Death Angel (31 page)

She didn’t know him except by reputation and had never met him. Marta Blanco was Lassiter’s handler. At virtually the last minute this morning Lassiter had learned about the meeting between Scourby, Carlson, and Adam Zane and passed the information along to Marta. There’d been time to engineer a double cross, allowing the Blanco gang to massacre the Scourby/Varrin coalition and secure Carlson and Zane.

For icing on the cake, Jack Bauer had been killed at the scene. Of course, Lassiter had to die, too. He’d served his purpose, and besides, he knew too much.

So here she was, in possession of the field.

Adam Zane would deal, the PALO codes were priceless; he’d jump at the chance to acquire them. The leopard doesn’t change its spots; he was the same as always and would react according to the predictable tropes of greed and power.

She was the same, too—Annihilax lives again.

And the mole, the master spy of this century, the atomic secret stealer supreme, was the one man she’d never suspected:

Her husband, Hugh Carlson.

9:23
A.M
. MDT
Mission Hill, Los Alamos County

“This family reunion is all very touching, but what about the demo?” Adam Zane asked.

He was right, of course. The purveyor of stolen secrets had seen clear to the heart of the matter as far as he was concerned; he had to be sure that he had secrets to purvey.

Dr. Hugh Carlson had gotten some of his guts back. “Without me you’ve got no demonstration. You’ve got the PALO codes, sure. What of it? Eventually you can peddle them to some foreign power. But it’ll take a platoon of their best brains hundreds of man-hours to make them work properly. The data is there. The words but not the music. They’re the building blocks, the bricks. But my brain’s the mortar, the cement binding them all together.

“I know all the tricks and shortcuts and shades of interpretation. I can make them work now and later. Another thing, Zane—I know exactly what they’re worth, what they can do. Invaluable for you in a negotiation. I can make sure you’re getting full value and that the other side isn’t trying to drag down the price with double talk.”

“Prove it,” Adam Zane said.

“I will—for the right payday.”

“You’re in no position to make demands,” Jane Miller said.

“No? What are you going to do, kill me? Torture me?”

“Two very attractive options, husband dear.”

“Bull. You’re not going to throw money away. I’m worth it—big money. With or without the codes. Get rough with me, and I might get so nervous as to miss a vital keystroke and glitch out the process.

“That’s not counting what I know about Perseus and Argus, too. A treasure trove of classified secrets. Use your heads. Stop thinking of me as a prisoner and start thinking of me as a partner. Then let’s get the show on the road.”

“There may be something to what you say, Carlson,” Zane said thoughtfully.

“There is. And don’t try any of the old soft soap. Take a good look around you at each other. I’m the only nonexpendable person here. I’m the creator. You others are just hijackers, brokers, and middlemen. I’m the one person you have to keep alive.”

“What’s your pitch?” Jane Miller asked.

“Equal shares,” Carlson said. “I’m not greedy—unlike the rest of you. Equal shares all around. Of course, that number may dwindle if you decide to thin your ranks to up your shares, but that’s your business.”

Zane’s jaws firmed. “Don’t press your luck, Carlson. Live goods are a headache. They’re a lot more difficult to
transport than a case full of codes, so—don’t overplay your hand.”

Carlson was almost cheerful, or perhaps hysterical. “I won’t ask you to give your word. Word of honor? What good’s the word of a bunch of thieves and killers? No, I’m appealing to something a lot more solid. Good common sense. You know what I say is true. That’s my insurance policy and it’s better than all the solemn vows in Creation.”

“It is if you can do what you say you can do. Otherwise…Well, get to it.”

“Done. We’re powered up so let’s start inputting the codes.”

The electronic arena was alive. Outside, in its protective housing, the generator was humming. Inside, green on lights glimmered on the faces of instrument boards and panels. Electronic machinery clicked, buzzed, droned.

Dr. Hugh Carlson sat at the main computer console like a virtuoso instrumentalist getting set at the keyboard of a concert piano. He selected a coded desk from the metal box and fed it into a slot. The machine’s plastic tongue retracted.

“Takes time to input the correct coded disks,” he said. “Just the purely mechanical act of feeding them in one at a time. Luckily we’ve got the right hardware with the proper specs. Well, luck has nothing to do with it. I selected the machines myself and Scourby followed my orders to the letter.”

