Mariposa

  "Sorry to interrupt such a pretty show, but the moment has arrived. Years of opportunity, years of planning, to correct centuries of injustice and incompetence—of cruelty, greed, and spite, visited upon us by those who are now about to—"

  A sound interrupted him—a single high-pitched musical note, totally out of place. At first the guests cringed, thinking the feedback had returned.

  But the high note resolved into a jerking, mournful cry—a child weeping.

  A young boy.

  Price looked puzzled, then waved his hand angrily. Two of his Haitians staggered off to investigate, their weapons wide and awkward as they pushed through the crowd.

  The crowd laughed again, as if the weird weeping had been planned—the world's cry of pain only appropriate, considering their coming triumph.

  On the biggest screen, a net media news banner announced a breaking story—blackouts.

  A wave of power outages sends much of the northwest and Canada back to the stone age—

  Video pans of dark streets, black skylines silhouetted against the morning glow.

  "Apocalypse now, by God!" the elderly congressman enthused in a booming voice.

  The Saudi prince took this opportunity to push his way onto the riser, his own retinue glaring a challenge at Schmitz and the Haitians.

  Schmitz did not intervene.

  The prince's eyes fixed on Fouad. His face was stony but his hands quivered. He stepped close and leaned over. Fouad angled his head back, taking in this looming presence with doped nonchalance, then a twitch of his brows, a slight bow of his head, to a prince of the ancient blood.

  Speechless with fury, the Saudi struck him hard across the face with the back of his hand, and was about to do so again.

  Schmitz moved in this time to block the blow—

  The air changed, turning suddenly crisp and terribly dry.

  Schmitz cried out, grabbed his arm, and reeled back. His Haitians did the same, along with the prince's retinue—clutching the same spot on their right arms, as if branded by hot, invisible pokers.

  The dance floor erupted in howls of pain.

  The ballroom lights flared an intolerable white, then sizzled out in cascades of sparks.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Judah P. Benjamin International Airport (JPB)

  Bruised and battered, blood streaming from his scalp down the back of his neck, William crept along the northern edge of the highway, sometimes crawling, sometimes marching in a low, awkward crouch, always aware of the traffic both on the ground and in the air.

  Limos, Torq-Vees, a steady stream of light trucks . . .

  Drones hugging the terrain along the highway, keeping low to avoid incoming flights.

  He had come within a few dozen yards of the airport's northern boundary, protected by a high wire fence, when a Gulfstream sighed in for a landing to his left, catching the sunrise, its fuselage a gorgeous flow of gold and salmon pink.

  Almost simultaneously, west of the airport, a big twinkle in the sky went nova. From the bright center, flares spread out to form a five-pointed star, each point expanding into a spherical front of purple plasma.

  The plasma spheres warped, twisted, and merged, in turn provoking an atmospheric outrage unlike anything William had ever seen—a shower of spinning, darting puffs of intermittent light spreading out over the Texas landscape.

  The air above the desert began to crackle.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Over Lion County

  The sun rested on the horizon, cut in half, before its final heave toward day. The sky visible through the jet's opposite windows seemed to briefly flicker, like a passing torch flame. Fore and aft, Rebecca heard light mechanical clicking, like fingers randomly working keyboards.

  Haze's face beaded with sweat.

  "Bright number one," the first weapons officer announced. "Five-minute burn."

  Something about the aircraft interior changed—something about Rebecca's own skull, as well. The air seemed dryer. Sharp pains wormed and twisted in her jaw, her mandible: the fillings in her teeth were getting hot.

  Kunsler grimaced and covered her mouth.

  Haze let out a whoop and bent over.

  The weapons officer swore and produced mouth pieces from a bag. "Jeez, sorry! Most of my guys—here, use these—like a boxer," he said.

  Rebecca inserted the guard between her teeth and sat back, feeling the pains subside.

