But Scooter hadn’t been able to make a money tie to him just yet.
Something else Bubba was now keeping a close eye on.
Arliss couldn’t afford any more moles in his food chain—or anywhere else, for that matter—who might possibly interfere with what was going on in Atlanta.
The scientists had to succeed. Not just to save the human race, but to save the United States government as laid out in the Constitution.
Arliss hadn’t realized Kite would appear and ravage the globe, but he’d been planning for the better part of six years to eliminate Silo, eliminate the money backers in the government who were buying pro-corporation governing decisions to the detriment of the country, and making sure to topple those interests in such a public way that not even the most clueless citizen could ignore what had been going on.
Unfortunately, Kite.
Which complicated a lot of things. Oddly enough, it also made some things easier. He’d been easing one of his operatives back into the fold ever since he realized Los Angeles was a lost cause, not wanting that prong of his attack to disappear. The irony only multiplied when they managed to get their hands on proof of Barstow.
His hands, however, were clean of that decision. Charlotte Kennedy had been the one to pull that trigger, officially.
Unfortunately, she was weak in more ways than one. At least the VP was in his pocket and ready to step in when Arliss made the play.
Bubba’s reappearance in his life had been a sheer stroke of luck, and a welcomed addition to the entire operation, making it far easier for him to focus on the task at hand. He’d handed several operatives off to Bubba’s control, giving the man an enviable black ops budget that would make even Wall Street tycoons green with envy.
Because if he couldn’t pull all of this off before he was either killed or died, the nation was doomed to slide back into an ideological and financial Dark Ages that would forever alter the course of history. Especially now, with the US the last major world military power left relatively unharmed by Kite.
Excluding LA and Barstow, of course.
The burner cell on the TV table in front of him rang. He wiped his hands off and answered.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Joe. You get it?”
“Going over it now. I need to see what pots Goldfinch has simmering on the stove before I can authorize a clean-up, unless you have actionable intel. He’s in a different department. I have pull in the CIA, but I can’t work miracles without putting some effort in.”
“I know. I’ll keep an eye on him. Got a friend who’s moving into position today who will cover ground ops for us.”
“Thanks. Obviously proceed as you see best if things unravel.” He sighed. “If it wasn’t for the damn human race being at stake, I’d sort of enjoy myself and what we’re doing.”
Bubba laughed, a rich, deep sound. “If our women could see us now.”
“Yeah. Lila and Lana would be scolding us for playing soldiers and spies at our ages.”
They both sighed that time. “I feel guilty, Mike,” Arliss admitted.
“Why?”
“Because I was gone when she got sick. She kept it from me for so long, until you made her call me. I should have been here for her.”
“Hey, she was a grown woman. A stubborn one. Fiercely so. And she loved you.”
“Thank you for being there for her. I wish I’d been able to say it to Lana again.”
Mike sounded a little choked up, too. “Yeah, well, it was the least we could do.”
A moment of silent contemplation passed between them. “What are your future plans?” Arliss asked him.
“Me? I’m having too much fun saving the world right now to think about that. We don’t have a production vaccine yet. I don’t want to jinx things. What about you?”
“I’m not retiring,” Arliss said. “You know that. I can’t. Not until I’m sure. Even then they’ll probably find me at my desk one day.”
“You’re still a young man, Joe.”
“Says you. Speak for yourself.” Another of those comfortable pauses. “Thanks for all of this,” Arliss told him. “Seriously. I thought I had a handle on things, but you made my life infinitely easier and guaranteed success.”
“Dammit, Joe. Quit jinxing shit. You gonna do that, I’m hanging up.”
The general laughed. “Can’t believe you really believe that nonsense.”
“Hey, I thought everything was hunky-dory and ended up in a damn wheelchair with shrapnel in my spine. So fuck, yeah, I believe in jinxes. Call me back if you have any questions.”
“Will do. Happy Thanksgiving, Bubba.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, General.”
Arliss ended the call and stared at the phone. Back in the day, the two of them had been close even though he’d been Mike’s commanding officer.
Friends. The four of them eating dinner together at one house or another on the rare days that the men were both in DC at the same time.
He knew Lana’s death had gutted Mike. Having unfortunately been through that first, he understood it.
Mike had faded into civilian life while Arliss had toughened his hide and used work to insulate himself and mute the pain. He’d medicated himself with it, determined to make positive changes so that when he finally died, he could honestly say that he’d done his best to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Considering he felt like he’d fucked up upholding his wedding vows, at least he could do that. Especially since Lila had suffered alone and in silence for so long.
He hoped that if there was an afterlife, that their wives had found each other there and were chatting, shopping, waiting for them to one day join them.
Unfortunately, he didn’t believe in an afterlife, much less a god.
Which meant he couldn’t send Hannibal Silo to eternal hell, only to death.
