Scott sighed. “Least I could do, considering what you’ve done for this country …I mean America.”
“So,” Smith mused. “I repeat. What do you do now?”
Diana was ready this time. “The same as the other fire investigation organizations. Find the origin, cause, and attackers.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Origin and attackers, this organization we’re calling Alpha.”
“The opposite of Zeta,” Smith interjected, unable to quell a small ironic smile.
“The cause,” Bloch continued, “their desire to destroy us so they can succeed in their desire to destabilize alliances and foment disorder.”
Smith grimaced. “Really?” he interrupted. He looked around the table again with a bemused look on his face. “So where’s the profit in that? Fun, yes, but no organization as apparently powerful as Alpha can continue to exist without taking advantage of the disorder and destabilization it creates.”
Randall caught his eye. “Follow the money, you mean?”
“Always follow the money,” Smith agreed. “I do it out of habit now.” He stretched a hand out toward Bloch. “When Diana alerted me to this disaster, it was the first thing I did.”
Dan saw that several people, most notably Renard, looked furtively around to see if anyone else was noticing them looking furtively around.
“Did you find anything?” Bloch asked.
Smith straightened and clasped his hands like a pastor surveying a wayward congregation. “You ever notice that when a fire starts in someone’s home, the first thing they do, after panicking, is to reach out to the most important thing to them? You get to find out what people find most important if you pay attention to that. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s someone. Sometimes it’s a treasured keepsake…”
“Where is this getting us?” Renard asked, taking on the tone of a corporate leader who wanted to make sure a meeting ran right.
“To the truth,” Smith answered.
Renard, having faced the most powerful businesses in the world, was unfazed. “And that is?” he asked.
Smith, who had faced the same people, as well as those much worse, was equally unfazed. “I’m glad you asked that, Scott.” Smith placed his hands on the table and leaned down. “Alpha could not have destroyed your headquarters and your homes without help. Someone in this room betrayed Zeta. Someone in this room has been informing Alpha of your every move.”
“Who?” Diana Bloch demanded.
Smith sat down. “Could be anyone who’s been hiding pay-offs.” He looked at each face around the table. “It could be anyone who is at the crossroads of all the information that goes in and out of Zeta.” He smirked as they all looked at each other with suspicion. “You’re already narrowing the suspects, aren’t you? You’re all realizing who’s been holding your lives in their hands—”
“This is nonsense,” Renard exploded, bolting up so fast he sent his chair crashing down behind him. It knocked some of Lulu’s findings around, and the Taiwanese woman went scurrying to collect them while giving Dan an incredulous look. “This is getting us nowhere,” Renard continued railing, pointing angrily at Smith. “All you’re doing is turning us against each other!”
“All right, all right,” Bloch interrupted, standing up herself. “Enough drama, Smith. You’ve had your fun.” She looked at each of the people at the table. “Let’s take a break to calm down.”
“We don’t have time to take a break!” Randall insisted, looking at her tech boyfriend with doubt for the first time in months. “If someone has been informing on us, Alpha could be moving in right this very second!”
“Well, let’s take a break anyway,” Bloch ordered. “And when we come back in a few minutes, let’s dispense with the nonsense and come up with some effective plans, shall we?” The woman shook her head and left the table.
The rest of the group also rose with varying degrees of worry and relief. Dan caught Lulu’s eye again, and this time her expression clearly communicated: you gweilo are nuts. Dan couldn’t help but agree as he rose, exchanged a doubtful look with Conley, then noticed Hot Shot murmuring in Renard’s ear. Renard listened absentmindedly before turning to talk intensely 1with Chilly.
Dan kept watching as Hot Shot approached Lulu and said something. The young woman pointed off to the living quarters, then went back to tidying up her evidence. For some reason, Dan kept watching Hot Shot, who went off, obviously to the bathroom.
As soon as the hacker had left the room, Diana, Jenny, Alex, Smith, Renard, Randall, Linc, O’Neal, and Lulu completely changed. They moved like a tidal wave toward the hot spring pools, taking everyone with them as fast and as quietly as they could go.
