Pyramid Lake (54 page)

But my flying cohort rapidly fell behind. A mile past the island, I looked over my shoulder and watched them veer away toward the right shore, shrinking into the distance. A great loneliness descended onto my shoulders. I had imagined the flying legion my army, but I was wrong. They were my ceremonial honor guard. This was my funeral.

I had failed as a husband and failed as a father. Dying now was probably the last, best thing I could do for my family. I let myself think of Amy one last time, then concentrated my thoughts on Frankenstein. If the daughter I would leave behind represented all that was good in me, then the
thing
I had created was the opposite, stitched together from the parts of myself that were the worst.

I stared at the end of the lake and the base, coming into view up ahead, and felt a snarl spread across my damaged face. If I was going to die now, then I was ready to—and I knew one nasty metal motherfucker I planned to take with me if I could.

A shout, electronically amplified by a bullhorn, echoed across the water to my left. I turned my head to see a small patrol cutter angling to intercept. Outrunning the twenty-foot boat would have been easy, but I slowed because I thought I recognized the voice.

“Sheriff’s Department,” Evan Peterson shouted. “Turn off the watercraft, and throw your keys and the gun into the water.”

“This doesn’t concern you,” I shouted back. “Stay out of it.”

I saw Ken Zajicek in the boat, too, minus his cowboy hat. He grabbed the bullhorn from his partner.

“Fella who’s got your little girl,” he shouted. “He’s holdin’ her hostage now, wants to talk to you.”

Ray? No way.

I slewed the FZR around and stopped a hundred yards from their boat, feeling a trickle of doubt.

Evan cut the throttle, and the cutter coasted to a stop, also, facing me nose-to-nose across a hundred yards of open water.

“That’s right,” Zajicek called through the bullhorn. “You want to be smart right now, for the sake of that pretty little curly-haired girl. This guy who’s got her, he’s a kiddie raper—”

Evan’s voice rose behind him, fainter but still amplified, sounding surprised. “What the hell, Z? What kind of bullshit is
that
to tell a guy?”

Zajicek cut the bullhorn, silencing his partner’s objection. Watching their silhouettes standing upright in the drifting boat, arguing silently, I felt the muscles of my neck and shoulders tighten like cables.

Amy had told me a “policeman” took her off the plane, but I had neglected to ask her what department was written on the badge.

I twisted the key, and the Waverunner’s engine roared to life again. Reaching over my shoulder to grab the barrel, I slid my rifle around so the sling held it tight against my chest and belly. Then I leaned forward and rolled the throttle full on.

Seeing my watercraft rocketing straight toward him, Zajicek dived to the controls and jammed his own throttle forward. He aimed the bow of his cutter, so much larger than my Yamaha, straight at me.

Holding the wheel one-handed, Zajicek drew his gun with the other. Evan also yanked his .40 of the holster. As the distance between us shrank, bright flashes flickered in their cockpit. Both Sheriff’s Department officers were firing at me as fast as they could pull the trigger.

I wasn’t too worried—I’d seen them shoot before.

I hunched behind my small windscreen, pressing my rifle between my chest and the Waverunner’s gas tank, judging the distance as the bow of the cutter expanded in front of me like an inflating balloon. At the last instant, I took a deep breath and rocked my weight sideways as hard as I could, yanking the steering with me. The Waverunner rolled over in a tight corkscrew, spiraling like a thrown football, driving my body and head underwater. Upside down, my watercraft collided keel to keel with the Sheriff’s Department cutter.

The force of the impact shuddered through my legs, rattled my teeth, and sent bolts of pain shooting through my damaged face. It drove me headfirst deeper into the water—but unhurt, protected beneath the chassis of my submerged watercraft.

Despite the drag of current trying to suck me off my ride, I hung on and stayed on the throttle. Momentum carried me all the way around, and I popped upright on the other side. The Yamaha’s buoyancy sent it erupting six feet out of the water. It landed with a splash.

I shook my head hard once, throwing off a spray of droplets, and took a breath. Then I slewed the Waverunner in a wide circle toward the collision site. My motor ran a little ragged now, and the Yamaha wanted to pull to the right, making me fight the steering, but otherwise, it had come through the crash okay.

