Only a trick of the light.
Except that he was sure that it wasn’t.
Whitechapel, London
December 18, 7:29 A.M. GMT
Next morning I caught two chilly hours’ sleep in the back of a police car
while Ghost kept watch, and then shambled to a pub for a late breakfast. Eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, and jam. I’m a big believer in the adage of eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. Except that I tended to eat lunch and dinner like a king, too. That way there were plenty of leftovers for the mouth-on-legs that was Ghost.
I called Rudy, who was on the plane to America, and I woke him up. You’d never think that a civilized, cultured, and educated medical man like him could curse worse than Amy Winehouse on a bender.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“Where do you think I learned to curse?” he growled.
I’d met his mother and I could see his point.
“Why am I awake and talking to you?” he asked after a yawn so loud that I could hear his jaw pop over the cell phone.
“You hear about what happened yesterday?”
“Yes,” he said, and that fast I could hear that he’d shifted gears. “Mr. Church said that you weren’t injured. But … how are you feeling?”
“Paranoid, scared, angry, and frustrated.”
“I can imagine,” he said. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”
“We’re chasing phantoms.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just the feeling that keeps popping into my head. Trying to fight back against the Seven Kings is like trying to grab shadows. You can never put your hands on them.”
“If I said, ‘That’s part of the spy game,’ how much of a beating would you give me?”
I laughed. “Look, I called because I need to bang some ideas off of you before I bring them to Church.”
“Sure,” he said, and, “As you’re so fond of saying, ‘hit me.’”
I took a sip of coffee. “Okay, the way in which it was set up, the multiple bombs in key spots, suggests inside knowledge, and we’re probably looking at someone in authority. Barrier estimates that the bombs had to be big, hundreds of kilos of C4 or something like it. The blast didn’t have the signature of TNT, so we can probably rule out materials hijacked from a mining or demolition company. This is military grade, and that’s very hard to come by.”
“That’s two points,” Rudy observed. “The first being the access to the building and the probable authority to allow for materials to be brought in, or to cover up the fact that they’ve already been brought in. The second point being that the bombers had access to significant amounts of military-grade materials.”
“Right. But on the first point, that suggests more than one person.”
“Why?”
“Unless this was done in increments over time, it would take several people and some equipment to get all those explosives into the building. Hand trucks at least. And the materials would have to have been hidden, so maybe file cabinets filled with them. Or laundry hampers.”
“File cabinets or hampers that no one cared to look in between the time they were brought in and the time the bombs went off,” Rudy said. “That’s not actually very hard for the right person to manage.”
“Who would have that authority?”
“The hospital administrator and the first tier of assistants, of course. But to move objects in carts or hand trucks you have the head of physical plant, the senior janitorial staff, and the head of housekeeping. It’s actually a longer list of people than you might think.”
“That’s what I was thinking. So we’re probably looking at a minimum of two people working to bring the materials in under the radar of day-today operations.”
“Or on the radar.”
“Why?”
Rudy thought about it. “I’ve worked in enough hospitals to know that when new resources are brought in they’re often distributed to appropriate departments but not immediately assigned to individual staff. There’s always a paperwork lag. It wouldn’t be unusual at all for new cabinets to be brought in and put in corners or disused offices or closets until they were assigned to the staff. And … another snag could be that they were brought in, but the keys hadn’t yet arrived or someone had accidentally sent the wrong keys. That’s a typical hospital snafu. At Mount Sinai we once had six brand-new cardiac crash carts sent, but the manufacturer had forgotten to ship the wheels. They sat in closets for almost two weeks before they were assigned to floors.”
I drank my coffee and thought about that. Ghost made a noise very
much like a person clearing his throat for attention, and I tossed him a sausage. He snatched it out of the air with the precision of a dolphin taking a leaping mackerel.
“That’s good, Rude,” I said. “Now, who would know the physical layout? Who would have access to the blueprints? Those bombs were placed at exactly the right structural points.”
“Again, that’s going to be a long list, Cowboy. Hospital plans are public record, and something as high profile as the London renovation would have drawn a lot of attention. There would be dozens of copies of the main layout available to civil engineers, the fire department, civil defense, and anyone in hospital management. If and when we get a list of suspects, you should look for someone with some kind of background in engineering.”
“And someone with some military or demolition experience, too. That might be our hook,” I said. “I think I’ll have my friends here take a closer look at the building maintenance staff.”
We swapped a few other ideas but got no other brainstorms.
