Code Zero

Chapter Eleven

On the day that she died, Dr. Noor Jehan had a premonition.

It was not an unusual thing with her, though she’d had them less often as an adult than when she was a little girl in Punjab. Since coming to America with her parents at age thirteen, her premonitions, once an almost daily occurrence, faded to a scattered few. They were rarely anything of note. She would look up a few seconds before a doorbell rang, or she’d take her cell phone out of her purse and hold it, knowing that a call was coming. A few times she bought scratch-off lottery tickets on a whim. Once she won fifty dollars and another time she won five hundred.

Like that.

Nothing that rocked her world. No insights into matters of any consequence heavier than the early arrival of a traveling aunt or the tie color of a blind date.

There were three exceptions.

The first was when she was eight years old. Noor woke from a sound sleep and cried out for her brother. His name, Amrit, burst from her and the sound of it pulled her from a dream of drowning. In the dream it was Noor who was sinking beneath black waves as the sodden weight of her sari pulled her down to coldness and invisibility and death. But as she woke, she knew — with perfect clarity and absolute certainty — that it was Amrit who had drowned.

Amrit was a petty officer about the INS Viraat, India’s only aircraft carrier — a Centaur-class ship bought from the British and serving as flagship for India’s fleet. It was vast, strong, and as safe as an island. That was what Amrit said in his letters.

But at that moment, the young Noor sat bathed in sweat, as drenched as if she had been sinking in salt water, and knew that Amrit was lost. It was almost two days before the men from the Ministry of Defence came to their house to break her mother’s heart. There had been an accident, they said. A crane had come loose from its moorings, the big iron sweep had knocked a dozen men into the ocean. Six were pulled out alive, and six had died. They were sorry, they said; so sorry.

The second time was a month before the Jehan family packed and moved to America. Noor had been at school, copying math problems from the blackboard, when a bus suddenly crashed through the wall and killed her. Only it wasn’t like that. She woke up in the school nurse’s office, screaming about a bus, but nothing at all had happened at the school. However, that evening on the news it was reported that a tourist bus had been in a terrible accident with a tractor-trailer filled with microwave ovens. The driver of the truck apparently had had a heart attack and fallen forward, his dead foot pressing on the accelerator, his slumping body turning the wheel. The truck hit the bus side-on. Nineteen people were killed, thirty-six were injured. The following afternoon her father received a call from his mother saying that his brother, Noor’s uncle, had been a passenger on that bus and had been crushed to death.

That second terrible premonition had been nearly thirty years ago.

Noor Jehan was no longer a little girl, and she was no longer in India. Now she was deputy director of the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, a highly specialized and highly secret government base. She headed a team that stored and studied some of the most virulent diseases and destructive bioweapons on earth. A place so secret that it was only occasionally mentioned in eyes-only reports, and even those were appended to black-budget R and D filings. In those reports the facility was known only as “The Locker.”

Noor was now Dr. Jehan, with a Ph.D. and an M.D. and a list of credits and titles that, even abbreviated, wouldn’t fit on a standard business card. And although she clearly remembered her intuitions and premonitions, she now kept that kind of belief on a small shelf in a mostly disused corner of her mind. The rest of her life was dedicated to hard research, to things that could be measured, weighed, metered, and replicated according to the plodding but beautiful process of empirical science.

And yet …

This morning — early, somewhere in that blackest part of the night when the body is chained by sleep, unable to move or even glance at the clock — Noor Jehan had received her third exceptional premonition. This one was stronger than the fantasy of drowning when Amrit had died. It was more real than the deadly bulk of a bus splintering its way through the walls of her schoolroom. No, this was so thoroughly real that when Noor finally woke in the golden light of a steamy Virginia morning, she was not sure whether she was now awake or still dreaming. Because the dream felt more real than reality.

In the dream, Noor had been right here in her office on level six of the Locker. The alarms were all going off, the lights were flashing red and white, slapping her eyes with painful brightness. People were running and screaming. The wrong doors were open. Doors that could not be simultaneously open were nonetheless ajar. The air had become a witch’s brew of toxins and weaponized versions of poliomyelitis, Ebola, E. coli, superstrain typhus, half a dozen designer strains of viral hemorrhagic fever, aerosol Mycobacterium leprae, and other microscopic monsters. All free, all released from containment systems that had been designed with what many had thought were an absurd number of safeguards and redundancies. Foolproof and failproof.

In that dream, Noor heard shrieks coming from shadowy corridors and through the open doors to side rooms. She was screaming, too. She dreamed of fumbling with the catches and seals and dials of her hazmat suit, but none of the seams would join. Then she heard the sounds of footsteps. Staggering steps, shuffling steps. The disjointed and artless footfalls of dying people; her friends and staff wandering in their diseased madness, wasting the last minutes of their lives in a shocked attempt to find a way out. But there was no way out. Soon the biological disaster protocols would reach a critical failsafe and then the main and rear doors would thunder down — each of them two feet thick and composed of steel alloys that could withstand anything but a direct hit from a cruise missile. The failsafe systems would ignite massive thermite charges that would flash-weld the doors in place. After that, cluster bombs built into the very walls would be triggered, detonating fuel-air bombs. Everything, from the strongest man to the tiniest microbe, would be incinerated.

And it would all be abandoned. No one would ever dig through the mountain or try to cut through that weight of steel to try and breech this place. The Locker would officially cease to exist because, in point of fact, everything of which it was composed — human staff, lab animals, equipment, computers, furniture, and the stores of biological agents — would be carbon dust.

The dream persisted. It kept Noor down in the darkness where she had to feel and hear and smell it all. It was like being forced to watch a hyperreal 3D movie that had become reality.

The scuffling of the dying staff grew louder as they came toward her office. She knew that she should stop wrestling with the hazmat suit and close her door — and her dreaming mind screamed at her dream-self to do just that — but she did not. She fumbled and scrabbled at the ill-fitting protective garment even as the first of the infected staff members shuffled through the door.

The dreaming Noor watched her dream-self look up, watched her turn toward the people, looking to see which of her friends and colleagues came through first. Dreading to see which symptoms were presenting on familiar flesh.

But then both Noors — the dreamer and the dreamed self — froze in shock.

The person in the doorway was dressed like Dr. Kim, and wore that name tag, and even had the same tie, but this figure was wrong. So … wrong.

It had no face.

It wasn’t that the hazy air masked it, but the thing in the doorway simply had no face. It had a head, hair, cheeks and a jaw, but otherwise the face was gone, erased, just a featureless mask of white.

And the skin … it was the color of a mushroom. Pale and blotchy. Sickly in appearance and sickening to look at, as if it were in itself a creature composed entirely of disease. No longer human, but rather defined by the pestilential bacteria and viruses that permeated the air.

The faceless, diseased thing stood for a moment in the doorway, its head raised and cocked as if trying to find her through some sense other than smell or sight. It swayed a little as if it might fall down at any moment.

Noor wanted to scream, but instead she balled her fist and crammed it into her mouth, dreading what would happen if this faceless thing heard her.

Then …

The thing took a single awkward step forward.

Into the room.

Toward her.

It raised pale hands and pawed at the air, trying to find something to touch.

To grab.

Other figures crowded behind it, their mass and weight pushing the first creature farther into the room so they could enter, too. Each of them — scientist, research assistant, technician, security guard, maintenance man — was faceless.

Noor backed away as they filled the room, squeezing into it the way a liquid expands to fill a vacuum. First three of them, then eight. A dozen. Twenty.

Noor scuttled backward into the corner, her legs banged against the chair and sent it rolling toward them. As it bumped up against the first one, the whole mass of them stopped, just for a moment, as if one of them feeling something allowed them all to feel it. A sympathetic reaction. A hive reaction.

Then they began moving again. Faster, with greater purpose.

Toward her.

Noor screamed.

That was when the dream had ended.

That had been a dream.

Now she was awake. Totally awake.

Now Noor stood in her office, crammed into the corner, sweat and tears running down her face.

And her office was crowded by pale, shuffling figures. Dozens of them. As many as could squeeze through the door. They closed on her.

They closed around her.

Exactly like in her dream.

Except for one thing.

In the dream these creatures were all faceless and featureless.

In the dream they had no mouths.

No teeth.

This, however, was not a dream.

Noor Jehan screamed and screamed for as long as she could.

Until there was not enough of her left for screaming.

Chapter Twelve

Vice President William Collins woke with a smile on his face.

The big windows were open to the dawn breeze and the scent of roses and honeysuckle. The trees outside were filled with birdsong.

Collins got out of bed and padded barefoot across to the chair where he’d left his bathrobe, shrugged it on, and stood by the window to watch the rim of the sun peer over the line of trees. He took a deep breath and let it out as a long and contented sigh.

Behind him he heard her stir.

A soft sound, warm and vulnerable. A rustle of sheets as she turned over, then the deep, slow sound of a sleeper far below the surface.

He didn’t look at her, preferring instead to remember the way she looked last night. She’d flown into town on a private jet from Atlanta and showed up in a black dress that clung to her curves like a second skin. The delight in peeling that faux skin from her, revealing an electric blue push-up bra and matching thong. Those were probably downstairs with the rest of their clothes. They’d been naked when they made love on the stairs, and in the hallway, and here in the bedroom.

God, he’d been a lion last night. A tiger.

A beast.

He made her scream when she came, and when he came inside her the first time he roared like the beast he was.

That’s how it always was with her.

It was never that way with his wife.

She was a cold fish who had be stoned or smashed before she spread her legs. And the world would have to be burning down to its last hour before she’d open those thin and prissy lips to give him a blow job.

He wondered if he she knew he was cheating on her.

Probably. Probably felt relieved, too. The more ass he got elsewhere, the less often she had to act like a sexual being.

Anger began to creep into his mood and he forced it down, letting memories of last night wash it out of him. He turned and leaned on the window frame to watch the woman sleep. Silky black hair spilled around her like fine lace. The curve of one shoulder and one breast, a nipple that was surprisingly dark against the soft golden tone of her skin. He was glad she didn’t dye her nipples like many Asian women did in the belief that it would be more appealing to white men. Collins thought she was perfect the way God made her. Appealing to each one of his five senses.

Not bad for the ego, either.

Though he had to wonder if he was a bigger ego hit for her than she was for him. Vice president of the United States. Even if she couldn’t tell anyone, she knew she was banging the guy who was one heartbeat away from being the most powerful man in the world. A man who had, in fact, been the president twice. Once when the president had bypass surgery, and then last year, during the abduction thing.

Collins had tasted that power. He had become addicted to it, and he did not apologize to himself for that addiction. It would have been a greater lie to tell himself that he didn’t need or want that power again.

Goddamn right he did.

Wanted it, and would have it.

The anger crept back into his veins, and this time it took hold. It changed the color of the sunshine to an ugly brightness, and transformed the birdsong to irritating noise.

Collins felt his mouth curl into a snarl.

He pushed himself away from the windowsill and crossed to the bed, caught the edge of the sheet and whipped it away. The noise and the sudden air shift snapped the woman out of her sleep, and for a moment she recoiled, cringing, her hands instinctively moving to cover her cupcake breasts and smudge of ink-black pubic hair. Then she saw him and her sleepy confusion changed into something different. A smile that was as sly and old as all the corruption in the world ignited fires in those eyes.

“Well,” she said slyly, moving her hands and rolling onto her back, “good morning to you, too. You look like you’re ready to take a bite out of the day.”

He grinned down at her, leered at her. Wanted her. “So do you. And it’s a big damn day for you, sweetie.”

“I know. I have to get back to Atlanta,” she said. A shadow passed through her eyes when she said that.

“You okay?” asked Collins. “Having second thoughts?”

The woman took a half beat before answering. “No. It’s just that once this match is lit, this is it. There’s no turning back.”

“I know.”

“And we might not see each other again.”

He gave her his best smile. “Sure we will.”

“When?”

“When the game is reset.”

She shook her head. “It’s not a reset. You never get the terminology right.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Whatever you gamers call this stuff.”

“It’s a new game. Brand new.”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “And everything will be different afterward. A new America … a new world.”

“But we won’t share it,” she said.

“We will.”

“No—”

“We will,” he insisted. “It’ll just take some time. You’re going to be busy getting the hell out of Dodge and I’ll be busy remaking this country into what it should have been if we’d stayed the course. So, call it a new game, call it what you like, honey. When all the fires are out, we’ll find a way to get together. Maybe even out in public.”

“You’re a very charming liar.”

“I mean it.”

“What, you’ll dump your wife and trot me out on your arm? The world’s most hunted terrorist, and you think that’ll make for good arm candy?”

“You’re not the world’s most hunted terrorist yet.”

“Day’s young.”

He laughed. “You’re an evil bitch, you know that?”

The woman reached up and caught the end of his bathrobe belt, gave it a sharp pull, and licked her lips as the robe parted.

She reached between the flaps of the robe and wrapped her fingers around his hardness, and with that as a handle, drew him toward her. She was not gentle about it. It hurt. But that was okay. Pain was another kind of drug. Her breasts and thighs and buttocks were still red and bruised from last night’s slaps and bites. Collins shoved her back against the mattress, used his knee to roughly part her legs, and with a low feral growl thrust into her with only a little guidance from her strong hands.

He did not take her. They took each other, both of them thrusting against the other with brutality and need and a shared viciousness that was an incredible aphrodisiac for each of them.

Outside, the sun set fire to the morning and the sound of the birds in the trees changed in Collins’s ears to the shrill screams of fear.

And that, too, was a turn-on.

Chapter Thirteen

The girl who came into the Surf Shop was one of those twenty-somethings who could actually have been anywhere from seventeen to thirty. She had a porcelain complexion and gleaming black hair in a Betty Page cut. She wore red sneakers, black leggings, and a baggy black T-shirt that had a picture of an androgynous Asian with a shock of white hair and hugely oversized sword. The words DEVIL MAY CRY were hand-painted below the image. A loose leather belt was clasped around the shirt, hanging low on one hip. The girl wore oversized sunglasses and never took them off the entire time she was in the café.

She stood in line with the other early birds, earphones in, texting on an Android, talking to no one and acknowledging no one.

The sleepy counter man, Caleb Sykes, had seen her or a thousand girls like her every day. Most of them were underpaid secretaries who still couldn’t afford a smartphone or their own laptop and who wanted to check their e-mail before heading into the city to start their day. It wasn’t as common to see them this early on a Sunday, but really Caleb didn’t give much of a shit.

When it was her turn to pay, Caleb took money for a Red Bull and handed over a log-in card for one of the computers bolted to tables scattered around the room. The girl paid cash, didn’t tip, didn’t say anything else except when she’d ordered the drink. Caleb’s only thought when he saw her was that her hair looked like a wig. Just that. When she left the counter, Caleb forgot her completely. Fifteen minutes later, when the counter rush slowed and Caleb looked around the room, the girl was gone. He was not consciously aware of her not being there. She would have slipped entirely from his mind had it been an ordinary day.

However, the day was not ordinary and, as it turned out, Caleb would come to remember that young woman for the rest of his life. She would visit him in his dreams, though when that happened there were no eyes behind the dark lenses of the shades, but actual fire. The heat of that fire became so intense that it would chase him from sleep into a trembling wakefulness, and he would sit up in bed, drenched with sweat, listening to the desperate pounding of his heart.

At the moment, as he looked around the cyber café, he did not see her and did not think about her.

Until he had no choice.

At precisely 6:30 that morning her face appeared on every screen in the café. Even on the personal laptops of customers who came in for the wi-fi access. Caleb was bent over the counter running a debit card, heard the chorus of grunts and questions.

He looked up and saw the face on the monitors.

A girl with dark glasses and an anime T-shirt. Caleb thought he recognized the Betty Page haircut, but her presence on the screen did not immediately connect with a customer who had been in the store.

The girl smiled placidly but said nothing. It wasn’t a static image, because at one point she sipped from a can of Red Bull.

“Yo!” growled one customer as he pounded at his keyboard in a vain attempt to break the connection. “What the hell?”

“Hold on, guys,” said Caleb loud enough for everyone to hear. “Must be a server error. I apologize for the delay, let me see what I can do.”

Caleb pulled his laptop closer and tapped some keys, checking the router status, running a diagnostic, doing the routine things that should have fixed this in seconds. The image remained in place. The Korean girl took another sip of Red Bull.

“Okay,” Caleb announced, “I’m going to have to reboot the router. Everybody should be back online in a couple of seconds.”

“I’m not paying to sit here and stare at some Japanese chick,” groused the man who’d yelled earlier.

She’s Korean, jackass, thought Caleb, but he didn’t see any value in saying that out loud. “Gimme a sec.”

He unplugged the router from cable and power sources.

Every screen in the café flickered to black for one second, and then the Korean girl was back.

Caleb stared at the dozen-plus copies of her face scattered throughout the room. He looked at his own laptop. With the plugs pulled all that he should be seeing was a no-connection screen.

The Korean girl smiled.

Caleb said, “What?”

He tried several other things. The image of the girl blipped and for a moment Caleb thought he’d solved it, but when the girl sipped the Red Bull in exactly the same way as before he realized that this was a video loop. That was weird. If the computers weren’t connected to the Net and yet were showing the girl, then that meant there was some kind of video file planted on each machine. Even computers belonging to customers who came in after that girl left the store. Was that possible?

Yeah. And if it was true it could be real trouble for the café.

That girl could have uploaded a Trojan horse to all of the rental computers here at the Surf Shop, and anyone logging on through the router was probably receiving it when they agreed to the terms on the café’s homepage.

Shit.

The customers were mad now. Several were badgering him about getting things fixed. The loudmouth was saying that they should all get their money back.

Caleb quickly restarted his MacBook Pro. He entered his password and for a moment he saw his usual desktop display.

And then the image of the Korean girl reappeared.

“What the hell are you doing over there?” demanded the loud customer.

Caleb shook his head. “I–I’m having a little trouble with … Um. Hold on, let me try something else.”

He plugged the router in and waited as it ran through its opening diagnostic.

“Hey,” said a woman seated by the window. She held up her iPhone. “It’s not just us. It’s on the news.”

Everyone scrambled for their cells. Caleb subscribed to several RSS news feeds, and as soon as he unlocked the screen he saw a string of news alerts from USAToday, New York Times, Yahoo News, and even the BBC news. Caleb fished under the counter for a TV remote and aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, which had been flashing advertisements from a CD-ROM. He channeled over to CNN.

And there she was. The patrons got up from their laptops and began drifting toward the TV. Below the Korean girl’s face was a title credit:

“Turn up the volume,” said a woman, one of the café’s regulars.

“… will auto-delete in a few seconds,” the Korean girl was saying. “Good luck trying to figure out how we did this. And even if you do, so what? Big deal. Give yourself a cookie.”

This wasn’t the video loop still playing out on their laptops. This was a live feed on national news. And … the girl looked different. The hair and sunglasses were identical, but she no longer looked Korean. Caleb thought that she looked older. A young woman instead of an older teenage girl. And maybe — Chinese? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that something was different.

“What the hell is this?” demanded the loudmouth.

All Caleb could do was shake his head.

“Okay, monkeys,” continued the woman on the screen, “pay attention, ’cause there are three things you need to know and Mother Night is here to tell you.”

Caleb mouthed the words, Mother Night.

“First, if we do not all rise up against globalization then we do not deserve to be free of the shackles welded around our necks by groups like the World Trade Organization, the Group of Eight, the World Economic Forum, and others like them. We are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and take the streets back. Occupy Wall Street failed because there were too many do-nothing pussies. That wasn’t anarchy. The pigs in the system haven’t seen anarchy. Not yet.” She licked her lips in a mock-sexy way, as if tasting something forbidden but delicious. “But it’s coming. The only action is direct action.”

“Jeee-zus,” said the loudmouth. “What kind of Communist bullshit is this?”

“It’s not communism,” said a college kid seated near him. “It’s anarchy.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what it—”

“Shhh,” hissed several people. Caleb raised the volume.

“Second,” said the woman who called herself Mother Night, “because complacency is not only a symptom of a corrupt society, it’s also a cry for help, I am going to shake things up. Will it take the sacrifice of one in three hundred to force the pigs in power to let true freedom ring?”

Mother Night paused to smile. She had perfect white teeth, but smiling transformed her from a pretty girl to something else, something unlovely. The effect was transformative in a chilling way. It was a sardonic, skeletal, mocking grin, a leer that was hungry and ugly.

The screen display below the image changed to read: WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

“Third, Mother Night wants to tell all of her children, everyone within the sound of my voice, all of the sleeping dragons waiting to rise — now is the time. Step out of the shadows. Be seen, be heard. Let your glow cast enough light even for the blind to see. ’Cause remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

She gave another of those terrible, leering grins, then every screen went dark. TV, laptops, smartphones.

For five seconds.

And then, one by one, the screens returned to Yahoo, Safari, Gmail, and websites. They returned to normal. The TV suddenly showed the confused faces of the unnerved reporters.

Everything looked normal.

But Caleb — and everyone else at the café or who’d watched the broadcast — knew that normal was no longer a part of this day.

Chapter Fourteen

Digger Hohlman sat in the rear corner of a Dunkin Donuts, head bent low, earphones screwed in, his Styrofoam cup of coffee nearly forgotten as he watched the screen. He was entranced.

Mother Night’s face had suddenly filled his laptop screen. It was like magic. One minute he was watching “Awakening,” a video from the deathcore band Molotov Solution, and then she was there. It made Digger’s hands clench into fists and he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

After all these months, after encoded e-mails, after packages left for him in coin lockers, after the slow and insanely careful process to bring him into the Family, now here was Mother Night. On his laptop. Speaking to him.

On some level he knew that this was a general message going out to the whole world, something she said would kick open the doors and light the fires. However, Digger also knew that it was a clarion call to the many members of the Family.

Like him.

Born in the dust and promised so much more. Mother Night had told him that she would set a beacon ablaze in his skin. For Digger, who had never shone for a single moment in his life, he would shine because of the grace of Mother Night.

He bent closer to the laptop, so close his breath steamed on the screen, and he turned the volume all the way up so that her murmured words shouted in his ears.

“Okay, monkeys,” began Mother Night, “pay attention, ’cause there are three things you need to know and Mother Night is here to tell you.”

Digger smiled. A rare thing for him. As he listened he thought about the things he had in his backpack. The chemicals. The detonators. The blades.

All the time she spoke, he mouthed the sacred words.

Burn to shine.

Burn to shine.

Pasco, Washington

Julia Smith and her girlfriend, Rage, sat huddled together in a booth at Jerry’s Java on North Twentieth Street. They were sharing an omelet with extra onions and peppers. They were dropping down, mile by mile, from their first pipe of the day.

Normally the descent to earth would be painful and sad, and the ground would be covered in broken glass. They didn’t have enough cash to buy more rock, so that high was the only one they were going to have that day unless they could do some blow jobs for truckers passing through. Rage still had her teeth, and in the right light, with a push-up bra and short shorts, she could usually score three or four ten-dollar tricks. Julia knew that her own looks were too far gone. Hand jobs in the dark for five a rub was about her best.

Luckily, Jerry’s had a three-dollar omelet with a bottomless cup of coffee.

They were watching the news on the tablet Mother Night had sent them. The wi-fi was free at the coffeehouse, and the tablet had a good battery as well as a splitter, so they could both plug in their earphones at the same time.

When the news feed vanished to be replaced by Mother Night, Julia sought Rage’s hand under the table. They sat, fingers tightly entwined, watching the world change. This was what they had been promised was coming. This was the way out of the shadows for both of them.

Los Angeles, California

Tayshon watched the broadcast on his laptop, which he’d snuck into the bathroom. His mother’s boyfriend, Isaiah, didn’t know he had the computer and would have taken it away from him if he’d found out. Isaiah would then beat the living shit out of Tayshon, demanding to know where he got the laptop, why he had it, why he didn’t say anything about it, and on and on. It wasn’t like Isaiah could use a computer. He was an illiterate fool who thought he was a thug, but he was really just a wife beater, a child beater, and a drunk. That bastard loved using a belt, and he didn’t mind if the buckle was what made contact. He made Tayshon kneel on grains of rice. Made him stand barefoot on screws and nuts. Sometimes he’d use his fists, rings and all. Trying to beat his own life’s defeats and disappointments out of his girlfriend and her sixteen-year-old son. Tayshon had scars on his face and body that he’d carry to the grave because of Isaiah.

The only good part of that, as Tayshon saw it, was that the grave was right there. Close enough to touch. Offering a perfect escape hatch from the bullshit and the humiliation and the nothingness.

On the screen, whispering to him through his earbuds, Mother Night said, “… remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

When it was over, Tayshon bent and put his face in his hands and wept, his thin shoulders trembling as each sob rocked him. They were the happiest tears he’d ever shed. He prayed then. Not to God, but to Mother Night. Prayers of gratitude.

Then he washed his face, opened the bathroom door, went back to his bedroom, and fished in the very back of his closet for the things Mother Night had sent him. The knives. The kilos of semtex. The detonators.

The gun.

He heard a sound downstairs. Isaiah’s chair scraping as he pulled into the table for his breakfast.

Tayshon tucked the pistol into the waistband of his pants, the steel cold against belly flesh. Then he picked up the skinning knife.

When he turned the blade this way and that he imagined he could see Isaiah’s face. Bloody and screaming.

“Burn to shine,” said Tayshon in a voice thick with tears and strong with purpose.

Orlando, Florida

His name was Parker Kang.

He was twenty years old and he was certain that he was as old as he was ever going to get.

He was good with that.

It was perfect.

It was soothing to think about it.

No more pain.

No more humiliation.

No more loneliness.

No more anything.

He sat at a desk he’d found in an office building that had been closed during the economic crash a few years ago. He and some other squatters had broken in the night after the place had been shut, moving fast because they knew that someone would be coming to remove everything of value. Parker and his friends came in quick and quiet, using skills honed from years of living hard and surviving from day to day. Each of them knew how to disable a basic security system and open a lock. There were always a lot of chicken hawks learning from older, more experienced squatters. Back when Parker was a snack rat, living off the crumbs dropped by the real players on the street, he learned everything he could. Now he was on his own and didn’t need anyone else.

Except Mother Night.

He needed her more than anything he ever smoked, huffed, swallowed, or spiked. He needed her voice. Her face.

He needed her permission to step off the ledge and fall into forever.

The laptop on his stolen desk was from her. It was nice, too. The shell was that of a MacBook Pro, but the guts were something else. Something weird that she’d designed herself. Stronger than any computer Parker had ever touched, with built-in programs that allowed him to sneak into almost anywhere. He could order food delivered from Domino’s and pay for it with fake credit card numbers. Never a kick out, never a canceled order, because the card numbers were hijacked. The pizza always showed up. Other stuff, too. FedEx and UPS deliveries with clothes and equipment. Even parts for the devices Mother Night had asked him to build. Asked. As if he would ever say no to her.

She was the only person he believed in. The only thing he believed in.

Parker had no god, no angels. Like most of the kids who move like ghosts through the cities, he belonged to nothing. He wasn’t like the homeless who clung to the coats of groups like Homes Not Jails and Take Back the Land. He didn’t have that kind of optimism. He didn’t give a cold rat’s dick about squatters’ rights or the plight of the homeless or any of that shit, because nothing was ever going to change.

Not unless Mother Night made it change.

Even then, though, even if Mother Night ignited a fire that burned down everything that was and cleared the way for something new to grow, Parker knew that he wasn’t going to live in that world. He didn’t want to. He didn’t care if the changes she wanted to make would really build a better world for the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the forgotten, and the lonely. Parker had even less politics than he had religion.

All he wanted was to help Mother Night light those fires.

There was a big table lining the wall opposite where he sat. Something else he’d boosted from the bankrupt office. One half of the table was filled with boxes of parts. The parts always came in individual shipments. Screws one day, housing another, specific chemicals another. Like that. Sometimes shipments from every professional delivery service, including the Post Office. And occasionally things were left in coin lockers for him, or in post office boxes. In those cases he’d get a key in the mail.

On the other half of the table six devices were in various stages of assembly. A FedEx carton filled with brightly colored vinyl backpacks stood open at the end of the table. Each pack waiting to be filled.

When Parker thought about those boxes, he smiled.

Maybe it was a revenge thing after all. Just a little. A baseball bat upside the head of the kind of people he fled from when he was nine. Foster parents who think orphan kids are cash cows, dogs to whip, or something to stick their dicks into. People like the losers at child welfare who can’t think their way around regulations in any way that does real good for the kids in the meat grinder. Politicians who fuck up the system with regulations because they’re in the pockets of landlords, big business, credit card and health care companies.

So, yeah. Revenge, not politics. He didn’t want to see the system changed. He wanted to see it burn. Then he wanted to dive into those flames, let them consume him, and vanish into ash and smoke.

That’s what Mother Night promised him.

It’s what she whispered in his ear that first day.

The whole thing started weirdly. He came home from a day of panhandling at a long traffic light on Sand Hill Lake Road in Orlando and found his door ajar. At the time, he was squatting in a foreclosed house miles away from the tourist areas. The house was in a pretty good neighborhood, but there must have been some kind of legal thing going on about the title, because it remained empty for over a year. Parker moved in, sealed some windows with black plastic sheeting to keep light from escaping, had a friend help him move his furniture in, and took possession. He figured he had a month before he would have to move. That timing seemed to work for him. If the place was shittier, then he might have stayed three months.

But when he came in that day he saw an envelope on the floor. His name was written on it.

Parker wasn’t sure how to react to that. Run, or be relieved because this was probably from someone he knew. He slit it open with his knife. Inside was a short letter and a key. And two twenty-dollar bills. Crisp and new. The letter read:

It was printed on a computer, but it was hand-signed.

That night Parker got some friends and moved his stuff out of there. Over the next few days he began casually passing the Your Mailroom place, checking it out. It was one of those stores where you could rent a mailbox. It gave you a mailing address, and it was used by a lot of squatters. Parker never used it, but he knew people who did. He also knew that cops were aware of this, too.

It took almost three weeks of burning curiosity and nearly crippling paranoia before he walked into the mail service store and used the key. He waited for a time when it was busy, when there were a lot of people in there. He slipped in, opened the mailbox, and peered inside. There was a computer case. Old and battered. Parker bit his lip as doubt chewed him. Then he snatched out the bag, slung it over his shoulder, relocked the box, and got out of there.

An hour later, when he was in a quiet, secure place, he opened the bag.

Inside was the MacBook along with all the necessary cables and chargers. Cards for Starbucks, Panera, and other places that had free wi-fi. He later discovered that each card had one hundred dollars on it, and when they got low they were recharged by someone else. There was an envelope in one pocket of the bag that contained thirty twenty-dollar bills. The last parcel included in the bag was a thick stack of CD-ROMs loaded with games. Edgy stuff. Games that challenged him. Parker had played enough stolen games to be very good.

And there was another note.

It was signed by Mother Night, and below her name was a Yahoo e-mail address.

All of that was months ago.

Parker had learned to trust Mother Night.

He had learned to love her.

Every night he played the games. The package had included multiple versions of Grand Theft Auto, as well as select versions of God of War III, Manhunt, Dead Rising, MadWorld, Saints Row 2, Gears of War, Postal 2, Call of Duty, Splatterhouse, and Solder of Fortune. Plus there were other games in there, stored on disks with titles handwritten on them. Anarchy I through IV, and one highly technical though very difficult strategy game called Burn to Shine, which had one side adventure in which you had to break into a high-security government facility. That one was a real bitch.

Parker later learned that when he played those games his scores were sent to Mother Night. Every time he beat a difficult level on a speedrun, she sent him money and food along with notes of praise.

Those notes were the only praise Parker ever remembered receiving from an adult. If there had been others in his life, the meat grinder had torn them from him.

Mother Night sent him links to videos in which he could see her and hear her. She was beautiful. Asian, like him, but maybe black, too. Or something. Her skin was darker than an Asian’s, and she had a lot of piercings, dark glasses, and a wig. A disguise, but that was okay. That was smart.

Some of those videos had been recorded for him alone, and in those she said his name and spoke as if he were in the same room with her.

At other times the video was clearly intended for multiple viewers. A family. Her family. A family to which he belonged, and wanted to belong. But a family he knew nothing about. Not its faces, not its names, and not its numbers. From the way she spoke, though, Parker had the impression that there were a lot of people out there.

Like him.

At first he was ambivalent about that. Jealous that there were others she cared about. But he knew that was sentimental and stupid. Later he came to appreciate the fact that he had siblings for the first time in his life. Sure, in a way this was another foster family, but before Mother Night he had never felt like he belonged. And he’d never felt like he was understood.

Month after month the videos came, and he quickly discovered that when he went back and tried to view them again, they were gone.

Smart.

So smart.

Then today, a video had just popped up on his computer. On his laptop and, he later learned, on millions of computers, and all over TV and the Net.

Mother Night spoke to the whole world.

However, buried within that global message was one directed only to the members of her family. And to him.

She’d said, “Mother Night wants to tell all of her children, everyone within the sound of my voice, all of the sleeping dragons waiting to rise — now is the time.”

Those were her words.

He smiled with such deep contentment that it was nearly orgasmic.

He could almost smell the sulfur on the match as she struck it.

You have to burn to shine.

Parker got up from his computer, crossed the room to the table, and completed the last few small steps necessary with the waiting devices. Then, still smiling, he began carefully placing each device into a separate backpack.

Chapter Fifteen

Nikki Bloomberg was the third most senior member of the DMS computer division. Only Yoda had more seniority, and then of course there was Bug.

Nikki had been part of Bug’s team for nearly five years and she loved her job. Even though she worked in a glass-walled office buried a hundred feet below Floyd Bennett Field, she felt like she was an international woman of mystery. A superspy with superpowers. Working with MindReader had that effect.

Each senior member of the computer team — variously known as Bug’s Thugs, the Igors, or the Nerd Herd, depending on who was sending the e-mail — ran a different aspect of the MindReader network. Yoda was head of cyberintrusion, and it was his job to make sure that no opposing system could lock its doors to MindReader. That meant that he had to write code or edit code all day. It wasn’t a job Nikki wanted.

Her job was to manage the pattern search team. MindReader had more than seven hundred pattern recognition subroutines, each of which could be used separately and all of which could be combined into a massive assault on raw data. All day long her team received notices in the form of small pop-up windows with keywords and case numbers. Each pop-up contained a hot link to a data cascade where everything related to the keyword was collated. It took a certain kind of mind to be able to interpret that data and make sense of it. Nikki had that kind of mind. A super anal-retentive skill set that was unattractive in, say, relationships, but invaluable within the DMS. She also had a photographic memory, without which she could never even attempt that job.

She was at her desk rerouting data threads from the pop-ups when a new one blipped onto her screen. This one came with a red flag in one corner, indicating it might belong to one of the major active cases. Nikki opened the link in the pop-up and suddenly her screen was filled with a fragment of a video clip. An Asian woman speaking directly to the camera. The phrase MindReader had plucked out and flagged for attention was this: “’Cause remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

The software pulled the words burn to shine out of the sentence and floated them as text on the screen. The file to which this was attached was one of Joe Ledger’s.

The Mother Night case.

One of the few DMS cases that was unsolved.

“Oh my god,” breathed Nikki. “She’s back.”

She hunched over her computer and began hitting the keys that would ring alarms all through the halls of power.

Interlude Three

Artemisia Bliss sat at one end of a massive oak conference table. Three people sat at the far end. Dr. William Hu and two strangers, a big white man and a short black woman. The woman looked oddly like Whoopi Goldberg. She could have been her twin, except that she had eyes that were as flat and cold as a Nile crocodile and a mouth that was permanently set in a frown of disapproval.

Hu said, “You understand that anything we discuss here is strictly confidential.”

“Okay,” said Artemisia. “Do I need to sign some kind of nondisclosure form?”

The black woman’s disapproving mouth hardened.

The big white man opened a briefcase but instead of producing government forms, he removed a package of Nilla wafers, opened it, selected a cookie, bit off a corner, and munched quietly. He placed the package on the table but did not offer a cookie to anyone else. No one asked him for one.

Artemisia waited. She didn’t know who he or the woman was, but it was clear from Hu’s demeanor that they were his superiors. Hu’s manner had become immediately deferential when they’d entered this conference room, particularly to the white man. The big man looked sixtyish, but it was the kind of middle age that came with no diminution of personal power. He wore a very expensive Italian suit, an understated hand-painted silk tie, and tinted sunglasses that effectively hid any expression in his eyes. The lenses looked flat and did not appear to have any corrective curves, so she guessed that their sole purpose was to keep people from reading his eyes. That was interesting. Either he was the most closed-in person in the world, or he was aware that his eyes were the only weak link in otherwise impervious armor. Whoever he was, Artemisia was certain that he was in charge of this place. He had a natural authority and sense of power that was palpable, and yet he did not appear to be deliberately projecting an alpha dog vibe. He simply was the alpha. Here and, she thought, probably in most situations in which he found himself. She was certain she’d never met anyone quite like him.

His vibe was extremely scary. And sexy.

She doubted he would have showed off by making a comment about her name and the connection to the artist, as Hu had done. While with Hu that was mildly flattering, the doctor’s energy was more earthy and real. This man was far more aloof, and probably didn’t need the ego stroke of wanting to appear hyperintelligent and well-informed.

Artemisia realized that she feared him for reasons she could not adequately understand. She was in the presence of power on a level she’d never previously encountered.

And the woman, the Whoopi Goldberg with ’tude, had a lot of power, too. But it wasn’t quite on the same level.

After the cookie was gone, the big man took a handkerchief — a real one, not a tissue — and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. He folded the handkerchief neatly and placed it on the table beside the box of cookies.

“My name is Church,” he said, then nodded to the black woman. “This is Aunt Sallie.”

“‘Aunt Sallie’?” echoed Artemisia.

“You can call me Auntie. Call me ‘ma’am’ and I’ll kneecap you.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it.

“Noted,” said Artemisia.

“Dr. Hu speaks very highly of you,” said Church.

Artemisia nodded. She was letting her instincts guide her, and the remark did not seem to warrant a verbal reply. The man was stating a fact, not asking for agreement.

“Your profile suggests that you would be a good fit for us.”

“May I ask who ‘us’ is, exactly?”

“We’ll get to that.” Church studied her for a long time. A longer time than was comfortable, and she began to fidget. She hated that, because she never fidgeted. It was a point of pride for her. The big man ate another cookie. Slow bites, a lot of measured chewing. A dab of the handkerchief. Without consulting any paperwork or computer, he said, “You were first in science and math in every school you’ve attended. You graduated from high school at age fourteen, you received special consideration that allowed you to earn a doctorate at twenty. You don’t appear to have much in the way of personal politics.”

She resisted the urge to give a dismissive shrug. Instinct told her that a reaction like that would cast her in a poor light. Probably in the black woman’s eyes and definitely in the big man’s eyes.

“I care more about people than political parties,” she said.

“Oh, jeez,” sighed Aunt Sallie.

Mr. Church gave a faint smile. “Would you mind elaborating on that?”

Artemisia felt her face growing hot. Despite her best effort she’d put her foot wrong. Still, she kept her voice controlled, her manner calm. Much calmer than she felt inside.

“I don’t know enough about politics to have an opinion that would matter. Not when it comes to Republican and Democratic pissing contests. If we’re talking the politics of science, then I land on the humanist side.”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning that science should benefit humanity. I have a private loathing for any science that exists for its own sake. Science should be used. It should be applied. The end result of research is practical and beneficial application.”

“What about military applications?” asked Mr. Church.

“Is that a trick question?”

“No.”

“I won’t build nukes, I won’t create bioweapons. Beyond that … if you’re talking about drone technology that can fight an enemy in a modern combat scenario while keeping U.S. troops out of the line of fire, then … sure. I’d do that. Would I build a space-based laser system so the CIA can assassinate whoever’s on their shit list, then no. That’s bullshit and it’s too much of a gray area.”

“You distrust the Agency?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re untrustworthy.”

“How so?”

She took a moment to find the word that she thought would work best. “They’re inept.”

The Whoopi Goldberg lookalike turned away to hide a smile. Dr. Hu studied his nails.

“What makes you say that?”

Now she did shrug. “Because they get too much press, and none of it’s good.”

“It could be a front,” he said. “A misdirection.”

“Sure. But I don’t think it is. I think they’ve had to do too much and never had enough legal funding. They let their need to accomplish an impossible agenda trick them into making bad choices. The whole drug thing in the sixties. That may even have begun as a well-intentioned reaction to the threat of Soviet expansion, but it was badly played. They broke so many laws while trying to save capitalism that it became their knee-jerk reaction. It became the easiest path to a series of short-term goals that probably looked good on reports to Congress but were chump change in terms of real global control. The space race did more to scare the Soviets, as did the Reagan-era military buildup. That’s what tore the wall down and collapsed communism.”

“So you do have politics,” observed the woman.

“No,” said Artemisia, shaking her head. “I’m aware of politics … but really what I’m aware of is the evolution of military sciences since the Manhattan Project.”

Mr. Church selected a cookie, tapped crumbs off, took a bite. “Why?”

“Because that’s the sandbox I want to play in, and I can’t do it from the outside. All of the university research projects are in permanent stall mode, presenting only enough results to renew their grants. And don’t get me started on the private sector. If I were a male Asian scientist I’d already have a job in the high six figures, but there is a bizarrely counterproductive bigotry against placing women, particularly ethnic women, in the trenches of the top military contract teams. That leaves DARPA or something like DARPA. Some kind of think tank way out on the cutting edge where results matter more than gender, race, age, or any other bias.”

Aunt Sallie opened a file folder, read for a moment, her lips moving, then raised her head and gave Bliss a direct stare. “What would you say if I told you that we have transcripts of your therapy sessions going back to junior high?”

“Hmm. Two things occur to me.”

“And they are?”

“First, fuck you.”

Auntie measured out a slice of a smile. “Fair enough. What’s the second thing?”

“I’d be surprised and a little disappointed if you hadn’t.”

That seemed to surprise Aunt Sallie. “Oh?”

“I’m beginning to get an idea of the scope of this organization, or division or whatever it is. If I was on that side of the table I wouldn’t hire anyone whose full psych records I didn’t have.”

“Invasion of privacy…?”

“I’m all for privacy, hence my telling you to go fuck yourself. But at the same time I understand your needs. It’s a gray area and I’m neither a philosopher nor political ethicist.”

Aunt Sallie nodded.

“If you have my records, then,” continued Bliss, “aren’t you going to ask me about the suicide attempts?”

“It was going to be my next question.”

“Yes, I tried to kill myself. Twice.” She held out her arms, palms up, to show her wrists. There were two lateral scars. “Razor blades the first time, pills the second. Ask your question.”

“Why do you want to die?” asked Aunt Sallie.

Bliss smiled. “I don’t. If I did, I’d be dead.”

“Explain.”

“A determined suicide is nearly always successful. Countless studies show that. That’s point one. Point two is how I went about it. Razors across the wrist.”

“Right.”

