Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

WET TUESDAY BY DAVID FARLAND

Some people are too evil to live. I know because I work with them every day. Take this case just a few days ago.

“This had better be critical,” I groused, “waking me on a Sunday morning.” My head throbbed dully from the aftermath of last night’s party.

Church stood at my door beneath a black umbrella. He looked pastier than normal, as if he’d grown five years older in the past day. His lack of sympathy for my hangover carried in his tone. “Got a dead Saudi prince.” He handed me a photo fresh off the AP newswire.

I squinted at it.

I’d seen what was left after car bombs before. Usually a fractured frame from a car, lots of smoke stains full of the explosive’s residue, and a charred corpse or two. What remained of the prince’s stretch limo and its passengers resembled a can of diced tomatoes that’d been blown up over a bonfire. Too many body parts for just one person.

“Looks like the prince isn’t the only one who got face time with Allah,” I said.

“Whole family,” Church confirmed. “Two wives and four or five kids. Detonated in downtown Riyadh.”

The Kingdom Centre loomed in the background, a distinctive tower with a top like a strange crown. I’d had lunch there once. I could never see that crown without thinking that the eye of Sauron should have been gleaming from its center.

“In the heart of the city? Holy shit!”

Now, one fewer rich Saudi oil-monger in the world is no skin off my ass, but when you drag women, children, and innocent bystanders into it, that’s a different story. “Sounds like somebody was being made an example of,” I said. “What’d he do to torque off the local Wahhabis, give financial backing to some American porn producer?”

Church shrugged. “Here’s the kicker, Captain. It was a self-driven car, no chauffeur.”

He gave me a second to let it click. We hadn’t seen that one before — a new death delivery system. There’s an arms race that has been going on for thousands of years, from the time that man invented the first club, to spear-throwers, to… well, this. A new death delivery system. The thing is, I saw the potential instantly. Back in the Middle East, suicide bombs are popular. It makes a statement: I hate you so much, I’m willing to kill myself to be rid of you. You’ve got to be a true believer to be a suicide bomber — and an asshole. But for the past few years, a lot of these suicides have been committed by kids — twelve or thirteen. The jihadists fill the young boys with bloodlust, maybe inject them with a bit of heroin, and then aim them at an embassy or military compound. Half the kids don’t even know how to drive, so the jihadists tape their foot to the gas.

But the kids get scared, and sometimes they try to drive the wrong way, or they get shot while trying to break through a checkpoint.

Self-driven cars would allay that problem, take out the human dynamic. And a big truck could carry massive payloads.

Church said dryly, “Looks like we’ve got a terrorist who’s taken his childhood fascination with remote-controlled cars to a whole new level. I need you to shut him down.”

Now, I don’t like terrorists, but I admire them sometimes, the way you can admire a jaguar in the jungle, all full of deadly grace. I imagined my target that way.

“I’m guessing you want it done now?”

“With this kind of terrorist,” Church said, “there’s always a ticking bomb waiting to go off. We don’t know what targets might be lined up, but I want the killing spree stopped. Now would be good.” Church smiled, and I smiled in return.

This was already feeling up close and personal.

Ashley slipped me one of her come-on glances as she placed a folder, stamped with TOP SECRET and a couple of compartmented code words, on my desk. “Here’s the latest from the CIA, Joe. I included links to a handful of videos.”

Somehow, knowing that Ashley wasn’t getting her Sunday off, either, made me feel better. She didn’t appear sleep-deprived. A lot of top researchers are like that — half machine — but she was special.

She had platinum-blond hair that drifted like sunlit fog to her nicely rounded butt and swayed enticingly as she walked; sapphire eyes as deep as cenotes in the Yucatán, so wide they gave her a perpetual expression of mild surprise; and a wardrobe of blouses that fit like second skins, hugging in exactly the right places. Never mistake her for the stereotype blonde, however. Ashley is the Baltimore Field Office’s top analytical researcher, and a deadeye with any firearm you hand her. She’s outshot me on the range a couple of times, and not because I let her.

