Fuse of Armageddon Read Online Free PDF

answered. “You don’t know how bad I need to talk to her.”
    It was bad. Joe was no lawyer or car salesman, but he’d thought this through over the last few days. There would be an opportunity, he’d believed, when the threat of walking away would be the most powerful. This seemed as good a chance as any. And he wanted to talk to Sarah bad enough to take a bullet in the back.
    “Look, grunt—“
    “There’s no looking involved. I talk to my wife, or I walk. Maybe you shoot me; maybe you don’t. But I’m guessing you don’t want to make a bad impression on the other guys. Not here. Not now.”
    “Do you have any idea what’s at stake here?” Saxon asked. “Your wife can wait until the rest of the world knows about us.”
    “She can’t. And won’t. One minute. That’s all I need with her. She’ll swear to secrecy. All I need to do is tell her it’s part of the Lord’s work.”
    A vein pulsed on the side of the commander’s head.
    “All right then,” Patterson said when the answer didn’t come. “I’m walking. Nice and slow. Enough time for you to shoot or call me back. Your choice.”
    “This is not the time for a showdown, Patterson.”
    “That,” Patterson had said, earnest and dead serious, “depends on your viewpoint.”
    That’s when Saxon had handed him the satellite phone, accomplishing the resurrection of Private First Class Joe Patterson. Ten minutes after Patterson ended his call, the last of the pigs had been prepared.
    It was go time.
    Hoover Dam, Nevada • 14:42 GMT
    The cube van with the upside-down dead body was parked in a tourist lot, well away from the Hoover Dam. Even so, someone would have called for a routine check first thing in the morning. Homeland Security and all that. Of course, whoever came down from the dam to check the license plate would have seen the body. The van door had been open when Kate and Frank arrived.
    “You know what I don’t like,” Frank said. “The flies.”
    Kate snorted.
    “What I meant was that I don’t like the fact that the flies are here already.” Frank knew about Kate’s near phobia of flies. “What are the chances this van’s been here for a day or two?”
    “Zilch,” Kate said. Homeland Security again. The Hoover Dam had long been closed to 18-wheelers, forcing drivers to take a route that cost them seventy extra miles. A vehicle parked near the dam for more than two hours was red-flagged for close inspection. After three hours, it was towed. Nobody wanted a big bomb wiping out the dam and every town and city downstream for a hundred miles.
    “So the van hasn’t been here long,” Frank said. “This many flies couldn’t have shown up during the night.”
    “Flies have superpowers. I’m not kidding. They’re evil. They don’t need light.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Frank said. “Gonna file that in the murder book? ‘Flies appeared instantly because they’re evil and know how to use their superpowers.’”
    “Whoever did him did him out in the desert, then. Maybe yesterday or the day before—during the daylight, when the flies were active. The flies were already in the cube van when they drove it here.”
    “Then called it in.”
    “Yeah,” Kate said flatly, thinking about the number the caller had told them to try once they found a body, a number with a DC area code. Kate and Frank would eventually get all the information they needed on it, but it had only been a fifteen-minute drive to the dam, lights flashing, sirens silent. During the drive from Boulder City, they had debated whether to get someone to run the number down immediately but finally decided to wait until verification of a body. There was always a chance the person making the 911 call had hoped to sucker the cops into calling the number to hassle the person’s friend—or enemy—as a practical joke.
    “What about the number?” Frank asked. They’d been partners awhile. Some days, Kate figured he could read her thoughts by the way she twitched her