't give a damn. Stay out of our way or you're going to get a bullet."

She gasped, and fell back with the others. Williams led the way down the stairs, Savas and Cohen behind her, the remaining soldiers following closely.

"Little harsh, John?" asked Cohen with a raised eyebrow as they rounded a turn in the steps.

" _I have a Nobel Prize_. What a bunch of self-important blowhards."

The stairs ended, the passageway opening to a broad tunnel leading down into the bowels of the island.

"Why does a university have a series of underground tunnels?" asked Cohen, staring in disbelief as the passageways plunged down in front of them.

"For something that needs to hide underground," he mumbled. He drew his sidearm and began to head down the tunnel. He felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

"No disrespect, agent Savas," said Williams. "We're all combat vets. Seen more tunnels than we'd like to think about. We'll take the lead here."

Savas nodded, stepping to the side. "You have point, Sergeant. We'll stay out of your way and watch your back."

"Glad you're not going to go alpha on me," she smiled, moving forward.

"Too damn tired for that, ma'am."

Williams turned around and motioned the soldiers forward. They swept into the tunnels.
67

# Iron Oxide

They did not get far. The group had been moving cautiously down the main tunnel passage, ignoring side branches and the many closed doors and hatches dotting the walls. Most of those were locked on examination, and the maps York had provided indicated none led to anything more interesting than storage or machinery rooms. The maps did not show where the main path ended, which was all the suspicion they needed to continue following its course.

The temperature within the tunnel spiked dramatically as they moved forward. Enormous steam pipes ran overhead and alongside the walls, the thermal energy radiating outward and noticeable from a few feet away. After less than ten minutes, having seen no one and no clues, the passage began to slope upward and a large opening to another building came into view.

"Damn," said Williams. The extended line of soldiers stopped along with Savas and Cohen in the back.

"The new research building," said another soldier, pointing to the map. "The tunnel connections fade out in the middle, but we've just gone from building to building. No secret lair. No escape route."

"He had to go somewhere!" Williams said. "What did we miss?"

"About fifty doorways that aren't on the maps," said Savas, moving toward the front of the group. "And that might have something else behind them the maps don't show."

"We go back over it, carefully this time," said Cohen. "There's got to be more to this than a simple passage between buildings."

"We're running out of time," said Savas.

Cohen nodded. "Then let's work fast."

Williams moved through her team and toward the FBI agents. Savas interrupted her.

"No disrespect, Sergeant, but this is where we take over."

Williams smiled. "Touché."

"Only Rebecca has point, and we give her some cover. She's the real sleuth."

Williams positioned men at the beginning and end of the tunnel, blanketing all entrances and exits. She and another soldier accompanied Savas as he followed behind Cohen while she meticulously swept along the tunnel walls. Her deliberateness was painful. Time was running through their hands, every second an hour. When she stopped in front of a rusted door, he checked his watch, surprised only five minutes had passed.

"This is it," she said, crouching and touching the ground.

Williams shook her head. "This is what? What do you see?"

Cohen held up a finger, a dull orange powder coating her skin. "Rust," she said and stood, gesturing to the door. "This thing's been here a long time. The metal's built up a layer of rust ignored for years, maybe decades. But look. Around the handle and the hinges, the rust is disturbed. Some scratched, some cracked. It fell to the floor here," she pointed to a thin film of red on the rock below.

"There's a shoe print in it," said Savas.

Cohen nodded. "Not from your team," she said to Williams. "I got a lot of looks at the boots from behind. Not John or my shoes." She placed her hands on the door handle. "Someone's opened this door very recently."

Williams called the soldiers back from the tunnel extremities. They took positions near the doorway as Cohen yanked on the handle. It didn't move. Savas stepped up and together they forced the rusted hinges to yield, a screeching sound echoing around them.

The red glow of emergency bulbs lit an empty passage. The rank smell of sea and grime spilled outward, and the shoe prints continued into the thick muck coating the floor. But the prints were far more numerous, a confused stampede of footsteps preserved.

Savas checked the map. "Definitely not a machine room. And judging from all these prints, it looks like the president has a few friends."

Williams motioned to her team. "We move in separated pairs. Khyber spacing."

