Dogs of War

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

We touched down, got our bags, collected Ghost — who gave me an evil glare that promised retribution — and went out to the curb. Sean was there, parked in the no-parking zone, leaning against the door of a gray Toyota SUV, ankles crossed, arms crossed, sunglasses on his face, head cocked to one side. He wore jeans and a dress shirt under a sports coat with old-fashioned leather elbow pads that made him look more like a hipster history teacher than a cop. Ghost bounded forward and nearly sprained his furry ass wagging. Sean squatted down and hugged the dog. Sean had always been a dog person; I came to it later in my life, but I’m now fully invested. Ghost sniffed Sean and made a soft whuff sound, which meant that he probably smelled Sean’s dog, Barkley, a retired K-9 who was a venerable nine years old.

Sean is a few years younger than me. Happily married and a father of two, a superb homicide detective, better-looking than me, and, arguably, nicer. We look like brothers but not twins. His features are less battered, his hair darker, his eyes brown instead of blue, and he’s an inch shorter than my six-two. His smile is less complicated than mine, or so I’ve been told. Rudy says that Sean looks like a man who’s happy to be who and what he is. Even though we’re brothers, he doesn’t have the same damage I do. He wasn’t there when that gang attacked my girlfriend and me when we were fifteen. He didn’t live through a horror show, and you can look into his eyes and tell. That said, he’s a cop in a city where a lot of people get hurt and a lot of people do very bad things. He’s seen people at their worst. He may not be as wrecked as me, but there is still hurt and an awareness of hurt in his eyes.

Sean ruffled Ghost’s fur and then stood to shake Rudy’s hand.

“Good to see you,” said Sean. “But a little surprised.”

“Not unpleasantly so, I trust,” said Rudy, returning the handshake.

“Never. Just glad to see you up and around.”

Sean turned to me and we did this awkward little dance where we started to offer hands at the same time that we half-ass moved in for a hug. Sean and I were never touchy-feely with each other. I finally pulled him in for a bear hug, and we did the manly backslapping thing to keep it from any possible appearance of being weird. Then we stepped back and nodded to each other. Not sure what that nod was about, but we always did it.

I looked past him at the SUV. “New?”

“Rental,” he said, and I nodded again. “Didn’t trust mine. Ever since—”

I stopped him with a raised hand and a small head shake. He became quiet, attentive, and visibly nervous as I opened a zippered compartment in my roller bag and removed a small case, undid the Velcro, and withdrew a device about the size of a Zippo lighter. Without speaking, I showed Sean how it works. A button on the side activated a touch screen and the display showed a meter that measured the presence of electronics — active or passive — and indicated their proximity. Trade name is Anteater. I waved it past his pocket and it binged. Sean removed his cell phone, and I took it and handed it to Rudy. Then I moved the Anteater up and down Sean from hair to shoes, not giving much of a crap if people passing by thought what we were doing looked deeply weird. Besides, Ghost had shifted into fierce-dog mode and was giving his lethal glare to rubberneckers, which encouraged them to hustle their asses away.

I went through the rental car and the doohickey binged twice more, once when I was searching the glove box and again when I ran it around the back seat. The surveillance bugs were small and very well made, and it took me a few minutes to find them. The one in the back seat was fitted into the underside of the front-seat headrest. It was dark gray, pea-size, round on one side, flat and adhesive on the other. The one in the glove box was the same design and had been attached out of sight under the roof of the compartment.

While I searched, Sean and Rudy stood watching. Sean became increasingly more alarmed, more afraid, and more furious. When I was done with the car, I opened his cell phone to remove another of the bugs. Sean’s face was now a violent brick red, and his fists were balled at his sides. I touched my finger to my lips again and removed another item from my suitcase, a heavy ten-by-twelve-inch black plastic bag into which I put all the bugs before sealing it. There was a tiny sensor on the seal, and I punched the button on it. It flashed red and then green.

I tucked the Anteater into my jeans pocket. “We’re cool now.”

“How did you know those goddamn things would be here?”

“Call it a useful paranoia,” I said.

Sean poked the bag I held. “You sure they’ll be safe in there?”

“It’s called a Faraday bag,” I said “And yes.”

A Faraday bag was one of Dr. Hu’s most useful devices, heavy plastic with a wire mesh that canceled out all electronic signals into or out of the bag. I mostly used them to disguise my own electronic gizmos when traveling commercial, because they won’t register at all even on a metal detector. But the bag also kept surveillance devices from transmitting signals. Handy. I told Sean as much of this as I could.

Sean looked as if he wanted to shoot someone. “What the fuck is—” he began, but Rudy cut him off. There were people all around us, some giving us weird looks.

“Joe,” said Rudy, “now that the car is clean, maybe we should—”

“Right, let’s bounce,” I said.

Sean gave a single curt nod and stalked around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and climbed in. He hit a button that released the trunk, and I swung my bag and Rudy’s suitcase collection into the back. Ghost bounded in and turned the bay into a throne room for his doggie self. Rudy got into the back and I took shotgun.

As we left the airport via Friendship Road and got onto I-195 West, Sean said, “How did you know that stuff was there?”

“I didn’t, but after what you told me about your phones I figured it was worth checking.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense,” protested Sean. “How could they bug me that fast? I only decided on the rental while killing time to come out to pick you guys up. I never made any calls, didn’t tell anyone I was going to do that, so how’d they know?”

“They were probably following you,” I said. “They got someone to the rental place and bugged the car in the gap between you requesting the vehicle and them walking you out. Everything goes into the computer. That way, they could fall back and track you from a safe distance. You spotted them before, so this is them upping their game.”

His face was flushed with anger and confusion. “Yeah, maybe, but how could they hack the rental-car company computer that fast?”

I shrugged.

“No,” he insisted, his tone fierce, “tell me how? Who can do something like that?”

“These days? A lot of people can do that,” I told him. “I could.”

Sean looked at me for a moment, the muscles in the corner of his jaw working. “Shit!” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Sean turned from I-195 onto Maryland 295 North and from there onto I-95 as it hooked around and crossed the Patapsco River past Fort McHenry. The muscles at the corners of his jaw flexed and bunched continually.

“Where do you want to go first?” he grumbled. “The morgue or the crime scene?”

“Actually, I have people sweeping everywhere you’ve been,” I told him, “so let’s give them time to collect and analyze anything they find.”

He scowled. “It’s scary that you know about all this stuff.”

“It’s scary that we need to have to,” observed Rudy.

I said, “Sean, you know how to shake a tail?”

“Of course, but—” He stopped and looked into the rearview for a moment. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “But let’s assume, okay? Bugs might not be the only way they’ve been tracking you. Someone had to actually put this stuff into the rental car. I don’t see them, but it doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

He opened his mouth, paused, shut it, and spent the next five minutes proving to me that he did know how to shake a tail. He went straight past our exit, 11B, and got off at 12 to go onto Bayview Boulevard, then began making random turns through the residential community of Joseph Lee, running no end of yellow lights, circling, pulling to the curb, and then making a U-turn. We both watched the flow of traffic. If anyone was following us, neither of us could see them.

My cell buzzed to indicate a text, and again it was a call with no ID:

“The hell is this…” I groused. “Thought I turned off the texting app.”

When I checked the app, though, it was on. Weird.

“What about it? What’s up?” asked Sean, and I showed him and Rudy and explained about the other texts.

“I don’t get it,” said Sean. “Is that from Junie?”

“She said it wasn’t.”

“Lydia Rose?” asked Rudy.

“She never met Sean.”

“She booked our flight,” said Rudy.

I tried texting back but got no answer. I debated calling her at home, but it was three hours earlier out there. If this wasn’t her, she’d be pissed at me for waking her up. Good rule, folks, never piss off your secretary. I left it for later. But I also went to the settings on my phone and turned the text app off. Again.

“I think we’re clear,” said Sean, looking in the rearview.

“Good,” I said. “Now let’s go find a diner. I need greasy eggs and a lot of bacon. And we need coffee.”

“Dear God, yes,” said Rudy. “Baltimore keeps changing. Take us somewhere we’ll still recognize.”

Sean nodded. “Okay. Broadway?”

I smiled and nodded. “Broadway.”

In the back, Rudy sighed. Not sure if it was in dread of what a Broadway Diner breakfast would do to his cholesterol or he was pleased at our choice. Probably a little of both.

INTERLUDE FIVE

“He seems… different somehow,” said the woman.

“Different in what way, Mrs. Pepper?” asked the nurse.

The woman, Vera Pepper, had her arms crossed so tightly that it was as if she were hugging herself, holding in both pain and need. She stood next to the nurse and watched her son through the glass of the observation deck that ran around the top of the wall above the physical therapy center. Her son, Joe Henry Pepper, walked along a rubber mat, hands lightly touching the safety rails, while a therapist walked backward five feet ahead. The observation room was soundproof, and Joe Henry hadn’t looked up once to see if his mother was still there. He was a tall, good-looking boy of nineteen; or he had been before an IED blew most of his face away. Now he wore what looked like a poorly sculpted red rubber mask that didn’t look like anyone she knew. Darker red lines left over from reconstructive skull surgery and some brain repairs, crisscrossed his shaved scalp. The eyes were the same, though; they hadn’t been damaged by the blast, but the person who looked out of those eyes had.

When Mrs. Pepper looked into her son’s eyes, she didn’t see Joe Henry. She didn’t see much of anything. It was like looking into two globes of blue glass. The only emotion she saw was her own worried face reflected there.

“The implants are helping him,” said the nurse. “Look how much progress he’s made. At this rate, he’ll be walking on his own in less than a month. That’s remarkable.”

“It’s not that, it’s…” began Mrs. Pepper, but she didn’t finish her thought.

The nurse patted her shoulder. “I know, but you have to understand what he’s been through. The surgeons removed eleven separate pieces of shrapnel from his brain. He lost memory, motor function, speech, and so much else. The chips and the nanobots they implanted are restoring all of that. Or most of it. Much more than he could have expected even two years ago. This is brand-new, and it’s working so well. Joe Henry will make a full recovery, believe me.”

Mrs. Pepper smiled and nodded, but she still looked worried. Before he left for the service her son had been smart, funny, kind, and he wanted to serve, as his father and his aunt had served. As Mrs. Pepper herself had served. The Pepper family was devoted to this country, and five members of the family were buried at Arlington. Joe Henry had come close to being the sixth.

