Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3) Read online

  So why did he have a big knot in the pit of his stomach?

  CHAPTER 29

  The black panel van entered Chinatown coming downhill from the southwest, Harry driving, Spider beside him in the passenger seat, and Janet, Bobby, Paul, and Bronson in the back. They all wore black bulletproof utility vests with “POLICE” and “ICE” stenciled across the front and back. Except for Harry, they all held their MP5s, ready to make a high-speed tactical exit from the vehicle, the submachine guns lengthened by the KAC suppressors.

  Harry turned left off of Kearny onto Pine Street and then right into a maze of narrow side streets.

  “One minute out,” Bobby said.

  Janet felt the familiar cold thrill of coming conflict sharpen her senses, accompanied by a strange uneasiness.

  Harry pulled to a stop at the entrance to a narrow pedestrian lane called Spofford Street. Then, as five team members exited and moved into a tight tactical formation along both sides of the walkway, the van rolled forward, rounded a corner, and disappeared into the night. Harry would stay with the vehicle, ready to come get them when called.

  The squad moved rapidly between the red brick walls flanking the street entrance, Janet and Bronson on the left while Paul and Bobby followed Spider past the interconnecting buildings on the right. Twenty feet down the lane, its nature changed, the plain walls giving way to multicolored interconnecting storefronts. At two hours past midnight, the barred shop windows were mostly dark, as were the three levels of apartments above them.

  Spider held up his left hand and the team stopped. “Goggles on.”

  Janet unclipped her NVGs from her utility vest, slid them onto her head, and switched them on. Suddenly the dark spaces along the dimly lit street became clearly visible in different shades of green.

  The team moved quickly past several more shops, coming to a halt beneath one of the many fire escapes that lined the side of the interconnecting buildings. Janet slung her weapon across her back. Then she and Bronson scrambled up a pipe and onto the fire escape while the rest of the team covered them from below.

  “Video?” Janet asked, speaking softly into the jawbone microphone.

  “Looks calm,” said Harry in her earpiece. “Two bored-looking guards near the tank and a couple of technicians at computers.”

  “Janet,” said Spider. “You and Bronson get up on the roof and come in through the access door. Tell me when you’re inside; then the rest of us will enter from the third-floor fire escape. Stay dark and quiet as long as possible.”

  Climbing silently, Janet and Bronson made their way to the top of the fire escape as the other three team members scrambled up behind them. As she climbed, Janet scanned the opposite rooftop for potential targets, but it was clear. She found the same to be true when she slid the flexible, fiber-optic periscope up over the edge of this building’s flat rooftop.

  “Clear,” she said as she swung her leg up and over.

  Bronson came up behind her silent and fast, covering right as she covered left, both moving in a crouch toward the rooftop access door twenty feet to their front. Assuming a kneeling position to the right of the door, Janet covered Bronson as he applied the small torsion wrench and snap gun to the door lock. She heard three soft clicks, saw Bronson turn the cylinder, and heard the door move slightly open, though not as silently as she would have wished.

  Again Janet spoke into her jaw microphone. “Going in now.”

  Bronson pulled the door open and Janet went in fast, finding herself at the top of an empty stairwell.

  “Top of stairwell clear,” she said.

  Then they were both inside and moving down, MP5s ready to fire. In her ear, Janet heard Spider’s calm voice. “Going in.”

  CHAPTER 30

  With Gan Liu standing to his left, practically quaking with desire to release three dozen heavily armed triad gang members who waited in the surrounding buildings, Qiang Chu studied the display on his mini-tablet. Four men and a woman wearing ICE vests had just entered the Green Dragon Dry Cleaners building, two through the roof and three more through the third-floor fire escape.

  Qiang spoke into his secure cell phone. “Make it dark.”

