Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (20 page)

The eye color thing struck him as weird, but maybe that was just a trick of the light.

“Did something happen?” Sathorn asked her. He kept his voice somber but polite, resting his arms on the cherry wood table.

The old woman continued to stare at him.

Something about the blankness of that stare, or perhaps the utter lack of feeling he could sense in it, made him nervous.

Novak blinked even as he thought it, looking away.

“Yes,” she said. Leaning back, she adjusted the metal-frame glasses, giving him a grim smile. “…The Chinese have issued another threat.”

Sathorn felt his fingers tense on the table. “What do they want?”

Novak made a vague gesture with one hand, one Sathorn wasn’t sure how to interpret.

“What do you think?” she said, again that faint trace of German accent touching her syllables. “They want us to hand over the antidote. They believe the rumors put out by the Russians that we are hoarding some kind of vaccine for the C2-77 virus. They think we are refusing to share it with the rest of the world.”

Sathorn frowned. “There’s no truth to that, is there?”

He said it without thinking.

Even so, he was startled at the faintly amused smile that ghosted the old lady’s lips.

“Why would you ask me that?” she said.

Sathorn decided to tell her the truth. He’d long believed that truth-telling begat truth-telling. People often knew instinctively when someone was lying to them, even if they chose to believe that lie for emotional or other reasons.

“One hears things,” he said. Leaning back in his chair so that the swivel joint squeaked, he smiled, mirroring her businesslike tone as he also gestured lightly with a hand. “It occurred to me that if supplies were limited…assuming such a thing existed, of course…we might sit on it for awhile. We might wait on sharing it before we had the manufacturing capacity to begin production on a large scale, especially given the civil unrest it was likely to provoke. Moreover, the Chinese have not been good allies to us in recent years…”

Trailing, he gave a loaded shrug, again gesturing a question mark with his hand.

“…I suspect they would not be high on the list for distribution,” he finished. “Not only because of Caine…or even the attack on our White House and the death of our revered President Wellington…although it’s a bit of an insult to our intelligence at this point that they still deny involvement in either. Regardless of the specifics, the lies have been numerous and unrepentant. And the acts of war have been unprecedented, at least since the Nazis took power in the last century. We have any number of reasons to want to share any technology we might have in that regard with others before we gifted it to China.”

Novak didn’t blink the whole time Sathorn spoke.

When he finished, she gave him one of those half-smiles again.

“Well said,” she murmured. “Although if you are right, that snubbing may come at a very high cost, given the nature of this current threat.”

“Which is what?” Sathorn said.

“Nuclear war,” Novak replied.

She said it like she’d said everything else, drumming her fingers on the table as she watched his face, as if gauging his reaction.

When Sathorn didn’t speak, Novak shrugged. The shrug was strange, and seemed to encompass her hand as much as her narrow shoulders.

Again, he thought he heard the trace of a German accent.

“They have threatened to bomb what remains of our cities, one by one, until we hand over this antidote they believe we are keeping from them,” Novak continued in that emotionless voice. “Our President may have no choice but to take extreme measures, as a result. Preemptively, perhaps. Perhaps within the next few days. A week at most.”

Sathorn felt his face lose every shred of its warmth.

His hands felt cold too. He found himself clenching his fingers in reflex, without looking away from Novak’s face. As much as he’d wanted Brooks to make a bold military statement in the wake of C2-77, he hadn’t really wanted it to be this particular statement. Not right now. Hell, he’d figured the time for that was already hell and gone.

“Preemptively?” Fighting to get the saliva back into his mouth, Sathorn adjusted his seat, causing the leather to sigh. “As in––”

“They are deciding that now,” Novak said, still measuring him with her small eyes.

Sathorn looked away from that wrinkled face. He let his eyes focus back on the screens spread around the upper third of the room in a flickering ring of real-time feeds.

“Will she make the decision today?” he said finally.

“I do not know,” Novak said, her voice crisp. “But I suspect yes…she will. The bare bones of it anyway. In fact, I suspect that decision might already have been made.”

Sathorn looked away from the screens and back at her, not hiding his incredulity, but the old woman shocked him by smiling.

“Do not worry yourself,” she said. “We are quite safe here.”

“Do not…” He practically choked on the words. “It could mean extinction. Real extinction. Or were you planning on simply cloning the last few hundred of us down here?”

Her smile lingered, but that colder look returned to her eyes.

Sathorn’s gaze followed the strange muscle movements that rippled through her small body as she shrugged.

“Do you ever think maybe that is inevitable, anyway?” she said casually.

“What is?” Sathorn let out a humorless laugh. “Extinction?”

“Yes,” she said.

