9
Thomas Richards:
My comlink chimes me back into the world in time to realize the sun is coming up. The travel and the caffeine and the special weirdness of this mission are catching up—I feel like I’ve had a hard weekender without the prior benefits. I’m grateful the incoming call is audio-only.
“Richards,” I answer it, hoping my voice is still recognizable to the software.
“Henderson,” the link responds, managing to make me feel worse.
“I don’t have a brief for you, Lawrence, if that’s…”
“No brief,” he cuts me off, sounding like he’s more wound up than usual. “Incoming. It’s Becker over at the Datascan. Actually scored the target.”
My brain clicks enough to figure that it must be about zero-one-hundred where they are in Virginia, which means they’ve either been up on this late, or whatever is going on dragged them out of their beds.
“Good?”
“No. Not good,” he measures out slowly. “Not good at all.”
His tone has me trying to imagine anything that could be worse than what Gray’s already been at, and anything that Henderson himself would specifically consider bad. Most of the thoughts that come include more dead children. I almost ask him to give me the details himself, but I’d rather get the straight version.
“Send me the flash.”
I get my feet on carpet, and get over to the suite’s little desk to boot my book. My eyes manage to focus about the same time the screen loads.
“Oh… This cannot be real…”
It’s a bad neo-samurai splatter-vid. Pure grindhouse pulp, gratuitous gore and all.
But it’s him. No denial. Cool and smooth, like he’s just using the Wabs for target practice with that sword—a fucking sword—and then grinning like a sadist right into the camera lens.
God damn it.
“Where? When?” I ask the obvious. The AI tells me: Bari. A seaport on the other side of the boot, about three hundred clicks from here airborne. Not twenty minutes ago.
Christ.
“Assemble the teams. Get me a flight.” I’m dragging my pants on and wishing I had time for a shower. Or breakfast. Or even a half-assed cup of coffee. Shit. “Get me Captain Burke, too…” Let’s see what he’s worth.
It takes ten to get everybody to the cars, and another twenty-five to beat traffic to the airbase. At least they’ve got the helos hot. I hope Gray appreciates the tax-dollar investment he’s rating.
Then we sit an hour-and-a-half inflight. It gives my teams—and Burke—plenty of time to watch and re-watch the morning’s new footage. Burke doesn’t say much. I take further satisfaction in that he actually looks worse than I feel—like he’s been up tossing all night. At least he’s wearing a uniform today, though I expect it’s because the tourist rags he arrived in smell too bad even for his HumInt tastes.
I try to read his face. He just sits there watching the Bari video as the mountains go by out the window. The video is only forty-nine seconds long, with only the last half being particularly nasty, so even on slow-mo he has time to watch it almost a hundred times before we land.
I can’t read his face. And I’m still not sure why he’s even here.
They drop us at a local hospital because it has the closest pad, but then they screw up the ground transport, costing us another twenty minutes. Then we manage no less than three wrong turns in the crazy maze of ancient backstreets trying to find the site. All told, Grayman would be more than three hours gone when we finally crash the target. The good news: we get there first this time, before the locals go stomping in and we have to contain their panic as well as what Grayman put up on the Net.
I sweep two teams through the first floor at crossfire angles, while covering the other potential exits from the outside alleys. Henderson got us supplemented with a quick-mixed CT platoon of Ranger, Delta and Air Force Special Operators dropped in from Corfu, but I send my own guns in first. They don’t find any life by the time they meet in the middle, and nobody comes out. So I leave the backup to keep the perimeter, and coordinate SatCom and air support while I drag Burke (not drag—he was itching to go in on point, so I had to shorten his leash) and the McCain scanner specialists in through the front door, and order the sweep-teams up to the floors above.
Ten seconds inside, and I doubt we’ll be needing the extra firepower Henderson sent. The whole place is clear—tactically speaking: the only life-sign being the hostage Abdul Hassim, a minor Iraqi diplomat that had been snatched after his car got ambushed just outside of Rome last week. We find him curled up and near catatonic in a dark back apartment, hiding in a closet. He didn’t even try to leave. I get a deer-in-the-headlights shot of him through one of the helmet feeds. He’s covered in dried blood that I know mostly isn’t his.
Zero is easy enough to find. The lights are still on, harsh and bright for the webcam’s sake, making the place look even more like a meat-processing plant—it makes Wiesbaden seem positively tidy. The Wabs’ webcam video did not remotely capture it. The scanner techs all look pretty reluctant to go in at all. In fact, I get it pretty clear (without them actually having to say it) that most all of my team are eager for fresh air.
Except Burke: He’s got to go wander off quietly on his own, after the techs have done their initial scans, to go back and look at it up close. I didn’t even notice he wasn’t with me anymore in Al Ra’d’s flat (my attention was understandably absorbed by what Lieutenant Ransom found: the mostly-full case of undetectable firearms left in the middle of the floor).
The teams find Burke for me on their return sweep: crouched in the doorway of the makeshift abattoir (and they almost shoot him because they weren’t expecting him to be there), his face half in his hands, breathing hard through his fingers, just staring at it.
I back them off of him (I don’t know why—it just seemed appropriate to leave him to suck it all in for a few) and edge myself up through the dim corridors, just close enough to watch him for a bit without crowding him. He doesn’t budge, and I don’t stay long. It smells like Wiesbaden in there, too. Only worse, of course, because there’s a lot more carnage. I don’t know why it doesn’t chase him away.
