They blow into the door with a staggering jolt. It bursts from its hinges, the top falling forward into the apartment like a drawbridge cut from its chain.
The soldiers closest to the door on each side flip their flashbangs into the apartment and quickly turn away from the threshold. A second later, the stun grenades detonate, producing a concussive blast of 180 decibels and a searing, blinding light.
For five seconds, the occupants will be blind, deaf, and unbalanced.
One, two. Christoph is first through the door as the white light evaporates, the afterbuzz of the blast still audible.
“Don’t move! Don’t move!” he shouts in German as one of the team members shouts the same in Turkish.
He scans the room, head on a swivel.
Fat guy in purple shirt, half fallen off a couch, eyes squeezed shut. Not him.
Man in undershirt and boxers, staggering backward as he clutches a bottle of water, collapsing to the floor. Negative.
Shirtless guy, dazed, on the floor, a bowl of fruit spilled over his chest. No.
Christoph moves to the other side of the couch, where a man wearing only underwear has fallen over the couch and lies unconscious. Not— And over by the sliding glass door to the balcony, the final target, lying prone on the floor: a young Asian girl wearing a bra and panties and a pained expression.
“Only five targets, team 3?” he cries.
“Affirmative, team leader. Five targets.”
Christoph moves past the Asian girl, already subdued by one of the soldiers. He slides the glass door open and bounds onto the balcony in a crouch, swinging his anti-riot weapon from side to side. Empty.
“Rest of the apartment is clear,” his second in command tells him as Christoph walks back into the living room, the adrenaline draining, his shoulders slumping.
He looks around, defeated, as the five targets are zip-tied and lifted to their feet, still dazed—if they’re conscious at all.
Then his eyes move up to the corner of the room.
At the camera looking down on him.
Chapter
84
Guten Tag,” Suliman says, giving a small salute to the soldier who cannot see him. The soldier looks so disappointed that Suli almost feels sorry for him.
Then he closes up his laptop as he is approached by the waiter at the outdoor tavern on the Spree, twenty kilometers away from the penthouse.
“Will there be anything else tonight, sir?” says the waiter.
“Just the bill,” says Suliman. He needs to get going. It’s a long boat ride.
Chapter
85
Inside the black communications tent, Chancellor Richter ends his phone call. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
“Gone without a trace?” I ask.
“Yes. The other people captured in the raid say he left approximately two hours ago.”
He was one step ahead of us, as usual.
“I…I need to think,” I say.
I part the flaps of the tent and walk back up to the cabin. My hopes were up, more than I cared to admit. That was our best chance. The last person who could stop the virus.
I walk into the basement, Alex Trimble trailing me. I hear them even from the hallway, before I enter the war room.
I stop at the door, keeping a distance. The techies are huddled over a speakerphone, no doubt talking with the rest of our threat-response team at the Pentagon.
“I’m saying if we inverted the sequence!” Devin is saying into the phone. “You do know what inverted means, don’t you? You have a dictionary there somewhere?”
From the speakerphone: “But WannaCry didn’t—”
“This isn’t WannaCry, Jared! This isn’t ransomware. This is nothing like WannaCry. This is nothing like anything I’ve ever freakin’ seen.” Devin throws an empty water bottle across the room.
“Devin, listen, all I’m saying is the back door…”
As the speaker continues talking, Devin looks up at Casey. “He’s still talking about WannaCry. He’s making me wanna cry.”
Casey paces back and forth. “This is a dead end,” she says.
I turn and leave the room. They’ve already answered my question.
“I’m going to the communications room,” I tell Alex. He follows me to the door, but I enter alone.
I close the door behind me. Turn off the light.
I sink to the floor and squeeze my eyes shut, though it is already dark.
I reach into my pocket, take out my Ranger coin, and start reciting.
“I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession…”
The utter destruction of a nation of three hundred million people. Three hundred million people, ruined and desperate and terrified, everything stolen from them—their safety, their security, their savings, their dreams—everything shattered by a few geniuses with a computer.
“…my country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other soldier…
“…I will shoulder more than my share of the task, whatever it may be, 100 percent and then some…”
Hundreds of test computers, used and useless. Our best experts utterly clueless about how to stop the virus. A virus that could hit at any minute, the one man capable of stopping the virus toying with us, watching from a remote location as German special forces invaded his penthouse.
“…I shall defeat them on the field of battle…
“Surrender is not a Ranger word.”
Maybe not, but if the virus takes hold, I will have no choice but to impose the most authoritarian of measures just to keep people from killing one another for food, clean water, and shelter.
If that happens, we will be unrecognizable. We will no longer be the United States of America as anyone has ever known it or conceived of it. To say nothing of the fact that with all the troubles on the streets of America, there’s a real chance we’ll find ourselves in a war with the likelihood of nuclear exchanges greater than at any time since Kennedy and Khrushchev.
I need to talk to somebody besides myself. I grab my phone and dial my go-to guy. After three rings, Danny Akers picks up.
“Mr. President,” he says.
Just hearing his voice lifts my spirits.
“I don’t know what to do, Danny. I feel like I’ve walked right into an ambush. I’m out of rabbits and hats to pull them out of. They might beat us this time. I don’t have the answer.”
“You will, though. You always do, always have.”
“But this is different.”
“Remember when you deployed with Bravo Company to Desert Storm? What happened? Even though you hadn’t even been to Ranger School yet, they made you a corporal so you could be team leader after Donlin got wounded in Basra. Probably the fastest rise to team leader in Bravo Company history.”
“That was different, too.”
“You didn’t get promoted for no reason, Jon. Especially over all the other people who’d been to the academy. Why?”
“I don’t know. But that was—”
“Shit, I even heard about it stateside. It got around. The lieutenant said that when Donlin went down and you were under enemy fire, you stepped up. He called you ‘a born leader who kept his head and found a way.’ He was right. Jonathan Lincoln Duncan—and I’m not saying this because I love you—there is no one I’d rather have in charge right now.”
Whether he’s right or not, and whether I believe it or not, I am in charge. Time to quit whining and suck it up.
“Thanks, Danny.” I push myself to my feet. “You’re full of shit, but thanks.”
“Keep your head and find a way, Mr. President,” he says.
Chapter
86
I punch out the phone call and flip on the overhead light. Before I can open the door, I get another call. It’s Carolyn.
“Mr. President, I have Liz on the line.”
“Mr. President, we conducted the polygraph on the vice president,” says Liz. “The results were inconclusive.”
“Meaning what?” I ask.
“Meaning ‘no opinion on deception,’ sir.”
“So what do we make of that?”