Top coughed and tried to blink his eyes free. His gun was gone and he began frantically slapping the floor to find it. Found it under a piece of burning wallpaper, swatted the flames away, grabbed the gun, fumbled it back into his hands. All in a wild moment while his brain tried to process what was happening. The hall was filled with choking dust and burning rubble. The heat was immense and Top shimmied away from the flames that were spreading across the far wall.
A shape rose in the gloom. Massive and hunched, and it took Top’s dazed brain a second to realize that it was Bunny, staggering to his feet, his gun clutched in his fist, blood streaming down his face from between ruptured stitches.
“Motherfucker!” bellowed the young giant. “Top? Top—are you alive, you old bastard?”
“Kiss…,” gasped Top, “my black … ass.”
Bunny grabbed him with his free hand and pulled Top up. The door to San Pedro’s office stood open, the wood nicked and charred. Both men raised their weapons.
“That was a fucking microwave pulse pistol,” growled Bunny.
“I know.”
“That fucking guy was a—”
“I know.”
“—fucking Closer.”
“I know.”
The fear was there for Top to hear in his own voice.
A Closer.
One of the elite group of trained killers who worked for the warped scientist who had developed the MPP handguns as well as a long list of other even more deadly weapons.
But Howard Shelton was dead.
His organization, Majestic Three, was gone. Torn down by the DMS. Top and Bunny had both been there when that group was ripped apart.
The Closers had been killed or arrested. Employment records from M3 had helped the DMS and the FBI track them all down. There were no Closers anymore. There was no M3 anymore. And no one had MPP pistols.
No one.
Except …
“Fuck me,” said Bunny as he began inching toward the open door.
“No,” said Top, “fuck them.”
His fear was still there, but now anger was burning hotter than the flames that were eating the wall behind them.
“What’s the play?” asked Bunny.
“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” said Top. He reached into his jacket, produced a micro-FB, flipped the arming switch with his thumb, and hurled it side-arm through the doorway.
The new generation of flash-bangs were tiny, less than a fifth the size of the M84 stun grenades used by the military. But the flash and the bang were 30 percent larger.
The explosion rocked the room and made the dividing wall shudder as if it had been rammed by a truck. The sprinklers overhead kicked on and the whole hallway was caught in a rainstorm.
“Go, go, GO!” yelled Top and they were up and running, moving around the edge of the doorway, pointing their guns, following their barrels into the room, cutting left and right, seeking targets.
The Closer who had shot at them was on the floor, his face scrunched up with pain, eyes blinking as he tried to see, his MPP held up in a two-hand grip as he fired blindly.
TOK!
TOK!
TOK!
The superheated microwave blasts tore the room apart.
Literally tore it apart. Desks and filing cabinets exploded into burning clouds of metal splinters and blazing paper. The whole doorway disintegrated into a cloud of superheated gas. Top once more felt himself lifted and thrown like a doll. He crashed into an oak desk, rebounded, and fell hard onto the floor. The world swirled around him like toilet water after a hard flush, and he fought to hang on to his gun and to his consciousness.
Bunny was somewhere on the other side of a cloud of burning dust, cursing and grunting. Top could hear the sound of a vicious fight as vague shapes moved in an awkward ballet.
The Closer got to his feet and swung the MPP toward him. His face was lined with pain from the flash-bang, and blood ran from both ears, but his eyes had cleared and there was a cruel smile on his hard mouth.
He said a single word as he raised his gun to fire.
“Sims.”
Top shot him six times. Three to the chest, but that only staggered the man, and Top remembered that the Closers wore a micro-mesh undergarment that was harder to penetrate than Kevlar and whose structure nullified most of the foot-pounds of impact. The 9mm rounds drove him backward but didn’t put him down.
The next three shots went into his face.
The cruel grin disintegrated into red nothingness and the rounds punched through the back of his skull, pulling streams of blood and brain matter behind them. The Closer went down and Top rolled onto his knees, sweeping around to find Bunny. Immediately he had to throw himself to one side as a figure came hurtling through the smoke toward him.
A big figure with blond hair, and for a terrible moment Top thought that it was Bunny.
But it was not.
This man was a stranger and unless Top read his autopsy report he would remain one. His head was twisted more than halfway around, and his eyes bulged with shocked awareness at how this day had ended so much differently than he expected. The big body landed hard and lay immobile.
By then Top was up and moving, running into the smoke.
He saw the third Closer and he saw Bunny.
The man saw him, too, and Top could see his eyes, could see the quick calculation of his eyes. The man knew he could not win this fight. Or maybe he did not want to roll those dice.
So he did something that Top would have thought impossible.
The man ducked under a looping right from Bunny that would have dropped a bull, grabbed the big young man by the arm and belt, picked him up, and hurled him at Top as easily as Top might have tossed a small suitcase. The man did not even grunt with the effort of lifting 240 pounds of solid muscle.
Top tried to get out of the way.
Tried.
Failed.
And went down.
