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“Don’t make me murder you in your sleep, lad,” McCarter quipped. “What’s wrong, Barb?”
“The big new French interior intelligence agency has been comparing notes with itself, and they decided they don’t want to play with American-sponsored Interpol investigators anymore,” Price replied. “Especially in matters of French nuclear-energy security breaches.”
“We’ve been on good terms with both French Intelligence in the past,” Manning said. “What is the problem now?”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” McCarter growled. “The head of the new amalgamated agency has his head up his arse. Though it’s not as if the bloody wankers sitting behind the desk realize that they’re telling us to sit this one out and leaving it to the second or third best in the world.”
“Pride is unbecoming of you, David,” Price admonished.
“Bollocks,” McCarter continued to snarl. “It’s the same ‘I know what’s best’ shit that happens every time we have to work with some department. We go somewhere and some half-wit thinks he’s the cock of the walk when he’s just a flounder in a bucket.”
“Well, Hal doesn’t want you to get caught. And if DCRI sends someone after you, try not to maim them,” Price ordered.
McCarter sneered. “Just a dent on their chin and a slap on the ass to run home to mother.”
Manning pulled out his Smart phone and began the process of ordering Chunnel train tickets. “Looks like you’re going to have to grin and bear it with whatever your mate supplies you.”
“I don’t care if it’s a wooden shoe that I have to break off in someone’s bum,” McCarter returned. “It’s time to show the DCRI how professionals deal with infiltrators.”
Manning grinned. It was good to see a flash of the cocky McCarter. It was also an indication of how much the enemy was going to regret pulling an operation that showed up on the Phoenix Force commander’s radar.
CHAPTER TWO
Lyons stood in the hallway, battered forearm wrapped in an athletic bandage to secure it in case the blow it had taken had resulted in a hairline fracture. The bandage would serve as a temporary splint until the forearm could be x-rayed. The Able Team leader didn’t intend to remove himself from the crime scene until the technicians had all of the data they needed to track down the escaped robot’s murderous masters. He had seen the killer, but he didn’t know its origins and who had sent it. The evidence linking Mare Hirtenberg’s murder to the rash of security breeches at international nuclear power plants was purely circumstantial, but Lyons couldn’t dismiss the possibility that someone had used a compact mechanical assassin to penetrate the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C., offices with the same ghostlike ability of the saboteurs at the other plants.
Lyons’s leg was still raw from where the Taser darts had penetrated his skin and pumped twenty thousand volts through his body. The Justice Department crime scene techs had collected the contents of two Taser cartridges that had been loaded into the robot’s head section. There might have been more in the mechanism, in case the mechanism had encountered multiple opponents. A security officer, assigned to protect the DoE offices, approached Lyons, his step cautious as he caught the grim darkening of the big ex-cop’s face.
“No sighting of the robot?” Lyons asked, putting aside his rage to speak with a fellow lawman.
“No,” the security officer said. “It’ll take us a while to get our own camera-mount robot here, and even then, it might not fit into the air vents.”
Lyons’s brow furrowed. “I’d get a bomb-sniffing dog team here, just to be safe. If the device did have a self-destruct mechanism, it wouldn’t do much damage to the infrastructure of this building, but it could harm a mainframe or more personnel.”
“We’ve thought of that possibility already,” the officer replied. “But thanks for confirming that we’re not completely paranoid.”
“My teammates think otherwise, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Lyons returned.
The office door opened and a covered body on a gurney rolled into the hallway. The coroner walked beside the body of Hirtenberg, having claimed the corpse for release. The Justice Department medical examiner met Lyons’s gaze for a moment before the brooding Stony Man warrior looked down at the remains of a woman whom he’d befriended over the past few days.
“Cause of death was fairly obvious,” Alicia Khan said softly. Her dark, elfin face was serene and sympathetic, large and soulful brown eyes steady in the path of Lyons’s disquiet and angry grief. “Exsanguination due to laceration of the throat by an unknown weapon.”
“I saw it in action. It was a metal wire spun on an electric-motor-powered spool,” Lyons said. “The crime techs picked up trimmings of it with blood transfer from her.”
Lyons didn’t want to give in to the queasiness in his gut at the description of a friend’s agonizing murder, especially in front of someone as sympathetic and empathic as Khan. He swallowed his disgust at how clinically he spoke of her end. “You might find traces of the wire on her vertebrae, since the wire cuts flesh and thin aluminum easily, but might have been stopped by heavy bone.”
Khan nodded. “I’ll run an X-ray in that area. Metal from garrote wires or knife wounds often transfers to heavy bone. You going to be all right?”
Lyons took a deep breath. Khan, a gorgeous woman in her mid-forties, was no stranger to Lyons. She was one of a team whom Hal Brognola, director of Stony Man Farm, kept on hand to deal with the aftereffects of a domestic operation undertaken by Able Team, Phoenix Force or even the Executioner. The Justice crew kept traces of Stony Man’s covert operations well out of the public eye, but kept data on hand in case there was a prosecutable case left in the wreckage of Stony Man’s cleansing flames.
