“Chief’s ordered everybody out!” he shouted. “It’s going to collapse any minute!”
Branford cleared his throat. “The chief just sent us up to make sure no one else was inside!” he shouted, besting the fireman’s authoritative tone with his angriest drill sergeant bark.
Branford couldn’t see the fireman, so he had no way of reading him, of knowing if he was buying it or not.
“Call the chief on your radio if you want, to confirm, but we don’t have time to argue!” yelled Branford over the fire.
“Just hurry it up!” replied the fireman, and he was on his way.
They continued to climb, and after a moment, Alice complimented Branford on his ruse. “That was impressive.”
“Started my career in law enforcement,” Branford mentioned. “The mentality’s not that different from the military.” He wasn’t one for talking about the past—and his life hadn’t been nearly as interesting as Nolan’s—so he decided that that was all the explanation he’d offer.
At last they reached the top floor, and both of them were winded and starting to feel the effects of the smoke. Branford led them into the big central room with the broken skylight. He felt the crunch of glass and debris beneath his shoes, though he couldn’t hear it over the din of the burning building.
“Nolan!” Branford shouted.
The blaze all but encircled the entire room, and most of the furniture and the expensive rug on the floor were consumed as well. The man who’d attacked Nolan was nowhere to be found, and Branford saw no sign of the teenage girl either.
“Help me out here, Arjay,” he said. “I can barely see my own feet! Can you describe anything that Nolan’s close to?”
“He’s behind a broken chair with, I believe, green upholstery,” replied Arjay in his ear.
“Copy that.” Branford canvassed the area, peering carefully through the smoke and taking steps cautiously to avoid the spreading fire and any dangers they couldn’t see.
“There!” he shouted, pointing, and he and Alice ran to the spot.
It was indeed a carved wooden chair with dark green fabric. Branford knelt down to scan the ground up close. He found a gloved human hand sticking out from under a sofa, atop which was an enormous support beam that had collapsed diagonally from one corner of the room.
The top of the wooden beam, touching the ceiling, was on fire, and the flames were slowly moving down toward the floor. The giant thing looked like it weighed half a ton, but Branford never hesitated. He crawled underneath an open section between the beam and the floor. On all fours, he put his back up against it.
“When I heave,” he shouted to Alice, “you pull him out as fast as you can!”
Using the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he flexed and strained with all his strength pushing against the ground. It felt like the heavy beam moved less than an inch, but he held on as long as he could, grimacing and holding his breath. He tried counting the seconds to help him focus, but it didn’t work.
By the time he reached four, Branford was already feeling wobbly, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do this more than another few seconds. The intense heat from the fire, the scarce oxygen . . . He couldn’t last—
“Got him!” shouted Alice, and Branford collapsed with a groan. The beam settled with a crack, and he crawled out from under it backward to see that the flames had nearly reached his back.
When he was out and could turn around, he found Alice already inspecting Nolan for damage.
“Good strong pulse,” she said, her voice loud enough to rise above the racket. “Looks like the bullet bounced off his hood without penetrating it, but it hit him like a hammer to the head. He’s out cold.”
“The shot was fired from point-blank range,” confirmed Branford, remembering the sight of it from watching through Nolan’s goggles. Seeing the crazed man with the gun point it directly at the camera was something he wouldn’t forget anytime soon. The man’s face had been blood red, his eyes filled with so much pain and hate . . .
Another thought occurred to him, and he glanced around at the floor. But there was no sign of the gun.
Another beam collapsed, this time on the other side of the room, sending wild embers scattering across the floor.
“I don’t think I can carry him,” said Branford wearily. “I’m weak and shaky now.”
Alice frowned, examining Nolan again. “His legs don’t look like they took any damage,” she muttered. She searched through the medical kit for a moment, retrieved a tiny vial, and held it under his nose.
The smelling salts did their work, forcing Nolan to twitch himself awake to escape from the powerful odor. When he fully came to, he started violently with wide eyes and looked up at Alice in shock.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Then he spotted Branford standing above him.
“Can you walk?” asked Alice.
Nolan willed himself to his feet, swaying wildly but refusing to yield. “Take these, General. Use the night vision,” he said to Branford, handing the old man his goggles. “Lead the way.”
29
A re you feeling all right?” asked Alice when Nolan awoke the next morning in his own bed. He was still wearing his clothes from last night, and Alice sat next to the bed, reading a book and watching over him.
No, he was not all right. From what he could feel, he knew he had a concussion from the two blows to the head, and he had a strong urge to cough, tasting the burnt tang of smoke in his throat. Smoke inhalation, no doubt.
But it was more than that. As his memories of the previous night came back in a rush, he suddenly felt a strong need to punch something. He would have preferred to pummel the face of the person who’d signed off on that botched operation. But since that wasn’t going to happen, he made a mental appointment with the professional-grade punching bag in his small training area off beyond his bunk as soon as he’d gotten some answers.
He stood up, and Alice immediately rushed to his side.
“Stop!” she cried. “Lie back down! You’ve got to take it easy for at least—”
“No, no way, I can’t,” he said, brushing off her words as if they were meaningless.
