"But sir, we'll get snarled in the local traffic."
"Just do it!"
Craig wasn't sure what was happening, but his instincts were never wrong. He had lived too long as a predator and master of the games of power. When soldiers around him died in Vietnam, he made it out alive. It was a sixth sense, background processing, something that always alerted him to danger and opportunity. Right now, his alarms were ringing frantically.
The limo darted across lanes toward the exit to a chorus of horns. The small flying thing matched their motion, and continued to close the distance.
Miles grumbled as the wheels hit the exit ramp. "This some new paparazzi thing?"
Then, the impossible! The small craft accelerated and slammed directly onto the roof of the car.
Craig jumped. Shit! "Pull us over, Miles. Now!"
But there wasn't a place to stop the car. Still exiting the off-ramp, the driver accelerated and hurtled toward a curbside ahead.
"Goddamn thing is stuck to the rooftop," yelled Craig, grabbing the handle of his door. He prepared to leap out of the vehicle.
A large explosion rocked the corner of 53rd and Sutton Place. Windows of surrounding buildings shattered, facade stone fractured and fell, and debris from a black limo blasted outward with a fireball that set nearby trees and garbage on fire. Smoke surged upward from the demolished vehicle, only a chassis and partial skeleton remaining. Alarms sounded from cars parked near to the blast radius, and voices screamed over the din. Bodies were strewn motionless around the inferno. Wounded screamed for help.
Above the growing chaos, unseen by anyone below, a frenetic buzzing purred. An apple-sized object hovered hundreds of feet above the fire, a propeller whirling above an octagonal hardware collection ending with a downward-pointing lens. The mechanical insect watched over the scene with a cold stillness. As the first sounds of sirens began to spill toward the carnage, it climbed above the buildings and disappeared into the sky.
2
“So it is only fitting that today, five years after the events in New York and around the world that brought us to the brink of international conflict, we honor a man who was instrumental in bringing us back from that cliff.”
Special agent John Savas squirmed in his metal fold-out chair and prayed that this horrific political pageantry would reach its inevitable and dreaded climax. His salt-and-pepper hair was trimmed similarly to that time five years back, a time when the home-grown terrorists of Mjolnir had aimed a nuclear warhead at the Muslim holy city of Mecca during the great Hajj pilgrimage. But no amount of self-delusion could hide the fact that it was considerably more salty now than it had been. While he still worked to keep himself in shape, at fifty-five, age was beginning to finally have the upper hand, and his increased desk time as the director of Intel 1 hadn’t helped.
But it was more than simply age. As for the nightmares — Savas was too mired in a dying male culture to do much about them. PTSD was what psychologists talked about on cable news, not what men had or admitted to. Only his wife of three years, agent Rebecca Cohen, truly knew the extent of the damage. And that because she shared the trauma as well.
Savas watched the new Attorney General of the United States bring the speech to a point of tension and transition. The former prosecutor looked in his direction and nodded.
“And without further delay, here to receive the Award for Exceptional Heroism, please welcome a true American hero and pride of New York City, John Savas!”
Savas surged to his feet, flashbulbs exploding around him, applause drowning his thoughts like a churning waterfall. He moved as confidently as he could toward the stage, remembering to paste a reserved smile on his face for the evening news. A row of officers from the NYPD and local FBI branches greeted him with handshakes and pats on the back. Nearing the podium, reporters’ cameras pummeling him like strobe lights, and he shook hands with the Attorney General with one hand while grasping the medallion case and plaque in the other.
As they paused for the photographers, Savas instinctively searched among the front row of FBI agents for a diminutive brunette. Her long hair would be secured formally behind her. For events like this she usually wore her blue pantsuit. He would see her radiant smile beaming toward him, his desire to impress her flooding him with energy.
But she wasn’t there. He knew she wouldn’t be there, but looked anyway. She was hundreds of miles away in a secret location only a handful of people knew, checking up on two charges that Savas had personally assumed responsibility for. Deep in a forest, high in the mountains, Rebecca Cohen was at this very moment in the company of the nation’s most wanted fugitives.
Savas shifted his focus back to the Attorney General. He smiled for the cameras.
Exhausted, Savas dropped into his office chair and stared forward blankly. The medal and certificate stared back at him from his desk. He didn’t want them. He didn’t join the FBI after his son’s death on 9/11 for honors, and he hadn’t risked everything, even Rebecca, to stop Mjolnir to get a damned medal. He could think of thousands of victims of terrorism who deserved much more than he did. Who would repay them and their families? He could think of one man, Husaam Jordan, who had stopped a nuclear holocaust by sacrificing his own life. But what good were medals to the dead?
He grasped the award materials and unlocked a key-coded drawer in his desk. He yanked it open and pulled out a thick file folder, dropped the medal into it, and closed the drawer. It clicked loudly as it locked. The label on the file, bold black ink on white, left an afterimage in his mind: The Ragnarök Conspiracy.
Savas loosened his tie and sighed deeply. Now for just five minutes of peace.
“Captain Overlord, sir, transitional paperwork is now one hundred percent completed.”
He startled at a bald women framed by his office door, her arms grasping the metal frame above her head. Savas tried not to gawk at her toned body, hammered and stretched by several years of intense combat training. Gone were the waist-length orange hair and the Amish dresses. Piercings ran up her ears, in her lips and eyebrows. Today she wore fatigues and a green tank revealing rippling muscles on a thin frame — some punk version of Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3, but with orange eyebrows, green eyes, and a more spaced-out glare.
Another casualty. The meek girl he had known was gone, murdered just as surely as many in the ground. In her place stood something far more potent.
“Morning, Angel. Here to ruin my day?”
"It's part of my mission statement," she said.
"You know, agent Lightfoote, I’ve spent every favor I had left to let you parade around here like GI Jane. A little protocol every now and then would be nice."
"Stopping a madman and saving the world buys some unique capital, Fearless Leader." Her face darkened. "Steals other things though."
Savas absorbed her words silently. The losses could never be measured. Talented people, good people who could never be replaced.
"John, it's not your fault they died. Not your fault that you're the best to run Intel 1. Trial by fire," she said, nodding to herself. "They cut the fat. Axed all those 9/11 counter-terrorism toys or put them under you. Larry couldn't have done a better job."
Visions of a house bomb rushed through his mind.
"I don't know about that. He was a genius."
"And things are different now. Larry didn't know shit about cybercrimes. You set up the Operations Center under Manuel, not Larry. After what happened, you knew where crime and national security were headed: digital."