“Go back to sleep, Rude. Maybe you’ll wake up and find that this was all a dream.”
He sighed. “That would be nice. And maybe Santa Claus will put Shakira under my Christmas tree. That’s just about as likely.”
He hung up and I set my plate down and let Ghost go to town on my unfinished sausage and toast. I was finishing my last cup of coffee when my phone rang.
“Do you have anything new?” asked Church.
I told him about my conversation with Rudy.
“That’s useful. I’ll discuss this with Benson Childe and we’ll put some additional assets on those aspects of the background checks. What are you doing right now?”
“I was about to head back and put in a few more hours with the door-to-door.”
“I may have to take you away from that later this morning.”
“What’s up?”
“Details are still sketchy, but this may be more of a DMS matter than police work.”
“C’mon … what could be more important than what just happened?”
He said, “Something that hasn’t
yet
happened?”
“Look,” I said, “I’d like to stick with this thing if I can. Try not to need me on whatever else you have cooking.”
“I’ll use you as the situation demands,” Church said coldly. “Keep your phone on.” He disconnected.
I sat in the dark little booth for a couple of minutes, feeling the aches in bone and tendon and soul. I didn’t want to be pulled off this part of the investigation. It kept me grounded on the level of real people rather than on the surreal level of Kings and governments. That was important because since Grace’s death my connection to basic humanity had been questionable at best.
After she died I came here to Europe for the sole purpose of killing someone. My only companion was a dog. The guy I was chasing was one of the world’s most dangerous assassins. I should have called for backup and didn’t. I slaughtered the son of a bitch and it felt good. That’s probably not a good thing from any psychological perspective. I was still dealing with grief and recovering from injuries received in the same battle that had killed Grace. I should have gone back to the States and spent time with my dad, my brother, and his family. In therapy with Rudy. Instead I got into fights, went scuba diving and skiing, spent hundreds of hours rigorously training Ghost, and even threw myself out of a couple of airplanes. That was my game plan for “relaxing and recharging.”
So, I’m kind of a whack-job. That’s not a news flash to anyone.
My disconnect didn’t start with Grace, though. I went through some trauma as a teenager that fractured my psyche. At the best of times I have several people living inside my skull. There’s the Modern Man, that part of me who clings to idealism, hoards his dwindling supply of optimism, and is frequently shocked at the dreadful things people are willing to do to one another. Over the last year, that part of me has begun to crumble. The other two aspects—the Cop and the Warrior—are teetering on a precarious balance. The Cop is probably the closest thing to a primary identity that I have. He’s the well-balanced, astute, and emotionally controlled member of my inner committee. He’s the part I trust the most, and it’s his face that I show to the world. Most of the time. Sometimes—more and more often lately—the world has seen the face of my other self. The Warrior. Remember that TV show
Dexter
? He would have called it his “dark passenger.” When I imagine what that part of me looks like, he’s crouched down in the weeds with green
and black greasepaint camouflage on his face, a red dew-rag tied around his head, and eyes that are both fierce and dead. He waits there, always ready, never sleeping, perpetually eager to take it to the bad guys in ugly and brutally efficient ways.
I closed my eyes and looked inside for some light, but there was nothing but shadows and dust.
So I threw some money on the table, absently tapped my left side to reassure myself that the Beretta was snugged in place, clicked my tongue for Ghost, and went back out to the war.
Area 51
Eighty-three Miles North-Northwest of Las Vegas
December 18, 4:31 P.M. EST
First Sgt. Bradley F. Sims—Top to everyone who knew him, and second in command of Joe Ledger’s Echo Team—stood by the Humvee and squinted at the open hangar door. The sharp, evil-looking snout of an experimental fighter-bomber leered at him from the shadows, its black skin absorbing the stray rays of sunlight without reflection. Four other DMS agents clustered around the vehicle, each of them in unremarkable DCUs, the desert combat uniforms unmarked by unit patches or insignia. Their agency logo—a black biohazard symbol with “DMS” above and “Department of Military Sciences” below, was only used inside the Warehouse and other field offices. They currently carried ID from Homeland and the FBI, and Top had an extra set that identified him as a special agent of the NSA. All legal but not in any way accurate.
“Getting hot out here, Top,” said the big man to his right. Staff Sgt. Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit was six-seven, and most of it looked to be packed onto his arms and chest. Even with the three hundred pounds of muscle, he had long, rangy limbs and the quick, agile balance of a volleyball player, a game he’d played to Pan Am Games level, missing the Olympics only because of the Gulf War.
