The Dragon Factory (8 page)

My father was making a run for Mayor of Baltimore and the pundits were calling it a slam dunk for him. He had friends on both sides of the badge.

“I have him on speed dial,” Rudy assured me. “What’s the other thing?”

“Two other things. The NSA guys came for me at the cemetery.”

“Ouch,” he said. “How are you?”

“I vented a bit by beating on them some.”

“But it’s still with you?”

“Yeah, and that’s the other thing. And Helen’s a part of that, too. In a way. Today started off weird even before I woke up.”

“How so?”

“I know this ain’t the time for this, but it’s weighing on me and I’ve got to kill time until I hear from Church—”

“Don’t apologize. Just tell me.”

“Okay . . . tomorrow is the anniversary of Helen’s suicide.”

“Oh,
dios mio
,” he said with real pain in his voice. With everything that had happened over the last two months he had forgotten. “Joe . . . I . . .”

“I dreamed about it last night, man. I dreamed about her sister Colleen calling me, saying that Helen hadn’t answered the phone in days. I dreamed about going over there. Every single detail, Rudy, from picking up my car keys on the table by the door to the feel of the wood
splintering when I kicked in Helen’s door. I remembered the smell in the hallway, and how bad it got when I broke in. I remember her face . . . bloated and gassy. I can even remember the bottle of drain cleaner she drank from. The way the label was torn and stained.”

“Joe, I—”

“But here’s the really shitty part, Rude . . . the worst part.”

He was silent, waiting.

“In my dream, when I walked over to her body, knowing that she was dead and had been dead for days . . . when I stood over her and then dropped to my knees and pulled her into my arms . . .” I paused and for a moment I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish this.

“Take your time, Joe . . . ,” he said gently. “It’ll hurt less once it’s out.”

“I . . . don’t think so. Not this time.”

“Why, Joe? Tell me what happened when you held Helen in your arms.”

“You see, that’s just the thing. . . . I picked her body up and held it, just the way I did back when it happened. And her head kind of flopped over sideways just like it did. But . . . aw, fuck me, man . . . it wasn’t Helen I was holding.”

“Tell me. . . .”

“It was Grace.”

Rudy was silent, waiting for the rest, but there was no more. That’s where the dream had ended.

“I woke up in a cold sweat and I never went back to sleep. Stayed up all night watching Court TV and reruns of the Dog Whisperer. Anything to keep from going back to sleep.”

“Joe, this isn’t all about strength. It’s obvious you have feelings for Grace, and both of you are in a highly dangerous line of work.”

“Shit, I knew you wouldn’t get it,” I snapped, then immediately regretted it. “Sorry, Rude . . . belay that. What I meant to say is that I knew I couldn’t explain it the right way.”

“Then tell me what the right way is, Cowboy.”

“I. . . .” My voice trailed off as I drove aimlessly through the streets.
“I . . . know that having, um , ‘affection’ for Grace is ill advised. Got it, got that filed away. But there was something about this that felt weird and dirty and wrong. Wrong in a guilty kind of way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like . . . I failed her. The way I failed Helen.”

“Joe, we’ve been over this a thousand times. You were not responsible for Helen’s life. You were not her protector. She had been rehabilitated back into a lifestyle where all of her doctors agreed she was capable of taking care of herself. You visited as often as you could, more than anyone else. More than her own family.”

“But I took the job with the Homeland task force and that kept me away for days and even weeks at a time. Don’t try to tell me that I wasn’t aware of how that job would impact my regular visits to Helen.”

“Which still doesn’t make it your fault. You don’t rule the planet, Joe. And even if you lived with her, if she wanted to end her life—as she clearly did—she’d find a moment when you were asleep or in the shower and she would do what she ultimately did. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”

I didn’t feel like going down that road with him again, so I switched tack. “So why did I see Grace in the dream last night? Are you saying that I feel responsible for her?”

“I hope not.”

“It’s not like we’re in love,” I protested.

Rudy said nothing, and then his phone clicked. “It’s Mr. Church calling me, Joe. I’d better take this.”

“Okay.”

“But Joe . . . ?”

“Yeah.”

“We need to come back to this.”

“Sure, Rude . . . when the dust settles.”

And it starts snowing on the Amazon
, I thought.

I closed my phone and drove, aware that I was driving myself a little crazy.

Wilmington, Delaware

Saturday, August 28, 9:09
A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 98 hours, 51 minutes

It was a routine pickup, a classic no-shots-fired thing where the afteraction report would be short and boring. Only it wasn’t.

First Sgt. Bradley Sims—Top to everyone who knew him, and second in command of Joe Ledger’s Echo Team—was on point at the door knock. Like his two fellow agents he was dressed in a nondescript navy blue government-issue suit, white shirt, and red tie. Flag pin on his lapel, a wire, and sunglasses. The motel hallway was badly lighted, so he removed his shades and dropped them into his coat pocket. He might have been NSA, FBI, or an agent of any of the DOJ’s domestic law enforcement agencies, maybe a middle-grade agent in charge of a low-risk field mission. He dressed for the part. He had FBI credentials in his pocket, though he’d never so much as set foot in Quantico. He also had badges for the ATF and DEA in the car.

The Department of Military Sciences did not operate under the umbrella of the Department of Justice, nor did it fall into the growing network of agencies under the Homeland charter. The DMS was a solo act, answerable to the President of the United States. They didn’t have their own badges. They weren’t cops. The credentials Top Sims carried, however, were completely authentic.

He knocked on the door. “FBI!” he announced in the leather-throated roar of a lifelong sergeant. “Please open the door.”

Out of habit he stepped to one side so that the reinforced frame rather than the door was between him and whoever might be inside. Cops did that; so did soldiers. Top had been a soldier since he enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, and that was twenty-two years ago and change.

