“My man of steel.” She kissed me. I thought it would be a brief throwaway, but it blossomed into the kind of kiss you remember for a lifetime. When our lips parted, I felt dizzy and weak.
“If there really is an Aphrodite, she’s envious of the way you kiss,” I whispered.
She reached up and gently tilted my face until our foreheads touched. “Promise me it will not be the last one,” she said, her eyes unwilling to meet mine. I hadn’t realized how scared she was until that moment.
“I promise.” I pulled her to me and we embraced, so hard I was worried I’d hurt her. She didn’t complain. When I finally let her go, tears welled in her eyes.
“I love you,” she said. The words washed over me like warm ocean water. All I gave in return was a dreamy smile. My first reaction was that she’d turned on the juice accidentally—her emotions kicked in and her power leaked out enough to bathe me with those waves of happiness.
A great rationalization, but the truth was so much better: I was happy for the oldest, best reason in the book. The woman I loved . . . loved me back.
“I’ll take your stupefied silence as a sign you love me, too,” she finally said.
“Since the day I saw you in your scrubs in the mess hall, smart-ass. I’ll say it every day of our lives from here on out. And there will be lots of them, I swear. See you at the rendezvous.”
She touched the side of my face without saying another word.
I kissed the Goddess of Love one final time and went downstairs to meet Diego. You’d think I’d have a jumble of thoughts and emotions in my head at that moment: strategies, tactics, possibilities, danger, even fear. As I climbed into the passenger seat of the Porsche, though, only two mental bullets ricocheted inside my skull.
One: Lyla Ravzi had ruined me for all other women.
Two: I really should have put her to sleep.
Both were true.
CHAPTER 48
D
iego and I stood on a bluff overlooking our target. The George Bush Center for Intelligence—fancy name for CIA headquarters—loomed in the darkness below the Potomac River bluff, spread out over 250 acres of Virginia farmland. The complex radiated a ghostly green hue through the night-vision binoculars, one of many gifts from Lyla’s minions. Our location was another: a field agent pointed out the perfect vantage point—just outside the security grid and the perimeter fence that waited in the woods less than a hundred feet ahead.
Despite the wondrous night vision, the binoculars revealed little activity. No foot patrols. No men on the roof. The vast parking lots surrounding the two main buildings were mostly empty.
“Time?”
“Almost eleven,” Diego answered.
“Perfect. Shift change at the local police stations. CIA security will be full strength but operations are a skeleton crew this late. Don’t need to worry about a couple thousand nine-to-five workers.”
“Are Lyla’s boys in place?”
I turned to look at the access road from Highway 123. The four-lane divided street was the only avenue leading to the campus. The first rule of a truly secure installation: limited access. Only problem—if your secure site comes under attack, there’s only one direction help can come from.
A caravan of tractor-trailers made the turn off 123. Twelve in all, each driver the recipient of special instructions from Aphrodite.
They came up the road and fanned out, each driver moving their rig perpendicular to the flow of traffic. The first four trailers blocked the road itself, while the remaining eight came to rest along the sides of the road, all the way to the tree line. Twelve drivers calmly got out of their trucks and walked back toward 123, keys tucked safely in their pockets.
“Road’s blocked. Anybody coming to the rescue better have excellent cardio, ’cause they’ll be walking.” I scanned the sky above. “No planes overhead, either.”
Diego blew out a deep breath. “Time to start the party, then. Put your toy in the safety box.”
I slipped the binoculars into the shielded container at my feet. When Diego heard me throw the latch, he stepped a few paces down the bluff. He crossed his arms in front of his chest in an X and concentrated. I knew better than to wait for the hum or an explosion of light—this part of Diego’s repertoire was more subtle, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t just as destructive.
When he exhaled, the lights of the entire CIA complex went out. Power grids beyond the campus also went dark; everything within a five-mile radius, including the nearest police station and two mobile-phone towers.
Diego turned back, grinning in the dark. “So much easier than throwing lightning bolts.”
