Gun Metal Heart (20 page)

“Status?”

Someone turned down the music. Snow and the pilots exchanged glances. The chief engineer said, “Didn't know anyone was still up.”

The basement air was stuffy from hours of work and poor circulation, but Snow hadn't noticed it until that moment.

Crace stared at him and began rolling up the other sleeve with careful, symmetrical folds. She had asked a question. She would wait for an answer.

It took Snow close to six seconds to realize her greeting had been in the form of a question. “Oh. We're nearly there. The truck. It's nearly there.”

Colonel Crace mulled the information. “Where?”

Snow adjusted his voice wand and tapped a key on one of the three keyboards before his chair. “Away Team: Hit your GPS, please.”

He turned to one of his in-house pilots. “Gary, bring it up, please.”

With a few clacks in the otherwise quiet control room, one of the screens before Snow's chair lit up. It showed a map of northwestern Italy with a red dot near the town of Turin. The map showed a mountainous region to the west, then a portion of southeastern France.

Snow's chair sat in the center of a dais, ten feet in diameter and six inches higher than the rest of the room. Crace stepped up onto the dais next to his chair.

“Traffic?”

“Yeah. It's slowed down the truck. Doesn't matter, though. We have two complete suites of Mercutio and Hotspur drones. We've sent one suite of both ahead of the truck. They can stay airborne for three hours. If the truck hasn't caught up to them, we just send those drones back and swap them out with the other suite while the first group recharges using the truck battery.”

Crace stared at the one lit screen. She rested a hand on the back of his chair. Bryan Snow stiffened when he felt the chair swivel an inch.

“Why heavy traffic? It could be a factor.”

Snow said, “It won't be. Probably. You know, there's a coffee machine in the break room. We can feed all the images into the observation lounge.”

Crace said, “No thanks.”

Snow inhaled, then swiveled his chair toward her. He knew it would swing the seat back out from under her hand.

“We'd prefer you observe from the observation lounge.”

Crace turned and looked down at him. “Why?”

Snow couldn't say,
because Major Arcana could contact me at any time
. He stared directly up into her laser-precise vision. “Because I want controllers in my control room and observers in the observation lounge. Because that's the way my team and I operate. Colonel.” He gave it a pause before adding her rank.

Crace appreciated straight talk. She made him wait a couple of seconds, then crooked one corner of her lips into an almost smile. “Fair enough.”

She stepped back down off the dais, and Snow silently exhaled. As she moved to the door, Colonel Crace spoke over her shoulder. “Let me know when the birds reach Gibron.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Also, find out what's going on in Turin that…”

Her voice faded. She stopped walking.

Snow turned to her.

She spun. “Turin?”

“Yeah. Like in ‘Shroud of…' I think. I don't know—”

Crace marched back to him. “Bring up a news site. An international news site.”

One of the pilots said, “We monitor all breaking news, as well as law enforcement and public safety Web sites, ma'am. We—”

She said, “Get me ESPN. Or Fox Sports.”

One of the pilots began banging away at his keyboard. Seconds later a monitor blinked to life and quickly turned to a sports cable channel.

The other pilot squinted at the screen. “Wait. That's … is that Turin?”

Crace nodded. “It's the Tour.”

“Tour?”

“Tour de France.”

 

Twenty-Three

The Tour de France doesn't start in France. Not most years. It starts elsewhere, like England or Belgium or, that year, in Italy.

That year's Tour featured twenty-three teams. Each team had nine bicyclists. Each rider was wearing a transceiver low on his back, with an earjack that let him communicate with the team captain, as well as with the team managers traveling by car or motor home behind the two-hundred-plus scrum of riders called a peloton. The riders also could communicate with ancillary spotters who rode motorcycles in front, behind, and, quite often, amid the peloton.

Besides having talented and attentive drivers and riders, each team of bicycles and motorcycles and cars had its own communication frequency.