He input another disk. “It’s all a matter of proportion. With these codes I could launch an ICBM and hit Moscow or Beijing. Impressive, but we don’t want that. We don’t want to start World War III. No money in Armageddon. What we want is an incident. Something to show we can do what we say we can do, convincing all buyers of its potential worth.

“We want to sell these codes to the highest bidder. It’s
possible that that might be Uncle Sam. Not entirely likely, considering the state of the dollar and the national debt, but possible. So we want deniability. In case Uncle wants to pay to hush up the whole mess.

“So—we want an incident. Something that’s too big to ignore but not so big that it triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust. What we do, we light up a candle someplace far away from here. A nuclear missile silo somewhere up north. I was thinking Montana first but I decided on North Dakota. It’s a wasteland anyway and nobody’s going to miss a few hundred square miles of it if they go boom. Of course they’ll stay hot for the next several hundred years or so.

“What I’m going to do, I’ll detonate the atomic warheads of a Minuteman missile in a silo in North Dakota. I’ll touch it off so it blows in the silo. The blast will create an electromagnetic pulse that will screw up communications and everything else for that part of the country and Canada, too, but that won’t be so bad. The confusion will aid our getaway. Just make sure we go south.

“There’ll be several thousand people dead from the blast, tens of thousands more from the radiation, fallout, and related phenomenon. The whole north Midwestern tier will probably go dark from the EMP. No power, TV, cell phones, computers, nothing. Back to the Stone Age. Washington will claim it’s a terrible accident. To save face. If they can pay, fine. If not, the codes—and my services—go to the highest bidder.

“Once the codes are loaded into the computer, they’ll be uploaded through our satellite transceiver to an orbiting communications satellite. The comsat will download them into the preselected missile silo. The override will negate all their controls, rendering them useless. I’ll be controlling them from here. I’ll arm the warheads and detonate them on the ground in the silo. After that, it’s all over but the getaway and the payday.”

9:59
A.M
. MDT
Minuteman Missile Silo, Moosejaw, North Dakota

Being a missile man is a study in futility. It takes on much of the aspects of being a night watchman. There’s an inherent contradiction. The silo is loaded with one of the most potent and deadly weapons in the world, an instrument of awesome megadeath potential. The other side of the coin is that nothing ever happens.

For the United States Air Force missile technicians serving out their duty shift, there are things to do. Routine maintenance programs. Drills. Occasional exercises.

Above ground is the flat, steppelike appearance of barren North Dakota flats, a sprawling emptiness of vast grasslands stretching out to all corners of the globe.

Below ground, beneath a hinged sealed camouflaged hatch cover, lies the silo, a concrete-lined, steel-reinforced vertical pipe sunk deep in the ground. It’s well-named, this silo. Like an aboveground grain silo, only inverted. A sheath for an atomic-warheaded dart.

The vehicle, a Minuteman missile topped with an MIRV warhead. Multiple (targeted) independent reentry vehicles. Based on the principle of “bigger bang for a buck.” Containing not one but several atomic warheads, each programmed to strike a different target in the area.

Today, like all the other days, all the other duty shifts, the USAF missile techs—a two-man crew—face another dreary round of exquisite boredom. Atomic war? Not a chance, brother. The superpowers have grown up. They stay away from no-win nuclear showdowns. The real threat today comes from nuclear “suitcase” bombs and dirty bombs made by rogue states and disseminated into the hands of terrorists.

The missile techs on duty in Silo 14 go through the motions by routine turned near robotized.

Suddenly—

Things started happening. Red lights flashed. Buzzers sounded. Somnolent, lazy readouts were suddenly goosed into spitting out masses of digits. Machinery switched on.

After a moment’s disbelieving paralysis of mind and body, the techs started throwing switches, pressing buttons, trying to regain control of the system. To arm an atomic weapon is a two-man operation. Both missile techs must simultaneously insert their keys and use the day’s PAL codes to arm the warheads.

Now, while they have done nothing at all to initiate a launching sequence, a phantom force has reached in, punching past their fail-safes and switched on the system, arming the atomics.

The nuclear warheads are alive and counting down.

