Predator One (30 page)

As if in answer, Church’s phone rang again.

He
looked at the display and walked out into the hall to take the call. I could see him stiffen as he listened. Then he spoke very quietly for several minutes. His body looked incredibly tense. Beside him, Brick looked on with growing concern. Brick shot me a brief, worried look.

Few things worry Brick.

Church ended his call and spoke with Brick for a moment. Then the big soldier went hurrying
off. I watched Church take a moment to compose himself before reentering my room. He is not a man who rattles easily. Or, like, at all. But he looked rattled now. You had to know him to tell, though. He came in and sat down, crossed his legs and drummed his fingers very slowly on his thigh. That’s his tell. He only does that when he’s been pushed out of his calm space. He does it very slowly and deliberately,
as if each tap hammers another nail back into his calm. I said nothing, waiting him out, and dreading what he was going to say.

Finally he took a breath, exhaled, nodded as if agreeing with a thought. “That was Chief Petty Officer Ruiz. There has been an incident at UC Medical Center in San Diego. Doctor Sanchez has been attacked.” He held up a hand to stop me from jumping out of the bed. “Hear
me out. Doctor Sanchez is alive and is not in danger. He has a concussion.”

“How’s that possible?” I demanded. “You told me you had a man on Rudy. Cowpers, right?”

“Agent Cowpers escorted Doctor Sanchez to a chapel at the hospital where Circe is staying. He cleared the chapel before letting Doctor Sanchez enter. However, he heard the doctor cry out. And when he went back into the chapel, he
found Doctor Sanchez unconscious on the floor between two pews. He had been beaten by a man dressed as a priest. He has a head injury and some burns.”

“Burns?”

“On his hand.”

“Who did this?” I demanded. “Who the hell is this priest?”

“When he was brought upstairs, Doctor Sanchez was semiconscious and murmuring a name.” He paused to take a steadying breath. “Nicodemus.”

Chapter Sixty-two

Over Nevada Airspace

March 30, 8:46
P.M.
Pacific Standard Time

The little camera on the wall of the black woman’s townhouse captured everything.

The silver flash of the knife as it moved.

The intense and lovely red of blood. Always darker than people expected. Rich.

The slithery sound of steel stabbing through clothes and deep into muscle and organs.

The piercing shriek
of pain.

Boy watched it all and felt her pulse quicken. She felt herself get wet and ached to touch herself, to stroke herself to orgasm as the murder unfolded before her on the big-screen TV.

Chapter Sixty-three

27 Eighth Avenue

Park Slope, Brooklyn

March 30, 5:48
P.M.

“Taking a long time,” said Kang. “She’s usually in and out.”

“You want to tell her she’s wasting our time?” asked Tank.

Kang snorted. “No thanks. I like my nutsack attached, thank you. I was just saying—”

They suddenly turned at the sound of shattering glass. Tank’s gun was in his hand before he completed the
turn, and he looked up to see the bloody figure fly outward from the second-floor window. It fell, trailing a comet’s tail of glittering fragments and shreds of curtain as Kang and Colby both cried.

The body slammed down on the roof of the Escalade with enough force to blow out the windows. Tank spun away, shielding his eyes from the safety glass.

“Auntie!” he bellowed.

The body had landed
solidly and was sprawled like a broken doll in a crater of black metal. The head hung down over the cracked windshield. Eyes vacant, mouth open. Throat cut.

It was a man.

Had been a man.

Now it was meat.

Through the open second-floor window, Tank heard a shriek of terrible agony. And then two gunshots.

Tank charged up the steps and threw his shoulder against the door, which splintered inward
with a huge crash. Colby and Kang were right behind him.

They almost tripped over the body at the foot of the stairs.

This one was a woman.

She wore black clothes and a ski mask. Her broken right index finger was twisted inside the trigger guard of a .22 automatic pistol. A knife was buried to the hilt in her eye socket.

There was a third shot from upstairs.

A fourth.

