“She still to the right?” he asked Telakus.
“Radar has her there. We can’t see the hall. We lost the video from the security camera when the SWAT team went in,” added Telakus. “They killed the backup power.”
“I’m throwing the ball.”
Johnny slipped open the door and tossed the gadget, then, without waiting for Telakus to tell him if it was clear or not, he threw himself out into the hallway, rolling on the floor and then leaping up, an easy target had the terrorist been watching.
“You’re clear,” said Telakus. “Jesus, wait for me.”
Johnny kept moving, scrambling forward. “Where’s the room?”
“Fifty feet, on your right, down that little hall — he’s going into the room!”
Desperate, Johnny lifted his gun and fired down the empty hall.
Chelsea felt the beast entering the room, plunging past the door, stumbling. She had pulled the mattress over her, and even if there had been light in the room she couldn’t have seen him. Yet she knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, what he looked like — five-eight, on the lighter side, scraggly beard, fanatical eyes.
There was gunfire, a burst in the hallway.
Then a boom louder than any she had ever heard before.
A blast of hot wind shot from the room as if a door had opened on hell. Still in the main hall, Johnny fell against the wall, more from shock than anything. He bounced, fell, got back on his feet, and then ran to the hall with Chelsea’s room.
Too late. Too damn late.
The corridor smelled of ammonia and steel and blood and something burning. Johnny started to cough. He covered his mouth with his arm, thinking it would make it easier to breathe.
“Johnny? Johnny?”
Telakus called to him from far away. The blast had dulled his hearing.
Rather than answering, Johnny pulled the headset from his ear and unclipped the mic. He stuffed the unit into his pocket: he didn’t want anyone to hear.
The door to Chelsea’s room had been blown off its hinges. It sat on a slant, propped against mangled furniture. Johnny pushed it to the side, but he couldn’t get it entirely out of the way. Squeezing through, he stared at the destruction.
The blast had scorched the far corner of the room and broken the window and drapes, leaving a jagged hole. It had also torn the terrorist into pieces. His legs and the bottom half of his torso lay near the debris at the door. The rest of him had largely disintegrated.
Except for his head. Johnny saw it as he walked into the room. It lay wedged in the corner, red, unrecognizable as anything human, yet somehow obvious.
He went and kicked it. It was like kicking a rotted pumpkin.
Except… it moaned.
Johnny jumped back, horrified.
“Help me out of here.”
Johnny whirled around. The mattress was moving. Chelsea Goodman emerged from underneath it, face blank, eyes wide, staring up at him.
“Johnny?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“I’m alive,” Chelsea told him. “Oh, my God, I’m alive.”
A Need to Avenge
Flash forward
Massina felt a sudden attack of nerves as he was called to the podium. He hadn’t expected the President to be here.
Not that he was intimidated, exactly. Just that he was suddenly aware that this was a very big deal. There were news cameras all over the place; what he said would be broadcast live to the entire world.
Which he wouldn’t have minded, except that he hadn’t prepared a speech; he hadn’t considered what to say. No one had said it would be this important.
Massina took a breath and forced a smile. He remembered the rule one his grammar-school teachers had given him about speaking before an audience: Talk from the heart and you won’t go wrong.
“Mr. President, Governor, Mayor, thank you for coming.” Massina tilted the microphone down, making sure it was directly in line with his mouth. “Everyone else has spoken about how we’ll rebuild,” said Massina. “We will. And we’ll do more than that. Much more.”
He stopped talking. It was as if his mind had emptied.
What did he feel?
Something lofty, inspirational?
Hell, no. He felt a need for justice.
Revenge.
Right this wrong.
“I tell you something, from the bottom of my heart, speaking for everyone from Boston, whether you live in town or not,” he said. “We’re going to get those bastards. We’re going to wipe them from the face of the earth. We will. And no one will mess with us again.”
The crowd hesitated, then broke into a thunderous applause as he left the microphone.
17
Real time
One hundred and seventy-three people were killed in Boston during the Easter Sunday attacks. Seventeen terrorists also died, but they didn’t count as people, at least not to Louis Massina.
Massina attended most of the funerals. The first convinced him to go to them all. It was a service for a young man named Joseph Achmoody.
Massina had met the teenager when he received a limb crafted by Massina’s company a year before. He remembered their conversation before the operation: seeking to reassure him, Massina had showed him his own prosthetic arm, removing the plastic “skin” to let him have a good look at the titanium “bones.”
“Yours will be even better than this,” he promised. “Lighter, stronger, and it can grow.”
“Grow?”
That always got the kids. How could a fake arm grow?
But that part was easy — a simple operation extended the skeleton. Assuming the patient wasn’t squeamish — about half were — he or she could even watch.
No, the real art and science were in the way the devices worked seamlessly, or almost seamlessly, with the brain. Translating nerve impulses into actual movement — you could set that out in a formula, and not a particularly complicated one either. But to make it work in the real world, to make it work without a hitch, despite fatigue or something as bizarre as magnetic interference — there was the difficulty. The fact that Massina’s scientists and doctors had managed to do it only increased Massina’s genuine admiration for the original workings of the human body. To do this all on the fly as it were — to construct life in “real time”—now, there was the magnificence of Nature, and through Nature, God.
As he stood at the back of the church watching Joseph Achmoody’s funeral mass conclude, Massina couldn’t help but feel immense loss. The unfairness of his death ate at him. The kid had barely entered his teens; most likely he hadn’t even had a real kiss yet.
And somehow, the fact that the church was less than a quarter full bothered Massina even more. The kid was a martyr, yet only a handful of people had taken the time to honor him and comfort the family. That, too, seemed wrong. Massina, in a rare and uncharacteristic show of emotion, made a point to go to the mother and father and directly express his condolences.
Walking away, he decided he would go to as many of the others as his schedule permitted, to bear witness, to honor the dead. And he made sure that his schedule permitted the absolute maximum possible.