Sam saw a huge and intensely bright flash of green, and then he felt himself being lifted on a ball of glowing green gas. It burned like fire and the flames punched him into the air and across the street and through the window of a restaurant. In the movies, windows break easily and people are rarely hurt.
In real life they are made from thick, tempered glass, and smashing through them is akin to flying through a cutlery store. Those big, wickedly sharp pieces of glass did not break easily, and they punished Sam—oh yes, they punished him—for his rude passage through. They slashed at him like knives, like spears, like swords. Seeding the air with his blood.
Pieces of the Ford Focus, the debris that lay atop it, the Kawasaki, and the biker also chased Sam through the window. All along the street, windows shattered and car alarms blared and people screamed because they thought it was all starting up again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CORNER OF WHITTIER STREET NW AND HARLAN PLACE NW
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Calpurnia called the turns and I fought the traffic. D.C. looked like a war zone. I was hoping that it actually wasn’t, that we were wrong about what was going on.
I also hope that politicians are honest and Santa Claus is real.
The sky was filled with helicopters of every stripe, and there was blood on the sidewalks.
The street Doc thought might be a location for another bomb was impossible to access because of damage and emergency vehicles. So I parked, put on a vest that could stop shrapnel, fished a tool kit from the back, clicked my tongue for Ghost, and told Calpurnia to lock up. Walking was painful as all hell. I said fuck it and jogged.
That was fun. Every nerve ending from my shoulder blades to the tops of my thighs was sending me hate mail. Ghost ranged ahead and glared people out of our way. I had a DHS badge hung around my neck on a lanyard, but nobody stopped to look, and no one asked to see the badge up close. Everyone was dealing with their own stuff, and they had a lot on their plates. I saw two Latino boys, both dressed like they were either in a gang or wanted to be seen that way, doing first aid on an old white man with a leg injury. I saw a young Asian man sitting cross-legged in the middle of the street, face in his hands, weeping. He looked untouched, but that was a relative concept. I saw a heavyset black woman whose face was covered with ash walking slowly across the street, eyes seeing nothing. She had pieces of burned newspaper sticking to her clothes. A dead cat lay on the hood of a crushed Volvo. There were two houses on the corner where I parked. One had collapsed into a sinkhole and smoke curled up from the splinters of the room; the other was absolutely untouched.
Flash images of hell.
Or maybe purgatory. Not sure of the difference. Ask a priest, or maybe a surrealist filmmaker.
We ran.
The target was on Second Street, Northwest, just off of Whittier. The through street was ruptured and water shot upward from a broken main. I had to circle wide to keep from being drenched. Cars on both sides of the street had been upended and lay on their sides, or on lawns, or atop one another like copulating metal turtles. A few people were with the cars, removing stuff, or maybe stealing it. Looks the same in a crisis. Three teens were huddled together, laughing at something inside one of the cars. It annoyed me so I told them to fuck off. Then I saw that the windshield was cracked and splashed red, and they weren’t laughing. They were crying. A figure sat belted into the car, but from the slack way the head lolled on the neck I could read the story. It did not matter that the kids hadn’t heard me yell at them, but I knew I’d just bought myself some evil karma for my quick and stupid judgment.
Damn.
I moved on quickly, coward that I am, and I applied a thin veneer of salve to my conscience by calling it in to the TOC. Someone would come, I told myself. Sure. And that would make it all better, right?
There was a Harley-Davidson parked near four cars that were heaped like discarded toys, and to the left of that a man stood on the end of the soaked lawn. He looked ordinary enough. About my height, with sandy blond hair and sunglasses, jeans, and a heavy leather jacket. There was tension and frustration in his body language, but that seemed to fit, especially if one of the cars was his. But as I got closer my brain began picking out details that did not really fit with the moment. Two things really stood out. First, he was absolutely unmarked by blood, dirt, ash, or trauma. And the second thing was that he held a crowbar in his hands.
