Code Zero

Chapter One

The philosopher Nietzsche didn’t get it right. He said, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.”

That’s not exactly true.

Or, at least, not all the time.

If you battle monsters you don’t always become a monster.

But you aren’t entirely human anymore, either.

Chapter Two

Some cases start big. Something blows up or someone unleashes a nasty bug and Echo Team hits the ground running. Most of the time, even if we don’t know what the endgame is going to look like, we have some idea of what kind of fight we’re in. And we can usually hear that big clock ticking down to boom time. Other cases are running fights and they end when one side runs out of bullets and the other doesn’t.

I’ve had a lot of both.

This one started weird and stayed weird, and for most of it felt like we were swinging punches at shadows. We didn’t even know what we were fighting until we were right there at the edge of the abyss.

And even then, it wasn’t what we thought it was.

Not until we knew what it was.

Yeah, it was like that.

It started four months ago on one of those sunny days T. S. Eliot wrote about when he said that April was the cruelest month. When spring rains wake the dead bulbs buried in the cold dirt and coax flowers into first blooms. When we look at the flowers we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we’ll join them in the cold ground.

I spent years mourning the dead. Helen. Grace. My friends and colleagues at the Warehouse. Members of my team who fell in battle. All of them in the cold, cold ground.

Now it was April and there were flowers.

In my life there was Junie Flynn. She was the flower of my spring.

As far as we knew, her cancer was in remission, though we were waiting for her last panels. But for right now, the sun shone through yellow curtains and birds sang in the trees.

I sat at a kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the remains of a big slice of apple-pecan pie. The rest of the pie was gone. There was evidence of it in crumbs and beige glob smeared on the floor, on the aluminum pie plate, and on the muzzle of my dog. Ghost. Big white shepherd.

He loves pie.

The mess was considerable. However, I had no intention of cleaning it up. It wasn’t my pie.

It wasn’t my house.

When the actual owner of the house — a Mr. Reginald Boyd — came home and then came storming into the kitchen, he told me, very loudly and with lots of cursing, that it wasn’t my house, my kitchen, or my goddamn pie.

I agreed with those observations. Less so about his accusations that I fornicate with livestock.

Reginald Boyd was a big man gone soft in the middle, like an athlete who has gone to seed. Played some ball in college, hit the gym a bit after that. Started going soft probably around the same time that he started getting paid for stealing some real important shit from work.

“Work” was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Basically a collection of the most dangerous geeks on earth. Except for idiots like Reggie, those geeks try to keep America safe.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” yelled Reginald Boyd.

Ghost, his face covered in apple pie and pecan bits, stood up and showed Boyd how big he was. And how many teeth he had.

I smiled at Boyd and said, “Lower your voice.”

Boyd backed a step away. “You broke into my house.”

“Only technically. I loided the lock with my library card. Loided,” I repeated. “It’s a word, look it up. It means to bypass a lock. You have a two-hundred-dollar dead bolt on your front door and a Mickey Mouse spring lock on the back door. A moron could get in here. So … whereas I got in, I did no actual breaking.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he glared at what was on the table. “You made coffee? And you ate my pie?”

I felt like I was in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears reboot.

“First off, the coffee is Sanka. How the hell can you call yourself an American and all you have in your pantry is powdered decaf? I ought to sic Ghost on you just for that.”

“What—?”

“The pie’s good though,” I continued. “Could use more pecans. Store-bought, am I right? Take a tip and switch to Whole Foods, they have a killer deep-dish apple that’ll make you cry.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

“Very likely,” I admitted.

His hand touched the cell phone clipped to his belt. “Get the hell out before I call—”

I reached under my jacket, slid the Beretta 92F from its clamshell holster, and laid it on the table. “Seriously, Mr. Boyd — actually, may I call you Reggie?”

“Fuck you.”

“Seriously, Reggie, do you really want to reach for that cell phone? I mean — who are you gonna call?”

“I’ll call the fucking cops is who I’ll call.”

