This was a whistling sound. Almost a shriek.
Getting closer.
Getting louder.
Something moving so fast through the dark air that the wind screamed along its sides.
Marty knew what it was. He knew.
The moment that his brain identified what it was … that was his last thought. He even said it aloud.
“They’re falling,” he said in a whisper that was filled with awe. “They’re all falling.”
A moment later a Boeing 737 struck the top floor of the Marriott.
Between the hotel and the airport, the rest of the planes stacked up for landing fell.
Like dead birds.
Like stricken crows. Black and falling through blackness.
Until the darkness recoiled from the fires.
But by then Marty was long gone.
PART TWO
FATHERS AND SONS
What do we know … of the world and the universe about us?
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few,
and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow.
We see things only as we are constructed to see them,
and can gain no idea of their absolute nature.
With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the
boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings
with wider, stronger, or different range of senses
might not only see very differently the things we see,
but might see and study whole worlds of matter,
energy, and life which lie close at hand
yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
—H. P. Lovecraft
Excerpt from the short story “From Beyond”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE NATIONAL SZÉCHÉNYI LIBRARY
F BUILDING OF BUDA CASTLE
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
TWO WEEKS AGO
His name was Harry Bolt and he was not a great spy.
He was probably not a very good spy. Or even a moderately good one. He knew that. Everyone who knew him knew that. His boss did, too.
And his father definitely did.
Harry thought about this as he crouched in the dark and tried hard not to get caught, not to get seen, and not to get killed. All very important things on his to-do list. Right at the top of his priorities this evening. Harry was a disappointment to many but he was still his own favorite person. Getting arrested, interrogated, disappeared, or shot would seriously interfere with his motto of “Die Old and Rich and in Bed with a Porn Star.” He wanted to get that translated into Latin and tattooed somewhere on his body.
The night was dark and the rest of his team were taking their sweet time doing their part of this job. This very, very illegal job. Being a third-tier field agent for the CIA did not come with many protections. He was alone now because the two other members of his team, Roy Olvera and Jim Florida, were nowhere to be found. Olvera was supposed to have prepped this lock so all Harry had to do was cut a wire and manually push back the metal service door to enter the underground chamber. But, no Olvera and no prep work. God only knew where Florida was. He’d gone off to upload a neutral video loop to the security cameras, but he was taking his sweet time about it. Or he was lost again. Florida got lost a lot.
That was the problem. Neither of those other two clowns took this job seriously because it was a bullshit assignment. All three of them knew it. Shit jobs like this were only ever given to field operators who had screwed up as badly or as often as the Three Stooges. That’s what the other staffers at the Agency’s Hungarian station called his team. Nice. He wished that it hadn’t been so thoroughly earned, though. Screwups were their specialty, and Harry had to admit it.
He wondered if his father had ever screwed up any part of any mission in his entire life. No. Probably not. Demigods don’t make mistakes. In truth, Harry’s father was a great spy. Maybe the great spy. Absolutely everyone knew that. Dad was Harcourt Bolton, Senior, and Harry knew that nothing he ever did was going to let him live up to that kind of a legacy.
Harry Bolt loved his father. He really did.
Conditionally.
He also hated his father. Conditionally.
Like everything in Harry Bolt’s life, his relationship with his dad was complicated. It was always complicated. Even more complicated than Harry’s love life, which was so weird you couldn’t sell it as a reality show. No one would believe the string of beautiful, artistic, accomplished, and absolutely bug-fuck nuts women who came and went in his life. Harry couldn’t believe most of it and he’d been there, done that, and had all the scars and souvenirs.
His relationship with dear old Dad … well, that was even more of a mess.
Most of those complications stemmed from the challenges associated with living in the shadow of a great man. A better man, as Harry’s fourth consecutive stepmother went to such great lengths to point out. A man who was, as Harry’s superiors in Central Intelligence so often reminded him very quietly, a hero. A millionaire whose net worth was soon going to change its first letter from M to B. And while being the son of someone about to join the billionaire club had its perks, it also came with its burdens.
One of the problems—and there were many—was that there was no actual way to live up to his father. Ask Jakob Dylan, ask Julian Lennon. “Son of a Legend” should qualify one for handicapped parking privileges. His father’s unattainable reputation was the reason Harry shortened his last name. Fewer people made the connection even though they looked exactly like father and son. Except that Dad was a little taller, a little thinner, a little better looking, and had—despite his age—six-pack abs rather than Harry’s shorter stature and kegger gut.
Life, as Harry Bolt saw it, sucked moose dick.
And where the hell were Olvera and Florida? Slacker buttholes, both of them. Harry hated being the third Stooge. He squatted in the dark in a tiny electrical access corridor three hundred feet below the subbasement of the library in Budapest. He was sure that if his father was there he’d have disarmed this frigging lock with nothing more than a lift of one disapproving eyebrow, and he’d be inside already. Getting it all done.
