The Dragon Factory (68 page)

The Dragon Factory

Tuesday, August 31, 3:04
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 32 hours, 56 minutes E.S.T.

I went down and I almost went out.

The only thing that saved me was my injured leg. As soon as I saw the Berserker lunge at me I shifted backward and my bad leg buckled under me. He still nailed me, but it wasn’t full-power. It was enough, though, to knock me across the hallway and smash me into the far wall. My head felt like cracked church bells were ringing and fireworks burst in my eyes.

I heard the Berserker laugh.

He drew his sidearm as he came out of the office. I brought my gun up
and fired over and over again, trying to aim through the haze and distortion filling my eyes. There’s an Army saying that if you put enough ordnance downrange you’re bound to hit something. I put half a magazine into the air where I thought his head should be.

He never returned fire.

I blinked my eyes clear and stared. The Berserker was leaning back against the door frame and he slowly . . . slowly sat down. His eyes were wide and filled with surprise, and there was a black dot above his right eyebrow.

I’d fired eight shots and hit him once.

Once was enough.

A voice inside my head said,
Tick-tock.

I got to one knee. Then to my feet. My left leg felt like it was made from Silly Putty and a furnace had opened in my chest. My head was a bag of broken stones.

“Grace . . . ,” I said.

I kept going down the hall. There was just one door left, and as I reached for the handle I heard shouts and then gunshots. I tried kicking the door open, but my bad leg collapsed under me and I fell.

“There!” someone yelled, and I turned to see more of the goddamn Berserkers pounding down the hallway toward me. I leaned against the office door, raised my pistol, and fired.

And then from the other side of the door I heard Grace Courtland scream.

Grace

Tuesday, August 31, 3:05 a.m.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 32 hours, 55 minutes E.S.T.

For Grace Courtland it had all come down to this. A single moment in time when what she did and who she was would matter most.

She had climbed up through the long darkness of the access stairs and emerged into the darkness of the utility closet in Hecate’s office.
She almost rushed straight out, but when she heard them talking about the trigger device she stopped to listen. She understood what had to be done.

“It’s all yours, Father,” said Hecate. “Let’s change the world.”

Grace stepped out and pointed her gun at Cyrus Jakoby’s face.

“Let’s not,” she said.

The three of them froze, in shock, but their eyes were filled with sudden and immeasurable hatred.

“
Mein Gott!
” cried Cyrus.

Grace fired.

Not at Otto, or Cyrus, or Hecate. She fired at the laptop. But the lead-shielded computer was too tough and the bullet ricocheted off to punch a hole through Cyrus’s left biceps. He screamed and fell back, clapping a hand over the bloody wound.

“No!” said Otto in a hoarse whisper.

He lunged for the keyboard and Grace shot him. The first bullet took Otto Wirths in the shoulder and spun him, and her second punched a wet hole in his chest. Otto crashed to the desk and then rolled off onto the floor, dragging the laptop with him.

And then Hecate threw herself at Grace. The albino woman leaped twelve feet across the office and drove Grace against the wall. With a snarl of inhuman rage Hecate bit down hard on Grace’s shoulder. Grace screamed and reeled back and she struck her already-injured head on the corner of the closet doorway. The pain was almost unbearable, but she clubbed Hecate with the butt of her pistol. The blow barely slowed the woman. Hecate snarled at Grace, her lips red with the blood that pumped from Grace’s torn shoulder. Grace hit her again and again, but Hecate backhanded her so hard that the world went white in the midst of all the blackness.

Grace hit the ground and her gun slid away from her. Hecate looked from Grace to the fallen pistol and was caught in a split second of indecision. Grace tried to focus her eyes, but there were two of everything. Even so she did not hesitate. He kicked hard and swept Hecate’s feet from under her, and as she fell Grace rolled sideways toward her gun.
Hecate sprang into a catlike crouch and lunged again, but Grace had her gun now. She fired from point-blank range and the bullet tore through Hecate’s stomach.

“No!” cried Cyrus as his daughter was flung backward.

Grace struggled to her knees and pointed the gun at Cyrus.

“Step away from that fucking computer!” she ordered.

Someone began pounding on the office door and then came gunshots. Grace could not tell who it was—Special Forces, the Russians, the Berserkers—and she couldn’t risk it.

“Step away or I will kill you!” Grace yelled. Her head injury was making her sick, and the double vision was getting worse.

Cyrus hesitated. His eyes were wild, mouth open, drool beginning to drip from his lower lip.

“You can’t,” he implored. “This is everything I’ve worked for my whole life. This is the
purpose
of my life!”

“Move away from the keyboard. . . .”

“You idiot . . . you’re white! What I’m doing will be the saving of the entire race. Don’t you understand that? This for the survival of the white race!”

Grace’s eyes narrowed to icy slits. Her hands were trembling, but her voice was firm. “And this is for the survival of the human race.”

She pulled the trigger.

There were two blasts.

The first caught Cyrus Jakoby high on the left side of his chest and spun him against the wall.

The second blast, which happened in almost the same instant, struck Grace Courtland in the back.

The impact threw her forward to the edge of the desk. She hit it hard and collapsed to her knees. Shocked beyond understanding, she turned and saw a shape emerge from the shadows of the closet.

Conrad Veder. He held his smoking pistol in his hand and raised the barrel to point at Grace’s head.

The Dragon Factory

Tuesday, August 31, 3:06
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 32 hours, 54 minutes E.S.T.

I fired three shots, two at the Berserkers, hitting one of them in the head, and then I pointed the gun at the door and blew the lock off. I threw my shoulder against it and saw a sight that nearly tore the heart out of my chest.

