Code Zero

Chapter Six

I skated the edge of the Mother Night thing again on a rainy afternoon in a lovely park in Istanbul. They don’t get a lot of rain in that part of the world, and if the skies above hadn’t been dark, the conversation I was having might have taken place indoors.

My friend, you see, doesn’t appreciate bright sunlight. She can deal with it if she has to, but she doesn’t like it. Call it an allergy to the sun if that works for you.

Even in the gentle drizzle, Violin wore a hat with a floppy brim, and sunglasses, and she kept her hands in her pockets. Ghost sat on the ground with his head in her lap, letting her pet him and play with his soggy ears. Few people ever get that close to Ghost without losing important parts. But he has a thing for Violin. For her, and for Junie.

It’s all pretty complicated.

For him. Not for me.

Violin had once been my lover, and a pretty intense one at that, but things had changed. I’d changed. Maybe the world had changed. Now I had Junie in my life and Junie was my life.

What did that make Violin?

Certainly not a sister. That was too inbred a concept for me.

Comrade in arms, I suppose, though that definition was far from accurate.

We drank bitter coffee out of cardboard cups, pretending that we couldn’t still smell gun smoke and spilled blood. Three hours ago we’d cleaned out a nest of Red Knights, and our nerves were totally shot. Well, mine were. I still get a case of the shakes every time I see one of those saw-toothed freaks. They are human, of course, but they’re from a different genetic line called the Upierczy. An evolutionary spur that dead-ended, resulting in them being just enough different from normal humans to appear inhuman. Or nonhuman. However that’s supposed to be conjugated. Freaks works for me. They are the reason we have legends of vampires. Pale, immensely powerful, and they have a real taste for O positive; but they don’t sleep in coffins, they don’t turn into bats, and you don’t need a stake to kill them. A nine-millimeter bullet in the brainpan works nicely, thank you.

Today we’d killed five of them.

I took two out, one with bullets and one with a knife in the eye socket. Yeah, that works pretty well, too. Ghost crippled one of them, and Violin finished the job. Then she tore the remaining two to shreds. Violin was not an enemy you’d want to have. And in a lot of ways she, and the other women of the covert ops team Arklight, were much scarier than the Red Knights.

That was a handful of hours ago and now we were pretending to be ordinary folks out for the day in a light rain, enjoying the soggy park with their waterlogged dog, drinking coffee. It was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering.

Funny thing was that I hadn’t come over here to hunt vampires. I was tracking a shipment of fissile materials that had been covertly purchased by a splinter cell of the Seven Kings. We’d torn the Kings down a few years ago, but it wasn’t dead. Even though at least half of the Kings were dead — Hugo Vox, Sebastian Gault, and Bin Laden for sure, and maybe one or two others — the rest had eluded us. Rumors were afloat in the seas of international terrorism that the Kings were regrouping. If they do, I think I’ll quit and get a job kicking Siberian tigers in the nutsack — I’d be safer and have a better chance for retirement.

“When are you going back?” asked Violin, trying to make it sound casual.

“Tonight.”

“She’s expecting you so soon?”

I looked at her. The question was clumsy, and she colored as she realized how it sounded.

“Violin…,” I began, but she shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Joseph. That was wrong.”

We had some coffee. A young father walked by, holding the hands of two little kids, a boy and girl in raincoats. He smiled at us and we at him. I listened to the sound of little feet in galoshes, pleased that each footfall made a true “galosh” sound.

Violin tried it again. “This is serious, then? With you and that woman?”

“Her name is Junie.”

“I know her name.”

“You never use it.”

She sighed. “This is serious with Junie?”

“It’s serious.”

Violin looked into my eyes, into me. She was very good at reading people. Not as empathic as Junie, but no slouch. She sighed again and looked away.

“Okay,” I said, “what gives? What’s with the heavy sighs and leading questions? Since when were you a love-struck schoolgirl? This isn’t like you, Violin.”

After a long time she said, “You know that’s not even my real name.”

“Yeah, but you won’t tell me your real name.”

She shook her head.

We sipped. She petted. Light rain fell.

“It gets lonely after a while,” she said.

Jesus. And what do you say to that?

“I know,” I said, aware that it was both lame and more than a little disingenuous. Okay, sure, I did know about loneliness and loss. And heartbreak. All that. But at the same time I was five degrees past insanely in love. Happier than I’d ever been in my whole life. So … lip service felt like talking shit.

Violin said nothing, and I kept my dumb mouth shut.

The rain gradually stopped and the day began to brighten as the clouds thinned. Violin adjusted her hat and sunglasses.

“Joseph,” she said, “I’m sorry I said anything. It was weak of me. And impolite.”

“No.”

“Yes. Please … let’s forget I said it, okay? Let’s go on being us. Allies in the war. Can we do that?”

“Absolutely.”

She glanced at me, read me, nodded. And measured out a thin slice of a smile. “I worry about you,” she said. “I suppose I always will.”

