The Firefly Read online

  KNOCK-OUT PRAISE FOR P. T. DEUTERMANN AND HIS THRILLERS

  THE FIREFLY

  “Complex…fascinating…Firefly offers strong female characters, a protagonist who should appeal to middle-aged readers of all sexes, fascinating details on covert operations, intriguing interplay among characters and unexpected developments that bend the unspoken rules of who lives and who dies in a thriller…all these elements make Firefly something out of the ordinary.”

  —Washington Post

  “A first-class page turner.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “A deft thriller…impeccably authentic!”

  —Library Journal

  DARKSIDE

  “Gripping…thoroughly absorbing!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Deutermann, as in his seven previous novels, writes page-turners. And this one has a surprise ending—one that comes as a bombshell.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A dead-on sense of place and appealing characters in tight corners…satisfying.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Deutermann has now published seven pounding-pulsers. For this book, he was back at Dahlgren and Mahan, updating his reef points.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  HUNTING SEASON

  “A non-stop page-turner…[an] explosive tour de force…the author exceeds his near-perfect Train Man with this ripped-from-the-headlines plot pitting a middle-aged Rambo with a small but deadly arsenal of spy gadgets against spine-chilling villains, corrupt agency brass, and powerful political forces. Deutermann never sounds a wrong note.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The tale is loaded with political and bureaucratic skullduggery, and there are plenty of well-banked curves and clever twists. A solid read from an author whose own trade craft is every bit as good as that of his characters.”

  —Booklist

  “You think you have read this before. Trust me. You haven’t. And you should…a great read.”

  —Tribune (Greensburg, PA)

  “One of the lasting conventions in thriller-writing involves putting the hero in a situation where the reader is forced to ask, ‘How can he possibly get out of that?’…Deutermann…exploits that convention to the hilt in Hunting Season.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Enough techno and black ops to satisfy Clancy fans, enough double-dealing, back-pedaling, internecine treachery to keep le Carré fans reading and enough plot turns and suspense to keep Crichton and Higgins Clark devotees guessing.”

  —The Florida Times-Union

  “Deutermann’s previous novel, Train Man, was a marvelous, bang-up action novel…in Hunting Season he equals the thrills…Deutermann writes with authority and inventiveness. Add in top-secret gizmos, heroes meaner than villains…and you’ve got one of the best by one of the best at what he does.”

  —Telegraph [Macon, GA]

  “Deutermann has sold three novels to Hollywood already. They’re blind if they pass on this one.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  TRAIN MAN

  “Deutermann delivers his most accomplished thriller yet. Intelligent, expertly detailed and highly suspenseful.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Another solid performance from Deutermann, this time about a train-hating, vengeance-hungry madman and the FBI agents seeking to derail him. Quality entertainment: the details convince, the people are real, the plot twists legitimate.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ZERO OPTION

  “Zero Option delivers…[Deutermann] keeps his story moving briskly.”

  —Proceedings

  “Exciting, moving…a top-notch topical thriller.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Deutermann] returns in top form with this gripping tale…intensely plausible entertainment.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  SWEEPERS

  “An explosive drama…Deutermann fans like myself will be thrilled to see that he keeps getting better.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  “Deutermann’s inside knowledge of the Navy and Pentagon politics, coupled with his likeable protagonists, make this a gripping new addition to his line of naval mysteries.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fine page-turner.”

  —Library Journal

  OFFICIAL PRIVILEGE

  “A tight story line…An attractive combination of murder mystery and naval politics.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “P. T. Deutermann has become one of our best thriller writers…a keenly entertaining, fascinating mystery.”

  —Observer (Florida)

  “Superb plotting and characterization are here, as is suspense and a clear awareness of the dangers and dalliances that can thrive in official Washington…Official Privilege is more than just a whodunit and a Navy story; it is a suspenseful indictment of power politics.”

  —Florida Times-Union

  THE EDGE OF HONOR

  “One heck of an exciting voyage…P. T. Deutermann ships a reader onto the bridge in that special place—where men go down to the sea in ships…a first-rate suspense novel.”

  —Tampa Tribune and Times

  “The Edge of Honor is the rare book that addresses the complexities of war at the front and also at home. The author captures the Vietnam period and its confusion perfectly. Particularly interesting—and horrifying—is the culture depicted on the Hood, a real-life ship around which the novel is set.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “The Edge of Honor…is headed up the bestseller list.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Utterly convincing…Unlike many technothriller writers, he has a good grasp of what makes people tick as well as what makes a modern warship function. Deutermann’s clear mission is to picture Navy life in a depth we have not seen before, and he succeeds brilliantly. His craftsmanship is amazing.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES BY P. T. DEUTERMANN

