Dogs of War

CHAPTER ONE

“Mom…?” she whispered into the phone. “Mom, I want to come home.”

The girl sat huddled against the headboard of the motel bed. It was scarred with cigarette burns. So was she. Old ones, from before she ran away.

Her words drifted down the telephone lines and only silence came back.

“Mom… are you there…?”

Tears broke and ran down the girl’s face. She was naked. Her clothes were torn because the last john liked to do that. She hurt inside, because he liked that, too. The sheets she’d wrapped around herself after he left felt stiff and coarse, abrading her skin, offering scant protection and no comfort.

“Mom, please,” she begged.

She heard the sucking sound of her mother drawing on a cigarette. A pause, then the long hissing as she blew smoke. It was so vivid that the girl could almost smell the unfiltered Camel.

“Mom…?”

“We looked for you,” said the voice. It sounded the same. Cold, with a cigarette rasp. “We looked all over for you.”

“I know… I’m sorry…”

“You just up and left.”

“I’m sorry, Mom… but I… I had to.”

“Had to? Bullshit, Holly. All you had to do was act right and you couldn’t even do that,” said her mother. “Why’s that? What’s wrong with you that you couldn’t even try to act like we’re all family.”

“He’s not my father.”

“Yes, he damn well is. Maybe not by blood, but what’s that matter? He raised you. He took care of you. He took care of us both. Who do you think paid for everything you ever had? Your school stuff, your health care. Who do you think bought your birthday presents and gave you that bike for Christmas when you were eight? Who do you think cares so much about us that he does that, even for an ungrateful girl that ain’t even his?”

“Mom, I—”

“And how do you say thanks? You tell lies about him. Who do you think you are to tell lies like that about someone who’s always taken care of you?”

“I didn’t lie,” insisted Holly.

“You always lied. About that, about taking money from my purse. About the drugs.”

“I didn’t lie about him. About what he did.”

“You’re nothing but a little liar. And a junkie… and a whore. God, how are you even my daughter?”

“Mom… please!”

“And then you leave without so much as a goddamn note. You tell all those lies and then you break my heart and you don’t have the respect to even leave a note. Would that have been so much? A note? You could have fucking texted me. But no. Nothing. That’s so like you, Holly. It’s exactly the sort of mean thing you’d do.”

Holly was sobbing now, her tears clinging to the lines of her chin, then losing their purchase and falling onto the soiled sheets. Then suddenly she started to cough. Heavy, deep coughs that vibrated and burned in her throat. Spasms hit her so hard it made her ribs flare with pain, as if someone was punching her.

“Why now?” demanded her mother. “Why are you calling now? No, let me guess. You’re in jail and you need bail money, right? Or are you going to try and trick me into sending you some cash so you can buy—”

The coughing fit battered her, making the room swim. Lights seemed to pop and sizzle in her eyes and there was a buzzing noise in her ears, as if a thousand blowflies were swarming inside her skull. The lights seemed to flare and dim, flare and dim, and each time more of what she saw seemed to be painted in a thin wash of dark red. It was like looking through a red veil that shimmered and jerked.

“Mom,” she cried, when she could catch her breath. “I’m sick.”

“Yeah? Go to the free clinic. They’ll give you all the penicillin you want.”

“No, it’s not that. Please, I’m really sick.” The buzzing in her ears was worse now, blocking out her thoughts. “There’s something wrong with me.”

Her mother laughed. Actually laughed.

Holly wiped her face with the sheet and in the gloom didn’t notice the stain. Not for almost three full seconds. Then she saw it. The tearstains were wrong. So wrong.

They were red.

Such a bright, bright red. Not like the veil that covered her eyes, but the color of…

Blood.

“Mom…?” whispered Holly. “Oh, God, Mom…”

“He said you can come home,” her mother said, harsh and icy. “But only on the condition that you apologize to him. You have to tell everyone that you were lying about what you said.”

“… Mom…”

“You need to fill out some papers at the school and with the police to take back everything you said. You understand that? You can’t just say stuff like that and hope it goes away. You hurt him with what you said.”

“Mom, please…”

Blood was running from her nose now, too. She wiped at it with the sheet, terrified by how much there was. Then she felt warmth in her ears, and when she touched them her fingers came away glistening with crimson.

Her mother’s voice droned on and on, telling her of the damage she’d done, the wreckage she’d left behind, the betrayal, the lies, the humiliation.

Holly whispered one last word.

“Mommy…?”

A question. A plea.

Then the pain began and all that came out of her mouth after that was the screams. The red veil seemed to catch fire, and black flowers blossomed in her mind. She bared her teeth, biting the phone, biting at her own hands.

And that’s when a sound came from deep inside her. It wasn’t the blowfly buzz, or even a scream.

When Holly threw back her head and let it loose, it all tore out of her as a howl of pure, unfiltered, unstoppable rage.

CHAPTER TWO

I just got back from a dirty little piece of business in San Antonio and wasn’t looking for more trouble. I’d gone down there as a gunslinger-on-loan from the DMS to intercept a bunch of cartel mules that were bringing in something nasty through a series of underground tunnels. Not drugs this time. No, these cats had containers filled with live mosquitoes carrying a very nasty new strain of the Zika virus. We tried to make it a clean arrest, but a couple of the bad guys decided to play it stupid rather than smart. That’s something I’ve never understood. What’s the worst that could happen to them if they surrendered? A few years in prison? Deportation? Better than being dead, which hurts more and lasts a long time.

We yelled at them, told them to drop their weapons, told them that they had no chance. They drew on us. We put them down. It was all very loud and nasty.

And, oh yeah, the transport containers? Not bulletproof. So we had to use flame units to incinerate everything in the tunnels. Even the few bad guys who, by then, were trying to surrender — they all died. Some quickly, some very badly.

I carried the sound of those screams with me all the way home. I knew it would be stored in that special place in my mind where the worst things I’ve experienced are placed on display in well-lighted niches. Ready for me to look at when I think I’m too happy.

My secretary, Lydia Rose, was waiting for me when I got off the elevator. She is a lovely woman. Short, round, with masses of black hair and the brightest smile in California. She took one look at my face and her smile dimmed perceptibly.

“Was it bad, Joe?”

“It could have gone better,” I said.

Ghost was with me. He’d been shampooed, too, but he smelled like smoked dog.

Lydia Rose glanced up at me. “You probably don’t want to hear this, then, but Mr. Church wants you to call. He says it’s something important.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “The ass is probably about to fall off the world and everyone else but me is smart enough to screen their calls.”

“Should I set up the call?”

I sighed. “Sure.”

Ghost gave me a pitying look and trotted into my office. Lydia Rose asked, “Is Junie back yet?”

My live-in lover, Junie Flynn, was in some remote village in the Brazilian rain forest on a joint World Health Organization and FreeTech venture intended to improve water purity. Hepatitis A started going wild down there a year ago, and Junie’s researchers had come up with some spiffy new method of purifying river and rain water. The technology was part of the vast body of research and development conducted for decidedly non-humanitarian purposes by some of the groups we’ve torn down. Funny how something made to destroy can be spun around and used for the common good. That’s what FreeTech is. Junie runs it, along with Alexander Chismer — Toys — formerly a bad guy who’s now trying to save his soul by saving the world — and a dedicated staff of scientists and developers. The downside — or, perhaps the selfish side — of this is that she’s away. A lot. The Brazil trip was supposed to be two weeks long, but we were already into the second month.

“No, she’s damn well not,” I grumped, and slammed my office door.

A moment later I heard Lydia Rose yell, “Well, don’t take it out on the whole damn world!”

My phone rang. Outside the window I could see the beautiful sand and beautiful surf under the beautiful sun and knew with absolute certainty that I wasn’t going to be enjoying any of it. I answered with great reluctance.

“What’s your operational status?” asked Church. No “Hello,” no “Good job in San Antonio. Thanks for saving the world.” That’s Church.

“I’d like to get drunk and eat too many fish tacos.”

“Get them to go,” he said. “I need you on a plane to Prague.”

“Why do I want to go to Prague?”

Church said, “Do you remember the sewers of Paris? Remember what you went there to destroy?”

“Yes, and I’m pretty sure I actually did destroy it.”

“Life is full of ugly surprises, Captain. It’s surfaced again in Prague. Same technology, or perhaps the next generation of it.” He explained the situation to me. It started with a case that I seemed to be handling on the installment plan. It happens like that sometimes. You think you closed the file on something and it turns out there’s more to do. Either the case is bigger or you missed something or someone comes along and tries to resurrect it. There’s a saying that evil never dies; it merely waits and grows stronger in the dark. I used to think stuff like that was poetic claptrap. I’ve since come to realize the unfortunate wisdom in old adages.

Church told me that a team of agents working for Barrier, the British counterpart of the DMS, caught wind of something while they were in the Czech Republic working on another case. They couldn’t stop their own operation, so they handed it off to us.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Go to Prague,” he said.

