Spiral

“You got it. Your heart stops, your epidermal tissues cool fast. A sensor will go off if the temperature drops below ninety-two degrees. It triggers somewhere between one and five minutes after you expire, depending on the thickness of the fat in the surrounding tissues. It’ll go off even faster if you pull the tripwire. Maybe ten seconds. In either case, we triangulate from the satellites, and we’ll be there in minutes.”

“How many minutes?”

“You let us worry about that. Just as soon as everyone is together, do it. We’ll hit the area with an EMP pulse. Then we’ll be there. We got your back. Jake, you with me? Orchid’s there, you’re there. You pull. Then we come in.”

“Got it.”

“One more thing. You pull it, you be sure and make Orchid stay put for the next few minutes. Make sure she doesn’t wander off. No more than, say, two hundred meters. You understand me?”

Jake caught the look in Altair’s eyes. Jake nodded. He understood. In case they wouldn’t be putting boots on the ground. In case they’d be sending bombs.

“You understand? No mistakes, soldier. No excuses.”

“No excuses, sir,” Jake said, an Army man’s reflex.

44

DUNNE WAS SWEATING LIKE CRAZY AS HE SAT WITH THE President and the NSC principals in the conference room at Camp David. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs stood, a rail-thin Marine named Stanley Narry: “Mr. President, it’s go/no go time. We either send Sterling and Kitano, or we hold back.”

The FBI director, an African-American ex-senator from Illinois, also got to his feet. “Mr. President, his psychological profile checks out. Sterling is ex-military. Good mental discipline. Scores low on rebellion scales. The only caveat is that he knows Maggie Connor well, has some involvement with her family, though, of course, that’s why Orchid wants him.”

They were silent. Dunne watched them trying to come to terms with a world suddenly on the brink of devastation. He couldn’t think straight, had barely slept the previous night. It had to be the stress. He’d never reacted to pressure this way before-he thrived on pressure. But then again, no one in this room had ever faced down a danger like this.

He caught himself scratching at his arm. His skin itched, as though ants were crawling underneath.

The President turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Stanley? Where are we?”

“Every EMP weapon in the arsenal is in the air, full coverage except for some remote areas. And if you want something burned, odds are we can do it in under twenty minutes. We pulled all the MK-77 incendiaries that we could, including all the old Vietnam-era stuff that was mothballed at Fallbrook Detachment. And we’ve got the MOABs. Biggest non-nuke in our arsenal, blast radius of a couple of football fields. That’s what I’m recommending, Mr. President. If it comes to it. No mistakes with a MOAB. The Mother of All Bombs.”

“What about boots on the ground?”

“That’ll take longer. Depending on the location. Hour, half-hour at best.”

The head of the NSA cleared his throat. “If I can interrupt. The first tracker is set to go off in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”

Dunne watched the screen displaying a map of the eastern United States. When the tracker in the money blipped, satellites would record the signal and the location, and have it on the screen in less than a second.

“Five, four, three, two, one.” A moment of silence, then a blue blip appeared along the coast, north of the tendril of Cape Cod. The satellite perspective zoomed in, the coastline magnified, the grid of human cities defined, along with the tangled web of the Boston road system.

Dunne recognized the Charles River, the haphazard buildings of the MIT campus on one side, Back Bay Boston on the other. He felt nauseated. Finally the zooming stopped, the screen at maximum resolution.

The blue blip was on Beacon, two blocks from Mass Ave.

“They’re waiting for the go.”

The President said, “All right, folks. Look sharp. You gotta take a piss, it’s too late. This is about to get hot.”

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR THINGS TO GO WRONG.

Jake Sterling was behind the wheel, Kitano in the passenger seat. The car was a silver 2006 Toyota Camry, just as they’d been told. It wasn’t lost on Jake or his handlers that the Camry was the most popular car in America, and silver was the most popular color.

It was a quiet Saturday morning in Boston, the sky clear, only a few clouds. A cold front was predicted to move in by the afternoon. Leaves swirled off a maple on the side of the road.

They arrived at the parking lot on Boylston, following Orchid’s instructions emailed hours before. They had with them a cellphone that had been mailed to Fort Detrick the previous day. The Langley spooks had studied it as though it was the Rosetta stone, looking for anything that would reveal the nature of their quarry. They took it apart, checked every component, every diode and RF filter, but there was not a damned thing special about it. It was a cheap cellphone with a phone number. Nothing else.