Written in Fire

CHAPTER 26

“Will it hurt?”

They were in Hawk’s room again. He’d cleaned it up. It just sort of felt right, like something he would do before leaving on a long trip, even though he wasn’t going anywhere. He sat on the bed, John in the chair. His friend looked tired, but comfortable, too, as if he was okay to let down his guard in here, a notion that Hawk treasured.

“This is a jet injector.” John held up a device that looked like a futuristic squirt gun. “Fires a high-pressure blast of fluid through the dermis into your bloodstream. Feels like a mosquito bite.”

“What about . . .”

“The flu is just the flu,” John said. “Sneezing, coughing, maybe a little nausea. But we modified it to be as minor as possible. That’s part of the point—if people feel awful, they’ll stay home, and we need them out spreading the virus. But the change, becoming brilliant, that’s a little different.”

“How?”

“Well, it’s altering the way your brain works. It’s going to be disorienting. Probably a little scary.”

Hawk realized he was biting his lip, made himself stop. “What will it feel like?”

“I don’t know exactly. You’re only the second person in history to go through it.”

“Dr. Couzen was the first.” He took a breath. “His face was all scratched up. Did he—he did that to himself?”

“Yes,” John said. “But remember, he’s too old, too rigid. You’re young and strong and malleable. It will be confusing. You’ll start to see things differently, to be able to do things that you weren’t able to before. My advice is to take it slow. Like going from a dirt bike to a ten-speed. You don’t want to go as fast as you can right away. Get used to it, learn how the gears interact, how the brakes work. As you get more comfortable, then you can stretch yourself.”

“Do you know what my gift will be?”

“That’s the best part. Those who are born gifted, our gifts are set. But because this is pure, you’re going to be able to do a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe everything.” John smiled. “Once you have it under control, you’re going to be more powerful than I am.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Hawk tried to imagine that, what it would feel like. To be able to think like John, to have that thing he had, that power that made people want to help him. Or to be able to move like Haruto—Sensei Yamato, he corrected himself—who could control his body with perfect precision, who could fight blindfolded using only sound to guide him. How amazing would that be?

“Are you ready?”

Aaron took a deep breath, then blew it out. Nodded.

The metal barrel of the injector was cool against his arm. Before he could tense up, his friend pulled the trigger. There was a pfff sound and a tiny pinch. “That’s it?”

“Yup.”

“I . . .” Emotion inflated his chest like a balloon. Hawk wanted to hug John, to cry. This was everything he’d ever wanted. To be like his mom, like John, or Tabitha. How would she look at him now? “Thank you.” His voice came out a little wobbly, and he wiped at his nose “Thank you.”

“No, Hawk.” John put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you.”

There was a muffled boom, like someone dropping heavy free weights in the gym. John’s head jerked up, and he stared at the door. Hawk said, “What was—”

“Shh.”

For a second, nothing happened.

Then the shooting started.

From the outside, the building wasn’t particularly notable. A warehouse on the outskirts of Tesla, tucked in amidst the others. The Holdfast had to import the vast majority of products, and they all had to be stored somewhere.

The Wardens moved with easy precision, every commando knowing exactly where to move and what to cover. There was no shouting, no hardened sergeant yelling, Go go go! That was for the movies. Here, in the bright sunlight of a Wyoming winter afternoon, the only sounds were the hustle of footfalls, the hum of traffic from a nearby artery, and the rumble of the truck engine.

Alpha Team hit the warehouse like a black wave. The point man slapped charges against the front door, stepped back, made a quick hand symbol. Cooper checked the safety on the assault rifle he carried, a Holdfast design of curved carbon fiber. His armpits were sweaty and his heart was loud, but his hands had the in-mission steadiness he’d always been able to count on. How many times had he been in a raid for the DAR? Hundreds, counting the drills.

But never one where you knew John Smith was on the other side of the door.

He muted the thought. The time for second-guessing was past. It was do or die.

The charges took the door right off the hinges, hurling the heavy metal inside with a roar of sound, quickly followed by an explosion of light from a flashbang. Two-man teams flowed in, and Cooper followed.

