Extinction Machine

Chapter One

The word “impossible” used to mean something. It was a line that couldn’t be crossed. It was the outer edge of the safe zone.

I can’t find that line anymore.

Chapter Two

It started with a door knock.

It was the last time it would be knuckles on wood. Next time I’d pound with my fist.

“Nobody’s home,” said Bunny. Not for the first time.

“Parking lot’s full of cars,” said Top.

“They’re here,” I grumbled.

Master Sergeant Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit popped his chewing gum. “Then how come they’re not answering the door?”

I gave him a withering stare. He’s six seven, so I had to look up to do it. “Do I look like Carnac the Magnificent?”

“Who?”

“Cap’n’s telling you that he’s not psychic, Farmboy,” said Top. Full name was First Sergeant Bradley Sims. He currently held my old spot as leader of Echo Team. “And I believe he’s saying something to the effect that if you keep telling him no one’s here he’s going to kneecap you.”

“Words to that effect,” I said.

I knocked again. Louder. With the side of my fist.

This was not how I planned to spend my vacation. Sure, I love my country and yes I would die to protect her … but this was my first vacation since dinosaurs ruled the earth.

I had today planned out, too. It was a very well-constructed plan, starting with lots of sleep, followed by the kind of diner breakfast that would keep my arteries nice and hard. Then take Ghost, my white shepherd, for a long walk in the park where he would help me appear irresistible to pretty women. Then I’d catch the first part of an Orioles doubleheader in the afternoon, ideally to see them make the Phillies weep and gnash their teeth. Then back to planning the greatest bachelor party in the history of personal excess.

My best friend and occasional shrink, Rudy Sanchez, was getting hitched in two months. His fiancée, Circe O’Tree, was away on a book tour, and Saturday night was the party. I already had Sunday set aside for whatever was required after the party: medical attention, psychological counseling, or bail hearings.

Instead, where was I at ten in the morning on a glorious Thursday?

Stuffed into a suit, not flirting with girls in the park, standing outside of Shelton Aeronautics with Top and Bunny who were every bit as disgruntled as I was.

And nobody was answering the goddamn door.

We were out on one of those busybody projects that are often immense time wasters. We were out doing legwork to try and track down some cyber-terrorists. Yeah, I know — that battlefield is online so why were first-team shooters knocking on doors?

Like everything else in my life, it’s complicated.

The short version is that over the last few months there have been some significant attacks on the computer systems of several of the most important defense contractors. These were all private corporations who used intranet rather than the Internet for all the important stuff, so Web access to their research records was supposed to be impossible.

Well, virtually impossible. We could do it. By “we” I mean my team, the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS has the MindReader computer system and MindReader is to other computers what Superman is to the spandex crowd. MindReader can intrude into any other system, read and copy its data, and exit without a trace. Its superintrusion software package is unique and it rewrites the target system’s software to erase all tracks. Other invader systems leave some kind of detectable scarring, no matter how subtle. MindReader doesn’t.

The attacks began small. Some cute little viruses that were more nuisance than threat. Like jabs a boxer throws when he’s trying to get the measure of his opponent’s timing and reflexes. You’re not really trying to score with the jab, but by learning how the opponent reacts you set yourself for the hard right.

The hard right came around the first of the month.

Someone hacked the security computers at a Lockheed Martin plant in New Jersey and accessed the fire control system. The virus told the system there was a major fire in the labs and that tripped the halon fire retardant. Without a single warning bell, the security doors autolocked and massive white clouds of toxic gas began jetting into the labs. The fully staffed labs. Thirty-eight people wound up in the hospital.

Two days later a missile in a test silo in Kansas tried to launch itself. Luckily the warhead was a dummy and there was only residual fuel in the tanks, so the damage was minor. The implications, however, sent shock waves throughout the Department of Defense and Homeland.

The attacks escalated. A tapeworm tunneled through the mainframe at an Aurora Flight Sciences plant at the Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia, destroying all files associated with a new unmanned aerial vehicle, and then self-deleted. Sure, there were backups to all the files concerned with the UAV, but there was a scramble to pull them off any hard drive even remotely attached to an Internet connection.

The big play had been the triggering of an autodestruct protocol at a testing facility in Poker Flat, Alaska. The autodestruct wasn’t something as dramatic as a nuclear core going into the red zone. There was no automated female voice warning everyone to get to minimum safe distance. Nothing like that. This was a small series of thermite charges connected to the mainframes of the lab’s supercomputers. In the case of a physical intrusion, the crucial information was supposed to be flash transmitted to a satellite uplink right before the charges blew. Only it happened the other way around — the charges blew without warning and without uploading the files. The price tag was eleven million. Supercomputers ain’t cheap.

So, the industrialists called their contacts on the congressional oversight committee, who called the brass at the DoD, who called the president, who called my boss who pulled me in despite my being on vacation. Suddenly I was attached to the Cyber Crimes Task Force.

Everybody had a theory about what was happening and who was behind it. The Chinese Ghost Net got a lot of play, of course. Lot of people in Washington agreed it was exactly the sort of thing they’d do. Not only was it a cyber-attack that was so cleverly managed that it couldn’t be tracked back to anyone, it also did a lot of damage to our efforts to bring the next generation of stealth and unmanned aircraft to fruition.

Of course the Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans were put on the Cyber Crimes Task Force watch list. Even some of our allies — the Israelis, the Brits, the French, the everybody else — got some play because when you’re the biggest, toughest, richest kid in school nobody really likes you.

I had to admit that I wasn’t in the mood to buy Uncle Sam a beer either. How the hell were the Orioles supposed to win without me watching?