I slowed as I approached from his blind side, and signaled Ghost to be ready. The man was unaware of us. When we were fifty feet away I heard a cell phone ring. It was surprisingly loud, as if the ringer was turned all the way up. The man shifted the crowbar to one hand and removed a sleek cell with the other. I couldn’t hear what the caller said, but the man stiffened into a posture of animal alertness.
He began looking around as if suddenly expecting to find someone creeping up on him.
Which is when he saw me. At that same moment, Bug’s voice was in my ear telling me bad things about Sam Imura. I went for my gun. The man dropped the crowbar and ran, vanishing around the end of the pile of wrecked cars.
“Ghost—own!”
The big white shepherd, tired as he had to be, exploded into motion, transforming into a pale blur as he raced across the lawn and around the cars. I broke into a run, too, but it was slower, spoiled by pain and limping legs and a fatigue that had not yet been overwhelmed by adrenaline.
Then I heard Ghost utter a high, sharp cry of terrible pain.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CORNER OF WHITTIER STREET NW AND HARLAN PLACE NW
WASHINGTON, D.C.
I ran. Pain or not, I ran.
As I rounded the mound of dead cars, I saw Ghost first. He lay on the wet grass, twitching with terrible spasms, foam and spit flying from his gaping mouth, eyes wide, legs straight and rigid. It took my brain a microsecond longer to see and understand the two silver wires that ran from my dog’s shoulder to a tiny power pack that lay next to him. I knew that kind of gun. A multishot Taser that discharged the power pack of each round and automatically loaded the next.
I shot the man in the chest but he shot me almost at the same time. My brain processed the fact that my rounds should have knocked him way back, but didn’t. In the too-little time I had to understand it, it was obvious that he had some high-end body armor that absorbed impact as well as protected against penetration. But before I could adjust and park the next round in his brainpan, the flechettes of his Taser hit me in the shoulder.
He stayed on his feet and I went down.
If you have never been hit with a Taser, try it sometime. It’s almost exactly as much fun as being punted in the balls by an enthusiastic NFL placekicker, but there are no crowds to cheer. The power can range all the way up to a molar-melting million volts, and most shots will drop even a supermax prison yard monster for a minimum of thirty seconds. The one he used on me was a son of a bitch. You can feel it start, and for a split second you think, I got this. I can do this.
You can’t.
The electricity opens up your nerve endings and commandeers your nerve conduction and you go the hell down. Your entire body contracts into one massive cramp and even though you can scream, all that you manage is a prolonged and inarticulate howl.
Sure, there are stories of people shaking them off. I’ve even done it with some of the lower-wattage versions they use in training and demonstrations. This wasn’t one of those. This was military grade, and on the higher end of that scale. These are designed to put anyone down. It did not help one damn bit that I was twitching around on wet grass.
The power pack had a thirty-second charge, but the aftereffect of that level of stunner was going to leave me about as spry as a Gumby left out in the sun, and it would last for maybe five minutes. The man bent and picked up my pistol, and stuck it in the back of his belt. He did not shoot me with it. He glanced at my Department of Homeland Security badge and nodded to himself.
Then he went and fetched his dropped c
rowbar.
I twitched and thrashed and screamed and could not do a single useful thing. Voices in my ear—Bug and Doc—sounded like they were a hundred miles away, on the other side of a vast thunderstorm. I caught words, but each of them cracked open like fortune cookies in which no one had thought to include fortunes.
The man returned, and for a moment I thought he was going to strike me with the crowbar. Or worse, Ghost. He didn’t. Instead he went immediately to work on the trunk of one of the smashed cars. It took him maybe ten seconds to break the lock. It went up with a creak of protest. The man dropped the crowbar between Ghost and me, then bent to lift something out of the trunk. It was a device about the size of an old-fashioned boom box, but not shaped like that.
No. This was built like a small generator but with a large circular opening wrapped in coils of silver and copper wires.