  "Range increasing." The weapons officer watched the lights on his remote trigger. He looked back at Rebecca and Kunsler, opened his mouth, and tapped his eyetooth with a fingernail. "Younger guys have ceramic caps, not amalgam. Double apologies—it'll pass. Keep those guards in."

  "We're taking that first one well, ladies and gentlemen," the pilot announced. "Last plane into JPB has made it to the runway and is coasting. Engines puffing and throwing out sparks. That's quite a show down there."

  "Second burn in three minutes," the weapons officer said, eyes bright. Totally into it. "Runway looks clear for a landing—if that's the plan."

  Kunsler looked to Rebecca.

  The HRT commander gave her a high-five—his team was ready.

  Chapter Sixty

  JPB

  William toppled from his crouch and lay on his back in the dirt, looking sideways. From this perspective, he saw a handful of metallic discs spark and dance on the pea gravel and sand.

  Something was pumping the ubiquitous Talos surveillance chips full of energy. As if in rowdy applause, a number of nearby bushes snapped into smoky torches.

  Under his legs, several of the chips burned his skin. William hastily kicked them away, then looked around for a place where there were no chips—nothing to absorb the pulse from the sky and catch his pants on fire.

  A big drone came spinning down and augured into the dirt barely a hundred and fifty yards away. Its load of ammunition immediately began to cook off like a hideous popcorn machine, a continuous rolling snap-snap-wow followed by singing whines, much too close to his head.

  Then its Hellfire missiles blew, knocking William several yards back into the scrub and poking small shrapnel holes in his legs.

  He rolled and stayed low, waiting for his senses to return, then felt for injuries with filthy fingers, poking through torn pants legs and shirt. Eventually he realized that he wasn't much worse off than he had been before.

  He had been tossed into a comparatively parched and empty patch of ground, no bushes, so he rolled over to watch the show.

  Thousands of fist-size spheres of blue-green plasma bounced like elfin jewelry along the desert contours, following their own sense of magnetic destiny.

  Without knowing precisely what was happening, William began to laugh like a maniac. This seemed to disturb a line of sizzling spook-gems. They backed off in sincere resentment, glimmering, studying his energy and static profile, and then accepted the new way of things. A few flowed around him. One touched his knee, and another an outcrop of boulder.

  Both popped like tiny balloons.

  Brush fires had broken out all over the desert. Smoke was already thick.

  William realized he couldn't just stick around and play the stunned audience. He got up, brushed himself off, and walked toward the airport's wire fence, looking for a gate, a culvert, a water drainage pipe, some sort of entrance.

  Somehow he guessed there wouldn't be much left in the way of a security presence. Axel Price had just provoked a federal response William did not even know was in their arsenal—

  Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse.

  Another drifting star went nova and it started all over again.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  The Smoky

  The unrolled screens went black as one. Throughout the ballroom, more fixtures exploded and threw sparks down on the crowd—already dancing to another tune, not a waltz but a frantic thrashing accompanied by swinish squeals of pain.

  Three hanging banners had caught fire. In the weird glow, Fouad saw Price grab his mout
h and bend over double. His Haitians had thrown aside their weapons, which crackled and sparked on the polished oak floor. Despite their pain, as the guards twitched and groaned, they tried to move him from beneath the banners and out of the ballroom.

  Price jerked straight and resisted.

  Some of the guests had already left but dozens more were bowing, cursing, and screaming, bouncing into each other—cutting spastic orange figures against the darkness.

  Schmitz could not help but be distracted.

  Fouad had no idea what was happening but did not much care. He saw his moment. He had tracked which of Schmitz's two Haitians held the key to his cuffs and leg irons. Lifting his legs, twisting his shoulders, he leaned and gave the other Haitian a wobbling, half strength slam of his elbow just below the nose. The blow was not what he had hoped, but still firm enough to shove the man's nasal bones into his brain—unseen by the others.

  The man made a sudden mimp and fell back.

