Too damn long!
“Johnny wants to talk to you,” said Telakus, the computer whiz who’d broken into the video system at the Patriot and was feeding data to Givens and the team preparing to enter the hotel.
Massina picked up the handset.
“Chelsea’s up on the seventh floor,” said Johnny. “I’m getting her.”
“What?”
“I saw her.”
Massina turned to Chiang. “Check the surveillance feed on floor seven. Get the face-recognition program online — Johnny says it’s Chelsea.”
“I need to get on the roof. But I want to know what room she’s in. Can you use her GPS in her phone?”
“The terrorists are blocking transmissions,” Massina told him.
“How about with the UAV?”
The penetrating radar aboard the Nightbird UAV was powerful, but it wasn’t designed to identify people inside buildings.
“Maybe if we look at the image,” said Massina, though he was doubtful. “We’ll try. It’s not overhead yet.”
“How long?”
“Soon.”
“I need help to get on the roof,” added Johnny.
“How is the team getting there?”
“It’s just me.”
Massina rubbed his chin.
“Let me get Blake on the line,” he told Givens. “Get to a place where a drone can hover.”
Chelsea had already pushed a chair against the door when she heard the explosions. They were below her somewhere, two or three together, then a few more.
The assault had begun.
She made sure the chair was as tight as possible against the door panel, then stepped back, looking for something else to block the way. The nightstands flanking the bed were bolted to the floor. The bureau with the TV was either too heavy or fastened as well. The only thing was the chair near the window; she carried it over, lifting it just high enough to get it on the first chair.
She’d taken a step back when the door lock sprung open, unlocked by the master key of one of the terrorists. Before she could react, the door rammed against the chairs, pushing forward until it was stopped by the bar lock above the handle.
The man outside yelled at her to open the door.
Something warned her what would happen next: she threw herself back behind the wall that separated the bathroom from the bedroom proper. As she hit the floor, bullets flew through the door.
If I’m quiet, she thought, maybe he’ll think I’m dead.
The Lifter was designed to pick up machinery and heavy parts like bridge supports, not people; the grappling claws were metal and hardly gentle as they clamped around Johnny’s arms.
He shielded his face as best he could as the twin rotors filled the air with a thick mist of dust and grit. A discarded plastic bag and some pieces of paper flew against Johnny’s legs as he was lifted. Blake said something in his earset, but Johnny couldn’t hear over the drone’s engine.
The UAV took him straight up into the air. Johnny’s arms felt as if they would be ripped off his shoulders. He glanced down and immediately wished he hadn’t: the ground seemed to be spinning.
It wasn’t the ground, it was him: between the motion of the helicopter and the wind, his body twisted and swayed, arcing in a nauseating dance. Blake said something — he was trying to tell Johnny how to extend his legs to help brake his momentum — but Johnny couldn’t make out the words. The UAV slowed and tilted, cutting off some of Johnny’s momentum. He forced his eyes open and saw that the roof of the building was to his right, a flat expanse dotted with what looked like sloped aluminum tents — roof shelters for the mechanical equipment. Johnny braced himself as the Lifter darted toward one of the “tents,” aiming to deposit him near an access point to a stairwell. The drone slowed abruptly and he swung forward, not quite as wildly as before.
Blake intended on setting him down, but Johnny had had enough: he took a deep breath and let go, falling a good fifteen feet. His legs saved him — the high-tech prosthetics absorbed most of the energy from the fall, leaving him balanced on his feet.
It was his first step that felled him. His head was still dizzy and his stomach reeling. He threw his arms out, cushioning his fall.
Then he threw up.
“You OK?” asked Blake in his ear.
“Ugh.”
“Telakus has directions for you. We think we have Chelsea’s room.”
“Good.”
The man at the door pounded, but the door held.
Chelsea heard a scream, then realized it was hers.
I’m losing control!
The door cracked; the lock was giving way.
Desperate, she looked for any cover, any barrier that would slow the demon down, cause him pain or delay or anything — anything was better than surrender.
She reached across to the bed, grabbed the covers, grabbed the top mattress. She pulled it across, over her, as she heard the lock snap off its mounts.
Johnny had come equipped with a small pry bar in his backpack, as well as a set of lock picks. He needed neither — the roof door was ajar. He dropped to his knee to sling the pack off; opening it, he took out his AR-15 and what looked like a Spalding rubber ball.
Like the assault rifles the police were equipped with, Johnny’s gun had a telescoping stock and a laser dot, along with a thirty-round magazine and a spare taped to its side; there were two more in his pack. He checked the gun quickly, made sure he was ready, then tossed the ball into the stairwell.
“It’s clear,” said Telakus. The “ball” was actually a video-and-audio array ordinarily used for recording experiments, which was now transmitting a signal back to Smart Metal. Software stabilized the images and analyzed them in about a tenth of the time it would have taken a human to simply scan a still picture.
“Johnny, we think there’s somebody on her floor,” said Telakus. “He’s got a gun.”
“Right or left off the stairs?”
“Your right.”
There was an explosion below. The building shook.
“What the hell?” asked Johnny as he started down.
“One of the bastards in the ballroom blew himself up.”
Massina leaned over the console in the Box, watching intently as the first wave of SWAT officers followed one of his robots into the building. The bot, equipped with a chemical sniffer as well as a video camera, was looking for explosives, but apparently the terrorists hadn’t had time to rig them in that part of the hotel.
Suddenly the screen shook — there had been another explosion offscreen.
“Where?” said Massina.
“The kitchen,” said Telakus. “That’s number two. They had him cornered. There are only three of them left.”
“That’s three too many,” said Massina.
As an FBI agent, Johnny had been trained to deal with hostage situations and had in fact gone through two simulations very similar to this actual situation. But they were buried somewhere deep in his consciousness, pushed away by the adrenaline rocking through his body. He knew he should stop and clear at each landing, but that was impractical now — he needed to get to Chelsea right away; he needed to be there. He really ought to have an entire team behind him; he should have more intelligence, more firepower, more of everything. But the reality was that if he didn’t get there now, if he didn’t kill the terrorist on her floor, she was going to die.
The ball had bounced against a doorjamb and come to rest on the eighth floor. Johnny grabbed it and went down one more floor, throwing himself against the closed door.