Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Still, if he were going to escape the estate grounds, his problem would be one of evasion. And it couldn’t be minimized. Tonight’s raid would have required careful and extensive planning. It would not have been undertaken without some sort of aerial surveillance and support. An eye in the sky. Or several eyes. Meaning he couldn’t just run off like a scared rabbit and think he would avoid capture. It was one thing to know he wasn’t first in their sights. It was entirely another to make himself an obvious, easy target of opportunity.

No, he—

Lazlo’s thought was cut short like a snipped thread. He felt his abdominal muscles tense into two tight lateral bands.

He’d heard something. Not outside the castle. Inside. With him.

He stood listening, his carbine down against his outer thigh, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. Though he was sure the sound had come from the spiral staircase, he did not glance over at it. He had been looking neutrally across the room at the fireplace, and that was where he kept his gaze. He looked unbothered, not at all focused on the stairs.

But he was studying them closely out of the corner of his eye. The upper curve of the staircase, especially. A person in his line of work naturally grew alert to certain warning sounds, and what he’d heard was the click of a heel.

Sharp, clear, slightly hollow.

Not a man’s shoe, he realized with a flicker of surprise.

He listened, watched...and soon saw what he was looking for on the staircase. At the top step of the curve leading to the floor above.

The bottom of the fur coat falling almost to her knees. The lower part of her legs. The pointed stilettos.

Lazlo pivoted hard on his left foot, bringing the right side of his body around with one swinging step, snapping his weapon upward in his fist.

“Nu fungi...stai unde esti!” he said in Romanian. Warning her not to run, to stay right where she was, as he took a broad stride, then another, then moved forward so he got closer to the stairs.

She didn’t retreat. Didn’t budge. She was too terrified to move a muscle.

Lazlo stood there looking up the stairs, the snout of his Rattler aimed squarely at the young woman above him. He had brought her here earlier that night. Driven her from some loud Cluj pickup spot with Zolcu. She was looking worn and tired, her hair a bit disheveled, her eyes...

But it had been long night.

He searched his recent memory for her name.

“Clinia,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

She didn’t answer his question. Not that time. But it was all right.

He had barely gotten started on her.

11

Langley, Virginia, USA/Baneasa, Romania

(FOB Janus)/New York City

The George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley

CIA Director of Operations Carol Morse was driving her black Lexus RX up Dolley Madison Boulevard when her satphone rang. It was 7:00 p.m., an odd time for her to head into the office, especially on the night before Thanksgiving. But with Scalpel underway in Romania, she’d thought it best to be here in case any contingencies arose. She didn’t want her tension infecting the kids right before the holiday. Jackson and Tricia were better off just being with their father.

She glanced at her dash and saw the caller ID letters J2R JH on the display. It was Howard at Janus. That couldn’t be good. All parties involved in Scalpel were on strict orders to preserve operational silence while the mission was in progress...unless something major had occurred to warrant her immediate attention.

“Colonel?” she answered on the hands-free.

“Duchess. You at home?”

“On the Campus road,” she said. “What’s happening?”

“I can call back once you’re in the office,” he said. “We won’t want to be interrupted.”

“No, stay with me. I just have to get through security.”

Morse reached the checkpoint and showed her credentials. Her cell was a Cognizant Model 21, the most secure satphone in the world. But if she went on to her office, she would have to temporarily end their call or route it to her landline and risk losing it in the transfer. Agency policy prohibiting mobile devices inside the complex left no room for exceptions—there couldn’t be even a slim chance of a compromised GPS signal being used to map the facility. This applied equally to high-level officers and visitors. Everybody on the compound was required to leave their phones in their cars or lockers.

Morse drove through the guard station and turned past the Mi-17 helicopter on display near the headquarters building. The parking area outside HQ was nearly empty at this hour, and she pulled into the first in a long row of open slots. Her office was farther up in one of the complex’s newer steel-and-glass buildings. But Howard would not have called without an urgent reason. She wasn’t going to wait.

“Colonel,” she said. “Are you still with me?”

“I’m here.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

FOB Janus

Whirr. Click. Ssssst. Click.

Mario checked his watch again. The hedgehog’s latest search of the alley between the Quonsets had gone on for nearly three minutes.

Two to go , he thought.

He listened and waited inside the chest, sweat pouring down his face and making his shirt cling damply to his chest, back, and arms. According to his watch’s digital thermometer app it was eighty-three degrees, an uptick of five degrees in the last four minutes. When they had climbed in to hide, it was the same low temperature as the night air, cold enough to make him shiver.

That wasn’t good, but Laura’s labored breathing was more worrisome. And his own breaths were even heavier than hers. Under her peacoat, meanwhile, Buttons’s panting had grown fluttery, irregular, and so faint he could barely hear it.

He realized somewhat guiltily that the cat’s weakened condition was part of the reason he and Laura were still alive. If it had been strong enough to carry on the way cats normally did under stress, meowing and clawing and squirming around, the ’hog would have picked up the sounds and gone into attack protocol. But it was hardly moving or breathing at all. The poor thing was fading away. Dying from a combination of overheating, oxygen deprivation, and CO toxicity, like a canary in a coal mine.

And that, Mario realized, meant he and Laura would be next.

Whirrrrrr. Click.

He kept his eyes on his smart watch. Laura had asked how long it would be until they lost consciousness, and he’d told her he wasn’t sure. But that was a lie. Or at least only halfway true. He had a very good head for measurements and ratios. If he estimated the cubic space inside the freezer, he could easily figure out the amount of air it held empty, and about how much would be displaced by two average-size people, and how fast they would use it up, and how much carbon dioxide they would exhale into the space in a given time. But he hadn’t even tried doing the math. He didn’t see the point. He knew they needed to get out of the chest, and soon, or they never would.

He checked his watch. They had a minute and a half until the ’hog moved on again. Assuming it didn’t break the search pattern it was stuck in and use its claw arm to lift the freezer’s lid and peek inside. If that happened, he and Laura were goners.

But so far it hadn’t happened. Though that surprised and puzzled Mario at first, it also clued him into what Laura had called its robot OCD. Before coming to Janus, when he was with the five Cs—Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Combat Systems—at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, his job had been to put bots through their paces in simulated operational conditions. He’d worked with all types, from the dumbest PackBots used for inspections and bomb disposal to the smartest robot soldiers, and had helped to develop the huge fleet of mechanical sentries that patrolled over two hundred square desert miles of Army ammunition-storage facilities in Hawthorne, Nevada. They were in the midrange of artificial intelligences and never deviated from a limited set of behaviors and responses. They were also mostly unarmed and programmed to alert human guards if there was a security breach.