  Fouad went under the table, grabbed the key-bearing Haitian's legs—the one who had smiled broadest, apologetic about showing his former teacher a lack of respect—and pulled him down from his chair. Slipping his cuffed hands over the man's head, he broke his neck with a swift reverse spin—then rolled him like a sack of potatoes to present the right pants pocket.

  Now came the difficult part. Hunching along the corpse, Fouad reached into the pocket with cuffs still on, fumbling. After a moment, fingers poking the dead man's inner thigh, he looped through a steel ring, pulled it out, and grasped the key—

  Schmitz pushed aside the red cloth and leaped under the table. He tried to knock the key loose. They fought for a long, difficult moment, but Fouad had the advantage. He was still feeling the effects of the drug, but not in searing pain.

  With the cloth held back by Schmitz's torso, light from the burning banners flickered over his thrashing arms. Both of them smoked through melted holes in the sleeves just above the wrists. The smell filled the air.

  Fouad curled and grabbed Schmitz's right arm, squeezing the burned flesh over the ID chip.

  "God damn you!" Schmitz yelledy. His head thumped the bottom of the table.

  Fouad let go, jammed the key into the leg irons, and twisted. Then he pulled away from Schmitz in the other direction and inserted the key into the cuffs. The irons dropped loose but the cuffs only partially opened, then jammed—they felt hot.

  The fight under the table turned frantic.

  Fouad's foot came up and caught Schmitz under the jaw, a kick that might have killed him outright had the drugs not damped Fouad's strength. Schmitz grunted and wrenched his leg around. Fouad grabbed Schmitz above the elbow, pressing back and making the soldier roll in that direction to break loose—then grabbed his wrist, stretched the arm out, and with his heel pressed as hard as he could against the adjacent ribs, pumped like a tiger again and again, his kicks moving from ribs to stomach.

  The arm gave with a pop.

  Schmitz was making little puffing shrieks but still would not quit.

  Fouad's cuffs finally came loose. He reached down for the long steel chain. Schmitz desperately warded off the chain with his one good arm, breath whistling in his nose, grunting, legs flailing against the dead Haitian—

  Fouad came around on Schmitz's left and wrapped the chain around his neck and then, like a crocodile spinning in the water, twisted and twisted and looped and twisted again until they both emerged from beneath the table, pulling down the red cloth, and rolled off the riser, landing with a heavy thud on the oak floor.

  Schmitz clutched and clawed at Fouad's hands, reached up and poked a thumb into one eye, then stuck it in one corner of Fouad's mouth and yanked.

  Fouad bit down.

  Schmit pulled out his fingers and grabbed feebly for Fouad's head. Everything was coated in sweat and blood—he could not find purchase.

  In the flame-lit shadows of the ballroom, over the next few minutes—that awful interval of an adversary's final time in this world—Schmitz's arms fell.

  He stopped struggling, stopped breathing.

  His muscles relaxed.

  Fouad regretfully twisted Schmitz's head on the limp neck until the vertebrae parted, just to be certain, then shoved himself to his feet and staggered to the middle of the dance floor. He was covered in blood and saliva, half blind from the thumb gouge in one eye—muscles stretched to their limits.

  He knocked aside a staggering Chinese man and drew a welcome whoop of breath.

  Still alive!

  Allah would forgive all—he was still alive.

  And now the time of Mr. Price was come.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Over Lion County

  "Bright number three away," the first weapons officer announced. "Two-minute burn."

  "Look at that," Daniel Haze said in awe as he stared through the window by his seat.

  The ground around the Talos Campus—the landscape for at least twenty miles in all directions—was marked with the great, hashed brush-strokes of sooty fires—clearly revealing the criss-cross dispersal patterns of the aircraft that had years ago dropped Talos's ground-sensor chips.

  Wherever the chips had fallen, they had absorbed energy from the expanding plasma pulse and conveyed it to the local flora.

  At least ten thousand acres were ablaze. The fires were slowly merging into one great conflagration, with the Smoky, the Talos Campus, and the airport at three points of a triangle inside the burn.

