“Not yet, but your family is safe,” Little replied.
“Thank you, Allah.”
“And thanks to a Ranger team that risked their lives to rescue them.” Little looked down at his fallen comrade. Tears welled in his eyes. He felt an indescribable pain in his chest. “I’m afraid my man, Alex here, was not so lucky.”
CHAPTER 115
MR. CLEAN
Al and I were out of the Charger as Little emerged from his car up the street. I had just finished my call with Monica. Little went to the trunk of his vehicle and held up a vest for us as a signal. Swan popped the trunk of our car and we put on the vests. Two other DHS guys came out of nowhere behind us. One said, “Director Little told us to go with you to the office in the basement. I’m Ed and this is Larry. Entry is in the rear. He’s going with those other two agents upstairs. He has tracking on Hadar and knows she’s up there. He suspects that Target One is up there with her.”
OK, was I really walking into a gunfight? At times like this, thinking too much was not helpful. You just had to act and let instinct take over. Plus I was with three trained professionals. What could go wrong? I didn’t want to think about that either. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. I wondered if it was possible to OD on adrenaline. If so, I was a prime candidate.
We walked as quietly as possible along the side of the brownstone and down the back steps. We saw the scanners on the door. Remembering I had my cellphone still sticking up in my breast pocket with the camera facing forward, I whispered into my pocket, “Frank, are you still with me? Can you do anything about these scanners?”
“Yes, I’m here. Did you think I fell asleep? You know I don’t sleep now. Pretty cool, eh? Anyway, give me a minute on the scanners.” We waited. Shallow breathing. Sweat beaded up on my forehead despite the cool air. The pungent odor of my own moist armpits even wafted into the air. “OK. Bart disabled the scanners. I disabled the buzzer that comes with them. Just push in the door and you’re in.”
Al stepped in front of me followed by the two agents. “I’ll take the lead.” And just like in the movies she pointed to her eyes and then to the door. She held up three fingers and then bent them over one at a time. 3…2 . . .1. She burst through the door with us behind
I didn’t know what to expect. There was an array of cubicles in front of us. I swiveled my head to the left and there he was. Viktor, Mr. Clean, was pointing a gun right at us. Before I could blink, he fired. Al groaned and fell to the floor. Oh no. There was a collective scream from the cubicles. The two agents fired their MP5s on full auto into Mr. Clean. He wriggled and twitched like he was doing a Steve Martin dance. Blood stains dotted his shirt. He hit the rear wall and slid down.
The room smelled of cordite and gunpowder with a haze hanging in the air. My ears were ringing from the gunshots. But now, there was silence. I ran to Al who was lying face down on the floor. I rolled her over. Her eyes were closed. I felt for a pulse. I couldn’t feel anything. I lowered my head to her chest to see if I could hear anything.
“Umm, that feels good,” she said. I lifted my head up to look at her. Her eyes fluttered open. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily. Thank God these vests really work.” She lifted herself up forty-five degrees onto her elbows. Ouch, that hurts like a son-of-a-bitch.” I could see the bottom of two slugs collapsed in the vest over her heart.”
“You were really lucky,” I said. The two agents helped Al to her feet. They held her, one under each arm, to steady her. Heads slowly and tentatively began to appear above the cubicle partitions. We heard more gunshots from upstairs.
CHAPTER 116
PLAN B
We went back outside. I helped Al limp up the steps. Lights were flashing everywhere. It was 12:58 AM. I could smell the exhaust from all the emergency vehicles whose engines were still running. Several uniformed officers led the office team out in handcuffs. Had to be close to a dozen of them with their heads hung low. Cameras were clicking and flashing nearby. They had no idea what just happened to them. The officers started loading them into an actual school bus. How ironic.
