Predator One (58 page)

“I’m sorry … but you shouldn’t have called me.”

“Who else could I call?”

The silence washed back and forth on the line.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Bug. “If they have a quantum computer, even MindReader can’t beat it.”

“They may have a QC, Bug. They probably do. But if so, it’s not on this aircraft. The Solomon program is.”

Bug said nothing.

“I need to bypass a computer lockout system with a set of pocket tools and a Warlock handheld. I’ve tried everything
that I know how to do. I can get about a third of the way in, and then it locks me out again.”

Bug said nothing.

“We have about forty-three minutes of flight time left before we cross a certain line.”

“What line?”

“The president cannot let Air Force One cross into the New York metropolitan area. If we cannot take control of the plane in under twenty-five minutes, the president will have to
order ground-based missiles to blow us out of the sky.”

Bug said nothing.

For a long time.

Then he sobbed once and pressed a tissue to his eyes and clenched his jaws to stifle the scream that he wanted to give as the only reasonable answer.

He struck himself in the forehead with his cell phone. Once. Again. And again.

Then he dragged a forearm across his eyes, sniffed to clear his nose, and
mumbled a single word.

“Okay.”

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-nine

UC San Diego Medical Center

200 West Arbor Drive

San Diego, California

April 1, 3:53
P.M.

A figure emerged from the crowd of Kingsmen. Small, slim, female, with a Cambodian face and eyes like a shark. She wore a full set of high-tech body armor and carried a .22 automatic in her hand. Nicodemus hissed something at her and vanished into a doctor’s office.
The Cambodian took charge and immediately yelled to the Kingsmen, who began overturning gurneys to create shooting blinds. Lydia rolled out and fired four quick shots, catching one of the men in the throat and sending the others for cover. The Cambodian woman spun and fired and bullets chipped the desk an inch from Lydia’s face.

She squirmed back under the desk, peering through a splintered hole
as she reloaded.

The Cambodian knelt quickly, aimed, fired. There was a sharp cry, and one of the DMS team simply sat down, coughed red, and fell over onto his side.

“The cow is in the room at the end of the hall,” yelled the woman. “Take her. Kill the others. Do it now!”

The Kingsmen began pouring it on even heavier, turning the hospital floor into a whirlwind of flying lead and jagged splinters.

Lydia slapped the magazine in and then leaned out to fire at the newcomer, but there were two shooters in the way. She shot one through the side of the head, and he fell sideways into his companion, dragging them both down. That gave Lydia a clear shot at the Cambodian, but the slim Asian wheeled and snapped off a shot that punched into the center of Lydia Ruiz’s chest.

Lydia collapsed backward,
the air rushing from her lungs. Fires ignited in her eyes, and for a moment she could neither move nor breathe. She turned to see the Kingsmen rushing forward, howling as they fired.

Circe O’Tree-Sanchez’s room was across the wide hallway from where Lydia lay. Bullets hammered into the glass and exploded it inward, filling the room with a million glittering splinters. There was sudden movement
as two figures came up off the floor and threw themselves down across Circe. Junie used her body to cover Circe’s chest and face; Toys bent his body like an arch over her distended belly. Not touching her, but shielding her as the glass tore through their clothes and painted their bodies red.

Chapter One Hundred and Forty

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

April 1, 3:56
P.M.

“Tell me something good, Yoda.”

“Ummmm, Jesus, Cowboy, this is very advanced stuff. Some of this must be for the, ummm, QC and—”

“We’re not looking for the frigging QC,” I snapped as I threw down one notebook and opened another. “We’re looking for old game code. Does any of this fit?”

He started
to answer, faltered. Started again, faltered again.

“Goddamn, focus. The clock is ticking.”

“I know, I know. Mmmmmmm, God … I wish Bug was here.”

I flipped through the pages of the notebook. “He’s not. Pay attention. Is this game code?”

“I don’t know. I think it might be, but…”

I wanted to scream. Somewhere in the skies over Ohio or some Midwestern state, Air Force One was racing to punch
into the New York airspace. Minutes were breaking off the clock. My heart was racing so hard it hurt.

