Authors: Daniel Suarez
W
recked county and federal police vehicles came under the glare of a mercury vapor searchlight. The bomb disposal robot’s arm panned to reveal more carnage. A thousand feet away, a spectator in the control trailer whistled softly at the video image. A murmur went through the assembled agents. Special Agent Ellis Garvey released his hold on the joystick and awaited instructions.
The FBI’s Critical Incidence Response Group (or CIRG) had taken over operations for the siege of Sobol’s estate, but Steven Trear still had nominal control of strategy. He knew that he had to get this situation under control quickly, or it would be taken from him just as he had taken it from Decker.
Trear put a hand on Garvey’s shoulder. “Bring us up to the mansion’s front door.”
The lawn mower–sized robot turned in place on rubberized treads and started moving across a blood-streaked debris field of plastic car bumpers and shattered glass, toward the mansion’s front steps. Along the way the robot passed a crushed and twisted version of itself. It was the robot brought in by Guerner’s team the day before. Garvey’s camera lingered on the image. Ominously symbolic. Trear cleared his throat, and Garvey nudged the joystick again, sending the robot forward.
He halted the robot at the base of the mansion’s front steps and raised its camera arms—shining the bright lights into the yawning, black maw of the doorway. The door was still wedged open.
A score of federal agents in the command trailer craned their necks to see the monitors.
Trear nodded to Garvey, who took a breath and eased the left joystick forward. The little robot’s motors whined as it inched up the stone steps.
Before long it moved warily through the front door and into the foyer, where some type of fearsome technology had assaulted Guerner and his team. Washington wanted more information. The robot’s camera arm panned the room. Glass from a shattered vase littered the tiled floor—along with vomit and specks of blood.
Someone in the back muttered, “Jesus.”
One of the bomb squad guys leaned in. “Look for transceivers or sensors on the walls.”
Garvey started panning the walls with the camera lights.
It looked like a classic Mediterranean, but there was a lot more than paintings and sculpture alcoves along the winding stairs. Near the ceiling an array of mysterious, white plastic sensors lined the walls.
Trear called out. “Guys, what are we looking at?”
A deafening silence filled the darkened trailer. In the glow of the camera monitors Trear looked for Allen Wyckoff, an FBI senior systems analyst who always seemed to know what he was talking about. Although there were bomb squad agents and a couple of computer forensics experts on hand, this wasn’t a bomb and it wasn’t software. It looked like a system. “Wyckoff. What am I looking at here?”
Wyckoff was just a silhouette in the darkness, except for the lenses of his round glasses, which reflected the monitor images. “Those are standard motion detectors…also what looks to be infrared sensors…I have no idea what
that
is…. The round pod might be a transmitter of some sort.” He turned toward Trear, and the monitor reflections disappeared from his glasses. “Sir, we’re going to need to analyze this video. There’s a lot of technology there I’m not familiar with.”
Trear looked around at the assembled experts, who were silently nodding in the dark. “So no one can tell me how the bomb disposal team was incapacitated? No guesses?”
The agents exchanged glances in the shadows.
Garvey ventured, “Should I keep going?”
Trear nodded. “Get us into the server room.”
Garvey took another breath and eased the joystick forward again.
The robot moved easily across the floor toward the center doorway at the back of the foyer. The mercury light revealed a long hall with stone tile flooring and embroidered rugs. Mission-style furniture braced the walls here and there along the length of the hall.
One of Garvey’s team spoke from the console nearby while examining blueprints. “We want to take the next hall on the right. Then it’s the second door on the right.”
“Got it. Turning.” Garvey turned the robot in place and shined the camera lights down a short side hall. It led into the recreation room toward the back of the house. Garvey panned the hallway, examining the walls and ceilings. More of the mysterious sensors lined the walls. It was dark except for the lights on the robot.
“Cellar door, second on the right. It should lead down to the server room.”
Garvey brought the robot forward, then moved to a second set of controls to activate the robot’s arm. The mechanical hand slid into camera view and swiveled once to align with the lever door handle on the cellar door. The arm moved forward, grabbed the door handle, then depressed it.
Suddenly the camera image jolted wildly and shouts of alarm filled the trailer. In a moment all the screens were filled with snow.
