Predator One (7 page)

Will I kick a man when he’s down?

Nah.

But I’ll kick a pedophile from any angle at any time.

I went back to my search without a
flicker of guilt.

Interlude Three

The Imperial Condominiums

Unit 6A, Edgewater Drive

Corpus Christi, Texas

Four Years Ago

The car idled outside the Imperial Condominiums, engine quiet, driver silent. No radio, no conversation, even though there was a second man in the front passenger seat. They sat and waited.

They were slim men. Midtwenties. Average height. Average weight. Average in
every useful way. Forgettable.

The car was a medium blue Ford Focus.

The men were dressed like grad students. The driver wore a print dress shirt and moderately tasteful Dockers. The passenger wore a Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, basketball sweatshirt over pressed jeans and New Balance running shoes. They looked like what they wanted people to see. They did not look like who and what they were.

The man in the Dockers was currently using the name Jacob. It was listed as the most popular name for boys based on statistics from the Social Security Administration. The man in the jeans was using the second most popular name, Mason.

Before coming here they had been at a Starbucks on Ocean Drive. Jacob pretended to read the paper. Mason pretended to surf the net on his iPad. They sat near each
other, but not together. When they left, Jacob went out first, walked around the corner, and got into his car. He circled the block and picked up his companion one street away. The driver made sure he was not being followed.

They were both very careful men.

Then they drove over to Edgewater and parked outside the condos. Engine on, both of them waiting.

Jacob had a Ruger SR22 pistol snugged
into an ankle holster. Mason had an identical gun in his zippered tablet case. They always carried the same make and model of handgun. It made it easier for sharing ammunition. These were efficient men.

However, both of these guns were their backup pieces. Neither of them preferred to kill with them.

They used something else for that.

The cell phone that rested on the dash vibrated.

The driver
picked it up, thumbed the green button, and said, “‘
Ā
ll
ō
.”

He listened and then disconnected without a comment, switched the engine off, and got out of the car. The other man removed a small hemp-handled paper bag. The bag was from Starbucks. Two plump one-pound bags of Pike Place blend peeked out of the top.

Together, Jacob and Mason approached the building.

They pressed the call button for
unit 6A. A moment later, it buzzed and the door lock clicked.

They entered and took the stairs. They did not go to unit 6A. Instead, the driver led his companion to unit 12B. It was at the end of a short hallway. The hall was completely empty and very quiet. They knocked on the door and waited until a woman answered it. She smiled expectantly at them. They were unobtrusive and well-groomed young
men. Everyone in this building worked at the university. Nearly every tenant was a professor. It was not at all unusual for a couple of grad students to visit.

“Yes?” said the woman.

“Mrs. Harrison?” asked Jacob.

“Yes.”

“We work with your husband. Doc Harrison asked us to bring this over.”

He held up the Starbucks bag.

She was still smiling, but there was as much frown as smile on her mouth.
“He’s in the shower, but I can—”

Mason punched her.

Once, very hard, in the throat. He used the folded secondary knuckles of his left hand. A leopard’s-paw punch.

The blow crushed her hyoid bone and larynx. It silenced her voice. She collapsed immediately, and he stepped forward to catch her. He smiled at her as she turned purple. Trying to breathe, trying to find even a whisper of breath in
a throat filled with shattered debris.

Mason caught Mrs. Harrison and laid her very gently on the floor, holding her down to keep her heels from hammering on the hardwood as she died.

Jacob closed the door. He took the coffee out of the bag and removed a pistol. It was not another .22. It did not fire bullets at all. The weapon looked vaguely like a silvery space pistol from a bad science fiction
movie. It didn’t look entirely real.

It was.

The weapon was a Jarvis USSS-2A pneumatic mushroom-head nonpenetrating stunner. Very effective for the quick and humane slaughter of cattle. Unlike the captive-bolt stunners, this one did not even break the skin. No risk of contaminants. No need to meticulously clean the fittings to remove DNA.

“Doris—?” called a man’s voice from down the hall. “Who
was at the door?”

They could hear the shower water running.

