“Has to be something else,” he said to himself, his voice barely a whisper. “After all, there are a lot of bloody-minded maniacs in the world.”
On the screen, they were bringing out the wounded. Many of them were horribly mangled.
“Bugger this,” he said, and reached for his phone. He debated whom to call. Mr. Church?
No. This was terrorism that used advanced technology, which meant Church and his people would be involved. Getting the man on the phone was difficult at the quietest of times.
Who then?
His fingers punched buttons as if on their own. The phone rang four times, and he was about to give it up when the call was answered.
“Hello?” said a soft female voice.
“Junie,” he said.
“Oh,” said Junie Flynn, “Toys. Look, I can’t talk right now. Things are bad here.”
“Bad where? Are you in Philadelphia?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m in San Diego. At the hospital.”
“Why?” demanded Toys. “What’s wrong? Are you—?”
“It’s Circe,” said Junie. “She collapsed. God, Toys, I think she’s in a coma…”
Junie quickly explained about Circe’s collapsing while they were house hunting. Since being brought to the hospital, the doctors had not been able to revive her.
“They’re doing all kinds of tests.”
“The baby—?”
“They don’t know yet. Oh God, Toys, this is so terrible. Rudy and Joe are in Philadelphia, at the ballpark.”
“Oh my God.”
“Rudy called. He’s okay. Joe’s hurt, but Rudy says it isn’t bad. But they’re so far away.”
“Stay right there,” Toys said. “I’m on my way.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 2:34 P.M.
I listened at the door.
Heard muffled conversation. Men’s voices. Low. Speaking quickly. Like people in a hurry.
Not speaking English.
I’m pretty good with languages. I took the door handle and turned it very slowly, met no resistance, opened the door a fragment of an inch. Listened closer.
At least three people speaking.
Definitely not English.
Farsi.
It was the most common language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
Not entirely uncommon in the States. Lot of immigrants here. Melting pot and all that. So it wasn’t the language by itself that let me know I’d found my bad guys.
It was what they were saying.
Like I said, I’m pretty good at languages.
One guy said, “Your jacket is buttoned wrong.”
Another one said, “Let’s go. The timer is running.”
Then there was the sound of footsteps.
The killer inside my head was growling.
Or maybe that was Ghost.
I whipped the door open and went in low and fast, bringing the little gun up into a two-handed grip, searching for targets. Finding five men, not three.
None of them looked Middle Eastern. No one was an Arab. No one was Persian. They looked like average Americans.
They were all dressed in uniforms.
Four wore the blue shirts and navy trousers of paramedics.
The fifth was dressed in the uniform of a Philadelphia police officer.
If I’d seen them in the hall, I might have bought the con. If I hadn’t heard them speaking in Farsi. If I hadn’t heard that comment about the timer. Yeah, I might have bought that they were here to help. That they were good guys.
But … that ship sailed.
Ghost bared his teeth at them. I pointed the gun and yelled, “Federal agent, freeze!”
Knowing they wouldn’t.
Hoping they wouldn’t.
They didn’t.
One of the paramedics grabbed the man closest to him and shoved him at me. As the man staggered forward, the first man yelled, “Kill them!”
I fired. The guy staggering toward me took the round above the right eye. His head snapped back, but his body continued forward, crashing into me, knocking me back.
I yelled to Ghost, “Hit! Hit! Hit!”
He moved like a white blur, snarling, rising, slamming into the cop. I heard terrible screams as I pivoted to shake off the dead man. But the body shuddered as if punched, and as an aftereffect I heard the pop of a handgun.
With the corpse still atop me, I reached around and fired at movement.
Another scream.
I shucked the body off me in time to see one of the paramedics sag back, his stomach pouring red, the gun falling from his hand. I fired two more shots. And another man went down, his lower jaw shot away.
Ghost had the cop down and they were trying to kill each other. No idea who was winning.
Then the fourth man was the only uninjured guy left. I fired my last bullet at him, but he was in motion and the round missed him by half an inch. He tore open his shirt and clawed for a Glock.
I hurled my empty gun at him, and as he dodged I came up off the floor and drove my shoulder into his gut, driving him backward. But the son of a bitch was spry. He took my momentum and twisted, whipping me around his hip. I flew into the wall, rebounded, and crashed down.
The killer dove for his gun, but I snapped a kick out and knocked him down. Then I was on my knees, my right hand going for the rapid-release folder. It was ultra-lightweight and had a small 3.375 blade that popped out with a flick of the wrist and locked in place.
My opponent had a surprise of his own. He slipped a scalpel out of a barrel sheath and rushed me.
In the movies, a knife fight takes five minutes, and the players dance around each other like they’re extras from the Michael Jackson “Beat It” video. In real life, knife fights are short, brutal, and messy. The better fighter usually wins right away, and the other guy goes down in pieces.
This was different. The guy with the scalpel was good.
Real damn good.
