Chapter 59
He got out and grabbed a green duffel bag from the back seat, locked the car, and went for a walk.
It was a warm night, and nearby he saw the blinking neon of the off-strip casinos. About ten miles to the east was the main drag, visible from here as a chain of glittering golden light.
He kept away from any businesses or other establishments where there might be cameras, which was easy around here.
He went beneath a desolate highway overpass, then stripped off his outer layer of clothes and shoved them in the duffel to reveal black athletic pants and a black hoodie.
He put on black leather gloves, then removed a small canvas bag from the duffel and slung it over his shoulder.
He walked to a sloping embankment of rocky sand and desert scrub, stashed the duffel inside one of the fuller-looking bushes, and continued on.
In fifteen minutes, he’d reached the entrance to the gated community, which, like most of these places, practiced security theater instead of actual security.
Keeping his distance from the main entrance with the guard booth and rent-a-cop, he walked along the black metal fence, which was obscured by bushes on the other side so that the residents didn’t have to see the unsightly thing.
He looked around to confirm he was alone before scrambling up the fence and hopping down.
He kept his hood up and his head down as he walked along the empty road.
No sidewalks. Houses with big lawns set far back.
He knew the route without looking up at street signs.
He’d studied the map. Three blocks down, two blocks to the left, then the cobblestone driveway would be on the right.
It was the biggest house in the community.
He kept his eyes on his sneakers, only occasionally allowing himself to peek and make sure there was no security doing a drive-around. Six blocks ahead he spotted a slow-moving car gliding across the road. He froze. The car didn’t stop, and he continued.
He reached the cobbled drive and kept walking past it. The outer fence would run about one hundred and sixty paces. He counted.
When he reached the end of the property, he rounded the corner of the fence. The neighbor’s property would be on his left. A more modest home, but most likely with a security camera over the door. He kept his head down.
He walked another two hundred paces until he was roughly in line with the back of the house.
He crouched and looked through the fence, where he saw lights scattered around the large, grassy backyard.
He removed a pair of infrared binoculars from the canvas bag and used them to scan the area.
Ten yards to his right was an infrared beam detector mounted on a pole about three feet off the ground, one piece of a virtual security perimeter that likely surrounded the entire property.
He returned the binoculars to the bag. Then he climbed up and over the fence, landed as quietly as he could, then marine-crawled along the grass beneath the infrared beam. Once he was clear of the device, he stood and looked around.
The house was massive, some oversize quasi-European villa. A glowing, rippling swimming pool sat amid the manicured grass. Beyond it was a landscaped garden and tree orchard. Quite a setup for the desert. This place’s water bill was probably higher than the GDP of some countries.
The house had big windows with large windowpanes.
He had a glass cutter and suction handle in his bag, and a bastardized Glock-style ghost gun in his rear waist. One of the benefits of being a criminal investigator was that you knew criminals.
One particular criminal, an arms smuggler in SoCal who’d done his time and claimed to be out of the game, knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.
Enough degrees of separation for everyone to be comfortable.
Still, it had been a risk. And it still was.
There could be motion detectors he hadn’t spotted—in which case a home security service might already have been alerted.
Or maybe the house had laser trip wires along the windows, and even if he managed to cut the pane properly and not set off a glass-break detector, he’d trigger the alarm anyway.
Well, what was the worst that could happen? Death or prison. He’d already made his peace with either.
He heard a sound to his right near the pool and spun toward it. He heard it again. It was snoring. Loud snoring.
He approached the pool. Sprawled on a tufted chaise longue was a sleeping sixty-year-old man in bathing suit trunks. He was flabby and balding. Next to him was an oversize cocktail glass, half full of watery-looking margarita with a floating lime wedge.
Brodie looked toward the house. It remained dark and quiet. He knew the man was divorced. There was no one to wake him to come back inside. He probably had plenty of staff, but they were sleeping, or had gone home, or just didn’t care. Not everything can be bought.
Brodie approached the man, picked up the glass, and threw the rest of the drink in his face.
The man sprang awake, startled, and looked around. It took a moment for him to land on the man in black standing over him.
“Jesus! Who the fuck are you?”
“It doesn’t matter who I am. Who you are is what is important. Charles Langer, chief technology officer of Synotec Systems.”
Langer furrowed his bushy gray eyebrows. “What is this? Because I—”
“Shut up.” Brodie drew the Glock from his waist.
The man stopped talking and stared at the gun. Then he said, “I have money.”
“No shit.”
The man lunged for something next to him. A cell phone.
Brodie got to it first and flung it into the pool.
Langer looked at the water as it rippled outward from where his phone had plunged. Then he said in a low voice, “What are you going to do?”
“I am going to kill you.”
The man’s eyes widened. He looked again at the gun. “Why?”
“Because you are a mass murderer, operating at the highest levels of a conspiracy that has led directly to the deaths of an Army scientist, a DARPA scientist, a Military Police officer, an Army captain, an Army Ranger driven to suicide, and seventeen more Rangers who died violent and terrifying deaths at the hands of Synotec’s premium product. ”
Langer sighed. “You were at Hayden.”
Brodie nodded. “And it’s your bad luck that I didn’t die there too.”
“We didn’t want all that to happen.”
“Of course you didn’t. It’s set you back, cost you money, risked exposing Praetorian. But here’s the thing. The D-17s did exactly what you designed them to do. They just did it earlier than your roadmap had laid out.”
Langer met Brodie’s eyes and said emphatically, “Look around you. Things are unraveling in this fucking country and it’s only a matter of time before the bottom falls out. We are trying to save this nation.”
“From its own people. That’s called tyranny.” Brodie took a deep breath and raised the gun. “I made a vow. Those Rangers did the same. Machines can’t take an oath.”
Langer looked defeated. He stared into the pool, and the water’s mottled blue light reflected off his jowly features. He said in a low voice, “This will not change anything.”
“I know,” said Brodie. “But it’s the only justice those men are going to get. I am going to say their names now. And when I am done, I am going to kill you.”
Langer looked up at the blank sky. He looked terrified.
Brodie said, “Private First Class Justin Beal. Major Roger Ames. Captain Ben Pickman. Specialist Daniel Kemp. Sergeant First Class Mike Miller. Corporal Yusuf Khan. Corporal Frank Dobbs. Corporal Stan Ewing. Private—”
Langer shot up from his chair and began running toward the house. Brodie aimed and fired, hitting the man in the back. He cried out and fell forward.
Brodie walked slowly across the lawn toward him. The man was still alive. Breathing hard.
Brodie continued, “Private First Class Sam Kowalski. Private First Class Dominik Bell. Staff Sergeant Kevin Chung. Corporal Richard Santos. Corporal Mark Bishop. Specialist Nathaniel Reeves. Private First Class Christopher Dominguez. Private First Class Connor Gibson. Specialist Julian Gallegos. Corporal Joseph Rinaldi. Corporal Isaiah Washington. Sergeant Harold McCarthy. Sergeant Carl Durham. Greg Meeks of DARPA.” Then he said, “Twenty-two names. Twenty-two lives. I’m done now.
” Then he put a round in the man’s head.