Code Zero

Interlude Seventeen

“I can’t believe this,” said Hu. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. He looked younger than his years and shock had stripped away his arrogance, revealing a far more vulnerable person than he generally revealed. Rudy placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

They stood in the corridor outside the cell. Aunt Sallie stood slightly apart with Joe Ledger and Ghost, while Jerry Spencer was inside the cell, crouched over the blackened, withered husk that had been a person hours ago.

“God,” Hu said, shivering, “it doesn’t even look human.”

Joe Ledger opened his mouth to say something, almost certainly a sarcastic jab of some kind, but Rudy gave him a quick shake of the head. Joe looked disappointed. He went back to the quiet conversation he’d been having with Auntie and Jerry.

“What I don’t get,” said Hu, “is why anyone would do something like this.”

“Prison violence is common. Until the staff and other inmates are interviewed we won’t know the details.”

“But why her?”

Rudy shook his head. The warden and guard shift supervisors were conducting interviews under the supervision of Gus Dietrich. Answers would emerge. One of the female guards said that she thought she heard Bliss arguing with a couple of other women prisoners who had reputations for harassing the more vulnerable detainees. Rudy wondered if this would turn out to be a punishment for refusing sexual advances, though that sounded a bit cliché to him.

They watched as the forensics ace Jerry Spencer moved around the corpse, taking small samples of burned flesh and clothing. More extensive samples would be taken once the body was transported to the coroner’s office, but Jerry exercised the authority allowed him under the DMS charter to take his own samples first.

Hu was angry with what he described as a violation of Bliss’s person. “Why can’t he just leave her alone?”

“Because,” said Spencer without looking up, “right now I’m not seeing Artie Bliss. I’m seeing a charcoal briquette. And I won’t believe this is Artie Bliss until DNA, tissue comparisons and dental records prove it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Spencer glanced up at him. “This is my crime scene, doc. Shut up or fuck off. No, better yet, shut up and fuck off.”

“Gentlemen, please,” said Rudy, pushing the air down with calming hands. “We’re all upset by this—”

“I’m not,” said Aunt Sallie.

Spencer gave her one of his rare smiles and returned to his work.

Ledger just spread his hands.

“You’re all a bunch of assholes,” growled Hu. “Artemisia used to be part of our family. Show some respect.”

“Family?” said Auntie. “Yeah, as I remember it, Cain was part of a family, too. So was Judas.”

That shut Hu up.

There was no more conversation. Spencer continued his work and everyone else stood and watched him.

Rudy stayed by Hu’s side. Despite the animosity between Ledger and Hu, and the more recent tension between Hu and Auntie, Rudy liked the scientist. Per DMS requirements, Hu had spent hours in therapy sessions with Rudy, and that allowed Rudy to see a more three-dimensional person. A man with vulnerabilities, with layers.

Although Rudy had become fond of Hu, he found that he did not entirely trust the man. And for the same reasons that Rudy had liked but not entirely trusted Bliss. Both of them were cut from similar cloth. Brilliant on a level that made life awkward in many ways. Both socially inept, though Bliss managed it better, partly because she’d known how to use her looks to advantage and because she appeared to have some consideration for how her words affected people. Joe had confided to Rudy that he thought Bliss was much more manipulative than she appeared.

“It’s crazy,” Joe had told him last year, “but I’d find myself telling her the damnedest things. Really opening up to her.”

“Why?” asked Rudy.

“Beats the crap out of me. Maybe it’s that she looks so earnest. And she listens. She’s like you in that regard. She really listens. When someone listens with that much focus and attention, it’s … I don’t know, it’s somewhere between an ego stroke that says ‘damn, but you’re one interesting son of a bitch’ and a validation that what you have to say matters. Does that make sense?”

It had.

Rudy had noted that about Bliss. She was always paying attention. Her brain was never cruising on autopilot. Another of Joe’s phrases. But she was like Hu in another way. Both were ambitious, and if they’d been in the private sector they would probably have set up competing shops and battled each other while making vast fortunes. As it was, within the confines of the binding security and nondisclosure agreements of the DMS, their ambition had been mostly channeled into bringing the edgiest science into play so that the organization was second to none in the world. More than once Rudy had cautioned Mr. Church about that arrangement. He felt that Hu, Bliss, Bug, and the other experts should be given some opportunity to profit from their work, even if only in the form of accolades from publications. The generous bonuses — which Rudy was certain came from Church’s personal bank account — were nice but they couldn’t match the enormous wealth his people were passing up in order to do their jobs. Church was adamant, however, believing that this would open a door beyond which was a slippery slope.

“People need reward,” said Rudy during one conversation. “As much as we would both like patriotism, humanism, and idealism to be their own rewards, we have to accept that these are people. They’re not characters from a heroic ballad.”

“Yes, doctor,” Church replied with a faint smile, “I am aware of that. However, I won’t apologize for holding a high standard for people who are doing work as important as this. And I won’t lower those standards to accommodate personal agendas. If we do that, then the focus becomes personal gain. The work we do requires the best efforts and actions from those few people with minds and skill sets that are truly exceptional.”

“It’s a lot to ask.”

Church nodded. “I know. And because so few can rise to that standard the DMS is — and will likely remain — a small organization.”

Rudy could understand Church’s rationale, but in his professional experience he’d met only a precious few people who could live within those restrictions. Joe Ledger was one, and Samson Riggs. Bug was another. And there were a few dozen within the DMS. Top, Bunny, Lydia. Each answering the call with varying degrees of personal commitment. Rudy knew that some of those people would burn out and fall away.

Church, of course, was the icon, the role model for that level of total dedication to this war, but he was a very hard act to follow. Likely an impossible act. Like Lancelot without the emotional flaws. There were few people answering his call, relative to the vast sea of available military and paramilitary operatives, scientists, and support staff; the world rarely coughed up someone like Church. Rudy knew more about him than anyone except Aunt Sallie, but even with the privileged insights from staff-required therapy sessions, Rudy was certain he’d merely scratched the surface of who Mr. Church was.

Rudy wondered what Church was thinking now; how the news of Artemisia Bliss’s murder had affected him. Even though Church had never been her biggest supporter, had hired her only on the strong recommendations of Hu and Auntie, he had worked with her for years. Rudy knew that her criminal activities had hurt and angered him. Would he grieve over her death?

“We’re done here,” said Spencer as he got to his feet. They all took a moment longer to look down at the blackened corpse.

“Such a waste,” Ledger said.

He, Aunt Sallie, and Spencer left. Hu lingered for a moment longer, and Rudy stayed with him.

“I can’t believe it,” said Hu.

Rudy thought he caught the edge of a sob in his voice.

With his hand still on Hu’s shoulder, the two men turned and left the cell.

By the end of the day the dental records had been compared and matched. Within three days the DNA comparison was done and that, too, matched.

And that was the end of Artemisia Bliss.

Chapter Sixty-one

We were met at Liberty Avenue Station by a small DMS field team. The techs sprayed us with some noxious shit that smelled like moose piss, then we stripped out of our Hammer suits right down to our skivvies. The suits, our gear, and even our weapons were stuffed into big oil drums and filled with more of the smelly stuff, then sealed. Permanently sealed, I think. The bag of cameras went into a biohazard bag for immediate transport to Bug. The only things we kept were our earbuds and cell phones. I told everyone to stay offline. Now was the not the time to be texting our BFFs or playing Angry Birds. Silence was genuinely golden.

There were clothes for us to change into, and we variously became Con Ed, water department, subway techs, or cops. Not a whiff of anything federal. I was a transit cop, which is okay because I used to be a cop and could talk the talk if it came to it.

My cell buzzed and I looked at it warily, expecting something bad.

Getting it.

The message read:

I showed it to Top and Bunny.

“Shit’s not funny anymore,” said Bunny. The strain of the shooting and now the knowledge that we were being labeled as monsters had etched deep lines into his tanned face.

I said nothing.

As we all changed there was a noticeable lack of the usual rough humor and trash talk. Lydia didn’t make jokes about the way Ivan looked in boxers. Bunny didn’t flirt with Lydia. Sam didn’t flirt with the new gal, Montana. They all looked at me, though. Hard eyes from hard people who were as deeply afraid and confused as I was. My own snarky sense of humor seemed to have shriveled up and crawled off to hide under a rock. Usually, I could joke my way out of most tense situations. A defensive reaction, sure, but a useful one because at least I kept myself amused. Now all I had inside my head were growls and questions.

The lead tech from the Hangar was a guy named Rasheen who’d once run with Broadway Team before he got hit with almost enough bullets to kill him. Now he ran logistics for the New York office. We were old friends and we shook hands in the troubled darkness.

“Must have been some shit back there,” he said. “You holding it together?”

“For the moment.” I said, accepting a police utility belt. “Give me some good news, man.”

“They don’t have your names on the news. That’s something.”

I grunted.

“But otherwise the goddamn Net’s gone ass-wild on this shit.”

“Tiny midget balls,” grumbled Ivan. Not one of his better choices but not bad in the moment.

Rasheen handed me a set of car keys. “The big man wants you at the Hangar a.s.a.p. Can’t risk a military helo or regular DMS transport. They got every news helicopter in North America up there, and you wouldn’t believe the crowds we’re drawing. You’ll have to go out in ones and twos. Get in your vehicles and get out of here nice and slow. Don’t draw attention.”

“What about my dog?” I asked.

“Big Fuzz is already at the Hangar.”

“What about us?” asked Noah Fallon. He and the other newbies, Montana Parker and Duncan MacDougall, stood together in a kind of defensive cluster. “Are we supposed to go to the Hangar or what?”

The logistics man turned to them. “That depends,” he said. “Y’all are new, right? Just signed on?”

They nodded.

“But you signed on? You rolled out with Captain Ledger?”

A pause, then another nod.

“Then what do you think you’re supposed to do?”

The rest of us gave them a few moments to work it out. It was Montana who answered. “I guess we get our asses back to the Hangar and circle the wagons.”

“Hooah,” said Rasheen.

The rest of Echo Team said it, too.

With the goggles and masks off I could see their faces. After several days of training with them I could tell you everything about their service histories and combat capabilities, but I had no idea who they were.

Still strangers.

And yet not so, because we had just shared an event together that connected us in ways no one else could possibly share. This massacre and the media firestorm that it had ignited were ours. We were the family that lived on that plot of land in that dark country.

It was an odd connection, like passengers on a crashed airliner working diligently side-by-side to pull total strangers out of the debris. Or folks who might otherwise pass on the street without even a nod to the existence or humanity of the other suddenly striving together to save the injured after a bomb goes off.

I hoped I would get to know them, to have them become fully rounded people in my mind instead of ciphers, though part of me resisted that thought. Some cops and soldiers never form close connections, even to someone they’ve gone into battle with or kicked in the door with at a gangbangers’ clubhouse. They despise the attachment, the connection to a human personality, because of all the potential for grief, for loss, for personal hurt. They think it’s better to keep their own emotional plugs pulled than to risk sticking their fingers into the fan blades. Maybe that’s a better way, a safe and sane form of professional detachment.

But I’ve never played it safe and no one has ever accused me of being sane.

Chapter Sixty-two

I took Montana Parker with me. I drove; she road shotgun. She sat so far from me that she was crammed against the passenger door.

Traffic was almost totally snarled. While we inched along I tapped my earbud and surprised myself by getting Church. I gave him my location and ETA.

“Where do we stand right now?” I asked. “How much shit is hitting the fan?”

“The intensity varies but we haven’t caught any breaks today,” he said. “Circe estimates that the video is having exactly the effect Mother Night intended. The world press is galvanized and public outcry hasn’t been this intense since the planes hit the towers. Every reporter with an audience has begun a personal witch hunt, and that is being reflected within the government. Not merely party polarization, but even within the president’s party a lot of people are distancing themselves from him in case he is complicit in some illegal act.”

“He isn’t.”

“No, but considering how many levels of secrecy are involved, including those which both charter and protect the DMS, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for the president to come clean to the American people. Virtually anything he could say would either endanger or substantially weaken Homeland. It could potentially cripple our fight against global terrorism. It’s not unlikely that the DMS will lose its charter and be shut down. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective attack on our nation’s apparatus for counter- and antiterrorism.”

“Is that Mother Night’s endgame?” I asked him.

“Difficult to say. Not everything she’s done appears to serve that goal, but we don’t yet know the scope of her plan. We are rich in suppositions but wanting in facts.”

“Meaning that we have nothing.”

“Deliberate and well-crafted obfuscation is clearly part of her agenda.”

“Meaning,” I repeated, “that we have nothing.”

“As you say.”

“Is she a she or is she a them?”

“I asked Dr. Sanchez to speculate on that earlier today. It’s his considered opinion that Mother Night is an individual who is using stand-ins for certain high-risk activities. He says it fits with a certain kind of megalomaniacal personality subtype.”

“Sounds like Rudy.”

“However, it’s clear that she fronts a large organization,” added Church.

“Of what?” I asked. “Is she the poster child for National Anarchy Day?”

“Remains to be seen,” said Church. “Dr. Sanchez has some doubts as to whether this actually is anarchy, and I agree with him.”

“Why?”

“He’ll discuss that with you when you get here,” said Church.

“Are we anywhere on the text messages?”

“No, although it’s interesting that only you and Colonel Riggs are receiving them. Circe and Dr. Sanchez are working on ways to attach specific meaning to that.”

“We’re the cool kids in class.”

“You are of a kind,” said Church, but he didn’t explain. “Bug is working on some things and believes he might be able to crack the block on the tracebacks. In the meantime we have a few other things to cover first.”

“Hit me.”

I was aware that Montana was watching me like a hawk. She had an earbud in but she wasn’t on the same channel as my conversation with Church; she had only my side of things. Fine for now.

Church said, “Vice President Collins is among those who have distanced himself from the president since the video went live.”

“What a guy. I’d hate to be next to him on a sinking ship. Pretty sure he wouldn’t want to share the lifeboat.”

“It’s unlikely,” conceded Church. “He hasn’t gone public with anything, but he made some challenging remarks in the Oval Office in front of the senior staff members. Word has already begun leaking.”

“So much for top secret.”

Church made a small sound that might have been a laugh. “The Speaker of the House and several other key members of Congress have begun demanding information about the team shown in that video. Some of them unofficially know about the DMS but they are reluctant to reveal that knowledge until they sort out how it might reflect on them. That buys us a little time.”

“Which is all well and good, but how close are we to knowing anything at all about Mother Night?”

“I wish I could say that we were close to putting her in the crosshairs, but we are no closer now than we were when she first surfaced in April.”

“That’s not making me feel good. How much more has to blow up in our face before we can put a name at the top of our hate list?”

“We are working on it, Captain. If there’s a method of discovery you know about that you feel we’ve missed, I am all ears.”

“Yeah, sorry. Just feeling a bit frustrated.”

“Is that all you’re feeling?” he asked, and I nearly snapped at him before I realized what he was asking. I took a moment then said, “It was a bad scene down there.”

“I imagine it was.”

With most people a comment like that is lip service. Not with Church. I don’t know much about his history, but from what I’ve been able to put together he’s waded through more blood and fire than I’ve ever imagined.

“You had three new members on the team today,” he said, and for a moment I had an itchy feeling like he could see me and Montana in that car. But I dismissed it, sure that Rasheen or someone else told him who drove out with whom. In either case he knew that I wasn’t alone and was feeding me a cue. So I took it.

“Echo Team performed superbly,” I said, but I made sure I wasn’t looking at Montana as I did so. “Everyone did their jobs.”

“Any casualties?”

I knew Church well enough to know that he wasn’t asking about KIA or physical injuries.

“Unknown but I don’t think so,” I said. “A lot will depend on how things play out today. I would hate to see anyone’s name surface in either a news report or in congressional testimony.”

“You have my word on that, Captain,” he said. It was a hell of a promise to make, but then again, I’d like to see the son of a bitch who could force or bully information out of Church. On his weakest days Church scares the cat piss out of me.

The line went dead.

The traffic moved at a glacial pace. Montana kept staring at me. It felt like a couple of lasers burning on the side of my face. I let that slide for a few blocks.

Finally I said, “It’ll be okay.”

