The Ragnarok Conspiracy (28 page)

The voice on the other end spoke again, and Cranston shook his head. “No, sir. It's a perfect match. There are no doubts. Serial numbers, make, appearance. ‘Dial-a-yield,' five to one hundred and fifty kilotons. A blast up to ten Hiroshimas. It's our broken arrow, sir. In the hands of the devil's minions.”

He spoke for several more minutes and hung up the phone, running his hand across his nearly bald head. He stared in front of him. His computer screen displayed the washed-out image taken from the cell phone of Michael Inherp, the long metallic tube of the missile dominating the screen, the numbers printed on its surface: small yet clear. The colonel stood up and walked to his window, staring into the night.

God help us.

Three dark shapes rested against the glass like spiders on a wall. Gunn Tower rose mercilessly into the Manhattan sky, the spider shapes dwarfed and vulnerable beside its might.

Jordan released his grip on a suction cup and removed a small disklike object about the size of a Frisbee from his belt. The suction cup remained firmly fastened to the glass, and he placed the device against the building to the right of him. A bright light shone as sparks flew, and within seconds, an ellipse could be seen in the once perfect glass surface. He leaned over, breathing heavily from the exertion, and pounded on the circle. After two strikes, the glass broke inward, leaving a hole in the building. This action was repeated several times as his men repositioned themselves around the growing hole in the glass surface. Finally, Jordan scaled with the suction cups to the metal above the hole and attached a much larger cup into which a secured rope had been fitted. The rope dangled down beside the hole. He grasped it tightly and swung himself inside.

He landed inside a dark office, followed quickly by the rest of his team. He spoke in hushed tones to the others. “We are on the fourth floor, east side of the building. A stairway is around the corner outside this room. It will take us to the floor we are looking for.”

He walked to the door. Although it was locked from the outside, it was simple to open from within. Around the corner they found the stairwell and began a long assent, punctuated by intervals of deactivating security cams. Their labored breathing echoed as they passed more than forty floors. Jordan's legs burned from the lactic acid buildup, and he limped slightly as they progressed, the wounds from
Sharjah not completely erased. After forty floors, they felt as if their hearts would explode in their chests. Finally, he halted at the fiftieth floor. For a moment they each caught their breath, their legs shaking, sweat pouring down their faces behind the ski masks.

“We'll pause a minute,” said Jordan. “I'm sorry we couldn't take the elevators. They require keycard access and have video monitors. The office is down the hall.”

They walked stiffly but silently through the floor, stopping at an elaborate wooden door. It, too, was locked, and the men spent several minutes closely examining the door and its frame.

“Look carefully,” said Jordan. “We don't want to trigger any alarms.”

Finally, one of the men motioned the other two toward the bottom of the door. Using tools from his belt, he dug around the frame and into the drywall, eventually freeing several wires.

“Good work. Let's deactivate this.”

Jordan examined the wires and cut one of them. Satisfied, he nodded to the others who picked the lock on the door. Inside was an enormous office, and at the far end, along a wall of glass, an oversized desk with a large flat-screen computer monitor on its center. Jordan approached the monitor and knelt down, removing a computer tower from underneath the desk.

He unplugged the computer from the power supply and quickly removed the screws in the case, lifting it and placing it to the side. The motherboard and graphics card glinted in the moonlight streaming in through the windows. He motioned to the other two.

“Search the room, photograph anything you can't take, search the files. We need to be out of here in an hour.”

The other two responded quickly and circulated throughout the room, examining desk drawers, closets, filing cabinets, and looking behind and under every object. Jordan meanwhile bent over the computer and got to work.

He grounded himself with a wrist strap to the chassis and reached around to disconnect the computer data ribbon from the hard drive. With a screwdriver, he removed it from the metal rails and set it on the
desk. He reached into his backpack and removed a device that had its own data ribbon connected to what looked like another hard drive. He connected the hard drive to the device, and the device to AC power. Immediately, a red light went on, and the sounds of drive access could be heard. He then joined the other two men in sweeping the room.

