How many times in his career had Ben dropped over an eight-foot fence or wall? Never once had he so much as twisted an ankle. This time faux grass gave way on impact and he fell another six feet into a square, carbon fiber pit. The extra distance, combined with the disease and the weight of his backpack, drove him into the floor—an undignified heap of arms and legs.
Laughter. Dylan’s voice—undercut by a whining hum. “Oh how the mighty Saber has fallen.”
Ben zeroed in on the source. A drone about the size of a volleyball zipped into view to hover beneath the oak tree’s overhanging branches.
“You chose the most obvious route over the wall, Grandpa. Try not to be so predictable.”
The drone’s camera twitched and zoomed to watch Ben haul himself from the pit.
Ben dusted himself off and looked up with a growl. “Is that all you’ve got?”
It wasn’t.
Ben took one step into the yard and a sprinkler head popped up. A burst of high-intensity light seared his brain—an instant migraine. Ben shielded his eyes and stumbled sideways, only to catch a blurred glimpse of a larger head rising from the grass. A drum with a wide gun barrel attached to each side swiveled to track him.
“Dylan, don’t you—”
The device opened fire.
Ben hoisted his backpack up as a shield, knocked back by the rapid pelting of hard rubber slugs. A ripple of four caught his kneecap. “Aagh!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did that hurt?” The camera drone haunted him, following wherever Ben went but staying just out of reach.
Still blocking the rubber projectiles, he retreated to the cover of a tree trunk deeper in the yard. He waited until a whirring noise told him the drum had run out of ammo, then dealt with the drone. He stepped into the open and swung his backpack at his tormentor.
The drone shot upward, but it clipped a branch, slowing it down. Ben let the backpack go at the apex of its swing and hit his target. The drone fell to the grass, one rotor spinning, the other broken. He hobbled over and picked it up to glare into the camera. “Remember. You did this. Not me.” Ben walked to the brick wall and smashed the drone to bits.
He still had to deal with the flashing sprinkler head. By covering his eyes with his coat, Ben reduced the light to a faded blink and walked close enough to find it with his foot. He stomped it into the grass.
Head pounding, knee aching, eyes burning, Ben marched up to Dylan’s porch steps. “I’m coming in one way or another. Open up or get clear.” He dug through the contents of his bag, drawing out a steel square, six inches on a side, with holes in each corner.
A panel next to the door slid down, exposing a large round disk. Ben instantly felt heat and nausea developing in his chest. He sighed and jammed his KA-BAR straight into the device. A spark flashed. The heat and nausea went away.
A speaker next to the door crackled. “Harsh, Ben. Truly harsh. Do you have any idea how much an acoustic incapacitator costs?”
“Then you shouldn’t have turned it on.” Ben returned to his work.
A camera lens in the porch ceiling turned, zooming in. “Now what?” Dylan said. “What’ve you got there?”
“I went shopping.”
“Shopping for wha—” The kid paused as Ben drew out a plastic grocery bag. “Wait. You didn’t go to Walmart.”
“Yep. Walmart. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“Okay. I can see you’re angry. We both are. And maybe we both said and did things we regret. But that’s no reason—”
“I’m not bluffing, Dylan.”
A laugh—nervous and uncertain. “My door is double-reinforced steel. You’ll never get through.”
“I guess we’ll find out. I don’t know if I ever told you, but I scored high in field chemistry at the schoolhouse.”
Walmart. Low prices on everything an isolated field operative or a homegrown terrorist could possibly need. The idea that you can buy cold packs, geriatric laxatives, fuel additives, and powdered sugar all in the same place—without a photo ID or a federal explosives license—is ludicrous, bordering on criminal.
The only piece of the old recipe missing from the store shelves was iron oxide—more of preference than a necessity. Ben had filed all he needed off the bumper of a rusty Ford in the motel parking lot.
Ben carefully lifted a ball of pinkish-gray putty from the Walmart bag and mashed it against the door next to the knob. To this, he added a model rocket ignitor and attached a roll of wire. He covered the putty with the steel plate and used a miniature drill to drive metal screws into three of the corners.