  Darkside

  Hunting Season

  Train Man

  Zero Option

  Sweepers

  Official Privilege

  The Edge of Honor

  Scorpion in the Sea

  THE FIREFLY

  P. T. DEUTERMANN

  This book is dedicated to all the men and women in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Central Intelligence who will be on the front lines, facing the barbarians, for a long time to come.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Don, Penny, and Laurie for their help with some of the technical aspects of this book, and my editor, George Witte, for his careful editing job. I also made extensive use of the public information Web sites of the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security and am grateful for the efforts put forth by these agencies, one of which is now part of the other, to help civilians understand what they do. I wish to also thank Dr. Marc A. Branham, Ph.D., creator of the Web site The Firefly Files, for letting me excerpt (loosely, from a technical standpoint) some of his fascinating material. That said, this book is entirely a work of fiction. Where real government agencies are depicted, the reader should understand that they are portrayed creatively and not necessarily in a factual manner. Any resemblance of the characters or incidents contained herein to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Fireflies I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chap
ter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Fireflies II

  Fireflies I

  There are many species of firefly illuminating the common summer garden, and while their bioluminescent blinking appears to be completely random, it is not. Most of the blinks we see in the warm night are actually males in search of a mate, and each kind of firefly blinks out a specific code. The females watch. When they see the code of a male of their own species and it suits their purposes, they blink back the same code. The male then approaches for breeding.

  Prologue

  THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF JÄGER HEISMANN AWAKES IN the dimly lighted recovery room of the private cosmetic surgery clinic in northwest Washington, D.C. He blinks rapidly to clear his sticky eyelids and then checks his watch. Almost midnight. Fire time. He closes his eyes for a few more minutes. His brain is not quite clear yet. He hears a nurse attendant come into the room, smooth his covers, check a monitoring panel, and leave. He does a mental situational-awareness check: He’s just been through the last of the eighteen procedures of his year-and-a-half ordeal, this one relatively minor. His lower face and lips are numb and feel swollen to his touch. His lungs feel heavy and there is a soporific wave lapping at the edges of his brain, but otherwise he’s in no pain. He concentrates on deep breathing to disgorge the last remnants of the anesthetic. The monitor behind him beeps encouragingly.

  Sometime later, he opens his eyes and checks his watch again: midnight. His head is just about clear.

  He sits up and swings his legs gingerly out of the bed, then waits for his balance to stabilize. He thinks about what he’s about to do and summons the adrenaline necessary for the task. There’s still a slight heaviness in the bottoms of his lungs, so he does some more deep breathing, shoulders back, focusing on extending his diaphragm. The monitor’s beeping noise accelerates as he comes alive, so he reaches up and hits its power button and then removes all the probes and wire patches from his skin. There’s no IV. He gets up, pulls on his street clothes, still doing the deep breathing and using a towel in his mouth to suppress the sounds of a sudden coughing fit. He goes over to the closet where he stashed his small duffel bag earlier, takes out the liquid Taser gun and its fluid pack, and carefully straps it on. He retrieves his jacket and slips it on loosely over the Taser gear.

  He cracks open the door to the hallway and listens while he arms the Taser unit. He can hear the nurses cleaning up in the surgery, one door away, and the low murmur of the two doctors talking in their office, a door away in the opposite direction. The men first, he decides.

  One more really deep breath. He detects the slight taste of something chemical at the back of his throat. Then he adjusts the portable tank pack and steps out into the hallway, the stubby Taser gun in hand, its fluid tube trailing around to the small of his back. He walks quietly down the hall and pushes the door to the doctors’ private office fully open. They’re still in their scrubs, drinking tea. The fat older Paki is dictating notes into a small machine. They both look up, surprised, although hardly alarmed. They never see the Taser in his hand. He points its boxy snout at the fat one, barely sees the charged stream arc out, and then the swarthy man is going over backward in his chair, flopping onto the carpeted floor like a pregnant fish. Heismann then turns and nails the other one, the young one, only two years out of Karachi, whose mouth is opening to protest. His whole body jumps and then pitches forward into a fetal position on the floor, one heel twitching audibly. Heismann waits a second and then hits each of them again, this time aiming directly for their exposed throats, sending them deep into a stunned stupor.

  The equivalent of 400,000 volts. Nonlethal, they call it. Looks lethal to him. They’re not dead—yet. He hefts the portable tank, tightens one strap, and then goes down the hall to the surgery.

  Two women in green scrubs are loading the autoclave with trays of instruments. One of them sees him and smiles. “You’re up,” she says brightly.

  “Ya,” he mumbles, and drops her with a jolt to the throat. The tray of instruments crashes to the floor. The other, eyes widening, realizes something’s terribly wrong and puts out her hand defensively. Heismann fires the stream right at it and she makes a sound like a turkey as her arm snaps back into her face. She stumbles against the autoclave, then folds to the floor, arm twitching. They both end up on their faces, so he fires a second stream at each one, hitting them in the back of the neck, hearing them grunt in turn. Then he turns off the unit and pockets the Taser. Mentally smiling at the memory of the instructor’s careful warning about that sequence: “Unit off, then pocket it. Never the other way round.” He grabs some plastic gloves out of a box and puts them on.