Alice continued to protest while Nolan massaged his aching temples and walked unsteadily toward the Cube. When Alice saw that he wasn’t going to listen, she came up beside him and offered herself as something he could lean on to steady himself.
“You are the most stubborn person . . .” she grumbled.
“Tell me what happened back there,” he said, walking inside the Cube. “Tell me what those people died for.”
Branford glanced up without expression, as if he’d been expecting Nolan to walk in at any moment. Alice remained at his side, while Arjay was in his corner working as usual, though when he saw Nolan, he put his tools down and came nearer.
“That was the OCI, right?” Nolan asked.
“Nobody’s saying,” replied Branford. “The major news networks have barely mentioned the fire; that’s not big news these days. Seems pretty clear-cut though.”
“Their actions were owed to poor intelligence?” suggested Arjay.
“That, or they just made a bad call,” Branford said.
“Could it have been an honest mistake?” asked Alice.
“No,” declared Nolan, thinking back on the woman he saw kneeling over the two female dead bodies. “They were arrogant. Thought they couldn’t make a wrong move.”
Branford was pensive. “Soon as word gets out, the OCI’s days are numbered. Unless they try to bury it.”
Nolan frowned. “Thor would never do that.”
The room fell silent as everyone was suddenly reminded of Nolan’s close friendship with Thornton Hastings, the president of the United States. The world leader who currently believed that Nolan was dead, just as everyone else did.
“Perhaps he is no longer the man you knew,” suggested Arjay.
Nolan considered this, but only for a moment. “The things that . . . when we we
re taken captive, we were put through, I mean we saw . . . atrocities. Brutality. We vowed that if we ever escaped from that hell, we would do whatever it took to make the world a place where things like that never happen. We were brothers, and we promised each other. He would never go back on that.”
“How can you be certain?” asked Arjay.
“Because I haven’t.”
The room was quiet again. Nolan knew that Branford especially was probably absorbing this little snippet about his time in captivity. No one knew the horrific things they’d seen and been subjected to back then—not the full extent of it. Much of it was just too awful to speak of or put into an official report. And until now, no one on earth knew that he and Hastings had made this vow to each other.
“All the same,” said Branford, breaking the silence at last, “I’d feel better if we put up something on the website, made a brief statement. Just to beat them to the punch, in case some zealous White House aide decides to shift the blame in our direction.”
Months ago, even before Times Square, Arjay had volunteered to build Nolan a website at thereisabetterway.com. It would be a place where Nolan could address public concerns without having to use his real voice, as well as a rallying point in cyberspace for all of Nolan’s activities. Arjay had gotten so into it that he was now maintaining a mailing list that he used to send out daily recommendations of things that anyone could do to help their fellow man and make New York City a better place—or really, any part of the world—on behalf of The Hand.
Nolan wasn’t pleased, but he conceded. “Fine. Just keep it brief and don’t point any fingers.”
“ ‘Grief fills the heart as condolences are sent out to the victims of the tragic events that took place last night in Manhattan, and their families. . . .’ ” mumbled Arjay to himself, composing out loud. He turned and left for his workspace, continuing to mutter.
“What about the man that attacked me?” asked Nolan, turning back to Branford.
Branford nodded gravely. “That’s probably the most troubling part of the whole thing.”
30
Branford ran his hands over the keys and called up a recording of everything Nolan’s glasses had recorded that night. It took just a few seconds of scanning to reach the moment Nolan had referred to, when the mystery man arrived on the scene. Branford showed the results of the facial recognition program, declaring that the guy’s name was Yuri Vasko.
“Who is he?” Nolan asked.
Branford pulled up an FBI dossier on Yuri Vasko and magnified it on one of his screens. “Small time crime lord. Ukrainian national, immigrated to the U.S. with a few others some fifteen years ago. Operates in downtown Manhattan, but runs a pretty small empire compared to most of the others. Got a hand in a bunch of different pots—everything from drugs to extortion. His FBI file says he has a natural talent for profiling his enemies, understanding them inside and out.”
Another few keystrokes, and photos of Vasko were on the main screen. Nolan’s eyes lit up. “That’s the woman and the teenager I saw. They were killed in the raid.”
“Vasko’s wife and kid,” said Branford with a bit of hesitancy. A murder in the family of any crime lord would require an answer of blood vengeance.
“Look there,” said Nolan, pointing to a smaller detail on the screen. “He was known to be Russian Mafia before moving to the U.S.”
“Maybe he still is,” suggested Branford. “Or maybe he’s doing his own thing now.”
The Russian Mafia was a relatively new subset of organized crime, birthed at the end of the Cold War. It began with former Soviet soldiers and KGB agents who acted as war profiteers and black marketers during the reign of Communism. When that ended, some turned mercenary for hire while others joined together under a single umbrella that now operated very similarly to the American Mafia.
“Oh my word,” said Alice, speaking up for the first time. She pointed to a different screen, where pages were scrolling up from Vasko’s FBI profile. “That just said he likes to kill his enemies by forcing them to swallow and choke on wet cement. He dumps the bodies in the ocean.”
Nolan’s eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.