“Wrong. You’ve seen my IQ tests and all of my other test scores. Do you think that, even at thirteen, I was so unaware of human anatomy that I didn’t know where to cut? Lateral wrist cutting does tendon damage, and I didn’t wind up with much — if I had, I wouldn’t have had the muscular control to cut both wrists. If I’d made a precise venous cut I would have suffered cardiac arrhythmia, severe hypovolemia, shock, circulatory collapse, and cardiac arrest. Clearly none of that happened.”

Aunt Sallie said nothing. Mr. Church ate his cookie.

“And the pills … I took a fistful of tramadol between classes in school. I vomited and passed out in health class. Ask yourself, of all the teachers in a modern school, which one is most likely to know basic first aid? A health sciences teacher.”

“So what are we talking,” asked Auntie, “teenage angst? A cry for help?”

Bliss smiled. “No. Absolute boredom. I was in an accelerated school but I was miles above those others kids. I was smarter than all my teachers. And I hadn’t yet had the offers from MIT, CalTech, and the other schools where my intellect would be cultivated and prized. I was screaming to be heard. And if I couldn’t be heard, then I wanted to be locked away and medicated so I wouldn’t be aware of how sucky my life was and how nowhere my future would be.”

The room was utterly silent.

Without commenting on that, Aunt Sallie opened a second folder, consulted it, and said, “There’s a lot of stuff in here about games. You play games, you hack them and design new levels, you share them with your friends.”

“Is there a question in there?” asked Bliss.

Irritation sparked in Aunt Sallie’s eyes, but there was none in her voice when she replied. “Games and game simulations are a big part of defense research. These simulations are used for everything from devising response protocols for various extreme threats to testing the security designs on new high-profile facilities.”

Bliss nodded.

“Games are also being used for psychological screening,” continued Aunt Sallie. “Put a bunch of candidates for spec ops or other classified jobs in separate rooms, wire them up so you can monitor everything from pupillary reaction to sweat glands, then let them play violent games, and you learn a lot. Like whether someone is going to freeze, to kill, to want to kill, to hesitate, whatever.”

Bliss gave her another nod.

“We’re always looking closely at that kind of research,” said Hu. “We do a lot of it, and we want to do more of it.”

“Building a better mousetrap,” said Bliss.

“Building a tougher mouse,” said Aunt Sallie. “Or spotting mice who are likely to become psycho killers if you put a gun in their hands and turn them loose.”

Bliss shrugged. “A lot of it will depend on the quality of the test and how perceptive the people are who are interpreting the data.”

There was a long silence. Church ate a cookie. Hu wrote some notes on a tablet. Aunt Sallie tried to stare holes through Bliss.

Finally, Church said, “How do you know we’re not CIA?”

“I don’t. But I’d be surprised.”

“Why?”

Artemisia pointed a finger at Hu. “Because they wouldn’t know what to do with someone like him.”

Dr. Hu turned the color of a ripe tomato.

“And they wouldn’t know what to do with someone like me.”

Bliss gave Church and Aunt Sallie as flat a stare as she could manage. They gave it right back to her.

It was Aunt Sallie who broke what became a very long silence.

“She’ll do,” she said, grinning like a thief who had just stolen something of unexpected value.

Hu beamed.

Church ate a whole cookie before he gave a single, small nod.

Chapter Sixteen

She didn’t know I was watching her.

She thought I was still asleep.

She slipped out of the bed the way she did every morning, moving slowly so as not to wake me, moving across the bedroom floor on silent cat feet, reaching for her robe, ducking into the bathroom and closing the door.

It was a kind of modesty.

Not that she was coy about seeing her nude body. I have happily explored every inch of that beautiful landscape. I’ve mapped every pale freckle, paused to consider each tiny scar, paid my respects to each curve and plane, and become lost in the textures and tastes and scents of her.

No, her furtiveness in the first light of morning was because she did not sleep with her wig on. She wore a colored headscarf to bed and it usually came loose.

Junie Flynn did not like me to see her naked scalp. She’d never said so in words, but I knew her well enough to know that she did not want to start the day for either of us with so obvious a reminder that a clock was ticking down inside the cells of her body. We had no way of knowing how many days or weeks or months she had left. If the drugs in the experimental program she was on worked, then maybe it would buy her years.

If not …

Life is a cruel, cruel bastard. It’s merciless and malicious.

Through the bathroom door I could hear her throwing up. Again.

When I’d met Junie last year she was already undergoing chemo, having already finished previous sets of drugs and radiation. The tumor in her head had been removed. Twice. But it was aggressive and sly. It hid little bits of itself from the doctors and then waited for everyone to take a deep breath for that sigh of relief before it snuck back into our lives.

At the moment, she was doing okay. She’d regained some of the weight she lost during the last relapse, with new padding to soften the edges of hip bones and ribs. I was doing my best to fatten her up with hot dogs and beer at every Orioles home game — and at the same time trying to convince her that baseball, not football, was the American national pastime. And we spent a lot of time with my best friend, Rudy Sanchez, and his new wife, Circe — both of whom could cook, and both of whom were medical doctors. Rudy was a psychiatrist and Circe had so long a list of credentials after her name that I’m not sure which profession most factually applied. Dinners with them always involved rich foods and appallingly rich chocolate desserts.

Junie had filled out to almost one hundred pounds. Twenty-five to go to hit the target weight for her height.

But her head was still pale and hairless and she didn’t want it to be a statement in the morning. A reminder.

A threat.

So I faked being asleep and watched her out of the thinnest possible slit of eyelids. I saw her dart toward the bathroom, stepping over Ghost, who lay twitching, deep in a dream of flight and pursuit. Junie paused at the bathroom door and looked back to see if I was still asleep. I affected a soft snore. She bit her lip and there was an expression on her lovely face that was equal parts love for me and sadness for us.

No trace of self-pity even though, let’s face it, it would be completely excusable and understandable. But that wasn’t Junie. Her biggest concern was making sure those she loved could survive her passing.

Her death.

God.

The new experimental drugs were rough. They robbed her of energy, they gave her frequent nosebleeds, and they nauseated her.

But were they also saving her? Were they worth the suffering?

We all hoped and prayed so.

The bathroom door clicked closed and I waited until I heard the shower running before I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I sat there, flexing my toes in the carpet shag, staring at the closed door, feeling an ache throb in the center of my chest. It was so deep, so sharp, so powerful that it felt like a stab wound.

I would have preferred a stab wound. If that were the worst that we had to face, then I’d take the hit and go down smiling, knowing that she was safe and would live. Or I’d do what I do when someone tries to stab me for real. I’d deflect, defend, disarm, and destroy. If this were something I could confront and engage, then I’d be in the thick of it, teeth bared, eyes narrowed, a battle song in my head, blood singing in my ears. If this were some threat come to harm the woman I loved, then there would be no level of ugly to which I wouldn’t go, no depth of crazy to which I wouldn’t descend, to protect her.

I would win that kind of fight, too.

That’s what I do. That’s what people like me do. The trained killers. The shooters and fixers who work in the topmost level of special operations. Defeat is a rare thing for us because we train to disallow the probability of it, and we strive toward eliminating even the possibility of it.

And that’s proof of the cruelty of this thing.

Among my friends who are doctors, my boss, Mr. Church, has the best of the best scientific resources at his disposal, and I’m top kick of the most lethal crew of shooters in the world, and none of us can really stand between an innocent woman and a monster so small that it has to be seen through a microscope.

It’s all humbling in a vicious, mean-spirited way.

“Junie,” I said, whispering her name.

She came out of the bathroom after a while, looking fresh and clean and wholesome and whole. Here wig of wavy blond hair was in place. Small touches of makeup applied to her face. Wearing a sheer white cotton blouse over a cream camisole and jeans. Lots of earrings, pendants, bracelets, and rings. Looking perfect.

Smiling at me.

“You’re up!” she exclaimed happily.

“In many interesting ways,” I agreed.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Morning wood or genuine interest?”

“Both.”

“I’m already dressed.”

“You got dressed before you checked the calendar.”

“Why,” she asked, “what’s today?”

“It’s National Romp Junie Flynn in the Ol’ Sackaroonie Day.”

“Elegant.”

“It’s early,” I confessed. “Best I could come up with.”

“Romping is sooo sexy a word.”

“It’s classier than ‘banging my baby’ day, which was in the running for a while.”

She made a face. “I would have hit you with something heavy.”

“Why should you be different from everyone else I know?” I held out my arms toward her. “It’s an official holiday, ma’am. You wouldn’t want to fly in the face of tradition.”

“We both have important meetings today.”

“Then let’s start the day off with a bang.”

She winced. “Ouch. That’s bad, even for you.”

“It’s still early.”

“I don’t know,” said Junie skeptically. “With a start like that, I don’t know if your day is going to get any better. You’ll be doing knock-knock jokes next.”

“I never make jokes,” I said. “I am a serious-minded kind of guy.”

“Who wants to start the day off with ‘a bang’?”

“That’s serious.”

She pretended to look at her watch, which she wasn’t wearing. “Well … I have a few minutes.”

Clothes went flying. Makeup was spoiled. My dog became disgruntled. And we did, in very point of fact, start that day off with a hell of a bang.

And through the laughter and gasps, the squeals and the insistent slap of hungry skin against hungry skin, we managed to forget to listen to the clock inside our world go tick-tick-tick.

Afterward … and after a second shower for her and a long, blistering crab boil of a shower for me, we kissed on the curb while the valet parking guys fetched our cars. Then I watched her drive off in her squatty little metallic green Nissan Cube.

As of three weeks ago Junie was deputy director of FreeTech, a brand-new think tank put together by Mr. Church and funded by private investors who were unnamed friends of his. Rich friends, too, because they put billions into the company. FreeTech’s job was to find nonmilitary applications for technologies acquired from what they call “alternative sources,” which included some of the weird science DMS teams take away from the bad guys. Understand, we trashed a lot of the really naughty stuff, but there was some radical science that could be repurposed in a way that would genuinely benefit humanity. Sounds corny, but isn’t.

Church was the nominal director, though Junie was actually going to run things. I didn’t know most of the other members of the board, but I suspected that some of them had checkered pasts and had been given the opportunity to redeem themselves. Not sure I agreed with that strategy, but then again, I don’t remember Church asking for my opinion.

Circe O’Tree was a consultant, as was Helmut Deacon, a teenage supergenius who had become the unofficial “ward” of the DMS after the Dragon Factory affair. Spooky kid, but absolutely solid to the core. And one of the weird little kickers in all this was that Mr. Church had extended an invitation for Lilith, the head of Arklight, to join the board of FreeTech. Lilith accepted, but sent a proxy to attend the meetings. Guess who the proxy was.

Yeah. Violin.

Junie and Violin working together.

I made a mental note to buy a very large bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the way home from the office. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

I leaned against the wall of the hotel and watched Junie drive away. Ghost sat beside me, his brown eyes following the little Nissan Cube as Junie threaded it through the thick traffic with a combination of raw nerves, wild risk-taking, and deliberate aggression. She was a gentle soul but she drove like a New York cabbie.

When the car was gone from our sight, Ghost looked up at me and gave a small whine.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

I closed my eyes and stood there for a while, trying not to be afraid of every single new moment in the day.

Junie, I thought. And I silently offered a prayer for her. Or maybe it was a plea to whichever gods were working the day shift, to look after her. To chase away the monsters in her cells and in her blood. To champion her in ways I could not, and let her live the life she deserved to have.

I doubt I have ever felt as profoundly helpless.

Then Ghost and I got into my car and we drove off to see if there were any monsters we could chase.

And catch.

And defeat.

Chapter Seventeen

The sad-faced little man watched Joe Ledger and his dog get into the black Ford Explorer and drive away.

His name was Ludo Monk. Ludovico Monkato, according to his birth certificate, but he had it legally changed when he was old enough. Ludo Monk was simpler.

He was thirty-two years old and had once been told that he looked like a disappointed monk from a bad Renaissance painting. Monk did not disagree. Doleful eyes, receding mouse-colored hair, a hint of the jowls that would appear before another decade was out, perpetual five o’clock shadow, and a wide mouth that tended to turn down into a frown even when he was happy. He was, however, seldom happy.

Monk knew, with no margin for doubt, that he was more than a little crazy. The last time he’d hacked his therapist’s session notes, the things he found only confirmed what he already suspected. There was a lot of jargon in the diagnosis, but the bottom line was that he was batshit crazy. He knew it and accepted it.

But he didn’t like it.

There were drugs, of course. The ones that helped keep him stay steady, which he sometimes took. And the ones that helped him forget, which he kept handy all the time. Some others, too. Uppers, downers, and a few that moved him sideways. Right now he was running on empty, and the spiders were starting to crawl out of the doors in his head.

Being nuts was hard work and there was no payoff at the end of it except to either become so mad that he no longer cared — and he hadn’t yet reached that point — or find a nice balance between his own damaged internal chemistry and the pills he popped. All that would give him would be a sharper awareness that he was damaged goods. And a clearer memory of every bad decision, every ounce of blood spilled, every scream.

Well, maybe there was one payoff. He was useful to Mother Night.

She said that she loved him. And he knew that she needed him.

Him and his weapons.

Whichever weapon she put into his hands. Guns, knives, whatever. So far Mother Night had asked him to kill thirteen people. Each kill had been important to her, important for the work she was doing.

For Ludo it was a way to shine a light into his personal darkness.

Burn to shine.

It was a thing Mother Night often said. It was a tenet of the religion of Mother Night, which was not a religion at all, because it was anarchy even though it used the structure of a religion and …

Every time he tried to make sense of it he just wanted to scream.

Actually, that would feel really good.

Nothing like a scream, he knew. Big ones, little ones. The kind you can feel building down in your testicles and that come out through the top of your head. The kind where you spit up some blood afterward. They were the best.

Of course, it mattered what he was screaming about.

When he played the video games Mother Night sent to him, he screamed and screamed and it was fun. In those games he killed thousands and thousands. With guns, with bombs, with germs, with fires. Sometimes he stomped people. He had the second-highest scores in all of Mother Night’s family.

In games, that was.

When it came to pulling an actual trigger, he was second to none.

None.

Sometimes he screamed with pride at that. But they were private screams and he usually let them rip when he was in his favorite closet with a pillow pressed against his mouth.

He bit open a plastic bag of black licorice and watched the cars down in the street. They looked like insects. He wondered what they thought, or if they thought. If they could think. Lately, Monk had come to believe that all machines of war had some level of consciousness. Maybe cars, too. Motorcycles definitely did, anyone with half a brain knew that. And electric guitars.

He chewed the licorice slowly as the traffic closed around where Ledger’s car had been. When the man was gone, Ludo lowered his binoculars and leaned against the window frame of the hotel room where he’d been waiting for just this eventuality. He tossed the field glasses onto the bed, fished his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, hit a speed dial, and waited through four rings.

“Yes, my dear,” said Mother Night.

“They’re on their way,” he said. “The Flynn woman in a Cube. Ledger in his Explorer. I think he’s going to pick up Dr. Sanchez.”

“You didn’t shoot anyone, did you?”

“You said not to.”

“Good.”

There had been a discussion about that. Ludo tried to explain to Mother about the right time and place for a kill shot. Morning rush hour was ideal. But Mother wanted it later, at a certain time and only if certain things happened in a desired order. Ludo privately believed that Mother was overplanning, but he would never dare say that to her. He would stab himself in the eyes before he told her that she was wrong. That her logic was flawed.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “I’m set up in both places. I can guarantee a kill for either of them but unless they go back to the hotel tonight I can’t get them both.”

“I only need one,” she said, and gave him the details. “And, Ludo, it might not be a shot I’ll need. Good chance I’ll want you to use something else, so keep it in mind.”

“Okey-dokey,” he said.

“Ludo … please don’t say ‘okey-dokey.’”

“Yes, Mother.”

The line went dead.

He sat on the edge of the bed and ate some more licorice while he thought about Joe Ledger, Rudy Sanchez, and Junie Flynn. He would have no regrets about killing Ledger — that brutal son of a bitch was a real killer.

Not the others, though.

Sanchez was a man of peace, a doctor. A psychiatrist. On most days, though, Ludo would gladly kill any psychiatrist. Free, no charge. Except on the days they wrote out the scripts. No way he’d want to interfere with a shrink who wanted to write a prescription for pills. Any color, any flavor. But on the other days, on days when the shrinks wanted Ludo to unlock the big box of spiders in his head … yeah, on those days he could kill one. Very easily. Wouldn’t blink.

But what about Junie Flynn?

Ludo used to love her conspiracy theory podcasts and was sorry she didn’t do them anymore. All that stuff about alien-human hybrids, reverse-engineered flying saucers, Men in Black. It was great stuff, and Junie seemed to believe all of it. It made him wonder if she was as batshit crazy as he was.

She was a civilian. And she was pretty. But there were two things that might make it easy for Ludo to punch her ticket. The first was that Mother Night wanted her dead, and that was about 75 percent of it. The second, though, was that Junie Flynn was being treated for a brain tumor. For malignant cancer. Shooting her might be kind of a nice thing to do for the pretty lady. Save her a lot of hassles and indignities later.

Again and again his thoughts revolved from Ledger to Sanchez to Junie Flynn. Three targets. Which one would Mother Night want him to kill today?

He breathed three words that were earnestly meant.

“God help you.”

He had another piece of licorice.

Interlude Four

“They look like a gang of thugs,” said Artemisia Bliss, loud enough for only Dr. Hu to hear. They stood together at the edge of a wide matted area in the new training center at the Hangar. The walls still smelled of fresh paint and there was a mountain of equipment still in crates from vendors ranging from sporting goods to weapons manufacturers.

The gathered men standing in a line on the mats were all hard-faced and battle-scarred. A few, she thought, were attractive in a brutal way. Like the way James Bond was described in the novels. They were dressed in baggy black pants, T-shirts, and training sneakers. None of them showed any emotion, not a flicker. They stood like robots, bodies straight but not tense, eyes focused on the three people who stood in the center of the mats. Mr. Church was there along with his aide and bodyguard, Sergeant Gus Dietrich; but the third person was a slender dark-haired woman Bliss had never seen before.

“Who’s she?” asked Bliss.

Hu leaned close. “Major Grace Courtland. She’s Church’s pet killer.”

“She’s his girlfriend?”

“No. I don’t think so. More like a protégée. She’s apparently a superstar in the special ops world. First woman to join the SAS. Imagine the kind of harassment she had to deal with there.”

“Joined as what? Field support or—”

“Shooter,” said Hu. “Courtland went through the full training and rolled out with them a lot of times. Pissed a bunch of people off, but it also proved a point.”

Bliss snorted. “It’s not exactly news that women can fight, Willie.” She was the only person who called him that, and she knew he liked it.

“Courtland’s apparently more than that,” he said. “Kind of a cross between Lara Croft and Alice from Resident Evil. Video game superbadass kind of tough.”

“Lots of tough women in the world,” said Bliss, already tired of the hype. “Go ask the Israelis and a lot of other armies. Hell, go ask the ancient Celts.”

“I know. Look how long it took the U.S. Army to let blacks fight. Except in a couple of rare instances, it wasn’t until the Korean War when they were fully integrated. It’s stupid.”

It was one of many points on which they agreed. Hu was a second-generation Chinese American, and Bliss had been adopted from China. The uneven pace of the American melting pot process was difficult to understand when viewed from any distance. It was impossible to accept when viewed from up close. The same damaged logic applied to gender, too, and that was going away even more slowly. Bliss was pleased to see a woman in a position of obvious power.

Under her breath, Bliss said, “God, I wish I were like that.”

“What?” asked Hu.

“Nothing. It’s just … that kind of power? In a woman? That’s so … so…”

Even her vast vocabulary failed her.

On the mats, Mr. Church was addressing the line of men.

“Gentlemen,” he said slowly, “congratulations for making it through the testing process. Welcome to the Department of Military Sciences.”

The men said nothing, though one or two of them nodded. It occurred to Bliss that they might not all be military. Some had more of that bearing while others had the more streetwise demeanor of cops.

“You’ve been briefed on the kinds of threats that the DMS was formed to confront,” continued Church. “There is no other domestic agency empowered or equipped to deal with that level of technological danger. You will be the front line in a new phase of the war on terror, and make no mistake — we are very much in the business of stopping terror. The fall of the Towers initiated a new era in Special Operations. Much will be expected of you. Everything, in fact, except the possibility of failure. And before you think that my last comment is glib, it isn’t. The DMS is both a first-response and last-defense organization. We will accomplish both. Failure to stop the kinds of threats we know are coming will likely result in catastrophic loss of life and incalculable damage to America and its people.”

All eyes were on Church. Bliss knew that each of these men could tell — as she could tell when she first met Church — that he was not given to exaggeration or swagger. He was not that kind of person, and that made his words far more chilling.

Church gestured to the woman who stood behind him. She was medium height, fit, with short dark hair and brown eyes. No rings, no jewelry. “This is Major Grace Courtland, late of Barrier and the SAS. Some of you will have heard of her record in the SAS.”

Bliss watched the men appraising her. Most of the men’s faces were wooden; one or two showed an unintentional sneer of contempt.

“Major Courtland has been seconded to the DMS and I have appointed her as the senior field agent. Henceforth you will answer to her without question. She will train you and together you will form the first DMS field unit, designated Alpha Team. Are there any questions?”

There were none but Church and Courtland watched their eyes. Bliss could see when Courtland spotted one of the sneers, even though the man in question — a bruiser with a row of fifty-caliber rounds tattooed around his massive biceps — tried to clear his face of all emotion. Courtland pointed to him.

“What’s your name, soldier?” she asked in a clipped London accent.

“Staff Sergeant Ronald McIlveen, ma’am.”

“Step forward.”

His face was like granite as he took a single step toward her. He was well over six feet in height and loomed above the Brit.

“You don’t want to take orders from a woman, do you?”

“Ma’am?” he asked, clearly trying to sidestep the question.

“I said, if I gave you a bloody order, would you take it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Any order?”

There was only a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Courtland. “In fact, I think you’re a sexist prick who thinks women are for shagging and not fit to stand in the line of battle.”

The man stood absolutely rigid, eyes locked on the middle distance.

“Well, answer me.”

“I will follow orders, ma’am,” he said, though it sounded false even to Bliss, who had never been part of the military.

“Will you indeed?” Courtland stepped close. The overhead lights threw his shadow across her, and she looked tiny and frail. “What if I ordered you to hit me?”

The soldier blinked. “Ma’am?”

“I didn’t stutter, Staff Sergeant. I asked if you would follow my order to hit me.”

“I cannot strike a superior officer, ma’am.”

“So, then you’re refusing a direct order.”

“No … I mean…”

“Hit me, staff sergeant.”

“I … …” began the sergeant, then he shut his mouth and froze into a statue. The other men in the line looked variously angry and amused.

Major Courtland snapped her fingers. “Sergeant Dietrich.”

Church’s bodyguard instantly stepped forward. “Major,” he said crisply.

“Draw your sidearm.”

He did it without question or hesitation.

“Did you hear my order for Staff Sergeant McIlveen to strike me?”

“Yes, Major.”

“I will repeat that order, Sergeant. If he does not strike me, or if you believe his strike is either deliberately weak or deliberately misaimed, you are to kneecap the effing cunt. Is that clear?”

“As glass, Major.” Dietrich raised his Glock and pointed it at McIlveen’s left knee. Dietrich’s hand was as steady as a statue.

“Ma’am,” protested McIlveen.

Courtland looked up at him. “Prove to me you’ll follow a woman’s orders. I want you to punch me in the face. I want you to knock my effing teeth out. I want you to break my effing neck, you effing overgrown cock. Do it right now.”

Bliss’s breath caught in her chest. She grabbed Hu’s hand and squeezed it.

The big sergeant had no choice, so in the absence of retreat he attacked and swung a punch that was powered by his entire body. All his mass and muscle, all his confusion and anger, all his training and skill. He threw it fast and he threw it well, right at Grace Courtland’s jaw.

And then he was falling.

Bliss couldn’t understand what had happened.

There was a confusion of movement and Major Courtland’s left hand seemed to blur. The meaty after-echo of impact bounced across the floor a split second before the big man dropped heavily to his knees, his hands clamped around his throat, his face turning a dreadful red. Courtland stepped sideways and hit him again, the side of her balled fist crunching into McIlveen’s skull just behind his ear. His eyes rolled up and he flopped face-forward onto the floor and lay as if dead.

Mr. Church sighed and brushed lint from his sleeve.

Gus Dietrich holstered his pistol, his eyes roving over the faces of the line of startled men.

Between them, Major Courtland straightened. She snapped her fingers again and a pair of EMTs came running from behind where Bliss and Hu stood. They crouched over the fallen soldier, who was now making hoarse croaking sounds.

Courtland walked over to a second man. “What is your name?”

The man stiffened. “Master Sergeant Mark Allenson, Marine Force Recon.”

“Do you have any issues about taking orders from a woman,” asked Courtland, “or about obeying those orders without question?”

“I do not, ma’am.”

“Hit me.”

Allenson moved like lightning, hooking a vicious short right into her ribs.

Courtland blocked it with a chopping downward elbow block. Allenson hissed in pain and stepped back, clutching his hand to his chest.

The major smiled at him. “Allenson, henceforth you are my second in command. The rest of you, fall out and hit the showers.”

The men stared at her, their eyes darting from her to Allenson to McIlveen and back again. Then they began moving off, at first with slow and uncertain steps, and then nearly running to the exit that led to the shower rooms. As they passed, Mr. Church quietly said, “Welcome to the DMS, gentlemen.”

Bliss was riveted, transfixed, her body flushed with an almost erotic electricity. The way those men — those huge, terrifying, powerful men — now stared at Major Courtland was so delicious.

There was so much power in the room, and so much of it belonged to that woman.

To a woman.

Artemisia Bliss studied Courtland and she wished she could stab her hands into the woman’s chest and tear out that powerful heart.

And eat it.

Consume it.

Be it.

Her entire body trembled.

Chapter Eighteen

I made two stops on the way to work.

The first was the Starbucks on East Forty-second, where I double-parked in a tow-away zone. Coffee is more important than parking regulations. Ask any of my fellow caffeine addicts.

The barista flashed me a big smile as I came in and was already pouring my venti bold by the time I got to the counter. This was the Starbucks I frequented every time I was in New York. I was a confirmed regular, on a first-name basis with the staff and a nodding acquaintance to a bunch of frequent-flyer customers.

The barista set my cup down.

“Hey, Emily,” I said as I stepped to the counter, “any chance you could put that in an IV drip?”

“Sorry, Joe … they still won’t let us go intravenous.”

“Barbarians.”

“No argument,” she said. “Is Rudy coming in today?”

“Heading over to pick him up now.”

“Does he want … the drink?”

“Sadly, yes.”

Emily half turned to another barista and rattled off the name of the unholy alchemical abomination Rudy Sanchez insists is the perfect morning cup of wonderful. “Iced half-caf ristretto quad grande two-pump raspberry two percent no whip light ice with caramel drizzle three-and-a-half-pump white mocha.”

No one with testicles should be allowed to drink that.

No, check that, it’s not a gender thing. No one with any self-respect should want to drink it.

“On it,” said Jared, the boy who shared the morning shift with Emily. I could see him square his shoulders like a rat catcher about to leap into a nest of vermin.

I ordered egg sandwiches for us — not forgetting the fur monster in the car — and a paid with a scan of my smartphone.

Emily gave me a tentative smile. “How is Rudy? How’s he doing?”

I knew that her question wasn’t an idle one. Like everyone else who ever met Rudy, Emily was concerned about how his recovery was coming along. People cared about him. He was that kind of guy. I could have an I-beam through my chest and maybe I’d get a nod. Rudy gets a hangnail and everyone wants to mother him.

To be fair, Rudy was worthy of the concern, and he had been pretty badly mauled when the Warehouse was destroyed last year. He and Church were lifting off from the helipad on the roof when the bombs went off. The blast threw the chopper into the bay. Rudy now wears an eye patch and walks with a limp.

“He’s auditioning for the role of Captain Jack Sparrow for the Broadway version of Pirates of the Caribbean,” I told her.

She laughed. It took her a moment, though, because jokes like that can come off as insensitive. God knows I would never be insensitive. Ahem.

“Tell him I said hi,” said Emily dubiously.

While I waited in line for Rudy’s drink, I felt my phone vibrate, indicating an incoming text. A grin began creeping onto my face because I knew it had to be from Junie. Rudy is a borderline Luddite who has no idea how to text; Top and Bunny would call; and, let’s face it, Church isn’t the kind to text his BFF about last night’s rerun of How I Met Your Mother. I’d only ever gotten texts from Junie and they tended to be pretty saucy. She loved doing that when she thought I was in some high-level meeting.

Oh, Junie, you vixen.

So I wore a wolf’s smile when I unlocked the screen and read the message.

There was no signature and instead of a sender’s name there was only a capital letter A. That’s it.

I think I said something like “What the fuck?”

The people around me waiting for drinks shot me looks. One lady in a fussy business suit actually made a tsk-tsk sound and shook her head in disapproval.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

I typed “Who is this?” into the reply box and sent it, but I got nothing back. So I forwarded the message to Bug with a request to trace the sender.

Back in the car I gave Ghost his sandwich, which he took apart and ate in pieces. Bread, cheese, turkey bacon, egg. I’ve never known another dog that eats like that. If he were a kid he’d be one of those who can’t have his peas touching his mashed potatoes.

The dog will spend an entire evening licking his nuts, but when it comes to breakfast he’s as dainty as a Bryn Mawr socialite.

Rudy was waiting curbside for me.

He was wearing khakis and a Polo shirt, Italian loafers with no socks, a gold watch, and Oakley sunglasses tucked into the vee of his shirt. Circe had begun to dress him like a Ken doll. But it was better than some of the outfits I’ve seen him pick, including his favorite electric-blue bike shorts. He was smiling and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because he saw his best bud slowing to a stop. Maybe the newlyweds had enjoyed a morning wake-up call of the kind that kept putting a smile on my face. Rudy wiped his mouth, and I’ll bet a shiny nickel he was removing a smudge of lipstick.

Rudy limped around to the passenger door, leaning heavily on a cane with a carved parrot head. It was one I’d given him. I figured anyone with an eye patch needed a parrot. I also bribed Bug to reprogram Rudy’s phone so that the ring tone said, “Arrrrr, Arrrr.” Rudy had so far not managed to remove the pirate sounds.

I leaned over and opened the door for him. As soon as he was in, he reached back to scratch Ghost on the head, earning a quick lick across his knuckles. Then Rudy fairly lunged for the Starbucks drink as if he were a man dying of thirst and this were the purest water.

“Not sure how you can tolerate that toxic waste,” I said.

He took a sip, sighed, and cocked his eye at me. “Not sure why, after all these years, it still bothers you.”

“Getting kicked in the nuts still bothers me, too.”

“My masculinity is not endangered by my choice of beverage.”

“How sure are you about that?” I asked. “It’s not exactly a manly man drink, Rude.”

“And a big cup of dark coffee is? Have you considered everything implied by your choice, Cowboy?” he asked mildly. His accent is cultured Mexican in a good baritone. Always reminds me of Raul Julia from the old Addams Family movies.

“There’s nothing implied. I like a big cup of dark, strong coffee.”

“Ah.”

“Ah — what?”

“You like a ‘big’—suggestive of size inadequacies; cup of ‘dark’—an unintentional reference to your chronic disconnect from social normalcy, i.e., having a dark side that you are both proud of and fear; ‘strong’—again we see fears of inadequacy and an infantile attempt to demonstrate strength through proxy; ‘coffee’—said defensively as if all other forms of caffeinated drinks are somehow less so, and such a state only reinforces the fact that you want people to believe you’re strong because your coffee is. Really, Joe, it’s textbook, and it paints you as a weak, sad man. I pity you.”

“I have a gun,” I said, “I could shoot you.”

“Intense feelings of male inadequacy often manifest as threats or acts of desperate violence.”

“Ghost,” I ordered, “kill.”

Ghost looked up from his sandwich and gave me a pitying look.

I turned back to Rudy. “Yeah, well at least I’m not trying to get in touch with my inner tween girl with that drink.”

“Perhaps I am,” said Rudy, “but I, at least, will admit it.”

“Fuck you.’”

“A cogent argument, very well put.”

I put the car in gear and we drove off.

After we’d gone a couple of blocks, I said, “How are you doing, brother?”

“Good.”

“The leg?”

“Meh.”

“Meh?”

“I’m aware of when the weather is changing.”

“Dude,” I said, “after all the stuff I’ve had broken, I can tell when the weather’s changing in the Dakotas.”

“I defer to the human crash test dummy.” He sipped his glop. “But to answer the question, the leg is about the same. We’re discussing a surgical option, but it’s unlikely to substantially improve things, so I’ll probably opt out.”

I nodded. “Sucks.”

“It sucks,” he agreed. “But it is what it is.”

That was a big part of Rudy’s philosophy. I was still juvenile to believe in the “cowboy up and walk it off” approach to pain and injuries. Rudy was more adult and he was a realist. His leg was never going to be prime again and no amount of personal rah-rah stuff was going to change that. The severity of the nerve damage also meant that he probably wouldn’t drive a car again, not unless he got one that was modified for a left-foot driver. In that and other more fundamental ways, Rudy was permanently marked by the violence of our world.

In the rearview mirror I caught him checking me out, watching my eyes. Doing the kind of thing that made him a good shrink.

“How is Junie?”

“Doing good.”

“The nausea, the disorientation—?”

“She’s going through a phase. She says it’ll pass.”

“What about her latest panels?”

“We’re waiting for those,” I said.

Rudy gave me an assessing look. “Many people find waiting for the results of chemotherapy to be emotionally and psychologically corrosive.”

“Kind of an understatement.”

“Paranoia and doubt tend to crop up in a number of ways, Joe. Left unaddressed they can lead to bad decisions and poor judgment. They can do damage to each individual involved in the process as well as to the strength of the couple’s relation—”

“Uh-uh. We’re not having that kind of trouble, man.”

As I said it I heard the unintentional emphasis I put on that. Rudy caught it at once.

“Do you need to talk about something else?”

With any other friend that would be an invitation to unload now, on the drive to work, or maybe later over a beer. But Rudy was more than a shrink, he was the senior medical officer for the DMS and it was his job to offer counseling to the staff. Just as it was his job to evaluate each field agent to determine whether we should go back out or hang up our guns. I have a rather long and complicated history of psychological and emotional trauma. Mentally, I’m paddling a canoe alongside the crazyboat. Rudy helped me find my balance and to use the dark, splintered fragments of my mind. But he kept his eye on me. We both feared the day when my inner demons would slam the door to lock him out, and trap me inside.

It took some effort to get it out, but I finally nodded and said, “Yeah, we could do an hour.”

He looked relieved. “I’m free most of this afternoon. Two o’clock?”

“Two’s fine.”

“Tell me this much,” he said, “is this a personal matter or is it her?”

“Her.”

He nodded. We both knew that we weren’t talking about Junie Flynn. Or Violin. This was about the Asian girl I’d strangled and drowned on a cold night in Baltimore.

“Two o’clock, then.”

“Yup,” I said.

With that settled, there was no need to talk about anything now. Nothing heavy, at least. It was a sunny, beautiful morning in the Apple. My day was likely to be a walk in the park, interviewing and evaluating potential new recruits.

Nothing stressful.

Nothing to worry about.

At two o’clock I’d unlock the Pandora’s Box in my head and let Rudy clean it all out with Clorox.

Then I’d go home to Junie.

It was all going to work out, I told myself.

Everything was going to be fine.

So why did I suddenly sit upright and stare out the window of my car as two teenagers with hoodies and backpacks slouched by? They were skinny, and one had the skull from the Misfits on the back of his hoodie, and the girl had the A-for-Anarchy symbol stitched in sequins on the front of hers. Both of them had dark sunglasses. He wore Doc Martens and she had a pair of orange Crocs. They each wore iPods and mouthed silent words in time with whatever was blasting in their ears.

They began to cross just as my light turned green, making me and everyone behind wait. That was clearly intentional, and I began rolling down my window to growl something at them, but Rudy touched my arm.

“Don’t feed it,” he said mildly.

“Feed what?”

“Their desire to provoke you.”

“If it’s what they want, then I’m fine with—”

“Listen to yourself, Cowboy. They’re a couple of kids who do something like this, dress that way and inconvenience people, for a very specific reason. They are forcing you to notice them and to acknowledge their existence by reacting to them.”

“They could have done that by handing out flowers instead of blocking traffic.”

“And maybe they would have felt silly or maybe it didn’t occur to them. This is their way of spray-painting their name on the world.” He shrugged. “Let them have their power. It shouldn’t diminish us, Joe.”

The kids passed, and the girl turned and smiled at me. It was a strength smile, almost a knowing smile.

My cell rang and I took the call. Bug.

“Hey, Joe,” he said, “I had Nikki do a traceback on that text you got.”

“And—”

“According to your phone provider’s records, no such text was ever sent.”

“Umm … how’s that work?”

“Don’t know. Glitch in the system?”

“If I were a normal guy working a normal job I’d buy that. Keep checking.”

“Will do.”

As I hung up, Rudy asked, “Problem?”

“Not sure,” I said. Then laughed. “Nah. It’s nothing.”

Interlude Five

“Is it safe?”

It wasn’t the first time Artemisia Bliss asked that question, but it was the first time someone took the time to answer.

“It is now,” said the big man with the gun. Major Samson Riggs was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome in a weathered Matthew McConaughey way. Older than her by almost two decades, but square-jawed, blue-eyed, and built like a fitness trainer. He offered her a hand that was tanned but crisscrossed with scars.

Riggs offered his hand to help her out of the armored SUV.

The air was filled with smoke and the rhythmic thump of helicopter blades. Various tactical vehicles sat at crooked angles in front of a four-story brick warehouse. A sign outside said that this place manufactured tennis rackets. It did not. Some of the things it did manufacture lay sprawled and broken in the tall grass. On paper their designation was rather bland, even by military standards. Enhanced drones. In reality they were terrifying.

Riggs led her past several of them. She paused to look down at one of them. Inside the shattered fiberglass-and-metal hull of the unmanned aerial vehicles were torn pieces of red and shattered spikes of white.

Meat and bones.

Bliss gagged and turned away for a moment, and Riggs placed a fatherly, calming hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” he said gently. “First time in the field?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Don’t sweat it. Everyone has a moment like this. God knows I did.”

She cut him a look to see if he was patronizing her.

“Seriously,” he said. “My first gig with the Deacon was a dirty piece of business down in Guam. One of those damn supersoldier programs. Steroids, cybernetic enhancements, implants dumping hormones and stimulants directly into the bloodstream. Very nasty. We busted the place up pretty good, and that was just business, but then we crashed into the surgical labs. Lots of works in progress, if you catch my drift. It was like something out of a horror movie. All those poor bastards strapped to stainless steel tables or chained in iron cages. I don’t think there was one single operator in that room who didn’t toss their cookies. Not one.”

“Even you?” asked Bliss in a croak of a voice.

“Hell, girl, I was the first one. Couldn’t find a trash can, so I threw up into a desk drawer. Sounds like something from a bad comedy, but it wasn’t funny.”

“No,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

He fished in his pocket and produced a tube of ChapStick, uncapped it, and held it out. She could smell the strong mint. “Here, rub this on your upper lip. Put a lot on. The mint kills your sense of smell and helps calm your stomach. Go on, take it. You’ll feel better.”

She reached out and tentatively took the ChapStick, screwed out the lip balm, and applied it liberally to her upper lip and around her nostrils. “Mind if I ask a personal question, Colonel?”

“It’s Samson, and no, go ahead.”

She looked up at him. “How did you become strong? I don’t mean at the gym or good with a gun. I mean how did you, a human being like everyone else, become strong enough to do what you do? To go into battle? To kill. How? Were you born with it?”

She thought Riggs would blow the question off with the typical military trash talk, but he paused, giving it real consideration. “It’s all about choice,” he said. “If you have a calling, if you feel you know that this kind of work is what you want to do, or if you discover you’re good at this and you let your talent pull you in a certain direction, then you have to make a choice. You have to look it in the face. It’s like the way doctors do. The first day in Anatomy 101, when they wheel out the cadavers, half the med students pass out or throw up. Everyone feels sick, even the stoic ones, or the ones who believe they’re stoic. And the reason they do is because it’s a human moment and there is a very clear set of lines drawn in the sand. They have to cut into, dissect and therefore violate a human being. There are so many taboos, so many ancient dreads hardwired into our brains about not doing something like this that it feels perverse. However, the end goal is that the doctor learns things that will make him a good doctor and therefore a healer. Cutting into that corpse is like crossing the river Styx. Or maybe it’s the Rubicon, I have my metaphors messed up. The point is that it’s a rite of passage. You do what you have to do in order to be prepared for what you know will be expected of you later. It’s the same in the military. We train to fight. We visualize and imagine killing the enemy. We learn the mechanics of it, the sociology of it, and the psychology of it. Those of us who want to be good at it also dip our toes into the philosophy of it.”

“Which is?”

“Short version of that is we accept that killing is how we will survive, and it is through killing our enemies that we will guarantee the safety of those we love. Measure killing of that kind against the lives of those we hold precious, and the trigger is easier to pull.”

“That can’t be true for every soldier. Some of the men I’ve met in the DMS seem to be able to kill without emotion and maybe without remorse of any kind. It’s part of their job.”

“That’s true, in the moment. And between jobs it’s a useful mask to make. But we all take it home with us in one way or another. Hell, look at the current military, where there are more deaths from suicide than from combat.”

“And for the bad guys? Like the Hutus in Rwanda who slaughtered nearly a million Tutsis. They hacked off arms and legs, butchered babies, killed nuns and missionaries. Are you saying that they went home and brooded over those killings?”

“Ah,” said Riggs, “that’s a different question. You asked me how guys like me reconcile killing. I’m a moralist as well as a shooter. I will pull a trigger but I damn well want a reason. But you’re right when you say that there are plenty of people in the world for whom life is inconsequential. Ask a Nazi. Ask anyone in the drug cartels. The Russian Mafya. Yeah, there are coldhearted people out there. Some are sociopaths who have found their calling. Others have become dead inside because that is the culture in which they were raised. And maybe some are just plain evil.”

“But they’re powerful.”

“Oh, yes. And there are a lot of them.”

“Who is more powerful?”

Riggs laughed. “Ask the winners. In any fight, always ask that question of the winners.”

“Last question,” she said.

“Are you writing a paper or something?”

“No. I’m trying to understand how this all works. You know about the VaultBreaker software I’m writing? It’s all about trying to get inside the heads of the bad guys in order to predict how they might attempt an intrusion. I need to know to what lengths someone would go to get what they want.”

“That’s your question? How far would someone go?” He grunted. “If they wanted it badly enough … if having it was more important than anything else in their life, then that person might do absolutely anything, cross any line, break any taboo, do whatever it took to have that thing.”

Bliss nodded, letting it all sink in. She looked down at the dead baboon with all of the mechanical apparatus surgically forced into its flesh. The science displayed there was so radical, so cutting-edge. So powerful in its potential.

“It’s unbelievable,” she murmured.

“Welcome to the face of war,” said Riggs, misreading her reaction. When she looked up at him, he added, “This is what the DMS is all about.”