As the Sheriff’s Department craft came around into view, I laughed. Their ride hadn’t. It was upside down and sinking, a desk-sized hole gaping at the front of its fiberglass hull.

Zajicek and Peterson struggled in the water nearby, on opposite sides of their demolished boat. Zajicek had lost his gun. His left arm splashed frantically, and he held his right curled close to his side. At mid forearm, something gleamed white against his darkening sleeve: a projecting lance of splintered bone.

I swung around next to Zajicek and stopped, letting him splash closer.

“That looks painful,” I said, and scooted forward to make room on the seat behind me. Letting go of the handlebars with one hand, I leaned toward him and reached. “Here, give me your good arm.”

He clasped my wrist, and I clasped his.

“Ready? One… two…”—I shifted my foot off the Waverunner’s footwell to plant it on Zajicek’s collarbone—“
three.
”—and jerked his arm as hard as I could, pulling his humerus out of the socket and dislocating his shoulder.

He let out a hoarse scream, and I let go, shoving him away with my foot.

“You’re stone crazy,” he said, white-faced with pain. “I’m a
police officer
.”

I grinned. “That’s nice. I’m a scientist, myself. But this isn’t career day at our kids’ school.”

“Get me to shore, and I’ll split the two million with you. I’ll tell you everything.” Struggling to keep his face out of the water, he grunted. “Otherwise, you
never
find out who has your little girl.”

“You sure about that?” I said. “This buddy of mine who’s a senator thinks that to get someone to tell you anything, all you need is a bucket of water.” I reached down, knotting my fingers into Zajicek’s thick hair, gripping tight. “Sorry, I don’t have a bucket. But that’s okay—we’ve got a whole lake to work with.”

Rolling on the throttle one-handed, I accelerated, pulling Zajicek through the water by his hair. I had to lean hard to compensate for the drag as his torso plowed alongside my wake. His arms flopped uselessly in the standing plume of spray that flared around his head.

I looked over my shoulder, seeing that their boat was already gone—sunk. Splashing in the waves, Evan Peterson receded in the distance behind me.

For his sake, I hoped he could swim better than he could shoot.

A half mile farther down the lake, I slowed and hauled Zajicek’s face up out the water. My forearm ached.

Coughing and sputtering, he choked out words as fast as he could.

“Douglas Hens-ley…” He gagged, spitting water. “Sex offender… lives… in an RV… out by—”

“Moon Rocks, Hungry Valley O-H-V,” I said. His eyes widened, and I laughed. “Yeah, yeah, been there, done that. I was just fucking with you—wanted to see if this waterboarding stuff really works.”

“You kill me, you bring a world of shit down on yourself,” he sputtered. “
I’m a cop, for God’s sake!
”

“Protect and serve, do you?”

I leaned down to snarl the words into his face.

“You
served
my daughter to a convicted child molester, you chickenshit piece of motherfucking garbage. There is nothing—absolutely
nothing
—that can protect you now… Not
from
me
.”

Forcing Zajicek’s head down into the water, I accelerated again, aiming for the end of the lake, two miles ahead. I fixed my gaze on the gray five-story rectangle of the DARPA building, while the drowning-pitbull-pup struggles I felt through my wrist weakened and then ceased altogether.

Holding Zajicek’s head beneath the surface, I dragged his limp body across the dark lake. Full night fell across the sky. The base, pale and greenish under a sickle moon, grew in front of me until it filled the horizon, and the DARPA building dominated the lakeshore.

I let go of the garbage I was hauling. I shook the lactic acid out of my forearm and flexed my fingers, then swung my arm forward to grab the handlebar grip again. Steering two-handed now, I leaned the Waverunner left and veered toward the shore just outside the electric fence, directly beneath the geyser’s billowing white plume.

Whether Frankenstein knew I was coming no longer mattered.

Now there was no turning back.

T
he gravel beach at the water’s edge sped toward me at a hundred miles per hour. Speed was my only weapon now; the darkness offered no concealment. Frankenstein would have upgraded Kate’s OctoRotors with infrared cameras—my own body heat would betray me.

Aiming for the base of the geyser, I rose to a half crouch and felt the kiss of sand scraping like a ramp beneath my hull.