As soon as they entered, Bloch pointed Dan, Jenny, and Alex toward one. Conley was brought by Linc and O’Neal into another. Valery was brought by Lulu into a third. Renard and Randall went into the fourth. Shepard and O’Neal went into the fifth. Bloch and Smith went into the sixth.
Dan looked everywhere for Dani, but she was nowhere to be seen, and before he could say anything about it, his wife and daughter all but dragged him into the hot spring pool teepee, which, he was relieved to discover, was stone dry. Dan watched as Alex pulled the latch of the textured tops closed and latched it into place. From the outside, the covering looked like canvas. From the inside, it looked like Kevlar.
“Holy…!” Dan started before Jenny pressed a finger against his lips, then embraced him before pulling him down to the cement floor. Alex gripped her parents from the other side, just like she used to when she was a little girl.
A small army of helmeted, visored, bulletproof-uniformed Alpha agents who had surrounded the spa during the last ten minutes opened up as one with their diamond-tipped needle, laser, and air cannon guns.
Chapter 41
For more than a solid minute, tiny titanium missiles with diamond chip heads, hypersonic-intensity light, particle, electromagnetic, and microwave beams, and air cannons with the power of firehose water pounded the Happiness Place. It was the longest sixty-three seconds Lo Liu had ever experienced.
While none of the people inside the hot spring pools saw it, they all heard as the needles tore open wood, the beams sliced through stone, and the air smashed glass all around them. They did see, however, things bouncing and sliding off the pools’ Kevlar caps.
Had to be some combination of bulletproof and super strength material, Dan thought. Maybe developed in Zeta or Renard labs.
In any case, he watched and listened as Gaoxing Didian was torn apart around them. As it was, Dan remembered the construction of the hot spring room. Lulu’s parents had built it to be the safest place in the spa, with no heavy beams or rocks perched precariously over the bathers.
But the attack just kept going. Dan remembered what just a few Alpha weapons had done to his Mustang in that Boston alley, and imagined how much damage what sounded like many more were doing to the quaint spa. He could practically see, through the sounds alone, the foyer and temple getting torn apart.
He saw Lulu’s parents’ shrines being ripped apart by monsters’ scratching, tearing, punching fingers. He saw the glass and wood of the picture frames shredded and hammered. He saw the photographed faces ripped, crumpled, torn, and scattered. He saw all of Lulu’s gathered evidence being erased as if a giant were repeatedly stomping on it.
He listened as the sound of shredded wood, pulverized stone, and shattered glass diminished until the only noise that was left was of the weapons themselves. Yet still the attack continued, as if the attackers were just too pumped by the easy destruction they were wreaking.
Dan couldn’t help but wonder if the weapons would lower enough to reach the pool walls. But then he remembered their design. The only thing above the bamboo jungle floor was the spa’s walls and windows. The attackers would have to stand over the pools, pointing down, to reach the occupants. Dan moved his hand beneath his
jacket and gripped his Walther. He wasn’t about to let them catch him unprepared.
The weapons slowly stopped pumping their needle, light, and air missiles into what had once been a resort. Dan started vaulting to his feet, pulling his PPK out, when the hands of his wife and daughter grabbed him, and yanked him back down between them with a strength he never knew they had.
“Wait for it,” Alex whispered.
For an agonized few seconds, a smoky silence descended on the little ruined resort as the circle of helmeted, visored, uniformed attackers cruelly, sanguinely, and ravenously surveyed the destruction they had caused. For another endless second they gazed at the devastation, before one lone Alpha agent, near the middle of the circle, took a single step forward.
Then the jungle erupted around them.
It was a second circle of needle, light, and air destruction. A second circle outside the first circle the helmeted attackers had created with their own bodies. A second circle that didn’t spread out all their shots. The explosion of dozens of missiles, beams, and punches came all at once like a crop circle of scythes tearing down anything before it—including those who’d thought they had impenetrable clothing, helmets, and visors.
