Gun Metal Heart (36 page)

Daria's voice came from two directions at once, bouncing madly off the jagged metal briar patch of the fourth floor. “So? What's your end game?”

“The drones are the bee's knees. But Incantada's remote control circuitry is every bit as cool. This bit of electro-doohicky can be retro-engineered to all manner of drones. All's you need is a powerful enough broadcast.”

Daria maneuvered a little. Detritus slid from beneath her feet and clattered down to the floor below. She winced, the picture of Viorica's scam becoming clearer.

“God,” she moaned. “The U.S. ambassador's residence.”

“Oh, yeah! You got it, Punkin. That old guy is making his speech there. He needed the boosted signal from the American's satellite transceiver to reach the Faithful throughout Europe. I needed the transceiver to override any effort to block the Incantada device from controlling the drones. Have you got any idea how much money I'm gonna make off this thing? It's, like, the Ginsu knives of terrorism!”

“Strong enough signal, that thing in the doctor's bag could override any drone on earth.”

Viorica yelped. “So cool! Ain't it just?” She heard something thin and aluminum clatter. She raised her head and her gun over the top of an overturned desk chair, its starfish legs spread in the gloom.

Nada.

Viorica shifted carefully, Converse All Stars on an exposed crossbeam. She could see through the matrix of debris to the third flood below.

Daria shouted, “What is the old man saying?”

“Who cares? He's probably telling the true believers that the Americans have gone crazy. Afghanistan. Iraq. Can I have democracy from Column A and peace from Column B? And does that come with Arab Spring Rolls?”

She ducked under a low loop of wires. A fine crust of dust had formed along the top, like cheap, preshredded Parmesan. Viorica didn't want to sneeze. She crouched low, arced her long, lean body under the wires, sidled slowly up on the far side of them. She caught a glimpse of skin across the room. She looked down long enough to position her sneakers on two semistable crossbeams.

Daria shouted: “You know Asher.”

The tall blonde thought:
Ah ha!

“Oh, yes.” She straightened slowly so as not to disturb debris. She kept her weight evenly distributed on two apparently stable floor joists.

“He lives?”

“Since your reunion in Milan? Yes. He lives. No thanks to you.”

Viorica peered over the chaotic mounds of crap. The skin she was seeing was a neck and shoulder and a bit of long arm. She sighted up on it.

Shadows swooshed past at two of the three round missile holes in the wall.

Two Mercutio drones ducked into the building, humming. They held station, twisting this way and that. Seeking.

The outside light flickered as two hawks cruised by the third hole: one heading south, the other arcing west.

They were hunting.

Viorica considered the situation. Before this fight they had been tasked with finding Dragan Petrovic and the Serbian embassy. Before that: Daria Gibron, on the loose in northern Italy.

And before that? Both Daria and Viorica. In a livery building in Florence.

So which program were they following now?

 

Forty-Seven

John Broom pressed his jacket against Diego's stomach wound. Blood spattered the sleeves of his new white shirt and his pant leg. Diego lay on his side, wrists cuffed behind his back. A Marine finally arrived. He had captain's insignia.

Diego moaned. “This … a hell of a plan of yours.”

“Going better than expected.” John turned to the Marines and noticed that the camera and audio men had fled, leaving their equipment behind. The rigger—the man Diego had savagely kicked, the man with no front teeth—lay on the floor, wrists tightly cuffed at the low of his back, the captain's knee on the his spine.

John said, “Get a doctor!”

The captain said, “That dude's in custody.”

“Throw him in the stockade.
Build
a stockade. Just get a fucking doctor!”

“Soldier.” General Cathcart grabbed an ornate white chair and levered himself to his feet. His left pant leg was stretched tight over his ruined knee, and his skin was blotchy and sweaty.

The Marine captain said, “Have a seat, sir. We'll get that leg looked after.”

“I need to leave. Now,” Cathcart growled.

The captain shook his head. “Not till I figure out who's who here. Please have a seat.”

“Soldier! I'm ordering you to—”

“I'm not a soldier. I'm a Marine. Sit your ass down … sir.”

