from its sheath clipped inside my jeans pocket. The RRF has a wicked little 3.375-inch blade that locks into place with a snap of the wrist. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in speed, because at only four ounces it moved as fast as my hand. No drag at all.
I bashed the rifle aside with my left and whipped him across the throat with a very tight semi-circular slash. Blood exploded outward in a hydrostatic jet. I faded left and took a hard leap past his shoulder, and drove the point of the knife into the face of the fourth shooter. The blade caught him beside the nose and I punched it all the way through. He screamed and his finger clutched around the trigger, sending half a magazine into the legs of the guy whose throat I’d cut. I gave the knife a quarter turn and yanked it out, then plunged it back into his throat.
He collapsed over the tangled legs of his comrade.
I tore the knife free and wiped it clean on a dead man’s sleeve, then retrieved my Beretta and swapped out the mags.
My heart was hammering in my chest and I could smell my own sweat mixed with the copper stink of blood. There hadn’t been time to be scared before now, but it was catching up to me like a son of a bitch.
I tapped the commlink. “Chatterbox, Green Giant—center room clear. All hostiles down. Repeat: All hostiles are—”
It broke into the team channel. Top’s voice. Screaming.
“Hostile with a vest! Hostile with a vest! Out–out–
A vest.
Jesus Christ.
We all knew about those vests. Anyone who had been in Iraq or Afghanistan knows about suicide bombers who follow the compulsion to strap on forty pounds of high explosives and turn the day into red nightmare.
Suddenly we were all yelling and running. I ran for the window and went out like I was Superman. Maybe a drop of fifteen feet to the street. There was a huge black noise behind me, and just as I cleared the window I felt myself lifted as if wishing I could fly was making it so.
As if.
The force of the blast threw me out over the street. I pinwheeled my arms, and my legs mimicked running as I flew. There were cherry trees along the curb. In one of the weird moments of clarity that happen in the middle of a crisis, I knew that the leaves and branches were going to break my fall, but I wasn’t going to like it one bit. Behind me the fireball burned the air and ignited the leaves and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then the tree curled its branches into a fist and knocked me out of all sense and understanding.
I WOKE UP in an ambulance. Top and Khalid were with me, both of them covered with soot and bloodstained field dressings. Top told me the news.
One of the hostiles had come up out of the cellar wearing a vest packed with bars of Semtex. Everyone on Echo Team had taken cuts and burns except John Smith.
I started to say that we’d gotten off lucky, but something in Top’s face stopped me.
“What—?” I asked.
“Joey,” he said. “He pushed Khalid out the door, but he caught his foot on a throw rug and went down. He got up, but he was one step too late.”
Joey Goldschein had been the only one of my team left inside when everything went to hell. He was six months back from his second tour in Afghanistan. He deserved a longer life.
That was our first encounter with the Seven Kings.
AFTER THAT, DEEP Throat came to Church with dribs and drabs of intel. My part in the Seven Kings affair slowly evaporated as I became involved in several unrelated cases. Other DMS teams worked on it, and it’s both sad and frightening to say that there are always multiple threats chewing at the fabric of our society. Vultures and predators, sharks and parasites, bent on destroying us in order to satisfy their own political agendas. I don’t say that they do this to satisfy their religious agendas, because I’m either idealistic enough or cynical enough to believe that religion is deliberately misused as a label for greedy sons of bitches whose real objective is wealth and power. Sure, the freedom fighter in the trenches may think that God wants him to strap C4 to his chest and walk into a post office, but until the so-called religious leaders do that themselves I think it’s a scam. And they’re scamming their own loyal followers as much as they’re scamming the rest of the world. I think this was true during the Crusades and it’s true now in the Middle East. I seldom trust the guys at the top.
The real bitch was that despite having clashed with groups supported by the Seven Kings, we didn’t have a frigging clue as to who or what the Kings were. It was like fighting an invisible empire … and yes, I know that sounds like an old movie serial. But there it is.
Chapter Six
The Royal London Hospital
Whitechapel, London
December 17, 10:52 A.M. GMT
Church said, “The Kings have been busy during your ‘vacation.’???
“Deep Throat been calling his BFF again?”
“I see isolation and contemplation haven’t matured you. Pity,” Church said. “We’ve had five additional tips. Three out of five of the tips resulted in action taken. We recovered prisoners in several of the raids, but none of them were above street level. They knew the name Seven Kings but nothing else of substance.”
“Did Deep Throat warn you about today?”
“Not specifically. He said, ‘Watch out; the next one will be epic.’ However, if this is a Seven Kings attack, it would be their first hit on foreign soil.”
“That we know of.”
“Yes.”
“You any closer to finding out who Deep Throat is?”
“No. But I have some friends in the industry working on this.”
The blaze looked even hotter than before. The crowds surrounding the Hospital had to number in the thousands.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a terrorist hit,” I said.
“Even if no one comes forward to take credit for this, we’re likely to see a rise in hate crimes.”
I agreed. After 9/11 there was an insane wave of violent hatred toward Muslims even though we were not— and never had been—at war with Islam. Echoes of the Japanese internment camps. Xenophobia is one of humankind’s most embarrassing traits.
I said, “Destroying a medical complex of this size had to have taken enormous and very detailed planning. Can’t have been a matter of someone walking in the front door with a C4 vest or a car bomb in the parking garage. This place is massive and it all went up at once. Someone put some real thought into this and—”
Church interrupted me. “How are you doing?”
Church is borderline heartless, so the fact that he was asking made me stop and do a quick self-check. I realized that I was speaking way too loud and way too fast. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and in doing so I could feel how much of it was stale air that had been turning to poison in my chest.
“I’m good,” I said more slowly.
