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

“I don’t want to call off anything. But I like to be informed. So I can make smart decisions.”

Bryan nodded. “I’m sorry, Tasha.”

“It’s OK.”

“Also, well, optimistically, the system’s still heading offshore.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “That so?”

He nodded again.

“And pessimistically?”

Bryan looked thoughtful a moment. Then he gave her an earnest glance. “I guess I don’t know how to be pessimistic,” he said.

Kai was ten miles past Hartford, Connecticut, on I-95 when the sky opened up on him. It started with some ominous rumbles of thunder, followed by a few fat, scattered raindrops splattering against his windows. Within minutes it became a torrential downpour.

He swore under his breath, his left hand on the wheel, the other around a hot cup of coffee. No question he’d needed to take care of the man with the van. That was exactly what Tai meant by a thorough cleanup. But his detour to Brooklyn had cost him hours. After driving the equipment van from the storage facility to its monthly parking space, where it could sit for a while without drawing suspicion, he’d still needed to fetch the MINI from where he’d left it, backtracking a good two miles on foot.

By the time the body was discovered at the storage place, he and Tai would have completed their mission and left the country. The killing would look like the messy result of a robbery or a love triangle, something of that nature. It was all worth the trouble. But Kai had fallen a long way behind his brother and wanted to make up some distance.

He sipped some coffee, his wiper swiping across the windshield. He’d brought up a radar map on his neurotech, and it indicated the leading edge of the weather system was barely into southern Massachusetts, moving at a sluggish fifteen miles an hour. Which meant he soon would be ahead of it. By his reckoning, he and Tai would have the larger part of a day to bag the snow pixie, before the rainstorm caught up to them on that island.

Chacagua. It was an unusual name for Nowheresville, Maine. Almost sounded Spanish. In fact, it reminded Kai of a place off Valparaiso, where he’d spent some months doing work for the Chilean government. Isla de los Pinguinos, the locals called it—Isle of the Penguins. The birds were everywhere. A rare, protected species, they were shaped like torpedoes and swam thirty or forty miles an hour. It made them excellent moving targets.

Kai remembered going out on an inflatable pontoon boat for shooting practice. It was an hour or so past sunrise, and he had used his Super Jägar hunting pistol with a standard red-dot sight. At 150 yards, it was a challenge nailing the penguins—and he’d needed to stay on the lookout for fishermen and wildlife police. But no one ever knew the better of it, and he’d popped quite a few birds.

He drove on now, rain hammering his roof, the roadway awash around him. It was no coincidence, possibly, that he had brought the Jägar along for his current job. The Russians wanted Snow Pixie erased with good reason. According to the mission file, Natasha Mori was more than she even knew she was, the rarest of rare birds, and that would make carrying out the assignment especially interesting.

Kai only hoped he could quickly outpace the storm and get into clear weather.

He and Tai were big game hunting, no doubt.

Part Two:

Dem Bones

Chapter Six

Maine

April 14, 2024

Thorntip Landing was just west of Bishop at the end of a narrow county two-lane that twisted and turned and dipped and climbed for some twenty miles after splitting off the main road. Bryan and Natasha drove through intermittent sunlight and shadow, winding between a mix of tall, dark green conifers and deciduous trees with plump green leaf buds on their branches.

She noticed the treetops were all pretty still. They had gotten well ahead of the high winds that had rocked the Pilot back at the bridge crossing from New Hampshire.

“You know,” she said, turning from her window. “We never got around to talking about the Internet of Tr—”

“Wait. I want to show you something. Up ahead.”

He took a wide, slow bend. Set back to the left of the road beyond it was a single-story building with white siding and blue-framed picture windows. Above the door, two 1960s-era Coca-Cola signs bracketed the words: Bait, Tackle, Hunting, Lobster, and Candy Store.

“The owner’s Dwight Stimson, a good friend of my mom’s.” Bryan slowed as they drove past. “I used to ride my bike here. Over five miles, round trip. It’s where I got my comic books and ice cream sundaes.”

“And candy, I take it.”

He nodded. “All kinds.”

“One-stop country shopping at its finest,” Natasha said, looking out at the place. “Wonder if Duncan likes his lobster stuffed with gummy bears?”

“Did you ever ask him?”

She rested her gaze on his face. Opened her mouth, closed it.

“That’s next on my to-do list,” she said.

About forty yards up, the two-lane ended at a small pebble beach. Beyond it, she saw the bright, glossy expanse of the bay, gulls wheeling and squalling above it. There was a red pickup truck parked on the rocks, its flatbed piled with lobster traps, a ladder racked to one side. Just beyond it, a small dock stacked with many more traps. A few yards to the left of the dock, a dilapidated wooden shed stood in the shallows below the tide line on high wooden posts or stilts. It looked like it could have been built before the invention of the light bulb.

Bryan checked his dash clock.

It was 2:05 p.m.

“We’re here,” he said, stopping on the pickup’s passenger side.

Natasha stepped out her door and looked around, inhaling the cool, crisp air. Though the landing was mostly pebbles and stones, she noticed a dirt path running off to her right. It led straight into a patch of brambles, then out of it for about ten yards, after which it vanished around a curve