By the time he and Bunny managed to untangle themselves, the Closer was gone. The office was filling with dense smoke and everything seemed to be on fire. They paused, looking around, trying to decide how to save the moment. The Closer was nowhere to be seen, and the other two were dead.
Top dragged Bunny to his feet and they ran for the elevator, but when the doors were halfway open they suddenly stopped. The lights went out, inside the car and in the hall. In fact the whole building seemed to go strangely still despite the water pulsing from the sprinklers. Then they died, too.
“Stairs,” yelled Top and they blundered through the smoke to a crash-door and into a stairwell.
It was utterly black. Even the battery-operated emergency lights were dark. Far below they could hear the clatter of footsteps.
“Give a light,” growled Top, but Bunny already had his powerful little penlight out. He slapped it into the clip on the underside of his gun. But the light did not flash on. There was nothing, not even the faintest glow. They stood for a moment, confused and disturbed, lit only by the trembling firelight behind them. The stairwell was like the mouth of a dragon, black and deep and treacherous.
Bunny leaned one hand on the rail. “We go down there and he’s waiting…”
No need to finish it.
“How’d he kill all the damn lights?” asked Top. “Don’t make no sense.”
They saw a brief flash of daylight at the very bottom as the killer broke from the fire tower.
“Call it, Top,” said Bunny.
If they had been dressed for combat they would have both been carrying nonelectric chemical flares. Below them the door swung shut and the stairwell was immediately plunged into total darkness.
“Call it in,” said Top. “Let’s get a BOLO out on this son of a bitch. And we need the fire department.”
But, of course, their cell phones and earbuds were as dead as the lights. The fire behind them began to roar.
INTERLUDE TWENTY-ONE
BELL FAMILY ESTATE
MONTAUK IS
LAND, NEW YORK
WHEN PROSPERO WAS EIGHTEEN
Oscar Bell dreamed of her.
Or, maybe it was that she dreamed of him.
He was in his bedroom, alone in a midnight house, all the doors locked, all the alarms set. Dogs on the prowl, guards with guns. The way it always was.
Not that German shepherds and mercenaries with automatic weapons could keep them out.
No.
Nothing could keep them out.
Not unless he wore one of those ridiculous skullcaps. Jesus, he hated the thought. A grown man, a multibillionaire who owned more companies than he could count, a scientist and defense contractor, wearing a fucking aluminum foil hat. Well, technically a dome-shaped glass and crystal-lined metal alloy hat.
It blocked out most of the intrusions.
It stopped the dreamwalkers from stealing into his head and stealing his knowledge. It kept his slumbering mind from being complicit in the theft of his own technologies.
Shutting the barn door after the cows had run off, though. He was sure of it.
Not that Bell knew who exactly had been sneaking around in his head. Someone from Gateway, for sure. Some of Erskine’s remote viewer spies, those fuckers.
And someone else.
Was it Prospero? Was the boy still alive? If so, what on Earth was he up to? The rumors Bell was hearing terrified and sickened him. ISIL, for Christ’s sake. Selling the null field to a gang of insane murderers. How was that any kind of justice, even from Prospero’s perspective?
How?
If it was true, and Oscar Bell did not have real proof.
Then there was Corrine.
She’d been in his dreams, and maybe inside his head twice now. Both times on nights when he forgot to wear the damn helmet.
Bell hated it. He was no romantic and even if he was, having someone inside his head like that was not romance. It was rape. It was a violation on a level that ran so deep that he wanted to saw open his head and scrub his brain with Lysol.
Damn the woman.
After the first time, he tried to call her, but her assistant said she was unavailable. After the tenth call Bell decided that Corrine was down at Gateway.
Last night’s dream … well, that sealed it.
He’d become aware that he was sleeping. It was like that. You are asleep but then you realize that you’re asleep. You are still inside your body but you are aware the body is sleeping.
That’s how it began. And then she was there.
It was not like meeting her in the flesh. There was no flesh. It was her but it was like he could see her with some sense other than eyes. There is no word for it in the English language. “Sensed” her did not fit because there was no precise sensory input. No sight or smell, no sound or touch. But she was there and he knew it was her.
Corrine Sails. Stripped of everything. No uniform, no face. No skin or bones. No blood or breath.
Just her, whatever “she” was.
Bell knew why so many people had committed suicide. It was a nightmare encounter. Her thoughts were right there, shooting through him like electrical shocks, as if the nerve signals fired by neurons were stun guns. He had no defense against them and the power was raw and immediate. Bell wasn’t sure how exactly his body was registering them. Again, there were no words for this kind of contact. It wasn’t even a purely electrical connection, either. There had to be some of that, of course, or the helmets wouldn’t work, but on the plane of communication there were other rules, other forces yet to be cataloged. Someone at Gateway had tried to coin the term “soulspeak” but it was too silly for the scientific and military minds to grasp.
Bell, despite his cynicism, thought it might be right.
What were souls, after all? If they existed at all, then they were some kind of energy that had no label in science. Yet. Quantum scientists would have to label them at some point, give them a properly sober Latin name, place them in a category, force them into a range, measure them and meter them.