“That new ordnance you asked Smith about?” Dan heard Linc say in his ear. “It’s ready.”
Dan heard Linc’s voice, but it didn’t drown out the sounds of screams from outside as he remembered the needle, light, and air weapons he’d collected off the fallen hired help in Boston. The weapons he had handed over to Zeta and Renard’s research and development to see if they could improve them. Apparently, once they saw how they worked, they easily did.
“Now,” Alex told him, getting up herself as she pulled out her double Sig Sauer P320s.
Dan followed his daughter out of the makeshift but extremely effective bunker, seeing Conley, Valery, Lily, and Lulu doing the same, each holding their weapon of choice. In the latter’s case, it was an ancient Taiwanese farm tool—a short nunchaku-sized club attached to a longer spear by a short chain. It had once been used to beat wheat, but when it was used to fight back an invading Japanese army, it had become a foundation of the eighteen legendary weapons of kung-fu.
Smith and Bloch also emerged, but rather than brandish weapons, they pointed the others in different directions, making a quick, effective circle so no Alpha attacker could escape. No one had to find a window or door. They had all been reduced to slivers. Dan and Alex went out where the foyer used to be, finding a staggered line of crumpled bodies. After they made sure no one was in any condition to fight back, Jenny appeared behind them to pull away, then pile the fallen, damaged weapons where a crawling, bleeding, Alpha agent couldn’t reach them.
As Alex took the lead, Dan looked up to see an actual line in the trees where new weapons, adapted from the ones he had collected in Boston, had been set to do the most effective damage. Through a gap in the bamboo, he focused on just one. It looked like a slightly larger version of the kind of ankle monitors cops put on suspects under house arrest. Only these were strapped to bamboo tree trunks, designed to bathe ambushers in destruction.
“It wasn’t easy,” Dan heard Renard in his ear. At first he thought it was from the R-comm, but when he glanced left, he found Renard nearby. “But it wasn’t impossible. The tech was brilliant but simple—like many new advances—and thankfully we had many cutting edge batteries already in production for our digital devices. Coming up with enough new needles was the biggest bump—these aren’t diamond-tipped, I’m afraid…”
Dan looked down at a writhing helmeted man and kicked him unconscious. “Don’t think you’ll be hearing any complaints,” he muttered to the tech genius.
Renard didn’t seem to hear him. He was looking off at a portion of the bamboo forest that was shaking as if a bear were moving in on a campsite. “Well, maybe not the biggest bump,” he admitted, moving in that direction as the other Zetas finished their sweep. “The biggest bump was keeping all this from a certain employee…”
Some bamboo trees on the inner edge, closest to the section of the spa that had been the family quarters, opened. Hot Shot came out first, his arms behind him, looking pained. Right behind him was Danhong Guo.
“Look who I found,” she said with a grim, satisfied smile.
She turned him to show everyone that the hacker was pull-tied with plastic, as well as cheaper but more secure Chinese Bri-Circle handcuffs around his wrists. Vicious Chinese thumb-cuffs trapped his fingers, but what completed his captivity were riveted, rounded Chinese leg irons, which had, over the years, gained the accurate nickname of “death shackles.”
Dan appreciated that the Chinese woman was taking no chances, remembering stories of how it was easier to bury executed prisoners with the leg irons than get them off them.
“He seemed to think he could get by me,” she continued as Smith, Bloch, and even Chilly came up to them.
Dan may have wanted to join the crowd, but like the rest of the field ops, he knew where his priorities lay. Still, he kept his ears open.
“But he was trained by the American military,” Dani continued, “while I was trained by the Chinese.” She looked at the informer with a sadistic smile. “And that made all the difference.”
Hot Shot looked like he wanted to say something, but just ground his teeth instead.
“He looks none the worse for wear,” Bloch commented at his unmarked face. “Too bad.”