She also has a low purr of a voice that always sounds like a come-on. Something in my vitals stirred.

“Thanks, Ash.” I returned the best smile I could muster under the circumstances. Maybe when I wrap this up we can do something video-worthy ourselves, I thought.

Her pursed lips and the glance over her shoulder as she sashayed away weren’t exactly a turndown.

As usual, Ashley had been thorough. The fat folder she’d brought me contained maps; geo-coords; a page of photos with names, personal data, and high-value target ID numbers; and half a dozen black-and-white stills of a rambling, single-story building taken by Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel. Developed by LM’s Skunk Works specifically for the CIA and operated by the U.S. Air Force, the Sentinel collected much of the intel that had resulted in Osama bin Laden meeting his seventy-two virgins in May 2011.

Except this facility wasn’t in Abbottabad, Pakistan, or Kandahar, Afghanistan. This building was identified as a technological research facility on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah, capital of the northern Syrian governate, or province, of the same name. The CIA had confirmed that ISIS was using the place to create car bombs.

Conclusive proof of that came with the videos Ashley had provided. Though annoyingly jerky, they followed a trio of Middle Eastern men, middle-aged by their salt-and-pepper beards, as they sauntered along the kind of assembly line one would see in a DOD explosive ordnance plant. A great deal of gesticulating punctuated their muffled discussion.

The last video included white arrow markers and a voice-over by some spook linguist who called himself Mack. Yeah, I know, really imaginative. I kept thinking Dweeb and picturing the Napoleon character from that odd little movie made in Idaho a few years back. Nothing dynamite about this guy, however.

When the flighty camera managed to zoom in on each of the terrorists’ faces for a couple seconds, Dweeb identified each man by name. None of the hot ISIS leaders one occasionally hears about in the news — when the news services actually admit that Islamist terrorism exists — but I knew who they were. I tried to adjust my monitor’s focus. Or maybe my bleary eyes just needed adjusting.

Dweeb went on to explain, in a monotone as dry as a stale biscuit, that even with these state-of-the-art upgrades to their factory, the three scientists doubted they could produce sufficient car bombs in time.

In time for what?

That made my short hairs stand at attention and not just the ones on the back of my neck.

I watched eagerly as they went into a room where they had taken a mannequin and had fitted its head and arms with various gears so that it could move in a semi-realistic way. A red butch wig completed the description.

Shit, I thought. These guys weren’t just rigging up cars to drive themselves, they were creating robot drivers so that they could fool any bystanders. All the better to get close to military checkposts.

The kicker was, the mannequin was wearing a uniform: Royal Mail. I saw the joke immediately: I’ve got a message for England.

“Pay dirt,” I told Church. “But these guys aren’t settling for one lousy prince. Sounds like they’re planning something big. Watch this.” I showed him the video.

Church arched an eyebrow. “Time to deploy the fleet.” Before I could ask what he meant by “the fleet,” he ordered, “Contact Bug.”

Jerome Taylor, known as Bug to everybody including his mother, is DMS’s resident computer supergeek. He’s also the undisputed nerd master of pop culture. That’s actually proven useful on a few occasions.

“What did he mean by ‘the fleet’?” I asked Bug via telecom a few minutes later. He’s located at our headquarters based at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.

Bug grinned like a prankster about to pull off a practical joke. Obviously, he hadn’t been out partying a few hours earlier. “Fly cams,” he said.

I flashed a quizzical smile.

“Remember that hummingbird UAV our friends at DARPA announced in, what, 2011, 2012?” When I nodded, Bug said, “Well, they’ve taken it a step further. Several steps, including taking it operational. CIA’s using them all over the Middle East, where houseflies are as thick as mosquitoes on a Louisiana bayou.”

I couldn’t resist. “How many of them have been swatted in the line of duty?”

