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  There she had been assigned to a military police unit, the beneficiary of specialized training that “they” had promised would make her application a “sure thing” when she returned to full-time civilian life.

  The lingering post-crash economy and what seemed like an epidemic of law-enforcement hiring freezes had put a resounding kibosh to those plans.

  Piper still sent out her vitae on a regular, if recently a less-frequent, basis. But as with the inexorable solidity of concrete hardening, she knew: Fate had carefully studied her, weighed its options, issued its edict.

  Congratulations! Your “career” is limited to shoplifters and the occasional pickpocket, she told herself. Oh, yeah, and giving teenaged mall rats—who are almost as bored as I am—carefully jovial, unflinchingly polite suggestions to move along or go home.

  She tried to reassure herself. That the mall rats complied—if usually with more than a few snickering asides—was fortunate for them. That they did so grudgingly was probably due more to youthful disdain for any Authority Figure than to the fact that she was admittedly shorter than many of them, and looked younger than most of them.

  On the plus side, Piper reasoned, after five years in the Guard, I’m arguably more physically fit than any of ’em. So eat your Wheaties, kids. You too can aspire to a thrilling life of crime fighting at the shopping center…

  Piper Cameron sighed.

  Ahead of her, through the wide entry of the store, the expanse of skylighted mall was bright and bustling. It turned the foreground of passing shoppers into little more than silhouettes—including one who now detached himself from that moving river of bodies, then stood stock-still, gazing down at the crowded food court.

  • • •

  Amanda was still crying as Randi slid into the recently vacated plastic seat, still warm from the previous occupant. Randi wrinkled her nose, only partly due to the miasma of frying meats from the half-circle of food vendors. She frowned at the crumpled burger wrapper and the half-consumed soft drink that her unknown seat-benefactor had abandoned.

  A resigned sigh, barely audible; Randi pulled the stroller closer, then fished out an opaque plastic bottle from amid the spare diapers, baby wipes, and other essential detritus that filled the bag.

  “C’mon, Mandy,” she cooed. “Let’s see if a little snack will dry up those tears, ’kay? Just for Mommy, baby?”

  Thus occupied, Randi Taylor did not notice the figure—thirty feet above and slightly to the side of her—who at that moment was reaching inside his tweed sports coat.

  In this, she was not alone. No one else noticed, either.

  • • •

  “The damn thing … is … oh, shit … c’mon!

  Right shoulder hunched awkwardly, Chaz could touch the butt of the Glock thrust deeply into the waistband of his trousers.

  Too deeply. As he worked his fingertips past the belt he had earlier cinched tight, the pistol slipped further down.

  It hung at his abdomen, hooked only by the lip of its magazine extension—as delicately poised as a hapless tightrope artist might dangle by a finger after a slip.

  Gravity always wins. As he pushed his two-finger pinch deeper, the Glock was suddenly free—sliding down Chaz’s pant leg and out the cuff, landing with an acrylic clatter on the polished concrete floor at his feet.

  Chaz ducked into a crouch and snatched up the pistol, feral in posture and eye.

  But among the passing crowd, only one person had taken note: a boy, perhaps six years old, being wrist-tugged by an oblivious mother as they pushed past. As Chaz straightened, from the corner of his eye he could see the boy look back over his shoulder, curious yet unconcerned.

  And then Charles Campbell turned, his waist pressed hard against the balcony railing and the pistol in both hands, the faceless crowd below filling its sights.

  • • •

  The first shot was a single shot, but only strictly speaking. The 9mm Glock is a semi-automatic weapon, firing once with each trigger pull. But the plastic and metal pistol is also renowned for a smoothness of operation, a steadiness of recoil, an ability for the shooter to reacquire a target quickly and accurately.

  It also allows firing at the speed at which the shooter can twitch his finger.

  For his initial fusillade, Chaz Campbell twitched his finger at an appalling speed.

  Firing into a packed mass—first, a half-dozen rounds down into the food court, then several rounds snapped to his left, right, and behind his position—made any sharpshooting accuracy needless.