“Really?” It came out sharp and sarcastic. In any other circumstances it would have been insubordinate, but let’s face it, we were miles past that kind of policy.

“No,” I said, “actually I don’t know how this is going to play out.”

She stared at me, appalled. “Then why did you say that?”

“Had to say something.”

She turned away so I wouldn’t see her mouth the word fuck. Or maybe it was fucker. Could have been that.

“It’s okay if you want to call me an asshole.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, then added, “Sir.”

I had to grin. “Lose the ‘sir’ bullshit. We don’t use it in the DMS and I don’t like it.”

Montana said nothing.

“The first time I met Mr. Church,” I said, coming at her from left field, “he put me in a room with one of those walkers. No gun, no knife, and no clue what I was facing. He gave me a pair of handcuffs and told me to go in and cuff a prisoner.”

I paid attention to the traffic but I could feel her eyes on me. “He didn’t tell you what it was?”

“Nope.”

“Just sent you in there?”

“Yup.”

“Bullshit.”

“God’s honest truth.”

“What happened?”

“I got bitten and turned into a zombie, and now I have my own reality show—Real Zombies of Baltimore,” I said. “What the hell do you think happened?”

“You cuffed him?”

“Actually, I beat the shit out of him and then broke his neck.”

“Bare-handed?”

“I was in the moment.”

“Damn,” she breathed.

We sat in heavy traffic for a while. I debated using my lights, but the street was gridlocked. All that would do was add noise.

After a while she said, “They never told us any of this when we were invited to try out for this gig.”

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they? I mean, how many of you would have showed up if the recruiters said hey, join the DMS and fight zombies, supersoldiers, and vampires.”

She smiled at the word vampires, but then she took a better look at my face and went dead pale. “Oh … come on … don’t even try to tell me that there are vampires…”

“Not the sparkly kind,” I said, “but, yeah, vampires.”

I told her about the Upierczy, the Red Knights. Then I told her about some of the other things Echo Team had come up against. Several different kinds of enhanced supersoldiers, including a group of men given gene therapy with insect DNA that resulted in a kind of freakism that still gives me nightmares. All of those soldiers are, I hope, dead. I told her about the Berserkers and what they did to Shockwave Team this morning. Her face went dead pale under her tan.

“Can we do that?” she demanded. “I mean, can science really go that far?”

“Science is all about pushing back boundaries. If you’re willing to sidestep the restrictions about testing on human beings, or disregard all safety precautions, then it’s possible to make huge jumps forward.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Pretty much why we call them the ‘bad guys.’”

She thought about that as I shifted into a lane that had started to move. “What about us? Do we do that kind of thing? Off the radar, I mean?”

I sighed. “I wish I could say that we don’t, but that would be a lie. But here’s the thing … the DMS doesn’t approve of it. Mr. Church doesn’t approve of it. He has a bit of a hard-on for people who misuse science like that. That’s why he hires shooters like us.”

“How can he do that if some of this is government-sanctioned?”

“First off, a lot of what goes on inside the government isn’t sanctioned. There are levels and levels of secret research going on funded by black-budget dollars. We’re talking about stuff the president never hears about. All of it’s supposed to be — and pardon me if I throw up while saying this — in the ‘best interests of America.’ Some is. A lot isn’t.”

That’s when I told her about what happened last year with Majestic Three, the T-craft, and the general feeling it left us that we are definitely not alone in this big ol’ universe. Even then, recounting the details of that investigation, I felt like it was something that I’d seen in a science-fiction movie rather than a series of events I’d lived through. It had taken a hell of a lot of effort to keep the main details off the public radar and to find acceptable explanations for those events that played out where everyone could see them.

Montana said nothing for quite a while as we inched through another traffic snarl. When I glanced at her I could see that she was sweating. She kept shaking her head.

“It’s a lot to process,” I said. “I wish there was a better way to do this than to dump it on you.”

“No,” she said. “No.” I waited to find out what no meant in this context. Eventually she said, “All this is going on all the time? The DMS is fighting this kind of war all the time?”

“All the time.”

“Alone?”

“Mostly,” I said. “But we have a few friends. There’s Barrier in the U.K. They were actually the first group like ours. Church helped build that and used its success to sell the idea to Congress here. And there’s Arklight. You’d like them. A bunch of totally bad-ass women warriors.”

“Are you saying that because I’m a woman?” she asked sharply.

“Yes, I am. You have a problem with that?”

“I … guess not.”

“Good. You might get to meet them. They were in on a part of this.” I told her about the stuff in Poland and Lithuania. “One of their operators is in New York right now. Combat call sign is Violin. She’s top of the line.”

A hole appeared and I steered through it. Soon we were away from the congestion that was turning that part of Brooklyn into a parking lot for rubberneckers. Above us the thrum of news agency helicopters was constant.

Montana had gone into her own head and seemed content to stay there while she worked some things out. That was fine. I put the radio on and listened to the news. The story of the Subway Massacre, as it was now being called, dominated everything. No one knew who the soldiers in black were, but on the news we were being labeled “monsters.”

I’m not sure if I objected.

You see, there are really three people living in my head. They are the result of a psyche that was fractured when I was fourteen. A group of older teens trapped my girlfriend, Helen, and me in a deserted place. They stomped me almost to death and then, while I lay there, dying and unable to help, they destroyed Helen. We both survived the day and later, after surgeries and rehab, we went back into the world; but in a lot of important ways we were only pretending to be alive. I found that my mind began splitting off into separate parts, and it was only through intensive therapy that I found my footing again. Later, when I met Rudy Sanchez, he helped me pare away the inner voices until only three remained, and those three became more or less stable. They didn’t go away, though, and I’ve learned to accept that my life is always going to be shared among the Civilized Man, the Cop, and the Warrior.

The Civilized Man is closest to who I might have been if life had been kinder. He is the idealist, the humanist, the optimist. He also gets his ass comprehensively kicked every time I go to work. The Cop is pretty much my central personality. He’s balanced, astute, precise, and cold in a useful, detail-oriented way. He’s the puzzle-solver, the investigator, and, in many ways, the protector.

The other aspect is the Warrior, or as he prefers to be known, the Killer. That’s the part of me who was truly born on that awful day when Helen screamed and I bled and innocence died. The Warrior is always vigilant, always ready to go hunting in the jungles of my life, always aching to bring terrible harm to those who in any essential way resemble the people who destroyed Helen’s life and changed mine. That part of me grieves most for Helen, because he could not save her when she went looking for a permanent way out of her personal darkness — and found it.

As I drove back to the Hangar, the Civilized Man was too numb to comprehend the enormity of what was going on. The Cop kept trying to make sense of something that refused to be understood. The Warrior wanted to find Mother Night and everyone who worked for her or with her, and he wanted to do red, wet things to all of them. As punishment for bombs and murders, and — I have to admit it — for putting me in that subway tunnel with the wrong people walking into my spray of bullets.

I—we—drove on, thinking some of the darkest thoughts I have ever had.

Chapter Sixty-three

A priest and a rabbi walked into a bar.

The priest was a tall man with lots of red hair and intensely blue eyes. The rabbi was shorter and dark, with intensely black hair and blue eyes. Their eyes were the exact shade of blue. An improbable electric blue with a metallic glitter.

The bar was packed with a Sunday holiday-weekend crowd and a five-piece band was playing down-and-dirty swamp blues. In what little space was available more than fifty people were dancing. Some well, some not, all happily. The priest and the rabbi stopped at the edge of the dance floor. They each carried a bulging plastic shopping bag on which INTERFAITH MINISTRIES was printed in a blue that matched the eyes of the two clerics. The bags were heavy and the men carried them with some effort.

Some of the crowd — those that noticed the two men — reacted in a variety of ways. Some gave them sober nods. Some raised glasses to them. A few avoided eye contact with one or the other and shifted away to be outside of whatever implied field of guilt emanated from the men of the cloth. One very drunk woman curtsied to them with all of the elaborate grace of a tipsy lady of the court.

The priest and the rabbi smiled at her. They smiled at everyone.

They smiled and smiled and smiled.

A waitress came up to them, approaching with a nervous and tentative smile.

“Um, can I get you a table or…?” Her words faltered as she noticed their eyes. Working in a bar, she’d seen a thousand kinds of false contact lenses, everything from bright green lenses on ordinary brown eyes to Marilyn Manson glaucoma chic to slit-pupiled cat’s eyes. She’d even seen eyes as metallic and blue as those of the priest and rabbi. But she had never seen novelty contacts on a priest or, for that matter, a rabbi. It was a kind of freaky that wasn’t funny and wasn’t cool, and wasn’t even nerdy comical cool. What it was, was weird.

It was a funny day to be weird.

That’s how she saw it.

What with all that was going on in Pennsylvania and Kentucky and New York. The day had enough freakiness in it already. It was probably why so many people were out getting hammered. Not merely drinking, but guzzling the stuff.

She tried on a smile, hoping that it would somehow let her in on the joke.

But their smiles were bigger and brighter and totally …

Well … weird was the word that stuck in her head.

Another word occurred to her, too.

Those smiles were wrong.

The rabbi opened his big shopping bag and for a moment the waitress thought he was reaching for a gun. The news reports were still running through her head.

But then she saw what the rabbi had.

It was a water balloon. Bright red. With a happy face on it. He showed it to her and his grin widened.

Her smile flickered on again, though uncertainty kept it at a low wattage. She thought she understood what was happening.

These guys weren’t real. They weren’t a priest or a rabbi. No way. They were a little too hunky anyway. What with the contacts and the water balloons … this was some kind of college stunt. A frat thing. These were a couple of guys from the University of Tennessee. And, oh God, they had two bags filled with water balloons. They were going to throw them and get everyone wet and then get their asses kicked and there would be a big fight and the cops would come and … and … The waitress’s mind raced on and on at warp speed, working it out all the way to the point where she was out of work because the place was closed by the police and there were lawsuits from injured customers.

“Sir,” she said, stepping close to the rabbi to make sure he heard her over the band’s cover of “Down on the Bayou,” “you can’t—”

And the rabbi hurled the water balloon high over her head. It struck the whirling blades of one of the bar’s six ceiling fans and exploded, showering the dance floor with water.

There were shouts and screams.

And laughter.

None of the laughter was from the people who were spattered with water. But there was a lot of it from the people seated and standing around the dance floor.

The priest set his bag down and removed two more balloons. A yellow one and a blue one.

“Here!” he said brightly, handing them to a pair of brawny college jocks in UT shirts. The jocks looked at the balloons, at the priest, at each other, then they grinned and hurled the balloons, which burst against the ceiling and rained clear water onto the crowd. The crowd yelled and shouted, and some of them laughed.

The waitress was yelling, but the rabbi ignored her as he pulled another balloon out of the bag and hurled it at a different ceiling fan. The priest handed out more balloons.

That’s how it started.

In seconds the whole place was wild.

Water balloons were flying everywhere. The waitress was shrieking now, but no one was paying attention to her. Bouncers were trying to fight their way through the press. The people were getting into it. Water balloons hit women and burst without doing harm, but the effect was an impromptu wet T-shirt show.

It spiraled upward into a massive prank that toppled off the ledge of order into a loud, laughing chaos.

Until the screaming started.

It came from one of the dancers who’d been splashed by the first balloon. She wiped water from her eyes but her fingers came away red. Bright, bright red.

The man she had been dancing with stared at her in white-faced horror.

Except that his face was white only where it wasn’t red.

They stared at each other, caught in a fragment of reality that was chipped off the craziness of what was going on. Blood ran from their eyes and noses and ears. When they screamed they sprayed blood at each other. Blood darkened their clothes as it ran from every opening in their bodies.

The people nearest them screamed, too. Not because of what was happening to that couple, but because it was happening to them. To everyone.

Everyone.

The laughter was gone, replaced by shouts and screams.

Some of the people bolted for the door as if they could flee what was already happening to them. However, as they crashed against the double doors they rebounded. Someone had looped a heavy chain through the wrought-iron handles set in the big wooden doors. The rear door was blocked by a Jeep that had been backed up against it. No one was getting out. Bloody fists pounded on the doors.

When the two jocks from UT grabbed a table and tried to heft it through a window, the rabbi drew a pistol and shot them both. The priest took a Glock from under his vestments and began firing indiscriminately into the crowd.

The priest and the rabbi were both bleeding from every orifice, every pore. They used their last two bullets on themselves, tucking the hot barrels under their chins and blowing off the tops of their heads.

Dying patrons collapsed slowly onto the floor as their tissues melted and ruptured. Blood boiled out through their pores. They vomited it onto one another, onto the floor, onto themselves.

In the distance the first sirens wailed, but no one in the tavern could hear them. And never would.

In all the panic, no one noticed the small boxes affixed to the walls, high up near the ceiling. The devices had been planted in the middle of the night and were hidden among decorations and beer posters. Six tiny red eyes watched the death below. The video feed from the cameras was compiled into a single streaming signal, at the bottom of which was a continuous text crawl. It read: Quick onset Bundibugyo ebolavirus suspended in distilled water. Bidding starts at fifty million.

Chapter Sixty-four

“Boss,” said Bug from the view screen, “I think I have something.”

Church had a phone to his ear and others lighting up on his desk. Into the phone he said, “Excuse me for a moment, Mr. President.” He muted the call. “What is it?”

“The forensics team just called. They’ve been collecting evidence at the apartments of two of the shooters from the cyber café. At both locations they found portable game consoles. Like Gameboys, but off-market stuff. A runner just brought them in to me. They’re loaded with games, and—”

“Cut to it, Bug,” snapped Church. “What have you found?”

“The most recent game played is Burn to Shine. It’s a massive program and heavily password-protected. Here’s the kicker, though. MindReader is having trouble hacking it.”

“Keep on it and keep me posted.”

“No, listen, boss, this is scaring the crap out of me.”

“Why?”

“The reason MindReader is having trouble cracking it is because it’s fighting back exactly the way MindReader would. I think Mother Night has our technology.”

Chapter Sixty-five

We reached the Hangar without incident. Bunny, Ivan, and Noah were already there; the others would arrive soon. Ghost was there and he let out a series of furious barks as he came bounding over to me. I couldn’t tell whether the barks were because he was happy to see me or to scold me for leaving him behind. I didn’t care, either. I dropped to my knees and gathered the fur monster into my arms. He licked my face with enough enthusiasm to remove a layer of skin. Then he began nosing at my pockets, but I was wearing borrowed clothes.

Brick came to my rescue. He was almost as big as Bunny and looked like the actor Ving Rhames except for some shrapnel scars on his face and a high-tech artificial leg. He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet then gave me an up-and-down appraisal. “Damn, son, normally a guy has to get mugged in an alley to look as bad as you.”

“Getting mugged would be a step up for my day, Gunny.”

“Yeah, so I hear.” He clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to loosen some fillings. “The big man is in the big conference room.”

“We anywhere yet?”

“We are exactly between a rock and a hard place.”

“Ain’t that just fucking peachy?” I grumbled.

I left Montana with my team and headed to the conference rooms, which were on the next level down. On the way I got a phone call and stepped into an alcove to take it. Junie.

“Hey, beautiful,” I said. “We have to make this fast.”

“Are you okay?”

“Define okay.”

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

I had cuts and scrapes all over my body from the flying glass at the Surf Shop, and I had a gaping wound in my soul from the subway. “Nothing a couple of Band-Aids and a change of career wouldn’t fix.”

“Oh, Joe,” she said, breathing it out with a lot of pent-up frustration and concern. There was an old saying about how the people who sit at home and wait are also serving. But it goes deeper than that. They’re also taking fire in their own way, and they’re being injured as surely as if shrapnel pierced their flesh. It is a phenomenon as old as war and as horrible as all the pain in the world. Nothing that I could say could make it right because “right” had so little to do with my world.

“I will come home to you,” I told her. And I meant it.

“You have to.”

“I will,” I swore. “In the meantime, I have a couple waiting in the lobby at FreeTech. Things are getting really weird, so I want you to go with them back to your hotel. Stay there until this is over.”

“Violin’s here. I’m quite safe—”

“Please,” I said.

She said, “Yes. Okay.” A reluctant acquiescence, but enough to keep me from having a heart attack. We hung up a few seconds later and I stood there for a bit, allowing myself to dwell in the oasis of understanding that came from knowing there is a world beyond the one in which I generally traveled. There were clearer skies out there somewhere, and suns that did not shine on spent bullet casings and spilled blood.