“Only one so far,” Bug said, “when it literally got in the face of its intended target.”

That explained the random jerkiness of Dweeb’s videos. I guess that was the price we’d have to pay for up-close-and-personal imagery intelligence.

“Here you go, Cap,” Bug said. His face filled the massive telecom screen on Church’s office wall. “First feeds from Al-Raqqah Technological Research Facility.”

Bug’s face blinked out, to be replaced by… a bug’s-eye view of a surprisingly modern laboratory.

“The fly’s eyes are the camera’s lenses,” Bug said as our pest-sized drone made an initial reconnaissance loop around the spacious room. It jinked like a fighter pilot with pursuers on his six, and careened toward a turbaned man with a neatly trimmed beard.

The target absently waved our bug away with a hand bearing several heavy gold rings, and it swooped in toward a top-of-the-line, secure computer setup parked on a desk in a windowless corner.

“Indistinguishable from the real thing,” Bug said from offscreen. I didn’t miss the grin in his voice. “That’s our lead scientist it just buzzed.”

“Skip the sales pitch, Bug,” I said, “and cut to the chase.”

“Right.” The screen blanked for a few seconds, then lit up with an over-the-shoulder view of our scientist at his computer. Metadata in the video’s lower corner showed a time-hack a couple of hours after the opening recce shot. A log-in box, labeled in Arabic, glowed on the monitor, while lean, gold-ringed fingers darted across a keyboard. When one hand rose in a shooing motion near the guy’s ear, the drone skated clear, maintaining its view of the hardware.

“Did you capture that?” I asked Bug when the log-in screen yielded to an austere email in-box, also in Arabic.

“Sure we got a freeze-frame,” Bug said. “I gained access to our terrorist’s system a few minutes after he walked away. His whole email account and the contents of his research files are now being analyzed and translated by our Arabic section. We should have results for you first thing tomorrow.”

I nodded, and suddenly got a nervous feeling, as if someone were training a sniper rifle on the back of my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that… something was coming soon. “Get it to me sooner,” I said. “Tomorrow might be too late.”

I didn’t even make it as far as my office before Church waved me into his. “Our friends lit up an embassy in Pakistan an hour ago.”

“Their objective?”

Church’s brows furrowed in an uncharacteristic way. “That, I’m not sure. I think it was just a field test, to see what they can do.”

“I got a bad feeling about this,” I said. “They’ve got a bigger game in play.”

Church nodded in agreement. “First load from the translators just came in,” he said. I hadn’t heard that deep of a rumble in his voice or seen that hooded narrowing of his eyes since the second airliner hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.

“That bad?” I returned. I took a gulp from my coffee mug and swallowed before he said something that might prompt me to spray it all over his office.

“They’ve uncovered a veritable Encyclopædia Britannica,” Church said, “but only two points matter to us. The ISIS bomb-makers are getting their driving robotics from a small company in Freiberg, Germany, and they’re planning a massive attack in London.”

“London?” A number of potential targets crossed my mind. Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey. “Do we know where?”

“The State Opening of Parliament,” Church replied.

Good thing I’d swallowed my coffee.

“Are they hoping to take out the queen?”

“And as many members of the Houses of Lords and Commons, and civilians as they can. They’re calling the operation Carmageddon.”

“Lovely sense of humor,” I growled.

Church gave a stiff nod. “They’re planning to position large, self-driven trucks loaded with explosives close to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Parliament, and along the queen’s route from one end to the other, and detonate them all at once.”

“Holy shit!”

The State Opening usually takes place in May. I’d been in London for it once. I still remembered Londoners pressed six or seven deep against police barriers, children in front, of course, dressed in their Sunday best and waving miniature Union Jacks as the queen rolled by in her horse-drawn carriage. I had watched the parade under the keen eyes of British troops, and bobbies mounted on leggy bay horses. It looked as if the whole city had turned out.

I shook my head against horrific mental images. “Has the British government been informed?”