“No you won’t.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“’Cause I’m a cop, Einstein,” I said. Which was kind of true. I used to be a cop in Baltimore before I was shanghaied into the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS gig gives me access to credentials from every law enforcement agency from the FBI to local law to the housing police. I need to flash a badge; they give me the right badge. The DMS, though, doesn’t have its own badges.

Boyd eyed me. “You’re no cop.”

“I could be.”

“Bullshit. I’m going to call the cops.”

“No you’re not.”

“You can’t stop me, this is my house.”

I drummed my fingers on the table next to my gun. “Honestly, Reggie, they said you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but come on … Big guy? Big dog? Big gun? You’re armed with a cell phone and a beer gut. How do you think this is going to play out?”

“I’m not afraid of any stupid dog.”

I held up a finger. “Whoa now, Reggie. There are all kinds of lines we can step over. Insulting my dog, however, is a line you do not want to cross. I get weird about that, and you do not want me to get weird on you.”

He stared blankly at me, trying hard to make sense of our encounter. His eyes flicked from me to Ghost — who noisily licked his muzzle — and back to me.

He narrowed his eyes to prove that he was shrewd. “What do you want?”

“What do you think I want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

“No, I don’t know.”

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll give you a hint because you may actually be that stupid.”

He started to open his mouth.

I said, “VaultBreaker.”

His mouth snapped shut.

“Proprietary military software? Am I ringing any bells here?” I asked. “Anything? Anything? Bueller?”

That’s when Reggie Boyd tried to run. He spun around and bolted down the hallway toward the front door.

I took a sip of the coffee. Sighed. Said, “Go ahead.”

Ghost shot after him like a bullet, nails scratching the hallway floorboards, one long, continuous growl trailing behind him.

Reggie didn’t even make it to the front door.

Later, after we were past the screams and first-aid phases, Reggie lay on the couch and I sat on the edge of a La-Z-Boy recliner, my pistol back in its shoulder rig, another cup of the pisswater Sanka cradled between my palms. Ghost was sprawled on the rug pretending to be asleep. The living room was a wreck. Tables overturned, a lamp broken. Bloodstains on the floors and the walls, and one drop on the ceiling — for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how that got there.

My chest ached, though not because of anything Reggie had done. It was scar tissue from bullet wounds I’d received last year during the Majestic Black Book affair. Couple of bullets went in through the armhole opening of my Kevlar and busted up a whole lot of important stuff. I was theoretically back to perfect health, but bullet wounds are not paper cuts. I had to keep working the area or scar tissue would build up in the wrong places. Wrestling Reggie onto the couch helped neither my chest nor my mood.

“We could have done all this in the kitchen,” I said irritably. “We could have had a pizza delivered and talked this through like adults.”

Reggie said nothing.

“Instead you had to do something stupid.”

Nothing.

“That alone should tell you something, man,” I said. “Didn’t your spider sense start to tingle when you found me sitting at your kitchen table? No? Maybe you’re good at your job, Reggie, but beyond that you are as dumb as a box of rubber hammers. You assumed you were being slick and careful, but since I’m here, we can agree that assumptions about your overall slickness are for shit. Ass out of you and me, you know what I’m talking about?”

Nothing.

“The question is, Reggie, what do we do now?”

He turned his face away and buried it in the couch cushions.

Back in Baltimore, Junie was shopping for a dress to go with the killer shoes she bought last week. We were going to see Joe Bonamassa play stinging blues at the Hippodrome. Thinking about that, and about how I was pretty sure I was falling in love with Junie — real love, not the unstructured lust into which I usually fall with the women who pass through my life. I don’t want to get all sappy here, but I was beginning to get the feeling that Junie was the one. The actual one. The one they write cards and movies and love songs about. The kind of “one” I used to make jokes about, as all male outsiders make jokes when they don’t think they’ll ever meet, or perhaps don’t deserve to meet, their one.

All of that was waiting for me once I cleared up a few details with Reggie Boyd.

I leaned over and jabbed him with my finger.

