Top of the hour. Bottom of the hour. Things always happened.

  As the clock read midnight, I stayed low and jogged with a limp to the stairwell, rapidly climbing without slowing down. My feet were like pillows on the grated metal steps. Using my hands on the rails to lighten my footfalls, I was standing outside the exit door, which had a vertical rectangular wire mesh window, like you might see at an elementary school.

  As I tested the door to the interior, it opened. I used my knife to jab the guard in the neck as I covered his mouth. He was a big man and fought my grip, but I was filled with rage. Whoever got in my way would be an unfortunate pawn taken off the board. Blanc and Drewson would pay for harming my daughter, and I would fight to my last breath seeking vengeance. He threw a couple of elbows into my bruised and broken ribs, but he weakened quickly as he bled out. Holding the knife in place as blood oozed across my tactical gloves, I dragged the body to the landing and laid him there. Beyond the man dying at my feet, I assumed I was undetected, and that we had the element of strategic surprise, the rumors of our deaths being slightly exaggerated and still working to our advantage.

  The wind howled. Metal banged on metal. The crane swung as it lifted heavy crates. The lock clicked open, and I pulled the door partially ajar, sliding my body through the gap as quietly as possible. The hallway reeked of new paint, wood, and drywall. All of this was a work in progress.

  Men were talking loudly in an open door room near the middle of the hall, which was a long, straight, and brightly lit corridor. Mahegan appeared at the opposite end, as if we were dueling from fifty meters away. I imagined he had an encounter similar to mine. He stood there in all his bulk looking like the monster that Misha believed him to be. His face was painted black. His hands flexed in and out like two beating hearts. His eyes were focused on victory.

  I lifted my rifle and began moving toward the conference room. Mahegan did the same. We braced with our backs to the conference room and listened to the conversation.

  “Why on earth did you put me in the Hôtel du Palais, Aurelius? It was dreadful,” Evelyn said.

  “Drewson here did that. Quit stalling, Evelyn. Modify the code. Now,” Blanc demanded.

  “I’ll do no such thing,” Evelyn sniffed. “Garrett gets Phalanx and Sharpstone. It’s as simple as that. Most important, it is what your father wanted.”

  “It is my company. I built it! All of it.” His voice rose and he was angry.

  “You can’t change your father’s will, Aurelius. The code is the code. He had it written in blockchain, being the techie that he turned out to be.”

  “You’re the greatest cryptologist in the world. You can fix it for me.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. Misha has it secured in a crypto vault. I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.”

  A hand slammed down on a table or a wall.

  “Fix it now!”

  “No. The only way you could get the entire company would be to kill Garrett Sinclair, and even you aren’t that depraved.”

  There was a long moment of silence. I looked at Mahegan across the glassed doors. We locked eyes. I shook my head slowly as if to say, “No, not yet.”

  “Tell me you didn’t kill Garrett Sinclair,” Evelyn said.

  “It was a terrible accident. You must believe me when I tell you that I didn’t mean to, Evelyn,” Blanc said. “Mitch here can confirm that, can’t you?”

  “Coop left the company to Garrett, to inherit his fifty-one percent when he retired. And you’ve built this … this monstrosity on Coop’s land. Garrett’s land. France’s gift to America as a thank-you for saving our country. And now you’ve killed him?”

  “Well, that’s irrelevant now,” Drewson said. “As I get Sinclair’s forty-nine percent.”

  “Shut up, Mitch. I didn’t kill Sinclair. There was an accident, but it appears that he is dead.”

  “You can’t be serious!” Evelyn spat.

  Neither man said anything.

  “Unbelievable. Well, then, his children will inherit all of this. Phalanx. Sharpstone. Whatever it is that you’re doing here. Everything. From what I understand Reagan is quite intelligent and enterprising,” she said.

  There was another long pause.

  “Oh no. No,” Evelyn said. “You killed his children, too?”

  “The accident killed his entire team,” Drewson said. “Including Brad and Reagan. Very sad. They’re exhuming the bodies as we speak.”

  “You bastard!” Evelyn spat.

