“Hush, Adina,” scolded Qadira, then she paused and touched the girl’s arm. “If she is dead, then she’s dead. We can at least bring her body back to her mother. Either way, Lilith wants to know what happened.”
The team leader stepped down into darkness and the others followed.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Sam Imura rolled to a stop, killed his lights and sirens, and studied the area.
Wisconsin Avenue was not as badly damaged as some of the streets he’d fought through. The asphalt was cracked but drivable, and there were no cars or buildings on fire. There was damage, though.
The entire face of a building — a restaurant by the look of it — had broken free and collapsed across the pavement. Chunks of brick, shattered neon tubing, and shards of decorative metal molding lay like a blanket over the hood of one car — a five-year-old Honda Accord — and the trunk of the vehicle in front of it, a late-model Ford Focus. The weight of the impact had blown out the front tires of the second car and crumpled the dark blue skin.
People wandered like ghosts, most of them dusted with ash or smudged with smoke. Nearly all of them were bleeding from cuts, large or small; many had burns. Every face Sam saw was filled with that special awareness of having lived through something they would never and could never forget. It was all still too new, too real, to be a shared experience, and there was no crisis work to snap them out of it. No one was caught beneath wreckage or needing critical first aid. Everyone was caught in a kind of homogenized level of injury — not serious, but of a kind that would leave scars. These people were not only going to remember this moment forever, they would be deeply marked by it. Sam understood that. He had seen it in the eyes of his grandfather and great-aunt, both of whom had lived in a village near enough to Hiroshima to have gotten flash-burned, but not so close that the radiation killed them. Instead they became lifelong witnesses to an event that was always intensely real and intensely current in their minds.
Now D.C. was going to be that for hundreds of thousands of people. It would be something different to the families of those whose loved ones had died. Different still for people who had been caught up in the strange fits of madness and now had to reconcile their actions with what they knew of themselves. For all of them, the world had changed, and there was no reset button to make it normal again. Ask anyone who’d been in New York on 9/11. Sam knew a lot of those people, too.
He took a breath and tapped his earbud. “I’m here.”
“Any sign of a device?” asked the voice of Doc Holliday.
“Not yet.” To the vehicle, Sam said, “Calpurnia, deploy drones. Scan the area. I want a full-picture three-D.”
Four hummingbird-sized drones shot from concealed compartments and rose into the air, circling the scene. Only one person noticed, but the tiny machines looked like birds, and even if they didn’t, they were not the strangest part of the day.
A ghostly image overlaid the inside of Sam’s windshield, turning everything he saw into a kind of blueprint, complete with small identifier tags. Every car was labeled for make, model, and year; and when license plates were visible the name and basic information for the driver was given. Stores and buildings were named. Even people on the street were quickly identified through facial recognition. Sam, who was impressed by very little, nodded in appreciation.
“Search for chemical signatures,” ordered Sam.
“Searching,” Calpurnia assured him. “Detecting no traces of particulate matter consistent with nitroglycerin, pentaerythritol tetranitrate, trinitrotoluene, or triacetone triperoxide.”
“What about Semtex? Scan for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”
“No evidence of Semtex or its components. Fuel oil is present, but consistent with admixtures in fuel tanks. No trace of cyclomethylene trinitramine.”
Sam frowned. “Expand scan. Search for timing devices, clocks, anything.”
A series of yellow circles popped up on the display. “Forty-eight cell phones have been tagged,” Calpurnia said. “Forty-four on the persons of people within the scanning area. Three are on the street.”
These items were highlighted, but the drones sent pictures of three phones lying where they’d fallen from the hands or pockets of fleeing people.
“Where’s the last one?” asked Sam, then he stiffened. “Wait. I think I have it.”
A motorcycle came weaving through the debris and stopped near the Ford Focus. The bike was a new black Kawasaki Z650 with green trim, ridden by a driver dressed head to toe in black leather. His helmet had no logo and a smoked visor. The driver leaned over and steadied the bike on one foot and drew a cell from his pocket. He pointed it at the Focus and appeared to be pressing a button as if he was aiming a TV remote.
“Calpurnia…?”
“The driver of the motorcycle is sending a call to a number registered to a Virgin Mobile ZTE Temple X 4G LTE disposable phone.”
“A burner,” said Sam. “Hack it.”
“The call has not been answered.”
The driver looked around and did not see Sam behind his dark security windows. He punched in a number and pointed it at the Ford Focus again. Nothing appeared to happen.
“The other cell phone is in the trunk of that car,” said Calpurnia. “It is operational but appears to be damaged. I pinged it to verify that it is the number the driver is attempting to reach, but the phone is not ringing. Ronin,” she continued, using Sam’s combat call sign, “I am detecting other electronic equipment inside the trunk but cannot verify what kind.”
“This is our guy,” decided Sam. He touched his earbud. “Do I have backup?”
“No backup is available at this time, Ronin,” said Doc.
“Fuck it.”
He tapped the dashboard display to clear it and hit another key to slide out the tray of handguns. Then he opened the door of his car, stood up from the driver’s seat, leaned his arm across the hood, and pointed his pistol at the man on the bike.
“Federal agent,” he yelled. “Drop the cell phone and put both of your hands on top of your head. Do it now or I will shoot.”
The motorcycle driver froze, clearly startled.
But not startled enough. He dropped the cell phone, but with a smooth move that was as fast as it was elegant, his hand flashed toward the unzipped vee of his leather jacket and closed around a holstered pistol. It was so fast that it might have worked on nearly anyone. A regular street cop for sure, and maybe even some top-quality federal agents or marshals.
Sam was faster than that.
He fired three shots, catching the man in each shoulder and the middle of the thigh. Most professionals would have fired center mass to guarantee a kill; but Sam wanted the man alive, and the former sniper was a superb shot with any firearm. The man cried out in a foreign language and collapsed. And it should have ended there, except for a bit of bad luck. The cell phone landed facedown on a pile of debris and one sharp stone hit a key. Not the one to resend the deactivation code. The other one. The wrong one.
Sam saw a huge and intensely bright flash of green, and then he felt himself being lifted on a ball of glowing green gas. It burned like fire and the flames punched him into the air and across the street and through the window of a restaurant. In the movies, windows break easily and people are rarely hurt.
In real life they are made from thick, tempered glass, and smashing through them is akin to flying through a cutlery store. Those big, wickedly sharp pieces of glass did not break easily, and they punished Sam — oh yes, they punished him — for his rude passage through. They slashed at him like knives, like spears, like swords. Seeding the air with his blood.