“Through appropriate channels,” Church confirmed. “In the meantime, Captain, our jet is being prepped at BWI for a flight to Germany. Takeoff is four thirty this afternoon. You’re to put a stop to this.”

No guidance. Pretty much carte blanche. Church preferred it that way. If necessary he could fall back on the Sergeant Schultz defense: “I know noth-ink.”

“I’ll start packing,” I said, “once I’ve called in a strike on that research facility.” I considered some options. An MQ-9 Reaper carrying a couple of five-hundred-pound GBU-12s or GBU-38 JDAMs should do the job.

I’d want to hit them in the evening, light up the sky — shock-and-awe style.

DMS personnel don’t use commercial airlines when we’re on a mission. Ghost, my combat-trained white shepherd, dozed at my feet while I reviewed Ashley’s info packet on the little company I’d be checking out in Freiberg.

Established five years ago by a former nun named Frieda Stoltz, Assistenzdienst, (Assistance Services, in English) designed and produced equipment and software apps to assist people with various disabilities, everything from blindness to quadriplegia. Sounded innocent enough. But was the company only a front? Did Fräulein Stoltz have ties to terrorism herself? Or were her products being used in ways she wasn’t aware of?

In spite of the airport’s spacious, modern terminal, all glass and steel with a high-speed tram, history loomed around me like the usual winter overcast as I disembarked from the jet.

Private jet or not, I still had to deal with Customs. I used my tourist passport to stay low-profile, though I’d brought my “official” one just in case. I flashed Ghost’s equivalent of a passport, too, which identified him as a service dog. The chipper young official didn’t ask what kind of service he provided, which was fine by me.

I could read a little German, better than I could speak it, so I picked up a map along with the keys to a brand-new, shiny black Porsche 918 Spyder. With 887 horses under its sleek hood, I couldn’t help wishing I had time to put it through its paces on the autobahn.

I opened up the throttle when I found surprisingly little traffic for a dreary workday morning and just enough chilly rain to necessitate windshield wipers. The Spyder purred like a kitten and responded to my touch like an experienced dance partner.

Occasional farms dotted the terrain. Fräulein Stoltz had acquired one of them, situated on a small rise, for her assistive technologies company. Six or seven mature oaks, stripped of leaves and dripping, huddled around an old house that could’ve passed for a small manor.

I lowered the passenger window a few inches to let Ghost poke his nose out and he snuffled noisily at the rain.

We were halfway up the lane to the house when my secure satellite phone sounded in my duffel, which lay on the passenger-side floor. That couldn’t mean anything good.

I had to stop to fumble for the bag. The phone never stopped ringing as I searched for it, which reinforced my gut feeling of “not good.”

I wasn’t disappointed. Well, actually, I was.

“Where are you?” Church asked.

“About a hundred yards from Sister Stoltz’s Home for Disadvantaged Terrorists.”

I heard a grunt before he asked, “Have you seen her?”

“Not yet, I’m on approach.”

“Well,” Church said, “no joy on the air strike. Drone got to the target and found the cockroaches had scuttled. Looks like they knew they were in somebody’s crosshairs.”

“Damn,” I said. I hate terrorists, but terrorists with good intel are particularly scary. “Out here.”

He didn’t say, Proceed with caution. He didn’t have to. The hair on the back of my neck was already doing that.

I left the Porsche at the side of the lane and, with Ghost trotting a few yards ahead, conducting olfactory reconnaissance, I strolled toward the house. Classic architecture, built of stone, three stories high, lots of windows. A façade displaying the company name in blocky white letters had been added to the front, and a dozen or so small cars, most of them gray or white, stood in an orderly row along the left side.

As I passed the first oak, I studied the yard. Bare branches couldn’t conceal security monitors and floodlights mounted among them. Typical for a business in a crime-ridden urban neighborhood, but it seemed like overkill in the German countryside. I furrowed my brow, wondering what she was afraid of.