“I don’t have a team on deck,” I said. “Top and Bunny are still out scouting for recruits. Triton and Boardwalk Teams are out on gigs. Unless you want me to take my secretary, I’ll have to do this alone.”

“Call a friend,” said Church, and hung up.

I set the phone down, got up, and looked out at the beautiful spring day. Call a friend. Church was famous for his “friends in the industry,” a catchall label to describe key people whose knowledge and qualities he trusted. I had my own friends, as he well knew. He hadn’t named a name, but he didn’t have to.

I took out my cell phone, punched in a number, leaned my forehead against the cool glass, and waited for her to answer.

“Hello, Joseph,” she said after the third ring.

“Hello, Violin.”

CHAPTER THREE

Preston Wiśniewski was a connoisseur of screams.

In the seventeen years that he had worked as the building super for the Imperial Hotel, he’d heard them all. The sharp, sudden scream of a new resident seeing a rat for the first time. The piteous scream of a junkie finding his or her lover dead with a needle still in the vein. The outraged scream of an inexperienced prostitute the first time a john took her anally. The staccato scream of someone being whipped. The piercing scream of sheer, unbridled lunacy. The phlegmy scream of someone losing a fight in a very bad way. The soulless jackal screams of gangbangers as they stomped someone to death. The apologetic scream of a girl who tried to renege on services paid for.

So many different kinds of screams.

He sat at his kitchen table on the second floor, dressed in blue work pants and a T-shirt with a faded logo of Mr. Clean on the chest, working his way through a Sudoku that was giving him problems. The scream made him glance up, and he listened to the memory of it in his mind.

Was it different somehow?

Was it a new kind of scream?

Wiśniewski didn’t particularly like screams, but he was philosophical about them. They were a part of his world. They were expected in a place like this. And, since this world was his world, he tried to understand them, categorize them, assign them ratings. Last week there had been a whopper of a scream when a male client was introduced to a strap-on for the first time. His scream had gone ultrasonic, and he’d kept it up for a full five minutes. That had been a new one, and Wiśniewski rated it a seven in a new category. He figured the man could have put a little more into it, and maybe would with a bigger attachment to the strap-on. The man had left smiling — and walking funny — and Wiśniewski figured he’d be back.

This scream, though… it wasn’t like that. It was a female scream. A girl, he thought, not a woman. Probably one of the girls up on three. There were two whores working day shift up there. Kya something and Brandy something. The guys who liked to fuck the young ones did it in the middle of the day, usually on their lunch breaks, so no one would take notice of them being out. So their wives wouldn’t miss them and think they were up to something. There were two guys up there now with the girls. The scream had come from one of the rooms directly above him, 304 or 306. Wiśniewski could tell. Even on four or five, he could usually pick the floor, the room.

There was another scream, and Wiśniewski frowned. It was shrill and somehow wet. Raw wet, like someone who wasn’t used to screaming that loud and did it the wrong way. Did it hard enough to tear something. That surprised him, because he hadn’t pegged either of the johns as hitters. They were both semi-regulars, and there hadn’t been problems before. No bruises on the girls. Not even on Kya, who sometimes sassed the johns. She chased some clients off, but not because any of them had made her scream.

Not like this.

Wiśniewski waited, listening, head cocked. He chewed on the end of his pen for a moment, waiting for the next one. When they were that loud and nasty, there was almost always more, softer or louder. Seven times out of ten.

He waited.

There was another sound. Another scream, but different.

This time it was a man who screamed. And then there was a thud. Another. Hard, reverberating through the ceiling, spitting dust from between the cracks. More screams. Male and female now, overlapping, colliding, and the crash of something heavy. A table? A chair?

A body?

“Jesus Christ,” growled Wiśniewski as he launched himself from his chair. “What the fuck is happening up there?”

He raced into the living room, where his nephew, Stanley, was playing video games with some kind of stupid set of goggles. Stanley stood in the middle of the floor kicking and punching as if he were fighting a host of ninjas. Stupid kid. Wiśniewski slapped the goggles roughly off the young man’s head.

“Ow!” cried Stanley, and was about to say more when he froze, raised his face, and stared at the ceiling. The screams were constant now. “Oh, jeez… what’s going on?”

Wiśniewski didn’t answer. Instead, he snatched a sawed-off baseball bat from an umbrella stand by the door and hurried out.

He rushed to the stairwell, slammed through the door, and took the stairs two at a time. Wiśniewski wasn’t a young man, or a thin one, but he was strong. Peasant stock, his grandmother used to say. Wide and barrel-chested and thick. Stanley, thin and short, followed but not as quickly. Wiśniewski reached the third-floor landing, yanked the door open, and saw that the hallway was filled with people. Girls dressed in underwear or towels or nothing. A few men hanging back, peering uncertainly out of rooms, not meeting the eyes of the other customers. One door was closed, and the screams were coming from inside that room.

“Everybody get back,” bellowed Wiśniewski. “There’s nothing to see here. Go back to your rooms. It’s all okay.”

The spectators retreated half a step. Wiśniewski bulled his way through them, bawling for Stanley to clear everyone out of the hall. The super reached for the handle and froze. The screams inside were rising in pitch now. They were terrible to hear, and there was another sound buried inside them. A more animalistic noise, which made no sense.

Was it a growl?

Christ, had someone brought a dog into the place? Why? Even here at the Imperial there were limits. Getting busted for prostitution was one thing, but bestiality was a whole different set of laws that Wiśniewski didn’t want to break. Oh, hell, no.

He cut a momentary look over his shoulder. The girls, the johns, and his nephew all seemed to be frozen, barely breathing, staring. Then Wiśniewski tightened his grip on the baseball bat, turned the handle, and opened the door.

He stepped into a nightmare.

He stepped into a scene from some horror movie.

There was blood everywhere.

So much blood.

On the bed. On the walls. On the lampshade.

On the john, who lay sprawled like a starfish, half on and half off the bed. He was naked, hairy, pale-skinned, and all the blood, Wiśniewski was certain, was his. One of his eyes had been torn out and lay as a collapsed, dripping ruin on his cheek. His face and chest and arms were covered in long slashes and vicious purple bites. He screamed and screamed and screamed.

The girl, Kya, sat astride him. She, too, was naked. A tiny thing with vestigial breasts, a shaved crotch, a tattoo of a butterfly above her heart, and wild red hair. She screamed again, throwing her head back to hurl the shriek at the ceiling — or, perhaps, at God above — and then she suddenly bent forward and bit the throat out of the screaming man.

His screams collapsed into a wet gurgle. The girl worried at his throat, growling like a dog, ripping at the tough skin as she beat at him with bloodied fists.

Wiśniewski almost ran.

He stood there for a moment, stock-still, the weapon forgotten in his hand, mouth agape, staring at the red horror in front of him.

Behind him someone else screamed. He turned to see Stanley and the other girl, Brandy. Wiśniewski wasn’t sure which of them had uttered the scream.

Then Kya snarled, and Wiśniewski realized that she was looking at him now. Her mouth was smeared with blood, and there was a shred of something glistening between her teeth, but her wild eyes were focused on him.

“Watch!” yelled his nephew, and it was almost too late, because Kya launched herself at Wiśniewski with shocking speed. The big super stumbled backward and swung the bat as much by accident as by intention. It whistled through the air and hit the girl on the upper arm. It was not a well-aimed shot and nowhere near as hard as he could have managed if he hadn’t been panicked, but it was still hard. The girl weighed eighty-nine pounds, and the force of the blow sent her crashing into the dresser. That should have knocked her senseless, but it didn’t. She hissed in fury rather than pain and came off the floor in a tearing rush. The super backpedaled and his shoulder caught the outside edge of the door at just the wrong angle, and his bulk slammed the door shut.

Outside in the hall, Stanley Wiśniewski stood staring at the closed door. Hearing the dreadful sounds that were coming from inside. Hearing the screams.

Hearing his uncle’s screams.

Hearing those awful, awful screams.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I need your help on something,” I told Violin, “and I’m resource-poor at the moment. Are you free?”

“Depends on what you have in mind, Joseph,” she said.

“A job.”

“Sigh,” she said. “You’re no fun. What kind of job?”

“Remember the sewers of Paris?”

“How could I forget? We waded through the shit of an entire city and then watched the sunrise together. So romantic.”

“No, I meant do you remember why we were there? The research data we were after?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “We burned it. Why?”

“Someone else has it.”

I heard her sharp intake of breath, and then there was a short, heavy silence. I could almost hear her reliving that mission. A group of scientists had developed a performance-enhancing synthetic compound that combined select lean mass-building steroids with a synthetic nootropic compound that significantly increased and regulated hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology, these drugs are wakefulness-promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version was designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the person being treated wouldn’t tire and wouldn’t lose mental sharpness. This wasn’t for a supersoldier program or for anything tied to the military. It was for factory workers. The drugs were intended for use in Third World countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who could work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output. It was a new tweak on legal slave labor, because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human-rights presence and where governments are easily bought. It could also be used for sex workers, and that is a special kind of living hell.