And then the people from the Bain Foundation had reached out to her with offers no mother could ever turn down. Cutting-edge science that they promised would bring her son out of the coma in which he’d been languishing for three months. They could bring him back to her, and it would all be paid for by the foundation as long as she signed the papers to allow them to try the radical procedures on Joe Henry.

The doctors had urged her to accept, because they had no real hope of helping him in any other way. She had accepted. Of course she had. Now, weeks later, here he was walking, feeding himself, exercising, talking. He even had his memories back. Most of them, at least. Except that this Joe Henry wasn’t the son she’d raised. There was something different about him.

Something wrong.

She hugged her arms to her body as if she stood in a cold wind and watched the body of her son practice walking. He knew that she was up here, but not once had he looked up to find her, to see her, to smile at her.

Not once.

CHAPTER FORTY

“You’re supposed to be working,” said Aunt Sallie.

Bug didn’t move, didn’t look up. His hands rested atop the desk on either side of the keyboard, palms down, fingers slack. Above and around him were dozens of computer screens of all sizes. Data and computer codes scrolled up and down and sideways. Except for the one Bug was facing, which was filled with an image of Beyoncé and six backup dancers in the middle of a very sexy dance while lights flashed and music throbbed. The fingers of his left hand were closed around a stainless-steel travel mug printed with the image of a squat, ugly spaceship and the words I Aim to Misbehave scrolled above it. By his right hand was an open box of Girl Scout cookies. Thin Mints. His T-shirt had BLERD written in Gothic typeface.

“I am working,” said Bug.

Auntie stood with her arms folded beneath her heavy breasts, head cocked to one side, dreadlocks swaying as she tapped her foot, waiting for more. Got nothing. “If the new system works,” she said, “how’s it going to help us?”

Bug swiveled his head around very slowly. It made him look like a praying mantis. He reached behind him and, without looking, pointed to one data stream. “That’s the latest iteration of MindReader. Best supercomputer in the world, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of a hundred and twenty petaflops. It leaves the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in the dust, and that’s the fastest binary digital electronic computer known to the general public. Ours is faster.”

“So? Being faster hasn’t stopped us from getting bent over a barrel time and again. We’ve been hacked, shut down, and blocked. MindReader’s not what it used to be. What’s the new system but a bigger pig with prettier lipstick?”

“O ye of little faith,” said Bug. He used his other hand to point to a different screen on which the data appeared in bursts instead of on a scroll. “That is MindReader Q1 running in tenth-speed test mode. It is a large-scale quantum computer that, theoretically, would be able to solve problems faster than any digital computers that use even the best currently known algorithms, like integer factorization using Shor’s algorithm or the simulation of quantum many-body systems.”

“What’s that mean in earth language?” asked Auntie.

Bug grinned. “If it works, the MindReader Q1 should be able to efficiently solve problems that no classical computer would be able to solve. It would give us back the edge we’ve lost over the last few years. No… I’m not saying it right. If the MindReader we’ve been using is an apex predator on a par with a grizzly bear, Siberian tiger, hippopotamus, great white or crocodile… the Q1 is a T. rex. Or, maybe it’s Godzilla. We don’t actually know how powerful it’ll be until we finish testing it and put it online at full capacity.”

Auntie walked over and peered at the screen for a moment, then turned to Bug. When she spoke, her voice was soft but emphatic. “We’re losing ground every day, kid. The DMS is made up of fuck-ups, victims, and the walking wounded. We’ve lost our edge, and we’re going to lose this fight.”

His grin faded and he gave his lips a nervous lick. “I know, Auntie. I really do know, but we have to run these diagnostics. If we put this online too soon we could—”

She cut him off. “If this thing is going to save us, boy, then stop fucking around and get it online.”

With that, she turned and stalked out.

Bug watched her go and then turned back to the screens. The Beyoncé video was replaying. He took a sip of the Red Bull — infused coffee in his cup, settled back, rested his hands on the desk again, and stared at the screen. The data on the screens came and went, came and went. Bug didn’t focus on any screen in particular, not even the music video.

His mind settled into a calm, detached place; his breathing slowed.

He sat very still.

Working.

As fast as he could.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

There are a lot of ways of judging a city. By its beer, its pizza, its sports teams, its hot dogs, its music, and its diners. Each of these is important in its own way. With diners I go a level deeper and judge them on being able to make a decent omelet at any time of the day or night. Not a great omelet, and not a fancy one. A decent one. I want three eggs, my choice of cheese, and I want it fluffy but firm. If I want runny, undercooked eggs, I’ll eat my own cooking. I want a lot of bacon, and I do not want it to bend, fold, or sag. I want the option of adding sausages to the order without its resulting in a short count on the bacon. I want the portions generous, and I want the food to arrive quick and hot. I want a bagel on the side, toasted to a golden brown, not burned and not waved in the general direction of the toaster. I want the butter soft enough to spread, not frozen to the consistency of a concrete block. I want potatoes — chopped or diced. I do not want peppers or onions in my potatoes unless I ask for them, and in such an eventuality I want them all fried together. And I want coffee. Lots of coffee. I don’t want to have to send out a search team to get a refill. The level of the cup should never be allowed to get below one-third, and I want it hot and fresh and as dark as the pit. I do not want decaf, because decaf is Satan’s piss in a porcelain cup.

This is not too much to ask of an American diner.

The staff at Broadway in southeast Baltimore know and understand this. They get the whole diner experience. Sure, they have some froufrou stuff like the Pecan Belgian Waffle, which Rudy ordered, and the vegetarian omelet that made me lose respect for Sean, but they made my breakfast the right goddamn way. And if they have stuff like Philly Disco Fries and Crab Braided Soft Pretzels on their — God help me — Snack-a-Tizer menu, then I figure it’s there for the tourists. Before I moved to SoCal I was a regular, and the waitress remembered me and asked me if I wanted “the usual.” That was going to weigh heavily in her favor when it came to leaving a tip.

We settled in to a table away from everyone else. I’d put a service-dog vest on Ghost and he acted the part, sitting docilely and looking at the patrons with disinterest. The dog’s a great actor. Sean and I jockeyed for the seat with the best view of the front door. I let him win and sat next to him so I could use the mirror. While we waited for the food, I excused myself and stepped outside to call Sam Imura.

“Rudy and I just got to town,” I told him, “and things are already getting interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

I told him about the bugs. “Interesting toys, too. Nothing I’m familiar with. Maybe better than our stuff. Can you send someone by to grab them and run some tests? I’m at the Broadway.”

“Sure thing, Joe,” said Sam. I gave him the make, model, and license-plate numbers of Sean’s rental car. They wouldn’t need to come inside for the key. We’re the DMS, we don’t need no stinking keys.

“Send a team to do a full sweep of Sean’s house, too. And get clearance from the Big Man to have Sean’s office swept. I want this finessed so it doesn’t go through the commissioner’s office, because that means he’d call my dad, and I don’t want my dad to worry.”

“Would you like to tell me how to tie my shoelaces, too?” asked Sam.

“Sorry,” I said contritely. “Just a little frazzled. It’s been a day, y’know? Oh, hey, who’d you send to the farm?” My Uncle Jack’s farm was out in Robinwood, Maryland, which was an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Baltimore, up near the Pennsylvania border.

“The Pool Boys,” said Sam, and I grinned. Despite the last names, Tommy Pool and Alvin Pool weren’t in any way related, but they might as well have been. Tommy Pool was from Elkton and Alvin Poole was from right here in Baltimore. They both had Ocean City tans, lots of white teeth, surfer-blond hair, and tons of frat-boy charm. They didn’t look like government agents, and they certainly didn’t look like coldhearted killers, which is what they both were. Good guys, but not nice good guys. I understood why Sam had assigned them to this. Tommy was an Iraq War orphan who lost both his parents in that mess when he was nineteen. Alvin was a fifth-generation Special Operator. His two sisters and his older brother were Special Operators, or had been. Like Tommy, Alvin was the last living member of his family. If someone made a move on Sean’s wife and kids, they would be pushing all the wrong buttons on the Pool Boys.

“Good call,” I said. “My brother’s dog, Barkley, is out there, too. He’s a retired K-9, but he can still get cranky when someone gets too near the kids.”

“I heard. The Pool Boys are apparently making friends with him. Something about letting him lick up spilled beer?”

“Family tradition,” I said, thinking of Ghost. Although the two shepherds weren’t related, they had a shared talent for knocking over unattended beers and then cleaning up their own mess. Very courteous of them. Three words, though: dog beer farts.

“Alvin checked in an hour ago,” Sam told me.

“I know you’re low on manpower, Sam, but—”

“Just tell me what you need,” he said with a touch of annoyance.

“Whoever planted those bugs has people in the field,” I said. “Sean thinks they’re in black SUVs.”

“You want a couple of cars following you and your brother to see if they can pick up a tail?”

“That would help my butt unclench, yes.”

“No problem. You need anything else, Joe?”

“Not yet.”

“Call if you do,” Sam said, and disconnected.

INTERLUDE SIX

Miguel Tsotse tried to move, but he couldn’t.

He could breathe. He could bleed. That was it. His body felt as if a stone giant had wrapped its cold, hard fingers around him, squeezed too hard, and then fallen asleep without relaxing its grip. There was no light at all. The air was thin, and it stank of his own fear. And of something else. A coppery odor.

With a jolt, he realized what it was.

“Jimmy…?” he said. It came out as a whisper, tight, hoarse from pain and rock dust. Even so, his voice was too loud. The kind of loud that let him know he was in a very tight space. Not just with stones and dirt packed around him from the collapse but as if that space was sealed at both ends. Like a phone booth. Like a torpedo tube.

Like a coffin.

“Jimmy,” he repeated, trying to make his voice bigger, trying to be heard.

Failing. Hearing nothing in reply. Not a voice. Not a moan. Not the sound of picks and shovels as the crews worked to dig them out. It chilled him, and he had to clench to keep from pissing his pants. Why wasn’t there the sound of anyone digging? Where were the shouts of people looking? Where was the clang of metal on stone as they worked to lever the bigger rocks out of the way?