“Reggie? Listen to me now,” I said quietly. “You know I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t in trouble. You know that you’re going to be arrested. We both know that. What we don’t know, what you and I have to decide, is where you go once you’re charged. There are people who want me to take you to a private airstrip so we can send you to Gitmo, where you will never be seen again and from where — I guarantee you — you’ll never return. Personally, I don’t dig that option. I’m not a huge fan of enhanced interrogation. Not unless I’m up against a wall. There’s a wall pretty close, though, and I don’t think it’s in either of our best interests if you push me against it. You dig?”

He didn’t answer, but he lay so still that I could tell he was listening.

“Second option is I bust you through main channels with the NSA. That means you get charged with treason and you’ll spend the next forty years in a supermax prison learning what it means to be a ‘fish.’ It’s not a lesson you want to learn, trust me. If we go that way, I lose control of the situation and less friendly people run your life henceforth.”

Reggie shook his head, still silent.

“Third option is the one I like. Yes, it still ends with you in prison — that’s going to stay on the table, no way around it — but in that option it’s a federal country club prison and you don’t spend every Friday night giving blow jobs to tattooed members of the Aryan Brotherhood. I think you’ll admit that it’s a better option.”

“You’re lying to me,” he mumbled. “You’re going to kill me.”

“If I’d wanted to kill you, Reggie, I wouldn’t have pulled Ghost off of you.”

Ghost opened one eye, looked around, closed it. Made a soft whuff sound.

“We don’t want you dead, Reggie. What we want is for you to become a cooperative person. Totally open, totally willing to share everything you know. That kind of thing opens hearts, Reggie. It earns you Brownie points.”

Reggie said nothing.

“Now, I need to make a phone call, Reggie,” I said. “I need to make that call in the next five minutes. I need to tell my boss that you’re going to cooperate with us. I need to tell him that you’re going to help us plug the leak in the Department of Defense. I need to tell him that you’re going to name names and make connections so that we can make a whole bunch of arrests. And, yes, some of them will go to Gitmo and those that don’t will be doing the shower-room boogie-woogie in supermax. You, however, won’t. You’ll be watching American Idol on cable, eating food nobody’s spit in, and sleeping soundly at night with all of your various orifices unviolated. Not sure if that’s a word, but you get my gist.”

He turned and looked at me, uncertainty and conflict blooming like crabgrass in his eyes. “How do I know I can trust you?” he said in a near-whisper.

I smiled, then reached behind the chair and dragged out a heavy leather valise, opened it, and spilled the contents onto the rug. Reggie stared at what spilled out and his color, already bad, went from pale to green. The light from the one unbroken lamp glinted from the curves and edges of pliers, bone saws, wood rasps, electrical clamps, scalpels, and rolls of duct tape. “Because I didn’t use these.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I know, right?”

“But you fucking brought them! You were going to use those … things on me.”

“Actually,” I said, “I didn’t bring this shit.” Before he could reply I got up and walked over to the small coat closet beside the door. I opened it. Two bodies tumbled out. A third lay twisted inside. “They did.”

Ghost made his whuffing sound again. It sounded like laughter of a very bad kind.

Reggie gagged. Even from where he lay he could see bullet holes and bite marks.

“Two of those guys are North Korean,” I said. “Other guy’s Iranian. They’re working together, which I find interesting as all hell. They came here and began unpacking their party favors. Can you imagine what fun you would have had with them? They’d have had to bury you in separate boxes. Ghost and I dissuaded them.”

I sat down again and gave him my very best smile. The one that crinkles the corners of my eyes and shows a lot of teeth. The one I never show to Junie.

“Now,” I said, “how about we have that talk?”

He licked his lips. “What … what do you want to know?”

Chapter Three

Once he got started I couldn’t shut Reggie Boyd up.

Seriously.

At one point I considered clubbing him unconscious long enough to make a Starbucks run, but I think that would have been hard to justify in my after-action report. He talked and talked and talked. He was Mr. Helpful for the rest of the afternoon.

Part of it was that tool bag. There was some nasty shit there, and Reggie had enough imagination to guess how his afternoon might have gone if I hadn’t showed up. Part of it was the presence of a big man and his nasty dog. And part of it was the fact that he believed me when I said I could cut him a deal that he could, in real point of fact, live with. That much was true because the DMS had been given a lot of latitude to strike such a deal courtesy of Vice President William Collins, who was the nominal head of the CTF, the federal Cybercrimes Task Force. Collins was also a major dickhead in many important ways, but he had powerful friends all through the government. Collins had provided me with papers detailing what I was allowed to offer Reggie in return for actionable information.

