The Grays (45 page)

Lauren ran toward them.

THE AXE CAME DOWN, CAME
with blinding speed, like the striking head of a snake.

Katelyn saw Dan grab the handle of the axe in both hands, and in doing so give Conner time to get to his feet and stagger toward the deeper woods. Jimbo roared with frustration as he took off after him.

She ran to Dan, knelt over him. His eyes met hers. “Help him,” he said, “help our son.”

She looked toward the woods, got up, and ran on.

Rob struggled frantically for his gun, and Lauren saw that he was fighting an arm so broken it was almost snake-like. His lips twisted, his face went ashen, but he used it anyway, getting to the weapon, dragging it out of the holster.

“Your left hand,” she screamed. “Rob, your
left
hand!”

He raised it past his body so she could see the useless hunk of meat that dripped there. She saw his chest heaving, saw a froth of bile appear between his lips, but saw him still struggling, still trying to raise that pistol.

WHEN MIKE SAW ROB APPEAR
at the edge of the clearing where this thing was coming to climax, he pulled the TR back quickly. Rob was familiar with the TR and he just might spot it despite all the optical camouflage. As he maneuvered the craft, a soft female voice began a countdown. “Alert. Destruct in thirty seconds. Alert. Destruct in twenty-nine seconds . . .”

Mike hammered at the controls, increased the velocity of the plasma, the speed of the fans, and brought the lift level inching back up. “Countdown ends.” For a moment, he sat absolutely still, hardly breathing, but the countdown did not resume.

He activated the secure communications system. It didn’t matter much if the Air Force found him now. They were going to be too late, and he needed to let Charles know the situation. “This is TR-A1, I am going to burp coordinates.”

“Negative that.”

“Charles! Can you reach me?”

“Three hours.”

“I’ve got progressive damage. This thing is going in sooner than that.”

“Do you have the kid?”

“Just about.”

“Mike, the president’s arresting the Trust. Until further notice, consider yourself a fugitive.”

What in hell had happened? The president couldn’t arrest the Trust, could he? Mike wasn’t sure, but he was sure that he had a battle to fight, so he forced the issue out of his mind and instead concentrated on working the TR closer to the boy. He took out his pistol.

CHARLES GUNN, STILL OVER WASHINGTON,
did not like that “just about.” To him, that meant that the child was not secure, and if that was true, he might never be secure. Charles must not end up in the situation that had destroyed
der Wolf
in the forties—a two-front war. For the Trust, one front would be this monster of a child, using his powers of mind to stay ahead of them and undermine their plans. The other front would be the president and his powers of arrest.

He had hesitated to do what he now knew he must. He’d hidden the TR by hanging in a wooded draw in Rock Creek Park. He rose up to the level of Glover Bridge and headed down Embassy Row. He cleared his vision. It was as if the plane around him had disappeared, except for the three control panels and his immediate seating area. He moved low over the buildings, stopping above the Prince Mansion. Just a few voices. Very well, the president was in the White House.

As he aimed the TR down Massachusetts Avenue, he opened a small cover under his right hand, revealing a black button. He adjusted his altitude, then activated listening devices. Much clearer voices filled the small area, a press officer on the telephone, two Secret Service agents chatting about their house cats, the First Lady discussing colors with her dressmaker.

Finally, he heard the president’s voice in the Oval Office talking to somebody through an interpreter.

He pressed the button. He held it down.

THE WHITE HOUSE KITCHEN WAS
organized pandemonium. Last night had been the Thai prime minister. Tonight, it was the sultan of Qatar, the second state dinner in a row. The pastry chef was the first to notice something awry: a meringue was shaking wildly. Then he realized that he was shaking, too.

In the press room above, Press Secretary Roger Armes said, “We appear to be—” as ceiling tiles began to come down. Then the lights went out, immediately
replaced by emergency lighting. Voices rose, shouts and screams, and some of them terrible screams.

In the Vermeil Room, the portraits of all seven first ladies fell at once. A moment later, the ceiling followed. In the Oval Office, the president, his chief of staff, and two, then three, then four Secret Service agents were thrown with ferocious energy to the floor along with the elaborately robed sultan and his translator. The Resolute Desk, made from the timbers of the
HMS Resolute
and used by such presidents as FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan, now crashed with a crackling thud into the floor. A moment later, the walls came in, and the whole contents of the office thundered through into the Blue Room below.

From thirty feet away, Charles watched the carnage, directing pulse after pulse toward the building. The private apartments on the roof shuddered and caved in, then the whole West Wing sank away into a cloud of dust.

Charles traveled over the mess, heading for the Mall. He moved just inches above the Reflecting Pool, aiming toward the Washington Monument.

High above, the long snout of the scalar weapon now glowed bright red. Every time Charles pressed the button in the TR down below, the red fluttered brilliant white, and a ball of light shot toward the Earth.

Tourists screamed and ran across the Mall as the worst earthquake to strike the area since the Mississippi embayment in 1811 rumbled and rattled. The Washington Monument swayed, its sheer marble facing dancing with cracks. Inside, more tourists scrambled down the stairs.

The monument came down almost gracefully, sinking into its own base as it disintegrated. Marble is a soft stone, and does not stand up well under stress.

Charles circled the collapsing monument, then moved toward the Capitol. Far overhead, the scalar weapon’s servos emitted flashes as it made fine adjustments.

Congress was in session when the balconies swayed like hammocks and crashed down into the house chamber. Fortunately for all except the observers, few representatives were actually in attendance.

The Senate was not so lucky. A ceremony honoring a retiring senator was under way, and three-quarters of the senators were present when the chandeliers began to fall, exploding into the chamber with horrendous loss of life.

