Dale Brown, Jim Defelice
Act of Revenge
Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.
Data sheet
Louis Messina — scientist and entrepreneur, proprietor of Smart Metal, deeply religious; lost his hand and his wife in a car accident as a young man; never remarried
Chelsea Goodman — project engineer at Smart Metal; genius at math, young, petite, creative
Johnny Givens — young, athletic FBI agent on Jenkins’s task force
Yuri Johansen — veteran CIA officer, in charge of a covert antiterror action group primarily operating overseas
Ghadab min Allah — nom de terror of Samir Abdubin, roughly, “God’s wrath.” More demon than man, with a fetish for knives, especially ornate khanjars, which he uses to slit victims’ throats
Shadaa — Ghadab’s paramour
Boston & suburbs — birthplace of freedom, hardscrabble values, great Italian food, and the best baseball team in the world
Palmyra, Syria — city in Syria occupied by ISIS/Daesh, used as sanctuary by Ghadab
Bot — Smart Metal slang for robot that can function to some degree on its own, in contrast to mechs and industrial robots designed for specific, stationary tasks such as welding or chip making. Smart Metal constructs all types
Mech — Smart Metal slang for robots that are preprogrammed for specific tasks but retain more flexibility than industrial robots
Autonomy — ability of bot or other entity to “think” or make decisions without direct commands from operator
UAV — unmanned aerial vehicle, commonly referred to as a “drone”; Smart Metal UAVs can operate without direct human guidance
Obscenity
Flash forward
Louis Massina paced back and forth in the small high-security area, worried, anxious, and angry.
But most of all, impotent. Boston was under attack. The lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of his friends were directly threatened. One of his closest employees, a young woman with tremendous promise, was among the hostages.
Maybe even dead.
And all he could do, for all his money, for all his inventions — his robots, his drones, his computers, his software — was walk back and forth, trying desperately to suppress what could not be suppressed.
Anger. Rage. The enemy of reason, yet the core of his being, at least at this moment.
There were other alternatives. Prayer, for one.
Prayer is impotence. Prayer is surrender.
The nuns who taught him would slap his face for thinking that. They held the exact opposite: Prayer was strength, tenfold.
But while in many ways Massina was a man of faith, he had never been much given to prayer. In his mind, actions spoke more effectively than words. Prayers were all well and good, but they worked — if they worked at all — on a realm other than human.
And the action needed now was completely human. Not even the Devil himself could have concocted the evil his city faced.
Light flashed in the center of the far-right monitor.
“They’re going in,” said the operator watching the hotel where Massina’s employee had been taken hostage. The light had come from a small explosion at the side of the building. “They’re going in.”
Almost in spite of himself, Massina started to pray.
1
Real time
There were few better hotels in Boston than the Patriot Hotel if you wanted to soak up the city’s history: city hall was practically next door, Faneuil five minutes away. You could catch a trolley for the Old Town tour a block or two down the street. Bunker Hill was a hike, but then the British had found that out as well. The rooms were expensive — twice what they would go for at similarly appointed hotels nearby — but money had never been a major concern for Victoria Goodman, Chelsea Goodman’s favorite aunt. Victoria had gotten a job as a secretary for Microsoft very soon after it started, and when she cashed out her stock in the early 1990s, invested in real estate in and around San Francisco, most notably Palo Alto and Menlo Park — the future homes of Facebook and Google. Victoria had that kind of luck.
Despite her luck, and her money, Victoria was especially easygoing, self-assured yet casual. She met Chelsea in the hotel lobby wearing a blue-floral draped dress that showed off toned upper arms and legs that remained trim and shapely despite the fact that she had recently passed sixty.
“Just on time,” declared Victoria, folding Chelsea to her chest. “I hope you’re hungry.”
“I wouldn’t mind breakfast,” answered Chelsea. “How far did you run this morning?”
“It’s not the distance, it’s the attitude,” replied Victoria. “Only five miles. But it felt wonderful. It’s so marvelous running through the city.”
“You’ll have to try for the Marathon.”
“Those days are gone, dear,” said Victoria lightly. “I’d never qualify. But thank you for the thought. You didn’t bring your young friend?”
“We’ll meet her at the Aquarium,” Chelsea said. “She had to go to church with her dad.”
“Well, it is Easter.”
“Actually, they’re Russian Orthodox, so it’s Palm Sunday. He’s a single father, and lately he’s been trying to instill religion in her.”
Chelsea followed Victoria across the paneled lobby to the restaurant entrance, where a maître d’ greeted them with a nod. He had a fresh white rose in his lapel and the manner of someone who’d been looking forward to this encounter the entire morning. He showed the two women to a seat at the far end of the room, then asked if they would care for something to drink while they looked at the menus.
“Mimosas,” said Victoria. “And coffee.”
“Mimosas?” asked Chelsea.
“Why not? You don’t have to work today, and champagne always puts me in the mood for sightseeing.”
Chelsea was just about to ask how exactly that worked when a loud crack shook the room. The metallic snap was followed by two more, each louder than the other. The noise was unfamiliar to most of the people in the restaurant, but Chelsea had lately had a singular experience that not only made the sound familiar, but warned her subconscious that there was great danger nearby. She leaped up from her seat, and before her aunt could respond, had grabbed her and pushed her to the floor.
“Someone is shooting!” Chelsea told Victoria as the crack of a fresh round of bullets echoed against the deep wood panels of the room. “We have to get out of here!”
2
Johnny Givens couldn’t help but be impressed. Since coming to Smart Metal, the former FBI agent had seen more than his share of high-tech gizmos and gadgets. The company was the leading manufacturer of stand-alone robots in the Northeast, and its R&D section was beyond anything Jules Verne, Gene Rodenberry, or William Gibson could have imagined. And he himself was an example of its cutting-edge technology — having lost his original legs in an accident while working a case, Johnny now walked on a set of prosthetics designed and manufactured by Smart Metal’s Bio-Med division. Yet what he was seeing this morning impressed him even more than his legs. For he was seeing the future of policing.