Also, I think that part of the reason Reggie cracked was that once he was talking, I think on some level he felt relieved. He was out of it now. Maybe he was of that type who wasn’t suited to be a criminal. Maybe by the time he was fully invested in taking money to sell secrets from DARPA, he realized that this wasn’t a criminal thing, it was a terrorist thing.

It happens. Greed or idealism kicks you in the direction of bad choices because at first it’s all about the money or the politics. None of it’s quite real. At first it’s just data on a flash drive. No fuss, no muss. But then something makes you step back and look at the bigger picture, at the actual intended use of the information you’re selling, and the abstract becomes so crystal clear that its edges can draw blood. That’s when you realize that you, as a part of a larger conspiracy, will be complicit in acts that could kill people. That almost certainly would kill people. Acts that could lead to war.

What was it he sold?

The latest generation of a software package called VaultBreaker.

It’s the absolute bleeding edge of cybersecurity technology. On the surface it was an advanced counterespionage program to keep China, Iran, and North Korea from hacking into our energy grids and shutting them down. That’s been a real threat for the last few years thanks to superhacker groups like Comment Crew, which sounds like a rap band but isn’t. They’re a group of Chinese operators also known as Advanced Personal Threat 1, or APT1, headquartered in a nondescript twelve-story building inside a military compound in a crowded suburb of China’s financial hub, Shanghai. They’ve intruded into banking, credit card companies, power companies, Internet providers, and other places, and our cyberwarfare people have no doubts that these pricks could do us serious harm. It’s a little scary that they’re not even trying to hide, though the Chinese government officially denies their existence. VaultBreaker is designed to both predict attacks and respond to them, and it has some intrusion capabilities that allow it to fight back in creative ways, either by planting viruses or sneaking into attacking systems to rewrite their operating software.

The other thing VaultBreaker was designed to do was attack our own security systems. Sounds nuts, I know, but there’s a logic. Once a new ultrasecure facility was designed, VaultBreaker would be used to try to crack its defenses. Each time it found a hole, the designers of the facility would then be able to address that vulnerability. Reset and replay until there were no holes left to find. Smart stuff.

And from what Bug told me, VaultBreaker was designer to play like a video game. They even hired some top game nerds to play versions of it — in very controlled situations, of course — to see how good it was. What alarmed everyone was that these gamers, most of whom were teenage kids, were better at using VaultBreaker against our best security than most of our security people were. In fact, only two of our geeks were better than the geeks-for-hire. Bug — which surprised no one — and Dr. Artemisia Bliss, a stunningly brilliant computer engineer who’d helped design the system. Bliss was gone now, of course, and VaultBreaker had been revised and upgraded many times since.

That was what Reggie Boyd wanted to sell.

He’d managed to bypass the protections in the system and burn a complete copy. He didn’t have the codes to enable it, but once it was in the hands of hackers like the Comment Crew, VaultBreaker would be broken. Then it could be used for all sorts of fun and games. And by fun and games I mean it could be used to orchestrate a coordinated shut down of more than forty percent of the power grids in the United States, and — and here’s the kicker — neutralize more than half of our missile defense systems. Viruses would be introduced to screw up the rest of the systems, including our satellite early warning systems and all military and civilian air traffic control.

We would be blind, naked, and bent over a barrel.

Nice.

It would also give anyone with enough computer savvy a real chance at cracking the defense systems of ultra-high-security facilities such as the Locker — the world’s most dangerous bioweapons lab — as well as all of our military bases, and every bank in the world.

Vice President Collins gave us a lot of authority to get that program back, even going as far as calling off his long-standing holy war against Mr. Church and the DMS. Suddenly he was our friend and ally. Couldn’t help us enough. Kind of like having Satan ride shotgun with you while you’re driving a Meals on Wheels truck.