“Believe me when I tell you that I worry about you, too.”

She shrugged. “I’m used to this life. I know what’s in the shadows.”

“So do I.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t know if you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She said, “Have you ever heard of someone called Mother Night?”

I stiffened.

“Ah,” she said, smiling, “apparently so.”

“How do you know Mother Night?”

“A woman who goes by that name has become a player in some dangerous games.”

“What games?”

“Theft of science. Two weeks ago an Arklight team hit a lab in Warsaw sponsored by the Red Knights. It was a group of scientists working on computer viruses. There was some Iranian money involved, but their principal clients were the Upierczy. They have been trying to obtain as much information as possible about gene therapy and transgenics. They want to force their own evolution. They want to become indestructible, invincible. They want to be like the vampires of movies and books and they’re convinced genetics will accomplish this.”

“It might,” I said sourly.

She nodded. “Yes, and if it happens we’ll lose the fight against them. But my point was that when we hit their lab it was already in turmoil. Someone had hacked into their systems and stolen everything. Research, testing data, backup files, the works. We used Oracle to hack their system but we couldn’t find anything, not even a hint as to who’d stolen the data. It was so clean and thorough a job that we thought it was the Deacon using MindReader, but he said that it wasn’t the DMS.”

I said nothing. Church had mentioned something about the Red Knights’ computers being hacked, but it was a comment in passing. And I’d assumed it was Arklight using Oracle. Assumptions, assumptions.

“How’s any of that connect with Mother Night?”

“Ah,” she said, smiling faintly. “One of the technicians at the lab said that it was Mother Night. It was all he said, though. Just that.”

“You couldn’t get any more out of him?”

Her smile never flickered. “Alas, he was unable to say more. However, a few days later we hit a second site in Vilnius. A testing facility for genetic enhancement. When we broke in, though, everyone was already dead. Four Red Knights and sixteen technical staff. All dead.”

“How? It would have taken a hefty strike team to—”

“No,” she said. “They had not been shot. Someone had released a toxin into the system. Specifically, a radically weaponized strain of enterohemorrhagic E. coli. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. Our scientists tell us that it triggered a quick-onset form of hemorrhagic colitis. The victims bled out through their rectums.”

“Christ, that’s disgusting.”

Violin’s eyes were ice cold. “They were Red Knights and their servants.”

I said nothing to that. The women of Arklight had suffered indescribable indignities, torture, rape, and worse at the hands of the Knights, and this went back centuries. Whatever mercy they might have had for their former oppressors was long since beaten out of them. They were now the most vicious and efficient kill team anywhere in the world. Second to none, and I do not exaggerate. I was very, very glad they were on our side.

She said, “All of the computers had been stripped of their data and there were no viable materials left. It was all gone, except for empty cabinets, ransacked computers, and the bodies of the dead. Those, by the way, had been piled up and set on fire. There was a message painted with blood on the wall that read: Mother Night Says that you have to Burn to Shine.”

“Oh, man…” I shook my head. “But even so, how does that connect Mother Night to me and the DMS?”

“Since we found that site, Arklight has been asking around. We’ve managed to conduct a few interrogations of Knights we captured, and with people connected to them. No one knows much, but several of them told a story about a senior scientist for the Knights who’d been found at the point of death. He’d been severely tortured and left for dead.”

“Tortured by whom?”

“By a woman who called herself Mother Night,” said Violin. “She asked him a lot of questions and most of it was about the Knights, their former connection with the Red Order, their more recent connections with the surviving members of the Seven Kings, and a mutual enemy of all of then — the DMS. Your name came up in the interrogation. The scientist said that he was aware of you, and of your role in killing Grigor, king of the Red Knights. Unfortunately, that was the extent of the questioning. The scientist died shortly after that. So … all we have is a small, fragile connection between you and someone who has been doing significant harm in order to steal computer files and research. A group who has either developed an E. coli—based bioweapon or who has stolen it for use.”

“I’ll have to share this with Church, and he’ll probably want to talk to you or to your mother.”

Lilith, Violin’s mother, was the leader of Arklight. I have never met a more formidable woman. She and Church had some history, but I didn’t know what it was or how deep it went.

“Of course,” she said.

Violin stood up. When I began to rise too, she touched my shoulder to keep me seated.

“If I hear anything else I’ll let you know,” she said. “Goodbye, Joseph.”

“Goodbye, Violin,” I said.

She began to move away, but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “Joseph…?”

“Yes?”

“This woman … Junie Flynn?”

“Yes.”

“Be good to her.”

There was so much meaning in what she said, so many layers to it that I could not respond. It felt like there was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. However, Violin nodded to herself as if I had replied.

As she walked away I felt a weird ache inside. Almost a premonition, like maybe I’d never see her again. But that was stupid.

I sat there and took over the job of petting Ghost, who stared at Violin’s retreating back. “Mother Night,” I said aloud.

Ghost whined softly.

Chapter Seven

Mother Night surfaced again later that month.

It went like this.