A lobby of some sort. Tall ceilings with exposed girders. A bench, a security camera, a guard doubled over and clutching his eyes. The teams swept past him, Cooper surfing their wave, leaving the guard for the tail of the column. On the schematics this broad entrance connected directly to the storage space, with a side hall leading to a series of offices. But in reality, walls had been built that framed the space out differently. No surprise. Schematics only showed the initial design. Smith’s team would have customized the interior to their specifications, and they wouldn’t have filed permits. Cooper was glad of it. He was counting on it.

The team stormed the hall and took up positions at a corner, then moved around it in neat synchronicity. Cooper heard yelling, a Warden ordering someone to get on the ground, and before that was even possible, the fast hard crack of automatic weapons fire, forward commandos dropping a target. He swung around behind them, saw two bad guys bleeding, one on his knees, the other staggering, both clean shots. Behind him someone yelled, “Flash!” as another stun grenade arced over Cooper’s head.

A man stepped from an alcove with the precision of a ballet dancer. His features were bland, his expression mild. His eyes were closed. Without breaking stride, he reached up to pluck the flashbang from the air and toss it back with a flick of his wrist. Cooper barely had time to turn away before everything vanished in a swell of roaring white.

The flashbang hazed out his vision, but he’d recognized the man. Haruto Yamato, one of the lieutenants who had been with Smith in New York. He made himself focus as Yamato started forward, eyes still shut as he took out the first Warden with a neck chop that segued into a leg sweep on the second.

Yamato’s gift is audiokinetic. He fights with his eyes closed and holds high-rank black belts in a dozen martial arts.

You can’t win toe-to-toe, but this doesn’t need to be a fair fight. All you need to do is tie him up long enough for the others to—

Wait a second.

You’re carrying an assault rifle.

Cooper raised his weapon and fired.

Yamato danced and sidestepped his way around the first three bullets. But the fourth, fifth, and sixth tore open his chest, and he staggered into a wall, then slid down it with a red smear. His empty eyes opened.

I’m coming for you, John.

Gunshots, lots of them, and yelling, and more explosions. Hawk was starting for the door before he realized he’d moved at all.

“Stop.” John’s voice was a whip, no warmth in it.

Hawk froze. More gunfire, this time from the other direction. A scream. Everyone had always said that enemy soldiers could storm the building, but he’d never really believed it, not in his bones.

Smith opened the door a crack and peered into the hall before stepping out. Aaron followed, trying to remember the drills, what to do if they were ever raided. Stay in their rooms? No, that didn’t make sense. The armory. Everyone was supposed to fall back to the armory.

“Come on.” John set off at a jog.

“Wait, the armory is the other way!” More shots, closer. His heart was going crazy, and he needed to pee desperately.

“We’re not going to the armory. Move!”

Cooper hadn’t been in that many secret laboratories. Two, to be precise. But so far they seemed like very dangerous places.

Abe Couzen’s facility in the Bronx had been a shiny wonderland of science toys, but by the time he and Ethan had found it, it had been redecorated via hand-to-hand combat—benches overturned, blood splashed on the wall.

This one was bigger, harshly lit, and filled with objects whose function he could only guess at. Blood spatter covered the sparkling surfaces and broken glass crunched underfoot. Commandos hustled between the tables, shouting and zip-tying captives.

The Wardens had shock-and-awed their way through the warehouse without significant incident. Plenty of Smith’s people resisted, but taken by surprise in ones and twos, none of them had posed even half the threat Haruto Yamato had. A dozen fighters had fallen back to a cinderblock armory, which Cooper found very considerate. So much easier to gas them all at the same time.

He paced the lab, taking in the place. The gunfire had died down to occasional bursts. Cooper stepped over a wet spray of brain matter and crouched beside a body. Two holes had been punched through the man’s face, but even so, it was obviously not Smith.

He keyed his earpiece, said, “Status.”

“This is Bravo Leader. We’ve cleared the building through our checkpoint.”

“Any sign of Smith?”

“That’s a negative.”