Reggie told me that he was scouted by an Asian woman who called herself Mother Night. She was his liaison to a nine-man team of cyberhackers from China along with day players from North Korea and Iran. Axis of Evil, nerd division. Reggie wasn’t sure if Mother Night was a foreign national or not. Nor did he know if she worked for China or was merely acting as a go-between. He was scared of her, though. He told me that five times, though he couldn’t say exactly why, beyond the fact that she “creeped him out.” Very helpful.

He liked her money, though, and apparently five mil is the going price for a man’s soul. Deposited, of course, into a numbered account in the Caymans. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but better men than Reggie have sold their souls for less.

So, once Reggie got going he tried to buy back his soul by telling me everything he knew. He knew a lot. More than he was supposed to know. He may have been stupid in some areas, but not when it came to computers because Reggie hacked his way into the systems of Mother Night’s crew of cybergeeks. He was, however, too stupid to realize that they’d figure that out.

Hence the closet full of dead guys.

Now here’s the clincher. We found out about all this because our computer geeks at the DMS — Bug and his brain trust — had been using MindReader to silently hack the Iranians. This popped up because it’s the kind of nastiness MindReader is programmed to look for.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Once Reggie provided me with a probable address for the team of cyberhackers, I juiced him with enough horse tranquilizer to send him off to la-la land and called for a pickup. After that I made calls to assemble a team to kick their door down.

Then I opened my cell, took a breath, and called Junie to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to go to the theater with her tonight.

“Are you all right?” she asked immediately.

“Right as rain,” I said. “But, I, um … have to work tonight.”

Her response was what she always said, and it said it all. “Come home to me when you can.”

Not just come home.

Come home to her.

“Always,” I promised, and that was no lie.

Chapter Four

Mother Night’s cyberteam was in Arlington, and we hit them hard the following day. Thirty men and women in Kevlar, black battle dress uniforms and ballistics helmets. Echo Team was on point, and we had a hodgepodge of shooters from FBI Hostage Rescue, ATF, local SWAT, and some warm bodies from every alphabet group who could get a man to us by the time we kicked in the door. The Veep made sure some of his CTF gunslingers were there, too. Everybody wanted skin in this game because it looked like an easy win but a damn big one.

The prize was so juicy. A joint Iranian-Chinese — North Korean team of cyberterrorists operating inside the United States. That was like crack to political strategists. The guy from the State Department nearly fell on my shoulder and wept. This gave us all kinds of political leverage. If we could prove official sanction on the part of the Chinese or their allies, then it was an act of war, and nobody wanted to go to war with America and all of its allies. I know North Korea makes a lot of noise about wanting to nuke us, but saber-rattling isn’t the same thing as wanting to duke it out with a country whose military budget exceeds those of the next twelve largest countries combined.

The ideal outcome would be a bloodless sweep of the splinter cell. It would be okay if they fired some shots, and I know that there are some cynical pricks on our own side who would love to spend the currency of martyred Americans, but that wasn’t the plan. We wanted everyone inside to drop their weapons, raise their hands, and come along like contrite schoolboys.

That was Plan A.

Plan B would be determined by how the hostiles reacted, and in a geeks vs. shooters scenario I liked our odds.

The splinter cell was in a suite of offices on the seventh floor of a nine-story office building that was still mostly under construction. There were occupied offices on the first two floors and sporadic occupancy above that. The eighth floor was only half finished and the landlord — who was as slimy an example of his profession as I’d ever seen but not actually an enemy of the state — rented it cheap to a group he described as “pencil-dick geeks from some dot-com thing.” The joint team had people in the basement and in the fire towers. Echo Team was on the roof. Bug was poised to cut power, telephone landlines, and cell service to the area. Helos with even more backup were sitting in parking lots or building rooftops a few blocks away, and local police were on standby for traffic control and backup.

Morning dawned with red sunlight burning the underbelly of low-hanging clouds. We had observers and cameras everywhere, and an eye in the sky. As the bad guys arrived we took high-res pictures and ran them through MindReader’s facial recognition program. FBI guys at street level checked tags on their cars, or on cars that dropped them off. Info was shared with local law, which remained poised to hit their residences after we took this nest.