Jacob nodded to Mason, who rose from the corpse, and together they walked down the hall toward the bathroom.

Sixteen minutes later, they were in the Focus driving away.

The two men were in the front, Boy was in the back. She had been waiting for them in the lobby.

There were three corpses in the condominium.

Professor Milo Harrison,
deputy department chair of applied robotics at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, and his wife, Doris. And Professor Harry Seymour, chairman of the school’s experimental aeronautics department.

The car moved at a comfortable pace along Edgewater.

Away from the three dead bodies.

Away from the Imperial Condominiums.

Away from the column of dense smoke that rose from that building.

Several fire engines
screamed past them. Five separate police cars roared by. No one took note of the nondescript car with its nondescript passengers.

They drove to a motel outside the city limits and checked into their rooms. They left all of their equipment in the car. A minute later, a silver-gray Toyota Camry and a beige Honda Civic pulled into the lot and parked in front of the rear exit. The drivers of those
cars got into the Focus and drove it away. They took it to a scrapyard on Holly Road, got into a black SUV, and left. The Focus was crushed within minutes. Later, it was added to a load of scrap metal that would be taken by heavy truck to the docks and included in a shipment bound for Japan.

At the motel, Boy went into one room and the two graduate students went into another.

Boy stripped off
her clothes and stuffed them into a plastic container. All other personal effects went into the same container. Naked, she went into the bathroom, took a shower, dried herself thoroughly, removed an aerosol can from a bag on the sink, and doused herself with a dark spray-on tan. She put contact lenses in her eyes, injected collagen into her lips, slipped on a blond wig and padded clothing. The last
thing she did was put on padded shoes that added two inches to her height.

After she left, a cleaning woman came in, took a hazmat suit from her cart, put it on, and proceeded to clean every inch of the room with industrial cleaner and bleach. She poured acid down the drains to dissolve any traces of hair or other DNA. Another cleaner did the same in the room used by the two young men.

The plastic
containers of clothing and personal effects were taken to a waste site and dumped into a tub of hydrofluoric acid. The residue was mixed with plastic and ball bearings and allowed to harden. The hardened blocks were dumped from fishing boats out at sea.

All of this took place within a few hours of the three murders at Imperial Condominiums. It is possible, even likely, that more than half of
these procedures were unnecessary, even wildly so. They were done anyway. Nothing was left to chance.

No trace was left.

Boy drove her new car to New Orleans. The trip took nine hours.

Mason and Jacob drove a more leisurely route along I-10 west to Alamogordo, where they checked in to the Holiday Inn Express. And waited.

They had no idea how long they would have to wait. Nor did it matter.

Instructions would come.

Instructions always came.

They spent the time swimming in the hotel pool, watching pay-per-view movies, playing video games, and making love to each other.

In New Orleans, Boy checked in to the Hotel Monteleone, ate room service food, and read three novels. When she wasn’t actively working, Boy read all day and into the evening. She was currently working her way through
the entire works of Elmore Leonard, having just finished all the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. Reading calmed her. It allowed her energies to idle in neutral.

She did not make any calls. She did not feel the urge to check e-mails. She had no Facebook or Twitter pages. She was patient and in her patience was content to wait. Doctor Pharos would call her.

He always called.

There was
still so much left to do.

The world was still on its hinges.

For now.

Chapter Eleven

The Resort

208 Nautical Miles West of Chile

October 13, 1:38
A.M.

“Cowboy,” came Bug’s urgent call, “be advised we have incoming.”

“Incoming what?”

“Looks like a UAV coming in low and fast.” UAV was shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicle. A drone.

He read off the coordinates and vector, indicating that it was coming from the west. From the seaward side of the island. I
hurried outside. Top and Bunny were already there, each of them fitting on their night vision.

“What’s this shit?” asked Top.

“This some Agency thing?” growled Bunny. “They have a second location out here? Another island we don’t know about?”

“Nothing on the satellite maps,” I said. “Bug, give me something. Who’s toy is this?”