That would have to suffice.
Chapter Nine
Worst.
Thanksgiving.
Ever.
The fifteen people making up the self-styled “social anarchist” hacktivist group called Freedom World Fighters sat huddled around a small space heater in the corner of an abandoned building in Kansas City.
Noel Tanaka, aka Tank, wasn’t sure if they were on the Kansas or Missouri side of the city.
Frankly, she didn’t care.
Using cubicle walls for support, she’d hung tarps from the walls at an angle, and over the top of the space, which helped keep the meager heat trapped around them. Gatsby, their “leader,” had wanted to keep moving south, toward Texas. It had taken Tank a considerable amount of arguing on her part to talk him into not doing that.
South was bad.
South meant deeper into the US, putting them more at risk. They already had a huge target painted on them, and she sure as hell didn’t want them to get killed.
They all had to head north.
She couldn’t tell them exactly why beyond the fact that getting over the border into Canada provided them with more than just a modicum of safety for several reasons.
Staying alive in the process might be problematic, and she didn’t want to ditch them. They could barely feed themselves, much less stay alive in a hostile weather environment. Many of them were native Californians who’d rarely, if ever, traveled before. They damn sure weren’t equipped to survive severe cold weather.
Leaving them alone would likely mean certain death for at least some of the group.
They all would have died in Barstow had she not stayed with them and gotten them out of the LA area, although she took great pains not to lord that over their heads. If she made a big deal about it, one of them might finally grow an inconvenient ounce of common sense and start asking questions she didn’t want to answer.
She had to protect her sources as much as she had to protect this group of dummies.
Like right now. They’d each wanted to spread out into the building and take up different cubicle areas for privacy. It took her shu
tting up and setting up her warm makeshift tent after she got the power turned on for them to realize why splitting up was a bad idea when the outdoor temps today were only in the forties and it was barely above fifty inside, and the building’s heating system didn’t work. That night it was supposed to drop down into the twenties.
When a couple of them had come in to talk to her, they’d remarked how warm it was inside her tarp tent. Then more of them joined the group.
Monkey see, monkey do.
Beating them over the head with simple science would have been a waste of energy. Not when their collective common-sense IQs totaled around five.
Why are the smartest people so damned stupid?
Noel was taking her time eating an MRE as she listened to the rest of them ramble on about their hopes and dreams of what they were going to accomplish.
Not rolling her eyes had become a survival skill all its own.
Getting them out of LA on the original timeframe she’d wanted to adhere to had been a lost cause. Not dying quickly became her backup goal. Keeping them focused on the main objective—exposing the truth about Kite infection numbers, and other government lies—ironically proved easier now that Barstow had been made to go boom. Barstow became the top item on their list.
It sickened her, though, turned her stomach how close her group came to dying. No way in hell had she planned to go to Barstow anyway. Especially when she learned what was going on there. Until she’d been able to produce proof as to why they couldn’t go, she’d thought she was going to be the last man standing, so to speak, and have to walk away from them.
Why they had wanted to trust the government about evacuating to Barstow when they refused to believe the government about other things still boggled Noel’s mind.
Irrelevant, because Gatsby was the popular leader. Had she not been able to make him see reason, the group would have been doomed. At least he wasn’t a narcissistic dumbass with a macho mindset. After Barstow, he’d given a lot of weight to her big-decision thoughts and had so far, eventually, ended up siding with her.
Although sometimes it took a lot of haggling on her part. She knew she had a set role to play. They saw her as the smart Asian girl, a stereotype that still played out even hundreds of years later.
A stereotype that, in this case, she didn’t mind using to her advantage. She could always cite her military parents teaching her stuff and telling her things while she was growing up.
They’d wasted precious time in Salt Lake City because she’d thought it was a good bet and had retreated there for safety. Only after she’d realized that was a dead end and a dangerous place to get caught did she mobilize the group and get them heading east.
The government wasn’t reporting the true Kite casualty numbers.
She’d personally seen the burn piles, bodies stacked like cordwood, people testing blue at government roadblocks…and what happened to them and the people traveling with them.
Euthanized on the spot with po-clo.
One night she’d slipped away from the group and did a little reconnaissance on her own, watched from on top of a building through a sniper scope as events played out a mile away when a small caravan arrived at the checkpoint.
And none of the people in the caravan had emerged alive from the tent they’d been herded into.
She’d prodded her group to move early the next morning, and they’d settled in Omaha for a short while.
Until one of them had lucked onto an unguarded digital backdoor into the servers at Edwards.
Which had led to a goldmine of data, including first-person helo and aircraft footage of the carnage at Barstow.
Of course, Connell had gleefully started posting it all online before Tank realized he was and she pointed out to the group that now they had to move—again—because he’d likely given away their position.
