John struggled to stand, then collapsed to the floor. “Oh, hell.”
“You’ve got three minutes,” Nancy said.
Deion knelt and took John’s emergency medical kit from his belt, removed the clotting agent, tore open the paper pouch, and dumped the contents in John’s leg and arm wounds. He saw John’s M11, still in its hip holster a few feet away. It had been blown off the webbing. He grabbed the gun and hauled John to his feet, then bent down and slung the young man over his shoulder, picking him up in a fireman’s carry.
Redman had Morse’s body slung over his body, Stratello and Young both carrying a dead terrorist, and Mark led them down to the vans, his own HK held in front, the bag full of evidence thrown over his shoulder.
He helped John into the back of the lead van. Around them, the street was a mish-mash of lit windows, and men and women watched fearfully from the relative safety of their apartments.
He grabbed a pair of smoke grenades, pulled the pins, and tossed them in each direction. “Taylor, fallback to your pickup position.”
The grenades whumped and began filling the street with billowing clouds of smoke. The smoke would provide them with visible cover, but also contained metals to confound any IR and thermal imaging. They tore off in the vans, screeching to a halt at the end of the block, where Taylor jumped in. Deion took the opportunity to fling another pair of grenades down the street as Redman floored it.
They turned north on a side street as sirens filled the air and were soon heading east again, following a route Redman and his team had mapped the day before.
It was a tense twenty minutes before the sound of wailing sirens receded in the background.
Nancy’s voice crackled through his earpiece. “I’ve diverted a Predator and we’re tracking your movement. You need to get across the border as soon as possible.”
“Understood.”
“How is John?” Eric asked.
He glanced back through the partition and saw John swaying as the van bounced over rough streets. “John?”
John popped the VISOR and the front clamshell opened. His face was pale. “I’ll live. What happened?”
“You already asked that,” Deion said.
“I did?”
Redman gave him a side-long glance. “Boy done had his bell rung.”
“Just sit back and try not to bleed to death,” he ordered.
“I’ll work on that,” John said, before slumping against the van’s wall.
Karen pounded on Dewey’s office door. There was a rattling, then the door opened and Dewey appeared, disheveled, clothes hanging loosely on his lanky frame.
She wrinkled her nose. “When was the last time you showered?”
He smiled, but his eyes were unfocused. “Sorry, got busy. It was a bear putting all the pieces together.”
He ushered her into his office and directed her to one of the empty desks covered by an electrostatic mat. He pointed to a disassembled camera on the mat. “That is a standard PanDigitech CCTV camera. Same model as the ones used in Nashville. Weatherproof, decent resolution, networked back to the DOT’s server farm. Nothing suspicious, right?”
She nodded. “It looks like a regular CCTV.”
“Right,” he agreed, then carefully picked up the circuit board by his fingertips. “This is where things get interesting. The board appears clean. The code is clean. But when I sniffed the traffic, I found a keep-alive packet being sent to an IP in China. It was phoning home.”
Her stomach lurched. “It’s in the hardware, isn’t it?”
“Bingo. The IC chip for the wireless network adapter has the code embedded in the hardware.” He tossed the circuit board up in the air and caught it. “This is some cool shit. Someone knows what they’re doing. I did the same thing back in 2003. Great minds think alike, eh? I pulled some of the same IC’s from a few other devices. They all have the same malware.”
“This can’t be the work of a terror group.”
Dewey clucked his tongue. “It’s not some Al-Qaeda offshoot, I can tell you that.” He dropped the card on the mat. “I tracked the IC manufacturer to South Korea. It’s a conglomerate. They make IC’s for literally everybody. Those IC’s are used by everything. Pretty scary. I’ve written up a briefing. It’s going to take years to track down the equipment that uses that chip and get it replaced.”
A new thought occurred to her. “What about other chips from that manufacturer?”
“A random sampling shows hardware-embedded malware in most of them.”
“We’ve got to run this up to the Old Man.”
“The research is in your inbox. Knock yourself out. I’m going to sleep.”
He turned and began to shuffle away, but she caught his arm. “You’ll get credit for this, Dewey. This is a big find with big implications.”
He yawned. “I don’t need credit. Besides, I have other stuff to work on.”
She watched him stagger to his bedroom, then close the door. She shook her head. All Dewey wanted was a steady supply of interesting problems. Still, she would make sure she mentioned him in her reports.
He woke from his dream, thrashing about wildly before finding the thin blanket and clutching it tightly. He blinked several times, trying to clear his eyes. The bedroom was dimly lit, and he could barely see the brown age-spots on his hand. For a moment, he thought they belonged to a stranger, the weathered and broken hands of an old man. He tried to think, to reconnect to the world, to remember who… and where… he was.
The only thing he remembered was the dream. It was a jumble of images, dark rooms, and hallways, maps of the world hanging from walls of steel huts, unbearable heat as men moved pins around the map. He remembered basic training and a drill instructor named Joseph Frist. He remembered meeting someone important, a short balding man who cursed in a gravelly voice.
Slowly but surely, Smith’s memories returned. He was in his apartment bedroom in DC, a place that hardly felt familiar. His bladder was full and he tried to remember the location of the bathroom. He staggered up and made it in time to void in the toilet. The stream came in starts and stops, and that felt more familiar.
The longer he stood in front of the toilet, the more he remembered. The apartment contained his bed, changes of clothes, and a bare minimum of water and soup cans in the kitchen.
He found his briefcase, a shiny metal box on top of the dresser. Inside was a secure cell phone, a weathered Colt 1911, and a folder. He removed the folder and climbed back into bed, switching on the nightstand lamp. He opened the folder and thumbed through the papers until he found the series of mathematical puzzles that Hobert had given him. He ran through them, trying to clear his mind.
His memory was slipping and there was nothing he could do about it. Hobert was dosing him well above maximum, but it was a race against time.
I’m going to have to tell her. Soon.
His thoughts turned to the man Nancy killed after John Frist stopped Abdullah the Bomber. She had to know he would piece it together, that he would know when Jim Rumple was found dead in his apartment, a bullet in his head. True, Rumple had almost cost Nancy her life, not to mention valuable HUMINT.
He planned on assigning Rumple an unpleasant detail in Eastern Europe before forcing his retirement, but Nancy disrupted those plans. It took considerable time and effort on his part to clean it up, and even more to ensure Eric knew nothing of it.
His daughter’s temperament had improved considerably since her assassination of Rumple, but he wondered if his only child was capable of handling the world without him.