Dani sneered. “My father taught me Guo family fist,” she informed the Zeta chief. “We don’t damage our fingers and toes on skull bones.” She poked her prisoner at a certain place under his right shoulder blade. “Right, Hot Shot?” Everyone saw the man twitch as if Dani had stuck a live wire onto him.
Although virtually everyone looked ready to chew the hacker’s face off, only Chilly stuck his jaw at his former partner’s nose. He looked like he was about to unleash a torrent of invective, but all he said were three words. Yet those words were dripping with derision and disgust.
“Not cool, man.”
Renard put his hand on Chilly’s shoulder as Dani and Conley yanked Hot Shot away.
“Didn’t matter how much I paid him, or depended on him,” Renard explained to the fellow hacker, who seemed more insulted and mortified than anything else. “He wanted to become his own boss …and to do that he thought he had to tear me down first.” He looked after Hot Shot sadly. “I’ve been seeing the signs for a while, but I never thought he’d go this far…”
Smith joined the two, putting his own hand on the tech genius’s shoulder. “Good performance in there, Scott,” he said. “If I didn’t know better, I would have said you were the traitor with the guilty conscience.”
Renard just grinned wanly at the master recruiter. “Thanks. Thought you overdid it a bit, though.”
Smith let that pass, and turned as the rest of the Zeta agents slowly joined them—save one. They all looked off to the circular killing field all around the wreckage of what was once the Happiness Place to see Dan Morgan going from body to body. He wasn’t checking their wounds. He was pulling off their helmets to look at their faces.
Lulu came back from where the temple had once stood, fragments of her parents’ shrine photos littering her open hands. But even she looked up to witness what Dan was doing. And as she watched, slowly and in growing numbers, the friends of her family—the ones who had been vital in creating the landing spot and getting the trap set up—appeared from the foliage and forest to join her.
By the time Dan had completed his check, almost two dozen Taiwanese had gathered around the girl. As Dan approached them, his face a stone mask, he recognized her fellow fisher-women, the Betel Nut Beauties, and the rest stop manager.
“She’s not there,” Dan said, breathing hard.
“Who’s not there?” Linc asked.
“Amina,” Alex correctly guessed. “Amina’s not here.” The sniper tur
ned to the others. “And she wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
Before anyone else could hazard a guess, explanation, or question, Valery Dobrynin stood stiffly erect and couldn’t help but touch his ear with his forefinger—cluing everyone in that the Russians also had their version of the Zeta/Renard ear-comms.
“It’s …it’s Sannikov,” he stuttered in amazement before turning to Dan. “They’ve done the blood tests.”
“Was it Kirby’s?” Dan asked urgently as he stepped up to the little Russian.
Dobrynin kept his finger on his ear, listening, then looked up at Dan, his big, glowing, wavering eyes wide. “It wasn’t even human!”
Even Dan reacted to that bit of news, looking back at all the others, who were staring in shock at him and the Russian.
“They …they are still not sure if it is pig blood or even …even …”
“What?” Linc exclaimed.
Dobrynin almost whispered the next words. “Stage blood.”
Dan snapped around to Renard and Smith. “Seems two can play at this special effect makeup game,” he snapped. “The entire execution was a set-up. A fake!”
Even Bloch was thunderstruck. “But…why?” she stammered.
Smith stood up straight, his eyes troubled. “Smoke and mirrors,” he said slowly. “More smoke and mirrors.” He looked to the others, specifically Shepard. “Why does any magician create a distraction?”
“To keep your eyes off the real trick,” Linc answered instantly.
Smith looked to the Taiwan skies, shaking his head as a wolf’s grin slowly grew on his face. As always, Bloch and her agents were fascinated by how the man reacted to things that would horrify anyone else.
“Oh, God bless them,” he sighed. “Here we thought we were setting them up, and all the time, they were setting us up.” He motioned at all the fallen bodies around them. “Just chaff,” he tragically presumed. “Just pawns, sacrificial lambs…” His eyes stopped when he saw Lulu. “Like your parents,” he breathed, falling solemnly silent as a realization struggled to take shape in his mind.
War of Shadows Page 28
