John sighed and closed his eyes. Gohl was lying, of course.
The Swiss would love nothing more than to humiliate the United States. Within hours, the story of an American bombing a German citizen would be on every channel and every talk show around the world.
Eric would have a stroke.
No — Gohl had him, but he didn’t have the OTM.
Not yet.
Gohl was fishing for information, trying to link John to Holzinger’s death.
Who killed Holzinger and why?
Deion had briefed them thoroughly before the mission. There had been no talk of murder. Then again, market manipulation was costing the world’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars in increased oil costs.
When that kind of money was on the line, murder followed close behind.
Why Holzinger?
Did Holzinger know who was manipulating the market? Was Holzinger involved? Had someone killed Reinemann to keep her quiet and then Holzinger because Reinemann’s death had scared him into cooperating?
Gohl cleared his throat. “The doctors will soon return. Once you are cleared, you will be transferred to a secured facility for further… questioning.”
John opened his eyes and turned to stare at Gohl.
The silence lingered until Gohl finally grunted. “You will tell me what I want to know. Your options are…” He held up his hand, palm up. “You have no options.” He stuffed his notepad back into his trenchcoat, shoved the white curtain aside, and left.
A door opened and closed. John strained his hearing, but there was no other sound in his room. The handcuff bit into his wrist, and he blocked out the pain and pulled hard. The handcuff was hardened steel, but the bedrail was made of cheap pot metal. He pulled harder and the rail started to bend, until it snapped, setting the handcuffs free.
He sat up and flung the sheets off, pulling the oxygen tube from his nose and dropping it to the floor. The blood pressure cuff followed, along with the pads stuck to his chest.
I’ve only got a few seconds before a nurse comes to investigate.
Luckily, they had left him his prosthetic leg. He stumbled off the bed and pulled the curtain wide.
He was alone. A window stretched across the far wall. His mind spun as he took in the surroundings. The door to the room was shut, so he kicked off the brakes on the bed’s wheels, maneuvered the bed in front of the door, and locked the wheels.
That should give me a few seconds.
He limped to the window and looked out. It was dark outside, but there were streetlights and cars below.
I must be on the fifth floor, at least. Or maybe the sixth.
He was staring out the window, considering his options, when he noticed a blinking LED on the drone hovering outside.
Yes!
It was one of the OTM’s black quadrocopter drones. He opened the narrow glass pane along the bottom as wide as it allowed. The drone’s swoosh was barely louder than a whisper. Deion’s familiar voice came from the speaker on the drone’s bottom. “Are you going to stand there gawking or are you ready to get the hell out of there?”
A wave of relief flooded through him. “What’s my exit plan?” he called out softly.
“Break through the window and grab the copter.”
“Are you crazy?”
There was thumping from the hospital door and loud voices from the hallway beyond.
“Do it, John. We’re activating the Implant.”
The Implant dumped a rush of chemicals through his veins. His heart thudded in his chest as his senses sharpened and his fear disappeared.
He spun around and grabbed for the heart monitor. It was made of heavy plastic and steel, and he smashed it against the window with all his strength.
The window shattered, and the monitor plunged to the street below. John jumped up, teetering on the windowsill with his prosthetic, and grabbed the base of the quadrocopter in a death grip.
The quadrocopter’s rotors spun up to maximum force. The drone could lift nearly one hundred pounds, but John was much heavier. His stomach lurched through his throat as he rode the copter to the ground below.
The copter’s hush technology could not hide the now-screaming pitch of the motors. The street below rushed up to meet him, and he hit the ground first with his prosthetic foot.
The prosthetic cushioned some of the impact, but the impact sent a lightning bolt of agony shooting up his leg. He smashed into the snow-covered pavement hard enough to take his breath away. The quadrocopter landed next to him and broke into dozens of pieces.
A white Ford transit van slid up next to him. The side door opened, and Valerie stuck her hand out. “You ordered a rescue?”
John staggered to his feet and took her hand. “I’m freezing, and my ass is hanging out of this gown.”
Valerie started to get out, but Deion bellowed from the driver’s seat, “Leave the drone!”
John collapsed onto the seat next to Valerie. “I’m glad to see you guys.”
Valerie slammed the door shut while Deion gunned the engine and took off down the street, dodging the crashed drone. She handed him a thick wool blanket and said softly, “You’re just lucky the blast in the hotel didn’t kill you.”
Huang Lei read his agent’s report from Zürich with a growing sense of wonder.
Finally!
A sound echoed through the room, and he was shocked to realize he was laughing.
So… unexpected!
He had hoped the Americans would finally make a mistake.
How fortuitous that my plans have finally yielded such sweet fruit. As if it was destined. As if the universe conspired to finally balance the scales tilted so heavily in my enemy’s favor.
It was all he had hoped for. Now it was time to start pulling the threads. Each precious thread required just the right amount of teasing, and one such thread led to Nathan Elliot.
With the help of the Lotus Blossom, he would find Elliot and, from there, his true adversary.
Lila pounded down the last of the Red Bull and tossed it into the trash can next to her desk. The Swiss Hyatt bombing was all over the Internet. She had watched as eyewitnesses recounted how an ambulance had taken a wounded man to the hospital.
A few minutes of searching had yielded the most likely hospital for the wounded man, and she’d started scanning the hospital’s firewalls with nmap before the ambulance had arrived.
The nmap scan of the hospital’s firewalls had returned multiple open ports, and she’d started another scan of IP addresses behind the firewall, praying that something would answer.
A few minutes later, a server behind the firewall had responded to an openssh scan. She’d checked the server’s version of openssh and found it wildly out of date. Another couple of minutes and she’d compromised the server, escalating her privileges to admin, then moved on to profiling every other reachable device.
Within an hour, she had mapped out the entire hospital network, logged on to every device, deleted any entries that might give away her presence, and started copying every file she could get her hands on.
As she continued her search, her copy routine announced a file lock. She was shocked to see her copy process killed and the file deleted.
It seemed unlikely that it was the hospital’s IT staff. The file was in the new admission report folder, so she uploaded and executed a binary file that would find the hard drive space and see if the file could be restored. But, by the time her binary completed, even the file’s remnants were gone from slack space.