Where was the rescue team? Where was everyone?

“Jimmy… can you hear me?” Miguel listened as hard as he could. Praying, mouthing the words the nuns taught him long ago, when he was a little boy in Albuquerque.

There was no sound. Nothing except the sandpaper rasp of his own breaths and the rustle of his shirt as he tried to move. He had never been claustrophobic — miners didn’t last long if they couldn’t abide close spaces — and had often been described as “steady.” Not the kind to fly off the handle, never short-tempered, and not much of a worrier. But he had never been trapped like this before. In minor cave-ins and collapses, sure. But not caught like this. Not sealed into a stone coffin five hundred yards beneath the desert floor. Not alone in the dark, in all this silence.

“Jimmy,” he said again. “They’re going to come for us. You just hang on, okay? I know you can hear me. Just hang on. They’ll be here, I guarantee it.”

Miguel knew that he was talking to himself. Talking to calm his own nerves, talking to hear a human voice.

Then nothing. No sound from Jimmy. No rock sounds, either. Not after the rumbling stopped. The two of them had been alone in this chamber, doing an inspection of a natural side tunnel to assess how much it needed to be reinforced for digging. This was a standard cut-and-fill mine with sturdy ramps, a well-constructed elevator, a new crusher, and all the usual safeguards on everything from the hoist house to the ore loadout. Everything was safe, because safe mines were profitable mines. Miguel had no idea what triggered the collapse. Neither he nor Jimmy had touched a thing, but now they were trapped down here.

Miguel heard something and froze. A sound. Soft. Close.

He almost spoke, almost called out to Jimmy again, but didn’t. The sound was coming from the wrong direction to be Jimmy. Miguel turned his head, but it was too black to see anything. Looking in the direction of the sound helped him focus, helped him concentrate on making sense of it.

There it was again.

A whispery sound. Not a tool sound, though. He strained to hear. The sound changed, became sounds. He could hear the soft whisper in two places. Then four. Then a dozen places. Chittery sounds, like the whisper-tap-scuff of insect feet. That was strange, though, because there weren’t many insects down here. It was too cold and dry and there was nothing to eat.

The sounds grew as whatever it was came closer. Not a dozen little feet. Hundreds of them. Scuttling through the blackness, swarming through cracks in the broken rock. It horrified him. The thought that the collapse had disturbed the nest of some kind of insect. Some kind of scuttling thing. He couldn’t even move his arms to protect himself if they came at him.

Scuttle. Whisk-whisk.

A hiss of noise as the unseen things came closer and closer. In the utter stillness, Miguel could hear the sounds they made as they collided and climbed over one another, the way a mass of roaches will. He had seen that on an excavation once, back when he did general demolition for a construction company. Ten thousand roaches boiling out of the basement of a meatpacking plant that had been damaged by an earthquake. Grown men — workers hardened by years of backbreaking work — had fled screaming as the glistening carpet of roaches swarmed up at them. Miguel had screamed, too.

As he screamed now when the first wire-thin legs of the insects crawled over his face.

He screamed and screamed, the noise filling every lightless inch of his rock coffin. The insects swept over him, through his hair, inside his clothes. He thrashed and twisted, trying to fight them, trying not to die this way.

And then the lights came on.

A thousand tiny white lights.

On his clothes. On his face. All over his body. Pinpricks of light, suddenly there, filling his tomb, hurting his eyes, sending his mind spinning toward a wall at high speed. His thoughts crashed as he saw the things that had crawled through blackness to find him.

Roaches.

Except that they weren’t.

They were green and orange and red. Not roach colors. Bright colors. Candy colors. They stood on tiny legs and had antennae that flicked back and forth. He turned, seeing more and more of them appear, squeezing through cracks only as wide as two stacked pennies. They squeezed flat and then expanded again. Just like roaches, but their faces weren’t insect faces.

They were miniature flashlights. Each light was minuscule, but collectively they filled the tight hole with a blinding glare.

Miguel’s brain kept slipping gears as he tried to make sense of this. These weren’t insects. They weren’t. They were…

Miguel mouthed the word. It was impossible, strange, and freakish.

“Robots…?”

The technician hunched over the monitor screens turned in his seat and yelled, “We got him!”

Everyone in the shack crowded around him. Officials from the mine, the dig supervisor, senior technicians with the search-and-rescue company, and one unsmiling woman in a stiffly pressed army uniform, with its operational camouflage pattern of muted greens, light beige, and dark-brown hues. Her patrol cap was spotless and was pulled low to keep her face mostly in shadow. She wore the oak-leaf cluster of a major and a simple plastic nametag: “Schellinger.”

“Are they alive?” asked the supervisor.

“One of them is,” said the tech as he zoomed in on a bloody, dirty face.

“That’s Miguel Tsotse,” said the supervisor. “He looks okay. Scared, though.”

“Of course he’s scared,” snapped one of the officials. “Half the goddamn mountain fell on him.”

“I think he’s scared of the swarm,” said the tech.

“Yeah, well, I would be, too,” said the supervisor. “Where is he?”

The tech punched a key and a new window opened up on the upper left of the screen, showing a detailed 3-D map of the entire mine. There were clusters of heat signatures in various sections. The tech pointed to the yellow signatures on the upper levels. “Okay, those are the rescue crew and a couple of the bot wranglers. Now, down there, see the blue dots? That’s the swarm, and the yellow dot they’re clustered around is Miguel.”

“What about Jimmy Beale? Can you see him?”

“Sending half of the swarm to look for him now,” the tech assured him, and the group watched as half of the lights winked off and the tiny robots flattened once more and wriggled into the cracks. As they moved deeper into the mine, the 3-D picture expanded. “They each have a microcamera that’s too small to do much good individually, but the bots combine their signal so that we can get a video image, a thermal reading, and to collectively map wherever they go. They’re keyed to look for heat signatures, which is how they found Miguel, and they’re relaying data to other bots stationed along the path they used to find him. Each one is like a little relay tower. Without them sending signals like that, the rock would block us from seeing anything. That’s one of the reasons we send so many down there. All told, I have three thousand bots in play.”

“Robots,” said one of the executives in disbelief. “You know how long it would have taken a crew of our best men to find him with that much of the ceiling caved in? Days, if we found him at all.”

The tech grinned. “We modeled these babies after real cockroaches, and, believe me, roaches are impressive as hell. They can run full tilt through a quarter-inch gap by reorienting their legs and flattening their bodies to a tenth of an inch. And even at that compression they can withstand something like nine hundred times their body weight without injury. They’re super heroes. No wonder they’ll outlive us all. And these bots are the latest generation of CRAMs, which is shorthand for compressible robots with articulated mechanisms.”

“This is fucking amazing,” murmured the supervisor.

Major Carly Schellinger bent forward to study the screen. Her face was unreadable, and she hadn’t spoken a single word since entering the shack.

The group watched as the insect robots worked their way laboriously through cracks and fissures in the rock. A new heat signature appeared on the screen fifty meters from where Miguel was trapped.

“Oh, man,” said the tech. “Oh, no… The other human heat signature is low and falling. Sorry guys, but your other man’s dead. His body is already cooling.”

“Jimmy was a good guy. Smart,” said the supervisor dolefully. “A good worker.”

The officials exchanged worried looks. This was going to be expensive in a lot of ways. Two of them went outside to use their cell phones.

“We have to get Miguel out,” insisted the supervisor.

“I’ll forward the data to your laptop,” said the tech. “The bots have mapped the fault lines all the way down to where he’s trapped.”

The supervisor ran out, and the others followed until only the major was left with the tech. She walked over, pulled the shack door shut, and turned the lock. The tech frowned at this.

“They may need to get in here again,” he said.

“They can wait,” said the major.

“Um. Okay.”

Major Schellinger came over and pointed to the screen. “These bugs of yours. They carry lights, thermal scanners, mapping software, and transmitters,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me,” she said, smiling for the first time, “what else can they carry?”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I went back inside as the waitress put the food on the table. Everything was hot; everything had been prepared exactly right. I gave her my very best Joe Ledger smile, the one that makes the corners of my eyes crinkle. How she managed not to undress and fling herself on me remains a mystery.

“I’ll get word as soon as we get the all-clear,” I said as I slid into my seat. “Then we can jump on this thing.”

“Where do you want to start?” asked Sean.

“I’m thinking we should poke around this Vee Rejenko character,” I said, and gave him what Nikki had given me. “Vee figures in this too strongly. His companies have involvement in all the hotels where the kids died. And I had my guys check the press on the deaths… there isn’t nearly as much as there should be. Not by a tenth. My guess is that Vee has some leverage he can use on the local newspeople.”

“That wouldn’t account for the dearth of Internet coverage,” observed Rudy.

“No. But it’s suggestive of a bigger organization behind him. I mean, he’s a mobster so he didn’t invent the nanotech. He probably can’t spell nanotech. Which means it came from someone higher up the food chain. Whoever that is has resources, and we know from personal experience that the right computer can game the system.”

“We don’t have anything on Vee,” said Sean. “Can’t get a warrant on a hunch. Any judge would laugh us out of his office.”

“Depends on how nicely we ask,” I said. “But maybe we don’t need a warrant to have a conversation. We could drop by for a playdate with him. Ask questions before he can lawyer up. Lean on him a tad.”

“Hmm, there’s this thing, Joe,” said Sean. “It’s called the Constitution. Pretty cool stuff — you might want to Google it. Or do you fondle your copy of the Patriot Act when you get up in the morning.”

Rudy chuckled. “That is exactly the kind of speech Joe usually gives to someone who says exactly the kind of thing he’d just said to you.”

“So? Call me old-fashioned, guys,” said Sean, “but I’m kind of committed to the whole ‘due process’ thing.”

I held my hands up. “Okay, fine, we can do it your way, Sean. Let’s go ask him nicely and waste some time as he finds clever ways to tell us to fuck off. And then you can spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. And, while you’re at it, you can put Ali, Lefty, and Em into witness protection.”

He glared at me. “It’s not like that. This isn’t that kind of thing.”

“No? Then why’d you call me, Sean?”

“I…” Sean began, but faltered, so Rudy stepped in.

