The Black Wolf picked up his pace, moving closer.
He liked to be close, not just to ensure that he hit the target, but to viscerally feel the kill. It touched something inside, some primitive emotion. Nothing else he felt came close to that feeling. It was the feeling of life, as paradoxical as it seemed: only in someone else’s death could he actually live.
Helmut Dalitz turned the corner. Wolf notched up his pace even higher, careful not to break into a run.
The white Mercedes was waiting just ahead.
The two bodyguards were spaced three and a half meters apart, trailing their client by a half pace each.
Wolf was ten meters behind them.
Seven.
Five.
He pulled the gun from his pocket. The man on the right started to turn.
A single shot took him down. Wolf swiveled, his left hand grabbing his forearm to steady the gun. He caught the second bodyguard in the temple.
And then it was Helmut Dalitz’s turn.
The businessman turned, his face an expression of utter surprise.
The Black Wolf grinned, and squeezed the trigger.
3
“Good morning, Colonel Freah. How would you like your coffee?”
Danny Freah turned to the ceiling as the elevator car plunged down toward its destination. “How do you know I want coffee?” he asked.
“You always want coffee,” responded the voice.
“I can’t break the pattern?”
“Breaking the pattern would be unexpected.”
The elevator stopped and the door opened.
“Colonel Freah, you did not answer my question,” said the voice.
“Surprise me,” said Danny, stepping out into the wide hall in front of the elevator. The space looked like the bottom level of a mall parking garage. A spider work of girders, beams, and pipes ran through it.
They weren’t for show, exactly, but the overall look was definitely intentional. The insides of the nondescript building — known only as Room 4—had an ambiance that mixed high-tech functional and blow-your-mind weirdness.
Case in point was the gray wall facing Danny at the far end of the room. He walked toward it, then straight through it.
Danny Freah was still so new to Room 4 and the high-tech gizmos associated with it that it felt eerily cool to do that. But he was too professional to admit it — or give in to the temptation to do it a few more times for fun.
The wall was not an optical illusion, exactly. It could keep someone out if the security system didn’t want them in. The barrier was a physical manifestation of an energy array — a kind of force field in layman’s terms, though the man responsible for inventing it, Dr. Ray Rubeo, hated the term force field.
Absolutely hated it.
Danny knew, however, that Rubeo did have a sense of humor, which apparently he’d programmed into the automated assistant that had questioned him about coffee in the elevator. Sitting in the beverage center at the left of the desk as he entered was a steaming cup of cinnamon herbal tea.
Pretty much the last thing Danny would ever drink.
“Very funny,” he told the computer. “Coffee. The usual.”
“The system still has some kinks to be worked out,” said Danny’s boss, Breanna Stockard, who was standing over a nearby desk.
“No — it’s my fault,” said Danny. “I should have known better than to try to outsmart something Rubeo rigged up.”
The coffee, very strong and hot, spurted through the dispenser into a fresh cup. While the automated assistant and the beverage center were a brand new addition to Room 4, their presence in the high-tech control area wasn’t a surprise. Back at Dreamland, one of the technology section’s proudest achievements was a zero-gravity coffeemaker, which could keep the crews aboard Megafortresses and other large aircraft pleasantly caffeinated no matter what the combat conditions were.
“I’ll meet you inside,” said Breanna, waving a hand to dismiss the computer screen that had been floating in front of her. “Everyone else is here.”
“Gotcha.”
Danny waited for the last drops of coffee to settle into the cup, then raised it slowly to his lips, cooling it with a gentle breath. He’d only been working for Whiplash — the new Whiplash — for two months, and things still felt a bit… different.
A full-bird colonel, Freah had recently been assigned to the Office of Technology, a special direct-report agency that answered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On paper, he looked like just another pencil-pushing staff officer, paid for his advice and experience. In reality, he headed Whiplash, one of the most exciting commands in the military.
A joint venture with the CIA, Whiplash aimed to combine up-to-the nanosecond intelligence capabilities with a covert action team. It was modeled on the Air Force’s Dreamland program that had so much success a decade and a half earlier, under Breanna’s father, Lt. Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian. Breanna had recruited Danny specifically to head the military end of the program.
They’d had one success so far, on a mission that had stretched from Africa to Iran. For Danny, it felt good to be back in the mix again; most of his assignments since Dreamland had been administrative and supervisory. This post got him back on the front lines with gusto. But it was also a lot of work. He’d spent the weeks since returning home recruiting people and trying to smooth out differences between the two halves of the team — military and active CIA. He was still working on the training routines they needed and filling in his command structure. He was inventing, improvising, and even stealing as the need arose.
He’d tapped another old Dreamland Whiplash hand — Ben “Boston” Rockland, now a chief master sergeant — as his main personnel guy, dealing with young bucks and their egos.
Bucks and does; it was a coed force.
Boston was in Florida at the moment, putting their recruits through their paces. They had twenty-four newbie “shooters” or Whiplash troopers, drawn mostly from active military commands, each with different specialties and strengths. Eventually Danny planned to have some forty-eight troopers to form the core of a covert strike force. They could be deployed as a group, or work in very small teams, depending on the assignment. Whiplash technology would increase their effectiveness exponentially.
Danny took a sip of the coffee — it was perfect, naturally — then walked down the hall to the conference room.
“Colonel, good morning,” said Jonathon Reid. Reid was the CIA director’s liaison to the project, Breanna’s equivalent in authority. As the lines of responsibility went, Reid was in charge of operations for the specific missions, while Breanna’s ultimate say was over strategic and funding issues. But as a practical matter, their responsibilities were shared. Reid had the immediate access to intelligence as well as the people who commissioned the ops. Breanna, as a member of the Pentagon, held sway over most of the personnel, and thus the means for completing the mission. Though in many respects they were opposites, they worked together remarkably well.
Danny took a seat at the conference table across from Nuri Abaajmed Lupo, nodding at him as he sat down. Nuri was a CIA officer who’d preceded him into the program — the first and for a short time only member of Whiplash. He was young but extremely capable, as he’d shown in Africa and Iran. Nuri did, however, have some difficulty dealing with the fact that Danny was the one in charge. He was also used to working alone.
“Now that we’re all here, we can begin,” said Reid. “Screen.”