Violin said, “When do we leave?”

I told her that I was heading to the airport now. “Don’t bring your puppy,” I said.

She called me a bastard and hung up.

CHAPTER FIVE

Zephyr Bain was a monster, and she knew it.

Nothing less than a monster would be able to save the world. Nothing less than a monster would have the courage and the vision to do what was absolutely necessary to save the world from itself.

She wasn’t even certain that she deserved to live in the version of the world that would exist when all the killing was done.

Probably not.

The people who survived, those who would thrive and benefit from what she did, wouldn’t want to share that world with anyone like her. They wouldn’t be the kind to abide a monster. It was a sad thought but an understandable perspective. After all, she was trying to cleanse the world of unclean things, and by definition she would become unclean in the process. The consolation was that the right kind of people would survive, and they would have a genuine chance to flourish. Without the others. Without the parasites who fed like vampires on the system.

The survivors would be the world’s true élite, the ones who hadn’t been chosen by any god but had earned their place in paradise through good breeding, intellectual superiority, usefulness to the forward momentum, and clarity of vision.

As for the rest?

Well, as she saw it survival of the fittest was more than a theory. It was a law mandated by the harsh realities of the world as it truly was, not as viewed through wishful thinking, political agendas, greed, or aggressive stupidity.

Even so, Zephyr would have liked to see the world make the change. After the dogs of war had been let off the chain and allowed to run rampant in the streets. How nice that would be. She had dreamed of it every night since she was a little girl. If she would be dead before it came to pass, then she prayed that her dying mind would revisit one of those dreams as the darkness took her.

It was only fair.

It was only right.

If it weren’t for the cancer, it would be so much harder to accept. But the universe had been quite clever in the way it stage-managed all of this. Even the cancer. Giving Zephyr the knowledge, giving her access to the tools, and then giving her a shield against her own hesitation. It was all very tidy and efficient, and no one appreciated efficiency as much as she. The universe was messy, but the scaffolding of scientific truths on which it was hung was clean, pure, and without contradiction.

Her friend and employee, the little problem-solving Frenchman everyone called the Concierge, was one of the few who knew that she was dying. Her mentor and sometime lover, John the Revelator, knew, too. Few others. No one else who knew cared as much as the Concierge or John. The others with whom she conspired to bring about the change saw her as a means to an end, an agent of change, perhaps even a hero of the war, but she doubted that any of them would mourn her passing. They would be too busy framing the new world. Nor would they be a comfort to her as she died. There was no doubt about that.

The Concierge was different, because he was a philosophical man. He was the one who helped Zephyr cultivate an interesting perspective on dying. “The Egyptians and other cultures saw death as a passage,” he told her. “The highborn would go into the afterlife with great fanfare and pomp. But they would not go alone. They would have their household staff killed, too, so that there would be people to see to their comforts forever.”

She had been raised in a rich Wasp family but had spent some of her life drifting from one religious movement to another. Other churches, other faiths, even a few cults. Looking for answers that she believed existed. Finding some truths, catching glimpses of others, but never quite landing on solid spiritual ground. It was John the Revelator who had helped her ultimately find something to believe in. John helped her see the face of God as He moved through the shadows of a twilit sky. He whispered to her that there was an answer, that there was something to believe in. There was a mission.

Her mission.

It was through John that Zephyr found her purpose in life, and in doing so realized what would have to be done to keep the whole world from falling apart. It was such a profound insight that Zephyr wondered if this was what Noah felt when God told him to start building a boat.

Maybe her allies, those indifferent framers of the future, would paint her as the new Noah. It was true enough, though her ark would be made of silicone and printed circuits rather than wood. And, instead of a flood, the unworthy and the unclean would be cleansed from the earth by a swarm of mosquitoes. The groundwork was already laid, a quiet process that had taken years. Soon — very soon — everything would be set and the go order would be sent. Sick as she was, she would live to see the process start. It would be glorious. There might even be the sound of angelic trumpets. God loved a good massacre. Zephyr had read many sacred books. God, in His love for the world, had killed billions.

So, too, would she.

For that is the work of both gods and monsters.

CHAPTER SIX

I took my private jet, a gorgeous Gulfstream G650 that once belonged to a Colombian bioweapons broker who somehow managed to trip and fall out of the cabin door when we were three thousand feet over the Gulf of Mexico. Clumsy. I call the plane Shirley. Yes, it’s immature to give a pet name to an ostentatious piece of luxury aircraft, and, no, I don’t give a finely textured crap if it is.

Church finessed the clearances all the way. Violin was waiting for me at the airport, driving a two-door Porsche 918 Spyder. It’s a superelegant hybrid that will eat pretty much any gas-powered car on the road. Six hundred and eight horsepower, with a top speed of two-ten. The sticker price, before extras, is close to $900,000. I’m not into car porn, but that thing gave me a woody. I climbed in, and she peeled away as if she was leaving a crime scene.

“You came alone,” I observed. “Where’s your puppy?”

She made a face. “First, stop calling him a puppy. And, second, Harry is fine, thank you. He is auditing a class in Florence.”

“A class? On what? How to find his ass with both hands?”

Harry Bolt — born Harcourt Bolton, Jr. — was the son of one of this country’s greatest intelligence agents, who became one of this country’s greatest traitors. It was Harcourt Bolton, Sr. who destroyed most of the DMS and damn near launched a pandemic that would have killed tens of millions of people, most of them children. We’d dismantled Bolton’s plans, and Harry had helped. So he was a good guy. He was also very possibly the most inept agent ever to work for the CIA. Clumsy, nerdy, not too bright, moderately unlikable, and a bit of a jackass.

However, he and Violin had bonded during the Kill Switch matter and have since been keeping company. I tend not to read fantasy stories, so I’m not sure I understand how the whole frog and princess dynamic works. She is a world-class beauty who is cultured, highly intelligent, and remarkably skilled, and Harry looks like a shorter, dumpier Matt Damon, but without the talent or the charm. I tried to make myself believe it was the fact that Harry had inherited a billion dollars, but since Violin isn’t that shallow I had to dismiss the idea. I’ve tried to make sense of it, but all I do is bruise my brain.

“Harry is auditing a lecture series on ancient mysteries and lost sacred artifacts,” said Violin. “It’s being given by an archaeologist in residence at the Pitti Palace in Florence.”

“Why?”

She gave me an enigmatic little smile. “Harry would like to be the next Indiana Jones.”

“Um… correct me if I’m wrong, but the last Indiana Jones was a fictional character.”

“Don’t be mean,” she said. “If this is what he wants to do, then what’s the harm? He’s his own man.”

Since Harry was now unemployed and rich, if he wanted to go globe-hopping to try and find the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, he had the free time and could finance it. Who knows, maybe he’ll even find something of great historical value. It’s less likely that he’ll find a clue, but I didn’t say that to her.

Besides, I was too busy hanging on for dear life. You have to be right with Jesus if you’re riding shotgun with Violin behind the wheel. I’m positive I left fingernail marks on the door handle, and I almost fell on my face and kissed the ground when we arrived at our destination.

She drove us out of the city and into the country, to a densely wooded patch of forest on a mountain slope overlooking an industrial campus. We arrived while the sun was high, which gave us more than three hours of daylight to observe and plan.

We were looking for a place with the nondescript name of Podnik Ŕešení, which means “Business Solutions.” Pretty much the John Smith of business names. Luckily, the lab wasn’t in a sewer this time. I’m a big fan of missions not being in sewers. There’s something about splashing around in the toilet water of an entire city that doesn’t make one feel like James Bond. Instead, our target was a suite of labs leased in the moderate-sized industrial complex. More than forty businesses were based there, most of them involved in some kind of chemical or biomedical research. A couple of technologies companies, too. The DMS computer guy, Bug, had provided me with a floor plan from the local zoning commission, and we had satellite and thermal-imaging pictures. Violin and I studied the data and then surveilled the buildings using sniper scopes, locating access points, cameras, foot patrols, and guard stations. We counted one foot patrol and two in each of the gate stations.

“As far as we can tell,” I said, “most of the businesses in there are legitimate. Podnik Ŕešení is both the name of the whole building and the name of our target company. The name confusion lets them blend in. Our target lab is sandwiched between a firm working on a diet supplement and an independent blood-testing facility. Bug ran background on both, and they’re clean.”

Violin nodded, and I assumed she’d done her own background check through Oracle, the Arklight computer system. It was nearly as good as MindReader.

A shift change took place as we watched, and Violin spotted something.

“Joseph, look at the uniforms of the guards at the west gate.”

The west gate was the one closest to the building entrance, with easy access to our target lab. I studied them and saw what she meant. “Different uniforms,” I said. “Slate-gray instead of dark blue. Different company?”