Both of the agents flanking him were bigger and younger than Top. They looked like a pair of giants. To his left was Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who stood six-five and had massive biceps that strained the fabric of the off-the-rack blazer. To Top’s right was
Bunny—born with the unfortunate name of Harvey Rabbit—who had joined the DMS after eight years as a sergeant in Force Recon. Bunny was two inches taller than Faraday and though he was also heavily muscled, his build was more appropriate to volleyball, which until recently he’d played at the Pan American Games level. His service in Iraq had kept him out of the Olympics, but he didn’t hold a grudge.

There was no answer at the door.

“Maybe he ain’t home,” suggested Bunny.

“It’s Saturday morning,” said Big Bob. “Guy’s got no job, no friends. He’s here or he’s at Starbucks.”

“Maybe I’ll just knock louder,” said Top.

He did. No answer.

“Let’s kick it,” Top decided.

“I got it,” said Big Bob, moving past Top to front the door. Big Bob had thighs like bridge supports and could bury the whole rack on the Nautilus leg press. Twice now he’d kicked doors completely off their hinges. He wanted a hat trick.

Top shrugged and stepped aside. “Entertain yourself.”

Top and Bunny drew their weapons and quietly racked the slides. The man they were there to arrest, Burt Gilpin, was a middle-aged computer geek who had figured a way to hack into the mainframes of several major universities that were involved in medical, viral, and genetic research. He’d constructed elaborate Web sites with phantom pages and rerouted e-mail drops so he could advertise the stolen data and accept bids from interested parties. Gilpin knew his computers and he understood security, but MindReader was designed to spot certain kinds of patterns related to key topics. Genetics and virology were major red flags and it zeroed him in a nanosecond, and Church had taken a personal interest because the method Gilpin used to hack the systems bore some similarities to MindReader. Nobody else was supposed to have that technology, and Church wanted to have a long talk with Gilpin.

Top drew the pickup detail and tagged the first two members of Echo Team to report that morning to go with him. Gilpin had no police record apart from parking tickets; he had never served in the military,
never belonged to a gun club or registered a firearm, and didn’t even go to a gym. Sending Top, Bunny, and Big Bob was overkill, but it was also an excuse to get out of the shop for the day.

“Kick it,” said Top.

Big Bob raised his leg and cocked his foot, but just as he was about to kick, Bunny saw a shadow move past the peephole on the motel door.

“Wait!” he started to say, and then the door seemed to explode as heavy-caliber bullets ripped through wood and plaster and slammed into Big Bob Faraday.

The big man screamed as two bullets tore into his leg; one smashed his shin and the other struck the underside of his kneecap and then ripped a tunnel through the meat of his thigh, tearing muscle and tendon and missing his femoral artery by three one-hundredths of an inch. Three additional rounds struck him high in the abdomen. The Kevlar vest is designed to flatten bullets and stop them from penetrating the body. The foot-pounds of impact still hits like a hammer, but the wearer can live with broken ribs.

Kevlar is not designed to stop steel-core Teflon-coated rounds. Street thugs and gangbangers call them cop killers for a reason.

The bullets chopped through Big Bob Faraday like he’d been bare chested. The combined impact slammed him backward with such force that he hit the door of the motel room opposite and tore it out of the frame so that he fell halfway into the room.

All of this happened in a second.

In the next second Top and Bunny threw themselves down and out of the line of fire as bullets continued to rip the doorjamb apart. Hundreds of rounds tore chunks of cement and pieces of lath out of the walls and filled the air above them with a hurricane of jagged splinters. They both knew, even as they were diving for cover, that Big Bob was down. Down and maybe dead.

Top flattened on the floor and reached his arm out to point his gun into the room. He opened fire, knowing he had little chance of hitting anything, but return fire can disrupt an attack and he needed to buy time.

A voice yelled, “
Perekroi dver!
” And though Top didn’t understand the words, he could recognize the language. Russian. It made no sense.

He unloaded his full magazine and there was a sudden shrill scream from inside. He’d gotten a lucky hit.

“Bozhe moi!”

Top saw that Bunny had squirmed around and was ready to imitate his blind shooting trick. Their eyes met and Bunny mouthed the word
Russians?
Top nodded and there was no more to be said. His receiver locked back, and as he withdrew his hand Bunny reached around the shattered jamb, his hand angled up, and began firing. The return fire was fierce and when Top whipped his hand back his skin was a cactus plant of tiny splinters that covered him from knuckles to wrist.

As Top dropped his mag and slapped in another, Bunny cut a lightning-fast quick-look through an apple-sized hole in the wall. He immediately moved away from the spot as bullets reamed the hole. The afterimage of what he’d seen was burned into his brain. He hand-signaled to Top. Four men in a firing line. One injured. What Bunny couldn’t convey was that a fifth man was duct-taped naked to a chair, his limbs streaked with blood. Gilpin.

Top signaled to Bunny to go high and left while he went low and right. He finger-counted down from three and then they spun into different quadrants of the ruined doorway and opened fire. Neither hit anything with his first shot, and they hadn’t expected to; the first round was fired to cover them as they came into position and to give them a fragment of a second to locate their targets. Four men in a small room. Very little in the way of cover. They both saw what they needed. Their next shots punched into the four Russians, hitting legs and groins and torsos and heads, the bullet impacts dancing them backward so that they looked like a film of people walking played in reverse. The heavy automatic weapons of the Russians filled the air with bullets, but Bunny’s and Top’s bullets spoiled all aim and accuracy. It was a perfect counterattack and it turned the apartment into a shooting gallery.

The slide locked back on Bunny’s gun and Top spaced out his last
two shots to give Bunny some cover and time to reload. Then Top dropped his mag and slapped in his last one.