  Watching from a third-floor apartment across the street from where the feds had just entered, Qiang saw San Francisco’s city lights go out. He knew that the Chinese hackers working from the Hayward facility were some of the world’s best, but Jamal Glover was incredible. Right now, using the backdoors Jamal had provided, the Chinese hackers were taking down power, water, phones, cell phones, and emergency communications throughout the city.

  In thirty seconds Qiang would release the Bay Triad on the unsuspecting federal agents working their way down into that dry-cleaning facility, but the ensuing gun battle would bring no police response. Right now, like every other city emergency department, the San Francisco PD would be scrambling to figure out what the hell had just happened to their city.

  CHAPTER 31

  “What the hell just happened?” Admiral Riles’s voice carried the same disbelief that numbed Levi.

  Levi turned to look at Dr. David Kurtz, who scanned a sixty-degree fan of OLED monitors that surrounded his workstation.

  When Kurtz raised his eyes, it seemed to Levi that the NSA’s chief computer scientist’s mop of gray hair had suddenly gotten wilder.

  “We’ve lost San Francisco!”

  Riles turned to face Dr. Kurtz. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean everything. Communications, power, utilities, emergency services. Everything just dropped off the grid.”

  Levi felt his throat tighten. “What about Oakland?”

  “Oakland’s fine.”

  “Give me a satellite view,” Riles said, stepping around behind Kurtz.

  Over the intercom, Levi heard the confused babble and shocked surprise coming from the Dirty Dozen in the War Room below.

  He thumbed a switch on his microphone. “Focus people! Caroline, get me back my satellite comm link to our team and I mean right now! I want the rest of you working on getting into the power and communications grids. Make it happen.”

  When Levi shifted his gaze to the satellite video displayed on Dr. Kurtz’s central screen, he sucked in his breath. “Jesus Christ!”

  San Francisco was as dark as North Korea.

  CHAPTER 32

  Sitting atop the Honda Shadow, looking down Clay Street toward the distant lights of the Transamerica Pyramid Center, Jack Gregory was fighting a losing battle with himself and he knew it. No matter how much he told himself that he needed to follow orders and let Spider and Janet’s NSA team do its job without outside interference, he couldn’t summon the self-control to force himself to comply.

  Then the lights went out. Not just on this block, but in every part of the city that was visible from his hilltop vantage point.

  The adrenaline rush that flooded Jack’s limbic system ended all internal debate and put him in motion toward the danger that called to him from Chinatown. It was ultra-stupid. He was on a motorcycle armed with only his Heckler & Koch pistol, the black-bladed Gerber Guardian combat dagger, and a throwing knife. And if that strange inner sense that pulled him relentlessly toward danger was correct, he was headed straight into a Montezuma shitstorm.

  Racing down the dark city street, Jack banked hard onto Grant, welcomed to the Chinese neighborhood by the sound of nearby gunfire. Not just a smattering—it sounded like a full-on war zone. A hundred feet from the entrance to Spofford Street where the gunfire seemed concentrated, Jack skidded to a stop, removed his helmet, and dismounted.

  With a rush that only raw adrenaline could provide, Jack entered the twelve-foot-wide pedestrian path at a dead run, jumped to catch a foot on the nearest window ledge, and propelled himself up to the first of many fire escapes that decorated the sides of this block-long building. Although he’d left the night-vision goggles behind, Jack
could sense the chaotic attack on the shop a half block ahead. Leaping over the railing, Jack launched himself across an open space, caught the edge of the next fire escape, swung and climbed, just one of the many bodies that swarmed toward the openings into the targeted building.

  Then, with a familiar red haze misting his vision, Jack surrendered to the dark entity within.

  CHAPTER 33

  Having rapidly cleared the upper three floors, the team had found only vacant apartments, something that raised all kinds of red flags in Janet’s mind. When the city lights that filtered in through the outside windows went out, the bad feeling in Janet’s gut suddenly got a hell of a lot worse.

  The cascade of gunfire that shattered the windows confirmed her growing fear that they’d been led into a trap.