“Roger,” Cooper said. “Exterior?”

“All quiet on the street. One in custody, two KIA. Neither is Smith.”

“Sir.” The commander of Alpha Team was a squat, hard-eyed woman who looked like she could bicep-curl Cooper’s weight. Her face was grim. “He wasn’t with the people in the armory, either.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’re doing a thorough sweep of the building now. But unless John Smith is hiding under the floorboards, we’ve missed him.”

Slowly, Cooper nodded.

Then smiled.

The tunnel was choked with dust. In the dark, Hawk couldn’t see the spiderwebs that brushed against his face, but each one made his skin crawl. The space was too tight to crawl. He had to wriggle like a worm, his elbows jammed in his sides.

While gunfire raged in both directions, John had led them to the closet near the lab, an ammonia-smelling room with mops and tools and a big plastic utility sink. One of the weird things about being in a resistance movement was that it wasn’t like you could hire janitors, so when it came to cleaning, there was a duty roster. Hawk had wielded a mop in John Smith’s service more times than he could count.

As Aaron stepped into the room, John had grabbed the sink and yanked. The metal feet grumbled across the concrete, revealing a hole in the wall about two feet square. Without a word, John had stuck his head in and started wriggling his way forward. For a moment Hawk had just stared, hoping John was going after weapons, but the shadow swallowed more and more of Smith’s body until he was gone.

Hawk had taken a deep breath and followed.

The first few feet were just the space behind the wall, but then they hit a ring of concrete, and beyond that, hard-packed dirt. He wasn’t normally claustrophobic, but the space was tight enough that his shoulders touched on both sides as he squirmed diagonally downward. With every forward inch, the darkness grew more complete, until there was nothing but the sound of his breath and cold dirt and the silky panic of spiderwebs brushing his face. In that womb-dark all he could think about was the weight above him. His imagination painted a picture of all that earth, the tonnage of soil and cement and building and street. What would happen if he got stuck? Would someone come to save him? In the chaos, maybe he’d be forgotten, trapped here, buried alive. Panic twisted in his belly, a blind and toothy worm, like the worms moving through the dirt around them, and who knew what kind of pale, crawling nightmare lived down here—

Don’t you quit in front of John. Don’t you dare, you pussy.

Slowly the tunnel leveled out. He kept moving, his breath fast and humid. He really needed to pee. After an eternity, John’s voice drifted back. “Here we are.” There was a metal-on-metal squeal, and then a ringing thud, and a burst of light ahead.

Pulling himself out of the tunnel felt like being born again. He panted, bent over, hands on his knees until he trusted himself enough to straighten.

They were in a long hallway lit by widely spaced bulbs. The ceiling was about eight feet high, but the top third was crammed with a dense lattice of wire that forced them both to stoop. John fit a metal panel back into the wall to conceal the hole they’d just come through, glanced both ways, then started moving. “Come on.”

“What is this place?”

“Maintenance shaft. Tesla was planned and executed as a whole, so the first thing the engineers dug was an infrastructure support system.” John put a hand up, traced the cables above. “All the data in the city runs through these lines.”

“Where are we going?”

“Out. The nearest access hub is a quarter mile up. There’s a truck parked nearby.”

“A truck?” Hawk straightened, banged his head on a metal brace, winced. “You knew they were coming?”

“You think we’d have been there if I knew?” John glanced over his shoulder. “The truck has been parked there for two years. That’s how you win, Hawk. Never focus everything on just one route to attaining your goal. Develop as many contingencies as possible. Like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most options never get used. But if you have them at the right moment, you can change defeat into victory. Like turning a pawn into a queen.”

Hawk tried to imagine the effort that had gone into just this escape route. Locating the exact spot in the maintenance passage. Digging the tunnel. Hauling away the dirt. Dodging maintenance engineers. Buying the truck, finding a place to park it where it could sit for years, checking it regularly to make sure that the battery hadn’t died and the tires hadn’t gone flat. A huge amount of effort, and all just in case someday, someone attacked your home—oh.

“Wait.” He froze. “What about the others?”