“You see this kind of thing in movies, in video games. I mean, I’ve played first-person shooter games where I’ve fought things as bizarre as this, but—”

“I know. The real world is always different.” Riggs paused for a moment, studying her. Then he said, “I have two young nephews who play all those games. Sixteen and eighteen. Both of them plan to enroll in the army once they’re out of school. They want to go into Special Operations, like their dad did, and like me, I suppose. I think they think that spec-ops is like Call of Duty or one of the games they play.”

Bliss fought the urge to roll her eyes, expecting this to segue into one of those trite lectures where someone who’s been there pooh-poohs the version of combat presented even in the edgiest games. She’d heard that rant a million times and wasn’t interested. On one hand, she was well aware of the differences between real life and games; after all, didn’t she design game simulations? On the other hand, her game simulations were the result of exhaustive interviews with shooters like Riggs, Gus Dietrich, Grace Courtland, and even Aunt Sallie. Plus she’d interviewed the counterterrorism expert Hugo Vox a dozen times, and had grilled more than a hundred operators at his Terror Town training facility. Bliss had built levels of realism into her simulations that were unmatched by anything on the current game market. And she’d played her own games, wearing earphones and goggles that gave her a massive 3D experience. She even co-created a simulator chair that provided smells — gunpowder, blood, sweat and dozens of others — so that the person playing the game had as real an experience as possible.

So, despite the “if it’s a game, it’s not real” diatribe, Bliss was pretty damn sure she knew what real felt like.

So to cut Riggs off at the pass, she nodded to the dead cyborg drone and said, “It’s a shame it’ll all get swept under the rug. We could repurpose this and—”

A shadow fell across the dead animal and Bliss pivoted to see Mr. Church. She hadn’t heard him approach, but he was like that. Sergeant Dietrich stood a few feet behind.

“Oh!” she said, and it came out as almost a yelp. “Hi. Um … we were just…”

Riggs came to her rescue. “The site’s secured, Boss. Nothing got out.”

“Very well, Colonel. My respects and appreciation to Shockwave Team. You may stand down.”

Riggs sketched a roguish salute, gave Bliss a wink, and walked off. That left Bliss smiling awkwardly at Mr. Church.

His face was impassive, a mask that told Bliss nothing about what he felt. She could never imagine him staggering off to vomit up his shock and disgust like the shooters in Shockwave had. Not him.

“What do we … um…?” She didn’t know how to finish the question.

“Everything gets cataloged,” said Church. “Bag and tag all the bodies, human and animal. Secure all computers and records. Trucks will be here in a few hours to collect everything. It will all be flown to Brooklyn.”

“No,” she said, rising. “What I mean is, what will happen after that’s all over? After we do our studies and dissections, after we run all of the data through MindReader, what happens then?”

“In terms of what?”

“In terms of the science.”

Church removed a stick of gum from his jacket pocket, peeled off the silver foil, and put the gum in his mouth. He folded the wrapper very slowly and precisely.

“This isn’t our science, Miss Bliss,” he said.

She did not dare respond to that. He’d just put a big bear trap on the ground between them and there was no way she was putting her foot into it.

Instead, she nodded.

Church put the folded silver paper into his pocket.

To Dietrich he said, “Gus, when everything is cleared out, set charges and bring the building down. Remove the debris and have the foundation filled with dirt. Three days from now I want a field here and nothing else. Are we clear?”

Dietrich gave him a sharp nod. After a moment, Bliss imitated the nod.

Church lingered for a moment, looking at her, then down at the dead animal, then at the building.

“This isn’t our science,” he said again.

Bliss could not have disagreed more.

Chapter Nineteen

Vice President William Collins sat back against the cushions of the armored SUV and sipped his coffee as his motorcade rolled along the streets from his residence on the grounds of the United States National Observatory to his office at the White House. Coffee always tasted better after sex. Not after sex with his wife, of course, but always after sex with the wild woman he’d screwed twice last night and once again this morning. Coffee was the perfect after-passion taste treat. Good for the soul, good for the nerves.

And his nerves needed some help today.

Today of all days.

Beside him, his chief of staff rattled on about the affairs of the day. Bryan “Boo” Radley was a moon-faced Midwesterner with a computer mind and no discernible personality. A great number-two man, but he did talk a lot.

“Should I do that, sir?”

The question hung in the air and Collins had to fish around for whatever had preceded the question. But if it was there he couldn’t grab it.

“Sorry, Boo, I was miles away,” said Collins. “Give that to me again.”

“It was the immigration reform bill. Were you able to look it over? Calvin has this morning blocked out to rewrite it before the press briefing and—”

“Ah, damn, I was so jammed up I didn’t get to it. Put it on the top of my pile and I’ll go over it first thing.”

“Very well, Mr. Vice President.”

Collins shot him a look. “Oh, don’t sound so disapproving. Jeez, you’re like my tenth-grade math teacher. She used to make me feel like shit if I forgot to do my homework.”

“Not at all, Mr. Vice President.”

“And here’s how I know you’re pissed at me, Boo.”

“Sir?”

“You only call me ‘Mr. Vice President’ in that tone when I’ve been naughty.”

“No, I—”

Collins laughed and reached over to clap Radley on the shoulder. “Christ, lighten up. It’s a beautiful day in the capital. Take a breath. No, I’m serious, actually take a breath.”

Bradley’s mouth was pinched but then he drew in a deep lungful of air, pulling it in through his nostrils. He held it for a second and then exhaled, long and slow.

“There,” said Collins, “now doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Collins gave him a rueful shake of the head. “You need to get laid, Boo. I’m serious, you are in more dire need of getting your ashes hauled than anyone in the District of Columbia.”

Radley made no comment.

“Okay, okay, I know, back to work,” said Collins. He genuinely liked Radley and wished that he could bring him into his confidence. What did they call it in that movie, he mused. Into the circle of trust. But although Radley was absolutely ruthless in the prosecution of his duties as the chief of staff to the vice president, he was also a patriot. Worse yet, he was a Constitutionalist, one of those patriots who was a fierce proponent of the letter of the law rather than the spirit of what was really best for the future of America. The kind of patriotism that kept the lights on and provided for the general welfare. Blah, blah, blah. Not the kind who would take a risk and do what was necessary to change the game. The Boo Radleys of the world were always looking to get America “back on track,” instead of taking America to the next level. That rather amazed Collins, too, because the Founding Fathers were innovative rebels before they created that restrictive piece of bad legislation called the Constitution. The Founding Fathers would never allow America to have fallen into the state of disgrace in which she currently wallowed. Escalating debt to China and other creditors. A continued off-the-books allegiance to old-money families like the Rothschilds. Allowing the bankers to constantly butt-fuck Congress. And a demonstrated fear of truly embracing the potential of radical new technologies.

In Collins’s view it was a widespread problem. Republicans and Democrats were both pussies, with maybe a few exceptions. Even though he was a party man according to the voters and election strategists, Collins privately considered himself to be a staunch, unflinching, and proud member of a much older party than either of those. The True American Revolutionary Party.

A party that, granted, existed only in shadows and private conversations, but which was growing very fast. It was gaining friends and power with every day.

And today …

Collins had to turn away to hide a smile. Today was going to be a very important day. A day of great social change. Not just for America, but for the entire world. Collins believed with his whole heart that by the end of today the world would be a different place. Public awareness would be tuned in to a newer and clearer frequency. Congress would no longer be allowed to remain complacent, or to put personal agendas ahead of the needs of what Collins prayed would be a renewed America. A reborn America.

“Sir?” said Radley, and once more Collins realized that his attention had drifted from what his aide was saying. He would have to watch that. Today was not a day to allow anything unusual to show, not even here in the relative privacy of his car.

“Sure, sure, Boo,” he said expansively, “I’m all ears. What else do you have?”

The motorcade moved on, closing in on the White House in so many different ways.

Chapter Twenty

Colonel Samson Riggs leaned wearily against the wall. He held an empty pistol in his right hand, the slide locked back. Shell casings littered the floor all around him and blue-gray gun smoke clouded the air.

The unfinished brick walls were slimed with mossy dampness, and tendrils of creeper vines and the roots of weeds trailed down through the cracked mortar. Above him, the ceiling was a gaping hole that still smoked from the blaster-plaster they’d used to breach the wall into this place. The building had once been a mill in Colonial times, and a tavern for more than two hundred years. Eight years ago the economy crushed it into a silent and empty husk that waited for the sheriff to sell it for back taxes. Recently, someone else had moved in and taken possession of the extensive cellars. Perhaps “some thing” was more apt, because the hulking figures that lay sprawled around him did not look human.

They were massive, grotesquely muscled, and their faces had a distinctly simian cast. Riggs knew what they were.

Berserkers.

But that made no sense. The Berserker program had been shut down years ago by Joe Ledger and his team at a place called the Dragon Factory. That’s where a group of fanatical scientists had used gene therapy to blend the DNA of silverback gorillas with that of a team of mercenaries. The result had been a kill squad who had all of the mass and muscle of the great apes and the total savagery of the world’s number-one apex predator. Man.

It was a deadly combination, but it was damn well supposed to be past tense. All of the Berserkers had been killed. Every last freakish one of them.

So where did these monsters come from?

It was a question with no answer.

A rattle of gunfire made Riggs jerk out of his reverie. This fight wasn’t over.

As he began running he slapped his pockets for a fresh magazine, found none. No grenades, either. All he had left was the fighting knife strapped to his combat harness.

“Never take a knife to a goddamn gunfight,” he muttered as he tore it loose. He raced along the stone corridors.

A shape loomed up in front of him and Riggs nearly gutted it with the knife; but it was Wendig, the sergeant of Two Squad, the second of Shockwave’s smaller teams. Wendig’s face was as white as paste. The rest of him was bright red. He reached for Riggs with his left hand. Except there was no hand at the end of the reaching arm.

“I–I—” stammered the sergeant, and then he collapsed onto the ground.

Riggs had no time to do anything or offer any help. Someone else was screaming. A woman.

There were two women on Two Squad, a stocky Navajo named Mary Tsotse, and Star Phillips, a lanky black woman from Detroit. Ordinarily it was possible to tell them apart, whether whispering, talking, or even yelling; but that scream was so massive, so raw that it could have been either of them. Whoever it was needed him right now.

He leaped over Sergeant Wendig, ran down a narrow side corridor and burst into a larger room where old, broken beer barrels stood on wooden racks.

Two of his people were down. Both male. The rest of Two Squad. Jespersen and McPhail.

Down and either dead or badly wounded. They shared their pools of blood with three hulking forms who were indisputably dead, their heads blown apart by bullets. The brutes wore heavy body armor. Another body, Star Phillips, lay twisted into a madhouse shape, her spine bent backward so that her head touched the back of her thighs. Her sightless eyes were filled with a terminal wonder.

Only one member of Two Squad still stood. Still breathed.

Eighty feet away.

Two more of the Berserkers flanked her, closing in on Mary Tsotse. She fired at them, but the big men held a thick wooden table at head level and let the hardwood soak up the bullets. Tsotse tried for leg shots, but the body armor sloughed off the rounds, though the foot-pounds of impact slowed the approach of the killers.

Tsotse’s body ran with blood from long, terrible gashes torn in her flesh by the steel-hard fingernails of the brutes. Her Kevlar and clothes were in rags, and the exposed flesh was ripped and bleeding. It was through sheer force of will that she was still on her feet, still firing, still fighting.

As Riggs ran into the room he saw the slide lock back on Tsotse’s Sig Sauer. A look of abject fear and hopelessness filled her eyes. The brutes laughed in sudden delight.

She backpedaled while fishing for another magazine, but the brutes hurled the table at her, catching her in the chest with it. Riggs heard the meaty crunch as the table smashed flesh and broke bones.

Then Riggs threw himself at the brutes.

The men turned to meet his charge.

They grinned at the man who wanted so badly to die that he dared attack them with only a knife.

The closest one swiped at Riggs, trying to end it fast by crushing the man’s skull. But Riggs changed his leap into a tuck and roll. He passed under the sweeping arm and hit the floor between them, rolling fast, coming up, spinning, cutting.

The blade caught the lunging mercenary across the back of the knee. Combat demands mobility and padding precludes it. The back of the knee was covered by thinner material that was far too thin. The edge of Riggs’s knife passed through Kevlar and tendon in a tight arc that trailed rubies.

Before the monster could even buckle from the loss of structure, Riggs spun left, turning in a full circle to give mass to his motion, pushing weight behind his second cut. This time the blade sliced cleanly through the Achilles tendon of the second brute.

It was all so fast.

So fast.

The monsters’ howls were filled with surprise as much as pain. Ordinary men did not move that fast.

As their legs buckled, they shifted to their uninjured legs and tried to dive atop him, to smother this man with more than a quarter ton of muscle and bone.

But Riggs came up out of his crouch, rising like a rocket, shifting toward the first brute, holding the Ka-Bar in both hands, shoving it edge upward, cleaving the simian face from chin to brow.

With a savage wrench, Riggs tore the blade free, pivoted into the rush of the second brute, and drove the point of his knife into the monster’s screaming mouth. The blade punched into the soft palate, and Riggs instantly let go with his right hand and used the heel of his palm to pound on the flat pommel, driving the blade all the way through to the brain stem.

The ape-man reeled backward, aware that he was dying, seeing the cold and emotionless face of his killer rise above him as he fell.

Then Riggs turned to the other Berserker. The thing had fallen against the wall. One leg was limp and sheathed in blood. The apelike face was a ruin, cut in half to expose gums and broken teeth and gaping sinuses. It howled in agony.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Riggs pivoted on the ball of one foot and drove his other foot in a brutal side thrust kick that shattered the Berserker’s other knee. Riggs then turned, bent, and tore his knife from the second ape-man’s mouth, turned back to the crippled first one, kicked flailing hands out of the way, and cut the monster’s throat.

As the body collapsed, silence crashed down all around Riggs.

Nothing moved except his heaving chest.

Everyone around him was dead.

Two Squad. All of them. Dead.

Then there were shouts from far away as One Squad came pounding along the halls. Rico and Marchman and the others. The cavalry, riding to the rescue thirty seconds too late. They burst into the chamber and skidded to a halt.

Riggs heard gasps and curses.

And, from someone, a sob.

With a trembling hand, Riggs tapped his earbud to call this in, but there was nothing. There had been nothing since they came down here. Some kind of jammer hidden in the walls.

However, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

He frowned and dug it out, wondering why it had a signal when the earbuds did not. He expected it to be Bug trying some alternate way of contacting Shockwave.

It wasn’t. Instead it was a text message, which was odd because he never used the message function. Ever.

The caller ID was only a capital letter A. The message read:

Riggs stared at the message.

“What the hell?” he murmured.

Chapter Twenty-one

The sign outside said 72-HOUR LABOR DAY SALE.

The boy who walked into the store did not look like the kind of customer who came to buy. He wore scruffy jeans, a black hoodie with the logo of the seventies band Crass silk-screened onto the back. His hood was up and he had sunglasses perched on a thin nose. Wires from an iPod trailed out from under the hood and disappeared into a pocket. The woman behind the counter spotted him right away and kept an eye on him as he moved from one display to another.

The boy stopped in front of glass display cabinets in which a dozen vintage French crucifixes were arranged with photos of the small towns from which they’d come. Then he moved sideways and stopped in front of an adjoining case that held hand-carved nineteenth-century walking sticks from Italy, Austria, and England.

A customer came to the counter and the saleswoman had to shift her attention to ring up a purchase, but a hissing sound made her jerk her head back to the boy. He had produced a can of spray paint from his pocket and was using it to spray a large letter A on the glass doors of the display case.

“Hey! What are you doing?” yelled the saleswoman as she began around the counter.

The boy ignored her and sprayed a letter O around the A. The legs and top spike of the A extended beyond the O.

The woman started to reach for the boy’s arm with every intention of snatching the can away from him, but he suddenly turned toward her and sprayed the black paint full into her face.

She screamed and reeled back, bringing up her hands too slowly and too late to protect her eyes. The customer screamed, but she was an older woman and there was nothing she could do to help.

With dry contempt, the boy said, “Didn’t anyone ever teach you the right way to think, you stupid bitch? The only action is direct action.”

The saleswoman was totally blinded by the paint and she tried to back away, to flee, but instead she banged into a table covered with baskets of small sale items. The boy stepped forward and gave her a sudden and vicious shove, sending her crashing into the table so hard she rebounded and fell to the floor. The baskets and their contents — small guest soaps and specialty candles — rained down on her.

“Stop that!” shouted the older woman.

“Fuck you,” said the boy, but he was laughing.

He was still laughing when he started kicking the woman on the floor.

The customer screamed and waddled out of the store as fast as her old, bad legs could carry her.

When she returned with the police, the saleswoman was still on the floor. She had been so comprehensively stomped that her face no longer resembled anything human.

The boy in the hoodie was gone.

No one — not the staff nor the police — noticed the small high-definition video camera attached at floor level near the crime scene. The camera shell was treated with photoreactive chemicals that sampled the background color of the wall and changed the thin layer of treated film on its outside to match. From five feet away it was virtually invisible.

Adams County Law Library, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The Adams County Law Library is maintained for use by the Adams County Court of Common Pleas, county officials, county attorneys, and the general public. The focus of the collection is Pennsylvania law. Along with thousands of books on case law, the collection also includes the Pennsylvania Statutes, Pennsylvania Code, and Court Rules.

Martyn Salinger ran the library with quiet pride, knowing it to be an excellent and accessible resource. The crucial information in so many important cases was found here. Maintaining and growing the library made Martyn feel like he mattered in the overall process of justice, and that was something he could take home with him every night. Something that made him want to go to work each day.

As part of a big Get to Know Gettysburg event that covered the whole Labor Day weekend, the library was opened at six in the morning and would remain open until midnight on Monday.

When the young woman came in that morning, Martyn assumed she was a law student. She had that underfed look. Too young to be a clerk, too poorly dressed to be a tourist, too into her own thoughts to be a messenger. She came in with a hooded sweater — he refused to use the term hoodie—and a heavy backpack, which she set down on a table. The girl wandered back into the rows of shelved books, apparently studying the titles on the spines with great interest.

“May I help you, miss?” asked Martyn.

She turned to look at him through the nearly opaque lenses of her sunglasses.

“No, thank you,” she said politely. “I know what I’m looking for.”

“Very well. Let me know if I can help.”

She gave him a smile and returned to browsing, and Martyn returned to a LexisNexis search he was doing on his computer for one of the judges. When he looked up a few minutes later he saw that the backpack was still there, but he couldn’t spot the girl. She must be all the way in the back.

A few minutes later she still hadn’t come out.

Martyn frowned, wondering what it was she could be looking for back there. He got up and drifted down one of the rows, trying to make his approach seem casual.

But the girl wasn’t there.

His frown deepened.

He made a circuit of the entire library and could not find her.

Realizing that she must have left and forgotten her bag, he hurried to the table where she’d left it to see if there was something in it that might have a name and phone number, or at least an e-mail address.

He unzipped the bag, which was fat and heavy.

Then he froze and his frown deepened even more.

Not a stack of heavy books, the contents of the backpack seemed to make no sense at all. Inside was a silver pot with a black lid. A pressure cooker. There was a small digital touchpad on the front and the maker’s name: Fagor. When Martyn bent close to examine it, he heard a few short, spaced electronic sounds.

Beep … beep … beep.

He said, “What on earth?”

Those were the last words Martyn Salinger ever spoke.

The pressure cooker exploded. The tightly packed ball bearings, screws, and nails tore him to red rags in a microsecond. Small incendiary charges mixed in with the shrapnel lodged into tables, chairs, and row upon row of books.

By the time the first fire trucks arrived, the library was thoroughly involved. It would be six hours before fire investigators would be able to begin sorting through the rubble, and seven hours before they found the remains of the pressure-cooker bomb.

However, when the trucks rolled up, they could see the thing someone had spray-painted on the front doors.

The letter A surrounded by a rough circle.

Within minutes the fire blackened and then consumed the door. Just as it had the two small cameras mounted inside the library. The video feeds from the cameras had already been sent by the time the components melted.

The LexPlex Sports Arena, Lexington, Kentucky

Duke Hapgood and Cletus Hart were having a long damn morning, and they’d been at it since before dawn’s early light. Their H&H delivery truck was too big to back up all the way to the service door, which meant they had to pick up each and every blessed folded gym mat and carry it from the parking lot, across a patch of grass, and into the event space. Ninety steps each way, and there were eighty mats.

“This is fucked up,” muttered Cletus. It was probably the twentieth time he’d said it, but Duke couldn’t argue with the sentiment.

Inside the event space, two of the other guys were unfolding the mats and laying them out on the floor. So far, thirty-six of the blue-and-tan mats were down, their sides trued up and secured with Velcro. Later those joins would have to be covered with strips of duct tape, and that meant a couple of hours with all four of them walking around on their knees.

“This blows,” said Duke, which had become his go-to response every time Cletus made his comment. They were both puffing and bathed in sweat.

All around the edges of the event space, groups of people watched and offered no help at all. Duke wanted to say something smart-ass to them, but everyone was wearing a black belt. Some of them had swords and staffs and all that Jackie Chan shit.

The Kentucky Brawl was an annual Labor Day weekend martial arts tournament that drew competitors from eastern Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, and the western part of West Virginia. Duke could throw a punch, but he didn’t want to complicate the day by brawling with three hundred trained fighters.

Under his breath, he muttered, “Wouldn’t kill one of these assholes to give us a hand for five minutes.”

Cletus grinned. “They might break a sweat. Couldn’t have that.”

For some reason they both thought that was funny, and they laughed as they carried the next load in.

On the way out to the truck they passed a couple of kids heading in. Teenagers with hoodies and sunglasses. Cletus and Duke ignored them. The kids were carrying backpacks and had the slacker look, but they were both Asian, so the guys figured they were there for the tournament. They didn’t look tough, but you couldn’t always tell with kung fu and karate types.

At the truck, Duke stopped and stretched, bending backward with a grunt to try to pop his vertebrae back into place. Cletus opened a couple of cans of Mr. Pibb and handed one to Duke, who stopped stretching to knock back half of his can of pop.

Later, when reporters and police interviewed them, it was Cletus who first said that their lives were saved by Mr. Pibb. If they hadn’t stopped to drink their sodas, they would have been inside when the bombs went off.

As it was, they were only flash-burned and bruised from the shockwave that picked them up and flung them against the stack of mats waiting to be carried inside. They were not among the eighteen dead and ninety wounded.

In one of those public relations decisions that defy rational explanation, the Coca-Cola company, manufacturers of Mr. Pibb, gave the boys a lifetime supply of Pibb and hired them for public appearances. They became known as the Pibb Boys.

Even Duke and Cletus thought that was weird.

Their story went unnoticed, however, by the people who received the video feed from cameras placed inside the arena prior to the detonation of the bombs.

Chapter Twenty-two

Rudy and I had just pulled into the cavernous hangar that gives the Brooklyn DMS headquarters its name. The hangar itself is mostly a parking garage. From the outside it looks like a dilapidated abandoned building. Lots of broken windows and obscene graffiti. But that was all for show. There was a double shell to the building, and directly behind those broken windows was a curved screen that projected a false interior view that reinforced the image of squalor. But behind that screen were walls of steel-reinforced concrete, sensors, alarms, and hidden guard posts. The guards who walked the perimeter were dressed to look like laborers working on restoring the building. They weren’t. Most were former DMS field-team shooters who were either too old for active fieldwork or who’d been injured on the job and couldn’t roll out for the kind of thing Echo Team faces down. Even so, it would be a serious mistake to mistake them for old guys or cripples. That would be bad in very messy ways.

My cell vibrated. I killed the Explorer’s engine and pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was another text message from “A.”

I showed it to Rudy.

“Nicely vague,” he said. “There’s no context to suggest a meaning.”

I grunted something unpleasant and forwarded the message to Bug.

As we climbed out of the Explorer we were met by Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, a massive and battle-scarred black man with a metal leg and hands that I’m pretty sure could crush a Volvo. When Gus Dietrich had been killed at the Warehouse last year, Brick had stepped up to take his place as Mr. Church’s personal aide and bodyguard. He wasn’t as tall as Bunny, but he had bigger arms and a broader chest. He usually had a genial smile, though he wasn’t wearing one now.

“What’s wrong?” asked Rudy as soon as he spotted Brick’s troubled expression.

“The big man will fill you in,” said Brick, “but the short version is that Shockwave Team just got cut in half on a routine look-and-see in Virginia.”

“Dios mio!” gasped Rudy.

The bottom seemed to fall out of my stomach. “What happened?”

“They rolled on a tip that a Chechnyan extremist team was in-country to start some shit over the Labor Day weekend. Riggs and his boys kicked the door, but it wasn’t Chechnyans waiting for them, and Riggs lost all of Two Squad.”

I bared my teeth. “Who ambushed them?”

There was a queer look in Brick’s dark eyes. “That’s the weird part, man. Like I said, these weren’t Chechnyans.”

He pulled his smartphone and opened the image files. The picture he showed us was a dead man. The face was distorted, brutish, with a heavy brow, wide nose, thin lips, and teeth with overgrown incisors.

“Berserkers…?” whispered Rudy. “I thought … I thought…”

“Come on,” said Brick. “The big man will give you the full briefing.”

Chapter Twenty-three

“Sir!” cried Boo Radley as he burst into the office. “There’s something on the news. You have to see this.”

William Collins quickly closed his phone and hid it between his thighs, out of sight of his chief of staff.

“See what?” he asked.

Radley snatched the TV remote from the coffee table, aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, and turned up the volume. The screen was filled with the face of a lovely Asian woman in a Betty Page black Dutchboy and opaque movie star sunglasses. Below her image was a banner: WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

The woman was speaking. “… are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and take the streets back.”

“Teresa Naylor at the President’s office called to alert me about this,” said Radley. “It’s on every station. Some kind of computer virus that’s hacked into all the news feeds.”

Collins held a finger to his lips. “Shhhh, I want to hear this.”

“… That wasn’t anarchy. The pigs in the system haven’t seen anarchy. Not yet.” The woman licked her lips “But it’s coming. The only action is direct action.”

It took every ounce of willpower the vice president possessed not to smile. Not to leer. That smile was delicious.

“Mother Night,” he said softly.

The video ended and after a few awkward moments the face of the Fox News reporter blinked onto the screen, looking confused and angry. He immediately began jabbering, but Collins took the remote and muted the TV, then tossed the device onto his desk blotter.

“The White House needs to make a response,” said Radley.

“That’s the President’s job,” said Collins.

“But—”

“But,” interrupted Collins, “whoever did this had to have hacked into the systems. That means it’s a cybercrime. And that makes it ours and we have to jump on this. Right fucking now. Get the team on this and set up a conference call with the divisional leaders. Do it now.”

Radley spun and nearly ran from the room, his eyes suddenly alight with purpose.

Then Collins sat back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, enjoying the way a smile felt on his face. He thought about the face of Mother Night. About her lips.

Those lips were incredibly sexy.

Full and ripe.

He remembered the way they looked when she kissed her way slowly up his thighs this morning.

Chapter Twenty-four

Mother Night arrived back in Atlanta courtesy of a private jet and driver. Her suite at the Westin was on the sixty-ninth floor, well above the motion and noise of the convention that sprawled among that hotel and four others here in the heart of Atlanta. She had other rooms — bolt holes, changing rooms, and staging areas — at the other four hotels that formed the loose quad used as a kind of convention center here in the heart of Atlanta.

Sixty thousand people thronged the streets and lobbies of those hotels. They were all very loud and everywhere you looked there was a dense crowd of people, more than half of whom were in costume. Mother Night had walked among them several times over the last two days, sometimes dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider — and she knew she had the legs to rock that costume; other times as Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, Sophitia Alexandra from SoulCalibur, and the other night she danced herself blind at a party while wearing the full bat-wing costume of Morrigan Aensland from Dark Stalker. She’d had to glue her breasts into the costume to keep from flashing the fanboys. Though later, when she’d cut one guy out of the pack and dragged him off to one of her rented rooms, he’d been so eager to get her out of her bustier that he nearly tore her nipples off. It was very good glue.

The pain was a turn-on for both of them.

Just like it was with Bill Collins. She never once left his bed without bruises or the burning imprint of his open palm on her flesh.

She had a costume ready for later today — Lucy Kuo from Infamous 2—for the big event in the afternoon. The costume was perfect. She’d made it by hand and every attention to detail was paid. Her body was ready for that costume, too. Brazilian surgeons had given her bigger and better boobs, sculpted her cheekbones, thinned her nose, and puffed up her lips. With the ass and legs genetics had given her, she knew that she was a knockout, a knock ’em dead statuesque beauty, and when she walked out in a costume everyone noticed her. Everyone. Male, female, traffic cops, everyone with eyes.

That was fine. Mother Night wanted to be noticed.

Right now, though, she was dressed in a different costume, as a character from an entirely different game. She was dressed as Mother Night from the game Burn to Shine.

Her own creations. Persona and game.

In all of gaming, there was no more dangerous a female character. Not a shooter, not a sword-wielding killer of orcs and war machines, nothing like that. Mother Night was a different kind of power. She had others to do the killing for her, to crack the game levels, to rack up the points.

She had an army.

And as she sat there at the computer, she watched the first news reports about that army. None of it connected yet. Not event to event, or events to her. That was the next level of the game. However, on her monitor she watched the first fires being set in Lexington, in Gettysburg, in Savannah.

With so many more to come.

Her long, slender fingers danced over the keys, capturing the news feeds and sending them to recipients in a dozen countries.

She felt her heart racing.

Hammering.

With a start she realized that her whole body was trembling. Sweat was gathering under her clothes and in the hollows of her palms.

It had started.

Her children were going to war.

She suddenly felt so strange. Nausea churned in her stomach and she abruptly stood and headed quickly toward the bathroom, but suddenly the floor seemed to tilt under her. She staggered sideways and hit the wall next to the bathroom door. Her balance was so ruined that she hit hard, bruising her shoulder, knocking her head against the wall, sliding down, collapsing onto the floor. Her rump struck the polished marble hard enough to knock her teeth together.

“What … what…?” she demanded of the moment.

The shakes started then, sweeping through her, running like cold fire through her skin, pebbling her flesh with goose bumps, striking sparks in her eyes.

“What’s happening?” she screamed.

The shivers continued, wave after wave. Tears broke from the corners of her eyes and ran in hot lines down her cheeks.

“What’s happening?”

This time the question was spoken in a tiny voice. Lost, and without hope of an answer.

But deep down she knew what was happening.

After all, it wasn’t the first time something like this had occurred.

There were other times.

Three so far. Three she knew of, but she suspected there had been others. Fugue states that were wiped from her memory but which had left her asleep in strange places. The living room floor in her apartment. In the backseat of her car. Once on a bench by a river a hundred miles from where she lived.

It was all stress, she told herself.

Just that.

It had started years ago. The first had really been the worst, when a young woman who looked very much like her was murdered in a horrible way. Burned alive. Mother Night hadn’t been there, but she imagined the screams and they echoed in her head for many nights after that. Drugs, alcohol, and hard sex with brutal men helped, but only when she was awake. Whenever she slept, those screams were there.

The death was necessary, of course. Mother Night knew and accepted that. If the girl hadn’t died, then Mother Night could never have been born. When viewed as a problem in mathematics, of cause and effect, then it was easier to bear.

And the girl who’d died volunteered for it. Begged for it.

Of course she did. She’d been carefully picked and cultivated for that one purpose.

The woman who’d thrown the gasoline and match was less important, and her death two days later — her head was rammed into the shower wall a dozen times — meant nothing to Mother Night. The woman was a parasite who was going down for her third felony conviction on the three strikes rule. She’d thought the torch job was a payday, and that’s all it was to her. The same went for the two dykes Mother Night paid to kill her in the shower. They, at least, were more or less human, and when they got out of jail they’d have money waiting.

But that burning girl.

God.

The shakes had been worse then.

They’d come again when the hit team she sent after Reginald Boyd had been slaughtered by Joe Ledger. It did not matter that their deaths were an almost foregone conclusion. Either they would die, or Boyd and Ledger would die, or some combination thereof.

When she heard that all of her people had died, and that Ledger had strangled pretty little Luisa Kan, the shakes came back. Very nasty, very intense. Mother Night had thrown up repeatedly and had diarrhea for two days.

It was nearly as bad when she’d helped torture a rogue scientist in Vilnius. Mother Night thought that it would be fun, that it would be interesting. Maybe even a turn-on. Instead it had been loud and ugly and smelly, and it had sickened her.

Even so …

That time wasn’t as bad as the fiery death of the girl in prison.

Now the shakes were back.

Damn it, they were back.

Anger flared in her so intensely that it nearly pushed back the horror.

And that’s what it was.

Horror.

Her people were out there killing people. With bombs, guns, knives, bare hands. On the news, the police were throwing out wild estimates of the dead in Lexington.

That was the tip of the iceberg.

There would be so many more deaths. Today. Tonight.

Tomorrow.

So many more.

Her teeth chattered as if she sat in a cold wind.

“Stop it,” she snarled. She bared her teeth at the world, at whatever part of her was so weak, so feeble, so chickenshit that it rebelled against the reality of everything she had spent years planning. She was smart enough to know that this was her conscience fighting for its existence. Fighting as hard as it could even though the battle had been lost when that match touched the gasoline-soaked flesh of a young woman in a lonely prison cell.

“Fuck you!” she screamed at the air around her.

The echo of it punched her in the face, the ears, the heart.

But she drew in as deep a breath as she could and screamed it out again, tensing every muscle, balling her fists, straining the muscles in her throat, roaring it with black hatred at her own weakness.

“Fuck you!”

The shakes rippled once more. Again.

Then stopped.

Mother Night sat there on the hard floor, her back against the wall, panting like a dog, fingernails gouging the flesh of her palms.

“Fuck you,” she whispered.

That whisper was as cold as dead stone.

She detested the weakness inside of her. The part of her who still felt. The part of her who wanted to put the barrel of a gun into her mouth and pull the trigger. The part of her that craved to punish and be punished for sins committed and pending.

“Fuck you,” she said again.

She could hear the news reporters growing hysterical as they speculated on whether the bombings were connected. Was this another Boston Marathon? Was this something new? Was it terrorism? Was is Muslims? Was it militiamen? The rumors and theories flew and escalated with each new body added to the count.

The people to whom she’d sent these news links would be watching. They would be expecting her to call. Her, Mother Night, not a weeping suicidal fool who had no guts or backbone.

After a long while she clawed her way to her feet and shambled into the bathroom to wash away the stink of regret. She had important video calls to make and she was damn well not going to show any sign of weakness.

“Fuck you,” she said one last time.

Chapter Twenty-five

Church wasn’t available to see me, so I had to gird my loins to face Aunt Sallie.

She looked like Whoopi Goldberg but had the personality of an alligator with hemorrhoids. No, check that, a hemorrhoidal gator would be much nicer. It’s my personal opinion that Auntie wasn’t so much born as burst out of someone’s chest like one of those creatures in those alien movies. Her opinion of me is slightly lower than that of used toilet paper stuck to her shoe. You’ll be shocked to learn that we have failed to bond.

In the hierarchy of the DMS, she was the appropriately named “number two,” and she ran the Hangar as if it were her private ring of hell. She and Church had history going back decades and there were rumors that once upon a time Aunt Sallie was one of the most feared shooters in the world. I believe those rumors.

Ghost disliked her as intensely as I did, but he stood behind me, out of her line of sight. Brave combat dog.

When Rudy and I asked her about Samson Riggs and Shockwave, her reply was pure Aunt Sallie. “He walked into a trap and had his ass handed to him. Fucking idiot got his people killed.”

“That’s hardly fair, Auntie,” protested Rudy.

She ignored him. They get along once in a while, but on a day-to-day basis the only person who can actually stand Auntie is Dr. Hu. And there’s a real surprise.

As for Colonel Samson Riggs, he was about as far away from being a “fucking idiot” as it was possible to get. He was the top team leader in the Department of Military Sciences, a real-life James Bond type who was smart, good-looking, suave, talented, inventive, and tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. Am I gushing like a fanboy? Maybe. Riggs was everything I wanted to be, and while normally natural human envy might dictate that I hate him, I didn’t. Maybe couldn’t. He was how I imagined Church might have been back in the day, except Riggs had a set of human emotions. I’ve done six missions with him, and each time I came away knowing more about how to do my job that I could have learned anywhere else. The fact that I had nearly as high a clearance rate as him meant nothing to me except that he set so great an example that I aspired to be like him, and maybe that brought my game up to a higher level. Hard to say.

His team were all heroes. No joke. Actual saved-the-world heroes.

To think that he’d lost four of them was appalling.

“Do we know where those Berserkers came from?” I asked.

Auntie shrugged. “That’s being looked into.”

“You want me to take Echo out there to—?” I began, but Auntie shook her head.

“You’re supposed to be screening recruits, Ledger,” she said sharply. “We need that done, so don’t try to skip out on your responsibilities.”

Ghost growled low and mean.

Aunt Sallie glared at him. “Growl at me again and yours wouldn’t be the first nuts I’ve cut off.”

Ghost did his best impersonation of a hole in the air.

I smiled at Auntie. “Do you spend time every night looking in a mirror and practicing how to scowl?”

She smiled back. “No, I look at a picture of you and practice gagging. Now get to work. If there’s anything you need to know, you’ll be told, so stop bothering me. I have grown-up work to do.”

With that she turned and headed off to the TOC — the Tactical Operations Center — leaving Rudy and I standing in a pool of her disapproval. When she was well out of earshot, Ghost gave another low growl.

“That was refreshing,” murmured Rudy.

“I know, chatting with her always validates me as a person.”

He looked at his watch. “I’d better see if Samson needs me out there. His team must be in a great deal of pain.”

“No doubt. Give them my best. I’ll call Riggs later on.”

Rudy nodded and head off.

“Come on, fierce descendant of wolves,” I said to Ghost, who slunk along at my heels.

Chapter Twenty-six

Colonel Sim Sa-jeong sat at his workstation and watched a series of events unfold half a world away. Six separate windows had opened on his monitor, each one obscuring the face of the person with whom he had been communicating. One window showed a sports arena in Kentucky seconds before bombs exploded. Another showed a random act of brutal murder in a fine-arts store. The rest were similar. Brutality and explosions.

Sim reached for his cup of tea but it remained in his white-knuckled fingers for long minutes, the tea growing as cold as the blood in his veins.

Then, one by the one, the small windows winked out until only the original image remained. The smiling face of a woman.

She spoke in English, not bothering to provide a translation. Sim had been assigned as her contact here in North Korea because his English was very good. A similar arrangement had been made, he was certain, in other countries.

The woman said, “Do I have your attention?”

Sim cleared his throat. “You do,” he said. “But of what value are these acts? Small bombs? Casual murders? Are we supposed to care about petty violence in America? We already know that it is a nation filled with corruption and—”

“Please,” said the woman, “let us forgo speeches. They are trite and repeated by rote, and I do not care to hear them.”

“Then—”

“These events are intended for three reasons,” she said. “The first is to get your attention, which I believe I have.”

Colonel Sim said nothing.

“The second is to make sure that the signals from the cameras are routed properly to you.”

Sim again said nothing, waiting for what was surely the true point of this elaborate and highly dangerous contact.

“And the third is to inform you that the auction will commence on schedule. Five minutes before the bidding begins I will send a call-in code and a banking routing number. Each bidder will receive a separate routing number. Any attempt to use that routing number for any purpose except to make a bid will result in termination.”

“Termination of what?”

The woman merely smiled and this time she did not answer.

Sim considered. “You ask a lot and yet we do not know this thing on which we are expected to bid? Do you take us as fools? Do you expect us to bid on crude bombs such as the ones—?”

“Of course not,” she said smoothly, her smile never wavering. “You are bidding on something that will change the nature of the arms race. Something that will, in fact, end it. If you bid correctly, it will end the inequality of the arms race solidly in your favor.”

“This is needlessly cryptic.”

“Is it?” She laughed. The woman had a deep, throaty laugh that Sim found entirely unpleasant. “Make sure someone is watching this feed, Colonel. By the time the bidding begins you will have no doubts as to the value of what we are selling.”

“What assurances can you provide that this is not an elaborate trick?”

“Beyond seventeen weeks of your own vetting process?” she asked.

“Yes. Beyond even that.”

“Keep watching the feed, Colonel. By the opening bell you will have no doubts at all. I can guarantee it.”

Before he could respond, the face vanished, replaced by a placeholder image of a sloppily painted letter A surrounded by a tight letter O. Even in China the symbol was known. It represented a concept that was totally antithetical to the strict Marxist social-political concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It was the circle-A.

A for Anarchy. O for Order. And its polluted philosophy:

Anarchy is the mother of order.

Chapter Twenty-seven

I sat on a nuclear bomb, swinging one foot, cleaning my nails with the tip of a skinning knife. All around me people I liked were beating the hell out of each other.

Ghost lay at my feet, chewing on an arm.

It was a normal Tuesday for me.

The arm, by the way, was rubber. It’s been a running gag with my crew to appease the fur monster by giving him toys shaped like human hands, arms, and legs. Occasionally they’d give Ghost toys fashioned to look like even more sensitive body parts. I took those away from him. Ghost sleeps on the foot of my bed. I don’t want him to get ideas.

I sipped a cup of Death Wish coffee and watched the members of Echo Team go through armed and unarmed combat drills with a bunch of candidates sent to us by Delta, the SEALs, Force Recon, and FBI Hostage Rescue. These guys were the survivors of a group of ninety-two we’d started with two weeks ago, and this was why we were here in Brooklyn. The job would normally have fallen to the senior team leader at the Hangar, but he was still in the hospital recovering from injuries received on a bitch of a mission that had, among other things, landed him in a pit filled with genetically altered pit bulls. The smallest of those dogs had been 140 pounds. The rest of his team was in various states of recovery and rehab.

Very frequently our job sucks.

I’d brought the six remaining members of my own battered Echo Team with me to Brooklyn, and they were currently pitted against the last fourteen candidates. There was a lot of grunting, cursing, sweating, thudding, and groaning going on.

Very little of it from my guys, I was happy to see. Happy, but not surprised. Echo Team has walked a lot of hard miles through the Valley of the Shadow.

A wooden knife came sailing through the air, hit the mat in front of me, and bounced up to thud against the bomb. The resulting carroom was hollow. Most of the bomb was a shell; a Teller-Ulam case was enough to make a point during lectures. It had a dummy electronics package for disarming drills, but no fissile materials.

We’re macho manly men, but we’re not stupid.

As I watched, a Cro-Magnon-looking guy who’d been a first-team shooter for Delta grinned as he closed on the oldest man on Echo — Top Sims, who was pushing forty-five now. The Delta shooter saw an old man with gray threaded through his hair, a seamed brown face, and crow’s feet. Easy meat. The Delta bad boy grinned and went for it.

The next thing the bad boy saw was the mat coming up to smack him in the face. I doubt he ever saw the punches and kicks Top used to knock a big chunk of ego off him. Next time maybe he’d fight the man rather than the assumption.

Ghost glanced up as the man hit the deck, and I swear to God I heard him snicker.

