He drew the vial from his pocket. He could just flush the damn thing. It wouldn’t cause much harm—the half-life of VX in air was short. The only people in danger would be a few sanitation workers at the worst. He could put an end to this now.
He held the vial over the toilet. It was the right thing to do. The other sleeper agents—if there were any left—might be successful, but he would stop his part. It would end there with him.
Then something else took over, another side of him, cool and hard like the vial in his hands. The mission asserted itself. The mission mattered, and nothing else. He put the vial back in its case, and the case back in his pocket. He waited for the nausea to pass and his breathing to normalize. Then he stood up and washed his face. The mission would continue. He would fulfill his purpose.
Chapter 117
“We’ve got a hit,” said Scott over the phone. “Ansley just used his keycard in a water station. Downtown. I’m sending you the address. Get in there and I’ll see what I can do to get you inside.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, pulling the Camaro out of its parking space. It was a five-minute drive, tops.
“There’s something else,” said Scott. “That water station—one of the pipes in there leads straight into the Pentagon. If Ansley gets VX in the pipes and the Legion sets off a fire alarm in there, we’re looking at more than twenty thousand dead, and the entire Department of Defense wiped out.”
Morgan stepped hard on the accelerator, swerving through traffic. The clock was ticking.
He made the Hayes Street Water Pumping Station in two minutes flat, bringing the car to a stop across the street with screeching tires. Like most of its kind, no one would have guessed that this was a utility building. If anything, it looked like a Georgian manor house or gallery. But inside, pipes that a full-grown man could crawl through were pumping thousands and thousands of gallons of water every second.
He picked up the phone and dialed. “Scott. Did you get me a way in?”
“Still working on it.”
“We don’t have time. He’s already inside.”
“It’s a complex government security system. I’m doing what I can!”
“Too slow.” As they were speaking, a woman turned into the path to the door of the pumping station. This was the time to do something really stupid.
Morgan got out of his car and ran as fast as he could without attracting too much attention, hand on his weapon in its holster. As she swiped her keycard, he grabbed her arm and showed her the gun. The blood drained from her face.
“This is a national security emergency. I don’t have time to explain. But I need you to get me inside the pumping chamber. I need to find Bruce Ansley.” She was like a deer in headlights.
Morgan stepped inside the well-lit space. The noise of machinery was deafening and constant. A row of eight enormous blue pipes rose out of the ground, each passing through a bright yellow pump twelve feet off the ground and plunging back underground. The pumps were accessible through catwalks that circled the facility.
A man in a blue button-down shirt was standing at one of those pumps. Morgan climbed the stairs to the catwalk, the sound of machines covering up the metallic clang of his footsteps.
He approached Bruce Ansley to find him holding an open vial over the ancillary intake valve on the pump. He seemed to be working up the courage to do it.
Morgan drew his PPK.
“Bruce!” he shouted, barely audible over the noise. Stop!”
Ansley looked up, wide-eyed. His shaking hand brought the vial over the intake pipe. Morgan had a clear shot, but he couldn’t risk shooting him and have the vial fall in.
“Don’t do it! Step away from the pipe!”
“You step off!” he shouted, voice trembling. “I have to do this!”
“You don’t! You’ll kill thousands of people, Ansley! You don’t have to be that man.”
“This is what I am. This is what I’m for.”
“You get to choose. That’s what it means to be human.”
“I killed my wife. Oh God, I killed my wife.” His hand shook. His fist closed tight. “Step away!”
With his free hand, Morgan dialed Alex. “Steady!” he said. “Look! I’m not coming closer.”
He brought the phone to his ear. “Dad? What’s that sound?”
“Is she there?” Morgan asked. “Will she talk?”
“Hold on.”
Ansley looked perplexed. “Who are you talking to?”
“Dad,” Alex said, “she’s here. She’s ready.”
Morgan held the phone out to Ansley. “It’s your daughter. She’d like to talk to you.”
Ansley reached out a tentative hand and took the phone.
“Hello? Dad?”
Pam was curled up on her bed with her stuffed animals. Her voice was shaking. Alex, sitting across from her, held her left hand tight.
“Dad, I don’t want you to hurt anyone else. Please. Dad, please, don’t do it.”
At the pumping station, Ansley was tearing up, his face contorted with anguish. “Pam,” he stammered. He drew the vial away.
“That’s it,” said Morgan. “Just put it down.”
“No!” he screamed. His grip tightened on the vial.
Morgan adjusted the aim of his gun. “Down! Now!”
Ansley wavered. And then his face set in determination. His hand twitched toward the valve—
Morgan shot. The bullet hit him in the chest.
The vial slipped from his fingers and shattered on the grated surface. The VX pulverized in the air, deadly particles dispersing.
Morgan bolted, holding his breath as Ansley convulsed on the catwalk. He stopped long enough to pull the fire alarm as he passed it on the way down the stairs. The siren shrieked.
Morgan didn’t inhale until he reached open air. The fire alarm proved to be unnecessary—if everyone had not already evacuated after Morgan had muscled his way in, the gunfire was enough to do it. Just four employees for the whole facility, counting the woman who had let him in. All were across the street, huddled together. They ran away when they saw him.
