“Where’d the money come from?”
“That’s the thing, he reported it to the IRS as consulting and speaking fees and returns on investments in technology corporations. It’ll take a team of forensic accountants to make sense of it all, though. He was very smart and very clever about it. Paid very heavy taxes so that he didn’t raise flags. But MindReader was able to go deeper. A lot of his investments were in dummy corporations. He was using them to launder his own money. And, Cowboy, get this, some of those fake companies are tied to Middle East oil money.”
“We can prove that?”
Bug laughed. “How? With information obtained illegally? Fruits of a poisoned tree.”
“Okay, but—”
Before I could finish, Mr. Church’s voice cut in as sharp and hard as a knife blade. “Deacon to Cowboy,” he barked, “we have fresh intel. We believe we know how Big Daddy intends to use the SX-56.”
“How?” I demanded.
“Freefall.” He said that among the papers Aunt Sallie had obtained from Washington was a proposal for a device designed to work in concert with Kill Switch. The idea was to launch batches of small drones, each of which was rigged with a chemical self-destruct device that was kept in safe mode by electrical current. Stop the current for any reason and the chemicals mix and destroy the drone, but the blast isn’t an incendiary. More like a big pop, seeding the air with the contents of the thin-walled plastic containers fixed to the underside of each drone. Shoot them down and they blow. Try to disarm them and they blow. Cut all power and they blow. Airbursts and prevailing winds are dangerous bedfellows for a bioweapon. Fly the drones over congested areas and let biology do the rest. Let the movements of people do it. Let the natural contact of humans to humans, parents to kids, person to person be the weapon that drives the plague.
And why not just fly the drones over the crowds and blow them up? Sure, that would work, that would spread the disease. But police and EMTs, the fire department, FEMA, the National Guard, and hundreds of other first and second responders would be able to step up and handle it. People would die, sure. Kids would die. But only a few. Not the thousands or tens of thousands that would contract the weaponized smallpox in the hours after the power went out. Kill Switch would do far more than kill the power. It was designed for use against technological cultures where the population relies on speedy and efficient response. The more civilized a person is, the more they panic when the lights go out.
Kill Switch turned off the power and Freefall filled the darkness with monsters.
I crouched in the shadows under the trees and felt my mind clenching into a fist.
Church said, “MindReader is tearing apart Bolton’s accounting. We have been able to track deliveries of drone components to ten cities across the United States. I’ve called the president but he refuses to listen. Bolton apparently already told him that we were going to approach him with some kind of wild cover story. He’s been ahead of us at every step. Erskine designed his drone weapon to operate via the Kill Switch. We’re working on the code sequence but you need to locate the main God Machine or we’ll have no chance at all of stopping this. Go!”
But I was already running.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
As I ran I called my “backup.”
“Cowboy to Spykid.”
And Harry Bolt said, “I wish you wouldn’t fucking call me that. I need a better call sign. And I don’t want Junior G-Man, Wonder Boy, Bambi, Scrappy-Do, Happy Meal, Fresh Meat, Zombie Bait, Boy Wonder, Shirley Temple, Red Shirt, Bear Cub, Son of a Gun, or any of the other stupid names you suggested.”
“Really?” I said. “Now’s the time for this?”
“I want to be called Jester.”
“Jester? You think this shit’s funny?”
“No,” he said. “Because I don’t think it’s funny. The name’s ironic.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I still want to be called Jester. It sounds cool.”
There are times when banging your head against a tree really feels like the right choice. I said, “Sure. Jester. Whatever. Can we save the world now? Just asking, because we’re not pressed for time at all.”
A pause. “Okay, Cowboy. Jester is on station.”
“Thank Jesus,” I said. “Keep sharp and follow me in.”
If Harry wasn’t my best chance of finding my way into the house and down to the Playroom I’d have given him a lollipop and left him behind. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he has no business being out in the field.
Lilith still hadn’t gotten back to Church with fresh intel, but every instinct I possessed told me that we were fighting the clock. Fighting and maybe losing. Santoro had gotten the drives with the code sequence. He — or one of the other people working for Bolton — could be down in the Playroom punching those numbers into the God Machine. Kids in ten cities across the country could be in the crosshairs right goddamn now.
Add to that the damage from the blackouts. How many people would that affect? Depends on the cities. If it was New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, places like that? Call it millions. Crashes, fires going unchecked, medical emergencies, and no one able to respond. People trapped in elevators and subway cars. People with pacemakers, people on life support, babies in neonatal units, patients in surgery. All of them plunged into darkness.
Or it could be even worse.
This could break us. It would simply be a matter of ISIL winning. This was a situation of terror proving that it was more powerful than sanity. This was a sword against which no shield would ever work. Fear and destruction wouldn’t be something in the headlines. They would be the defining qualities of our lives.
Those of us who survived.
If I didn’t find that code and the God Machine, I wasn’t going to live long enough to see the fall. That’s not a blessing. I’d burn for failing. I’m not particularly religious, but I know that much.
“I’m going in,” I told Bug. “Jester… be ready, you hear me?”
“Ten-four,” he said, using the wrong response. Idiot.
Ghost and I drifted along the line of hedges until we were at the wall. Then I drew my gun. For this part of the job I was using a Snellig A-220, a high-intensity gelatin dart filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine along with a powerful hallucinatory compound. We all call it “horsey.” Dart someone with it and they go down right now and dream of psychedelic lobsters. Or so I’ve been told. Some of the guys have volunteered to try it and they tell wild stories. It’s like a bad acid trip that puts you into a fucked-up version of Alice in Wonderland. You wake up hungover and disoriented. Horsey is designed to attack the nervous system like a neurotoxin, so it works faster than a bullet. You get hit and you go down.
Now, don’t get me wrong… under any other circumstances I’d have been happy as hell to punch the tickets of anyone working for Bolton. But you can’t ask questions of the dead, and if the code wasn’t on the premises, then I wanted to be able to hold meaningful group therapy sessions with the guards. Somebody would know something and with the lives of all those kids in the balance, I wouldn’t be in the mood to ask nicely.
I edged around the curve of one of the turrets. Two guards stood together, eyes roving back and forth across the grounds. Looking in the wrong direction. Watching the driveway, which was the only route in that wasn’t covered by the motion sensors. I raised the Snellig.