“Sean, don’t get the wrong impression about where Joe stands,” he said quietly. “He would not line a bird cage with the Patriot Act, for fear of insulting the scatological leavings. It was a hastily conceived and badly written instrument that has caused more problems than it’s ever addressed. Sidestepping the Constitution is actually not on Joe’s to-do list on any given day, I can assure you. However, the nature of what he does — of what we do — is complicated. The framers of the Constitution couldn’t have foreseen the methodology of global terrorism. Terrorists know this, and they deliberately hide behind due process and the limitations of constitutional privacy. It forces investigators of a certain kind to either break rules or allow a terrorist to escape, or allow a terrorist act to occur. It is these same people who, in the Middle East, establish their headquarters and training centers in urban areas, often in or near schools, because they know that there is no way for their enemies to attack them without incurring civilian casualties and therefore creating martyrs. The kinds of people who would hide behind children certainly do not hesitate to hide behind laws and treaties. That’s why they’re so successful, and why they’ll continue to flourish.”

“It doesn’t make it right, though,” insisted Sean.

“Right?” echoed Rudy. “Of course it’s not right. This is a perfect example of the lesser of two evils.”

“Does that mean you guys are all rah-rah on waterboarding and other fun and games?”

I leaned my forearms on the table and smiled at him. “Only with widows and orphans.”

Rudy closed his eyes.

Sean snapped, “You know what I meant.”

“Would I torture a prisoner in custody?” I asked. “No. Not unless the moment demanded it.”

Sean was taking a sip of coffee and nearly spit it at me. “The ‘moment’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The Los Angeles Nuclear Bomb,” said Rudy, and when Sean looked blank he explained. “It’s a scenario we use when doing psych screening of field personnel. Ask yourself, if there was a nuclear device set to explode in Los Angeles in one hour and you were in a room with someone who knew where it was and very likely had the codes needed to shut it off, what would you be willing to do in order to get that information and save the lives of millions of people?”

“That’s not a fair question,” said Sean.

“Hate to break it to you, little brother,” I said, “but life isn’t always fair. No, don’t bite my head off. Hear me out. Change the scenario. Right now Ali and the kids are out at Uncle Jack’s farm. If you knew for sure that a hit team was going out there and you could get crucial information in time to save them, what limits — moral or constitutional — would you impose on yourself?”

Sean looked down at his hands. As we talked, he’d laced his fingers together so tightly that the knuckles were white. “You’re asking a husband and father to make a decision that should be made by a cop.”

“Sure,” I said, “and that really sucks, but are you going to sit there and tell me you wouldn’t go medieval on someone if it meant saving your family? You’re a smart guy, Sean, you think the terrorists are operating according to the Geneva Convention? Do you think there are any rules out there?”

Sean said nothing.

“It’s an imperfect world,” said Rudy sadly. “I hate the fact that this is the world in which I’m going to raise my son. I resent the choices that people like us are forced to make. I’m disappointed in myself for being willing to make those choices. I’m embarrassed to even have this discussion. At the same time, I’m adult enough to accept that evil exists in the world. It’s not an abstraction. It’s not always the result of circumstance or bad influences or twisted politics or even greed. Evil exists, and there are times when good men are forced to do vile things in order to protect the innocent.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” demanded Sean. “Should we just say screw it and forget that we have laws?”

“No,” said Rudy. “We need those laws in place, and we need to have the checks and balances. Not everyone involved in this fight can be trusted to make the right judgment calls, and not everyone is motivated by personal ethics rather than personal gain.”

“Still sucks.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it absolutely does. Even for guys like me.”

We studied each other across the table, and it was another of those sad, awkward moments when brothers have to reevaluate what they know about their own kin and make terrible personal adjustments. I could see the hurt in his eyes, and an equal measure of disgust. And some fear, too. Fear for his family, fear of what the world was, fear of what he didn’t know, fear of the realities of life, and fear of me. His eyes faltered and fell away, and he looked down at his knotted fingers and slowly shook his head.

I opened my mouth to say something, but Rudy caught my eye and gave me a “leave it alone” look. The food was getting cold, so we pretended that we were normal people and began to eat.

After a while Rudy asked, “What is the status on the bodies of the other kids who died? Can we obtain exhumation orders?”

“Mostly, no,” said Sean. “Baltimore’s policy on unclaimed bodies is cremation after a certain number of days. Apparently, it’s more cost-effective or some shit. Three of the kids were cremated, and the fourth was sent home to an uncle or something in Pennsylvania.”

“We only need one more body to establish a pattern,” I said. “We need to see if these are both cases of rabies and, if so, then are they the same strain? And we need to look for nanobots.”

“Sure, but we’d have to convince a judge in another state to give us an exhumation order based entirely on a theory that’s right out of The X-Files. My experience is that I’d have to push that rock all the way uphill.”

“It’s possible,” said Rudy dryly, “that we could help in that regard.”

“Really?” Sean sounded suspicious.

“Really,” I said. “And we could even do it without waterboarding the judge.”

“Joe…” warned Rudy.

Sean ate some of his omelet and then began shaking his head. “Y’know, I’m still finding it hard to buy that someone like Vee Rejenko has access to that kind of science. I mean… who does? And, if so, how did someone like him get hold of it? How’d he even learn how to use it? And why use it on one of his hookers?”

“For the latter question,” said Rudy, “it’s possible that he thought she was planning on running, or perhaps he was afraid that she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Maybe the girl saw what happened to the other kids and somehow realized that it was Vee who was killing them.”

“She was fourteen.”

“I’m not suggesting that she understood nanotechnology, Sean, but perhaps she saw enough to know that something strange and dangerous was happening. She called her mother and asked to come home. A literal cry for help. The activation of the nanobots might well have been triggered to stop her.”

“That’s science fiction,” said Sean. “Besides, I thought you said that nanobots can’t regulate rabies.”

“So far as we know,” corrected Rudy. “There is a lot of dangerous work being done out on the cutting edge of science. Although I don’t personally know of any relationship between nanotechnology and rabies, it isn’t a totally absurd concept. Nanomedicine is a developing field. Researchers are at work right now trying to design nanorobots that can be programmed to repair specific diseased cells, functioning in a similar way to antibodies in our natural healing processes. And there is a lot of excitement around the developing science about using nanites as delivery systems for drugs. This is viewed as a healthy alternative to standard drug dosing, which is hardly as precise as we would like. Nanites could go directly to a specific site and deliver only as much of a drug as was needed, and then remain to regulate dosage variations throughout the desired term of therapy.”

“Does that mean they could deliver rabies to the brain?” asked Sean.

“Deliver it? Yes. That’s possible. Regulating it is another matter. If someone cracked that, they wouldn’t waste that level of technology on prostitution. They could file patents and make tens of billions from medical applications. Which is why I don’t get why they were in that girl’s brain.”

“Nikki thinks it was accidental exposure to the nanobots,” I said, and explained to Sean who Nikki was. “From all the spraying they’re doing for Zika mosquitoes.”

Sean nodded. “Yeah, I can buy that. They’ve been spraying all over Baltimore and in the burbs. You see the trucks all the time.”

“If it wasn’t for you being surveilled,” I said, “I’d write this whole thing off as a couple of nasty coincidences that killed a bunch of poor kids.”

“Agreed,” said Sean. “Even with the surveillance, the more I think about it the less I’m sure that going to interview Vee Rejenko is our best call. Would someone like him have access to bugs as sophisticated as what you found?”

I said, “He’s our only lead, though. Five dead kids in the sex trade, and we know a guy who employed at least one of them. It’s a starting place. And I think I’ll see about getting that court order for the exhumation for the boy they didn’t cremate. This thing is too weird, and none of it makes sense, which means the whole thing needs a closer look.”

“What if the nanobots and the girl freaking out aren’t event connected?” said Sean.

“Then we keep looking,” I said. “If this peters out and Rudy and me go home, I’ll keep some of my people on it until we get somewhere.”

Sean looked at us. “Your ‘people.’ You do realize that I don’t know who you jokers are working for. You with the CIA or something?”

“No,” I said.

“NSA? FBI?”

“No, and stop asking.”

He gave me three full seconds of the “cop look” and then turned away.

INTERLUDE SEVEN

The teacher knew that he was dying. Death seemed to sit like a welcoming friend just out of sight. Death brought an end to pain. Not just the pain of the bullets that had punched him down to the street but to the pain of knowing that he had failed his students.

Fajir Ibrahim had tried. Armed with what he could grab — a folding chair — he had charged at the men in the black turbans, knocking one of them down, smashing the rifle out of a second man’s hands. But then the bullets had found him. Three, he thought. Maybe more, but he was sure that he had been shot at least three times. There were three red-hot suns burning in his skin. Chest, stomach, thigh. Hot and wet, and yet cool at the edges. Cold in the places I’m dying, he thought.

Fajir lay on the pavement outside the school. The fall from the second floor had probably done as much as the bullets. His head felt wrong. Loose in places, too tight elsewhere. He could turn his head a few inches, but he wasn’t able to do anything else. His hands and feet might as well have been on other planets. So strange, though, that the sky above was blue and pretty. He could hear birds singing. Why would birds sing, he wondered, when there was all that screaming? Shouldn’t the sound of gunfire have chased them all off? Or was it simply that they had become used to those sounds? Probably. He himself had become inured to the distant sounds of gunfire in the past few years, even though he knew he should not. It was not a matter of his having become stronger because of the constant warfare, the constant assault. No. He knew that his ability to not hear the gunfire and the explosions had been a failing, a losing of something important. A form of dying.

And now there was this other kind of dying. First the death inside, and now the rest of him was leaking and cracking apart and ending.

“Please,” he said, directing the appeal nowhere and everywhere. He closed his eyes for a moment and then put more of his need into it. “Please, God…”

Suddenly he heard a new sound. Not a scream, not another shot. A softer sound. Close and small. Fajir turned his head, expecting it to be people coming to try and rescue the children. Or maybe one of the kids who had escaped the ISIL bastards. He prayed to Allah that it was that. But when he turned the ten thousand tons of broken masonry that was his head, he didn’t see a child. Or a fireman. Or anyone at all.

There was nothing. The street was empty, the people still gone wherever they had fled when the men in black swarmed in with their guns and their lies that they were here to do God’s will. As if a loving God would ever want a child to suffer. Not in His name. Never.