I leaned back against the wall, looked up at the ceiling as if I could see those unpolluted skies.

“Junie,” I said.

Like a talisman.

Like a lifeline.

And then I pushed off the wall and went to find Church.

Chapter Sixty-six

Donald Crisp sat across a food-laden table from Amanda Shockley and wondered if he was going to get anything this afternoon. A kiss? Sure, she kissed him every time they went out for food. Once she even let him get a little grabby. But when he tried to go from outside her tight-fitting blouse to under it, the flag went down on the play. Five times now he’d dropped serious cash on her and so far he’d gotten tongue action and maybe felt a nipple under her padded bra, but wasn’t sure.

He was losing confidence in his own charm.

Back in high school it was different. He was always smooth and had that brooding man-of-mystery thing because he was the new kid in town. He milked that for a lot of ass. Even got a BJ from a teaching assistant, and for a while that was a personal highlight. In college, ass was easy. There was a lot of it and everyone seemed to want to prove that they were consenting adults — emphasis on the adult part, so they consented a whole damn lot.

After college, though, it all slowed down. He went into insurance and discovered that there was nothing less sexy than insurance. There were no stud insurance reps. Stud real estate guys, sure; Donald’s best friend, Chico, sold condos and got more ass than a public toilet. It drove Donald nuts.

When he did score, he had to work for it.

Like with Amanda. She was a junior account executive. Half Swedish and half something else that gave her a permanent tan, black hair streaked with brown, and a body that would not let him have a moment’s peace. The ass-kicker was that she didn’t seem to give much of a hot shit that she was built. She dressed in expensive clothes, but the stuff she chose made her look like an upscale librarian. On the hot side of dowdy. Never anything low-cut, but she did like things tight.

Over the last few weeks, Donald had asked Amanda out for dinner, drinks, and music, followed by a romantic stroll along the River Walk and then …

And then it was some kissing, a little touch, and he was watching her walk to her doorway while he sat in the car with a restless trouser lobster.

Today, maybe, things would go a different way.

Today, maybe, he’d get to explore the undiscovered country of Amanda Shockley’s upper torso, sans blouse and Wonder Bra.

They’d worked their way through a spicy samosa and into chicken tikka masala, with naan and a bottle of really expensive wine. He sprang for a bottle of Gewürztraminer, a dry aromatic wine with a tangerine and white peach nose, and lychee flavor. Donald knew his wines and this one was perfect for Indian food. He pretended not to see how much the fucking restaurant charged for it, though, almost three times what he would have paid at a liquor store, but if it loosened some of those buttons and undid the hooks on her bra, then it was worth it.

“Let me fill your glass,” he said, smiling what he knew was his best smile, the one that got him so much ass in high school.

“Just half a glass,” said Amanda. “I’m already feeling it.”

He poured her a full glass.

They smiled as they clinked and her eyes met his in what Donald was absolutely sure was “the moment.” That point of connection when the internal conversation switches from trivialities to okay-let’s-do-this. Her smile changed, too. He’d seen that before, too. The lips relaxed in some indefinable way, becoming softer, fuller, less defensive and more inviting.

I’m so getting laid today, he thought.

And then her eyes slid away and looked past him. Too soon, too soon, he thought.

Her expression immediately changed again. Soft mouth parting into an O of surprise, eyes clouding with confusion, a narrow vertical line forming between her brows.

“Is something wrong?” he asked quickly, beginning to turn, beginning to look.

He heard it before he saw it.

It was a sound that did not belong in an Indian restaurant. Or on the River Walk. Or anywhere in San Antonio.

It was a roar.

Not like a big cat. Donald had heard cougars roar, and this was lower, deeper, more powerful than that. This was like the gorillas he’d seen when he visited the zoo in Philadelphia.

But the San Antonio Zoo didn’t have gorillas.

All of this flashed through his head in the time it took to twist around in his seat and look.

There were no gorillas there, of course. This was a restaurant. That would be silly.

But the man who stood in the doorway looked kind of like an ape. Massive sloping shoulders, huge chest and arms, thick black hair standing stiff and wiry on his head. And there was something clearly simian about his face. It was very … well, apelike.

The man wore a black tank top with a symbol printed on it that Donald didn’t know. A capital letter A surrounded by a circle. A for what? What team was that? Was it a school? He didn’t know.

Donald’s thoughts were falling all over one another, trying to find an exit from confusion into understanding. Everyone in the restaurant sat in shocked stillness, each of them struggling to make sense of it, too.

Two other people stood behind the ape-looking man in the tank top. A couple of girls. Chinese or something, Donald couldn’t tell. They each held a small portable video recorder.

The big man opened his mouth and roared again.

The sound was so ridiculously loud that it shook the whole place. And it jolted the diners out of their shocked silence. Some of the women screamed. Some of the men cried out in surprise.

One man got to his feet. He was big, too, though well dressed in a very expensive summer-weight suit. Donald thought the man had the air of someone who was used to handling things. Tough-looking.

“Okay, pal,” said the man, “time to dial it down and hit the road.”

The guy in the tank top said nothing. He smiled, though, and to Donald that smile was every bit as scary as that freaking roar.

Then the ape-guy swung a punch at the diner in the summer suit. Donald saw the look of surprise on the diner’s face, but also saw him whip an arm up to block the punch. The incoming blow hit the blocking arm — and bashed it aside like it was nothing. The punch struck the diner on the side of the head. Even from twenty feet away Donald heard the wet-sharp sounds of bones breaking inside the diner’s arm and head. The diner’s head jerked sideways and lay almost flat on his opposite shoulder; it stayed there as the man’s knees suddenly buckled and he fell like a bag of disconnected pieces onto his table. The man’s date screamed.

Everyone screamed.

The ape-man reached out and grabbed the screaming date by the throat, tore her out of her seat, lifted her above his head, and threw her across the room.

The last thing Donald saw was the screaming, flailing, flying woman slam into Amanda Shockley with so much force that another wet-sharp crack filled the air.

Then a shadow fell across Donald.

He never saw the hands that grabbed him.

All he saw was Amanda falling, falling, her lovely eyes rolling up, her soft lips open.

And then the world dissolved into red and black and then nothing.

Three men who surviving witnesses later described as “looking like gorillas” got out of a Humvee that had been driven all the way up to the front doors of the Morro Bay Aquarium. A fund-raiser was under way to raise money and awareness of sea lion conservation. A trio played light jazz, and two hundred people with checkbooks and an interest in conservation mingled, drank, ate little crab puffs, and chatted.

Until the three men showed up.

They piled out of their Humvee and without a moment’s pause barged through the doors and attacked the crowd. They did not have guns or knives. They used no conventional weapons at all. Instead they picked up people and used them like clubs to batter anyone they could hit. They tore arms and legs out of their sockets — a feat the medical examiner would later argue in court as a physical impossibility — and beat people to death with them. This was refuted, of course, by video footage to the contrary. The exact source of the footage was never determined.

Of the two hundred people at the fund-raiser, one hundred and sixty-one escaped. The others, including all three musicians and seven wait staff, did not.

Chapter Sixty-seven

Rudy intercepted me as I approached the conference room. He shook my hand and held it as he asked, “How are you, Joe?”

“Shaken, not stirred,” I said.

“This isn’t a time for jokes.”

“No,” I said and sighed. “It really isn’t. But I got nothing else right now.”

He studied me with his one dark eye. “No, don’t do that. Tell me how you are.”

My instinct was to bark at him like a stray dog and tell him this wasn’t the time or place for a therapy session. But I understood where he was coming from. He was the DMS house shrink and I was a senior operator. One who had just come back from two gunfights and might have to do more violence tonight or sometime too damn soon. So I took a breath and nodded.

“I’m halfway to being freaked out,” I said quietly. “There’s enough adrenaline in my bloodstream to launch a space shuttle, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to sleep again. All I can see are the faces of ordinary people as I gun them down — women and children, old people, civilians with no part in this.”

“You do know that—”

“Yes,” I interrupted, “I know that they were infected, that they were already dead. I know that, Rude, and you know how much that helps? It helps about as much as a fresh can of fuck you.”

“Take it easy, Joe.”

“Don’t tell me to—”

He placed a hand on my chest. It was such an oddly intimate a thing to do that it snapped the tether that was pulling me toward rage. He stood there, fingers splayed, palm flat, one eye fixed on mine. And I heard it then, like an audio playback. There was a note of genuine panic in my voice. Not quite hysterical but close enough to feel the heat.

I closed my eyes and nodded. Rudy removed his hand.

“It must have been dreadful down there,” he said quietly.

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“I imagine so. Have you spoken with the others on your team?”

“We weren’t feeling all that chatty.”

“Joe, look at me,” he said, and I opened my eyes. There was compassion in his expression, but also something harder, sterner. “Have you, Captain Ledger, senior DMS field commander, spoken with the members of your team?”

I sighed. “Fuck.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had called me on this, on being so wrapped up in my own reaction to the horrors of the war fought by the DMS that I forgot that this wasn’t a solo drama. Everyone was feeling it, being changed by it. I’d even thought about that fact while we ran, but I’d stumbled right past the moment where leadership — real leadership — might have made lasting difference to my team. Especially to the three newbies.

“I’m an asshole.”

Rudy shook his head. “We’re all experiencing shock. When you have a chance, do what you know you have to do to ameliorate this. As I will when this is over. Like most things, Cowboy, psychological survival is as much an inexact science as it is a work in progress.”

“I will,” I promised. “And when we have time I’m going to give you full permission to crack my head open and start swatting flies.”

Aunt Sallie seemed to materialize out of nowhere. “When you two fellows are done with your circle jerk, would you mind joining us for the briefing?”

With that she blew past and entered the big conference room.

Rudy smiled and smoothed his mustache. “What a charming woman. Haven’t I said it a hundred times?”

“Yeah,” I said, “she’s a peach.”

But before we followed her I asked, “Rudy — you’ve been here all day. Can you tell me what’s going on? Is this all Mother Night? If so — what does it mean?”

He shook his head. “We’ve been wrestling with that all day. Nearly everything that’s happened indicates that these events are connected, but no one has been able to establish a pattern. Even MindReader hasn’t come up with a clear picture and that’s what it was designed to do, look for patterns.”

“Well, Mother Night’s rant on the Net this morning seemed to be about anarchy…”

“Seemed to be, yes,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? If there’s no pattern then wouldn’t that pretty much fall under the heading of anarchy? From what Nikki told me on the way over here, that A and O anarchy symbol is popping up all over the place. Maybe we can’t find a pattern because there isn’t one to find.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “but the fact that she seems so organized argues against the anarchy model.”

“Yeah, fair enough, Rude, I’ve been wondering about that since the jump. So, what label do we put on her?”

“Definitively?” mused Rudy. “I really wouldn’t want to commit to anything. But on the level of intuition, assumption and the kind of paranoid cynicism I’ve been cultivating since we joined the DMS…?”

“If not anarchist, how does the label ‘terrorist’ fit?”

He gave another shake of his head. “That’s too easy and too broad. Knowing Circe has taught me a lot about how inexact a word that is. We’ve come to use it as a blanket term in much the same way that during the Vietnam War we called the indigenous people ‘gooks’ and in Somalia everyone was a ‘skinny.’ They are dehumanizing and demonizing labels that help to engender an aggressive-responsive attitude, but there is no genuine political insight in their use. To our enemies in al-Qaeda we are terrorists. Except in instances of psychopathy, terrorism is a biased view of a tactic that is implemented to achieve an end.”

“Noted. So, what does that make Mother Night?”

“I don’t know. To determine what she is requires that we know something about her, and I confess, Joe, that I don’t. Is she an extremist prosecuting an agenda? If so, for which political party, nation, religion, or faction? Is she a criminal, or part of a criminal empire? Is she a charismatic psychopath or a cult leader? We simply don’t know.”

“Got to be political,” I said. “We know about her connections with the cyberhackers from China, Iran, and North Korea.”

“We know that she was interacting with a cell, Joe, and the members of the cell were from those countries. However, I spoke to Mr. Church about this at length today and he said that neither the State Department nor the CIA have been able to definitively connect those nine men in Arlington with active operations in their native countries. And remember, those nations denied involvement in their actions.”

“Which they would.”

“Certainly, but that might just as easily suggest that Mother Night knows and understands the political process, the habit of denial, the subtleties of communication through diplomatic channels…”

“If that’s the case, Rude,” I said, “she’d have to be really well versed in behind-the-scenes politics, and I’m not talking about what she could crib from old DVDs of The West Wing.”

“I don’t think we can discount that possibility, Cowboy. Since this whole thing began I’ve developed quite an appreciation of her intelligence.”

“You said there were two reasons you didn’t buy this as pure anarchy. What’s the other?”

“It’s sideways logic, so you’ll think I’m losing my marbles.”

“That’s a past-tense observation, brother.”

His smile was small and fleeting. “Well, anarchy is by nature a lack of structure, correct? It’s an attempt to separate life from structure and procedure, allowing the infinitely creative potential of chaos to dominate.”

I nodded.

“So why isn’t Mother Night creating chaos?”

“Christ, Rudy, I thought you said you were following the fucking news. The whole country is going ape-shit out there and—”

“Is it? In its strictest philosophic form, anarchy is less about bomb-throwing and abandonment of rules and more about social justice, a breaking down of current corruption in order to allow a new and just system to emerge. In spirit, both the French and American revolutions fit that view. And if there was even a hint of a true political agenda in Mother Night’s actions, I might buy that that’s what we’re seeing. An attack on a dystopic political landscape. However, things as they are today appear to fit the more popular interpretation of anarchy as the absence of government, a state of lawlessness, a society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without a governing body. And yet Mother Night is a leader figure, and to do the things she’s accomplished necessitates a well-formed and well-run organization. In order to maintain the kind of secrecy needed to have avoided a MindReader search or detection by the CIA, her organization must be tightly administrated, and the members need to follow precise sets of rules. That is not anarchy, Joe. That’s not chaos.”

“So … what is it?”

But before he could answer, Aunt Sallie leaned her head and shoulders out of the conference room doorway. “Now!” she growled.

Chapter Sixty-eight

Junie Flynn and the other members of her board did no work at all on matters pertaining to their new organization. Instead they sat around the conference table gaping at the spectacle unfolding on the big-screen TV.

So much death. So much pain.

And Joe was out there, in the middle of it.

At one point, Violin got up, walked around the table, took a fistful of Toys’s shirt, and hauled the young man out of his chair. She then raised him completely off the floor with one hand, something Junie didn’t think even Joe could do.

“Convince me that this isn’t the Seven Kings,” said Violin in a voice filled with quiet menace and frank threat.

“I–I—”

Junie launched herself from her chair and grabbed Violin’s arm. She tried to pull Toys from the woman’s grip but it was like attempting to unlock a steel trap. Violin flicked a single, dismissive glance at Junie.

“Don’t,” she said.

Violin made a sound of deep annoyance and thrust Toys back into his chair, where he landed in a tangled and disheveled heap. Toys sprawled there, making no attempt to straighten his clothes.

Very slowly and clearly he said, “I am not with the Seven Kings. I haven’t been for years. I don’t know who is doing this, and if the Kings are involved I don’t know anything about it.”

It barely mollified Violin. “Do not let me discover that this is a lie,” she warned.

“I will definitely make a note of that. And if it turns out I’m lying, you have my blessing to rip out my fucking lungs. Fair enough?” said Toys. He sat straight, jerked his shirt into some order, and turned away from her. He did not ask for an apology.

Violin sneered at him and turned back to the television. There was a knock on the door and two men came in without waiting for a reply. Junie recognized them as security personnel from the Hangar. Reid and Ashe.

“Ma’am,” said Reid to Junie, “we’re here to escort you to your hotel.”

Junie turned to Violin. “Joe sent them. Do you … I mean, would you like to join me?”

