Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

“American...what will you do to me?”

Carmody kept his eyes on the screen. It was Clinia from Cluj, behind him. An unwanted distraction right now. He told himself not to waste a second answering her.

“American, please. What will you do?”

He told himself again not to answer.

“You should’ve probably asked your friend that question,” he answered with a backward glance.

She looked at him, her eyes red from crying. “I am afraid.”

“I said we wouldn’t hurt you.”

“No. Afraid of them .”

Carmody was silent. He understood her fear. She would be in trouble if the Wolf’s men suspected she had cooperated with him. Maybe she’d liked flirting with the danger those people represented. Maybe it was an edgy lure. But he knew what they would do if they felt betrayed. And so did she. Or at least she had an inkling. Suddenly her thrill ride wasn’t fun anymore.

He snapped his gaze to the almost indiscernible seams where the trapdoor was set flush with the floor, camouflaged so it almost completely disappeared against its surface. It had been over a minute since the snoofer blew through its first binary sequences. Going on a minute and a half. And waiting wasn’t his strong suit under any circumstances.

He was about to consider alternatives to the trapdoor when the wearable beeped. A coded binary tag was highlighted in green on the display. The snoofer had identified a protocol for the nearest source of common IoT radio emissions—the trapdoor—then searched its database for a range of possible key tags to activate its controller. Right now the app was like somebody standing outside a door with a huge clutch of keys, knowing one of them would fit its lock...just not which one. But while a person with a hundred physical keys might take as many minutes to test them all, Kali had claimed the snoofer could try fifty thousand possible digital keys in two seconds maximum.

It only needed one second to find a match, beating her outside estimate by more than half. Carmody saw a hinged square panel lift from the floor to reveal a flight of descending stairs.

He stepped over to the opening and reached down for the handrail. Then he motioned to Wheeler and Begai and called Schultz and Sparrow from the anteroom over the RoIP. They stacked up behind him and waited as he lowered himself into the entryway and his booted feet found the stairs. He was already several steps down, his head and shoulders barely above the floor, when he glanced back at Clinia. She hadn’t budged from the chair. It was as if some inertial force had settled over her.

“Did you come in through the Great Hall?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Wait down there, and I’ll come back for you.”

She looked at him. He wasn’t sure if what he saw on her face was hope, relief, or both. It was an expression understandably restrained by skepticism. She had already gotten burned once tonight.

“I will wait,” she said.

Carmody nodded and flipped down his goggles. A moment later he was gone, racing downstairs, his men pouring through the trapdoor behind him.

“Faye, I just saw three vehicles shoot right out of the ground.” Cobb enlarged a sector of the topo map on Raven ’s cabin-wide touch-screen window. “They must be kidding.”

Luna glanced over from the pilot’s seat. Their aircraft was hovering at a height of 6,000 feet, close to its ceiling in this bad weather. It was a nonstop battle keeping it on its sweet spot through the strong, shifting winds and extreme fluctuations in atmospheric pressure.

She rolled her neck to loosen a crick. “Everybody’s a James-freaking-Bond wannabe,” she said. “Bring us up to max zoom. With coordinates.”

Cobb spread the screen wider. Their SPDD’s intelligent, multispectral imaging not only provided crystal-clear video through a seemingly impenetrable curtain of snow between them and the earth, it gave it in perfect high-def color, using an object’s heat emissions and light-wave reflectivity to fill in the visual gaps of what the heavy snow conditions blurred out.

The flame-red car Cobb had just seen emerge from the grass beyond the estate’s rear gate was streaking northeast toward the Ukrainian international border, beyond which Quickdraw had no license to operate. The two black vehicles—SUVs judging by their large, boxier shapes—were still within the borders of the estate, driving off in opposite directions, east and west.

“Check out the car,” he said, reading his digital speedometer. “Baby’s juiced.”

Luna nodded. It had shot from zero to a hundred in under six seconds. Nobody on the ground was catching up to it. Not without an assist.

“Carmody needs to know,” she said. “Patch him in.”

Old slowpoke me , Cobb thought.

“On it,” he said.

Carmody was almost at the bottom of the stairs when he heard Cobb’s voice over the comlink. “Preacher, do you read me?”

“Yeah.”

“We have three FMVs.”

“Pictures?”

“Stand by.”

A second later, Carmody saw a tiny streaming video image appear at the upper right-hand corner of his goggles’ display.

“You run a vehicle recognition?” he asked.

“Affirmative,” Cobb said. “The black wagons are Rezvanis. Red’s a Koenigsegg Regera. Twin turbo, fifteen hundred horses. The electric motors give it instantaneous power off the line. Like lightning. And it’s already outside the grounds. Bearing north, number four-two road.”

“I need you to stop it,” Carmody said.

“What?”

“Stop the car and turn it around. Can you?”

“I think so. But we don’t have the legal auth—”

“Just do it. Inform Duchess. We’ll need her to run cover.”

Carmody descended the final few steps and saw a hallway or tunnel winding out ahead of him. A vaulted ceiling, ancient masonry walls, cool white LED droplight panels on overhead suspender cables. His men following close behind, he ran down the passage at a hurried trot.

A few paces in, an arched entryway on his left opened to a deep, brick-wall chamber. He motioned to Wheeler, Begai, and Sparrow, tapped his middle and index fingers to his eyes, and extended both toward the arch. The three men broke away and sprinted through it.

Then Cobb was in his ear again. “The sports car’s practically screaming for us to chase it, sir. What if it’s a deke and the target’s in one of those Rezvanis?”

Carmody paused a beat.

“That’s what they expect us to think,” he said. “Think what they don’t expect. Those wagons are the decoys. He’s in the Regera. Bet on it.”

The Regera’s tires bit deep into the snow, grabbing it up and spitting it back in white clumps and wads. Glancing into his rearview mirror, its driver saw the castle grounds recede into blurry oblivion behind a curtain of windblown flakes. As he sliced past the 180–miles per hour mark, a rapid surge of g-forces whumped the breath from his lungs. The car hummed and pulsed with turbocharged power and acceleration. He felt at the razor’s edge of control.

Three miles north of the castle grounds, he came up to the crossroads—its left leg running off into the western Transylvanian foothills, the right toward Satu Mare proper, the snow-dusted blacktop ahead stretching through miles of empty hayfields and scattered woods toward the borderlands.

He shot forward, staying on the main road, optimistic he could reach the nation’s outer margins in an hour. As long as the storm didn’t worsen. An hour, ninety minutes at the outside. There he would weave his way west and south along the lonely, zigzagging line between his country and Ukraine, eventually turning down through Moldova to the Crimean Peninsula. Even with occasional rest stops, and the weather potentially creating obstacles, he estimated it would take under a day to reach the secret city.