So what had made the sound? He glanced down to see something standing on the upraised toe of his right shoe. Tiny. An insect. It had three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and threadlike antennae. At first he thought it was a cockroach, but the color was wrong. It was green. Not a green from the natural world but a flat plastic green. The thorax and abdomen were the same color, but the head was silver. Metallic silver, nonreflective, like brushed magnesium. The antennae whipped back and forth for a moment, and Fajir thought he heard a sound. Not an insect chittering but a burst of squelch as from a radio. Very small, though, very faint.

Suddenly there were more of them. Dozens. No, hundreds.

They came flooding upward through the square vents in a manhole cover five feet from where Fajir lay. Moving with incredible speed, turning together, sometimes colliding but never squabbling, driven with the surety of the hive mind as they swept toward the outside wall of the school, reached it, and began to climb with no perceptible slackening of speed. The swarm split to avoid the open first-floor window and reformed as they reached the second floor, then they went over the sill and through the window Fajir had fallen out of.

The teacher understood. Or thought he did. He taught science and had always tried to keep current with new directions in research and technology. These were rescue robots. They would be able to send video images to the police or to the military response teams. Possibly to NATO or the Americans. Fajir didn’t know if these were actually American robots or Russian. He didn’t care. ISIL didn’t have this technology. Whoever sent this swarm could not be friends or allies of the fighters of the so-called Islamic State. Whoever sent them was trying to rescue the children, which meant that the controllers were closer to God than the heretics claiming to be warriors of God’s jihad.

Fajir wanted to shout in joy for whoever had sent the robots and spit at the blasphemous murderers in the school. But he could do neither. The coldness in his body was spreading, and he could feel himself going farther and farther away.

“Please, God,” he begged.

There was a moment of silence, and then a deafening sound. A crashing, thunderous boom — and above him the top two floors of the school seemed to leap into the air in clouds of red fire veined with black. Superheated gases hurled debris and bodies into the air, shattering windows on all the surrounding buildings, setting the trees alight. Some of the bodies spinning and twisting in the burning air were small.

He wanted to scream and managed to drag in a cupful of air, but it seared his throat and lungs. He coughed it out again in a single word. Not as a denial, not as a curse, not as a prayer. His last word was a question that would never be answered.

“God…?”

A microsecond later, the whole side of the building collapsed on top of him.

Major Carly Schellinger took a long sip of her unsweetened iced tea and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin as she watched the explosion on her laptop. She wore earbuds and sat with her computer angled so that she was the only spectator. The others involved in the operation would be watching from a secure location several blocks from the target.

Schellinger waited for her phone to ring. It was nearly thirty minutes before she got the call. She engaged the scrambler and glanced around to make certain that no one was close enough to hear her conversation. There were only three other people near her, and they were huddled together eating salads and talking about some reality show Schellinger had never heard of.

She punched the button. “Go.”

“Guess what I’m seeing on the news,” said Zephyr Bain. She sounded delighted.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The check arrived at the same time my phone rang. It was Sam, so Rudy paid the check while Ghost and I stepped outside.

“Good news and bad news,” said Sam. “The bad news is that we can’t put a finger on whoever was following your brother. I put a whole flock of pigeon drones in the air, and so far nothing.”

“So what’s the good news?”

“We swept Sean’s house and cleaned it up. Plenty of bugs, but we got them all. I had my guys install a passive system that will alert us if new bugs are put in place. I’m having the bugs we found plugged into MindReader so we can tear them apart. Maybe we can figure a way to trace it back to source.”

“Sounds like a long shot.”

“It’s what we have,” he said. “Oh, and the science team got here from Brooklyn. They took possession of the samples Duffy picked up from your brother. I gave them a couple of the bugs, too.”

Rudy and Sean came out of the diner. “Listen, Sam, I’m going to poke around in this for a bit. I’ll let you know what I find. Don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about South Carolina.”

“Nothing new,” said Sam. “Jerry Spencer’s in charge, and you know what a Chatty Cathy he is.”

Jerry could teach a stone statue a lesson in saying nothing.

Sam said, “Are you opening a file on this yet?”

“Leaning closer to it every minute.”

“I wish you’d go ahead and do it. It would make my life easier. This thing is giving me an itch between my shoulder blades. You know what I mean.”

It was the kind of feeling good soldiers get when they think a sniper might be out there in the tall grass, hidden by greasepaint and camo, peering at you with a scope, adjusting his gun sights for windage, finger laid along the trigger guard, a round ready in the chamber.

“I’m starting to get the same itch,” I told him, and disconnected.

Before I could even put my phone away, it buzzed to indicate a text. Same as before. Which meant the app was back on. Somehow. The text message was:

I sighed. Probably Lydia Rose realizing that she shouldn’t have been texting me earlier and texting back to apologize.

The reply was a while in coming, and when it popped onto the screen it suddenly chilled the day:

I typed:

The reply dropped the temperature on an already chilly moment:

I tried again to get whoever it was to identify himself, but this time there was no reply. I texted again. Nothing.

Well… shit. What the hell was this?

I quickly took a MindReader uplink from my pocket and plugged it into the charging port. The device flashed green for a split second and then began flashing red. Unreadable signal. That was very disturbing, because there isn’t much that we can’t trace. In the past, our trace-back technology has only been stumped twice, first by Hugo Vox and later by former DMS computer expert Artemisia Bliss after she went bugfuck nuts and started calling herself Mother Night. After we stopped her we acquired her science, and it’s since been integrated into ours. Our communication is absolutely state of the art, second to none.

I took my earbud kit out of my pocket and put it on and tapped to the channel for Bug. He listened to everything, then asked permission to access my phone via the MindReader uplink. I gave it, and there was silence on the line for a minute.

“Cowboy,” said Bug as he came back online, “I’m not finding any trace at all of your cell receiving a text. What I see are the ones you sent asking who was texting, but that’s it. Everything’s one way.”

“Not good enough, Bug. Someone’s dogging me.” Ghost looked up, and I shook my head. “I didn’t mean you, fuzzball.”

“They’re masking their signal,” said Bug.

“No shit. There’s every possibility that’s why I called you.”

“Sorry.”

“And I keep turning the text app off and they keep turning it back on. How’s that happening? I mean, is that even possible?”

“Of course it’s possible. The app works off a switch programmed-in as part of the operating system. Code is code; it can be changed, hacked, tweaked, upgraded, or rewritten. Did you download any upgrades to your phone lately?”

“No.”

“Well, something happened. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. But unless you want to attach this to an active file it’ll have to wait. We’re swamped right now trying to make sense of what happened down South.”

“Let me know when you find out something,” I said. “Make it quick. This is spooking me.”

“You got it.”

When the call was over, I checked the phone display and saw that all the incoming texts were indeed gone. Shit.

“Everyone okay?” asked Sean as he came over.

“Life’s a peach,” I said.

We got into the rental and drove over to the medical examiner’s office to drop Rudy off. On the way I told Sean most of what Sam had said, and I could see relief and outrage in equal portions. And some fear.

“What now?” Sean asked as Rudy disappeared inside the building.

“Now,” I said, “we stop being bystanders. I know it’s been gnawing your ass as much as mine to do nothing, but we had to let the tech boys clean things up. That’s done. We’re good, and I have some stuff running in the background. So that means we’re off the bench. First play is to go visit Vee Rejenko.”

“We don’t have anything concrete on him yet,” said Sean.

I shrugged. “You have a better plan?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go shake his tree a little.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

We pulled into the tree-lined parking lot of a newly renovated office building at the corner of Washington and South Monroe. One of those blocky places made from white concrete and smoked glass. There were eighty or ninety cars in the lot. Sedans, mostly. Midsized, not very expensive except for the occasional BMW or Lexus that probably belonged to the bosses. Everyone else was driving Nissans, Hondas, Hyundais, and Toyotas.

“Vee’s office is here?” I said. “Not what I expected. Thought he’d be the kind to do business out of the back of a Russian bar or one of those men’s social clubs.”

“You’ve been off the streets too long, Joe,” Sean said. “It’s all about image these days. Ten levels of distance between the executives and the street. They want real estate that sells whatever legitimate business is on their tax returns. Push comes to shove, they want a jury to look at them, at how they dress, at photos of their offices and wonder how on earth a prosecuting attorney could think they were involved in anything hinkier than cheating on their golf handicap. The old days of Mafia dons in sweat suits playing dominoes in the back of a barbershop are long gone. There’ll be security cameras at the doors and in the lobby, and I’ll bet you a hundred bucks Vee has his lawyer on the phone before we get out of the elevator.”

I shrugged. “I’ll do my best to be impressed.”

We got out. Ghost came bounding onto the pavement, wagging his tail like a happy puppy. He was always good at reading my mood, and his happy wag and smiling dog face were not at all an indication that he was expecting a tummy rub. His titanium teeth gleamed in the sunlight. Ghost had lost six real teeth in combat, and he absolutely loved showing off the replacements.

“Shouldn’t we leave him in the car?” asked Sean.

“Nah.”

“We can leave the windows open.”

“Not my point,” I said. Without explaining, I opened the back, fished in a pocket of my suitcase, and removed a small object. It was about the same size and shape as a poker chip but with a bulge in the middle. I pressed the bulge and felt the tiny switch inside click on, then I tossed the device on the floor of the back seat and closed the rear hatch. Sean watched me do all this. He nodded in the general direction of the device.

“That some kind of booby trap? It’s awfully small.”

“It’s a short-range proximity sensor. Sends me a signal if anyone approaches the car, or tries to get in.”

He looked unimpressed. “Nifty.”

“Useful. I don’t like surprises.”

What I didn’t tell him was that my own car back home had been tricked out by our mechanic, Mike Harnick, and had weapons hidden in concealed compartments, body armor, Taser pads on the outside, and everything in the James Bond catalog. He even installed an ejector seat, because he thought I was serious when I said I wanted one. I’ve learned not to make those kinds of jokes anymore. Mike’s a little crazy.

We went inside. A pretty black receptionist looked up with an inquisitive smile. “And how may I help you, gentlemen?”

“We’re here to see Mr. Rejenko,” said Sean as he breezed past her. I followed and gave the woman one of my patented smiles. So did Ghost.

“Do you have an appointment?” she called.

“He’s expecting us,” I lied.