My guys — Top, Bunny, Lydia, Ivan, and Sam were dressed in black BDU trousers and T-shirts with the green Echo Team insignia on the chest. Someone — I suspect Bunny — had added a scroll of words around the insignia as an unofficial motto for the team: If It’s Weird and Pissed Off — We Shoot It.

Crazy, but sometimes there is truth in advertising.

Besides, lately there was a lot of very bad stuff happening in the world. The DMS was stretched way too thin, hence the push to recruit some newbies. There was not one field team operating at full compliment. Not even Buffalo Team in North Dakota, which was nicknamed the “sewing circle” because they usually had twice the downtime of other groups. Not anymore. Buffalo Team had been chopped pretty badly in three successive gigs that left them with only two uninjured operators and four with moderate injuries who could still roll out at need. Hell, even our frequent collaborators in SEAL Team Six and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Teams were being run ragged. This wasn’t a new war against a single enemy. It was everywhere. Cartels rolling with body armor and high-tech firearms, religious fundamentalists with bombs, splinter cells buried like ticks in the skin of society, and let’s not forget a bunch of supposedly not officially sanctioned hit teams from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, neo-Nazis, and, yeah, even some secret societies. Everybody was cranky and the bad guys seemed bent on turning the whole world into a war zone. We needed to replenish all of our existing teams that had taken losses and put additional teams in the field, and we needed to do it yesterday.

I’d hoped we’d have more than fourteen left out of ninety-two. But one by one the candidates from that larger group had demonstrated qualities inconsistent with what we needed. Anyone who showed hesitation in a crisis was instantly cut. Anyone who couldn’t switch from pack member to leader and back again was gone. Anyone who lost a step when mission parameters were changed was out. Anyone who couldn’t take the bullshit, pain, and hardship we dealt was let go.

That left fourteen.

I set my coffee cup down and hefted my knife. This one was steel and it was sharp.

“Incoming!” I yelled, and threw the knife randomly into the mass of tussling bodies.

They all scattered, dodging and diving out of the way. All but one of them cut sharp looks at me as they moved. One guy, a wiry goofball with a shaved head, evaded the knife — which landed with a thunk in the middle of a training mat — but the way he did it pissed me off.

“Top,” I said.

Top had caught it too. His eyes blazed as he rose to his feet and bellowed, “Ten-shun!” with his leather-throated drillmaster’s voice. Everyone snapped to immediate attention, including the goofball. I picked up my coffee and sipped it while Top handled this.

He got up in the kid’s face. Top is about six feet tall but when he’s mad he’s a roaring giant.

“Soldier,” he roared, “what were you evading?”

“Knife, sir.”

“‘Sir’? Sir? Don’t call me sir, goddamn it. You think I’m an officer? I work for a living.”

“Knife, Sergeant Major.”

“Did you look to see if it was a knife?”

“No, Sergeant Major, but I—”

Top got a little closer. “How did you know it was a knife?”

“It was a knife drill—”

As soon as those first words were out the goofball tried to put the brakes on, tried to keep the rest of that sentence in his own head. I heard a couple of the other guys hiss the way people do when someone else steps barefoot into his own shit.

Lydia and Bunny were silently shaking their heads. Sam sighed. I heard Ivan mutter, “Oh, hog balls.”

No need to repeat exactly what Top said to the goofball. It was all bad, it was all nasty, and it was all deserved. In combat training you don’t react to what you think the drill is, you react to what is actually happening. It was a worse mistake than when the Delta shooter had underestimated Top. It was the kind of mistake a Special Forces operator should never make. There is no margin for error, no allowing for those kinds of assumptions. It made me wish I’d thrown a flash-bang instead of a knife, because that would have hammered home the point.

“So you just assumed it was a knife because it was a knife drill,” roared Top, “Your psychic powers eliminated every other possibility so that you did not even have to so much as turn your head to see what you were evading?”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant Major, it won’t happen again.”

“Tell me, son, who had the sheer audacity to send you to us?” demanded Top. “Who hates us that much?”

“Army Rangers, Sergeant Major.”

“Bullshit, son,” growled Top in a voice that shook the rafters. “I am an Army Ranger and Captain Ledger is an Army Ranger and the Army Rangers don’t have a clown college, so you can’t be an Army goddamn Ranger, now can you? I want you to get your shit and get the hell off of my training floor.” Top paused for a millisecond. “Why am I still looking at you?”

It was harsh and it was humiliating, and usually neither Top nor I go in much for a public dressing-down. But it was such a rookie mistake that any operator who was here right now would have doubts about this kid when it came to real combat. That kind of split focus and weakened trust would get people killed. Not could get people killed — it absolutely would.

The Department of Military Sciences is a tough gig. Mr. Church built it around teams of operators who were not among the best, they were the best. The top men and women recruited from active service in Delta, the SEALs, and elsewhere. The best of the best without exaggeration. It wasn’t an ego thing or a prestige thing. These soldiers had to be that good because of what we faced day in, day out.

However, while I was watching this incident I wondered how an ordinary citizen would react. They’d probably think that this was comical, or that it was needlessly cruel. That it was a bunch of macho thugs comparing dicks. From a distance, it looked just like that. But if that same citizen could see guys like Top in real combat, fighting the monsters we fight, then they might take a longer pause before passing judgment. This isn’t a Sylvester Stallone flick and it’s not a comic book. This is the world, and the world is a far scarier place than Joe Ordinary will ever know.

Ivan said, “Dog balls.”

Most things were some species of balls to Ivan.

The room fell into silence as the Ranger, his face flushed to scarlet, gathered up his gear and walked to the locker room. His backbone was straight, though, I’ll give him that. With luck, this incident will have burned out the last traces of slack assumption in him. He might go on to be the kind of soldier who would deserve his slot on our team. We’ll never know, though, because there are no callbacks in this theater.

When the door closed, everyone turned toward me. My guys and the recruits. I looked at them, particularly the new guys, looking for resentment, for hostility, for accusing glares. Anyone who pinned his own emotion to what had just happened was going to split cab fare with the Ranger. All I saw were serious faces from the thirteen remaining candidates. I waited out a three-count and then gave them a single, curt nod.

“Any questions?” I asked.

There were none.

“Very well,” I said. “New drill, Top — three to two, broken leg.”

“Bite my balls,” said Ivan, but he was grinning, enjoying what was coming. Lydia laughed and punched him on the arm.

Top gave me a curt nod. It was one of his favorite scenarios, too.

The group was divided into five-man teams. Three bad guys, two good guys; but the kicker was that one of the good guys was to simulate having a badly broken leg. Working together, the good guys had to fight their way past the three opponents, cross fifty feet of the mat, and cross a safe line Top had taped on the far side. The bad guys were allowed to have wooden knives and clubs. The good guys were not.

It was a bitch of an exercise. There were variations of it to simulate broken arms, being blinded, or in bigger groups having two soldiers protect a “shot” comrade from the whole rest of the team. There was nothing academic about any of this, most of the people in this room had already been in one real-life version of this kind of thing. And that’s a damn sad fact to report.

Ghost, however, sat up to watch and was apparently entertained by the thuds of wood on skin and the sounds fighters made when their mock opponents weren’t feeling all fuzzy and warm.

My phone rang. The screen display showed an icon of a steeple.

My boss, Mr. Church. Before I could get anything else out he cut me off. “My office. Now.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Church was alone in his office and he gestured for me to close the door and sit. I dropped into a leather chair. Ghost sat in the corner, watching us both.

“Captain,” Church said without preamble, “we are having an interesting day.”

“I know. I heard about Riggs and the Berserkers.”

“Before we get to that, where are we with the candidates? How soon before they’re ready to roll?”

I sucked my teeth. “‘Roll’ as in begin official training, or ‘roll’ as in go into the field?”

“The field.”

“Ideally? Three weeks. Why, how much time do I have?”

“Almost none. We’re having an interesting day.”

“I hate the word interesting.”

He snorted. “So far most of what’s happening does not directly involve us, but I don’t like the way the day is shaping up. If things move in a certain direction I would hate to lose a step getting into gear. To that end, we may have to dismiss anyone who needs hand-holding and assign the rest where they’ll do the most good.”

“That bad, huh?”

He merely grunted. There was a beautiful cut-glass water pitcher and two glasses on his desk. He poured us each a glass. In the middle of the desk, perhaps slightly closer to him than me, was a plate of cookies. Church always had cookies. If he had to jump off a sinking ship in only his skivvies he’d land in a lifeboat that was stocked with cookies. They were either his only weakness — or perhaps the only proof of his humanity — or maybe there was some kind of significance to the cookies. To which ones were on offer apart from his ubiquitous vanilla wafers; and to the times he offered one, or didn’t, and how many he ate — and how often. Rudy and I have been trying to work it out for years. We were sure there was something there.

Or maybe Rudy and I had become batshit paranoid. Jury was still out.

Church took a vanilla wafer, tapped the crumbs off, took a small bite, and set the cookie down in the precise center of a paper napkin. “Have you watched the news this morning?”

“No. Been busy making life miserable for the candidates. Why? Are the Berserkers—?”

“No. We have no news on that situation. However, a bomb was detonated this morning at a sports center in Lexington, Kentucky. Initial reports suggest it was a backpack bomb similar to the Boston Marathon event some years ago.”

“More Chechnyans?” I asked.

“Witnesses say that the suspects were two teenage boys, probably Asian.” He described the situation. “This is breaking news, so you now know as much as I do. However, I rolled Moonshine Team to provide any on-site assistance, and I put them at the disposal of the ATF and local law.”

“Okay.”

“There was also an explosion at a law library in Gettysburg. One casualty, no witnesses. Nature of the bomb is unknown. So far no one is connecting the two, but I dislike coincidences. I sent Liberty Bell Team via helo to put eyes on that.”

I nodded.

“We don’t yet know if these are connected to each other or to the situation developing on the Net.”

“Yeah, Bug sent something for me to watch, something about a hacker video, but I haven’t had time to take a look. It didn’t seem to be our sort of thing.”

“Take a look now, Captain,” he said. “I think you’ll find that it’s very much our thing.”

He picked up a remote and pointed it at the flatscreen on the wall. The face of a pretty Korean gal appeared on the screen. Betty Page haircut, big sunglasses, bright red lipstick.

“Okay, monkeys,” said the Korean girl, “pay attention, ’cause there are three things you need to know and Mother Night is here to tell you.”

We watched the video. Twice.

“Crap,” I said. “Mother Night? She’s back? How old is this?”

“It’s a combination of a brief prerecorded video loop used as a placeholder, probably to attract attention, followed by what appears to be a live feed.”

“That girl … she looks like the one I…”

Church’s eyes were dark marbles behind the tinted lenses of his glasses. He waited for me to continue. “Very similar,” he said, “but we ran facial recognition on both women and they are not a match. This woman is likely as much as ten years older. And before this video began there was a second video, a loop of yet another Asian woman in an identical costume.”

“What’s that mean? Is Mother Night a them rather than a her?”

“Unknown.”

“Jesus,” I said. “We should keep a lid on this. Who’s seen the video?”

Church sighed. “Too many people. This ‘Mother Night’ video, as it’s already being called, appeared in an extraordinary number of places via a Trojan horse that contained some very sophisticated intrusion viruses. Conservative estimate is two hundred million computers have been infected, very likely over a period of weeks or months. Bug said you could position this kind of Trojan horse on search engines like Wikipedia or stream sites such as Netflix and Hulu. Naturally, every news network has broadcast it. Bug tells me that it has already gone viral on YouTube.”

“Shit.”

“There’s more. Vice President Collins has been in touch with me.”

“Of course he has,” I said sourly. When Ghost heard the name Collins, he made one of his low growly noises. Not the kind of noise you’d want to hear when your name was mentioned. “Dare I ask what he said?”

Church pursed his lips. “He has officially informed me that his Cybercrimes Task Force is taking jurisdiction of this matter because he is convinced it falls under the umbrella of the VaultBreaker case.”

“Really? ’Cause I think that whole attempted-murder thing in Baltimore dribbled the Mother Night case into our court.”

“Not according to him,” continued Church. “The Veep went on to say that we are to offer additional field support to the CTF.”

“‘Field support’?” I said, giving it the same inflection you’d give “nutsack pimple.”

“Yes. He would like us to run down a few things for him.”

I smiled. “Like what? Pick up his dry cleaning and walk his dog? I mean, did I miss the part where we became his lackeys?”

“If so, then I missed the same memo. And it’s highly likely that task list will be misfiled.” Church pursed his lips. “The Veep is a difficult man to admire. However, our immediate concern is Mother Night.”

He replayed the video.

“What’s the deal with the anarchist rant?” I asked.

“The phrasing is a bit glib,” he said. “It could be a deflection. Nor does it give us insight to her real agenda.”

“Oh boy.” I thought about it. “And Labor Day’s on Monday. Are we thinking that the anarchy thing and Mother Night’s field trips to mad science labs are connected? It’s a stretch, but I can see it. Maybe. Labor is work, working for a wage, working for the system, working for the Man, that sort of thing. Could be some kind of proletariat link there—”

“It’s possible,” Church said dubiously.

“Wouldn’t be the first time some bonehead’s confused anarchy with socialism or Marxism. Most people don’t know the difference.”

He made a noncommittal sound, unconvinced.

I changed direction. “Much as I really hate to do it, I could also make a case for the anarchist comment and the bombs in Gettysburg and Lexington to be connected.”

“I agree with you on that much,” Church said. “It’s why I sent teams to each location. Dr. Sanchez and Circe are currently reviewing the video in hopes of decrypting any possible subtext. It’s Circe’s fear that if this is an anarchist matter then the ‘burn to shine’ reference may be a coded call to arms.”

“That’s the same phrase Violin said had been painted in blood on a lab full of dead people.”

“Yes,” Church said, nodding. He tapped a key on his laptop and Bug’s brown, bespectacled face filled the big screen on the wall. “Where are you with the ‘burn to shine’ analysis?”

“I have a couple of things so far. Oh, hey, hi, Joe. And is that Ghostie? How’s it going, pups?”

Ghost thumped his tail a few times. He likes Bug. He doesn’t wag his tail around Aunt Sallie or Dr. Hu. Ghost is a very discerning dog.

“Bug…” Church prompted.

“Right, burn to shine. That’s a very pop-culture phrase. Kind of a twist off the old ‘candle that burns brightest burns half as long.’ Or maybe the other one, you know, it’s better to burn out than fade away.”

“Specific examples?” asked Church.

“Sure. Burn to Shine is the name of a series of direct-to-DVD film projects created by Christoph Green and Brendan Canty — he used to be the drummer for Fugazi. Get this — for each DVD they select a house that’s scheduled for destruction and then get a local band to curate the event. They do a rock concert as part of the daylong event to destroy the house. The DVDs document each house’s history and so on. Not recent, though. Last one was in 2008.”

“‘Destruction of houses,’” I echoed. “Gettysburg and Lexington…?”

“Possible,” said Church, “or a general reference to destruction of any established structure or organization. Government, schools…”

“There’s more,” said Bug. “First off, a lot of musicians seem to grab that as a title or lyric. There was an album of that name by Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals back in 1999. Rudy thinks that ‘innocent criminals’ could be one extreme interpretation of anarchists who cause destruction based on their beliefs that society needs to be torn down. If it’s what society needs then it isn’t criminal.”

“Got it,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Lots, but one more that Circe thinks might fit.”

“Hit me.”

“Remember that show, The Sopranos? The theme song was by a group called Alabama Three. There’s a line, ‘You’re one in a million. You’ve got to burn to shine.’”

“Right,” I said.

“Well, get this, in the context of that song that advice is given as a quote from the singer’s mother. And, guys, remember, in the beginning of the song he wakes up and gets himself a gun.”

Church said, “Ah.”

“I’m compiling a list of all references in music, song, books, whatever. It’ll be a long list, though, ’cause I’m including direct quotes and anything that kind of says the same thing.”

“Good work, Bug,” said Church. “Keep us posted.”

“Wait,” I said quickly. “Bug, did you get anywhere with those text messages I’ve been getting?”

Bug looked troubled. “Actually, Joe, Samson Riggs got one, too. Right after the fight in Virginia.” He told me about it. “Same thing, though. No real caller ID and a dead end on a traceback.”

“How’s that possible? The only person who could block MindReader was Hugo Vox, and we now have that tech courtesy of that weasel Toys.”

Toys, aka Alexander Chismer, was a wanted criminal who had first served as assistant and valet to Sebastian Gault and later to Hugo Vox and the Seven Kings. He was on the most-wanted list in thirty countries.

“What can I tell you, Joe?” said Bug.

“You can tell me where I can find Toys so I can park my car on him. If he’s selling Vox’s technology—”

“He’s not,” Church said. “In fact, Mr. Chismer was quite helpful to us since he resigned from the Seven Kings organization. He is not currently on our wanted list.”

“He’s on mine,” I insisted.

Church gave me a long look through the tinted lenses of his glasses. “No, Captain, he is not. I believe you’ll discover that Mr. Chismer has become quite a useful ally. He is, of course, under constant scrutiny. However, he is designated a friendly and that means all hands off.”

It was not an invitation to a debate, though if there had been fewer things catching fire I might have pushed it. I wanted to know why Toys was no longer in the crosshairs.

Into the awkward silence, Bug said, “I have one more thing about ‘burn to shine.’ There are chat room rumors of an unlicensed video game called Burn to Shine that’s being distributed through underground networks. We’re trying to get our hands on a copy.”

“What kind of game?” asked Church.

“That’s where I think we’re going to overlap with Mother Night,” said Bug, “because from the chatter online it sounds like something that would appeal mostly to the real extreme anarchist crowd. Very edgy stuff. Rape, random murder of civilians, insurrection, and that sort of thing.”

“Whatever happened to Pong?”

“Whatever happened to bearskins and stone knives?” replied Bug.

“Point taken.”

“Find a copy of that game,” ordered Church.

“Working on it. Apparently the CTF has tried several times to obtain copies but has not so far succeeded.”

“The CTF couldn’t find its ass with a GPS,” I observed, and no one disputed me.

“Got to go,” said Bug, but he paused and spoke quickly to someone off camera, then came back to us. “Wait … hold on … something just came in. We’ve been running pattern searches on how Mother Night could have uploaded that video, and I think we figured something out.”

Church brightened. “Tell me.”

Bug launched into an explanation of how he tracked the video to a source, but it was total gobbledygook to me. I grunted to give the impression that I understood what he’d said.

“Give me the bottom line,” I said. “Where was the source file uploaded?”

“I’m about ninety percent sure it was done at a cyber café called the Surf Shop in Park Slope. Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street.”

That was an upscale part of Brooklyn.

I smiled and stood. “I’ll take Top and Bunny. Maybe we’re about to catch a break.”

“We could use one,” Church said. “I have a call scheduled with the president in five minutes, and I’ll be talking to State later this morning.”

“Does that mean you think we’re seeing foreign nationals blowing up our fellow citizens? Because that would be really fucking big. Like missiles-in-the-air big.”

“We haven’t reached that conclusion yet, Captain,” said Church. “We don’t yet know if Mother Night is a foreign agent or an American working with them. We don’t yet know if her current actions are her carrying out orders given by foreign powers or if this is something else. Something internal. In short—”

“—we don’t know. I’ve been using that phrase a lot lately.”

“Anonymity is a very effective weapon in the terrorist arsenal.”

“Yeah, and doesn’t that suck?”

As I turned to the door, Church asked, “Did anything else stand out from Mother Night’s message?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding to the plate on his desk. “If I was superparanoid I’d think the cookie reference was aimed at you. Could be a coincidence, though.”

Church studied me in silence as he took another bite of his vanilla wafer.

“Or not,” I said after a beat. “But aren’t we reaching pretty far to take that personally?”

“At this point we don’t know how far to take anything.”

I nodded, depressed by that thought. I clicked my tongue for Ghost and headed out to find Top and Bunny.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Once he was alone, Mr. Church swiveled his chair to face the big flatscreen mounted on the wall. He hit some keys and the screen was filled with the Seal of the President. A few seconds later that was replaced by the face of the president, who was seated at his desk in the Oval Office. Paula Michelson, his chief of staff, came and stood behind him as they both stared into a laptop webcam.

“Deacon,” said the president, “tell me something that will lower my blood pressure.”

“I wish I could, Mr. President,” said Church. “I have dispatched teams to Gettysburg and Lexington, and Captain Ledger is currently en route to a cyber café where we believe the Mother Night video was uploaded.”

“That’s something.”

“We’ll see.” He then gave him everything from Circe, Rudy, and Bug. “We may be seeing the opening moves of something much larger.”

“More bombings?” asked the president, his face grave.

“Impossible to anticipate, but I would not place a heavy bet on having a peaceful rest of the day.”

“The ATF is coordinating with the FBI on the bombings,” the president said.

“Apart from the oblique reference by Mother Night,” asked Church, “has anyone stepped forward to take credit for those attacks?”

Paula Michelson fielded that. “I just got off the phone with Central Intelligence and they’re as flummoxed as the Bureau. There wasn’t a whiff of this in the pipeline. No warnings, no threats, nothing.”

“Who’s tracking threats from the disenfranchised?” asked Church.

“The FBI is combing through recent events by suspected anarchists,” said Michelson. “So far, nothing jumps out as a connection.”

The president said, “This is Labor Day weekend, Deacon. That’s not a particularly political event.”

“No,” Church agreed. “However, it is one in which we have people gathering in crowds for parties, games, and events; which means that a great number of people are going to be in motion and away from homes or offices.”

“What does that matter?” asked Michelson.

Church’s expression was flat. “It means that bodies may be harder to identify.”

The silence was fierce.

Church eventually added, “And our infrastructure is working on a vacation schedule except for police, who will be challenged with crowd control and traffic management. If there is some kind of coordinated terrorist action — either by a foreign power or something homegrown — this is a ripe opportunity.”

Interlude Six

Artemisia Bliss sat in a car and watched a hospital burn.

Twenty-five minutes ago there had been more than one hundred and eighty-six civilians in the east wing of the hospital. Doctors and nurses, staff, patients, and visitors.

Now there was only flame and smoke. And a few fading screams.

Thirty-one minutes ago EMTs brought in a gunshot victim named Javad Mustapha, a suspected terrorist who’d been shot by a Baltimore police officer during a joint police/Homeland task force raid on a cell by the docks. Sergeant Dietrich told Bliss that several other terrorists were dead and some cops had been hurt. The E.R. was busy. But Javad Mustapha was definitely DOA.

Except that he wasn’t.

Somehow he wasn’t.

Impossibly, he wasn’t.

The video-cam feed from the Baker Team agents who had intercepted Javad and accompanied him to the hospital was like something out of a fever dream. Horror show stuff.

Working on some sketchy intelligence that Javad might have been infected with some new kind of weaponized pathogen, Mr. Church ordered Baker Team to oversee the transport of his body to the hospital and the taking of all appropriate samples.

But something went wrong.

As the body was being transferred from a gurney, Javad suddenly woke up.

If that was even the right way to phrase it.

One moment he was slack, clearly dead from gunshot wounds, and then he sat up, grabbed the closest agent, and bit his throat. There was so much blood. Pints of red driven by that hydrostatic pressure, bathing Javad’s face as he tore at the dying agent’s windpipe and jugular.

The second agent drew his weapon and shot Javad in the side. Twice, three times.

But instead of collapsing, Javad turned and hurled himself at the agent. The Baker Team shooter fired twice more as he was borne to the floor, and the bullets punched all the way through Javad’s stomach. One hit the ceiling and the other hit the pathologist in the chest.

The agent and Javad rolled around on the floor and for a moment the helmet cam showed nothing but wildly blurred movement.

The screams, though.

The screams.

They told what was happening with grotesque eloquence.

Aunt Sallie was in charge of the Tactical Operations Center at the Hangar and she immediately ordered backup into the hospital. The rest of Baker and Charlie teams raced inside. Twenty of the best special operators in the world.

Their helmet cams were all working.

Bliss and Hu watched all of this from inside a DMS SUV parked outside the hospital where they waited for the collected samples and also for the computer records from the task force raid. They were not even aware they were holding hands, but later each of them would have bruises on their fingers.

The car’s TV monitors played the images from all of those helmet cams. They saw more impossible things. The two agents that had been bitten came surging out of a stairwell and fell upon their comrades. The incoming agents did not fire.

Not at first.

Instead they stared in total, numb, uncomprehending shock at what was happening.

Then they tried to help.

They slung their rifles and stepped in to try and pull the infected agents away from the newly bitten. It was an act of brotherhood, of fellowship, of compassion.

And they died for it as the infected turned on them. A small bite here, a bigger bite there. Men staggered backward from the melee, bleeding and screaming.

The other agents panicked.

Some retreated, totally unprepared for this, unable to respond, their training lost in the madness of the moment.

Others, either colder or hardier men, opened fire.

Aiming for legs. Shooting to wound. To disable that which could not be disabled.

The injured bled out.

Died.

And came back.

Javad joined the frenzy. Killing, wounding, and then loping down the hallway, gibbering and moaning, seeking fresh prey.

Some of the agents followed. Living and dead.

There was continuous gunfire for as long as ammunition and life remained.

And then, when there was no one left who looked or acted like a DMS soldier, the real slaughter began. There was so much life here. Even sickness was life. One hundred and eighty-six civilians.

Soon, one hundred and eighty-six monsters.

Then Alpha Team showed up.

By now the hospital was lost, overrun.

Mr. Church and Gus Dietrich were there. So was Major Courtland. And Bliss almost screamed as Javad and a knot of infected burst through a doorway and attacked the three senior DMS staff.

Dietrich drew his sidearm and began firing double-taps to the chest. Infected fell from the impact of the bullets, but they did not stay down. He and Courtland stood side by side, firing, reloading, firing.

Javad ran around them. Dietrich twisted and hit him twice with rounds in the side of the chest. It should have exploded the man’s heart and lungs. But Javad drove straight for Mr. Church, hands reaching, red mouth wide to bite.

Church stood his ground, his face grave but without fear. As Javad lunged at him, Church slapped the reaching arms to one side and fired a Taser point-blank into Javad’s mangled face. The flechettes buried themselves in the dead terrorist’s cheeks and the gun sent two joules of electrical power into what remained of the central nervous system of the infected.

Javad Mustapha fell, immediately and with all the grace of a toppled mannequin. Bliss watched Mr. Church evaluate that and then study the gunplay unfolding around him. In her earbud, Bliss could hear him ordering everyone back, recalling the remaining DMS troops in the building. Church stood by the open door until the last stragglers — some of them bleeding from bites — staggered out into the parking lot. By now a sleek DMS Black Hawk helicopter was in the air above the lot.

“Kill all cell phone feeds,” Church ordered. “Cut all phone lines and jam the signals from the press. Do it now.”

Bliss took her hand back from Hu and immediately began hitting keys. Bug said that he was doing the same, both of them using the Blackout software package they’d written to Church’s specs. Maybe there was an Executive Order on file to approve this kind of thing, but probably not. Church needed it done and they did it.

“Done,” said Bug.

“Done,” said Bliss.

Then she heard Church address the pilot and speak two words that sent a thrill through her entire body.

He said, “Burn it.”

A moment later the Black Hawk launched its full complement of Hellfire missiles at the hospital. In seconds the entire place was burning.

A pyre.

Bliss stopped typing and leaned slowly forward to study Mr. Church. The massive fire was reflected in the lenses of his tinted glasses and for a moment Bliss had the irrational feeling that she was seeing inside his mind, that behind his stony face real fires burned.

Something shifted inside her own mind. Gears were stripped as she thought about everything that had just happened.

A designer pathogen so dangerous and sophisticated that it killed everyone who was infected — killed them and then raised them from death to become vectors for the spread of the disease. That was something military scientists had discussed since the Cold War. It was science fiction stuff. Horror story stuff. But now …

Real.

Right here.

Such power.

And Church himself. In the heat of the fight he was cool, efficient, his actions uncomplicated by any acceptance of his own emotions. Whatever he felt about what was happening Church kept chained in his head. It made him seem inhuman. Not less than human.

More than human.

Bliss felt heat flash through her body as if she could feel the fire that was reflected on Church’s glasses, and on his skin. Her own cheeks grew hot and she was glad they were inside a darkened vehicle.

Church was unlike anyone Bliss had ever known.

Completely in control.

So powerful.

With a word he’d called down hellfire and destroyed the entire hospital. At once stopping the immediate spread of the plague and demonstrating a level of personal power that was greater than anything Bliss had encountered. And she’d met generals and presidents.

Burn it.

That’s what he’d said.

“God…” she breathed.

Beside her, Hu said, “I know, right? This is fucking nuts!”

She nodded, but it was in no way a response to his comment or enthusiasm. Hu was already excited, happy in his own way, that there would be new puzzles to solve, new toys to play with. He was a genius sociopath, and as such he was less evolved, less interesting than Church.

No, Church was no sociopath. He did care about people. He cared quite a lot. So much that he was willing to take a scalpel to the skin of the world in order to carve out the cancers. He was willing to burn the sick and dying, the helpless and the desperate in order to save the city, maybe the world.

That was power.

That was real goddamn power.

Bliss felt a wave of erotic need surge through her and she almost moaned.

It was not completely a desire to hold someone that powerful in her arms or between her thighs. No … she imagined what it would be like to touch her own flesh and to know that the person inside that body was this powerful.

To be as powerful as Church.

To be more powerful.

“God,” she said again.

Chapter Thirty

“There it is,” said Bunny, nodding toward the intersection just ahead. He angled the black Crown Victoria toward the curb and parked near a bistro on the corner of Garfield and Fifth. It was a lovely area, with leafy green trees and moderate car and foot traffic. The Surf Shop was catty-corner.

We were in a nondescript Lincoln Town Car. Well, by nondescript I mean it pretty much shouted “federal agents,” but it wasn’t an armored personnel carrier. No rocket launchers mounted on the hood. I was in the front seat with Bunny, and Top was in the back with Ghost. Despite all regulations to the contrary, Top was slowly scratching Ghost between the ears, and my dog was, from all indications, floating in a lazy orbit around Neptune. His eyelids fluttered and occasional shivers rippled down his back.

There was a bing-bong in my earbud and then Church’s voice. “Deacon to Cowboy.”

“Go for Cowboy,” I said.

“There have been eleven additional acts of random violence in different parts of the country. In four cases crimes were committed by young women wearing the same glasses and wig as Mother Night. It’s likely this is being done to foil facial recognition, and probably to send a message, a reinforcement of the anarchist model.”

“Ah,” said Top, “black bloc?”

“That’s our guess,” agreed Church.

Bunny frowned at Top and mouthed the words black bloc, clearly unsure of the reference. Top held up a finger.

“Whatever is happening appears to be heating up. Proceed with caution,” warned Church.

“Copy that,” I said and disconnected.

Bunny turned off the engine. “What’s a black bloc? Or is it a hip-hop thing?”

Top gave him a pitying look. “Don’t you ever read the damn newspapers, Farmboy?”

“I read Yahoo news sometimes.”

“A black bloc is a protest thing,” explained Top. “It’s a tactic some groups use, including anarchists. Bunch of people show up to make a protest and they’re all wearing black hoodies, dark glasses, scarves, ski masks, motorcycle helmets. That sort of shit. Trying to be anonymous, like ants in a swarm. No individuals, just a faceless mob, which forces the target of their protest to react to the mob as a whole. No way to focus countermeasures like discussion or negotiation on a single person, because they’re all the same. Get it?”

“Yeah, okay, maybe I did hear about something like that. Started somewhere in Europe?”

I nodded. “Sure, Germany, places like that. People making protests against squatter evictions, war involvement, nuclear power. All sorts of stuff, and some of it’s legit. Sometimes they have a good point.”

Top’s expression was sour. “But the tactic’s for shit. Building barricades, setting things on fire, throwing rocks at cops.”

“Not to go all Occupy on you, old man,” said Bunny, “but some of those cops deserve it. Tear-gassing unarmed protesters.”

Top leaned on the seat back between Bunny and me. He gave Bunny a hard look. “So you’re saying there are assholes on both sides of a conflict? Really? That’s brand-new news for the whole world? Damn, Farmboy, you’re smart.”

“Okay, okay, you know what I’m saying. Sometimes you have to make a lot of noise to get heard.”

“No doubt. Sometimes you have to pull a trigger, too. But I don’t believe Mr. Church sent us here to debate political ethics.”

“Point is,” I said, leaning into their conversation, “the big man thinks Mother Night’s wig and sunglasses might be a black bloc costume. Emphasis on ‘costume.’ Doesn’t mean she’s an anarchist or a protester. Means she and her people are maybe trying to look like them.”

“Can’t rule it out, though,” said Top.

“Can’t rule anything out,” I said.

“So,” said Bunny, “we’re not sure this is a real anarchy thing? The hacking thing, the bombings.”

“You heard Mother Night’s rant,” said Top. “Pretty much right out of the anarchist textbook.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So textbook it’s generic.”

They nodded and Bunny said, “Wonder if her name has some kind of meaning to it. Some kind of symbolism.”

Top shrugged. “Comes from the title of a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. ’Bout a guy who becomes a Nazi propagandist. Ends up in an Israeli prison.”

Bunny half smiled. “Have you read every damn book in the world? I mean, when the fuck do you have time to read?”

“Maybe you’d have time to read if you weren’t playing video games all the damn time,” murmured Top, “and following Lydia around with your dick dragging on the ground.”

“Hey.”

Top shrugged. “Mother Night. Might be something in the name, in the book reference. What do you call it? A metaphor. Propaganda and that shit. We should keep it in mind, Cap’n. Been too many cases already that have one coat of paint over something else.”

“Yup,” I said, nodding. “Okay, street looks quiet. Let’s go do this.”

“Hooah,” said Bunny dryly. “Hoo-frickin’-ah.”

He opened the glove box and sorted through a stack of official identification wallets, selected two, and handed one each to Top and me.

I opened mine, saw the letters FBI, nodded, and tucked it into the inner pocket of my coat. We checked our weapons, nodded briefly to one another. Ghost wagged his tail like we were going to play.

We got out of the car and walked toward the cyber café.

Interlude Seven

Dr. Artemisia Bliss stood with her back to the wall, keeping out of the way as EMTs and DMS field techs carried in armloads of body bags.

Armloads of them.

Ninety-one people died at the Liberty Bell Center today. A few were part of a terrorist cell run by the legendary El Mujahid. Fourteen of the dead were members of Congress. The rest were civilians. Tourists, press, children.

Dead.

Dead twice, she corrected herself.

Killed by the seif-al-din pathogen delivered either by the explosive device that was hidden at the center or by the vectors.

Vectors.

Such a strange little word for so dreadful a thing.

The truth was much more horrible. Infected people whose bodies had been hijacked by genetically modified parasites, driven by unstoppable urges and specifically triggered brain chemicals to attack. And bite.

And devour.

Many of the bodies were no longer whole.

There was blood everywhere.

Everywhere.

Bliss wore a yellow hazmat suit and held a forensic collection kit in one hand.

“It’s safe,” said Dr. Hu as he came over to join her.

“‘Safe’?” she echoed.

“It’s not airborne,” he said, unfastening his hood and pulling it off. “Just don’t touch anything without gloves.”

She removed her hood and looked around at the devastation. The new DMS shooter, Captain Ledger, sat on a bench next to another recent recruit, the psychiatrist Dr. Rudy Sanchez. They both looked shell-shocked.

Bliss had watched videos of Ledger in action.

She could understand why Church liked him. The man was utterly ruthless, brutal and efficient. A nearly perfect killer, except for a psychological profile that read like it was written by Stephen King. Lots of people inside Ledger’s head, and none of them very nice.

Which did not at all change the fact that Bliss liked him.

No. Wanted him. That was closer to it.

She wanted the power that was in him to be inside her.

Sexually, sure, but that still wasn’t it. It was at times like this that she wished she were a vampire so she could drink his power and take it for her own. If she had that power, she knew she would use it. No question. She’d take Ledger’s power. And Church’s, of course.

Who else?

Samson Riggs — now Colonel Riggs; Aunt Sallie. A very few others.

Maybe even a weasel like Hu. He was as sexless as a broken dildo — and in bed he was all talk and very little else — but he had that brain. That sexy, sexy brain.

At times like this she felt that old familiar shift inside her head. As if something was changing. The first few times it happened, it felt like a loss of control, but an unspecified loss over an unknown area of control. Like something was happening in a closet somewhere in the back of her mind.

Now she understood it a little more.

It wasn’t a loss of control. Not a loss at all.

It was a process of removal.

Cutting away restraints. Removing the chocks from beneath the wheels of potential.

It was all about power.

Wanting it.

Deserving it.

Getting it.

Having it.

And … using it?

That part was still unformed in her mind, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to attach an agenda to the process. That felt somehow limiting. It was like the quantum phenomenon of light photons. A photon can behave as a wave or a particle, depending on how you measure it. To measure it restricts its infinite possibilities.

Bliss knew that she was changing, evolving, but she had no idea where that evolution would go or what form it might take. To predict is to attempt to measure, and that felt wrong.

These thoughts flowed through her brain as she moved into the Liberty Bell Center, knelt by one corpse, opened her kit, and began to collect samples. The protocol was simple enough: take three vials of blood, scrapings of skin from around the mouth and cells from inside the cheek. Bag and tag each set of samples along with a fingerprint card and digital photo of each victim and then place them in a plastic bag marked with a biohazard symbol. Later, at the Hangar, the science team would run a massive battery of tests.

But as she collected samples, Bliss felt as if that evolving part of her gently but firmly took over the controls that drove her hands. She filled three vials with blood. And then a fourth. A fifth. A sixth.

She took two sets of skin samples.

Two cheek swabs.

Two of everything.

Into identical biohazard bags.

One bag went into the evidence pouch. The other …

She glanced around to see if anyone was watching her.

No one was, although the vice president was in the room, and he glanced her way, then glanced away.

When she was sure no one was looking, she unzipped a tool pouch on her hazmat suit and slipped the duplicate bag out of sight.

Then she paused there, letting both aspects of her personality — the upstart science geek girl she’d always been and this more evolved personality — stare at each other across the fact of what she’d done. Like gunslingers.

However, only one real gunslinger had come armed to this confrontation.

She felt the smile that reshaped her mouth as she began taking two sets of samples from a second victim.

Why am I doing this?

Both parts of her mind asked that question.

The geek had no answer. Or was afraid to answer.

The evolved aspect whispered an answer that was couched inside a single word.

Power.

She rose and moved to another body, and another, and another.

When she was finishing with the eleventh body, she rose and yelped in surprise to find a man standing directly behind her.

A tall man. Good looking in a desk-jockey way but with big hands that Bliss knew came from blue-collar work in his youth. A square jaw and intense eyes. And a smile that she’d seen on TV and the cover of Time. A smile everyone in the country knew. A smile everyone in the world knew. The supremely confident smile of a truly powerful man.

She said, “Oh — Mr. Vice President … I didn’t see you there.”

“Yes,” he said, “you did.”

“W-what?”

His smile was very handsome, but not at all the same one from the cover of Time. This wasn’t the smile you wanted on the face of a man kissing babies at a rally. This smile, she knew, was meant for her to see, and to interpret exactly as it was meant.

“You’re the Deacon’s wonder girl,” he said.

“I, um, work for Mr. Church.”

“Church, Deacon, whatever the fuck he calls himself. You work for him.”

She nodded, wondering where this was going.

“Your team’s always wired in to each other. Did you see the way that bitch Courtland treated my wife?”

Bliss had. The Second Lady was a notorious loudmouth and a legendary bitch. When the outbreak started, Collins’s wife tried to take charge of the moment and boss everyone around, and even if she was well-intentioned, she went about it the wrong way. Things went south from there and Major Courtland had dropped Mrs. Collins with some kind of karate chop. The Second Lady was ambulanced off once the whole thing was over. She never stopped screaming threats up to the point where the beleaguered EMTs slammed the doors.

“I…” began Bliss, and didn’t know where to put her conversational foot.

But Collins leaned close and, in a voice pitched only for her to hear, said, “Between us, sweetheart, I was kind of hoping Courtland would have busted my wife’s fucking jaw.”

The statement was a showstopper.

Bliss stared at him, totally unable to react or respond in any useful way.

Collins laughed. “God, you should see the look on your face.”

“I…” Bliss said again, and once more her vocabulary failed her.

“That bitch’ll be in the hospital for a day or two. Longer if I can arrange it.”

“Um … yes, I suppose.”

He took a step closer. She could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “If the Deacon ever lets you off the leash, I know a great place for Kobe steaks. You’re Japanese, right?”

“Chinese.”

“Whatever. Steaks as thick as your wrist.”

She said nothing.

He removed a business card and a pen, scribbled something onto the back of the card, and then tucked it into the pouch on her hazmat suit. The same pouch where she’d dropped her duplicate samples.

“Call me if you want to get your hands on an expensive piece of meat.”

He turned and walked away. Almost sauntering. But as soon as he saw some officials, his posture instantly shifted from that of smug asshole to man of action. It was immediate, like throwing a switch on a nuclear reactor. Very smooth, very practiced.

And, despite everything else, including the man’s absolutely offensive comments, it was impressive. Appealing.

It was power.

Artemisia fished the card out of her pouch, turned it over, and saw that he’d written his cell number in a sprawling hand. The geek in her wanted to tear the card up. The professional and accomplished woman in her wanted to spit on the card before tearing it up.

However, that other part, the other self, the evolving self, smiled and tucked the card back into the pouch.

Chapter Thirty-one

We were still a few doors down from the Surf Shop when my phone rang. I expected it to be Rudy. It wasn’t. I held up a hand to the guys and stepped a few paces away to take the call. I smiled and punched the button.

“Hello, Junie.”

“Hello.”

When Ghost heard me say her name he brightened and made a happy whuff sound.

“How’s your day?” she asked.

“Oh, you know. Just another day in the D. of M. S.”

“I can only imagine.”

She could, too. Last year, she was there when we took down Howard Shelton and his team of superfreak killers. She’d pulled the trigger on one of them. She knew that my job did not involve shuffling papers or sneaking out of the office for a quick nine holes.

“What’s cooking, darlin’?” I asked.

There was a beat before she said, “I know you can’t talk about work stuff, Joe, but is everything okay? For real, I mean?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was on the Net looking at something on YouTube and suddenly this woman’s face popped up.” She described the Mother Night video.

“Yeah, we saw that. It’s a computer hacker,” I said. “Nothing you have to worry about.”

“Don’t patronize me, Joe. I can hear something in your voice.”

“Sorry,” I said quickly, lowering my voice and stepping farther away from Top and Bunny. “I wasn’t patronizing you. That video popped up all over and, sure, we’re looking into it. So far, though, it looks like what it is. A smart-ass hacker with more talent than common sense using the Internet to shout to the world that she’s there. It’s the cyberworld equivalent of spray-painting your name on a wall that everyone has to pass. Forced attention.”

“You’re sure that’s all it is?”

“No, of course not. That’s why we’re looking into it.”

“What about the backpack bomb thing? They’re saying it’s another Boston.”

“I’m not on that.”

“Is it connected to that video?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you tell me what you find out?”