This mission had some fuzzy edges and the best that could be said of the intel that put him down here in the dark was that it was marginally better than deciding policy by flipping a coin. Marginally, and that was Harry being generous. From a distance the job sounded pretty cool, almost glamorous. Almost “dadlike.” Harry’s team was assigned to track an international black marketeer named Ohan who had known ties with ISIL and who was possibly smuggling high-tech weapons to the extremists. The weapon, which had a cool code name—Kill Switch—was something stolen from a covert lab and was being ferried to ISIL in pieces. Harry’s team was supposed to locate one such shipment and verify its contents. If the mission was successful, then the Agency would spin up its engines for an all-out assault on Ohan’s smuggling network. On the other hand, if the shipment the Stooges had been tracking was a lot less important, as Harry’s supervisor implied, then this was something akin to busywork. Something that looked good in any report friends of his father might see—thereby casting the Hungarian station chief in a good light—but which in reality was a big steaming pile of horseshit.
This wouldn’t be the first such case. Not by a long damn way.
Harry would love to have gone up against a real ISIL field team. That would be cool. That would help him make some kind of statement about his career. Instead he was breaking into a museum for no good damn reason. He was absolutely positive that this was a waste of time.
He tapped his earbud to get to the team channel.
“Corndog to Waffles,” he said, using his call sign and trying to reach Olvera. No answer. He tried Florida—Sunstroke. Got nothing. Spent a few moments cursing. Then he sighed and went back to work on the access electronics. He had half a dozen wires stripped, alligator clips rerouting power, and tiny meters providing information Har
ry didn’t know if he could trust. Sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. His fingers were sweating, too, as he dug around in the junction box trying to snag the blue wire.
“Come on, you scum-sucking son of a canine whore…”
There. Got it. Harry snipped the blue wire and all of the lights inside the control box went dark. He frowned. Were they all supposed to go out? Shouldn’t the light on the circuit reroute he’d patched still be on?
He froze, listening for the sound of alarms. Sweat ran in lines down his face and his fingers were cold with tension.
Nothing.
He touched the Send button on his earbud. “Corndog to Sunstroke.”
Nothing from Jim Florida.
He tapped it again. “Corndog to Waffles.”
Olvera didn’t answer, either.
“Oh, mannnn,” whined Harry. He really hated those guys. Seriously. If ISIL ever wanted someone to publicly cut into lunchmeat, Harry could suggest a couple of names.
Harry tried the calls again. And again. Persistent nothing. That’s when his annoyance began to change to something else. It wasn’t yet fear, because Harry was almost always afraid. No, this was still over on the doubt side of worry. They could both be maintaining radio silence because they weren’t in places secure enough for a verbal response. Which was semi-likely. Not hugely likely, but at least possible.
Harry squatted in a pool of his own indecision for another three minutes, then he thought, to hell with this crap. He wasn’t going to win a commendation or leach approval from his father if he did nothing. The job was to break into the vault beneath the Széchényi Library before the exhibit went live, take photos of everything incriminating, and then get out without getting caught. The actual arrest would be made by the counterterrorism gunslingers of Hungary’s Terrorelhárítási Központ. The CIA did not make those kinds of arrests on foreign soil. No, sir. There was far more political currency to be gained by handing over the collar to the locals. Career-wise, though, if he scored this on his own—without the other Stooges—then he was, on Agency terms, a made man. Harry had seen what happened to the career trajectory of those agents who scored on something like that. He wanted his own elevator up past the glass ceiling.
Maybe even make Dad proud. A faint possibility, but still a possibility. His father, after all, had saved the world three times from major bioweapon releases. Three times.
Balls.
He shifted his position to address the metal panel. It was stiff, but he managed to dig his screwdriver into a gap and lever it open enough to put the edge of his hand against it. It didn’t want to move, but it did. One stubborn inch at a time. And as it opened a puff of air blew out at him.
“Nicely done,” he told himself. You took your back-pats where you could find them.
Then Harry set the panel aside, removed his flashlight, and aimed the beam inside. He saw a square chamber with stone walls. It appeared to be empty except for an old metal chest, bound by straps of iron.
“Bingo,” he murmured. He put the flashlight between his teeth and climbed inside.
It was at this point that the trajectory of Harry Bolt’s life changed.
Completely and irrevocably.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN FLIGHT
SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
AUGUST 20, 6:05 A.M.
When I could move, I got up and used the head to clean up. The nausea eased up by slow degrees but it didn’t go away. Top and Bunny sat like a pair of shivering old men. They sipped water and ate salty crackers and didn’t say a word or look at anyone.
I’d already called Church while we were still in Antarctica airspace to tell him what had happened, what we’d seen, and what I did when I thought this was a genie that could not be let out of the bottle. Not sure if he agreed with me or not.
Half an hour later Church called me back and hit me with the news about Houston.
