Joe Ledger (24 page)

Riggs was gone, now, though. Swept away by recent events the way so many other top operatives are who maybe spend one day too long in the path of the storm. Leaving guys like me to take the next job. And the next.

This was the next job.

So far there had been fourteen separate attempts to recover the package.

Those fourteen attempts resulted in sixty-three deaths and over a hundred severe injuries. That butcher’s bill is shared pretty evenly by all the teams in this game. There are six DMS agents in the morgue. Five more who will never stand in the line of battle.

And all for something that nobody really understands.

We call it “the package” or “the football” when we’re on an open mic.

Between ourselves, off the radio, we call it “that thing” or maybe “that fucking thing.”

Its designation in all official documents is simpler.

The artifact.

Just that.

It’s as precise a label as is possible to give, at least for now.

Why?

Simple.

No one—no fucking body—knows what it is.

Or what it does.

Or where it came from.

Or who made it.

Or why.

All we know is that twenty-nine days ago a team in Egypt ran the thing through an X-ray machine at what was the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology in Alexandria.

Yeah. You read about Alexandria.

The news services said that it was a terrorist device. Some new kind of nuke. The authorities and the U.N. aid teams keep adding more numbers to the count. So far it stands at seven thousand and four. Everyone at the University. Everyone who lived within a two-block radius. Not that the aid workers are counting bodies. There aren’t any. All that’s there is a big, round hole. Everything—every brick, every pane of glass, every mote of dust, and every person—is simply gone.

Yeah, gone.

And the ball buster is that there is no dust, no blast debris, and no radiation.

There’s just a hole in the world where all those people worked, studied, and lived.

All that was left, sitting there at the bottom of the crater, was the artifact.

One meter long. Silver and green. Probably made of metal. Nearly weightless.

Unscratched and untouched.

We saw it on a satellite photo and in photos by helicopters doing flyovers.

The Egyptian government sent in a team.

The artifact was collected.

Then their team was hit by another team. Mercs this time. Multinational badasses. They hit the Egyptians like the wrath of God and wiped it out.

The artifact was taken.

And the games began. The multinational hunt. The accusations. The political pissing contests. The media shit-storm.

Seventeen days later everyone is still yelling. Everyone’s pointing fingers. But nobody is really sure who was responsible for the blast. Not that it mattered. Something like that makes a great excuse for settling old debts, starting new fights, and generally proving to the world that you swing a big dick. Even if you don’t. If there hadn’t been such a price tag on it in terms of human life and suffering it would be funny.

We left funny behind a long way back.

About one millisecond after the team of mercs hit the Egyptians, every police agency and intelligence service in the world was looking for the package. Everyone wanted it. Even though nobody understood what it was, everyone wanted it.

The official stance—the one they gave to budget committees—was that the device was clearly some kind of renewable energy source. A super battery. Something like that. Analysis of the blast suggested that the X-ray machine triggered some kind of energetic discharge. What kind was unknown and, for the purposes of the budget discussions, irrelevant. The thing blew the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology off the world and didn't destroy itself in the process.

If there was even the slightest chance the process could be duplicated, then it
had
to be obtained. Had to. No question.

That was real power.

That was world-changing power.

For two really big reasons.

The first was obvious. Any energetic discharge, once studied, could be quantified and captured. You just need to build a battery capable of absorbing and storing the charge. Conservative estimates by guys like Dr. Hu tell me that such a storage battery would be, give or take a few square feet, the size of Detroit. There were already physicists and engineers working out how to relay that captured energy into a new power grid that could, if the explosion could be endlessly repeated under controlled circumstances, power… everything.

Everything that needed power.

People have killed each other over a gallon of gas.

What would they do to obtain perfect, endlessly renewable, and absolutely clean energy?

Yeah. They’d kill a lot of people. They’d wipe whole countries off the map. Don’t believe it? Go read a book about the history of the Middle East oil wars.

Then there was the second reason teams were scrambled from six of the seven continents.

Something like that was the world’s only perfect weapon.

Who would dare go to war with anyone who owned and could deploy such a weapon?

 For seven and a half days no one knew where it was. Everyone held their breath. The U.S. military went to its highest state of alert and parked itself there. Everyone else did, too. We all expected something important to go
boom.
Like New York City. Or Washington D.C.

When that didn’t happen no one breathed any sighs of relief.

It meant that someone was keeping it. Studying it. Getting to
know
it.

That is very, very scary.

Sure as hell scared me.

Scared my boss, Mr. Church, too, and he does not spook easily.

Halfway through the eighth day there was a mass slaughter at a research facility in Turkey. Less than a day later a Russian freighter was attacked with a total loss of life.

And on and on.

Now it was twenty-nine days later and a shaky network of spies, paid informants and traitors provided enough reliable intel to have me sliding down a wire into a deep, deep hole in North Korea.

If the artifact was here, then any action I took could be justified because even his allies know that Kim Jong-un is a fucking psycho. Basically you don’t let your idiot nephew play with hand grenades. Not when the rest of the family is in the potential blast radius.

On the other hand, if the North Koreans
didn’t
have it, then I was committing an act of war and espionage. Being shot would be the very least—and probably best—I could expect.

Which is why I had no I.D. on me. Nothing I wore or carried could be traced to an American manufacturer. My fingerprints and DNA have been erased from all searchable databases. Ditto for my photos. I didn’t exist. I was a ghost.

A ghost can’t be used as a lever against the American government.

I even had a suicide pill in a molar in case the North Koreans captured me and proved how creative they were in their domestic version of enhanced interrogation. I tried not to think about how far I’d let things go before I decided that was a good option.

I ran down a featureless concrete tunnel that was badly lit with small bulbs in wire cages. All alone. Too much risk and too little mission confidence to send in the whole team.