He’d emulated one of the odder effects of a nuclear bomb: the electromagnetic pulse. The pulse supercharged the atmosphere with high-energy electrons, emanating from the nuke (or in this case, Diego, the human atomic bomb). The pulse overloaded any device carrying an electric current, which in a metropolitan area meant . . . damn near everything. Power lines weren’t the only things knocked out: car electronics, smartphones, computers, solid-state circuitry. Anything with power flowing through it saw that power spike until the circuits burnt up.
An EMP was the ultimate techie’s nightmare, with almost unlimited range if you generated one high enough in the air so the pulse had room to spread. Explode a twenty-megaton whopper in the upper atmosphere and the Amish would become America’s technological elite.
Use Diego from ground level, though, and you don’t affect much more than the immediate area. Still, the immediate area was all we needed.
Five seconds after the pulse shredded the Agency’s power system, half the complex’s lights came back on. I knew they would, because I’d studied the building specs. Almost no one bothers to shield electronics against an EMP, for a simple reason: who cares about posting to Facebook when you can see a mushroom cloud from your back porch? The CIA, however, is one of the few installations built to function in the aftermath of catastrophe. Shielding every electric line was impossible, so the government did the next-best thing—they built a second set of electrical relays, turned off completely with no electricity running through the lines. An EMP doesn’t affect circuits with zero power in them, so in the event of a nuclear attack, the main switches reroute power to the secondary lines, and bam! Back in business.
Course, this brilliant backup plan clings to a single assumption: nobody would bother to nuke a site twice, right?
“Diego, if you please—hit ’em again.”
The second pulse killed most of what was left, and this time lights miles beyond the perimeter of the first EMP winked out, too.
“Oops. Got a little carried away on that one. Sorry.”
“C’mon, man . . . we’re not trying to send D.C. to the Stone Age. Be a little more cautious, would ya?” I removed the binoculars from the shielded case and powered them on. The rooftops of the buildings were easier to see with no glare from regular light sources. Before long, I saw dark figures scurry along the roofline. “All right, they’re following emergency protocol. I’ve got snipers on top of both buildings. They’ll have a bead on us before we make it out of the woods.”
Diego tapped his foot on the ground. “So . . .”
“Discourage them.”
Like he did in Iran, he summoned strikes from the clouds above the installation. Mammoth lightning bolts split the sky apart above the roofs of the two structures, so many I lost count. He hit the corners, the center, the helipad, the AC units . . . you name it, Diego fried it.
“Honey, don’t forget to do the dishes,” I told him between salvos.
He nodded and pulled down two quick strikes into the middle of the
massive collection of satellite dishes huddled at the far side of the old administration building. Explosions rocked the entire communications platform. The big dishes burnt out and the smaller ones went flying—burning metal Frisbees no one wanted to catch. If the Agency’s comm systems still had any power, it wasn’t going to matter.
When the cacophony died down, I scanned the roof again. Several fires, a lot of smoke, but most important, no moving shadows with rifles. The fires were a bonus; at least a portion of the CIA’s internal police force, the Security Protective Service, would be tasked to put them out, especially since no one could contact the fire department. Every SPS officer fighting fire meant one fewer gun shooting at us, and one less bodyguard for Tucker.
No structural damage, flames eventually contained by the SPS and shielded fire-prevention circuits, and the satellite dishes can be replaced within forty-eight hours, but for right now . . .
“They’re blind, deaf, and on fire. Won’t get any easier,” I said. We walked down the bluff through the woods until we reached the fence, eight feet tall and monitored by now-unpowered video cameras. I preferred wire cutters to setting the forest on fire, so I handled the dirty work while Diego peeked through the remaining trees with the binoculars. When I finished clipping a slot big enough for us to crawl through, he said, “Still don’t see anybody on the roof. Looks clear.”
The relative protection of the thick trees only ran for another twenty yards. After that, the approach was wide open: a driveway followed by three hundred feet of empty VIP parking, right in front of the entrance to the old administration building. I’d never been so afraid of a parking lot in my life. “Looks clear” isn’t the same as “clear,” and three hundred feet is a long way to run when you’re sniper bait. Luckily, body armor wasn’t my only protection.