My heart stopped beating for a moment. I was sure of it.
I knew that machine.
I’d seen two of them. Big ones. Much bigger than this. One was down in Antarctica. The other was in the basement of a mansion on the West Coast. I knew what those machines could do, and nothing I’d ever seen in life scared me as much as seeing one now, in the hands of some stranger.
He began walking toward the parked Harley, then stopped at the edge of the lawn, and looked down the street toward burning houses and the endless sound of sirens. Then he turned back to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you were me, you’d do the same. The war never ends, does it?”
I was incapable of speech. I wanted to ask what he meant. I wanted to tell him that he was a murderous bastard. All I could do was scream.
He nodded, though, as if I had agreed with his words. He went over to his bike and put the device into the cargo rack behind the saddle, wrapping it in a blue tarp and securing it with bungee cords. Then he put on a plain black helmet and swung his leg over. He started the engine, turned once more toward me, though now his face was nothing but a wall of curved, impenetrable plastic. He nodded to me.
Then he drove away.
The battery sputtered out and died in a puddle. I fought against the lingering pain and disorientation and rolled over onto hands and knees. Ghost was whimpering and trying to stand; and failing.
I lifted a trembling hand to tap my earbud. The ones we use are hardened against most kinds of power surges or shocks, but even so I was surprised that it still worked.
“C-Cowboy to T-T-TOC.”
Doc Holliday was right there, clear as a bell and urgent as a heart attack. “Cowboy, your telemetry is spiking. Are you all right?”
“No,” I gasped as I crawled over to Ghost and pulled him into my arms. “Nothing’s all right, goddamn it.”
“Did you locate the bomb?”
Ghost gave my face a feeble, desperate lick.
“It’s not a bomb,” I wheezed.
“You’re not making sense.…”
“It was a God Machine.…”
Ghost shivered and I bent and pressed my forehead against his and waited for the pain to stop.
Knowing it would not.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CITADEL OF SALAH ED-DIN
SEVEN KILOMETERS EAST OF AL-HAFFAH, SYRIA
ONE DAY AGO
The Arklight team moved through dusty shadows, following old maps and instinct. The leader was wise and older than she looked, and the others trusted her intuition when it came to missions like this. The older members of the team had walked through worse shadows than these with her and come out on the other side. Only the youngest of the team, Adina, Qadira’s grandniece, was new to field missions of this kind. She tried not to let her fear and apprehension show, but her words betrayed her nervousness.
“Won’t there be aftershocks?”
“Probably,” said her great-aunt.
“These walls are all broken,” said Adina. “Most of the ceiling has collapsed. What if—?”
Qadira stopped and turned to her, holding the flashlight so that they each leaned into a cone of its glow. “Listen to me,” she said. “There are always dangers. There will always be dangers. You know this. You were born into horror, and every day of your life until you were five was filled with dangers worse than anything down here. The walls may collapse, the rest of the roof may fall, and Gaia might swallow us whole. All of that could happen, but if so … then what?”
“We would die.”
“Yes. We would, as so many of our sisters and mothers and daughters have died. So, tell me then, Adina … what is death? What is it to women such as us?”
Adina straightened and took a breath. “Death is a doorway,” she recited. It was part of a very old catechism the Mothers of the Fallen had written for themselves during their centuries of captivity in the breeding pits of the Red Knights.
“What is beyond the doorway?” asked the older woman.
“There is life beyond life beyond life.”
Qadira smiled and touched Adina’s face and hair and shoulders.
“Men fear death,” said one of them. “But we are women. We give birth to ourselves.”
“Death is a doorway to life,” said Qadira. Then she grinned, and the lines on her face creased like a playful monkey’s. “But let’s not wait for death to catch us. He is slow and we are … what…?”
“We are fast,” said Adina, smiling in spite of herself.
“Yes, we are.”