  • • •

  The flat, piercing crack-thuds—the first of them, so closely spaced that they merged into a single, ripping, horrific stutter—spun Piper into an involuntary crouch, her body reacting with instincts honed under an Afghan sky even before her conscious mind had identified the sound.

  Not so for the plump woman beside her, still standing but now wide-eyed.

  “Gun! Get down!” Piper screamed, and the woman’s eyes shifted toward her without comprehension.

  And then the woman’s face exploded in a crimson mist, simultaneously with what Piper knew without counting was the next three-round burst. The woman—a body now, nothing more—fell to both knees, swaying slightly, then toppled to the floor.

  Piper looked around wildly, trying to identify the source amid the chaos of gunshots, gunshot echoes, and the sudden cacophony of screams.

  Other bodies were falling now too, almost at random: A man in a Kansas City Royals baseball cap clutched at his neck, spinning into a trio of manikins and sending all four figures tumbling; a teenaged clerk threw her arms high as if in elation, then pitched forward onto a cosmetics counter.

  More shots, more screams, legs scrambling past her in every direction; panic and pandemonium and still more gunfire. Her head still swiveling as if on a pivot, Piper snatched at her radio microphone.

  “Shots fired! Macy’s, west entrance, upper level! We’ve got a shooter here! I can’t … I can’t locate where it’s coming from—”

  The radio crackled in urgent reply, in words unintelligible to her.

  But suddenly, framed in the bright half-oval of the store’s entryway, her eyes found him: twenty feet distant. Where there had once been a moving mass of people, now only a single silhouette stood.

  As she stared, the figure leaned forward, fired one-two-three-four shots down into what Piper knew was the food court. Then he half-turned, the locked-back action of the pistol in a hand at shoulder height, the now-empty magazine falling from it, in Piper’s mind everything moving in an absurd slow-motion. The figure outline pawed at its jacket pocket, a re-load so he could shoot again, and—

  —and she was on her feet, not aware of rising, already at a full sprint past the fallen, over some of them, it was too far; he had reloaded and snapped forward the pistol’s slide and had seen her and was turning now and oh God, it’s pointing at my head!—

  Piper scarcely saw the muzzle flash, heard only the first millisecond of the gunshot before it deafened her, felt only what seemed like a slight tug beneath her collarbone—and then the impact, as she crashed into the figure with all the force and momentum and fury that an unlikely hero can muster, driving both of them back and over…

  Falling, falling, falling…

  Her arms were locked in a death-grip around her quarry; against the cheek pressed hard into his body, she recognized—and knew it to be incongruous—the feel of tweed.

  Impact again, immeasurably more painful and this time accompanied by a brilliant explosion of light.

  Piper sensed, rather than felt, herself rolling off the inert figure beneath her.

  Half-rolling, rather, her progress stopped by the pedestal of a food court table. The motionless figure beside her blocked all but a thin sliver of her vision. Yes, she told herself with an irrational satisfaction, it was tweed…

  But in that space, past the broken body of Charles Alexander Campbell, in the eerie silence of her deafened ears and crouched under a table, Piper sta
red into the eyes—full-mooned, blinking in horror—of a young woman who clutched a pink blanket in tight embrace.

  The blanket moved; a tiny hand emerged to grasp a mother’s blouse.

  Piper Cameron had just enough time. She smiled, just as the soft, black darkness closed like an iris around her.

  Chapter 2

  May 1

  Motiva Port Arthur Refinery

  Port Arthur, Texas

  2:09 P.M. CDT

  Shane Yerkey was a worried man.

  It was a chronic condition for him, though Shane took great pains to conceal that malady under a carefully constructed façade—one that he was convinced comingled good-ol’-boy bonhomie with the precise, professional eye-to-detail instilled by an engineering degree from UT’s Austin campus.

  Both attributes, Shane believed, were suitably reinforced by the “Hook ’Em, Horns!” tattoo on a beefy bicep, only partially concealed by the short-sleeved, pristine-white, medium-starched shirts that were his unofficial uniform at work.