The power had gone out. Not the whole city, but enough of it. Too much of it. Planes had fallen out of the sky. Thirteen of them. Some of them crashed on runways at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. That was horrible enough. One went through the roof at Air-Sea International Logistics near Lochinvar Golf Course. One pancaked down between the Budget and Avis car rental offices off Palmetto Pines Road. And one of them hit the top floor of the Houston Airport Marriott Hotel. The jet was fully fueled and every seat was booked. There was a sales convention at the hotel. Two-thirds of the rooms were booked. We wouldn’t know how many were dead. Five thousand was a conservative guess.
Five thousand people.
Gone.
How do you take news like that? What’s an appropriate reaction for a loss of life so dramatic that the world itself seems to wobble as all those souls take flight on burning wings? The part of me that is a decent, ordinary human being—that aspect I called the “Modern Man”—was appalled, shocked to silence, disconnected from coherent thought. The part of me that was a killer wanted to bellow out in rage and denial because this was an attack on the tribe. The human tribe. The Killer wanted to heal hurt by causing harm. And the Cop, that part of me—the central aspect of who I was—wanted answers.
“No one has taken credit yet,” said Church. “However, I spoke with Harcourt Bolton shortly before we got the news and he has been building a case to connect ISIL with the power outages that occurred earlier this year.” He explained about the black marketer Ohan, about Kill Switch.
“What do we know about it? What kind of weapon is this?” I demanded. “Was it some kind of e-bomb?”
“Unknown, but unlikely,” said Church. “There are no reports of any kind of explosion prior to the crashing of those planes.”
“I don’t understand. The power went out and then back on again? That can’t happen with an EMP.”
“I know. This must be something else. I’ve scrambled teams and they’re en route. I have Jerry Spencer and the whole forensics team on a plane. Same with Frank Sessa, though there is no evidence of any kind of explosives. In short, Captain, it’s too soon for us to know what happened. Something interrupted the power inside a roughly circular area around Bush airport. As far as we can tell, everything inside that zone that uses electricity was shut off. We have reports that this includes cell phones and battery-operated devices.”
“Why Houston, though? What’s there that they wanted to hit? What’s the statement? No, wait,” I said, “if this is ISIL, then that might explain it. Most of the commanders in their forces are ex-Iraqi military. George Bush launched the first Gulf War. His son launched the second. Maybe this is a statement. A revenge killing.”
Church nodded, not liking the idea but agreeing with the logic. “You may be right.”
“This is what happened at the NASCAR thing, isn’t it? And the presidential debate?”
“So it seems.”
“Which means they were, what? Test drives?”
“That would be my guess,” said Church. “But, Captain, it seems to me that you experienced this yourself. In your report you said that your equipment shut down and then restarted down in the cavern.”
I was silent. I’d told him that not an hour ago. So why hadn’t I put two and two together?
Church was on the same tack. He asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Bad,” I said. “But I’m going to divert this plane. Find me a safe runway in Houston and we’ll—”
“No, Captain,” said Church. “I was calling to inform you, not to put you into play.”
“Why not? This is why we have a Special Projects Office.”
“I’m aware of that, but you said that you and your men were exposed to some possible toxins.”
I had every intention of yelling at him and demanding that he put us into play. Instead I had a coughing fit that lasted two minutes. It left me spent and weak and feeling as fragile as spun glass.
“Go home, Captain,” said Church. “Let the medical team check you out. I’ll keep you posted.”
The connection went dead.
INTERLUDE NINE
BELL FAMILY ESTATE
MONTAUK ISLAND, NEW YORK
WHEN PROSPERO WAS THIRTEEN
Oscar Bell poured three fingers of scotch into a chunky tumbler and handed it to Major Corrine Sails.
“Thanks,” said the major, sipping it, nodding, and taking the glass with her as she began walking slowly around the big office. There were cases of books, mostly histories of science, histories of war, histories of governments. No fiction, no autobiographies. Nothing that connected the man with other people. There were no framed photos on the walls, no family pictures on Bell’s desk. No trophies of any kind. Major Sails noted all of it as she sipped her whiskey.
“Have a seat,” said Bell, waving a hand toward a pair of rich leather chairs positioned in a window alcove. Outside a pair of catamarans bounced over the light chop, and farther out to sea a big trawler was heading out to the fishing grounds off Montauk Point.
“Lovely view,” said Sails.
Bell nodded, accepting the comment without any visible sense of pride. She wondered if he ever took genuine pleasure in anything. Probably not. Her colleagues in the Department of Defense had warned her that he was a few degrees colder than a Vulcan. No visible warmth, no detectable personality. Not even precisely unlikeable, because there was nothing to like. Nothing really to react to.
She thought he was probably wretched in bed. A get-it-done approach to sex that was probably all about insuring progeny. No wonder he went through wives the way most people went through changes of clothes. The women were attracted to the billions, but not even the hardiest gold-digger seemed able to stay in it for the long haul. Sails couldn’t blame them. Not that Bell wasn’t attractive in his own way. He was lovely in photos and on TV, and when there was a camera he could turn on the charm and produce a winning smile. Off camera and away from the press he was a robot.
“If they sent you,” he said without preamble, “then somebody who doesn’t have their head up their ass took a look at my proposal.”
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