“I’ll tell you what I can.”

“Joe, I’m not asking you to break protocol. I’m just…”

“Just … what?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“Okay, you know how you joke about your ‘spider sense’ tingling when you think something’s wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it?”

“Sure. It’s one of my many superpowers.”

“Well … I guess my spider sense started tingling.”

“Because of that video?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been having weird premonitions all day, ever since I got to work.”

I grunted. “How weird?”

“I don’t know. Weird. Nonspecific. Just … bad feelings.”

A whole bunch of very ugly questions jumped into the front of my brain and I had to bite down to keep my foolish mouth from giving them voice. The process took too much time, I was quiet too long, and Junie caught it.

“Joe…?”

“Yeah.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Are you undressing, then?”

“I’m serious, Joe. Don’t joke.”

“Sorry.”

“These feelings I’m having … they’re not about me. They’re not about the test results.”

I did not trust myself to respond to that.

“But something is wrong,” she added. “I can feel it.”

Before I met Junie my tendency was to dismiss that kind of comment as too New Agey, too space cadet. I have since learned that my knee-jerk dismissal of that kind of perception was a fault in me rather than a fault in others.

There are, after all, more things in heaven and earth.

So I don’t laugh it off when Junie has a premonition or a “feeling.” I don’t wave it away like cigarette smoke.

At the same time, I don’t always know what to do with those kinds of things. It’s not like I can ask Bug to do a MindReader search on a feeling.

Instead, I said what I say when these things happen. “Okay.”

“Okay,” she said, accepting that she’d made her point and I’d got it. She knows as well as I do that there wasn’t anything specific I could do other than to make sure my awareness and reaction time was at high bubble. It had become a rhythm with us. A useful one.

“Come home to me,” she said.

“Always,” I replied.

I knew that she was smiling, as I was smiling.

As I went to put the phone back into my pocket it vibrated. Another text message from A.

I glared at the screen. Was it a threat or was I being stalked by someone in a fortune cookie factory? Either way, I sent it to Bug with a rather terse note to find whoever was sending this. Foul language was involved.

I clicked off and shoved the phone into my pocket. A few yards away Top and Bunny were pretending to look at the birds in the trees. As I joined them a chill wind blew up my spine and made me shiver. Ghost looked up at me and whined faintly.

“You okay, boss?” asked Bunny.

“Someone walked over my grave,” I said, making a joke of it.

Neither of my guys laughed. Come to think of it, it wasn’t all that funny to me, either.

Chapter Thirty-two

The man in the yellow raincoat looked out of place, even on the C train. It was hot in the swaying subway car, and he wore a black hoodie under the raincoat, the hood pulled all the way up. He was sweating heavily. Beads of moisture ran down his cheeks and throat and vanished inside the humid darkness beneath the slicker. The smell that seeped out from under the yellow rubber was intense.

The woman seated next to him was named Maria Diego. She was billing secretary for a firm of dentists, and next Thursday would be her fifty-seventh birthday. A thickset, quiet-mannered, plainly dressed woman with a Heather Graham novel open on her lap and Marc Anthony crooning to her through earbuds.

When Maria was sure the man in the yellow raincoat wasn’t watching, she removed a bottle of perfume from her purse, put a drop on her finger, and covertly dabbed her upper lip with it. The car was crowded, there was nowhere else to sit, and she was too tired to stand. The smell from the sweating man, however, was like the stink of an open sewer.

He’s probably a junkie, she thought, but that didn’t bother her very much. Maria slipped one hand into her jacket pocket and closed it gently around her can of pepper spray. As long as the man sat quietly, she was content to mind her own business, read her book, and make her way home. This was the New York subway system, so body odor was nothing new. The perfume always made that easy to manage.

The man’s smile, though …

That bothered Maria.

It was not a happy smile.

For six stops Maria tried to understand the smile. After thirty-four years of riding this line she’d seen everything, every kind of person, every frequency of expression. However, she’d never before quite seen an expression like the one carved into his face. It was so intense, so constant, that it was like a mask. His mouth was set in a huge jack-o’-lantern grin that stretched his cheeks so wide it had to be painful. His teeth were yellow and dry. His eyes stared forward and slightly upward with such intensity that when he’d first sat down Maria darted looks at the ads on the other side of the car, above the heads of the commuters, to see if the man was drawn to something in particular. But no. He stared with a fixity that made her wonder if he was obsessed with some thought that hung ten inches in front of his eyes. She tried not to look at him too often, but if he ever blinked then Maria hadn’t seen it.

Definitely a junkie.

The train rattled on underground. The lights flickered the way they often flicker. The train was old, the rails were old. And this was the C train.

The man kept staring at nothing Maria could see, so she turned back to her book and was soon lost in mystery and suspense.

The train made another stop and then headed into the tunnel, rattling along the rails, jostling its passengers, causing Maria to bump sideways into the smiling, sweating man. It was nearing the end of the line at Euclid Avenue.

The lights flickered again. Off. On.

Off.

And this time they stayed off.

The train slowed to a squealing halt. Not fast. Not at all once. And not at Euclid Avenue station.

The passengers did not fly into an immediate panic. Of course they didn’t. This was New York. This was the C train. This was Brooklyn.

When the car settled into stillness, the passengers were quiet for a moment as they listened for the kinds of sounds that would provide information.

There was no sound.

So they collectively moaned in soft irritation, sighed, rustled as they set themselves into comfortable positions to wait it out. There was not one person on that train, not one in that car who hadn’t been here before. Stopped, stalled, delayed, and in the dark.

The darkness was total.

And then one by one passengers began punching buttons on their cells phones, spilling the glow of screen displays into the car.

There were some laughs.

A couple of jokes. The MTA and the mayor had their names taken in vain.

Laughter rippled through the crowd.

Maria closed her book and accessed the e-reader app on her cell, found a different book — a mystery by Hank Phillippi Ryan — and began reading. Unperturbed. Undisturbed.

Unsuspecting.

Something brushed her side and she half turned to watch as the man in the yellow raincoat stood up. His face was illuminated by the glow of cell phones. His mouth was moving as if he was saying something, but by now half the passengers on the train were calling people who weren’t on the train to talk. The buzz of chatter was loud, and Maria didn’t catch a word the sweating man said.

Then she felt herself frowning as her mind began evaluating what her eyes were seeing. The man wasn’t speaking. His mouth was moving, jaws working, the way someone does when they’re eating. But she could see that he wasn’t really eating anything. There was nothing in his mouth. It was like he was pretending to eat.

Muy loco, she thought.

The man turned slowly in place, his unblinking eyes seeming to take in everything and everyone around him. Maria watched with an odd and inexplicable fascination. It was like watching one of those YouTube videos her son sometimes sent her without including a clue as to what it was about. She had to watch to find out.

The man completed his turn and then slowly closed his eyes. Maria felt strangely relieved that the man had finally closed his eyes. Her eyes had begun to feel dry and sore.

The train still did not move. The chatter of the crowd grew louder, more cell phones glowed to life. More rude jokes were swapped. There was almost a party atmosphere. Everyone was laughing, joking, smiling.

Except Maria.

What was this man doing? Standing there, eyes closed, sweating in a heavy yellow raincoat, pretending that he was chewing.

Then the man abruptly stopped chewing, drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and in a voice that was as fractured and raw as it was powerful, shouted at the top of his lungs.

“I have a message from Mother Night!”

It was so shockingly loud that for a moment everyone froze, silent, staring.

“The current administration of the United States government is acting in opposition to the will of the people and the laws of the Constitution. The American people are cattle to them and we will remain so unless we take action, take to the streets, take the country back.”

After another moment of awkward silence, a tall black teenager in jeans and a Yankees shirt lowered the cell phone into which he was speaking and said, “The fuck you talking about, man? Some kind of Occupy the C Train bullshit?”

A couple of people laughed, but none of them was seated close to the man in the raincoat and hoodie. The teenager who’d spoken out, though, was three passengers back from where the sweating man stood. The intervening people began shifting out of the way, not wanting to be a part of anything.

Maria couldn’t blame them. She slipped the pepper spray out of her pocket and held it in her lap, covered by both hands. Ready.

The sweating man pointed at the teenager. “Tell everyone. The only action is direct action.”

“The fuck’s with you?” asked the teen in a tone of rising belligerence. “You high or some shit?”

What the sweating man said in reply meant nothing at all to the black teen, or to Maria.

“Sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

And then without warning, without the slightest hint, the sweating man leaped at the teenager and slammed him back into the laps of a row of people seated against the wall. The scream he made as he pounced did not sound human. To Maria, it sounded like the hunting shriek of one of the big cats, like the mountain lions who hunted the canyons in Mexico where she’d lived until she was twelve. It was inhuman, and filled with fury and hate.

And with hunger.

But it was almost immediately drowned out by the high, shrill screams of total agony from the teenager as the sweating man bit into the flesh of his throat and tore it out. In the glow of the cell phones the geysering blood was as black as oil.

Then everyone was screaming.

Maria screamed, too.

It took two minutes and nine men to subdue the sweating man. They crowded him into a corner and hammered him with kicks and punches. People hung from the straps for balance as they stomped him. Breaking his face, breaking his bones, knocking out teeth.

Through all of that, the man kept fighting. Keep trying to bite.

He never grunted in pain. Never begged for mercy.

He stopped fighting back only when one of the kicks caught him just right and his head struck a pole so hard that skin and bone burst.

The kicks continued for ten more seconds.

Then the crowd froze again, caught in a tableau, shocked by what had happened, calculating the degree of their involvement in any police action that might follow.

Cell cameras flashed, flashed, flashed.

Someone said, “Jesus Christ.”

The sound of panting — from exertion and fear — filled the car.

Maria hurried over to the teenager, but she could tell that he was already gone. His windpipe was exposed and ragged, the arterial blood pulsed once more, weakly, then settled down to a dying bubble.

She felt for his pulse, felt the last throb, and then … nothing.

“Jesus Christ,” said someone else, loading it with a different meaning.

Then Maria herself said it. “Jesus Christ!”

Because the teenager opened his eyes.

And his mouth.

And he lunged for her.

The last thing Maria saw was a glaring eye inches from her own as the teenager — the dead teenager — darted in to take his first bite.

Chapter Thirty-three

Junie Flynn watched as each of the newest members of her board settled into their chairs. It was a strange mix of people, and Junie knew that each of them had secrets that the others at the table did not necessarily share. Each brought their own unique skills, knowledge, connections, and motives to FreeTech. They came to help and to share in the benefits of an organization with a structure like DARPA but which had no military agenda. It was, to Junie’s experience, a unique organization.

After thanking them each for attending this closed session, Junie addressed the group. “We will operate with two levels of disclosure. Each of you has requested and been granted a public identity that has been crafted by MindReader. No one outside of this group and the upper echelon of the DMS will know who you are.”

The people seated around the table nodded, some with less enthusiasm and more suspicion than others.

“However,” said Junie, “everything else we do at FreeTech will be available through the Freedom of Information Act. All benefits will be shared equally with the public, without reservations. Since none of our research or development is intended for military use, that freedom of access will extend beyond U.S. borders. Agreed?”

Another round of nods.

However, one person, a young woman with olive skin and dark hair, raised her hand. “As much as I can appreciate altruism on this scale,” said Violin, “it is expensive. Surely, whomever is financing this venture will want the lion’s share of any profits.”

“Actually,” said Junie, “if any profits are generated they will be used for further research and to fund foundations tasked with distributing the fruits of that research.”

“How? This will take many millions…”

Junie smiled. “We are operating with a start-up bank of seventy billion dollars.”

It was a shocking amount. An absurd amount. Everyone gaped at her.

“How?” demanded Violin. “Your congress could never pass an appropriations bill of that size.”

“Private donation,” said Junie. She was intensely aware that the challenge in Violin’s voice spoke to issues beyond FreeTech. Violin had been Joe’s lover and Junie suspected that the strange woman still had strong feelings for Joe. They’d gone into combat together on multiple occasions and shared a kind of intimacy that was unique to them. Even though Junie knew that Joe was faithful to her, she was adult enough to realize that there were unresolved issues hanging fire between him and Violin. Issues that might never be resolved.

Although her trust in Joe’s fidelity was ironclad, Junie had less faith that this beautiful, exotic, and powerful warrior woman was the kind to simply bow out without a fight. Junie had been mentally preparing herself for that fight, and she dearly hoped it wouldn’t involve actual knives.

“Donated by whom?” Violin’s brow was knitted with doubt and concern. “Who has that kind of money? And why would they give so much? Is this part of the Bill and Amanda Gates Foundation or—”

“No,” said a sad-eyed young man seated across from her. He was in his thirties, thin, handsome, and he spoke with a British accent. “I donated the money. All of it.”

“You?” asked the thin, dark-haired teenager seated to Junie’s right. His name was Helmut Deacon. “And how do you have that much money?”

“I suppose you could say I inherited it,” said the Brit.

“Oil money?” asked Helmut.

“No.”

Suspicion flickered in Violin’s eyes. “Inherited from where?”

The Brit turned to Junie and raised inquiring eyebrows. She nodded.

“No secrets between us,” Junie said. “That’s our rule. Besides, FreeTech is your idea.”

“Bloody hell,” said the Brit. He took a breath. “Well, buckle up, kids, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. The funding for this was appropriated on my behalf from the Seven Kings. I was made steward of the money on the condition that I find a way to do the best possible good with it. I proposed the creation of FreeTech as a way of fixing some of the damage the Kings did. Damage that I am partly responsible for.”

Everyone at the table stared at him in stunned silence.

“And before I give you those details,” said the Brit after taking a steadying breath, “I want one favor from you. No matter how much good we do, even if we cure the common effing cold, I don’t ever want to hear the words ‘thank you’ aimed in my direction. Ever. This isn’t about me and it never will be.”

One by one the others nodded, though they all looked suspicious and mystified.

“Very well,” said the Brit. “I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Alexander Chismer, but everyone calls me Toys.”

Interlude Eight

“Take it, you bitch!”

Bill Collins snarled the words as he thrust into her from behind. She was on elbows and knees; he stood beside the bed. Her buttocks flared red from where he’d slapped her over and over again with each thrust.

She snarled back at him from between clenched teeth. Goading him on, demanding that he go harder and faster, that he hit her.

Demanding it.

When they came they howled together like night creatures. Like wolves.

The iPod played very loud opera. If anyone else in the hotel heard them, no one called the front desk.

The Secret Service men outside the door were paid a lot of money under the table to pretend to be as deaf as they were blind. As far as they were concerned, they worked for Bill Collins, not for the vice president. That distinction was expensive and paid for in cash.

Collins collapsed on her by slow degrees, his sweaty chest falling onto her back and bearing her down to the sodden and tangled sheets. They panted loudly, unable to speak, spent and aching, lost in the exhaustion and pleasure and an afterglow that burned their skin.

This was the tenth time they’d met in private, and it was always like this for them.

Genuine tenderness formed no part of their relationship, though they went through the motions of it over dinner and before clothes were off. Once they were naked, each of them knew that they could be their real, true selves. They were not nice people, and that was part of the fun for each of them. They were rough and mean to each other, and that was a turn-on. And they both knew that they were trying through physical extremity to try and fuck each other’s mind. To do that, in fact, would have been their only goal, their only act; but in the absence of that possibility they drove each other toward the edge of the cliff every time.

And every time it was good for them.

Bliss had never allowed herself to be like this with anyone with whom she’d ever slept. Not even her foster father. In all other situations she’d made sure to dial it down, to play a borderline virgin, to be the good little geek girl who — oh my god! — has sex. None of that was her, or if any of it was, then it belonged to that lesser, unevolved self whom Bliss left farther behind every day.

As the sweat cooled on their skin, they gradually fell apart, him rolling off her, Bliss shifting toward the center of the bed. They were totally unabashed about nakedness or preference, and that was such a liberating thing.

After a while, he said, “The president has been having some heart problems.”

Bliss turned and looked at him. Collins was staring up at the ceiling, smiling.

“Really? Like what?”

“He nearly had a heart attack at Camp David. It was kept out of the press, but the doctors are freaked. They ran all the tests and his arteries are for shit. They’re going to try him on some statins to see if that will clear things out, but if not…”

“What? You think he’ll have a heart attack for real?”

Collins barked out a sour laugh. “I’m not that lucky. No … they’re talking bypass surgery.”

“Oh.”

There was a moment of silence and then Bliss realized that Collins was waiting for her to say something. She replayed the conversation and then realized what it was.

“If he has surgery and they use a general anesthesia,” she said, “wouldn’t that mean that you’d be president?”

“Short term … but abso-fucking-lutely.”

She turned and propped herself up on her elbow. “Bill — that’s so exciting.”

“It does not suck,” he agreed.

“Now, all we need is an allergic reaction to the anesthesia.”

“Or a surgeon with the hiccups.”

They were silent for a long time, and she pulled the sheet over herself. The room was getting cool. “Bill … while you’re acting as president, I mean … you’ll actually be the president, right?”

“Yes.”

“With all of the powers of the president?”

“Yup.” He stroked her hair. “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that it seems like a great opportunity. There has to be something you can do with that chance.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But what?”

Bliss smiled. “I don’t know. But let me think on it.”

Chapter Thirty-four

Ludo Monk was playing a video game while he waited to kill people. It was a great way to unwind one kind of tension — ordinary, everyday stuff — and an equally great way to ramp up for the trigger pulls to come.

He was on level sixteen of Burn to Shine, and he’d just completed the second Virus Vault level. He’d burned through two lives to do it, but the game gave you an unlimited number of replays.

The hit itself was of little concern to him. The target, location, angle, weapon, and escape route had all been worked out to the smallest detail, a process that included consideration of many hundreds of variables. Ludo had spent weeks getting it all set up the right way. He did not believe in haste. He never took a job that did not permit at least a month of planning, and preferred to have more time than that.

It was all about the variables.

Time of day, weather, wind conditions, location, angles, access and egress, distance to resources, traffic congestion at different times of day, frequency of police car and air patrols, access to multiple vantage points, availability of additional assets, reliability of those assets, training of same, events on that day’s calendar for any venue within a mile, even the particulate count in the air quality report.

He was aware that some of the variables he considered were requested by parts of his brain that were less orderly and reliable than the part that generally drove the car. But that was fine. The frequency of his own madness was also a variable and it had to be considered.

Had to be.

Things went wrong only when planning was weak. The hit on Joe Ledger and Reggie Boyd in Baltimore was a prime example. That was rushed, built on poor intel, and it relied on some of Mother Night’s goofy suicide flunkies. Henchmen, as Monk thought of them. Henchmen were notorious for flubbing things. Ask anyone. Read a comic book.

Monk never used henchmen. He would occasionally use a lackey, but they were different. Lackeys were for fetching and carrying, not for wet work in the field. Lackeys picked up supplies for him, had his vehicles serviced, delivered packages, and made sure he had licorice, Coke, and plenty of pills. They were good at that sort of thing.

It was the henchmen who fucked things up. Attacking someone like Ledger with a car and then trying to outgun him. Seriously? Ledger had killed more people than smallpox. Monk knew, he’d read the files. Ledger was a psychotic killing machine — or at least that’s the phrasing Monk used in his head, and he figured he was not very far off. Monk would have handled that whole thing differently.

For one thing, he’d have picked a secure and dry shooting position, ideally in one of the buildings across the street from the Warehouse. Then he would have used explosive rounds and parked six shots through the windshield as soon as Ledger pulled up to the security exit. There was a three-second window of opportunity there while Ledger showed Boyd’s transfer papers. It would have been a clean kill. Three shots into Ledger, and then three into Boyd, allowing the explosive rounds to turn the inside of the Explorer into a fireball. Then he would have abandoned his gear, set a ten-minute explosive charge in the room he was vacating, and been halfway across Baltimore before the debris stopped falling.

That’s how it should have gone.

But Mother Night had decided to let the clown college handle it, and that resulted in zero targets being eliminated while the entire so-called kill squad was butchered by Ledger and his dog.

As he thought about that he felt something shift inside his head. The colors of the paint on the walls started shifting in tone.

“Uh-oh,” he said and made a grab for his pills.

He stuffed a few into his mouth, reminded himself not to chew them, washed them down with warm Coke, and waited for the colors to return to normal.

“Fucking henchmen,” he said to the air around him.

Monk returned to the window and settled himself down. His elevated shooting position was inside a hotel room that had two banks of elevators and excellent stairwells. Six runners — all reliable lackeys — were positioned to flee down the stairwells, each of them wearing a ski mask. Monk would simply walk down the hall, enter a room booked under a different name, and take a bath. All of his equipment and clothing would be collected and disposed of by a woman seeded into the maid staff two months ago. The equipment would be placed in a barrel filled with hydrochloric acid, sealed, and stored in the basement among three other similar barrels, each marked as diesel fuel for the back-up generator.

Monk’s cover was ironclad. He was in town for a business meeting, and was, in fact, enrolled. A superb double would attend the meetings wearing a mike so Monk could hear the lectures. He’d already watched videos of yesterday’s sessions, and he would attend the closing session tomorrow. In the unlikely event that he was questioned, his alibi would hold water.

And polygraphs are virtually useless with the insane. He knew that from experience.

His team of lackeys had already prepped the shooting room before he arrived, but Monk chased them out and spent two hours going over everything. Obsessively. Multiple times. The only thing he did not do was disassemble the rifle. In the movies snipers did that, but it was silly. When you took apart a gun, no matter how carefully you handled it, you disturbed the settings. Those settings could not be perfectly duplicated without sighting it again on a range. He’d arranged to have the fully assembled gun wrapped loosely in bubble wrap and brought here by two lackeys who understood his rules.

Those two were replacements for a team who’d made an error on a previous job. Monk regretted what he’d done to them, but you couldn’t put people back together after they’d been hacked apart. He knew, he’d tried.

The new team was very, very careful, so it was really an opportunity for them all to grow together.

The rifle was a Dragunov sniper rifle, which was not his weapon of choice, but its use in this hit — and later discovery — would send a nicely conflicted message. It had mechanically adjustable back-up iron sights with a sliding tangent rear sight and a scope mount that didn’t block the area between the front and rear sights. Very useful and a nice piece of design work. Bravo for our Russian brothers, he thought. It fired 7.62 by 54 millimeter rounds at 2,700 feet per second, fed from a ten-round box magazine.

He decided to name it Olga.

Monk sat with Olga for a long time, explaining to the rifle what was expected of her and why it was important.

Olga listened without comment.

That was not a given. Monk had engaged other weapons in long and complicated back-and-forth conversations. His meds had changed since then, and he thought wistfully of the subtle insights of the German PSG1 and the wacky humor of the Beretta .50.

When Monk realized that he was falling into a depression because Olga wasn’t speaking with him, he got up and crossed to where he’d hung his jacket, dug his blue plastic pillbox out of the pocket, sorted through all the colors, made a selection, and swallowed two pills. He crouched in the closet until talking to a rifle seemed ridiculous.

He was grateful there were no cameras here in this room. His employer knew that he was mad, but she probably did not know how thin the ice was beneath his skates. Most of the time he didn’t, either.

It frightened him to realize that he was probably slipping. Or maybe had already slipped. At least a notch or two.

The woman he worked for was always looking, always watching. If he slipped in her eyes, then he would be dead. Two in the back of the head and his body run through a wood chipper. He’d seen that done to others. He’d helped do it to others, so he understood that it was standard operating procedure.

He was sad, he was crazy, but he didn’t want to die.

And he definitely didn’t want to become mulch.

Monk squatted inside the closet until he was sure that the meds had kicked in. As much as they could or would kick in. He’d have to up his dose soon, and that was going to change him. It would sand another layer from his mental sharpness. Dull him. Make him less of what he was.

When he opened the closet door he had to avoid looking at Olga until he was sure there wasn’t more he needed to say to her.

No, he warned himself.

Not Olga.

Not like that.

Just a gun.

A tool.

Nothing else.

“Fuck,” he said aloud. He permitted himself five curses or obscenities each day. This was his first for today, so he repeated it. “Fuck!”

The gun remained a gun.

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

He accessed an app on his smartphone that asked him a bunch of pop-culture questions. Monk was excellent at trivia, and appearing on Jeopardy was the third item on his bucket list. He took time to consider the answers. Who was the current speaker of the House? Who played Radaghast the Brown in The Hobbit? How many Americans walked on the moon?

Like that.

He answered all his questions and got each right. Weird answers raised flags and made him want to reach for his pillbox.

He took a breath and smiled a little as he let it out. The pills he’d taken seemed to have bolted him to the ground very nicely. It was a relief.

His phone vibrated. The screen display said “Mom,” which was not true. His mother had died in a fire when Monk was fifteen. It was the first fire he’d set that had taken a life, and as such it was sacred in his memory.

Nevertheless, when he answered it he said, “Hello?”

“Things are moving,” Mother Night, “but we’re not ready for you yet. You need to be patient and wait for the signal.”

“Okey-dokey.”

There was a pause.

“Monk…?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Don’t say ‘okey-dokey.’”

“Oh. Okay.”

Another pause. “How are you doing?”

He suspected that Mother knew about his problems, though not about their severity. The question was layered and it contained traps both obvious and subtle.

Ludo Monk was mad, but he had been managing his damage for too long to make that kind of mistake. On reflection, though, he wondered if Mother knew that about him and was giving him a gentle nudge toward self-management.

“I’m doing well,” he told her, and at the moment he meant it.

“Good,” said Mother Night.

She disconnected.

Monk moved a chair across the room and positioned it behind the tripod-mounted Russian sniper rifle. He did not check the box magazine. It had been preloaded by another member of their team. Someone who had fingerprints that would be consistent with Russian intelligence.

The tripod was set up well inside the room, away from the window. There was no chance of anyone spotting a gun barrel sticking out, no chance of sun glare on the blued steel. He turned the room lights off, made himself comfortable on the chair, and bent his eye to the scope.

It took very little time to find the big picture window on the third floor. The glass was clear, the angle of the sun was perfect to allow for a crystal-clear view of the boardroom at FreeTech. Several people sat in big leather chairs around a blond wood table. Four women, three men, and a teenage boy. Monk knew little about most of them and cared even less. Mother Night had specified only one target, and Monk knew everything about her. She had a very specific outcome in mind. Actually, Monk appreciated the effect she was going for. It was so deliciously subtle.

He tucked the stock into his shoulder and closed his hand around the gun, laying his finger along the outside of the trigger guard. Across the street, 206 yards away, one of the women began passing blue file folders to the others at the table. She was a very pretty woman. Tall, but not too tall. A bit on the thin side. With masses of curly blond hair and a lovely spray of sun freckles across her nose and cheeks.

Monk looked at that hair. At how light seemed to move through it and change. How it framed so beautiful a face.

He wondered if a bullet would knock that hair off her head.

It was, after all, a wig.

Chapter Thirty-five

“Tell me about the girl,” I said.

Caleb Sykes, the nerdy kid who ran the cyber café, was sweating bullets. He was seated on a backless stool with the three of us ringed around him and Ghost sitting like a hungry wolf ten feet away. It wasn’t exactly thumbscrews and the rack, but that’s how he was taking it. I think if I’d yelled “Boo!” he’d have fainted dead away.

“I already t-told y-you,” said Sykes. Nerves were bringing out a repressed stutter. I felt bad for the kid and believed that he really had nothing to do with anything. Had to go through the motions, though.

“You said she was Korean,” I prompted.

“Yeah. I th-think so.”

“Not Chinese? Not Japanese?” asked Top. “You’re sure?”

“I used to date a Korean girl. They don’t look Chinese or Japanese. They look Korean. But later, on TV … she looked Chinese. I d-don’t th-think it w-was the s-s-s-same g-g-g—”

He couldn’t get it out. I told him it was okay, we understood.

“Did she touch anything in the store?” asked Top.

“Like wh-wh-what?”

“Like anything. Can you remember any specific surface she might have touched with her hands, her fingers.”

Caleb suddenly brightened. “Oh! You m-mean f-f-for fingerprints.”

“Exactly. Take a second, son, and think about it.”

“Um … just the c-counter and the m-money she handed me.”

“Did she bring her own laptop in?” I asked. “Was she just using your wi-fi, or did she—?”

“She r-r-rented an hour on D-D-Dell Three.”

“Show us,” said Top.

We stepped back to allow Sykes to rise, but the kid did it carefully as if expecting us to swat him back down in the chair. We didn’t. Instead we followed him from the small office we’d been using for the interrogation and into the store. A CLOSED sign was hung in the window. Sykes led us to the table on which was the laptop used by the Korean girl who claimed to be Mother Night.

“This is it?” asked Top.

He nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“S-sure I’m sure. It w-w-was on the r-receipt.”

Top fished through the receipts and found the right one, read it, and handed it to me. “Station eleven.”

Sykes nodded again.

He reached out to touch the closed lid of the laptop for emphasis, but Top caught his wrist.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Fingerprints.”

“Oh … r-right…”

We all stood there and considered the laptop. A two-year-old Dell. It was open but turned off.

“How many other people used this computer after the girl?” I asked.

Sykes thought about it. “S-six…?” he suggested.

Top bent over it and grunted. As he straightened he nodded to the machine. “See that?”

I did. It was small, but it was there. And it looked to have been carved into the tabletop with a pin. A capital A surrounded by an O.

I waved Bunny over. “Dust it and bag it.”

Bunny produced a device that looked like a department store pricing gun. When he aimed it at the laptop it produced a cold blue laser light.

“What’s th-that?” asked Sykes.

“Digital fingerprint scanner,” explained Bunny. “Uses a laser to take microfine pictures of fingerprints. There’s special software to separate overlapping prints. Does it by determining the orientation, finger pad size, and so on, then it assembles the pieces into as clear a whole as possible.”

Sykes said, “W-wow. I watch suh-suh-CSI all the t-time and I never saw anything like th-that.”

Top smiled at him. “Our boss has a friend in the industry.”

My cell phone buzzed again and I nearly tore my pants snatching it out of my pocket. I wanted to smash the damn thing. The message this time was

NO ONE LIVES FOREVER

Ghost suddenly whuffed, and I glanced over my shoulder as a shadow fell across the front window. There were two people standing outside, peering in through the big plate glass.

They were both young. They were both wearing black hoodies and black sunglasses. They were smiling.

They each held a machine gun.

Sykes had played enough video games to know what AK-47s were.

He said, “Wh-what…?”

Then the world exploded into a terrible storm of shattered glass, bullets, screams, and blood.

Chapter Thirty-six

Toys was winding up his presentation about projects he wanted to fund in the more economically depressed areas of Central and South America, particularly of research into diseases of poverty that were doing incredible damage there. When he realized that Junie Flynn was no longer listening, his words trickled off and stopped.

The others at the table were also studying Junie.

“Is something wrong?” asked Toys.

Without answering, Junie got to her feet and slowly crossed to the big picture window. She stood there, staring out, though it did not appear to Toys as if she was actually looking at anything.

Violin rose, too, and came around the table to stand by Junie. And Toys could see a lot of dangerous potential in the catlike grace with which she moved.

“What is it?” asked Violin.

Junie crossed her arms and hugged herself as if she stood in a cold wind.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Violin hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand on Junie’s shoulder. Junie flinched, then shivered, but she didn’t shake off the touch.

“What is it?” Violin repeated. “Is it Joe?”

Junie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Something’s wrong.”

Interlude Nine

He caught her looking at him.

“What?” asked Joe Ledger. His tone was rough, all sharp edges.

“Nothing,” said Bliss quickly.

“No, it’s not nothing. You’ve been giving me the stink-eye all afternoon,” muttered Ledger. He wore a sling and had small bandages taped to almost every visible inch of skin. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Across the street was the blackened hulk of what had been the offices and labs of the Koenig Group, a billion-dollar think tank linked to DARPA. It had been shut down by the DMS after it was learned that — despite contracts, agreements, and laws — the senior management had buyers outside the U.S. government. Ledger had gone in to investigate possible intruders into the supposedly sealed building. Things had apparently gone badly wrong and now the place was a pile of ashes. Bliss had been sent to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. Computers, records, lab equipment, anything. But it was ashes.

A team from the coroner’s office was pulling bodies out of the place.

“I’m not giving you the stink-eye,” she said.

“Then what’s on your mind?”

“They … won’t let me read your after-action report.”

Ledger smiled. A strange and unpleasant smile. “Yeah, well.”

“Well … what?”

“Well, it wouldn’t make good reading.”

“Come on,” she pleaded. She’d known him for months now. Had even been to a barbecue at his father’s place in Baltimore. But Bliss didn’t know if she understood Ledger. In his time with the DMS he’d risen to equal Colonel Riggs as the go-to guy for impossible jobs. Dr. Hu hated and feared him, but that didn’t matter to Bliss. She’d cooled on Hu, realizing that he was in no way a pathway to power.

“The report is sealed for a reason,” said Ledger.

“But why?”

His response was a flat stare.

They sat in silence for a while, watching the forensics team pick their way carefully through the still smoking debris. He drank coffee, she sipped from a Diet Coke.

“Joe—?”

“What?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You did, and I told you I couldn’t talk about it.”

“No,” she said, and she leaned closer to him, dropping her voice, “I want to ask you something else. It’s something I’ve wanted to ask someone for a couple of years but I never knew who to ask.”

“I’m probably not the right guy.”

“I think you are.”

He studied her for a few moments. Then he said, “What’s the question?”

“I’ve read most of your other reports. I’ve been to a lot of the places you’ve been to. After you’ve been there, I mean. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“What’s it like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Joe … come on. They send you in only when they need something handled. You know what I mean by that.” She didn’t ask it as a question.

“So?”

“What’s it like?

He sighed. “You’re asking what it’s like to kill people, right?”

She paused, then nodded.

“It’s a lame question.”

“Sure, and it’s probably offensive,” she said, “but my hands aren’t exactly clean. The science I help create puts weapons in your hands and you use them to kill people. That means I share some of whatever is there. I’m not going to call it guilt because that’s not what it is, is it?”

“Not exactly. Not in any textbook way.”

“You’re a soldier, a special operator,” she said. “You were trained for this sort of thing. You had the mental training for killing as well as the physical, which means you’re better prepared for it than I am. I’m a scientist, a geek. Until I joined the DMS the only trigger I ever pulled was in first-person shooter games. I guess it still is. But that doesn’t change the fact that my science is being used as your weapon. That means when you kill, I’m part of that process. But I don’t understand it. And … and I need to.”

Ledger said nothing.

“I’m afraid that if I don’t understand it,” continued Bliss, “then it’s going to fuck me up. It’s going to do something to my head.”

“You talk to Rudy about this?”

“Yes,” she said. “He suggested I talk to you.”

“Ah.”

She waited.

He drank more of his coffee and looked everywhere but at her.

The forensics people pulled another twisted shape out of the rubble.

“If you’re sane,” he said softly, “you find ways of disconnecting your actions in the field from their context in civilized society. We’re a predator species, Bliss. Maybe we’re moving toward a point of spiritual peacefulness and grace, but we’re not there yet. We have a long damn way to go. Evil is not an abstraction. It’s a reality. And there are hundreds of variations on greed and corruption. Anyone who says different is a fool.”

She waited, almost holding her breath.

“Killing is necessary in this line of work. The bad guys want to burn down the world. Like the Jakobys. They wanted to kill everyone who wasn’t white according to their definition of white. That’s evil, and that has to be fought. That kind of evil doesn’t give up easily, either. They fight all the way, and they want to rack up as much of a body count as they can on the way down.”

She knew he was talking about Grace Courtland, but she didn’t say her name. An assassin working for the Jakobys had killed her. There was a rumor that Ledger had hunted the man down and murdered him somewhere in Europe. Courtland’s ghost seemed to stand with them, eavesdropping on his words.

Ledger kept watching the forensics techs. “There was a time when I could remember the face and name of everyone I ever hurt. Everyone I ever killed. But since I joined the DMS, I can’t even remember how many dozen people I’ve killed. In a war you don’t count the dead and invite them into your head like that. You do that and you lose your shit, you wander into the darkness and you don’t come back. That’s what happens to some guys who come home from the war. They make the error of taking stock of what they had to do while the war was going on, as if the things done in war could be assessed by a civilized mind. They can’t. War is war. The best you can hope for is to have a clear understanding of who the enemy is and what it is you’re fighting for. If you can hold that in your head, then you can continue to do whatever needs to be done.”

“How do the bad guys do it?” she asked. “How are they able to kill and kill and stay sane?”

“Who says they do?” he asked, shaking his head.

“I’ve watched some of the tapes of Rudy interviewing some of the people you and Colonel Riggs and the others have arrested. Some of them seem so ordinary. How can they commit those atrocities if they have a conscience? Is it their nature? Or is it a nurture thing, are they from an environment that makes it okay for them?”

Joe grunted. “I asked Rudy that same exact question once.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that the nature-versus-nurture argument is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that there are only two possible forces at work on a person. Sure, a person’s nature is a factor — and that could be a product of their brain chemistry, or whatever makes a person a sociopath or a psychotic or a hero. Just as the forces at work in a person’s life have to be taken into some account. Some abused children grow up to abuse, there’s math for that. But neither viewpoint covers all the possible bases.”

“So what’s missing?”

“Choice,” said Ledger. “Rudy thinks that choice is often more important than either nature or nurture. Some people grow up in hell and choose to let others share in that hell. Some people grow up in hell and they make damn sure they don’t let those in their care even glimpse those fires. It’s a choice.”

“Not everyone can make that choice.”

“No, of course not. But a lot more people can than you might think. Like the Jakobys. Like some of the people we fight. They want to be what they are. They groove on the power and the perks that come with it. It’s how they paint the world in the colors that please them.”

“Choice,” she said.

“Choice,” he agreed. “It’s what defines us. And it’s probably the most underrated power in the world.”

“What about conscience?” she asked. “Where does that fall into the equation?”

“It’s a factor. If I were naïve I’d tell you that conscience is what steers us toward a good choice instead of a bad, but that’s bullshit. Conscience can be kicked to one side, it can be locked away, and in some people I think it can be killed.”

“Killed?”

“Yeah. Hate will do it. When you can get to the point where you despise someone else, you can do all sorts of things to them. Look at how white folks treated blacks from the beginning of the slave trade. Those assholes had to convince themselves that blacks were subhuman in order to treat them the way they did. That was hate, sister, and it lasted for centuries.”

“You’re saying hate killed their conscience?”

“No. It edited their conscience. I imagine the slavers cared about their family and about white folks. They went to church and kissed babies. But they hated their slaves enough to brutalize and dehumanize them. Torture them. You know the drill. Happened to a lot of people in a lot of places. Still happens. There are a lot of sweatshops with women and kids more or less acting as slave labor now. You think the owners have sleepless nights thinking about how their employees feel? You think slumlords give a wet shit about the squalid living conditions in their tenements? And look at the Nazis and … well, you see where I’m going with this. My point is that conscience isn’t as powerful a force as we’d like it to be. If it was, we’d all be perfect. I sure as hell don’t put ‘spotless Christian hero’ in the blank for ‘occupation.’ No … at the end of the day it’s choice. You are what you choose to be. Good or bad, saint or sinner.”

She thought about it. “Conscience isn’t unbreakable, that’s what you’re saying?”

He snorted. “I’ve looked into the eyes of a lot of very bad people, Bliss. I’ve seen the damaged ones and the insane ones, I’ve seen the hurt ones and the asswipes who hate anyone that doesn’t look like them. Most of them are caught up in the nature, nurture, choice thing. But there are a few — not many, but a few — who don’t have a conscience anymore. I’m not talking about sociopaths born without one, if such a thing is really possible. I’m talking about people who, when you look into their eyes, you know you’re not looking at through windows of the soul. These are people who have no soul. No conscience. No nothing. They’re dead inside.”

“Sounds like you’re describing a zombie.”

“No, zombies are dead meat driven by nerve conduction. You science geeks told me that. No, sister,” said Joe, “I’m talking about people who deliberately take a scalpel to their own psyches and carve out their conscience.”

Bliss saw dark lights flare in Ledger’s eyes.

“That’s how evil is born,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-seven

The innocent and inexperienced often die because they are simply too shocked when violence sets into their lives. The possibility of violence is so foreign to the day-to-day reality of most people that even if they possess good reflexes there is no built-in protocol for how to react. So they hesitate, they stand and stare.

And they die.

In the split second before the smiling killers with the AK-47s opened up, Top hooked an arm around Caleb Sykes and was already in motion, halfway through a brutal diving tackle, when the bullets exploded the glass.

Bunny and I were also in motion. He was diving left, I was falling right and dragging Ghost with me. As we fell, Top, Bunny, and I tore at our jackets, pulling them open, grabbing for our guns.

We are not the innocents; and when it comes to violence and killing we, sadly, are not inexperienced.

The thunder of gunfire was impossibly loud. The huge picture window broke with a sound like all of the glass in the world shattering at once. Bullets tore into wooden desks and exploded the hearts of laptop computers. Chunks of plaster leaped from the walls.

I hit and slid toward the wall and floor, shoving Ghost with me, and I tried to cram us into the woodwork. Debris rained down on us. The razor edges of glass slashed at my clothes and skin. I could feel the bite as splinters sliced me. Blood was hot on my face and limbs. Ghost yelped and whined.

Then I was firing.

Firing.

Firing.

My rounds punched holes in the clouds of gun smoke and flying wreckage. Outside, one of the grinning killers suddenly spun away, but any cry of pain was lost in the din. Blood splashed the other killer, and there was a momentary pause as the second figure turned to watch his partner fall.

In that moment, Bunny put four rounds into his chest and face and blew him apart.

There was a second of silence so deafening I couldn’t even hear the echoes of the gunfire. My head felt like it was inside a drum. Ghost scrambled out from under me, his coat glittering with glass splinters, teeth bared in a snarl of pure rage.

Then someone else opened up on us.

Heavy-caliber automatic fire, but muted. Distant. Bullets struck the front door, which disintegrated into meaningless fragments. The CLOSED sign was whipped around and seemed to dissolve into confetti as it was struck over and over again. I saw Bunny, who had begun to rise from the floor, suddenly jerk backward and fall as bullets struck him as other shooters opened up from across the street.

“Ghost — down!” I snapped, and I had to repeat the order to break through his shock and anger. Then he flattened to the floor, out of range of the bullets.

I dropped my magazine, fished for a new one, and slapped it in place, praying that Bunny wasn’t dead. In that heartbeat of time it took to swap out the mags I cut a look across the room and saw Top and the kid, Sykes, lying under a blanket of silver and red debris. Silver from the glass, red from blood that ran from dozens of wounds in each of them.

“Green Giant!” called Top, using Bunny’s combat call sign. There was fear and desperation in Top’s voice.

Bunny didn’t answer. I raised my weapon and began firing.

Bullets chopped into the frame around the window, but there was enough of it left to give me a bit of protection. Enough so that I could stand and return fire.

They had assault rifles and they capped off a lot of rounds, but it was wild, the bullets sawing back and forth. They were hosing the place but not really aiming. I found the pattern of their gunfire and took my moment, leaned around the bullet-pocked wall, and fired with every ounce of skill and precision that I’ve learned as a Ranger, a cop, and a special operator. One of the guns went instantly silent.