A sergeant hustled over a civilian with deft eyes and dexterous fingers who carried the presence of a man well used to trauma. He brought the residence's well-stocked medical kit. He and the sergeant hustled John out of the way and began working on Diego's stomach wound.

John almost tripped on the video equipment, backing away. He adjusted the camera and audio boom, making room for the doctor and sergeant. Finished, he sat on the floor, back against a wall, knees up, arms out over his knees. His hands and forearms were bloody, his shirt ruined.

He spotted Professor Zoran Antic and, releasing a gust of exhausted breath, waved the old man over.

The small old man in the too large suit looked well pleased with himself. He eased himself down into the chair next to John. He wheezed a little.

The two of them watched the doctor and the Marine sergeant work on Diego.

John said, “Why? Please. Professor. I need to know why.”

Professor Antic sat ramrod straight, his body hardly seeming to weigh anything on the antique chair.

“Muslim holy wars around the globe. The utter failure of the euro. The first President Bush leads Europe into a land war in the Middle East, then the second President Bush does it again! Europe learns nothing. American arrogance, European weakness. What do these things have in common, Mr. Broom?”

John waited.

“The fall of the Soviet Union.”

He couldn't help himself: John actually snorted a little laugh. The blood on his arms and hands was turning stiff but remained tacky.

The old man shook his large head. “Oh, we are not stupid, Mr. Broom. We know that the Soviet model was corrupt and an economic joke. But the concept! The idea! A strong East, to counterbalance the blustering West. A European superpower to curb the American cowboys. It would have saved the last quarter century from so much bloodshed.”

“The Illyrian Party?”

“The Illyrian
League
, Mr. Broom. My counterparts throughout the former Soviet Union are taking up the banner. Romania and Hungary. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In Poland and Ukraine.” The old man allowed himself to preen a bit. He patted one spindly leg, the way a man might applaud while holding a wineglass.

“The fuse is lit. As with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in 1914. So today. We fan the flames of European independence and liberty.”

John wiped his left hand on his pant leg—the new suit was ruined anyway—then gingerly drew his stolen phone out of his pocket. He activated it, creating a perfect bloody thumbprint on the screen. He nudged his chin toward the man with the flattop haircut and badly swollen knee. The guy was sweating and in a great deal of pain but was trying to be stoic.

“That schmuck? He's American military. You lured him here?”

Antic chuckled. “Like shooting a barrel of monkeys.”

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” John sighed. “Fun as a barrel of monkeys.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Nothing. Give me your hand.”

John wiped blood off his. Then raised it.

Antic studied the younger man's hand warily.

“I'm serious. I see you're the grandmaster here. Give me your hand.”

Antic's distaste was obvious.

“Is it because you want to avoid blood on your hands?” John laughed. “'Cause, I gotta say: That ship's sailed. C'mon.”

“I admire you as a student of politics, Mr. Broom. I do.”

“But…?”

The old man shrugged apologetically. “You're just a Jew.”

John shrugged. “I'll buy that.”

But he didn't lower his hand. And after a beat, Antic took it. A simple, weightless, gripless up and down. Antic performed it the way one might shake a hound's paw: he's a lower species. He doesn't understand.

John nestled back against the wall. He closed his eyes.

“Boy. Hell of a day.”

To Antic, it looked like the young American was just giving up. The old man felt vindicated. He felt young.

“You're an anti-Semite.”

Antic shrugged as if to say,
Isn't everyone?

“The Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo?”

“They will rise with us now, when we need them. Later, like children, they will need to be put in their place.”

“You're a neofascist?”

“Let us not mince euphemisms, Mr. Broom. I was a Nazi.”

John held up the stolen cell phone and waggled it a bit. The old man glanced at it.

“You should see this,” John said.

The old man took the phone from John, peering myopically at the screen. His breathing grew thin.

“What … what is this…?”