The quake, finally finding a fault line, spread through the area. The tunnel to the Senate Office Building caved in. Then the Anacostia Bridge fell.
Everywhere, people strove to keep their feet, tried desperately to avoid falling monuments and falling ceilings.

Charles continued his mad ballet, paying special attention now to the Pentagon. Inside, people held onto their desks or clung to doors and walls, but the tough old structure would not come down.

Finally, Charles took his finger off the button. At monitoring stations around the world, the pens of seismographs returned to normal. But the record was clear: an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale had struck Washington, D.C. Strangely, the epicenter was located very close to the surface, rather than the three to ten miles beneath it that was normal. Stranger still, no fault line was known that could account for the highly localized event, which had been centered, for all practical purposes, on the White House. And yet it appeared to be entirely natural.

Henry Vorona, who had been in a car on the Anacostia Bridge when it collapsed, drowned with the two men who had arrested him. He died furious at Charles and at life, but also relieved, because he knew that the Trust would now certainly survive.

The president died, too, crushed beneath the desk he had so proudly accepted as his own, never dreaming that he would come to his end behind it—or rather, under it.

Charles grabbed altitude and headed off west-northwest as a flight of F-16s scrambled from Andrews screamed past him, their engine noise practically blowing out his ears.

“Mike, are you still up?”

“Just about on the deck.”

“What’s the status of the kid?”

“Unknown.”

“Goddamn you.”

TERRY AND JOHN KELTON CAME
out of the woods, both with high-powered rifles. As they strode past Dan, Terry knelt and fired into the trees.

Lauren leaped through the snow—which here had drifted as high as her chest—leaped and struggled in a slow-motion nightmare, feeling the cold of it sear her in places where she had never been cold. She clawed on anyway, because she knew without fully understanding that this was one of those tiny, secret moments on which a whole future turns.

She saw John laugh and stride forward so powerfully that the snow
seemed to part for him like the Red Sea, as if he was helped in some way by the purity of evil itself.

“Rob,” Lauren screamed. “Rob,
shoot
!”

Rob struggled to raise his gun, his whole body shaking with the effort.

Three of the Keltons zeroed in on Conner. Lauren saw that they were converging with a fourth, a boy of about fifteen. She recognized him from that last session with Adam: he had the hair, the face, the build of the image of the boy that Adam had put in her mind and that she had described so carefully to Mike.

“Oh, Mike, you are good at what you do.” He had turned the grays’ own decoy into one of Conner’s assassins.

She broke free of the drift and ran hard, but all the hunters except the fifteen-year-old were too far ahead of her. “Rob,” she shouted in his direction, “Rob, stop them!”

Rob stood as still as if he had frozen, and Lauren feared for a moment that he had done just that, but that limp, flopping arm still came up, still carried the heavy pistol. He grimaced in agony, his face now lined with bars of frozen blood.

She watched the shattered arm rise impossibly higher and higher, the gun wavering in it. Then she launched herself in a final burst and took down Jimbo. He exhaled with a whoosh and fell, and she grabbed his shoulders and kept smashing his head into the ground as hard as she could, so hard that it soon packed the layer of snow beneath it and began to make thudding sounds, and his eyes began to roll.

Rob raised the gun higher. Higher. And kept raising it up right
past
the hunters. “ROB! ROB, WAKE UP!”

Rob’s face worked, his eyes rolling. She looked up to where the gun pointed and cried out, astonished, a red-hot knife of terror stabbing her heart as she saw just a few feet overhead, a gigantic shimmering triangle that looked so much like the sky above that she hadn’t noticed it before.

The gun blasted and Rob hissed through bared teeth in his agony as the kick flashed torment down his arm. With his mangled left hand he shoveled snow against his face to force consciousness back, and fired into the thing overhead again and again.

“Alert. Auto destruct in ten seconds. Nine. Eight—”

As Mike twisted the controls, the TR wheeled away from the clearing, its huge wing skimming the treetops, leaving behind billows of snow.

“Five. Four.”

He slid down to the hatch. The treetops were five feet below him.

He leaped. As he did, he felt a fierce blast of heat from the dying TR. He crashed down among the wide pine branches and landed hard in a billow of snow. He checked himself, got to his feet—and realized that his ankle was broken.

Rob Langford stood not ten feet away. Mike’s pistol was gone, but he began to hobble toward Langford anyway.

“Rob, you’ve got to help me.”

“I can’t do that, Mike.”

“Rob, you don’t want the whole human race loaded with chains. You’re too good a man to want a thing like that.”

“They’re not loading us with chains, Mike, they’re giving us wings.”

“How the hell would you know?”

As Rob stood staring at him out of filmed eyes, Mike dragged himself closer.

He watched as if in a balletic nightmare as Rob’s pistol slowly rose from his side, clutched in a hand that looked like gnawed meat, and braced by a burned claw.

The pistol came to bear. He saw Langford’s teeth grinding, his eyes squinting with effort. He was almost on him now, just a couple more feet.

But the hammer went back, and he knew he had lost.

THE GUN WENT CLICK. AGAIN,
click. Langford dropped it into the snow and Mike reached him, shoved him back, and pounded him in the face with all his might. But Langford was also a powerful, resourceful man, and he fought back, finally hurtling Mike off him with his feet, sending him sprawling in the snow.

Mike tried to get up. He pushed at the ground and struggled with all his strength to raise himself but he could not. More than just an ankle was broken, he knew that from the blood frothing his lips.

Then a fist came down, and the lights went out.

Somehow, Rob got to his feet. Somehow, he moved toward the clearing. He hoped that Wilkes would be out, at least for a couple of minutes. But he knew the colonel. The colonel was one to be reckoned with.