The interrogation team finished with Reggie. They’d squeezed him like a Florida orange, and when they were sure he had no juice left, they gave him back to me to transport him to the witness protection program. Or, rather, our version of it. The one run by the U.S. Marshals is good, but in an age where computer hacking has become the most feared WMD, the protected witnesses aren’t all that secure. The Marshal Service is a government agency, which means it needs to keep records, transfer information, and receive reports from the field. All of that goes through computers. Last year, nine protected witnesses who were set to testify against a coalition of Mexican cartels were targeted and killed. Five of them had families, and each witness had on-site marshals as watchdogs. There were no survivors. Forensic computer analysis proved that the system had been hacked.

We didn’t want to turn Reggie Boyd over to the marshals. We trusted the agents but not their computers. The world of law enforcement is changing. A couple of keystrokes are more powerful than a bullet.

The DMS has gone old-school with its version of witness protection. Nothing goes onto any computer except MindReader. Even then, information is protected by 28-bit encryption and self-erase counterintrusion programs. There are missile codes with less security.

So, Reggie had been a guest at the new Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. My office.

Everyone I worked with still called it “new” even though we’d been in residence here for months. However, whenever someone spoke of the Warehouse, without the “new” prefix, everyone knew they weren’t talking about here. Once upon a time we’d been in a different building four blocks away. That building was now a hole in the world and everything that had been in it had been vaporized by a terrorist bomb. A hundred and sixty-nine people had gone up with it. Friends, colleagues, brothers-in-arms. Gone. On some level those of us who’d escaped that catastrophe felt it was disrespectful to simply call this the Warehouse.

The new building was bigger and it was crammed with every kind of interior and exterior surveillance and detection equipment. A sparrow couldn’t take a crap on a rain gutter without an alarm ringing somewhere. Paranoid? Sure, but as the saying goes, sometimes they really are out to get you.

Ghost and I came to get Reggie a few minutes before eight on a rainy Friday. Reggie’s “cell” was actually an office that had been converted into an apartment about as big as a good-sized dorm room. He had a flat-screen TV, cable with lots of premium channels, a Netflix account, and a tall stack of Blu-Ray DVDs. When I came in, he was in sweats and sneakers, and was sprawled on his couch watching an old episode of Game of Thrones.

“It’s almost over,” he said. “Can you give me a sec?”

“Sure.”

I perched on the end of the couch for a few minutes, watching it with him. It was from the second season, the siege of Kings Landing. Good stuff.

Ghost climbed up between us, and while the armies clashed on the screen, Reggie stroked Ghost’s fur. Their relationship had changed a bit. Not that Ghost wouldn’t kill him if I ordered it, but over the last month we’d all developed an odd fondness for Reggie. He was a traitor and a jackass, but Reggie didn’t seem evil. Not even a little bit. More like a cousin who can’t keep out of trouble but who’s fun at parties.

And, let’s face it, no one in the history of international espionage had ever been more cooperative. He could wear out a crack team of CIA interrogators in nothing flat. They dreaded interviewing him because he not only gave useful information; he was the kind of guy who had to tell you every single blessed detail of every single blessed moment of every single blessed day. Once, when a weary interrogator asked him to summarize some of the less important things — like Reggie’s account of driving to work or going to the gym — Reggie shook his head and said that he was afraid of missing something.

He didn’t miss a thing. Not one single, mind-crushing moment of his life. I was tempted to bribe him into shutting up and never speaking again.

When the episode ended, he turned off the TV and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. “Any chance you’re going to tell me where we’re going?”

“Come on, Reg, you know better.”

We got up. His suitcase had been packed by my people, but I allowed Reggie a few seconds to stuff some of his favorite DVDs into a bag. He looked around and sighed again.

“What?” I asked.

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t.”

He shrugged. “It’s just that I think I’m going to miss this place.”

“Oh, come on…”

“See, what did I say?”

“I’m not laughing,” I said, hiding a smile. “But why on earth would you miss this place?”

Another shrug. “I like it here. The food’s good. Nobody cheats at cards and you let me keep what I win. I seem to be getting somewhere with Rudy.”

Rudy Sanchez was the DMS house shrink as well as my best friend. He’d spent a lot of time with Reggie, not as part of the interrogation team, but trying to map the route from law-abiding citizen to criminal and back again. He planned to publish his findings in one of those incomprehensible psychiatric trade journals that I don’t think anyone really reads.

And, apart from that, Rudy was the kind of therapist who could help you find a way to like yourself again. He did that for me, and I was a real mess.

Reggie bent and scratched Ghost between the ears. “I’m going to miss the fur monster here.”

Ghost nudged his hand with a wet nose.

“Despite the fact that he bit you?” I asked.

Reggie straightened and gave me a philosophic shake of his head. “Puppy-boy there was doing his job. I can’t fault him for that.”

Puppy-boy liked being talked about and he thumped his tail.

