by Dana Haynes
The engineer shrugged her shoulders and her fleshy arms bobbed. “With the right technology. And the right knowledge. Yes.”
Daria said, “My backpack?”
The doctor pointed to the pile of boxes. One of the technicians had been carrying it since Daria had shrugged into the driver’s jacket. Daria scooped it up, unzipped it, and withdrew the cutthroat razor of Spanish steel. She doffed the jacket, let it unfurl around her sandals. She slung the backpack over her bare shoulder. “Stay here. If Diego comes, do as he says.”
Gabriella Incantada said, “Where are you going? Are you just leaving us down here?”
Daria said, “Yes,” and headed for the stairs. “Stay here. You’ll be safe.”
* * *
The major and the Serb soldiers sauntered confidently into the second-floor conference room of the Hotel Criterion. The room was simple, minimally adorned, the walls and ceiling and carpet a dull mushroom color. The room featured an array of audio and visual implementations designed for a state-of-the-art visual presentation. The room was outfitted with high-speed Wi-Fi and high-definition computer screens. The Criterion had become a favorite hotel for upper-level business executives, who wanted only the best for their presentations.
Major Arcana brushed aside a framed black-and-white photo of some Italianate architecture. Behind the frame was a wall safe.
She tapped in Gabriella Incantada’s code. As she did, one of the soldiers moved to a wall and began pounding with the butt of his hand. Within seconds his thumping took on a hollow sound. He’d reached a hollow space behind the wallpaper.
The major reached into the safe and removed a device the size of an e-reader. She turned and set it down on a conference room table next to the maple-colored doctor’s bag. She undid both buckled straps, on both sides of the handle, and opened the top of the bag. She removed a complicated electronic mechanism. She used a coaxial cable to connect the e-reader-sized device to the control circuits inside the attaché case.
She had retrieved her communication bracelet from the floor of the hotel lobby. She spoke into it now.
“We are go, this end.”
* * *
Daria couldn’t believe how badly the confrontation in the lobby had gone. True, she had been the one to tell Diego that she was out of practice. That she hadn’t faced a real foe since contracting the Pegasus-B super flu that last November outside Paris. I’m not one hundred percent, she had told him.
Then the cute-as-a-button blonde with the perky ponytail stomped her like a bug.
Daria hadn’t even gotten in a single blow.
Her head ached. Good, you bitch. I’m glad your head hurts, she groused. Had it coming.
At least she knew what she was up against now: No more surprises.
* * *
In the second-floor conference room, Major Arcana typed instructions on the keypad she’d removed from the stolen doctor’s bag.
One of the Serb soldiers reversed his machine pistol and used the folding stock as a hatchet. He began hacking away the room’s wallpaper, revealing a door-sized entry from the hotel conference room to the livery building beyond.
The other Serb guarded the conference room door. Nobody expected Dr. Incantada or her people to show any bravery, but there was still one other party checked into the hotel.
The guard at the door watched his partner gouge a door in the far wall.
“Pssst!”
The guard heard a beckoning voice from the hallway and turned back.
The black-haired woman in the brief lemon dress swung at him, as if to slug him in the chin. The Serb stepped back out of her reach. The blow didn’t even land.
He grinned and raised his machine pistol.
Or tried to raise his machine pistol. His arms refused to obey his brain. He paused, still grinning, and felt the earth tilt a little.
He looked down at his hands, and at the SR-2 Veresk.
His shirtfront was drenched in blood. More blood poured down. Apparently from his throat. How odd.
His legs buckled.
He dropped his auto, but it never hit the carpet. The dark woman knelt and plucked it out of the air.
In the conference room, the second Serbian thug hadn’t seen who had injured his cohort. He tried firing a prolonged blast blindly out the door. The bullets tore the holy hell out of the far wall and the industrial carpet in the hallway.
“It’s Gibron!” the blonde said, fingers flying over the keyboard and the command module. She produced a high-speed, male-to-male USB cord and connected the Incantada device to the conference room’s computer tower.