He body-feinted left and snapped a short circular cut right that traced a burning line from my wristwatch almost to my elbow. Scalpels are wickedly sharp. You don’t need muscle to cut deep. I jerked my arm down in the direction of his cut, letting it push me, but even so blood burst out of the wound. It was so slender a cut that it burned like an acid sting.
I twisted my body and hit his elbow with my open palm, then whip-changed back and slammed my right elbow into his biceps. A big torsion-driven one-two. He tried to turn inside the combination, but I checked him again with my left and rebounded my right up and over his deltoid for a very fast left-to-right lateral slash.
My blade caught him on the back side of the big tendon in the neck. It was a big, deep cut. I checked again and corkscrewed the tip into the socket of his throat, punching through trachea and hyoid bone all the way to the spine.
And that, as they say, was the ball game.
He made a terrible wet coughing sound as I twisted my hand to pull the blade free. Just for fuck’s sake, I bent and slashed his right knee tendon, sending him crashing and dying to the floor.
Then I wheeled around.
Ghost stood over the cop.
What was left of the cop.
From chin to breastbone, there was only a red ruin. Blood dripped from Ghost’s jaws, and in his eyes I saw only wolf. Primal, feral, victorious.
His eyes snapped toward the other two men.
The guy whose jaw had been blown off was thrashing and screaming in a muted parody of a human voice. He might live, but interrogating him was for shit.
That left the second guy I’d shot.
He lay on the floor, hands clamped to the bullet hole in his gut. There was no exit wound, which meant that the round was still in him. He was in terrible pain. Gut shot. Hurts like a mother. Ask anyone.
My sympathy level for him was a few hundred miles below don’t-give-a-shit. He could see that in my eyes.
I could tell, because I could see the fear expanding in his eyes as I stalked toward him. Ghost crept forward with me, his muzzle wrinkled, bloody drool falling from between his titanium teeth.
The killer knew he was in trouble that went a lot farther down a dark road than a bullet in his brisket. He could see the killer in my head glaring at him. I could tell, because I could see the awareness of it blossom in his eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Not in English. In Farsi.
“Who do you work for? Who did this?”
He licked his lips and shook his head.
“Is there another bomb?” I yelled.
He told me to go fuck a camel. He said it in a way that suggested the camel was also my mother.
I put the tip of my knife against the ragged edge of the bullet wound. Just laid it there, and looked at him while I did it.
“Do you want me to be creative?” I asked.
That’s an inexact translation. What I said is probably closer to “Do you want me to do magic?”
He did not. His line of bullshit and resistance only went so far, and then it was he and I in a small room, and we both knew I could make his last minutes on earth last for a thousand years.
He said five words. One short sentence. One name.
The sentence was eloquent in its simplicity.
“It’s too late.”
And then he clamped his jaws shut. I heard the crunch and knew it for what it was, what it had to be.
Bloody foam bubbled from between his lips. It smelled like bitter almonds.
Hollow tooth.
Suicide capsule.
Cyanide.
Shit.
He went rigid and then collapsed back.
Dead as dead will ever get.
“It’s too late.”
As much as those words terrified me, it was the name that made it all so much worse.
The name hung burning in the air. Two words that explained everything and told me nothing.
Two words that scared the living hell out of me.
Two terrible words.
“Seven Kings.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 2:37 P.M.
I staggered to my feet and began hunting through the room, looking for something very bad. Something with a timer.
I tore open every cabinet, every closet, every drawer. I upended the table. I slashed the sofa cushions and smashed the doors on the trophy case. I looked everywhere a bomb could be hidden.
And found nothing.
Then I started going through the clothes of each man.
That’s when I found the device.
Not a bomb. In the pocket of the dead cop, I found a compact and very powerful jammer. Ultrasophisticated. The kind that would link to many smaller relay stations that were probably placed all around the stadium. In trash cans, stuck to the undersides of seats. Didn’t matter where they were. They were here and this device controlled them.
On the front of it was a digital counter. A timer.
Ticking down from 305.
304.
303.
Ticking down to what?
I held the device out so Ghost could sniff it, but he had no reaction. If it was a bomb, he’d make a certain small whuff. So, it wasn’t a bomb.
It was a jammer.
Which is another way of saying that it was a transmitter.
Icy sweat began running down my spine. When it reached zero, it could do a couple of things. The only good thing I could imagine would be for it to cancel the jamming signal.
I did not believe for one second that this would do only that.
It could also blast out a signal to explosive devices planted in the building. Secondary bombs.
Or …
The SWAT guys came crashing through the door, guns out, screaming at me to drop my weapons, to get down on the ground.
“No!” I yelled. “Federal agent. There’s another bomb.”
They weren’t even listening. Two of them grabbed me and slammed me down onto the floor. Ghost began barking, and I had to scream at the top of my voice to keep him back. To order him to lie down. If he didn’t obey at once, they would have killed him. Guaranteed.
Ghost looked like he wanted to take them all on. Maybe it was shock or doggy adrenaline, or maybe he was as batshit crazy as me.
