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PORTLAND

I sabel Delvaux?

Well, fuck.

The Delvauxs were American aristocracy. Joe knew about them but not enough to know individual members. He knew that the family was political, with many members involved in environmentalism. Another couple of kids were involved in movies. The older generation was powerful. Alex Delvaux—Isabel’s father —had been talked about as the next president of the United States.

“Fuck me,” he said. “She’s rich and powerful.”

“No,” Felicity said. “Not anymore. Not the woman I saw. She’s been reduced to rubble.”

Felicity walked back into the kitchen to the big pan she’d set on the counter. Some amazing smells were coming from it. Joe lifted the aluminum and took a deep breath. “Wow. Big spaghetti.”

“Baked ziti, you barbarian,” Metal answered affectionately. “Are we going to get to eat this, too? I mean, after the boeuf bourguignon this seems almost too much.” He closed his eyes and took in the amazing aroma, too. “Ah, a woman who cooks.” Felicity shot an elbow to his ribs. “What? This is amazing stuff.”

“I cook,” Felicity protested.

Wisely, Metal kept his mouth shut. His fiancée was beautiful and super smart and scary good with IT. Her few stabs at cooking had practically landed them in the hospital. The only thing she cooked well was takeout.

“Isabel said to put this in the freezer, take it out an hour before you want to serve it and put it in the oven at 375 degrees for forty minutes and let it set for about a quarter of an hour before your guests arrive. I can’t believe you get to eat like this.”

“Hey.” Metal cocked his head. “I cook.”

She smiled smugly. “Not like this you don’t.” She turned to look at Joe. He probably still looked stunned.

Isabel, a Delvaux.

He’d been thinking that when she got better they could go out. Well, actually he’d been thinking more along the lines of when she got better they could have sex. A lot.

That seemed pretty foolish now. What would a Delvaux want with a beat-up former soldier?

“She’s rich and famous,” he said again. No use beating around the bush with Metal and Felicity. Metal knew him way too well and Felicity…well, she’d become one of the guys.

“No,” Felicity said crisply. “She’s not. I told you that. She’s a woman alone. Sit down.”

Joe raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve learned to just obey her,” Metal said. “Makes things easier.”

Joe sat down.

“So, Joe, what do you know about the Washington Massacre?” Felicity asked. “It happened while you were in the hospital between your third and fourth surgery so I imagine you read about it after the fact.”

“The Washington Massacre.” Joe lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Okay. When it happened I was in ICU. I didn’t even hear about it until a couple of weeks after. Still, I think I know what everyone knows. Terrorist attack. Killed almost a thousand people. The electricity grid was attacked too so there was a three-day blackout.”

“Those people who were killed included Isabel’s entire family. Parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. It was a close-knit extended family by all accounts, and they were wiped out. All of them, except her.”

“Shit.” Joe turned to Metal. “Al Qaeda was responsible, right? It was another 9/11, on a slightly smaller scale.”

“Nobody really knows who was responsible.” Metal bounced a fist off his knee. “There were very few survivors. Isabel was one, though I never thought to make the connection. Word was she was in a coma for a while and as far as I know, was never interviewed afterward.”

“It was bad for us, wasn’t it?” he asked Metal.

“The worst.” Metal held up a hand and ticked off the points on his fingers. “First—this was an attack on a gathering of the president’s political party, meeting at the hotel closest to the White House. Practically on the White House’s doorstep. The attack occurred during an event celebrating the announcement of a presidential run by a scion one of America’s top political families. In effect, it took out the man who would probably have been president in a year and a half. The closest thing possible to a presidential assassination without being a presidential assassination. And it took out a good section of the nation’s political elite. There were a lot of undersecretaries and heads of agencies and political journalists. And then the blackout. That scared the shit out of everybody. Images of a dark Washington, DC in the moonlight spooked the entire country. Looked like what would happen after the zombie apocalypse.”

“You think they calculated that? The photo op?”

Metal shot him a shrewd glance. “Yeah. One photo especially was seen all over the world.”

The sounds of tapping and Felicity turned her monitor toward him. It was striking and one he’d never seen before. The iconic view of the Mall and the Washington Monument, in total darkness, a full moon rising behind the monument. The top third of the Monument was sheared off. In the background, shades of red as a section of the city was on fire.

Metal was right. “Looks like a snapshot of the apocalypse,” Joe said quietly.

“It nearly was.” Metal clenched his jaw. “The city went dark, all the cell phones in the area were jammed. The president was hustled into Marine Force One and taken to an undisclosed location. The VP was in the bunker. For about half an hour we were at DEFCON 2.”

DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 was imminent nuclear attack. The last time the country had been at DEFCON 2 had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even 9/11 had been DEFCON 3.

“And I slept through that.” Joe shook his head.

“You were blown up. You’d died a couple of times. You’re excused.”

“So…Al Qaeda, huh? They’ve regrouped?”