For a woman who interacted with the dead, her empathy was outstanding. She could endure even the worst of Lyons’s legendary rages, never steering away from providing him with a bridge back to humanity. Lyons managed a smile for her. “Thanks, Alicia, I can deal with the grief.”
Khan nodded. “Catharsis is one thing, baby. Just don’t hang on to the pain for too long.”
Lyons nodded. “Then get to testing, Alicia. I have murderers to track down.”
Khan stroked his cheek, a brief touch of tenderness from tigress to lion. They were both hunters, different predators in the same ecosystem, tracking criminals. While the medical examiner took to her chase with microscopes and spectrometers, Lyons’s tools of the hunt were measured in twelve gauge and .357.
“Good hunting,” she told him and returned to escorting Hirtenberg’s body to the coroner’s wagon.
The Able Team leader glanced one last time at the receding gurney, then left the hallway to meet up with his partners, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, also fondly referred to as Pol. Able Team had gone from investigation and paper-pushing mode to full-on pursuit.
T HE DOOR PANEL on the side of the van rolled open and Hermann Schwarz felt the mass of Lyons’s muscular form tilt the vehicle. He opened his eyes after receiving a slap on the shoulder from his best friend, Rosario Blancanales.
“Look busy, the boss is here,” Blancanales said.
“Carl knows that I’m a slacker,” Schwarz replied.
“A slacker who calculates quantum physics equations the same way most people do Sudoko,” Lyons mentioned. “Actually, no. You don’t even need pen or paper. Do you need a description of the murder-bot one more time, Gadgets, or have you already cobbled one together out of soda cans and twist ties?”
Schwarz looked over his shoulder and looked back at his commander, attempting to imitate Lyons’s moments of annoyance. “Oh, fecal discharge, Rosario, my good man. The honorable Mr. Lyons just paid me a compliment and we haven’t even blown anyone up yet.”
“Gadgets, I’m being sweetness and love right now because I am under the delusion that you will put my hands around the throat of the scumbag who took out a fellow cop,” Lyons explained. “Do you want me to return that anger back toward you and your snarky attitude?”
Schwarz pivoted in his seat and handed over a clipboard. “No. I did not build my own copy of the robot. Seems we were out of guitar picks necessary for the stegasaur-style ridge plates. But I do have technical drawings that hypothetically reconstruct the device based on your description of its movements and external dimensions.”
Lyons rewarded Schwarz with a tight-lipped smile as he accepted the stack of papers with twenty pages of sketches of motors and circuits. He leafed through until he came to a page depicting himself, clad in a bearskin, wielding a massive thigh bone, ready to smash the robot that had escaped him. Scrawled in a cartoon word balloon were the words, “Carl smash shiny worm!”
“Can I keep this for my fridge?” Lyons asked Schwarz.
The Able Team electronics whiz raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”
Lyons carefully ripped out the page, removed the sketch of the robot, then crumpled the rest of the page and hurled it out the sliding panel door, where it landed in the gutter. Lyons stuck it under the front clip as an impromptu cover for the robot design notes. “Do you know who built it?”
Schwarz looked out the door of the van, even though the wadded sketch was long gone. “Attempting to narrow down the original designer of a robot is next to impossible. There are entire schools of kids who build these things, not to mention countless amateurs who enter them into battle-bot competitions.”
Lyons nodded. “I’m growing disappointed.”
“Ah, but Mr. Lyons, you asked for a designer, while I applied my mental powers to a more productive course of action. I thought outside of the box,” Schwarz said. “There is room in the robot for a 5.8-gigahertz transmitter that can maintain a remote link.”
Lyons smirked. “You’ve been monitoring that signal?”
Schwarz rolled his eyes. “But of course. Unfortunately, I’ve only narrowed down the broadcast to a nearby relay module.”
Lyons looked through the windshield as Schwarz turned wordlessly in his swivel seat. Halfway down the block sat a brown delivery van with a popular company’s yellow logo painted on the back door. Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”
Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”
Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”
“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”
Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”
Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”
Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”
“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”
Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”
Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”
Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”
“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”
Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”
The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered about a downgrade of hydraulic efficiency from Lyons’s gunshot, movement on the sidewalk drew the Able Team leader’s attention. A man was pushing a stroller down the street.
“It should have been able to push the grating over a little more easily,” Schwarz commented.
“I’d hit it with my .357 Smith,” Lyons said distractedly, watching the man and the toddler walk closer to the delivery van.
That brought a grin to Schwarz’s face. “Able Team. Travel the world. Meet technological wonders. Shoot them to pieces.”
“’Kin A,” Lyons agreed softly.
