Red Knight Falling (23 page)

FORTY-TWO

We rode in silence, the rumbling of the tires and the engine’s hum standing in for conversation. Cody had seen exactly what I didn’t want him to—and then some—and he didn’t seem interested in sharing his feelings. Jessie drove with a thousand-yard stare and caked blood on her hands. April, I caught glancing my way more than once. She was looking at all of us, though. Quietly reading us like clinical textbooks.

And Kevin just looked out the side window and watched the nightscape drift on by. The laptop sat cold and dead on his lap, abandoned.

After an hour on the road, the SUV was coasting on fumes, just like the rest of us. I read the sign for a way-stop five miles up the highway, a distant oasis of faded yellow light. There wasn’t much to see, just an off-brand gas station next to a brick visitor center with restrooms and a couple of battered old vending machines. Jessie pulled up to the pumps and killed the engine.

“Ten minutes and we’re back on the road. Do what you’ve gotta do.”

Jessie made a beeline for the vending machines. She bought a Coke and chugged it down, crumpling the empty can and tossing it into an overstuffed trash bin. Then she disappeared into the restroom without saying a word.

I didn’t need to go, but I followed her anyway. The restroom smelled like a summer-camp latrine, grimy tile bathed in low-wattage electric light. Jessie scrubbed her hands under a weak stream of tap water as the bloodstains slowly faded to the color of pink roses. I stood at the sink beside hers, looking at my dim reflection in the mirror and trying to fix my mussed hair, just to give my hands something to do.

“You okay?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose, pressing down on the soap dispenser. A yellowish stream drizzled into her cupped palm.

“I’d be okay if they had some halfway decent soap in here. Guess I’m not shaking anyone’s hand tonight.”

“Jessie, if you want to talk . . . you know, about what happened back there.”

She shrugged, glancing over at me as she lathered up her hands again.

“Because I’m supposed to be psychologically traumatized or something? Leave the headshrinking to Auntie April, Harmony. Keeping me mission functional is her job.”

“I’m not asking as a teammate. I’m asking as a friend.”

She paused, shook her head, and let out a tired sigh. She shut off the faucet.

“Harmony, do you know what it feels like when I let the wolf out? It feels like . . . slipping into a warm bubble bath. All my worries, all my cares, they all just melt away. Everything smells like roses, and everything tastes like a juicy bite of filet mignon.”

She pulled a handful of cheap paper towels from the battered steel wall dispenser, scrubbing her hands dry.

“See, I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” she told me. “The problem with letting the beast take control—it isn’t that I don’t like it. The problem is that I like it
way
too much. Waking up after,
that’s
the part I hate.”

She tossed the wadded-up towels into the bin and walked past me, her hands still branded faint, ghostly red.

Cody waited for me outside the restroom. He nodded back over his shoulder. “Hey, so, can you talk to Kevin? He’s around the corner over there, kicking rocks around.”

“Talk to him? About what?”

“About what happened back at Spearhead. He’s being pretty hard on himself. I tried talking to him, but I don’t know if I helped any. Look, I know that saying women are better than men at talking about feelings is a dumb stereotype—”

I nodded. “True.”

“—but,”
he said, “in this case, he might be more receptive to you than me. I mean, Jessie’s protective, but she’s also a little abrasive, and Dr. Cassidy is kinda . . . frosty. You’re better at the whole . . .”

He groped for words in the air. I tilted my head at him.

“Are you about to say ‘the mom thing’? Oh, no. I don’t mom. I can’t mom. I am terrible at momming.”

Cody flashed a smile. “You’re more of a people person than you think.”

“Cody,” I said, “I am the
least
people person on this entire team. But, sure. I’ll try.”

I found Kevin right where Cody had left him: around the corner of the visitor center, pacing along the brick wall with his hands jammed in his pockets and his head sagging. Behind me, beyond the narrow strip of empty parking spots, the occasional night driver swooped past on the highway. Bound for anywhere, fast.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He nodded my way.

“You doing okay?”

“I’m fine.”

I walked a little closer.

“Funny,” I said, “everybody’s saying they’re fine tonight. Not sure any of us really are.”

“Won’t have to worry about me much longer. Soon as we drop off the tablet, I’m out.”

“Out?”

He stopped pacing. He didn’t quite meet my eyes.

“I’m done. I quit. I’ll go back into Witness Protection, or . . . I don’t know. Something, someplace. Someplace where I’m not just dead weight.”