A soldier stepped forward and into the tunnels. "Back in the hellholes, snake-eaters," he said and disappeared. One by one they entered, and again, Savas and Cohen were relegated to the rear.

Moving through the hatchway Savas nearly struck his head on the low ceiling, the sounds of footfalls ahead of him echoing in the concrete tube. The red emergency lighting painted an infernal glare on the roughly hewn stone surrounding them.

The sounds of pounding metal reached his ears. The tight tunnel opened broadly to reveal a small chamber, a ladder racing upward, a four-way intersection of passages running from the focal point. The twelve soldiers were spaced to cover the passages, several training weapons on the ladder.

"Now what?" asked Cohen. "Four possibilities."

"This doesn't exist on the maps," said Williams. "We'll have to split up."

Savas felt his stomach drop. Too much time wasted, and now their forces thinned.

The soldiers conferred, pairs moving down the three new tunnels. Williams pointed to the ladder.

"We'll leave two here to guard against someone coming up our ass from the first tunnel. Leaves us four and you two to try this ladder. Here's what—"

Her words were cut off by gunfire. Echoes rang from the passageway in front of them. "Found them! Henson, Ripley, hold this point. The rest of you, with me!"

The automatic weapons discharge continued, and Williams and three other soldiers sprinted down the tunnel. Savas turned to Cohen.

"I guess we stay—"

Above him, metal screeched. Savas glanced up to see a hatch over the ladder open briefly, and momentarily caught a glimpse of a face. The man vanished, omitting to even seal the hatch, panic in his eyes.

"John, no!" cried Cohen.

Savas leapt onto the metal rungs and raced upward, thrusting his torso through the opening, weapon raised. A blurred shadow turned a corner down a narrow hallway, and Savas vaulted from the ladder to sprint down the passage. As it veered left, he spun quickly, gun raised, poised to engage.

He found himself in a claustrophobic space hewn carelessly out of the bedrock, a wall of guns aimed his way. Light poured from a broad opening behind the mercenaries. A brief glimpse showed Savas a short ramp leading down to the East River. An armored yacht approached on the water.

A thin man, in a suit, his hair graying, stepped forward. He held up a hand to the four bodyguards who had trained their weapons on Savas.

"A firefight at this juncture would be most unwise," he said to them, his eyes darting behind him.

"Luc Osomer-Levitt," said Savas, refusing to lower his weapon. He recognized the face of the Ramsey president from the last-minute dossiers York had sent them. The man appeared even more robotic in person than he did in the still photos, his face hardly displaying a flicker of emotion. "Or should I say: _Zero_."

"Agent Savas," he said. "I'm impressed, but please put your gun down before someone gets killed."

Savas heard the sound too late, distracted by the men in front of him. A heavy blow struck the back of his head as he tried to pivot. The ground raced up surreally. On his hands and knees, the world spinning, his gun kicked across the floor, powerful arms raised him to his feet.

"We wondered how you escaped," said Osomer-Levitt. "You live up to your reputation."

His head exploding, the figures around him only slowly returned to focus. The arms dragged Savas before the man. He winced as a gun pressed against his head.

"How do you know..."

"Who you are? Don't be coy, agent Savas. If you're here, you've clearly put together enough to know I have been involved in your capture and interrogation. I took a very personal interest in everything you and your Intel 1 group had to say."

"You bastard," Savas managed, his head pounding. "You have my people's blood on your hands."

"Collateral damage is such an unfortunate part of war. And this has been a war, agent Savas. Anonymous nearly destroyed us, and your cybercrimes head had radioactive material we could not allow to be released. We had no choice."

"The Nash Criterion."

"Yes. That madman was a double-edged sword for all of us. Useful for his time, but it's over now. Your people have put the planet on a course of self-destruction. We may not be able to fix this."

His fogged head still couldn't process much of his surroundings, let alone rebut the man. Adding to the confusion, a new voice spoke from behind the phalanx of guards

"Bring him forward. Let me see him."

The voice rasped and carried a striking tone of authority. For the first time, Osomer-Levitt's mask cracked, and concern flickered briefly over his features. The guards instinctively shifted, opening a small wedge to what lay behind. Savas strained to focus, the blurred outlines of a short and squat figure refusing to clarify. A grotesque form rolled forward, the legs swollen beyond possibility. Unless... _wheels!_ The figure sat in a wheelchair.

