Extinction Machine Page 6

  It was the lamb that Howard was placing on the altar that was the Project.

  The real Project.

  The Project that M3 had been working on for a very long time.

  Everything else—even the quite lovely Specter 101, mattered so much less. Just like the sixty employees at Wolf Trap mattered so much less.

  “If you want to hide in plain sight,” Bones had said when he’d suggested the slaughter to Howard, “and even get some sympathy from people who would ordinarily love to see your spleen on a platter—namely the boards at Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest—then become a victim. Let them console you, Howard. Hell, let them pity you. God knows they will. So will everybody who reads a newspaper or logs on to a news feed. You’ll be the heroic Howard Shelton, publically mourning at funerals, donating gaudy amounts of money to trust funds that provide for the offspring of whoever works at Wolf Trap. You’ll embody the tragedy so much that you’ll receive more sympathy cards than all the families together.”

  Howard Shelton had stared at Mr. Bones for nearly a full minute before he said, “You are an actual evil genius.”

  “This I know.”

  “If you had a twin sister I’d bang her silly.”

  “That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” laughed Mr. Bones.

  That discussion was two months ago. The slaughter was a little over two days ago. The offices of Shelton Aeronautics were so crammed with sympathy bouquets that it looked like a tropical rain forest. The president had called. The CEOs of every major defense contractor called. Celebrities had called. It was delicious.

  “How would you like to hit GE this time? Cyber or something more physical?”

  Howard thought about it as he winced his way through another chunk of grapefruit.

  “Let’s up the game. I think a fire in the corporate offices might do it.”

  “Done,” said Mr. Bones and sent a coded e-mail to someone who loved to play with matches. Then he wired a third of the payment to a Cayman Island account. Good faith money for a useful contractor.

  “What else?” asked Howard.

  “Well … if we’re going to keep this up, then we’re going to have to give the feds someone to look at. Too much blame is being directed at China, and they’re starting to complain to us.”

  “Pussies.”

  “Agreed, but they do have a point.”

  Howard pushed the grapefruit aside. “God, I’d rather eat a dead rat than another piece of that shit.”

  “Lose forty pounds and we can discuss pancakes.”

  Howard sipped his coffee. “So, you want to throw someone to the wolves. Good call. But who?”

  “I still want to point them at Mr. Church.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Oh, come on. He’s mysterious, he’s devious, and people don’t even know his real name. He’s perfect.”

  “He’s a Boy Scout,” said Howard. “The only reason you think he looks good for it is because he has MindReader, but it’s a bad fit.”

  Mr. Bones scraped butter onto a cold piece of toast. “Has to be one of his people, then. That nerd who runs their computer department, what do they call him? Bug?”

  “No. He’s too small fry. He looks like a puppy. No one would buy him for it.”

  “Aunt Sallie?”

  “Not a chance. Besides, she scares me more than Church.”

  They thought about it through toast and coffee refills.

  Then Howard snapped his fingers. “Christ, I know … and it’s been staring us right in the face.”

  “Who?”

  “Church’s pet psychopath. I mean, he was right there at Wolf Trap for fuck’s sake. He found the bodies. He’s perfect. People will think it’s like an arsonist calling in a fire.”

  It took no time at all for Mr. Bones to recall the name. “Ledger?”

  “Ledger.”

  Mr. Bones nodded. “Oooh—I like it.”

  He sent some e-mails to get that process going and at high gear. The phone rang as he was finishing. There were three cell phones laid side by side on the kitchen table. This was a gray one. The coded one. Mr. Bones picked it up and listened.

  After fifteen seconds of listening, he said, “Jesus Christ.”

  “What?” demanded Howard, but Mr. Bones held up a hand.

  “Bullshit. Don’t tell me that there’s no information, goddamn it. You fucking well find out, and get back to me right away.”

  He closed the phone with a sharp snap. His hand was trembling as he set the phone down.

  “What the hell was—” began Howard, but the look on Mr. Bones face stopped him.

  Mr. Bones said, “The president of the United States has been abducted. He was taken from his bedroom at three twenty this morning. There was no intrusion, no attack. The Secret Service agent at the door heard and saw nothing. There is no physical evidence, no trace. He is simply … gone.”

  “What? Who did it? How did they do it?”

  After a dreadful silence, Mr. Bones said, “If it’s true that he simply vanished from his bedroom without a trace of physical evidence … Well, Howard, there’s only one way to do it that I know of.”

  Howard Shelton stared at him.

  “Oh … shit,” he said.

  Part Three

  The Majestic Black Book

  The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

  —NIELS BOHR

  As the bomb fell over Hiroshima and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear.

  I wrote in my log the words: “My God, what have we done?”

  —CAPTAIN ROBERT LEWIS

  Chapter Thirteen

  Camden Court Apartments, Camden and Lombard Streets

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 6:09 a.m.

  Really bad time for the phone to ring.

  The naked woman in my bed picked my phone up and, without looking at it, threw it across the room.

  “Wrong number,” she said. The phone landed under the dresser and rang through to voice mail.