They came in according to no pattern. I guess terrorists don’t fight traffic to clock in on time. So it was midmorning before we decided that no one else was coming. Nine of them were in the building. A nice school of nasty fish.

All nine were men, though. Mother Night never showed.

Top, Bunny, and I drifted down to the eighth floor. Bunny had a breeching tool and Top had a combat shotgun. I drew my Beretta and clicked my tongue to bring Ghost to attack readiness.

I counted down.

On zero we came out of the fire tower and Bunny swung the breeching iron at the door, which exploded inward, half torn from its hinges. Top and I tossed in a couple of flash-bangs. Before the thunder of the explosions faded we were moving inside. Ghost lunged forward ahead of me and cut right. I faded left with Top beside me. Bunny dropped the iron, swung his M4 on its strap, and came in hard and fast.

The rest of Echo Team and two dozen other shooters boiled in through the door.

Everyone was yelling.

Everyone was pointing guns.

Each of us ready to kill if we saw even a glint of gun metal.

And then we all ground to a halt.

The main room was big, an open-plan office with desks and laptops. There were heavy curtains over the windows. And, true to what the landlord had said, the place was still under construction. Exposed brick, unpainted drywall, and no ceiling tiles to hide the pipes.

Maybe it would have been better if the pipes had been hidden.

Or maybe things would have gone a different way. A worse version of Plan B.

As it was, we found that there was a Plan C we hadn’t anticipated.

We all looked up. Bunny stood with his mouth hanging open.

Top said, “Well, fuck me.”

Ghost whined.

Nine bodies hung from the pipes.

Chapter Five

Someone had taken a can of red spray paint and used it to write a message on the wall.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” wondered Top.

“I know that phrase,” said Lydia. “I read it somewhere—”

It was Bug who answered. He could see the image via our helmet cams. “The top line, that’s a catchphrase from the anarcho-punk movement.”

“Punk?” I asked, but Bug had more.

“That’s computer language,” he told us. “Unicode. It’s the codepoint for circle-A.”

We all knew what that was. A capital A surrounded by a letter O. The international symbol for anarchy.

“The hell we into here?” asked Bunny.

I didn’t have an answer for him.

We never found Mother Night.

We sat Reggie down with a police sketch artist and someone who knew how to work an Identikit. The problem was that Reggie never saw Mother Night when she wasn’t wearing big, dark sunglasses and a kind of Betty Page haircut that he thought might have been a wig. She had lots of piercings in her ears, nose, and lower lip, and a couple of scars on her face. Her skin was darker than normal for an Asian, so he speculated that she might be part black. Her accent was European, but Reggie couldn’t pin it down even after many audio samples were played for him.

The sketch and the Identikit picture did not resemble each other all that much, which is pretty common with descriptions by people who are not trained observers. Even so, the pictures of Mother Night were sent to every law enforcement and investigative agency in the country, and to a fair number of our friends overseas, including Interpol and Barrier.

All of the laptops at the suicide site were trashed, of course. No surprise there. But when the forensics teams searched the residences of the dead men they struck gold. Reggie’s copy of VaultBreaker was hidden behind a false section of wall in one man’s apartment. And that’s where we caught our first break. The encryption on the software could not be hacked without the attacking hardware being hijacked to leave a signature on the disk. That signature included notations on the number of times the disk was read as well as critical information about the computer being used. It also uploaded a destructive virus to any attacking computer unless a separate piece of decryption software was preinstalled. When Bug analyzed the disk, he announced that the encryption had not been hacked.

Mother Night’s team had not yet accessed the VaultBreaker software.

As lucky breaks go, that one was massive. That’s when my nuts crawled back down from inside my chest cavity.

The second break we caught was that the drives had stuff on them that the bad guys really did not want us to have. Names were named. In North Korea, in Iran. And, we discovered, in China.

And in a few other places whose political stability took a serious kick in the nutsack once Mr. Church turned over the data to the State Department. And, with reluctance, to the Veep and his Cybercrimes team.

The effect of all this was pretty dramatic.

