Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Schultz checked the mission clock displayed on his night-vision lenses. It was 0128 hours. “Ready and set!”

The others gathered at the door. Schultz and Long belonged to Carmody’s Fox Team. The remaining three were on loan from Janus Base.

Carmody grabbed the coil of rope, leaned out, and looked down at the bastion thirty-five feet below. Raven ’s wings reduced the wash of its rotors so there was almost none of the push on the back of his neck that he would feel roping from a chopper.

He tossed the line and watched it uncoil, making sure the end of the rope touched on the bastion’s stone floor.

“Go!” he shouted. Then he was around and out the door, sliding down, the rope trapped between his feet to control his drop. Long followed, and the next man, and the next, less than six inches of line separating them, Schultz going last in the rear-guard position.

Thirty seconds later, they were all down.

Carmody’s Go! came over the RoIP at precisely 0130 hours.

Dixon straightened behind the wheel. Glancing into the rearview mirror, Kali saw Warren tap his phone to trigger the breaching charge he’d affixed to the lockbox.

The packet’s detonation was instantaneous, its C-4 core igniting an envelope of pyrotechnic thermite. Steel typically melts at two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Within three seconds, the burning thermite reached a temperature of four thousand degrees, reducing the lockbox and its guts to molten, white-hot slag.

Droplets of liquefied steel spat into the air. Kali’s NV-enhanced smart specs registered their color as fiery magenta. She braced herself, the gate looming in front of her.

Dixon floored the accelerator. “Okay, okay, we’re on!”

The Cat surged forward, bumping from the frozen dirt field onto the flat, paved road, then shooting toward the heavy gate. Midway up its height, the lockbox flared between its metal bars like a trapped nova.

A moment later, Dixon smashed through to the other side.

On the castle grounds, it did not take long for the emergency generators to kick in, with priority given to the estate’s guard stations and alarm systems.

In the front guardhouse, three black-clad men were thawing out over hot coffees when they heard a crash at the bottom of the drive. All of them glanced up at their monitors simultaneously.

The video feeds showed nothing unusual. There was no sign of a disturbance. The grounds were empty and still.

But their readiness did not hinge on what they saw on the screens. Two of them were former Constellis operators—top flight SpecOps-for-hire. Their group leader was a recent poach from Braithwaite Global, the new big gun in executive security. These were highly skilled specialists. The blackout had triggered their alertness, and that crash was very loud.

Wearing soft-armor vests, they abandoned their coffee cups and snatched their ballistic helmets and Steyr automatics from the weapons rack. The two Constellis men raced through the door to investigate. The remaining guy paused briefly at his console to notify the rear-guard station and manor house.

The shooting started outside as he was reaching for his carbine. When he heard the noise, he quickly changed his mind and grabbed something else.

There were several secret entries to Castle Graguscu’s vast, honeycombed complex of cellars, chambers, and underground passages, all hidden from plain sight behind false wall panels and other clever contrivances, some modern, others predating the Wolf’s renovations by many centuries. For mobile communications, he had originally installed the same type of radiating cables—or leaky coax—used by miners and large, modern metropolitan subway systems. Later he added a network of wireless sensors and subsurface radio relays to provide uninterrupted internet access and connect to his intruder-detection system.

Although the entire space below the castle served as his command center, he would not have tolerated anyone using that term to his face, smacking as it did of the governments, armies, and agencies he scorned and despised. Nevertheless, he had divided it into two functionally distinct sections that, together, constituted his lair in the truest sense. Deep underground, and most elaborately hidden, was the computer room from which he oversaw and coordinated the activities of his global hacking syndicate. The primary monitoring station for the estate grounds was closer to the surface, nested among the old count’s wine cellars, armory, and cavernous torture chamber.

It was to this room that his head of security, a man called Matei, came shortly after the blackout hit. He hadn’t initially linked it to his boss’s enemies; after all, the power failure extended beyond Satu Mare to the southeastern fringe of Marmures. While a localized disruption would have seemed suspicious, it seemed a freakish, random, widespread occurrence. But he had thought it best to err on the side of caution and check out the grounds.

All that had just changed dramatically. Now he sat upright in his chair as an alert flashed onto his desktop monitor. It was a Code Red from the front guardhouse. But the attached voice-to-text message was even more stunning—and confusing to him. How could there be a security breach at the gate? The images on his video wall showed that it stood intact. Yet the motion and RFID sensors confirmed the alert. According to them, at least one vehicle had passed through onto the grounds and was moving toward the castle.

Moving fast.

Matei jabbed the intercom button and felt a sharp pain in his wrist. On the best days, it felt tight. Most days it ached, and sudden motions could be pure agony. The thought of a surprise attack raised unsettling memories of the female demon who had shattered it, ruined his handsome nose, and left him with a broken windpipe. For two long months he had been incapable of speech. Despite tracheal reconstruction surgery and endless rounds of therapy, he was left with a voice that cracked and scraped like gravel. Worse, his breaths were accompanied by wheezing, whistling sounds when he exerted himself physically, an embarrassment.

He had to press the button three more times before getting a response from the master suite. The delay was not unexpected. Its occupant had one of his women up there tonight.

“Yes?”

Finally. Matei’s wrist throbbed. “We have a problem,” he said.

A moment’s silence at the other end of the line. Then:

“Talk to me.”

Clinia Ranor worked as an insurance agent in the city of Cluj-Napoca, a few short kilometers from her hometown of Rosalvea. She loved good times and dressing up, found the city’s wired-in nightlife an irresistible lure, and when feeling especially adventurous would slip off to the underground hot spots for some exotic kicks.

It was while partying at the scandalously in-vogue stim club Orbital that she was invited to the Wolf’s estate. She had found her host’s sexual cravings novel and fabulous... Certainly more fun than being stuck in tonight’s blackout.

But a minute ago their feast had been interrupted by the buzzing of his intercom. Now, after getting out of bed to answer, he was hastily putting on his clothes.

Stark naked, Clinia pushed herself up against the headboard with her elbows. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“I’m stepping out a while.”

“What? In such a hurry?”

He sat on an ottoman and slipped on his boots, then went across the room to his closet. His overcoat was a retrofuturistic tuxedo cut, with a long swallow tail and textured jacquard silk pentagrams on solid black velveteen.

“I won’t be long,” he said.

Clinia heard the faintest of creaks, seemingly from the middle of the spacious room. She cocked her head, listening. Then her eyes widened. A large, square section of the parquet floor was rising between his closet and the bed...opening like the lid of a hinged box.