Extinction Machine (55 page)

“Kiss my ass. In ten seconds my guys are going to—”

“I know, I know, tear me apart so you can piss on my bones. Yesterday’s news. No, what we need to focus on is what happens
before
they break in. They can find you alive and unharmed, or they can find you dead, and believe me when I tell you that I don’t need ten whole seconds to change your life. Or end it. If I’m going to hell, then you’ll be driving the cab,
capiche
?”

He opened his mouth to say something smartass or threatening, but didn’t. Instead I saw pain flicker across his face.

Uh-oh.

Whump!

Splinters flew into the room. Ghost stood wide legged and growled at the noise. He was fierce and he’d definitely get the first man through the door, but I had no illusions about our survival if things kept sliding downhill. Even so, I kept those concerns off my face.

I drew my piece and screwed the barrel into the soft underside of Shelton’s jaw. “No more jokes. I know you rigged the cyber-attacks and even killed your own people to make the authorities look elsewhere. I know you framed me and somehow got the president to shut down the DMS. I know you’re a governor of Majestic Three. I know you’ve been breeding alien-human hybrids, and I know that you’re building spaceships.”

His jaw went slack as I rattled all that off.

“Yeah, we’re smart, too. We know all that. We also now have
two
copies of the Black Book. The original and the pretty blond copy.”

His mouth worked like a silent gasping fish.

“But I really need to know what the end game is here. It’s not just to sell a new stealth fighter. You could have done that without all this bullshit. You didn’t need to frame me or kill my friends to accomplish that.”

Whump!

Whoever was hitting the door was serious about it.

Shelton found his voice and sneered at me. “You fucking idiot. You think you know a lot but you don’t know shit, but you don’t know what I’ve done to protect this country. You think
I’m
the bad guy? The fucking Chinese blew up the Locust bomber. They’re the ones who have a working T-craft. Not us. We’re years away.”

He sold it so well that for a moment I almost bought it.

Almost.

He was stalling, feeding me another lie, but why? He had things to bargain with.

Suddenly Shelton’s body stiffened and he arched his back as if I’d just Tasered him. His eyes rolled up in their sockets and he gave a single strangled cry. Then he collapsed back onto the desk. His breath rattled in his throat.

I felt for his pulse.

And didn’t find one.

Goddamn it.

“Bug,” I said as I dug into my pocket for another hypo, “we have a problem. Shelton’s coding on me.”

I jabbed Shelton with the needle and then started CPR.

Whump!

Shelton twitched and gasped, dragging in a ragged lungful of air.

Ghost’s bark jumped up a notch and I turned to see the door crack from top to bottom. The shattered wood bowed into the room, caught against the sleeves I’d affixed across the door, pressed them to their ripping point, and tore them apart.

I flung myself off the desk, hooked my arm around Ghost and dove for cover.

The wires inside the sleeves snapped, triggering the detonators in the cuff buttons, sending tiny electrical impulses into the chemicals that saturated the fabric.

The explosion was spectacular.

The force picked me up and threw me all the way across the room. It destroyed the massive door, turning the heavy wood into a death storm of jagged splinters that tore into Shelton’s men. Arms and legs flew everywhere; blood sprayed the walls and ceiling.

The screams were terrible.

Some of those screams were mine.

Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

House of Jack Ledger, three hours ago
Near Robinwood, Maryland
Monday, October 21, three hours ago

Snake Harris ran down through a gulley that was still bathed in shadows. Six men ran behind him, each of them with automatic weapons aimed toward the house. Snake was the only one carrying a handgun. It was boxy and awkward looking, with four prongs instead of a barrel; however, Snake had used that pistol several times. The last time was at Wolf Trap in Virginia while working a job under the name Henckhouser. He and his partner had painted the walls using those guns. Snake loved the effect.

He ran with the pistol in a two-hand grip, his eyes focused on the back porch door. The telemetry from the satellite told him that the four heat signatures inside were stationary. Probably asleep.

That was okay. If they wanted to take it lying down, then that was just fine.

