Glass House (47 page)

The wind was pushing at what was left of his
hair, as well. He had a decent head of it, gray and silver and
black and white all mixed together, but it was thin and patchy,
with tufts that were thicker around his ears and across the back of
his head than they were anywhere else. The erratic breeze was
making it all jerk like seaweed swaying underwater. The sudden
to-and-fro motions were intercut with upright stillness.

The man was sixty years by his looks,
seventy by his motions, and ninety by the absolute lack of
attention that any of the tourists buzzing in and around New York’s
South Street Seaport paid him. He had bought the
outrageously-priced cone at the Häagen Dazs on Pier 17. He’d waited
patiently, stooped-over with a cane in hand, until it was his turn,
then got the ice cream and slowly found a seat where only the
pigeons came close by. No one in the bustling sea of people had
bothered to glance at him since.

Had anyone done so, they might have noticed
something else about him. Something strange and out of place.
Something that didn’t fit with everything else and that couldn’t
possibly be created carefully and in front of a brightly-lighted
mirror, as the rest of his appearance had been earlier in the
day.

His eyes – the eyes of an old man with
slow movements – were impossibly clear and bright. And he was
watching the crowd with them. With every lick on the cone. With
every dripping drop of ice cream and turn of the confection in his
hand, he was studying the people who milled in and around the ships
and shops of the Seaport.

He watched their faces and the things they
carried. Their companions and the ways in which they talked with
and looked at each other. The directions they were coming from or
going. The presence of a seeming purpose or lack of purpose in
their motions.

He was waiting for a woman in all of it. Not
a standout woman, he didn’t imagine. That presumably wouldn’t be
how she appeared. She probably would be nicely but plainly dressed,
instead. Pants, not a skirt or dress. Sensible shoes that would be
comfortable and, certainly, quiet. A shirt that wouldn’t constrict
at the shoulders, with a jacket over it that would be loose and
somewhat long. Down to mid-thigh, perhaps. Long enough to conceal
but not get in the way.

She would also be dressed too warmly on this
day. Warm clothes sometimes were worn in disregard of the weather,
but they were concealing clothes. And concealing clothes were best
from time to time.

He was waiting for her because he knew she
would appear at the appointed time. He had sent the message
himself. In correct form. Properly delivered.

Gold Protocol.

Face to face.

She would appear because that was the way
things worked in the rigid world of American intelligence agencies.
You did things by the book. Particularly important things like
meeting people who had sent appropriately-encoded messages setting
the meeting up.

He figured she would arrive in thirty
seconds. There was a clock on a street corner pole nearby, and he
glanced at its face as his gaze scanned the crowd. Thirty seconds
to meet him by the
Pioneer
, the schooner that was only steps
away for him.

He stood as he caught sight of the clock
once more – fifteen seconds, if it could be trusted – and
he dropped the half-eaten cone into the garbage bin beside him,
almost all the vanilla chip left untouched. He turned in the
direction of the schooner. He saw the woman as he did.

On time. No surprise. She was on time and at
the designated place.

She had a camera in her hand, and she lifted
it twice while he watched, snapping pictures, which was a nice
touch. She stepped a few feet farther down and clicked another
snapshot, then checked the little digital screen on the camera’s
back.

The man continued steadily on with his cane.
It clicked against the boards, the sole sound his movements made as
his soft-soled shoes padded along.

When he was within fifteen feet of the
woman, he reached a hand into his sweater, pressing under his left
arm. When he was within ten, he was straightening without anyone
paying attention to him. At five, the woman, too oblivious for one
so diligent in timing, finally noticed him. But by then it was too
late.

The gun he retrieved from under his arm was
in all respects identical to one used in the shops off the Louvre
in Paris, only moments before. It was a Ruger Mark II, a
small-caliber, semiautomatic pistol that made relatively little
noise in the first place, and even less with a suppressor on
it.

He placed its muzzle against the woman’s
temple as she was turning to him, and he fired, like the woman in
Paris, two quick shots. His target toppled, her eyes never closing
as she fell to the ground.

The man didn’t hesitate, but he didn’t
hurry, either. He simply tossed the pistol a few feet to the water,
where it dropped with a quick
plunk
and sank instantly from
sight.

The man continued pacing away even when,
after the expected three or four second lag before anyone noticed
the blood, a single scream caused startled heads to turn. The
commotion of people, some approaching and some retreating from the
woman, didn’t alter his methodical step.

He kept walking, he crossed the street at
the light, and he made his way into the great city beyond.

May 8

7:59:55 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time

Over the Atlantic Ocean

Sean Ketelsen awoke with a jolt from a world
that was black and still and into one filled with screams and a
bright spotlight of orange flooding in through the window next to
him. He was barely awake and aware when a second, rolling lurch
came, this one tightening him against his fastened seatbelt as the
plane mounted a height before yawing right and pitching down. He
felt the seatbelt cut into his stomach as the contents of the
overhead bins burst out in a storm of debris.

Ketelsen turned to the window. The sky was
fire outside, the wing engulfed in the flames.

He knew, in the single second the whole
thing had taken, what would happen to him.

He knew he would die.