“You are
not
dead weight,” I told him. “You’re a vital member of this team.”

He let out a humorless laugh. “Yeah, I’m so vital I nearly got the three of you
killed
back there. Every time I go up against Roman Steranko—
every single time
—I get my ass kicked, and everybody else pays the price. I’m a fucking joke, Harmony. You need a real hacker on the team. You deserve better than this.”

“So he got ahead of you. It happens. Steranko is just one man—”

“You don’t get it.” Kevin looked up at the overcast, starless sky and took a deep breath. “Look, this is my passion, all right? I was poking around in government databases—and using someone else’s phone bill to do it—when I was twelve years old. I decided I wanted to be the best. So I
learned
from the best. White hats, black hats, Internet pioneers. I hunted down dudes who’d gone so far underground they popped out in China, just to learn from their style and refine my own. For years, my handle was Schoolboy, because I never stopped asking questions.”

I shrugged. “A lot of people aren’t passionate about anything. I think it’s good to follow your dreams.”

“Yeah, well, it was a big waste of time. All that stuff I did? Roman Steranko did it, too. After he cut off our comms, I dug in to find out how he worked. I know what he’s doing: it’s all textbook, classic moves. Like that worm he slipped into my system while I thought I had Spearhead on lockdown? I know this mercenary hacker who goes by the handle Pixie: that was
her code
. Her code, her exact style, line for freakin’ line. Steranko was taunting me.”

“Taunting you?”

“Yeah. Proving that he knows the same stuff I do, studied from the same teachers, all of it. It’s not about book smarts, Harmony.” His shoulders slumped. “It’s brains and talent. Roman Steranko is smarter than me. He’s better than me. He just is. And I can’t beat him.”

He fell silent. I started to reach for him. Paused. Wasn’t sure if I should try to hug him or not. I’m never good at knowing that.

“He’s not unstoppable, Kevin. Everybody has a weakness.”

He gave me a sad smile.

“Yeah,” he said, “and we found mine. It’s him.”

Jessie poked her head around the corner.

“C’mon, campers,” she said. “SUV’s gassed up and ready. Let’s get it done.”

We drove to the middle of nowhere, cutting through the California night with coal-black sky on our right and dangerous weather on our left. A storm front rolled in off the coast, the air rippling with thick smoky clouds that lit up silvery blue as lightning danced behind their veils. No rain, just the constant threat of it, the sky promising to burst under pressure. I felt it in my bones.

After an eternity of empty road, the lights of Vandenberg rose up to greet us. The military base was a sprawling mammoth, laid out over scrubland and mountainous foothills, stretching to the ocean’s edge. I saw the shadows of iron giants sleeping in the night, skeletal launch towers standing tall and ready to serve.

“Leave the guns in the truck,” Jessie said. “We don’t want to make anybody twitchy. We don’t know how much pull Bette and her people have around here, and we need her help, so let’s play nice. For now.”

We pulled into the parking lot at the visitor control center, a salmon-roofed building just outside the main gate. We didn’t have far to go. We’d just gotten out of the SUV when Bette Novak strode up with an entourage in tow. She’d traded in her civilian wear for pressed air force blues with a dark tie tab, her last name on a nightingale-blue epoxy name badge opposite a thin row of service ribbons. The four men at her back wore desert-pale camouflage fatigues.

“Do you have the tablet?” Bette asked me. I held up the lead sheet. She nodded, curt.

One of the men stepped forward and handed her a cylindrical casket, about a foot long and half as high. The casket gleamed a brassy deep crimson, the same odd metal the original Red Knight had been forged from. She opened it, revealing an empty compartment lined with spidery, etched runes. Some I recognized: seals of protection, copied from some Renaissance wizard’s grimoire.

I set the tablet in place, and she closed the casket lid, locking it down with a heavy latch. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Thank you,” she said. “Your service to your country is appreciated. We’ll take it from here.”

Jessie stepped up. “The hell you are. We’re not leaving until that thing’s back in orbit.”

“Vandenberg is a closed facility,” Bette told her. “No civilians without express permission of the base commander. Which you don’t have.”

“I’m thinking you have ways to get around that.”

“We have the situation under control. Your part is finished.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but what if something goes wrong? Can you really say you
wouldn’t
want a few more helping hands on the scene, just in case?”

Bette gave me a hard, appraising look, then nodded again.

