“We’d like to avoid those,” Warner interjected dryly. “So, we need to track down the attackers?”
“If at all possible,” the Colonel agreed. “Unfortunately, with OSPI in tatters, there’s not much I can send in terms of additional resources.”
“Our forensics people are already engaged at top priority,” the Major said. “Alston promised a briefing later today.”
“Good. Keep me informed, Major, Commander. The clock is ticking, and Washington won’t be giving us any more help.
“If we can give the President someone to publicly hang out to dry for Seattle, it will make my life easier,” he added. “The man is disturbingly uncomfortable with even lies of omission for someone in his position.”
#
As he was leaving Warner’s office, David’s phone chimed with an email from Alston, informing him that she thought they’d be ready to present their findings at sixteen hundred. She’d have a meeting room booked and would let him know.
Realizing he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere for at least another four hours, ONSET Thirteen’s Commander redirected to the main mess hall. While the individual offices and team dorms had full kitchens, in addition to the kitchenettes in many of the apartments, there was something to be said for the social value of eating in a shared environment.
The space was quiet today. They couldn’t afford to keep a third of the teams on Campus right now, so there were almost no ONSET agents on site. A lot of the support personnel had been scattered across the country, back-filling jobs normally taken on at OSPI HQ.
Normally, the hall had four different serving lines. There was only one running today, and the young man behind it looked almost grateful to have someone, anyone, come through.
As he was sitting down to eat, his phone chimed again, and he glanced at it.
Once you’ve had Alston’s show and tell, come see me.
-Charles.
David sipped his coffee carefully while he looked at the email. Charles had made a deal with the US government that he stayed hidden beneath the campus, which prevented him from putting his thirty-foot-long fire-breathing form into play to help ONSET. Instead, he used a custom-built computer rig to head up ONSET’s cyberwarfare division.
He suspected the dragon knew exactly what Alston was putting together—and that his take on it would definitely be worth listening to.
It better be—with all of the meetings, he was already going to be down one day of his seven.
Chapter 13
The forensics labs on the campus consisted of the third through eighth floors of the southernmost office tower. While most of the space was taken up with equipment that David recognized from his training—and a lot of equipment he suspected even trained CSI crews outside of Omicron wouldn’t recognize—they also had a set of glass-walled conference rooms on the eighth floor.
Since the rooms were intended for the kind of briefing that Alston had called David there for, they had an audiovisual setup more reminiscent of a home theater, which went oddly with the ubiquitous blue plush carpeting in the ONSET campus and the corporate-America-standard big conference table and leather swivel chairs.
The room dwarfed the small group who’d gathered in it. O’Brien was linked in by teleconference, but only David and Warner had joined Alston in person. The tall doctor wore the same lab coat as she’d been wearing when she’d arrived in Seattle and, from the bloodshot nature of her eyes, probably hadn’t slept in the intervening day.
“I take it you’re going straight from here to bed?” Warner said mildly as the Major studied Alston. “You look like death warmed over.”
“Not a chance, boss,” Alston replied. “I have at least one more top-priority item to bury first, though I’ll be trying to leave at something resembling my official office hours for once.” She shrugged. “This was urgent, so we hit it with everyone we had on deck and a few people we had to wake up.”
“What have we got?” David asked.
“A lot of data, not much in terms of answers,” the forensics head admitted. “I’ve turned over everything to our analysis team as we’ve identified it, and hopefully they have some better interpolation, but I wanted to cover the high level of what we’ve learned.”
She picked up a remote and turned on the projector, lighting up the wall with an image of the conference center taken from above. Dozens of small icons marked locations her people had flagged and photographed, and an inset image of the helicopter crash site had a similar covering of icons.
“We have, quite literally, thousands of photos and pieces of evidence,” she warned them. “It will take us weeks to sift through and analyze everything we’ve retrieved, so I made the call when we returned to the Campus to focus on three primary points of concern that seemed most likely to give us a lead: the attackers’ gear, the attackers themselves, and the helicopters.
“We actually did the first-sweep assessment of the attackers first, but something we found in the gear sent me back to review the pictures and do a few exploratory autopsies,” she admitted. “So, if Commander O’Brien is receiving everything and none of you have an issue, I’d like to start with their equipment.”
“I’m watching you on a laptop,” the werewolf pointed out. “I’ve receiving everything, but just assume I can’t read anything you put on the screen.”
“It’s your show, Dr. Alston,” David told her. “Show us what you found.”
“Good boy,” she said approvingly, tapping a command on her remote and bringing up an array of photos.
“All of the ground troops were equipped identically,” she noted, using the pointer on the remote to pick out the armor vest.
“The armor set is US-manufactured tactical gear, sold around the world,” she noted. “Depending on dealer and quantity discounts, the whole set is between twenty and forty thousand dollars a pop. No augmented-reality functionality, but otherwise absolute-top-of-the-line gear. Most of their fatalities were from Agent Johnston’s machine gun; your sidearms simply did not have the penetrating power to punch through their armor.”