“Stop that. Desist!” Another drone swept in to harass him, buzzing his head.
Without a word, Ben snatched it from the air and held it fast. He drilled the fourth screw through one of the drone’s skids, securing it to the plate’s last corner. The rotors spun with wild abandon, but the craft could not escape.
“Here’s the thing,” Ben said, packing up. “Nonlethals don’t stop a determined home invader. They just make him mad. Final warning, Dylan. Get clear. I’ll give you ten seconds.” He walked away, trailing the wire behind him.
Dylan’s six-foot pit provided convenient cover. Ben lowered himself inside and covered his ears. “Three, two, one . . .” He touched the wire’s alligator clip to a pair of nine-volt batteries duct-taped together.
The blast shook the last leaves of winter from Dylan’s trees. Dry and brown, they fell all around Ben. He groaned and pushed himself to his feet to survey the damage, watching the curling wisps of smoke clear away.
Nothing remained of Dylan’s door but smoldering masonry and torn steel. A stone fell from the transom above and landed with a sad plunk on the pile of debris.
“Warned ya,” Ben said under his breath, and drew his SIG.
63
Two more drones appeared as Ben approached the rubble. He shot them down, picked up the closest, and hobbled on through the haze. He found Dylan cowering behind a bank of flat-screen computer monitors at the corner of his open-plan living and dining room. The moment the kid’s face rose into view, Ben hurled the drone’s remains at him, forcing him to duck. “Fly too close to the sun, did we, Icarus?”
“Making you the sun, right? Just the sort of narcissism I’d expect from a traitor.”
That word again. Traitor. He growled and leveled his SIG. “Get out here. I need your help.”
Dylan took his time. “You know,” he said, finally dropping into a rolling chair. He took a long look at the remains of his door before spinning to face the computers. “You could’ve put a little less shock in your shock and awe.”
“Sorry.” Ben pulled up a chair beside him and winced as he touched the swelling at his kneecap. He kept the SIG pointed at Dylan. “It’s not an exact science.”
Dylan stared at him open-mouthed. “No, Grandpa. Chemistry is an exact science. It’s the very definition of an exact science. Google exact science, and you’ll find chemistry is right at the top of the list.”
“Yeah, well, I could never get my ratios right in the field. And your Walmart only had C&H sugar. It’s not the same as the old Tate & Lyle stuff. Besides—” He grabbed a fistful of Dylan’s collar and pulled him close so he could see the red marks around Ben’s eyes left by the pepper spray. “You had it coming.”
“Real nice.” The geek pulled his chin back, trying to turn away from Ben’s breath. “Way to social distance. I talked to Tess. She says you’re not like . . . corona-contagious, but that doesn’t make it okay to go around breathing on people.”
The kid had guts—or a big ego. When faced with a gun-wielding, plague-carrying psycho who’d just blown up the front door, most people would be inclined to keep their criticisms to themselves. Not Dylan. Probably a side effect of always seeing high-value asset next to his name on Company documents.
Ben stared him down for another heartbeat, then let him go, nearly pushing him from his chair. He thrust his chin at the monitors. “First things first. The neighbors are sure to
have reported that explosion and the gunshots. Bring up Fairfax County PD’s system and call off any vehicles heading this way.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Everything you do is illegal. Besides, I know you have their dispatch system on the hacker version of speed dial. You bragged about it during that op in Budapest, remember? Get it done. You don’t want the local constabulary crawling through your house any more than I do.”
The Fairfax police dispatch system showed two cars speeding toward Shady Oak. With a flurry of keystrokes, Dylan sent them both a false alarm/return to station order. “Happy?”
Ben’s attempt at an answer became a fit of coughs. He grimaced at the pain and fought to regain his voice. “Do I look happy?”
“That’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have turned—”
“If you say traitor, I will use the remainder of my homemade explosives and blow us both into next week.”
“I was going to say turned . . . against the Company. Not that such semantics make any difference.”