  Nonetheless, his unconscious reflex of unbuttoning the collar and yanking loose his tie, inevitably seen during the not-infrequent moments of mini-crisis on this job, was well-marked by his staff as a storm warning—even if it was a “tell” completely lost on Shane, who also considered himself an adept, if often inexplicably unlucky, poker player.

  Still, it would have taken a blithe spirit indeed not to be worried in the role Shane played, as manager of Engineering Control at the largest petroleum refinery in the United States. The fact that the Motiva refinery was co-owned by two of the most powerful corporate entities in the world—Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, the latter an unofficial nation-within-a-nation-state and the former, for most intents and purposes, nearly so itself—only underscored the weight of his responsibilities.

  Shane surveyed his realm, a deceptively calm expanse that belied its essential, even irreplaceable, niche in a yet-more-essential infrastructure. Without understatement, the enormous facility—much of it visible as a panorama of industrial bustle through the building’s glass walls—was a critical linchpin of the economy … certainly that of the U.S., and arguably of the whole world.

  One little mistake, Shane reminded himself, one overlooked blip on one freakin’ little screen, one inattentive moment by an overworked computer tech—that’s all it would take. Pressure? Yeah, a bit. How about every freakin’ second of every freakin’ day. Even more so today, on the day after terrorists had shattered the confidence, pissed on the illusion of security, for the whole freakin’ country.

  This was the nerve center, the “brain” for a four-thousand-acre, overwhelmingly complex, multi-billion-dollar metropolis of steel and concrete, of cracking towers and hydrotreaters that soared like skyscrapers, of searing production fire and numbing cryogenic ice. It was the nexus of a vast web of pumps and pipelines and supertankers that carried the crude from around the world. Daily—when running as it was today, at full capacity—thousands of workers painstakingly processed more than six hundred thousand barrels of oil into the fuels that, literally, powered Shane’s nation.

  And it was all controlled by powerful computers that were themselves—if also only arguably—“controlled” here. More accurately, the facility was controlled by electronic brains monitored by mere humans who sat under the stoic, unblinking, glowing eyes of a hundred-plus computer screens.

  Shane walked down the central aisle, paused next to a young woman half-slumped in one of the modernistic chairs: Carol Golembiewski, age twenty-three and proud possessor of a dual master’s in engineering and computer science from Stanford.

  “We still makin’ gasoline, Carol?”

  She looked up at Shane and smiled.

  “Everything’s copasetic, boss—green-on-green,” Carol replied. She tucked a wayward comma of auburn hair behind her ear, an unconsciously imperious gesture. “Had a call from Unit 8. The usual sort’a crap, routine. One of the pipe monkeys thought he was hearing some kind of unusual vibration.”

  She noticed Shane’s expression and raised a placating hand.

  “Computer says he needs his hearing checked,” she said, lip curled slightly. “But I queued a request for a ‘maintenance inspect’ anyway. They’ll do a hands-on before end of shift.”

  Shane nodded; his chronic concerns notwithstanding. Well, had it been anything serious, or potentially so, the word would have rung to my smartphone, pronto. My folks have that little standing order engraved on their souls, for damn sure.

  He barely stopped himself from clapping her on the shoulder before moving down the line. These days, bonhomie or not, even the most innocent of physical gestures could run afoul of company anti-harassment protocols.

  Normal, normal, normal.

  At each station, each screen, each of the random technicians with whom he paused to exchange a word, everything was running within parameters; everything was normal.

  Even that fact worried Shane, if slightly.

  Is anything ever “all normal”? he asked himself, then amended his thought. Unless “normal” means “constantly teetering at the edge of a massive cluster-fuck.” Guess that’s one way to say “normal,” right?

  Shane tried to chuckle at his own woe-begotten obsession, and failed utterly.

  • • •

  At precisely that moment, fully a mile from where Shane Yerkey stood, Unit 8 exploded.