  Blanc chuckled. “Yeah, you got the bastard part right.” After a pause, he shouted, “Now fix the code!”

  “You had Drewson do this so that you could avoid the slayer rule? I noticed you recorded that call with this imbecile. That’s why. So you had proof you were helping Garrett. Showing Drewson as a competitor helped you portray him as someone to whom you aren’t closely tied. Unbelievable. I thought better of you, Aurelius.” Evelyn paused and said, “And now that I know this, you’ll have to kill me. I really did think better of you.”

  “You were wrong to do so,” Blanc said.

  A phone rang inside the conference room. Drewson answered.

  “That’s not possible,” he said. “Keep looking!”

  “What?” Blanc asked.

  “The excavation team found a bag of cell phones by the exit,” Blanc said, breathlessly. “And except for our guys, no bodies.”

  32

  I NODDED AT MAHEGAN, and we spun into the conference room to find Blanc with a pistol aimed at Evelyn.

  There was a MacBook open on the conference room table. The large monitor on the wall showed a black screen with a series of commands beneath a phrase.

  The Phalanx Code.

  “Fix it now!” Blanc shouted before he had noticed us.

  She was standing, hands loosely bound to her front so that she could work the keyboard.

  “Drop the pistol, Blanc,” I said, but I was focused on the left corner. Mahegan had the right corner. We had entered the room low using a standard battle drill with sectors of fire, executing a “friend or foe” drill knowing that there would be more security inside the conference room. It was a good thing we did.

  Stepping from the corner was the tall woman named Cyrilla that Misha had shown me in the video and who I had seen on Blanc’s New York City rooftop. She was holding a French assault rifle at eye level. I didn’t expect her to hesitate, which she didn’t. The rifle spat automatic fire, which stitched the door above us as we dove. Another guard appeared from the opposite corner, and we were caught in an ambush. Because we had come in low and focused on the corners, our first shots were at the guards, who were wearing body armor. I emptied a magazine on Cyrilla, and it sounded like Mahegan did the same on her counterpart in the opposite corner. In a fluid movement I dropped the empty magazine on the floor and snapped another fully loaded one into place. Neither Cyrilla nor the other sentry were moving, so I shifted my focus to Blanc and Drewson.

  Blanc was slack-jawed and wide-eyed, motionless, as if in shock. Drewson, who had no weapon, lunged to the floor. Evelyn used the back of her bound hands and this moment of chaos to slap Blanc’s pistol away from her face. Still, he regained his composure and moved behind Evelyn, aiming the pistol now at us. Blanc began backing away with Evelyn, snapping rounds in our direction. Mahegan fired on Drewson as the billionaire went for the guard’s gun nearest him, causing Drewson to scramble in the opposite direction.

  As we clambered to our feet, Blanc hauled Evelyn through an exit, followed by Drewson, whom I tackled as his leg got caught in the door. Mahegan was trying to get past us, but it was impossible. I flipped open the bloody Blackhawk knife from my outer tactical vest and stabbed the tip into the side of Drewson’s neck much as I had just done to the guard on the landing. The blood spray convinced me that I had severed the carotid artery and I wasted no more time on him.

  I then ran down the steps with Jake Mahegan behind me. Blanc had locked the metal door to the chip plant behind him. Through the large Plexiglas window I could see he was holding Evelyn against his body as he backed into the center of the factory, half of which was operational. There were dozens of large silver machines the size of shipping containers with complex wiring and tubing, glassed-in bubbles, and high-velocity water nozzles. Fifty or so machinists and scientists were operating the machines, some holding clipboards, others inspecting the gear. Above them were large vats of solvents, fifty-gallon drums of chemicals, and other liquids with FLAMMABLE written in red letters on the sides.

  The door was locked. Mahegan put a boot through the weaker wooden doorjamb, once, twice, and it buckled and splintered a third time before spinning open. We pushed through as Blanc fired his pistol at us as we spilled onto the factory floor. The sparking bullets reminded me of the many highly combustible materials mixed in with the machinery, which was operating at high temperatures.