Daria fired from the corridor into the conference room. She fired blindly, but on single-shot. She could ping Major Arcana and the Serb for an hour, pinning them down, as Florentine police responded to the sound of gunfire. The tactical advantage to a standoff lay completely with Daria.
Wrong weapon, the blonde said to herself. She savagely hit the last few keys on the keyboard, then spoke into her wrist cuff. “Transferring … now!”
* * *
In the control room in Sandpoint, Idaho, Bryan Snow heard a familiar voice coming from his earjack. He swallowed the shit-eating grin that tried to manifest itself. He hit a knuckle-buster combination of keys on his master control. A second later, both of his in-house pilots reacted as their monitors died.
In the Hotel Criterion conference room, Major Arcana stabbed the Enter button on the Incantada device.
* * *
In Florence, three hawks floated on the city’s thermals, gracefully arcing over the southern half of the ancient city, the Arno and her bridges.
One of the three hawks broke its preprogrammed gyre and began descending toward a narrow alley.
The hawk was ceramic and plastic and glass and metal, but not much metal, at least on the outside. It was invisible to radar, which is calibrated for solid, metal things.
It turned out to be Hotspur.
A miniaturized version of a Hellfire missile screamed away from the first Hotspur drone. Relieved of a third of its mass, the mechanical hawk banked sharply and rose.
The missile smashed through the glass, into the lobby.
Whereas the Lockheed Martin Hellfire II weighs in at a tad over one hundred pounds and is sixty-four inches long, the American Citadel variation weighs less than ten pounds and runs only ten inches in length. The Hellfire employs high-explosive antitank technology that uses pressure—not heat—to punch through armor. The American Citadel missile relies on heat more than pressure. It also features an external blast fragmentation sleeve, which disintegrates on impact and vastly increases the carnage caused by an explosion.
The missile set the lobby on fire. The concierge desk ignited. The carpet ignited. The decorative chandeliers exploded. The wallpaper and the comfy couch and the aquarium and the big-screen TV and the magazine rack and the three engineers from Rome burst into flames.
Dr. Incantada was dead before she felt anything.
The swirling fireball, a tornado of flames and anger, ate up all the oxygen in the lobby and, seeking further fuel, spiraled up the curved stairs.
Sandpoint, Idaho
Todd Brevidge and Cyrus Acton watched the hotel lobby disintegrate, watched the charcoal-gray cloud billow from the ruined plate-glass window.
They realized they had seen the first-ever live field demonstration of their own weapon.
Brevidge shrieked. “Jesus the fuck is that! Christ! Snow! We fired! We fired a missile! Holy shit! The fuck is happening?”
He realized he hadn’t lifted the walkie-talkie, though Snow likely had heard him through the observation room window.
He shouted into his hand-held. “Snow! Do something!”
Next door, in the control room, Bryan Snow bit back his grin. His two pilots had popped out of their chairs as if they had ejector seats.
“Wow, Todd.” Snow tried to sound surprised. “Not sure what the heck just happened.”
* * *
In the obser
vation lounge, the Pentagon officials glared at the carnage on the screen.
The colonel, Miss Jones, initially thought she was watching a computer-generated illusion on the screens, part of the American Citadel sales pitch. She cracked a smile and shook her head at the salesmen’s gall. Then she noticed that the general wasn’t smiling.
The general, Mr. Smith, had seen his fair share of war and knew a missile strike when he saw one.
Florence
The walls in the second-story corridor shook and plaster rained down from the ceiling.
Daria was an Israeli. In her short life she had been in way, way too many buildings hit by mortar fire. She knew instantly what had happened.
What she didn’t instantly understand is why her heart rate flashed upward into the danger zone. She felt cold sweat prickle her body; felt her long muscles go rigid with fright.
Images pinballed madly in her mind’s eye. Bombs, blood. Long pianist’s fingers, reaching for her. Scrambling for her. Diggers above, screaming for help.