Chapter Three

“Let me knock,” suggested Bunny.

He knocked really hard. The door rattled, the building shook.

It was an overcast morning and every light in the place was on. No one had answered any of the phone lines and no one was answering the door.

Top cupped his hands and tried to peer through the frosted glass of the big double doors. “Lights are on, but no movement that I can see.”

Shelton Aeronautics was a sixty-person firm — twelve engineers, two metallurgists, a handful of physicists, and various support staff. Owned by Howard Shelton — yes, that Howard Shelton, the one who was on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and every talk show from Hannity to Colbert. The guy who was putting gaudy chunks of money into commercial space programs to mine raw materials from asteroids. The Sheltons were very old money, having made their consecutive fortunes from growing tobacco, importing slaves, coal and iron mining, B-52 bombers, and more recently stealth fighters and missiles. Interesting karma.

It was a four-story block building, functional rather than decorative, with big windows on the upper stories and lots of sculpted greenery. Parking lot had a bunch of cars, one motorcycle, and a late-model ten-speed bicycle chained to a rack.

Bunny ticked his head toward the camera. “Maybe they think we’re the IRS.”

It was a running joke with us, because when we do plainclothes scut work like this the DMS policy recommended that we wear dark navy blue or black suits, white shirts, plain ties. The outfit marked us as feds, which was an intentional move, but at a glance we could be FBI, Secret Service, NSA, or any of the many investigative arms of the Department of Justice, Homeland, or the Department of Defense. It was a way of hiding within the nondescript federal motif. Most people, when confronted by big men in dark suits and sunglasses didn’t get smart-mouthed. Not since 9/11 and the Patriot Act. And, although I thought the Patriot Act was a hastily written and poorly considered rag that I wouldn’t clean my dog’s ass with, the fear of its nebulous but ominous powers worked magic on tight lips.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where are we with that eye in the sky?”

“Getting the thermal scans now,” said Bug, our computer guy. “Wow. Looks like a party in there. Massed heat signatures, all in the same room. Clustered too tight to count individuals, but there’s a lot of them. Maybe the whole staff. We must be getting some interference from the structure, though. Signal’s weak.”

“Which room?”

“Top floor, toward the rear. Most are stationary, two are in motion on the ground floor.”

“Bunny,” I said, “take a walk around back.”

The big young man nodded and turned to the left, heading across the manicured lawn toward the east corner of the building. Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit looks like a Southern California beach volleyball player — which he used to be — and comes off as a harmless goof — which he never was.

In a quiet voice Top said, “Not a big fan of surprises most days, Cap’n. Maybe less so on days like today.”

“Hooah,” I said under my breath. It’s a general Ranger response that could mean anything from “yes sir” to “fuck you.” Occasionally both.

I stepped directly into view of the door camera and held up my leather identification case to show the NSA credentials. Again. Then I pocketed the ID, gave the camera a look that was a carefully constructed blend of annoyance, disappointment, and a threatened ass-kicking from Uncle Sam, and stepped to the right, out of video range.

“Call it,” said Top.

“Stay on the front door,” I said. “I’ll circle around the other way and meet Bunny.”

“What do we do if no one opens a door for us? We’re not here with a warrant.”

I shrugged. “We’ll improvise.”

He grinned at that.

Behind us, the main street was mostly empty except for a few cars. No one was looking at this building, so I eased around the corner. There was nothing on the side of the building but hedges, beyond that was a narrow side street. As I passed the end of the building I saw that there was a rear entrance to the Shelton campus that spilled into a small parking lot intended for deliveries. Instead of a proper loading bay there was a walk-in entrance with a metal roll-down door. I paused. That door was up, and there was a car parked at a crooked angle in front of it.

A black SUV.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Green Giant, what’s your twenty?”

“Cowboy,” said Bunny, “I’m on the far side by the back corner. I can see a black—”

“I see it but I don’t see you.” I said quietly. There was a subtle movement to my right and I saw a muscular shoulder move into and back out of my line of sight. Bunny was at the far corner of the building, in a shaded cleft between the wall and a row of trees.

“I see you,” I said. “Any movement?”

“Nothing. You?”

I drew my weapon and moved away from the tree, cutting through the hedges to the side street to put them between me and anyone who might be in the car. I bent low and ran fast along the pavement until I reached the driveway, then stopped for a moment to study the scene from this new angle. The windows of the SUV were smoked to opacity. Both front doors were open. I lingered at the corner of the building, searching the scene with narrowed eyes.

Bunny spoke quietly in his ear. “I can see the plate. Federal tags. Running it now.”

“Copy that. I’m going to the car,” I said. “Watch me.”

I rose from cover and ran in a diagonal line to come up on the driver’s side blind spot. I reached the car in two seconds.

“Empty,” I said. “Nothing inside. Bug — what do you have on the plate?”

“Uh-oh,” said Bug, “MindReader’s kicking back a ‘no-such-number.’ These guys are either phony or deep, deep cover.”

“We’re not the only gunslingers investigating this thing,” I said.

“I’ll keep looking,” said Bug.

Bunny said, “You’re thinking these guys have cover that goes deeper than MindReader? Is that even possible?”

I hurried over to meet Bunny near the open back door. The big man had his gun out, too. We nodded to each other and then wheeled around the edge of the open door, bringing our weapons up in two-handed grips.

All we saw was a storeroom filled with boxes. No people.

There was an inner door at the back off the storeroom. It was closed.

We moved inside, each of us moving along one wall so our field of fire could cover a large portion of the room and offer crossfire backup. Very quietly I murmured, “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock, hold your position. We’re going inside.”