The jolt had been a bomb, and the blaze was
from the rupture of the wing tanks. The plane’s structure was
disintegrating into a fiery ball that Ketelsen already could feel
on his face and in the oxygen being pulled from his lungs.

He had just enough time to wonder who was
behind it. Who it was that finally caught up with him or whoever it
was they wanted on this plane.

But as the framework around him shrieked and
alarms erupted, he also knew it didn’t make a difference. Not for
him or anyone else on board.

What was left of the plane was rolling over
in the air as it rode the flames that grew where its wings once
were. Ketelsen felt that turnover as he clenched in his seat. The
briefcase and its contents, the missile sales, the information
successfully learned and turned over – it was all forgotten.
As the destruction went on, the plane’s body finally fracturing
into pieces, he wished for only one thing at the last.

That was to be on the ground, in one
piece.

He felt nausea creep from his stomach into
his throat as he struggled to keep it down. He straightened himself
forcibly in his seat, still secure on a single chunk of the
fuselage, then pushed himself back firmly into it, not knowing even
which direction was up.

Glancing toward what once was the ceiling,
he watched the world spinning there for a moment before he could
sort it out. And then the nausea returned at the sight he saw. He
felt himself retch and cough, and, for the first time since he was
an altar boy at St. Matthew’s on Jackson Street in Seattle nearly
three decades ago, he prayed.

Ketelsen had seen the solid and uniform
image of the distant ocean, a slab of even color that was hard as
concrete miles below. It was the last thing he would see.

May 8

8:00:09 p.m., British Summer Time

London, England, The United Kingdom

From the City of London outward, the metro
was blacking out in rapidly spreading, puzzle-piece blocks. Entire
neighborhoods went dark in an instant, the streetlights and
business signs and houses all going cold and dim as they dipped
into a foggy depth that draped over the city like gray paint
spilled and oozing across the floor.

When the traffic signals and streetlamps
winked out, whatever traffic had been moving came instantly to a
standstill. In that moment, fourteen accidents occurred in the
greater London area, three people dying in one of them when their
cab driver swerved at a suddenly crowded intersection, jumped a
curb, and ran over a royal red postbox that split the cab’s petrol
tank open, jetting a sheet of liquid fire into the car.

The crowds, the fireworks, the bands and the
singing – all the sounds dropped away like a radio that was
turned off, the noise first slowing to an odd drawl as realization
came to the people, then stopping altogether. The wind was the
strongest sound then. Though it was no more than a breeze, that
light wind roared in the eerily-dead city.

Then there was a cheer. A single one at
first, as someone in Piccadilly Circus let out a whooping noise of
jubilation that was answered by another person across the circular
roadway. Before long, the throng was screaming joyfully in the
dusk, blissfully unaware of the events beginning silently and
stealthily around them.

The cheering spread. Caught by the people in
Trafalgar Square, it doubled in intensity, then ran down Whitehall
to infect those gathered in the streets around Parliament.

The clock was chiming there. Operated by a
system created long before computerized organization and power
supply, the chimes in Big Ben rang on, playing out their simple
melody in a clanging that, in the darkness, seemed to drumbeat the
hearts of everyone who could hear it. The crowds up and down the
river began to sing the Westminster tune, shouting out the
“
dum-dum-dum-dum
” of its last notes and then moving right
into the eight gongs that followed to mark the time.

All around the masses, the world was not so
content or merry. In the subway tubes running below the streets,
the lack of power had stranded the cars. Backup power came spottily
to the Underground, and it didn’t matter when it did come. Like the
power system, London’s transportation system was steadily
collapsing.

On the Thames, an electronically-tethered
barge broke free and began a slow, meandering run along the river.
It scraped the built-up shore and bumped the boats tied there. Two
smaller ones were crushed into boards and left sinking in the dirty
and dark water.

Farther out, at Heathrow and Gatwick, the
power system failures had blackened the airports, and the auxiliary
power had failed to come on at any system-wide level at all. The
only lights visible were those in the sky above, as the planes,
having no contact with the ground, began to stack up in ragged and
uncontrolled holding patterns that the pilots were devising of
their own accord.

Inside the control tower, a few of the
terminals glowed green with power, but their screens were blank.
The monitoring equipment had crashed with all the other heavily
computerized facilities in the city. Controllers were scrambling,
punching buttons furiously while they tapped light pens impotently
on the monitors in front of them, trying in vain to activate the
tracking systems.

And so it began. System by system, the
computers – after instantaneously seizing on new and
meaningful code that suddenly had come to them – shut down one
by one.

Power. Transportation and shipping. Public
services. Telephone and communications lines. Satellite
transmissions. A blackness was spreading across England. All of the
United Kingdom. Into highly select spots in Europe.

At specific locations around the world.

It was beginning.

Patrick Reinken is the author of
Judgment
Day
, which was published in the United States by Simon &
Schuster and in Japan by Hayakawa, and which
Publishers
Weekly
said “…conjures up one of our best worst nightmares.
…Reinken creates a nearly seamless medical/legal chiller that’s one
slick piece of work.”

You can email the author at
[email protected]
,
where even though he can’t promise to respond to all emails, he
will read them. You might also find him skulking around at
Goodreads (
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2637180.Patrick_Reinken
)
or other book sites.

He lives in Minnesota, where he practices
law.