Daria grit her teeth, eyes screwed shut. She tried to make fists and felt the Russian submachine gun in her grip. She’d forgotten she was holding it. She drew an odd comfort from its cool, slightly oily utilitarian solidness.
She hunkered low on the carpet, back hunched, arms up over her head. Snap out of it! she bellowed silently. This was hardly her first bombed-out building.
The flame tornado corkscrewed above her, seeking ever-higher floors.
The walls cracked, plaster disintegrating, and Daria felt the floor cant beneath her knees and felt the panic attack ebb.
* * *
In the conference room, Major Arcana had been braced for the explosion. She remained on her feet. She stuffed all the stolen mechanisms into the doctor’s bag and rebuckled both top straps. She thrust her chin in the direction of the door her soldier had carved in the wallpaper.
“Let’s go.”
Thirteen
The Hotel Criterion de Medici died badly.
Flames leaped from the lobby. Shrapnel and bits of the building littered the street. One pedestrian caught fire, totally engulfed, arms pinwheeling, leaving afterimages of flames etched into the eyes of onlookers.
A car outside the hotel had veered out of control and careened into a white van.
Diego dashed down from his rooftop vantage point after seeing Daria beaten in the fight. He’d missed her rising again and following the blonde and her men up the stairs. Now, out on the street, the plasma bubble of superheated air lifted Diego off his feet and threw him back six feet into the window of a pharmacy.
He lay amid the display shelves, safety glass pebbling all around him, and shook his head to clear the shock. He gaped as a roiling mushroom cloud of dense gray smoke billowed out of the alley.
As far as he could tell, the epicenter of the explosion came from the lobby—exactly where he’d last seen Daria Gibron.
* * *
In the livery building, Owen Cain Thorson and Derrick Saito were knocked off their feet behind the rolls of insulation.
Seconds later, Major Arcana and her Serbian soldier entered through a hole in the wall.
“Stand guard. Nobody steps through from the hotel. Understood?”
The Serb ratcheted the slide on his machine pistol.
The blonde marched across the second floor of the livery building. A weird, shimmering gray light leaked through the shroud that was the building’s façade. She found a bolted-down table saw with upright, discus-shaped blades. She set down Incantada’s pebbled leather bag and reopened it. She lifted out a tablet computer, the size of an e-reader, notched it against the doctor’s bag at a forty-five degree angle. The screen included a pinhole camera.
Arcana typed in a set of commands. A second later, the screen lit up. It showed a bright, white room, equipped with comfy chairs and drinks tables. Seven people were present. In the foreground stood a dapper young man and an exceedingly gaunt gentlemen. Standing behind them was a white man in his sixties with a flattop and a black woman in her forties.
Arcana gave them her best smile. “Delegates from American Citadel, representatives from the Pentagon: Welcome to sunny Florence!”
Sandpoint, Idaho
Everyone froze: Todd Brevidge and Cyrus Acton in the foreground, Mr. Smith and Miss Jones behind them, the three other senior brass from American Citadel still seated in the leather chairs.
The blonde’s lovely face took up nearly half of the full wall of screens. Miss Jones had a fleeting memory of the Wizard of Oz, addressing Dorothy and her companions.
“We are joined today by celebrities,” the woman said. She spoke English, Americanized and Midwestern. “Our guests are General Howard Cathcart and Colonel Olivia Crace. Both U.S. Army, both attached to a Pentagon weapons procurement division. General Cathcart, Colonel Crace, care to say a few words?”
The Army officers stood rooted, aghast. When they saw the hotel lobby in Italy incinerated they thought they were observing a worst-case scenario. Hearing their names spoken out loud by the psychopath responsible for the slaughter made things much worse.
“General, Colonel, please understand the following: I have command of the Hotspur and Mercutio drones. I’ll be giving you back control of them real soon. In the meantime, I’m recording your images, there in your supersecret hideout in Sandpoint, Idaho.”
Everyone in the observation lounge reacted to this news.
