Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of the Strike
The ambient temperature inside the subterranean data vault began to climb within forty seconds.
"She’s initiating a local purge," Keller shouted, his fingers hammering frantically against his terminal. "A thermite charge or a low-yield chemical incendiary in the storage arrays—she’s wiping the local persistent storage to eliminate the forensic link between this house and the Vermont facility!"
"Keller, get the drive images!" Sarah yelled, grabbing him by the shoulder of his jacket.
"I can't!" Keller pulled his patch cable from the switch as a thin, acrid ribbon of white smoke began to curl from the top air intake of the server rack. "The backplane is melting! It’s an internal magnesium fuse! If we stay in this room, the halon fire suppression system is going to trip and dump four hundred pounds of nitrogen into this space—we have sixty seconds before we suffocate!"
"Out! Move!" Sarah shoved Keller toward the heavy hemlock door.
We scrambled through the threshold, Higgins hauling the technician up the wooden cellar stairs two at a time as behind us, a muffled, metallic CRACK sounded from inside the cold room, followed by the deep, pressurized hiss of industrial gas extinguishing the fire.
We burst into the kitchen, coughing from the faint trace of ozone that had escaped into the stairwell.
The house was dark.
The power had been cut at the street. Outside the kitchen windows, the rain was coming down in sheets now, driven by forty-mile-an-hour coastal gusts that rattled the antique sash weights in their frames. The emergency cruisers were gone—Vance had undoubtedly made a call to the town selectman or the state police barracks, pulling the local units away under the color of administrative jurisdiction.
Only Sarah’s unmarked Interceptor remained, idling at the foot of the porch with its parking lights amber against the wet gravel.
"Where is Emma?" I demanded, my hands seizing Sarah’s lapels, my vision narrowing to a pinpoint of survival instinct. "Sarah, where did your sister take her?"
"Boxford," Sarah said, pulling her radio from her duty belt. She keyed the mic. "Unit Four-Seven, this is Ramirez. Status on the safe house."
Static.
Sarah adjusted the squelch, her jaw tightening. "Unit Four-Seven, do you copy? Status on the Boxford detail."
A burst of white noise tore through the small speaker, followed by a voice that was not the off-duty trooper.
"The safe house is secure, Detective," Arthur Vance’s voice came through the encrypted county channel, clear, dry, and polite. "Your sister was very cooperative once Investigator Davis presented the federal custody mandate. Emma is currently in the transport vehicle en route to the North Andover airfield. The flight to Burlington departs in twenty-five minutes."
I did not scream. I did not speak.
I turned on my heel, sprinted down the hall to my study, grabbed the Glock 19 from the desk blotter, shoved two spare fifteen-round magazines into my coat pockets, and bolted through the front entrance into the gale.
"Dan! Stop!" Sarah’s voice chased me through the rain, her boots splashing hard on the gravel behind me. "You cannot go to an airfield with a weapon! That’s federal airspace! If you draw down on federal marshals, they will put you in the ground!"
I reached the driver’s side of her running cruiser, ripped the heavy door open, and turned on her.
The rain plastered my hair to my skull. My shirt was soaked through, cold as a shroud, but my hands around the steel doorframe were steady.
"She’s my daughter, Sarah," I said, my voice cutting through the wind with an absolute, terrifying finality. "Laura died two years ago. Whatever is sitting in that chair in Vermont is a monster that built a machine to eat my child’s soul. I am taking Emma back. You can come with me as a cop, or you can stay here and file your report."
Sarah stopped three feet from the bumper. Her dark hair was drenched, water streaming down her sharp cheekbones into the collar of her tactical vest. She looked at the gun in my hand, looked at the road leading toward North Andover, and let out a long, ragged breath that was half-sob, half-snarl.
She stepped past me, shoved me toward the passenger seat, and dropped behind the wheel of the Interceptor.
"Move over," she barked, slamming the door and dropping the transmission into drive with a violent, mechanical clunk. "You don't know the access roads to the private hangars. I do."
The Interceptor’s rear tires hooked into the gravel, spitting two plumes of wet stone against the foundation of the house, and surged forward into the dark.
Sarah hit the switches on the center console.
The blue-and-red strobes behind the grille flared to life, casting strobing, demonic patterns across the weeping pines lining the two-lane country road. She pulled the siren knob; the electronic wail screamed into the night, a mechanical predator tearing through the coastal squall.
The speedometer climbed: sixty, seventy-five, ninety miles per hour down the winding asphalt of Route 114.
"What’s the play?" I shouted over the scream of the siren, checking the chamber of my pistol in the red glow of the dashboard lights.
"The North Andover airfield has one private charter hangar operated by Vance Aviation," Sarah said, her hands fighting the wheel as the heavy sedan hydroplaned across a sheet of standing water. "Runway Four-Right. They have an eight-passenger King Air turboprop registered to the firm. If they’re wheels-up, we can't touch them. We have to breach the perimeter gate before they hit the taxiway."
"And if Arthur’s people shoot?"
May you like
Sarah didn't look at me. She reached down, pulled a Colt M4 carbine from the electronic locking rack between our seats, laid it across her lap, and dropped the selector lever from safe to semi-automatic.
"Then we shoot back, Dan," she said, her eyes burning in the strobes. "Laura isn't the only one who knows how to calculate a trajectory."
