frothing mess.
Race seized the opportunity and leapt across the newly created gap in the jetty and bolted for the ATV.
As he stepped inside the ATV and Van Lewen slid the heavy steel door shut behind him, he looked back out at the river through a narrow rectangular slit in the door.
What he saw was completely unexpected.
He saw the cat—the same black cat that had accosted him only moments before—-climb slowly up out of the water and back up onto the jetty. Blood dripped from its claws, ragged chunks of flesh hung from its jaws, water dripped from its glistening flanks.
The animal's chest heaved. It seemed absolutely exhausted from the battle it had just fought.
But it was alive.
It had won.
It had just survived an encounter with two bull caimans!
Race slumped down on the floor of the ATV, totally exhausted. He let his head fall against the cold metal wall behind him and allowed his eyes to close.
As he did so, however, he heard noises.
He heard the grunts and snorts of the cats outside—close, loud, large.
He heard their paws splashing in puddles. Heard the crunch of breaking bones as they feasted on the bodies of the dead German commandos. He even heard the sound of someone crying out in agony in the near distance.
Soon Race would fall asleep, but before he did he would have one final, terrifying thought.
How the hell am I going to get out of here alive?
FOURTH MACHINATION
Tuesday, January 5, 0930 hours
Special Agent John-Paul Demonaco walked slowly down the white-lit corridor, careful not to step on the bodybags.
It was 9:30 in the morning, January 5, and Demonaco had just arrived at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in response to an order from the Director of the FBI himself.
Like the rest of the world, Demonaco knew nothing of the break-in at DARPA headquarters the day before. All he knew was that the Director had received a phone call at 3:30 that morning from a four-star admiral standing in the Oval Office asking for him to send his best domestic antiterrorist man down to Fairfax Drive as soon as humanly possible.
His best man was John-Paul Demonaco.
'J.P.' Demonaco was fifty-two years old, divorced, and a little loose around the waistline. He had thinning brown hair and wore a pair Of horn-rimmed glasses. His rumpled grey polyester suit had been bought from J.C. Penney for a hundred dollars in 1994, while the Versace tie that he wore with it had been bought for three hundred dollars only last year. It had been a birthday gift from his youngest daughter-apparently it was trendy.
Despite his dress sense, Demonaco was Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Anti-Terrorist Unit (Domestic), a position he had occupied for four years now, principally because he knew more about American terrorism than anybody else alive.
Walking down the white-lit hallway, Demonaco saw another bodybag lying on the floor in front of him. A star of blood smeared the wall above it. He added the bag to his tally. That made ten already.
What on earth had happened here?
He turned a corner and immediately saw a small crowd of people standing at the entrance to a laboratory at the end of the corridor.
Most of the members of the crowd, he saw, were dressed in perfectly starched, dark blue U.S. Navy uniforms.
A twentysomething lieutenant met him halfway down the corridor.
'Special Agent Demonaco?'
Demonaco flashed his ID in response.
'This waj6 please. Commander Mitchell is expecting you.'
The young lieutenant led him into the laboratory. As he entered the lab, Demonaco silently took in the wall- mounted security cameras, the thick hydraulic doors, the alpha-numeric locks.
Jesus, it was a goddamn vault.
'Special Agent Demonaco?' a voice said from behind him. Demonaco turned to see a handsome young officer standing before him. The man was about thirty-six years old, tall, with blue eyes and short sandy-blond hair—a Navy poster boy. And for some reason that Demonaco couldn't quite pin down, he looked oddly familiar.
'Yeah, I'm Demonaco.'
'Commander Tom Mitchell. Naval Criminal Investigative Service.'
NCIS, Demonaco thought. Interesting.
When he had arrived at Fairfax Drive, Demonaco had barely even noticed the Navy servicemen guarding the entrance to the building. It wasn't unusual in the DC area to have certain federal buildings guarded by specific branches of the armed forces. For example, Fort Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was actually an Army