As his team reached the end of the gulley he looked across the lawn and saw the second team move into position beside the front porch. Another six men. And a third six-man team was in the attached garage, ready to kick the door that led into the cellar. Eighteen men and himself, ready to close around this place like a fist.

The primary mission objective was simple. Secure Junie Flynn. If she was there. Everyone else dies.

There was a burst of very faint squelch in his earbud, the signal that the garage team was in place.

Snake whispered a single word.

“Go.”

The teams rushed their objectives. Snake’s sergeant, a hulking man, passed him and kicked the door. Almost in the same second Snake heard the front door bang in. And then they were pouring into the house, rushing from darkness into lighted rooms, weapons up and out, searching out the four lives whose time on earth had come to an end.

The closest heat signature was the den and Snake burst inside, his gun already firing.

Tok!

The curled form under a blanket on the couch exploded as the microwave pulse burned into it. There was a flash of colored blanket shreds and then the air was filled with feathers. In the confusion, his men opened up and tore the form, the couch, and the whole side of the room apart. Splinters flew from the floor, plaster leaped from the walls, glass disintegrated out into the side yard.

There were shouts upstairs, more gunfire.

“Hold your fire!” Snake yelled. “Hold your fire.”

The chatter of automatic gunfire dwindled down to silence, the last of the brass tinkled onto the ground.

Feathers floated on the smoke and mingled with plaster dust.

The couch was torn apart. So were the two thick pillows that had been positioned under the blanket.

“Where’s the target?” growled Snake.

“Thermals are saying it’s here,” insisted his sergeant.

Snake whipped left and right, his team kicked over chairs, tore open closets.

They found the heat source.

It was under the couch. A device about the size of a TV remote.

“It’s a signal relay,” said the sergeant. “These fuckers are getting cute. They’ve forwarded a thermal signature here to draw us away from where they are. Christ, boss, they could be anywhere.”

Which is when the house blew up.

*   *   *

IN THE BARN,
seated on a folding chair next to stacked boxes of Jack Ledger’s personal possessions, Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson tossed the detonator onto the floor.

“That’s for Baltimore,” he said.

Outside he heard a few sporadic shots. Birddog, cleaning up the leavings.

Brick switched off the jammer that hid the true thermal signatures. He stood up and walked to the barn door. The house was a burning pile of sticks.

“Joe’s not going to be happy about that,” he said.

A man moved out of the shadows.

“He’ll get over it,” said Mr. Church.

Chapter One Hundred Fourteen

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Monday, October 21, 7:57 a.m.

I landed on my side with Ghost cradled against my chest; the impetus of my dive sent us sliding fifteen feet across the polished floor. The shock wave kept us going until my shoulders slammed into a table on which was a huge bouquet of flowers. The blast flattened the table, withered the flowers and splattered us with splinters and chunks of masonry.

The aftershock of the explosion echoed away from me, rolling down the halls. The screams of the maimed mercenaries filled the air. Ghost staggered to his feet, barked once, and then fell over on his side. It was only then that I saw the blood smeared on the left side of his head. A piece of debris had struck him, ripping open the flesh.

I lunged over to him, touching his chest, and my heart almost stopped while I searched for his. Found the beat. Rapid, thin. But there.

He was alive, but he was out cold. Maybe crippled. Maybe dying.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Echo Team, I have the package. I need extraction and backup right now.”

Nobody answered me.

Across the room, Howard Shelton laughed weakly.

I turned to him.

“You dumb fuck,” he said.

I heard a sound behind me. There was nothing but empty wall, but as I spun around, something hit me. I had a vague image of light coming through a doorway that shouldn’t be there. There were figures in the light. Men. One small man with glasses. Several very big men.

I saw the stock of a rifle swing toward me and then blackness screamed in my head.

Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Monday, October 21, 7:59 a.m.

I never really went out.

Out would have felt better.

Instead I floated in a haze of sick disorientation. I was floating. Not in a good way. There were hands under my armpits, holding me almost off the ground. The toes of my shoes scraped along as they carried me for about a million miles. At one point they threw me into the back of a vehicle. A golf cart, I think. I may have drifted off for a while. They woke me by dragging me out of the golf cart and hustling me down another hall.