Trear pushed forward. “What just happened?”
Garvey’s hands hovered over the useless controls, his mouth open in shock. He turned. “I don’t know. I…”
“Do we have any signal from the robot?”
Garvey and his assistant checked the console and shook their heads. Everyone was talking again.
Trear shouted, “Quiet down! Everyone shut up.” He turned back to Garvey. “Play back the video—in slow motion.”
Garvey nodded, then rewound the video. All the monitors flickered, then a still image came up again: the mansion side hall.
“Roll it forward slowly.”
On-screen, frame by frame, the robotic arm grabbed the door handle and pushed down.
“There.”
Garvey stopped the image.
There was an unmistakable gap in the floor toward the bottom of the frame. The floor looked like it was opening up.
“Okay, advance it slowly.”
Garvey hit a button.
The gap expanded. In a quick succession of frames, the door handle pulled from the robot’s grip, and the entire machine slid down a chute that opened beneath it. Its mercury lights illuminated the dark hole, revealing a cinderblock-lined pit—the bottom of which was filled with water. Successive video images showed the water washing up onto its cameras and the robot shorting out. The entire process took about one and a half seconds.
Sidebar conversations filled the trailer.
Trear clasped a hand on Garvey’s shoulder. “It’s all right. That’s why we have robots.” Trear looked unruffled, almost serene.
He turned to the assembled agents. “I think we’ve established that there’s no power in the house.” He pointed to some techs sitting at a frequency-scanning console. “And there’s no radio transmissions emanating from the house, correct?”
The techs nodded.
Trear continued. “What we’re looking at here is a simple pit trap. Sobol’s high-tech weaponry is down. He’s gone medieval on us. That’s great news.”
Garvey turned from the robot command console. “That’s our last robot. We’ll have to send back to L.A. for another one.”
Trear nodded. “Bring in several. Fly them in if you have to. But we need to get our hands on Sobol’s personal computers as soon as possible.”
There was silence for a moment in the trailer.
Garvey hesitated, then asked, “Meaning that we…?”
“Send in the Hostage Rescue Team. Have them go in as far as the pit. I want the area around the cellar entrance ramped over by the time we get the extra robots here.”
Wyckoff looked surprised. “Sir, are you certain that’s a good idea?”
“Certain? No, not certain. But Sobol’s home computers might hold the key to destroying this monster. That’s what we came to do. So let’s do it.”
Everyone murmured in agreement.
Someone in back asked, “What about the Hummer, sir?”
“Pull out the wreckage and ship it down to the L.A. lab. Cover it with a tarpaulin before pulling it out. I don’t want to see any more pictures of the ‘death machine’ on the front page tomorrow.” He clapped his hands once. “Let’s get moving, people. The world’s watching.”
Special Agent Michael Kirchner sat poring over financial documents with five other agents in an unassuming accountant’s office in Thousand Oaks. The desks were littered with open folders, receipts, tax returns, and ledgers. Another agent was busy imaging computer hard drives. Kirchner, a CPA and a tax attorney, believed that he and his team did more to fight crime than any field office in the bureau. Organized crime couldn’t accomplish much without money.
They had spent the last eight hours scrutinizing the detailed financial history of Matthew Sobol. It was quite a trail. Sobol was an officer in thirty-seven corporations. He had three sole proprietorships, two partnerships, eleven LLCs—and a slew of international business corporations, holding companies, and offshore trusts. Tons of financial activity over the last two years, with equipment purchases, wire transfers, professional and consulting fees. It was a rat’s nest. The finances of the rich usually were.
Kirchner reviewed a report of the largest capital expenditures. Technical components from the looks of it. Purchased by one company but shipped to Sobol’s Thousand Oaks address.
Kirchner looked up at his partner, Lou Galbraith, who was sifting through filing cabinets nearby. “Lou, you lost money in fuel cells a few years back, didn’t you?”
Galbraith stopped, raised his reading glasses up onto his forehead, and gave Kirchner an impatient look. “I don’t want to talk about it. Why?”
