Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(80)

“Hush, hush, hush.”

I unreeled the cable. I laid it out, moving quickly, quietly.

I did that room in record time.



To Ballington, I said, “Don’t use the elevator.”

“I own this building.”

“Mr. Ballington. I need you to follow safety procedures. You and everybody else. I’ve marked a safe route for you all. You take the public elevator to the eleventh floor, then cut through and take the stairs up to the thirteenth. Otherwise I can’t guarantee your safety. Or the success of the retrieval.”

He put a hand up to his chin. He put his head on one side, as if I’d said something risible yet still, just possibly, amusing.

I said, “You need to follow everything I say. Immediately. Understand?”

He smirked at me.

“Is that so?”

“Yes. That’s so.”

He smiled, nodded, radiating his contempt.

But he didn’t have an answer.

So I reckoned there was just a chance he saw the sense of what I’d said, and might even obey.





Chapter 64

Not Mecca or the Vatican




“They had a plan. Their first plan. They were going to use the Vatican.”

McAvoy was calmer now. I took him coffee, and I tried not to get angry with him. I tried really hard on that.

He’d pushed himself into a corner of the office, away from Ballington’s crew. He might not like me, might not trust me, but I was just about the closest thing he had here to a friend.

What he wanted wasn’t help, though. What he wanted was to boast.

“They had such big ideas. I told them, you’re all stuck on religion, because that’s the way it’s always been. But you don’t need religion. You need something like religion. I said that, said it straight out.”

He was smug. I had an urge to knock him down a bit, but I held back.

“They didn’t listen . . . ?”

“They were talking, all of them. Not thinking right. The plan—we’d take fragments, hothouse them. Grow them. Not over hundreds of years, not like the old gods. We’d do it in just months. In weeks. They’d worked out how much energy they’d need. What the input had to be. Equations, calculations . . . The sites had to be current, see? In use. Lourdes. Mecca. The Vatican. I saw where they were going wrong. They had . . . small minds. So small.”

“Stop a minute. Who’s ‘they’?”

“The Registry. They wanted Lourdes, the Vatican—”

“Who in the Registry? Was this at GH9? Is it R&D?” A bad suspicion crossed my mind. “It’s not a guy named Shailer, is it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I want to know.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, because they all gave up. Every single one of them. Apart from—” He tapped his chest. “I saw the answer. I saw it without even thinking. Like a gift. From God. Uh-huh.”

His eyes were much too bright. His fingers twitched.

“Some people go to church, they pray. I wanted somewhere everybody prays. Even the atheists.”

“A gambling hall, a battlefield . . .”

“I did it.”

“But the Registry. They knew what you were up to? They knew you were here?”

His lower jaw stuck out. The skin around his eyes creased up.

“They knew that you were still alive?”

“Oh. Well.” He looked up then. His smile was wide. And suddenly, I could see it: the picture on the poster. It was not his looks, it was attitude, spiteful and cocky: Johnny Appleseed, that grinning little monster.

“The Registry,” he said. “Of course they know. I grew a god. I grew a great, huge, powerful god. From a piece. From a chunk the size of a pea.” He circled his fingers, smug now. “I didn’t even need a church.”

“You don’t have shielding,” I said.

He shrugged.

“It’s like building a bomb in your backyard. You’ve no control over what’s happening here, you’ve no safety measures, you—”

“It’s a different world,” he said.

“Not that different.”

“I changed it. And that is why the Registry will take me back. I did their work for them, the work that they were scared to do. The work they said was dangerous. Unethical. The work that didn’t fit their PR plan. You see now? You with me?” He folded his arms, put his chin up in the air. “See why a fucking amateur is more important than you’ll ever be?”

Was this the man I’d chased here from New York? Who’d sold off pieces of a god, and killed old ladies from afar, who’d made test runs on the homeless and done botched jobs for a billionaire? Who’d found the secret of creating brand-new gods, in this crucible in the Nevada desert?

He was dirty and emaciated. There were yellow stains under his arms. I could smell him, even from a yard away.

But I’d no more doubts that he was everything he claimed to be.

And that meant he was right: the Registry would save him. Protect him, cherish him, and treat him like a favored son.

Too bad I’d found him first . . .





Chapter 65

The Elevator