“I assume one of the quick thinkers was the Baron de Vesci at the time?”
He smiled. “The third Baron, yes. Colin Drummond. He quickly organized the whole town—women and children, too—into a fire brigade. They saved the church and the pub, and the lower two-thirds of the town.”
“So you’re telling me firefighting’s in your blood?”
He coughed out a laugh. “Apparently I am.”
She cleared her throat. It hurt, hurt deep. She was quiet for a moment. “Nicholas, our information was that COE had threatened to take out Rodeo San Francisco next, not Bayway.”
“For whatever reason they changed their minds. You know what? I think they’ve made a big mistake coming to New York. Now they’re here on our turf and shoving their god-awful destruction right in our faces. They’re going to regret ever screwing with the FBI.”
“I agree, Agent Drummond.” SAC Milo Zachery walked out of the night. They hadn’t heard him drive up over all the noise—helicopter rotors and car alarms and the shrieks and calls of the first responders and the roar of the fire. Mike realized he was nearly shouting to be heard, supposed she and Nicholas had been shouting at each other as well. The flames outlined Zachery in an orange mantle.
“Sir.” Nicholas pushed off the car, stuck out his hand, realized it was burned and black with soot, and shrugged.
Zachery’s voice was flat and angry. “We went to talk to Larry Reeves. Seems someone beat us to him.”
7
PAWN TO D4
Near the Bayway Refinery
From atop a nearby hill, Vanessa stood rigid, numb and disbelieving, as she watched the Bayway Refinery burn. When the tenth ambulance left the facility without its lights and sirens, signaling it was carrying another dead body, she fell to her knees, dropping her ATN NVG7 night-vision monocular to her chest, hugging herself. She had to get it together, had to.
Her Semtex hadn’t done this. The small second explosion, that had been her bomb. She didn’t want to believe what she was seeing, but the horrific flames, the shouts, the screams were all too real.
No deaths. That was her rule, Matthew’s rule. No deaths.
Well, it had been Matthew’s rule until tonight. Now they had blood on their hands, real blood. She wanted to scream with grief, with fury. She heard her uncle’s voice telling her, “Nessa, don’t blame yourself, sometimes things will simply be out of your control, awful things that you’ll simply have to learn to live with. Follow your training, Nessa, you won’t go wrong, not in the end.”
But these were innocent people’s lives, no way around it. However could she learn to live with that?
And she knew what it meant: Matthew had perfected his small gold-coin bombs and used a tiny part of one as a test. Thank heaven he hadn’t used an entire gold coin, it would have wiped out countless thousands and reduced the landscape to rubble.
She knew to her gut it was Darius who’d kept after Matthew to finish perfecting his bomb, Darius who’d decided to test it tonight. It hadn’t taken her long to recognize Darius for what he was—a born soulless killer who didn’t care how many people died. But this time she knew he’d had a reason. To see for himself how powerful Matthew’s new bombs were because he wanted them for himself.
She breathed deeply, again and again, until she calmed. She wondered what Matthew was thinking as he looked out over the killing field and knew it was his creation that had brought it about. Was he as horrified as she was, or was he with Darius, and very likely smiling and nodding at the success of his bomb? All the deaths. And it was up to her to stop both of them.