“Call and I’ll come running,” he said.

At the back Bunny and I faded to either side of the door.

“You open and cover,” I said. “I’ll go through.”

Bunny nodded and reached for the handle. But before he could even touch it the door opened and two men stepped through into the storeroom.

Two big men. Dressed exactly like us. Black suits, white shirts, dark ties. Wires behind their ears.

The newcomers stared at Bunny and me.

Bunny and I raised our guns.

“Federal agents,” we barked. “Turn and face the wall. Hands on the wall. Do it now.”

The strangers did not move. If the license plates hadn’t popped up as phony we might have handled this different, but my spider-sense was tingling.

“You’re making a mistake,” said the taller of the two. His voice was calm, his pronunciation of each word very precise.

“And you are pissing me off,” I said. “I told you to face the wall.”

“We’re federal agents,” said the shorter of the strangers. “We have identification.”

“Nice to know. But the man said to assume the position, chief,” said Bunny, getting close enough to fill the man’s line of sight with a lot of chest. “Don’t make a mistake here.”

The two men looked at each other. There was no change in their expressions, no obvious exchange of signals, however without another word they turned and placed their palms against the cinder-block wall of the storeroom. They spread their feet and waited.

Bunny nodded to me and I took up a shooting position, feet wide and braced, hands holding my Beretta rock steady. Bunny holstered his piece and used both hands to do a quick but very thorough pat down of each man. He wasn’t rough about it, but it wasn’t a Swedish massage either.

“Gun,” he announced as he pulled the first man’s jacket back to reveal what looked to be a Taser in a shoulder holster. “I think.”

Bunny took the gun and showed it to me. It wasn’t a Taser but I didn’t know what it was. It had a chunky frame with a slightly elongated square barrel. At each of the four corners of the barrel were curved metal prongs. There was no opening to the barrel, so whatever this gun did, firing bullets was not part of its function. That didn’t mean it was a toy. There were a lot of variations of Tasers out there and some of them were quite nasty. A few of them were even lethal. Bunny dropped the gun into his jacket pocket, then took the man’s wallet and ID case. He continued with the pat down and paused again, feeling along the agent’s arms. Then he grabbed the back of the man’s jacket collar and yanked the sports coat down and off.

“What?” I asked.

“He’s wearing something under his shirt.”

The agent said, “Don’t ruin your career with a bad choice.”

Bunny showed him a lot of white teeth. “How about you pour yourself a nice big cup of shut the fuck up?”

Then he hooked his fingers between the folds of the man’s shirt and yanked. Fabric tore, buttons flew everywhere and Bunny stepped back to let me see. Beneath the crisp white shirt was what looked like a gray leotard. It was very thin and formfitting, and it was crisscrossed with a mesh of thin wires.

“The hell is that?” I asked.

“Thermal underwear,” said the agent.

Bunny pinched some of the fabric between his fingers and rubbed it. “I think it’s some kind of Kevlar. Like that new spider-silk stuff, but thinner.” He gave the agent an uptick of the chin. “What’s with the wires?”

“Insulation for duty in cold weather.”

“Uh-huh,” murmured Bunny. He repeated the pat-down procedure with the second man, found another four-prong gun, and confirmed that the man wore the same micro-thin Kevlar. He took their ID cases and flipped them open. “FBI. Agent Henckhouser and Special Agent Spinlicker.”

I glanced at the pictures on the IDs Bunny held up, but I didn’t lower my gun.

“May we turn around?” asked the shorter man, Spinlicker.

“Turn around,” I said, “but stand right there.”

The agents turned slowly. Their faces were bland, their eyes dark and calm. Spinlicker asked, “Are you with the Cyber Crimes Task Force?”

“Are you?” I countered.

“You’re required to show us your identification,” said Henckhouser.

“Blow me,” I said.

Bunny backed six feet away and drew his gun. With his other hand he tapped his earbud and read the ID info to Bug.

I lowered my pistol, letting it hang by my side. “Okay, gents, you want to tell me who you are and why you’re here?”

Henckhouser said, “How about returning our weapons and possessions?”

“How about I don’t and you answer my questions?”

The agents said nothing.

“Where’s the staff?” I asked.

Henckhouser and Spinlicker exchanged a look, but said nothing.

Top buzzed me. “You need backup, Cowboy?”

“Negative, we got this,” I said. “Let me know if you see anyone else.”

“Copy.”

Then Bug was on the line. “Got something for you. The names and descriptions match active agents, but I have a couple red flags. The first is that they are currently assigned to the Alaska bureau. They’re not supposed to be all the way down here.”

“That’s interesting,” said Bunny. “Maybe they’re allergic to moose.”

It was a joke but it was also a code for Bug’s ears. Alaska was where the Poker Flat testing range was. One of the first sites of the cyber-terrorism campaign.

“Give me something better.”

“That’s the second red flag. MindReader kind of burped while running these guys down. At first we got a message saying that they were inactive, with a pop-up screen providing details of how they were both KIA while on that white supremacist terrorist thing in Pine Deep, Pennsylvania, ten years ago. But then the system did an autocorrect and replaced that with an error message. Now I have data saying that they are on active status.”

“So — is that a computer error or what?”

“I’d go with ‘what,’” said Bug. “Doesn’t feel good, Cowboy. We’re contacting the FBI deputy director to the lowdown.”

“Keep me posted,” I said. “In the meantime I think we’ll take these jackasses into custody. Maybe they’ll enjoy sitting in a holding cell for the rest of the month.”