Ahead of him, John stopped. He sighed, rubbed at his face. Then he turned and came back. “These are bad people we’re playing against, Hawk.”

“Are they—will they be—”

“I don’t know.” John put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Sensei Yamato. And Ms. Herr, and—oh my God. Tabitha. What about Tabitha?”

John cocked his head. “Were you and she . . .”

“No. I mean. No. Will she be okay?”

“Probably. As long as she doesn’t do anything stupid. And Tabitha isn’t stupid.” John paused. Hawk could see that he was weighing something.

Finally, he said, “I need to tell you something, Hawk. Something important.”

At this distance, the explosions sounded like firecrackers, but Shannon recognized them for what they were. Breaching charges. The assault had begun. Seconds later, there were more firecrackers, fainter and faster, and she recognized those too.

You should be there. The Wardens are good, but John is better. If you were there, you could shift, scout, make sure that Cooper didn’t walk into an ambush.

There was nothing for it now but to wait. Wait, and hope that Cooper knew what he was doing.

Waiting was frequently part of her job, and sometimes she’d even enjoyed it. Her ability to move unseen meant that very often she was someplace she absolutely shouldn’t be, a place where one wrong move could kill her. To be honest, she enjoyed that too. Everything was brighter when it was at risk. The colors more vivid, the air sweeter.

This time, though. Lately, though. All the fun had been going out of it. What she’d once considered the great big adventure that was her life had soured. Turned grim. The decline had started with the explosion at the stock exchange this spring, when Cooper had stopped her before she could prevent it. He hadn’t known what she was doing, of course, and in truth, she doubted she could have succeeded anyway. A thousand innocent people had died that day, and many more had died since.

And if this goes pear shaped, a lot more will join them. So pay attention.

She’d never spent any time in this part of Tesla; it was all warehouses and distribution centers. There were a surprising number of civilian cars, which struck her as strange until she remembered the New Sons of Liberty. As the militia pushed forward, a huge percentage of the Holdfast population was falling back to the safety of the Vogler Ring. Tesla must be full to bursting, every hotel room booked. People would end up sleeping in gymnasiums and churches.

This side street, though, was largely deserted. Few cars, no foot traffic. She stayed out of sight anyway, her mind processing every witness, the trucker a hundred yards away watching as a team unloaded his semi, the cameras mounted on every corner—nothing she could do about those—the electric car turning down the block, the drab metal hut with a sign on the door that read, MAINT TRUNK HUB N4W7—

A door that was swinging open.

Shannon put all her focus on it, subconsciously plotting the vectors of sight, the increasing angle of the door, the human eye’s tendency to dart rather than scan, the blind spot created by the parked truck that was actually a danger zone because it would draw attention, the change of light from inside the hut to the sunny Wyoming afternoon, and confirmed that she was in the best position given what she could see now. She sent up a silent prayer that Cooper had been right, and more important, that he was okay.

Two figures stepped out. The first paused to look around, a careful, professional gaze, but she read the intentions and the directions and shifted right around it.

John Smith. Her onetime leader, her onetime friend. Behind him was a kid she didn’t recognize, thin and tall given his age. They were both filthy, clothes smudged brown, cobwebs in their hair. The boy had the clenched-leg gait of someone who really needed to pee.

Shannon stepped from the shadows of the loading dock, shouldered the shotgun, and said in a loud, clear voice, “Don’t move.”

The kid jumped, and she could see that at least some of his bladder problem had been resolved.

John, on the other hand, only stared. They were separated by fifteen feet, and she could see he was deciding whether to run.

“Don’t.” She stared down the barrel. Her finger had pressure on the trigger.

“Shannon. Of course.”

“Put your hands on your head, take two steps forward, and drop to your knees.”

“Okay.” John laced his fingers behind his head. In a conversational tone, he said, “Run, Hawk.”

“Don’t move!”

“Run.”

The kid hesitated for a second, and then spun on his heel.

She couldn’t miss at this distance. But did she want to take the shot? It would mean murdering a fleeing teenager.

More than that. It means shifting your aim from John. How many people have died because they took their eyes off him for a fraction of a second?