Dog’s very strange. He won’t let my brother, Sean, pet him, but he goes all goofy around a bonehead enemy of the state like Reggie. Go figure. Maybe Ghost needs to log some couch time with Rudy.

“I’ll make sure the fur monster sends you Christmas cards,” I told Reggie. “Let’s go.”

I checked us through security and we walked together out to my Ford Explorer. When Reggie saw it he whistled.

“You got the new one? Niiiiice,” he said, stringing it out. “What did you get on the trade-in?”

“Less than I’d hoped,” I said. What I didn’t tell him was that my last Explorer had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The one before that had been parked at the old Warehouse and was destroyed when that blew. This new Explorer was my fifth in four years. My insurance company freaking hates me.

The new car was next year’s model. Black, with smoked windows and a bunch of extras, including bullet-resistant glass and extra suspension to compensate for the body armor. No ejector seats, though. I keep requesting them but they won’t give me one. I think they’re afraid I’ll use it for fun. They’re not entirely wrong.

“Buckle up for safety,” I said as Reggie climbed in.

Ghost went into the backseat, flopped down, and began enthusiastically licking his balls. Everyone needs a hobby.

I got in, started the engine, locked the doors, and drove past the security guards, both of whom waved to Reggie.

Reggie Boyd, the cybercriminal who’s everybody’s pal.

Even with heavy rain, the ride should have taken only two hours, and this was something I could have turned over to any of my staff. There are more than two hundred people working for me at the new Warehouse, including four teams of top-of-the-line shooters. I should have sent some of them, but I wanted to do this myself. It was low-risk, and besides, despite everything, I kind of liked Reggie, too.

Reggie turned on the Sirius, found the Raw Dog Comedy station, and we were laughing our asses off when the team of killers came out of the rain and rammed their Humvee into the side of my Explorer.

Chapter Eight

We’d veered off Cromwell heading to McComas, which ran parallel to I-95, when a dark green Hummer slammed us on the driver’s side. The impact tilted the Explorer onto the two passenger-side wheels and drove it sideways toward a row of cement cattle guards that had been placed to guide traffic. It felt like being punched by a giant. The front and side air bags blew, hitting us hard in the face and the side of the head, slamming us back against our seats. The rain-slick streets offered no resistance as the bigger vehicle smashed us into the cattle guards with bone-jarring force. Reggie screamed. Ghost began yelping in fear and pain. I had a mouthful of air bag and couldn’t breathe; my side of the car was canted inward toward me. Cracks appeared in the reinforced glass. If it hadn’t been for the body armor, the car would have collapsed like a beer can.

“Joe!” howled Reggie in a high and terror-filled voice. “God, Joe!”

With one hand I fought to release the seat belt while my other hand clawed at the handle of my rapid-release folding knife, which was clipped inside my front trouser pocket. The air bags were designed to deflate almost immediately after deployment, with nitrogen leaking out of small vents; but we were so crammed in that the vents were blocked. There was almost no room to move.

Ghost’s whines changed to barks and I craned my head to see the Humvee’s headlights receding. I wasn’t fool enough to think they were going away. They were backing up to hit us again.

I stamped blindly on the gas and the Explorer lurched forward as the Hummer roared and slammed forward again. My car was too badly damaged to drive away — even if I could see to steer, which I couldn’t — but it jerked forward a few feet. Enough so the Humvee crunched into the side of the rear bay with a huge whump. Metal screeched and I heard one of the tires explode. The car settled awkwardly into a cleft formed by the Humvee and the cattle guards. There was no damn where to go.

Then the knife was in my hand. I flicked it open and jabbed the airbag. White powder filled the cabin, and I spat and sputtered as I twisted to cut the seat-belt straps with the knife. Ghost kept barking but I could hear other sounds. Reggie’s groans of fear and pain. Car doors opening. Feet crunching on broken glass. Shouts.

Reggie was bleeding and dazed, but alive. Ghost was going nuts in the backseat and I silenced him with a stern command. Through the cracked glass I could see several figures. All wearing black hoodies and black jeans.

They all had guns.

Jesus Christ.

Panic flashed through me. The driver’s door was crushed in. Reggie’s door was locked and the glass was reinforced, but five armed people could definitely break in. The impact with the Hummer had twisted the Explorer’s frame and the steering wheel sat askew, blocking me from climbing backward over the seat.

Shit.

I saw gun metal glimmer in the downspill of streetlights.

Then a barrage of thunder as they opened up on the car with automatic weapons. I could hear the bullets punch into the side of the car, tearing through the metal skin, flattening themselves on the steel lining. A couple of rounds ricocheted away and I heard a sudden scream of pain and surprise as one of the figures staggered and fell.

Dumb ass, I thought. The fuck do you expect when you fire at an armored vehicle?

They closed on the car and began trying to kick the windows in.

That, unfortunately, they might accomplish. The impact of the two heavy vehicles had damaged the glass and it was bound to give.

I clawed the torn fabric of the air bags away from me, tore open the flaps of my Hawaiian shirt, and grabbed for my gun just as the bad guys tried to open the door.