“Dedicated security team,” she said. “They have better weapons, too. Kalashnikovs as well as sidearms. The guards at the east gate only have handguns. What would you like to wager that only the Podnik Ŕešení lab has access to that entrance?” mused Violin.

“Sucker’s bet.”

We lay prone under cover of a gorse bush. Violin set down her scope and turned to rest on her elbow, looking at me. “If I was one of your team members, this is where I would ask about the rules of engagement.”

“We need to walk out of there with hard drives, research data, and any biological samples we can carry.”

“You’re only talking about physical assets. What about the staff?”

“This science is used in over ninety sweatshops and fifty brothels in Southeast Asia and the poorer parts of Africa. These pricks have girls as young as nine on their backs and on their knees twenty hours a day, servicing anywhere up to forty johns every day of the hell that is their life. The people — and I use that word loosely — who work in the lab make the stuff that keeps those girls going like sex robots. They make the stuff that keeps thousands of slaves on the job round the clock, day in and day out, making phones, sneakers, and high-end electronics. These people will keep working until they die. The rest of the family usually works in the same factories or whorehouses, Violin. You tell me how many prisoners we want to take? Personally, I’m feeling moderately Old Testament right about now.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “That’s the Joseph I remember.”

It was fully dark when we approached the west gate.

The two guards in the booth were big, and tough-looking. I didn’t know a thing about them, or why they were there. Or even how much they knew about the kind of horrors they were protecting. Maybe they were just hired muscle and had no clue about the atrocities their employers were inflicting on the world. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Violin and I circled the booth and then went through the door in a fast one-two. We gave the guards no chance at all. Violin rose up, as silent and unseen as a midnight wind, and cut one man’s throat. Before his blood could even splash the second man, I had a hand over his mouth and was using my rapid-release knife to screw a hole in his kidney.

They had key cards, so we took those and moved off, keeping out of sight of the rotating cameras, slipping in during split seconds of misaligned video sweeps. I removed a small device from my pocket and plugged it into the security-booth computer.

Violin nodded toward the device. “My mother says that MindReader is getting old. It’s been hacked too many times.”

“You have something better?” I countered. “Don’t forget, sweetie, but your Oracle system is based on MindReader.”

She shrugged. “Mother has played with it a bit since.”

Her mother was Lilith. No known last name, no known date of birth or place of origin. Not much in the way of human emotions, either. She was a survivor of a particularly brutal harem of sex slaves run by the Red Knights. Violin was born as part of a truly horrific breeding program. Lilith led a revolt that left the halls of that prison painted with the blood of her captors. I’ve heard some rumors of the things Lilith did to the ones she didn’t kill outright, and I’ve since seen evidence of her handiwork. She runs Arklight, the militant arm of the Mothers of the Fallen, the group of refugees who escaped with her. Arklight is on a par with the DMS when the DMS is at its very best. Its members are vicious, uncompromising, and unflinching in their war against men who do this kind of thing to women. Lilith has killed more ISIL and Boko Haram fighters than any single person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met all the top fighters. Do I agree with her methods? Tough question. Let’s just say that she makes a compelling argument, and I am neither fool enough, brave enough, nor chauvinistic enough to want to ever — ever — get in her way.

Oh, and she and Church apparently had a fling once upon a time. Not that this matters in relation to her combat work, but it somehow makes her even scarier.

“Since when is your mother a computer expert?” I asked.

“Since it became useful to be,” said Violin, and allowed me to interpret that however I chose.

I sniffed petulantly and pressed the button to activate the computer connection. The little green light flashed, then went dark. I tapped it, but it stayed dead.

“Not a word from you,” I warned Violin, and she held up both hands in a “no comment” gesture.

I removed the device, blew on the jack to make sure there was no pocket lint on it, and tried again. It flashed red, and then the light turned a steady green. MindReader walked in and owned their whole network. So there.

“Oh, bravo,” said Violin dryly. I scratched my nose with my forefinger.

We crouched in the booth until the security cameras had done a full cycle of back-and-forth sweeps, during which MindReader recorded a loop. Then it fed that loop back to the system so that anyone watching would see only the same darkened parking lot. I tapped Violin and we left the booth and drifted toward the wall, used the key card, and slipped inside. As we’d predicted, this entrance was dedicated to the target lab. These people probably thought this setup gave them increased protection. They were wrong.

Violin drew her two knives. Lately she’s been partial to a custom pair of curved kukri knives, the weapons favored by the fearsome Gurkhas. Her blades were blackened, and she held them with the loose circle grip of a serious professional. I’d seen those blades in action before, and it was a nightmare sight. I had my Wilson tactical combat knife. Short-bladed, light, but eloquent.

The foyer of the Podnik Ŕešení complex was simple, with pegs for coats, two administrative offices, and four labs on either side of a wide hallway. All the lights were on, but the switches were on a panel right inside the front door. Tsk-tsk. I swept my hand down and plunged the whole place into darkness. We put on our night-vision goggles and went hunting in the dark.

There were cries of alarm. Then there were screams of fear. Then shrieks of pain. One voice begged for mercy, but he was asking the wrong people. It was ugly. So were we. And it was all over very fast. Fighting takes time. Killing doesn’t. From the time we approached the guard booth to the time we fled into the night with backpacks filled with hard drives, our mission clocks hadn’t even ticked off seven minutes.

The fires didn’t start until we were halfway back to the car.

INTERLUDE ONE

Zephyr Bain sat on the edge of the examination table, slowly buttoning her blouse, staring at the wall, seeing nothing. The doctor was still talking, but Zephyr had long since tuned him out. She’d stopped listening when he reached a certain point, and a single word hung burning in the darkening sky over the landscape of her mind.

Metastasized.

As words go, it was a monster. It was a bully, a brute.

Tears burned themselves dry in her unblinking eyes.

She didn’t bother asking how long. She already knew the answer to that question. Not long enough. Never long enough. She was nearly as old as she would ever get. There would be no more birthdays, no more Christmases. No New Year midnight kiss. No winter snows. None of that. Not for her. Never again for her.

All that was left was the bad parts. The process of getting sicker, of learning how deep the well of pain could go. From here on she would lose herself in increments — first her energy, then her strength, then control over bodily functions, then her mind. Her beautiful mind. It would all go away, like mourners leaving a graveside, until only she remained, cold and gone.

It wasn’t fair, but then life was never fair.

It wasn’t right, but then life was seldom right.

And it was inevitable, because the important things are.

She thought about that night twenty-eight years ago when John the Revelator had first come to her when she thought all the time had leaked out of her life. He said he’d filled her back up, but he had never promised that she would live forever.

Twenty-eight years, though.

Fuck.

It was twenty-eight more than she should have had. Even at six Zephyr knew that she was dying, that she would soon be dead. John had given her time. All this time.

Not enough time.

“Goddammit, John,” she said quietly, spitting the words out in a fierce whisper. “God damn you for doing this to me.”

“I’m sorry.…” said the doctor, confused, but she waved it away. After a moment, the doctor waded back in. “Our focus now will be on pain management. We can keep you comfortable and—”

She tuned him out again. Pain wasn’t something she wanted to manage. Pain could be useful to her, and managing it meant drugs. That would shut her mind down even before the cancer took away her ability to think. No. There would be no management of the pain; there would be no willing participation in a conspiracy to numb her mind. No thanks.

Zephyr wished John were there with her right at that moment. She wanted to smash his head in with a chair. She also wanted him to hold her and say that everything was going to be all right, and tell her that he would fill her back up again. She wanted both things with equal fervor. She wasn’t grateful for the extra time. She felt cheated by it because it made her understand what she was losing, and it was a much sharper and clearer understanding than a child could ever have.

John, she thought, please do something.

But John wasn’t there, and even if he were she knew that he wouldn’t do what she wanted. Even if he could. That time had passed, and he’d given her those twenty-eight years.

Zephyr slid off the table and landed flat on her feet, swayed, darted out a hand to catch the edge of the bed, waved off the doctor as he reached to help. Without saying a word to him, she walked out of the examination room, into the hall, through the waiting room, down in the elevator, and out to the curb, where her driver waited. There was concern and inquiry on the big man’s hard face, and when he looked at her and saw the truth in the stiffness of her posture the driver’s eyes grew moist. She marveled at that. Campion was an employee, a worker bee who had talent with automobiles and could stand in as a bodyguard if necessary, but he wasn’t family and he wasn’t a friend. Why should he care? she wondered. Was he afraid for his job? It had to be that, Zephyr thought as she climbed into the back seat of the Lexus SUV. He couldn’t care for her any more than she cared for him. He was paid enough to be good at his job, but she didn’t pay him enough to actually care. It made her angry. Fuck him and his emotions. Fuck him for whatever he was feeling, whether it was self-interest or compassion. She didn’t need that from him or anyone.

Campion closed the door and hurried around to climb in beside the wheel. “Home, Miss Bain?”

“No,” she said. “The office.”

He frowned. “The office? Are you sure that’s best, considering —?”

