Chapter Ninety-Eight

Southwest of Gila Bend, Arizona

Monday, August 30, 5:19 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 42 hours, 41 minutes E.S.T.

I was alone in a world of heat shimmers, scorpions, biting flies, and nothing else. The Sonoran Desert may not be the Sahara, but it has its moments. The temperature at one o’clock in the afternoon was 122 degrees, and there was not so much as a wisp of cloud between its furnace heat and me except camouflaged BDUs and a thin film of sunscreen. Bunny and Top were in the air-conditioned back of an FBI van that was painted to look like a Comcast Cable TV truck out on a dirt road that led from nowhere to nowhere. Grace and Alpha Team were somewhere in a Black Hawk helicopter on a mesa fifteen miles to the northwest. Somewhere up in the wild blue yonder was the 358th Fighter Squadron, ready to rain hell and damnation down on the Deck if I gave the word. One of those planes carried an E-bomb. The upside was that we could get one; the downside was that my own electronics might not survive it. The ruggedized unit I had in my pack was supposed to be able to withstand the EMP, but as has been pointed out to me so many times since joining the G, it was a piece of equipment built by the lowest bidder.

A westerly breeze did nothing but push hot air past barrel cactus, water-starved junipers, jimson weed, and tumbleweed. I shimmied through the hard pan to the lip of a ridge that looked down on a small cluster of buildings nestled in a shallow basin between two nondescript ranges of small mountains. According to the Pima County Assessor’s Office, the buildings were commercially zoned for “scientific research and development.” The IRS told Bug that all appropriate taxes had been paid by Natural White, a company doing research on a cure for “vitiligo,” a pigmentation disorder in which melanocytes-the cells that make pigment-in the skin are destroyed. As a result, white patches appear on the skin in different parts of the body.

Very cute. I guess even psychopathic white supremacist assholes can have a sense of humor.

There were several names on the IRS and deed forms, and so far they all checked out as citizens of the United States with no criminal records. With an organization as large as the Cabal, there was probably no shortage of members willing to lend their name to a dummy corporation.

Bug and his team were working on locating all assets and accounts tied to Natural White so they could be frozen when we made our move. Sometimes you do more to cripple the beast by picking its pocket than putting a bullet in it.

I shielded my PDA from the sun and studied the satellite image of the facility. The central building was, as SAM had said, shaped like a dodecahedron. There was a long, flat road to the east of the building that didn’t seem to go anywhere but was just about the right width and length to serve as a decent airstrip.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“I’m in position. Ask the Kid if they use the eastern road as a landing strip.”

“He says yes. The Twins use it for their Lear and he’s seen other small craft land there. He says there is a hidden hangar as well. We’re sending you thermal scans. They’re enlightening.”

My PDA flashed with a new image that showed thermal scans of the basin. The Deck was the hot center point, but there were radiating lines of heat going out in all directions to form a pattern that had nothing to do with what the naked eye could see. One long corridor ran half a mile from the center of the Deck to another hot spot that was nearly as big.

“Ninety percent of this place is underground,” I said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t say anything and I knew that he was giving me a chance to change the mission, to back out or ask for backup. But I didn’t want to do that, because we could not risk tipping our hand too soon.

“Wish me luck,” I said with as much jauntiness as my nerves could afford. “Keep the Kid handy.”

“I’m here, Cowboy,” SAM said.

“Roger that. I’m proceeding inside.”

I took a small high-power camera and clipped it to my topmost buttonhole. I wasn’t wearing full combat rig, no tin pot with a helmet cam. The lapel cam was one of Bug’s toys, and it fed images to a satellite that relayed them to the TOC. With that in place, I crept down the side of the basin in an uneven rhythm. If a tumbleweed moved, I moved. When the wind died and everything stood still, so did I. SAM said that he didn’t think that there were any motion detectors, but there were cameras. He’d written out a timetable that was impressive bordering on obsessive-compulsive. When I’d commented on the precision, SAM shrugged and said that he had a lot of time to himself, then, after a long contemplative pause, added, “Besides… the only way to really be alone in that place is to become invisible, and that means staying out of the camera cycle.”

He blushed when he said it, realizing that it sounded weird. Actually, I thought it sounded very sad.

It took forty minutes to make my way to the first camera.

SAM’s voice guided me through the security maze.

“The first camera’s in the dead cottonwood tree twenty yards ahead and to your right,” he said. He and Church were watching my progress via the clip-on camera and a real-time satellite. “Wait for it to swing past, then run. Go straight to the red rocks and stop. Great! Now the next camera is on that pole coming up out of the ground right ahead. It does a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sweep, so once it moves you can follow it almost all the way around. There’s an old wooden picket fence. See it? Drop down behind that and count to fifty, then get up and run to the first building.”

I followed every step, moving, stopping, dropping, running, and made it to the building.

“The doors need swipe cards,” he said.

“No problem, Kid.” I crouched by the door and fished out the first of a bunch of gizmos Dr. Hu and Bug had given me. The unit was the size and shape of a pack of stick gum. I peeled off a plastic strip to expose the adhesive and pressed it gently onto the key-swipe mechanism. Adhesive was safer than magnets in case the unit had a magnetic detector. Downside was that they weren’t recoverable, so there was a timer inside that would release a tiny vial of acid in an hour-just enough to fry all of the internal works-the chemical reaction would also neutralize the adhesive and the thing would fall off.

Once the unit was secure, I tapped in a code and waited. The unit was remote linked to MindReader; it raced through possible code combinations while MindReader’s stealth software instantly erased all traces. It was designed for keycard systems that trigger alarms if the wrong card or a failed card is used too many times.

“Got it,” I heard Bug say over the commlink.

“Copy that,” I whispered, and removed a master keycard that had now received from MindReader the proper code. I swiped it and all the little lights above the lock flashed a comforting green. I opened the door and stepped inside, staying low per SAM’s instructions.

“I’m in a tractor shed,” I said. “No visible doors other than the one I came in and the big garage door.”

“There are four operational modes for the Deck,” said SAM in way that sounded like he was reciting back a training orientation speech. “The Daily Mode maintains a security-neutral appearance for all exterior buildings, but there are a lot of extra security steps to keep unwanted guests out. All secure entrances to the Deck are closed. There’s a Work Mode, which leaves only crucial doors locked, but there would be guards everywhere. Then there’s a Visitor Mode, which is what they do when the Twins come-it hides stuff inside as well as out. And last is the Defense Mode. I’ve never seen that.”

“Let’s hope we don’t. What’s next?”