‘I need your bike,’ Ethan replied. ‘If I don’t use it, we may be facing World War Three.’
The bikers stared at him for a moment and then they chuckled grimly. Their leader, a man with a thick and drooping moustache that framed his thin lips, smiled back at Ethan.
‘Well why didn’t you say so? I’ll call Iron Man for you.’
Ethan didn’t want to shoot them, but the man with the blade moved toward Ethan so he reached beneath his jacket and whipped his pistol out.
‘Bad idea,’ he snapped at the knifeman.
The knifeman smiled as his companions immediately pulled knives of their own and sneered at Ethan.
‘Real bad idea!’
Ethan didn’t have time to argue with the bikers and he sure as hell couldn’t fight all four of them but he could see that despite their bulging biceps and chests they were old, fat and out of shape. He jumped backwards onto the Harley’s seat and swung one leg over the saddle as with one hand he closed the clutch. Then he stamped down on the gear lever with his boot even as the bikers’ lunged toward him and swung their blades. The Harley’s engine changed note and Ethan opened the clutch a fraction as he reached back and twisted the throttle.
The Harley thundered into motion, the big — bore engine jerking Ethan away from the bikers’ grasp as two of the blades flashed down and scraped across the bike’s tail. Ethan let the bike roll across the lot, looking over his shoulder as he turned for the exit between the ranks of cars. The bikers lumbered in pursuit, screaming obscenities at him, but their faces were already sheened with sweat and he could see that they would never catch him. Their leader threw his knife, which whistled past Ethan’s shoulder and clattered against a parked Ford as Ethan left them behind.
Ethan reached the exits, stopped the bike and then turned around on the seat before kicking the Harley back into gear. Within minutes he was riding the up ramp onto the freeway and began scything through the traffic heading north toward the Capitol.
The only way to pin down Abrahem now was to find the vehicle that would be used to control whomever his people had implanted, which Ethan knew would have to be capable of emitting signals with a high enough intensity to break through the lousy reception range in the vicinity of the White House. He rode one — handed as he pulled his cell phone out and dialed a number, gambling that his elevated position on the freeway might get a signal through.
XLI
‘Lopez.’
Nicola Lopez answered her cell on the second ring as she lingered on the south lawn and watched hundreds of dignitaries waited patiently for the President, the First Lady and the President of the People’s Republic of China to emerge from the White House.
‘It’s me,’ Ethan said, sounding as though he was in the middle of a hurricane.
‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s the cell phones!’ Ethan yelled. ‘They’re using the cell phones to relay their signals! They must have a booster somewhere, somebody acting to get the signal through the electromagnetic shielding around the White House!’
Lopez covered one ear as she struggled to hear Ethan above a sudden rapturous applause as the guests on the White House lawn stood, the President of the United States emerging from the White House with his wife and the Chinese President beside him.
‘Do we have a suspect or a target?’
Ethan shouted from the other end of the line.
‘The Chinese are involved, possibly intending to target the President himself but I can’t be sure! There’s got to be somebody in the crowd who’s helping them! Mitchell was here… took the hard drive… could be there….’
‘Ethan you’re breaking up!’ Lopez gasped. ‘Do we have a target?!’
‘… likely to be… who’s helping them… apprehend them now…’
The line went dead in Lopez’s ear and she cursed as she shoved the cell back into her pocket and scanned the crowd. With them all standing and clapping, she figured that nobody would be able to fiddle with their cell phones. Maybe they wouldn’t have to do anything at all, just keep them switched on and let the Chinese hack their way into an unwitting assassin’s mind and unleash hell across the South Lawn.
The only people carrying weapons were the Secret Service and Lopez, and with a sudden start she realized that she could have been implanted. Her weariness clouded her thinking, made her question herself and for a moment she was lost in a delirium of silence, her eyes focusing on nothing and her legs feeling numb as she swayed on the spot. The applause before her died down and a blissful silence enveloped her as she literally began to sleep on her feet.
‘Lopez.’
She jerked awake and looked to her right as a Secret Service Agent peered at her. ‘You done napping?’
Lopez nodded, both ashamed and angry at herself as she focused on the gathering before her. She watched as the two Presidents, accompanied by their wives, walked down onto the lawns and a plethora of dignitaries moved forward to greet them.
Lopez scanned the crowds but she could see nothing that suggested an assassin was preparing an attack. Ethan had mentioned Mitchell and that he had grabbed a hard drive of some kind. Presumably the Chinese had been involved and perhaps that hard drive had contained the data necessary to control the assassin, whoever they may be.
Lopez’s microphone hissed and she heard Jarvis’s voice on the line.
‘Lopez, we’ve got a plan. We’ve got a feed here from the Chinese computers we captured, and we’re trying to hack into it now and figure out who has been implanted at the ceremony. It turns out they were watching through the eyes of whoever Abrahem Nassir managed to implant in Iraq, but they couldn’t figure out who it was. You need to get to the Horsepower bunker and relay the feed through from us here at the DIA.’
‘You can see what they see?’
‘If we can hack the signal,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The Chinese were using a modulating frequency to hide their activities and they don’t have a way of deactivating it after the computers were damaged in the crash — it’s all part of their state’s efforts to prevent their exposure here in the United States. If the computers were shut down their signals were scrambled and erased. Hellerman’s working on a code to reactivate the signals based on the original modulation but it’s taking time. You need to be ready.’
Lopez looked at the Secret Service Agent alongside her, who nodded once as he heard the same transmission.
‘I’ll take you down there but we only have a few minutes. The ceremony’s begun and if they’re going to make a move, it’s going to be real damned soon!’
‘Get on it, Nicola,’ Jarvis urged. ‘This is the only way to stop the attack without causing a major international incident!’
‘Hurry it up!’
Doug Jarvis followed Hellerman like a ghostly shadow as he hurried into the National Security Agency’s Identity Mine Watch Room and rushed toward a vacant seat among the operating consoles. He sat down and immediately began accessing files, then slowed as he saw the screens arrayed before him showing the world through the eyes of criminals.
‘Wow,’ he uttered as he stared in amazement at the technical fecundity. ‘I wouldn’t have believed this possible in my wildest dreams.’