Hearing the sound of approaching police sirens, Morgan ran back to the Camaro. He took off, passing the wave of police cars four blocks from the pumping station. They paid him no heed.
Morgan stopped at a convenience store a few miles away to make two calls from the pay phone. The first, to 911, putting in an anonymous tip that there was a nerve agent inside the pumping station. The second was to his daughter, telling her to stay put.
Chapter 118
Morgan met Alex at Ansley’s house. They left Alex’s motorcycle behind and drove together out of the city, going north. Morgan had a headache from fatigue, and the headlights from the oncoming cars made him squint with pain. But what worried him more was Alex, quiet as a stone in the passenger seat.
“You did good today,” he said. “I haven’t met many people in the business who can think on their feet as well as you.”
She mumbled some vague thank you. Now he was worried. If there was anything that never failed to cheer her up, it was praising how good she was as an agent.
“Is this about the girl?”
“Her mom and dad, dead the same day,” she said. “I thought she could save him.”
Morgan sighed. “Listen, kid. Things don’t always work out. Sometimes things pile on one another, and sometimes one person gets the brunt of it. Sometimes it’s an innocent girl.”
Alex looked out the window at the suburban landscape, the quiet family homes, all the people who escaped the horror of a homeland attack that day. “Do you think we used her?”
Morgan took her hand in his. “You’re going to have to make some tough calls in this line of work. Can’t be helped. But to answer your question, no. I don’t think you used her. You didn’t get her involved in this. You were there for her in maybe her darkest time. And you gave her a chance to turn things around. That was all you could do. Just because you couldn’t make it b
etter doesn’t mean you were responsible for making it worse.”
“Doesn’t feel much different.”
“Well, it is. And it’s important to know that difference when you’re involved in this business.” He squeezed her hand. “I know you feel guilty. You pushed Simon because you were after the thrill. That was wrong, and I’m happy that you feel bad about that.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “It shows you have a conscience. Ethics. It’s not such a common thing. And I know it was your conscience that guided you today.”
“How do you know the difference?” she asked.
“Practice. And even then you make a mistake now and then.”
Alex didn’t answer, but Morgan saw that her face had lost the tension it was holding before, and in less than an hour she had fallen asleep. Morgan was considering stopping for dinner when his phone rang.
“Morgan. It’s Karen. I looked at the Zeta data dump.” She was going a mile a minute. “Everything they took from us before they torched the place. It was a massive load, terabytes on terabytes.”
“Karen, slow down. What are you talking about?”
“I tried to track the transfer, but his data packets are relayed pseudorandomly through communications satellites. That has the effect of obscuring where they’re coming from and where they’re going. But with all this data, I wrote a machine learning algorithm that saw the signal in the noise.”
“Karen!” said Morgan. “What are you telling me?”
“We found him,” said O’Neal. “We found Praetorian.”
Chapter 119
The Black Hawk helicopter flew low over Appalachia, skirting the mountaintops that were catching the first rays of the rising sun. The forest seemed to stretch forever in every direction, a choppy, wavy sea of green.
Morgan held onto the strap, looking forward, trying to make out Praetorian’s hideout before it was announced. It would still be a few minutes before it came into view. He turned his attention to Conley, doing his mindfulness practice, and Lily, her pretty face lined with preoccupation. The four other men, on loan from Zeta’s umbrella organization, Project Aegis, showed the usual mixture of emotions—anticipation, excitement, dread, a solemn sense of duty.
As for Morgan, energy pumped through his veins. He hadn’t slept in at least forty hours, but his body somehow knew to keep him, at whatever cost, strong and alert.
I’m coming for you, you bastard. I’m coming for you.
“Coming up on the drop-off area,” said the pilot over the communicator. Morgan checked his equipment—MAC-10 on a sling around his shoulder, Walther PPK in his shoulder holster, snub-nosed Smith & Wesson on his right ankle, and combat knife on his left, flashbang frag grenade. He curled and extended his fingers, checking his gloves for flexibility.
All systems go.
Morgan braced as the helicopter lost speed and came to a hover two hundred yards away from the house. He loosed the rappel rope and was first to push off, sliding down until his boots hit the snow, then leaping away to make room for the next man down.
It was dark enough that Morgan brought down the night-vision goggles over his eyes.
A flash of red.
“Take cover!”
A fwoosh filled the air as the surface-to-air missile rocketed toward the chopper and exploded in a fireball that lit up the dawn forest.
“Run!”
Morgan dashed away from the fiery carcass of the chopper as it bore down on top of them. The others scattered.
“Squad!” he said. “Move in!”
They advanced toward the house in the battle swarm formation, covering each other as they moved from tree to tree.
A single gunshot—BANG—rang out from the house—rifle fire, though Morgan couldn’t make out which. A man fell to the ground and didn’t get up again.
“Suppressive fire!” Morgan called. The men loosed bursts from their submachine guns as they moved, in their best approximation of the direction of the gunman.
Morgan leapt out from behind the tree. Muzzle flash. The gunshot caught him square in the chest.