  “Get down to the first floor,” Spider yelled. “Grab Jamal and get the hell out of here.”

  Staying low, Janet was the first to reach the stairwell, with Bobby Daniels right on her heels. Without hesitation, Janet bounded down the stairs and paused to let Bobby catch up before cracking the door open to toss a flash-bang grenade into the bedlam beyond. Then a bullet struck her high up on the left side of her vest. Its impact knocked her over backwards and she struck her head on the stairwell railing as she fell.

  Stunned, she was barely aware of the light and sound from the percussion grenade, or the other team members that piled through the open door to lay down a base of fire into their attackers. Strong hands grabbed her and dragged her away from the opening.

  Struggling to keep from blacking out, Janet felt those same hands check her body for wounds. In the fall, she’d lost her NVGs. But then she felt them dragged back into place and found herself looking up into Spider Sanchez’s similarly goggled face.

  “The vest stopped the bullet,” he yelled over the sound of the gunfire. “Get back up the stairs and help Paul stop anyone who tries to come down.”

  Then he was gone, disappearing into the dry cleaner shop after Bobby and Bronson. When she climbed back to her feet, a wave of dizziness almost dropped her back to a knee, but she fought through it. She felt blood running down her neck from the cut on the back of her head, but she was standing, so it couldn’t be that serious. Her chest hurt like hell. Hopefully the bullet’s impact hadn’t broken her clavicle.

  Of course, if she didn’t get her ass moving up those stairs to help Paul, someone would come down here to make sure she no longer cared.

  CHAPTER 34

  Jack reached the rooftop, just one of many to do so, and ran toward the point where they bunched at the access door, trying to enter the stairwell that led down into the building. The sound of gunfire from inside made it clear that someone was fighting hard to prevent them from charging down those stairs.

  That way in was no good, but the fire escape called to him, and Jack ran toward it. His black blade filled his hand and he cut the throat of the man at the top of those metal steps. The dying body tumbled through the darkness into the two men on the steps below and Jack came with it, his blade feasting on soft flesh, feeding the adrenaline-fueled rage that powered it, a hunger that could only be sated by blood.

  Jack swung out and down, launching himself into three men who were intent on climbing through the fire escape into the bedlam inside the fourth-floor apartment. Again and again, Jack’s knife plunged and slashed, killing the first two before they realized the person behind them wasn’t one of their own. Despite the thunder of gunfire that echoed from the room, the third man recognized this new danger and spun to meet Jack.

  As if in slow motion, the man’s head turned and his gun followed, a half second too late to save him from the impaling blade. Jack felt the knife slide into the man’s solar plexus to its hilt and heard the gun boom beside his head as his churning legs drove forward, propelling the convulsing body into the group firing down the far hallway.

  Then Jack was among them and their gargling screams joined the cacophony that filled the dark building.

  CHAPTER 35

  “Jamal’s not here. We’re falling back to the stairwell.” Spider’s angry voice crackled through Janet’s earpiece, confirming what she’d feared. They’d been suckered.

  With bullets whining through the stairwell from above and from the room at the end of the fourth-floor hallway, Janet slapped a new magazine into the MP5 and put a bullet through the head that poked around the switchback that led up to the roof.

  Suddenly Harry’s voice was on the radio. “I’m coming to you.”

  “Negative!” Spider said. “That van’s our only way out. I’ll tell you when I want it.”

  A bullet ricocheted off the corner of the wall, spraying concrete shards into Janet’s face, chipping the left lens of her night-vision goggles. She placed an answering three-round burst down the hall.

  The pain in her shoulder felt minor compared to the ache in her head and the accompanying nausea that signaled a concussion. It would be so sweet to just let her consciousness slip away and take the pain and sickness with it. But if she did that, their attackers from the roof and fourth floor would link up and then she wouldn’t be the only one to die.

