Predator One
I cut over to the desk and saw that it was piled high with papers of all kinds. Reams of computer printouts, scores of file folders, three-ring binders, and loose pages torn from yellow legal pads. Nothing that I could see screamed “Hey, this is what you’re looking for!”
Until it did.
Sitting on one corner of the desk was a stack of spiral-bound notebooks with cheap cardboard covers. The kind they sell for a buck at Staples. There were maybe forty of them bundled together in sets that were bound with oversize rubber bands. Either Davidovich had stacked them haphazardly or someone had already gone through them. I tended to believe the latter. Davidovich had many flaws, but sloppiness was not one of them.
I set my gun down and picked up one of the books, flipped it open. On the inside cover I saw a handwritten name. Not Aaron Davidovich’s own name. It was Matthew. His son’s name. Written over and over again. In pencil, in felt-tip marker, in three different colors of ballpoint. Hundreds of times. The pages were filled with computer code. Meticulously written in pencil in a small, crabbed hand. Flipping through, I saw that the book was completely filled. Almost. There were a few blank pages, maybe to separate one program from another, or one set of functions. Something like that. I’m talented with spoken languages, but computer speak isn’t even Greek to me. I can speak and even write Greek. This was an alien language. What had Davidovich said?
They’re still on the island in my notebooks, hidden in a piece of old game code that I stopped working on. It looks like junk unless you know the key to using it.
Then he’d rambled on and on, losing his shit in the midst of panic. I picked through my memory everything he said. Every detail, fishing for something useful. He’d said something … something … I closed my eyes and willed my brain to replay the conversation.
Pi from nine, he’d said. There was more and I had to claw for it. I mouthed the words I remembered, and as I spoke them aloud they congealed into something that maybe sense. A kind of sense.
“Pi from nine, backwards,” I murmured. “Page two.”
That’s what Davidovich said.
I opened the notebook to page two, but it was merely the middle of a code string that began on the previous page. I tossed it down and began going through the others and very quickly discovered that I was totally out of my depth. None of it looked right to me. The only thing that I could understand was the name Matthew. Davidovich had spent a lot of time writing his son’s name on the inside covers of his notebooks. Why? Obsession? Regret? Who knows.
So I took a risk to break radio silence and tapped my earbud to get Yoda on the line. In the absence of Bug, Yoda was the software genius of the DMS. His real name, by the way, is Yoda. He has a sister named Leia. His parents could use some therapy.
“Mmmm, what have you got, Cowboy?”
“I think I found Doctor Detroit’s notebooks, but there are a lot of them and I don’t have time to exfil with them.” I tapped the camera on my Scout glasses so Yoda could see what I saw. “He said it was game code on page two.”
I could hear Yoda take a breath. “Okay,” he said, “start with the, ummm, first one.”
The clock kept ticking.
Ticking.
Ticking.
Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-six
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 3:51 P.M.
“Is that thunder?”
Rudy Sanchez and the infectious-disease specialist looked up from the NF reports they had been discussing. Above them, the building seemed to tremble.
The doctor had asked the question, but he was frowning.
“No,” said Rudy.
“It sounds more like fireworks,” said a nurse who was on the other side of the room taking updates from the printer.
Rudy murmured, “Ay Dios mío. That’s not fireworks. Doctor, call the police. Do it right now.”
He reached for the silver handle of his cane and pushed himself up. Rudy tapped the earbud Lydia required him to wear. He tapped it to bring her online, but there was no answer. He tried Sam. Montana.
No one answered his call.
He tried Church. Nothing.
Finally, he contacted the DMS headquarters at the Hangar on Floyd Bennett Field. The duty officer answered at once.
“This is Doctor Rudy Sanchez—”
“Combat call signs only on this line—”
“To hell with that. I am at UC San Diego Medical Center. Send immediate help. We are under attack.”
Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-seven
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 3:52 P.M.
Doctor Pharos felt his phone vibrate, and when he looked at the display, he smiled.
“Boy,” he said into the phone, “I was waiting for your call.”
“Father,” she said, “it’s started.”
“Ah. Excellent.”
“And … Father?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“After this, I get to come home?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“No, honey, thank you.”
The line went dead. Pharos slipped the phone back into his pocket and glanced at the burned man, who in turn was watching the news coverage coming out of San Francisco.
“So beautiful,” said the Gentleman. “So beautiful.”
Pharos said nothing. Instead, he stood and walked without haste to the door. This was all accelerating now. He had to make sure that the twelve separate escape routes he’d arranged were all prepped and ready. Once he had the codes from the burned man, he was going to be out of there like a bullet leaving a gun.
And if those codes were never to be his…?
So sad.
But his feelings were soothed by all of that gold.
He was smiling as he left the dying man’s room.
Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-eight
Fort Myers, Florida
April 1, 12:53 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
Bug sat in his hotel room. His clothes were draped over the edges of his suitcase, empty sleeves reaching like dead arms, head collars collapsed in defeat. A pizza box stood open, one slice missing, the cheese cold and congealed. More than a dozen cans of Coke stood on the night table or lay on the floor. The TV was on, and news footage of the horrors in San Francisco was like something from a summer disaster movie. A box of tissues was within reach on the small dining table. Dozens of crumpled tissues overflowed the metal trash can.
Bug listened to what Mr. Church was telling him, and as he did so he could feel the malaise in his mind and the grief in his heart fusing into a wall of indifference. He didn’t care about the president, the ballpark, the bridge, the submarine, or any of it. He wasn’t even sure he cared about Mr. Church. He certainly didn’t give a shit about the president or anyone on Air Force One. None of it was quite real.
Only one thing was real to him, and it was going to be buried in a closed coffin. He wasn’t even sure all of her would be in there. The blast had torn her to pieces.
Pieces.
The thought was too horrible to fit into his head.
His mother had been torn to pieces. Bloody chunks. Broken bits of bone. Burned blood.
That face, the one that was always filled with smiles. The first thing he had ever seen in this world. Those eyes, brimming with laughter and love. That heart. That noble and loving heart. The hands that had bathed him. The laugh that could burn away the darkest shadows. The mind that held a fierce intellect and a generous nature. The personality.
Gone.
All of it blown to pieces by a bomb.
All of it gone.
All of her gone.
Gathered up in bits and put into a bag so it could be buried in a box.
So sorry, the police and the doctors and all his friends had said. So sorry.
Now the world itself was being bl
own to bits, and that seemed only right. It should all blow up, all fall down, all go into the cold, cold ground.
Like Mom.
Like her.
Like his own heart, which was so badly broken that Bug knew it could never be fixed. Some things can’t be fixed. Some things had no reset button.
“Bug,” said the voice on the phone.
“I can’t,” Bug told him.
“Please.”
“Get someone else. Get Yoda.”
“Yoda isn’t up to this,” said Mr. Church.
“I’m not up to this.”
“Bug…”
“It’s not fair!” Bug suddenly screamed into the phone.
After a long moment, Mr. Church said, “No, it’s not. They took your mother away from you, Bug. They’re trying to take my daughter away from me. They may have killed Aunt Sallie, and they will kill me.”
“I’m sorry … but you shouldn’t have called me.”
“Who else could I call?”
The silence washed back and forth on the line.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Bug. “If they have a quantum computer, even MindReader can’t beat it.”
“They may have a QC, Bug. They probably do. But if so, it’s not on this aircraft. The Solomon program is.”
Bug said nothing.
“I need to bypass a computer lockout system with a set of pocket tools and a Warlock handheld. I’ve tried everything that I know how to do. I can get about a third of the way in, and then it locks me out again.”
Bug said nothing.
“We have about forty-three minutes of flight time left before we cross a certain line.”
“What line?”
“The president cannot let Air Force One cross into the New York metropolitan area. If we cannot take control of the plane in under twenty-five minutes, the president will have to order ground-based missiles to blow us out of the sky.”
Bug said nothing.
For a long time.
Then he sobbed once and pressed a tissue to his eyes and clenched his jaws to stifle the scream that he wanted to give as the only reasonable answer.
He struck himself in the forehead with his cell phone. Once. Again. And again.
Then he dragged a forearm across his eyes, sniffed to clear his nose, and mumbled a single word.
“Okay.”
Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-nine
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 3:53 P.M.
A figure emerged from the crowd of Kingsmen. Small, slim, female, with a Cambodian face and eyes like a shark. She wore a full set of high-tech body armor and carried a .22 automatic in her hand. Nicodemus hissed something at her and vanished into a doctor’s office. The Cambodian took charge and immediately yelled to the Kingsmen, who began overturning gurneys to create shooting blinds. Lydia rolled out and fired four quick shots, catching one of the men in the throat and sending the others for cover. The Cambodian woman spun and fired and bullets chipped the desk an inch from Lydia’s face.
She squirmed back under the desk, peering through a splintered hole as she reloaded.
The Cambodian knelt quickly, aimed, fired. There was a sharp cry, and one of the DMS team simply sat down, coughed red, and fell over onto his side.
“The cow is in the room at the end of the hall,” yelled the woman. “Take her. Kill the others. Do it now!”
The Kingsmen began pouring it on even heavier, turning the hospital floor into a whirlwind of flying lead and jagged splinters.
Lydia slapped the magazine in and then leaned out to fire at the newcomer, but there were two shooters in the way. She shot one through the side of the head, and he fell sideways into his companion, dragging them both down. That gave Lydia a clear shot at the Cambodian, but the slim Asian wheeled and snapped off a shot that punched into the center of Lydia Ruiz’s chest.
Lydia collapsed backward, the air rushing from her lungs. Fires ignited in her eyes, and for a moment she could neither move nor breathe. She turned to see the Kingsmen rushing forward, howling as they fired.
