Predator One (17 page)

I fumbled
for my cell phone, but it was gone. I didn’t remember dropping it.

There were more explosions. Smoke curled along the top of the curving corridor. It looked alive, like a writhing dragon. Sinister and hungry.

More bangs.

I lost count at ten.

I lost consciousness, too.

Not sure how long I was out. I don’t think it was that long.

When I opened my eyes, Ghost was licking my face. He had a crazed
look in his eyes, and he was panting way too fast. I pulled him against me, stroked his fur, said meaningless words in a soothing tone into his ear as an ocean of people ran past.

Then I saw what was blowing up.

It was small. No bigger than a …

“Oh, shit,” I said.

It was a pigeon.

Except that it wasn’t, and now I understood what the killers had brought to the stadium in their wooden crates.
Not boxes of birds.

These were
drones
.

Small, perfectly crafted to blend into the environment and call no attention to themselves. I’d seen this type before. I’d worked with similar unmanned aerial vehicles.

Pigeon drones.

Not sent out for surveillance.

These were packed with explosives. That’s what I’d heard. That was the only thing that made sense.

The fake bird flew toward me, its wings
beating at a tremendous rate, more like a hummingbird than a pigeon. Glass eyes seemed to stare at me as it buzzed past.

There were four people between me and the drone. I shoved Ghost to one side and scrambled to my knees despite the sickness in my head and gut. The world seemed to tilt sideways.

“Get down!” I yelled, my voice hoarse and thick.

The people closest to me turned, and I immediately
began shoving them toward the walls. I tripped a few, foot-swept a couple of others, knocking them back, knocking them down, trying to get them out of the possible debris field of the drone. Taking shrapnel in the back while laying down would do a lot less damage than taking it in the face. In the eyes.

The drone suddenly stopped in midair, its wings flapping with blinding speed. It seemed to
be watching what I was doing. Assessing it.

Which meant that the machine had a camera and someone was watching.

That was not good.

I snatched a bottle of Mountain Dew from someone’s hand and hurled it at the drone. It instantly shifted out of the way.

That wasn’t good, either. That meant whoever was at those controls had some goddamn fast reflexes. There should have been a lag. I should have
knocked the thing out of the air before the video signal could go back to base, be observed, and be reacted to and before a response movement could be sent back to the drone. My bottle should have hit it faster than a person at a remote pilot station could react.

But the drone swerved to avoid the bottle.

It’s stupid, it’s crazy, but I had the horrible and irrational feeling that it was the
machine itself that had reacted. Doing it at machine speed. At computer speed.

The drone rose to the ceiling and turned in a quick circle.

Reassessing?

Accumulating data?

Or picking the best target?

I saw my gun on the ground being kicked as a flood of people ran for the exits, colliding with one another, cursing, screaming.

I aimed my shoulder and drove into the crowd, battering people
aside, yelling at them to let me through, shouting “Police!” and “Federal agent!”

Someone to my left yelled back, “Fuck you!”

And he punched me in the side of the head.

It was one of those big, lazy, looping haymakers that, on any other day, would have allowed me to have a sandwich and coffee before yawning my way through a block or evasion. This wasn’t one of those days. The guy could hit,
too. Damn him.

I went right down.

Even as I fell, though, through the fireworks in my eyes I saw my gun. I stretched out for it as I crashed down. My fingers fumbled over it, and my fingernails caught on the fittings. I gathered it into my hand, turned, rolled onto my back, and brought it up to aim at the drone.

Then it blew up.

A big, solid bang that shook the floor on which I lay.

The people
above me seemed to fly apart like corn dollies. Clothing and skin, muscle and bone. It all splashed me. Their deaths prevented mine, but I wore their blood. I heard someone screaming and screaming. Whoever it was tottered on the precipice of a never-ending fall into black madness.

I was so afraid it was me.

It was me.

And I fell.

Chapter Thirty

South Lawrence Street and Pattison Avenue

Philadelphia

March 29, 1:15
P.M.