Kirchner held up the printed report. “Sobol made some big purchases that I thought you might be interested in….” He leafed through the report. “Here, identical hydrogen fuel cell power units purchased by two separate holding corporations, both shipped to his estate. $146,000 a pop.”
“Tax dodge?”
Kirchner frowned. “We’re not trying to nail him on tax evasion, Lou.” He looked down at the report. “Fuel cell power units? Things like that really work?”
“I wasn’t an idiot, Mike. Of course they work. Hospitals and big companies use them to generate electrical power from natural gas. You know, where the electrical grid is unreliable or too expensive. It was supposed to be huge. Just before its time, that’s all, and—”
“These things were shipped to Sobol’s estate.” Kirchner looked even more concerned.
“What’s wrong, Mike?”
“Call the SAC at the Sobol estate. I want to make sure he knows about this.”
Agent Roy “Tripwire” Merritt took a deep breath, gathering in the last of the night air, redolent with moist earth. A sliver of moon hung just above the horizon, silhouetting the tree-dotted hills. He scanned the terrain without night vision gear, taking joy in this simple pleasure. It reminded him of the Basque region of Spain by moonlight—or South Africa’s Transvaal. He’d seen a lot of the world by night, and usually from behind third-generation night vision goggles.
The predawn air was crisp and cool on Merritt’s face as he stood in the payload area of an army ten-ton truck. Its powerful diesel engine labored in low gear as it climbed through a bulldozered breech in the estate wall. The canvas top had been removed, leaving it open to the night sky.
Merritt slung an HK MP-5/10 over his shoulder, then looked back toward his FBI Hostage Rescue Team. Six of the best-trained operators in the bureau sat on either side of the cargo bay, swaying in unison as the truck lurched over mounds of dirt and rock. These were
his
men, and they were intimidating as hell. Clad in black Nomex flight suits, body armor with ceramic trauma plates, Pro-Tec helmets, night vision goggles, and bulletproof face masks, they made Darth Vader look like a Wal-Mart greeter. But of all the missions they had carried out together—from Karachi to the wilds of Montana—Merritt had never had more misgivings than on this one. During the mission briefing he kept thinking that this was a job for the bomb disposal teams or the demining experts. It kept coming back to urgency. Six officers were dead, nine more injured. No one had any answers and time was apparently of the essence. Still…
Merritt looked down at the metal and wood scaffolding materials lying on the floor space between the benches. Four toolboxes lay there as well. His highly trained rapid response team was going to bridge a pit in a hostile environment. He wondered what sort of fuck-up happened upstairs to make this come about.
Merritt glanced over at the mansion three hundred yards away. No lights had appeared in it since last evening. Radio communications had been back up for the last hour, ever since the ultrawideband transmissions from the house died.
Merritt spoke normally, knowing his headset mic would pick it up. “Echo One to TOC. We’re at yellow. Request compromise authority and permission to move to green.”
“Copy, Echo One. I have your team at yellow. You have compromise authority and permission to move to green.”
“Copy that, TOC.” Merritt gave his men the thumbs-up signal. They returned it.
Waucheuer, the breaching specialist, flipped up his face mask and grinned. “Hey, Trip, why do we need guns? Sobol’s already dead.”
“Cut the chatter, Wack. Dead or not, Sobol managed to kill some good people here. Stay alert.”
Waucheuer shrugged, then nodded sharply, causing his face mask to flip back down.
Merritt stood and looked over the cab of the truck as it advanced slowly across the wide lawn of the estate. They were coming up on the burnt-out hulk of the automated Hummer now.
The other men stood to lean against the railing as the Hummer came up on the right-hand side. The truck slowed, then stopped about twenty feet from the wreckage. Two county SWAT team members were in the truck cab. The passenger kicked on a side-mounted searchlight, focusing it on the still smoldering remains. The Hummer was definitely nonoperational. The wheels were just blackened hubs, and the interior was gutted.
“Those marines ever hear of a little thing called evidence?”
Merritt could practically hear Waucheuer grinning behind his mask. Merritt ignored him. He spoke into his headset. “Echo One to TOC. The Hummer is nonoperational. Proceeding to green. Out.” Merritt pounded the cab roof twice. The truck lurched forward toward the mansion some one hundred yards away.