Ghost ranged around the yard, nose to the ground, tail wagging with the rhythm of his trot. No indications he’d detected explosives, drugs, or anything else of concern.

I called him to heel with a hand signal before I pulled the antique doorbell chain. Soft, quick, padding footsteps reached me before the front door swung open, and a slim woman peered up at me with sky-blue eyes. About my age, I estimated, with blond hair twisted up in a braid around the back of her head. Not a knockout, but certainly she surprised me. I’d imagined more of a Mother Teresa. The eyes revealed boundless compassion veneered with caution.

“Sister Stoltz?” I queried, and hoped she spoke more than rudimentary English.

She offered a small smile that bordered on shy. “Fräulein Stoltz now. May I help you?” Her pronunciation was precise, but not accent-free.

I introduced myself, displayed my credentials.

“American government?” She sank back, one hand going to her ample breasts, and her eyes widened with concern. Not fear, I noted. “Is something wrong?”

“I hope not,” I said, and genuinely meant it. Something I couldn’t put a finger on touched a still-painful spot in my heart. Grace. What is it about her that reminds me of Grace? “I need to ask a few questions,” I said. “May I come in?”

“You may, Mr. Ledger,” she said. Her gaze fell on Ghost, who sat near my feet. He cocked his head in a beguiling manner and gave her his best tongue-out dog-smile. Even offered her a paw to shake. Yeah, my highly trained combat dog. But her fine brows lowered slightly. “I must, however, request that your dog remain out of doors.”

I swore inwardly. I really wanted Ghost to help me check out the facilities here, but dared not push it.

“Sorry, boy,” I said, and slipped him the guard hand signal as I stepped inside. My hackles hadn’t entirely lain down even if Ghost’s hadn’t risen. Yet.

As Frieda Stoltz guided me through a variety of labs and assembly rooms on all three floors, giving me the nickel tour, I noted how she had preserved the old home’s refinements despite converting it to a lab. I also observed unfeigned warm greetings from several researchers and mechanics as we entered each area, and their eagerness to demonstrate or explain their projects to me.

One older man stopped to shake my hand and confided, “Fräulein is the angel for people who suffer with disadvantages.” The radiance in his eyes more than compensated for his uncertain English. I had no doubt he believed that to be true.

None of the workers seemed well-dressed or had driven new cars. I realized that these folks weren’t out for money. They were trying to save the world. I knew that feeling.

Of all her creations, she clearly considered her self-driving auto technology to be her magnum opus. Excitement lit her features as she explained, “This will allow blind persons in Third World countries to have greater independence without the expense of human drivers. We are conducting a test program that I believe will bring about great change.”

She opened the door into her office on the second floor, what appeared to have been a spacious bedroom, complete with a tall, antique armoire against the wall opposite her equally antique desk, and bay windows that overlooked the front grounds. “Please be seated, Mr. Ledger,” she said, indicating a deep wing chair. She closed the door, sat opposite me, and said, “Now that you have seen my company, what questions may I answer?”

I cut to the chase. “We have reason to believe your self-driving auto technology is being used by ISIS.”

Frieda transformed into a human ramrod before my eyes. She stared with mingled shock and outrage. “How dare you—”

“I’m not accusing you,” I began, raising a placating hand.

“How can you believe such a thing?” she demanded. “What evidence do you have to support such an accusation?”

The demise of the Saudi prince and his family had been all over the international news since Sunday morning. While that was open source, certain details uncovered in the investigation were highly sensitive and had not been released to foreign nationals. I said only, “There’s ample evidence.”

She studied me for several heartbeats, her shapely jaw taut.

“Who buys your self-driving technology?” I pressed. “What countries have the highest demand for it? Do you only sell whole systems, or also parts for them? Do you handle shipping yourself?”

“This is foolishness!” she insisted. She sprang up from her chair, arms rigid at her sides, her fists clenched. “At this time the cars are going only to North Africa, where they are being tested. They are not available on the open market.”

