The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (beach read .TXT) 📕

the last leaves of winter from Dylan’s trees. Dry and brown, they fell all around Ben. He groaned and pushed himself to his feet to survey the damage, watching the curling wisps of smoke clear away.

Nothing remained of Dylan’s door but smoldering masonry and torn steel. A stone fell from the transom above and landed with a sad plunk on the pile of debris.

“Warned ya,” Ben said under his breath, and drew his SIG.

63

Two more drones appeared as Ben approached the rubble. He shot them down, picked up the closest, and hobbled on through the haze. He found Dylan cowering behind a bank of flat-screen computer monitors at the corner of his open-plan living and dining room. The moment the kid’s face rose into view, Ben hurled the drone’s remains at him, forcing him to duck. “Fly too close to the sun, did we, Icarus?”

“Making you the sun, right? Just the sort of narcissism I’d expect from a traitor.”

That word again. Traitor. He growled and leveled his SIG. “Get out here. I need your help.”

Dylan took his time. “You know,” he said, finally dropping into a rolling chair. He took a long look at the remains of his door before spinning to face the computers. “You could’ve put a little less shock in your shock and awe.”

“Sorry.” Ben pulled up a chair beside him and winced as he touched the swelling at his kneecap. He kept the SIG pointed at Dylan. “It’s not an exact science.”

Dylan stared at him open-mouthed. “No, Grandpa. Chemistry is an exact science. It’s the very definition of an exact science. Google exact science, and you’ll find chemistry is right at the top of the list.”

“Yeah, well, I could never get my ratios right in the field. And your Walmart only had C&H sugar. It’s not the same as the old Tate & Lyle stuff. Besides—” He grabbed a fistful of Dylan’s collar and pulled him close so he could see the red marks around Ben’s eyes left by the pepper spray. “You had it coming.”

“Real nice.” The geek pulled his chin back, trying to turn away from Ben’s breath. “Way to social distance. I talked to Tess. She says you’re not like . . . corona-contagious, but that doesn’t make it okay to go around breathing on people.”

The kid had guts—or a big ego. When faced with a gun-wielding, plague-carrying psycho who’d just blown up the front door, most people would be inclined to keep their criticisms to themselves. Not Dylan. Probably a side effect of always seeing high-value asset next to his name on Company documents.

Ben stared him down for another heartbeat, then let him go, nearly pushing him from his chair. He thrust his chin at the monitors. “First things first. The neighbors are sure to have reported that explosion and the gunshots. Bring up Fairfax County PD’s system and call off any vehicles heading this way.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Everything you do is illegal. Besides, I know you have their dispatch system on the hacker version of speed dial. You bragged about it during that op in Budapest, remember? Get it done. You don’t want the local constabulary crawling through your house any more than I do.”

The Fairfax police dispatch system showed two cars speeding toward Shady Oak. With a flurry of keystrokes, Dylan sent them both a false alarm/return to station order. “Happy?”

Ben’s attempt at an answer became a fit of coughs. He grimaced at the pain and fought to regain his voice. “Do I look happy?”

“That’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have turned—”

“If you say traitor, I will use the remainder of my homemade explosives and blow us both into next week.”

“I was going to say turned . . . against the Company. Not that such semantics make any difference.”

Ben lifted a spare cold pack from his bag and nursed his smarting knee. “I didn’t turn against anyone. The severance was a mistake.”

“The Director doesn’t make mistakes. You’re guilty.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Stuff. You did the stuff. You tell me, Grandpa.”

“Stop calling me that.” Ben tapped the central monitor with a fingertip. “Okay. I need you to find a missing boat.”

“Boat? What boat?”

“Don’t play dumb. You talked to Tess. A cargo megaship called the Behemoth, registered to Sea Titan Cargo, is heading this way. It left Spain the day before yesterday carrying thousands of tanktainers filled with aerosolized plague. Now it’s gone dark.”

“Okay, I might have looked into your boat.” Dylan held up air quotes as he said the word. “And I might have found it. I’ll show you, but first, we need to establish boundaries.”

Really? Boundaries? The gall of this kid, after kneecapping Ben in his yard of horrors. “We’re kind of past boundary issues, aren’t we?”

“You want my help or not.”

“Fine.”

“Good.” Dylan pushed Ben’s chair, rolling him an arm’s length away. “I’m allowing your diseased self to violate the two-llama distance rule, but only so you can see my screens. You get no closer than this. And you don’t breathe on me, my keyboard, or any of the mice and trackballs. Got it?”

Ben flattened his lips.

“I’ll take that as a yes. And finally”—he glanced back at the rubble and the dead drone lying on his faux wood floor—“don’t . . . touch . . . anything.”

Dylan scrubbed his wrist pad and keys with a Clorox wipe, then brought up a satellite map depicting the world’s shipping traffic. “There. All done. See?”

“See what?”

The kid shook his head, grumbling to himself. “It’s like trying to show my mother how to use Alexa.” He tapped a key, zooming in on the Spanish coast and panned the display to a long structure, a few miles south of Valencia. “I’ve tapped into the ONR’s classified—”

“ONR?”

“The Office of Naval Research. I tapped into their classified tracking system. The public site Tess showed you compiles data from ship transponders across the globe. But the Navy uses”—Dylan rocked his head back and forth—“other methods to track ships. Even so, their program agrees. The Behemoth is not on the water.” He moved the cursor over