Heads rolled. Literally in North Korea, I believe.

People went to prisons and gulags. Some were disappeared. Governments denied official involvement. All players were disavowed and labeled as rebels, dissidents, enemies of various states. Blah, blah, blah.

What mattered to me was that the power grid stayed on, the missiles remained in their silos, and all of the microscopic monsters slumbered in their test tubes at places like the Locker.

The farther we got from that day in Arlington the less the DMS was involved. It became part of yesterday’s box score. We moved on to other fights, other wars, other horrors.

And in doing so we believed that we had won an easy victory, kicked all kickable asses and put one in the win column for the good guys.

There’s being wrong, and then there’s being wrong.

This was the other kind.

Interlude One

The young woman sat on the edge of her seat, knees together, hands in her lap, briefcase open on the other guest chair. She was twenty-three years old but already had a Ph.D. in computer science and masters in cybernetic engineering and software engineering. She’d graduated from high school at thirteen and was courted by scouts from every big-ticket science school from Cal Tech to Harvard.

The interviewer read her name off the top of her resume.

“Artemisia Bliss,” he said, pronouncing it slowly, savoring it. “Real name?”

“Real name,” she agreed. “My father is a professor of genetics, specializing in the hybridization of ultrarare plant species. My mother is an assistant curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Baroque art. She discovered two lost paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian who was—”

“—the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi,” finished the interviewer.

Miss Bliss blinked, confused. “Did you look that up after I scheduled this interview?”

“No, I happen to know something about art.”

The interviewer left it there. Left it for her to ponder whether that statement was true or not.

He sat back in his expensive leather chair and pretended to study the psychological evaluation on this woman that had just been hand-delivered to him. In point of fact he was looking past the pages at Miss Bliss. She was, he was quite sure, the most beautiful woman with whom he had ever had a conversation. Possibly with the exception of Dr. Circe O’Tree, who was a young but brilliant counterterrorism analyst he occasionally consulted. Dr. O’Tree was a mix of European ethnicities, with some emphasis on Irish, Scottish, and Greek. Artemisia Bliss, unlike the scholarly couple that had adopted her, was pure Asian. Vietnamese and Chinese. She was slender, but not skinny. Not like many of the Asian women the interviewer had known. Miss Bliss was in no way a stick figure. Excellent nutrition had given her height and curves. Exercise toned her and gave her the posture of a dancer. And a lottery-winning set of genes gave her an IQ of 192 and the ambition to use it.

The IQ test was not a fluke or an error. Miss Bliss had first been tested at age nine and scored 187. Everyone concluded that she was a prodigy; but the growing body of evidence on intelligence testing indicated that a childhood IQ of 180 might only translate to an adult score of about 115. However, new developments have come up with much more accurate and flexible tests based on multiple dimensions of intelligence, including analytical, interpersonal, logical, memory, musical, spatial, linguistic, philosophical, moral, spiritual, intrapersonal, bodily, and naturalist. The information in Miss Bliss’s assessment had been drawn from that kind of exhaustive testing, and it deeply pleased the interviewer. He made a note to have his computer people try to hack the records of the adoption bureau in Beijing. There were people he worked with who would probably want to put eyes on any siblings or close cousins. Intelligence levels of that kind were distressingly rare.

The interviewer riffled the pages, pursed his lips, and pretended he wasn’t looking at Artemisia Bliss. He had an IQ of 198, and halfway through this session he was wondering how many Nobel prizes their kids would earn. As he saw it, supergeniuses should be allowed to mate only with each other. The fact that the supergenius gene pool produced someone like Artemisia Bliss was, to him, proof that the universe as a collective whole was working to make it happen. It was an evolutionary imperative.

He placed the evaluation facedown on his desk and laid his palms flat on top of it.

“What do you know about us?” he asked.

She gave him a brief smile. There and gone.

“I know only what I was allowed to know,” she said. She leaned ever so slightly on the first “know.”

The interviewer decided to play along. “Which is?”

Miss Bliss raised a few fingers of her hand in a way that was meant to indicate the interviewer, the office, and everything associated with it. “That this is an interview for a possible position in a government think tank.”