David had already been grateful that Stone had brought along the big gun. From the sounds of it, he might not have been grateful enough.
“Communications gear”—the laser pointer flicked to another set of photos—“is much the same. Expensive, high-quality gear built into the helmets. Encrypted local radios. Nothing else—none of them were carrying so much as a smartphone.
“All of the gear was fully sanitized,” Alston noted. “There are identification features on the armor that the manufacturer doesn’t think we know about, but even those had been removed. The armor and comms were almost certainly purchased legally, but we have no way of tracing back those purchases. The manufacturers involved supply gear to half the security companies, police forces, and bodyguard services in the United States.”
The laser pointed flicked over to the rifle, a familiar banana-clipped silhouette but cut in black steel instead of the usual gunmetal and wood.
“The rifle is an AK-47 variant manufactured in the United States. The manufacturer makes them semiauto only, but each of these has been professionally modified for full selective fire. Again, these are mass-produced and sold to a hundred different buyers, and the weapons were also professionally sanitized.”
“The suppliers were picked carefully, I’m guessing?” David asked. There was no way everything was from suppliers too large to trace specific orders by accident.
“Clearly,” Alston confirmed dryly. “All of the gear is also exported, and the vendors do significant business in South America and Africa. The equipment tells us that your attackers were well financed and well equipped, but the guns and armor don’t tell us much beyond that.
“Their bullets, however, are a more interesting story.”
The screen advanced to show a single photo, this of an emptied AK magazine with its bullets standing tip up next to it.
“These are copper-jacketed, silver-tipped hollow-point rounds,” A
lston told them. “ONSET uses a steel jacket. So did the armorers who assembled the Church of the Black Sun’s arsenal, the most common source of illegal silver ammunition we’ve encountered in the last month.”
The Church of the Black Sun had manufactured an almost incalculable amount of silver ammunition—and while the shattered Omicron forces had managed to lock down all of the Church’s weapons, they hadn’t managed to secure all of the ammo.
In-the-know scavengers had gone through the sites while Omicron had been re-finding its feet, and a lot of the Church’s bullets had ended up on the supernatural black market.
“So, where did they come from?” David asked, though from the sick expression on Warner’s face, the more experienced officers knew.
“We see these bullets a lot,” Alston told him quietly. “You’d have seen them in Montreal, Commander. The primary manufacturers of this style of silver rounds are the Vampire Familias.”
The Vampire Familias had been involved in supplying the Black Sun through a Montreal facility of theirs. ONSET Nine had been lent to the Canadians to help shut down that base, and David had ended up facing one of the oldest vampires in North America—and killing the man in one of his first demonstrations of his full power.
“Are we looking at vampire thralls then?” he asked.
“That’s what led me back to the bodies,” she replied. “None of them had bite marks or any of the other signs of thralldom, but we’ve only completed a couple of full autopsies.
“There’s none of the signs of chemical dependency we would recognize a thrall by,” she continued, “but thralls are hard to identify.”
A vampire thrall was a human addicted to vampire blood, a control method that was effective enough to provide the vampires with a degree of outright mind control over their victims. Many vampires would also feed on their thralls—hence checking for bite marks—but identifying a thrall was all but impossible in an autopsy.
“But the odds are that they were equipped, if nothing else, by the Familias,” David concluded grimly.
“Agreed,” Alston said.
“While we have no evidence that they’re thralls, an examination of the bodies showed some interesting patterns. All were white males between the ages of thirty and fifty. All had seen at least one previous gunshot wound. The skin of the handful we’ve fully autopsied has several markers suggesting significant exposure to sunlight, heat, and high temperatures.”
“So, they’re not from Seattle,” O’Brien pointed out from the video screen. “It’s raining here again.”
“My best guess would be Africans,” the doctor said calmly. “We’re running some genetic sequences and a few other things, trying to narrow it down, but I would guess that they are not from the United States.”
“But all of their gear is,” David pointed out.
“African or South American mercenaries, equipped locally,” Alston concluded flatly. “Partially briefed and properly equipped, but didn’t believe their brief when it came to the supernatural.”
“Probably not warned it was a suicide mission,” Warner added. “Mercenaries don’t buy in for those, no matter what you’re paying.”
“All of this is fascinating,” David interjected, “but doesn’t help us identify them.”
“I know,” Alston admitted. “The helicopters give us a couple more clues, though.”
She clicked the remote again, advancing to a new series of photos. These showed the crash site in one of Seattle’s parks—thankfully empty when the choppers had come down—and more photos of the debris laid out in the sterile labs on the Campus.
“This is an armed twin-engine helicopter,” she pointed out. “An older one, though the model is still in production. The Aérospatiale SA365N Dauphin,” she identified it calmly. “It can be equipped with weapons, as these ones obviously were.
“This particular model was built in the early nineties and sold to a number of civilian and military buyers. Most relevantly, I suspect, was that a number were sold to the apartheid-era South African military, and we know not all of the ones delivered ended up in the hands of the post-apartheid South African military.”
