Extinction Machine Read online

  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.

  Part Two

  Taken

  Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

  Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

  —ANNE FRANK

  Chapter Eight

  Secret Service Ops Center

  The White House

  Sunday, October 20, 3:22 a.m.

  Nothing was happening. That’s how Duty Officer Lyle Ames liked it. The ideal day for the Secret Service Presidential Detail was one in which the president did nothing, shook no hands, saw none of the public, and basically stayed indoors, out of sight, and safe.

  The press hated days like this.

  Ames loved them.

  According to the duty log on his desk, nothing much had happened all day. It was slow. Boring.

  Perfect.

  He sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with the presidential seal on it and flipped the duty log over to the last page. Nothing there, either. Nice.

  The office was nearly empty. His agents were at their posts, and Ames’s only company was Regina Smallwood at the ops desk. Smallwood sat in front of a row of computer monitors that displayed real-time feeds of security cameras. Each monitor screen was divided into many smaller windows that displayed telemetric feeds, coded to correspond with the heartbeat of an individual. Green lights pulsed for the president, the first lady, their family, the vice president, and the key members of government who formed the line of succession—the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, secretary of the Senate, all the way down to the secretary of Homeland
Security. Most of the green lights pulsed with the slow, rhythmic beating of sleeping hearts. A few were more rapid, indicating that these people were night owls or in different time zones.

  The signals were sent by RFID chips—radio frequency identification chips the size of rice grains. Each VIP had one surgically implanted in the fatty tissue under their triceps. Unlike the passive chips used to store medical information, these were true telemetric locators. The chips were late-generation models manufactured by Digital Angel, and as long as GPS tracking satellites circled the earth the chips would locate the wearer and send a continuous feed to establish location and proof of life. It was one of the technologies that allowed agents like Ames to dial down his Maalox consumption.

  Ames set down the duty log, stood, stretched, yawned, and took his cup over to the Mr. Coffee to pour some hot into it. As he raised the carafe he heard a bong-bong sound. An alarm from the telemetry board. A soft, unthreatening sound; more of a notification than a crisis shout.

  Smallwood snapped her fingers at him. “Got a transponder failure,” she said. “POTUS just went dark.”

  “Balls,” growled Ames. He set his cup down and hurried over. “Is it the panel or the transponder?”

  “Unknown, but the other signals are strong and steady.” She looked up. “You’d better call it. Gil stayed over tonight.”

  Ames was already hitting the speed dial for Gilbert Shannon, the president’s body man.

  A sleepy voice answered, “Shannon.”

  “Gil, this is Lyle. Are you with the president?”

  “No, I’m in my room down the hall.”

  “Okay, I need you to go put eyes on the president. Have the agent at the door accompany you in.”

  All the sleepiness vanished from Shannon’s voice. “Is there a problem?”

  “Probably not, but the boss’s transponder stopped transmitting.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll call you in one minute.”

  Ames set down his phone and made a second call to alert the agents outside the president’s bedroom door. That done, he bent over Smallwood’s shoulder to study the telemetry feeds. The small pulsing green light had been replaced by two words in red LED letters: SIGNAL LOST.

  Ames did not yet feel panic. There was only a tingle.

  “Could have happened at Camp David,” suggested Smallwood.

  “Hm?” asked Ames.

  “The transponder. The president was all over the place. Basketball, jogging, that softball game at the barbecue. He could have banged his arm when he tried to steal second base in the third inning. Remember, he dove in headfirst? Brierly tagged him pretty hard and I think that was on the upper arm.”

  Ames shook his head. “He reached for the base with his left arm.”

  “Sure, but he was tagged on his right. The ball could have hit the transponder.”

  “Maybe,” said Ames.

  “Or, it could have been—”

  The phone rang.

  Ames snatched it up. “Talk to me.”

  It wasn’t Gil Shannon. It was Sam Holly, the senior agent on shift at the residence. His voice was ratcheted tight with tension.

  “Sir, we have a situation…”

  Chapter Nine

  The Rose Garden

  The White House

  Sunday, October 20, 3:25 a.m.

  Agent Jeremy Nunzio had his weapon in a two-handed grip as he ran along the row of hedges outside the Oval Office. The radio in his ear was a crazed jumble of yells, commands, contradictory orders, questions, and desperate demands for fresh intel.

  “We’ve got movement,” cried one of the other agents. Sziemesko. “We’ve got movement.”

  Sziemesko shouted the location and everyone was in motion, a fist closing around a specific point outside the White House. Nunzio was the closest, he got there first, rounding a corner, bringing his weapon up, finger laid along the trigger guard, all his years of training bringing him to this moment. He saw Sziemesko standing a few yards away, his back to the building, staring into the darkened lawn. Suddenly a dozen additional security lights flared on.

  “On your six,” Nunzio called, as he caught up with Sziemesko. The other agent’s gun was also raised, pointing to a specific spot within the darkness. Nunzio sighted down the barrel of his own piece.

  And saw nothing.