Osomer-Levitt spoke. "We don't have time. There may be others with him. At the least his agent wife."

A woman's voice came from behind him, and Savas flinched.

"Too late," said Cohen. "She's already here."

Savas's head throbbed as he looked over his shoulder. Cohen stood alone, an army-issue coat wrapped around her, eyes trained on Osomer-Levitt.

"Time for parlay," she said.
68

# Kingfish

"Parlay?" scoffed the Ramsey president. "I have your husband at the barrel of a gun. You are unarmed. What can you possibly bring to the table?"

"You're talking. You're hesitant. What are you afraid of, Luc?"

Osomer-Levitt licked his lips as Cohen stepped several paces closer. Savas looked on helplessly, trying to organize his thoughts for some sort of attack. Cohen simply stood there, her arms awkwardly out from her sides, her eyes fierce. _What is she doing?_

"It wouldn't be the figure behind you, in the wheelchair? Or the ship coming into dock?"

"You both should have never come looking."

Cohen stepped two more paces forward, now only feet from the group of men.

"Did you think we would simply turn our backs on what's going on? We stopped Anonymous, Luc. We saved your little plan."

"And then blew up our base of operations."

"None of our people."

Osomer-Levitt smirked. "Such coincidences do not happen. You have shadows we can't uncover. I commend you for that. But it has York's fingerprints all over it."

"The boat is about to dock!" cried out one of the mercenaries.

Osomer-Levitt shook his head. "You have no idea what you have done. You think you are saving the world, but you are dooming it to repeated cycles of dark ages."

"And only your tyranny could save us all from ourselves? That's why you nuked an entire city? Were about to nuke the entire country? This is your enlightened march to global civilization?"

"A _necessity_ because of the terrorist Fawkes. Had we been left alone, the course of human history would have only been forward. But you are too trapped in your primitive tribal systems to see it." He pointed to one of the guards. "We'll take them with us. When we are secured, we'll deal with them in a controlled fashion."

"Don't count on it." Cohen smiled as the guard approached her. "A little trick I learned from a hacker frenemy."

Cohen raised her arms out from her body. Savas's blurred vision leapt back months to a warehouse in New Jersey, the motion and similarities triggering the deja vu. Two metal canisters clanked on the ground, rolling forward toward the group. The men instinctively looked down, their weapons aiming toward the floor. The gas bombs ignited.

Even without shrapnel, the compressed air blast stunned Savas and the guards. Then, the chemical concoction attacked. He felt his lungs and eyes burn, his breath hellfire. He fell to the floor coughing violently.

A short spurt of automatic weapons fire erupted behind Cohen. _The Special Forces soldiers?_ _More mercenaries?_ Time ticked languidly. His body heaving, he crawled blindly to find some escape from the gas. Someone grabbed his head. He couldn't resist. He felt a bag yanked over his face. No, _a mask_. A short blast of fresh air purged the toxic fumes. He breathed wildly like a drowning man.

"John! Slow down! Breathe slowly." _Rebecca_. He grabbed her arms, opening his eyes. A masked monster from World War I stared back at him. Inside the goggled eyes were brown irises, threads of brown hair. He staggered to his knees, leaning against the wall. A pair of strong arms helped him to his feet. _Sergeant Williams_.

"The boat!" she cried, darting past him into the room.

Weapons fire erupted again. He turned and limped through the dissipating gas, bodies of mercenaries littering the floor. Among them, the blood-stained suit of the powerful president of Ramsey University, Luc Osomer-Levitt. His eyes stared vacuously toward the ceiling.

Savas watched as Cohen holstered her Glock pistol. He looked between her and Osomer-Levitt. "You?"

She nodded. "Got it when I need it, John. Just next time, don't run off like an untrained monkey after the bad guys. Okay?"

He nodded, turning his head to the East River below them. Williams and the other soldiers returned from the ramp, their eerie masks still in place. She spoke loudly through the plastic.

"It's gone, dammit. We took out some windows and maybe punctured the fuel tank, but not enough. We need to get assets on the river and ocean before they disappear."