“It’s a fucking desert, Farmboy,” said Top. “Tends to
be
hot.”
Bunny took a pair of Oakley sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. He was blond and pale, a Scots-Irish mix with a few Polish genes somewhere
in his family tree. Top was a black man from Georgia. Bunny was the second youngest man on Echo Team, though he was third in command after Top. At forty-two, Top was the oldest by ten years. The others—the thin, dark, and professorial ex-SEAL Khalid Shaheed, eagle-eyed and beak-nosed former MP DeeDee Whitman, and the laconic SWAT sniper John Smith—were all in their late twenties or early thirties.
Six other vehicles were parked around the open hangar. Two from the base’s own military police, one from the intelligence team based at Nellis, two DMS Humvees from the Casino, the Nevada Field Office located in an actual—though no-longer-operating—hotel casino. Lucky Team had gone inside with the military investigators, leaving most of Echo Team outside to bake in the sun. Only Ricky Gomez and Snake Henderson from Echo went in with the others. They lost the coin toss.
Echo Team was here to do some babysitting. Lucky Team was down three men following a raid on a Reno chemical lab that had turned into a firefight. The intel from the FBI had been weak, indicating that there were only five hostiles on-site, but Lucky had walked into a nest of thirty. By the time an HRT unit could roll, two DMS agents were dead and the team’s former leader, Colonel Dolcyk, had taken a bullet graze on the forehead that would keep him in the hospital for weeks. The second in command, Leto Nelson, had rallied his team and laid into the hostiles like the wrath of God. They’d held their line until the backup arrived, killing eleven of the terrorists and wounding six others, but it had been a bad day for them. Echo was here to make sure it didn’t turn into a pattern. When luck goes bad it can keep flowing downhill.
The operation itself was little more than a “look-see.” Over the last three nights the surveillance cameras on the base had malfunctioned. Once could be mechanical failure; twice was an alert. Three times was deliberate action even to the most hesitant and short-budgeted military pencil pusher. On any other base the response would have been an increase of guard patrols and the installation of a secondary and covert set of cameras that would watch the standard security cameras, and a check-back of everyone who had access to the security office. But this corner of Area 51 was home to the Locust FB-119, the newest generation of stealth aircraft. Unlike previous generations, the Locust FB-119 was designed to be totally invisible to radar, building on a radical new design philosophy
that was generations up from the faceted surfaces of earlier stealth craft. The Locust could also disguise its infrared emissions to make it harder to detect by heat-seeking surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles, and chameleon fast-adapting skin that immediately changed its underbelly colors to match the skies through which it flew, with a lag time of .093 seconds. Six Locusts sat in the hangar, ready for the last phase of tests before Senate approval for mass production.
If even a single photograph of the craft hit the Net or fell into North Korean, Iranian, or Chinese hands it could spark a new and ugly round of the arms race, because it would be clear to any aeronautics engineer that these birds were designed to deliver nuclear payloads.
Bunny squinted up at the unrelenting sun.
“December my ass,” Bunny complained. “Got to be ninety.”
“It’s seventy-three,” said Khalid, and under his breath he said, “Kisich.”
“Hey, I heard that.”
“But you don’t know what it means.”
“If I shoot you enough times you’ll tell me.”
Top touched his ear jack. “Go for Sims,” he said, and listened for a moment. “Copy that, Snake. Sounds like it’s Miller time. Tell Lucky Team that first round’s on Echo—”
And the hangar blew up.
They saw it before they heard it. The windows above the half-open doors bowed outward and the entire roof leaped in a single unit above the building. A split second later the heavy
whump!
slammed them all backward. A massive ball of red-veined yellow flame mushroomed up from the building. Another blast followed the first less than a second later, and a third. The walls disintegrated, filling the air with debris as sharp as blades.
Top twisted and dove for cover, tackling DeeDee as he went, spilling them both into the open door of the Humvee even as the shock wave lifted the vehicle and battered it onto its other side. Bunny was plucked off the ground and slammed into Khalid and they struck the ground on the far side of the vehicle, both of them losing their weapons as superheated gasses blew them along the hardpan like debris. John Smith tried to run, but a piece of debris—a half-melted plastic bucket—struck him in the lower back and dropped him like he’d been shot.
The Humvee lurched over onto its side and rocked back and forth as gravity pulled Top and DeeDee down into an awkward tangle of too many arms and legs against the door of the passenger side. There were more explosions, one after the other, the force of them rumbling with earthquake power through the ground, rattling every bolt and fitting in the big vehicle. The windows shattered and a hail of gummed safety glass hammered them.