Chapter Sixty-nine

Sammy Ramirez always thought he’d either end up in Hollywood or end up in prison. He had that kind of life. Two of his brothers were in jail. Ishmael was doing three to five for armed robbery after he used a plastic gun to steal sixty-two dollars and a can of Red Bull from a 7-Eleven in Miami. Jorge was on his second fall for grand theft auto. The sad part of that was, the car he boosted was a piece-of-shit Chevy Suburban. He couldn’t even get respect for having stolen an Escalade. A Suburban. Jesus.

Sammy had done a few small crimes, but always stupid little things. He sold some weed in high school. He shoplifted a cell phone charger from a strip-mall CVS. Like that. Peer pressure from his brothers or his friends had been involved every time.

It wasn’t who he was, though, and it wasn’t who he wanted to be.

Who he wanted to be was the first major Latin action hero. He had the speed, the reflexes, a little bit of tae kwon do, and the best smile in the neighborhood. He had no trace of an accent and was sure that with a little training and the right breaks, he could be to Latinos what the Rock was to whatever the fuck ethnicity he belonged to.

That was what Sammy thought about every day. He thought about it when he woke up, he thought about it before he went to sleep. He even prayed about it sometimes. And he thought about it all day at work.

Sammy Ramirez, star of his own series. Legal Aliens, a cross-border science fiction thing. Yeah, that would not suck. Or maybe something generic where none of it was based on race. Just on good looks, the ability to kick ass on screen, and charisma. Sammy knew he had bags of charisma.

That’s why the kids loved him so much.

After all, he wasn’t the only one dressed as a cartoon dog here at Disney, but goddamn it, more kids wanted their picture taken with him than any two of the other Goofys combined.

Booyah, motherfucker. That was star power.

Working at Disney was not exactly the most direct route to an action franchise of summer blockbusters, but it was technically acting. Disney called its staff “cast members.” He was working on getting into one of the shows, which was a shortcut to getting an Equity card. That was the plan. Get into Actors’ Equity and then leverage that to get some screen time, enough at least to get a SAG card. That would get him an agent, and an agent could get him some auditions, which would in turn allow him to fire his charisma guns on full auto.

Neither his friends nor his brothers knew he earned his pay as a cartoon dog. Specifically as a mentally challenged cartoon dog dressed in a cowboy outfit. You couldn’t lay that rap on your homies and ever walk it off. They all thought he worked maintenance at Epcot.

Sammy was posing with a bunch of fat little German tourist kids when he spotted the two men in hoodies. They both wore dark hoodies on a hot Florida night in August. Sammy was boiling the pounds off in his Goofy suit, so he knew how hot it was. But he had to; why were these kids in hoodies, with the hoods up? That seemed odd to him.

And they both had backpacks.

Not uncommon in Disney. People walked all day long. A lot of them carried water, souvenirs, and other stuff.

But Sammy knew what was going on today. Everyone did. That’s why all of the off-duty security had been called in.

The guys in the hoodies were drifting along behind a large group of girls dressed in cheerleader costumes. There were always cheerleading contests and events at the park. Had to be fifty, sixty girls in three or four different school colors, all of them laughing. None of them paying attention to the men in the hoodies. The whole group melted into the lines waiting to take photos with him. There were more than a hundred people in line. The park was jammed, even this late, and the costumed staff was working overtime. Fireworks were exploding in the sky. And Sammy did not like those two fuckers in the hoodies.

There was something about them.

Maybe if Sammy had grown up in the richer parts of town he might have looked right through those guys. But he’d grown up hard in Washington Shores. He was used to seeing trouble coming long before it ever got up in his face.

So, when the two men stepped out of line, moved to stand by a trash can near the heaviest part of the crowd, and shrugged out of their backpacks, Sammy knew that something bad was about to happen. The men did it together, smoothly, like it was something they had rehearsed. The men set the packs down and started to turn to walk away.

That’s when Sammy knew for sure. For absolute goddamn sure.

He was running before he knew he was going to do anything. In his huge, ungainly costume and floppy oversized feet, he blew past the startled German kids, shoved a Korean tourist with a video camera out of the way, drove right through the suddenly shrieking gaggle of cheerleaders, and threw himself into a flying tackle that slammed him into the two men. He hooked an arm around each one and drove them forward and down onto the hard concrete. They landed with a muffled thud and yelps of surprise.

Instantly the two men tried to get away.

Not to struggle with him. Not to fight him. Not to demand to know why a cartoon dog had just tackled them. They wanted out of there.

They clawed at the ground to get out from under him.

Sammy wore big, fuzzy gloves, so he had no fists. So he raised an elbow and drove it down as hard as he could between the shoulder blades of one of the men. Sammy was not a big man — only five ten — but he was all muscle. He was lean to a rock hardness from sweating in that suit. And he was madder than he had ever been in his whole life.

The elbow hit with so much force, the first man’s head snapped back and then nodded nose-first into the concrete. The second man twisted under Sammy and simultaneously tried to shove him away and pull something from a pocket. A gun, a knife, Sammy couldn’t tell.

He raised himself up and dropped down full weight on the man, crushing the air from him. Then he elbowed the man’s face into a red mess. The item the guy had been reaching for tumbled to the ground.

Not a gun.

Not a knife.

It was a cell phone.

In a flash of clarity, Sammy understood.

It was like Boston and those other places. He tore off his mask and at the top of his lungs yelled one of those words you are never supposed to yell in a crowded theater, on an airplane, or in a theme park.

“BOMB!”

Sammy heard the screams, felt the tide of panic swirl around him. This was America and most of these kids had been born after 9/11. They understood bombs. Even the tourists from other countries. America didn’t own terrorism; that belonged to everyone everywhere.

They ran.

Sammy didn’t.

The two men, bleeding as bloody as they were, were still game, still struggling. One of them kept reaching for the cell phone.

Later, when the reporters interviewed Sammy about what he did then, his initial answer was “Fuck, man, I just went ape-shit.”

He would be asked to give them a new sound bite. Many hundreds of times.

However, in all fairness, he did go ape-shit. He beat the two men into red pulp. Putting one into a coma, maiming the other. Then he picked the cell phone up and threw it into a pond.

The two backpacks did not blow up.

Bomb squad crews came and took them away. Sammy later learned that there were enough explosives in each to kill dozens. But that wasn’t the worst threat. Mixed in with all the screws and nails and other shrapnel were tens of thousands of tiny pellets filled with ricin. A dose the size of a few grains of table salt can kill an adult human. Each pellet had twice that amount.

In all of Mother Night’s dozens of orchestrated attacks, it was the only one in which no one died.

No one.

All because of a cartoon dog.

Sammy Ramirez did not become the first Latino star of summer blockbusters. Instead Disney cast him as a Jedi in their ongoing series of Star Wars movies. They would later hire actors to play Sammy Ramirez at their theme parks, so kids could get an autograph with him.

Sometimes the good guys actually win.

Chapter Seventy

We met in the big conference room. Church was at the head of the table, Rudy and Circe to his right, Dr. Hu and Aunt Sallie on his left. I grabbed the seat at the other end.

“What’s the good news?” I asked.

“Your optimism is an inspiration to us all,” said Church dryly. “Today’s events are accelerating downhill.”

I sighed.

“There’s no good place to start,” he continued, “but let’s begin with something Bug has worked out. He’s analyzed the video cameras from the subway and several others obtained from other attacks. Even though some are different brands, they’re all of a type and each has received an aftermarket upgrade from Mother Night. Bug was able to determine that the reason we haven’t been able to interrupt the video feeds is that some of the technology being employed is strikingly similar to certain elements of MindReader.”

That had the effect of tossing a flash-bang onto the table. Heads jerked up, eyes bugged out, and if anyone said anything, I was unable to hear or process it.

“How the hell is that possible?” I demanded. “Do we have a leak?”

“Unknown. Bug says the technology is similar, but there are some subtle differences.”

“What differences?” asked Hu. “Our systems are constantly being updated. Can we compare the software in the cameras to versions of ours? If so, we could probably put a date on when it was stolen.”

Church nodded approval of the question. “The software matches ours at two points, both a little over two years ago. Nikki is preparing employee lists from that time and matching them against team members with access to the software.”

“You said that ‘some’ of the technology was ours,” I said. “What’s the rest?”

“That opens up an entirely different can of worms. The cameras have a chip specifically designed to make traces impossible via a random and encrypted rerouting process. That chip was designed specifically to foil MindReader searches.”

Another kick-in-the-teeth moment.

“Wait a goddamned minute,” I said, “we know that chip.”

“Yes, we do,” said Church, tapping crumbs from a vanilla wafer.

“Hugo,” breathed a stricken Circe.

She’d been Hugo Vox’s protégée for years and he’d been like family to her. The revelation that he was a world-class traitor and terrorist damaged something in her. It was like discovering why your beloved uncle Adolf didn’t like your Jewish friends. It left a huge, ugly hole carved in her life. During our battle with Vox and the Seven Kings, he’d stymied us with technology that had been, at the time, impossible to trace. The key to that tech was a certain chip.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Does that mean Vox is a part of this?”

Church nibbled his cookie and stared at nothing for a moment. “Hugo Vox is dead.”

“How do you know that?” asked Rudy. “He was never—”

“Hugo Vox is dead,” repeated Church. “There is no doubt.”

The silence was big and filled with unspoken conversation. I wondered if Church would ever share the details. Probably not.

“Then someone has his science,” said Hu.

Church nodded. “At least as far as the chip goes. It’s reasonable to assume the chip is being used to block all traces of the text messages being received by Colonel Riggs and Captain Ledger.”

“Excuse me,” said Rudy, “but we’ve had Vox’s chip for a while now. Surely we’ve figured out how it works…”

“We have. This new chip has some upgrades, and yes, we’ll figure those out as well. Unfortunately, Bug and his team have been stretched pretty thin with this case. However, I’ve made cracking that chip a priority.”

Hu made a face. At first I thought he was having gas and needed to be burped, but as it turned out he had a thought. “This is going to sound very weird, but there are very few DMS people I know of who had access to MindReader and the Vox chip and who had enough knowledge and technical sophistication to take that science further. Actually, only three people occur to me. Two of them are in this building — Bug and Yoda. And the third is … well … the third is dead.”

“Yes,” said Church, “and isn’t that an interesting line of speculation?”

I held my hand up. “At the risk of being mocked by Dr. Frankenstein, what the hell are you talking about?”

Rudy turned to me. “They’re talking about Artemisia Bliss.”

“Yeah, I got that part. But she is actually dead, right? So why the fuck are we wasting time talking about her?”

“Because,” said Hu with asperity, “we have to be open to the fact that she sold this technology to someone.”

“Ah,” I said. “Okay, putting my dunce cap on and shutting up now.”

Hu actually grinned at me. Maybe the way to his heart was through self-mockery.

“Circe,” said Church, “where do we stand on the subway video?”

“It’s not good,” she admitted. Circe was a beautiful woman with a lovely heart-shaped face framed by intensely black hair that fell in wild curls to her shoulders. Her eyes were so dark a brown they looked black, and in those eyes glittered a steely intelligence. She had advanced degrees in a variety of fields including archaeology, anthropology, theology, psychology, and medicine with a specialty in infectious diseases. But her principal area of expertise was as a world-class expert in counterterrorism and antiterrorism, and specifically in how the terrorist mind works. “The video from the subway has gone global. It’s everywhere, and everyone is reacting to it. In a way, we have to admire the finesse by which Mother Night primed the pump for it. First there was the cyberhacking this morning. That alone was a massive media event, and it dominated the news until the bombs went off. Then public attention was shifted there, with some reporters speculating on a connection.”

“How did they make that connection?” I asked, breaking my self-imposed silence.

“That’s the right question,” said Circe, nodding, “and we’re looking into that. We can’t say for sure if it was because the reporters are cynical and suspicious, or if they speculated on the connection in hopes that there was one — thereby giving them a scoop while insuring that they appeared savvy and insightful—”

“So young to be so jaded,” I murmured. She ignored me, as was appropriate.

“—or if they were in some way tipped off. Because the coverage was so widespread, it’s taxing our resources to try to pin that down.”

I said something like “Hmm.”

She glanced at me. “What?”

“Mother Night seems pretty savvy herself, and she’s clearly using the media as a weapon. But at the same time we have to consider whether she knows how the investigative system works. If she’s the computer genius she appears to be—”

“She is,” said Bug.

“—then she might have counted on investigative agencies targeting the media for deep background checks and thereby allocating resources that might otherwise be useful in hunting her.”

“What else could we do, though?” asked Rudy. “Don’t we have to make those background searches?”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “I’m not saying we’re making a wrong move. What I’m saying is that she may have played a good card and we have to accept it.”

Church nodded. “In light of her other moves, I think that’s a fair assumption.” He nodded to Circe to continue.

“I don’t think Mother Night’s ultimate goal is terrorism,” she said, and held up a silencing hand as we all started to speak. “Hear me out. Rudy and I have been wrangling with this all day. Most of you have heard this already.” She recounted what Rudy had said to me before the meeting regarding the elements of anarchy. “If she was using bombs in order to create chaos then her picks were clumsy and moderately ineffectual. A law library and a martial arts sporting event? Don’t get me wrong, those bombs were devastating and there was terrible loss of life, but this is Labor Day weekend. There are parades, mass gatherings, ball games, concerts. If she’d wanted to rack up a body count to create genuine chaos, she could have picked a thousand more useful targets.”

“So what was the point?” asked Aunt Sallie. “To get the media’s attention? She already had that.”

“No,” said Circe, “I think we can call the hacking phase one, with the goal being to energize the media. Phase two was the bombings, and that effectively brought every law enforcement agency to point. Bombings will do that in post-9/11 America. The way the media covers it and the pervasive buzz of social media only serve to reinforce that conditioning. It’s very Pavlovian.”

“And phase three is the subway?” asked Aunt Sallie.

Circe nodded. “Sure. Phases one and two nicely set up phase three so that the false message conveyed by the altered soundtrack — that the government is using illegal force on ordinary citizens — was something the media helped sell to a willing audience. It’s really very smart. Get the media and everyone in the country watching, then bring all emergency response teams to a state of high alert so that armed cops and soldiers are in the streets in certain places. It doesn’t matter that they’re not in every street, but the sensitized, ratings-hungry media will make it seem that way. Prior to the subway the media rolled footage of SWAT teams, cops, and other emergency responders as part of the message that ‘America is responding to terrorism’; but once that video went out, the message automatically changed to ‘America responds to a threat by using lethal force against its own people.’”

“The logic doesn’t hold,” said Hu.

“It doesn’t have to hold. It has to be big. In media terms it has to dominate the conversation, and right now that is the only conversation.”

I said, “I can see it, Circe, but then I hit a wall at high speed. What’s Mother Night want from all of this? Now that she has everyone’s attention, what’s she selling?”

“Ah,” said Circe, “that’s where I hit a wall, too.”

Rudy said, “If, as we agree, the logic does not hold, then we have to wonder if that is a known variable. In other words, does it need to hold? Mother Night would have to know that this would eventually be picked apart and, to some degree, defused. That would suggest that this is a plot of limited duration, yes?”

We all nodded.

“Then,” concluded Rudy, “if we can predict the time it would take for the story to crumble, then wouldn’t that give us an idea of the timetable for whatever Mother Night’s larger plan is?”

In the thoughtful silence that followed, everyone began nodding, first to themselves as they worked it through according to their own insights, and then to the group.

“That’s very good, doctor,” said Church. “Circe … public perception and reaction is your field. Can you project a timetable?”

She chewed her lip. “With the prevalence of social media everything is faster. Action and reaction. Ballpark guess? I think whatever Mother Night is doing — providing she needs the social and media disruption she’s created as a cover — then I think we have twelve to twenty-four hours to figure it out and stop her. And maybe not even that long.”

That was not good news. It took the clock that was ticking in my mind and bolted it to the wall in front of us. Twelve hours to make sense of the senseless, to solve a puzzle whose shape and meaning was completely unknown to us.

Swell.

Right around the time I wondered if we were doing any damn good at all, like maybe we should turn jurisdiction of this case over to a more competent group — say, the Cub Scouts or a group of mimes — Bug interrupted with a news update.

“What do you have?” asked Church.

“Nothing good.”

“Can I go home?” I asked. Church ignored me.

Bug said, “Our field lab in Virginia finished their preliminary examination of the mercenaries Shockwave ran into this morning. There’s absolutely no doubt about it … they’re Berserkers.”