Metal shrugged. “That’s the story. Some obscure group based in Yemen no one has heard of claimed it. JIAP. Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula. Loosely connected to AQAP.”

“We bomb anyone?”

“Yeah. In Yemen. I think mostly we reduced boulders to rocks.”

Felicity cleared her voice delicately. “Not everyone believes it was JIAP. Or even AQAP. Some believe it was closer to home.”

Metal sighed and glanced at Joe. “She’s Russian. She sees conspiracies everywhere. It’s in her blood.”

They’d clearly had this discussion before because Felicity didn’t bat an eyelash. “Did you know that the next day over three trillion dollars disappeared from the American economy?”

“What? No.” Metal raised his eyebrows, a big reaction for him.

“Oh yes. Someone—and we have no idea who—made a killing in the market. Sold a ton of shares short. The darknet talks of nothing else.”

“Christ.” This was the first Joe had heard of it, too. He’d learned about the Massacre weeks after the fact, when the lights were back on in Washington and the funerals were over and it had been shoved off the talking head shows in favor of the ongoing war in Ukraine and Moldova. “Is there a way to read up on that?”

Her fingers blurred again. “I’ll send you stuff, but I’ll send it encrypted and leave you the encryption code. Delete everything you read. I mean it, Joe. Get rid of this stuff from your laptop because some of this stuff is incendiary. There’s a whole meme on the CIA being behind the Massacre.”

“Fuck,” Metal breathed.

“Yeah.” Joe shook himself. “I just got shivers down my spine and I don’t scare easy.” He met Metal’s eyes. “Let’s hope it’s not true because otherwise…” His voice trailed off.

“Otherwise we’re fucked,” Metal said. “Big-time.”

“Okay.” Felicity stood. “Now that I’ve given you nightmares about your foremost intel gathering institution actively plotting murder and mayhem, I’ll leave. I’ve got some work to do at home.”

Metal rose with her and Joe walked them to the door.

Felicity turned to kiss him on the cheek. “Read that stuff I sent you on the Massacre. Isabel’s been through a lot. Be kind to her.”

“No need to worry, honey.” Metal put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think there’s any way Joe would hurt her.” Metal met Joe’s eyes. Felicity had taken Isabel under her wing and anything that bothered Felicity bothered Metal.

Joe met his gaze steadily. Fuck no, he wasn’t going to hurt Isabel. He was going to protect her, just as the anonymous emailer asked.

It was dark when Metal and Felicity left and he closed up the house for the night. He wasn’t going out, he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d read every single word of the Massacre reports and the darknet conspiracy theories.

He carefully put the ziti—though it still looked like overgrown spaghetti to him—in the freezer and heated up the beef stew that was left. He mopped up the sauce with some bread Isabel had made that had olives and sunflower seeds in it and drank a beer.

Then he opened his laptop and started reading.

It was fascinating stuff. He looked at the attack from a SpecOps point of view. If he was going to attack the country’s best and finest in a fancy hotel across the street from the White House, how would he go about it?

Well, more or less exactly as the terrorists had done, except they used some tech tricks that weren’t in his arsenal. 9/11 had been low-tech, the flyers counting on the fact that no one could even remotely imagine people would fly fuel-laden jets into office towers. But it hadn’t been a precision attack, based on special intel or weaponry. Basically it had taken box cutters and men willing to die and take thousands of other people with them.

This had the stink of a SpecOps operation all over it. Starting from knowing where all the security cameras were and blanking them out before the massacre.

Whoever had planned it had the right event. After Alex Delvaux had declared his candidacy, he would have been surrounded by secret service agents. They weren’t the best of the best, in Joe’s book. They weren’t as hardened as SEALs but that was because they operated mainly in the USA and not in hellholes the way SEALs did. But they would have certainly supplied better security than had been on hand at the Burrard Hotel.

Which had been, essentially, zilch. It wasn’t stated specifically but Joe knew how to read after-action reports. There had been the hotel security, which was pitiful, and ten agents from a private company. Joe checked the company out and he’d never heard of it. He’d heard of more or less every single important security company in the US and most operating throughout the world. The fact that he hadn’t heard of the outfit meant that it was either a super elite one or rank amateurs. Joe opted for door number two.

There was no way to interview any of the security force—whether the hotel’s or the private company’s—because they’d all died in the attack. Not one man from the security detail survived.

Very few survived, in fact, so there weren’t many eyewitness accounts. Maybe forty people including a congressional aide so traumatized he’d had to be sedated and was still in a psychiatric hospital.

Reading carefully, Joe was able to piece together a bare-bones timeline. He started with the recordings. Several major news networks and an even bigger number of bloggers with cell phones were recording the proceedings.

Early evening. 7:20 pm. Big hullabaloo in the hotel ballroom, thousands of excited people. Canned music in the background. A buffet against the wall with waiters standing behind it, white-gloved hands clasped in front of them, staring off in the distance, as if the goings-on at the podium had nothing to do with them.