Ignition is only minutes away. There is nothing they can do to stop it.

10:13
A.M
. MDT
Mission Hill, Los Alamos County

Mission Hill was a fortress. Max Scourby made it so. Torreon and Marta Blanco, its new masters, have reinforced it. The boundary wall was already a foot thick, its ten-foot height hardened with rows of black iron spikes with spear blade points. The main gate, made of motorized wrought-iron grillwork, has been reinforced by the simple expedient of parking a rented delivery truck inside the gates, blocking them lengthwise.

The grounds are patrolled by a small army of Blanco gunmen armed with assault rifles, machine guns, and shotguns. A smaller but equally well-armed cadre guards the inside of the mansion on every floor.

There was a flaw in the hardened defense system, however, a failure to think in dimension. Jack Bauer launched
his assault by air. A long, slim, needlelike yellow helicopter with black trim hovered over the roof of the Mission Hill mansion. Pilot Ron Galvez was at the controls. In the cockpit were Jack Bauer and Tony Almeida. They’d armed themselves with weapons from the top of Bluecoat Bluff. The heaviest firepower they could find.

Earlier, Jack Bauer had used the cell phone to contact Ron Galvez at his home base at Black Eagle Airfield. Galvez had been dozing off on a cot in the hangar, where he’d set up station the night before, standing ready to respond to Jack Bauer’s summons.

The helicopter had been serviced and fueled, and stood ready to go.

When Jack’s call came, Galvez rose from the cot, gulped a paper cup of cold coffee that had been standing for hours on a nearby desk, and hustled out to the helicopter. After a preflight check, he’d lofted the copter into the sky, arrowing toward Bluecoat Bluff.

Jack and Tony had descended to the ground at the base of the hill. The copter touched down in an open field. The CTU agents climbed aboard and the copter soared upward.

A short time later the aircraft was hovering over the Mission Hill mansion. The fenced-in grounds below were a scene of frantic action. Like an overturned anthill. Blanco guards were running this way and that along the paths. They didn’t know what to do or where to go first. Their confusion was compounded by the fact that they were under siege, not just from above, but also on the ground.

Jack Bauer had also put in a call to Vince Sabito. A torrent of obscene abuse directed at Jack poured out of the phone. Vince Sabito vented until he paused for breath. Jack managed to get a few words in edgewise—enough to get Sabito listening.

“This is the showdown. The Blancos and Carlson are forted up at Mission Hill,” Jack said.

“Mission Hill? That’s Scourby’s place,” Sabito growled.

“Not anymore. Scourby’s dead and so is the Varrin gang, massacred by the Blancos. Torreon and company—and Carlson—are at Mission Hill. If you move fast you can bag them all.

“Unless I get there first,” Jack said. He broke the connection, cutting off Sabito in mid-squawk. He’d thrown in that last crack about getting there first just to irritate Sabito and goose him into moving out fast.

Jack had also contacted Deputy Wallace Ross. “This is the big one. Bring out the big guns. You’ve been waiting to clean up on the Blancos—now’s the time.”

The results were plain to see from way up in the middle of the air. FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies were besieging Mission Hill. Their vehicles surrounded it on all sides.

Sabito had apparently gotten those reinforcements he’d requested from Albuquerque, including an entire FBI Tac Squad in an armored war wagon.

Mission Hill was the scene of a battle royal. From above, gun smoke clouds bobbed around inside and outside the walls like floating cotton balls.

Ron Galvez brought the helicopter close to the central bell tower whose flat roof was topped by the satellite dish aimed at a forty-five-degree angle at the sky. A couple of Blanco riflemen were in the bell tower shooting at the helicopter.

The passenger side door of the cockpit was open and Jack Bauer hung by a safety harness half out of the cockpit, wielding an M–16. Tony Almeida crouched behind him and to the side, working an M–4 carbine.

Jack snapped a succession of three-shot bursts through the open arches into the bell tower, spraying the riflemen with gunfire. They spun and whirled under the fusillade.

One dropped to the floor, inert. Another flopped sideways out of an open arch, falling off the tower to come
crashing down on the orange ceramic-tiled scaled roof. He broke some tiles and sent them skittering down the side of the slanted roof. He rolled, following the same trajectory. He fell off the edge of the roof and dropped three stories to land flat on the ground-level patio.