The long, slow
boooooom
of the last explosion echoed out across the desert.
Then there was silence.
To Top Sims the silence felt like it was filled with knives. He hovered on the edge of consciousness, agony stabbing through every bruised inch of him. Top knew he was hurt, but he could not tell how badly. His head throbbed horribly and there was warmth in his ears. Blood? He prayed that his eardrums hadn’t been blown out.
He lay still for a moment, listening for the sounds of combat. The echoes of the blasts kept pounding inside his head. He worked his jaw and something clicked behind his jaw and one ear popped. He could hear. First his own labored breathing and then a muffled sound. Below him.
“DeeDee,” he croaked.
She made a soft, hurt sound.
“Talk to me, soldier,” he said as he tried to shift his weight off her. She was a strong woman, but his 175 pounds were smashed down on top of her 130, and at an angle that was doing neither of them any good.
“Can’t … breathe … ,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
Top reached up to grab the steering wheel and pulled his weight away from her. He heard her gasp in a lungful of air.
“Better,” she said, but her voice was weak.
“I’m going to climb out. Got to see what’s what. I’ll be back for you.”
“I … I’m good,” she said without conviction.
Top reached up with his other hand, taking the knobbed wheel in both fists, then set his teeth and pulled. It was like doing a chin-up through a junk-cluttered manhole, and the strain on his muscles was incredible. Particularly on his left side, which had only recently healed from injuries from a mission down in the Bahamas back in August. As he pulled himself up he could feel the burn along the newly healed ribs and barely knit muscle in his shoulder. Top set his teeth against the pain and hauled.
“Top!”
He looked up as a big shadow moved above him, blocking out the sky. Bunny’s face was streaked with dust and lines of blood, but his eyes were clear. He reached a hand down and knotted his fist in the front of Top’s combat vest, then with a grunt like an angry bear reared back and hauled Top out of the Humvee as easily as Top might pull out a child. The huge muscles in the big young man’s arms swelled like ripe melons as Bunny … pulled. Top caught the edge of the frame and hoisted himself onto the side of the vehicle.
“You may be ugly, Farmboy, but right now I could kiss you.”
“Buy me dinner and a movie first, old man.” He wiped sweat from his eyes. Top’s trembling fingers fumbled for his sidearm, but Bunny said, “We’re not under fire, Top. No hostiles. No nothing.”
“Got to get DeeDee out.”
Bunny bowed down and thrust his head and shoulders into the Humvee. “Hey … DeeDee … how we doing down there?”
“Just fine. I’m down here doing my fucking nails.”
Bunny snorted and took the hands that she reached up to him and pulled her out. She and Top hopped down onto the ground, dazed and unsteady.
“Report,” gasped Top.
Bunny crouched atop the Humvee. “We’re not under fire. This isn’t an active attack. Khalid’s winded. I landed on top of him. Smith’s good.” His blue eyes were hard as diamonds. “Top, Ricky and Snake were inside when it blew.”
Top closed his eyes.
Ricky Gomez had been with Echo for three months, the longest active service besides Bunny. He’d proven himself in half a dozen tough assignments. But … Snake. God. This was only Snake’s third day on the job. His first field op.
He was only inside because he lost a coin toss.
“Is Smith on-point?”
“Yeah,” said Bunny. “His weapon was damaged in the blast, but I gave him mine and he’s watching our asses. Sat phone’s toast, but we have team radio. Smith’s on channel two.”
Top spit blood out of his mouth and tapped his commlink to the channel. “Rock to Chatterbox, come in.”
“Go for Chatterbox,” said Smith quietly. The link was bad, full of static.
“What’ve you got?”
“Zero movement, zero hostiles.”
“ETA on fire and rescue.”
There was a pause. “From where?”
“From the main damn building,” Top snapped, but then he caught Bunny’s eye. The big man shook his head, then nodded past the end of the overturned Humvee. Top staggered away from the vehicle and looked past it. The Locust hangar had been at the edge of the complex, the outermost of eleven buildings. Most of the buildings were empty as the base dwindled toward complete decommission, but there was a security shack, crews quarters, and the aeronautics lab. Four active buildings and seventy staff.
Or … there should have been.
Now all there was, as far as the eye could see, was burning rubble and towers of smoke that rose to the sky like the pillars of hell.
Area 51 had been wiped off the face of the earth.