Fifty minutes later, the device on the desk went from red to green, and he walked over and disconnected it. Reversing the previous procedure, he reinstalled the hard drive and closed up the computer, replacing it under the desk. He stuffed the items back inside the pack and shouldered it, stepping from behind the desk and toward the door. He motioned for the other two to follow him.

One of the men gestured to the door. “They'll know we were here.”

Jordan smiled. “After the window damage we did, there is no avoiding that. But we got what we came for. Let's hope it leads us somewhere.”

“We were never with you on this one, Husaam.”

“I'm a lone wolf. Besides, who would be foolish enough to come?”

Cohen stared blankly at the rush hour traffic. The black limo carrying her home was just one more of thousands of cars trapped in a giant parking lot called midtown Manhattan. The driver had discussed with her bodyguard whether to put on the flashing lights, but they had both laughed, realizing that in the current gridlock, they weren't going anywhere no matter what they did. She glanced over at the man assigned to guard her life. Who was he? Did he take seriously the task and risk placed in front of him? Could he really understand the ruthlessness of the organization that sought her life?

The guard traded macho banter with the driver, also an armed bodyguard. Cohen did not really feel safe with these two men, so confident in their prowess, so unappreciative of the true risk she felt every moment. It had only been a week since the horror had descended on her life. Mjolnir had sent its assassins into their lives and had brutally taken people she had known and worked with, had come to care for and support, for so many years. She fought back the tears as she thought of each one, murdered so cruelly and coldly, only because they dared to try to investigate these killers.

Larry Kanter had died in his home. Matt King died quickly, a bullet to the head. Mira was never to share another crazy story from her days as a child in a Serbian village. Or Manuel. Sweet, clumsy Manuel. If he had been securing
all
the FBI's computers, they would never have found his name, his place of residence, or known where to place the bomb that incinerated him inside his car.

Kanter's superiors had insisted on round-the-clock security now, and no one in the division could travel together in order to prevent
multiple fatalities from a single attack. The coldness of the logic was unsettling. She hated being separated from John in this way. More than anything, she needed to be with him everywhere now. FBI agents in the movies were like police officers—always ready to tumble with the bad guys. The truth was, many were just like her—analysts, smart, bookworms, and not expected to encounter violence, despite the general training they received at the academy. The last week had stunned her, shaken her life apart. Even the power of the FBI could not shield her from those who hunted them.

Suddenly, the driver's side window exploded. Blood and glass shards sprayed across the front seat as the driver's head ruptured, snapping to one side, then crashing on the steering wheel and causing the horn to blare continuously. The car lurched forward and crashed softly into the cab in front of them, eliciting a set of expletives audible within the limo.

Cohen screamed. The agent next to her drew his gun and opened the door in a quick motion, stepping outside and raising the weapon. Cohen watched in horror as his gun arm was pinned against the roof while a foot kicked him across the face. Several shots were fired into his frame, his body convulsing and dropping to the ground.

She pulled back against the door next to her, as far away from the driver's side and open door as possible. Suddenly, her door opened from behind her, and she fell out onto the road. Around her, people were screaming and running from the scene. She felt the barrel of a gun against her temple as a firm hand held her by the hair. She closed her eyes and prepared to die.

“If you wish to live, say nothing, do nothing but what we tell you. Do you understand?” an emotionless male voice spoke into her ear.

Cohen opened her eyes and nodded. It didn't make sense, but he had not pulled the trigger. She was still alive. She planned to do whatever she had to in order to stay that way.

“Then get up and move with me to that alley. Quickly!” Cohen saw the gun gesture toward a dim alleyway on the left side of the street. She got to her feet and walked quickly with the man at her side. She
dared not look at him nor at the other men busy around the car. The man walking with her kept his gun in his hand but lowered it, keeping it as hidden from view as possible.