"The man in the wheelchair?" asked Cohen anxiously.

"What wheelchair?" said Williams.

"There wasn't an old man in a wheelchair? He's not in here. He got to the boat!"

"Who got to the boat?" Savas asked.

Cohen's shoulders slumped. "The kingfish. _Zero_."

Savas stared into her mask. "That old man was Zero? I thought it was Osomer-Levitt!"

"I don't think so, John. Osomer-Levitt was taking orders. One more facade in this cursed house of mirrors. And Zero escaped."

"All the more reason to get on the COM and call this in." Williams left them and consulted with her team, several of them accompanying her outside with a backpack.

"Let's get outside," said Savas, "and get some real air."

The pair walked outside. Already the soldiers had removed their masks, and Savas and Cohen followed suit. One of the men had placed a portable radio on the ground, quickly working the device. Savas bent over and coughed, breathing in the crisp winter air, the cloud of water vapor heavenly after the chemical fog.

"Jesus, John, you've got blood all over your neck." Cohen removed a scarf from inside the heavy coat she wore and pressed it to the back of his head.

"Easy!" said Savas, pulling away. "Damn, that hurts."

"Sit still. You always find a way to bleed on these missions." He lowered to the ground as Cohen applied pressure to the back of his head. She shook her head. "You need stitches."

"The old man—Zero?" he sighed. "Who was he?"

Cohen looked out over the water, a mist rising off the river, no sign of the boat or other activity. Across from the university, Roosevelt Island ran along the water like a thin canyon wall.

"I have a theory," she said.

"Yes?"

"There is one name that comes up over and over in all this. A key member and organizer of the Bilderberg group meetings. A well-known proponent of a one-world government, on the record as preferring it and that it be run by a small group of financially aware people. The key figure funding this university, selecting its leadership, and whose family set the entire project in motion."

Savas grimaced as he turned toward her. "You mean?"

"And of the right age and health to be trapped in the constraints of a wheelchair," she ended.

"Daniel Ramsey."

Cohen nodded. "I didn't get a good look at him, and I wouldn't likely recognize him anyway. Like the old Soviet leaders, he's been rumored to be dead fifty times. He's over one hundred years old."

"One hundred?" asked Savas. "How?"

"Through his nineties publicly active. I don't know how. Ramsey biomedical science miracles?"

"This is crazy."

"I agree. And I'm sure it's not over."

The heavy boots of Sergeant Williams tramped down the wooden ramp toward them. She crouched beside the water.

"Reached a relay. NORAD's in the know. New intel: Hastings is dead. The coup had its own coup. It's chaos over on this side of the country right now, but the president is moving fast to reassert authority. Looks like this might be over soon."

"The boat?" asked Savas.

Williams shook her head. "Not many assets in the area we can use. They'll do what they can." She fixed her eyes on them. "But I think it'll be long gone before they do."
69

# Going Underground

Three Months Later

"I like what you've done with the place." York sat in a chair beside Cohen, the cluttered surface of a desk separating her from Savas. The newly outfitted office smelled of wood finish and plastics. "This is yours, John?"

Savas nodded. "Rebecca's is down the hall, next to the data centers. She wanted to be close to the raw intel."

"You two look a thousand percent better." The president smiled. "I think John's nose almost looks normal."

"We've all recovered a good bit since Ramsey," said Cohen.

"At least physically," said York.

Savas shifted uncomfortably. "Still nothing on our Zero?"

"No," said York. "Coincidentally, the Ramsey family has let it be known that Daniel passed away peacefully during the crisis. A funeral attended by big names will occur soon. By invitation only."

"Amazing," said Savas.

"Could be true," Cohen said. "He was over one hundred. Maybe the stress of what happened at the university? Or should I even call the place that?"

"A university?" asked York. "It certainly was a research institute handing out PhDs, did real science. But it was a golden facade over a skull. While you two were holding the East Coast together, I turned loose some less gifted detectives. Their job wasn't hard, once we knew where and what to look for. The place was a cesspool of corruption and fraud. Researchers bought like free agents, showered with insane amounts of money. Biotech and Big Pharma on their leash. Oligarchs laundering support for Bilderberg through the financial ledgers. Nobels bought and paid for. All to construct an unassailable reputation, one that would shield the university from all prying eyes."