As they were loading the handcuffed group on the bus, a black Crown Vic pulled up in front of the bus blocking its path. Two men in matching black suits, white shirts, black ties and fedoras stepped out. One had blond hair and the other brown. Otherwise, both were indistinguishable with their pale skin and dark-rimmed glasses. They approached the officers loading the bus. Blond flashed his credentials. “DHS. Please stop loading the prisoners.” The officers hesitated. Then both Blond and Brown held up their credentials for the officers to see.
About a third of the group were already inside the school bus. The remainders were in a line ready to board. The two men examined the lineup. Brown spoke pointing at one of the detainees. “We need to take that one with us. You can take the rest downtown as planned.”
The two junior officers guarding the group looked at each other and shrugged. “OK, sir.”
Blond stepped forward and grabbed one of the young men out of the line and led him to the back of the Crown Vic. The young man looked Middle Eastern and had a slight mustache. Standing by the rear door of the car, he surveyed the chaotic scene of emergency vehicles, reporters, bystanders and helicopters hovering overhead. He made the slightest of grins before Blond opened the back door, pushed his head down and shoved him roughly into the rear seat of the car.
The officers resumed loading the bus. Brown took the wheel of the Crown Vic and backed out of the swarm of traffic. He opened his window and put a turret flasher on the roof to help cut through some of the congestion. Once he turned onto Storrow Drive, he pulled the flasher back inside.
Blond, who was in the backseat with the young man, cut off the flex cuffs. “Where to?”
The young man rubbed his sore wrists. “Take me to the safe house, then ditch the car. We need to regroup.”
Brown picked up speed. “Will do. We thought you were dead.”
The young man smiled. “That was the idea. The exploding sub was a diversion. As far as anybody including you knows, I’m long gone.”
“We’re sorry about your brother. He was a great leader for the cause.”
“Yes, my brother was a great man. He will be missed, but he taught me an important lesson. When performing a mission, always have a Plan B. I guess you could say that I’m the Plan B,” the Cub said.
They drove on in silence.
We met up on the street with Little and Hadar, who was now dressed, but pretty disheveled. “I gather from my guys that Viktor went down hard,” Little said.
“You could say that. No more Mr. Clean. What happened upstairs?”
“LaSalam met his maker as well. Michelle got off a message to the saboteurs a few minutes ago. Hopefully, it was the right message.”
I looked at Michelle. “How’d you do that?”
She lifted her wrist up to expose the gold leaf tattoo. She then silently ran her finger across the design. “We should know any minute if it worked. The team of saboteurs were supposed to execute at 1:00 AM.”
“Holy shit, Frank. Frank, what’s your status?” I said.
I pulled out my earplug and put Frank on speaker. “We only got the code working about ten minutes ago. We uploaded it to the agents who were on standby at the power plants with laptops and flash drives. The bad guys were already draining coolant so they could achieve meltdown at 1:00. It’s close. We were only able to stop the coolant drain and reverse the process in about half the sites. We sent the code to India and France as well, but we don’t know yet how they’re doing.”
Little looked pale and worried. All the self-confidence I’d seen in him drained away. “Looks like Michelle’s signal better have worked or we’re toast or at least half-toast.”
I glanced over Little’s shoulder to see Al being treated on the tailgate of an ambulance. What a night. How could this be real? I looked down at my watch. It was an old Pebble Smartwatch, but it displayed traditional minute and second hands a
nd was perfectly synched to atomic time. I watched as the second hand crossed the 12 and the minute hand struck 1:00. We all held our breaths.
Little picked up his phone. “I guess I’ll call it in.”
Frank spoke up on speaker. “No need. I’m monitoring all news outlets and other feeds. I should be able to tell you the instant anything occurs, if it happens.”
I couldn’t help myself. “So what do we do, just wait?”
Little was more composed now, but no less anxious. “Yes we wait. Waiting is what we do.” A little weird and redundant, but I understand how stressed he was. We all were.