“Fine. You and your team can come with me. Stick close.” She handed the closed casket back to the airman on her left. “And you four, get this over to the Horizontal Integration Facility and mount the payload. I want that Atlas ready to fly in sixty. If anyone gets in your way, get on the brick and call me
immediately
.”

Harsh headlights washed over us as a jeep swung into the lot, screeching to a stop. The man who jumped off the back bench and stormed toward us, hair and eyes the same shade of hard, steel gray, wore the silver eagle of a full colonel on his uniform jacket.

“Bird incoming,” Bette muttered under her breath, walking past me. “Let me handle this.”

FORTY-THREE

Bette snapped a crisp salute. “Sir. Master Sergeant Bette Novak, National Air and Space Intelligence—”

“I know who you are, Novak,” the colonel seethed, “because there’s a crew of airmen in battle dress occupying my HIF on your say-so. I’ve got a rocket that should have gone up hours ago still waiting on nose-cone assembly, and your boys have done everything short of hold my technical staff at gunpoint. So how about you tell me what the piss is going on here, and what you think gives you the authority to countermand my orders?”

“Colonel Bradley, sir, I believe this will explain to your satisfaction.”

Bette handed him a slender envelope tinted cornflower blue. He tore the seal, tugged out the typewritten page inside, and began to read. His eyes widened; his lips pursed into a tight, bloodless line.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said, his voice soft as he refolded the page and slid it back into the envelope. “The Redstone situation. It’s really happening. I was privately briefed years ago when I took command, but I never thought . . .”

His voice trailed off. Bette took the envelope from his outstretched hand.

“It’s happening. I’m here to resolve the problem.” She glanced back at us. “These people are with me.”

In five minutes and one radio call, Bradley rallied a small convoy of jeeps into action. Bette’s men sped off to the integration facility hangar while we made our way in the other direction, roaring through the base’s quiet streets. A security-patrol wagon flanked us forward and back, their flashers scything against the dark.

The wind howled over us, ruffling my hair with warm fingertips, as thunder crackled overhead. Lighting danced in the smoky sky. Sitting next to me, Bette leaned in close.

“Tonight’s launch is a low-orbit communications satellite. Supposed to be good for fifteen years, which gives us fifteen years to come up with a permanent solution to the King of Silence. Right now, my men are installing the tablet inside the satellite’s hull. Once the Atlas’s nose cone goes on, the whole assembly will be ferried to the launchpad.”

“How are we on time?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the wind.

“Another forty minutes for prep, maybe an hour to get her to the pad. As long as nothing goes wrong, the tablet will be back in orbit well before the deadline. Whoever you people really are, you did good out there. Don’t suppose you got a chance to sanction Diehl?”

“No such luck,” I told her.

We made a beeline for the Flight Control Center. Colonel Bradley led the way, striding like an unstoppable hurricane through checkpoints and security gates. Our destination was a gallery lined with workstations, two monitors for every chair, and each one pumping out radar and telemetry data in a blistering torrent. At the head of the room, three eight-foot screens stood shoulder to shoulder on the back wall, displaying grainy camera feeds angled on an empty launchpad.

I heard the call to attention as the colonel, ahead of me, entered mission control. By the time I passed through the double doors, the entire room—some twenty airmen in all—were standing at attention and holding a perfect salute. Bradley stormed past them, not returning the gesture until he stood at the head of the room and the doors had sealed shut behind us.

“At ease,” Bradley said. He waved Bette over to stand beside him. “This is Master Sergeant Novak. For the duration of this mission, she is in full control of operations. To make myself perfectly clear, an order from her is an order from me. Master Sergeant?”

Bette stepped forward, hands clasped behind her back.

“Understand this: from this moment forward, everything you hear and everything you see is covered by security protocols that you are not cleared for and never will be cleared for. In short, if between now and your dying day you breathe one single word of what happens in this room tonight, I will personally dig the deepest, darkest pit in all of human history and bury you in it.”

She paused, making sure she had everyone’s full attention, and continued.

“Tonight’s launch has a new designation: Red Knight Two. Our launch window is nonnegotiable.”

We clustered at the back of the room, trying to stay out of the way, while Bette strode from terminal to terminal and handed out orders. My phone buzzed. A text update from Linder.

NAVSTAR GPS satellites, 20 km out in geosynchronous orbit, are going off-line one by one. King of Silence inbound. Get it done, Agents.