  With Spider and Bobby holding the first-floor landing while Bronson and Paul controlled the second and third, she had to hold this flank if they were to have any chance at all of getting out of here. Right now she had no idea how she was going to make that happen.

  The change came so suddenly that she almost thought her fevered brain had imagined it. The gunfire from the far room faltered and the screaming began, screams of pain and terror. The eerie nature of those sounds raised the hair on the back of her neck and momentarily stopped the gunfire from above as the sounds echoed out to the roof. It pulled Janet so powerfully that she peeked around the corner before she was aware she was doing it.

  The sight that confronted her brought a gasp to Janet’s lips. At the far end of the hall a figure held another pinned to the wall, repeatedly thrusting a long blade into the man’s stomach. Then, as if he’d only just become aware of her presence, a blood-soaked Jack Gregory let the limp form slump to the floor and turned to face her, his eyes burning white hot through the twin tubes of her NVGs. Jack. You beautiful demon.

  A fresh round of wild gunfire from upstairs brought Janet back to her senses and she squeezed off a half dozen 9mm rounds in that direction. But when she glanced back around the corner, Jack Gregory was gone.

  CHAPTER 36

  Qiang Chu watched the triad assault into the building across the narrow street from the third-floor window, the low-light goggles illuminating the scene as if a bright full moon hung in the sky above. Whipped into a gang frenzy that only the promise of killing federal agents could impart, Asian gangsters threw themselves into the assault with reckless abandon, each one trying to outdo his fellows as they swarmed up the fire escapes. From the street, several of them fired into the dry-cleaning shop as others tore the barred security grate from mounts that had never been designed to endure such a mass assault. When some fell before the gunfire from within, others rushed in to fill the void. In a matter of moments, the quiet Chinatown street had been transformed into a combat zone.

  A movement from the north end of the street drew Qiang’s gaze in that direction. A lone triad member raced to the building, jumped and kicked off of a window ledge, using his momentum to propel him to the next hand or foothold as he sprinted up the side of the building. Qiang doubted that even he could have done better. Although he had no idea who this man was, Qiang intended to recruit him away from the triad as soon as this was over.

  The climber swung himself up onto the roof and for several seconds Qiang lost sight of him. When he reappeared at the top of the fire escape, Qiang saw the knife in his hand and smiled. A man after his own heart. What the climber did next wiped that smile from Qiang’s lips.

  The climber plunged his blade into a gangster who had just reached the top of the fire escape and hurle
d the body into two others. In a nonstop rush, he cut his way through six men and into the room beyond. The realization of what he had just witnessed momentarily froze Qiang.

  The Ripper!

  Qiang Chu felt the veins in his temples throb so hard that they threatened to explode, painting the room with blood. Who the hell is that guy? Moving quickly, Qiang reached the stairwell and descended to the street.

  As he raced toward the action in the opposite building, he couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t the MSS alerted him to such a major threat?

  CHAPTER 37

  Jack saw Janet Price and froze. For a second it seemed that she wouldn’t recognize him, that she would swing the MP5 submachine gun toward him. But she paused, recognition and surprise registering in the part of her face that was visible below her NVGs.

  Jack knew he shouldn’t be able to see those features in the nearly perfect darkness and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just sensed her presence. When he got like this, it was just too hard to tell. In the past he had thought this strange sense was more akin to smell than to vision. But in the end, it just didn’t matter. It was what it was.

  Beyond Janet, the booming echo of renewed gunfire swiveled her head in that direction and the subsequent muzzle flash from her MP5 brought a scream from above. Time to move.

  Switching the black knife to his left hand, Jack drew his gun and charged back to the fire escape. Seeing movement from below, Jack put a single bullet through the head of the man that climbed toward him. His second shot merely winged a second man who dove for cover and Jack used the momentary lull to climb to the roof, fully aware that if Janet failed to react to what he was about to do, his new position would very quickly become untenable. But in the past, Janet had never faltered when she’d had his back and he didn’t think she’d fail him now.