“Unknown, Cowboy,” said Bug. “Definitely not one of ours. The only
drones we have are running surveillance between here and the mainland. This one just appeared on the radar. Probably launched from a boat.”

“Boat,” echoed Bunny nervously. “Chilean navy? They could have launched one from a submarine out of Talcahuano. They got a couple of those Type 209 German-made boats.”

“Got Exocets on ’em, too,” said Top. “Don’t want to overstay our welcome and get a missile
shoved up our asses, Cap’n. We ain’t supposed to be here.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug. “This is a small signature. Don’t think it’s military. Not big enough to carry heavy weapons. Coming right at you, though. Seven miles and closing. We have two helos heading to intercept, but the UAV will get to you first.”

“Frigging drones are a pain in my ass,” said Top.

I had to agree. These days they
were everywhere. The military had a lot of them, but they were also being used not only to map streets and, by law enforcement, to conduct aerial surveillance and patrol the border but also to film sports events, take real-estate photos, and even deliver goods. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Domino’s, Taco Bell, and hundreds of other companies had applied for licenses. The FAA kept trying to fight it,
and for very good reasons. UAVs could be used to deliver a lot more than chalupas or the latest Janet Evanovich novel, but the agency was losing most of their cases.

“Still not seeing it, Bug,” said Bunny. He held a muscular AA-12 shotgun with a drum magazine. It was a monster. Fully automatic and drum-fed, it fired five 12-gauge shotgun shells per second. Very reliable, very little recoil. I’ve
seen Bunny fire it one-handed. And for times when a hail of hot buckshot isn’t enough of a crowd-pleaser, he could swap in another drum loaded with Frag-12 high-explosive or fragmentation grenades. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny has issues.

We listened.

Drones are very quiet. Maybe if there weren’t a million crickets and cicadas filling the night air with their steady whistling pulse, maybe—just
maybe—we’d have heard it. Maybe not.

“Infrared,” I said, and we cycled through the Scout’s lenses until the world was painted scarlet.

“There it is,” said Top as he raised his M4. “Two o’clock. Fifty feet above the trees.”

“C’mon, Bug,” I said, raising my own rifle. This wasn’t the time for horse tranquilizers. “Tell me something useful or we’re going to blow this thing out of the air. Not
in the mood for surprises.”

“I got nothing on it, Cowboy. Satellites are not picking up an active weapons system.”

“Doesn’t mean it ain’t a bomb,” observed Top.

We all saw it then. A pale blotch of heat painted against the fifty thousand shades of red and gray that made up the forest. It was a four-rotor quadcopter and it was bigger than I thought. Maybe six feet across. It wobbled slightly
as it flew, pushed out of true by a freshening easterly breeze. It flew just above the tree line until it hit the clearing between trees and fence.

“I don’t see a payload,” said Bunny.

“No rocket pods,” agreed Top.

“I got it,” said Sam Imura’s voice over the radio. “Call it, Cowboy, and I’ll switch off the lights.”

“Everyone hold fire,” I said. We kept our guns on it as it flew closer.

“It’s
slowing,” Bunny said.

It was. The machine crossed the fence line very slowly indeed and drifted over twenty feet of lawn, coming straight for us. Then it stopped; hovering there as if painted on the night sky.

“Cowboy,” said Bug urgently, “be advised, we’re picking up a strong, active video feed. It’s going up to half a dozen satellites.”

“Who’s satellites?”

“It’s crazy—it’s hacking into every
communication satellite in range and bouncing them all over. This thing is broadcasting this live. It’s showing up on TV and the net.”

And there, lying on the ground at our feet, was the corpse of Osama bin Laden.

Dead and in color.

“Jam the signal!” I shouted.

“Can’t do it, Cowboy—it’s already out there.”

The drone hovered there. Mocking us with what it could do. Mocking us with what it
was already doing.

“Take it out,” ordered Church. “Right now.”

Sam fired first, but I think we all hit it. We blasted the drone out of the sky and into a thousand fragments of metal and plastic. The motor core exploded and shot firework sparks into the dewy grass as the parts rained down.