“Take out that satellite dish,” Jack shouted. He and Tony unloaded on the transceiver, sieving it. Here was where he could have used a grenade launcher, Jack thought.

Bullets raked the flat roof and sides of the bell tower, stitching them. Jack poured more slugs at the base where a bundle of black cables fed upward into a box at the hub of the rear of the dish. His clip emptied. He ejected and slapped in a new clip, locked and loaded, and resumed firing.

Tony Almeida was a sharpshooter. He squeezed off tight bursts into the base of the dish where neat little framework steel feet helped anchor the dish into place. The dish wobbled shakily.

A prolonged burst from Jack’s weapons severed the bundle of cables loose from where they fed into the hub box. Tony shot off the foot he’d been working on. The dish swayed, off-balance. It leaned backward, teetering precariously for an instant.

Jack and Tony sprayed some more slugs into the dish, ventilating it, shoving it backward by main force.

That did it. The dish leaned farther backward and tipped over, falling downward. It broke free from its remaining stanchions and pitched off the side of the bell tower, plummeting to the ground.

In Moosejaw, North Dakota, Silo 14, the phantom force from outside that had taken control of the control panel suddenly loosed its iron grip of control and ceased to exist.

As soon as they realized that the big board was once again under their control, the two missile techs went to work disarming the bomb.

The red lights on the board turned green, alarms fell silent. The danger was ended.

The FBI Tac Squad commandeered a fire truck and charged the Mission Hill main gate, using it as a battering ram. The wrought-iron grille gates flew apart with little resistance. The front of the fire truck plowed into the delivery truck parked on the other side of the gate, hitting it broadside. The fire truck’s progress slowed.

The driver stomped the gas pedal and the fire truck lunged forward, bulling the delivery truck backward, sliding it sideways across the lawn. The gate was forced and Tac Squad members poured through it, charging into the Mission Hill grounds.

Jack Bauer motioned to pilot Ron Galvez to drop closer to the roof of the mansion. Galvez shook his head no. Jack was insistent, motioning vehemently.

Galvez worked the controls, hovering six feet above the roofline to the left of the bell tower. He had trouble holding the machine steadily in place.

Jack Bauer slung the M–16 over his shoulder. He unfastened the safety strap and jumped out of the cockpit to the roof.

He hit hard and slipped on the ceramic tiles, knocking some of them loose. His feet worked, seeking purchase. Jack succeeded in draping himself over the rooftop ridgeline, lying facedown across it at right angles, his middle in the center.

Galvez lifted up the chopper. The downdraft battered at Jack. It eased as Galvez guided the helicopter off to the side and away.

Jack got his feet under him and rose up into a low crouch. Like a tightrope walker he crossed the roofline to the bell tower, stepping through an archway to the tower floor. The dead body of one of the riflemen lay sprawled on his back
on the floor. A square open hatchway accessed a flight of stone stairs.

Jack unlimbered his M–16 and held it leveled at waist height, pointing the muzzle down toward the interior recesses of the shaft. He climbed down the stone stairs, descending toward the bottom of the bell tower.

Things were out of control in the electronic arena on the ground floor. Adam Zane decided he’d had enough. He broke and ran toward the front of the building, holding his hands in the air, shouting, “Don’t shoot! I surrender—”

Torreon Blanco drew his gun and shot Zane in the back. Zane lurched, almost falling. He recovered his balance and moved ahead, advancing slowly, laboriously, as if he were wading through hip-deep water.

Torreon fired again. Zane pitched forward, falling on his face. “I hate yellow bellies,” Torreon said.

“What’s your plan?” Marta demanded.

Torreon brandished his gun, fist-pumping it in the air. “We’ll go down shooting!”

Marta nodded. “That’s my brother—you’re some kind of hombre!”

Torreon grinned, showing lots of teeth. Behind him, Hugh Carlson eased out of his chair facing the instrument board and began sneaking toward the rear of the room and the sunny patio beyond.

When he got clear of the masses of electronic equipment and saw daylight he broke into a run. His footfalls slapped the tiles, catching Torreon’s attention. He spun around, gun in hand, arm extended as he drew a bead on Carlson’s retreating back. “Another deserter—”

A nearby window shattered and rounds from the gun battle outside raked his chest. Falling, he gasped Marta’s name and landed motionless.