Diego said, “Remember, stay behind me. But not too close.”
“What’s too close?”
He grinned. “If your hair stands on end, you’re too close.”
He walked beyond cover and extended his left hand to the side, palm up. A bubble of shimmering air surrounded him, almost fifty feet in diameter. A breeze carried the low-level hum back through
the trees to me. With slow, deliberate steps, Diego moved toward the administration building in the dark. He took fewer than ten of those steps before the shooting started.
A sniper from the roof fired first—he’d been hiding below the lip—and he ducked back under cover before Diego could target him. What the shooter didn’t realize was Diego wasn’t concerned about him. He only cared about the bullets.
The hardiest sniper rounds are made of tungsten, one of the densest, strongest metals in existence. Although I’m confident our rooftop shooter was well versed in the metal’s ballistic properties, weight, and penetration stats, I was pretty sure he didn’t know the one statistic that mattered: tungsten has a melting point of 6,000 degrees.
When the bullet reached the boundary of the energy bubble, a 30,000-degree bolt of lightning exploded from Diego’s outstretched palm, automatically drawn to anything more conductive than air. The electrified plasma intercepted the round in midflight. A few droplets of molten tungsten penetrated the bubble, but they fell harmlessly to the pavement, not even close enough to make Diego flinch.
He continued his slow march toward the entrance until two SPS guys came out the front doors, barrels of their M-16s leveled at him. At first I thought they’d waste time ordering Diego to stand down and surrender, but they didn’t bother. Both men opened up with the M-16s on full auto, spraying their entire thirty-round magazines in seconds. Lightning bolts danced out of Diego’s left palm in response, one for every piece of metal that approached his sphere of supercharged air. The effect was dazzling, like touching one of those plasma globes from the 1980s—with magical arcs of current reaching out to sizzle against the glass under your fingertips—except this was a helluva lot bigger.
A spatter of glowing slag came through the bullet shield, but nothing else.
Diego was far enough away from the tree line that I could safely follow, keeping my distance but still enjoying the fifty-foot-high cover his bubble provided. The guy on the roof popped up to fire again, and this time took a bead on me. His round dissolved like before but this time he stuck around long enough to see the effect. I didn’t want to
give him the opportunity to sprint down the roofline until he found an angle that worked, so I yelled, “Guy on the roof !”
Diego’s head rotated in the sniper’s direction. He maintained the bubble with his left palm and pointed his right fist at the roof’s edge. While the bullet-shield bolts were thin and relatively quiet, the one Diego fired at the roof was neither.
The sniper didn’t pop up again.
The two slack-jawed idiots with empty M-16s witnessed the earthshaking blast from less than one hundred feet. Once they got off the ground, they ran. Didn’t blame them; shooting at Diego was as effective as spitting at God, and Diego wasn’t full of loving grace like the Big Guy.
He walked another twenty paces and stopped. The right fist came up again, pointed at the main entrance; bulletproof glass doors, security barriers, and X-ray checkpoints were beyond. I covered my ears this time.
Shit. This is gonna be bad.
The thunderous sustained volley blew apart doors, columns, metal, glass . . . anything in the way. When the blinding arcs of bluish white electricity faded, the door to Tucker was wide open. I sprinted through as soon as Diego dropped the shield.
CHAPTER 49
O
nce inside, I was responsible for the heavy lifting. Diego’s shield was useless indoors—he’d never learned how to alter the size of the bubble, and fifty feet of supercharged air would have touched everything around him. The bolts would have fried it all, electrifying floors, walls, anything mildly conductive. Including me.
I didn’t plan on needing a shield, though.
