The room shook. Static.
"Gregor? Gregor?"
Litt bolted from the bathroom and headed for the bedroom door. The monitor on the dresser showed several people running past in the hall. He tripped over something and fell to the floor. He got to his knees, and his handheld jangled, an incoming call. Without looking at it, he answered.
"Gregor?"
"Hello, Karl," Kendrick Reynolds said.
Litt glanced around the darkened room, half expecting to see the old man standing there, grinning down at him.
"I'm surprised how quickly we found your number," Kendrick said. "Once we knew where to look."
Litt rose to his feet. He had always believed Kendrick's assault, if ever he found Litt, would entail an elite division of commandos quietly killing its way into the compound and slipping into the subterranean complex to kidnap or murder the evil Karl Litt. Explosions didn't fit the model.
"Karl?"
"I'm here." He opened his bedroom door. The corridor fluorescents appeared unaffected. Several were out and others flickered, but they'd been like that as long as Litt could recall. Squinting against the light, he remembered the sunglasses in his hand and slipped them on. The siren blared, piercing his ears.
"You don't think you'll get away, do you?" Kendrick asked. "The sort of air strike we have planned for you will take some time, but I assure you, it's quite comprehensive. The explosions you're feeling now are merely a prelude. My advisors thought it would be prudent to knock out any aircraft you have in the hangars. Next, we'll pelt the surface above your head with earth-penetrating tomography bombs. Those will give the Vikings flying at forty thousand feet with their ESM suites and Inverse-Synthetic Aperture Radar clear pictures of the area's subterranean architecture. We'll see your underground complex as if it were topside."
Litt stopped moving down the corridor. "How . . ."
The sirens stopped.
Kendrick said, "That's better. Did your alarms stop because of a lull in our bombing? I'm sure the next wave will commence shortly."
"How did you figure the underground part?" Litt asked. He could not imagine that Despesorio's information was so detailed.
"You got sloppy, Karl. You let a tracking device get in."
That thing inside Allen Parker. It must be more sophisticated than the devices he had surgically installed in his staff—always under the guise of repairing an "accidental" injury. His could not be detected under so much earth and concrete, and they did not provide the altitude relative to ground level. Leave it to Kendrick to have the best.
He pressed the handheld into his face until his cheek and ear hurt. It was Gregor who had become sloppy, inviting Atropos. He hoped that last interrupted transmission from him marked his death.
"After the Vikings get a handle on the layout, we'll send in the F-15s. They'll drop GBU-28 bombs. You know about those, Karl? Bunker Busters? Forty-seven hundred pounds. Designed to punch through packed earth and twenty-two feet of reinforced concrete before exploding. Boggles my mind, the weapons we have these days. FA-18 Hornets will sweep in next. They'll cover the whole area— especially inside the smoking craters—with Maverick missiles and napalm. That stuff burns at 3,000 degrees, Karl, enough to make your germ just . . . disappear. Want to know what's next?"
Litt ran an arm over the perspiration on his forehead. All the lab doors were open, the workers gone. He went into his private lab, where he squatted in front of a cabinet and opened it, revealing a safe.
The floor shook, a prolonged vibration that cracked the tile. Explosions rumbled in the distance, deep and low. If Kendrick had faithfully described the attack, either the tomography bombing had started or they were still striking at the hangars and the assassins' Cessnas. He hoped the Hummer he had stashed in the jungle was small enough and distant enough to escape the bombing. He hoped he could get to it before the serious ordnance rained down. He hoped he wouldn't stumble into the ground troops Kendrick would surely send in last.
And while he was hoping, he hoped to someday see Kendrick feel the bite of his germ and watch him as he died.
"How can you do this?" he asked. "You're bombing a foreign country."
"Haven't you heard? You're operating the largest methamphetamine laboratory in the world there. Side things too—refined cocaine hydrochloride, heroin, marijuana, a little money laundering for the Colombian and Bolivian cartels. All kinds of nasty stuff we created the Anti-Drug Abuse Control Commission to stamp out. Considering how much anti-drug money Paraguay and Brazil get from us, they were more than happy to cooperate."
Inside the safe was a Halliburton briefcase. Litt pulled it out and stood. Its heft made him feel a little better.
"You realize," Kendrick said, "you might have gotten away if you'd have left the president's family out of your plans. Without his authorization, I would have had to send hired guns. And we've seen recently how ineffective they can be."
"Das gebrabbel. Make sense, Kendrick." He headed for the stairs.
"You could have targeted me without hearing so much as a raised voice." A pause. The clinking of ice against glass near the receiver. The old Schlauberger was having a cocktail. "My time's almost up anyway."
Footfalls slapping against the tile startled him. He turned as a man ran past, lab coat flapping. The man rounded the next corner, going for the exit.
Litt moved the handheld closer to his ear and heard, ". . . was the only thing that allowed me to move so quickly."
"What? What was?"
"Hold on a mo—"
Litt heard him speak to someone. The background noise was a cacophony of voices, some raised in excitement, others droning out information. Litt grew incensed at the thought that Kendrick's room hummed with the activity of his, Litt's, destruction.
After a moment, Kendrick came back on. "Excuse me, Karl. We have a lot going on."
He pictured Kendrick's smug expression. He said, "Du willst mich wohl fiir dumm! This isn't over, Kendrick. You're too late."
"You mean your hit list? The people you infected? Yes, your bitterness, your vengeance, will be felt, if that pleases you. But that's where it ends, Karl. You will have killed them in vain. The media will assume some cult infected them through a contaminate in their food or drink or injected them and then sent out a list of victims. Cruel, but nothing else. They will never hear from you. They will never know why." He paused, then added, "We'll probably frame a militant group, take them out of the picture, and make our citizens feel safe again. In a few years, even their grief will fade."
Litt arrived at the door to the laboratory wing. He moved his face to the facial thermogram. Nothing happened. His heart wedged in his throat. He looked into the black pane again, his reflection glaring back. The door clicked open. As he started up the stairs, he said, "I'll save you a spot in hell, old man."
"You do that, Karl."
He heard a click on the line, then nothing. He growled and shoved the handheld into his pocket. At the top of the stairs, he pushed through the door into the sun and the sound of droning planes.
ninety-three
Convinced they had been spotted and fired upon by a guard with some sort of monster-gun, Julia and Stephen scuttled back down the chimney as fast as they could. Julia anticipated her next moves: roll away from the ladder to make room for Stephen; grab the flashlight; draw the Sig Sauer; run like hares for the adit. Stephen clambered down right above her.
He was counting—"Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen."
"What's that?" she asked, breathless, thinking he somehow knew when the next assault would strike.