The doors were locked.

One of them must have gone back to their Hummer because suddenly they began swinging a tire iron at the glass. Little chunks of glass popped out from pressure cracks and pinged off the dashboard, the rearview mirror, and my head.

I slashed at Reggie’s seat belt and shoved him roughly into the foot well.

“Stay down!”

The window glass abruptly turned to white as a solid blow send a thousand microcracks all through it.

Then I jammed my back against the door, banged the door lock control with my elbow, took my Beretta in both hands, and fired at the glass, blowing it outward.

I fired, fired, fired.

There was thunder. Theirs, mine, and real booms coming from above. It all blended together into a deafening symphony of intolerable noise. The figures reeled back. Some falling, some staggering. I swapped out my magazine as I lunged across the seat. With a savage grunt I jerked open the door.

“Ghost—hit!”

A flash of snarling white barged past me, knocking me into the steering wheel. Outside I heard a terrible scream of pain.

Then I was crawling over the seat, over Reggie, shoving my gun hand out the door, firing at anything standing. I saw two of my bullets hit a figure, once in the chest and once in the jaw. The impact tore half his face away and he spun around and fell into the glare of headlights. My third shot blew out the Hummer’s left headlight.

As I emerged from the car, I saw that chaos ruled the street. One man was down, hands clamped to his stomach as he rolled back and forth. Probably the idiot who’d been hit with a ricochet. A second man leaned against the grill of the Humvee, bleeding from a bullet wound to the thigh, fingers slick with rainwater and blood as he tried to swap magazines on an AK-47. I shot him three times in the chest and once in the head. Ghost had a third man down and all I could see was teeth and torn flesh and a hell of a lot of blood.

The first man I’d shot in the face was down, too.

That left one of the attackers uninjured. He was the one with the tire iron, and he lunged forward and swung it at my head.

If he’d backed up, dropped the tire iron, and pulled his gun, he might have had me.

Might have.

I was moving pretty fast by that point, though, going past the obstruction of the open Explorer door, swinging my gun up.

The tire iron came whistling down through the rain and hit the top of my gun so hard that the weapon was torn from my hands. Pain shot through my fingers and wrists and ran like an electric charge all the way to my elbows.

The guy stared at my empty hands as if he was stunned that his desperate blow had worked. I was surprised, too, but I didn’t think a gaper delay in the middle of a fight was a good tactical move. So I rushed him, launched myself into a flying tackle, wrapped my arms around him and his tire iron, and smashed down into a huge puddle. It geysered up around us. I never heard the tire iron fall, but the guy’s hands were empty and he started punching me in the face. He had small hands and he didn’t really know what he was doing. I could feel his hand bones break on my cheeks and forehead and jaw. While he did that, I wrapped my aching hands around his throat and shoved him down under the water. He beat at my face, my shoulders, my chest. His body writhed and bucked. He tried everything he could to fight back, but I strangled him and drowned him in eight inches of muddy rainwater. Something inside the circle of my hands, inside the structure of his throat, broke, and then the hands fell away.

And then it was over.

I reeled back, a savage growl tearing its way from my throat as I twisted around to see if there was anyone else who needed to die.

There was no one.

The man Ghost had attacked was dead, his throat gone.

The fool who’d been hit by a ricochet lay near him, no longer bleeding. The dead don’t bleed. Ghost had gotten to him while I was fighting in the puddle.

My dog raised his head and looked at me with eyes that were ancient and strange. Wolf eyes in a dog face. I knew that what he saw in return were not the eyes of a civilized man. Nor the eyes of a cop or a special operative. In that moment, I — like he — was a more primal thing. A killer. A savage.

The rain fell and fell, each drop as hard as a needle.

I looked down at the man I’d strangled.

It wasn’t a man.

It was a woman.

Barely.

Her face floated in dirty water. Thin, frail. Features that might once have been lovely were distorted by the pain of her death. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding between full lips.

She couldn’t have been older than twenty.

Maybe not that old.

A girl.

Dead in a ditch, with her throat crushed into an improbable shape by the brutality of my hands.

A girl who’d tried very hard to kill me.

A girl who matched the Identikit sketch of the missing Asian woman from the Arlington team of hackers.

The others around me were young, too. Three men, one other woman. The first one I’d shot in the face was a woman, too. No way to tell how old she’d been. There wasn’t enough of her face for that. Only the damaged landscape of her body told me that she was female.

Young.

All of them so damn young.

I rose very slowly. The shakes started then, shuddering their way through my muscles on relentless waves of adrenaline, fear, and revulsion.

Ghost was shivering, too.

He whined in the rainy darkness.

Somewhere, a million miles away, I heard a voice. Reggie.

“Joe…? God … are we okay?”

It was a stupid question.

No, I nearly said. No, we’re not okay.

But I couldn’t say that to him.

So I said nothing.

Around me there was so damn much death.

And no answers at all.

Chapter Nine

That was a long damn night, followed by a longer day.

