The second problem was a two-truck miniconvoy coming in hot and fast from the east. Six men and a driver in each truck. We almost didn’t spot them because their trucks were shielded with the latest in stealth tech — radar-repelling scales that contained thousands of tiny cameras and screens so that it took real-time images from its surroundings and painted them all over its shell. You could look at it and look right through it. Only a focused thermal scan can peek inside, but it has to be a tight beam. We were able to do that because of the one flaw in that kind of technology — human eyes. One of our spotters saw the thing roll past. Video camouflage works great at a distance. Up close, not so much, which is why it’s mostly used on planes or ships. The science is cutting edge but it’s not Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. Not yet, anyway.
If I wasn’t out of here real damn fast I was going to get caught between three hostile forces — the guards here, the incoming military convoy, and whoever was in those two trucks. I did not think this was going to be a matter of embarrassed smiles, handshakes, and a trip to the local bar for a couple of beers.
I’d wasted too much time with the laser grid, and now I could feel each wasted second being carved off of my skin.
I quickly knelt by the door and fished several devices from my pockets. The first was a signal counter, which is a nifty piece of intrusion technology that essentially hacked into the command programs of something like — say — a keycard scanner. It’s proprietary MindReader tech, so it used the supercomputer’s software to ninja its way in and rewrite the target software so that it believed the new programs were part of its normal operating system. In the right hands, it’s saved millions, possibly billions, of lives by helping the Department of Military Sciences stop the world’s most dangerous terrorists. If it ever fell into the wrong hands, MindReader and her children could become as devastating a weapon as the device I was here to steal.
Which is why each of the devices I carried had a self-destruct subroutine. If I died, they blew up. If they were too far away from me for too long, they blew up. If Bug, Dr. Hu or Mr. Church hit the right button, they blew up.
Such a comfort to know that all the devices hanging from my belt near all my own proprietary materials were poised to go boom.
I placed the device on the side of the keycard housing and pressed a button. A little red light flickered, flickered, and then turned green. I plugged a USB cable into it and attached the other end to a second device I had, which was flat gray and the size of a deck of playing cards. After too many seconds, a green light appeared on it as well, and a slim plastic card slid from one end.
I removed it, took a breath, and swiped it through the keycard slot.
And prayed.
Nothing happened.
My balls tried to climb up inside my body.
I swiped it again.
Nothing.
“Shit,” I said.
And tried one more time.
Slower.
There was a faint click, and then the big red door shifted inward by almost an inch.
I let out the air that was going stale in my chest. My balls stayed where they were. They didn’t trust happy endings.
When I bent my ear close to the doorframe, all I could hear was machine noise. A faint hum and something else that went ka-chug, ka-chug. Could have been anything from a centrifuge refining plutonium to a Kenmore dishwasher. I don’t know and didn’t much care. All I wanted was the package.
No voices, though. That was key.
I nudged the door so that it swung inward, slowly and only slightly. Light spilled out. Fluorescent. Bright. The machine sounds intensified.
No one shouted. No voice spoke at all.
I pushed the door open enough to let me take a look inside. Not one of those dart-in, dart-out looks you use in combat situations. When there’s no action, the speed of that kind of movement was noticeable in an otherwise still room. I moved slowly and tried not to embrace any expectations of what I’d see. Expectations can slow you, and if this got weird, even losing a half step could get me killed.
The room was large and, as far as I could see, empty.
I held another breath as I stepped inside.
The ceiling soared upward into shadows at least fifty yards above me. Banks of fluorescent lights hung down on long cables. Bright light gleamed on the surfaces and screens and display panels of rank after rank of machines. Computers of some kind, though what they were being used for or why they were even here was unknown. I’ve seen a lot of industrial computer setups and there had to be eighty, ninety million dollars’ worth of stuff here. Then I spotted a glass wall beyond which were rows upon rows of modern mainframe supercomputers, and I rounded my estimate up to a quarter billion dollars. The floor was polished to mirror brightness.
I tapped my earbud hoping to get Bug back on the line.
Nothing.
I faded to the closest wall and ghosted along it, taking a lot of small, quick steps. There was a second door at the far end of the big room. If any of my intel was reliable, the artifact had to be in there, or near there.
Fifty feet to go, and I was already reaching for another of the bypass doohickeys when a man stepped from between two rows of computers. A security guard. Young, maybe twenty-two. With a gun.
He stared at me.
I stared at him.
His eyes bugged, and he opened his mouth to let out a scream of warning.
Chap. 4
There are times in combat when you have options. You can take someone prisoner. You can use some hand-to-hand stuff and subdue him, leave him bound and gagged. Or you overpower him and juice him with some animal tranquilizers.
Those are options that let the moment become an anecdote for both of you, to allow it to be a story — however painful or embarrassing — to tell later on. Maybe over beers with your buddies, maybe at your court martial, maybe to your wife as she holds you to her breast in the dark of night.
Those are moments when mercy and a regard for human life are allowable elements in the equation. They’re moments when even if blood is spilled, it’s merely a price to be paid. A small price. No one dies. The price doesn’t pay the ferryman’s fee.
This wasn’t one of those moments.
This was the kind of moment when there is no allowance for human life, for compassion, for choice.
The guard opened his mouth to scream and I killed him.
That’s the only way the moment could end because there wasn’t time for anything else. If he screamed, I’d die. If he screamed, the artifact would slip beyond the reach of people who wanted it stored and studied rather than used.
So he had to die. This young man. This peasant-soldier working for people who had no regard at all for his life.
Nor, in that terrible moment, did I.
As his mouth opened I moved into him, intruding inside his personal envelope of mental and physical safety. My left hand cupped the back of his neck, and I struck him under the Adam’s apple with the open Y of the space between thumb and index finger. The blow slammed the side of the primary knuckle of the index finger against the eggshell-fragile hyoid bone. He stopped breathing. His face instantly turned a violent red and seemed to expand as he tried to drag air in through an impossible route. I swung him around, turning him so that his panicked face was pointed to the ceiling as I dropped to my right knee and broke his back over my left.
It all took one second.
One bad second that changed his world and broke a hole in the lives of everyone he knew and everyone who loved him, and slammed the door on every experience he would ever have. Bang. That fast.