The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story

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Book: Read The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story for Free Online
Authors: Christopher Farnsworth
those problems. He considered the problem so he could find the most effective solution. That was Cade’s job.
    It was all down to Adam. Where would he go? None of them had shown much imagination so far. After returning from Nevada, they hadn’t gone far. Perhaps that was a side effect of the change they’d made inside themselves. Perhaps their time was limited before they burned.
    Or perhaps they were simply too eager to show the world what they could do.
    Either way, it led him to believe the last two would not go far. But Adam would want to make a statement. Especially now that Zach had spoiled the fear and panic of the mall attack by turning it into an accident in the eyes of the public.
    Adam wanted people to know they were not safe. That he could walk past any obstacle and burn them into nothingness. This was a boy raised on terror alerts and media panics. What would be the best place to spread fear? Where would he find his next mass of humanity, his next group of victims? Sheep, huddled behind fences, believing that made them safe from the wolves.
    No one was ever safe, Cade knew.
    And suddenly, he had the answer.
    He swung the car into a U-turn on the freeway. It snapped Zach out of his reverie.
    “Cade, what the hell?”
    “The airport,” Cade said. “They’re going to attack the airport.”
     
    
     
    Logan International Airport was a zoo at the best of times. With the theater bombing, and the freak explosion at the mall — Zach’s spin on that was holding — people were even more tense.
    But they still had places to go, and they’d paid too much for th eir tickets, and they weren’t about to lose their spot on the 7:40 a.m. shuttle to JFK just because some idiot blew himself to bits. So they got out of their taxis, or kissed their loved ones goodbye at the curb, pulled their carrier bags behind them as they rushed to stand in line along with thousands of people just like them.
    Thousands. All moving in and out of the doors and crammed into waiting areas and stuck in the extra-long lines at the TSA checkpoints.
    There were so many of them, Zach realized. So many faces, it inspired vertigo.
    He stood in Logan’s central security office, watching them all on over a dozen small high-definition screens, cycling through every angle of the airport’s security cameras on a three-second rotation. There were hundreds of feeds and thousands of images per minute, arranged specially as part of a pilot program to use facial recognition software to track suspected terrorists . Logan was one of the few airports in the nation to have the cameras and the equipment ready.
    The only problem was that the software wasn’t finalized yet. It was still in the debugging phase. Testing wasn’t supposed for another six months.
    Instead, they had Cade.
    He sat at the console for the cameras, running them all manually, his hands a constant blur over the keys. Cade’s eyes scanned the screens, never blinking, never resting for more than a fraction of a second. It didn’t remind Zach of anything as cold and emotionless as a computer. This was more like watching a hawk look for mice from a thousand yards in the air. Pure predator mode.
    Zach hoped it would be enough.
    There was a specially trained Secret Service agent in the room with them, the commander of one of the Secret Service’s Emergency Response Teams. He was in full body armor and gear, with a walkie-talkie tuned to a channel that would alert his team as soon as Cade saw something.
    “We should be setting up sniper positions,” the ERT leader said. He was still unhappy with Zach and Cade running this operation. He’d worked with them in the past, and he was aware Cade was some kind of government special weapon in human form. But he’d never seen Cade in action first-hand. And he wanted to follow standard protocol.
    Zach didn’t answer. He didn’t want to distract Cade.
    “I said, we should set up — ”
    Cade’s eyes didn’t move from the screens when

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