“Are you watching the news, Father?” asked Boy, the phone pressed to her ear. Her tablet lay on her thighs, the screen filled with images of smoke and blood.

“I am,” said Doctor Pharos. “It’s very entertaining. I’m very proud of you.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased.”

“Very much so.”

“Has the Gentleman
seen it?”

“He has. And he was also very pleased,” said Pharos. “You know that everything you do pleases us. We’re both so proud of you.”

She felt her face burn, and she mumbled a reply.

“Boy—?”

“Yes, Father?”

“Are you all right?”

“I…”

“What is it?” he asked, his tone gentle. “You can tell me.”

“I want to come home.”

“Ah.”

“I haven’t see you in so
long.
I can’t … I can’t stand it.”

“Boy—is it the work? Is it getting too difficult?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Everything is perfect out here.”

“Is there a problem with your people?”

“No. Everyone’s doing their job, but—”

“Are there any glitches in the operation?”

“No, it’s not that. The machine is the machine. It’s perfect the way you made it. That’s just it…”

“What do you mean?” asked Pharos.

“I don’t need to
be
out here
anymore, do I? Davidovich is with you now. I don’t understand why I’m even out here. All I’m doing is watching. And … I mean … couldn’t I do that there? With you?”

There was a pause. Then Pharos said, “Believe me, sweetheart, that there’s nothing more important to me in the world than you. You are my family.
We
are family. You and I.”

“And the Gentleman?” She asked the question but tensed against
the answer. To her the Gentleman was an almost godlike figure, the last of the Seven Kings. On the other hand … Boy almost cringed at the truth in her heart. The Gentleman was dying, and he was crippled—and that made him a burden. If, against all logic, odds, and planning, something went wrong and they had to flee, Boy knew that her father would try to take care of the burned man, try to find
some way to flee with him. Boy understood fieldwork better than her father. He had his genius; she had hers. There was no way to flee with an anchor, and the burned man was an anchor. It hurt her heart to think of him that way, but it was true. And, as devoted as she was to the family that was the Seven Kings, if it came down to a choice between saving her father or letting him get taken because
of that anchor …

Boy knew full well she could put a bullet through the seared flesh of the Gentleman’s head. Without a moment’s hesitation.

There would be regret later, sure—and maybe reproach from Father. But hesitation? Boy did not possess that particular flaw.

Her father was a long time in answering her implied question about the Gentleman. She knew that he must be conflicted and filled
with sorrow at the ill health of the great man.

“Our dear friend,” began Pharos, “is a realist.”

And that was answer enough.

“I understand, Father.”

“I know you do, my sweet. Now … is everything in place for the rest?”

“Yes.”

“Good. As soon as things are concluded there, I’m going to need you in San Diego. I’ll send flight details. It will be outside the no-fly zone. You know where.”

“Yes,
Father.”

“One last job to do,” said Pharos. “After San Diego, you come home to me.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Thank you!”

“No, my love, thank
you.
No father has ever been more proud of a daughter than I am of you. Once this is done, then we will slip away like birds on the wind.”

It was a line from a very old Cambodian song. He used to sing it to her after her therapy sessions in those
days after he took her from the brothel.

“Like butterflies on a spring breeze,” she said softly, repeating the last line of that old song. One tear curled over her cheek and found the corner of her mouth. She tasted the salt. Her tears were always so cold. They tasted like seawater.

“I’ll send you the details,” said Pharos. “You’ll need to be strong, and you’ll need to be brave. This will be
dangerous.”

Boy sniffed sharply and swallowed those tears. “I’m ready,” she said. “You know I’m ready for anything.”

“Yes, I do,” said Pharos, a smile in his voice. “But first things first. Finish up there. The Gentleman is counting on you. As am I. Remember that I love you, my daughter.”

The line went dead.

Boy pressed the silent phone against her cheek, closed her eyes again, and conjured
images of her father. Tall and so handsome. Powerful. Brilliant. Not a King, but kingly in his way.