Battery-powered emergency lights cast a yellow glow over the ruined entrance. The main foyer behind them was the biggest room in the building, but it wasn’t large enough for someone to take a shot at us without being in my range. The first responder to the foyer destruction was an SPS officer wandering around with a flashlight. I dropped the guy before Diego even noticed him. The officer’s gun never made it out of his holster. Once we cleared the rubble of the security stations, I didn’t bother with constantly scanning ahead. Speed was more important. I blanket wiped a hundred feet in front of us, over and over, every few steps. Tiring, but effective.
Nobody conscious got in our way, although we did have to step over a full tactical team sleeping in a hallway next to the cafeteria. They were armed more like an army platoon than a security force: heavy squad automatic weapons and full-plate body armor. One of the guys even had a nasty-looking grenade launcher—with a circular drum magazine like an old-time gangster’s tommy gun. Armament like that wasn’t mentioned in the intel from Lyla’s minions; evidently Tucker or his bosses had added a little muscle to their defenses. Still, sleeping muscle
wasn’t very intimidating. We kept going.
The quick pace didn’t stop until we approached the mouth of a large glass walkway. The path ahead led to the central courtyard of the Administration Building, an atrium comprising the last bit of open ground separating us from the Operations Center. The atrium was square, almost two hundred feet on each side and six stories of building façade looming all around. Too big an area to blanket wipe, not to mention the hundreds of office windows on the surrounding walls, any of which could be a perfect shooter’s nest. Filled with gardens and a paved walking path, the atrium was a quiet, tranquil killing field.
Diego motioned for me to hold back. “Same as before. Wait until I say go.”
He initiated the bubble before he made it fully into the courtyard. Glass and metal door frame melted in response to the sustained arcs of electricity. By the time he stood in the center of the atrium, there was a well-defined hole in the glass walkway he’d entered from. Diego waited patiently in the center of the walking path through the atrium gardens. No shots came. He slowly turned in place several times, left palm upturned at his side, waiting. After an excruciatingly long minute, he motioned for me to come and dropped his bubble. I took one step into the courtyard and heard glass shatter, above and to my right.
The source was a fourth-floor window on the far side of the atrium. An emergency light silhouetted an SPS officer breaking the glass with the butt of his weapon. I recognized the bulky drum of another grenade launcher. Diego turned and reinitiated the bullet shield on reflex, assuming it was a rifle.
He doesn’t realize . . .
The officer fired and his grenade hit the boundary of the shield, exploding in the air above Diego’s head. Blaster crumpled to the ground beneath the fireball, his shield dissolving in the process.
“No!”
I ran for him, no longer worried about cover.
Halfway to Diego’s body, self-preservation kicked in and I twisted on the run to see if I was about to be on the receiving end of another boom. I wasn’t. The grenade’s only fortunate side effect was it blew up fifty feet in the air—a lot closer to the shooter than he’d anticipated.
Three floors’ worth of office windows shattered from the up-close explosion and the shooter’s was at the epicenter.
I got to Diego at a dead run, barely slowing down enough to grab his arms. The words “please don’t be dead” spilled from my mouth more than once. The moment I touched him, though, I knew he was alive. Unfortunately, I knew it because the contact zapped the hell outta me.
It wasn’t a full-on electrocution—more surprising than painful. Like Blaster’s “up yours” handshakes. Y’know, the exact amount of electricity necessary to render me powerless.
“Oh, you
dick,
” I muttered while pulling his unconscious body to the far side of the atrium. I leaned back to kick open the door, knowing full well we were screwed. If another of those tactical teams waited beyond, we were dead. Hell, with Diego unconscious and me powerless, a janitor with a mop and a bad attitude could fuck us up. But waiting in the wide-open atrium was worse. The door flew open and revealed a blessedly empty hall. I pulled Diego into a nearby men’s room to check him.
Pulse strong. Couple of nicks, not much bleeding.
Whatever remained of his energy shield must have vaporized the grenade fragments in the milliseconds before it collapsed. Even without shrapnel, though, the concussive force of the grenade was enough to knock him out.
I slapped his cheek. Nothing. So I slapped him again, harder.
“Diego! Wake up, man, I need you. Bad.”