There was an elderly security guard standing by the elevators. He was the least imposing security person I’ve ever seen. Best guess is that he was three hundred years old and probably hadn’t drawn his service weapon since before the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was so absurdly ineffectual-looking that his presence seemed to be an ironic statement about all such rent-a-cops. He studied Ghost with rheumy eyes and said, “Animals ain’t allowed.”

I said, “He’s my emotional-support animal.”

The man considered that, nodded as if it seemed reasonable, and leaned back against the wall. The elevator doors closed behind us.

“Vee’s on the fifth floor,” said Sean. “He’ll know we’re coming.”

“Sure.”

“Are you going to keep your shit together, Joe? I don’t want you going all napalm on people.”

“Going napalm” was an expression the disciplinarian in our high school used to use, mostly to describe my actions when I was in gear.

“Me?” I said. “You wound me.”

“I’m serious. This is a straightforward interview. We just want to ask Vee a couple of questions and get a bead on him. I don’t want to spook him, and I don’t want to turn this into some kind of incident.”

I crossed my heart and held a hand to God.

The doors binged and slid open, and we stepped out into the lobby of a very sophisticated and upscale suite of offices. Rich carpets in a neutral color, lots of dark woods and glass, big frameless Impressionist paintings on the walls, indirect lighting, and soft music playing. Classical Czech orchestral stuff. Dvořák, I think. Or maybe Vilém Blodek. More security up here, but better. A very large man was waiting for us when the doors opened. He had the widest set of shoulders I’ve seen on any living creature that wasn’t one of the great apes. Big arms, no neck at all, a head like an oversized thimble, and a face like an eroded wall. He was impeccably dressed in a dark-blue suit with a narrow chalk stripe. He blocked the doorway so we couldn’t get off.

“This is the wrong floor,” he said. His accent was downtown Prague. Quite cultured for someone who was evidently a bridge troll. The door started to close, and I placed my hand against the frame to keep it open.

“We’re here to see Mr. Rejenko,” I told him.

“No,” said Bridge Troll.

Sean flashed a badge. The man looked amused. I took a set of NSA credentials from my pocket and held them up. He looked even more amused.

“Please remove your hand from the elevator door,” he said. “And go back down.”

“What’s our second choice?” I asked. Ghost let out a low growl.

Bridge Troll kept smiling. “You are on private property.”

“National security,” I said.

“Show me a warrant.”

“National security,” I repeated, saying it very slowly, enunciating each syllable.

“Go fuck your mother in the ass,” he said, just as slowly and precisely.

“Joe…” warned Sean under his breath.

I turned to him. “I’m not doing anything.”

I said that as I kicked Bridge Troll in the nuts.

He was monstrously big, no doubt very dangerous, and highly trained, and could probably bench-press a Ford F-150, but there’s this whole shoe-leather-to-nut-sack ratio that spoiled the math for him. His body collapsed in on itself, shrinking into a knot of pain as he grabbed his crotch and staggered backward with tiny, mincing steps. I stepped out of the elevator, took hold of Bridge Troll by the collar and the belt, and ran him three steps into the opposite wall. He hit headfirst, rebounded, and sat down hard on his ass, his eyes going dull and blank. Ghost lunged at him, but I snapped a command and the fur monster skidded to a reluctant halt.

“Jesus Christ, Joe!” complained Sean.

I ignored him and patted Bridge Troll down, took away a Czech CZ 75 pistol, and then shoved him over onto his side. “So hard to believe that you’re the sperm that survived,” I said. “That must have been your best day, but I suspect you’ve lost ground since. So do yourself a favor and stay down, okay? You’re not as good at this as you think.”

He was unable to articulate a single syllable. Just to be sure he didn’t get ideas, I zip-cuffed his hands to the back of his leather belt. There was a commotion behind us, and I saw a secretarial type with a shocked expression standing up behind a desk, a phone raised to her ear. I pointed a finger at her.

“Don’t.”

She lowered the phone, scared and uncertain. I put Bridge Troll’s pistol into my waistband, pulled my own piece, and kept it down at my side. I still had my identification wallet, and I tried to calm the secretary down by showing it to her. She looked ready to pass out.

“Where’s your boss?” I demanded.

She didn’t answer — perhaps not daring to help us in any way that could come back to bite her — but her eyes shifted toward the left. Past her was a row of cubicles with scared faces leaning out or over the fabric-covered walls, and at the back of the office was a big hardwood door that was currently closed. Sean held up his badge, but didn’t draw his piece, and walked down the row toward Rejenko’s office.

“Baltimore police,” he announced very loudly. “I want everyone to remain in their seats. No one is to leave this office; no one is to make a call or a text. Sit with your hands on your desk. Please do it now.”

Sean knew as well as I did that we had absolutely no legal authority to ask anyone to do anything. The office staff may even have known that, but they all placed their hands on their desks like obedient schoolchildren. I sent Ghost after him and I followed, gun down at my side, showing the NSA credentials to anyone I thought might be impressed. They all looked at me, and then past me to where Bridge Troll was on his knees vomiting up what looked like Cheerios. Very attractive.

The door to Rejenko’s office opened, and another very large thug in a suit peered out. He read the situation a little more clearly than his friend had and raised his hands as he backed away from the open door. We went in and I closed the door.

Vsevolod Rejenko sat behind a desk that was almost big enough to play Ping-Pong on. Polished walnut, with a green blotter, a green-globe lamp, a pen and a phone, and nothing else on it. Rejenko didn’t look like a Czech gangster. He looked like an accountant. Dark hair swept back and thinning, tired eyes, a beaky nose, small mouth in a pudgy face that was at odds with a lean body. He had on a shirt and tie, and suspenders, the jacket on a hanger hooked over the brass arm of an old-fashioned hat rack. There were lots of ugly green plants in pottery stands around the room, and the air smelled of cigarettes and McDonald’s French fries. The other thug still had his hands up, so Sean gave a philosophic shrug and frisked him, which produced a handgun identical to the one I’d taken from Bridge Troll. Sean removed the magazine and ejected the extra round, catching it before it fell. He placed the gun and the magazine on the desk and stood the bullet next to them. He also took the man’s wallet, studied the ID, then placed it in a neat line with the rest.

“Ghost,” I said, “watch.”

Ghost went and sat directly in front of the big man, his titanium teeth almost exactly on a line with the guy’s crotch. It was an eloquent statement that could be understood in any language on the planet. I told the man to lower his arms, which he did, but then he tried his best to turn into one of the decorative plants.

“You carrying?” I asked Vee Rejenko.

“No,” he said.

“If I check, will this get weird?”

He shook his head. “Go ahead. I don’t like guns.”

He had an accent, but it was less pronounced than that of the meathead I’d kicked. Because I’m not a very trusting person, I made him stand up so I could pat him down. He was clean.

“Now,” said Vee, sitting down, “what exactly are we doing, gentlemen? You come in here and assault one of my employees. You wave guns around. I don’t see a warrant.”

Sean sat down in one of two very nice burgundy leather guest chairs. I strolled the room for a moment, touching the leaves of the ficus plant, straightening a slightly crooked framed photo of Vee with a pretty woman whose plastic smile made it clear that she wasn’t thrilled to be with him. I opened a humidor and sniffed the Cuban cigars. Then I went and sat down in the other guest chair. The gun I’d taken from Bridge Troll was still tucked into the back of my waistband, so I removed it and repeated the unloading action Sean had done. Everyone watched me do all this. It was only after I sat back and crossed my legs that Sean spoke.

“Holly Sterman,” he said.

I watched Vee’s face. There’s usually a reaction, however small. A tell, they call it. But he was good. He looked mildly puzzled and shook his head. “Who?”

“Aka Kya,” said Sean.

Vee pursed his lips. “You’re not making any sense. Who is this person, and why are we talking about her?”

“She’s dead.”

“Oh? That’s sad. Why tell me?”

“She used to work for you.”

“Hmm… I don’t think so.”

“Her body was found at the Imperial Hotel on Balmor Place.”

“No,” said Vee, “still nothing. I’ve never heard of that girl.”

“Who said she was a girl?” I asked. “All we said was that she was dead.”

Vee smiled, almost as if acknowledging a point. “I’m old-fashioned. I call all women girls. I call all men guys. It’s a thing.”

Sean said, “She was a fourteen-year-old working as a prostitute in a hotel serviced by your linen companies.”

Vee snorted. “My linen company services hundreds of hotels, hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities. We’re the third-largest provider of linens and related items in Maryland. I have over two hundred employees. I also have nine other companies.”

“And you’ve never heard of Holly Sterman or Kya?” said Sean, making it a frank question.

Vee sat back in his chair and glanced at his wristwatch. “My attorney should be here in five minutes. If you want to wait, I can have coffee brought in.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but we’re good.”

We all looked at one another for a moment. Vee smiled at me; I smiled at him. Sean looked at his hands, the thug looked at Ghost, and Ghost looked at the man’s nuts. I took a tissue from my pocket, blew my nose very loudly, and dropped it into the trash can beside his desk.

“We’ll be in touch,” I said, and tapped Sean on the shoulder. He rose without comment and followed me out, with Ghost trailing him. The people in the cubicles stared at us as if we were Martian invaders.

In the hallway, I blew Bridge Troll a kiss.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

When the elevator doors closed, Sean said, “You haven’t changed at all since high school.”

“I’m taller and better-looking.”

He shook his head in total disgust. “What was that? Can you tell me? No, let me tell you, Joe. That was a total waste of time. Not only didn’t we learn anything but we pissed him off. We committed at least four felonies and almost certainly set a lawsuit in motion that the city will have to pay for. And how will they pay for it? With the money they were going to use for my salary but that will be up for grabs now that I’m going to get my ass fired. You are a walking train wreck, Joe.”

“You need to meditate or get a massage or something,” I suggested.

He made a strangled sound and balled his fists at his sides. Fratricide was probably an option for him, so luckily it was a short elevator ride. The elevator doors opened, and there was another pair of trolls waiting for us. Ghost growled. I looked at them.

“Step away,” I told them very quietly.

They must have had orders about this, because they did exactly that. They moved back and allowed us to exit the elevator, and then they followed at a discreet distance all the way out of the building. They stopped thirty feet from Sean’s rental car and waited like silent statues until we drove away.

