Matthew Reilly - Temple

There was no creak. No warning sound.

The old wooden jetty just gave way beneath the cat and with a bewildered screech the big black creature dropped into the water beneath it.

‘It’s about time I had some luck,’ Race said.

The caimans moved in quickly.

Two big bulls charged in toward the fallen cat and soon the water around the big animal became a seething, frothing mess.

Race seized the opportunity and leapt across the newly created gap in the jetty and bolted for the ATV.

As he stepped inside the ATV and Van Lewen slid the heavy steel door shut behind him, he looked back out at the river through a narrow rectangular slit in the door.

What he saw was completely unexpected.

He saw the cat—the same black cat that had accosted him only moments before—-climb slowly up out of the water and back up onto the jetty. Blood dripped from its claws, ragged chunks of flesh hung from its jaws, water dripped from its glistening flanks.

The animal’s chest heaved. It seemed absolutely exhausted from the battle it had just fought.

But it was alive.

It had won.

It had just survived an encounter with two bull caimans!

Race slumped down on the floor of the ATV, totally exhausted. He let his head fall against the cold metal wall behind him and allowed his eyes to close.

As he did so, however, he heard noises.

He heard the grunts and snorts of the cats outside—close, loud, large.

He heard their paws splashing in puddles. Heard the crunch of breaking bones as they feasted on the bodies of the dead German commandos. He even heard the sound of someone crying out in agony in the near distance.

Soon Race would fall asleep, but before he did he would have one final, terrifying thought.

How the hell am I going to get out of here alive?

FOURTH MACHINATION

Tuesday, January 5, 0930 hours

Special Agent JohnPaul Demonaco walked slowly down the white-lit corridor, careful not to step on the bodybags.

It was 9:30 in the morning, January 5, and Demonaco had just arrived at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in response to an order from the Director of the FBI himself.

Like the rest of the world, Demonaco knew nothing of the breakin at DARPA headquarters the day before. All he knew was that the Director had received a phone call at 3:30 that morning from a four-star admiral standing in the Oval Office asking for him to send his best domestic antiterrorist man down to Fairfax Drive as soon as humanly possible.

His best man was JohnPaul Demonaco.

‘J.P.’ Demonaco was fifty-two years old, divorced, and a little loose around the waistline. He had thinning brown hair and wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. His rumpled grey polyester suit had been bought from J.C. Penney for a hundred dollars in 1994, while the Versace tie that he wore with it had been bought for three hundred dollars only last year. It had been a birthday gift from his youngest daughter-apparently it was trendy.

Despite his dress sense, Demonaco was Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s AntiTerrorist Unit (Domestic), a position he had occupied for four years now, principally because he knew more about American terrorism than anybody else alive.

Walking down the white-lit hallway, Demonaco saw another bodybag lying on the floor in front of him. A star of blood smeared the wall above it. He added the bag to his tally. That made ten already.

What on earth had happened here?

He turned a corner and immediately saw a small crowd of people standing at the entrance to a laboratory at the end of the corridor.

Most of the members of the crowd, he saw, were dressed in perfectly starched, dark blue U.S. Navy uniforms.

A twenty-something lieutenant met him halfway down the corridor.

‘Special Agent Demonaco?’

Demonaco flashed his ID in response.

‘This way please. Commander Mitchell is expecting you.’

The young lieutenant led him into the laboratory. As he entered the lab, Demonaco silently took in the wall-mounted security cameras, the thick hydraulic doors, the alpha-numeric locks.

Jesus, it was a goddamn vault.

‘Special Agent Demonaco?’ a voice said from behind him. Demonaco turned to see a handsome young officer standing before him. The man was about thirty-six years old, tall, with blue eyes and short sandy-blond hair—a Navy poster boy. And for some reason that Demonaco couldn’t quite pin down, he looked oddly familiar.

‘Yeah, I’m Demonaco.’

‘Commander Tom Mitchell. Naval Criminal Investigative Service.’

NCIS, Demonaco thought. Interesting.

When he had arrived at Fairfax Drive, Demonaco had barely even noticed the Navy servicemen guarding the entrance to the building. It wasn’t unusual in the DC area to have certain federal buildings guarded by specific branches of the armed forces. For example, Fort Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was actually an Army compound. The White House, on the other hand, was guarded by members of the United States Marine Corps. It would have come as no surprise to Demonaco to learn that DARPA was protected by the U.S. Navy. Which would have explained all the Navy suits here now.

But no. If the NCIS was here, that meant something else entirely.

Something that went beyond merely failing to protect a federal building. Something internal…

‘I don’t know if you remember me,” Mitchell said, “but I took your seminar at Quantico about six months ago. “The Second Amendment and the Rise of the Militia Groups”.’

So that was where he had seen Mitchell before.

Every three months, Demonaco gave a seminar at Quantico on domestic terrorist organisations in the United States.

In his lectures, he basically outlined the make-up, methods and philosophies of the more organised militia groups in the country—groups like the Patriots, the White Aryan Resistance or the Republican Army of Texas.

After the Oklahoma City bombing and the bloody siege at the Coltex nuclear weapons facility in Amarillo, Texas, Demonaco’s seminars had been in high demand. Especially among the armed forces, since their bases—and the buildings they protected—were often the targets of domestic terrorist acts.

‘What can I do for you, Commander Mitchell?’ Demonaco said.

‘Well, first of all, as you will no doubt appreciate, everything you see or hear in this room is strictly classifi—’

‘What is it you want me to do?’ Demonaco was famous for his inability to put up with bullshit.

Mitchell took a deep breath. ‘As you can see, we had something of an… incident.., here yesterday morning. Seventeen security staff killed and a weapon of immense importance stolen. We have reason to believe that a domestic terrorist organisation was involved, which is why you were called in—’

‘Is that him? Is that him?’ a rough-sounding voice said from somewhere nearby.

Demonaco turned and saw a severe-looking captain with a grey moustache and a matching grey crew-cut striding quickly toward him and Commander Mitchell.

The captain glared at Mitchell. ‘I told you this was a mistake, Tom. This is an internal matter. We don’t need to involve the FBI in this.’

‘Special Agent Demonaco,’ Mitchell said, ‘this is Captain Vernon Aaronson. Captain Aaronson has overall responsibility for this investigation—’

‘But Commander Mitchell here, it seems, has the ear of those who would like to see this puzzle solved more slowly than it has to be,’

Aaronson quipped.

Demonaco judged Vernon Aaronson to be a couple of years older—and at least a decade more bitter—than his subordinate, Commander Mitchell.

‘I had no choice, sir,’ Mitchell said. ‘The President insisted—’

‘The President insisted…’ Aaronson snorted.