Seconds later, Frank came on again. “Shit. Fessenheim, France has blown. They have two of France’s fifty-eight reactors. The local population is small, only a couple of thousand. It’s virtually on the border with Germany. The radiation cloud will blow east over West Germany. It’s raining there now so, with any luck, it will wash the radiation out of the sky onto the ground before it can do much more serious damage.”
“What about the others? Any others?” Little said. Michelle was starting to shiver either from the cold evening or the shock. Ed and Larry were still nearby. “Ed, could you take Ms. Hadar over to one of the paramedics and get her checked out.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I know what happens.” Little put his arm around Hadar in a weak attempt to warm her up. She still shook like a leaf in the autumn wind.
So we stood there and waited. Police lights were flashing and the media was shouting questions from behind the police cordon. Two TV station helicopters hovered overhead, the din of their rotors making it hard to hear. I spotted Nancy Lu in the front of the throng of reporters. After twenty minutes, I shouted over the noise to Frank for the tenth time, “Anything?”
“Yes, I’ve had the guys pull data from all sites. There are no more incidents. It appears that the incident in France happened because our vaccine did not get there in time and the saboteur either didn’t get or ignored Michelle’s text.”
Little had been on his cell and he clicked off. “We have successfully installed the vaccine on all our reactors. I don’t know about France or India yet. But our guys have been rounding up the saboteurs at each site. It appears they got Michelle’s text and were recooling the nuclear storage anyway.”
“So we’re clear?” I said.
“It appears that way. Frank, do you have anything different?”
“No, what you just reported is consistent with the data I have.”
We all started breathing again.
Nancy Lu appeared at the ambulance where Al was being treated. “How you doin’ girl?”
“Oh, you know me. I took one for the team. Can’t say I’m in the mood for an interview at the moment,” Al said.
“That’s not what I had in mind.” Lu took Al’s hand, leaned forward and gently kissed her on the lips. She sat down beside Al on the bumper of the ambulance and wrapped her arm over Al’s shoulder. “You’re a real hero, my love.”
“I don’t feel like a hero. Medic says I probably have a couple of broken ribs. They hurt like hell.”
“So I guess the love-making will have to wait a little while.”
“Yeah, I guess you’ll just have to keep it in your pants a little longer.” They both laughed. “Ouch, fuck it hurts to laugh.”
“I’m just glad you’re OK. Now about that interview…”
CHAPTER 117
DAMAGE REPORT
“Madame President, it appears we dodged a bullet or a catastrophe I should say. All our nuclear sites are secure. The saboteurs have been rounded up and the Leopard has been neutralized. Unfortunately, we have the two incidents in France and one in India. The good news, if you can call it that, is that both were in low population areas and we expect the number of casualties to be low. It may be days before we have an exact count. At least we could help both countries secure their other reactors,” Hager said.
“Please extend my condolences. I will call both Prime Ministers when we’re done here. How are Little and his team?”
“Detective Favor took two bullets, but her vest stopped them. Otherwise, they are all OK. A remarkable young woman, Michelle Hadar, helped them foil the plot. Also, Sunborn and his geek squad may have saved lives as well with their vaccine.”
“Get Director Little on the phone. I want to congratulate him, Sunborn and the others and extend the thanks of a grateful nation. We should also look at what we can do to reward their efforts. A promotion for Little at the very least.
“OK, so what’s next?”
“We have a situation in the DMZ between North and South Korea that we should brief you on…”
“Great. I love this job.”
CHAPTER 118
AND THEN IT HIT ME
I called out, “Frank…Frank!” I let out a final breath, and I could swear I saw butterflies rising with it. Blue butterflies. My eyes closed. Silence. Then my eyes opened again and I saw Frank standing in front of me—his full body this time, not just a head on a screen.
“Frank, what happened? I don’t understand,” I said.
Frank looked at me with a faint smile. His gray hair was disheveled as I remembered. “Well, do you want the good news or the bad news?”
I snapped, “I thought I told you that I hated that game. Cut the crap and give it to me straight. Wait. I’m sorry. That doesn’t sound like me. Deja-vu or somebody else’s voice. Sorry, Frank—I’m confused.”
