Fire Will Fall Read Online Free PDF

hard copies any that might be the work of a terror cell looking to kill fifty or so people without attracting attention to itself. He then sends them to Hodji Montu, a USIC agent we're tight with.
    I studied the picture of the skeleton in the middle of a dusty road. "What's so great about a dog corpse?"
    He reads Spanish easily and pointed to a line of text under the picture. "Outskirts of Mexico City. Several locals are hysterical. They say the dog fell down in the road sick, and several hours later, this is what it looked like."
    He enlarged the picture two hundred percent, and even in black-and-white I could see the bones lay in some sort of gloppy mound with a few hairs sticking out.
    "Um...
ew?
" I plopped down beside him on my mom's bed—now his bed—yawning. "You know that's bullshit. Bodies don't deteriorate that fast. Aren't Mexican locals given to smoking homegrown marijuana?"
    "They say it is the fourth such incident in as many days. They contacted a photographer from a Mexico City newspaper, who came for this one and photographed the deterioration." He spun up a PDF page that had been off the screen and pointed to a similar picture, only in this one you could still see it had been a dog. Had a tail, had some hair, but some internal organs were already showing.
    "This was shot at hour two." He pointed.
    Fat chance I would escape my usual nightmares tonight. The recurring one was my favorite: My mom reaches out to me through prison bars, crying, "
Tyler, you rat, how could you?
"
    "Why can't you find your weird stories at ten in the morning? How did you even capture this swill?"
    "I surfed," he said.
Duh.
    I said that the Trinity Four are personal to me. The first reason is that as self-proclaimed v-spies, Hamdani and I look for members of ShadowStrike online. We follow them into chat rooms and try to script their chatter, and we give it to USIC. But they're not easy to find, and in the five weeks we've lived and worked here together, our search engines have coughed up
nada.
After ShadowStrike members were arrested in March for the Trinity Falls water poisoning, it seems that all chatter from extremists anywhere on the planet suddenly stifled itself. You'd think ShadowStrike was defunct, if you were an impatient type. But we know more operatives are out there, including two dangerous officers—one a scientist and the other a trained assassin—who escaped Trinity Falls by the hairs on their asses. OmarLoggi and VaporStrike were two log-ins we hunted constantly.
    Our favorite game in the world is trying to find them online. But in the barren wasteland of online intelligence lately, Hamdani succumbs to surfing the news. ShadowStrike specializes in designer germs, hence Hamdani's charming collection of suspected Weapons of Mass Destruction on the wall.
    "Don't be a smart-ass," I begged him. "It's late. How in the hell did you bump into dead dogs in your search for potential terror attacks?"
    He slumped back in the chair, watching the edge of the keypad, blinking. It's the first clue I had that "I surfed" might have been a stalling tactic and not smart-assery.
    His gaze turned to me with those big Pakistani browns, and he said, "I decided I would surf for the germ 'tularemia.'"
    Ah. This is
really
personal. My eyes flew to the photo of the bones and glob pile, then looked down at my hand on the back of his chair. I knew how many scabbies were on that one hand, because I'd counted them a dozen times. Thirty-nine: four between my fingers, one under my pinkie fingernail, eleven on my fingers, thirteen on the back of my hand, and ten on my palm. The rest of our bodies were decorated, too. We have a little more in common with the Trinity Four than that we'd love to see the same guys caught. We had been struck, too, in a different way, though they have no idea.
    "Obviously, this would be a far more stringent mutation of tularemia than what you and I were attacked with," he said.
    "They're
sure
it's tularemia?"
    "So they