  The concussion, the shrapnel of torn steel, and the roiling fireball from sixty thousand gallons of high-octane gasoline pulped, ripped, or incinerated all fourteen workers at the site instantly. Within an eighty-yard radius, fabric and flesh spontaneously ignited from the sudden radiant heat; the blast ring surfed outward, faster even than the roar of the explosion itself, killing and maiming more; and then, wider still, the lethal cloudburst—massive chunks of jagged metal, much of it red-hot—began its barrage.

  The fireball that had been Unit 8 clawed skyward, its cloud-summit clenching into a horrific orange-black mushroom, growing in malice and fury even as it rose high into the clear-blue sky.

  To any on the ground still surviving, it looked like something alive.

  • • •

  The blast shook the building, imploding several of the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows and turning others into translucent spider webs. It sent Shane lurching into one of the consoles, then to the floor, where he found himself staring into the equally wide eyes of one of his workers.

  The technician pointed, wordless and with a shaking arm, behind Shane.

  Even through the ruined windows, Shane could see the enormous fireball; immediately, he knew from where it came.

  Without realizing he had moved, Shane found himself on his feet, sprinting past dazed staffers, skidding to a stop, ignoring any anti-harassment guidelines to haul one figure bodily to her feet.

  “Carol! That was Unit 8! I need data, now!”

  The tech stared at Shane for a moment, blinking. Then she bit her lip, nodded, and squatted before her monitor screen.

  “All … all normal?” Carol murmured. “Boss, according to the computer, Unit 8 is up and running, all systems ‘go.’”

  “No. No! That isn’t … that can’t be right,” Shane shouted. “Reboot the … what the hell is—”

  His right hand fumbled open his shirt collar, groped toward his necktie knot.

  At that instant, from a corner of the refinery complex far from the stricken Unit 8, a second explosion shook the building again.

  In series, spaced an eye-blink apart, came a third blast. And a fourth.

  Then another, from a different direction, and yet another still.

  Even as he stood frozen in shock, Shane could see the displays of other monitors along the length of the corridor.

  All were reading green-on-green. All were reading “normal.”

  Chapter 3

  May 1

  Intersection,

  Avenue Of The Americas at West 54th Street

  New York City

  3:11 P.M. EDT r />
  Life is good, Dennis Littrell told himself, a self-satisfied smile on his face.

  Sure, he said, pretending conversation with the back of his driver’s head. Sure, a lot of people are dead who were alive yesterday. A helluva lot. And sure, Washington D.C. is a radioactive wasteland; God knows how many people are still trapped in shelters there, dead or dying.

  But, still … it was a helluva broadcast. A helluva story, and all mine to tell.

  It was narcissistic, even callous; Denny knew that, and under most other circumstances might have felt, if uncharacteristically, ashamed.

  But the newsman’s exclusive—a prime-time special, in which a worldwide audience heard the fruits of his breaking-news reportáge—had been a coup of broadcast journalism at its finest; in addition to capably informing an audience, it had helped prevent what could have been—and, he reminded himself, had been intended to cause—a horrific, civilization-shaking, vengeance-driven attack by the full, awesome military might of the United States…

  On the wrong target, he reassured the driver’s head, silently.

  Candidly, Denny would have been the first—okay, he shrugged, maybe among the first—to admit that in reality he had been but a bit-player in a far larger drama. He—not to mention, the world—owed far more to a cast of characters-sources whose clandestine efforts were far more central in avoiding a more terrible catastrophe than even the loss of the nation’s capital.

  Beck Casey, for certain. If I ever get to tell the story-behind-the-story, he’d have to top the credits. And of course, the FBI kid: Jeffrey Connor. Wouldn’t have even had a story if he hadn’t leaked it to me. And oh, yeah, note to self: I better start thinking about a wedding gift for him and Katie. And send a card to good ol’ Beck. Maybe something like: “Congrats! Your kid is marrying a G-man!” Every CIA spook’s worst nightmare, eh?