“That’s all right. It’s a bit of an adjustment. I know. The good news is that we were able to save you digitally, just like you did with me. The bad news is that you no longer have a physical presence.”
I gulped and took a deep breath. At least I thought I did. This was the whole point of our big idea to digitally preserve ourselves, even when our physical selves were gone. I just didn’t know if I was ready for it for myself. “When did this happen? I mean, what or how did this happen?”
“Do you remember the shoot out at the office in the lab?”
“Sure, that’s when you got killed, I mean physically, and we brought your digital self online,” I said.
Frank hesitated and looked even more serious now. “Well, you got killed then too.”
“Wait, that’s impossible! I got up from under your body. I met Al and Little. I helped fight the Leopard and stop the terrorists. I felt the pain of being shot and the freezing cold water after being thrown overboard of the Take Down. It just doesn’t make any sense. How could I be dead and feel those things?”
Now Frank took a deep breath. “You had a different setting. You look puzzled. I understand. Let me explain. We had a choice of settings when we uploaded our digital selves back in the lab. I chose ‘Pure Digital.’ This gave me the freedom to move at incredible speeds around the Net without any physical-like encumbrances. You chose ‘Physical Simulation,’ so you could feel hot and cold and move about as if you were physically alive. You were even able to enjoy sex. We did it. It worked. Just what you and I imagined could be done. We did it! The only downside for you, from my perspective, is that the Physical Simulation meant that you could only move and process thoughts at normal human speed. I chose to give that up for my digital freedom. Besides my physical body was getting old. Pains were everywhere—back, knees, neck, especially in the morning. I was happy to give that part up. No pain now.”
This was a lot to process, even for a pure digital self. “So, all these things, Al, Little, the Leopard, the Take Down, Cambridge—were they real or not?”
Frank had a bigger smile now and put his arm around me, digitally at least, “Some of it was real physically and some of it just happened digitally. Some of it could have been your imagination or come from other people’s experiences. I can see how you could be confused. It’s complicated. But now that you are completely digital and no longer physical, you can go back and retrace what happened and where. Everything is saved in the Cloud.”
The Cloud seemed like an ironic term to me. The traditional portrayal of hea
ven was in the clouds and now I was somewhere or everywhere in the Cloud. “But why am I now Pure Digital? What happened to my Physical Simulation setting?”
Frank held both my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “The last sequence of events was or had to be fatal for your physical self. The simulation had played out or maybe your system metaphorically ran out of storage space. I’m not sure. So like with me, we kept backups of you. However, when we did the ‘Restore,’ we could only bring you back digitally. Maybe in version 2.0 we can do better. I’m working on it.”
“Wow, I can’t believe it. This will take some getting used to,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll get used to it. You may even enjoy it. The freedom to go anywhere you want instantly, the speed and the infinite knowledge is invigorating. No more depression either.”
I tried to absorb what he was saying. It was just gonna take awhile, maybe a very long time even digitally. “OK, so now what?”
Frank put his finger to his chin like Rodin’s famous sculpture. “Hmm, wouldn’t it be something if we could download ourselves back into real physical bodies again? I wonder.”
Some time has passed and I suppose I’m adapting to my new form. Although “adapting” may be an overstatement. I still spend some quality time with Monica, but I miss the warmth and softness of her touch or the feel of her warm breath in my ear. At least I can watch my son grow up. All is not darkness.
Frank treated me to his anti-depressant script, which helps me break out of my funk. The other remedy Frank prescribed is getting back to work. Focusing on helping others is always the best cure for what ails you, both in life and in this digital world.
Meanwhile, Frank continues working on reversing the mind to digital process with the goal of reinstating a digital mind into a physical body. This will be a long, hard, if not impossible task. As of this writing, he is still not there.
Not So Dead: A Sam Sunborn Novel Page 25