“And some of the missing ones, I’m guessing, ended up in the hands of mercenary groups?” David asked.
“Among other sources of machinery, yes,” she confirmed. “They’ve sanitized serial numbers and such, but that doesn’t work as well with helicopters as it does with guns. We might not be able to trace who owned them, but we know where they came from, which helps.”
“I don’t suppose someone officially imported any of these?” Warner asked.
“Not that my people have found,” the forensics head told her. “Like the troops, I suspect these were snuck into the country. But…we can be reasonably sure they’re African, and that they are among the people buying those guns and other gear.
“I haven’t had time to run those parameters,” she admitted, “but that should give us a starting point.”
“We have a meeting with Charles after this,” David told Alston. “Knowing our scaled friend, I suspect he has had time to run those parameters.”
“I’m impressed, Doctor,” Warner added. “Your team has done well.”
“We try, ma’am,” the tall woman demurred. “And the time limit on this one makes me twitchy—give me a month, and I’ll be able to tell you who all of them are, where they were born and what their favorite colors were. With a day?” Alston sighed.
“I’ve given you what I can. I just hope it’s enough.”
#
Charles’s underground lair lacked the corporate trimmings of the conference room in the forensics lab, but he made up for it by having an even larger display setup. The dragon had an “alcove” at one end of the massive, gorgeously furnished cavern Omicron had provided him set up with dozens of massive computer screens, linked together to form an absolutely immense display.
At the center of it was the dragon’s oversized keyboard and trackball-style mouse, on articulated mounts in front of the dog-bed like couch the dragon curled up on to work.
“I suppose you were listening in on the presentation Alston gave?” Warner asked as the dragon carefully and delicately used the tips of his ten-centimeter claws to pour tea into cups that David knew were worth roughly the same as a luxury SUV. Each.
“Ai was not, actually,” the dragon brogued. “Sugar? Milk?”
“Black is fine,” David replied, watching at Warner dropped two sugar cubes into her tea—and the dragon half-filled his own porcelain bowl with milk on top of the tea.
“Doctor Alston sent mae the entire details aforehand,” Charles replied. “Ai spent yer meeting researching the mercenary companies likely to meet yer needs.”
“And?” Warner asked.
“Let’s move this to mae office,” the dragon said with a grin that released a tiny wisp of smoke.
Both humans remained sitting in the little kitchenette as the thirty-foot reptile rose and made his way to his couch. Once Charles had moved his immense bulk across the cavern, they followed him over and pulled out chairs to sit beside him.
The dragon was careful and gentle in his movements, but there was no point making that hard for him.
“Ai started with the easiest,” he told them, a claw gesturing toward the screens, which had three lists of company names.
“Each of these lists contains the organizations that have purchased more than sixty of an item: the AK variant, the body armor, and the communication sets,” the dragon told them. He tapped a command and the lists combined, going from over a hundred names on each to maybe forty or fifty.
“Ai then narrowed down to international firms known to engage in mercenary operations.” The list shrank to six names. “Three have African connections.”
Those three companies flashed bright green.
“Lament Security is known to us,” Charles noted. “They’re an in-the-know organization headquartered in the United States that runs supernatural security operations a
cross large swathes of Africa. They do some private security gigs in the US, usually for the smaller civilian supernatural organizations.
“They don’t officially have armed helicopters in the US, though neither do the other two, but most of their heavy shipping goes from here to Africa, not the other way around.”
The dragon tapped their name with one long claw.
“Lament could have done it,” he admitted, “but Ai can’t help but feel they’d have planned better.”
“I know Lament’s head of North American ops,” Warner said aloud. “He is Elfin. He wouldn’t have taken the contract.”
“That was my assessment as well,” Charles agreed. “Lament is not our perpetrator.”
“Who are the other two?” David asked.
“Talon Security and Behemoth,” Charles replied.
“Behemoth is scum,” the dragon continued after a moment’s consideration. “They’re officially blacklisted as a US military contractor for a long list of offenses, some dating back to the Cold War. They have a few bases in the US and keep a training facility here.
“They’re not in the business of running operations in the USA, but they could. However, their facilities are in Louisiana.”
“A long way from Seattle,” David agreed. “What about Talon?”
“South African mercenary company, born out of Afrikaners who resigned from the South African Army after the end of apartheid,” Charles replied. “Been involved in at least one nasty bush war in Africa but have mostly cleaned up their image, running VIP security worldwide.”
“A job that often involves helicopters,” David pointed out.
“Ai thought the same thing,” the dragon replied with a smoky wisp of amusement. “They have four regional headquarters in the US that have bases for helicopters. Officially, none of their helicopters are armed, but they do have several Dauphin SA surplus boirds.”
“And if someone’s dad stole the weapons pods on retirement, those are easier to sneak into the US than the helicopters…” David trailed off.
ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy Page 9