I was about to smack him a third time when a quiet voice said, “Please stop hitting me.”
My joy was spontaneous enough that I cried out and hugged him.
“What happened? Are we in the crapper?” He was dazed, but appeared unharmed.
“Please tell me you’ve got some juice left. You shocked me when I dragged you in here. I’m shooting blanks.”
His eyes stopped wandering around the john and found mine. “What? How long until you get your powers back?”
I shook my head. “Don’t know. Ten minutes, twenty. More time than we have. Our little light show will bring helicopters out of D.C.
in less than that. We’ve got to keep moving.” I helped him to his feet.
He steadied himself on the low counter of sinks. “I’ll be okay.”
“Only fifty more feet. Down the hall to the left.”
We exited the bathroom and moved down the last hall. Diego had his fists raised, ready to turn the entire corridor ahead of us to plasma. I did my best to violate the laws of physics and make an almost two-hundred-pound man disappear behind a 140-pound one. We made it halfway to the Operations Center before things went to shit.
First, the door to the OC banged open and three SPS guards spilled into the hall. It’s fair to say they were more surprised to see us than we were to see them. Diego lit them up just as I clamped hands over my ears. The shock wave from the lightning cracked the walls on either side. In the closed corridor, the thunder was so loud, covering my ears almost didn’t matter; I recoiled and turned back the other direction, sinking to my knees in pain. The metal door to the stairwell flew open in front of me. Another guy in body armor stepped into the corridor, and he looked angry.
Bloody, dirty, with sweat dripping off his face, he held a battered grenade launcher. The asshole who’d almost killed Diego; damaged but not disabled from the explosion’s backlash. He’d recovered enough to run down a maze of dark floors and find the staircase leading down to Operations. And he was standing less than ten feet behind us.
I moved without thinking.
I lunged off the floor and ran at him, catching him in the upper body before he could aim the launcher. I kept pumping my legs after contact—my high school football coach would have been proud—lifting the larger man up, then driving him straight down into the hard surface of the corridor. When we landed, the air whooshed out of his chest and I went at him like an animal. I couldn’t put him out my normal way, so I went old-school. While he was still worried about breathing, I grabbed him by the helmet and rammed the back of his head into the ground. I kept ramming until his eyes shut. The helmet probably saved his life, but his consciousness kicked the bucket after seven smacks against the linoleum. I pushed up off his unconscious body and got to my feet.
When I turned around, Diego had his hands on his hips. “Still powerless?”
I reached down and hefted the grenade launcher to my shoulder. “Not exactly.”
“You know how to work that thing?”
“It’s got a safety and a trigger. I’m good.”
“Then show me,” he said, pointing at the door to the Operations Center. “I’m not walking in there first.”
I sidled up next to the open door and fired a single grenade around the corner into the middle of the OC. The explosion wreaked havoc on equipment, but I didn’t hear any voices. Diego and I spun into the room, ready to fire again if necessary.
Computers, chairs, and desks were strewn about the room. The acrid smell of the grenade filled the air. Several ceiling lights were damaged in the blast, but the rest beamed fluorescent light over the wreckage, which meant this section of the building was shielded against EMPs. Not a surprise, but the lack of people was. The room was empty.
“The analysts on duty must have evacuated to the emergency bunker,” I said. “Keeping Tucker company.”
Diego walked to the large metal door at the far end of the room. The sign on front shouted
KEEP CLEAR IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
in bold red letters.
Door
didn’t do the barrier justice. It looked more like a compartment hatch on a submarine; thick metal, blast-proof, and locked tight. Diego smiled. “You’re gonna want to cover your ears for this.”
Six seconds’ exposure to temperatures hotter than the sun turned the big, bad, scary door into molten goo. Diego stood like a butler presenting a dining room full of guests, ushering me toward the opening with both hands. He practically oozed self-satisfaction. I muttered something about getting the short end of the superpower stick again, and we walked into the access tunnel of the bunker.