Grace was on her knees, half-collapsed over the front of a big office desk. In the pale glow of a laptop screen I could see that she was covered in blood. Her face was painted red; her back was slick and wet. Hecate Jakoby was crawling slowly along the floor toward the desk and she, too, was bleeding. Otto Wirths lay dead on the floor, and Cyrus Jakoby was climbing back to his feet, blood streaming from his arm and chest.

And one person stood on his feet.

I knew him as Hans Brucker and Gunnar Haeckel. But those men were dead. This was an exact copy. Another clone. And he held a pistol in his hand.

“Joe . . . ,” said Grace in a ragged whisper. “The code . . .”

The assassin shot her.

I think I screamed. I don’t remember. I could feel the gun buck in my hand. I saw the assassin duck backward into a closet, saw splinters rip loose from the doorjamb. I staggered into the room, screaming as Grace slid down to the floor.

I wheeled into the doorway of the closet, but it was empty. There was an open trapdoor in the floor and splashes of blood all around it. I’d hit him. But he was gone.

I spun back into the room and shot Cyrus Jakoby in the stomach. He fell backward and collapsed. Hecate stretched up a long arm from the floor toward the laptop. I shot her in the head. My slide locked back, my gun empty.

I could hear the Berserkers coming.

If I had any chance of saving Grace I had to do something. I looked wildly around. There was an adjoining office, and I stumbled to it. It was almost identical to Hecate’s. Probably her brother’s. I staggered back to Grace and pulled her to her feet. She was nearly unconscious. I grabbed the laptop with the other hand and somehow dragged us all into the next room. I eased Grace down into a chair and then rushed back, scooped her gun up off the floor as the Berserkers began crowding into the room. I shot the first one in the forehead, but I could see that there were more of them in the hallway.

I retreated to Paris’s office, slammed and locked the door. There was a security crossbar on the door and I dropped it in place. Almost immediately the Berserkers began pounding on the door. The whole frame shook. I knew it wouldn’t hold.

I staggered over to Grace. There was harsh white light coming in through the window. One of the soldiers outside had set off a flare. Gunfire was constant.

Grace was slumped in the chair. She had been shot twice in the back, and the exit wounds on her stomach and chest were dreadful. I tore off my Kevlar and ripped my shirt to rags to staunch the flow of blood. Her head lolled and for a horrible moment I thought she was gone, but when I pressed my fingers against her throat I could feel a pulse. It was weak, but it was there.

“Grace” I said, pitching my voice sharply enough to wake her from the stupor of shock. “Grace, stay with me, babe . . . come on . . . stay with me.”

She opened her eyes a little and licked her lips. “That’s . . .
Major
. . . Babe . . . ,” she said with a smirk.

“Yes, it is, honey; yes, it is.”

The pounding on the door was incessant.

“Joe . . . the laptop . . .”

It was on the desk and I pulled it close. There were two words in a little gray box.

Message sent.

“Grace . . . did Cyrus send the code?”

“I—don’t . . .” Her voice disintegrated into a fit of coughing. Blood flecked her lips.

“Grace, honey, stay with me. Help’s on the way.”

I hoped to God that I wasn’t lying to her. I could hear helicopters in the air now, which meant that help was arriving from outside the EMP blast zone. Soon hundreds of troops would be landing. But was it all for nothing?

“Joe,” she whispered, “listen. . . .” She reached up with a weak hand and gripped the front of my shirt, tried to pull me close. “Joe—if the . . . code . . . was sent . . . there’s . . .”

She broke off into another fit of coughing. I used another strip of cloth from my shirt to dab the blood from her lips. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything to get out of this room, to get her to a medic.

“. . . Joe . . . if the code was sent . . . there’s still time.”

“What do you mean, Grace? How can we stop it?”

“Cancel. . . . code. . . .” More coughing, more blood. “Cyrus knows. If not . . . MindReader. . . .”

The Berserkers were knocking plaster out of the wall. The whole room shook.

“Take the flash drive . . . to Bug . . . tell him.” Her eyes drifted shut.

“Grace, come on . . . don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me. . . .”

Her eyelids fluttered open. “I’ll . . . never leave you. . . .”

But she did.

Her eyes closed and she settled against me. Her head lolled forward and she died right there with her cheek pressed against mine. I screamed her name. I screamed and screamed until I tore blood from my own throat.

But all the screams in the world could not bring her back from the infinite sea of darkness in which she now swam. I could actually feel her leave. It was like a whisper against my lips. Her last breath, exhaled as I held her.

I pulled her against my chest and rocked her back and forth as one by one all of the lights that held back my personal darkness flickered and went out.

The Dragon Factory

Tuesday, August 31, 3:08
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 32 hours, 52 minutes E.S.T.

I crouched in the dark. I was bleeding and something inside was broken. Maybe something inside my head, too. Grace lay in my arms and yet she was gone.

I was gone, too.

Slowly, with infinite care and gentleness, I slid from the chair and laid her on the floor. I straightened her arms and legs, and I bent and kissed her forehead and eyes and her lips. For a long moment I knelt there with my head on her chest, praying that I could hear that noble and loving heart beat once more.

But all I heard was silence and the screaming madness that was boiling inside my own head. The door was barred, but the Berserkers were going to get in. I knew that.

I got to my feet. I had Grace’s gun. I released the magazine and checked the rounds. I had three bullets left. Three bullets and a knife.

The pounding on the door was like thunder. I knew the door wouldn’t hold.