We found one room in which a large piece of some unidentifiable equipment hung from a chain hoist. From the scattering of tools and the droplight that still burned it looked like a work in active progress. There was no one around. Everyone must have gone to investigate the fire the Kid had set and, like most employees would, was probably stalling before heading back to work.
I still had the Beretta in my hands and we moved through a building that was empty and silent.
That all changed in a heartbeat.
Two men rounded the right-hand side of the T-juncture while we were still twenty feet away. Both wore coveralls stained with grease, and I knew they had to be the mechanics working on the equipment. They were deep in conversation, speaking German with an Austrian accent, when they saw us. They froze, eyes bugging in their heads, mouths opened in identical “ohs” of surprise as they stared down the barrels of three guns. I put the laser sight of my Beretta on the forehead of the bigger of the two men and put my finger to my lips.
All he had to do was nothing. All he had to do was stay silent and not try to be a hero.
Some people just don’t get it.
He half-turned and drew a fast breath to scream and I put one through his temple. Top took the other with two side-by-side shots in the center of his chest. They hit the floor in a sprawl.
If Lady Luck would have cut us a single frigging break we’d have been past them and into the complex within a few seconds. But she was in a mood today. There were other people behind them, out of our line of sight, farther down the side corridors.
People started screaming.
Then people started firing guns.
A moment later the alarms sounded.
So much for stealth.
Chapter Seventy-Five
The Dragon Factory
Sunday, August 29, 3:17 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 43 minutes E.S.T.
The three businessmen from China stood wide-eyed and slack jawed, all pretenses at emotional aloofness lost in the moment. Behind the glass, perched on the twisted limb of a tallow tree, its wings folded along the sleek lines of its sinuous body, was a dragon.
The creature turned its head toward them and stared through the glass for a long minute, occasionally flicking its flowing whiskers. It blinked slowly as if in disdain at their surprise.
One of the men, the senior buyer, broke into a huge grin. He bowed to the dragon, bending very low. His two younger associates also bowed. And just for the hell of it Hecate and Paris bowed, too. It might help close the deal, though both of them knew that this deal was already closed.
“Does… does…,” began the senior buyer-a fat-faced man named Chen-“can it…?”
Paris smiled. “Can it fly?” He reached out and knocked sharply on the window. The sudden sound startled the dragon, and it leaped from its perch, its snow-white wings spreading wider than the arm span of a tall man, and the creature flapped away to sit in a neighboring tree. The enclosure was designed for maximum exposure, so even though the dragon could move away, it couldn’t hide.
Chen murmured something in Mandarin that Paris did not catch. Neither of the Twins could speak the language. All of the business with these buyers had been conducted in English.
“How?” said Chen in English, turning toward the Twins.
“Bit of a trade secret,” said Paris. He was actually tempted to brag, because the creation of a functional flying lizard was the most complicated and expensive project he and Hecate had undertaken. The animal in the enclosure was a patchwork. The wings came from an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body was mostly a monitor lizard. There were a few other bits and pieces of genes in the mix, and so far the design had been so complicated that most of the individual animals had died soon after birth or been born with unexpected deformities from miscoding genes. This was the only one that appeared healthy and could fly.
The really difficult part was designing the animal for flight. It had the hollow bones of a large bird and the attending vascular support to keep those bones healthy. They’d also had to give it an assortment of genes to provide the muscle and cartilage to allow it to flap its wings. Unfortunately, they had not identified the specific gene-or gene combinations-that would give it an instinctive knowledge of aerodynamics. So they’d spent hours with it in an inflated air room of the kind used at carnivals and kids’ parties, tossing the creature up and hoping that it would discover that those great leathery things on its back were functional wings. The process was frustrating and time-consuming, and the animal had only recently begun flapping, and the short flight it had just taken was about the extent of its range. More like a chicken thrown from a henhouse roof than a soaring symbol of China’s ancient history. The heavy foliage in the enclosure helped to mask the awkwardness of its flight. The entire process had been a bitch. A forty-one-million-dollar bitch. And the damn thing was a mule, unable to reproduce.
But at least it was pretty, and it more or less flew. Paris hoped it would live long enough for them to sort out all of the genetic defects so they could actually sell one. This one was display only. A promise to get the Chinese to write a very, very large check.
Paris thought he could hear the scratching of the pen even now.
The three Chinese buyers stood in front of the glass for almost half an hour. They barely said a word. Paris was patient enough to wait them out. When the spell finally lifted-though they still looked quite dazed-Paris ushered them to a small table that had been set with tea and rice cakes. The table had a view of the dragon, but it wasn’t a great view. That was Hecate’s suggestion.
“If they can’t see the damn thing,” she’d said, “they’ll get impatient. They’ll want to close the deal so they can go back and gape at it.”
Paris liked the tactic.
Before the tea was drunk, before it had even begun to cool, the buyers had placed an order for three full teams of Berserkers. The total purchase price was the development price of the dragon with a whole extra zero at the end. The Chinese had been too dazzled and distracted to do more than token haggling.
The deal closer was Paris’s promise to provide them with a dragon of their very own. Just as soon as they managed to make another one. Which, as far as he was concerned, was a couple of days before Hell froze over.
Chapter Seventy-Six
The Hive
Sunday, August 29, 3:26 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 34 minutes E.S.T.
Four guards rushed the corner and they did it the right way, laying down a barrage to stall us and then putting just enough of themselves around the corner to aim their guns high and low. It was nice.
I threw a grenade at them.
We ran through the smoke and screams and took the corner ourselves. The side corridor was choked with people who were fleeing back from the blast, tripping over one another, trampling the fallen, getting in the way of armed resistance. The opposite side corridor led to a ten-foot dead end and a closed door.