“Who conducts the tests?” I persisted. “How do the cars get to them? Do they provide you with reports? Written documents, for example, or videos of the tests?”

“Yes, yes.” Frieda slipped behind her huge desk, her face a mask of determination. Grace, I thought again. But she had opened a drawer and produced a simple business card, which she thrust at me. “He is from Sudan,” she said, “a very pleasant man who is very hopeful for my work.”

The name hit my eye like a boxer’s glove. One of many that the thug went by. He’s also very wanted by Interpol, for trafficking in opium, little girls, and anything that goes boom. He’s playing her for all she’s worth.

I didn’t tell Frieda that, at first. Instead I said, “Thank you. May I keep this?” as I slid the card into my shirt pocket. “Please, sit down now.”

To my mild surprise, she did, though her sky-blue eyes still held a furious glint.

“In ancient China,” I said, “it was actually considered a virtue for a military commander to be unspeakably evil.” Hitler is still a sensitive topic in Germany, so I skipped the comparison. I just said, “That mentality remains to this day in some circles. The man that you’re dealing with is one of them. In fact, he deals closely with China. Years ago, he used to buy machetes cheap from there and provide them to Hutu rebels. They made cheap weapons, since they only cost fifty cents each, but with them they committed genocide against more than a million Tutsis, and from there spread terror—”

“You lie!” she said, her face going pale as chalk. She began trembling and leaned back from me in revulsion.

I had a lot more to tell her — about blood diamonds and arms deals and a recent shipment of stolen uranium — but as I tried to warn her, she grew paler, more rigid, and fell into muttering denials in German. I don’t think that it was that she didn’t believe me, but that the thoughts I spoke about were too horrifying, too repugnant, for her mind to hold.

“Being unspeakably evil is also touted as a virtue by ISIS,” I said. “Especially if that evil is used, ironically, to advance the cause of Allah, to build a world caliphate and bring down, once and for all, the Great Satan and its allies. Because of that, they take perverse satisfaction in deliberately using the good intentions of Westerners against them. For example, in West Africa, when Christian organizations supplied wells to provide clean water for poor villages, your man poisoned them, killed thousands of children, and then said that the Christians themselves had done it.”

She had to know that I was speaking the truth. Certainly, she’d heard tales of it.

“Nein!” Frieda leaped to her feet again, fists clenched once more, eyes blazing. “Nein!” She took two swift steps toward me, and for a couple of heartbeats I thought she was going to pound on me. I could have restrained her without hurting her, but I didn’t like the thought. But she whirled and began pacing her office. “That is a complete fabrication! Terrorists are not using my technology! How could they?”

I’ve seen people transfixed by horror. She wasn’t faking it. Her eyes widened and darted back and forth. I’ve seen people black out from it, rewrite thoughts, erase memories that they couldn’t hold. I knew that she wasn’t owning this.

I let her rant, storming back and forth across the office.

Outside, Ghost barked, whimpered, and barked twice. Bomb.

My heart began racing, and I knew that we had to get out. Frieda’s unwitting ties to the ISIS cell in Syria had to be pretty tight. Enough so that they were probably spying on her.

My glance swept the room. Yep, there they were. A small protrusion like the head of a nail under the deep windowsill; a video pickup the size of a pencil eraser in one corner against the ceiling, camouflaged by the wallpaper pattern; a “chip” in the rim of the desktop. Clumsy bugs that Ghost would’ve detected in a wag of his tail if he’d come in with me.

But I should have spotted them as soon as I followed Frieda in here. The hair rose on my neck again, and my pulse stiffened.

“Fräulein,” I said, keeping my voice absolutely casual as I pushed up from the deep chair, “let’s step outside for a few minutes, take a little stroll. Looks like the rain’s finally stopped.” I cracked a smile. “I’ve probably got a wet, brown dog waiting for me by now.”

I didn’t expect her to come with me. I don’t know if it was the smile or mentioning Ghost, but she stopped pacing, eyed me for a moment, then gave a small nod.