We’d all been expecting that. Absolutely sucked, though.

“But here’s the kicker,” continued Bug, “we had a molecular biologist and two pathologists examine the bodies, and our field investigators did a load of interviews with family and known associates of the dead Berserkers. And … these guys are new to the whole mutant supersoldier job description. They were all normal eight to ten months ago, but there’s no way they were part of the Berserker team at the Dragon Factory. We’re running background checks on them, and so far we’ve proven that three of them were in the military on overseas deployment during the raid on Dogfish Cay. So … bottom line? Someone’s making new Berserkers.”

Chapter Seventy-one

Violin had accompanied Junie back to the hotel and followed the DMS agents from room to room, making sure that everything was secure. Then, when they were positioned out in the hallway, Violin checked the suite again, this time scanning it with a small electronic device she produced from her bag. Once she determined that the room was truly secure, she and Junie sat on the couch and watched the news. They had some food sent up, which Violin again checked using a small chemical analyzer. They drank wine. They watched horrors on TV. They did not hear from Joe Ledger.

Finally, Violin stood up and reached for her bag, removed her cell phone, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and called her mother.

“What is it?” That was how her mother usually answered the phone. Lilith was not known for social graces.

“You are aware of what is happening in America?”

“Of course I am, girl,” snapped Lilith. “Do you think I’ve gone blind?”

Violin let that pass. “The Deacon’s people are being stretched dangerously thin.”

“So?”

“So, I would like to offer them our help.”

“Our help or your help?”

“Mine, if we have no one else here in the States.”

Lilith paused. “It is my understanding that Captain Ledger is in love with another woman.”

“Yes,” said Violin.

“Make sure that your motives are quite clear, girl.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Don’t ‘Yes, Mother’ me.”

“Sorry.”

“And don’t say you’re sorry. If you truly want to help then I will clear it with the Deacon. But you’ll go where he needs you, not where you think you should be.”

“Of course, Mother.”

“‘Of course.’ God, save me from fools in love.”

Lilith ended the call.

Violin waited until the burning red was gone from her face before she left the bathroom. Junie was right there and she pushed abruptly past her and swung the door shut. Violin could hear the woman gagging and then the flush of the toilet. Water ran in the sink for a long time, and when Junie came out her face was flushed.

“Chemo?” asked Violin, realizing at once how awkward a question it was.

Junie shook her head. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“Very well,” said Violin uncertainly. She turned away, checked her equipment, and moved toward the door.

“You’re leaving?” asked Junie, surprised.

“Yes.” Violin nodded to the carnage on the TV. “I am going to see if I can help with this.”

“What can you do? They don’t even know where this Mother Night person is.”

“Well, I can’t very well sit around here all night, can I?”

Junie and she studied each other for a long, long time. “Violin,” she said softly, “Joe cares very much for you. He really does. We both do.”

Violin said nothing.

“I hope we can be friends.” When Violin still didn’t answer, Junie said, “Stay safe.”

Violin simply nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She closed the door quietly behind her as she left.

Chapter Seventy-two

“Who has the capability of making new Berserkers?” asked Rudy.

“Theoretically, anyone,” said Hu. “The Jakobys cracked the science. Any lab with the capability to perform gene therapy can replicate their processes if they have the notes.”

“And if they don’t?”

Hu shrugged. “The Jakobys were so advanced because they used their Pangaea computer system to steal research data from hundreds of other labs around the world. They were, in fact, standing on everyone else’s shoulders, and that allowed them to reach higher. Reusing their science is one thing; rediscovering it would take years. Conservative guess, ten to twenty.”

“Then we can reasonably conclude that someone has stolen their science, yes?” suggested Rudy. Hu and Church both nodded. “I think we—”

Before he could finish, Nikki appeared on the big screen and gave us the latest information about the crimes happening across the country. Mother Night was not slackening off. We stared in abject horror at what was happening. Murders by skinny kids in anarchist hoodies and Doc Martens, and murders by guys who looked like defensive linemen. The release of a quick-onset Ebola in an Indian restaurant in San Antonio.

Three more backpack bombs. At a flower show in Jacksonville: an estimated seventy dead and three times that many wounded. At a wedding on the beach in Malibu: twenty-eight dead. At a playground in Gary, Indiana, where a bunch of teenagers were playing pick-up basketball: thirty-four dead and wounded.

And more.

Much more. Beatings. Molotov cocktails thrown through windows in upscale neighborhoods in Connecticut and low-rent trailer homes in New Jersey. Random stabbings. More attacks in restaurants by Berserkers.

We watched in horror, but we were not idle.

Church and Aunt Sallie were on the phone, dispatching DMS teams to hotspots, especially those where a suspected bioweapon was being employed. Soon, though, we were stretched so thin that Church began splitting the teams, and then splitting them again. In California there were seven two- and three-person teams rolling out to cover situations where we would normally insert two full teams. SWAT, FBI hostage rescue, ATF, and Homeland’s various task forces were also being pushed to the limits. Every biological disaster team in the country was in play. Ordinary police were stretched just as thin, working crowds at each of the crime scenes, and establishing unbreakable perimeters around every site where a biohazard was known or suspected.

It became unreal. It was like running around putting Band-Aids on leaks on a sinking ship when God only knew what was happening below the water line. As we worked to move assets into place, we fought to carve out a few seconds to analyze these new attacks. We worked with limited information, relying on experience, intuition, and guesswork.

Minutes and then hours burned away. It was nearly dawn when we caught enough of a breather to go back to trying to assemble our puzzle.

“Dr. Sanchez,” said Church, “yesterday, when we were discussing the stolen Berserker technology, you were going to make a point. What was it?”

“Was I?” Rudy rubbed his eye, which was red and puffy. “Yes, yes … God, I’m exhausted.” He cleared his throat, looking grainy and old. “It wasn’t about the Berserkers per se. It’s just that we’ve been dealing with so many events over the last twenty-four hours that I’ve begun to wonder how much of that has been orchestrated to have the effect it’s been having. By that I mean we are being distracted from a simple progression of logic.”

Church twirled his finger in a go-ahead gesture.

“I’m no statistician, but it seems improbably ponderous to me to believe that a single group like Mother Night’s could rediscover the Jakoby science for the Berserkers, reinvent pathogens like the seif-al-din and quick-onset Ebola, build a microchip like Vox’s, and develop a computer comparable to MindReader.”

“Well, damn,” I said, “when you say it like that—”

“I agree, Dr. Sanchez,” said Church, “the timetable for development is as improbable as it is to assume they’ve merely come up with bioweapons and technologies coincidentally similar to those the DMS has faced.”

“Right,” I said, “so there is a leak?”

“Maybe,” said Church and Rudy at the same time.

“Maybe?”

“Sure,” said Aunt Sallie, jumping into the conversation. “If Artemisia Bliss stole some of this stuff, and I think we’re all thinking that, then she could have handed it off to someone else before the weenie roast in her cell.”

“How likely is that?” I asked.

“Not very,” confessed Aunt Sallie. “We confiscated her computers, went over every inch of her apartment, even checked her storage unit. Everything we found was turned over to the federal prosecutors, and I can tell you for damn sure that there was nothing there that even touched on the science behind the Berserkers.”

“Then explain what’s happening.”

“I can’t.”

Rudy asked, “Could Bliss have done that if she was alive?”

“No way,” said Auntie. “She was a computer engineer and—”

“Yes,” said Hu.

All eyes snapped back in his direction.

“You keep forgetting that Bliss wasn’t just a genius, she was a supergenius. That’s not a casual phrase. Her intellect was staggering. If she had the information and enough resources, she could either do it or arrange to have it done. That was one of the things we were all afraid of when we discovered that she was copying information and planning on selling it. Her level of genius was profoundly dangerous.”

Auntie said, “So what are we talking about? We know Bliss is dead. Could she have obtained Berserker science and sold it elsewhere while she was alive? Sold it and then cleaned up after herself?”

“I don’t … think so,” said Bug tentatively. “MindReader tore her computer apart, and if she’d ever had that information there would have been some record. You can’t erase that much data without leaving a trace.”

“Couldn’t she have bought another computer?”

“We hacked her banking records going back a lot of years,” said Bug. “We were looking for that kind of purchase, but there was nothing. We found the stuff she actually stole, and that’s why we busted her.” He paused and cocked his head thoughtfully. “You know, though … if she was still alive, then I could build a pretty good case for her being Mother Night. The level of genius, the subtlety and complexity. She had that by the bagful. And I’ve played a lot of games with her. She was devious as shit.”

“But she’s dead,” said Circe.

“She’s dead,” agreed Bug.

“Guys, guys,” I said, “let’s stick with who might actually be alive. Bug, have Nikki run a thorough background check on Bliss. I know she was adopted from China, so see if you guys can hack Chinese adoption records and—”

“I already did that,” said Hu. “She had one sister, but the girl was adopted by a family in Des Moines. School records indicate above-average intelligence, but only just. There’s nothing to indicate that she had anything approaching Artie’s genius. And there’s no indication that Bliss ever had contact with that girl.”

“Check again,” Church said to Bug. “Find that girl and run a deep background check. Also establish her whereabouts on all dates and times relative to this case.”

“On it.”

“And send information to all law enforcement agencies about the Berserkers.”

Bug hesitated. “Really? That’s going to raise a whole lot of questions.”

“Do it.”

Chapter Seventy-three

I was on my sixth cup of coffee and my hands shook with the aftereffects of violence and way too much caffeine. The last hours of Sunday had burned away and now we were four and a half hours into Monday. We’d spent all night going over every bit of data going all the way back to Arlington and up to the news reports of violence all across the country.

The number of bombings was now eight.

Random acts of violence, fifty-three.

Arsons, eleven.

The release of weaponized pathogens, four. DMS teams were handling each of those, but with plenty of help from local law. Word came down from the White House through subtle channels to drastically but quietly diminish any show of federal involvement in matters that might involve a trigger pull. At the same time, the press secretary and his team were doing heroic spin control. Experts were being trotted out to decry the government’s involvement. Those experts included a number of writers, pundits, and scientists in various extreme groups, but people who were willing to participate in a conversation rather than rant and shout. So far it was working. A bit.

The radical right and left, the loudmouth extremists on both sides, were being jackasses. As they usually were. A lot of the moderates were keeping mum for fear of standing on the wrong side when the full story finally came out. If it ever came out.

The president made a few short and very calm statements to the nation, and attended one press conference. Even that, I learned, was staged pretty well, with handpicked members of the White House press corps.

So far, Washington was not burning.

Other places were not so lucky.

At one point I turned to Hu. “Doc, that was definitely the seif-al-din down in the subway, no doubt about it, right? One of the early generations.”

He nodded. “I know, though my people are running tests.”

“Here’s the kicker, though,” I said, and ran the footage from the subway attack. Not our part in it, but the earliest parts of the video. We watched a sweaty man in a hoodie and yellow raincoat make his announcement about Mother Night and then attack a black teenager. I froze the image. “There! See that guy? He was the patient zero of that attack, right? But he’s talking. That means—”

“—he was infected by one of the later strains,” said Hu. “I know. I already instructed the forensics team to locate his corpse and take samples.”

“My point,” I said, “is that someone had access to two different strains of the pathogen.”

“Obviously.”

“How?” I asked.

There was a beat.

“I mean … where’d they get them? As far as we can tell, the original lab in Afghanistan blew up. The only person we know of who was infected with Generation Twelve of the pathogen was Amirah, and I put a bullet in her head.”

It was true. After El Mujahid tried to release the seif-al-din at the Liberty Bell Center in Philly a few years ago, I took Echo Team to Afghanistan and hunted Amirah down. By then she was already infected and driven mad by the experience. I offered her a chance, live as a monster or ride a bullet into paradise. She made the best choice for everyone.

“So who else has both generations?” I asked.

Hu and Church exchanged a look, then Hu said, “There are three places that have both samples. The Locker in Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and right here in the Hangar.”

The tension in the room was palpable.

“And do we know the status of all three sets of samples?” Rudy asked quietly.

“Nikki conveyed your request for a full security scan of the Locker,” said Aunt Sallie. “All the lights were green.”

“What about the CDC?” I asked.

“Same thing, and they called in additional security.”

“And the stuff we have here?” I asked Hu.

“The samples here are safe,” Hu said defensively.

“When you say the lights were green,” I said, “exactly what does that mean?”

“It means that all of the dozen or so automatic security programs run system-wide diagnostics and—”

I cut him off. “You mean that we’re going on nothing but a computer’s word that everything is okay? Jesus fuck, doc.”

He immediately whipped out his cell phone to call his senior lab assistant. “Melanie, I need you to check our storage vault. Put eyes on the samples of the seif-al-din. All generations. I need a count of how much material is in each vial. Exact numbers, okay? Then run a diagnostic on the log-out computer. I want to know who looked at it, if any vials were touched, when, the works. Go back all the way and get back to me. Then get me somebody at the Locker. I want to talk to the senior researcher on shift or someone in administration.” He set his phone down and I gave him a nod.

“What happens if the pathogen is still safely stored in all three places?” asked Rudy.

“Then we’re in big fucking trouble,” said Aunt Sallie. “’Cause that means someone else has access to it.”

“But who else even knows about it?” persisted Rudy. “We never fully disclosed the nature of the disease to Congress.”

“He’s right,” said Circe. “And the samples at the CDC are in a special lab with access by only a short list of researchers, all of whom are with either DARPA or the DMS.”

“We need to check it all,” I said. “Triple the security and dig a fucking moat if we have to.”

Hu made another round of calls.

Circe said, “Building on what we were talking about before, about how this may not be as chaotic and anarchical as Mother Night would have us believe, I think her choice of which subway car to hit seems obvious. It’s a controlled environment. Going on the assumption that Mother Night knew both the nature of the disease and how we would have to react to it, the stalled subway car gave her a kind of sound stage. The cameras Joe found prove that it was staged so that the drama would unfold in a precise place and manner.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Hu said. “If Mother Night knows about the function and communicability of the seif-al-din, then she had to know that if it got out there would be a lot more than anarchy. It would be a feeding frenzy.”

“Begins with an A and rhymes with Ohpocalypse,” I muttered.

Church nodded. “So the stalled subway car was both a stage and a containment facility. That’s very interesting.”

“Doesn’t that give us a little bit of hope?” asked Rudy. “Clearly Mother Night is not trying to create an apocalyptic event.”

“She’s trying to take down the president,” suggested Hu, but nearly everyone shook their heads.

“I think Dr. Sanchez is correct when he says that damaging the presidency is a side effect,” said Church. “Or a means to an end.”

“How did she do all that? Is this a cyberwarfare attack? Like Comment Crowd or something like that?”

“It could be,” said Circe.

“I asked Bug about that and he put some people on it,” said Aunt Sallie. “MindReader can’t trace it exclusively back to China.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that his guys have been backtracking the source of these posts and e-mails, and they’re linking everywhere. China, yes, but also England, Taiwan, Guam, you name it. One source went to a tiny village in Peru. I asked Bug if he thought Mother Night had a global network or a rerouting system, and his best answer was ‘maybe both, probably.’ But he couldn’t pin anything down.”

Rudy leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table. “That troubles me. Why is MindReader having so hard a time pinning this down?”

“I asked Bug that, too,” said Auntie. “He’s run ten kinds of diagnostics on the system and hasn’t yet come up with an answer. One thing he did find, though, is a number of instances when one computer or another has attempted to sneak in to MindReader. However, every one of those attempts was rebuffed. No one even dented the outer firewall. Bug is confident that no one has hacked us.”

“How would we know?” asked Rudy. “Isn’t MindReader designed to hide all traces of intrusion?”

“Not in our own system,” said Auntie. “When someone or something attempts to hack MindReader all sorts of bells go off.”

“And — nothing?”

“Nothing except failed attempts.”

“What option does that leave us?” I asked. “You guys always tell me that MindReader is the only computer system capable of doing some of what we’re seeing. How true is that statement as of right now?”

Church nodded, approving the question. “It suggests several possibilities. One is that someone else has built a machine identical to MindReader.”

“Which is impossible,” said Auntie quickly.

“Why impossible?” I asked.