So many questions.

From my people, from the cops, from Homeland and everyone else. From Vice President Collins’s Cybercrimes Task Force. Everyone wanted to know what happened. I told the same story forty times. It didn’t make any more sense the fortieth time than it did while it was happening.

None of the five dead people had ID. The Humvee was stolen. The serial numbers had been removed from the weapons, and ballistics didn’t match anything on record. No fingerprints on file.

We had to wait for dental records and DNA. The woman I’d strangled was named Luisa Kan. Korean by birth, raised in foster care, and a runaway at fourteen. She was nineteen when I’d killed her.

Reggie said that she looked like Mother Night. He was sure it was her.

So who were the others? Two were Asian: a twenty-two-year-old Japanese boy named Hiro Tanaka who’d come to America as an exchange student three years ago and dropped completely off the radar; and Sally Lu, fifth-generation Chinese American, twenty years old and a junior at the University of Southern California. Last seen at the end of the spring term. We were unable to verify that she was the same woman Reggie met in Arlington. There was simply not enough evidence.

The others were Neil Cox, nineteen, a former employee of a store that sold role-playing and video games; and Arnie Olensky, a high school dropout with no work record. Both of them from Baltimore.

All of them dead.

Jerry Spencer and his forensics team worked their apartments. They found money, expensive video game consoles, including one handheld that was like a souped-up Gameboy, but which no one could identify. Bug later said that it was the most sophisticated handheld game he’d ever seen. He did a patent search on it and found nothing. It was loaded with a bunch of games, but most of them were standard first-person shooter stuff. Except for one, a Mission: Impossible—style intrusion game called Burn to Shine. However, when Bug tried to hack the game software it triggered a series of microcharges. The game was destroyed and Bug spent a week in the hospital. They found nothing else of value.

The phrase “burn to shine” stuck in my mind. Violin had told me that those words were painted in blood on a wall in an illegal genetics lab in Vilnius, Lithuania. So far no one understood the exact meaning, at least as far as Mother Night’s organization viewed it.

Various agencies worked the case. Nobody made headway, and it eventually reached that point in an investigation where the various agencies covertly dropped out so they wouldn’t be seen as the agency still fruitlessly searching.

Bug kept his people on it, though, and MindReader dug up every known fact on the five dead kids. We had a ton of information and we knew absolutely nothing.

If they had political ties to Iran, China, or North Korea, MindReader couldn’t find them. No one could.

After a month, the investigation ground to a halt. There was simply nowhere to go with it. The press had bailed, frustrated by the lack of anything juicy to follow up the initial news of five good-looking kids dead by violence.

My name stayed out of it. Press releases from Homeland declined to name the “agents involved.” Reasons of national security, yada-yada.

I spent some time with Rudy Sanchez, drinking beers with him in my dad’s backyard, and sitting on the couch in his office. Rudy listened. We talked. He gave great advice on dealing with the shock and feelings of self-loathing that any moral person would feel after such an encounter.

Again, yada-yada.

Nothing he said, nothing Church said, nothing Junie said, could change the fact that I’d strangled a teenage girl and participated in the slaughter of four other young people. Kids.

I knew I’d take the memories of that night with me to the grave. Just as I knew that on my bad nights, on those nights when the hinges of the Pandora’s Box in my damaged head come loose and the monsters sneak out, then five ghosts would be standing beside my bead. Watching me with accusation in their dead eyes.

Maybe if we knew what all of this meant, then there would be some closure for me.

Maybe.

But I doubted it.

Chapter Ten

On the last day of May, Junie found me on the balcony of our apartment. I was in my boxers and undershirt with the macramé lap blanket from the couch wrapped around my shoulders.

“Joe—?” she asked, her voice soft and tentative.

Without waiting for my reply she came out onto the balcony and sat down next to me. It was a strange morning, with shreds of clouds scattered haphazardly against a dark blue sky that refused to grow brighter as the sun rose. In the distance a few big birds rode the thermals, but from that distance I couldn’t tell if they were gulls or vultures.

Carrion birds either way.

Junie lifted the edge of the blanket and snuggled up against me.

“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked.

I shrugged. Truth was that I hadn’t noticed the temperature.

I kept looking at the birds, but I could feel Junie’s eyes on me as she studied the side of my face.

“Tell me,” she said. It was gently said, an offer instead of a demand. And it was part of our rhythm. We each had a lot of complications in our personal history; we’d each been battered by the circumstances of lives lived in the storm lands. She had every right to be more emotionally screwed up than me, God knows, but Junie was far more balanced. More at peace with who and what she was. The same cannot be said of me.

“Bad night,” I said.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“Couldn’t shut my head down.”

She kissed my shoulder.

The winds of morning kept tearing the clouds into gray and white tatters.

“Those kids?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Joe … I remember you once telling me that if the bad guy deals the play then he owns whatever happens. Those are your exact words.”

“Clever words, too. I should put them on my business cards.”

