Extinction Machine (12 page)

The four agents I’d dropped were semiconscious. Officers were trying to question them, asking where they were hurt, who they were. The agents said nothing. Not a word.

A sergeant supervisor arrived on the scene and came hurrying over. When he saw my face he slowed to a stop, a confused half smile beginning to form on his face.

“Joe—?”

I grinned. “Hey, Tommy.”

“The fuck’s this all about?” he asked, closing in.

Tommy O’Malley was a good cop. We’d worked together at a couple of precincts—White Marsh and Essex. He took my identification wallet from one of the officers, looked at it, frowned, and handed it to me.

“I thought you were with the Feebs.”

“I am, but … it’s complicated.”

He gave me a few seconds of the “cop” look. Frank and suspicious. “Uncomplicate it for me.”

But, I shook my head. “Can’t do it, man. And I hate like hell to do this to a friend, but I have to stonewall you. This really is a national security matter and I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

Tommy was shorter than me, and he had one of those thin, freckly Irish faces that are no good at hiding their emotions. I saw the sudden shift as our relationship changed from Tommy and Joe to street cop and fed. Or, as we used to say when I was on his team, street cop and fucking fed.

I could feel him take a mental step back from me, and even after we’d hurried through the necessary steps and I was back in my car, the weight of his disapproval was heavy on my shoulders.

It depressed me. I was no longer one of that brotherhood.

Chapter Twenty-four

Little Palm Island Resort
Little Torch Key, Florida
Sunday, October 20, 6:39 a.m.

“Where are you going?” asked Berenice.

Erasmus Tull looked up from the suitcase he was packing. Berenice stood in the bedroom doorway. She still wore the bikini bottoms but she’d pulled on a loose white cotton shirt. His shirt. It hung open and unbuttoned. Purple shadows painted her skin and darkened the undersides of her breasts.

“I have to go to Maryland on business.”

She came in and leaned against the dresser. “I thought you were retired.”

“I am,” he said, stuffing his shaving kit into the corner of the bag. “But I take it in installments. Now I have to go back to work to pay for the next installment.”

She stepped over and removed his shaving kit from the suitcase, unzipped it and held it out. The small .22 pistol was wrapped in blue silk. She whipped off the silk and held out the pistol flat in her pam. “And so what business is this?”

Tull gently took the pistol from her. “My own.”

“Are you a criminal?” she asked, her green eyes searching his. Concern etched a single vertical line between her brows.

Outside the window a mockingbird taunted Tull in a hundred voices.

“No,” he said. “The gun is protection.”

She straightened and her features hardened. There was a small crescent scar on her cheek, a souvenir from a baby moray they’d encountered in the waters off Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea. When she was hurt or angry that scar darkened to the color of autumn wine. As it did now.

“Am I a fool that you lie to?” she demanded. “Am I some little beach bunny that you hump and dump?”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Why? Is it less polite than lying?”

He sighed and tossed the gun down onto his folded pants. “I thought we agreed not to talk about our pasts?”

“Easy for you,” she said. “You already know mine. Donderbus Elektronica is hardly unknown and I may be last in the line of succession to take over the company. I am still an heiress, which means that you could Google everything you need to know about me.”

Tull had to force his lips not to curl into a smile. When they’d first met, he had done exactly that. “I know, but you still agreed to the arrangement.”

“Because I didn’t think it mattered.” She indicated the pistol with a curt uptic of her chin. “Until this.”

“This doesn’t involve you—or us,” he insisted. “I’ve got a small matter to handle and then I’ll be back.”

“What is this ‘matter’?”

“It’s confidential,” he said. “I can’t discuss it with anyone, not even you. Considering what your family does, I’m sure you can appreciate the need for secrecy in some aspects of business.” He reached to take her hand. “Look, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Berenice took a step back from him.

“So that’s it? You just up and leave and to hell with me and us and everything we’ve—”

“Believe me,” he said, “I’ll be back.”