He fell backward, gasping for air. His hand moved to the spot where the bullet had hit. No blood. His Kevlar had held.
He rolled out of the way, and another bullet hit the ground where he had been a split second before. He stood, taking cover against the tree. He felt his chest, bruised and aching but in one piece.
“Hold position!” he yelled.
Something wasn’t right. This sniper was getting a reliable shot every few seconds even against suppressive fire. It was inhuman. It was—
Morgan flipped the night-vision goggles over his eyes and switched to infrared. He peered out from behind the tree. He found the barrel, showing bright on the infrared. But there was no rifleman. No human heat signature at all.
The barrel turned toward him. He drew back his head, the bullet whizzing past his ear.
“It’s a machine!” Its aim was uncanny, and it stopped only long enough to calculate the trajectory of its next target. “Cease fire!” The bursts of suppressive fire stopped.
Morgan flipped up the heat vision and squinted in the half-light, peeking around the other side of the tree. The muzzle was sticking out of a small pillbox bunker. It turned back to him. He ducked, and another bullet shot past him.
“We need to move together,” he said. “Never spend more than five seconds in the open. I want each of you to know where you’re going next. In position?” He got confirmation from the five remaining members of the team.
“Move out!”
He ran, pounding the hard frozen ground. One, two, three, four—the crack of gunfire.
“Anyone hit?” said Morgan, back to a thick sycamore.
“Just a graze,” said Conley.
“Okay, again,” he said. “On my mark. Go!”
Morgan ran. One, two, three, four—gunshot.
“Augh!”
“Man down,” said Conley.
“I’m alive.” It was one of the others, who went by the code name Stone. “Bastard got my leg. I’m out of this one.”
Morgan gritted his teeth. He was close enough now. He knew what he had to do.
“Cover me. I’m going for it.”
He ran out from behind the tree—straight for the gun. Morgan counted—one—in his head—two—as the rifle turned—three—to aim—four—straight at him.
Morgan dove out of the way as it fired, and the bullet hit the ground.
The others took his initiative and stopped taking cover, running straight for the pillbox instead.
BANG.
Out of the corner of his eye, Morgan saw a petite female figure hitting the ground with a somersault and getting up again.
Atta girl, Lily.
Morgan was close, but another runner passed him on his right, grenade in hand. He tossed it in like he was dunking a basketball and dropped to the ground. The muzzle turned, and Morgan was looking down the barrel of the rifle.
FOOM.
A muffled burst as the frag detonated. There was no muzzle flash.
Morgan ran, along with the rest of the team, and stood flush against the side of the house. Morgan took stock. Five of them left. He made out the outline of Conley’s nose in the half-light. And there was Lily, alive—but clutching her right arm.
Morgan examined the house—boxy, its first story made of stone, the other two built out of logs. The windows were boarded up, and a satellite dish protruded from the roof. Morgan signaled for Conley to lead Lily and one of the men around the left side of the house while Morgan took the right with the remaining member of tactical.
They crept around to the front of the house, where the vista opened to a sprawling valley. Where the hell was Conley?
There was no time to lose. Morgan signaled to the men and kicked in the door, taking the lead inside while the other took the rear.
BANG! BANG!
Two shots in the darkness, and his companion fell, dead.
“Drop the gun,” Praetorian ordered. “All the guns.”
He was truly, royally screwed.
Morgan let the MAC-10 clatter on the wooden floor, then unholstered his Walther and undid his grenade belt.
“The little one, too. Do you think I’m blind? And the knife. Kick them all over here.”
Morgan removed the snub-nose and the knife, too. Each scraped along the wooden floor as Morgan pushed them away with his foot.
The floodlights were shut off, each dimming from blinding to a mellow orange as they cooled. Morgan blinked against the afterimages, which faded to reveal the figures that surrounded him. Two men, approaching their thirties, he didn’t recognize. They were flanking Morgan on either side, each clutching a Daewoo K7. The Russian, Sergey, the Puppetmaster, sullen, crazy-eyed. Centurion he recognized, and next to him a woman he didn’t—black hair with purple-frosted tips. Face like a china doll. And next to her—
Praetorian. Clean-shaven, hair cut, in a black turtleneck and denim jeans.
“You clean up good,” Morgan said.
“Is this the one who killed my kids?” asked the Russian. He spat on the ground.
“You are a real rock in my shoe,” said Praetorian. “I regret not killing you the first time we met.”
“As I recall, you tried.” Morgan examined his environment—a bare room, taking up the entire first floor of the house, with a wooden staircase in the corner leading up to the second floor, and another on the side corner leading down into the basement.
Praetorian laughed. “You know what happens when I try.”
“I stop you. And now I found your little castle.”
“Tell me when that starts working out for you,” Praetorian said.
“And what do you do now?” Morgan asked. “Your network has turned on you. The sleepers have all been neutralized.”
“That reminds me,” said Praetorian, picking up Morgan’s PPK and shooting Sergey in the head. Despite his light frame, the Russian hit the floor with a heavy thud.
Arch Enemy Page 37