But there were four more shooters.

They were arrogant because they thought we were nothing.

They walked toward the front of the store in a loose line, firing, dropping spent magazines onto the blacktop, reloading, firing.

Then I sensed movement behind me and Top was on his feet, cutting low and forward to take cover behind the other side of the ruined window frame. He carried a Glock 34 with a nineteen-round extended magazine. I swapped out my magazine again and gave Top a nod. Then we emptied our magazines into the four men. They had the numbers and the better weapons.

We had the skill.

Even as their bullets continued to chew at our protection, we aimed with precision, forcing down the panic, keeping our heads in the moment, letting all of our training carry us through the insanity. We conserved our ammunition, picked our targets, and killed them. Their bodies juddered and danced, blood erupting from terrible wounds. The slide on my gun locked back.

“I’m out,” I said.

“Got this,” said Top as he swapped in his last magazine.

But there was nothing left to do.

No one left to fight.

Outside, the street was littered with the dead. Shell casings by the hundreds twinkled in the bright sunlight. Just as it gleamed from the bright blood that flowed out from beneath the bodies. A pall of gun smoke polluted the afternoon air of this quiet part of Brooklyn. In the distance I could see the heads and shoulders of people hiding behind bullet-riddled cars and benches.

Ghost staggered to his feet, furious for having no one to attack. He snarled and showed his fangs, but the only audience left was the dead.

With Ghost beside me, I stepped through the shattered window and scooped up a rifle that lay by the slack hand of one of the first two men I’d killed. I tore a magazine from his pocket, dropped the half-empty one, and slapped the fresh one into place. The echo of thunder still hammered in my head.

Seven bodies were collapsed in ugly heaps.

Smoke ghosts haunted the air above them and drifted between the store and the open doors of a now-empty white panel truck.

The first two shooters were on the pavement just outside the window. One lay in a twist, arms reaching toward the truck as if imploring help that could never arrive. The other was splayed like a starfish.

All of the corpses were dressed in black hoodies.

All of them were young. Twenties. Late teens.

Kids.

Except for the smoke, nothing moved.

The only sound was the fading echo of death and the soft moans from Caleb Sykes.

Then I remembered Bunny and wheeled around, but I saw Top helping him to his feet. There were two holes in Bunny’s shirt, but the Kevlar had done its job. Even so, Bunny looked gray and sick and in pain. They stepped through the gaping window, fanning their gun barrels left and right, eyes tracking, looking for more targets.

But there was nothing.

This storm had raged and raged, but now it had passed.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, we lowered our guns.

Far away was the promise of complications as sirens began to wail.

Top looked down at the shooter who lay dead at his feet, arms and legs splayed wide. With the sunglasses blown away, the revealed face was slack in death. It had been a pretty face. A woman’s face.

Young. Asian.

“Mother Night?” murmured Top.

But I shook my head.

“I don’t know.”

Somewhere back inside the store my cell phone lay amid the debris, and I recalled the last text message I’d received. “Nobody lives forever.”

Maybe the woman on the ground wasn’t Mother Night, but I was now absolutely certain who was sending me messages.

A police car rounded the corner at the end of the block and screamed its way toward us.

Interlude Ten

On a cold November morning Artemisia Bliss trudged into the Hangar, lightly hungover from too many dirty martinis and exhausted from a night with Bill Collins. The man was inexhaustible. She suspected he took something. Viagra and maybe some kind of energizer. Whatever it was, he could go all night like a horny, well-hung version of the Energizer bunny. It was worse than screwing a college boy — and college boys were notorious for having no off button when it came to sex. For her own part, Bliss had a lot of appetite, but she didn’t have the staying power she once had.

When she looked into the bathroom mirror before leaving her apartment it was like looking at a zombie movie.

“Yeah,” she told her image, “you’re ready for that Vogue cover shoot.”

Dark glasses and a Starbucks drive-through helped.

It was going to be a tough day, too, because she had to finish proofreading the code for a video game simulation she was designing to help test the new VaultBreaker software. It was her idea to hire a bunch of gamers from outside the Defense Department to play the simulation without knowing what it was. She’d convinced Church — and Collins — that only real gamers could test the limits of the software. Her argument had been compelling enough to get approval. Collins had gone to bat for it, too, but from his own direction, and so far no one knew about her relationship with the vice president.

The simulation was a matter of pride for Bliss. It was one of the most elegant and sophisticated game modules in existence, a claim she was certain was true. It really burned that there was no way to take VaultBreaker and turn it into an actual commercial game. It was so devious and crazy, and so damn much fun to play, that she was absolutely positive it would make a hundred million easy. Video games were big business — often pulling in more cash than big-budget movies.

The delicate work of proofreading game code, however, was not going to be a picnic with her head feeling like it was filled with spiders.

But as soon as she walked into the lab complex she knew that her day was about to get worse. Sergeant Gus Dietrich stood beside her desk, and instead of his usual benevolent bulldog grin he wore an expression of pinched disapproval.

“Hey, Gus, what’s—?”

“Doctor Bliss,” said Gus in a strangely formal way, “you need to come with me.”

It was one of those moments when every guilty action ever taken, from jaywalking to screwing her college roommate’s father, flashed on the movie screens in her mind.

Do they know?

That was the real question.

Did they know about the duplicated files and all the samples she’d taken while collecting evidence at more than thirty DMS crime scenes?

Did they know?

How could they know?

Oh God, what did they know?

“Wh-what’s going on, Gus?”

He shook his head. “Aunt Sallie’s waiting for you.”

Dietrich refused to say anything else as he escorted her down hallways and up a flight of stairs to Auntie’s office. The face of the woman behind the desk was locked into a grim scowl.

Bliss began to tremble, but she fought to keep it from showing.

“Sit,” ordered Aunt Sallie. She jerked her head for Dietrich to leave.

When they were alone, Auntie leaned back in her big leather chair and studied Bliss through narrowed, suspicious eyes.

“You know why you’re here?”

“N-no.”

“Really? No idea?”

“No!”

Aunt Sallie lifted a sheet of paper from her desk. Bliss couldn’t read it, but it looked like an interoffice memo on the pale green paper used by Bug’s computer division. Auntie put on her half-moon granny glasses and read from the memo.

“… between 3:51 p.m. and 7:18 p.m. MindReader recorded nineteen separate intrusion attacks. These attacks were targeted at bypassing the cycling encryptions. Four attempts were made during that time to bypass the password protection; and three attempts to clone the intrusion software. All attempts were made from the same workstation.” She slapped the memo flat onto the desk. “Three guesses whose workstation was used for those attacks?”

Bliss couldn’t even speak. The world seemed to have frozen solid around her, turning her blood to slush and freezing her vocal cords.

“Goddamn it, girl, you fucking tell me what’s going on right fucking now or by God I will have you arrested and I’ll ram the Patriot Act all the way up your tight little cooze.” Auntie was so furious that spit flew with every word. Her brown face darkened to a dangerous purple.

“But I—”

Aunt Sallie jabbed a warning finger at her. “Be real careful, girl. You tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the fucking truth, so help you God.”

Time ground to a halt as Bliss’s evolved self stepped back from the moment to take a cold, hard look at the situation. There were a lot of ways to play this, most of them bad. She could burst into tears and pretend innocence, claiming that she was just curious. That was even partly true, though it sounded lame enough to walk with a limp. Bliss dismissed it with a mental sneer.

Or she could act genuinely surprised that what she’d done was in any way improper. Aunt Sallie might buy that on the grounds that the policies about not trying to hack MindReader were not so much written as generally understood, and it was impossible to prove the extent to which something like that was grasped. But that was likely to be a long and acrimonious tug-of-war, and Bliss didn’t like her chances of winning. It would also never remove the stink of suspicion.

Then there was the way her evolved self wanted to play it. It was totally out of character with the Artemisia Bliss who’d been working here for three and a half years, but not entirely out of character for the Bliss who’d been interviewed by Dr. Hu. Surely that interview had been recorded. Her attitude and self-possession had to be part of her record, even if since then she’d played the role of a dutiful team member.

Yes, that felt like a good card. Maybe the only real card she could play without going bust.

Auntie’s eyes seemed to exude real heat.

So Bliss untangled her fingers, leaned forward, and placed her palms down on the edge of the desk. She deliberately shifted her posture forward in a way that was a borderline physical threat.

In a voice as flat and cold as a reptile, she said, “Excuse me, but who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

Aunt Sallie, veteran of a hundred violent field encounters, blinked. She said, “What?”

“You heard me. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to here? You drag me in here and accuse me of impropriety. Me? I bust my ass all day, every day to make sure the DMS is cutting-edge. With my skills and my brains I could be a billionaire by now, filing patent after patent, kicking Bill Gates in the nuts with my designs. I could have made fortunes designing video games. Instead, I work for salary night and day to make sure that every threat we face is assessed and defeated as quickly as possible. I wrote the code for two thirds of the tactical software packages every one of our teams relies on when they go into battle. I designed the security simulations that keep every DMS facility secure from cyberattack and I co-designed most of the physical security systems. My programs are built into every workstation, every MindReader field kit, and even into some of the counterintrusion software Bug installed into MindReader itself. And who do you think came up with the idea for VaultBreaker? The fucking Easter Bunny? Shit. You want to know why I tried to get into MindReader? Because I need to be prepared for when someone tries it for real. I need to understand the safety measures so that I can be ready with backup, with stronger and fresher systems, with new designs no one has ever thought up. That’s why you hired me and that’s what I do, and fuck you, but I do that better than anyone else.”

Her voice was never once raised above an arctic snarl.

The moment held as the two women glared across the width of the desk and a frozen wasteland at each other.

“Making modifications on MindReader is not part of your job,” said Auntie, but her voice had lost some of its edge. “All modifications are overseen by—”

“By Bug, I know. So what? He’s smart, sure, but he isn’t the smartest person in this building by a long stretch. You don’t believe that, look at our last performance evaluations. Hell, look at our scores on game simulator speedruns.”

Aunt Sallie did not reply, and Bliss knew that she’d scored big with that. Either Auntie already knew those scores or she hadn’t checked. In either case she was short one card.

Bliss’s heart was going a million miles an hour but she’d be damned if she’d let it show on her face. Instead she played her next card.

“Tell you what, Auntie,” she said, her voice about twenty degrees colder, “why don’t you go through the field reports of the last forty missions. Pick any teams at random, any missions. Then do the math to see whose software contributed most to preserving the lives of our operators and insuring the success of the missions. Match that against Bug or anyone else, then if you have anything to say to me we can do it as part of my exit interview. Otherwise I’m done with this bullshit and I have work to do.”

She stood up, intending to use the objectivity of the height of a standing person over one sitting to put Aunt Sallie in a defensive position. Instead, Aunt Sallie smiled and folded her hands primly on her desk.

“Sit your ass down,” she said. Her voice was on the cold side of dangerous.

Bliss gave it a moment, then sat. Slowly, and with control.

“You spoke your mind, and it’s nice to know that you have a backbone. After all these years I was beginning to wonder. And maybe you’re being straight up and not simply wiping your ass with the flag, but I have two things you need to hear.”

Bliss said nothing, knowing that any response would weaken her hand. Instead she arched one eyebrow. Half interested, half mocking.

“First,” said Aunt Sallie, “you do not have full clearance on MindReader, and that means you will attempt no further intrusions into the system. I don’t care if there are missiles inbound and that’s the only way to save the day. You. Don’t. Hack. MindReader.” Aunt Sallie spaced those last four words like gunshots.

Instead of replying or acknowledging that, Bliss asked, “And what’s the other thing?”

“Don’t ever get in my face again,” said Aunt Sallie.

Bliss leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. She gave it a moment while she composed the best response, given the nature of the implied threat, the nature of her own faux pas, and the echo of her own words which still hung in the air.

“A lot of people are afraid of you, Auntie,” said Bliss, her tone conversational. “Maybe they have reasons. There are a lot of tall tales floating around about you. And even if half of them are true then once upon a time you were hot shit. Well, here’s a news flash, that’s not even yesterday’s news. It’s last century’s. You’re a bitchy, foul-mouthed, and disgruntled old woman who likes to bully people and you probably get some kind of contact high every time you verbally bitch-slap someone. It’s all very interesting and maybe it would make a good movie. But in the real world, in the world of right now, I’m more valuable to the DMS than you are. You’re not a scientist and you’re long past being a field agent, and this organization’s entire effectiveness is built on geeks and shooters. I’m worth ten of you. Now either fire me or fuck off.”

Later, back at her desk, Bliss tried not to smile.

An official reprimand went into her file. And that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, since she worked for a secret organization. Besides, she could take her skills anywhere — even outside of the Department of Defense, DARPA, or any related group — and if she couldn’t file patents on what she’d done as part of the DMS, she knew that she had a lot more game. She’d come up with something brand new. Something that would kick the ass of everything else on the market.

That evening she lay in the warm circle of the vice president’s arms in a hotel room guarded by Secret Service agents who were totally owned by Collins. The vice president’s wife was on yet another charity trip. Bliss told Collins everything that had happened.

They both laughed until they cried.

Chapter Thirty-eight

I tapped my earbud for Bug but got Nikki instead.

I told her about the attack and ordered her to put it into the system with A-clearance priority.

“God, are you all right?”

I had glass splinters in my hair and a case of the shakes I was sure would never go away. I wanted to curl up on my couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and watch daytime TV until I no longer believed that there was a real world.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m just peachy. Listen, kid, have you guys made any progress on those text messages? ’Cause I got one right before the hit.”

“Not so far, but—”

“Put more people on it,” I barked, and told her about the one I got right before the attack. “These have to be coming from Mother Night. Which means she knows my cell number and she can bypass MindReader. I don’t care what you have to do, but get this solved.”

Then my brain shifted gears so fast that I nearly hurt myself.

“Wait a goddamn minute. The message before that last one. You always hurt the one you love. Christ, it sounded stupid at the time but it sure as shit doesn’t now. It sounds like a threat. Junie is at FreeTech. I want two security guards bookending her and I want it right fucking now. And call her to let her know they’re coming. Don’t talk to me. Make it happen.”

She was gone.

I stood trembling in the street, but now the shakes had nothing to do with gun battles or flesh wounds.

“No,” I said to the day — to this awful, awful day. “No.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

NYPD transit officer Maureen Faustino stared into darkness.

“What happened to the damn lights?” she asked as she reached for her flash.

A few feet away, her partner, Sonny Dawes, clicked his light on. The beam reached twenty yards down the subway tunnel before being consumed by the intense darkness. Faustino turned her flash on and swept it along the ceiling and the damp walls. Rows of security lights in wire cages were dark.

With her other hand, Faustino clicked her shoulder mike and reported the power outage. The dispatcher noted it and told them to proceed with caution.

Use caution walking into a pitch-black tunnel? thought Faustino. No shit.

“How far’s the train?” asked Dawes.

“Dispatch says six hundred yards.”

They looked at the utter blackness beyond their flashlight beams.

“Well, fuck a duck,” said Dawes.

They glanced at each other for a moment, nodded, and drew their guns.

Faustino and Dawes were down here responding to a call from the conductor. There had been some cell calls from people trapped on the train, but those calls were badly distorted by some kind of interference, and then they all abruptly stopped. To prevent a collision, the transit company halted all other trains on that line, so now people were in stations all along it, getting impatient, getting pissed, demanding answers.

No further contact had been established with anyone on the train.

Faustino swallowed nervously. Nothing about this felt right.

“Think we should call for backup?” asked Dawes.

“For what?” answered Faustino. Though, in truth, she wanted to do just that. She didn’t, though. The transit authority had begun installation of cellular carrier boosters in the subway system, but there were still cell phone dead spots, and they seemed to be in one. Hardly justification to ask for additional units when everyone was already stretched thin because of Labor Day. Besides, they were both experienced at this sort of thing — the New York version of tunnel rats. Faustino had lost track of how many times she’d had to walk through these stone veins beneath the city.

“Let’s go,” she said, and together they moved single-file along a narrow concrete service walkway.

The smell was damp and electrical, with undertones of rot and waste.

The tunnels were bad enough when the lights were on. Vermin of every kind. Cockroaches big enough to mug you. Shit from homeless people coming down here to take a dump. Syringes and crack vials underfoot — though Faustino could never imagine anyone coming down here to get high. And the constant drip of water and puddles that never seemed to evaporate.

Dawes pointed. “There’s a light up there.”

She looked past him and saw something. Not a train light or a service light. This was small and red. And as they approached they saw that it was a small security camera of a kind they’d never seen before. Very compact and brand new, stuck to a pillar with some kind of adhesive.

“Since when are they putting CCTV down here?” asked Dawes. “And what for? To watch rats fuck each other?”

“Hey, watch your language,” cautioned Faustino in a whisper. She pulled him away from the camera. “You don’t know who’s watching. Don’t want to get written up.”

He nodded and they pressed on, but soon found a second camera. And a third.

“Must be something new,” decided Faustino. “Quality control or something.”

“Not our problem,” said Dawes. Then he stopped and squinted into the shadows. “Wait … you hear that?”

Faustino listened.

She heard nothing.

And then she heard something.

Very faint, very far away. Soft. Distorted by distance and …

“You hear that?” asked Dawes.

“Yeah. But I can’t…” Her words trailed off as the sound came again, a little louder now.

It wasn’t a scream or a yell for help. Nothing like that.

But it was a human sound.

Almost like … singing. Faustino frowned, trying to understand what she was hearing. No, not singing. This noise was not musical. Not humming either, though that was a little closer to the quality of the sound that drifted on the fetid breaths of bad air.

It was like someone was keening.

The way old women do sometimes at funerals. The way her aunt Maria used to do. A steady, keening sound that chilled Faustino to the marrow.

Whatever it was, it was wrong in ways she could not identify.

Something worse than any malfunction of motors or generators.

“Call this in,” whispered Dawes. “We need someone else down here.”

This time Faustino did not argue. She keyed her mike for dispatch.

And got a burst of sharp static.

Faustino adjusted her squelch and tried it again.

More static, but this time she could hear a voice.

“… at … ituation … all back and…”

Just pieces.

Then nothing as the signal faded and died.

Faustino could feel Dawes’s breath on her cheek and throat. As close as a lover, the exhaled air warmer than anything down in this tunnel.

“What is that?” she asked.

They both knew she wasn’t asking about the message from dispatch.

The sound filled the tunnel, rolling in waves, rising and falling.

Human voices.

Not singing.

Not humming.

They were … moaning.

Chapter Forty

Bug perched on his chair, eyes darting from screen to screen as his slender fingers danced like hummingbird wings over the keys. A lot seemed to be happening in the world, and none of it was good. Bombings in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, a bizarre spike in random violence ranging from gang attacks in upscale neighborhoods in five states to eight separate attacks on salespersons in stores in different parts of the south, and arson in three sporting goods warehouses in Indiana. Individually, they were the kind of events that would make headlines and be top stories on any news broadcast. Collectively, they were likely to make this the most violent day in the country in a decade. News services were already slanting their coverage that way.

Bug and his team were running it all through MindReader’s pattern-recognition software. There was no known connection and no reason to believe that these events were connected, but Bug didn’t like coincidences any more than his boss did. Also, the Mother Night cyberhacking had everyone on edge. Her message used anarchist rhetoric, and the craziness sweeping the country felt like things were falling apart. So Bug created a search argument for anarchistic behavior and asked MindReader to create a list of possible connections. Sadly, this being America, the list of apparently random acts of violence grew too rapidly to read.

Sighing, Bug let that compile and worked on ways to refine the search so it didn’t include everything from road rage to jaywalking.

His intercom buzzed and he hit a key to take a call from his senior assistant, Yoda — which, sadly, was his real first name. Yoda’s parents were ultrageeks even by Bug’s standards.

“Bug!” gasped Yoda. “Jesus, man, you have to see this.”

“See what?”

“It’s from my friend at the NYPD. He sends me stuff when there’s something hot. This is direct from the subway in Brooklyn. You have to see this shit to believe it.”

“I’m really swamped here, Yoda, and…”

Bug’s words trailed off as a video feed filled the main screen with dozens of smaller windows, each one showing a crowd of civilians crammed into a tight space. It was clear that the crowd was standing in darkness and lit only by the glow from cell phones and tablets. The pictures were erratic. People were screaming, yelling for help, shouting at one another.

Then one by one most of the phones fell or were knocked from the hands of the people making the calls. Instead of normal angles, the phones lay on the floor or on seats of what was obviously a subway car.

“What the hell…?” whispered Bug.

The people on the subway car were tearing one another to pieces.

They were eating one another.

Chapter Forty-one

The mailroom at the Brentwood processing center receives tens of thousands of pieces of mail each day addressed to the White House and Congress. It operates twenty-four hours a day and rarely pauses for holidays. Items marked for the personal attention of select individuals in the succession of powers were culled from the mass and sorted separately, put in sacks and sent by cart to a senior sorter for screening.

On Sunday morning, Jorge Cantu loaded the fourth mail sack onto the conveyor belt that fed the sacks through a high-tech scanner. There were several sections of the scanner, including an X-ray, a metal detector, an explosives detection system — EDS — and a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer typically called a BAMS unit. If any of these machines so much as coughed, Cantu stopped the belt and hit an alert button. Different alerts resulted in different kinds of responses.

The nitrite sniffer never, in Cantu’s experience, beeped, because there were similar explosives detection devices used by the Post Office and Secret Service before the bags were ever sent to the mailroom. Ditto for the metal detectors. Once in a while something like a bolo tie from a western resident or a tin of chocolates from a sewing club in New England would make it as far as the White House mailroom, but never any farther. No matter how well-intentioned, gifts of that kind sent through the mail seldom made it even as far as the president’s staff. Never to the desk in the Oval Office.

The same scrutiny was afforded to the vice president, Speaker of the House, and other notables. There had been enough problems, even before 9/11, that no one took chances. And there were so many stages of screening that Cantu seldom encountered anything more dire than junk mail. Once, though, a load of dog crap sealed in plastic made it to the desk of the press secretary’s assistant before it was discovered. The package included a note that said, “At least this shit is honest.”

No return address.

There was a rumor that the press secretary had the letter framed.

Otherwise, the mailroom at Brentwood was busy but not particularly interesting.

Until the morning of August 31.

A warning light flashed red and a small bell suddenly started ringing.

Not the bomb alert.

Not the metal detector.

This bell was one that had never rung once in the seven years Jorge Cantu had sorted mail for this administration.

It was the warning alert for the mass spectrometer.

The device whose sole purpose was to detect dangerous particles. It had four colored lights. Green for normal. Yellow for suspicious. Orange for likely toxins.

And red for a verified hit on one of four possible threats.

Spores.

Fungi.

Bacteria.

Or viruses.

Cantu stared at the light as the bell jangled in his ear. He said, “Oh my god!”

He hit the stop button and stumbled backward from the scanner, kicking his chair over with a crash, heels slipping on the floor in his haste.

“Red light on four!” he yelled. “Red light on four.”

There was instant motion, the slap of shoes on the hard floor, shouts as Secret Service agents hustled in his direction.

“Step back from the scanner,” ordered the lead agent even though Cantu was already as far back as he could go.

Within minutes the mailroom was cleared as were adjoining offices in that part of the mail processing center. Dozens of people flooded in, however. Police first, then within minutes agents from Homeland arrived. Soon techs in hazmat suits descended on the center accompanied by squads of supervisory personnel.

The bag was removed from the scanner and placed very gingerly into a portable steel biocontainment unit. The scanner was draped in chemically treated cloth and the entire area was sprayed with a ferociously dangerous antibacterial, antiviral agent.

The biocontainment unit was loaded onto a specially designed truck, and it roared off with heavy support from Secret Service and Homeland officers in riot gear. The motorcade went lights-and-sirens to a facility in Arlington where scientists and technicians waited.

The bag was offloaded, scanned again for explosive devices, and when it was conclusively determined that nothing was going to blow up, the bag was opened and the contents each placed in a separate biohazard container. The pieces were then scanned by a much more acute BAMS unit, and although several pieces of mail were deemed to have secondary contamination, the techs quickly identified an envelope that they separated out. It was a standard white greeting card envelope sealed with clear adhesive tape. No bulges, no metal or plastic components. The envelope was moved to a special containment chamber and a scientist used Waldo gloves to slit the envelope open and remove the card. A Hallmark card.

On the front of the card was a photo of a field of flowers that rose up to the crest of a gently sloping hill. Beyond the hill were trees and puffy white clouds. In flowing script across the top of the card were the words So sorry for your loss. It was obvious that the sentiment was printed as part of the card’s professional design.

The card had no preprinted message inside. Instead there was a handwritten note.

Inside the card, compressed between the cardboard covers, contained by the heavy grade envelope and tape, was a fine-grained white powder.

High-res digital images of the card, envelope, and message were sent to the Secret Service and Homeland. Laser scans of the card were initiated to capture any fingerprints. Small samples of the card, the envelope, and the tape were taken for separate analysis.

But that was secondary to the rush to analyze the white powder.

The BAMS unit had provided a preliminary identification, but the techs at the Arlington lab were able to discover much more about it. So much more that the BAMS reading was later viewed as “inadequate.”

Yes, the BAMS unit correctly identified it as Bacillus anthracis.

Anthrax.

But that description did not and could not fully describe the bacterium in that powder. It was like nothing the Arlington lab had ever seen. A mutation of anthrax so virulent that it was terrifying.

Data and samples were flown by armed couriers to military laboratories at Fort McNair in D.C. and Fort Myer in Virginia, next to Arlington Cemetery.

The information about the terrorist attempt was shared with the national security advisor, who requested an immediate audience with the president and vice president. When the president’s chief of staff asked why the vice president’s presence was requested, the answer was simple, though frightening and inexplicable.

The letter had been addressed to the vice president.

Chapter Forty-two

Officers Faustino and Dawes stood listening to the darkness. Listening to how wrong it was. The moans came rolling down the line, louder now. Stranger.

They were not moans of passion or disappointment. Not moans of defeat or frustration.

The moans were filled with hunger. Faustino knew that, even though she could never explain to herself or anyone else why she knew it. Her reaction and the understanding that came with it was purely primal. This was the sound of a hunger so deep, so vast that it could never be assuaged.

The two officers pointed flashlights and guns into the darkness but did not take another step toward that sound.

No way.

“What is that?” said Dawes in a voice that trembled with fear.

Faustino took several long, steadying breaths before she reached for her shoulder mike. She keyed the button and called for dispatch.

Got static.

Got nothing else.

The moaning was continual.

“Shit, shit, shit,” whispered Faustino. She glanced up at one of the small security cameras with its steady red light. It reminded her of a rat’s eye. “I wonder if anyone’s watching.”

Dawes waved at the camera. “Hey! Anyone there?”

Of course there was no answer.

Faustino stepped in front of the lens. “This is Police Officer Maureen Faustino and Officer Sonny Dawes. We’re down in the subway tunnel near Euclid Avenue. The lights and power are off down here and we’re not getting radio reception. If anyone is watching this, please contact our department and tell them officers are requesting backup.”

She gave some additional information, including their estimated position in the tunnel and their badge numbers.

The red light remained fixed and uninformative.

In the darkness the echoes of the terrible moans were growing louder.

“Oh, man,” complained Dawes, “what the hell is that?”

“Shit,” muttered Faustino. “C’mon, Sonny, we have to find out.”

They stood where they were for another minute. The hungry moans bounced off the walls and were amplified by distance and fear and cold concrete.

“Fuck this,” said Dawes. “I think we need to get our asses back to Euclid Station and see if we can get a signal. Or use an emergency phone. Something.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

They didn’t move.

“Shit,” Dawes said after another minute.

“Shit,” agreed Faustino.

They began moving forward. Not toward Euclid, but farther down the tunnel. Toward the moans.

Their feet crunched softly on the walkway, the sound battered to insignificance by the moans. The tunnel curved around, and from the intensity of the sounds they knew that the train had to be right there, no more than twenty yards away. There were more of the small security cameras mounted on the wall. Faustino had a weird feeling about them, but right now they were the least of her concerns.

The officers paused again, whispering to each other the way cops do, stating proper procedure, assigning right-and-left approaches, reminding themselves that they were in control of the moment.

It usually worked.

It didn’t work now.

Like a pair of frightened children they crept around the bend in the tunnel, keeping their flashlight beams low so as not to signal whoever was inside the train. They saw their light gleam on the silver rails and then reflect dully from the steel body of the last car. The blocky lines of the train, the letter C in the window.

There was no one outside the car.

But there was so much noise coming from inside.

The moans.

Those terrible moans.

And other sounds they hadn’t heard before. Dull thumps. From inside.

Like weak fists pounding on the doors and windows.

Inside.

Faustino slowly raised the beam of her flashlight and the glow climbed over the metal skin to the big panes of glass on either side of the rear door. The glass was cracked. Spiderweb faults were laced outward from multiple impact points. Behind the glass, darkened figures moved. The pounding sounds continued and Faustino realized that the people inside were banging on the glass.

Cracking it.

Breaking it.

Trying to get out.

“Jesus Christ,” yelled Dawes, “they’re trapped.”

He suddenly broke and ran forward, leaping down from the service walkway.

“Hey!” he called at the top of his voice. “New York Police. We’re here to help you. Just calm down and we’ll get you out.”

Behind him, Faustino stood her ground. Her flashlight beam still covered the rear of the car, sparkling along the fissures that continued to spread out from the damaged glass.

There was color on the inside of the glass.

Red.

Blood red.

For a moment she thought that the people had injured themselves trying to break out of the crippled train. But that made no sense. The rear door wasn’t locked. Anyone could open it.

Anyone.

The pounding continued, despite Dawes’s yells.

The moaning got louder.

More insistent.

Hungrier.

As Dawes raised his leg to climb onto the back of the train, Faustino shouted a single word.

“No!”

Chapter Forty-three

Bug lunged for the phone. Not the regular phone, or the one connected to the Tactical Operations Center. He grabbed a slender black one that automatically made a call when the handset was picked up. Bug waited through two rings that seemed to take an interminable time, then the call was answered.

“Bug,” said Mr. Church.

“It’s happening again!” cried Bug. “Oh sweet Jesus they’re back!”

“What’s happening? Calm down and—”

Bug pounded the keys that would send the feed to Mr. Church.

“They’re back,” Bug said in a strangled voice.

There was a profound silence on the other end of the line.

Then, “Where did you get this? Where is this happening?”

Bug told him.

“Spin up the system,” growled Church. “Put all teams on maximum alert, recall all off-duty personnel. Do it now.”

“Already doing it,” Bug said. His fingers flew across the keys.

Chapter Forty-four

Boo Radley laid several folders on the vice president’s desk.

“These are the latest reports on the Mother Night video,” said Radley. “As you’ll see, the task force hasn’t locked anything down yet, but they’re following some promising leads. We reached out to the DMS for assistance, hoping that they’d do some deep searches for us with MindReader.”

“Is the Deacon stonewalling us as usual?”

“Actually, sir, they’re not.”

Collins raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“They’ve been unusually cooperative today, and it’s because of their help that we’ve gotten as far as we have.”

“Hm,” grunted Collins. “Keep that back-and-forth going, Boo, but make sure that when we get something solid we have the first men through the door. I want our cuffs on these hacker assholes, not the DMS’s, you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, sir,” said Radley with a cold little smile. “I took the liberty of passing along a similarly worded message to our division heads.”

“Nice.” Collins set the top folder aside and opened the second. “What’s this? The anthrax thing?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we with that?”

“It’s too soon to be anywhere, sir, but the president has thrown his full support behind the investigation and that’s greased the wheels a bit.”

“As well he should.”

“Agreed, Mr. Vice President.”

Collins leafed through the file, then slapped the cover shut. “Christ, I want this psycho bitch found. I want her head on a pole.”

In his private thoughts, he smirked and rephrased that as I want her on my pole … again.

Collins was aware that his inner self was often a twenty-year-old frat boy, but he was fine with that. Kept him young.

Radley’s cell rang. He looked at it, arched an eyebrow, and excused himself as he stepped a few feet away to take the call. Collins listened to one side of the conversation.

“… I’m with the vice president,” said Radley. “No, I haven’t heard — Wait, what—? What channel?” With the phone still pressed to his ear, he suddenly crossed to the table, picked up the remote, and jabbed it toward the TV. “It’s on now. Get me everything you have on this. No … I’ll stay here with the vice president. C’mon, get your ass in gear. Get moving on this and give us regular updates.”

He lowered the phone, looking dazed and sweaty.

“Now what?” demanded Collins.

Radley swallowed. “Sir, there’s been an incident on a subway train in Brooklyn.”

They both turned to the television, which showed a grainy, jumpy, and badly lit image of what looked like a brawl. Radley turned up the volume, and the shrill sound of screams filled the office.

The voice of the commentator from the local ABC affiliate was rattling on in a tone that was partly normal shock and partly the malicious delight of a news reporter.

“If you’re just joining us, we have exclusive coverage of what appears to be a deadly riot on the C train in Brooklyn, New York. We must warn you that these images are streaming live. We have not watched them and the content may be too intense for some viewers.”

On the screen a portly Latina grabbed the arm of whoever was filming the melee with his cell. There was a flash of white teeth, a terrible scream, and then bright red blood spurted from a vicious wound. The cell fell to the floor and a moment later the signal was cut as someone stepped on it.

The news reporter was caught in a moment of shocked silence, then he dived right in, taking his own bite out of the story. The screen divided into two smaller windows as the footage was replayed while the reporter commented on it.

“Details are still sketchy but reporters are en route to the C train to bring you up-to-the-minute coverage of this unfolding situation. To recap what we know, there appears to be a deadly riot aboard a stalled train near the Euclid—”

Radley stood with a hand to his mouth. “My god … what’s happening?”

Vice President William Collins could feel the shock tightening the muscles of his own face. It was, indeed, shocking to see something like this.

It was so much more real and messy than he’d imagined.

Though, he mused, it was every bit as impressive as Mother Night said it would be.

His mouth said, “Dear God in heaven.”

His mind said, Nice!

Chapter Forty-five

Ludo Monk’s phone rang and he sat back from his rifle with mixed emotions. Part of him was suddenly disappointed because he wanted to pull the trigger and see what kind of red splash patterns he could paint on the walls. The woman with the blond wig and the others at the conference table were just waiting for his bullets, begging for them, really.

The other part of him — the part that was responding to the pills he’d swallowed — did not want to pull the trigger. That part of him wanted to find a church and talk to a priest and see what it would take to buy a ticket back from the outer rings of hell. He had money and was willing to make significant donations to have a reasonable priest apply a fresh coat of whitewash on his immortal soul.

However, the call was from Mother Night, so he sighed, picked up his phone, and answered.

“Yes, Mother?”

“You haven’t taken that shot, have you?”

“No,” he said sulkily, “you said not to.”

“Good boy. We’re moving some pieces around on the board. The target may return to her hotel or go to another location. Possibly the Hangar. If so, I want you to use one of the fallback locations for the shot.”

“Why not now? I can do her right now.”

“The timing is wrong, Ludo. How many times have I told you, it’s not the target, it’s the timing.”

He grumbled something to himself. Not loud enough for her to hear.

“This is a tweak on the model,” said Mother, “and it’s within the operational plan we discussed, so stop bitching. You’ll get your shot. Stay ready and I’ll call back in a few minutes to give you the go order.”

“Okey-dokey.”

A sigh on the other end of the line. “Ludo … don’t say okey-dokey.”

“Sure.”

The line went dead.

Ludo lowered the phone. The room was awash in brown shadows intercut with bars of light that sliced through the gaps in the blinds. The rifle waited on its tripod. Calling to him. Flirting with him. Daring him to touch it. Wanting him to.

Across the street heads waited for bullets.

Wanting them, he was sure of it.

“Okey-dokey,” he said to the empty room.

Chapter Forty-six

It was a burst of squelch that saved the lives of Officers Faustino and Dawes.

A static rasp and then a voice.

“… your location…”

“Sonny,” cried Faustino. “Don’t. We got the radio.”

Dawes stopped with his leg raised to climb onto the back of the car. A few feet above him, darkened figures moved behind the cracked glass. Dawes looked from his partner to the milling shapes, and he lowered his leg and stepped back.

Faustino plucked her radio from her shoulder and keyed the mike to call dispatch. The connection was bad and polluted by static, but she reported the situation and asked for orders. The delay in response was so long that Faustino was worried that the connection had been lost. Inside the train, the pounding was getting louder, more urgent.

Dawes stared up at the shapes like a man transfixed.

“How come nobody’s saying nothing?” he said.

Faustino held the radio to her ear to hear what the dispatcher was trying to say.

“… ordered to return … station…”

“How come none of them people are saying nothing?” demanded Dawes.

“Dispatch,” growled Faustino, “you’re breaking up. Repeat message.”

The reply was almost totally garbled. Faustino was able to pick only four words out of the mess, but those words were enough to chill the blood in her veins even more than the sound of that awful moaning.

“… biohazard … do not approach…”

“Dawes!” she shrieked as she holstered her gun, grabbed her partner by the arm, and dragged him backward.

“What the fuck—?” he barked, surprised by the violence of her grab.

“Sonny, they told us to get back.”

“There are people in there.”

“They said it’s a biohazard situation.”

That shut him up and he allowed himself to be dragged back to the midpoint of the tunnel’s curve.

Suddenly he was backpedaling, scrambling as fast as he could to get away from the train. “Oh God oh God oh God!” he said in one long continuous breath.

They retreated all the way around the bend and then another hundred yards, both of them panting like dogs, running forward and then backward, too scared to really think.

“What … what is it?” gasped Dawes as they slowed to a trembling stop.

She shook her head and once more the radio was filled with useless static. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Some kind of toxic thing. They didn’t say what it was. The connection’s fucked.”

He gripped her sleeve. “Christ, you think it’s a terrorist thing? Anthrax or some shit?”

Faustino shook her head. Not in denial, but in fear that he might be right. Now it all seemed to make sense; a brutal and broken kind of sense. The moans, the lack of verbal communication.

Then they froze as they heard new sounds. Not from the train. Behind them. They whirled, guns up and out.

These sounds were different. Loud, insistent. Boots crunching on the ground, splashing through water. The creak of leather, the rattle of metal, the whisk-whisk of clothing.

And shouts.

Human voices.

The a dozen figures came pelting out of the darkness. A full SWAT team in Kevlar and body armor, helmets and guns, lights and shouting voices. They spotted Dawes and Faustino. One of them — a man with sergeant’s stripes — stopped and pointed his rifle at them.

“Holster your weapons,” he shouted. “Do it now.”

Numbly, Faustino and Dawes slipped their Glocks into the holsters at their hips. They identified themselves and stood with their hands well away from their guns.

The SWAT team surged past, running at full speed down the tunnel toward the train, which was still hidden by darkness farther along the track.

“Officer Dawes,” said the sergeant, “Officer Faustino, did you approach the train?”

“What?” said Faustino. “No, we—”

“Did you go inside the train?”

“I told you, we didn’t—”

“Did you encounter anyone else down here?”

“What’s going on?”

The man pointed his rifle at her head. “Did you encounter anyone down here? Anyone at all?”

“Get that rifle out of my fucking face.”

The sergeant’s hands were rock steady, the black eye of the gun barrel relentless in its stare. “I won’t ask again, officer,” he said.

Faustino and Dawes exchanged a look.

“Don’t look at your partner, officer,” warned the sergeant. “Look at me, and tell me if you encountered anyone or spoke to anyone since you came down here.”

“No,” said Dawes hastily. “No one, man. Just us. And this is as far as we got.”

The gun barrel moved from Faustino to Dawes. “Be sure, officer.”

Faustino swallowed a lump in her throat that felt as big and rough as a pinecone.

“What’s happening?”

The sergeant studied her for a moment, then lowered his gun. “Listen to me,” he said in a more human tone, “we received a call saying that a biological agent had been released on that train. It’s happening.”

“What’s happening?”

The SWAT sergeant shook his head. “We’ve been hit again.”

Neither Faustino nor Dawes had to ask what that meant. This was New York. It would take a lot of years before the events of 9/11 had to be explained.

The sergeant pointed a finger at the two cops. “Get the fuck out of here now. Get back to Euclid Avenue Station. Make sure nobody comes down here. Do you understand me? Nobody.”

He did not wait for their answer, did not flinch or respond to their outraged protest. Instead he ran into the tunnel, and a few moments later they heard another gun open up.

Faustino drew her pistol.

So did Dawes.

And for a moment they stood facing the direction of the gunfire.

“What the hell’s happening?” asked Dawes. He sounded absolutely terrified.

All Faustino could do was shake her head.

Together, guns raised and pointing, they began backing away. Soon they turned and ran for the lights of Euclid Avenue Station.

They hadn’t gone two hundred feet before a new sound tore through the chatter of gunfire and the dreadful moans. These sounds were sharper, higher. Far more horrible.

It was the sound of men in great fear and great pain … screaming.

Chapter Forty-seven

Rudy Sanchez came running into the Tactical Operations Center just as all hell was breaking loose. He spotted Aunt Sallie and Mr. Church, who were each speaking hurriedly into telephones. He rushed over to them, and as Church disconnected a call, Rudy touched his arm.

“Dios mio, is it true?” cried Rudy. “Is it true?”

Church gave him one moment of a hard, flat stare.

“I pray that it is not, doctor.”

“But—?”

“But I fear that it is.”

Church turned away to make another call. And another.

Rudy, helpless and impotent, could only stand and stare.

And pray.

Chapter Forty-eight

I stood in the street, watching the police and paramedics do their job. I was shirtless, and the left leg of my trousers had been slit from ankle to hip. Bloody bandages were wrapped and taped in place. I felt sore, angry, and older than my thirty-odd years. Someone had brushed the glass out of Ghost’s fur and wrapped some gauze around his legs and chest to staunch the flow of blood from a dozen shallow cuts.

A dozen yards away, Bunny sat in the open back of an ambulance while a nervous EMT picked glass and wood splinters out of his back. Top stood watching, his face an unreadable stone. The EMTs had argued with them both, wanting to transport them to the local E.R. instead of doing much on site, but we flashed the right ID and pulled rank and they stopped arguing. Apparently, calls had been made to hospital administrators, the fire commissioner, and the police commissioner. Resistance crumbled, wheels were greased, but no one was happy about it.

I’d recovered my cell phone, but there were no new messages from “A.” Nothing from Junie either. I kept fighting down the urge to scream.

I wanted to grab my woman and hit the ground running. Take off for some tropical spot that was ten thousand miles away from gunfire and explosions and senseless death.

Instead, Top, Bunny, and I were watching forensic techs take photos of people we’d killed.

Young people.

Kids.

My earbud buzzed and Nikki was there.

“Cowboy,” she said quickly, “we have assets at the desired location. Bookworm is okay. Repeat, Bookworm is safe and sound.”

Bookworm was the codename Top had given Junie last year.

I sagged against a parked car and actually had to fight back the tears. “Thank God.”

“Everything’s okay there. She’s fine. Really.”

I was so dazed that I had to scramble to remember Nikki’s call sign. “Thanks, Firefly.”

“But I have to tell you, Cowboy,” she said, “there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on.”