“But…?” he prompted.

“But … this is window dressing for something else.”

“Oh?” He wanted to smile, but didn’t. “Please explain.”

Another flicker of a smile. It was a trademark with her, he noted. Less than a second in duration, meant to convey a bit of warmth but also to show that she was aware that these hoops were all necessary. She didn’t like them, but she’d jump through them with grace because there was a nice reward at the end.

“This is not a government office.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes.”

The interviewer pursed his lips. Miss Bliss was very composed, in a tailored linen suit in a pale charcoal, with a salmon blouse. Three earrings in each ear, which told the interviewer that she took some time for leisure and fun — a single pair of functional studs would have indicated a loner — but her mind tended toward order. She wore silver rings on two fingers of her left hand and gold rings on three fingers of her right. Perhaps an indication of qualities of her right and left mind. Her glossy black hair was pulled back at the temples with scarab-shaped clips; the wings prevented her hair from falling into her face. A sign of purpose and confidence. The interviewer filed it all away in his mind.

“Then walk me through it,” he suggested.

A more pedantic person would have ticked it off on her fingers as she explained. Miss Bliss did not. She said, “There is a soldier sitting outside the building.”

“Soldier?”

“He’s dressed like a FedEx guy, truck and all. I got here early and stood outside to finish my coffee before I came in. Maybe three minutes. The whole time the man looked at maps on a GPS.” Before he could ask her to elucidate, she held up a single finger. “A FedEx man working in Manhattan wouldn’t need a GPS even if he could get a clear signal. There are so many businesses compacted into each few square blocks that deliverymen would work a tight region. He’d know it backward after a day.”

The interviewer almost flipped her file open to check her birth date to make sure she was really only twenty-three. Instead he merely said, “Continue.”

“Sure. The big tip-off is the fact that he has a wire behind his ear, like the Secret Service wear. It was on the passenger side at least, so it wasn’t too obvious, but he has a tan and the wire is white. At the very least he should have been wearing a flesh-colored one. It spoiled the whole effect.”

“You’re very observant.”

Her mouth twisted into momentary irritation. Like the smile, it was there and gone. The interviewer appreciated it. His compliment had been deliberately weak and obvious, and her irritation showed that she wasn’t the kind of person to seek compliments like a puppy wagging for treats. She was giving information and did not appreciate a pointless interruption. He gave a small gesture with his hand to indicate that she continue.

“Inside the lobby, the menu of offices was wrong,” she said. “There are a lot of insurance companies and similar firms here, and they comprise nearly seven eighths of the office space. When the government rents office space it tends to do so in larger chunks. This was the only such office. However, if an organization — federal or private — wanted to have an office for interviews in the right zip code in Manhattan, they might rent something like this. It’s expensive without being a clear misuse of taxpayer dollars. The waiting room is a bit careworn, which is a nice touch, but there’s some old cigarette smoke lingering, and government offices have been smoke-free for years.”

He nodded, considered making a Sherlock Holmes joke, decided against it because it might weaken him in her eyes, and instead asked, “Anything else?”

She smiled now, a full smile that was beautiful but not warm. “You never bought that suit with a government paycheck. No government pencil pusher is going to wear an H. Huntsman just to sit behind a desk. Same goes with that watch. A Rolex Daytona? Seriously? That costs about the same as a semester at Harvard. So, no … this isn’t a government office.” Her smile changed, became a bit shy. “Besides, I know who you are, and this,” she said, reaching over and nudging the brass nameplate holder, “isn’t you.”

The nameplate read Michael Chang, Ph.D.

The interviewer had to clear his throat before he asked, “Are you certain about that?”

“Yes, because I know who you are. I have six of your books, including the latest one, Filamentous Bacteriophage: Biology, Phage Display and Nanotechnology Applications. You’re wearing that same suit in the author photo.”

He said nothing. It took a great deal of effort to control the expressions that wanted to twist his face into a mask of great delight.

“You’re the man Scientific American called ‘DARPA’s real-world mad scientist,’” Miss Bliss said. “You are Dr. William Hu.”