Hugh Carlson ran outside on to the rear patio. The back grounds were filled with Blanco men in retreat, running toward the rear wall. A few of them had reached it and were trying to scale it. It was smooth and ten feet tall and they were meeting with little success. Hugh Carlson ran across the patio to join them.

Ahead, a Blanco gunman had turned to fire at some FBI men who appeared rounding the corner of the house on his right. He glimpsed Carlson in the corner of his eye and saw a stranger charging toward him. He opened fire, cutting him down.

The helicopter zoomed low over the back grounds, Tony Almeida strafing Blanco gunmen with his M–4. Galvez pulled up, made a wide, swooping curve, and came in for another run. Tony looked like he was having a hell of a time.

Jack Bauer reached the bottom of the bell tower just in time to hear a dull booming blast like the sound made by a shotgun. He flattened against the wall beside the doorway opening into the drawing room turned electronics installation. He peeked out cautiously.

On the other side of the room he saw Carrie Carlson standing alone. He went to her. As he neared her, he saw the body of Torreon Blanco sprawled on the floor, shot twice in the back, dead.

Coming closer, he got a good look at Carrie Carlson. Her face was a wide-eyed, staring, openmouthed mask of fear. She stood leaning against a computer console for support. She leaned heavily on the cane that supported her bad left leg.

Nearby lay Marta Blanco, or what was left of her. She didn’t have much of a face.

Most of it had been blown away. Jack Bauer was able to
recognize her mostly from her gorgeous mane of hair, now gore-streaked, flecked, and splattered.

Her face was a mess, a red bubbling wreck. Somehow the damage had managed to spare one long, slanted green eye. It glittered like an emerald sliver. The extent of the devastation reminded Jack of the death of Peter Rhee. He’d been slaughtered in similar fashion.

No gunshot wound that, which had destroyed Marta Blanco’s face, not even from a big-caliber gun. A shotgun blast had done the damage. At close range. Only—where was the shotgun? Jack saw no shotgun nearby, not a conventional model or a sawed-off job. Not in Torreon’s hand, or Marta’s, either.

“Thank god you’ve come,” Carrie Carlson said. “It’s been a nightmare! They kidnapped me, swore they’d kill me—”

Jack Bauer looked her up and down. A thin line of smoke was rising from the bottom of her cane. Smoke?

He got it then. It all came together:

The way Peter Rhee had died—the pair of curious round holes that had been pocked in the sand beside the car where he’d been killed—the nagging feeling that had irked him at the Carlson house when he’d seen the umbrella holder with the three canes in it—

Most of all, that telltale line of smoke, thin, straight, rising from the base of the cane that Carrie Carlson was now leaning on.

He swung the M–16 to cover her. “I wondered how anyone could have gotten close enough to Peter Rhee to take him out with a shotgun blast. He was on his guard against assassins. But you, Dr. Carlson’s wife, the well-respected humanitarian and do-gooder—you could have got close enough to him,” Jack said.

“How did you set him up? Did you tell him in confidence that you’d discovered something shocking about your husband that threw his loyalty into question and that you had to
meet him in private to tell him the awful truth? Rhee would have bought that. He expected danger and treachery from all sides, but not from you.

“The African artifacts in your house were a tip-off, too. Or they should have been, if I’d been paying attention at the time. I’m sure when the dates are checked they’ll show that you were in Africa at the same time and place as Annihilax.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carrie Carlson said.

“The fatal clue is the hardware itself, lady. Another minute or two and you would have been in the clear. But you blasted Marta right before I came in and that’s what tripped you up.

“Gun smoke is coming out of the bottom of your cane, smoke from the shotgun blast you discharged into Marta’s face, just like you did to Peter Rhee. It’s a trick cane, a single-barreled shotgun disguised as a cane. I’m betting the trigger is concealed somewhere in the handle. It’ll make a hell of an exhibit at your court case,” Jack said.

“No court case—no court case for Annihilax,” Carrie Carlson said.

She leaned back against the console, taking her weight off the cane so she could swing it freely, raising it up to level against Jack Bauer to deliver another killing shot.