“How many times have you said that? How many women have stood where I stand now? Involved with you, in love with you, fascinated by everything that you know and all the mysteries you never shared? And then—what? Abandoned? Is that what drives you? To seduce and abandon?”

Tull laughed. “Seduce? As I recall, Berenice, you seduced me. Or as near as. You came up to me at that party in Marseilles and dropped a killer line on me. What was it? ‘I’m a lot more interesting than anyone you’ll find here. Escape with me.’ You had me on your hook from the beginning.”

The stern expression on Berenice’s face flickered momentarily. “I was only telling you the truth. We were more interesting than those inbred swine.”

“No argument. The point is, you’re not a victim of my irresistible seductive powers and I’m not the love ’em and leave ’em type.”

“Oh? What type are you?”

“Mostly,” he said, “I’m alone.”

Berenice came and sat down on the bed. The action caused her shirt to flap open, revealing a perfect breast. The nipple was as dark as her scar and fully erect. Caused by anger, he knew, but that was a form of passion, too. He busied himself with folding his shirts so that he did not stare at her.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked.

“I—don’t know. A few weeks at least. Maybe longer.”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone? Sit here and pine?”

“Cut it out, Berenice,” he said softly. “You define your own life and always have. That’s why they don’t like having you at board meetings. It’s why you picked me out of the crowd at that party. So, skip the guilt trip. You’re playing the wrong card.”

The mockingbird hopped onto the windowsill and regaled them with a schizophrenic diatribe.

“Will you have to use that gun?” she asked.

He picked up the blue silk and rewrapped the pistol.

“You’re not answering me?” she said. “Is it because you don’t want to lie? You’d rather say nothing?”

“What do you want from me?” said Tull. “I told you this is confidential … Can’t we leave it at that?”

“Not if you want to be able to find me when this is over,” said Berenice.

He looked at her.

“That’s what it comes down to, Tull,” she said. “We’re both adults, so if this is the end of what we had, then have enough respect for me to say so.”

“I—”

She stood up and moved in close, pressing her body lightly against his. Tull was infinitely aware of her animal heat, of the familiar curves and planes of her body, of the insistence of nipples hard enough to be felt through the fabric of her shirt and his. She looped her arms around his neck and looked up into his eyes.

“I can bear any truth,” she breathed, “but never lie to me.” She reached for his belt, unbuckled it, popped the top button of his trousers, slid the zipper down.

“I…”

His trousers fell down. Her fingers, clever and cool, slipped inside his boxers, found his hardness, squeezed it, stroked it.

Tull closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers. He was breathing as hard as if he’d run up a flight of stairs. So was she, and for a moment they breathed the same breath back and forth.

“Berenice…,” he murmured.

“Please,” she whispered.

And then his lips were on hers. On her lips, on her face, her throat, her breasts.

He reached out and swept the suitcase off the bed and then they crashed together onto the sheets. Their mouths breathed fire, their hands were everywhere. The bird stood on the window sill, silent now, wise enough not to mock this.

*   *   *

AN HOUR LATER,
Berenice lay naked on the tangled sheets, the sweat still drying on her skin. Tull could see her through the open bathroom door, through the gap between the shower curtain and the wall.

When he’d left the bed to go into the bathroom, he’d taken the pistol. It lay on the closed lid of the toilet, wrapped in a towel.

Waiting.

While he and Berenice had made love, his thoughts kept drifting from the beautiful woman under him to the gun.

To
its
elegant lines. To its potential.

To the way in which it simplified things.

He wished she hadn’t asked him about it.

He wished she hadn’t asked him about where he was going. Or when he was coming back.

As the hot water rinsed away the soap and their commingled oils and the scent of her passion, Erasmus Tull tried to keep her in his thoughts. Only her.

But the gun was there. So close.

It never asked anything of him.

It never complicated things for him.

He closed his eyes and leaned into the spray.

And wondered what to do.

What was the right thing to do?

What was the human thing to do?

The shower pounded on his back, his head. The questions pounded inside his mind.

He ached for Berenice. To be with her. To be normal with her. To be able to be normal.

He ached for the gun and its simplicity.

