“And you never looked to see if that was true?” I asked.
He gave me a funny look. “Why would I? The video games were long gone by then. Besides … I haven’t been there at all except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and those were always pretty dreary. Nothing lifts the soul more than having your superstar father go point-by-point through your personal and career failures.”
“Turns out you’re a better man than him, kid,” I said.
It only made Harry cry again.
I turned to Church. “I’m thinking an airstrike would be pretty useful right about now. Worked on Gateway.”
“And if the God Machine isn’t actually there?” asked Church. “What then? Besides, right now the president still believes that Harcourt is his white knight. We have suspicions, not proof, and let’s face it, we’re being guided by something you saw in a dream. We have no political cards to play.”
I got up and crossed to the weapons rack. “I’d love to go in guns blazing,” I said. “But after what happened to Top and Bunny … and me…”
As if in answer to that statement, Church’s phone rang. He answered it and I saw relief on his face. “How long, Doctor?”
He listened. I could feel my gut clench like a fist.
“Go to FreeTech. Tell Junie you need access to the model-making room. They have a full shop for making prototypes. Go.” He made two more calls, one to Junie to tell her that Hu was on his way, and another to Toys to tell him to offer any support that Violin might need. Then he disconnected and turned to me. “Dr. Hu believes he can make a protective skullcap. FreeTech has the fabrication equipment. We don’t have much time, so it might be crude and uncomfortable.”
“I don’t care if you have to nail it to my head. I can’t go after the God Machine without it. What about my team?”
Church shook his head. “We can’t risk involving anyone else. It will be hard enough for Dr. Hu to make one helmet in time.”
“Shit.”
“On the upside,” said Church, “Ghost is at FreeTech with Junie. From what I read in the Stargate file, the process does not work on animals.”
“He’s been acting really weird around me,” I said.
“More probably he’s reacting to you being weird around him.”
I grunted. “Ah. Okay. Then let’s haul ass.”
Brick hauled ass.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
BOLTON HOUSE
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:12 P.M.
I came over the hill, moving quickly but quietly. Ghost ranged ahead to find any traps or sentries. I hadn’t given him a kill order so nobody died. Yet. The night was still young.
I was dressed all in black, armed to the teeth, face painted in camouflage colors. And I was wearing an aluminum foil hat.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not aluminum foil. It’s a crystal-infused, polymer-lined, low-conductivity, aluminum-magnesium-alloy skullcap. You can tell me that all day and night, but at the end of the day, I was going hunting wearing a metal hat so people won’t climb into my head. Joe Ledger, American Dweeb. I wanted to kill someone just because of the fucking hat. Let alone the other two or three hundred points on my Justifiable Homicide Greatest Hits list.
Harcourt fucking Bolton. Damn it all to hell. Why did it have to be him?
How could this country’s greatest hero be willing to unleash something like SX-56 and slaughter all those children? How?
Resentment at growing older and feeling marginalized? It couldn’t be that. There had to be a deeper meaning. Insanity, a brain tumor. Something.
His house was a sprawling mansion that looked like it belonged in medieval England. Or maybe Westeros. Gray stone walls that rose above acres of manicured lawn that was dark green despite the drought and the governor’s water restrictions. The richer you are, the more you take laws as suggestions that you can choose to ignore. The house had eaves and turrets and even a suggestion of battlements. You could defend that place against the Normans. Or Saxons. Or whoever the hell the medieval English fought. It’s been a long time since high school history and, as it turns out, I don’t give a shit.
I crouched down and pulled out my Scout glasses. They’re high-tech premarket devices developed for Church by a friend of his who worked at Google. Or possibly owns Google. They have excellent night vision, but the lenses can be cycled so that I can switch to ultraviolet, thermal scan, and even an overlay from a satellite. Nifty. Useful, too. It was still too light for night vision, so I used the heat-seeker function and bam, there they were. Sentries in nicely concealed posts dotted throughout the landscape. Ghost sniffed the air and probably knew their placement, height, weight, and what they had for dinner. He whuffed at me. Asking for the go order.
“Hold,” I said quietly. He gave me a withering look. Telling me I was too timid.
Could he really tell that the Killer in me was still gone, or possibly dead? Maybe. There have been plenty of times when that killer’s eyes looked out of my head and into the wolf’s eyes in Ghost. We’d met on that primal level so many times that in the heat of the fight we didn’t need words or commands. He knew because in those moments we were the same. Predators from an earlier age of the world.
I held my position as pack leader as much for that primitive aspect of my personality as for any of the training we did. Maybe another handler would have forged a different kind of relationship with Ghost. I’m not like other people.
Or … maybe that was changing. Maybe the fact was these dreamwalking bastards had cut the Killer’s throat while they were ransacking the house of my private thoughts. That might be a mixed metaphor, I don’t know. You get the point. There was something wrong upstairs and I was afraid that without that aspect of my personality, I was going to die. I probably should have died already. I’ve been lucky.
Luck has a shelf life; ask any gambler. Ask any soldier.