“No,” said Yoda. “Not that one. Ummm, let me see the next one…”

Chapter One Hundred and Forty-one

UC San Diego Medical Center

200 West Arbor Drive

San Diego, California

April 1, 3:56
P.M.

Lydia pressed her fingers to her chest and looked at them, expecting to see blood.

All she saw was her own copper-brown skin.

Kevlar. She wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. The vests stopped the bullets, but they could only do so much to diffuse the pounds of
force.

“Get the cow!” screamed the Cambodian woman.

Then another voice, older, male, snarled, “Bring her to me.”

Nicodemus.

Lydia growled, took a big bite of her pain, and rolled back to her knees. The Kingsmen were racing toward Circe’s room. Montana took three of them down, but it didn’t even slow their rush. Then a heavier weapon spoke from the far end of the side hall. A big, throaty cough,
and in the same instant one of the Kingsmen seemed to fly apart. There was a second shot, a third, a fourth, and with each one a Kingsman died. Heads exploded. Chests ruptured.

Lydia could not see where Sam Imura was positioned, but he kept firing, killing everything he aimed at. He’d brought his “indoor” gun with him, an M21 semiautomatic with a twenty-round box magazine.

Except that the gun
needed to be reloaded and the hall was choked with Kingsmen. How many magazines did Sam have? One spare, tops?

As Lydia shifted back into a shooting position, she saw another DMS agent go down, his upper chest torn apart by a dozen rounds. The fusillade drove Montana back from the doorway. Police officers and the support team from Homeland poured out of the fire tower, down near Sam. They opened
fire at once, and the Cambodian woman sent half her team down the hall to intercept them. There were a lot of DMS, SWAT, and Homeland shooters in the hospital.

There were five times as many Kingsmen.

Nicodemus and the Cambodian woman had brought an army.

An army.

Why?
Lydia couldn’t understand why they would send such overwhelming force to abduct one pregnant woman. Who was Circe to them?
Why did she matter?

These thoughts and questions ran through her head as she fired and fired, killing and wounding, emptying her gun, dropping the spent magazine, reloading, aware of how many rounds she had left.

Not enough.

Even if she put one bullet in every Kingsman here, she did not have enough ammunition to win this. Nowhere near enough to survive it. And far too little to protect Circe
and her baby.

Nicodemus came stalking along the hall, his wizened body canted forward like some predatory dinosaur. His smile was an awful thing to see. Totally inhuman, filled with obvious delight at the chaos and blood that swirled around him. Again, Lydia tried to shoot him, but a pair of Kingsmen rushed at her, and she had to waste bullets on them instead of taking out that perverse parody
of a priest.

“The cow is mine,” said Nicodemus, his thin voice rising above the din. “Mine!”

Suddenly something came bounding out of Circe’s room. With a howl that momentarily stilled the fighting in the hallway, it leaped through the shattered window frame and struck a Kingsman with such force that the man bent backward, folded nearly in two. The man’s spine snapped with gunshot clarity.

“Banshee…” breathed Lydia.

The enormous wolfhound drove the dead man to the floor and sprang forward, tearing the throat out of a second man.

“Kill it!” shrieked a voice. “Kill it!”

The voice belonged to Nicodemus. He pointed at the dog as he backed quickly away.

“Kill it!”

He sounded different.

Not boastful. Not confidant.

Nicodemus sounded terrified.

And Lydia Ruiz was certain of it.

Immediately, a half dozen of the Kingsmen hurled themselves at the hound and dragged it down out of sight.

Chapter One Hundred and Forty-two

Air Force One

In Flight

April 1, 3:58
P.M.
Pacific Standard Time

“The green wire’s next,” said Bug. “I think.”

“Bug,” said Church as he lifted the green wire in the jaws of a pair of needle-nose pliers, “I need something better than ‘I think.’”

Church’s teeth were chattering, and his fingers had turned a dusty purple.

“I know, I know, but I can’t see
the circuits. Move the light.”