In the past, when he was torn like he was now, the gun always won.

It always won.

Always.

Chapter Twenty-five

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 6:59 a.m.

Mr. Bones left Howard with the staff doctor and went into his office to take a call. He listened to a very trusted and capable operative tell him very bad news.

Per his e-mail of earlier that morning, a team was sent to pick up Captain Joe Ledger of the DMS. They were supposed to hold him for a length of time, then release him. During the detention, agents were to collect his fingerprints for use in building an evidentiary case that Ledger was involved—or perhaps directing—the cyber-attacks. They would also drug him with one of the many compounds useful for eliciting a cooperative mental state. In such a state a subject could be asked to sign his name to any kind of document, or make simple calls, record messages, and even stand for photos. The memories and personality tics would still be in play, but the conscious control would be detached from the events. It was a lovely thing to see; something the Russians had developed a bit too late for it to be of value in the closing days of the Cold War.

The whole process would have taken Ledger out of play for an entire day, and additional drugs like some of the modern benzodiazepine variations would do that. The newest generation of midazolam was always fun for these sorts of things. Then Ledger would be returned to his car with a mild sedative, where he would have awakened to a world that had suddenly decided that he was a very bad man.

It was a simple operation. Ledger would never have been able to adequately explain his brief absence and the evidence would be ironclad. Mr. Bones had ordered variations on this at least a dozen times, never with a hitch.

Except that today there was a definite hitch. Captain Ledger had brutally beaten all four men sent to handle the pickup. Suddenly a very minor detail in a day that had much more important concerns was now a major issue.

“That is very disappointing,” said Mr. Bones.

The caller was silent. Mr. Bones let him sweat for a while.

“I will have it cleaned up, sir,” said the caller.

“Well that would be nice,” said Mr. Bones icily and disconnected.

The good news was that Erasmus Tull was on his way to Maryland. Tull would never have fumbled so easy a play as this. In Mr. Bones’s knowledge, Erasmus Tull had never fumbled anything. The worst that could be said of him was that once or twice he retreated from overwhelming odds, but that was simply good sense.

Mr. Bones activated Ghost Box and began reading updates and reports.

The air show was still on schedule. The prototype of Specter 101 had been safely delivered to VanMeer Castle, and the grandstands were already erected. Not that it really mattered, he mused. He really didn’t care about the plane, nor did Howard, who privately referred to it as the “flying red herring.” But for now, for today, all appearances must be maintained—and that was even more important if the thing in D.C. caused the air show to be postponed.

Christ, that really would give Howard another heart attack. It was a mercy that the minicrisis brought on by the news from Washington was only a “concern” rather than an “event.”

Mr. Bones clicked on to the next item.

The tech teams had managed to launch several flocks of the new pigeon-size surveillance drones. How lovely. Ten flocks in Baltimore, ten in Brooklyn, and five each in nine other locations. The drones were one of Bones’s own toys. Darling little machines. When Howard discovered him, Mr. Bones was the senior designer at AeroVironment, a nano aerial vehicles shop funded by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. He’d been building unmanned aerial vehicles that looked like birds. The one that sold the project to the DoD was the hummingbird, which was beautifully painted and could flit and fly just like a bird—unless the observer was an expert on hummingbirds. The pigeon drones were more durable and their larger bodies allowed for the inclusion of technical packages for secondary objectives.

It amused Mr. Bones to imagine those flights of pigeons winging their way toward the Warehouse in Baltimore, the Hangar in Brooklyn, and the nine DMS field offices.

Another check mark on his to-do list.

Nice.

He scrolled through more items. More reports of UFOs. He dismissed any sightings in Washington State, Pennsylvania, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, and New Mexico because the rubes were seeing experimental craft of one kind or another. With the air show pending, everybody in the industry was out test-flying their latest machines. That was fine. The reports from Upstate New York, Rhode Island, Iowa, Wyoming, and Central California were not as easy to dismiss. Frowning, Mr. Bones coded that for investigation and forwarded it to the field team supervisor with a request for twice-daily updates.