10:07 A.M.
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Dewey pressed “20” and the elevator doors shut as the cab started climbing.
He removed a combat knife, a fixed-blade SEAL Pup, from a sheath at his calf and pried the electrical control panel ajar, bending the corner back. With both hands, he yanked back on the panel and ripped it off the wall, exposing the internal workings of the elevator. He found the wires to the bell and lights, took the blade, and severed them. Immediately, darkness cloaked the elevator.
Dewey crouched in the corner, putting the hilt of the knife between his teeth. His eyes acclimated and he saw a thin seam of light between the two elevator doors as it went higher. He targeted the MP7A1 at the seam of light. Dewey found—in his mind—a shooting seam between the elevator doors, and waited. A square opening no bigger than a deck of cards. He targeted the silencer into the mental aperture, completely still. The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened and he prepared to fire.
Nothing happened for several moments. He stared from the back corner of the elevator and listened in silence. He heard alarms in the distance, on other floors, but nothing on this floor, it was a ghost town. After several silent moments, the doors slid shut. The elevator remained sitting there, and Dewey acclimated to his shooting point by the trails of light around the edges of the elevator cab, cast through seams around the now closed doors. He waited a half minute, and still the doors remained shut.
He listened, feeling each passing second like a belt whipping across his back. He could hear nothing. Inside the dark cab, only the occasional creak of a cable somewhere spoiled the silence.
In the background was the incessant wail of emergency alarms inside the building.
Then the doors opened.
Dewey pressed his finger harder against the trigger, though he didn’t fire. There was nothing there, just an empty corridor. After several seconds, the doors shut. He remained fixated on the doors.
Dewey had killed the man who built QUDS, Abu Paria, in a Macau casino. He’d almost died that night in a casino restroom. He’d seen firsthand the savages QUDS made. They had no regard for human life. Yet Dewey learned that night in Macau that he was more of an animal than even Paria.
A few moments later the elevator doors opened and a man stepped quietly into the hallway outside it. He had on a black ski mask and was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and jeans, clutching a PS90. Dewey pumped the trigger, catching the gunman with a bullet to his forehead, then fired a second time, a staccato thump. The second bullet pounded a hole in the man’s chest, kicking him sideways—two fast shots that dropped the gunman with a dull grunt, in a contorted pile on the hallway floor.
Dewey stepped over the dead Iranian into the hallway, SMG clutched in his hands and blade between his teeth.
There were no lights on, but ambient light cast a yellow hue to the silent corridor. He paused and skulked to his right, looking for stairs. As he came to the corner of the elevator bank, he paused and listened. He waited a dozen seconds then rounded the corner, led by the suppressor at the end of the MP7. A red light with the word EXIT shone a few feet away.
Dewey slung the SMG across his back and, with his right hand, took a suppressed Colt M1911A1 semiautomatic .45 caliber pistol from beneath his left armpit. He took the knife from his teeth into his left hand. He entered the stairwell in silence.
The stairs were flashing between utter darkness and bright momentary bursts of red from battery-powered emergency beacons every few seconds.
He moved down the stairs, hugging the back wall and crouching as he descended toward the eighteenth floor. He heard a noise—just the faintest movement of a shoe scratching concrete. There was someone on the stairs below.
Dewey got down on his stomach. He started crawling down the stairs, like an alligator, at the edge of the back wall, trying not to make a noise. Dewey was tilted down the stairs on all fours, his feet up behind him, his hands on the concrete aimed down the stairs, in each hand a weapon. With each step down, he came closer and closer to eighteen. When he turned a corner on his stomach, he saw, in the flashing red light, a shadow. Dewey crawled down the next set of stairs, just before the turn. He let his hands go and his body suddenly started sliding down the stairs. As he passed the corner of the stairwell—sliding painfully—Dewey saw the gunman in the flashing red light. He was looking up the stairwell for him. Dewey pumped the trigger, hitting him in the temple and dropping him.
Gunfire erupted from just below.
Dewey got to his feet and lurched to the outer wall as bullets pelted the ceiling and wall just above him. Dewey holstered the Colt and put the knife in a pocket. He took the MP7 from over his back and found the trigger for the M203, an attachment under the barrel that fired antipersonnel rounds. He pumped the trigger and sent a grenade down at the gunman. The blast was loud and shook the stairs. The grenade hit way past the gunman but the force of the explosion kicked him awkwardly forward, blown out by the grenade. The weight of his momentum carried him over the railing and he tumbled over it and dropped into the chasm, screaming, his skull clanging several times along the sides of the stairwell as he plunged to his death.
He set the fire selector to full auto as he entered the eighteenth floor. He moved quietly down the corridor. There were dozens of people scattered dead on the ground, blood spilled out in maroon pools. Desks were turned over. Shattered glass was everywhere.
Wind pulsed in from a blown-out window.
This was where the missile attack had taken place.
There were bodies everywhere. The killing was fresh. Holes in walls, broken, turned-over furniture, missing limbs, tons of glass, and the remnant smell from the explosion.
As he scanned the large suite for Dellenbaugh, he sensed movement and turned.