“Henderson?” I link in from a discreet distance.
“You’re onsite?” he replies, knowing the answer already.
“Looks like Darfur in here. Or Iraq when they really wanted to piss us off.”
“Just like the clip, in other words.” He has no idea. None. Sits in his offices in Langley. Runs his ops from a comcenter: screens and interfaces and a hot cappuccino. 2-D. No smells.
“Have we confirmed containment?” I ask him.
“Containment?” I hate him when he’s an ass. This is apparently much of the time. “What containment?”
“The video upload. You told me you shut it down.”
“I didn’t do jack.” First true statement he’s made. “Talk to the kid—Becker—maybe he can explain it.”
“On, sir… Colonel…” Voice out of nowhere. Sounds like a kid.
What the hell?
“What are you doing, Doctor?” I hear Henderson complain. He says “doctor” like it’s an insult. “Why are you on live?”
“Sorry, sir,” Kid-voice apologizes too quickly for my respect. “I wanted to stay linked once Datascan locked.”
“You’ve been on this whole time?” Henderson sounds like he’s scolding his teenage son for surfing porn.
“I need to monitor the field-test,” the kid starts fighting back. Becker. This must be the famous Scott Becker. “We are in active-running…”
“What’s the containment status?” I interrupt the mutual posturing. “How far did the video upload get?”
“Still tracing,” I get back from the kid. Not what I wanted. But then he comes up with the mea culpa: “Datascan caught the upload when it hit the popular Rad sites it was aimed for. It was only up for about thirty seconds before we shut them down. I think we got all of it, first-run anyway.”
&n
bsp; “First run? What does that mean?”
“There were hits on the sites before we pulled the plug on them. People were waiting for this. Wanting to watch it live.”
“Did they download?” Copies. We could be chasing copies.
“The Rads use some pretty effective cover, Colonel. We would have to get more invasive to be sure. Viral spyware, at least. And mazebreakers. I’ll need authorization.”
“No,” Henderson cuts him off with unexpected absoluteness. “I don’t want anyone thinking this was anything more than a standard Agency containment. We wiped the original uploads. If we let them know that we can chase them down through their mazes, they’ll freak on us.”
“Datascan can do it without…” Becker starts to insist.
“Not taking the risk, Doctor Becker,” Henderson slaps him down again.
“How many hits, Doctor Becker?” I need to know.
“Five, Colonel.”
Then I realize that Burke is here, come up on me real quiet. Linked and listening.
“So, they’ve seen him,” I just go ahead and say it. “And odds are they’ve got copies of his lovely little performance to disseminate to all their friends. Though your new AI might well be able to keep running down copies if they surface on the public Net, it can’t do much about the offshore and offline traffic.”
“Which means the whole Rad web-ring will know they’ve got a monster on their tail by tomorrow,” Burke cuts in, sounding just a bit more angry than I would have expected. “They’ll even know what he looks like. The rest of the world won’t, but they will.”
“And they’ll start doubting their flashware security,” Becker confirms.
“So what he’s given us will quickly turn into crap,” Burke concludes. “All that sweet Wab flashware he left behind for us to sift through…”
“That isn’t the point, Captain Burke,” Henderson stops him, then does something I don’t expect: “Truth being, he’s not given us anything we didn’t have already. It’s just that now they’ll rush to regroup and reshuffle, and all that we did have will be crap as well.”
“What we had already?” he repeats, sounding like he’s trying not to explode.
“Yes, Captain. Contrary to the public view, we don’t just stand around with our thumbs inserted. We’ve had our ins for quite some time. The Wabs aren’t as mole-proof as they think. We just didn’t want to advertise that little fact.”
“So you sit back and play bushy and let them keep getting away with shit because it’s not worth blowing your intel advantage?” He’s seething. Doing the righteous young officer thing. He still thinks he’s in it to make a difference, like the recruiters sell. Reading his file, I would have thought he’d left the cherry ideals back in the jungle. “So—What?—you give ‘em a certain number of decaps and minimarts per year so you can catch the big plays? What the fuck…?!”
“Stand down, Captain,” Henderson cuts in, sharp and hard.
“And who are you, anyway?” Burke keeps challenging.
“Henderson. JIC.” He’s actually being remarkably patient. “The one who signed off on your assignment to this team, if it matters to you. And now un-stick yourself from hero-mode and consider what this means: The Rads, despite popular opinion, do indeed have enough brain cells between them to assume, based on this video, that Grayman has broken their security big time. They will also consider—just as we did but with greater paranoia—that he may be somebody’s operative. They will then assume that he’s shared the contents of their flashware with us. So: If you were a Rad Warlord or cell coordinator with a big loud one in the works right now, and got the idea we might be hacked deep into your intimates, what would you do?”
Burke cools, having to digest that while I try to wrap myself around any logical reason why Grayman—apparently sharp enough to get this far—would do something so calculatedly stupid.
“The Rads will change up and speed up,” Burke concludes, getting focused, heading for the exit. “They won’t just take the setback with a smile. They’ll assume we’re about to move on them massively, so they’ll hit us hard before that, hurt us worse.”
It’s raining on him when he gets through the front door and out into the narrow street. He stops in his tracks, starts shaking his head.
“No. This isn’t what it scans as. It isn’t Grayman losing it and impulsively fucking all of us—and himself—just to taunt them.” And I don’t think I like the smile on his face when he turns around and looks at me. “He’s instigating something.”
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 8