  He drags the two semiconscious doctors down to the surgery and dumps them around the operating table. Then he drags the nurses over. The younger one has one unfocused eye partially open. She can see him. She groans, but she still can’t move. He begins setting up for the fire, then pauses. If they’d all been working in here, one of them would have seen the fire and tried for the fire extinguisher. Right. He drags the middle-aged nurse by her heels over to the wall near the door, where there’s a fire extinguisher. He puts it near her clenched hands. Then he pulls the pin and fires it in the direction of the operating table’s curtain, covering the floor and lower wall in white powder, where the arson squad should find it. He can see her fingers twitching, but she still can’t move her arms. Plenty of time, although he has the feeling he’s missing something about the nurses.

  Leaving the one nurse by the door, he repositions the remaining “victims” on the other side of the operating table. He glances again at his watch and then sets up the oxygen system for the fire. He’s especially careful with the system lineup, ganging the two green service tanks together to ensure a plentiful supply. There are two spare nitrous-oxide tanks in a separate locker with a glass front panel. These are the ones he swapped out on Sunday, and they are fakes. What looks like metal valves and pressure gauges are instead heavy-gauge plastic, which shortly will melt.

  Making sure the service valves are closed, he uses his cigarette lighter to burn through the oxygen-gas supply hose where it passes right over the wall receptacle. He takes an insulated screwdriver from his little bag and chooses the autoclave’s three-pronged plug as the ignition source. He pulls one of the surgical curtains back to the wall, making sure it’s in contact with the autoclave’s cord. Then he pulls the plug partially out of the wall and touches the hot prong and the ground prong at the same time with the blade of the tool. There’s a nasty snapping noise and a brief flash of arc light, but then the breaker trips down the hall, taking some of the surgery’s lights with it. Dumb design, he thinks as he extracts the lighter again.

  He checks to see that the blade prong has been physically cut by the arc, then ignites the hem of the surgical curtain. This, too, he had replaced on his 2:00 A.M. visit Sunday, substituting plain nylon for the fire-resistant Nomex curtain that had been there. This material flares nicely, first scorching, then whoomping into an ugly flame that quickly blackens the white ceiling tiles above it. He edges toward the door, watching the fire spread. Plenty of starting fuel in this room, with all that plastic ceiling tile, one entire wall of drapes, piles of surgical linens, the plastic laser-equipment cabinets. A dense, boiling cloud of noxious black smoke gathers rapidly along the ceiling like an angry octopus. He watches the sprinkler heads, but they do not fire. Good. Got them all. He opens the door of the locker containing the spare nitrous-oxide bottles, cracks the valves on the bottles, and then cuts on the main oxygen lines. He listens to make sure the hanging hose is hissing at full volume. Then he steps through the door and closes it behind him.

  He figures he has about a minute before the flame-detector alarms go off. They’re embedded in the building’s security system, so he hadn’t been able to cut them off. The sprinklers had been simpler—one maintenance valve. He takes one more thing out of his bag. It’s a badly scorched folding ste
el clipboard. Inside is an equally scorched medical record, with the clinic’s name and address printed on the forms. He removes the record, goes over to the water fountain on the wall, and soaks the cardboard jacket thoroughly. He puts it back into the metal clipboard and drops it into a metal record rack just outside of the surgery’s door. He pats it once. He hopes it survives, because it’s the key deception element—the bait, preburned to leave just the important bits legible.

  He can hear the fire now, and the hallway walls are beginning to tremble. Fluorescent lights are starting to flare and dim, and the handle on the surgery door is hot to the touch. He listens at the vibrating door and smiles when he hears the familiar roar of an oxygen-fed fire. Getting really hot in there, he thinks, and it’s going to get a whole lot hotter, especially when those altered nitrous-oxide bottles join the fun. The heavy plastic heads have been designed to melt through at only five hundred degrees and then release the flammable gas through a venturi nozzle that will feed the fire without exploding all at once. The bottles themselves have been designed to melt at one thousand degrees, which should happen about three to five minutes into the fire. By the time the fire department arrives, the humans in that room will have been reduced to carbonized goo. Something heavy goes down inside the burning surgery, so he grabs his bag, makes sure the doors to the office and records room are wide open, and then leaves through the clinic’s back door. He walks around front, gets in his car, and drives off.

  When he’s two blocks away, he remembers what it was about the nurses and mutters an audible curse in German. The third nurse: the sexy brunette. Thirtysomething, the Ammies would call her. She hadn’t been there tonight. But of course she had seen him previously, several times. She knew what he looked like before those Paki doctors had done their magic. And wasn’t she the record keeper? He slows and pulls over in front of an apartment building, stops the car, turns out the lights, and tries to think. He should have noticed before this. And now he has a big loose end to attend to. The record keeper. Damn!