"How on earth do you buy a Nobel prize?" asked Cohen.

"Like anything else. Meet the market price. You don't think the old farts in Sweden handing those things down are the Twelve Disciples?" York smiled ruefully. "They even had one poor researcher on ice for days, hiding his death from the world. Paying off the hospital and doctors for a week until the prize was announced."

"Why in the world?" asked Cohen.

"Nobel Prizes only go to the living. And Ramsey had put a substantial down payment on this one and wanted to get the return on his investment."

"I expected something more," she said. "A lot more. Science is supposed to be about truth."

"A hundred years ago, Alfred Nobel dumped a ton of money on the prize. Money spoke loudly then. It speaks loudly now. Always has, always will." York laughed. "You wouldn't believe the email exchanges the NSA dug up. The Nobel committee's a tired group of Swedish has-beens, mostly unknown in the world, even in the fields of science. Poor bastards are charged by history with the important yet unrewarding task of bestowing the ultimate scientific prestige on others. Think of the power they hold. Think of the _temptation_ to make that job a little more _rewarding_. Many had their price. And Ramsey had the means to meet _any_ price."

"This is science, not politics!" said Cohen.

"My dear, everything is politics. And with so much power and money involved, bring in the plumbers. Because you've got a nasty brew. Priests, senators, and scientists—dirty laundry all the same. Human nature."

"They should be held to higher standards."

"They are. Just means the price goes up. Ramsey had more than enough to shape things as he wanted. And those investments did bring a return, a shield of false honor. Behind it Bilderberg operated with impunity." She shook her head. "It's so ironic. Nobel and Ramsey were rivals for the world's oil supply before the Communist Revolution. Some accuse the Ramsey family of funding that coup. It blew up the oil region, and Nobel suffered a crippling loss while Ramsey locked in control of the world's petroleum supplies. Nobel actually had to sell his remaining shares in oil companies to Ramsey! _Humbling_."

"You know a lot about this," said Savas.

"Former law and history teacher, John. Also, it's been an eye-opening read of the intel reports the last few months."

"So, Daniel Ramsey inherited a Nobel Prize that owed his family deeply," said Cohen. "Zero had a lot to work with. A brilliant use of resources."

"Assuming Zero _is_ Daniel Ramsey," said Savas. "With his disappearance, or perhaps death, we might never know. Meanwhile, with or without him, Bilderberg will be regrouping."

"With Angel's data, it's not going to be easy for them," said York. "We've busted four of the sites on her list, apprehended several powerful and shadowy figures. The others managed to make a getaway, but their organization is trashed, their web of influence shredded. They've got _a lot_ of rebuilding ahead of them."

"And so do we," said Savas.

"We do." York looked them in eyes. "I won't forget what all of you went through for me, for this nation. I won't forget what you lost." She pulled out a set of papers and placed them on the desk. "Here are the orders for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Frank Miller and Jean-Paul Rideout. Congress has too much on its plate with elections and reconstruction. Had to go executive order for the funerals."

"Without the bodies, it's a hollow ceremony," said Savas.

"Not at all," said York. "Funerals aren't for the dead. The dead get nothing from them. They're for us, the living. For grief and something even more important—for memory. It's what holds our society together. That's why we need them. And that's why I'm going to make sure these men are remembered well."

Savas didn't yield. "Even so, they deserved better."

"It's all very much appreciated, Elaine," said Cohen, reaching across the chair and squeezing the president's hand. "John never really lets go. It's why he's up at 3am too many nights. But he does appreciate what you're doing."

"I know he does," York said, smiling toward Savas. "It will be a beautiful service in DC. Many of the cherry orchards survived the riot fires. They're beginning to bloom. Colors everywhere."

"A rumor of spring," said Cohen wistfully. "This bunker has some strong downsides. Most of us don't get out for weeks at a time. It's a problem for morale. We need to schedule more frequent top-side rotations, even if it means some risk of exposure."

"You're the bosses," said York. "But I think you're right."

Savas shifted in his chair. "On that point, Elaine—the coup is over. The military and civilian leadership stabilized. We still have distribution problems, but beyond the function of this bunker. I think we've done our job in the crisis."