Ben lifted a spare cold pack from his bag and nursed his smarting knee. “I didn’t turn against anyone. The severance was a mistake.”
“The Director doesn’t make mistakes. You’re guilty.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Stuff. You did the stuff. You tell me, Grandpa.”
“Stop calling me that.” Ben tapped the central monitor with a fingertip. “Okay. I need you to find a missing boat.”
“Boat? What boat?”
“Don’t play dumb. You talked to Tess. A cargo megaship called the Behemoth, registered to Sea Titan Cargo, is heading this way. It left Spain the day before yesterday carrying thousands of tanktainers filled with aerosolized plague. Now it’s gone dark.”
“Okay, I might have looked into your boat.” Dylan held up air quotes as he said the word. “And I might have found it. I’ll show you, but first, we need to establish boundaries.”
Really? Boundaries? The gall of this kid, after kneecapping Ben in his yard of horrors. “We’re kind of past boundary issues, aren’t we?”
“You want my help or not.”
“Fine.”
“Good.” Dylan pushed Ben’s chair, rolling him an arm’s length away. “I’m allowing your diseased self to violate the two-llama distance rule, but only so you can see my screens. You get no closer than this. And you don’t breathe on me, my keyboard, or any of the mice and trackballs. Got it?”
Ben flattened his lips.
“I’ll take that as a yes. And finally”—he glanced back at the rubble and the dead drone lying on his faux wood floor—“don’t . . . touch . . . anything.”
Dylan scrubbed his wrist pad and keys with a Clorox wipe, then brought up a satellite map depicting the world’s shipping traffic. “There. All done. See?”
“See what?”
The kid shook his head, grumbling to himself. “It’s like trying to show my mother how to use Alexa.” He tapped a key, zooming in on the Spanish coast and panned the display to a long structure, a few miles south of Valencia. “I’ve tapped into the ONR’s classified—”
“ONR?”
“The Office of Naval Research. I tapped into their classified tracking system. The public site Tess showed you compiles data from ship transponders across the globe. But the Navy uses”—Dylan rocked his head back and forth—“other methods to track ships. Even so, their program agrees. The Behemoth is not on the water.” He moved the cursor over the long structure. White text appeared on the screen.
BEHEMOTH
DRY-DOCK
SEA TITAN STN 1
UFN
“She’s in dry dock for repairs, Ben. The Behemoth left Valencia almost three days ago and parked at Sea Titan’s largest maintenance station two hours later. UFN means until further notice.”
“I know what it means.” Ben wanted to punch the screen for its lies, or maybe Dylan for his pedantic tone. The ONR’s program couldn’t be right. He lifted his chin. “There’s no sign of her at the dock.”
“It’s a covered facility.”
“Sure, but look.” Ben traced a strip of empty concrete visible beside the covered dry dock with his pinky, careful not to touch the screen lest he break Dylan’s rules. “No people. If Sea Titan’s biggest ship is there, where are all the workers?”
“Thin.”
“I know what I saw, and you don’t load a ship with cargo if she’s headed for dry dock.”
Dylan threw his hands in the air, spinning his chair away from the screen. “You’re hopeless.”
“No arguments there. Humor me and keep looking.”
“All right.” The geek spun himself back to the keyboard. “As a matter of fact, I did. I knew you’d keep harping after I showed you the truth. Take a look.” He scrolled the map to a cluster of ships leaving the Strait of Gibraltar. A packet of text followed each vessel. “These are cargo haulers, easy to find because they’re running with their transponders on, as required by law. Your missing plague ship might”—he raised a finger—“might falsely report shutting down in dry dock and then hide from the online tracking apps by running with her transponder off. Smugglers do it all the time.”
“So how do we find her?”
“We use this very program. I told you, the ONR uses alternative tracking methods. Real-time satellite imagery matching, electromagnetic shadow hunting—highly classified stuff. For instance, check out this smuggler.” Dylan zeroed in on a small vessel, highlighted by a red triangle. The packet of text following the boat began with its name—Lazy Ostrich.