The boy started back into the hut. She let him go. Without releasing pressure on the trigger, she circled to put John between her and the doorway in case the kid came back with a weapon. “Another of your holy warriors?”

“Hawk? He’s a friend.”

“You don’t have friends.”

“That’s not true.” His voice was mild. “What about you?”

“Last time we spoke, another of your teenage suicide bombers was about to blow me up. Along with a trainful of civilians.”

“It wasn’t personal, you know that.” He smiled wryly. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could talk about this?”

“Sure there is,” she said. “As soon as you take two steps forward and hit your knees.”

Cooper hauled the wheel sideways without letting up on the gas, and the truck slewed and rocked. Almost there.

The moment it had been confirmed that Smith wasn’t in the warehouse, Cooper had sprinted outside. As he’d ordered, a Warden was waiting in an SUV, the engine running. The commando hadn’t seemed too happy to be kicked out of the vehicle, but one look at Cooper’s face and he’d done as he was told.

There wasn’t really any need to go this fast, but Shannon was out here alone, and that scared him, scared him more than he had expected. She was one of the most capable people he’d ever met, but so was John Smith, and Cooper’s imagination was conjuring all kinds of unwanted ugliness.

Be okay, Shannon. If it comes down to you or him, please choose right.

He spun around the last corner, hoping for the best and fearing—well, everything.

Then he saw her, his Girl Who Walked Through Walls. Silhouetted against a burning sky with a shotgun braced on her shoulder and John Smith kneeling at her feet. His heart howled with joy. He screeched to a stop, snatched the assault rifle off the passenger seat, and climbed out to lock in a second line of fire.

The man Cooper had chased for most of a decade squinted up at him. “Hello, Nick.”

“John. Game over.”

“Looks like. Well played.” Smith was trying for cool, but Cooper could see the tremble in his hands. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Why not? Gently.”

The terrorist reached into his pocket very slowly. Cooper watched, ready to fire at the first hint of danger, but all Smith withdrew was a crumpled pack. He took one, lit it, inhaled deep. “How did you know?”

“I’ve been chasing you half my adult life, man. I’ve got you patterned. It’s all options and fail-safes with you. As soon as I saw that fifty yards away there was a maintenance passage that didn’t connect to the warehouse, I knew.”

“That’s funny. I purposefully didn’t buy a warehouse above the passage for that reason, and it’s what tipped you off. So now what?”

“Finish your cigarette.”

“Hmm.” Smith smiled. “It’s like that, huh?”

“After all the blood you’ve spilled? Yeah.”

“Only way to build a new world. Gotta burn the old one down. History is written in fire.” He took a long drag at his cigarette, then looked at Shannon. “You’re okay with this?”

“You once told me,” Shannon said, “to decide who I really care about. I have.”

A ghost of a smile flitted across Smith’s lips. “Good for you.” He turned to Cooper. “You’re a lucky man.”

“I know.” The moment had a surreal heft to it. So much of life slipped by like a breeze: sweet, brief, gone. This would linger, the impressions sharper than the details. Pale light from a white sky. Attenuated shadows. The smell of gun oil. The smear of dirt on Smith’s cheek. The cigarette in the hinge of his fingers, the crackle of tobacco as he took a final drag, then grimaced and flicked it away.

“Want another?”

“No. Thanks.” Smith inhaled a short, fast breath and rolled his shoulders. “You should know. Killing me isn’t the same as beating me.”

Cooper said, “It’s a step in the right direction.”

Then he pressed the trigger and blew three holes through John Smith’s heart.

The report echoed out across the plain to the distant mountains beyond. A bird startled from a nearby roof with a screech. A few blocks down, a trucker flung himself to the ground.

John Smith blinked. His head drooped as he looked at the wound. For a moment, his muscles held him in place, wobbling.

He fell over.

“Target located,” Cooper said, triggering his earpiece. “Come get him. Bring a body bag.”

Then he lowered the weapon and stared across the corpse at one of the women he loved. She stared back.

Neither spoke.

Not with words, anyway.