Just me.

Alone.

Racing the clock.

Scared out of my mind.

Hurrying as fast as I could into the unknown.

My life kind of sucks.

Chap. 3

“I’m losing your signal,” Bug said. “Some kind of interference from….”

That was all he said. After that all I had in my ear was a dead piece of plastic.

I looked at Karnak.

The small HD screen still showed a floor plan, which was good. But it wasn’t updating, which was bad. The data it showed was what Bug had sent me when I’d detached from the spider cable. We had an eye-in-the-sky using ground-penetrating radar to build a map, but that was a slow process, and suddenly I was behind the curve. The corridor ran for forty more yards past blank walls and ended at a big red steel door. Shiny and imposing, with a single keycard device mounted on the wall beside it. Knowing what was on the other side of that steel door was the whole point of the satellite. Pretty much no chance it was a broom closet. Before I tried to bypass the security I’d like to know that it was my target. Intel suggested that it was, but a suggestion was all it was. That’s a long, long way from certain knowledge or even high confidence.

“Balls,” I said, though I said it quietly.

Our timetable was based on the fact that two things were about to happen at the same time. A motorcade of official cars and trucks was headed here. We’d tracked it all the way from the Strategic Rocket Forces divisional headquarters in Kusŏng. Infrared on the satellites counted eighty men.

The second problem was a two-truck miniconvoy coming in hot and fast from the east. Six men and a driver in each truck. We almost didn’t spot them because their trucks were shielded with the latest in stealth tech—radar-repelling scales that contained thousands of tiny cameras and screens so that it took real-time images from its surroundings and painted them all over its shell. You could look at it and look right through it. Only a focused thermal scan can peek inside, but it has to be a tight beam. We were able to do that because of the one flaw in that kind of technology—human eyes. One of our spotters saw the thing roll past. Video camouflage works great at a distance. Up close, not so much, which is why it’s mostly used on planes or ships. The science is cutting edge but it’s not Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. Not yet, anyway.

If I wasn’t out of here real damn fast I was going to get caught between three hostile forces—the guards here, the incoming military convoy, and whoever was in those two trucks. I did not think this was going to be a matter of embarrassed smiles, handshakes, and a trip to the local bar for a couple of beers.

I’d wasted too much time with the laser grid, and now I could feel each wasted second being carved off of my skin.

I quickly knelt by the door and fished several devices from my pockets. The first was a signal counter, which is a nifty piece of intrusion technology that essentially hacked into the command programs of something like—say—a keycard scanner. It’s proprietary MindReader tech, so it used the supercomputer’s software to ninja its way in and rewrite the target software so that it believed the new programs were part of its normal operating system. In the right hands, it’s saved millions, possibly billions, of lives by helping the Department of Military Sciences stop the world’s most dangerous terrorists. If it ever fell into the wrong hands, MindReader and her children could become as devastating a weapon as the device I was here to steal.

Which is why each of the devices I carried had a self-destruct subroutine. If I died, they blew up. If they were too far away from me for too long, they blew up. If Bug, Dr. Hu or Mr. Church hit the right button, they blew up.

Such a comfort to know that all the devices hanging from my belt near all my own proprietary materials were poised to go boom.

I placed the device on the side of the keycard housing and pressed a button. A little red light flickered, flickered, and then turned green. I plugged a USB cable into it and attached the other end to a second device I had, which was flat gray and the size of a deck of playing cards. After too many seconds, a green light appeared on it as well, and a slim plastic card slid from one end.

I removed it, took a breath, and swiped it through the keycard slot.

And prayed.

Nothing happened.

My balls tried to climb up inside my body.

I swiped it again.

Nothing.

“Shit,” I said.

And tried one more time.

Slower.

There was a faint
click
, and then the big red door shifted inward by almost an inch.

I let out the air that was going stale in my chest. My balls stayed where they were. They didn’t trust happy endings.

When I bent my ear close to the doorframe, all I could hear was machine noise. A faint hum and something else that went
ka-chug, ka-chug
. Could have been anything from a centrifuge refining plutonium to a Kenmore dishwasher. I don’t know and didn’t much care. All I wanted was the package.

No voices, though. That was key.

I nudged the door so that it swung inward, slowly and only slightly. Light spilled out. Fluorescent. Bright. The machine sounds intensified.

No one shouted. No voice spoke at all.

I pushed the door open enough to let me take a look inside. Not one of those dart-in, dart-out looks you use in combat situations. When there’s no action, the speed of that kind of movement was noticeable in an otherwise still room. I moved slowly and tried not to embrace any expectations of what I’d see. Expectations can slow you, and if this got weird, even losing a half step could get me killed.

The room was large and, as far as I could see, empty.

I held another breath as I stepped inside.

The ceiling soared upward into shadows at least fifty yards above me. Banks of fluorescent lights hung down on long cables. Bright light gleamed on the surfaces and screens and display panels of rank after rank of machines. Computers of some kind, though what they were being used for or why they were even here was unknown. I’ve seen a lot of industrial computer setups and there had to be eighty, ninety million dollars’ worth of stuff here. Then I spotted a glass wall beyond which were rows upon rows of modern mainframe supercomputers, and I rounded my estimate up to a quarter billion dollars. The floor was polished to mirror brightness.

I tapped my earbud hoping to get Bug back on the line.

Nothing.

I faded to the closest wall and ghosted along it, taking a lot of small, quick steps. There was a second door at the far end of the big room. If any of my intel was reliable, the artifact had to be in there, or near there.

Fifty feet to go, and I was already reaching for another of the bypass doohickeys when a man stepped from between two rows of computers. A security guard. Young, maybe twenty-two. With a gun.