Agent Henckhouser said, “You’re making an unfortunate mistake, Captain Ledger.”

That froze the moment.

I took a half step forward and pointed my gun at Henckhouser’s face. “Now how in the wide blue fuck do you know my name?”

Henckhouser continued to smile. “We’re working toward the same goal, Captain. We both want to know who is behind the sabotage.”

“Not liking this, boss,” murmured Bunny.

I sucked my teeth. “Okay, I want both of you ass-clowns facedown on the ground, hands on your heads, fingers laced.”

Bunny produced a fistful of plastic flexcuffs and reached a hand out to turn Spinlicker.

Then without a word or a change of expression, Agent Spinlicker lunged at Bunny.

It just happened.

There was no tensing of muscles, no sign at all. Spinlicker went from bland immobility into a full-speed attack that was so blindingly fast — so improbably fast — that Bunny was caught totally off guard.

Before I could even react, Henckhouser’s left hand whipped out and knocked my gun arm aside and he chopped at my throat with the stiffened edge of one callused hand.

Chapter Four

I turned, sloppy but fast, and took the blow on my shoulder. Spinlicker pivoted and did his level best to bury his fist in my kidney. I twisted away and the punch hit at the wrong angle, skittering up my spine. Even so there was enough solid force behind the blow to knock me forward.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bunny stagger backward into a stack of boxed computer paper. The whole stack canted and fell, hammering Bunny down to the floor. Reams of paper flew everywhere, sliding like bulky hockey pucks across the concrete floor.

Then I was too busy to look. Henckhouser drove straight at me, throwing rather conventional karate-style kicks and punches at me, but throwing them with insane force and speed. He was like Chuck Norris in his prime, and then fed a shovel full of uncut coke. I blocked, evaded, and parried as fast as I could.

Son of a bitch was dishearteningly good.

Then I saw an opening and changed the game on him. He tried to smash my nose with a back fist but I ducked directly into it so that he crunched his knuckles against my forehead. It hurt me, but it had to have done damage to him. The backfist isn’t intended as a bone breaker. He hissed in pain — the most human reaction he’d had so far — and yanked back his hand like it had been scalded. I dove into that, following the hand back, making the long reach to slap his elbow up, and then drove one mother of a straight right hand into his short ribs.

It knocked air out of him with a whoosh and he fell back in a sideways series of tiny overlapping steps. He kept his balance, though, and when I closed on him he tried to kneecap me with a low side-thrust kick.

I dropped into a crouch and used the sudden dip in weight to drive a pile-driver fist into the hard meat on the outside of his thigh. That’s usually a deal closer. You put 80 percent of your body weight into a downward punch that concentrates all that speed and mass into the surface area of two knuckles and the other guy sits down and cries for mommy. If he’s lucky, and if he has friends to help him, in two hours he’ll be able to limp out to the car. That was the basic plan, and I hit him a doozy. I think the inventor of the side-thrust kick suddenly rose from the dead and yelled ouch.

Agent Henckhouser winced.

Didn’t fall down. Didn’t burst into girlish tears.

He winced.

Balls.

And I remembered the thin Kevlar he was wearing. There are all sorts of new experimental body armor materials out there, and some of them could stop more than a bullet. Some were designed to slough off the foot pounds of impact. I had a bad feeling that Henckhouser’s longjohns were making my attacks feel like baby taps.

Shit.

He abruptly dropped, spun, caught up one of the fallen reams of computer paper and, while still moving, twisted and flung it at me with all the skill and precision of a competitive Frisbee player.

I got my arms up to block it.

The second one he threw caught me right in the gut and knocked all the air out of my lungs. I went whooooof and fell backward into the stacked boxes of office supplies — which tore apart as they toppled over, showering me with packs of Post-it notes, plastic boxes of pushpins, packages of pens, and rolls of toilet paper.

I was buried up to my teeth. As I began to thrash and flounder my way out, I saw that Bunny was on his knees and he had his weapon. Then there was the thunder of gunfire as he opened up on the agents. His first round went wide, but he kept firing. Henckhouser started for the open loading door, but that was Bunny’s best line of fire; so the agent shoved some stacks of boxes at him and made for the inner door. Bunny corrected his aim, but then Agent Spinlicker plowed right into him, driving him all the way across the loading bay. Bunny clubbed the agent with the gun and twisted his massive body and they were halfway into a turn when they crunched into another stack of boxes. Whatever was in the boxes was too fragile to withstand the impact and the two men collapsed into a deep, ragged hole. More cartons rained down, smashing Bunny and Spinlicker to their knees.

I was in the middle of a comedy act. The more I tried to fight my way free of the office supplies, the more of it rained down on me.

Looking dazed and hurt, Bunny still managed to swing the gun around, but Spinlicker swatted it out of his hand. The agent punched Bunny in the chest.

Bunny was six and a half feet of lean muscle and brute strength, but even so the punch half lifted him off his knees. He exhaled with a mighty whooof that was identical to my own.

That Kevlar underwear had to be more than protection. Those wires must be part of a muscle enhancement system. I’d read reports on those but no one had perfected the science yet. Or, so I thought.

I hate it when I’m wrong about stuff like that.

The only upside was that these guys were bozos with high-tech Underoos. Not vampires, not genetically enhanced supersoldiers. Though, at the moment that “upside” sucked ass.

Even with all the power of that blow, Bunny did not go down, and Spinlicker gaped at him. People often underestimate Bunny. Few things short of a cruise missile can put him down for the count.