About thirty people on the podium, including Alex Delvaux. His wife was there and two young boys. Isabel was on the sidelines, smiling, talking to someone in the audience. The older brother was missing. Jack, his name was, Joe remembered reading. He didn’t recognize many of the others on the crowded podium. Then a woman stepped away and Joe recognized a face in the second row. Hector Something. Hector…Blake. He’d been around for as long as Joe remembered. Had even been a Secretary of Something. A Senator, too. Maybe twice.

He saw Isabel frown, look around, step away from the podium with a cell phone to her ear.

The crowd was chanting, “Del-vaux, Del-vaux, Del-vaux!” Alex Delvaux stepped to the microphone, smiling, hands up, patting the air. Calming people down. It took him a quarter of an hour as they kept getting revved up, over and over again.

Finally, there was a little quiet. Delvaux bent his head down to the podium mike. There was a feedback whine and Delvaux stepped back quickly. The whine stopped and he stepped forward again. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome! Thank you for joining us on this historic evening. We’re going to shake things up!”

The crowd went wild, jumping up and down, most of them holding up cell phones to capture the moment.

Delvaux held back a moment, grinning, letting the crowd have its moment.

Joe rarely paid attention to politics and politicians. He considered it all a rigged game, like pro wrestling, only less fun. He had to admit, though, there was real excitement in the air. He leaned forward to study Delvaux. Handsome but not too handsome. The lines in his face showed that he smiled more than he frowned. Charisma came off the man in waves.

So this was Isabel’s father.

“I know some of you are thinking of the excellent buffet tables behind you—” Raucous laughter. “But first there are some things we have to say, about us as a people and about our country. We feel?—”

The lights went out. Gasps, a few snickers, as if this was planned. There was light coming from the cells, a little forest of them held high in invisible hands. Some people started shouting.

And then the cells blinked to black and the camera feed cut out.

The screen showed nothing—a blank black.

There were no recordings of the Massacre, at least none that had come to light. When police and CSI units came after the shooting and killing was done, after the explosives had been set off, after the attackers fled and disappeared completely from the earth, they found candles that had been lit by staff still burning and a few flashlights, so there had been some light.

The killers had had night vision. They had to have had night vision. You didn’t set out to do mass murder by first killing the lights, without being able to see.

A few eyewitness reports had leaked out from what was still an ongoing police investigation. They all reported that the attackers had been dressed in shiny black head to foot and had worn balaclavas. They had shouted ‘ Allahu Akbar!’ Over and over.

Jihadists changing the course of American history, killing another Kennedy. Another vigorous young leader who embodied hope and energy.

Joe was going to ask for the CSI photos and if he didn’t get them through his friend Nick Mancino, a former teammate and now in the FBI’s elite HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, he’d get Felicity to hack into the FBI files. He wanted to see the results of the Massacre firsthand.

He wanted to see what Isabel had survived.

She was mentioned in the reports. They’d tried to interview her several times, the first time after she woke up from surgery having suffered a broken clavicle and cracked hipbone and a very bad concussion in the explosion. And many times after that. She remembered nothing. Retrograde amnesia.

Ah, honey , Joe thought in sorrow. He hadn’t been bugged by anyone after he’d woken up from surgery. Metal and Jacko had taken turns sitting by his bedside and then had arranged to have him flown out to Portland on an ASI private jet.

He hadn’t had any worries other than getting better. He hadn’t been given the news upon waking that his entire family was dead.

How horrible it must have been for her. Even worse than horrible because of the concussion and amnesia. The phone call had saved her life. Apparently the explosion had tossed her into a section of the ballroom just past the area that had totally collapsed.

Amnesia. So she couldn’t even remember what had happened. All she knew was that she woke up severely injured and her entire family was gone.

Joe put to one side the news reports on Isabel and continued studying the attack itself. He got up to make himself a pot of coffee and ate the last of the beef stew, then attacked the rest of the files with a notepad at his side. He took copious notes. There was a lot of stuff that made no sense to him.

Part of that might have been the journalists who got things wrong. Part of it was also likely classified as top secret, since this was the biggest terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. So he made notes regarding what he thought would require further study and moved on.

He read every news report he could find, and read newspapers from around the world on the day of the Massacre and for a few days after that, putting everything through an AI translation program. It was enough to get a feeling for which countries were truly sorrowful and which thought that the US had somehow brought this attack down on itself. After exhausting journalists’ articles, he went on to those forensic reports that were publicly available.

Then he moved on to the blogs, all across the political spectrum. About 90 percent of what was written was speculative bullshit, but he waded through everything. What wasn’t bullshit were the opinions of several SpecOps blog sites he had read regularly before being blown apart himself. They had a lot of questions about what actually went down during the Massacre.

It was midnight and he’d been reading steadily for six hours. He stood, stretched, thought about another beer when his heart nearly stopped.

Isabel, screaming.

* * *