  Some of the employees dove to the concrete flooring while others were oblivious to the gunshots, which could have sounded like a hammer or piston on one of the shaper, grinder, or prober machines. Mahegan was taking aim on Blanc, but there was no shot without endangering Evelyn. Blanc snapped off a few more rounds, each one sparking until finally a blue flame ran along a set of piping above us and enveloped one of the wafer dicing machines. Because the solvents were pyrophoric, once they mixed with oxygen, the chain reaction of fires leaped from one machine to the next.

  Soon, a ring of fire enveloped us as Blanc dragged Evelyn through a door that led to the unfinished part of the building. Opening the door and allowing the howling wind into the manufacturing area spread the fire to the point that everything was ablaze. The employees were trapped inside the circle of fire while Mahegan and I had an exit back into the transition area and the conference room. Smoke billowed. The chemicals were so thick, it was difficult to breathe.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Mahegan as I donned a protective mask from my small rucksack.

  Mahegan did the same as we waded into the group of huddled employees and began directing them into the metal staircase beyond the double doors and into the airplane hangar. Some followed under their own power, while others were already unconscious from the fumes and needed to be carried. We made several trips, but the smoke became so thick, by the third venture into the chaos I couldn’t see Mahegan anymore. I frantically searched through the chemical fog until I tripped over two people crawling to stay low. I helped them to the hangar and went back in for Mahegan but couldn’t find him. My mask was melting from the heat, but I made one more trip into the inferno, bringing with me two women who were screaming because their lab coats were on fire. They had been hugging each other in terror as they rolled on the floor trying to extinguish the flames, not realizing the floor was a blue flame of combusted solvents. My gloves and mask were smoking and unusable. When I removed my protective mask, the air smelled of burnt flesh and hair.

  In the hangar, I bent over and took several deep breaths, then elevated and counted twenty-eight people either unconscious or milling around aimlessly.

  None were Jake Mahegan.

  Some were burned beyond recognition but still alive and wailing at the top of their scorched lungs.

  A man ran into the hangar shouting something unintelligible. I grabbed him by his lab coat and said, “Appellez les ambulances et médecins!” Call the ambulances and doctors!

  “Oui! Oui!” he said. Grasping his face in his hands, he said, “Je suis le contremaître.” I am the foreman.

  I looked frantically for Mahegan. The entire facility was an inferno now and the able-bodied employees were dragging the burn victims from the hangar onto the taxiway as police and ambulances began to arrive. Standing on the apron of the airfield, I watched the four-story semiconductor facility fold in on itself and collapse as the fire engulfed everything.

  I walked the line of incapacitated bodies, some covered with sheets, looking for Jake and praying he had found a way to survive. Back and forth. No one was his size. I didn’t see him beneath any of the sheets. I began shouting, “Le grand homme?! Le grand homme?!”

  No one had seen the big man. The fire spat up a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion and in my fog of a mind I wondered if it was Jake’s spirit.

  Across the runway at the two-story farmhouse, Blanc was limping next to a four-door pickup truck after shutting the rear driver’s-side door. I darted across the asphalt airfield, sprinting as fast as I could. At the last moment, I dove into the open bed of the truck. He peeled out, perhaps not realizing I was an unwelcome passenger.

  I stayed low in the truck bed as he barreled along narrow, winding roads. The first drops of rain began to fall, and I had lost all communications. Everything except my outer tactical vest had either fallen off my gear or melted in the melee. I slid to the back of the cab and risked a peek into the vehicle. Inside were Blanc, who was driving, and Evelyn, who was in the back with her wrists and ankles bound with rope.

  He swerved hard and I slid into the side of the pickup with a loud thud. The wind was still screaming across the plain and intensified as Blanc dipped into the low ground spanning the Carentan canals and then rose onto the coastal road high above the Atlantic Ocean. I saw a sign for Grandcamp-Maisy slip by as the rain began lashing down in sheets.

  Police cars and ambulances raced toward the fire at the semiconductor plant and had blocked off the major arteries so the medical personnel could get to the mass casualty scene. Blanc kept turning left at police roadblocks until he passed through Grandcamp-Maisy, a coastal town overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Flashing lights beckoned in the distance on this road, also, forcing Blanc to make another turn until he came to an abrupt, skidding halt, tossing me into the rails of the pickup bed.