"Indeed you have, John. And it's been a critical one to getting things back on track quickly. You two have coordinated a truly remarkable East Coast intervention."

"Then we're wondering what the end game is. We need to get back to Intel 1, to the FBI. I know there's an interim leadership in place, but I'm anxious to make sure things are done right."

"Anxious to get your crime-fighting division back into the game?" asked York. "After all this, you're not looking for a break or early retirement? You could ask for a helluva severance package."

"You have to ask after Kansas City?" Savas shook his head. "I don't think I'll pass any emotional quotient tests or whatever they're called. My therapy is work, the only one I've known or will know. Work to protect this country. Over and over again I've seen how much needs to be done. What's happened hasn't changed that. It's only strengthened it. And I'm not done with Bilderberg quite yet."

"And you?" she asked Cohen.

"This is what we do, Elaine. This is what we love to do. At least when we're not getting shot or tortured for it."

York nodded. "Well, you're right. The need for this Manhattan bunker is coming to an end. Fawkes and his brand of Anonymous are gone. Bilderberg is on the run. The country is coming back online."

"I'm glad you agree," said Savas, relief evident in his voice.

"I do. And that's why I'm here today. Canceled some terribly important and boring meetings with Congress to make it." York stood and looked through the window to the hive of activity outside the office. "You've taken a decayed infrastructure and turned this bunker into a formidable enterprise. Of course, you had ample funding and top personnel we supplied. But give people a mound of clay and only a few can turn it into a masterpiece." She pivoted back to them. "This site is too valuable to simply shut down. Our world has changed, my friends. Become too fragile, at the mercy of poorly secured systems and encircled by terrible weapons too easy to use. And we know too well that powerful forces want to control our destiny beyond the will of the people. After what's happened, after we nearly lost our nation—well, I think this place needs to go on functioning. But perhaps in a different guise."

Cohen arched an eyebrow. "What kind of guise?"

York sat again, placing her fingertips together in front of her face. She stared intensely at the two agents.

"Well, that's what I really came to talk to you about."

The construction vehicles passed by the unusual military checkpoint, a wall of concrete slabs and scaffolding obscuring what lay behind. Alongside the checkpoint, cars continued to rumble through the Lincoln tunnel, traffic beginning to pick up again in the intervening months since the crisis ended. All was not back to normal, as the armored Army vehicles lining the toll booths testified. But for many, normal appeared to be on the horizon at last.

Lopez and Houston sat in the far back of one of the beat-up vans passing through the hidden entrance. They wore laborer's work gear—boots and blue jeans, yellow hats on their laps—distinguishable only by the looming bulk of Lopez behind the other workers.

They passed under the archway in the bedrock, the van rocketing down an orange-lit tunnel under the Hudson. The driver spoke. "Clear of the final checkpoint. We'll be at the facility in five." The passengers relaxed, some loosening and removing the hot costumes, revealing other clothing beneath.

"So, the bat cave?" said Lopez, his large hands spinning the hard hat. "Are we sure about this?"

Houston shook her head. "I don't think so."

"Good answer."

She whispered to him privately. "Look, Francisco, cons: we're disappearing again, giving up the hope of a pardon or vindication. Getting a new set of laundered identities."

"I love it when you talk dirty in my ear."

"Shut up." She smiled. "York was right. Her political situation is too fragile right now. The country is barely on its feet again. We're too radioactive. But the pros! We get to fight bad guys with people we trust and believe in, with ridiculous, _presidential_ resources to conduct investigations."

"Doesn't this secret presidential force scare you a little?"

She looked out the window at the rock walls speeding by. "It does. Sounds a little too much like something Cheney would have done. _Or did_. Don't forget his secret assassination squads. But, I trust York. More than most, anyway."

"Maybe more than you should."

"Maybe. But she's proven to me where her heart lies. She could have _been_ Hastings, held on to power, been Bilderberg's puppet." She exhaled, a smile on her face. "And Intel 1! John, Rebecca, and Angel—we've been through fire with them, more than once. I'm alive because of them."

"That I don't forget," said Lopez, running his hand through her hair.