“Come on, Joe, what else could you have done? And don’t tell me that it’s not the point. We both know it is.”

“You’re quoting Rudy.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, and there was an edge of irritation in her voice. She was a smart and empathic woman, and it was unfair of me to say that she was cribbing lines from anyone else.

“Sorry. It’s just that Rudy’s been harping on me with that for a couple of weeks.”

“Maybe you should listen to one of us. I think it’s fair to say that he and I know you best. Okay, Rudy knows you better and longer than I do, but I know you, Joe. I do. And I know that sometimes you look for ways to beat yourself up over things that are beyond your control and aren’t your fault.”

“It’s more complicated than—”

She cut me off. “I know it’s more complicated than that. Of course it is. The life you live is extremely…” she fished for the right word, “… difficult. The things Mr. Church asks of you, the things you ask of yourself, not only push your body to dangerous limits, they constantly put you in situations where there is no good option, only options less terrible than others. I’ve seen that, Joe. I saw what you had to do to protect me the day we met, and what you had to do in order to save everyone from disaster. I saw it. Just as I saw the hurt in your eyes afterward.”

I said nothing. Her body was a warm anchor to a better world and I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feel of her arm and breast where they pressed against my side.

“The question, my sweet love,” she said softly, “isn’t whether you did something wrong. You didn’t. You couldn’t do anything other than what you did. No, the question is whether you need to go back to the fight. We both know that this kind of war won’t really end. Terrorism is a fact of our lives. It’ll be here forever because there will always be hatred in the world and technology has gotten so user-friendly that anyone can reach out through the Net to do harm or cook up something in a cheap lab. I spent years talking about this sort of thing on my podcast, and it’s not all conspiracy theories. This is our world.”

“I know, but…”

“But do you have to be the one to fight everyone’s battles, Joe?”

I said nothing. I didn’t dare, because I knew what my answer would be.

“Joe … listen to me. If you’re fighting because you’re afraid to stop fighting, then you’re fighting the wrong war. Maybe it’s time to stop.”

I watched the carrion bird circle high in the sky.

“Not yet,” I said.

Interlude Two

Miss Artemisia Bliss looked out the window. “Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”

Midway through the interview Dr. Hu left the room to make a call, and when he returned he told her that they were going to take a drive. Without telling her anything else, he escorted her down to the lobby, where they were met by two very tall, very imposing men in dark suits. Hu knew that she was sharp enough to peg them as Secret Service or the equivalent. Outside, they got into a black Escalade that had a third man behind the wheel. The big car headed straight to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Now they were in Brooklyn, heading west on I-278.

“Am I allowed to know where we’re going?” asked Miss Bliss.

“You’ll see,” said Hu.

She nodded, accepting the conditions.

“You’re fond of games,” said Hu, coming at her out of left field.

She gave him a full second’s appraisal, then nodded. “Sure. Video games, mostly. Some RPG stuff and simulations.”

“I’m going to shock and possibly offend you,” said Hu.

She said nothing.

“According to your debit card purchase history, you’re a frequent flyer at GameStop and other stores. Are you angry that I know this?”

“I’m not pleased,” she said, “but not surprised. I’ll bet you know all sorts of things about me.”

She smiled when she said that, and Hu’s pulse jumped a gear. Was that a flirty smile? There was definitely some kind of challenge there. He kept his composure intact, however.

“Thorough background checks are necessary for reasons you’ll discover shortly.”

“Oh, I have no doubt.” She paused, then prompted, “Games—?”

“Right. Games.”

“What about them?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” said Hu. “What’s your interest?”

“Amusement?”

“Please.”

She shrugged. “The real answer is kind of boring.”

“Try me.”

“I like to solve problems,” she said. “The tougher the challenge, the more fun it is.”

“You bought the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. How’d you do on the Water Temple level?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Yes. Did you beat it?”

“When I was like … ten?”

“You survived the jet ski level of Battletoads?”

“Sure.”

“What was your best time?”

“It’s not about best time. It’s about remembering where you died in previous tries. I only played it six times, and beat it on the seventh try. I didn’t have a stopwatch running.”

“Have you done a speedrun?” he asked, referring to one his own favorite aspects of gaming, which was a play-through of a whole video game or a selected part of it, with the intent of completing it as fast as possible. Although Hu didn’t compete with other gamers except a kid named Jerome Williams — known familiarly as Bug — recently hired by Mr. Church. They were neck-and-neck at speedruns of most games.

“Sure. Everyone does a speedrun once in a while.”

“Did you do one of Battletoads?”

“No,” she said. “Haven’t played it since I beat it.”

“Why?”

“I beat it, and then beat it again,” said Bliss. “What would be the point?”

“To beat your best time…?”

Hu smiled. “What about Halo: Combat Evolved, the Library level? To beat your best time…”

Bliss snorted. “Overrated. I beat that on my second try. I expected more.”

“Super Mario Sunshine, the—”

“Corona Mountain level,” she finished for him.

“How fast did you beat that level?”