  I peered at the lady from between eyelids that had been welded shut a moment before. What was left of my brain was still deep in a dream that was a sweaty replay of the party last night. The dream wasn’t specific because my brain was too deeply pickled for that. Instead there were flash images. The slideshow started off with an R-rating for content. The guys from Echo Team serenading Rudy Sanchez with a song from Mamma Mia!, with a few significant modifications of the lyrics. Our version of the lyrics would have been too extreme for the letters page of Penthouse magazine.

  We didn’t go as low as hiring hookers, but there were strippers.

  Lots of strippers.

  Rudy had asked for something small and tasteful, but let’s face it, he asked the wrong guy. Me. No way was I sending my best friend down the aisle with anything less than a blowout of epic proportions. Creating an international incident was a real likelihood at one point, no joke. I believe the police were involved for some of it, but I’m pretty sure we wound up cuffing some of them to the toilets in the ladies’ room.

  It was that kind of a party.

  For what it’s worth, even though I may have kissed several people—and I pray that most or all of them were women—I did manage to go home with the woman I came with.

  Violin.

  A luscious Italian shooter-for-hire who had a psychotic mother who frequently wanted me dead. Violin had warrants on her from several countries that had extradition agreements with the U.S. She also had a set of curves that made me not care about any of that, and more importantly, she was one of “my” people. That’s a small group of folks who I trust completely. Violin and I had history, we’d been through fire together, which meant that if anyone ever took a run at her they’d have to go through me. That would get very expensive in ways most people don’t want to pay.

  Were we a couple?

  Not really. Not in any way you could write a romanc
e novel about.

  When she was in this part of the world, and if neither of us was otherwise involved, we tended to attack each other in hot and creative ways. There were no strings, no obligations, and that was an arrangement that worked just fine for both of us.

  Violin lay sprawled in a tangle of sheets in my Baltimore apartment. I think she’d gone back to sleep before the phone stopped ringing. She had pale skin with just the slightest hint of a Mediterranean olive in her complexion. No trace of a tan or even the ghost of a tan line—she’s definitely not the beach type. Round where it mattered, but lean and strong. Really, really strong. Some might say freakishly so, but she didn’t look it. She lay on her stomach, her face turned toward me, eyes closed, emitting a soft, purring snore. My middle-aged marmalade tabby, Cobbler, was snugged up against her, almost nose to nose with her, and they breathed with exactly the same feline rhythm.

  The phone began ringing again.

  My cell.

  And then the house landline.

  My dog, Ghost, started barking on the other side of the bedroom door.

  Balls.

  “Don’t,” mumbled Violin as I started to get up. It was somewhere between a plea and a threat.

  “It’s probably my office.”

  “Let someone else save the world for once. It’s Sunday, you’re hungover and more importantly I’m hungover. If you don’t let me go back to sleep I’ll kneecap you.” She said all this without opening her eyes, her voice a soft mumble of credible threat.

  “I’ll risk it,” I said.

  “Your funeral.”

  I sat up and the motion set the room to spinning. Violin wasn’t joking about a hangover. I remember swearing to God while on my knees that I would never—ever—drink again if He’d just let me stop throwing up. Next time I was in church I was going to have to take a look at the fine print on that contract.

  Right now, though, I watched the room do a tilt-a-whirl around the bed.

  “Oh God,” I mumbled.

  Both phones stopped ringing right before they would have gone to voice mail.

  “Thank you, Jesus.”

  And started up again.

  I lunged for the cell phone, missed it by ten feet and crawled like a sick tree sloth across the carpet, grabbed the cell, pushed the little green button.

  “What?” I snarled belligerently.

  “Good morning, Captain Ledger,” said Mr. Church.

  “Ah … shit.”

  “Although it pains me to interrupt your Sunday morning meditations, I would appreciate your attention on a matter of some importance.”

  Church hadn’t been at the bachelor party. I’d invited him but even though he didn’t say so I believe he would rather have been eaten by rats. Partly because, let’s face it, a bachelor party wasn’t his scene, and partly because Circe was his daughter. A precious few people on earth knew that fact, and I don’t want to know what Church would do to someone who let that fact leak. I’m a scary guy, but Church scares the kind of people who scare me.

  “I’m off today,” I said with bad grace. “The duty officer is—”

  “Joe,” said Church, “you need to get into the office now.”

  Church never calls me Joe. Never.

  I sat bolt upright.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  I looked at Violin. She’d caught the urgency in my voice and propped herself up on one elbow. Alert and cautious. Cobbler crouched on the sheets next to her with wide, wary eyes.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then call me from your car. I’ll expect to hear from you in two minutes.”

  He hung up.

  I’ve been working for Church for a couple of years now, I’d seen him in the middle of some of the most terrible catastrophes this country has faced. Stuff that doesn’t make the newspapers, which is why my fellow Americans can still sleep at night. I’ve seen Church in situations where everyone and everything is falling apart and he’s always as cool as a cucumber.

  But now there was something in his voice. Raw emotion held down by his iron control.

  Fear.

  Or maybe … panic.

  Chapter Fourteen

  VanMeer Castle

  Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  Sunday, October 20, 6:10 a.m.