“Because it wasn’t designed following any predictable philosophy or developmental progression,” she said. “And it’s been futzed with a lot, both to make it work better and to keep its operating system unique.”

“The next thought is that someone,” said Church, “the Chinese or another group with extraordinary resources, has developed a better computer. Something so much more powerful than MindReader that it’s doing to our computer what ours does to everyone else’s.”

Rudy whistled. “That would be devastating.”

“We are experiencing a degree of devastation right now,” Church pointed out. “This may be proof that our edge has become blunted.”

Auntie gave an emphatic shake of her head. “No, I’m not buying it, Deacon. Part of MindReader’s daily function is to scout for anything that even suggests that a lab or design team is headed that way. So much of that kind of research, development, and planning would involve the Internet, even proprietary access setups. We’d have seen it.”

“Wait,” said Rudy, holding up his hands, “pardon me if this is impertinent or above my pay grade, but perhaps if we understood how MindReader came to be the powerhouse that it is then we might have some chance of figuring this out.”

Church nibbled a cookie for a moment, then nodded. “Prior to the formation of the DMS, I was involved in various operations with a team of players from different countries, code-named the List. Our primary goal was to tear down a group of scientists called the Cabal, who had built very advanced systems using illegal technologies first initiated by the Nazis. They had a computer scientist named Antonio Bertolini, who was very likely the most brilliant computer engineer I’ve ever encountered. A soaring intellect who could have done great good with his work. But he took a different path. The cornerstone of the Cabal’s efficiency was Bertolini’s computer and its search-and-destroy software package — known as Pangaea. The Cabal used Pangaea to steal bulk research material from laboratories, corporations, and governments worldwide, and much of that research was later used by the Jakobys.”

I nodded, familiar with part of the story. “You killed Bertolini and took Pangaea and somehow that became MindReader, right?”

“In a way,” said Church. “I was already supporting the development of a similar computer system called Oracle.”

Oracle, I thought. Wow. That was the computer system Church gave to Lilith and the women of Arklight.

“Oracle was good,” Church continued, “but it wasn’t Pangaea. However, we were able to combine the best elements of both systems into a new generation, originally designated as Babel. But even that was insufficient for what I believed we needed to create an organization like the Department of Military Sciences. I scouted for the very best software engineers who were also insightful into the current and future needs of cyberwarfare. They wrote the master programs for MindReader.”

“Doctor,” Rudy said to Hu, “you said that the Jakobys used Pangaea to steal research data?”

“Yes.”

“Did they have the actual machines built for the Cabal?”

“No,” said Aunt Sallie. “Those were destroyed.”

“Then they did what? Built their own?”

Bug said, “Sure, the schematics were in Hecate’s safe.”

Rudy smiled. “Hecate had them? No one else?”

“No…” began Bug, but he slowed to a stop, then carefully said, “Not that we know of.”

“Let me ask this, then,” said Rudy. “If you, Bug, had those blueprints or schematics or whatever they’re called for computers and you knew about MindReader, could you build a computer that approximates what MindReader does?”

“Hecate and Paris couldn’t do that. They were geneticists and—”

“I’m not asking about them. I asked if you could do it.”

“Me? Well, sure, I could do it, but—”

“Ah,” said Rudy.

“Wait,” said Bug, “what’s ‘ah’ supposed to mean?”

“It means that if you could do it,” I said, “then someone on your level could do it.”

“They’d have to have some access to MindReader. At least some basic understanding of the software written after Pangaea was created.”

Rudy nodded. So did Church. And me.

“But there’s no one else I know of who could do it. Even Yoda and Nikki couldn’t do it.”

“I’m not asking about them,” said Rudy. There was another pregnant pause, then Rudy glanced at each person at the table. “We are absolutely certain Artemisia Bliss is dead, yes?”

Hu started to laugh, but Church raised a hand.

“I believe you visited the crime scene,” said Church. “You saw the body.”

“Her body was identified from dental plates and DNA,” added Circe. “There’s no doubt that it was Artemisia Bliss in that cell.”

Hu and Bug gave emphatic nods.

Rudy smiled. “No doubt at all?”

“Where are you going with this, doctor?” demanded Auntie.

That’s when I got it, and I slapped my hand down on the table so hard everyone except Church jumped. “Christ on a stick!”

“Joe,” said Rudy quickly, “what’s wrong?”

“I’m a goddamn idiot is what’s wrong.” Hu began to smile but I pointed a finger at him. “And you’re every bit as stupid as I am. As we all are. Shit, Rudy’s absolutely right and this is staring us in the face. I mean … we even said it but threw it away.”

“Captain,” said Church, “skip the dramatics. What are we all missing?”

“Burn to shine,” I said. “It’s right there.”

“What is?”

“This is Artemisia Bliss.”

“Um,” said Hu, “I’m pretty sure we already covered that, Einstein. She’d make a great suspect if she wasn’t ashes in a box.”

“No,” said Church, leaning forward, “hear him out. I think I know where he’s going with this, and I’m afraid I agree.”

Everyone looked from him to me. Rudy nodded encouragement.

“Okay,” I said, “we all put it on the table. Artemisia was smarter than almost everyone, right? Smart and devious. She was on Auntie’s shit list because she tried to hack MindReader. She got fired and arrested because she copied and sold a lot of the information we’ve been trying to keep the bad guys from using. She was bagged, tagged, and the judge hit her with max penalties. She was going to jail and she’d never get out. She was done.”

“And somebody killed her,” said Hu again, leaning on it so Captain Shortbus could understand the concept. But I shook my head.

“Somebody killed someone.”

“No,” said Circe, “Joe, you’re forgetting that Jerry Spencer collected DNA from her corpse and it was an exact match to hers on file. It was her.”

I gave another shake. “Jerry pulled DNA from a corpse and it matched DNA on file.”

“What?”

“Step back for a second and look at this from a distance. Think about how to do this and let’s pretend we’re all actually smart for a minute.” I said this last part while looking directly at Hu.

Church was already nodding. Rudy and Circe were a step behind him. Hu had to already be there, but he so did not want me to have figured this out.

It was Bug who put it into words.

“The DNA we matched it to was not physical DNA. We matched the samples Jerry collected against data stored in the system.”

“Right,” I said. “Data stored in the system. We only have the computer’s word that it’s actually Bliss’s.”

“No,” said Hu, shaking his head, “you’re talking about MindReader.”

“Right,” I told him. “I’m talking about a computer. Computers are basically storage devices. You can put anything in there you want. And Artemisia Bliss is one of the most brilliant computer experts who ever lived, as you’re so fond of telling. Fuck, man, you hired her. You want to sit there and tell me that she isn’t smart enough to have faked the data in MindReader?”

Hu cleared his throat. “Well … she, um, wrote the code for the bio-data retrieval software.”

Rudy said, “Oy.”

“But the passwords were all changed after her arrest,” insisted Aunt Sallie.

“Sure,” said Circe, “but I’m sure you didn’t go in and change every line of code she ever wrote. Or all of the millions of lines of code she supervised. Joe’s right, she could have built her own false evidence right into the code. Hidden it so that it popped up whenever any data was entered for a comparison with hers.”

“That would suggest she knew she would be arrested,” said Rudy. “And that her own death was planned.”

“It could have been planned,” I said, “or it could have been one of a dozen contingency plans she built into the system because she knows the system. Maybe there are other things that would have come up if something else had happened to her. They could be lurking in the system right now.”

Bug began hammering at some keys. There was a bing-bong as he received an almost instantaneous reply. “Oh, shitballs. I just sent a second set of DNA to the system for comparison to hers, and it came up as a positive.”

“Which DNA?” Hu asked reluctantly.

“Yours,” said Bug weakly. “And … mine. And Circe’s. All three came up as a match to Artemisia’s. There was no way we could have known it, but any DNA comparison request that involves Artemisia is going to come up positive.”

“Dios mio,” breathed Rudy very softly.

“Artemisia Bliss is alive,” said Hu, just as quietly.

“Worse than that,” said Church. “Artemisia Bliss is Mother Night. And that changes everything.”

Chapter Seventy-four

“Do we have an estimate on the number of people on the C train?” asked Vice President William Collins.

Boo Radley opened a blue leather notebook and consulted the top page. “The area is still sealed pending biohazard cleanup, but based on the hour and averages for holiday traffic we’re putting the number at around two hundred.”

That slapped Collins in the face hard enough to align all of his attention. “Two hundred?”

He fumbled for his coffee cup, found it empty, stared into it, set the cup down.

“K-keep me posted,” he said, tripping over the words.

“Yes, sir,” said Radley. He lingered for a moment. “Will the president address the nation?”

Collins shook his head. “It’s too early for that. We don’t know enough.”

In truth he didn’t know what the president would do. His relationship with his two-term running mate had steadily deteriorated to the point where they only ever spoke when it was absolutely politically necessary. Their dislike of each other was an open secret, and was often the substance of jokes by Leno, Fallon, Colbert, and Stewart. No one in the press or the talk show circuit knew the reason for the animosity, and neither Collins nor the president would respond to questions about it. There wasn’t much left to this second term anyway, and soon Collins would be out and would no longer have to endure the disdain — publically or privately — from his boss.

The truth of the schism between the two men ran deeper than the fact that Collins had lost to the president during the primaries and always felt that his vice presidency was a bone thrown to him. And a way for the president to keep his party rival close at hand. The real core of the trouble between them was their view of how best to serve the country. Not run it — serve it. The president was an idealist who kept trying to solve problems. Collins didn’t like him any more than he’d liked the two previous presidents. All three of them cared too much about party politics and brinksmanship. Collins saw things from a different perspective, from what he believed to be a big-picture angle that allowed him to see what America really needed. It needed to be strong again. As strong as it was right after World War II ended. A position of power it tasted only once more, when Reagan was in. When the American military was so scary strong that the mere threat of it put the cracks in the Berlin Wall and toppled the Soviet state. That couldn’t be accomplished with either the liberals or conservatives trying to cock-block each other. And it couldn’t happen if American corporations kept taking a shit on their own soil. Thirty years of poor management — political and corporate — had empowered North Korea and Iran and turned China into the most frightening superpower since …

Well, since the United States dropped the bombs on Japan.

What really pissed Collins off was that this was a problem that could be fixed. The balance of power could be shifted where it was supposed to be with so little effort. The primary obstruction wasn’t even the war in Congress over who had the bigger dick. It was a lack of courage. A lack of real balls.

It was a lack of the American spirit that built this fucking country.

He shook his head.

His mood was further soured by the body-count estimates. Two hundred dead?

Mother Night had promised him there would be a lot more than that.

And then, as if in response to his angry thoughts, his cell buzzed to indicate a text message. He glanced at it and saw that it was a message from her.

It was signed with the letter A.

He sat back in his leather chair and considered the message and its implications. The fact that Mother Night was going to see this through all the way to the end was comforting. Gratifying. The fact that she took the time to tell him was encouraging.

So why had she sent a letter filled with anthrax to him?

He sank into a brooding stillness, teeth grinding, fists clenched on his desktop.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he growled quietly.

Chapter Seventy-five

Once it was said, once it was out there, it made sense. A twisted kind of sense.

Artemisia Bliss was Mother Night.

Too many of our puzzle pieces now fit, but the picture they made was like something out of Salvador Dalí. Or maybe Hieronymus Bosch.

“This is nuts,” said Hu, still not buying it. “Artie was corrupt, sure, and maybe she made some questionable choices—”

“‘Questionable’?” echoed Aunt Sallie.

“—but we’re talking about Mother Night here. Artie never physically hurt anyone. Mother Night has killed hundreds. That person is either totally deranged or she’s outright evil. Where’s the evidence of that kind of evolution?”

“There are foundations of it,” said Rudy, “but I would need time to work up a profile and—”

Suddenly the big screen on the wall split and Nikki Bloomberg filled the second window. She was a tiny, mousy young woman with enormous eyes and slightly bucked teeth. She was twenty-six but looked like a gawky twelve. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said quickly, “but you have to hear this.”

“Go ahead,” said Church.

“When Rasheen brought us the cameras Joe’s guys pulled off the wall, I found that there were two kinds of transmitters inside. Two separate signals. One was the satellite feed that went out to the press, and that one had the fake soundtrack of people begging for mercy. The other one, though, was sent via a different satellite to a rerouting system that bounced it all over the globe. The thing is, that second video stream had an additional track, too, but it was a separate video track. A digitally imposed data crawl.”

“What did it say?” I think we all asked that at the same time.

“I’ll show you,” said Nikki, and immediately the screen split into two windows, one with her face and the other with the horrible footage of my team shooting at the walkers. With the false soundtrack off you could hear the moans of the hungry dead, and the effect was far more terrifying and monstrous.

But the data crawl at the bottom is what caught everyone’s eye.

It jolted us all and, I have to say, it changed the game right there and then.

It read: The bidding starts at fifty million.

Those six words, over and over again.

Rudy said, “Dios mio.”

I said, “Holy shit.”

“And there it is,” said Aunt Sallie. “The anarchy, the destruction, it’s all a cover for a fucking sales pitch. This whole goddamn thing is about money.”

“It’s always about money,” grumbled Bug.

However, Rudy shook his head. “Money, maybe … but I knew Artemisia. There was one thing she wanted more than money, more than career success, and more than personal fame. No, the thing she wanted most was power.”

“Yes,” said Church, “and look how powerful she’s become.”

Chapter Seventy-six

Donny Hauk sat on a square of cardboard that was padded by a folded towel that was carefully wrapped around a thick piece of memory foam. It was a very comfortable seat, and Donny believed that the memory foam remembered him. Or at least it remembered his ass. It welcomed his ass. It comforted his ass. And Donny’s ass was grateful.

It had been a long night. Hotter and far more humid than the weatherman had said — and Donny, who did this sort of thing several times a year, hated fucking weathermen. Assholes who were overpaid for being bad at their job. They said that it was going to be mild. Eighty-nine degrees wasn’t mild. Eighty-eight percent humidity wasn’t mild. It was a frigging sauna.

On the upside, the heat drove off a lot of what Donny called “civilians.” Shoppers who didn’t know how to wait on line, who hadn’t acquired the predatory survival skills necessary to make it through a long night.

Donny had those skills. In spades. They’d been honed over years and were locked firmly into place.

Sure, he’d made rookie mistakes. He’d been a civilian once. First time he ever waited on line for a doorbuster was the release of the unrated director’s cut of the second God of War game. Donny spent a bad night in worse weather than this, wearing a hoodie and nearly freezing his nuts off in sixteen degrees with a minus-two wind chill. His fingers and toes were almost dead from cold when they opened the door, and that made him sluggish and slow, and the crowd had surged past him. After eleven hours of waiting, Donny had returned home without the game, so crushed that he sat on the toilet, crapping and crying.

Not his best moment, he knew, but an instructive one.

When he showed up at Walmart for the latest version of Resident Evil, he was wearing a fleece-lined anorak, gloves, earmuffs, and a scarf. He had a thermos of espresso and six power bars. His only mistake then had been to neglect to bring something comfortable on which to sit, and as a result he stood too long and then sat too long on hard ground. The aches born from that slowed him by a step, and despite being third in line he was not even among the first twenty through the door when the lights came on.

Live and learn.

Now he sat on ten inches of foam next to an ice chest filled with food and drinks. He had his iPod, iPad, and iPhone charged, and had extended batteries for each. Donny downloaded fourteen hours of movies from iTunes and made deals with people to watch his flicks via an earjack splitter in return for them holding his spot during bathroom runs to Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away. He also shared power bars and icy cans of Coke with line neighbors who kept an eye on his stuff whenever he dozed.

At 6:00 a.m., when the sleep-deprived sales staff opened the door to the Best Buy in Willow Grove, Donny was on his feet, rested, as fit as his three hundred pounds on a five nine frame would allow, bags packed and eyes bright at the thought of the new game, Burning Worlds, which was rumored to be the toughest video game ever.

Donny was first in line, and by now the other doorbusters — they’d taken that as their name — showed deference to Donny. He had become royalty to then. While not quite a family, the doorbusters had become a community, a “people,” and Donny Hauk was their king.

As the store manager appeared and bent to unlock the doors, Donny led the applause. Then Donny turned to the others and in a regal voice declared, “Let the games begin!”

