Ten seconds. Twenty.

A minute crawled by. The only sound was the tinny sound of a Moroccan radio station from inside the compound and the ripple of laughter from the deputy warlords who were playing poker in the blockhouse where they bunked.

From the forest… nothing.

N’Tabo licked his lips. He blinked sweat from his eyes.

He waited there for another whole minute, and then gradually, one stiff muscle at a time, he relaxed. It was nothing.

Then a voice said, “Over here.”

It was low, guttural, a twisted growl of a voice. And it came from behind him.

N’Tabo did not understand the words. He spoke four languages-Somali, Bravanese, Arabic, and English-but the voice had spoken in Afrikaans, a language he’d never heard.

Not that it mattered. He jumped and spun, and as he landed three things happened all at once. He saw the person who had spoken-a strange, hulking figure silhouetted against the stark glare of the compound lights. N’Tabo opened his mouth to shout a warning. And the figure behind him whipped a huge hand toward him and closed it around his throat. All three things happened in a microsecond.

N’Tabo tried to shout, but the hand was too strong-insanely strong-and not so much as a hiss escaped the crushing stricture. He tried to fire his weapon, but the gun was ripped out of his grip with such savage force that N’Tabo’s hand was folded backward against the wrist and a half-dozen small bones snapped, the ends scything through the cartilage and tendons. The pain was massive, but N’Tabo had no voice with which to scream at the white-hot agony in his arm. Within the cage of iron fingers his throat began to collapse and he could hear his own neck bones grind. The trapped air in his lungs was a burning fireball.

N’Tabo swung his other hand at the figure holding him; he used every last scrap of strength he possessed and he felt his fist blows slam into shoulders and arm and face. His attacker did not even flinch. It was like beating a statue, and N’Tabo’s knuckles cracked on the hard knot of the attacker’s cheekbone.

A different and far more impenetrable darkness began to engulf N’Tabo, blossoming like black poppies in his eyes. The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was a line of brutish figures swarming out of the shadows and leaping up absurdly high, grabbing the top of the corrugated metal compound fence twelve feet above the hard-packed sand. One by one the figures hauled themselves up and over the wall.

Blood roared in N’Tabo’s ears, but he heard two distinct sounds.

The first was the mingled chatter of gunfire and the high-pitched shrieks of men in terrible pain.

Then he heard his own vertebrae collapse with a crunch like a sack dropped onto loose gravel. N’Tabo clearly heard the sound of his own death, and then he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

In flight

Saturday, August 28, 10:47 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 13 minutes E.S.T.

I had the Lear to myself and sank into a large leather swivel chair next to a self-service wet bar that saw a fair amount of action during that flight. I’m pretty sure black coffee laced with Kentucky bourbon is neither tactically sound nor medically smart in light of what I’d been through and what might lie before me, but damn if I didn’t give a shit. It felt good going down, and since I didn’t want it to be lonely I had another. I also wolfed down six packets of salted peanuts. I’ve never understood why they can’t put a decent serving in a single bag.

After we were at cruising altitude Hanler put it on autopilot and came back to show me how to use the videoconferencing setup; then he retired to the cabin, cranked up an old Bob Seger and the Silver Bullets CD. Either he didn’t want to participate or his current involvement with Church didn’t extend to DMS secrets.

I clicked on the remote and immediately the screen popped on with a real-time webcam of the video lab at the Warehouse. I had ten seconds of an empty room and then Dr. Hu came and sat down. He was wearing jeans and a Punisher T-shirt under a white lab coat that probably hadn’t been washed since last winter. Instead of his name he had “Mad Scientist” embroidered over the pocket. Hu was a Chinese American übergeek who ran the DMS science division; he was a few thousand neurons beyond brilliant, but he was also an insensitive asshole. If the building was on fire and it came down to a choice of saving him or my favorite pair of socks, he’d be toast. He hated me just as much, so we had a balanced relationship.

“Captain,” he said.

“Doctor,” I replied.

All warmth. Like a Hallmark special.

He said, “Has Mr. Church told you anything about the video?”

“Just that it came from an anonymous source and that it’s tied to whatever’s brewing.”

“It’s because of the video that Hack Peterson rolled Jigsaw Team,” Hu said. “We received that video two days ago. We ran the faces of each of the people in the video through our recognition software and got some hits. Mr. Church will conference in with us to discuss those with you. Bottom line is that one of the faces is that of a man known to have been associated with a major subversive organization back in the Cold War days. Don’t ask me for details, because Lord Vader hasn’t deemed it necessary to share those with me yet.”

Cold War, I mused. Grace was right.

“You know,” I said, “Church could be eavesdropping on this call.”

I said it just to be mean and Hu looked momentarily unnerved, but he shook his head. More to himself than to me. “Point is, Church initiated a MindReader search on the man and found that almost everything about him has been erased from government databases. MindReader couldn’t reclaim the data but was able to spot the footprints.”

“ ‘Footprints’?”

“Sure… think of them as scars from where data was forcibly erased from hard drives. It’s like forensics… every contact leaves a trace.”

“Except for MindReader.”

“Well… okay, except for MindReader. I think one of the things bugging the boss is that it would take a system a lot like MindReader to expunge this much information. Mind you, MindReader wouldn’t have left a mark, so we’re not looking at someone using our own system… but this is weirdly close.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that.”

“No one does. Anyway, we used MindReader to do extensive pattern and connection searches and located relatives of Gunner Haeckel, the man from the video. Stuff this other system, good as it was, missed. We accessed court records from family estates and pending litigation. His only living relative was an uncle who died in 1978.”

“And…?”

“And everything the uncle had is stored at a place called Deep Iron, which is a private high-security storage facility a mile under Chatfield State Park in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Denver. Mr. Church sent Peterson and his team to the facility at dawn this morning. He never reported in.”

“What kinds of records are stored there?”

“We don’t know. The Deep Iron system only lists them as ‘records.’ Could be a collection of old forty-fives for all we know. All sorts of things are stored at Deep Iron. People store yachts, film companies store old movie reels, you name it. And about a million tons of paper and old microfilm records.”

“And we don’t know how it relates to the video?”

“No, so Church is looking for you to get us some answers. Your boy Top Sims is already in Colorado.”

“Call Top ‘boy’ again, son, and you’re likely to end the day as a girl.”

He blinked. “It wasn’t a racial slur,” he said defensively. “It’s street talk. You know… Echo Team are your boys and all.”

“Doc, you were never cool in school and you’re not cool now. Stop trying.”

He pretended to adjust the nosepiece of his glasses, but he did it with his middle finger. You could feel the love just rolling back and forth between us.