No question that this part of the complex was shielded. Bright light filled the fifty-foot-long tunnel, and the door on the far side had a security keypad with red numerals. The tunnel itself was completely white, floor and curved walls alike. There were vents along the ceiling, but other than that, the walls were featureless and smooth. I touched
one. Not cement, and not metal. Felt more like . . . ceramic.
“Strange,” I said. “There’s a tiny vibration behind the surface.” I pulled back, suddenly aware of how alien the tunnel felt, and how exposed we were inside. “I don’t like this. Fry that door and let’s get to the bunker.”
Diego stepped ahead. “Open, says me,” he joked. He aimed and I clamped hands over my ears. Lightning erupted from his fist, more electricity in a single second than I’d use in a lifetime. The door ahead glowed like the first one, but before it dissolved into slag, the lightning cut off. I turned back to Diego, surprised. He looked confused yet undeterred, like a dog after the hidden-ball trick. It was almost funny.
Until he staggered and fell.
“Something’s wrong,” he moaned on his hands and knees.
Behind us, a secondary barrier came down like a guillotine, cutting off the tunnel from ceiling to floor. The vents above clunked open and water flowed out in thin curtains, soaking us. It wasn’t a one-time shot, either—the water kept coming—no deluge, but it was constant.
“This wasn’t on any of the plans,” I said.
Diego rolled to his butt and grimaced. “Shit. I can’t use my power if they soak the tunnel. I’ll electrocute you.”
“I’m more concerned about you. What’s wrong?”
“I feel weak, like I can’t . . .” His eyes opened wide. Too wide. “Oh no. Oh God no,” he gasped. I’d never seen the expression on Diego’s face before. Terror.
“What?! You’re scaring me, man. What the hell is wrong?”
“This tunnel . . . it’s not what you think. It’s a superconductor. Built to expel electromagnetic fields.”
“Speak English! What does that mean? It nullifies your power?”
His defeated expression scared me more than his eyes. “Worse. Welcome to my evolution, Scott. I’m an electromagnetic field now. Squeezed into human form. The superconductor will pull my body apart, siphon it off. They’ll shunt me into the earth . . . kill me.”
His head lolled back. I gripped the back of his neck to support him.
“I can feel it happening,” he said. “Some of me . . . already gone. Miles from here.” He lifted a thin arm. Impossible though it seemed,
his fingers were dissolving, unraveling at the tips. It was like watching an inkjet printer in reverse, once-indelible lines of humanity vanishing row by row.
“
No!
Fight it,” I pleaded. “There’s got to be something you can do.”
He started to laugh but it drowned in a coughing fit. After he composed himself, Diego said, “I’m open to suggestions.”
Only one came to mind. “Transform. Blast your way out. The superconductor can’t grab on to something moving at the speed of light, right?”
“Maybe, but”—he pointed his finger stubs at the rising water, now ankle deep—“you’ll die if I change.” Diego’s transformation would electrify the entire water-covered floor.
I chuckled and lifted a handful of water. “Champ, I got bad news for you. I’m powerless and trapped in an aquarium in the middle of CIA headquarters. I’m dead either way. If you manage to blow a hole in that wall behind us, I’ll at least have a shot.”
Diego turned toward the wall, then fixed his fading eyes on me. “I’ll give it a try. Can you get out of the water?”
I gently released him and took a few steps back. “Guess I have to. I’ll take a run at the wall and kick off. Be in the air for maybe a second. Can you do it that fast?”
His mischievous smile returned. “So fast you won’t believe it.”
I suddenly felt very heavy. When your existence depends on kicking yourself up into the air, you start regretting the multiple beers you had the night before, as well as your fashion choices. I struggled to free myself from the water-logged duster.
“Even if I make it . . . somehow survive and convert back,” Diego said while I stripped, “I’ll be half a world away with no energy to return.” He sounded stronger now, as though the decision to act somehow bound him together more tightly. Yet his fingers continued to spool away.
“Don’t worry, pal. I’ll take it from here. Just do one thing for me. If you make it, find Lyla. Tell her I’m sorry and I love her.”