  I rolled over the edge on the passenger side, landing softly on the ground, as Blanc opened the back door behind the driver’s seat and shouted, “Evelyn!” He dragged her onto the asphalt of what appeared to be a parking lot with painted lines, though in the rain it was difficult to tell. My ribs bit at me as I limped to the back of the truck. Red and blue lights flashed in the distance. Engines whined and roared.

  To the left was a large ellipse and concrete bunker. Across the bed of the pickup, I could see Blanc dragging a bound Evelyn Champollion onto the grass. I retrieved my SIG Sauer from its holster on my hip and jogged into the wall of water raining down from the angry clouds rolling over the bluffs. I passed a marker dedicated to the Second Ranger Battalion and realized we were at Pointe du Hoc.

  Blanc was standing on the bluff wrestling with Evelyn, who had managed to free her binds from her legs. She had dropped to the ground and was kicking him. Blanc lunged onto her and shouted, “Réparez le code!” Fix the code!

  “Go to hell, Aurelius,” Evelyn shouted. “You have destroyed everything that was given to you!”

  “Phalanx is mine! I built it all! It is mine!”

  I aimed but again couldn’t shoot without endangering Evelyn, so I sprinted in their direction from about twenty meters away. Blanc stood her up and shoved a pistol under her chin, shouting, “Réparez. Le. Code!”

  She was pressed against him, her wrists bound, as if in prayer. One of Blanc’s arms was locked around her torso, the other had the gun cocked under her chin.

  I angled my charge so that I would be tackling them away from the cliff, but best laid plans often unravel quickly. Blanc noticed me and spun toward the cliff, eliminating my angle. I collided with Blanc and Evelyn simultaneously. Evelyn slid toward the cliff, and I snagged the rope binding her wrists, pulling her onto the concrete slab that had at one time been a German pillbox. She rolled onto the cement as Blanc shot me. The bullet hit my left shoulder like a full swing from a Hank Aaron baseball bat. It spun me around to one knee.

  Blanc, ever confident, walked up to where I was kneeling and reflexively holding my shoulder with my gun hand. Rain pelted down. My shoulder oozed blood. I locked eyes with my half uncle.

  As he raised the pistol, an engine whined, sounding like a chain saw. A bright light shined on us. The rain poured down our faces. Blanc’s eyelids were nearly shut, shielding his eyes from the rain and the spotlight.

  His pistol continued to rise. I swept my right arm against his, backhanding him in the face. His pistol fired. His hand bucked with the recoil. The bullet whipped past my face and the flame from the barrel singed my right cheek. I reared back instinctively, leaving an opening for Blanc to land a roundhouse kick into my wounded shoulder and push me to the edge of the cliff.

  I fell, my face slapping into the wet concrete, water sluicing onto me as it coursed over the bluff. I was wounded worse than I thought. My mind swooned, but I rose to one knee and cupped Blanc’s ankle, picking it up and causing him to spin backward. He collapsed toward me, and I punched him with a weak right jab. I fumbled with my knife, opening the blade just in time to slice Blanc’s face.

  He rolled away and I followed, but we were out of land. The sensation of falling swirled in my mind as I thought of Reagan almost dying at the whims of this madman, related or not. I thought of Coop’s prestige and wisdom in what he had done by helping a child he could hardly be there for and helping a grandson he nourished and raised. And I thought of Coop climbing in this very spot behind his commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder. Their courage and bravery in the face of certain death.

  There’s no luck in living, Garrett.

  Indeed.

  Coop’s gift would pass on to Reagan and Brad, and as I plummeted, that gave me great peace. I thought of Mahegan and Hobart and Van Dreeves and Sally McCool and all of the Dagger team.

  And I thought of Melissa. As the Allman Brothers song went, “Lord, in his deepest dreams, the gypsy flies with Sweet Melissa…”

  I was flying with my sweet Melissa after living a gypsy life of constant travel and deployments, but it had been a good life, filled with meaning and purpose. I had done the best I could.