Ben huffed. “I know that guy.”
“Then you should probably tell him he’s not as sneaky as he thinks. Your friend is running dark, without a transponder. The ONR is still able to see and identify him and record his movements. Not that they care. His operation is too small. He’s no threat to the United States.”
Ben took note. If he lived long enough, he’d have to send a word of warning to Basile.
“Now,” Dylan said, zooming out to the whole Atlantic. Thousands of ships tracked across the display. “The ONR system tracks and identifies and flags false reports. If the Behemoth skirted the dry dock and headed into the Atlantic, I’d be able to find it with a simple search.” To demonstrate, he typed the name into the program’s search bar, omitting dry-dock results, and hit enter.
“Nothing,” Ben said, frowning at the red Zero hits result.
“Face it, Ben. There’s no plague ship. Either you’ve turned traitor and you’re trying to feed us bad intel again, or you’ve been played—and played hard. Admit defeat and give yourself some peace before you kick off into the great beyond.”
Ignoring Dylan’s boundaries, Ben pushed him aside and tried the search himself.
“Hey!”
The ONR system spat out the same result. Ben rolled his chair away again, shaking his head. “It can’t be. Jupiter must’ve hacked the Navy’s classified server to digitally hide the ship. There’s no other explanation.”
“Spoken like a true crazy man,” Dylan said, cleaning his keyboard with another wipe.
The insult of the action got to Ben more than Dylan’s harsh words. His grip tightened on the SIG. “Your self-assurance is getting on my nerves, kid. Things aren’t always so clear cut. For instance, not too long ago, I thought you were the traitor. The remote detonator I found at the cottage made me think you’d murdered Giselle.”
The geek, oblivious, kept scrubbing his equipment. “Yeah. Don’t remind me. And thanks for passing that little theory to Hale. Even with intelligence coming from a discredited source like you, the Company still had to follow up. Try to wrap your brain around the humiliation of having all your clearances suspended—called back to the States in the middle of an assignment.” Dylan crumpled up his wipe and let out a caustic laugh. “You did that to me. But the investigation cleared me. You, my former friend, were given a severance—a final judgment.”
“So you’re not interested in my side?”
“I don’t need to be. That’s what a judgment means, Ben. No more questions. No more quibbling. The investigation and trial are over, leaving nothing but the binary. A one or a zero. Either you’re innocent or you’re guilty.” Dylan, seeming to forget his fear of Ben or his disease, rolled close enough to poke him in the chest. “And you’ve been found guilty.”
64
“Are we done?” Dylan thrust a hand toward his obliterated foyer. “Because I have a contractor to call, and you’ve run out of arguments.”
“No I haven’t.”
The geek narrowed his eyes.
Ben set the thumb drive he’d taken from the dockmaster’s office on the desk next to the keyboard.
“What’s this?”
“Evidence. Maybe.” Ben told him where the drive had come from. When Dylan balked, claiming it might have a virus, Ben shook his head. “No virus. Tess already opened it once.”
“And? What’d you find?”
“Nothing. It’s empty.”
The kid rolled his eyes.
Ben held up a hand. “But if it contains hidden files, I’ll bet you can find them. In the worst case, you prove it’s really empty and ridicule me some more.”
Dylan wiped the drive down and held it between his fingers, turning it back and forth. “No. In the worst case, I trigger a virus Tess didn’t find and the thing floods my system, wiping out the electricity for the entire eastern seaboard.”
“Why would a virus in your system wipe out the electricity for the eastern seaboard?”
The geek looked at him sideways. “No reason. Forget I said that.” He set to work at his keyboard. “Hang on, I’ll need to partition off a safe space on my system to check your drive.”
While he typed, Dylan chattered on. “You know. Accusing me of killing Giselle was bad enough. But when you insist on your innocence in the face of this severance, the accusation you’re making is far worse.”
Ben didn’t follow. Maybe the disease had dulled his mind. “Explain.”
The Paris Betrayal Page 25
