Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(22)

"Yes, sir."

Setting the phone back in its cradle, the president grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the news. He wanted to hear it all. In his experience, the old saying was dead on. Bad news certainly didn't improve with age.





19


Jack glanced in his rearview mirror. Traffic looked normal, but it felt wrong.

As his eyes swept both sides of the street, he began picking them out, perfectly normal-looking people in perfectly normal-looking postures. But they weren't normal. They were part of an ongoing operation. He had been expecting this day for a long time now, and here it was.

Jack hit speed dial on his cell phone. Out of service. He switched to walkie-talkie mode, but again got nothing. Someone was jamming him. Sloppy. If he hadn't already known the takedown was in progress, this would have confirmed it.

Jack pressed a specialized button on his cell phone, sending out a cross-frequency squelch signal. He paused then pressed it three more times in quick succession. The signal wouldn't have much range, but Janet would get it. The rest of the team would have to rely upon themselves.

Ahead, on his left, was Fuller Lodge, the parking lot filled with cars. Jack gunned the engine, whipped the wheel hard, and tapped the brakes, sending the Audi sliding into a sideways skid, which ended as he floored the gas pedal once again. The car shot through a gap in traffic and into the Fuller Lodge driveway, leaving a smoking trail of rubber in its wake.

Swerving left once more, Jack sent the car crashing through the front entryway, scattering glass and debris into the wedding crowd gathered inside. As people screamed, struggling to scramble out of the way, Jack brought the car to a sliding halt.

He opened the car door and stepped out. Immediately, the handful of people in the crowd who had already recovered from the initial shock began moving angrily toward him. Three quick shots over their heads from his Beretta sent everyone scrambling away once again. He didn't want to kill them, but he needed their panic.

Jack moved around to the trunk, popping it open to reach inside, grabbing a long case and the Kalashnikov rifle. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and moved to the stairs leading up to the loft, a mental count running through his head as he walked. If the team outside was Delta, he would have less than a minute before the lead elements of the assault team hit the entrances, perhaps as little as thirty seconds if they were really, really good. They wouldn't want to let him get temporal separation.

Reaching the loft, Jack slapped a clip in the AK-47, partially snapped open a window, and secured the weapon to the frame with the strap so that it pointed down toward the edge of the parking lot. Working quickly, he flipped open the case, extracting a small device that looked like two opposing C-clamps.

He picked up the remote control, pressed the button, and the small device expanded slightly, pushing the ends further apart and then letting them pop back together. Satisfied, Jack popped the thing over the Kalashnikov’s trigger. Grabbing the case, Jack paused at the door and pressed the button again. The noise of the AK-47 firing shook the room. Not only was the weapon reliable, it was very loud, and right now he wanted that volume.

On his way back to the first floor, Jack remotely fired the rifle two more times. It didn't matter that it wasn't aimed at anything in particular. The firing would draw his enemies like moths to a flame.

As he moved down the stairs, Jack extracted the pieces of the sniper rifle from the long case, snapping them together in rapid sequence. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the assembly was complete and he flung the empty case to the side.

He squeezed the remote control three more times, sending the booming echo of gunfire cascading across the parking lot. This time it was answered by a staccato smattering of gunfire that quickly died out.

Jack shook his head. That wasn't Delta out there. It was someone more concerned about limiting civilian casualties than with immediately taking him down, no matter the cost. Well, they had forced his hand. Squeezing off two more rounds from the weapon upstairs, he moved back toward the people huddled at the far corner of the hall.

His voice thundered through the large room. "Everyone! Get out of here and into the parking lot. Now!"

With no need for additional encouragement, the panicked crowd raced toward the front exit. As they did, Jack slid unnoticed out the back.





20


Janet walked to the flashing alarm, reached out, and switched it off. Okay. So it all came down to now. That was Jack’s signal, the thing they’d been awaiting for weeks.

She walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and extracted two plastic baggies, one filled with one-inch meatballs and another that held three frozen syringes of blood. Making her way around the corner and up the stairs, Janet pulled the cord hanging from the hallway ceiling and climbed the steps into the attic. The computers and SATCOM equipment sat where they had since Admiral Riles had been killed, unused since the team had been cut off from any external support. Moving rapidly from system to system, Janet removed the hard disks and memory units, setting them in a pile around a pre-wired detonation device attached to a white phosphorous grenade. She smiled. Good old Willy Pete, as they had called it before her day, back in Vietnam. It burned so hot that almost nothing could put it out.

Within a minute, she was done and moving back down the steps to the second floor. In the office, she retrieved the ultra-thin laptop and placed it in her backpack along with the two freezer baggies. Then she opened the locker, grabbed the bulletproof vest and an M95 military protective mask, and slid into both.