They were an enthusiastic lot, even if they didn’t get any points for common sense.
Tank already knew through some of her sources that the military had assigned a team to find and neutralize them. Not a SOTIF team unfortunately, or it would have made her life easier getting them to safety, and she had no clue how far the team was behind them and their movements.
Staying ahead of them was critical to their survival.
Luck had it that one of their members had family in Iowa. They’d safely made it that far just to have to move again because Sylvan had stupidly put a message out on a board, trying to locate her parents in California.
No, killing Sylvan in her sleep is a baaaad thing.
Now they were holed up here in KC. And here they would stay, for now, unless or until someone fucked up…again. Connell and Sylvan had been chastised by the entire group for their actions, including by Gatsby, on whom Sylvan thought the sun rose and set.
She’s only twenty. She’s just an idiot and wasn’t thinking.
It was difficult under the circumstances to remember that none of these people had the knowledge she did, none of the survival skills, the sense of self-preservation.
She’d grown up the child of two career military parents, officers, learning how to shoot, how to fight, PT, survival training. Being an only child, some of her fondest childhood memories were going to the gun range with her parents, her father teaching her how to reload custom ammo at home, the pride in their eyes when she competed against other kids in shooting and usually took first.
Countless hours spent in martial arts training, or even sparring with her father. Camping in conditions most people wouldn’t venture out in for money, much less for fun.
Unlike this group. They’d lived sheltered existences, for the most part.
This was literally a whole new world to them. Their hacktivism was no longer centered around first-world social issues, cushy dorm rooms, and trendy coffee shops and student cafes.
They were out in the harsh, cruel world for the first time and having a lot of trouble adapting.
Noel didn’t have the heart to tell Sylvan that her parents were likely dead. The carnage in the LA area was complete. Had they managed to escape to Barstow, they were absolutely dead.
The Red Cross was trying to set up a refugee database, but it didn’t take into account all the dead and euthanized. Mainly because the military wasn’t forthcoming with their data.
Noel knew from her sources that, yes, there was an official military database. IDs were being taken from the euthanized so they could eventually release a record, once they’d figured out how to spin the story.
Typical.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t found Sylvan’s parents listed on it.
Yet.
After eating, Noel logged into a secure sat-link she had and checked one of her e-mail accounts. Fortunately, she had a message awaiting her.
ETA to Topeka from 20?
Noel glanced up. No one was paying attention to her or what she was doing. Some of them were napping, some were on their own computers or talking amongst each other.
She considered the question. Topeka, huh?
She typed her reply, wondering if her contact was online.
como
She wasn’t super-fluent in Spanish by any stretch, but her contact was. So she frequently mixed it in to confuse things just in case any of her group decided to hack her for a change and somehow managed to get lucky enough to break into her hidden computer system.
No way could the others in her group find out her sources. She couldn’t —wouldn’t—allow it.
The reply came less than ten seconds later.
secreto
Only one thing came to mind with that response, and hopefully the thing that her source meant.
Maize?
Another fast reply.
Bingo.
Her heart started racing, fingers almost vibrating as she typed.
You give me an ETA.
An immediate reply.
There isn’t one needed. Not right now. 20?
She grinned.
KC
T
rying not to smile was getting harder by the second before the reply came in.
:) Hold what you got. I’ll be in touch. Good job. OO.
She killed the connection and wiped her cache. OO was her connection’s short-code for over and out.
She’d desperately hoped for this, because it certainly would make her life a hell of a lot easier, as well as put the group in a position of safety that she’d worry about explaining later, preferably after their objective was achieved.
All she could do now was wait and hopefully keep herself, and the others, safe.
* * * *
Leta didn’t know what she thought their hideout would be like. But after passing through a gate—which they locked behind them—then driving over a causeway and bridge onto a barrier island, it wasn’t exactly matching up with dark corners and secret rooms from movies she’d seen.
Palm trees, sunny beaches, and a secluded Gulf-side outpost felt more like a high-end vacation resort than the world’s secret salvation.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
“Nope. Home sweet hideaway. Used to be a research station. Our cover story is we’re doing secret ops in conjunction with Homeland Security.”
“Nice.”
He parked her SUV next to several other vehicles. Due to the underbrush, you couldn’t see this side of the island or the three buildings up on stilts from land.
“I did mention I’m officially homeless, right?”
He smiled. “Not anymore. Not as long as you want to stay with us.”
“What if I get some sleep in me and realize this was a really stupid move I just made?”
His smile faded. “I hope that won’t happen, but you’re not a prisoner, if that’s the question. I’m hoping that once you see we’re serious about how close we are to a Kite vaccine that you’ll want to help us out. We won’t force you to stay with us as long as you promise to maintain our secrecy.”
“I’m not a researcher. I don’t know much about Kite other than the CDC updates and training we received.”