The Tour de France is one of the most widely covered sporting events in the world. That year's tour included credentialed newspaper, magazine, radio, television, and Web-based journalists from six continents and twenty-eight countries. It was estimated that one in five television microwave trucks in all of Europe was assigned to the Tour. The military and civilian airspace above each stage of it had to be carefully controlled by NATO to clear space for the helicopters, which would range from six to sixteen per day.

Fixed-wing airplanes also provided coverage.

In an increasingly homogenous journalism world, fans could watch the race online or on TV in virtually any language. That meant each team of journalists competed against the others. And each team used its own communications frequencies.

After the previous decade's terrorist attacks on the United States, England, and Spain all law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies had determined that big public events like the Tour were especially vulnerable. For the Italian stage of the Tour, every public safety agency in a two-hundred-kilometer radius was on high alert. Every agency had personnel in the field or in the air. And each agency had its own frequencies.

It was estimated that each stage of the three-week tour would field anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand fans. Sometimes they lined the straightaways between the villages. Sometimes they braved the cold and wind of the uphill half of the mountain stages, waiting for the monolithic peloton, its two hundred bikes, ancillary motorbikes, and follow cars to lug past them, churning slowly, defying gravity. Sometimes the thousands of fans filled the villages to overflowing. For the townspeople along the route traffic would transform sleepy villages into bustling metropolises and back again, all inside twenty-four hours.

One in eight fans along the route would use Twitter. One in nine would use Facebook. One in seventeen would use Instagram. And one in 1.3 carried an active cell phone.

Which meant the cell towers were pushed far beyond endurance long before the first racing bike arrived.

The Tour de France did not tour.

It raged.

Sandpoint, Idaho

Bryan Snow attacked his keyboard. His two in-house pilots attacked their keyboards. Everyone leaned forward. The first acrid taint of flop sweat began to fill the control room.

Colonel Crace stood on Snow's dais and watched the screens. Her hands formed fists.

“Nothing!” Snow growled, and paused to wipe sweat off his upper lip. “Nothing. Jesus … nothing.”

One of his pilots turned and, even in the bad lighting of the hidden subbasement, he looked pallid. “Confirmed,” the pilot said. “As soon as the drones hit that goddamned race! All comms are off. We got nothin'. We are blind, deaf, and dumb.”

Northern Italy

Daria watched the sky. There were no clouds, but the sky was filled with helicopters hovering between five hundred and one thousand feet, and with propeller-driven airplanes flying higher.

She stared through borrowed aviator glasses, but it was so bright she still squinted.

She had seen two hawks. And three hummingbirds. But that had been an hour earlier. They were nowhere to be seen now.

It was too hot to wear leathers, but Daria still wore the fuchsia-and-black uniform of Team Tarantola. The form-fitting bodysuit—leather trousers, tight leather bomber, riding boots—featured no fewer than ten company logos. Daria had gone into battle many times, but she had never before done so as a walking billboard for Amstel Beer or Barclays Bank.

Riders on the Tour de France do not wear leather, but the aides on motorbikes do.

Daria had explained to Gianni Docetti why she needed to ride one of the ancillary motorcycles during the race. It had taken some effort and flirtation to convince him.

Daria then explained it to team manager Paco Montoya. It had taken some talking and, admittedly, some threats regarding her hinted-at relationship with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She knew the right names to drop, she sprinkled the verb
doping
liberally, and he quickly saw the light.

Now Daria was assigned as a support rider. She would drive one of the team's tough little Moto Guzzi motorbikes while a small-boned but steady-handed Basque named Estebe carried a small video camera and sat behind her. They would ride slightly apace with, and sometimes ahead of, the peloton, shooting live video of the route and looking for obstructions or potential hazards or fans too stupid to get out of the way of the oncoming wall of riders. The video feed would be transmitted back to Paco Montoya and the coaches of Team Tarantola.

Daria would ride the one route in all of Western Europe that could keep her away from the eyes and the ears and the bullets and missiles of the micro-drones.

*   *   *

Not eighty meters to her left, a tempest rocked another group of participants: Team Rostelecom.