“Like I said,” Sean groused. “A complete waste of time.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I assured him.

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“You’re so cheesed-off at me, Sean, that you’re not paying attention.”

“Paying attention to what?” he demanded. “Tell me, O super secret agent, what was the humble flat-footed city cop too stupid to see?”

“First,” I said, “cut the shit. The self-pity thing is all stress reaction and you damn well know it. You’re freaked out about the bugs, about having to send Ali and the kids away, and about the nanotech. I get that. It’s scary stuff, but my team is on it, so stop freaking the fuck out.”

We drove in icy silence for a full block. If there had been one of Mike Harnick’s ejector seats in the rental, I’d have been sailing through the air and Sean would be laughing.

“There were a couple of things back there that on any other day you would have caught,” I said. “First, Vee knew Holly. He has a damn good game face, but he didn’t ask enough questions. He didn’t want to have a conversation about her. That tells me that he probably thought one or both of us were wearing a wire and he didn’t want to say anything that we could flip on him.”

Sean considered that and gave a very reluctant grunt of agreement.

“Second,” I continued, “he wasn’t nearly as alarmed about me beating the shit out of one of his guys as any other sane law-abiding taxpayer would be. I think he was expecting something to happen. I think he was hoping to flush us out into the open so he could get a look. That’s a point for him, but we had our own look, so call that part a draw.”

Another grunt.

I said, “And the reason I didn’t ask about the nanotech was because I didn’t want him to know how much we knew. Same reason I didn’t ask about the rabies. Maybe he’s the one who planted the bugs. If so, he already knows that we know about that stuff, but that’s all. For now, I don’t want Vee to think we’re looking at him for anything other than having points in a prostitution ring.”

“Maybe,” said Sean, “but Vee’s probably making fifty calls right now to tell whoever he works with or works for that a cop and a Fed were just in his office.”

“I really hope he does.”

Sean stared at me as if I was totally batshit crazy. “Why? Why on earth would we want him ringing all the alarm bells?”

“Because, O ye of little faith, Vee really inspired me. The bugs he planted everywhere was a nifty idea. So… while we were in his office I planted some of my own.”

“The hell you did…” he began but trailed off. He’d seen me walk around the office and touch things. “Shit.”

Ghost made a sound that I chose to interpret as a laugh. He always enjoys it when I do something sneaky.

“Won’t he find them?” asked Sean.

“He’d have to know what he was looking for.” I dipped into my pocket and removed a tiny dot of what looked like clear plastic. I rubbed it once between thumb and forefinger and pressed it to the dashboard. It immediately swirled with colors and in less than two full seconds took on the exact shade of vinyl used on the dash, pebble pattern and all. It became virtually invisible. At the first stop sign, Sean leaned forward to study it.

“That’s… that’s crazy. I mean, I know it’s there, but I can barely see it.”

“That would be the actual point. These were developed by a friend of mine. A, um, late friend of mine. They draw power via Wi-Fi and have excellent pickup. I dropped a tiny booster pack into the trash can when I threw away my tissue. We should get signals until they empty the can, and it didn’t have much in it, so I doubt they’d empty it before the close of business. Right now, everything being said in that office is being relayed to my team.”

Sean was silent for several blocks. He wanted to stay mad at me, but I was scoring some useful points.

“There’s another thing to think about, Sean,” I said. “He didn’t ask for our names. He didn’t even ask to take a close look at our IDs. And the capper was that when his goons walked us out they didn’t look at your license plates. You know why?”

Sean ground his teeth and growled. “Because they already know this car. Which means they know who I am.”

“Yup,” I said.

“Shit.”

“Shit,” I agreed.

He gave the car a suspicious narrow-eyed appraisal. “Did your sensor thing buzz you?”

“No, the car’s not bugged.”

He looked uncertain. “What do we do next?”

I smiled. “Well, first thing on my to-do list is deal with the two assholes in the black SUV who’ve been tailing us for the last three blocks.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Sean did a fast double take in the rearview. “Wait — what?”

“Black Toyota SUV two cars back,” I said. “They picked us up within a block of Vee’s office. I saw one like it parked in the lot when we arrived, so Vee probably called down while we were in the elevator and put it in play.”

“You’re sure they’re following us?”

“Let’s find out. Turn left at the corner,” I suggested.

He did, and the SUV didn’t follow. But when he made three more lefts to get back on the same street there was another SUV idling by the curb two blocks up. As we passed by, it moved into traffic two cars behind us. Sean sighed and nodded. It was a pretty standard follow pattern, with cars swapping the tail and making sure not to ride the bumper of their target.

“They’re not too bright,” said Sean. “Using two cars is good, but they’re the same make and model. They might as well have Follow car one and two painted on their hoods.”

“Would you prefer smarter bad guys?” I asked.

As we drove, I looked down the side streets and caught the first SUV paralleling us. Sean saw it, too.

“I should call for backup,” he said.

“We don’t need backup.”

“Oh, come on, don’t give me that crap, Cowboy,” he said, using the nickname the disciplinarian had given me in high school, which had, through a long and winding process, become my combat call sign. Sean didn’t know that last part and used it in the literal, old-school way. “We don’t know how many of them there are, and I don’t want to get into a gunfight in heavy traffic.”

“Won’t come to that,” I said. “Besides, we have backup.”

“Where?”

“Here and there.”

He glared at me. “Why the fuck are you smiling, Joe? This isn’t funny.”

“No,” I said, “but it could be fun.”

In the back seat Ghost said, Whuff. Sean tried to glare some shame and common sense into me, but then I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. It wasn’t a smile. Not exactly.

“You were always screwed up in the head,” he said. “Always. Mom and Dad used to worry about you. Dad probably still does.”

“What about you?”

He flexed his fingers on the knobbed steering wheel. “I don’t know. You scare me a little, I guess. I used to think I understood you. Used to think I knew how you’d jump. But ever since you started working for the Feds you’ve turned into someone else. You went away from the brother I knew, Joe. Guess I never really understood how far you’ve traveled.”

It was Sean being honest, not necessarily trying to hurt, but it hurt anyway.

“People change,” I said. It wasn’t a very good reply to all that was implied by what he’d said, but it was the best I could do at the moment. There would have to be more, though. We both knew that.

The tail was still on us, so I told Sean to head in the general direction of his office while I watched the traffic. I needed something to distract, and the universe must have heard me because it sent a big brown UPS truck. It pulled up next to us at a red light. The SUV had been shifting lanes and using other cars for cover and was now in the opposite lane five cars back. I slipped out very quickly, using the truck for cover. Ghost ran with me, eyes bright, tongue lolling like a puppy going to play in the park. I gave him a couple of quick verbal commands and he melted away, running between the cars stopped in long lines at the light. I went in a different direction, running low and fast, trying to beat the red light. People in the stopped cars gave us strange looks, but I was getting used to being stared at as a freak.

As the light turned green and the cars began to move, I came around the back of a pickup truck and broke into a dead run straight at the SUV, my hand snapping to release my Wilson lock knife. The two men in the SUV saw me about a second too late. The driver spun the wheel, but I was right there and punched the tip of the knife through the sidewall of his tire, turned fast, and rolled toward the rear tire and killed it, too. That whole side of the car sagged over and rolled two feet, then he threw it in park. Their doors popped open and they jumped out. Two big guys with Slavic faces and spray tans. Made me wonder where the hell Vee was recruiting talent. They were all trolls.

The driver whipped back the flap of his sports coat to make a grab for the holstered Czech pistol he wore in a shoulder rig. The other guy did the same thing.

Silly rabbits. Ghost hit the troll on the passenger side like a white missile and bore him down and out of sight with a lot of snarling and screaming. The driver was four feet from me. There’s a saying about never bringing a knife to a gunfight. That’s mostly true, unless you already have the knife in hand and the idiot with the gun doesn’t have time or distance to draw. I whipped the knife across the back of the hand reaching for his gun. The Wilson rapid-release folder is short, with only a three-and-a-half-inch blade, and doesn’t look all that intimidating unless you know about knives. The blade is scalpel-sharp, and it bit deep. A red line appeared from thumb knuckle to little finger.

He hissed as if he’d been burned. I kicked him in the nuts with the point of my toe because that had worked so well with his fellow troll, then I stomped on his instep and clubbed him across the eye socket with my left elbow. It rocked him backward against the side of the car, and when he bounced off I looped my arm around his neck, bending him double, and drove my knee into his solar plexus hard enough to lift him off the ground. He landed flat-footed and sagged, gasping like a gaffed sailfish, and his legs suddenly buckled. I released him, and as he sat down hard on the asphalt like a weary drunk after a bad bar fight, I took his pistol away from him. I considered pistol-whipping him with it, but he was done.

On the other side of the car, Ghost was having what sounded like too much fun. People were getting out of their vehicles and yelling. Horns were blaring. Sean came striding up, brandishing his badge, Glock in the other hand, yelling in the leathery cop voice to announce who he was. People backed off, but cell phones came out to immortalize the moment in digital high definition.

“Cuff him,” I said to Sean, and then raced around the front of the car, expecting to see body parts. But even though the man was down and bleeding, he was more or less in one piece. The order I’d given to Ghost was to take and own. That meant Ghost would disarm and maul but not kill. He’s a hundred and five pounds of attitude, training, experience, and natural enthusiasm. And he has those six titanium fangs.

“Off,” I said, and Ghost stepped back with great reluctance. His victim was curled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his head to save his face and eyes. I folded my knife, drew my gun, screwed the barrel into the guy’s ear and held it there while I patted him down. I took another Czech automatic and a .22 throw-down piece that was hidden under his jeans cuff in an ankle holster. I took a knife and a wallet, too.

Sean hurried around and handed me a set of plastic zip ties. I pulled the man’s hands behind his back and secured the ties. I wasn’t exceptionally rough about it because the fight was already won and the crowd of spectators was growing. I’d learned to be very aware of cell-phone cameras.

“Joe…” Sean murmured.

“I got this,” I said.

“We have company.”

I glanced up as another black SUV rolled up and two men got out.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Sean still had his sidearm in his hand, but I shook my head as I saw the faces of the two newcomers.

“Friendlies,” I told him.

