by Dale Brown
The watch.
The backing.
Scrape it off, said the voice in her head—her father. Press it against your skin.
I can’t.
Stop your whining and do it.
Yes, Daddy.
Chelsea twisted her hand, scraping as best she could. The watch, loose on her hand, flipped over. She kept scraping.
“Coming back to us, princess?” sneered Ghadab. He loomed over her. “Don’t fear. I haven’t killed you yet. There’s still more time for that. This, this I want.”
Ghadab leaned down and Chelsea felt something poke her in the wrist. Her watch flew off. Her wrist stung.
“Bandage her,” Ghadab told someone behind her she couldn’t see. “I don’t want her dying yet. There’s much more to enjoy before that deliciousness.”
104
The Box, Smart Metal Headquarters, Boston—thirty minutes later
A storm of emotions flooded through Massina as he parsed the different media reports. There had been as many as a dozen bombing attacks spread across the city, not counting the ones at Smart Metal. But there were no reports of hostage-style attacks like those that had hit the city months before. Nor had there been a direct attack on any of the power plants in the region, or the airport. With the exception of areas hit by suicide bombers—including his building—electricity was still flowing.
Which wasn’t to say that the city was going about its business as if nothing had happened. Boston was in lockdown, with the National Guard rushing to close all of the major highways in and out. The monuments were closed; city and state police were enforcing a curfew.
Ghadab obviously was behind this, Massina realized. So where was he?
“Why isn’t the line to the Annex open?” he asked Telakus, who was handling the com section at the consoles.
“We’re having trouble with all our lines,” Telakus replied.
“We shouldn’t have trouble with that. It’s direct. Try Chiang’s cell phone.”
“I did. It went straight to voice mail.”
Oh, no.
“Get one of the Nightbird UAVs up, and fly it over the Annex,” Massina told Telakus. “Have it feed us video.”
Neither the city police nor the FBI emergency posts had any information on Ghadab. Massina tried calling Johansen, but he went directly to voice mail.
By the time he finished leaving his message, the UAV had been launched. He walked over to the console where the controller was sitting—they were using a remote setup, having flown the bot from one of their test yards near the river—and watched as it sped northward.
If you subtracted the police vehicles and troop trucks, there wasn’t much traffic. In sharp contrast to the first round of attacks, the city looked amazingly calm.
Is this all you got?
Massina saw the smoke from the wreckage of the SUV miles before the drone closed in. He kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to worry, not to think the worst.
It can’t be our vehicle.
But it was.
The aircraft circled several times so they could examine the wreckage. There were two bodies inside, both in the front seat.
“Johnny, you better come down here,” Massina said over the company circuit.
Johnny sensed that something had gone terribly wrong as he made his way down to the Box. After realizing there was no cell service, he’d tried checking in with Torbin via their satellite connection, but gotten no response.
Still, seeing the burned-out hull of the truck was a shock. He couldn’t breathe; he felt the way he’d felt when he woke in the hospital after he lost his legs.
“They’re gone,” said Massina softly.
“God,” muttered Johnny.
Time contorted, somehow moving fast and slow at once. He felt as if he could leave his body and circle the room several times before a second passed. Yet it also seemed he’d been standing there forever, unmoving, welded to grief.
“Chelsea’s not there,” said Massina.
“What . . . ? What?”
“Here.” Massina pointed to another screen.
“What is this?” asked Johnny.
“The watch. She’s still wearing it.”
Johnny looked at the screen. “Where?”
“Heading south, toward Cape Cod maybe?”
“Pilgrim,” said Johnny. “The power plant.”
The Pilgrim Nuclear plant was among the most heavily guarded facilities in the Boston area, let alone on the East Coast. Ghadab would be a fool to attack there.
But it seemed clear that was where Chelsea was being taken.
Massina called their liaison at Homeland Security, warning him.
“I’m going down there,” said Johnny when he got off the phone.
“I don’t know that you’ll be able to do anything,” said Massina.
“I’m going.”
“Wait,” said Massina.
The look in Johnny’s eyes made it clear he was determined to go, no matter what Massina said or did.
“The FBI is sending a chopper down there,” offered Massina, conceding. “Let me see if I can get you on it.”
105
Boston—around the same time
It was all moving together perfectly. Surely this had been God’s plan all along. Ghadab had let his ego get the better of him, believing he was privileged to watch the final apocalypse in person. But God had humbled him. As he deserved.
Ghadab was still important. In fact, perhaps more than he realized. He would initiate the end days, reveling in its joy from Paradise, not earth. The Americans would surely seek revenge after the destruction of their birthplace city.
Shadaa, too, had been part of the plan. God had shown him the power of love—it could be as strong a motivator as religion, if properly understood.
And now he did.
Ghadab ran his thumb along the edge of the knife. It was a long blade, purchased at a hippie military surplus store near Burlington. Beautiful in its simplicity.