A moment later, I was airborne. The gray beach whipped past beneath me in the dimness eight feet below. I reached apogee and felt the Waverunner’s nose pitch down, but I fought it, pulling on the handlebars and throwing my weight onto my heels to keep it level.

I braced myself for the landing, knowing that coming down on dirt would be hard. But it wasn’t as bad as I expected. My legs absorbed the impact, bouncing my ass off the seat once, and then I was leaning hard, heart in my throat, to prevent the craft from rolling.

On land now, a rollover would be fatal.

I recovered the Waverunner’s balance and looked back over my shoulder. Seeing the trail I was carving through the rocky dirt, I laughed. Yamaha needed GoPro video of this—they could start selling the FZR as a dual-sport.

With a tremendous jolt, the nose crunched into something: the rocky cone of the geyser’s base. It hurled me forward, and I was airborne again, this time without a vehicle.

I landed hard and tumbled across the dirt, tangled up in my rifle sling. The shorty wetsuit protected me from the worst of the scrapes but not the bruises. I slapped to a halt, flat on my back, and blinked up at the white vapor cloud billowing above me.

Still, any landing you…

“…walk away from,” I said and stood up, plunging my chest, arms, and head into the sauna-hot plume of vapor above me.

The heat of the geothermal exhaust stung my scrapes as I walked back toward the geyser. The wrecked Waverunner lay crumpled at the base.

I yanked the broken seat off and tossed it aside. Reaching into the compartment beneath, I pulled out Amy’s unused wetsuit and shook it once to unfold it.

A shiny blue steel bottle lay strapped like a shorty scuba tank alongside the monster engine. I grabbed it by the valve top. Ripping the ten-pound NOS nitrous bottle loose from its straps, I hauled it out, sleeved the steel cylinder inside Amy’s wetsuit, and tucked it under my arm.

Then I unslung my AR-15, slapped the butt of the magazine, hooked my fingers around the charging handle, and racked it.

Ready for anything now, I strode toward the fence through the swirling opaque fog, masked from infrared eyes by the heat of the geyser’s steam.

The electrified fence had been repaired the day after McNulty’s murder. Slinging the rifle over my shoulder again, I raised the wetsuit-insulated NOS bottle that I had salvaged from the FZR’s nitrous-injection system. I aimed the nozzle at the fence and triggered it, spraying liquid nitrous oxide onto the links, sweeping the bottle in a slow circle.

The nitrous chilled the metal to minus 130 degrees, making it brittle. Turning the heavy bottle around, I hammered the steel butt against the frozen links. They shattered, and a big section of chain-link fencing dropped to the ground, leaving a man-size hole. Dropping the empty steel canister, I unshouldered my rifle and walked through, keeping inside the geyser’s drifting plume.

Five stories above me, on the roof, I could see the Trevornet’s small satellite dish. I was tempted to shoot it down, but it would be a wasted effort—Frankenstein would have established redundant connections by now. Following the fundamental design principle of the Internet itself, he would have eliminated all single points of failure from his network. Besides, any shooting would alert the base and I would lose my brief tactical advantage.

Instead, I lengthened my stride.

Fifteen seconds later, I swept around the corner of the DARPA building, startling the two MPs manning the guard post at the door.

One scrambled to climb on top of the nearby jeep, where the barrel of the mounted machine gun drooped, unmanned.

The other lifted his AR rifle and shouted, “Halt.”

Without slackening my pace, I raised my own rifle and shouted back:

“Start running.”

D
ark shapes the size of iPads suddenly streamed past my shoulders on both sides, their rise-and-fall whine piercing my ears as they zipped by. Arrowing toward the MPs, they descended on them—a swirling black cloud of carbon fiber and steel.

The two MPs disintegrated like raspberries dropped into the three-horsepower Vitamix blender on my kitchen counter.

The startling sight stopped me dead. I blinked in surprise. How long had my hidden escort been following me?

Like flies rising from roadkill, the OctoRotors swarmed into the air again. They left two lumpy shapes, no longer recognizable as human, lying on the tarmac in pools of dark, spreading wetness. The cloud of flyers streamed toward me, and I closed my eyes.

A moment later, I felt the sprinkle of tiny droplets on my face and arms. A muted drone hummed all around me, steady and insistent. But the blades didn’t bite.

Breath heaving in and out of my lungs uncontrolled, I opened my eyes again.