The Dragon Factory (69 page)

They
would get in.

The code had been sent. I pulled the flash drive from the computer and put it in my pocket. Somewhere the Extinction Clock was ticking down. If I was still in this room when it hit zero, more people would die than perished during the Black Death and all of the pandemics put together.

I thought I could stop them. We—me, Church, the DMS . . . Grace—we thought we could stop them.

Now it was down to me or no one. I had to get the flash drive to Bug, and I prayed that he and MindReader could read the codes on the drive and send whatever cancel signal could be sent. It might even be a fool’s errand. But Grace had died to get us this far, and with her last breaths she’d given me this task.

If there was any kind of justice in the universe, then a sacrifice so bravely made could not—
should not
—be in vain.

It wasn’t our fault we came into this so late. They chased us and messed with our heads and ran us around, and by the time we knew what we were up against the clock had already nearly run its course.

We tried. Over the last week I’d left a trail of bodies behind me from Denver, to Costa Rica, to the Bahamas. And now Grace Courtland was dead.

The pounding was louder. The door was buckling, the crossbar bending. It was only seconds before the lock or the hinges gave out, and then they’d come howling in here. Then it would be them against me.

I was hurt. I was bleeding.

I had three bullets and a knife.

I got to my feet and faced the door, my gun in my left hand, the knife in my right.

I smiled a killer’s smile.

Let them come.

In Hell

Tuesday, August 31, 3:09
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 32 hours, 51 minutes E.S.T.

When the door burst open there were five of them.

I used three bullets and killed three of them. Head shots. I would like to think that some force steadied my hand. I don’t know. But I killed the first three through the door.

When the fourth one climbed over the bodies I met him with a knife to the throat. I stabbed him a dozen times. I was screaming. He was screaming, too, trying to back away. I crawled out after him and killed him.

The last of the Berserkers came at me and hit me. I felt my cheekbone break. I felt teeth buckle in their sockets. I don’t know what kept me on my feet. I don’t know what put the power in my arm to slash him across the throat. Over and over again.

I blacked out for a while, and when I could think again I was covered in blood and the Berserker was . . . ruined.

I staggered across the office to the desk and then shambled around it.

Cyrus Jakoby lay on the floor. He was bleeding from several gunshot wounds. All were serious. None were fatal. That was a shame. For him.

He looked up at me, at my face, into my eyes, and he saw something that tore a scream from him. Maybe it was in that moment that he recognized the implacable, heartless, relentless monster that his victims had always seen in him. Maybe he realized that he was tethered to life by only one slender thread.

He knew the cancel code.

He knew that I would not, could not, kill him as long as he had it.

He thought that he could bargain with that.

He should have looked deeper into my eyes.

I stood over him, covered in blood—some of which was Grace’s—and I showed him my knife.

I never had to ask him for the code.

In the end, he gave it willingly.

But not easily.

(1)

Six days later I sat in a wheelchair in a chapel outside of Baltimore. Grace Courtland had no family in England. Mr. Church had appealed to her government to let her rest here near her friends. They argued, but Church got his way.

Everybody came. I don’t know how many thousands of people showed up. Grace Courtland was probably the most famous person in the world. The beautiful government agent who saved the world from the Extinction Wave. It was headlines; it was a Hollywood dream story. Books would be written about her; movies would be made. Most of it would be a fiction cooked up by Church’s PR people. There are too many villains—the world needs a hero.

My name was left completely out of it, which was only right. Ditto for the DMS. Homeland and a few other agencies were handed the credit while Church erased all traces of our involvement from every database. The key players knew the truth, and that was all that Church needed to keep the DMS in place. No one in government would dare go after us now.

I thought about these things as I sat in the chapel a dozen feet from where Grace lay in state like some warrior queen.

The procession to pass in front of her coffin lasted for hours. The President of the United States sat on my left side. The First Lady sat on my right and held my hand all through it. Most of Congress was there, and ambassadors from over one hundred countries, and the heads of state of those nations that were targeted in the first round of the Extinction Wave. There were Presidents and Chancellors, Queens
and Kings. The Air Force did a flyover with the missing-man formation.

Rudy, Bunny, Top, Redman, and the survivors of Alpha Team and as many DMS operatives as could be spared filled the whole section behind us. No press was allowed within a half mile of the chapel. I think Church asked Linden Brierly for that favor and it was done on behalf of “National Security.”

Oskar Freund, the son of Church’s murdered colleague, came and sat with us. His government had appointed him to lead an international task force to hunt down the remaining members of the Cabal. This fire may have been lit in Germany in the early twentieth century, but modern Germany was having no part in perpetuating it. They went after the Cabal with a ferocity that sometimes shocked the world press. But global public support for the witch hunt was overwhelming.

The coffin was closed at my request. If people knew Grace, they should remember her in their own way, not as some mortician painted her. Her casket was draped with the flags of England and the United States.

I DON’T REMEMBER
a lot of what happened after my fight with the Berserkers. Just fragments. A few words and images. . . .

I REMEMBER BUNNY
coming out of the smoke with all of Hardball Team behind him. Bunny was battered and bloody from fighting his way through a pack of Berserkers.

I REMEMBER BEING
carried aboard a helicopter. And I remember speaking into a radio, telling Church and Bug about the cancel code. I remember that the trigger device was smeared with blood. Grace’s and mine.

