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Damn it. He had thought of shooters, IEDs, gas, even another cyber hack with a physical manifestation, but he hadn’t imagined an attack this spectacular. Or maybe he simply hadn’t wanted to.
BREAKINGNEWS. The chyron blared beneath a somber newscaster.MULTIPLE CASUALTIES IN METRO COLLISION.
He barely had time to register the words when his phone rang. The number was blocked. Madison shot him a look, but he left the room.
He took a deep breath, then answered.
“You broke the rules, Mr. Weldon,” said the modulated voice.
“The hell I did,” Chase hissed, looking over his shoulder to the den.
“No cops, no tricks. We consider tipping WMATA a trick.”
How did they know?
Chase locked himself in his study. “Listen, I—”
“The price is now $200 million. Or this collision will be a footnote. A taste. By this time tomorrow, we’ll crash ten more. Industrial accidents, power outages, hospital equipment failures, airlines… a digital apocalypse that will grind DC to a halt and bring Avalon to its knees. Then we’ll move from city to city.”
“If you have that kind of juice, you don’t need me. So I think I’ll take my chances, thank you very much…”
“That’s the price we’re asking from Avalon. The price ofyourinsubordination is your family’s lives.”
“I told you, do not threaten my family.”
“Too late, Mr. Weldon. They’re already marked for death. The only variable is how badly they suffer along the way.”
The Voice went into sadistic detail, describing the horrors he and his unseen team would visit upon Chase’s wife and children. How there was no escape, how the outcome was inevitable, and how he’d brought it upon himself.
Chase’s mind raced ahead, plotting contingencies on the fly, but every plan he conjured was anticipated and mocked by the Voice before Chase could even protest, as if the Voice were reading his mind. It was like getting tangled in vines or falling in quicksand. The more furiously he fought, the harder he was seized, the quicker he was pulled under.
It was uncanny. Worse, it was undeniable.
Chase’s heart pounded and his vision swam. For the first time in his life, thinking three steps ahead wasn’t enough.
“Wait! Let’s talk about this,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “We can work something out…”
“Women and children first, Mr. Weldon,” the Voice taunted. “Your family dies by sunrise. By your hand or ours. And ours will not be merciful.”
Chase tried again, but it was no use. He was talking to a dial tone.
CHAPTER 16
CHASE WALKED ALL night. It wasn’t the first time. During FIRST’s earliest days, worried that he’d overleveraged himself, long walks were the only way to clear his head.
When in doubt, walk it out.
He headed west until he hit Rock Creek, then turned north and walked along the trail, barely hearing the water burbling over the rocks in the stream below.
Chase had spent his whole adult life calculating risk, mitigating it, mastering it. It was his specialty, his livelihood, his calling. He ran scenario after scenario, trying to figure out an alternative, running the numbers. It was a byproduct of his JSIVA days—the endless search for contingencies, loopholes for the contingencies, trapdoors for the loopholes—and that line of thinking was the very linchpin of the FIRST Group’s operations. Making cold calculations before having time to process normal human emotions was the name of the game.
Only tonight, when he most needed the numbers to add up, they had failed him.
He turned back, staggering under the weight of the adversary’s promised attacks. On the first day, it had sent a crowd into a full-blown panic just to get his attention. On the second, it had penetrated a network and blown apart a manufacturing floor, ripping three innocent people to shreds. And the death toll from the Metro collision was twenty and climbing. Bodies, crushed and battered, were still being pried from the twisted wreckage or scraped off the tracks. It was an exponential curve rocketing upward and the Voice was threatening thousands now.
But even that paled in comparison to the gruesome descriptions of what the Voice threatened to have in store for his family.
Chase would not allow Shay and the kids to suffer, and with that cold calculation made, there was nothing left to do but get it over with. Sometime before dawn, he rounded his block. He stopped a few houses away from his own, leaned over a low wrought-iron gate, and vomited into an azalea bush. He wiped his mouth and waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he continued to his own front door.