Church picked up the light, dropped it, picked it up again, dropped it. He took a breath and tried once more and managed to position the light. He could not actually feel the cell phone he was using as a flashlight. Almost all nerve conduction was gone from his fingertips. Where his fingers weren’t completely numb, they screamed with pain. Strange how the pain of
frostbite could feel like fire.

“Can you see it now?” he asked, forcing his voice to be calm.

“Yeah. It’s not the green wire. It’s the blue one. Strip it and hotwire it to the white one. That should connect you to the battery and give you power to run the locking computer.”

“You’re sure, Bug? I won’t be able to do this twice.”

“Blue and white. Absolutely.”

Church began stripping the wire.
His dying hands were clumsy, and the tools kept falling. Each time he picked them up and continued. He didn’t waste time with cursing or any of the dramatics of frustration. He worked as efficiently as the biting cold and thinning oxygen would allow. He could feel the beginnings of confusion at the edges of his focus. Carbon dioxide was building up in the cabin.

Bug said, “I … I wish I was there
to do this for you.”

“You are here with me, Bug,” said Church.

Chapter One Hundred and Forty-three

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

April 1, 3:59
P.M.

“Ummmm, Cowboy—?” said Yoda, “I, ummm, think that’s it.”

“Wait …
what’s
it?”

“That page. No, no, the book you just put down. Let me see that one again. Second page. Hold it steady so I can take a screen shot. Got it. Okay, give me a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute.”

“Half a minute.” Yoda
said, and then just hummed at me for what seemed like an hour. Probably only fifteen or twenty seconds, but it felt longer. Too long.

“Yoda…”

“Umm, holy shit, Cowboy,” he blurted. “
That’s definitely it
. Flip the page. No go to page nine. Davidovich said it was Pi and to work backward from nine. The value of Pi is 3.141592653. Keeps going from there to infinity. The ninth value is three. Hold
it so I can see line three.”

I did, and I noticed that in his excitement he’d stopped humming.

“Let me input the code from the third line. Got it. Now page eight, line five…”

Chapter One Hundred and Forty-four

UC San Diego Medical Center

200 West Arbor Drive

San Diego, California

April 1, 4:00
P.M.

Rudy Sanchez took the elevator up to the floor where his wife lay pregnant and helpless. He gripped his walking stick with hands that were slick with sweat. He had to clutch his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. Never in his life—not even when the burning
helicopter plunged into the brown waters of the Baltimore Harbor—had he been this terrified.

Circe.

Dear God,
he prayed in Spanish,
please … not Circe. Not her.

He could hear gunfire and screams. And through it all the bone-chilling howl of a monstrous hound.

Banshee.

Rudy had no gun. Joe had tried many times to teach him, but, even before he lost an eye, Rudy had been an indifferent marksman.
Now, with the loss of depth perception that came with being one-eyed, he was worthless with any gun except a shotgun. He didn’t have a shotgun.

All he had was the hand-carved walking stick made of hawthorn and topped with an ornate silver handle. He had used that stick to try and fight back against Nicodemus and failed. He clutched it now and wondered if he was rushing to help his wife or to
simply be murdered.

Dear God and all Your saints … not my wife. Not our child. Take me instead. If you need a life, take mine. Show them Your mercy.

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened to reveal a scene from hell itself. Hieronymus Bosch could not have painted a more horrific tableau.

Bodies lay sprawled on the floor; the walls were pocked with black bullet holes and splashed with red
blood. Shell casings glittered like discarded jewels. The combatants fought at close quarters. With guns. With clubs and stun guns. With knives. With bare hands. Rudy saw four DMS agents, including Agent Cowpers, lying dead. SWAT officers and agents of Homeland’s tactical response teams lay entangled with Kingsmen.

Lydia Ruiz knelt beside the nurses’ station, firing into the crowd. Across the
hall, Rudy could see Circe’s room. The big window was gone except for a few jagged glass teeth. On the bed, Rudy could see one sprawled form. A man’s body. Bloody and inert.