Ghost was damp and already exuding wet-dog odor, but not brown from testing mud puddles. He hadn’t moved from his guard position. I’d known he wouldn’t. He stood as we emerged into the soggy midday and wagged so hard his whole posterior swung back and forth.

“May I pat him?” Frieda asked.

“Be my guest.” While she did, and Ghost squirmed like a puppy and licked her hand, I squinted up the lane. “Fräulein, have you ever seen a Porsche 918 Spyder up close?”

“No, I—”

“Come take a look.” I took her by the elbow, in a totally gentlemanly manner. I didn’t want to scare her. Not yet. And I forced myself, against a slow rise of adrenaline, to stroll.

I waited until we’d left the encircling trees behind, with their “security” monitors. Waited until we’d practically reached the car. Then I stopped and turned her to face me. And I told her exactly what was going on. All of it. Top-secret umpety-ump be damned.

“Get in the car and don’t look back,” I begged. “We can worry about nondisclosure statements later. Your life and the lives of your employees aren’t worth dog crap if you stay here.”

She’d resumed her human ramrod posture. She stared at me with her jaw set, then made her decision. “You Americans! You are always full of crazy imaginations and wild stories.” She spun on her heels.

I made a swipe for her arm. She shrugged away from it. “Frieda, you’ve got to believe me,” I pleaded.

She didn’t reply, didn’t glance back.

I didn’t go after her. I didn’t know if ISIS was live monitoring her office or just replaying things later. I stood by the Spyder, Ghost at my side, and watched her march back up the lane, across the tree-hemmed lawn, into the lovely old house.

I should go in and warn everyone, I thought, get them out of there.

The explosion’s deep boom reached me a second or two after the black-and-orange billow blew out three front windows on the second floor. Frieda’s office. The bomb must have been stowed in the armoire, I thought.

“Damn.” I called Ghost, slid into the Porsche, and just sat, watching smoke billow, black and toxic, from the shattered windows, as ash and debris peppered my hood.

I actually jumped when my satellite phone sounded. So did Ghost, since he was sitting on it. I scooped it out from under his furry backside and muttered, “Yeah?”

“They’re back, Cap.”

Under other circumstances that line would’ve prompted a poltergeist quip. It took a moment to realize what Church meant. “Who, our little ISIS scientist shits?”

“Seems they went off for a celebratory feast. They’ve got an important visitor.”

“Let me guess,” I said, and named Frieda’s contact.

He didn’t ask how I knew, but there was a respectful silence at the end of the line for a moment.

“So,” he said, “should we light them up now?”

“Do it now,” I said. “I want to see craters where their assholes were.”

Smoke from the burning house melded into the lowering sky as I wheeled the Porsche around, into a fresh wall of rain. But Frieda Stoltz’s face glowed in my mind, radiant and eager as she showed me her creation.

I felt unaccountably happy. When it comes to death’s delivery systems, no one is better than us. Those damned ISIS scientists probably couldn’t comprehend the laser guidance system of the PAVEs we’d deployed on our GBU-38s. They wouldn’t understand how our satellites made sure that the bombs kept coming, coming, to fly right up their butts.

Fuck ’em. Some people are too evil to live.

But that day I began to wonder if some people are too innocent for their own benefit. I wondered if Frieda had been too good to live.

David Farland is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy, with more than fifty books in print. Currently, he is in the process of writing a thriller that deals with the dark underbelly of filmmaking in Hollywood called The Blockbuster.

EDITORS’ NOTE: “Prince of Peace” brings Joe Ledger face-to-face with Jack Sigler, call sign King, leader of Jeremy Robinson’s Chess Team, who specializes in battling ancient myths reborn through modern science, pitting elite soldiers against the likes of the Hydra, Golems, and Dire Wolves and the madmen who conjure them from the past. The Jack Sigler series is currently in development as a major motion picture.