With a roar, Bunny swung a roundhouse left that caught Spinlicker in the stomach and lifted the man all the way off the floor and sent him crashing against the wall. The agent’s mirrored sunglasses flew off and shattered against the cinderblock. It should have ended the fight right there, but all it did was send the agent sprawling.

“You’re making a mistake,” Spinlicker wheezed as he struggled to his feet. Blood trickled from his ear. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“Yeah, well kiss my ass,” said Bunny and threw himself at the agent, hooking a big right into his stomach and a left across his chin. Spinlicker canted sideways, but he still did not fall. Had to give the guy points for that because he didn’t have fancy superhero underwear to protect his jaw.

With a growl, Spinlicker whipped around and drove a backward heel kick into Bunny’s midsection that folded the big man in half and put him back down on his knees.

I finally kicked loose of the office junk. My own gun was buried, but I had the Tasers we’d taken from the agents and I pulled one out of my pocket and pointed it at them.

“Freeze!” I bellowed.

They did. For about a second. They stared in horror at the gun in my hand.

Then they whirled and ran for the inner door.

I pulled the trigger.

There was no blast. The gun didn’t launch any flachettes.

Instead it made a hollow and rather disappointing tok sound.

Suddenly a stack of boxes beside the inner door exploded in a fireball that showered everything in the room with melting packages of staples that hit us like hot bricks.

I gaped at the pistol. The tiny sound and the power of that explosion seemed to be part of two separate events rather than cause and effect. I was actually flummoxed for a moment. Not sure I’ve ever actually been flummoxed before. Thought it was just an expression.

The agents jerked open the door. “Go!” yelled Henckhouser, as he pushed Spinlicker before him.

Bunny was on his knees and he had my Beretta in his hand. “Freeze or I will kill you.”

They leaped toward the doorway.

Bunny opened fire. His first bullet hit the metal handrail, the second struck the wall, but the third punched Henckhouser between the shoulder blades and slammed him into the doorjamb.

“I said freeze!” yelled Bunny.

Top must have heard the shots because his voice was suddenly bellowing in my ear.

“Top!” I yelled. “Two hostiles coming your way. Put ’em down.”

“Hooah,” was Top’s growl of a reply.

Bunny staggered to his feet, firing, filling the room with new thunder. Rounds punched into the agents as they disappeared. I saw the impacts slew them around, stagger them.

I pulled the trigger on the clunky pistol. It tokked again.

Whatever it was firing hit the metal security door as the agents dove inside the building. The door was instantly wrenched off its hinges and flung against the wall. Big pieces of it flew everywhere. One chunk struck Bunny in the chest and sent him sprawling backward.

I raced over to him, but he moaned and waved me away. “Get the fuckers,” he said with a wet groan.

Clutching the weird gun, I ran toward the open door. The frame was smeared with blood, and there was a large pool of it on the floor. Either Bunny or the flying debris had tagged one of the bastards. I quick-looked through the doorway, but the hall was empty.

“Top — talk to me,” I breathed.

No answer.

I ran down the hall, pistol held up and out. There was plenty of blood. Red footprints on the carpet. Red handprints on the wall. A long smear as if one of them had leaned against the wall for support while he ran.

“Top,” I called again.

There was a sound. A groan. I slowed to a careful walk a few yards from where the corridor opened out into a small lobby. The lobby was empty, the doors open and smeared with blood. I slammed through the door and there was Top, flat on his back outside, eyes open and blinking, mouth working like a beached trout. An impact injury, not a gunshot wound. Thank God.

He had his pistol in his hand and waved it toward the side of the building.

“Go…,” he wheezed.

In my ear I heard Bunny say, “Out back!” at the same instant I heard gunfire.

Shit.

I spun around, reentered the building, ran down the hall, jumped through the open doorway to the loading dock, barrel coming up and out, seeking a target. Bunny was on his knees, firing at the black SUV.

As I ran past him into the parking lot I squeezed the trigger over and over again, hearing that silly little tok sound each time, seeing bushes explode into fire and a masonry wall detonate into a cloud of dust. I got one good shot at the SUV and the rear window exploded, but the wheels spun on the blacktop; plumes of rubber smoke rose in oily columns behind the SUV as it lurched forward.

Bunny limped out and a moment later a winded Top staggered around the side of the building.

The car vanished around a corner and was gone.

Bunny said, “Jesus Christ, boss … we just got our asses handed to us.”

Chapter Five

Then we turned and looked at the building. At the lights, the open door. The utter silence. The thermal scans had told us that there was a mass of heat signatures on the top floor. Bug had thought there was interference from the structure because the signatures were fading.

But that wasn’t it and as we stared up at lights we all knew what it was.

The thermals were fading because body heat diminishes after death.

Bunny said, “Oh, man…”

We didn’t want to go inside. We knew what we’d see.

We went in anyway.

I wish I could say that there were no surprises, but …

Chapter Six

We called it in. Police, FBI, Homeland, the coroner’s office.

As each new team of professionals arrived on the scene, we had to flash our NSA IDs and retell the same sanitized version of the story. Then we had to take the poor bastards up and let them visit the horror show.

That’s what it was, too.

There were sixty employees at this particular Shelton Aeronautics lab. Twelve top engineers and a lot of support staff. Everyone showed up for work that day. No one was lucky enough to have the flu or a broken leg or a sick child. Sixty people clocked in.

And then Henckhouser and Spinlicker showed up and destroyed them.

There’s really no other word for it.

Destroyed.

I stood next to the Fairfax County deputy coroner for almost five minutes, neither of us speaking, both of us staring at what lay inside the big conference room. If you caught it out of the corner of your eye you’d think it was splashed with red paint. Walls, floor, ceiling.

