The fourth drone took care of that. I hoped desperately that our source was right, and Sophie’s cell was underground, on the other side of the building. The fifth flew straight into the massive, jagged aperture in the building and erupted inside. That final explosion was the one that mattered. It was much quieter than the first four.
It had all happened in thirty seconds.
I looked around. There were no soldiers in sight. Lisa already had her gas mask in hand. I had rehearsed putting on my mask while in Dubai, but my hands had lost their fluency, the straps seemed foreign, incomprehensible. For a moment I feared disaster. Then Lisa’s strong fingers were over mine, arranging the mask on my face.
“Come on,” she said, her voice muffled, “move.”
As we dashed for the sundered prison walls we heard a violent and bloodcurdling noise, like the fabric of reality itself being torn. The sound of jets being scrambled. Too little too late.
The holes the drones had opened in the walls were sufficiently massive that we hardly had to scramble over any rubble. We had more explosives with us, to open any blocked passageways, but it wasn’t required, to my relief. Time had never been more of the essence.
The air inside the prison had an odd visual texture, a shimmer like some kind of transparent smoke, warping but not obscuring vision. Men and women in uniforms and civilian garbs lay collapsed in hallways and doorways. They looked dead, but I hoped I knew better.
The first drones had been aimed at an empty corner of the prison. The fifth and final drone had carried homemade nerve gas, courtesy of the twin Grassfire biohackers, much like what the Russians had used against the terrorists who had held a Moscow theatre hostage a decade ago: odorless, almost invisible, it would quickly render unconscious everyone who breathed in even a trace. But guaranteed nonlethal, the twins had assured us.
We raced down a concrete hall, past fallen soldiers and CIA agents. The steel doors at its end were shut. Lisa produced a card, inserted it into the reader, pressed her finger against a scanner. The doors slid open: LoTek’s work again. We dashed down stark passageways, into a stairwell, down a floor, through another secured door. A low siren yodelled relentlessly up above.
We didn’t know exactly where Sophie was, and we didn’t have much time, but we did know she was the prison’s only resident; and despite LoTek’s disavowal of the notion, we got lucky. Sophie lay curled in fetal position on a bunk behind the first door we opened, shivering with terror. The gas hadn’t filtered down to the cells yet.
When I saw her it felt like being struck by lightning.
“Miss Warren,” Lisa said, holding out a third gas mask, “you need to put this on.”
She rolled over, stared at us wide-eyed, half-panicked. “It’s happening,” she hissed. “I told you. The Russians. They didn’t wait for the G8. It’s too late for anything now. It’s started.”
I said, “This from the same woman who’s spent her whole life telling me not to jump to unwarranted conclusions on insufficient evidence.”
Our faces were obscured and our voices muffled by the gas masks, but my words, intonation, and body language were enough: her jaw dropped open and she gaped at me, transfixed by the spear of recognition. “James?”
“Here’s a crazy idea, let’s have the heartwarming reunion after the prison break,” Lisa suggested, and stepped forward to force the gas mask on Sophie. She didn’t resist. She seemed frozen by the shock of my impossible appearance. I couldn’t help but enjoy her reaction a little.
“Come on, clock’s ticking,” Lisa said, draping a lanyard with an ID card over Sophie’s gas-masked head. Her point was punctuated by another distant explosion. “That’s our getaway cover. Move.”
Chapter 70
We exited the prison less than three minutes after we entered. That had always been our only hope: either blink-and-you-miss-it smash-and-grab, or disaster. Between the drones, the nerve gas, LoTek’s hacks, and LSA Python’s red-alert lockdown policy, we just might escape before the US military and/or CIA began to realize that this was not an aerial assault but a prison break. So far everything was going perfectly. I could tell by the way that we hadn’t been shot, blown up, or captured yet.
“Where is everybody?” Sophie asked, through the mask. LSA Python seemed to have been entirely depopulated during our brief interregnum.
“Run,” Lisa said. “Red alert won’t last forever.”
I heard an incoming drone. Sophie started, grabbed Lisa and pulled her backwards.
She shrugged Sophie off angrily. “It’s one of ours, you idiot! Come on!”
She set off at a dead run along the nearest barrier wall. Sophie and I followed. I wondered when anyone had last called Sophie an idiot. Halfway there I glanced over my shoulder, like Lot’s wife, and watched another Grassfire drone dive into a distant empty patch of real estate and explode. The idea was to lure reaction teams elsewhere.
“Come on!” Lisa shouted.
I gave up on gawking and concentrated on running. We continued around the corner of the wall, and I nearly ran into the military ambulance waiting for us, with Jesse behind the wheel. It started moving even before we closed the doors.
“On the stretcher, both of you,” Lisa ordered us, as she peeled off her gas mask. “On your backs.”
I followed orders, as did Sophie, for once in her life too stunned to do anything but obey. Lisa ripped my gas mask off hard enough that I protested at the strap-burn, and replaced it with an oxygen mask. The pure O2 was cold and had strange mouthfeel.
“I need to hook you up,” Lisa muttered, “hang on.”
She had an IV in her hands. We were rattling forward at high speed, and I feared for my veins, but she chose a calm moment and caught a blood vessel with the needle first time out.
“Believe it or not,” Lisa said so softly that only I could hear, her face drawn, “my mom made me help with her needles sometimes.” She shook her head. “Funny what you think of when the shit goes down, isn’t it?”
I said, “I was just thinking a poisoned gas mask would be a really ironic murder weapon.” The oxygen mask muffled my words.
She chuckled, and the pain-lines smoothed from her face. “True dat.”
“Can I ask questions now?” Sophie asked desperately.
“No, shut up.”
Sophie had recovered enough to ignore that command. “Those drones. Grassfire.”
“Not bad for a bunch of hackers from twenty different countries throwing shit together on short notice, huh?” I could hear the grin in Jesse’s voice. “Drones come in, they call in a red alert and get the whole base to hunker down, because they can’t imagine anyone inside might be responsible. You’d be amazed how many warfighters are in Grassfire. Subvert from within.”
“Holy shit.”
“Don’t get too impressed. We’re not out yet. We need to be gone before they clear the alert and start figuring out what happened. Fifteen minutes if we’re lucky.”
The ambulance began to slow down.
“Play almost dead,” Lisa said. “You just got hit by a gas attack. We need to fly you out of here to a specialist facility.”
I nodded, closed my eyes and concentrated on method acting. It wasn’t hard. I had after all spent most of the last two weeks sick and weak with stress, fear, adrenalin and exhaustion.
The ambulance stopped. A voice that sounded like a teenage girl’s asked to see IDs. Lisa plucked mine from my chest.
“We need to get them to Kuwait immediately.” I heard the strain in Jesse’s voice and wondered if it was an act or he was genuinely scared of getting caught. The former, I reassured myself. Jesse was never scared. The world was Jesse’s plaything.