tried to encompass all the activity of the Mount Rushmore security office, while local police, Highway Patrol, Park Police, rangers, emergency medical personnel, and even officers from the local Air Force base struggled to proceed.
“Nothing,” Gensler told the sheriff. “Just trying to collect my thoughts. Christ, I’m just trying to think thoughts.”
The minutes following the attack were chaos, as tourists screamed and ran in fear of further explosions. Thankfully there were none, and there was protocol to follow, which Gensler had his staff practice monthly. But others had protocol to follow as well, and the park was locked down within the half hour—state police interviewing every visitor while those injured in the panic were tended to.
CIA and FBI agents were on their way, but Larry Michaels from the National Security Agency’s Q Directorate was already on scene. When Gensler had asked how he had arrived so quickly, he admitted to being on vacation with his family.
“Yeah, you’ll have to have your thoughts collected,” Michaels said. “These monsters not only used a child to carry a bomb but they stained this—what did Franklin Roosevelt call it?”
“The Shrine of Democracy,” Gensler reminded him. “When he officially opened it.” The man must’ve paid some attention during his vacationing tour.
“Yeah,” Michaels drawled, trying, like everyone else, to get his head around it. “The same year the Second World War started, right?”
Gensler nodded absently.
“Well…no matter what your thoughts, you’ll probably get shit-canned for this.”
Gensler looked at the NSA man sharply, but his words belied his angry gaze. “I probably should get shit-canned for this,” the former Marine snapped. “My watch, my fault.”
“Bernie,” Pamela Chinoa interrupted. She had been the one on duty at the surveillance screens when it happened. She had been the one who gasped. “We checked and rechecked the footage from every possible approach. No one got by. No one even appeared.”
Gensler couldn’t disagree. He had pored over the footage himself, as many times as he could once he felt certain his staff had the turmoil under control. “But still somehow they got up there,” he said bitterly. “And two are still missing while two of our own are still dead.”
Chinoa’s mouth shut and grew tight, her eyes watering. The two rangers who had appeared at the last second were the victims, their fronts torn apart—seemingly from the explosion’s shrapnel.
“How could they have gotten up there?” Gensler seethed. “Why weren’t they killed by the explosion too? Worse, how could they get out again?”
“Worse?” Michaels snorted. “How is that worse?”
“Because,” Gensler snarled at him, “this time we were on alert.”
Michaels shrugged and sniffed. “They must’ve slipped out in the panic.”
“We were locked down,” Gensler said almost to himself. “No one was getting in, yet they somehow got out. And no one saw them either way.”
“We sure as hell saw what they did,” Michaels said, looking at his cellphone screen. “The visitors might not be able to get to their cars yet, but even with the Wi-Fi shut down, tourists’ videos of the explosion are already all over the net.”
Gensler looked up abruptly. If there was enough coverage that videos could get out, any call he needed to make might go out as well. It might be picked up by any manner of surveillance device, but that didn’t bother the former Marine in the slightest.
“Pam,” he said, all but snapping to attention, “I’ll be in my office. Let me know if anyone needs me.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, but he was already on his way out of the security room, his thumb dancing on his phone screen.
As he strode down the hall, surveying the activity outside, he felt a swell of pride mingling with his misery. His staff and the local authorities were working together at prime efficiency. Something terrible, inexplicably terrible, had happened, but the response was more than he could have hoped, or asked, for. He prayed that it continued.
A good sign was that the person he was calling answered on the first ring.
“Chuck,” Gensler said. “You’ve heard?”
“I’ve heard,” retired General Charles Leonidas Lancaster replied. Unbeknownst to Gensler, he was replying from Tashkurgan, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China. “I’m watching the video now.”
“Chuck,” Gensler continued with immediate confidence born of long experience. “I’ve checked our surveillance footage closely and I can’t tell if it was the juice carton or not.”
Lancaster paused a microsecond longer than normal. “Well,” he said evenly, “if the explosive wasn’t in the juice carton—”
Gensler interrupted. “Didn’t you tell me about a report you read where a soldier swore his superior officer wasn’t shot, but exploded from the inside? It was in Syria, I think.”
“Yemen,” Lancaster corrected. “Yes, I did. And I know just the man to talk to about it.”
“Good,” Gensler replied, feeling more hopeful than he had since setting eyes on the angelic blond girl.
“I’ll need a full report, Bernie.”
“You’ll get it,” Gensler promised. “NSA be damned, you’ll get it. But one more thing for now, before this place is overrun—”
“What?” Lancaster asked quickly, knowing how these things went.
“Chuck,” his fellow former Marine said, his voice tight and unbelieving. “There was no blood. A little girl blew up from the inside, and I saw flesh and bone, and even muscle, but no blood. I may be going mad, but I tell you. To my dying day, I’ll swear on a tall stack on Bibles. There was no blood.”
Chapter 2
Josiah Key learned all he needed to know about Sujanpur, Punjab, India, one smoggy afternoon. It was the afternoon when no one seemed surprised to see a naked man run through their festival market carrying a child’s corpse.
The former Marine corporal had come to this village after being assigned to investigate reports of bloodless bodies. He and his Cerberus team had been following the rumors all along the India/Pakistan border—from Attari to Amritsar to Dera Baba Nanak, then finally, to this smallest, humblest, most northern town, which was also closest to the border.
The problem was that they just kept missing the corpses because all the previous cities were quick to get rid of their dead. It wasn’t like Attari, which was the last Indian stop on the Trans-Asian Railway, or Amritsar, the spiritual center of the Sikh religion, or Dera Baba Nanak, which was one of the most sacred Sikh centers, would let any corpse, bloodless or blood-full, gather dust.
By the time Key and his team arrived, the possible evidence had already been cremated. India hardly had time, or room, for the living, let alone the dead. But the mortician at the last stop shared, as all the previous ones had, word of another such body. Thankfully, like many morticians everywhere,
