Kill Decision (25 page)

“No.”

Blake spread his hands. There you go.

“Homeland Security—is that your idea of a joke?”

“One must maintain a sense of humor in these trying times.”

“Why’d they send you, Ritter?”

“To talk some sense into you.”

“Or because they hoped I’d kill you.”

Blake seemed uncertain for a moment.

“But I’m long finished doing their dirty work.”

Blake relaxed a bit and smiled genially. “NorthCom isn’t your territory. You’re supposed to be over there keeping the savages busy.”

“Maybe the savages back here need watching too.”

“The old man’s bitten off more than he can chew this time, David. This isn’t Pakistan. Maybe you’ve been overseas so long you forget that it’s a team sport here. And you’re not on the team.”

“I didn’t come to talk. I came for the girl.” He headed toward McKinney’s sedan.

“Does she know you’re using her?”

Odin turned. “Yeah. You might have noticed she tried to escape.”

“You can’t stop this, David. It’s going to happen no matter what. They want it. Stop looking.”

“You of all people know that isn’t going to happen.”

“Ah, never quit the hunt. Do you want to end up like Mouse? I hear they’re still finding pieces of him over there.”

Odin paused, but then regained his calm and reached the car door.

“What if they let you come home, David? Would you be willing to walk away?”

Odin stopped. He met McKinney’s gaze for several moments. “Walk away.” He nodded silently to himself. “And the professor here?”

“She’s already dead, and you know it.”

“Good-bye, Ritter.”

“Everyone wants this, David. Everyone. You can’t fight it.”

Odin turned to appraise Ritter for a few moments. “See, that’s the difference between you and me. I don’t just fight the battles I know I can win.” Odin opened the car’s rear door.

McKinney glared at Blake—or Ritter, or whatever his name was. He seemed to have transformed into a completely different person. “How did he—”

“Not now.” Odin pulled her up out of the rear seat by her waist chain and started moving her over to the blue van.

Blake called to them. “You can’t prevent something whose time has come.”

Odin opened the side door of the van. McKinney could see that it was an empty metal shell—no padding.

“I’m sorry. I had to know.”

“Now you know.”

He picked her up with powerful arms and tossed her into the cargo hold.

“Odin, I—”

He slammed the door, leaving her in the semidarkness, craning her neck to see the safety cage between her and the driver’s compartment. Odin got in and started the van.

McKinney realized how relieved she was to see him.

He adjusted the rearview mirror to meet her gaze. “Happy now, Professor? The monsters of the deep know you by name.”

She knelt and looked up at him. “I didn’t have a choice. You gave me no good reason to trust you.”

“Smart people are always difficult. Always looking for answers. And the answers always lead to more questions.” He accelerated the van toward the parking lot exit, and she slid into the rear doors.

She crawled forward again. “Who was that man?”

“I rest my case.”

“He said he was with Homeland Security.”

“There are people who work for the people who run the world. He’s one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they send the Black Chinook for me now.”

“You kidnapped me. You can’t seriously have expected me to trust you.”

“Why the hell did you trust them?”

“The FBI? Homeland Security?”

“You don’t seem the brand-conscious type, Professor.”

“Don’t be glib. I needed independent verification that this was real.”

“Oh, it’s real, all right. Think of it as an iceberg; you only see what’s on the surface. There are people beneath; people who built the systems that run everything.”

“In the government?”

“What difference does it make whether they’re in the government? They’re larger than government. They’re power. The world is a big system now. I don’t think anyone knows who’s in charge. But you can run afoul of various interests. That’s for damn sure. And you just did.”

She pondered that—then looked up at him again. “Shaw.”

He met her eyes in the mirror.

“That’s your real name: David Shaw.”

He clenched his jaw for a few moments. “That was his idea of a warning—letting me know that they know who I am. They think it gives them power over me.”

“But your family? Your—”

“It won’t lead them to anything. That’s why the colonel chose me.”

They locked eyes in the mirror.

“‘Shaw’ was the name of the road they found me on. It’s a common practice with foundlings at orphanages.” He looked back to the road. “All names were made up at some point. I just know when and where mine was.”

McKinney slumped against the sliding door as the van sped along a service road.

“Well, you poured some blood in the water tonight. Let’s see what shows up.”

That’s when McKinney noticed they were actually moving along the airport tarmac, approaching a large propeller-driven aircraft. McKinney recognized it as a C-130 cargo plane. She’d seen them used on various research projects in remote locales, although she’d never been aboard one. There were vehicles and work lights around it. Silhouettes of people rushing around.

In a few moments the van rolled to a stop. Odin got out, but Smokey was already opening the sliding door. He stood in the doorway a moment. “Look who decided to join us.”

She sighed resignedly as he pulled her up out of the van and onto her feet. They were parked next to the C-130’s lowered rear cargo ramp. The plane itself was unmarked and painted drab brown. Tail numbers were the only markings. Other team members were busy loading gear, while Hoov scanned the skies with some sort of boxy optical device on a tripod. But they all stopped for a moment at the sight of McKinney and broke into mock applause.

She looked guiltily to Odin. Hoov, Ripper, Mooch, and several more people she hadn’t seen before were all dressed in civilian clothes with no guns in sight. At a hand signal from Odin, they immediately resumed loading cases and checking equipment.

