Zhao looked up. “Yes?”
“Message from Lei, sir. They’ve weighed anchor and are under way. The job is done.”
Zhao sighed. Even Xun’s voice was weak. The boy was smart enough, with degrees from Oxford and MIT, but he had no Lān-hút—no stones,as the Americans say. Xun was a distant nephew, one of the few with his family name left alive. This,he thought, is what I am left with.A boy who had a mind for this business, but no heart for the brutality it required to not only survive, but to rule. Given time, Xun might be a worthy successor to the empire; but time was a precious commodity. During war, time was a luxury you couldn’t afford to squander.
“No complications?” Zhao asked.
“No, sir.”
Zhao nodded. Another pawn steps forward, joining the first two, shielding the king.
“The emergency bands?”
“We’re monitoring. The island is small; it shouldn’t take long. May I ask, sir. . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“What are we listening for?”
“We’re listening for the faint scrape of our opponent’s piece moving across the board.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Watch and learn.”
Zhao waved Xun out. Alone again, Zhao closed his eyes and visualized the board. He imagined his opponent reaching out, fingers hesitating over one piece, before lifting it from the board.
Your move.
15
THIRD ECHELON
HAVINGonly been gone for fifteen hours, Fisher was stunned at what had changed during that time.
The town of Slipstone was lost.
Within minutes of local environmental officials determining that the source of the water supply’s contamination was neither natural nor accidental, the small New Mexico town had became the focal point of a massive relief effort, starting with the President’s order to activate the Radiological Emergency Response Plan, or RERP.
Assets from every branch of government, from the FBI to the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Energy to Homeland Security, sprang into action, dispatching first-responder teams. Within six hours of the RERP’s initiation, Slipstone was quarantined. Every road, highway, and trail leading to and from the town was put under guard by state troopers. Those residents who had panicked upon hearing the news and hurried to leave the area were quickly rounded up and placed in the mobile quarantine and treatment camp that had been established by the Army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division. Unfortunately, this camp was one of the first scenes captured by news cameras: families being unceremoniously marched by biohazard-suited soldiers into a sterile white tent in the middle of the desert. The image sent shock waves across the country as Americans realized their worst nightmare had finally become reality: Terrorists had attacked the U.S. with a radiological weapon.
Meanwhile, the first responders to enter the town, a NEST team, found a greater nightmare waiting for them. Slipstone was a ghost town. Investigation would later show the water supply had been poisoned sometime in the afternoon, shortly before residents finished work and started heading home. Consquently, the streets were mostly deserted, with only a handful of bodies found, most of them in their cars as they had tried to escape the town. The bulk of the corpses were found in their homes, asleep, in front of television sets, in their bathrooms, and, heartbreakingly, sprawled beside the beds of their children, dead where they had fallen trying to reach their children.
Those few residents found alive shuffled through the streets like zombies: glassy-eyed, hair falling out in clumps, blood streaming from their eyes as the radiological poison slowly killed them. Those with any strength left headed toward the edge of town and the quarantine barriers, where they were stopped by state troopers and National Guard soldiers. This, too, was broadcast across the country: ghostly-white Slipstone residents, begging to be allowed to leave, while stone-faced soldiers and police officers forced them back into the hell they knew was killing them.
INthe Situation Room, Fisher watched, stunned, as the images paraded across the monitors. Across the country every broadcast and cable television channel, from the Food Network to Home Shopping Central, had either switched to emergency programming or had surrendered their signals to cable and network news coverage.
Sitting on either side of Fisher at the conference table, Grimsdottir and Lambert also watched in silence. Anna stifled a sob, then stood up and walked away.
“Good God,” Lambert muttered.
“How many?” Fisher asked. “Any idea?”
“Official figures won’t be released for a couple days, but Grim’s been monitoring the RERP’s secure frequencies. So far they only found fourteen survivors.”
“Out of how many?”
“According to the last census, five thousand plus.”
It took a moment for Fisher to absorb this number. He exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose. Unless the response teams were wrong and somewhere, somehow, there was a large group of survivors yet to be found in Slipstone, the death toll would far surpass that of 9/11.
“What’s happening in Washington?” Fisher asked.
“Both the House and Senate are in emergency session. The vote will be unanimous, I’m sure.”
“Declaration of war,” Sam murmured.
Lambert nodded. “Against nations unknown. The President is scheduled to talk to the nation at noon, our time.”
“What does this do to our mission?”
“Nothing. I spoke with the President while you were in the Bahamas. War is coming; there’s no way around that. Against who is the only question. He wants no stone left unturned, and no doubt about who’s responsible. Things are starting to snowball at the FBI and CIA now. Conclusions will be reached; recommendations made; targets chosen. Our job is to make sure—damn sure—we’ve got the right targets.”
The television screens went dark. Standing behind Fisher, Grimsdottir laid the remote on the table and said, “I can’t watch this anymore. I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Anna,” Lambert said. “Tell us about the Duroc.”
“Right . . .” She went to the table and paged through a folder, then selected a file. “Here. I haven’t had any luck tracing an owner, but based on the data Sam downloaded from the helm console, I know where she came from: Port St. Lucie, Florida. Shouldn’t take too long to narrow down a list.”
A phone on the table trilled. Lambert picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then replaced the receiver. “Good call on the Bahamian fire bands, Sam. Twenty minutes ago the local police found nine bodies inside a burned-out coffee warehouse outside Freeport City. We should have preliminary autopsy results in a few hours.”
“That explains what happened to the Trego’s crew, but not how the Durocgot involved. The one prisoner we’ve got is Middle Eastern and I’m betting those nine bodies will be, too.”
“The question is,” Grimsdottir asked, “why were they picked up, then executed by a yacht full of Chinese? What’s the connection?” Nearby, her computer workstation chimed. She walked to it, sat down, and studied the screen for a few moments. “Gotchya,” she muttered.
“Got what?” Lambert asked.
“Remember the virus from the Tregolaptop? Well, I knew its code was unique—the work of a pro. It took a while, but our database found him: Marcus Greenhorn.”
“Please tell me you know where he is,” Lambert said.
“I’ll do even better than that, Colonel. I’ll give you his room number.”