“Considering what?” she snapped. “Take me to my damn office.”

He winced as if he’d been slapped, and nodded. As he turned away, though, Zephyr saw the complex flicker of emotions in his eyes. He was stung, sure, but there was also evident tolerance and more of the same wet-eyed compassion. Christ. The asshole thought that she was being snappish because she was in pain and afraid. Like most of them, he had no clue what went on in the minds of his betters. Zephyr wanted to stab him. No, she wanted to give him her cancer and take his vitality. It was so wasted on people like him. When the change happened, when everything John the Revelator predicted came true, this oaf wouldn’t be worth keeping around to grease the engines. Maybe — just a slim maybe — he might be useful in a factory during the transition to full self-driven automation. Maybe, but she doubted it.

Campion squared his shoulders, put the car in gear, and drove away without another word.

She settled back in the seat and pressed the button that closed and sealed the pane of soundproof security glass between her and the driver. Then she took her cell phone out of her purse and made a call to the man who had been both friend and occasional lover for years now. On the lecture circuit and on TV, he called himself John the Revelator. His real name was buried in the past, and the fake one on his impeccable set of official documents was John St. John. Only Zephyr and one other person knew who and what he really was.

John answered on the fifth ring. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“We’re moving the timetable up,” she said.

A pause. “That badly?”

“Fuck it, and fuck you.”

Another, longer pause. “I’m sorry, my love. You deserve better.”

“I deserve to live long enough to see it work, goddammit. But—” She paused. “Look, I at least want to see it start, okay? I want to watch it catch fire. Is that too much to ask? After everything I’ve done, is that too much?”

“No,” said John in a soft and gentle voice. “It’s not.”

The car drove two blocks before she spoke again. “There’s no more time, is there?”

“For you, my sweet? No. I gave you what I could.”

“How?” she begged. “How did you do it?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I need to know.”

“You don’t,” he said. “You were a candle in a strong breeze and your light was going out. I kindled a flame and you have burned so very brightly. You will flare like the sun when you go. Isn’t that enough?”

She said nothing. Tears burned like acid on her face.

“When you go there will be nothing — not one person, not one inch of ground on this earth — that won’t remember you, Zephyr. You are about to become the most famous person in history. No, let me say it with more precision and truth. You are about to become the most important person who has ever lived. You will do this world more genuine and lasting good than Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, or anyone else. None of those pretenders have ever had your courage; none of them have ever had your genius. They are failures, because they had the same vision. They knew what had to be done, but they were weak men and you are a strong woman, and it is you, Zephyr Bain, my own beloved, who will give birth to a new world. You. No one else. You alone. Magnificent, beautiful you.”

She caved forward for a long moment, her face buried in her palms, and shook with silent tears.

“I… I can’t do it alone, John,” she mumbled through her tears. Agony of heart and body painted her words with loss, with fear.

“You’re not alone. I will never leave you,” he promised. “I’ll be with you to the very end.”

“There’s not enough of me left. I’m so sick… God, I can barely walk.”

“You don’t need to walk. You don’t need strength of limb anymore. Your mind, your will, your certainty of what needs to be done is all that matters. Zephyr, believe me when I say that if I have to I’ll hold your hand while you strike the match.”

It was that, those words, that hit her, and a sob broke in her chest that hurt every bit as much as if someone had punched her. It made her heart hurt, too. But it also made her smile.

“Thank you,” she said, and realized that she meant it. Her face scrunched up as sobs sought to bully their way out of her, but Zephyr forced it all back, stuffed it inside. She took a long breath. “Thank you for everything.”

“Of course, my love,” he purred. “Anything for you. Everything for you.”

“Can we move up the timetable?”

“We can, but there will be risks. Several aspects of Havoc will have to be rolled out at the same time. That will be noticed. Our enemies look for patterns, my dear.”

“Because of MindReader?”

“Because of that, yes, and because they have become habituated to a certain kind of useful paranoia.”

“Useful?”

“To them,” said John. “The nature of our troubled world has trained them to jump, and to jump very quickly. And experience with some of our old friends has engendered within them a tendency toward focused aggression. Mr. Church loves a scorched-earth scenario. The tidiness of it suits his insect mind.”

Zephyr chewed on that for a moment. “What if we cut the whole process down and launch most of it at the same time in eleven or twelve weeks?”

“The Deacon and his people would see it.”

“Would that matter by then?” she asked. “If it all happens at once, wouldn’t the DMS and all the other agencies be overwhelmed? Once Havoc starts moving — and I mean the whole thing — how would they be able to stop it?”

John made a soft humming sound as he thought it through. “Hmm… you may be right, but don’t underestimate the DMS. The Deacon is remarkably dangerous.”

“So you keep saying. God, John, you talk about him like he has superpowers or something. He’s just another government flunky. He’s a nothing, a piece of shit to avoid stepping in. We can—”

“No,” he said sharply, the reproof thick in his voice. “The Deacon is your enemy, but it is not for you to disparage him. Not ever, and certainly not to me.”

“Why not? I thought you hated him.”

“Hate him? No. I would gladly cut his heart out and offer it to the midnight stars, but hate him? How could I?”

Zephyr exhaled slowly. “You say things like that as if I’m supposed to understand what you mean.” When he made no comment, she said, “I want to move the timetable up. What is the absolute soonest we could launch Havoc with a high degree of probable success?”

“Eleven weeks,” he said at once.

“Then let’s do it. And if you’re afraid the Deacon and his goon squad will be a problem, then maybe we should ask the Concierge to see what he can do to spice things up. That little French psychopath always has some nasty ideas.”

“He is deliciously creative,” John agreed, “and he likes a challenge. Perhaps it would work best for us to get the DMS involved rather than try to do this completely off the radar.”

“How?”

“Oh… something will occur to us, and certainly to the Concierge.”

“Good. Give the Concierge the go-ahead. Let him deal the DMS in, if that will help. Make sure he understands that money is no object. Not anymore. Not for me. Tell him about what my doctor said.”

“I will,” he assured her. “But tell me, Zephyr my sweet, is this what you truly want? There is no coming back from this. If this fire is lit, it will rage out of control almost at once.”

The car made a turn onto a lovely street lined with graceful Mexican fan palm trees. There was no wind, and they looked painted against the blue sky.

“Then let it burn,” she said fiercely. “Please, John, let’s burn it all down.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

We took showers at Violin’s hotel. Separate showers, which was different from the way we’d cleaned up after some past assignments. There is a strange politeness that comes over people who were once lovers and now found themselves in a confined space doing ordinary things. Eyes were averted most of the time, there was a lot of courtesy, a lot of “please” and “thank you.” Like that. Except every once in a while we’d both become aware of it and exchange a look, a smile, a brief laugh.

When it was her turn in the bathroom, I sat down with a MindReader substation laptop and uploaded every bit of data I’d found on flash drives and CDs. There was a lot of it. And I had to hand-scan some papers. The MindReader uplink fritzed out on me twice, and I had to reboot to get it to send. After that everything ran smoothly, and Bug’s team was ready to receive it, triage it, and forward it along to different experts within our extended DMS family.

Some of the data was forwarded to Dr. Acharya, a celebrated specialist in biomechanical technologies. Acharya was not yet an official part of the DMS, but he was one of several multidisciplinary brainiacs being considered to replace Hu.

I was deeply conflicted about Hu’s death, because he had been far from my favorite human being, and it’s fair to say that I liked him a lot less than some of the bad guys I’ve shot, stabbed, and run over. He was a class-A dickhead… but he was our dickhead. Hu was beyond brilliant, and his conceptual understanding of cutting-edge science kept the DMS way out front. Since his death we’d worked with a number of experts, but we hadn’t yet found anyone who could fill Hu’s shoes. Never really thought I’d miss the little bastard.

“Can we get Acharya on the phone?” I asked.

“Sorry, no can do,” Bug told me. “He’s out in Washington State at this big super hush-hush DARPA event. He’s consulting with all the top experts on military applications of nanotech and robotics. They have this incredible security protocol in place for the whole camp. No phones of any kind, no Wi-Fi, no personal laptops, nothing. All communication requests have to go through the White House. How crazy is that?”

“Well, this is moderately important, Bug. I mean… nanotech and chemical slavery?”

“You know that and I know that, Joe,” said Bug, “but it’s not happening on U.S. soil or in any of our current spheres of influence. The new president’s still unpacking, and the Department of Defense is nearly as wrecked as we are. Ever since Kill Switch, the levels of security around things like the DARPA camp have gotten to the point that even a four-star general has to get permission in triplicate and countersigned by the Joint Chiefs to send an email to his own mother. It’s nuts, and it’s the kind of overreaction that creates a lot more problems than it solves. Besides, it’s being run by Major Schellinger — and you know what she’s like.”