  "Looks like all the Talos drones are down," the pilot said. "I don't see anything flying."

  Rebecca removed the mouth guard and felt her jaw, wondering if the heat had cracked a couple of molars. She should have had that amalgam drilled out years ago.

  "We go down—what are the chances they'll shoot at us?" Kunsler asked.

  "Their firearm ID chips are fried," the weapons officer said. "If what we were told about Talos armory rules is true, I don't think they'll be shooting at us for a while. The more high-tech they are, the harder they fall."

  "They could keep unchipped guns for an emergency," Rebecca said, considering their options carefully—about to make her major decision.

  "They're still feeling a world of hurt," the weapons officer said. "Our best trained special ops take twenty or thirty minutes to recover from a Bright, if they're chipped. Burns like a sonofabitch. Some of the older model chips burn right through the skin and set clothes on fire."

  "Tower systems are dead," the second officer said, coming back from the cockpit. "They have no way of knowing who we are, except by visual—and this plane is stealthy and can hide its markings. We disperse our heat. We should be ghosty even if they still have operational radar and IR—which they don't."

  Haze and Kunsler looked at each other across the plane's narrow aisle, nervously awaiting Rebecca's decision.

  Kunsler had never engaged in an actual combat landing before.

  "If we land now," Haze said, "confusion and smoke will provide excellent cover. "We can't delay. Price's soldiers are disciplined. They'll regroup quickly, I think—and they'll find some way to arm themselves."

  "I told William Griffin to get to the airport," Kunsler said. "If he's managed to connect with Nabokov—with Fouad—then they'll be looking for us. But that seems less and less likely."

  "Last FLIR images show their escape vehicle blown off the road," Haze said. "One agent killed in the brush . . . Two released west of our strike zone. They're off in the desert somewhere by now, if they weren't captured or shot."

  "One ejected," Kunsler said hopefully.

  "That's a maybe. Could be flaming debris—or a burning body."

  Rebecca felt the plane bank right. The pilot was preparing for a landing—or another pass. He had looked over the runways—two, in parallel, with taxiways and a third small plane strip arranged like a wobbly X in the desert, about two miles beyond the Talos campus.

  The Smoky—where most of the guests and Price were likely to be located, as well as Fouad—lay northwest of the line be
tween the campus and the airport.

  Her own senses seemed sharp. Her visual field was still expanded, still intensely detailed, still showing weird patches of color—useful or not, who could tell?

  Her ears sang sweetly. She felt a nervous jangle throughout her torso and legs, but that could have been nerves, excitement, anything.

  All that she was, she was not afraid.

  She felt strong.

  To hell with spreading new wings. She could arrange for all that later, at her leisure. Life had not cut her any slack before now.

  Maybe it was time to get her work done and force the issue in a better direction—

  After all, she had always wanted to make the world a better place, and now she was being given a unique opportunity to do just that.

  "Land this plane," she said. "Commander, gather up your weapons and alert the team."

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The Smoky

  Fouad maneuvered carefully between stumbling, disoriented guests, through the door taken by Price and his guards as they evacuated the ballroom—down a curving external hallway to the outdoors.

  They all seemed to be living through an Edgar Allan Poe horror story—the Masque of the Red Death. He had read Poe with guilty pleasure in grade school, in poor Arabic, better than nothing—but the vivid pictures remained, and now the mummers, the dancers, the guests, were in complete confusion, the world turned on its head, those who should be dead walking amongst them through darkness and smoke and pain . . .

  Fouad picked up his pace after he left the ballroom and angled to the left, under drifting smoke, around the kitchens and dining areas. He avoided a few knots of wandering Haitian troops, who seemed to have lost all sense of cohesion and discipline.

  They might have been well-trained, but the strike of a deadly invisible god reaching down and burning their flesh . . . Stopping their assault rifles and pistols from working (none carried guns now, and the ground was littered with expensive weapons—Fouad did not bother to pick them up)—