That would come. Science wasn’t there yet.
When Corrine stepped into his mind Bell was sure that the contact dragged them both into another place entirely. The soul level? Maybe.
Or another dimension.
Another world?
Another universe?
After all, the God Machine was Prospero’s attempt to open a doorway that would take him to what he believed was his home. To another world, but not another planet.
To a different universe than this.
Or to a different plane of existence where words like “world” and “universe” and even “dimension” had no practical relevance.
They did not really talk to each other. Conversation is a product of organic machinery. Breath vibrating the larynx, tongue and lips forming words, the jaw hinge moving, and electrical impulses accessing memories and forming thoughts, using syntax and vocabulary. All physical things.
They had no bodies in that place.
But he heard her. Felt her. Whatever it needed to be called.
Corrine was trying to tell him something. He was sure of it.
Warn him?
Maybe. Probably.
But warn him about what? About who?
He couldn’t remember what frightened her, only that something did. It terrified her. It was the only clear thing Bell could remember when he woke up.
However, he woke up naked, on the balcony where they often stood after making love. Except he stood on the stone rail, his toes over the edge, his body swaying as if trying to leap.
It took a lot of scotch to stop the shakes.
He did not know why he crawled under his desk with a gun.
All he knew is that after that night, he never went to sleep without that goddamn helmet.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 8, 8:41 A.M.
“The Gateway matter has presented us with a number of complications,” said Mr. Church. “Particularly in the matter of reliable information. Most of the records are unavailable to us through our usual channels, and that includes MindReader. We know that the project was initiated fifteen years ago and the focus of the research being conducted at Gateway has changed many times. We know that Dr. Marcus Erskine was the head of the research and development team down there, and that they were working on several projects that, on the surface, appear to be unrelated.”
“That’s all we have?”
Church removed a folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table to me. “This is something Bug dug up for us from very deep in the records of the black operations file attached to Gateway. It’s a fragment of a project proposal paper written thirteen years ago by Dr. Erskine.”
I read it hungrily, needing answers. Unfortunately most of it was scientific mumbo jumbo that shot way over my head. However, there were footnotes and annotations in the distinctive scrawl of Hu’s handwriting and Bug’s juvenile scribble. The story this all told was bizarre. Erskine hadn’t gone down there with one purpose in mind. Gateway was one of those cluster projects where several ultra-top-secret research programs were being conducted under one roof, with Erskine as overall director. Unfortunately each project had a code name. Kill Switch was the easiest to understand—a weapon that interrupted power. But also referenced—without useful explanations—were projects labeled “Dreamwalking,” “Dreamshield,” “God Machine,” “Freefall,” and “Unlearnable Truths.”
Church was petting his cat and looked way too much like a James Bond villain. Even the gloves creeped me out.
“This is all we have?” I demanded.
“It’s a piece of what was clearly a larger document. Bug said that most of it was scrubbed from the Net and this is part of an editing memo that he was able to salvage. The text is suggestive of certain kinds of projects that surface every once in a while. Psychic phenomena, esoteric espionage, thought projection.”
“Thought pr
ojection? You mean mind control?”
“Possibly,” he said. “I’ve put out some feelers for information on any project related to that, with a bias on anything that might explain what happened to Glory Price and Dr. Sanchez.”
I sipped my coffee, realized it had grown cold, and splashed some warm into the cup. “Mind control…? Is that even a real science?”
Church said, “There are a lot of radical projects in the various levels of R and D. Some are improbable, most hit walls and are proven to be unsound, some are merely unlikely, a few stretch credulity to the breaking point. But every now and then we advance the more arcane branches of science by an interesting inch or two.”
I drained my cup and set it down. “We didn’t get close enough to assess the process down at Gateway. And without our body cams and telemetry we got bupkes. Do you have anything else?”
“That was all Bug found. I asked him to dig deeper but so far he hasn’t found anything of use.”
“What about that QC thingie? I thought our new quantum computer could find anything.”
“Bug hasn’t fully integrated that science into MindReader,” Church said quietly. “He has been readjusting.”
I nodded glumly. Several months ago I’d recovered a prototype of a truly practical quantum computer. Normally Bug would have freaked out about it and danced the Snoopy dance, but the guys who owned that tech had made some vicious attacks against us, targeting our families in order to cripple the DMS. Bug’s mother was killed by a small drone packed with explosives. Her murder nearly killed Bug, though in a different way. It took Church a lot to get him to even agree to come back to work. Since then Bug sounds and acts like his old self, but I think a lot of it’s game face. My dad, Church’s daughter Circe—who was pregnant at the time—and other innocents were also targeted. Rudy was attacked and Aunt Sallie nearly died. If Bug needed time to get up and running, then I wouldn’t be the guy standing over him with a whip.
That said, I kind of wanted to stand over him with a whip because I fucking well needed to understand what happened in Antarctica. When, of course, I could actually stand.
I sighed. Very audibly, and Church gave a small, sympathetic nod.
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