His relationship with dear old Dad… well, that was even more of a mess.
Most of those complications stemmed from the challenges associated with living in the shadow of a great man. A better man, as Harry’s fourth consecutive stepmother went to such great lengths to point out. A man who was, as Harry’s superiors in Central Intelligence so often reminded him very quietly, a hero. A millionaire whose net worth was soon going to change its first letter from M to B. And while being the son of someone about to join the billionaire club had its perks, it also came with its burdens.
One of the problems — and there were many — was that there was no actual way to live up to his father. Ask Jakob Dylan, ask Julian Lennon. “Son of a Legend” should qualify one for handicapped parking privileges. His father’s unattainable reputation was the reason Harry shortened his last name. Fewer people made the connection even though they looked exactly like father and son. Except that Dad was a little taller, a little thinner, a little better looking, and had — despite his age — six-pack abs rather than Harry’s shorter stature and kegger gut.
Life, as Harry Bolt saw it, sucked moose dick.
And where the hell were Olvera and Florida? Slacker buttholes, both of them. Harry hated being the third Stooge. He squatted in the dark in a tiny electrical access corridor three hundred feet below the subbasement of the library in Budapest. He was sure that if his father was there he’d have disarmed this frigging lock with nothing more than a lift of one disapproving eyebrow, and he’d be inside already. Getting it all done.
This mission had some fuzzy edges and the best that could be said of the intel that put him down here in the dark was that it was marginally better than deciding policy by flipping a coin. Marginally, and that was Harry being generous. From a distance the job sounded pretty cool, almost glamorous. Almost “dadlike.” Harry’s team was assigned to track an international black marketeer named Ohan who had known ties with ISIL and who was possibly smuggling high-tech weapons to the extremists. The weapon, which had a cool code name — Kill Switch — was something stolen from a covert lab and was being ferried to ISIL in pieces. Harry’s team was supposed to locate one such shipment and verify its contents. If the mission was successful, then the Agency would spin up its engines for an all-out assault on Ohan’s smuggling network. On the other hand, if the shipment the Stooges had been tracking was a lot less important, as Harry’s supervisor implied, then this was something akin to busywork. Something that looked good in any report friends of his father might see — thereby casting the Hungarian station chief in a good light — but which in reality was a big steaming pile of horseshit.
This wouldn’t be the first such case. Not by a long damn way.
Harry would love to have gone up against a real ISIL field team. That would be cool. That would help him make some kind of statement about his career. Instead he was breaking into a museum for no good damn reason. He was absolutely positive that this was a waste of time.
He tapped his earbud to get to the team channel.
“Corndog to Waffles,” he said, using his call sign and trying to reach Olvera. No answer. He tried Florida — Sunstroke. Got nothing. Spent a few moments cursing. Then he sighed and went back to work on the access electronics. He had half a dozen wires stripped, alligator clips rerouting power, and tiny meters providing information Harry didn’t know if he could trust. Sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. His fingers were sweating, too, as he dug around in the junction box trying to snag the blue wire.
“Come on, you scum-sucking son of a canine whore…”
There. Got it. Harry snipped the blue wire and all of the lights inside the control box went dark. He frowned. Were they all supposed to go out? Shouldn’t the light on the circuit reroute he’d patched still be on?
He froze, listening for the sound of alarms. Sweat ran in lines down his face and his fingers were cold with tension.
Nothing.
He touched the Send button on his earbud. “Corndog to Sunstroke.”
Nothing from Jim Florida.
He tapped it again. “Corndog to Waffles.”
Olvera didn’t answer, either.
“Oh, mannnn,” whined Harry. He really hated those guys. Seriously. If ISIL ever wanted someone to publicly cut into lunchmeat, Harry could suggest a couple of names.
Harry tried the calls again. And again. Persistent nothing. That’s when his annoyance began to change to something else. It wasn’t yet fear, because Harry was almost always afraid. No, this was still over on the doubt side of worry. They could both be maintaining radio silence because they weren’t in places secure enough for a verbal response. Which was semi-likely. Not hugely likely, but at least possible.
Harry squatted in a pool of his own indecision for another three minutes, then he thought, to hell with this crap. He wasn’t going to win a commendation or leach approval from his father if he did nothing. The job was to break into the vault beneath the Széchényi Library before the exhibit went live, take photos of everything incriminating, and then get out without getting caught. The actual arrest would be made by the counterterrorism gunslingers of Hungary’s Terrorelhárítási Központ. The CIA did not make those kinds of arrests on foreign soil. No, sir. There was far more political currency to be gained by handing over the collar to the locals. Career-wise, though, if he scored this on his own — without the other Stooges — then he was, on Agency terms, a made man. Harry had seen what happened to the career trajectory of those agents who scored on something like that. He wanted his own elevator up past the glass ceiling.
Maybe even make Dad proud. A faint possibility, but still a possibility. His father, after all, had saved the world three times from major bioweapon releases. Three times.
Balls.
He shifted his position to address the metal panel. It was stiff, but he managed to dig his screwdriver into a gap and lever it open enough to put the edge of his hand against it. It didn’t want to move, but it did. One stubborn inch at a time. And as it opened a puff of air blew out at him.
“Nicely done,” he told himself. You took your back-pats where you could find them.
Then Harry set the panel aside, removed his flashlight, and aimed the beam inside. He saw a square chamber with stone walls. It appeared to be empty except for an old metal chest, bound by straps of iron.
“Bingo,” he murmured. He put the flashlight between his teeth and climbed inside.
It was at this point that the trajectory of Harry Bolt’s life changed.
Completely and irrevocably.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When I could move, I got up and used the head to clean up. The nausea eased up by slow degrees but it didn’t go away. Top and Bunny sat like a pair of shivering old men. They sipped water and ate salty crackers and didn’t say a word or look at anyone.
I’d already called Church while we were still in Antarctica airspace to tell him what had happened, what we’d seen, and what I did when I thought this was a genie that could not be let out of the bottle. Not sure if he agreed with me or not.
Half an hour later Church called me back and hit me with the news about Houston.
The power had gone out. Not the whole city, but enough of it. Too much of it. Planes had fallen out of the sky. Thirteen of them. Some of them crashed on runways at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. That was horrible enough. One went through the roof at Air-Sea International Logistics near Lochinvar Golf Course. One pancaked down between the Budget and Avis car rental offices off Palmetto Pines Road. And one of them hit the top floor of the Houston Airport Marriott Hotel. The jet was fully fueled and every seat was booked. There was a sales convention at the hotel. Two-thirds of the rooms were booked. We wouldn’t know how many were dead. Five thousand was a conservative guess.