The Russian-telecom-financed team figured to do well in that year's Tour de France. The team had a world-class leader, exceptional secondary riders, a great manager, and one of the best fat-cat sponsors in all the world: Rostelecom, provider of more than 50 percent of the long-distance telephone service in Russia.

Despite that, the manager of Team Rostelecom sat in a Winnebago a mile behind the starting line pounding the walls and screaming obscenities in Russian. He had just lost communications with two of his outriders: men on Kawasaki motorcycles.

*   *   *

Behind a closed service station in Turin, Owen Cain Thorson and Jake Kenner pulled on leather jackets in the cream-and-teal colors of Team Rostelecom. The outriders wouldn't wake up before being found and transported to a hospital. By the time they did recover it would be too late for authorities to do anything about it.

Kenner kept one eye on Thorson. “You lost a lotta blood, dude. We should—”

Thorson gingerly slid on a motorcycle helmet, pulling outward on its edges as it slid painfully over his swollen cheek and oozing, possibly septic, ear.

“Pink and black,” he rasped. “She's wearing pink and black.”

“Yeah. I seen her.”

Thorson was sweating, but then he'd been sweating since they left the safe house in Florence. His skin looked pinkish, and he radiated fever. “Hundreds of bikes,” he said. With his swollen cheek, it came out
hunners abikes.
“Dozens of motorcycles. Thousands of fans. We hit her in the mountains. Don't worry about what I said earlier. About my talking to her. I don't need to talk to her.”

Jake Kenner said, “Got it, man. But listen, let me do this. Okay? You're in no shape—”

Thorson said, “More than a hundred-mile ride. Five straightaways and seven climbs. Toughest climb is at the end. We get her in a pincer there. You take down her bike. I'll run her over. That doesn't work, we shoot her. Understood?”

“Confirmed. Listen, dude, Let me—”

Thorson slipped on smoked goggles, covering his red-rimmed, too bright eyes. “We kill her. Follow the plan. Kill her.”

“I understand. We—”

“Kill her. We kill her.”

 

Twenty-Four

The first stage of the Tour de France usually is a time trial. Each rider takes off one at a time, zips through a lovely village or city, and establishes his time for the day. But this year would start with a race day, beginning in Turin and crossing the border into France. The riders would zoom westward for almost two hundred kilometers and for four hours, into the heart of the Alps and into France. They would begin in the lowlands, with Italian towns such as Condove and Borgone Susa along the A32. There would be four fairly good climbs at this stage, ending with a tough 17 percent grade up the Col du Mont Carbonnel and a quick descent into the town of Romans-sur-Mercellen.

Estebe, the Basque cinematographer, was not happy about having a motorcycle driver he did not know, but Daria quickly demonstrated that she knew how to handle a cycle.

As the race commenced, Team Tarantola consisted of the nine riders in the middle of the pack plus the motorcycle, plus the team's Dodge Durango with the coaches and team medic, riding behind. The Durango's roof carried five extra bicycles, upside down. Every team was equipped more or less the same, meaning about twenty motorcycles would ride along.

The riders wore shorts and zippered, moisture-wicking short-sleeve tops, with reflective sunglasses and lightweight, honeycomb helmets. Daria, Estebe, and the others on motorcycles wore leathers with heavy helmets, transmitters on their belts, and microphones and receivers in their helmets.

For the first hour of the race, the peloton loped through the Italian, then French, lowlands, through farms and along a well-maintained highway. With the 102-horsepower engine, Daria had the luxury of roaming back away from the riders, then quickly gaining ground on them as needed. She often pulled behind the pack of riders and, from that angle, all she could see was a roiling mass of helmets and shoulders. They looked like the surface of rough seas bobbing up and down. From behind, the two-hundred-plus riders looked insanely close to each other; it was only when Estebe spoke into his mic and urged her to move forward that she could see the actual space between the riders. Even then, it didn't seem like much.

The man who sat behind Daria had his thighs on either side of her hips. His occasional nudge, as if she were a horse he was guiding through a turn, made Daria grin under her helmet. Estebe carried a small video camera that produced a remarkably clear image.