“I never lost faith in you, Captain.”
Violin said, “Wait, what about me?”
Church smiled. “I have something else I’d like you to do.”
Harry Bolt looked very much like the fifth wheel he was. “Okay… well, what about me?”
I walked over to him. “A lot of that will depend on whose side you’re on. Your dad seems to want to tear the DMS down. Maybe you hit the nail on the head when you said he was jealous. Whatever. He’s going to drag his feet and play this wrong and a lot of people are going to die. So, ask yourself, kid, where do you think you fit?”
There were a lot of ways Harry Bolt could have played it. He was a schlub, so he could play dumb and sit it out. He was CIA, so he could side with the home team. He was Harcourt Bolton’s son, so maybe blood was thicker than water.
He straightened and although he was seven or eight inches shorter than me he did his best to look me in the eye.
“My father’s wrong,” he said.
“So where does that put you?”
His gaze shifted from me, to Church, and then settled on Violin. She gave him the kind of smile I’d only ever seen her give to me. Once upon a time. It jolted me.
Then Harry Bolt looked at me again and held out his hand. “Good hunting, Joe.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
“There they are,” whispered Bunny.
He eased away from the narrow slot in the curtains so I could take a look. We were in the marina office. Bunny, Top, and me, each of us dressed in black BDUs and balaclavas. We were the only field agents at the Pier when the call came in.
“We can take them right now,” said Top. He had his Heckler & Koch HK416 in his hands, the barrel lowered, finger laid along the curve of the trigger guard. The effective range of the HK416 is four hundred yards. The cluster of men was less than fifty feet from where we crouched. If I gave the word, Top would send them to Jesus without so much as a flicker. “Say the word, Cap’n, and we can all clock out early.”
There were seven men on the dock. All dressed in boating clothes, or some approximation of them. Shorts, boat shoes, Polo shirts or lightweight Windbreakers. One of them wore a Hawaiian shirt with brightly colored tropical fish on it. Sunglasses and ball caps. Looking like people who belonged among all these expensive seagoing play toys. Looking ordinary. They didn’t look like Closers.
“Not until we’re sure,” I murmured. We were all killers, but we were soldiers, not assassins.
Dr. Kang’s report was that Priest had exited the building carrying a metal briefcase in which were several portable high-capacity external drives. One with the scans of the Unlearnable Truths and the master code sequence Kang’s people had interpolated from the books; and several others with lots of information related to projects owned by either Erskine or San Pedro. None of them, according to Kang, said either “Majestic” or “Gateway” on them. Nothing labeled “Kill Switch,” “God Machine,” or “Dreamwalking,” either. We didn’t know what the data was, but we damn sure didn’t want it to get into the hands of whoever was behind all of this. ISIL or someone else. My guess was that it was going to be “someone else,” and I was beginning to get a nasty idea of how this was all being managed.
Priest’s photo had been fed into the facial recognition feeds of security cameras all over this part of California, with MindReader interpreting the data. The target used some of the most devious tricks in the evil bad guy playbook to avoid capture and make it from Los Angeles all the way down to the marina here in Oceanside. By car in good traffic that’s two hours, but when you’re trying not to get arrested and sent to Gitmo it can take a lot longer. In this case five and a half hours, with long heart-stopping gaps when we all thought he’d slipped the leash.
If that happened, and the Mullah or whoever was in control of Kill Switch got their hands on that control code, then America was going to experience a new Dark Age. And if our worst fears were realized, inside that darkness the SX-56 pathogen was going to spread every bit as aggressively as the Black Plague had, as the Spanish flu had. Why? Because every aspect of emergency response, from cops to doctors, depended on electricity. Shutting off the lights would give us no chance to get in front of the bioweapon. So, yeah, I almost told Top to take the shot.
Almost.
But we needed the drives and we needed to ask questions and you can’t ask those questions of a corpse. I wanted a name and I was damn sure Mr. Priest — Esteban Santoro — was going to want to tell me. I planned to ask very nicely. In a manner of speaking, “nicely” being a relative term. I am not a fan of torture, but these bastards wanted to kills thousands — perhaps millions — of children. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to prevent that from happening. Nothing.
I kept expecting the Killer in my soul to roar out his blood challenge. He was the ultimate protector of the innocent because to his primitive sense of survival, the young were a guarantee that the tribe would survive. You had to protect them, and I remember the things that part of me has done when the bad guys have targeted kids. Those memories will haunt me until I die. Letting those children die, though, would kill me.
We’d arrived at the dock in a boat belonging to a close friend of Mr. Church. It was a very expensive XSR high-velocity speedboat. If this came to a sea chase we had a clear edge.
“Call the play, Boss,” murmured Bunny. He had an AA-12 drum-fed shotgun. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny is working out some issues. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.”
“We need him with a pulse,” I said. “No one’s clocking out until we get those drives, feel me?”
“Hooah,” said Bunny, the disappointment clear in his voice.
“Hooah,” said Top, his tone more workmanlike and philosophical.
I tapped my earbud to get the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon.”
“Go for Deacon,” said the voice in my ear. Mr. Church was in one of our mobile tactical operations vehicles, with all communications routed to him rather than through the Pier. “Give me a sitrep.”
“Target is acquired,” I said. “Santoro plus six. We are about to make our run.”
“Do you have eyes on the package?”
I began to say no, but then another man came walking along the dock with something tucked under his arm. He stopped in front of Santoro, his back to me so that what they were doing was briefly obscured. I heard a faint murmur of conversation and when he stepped aside I saw that Santoro now gripped the handle of a small waterproof black plastic case. They must have transferred the drives to something safer for boat travel.
“That is affirmative,” I said. “I have eyes on the package. Repeat, I have eyes on the package.”
“Copy that. Bring it home.”
“Roger that,” I said.
I moved away from the window and knelt on the far side of the door. Top took up station beside the door and Bunny squatted like a linebacker.
We counted down and moved.
Top opened the door quickly and we went out. I went left, Top went right, and Bunny moved straight toward the men. The gas dock was wood and concrete, with three benches, a trash can, and a long row of fuel pumps stationed at the ends of a line of finger piers. There were several boats in slips, their bumpers nudging the dock in the mild swell. A dockhand was swiping the credit card of one of Santoro’s men. Nice that they were paying for the gas. Made it almost seem like they were ordinary citizens.
Almost.
We moved instantly into concealed shooting positions before the bad guys could turn and draw their weapons. We yelled real damn loud. “Federal agents! Hands on your heads. Get down on your knees with your hands on your heads or we will kill you.”