I sighed. Major Carly Schellinger was nominally U.S. Army but actually on the payroll of the CIA. She oversaw a lot of the most highly classified field testing of advanced technologies and was known for being humorless, unapproachable, unkind, and inflexible. Schellinger also swung an extraordinary amount of political weight, and I’d seen generals defer to her. To be fair, she has overseen most of the practical applications of advanced technology in the past ten years, including the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, which has the capacity to emanate a 10-kilowatt missile-killing energy laser from a mobile vehicle; SWARM, a deadly flock of coordinated roach-size explosive microdrones; combat autonomous-drive systems for mobile robot gun emplacements; and the electromagnetic railgun, which has a muzzle velocity of Mach 7.5 and a range of a hundred and twenty-four miles. She gets the geek squads and the think tanks to perform at max output and then drives development through prototype variations to field-ready rollouts in record time. She’s also old money, and her family has been interbreeding with most of the other old-money defense contractors since someone filed the patent on the first bow and arrow. A battle-scarred old full-bird colonel once told me that he would rather try to pass a live porcupine through his own colon than try to get Major Schellinger to deviate from her personally orchestrated security protocols.

“Well… call her,” I told Bug lamely. “Use your charm and nerdish good looks.”

“She’s Satan in the flesh.”

“Try and sweet-talk her. Oh, hey, while I have you,” I said, “I’ve been having all kinds of problems with MindReader lately. The upload gizmo was funky, and it took me forever to log into the network tonight. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Everyone’s bitching at me about that today.”

“Violin says that MindReader’s getting old and senile.”

“She can bite me.”

“Be nice,” I said, but he hung up on me.

I ordered food from room service and trolled through the data while I waited. It was some pretty horrific stuff. If I was feeling any lingering guilt about the lives we’d ended, it melted away as I read. Not only had someone found the science we thought had been destroyed; they’d upped the game. The nanites that had been introduced into the game worked like microscopic processing plants to manipulate the brain chemistry of every slave worker, making them dependent on new doses. If they ever escaped and tried to get clean, the nanites would then migrate into the brain and attack the pain receptors. The victims would be plunged into a world of mind-rending agony from which there was no possible escape short of being caught in an electromagnetic pulse. They would very likely be driven insane and probably kill themselves to stop the pain.

It was horrible. This was twenty-first-century science. I wanted to believe that when we torched that lab we wiped out the entire organization. Yeah, I wanted to believe that.

But I’m just not that naïve.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The man parked the truck as close to the plaza as he could get. He opened the door but didn’t get out. Instead, he lit a cigarette and watched the madness.

The crowd had been building for days and was now pushing three hundred thousand. The noise from fifty different bands and all those happy voices created a joyful thunder that covered the entire town like a cloud. Some of the bands were on stages, but most were strolling musicians in little groups of two or three or four. The revelers were adorned with bright-colored embroidery and beadwork, with jewelry and extravagant hats. The man had no idea what holiday this was, and didn’t much care. It was fun to watch.

A small pack of laughing children ran past, chasing one another, dodging and ducking out of reach in an improvised game of tag whose rules seemed to change depending on who was “it.” The kids were dressed in old clothes that showed signs of use and had been patched and repaired many times. One boy had expensive American-made basketball sneakers, but they were ancient and patched with ragged strips of silver duct tape. The kids were skinny and dirty, but they were all happy in the moment, caught up in the immediacy of their game.

The man took a drag and exhaled slowly as he watched them. One boy — the one with the taped shoes — caught his eye and stopped a few feet away.

“Buenos dias!” he cried, and then held out a hand, asking for something. Anything. Begging is rarely specific. The man studied him with narrow-eyed appraisal, then dug into his pocket. The other boys, alert as wolves, caught the movement and flocked around the first boy, jostling for position, wanting and needing to be close enough to grab a coin. The man removed the silver from his pockets, saw that there was a little over a dollar’s worth in American coins, and tossed it high. The boys rose like hungry koi, their colors swirling, as they lunged for the money, elbowing and hip-checking their friends to snatch nickels and dimes and quarters out of the air.

Laughing aloud, the man flicked his cigarette into the street, jumped down from the truck, and walked around the kids, who were now wrestling one another for the last coin. He went to the back of his small panel truck, unlocked it, and pushed the roll door up. He unhitched the metal cargo ramp and pulled it out, placing it just so on the ground at the best angle for removing cargo.

“Okay,” he said aloud. “Playtime.”

Immediately a dog walked out of the shadows of the truck. It was big and barrel-chested, with a bull neck and the blunt face of a mastiff. It came down the ramp with surprising care and delicacy, taking small steps until it was on the blacktop. The man nudged it to one side with his thigh, and the dog lost its balance and skittered for a moment before righting itself. It didn’t bark or snap at the man. A moment later a second dog came down the ramp, then two more. All four were identical except for embroidered vests in different festive colors — red, blue, orange, and yellow.

The children stopped fighting over the coins — each having rightfully been claimed and pocketed — and stared at the dogs. The duct-tape boy leaned close to a companion with whom he had been wrangling over a nickel ten seconds ago and spoke in a confidential whisper. The other boy nodded. Whatever they said was lost on the driver, whose Spanish was indifferent.

“Hey,” said the man, “any of you kids speak English?”

They all swore that they could, though that was mostly a lie. Like most poor kids in tourist towns, they knew enough English to work their street scams and to beg for money. But the duct-tape boy said, “I speak some little.”

“Yeah? Good,” said the man. “What’s your name?”

“Israel Dominguez,” said the boy.

“Israel,” repeated the man, amused. “Nice. Well, tell me, Israel, do you like dogs?”

“Oh, yes, very much like! We have un perro pequeño—”

“English, kid,” the man corrected.

“We have a little dog. Su nombre es… I mean, his name is El Cerdo — pig, because he is muy gordo. Very fat.”

“Do your friends like dogs, Israel?”

The boy was immediately cautious, wanting to cooperate but not willing to share if there was some money involved. The man could read that on the kid’s face, and he admired the self-preservation. It was always good to look out for oneself. He always had.

“Maybe they do,” said the boy.

“Would you and your friends like to make a few bucks?”

Israel stiffened. So did the other kids. They all knew that word. Bucks.

“Oh, yes. Very much. How much?”

“You see my four pups here? You know what they are?” asked the man. The boys all shook their heads.

“These are party dogs. You know what that means?”

None of them moved, but their eyes became wide in anticipation of learning something new and amazing.

“They do tricks,” said the man. “That’s why I brought them here. They know all the best party tricks, and, let’s face it, there’s one hell of a party going on around here. Am I right?”

“Yes, señor,” agreed Israel. “There is much party here.”

“Now listen closely,” said the man as he reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. The kids watched with absolute fascination as he opened it and withdrew a thick sheaf of bills. He looked up and did a quick head count, and then peeled off eleven ten-dollar notes. American currency. “I’ll give you and every one of your friends ten dollars each if you’ll do me a favor. And there’s an extra ten for you, Israel, because I’m making you the boss. What’s the word? Chefe? I’m making you the chefe, Israel. You get twenty U.S. dollars.”

The boys stared at him with huge eyes. Ten dollars was an incredible amount of money to them. The man had driven through the suburbs of this town. He saw the hovels these people called home. These kids were all half-starved, and ten bucks would buy a lot of tortillas and beans. Ten bucks was huge money. Twenty dollars was impossible.

“Do you want to earn that money, Israel?”

“Yes,” said the boy quickly, his voice cracking a little with excitement. The other boys all shouted agreement, but the man patted the air to make them quiet down. The adults passing by cut looks at what was happening, and a few even stopped to watch, but the man ignored them. The boys did, too, except for the occasional uneasy glance for fear of seeing a parent or a cop.

“It’s easy money, kid. All you have to do is take my party dogs into the plaza.”

The boy frowned, looking at the huge dogs.

“Oh, don’t worry,” the man said, laughing. “I told you, they’re friendly. They won’t bite. They’re part of the entertainment.” He turned to the dogs. “Isn’t that right? Give me a wag.” All four dogs wagged their tails. “Okay, knock it off.” The wagging stopped. “See how well behaved they are? Now, all you need to do is take the dogs to the best places.”

“Best places…?”

“Sure. I want you, Israel, to pick the spots where there’s the most people. I mean really packed and popular places, you understand what I mean?”

The boys nodded.

“Then you leave a couple of your friends with each dog. You make sure you pick the right spots, Israel, because I’m counting on you.”

Israel nodded, though he looked confused.

“Then I want you to take the last dog with you to the best spot of all.”

“But… why?”

“So we can all make some money, kid. Mucho dinero.”

Now they all stared at him like attentive schoolchildren. A shrewd look crept into Israel’s eyes, and it was clear that he was getting the idea.

“The perros will do… tricks?” he ventured.

“Right,” said the man. “They’ll do lots of tricks and people will love it, and they’ll throw some coins. Maybe pesos. I want you to collect all the money, you understand? All of it. And then when the party’s over I want you to bring it back to me. I’ll count it, and then you get ten percent. If you don’t cheat me, I’ll give you a bonus.”