"They're gold in my book. Besides—all of us, we did good. We did _damn_ good. I don't know, but if we're gonna get the bang-bang toys and put on a fucking cape, who else would you pick for your team? I trust them. Not just to do the job, but to do it honorably."

The orange light began to fade, replaced slowly by a sterile fluorescent glow. Through the front windshield, they could see the opening in the tunnel and large underground lot that lay behind it, two monstrous metal doors swinging inward to allow their passage

"I hope you're right, Sara. Good intentions and the path to hell and all that."

Houston stared forward, the vehicle passing through the blast doors. She set her jaw. "You know, Francisco, so far every damn road we've been on has been to hell. We might as well do what we want while we're traveling."

Lopez grunted. "And Angel? You think it's wise to put it all in her hands?"

Houston sighed. "I don't know. Power for good or for evil. Crazy stuff. If you had sole control of the plans for the atomic bomb back in '45, what would you do? Turn the tech loose on the world? Destroy it? Either way you play God. I don't want that kind of responsibility. Do you?"

"No," said Lopez. "I'm glad I'm not able to make the choice. But two times she's held the fate of the world in her hands. Now a third. I hope she makes the right choice." The van pulled to a stop and the giant doors slammed shut behind them. "Whatever it might be."
70

# Gods Another Day

The setting sun burned a potent crimson through the glass, backlighting the explosions of spray from the massive waves pummeling the rocks below. Lightfoote stared out toward the craggy rocks and the expanse of the Pacific racing to the horizon. Her scalp was freshly shaved and gleaming, her bare arms like Greek marble against the dark fatigues she wore. One hand played with an eyebrow piercing while the other drummed along the thick glass. Around her, the floor-to-ceiling windows of the restaurant offered stunning panoramic views of the ocean, the Seal Rocks, Marin coastline, and the entry to the Golden Gate Bridge.

It had been a peaceful day, but she experienced it only as a bizarre and unnatural event in the context of the last six months. At dawn, she had begun at one end of the San Francisco Zoo, walking leisurely west toward the shore. No animal, no botanical arrangement was too inconsequential for her time. She lingered at each exhibit. Her eyes drank the miraculous life forms around her like balm poured over a burnt wound. By the time she reached the jutting outcrop of rocks thrusting the restaurant over the churning waves, the day had almost ended and the sun had begun to dive toward the water.

Her laptop was open on the table, an untouched plate of food and full cup of now cold coffee on either side of it. She refused to look at the screen again. Its contents were memorized, seared into her mind from hours of obsession. The final code was ready. Looking at it wouldn't change anything. Her problem now wasn't technical—it was moral, and she struggled to make a choice.

Press ENTER, and let loose a modified version of Fawkes's code, one that would leapfrog over the duct-taped patches placed across the world's computers to block it. Code that would take her still ranging immune worms weeks to recognize and erase. By then, the task would have been completed, every trace on the computers of the Bilderberg group wiped clean of the Nash equations. The power to scientifically model human populations and manipulate them would once again be relegated to science fiction, the can kicked down the road to some near future when the ideas were rediscovered. Gone would be that temptation to tyranny, to the godlike powers offered. Gone also would be the ability to correct societies that had gone wrong, to use reason to try and steer the mad human course on Earth toward something less self-destructive.

All she had to do was press a button.

Lightfoote had already erased the files Fawkes had sent to her, the images of the mad cork board she and Houston had reduced to ash. Gone too was the decoded text of Nash's paper. With the murder of Nash and Kaplan, the last human beings able to resurrect that work had perished as well. All that remained were the computer servers of the scattered Bilderberg group. As Fawkes had shown, they hadn't adapted to the new realities of the digital realm. Her code would hunt them down faster and more effectively than any governmental agency. It would complete the destruction of this terrible knowledge.

And all she had to do now was press a button.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, was there a problem with your meal?"

A young waitress looked down anxiously at Lightfoote and her plate, her bulging chest and tight clothing contrasting oddly with her customer's militarized appearance.

"That's all there are," said Lightfoote. "Problems."

The woman smiled weakly. "I can get the manager."

Lightfoote stared through the woman, turning her head in a slow arc, taking in the restaurant, the clientele of tourists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. She frowned.

"You know, we're just not ready. It's too soon."

