Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

Kai waited till the door was shut before reaching down to his work belt. Then he pulled his tanto knife out of its scabbard, took a gallon ziplock slider bag out of a pouch, and leaned over the corpse. The knife sliced cleanly through the cartilage at the root of the dead man’s ear. He felt no resistance to its hand-forged white-steel blade. It was like he was carving air.

“‘Thigh bone connected to the back bone, back bone connected to the neck bone, neck bone connected to...’”

Kai lifted the ear away from the scalp, dropped it into the ziplock, and sealed the bag with its slider. It fit handily into one of the larger pouches on his belt.

When his trophy was tucked away, he took a bit of time hiding the corpse behind the mattress and box spring. Eventually it would ripen and be discovered. But that would take a while. Long enough for him not to waste a thought on it.

Fifteen minutes after he’d entered the storage facility, Kai emerged into the parking lot and strode over to the dead man’s van, still singing in a low undertone. A strong gust of wind nearly tore the ball cap off his head, but he held it down with one hand as he opened the door and climbed behind the wheel.

He hadn’t been aware a blow was in the offing. But he also hadn’t paid much attention to the forecast, and you never knew. The weather could be finicky.

Kai pushed back the driver’s seat to give himself more legroom. There was still some cleanup ahead of him. He would have to drive the van over to the garage where the mark had parked it the night before, then return here on foot for his MINI.

He started up the engine and drove toward the gate, thinking it would be full daylight before he joined his brother on the road.

Chapter Five

New England

April 14, 2024

The slow-moving low pressure system had developed on April 9 along a cold front over the waters off Elizabeth City, Virginia. At first it drifted west, scraping the state’s seventy-two hundred miles of shoreline, edging up the coast to bring high winds and heavy rain to Norfolk, Richmond, and Fredericksburg. Near the Lower Chesapeake’s barrier islands, the storm briefly came to a standstill, slurping up massive amounts of moisture from the Atlantic Ocean before resuming its northward crawl. Moving at a sluggish two miles an hour, it brought swirling gusts, drenching rain, and flash floods to Delaware and Maryland for the next two days.

Meteorologists with the National Weather Service did not expect the storm to reach New York or New England. As a cyclonic system, it unquestionably bore watching. But it wasn’t even close to the sort of storm that got assigned a name, which would denote a certain elevated level of guardedness about its troublemaking potential. In most professional minds, it was a pesky, anonymous disturbance. According to nearly all projections, a strong high pressure airflow sweeping across western Pennsylvania would collide with it somewhere below Long Island and smack it well out to sea.

But the vagaries of the atmosphere defied the forecasts. On April 11, that high pressure mass ticked south of its expected trajectory, where it ran into the western Allegheny Mountains. Shredded and dispersed, the mountains merely poked the irritable bear, which kept grunting, snorting and snuffling its way up into eastern New York.

Around noon on Sunday, April 14, the storm reached Connecticut, where complex interactions with downdrafts, updrafts, and terrain added to its speed and energy.

The revised NWS projections were contradictory. Some had the turbulent cell making a sharp curve back out to sea above Hartford and dying away long miles from land and civilization. Some had it pushing on up to Massachusetts before yet another wall of high pressure moved in to stop it. Others were more worrisome and had it accelerating around and past the front to race up through New Hampshire into the Gulf of Maine.

If that course held true, it would continue to gain momentum as it crossed the water and roared northward at a fierce clip, becoming a nor’easter with potential to leave a path of destruction extending all the way across the state to the Canadian border.

There was also a chance of an even more explosive, devastating transformation. But the satellite data showed it to be infinitesimal, a mother-of-all-flukes scenario.

All the standard models ignored it.

“In one and a quarter miles, make a right on Exit 88B for Amesbury. Then continue north on Route 15 for two hundred feet. Buster’s will be on the left.”

Natasha awoke at the sound of the navigator app’s voice and checked the map on the head unit. It was eleven fifteen Sunday morning, and the Pilot was on 1-95 in northern Massachusetts, about five miles below the New Hampshire border.

She glanced over at Bryan, who was driving quietly. “Guess I dozed off for a few minutes.”

“More like an hour.”

“Wow. That long?”

He nodded. “We were just past Boston when you fell asleep.”

Natasha stretched her arms. “I must’ve been more tired than I thought.” She looked at the map again. “So, what’s Buster’s?”

Bryan gave her a quick glance.

“I’ll show you,” he said, unzipping his hoodie to flash the front of his T-shirt. It was white with red letters that read You’re Bustered! above a picture of a smiling cartoon hamburger with a finger pointing straight at the viewer.

“Clever.” Natasha pulled a face. “I assume Buster’s is a burger joint?”

“Best in New England,” he said. “Buster used to be a professional wrestler. Buster Bunker.”

“Oh, yay.”

“A World Class Federation wrestler,” he said. “I watched all his matches. There’s a physics to his holds and flips.”

“Good for him. But I thought you brought us world-class sandwiches.”

“They’re for later,” Bryan said. “Besides, everybody has to try Buster’s short and frizzies.”

“His what?”

“Short and frizzy potatoes. They’re double battered, double fried...and spiralized.”

Natasha realized her appetite was roaring back after being MIA since Saturday night. By no coincidence, it had