We were moving through the trees, staying in the deepest shadows. I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug,” I said quietly.
“I’m here, Cowboy,” he said at once. He was at Auntie’s Brooklyn safe house but it sounded like he was standing right beside me. “We just picked up your transponder on the satellite.”
“Where’s Big Daddy?” I asked. We’d given that nickname to Harcourt Bolton. I’d suggested Big Fucking Asshole, but Church overruled me.
“At the beach,” said Bug. Meaning, still at the Pier.
“Okay.”
“I have fresh intel, Cowboy,” he said, and from the tone of his voice I knew it was bad.
“Hit me.”
“I’ve hacked into Big Daddy’s accounts and his personal computer,” he said. It was something he wouldn’t have done half a day ago. Now, all bets were off. “Bolton has been building a shell around himself for years. Layers of it. Shell corporations, offshore holdings, numbered accounts. You name it. Any way you can hide money, he’s using it. No idea how much. We’re hacking our way through it but it’s complicated. Short version is that ten years ago he was borderline broke. He was one of the people really crushed when the economy crashed. His mansion was mortgaged to the hilt, he was behind on payments to a dozen banks. He kept it hidden pretty well, but he was about to lose it all. Then it turned around. He started suddenly making payments on time and paying back the principle.”
“Where’d the money come from?”
“That’s the thing, he reported it to the IRS as consulting and speaking fees and returns on investments in technology corporations. It’ll take a team of forensic accountants to make sense of it all, though. He was very smart and very clever about it. Paid very heavy taxes so that he didn’t raise flags. But MindReader was able to go deeper. A lot of his investments were in dummy corporations. He was using them to launder his own money. And, Cowboy, get this, some of those fake companies are tied to Middle East oil money.”
“We can prove that?”
Bug laughed. “How? With information obtained illegally? Fruits of a poisoned tree.?
??
“Okay, but—”
Before I could finish, Mr. Church’s voice cut in as sharp and hard as a knife blade. “Deacon to Cowboy,” he barked, “we have fresh intel. We believe we know how Big Daddy intends to use the SX-56.”
“How?” I demanded.
“Freefall.” He said that among the papers Aunt Sallie had obtained from Washington was a proposal for a device designed to work in concert with Kill Switch. The idea was to launch batches of small drones, each of which was rigged with a chemical self-destruct device that was kept in safe mode by electrical current. Stop the current for any reason and the chemicals mix and destroy the drone, but the blast isn’t an incendiary. More like a big pop, seeding the air with the contents of the thin-walled plastic containers fixed to the underside of each drone. Shoot them down and they blow. Try to disarm them and they blow. Cut all power and they blow. Airbursts and prevailing winds are dangerous bedfellows for a bioweapon. Fly the drones over congested areas and let biology do the rest. Let the movements of people do it. Let the natural contact of humans to humans, parents to kids, person to person be the weapon that drives the plague.
And why not just fly the drones over the crowds and blow them up? Sure, that would work, that would spread the disease. But police and EMTs, the fire department, FEMA, the National Guard, and hundreds of other first and second responders would be able to step up and handle it. People would die, sure. Kids would die. But only a few. Not the thousands or tens of thousands that would contract the weaponized smallpox in the hours after the power went out. Kill Switch would do far more than kill the power. It was designed for use against technological cultures where the population relies on speedy and efficient response. The more civilized a person is, the more they panic when the lights go out.
Kill Switch turned off the power and Freefall filled the darkness with monsters.
I crouched in the shadows under the trees and felt my mind clenching into a fist.
Church said, “MindReader is tearing apart Bolton’s accounting. We have been able to track deliveries of drone components to ten cities across the United States. I’ve called the president but he refuses to listen. Bolton apparently already told him that we were going to approach him with some kind of wild cover story. He’s been ahead of us at every step. Erskine designed his drone weapon to operate via the Kill Switch. We’re working on the code sequence but you need to locate the main God Machine or we’ll have no chance at all of stopping this. Go!”
But I was already running.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
BOLTON HOUSE
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:15 P.M.
As I ran I called my “backup.”
“Cowboy to Spykid.”
And Harry Bolt said, “I wish you wouldn’t fucking call me that. I need a better call sign. And I don’t want Junior G-Man, Wonder Boy, Bambi, Scrappy-Do, Happy Meal, Fresh Meat, Zombie Bait, Boy Wonder, Shirley Temple, Red Shirt, Bear Cub, Son of a Gun, or any of the other stupid names you suggested.”
“Really?” I said. “Now’s the time for this?”
“I want to be called Jester.”
“Jester? You think this shit’s funny?”
“No,” he said. “Because I don’t think it’s funny. The name’s ironic.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I still want to be called Jester. It sounds cool.”
There are times when banging your head against a tree really feels like the right choice. I said, “Sure. Jester. Whatever. Can we save the world now? Just asking, because we’re not pressed for time at all.”
A pause. “Okay, Cowboy. Jester is on station.”