  Mr. Bones opened the wings of his Ghost Box and engaged the encryption. When it finished running through a system check, he waved to Howard, who was pouring cups of coffee into a pair of tall ceramic mugs. Howard’s mug had Doctor Doom on it, Mr. Bones had Lex Luthor. They had matching workout shirts. Christmas was weird last year.

  “She on the line?” asked Howard. He hooked a wheeled chair with one bare foot and pulled it over to the desk. They were no longer in the kitchen. The incident in Washington had sent them running for Howard’s big office, where they each made a series of phone calls to try and get the latest information. In almost every case the people they called had no idea that anything was happening in Washington. Only the vice president, Bill Collins, knew anything, but the extent of his knowledge was the same as what they knew. It was maddening.

  Now they settled down to call Yuina Hoshino, the third of the three governors who ran Majestic Three. Hoshino was a naturalized American whose family had moved from Japan when she was one. Like her parents, she was a physicist. Unlike them, she was a laconic and introverted hermit who seldom spoke to anyone except her lab staff and the other governors. She was not a mouse, as Mr. Bones viewed it, but more like a burrowing tick—relentless, solitary, and bloodthirsty.

  The space between the wings of the Ghost Box glowed and Yuina Hoshino’s head and shoulders appeared. She had straight black hair streaked with gray, glasses hanging around her neck on a chain, and a face that might have been pretty had she spent any time at all in sunlight and fresh air rather than inside a lab. At sixty-one she was five years younger than Shelton and looked ten years older.

  “What do we know?” asked Hoshino in a voice that was creaky with disuse.

  “Only what we’ve told you,” answered Mr. Bones.

  “What’s the problem with our intelligence sources? Are we out of the loop?”

  “No,” said Mr. Bones, “that’s all there is. Linden Brierly arrived to take charge. Ghost Box has taps on all cellular and landline calls, we’re inside the Secret Service intranet, and we have bugs on every important wall. If there was more to know, we’d know it.”

  Hoshino frowned. “That’s disturbing. This is not a good time for mysteries. The air show is so close…”

  The Third Annual American Advanced Aeronautics Convention—informally known as “the air show”—was held at a fairground in Ohio. It was the highlight of the year for all defense contractors invested in fixed-wing aircraft, and particularly those who were rolling out new prototypes like old money families trotting out this season’s debutantes. M3 planned to steal the show with the Specter 101. The air show was not open to the public, of course, but everyone even tangentially associated with the DoD, Homeland, and the crucial arms sales to foreign markets would be there. It was the best opportunity to impress the brass and the congressional bean counters, and it was equally fine for showing up the competition.

  Last week the security systems at the Ohio fairground were hit by the cyber-attacks, so Howard offered to host it at VanMeer Castle, where he had his own private airfield and grounds well screened by mountains and trees. Howard offered to augment security with a hundred operatives from Blue Diamond Security, a company in which he owned a sizable interest. The other exhibitors were reluctant at first, but the promise of security by the fierce Blue Diamond private contractors helped smooth things out. That, and there was a lot of sympathy for Howard after the tragic events at Wolf Trap.

  “This won’t stop the air show,” assured Howard.

  Hoshino snorted. “Of course it will. I’m surprised the show hasn’t already been canceled. And, frankly, Howard, it surprises me that you even want the sho
w to go on. After Wolf Trap and the others events, it’s clear that whoever’s behind these cyber-attacks wants that show stopped and they want Shelton Aeronautics crippled.”

  Howard hoisted a suitably morose expression into place. “My security people tell me that the new upgrades will assure a safe event.”

  “Maybe,” grudged Hoshino, “but even the air show is secondary to this thing in Washington. And … let’s face it, gentlemen, we’ve all known that this could happen.”

  “What exactly is it you think has happened?” asked Mr. Bones.

  “Isn’t it obvious? Someone else has developed a working device before us.”

  “Who?”

  “It could be anyone,” said Hoshino. “It could be the Chinese. They’ve acquired most of the D-type components that were on the black market recently, and they’ve had an army of agents out there looking for more.”

  “No,” said Howard. “If they had a complete device we’d know it by now.”

  “Maybe we do know,” said Hoshino. “Maybe that’s what we’re seeing now. This could be their opening move.”

  Howard constructed a brooding and contemplative face. “If they had a device,” he said dubiously, “they’d have to test it first before they did anything like this.”

  “If you ever bothered to read my reports,” said Hoshino, “you’d see that there’s some indication of that. Sightings are up all over the world.”

  “Oh, hell,” barked Howard, “we’re seeding most of that crap into the press. And a lot of it’s faked by morons hoping to get onto one of those stupid specials. They spray a Frisbee with silver paint and get one of their asshole friends to throw it over the house so they can take a picture of it with a cell phone.”

  “Some of it,” agreed Hoshino. “Not all.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Mr. Bones.

  “I’m saying that there’s something up there and it’s not us,” said Hoshino. “It could very well be the Chinese. Maybe they’ve finished testing their device and this abduction is the opening move in something bigger.”