That sparked another round of applause and laughter, but this time it was all for him. With a great beaming smile, Donny picked up his shopping bag, waved to the crowd, turned, and walked through the doors. The crowd bustled like anxious bees, but no one tried to push past him. No sir. Not anymore. Not King Donny.

He waddled along familiar aisles with the horde of doorbusters behind him, heading to the big display for Burning Worlds. They had life-size character cutouts on either side of a kind of cattle chute that opened in a space where a long rack of games had been placed. One hundred copies of the new game were in the center, and all of the other hot products put out by the same company were racked for impulse purchase.

Donny reached out his hand, fingers wiggling, as he selected which copy of Burning Worlds he wanted. There were grunts and a few curses behind him — not directed at him but fired by members of the increasingly agitated crowd. Donny picked one, top row, fifth from the left. The plastic wrapping on the box looked perfect. No smudges or fingerprints, no tears in the cellophane.

When Donny turned and held up his selection, the crowd applauded again.

All hail the king.

Satisfied, happy, and excited, Donny stepped away from the rack, giving only a casual glance behind him as the crowd surged forward and the feeding frenzy began. A few people ran past to be first in line at the checkout, but that was fine with Donny. He didn’t need to be first to pay. Instead he drifted over to look at the Blu-ray box sets. He was reading the back cover text on the fourteenth series of Doctor Who when he heard one of the staff say, “What the hell?”

Donny looked up in time to see a semi pull to a stop out front, the truck so close to the building that it triggered the automatic door. The truck was big, white, with no markings. Everyone who was near the front of the store stopped what they were doing and looked. Donny frowned because the narrow gap left by the truck was far too tight to allow him to get out. Complaining about that would be awkward, and anxiety immediately began to climb inside his chest.

He turned to the closest salesman to ask a question, but the young man was already in motion, striding toward the front with a firm jaw, an outraged expression on his face, and balled fists. Donny drifted along behind.

A slender Asian woman squeezed though the tiny gap between the open door and the cab. The door effectively blocked any additional doorbusters from getting in, however. The truck and its door formed a bulky seal to the front of the building.

The salesman began yelling questions as soon as he was close, but Donny was bemused to see that the driver completely ignored him. The driver wore a white jumpsuit, brand-new sneakers, and leather driving gloves. A pair of nearly opaque sunglasses clung to the front of her face.

The morning breeze blew under the truck and into the store, carrying with it the stink of gasoline and …

And what?

It wasn’t skunk and it wasn’t the sulfur stink of a troubled engine.

This was more like his fridge smelled when a storm tripped the circuit breakers in his apartment the week he was away at San Diego Comic Con. Everything in the box, from leftover Chinese to the brisket his aunt Helene had brought over, turned into lumps of rot. It took a week, lots of scrubbing, and four boxes of baking soda to get rid of the stink.

That’s what the female driver smelled like.

Like rotten food.

The Asian woman seemed to tune in on his thoughts, and while the salesman continued to yell at her, she removed a small spray bottle from a pocket, uncapped it, and sprayed the contents on her clothes.

The god-awful smell of decay suddenly became ten times worse.

“What the hell are you doing?” yelled the salesman.

The Asian woman put the bottle back into her pocket, unzipped her jumpsuit, reached inside, and when she removed her hand she held …

A gun?

Donny gaped at it. He’d played every kind of first-person shooter game on the market and yet he’d never once seen a real gun.

The salesman froze, his expression caught between outrage and horror.

“What…?” he said.

Donny’s legs trembled with the desire to run, but he dared not move. The crowd in the store was noticing the gun by degrees. There were gasps and yells. And screams. The Asian woman smiled placidly and watched the effect, apparently enjoying it. She raised her gun and pointed it at the salesman.

“Shhh,” she said.

The salesman became a statue, though Donny could see him go dead pale. Then the slim woman in the reeking jumpsuit half-turned and looked at Donny.

No, she looked above Donny. Despite himself, Donny turned and looked up, too, and saw one of the store’s many security cameras. A small red light glowed beside the black lens.

Without a word of warning, the Asian woman shot the salesman in the chest. It was done with an almost casual disinterest. The bullet punched through the salesman’s body and exited with a burst of blood that splashed across Donny’s chest and face. The salesman fell backward and crashed to the floor.

Everyone screamed.

The killer raised her pistol and fired the next shot into the ceiling.

“Shut the fuck up,” she bellowed, spacing out the words for maximum clarity.

Everyone shut the fuck up.

Donny’s bladder suddenly let loose and hot urine coursed down his legs and into his shoes. Even with death looking at him, he was wretchedly ashamed and hoped no one would notice.

No one did.

The woman turned in a slow circle with the eye of the pistol following her line of sight. She held a shushing finger to her full lips as she turned. When the store was totally silent, the woman once more looked up at the video camera.

“Now that I’m pretty sure I have your attention, here’s the news,” she said, smiling, enjoying herself. “The only action is direct action. Sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

That’s when Donny — and everyone else — understood what was happening. It was more of the Mother Night stuff. The anarchy and chaos that was all over the news. It was here. Right here. For real.

Laughing at the crowd’s reaction, the woman walked out to the truck, jerked open the side door, and then came back into the store. People began jumping down from the open door.

But that was wrong. Donny frowned, trying to understand what he was seeing. The truck seemed to be filled with people, but they weren’t jumping down or climbing down. They were falling down.

Awkwardly.

Clumsily.

Hitting the ground so hard Donny was sure he heard bones break.

They were dirty, dressed in rags, slack-faced.

And they stank. God almighty, they stank worse than the Asian girl did.

The people kept tumbling out, landing on one another, crawling, struggling to their feet. They all looked stoned.

They all looked sick, Donny thought.

Their faces were pale. Some as white as mushrooms, others as gray as dust,

What was weirdest of all, what disturbed Donny on a level he couldn’t understand … was why none of them cried out when they fell or when someone fell atop them. Even the ones who clearly broke a hand or arm or leg didn’t scream or curse or anything.

However, they did make sounds. Small sounds. Low and so oddly out of keeping with what was happening.

They moaned. Soft, plaintive.

Moans of deep need.

Then the people got to their feet and began shuffling awkwardly into the store. The people inside, the sales staff and the doorbusters, shifted back from them. No one liked the look of them.

There was something intensely wrong here.

When Donny looked into the eyes of the closest of these newcomers he saw …

Nothing.

No trace of personality. Not even the deadened gaze of stoners. There was simply—nothing.

Like they’re dead, thought Donny.

That was the worst thought he’d ever had. It was also the most cogent and accurate observation he’d ever made.

Like they were dead.

Like.

They.

Were.

“Oh, God,” whispered Donny.

The Asian woman — the one who called herself Mother Night — smiled as the slack-faced people passed her on either side. They ignored her. Once past her, however, their moans of need sharpened into driving, intense moans of another kind.

Moans not just of need.

But of hunger.

A hunger so deep that it made Donny’s bowels ache and throb.

To the camera, the woman said, “Generation Six. Old school, I know, but a classic nonetheless. Now, children, remember what Mother Night said. Bidding kicks off at fifty million euros.” Then, as she turned, she said something else, but it was directed to the slack-faced people. To Donny it sounded like, “Bon appetit.”

Donny was sure of it.

Dead certain.

Donny had seen this before. In games. In movies.

He’d played this before.

As the gray-and-white people rushed him and bore him to the floor, as his own screams drowned out the moans of the dead, as the pain burned down the world in his mind, Donny wondered how he could reset this. Which button did he have to push to get a replay, to get a new life?

How?

How?

That was his very last thought.

Chapter Seventy-seven

Violin sat in the darkness under a tree, feeling lost and useless. The sun was still down, though there were fires over the horizon line across Jamaica Bay and past Flight 587 Memorial Park. Six hundred yards away from where she sat, the humped shape of the Hangar pretended to be a vacant building. Violin knew better. She also knew that Joseph Ledger was inside.

Since leaving Junie Flynn’s hotel and coming here, Violin had wrestled with herself as to what to do. And although Lilith had granted permission for her to assist Ledger, Joseph himself had not asked. Nor, technically, had the Deacon. In her brief conversation with him, the man said that he would appreciate her help should the appropriate situation arise, but he neglected to say what that situation might be. This whole country was in turmoil, people were dying, but it wasn’t a fight where you could locate the battle lines. It was all random, chaotic. There seemed to be no way to actually help anyone.

So she crouched in the darkness and watched the Hangar and hoped that her cell would ring. As the hours crawled past, she thought about her feelings for Joseph. It was a fact that she loved him, and she was furious with herself for allowing that to happen. It made her madder still that those feelings persisted long after he’d fallen in love with someone else.

Junie Flynn. An ordinary woman? Maybe. A dying woman? Possibly.

The right woman for Joseph?

No.

Violin was certain of it. Junie was soft. Not a warrior at all. A civilian. Joseph was a warrior, a killer. In many ways he was every bit as much a monster as Violin herself.

The most troubling thing of all was the fact that she, a woman of Arklight, daughter of Lilith, soldier in the war against the Red Knights, felt totally defeated by an ordinary woman who would probably waste away and die sometime soon.

Violin tried very hard to hate Junie Flynn.

Chapter Seventy-eight

Mother Night did not want them to see an ordinary person.

However, deciding what to wear took some time. Although she had no one to confess it to, there were times when she considered wearing a costume. Something outrageous, like a supervillain costume, and she had several in mind. She got as far as the sewing stage for one of them before she realized how totally ridiculous that would be. The real world was never cool enough for anyone to accept a costumed supervillain.

Which sucked.

Some of her people would appreciate it, though, and every now and then she considered doing a Skype chat with them while wearing a costume. The foot soldiers would dig it, and Ludo Monk would probably come in his pants. Especially if her costume included cleavage and a large firearm.

But for the meeting with the bidders, a costume just would not work.

So sad. So boring and commonplace.

She thought about how rich she was about to become. Richer than she was already, and Haruspex had helped her loot tens of millions from groups ranging from Citibank to the Russian mob. After the auction, though, she would be many times richer. As rich as she imagined she deserved to be.

She wondered what would become of all that money.

Speculation about that made her think about everything else she’d leave behind. Apartments, cars, jewels, labs, all the science she’d torn from the Jakobys’ computer records. She couldn’t take that stuff with her. She’d had no need of it where she was going.

Deep inside her head a small voice tried to whisper to her, but Mother Night didn’t listen. Would not listen. That voice was only an echo anyway. A glitch in the system that played a tired recording of someone else’s voice.

Artemisia Bliss.

That weak little cow.

That dead bitch.

She forced herself to focus. The outfit she ultimately chose was a simple one, and it was also the first one she’d thought of. A black hooded sweater, black pageboy wig, black glasses. The same one the girls in her street teams used. She darkened her skin with spray tan and painted her mouth with black lipstick. And she took nearly forty minutes using professional stage makeup to change the shape of her face. Padding in her cheeks and behind her upper lip, suggesting an overbite. Plastic-coated wire springs to flare her nostrils, and putty to thicken her nose. Black pencil to add multiple fake piercing holes to her ears and two very heavy earrings to stretch her lobes. Clip-on ring to her nose and one to her lower lip. Then she used latex to give herself a small crescent-shaped scar above her left eyebrow, and a small surgical scar on her throat. More of the spray tan hid the latex and blended it all.

She appraised the final result in the bathroom mirror, and nodded approval.

Mother Night smiled back at her. Haughty, confident, and gorgeous.

The spray tan changed her skin tone from Asian to something more complex, and combined with the reshaping of the nose it suggested mixed ancestry. She’d based a lot of the look on photos of a Congolese fashion model who had been popular in France in the sixties.

Her cell buzzed and she dug it out of her hoodie pocket. It wasn’t a call but rather her alarm.

It was time.

Mother Night hurried out of the bathroom and into the dining room, where everything was set up. She opened her laptop, engaged the global rerouter that would bounce the video feed to more than a thousand spots every ninety seconds, and loaded a videoconferencing utility she’d built by hacking and rewriting the Skype software.

One by one, calls began coming in. Most of these were rerouted, too, and Mother Night smiled at that. It was adorable. As they logged in, she engaged Haruspex to begin tracking them down. Rerouting didn’t mean a fucking thing to Haruspex. There were eleven bidders. None of them had their webcams turned on, of course; however, Mother Night broadcast her image to all of them.

“Good evening,” she said, giving herself a vaguely European accent she’d cribbed from the movies. She’d practiced it for months, listening to playbacks and making adjustments. All part of the “woman of mystery” mystique that made playing Mother Night so much fun. “I trust I have been able to adequately entertain you with today’s festivities. Here is how the game will be played. Each of you has access to the conference chat function. No one is required to speak. Type in your questions and comments. Everyone will be able to see the amount you are bidding. If you wish to send me a private message, use the button marked with a W, for whisper. Only I will be able to access the whispers. This session will conclude when I have accepted the winning bid. The winning bidder will then wire me the entire amount to the routing number I will type in now.

She had a different number for each bidder, and quickly cut and pasted those into individual whisper boxes.

“I will warn you now that I am monitoring those accounts. If there is any attempt to trace them I will be very cross. You have each seen what I am capable of doing. Let us all remain friends. We have a common enemy.”

One of the bidders typed a message into the main chat.

HOW DO WE TRUST YOU?

She laughed, and said, “This is not about trust. At this moment I have my people in each of your countries or inside your groups. Each one of my people has a supply of the pathogen built into a wide-dispersal explosive device. When I have a winning bid, that courier will place their parcel in a protected place and you will be texted the location and the disarming code.”

“Ah,” said Mother Night, “that is another matter. The losing bidders will each wire me a penalty amount of ten million euros. Failure to do so within ten minutes of the end of this conference will result in my people releasing the pathogen in the nearest crowded city. And if any of you decide to drop out of the bidding, the pathogen will be released.”

She let that sink in.

“Of course it is,” she said with a laugh. “What’s your point?”

There was no answer to that.

“Oh, and one last thing,” she said after a moment. “In case you are thinking that this would be a good time to swear one of those tiresome vendettas or fatwas against me, bear this in mind: the seif-al-din is not the only item I have for sale. Play fair with me and you will get to bid on other toys. Break faith with me and you will spend the rest of your lives burying everyone you have ever known. Tell me you understand and accept the terms of our game.”

One by one they sent her private whispers.

Everyone understood.

“How delightful,” she said, settling back. “Now, let the games begin. The starting bid is fifty million euros.”

The first bid was for sixty-five million euros.

Chapter Seventy-nine

“We need to reassess everything,” I said. “Every reaction we’ve had, every response we’ve made. Knowing that this is Bliss changes the game entirely. Bug, if she built something like MindReader based on what she hacked from our system, and maybe schematics for Pangaea, what does that do for us?”

“Puts us up shit creek?”

“No, damn it … work the problem. You know MindReader better than her. No matter how smart she is, you know that computer. Are there assumptions she might make that we can use against her? Are there ways MindReader can set a trap? And more important, now that we know she’s using those technologies plus Vox’s chip, does knowing it give you a way to work around her tech?”

This was the core of any counterattack — knowing your enemy. It’s virtually impossible to protect yourself against the unknown. But with knowledge comes understanding and with that comes strategic thinking.

“I’m all over this,” Bug said with more edge in his voice than I’ve ever heard. His screen went blank.

Then I focused on Hu. “No fucking around now, doc. Where did Bliss get those pathogens? You’re supposed to be a couple of points smarter than her. Prove it.”

If I expected him to get snarky or huffy, he proved me wrong. Hu straightened in his chair. “She could have obtained some samples at the Liberty Bell Center. If she was going crazy back that far, it’s possible she pocketed some samples of Generation Six and Generation Twelve.”

“Enough to do the damage she’s doing?”

“I don’t know. Probably, but definitely not enough to sell to bidders. And the same with the quick-onset Ebola released at the bar. Unlike the seif-al-din, that strain of Ebola doesn’t replicate inside a host. It kills through direct exposure but that’s it. It has to be produced in a lab, and it’s a very complicated process. I think it’s most likely she got some from that lab Colonel Riggs busted in Detroit. Bliss was there running the cleanup team. The reports say that she used water balloons at that bar and in other locations. If that’s the case, then she probably added a portion of her supply to each balloon, so she’s probably burned through any samples she might have obtained. From what I can put together in my head based on where she was and what she had access to, I think her real weapon is the seif-al-din. She’s more likely to have enough of that for more hits, and, like I said, she could possibly have harvested more from infected test subjects.”