Not a khanjar, but certainly serviceable.
106
The Box, Smart Metal Headquarters, Boston—thirty minutes later
A state police helicopter had tentatively tracked Chelsea’s locator to a van driving south on Route 3. But even as the van neared the turnoff for 3A—which would take it directly to the power plant—the police coordinator wasn’t convinced that the plant was the target.
“If it’s a kidnapping, the last place they’re going to go is the power plant,” he told Massina.
“This isn’t your ordinary kidnapping.”
“They won’t get to the power plant.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The state police were feeding real-time images of the power plant to the Box via the CIA connection; the image was from a police UAV circling around the plant. The helicopter Johnny was aboard was just coming south, not yet in range of the van.
The exit for 3A north of the plant was open to allow residents to get to their houses. But the van passed up the ramp, heading instead toward the interchange with the access road. This was closed off, and heavily guarded besides.
He’s going to ram the barrier and that’ll be the end of it, thought Massina. The end of Chelsea, probably.
He felt helpless.
Ghadab was a fool—going to such elaborate preparations only to thrust himself against a police barrier and die in a hail of bullets.
No, that wasn’t him at all. He was crazy, but smarter than that. He’d know his computers were taken and might even have suspected that his men would talk.
He wasn’t going to go throw himself against a police barrier. Not there.
Not there.
“Passed the interchange,” said the cop. “Still going south, turning off at White Horse Road—they’re going the back way? They’re going the back way!”
107
Over Plymouth—the same time
There were so many trees lining the road that Johnny couldn’t
see the van as it sped past the residential area, heading back north toward the power plant. A barrier manned by National Guardsmen as well as plant security and local policemen had been set up three days before at the main entrance. Alerted by the state police, a team moved a pair of heavy troop trucks across the road about fifty feet from the intersection itself; the entrance to the power plant was blocked by two other trucks, which together straddled the entrance. Behind them was an up-armored Humvee, with a gun turret.
Nobody was getting in that way.
“Take out the tires and stop them,” said Johnny. He had a headset connected to the command frequency. “Shoot the driver—they have a hostage.”
“They’ll try,” said the pilot over the interphone circuit, an internal line only those in the helicopter could hear. “Leave the line open.”
As they came up toward the intersection, Johnny saw men taking cover behind the trucks. There were snipers along the roadway and a set of spikes that would shred tires farther along. A police car with its lights flashing was ahead of the spikes, and two officers were standing out in front of it.
They waved their arms as the van approached, but it was clear the vehicle wasn’t stopping.
Oh, God. Oh, God, no!
He could see a burst of glass as one of the snipers took out the driver, but it was too late—the van swerved slightly, banging the front of the police car and then careening across the spikes as it erupted in a fireball so intense the men behind the truck threw themselves down or ran back for more cover.
Oh, God, no . . .
108
Boston—around the same time
Massina stared at the screen as he scrolled through the data, trying to piece everything together. The link to the Annex was still out; he had Chelsea’s last report but nothing more recent.
Trying to blow up Pilgrim? That makes zero sense. And nothing in this report comes close to hinting at an explosion, so . . .
What the hell is he doing?
Ghadab was not a stupid man. Evil, a psychopath, the Devil incarnate . . . but not dumb enough to think that he could crash into a power plant and do damage on the scale he dreamed of.
Socrates had to have something.
Chelsea!
He couldn’t watch her die. He had to do something instead. Something tangible. Even if it was a dead end.
“Come on,” he told Boone. “I need you to drive.”
“Where?”
“The Annex.”
Outside the door, Massina stopped short. RBT PJT 23-A sat nearby, in full-ready state.
“Peter, come with me,” he told the bot. “I may need you.”
The bot jumped to follow.
Traffic had been shunted away from the city, and the streets were relatively clear once they got a few blocks from the building. Massina had grabbed a sweatshirt to hide his arm; he sat in the front seat next to Boone, turning the problem over in his mind.
Ghadab had to want more than simply killing him and Chelsea. He wanted Armageddon and would never settle for mere revenge.
Oh . . .
“We need to get to Cambridge,” Massina told Boone. “Fast.”
Given that the attacks in downtown Boston were barely an hour old, Cambridge was almost supernaturally calm. True, there were plenty of police and other security types scattered around the MIT campus, but there was still a queue in front of the coffee truck parked outside the building.
Under extreme protest, Boone dropped Massina off near the building and squealed off to find a parking spot in a nearby lot. Though he’d promised to wait, Massina walked briskly past the guards at the front and around the corner to the side door. Here, he showed the man his license—and the card that indicated he was a member of the board of trustees.
“We’re going to have to pat you down,” said the guard. “Could you take your sweatshirt off?”