By the time we got where we were going, they were grunting and wheezing. And I was not quite as out of it as I was at the start of our journey.

I made damn sure not to let them know that.

When they dumped me onto the floor, I collapsed in a suitably boneless heap and didn’t move.

There were voices.

Shelton. Weak, but getting stronger. And a lot of people fussing over him. I heard him gasp and curse when someone gave him an injection. I heard the
puff-puff-hiss
of a blood pressure cuff. Lots of technical medical terms. Lots of cursing. Mostly Shelton, telling everyone that he was okay, ordering them to leave him alone.

One voice was consistent throughout. Male, fussy, nasal. I think I heard Shelton call him Mr. Bones.

Minutes passed and the room settled.

Then I heard footsteps coming toward me. Slow at first and then speeding up with the unmistakable gait of someone about to punt the ball into the end zone, and I had no doubt at all what that ball was.

So I stopped faking it and rolled into the kicker, jamming the kick short as I looped a punch up and over and into something that squished like a bag of figs.

I pried my eyes open to see a medium-size man with a bow tie and round glasses stagger back from me, hands cupped around his balls, eyes absolutely bugged wide, mouth locked into an
O
of indescribable pain.

And one second later there were gun barrels screwed into both of my temples.

The little guy I’d punched was turning an interesting shade of puce. He dropped to his knees and it was clear he was trying his level best not to cry.

A dozen feet away, Howard Shelton sat in an expensive leather chair, his shirt unbuttoned, his color bad but better than it had been upstairs. I saw his Ghost Box laptop on a wheeled table next to him. The Majestic Black Book lay on his lap. A second Ghost Box rested on a table by a low couch. “Bones … get off the damn floor. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Bones shot him a look of pure hatred. I don’t think it was particularly directed at Shelton, but he had to fire off at someone. “Kill that son of a bitch.” He spat the words at the guards, but nobody pulled a trigger.

Shelton nodded past me. “Burke, help him up.”

I turned to see that there were other guards there. My friend Burke was there. He didn’t look like he was enjoying the day. He walked past me to help the man called Mr. Bones. As he passed me, Burke whispered, “I’m going to cut your balls off.”

So, fuck it, I swung a nice one into his nutsack, too.

Hey, these guys had me dead to rights. I had no illusions about getting out of there alive. Might as well enjoy myself.

Burke’s eyes flared wide in genuine surprise. Guess he figured a guy on his knees with guns to his head wouldn’t try it. Wrong guess. He tried to twist out of the way, but I caught him good. He dropped down right next to Bones.

The guards reversed their guns and beat the shit out of me.

So, there were three of us down on the floor.

“Enough,” snapped Shelton and the hammering stopped.

Blood leaked out of my ear.

Guards helped Mr. Bones up. I saw that the front of his pants were wet and dark. Not the first guy to piss himself after a good punch to the balls. Burke’s pants were dry, and he was getting to his feet all by himself. His face was as red as a ripe tomato and if I thought he hated me before, I’m pretty sure he’d found a new definition for murderous rage. That was okay. It’s not the enraged ones you have to worry about. It’s the calm ones.

“You’re quite something,” said Shelton. He drummed his fingers on the cover of the Black Book. “I very nearly like you, Ledger.”

I didn’t say anything.

“No, really,” he said. “You’re a breath of fresh air. You’re a reality check. I ought to give you a consultant’s fee for quality control. Here we are thinking we’re the toughest, scariest sons of bitches in the world. You know, super-rich industrialist and his henchmen, right here in my own castle surrounded by a million dollars’ worth of security and my own private army, and you roll up in a fucking Ford Explorer, torture the shit out of me—well, okay, mind-fuck me—and make me give up the most important single document since the ten fucking commandments. You blow five of my guys to Swedish meatballs, and you punch the nuts off my fellow governor and my chief of security. This is all very important to know, considering what I have going on, and with the guests we have coming.” He chuckled. “But I got to tell you, Ledger, you are a lot of fun.”