  Just darkness and security lights and …

  He and Sziemesko moved at the same time, their guns jerking left as one of the lights moved.

  “Freeze!” bellowed Nunzio.

  “Step into the light with your hands raised,” yelled Sziemesko. “Do it now.”

  But no one stepped out of the darkness and into the glow of the lights. The light itself moved. It looked like a lightbulb, but there was no flashlight attached to it; it projected no beam. It was simply a light. Simply there.

  Drifting slowly from left to right in front of them. Unattached, unsupported.

  Just a light.

  “Freeze!” Nunzio repeated.

  The light continued to move. It was forty feet away from them.

  “The fuck—?” murmured Sziemesko.

  The two agents edged forward, weapons ready. Voices in their earbuds told them that the White House was now in full crash mode. Doors and windows were locked. Every agent on duty was involved in a search for the president.

  Nunzio felt panic exploding in his chest.

  The president was gone. Missing from his room.

  And what the hell was this thing?

  The light stopped moving for a moment, then it dropped down to the grass and hovered inches above the lawn.

  “Go,” said Sziemesko, “I’ve got your back.”

  Nunzio edged tentatively forward.

  The light suddenly rose from the lawn and began moving away. Nunzio broke into a run, yelling at it to stop. Yelling at a person to stop, even though he could not see anyone out here. The light moved faster and faster and Nunzio almost—almost—took the shot.

  Two things happened to prevent that. Two things that made him almost forget he was even holding a gun.

  The other five security lights, the ones that had switched on when he’d run to this part of the lawn, also began to move. The movement was abrupt, without warning, and they accelerated until they caught up with the first light. They moved across the lawn in a straight line of retreat from Nunzio, then they slowed and formed a circle of lights that seemed for a moment to be frozen against the night. Then the circle rose.

  Straight upward.

  Very fast.

  Too fast.

  As Nunzio watched, the circle of lights tightened until there was only one large light.

  It pulsed once.

  Twice.

  And shot away into the eastern sky so fast that it was gone before Nunzio was aware that it was in motion.

  Nunzio stood there, gaping up at the sky. The dark and empty sky.

  “Nunzio!”

  He whirled at the sounds of Sziemesko’s shrill yell. Nunzio ran back to the other agent and skidded to a stop, remembering his gun, fanning it right and left.

  Sziemesko stood with his pistol hanging limply from his right hand, his slack face staring in total confusion at the lawn. Nunzio realized that there was something wrong with the grass. The lawn had been trampled as if a hundred people had run through here.

  He thought that, but even as that idea formed the rest of him rebelled at the assessment. The lawn was not trampled. No one else had been out here. No one had been out here since Nunzio had come on shift.

  He glanced at Sziemesko and their eyes held for a moment. Then slowly, wordlessly, they began backing away from the trammeled grass. They backed up almost to the White House itself, then they stopped. Nunzio heard Sziemesko say something under his breath. A denial, maybe. A curse. A prayer. He wasn’t sure.

  For his own part, Nunzio had no idea what to say. What words would really fit?

  The grass was not haphazardly smashed down. The blades looked folded. Nunzio knew that ther
e was a name for something like this, but his mind did not want to think it. That name was connected to something that had nothing at all to do with the White House, and the president, or anything in Nunzio’s world.

  Except that maybe it did.

  The name, those two words, despite all his denials, whispered inside his head anyway.

  This was a crop circle.

  Chapter Ten

  Aboard the Secret Escape

  Chesapeake Bay, off the coast of Virginia

  Sunday, October 20, 3:28 a.m.

  Linden Brierly was still awake. He lay in his bunk, staring up through the skylight at the infinite starfield that was spread like a jeweler’s display above the Chesapeake. His boat, a thirty-six-foot custom Beneteau, rocked gently, keeping him at the edge of sleep but not yet tumbling him over. His wife lay curled against him, soft and warm and beautiful. Her hair was still tangled from lovemaking, and the cabin smelled of her expensive perfume, superb wine, and sex.

  Brierly stroked her hair, careful not to coax her to the surface of her dreams. By starlight her naked body was alabaster perfection. After nine years of marriage he still marveled at her, lost in the graceful lines and curves that only he knew with such intimate familiarity.

  He glanced at the luminous face of the bedside clock and watched it turn from 3:29 to 3:30. He and Barbara were three and a half hours into the tenth year of their marriage.

  Nice.

  The boat rocked on a series of small, slow rollers.

  And then Brierly’s cell phone rang.

  His hand snaked out and snatched it off the night table, his thumb hitting the ringer mute halfway through the first jangle. He cut a look at Barbara, but she was still down deep. Then Brierly looked at the screen display and his heart lurched in his chest.

  No name. Instead there was a coded symbol: ***!!!***

  Jesus Christ, he thought. No, no, no …

  He answered the call.

  “Brierly.”

  “Sir,” said Lyle Ames, “we have a Jackhammer situation. Please verify that confidential protocols are in active play.”