“Gladly,” he told the officer, who was an MIT employee. “I just want you to know, I have a prosthetic arm, and the surface was damaged. So you’ll see metal. It will look a little strange.”
The guard gave him a funny look and took a half step back, as if he were expecting a trick of some sort. Massina took off the sweatshirt and lifted his arms. He had been able to get a temporary repair to the prosthetic, which gave him better control and mobility in the arm and hand, but not a lot of strength.
Meanwhile, two other guards looked on from the vestibule nearby, more out of curiosity than concern. Behind them stood a pair of National Guardsmen with M4s.
The pat down was quick and light.
“You can, uh, put down your arms,” said the guard, handing back the sweatshirt. “You’re here to do what?”
“I’ve come to see Jack, the student manager?”
“You know the way?”
“I’ve been here once or twice.” Massina had actually been in the building at least three dozen times over the past five or ten years.
“You’re Louis Massina, right? The robot guy.”
“That’s me.”
The guard nodded. He gave him a visitor badge and a small detector that would keep track of the radiation he was exposed to. Massina clipped it to the pocket of his jacket, then walked across the hall to the stairs.
“You better come with me,” said Massina.
“I can’t leave my post without permission and—”
“Screw permission,” said Massina, starting down. “It can’t wait.”
They called the building the Blue Mushroom, partly because the containment vessel that covered the nuclear power plant was blue and partly as a very twisted joke. It looked more like a water tank than a mushroom, and as a piece of architecture it was about as interesting.
But the Blue Mushroom’s purpose had nothing to do with architecture. The plant was one of a small number of research facilities around the country constructed in the 1950s and early ’60s. Besides having helped educate several generations of nuclear engineers, the reactor could be credited with saving a number of lives: its radioactivity had played a role in various cancer therapies.
Like every nuclear power plant in the U.S., it had been designed in such a way that a nuclear explosion was impossible; nearby residents had far more to fear from the butane tanks on their barbecue grills than the plant.
But just because it couldn’t explode didn’t mean it couldn’t present a danger. As Fukushima, Chernobyl, and even Three Mile Island showed, there was always a slight possibility of an accidental release at the plant or, far worse, a meltdown that would irradiate the area. To guard against that admittedly remote possibility, nuclear power plants had layers and layers of precautions and were subject to constant monitoring. The Blue Mushroom was no different.
The reactor control room looked as if it were the set for a slightly dated sci-fi movie. Banks of wall-to-ceiling green metal cabinets lined the walls, housing different instruments and monitoring systems. Lit by overhead fluorescents, the floor shone; there was a slight hint of ammonia in the air, as if the room had just been sanitized. Ordinarily, the control room was staffed by one or two students; today there was only one.
“You need to shut the reactor down immediately,” announced Massina. He was alone; the guard had remained upstairs. “Begin the shutdown procedure.”
“Who the hell are you?” asked the student.
“Shut it down.”
The student stepped in his way. Another came down the hall behind him, an AR-15 in his hand.
“Who’s in charge?” asked Massina.
“I’m in charge,” said a man, rising from behind the console on Massina’s right. “I’m so glad you finally figured it out. I was concerned that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing you off.”
It was Ghadab min Allah, with a grin on his face and a long combat knife in his hand.
109
Plymouth—around the same time
The safety protocols put into place because of the emergency meant the helicopter had to land a good distance from the van. Rather tha
n waiting for one of the state troopers to ride him down to the site, Johnny decided to run. And run he did, his prosthetic legs carrying him at a tremendous clip, moving so fast that if he were competing in the Marathon he surely would have set a world’s record.
He smelled it first: a bag of fertilizer dumped in a charcoal grill.
The thick black smoke from the explosion and fire had dissipated, but what looked like a gray mist hugged the charred remains of the truck and two vehicles it had rolled into as it exploded. The intense fireball had scorched the ground and nearby vegetation; trees some thirty yards away were scarred black, and the pavement was a slick black splotch, still sticky with the heat.
Three men and one of the women who’d been at the barrier were lightly wounded in the explosion, cut and bruised, but otherwise the only casualties were the people in the van.
The nuclear power plant was safe, though at the moment that was little consolation to Johnny.
As he approached the van, one of the police supervisors, a lieutenant, put his hand out to stop him.
Johnny stopped and held up his credentials, but the lieutenant didn’t budge. “My—my, uh, wife, was the hostage,” said Johnny.
It was the only word strong enough to let him through, Johnny intuited. And at the moment, he couldn’t have felt any more pain than if it’d been true.
The lieutenant stared at the credentials balefully, then put his radio to his mouth and called in the ID. He held his other hand to his ear, listening on the earpiece.
“I have to see,” said Johnny, starting past. “Let me. I’d do the same for you.”
“Yeah, OK,” the lieutenant told the others. “Let him. But listen, it’s a crime scene,” he added. “It’s a crime scene.”