At his silence, she gave him another of those small smiles.

“The human race seems to have been asking for such a thing for over a century at least,” she added. “…if not since its genetic inception.”

Staring at her, Sathorn felt a cold finger trail down his spine.

A darker suspicion crept over his mind.

Those weird eyes. The way she talked about human beings.

That fucking accent she tried to hide, that sounded even older than she looked, and she looked older than God.

The fact that she’d wormed her way into the highest corridors of power. The fact that no one seemed to be able to kick her out of the Oval Office…not even Brooks herself.

Maybe it really was all bullshit.

Maybe his pal in the NSA, Dworkin, was right. Dworkin had been drunk, of course. He’d also later claimed to be joking…but maybe he was right with what he’d said. Maybe the human race really had been played by seers all along. Maybe all of the supposed controls––SCARB, the World Court, the Sweeps, all of it––were just a smokescreen built by seers to obscure who was really in charge. A comforting lie that seers let humans tell themselves.

The illusion of control. Nothing masked real power better.

Even as he thought it, Sathorn knew that if he was right, he would never leave this room alive.

When he met the old woman’s gaze, he saw that same knowledge reflected in those blue-gray irises. The smile still toyed at the edges of her nonexistent lips, but the eyes remained shrewd, assessing. Animal-like.

Reptilian.

Sathorn imagined he saw some flicker of curiosity there too, as if she found it interesting that he would have put the pieces of her identity together now, when it was entirely too late. Sathorn watched her look at him and found himself thinking, it was over.

It really was over this time…and not just for him.

The human race was going the way of the dinosaur.

Even as he thought it, Sathorn let out a low chuckle.

No humor lived in the sound at all. It came out strangled, choked.

Still chuckling, he looked down at his thigh…where he now held his sidearm clutched in his hand. He watched it in a strange sort of fascination as he lifted the gun out of his lap. He didn’t send the command to do it. The arm and hand were no longer his.

He imagined he could almost see the puppet strings as Chief Justice Novak caused him to jam the barrel of his Beretta M9 against his own temple. He felt his fingers tighten around the handle, his finger slip into place by the trigger.

Again, without him willing it, he smiled.

She returned his smile, but the coldness never left those stone-like eyes.

“You know something, Novak?” Sathorn said.

He struggled to say even that much, forcing the words out between clenched teeth and that inhuman smile.

She inclined her head, a seer’s motion of acknowledgment.

Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. She looked so alien to him that he couldn’t imagine anyone believing her to be human, not if they really looked at her.

She looked amused now, as cold as the coldest merc iceblood he’d ever met in the field, back in the days when Sathorn had been a Ranger and fighting in the desert. Most of these icebloods got tagged with wet work for a reason, versus sitting in a room somewhere, feeding intel to agents on the ground who pulled the trigger for them.

Most of them were born murderers.

They got off on it. Killing and fucking.

It was all they knew. All they were good for.

Then again, maybe that’s what it took to survive. Maybe that’s why their race would inherit the Earth and the human race would rot from this fucking disease.

Those blue-gray eyes grew a touch colder.

“Yes?” she said. Her voice was crisp, strongly accented now. “What is it, Mr. Secretary? You had something you wished to say to me?”

Sathorn fought to smile.

That time, he couldn’t.

“You really do look like a fucking lizard,” he managed.

If she replied to his words, Sathorn never got to hear it.

The shot echoed in the small room, and Sathorn slumped to the cherry wood table.

“What do you mean, he shot himself?” Brooks frowned, staring at the woman in uniform standing in front of her. “Are you kidding me? Sathorn? Why?”

The woman flushed, her eyes betraying her discomfort.

She didn’t move out of her at-attention position, however, or lower her gaze.

“I don’t know that, sir,” she said. “I can only give you the physical disposition of the act itself. His body was found in Conference Room B, sir, in the Executive Wing. He seems to have disabled the surveillance in there before he did it, but we have no reason to suspect foul play. He had carbon residue on his fingers and his fingerprints were the only ones found on––”

“Yeah, okay, okay…” Brooks waved her off, grimacing. “Who found him?”

“Chief Justice Novak, sir.”

“Novak,” she muttered. “Figures.”

“Sir?”

Exhaling, Brooks averted her gaze, placing her hands on her hips.

President Moira Aisha Brooks––“Moi” to her friends, of which there were precious few these days and “Moisha” to her parents, who had been confirmed dead two months ago along with most of the people Brooks grew up with in that dingy suburb of Detroit––grimaced. She didn’t comment, however. Instead she turned from the Marine altogether, looking out over the sunken floor command center from the catwalk balcony where she stood.

“Sir…” the Marine began.