“I would never!” cried the boy, raising a hand to swear to God and the Virgin Mary.

“My dogs won’t like it if you cheat me.”

“I swear, I swear.”

The man grinned at him. “Okay, then that’s all there is. You do that and after a couple of hours we’re all going to have a lot of money. If you’re really good at it, we can do it again tomorrow. What do you say, partner?”

He held out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation Israel took it and shook. Each of the other boys shook it, too. The man gave them some additional minor instructions and handed out the ten-dollar bills. The children stared at the bills and then stuffed them away in secret pockets where even their parents wouldn’t find the money. The man had Israel make teams out of the ten other boys, and had the members of each team let a particular dog sniff their hands. Each sniff resulted in a single sharp tail wag. The dogs went and stood with the boys on their team.

“Vamoose,” said the man, then to the dogs he said, “Go play.”

Looking dazed, scared, and excited in equal measure, the boys and the mastiffs departed and were soon lost inside the huge crowds of holiday revelers. The man lit another cigarette and leaned against the truck, smiling contentedly.

“Like fucking clockwork,” he said to no one in particular.

He finished his cigarette, returned the ramp to its position, pulled down and locked the door, got in, and drove away. It took nearly an hour to make his way through two miles of party traffic. When he was out of the city, he found the closest highway and drove off at high speed. He pulled into a small village seventy-three miles east of the town, parked the truck on the street, closed and locked the door, and walked around the corner to a little hotel. He ran up two flights of stairs, entered a room, then locked the door behind him. He opened a desk drawer and removed a thin laptop, loaded a program, and waited as the screen filled with four smaller windows. Each one showed the swirling, dancing, laughing, singing throng of people at the celebration. The crowd was so thick that it was nearly impossible to see anything. The angle of the camera was low, aimed upward. On one of the screens, he saw a skinny boy with silver duct tape on his shoes. The camera angle changed and jolted and spun in a circle. It was dizzying to watch, but the people in the area laughed and applauded and threw coins at the dancing, twirling dog.

It made the man smile.

He fished in his pocket for his cigarettes, kissed the last one out of the pack, lit it, watched the crowds as they watched the dogs. Caught glimpses of the ten street kids. Everyone was having such a great time. He watched the screen and saw one dog’s point of view as it trotted around the edge of the crowd, saw the laughing people wave at it, blow kisses at it, laugh at the thing. The camera showed the dog going in through the open door of the police station at the edge of the plaza.

“Release the hounds,” the man murmured, and laughed. “God, I always wanted to say that.”

He pressed the Enter key. There was a flash of bright white and then all four screens went dark. No sound, no other images. He was left to imagine the sound of the explosions. He sighed and leaned back in the chair, enjoying the menthol tickle of the smoke as he took a deep, contented drag. Then he got up and turned on the TV, channel-surfed over to the news, and waited for the story to break. Maybe someone caught it on a cell camera. Maybe one of the news people would have footage. After all, with everyone having a cell phone, somebody had to have caught one of the four dogs exploding during a festive celebration.

It would be nice to watch.

“Good doggies,” he said to the empty screens.

CHAPTER NINE

I heard about Mexico while I was halfway across the ocean.

Church called me at the same time that I was trying to call him. “Robot dogs, boss?” I said. “This is mine. I’m going to refuel in New York and then head down to—”

“No, Captain,” interrupted Church, “you’re not.”

“The hell I’m not. I run the Special Projects shop, and what says ‘special’ more than exploding robot dogs?”

“Normally I would agree, but you’ve just come off two back-to-back combat assignments. Mexico has its own counterterrorism teams. Our assistance has been offered, as has that of some of our colleagues. The Mexican government has accepted help, but not from us.”

“Well… shit.”

I didn’t have to ask why not us, because it wasn’t the first time we’d been snubbed lately. Ever since Kill Switch, the DMS has stopped being the go-to SpecOps outfit. The people in the know are aware that, while we didn’t actually become a clown college, it looked that way from a distance. Best case was that we were being treated as if we’re all invalids. They look at us like we’re guys in wheelchairs offering to run foot races. Thanks, but no thanks. Fair? No. Understandable? Yeah, but it still pissed me off, and it still hurt.

We talked for a while about the Prague gig, about the nanotech and the steroid stuff, and explored theories about who was behind it. We had a lot of ideas, but none of them seemed to go anywhere. Sadly, there are a bunch of smart and very bad people out there, and, yeah, some of them are actual mad scientists.

“Go home and rest,” said Church. “I have no doubt something else will come up.”

I spent a good portion of the rest of the trip home sulking.

Well, drinking and sulking.

INTERLUDE TWO

“Eleven weeks?” echoed the Concierge, his voice filled with alarm.

“Yes,” said John.

“Is she serious?”

“Quite serious.”

“It took quite a lot of time to set things up a certain way,” said the Frenchman. He was in the vast kitchen of his villa. The house was fully automated and required only a monthly visit from a maintenance supervisor and biweekly deliveries of food. He preferred living alone, and, despite his profession as fixer and arranger for a select few clients, he was generally an antisocial man. Or, as he saw it, asocial. He didn’t dislike people, but he preferred to keep his own company. Robots of various functions and the household artificial-intelligence computer system offered enough interactive challenges to satisfy any residual need for chitchat. And his job required that he spend hours on the phone or in virtual-reality conferences. When he wasn’t working, the silence of his huge, empty house was a comfort to him. If he had his way, he would never leave the place. VR and luxury robots brought everything to him that couldn’t be physically delivered.

Problems, though, always seemed to find him.

Case in point.

“Should I tell Ms. Bain that you’re unable or unwilling to make the necessary adjustments?” asked John.

“Of course not,” said the Concierge. “No… of course not. It is merely that eleven weeks is a very tight timetable.”

“And…?”

“It will require a great deal of cooperation. Gifts will need to be given in order to allow things to move quickly.”

“You have carte blanche, my friend.”

“People often say that and then I find out that there is, in fact, a budgetary limit. If I am expected to make a change as radical as this, then—”

“Hush,” said John, and the Concierge hushed. “Spend whatever is necessary. This is the eve of the revolution, my friend. Act like it. The lady is relying on you.”

“Of course, I—”

“She will expect you to pay special attention to our friends in the DMS. Very special attention.”

“Yes, but I have outlined the risks with that part of the—”

The line went dead.

The Concierge sat in his electric wheelchair and drummed his fingers on the armrest. When he moved his fingers, there was the faintest sound of tiny servomotors and mechanical clicks. He was no longer aware of that, though, except when he was in his moments of despairing self-awareness. Every part of his body made some kind of sound. Even his breaths were accompanied by a hiss of hydraulics and compressors. It was a fact of his life.

There had been times of silence. Long stretches of it when he lay in bed, either in hospitals after the bomb went off on the Boulevard Voltaire back in November of 2015 or at home once he was discharged. His legs were charred and withered nothings, his arms were covered in melted skin, his spine — what was left of it — was wrapped in a complexity of plastics, metal reinforcing rods, tubes, and wires. Only his face was unmarked. Completely unmarked. He had not received so much as a scratch anywhere above the Adam’s apple. A twist of fate that was in no way a kindness. When he looked into the mirror he saw a normal man, but that was a lie. Normalcy was a façade that he wore over corruption.

The household robots didn’t care what he looked like, though. Nor did Calpurnia, the ever-evolving AI that ran every aspect of his daily life, from waking and washing him to tucking him in at night and lulling him to sleep with subtle injections of lovely drugs. Robots and computers were pure. They possessed no judgment and therefore were not slaves to aesthetic opinions. No human caregiver could do as much for him without something showing in the eyes. Contempt, apathy, pity, horror. He’d seen it all. With robots there was only the precision of programmable care. How wonderful.

He thought about what the world would be like once Havoc and its Internet-destroying WhiteHat companion program had been allowed to run loose. Would it really be better, as John the Revelator preached? Would it be the golden age that Zephyr Bain had labored so long to bring about? Was the programming truly that good? It frightened him, because he knew that any program, no matter how sophisticated, always launched with a few bugs. The more sophisticated, in fact, the greater the risk of unexpected variables, design flaws, outside interference. No program had ever approached the complexity of Havoc. It was an incredible undertaking that was decades in the making, evolving as the computers and other crucial systems evolved. Which brought with it the constant risks of compatibility errors. Would it run smoothly? Could it launch without a hitch? Was that even possible, no matter what the simulations said? Simulations, no matter how carefully organized, were not the same as real-world, real-time operation.

And if it failed, in whole or in part, what then? There was no Havoc 2.0. There couldn’t be. The world, as it existed right then, at that moment, would end within hours of Havoc and WhiteHat being initiated. There was no reset button. For Havoc to work, that infrastructure needed to be intact for a certain period of time. Power grids, water, emergency services, military response. It wasn’t useful to disrupt that and not complete the entire program. The possibilities of a partial rollout were sickening to contemplate. Only the fully delivered, fully functional program would change the world into something cleaner and better.