Then, when you took a closer look, you’d understand. When you smelled the stink of copper and feces and the thousand other odors released when a body is burst apart, you’d understand.

But, like the coroner and the rest of the people there, you would not understand how.

I thought I did. The clunky little gun — the one that looked like a Taser but wasn’t — was snugged into the back of my waistband, under my coat. Bunny had the other. They were mentioned in no official report that anyone outside of the DMS would ever read. I called in a full description to Mr. Church.

An EMT looked us over, put Band-Aids on minor cuts, gave us chemical ice packs for the bruises, and made sure not to look us in the eyes. He’d been upstairs already. He was dealing with that.

The only thing the coroner said to me the whole time was, “Jesus H. Christ.”

Top, Bunny, and I got out of there four hours later. We got into my Explorer, buckled up for safety, and made our way to I-95. Church called and I put him on speaker.

“What’s the status of your team?” he asked.

“Dented and dissatisfied,” I said.

“I passed along your description of the pistols you obtained and your account of the damage done. Dr. Hu tells me that they fit the profile of a microwave pulse pistol, an MPP.”

“How come I never heard of it?”

“Because until today it was a hypothetical weapon. Dr. Hu says that it’s never been practical because the energy output would require a battery approximately the size of a Subaru. His words.”

Top currently had one of the pistols, turning it over very gingerly in his hands. “Can’t weigh more than a pound.”

“Someone cracked the science then,” said Church. “I’m sure Dr. Hu will be delighted to study them.”

Dr. William Hu was the DMS’s pet mad scientist. He was way past brilliant and he had a pop culture sensibility that almost made him likable. But then you got to know him and it turns out he’s an asshole of legendary proportions. He’d have probably gotten a chubby looking at the damage the clunky little gun had caused. He was like that. He’d be sorry it hadn’t been used on me. Neither of us broke a heavy sweat worrying about the other guy’s health.

“What about the computer systems and research materials at the lab?” asked Church.

“Slag,” I said. “The computer room looks like melted candles, and the file cabinets are full of ash. This was a very nasty and very thorough hit.”

“That is unfortunate.”

“You talk to Shelton?” I asked.

“Briefly,” he said, “but remember we’re not running this show. There are, at last count, eleven separate investigative agencies working on this case. The president asked us to provide some extra boots on the ground.”

That was not entirely true, but the real reason wasn’t something generally shared among the overall task force. Yes, Church had put some assets — like Top, Bunny, and me — on the ground, but what the president really wanted was MindReader. Church had obliged, with reservations. All the task force’s data was being run through MindReader in hopes that its pattern recognition software would find something. A fingerprint, a lead, anything. Those requests were funneled through Bug and his geek squad. Church declined, however, to allow anyone from outside the DMS to even look at MindReader, let alone play with it. That’s no joke — MindReader was Church’s personal property and he guarded it with the ferocity of a dragon. We all knew what kind of damage someone could do with that system. As it was, only Bug had total access.

I said, “After today, are we going to be cut a bigger slice of this?”

“Is that what you want?” asked Church.

“Not sure,” I admitted. I could feel Top and Bunny studying me. “Part of me does. Part of me wants to have a more meaningful discussion with agents Henckhouser and Spinlicker.”

“I believe Dr. Sanchez has frequently spoken out against the need for revenge.”

“It’s not revenge,” I lied. “There are some, um … technical questions I’d like answered.”

“Such as?”

“They shook off a lot of damage. Physical blows, hard falls, gunshots.”

“That’s right,” said Bunny, speaking up for the first time. “When I patted them down I didn’t feel any heavy body armor, found microthin stuff. Those guys took hits they shouldn’t have been able to. We need that stuff, and we need to know where they got it.”

“Maybe we’re looking at a new generation of body armor,” I said. “The Canadians have been playing with some ultralight stuff.”

Church grunted. “Let me make a few calls to some friends I have in the industry.”

We all smiled at one another. Church always seems to have a “friend in the industry,” no matter what industry happens to be involved in our investigations. He can make a call and suddenly we have whatever we need. Circus tent to use as a field biohazard containment command center? No problem. Special effects experts from Industrial Light and Magic? Sure. Next year’s prototype deep-water submersible? Pick your color. Church never explains how he happens to know so many people in so many critical industries, but as long as he’s one degree of separation away from whatever helps us do our jobs, then it’s all cool with me.

“What else?”

“They were strong,” said Top. “Even with gunshot wounds they were fast and strong. Maybe we can hijack the lab results on the blood work, see what kind of pills these boys are popping.”

“I’d like to see a DNA report, too,” I said. “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve run into freaky-deaky gene therapy.”

“Noted,” said Church. “So, am I to infer that your only reasons for wanting to encounter these agents again is for the opportunity to take a full set of forensic samples?”

His voice was as dry as desert sand.

“Sure,” I said. “If anything else occurs to me, I’ll let you know.”

Church didn’t respond to that.

“So, again, I ask,” I said, “are we going to take a bigger role or not?”

There was a long silence. So long, in fact that I thought the call had dropped.

Finally Church said, “Actually, as of now we are off the case.”

“What? Why?”

Another pause. “There are two answers to that, Captain. The official answer is that now that Congress has doubled the task force budget they will be able to pay overtime for more FBI and NSA agents to participate in the investigation.”

“That sounds like bureaucratic bullshit. What’s the real reason?”

“No one will come out and say it,” murmured Church, “but some off-the-record sources have informed me that the task force has concluded that cyber-attacks of this level of sophistication could only be accomplished by a computer with MindReader’s capabilities.”

