John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

But first, the test. First, Culpeper.

Burke retrieved Miranda Renfro’s address from the town of Fallon’s website, which listed the property owners and the amounts of their assessments.

Miranda Renfro owned lot 7B, Echo Village, 3 Fred Brigham Road. With data from the same site, he tried calling her immediate neighbors to see if he could persuade one of them to bring her to the phone.

But no. Two of them thought he was a scam artist, the third didn’t speak English.

That night, he drank beer and sat in front of the box. He watched Man United play to a draw at Man City. Then the news, then a program about the Crusades.

He was still drinking too much and it worried him. But it didn’t stop him from grabbing another beer. He paced around the room, thinking about it, and finally, he made a decision. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad would go to it. He sat down in front of the computer, and turned it back on. He typed “Travelocity” into the search bar.

As it turned out, making travel arrangements was easy. Explaining to Tommy wasn’t.

Burke was telling him about the trip when he realized how obsessive his quest for Wilson must seem. Belgrade was one thing, a little side trip to Slovenia, okay, maybe, but following a slender lead thousands of miles to Nevada ? This was going too far – geographically, and in every other way.

He could read this in Tommy’s eyes, both skeptical and worried. “What you think you’re going t’find there?”

“Jack Wilson, if I’m lucky.”

“Nooooo,” Tommy said. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Maybe this Mandy woman will tell me where I can find him. And I can tell Kovalenko.”

“You think so, lad? If someone like you comes here looking, I’m going to tell them – oh, yeh, Michael’s over in Dublin, let me gi’ you his address?”

“Well-”

“And if you do find him, what you gonna do, hey? ‘Jack Wilson, come wi’ me to the FBI?’” The old man frowned. “And you think he’ll toddle along? This man is a criminal. No, it’s madness, Michael. If you’re doing this for the business, forget it. We wait, we take our chances wi’ the courts, I canna have you racing around the globe. ”

Burke said he’d think about it. And he did. In fact, he slept on it.

And in the morning, he took a cab to the airport.

It occurred to Wilson that if he waited until night, he could see the town wink out. Which would be interesting, but he wanted to strike during banking hours.

He drank his coffee and packed up. Had some Cheerios and a banana for breakfast. Checked out. Looked at his watch. Nine thirty.

Might as well go.

He started the Escalade and flicked the switch to engage the step-up module (a glorified Tesla coil) with the vehicle’s V-8 engine. This comprised the weapon’s power source.

He left the car running, and stepped outside. The Escalade’s short bed had a rigid cover. This he removed, and set down next to the truck. He dismantled the gimbal rig and moved aside the pieces of the foam cocoon, then connected his laptop to the device. The software that controlled the weapon elevated the barrel and then the focusing program kicked in, swiveling it into position. It was almost noiseless: a faint whir.

If anyone had asked, he would have told them that the weapon was a surveying device. But he was parked near the lot’s perimeter and there was no one in sight.

He touched the tattoo on his chest for luck, then flipped the toggle switch that fired the weapon. He could not detect the beam at all. He heard nothing and, like Tesla and Ceplak before him, he wondered if it had worked.

But unlike Tesla, Wilson did not have to wait weeks for news reports from Siberia. Even as he watched the barrel retract and fold in upon itself, a 727 heading for Dulles slid by directly overhead in complete silence.

Its momentum and glide had taken it beyond the target area. The engines were dead and it was already losing altitude. He wondered how far it would glide. He wondered if he’d hear the impact and explosion.

The plane represented another part of the Culpeper experiment. As the agent of death for innocent people, what would he feel? Would he be repulsed?

The plane yawed to the right.

He hadn’t been entirely sure about planes. In trim, with the ailerons and landing gear tucked in, they could glide for quite some distance. And some had backup hydraulic systems that might allow a very good pilot to bring a plane down safely.

But not this aircraft. It was entering a dive. Without the thrust of the engines, it was basically a flying rock.

Wilson lost sight of it for a moment. Then he heard a concussive thump, and black smoke billowed on the horizon.

He felt a strange mix of remorse and elation. He’d been on a lot of planes, and knew what really bad turbulence could do to people. He could imagine the terror of the crew in the cockpit and the passengers’ panic. It was probably a bit like Wounded Knee, with death in your face and nowhere to run.

In any case, Wilson thought, it was all in a good cause – and besides, it was fate.

Theirs and his.

The random nature of the destruction intrigued Wilson and he would have liked to stay in Culpeper to witness the cascade of events firsthand. But no.

The Comfort Inn was beyond the impact area and he’d been careful to map out an exit route, because it wouldn’t take long for the gridlock to ripple outwards. He didn’t want to get caught up in that. And besides, he had other business to attend to. He could listen to the news while he drove.

There was a bad moment when he turned the Escalade’s key and nothing happened. A rush of sensation in his chest. Maybe his own car hadn’t been out of the target area! Had he miscalculated?

But no, his watch was still working. So he tried the key again. This time the engine started with a roar.

As he approached an intersection almost thirty miles from the motel, he saw that the traffic signals weren’t working. Cars edged through, one at a time.

He wasn’t surprised. An EMP hitting Culpeper was certain to cause peripheral damage. He’d had no idea how extensive the damage to the power grid would prove to be, but he knew it could be considerable. The excess voltage from the pulse would fly along the conductive electrical lines, burning out everything for some distance. And as far as the grid was concerned, despite the big outage of 2003, little had been done to improve its stability.

And the truth was that electrical substations were not created equal. If the Culpeper substation was a node that carried a heavy voltage load, its failure would propagate for hundreds of miles. Those outages would be short-lived. The utilities would have things up again in a day or two.

But not in Culpeper. Culpeper was dark. Culpeper was fucked.

He listened to the radio.

The first reports were about events that took place outside Culpeper: the plane crash, the spectacular traffic jams. That made sense, of course, because there was nothing coming out of Culpeper itself. Getting TV trucks and communications gear into the little town would be impossible until the traffic jam could be untangled and tow trucks could begin to pick away at the permanently stalled cars.

By the time he reached Pennsylvania, he knew that the banking facilities in Culpeper had not proved capable of withstanding the pulse. The financial markets had closed early – due, it was said, to “technical problems.” Breathless reporters speculated about “computer viruses and Trojan horses,” while a White House spokesman dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” those who suggested that the plane crash was somehow related to the problems Wall Street was experiencing. “The next thing you know,” he said, “they’ll be dragging in the traffic jams we’re seeing outside the Beltway.”