If, and only if, everything worked exactly right. If every component — organic and digital — worked with maximum efficiency and in perfect harmony.

If that was actually possible.

With eighteen months, it was possible. With twenty-six months, it was likely.

But in eleven weeks? He looked around at the kitchen as if it were a window to the whole world.

“My God,” he murmured. “My God.”

He sat like that for nearly half an hour. And then he began making the necessary calls.

CHAPTER TEN

“You’re here as an observer, Miss Schoeffel,” said the major.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” said Sarah Schoeffel, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “And, yes, I know that means I keep my hands in my pocket and keep my mouth shut.”

Major Carly Schellinger smiled. “It’s not quite that bad,” she said, gesturing toward the cabin door. “Shall we?”

They went outside. The camp was large and constantly in motion. No flyovers were permitted, so Schoeffel’s helicopter had landed in a clearing at an old, deserted logging camp and she’d then been driven here in a Hummer with blacked-out windows. The soldiers guarding the landing site were dressed in unmarked black combat uniforms. No unit patches, no insignia of any kind. The helicopter had also been plain black, without serial numbers. The Hummer had no license plates. The soldiers wore black balaclavas to hide their faces, and most of them had on opaque sunglasses. None of them spoke to her except to tell her to duck under the helicopter blades or to get into the truck.

The camp was set up in a valley, with dozens of small cabins and tents concealed from the air by camouflage netting. Heavily armed guards patrolled in pairs, and Schoeffel was surprised to see that some of them were accompanied by dogs. Robot dogs. Big, ugly, strange, and quiet.

It was their silence that disturbed her most. The last time, Schoeffel had seen an awkward and noisy machine. The prototype of BigDog was three feet long, two and a half feet tall, and weighed a ponderous two hundred and forty pounds. It was a bulky body with four oddly delicate legs that could run four miles an hour carrying more than three hundred pounds of gear. Its motion was directed by a sophisticated onboard computer that drew on input from various sensors. The problem was that it was noisy. You could hear it coming. Schoeffel had heard one soldier complain that it sounded like a moving junk pile.

As she walked along with Major Schellinger, one of the dogs fell into step with them, clearly programmed to accompany the major. Schoeffel kept cutting quick looks at it to study the upgrades. These dogs were different in many impressive ways. They had a head and a tail, though the former was a hard shell around a CPU and the latter was a whip antenna.

“Can I ask about the dogs?” Schoeffel said.

The major walked a few paces before responding. “Current designation is WarDog. A different generation from BigDog. New design in almost every way. We’re still field-testing them. We have several models. Bigger ones for equipment transport or to serve as mobile gun emplacements.”

“Meaning —?”

The major pointed. Down an alley between two cabins was a shooting range with six targets fixed to hay bales and set at incremental distances of up to three hundred yards. There were no soldiers working the range. Instead, there was a pair of WarDogs. One was the same sleek model that walked beside her, except its body and legs were draped with camouflaged material. The second dog was at least twice the size and a pair of trapdoors on its back had opened to allow a machine gun to swing up and drop into place. Ammunition belts trailed down to thick saddlebags.

“Are you familiar with guns, Deputy Director?”

“I’m qualified with handguns,” said Schoeffel.

Major Schellinger laid an affectionate hand on the barrel of the weapon. “The M60E4/Mk 43 is a gas-operated, disintegrating-link, belt-fed, air-cooled machine gun that fires the 7.62 × 51-mm. NATO cartridges from an open bolt. It has a cyclic rate of five to six hundred rounds per minute, with an effective distance of twelve hundred yards; however, we have modifications in place for WarDog that allow for accuracy at considerably greater range. We chose this weapon for the balance of stopping power, overall reliability, and weight. Even with the extended barrel, it’s only twenty-three pounds. It can also be removed from the WarDog and used on any standard NATO tripod and vehicle mount. The barrels are lined with stellite, a cobalt-chromium alloy, to allow for sustained fire and extended life. All major components of the Mk 43/M60E4 directly interchange with other M60 configurations.”

“That’s… impressive.” Schoeffel didn’t know what else to say.

“We’re in full production with them now,” said Schellinger.

“We are? I thought they were still being tested. I thought that was the whole point of this camp.”

The major smiled. “Oh, we’re a lot further along than you think.”

“Then what’s the purpose of the camp?”

“Fun and games, Deputy Director,” said Schellinger. “Fun and games.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Instead of answering, Major Schellinger gestured toward the DARPA scientist overseeing the testing range, who came over at once. He was a bookish man who looked somewhat out of place in a military uniform. The major made brief introductions and asked for a demonstration.

“Let’s have long and short range. Speed and accuracy,” she said. “Impress Deputy Director Schoeffel.”

The scientist looked pleased and set it up.

“Patton,” he said sharply. “On the line.”

The WarDog with the machine gun turned and walked quickly over to the top of the range. His padded feet made no sound at all. A sergeant ordered everyone else off the range and announced a live-fire exercise.

“Six targets, three rounds each,” ordered the scientist. “Engage.”

Without hesitation, the WarDog named Patton shifted its body to aim at the closest target and fired a three-shot burst. The bullets punched into the kill zone of the target that was fifty feet away. The dog instantly shifted and fired at the hundred-and-fifty-foot target, then the thousand-yard target, and on and on, until it had fired bursts at all six targets.

With a thin smile, Schellinger offered a small pair of binoculars to Schoeffel, who raised them to her eyes, adjusted the focus, and stared in amazement.

“WarDogs use sensors and real-time intel from satellites and telemetry-gathering drones to calculate angle, adjust for windage and terrain. The targeting software removes all ‘judgment’ from the shot, which is what makes human shooters score below a constant maximum potential. WarDogs go on pure math. Machine thinking, machine logic, no guesswork.”

“That sounds a little creepy,” said Schoeffel.

“Wars are won by the side with the best technology.”

“Are they?”

“Yes. Technology, the nerve to use it.”

While Schoeffel digested that, the major continued with her praise of the big WarDog. “Patton can be fitted for mortars and grenades, too, or we can pull the machine gun and replace the whole combat package with anything from a flame thrower to a series of antipersonal or anti-tank mines that can be dropped at precise points.”

“That’s… that’s…” Schoeffel stopped herself before she finished the sentence.

“Impressive as hell?” suggested the major.

“Yes,” lied Schoeffel. The word she had been about to use was terrifying.

The scientist said, “We’re field-testing ten prototypes this week. Our goal is to improve the bullet-to-body ratio.”

“Which is what?” asked Schoeffel.

“With human combat troops, there is actually a very high ratio of number of rounds fired compared to the number of enemy killed, particularly in the recent wars in the Middle East. We’re talking about a quarter million bullets per kill. Our goal with the WarDog is to reduce that number to something closer to two hundred bullets per kill.”

“Which,” said the major, picking up the story, “will allow us to send in armored dogs with sophisticated software for target selection and thereby reduce the number of human soldiers we put in harm’s way. Let the robots do the fighting.”

“Wait, you mean these machines will be picking their own targets?”

“Of course,” said the scientist.

“How will they be able to tell the difference between enemy combatants and our own troops?”

“All soldiers will have an RFID chip implanted,” explained the major. “No WarDog will fire on someone who has a chip.”

“That’s all well and good,” said Schoeffel, “but ISIL and the Taliban tend to hide in urban areas and among civilian populations. How do we keep civilians safe?”

The scientist didn’t meet her eyes.

Major Schellinger said, “We’re still working on that.”

Schoeffel watched the second dog trot into position. This one carried a lighter weapon, a modified Remington Mk 21 Precision Sniper Rifle, with a lever system operating the bolt and a new generation of laser sighting. The twenty-seven-inch barrel extended out over the dog’s head, and it could be replaced to fire .338 Lapua Magnum, 338 Norma Magnum, 300 Winchester Magnum, or the standard 7.62 × 51-mm. NATO rounds. Schoeffel watched it select targets using each of the four possible calibers and shoot with deadly accuracy up to three hundred yards. Then targets were attached to eight separate remote-controlled carts and went rolling off through the forest in different directions. Bird drones followed each and sent video feeds back to the chief scientist’s laptop, where everyone crowded around to watch. The dog leaped forward to pursue, and within eleven minutes had caught up to each of the targets and scored multiple shots in the kill zone. Then it loped back to the top of the range and stood there, quiet, brutal, deadly, and alien.

Major Schellinger actually patted its head as if it were a real dog. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

The dog had two red lights for eyes, and although Sarah Schoeffel knew they were nothing but colored lenses over laser targeting systems, she swore that those eyes glared at her. With menace, with what she felt was a kind of bloody, wicked pride. It was stupid to read emotion into a machine.

Stupid, sure.

Schoeffel forced a smile onto her face. “Wonderful,” she echoed. “Yes.”