“Down!” I shrieked. “Ghost—down now.”
He finally sank down. Two SWAT shooters had guns on him, ready to kill. A bad day could have gotten a whole lot worse if they tried.
“Federal agent,” I said, over and over again, raising my hands. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
“Shut up,” snapped one of them and kicked me in the ribs. Hard. Ghost nearly came off the ground at him, but I bellowed him back. Then I craned my head and snarled at the man who’d kicked me. “There’s a fucking bomb about to go off, asshole. If it does and anyone dies, I’m holding you responsible for it. I will fucking kill you, do you understand me?”
If he was impressed, it was impossible to tell through the mask, goggles, and helmet.
An officer suddenly pushed his way into the room. He knelt in front of me.
“What’s your name?” he barked.
“Captain Joe Ledger,” I said. “Your name is Hooper. You were told about me. Listen to me, lieutenant. There is another bomb in this building. See that device? That’s a timer. It’s counting down. We have to stop dicking around and find it.”
He gave me exactly one second of appraisal, and then he grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet.
“Where is it?”
I snatched up the timer. It said 58.
57.
56.
I said, “I don’t know. We have to find it.”
The jammer was still working.
Their radios were as dead as mine.
We all left the room at a breakneck run.
But we all knew that we were already too late.
We tried.
We really tried.
I don’t actually remember the blast. They call it traumatic amnesia. The effect of traumatic shock on the brain. My only splinter of memory was of something white. Just that. A big, white nothing.
I closed my eyes to avoid the glare.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital.
Chapter Thirty-nine
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
March 29, 3:19 P.M.
Toys saw Junie Flynn at the end of the hall. She was in an ICU unit, behind a big pane of tempered glass, standing beside a hospital bed. There were two soldiers standing guard outside the room. Toys recognized one of them.
Chief Petty Officer Lydia Ruiz.
Lydia recognized him, too.
She said something to the other soldier and then came hurrying down the hall to intercept Toys. She had a rifle slung on her shoulder and a look of complete contempt on her face. It turned her pretty face into something ugly and ferocious.
“Lydia—” began Toys, but she cut him off with a vicious two-handed shove that slammed him in the chest and knocked him against a wall.
“Chingate,” she snarled. “Yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre.”
Lydia got right up in his face. Her hot spit dottled his cheeks and mouth.
“Listen to me, I—”
“Bésame el culo, maricón.”
“If you’re going to call me a faggot,” he said, “at least have the courtesy to do it in English so there’s no misunderstanding.”
Lydia grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt, pulled him off the wall, and slammed him back again. She was very strong and very fast. In another time and place, when Toys was a different person, he might have risen to this challenge. He might have wanted to make her eat her words. To make her earn the power she was trying to show him. Toys was a pacifist now, but he
had been a killer for most of his life. Ruthless, efficient, and cold.
Even now, he had to fight to keep his balled fists down, pressed against his thighs, shackled by will so that he did not commit another sin. Even the sin of defending himself.
“Lydia!” called a voice, and they both turned to see Junie Flynn hurrying down the hallway, her face grave with concern. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” said Lydia with a nasty smile. “I’m thinking of dragging this pinche puta in the stairwell to see if I can bounce him all the way down to the first floor.”
Junie reached out and caught Lydia’s wrist. “Don’t.”
“You got other business, Junie,” said Lydia. “Let me—”
Junie stepped very close, forcing enough of herself between Lydia and Toys so that the DMS soldier had to look at her. “I am ordering you to let him go.”
Lydia blinked at her. “Ordering? Excuse me, Miss Flynn, I know that you’re the captain’s lady, but this is a DMS matter.”
“No, this is a FreeTech matter. I am the director of that company. Toys works for me and with me, and that is by a special arrangement made by Mr. Church. I know that Joe disapproves, but this is no more his call to make than it is yours. Toys is under my protection. Let him go right now, or I will have you removed from this detail.”
Lydia stared at her. So did Toys.
In the space of a few seconds, Junie Flynn seemed to grow to fill the hallway. Her voice was no longer the soft, almost passive and conciliatory one she generally used. Now it was filled with authority. It was filled with command. And with an absolute confidence in that command.
Lydia Ruiz held her stare for three full seconds. Then, with a grunt of disgust, she shoved Toys away from her. The young man thumped into the wall and nearly fell, but Junie darted out a hand and caught him under the armpit. She pulled him upright but then shifted her hand to the front of his shoulder, holding him gently but firmly against the wall.
Then Junie turned more fully toward Lydia. “This is a misunderstanding. A difference of opinion. Tell me, Lydia, are we going to have a problem between us now, or are we done with it?”
It took Lydia a few seconds to orchestrate her response. She sighed and stepped back.
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t give me that ‘ma’am’ crap,” said Junie with half a smile. “I don’t like being called that any more than Aunt Sallie does. I’m asking you a serious question, and I would like the courtesy of an honest answer. Are we done with this?”