“I know, I know. Gettysburg and Lexington…”

“That’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s stuff going on all over the country. Lots of weird violence. Vandalism and arson. Stuff like that. And the phrase ‘burn to shine’ keeps showing up everywhere there’s something bad happening. It’s on walls, spray-painted on the street. They even brought a guy into an E.R. in Akron with it carved into his skin. They think it was done with a razor blade. We’re still trying to make some sense of it. If this is terrorism, then no one’s taking claim except indirectly. There was that Mother Night video and now all this.”

“Burn to shine,” I said. “A call to action.”

Circe was right.

“Everything’s chaotic. And even if it is Mother Night, then we can’t find a pattern to it.”

“Keep trying. Look, what about the digital prints we sent from here? You get any hits on our shooters?”

“Only two of them are in the system, Cowboy. Serita Esposito and Darius Chu. Both have juvenile records. Esposito was arrested twice for hacking. First offense was an intrusion into the computers belonging to her bank in order to add funds to her debit card. She was fourteen at the time and the intrusion went unnoticed for eleven months. Two-year suspended sentence and community service, plus appropriate fines and restitution. A couple of years later she hacked Delta Airlines to obtain first-class tickets to Paris for her and five of her friends. She was arrested upon her return to the States and is — or rather was — awaiting trial.”

“Only seventeen,” I said, feeling even older.

“She fired on you, Cowboy,” Nikki said.

“Small comfort.”

Nikki sighed. “I know.”

She didn’t know. Like all of Bug’s team, she was support staff and never once set foot in the field. But she meant well.

“What about the other one?” I asked. “The boy? Chu, was it?”

“Let’s see … he’s a Canadian citizen and, according to Montreal police, is in custody awaiting trial for armed assault.”

“I can pretty much guarantee he’s not in prison,” I said, watching them zipper him into a body bag.

“The prints match a suspect arrested in Montreal following the nonfatal shooting of a member of the Canadian Parliament. However, the photo you sent does not match the person in jail, and apparently neither do that person’s fingerprints. The Canadians are trying to determine how the swap was made, and the person in custody as Chu refuses to talk. I’ll have to go deeper and—”

Suddenly, Nikki’s voice vanished and was replaced by a three-note alarm signal. Then Church’s voice was in my ear.

“This is Deacon for Cowboy, do you copy?”

“Go for Cowboy.”

“What is the status of your team?” he said, and he sounded stressed and hurried. “Give me the short answer.”

Now was not the time to complain about cuts and scrapes. Even a lot of cuts and scrapes.

“We’re still at the cyber café, but we’re good to go,” I fired back. “What’ve you got?”

Seemingly out of left field, Church said, “Have you heard about the event in Brooklyn?”

“Other than this one?”

“In the subway,” he said. “The C train.”

“No.”

I could hear him take a breath.

“Scramble your team,” he said. “We have a Code Zero.”

Chapter Forty-nine

Code Zero.

There are no words more terrifying to me, either in my private lexicon or in that used by the Department of Military Sciences.

Hearing those words punched me in the solar plexus.

It stabbed me in the heart.

A big, dark ball of black terror expanded inside my chest.

We have different codes for the various kinds of threats we face.

Code E is an Ebola outbreak.

Code N is a nuke.

But Code Zero …

God.

That was used only for a specific kind of horror that I hoped was gone forever from my life and from this world.

“Wh-hat?” I stammered. “How?”

Church told me about the C train and the SWAT team that went down into the tunnel. I held my phone up so I could watch the video feed. It was herky-jerky and tinted green from night-vision equipment. The ghostly shape of the big silver train rose out of the darkness as the SWAT officers swarmed toward it. I could see that the windows of the train were cracked and some of them had been smashed outward. People wriggled through the shattered windows and filled the tunnel.

I call them people, but I knew that it was a term applicable only in the past tense. They were streaked with blood, their clothes and skin torn. Their mouths biting at the air, their eyes black and dead.

The SWAT team reacted to them the way compassionate people will. They tried to help. But I heard the helmet radio feed from command telling them to fall back, to make no contact. Warning the cops of a biohazard threat.

Some of the cops held their ground, caught by indecision. Some retreated a few paces. A few could not let their compassion for injured fellow citizens outweigh personal safety.

And that is the horror of warfare in the twenty-first century. Terrorists view compassion as a weakness and they attack it as a vulnerability, making the benevolent pay for their own humanity. The SWAT officers who stepped forward to help were buried beneath a wave of the infected.

I wanted to turn away from the images, I wanted to smash the phone so I couldn’t hear the screams. There was too long a delay in responding. The gunfire — the awful, necessary gunfire — came much too late.

The feed ended abruptly when the camera was smashed.

It brought me all the way back to my first day with the DMS. To the first of horror of this world in which I now live. Code Zero indicated an outbreak of a very specific kind of disease pathogen. A bioweapon of immeasurable ferocity. The people who designed this weapon called it the seif-al-din.

The sword of the faithful.

It was nothing that could have ever developed in nature, though each of its components was, to a degree, natural. The core of the seif-al-din was a prion disease known as fatal familial insomnia, a terrible variation of spongiform encephalitis from which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. In its original form it was a process that took months, and the victim generally died as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. But Sebastian Gault and his scientist-lover Amirah rebuilt the disease and married it to several parasites and a radical kind of viral delivery system. The infection rate of this designer pathogen is absolute, and it triggers an uncontrollable urge in the infected to spread the disease. It is spread primarily through bites.

The infected host lapses into a nearly hibernative state, with most body systems shut down and all conscious and higher mental functions permanently destroyed. Stripped-down parts of the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems remain in operation — only enough to keep the host on its feet and able to attack in order to spread the disease.

Unless you used very precise medical equipment it is impossible to detect signs of life. Heartbeat is minimal, respiration is incredibly shallow. And those tissues that are not necessary to the parasitic drive are not fed by blood or oxygen and therefore become necrotic. What is left is a mindless, shambling, eternally hungry killing machine with an infection rate of nearly one hundred percent.

A walker.

A zombie.

No one had survived a bite; no one came back from infection.

That was the seif-al-din.

That was a Code Zero.

We stopped an intended mass release at the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia four years ago. All of our computer models predicted that an outbreak in a densely populated area would result in an uncontrollable spread. If this got out, the world would consume itself.

Totally.

Completely.

Ravenously.

Dear God.

All of this — the science, the memories, the horror — flashed through my brain in a hot microsecond after the video ended.

“Where?” I demanded.

Church told me. “The infected are still in the tunnel, but it’s only a matter of time before they find their way to the station and then up to the streets. I have a chopper in the air. It will pick you up in Prospect Park. Echo Team will rendezvous with you at Euclid Avenue station, and I’ve called in the National Guard. Every subway exit is being sealed, but I need you to go down there, Captain. I need you to stop this.” He paused for a terrible moment, then added those dreadful words. “No matter what it takes.”

But I was already pushing past cops and EMTs, yelling for Top and Bunny. Ghost barked as we ran. All four of us were bleeding and hurt but we ran like we didn’t care, like we didn’t have time to be hurt. I could hear the distant beat of the heavy rotors of a military Black Hawk. Prospect Park was only a few blocks from here.

We piled in the car. I hit lights and sirens and we broke laws as I kicked the pedal all the way down, scattering civilians and emergency personnel in every direction.

There are times to stand there with your jaw slack and your pulse hammering, and there are times to get your ass into high gear and run over anything in your way.

Chapter Fifty

Ludo was masturbating when the phone rang.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants and boxers puddled around his ankles, staring at the rifle on its tripod as his hand moved with feverish speed.

Nearby, the rifle gleamed. Oiled and curved and so lovely.

Olga.

The phone began jangling with the same shrill outrage that was in his mother’s voice when she’d caught him doing this. There had been no gun that first time, but that didn’t matter. She’d dragged him out into the hall in front of his younger brother and older sister, his underpants still down, and had beaten him to the edge of unconsciousness. Calling him a freak, a pervert. Telling him that God was watching. Saying that God would punish him.

Ludo had tried to cover his shame with hands over his groin and face, but his mother slapped those hands away and rained blows on every inch of him. Even when his siblings started screaming for her to stop, she kept hitting.

Ludo did not remember how it had ended. He’d begun screaming, too, and he’d screamed so long and so loud that it opened a big, dark trapdoor in the floor of his mind, and he’d plunged downward into shadows.

There had been other beatings, of course. And his mother had removed the locks on the bathroom door so she could barge in to try to catch Ludo doing something disgusting. Something worthy of a beating.

The others got beatings, too. His sister, Gayle, lost hearing in her left ear because of a beating. And Bobby, who was a bleeder, had tiny scars all over his body. Mother always found something they were doing wrong.

Always.

She hadn’t ever caught him masturbating again, but that didn’t matter. She searched his belongings and found things that gave her fists their purpose. A copy of Playboy Ludo had stolen from a drugstore. Pictures of naked girls Ludo downloaded from the Net. Then, later, as Ludo spent more and more time swimming in the shadows beneath the floor of his mind, the things she found were different. Gun magazines. And then guns.

That was when the beatings stopped.

As Ludo grew, he sometimes walked in on her in the bathroom. While she was on the toilet. Ludo would stand there with a gun in his hand, saying nothing while his mother tried to hide her shame.

That’s when his mother started drinking.

She never could find his guns after that. She looked everywhere. When he was out, either at school or bagging groceries at the Acme, his mother looked. Every once in a while Ludo would leave a bullet for her to find. The lead tips were bright with dots of her lipstick. Ludo wished he could have seen her face when she found those.

A few weeks later, after his mother died in an unexplained fire, Ludo snuck into the cemetery the night they buried her. With shadows swimming around him, he dropped his pants and masturbated on her grave.

It was the fastest he ever came. And it removed so much of the tension in his soul. Even so, it was oddly asexual, despite the necessary mechanics of the process. He never fantasized about his mother. He didn’t think about seeing her naked — a thought that deeply disgusted him. And he never thought about having sex with her. He’d rather stab his own eyes out. What turned him on was the thought of maggots and worms wriggling their way through her skin. The mental picture of cockroaches and beetles feasting on her flesh and shitting on her bones was deeply erotic.

Today, though, it was the gun.

Olga.

So pretty.

So saucy.

Sitting there in the hotel room, waiting for the kill order, he kept glancing at her. Kept remembering what it felt like to slip his finger inside her trigger guard. To let his fingers glide ever so lightly along the length of her barrel. He stuck the tip of his tongue into the opening of the barrel, licking and tasting the gun oil.

That was when he knew he had to rub one out, and his pants were down in a moment.

And then the damn phone rang.

Mother Night.

Another mother.

Fuck.

Catching him at the wrong moment, catching him in a shameful act.

His penis went instantly soft and he grabbed for his pants as quickly and desperately as if Mother Night had banged the door open right here.

He was panting when he snatched up the phone.

“Yes,” he gasped.

“Ludo—?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you out of breath?”

“I—”

“What were you doing?”

The moment froze around him. God! Did she see him? Did she have this room bugged? Were there cameras in here? Oh God, oh God, oh God.

“I–I-,” he stammered. “I was doing push-ups.”

A beat.

“Push-ups?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” asked Mother Night.

“Um … trying to keep my muscle tone.”

Another beat. “Uh-huh,” she said slowly.

“Seriously. You can’t do what I do with flabby, um, muscles. Killing requires core strength.” He winced at that, believing it to be the single silliest thing he’d ever said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

There was a final beat.

Then, “Ludo, are you feeling okay today?”

He paused before answering, taking a moment to make sure his voice and tone were perfectly normal.

“Sure,” he said. “Absolutely tip-top.”

“I can get someone else in there if you want me to.”

“No.”

“You’ll still get paid,” she insisted. “It won’t be a problem.”

“No,” he said again, leaning on it. “I’m right as rain.”

“Okay,” she said dubiously.

“Okay.”

“Now listen to me. I want you to rest. I don’t think I’ll need you today. Maybe tonight, though. Or early tomorrow.”

Ludo felt his flaccid penis suddenly jump to new hardness. He glanced at Olga, who waited there for his touch.

“Oh,” he said, deflated.

“Proceed to the other location and wait for my call or a text. And Ludo—?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“No more push-ups.”

The line went dead, but he barely noticed. He tossed the phone onto the bed and, with slow steps and a beating heart, he approached the lovely, lovely rifle.

Interlude Eleven

The place was called the Dragon Factory, but that was a conceit. There was only one dragon there and it was a pathetic little thing that had been cobbled together from other animals in an attempt to make it look like a Chinese dragon. The wings of an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body that was mostly an immature Komodo monitor. From the records Artemisia Bliss found on the recovered computers, the creature had been made to impress Chinese investors. But it was a fraud. A chimera born of radical surgery and ill-conceived transgenics.

It lay dead, its neck broken from repeated impacts with the glass wall of its cage as it tried to flee the sounds of gunfire and slaughter. Most of the other animals were dead as well. Faux unicorns and griffins and basilisks. And some things that were almost sad — midgets surgically altered to look like leprechauns or satyrs. Sad, pathetic things that were insane from pain, humiliation, and the horror of what had been done to them.

Bliss kept expecting some kind of outrage to soar up inside her. Or empathy. But there wasn’t even much sympathy flickering in her heart as she moved through the complex, day after day, collecting samples, weighing and measuring corpses, and sitting in on the endless dissections.

The only thrills of any kind, she felt, were when she cracked another level of the encryption the Jakoby twins had built into their computers. Sadly, the code writers who created the system for the twins were dead. Most of the staff was either dead or keeping mum per their attorneys’ instructions.

That meant each level of the encryption had to be cracked.

That, for Bliss, was fun.

Every time she bypassed a firewall or disabled a self-delete subroutine, Bliss felt a genuine thrill. A tingle at first, but one that grew and grew.

And grew.

There was so damn much here.

The Jakoby twins — Hecate and Paris — were geniuses on a par with Dr. Hu and, she had to admit, herself. That rare group of supergeniuses whose nature suggests an evolutionary leap forward. Granted, the Jakobys were sick, twisted, murderous sociopaths whose father was attempting ethnic genocide on a global scale — a genocide that would have wiped out those of Asian blood as well — but Bliss had to admire the science. It was so vast, so ballsy.

So damn sexy.

As she worked, she wished there was someone she could talk to about it.

Someone who was not William Hu or Bug or anyone even remotely related to the Department of Military Sciences. With every single passing day Bliss felt less able to open up to them, to share her thoughts with them.

Though even she had to admit that sharing those thoughts would make for one very awkward conversation. Quickly followed, she was certain, by emergency phone calls, a psych evaluation, and her walking papers. She’d be out the door so fast that it would make her head spin.

Out, or maybe worse. Aunt Sallie watched her like a hawk, and Bliss was positive that the old bitch was waiting for the first opportunity to strike.

Let her wait. Caution was part of Bliss’s skill set. When you helped to crack systems designed to counterattack, you learned caution. When you helped design security protocols for the highest level of ultrasecure facilities, you learned caution. Bliss knew that her old, unevolved self had been smart but not necessarily sharp; whereas her evolved self was as sharp as a scalpel and intensely sly.

She wondered what Aunt Sallie or Church’s actual reaction would be if they suspected that she was duplicating every bit of evidence, each file, each report on genetic design, each computer program.

Would they have her locked up?

Or would Bliss wake up one night and find Colonel Riggs or Captain Ledger standing over her bed, dressed all in black, with a pistol aimed at her head.

She rather thought the latter was a more likely possibility.

Though … what could they prove?

She sighed. Depends on where they looked.

There was nothing at her apartment, of course, except some deeply encrypted stuff hidden inside video games. Not even her games. She’d built dozens of “libraries” into new game levels she’d hacked onto the existing software of popular games. She concealed petaflops worth of data in the virtual game world, all of it disguised as something else, all of it protected by what she was absolutely certain was the most sophisticated can’t-beat-them levels of game play.

To her, it was like hiding diamonds in the sand at the playground. No one would think to look there, and anyone who found them by accident wouldn’t believe they were what they were.

Bliss sat hunched in front of Paris Jakoby’s personal workstation computer as a steady stream of data was flash-downloaded onto dual drives. That dual-drive system was her own design. Bundled flash drives feeding off a single rebuilt USB plug. Since the data was being downloaded only once — albeit in two exact and simultaneous copies — the system only registered a single download.

She paused and looked around.

Paris Jakoby’s office was built onto a balcony and it had a glass wall that looked down onto the main lobby of the facility. The last of the corpses — human and otherwise — had long since been removed, but the tiled floor and carpeted areas were still stained with dried blood. She’d watched the battle on the big screen back at the TOC, her lip caught between her teeth, fingernails digging into her palms. Major Grace Courtland had led the first wave of DMS agents onto the island, followed by Captain Ledger’s Echo Team and others. And then a wave of Navy SEALs. That should have been overwhelming force, but there was a shocking amount of resistance, the core of which were the Berserkers — mercenaries with silverback gorilla DNA. The men were massive, enormously strong, and filled with a nearly uncontrollable rage. She rewatched the videos of them in action a dozen times. So much power.

But there were other horrors on the island, and Ledger’s team encountered those first. When Bliss saw those she nearly screamed. Monstrous mastiffs that had been surgically and genetically altered so they had the chitinous armor plating and deadly arching tails of scorpions. It was like something out of an old Michael Crichton novel. Or one of those corny monster movies on Syfy.

The main part of the fight was recorded on helmet cams until Church ordered an E-bomb to be detonated over the island. The electromagnetic pulse knocked out all electronics and ended the show.

It became fun again for Bliss only when the science team was sent onto the island with orders to catalog everything. Absolutely every single thing.

Weeks of work.

Weeks of fun.

They were to be sequestered on the island during the forensic collection and initial analysis period, and then would be debriefed once they returned to the Hangar. That, however, was still many days away. The first part of the job was rebuilding the power systems and replacing those components necessary to make the computer systems functional again.

Still plenty of time to continue the process of copying everything. Of duplicating samples. Not everything, of course. But everything she was assigned to collect. It was too dangerous to interfere with what other techs and scientists were doing.

One of the most fascinating things she found was the complete record, including all research and procedures, for the Berserkers. Although intensely complicated and enormously expensive, it was a step-by-step guide to creating the transgenic mercenaries. There were even samples of all of the chemicals, drugs, and genetic materials necessary, stored in bio-safe bins.

All of the data was on an external hard drive stored in Paris’s closet. Not one byte of it was on the main computers.

On a whim, Bliss took the hard drive, duped the data onto her own laptop, and destroyed the original. Obtaining samples of the genetic material would have to wait until her team was ready to leave the island. She would, however, manage it, even though she had no idea what she was ever going to do with it.

Not yet.

It was late on a Sunday night when Artemisia Bliss made the single most significant discovery while she was decrypting a series of files labeled BULK DATA — MISC UNSORTED. The encryption was particularly difficult, and Bliss opened a fresh Red Bull and dived in with gusto. So far, the encryption on all of the Jakoby files was exceptionally tough, some of it so mind-bogglingly complicated that it felt like pulling nails out of hardwood using only her mind. But it was so damn much fun. This was what she lived for. Each layer she peeled back, each level she cracked made her feel more powerful, more alive. Naturally, the encryption on the Jakoby main research files was devious, but after two weeks Bliss found her way in, which opened the system to her whole team.

That Bulk Data file was something, though.

The encryption was many layers deep and had some very strange traps built into it, including a counterattack tapeworm that was strangely familiar. The tapeworm tried to intrude into her MindReader substation and rewrite the software. That stunned Bliss. MindReader was unassailable. It was the ultimate intrusion monster and even Bliss had never been able to hack into its programs. But this program attacked in the way MindReader typically did.

Ultimately, though, MindReader slapped it down. Bliss was able to remove the attack programs with some effort and then began rooting around inside the data files.

What she found at first startled her, because there were monstrously large files hidden inside the nondescript “misc unsorted” folder. Massive files, including hundreds of subfolders filled with computer code.

As she scanned through them, Bliss felt her pulse quicken. Then her heart began racing. Sweat popped out along her brow. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

She simply could not.

The files contained a complete schematic for a computer system. A system with ultrasophisticated intrusion software. A system with multiphasic pattern-search capabilities. A system with a subroutine designed to erase any trace of its footprint after it hacked other systems.

A system labeled “Pangaea.”

But one that she knew under a different name.

MindReader.

Chapter Fifty-one

Everyone snapped to attention as Mr. Church came hurrying into the training hall. Lydia cut a surprised look at Sam. Neither of them had ever seen Mr. Church hurry. The world usually waited for him. His aide and bodyguard, a monstrous gunnery sergeant known as Brick, was right at his heels, keeping up despite an artificial leg.

They came right over to where Echo Team formed up at a right angle to the line of candidates.

“Chief Petty Officer Ruiz,” said Church, “Captain Ledger says that there are three candidates he likes for Echo Team. Call them out.”

Lydia did a neat half-turn. “Sergeant Duncan MacDougall, Sergeant Noah Fallon, Special Agent Montana Parker, step forward.”

The three named candidates did. A short, squatty man with no neck and Popeye forearms, a tall, ascetic man with a poet’s face and shooter’s eyes, and a tanned blond woman with cold gray eyes.

Church gave them one full second of appraisal. “You three now work for me. Welcome to the jungle.” They saluted, but he turned to the others. “You are dismissed and may return to your units.”

Once more he turned, this time to Echo Team.

“A Black Hawk is smoking on the roof,” he said. “You will be on it four minutes. It takes off in five. Weapons and equipment are already being loaded. Hammer suits and BAMs for everyone. Full kits for the new team members.”

“Sir,” began Lydia, but Church cut her off.

“No time. You’ll be briefed en route and will rendezvous with Captain Ledger. This is a Code Zero.”

They did not argue or hesitate.

A few blurred minutes later they were in the air.

Interlude Twelve

Dr. Bliss sat next to Dr. Hu, both of them sipping Diet Cokes and swinging their feet off the side of an open Huey. The big helicopter was a rebuilt holdover from a war that ended before either of them was born. It was also the personal property of Colonel Samson Riggs. It was parked on the side of a runway behind the Barn, the massive former dairy farm that had been recommissioned as the field office for the DMS’s new “special teams” division. Riggs ran two teams out of the Barn, Shockwave and Longhorn. The latter was used as backup for whenever the ATF ran up against something coming over the border other than cartel gun thugs and drugs. Bioweapons and teams of foreign terror squads trying to use the Mexican pipeline as a conduit. That sort of thing. The former, Shockwave, was a go anywhere, do anything all-purpose team. Freed from normal duties as a regional team like those at the Warehouse in Baltimore or the Hangar in New York.

A few feet away, leaning a muscular shoulder against the Huey’s frame, was Gus Dietrich. He was pretending to look at something on his smartphone, but Bliss knew that he was listening. Dietrich was always listening, always watching. Because he did such a stellar job of fading into Mr. Church’s shadow, and because he looked like a muscle-bound mouth-breather, people tended to regard him as slow. He wasn’t. No one who worked for Church was slow. No one who worked for Church was even ordinary.

Bliss and Hu were at the Barn to take possession of boxes of scientific research records Riggs and his shooters had taken from a biological warfare lab in Bucharest. That lab was supposedly closed during the last days of the Cold War, but Interpol had discovered otherwise. Sadly, the Interpol team had been wiped out. Riggs brought Shockwave in and got some useful backup from Echo Team, which had been in Europe anyway. Echo was the only other team authorized to go anywhere.

Beyond where the tech people were offloading the boxes of records, two figures stood together, talking and laughing. Colonel Riggs and Captain Joe Ledger.

“They seem to have bonded,” observed Bliss. There had been a running bet at the Hangar that the two team leaders would do nothing except butt heads. Instead they’d developed a quick and, apparently, deep friendship. Their combined teams had mopped the floor with a much larger force of mercenaries in Bucharest. A four-to-one fight, and every member of Shockwave and Echo Teams had come home, alive and whole.

Hu sniffed. “Cut from the same cloth,” he said in a way that implied no compliment.

She looked at him. “What is it with you and them? You can’t stand either of them.”

“They’re at the wrong end of the evolutionary curve,” sneered Hu. “Useful when we need something dead, but otherwise they’re meat. And arrogant meat at that.”

“Oh, come on, Willie,” she countered, “that’s not fair. If you combine their clearance rate for high-profile jobs it exceeds the rest of the DMS combined.”

Hu made a small, disgusted noise. “So they can pull triggers. Big deal. Hugo Vox has compiled a list of men — and some women — with the same potential. Same military and martial arts background, same psychopathic tendencies. Same lack of intellectual refinement. Don’t fool yourself, Artie, they’re entirely replaceable.”

There was another sound, equally disgusted, but not from Hu. The two scientists leaned out to look at Dietrich.

“Excuse me,” said Hu with chilly contempt, “did you have something to add?

Without looking up from his cell phone, Dietrich said, “For a smart guy, Doc, you do say some stupid shit.”

“What did you say?” The chill in his tone turned to arctic ice.

Bliss jumped in. “What do you mean, Gus?”

He glanced up at her. Pointedly at her. “You think that Riggs and Ledger have such a good clearance record because they’re lucky? You think shooters of their quality are interchangeable? If that’s what you think, then you either don’t understand them or don’t understand how the DMS works.”

“As if you do?” demanded Hu.

Bliss elbowed him lightly.

“Ow!”

“Go on, Gus. What were you saying?” she asked.

Dietrich put his cell phone into a pocket and folded his arms. He had a bulldog face that was scarred and weathered. “I’ve seen Hugo Vox’s list. I recruit from it all the time. I’d have any of them at my back in a fight. Any kind of fight. But none of them have a certain thing that Riggs has and Ledger has. Major Courtland had it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, all of the operators on Hugo’s list are top-notch, best of the best, but they don’t have that thing, that X factor.”

“What X factor?” asked Hu belligerently.

“Well, Doc, if I knew exactly what it was I wouldn’t call it an X factor, would I?”

Bliss had to bite down to keep a laugh from bubbling out. Hu went livid.

“Can you explain it at all, Gus?” Bliss asked.

He nodded, shrugged, shook his head. Shrugged again. “If you understand combat from a spec-ops perspective, then you know there’s a lot of variables. You guys, the science team, and Bug’s team, do a great job providing real-time intel so that the field teams can adjust to the variables and react in the right way. Without the science and computer teams we’d have lost a lot of fights, no doubt and no joke. But sometimes, deep in the heart of something, there comes a point when things are going south so fast there isn’t time to ask for or use additional intel. Not just the heat of battle,” he said, “but times when everything is totally crazy, shifting inside the firefight, with radical new elements being introduced that no one could foresee. Like when Echo Team ran into the Berserkers the first time. No one could have predicted mercenaries amped up with DNA from silverback gorillas. I mean, seriously, who could have seen that coming? It wasn’t part of the game as we understood the game at the moment. The first DMS team that ran into them was slaughtered. So was a Russian kill team. Then Ledger, Top, and Bunny got ambushed by them. They should have died right there and then. No doubt about it. Do a statistical-probability assessment of it and it comes out with them dead ten times out of ten.”

“But they didn’t die,” said Bliss, fascinated by where Dietrich was going with this.

“No. Joe Ledger changed the game. It wasn’t exactly what he did, ’cause from a distance it was just him using a knife. But it was how he did it in the moment. The lack of hesitation, the choice of target, the way he reacted, the fact that he attacked rather than retreat, that he wasn’t trapped by how freaky and fucked-up everything was. It was his X factor that changed it from a certain loss to a win that just pissed all over the odds. The same thing goes for how Riggs dealt with those cyborg baboons. I mean, shit, cyborg baboons. Most guys, even top shooters, would be like, ‘holy fuck, those are cyborg baboons, what the fuck?’ And they’d have died. Riggs just adapted to it because in his mind it wasn’t Freaky Friday, it was how things were in the moment. I’ll bet those frigging baboons where thinking ‘what the fuck’ when Riggs went apeshit on them.”

Bliss nodded, seeing it.

“If those were the only instances, you could throw statistics at me again and say it’s a fluke. But go browse their files. Those two. And look at how many times they’ve thrown Hail Mary passes and won a game that everyone — every-fucking-body — said was lost. Time and time again, and those are numbers that do not lie.”

Hu sniffed dismissively, but he said nothing.

Bliss was still nodding. “So … this X factor is what defines them.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“And they’re the only two who have it?”

“So far,” said Dietrich. “The big man is always scouting for others, but guys like that are pretty scarce. And believe me, we are looking.”

“Gus,” she said, cocking her head to one side, “have you ever played games?”

“Games? Like what? Poker?”

“Video games, board games. Ever play Dungeons and Dragons?”

“Nope. Never much gone in for wizards and dragons and all that shit. Not fake ones. Why?”

“There are a lot of qualities that make up your characters in D and D, and it’s all based on how you roll the dice. You can be good, evil, neutral, or chaotic.”

“Chaotic?” Dietrich thought about that and a slow smile grew on his face. “Yeah, Doc, you might have put your finger on it. It’s not an X factor—”

“It’s chaos,” said Bliss, finishing it for him. “Chaos resists computer models, it can’t really be predicted. What Joe Ledger and Samson Riggs bring to any fight is a chaos factor.”

Dietrich nodded. “Yes, ma’am, and that’s what makes them so damn dangerous. Understand something, I’m good — I’m real fucking good — but if it came to it, I would never want to go up against either of them.”

“Sure, sure,” said Hu, breaking his own silence, “and what are we supposed to do if we ever encounter this ‘chaos factor’ in one of our enemies?”

“If it was someone like that, we’d throw Ledger or Riggs against him.”

“And if they weren’t available?” asked Bliss.

“God help us if that ever happened, doc,” said Dietrich. “Because we would stand no chance at all.”

Chapter Fifty-two

We jumped the curb and drove straight into Prospect Park and tore deep furrows in the dirt of the baseball field as we raced to meet the Black Hawk. The big helicopter’s wheels touched down at the same time that I slewed us into a bad skidding, turning stop. We left the doors open and ran bent over through the rotor wash, Ghost ranging ahead. The bay door opened and we dived in.

“Go, go, go!” I bellowed, and the helo rose straight up into the afternoon air.

By car, it’s twelve congested miles from Park Slope to the subway entrance on Euclid Avenue at Pitkin, and by now the streets around the station would be jammed with civilians wanting a peek at a disaster. The Black Hawk helicopter tore above the traffic at nearly two hundred miles an hour. We were there in minutes.

It still felt like too long.

During that short flight, Top, Bunny, and I shucked our torn and bloodstained suits and pulled on black BDU trousers and tank tops. Then the tech crew helped us into Saratoga Hammer suits. These are two-piece, lightweight overgarments consisting of a coat with integral hood and separate trousers. The suit incorporates a two-layer fabric system consisting of liquid repellent cotton fabric and a carbon sphere liner. The double layers protect against chemical warfare vapors, liquids, and aerosols. The ones Mr. Church bought for us were not the standard off-the-rack variety but a special grade designed by a friend of his within the company. They were tougher and they had spider-silk fabric woven into what is normally Kevlar sheathing. Very tough and tear-resistant.

Not tear-proof, but tear-resistant. The difference mattered and it was never far from our minds.

Our suits were black and unmarked. No agency patch or rank insignia of any kind. With the helmets on and balaclavas in place we looked like high-tech ninjas. We strapped gun belts around our hips and equipment harnesses to our torsos. These harnesses had pouches for lots of extra magazines and hooks for flash-bangs and fragmentation grenades.

They don’t make Hammer suits for dogs. “You’re staying on the chopper,” I told Ghost. He gave me a wounded and baleful glare.

The weapons tech from the Hangar, a moose named Bobby Cooper — Coop to everyone — handed out lots of useful gizmos and additional equipment, including various-sized blaster-plasters, knives, strangle wires, and everything else a psychotic kid might have on his Christmas list. The last thing Coop did was strap a tactical computer to each of our forearms. When he was done, he patted me on the shoulder. “You’re good to go.”

“Thanks, Coop. Take care of my dog, okay?”

He grinned. “With all the shit that’s going on today, Joe, I think Ghost and I should go the hell out and get drunk.”

“He’d like that.”

Coop’s grin was fragile and it eventually slid off. “Is it true? Are you going after walkers?”

“We’ll see,” I said to Coop. He didn’t press it.

Bunny clipped a sturdy fighting knife handle-downward onto his rig, ready for a fast pull. He said, “Is this more Mother Night stuff, too?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

“It is,” said Top. We didn’t argue. We couldn’t be sure, but the day had a certain feel to it. A lot of things were sliding downhill, but it seemed to be one hand doing the pushing.

“How’d they get this shit?” asked Bunny. “I mean, we have it secured, right?”

“Yes, at the Locker,” I assured him.

“You sure?”

I wanted to tell him that of course I was sure. Instead I contacted Nikki. “Have someone run a security check on the Locker. Let’s make sure that—”

“We already did,” said Nikki. “As soon as word came in about the subway, Aunt Sallie initiated a system-wide security lockdown and status check. All the lights at the Locker are green.”

That was a tremendous relief. Keeping that place safe was always number one on any security to-do list. Always.

The Locker is the nickname for the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, located three quarters of a mile beneath a wooded hill in a thinly populated corner of Virginia. There are other similar facilities scattered around the country and the world, places where dangerous things like chemical weapons and VX nerve gas and other monsters are stored. Domestic and international agreements have shut a lot of them down, but we still have a few, some being closely monitored by congressional watchdog groups and teams of independent observers composed of members of NATO, the U.N., and others. And there are facilities squirreled away in places no one would think to look for them. Places funded by obscure allotments in black budgets; places you might pass every day and never know what insanity was stored behind nondescript stone walls and meaningless signs.

But there’s no other place exactly like the Locker.

In the six years since its inception, the Department of Military Sciences has gone to the mat with the world’s most extreme terrorists. Not just al-Qaeda fanatics wearing explosive vests or Taliban fighters with shoulder-mounted RPGs. I’m talking about actual mad scientists who put vast amounts of money and their own towering but fractured intellects to the task of creating the most dangerous bioweapons imaginable. Things like quick-onset Ebola, mutated strains of anthrax, radical new forms of ultracontagious tuberculosis, weaponized HIV, and even genetically engineered contagious forms of diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell, which had previously been purely genetic disorders. And, not that this shit had to get any scarier, but there were also a slew of designer superpathogens in there, each of them constructed as doomsday weapons, either as threats in the postnuclear covert arms race or as kill-them-all-let-our-version-of-god-sort-’em-out holy war weapons, or retaliatory devices for use as a Hail Mary pass if their side was losing a war. Stuff like Lucifer 113, Vijivshiy Odin-Vasemnartzets, Reaper, and the seif-al-din. Stuff no sane human, however politically or theologically motivated, should be capable of dreaming up, let alone making. All of these things were out on the bleeding edge of science.

In my four years with the DMS I’ve taken my fair share of these toys away from people like the Jakobys, Sebastian Gault, the Cabal, the Seven Kings, the Red Order, the Hebbelmann Group, and others. Too many others. I’ve had to do some terrible things to keep those weapons from creating the misery for which they were created. Things that have ruined any chance I will ever have of sleeping peacefully through an entire night.

I told Nikki to make sure Church called me as soon as he was free and then disconnected. In my pocket my cell phone vibrated. I removed it and all three of us looked at the message window.

“Well, ain’t that damn interesting?” said Top sourly. “Nice of someone to give us advice in our time of trials and tribulations.”

“Amen, Reverend,” said Bunny. His tone was light, but his eyes were bright with tension.

I said nothing. It was getting harder and harder not to smash the phone against the metal wall of the helo.

“Those texts have to be from Mother Night,” said Top. “This new one proves that she knows what we’re about to step into. It proves that she has the seif-al-din.”

Bunny licked his lips. “Okay, but how the hell did she get her hands on it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

“Hooah,” Bunny agreed.

Without taking his eyes from mine, Top Sims said, very softly, “And then we are going to kill her and everyone working with her.”

I added two extra magazines to my pouch. “Yes, we damn well are.”

“Hooah,” they both said.

“Coming up on it,” called the pilot.

Interlude Thirteen

When Dr. Bliss heard the news it rocked her.

Hugo Vox was a traitor.

Worse than a traitor, he was a terrorist and mass murderer.

And, worst of all, he was a founding member of the Seven Kings. A faux secret society that borrowed the myths and legends of other secret societies — real and imagined — to make itself appear ancient and vastly powerful.

Only some of that was a lie. They were not ancient … but their power was beyond dispute.

The Twin Towers had fallen according to their plan. As did the London Hospital. The Seven Kings used bribery, manipulation, and other means to inspire various fundamentalist groups to commit acts of terrorism. The Kings, knowing that such atrocities always impacted the stock market, made hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of that money would never and could never be recovered.

And Hugo Vox was at the heart of the whole thing.

A man trusted by everyone in the U.S. government, from Mr. Church to the president. A man who had access everywhere. A man who was tasked with developing the most elite counterterrorism and antiterrorism training programs.

Bliss stood in Vox’s office at Terror Town, the training facility in Washington State where America trained its agents, and where teams from the nation’s allies came to learn the best ways to combat terror.

The irony seemed to scream at her from every molecule of air in the place.

Vox was a bad guy.

The news seemed to hit Bliss very hard but from several different angles. On one hand, as a DMS team member, the betrayal was huge. It rocked the foundations of the whole organization and damaged the previously iron-hard credibility of Mr. Church. There were some angry murmurs in congress that Church already had too much freedom of action, and that his judgment no longer warranted that level of trust or authority. Bliss thought this was a little unfair. She had no love for Church or that harpy, Aunt Sallie, but Vox was a master manipulator. Maybe the smartest and most subtle of his kind that ever lived. He hadn’t just fooled Church, Vox fooled everyone. Including the president and every member of Congress, including the grumblers. They’d all been cheerleaders for Vox for years. Church was merely a handy target. That rankled Bliss.

On a more personal level, she was hurt. She liked Vox and had worked closely with him and his protégée, Dr. Circe O’Tree, on dozens of cases. She’d gone to him to vet nearly every employee she hired for her division and every contractor she used when designing security systems for top-secret facilities like the Locker. Many of those people had been personally vetted by Vox.

Just as she had been.

Until two weeks ago, “vetted by Vox” was the highest stamp of approval you could get. It was a badge of honor. Grace Courtland had been vetted by Vox. So had Top Sims, Captain Ledger’s right-hand man. And dozens of others in the DMS, and hundreds within government service.

Clearly not all of them could be villains. But how to tell which ones were Vox’s creatures?

But the news hit Bliss in another way.

She found that she admired Vox even more for all of this.

Admired him a lot.

Thinking about it sent a thrill through her veins. This was real power. Bigger power than anything she’d ever glimpsed. Eclipsing Church by miles, in her estimation. Power that changed the entire world. 9/11 was a point around which the future history of everyone on earth turned, and Vox had done that.

Vox.

She sat at his desk and looked at the computer he’d left behind. Vox had somehow constructed some technology that could fool MindReader. He had untraceable cell phones. His plotting was accomplished through some means MindReader could neither detect nor control.

Power.

So much power.

Bliss booted up the computer and, when it was ready, removed two devices from her bag. One was a micro MindReader substation. The other was something neither Aunt Sallie nor Bug nor Mr. Church knew she had. A device Bliss had painstakingly constructed from the schematics she’d found in Paris Jakoby’s computer.

He’d called it Pangaea, and from his records it was clear that the system was not only designed and built by a now-dead Italian computer pioneer, but it was without doubt the forerunner of MindReader. There were far too many similarities for it to be coincidence. Bliss did a little digging, and from bits and pieces of information gleaned from Bug, Captain Ledger, and Dr. Hu, it seemed that in his pre-DMS days, Church had run with an international team of shooters. They’d torn down a group called the Cabal, which in turn had been built on the philosophical and scientific bones of the Third Reich. Pangaea had been allowed the Cabal — and later the Jakobys — to steal information from hundreds of other research programs around the world. Steal it without leaving evidence of the theft. By combining research from so many sources, the Jakobys were able to make what appeared to be freakish intuitive leaps in various fields related to genetics.

Captain Ledger and Grace Courtland had torn their empire apart, killing Paris and his sister, Hecate, in the process. That Grace Courtland had also died was something Bliss thought she’d feel bad about, but found that she did not.

Several Pangaea workstations had been bagged and tagged by the DMS forensics team, but the schematics in Paris Jakoby’s desk were known only to Bliss. She’d copied them and then deleted them. Then she spent months handcrafting a new system that including many of her own upgrades. Although she had great respect for the man who designed Pangaea, she knew that she was smarter. Her knowledge base, in terms of programming, hacking, and cyberwarfare, was decades fresher. That meant that the computer she built was as unlike MindReader as it was similar. A cousin rather than a twin.

It was no longer Pangaea, and it was definitely not MindReader.

She gave it a new name.

Haruspex.

That was far more suitable, considering how she’d built it. A haruspex, in terms of ancient Etruscan and Roman culture, was a person who could divine the future and unlock the mysteries of the fates by reading the entrails of sacrificed sheep.

Very appropriate. She’d read her own future in the entrails of Pangaea. Haruspex had been born in the blood of devastation left behind by the slaughter at the Dragon Factory and the fall of the Jakoby empire of twisted science.

Now she had a computer that was nearly as powerful as MindReader, and more important, one that was invisible to Church’s system.

Invisibility was a kind of power.

She smiled at the thought. It was like a superpower. Bliss had enough geek genes to actively wish that she could be a superhero.

Or even a supervillain.

But this was the real world.

She sighed and began her assault on Hugo Vox’s computers using MindReader and Haruspex.

Firewalls and anti-intrusion programs rose up to challenge her, but with the deftness of a pagan priest of the religion of cyberscience, she eviscerated them and thereby divined their secrets.

Chapter Fifty-three

I leaned my head and shoulders out of the open bay door. The area was cleared of everything except official vehicles, and per instructions the actual intersection was cleared. Police were erecting barricades and working crowd control. A half dozen news vans were already there, their satellite towers rising like metal trees above the crowds. News choppers were in the air, but police birds were establishing a no-fly zone for anyone but cops, Homeland, and us.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Warbride.”

“Go for Warbride,” said Lydia.

“What’s your twenty?”

“Right below you, boss. In the lee of the SWAT van. There’s not enough room for the helo to land. We had to rappel in. You will, too.”

“Copy that.”

“Cowboy — we are Echo plus three. Deacon made the call, but they’re locked and loaded.”

“The three we talked about?”

“Affirmative,” she said. “See you on the ground.”

Top and Bunny had listened in and were already setting up the fast-ropes for our drop to the street. I explained the situation to the pilot and then rejoined my guys.

“Duncan, Noah, and Montana?” asked Bunny.

“Yup.”

Of all the candidates we’d tested, three were solid standouts. A SEAL, a Boston brawler turned ATF agent, and an FBI agent who looked like a country cowgirl but who was one of the most vicious unarmed combat fighters I’ve ever met. I had good feelings about them, both in combat ability and in the likelihood they would fit into Echo Team. It remained to be seen if it was their bad luck they joined the DMS today, or my good luck that they were adding useful skills to my team.