Odin produced a key and started unlocking her chains and handcuffs. “You want to escape, Professor?” He tossed the handcuffs and chains into the van and closed the sliding door. He then gestured to the vast expanse of tarmac around them. “There! You’re free to go. Best of luck to you.” He stomped up the cargo ramp.

Foxy stood alongside McKinney as she watched Odin go. He whistled. “Impressive. You got under his skin.”

She looked to Foxy. “I hope you don’t take what I did personally.”

Foxy held up a clipboard. “Well, let’s see. Our electronic warfare truck’s been impounded by the Feds, we had to destroy servers and prototypes we couldn’t move, we lost our JOC, and we’ve had to dangerously accelerate the entire timeline. Basically you fucked everything up.” Foxy looked up from the clipboard. “But on a personal note: That was seriously metal.”

CHAPTER 16

Damage Control

“W
e have a problem,
Henry.”

Henry Clarke looked up from his Chateaubriand in surprise. He spoke while chewing. “Good to see you too, Marta.” Clarke gestured with his fork to his date. “Emily, meet Marta. Marta, Emily.”

The young woman smiled amiably, extending a dainty hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Marta just stared at her—cherubic cheeks and straight blond Dutch hair hanging in bangs that ended just above the eyes. “I need to borrow Henry for a moment, my dear.”

“Oh . . . Okay, I—”

Clarke nodded, stuffing one more piece of steak into his mouth. “Back in a sec.”

Marta led Clarke toward a private room in the back of the busy restaurant. Her eyes swept the place. “I’m shocked to find you in a place like this. An overpriced strip mall.”

“What can I say? She chose it.”

“Ah, I see. Was it near her school?”

“Ha, ha. You know, it’s very uncool to just keep showing up with little or no warning.”

Marta brought them into the private room as two suited gentlemen in her security detail closed the doors behind them. The room was empty. “The schedule has changed. There’s word of some rogue element loose out there that could corrupt the message. Before that happens, we need to be ready.”

“When, ready?”

“Like whenever I say. Tomorrow. The day after. Whenever means whenever. Can your people deliver?”

Clarke sighed deeply. “Christ, I thought you told me ‘have patience.’ What happened to patience?”

“We don’t have time for patience. The situation has changed, Henry. Serious people are on the move. So say good-night to your little friend and get your ass to the office. Be prepared to man a crisis center for the next few days.”

Clarke nodded. “Okay. All right, I’ll gather the troops.” He paused as something occurred to him. “This ‘rogue element’—they don’t think we’re actually behind the . . . ‘troubles,’ I hope?”

“Even if they did think so, it will shortly be moot. Let the serious people deal with that. Ours is a struggle for messaging supremacy, and we need to win.”

“About them thinking we’re behind this . . . was that a yes or a no?”

CHAPTER 17

Safari-One-Six

L
inda McKinney had never ridden
in the cargo bay of a C-130, and now that she had, it wasn’t something she looked forward to repeating. The cavernous space reeked of jet fuel and the hydraulic fluid and oil from past vehicular cargo. Then there was the roar of aircraft engines. But at least on that last point, the team used wireless Etymotic headphones to reduce the noise and permit conversation. The headphones were also tapped into the pilot’s address system, not that much info had been forthcoming from the flight deck.
“Prepare for takeoff”
had been about it.

After a while McKinney switched the headphones off, enjoying the unearthly silence. Looking around in the red-light semidarkness she could see the team sitting in jump seats to either side of the cargo bay, or moving about, checking on equipment. Foxy and Tin Man were cleaning assault weapons. She could see Foxy’s African kora sitting atop a pile of gear—at least he’d managed to salvage that from the abandoned SubTropolis facility.

Farther forward Hoov was clicking away at a laptop. The aircraft’s loadmaster was double-checking static lines and conferring with the flight engineer—who was busy moving about on other inscrutable duties. There was also some sort of signals workstation set up against the forward bulkhead, with twin flat screens showing radar and other sensor data. Two airmen in headsets sat there, monitoring and talking on radios.

McKinney sat by herself on one of the uncomfortable DayGlo nylon webbing jump seats. Like everyone else she wore an insulated gray aircrew jumpsuit to help keep back the cold, and cold it was. McKinney occasionally exhaled just to see how much vapor she could create. The cargo hold was pressurized, and she knew they had heaters, so she was unclear why they were keeping the temperature so low.

She’d spent the past hour trying to figure out their cargo. It looked like a gray fumigation tent folded and strapped onto a double-wide pallet that stood near the middle of the hold. Steel cables snaked from it into neatly rolled and bound coils on the floor, and then stretched to another, half-height pallet of solid concrete. This was apparently some sort of deadweight. McKinney guessed it was a parachute linked to a concrete weight, although the precise purpose of it escaped her. There were high-tension cables locking the concrete slab into place, along with some sort of quick-release lever. There were also a couple of pallets of equipment and supplies cocooned in plastic wrap farther forward that obviously weren’t meant to be deployed in midair, since they didn’t have static lines attached.

They’d been airborne for nearly an hour when McKinney noticed Odin emerge from the narrow door at the front left of the cargo hold with two paper cups of coffee. He approached and extended one to her.