She considered. “It’s not about how fast, okay? Only gamer newbies or people who don’t game care about time. It’s about how. For Super Mario Sunshine, you can only get to Corona Mountain by clearing the seventh episode of all other areas. But the real challenge is the boat controls. You have to propel a boat by facing backwards and turning on the spray nozzle, then navigate through a section of platforms with either retracting spikes or fire. But you have to figure out how to use the Hover Nozzle.”

Hu tried another. “What about level forty of Dead Island?”

“Not really a fan of zombie games.”

“But you play them.”

She gave him another of those coquettish smiles. “I play everything.”

“Did you beat level forty?”

“Yes. On my third try.”

“The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for NES? The underwater bomb disarm section?”

“Set the Way-Back Machine, but sure. When I was eight, I think.”

“You’re making me feel old.”

Another smile. “You’re not too ancient.”

“What’s the hardest game you’ve ever played?”

She had to think about that. “None of them are what I’d call skull-crackers. If I had to put one up at the top, maybe Super Ghosts and Goblins. I underestimated it because it was harder than I’d heard.”

“But you beat it?”

“Yes, and it taught me a lot about making assumptions.” She paused. “Excuse me, but are we really going to dissect every single game I ever played? I mean, is there a point to this?”

Instead of answering directly, he said, “Do you have any practical experience with game design?”

“Some.”

“It’s not in your résumé.”

“It was just for fun.”

“‘Fun’?”

“Well, for the challenge. I, um, hacked into the game programs for Halo, Battletoads, and Gears of War and wrote new levels.”

“Why?”

“Like I said—”

Hu shook his head. “I want the real answer.”

Miss Bliss took a moment, stalling by adjusting her clothes and shifting to find a more comfortable position on the bench seat. “I … have a few friends who are gamers.”

“Gamers of your caliber?”

“Pretty much.”

“And—?”

“I wanted to see if I could create game levels that they couldn’t beat.”

“Could they beat them?”

“The first few, sure. But the more recent ones? No.”

“Can those levels, in fact, be beaten?”

“Sure. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a game.”

Hu smiled.

“What?” she asked.

“I think you’ll enjoy where I’m taking you.”

“Meaning — what?”

Hu threw a different line into the water. “What do you hope to accomplish?”

She didn’t turn. “Specifically—?”

“In life,” he said. “With your career.”

Her response was casual, with no trace of defensiveness. “I don’t know. I’m keeping my options open.”

“And yet you applied for a job with us.”

“Sure, I applied for a job because the job description, though necessarily vague, was designed to hook someone like me. You dangled the bait of this being either under the DARPA umbrella or connected to it in some way. That’s where I want to be.”

Hu nodded. “And you think you’d flourish in a DARPA setting?”

She cut him a quick look as if she’d caught something in the way he’d inflected that question. Her eyes searched his for a long moment before she answered.

“DARPA … or something like it,” she said carefully.

Dr. Hu smiled as the Escalade drove through an opening in a rusted chain link fence. Frowning, Miss Bliss looked out at the building embowered by that old fence. It was a massive airplane hangar of the kind built seventy or eighty years ago. Many of the glass panes were busted out and the gray skin was peeling and long in need of fresh paint.

Miss Bliss began to ask, but Hu held up a finger.

“Wait,” he said.

The Escalade curved around and entered through a small side entrance just big enough for the SUV. Once inside, a door slid shut behind them and for a moment the vehicle was in total darkness. Then there was a shudder beneath the vehicle. The kind of tremble elevators gave. Even through the closed windows there was the sound of heavy hydraulics.

Lights blossomed around the vehicle and Miss Bliss stared in shock as the Escalade descended into what seemed like another world. Bright lights filled a vast chamber that was easily three times the size of the gigantic hangar. Where the structure above looked decrepit and abandoned, down here everything was new. Metal gleamed, computer screens glittered like jewels, hundreds of people moved here and there, many of them in white lab coats but others in blue or orange jumpsuits, green coveralls, the crisp gray of security uniforms, and even ordinary street clothes. Rank upon rank of the latest generation of Titan supercomputers ran the length of the room, their precious drives encased in reinforced glass.

The Escalade reached the bottom and the hydraulic hiss faded into silence.

Miss Bliss gaped at the room around her. Even from a distance any scientist could tell that everything here was cutting edge. Bleeding edge. Billions of dollars’ worth.

After several breathless moments, Miss Bliss turned to stare at Dr. Hu.

“I don’t … I don’t…” She stopped and gulped in a breath to steady herself. “What is all this?”

Dr. Hu adjusted his glasses. “You could choose to work for DARPA,” he said with a hyena grin, “or … you could come work for us.”

“But … but who are you? What is all this?”

“It’s something so new that it doesn’t even have a name,” he said. “We’ve been calling it the Department of Military Sciences as a kind of placeholder name. Something to put on congressional memos.” Dr. Hu stepped out and then turned and offered her his hand. “How would you like to help us save the world?”