“Thank Jesus,” I said. “Keep sharp and follow me in.”
If Harry wasn’t my best chance of finding my way into the house and down to the Playroom I’d have given him a lollipop and left him behind. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he has no business being out in the field.
Lilith still hadn’t gotten back to Church with fresh intel, but every instinct I possessed told me that we were fighting the clock. Fighting and maybe losing. Santoro had gotten the drives with the code sequence. He—or one of the other people working for Bolton—could be down in the Playroom punching those numbers into the God Machine. Kids in ten cities across the country could be in the crosshairs right goddamn now.
Add to that the damage from the blackouts. How many people would that affect? Depends on the cities. If it was New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, places like that? Call it millions. Crashes, fires going unchecked, medical emergencies, and no one able to respond. People trapped in elevators and subway cars. People with pacemakers, people on life support, babies in neonatal units, patients in surgery. All of them plunged into darkness.
Or it could be even worse.
This could break us. It would simply be a matter of ISIL winning. This was a situation of terror proving that it was more powerful than sanity. This was a sword against which no shield would ever work. Fear and destruction wouldn’t be something in the headlines. They would be the defining qualities of our lives.
Those of us who survived.
If I didn’t find that code and the God Machine, I wasn’t going to live long enough to see the fall. That’s not a blessing. I’d burn for failing. I’m not particularly religious, but I know that much.
“I’m going in,” I told Bug. “Jester … be ready, you hear me?”
“Ten-four,” he said, using the wrong response. Idiot.
Ghost and I drifted along the line of hedges until we were at the wall. Then I drew my gun. For this part of the job I was using a Snellig A-220, a high-intensity gelatin dart filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine along with a powerful hallucinatory compound. We all call it “horsey.” Dart someone with it and they go down right now and dream of psychedelic lobsters. Or so I’ve been told. Some of the guys have volunteered to try it and they tell wild stories. It’s like a bad acid trip that puts you into a fucked-up version of Alice in Wonderland. You wake up hungover and disoriented. Horsey is designed to attack the nervous system like a neurotoxin, so it works faster than a bullet. You get hit and you go down.
Now, don’t get me wrong … under any other circumstances I’d have been happy as hell to punch the tickets of anyone working for Bolton. But you can’t ask questions of the dead, and if the code wasn’t on the premises, then I wanted to be able to hold meaningful group therapy sessions with the guards. Somebody would know something and with the lives of all those kids in the balance, I wouldn’t be in the mood to ask nicely.
I edged around the curve of one of the turrets. Two guards stood together, eyes roving back and forth across the grounds. Looking in the wrong direction. Watching the driveway, which was the only route in that wasn’t covered by the motion sensors. I raised the Snellig.
Pop. Pop. They fell as surely as if I’d reached into their brain stems and flicked a switch on the nerve conduction.
Ghost bared his teeth at them, and I knew that if I hadn’t given him a stand-down sign he’d have made sure they never woke up. He was in a mood.
Wish to hell I was. My nerves were shot and when I’d raised the gun I was half-sure the shakes would have spoiled my aim. Yeah, it was that bad. I needed my edge. I needed the Killer back.
Even so, even without him, I bent low and ran, dropped one more guard at the front door, and then I was inside. In the belly of the beast. Ghost was with me, but he was drifting farther and farther from my side. I didn’t like the looks he was giving me, either.
Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
THE BEACHVIEW APARTMENTS
ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:16 P.M.
Chief Petty Officer Lydia Ruiz pulled into the ten-car parking lot, eased into a slot between a squatty little Fiat and a PT Cruiser with wood side panels and a roof rack for surfboards. She killed the engine and got out of the car. The motor tinkled slightly as it
began to cool.
A warm breeze blew off the water and the sun was high in a clear blue sky. Out on the water a boat full of whale watchers was cruising north from San Diego, its hull painted a white so bright and pure that it hurt her eyes to look at it. Lydia took a few steps toward the entrance, then paused and turned back to her car. The passenger door was still closed. Bunny hadn’t moved at all.
Lydia went back to the car and came around to his side. Through the tinted glass she could see his face. Rigid, emotionless, blank. His sunglasses were tucked into the collar of his T-shirt, his blue eyes fixed on something that was not part of anything there in that moment. Seeing him like this twisted a knife in Lydia’s heart.
“¿Conejito—?” she called. Little bunny. A joke because he was so tall and muscular. Except now he seemed small, diminished by the comprehensive loss of confidence in who he was, and total lack of understanding of what he’d done. The intel about Project Stargate and all that mind control stuff did not seem to help Bunny. It had still been his finger on the trigger.
She opened the door and touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. When she did that he always closed his eyes and leaned his face into her touch. It was a thing he’d always done and it never failed to ignite the love flame deep in her heart.
Except he didn’t do it now.
Instead he sat staring through the windshield glass as if it projected a movie he was commanded to watch. And Lydia was wise enough about combat trauma to recognize what was happening. The events on that gas dock had broken something inside Bunny. In his heart and maybe in his head.