“So he’s dirty, he’s ruthless, and he’s intelligent,” said Branford, summing it up. “He follows his own set of rules, and murder doesn’t bother him. His FBI profile says that someday he could be the most dangerous crime boss since Al Capone.”
“This is the guy that thinks I murdered his family,” said Nolan.
Branford nodded. “You’ve just made a blood enemy of one of the most dangerous men in the country.”
Nolan shook his head. “If he’s a crime lord, then he was already my enemy.”
He glanced over at Alice, saw that her expression was severe. “What? Do you know this guy?”
“I think I’ve been here long enough. How is it that you have access to all this information?” she asked, her eyes pouring over the various screens that surrounded them.
Nolan glanced at the old man. “The uplink.”
Branford frowned and sighed. “She knows everything else.”
Nolan had designed the surveillance cube himself. The idea was that it would be tied into an advanced surveillance computer that was equipped to coordinate live satellite feeds, traffic copters, unmanned drones, and any home or business security cameras that the authorities could override and look through themselves. The system was set up and in place, per Nolan’s specific instructions, long before his debut in Times Square, but it was just a shell without any data pumping through it.
About two weeks before the events in Times Square, he’d explained to Branford how he was going to pull off linking their hardware to existing surveillance software and systems—the kind of stuff that no one but the government owned. As with everything else, he’d figured out how he was going to accomplish this years in advance.
As he’d told Branford that day, his plan was to piggyback onto government surveillance systems, giving unlimited access to the most secure systems in the country.
When he explained it to Branford, Nolan had to fight the urge to grin; he was particularly proud of this part. “Remember Marty?”
Branford’s eyebrows knotted. “Martinez? That runt that got assigned to my unit during our second tour?”
Nolan nodded. “Care to guess where he works now?” He paused for effect. “CIA. Covert Surveillance division.”
Branford let out a long breath, understanding now but not entirely on board. “Kid could barely walk in a straight line, much less fire a weapon; he was a liability to the entire unit. And I was hard on him for it. Why would he help us?”
“I saved his life,” Nolan said. “Twice.”
So Nolan had called up his old friend, later that same day.
“All I’m asking for is remote piggyback access to the mainframe, and that you put in some masking subroutines to make it so no one can tell we’re accessing it,” Nolan said into the small satellite phone Arjay had programmed for him to route through an endless loop of towers and servers, putting its calls beyond anyone’s ability to trace.
“ ‘All you’re asking for . . . ’ ” On the other end of the line, Martinez swore. “As if that’s some small thing. You’re asking for a lot more than that and you know it!” he hissed. Nolan imagined the short, skinny man, suit and tie, sitting in his closed-door office and trying to remain casual to passersby while the very conversation he was having was a betrayal to his oath as a CIA officer.
Martinez was probably sweating, a thought that gave Nolan an odd sense of amusement.
“This is treason,” Martinez whispered. “If anyone found out, I’d be in front of the firing squad! And do I even want to know how you managed to fake your own death?”
“No,” Nolan replied, “but if I pulled that off, then that should tell you how far I’m willing to go to protect the uplink—and your involvement.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
Nolan hardened. “You owe me
, Marty. This is me cashing in.”
As he finished his story, Alice screwed up her brow.
“You don’t approve,” he suggested, surprised to find himself bothered by the thought.
“I’m not overjoyed,” she told him. “But that’s not what I’m thinking.”
He regarded her. “What, then?”
Alice locked those piercing eyes of hers on his. “The way you all talk about this stuff. It’s so cold. Your determination to keep going, even though you’re hurt . . . It’s all a big military operation to you. You can’t stop until the job is done. Everything in life can’t be defined in military terms, you know.”
Nolan was taken aback by this. It was a notion that had never occurred to him. Just one reply came to mind; it was the only answer he had. “I’m a soldier, Alice. It’s all I know.”
Her expression became hard as she pointed at the exit. “Those people out there on the streets that you’re so eager to help? They don’t need a soldier. They need a hero.”
31
How did this happen?” demanded President Hastings from the head of the table, slamming a single fist onto the hard surface to punctuate his words.
His underlings—Chief of Staff Marcus Bailey, OCI Director Sebastian Pryce, OCI Agents Janssen and Lively, and a few others—were seated around an oval table made of dark walnut. The black walls and dark light in this underground room at the White House allowed them to see the big screens surrounding the room with greater clarity, but it only fed Hastings’ feelings of anger and gloom.
Jonah Janssen was the first to speak up. “Sir, we have reason to believe that the informants who provided the intel that led us to Vasko’s home were on the payroll of a rival crime syndicate in New York.”
“What?” said Hastings, leaning forward and not believing what he’d heard.
“Our intelligence about Vasko’s operation,” said Director Pryce, a dour, overweight man with tiny eyes, pencil-thin lips, and a thick goatee, “came from a combination of four spoken testimonies given to the OCI. The physical location of Vasko’s headquarters is a closely guarded secret inside his organization. The individuals who gave us information presented intel that we triple and quadruple checked. But this morning, one of our informants confessed, under duress, to having been paid to give us false data.”
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