I REMEMBER LOOKING
out of the helicopter window and seeing waves of U.S. troops surge across the island. Someone later told me that the 164 enemy combatants were killed in the action. That included Russian mercenaries, Dragon Factory guards, and the Berserkers. Someone
else told me that the SEALs cleaned up a nest of the scorpion-dogs—Stingers, as we later learned they were called. There was no attempt to take any of the transgenic guard dogs alive.

I REMEMBER DRIFTING
off into a morphine sleep and dreaming that this was all a dream. When I woke up, the hurt was a hundred times worse. Even nightmares are better than some realities.

THE LINE OF
mourners kept moving and the day dragged on and on. I said almost nothing. I folded into myself. The darkness inside was welcoming.

(2)

The cancel code Cyrus Jakoby had given me was the correct one. By that point he was beyond lying. When our forces raided the Deck they found the Extinction Clock ticking down. It reached zero at noon on September 1, but the release had been aborted. It wasn’t a James Bond finish with one second on the clock. By the time Bug hacked the system and inputted the cancel code there was still over seventeen hours left. Seems like a lot of time. But it isn’t. They’ll probably change it for the movie.

The DMS worked with the State Department, Interpol, and other agencies to identify and locate the operatives worldwide who had been ready to release the tainted water and disease pathogens. There was no way to keep the story out of the press. The bigger the witch hunt became, the more leaks it sprang. When the President of the United States went on TV to make an address everyone everywhere stopped to listen. True to his form since taking office, the President was calm, clear, and candid. He told as much of the story as security would allow: eugenics, transgenics, gene therapy, pathogens made from genetic diseases, clones. Measured against the whole, even the fact that Jakoby and Otto were virtually immortal because of gene therapy was less fantastic than the knowledge that the worldwide AIDS epidemic had been deliberate.

Of course all of this brought out every conspiracy theorist and lunatic-fringe religious nut, and the news shows trotted them out continually. I stopped watching and had the TV in my hospital room disconnected.

(3)

During the raid on the Deck the DMS teams found irrefutable proof that the assassin who had killed Grace was named Conrad Veder and that he was one of four clones of a man named Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the most highly decorated Stuka dive-bomber pilot of World War II. Rudel was a king among professional killers and the only person to be awarded the Nazi Knight’s Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds.

They also found twenty-nine boys who looked exactly like Eighty-two. Rudy spent days interviewing them. Some, he said, were irretrievably psychopathic; others were borderline personalities. All were damaged. The only one who showed any signs of normalcy was Eighty-two.

Nobody calls him that anymore, though. Rudy encouraged him to pick a name, but the boy asked Rudy to pick one. Rudy named him Helmut. It’s German for “courageous.” The boy picked Deacon as his last name.

Helmut Deacon sat behind me all through that long day in the chapel.

He’s asked Rudy to appeal to Church to allow the boy to work with the Red Cross and WHO teams that are caring for the New Men. I think Church will agree.

(4)

The DMS teams on Dogfish Cay found Paris Jakoby when they broke into the Chamber of Myth. He had sustained a heavy blow that fractured his jaw and sprained his neck, and from what the field medics determined, he had still been alive when the transgenic animals in the chamber began feeding on him.

The animals that survived the battle are being kept in a secure facility until someone can decide what to do with them.

A squad of Marines found the underground cavern where the Dragon
Factory staff had hidden during the fight. They were low on fresh air, but they had survived. Many of them claimed not to have the slightest clue what Paris and Hecate were doing, and for some polygraphs and psych evaluations bore out their claims. A lot of others had varying levels of knowledge and involvement.

The people at the Deck were a bit more openly involved in Cyrus and Otto’s scheme, though few seemed to know what the end goal was. Even so, the “we were just following orders” defense carried no weight at all in the trials that followed.

Those trials are still ongoing. They’ll take years.

(5)

I missed most of this. The medivac chopper took me to a hospital in Florida. I was there for eleven days. I sustained a cracked cheekbone, five broken ribs, a torn ligament in my ankle, a hairline fracture of the jaw, and a skull fracture resulting in subdural hematoma. Late the next day the scans showed a dangerous buildup of blood in the inner meningeal layer of the dura, so they wheeled me into surgery and cut a hole in my skull to relieve the pressure. The doctors warned me that I would probably have some memory loss. I wish they’d been right about that, but I remember everything. Maybe one day I’ll be happy about that.

Top Sims was in the room next to me and was recovering from surgery to repair the compound fractures. It was uncertain if he would ever be fit enough to return to active fieldwork. Bunny was treated and released, but he stayed at the hospital for almost a week. Rudy, too. Friends from the DMS brought them changes of clothes and hot meals in Styro-foam containers.

They let me out for the day so I could attend the funeral, but I was scheduled for ankle surgery the following day.

After the service, when I was back in my room at the hospital, Rudy sat in one of the two visitors’ chairs. Mr. Church came and sat in the other chair.

“How much do you remember?”

“All of it.”

“Then you know Cyrus Jakoby is still alive,” Church said.

I nodded.

“You didn’t kill him.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“When he heals, after the damage is repaired, I want him to stand trial.”

Church nodded. “They will execute him.”

“They shouldn’t,” I said.