“I never thought I’d ever say that I wish we were facing Ebola instead,” I muttered.

No one argued. People infected with Ebola would die, but they wouldn’t become carnivorous vectors.

“If Bliss intends to sell these bioweapons to foreign bidders,” said Rudy, “and if we can reasonably believe that her supplies are limited to what she might have taken from DMS crime scenes … then how can she have enough to sell?”

Hu shook his head. “I don’t see how she can. She would need the purest strains to be able to sell them to anyone’s bioweapons program.”

“Unless she has a source for more pure pathogen,” suggested Circe. “Is it possible that all of this chaos and violence is a distraction to keep us from looking for her true agenda? Could this be a screen while she makes a run at getting a supply of the purest versions of each pathogen?”

We looked at one another for a long second, and then Church snatched up the phone. He called Samson Riggs and ordered him to drop everything and take what was left of Shockwave Team and get to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Auntie was on her phone ordering Brick to triple the guards on the virus vault buried six levels down here at the Hangar.

That left the site with the biggest array of pathogenic monsters and the largest supply of each.

The Locker.

“Captain—” began Church, but I was already heading for the door at a dead run. Ghost ran beside me, his nails clicking on the marble floor.

Chapter Eighty

By the time Ghost and I reached the prep room, Top had already gotten the word. Everyone was in the process of grabbing gear and stuffing it into duffel bags. We were all wearing borrowed clothes and would be rolling with guns and equipment that wasn’t ours.

I tore off the fake police uniform I’d been wearing since leaving the subway and began pulling on a Saratoga Hammer suit. Top was next to me, buckling on a gun belt. “Not trying to dodge all the fun and games, Cap’n, but why are we rolling on this? There are two teams closer.”

“Everyone’s already deployed,” I told him. “There’s so much shit going on that most teams are split into two-man squads. As of right now, Echo has more manpower. So it falls to us.”

“Even though we’re America’s most wanted?” asked Montana, who stood next to Top, hooking flash-bangs on her belt.

“That’s not how it’s playing out,” I said. “The public and the press are looking for that team in the subway, but nobody has a face or a name. We’re rolling out with DEA stenciled on our body armor. Nobody’s looking twice at a DEA team right now.”

Doubt flickered in her eyes, but she gave me a tight nod.

We grabbed our equipment and hauled ass to ground level, where Church’s private Lear was waiting, engine hot, door open. We piled in, Coop slammed the door, and seconds later we were climbing high and fast, leaving Brooklyn behind. Ghost huddled down by the door, his hair standing on end, eyes filled with a lupine wariness. As we flew, we loaded every spare magazine we had and prayed that we were not already too late.

Church called before we even hit cruising altitude.

“Tell me something good,” I asked. Or, maybe, begged.

He told me about the release of the seif-al-din in a Best Buy in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Mother Night’s people had used big tractor trailers to block front and back doors, and then they released a couple of dozen infected into the store during a doorbuster sale of a new video game.

“Are there any survivors?” I asked.

“No,” Church said wearily. “But no infected have escaped. The trucks kept everything contained and local SWAT have the area locked down. However, the entire thing was broadcast live via cameras apparently placed inside the store.”

My stomach felt like it was filled with raw sewage. “The press is going to keep on this, you know. They’re going to want to show everything, maybe hoping for a response like to what we did in the subway.”

“No doubt.”

“If you wipe out the infected, they’ll see that, and if you don’t — and people get wind of what’s really going on in there … Christ, we’re screwed either way.”

“And all the confusion, public outrage, and panic serves Mother Night.”

I wanted to bang my head on a wall. Or maybe toss myself out of the damn jet. Would have simplified the day.

“You know,” I said, “thinking back on it, I can see how Bliss got here. Some of the things she asked. The kinds of trouble she got into with Auntie. The opportunities she had. It’s not unlike Hugo Vox.”

“Yes,” said Church, “power corrupts. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

He disconnected.

But he was back in less than five minutes. It wasn’t about Bliss’s possible friends and it sure as hell wasn’t good news.

“Captain,” he said in a voice from which all emotion and inflection had been crushed, “at 10:01 this morning we lost all contact with the Locker.”

Chapter Eighty-one

Colonel Sim Sa-jeong mopped sweat from his face as he watched the numbers flow from the account he managed for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and into the numbered account of that witch, Mother Night.

He had won the auction, though barely.

Three-hundred and seventy-eight million euros. Nearly half a billion in U.S. dollars. Nearly one quarter of his yearly operating budget. And all for a weapon that the supreme leader might never have the courage to use. In his private mind, Sim knew that the young leader was more bluster than bite. Would he dare to use a bioweapon of such devastating power as the seif-al-din? Apart from the commonsense question as to whether such a weapon could ever be used with even a prayer of controlling it, the knowledge that North Korea had it could be disastrous. The entire world would fear the country, no doubt, and that was what Kim Jong-un truly wanted. But they would also become a unified force against Sim’s beloved country. North Korea would become an island in a sea of enemies. No one would dare invade them, but would anyone trade with them? Would fear of the prion-based pathogen force the world to defer to North Korea and treat it like a global supreme power?

Sim had his doubts.

But now the money was paid.

The only grace was that all of the bidders were blind as to the nationality and personal identity of the others. No one yet knew that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had bought the world’s most dangerous weapon. Only Sim, the supreme leader, and Mother Night knew.

For now.

His computer screen changed to indicate that the money transfer was complete.

Sweat ran in lines down Sim’s face as he waited for the last part. The coded message with instructions on where and how to take possession of the seif-al-din.

An icon appeared. A symbol of the English letter A surrounded by a circle.

Below it were the words, in Korean, CLICK HERE.

Sim did as instructed.

Nothing happened for a few moments, but he waited with all of the patience he could muster.

Then the display changed again. The letter-A symbol expanded until it filled the entire screen. It paused for a moment, then dissolved into a cartoon version of the face of Mother Night. The cartoon image was laughing.

Laughing.

Then everything went crazy.

The computer system isolated and disabled its own keyboard and mouse. He tried pressing CONTROL, ALT, and DELETE simultaneously, but that did nothing.

Nothing that he was aware of at that moment.

In truth, those keys unlocked the Trojan horse that had been planted in his system by Mother Night during the auction. Once unlocked, hundreds of viruses and tapeworms invaded Sim’s computer and, via its wi-fi and landline connections, plunged into the intranet used by his department. From there it raced onward, infecting thousands of computers through the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Copying files, destroying security protocols, interpolating data, shutting down every system and program that could be used to defend against cyberattacks. And in flash-bursts it sent all of that data back out to the Net.

To Britain and Israel.

To Japan.

To South Korea.

To China and Russia.

To America.

To the major press agencies in more than one hundred nations.

And while that was happening, a secondary set of programs reinitiated the banking transfer order, using Sim’s passwords for authorization. Three separate sets of transfers began. Each one taking a remaining third of Sim’s annual budget. Two billion in American dollars.

It was all so fast.

By the time Sim realized that he could not stop the process and tore the battery out of his computer, the damage was done.

Everyone knew that North Korea had just paid two billion dollars for a doomsday plague.

Chapter Eighty-two

“No, Mr. President,” said Mr. Church, “we can’t prove any of this yet. However, this is the most credible way for the pieces to fit.”

On the big screen the president of the United States looked like the victim of a violent mugging. He was gaunt, his eyes and cheeks were hollowed out by stress, the lines on his face seemed to have been carved there by a rough hand.

“I’ll be addressing the nation again in a few minutes,” he said. “My advisors are telling me not to, that right now the people don’t want to see my face anywhere except with a noose around my neck. In their shoes I couldn’t blame them. That video is damning.”

“Bug’s pulled it apart.”

“I know, he sent it to my people and they’re trying to decide how best to present that information to the public without it looking weak, phony, and desperate.”

“Good luck with that.”

The president bristled. “Is that sarcasm, Deacon?”

“No, Mr. President, it’s heartfelt. I believe you will need all the luck you can muster, and I sincerely wish you well.”

Some of the tension leaked from the president’s face, and he nodded. “Sorry. I’m a bit on edge.”

“We all are. Right now I have teams on their way to—” His cell buzzed and Church glanced at it. “One moment, Mr. President,” he said. “This may be news.”

He picked up the phone, listened for a moment.

“Send it to my screen. I’m on with the president.” He set his phone down. “Mr. President, I believe you need to see this.”

The big screen split and the other half was filled by Anderson Cooper. Two small pictures flanked the reporter. One was a screen capture of the Mother Night video from yesterday. The other was a picture of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. The text banner below the pictures read: BIOTERRORISM.

“… in a bizarre twist on the catastrophic events of the last twenty-four hours, sources now confirm that North Korean president Kim Jong-un has purchased a deadly weaponized pathogen — a so-called doomsday weapon — from the terrorist calling herself Mother Night…”

The president of the United States said, “Dear God…”

Chapter Eighty-three

He thought it was funny.

He thought everything was funny.

The looks on their faces.

The screams.

The bright blood, red as balloons.

The way they tried to run from him.

The way they tried to play hide-and-seek with him. Well, the way they tried to hide from him.

So funny.

All so fucking funny.

Like the two women who managed the data-processing office. One was as fat as the Goodyear blimp and the other looked like a pencil with boobs. Jack Sprat and his wife. An imperfect comparison, but he didn’t care. It was funny to think of them that way. The fat one trying to squeeze into a closet, screaming, crying, snot running down over her lips and chin. As if she could cram her fat ass into a closet that wasn’t even deep enough for the skinny one.

And the skinny one. Hiding under a desk. Silly bitch. How can you expect to hide under a desk if you give yourself away by screaming at the top of your lungs?

Silly, silly, silly.

And funny.

The way her hands just came off when he swung the axe. They leaped up and landed on the seat of the leather roller chair. One on top of the other, like pancakes. He couldn’t have managed that if he’d tried. He tried to get her head to land up there, too, but his aim was bad and her skull just fell apart.

But that was funny, too.

It was all funny.

The brains were delicious, too. So sweet. Filled with secrets. Better even than the flesh of their breasts, which he thought was the best thing he’d ever eaten. A naughty pleasure that made him chuckle guilty little chuckles with each bite.

Later, he stood in the doorway to the data office. Blood ran in twisty lines down his clothes, and it plop-plopped from the blade of the fire axe. It misted the air when he laughed because there was so much of it on his face.

He was sure some of it was his blood.

But that was okay.

That was funny.

It was all funny.

He turned away from the chunks and lumps, trying to remember their names. He should know their names, having eaten their brains. He was sure they had names. He’d known them for three years. But the names slipped away like greasy eels.

He thought about that image and laughed and laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

And …

Chapter Eighty-four

I gathered my team and broke the news to them.

“Here’s what I know. We’ve lost all communication with the Locker. That includes landlines, cells, computers, the works. It happened in a way that somehow prevented the automatic systems from notifying anyone. In fact, from the outside during automatic checks by computers it appears as if things are normal. When MindReader pinged the system the automatic status sent back an all-clear message. It was only after Aunt Sallie tried to call them to have on-site security coordinate with us that she hit a dead line. All attempts to reestablish contact have been negative. Because the automatic replies were still functioning there’s no way to know exactly when the facility was actually compromised. Last verbal contact of record was nine thirty last night.”

“How the fuck are we just finding this out now?” asked Lydia. “I thought Auntie confirmed that the place was secure.”

I sighed. “It’s set up for computer confirmation rather than person-to-person. It was a design element that keyed a request from the Hangar directly to the Locker’s security systems. Ask for a status report and it runs an immediate diagnostic that excludes the possibility of human coercion.”

“Except when one of the world’s smartest computer experts rigs the system.”

“Yup. And I’m pretty sure Mr. Church is going to fry Aunt Sallie for not speaking directly to a human being,” I said. It’s possible my total lack of sympathy for Auntie was evident in my tone.

Top grunted. “Maybe that was built into the plan. Mother Night’s been jerking us in so many damn directions it’s likely she knew that this sort of slipup might happen.”

That thought had occurred to me, too, though I felt ungracious enough not to admit it. Aunt Sallie had threatened to neuter my dog. Ghost seemed to catch my train of thought and bared a fang.

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” said Bunny. “I’m having a hard time buying that the Locker’s been taken. I thought that couldn’t happen.”

“Titanic couldn’t sink either, Farmboy,” muttered Top.

“No, I mean aren’t there like ten kinds of redundancies?”

“At least,” I said. “There are separate backup landlines for the computers and phones, ditto for wi-fi and cells. The redundancies are both passive and active. The passive ones go active when the primary signal is interrupted; the active ones randomly ping the system and go active when they don’t get a reply. And we have some phantom lines that even the people at the Locker don’t know about. These can be remotely activated on Mr. Church’s say-so.”

“Which he gave?” asked Top.

“Which he gave,” I agreed. “However, no one’s picking up the phone, and now even the computers have stopped responding.”

“Is the Locker the prize in this whole game?” asked Noah. “Or is this another way to thin us out to the point where we’re effectively useless?”

Of all the newbies he was the one whose personality I hadn’t quite grasped. Montana was a tough country woman with the professional skeptical cynicism of the FBI. Dunk was a solid team player with a sense of humor that was probably a façade over some kind of personal hurt. Maybe an idealist wearing the uniform because he actually thought it would make a difference. But Noah was a blank, a mask. In some ways he reminded me of a shooter who’d run with my pack a couple of years ago, a laconic man named John Smith. He’d been the best sniper in the U.S. military, the hammer of God in a firefight; but he kept everything in. He never shared his opinions or feelings, never let anything show. Was Noah cut from the same cloth, another internalizer and self-imposed loner? Or was his bland mask hiding complexities he didn’t want to share? Wish I had the time to find out.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We’re operating on guesswork and supposition.”

“Is stealing those things from the Locker really a possibility?” asked Montana. “Can that facility be cracked and looted?”

“If you had asked me that question this afternoon I’d have told you no. Not without a computer like MindReader and a security strategist as savvy as Bug. Things have changed, which sucks for all of us.” I switched on a tabletop computer and brought up the floor plan of the Locker.

As I loaded the screens, Bunny mused, “I didn’t know her real well, but well enough. When the hell did she become evil?”

“Not the first time that question’s been asked,” I said. “We know she went off the reservation when she started stealing classified materials, but when did she cross the line to the point where she was willing to take lives? I don’t know.”

I thought back to some of the conversations I’d had with Bliss. About the nature of good and evil, and of where evil came from. About nature, nurture, and choice. She’d brought those topics up. Was she looking for how to put her ethics and compassion on a shelf? Or kill those qualities within her life? I think so, and it made me feel sick to think that I played a part, however small and tangential, to that process. Part of me felt sorry for her. I’d known her pretty well, and I’d liked her a lot. I thought she was part of the family, and even after she’d been arrested, I wished her well. I was sorry when the judge threw the book at her, and sorrier still when I thought she’d been murdered in prison. Those feelings were still inside me, warring with the apparent truth that Bliss had become a murderous monster.

The civilized man inside my mind was appalled and refused to accept that such things were possible. The cop was far more worldly and cynical. He knew about the pathology of all kinds of criminals. After all, everyone is innocent until they commit their first crime. Even Hitler was innocent once. And Charles Manson.

Could we — the experts in the DMS — have spotted this thread of damage in Bliss? Should we have spotted it sooner? Aunt Sallie saw it and stopped trusting Bliss months before she was able to bring charges.

Hu never saw it, though. Nor did Rudy.

I didn’t.

And Church? Who the hell knows what he saw, but I know that he couldn’t have anticipated this level of treachery or criminality.

This level of evil.

The third voice inside my head — the warrior, the killer — was not trying to figure it out or assign blame. All he wanted to do was hunt that other killer, to find the enemy and destroy her.

He was banging on the bars of his cell, demanding to be let out.

Soon, I knew, I would want to do just that.

Once more Ghost sensed what was in my mind, and the look in his eyes made that subtle and dangerous shift from dog to wolf.