“And you never looked to see if that was true?” I asked.
He gave me a funny look. “Why would I? The video games were long gone by then. Besides… I haven’t been there at all except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and those were always pretty dreary. Nothing lifts the soul more than having your superstar father go point-by-point through your personal and career failures.”
“Turns out you’re a better man than him, kid,” I said.
It only made Harry cry again.
I turned to Church. “I’m thinking an airstrike would be pretty useful right about now. Worked on Gateway.”
“And if the God Machine isn’t actually there?” asked Church. “What then? Besides, right now the president still believes that Harcourt is his white knight. We have suspicions, not proof, and let’s face it, we’re being guided by something you saw in a dream. We have no political cards to play.”
I got up and crossed to the weapons rack. “I’d love to go in guns blazing,” I said. “But after what happened to Top and Bunny… and me…”
As if in answer to that statement, Church’s phone rang. He answered it and I saw relief on his face. “How long, Doctor?”
He listened. I could feel my gut clench like a fist.
“Go to FreeTech. Tell Junie you need access to the model-making room. They have a full shop for making prototypes. Go.” He made two more calls, one to Junie to tell her that Hu was on his way, and another to Toys to tell him to offer any support that Violin might need. Then he disconnected and turned to me. “Dr. Hu believes he can make a protective skullcap. FreeTech has the fabrication equipment. We don’t have much time, so it might be crude and uncomfortable.”
“I don’t care if you have to nail it to my head. I can’t go after the God Machine without it. What about my team?”
Church shook his head. “We can’t risk involving anyone else. It will be hard enough for Dr. Hu to make one helmet in time.”
“Shit.”
“On the upside,” said Church, “Ghost is at FreeTech with Junie. From what I read in the Stargate file, the process does not work on animals.”
“He’s been acting really weird around me,” I said.
“More probably he’s reacting to you being weird around him.”
I grunted. “Ah. Okay. Then let’s haul ass.”
Brick hauled ass.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
I came over the hill, moving quickly but quietly. Ghost ranged ahead to find any traps or sentries. I hadn’t given him a kill order so nobody died. Yet. The night was still young.
I was dressed all in black, armed to the teeth, face painted in camouflage colors. And I was wearing an aluminum foil hat.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not aluminum foil. It’s a crystal-infused, polymer-lined, low-conductivity, aluminum-magnesium-alloy skullcap. You can tell me that all day and night, but at the end of the day, I was going hunting wearing a metal hat so people won’t climb into my head. Joe Ledger, American Dweeb. I wanted to kill someone just because of the fucking hat. Let alone the other two or three hundred points on my Justifiable Homicide Greatest Hits list.
Harcourt fucking Bolton. Damn it all to hell. Why did it have to be him?
How could this country’s greatest hero be willing to unleash something like SX-56 and slaughter all those children? How?
Resentment at growing older and feeling marginalized? It couldn’t be that. There had to be a deeper meaning. Insanity, a brain tumor. Something.
His house was a sprawling mansion that looked like it belonged in medieval England. Or maybe Westeros. Gray stone walls that rose above acres of manicured lawn that was dark green despite the drought and the governor’s water restrictions. The richer you are, the more you take laws as suggestions that you can choose to ignore. The house had eaves and turrets and even a suggestion of battlements. You could defend that place against the Normans. Or Saxons. Or whoever the hell the medieval English fought. It’s been a long time since high school history and, as it turns out, I don’t give a shit.
I crouched down and pulled out my Scout glasses. They’re high-tech premarket devices developed for Church by a friend of his who worked at Google. Or possibly owns Google. They have excellent night vision, but the lenses can be cycled so that I can switch to ultraviolet, thermal scan, and even an overlay from a satellite. Nifty. Useful, too. It was still too light for night vision, so I used the heat-seeker function and bam, there they were. Sentries in nicely concealed posts dotted throughout the landscape. Ghost sniffed the air and probably knew their placement, height, weight, and what they had for dinner. He whuffed at me. Asking for the go order.
“Hold,” I said quietly. He gave me a withering look. Telling me I was too timid.
Could he really tell that the Killer in me was still gone, or possibly dead? Maybe. There have been plenty of times when that killer’s eyes looked out of my head and into the wolf’s eyes in Ghost. We’d met on that primal level so many times that in the heat of the fight we didn’t need words or commands. He knew because in those moments we were the same. Predators from an earlier age of the world.
I held my position as pack leader as much for that primitive aspect of my personality as for any of the training we did. Maybe another handler would have forged a different kind of relationship with Ghost. I’m not like other people.
Or… maybe that was changing. Maybe the fact was these dreamwalking bastards had cut the Killer’s throat while they were ransacking the house of my private thoughts. That might be a mixed metaphor, I don’t know. You get the point. There was something wrong upstairs and I was afraid that without that aspect of my personality, I was going to die. I probably should have died already. I’ve been lucky.
Luck has a shelf life; ask any gambler. Ask any soldier.
We were moving through the trees, staying in the deepest shadows. I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug,” I said quietly.
“I’m here, Cowboy,” he said at once. He was at Auntie’s Brooklyn safe house but it sounded like he was standing right beside me. “We just picked up your transponder on the satellite.”
“Where’s Big Daddy?” I asked. We’d given that nickname to Harcourt Bolton. I’d suggested Big Fucking Asshole, but Church overruled me.
“At the beach,” said Bug. Meaning, still at the Pier.
“Okay.”
“I have fresh intel, Cowboy,” he said, and from the tone of his voice I knew it was bad.
“Hit me.”
“I’ve hacked into Big Daddy’s accounts and his personal computer,” he said. It was something he wouldn’t have done half a day ago. Now, all bets were off. “Bolton has been building a shell around himself for years. Layers of it. Shell corporations, offshore holdings, numbered accounts. You name it. Any way you can hide money, he’s using it. No idea how much. We’re hacking our way through it but it’s complicated. Short version is that ten years ago he was borderline broke. He was one of the people really crushed when the economy crashed. His mansion was mortgaged to the hilt, he was behind on payments to a dozen banks. He kept it hidden pretty well, but he was about to lose it all. Then it turned around. He started suddenly making payments on time and paying back the principle.”