As she stepped on the pavement, a muscular man blocked their way and shoved the man walking beside her to a stop. He had come out of a shop, a bag in one hand, not yet understanding what was transpiring around them. He had noticed Cohen and the forceful treatment she was receiving. A knight in shining armor.

“Hey, buddy, what the hell's going on here? You giving this lady trouble?” Cohen closed her eyes. Several shots rang out, and she felt a push. She opened her eyes to keep from falling over the prone figure that had just dropped to the sidewalk. More screams erupted from the street behind her.
Please, God, help me.

As they entered the alley, the man pressed her hard until she was practically running to the other side. They passed by trash bins and refuse, discarded machinery, and many things she had no chance to process. Within a minute, they exited into the sunlight again, and the man waved her over to a beat-up white van. The back doors swung open as two men jumped out, dressed in utility workers' uniforms. They led her quickly into the van as the man who had dragged her this far spoke into a mouthpiece and surveyed the area. Suddenly a loud explosion from down the alley rocked the block, and pedestrians turned toward the sound in shock. Many raced over to the alley or down parallel streets to find out what had happened. As the doors closed and Cohen was left imprisoned within the walls of the van, she understood. There would be no one to see her pushed into the van, no one to follow them from the events a few moments ago. The men she had seen around the car had rigged it to blow, and the explosion, death, and chaos would make it simple for her abductors to make a clean escape.

The doors opened again, and the man entered. She saw him clearly now, a young man with a military haircut, blond, dressed in nondescript clothing. He carried with him rope and duct tape. The sounds of sirens and screams filled the air outside the van.

“Don't make a sound and you'll live,” he said as he bound her hands
behind her and tied her feet together. Tears trailed down her cheeks as he affixed the tape over her mouth and pushed her onto her back on the padded floor. The van lurched forward into the streets of New York.

John, please, help me…

Jordan was bleary-eyed from hunting through thousands of files—text files, e-mails, log files—trying to glean some hint of Gunn's whereabouts from the rip of his hard drive. He had probably ended his career last night by breaking into Gunn's office, but the time for niceties had passed.

He had wondered whether the man was so secretive that he left nothing behind, no trace, even on a computer that he must have assumed was utterly safe from prying eyes. On more than one occasion, he wished he had Manuel Hernandez from the Savas group with him now—that man knew a thing or two about computers. But William Gunn had seen to it that Hernandez and many others would never be walking the earth again.

In the end, the sleepless night had been worth it. Gunn had not been careful enough to delete from the disk all records of his activities. Jordan gazed at the failing afternoon light with a mixed feeling of dizziness from lack of sleep and elation. Now he knew where that bastard was. What he was doing in Mexico was still a mystery, but the secrecy of his trip and the ruthlessness with which he had sought to crush the investigation told Jordan that this was not an idle excursion. It had purpose written all over it. Where Mjolnir had a strong purpose, there was death waiting.

He swirled the coffee around in his cup but decided he'd had enough caffeine and cold bitterness for one night. He glanced over toward the bedroom door. Vonessa was asleep, exhausted from several days of caring for two sick boys. His grip tightened over the mug. Some would say he was a negligent father for taking the risks he did.
Part of him agreed with them. But another part could not back down from what he felt was his responsibility to the world, to all families, to himself. There were times that demanded risk and sacrifice for the greater good. This was one of those times. He knew what he had to do.

There was little point in going through the motions. After what had happened, the conservatives in the organizations would descend, locking up any fruitful or bold action, giving Gunn too much time. No doubt this was part of the CEO's plans.
Well, my friend, you have a surprise coming.
Jordan was tired of reacting. Time to bring the fight to Gunn.

He opened his laptop and entered the password. He called up a website and entered in the information. Soon he had purchased a round-trip ticket to Mexico. He had some packing to do and arrangements to make once he was south of the border. Most of those plans involved acquiring weapons. He looked back toward the door. He'd call Vonessa's mother to come over. He'd apologize. He'd make it up to them when he got back.