Circe O’Tree-Sanchez’s room was across the wide hallway from where Lydia lay. Bullets hammered into the glass and exploded it inward, filling the room with a million glittering splinters. There was sudden movement as two figures came up off the floor and threw themselves down across Circe. Junie used her body to cover Circe’s chest and face; Toys bent his body like an arch over her distended belly. Not touching her, but shielding her as the glass tore through their clothes and painted their bodies red.
Chapter One Hundred and Forty
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 3:56 P.M.
“Tell me something good, Yoda.”
“Ummmm, Jesus, Cowboy, this is very advanced stuff. Some of this must be for the, ummm, QC and—”
“We’re not looking for the frigging QC,” I snapped as I threw down one notebook and opened another. “We’re looking for old game code. Does any of this fit?”
He started to answer, faltered. Started again, faltered again.
“Goddamn, focus. The clock is ticking.”
“I know, I know. Mmmmmmm, God … I wish Bug was here.”
I flipped through the pages of the notebook. “He’s not. Pay attention. Is this game code?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be, but…”
I wanted to scream. Somewhere in the skies over Ohio or some Midwestern state, Air Force One was racing to punch into the New York airspace. Minutes were breaking off the clock. My heart was racing so hard it hurt.
“No,” said Yoda. “Not that one. Ummm, let me see the next one…”
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-one
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 3:56 P.M.
Lydia pressed her fingers to her chest and looked at them, expecting to see blood.
All she saw was her own copper-brown skin.
Kevlar. She wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. The vests stopped the bullets, but they could only do so much to diffuse the pounds of force.
“Get the cow!” screamed the Cambodian woman.
Then another voice, older, male, snarled, “Bring her to me.”
Nicodemus.
Lydia growled, took a big bite of her pain, and rolled back to her knees. The Kingsmen were racing toward Circe’s room. Montana took three of them down, but it didn’t even slow their rush. Then a heavier weapon spoke from the far end of the side hall. A big, throaty cough, and in the same instant one of the Kingsmen seemed to fly apart. There was a second shot, a third, a fourth, and with each one a Kingsman died. Heads exploded. Chests ruptured.
Lydia could not see where Sam Imura was positioned, but he kept firing, killing everything he aimed at. He’d brought his “indoor” gun with him, an M21 semiautomatic with a twenty-round box magazine.
Except that the gun needed to be reloaded and the hall was choked with Kingsmen. How many magazines did Sam have? One spare, tops?
As Lydia shifted back into a shooting position, she saw another DMS agent go down, his upper chest torn apart by a dozen rounds. The fusillade drove Montana back from the doorway. Police officers and the support team from Homeland poured out of the fire tower, down near Sam. They opened fire at once, and the Cambodian woman sent half her team down the hall to intercept them. There were a lot of DMS, SWAT, and Homeland shooters in the hospital.
There were five times as many Kingsmen.
Nicodemus and the Cambodian woman had brought an army.
An army.
Why? Lydia couldn’t understand why they would send such overwhelming force to abduct one pregnant woman. Who was Circe to them? Why did she matter?
These thoughts and questions ran through her head as she fired and fired, killing and wounding, emptying her gun, dropping the spent maga
zine, reloading, aware of how many rounds she had left.
Not enough.
Even if she put one bullet in every Kingsman here, she did not have enough ammunition to win this. Nowhere near enough to survive it. And far too little to protect Circe and her baby.
Nicodemus came stalking along the hall, his wizened body canted forward like some predatory dinosaur. His smile was an awful thing to see. Totally inhuman, filled with obvious delight at the chaos and blood that swirled around him. Again, Lydia tried to shoot him, but a pair of Kingsmen rushed at her, and she had to waste bullets on them instead of taking out that perverse parody of a priest.
“The cow is mine,” said Nicodemus, his thin voice rising above the din. “Mine!”
Suddenly something came bounding out of Circe’s room. With a howl that momentarily stilled the fighting in the hallway, it leaped through the shattered window frame and struck a Kingsman with such force that the man bent backward, folded nearly in two. The man’s spine snapped with gunshot clarity.
“Banshee…” breathed Lydia.
The enormous wolfhound drove the dead man to the floor and sprang forward, tearing the throat out of a second man.
“Kill it!” shrieked a voice. “Kill it!”
The voice belonged to Nicodemus. He pointed at the dog as he backed quickly away.
“Kill it!”
He sounded different.
Not boastful. Not confidant.
Nicodemus sounded terrified.
And Lydia Ruiz was certain of it.
Immediately, a half dozen of the Kingsmen hurled themselves at the hound and dragged it down out of sight.
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-two
Air Force One
In Flight
April 1, 3:58 P.M. Pacific Standard Time
“The green wire’s next,” said Bug. “I think.”
“Bug,” said Church as he lifted the green wire in the jaws of a pair of needle-nose pliers, “I need something better than ‘I think.’”
Church’s teeth were chattering, and his fingers had turned a dusty purple.
“I know, I know, but I can’t see the circuits. Move the light.”