Then she closed the tablet, turned off the car engine, got out, put her earbuds in, and walked back to the stadium while emergency vehicles and crowds of rubberneckers raced toward the pillars of smoke.

Chapter Thirty-one

California

March 29, 1:17
P.M.

The president of the United States was giving a speech at a brunch for a group of celebrity vintners in Napa Valley. The speech was virtually the same one he’d given to the Deep Sea Fishing Association, the Art Alliance of Berkeley, a group of Silicon Valley billionaires, and a charitable foundation created by the wives of professional football
players.

The speech was going well, as he and his team expected. This was one of his party-platform speeches that was flexible enough to allow for subtle changes to make it relevant to any specific target audience. The president had the rhythms of it down, and he’d watched enough playbacks to know when to make lingering eye contact, when to give that confident smile, when to glower like a tough
commander in chief, when to beam like the proud father of the nation. It was all theater, but so was all of politics. It didn’t make it meaningless, though. The president believed in most of what he said and accepted the necessary compromises of the rest. No president who ever served managed to get everything he wanted. Not even close.

He was just warming to one of his own pet themes, a project
to work off college loans built on elements of FDR’s New Deal, when Alice Houston came from offstage and bent close to speak to him. It sent an immediate ripple through the audience.

“Mr. President,” said Houston, “there has been an attack in Philadelphia…”

Out in the audience, people were pulling their cell phones to look at the text messages and Twitter screens.

The news was reaching everyone
at once.

Interlude Ten

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

One Week Ago

It was a three-mile commute across Puget Sound from the mainland to the small island. As the boat approached the island, Doctor Pharos gestured to the pilot to circle it. The boat began a slow circuit. The craft was a Sea Ray 350 Sundancer. Old, but in excellent condition, with quiet engines and a pilot with
a subtle hand. Water creamed along the fiberglass hull and foamed out behind in a widened V.

Tanglewood Island was tiny, like a crumb that had fallen from the vast bulk of Fox Island. It was only eighteen hundred feet long and six hundred wide but densely wooded, with lush growth even this early in the year.

“We’re coming up on it, sir,” said the pilot.

Michael Pharos nodded. “Circle around
so we can take a look at it. Take your time. Let the Gentleman see it.”

Beside him, the burned man hunched in his wheelchair, wrapped in layers of blankets, warmed by a portable heater, sustained by the machines fixed to the chair’s frame. He wore a fur-lined hat with the earflaps pulled down and heavy protective goggles to shield his eye. The lenses were flecked with spray, and he had to squint
to see anything.

“What do you think of our new home?” asked Pharos, nodding to the island.

They both knew that it was very likely the last home in which the Gentleman would ever live. They knew he would die there, and that day was not far away. A matter of months now. The treatments, the surgeries, the mind-clarifying cocktails by Pharos’s pet mad scientist, a disgraced chemist named Doctor
Rizzo. The man had been fired from Merck for using the R & D facilities to concoct street drugs, and Rizzo had avoided jail only because the company didn’t want the scandal. Instead, they’d released him and made him sign papers swearing that he would not seek employment in big pharma for at least ten years. No one but a guilty man who’d been caught red-handed would ever sign a paper like that. Doctor
Rizzo had, and three weeks later he’d been recruited by one of Pharos’s street scouts.

The chemist had been working on a new cocktail that was part psychic stabilizer and part painkiller. It also had small amounts of different so-called psychoactive “truth” drugs developed for interrogators in various countries: narcoanalytics like scopolamine; potent short- or intermediate-acting hypnotic benzodiazepines
such as midazolam, flunitrazepam, temazepam, ketamine; and various short- and ultrashort-acting barbiturates, including sodium thiopental and amobarbital. Pharos could barely make sense of the chemistry.

It was a dangerous brew, but Rizzo said it was all about balancing the trace elements and keeping a bunch of rescue drugs primed and ready. Rizzo was probably certifiable, but he knew his chemistry.