The only evidence that he existed at all was the merchandise he sold; for four years now, all over the world, government raids of terror cells and crime syndicates had been finding the shit, and it wasn’t garden-variety—the guy wasn’t selling Kalashnikovs or cheap knockoffs of Stinger missiles. No, Whiskey was selling classified U.S. military hardware, some of which had never actually been deployed in the field. In a few cases, the stuff had never even been approved for production beyond a few prototypes, which should have been kept under lockdown at secure R & D sites.

How the guy was getting his hands on that kind of stuff, nobody knew. He had to be cutting deals with insiders, manipulating them with carrots and sticks. But if he could do that, it meant he knew his way around the inner workings of the military, just as he did with the FBI.

When that fact became apparent, the hunt for Whiskey Four got shifted into the highest possible gear. Congressional committees met with high level FBI and CIA people behind closed doors, and cut them blank checks with a single, wire-taut string attached: find him and stop him, right fucking now; if the rules get in your way, let us know and we’ll bend them around you.

None of it helped. The money and the blanket-approval made no difference at all. There were simply no tracks in the soil. Whiskey was a ghost—the rumor of a ghost—and in the past four years, the picture of him had become no clearer.

It had become scarier, though—just under a week ago now. That was when chatter started coming in, from informants in half a dozen criminal organizations around the globe. Those scattered reports all said the same thing: Whiskey had gained possession of a weapon system unlike anything ever used in battle before—a weapon that would stun the world. To prove this to potential buyers, he promised to demonstrate it against a civilian target inside the United States. That would happen on a set date, before noon Eastern Time.

The informants providing these leaks had all been reliable in the past. Their handlers were vouching for them at present. The analysts at Langley and Quantico who broke down the data, compared it to other intel, and ran it through the confidence protocols all came back sweating and pale. The threat looked real—as real as anything else that had ended with helicopter footage on CNN and Fox.

That was when the higher-ups went back behind closed doors with the congressional committees, and asked about bending the rules a bit further, or breaking them, or putting them through a wood chipper.