The robotic inchworm crawled toward the center of the truck’s undercarriage. A panel opened above it, and two hands reached down to grasp it.
“We’ve got the bas—” Lyons began.
“It’s a segment too long,” Schwarz cut him off.
Lyons’s attention flitted from the monitor to the father and child on the street. He exploded out of his seat, jumping to the sidewalk and charging toward the delivery truck. He didn’t need an explanation about the nature of Schwarz’s grim, sudden warning. He took off from the Able Team van as if launched from the barrel of a gun as fast as his powerful leg muscles could propel him.
“Carl! Wait!” he heard Blancanales call out.
It was too late to stop Lyons as he drew upon his high school and college football conditioning to rocket him down the sidewalk with explosive speed. Each thrust of his powerful leg muscles carried him closer to the delivery van and the two bystanders who were now even with the stopped vehicle. The young father looked up from his child in the stroller, seeing the human freight train barrelling toward them both. Lyons unfurled his massive arms and scooped up father and infant. The Able Team commander twisted himself so that his broad back would absorb the shock wave that he expected to erupt. It came an instant later, the brown metal skin billowing out. Thankfully the hull of the truck was not pre-scored metal so that when it split due to the rupturing overpressure of the exploding robot, no shrapnel flew from the delivery van, though Lyons had his Kevlar on under his shirt and jacket. Lyons’s forward momentum had carried all three of them past the torn vent in the side of the truck, sparing the trio exposure to a gout of flame that vomited through the wound in the vehicle.
Outside, in open air, the pressure wave had space to roll and disperse, sparing the Able Team leader and the two bystanders. The men inside of the truck would have had no such dispersal as the atmosphere inside of the vehicle could only compress so much before it crushed the bodies it was trapped with. Any living leads had been pulverized by the self-destruct mechanism in the robot.
“Y-you saved us,” the man stammered.
Lyons set down the stroller, unhooking the crying toddler within. He handed the girl off to dad after a quick examination for shrapnel injuries or possible burns. The father had suffered a scraped elbow, but the baby had been shielded from sidewalk rash by Lyons’s body and her crumpled stroller. “Just calm your little girl down and go home.”
“What…is this, a terrorist attack?” the man inquired.
“No. It’s just a couple of crooks being silenced by their boss,” Lyons explained. “You didn’t see anything, but don’t stick around, all right? Just make sure the kid’s fine.”
The girl’s wails subsided as her father cradled her. “Thank you.”
Lyons nodded and waved him off.
Schwarz and Blancanales had run up to the gutted van, but the heat of the fire inside kept them at bay. Lyons jogged back around toward his partners, phone already in hand.
“Barb, we have an explosion four blocks north of the Department of Energy offices. Get on the press and the Justice Department and start spinning that it’s organized crime related, and totally independent of the murder of Mare. Keep this from being released as a terrorist attack,” Lyons said to Stony Man.
“You found the robot?” Price asked.
“Yes, and it had a self-destruct mechanism inside,” Lyons told her. “We won’t get anything from the punks who delivered it.”
“I’ll put word forward to Calvin and Rafael,” Price replied. “They’re following another van with a mystery load in the vicinity of Inshas.”
“Relay to them that the robot I encuntered had built-in Tasers and a wire whip that cuts through aluminum and flesh like butter,” Lyons added.
“Given the Israeli situation at Negev, the robot they might encounter could have a firearm built in, as well,” Price said. “You lucked out.”
“Didn’t seem so lucky for Hirtenberg,” Lyons growled. “Send Alicia to pick up our crispy critters here. And give her my apologies for two call-outs in one day.”
“You sound like you’re not coming back to the Farm,” Price mused.
“No. I know the van builders who might have crafted the fake delivery truck,” Lyons said.
“We haven’t even run the plates off of Gadgets’s video footage,” Price replied.
“I know the D.C. area chop shops and kinky garages like the back of my hand, Barb,” Lyons countered. “We beat cops don’t like waiting for slow shit like Web searches.”
Price laughed. “All right. Khan’s team is on the way to the blast site. D.C. Metropolitan Police has been advised to control the area and allow you egress from the crime scene.”
Lyons looked up at the police helicopter that was already watching the area. “Good. Just to be safe, tell Alicia we may have a third corpse pickup for her.”
“I’ll convey your apologies,” Price said. “Flowers and candy, too?”
“And reservations for dinner,” Lyons added. He turned to Schwarz and Blancanales. “Mount up, soldiers. It’s time to kill people and break things.”
“Enough investigation?” Blancanales asked.
Lyons nodded. “Now it’s time for prosecution.”
Schwarz grinned. “Prosecution to the max, baby.”
Able Team drove off, ready for war in the streets.
C ALVIN J AMES, RIDING IN the backseat of the Peugeot station wagon with “Atalanta” Kristopoulos, answered his satellite phone’s chirp on the first ring.
“Farrow here,” James said, using his cover name.