I nearly drove my Explorer into the oncoming lanes.

“What?”

“The report stopped short of accusing us of criminal activity, but there is language in there suggesting criminal negligence in — and I’m quoting from a report I am not supposed to have—‘mishandling security for the MindReader system resulting in person or persons unknown to use it for the purposes of cyber-terrorism.’”

I looked at Top, who closed his eyes and lightly banged his head on the side window. In the backseat, Bunny very quietly said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Whose name is on that report?”

“Ah,” said Church, “that’s the other new development. The vice president has personally taken charge of the Cyber Crimes Task Force.”

“Well isn’t that just peachy,” I said sourly.

“I thought you’d find it amusing.”

Vice President Bill Collins was no friend to me, the DMS, or Mr. Church. A while back, when the president was having bypass surgery, Collins — in his role as acting president — tried to use the NSA to dismantle the DMS. We could never prove that he was doing so in order to help some crooked colleagues. Collins is a master at keeping shit off his shoes, but ever since that incident we’ve kept a wary eye on him. This task force nonsense was exactly his sort of thing.

“Are they going to file charges?” I asked.

Church gave us one more pause. “They are welcome to try,” he said.

“So — what’s the game plan?” I asked.

“No game plan,” he said. “Go back to the Warehouse, send those guns up to Dr. Hu at the Hangar, write your reports, and try to enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

I thought about what I’d seen at the lab. The red walls. The destroyed people.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

I disconnected the call. The three of us lapsed into individual brooding silences all the way back to Baltimore.

We thought it was over.

We thought we’d seen the worst of it.

We were out of it.

Sometimes you can be so totally wrong about something.

Chapter Seven

Howard Shelton loved to blow things up.

Everyone needs a hobby, a passion, and that was his.

When he was eight he did it the wrong way. Firecrackers duct-taped to the butler’s cat earns you a beating. A rather savage beating, in point of fact. When his mother was not in diamonds and a ten-thousand-dollar Dior gown she was a heavy-handed witch who knew where to hit and how to make it last without leaving visible bruises. And, thereafter, Howard was fairly sure that the cook — who rather fancied the butler — spit in his food.

So, Howard did not blow up any more cats.

Not unless he was traveling. Then, for recreation, to let off a little steam, sure. Fuck it, it’s a cat.

In high school they gave him awards for blowing things up. Science fair judges loved that sort of thing. People stood and applauded, they gave him trophies. Mom kept her hands to herself.

In college it was hit or miss. A lot of it depended on what he blew up, how controlled the explosion was, and who was in the lab when it happened. If it was Bryce Crandall — the math stud who was putting it to Howard’s girlfriend, then that was bad. That was a police report, black armbands around campus, and a bad breakup with Mindy who, Howard guessed, never quite believed that it was all an accident.

On the other hand, if the explosion was in the firing vault and the people in the lab were those cold-eyed men from the Department of Defense … well that was a whole different picture. That was pats on the back, job offers, and grant money. That was egregia cum laude, a level of graduation honors rarely seen even at MIT.

Mom actually hugged him that day.

The people from the DoD brought along a couple of stiffs from DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Lots of handshakes, more serious job offers, and doors blown completely open.

Not that Howard Shelton needed to work. Dad was two years dead by the time Howard got his Ph.D., and Mom was one shove down the stairs away from leaving Howard six hundred and twenty-two million dollars.

Shame about those steps, that loose bit of carpeting.

All things considered, though, Howard would have preferred to blow her up.

But … you can’t have everything.

On Thursday evening, Howard Shelton sat on an exercise bike in his personal gym, pedaling and sweating and watching the TV news coverage of the massacre at his laboratory in Wolf Trap, Virginia. There was different coverage on each of the four big screens mounted on the wall. Howard watched the news for two solid hours.

“Perfect,” he said aloud.

He never stopped smiling once.

Interlude One

General Lo peered through the foot-thick glass, his lips pursed, eyes narrowed to suspicious slits.

“What guarantees do we have this time?” he asked. “I would be disappointed with another failure.”

Lo deliberately pitched his voice to be cold and uncompromising. That made these scientists jump. It reminded them that they worked for him and he was the face of the Party here. Just because they were afforded more personal freedom and greater comforts because of this project did not mean that they were untethered from the chain of command. If they were as smart as they were supposed to be, then they would realize and accept that their comforts were the equivalent of clean straw and fresh water in a pet rabbit’s cage.

The scientists straightened respectfully even though Lo was not looking at them. But he saw it in the reflective surface of the window.

Good, he thought.

The chief scientist, an ugly fat man named Zhao, said, “Everything is working normally, General Lo.”

“You said that last time,” said Lo, continuing to study the machine that squatted in the stone chamber on the other side of the glass. It was a bulky device, awkward in appearance, looking more like a haphazard collection of disparate pieces rather than one integrated machine. And, to a great degree this was true. Only six of the machine’s ten components were original. The others were copies made from pieces or from schematics bought from the Russians or stolen from the Americans. The last of the ten pieces, which was one of the very best recovered components, was held suspended over the device by chains. It was the master circuit, a metal slab eight inches long and four inches wide; slender as a wafer but improbably heavy. Once that piece was fully inserted the machine would become active. It would growl to life.

The Dragon Engine.

Lo privately scoffed at the name. Dragons were part of the old China mentality. Hard to shake from the more practical and far less romantic communist way of thinking. But his superiors had liked the name. Ah well.

Ice crystals glittered like diamond dust on the Dragon Engine’s metal skin. Lo glanced at the thermometer mounted on the inside of the glass. Minus 160 degrees.