Great pep talk, except there was nothing we could do. Nothing but stand around and feel useless while we waited for the launch. One of the big displays shifted to footage from the assembly hangar: the Atlas was ready, lying on its belly and rolling out slow on a treaded carrier. It was a giant, sixty feet long and painted arctic white, with a bulbous nose cone protecting its precious cargo.

Bette swung by to update us. “It’s all good. The Atlas is on her way to the pad at Slick Three East. Everything checks out, no sign of technical problems so far.”

Cody waited until she left before leaning close and murmuring, “That’s fine, but does anybody have a plan B, just in case?”

“We
are
the plan B,” I told him. I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.

We watched on the feeds as cranes hoisted the mighty rocket into position on the SLC-3E launchpad, shackled by thick cables and hoses to the skeletal superstructure. Now two timers counted down in the top-left corner of the leftmost screen: one hour and seven minutes, and one hour and fifty-two minutes. The ETA to launch, and the ETA to doomsday.

“I hate this bystander crap,” Jessie said. She folded her arms. “I want to be
doing
something.”

“We are,” April said, watching the monitors with a gimlet eye. “We’re standing in readiness in case we’re needed.”

“Well, maybe I’d like to feel a little more needed.”

The lights went out.

Monitors flickered as mission control powered down, plunging the room into darkness. A moment later, a distant whine shook the walls as the emergency backup generator kicked in, lights shining dim at half strength while all the workstations rebooted themselves.

“Think you just got your wish,” I said, striding over to Bette and the colonel. “What’s going on?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bradley said, leaning into his radio handset. “What’s going on out there? I need a sitrep.”

“Sir,” came the response, “power overload in all five main generators. I think it was a lightning strike. We’re checking it out now.”

Bette’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Backups can’t handle this workload. We need full power or that Atlas isn’t going anywhere.”

“Restoring power is your number one priority, Airman,” the colonel barked into the handset. “Get it done, and get it done fast. I want status reports every five minutes.”

Lightning? Maybe, but so far the oncoming storm front hadn’t produced a single drop of rain. And with structures as tall as the launch gantries to strike—or the rocket itself—what were the odds of a bolt hitting a lower-ceilinged building anywhere on the base?

“Colonel,” I said, nodding at the wall screens, “can you pull any other camera feeds onto this thing? Do you have security cameras near the generator room?”

He snapped his fingers at the closest technician. One display of the launchpad vanished, replaced by a view of pristine generator hulls and a rat’s nest of electrical conduit. The generators hadn’t been hit by anything. They’d just stopped working.

“Sir,” squawked the voice on the radio, “we have intruders! Motorcycles inbound through the Lompoc Gate. We have—” He paused, breathless, as small-arms fire echoed in the distance. “We have sentries down and—”

His voice erupted in an inhuman screech, drowned out by the crackling of flames.

“Your base has been compromised,” I said, then looked to Bette. “Diehl’s making a last-ditch try for the tablet. He doesn’t need to get it back—he just needs to stop us from launching it.”

“Raise the alarm,” the colonel snapped, “and somebody get me comms online, I need to make a base-wide announcement.”

The power flickered and died again, the emergency power flooding back ten seconds later as if it was struggling to stay online.

“Sir,” one of the technicians said, “we can’t do anything under these conditions. Every time the emergency power cycles like that, our workstations have to reboot. We’re as good as locked out.”

Meanwhile, more reports were flooding in by radio. Terrorists rampaging across the base, spreading chaos, killing as they rode. Bullets and fire.

“What have they got?” Bette asked me.

“Same as you saw in Orlando. Seasoned hitters and a world-class pyrokinetic. Maybe more occult support, if Bobby Diehl expanded his ranks.”

“A pyro.” She gritted her teeth. “Does her power work on organics only, or can she light up inanimate objects?”

I paused. “I’m . . . not sure, really. Why?”

“Because,” Bette said, “that Atlas has a first-stage booster loaded with over six hundred thousand pounds of liquid oxygen and rocket propellant.”

I looked to the colonel. “Call your security forces back. Pull them away from the launchpad, and move them to protect your unarmed troops.”

“Pull them
away
? Why?”

“Because they’re not equipped for this fight.” I looked to Bette, feeling a sense of grim resolve as my heart pounded faster and the countdown clock ticked down the minutes left until doomsday. “But we are. We’ll handle this.”