"If you want us to bring it out later, I can have another—"

"Not _mature_ enough. Monkeys just knocked out of trees."

The waitress took a step back, her eyes darting. "I'm sorry?"

Lightfoote raised her index finger and struck a key on her laptop. She stared at the screen, ignoring the waitress for several moments.

"There," she said at last. "Yup. It's all done. _Cleaned up_. We'll be gods another day." The waitress looked on in bewilderment. Lightfoote stuffed her laptop into a bag. "Can I have the check, please?"

> _"If Bilderberg meetings are just talking shops, why do the most powerful figures from around the world bother to attend? What other summit of world leaders in politics, finance and business would go completely unreported in the mainstream media such as the BBC? It's impossible not to reach the conclusion that the non-reporting of these events is anything other than a conspiracy between the [Bilderberg] organizers and the media. It merely confirms the belief of many that the hidden agenda and purpose of the Bilderberg Group is to bring about undemocratic world government. It's a disgrace that the European Commission is colluding in that."_
> 
> Gerard Joseph Batten, British representative to the European Parliament, 12 September 2011, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France

* * *

> _"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."_
> 
> David Rockefeller, Memoirs

* * *

> _"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."_
> 
> David Rockefeller, purported remarks at the Bilderberg Group meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany in June 1991 (published in Hilaire du Berrier Reports), considered apocryphal despite widespread dissemination, as no written or audio evidence has been presented from this meeting.

**ANDROCIDE**

**_5th Book in the INTEL 1 Series_**

"Integrating police procedural, holmesian puzzle-solving, bio-thriller, and political commentary, Androcide's style and substance will prove irresistible for readers." —The Booklife Prize

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# INTEL 1 Audiobooks

Book 1: A Western terrorist organization targets Muslims around the world, and FBI agent John Savas must put aside the loss of his son and work with a man who symbolizes all he has come to hate. Both are drawn into a race against time to stop the plot of an American bin Laden and prevent a global catastrophe. PURCHASE.

Book 2: A rogue CIA agent uncovers a shocking conspiracy deep in the intelligence community. A killer pursues a terrible vengeance. No one emerges unscathed, no beliefs go unchallenged, and no wrong escapes the terrible, final, and _extraordinary_ retribution. PURCHASE.

Book 3: No forgiveness. No forgetting. Expect it. The global financial system is in chaos. World leaders have been compromised. An unstoppable computer virus eats through the Internet. Join an elite team of FBI and CIA agents, and the shadowy figures they must work with, as they try to stop a global catastrophe and act of digital terrorism, unlike anything ever witnessed. Can they stop the virus from devouring the world's digital mind before it releases The Anonymous Signal? PURCHASE.

Book 4: **We believed our government was of the people, by the people, and for the people.** _We were wrong._ A terrorist's last words lead a team of special agents to the discovery of an unimaginable global conspiracy. But time is running out. The numbers are converging. Can a group of fugitive FBI and CIA operatives prevent the coming catastrophe before the world crosses The Nash Criterion? PURCHASE.

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**ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

Erec Stebbins is a biomedical researcher who writes thrillers, science fiction, mysteries, and more.

He was born in the Midwest. His mother worked as a clinical psychologist, and his father was a professor of Romance languages at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In fact, his father's specialty, old Romance languages and their literature, is the source of the strange spelling of his middle name: "Erec." It is an Old French spelling, taken from an Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes written around 1170: _Érec et Énide_.

He has pursued diverse interests over the course of his life, including science, music, drama, and writing. His academic path focused on science, and he received a degree in physics from Oberlin College in 1992, and a PhD in biochemistry from Cornell University in 1999. He completed postdoctoral studies at Yale University. He has worked for several decades studying the atomic structure of biological macromolecules involved in disease.

_For more information:_

www.erecstebbinsbooks.com

erecstebbinsbooks@gmail.com
"WORKS THAT NURTURE WONDER AND BREAK HEARTS"

—Foreword Reviews

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> **READER, WRITER, and MAKER:** Speculative fiction trilogy with time travel, aliens, metaphysical mysteries, action, adventure, cosmology, cybernetics, religion, and romance!

_" VISIONARY"_ and _" ENTHRALLING"_

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