“General Cathcart: Gabriella Incantada is dead. So are her chief engineers. I’d taken the liberty of emptying the Hotel Criterion before stealing this technology. But you need to know that one set of guests never got the message to leave. They were meeting Dr. Incantada here. They represent the Russian air force.”
General Cathcart’s fists clenched.
“Here’s the deal: American technology just blew up a hotel in a NATO country, killing Italian scientists and Russian military attachés. It was yet another deplorable American drone strike, like the ones that have riled up world sentiment in Pakistan and Yemen and elsewhere. Only this time, it’s in the heart of a major European tourist attraction.”
General Cathcart surged forward. “What in God’s name is going on here? Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the woman who has your facial recognition imprint and, thanks to that outburst, your voice print, sir. Linking you to a company that’s facing some pretty stiff sanctions and criminal charges. Tsk. Not good, General. Not good.”
Cathcart fairly vibrated with anger.
“Now, you’re about to regain control of your systems in, say, thirty seconds. When you do, I want you to consider something. My friends and I have the voice and face data that link you to the deaths in Florence and to business dealings with American Citadel. I’ve already transferred this data for safekeeping. My friends and I wish you no ill will. You’re free to go about being the World’s Policeman and protecting Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Amen and God bless. However, there’s a certain black-haired bitch who’s messing up my operation. She, too, knows all about you guys. Her name is Daria Gibron and, General? If you check with your buddies at the Central Intelligence Agency, you’ll find her filed under Complete Pain in the Ass. Do what you will with her; the U.S. intelligence agency won’t coming knocking on anybody’s doors.”
General Cathcart and Colonel Crace exchanged looks. Todd Brevidge and the brass of American Citadel were still in severe shock.
“Alrighty then!” the blonde beamed. “This is Major Arcana, signing off. Peace out.”
She made the V sign with her fingers and disconnected the line.
* * *
Behind the Pentagon officials and the brass, in the control room, Bryan Snow again hit his combination of shift-command-option and three letters. As he did so, his pilots’ workstations began to light up again.
Fourteen
Daria felt the floor ripple beneath her legs and the hotel groaned, a long, low, ominous sound that was as much felt in the sternum as heard.
W
hatever that brief panic attack had been about, it had passed. Leaving Daria more annoyed than frightened.
She rose and dared a glance into the conference room. The man whose throat she’d sliced open still hadn’t quite died; he lay, gasping, twitching, both hands around his throat, holding back the weakly pulsing streamers of blood.
A whacking great hole had been torn in the far wall. The building under construction lay that way. She stuffed the razor blade into her backpack, knelt, and grabbed the nearly dead mobster’s Makarov. She had never held a Veresk submachine gun and didn’t trust unfamiliar weapons. But she gathered the leather strap, letting the machine gun join her backpack over one shoulder.
The hole gouged into the wall looked inviting. The floor under Daria’s sandals vibrated and smoke began billowing into the conference room.
She stayed down on one knee, left hand bracing her right, and pointed the .45 at the impromptu door. She squinted and fired two rounds through the wall to the left of the gaping hole, and two rounds to the right of the gaping hole.
Another machine pistol clattered to the ground and the second Serbian stumbled into view, holding a bloody hand against his belly.
He glared hatred back into the conference room and began to cough up blood. Daria put a fifth round through his sternum.
She rose fast and hit the hole in the wall just as the conference room ceiling began crashing down behind her.
* * *
The dank gray shroud over the livery building billowed like diseased lungs, stirring up dust devils on the second floor. Sawdust eddies undulated across the floor in long sinuous S-shapes like sand in the Sahara.
Daria knew the structure wasn’t going to last much longer. It had been anchored on its left side by the Hotel Criterion, which was collapsing. The more stable but blast-gutted building would bring down its less stable neighbor.
Daria spotted the blonde running pell-mell across the livery building. Daria shouted, “That’ll do!”
She planted her sandals and raised the Makarov pistol.
The blonde stopped running.