“Yesterday’s pretest was a—” began Zhao, but Lo cut him off.

“Yesterday was very nearly a disaster.” Lo turned to face Zhao and the other members of the science team. They flinched under his stare. “During each of the three calibration tests the well water in the local villages visibly rose and fell.”

“Yes, General Lo,” agreed Zhao nervously, “but it was not at all like what happened before.”

That was true enough, and even Lo had to admit it to himself. On the twelfth of last month superheated gasses suddenly shot from wells in two other villages. On the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth gas erupted from another dozen wells during tests of the power couplings connecting the device to the gigantic batteries built to store the discharge. Five civilians had been seriously burned and one killed.

That was when the dragonflies fled into the forest. Although Lo would never admit it to anyone else, he personally believed that the sight of thousands of dragonflies fleeing the towns was a bad omen. That happened with earthquakes and the worst storms. The dragonflies knew.

They always knew.

And they had not yet returned from their leafy sanctuary.

Lo glowered. “What assurances can you give me, Scientist Zhao, that turning the complete device on won’t set the countryside on fire?”

“No, no, General Lo,” insisted the scientist, “we have solved those problems. We have reinforced and triple insulated every coupling. We have coated the seals with nonporous clay, and the temperature in the chamber has been lowered to well below the safety level. We’ve added nonconductive baffles to soak up any resulting static discharge. We have learned so much from each of those tests and we are confident that the Dragon Engine will work perfectly this time.”

Lo stepped close to Zhao. He was a very tall man, so the closeness forced the scientist to crane his neck in order to look up at the general. That created a position of weakness and subservience that Lo found very useful.

“You will be held personally responsible for any further delays or accidents,” he said quietly.

The fat scientist’s body trembled as if he wanted to shift from foot to foot, but discipline required that he stand and endure. Sweat beaded Zhao’s face.

“Are we in agreement on this?” asked Lo.

“Y-yes, General Lo. I will not fail you.”

“Then, for the prosperity of the Party and the enrichment of the people, you may continue.”

With that General Lo turned and walked back to his spot in front of the glass. He ignored the bustle of technicians moving to their places and the low chatter as orders were given and information shared. If the Dragon Engine worked, then so much would change. The world itself would change. That thought made Lo feel like a giant. It made him feel like all the potential energy promised by that machine coursed through him. Lo imagined that America and its many allies were already trembling, aware on some deep spiritual level that their political, military and economic domination of the earth was a button push away from ending.

“We are ready, General Lo,” said Zhao. “All indicators are green. Dampeners and buffers are functioning at one hundred and fifteen percent. We have a wide safety margin.”

“Very well,” said General Lo. “Turn it on.”

Zhao exchanged a quick, excited smile with his colleagues.

He touched the button that would lower the final component into place. That was all it took. No bolts or screws. The machine’s parts adhered to each other using a unique form of magnetic assembly.

The master circuit descended on its slender chains, pulled into its proper place.

Sparks danced along its bottom edge. Tiny arcs of electricity leaped between the circuit and the rim of the slot. General Lo bent forward, suddenly fascinated by the process. Until today the entire Dragon Engine had never been fully assembled. The disruptions of the last few weeks had all occurred at this point, with the board not quite in place.

“All readings are still in the green,” said Zhao. “We are already past the disruption point.”

The board slid down, vanishing millimeter by millimeter into the slot. Snakes of electricity writhed along the whole machine now. Then the master circuit clicked into place within the heart of the engine. There was a moment — a millionth of a second — where the machine seemed to freeze in place, the arcs of electricity vanishing.

“Scientist Zhao…?” murmured Lo.

“The readings are still in the green. Dampeners and buffers are functioning at ninety-two percent. That is more than enough to—”

General Lo did not hear the rest of Zhao’s sentence.

The Dragon Engine exploded.

General Lo saw a shimmering bubble of energy balloon outward from the device, and on the other side of that millisecond, he was vaporized.

The lab — all thirty-two rooms that comprised the New Technologies Development Site #18—became extensions of the blast.

The force punched like a fist down into the heart of the bedrock, smashing along the twenty-five-mile Tangshan Fault, causing the Okhotsk Plate to grate against the great Eurasian Plate. The whole earth recoiled from that blow, shuddering from the impact. Waves of trembling power shot through the entire region.

Some seismographs metered it as 7.8 on the Richter magnitude scale; on other machines it was measured at 8.2. The unbridled ferocity of it shot upward through the earth, tearing apart thousands of buildings. There were no foreshocks to warn people. There was no hint at all that this was coming. It was incredibly fast and without mercy. Virtually none of the structures in this part of China had been designed to withstand such fury. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. Tremors were felt as far away as Xi’an, nearly five hundred miles from the blast. Closer cities — Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, and even Beijing — shivered as the shock waves hit, shattering glass, cracking walls, tearing up the streets.

So many people were asleep when it happened. Nestled in bed, unaware that hell had come to their part of the world. Houses and buildings crumbled to become tombs for more than half a million.

The New Technologies lab had been built there because Tangshan was a region with a relatively low risk of earthquakes.

And yet this was the worst earthquake of the twentieth century, and the third deadliest in all recorded history.

Nearly seven hundred thousand people died.

Within a month teams of diggers had burrowed beneath the rubble of houses and the bones of the dead and were inching their way down into the troubled earth. Not in hopes of finding survivors. Not in hopes of recovering General Lo or Scientist Zhao.

However, if there was a chance — a single chance — to recover even a piece of the Dragon Engine, then nothing could be allowed to interfere.

That excavation continues to this day.