And, true to their litany, the women, old and young, moved off quickly through the darkness beneath the broken earth.
Ten minutes later they found a man sitting with his back to a wall. He was covered with dust and blood, and his eyes were filled with madness. A woman lay on the ground with her head on his lap. She, too, was bloody. A pistol, with the slide locked back, was on the ground near them.
Both the man and the woman were as pale as ghosts.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CORNER OF WHITTIER STREET NW AND HARLAN PLACE NW
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It took a long time to get back to the car.
Ghost limped along on wobbly legs and we both had to stop and rest. Whatever kind of stun gun was used had more kick than anything I’d ever even heard of. Nearly lethal, but not actually.
When I reached the Betty Boop, I collapsed against it and stood there on macaroni legs, trembling and weak and stupid. The locks clicked open and I helped Ghost inside.
“Calpurnia,” I wheezed, “get a forensics team here. I want that car taken to the Warehouse. And find that motorcycle. Retask any drones you need and access all pertinent traffic cams. This guy doesn’t slip away, understood?”
“Of course, Cowboy,” she said briskly, then added, “You appear ill. According to the RFID chip, there is a ninety-two percent possibility that you have been Tased.”
“Well, no shit, Sherlock.”
“Don’t be snotty,” scolded the computer. “And watch your—”
“If you tell me one more time to watch my fucking language I’m going to open up your CPU and let Ghost take a piss in it.”
There was a beat. “Initiating a full medical diagnostic, Joseph.”
“Do that,” I said, and called Doc Holliday. “Tell me if Sam is alive.”
“He is,” Doc said, “but he’s in bad shape. Shrapnel, shock, and blood loss. An evac team is flying him out of D.C. and when I know more you’ll know. He was wearing a bodycam but it was damaged and the video feed is distorted. Our people are running all kinds of filters and we should have something soon. One thing I can tell you, though, is the blast that took him down was weird. Not orange or yellow flame. It was bright green. That jibes with witness reports from the other explosions.”
“What the hell blows up green?”
“For fireworks,” she said, “they use barium chloride. People throw copper wire into campfires to make the flames burn green, but there’s a longer answer about color spectrums, heat, and gas that you don’t want to hear.”
I gave myself another jab of p
ainkillers. “No,” I hissed. “I don’t.”
“So, short answer is we don’t know why the explosions are green. Or, why they’re so hot. Teams that have managed to examine blast sites report a great degree of melting, indicating intensely high temperatures. We don’t know what it means, but it’s weird and I don’t like weird unless I’m in bed with someone.”
“Is Sam going to be okay?”
“Honey, he’s a mess and the only people who’ve seen him are EMTs. I hope so, but right now I can’t put good money on any bets.”
“What about Auntie…?” I asked, afraid of almost any answer.
“Alive and holding on,” said Doc, “but she’s critical and, trite as it is to say this, they’re doing everything they can. Seriously.”
“Will she make it?”
“Cowboy, you’re asking me to read the future, and I left my tarot cards at home. If I was still a church lady I’d pray to one of them saints, but far as I know nobody up there’s taking calls from this Texas gal.”
Right about then, Church joined the call from his jet, which was nearing D.C., and asked for a full report. I didn’t omit a single detail.
When I was done there was a solid two-count, and Church said, “A God Machine?”
“A small one, but, yeah, that’s what it looked like, boss,” I said. “So, any of you geniuses want to tell me what the hell’s going on? Earthquakes, insanity, mass suicides and murder, and now this. And, if this thing was the same as all the others, the ones that exploded, then why? What’s the point of any of this?”
“We can draw a few conclusions,” said Doc. “These devices, whether they’re actually the same technology that Prospero Bell created or not, were positioned around the epicenter of this quake. They have to be involved, but we don’t know how. I read all of the reports obtained during the Kill Switch matter and there is absolutely nothing in there about effects on plate tectonics. Nothing.”
Deep Silence Page 24