I spotted Lydia standing with the rest of Echo Team. They were between two white-and-blue NYPD SWAT trucks parked crookedly by the subway entrance. A dozen men and women in body armor and helmets stood looking up at us. Even from that distance I could feel their anger and tension. Their friends and colleagues were down in the tunnel and they felt it was up to them to go charging to the rescue.

Bunny was next to me and must have been reading my thoughts. “We going to have trouble keeping them off the dance floor, Boss?”

“Let’s hope not.”

We dropped fast-ropes toward the street, clipped on, and flung ourselves into the air. Normally any kind of jump scares the shit out of me. I am not a heights person. Today I had other things to be afraid of. I plunged toward the ground, one gloved hand on the rope, the other behind my back to work the brake. We touched down one, two, three, unclipped, and saw the ropes rise like magic snakes as the Black Hawk climbed away, dragging its wind and noise with it. We hurried over to meet Lydia and the team. Sam nodded to us. The newbies did, too, but they were far more wary. Ivan wasn’t there.

“Where’s Hellboy?” I asked.

“Down on the platform with the first responders, a pair of transit cops, Faustino and Dawes,” said Lydia. “The station’s been cleared. We have National Guard units on their way, ETA eleven minutes. SWAT is positioned at the stations down the line, but they’ve been told to stay at street level. Deacon ordered that no one goes down there but us.”

We were all dressed in Saratoga Hammer suits and helmets, and under the August heat it was boiling hot. I caught a brief exchange of micronods between Bunny and Lydia. It was an open secret that they were a couple, but they were professional enough to keep it to themselves. They didn’t let it spill over into the job.

“What do we know about the SWAT team that went in?” Bunny asked.

Lydia shook her head. “No contact with them. Faustino said she heard gunfire. Mira, jefe,” she added, “the transit cops said that their radios didn’t work in the tunnel. From what she described, it sounds like a jammer. Said there were cameras down there, too, mounted on some of the pillars.”

“Ain’t that interesting as shit,” mused Top.

“Whatever it is,” I said, “we’ll figure it out on the fly.”

Without another word we then ran down the stairs into the subway.

Down into hell.

Chapter Fifty-four

Officer Faustino stared at us with big eyes in a white face. She held her Glock in one hand, the barrel pointed to the ground. Her partner, Dawes, stood nearby, looking equally scared and confused.

“Officers,” I said, pulling down the lower half of my balaclava as I stepped onto the platform. Sweat ran down my face. “I’m Captain Ledger, Homeland Security.”

A lie, but a useful one.

Beyond the cops I saw Ivan squatting on the edge of the platform, pointing a combat shotgun into shadows. The rest of Echo swarmed past me, moving quickly to double-check that the station was secure.

“C–Captain,” said Faustino, tripping over it a bit. “What’s happening?”

Instead of answering, I said, “Holster your weapons, officers. Do it now, please.”

They did so, but reluctantly. The two cops looked to be about one short step away from losing their shit. The male cop maybe more so. I could sympathize. Control is not a constant or a given, even if you have a badge pinned to your chest.

However, Faustino forced herself to straighten and chased the tremolo out of her voice as she asked, “How can we help?”

A good cop. I gave her a smile.

“We can’t let anyone down those stairs,” I said, “and we sure as hell can’t let anyone go up. Not unless you get an all-clear directly from me or my superiors. Can I trust you and your partner to hold this line?”

She forced herself to straighten. “Yes, sir. We got it.”

I kept eye contact for a few seconds longer, then spun away to join my team. This was a “life sucks” moment for everyone. I dearly hoped this would be the worst moment of all of our days.

At the edge of the tracks I hunkered down next to Ivan, who was studying the tunnel through a night-vision scope.

“What are you seeing?”

“Seeing nothing, boss,” he said, quietly, not looking at me. “Hearing some weird shit, though, and its making my balls want to shrivel up and hide.”

I held my hand up for silence and bent my ear toward the tunnel entrance. I didn’t hear anything. Until I did. It was soft, distant, like a breeze blowing through a cracked window on a stormy night.

“Those are human voices,” said Sam quietly. Lydia and the others clustered around us and they listened, too. They all heard it. Some sooner, others after a few seconds, but they all heard it.

The moans. Plaintive and hungry.

“Fuck me,” whispered Bunny.

“Okay,” I said as I went over the edge and down onto the tracks, “form on me.” We moved quickly and quietly into the tunnel, but a hundred feet in I stopped and turned to the others. “Listen up,” I said, facing the newbies, “there wasn’t time before and I didn’t want to say this in front of those cops, but here’s the deal. This is the point where I’m supposed to make a speech to the new recruits. But I don’t like speeches and we don’t have time, so this will be short and sweet. You three are jumping in ankle-deep shit. You’re doing that without being properly briefed or trained. All of that sucks, but there it is.”

Three sets of eyes studied me. Everyone pulled down the lower shrouds of their balaclavas. Easier to have a conversation that way. Ivan stood apart and kept his shotgun pointed down the tunnel.

“We’re heading into a situation that is probably going to be worse than anything you’ve dealt with,” I continued. “Get used to that because this is what we do. The DMS usually doesn’t put boots on the ground unless the shit is already hitting the fan. Sucks but there it is.” I cut a look at Lydia. “You tell them what’s down here?”

She nodded. “As much as I could. Wasn’t a lot of time.”

To the newbies I said, “So you know. This is the real face of terror, kids. Not guys in turbans and not homegrown assholes with fertilizer bombs. As far as the DMS goes, it’s mad science and monsters. You three good to go or do I send you back to babysit the cops? The appropriate response is ‘hooah.’”

“Hooah,” they said. If there wasn’t overwhelming enthusiasm, who could blame them?

“Good. Combat call signs from here out.”

“Sir,” said the bullet-headed ATF shooter from Boston, Duncan MacDougall, “we don’t have call signs. At least I don’t.”

The FBI woman, Montana Parker, shook her head. “Me neither.”

“I do,” said the Navy SEAL, a tall, ascetic man with a poet’s face. “Been called Gandalf since OCS.”

“Gandalf,” I said, nailing it in place.

MacDougall, I remembered from the training sessions, had a tattoo of a snarling wolf on his left forearm. I pointed to him. “You’re Bad Wolf.”

He grinned.

“What about you?” I asked the FBI woman.

“Most of the guys I’ve ever worked with have called me ‘that bitch,’ but I don’t think that’s going to play.”

Despite everything, I laughed.

Ivan shifted to stand next to her. He was six four and she came to well below his shoulder. Five three, tops. “How about Stretch?”

She gave him a smile that was softer and brighter than I would have expected. She hadn’t smiled once during the training sessions, and I had the feeling that no one had ever accused her of having an overly sunny disposition. I’d been leaning toward a call sign of Genghis or Harpy, but I was glad I hadn’t said anything.

“Welcome to the DMS, Stretch. I’m Cowboy.” I pointed to Top and Bunny. “Sergeant Rock and Green Giant.”

They’d already learned the call signs of the others. Lydia was Warbride, Ivan was Hellboy, and Sam was Ronin. And for a weird little moment I thought I heard other call signs whisper through the shadows. Names of comrades and friends long gone, and others who’d taken injuries that had pushed them off the firing line.

Dancing Duck.

Chatterbox.

Trickster.

Scream Queen.

So many others.

Too many others.

“Now pay close attention, and that goes for everyone,” I said. “We’re stepping into a world of wrong here, and if we come to a worst-case scenario then we are going to have to make hard choices without hesitation. The first two DMS teams who faced people infected with the seif-al-din were overwhelmed and destroyed because they hesitated. They let ordinary human feelings get them killed. We can’t repeat that. The reason you three made the cut is because you never hesitated, not in any of the drills. Well, this isn’t a drill. This is as real as it is ever going to get. We are going to face walkers. You understand what that means?”

MacDougall — Bad Wolf — said, “What Warbride told us seems unreal. This is World War Z stuff. I mean … are we really talking zombies here? It’s hard to believe.”

“Tell you what, son,” said Top in a slow drawl, “how about you cover yourself with steak sauce and walk point for us. Let’s see if it feels like hazing when those fuckers tear a flank steak off your ass.”

The other members of Echo laughed. Not nice laughs.

Bad Wolf stiffened. “No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just…”

Top laid a hand on his shoulder. “Son, you’re fishing for a context that just ain’t there. We’ve all been through it. You’ll get through it, too.”

“It’s what we do,” murmured Lydia.

“She’s right,” said Bunny. “You know that line from Shakespeare? The one about there being more things in heaven and earth?”

“Sure,” said Bad Wolf. “Hamlet.”

“Pretty much our job description.”

It chilled me to hear that line used now when I’d thought it less than two hours ago.

I said, “Look, guys, here’s the bottom line. These walkers — they’re not supernatural, nothing like that. This is a weaponized disease that turns innocent people into mindless killers. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t curable. Anyone who is infected is a time bomb because he or she can and will try to spread it. If we don’t stop it, those movies—The Crazies, 28 Days Later—they won’t be horror flicks, they’ll be historical documents. That is not a joke and it’s not an exaggeration. Tell me you hear and understand.”

The horror in their eyes was total now. But they said, “Hooah.”

I pulled my balaclava into place. “Then let’s go to work. Ronin, you have our backs. Hellboy, you’re on point. Nobody gets out of visual range. Be sharp and be professional.”

We moved on. It did not help my peace of mind knowing that Euclid Avenue Station was the end of the line. I hope we didn’t cut ourselves on that kind of irony.

Interlude Fourteen

“I think they know.”

The vice president propped himself up on one elbow and placed his other hand on the naked back of Artemisia Bliss. She sat on the edge of the bed, a wineglass cradled between her palms, head bowed, black hair falling to hide her face.

“Who knows?” he asked.

“Aunt Sallie,” she said. “Church.”

Collins snorted. “I doubt it. If they had a clue you’d be out on your ass.”

She shook her head. “I might be out on my ass. I’m not sure.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I tried to do a remote login to my workstation from my laptop and it said that the system was down for repairs.”

“So?”

“The system is never down for repairs. There are too many redundancies.”

He grunted and stroked her back, running his fingers slowly up and down the knobs of her backbone, circling them one at a time as he went.

“What could they know?” he asked.

Bliss pushed her hair out of her face and took a sip of wine. “It’s possible they may have discovered that I copied Hugo Vox’s records.”

“Vox? Not Paris Jakoby?”

“I deleted all traces of what I took from the Jakobys. No, Aunt Sallie has been retracing all the stuff we took from Terror Town. And I saw that there were special eyes-only requests for any files I accessed.”

“I thought that Haruspex thing could hide from MindReader.”

“It can … but this was right after I started using it. I’ve upgraded it a lot since then.”

He stopped caressing her and sat up. “You erased your tracks, though, right? Haruspex is just like MindReader, right? It doesn’t leave a footprint. That’s what you told me.”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

She shifted to look at him. “I know everything Pangaea could do, and I think I know everything MindReader can do…”

“But—?”

“But what if I’m wrong? What if MindReader can somehow track erasures, even ones made by software that does what it does?”

“Is that even possible?”

She was silent for a long time.

“Bliss?”

“Maybe.”

Collins launched himself off the bed and walked across the room, then wheeled on her. She could feel his anger. It filled the whole room.

“And you’re fucking telling me this now?”

“I—”

“You do know that Deacon wants my head on a pole,” he growled. “After the NSA dropped the ball in shutting them down last year, Deacon all but tore me a new asshole. Came right up to the edge of threatening my fucking life, you know. He came right out and told me that he had his eye on me, that if he discovered any impropriety he would bury me. His words. Bury me — and knowing him I don’t think that was a metaphor.”

Bliss shook her head. “He can’t touch you.”

“He can if he gets inside Haruspex and sees what we’re doing. Jesus fuck, Bliss. There’s enough there to have me arrested and jailed.”

“No…”

“Yes there is and you damn well know it.”

“I … I’ll wipe the files. Demagnetize the drives and wipe everything,” she insisted.

He came back and squatted down in front of her. “Can you dupe everything and hide it?”

“Hide it?”

“Yes. Make a master copy and put it somewhere safe. Somewhere MindReader can’t find it. No Internet connection.”

“Sure, I can copy it to a master drive and—”

“How long will that take?”

“I don’t know, Bill. A day…?”

“Do it. I’ll have one of my guys come by your place. We need that data. All of Vox’s notes, the security game modules, the pass-code interpreter … we need all of it. If we lose it then we lose any chance of doing some real good.”

Bliss said nothing but she gave him a token nod. Bill Collins had a different worldview than she had. He was, in his own way, a patriot. She was genuinely apolitical. He wanted the presidency so he could rebuild America into a form that he believed would approximate the way the country would have been had politicians not spent two centuries wandering in the opposite direction of what the Founding Fathers intended. Bliss wanted to publish file patents, and revise the current definition of what “filthy rich” meant. So far, though, both paths led through a landscape she thought of as “deliberately chaotic.” Funny how fanatical idealism and rampant greed sometimes look the same from a distance.

“I can make the copies,” she said, “and I can blank out my own laptop. But what happens if they hit me with a warrant? Think about it, Bill, if they really think I hacked and copied those files, a warrant would be a no-brainer.”

He nodded. “Yeah, damn it.”

“So what do I do? I could get arrested.”

That was a big ugly truth and it hung in the air, leering at them. Collins refilled their wineglasses and they sat next to each other, naked and slumped, thinking it through.

Collins said, “We have to stop using Haruspex, that’s for certain. At least for now.”

“I know.”

“When I send my guy to get your drive, let him have that, too. I have places to hide it where no one can find it. Believe me.”

She gave a weak little laugh. “I’ll feel naked without it.”

He touched her face, then trailed his fingertips down over her chin, her throat, her breast.

“Bill—?” she asked, her voice small.

“Yeah, babe?”

“What will happen to me if they really arrest me?”

He didn’t answer. Not at first. Long moments drifted past them like burning embers.

“We’ll think of something,” he said. It sounded weak.

“If they find out,” she said, her voice even smaller, “we’ll never see each other again.”

Collins put a smile on his face. Bliss wanted to believe that it was real.

“Sure we will,” he said. “We’ll find a way.”

And then he took her wineglass and set it on the night table next to his. Then he took her in his arms and they fell together onto the tangled sheets.

When Bliss arrived at the Hangar the following morning, Aunt Sallie and Gus Dietrich stood beside her workstation. Their eyes were ice cold. Harsh. Angry and unforgiving.

Before Bliss could say a word, Dietrich tossed a pair of handcuffs onto her desk.

Chapter Fifty-five

We moved through darkness that had never seen sunlight or felt rain. Our footsteps sounded strangely muffled. With the lights off we used night-vision goggles, which painted everything in eerie shades of green and gray.

For the first hundred yards we saw nothing. Not a rat, not even a cockroach.

The original members of Echo each carried a BAMS unit clipped onto their shoulder straps. Ivan kept checking his, murmuring the comforting “Green” every few dozen yards.

We ran around puddles and long steel rails, guns in hand. Ivan was on point, leading the way with a combat shotgun fitted with a heavy drum magazine. Bunny had an identical shotgun. Lydia had our backs. I knew the newbies knew their jobs, but they didn’t yet know ours, and I needed someone I could trust without supervision.

Suddenly, Ivan stopped with his fist raised, the universal signal to stop.

We stopped.

He unclenched his fist and pointed to something attached to a pillar. A small high-tech camera with a burning red eye.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug.”

“With you, Cowboy.”

“What do you know about this?” I tilted my helmet cam toward the device on the wall.

“It’s not regulation,” he said.

I snapped my fingers. “Green Giant.”

Bunny moved past me, pulling a small scanner from a pocket. He reached up and swept it past the camera. “It’s not a bomb,” he said, then pressed a button to switch the nature of the scanner. “Not sending a signal. Whatever it is, it’s not doing anything.”

“Getting the scanner feed,” said Bug. “Wow, that’s a nifty toy. Mucho expensive and it should not be there. Since company policy is that we don’t like coincidences, my best guess is that it was put there by our bad guys.”

“Is it safe to touch?” I asked, stepping up beside Bunny.

“Yeah. It’s just a camera.”

I reached up and punched it with the side of my fist. Very damn hard. “Fuck it.”

We moved on. There were more cameras. Bunny scanned each one, and once the bomb detector gave a green light, he smashed them.

“That’s like eight thousand dollars a pop,” said Bug.

“Not anymore,” said Bunny.

We kept going, running through darkness as quickly and quietly as we could.

Then we crossed a line.

It wasn’t something you could define, nor was it an actual line on the ground. But within the space of a few steps the world suddenly changed. It no longer felt like we were running through an empty tunnel toward something. No, all at once it felt like were in something.

Something ugly.

Something wrong.

That fast, Ivan’s pace slowed from a careful run to a wary walk.

I could see it in his body language, in the tightening of his shoulders, the hunch of his back as if following a primitive instinct to shield his vitals against an unseen claw.

We slowed, too.

And then Ivan held up a fist again.

We froze. Nobody was stupid enough to ask what was wrong or if Ivan actually saw anything. Even the newbies knew better than that. In that polluted darkness we stood as still as statues in some lost and forgotten tomb of ancient warriors.

Then Bunny raised his BAMS unit and showed me the display. The warning light was no longer green. Now it was a faint orange. There was something in the air and I didn’t need the digital display to tell me what it was.

Seif-al-din.

Although the pathogen was a serum transfer, traces of it could be carried in moist air. Not enough to infect on inhalation but enough to scare the living shit out of me.

Something ahead of us moved. It was a soft step. Faint, dragging. Around the bend in the tunnel. Coming our way.

I signaled the others to hold their positions as I crept forward to stand with Ivan. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the tracks, guns up and out. The sound grew louder. A shuffling step, a scrape of rubber soles on the wet concrete. Footsteps without emphasis. Listless. The way a dazed and injured person walks.

The figure moved around the bend in the tunnel and into our line of sight. Behind me I heard Noah whisper something.

“Jeez, it’s one of our boys. Good … maybe they have everything contained.”

The figure was dressed in full SWAT gear. Limb pads and body armor, a helmet, weapons. Sergeant’s stripes.

No mask, though.

That was gone.

Beside me Ivan gagged. “Oh … balls…”

Behind me I heard a sharp intake of breath. Maybe Noah, maybe one of the others. The SWAT sergeant moved toward us without haste. Limping, dragging one foot. He stopped for just a moment, head coming up, eyes seeming to flare with green light because of the night-vision distortion. But I knew that the SWAT man could not see us. And it wasn’t because the tunnel was so dark.

You need eyes to see.

He had none.

No eyes.

No nose.

No lips.

All we could see was raw and ragged ends of muscle and chipped edges of white bone.

There was no way this person could still be alive. His throat had been savaged, his clothes were drenched with blood that was as black as oil in the green night-vision light. I thought that it might somehow be easier for me because I’d seen this before. The walking dead, the violation and perversion of the body that was the hallmark of the seif-al-din pathogen. I’d fought these walkers before. Fought them with guns and knives and my own hands. I believed that having defeated this horror before that I was somehow immune to the soul-tearing sight of it again. That the reality of it would be less real to someone like me.

That’s hubris. That’s the kind of thinking that only a fool can manage and I hated myself for my blindness and my weakness.

The man — the wreck of what had been a man — opened its jaws and from between rows of broken teeth he uttered a moan of such aching and indescribable hunger that it made me want to weep. Or scream.

Instead, I pointed my gun at his ruined face and pulled the trigger.

God help us all.

Chapter Fifty-six

He checked into the hotel under the name Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. It was a nice choice, Monk thought. Goldsmith had co-created the very first interactive electronic game — a missile simulator — back in 1947. One of Mother Night’s little jokes.

Monk took the elevator to the thirteenth floor and entered his room. A gift basket stood on the table by the window. Wine, fruit, cheese, chocolate. And at the bottom a plastic pill case filled with the right goodies, and also keycards for three other rooms at the hotel. Those rooms were booked for Estle Ray Mann, Goldsmith’s partner for the missile game; Alan Turing, inventor of the first computer chess game, also in 1947; and his colleague Dietrich Prinz.

Each room had an identical suitcase and bag of golf clubs. In each golf bag was a twin — or a sister, as Monk viewed it — of his darling Olga. The suitcases also contained handguns and explosives. Better to be prepared for all eventualities.

He unwrapped a chocolate bar, bit a piece, and sat down to wait for Mother Night’s call.

“Hope it won’t be too long,” he said to Olga’s sister.

Interlude Fifteen

Her lawyers told her to wear a pretty suit and show a little leg, maybe a hint of cleavage. Bliss spent a lot of time on her makeup, and when she stepped into the courtroom she was sure that no one even noticed the handcuffs. They were looking at the prettiest woman in the room, and that was a tactic. It was, the lawyer assured her, the last card they had left to play.

The judge had spent a lot of time during the trial looking at Artemisia Bliss’s legs. The judge was a well-known hound dog and had a useful track record in light sentencing for pretty women.

She smiled at him — not too overt a flirtation, of course — as she sat down at the defense table. Her lawyers — both attractive women — sat on either side of her. They, too, were showing a little skin. Skirts and tailored jackets. Probably push-up bras, too. Anything that would work.

Bliss was well aware that nothing much else had worked so far.

Eighteen separate charges had been brought against her. Her lawyers had gotten four of them tossed on technicalities and the jury had decided in her favor on six more. That left eight in place, and the jury didn’t let her slide on those. Standing there, listening to the foreman delivering eight guilty verdicts, was the toughest thing Bliss had ever done. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. Before that day she’d been certain that it wasn’t possible to feel more completely vulnerable and afraid than she already had. Through the booking phase, that awful first night in jail, the arraignment before a grand jury, the months in federal custody, the endless nights in jail where predators abounded and her looks and breeding were no protection at all. Feeling abandoned by Bill Collins, who could not risk even the most tenuous connection to her. The trial itself, burning away days, then weeks, and finally two months of her life.

And the endless deliberation. Four and a half days of it.

Guilty of cybercrimes.

Guilty of wire fraud.

Guilty of unauthorized access to protected computers. Notably those belonging to federal agencies.

Guilty.

Guilty.

Guilty.

Including the big one. Guilty of human rights violations.

That was not actually true. Not as such. But she had copied all of the information in the computer systems of the Jakoby twins and their father, Cyrus. The elder Jakoby had devised a number of pathogens designed to target different ethnic groups. Her theft of that science painted her with the same brush. No amount of argument from her lawyers could convince a jury that any innocent person would want the formulae for ethnic genocide for any reason other than to use or resell it.

Hence the conspiracy charges for which she was convicted.

Which brought her to today.

The sentencing.

Her looks and the judge’s poor personal judgment when it came to women. One card left to play.

The judge sat behind his bench and listened to prosecution and defense make their elaborate arguments for and against a harsh sentence. Bliss thought her lawyers were particularly eloquent, and the judge even smiled as he watched the younger of the two attorneys jiggle her way to the lectern. The cuffs had been removed before the proceedings began.

The judge then turned to Bliss.

“Would the accused like to make a statement?”

“Yes, your honor,” said Bliss, rising slowly to her feet. Exactly as she had been coached.

He gestured for her to continue.

“Your honor,” began Bliss, “I understand the gravity and consequences of what I did. I really do. But I meant no harm. I’ve been a loyal and dedicated member of the team since its inception.” It had been agreed by all parties that the DMS would never be named and would instead be referred to as the “team.” “I’ve done everything I could to help strengthen our country against all threats.” Her use of our was deliberate and she leaned on it ever so slightly. “Everything I’ve done since joining the team was to make sure that we were prepared for anything that could pose a threat to us. Collecting and collating data, analyzing it, disseminating it to the proper groups within the team was my only concern. Everything else was part of that goal. Everything. I love our country. And I want to continue to serve it and to help protect the American people.” She paused and gave him a brave smile. “Thank you.”

There was a frown on the judge’s face. Was it doubt about the convictions? Was it doubt about whatever sentence he’d already decided before today? As she sat down, each of her attorneys took one of her hands. When she cut a look at the prosecutors, they looked worried.

The judge was silent for a long time, his lips pursed, chin sunk on his chest. Finally, he looked at Bliss and nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “Bearing in mind your record, the evidence, and the remarks made here this morning, I am prepared to pronounce sentence.”

He cited the verdicts and the applicable laws and statutes.

Then he smiled at her. “Dr. Bliss, you are a very attractive and charming woman. You are a brilliant scientist and perhaps one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Your skills and your potential are, as has been pointed out, a powerful weapon capable of doing great good for the American people in these troubled times.”

Bliss brightened, and both of the hands holding hers tightened.

“However,” said the judge, “when a person puts self-interest in front of patriotism, and personal gain before the general welfare, then that person has thrown away any grace or consideration she might otherwise have.”

Bliss did not hear anything else the judge said.

Her mind simply shut down.

There were only vague memories. She remembered screaming. Weeping. People putting hands on her. The coldness of handcuffs. Shouts.

Red madness.

It was only later that she was able to assemble the facts. The horrible, impossible facts.

The judge had given her the maximum sentence for each separate charge.

One hundred and sixty-five years.

Life.

And death, because she would never get out.

They had to drag her from the court.

Chapter Fifty-seven

Sometimes a gunshot is a small, hollow pok. Sometimes it’s a sharp crack.

In the damp blackness of the subway tunnel, my pistol boomed like thunder. Too loud, too harsh, the echo slammed off the wall and boomed into my eardrums.

The SWAT officer’s head snapped back and he fell.

It was that quick.

There was no intermediary phase of a body slowing down from the chemical urgency of life into the stillness of death. This was as immediate as throwing a switch. Like cutting the strings of a puppet. The strange blend of misfolded proteins, chemicals, and genetically modified parasites that made up the seif-al-din kept only a part of the brain alive. The motor cortex and some cranial nerves. Everything else was already dead. So when my hollow-point bullet punched through his forehead and exploded his brain, that entire process simply stopped. On one side of a broken moment the man was a walking, ravenous monster, and on the other he was simply dead. Totally, finally, tragically dead.

I watched the officer fall.

A SWAT operator.

A cop.

A person.

Gone.

I heard Ivan say something. No joke about balls in this moment. He called on God, needing and wanting some mercy down here. Some grace. But then movement around the bend proved that we were closer to hell than heaven as several figures shambled around into view.

Four.

Six.

More.

The rest of the SWAT team. Their Kevlar armor ripped and yanked aside to reveal flesh that was no longer whole. We saw dreadful things.

They were twenty feet away and moving toward us. Their moans rose from the cry of the lost to a more urgent and hungry tone.

“Hellboy,” I said, using Ivan’s combat call sign.

He did not move.

“Ivan,” I barked, my voice as sharp as a gunshot.

He flinched and jumped. For one brief, wretched moment he looked away from them and into my eyes. With the night vision he could not have seen much, and maybe it wasn’t a visual connection he was looking for. Maybe he needed to see the living, to remember that he, too, was alive, before he could bring himself to fight the dead. I don’t know. I’m a soldier, not a psychologist, not a philosopher.

“Ivan,” I said again. Just that. His name.

I saw the exact moment when he regained himself. He jerked as if I’d shocked him with an electrical cord, and I think that’s when he realized that this was how so many of our comrades had died in the past. Charlie and Delta Teams, who were devoured the first time any of us encountered this disease. This was how the SWAT team died. Ivan’s mouth became a hard line and he bared his teeth as he brought his gun up.

He carried an AA-12 assault shotgun and the big drum magazine loaded with twelve-gauge rounds. He had the selector switch set to full automatic, and the gun fired five rounds per second, filling the tunnel with thunder a hundred times worse than my Beretta. The walking dead men were caught in a maelstrom of destructive force. Ivan was aiming at them but not aiming for their heads. His first thirty rounds tore away arms and legs, blew torsos apart, tore heads from necks, but he wasn’t destroying enough of them.

Then Lydia was there and with her were the new members of Echo Team. More and greater thunder filled the tunnel. Lydia had her rifle snugged against her shoulder, shooting on semiauto, taking time to hit the head. To end the unlife of these monsters. Duncan, Montana, and Noah hesitated for only a moment, and then they crossed the line that the moment demanded we all cross. They opened up on fellow officers, on men and women in uniform. On victims of terrorism who had been forced to embody the very concept of terror.

There were screams stitched into the thunder.

They did not come from the walking dead.

The screams came from the living.

From us.

From all of us.

The SWAT members fell, but the fight did not end there. We stepped over torn pieces of bodies and rounded the bend. Knowing what we’d find.

The train was there.

The tunnel was filled with the dead.

Hundreds of them.

Some dismembered, some dragging twisted limbs. Others achingly whole, their death wounds hidden from our eyes.

All of them dead.

Walkers.

Zombies.

Coming for us. Moaning, aching for our flesh.

We stood there in a shooting line. Lydia, Sam, Ivan, Duncan, Montana, and Noah. And me. Echo Team.

We fired and fired and fired.

We covered one another as we reloaded.

Our guns bucked in our hands, the barrels growing hot. The air was thick and toxic with gun smoke and cordite.

The dead walked into our gunfire. They did not — could not — evade or duck away. They came into the bright muzzle flashes and the lead. They flew apart like broken toys.

We used every bullet, every grenade, every magazine.

And they still kept coming.

In the end, when the last bullets were fired and the empty magazines dropped, when we were ankle-deep in blood and spent shell casings, the dead still came.

A few left.

Civilians.

The ones from the last car.

Old and young. Some children among them.

They came.

Ivan was weeping openly. So was Noah. Lydia’s face was stone and I feared for her. She was way, way out on the edge.

“God, please,” said Duncan. He was breathing too fast, his whole system teetering on the edge of shock as he slapped his pockets for fresh magazines that weren’t there. “I’m out. I’m out.”

I felt a sob break in my chest as I drew my knife.

What followed was unspeakable.

Chapter Fifty-eight

Mother Night watched the video feeds.

There were six cameras mounted at different points around the subway train. Each one had a lens that provided a panoramic view of the slaughter. Three of them showed close-ups of the infected, and she took them offline, not wanting to send a mixed message. One camera had a tight view of a line of DMS agents, and Mother Night was almost positive that the second man in that line was Joe Ledger. Even with the helmet, a balaclava covering his nose and mouth, and night-vision goggles, he had the right build, the right carriage. He looked like a video game character. She could have sampled him and built him into one of her own games. Maybe she would. She’d already established a network of dummy corporations and technical obfuscation that would allow her to bring games to market under a variety of false names so that nothing could be traced back to her.

It would be hilarious to have Joe Ledger, Top Sims, and that hunky Bunny as characters. Maybe Lydia, too, though Mother Night did not know her very well. The others were strangers to her except as names on covert reports hacked by Haruspex.

The two remaining cameras showed the whole line of shooters from a distance, and as the walkers shambled forward they were torn apart. Nice. From that angle and that distance, and in that shitty light, it was impossible to tell that they were infected. Or how badly they were infected. They looked like frightened people reaching out for help. And being killed by government troops.

Absolutely perfect.

She took a sip of Diet Coke, drew in a calming breath, let it out slowly, and then tapped the keys that would send this video feed to its various targets.

First was YouTube, with links automatically placed on six hundred preset Twitter pages and fifty Facebook group and event pages, as well as on thousands of blogs into which Haruspex had intruded.

Bang, bang, bang.

Using reposting services modeled after Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, the link was posted over and over again every few seconds. Tiny changes in wording and URL kept the antispam programs from blocking her out.

The number of hits began sluggishly, but within three minutes it had jumped, and then soared.

The thought of it going “viral” was an irony not lost on her.

She took another sip of Diet Coke.

Then she sent the YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook links to the media.

To every network news desk. To more than six hundred global news agencies, from the Associated Press to Al Jazeera. And then Haruspex took over, sending the links to local affiliates, newspapers, and Web news editors.

Within minutes the slaughter in the Brooklyn subway system had hit sixteen thousand news sources.

“Burn to shine, motherfuckers,” she murmured.

Chapter Fifty-nine

Vice President William Collins stood with a group of top advisors as they clustered around the president’s desk to watch the horror unfolding on the TV screen. The image was that of American troops in unmarked black combat gear firing continuously on a group of unarmed civilians.

The bullets tore into the people.

The soundtrack was filled with shrieks and screams as the people begged for mercy. Threaded through the gunfire was the sound of gruff laughter.

Nice touch, thought Collins; and he wondered from which video game or movie Mother Night had lifted that soundtrack. In all the confusion it was impossible to match those cries for help to any actual mouth on the screen. Maybe one day someone would discover that the soundtrack didn’t match the video at all, but by then it would be a different world.

And a different president.

Maybe a president whose last name began with a C.

It was hard not to smile, so he took the urge and made it look like a grimace.

The gunfire began to dwindle as the last of the civilians staggered and fell. Collins knew that the staggering movements were as much to do with the nature of the seif-al-din pathogen as they were from bullet impacts, but millions of TV watchers wouldn’t know or suspect that.

The secretary of state said, “Oh my god.”

The president was pale with shock. “How did this get on the air?”

Collins pushed through the crowd. “Did you authorize this?” he demanded. “Did you send troops in to kill those people? My god … these are Americans!”

The president shook his head, dazed and apparently lost. “How did this get on the air?” he repeated.

Collins had to bite his tongue to keep from smiling.

Chapter Sixty

We stood there, wrapped in a shroud of gun smoke, haunted by the echoes of our guns, ankle-deep in blood, filled with horror.

Everybody was panting. Hands shook with a palsy that was born of the realization that this moment was both unreal and yet sewn into the fabric of our lives. No matter what else happened, no matter how hardened we got, or how insane we became, in one way or another we would each revisit this place in dreams. In those dark times we would stand in the fetid darkness and do awful things, knowing that we must and knowing that with each bullet fired we were blasting away at those precious human qualities that defined us. In a very real way, we all died a little that day, and we would be less alive from here on.

Behind me I heard someone quietly weeping. Maybe one of the newbies, maybe one of the regulars. I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

I understood, though.

If this had been a regular battle between us and the bad guys — terrorists, criminals, soldiers in a foreign army — then there would be some kind of natural path along which we could walk from here back to the world.

These were civilians. They hadn’t been driven by an ideology to attack us. It wasn’t politics or religion or even greed.

They were victims.

They had been murdered twice.

Once by whomever had released the seif-al-din pathogen aboard that train; and then again by us.

My earbud buzzed.

“Deacon to Cowboy,” said Mr. Church, “I need you to listen to me very carefully. Do not say anything. Not a word. Switch to my private channel. Only you.”

I raised my hand and snapped my fingers. Everyone fell silent.

Church said, “This action has been filmed. Look for cameras.”

I did. And I found them. Same as the ones from the tunnel, but we’d missed them as we’d closed on the train. There had been no time to look for cameras at that time. Now I saw all the little red lights shimmering like rats’ eyes in a sewer.

“Disable the cameras,” ordered Church.

But before I could even reach out the red lights flickered off. They all went dark.

“Cowboy, the feed has stopped,” said Church. “Locate and collect those cameras. Bug will want to examine them.”

Top instantly organized everyone into a search.

Church switched to a private channel. “Just listen. We have a situation developing. The feeds from those cameras were streamed to the Internet and all major news services.” He quickly explained about the soundtrack of people screaming and begging for mercy. The president just called me and demanded that I pull your team and order you to stand down pending an investigation. The media is exploding with this, and a great deal of that heat will be directed toward the president. It’s likely to damage or destroy this administration.”

I cursed very quietly.

“Do not exit at Euclid Avenue,” Church continued. “Proceed along the tracks three stops to Liberty Avenue station. It’s a mile and a half. I’ll have people down there with decontamination equipment and fresh clothes. We’ll extract you from there.”

“How much shit are we in?” I asked.

Instead of answering he said, “Get moving.”

The line went dead. I called my people over and gave them the short version of what was happening.

Ivan said, “This sucks dog balls.”

“Hooah,” muttered Top darkly.

“Nobody knows who we are,” I told them, touching my balaclava. “We’re soldiers in unmarked black. Trust Deacon to protect us.”

“Can he?” asked Montana.

“If anyone can,” I said, which did not sound as comforting as I hoped it would. “Clock’s ticking, so let’s haul ass.”

We hauled ass.

We ran as if monsters were chasing us. Which they damn well were.

Interlude Sixteen

Artemisia Bliss sat in her cell and waited for her life to end. Wished, in fact, for it to all be over. They had her on suicide watch, though. Fair enough. If there was any chance for a quick way out, she’d take it.

Living in hell was not living.

This was going to be hell. Of that she had no doubt. The judgment against Artemisia Bliss had been so severe.

One hundred and sixty-five years.

The joke was that there was a chance for parole after seventy years.

By then Artemisia Bliss would be ninety-seven years old. Even in the unlikely event that she was still alive, freedom would not be freedom at all. No, the judge had given her a death sentence. Soon they would come and take her from this holding cell at MDC and transfer her to a medium-security prison whose location was still to be determined. Her lawyers were still wrangling with the judge about placement. They wanted her in a minimum-security facility like Waseca in Minnesota or, better yet, the one in Danbury. The judge wanted her in supermax. The only reason for the delay in his orders being carried out was the scarcity of women’s cells in supermax. It gave the lawyers a little time and it kept her in Brooklyn. It was much easier to influence the destination of a new prisoner from an administrative facility than it was to effect a transfer from one long-term prison to another.

A small and very cold comfort.

Every time she heard a footfall outside her cell, Bliss dreaded what it could mean. Lately there was bad news and worse news.

The only blessing, however small, was that the cliché of aggressive sexual abuse in the showers hadn’t happened. But Bliss always mentally tagged “yet” onto that.

She had few illusions about what would happen to her.

She was young. She was very pretty. And she had lost all of her power.

All of that wonderful power. To her it was losing her heart and all the blood that ran through it. She felt dead inside.

Almost dead.

The fact that there were still some very small options kept her from finding a shortcut out of the cell and this — whatever it was. She couldn’t call it “life” anymore, even though that’s what the judge called it.

Cosmic jokes like that she did not need.

She knew she could try to play the card of her affair with Bill Collins as a way of getting a new trial and the protection of becoming a high-profile witness against a sitting vice president. That card was all that was really left to her, and with every passing moment she drew closer to playing it.

What would he do, she wondered.

Would he have her killed?

She had absolutely no doubts that he could. Collins, for all his passion and words of love, was a vicious man who had layers upon layers of friends in very low places. He was enormously wealthy and his friends were wired in everywhere. Bliss suspected that Collins had been more directly involved with the Jakobys and the Seven Kings than anyone — even the DMS — ever guessed or could prove. He owned people in the Secret Service, the FBI, the ATF; and nearly everyone in his Cybercrimes Task Force belonged to him heart and soul. If he ever became president, which was becoming a real possibility, then he would build an empire whose corrupt roots dug down into the deepest levels of big business and the military-industrial complex.

So, yes, she decided, he could have her killed. If she could be certain that he would find a way to do it without pain or humiliation, then Bliss would have welcomed it. It would get the job done. She just didn’t want to suffer in the process. She was okay with death, but not with pain.

No matter how she died, she didn’t think Collins would shed any real tears.

Well, she thought bitterly, maybe one.

They’d had a lot of very good nights. There’s only so much passion you can fake before your true heart shows through. She knew Collins had glimpsed her inner self, her evolved self. Just as she had seen his true face.

There was love there.

There was a genuine connection there.

Whether any of that could buy her a splinter of mercy was another thing.

After her conviction and sentencing, Bliss had given a sealed envelope to her lawyer with instructions to mail it to a certain address. The letter was coded, so that if anyone read it all they’d see would be a lot of prayers for forgiveness. The real message was hidden in references that Bill Collins could read using the key they’d worked out years ago.

Had he ever received the letter? It was filled with words of love, genuinely meant. And with pleas for help. In all this time he hadn’t reached out to her in any way, not even using contacts so many times removed that they could never implicate him.

Nothing.

The silence was deafening.

Soon they would come for her and she would descend into hell, with the only grace being the certain knowledge that it was impossible to prevent people from killing themselves if they truly wanted to die. That seemed to be all that was left to her.

Bliss put her face in her hands and began to weep very quietly. She was too afraid to let her sobs be heard. Not in this awful place.

Broken minutes crawled past.

Then she heard the clang of cold steel as the security doors rolled open.

A moment later there was the distinctive sound of shoes on the concrete floor. Not the clickety-click of the heels her lawyers wore. No, these were solid, flat sounds.

Bliss cringed, tried to shrink into herself, to become small and invisible.

The footsteps approached with the unhurried and measured pace of someone with purpose and confidence. Jailor’s footsteps.

A shadow moved along the floor, long, distorted by lights behind whoever cast it.

Not a man’s shadow, though.

But mannish.

A few moments later a large woman stepped into view. She stopped outside the cell and stood there for a while, shadow-shrouded eyes fixed on Bliss.

“Prisoner Bliss,” said the woman. Not as a question, but in a flat statement. “On your feet.”

“Wh-what?” stammered Bliss.

“Now.”

The woman’s voice was hard, certainly not inviting debate.

“But…”

The guard stepped into the cell, towering over Bliss. And now Bliss could see that the woman held something. A garment bag. “Get dressed.”

Bliss frowned, not understanding. The garment bag was the one in which her courtroom clothes were stored. She wasn’t due in court again.

Unless …

Oh, God, she thought, sudden hope flaring in her chest. The request for change of facility came through!

She leaped up, smiling, wanting to shout for joy. A minimum-security prison was bearable. It was a lesser ring of hell. One she could possibly endure. Cable TV, Internet access, no brutality …

Was this her lawyers? Or had Collins pulled some covert strings?

The guard held the garment bag at arm’s length.

“Time’s running out.”

Bliss took the bag with a fumbling thanks. The guard did not turn away or leave her to change in private, but Bliss didn’t care. She stripped off the orange jumpsuit issued to her at the holding facility and dressed quickly in her charcoal skirt and coral blouse. Her shoes were in there, too.

And other things. She looked at them and then frowned at the guard.

“I don’t … understand.”

The guard said nothing.

After a long moment of hesitation, Bliss finished dressing. She reached for her books and possessions, but the guard interrupted. “No. Leave everything here.”

Bliss straightened, her joy turning to doubt. Fear began once more to eat at her.

However, without another word she followed the guard out of the cell.

Two hours later, an unsmiling woman in a charcoal skirt and coral blouse was led into the cell.

“Give me those clothes,” said the guard.

The woman changed and put on the orange jumpsuit. Tears cut long channels down her face. Her gleaming black hair fell like a veil as she sat down and hung her head as she wept.

The guard was smiling as she stuffed the nice clothes back into the garment bag.

The weeping woman listened to the sound of the guard’s shoes echo on the hard floor.

Then there was another sound.

A softer footfall.

She looked up.

Another woman stood outside the cell. Not the guard. This was another inmate, a hatchet-faced white woman with cornrowed hair and old blue prison tattoos on her neck.

“Artemisia Bliss?” asked the woman.

The weeping woman nodded.

“They say you have to burn to shine,” said the woman.

Then she hurled something in through the bars. A gleaming, stinking pintful of golden liquid. It slapped the seated woman in the face, blinding her, gagging her, choking her with gasoline fumes.

The weeping woman never heard the strike of the match.

Never saw the flames.

Her screams filled the whole of the prison.