Read Online Dead Zero by Stephen Hunter - Free Book Online

plus offering his firstborn if necessary to three separate officers—of the Many Pleasures Hotel across from the Beheader’s complex, as seen from a discreetly cruising Predator drone a few thousand feet overhead. Ray’s GPS was talking to its friends in the sky and by magical technical shit beyond the imagination of the colonel the chatter was being intercepted and used to pinpoint the GPS’s location, and the camera in the Predator laid out everything perfectly, despite the readouts all over the screen, the other small screens from other feeds, the gray-green-black color scheme.
    They could see the walled complex, the big main house, the garages out back; they could see the incandescent scuttle of ants that were men, the glow of cooking fires on the property, a silver ribbon where a stream ran through it. Outside the walls, a human glowworm passed to and fro, this being the blur of pedestrian traffic. The white square roofs of the odd vehicles caught in this river of humanity showed clearly. It was the best movie Colonel Laidlaw had ever seen. He watched the hotel, slightly obscured under the cruciform of the locked-on locator, and saw the street scene from his memory, as on two occasions earlier on the tour he’d been a guest of the Beheader.
    “Here comes the Humvee,” said S-2.
    Indeed from one of the smaller buildings in Zarzi’s complex, the square roof of the armored vehicle scuttled forward, scooted between buildings, and came to rest in the driveway along one wall, perhaps thirty yards from the main building. The glowing signatures of underlings scurried this way and that. They seemed to form a security cordon right at the house itself, and it didn’t take long for the door to open—so sharp was the long-range image that the narrow slice of the door, viewed from above, was clearly resolved—and a figure stepped out.
    Laidlaw remembered him: he was a tall, stately man, handsome, always well dressed and exquisitely groomed, who favored Savile Row suits under beautiful lavender pashminas and an elegant if discreet fez of some kind of highly glossy material, possibly silk or velvet, neatly encompassing his silver-gray hair. His vanity was watches. Patek Philippe, Rolex, Fortis, Breitling, always something beautiful and complex. He had deep brown, extremely empathetic eyes.
    “Get ready to die, motherfucker,” said Exec.
    All eyes switched to Ray’s site on the roof, 230 yards out, revealed by the cruciform.
    At that moment, so hot it burned their eyes, so fast it had to be a phenomenon of explosive energy, a smear of white ruptured and radiated outward, sending waves of electronic disturbance across the screen and in another second the image itself wobbled crazily, as if a giant wave had reached and smashed into the light unmanned aircraft, disturbing its equipoise and threatening its survival.
    “S-Two, what the fuck was that?”
    “Detonation,” said S-2.

PART TWO

SEARCH MODE

CASCADE MEADOWS, IDAHO
    32 MILES EAST OF Boise
    1515 HOURS
    SIX MONTHS LATER
    Julie came out of the office where she’d been checking the expenditures at the Missoula barn when she heard the racket, watched the horses jump and shiver in the corral. The helicopter settled slowly out of the blue western sky, and in its rude, invasive way kicked up dust and energy everywhere. It certainly was an impressive machine, a huge green hull with lots of portholes, a bubble canopy behind which sat two men in goggles looking very insectoid, landing gear, struts, insignia— USAF —under the great swirl of the blade at idle. It looked like it had emerged from CNN, on the television set.
    A hatch opened and, as she expected, it was her husband’s friend, a man named Nick Memphis, now a hotshot executive with the FBI. They’d been trying to reach Swagger for some time now, but he wouldn’t talk to them. He was sick of them and, in a way, of the world, or at least the world they represented. He no longer read anything but big, fat World