“Federal agents,” bellowed
Colby, but Tank saved his breath for running. He jumped over the corpse and took the stairs three at a time. The entire second-floor landing was painted with blood. On the floor, on the walls, splashed over the big painting at the top of the steps.

There was a third body there. His arm jagged to the right, and a vicious compound fracture had sent the ends of his humerus through the meat of his
biceps. His throat looked wrong. Flattened. As if the entire trachea and hyoid bone had been crushed.

The left-hand hall was empty. But a trail of blood led to the front bedroom, and inside were the sounds of a violent struggle. Screams and curses. Tank and the others barreled down the hall and burst into the master bedroom. Two figures stood locked in a deadly struggle. A man dressed in the
same dark clothes as the other assassins, and Aunt Sallie.

Both of them were hurt. Both were bleeding. The handle of a knife protruded from Auntie’s lower back, and blood streamed from both nostrils and bubbled over her lower lip. She had one hand locked around the wrist of the man, and his hand held a smoking pistol; his face was a torn mask of ruined flesh. One eye was gone, burst and dripping,
and his nose was shattered, but he had Auntie’s throat in his other hand and was driving her toward the smashed-out window. The figures were locked in a terminal dance.

Tank reached the man in two long strides. He grabbed the wrist of the gun hand and tore it out of Auntie’s grip, clamped another hand around the back of the man’s neck, and, with a savage grunt, dragged him backward. Tank lifted
him into the air and slammed him down as he quickly knelt. The man’s spine struck Tank’s knee and broke with a sound as loud as any gunshot.

With a grunt of fury, he shoved the man aside just as Colby and Kang were lunging to catch Aunt Sallie before she fell out the window. Kang muscled in between them and scooped her up.

“
Call 911!
” he roared.

In his arms, Aunt Sallie’s face was knotted with
pain.

Then her eyes rolled high and white and she went totally slack.

Chapter Sixty-four

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

March 30, 6:31
P.M.

The day was far from done with us. Just as Church finished telling me about Rudy, his phone rang again. I could tell that he didn’t want to answer it. His face was a stone mask.

He listened, and I saw the color drain from his skin.

It was bad. Worse than bad.

“Is she alive?” he said.

Those are not good words, no matter who they’re attached to.

She.

There are a lot of women in my life. In Church’s. All of them are precious. All of them, in one way or another, are family.

There was pain on Church’s face, in his eyes. He listened.

Then he said, “I am initiating a Level One-A-One security protocol. Alert all stations. Activate the Red Blanket. Do it now. Call me when it’s
done.”

Church lowered the phone and sagged back.

“Christ,” I said, “what happened?”

He had to take a moment to collect himself. Whatever the news was, it was hurting him. “There has been another attack on our people,” he said in a ghostly quiet voice.

I tensed, actually gripping fistfuls of the sheets as if they could keep me braced for what was coming.

“Aunt Sallie is in critical condition
with a knife wound to her right kidney,” he said slowly. He paused and pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting, getting a grip on his emotions. “The emergency surgeons are not optimistic.”

Chapter Sixty-five

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

March 30, 6:33
P.M.

“Your daughter,” said the Gentleman. “You know she’s totally daft, right?”

Pharos shrugged. “Look at us. How many people do either of us know who could be cited as a paragon of mental stability?”

The burned man thought about it. “Fair enough.”

After a moment, the Gentleman added, “She’s good, though. I’ll
give her that. Mad as the moon, but she’s bloody good.”

Pharos smiled, his heart swelling with pride.

They watched the news stories tumble and spin.

A few small windows on the big screen were data feeds that provided text-message updates from field agents. Some of them even included digital images. They were every bit as entertaining as the news stories.

Below the cluster of windows was a
stack of news crawls, each showing information from different markets. Not the American stock market, of course, which had been closed following the ballpark bombings, but real-time feeds from commodities markets around the world. Asia, the EU. Elsewhere. Even smaller markets controlled by China and Russia. Gold, wheat, pork bellies, orange juice, rice, technologies, pharmaceuticals. Many others.
And oil, of course. Always oil. With each new story, each update from reporters who shared the latest death tolls, the prices shifted. Up and down, up and down.

Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman owned hundreds of people in the world markets. Commodities buyers and sellers who scrambled to find the profit foothold. Many people were panicking, thinking that another 9/11 was happening. Pharos had
primed the pump with the release of the partial video; and now they let that engine run wild. The machine purred, and the product it manufactured was fear. No one wanted another Iraq, another Afghanistan. Not America or its allies. Not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, who, despite their bluster, had been devastated by the wars. America had withdrawn the bulk of its forces from Afghanistan and ended the thirteen-year-long
war. No one wanted them to rearm and return. Especially not with their new generation of autonomous UAV weapons of war. Shooting down a drone doesn’t make the same kind of emotional statement.

So, the market shuddered and jerked as if continually punched.

With every staggering step, the brokers and bankers, buyers and sellers working for the burned man and Pharos made a profit. They bet on rises
and falls, or steep swoops and terrified plummets. It was all a matter of being positioned long before the first tremor.

“As the American expression goes,” said Pharos, “buckle up. It’s about to get bumpy.”

There was a small sound from the other side of the room. A soft gagging sound. They turned.

Doctor Aaron Davidovich sat on a metal folding chair. Two broad-shouldered Blue Diamond Security
men flanked him. Davidovich had one hand over his mouth and the other flat against his chest.

“Christ,” growled the burned man, “if you’re going to vomit, don’t do it in here.”

Davidovich’s face was the color of old milk, but he shook his head. The only sounds he made were tiny squeaks as his eyes darted from screen to screen to screen.

Pharos and the Gentleman exchanged a glance.

“I told
you,” said the Gentleman. “I bloody well told you.”

Pharos raised both hands and made small pushing motions with his palms. “Wait, wait, let’s give him a chance.”

He got up and walked over to the scientist. Davidovich flinched back, but one of the guards clamped a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Shhhh,” said Pharos, holding a finger to his lips, “shhhh, it’s all right, my friend. You have
absolutely nothing to fear from us. Nothing at all.”

“I—I—I’m not af-afraid,” stammered Davidovich.

“No, of course not. We’re all such good friends here. Everything is perfectly fine.”

Davidovich said nothing. He was sweating heavily and smelled sour and stale.

Pharos squatted down in front of him, still smiling warmly. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and looked at the screens behind him,
then turned back to the scientist.

“Does all of that bother you?”

Davidovich said nothing.

“Does it?” prompted Pharos.

“N-no…”

“Doctor, please … if we can’t be frank with each other, then what do we have? Nothing. So, come now. There is absolutely nothing you can tell, nothing you can say that would offend or upset me. Truly, nothing.”

Davidovich said nothing.

“Doctor … listen to me and,
please, hear me. I do understand what you’re going through. I am also a scientist. A doctor, not of computers. Of medicine, but even so. We are men of science. We were not trained for this. When we began our schooling, we did not have this in mind. I did not, and I’m sure you didn’t, either. Can we agree on that?”

Davidovich paused, then nodded. A small nod.

“We can also agree, I’m sure, that
the view we held of the world when we were younger was much different from what the world actually is. Yes?”

Another small nod.

“Over the years, I became much less naive about the way things work. I looked at the play of politics. Right and left, one party and another, and I’m sure you know what I discovered when I stepped back to view it with perspective. There is no difference. Liberal and
conservative, capitalist or socialist, first world or third. All of the rhetoric amounts to something less than a pile of old shit. We can agree on that. The promises of politicians has value only to them and the people who expect to benefit from seeing them get into office. The policies of governments are never actually for the betterment of anything but are truly only grunts of effort as they jockey
for position and advantage in a giant global polo match. Even the so-called nonprofit organizations are either covertly funded by governments who want to exploit their access or resources, or they are even more naive than I was and are therefore inconsequential.”