“Bunch of really smart twenty-something interns in Washington.” John leaned his head back against the wall and watched the doctor work on Diego. “They're crazy-good with the Internet. They created a bunch of hashtags and markers telling young people to watch your broadcast. They pushed it out on every social media platform. Then they located your original feed from here. And they're rebroadcasting it throughout Europe.”

The professor's face fell. His rheumy eyes flashed from John's phone to the video camera and audio boom.

Which lay on the floor. Facing them.

“You're still live, Professor. You and the discredited CIA agent you just shook hands with. Smile for your fans.”

 

Forty-Eight

Daria studied the floating hummingbirds framed in the harsh oval light as if they were lead performers, dead center onstage in their designated follow spots. They hummed. When they didn't move, they didn't look much like hummingbirds. More like badminton birdies with four horizontal plastic wings and miniature helicopter rotors at the end of each wing. Their downdrafts sent up billows of dust and paper debris.

Outside the hawks swooped past the aging missile holes.

Daria held one of her incendiary meth bottles in both hands, one hand wrapped around the cap. She stood on the remnants of a filing cabinet, on its side, straddling it like it was a surfboard. She could see the curled remnants of tile flooring beneath it, but also holes that plunged all the way down to the third and second levels as well.

“Those,” Viorica's voice echoed, “are Mercutio. I think they like you.”

“And the hawks?” When Daria spoke, both hummingbirds snapped in her direction but held themselves motionless in the middle of the white beams from the ground-floor floods.

“Hotspur. Made illegally by a company called American Citadel. A company that, collectively, is peeing its pants right now.”

The Mercutio drones did not sight up on Viorica when she spoke. Daria cursed silently. Flying fucking Monkeys.

“We need to get them out of here.”

“How come, Punkin?”

“Because–”

A shot rang out from outside. A .22 bullet raced into the confining, confusing space, through the centermost of three missile holes. Subsonic, the bullet made a zipping sound before it embedded itself in a downed ceiling support column, inches from Daria's right shoulder. She twisted back, hissing in pain. The bullet missed but blood bloomed from the talons of wooden shrapnel driven into her shoulder.

In the shock of impact, she'd jostled the lid of the water bottle. Daria felt it begin to expand.

She threw it clumsily, left-handed, without room to wind up and really heave. The bottle lobbed about five feet in a high arc.

Daria ducked.

Viorica spied the bottle and rolled up and over a pile of debris.

The fireball erupted.

Wood and copper and ceramic shrapnel rained down from the ceiling. Already twisted debris twisted more. Mounds of detritus crumbled, falling through the missile holes to the floor below. A cyclone of dust and asbestos and bits of paper and plastic swirled around the floor.

Both spotter drones crashed into the wall and fell to the floor.

Viorica had scrambled over debris and almost tumbled into a great hole in the floor. It was almost six feet in diameter, the rim cluttered with felled bits of building and office equipment. It was almost round.

Viorica teetered precariously on the edge of the round abyss, grabbing onto a truncated length of water pipe, her left foot dangling for a moment. Her Glock bounced off an old coat rack and glittered as it fell to the floor below.

The dust was suffocating. Both women hacked coughs.

Daria rose and clambered unartfully over an mound of insulation, moving clockwise from Viorica's presumed position, finding a new hiding place. She couldn't know that Viorica had dropped her weapon. Daria's right arm throbbed as long slivers gouged against the hardworking muscles. Blood from the cuts around her left eye again obscured her vision. She found a depression behind a remnant of a chalkboard that now served as a pretty good duck blind.

She hunkered down, the backpack dragging in her wake. Volatile meth bombs had seemed like a good idea down on the first floor. Now they felt like a ticking time bomb strapped to her back.

She rubbed blood away from her left eye and let her finger just brush the handle of the cutthroat blade in her boot.

She glanced at the chalkboard. Miraculously, it still held writing, even after all these years. It looked like the ghost of a Venn diagram with Cyrillic scribbling around it.

Only ten feet away, Viorica swung one of her red canvas sneakers up and snagged a jagged bit of copper pipe around the edge of the abyss. The pipe held. She levered herself back up and put her other shoe on the last viable floor support she could see.