Extinction Machine

Chapter Twenty-six

The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences field office

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 6:44 a.m.

I rolled past security at the Warehouse, parked badly, killed the engine and hurried over to where the squat and muscular Sergeant Gus Dietrich—Mr. Church’s personal aide and private bulldog—was waiting for me. Ghost was right at my heels.

Dietrich said, “You look like shit, Joe. Can’t hold your booze like you used to? Too many Jell-O shots out of the navel of that Italian broad you brought to the party?”

“F*ck you,” I said.

“There’s that,” he agreed.

I told him about the attack on the street.

“Well damn, son,” he said. “You okay?”

“A bit rattled, highly suspicious, and mightily pissed off.”

“Are you sure these clowns were feds?”

“I’m not sure of any-damn-thing, Gus. All I can tell you is that they weren’t friends.” I handed him four ID cases. “I doubt they’re legit, but let me know if we get anything.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, and there’s this.” I dug the small piece of metal out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Took this off the lead agent. No idea what it is.”

Gus weighed it in his palm. “Don’t weigh nothing. And it’s warm. Could be a tracker or something. I’ll run some scans. But that can wait. Better haul ass—the big man’s waiting for you.”

We piled into a golf cart. Ghost tried for shotgun but I banished him to the back. Gus got behind the wheel and we whizzed off down the halls.

“I took the liberty of calling in your whole staff, Joe,” Gus said. “Top Sims is already here, and he’s got everything in hand.”

Top was my number two. He was the smartest, toughest, and most organized noncom I’ve ever met—and that made him smarter, tougher, and more organized than just about any officer I’d ever heard of. Like Gus, Top was proof that nothing of any historical military importance has ever happened without the presence of good sergeants.

“Something came in right before you got here,” Gus said. “A video file sent by an anonymous source. Wait till you see this, Joe, it’ll blow your socks off.”

“What’s on it?”

He shook his head. “You better see for yourself.”

The Warehouse is the third largest DMS field office. The biggest was the Hangar in Brooklyn and a small step down from that was Department Zero in L.A. The Warehouse was the office whose active range covered D.C., and it was all mine. I ran four field teams out of it—Alpha, Echo, Dogpack, and Spartan—and, including technical, maintenance, and general support, I had a total staff of about two hundred. Right now the whole building was at high alert and there was nobody loitering in the halls, no one anywhere except where they should be.

Gus dropped me outside my office. Church was already there, seated behind my desk with his laptop open. Church glanced at me and Ghost but didn’t say a word. Didn’t ask if we were okay. Didn’t even offer to let me have my own chair. Apparently he forgot to bring his compassion to work today. Again.

Instead, he spun his laptop around and showed me an image. It was the president.

“This came in seven minutes ago,” he said.

“They found him?”

“No,” he said. “Watch.”

He reached out to press a button. The static image of the president resolved into a video. The president sat in a straight-backed chair. He was not visibly restrained, but he sat unnaturally stiff and straight. His skin looked bad, blotchy, as if his blood pressure was firing on the wrong cylinders, and there was a weird glazed look in his eyes.

He spoke in a monotone, without inflection or pause. A tumble of words that had no life at all in them. It reminded me of the computer voice used by Stephen Hawking.

“Rector,” he said, “I need you to do something. I need you to find the Majestic Black Book. You need to find the Majestic Black Book. You must find the Majestic Black Book.”

Then the image abruptly changed. Instead of the president’s face, the screen was filled with an image of an island somewhere in the middle of a blue ocean. There was a line of rocky ridges from some ancient volcano.

The president was back. “You need to find the Majestic Black Book.”

Another image shift, this time showing a satellite image of the whole volcano. It was situated just off-center on an island. The island was small, the volcano was big. The image shifted again to show the same island from a much higher altitude, and that allowed us to see other landmasses.

“Where—?”

Before I could ask a question the image changed once more. Instead of static images, this was a series of video clips. First there was the storm surge as Hurricane Katrina smashed its way through the levees. Then a smash cut to the president repeating: “You need to find the Majestic Black Book.” Then another cut to the tsunami that pounded Thailand the day after Christmas in 2004. Back to the president, same message. Then multiple images of a wall of ocean water sweeping across the coast of Japan. Back to the president. And then something even weirder—something scarier. The waters of the Atlantic rose up and slammed into the coastline of New York, sweeping over the Statue of Liberty, striking the docks, sending deadly waves through the streets, sweeping away cars and buses and all the people. The video clip ended and the satellite image of the volcano was back. That held for ten seconds and then we saw the president again.

“You need to find the Majestic Black Book,” he said. “You don’t have much time.”

The screen dissolved into snow.