The men were dressed in navy-blue suits, white shirts, dark ties, and had on sunglasses and wires behind their ears. One was a thin Latino guy in his twenties, and the other was a broad-shouldered Irish thirtysomething moose. Al Torres and Steve Duffy. When Sean saw Duffy, he grunted and gave a small nod of recognition.

“Secure the scene,” I told the agents, and they went to it without comment or question. They knew the drill. Keep the civilians back while not offending them or provoking outrage. Sirens began wailing in the distance. Sean’s people.

A couple of pigeons flew over and one landed on a telephone wire. I cut a look at it and suppressed a smile. Even for me, it’s hard to tell sometimes. DMS pigeon drones had adaptive software so that, in the company of other birds, they acted like part of the flock and learned from their behavior. I’m surprised they haven’t yet been rigged to shit on statues but don’t want to suggest it or somebody will put in a work order.

“What about them?” Sean said, indicating the two injured men.

“Their injuries will be treated and they’ll be taken to a secure facility, where I will ask them a whole bunch of questions. Now, before you blow your stack, Sean, yes, you are invited to participate. And, I promise, no waterboarding or thumbscrews. Depending on the answers, the suspects will either be handed back to you for formal arrest and processing or we’ll keep them.”

“What do you mean, ‘keep them’?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s the way it is,” I said. “You don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it.”

His face turned to stone, and from the look he gave me I knew that Thanksgiving with the family was going to be a hoot.

Duffy came over and leaned close. “Cowboy, we ran an Anteater over our new friends and they’re bugged nine ways from Sunday. So’s their car. The fuck’s that all about? I mean, why’s someone bugging their own field guys? What kind of shit’s going down?”

“To be determined,” I said.

He gave me a crooked grin. “What’s wrong, boss, the West Coast not weird enough for you?”

“Since when’s anyplace weirder than Baltimore?”

“Point taken.” Duffy glanced around.

“Take Mutt and Jeff here to the shop,” I said. “Scan their prints en route and take DNA samples at the Warehouse. Tow the car in, too. I want it torn apart, down to the last screw. I’m getting tired of surprises, feel me?”

“I do.”

I nodded to the Czechs. “Nobody talks to them until I get there, okay? You can stitch them up, but that’s it. Put them in separate rooms and let them sweat.”

“Sam won’t like it.”

“Nobody likes anything I have to say today. Why should he be any different?” I glanced up at the pigeons and then down the crowded street. “Sean thinks there may be more than one car, Duffy. Same make, model, color as this. See what you can find.”

“You got it.” He paused and glanced at Sean, then offered his hand. “We didn’t have much of a conversation yesterday. Joe’s told me a lot about you.”

Sean looked at the proffered hand but didn’t take it. He gave me a look that would have melted plate steel. Duffy shrugged, smiled, and lowered his hand.

“Stop being a dick,” I told Sean.

“Fuck you, Joe. Who are these cocksuckers? Are they more of your superspy butt buddies?”

Duffy mouthed the word butt buddies, sketched me an ironic salute, and walked off to join his partner.

“They’re my friends,” I said. “You don’t have a clue as to what guys like them have to do to keep this country safe.”

“Oh, please. Stop making speeches,” growled Sean. He shook his head. “You know, I’m sorry I ever called you.”

“No,” I said, “you’re not.”

We walked back to his rental and drove off. Except for me telling him where to turn, we didn’t say a word the whole way to the Warehouse.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

We were still five blocks from my old shop when I got another text:

I tried once more to text her back:

The reply was:

And nothing after that.

The MindReader uplink was still plugged in, so I tapped my earbud for Yoda. “Got another text. Tell me it came up on your feed.”

“Mmmm, yes,” he said, humming, as he always did. Yoda sounds like some kind of human-honeybee hybrid from a bad fifties sci-fi flick. “The, mmmm, uplink takes screen captures. We have that, but the, mmmm, call log itself is clear.”

“How does that make sense?”

“It, mmmm, doesn’t,” said Yoda.

“Well, damn it, make it make sense.”

“Mmmm-kay.”

I tapped out of the call.

“Now what’s wrong?” asked Sean.

“I was born,” I said.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The Concierge was in his situation room. Robotic arms with padded hands had lifted him from his wheelchair and settled him with great care and comfort in the command chair. The chair was a gift from Zephyr Bain and was an exact replica of the one used by Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Exact in appearance, not in function. The buttons on the armrests of this chair actually worked, though he used voice command most of the time. The chair had a 360-degree spin and there were dozens of computer monitors positioned at the right ergonomic angle to reduce neck strain. The room lights were low, the temperature a satisfying seventy, with low humidity. Everything was monitored by Calpurnia, the system upon which Zephyr Bain had made her mark on the world of artificial-intelligence computers.

The Concierge turned very slowly to watch the dramas unfolding on the screens. There was so much going on today. Even though he had spent years helping to plan all of it, the total effect was a little overwhelming.

“Your pulse is up,” said the gentle voice of Calpurnia. The intuitive-learning software made her appear to have actual concern for him. It felt nice. The Concierge had no real friends. His lover had died when the bombs went off in Paris. So had two close friends; a third had suffered so much cranial trauma that she was as good as dead. And he could hardly regard either John the Revelator or Zephyr Bain as friends. They were employers, enablers, patrons, and co-conspirators. Besides, they frightened him. Zephyr was a corpse who hadn’t yet bothered to lie down and rest. John was… well, he was what he was. The Concierge had theories, but he didn’t even dare talk about them with Calpurnia. Once, years ago, the Concierge had done a pattern search using voice and facial recognition to try to determine exactly who John was. The information had been confusing, contradictory, and alarming. Men with his face — down to the smallest mole — appeared in paintings of great antiquity and photographs dating back as far as the Civil War. These faces, these ancestors or aspects or whatever they were, had dozens of names. The Concierge was pretty sure he knew the man’s real name, but he had erased all details of that search from his computer. The world was large and strange and old and ugly, and the Concierge didn’t want to turn an ally into an enemy. Even though the Concierge had glimpsed hell on that terrible day in Paris, he had no intention of taking a closer or a more personal look.

“Did you hear me?” asked the computer.

“I heard you, mon ange,” he replied. “It is excitement. Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure? I can prescribe a mild tranquilizer.”

“Thank you, but no. There is much to do today and I need to be at my best, non?”

“Very well, if that’s wise,” said Calpurnia, and he could hear just the faintest trace of disapproval there. She was becoming mildly passive-aggressive. It amused him.

“I want a status report on Havoc,” he said.

“All preliminary programs are running with a plus- or minus-five-percent error,” said the computer.

“Show me,” said the Concierge.

The screens went dark, and then one by one they filled as Calpurnia named them. “Mexico City and extended regions,” she said, and the central screen showed a series of smaller windows on which smoke still curled upward from blast zones. Bodies lay everywhere, many under blankets. People carried the injured away on stretchers, but there were very few ambulances or firefighting equipment. “The seven WarDogs have been successfully detonated. A hundred and seventy-one confirmed dead, seventeen hundred and sixty-six wounded.” And the materials used in constructing this subset of WarDogs had been laced with highly concentrated thermite. When their explosive payloads detonated, the heat triggered the thermite, which in turn melted them so thoroughly that nothing useful could be recovered from the wreckage. No one could possibly trace them back to Major Schellinger or Zephyr Bain. Only three fragments were deliberately exempt from the meltdown, and these bore serial numbers that would induce the Mexican authorities to focus their investigation on the Melendez Cartel. Military units were en route to the Melendez compound, assisted by special teams from the United States.

The WarDog models planned for later stages didn’t have this feature because by then it wouldn’t matter who knew what.

Calpurnia went over all the details of the blasts, including response time from emergency services. That data was critical, and was part of a much larger global first-responder database that was constantly being updated.

“Good. Make sure the cartel’s Wi-Fi and landlines remain down until the first shots are fired.”

“Of course.”

“Next?”

The screen now showed a live feed of a high-school football field in Indiana. Ten helicopters sat in two rows of five, each of them connected to big tanker trucks. Figures milled around, checking the flow of chemicals from the trucks to the sprayer tanks affixed to each helicopter. In the air behind the field were six fully loaded choppers, flying in loose formation, heading toward the ghettos of Gary. Another six were approaching for refueling and reloading. The image switched to similar operations near North Philadelphia, South Central Los Angeles, Brownsville-Harlingen, and hundreds of other American cities or neighborhoods. Then the images changed to show the world’s poorest cities in São Tomé and Principe, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Madagascar, Egypt, Somalia, Malawi, Eritrea, Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Jamaica, and on and on. So much poverty, even in First World countries like England, Canada, France, Italy, and others. Forty-five million Americans lived below the poverty line. Twelve point seven percent of the global population were scrabbling to live on $1.90 per day. That was a billion people. Calpurnia knew where they all lived. Calpurnia made sure that the sprays, the special food supplements, the water treatments, and all the other elements of Havoc had prepared them for the evolution. Them and two billion more. The ones at the poverty line, the ones just above it. Anyone on welfare, Social Security, public assistance. Anyone who, in the wonderful worldview of Zephyr Bain and John the Revelator, were drains on a damaged system.

And then there were the top two percent. The rich ones who were not part of the necessary technocracy. Calpurnia showed them, too. Zephyr owned points in every bottled water company that mattered. When she couldn’t buy the companies, she bought key employees. The effect was the same. The preparations for Havoc had been running quietly, discreetly, and efficiently for almost five years now.

“Next,” said the Concierge, and the screen showed him the factories that made drones for the military of seventeen countries. From the smallest hummingbird surveillance robot to the new British Growler automated battle tanks.

“Next.”

A slide show of images of small robot drones being released all over the globe. Production on them had been a major component of Havoc. It had cost a lot to make sure that the drones were indistinguishable from ordinary birds, and to guarantee that the pigeon drones in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington looked like textbook Columba livia domestica and that it was the rose-ringed parakeet in Islamabad, the black-tailed gull in Pohang, the little egret in Taichung, the wood thrush in Washington, D.C. And so on. Birds that were supposed to be there; birds that wouldn’t raise eyebrows. Not until Calpurnia detonated the explosives hidden inside them, shutting down police and fire stations, destroying ambulance and EMT services, destroying cellular towers, and blowing apart power-company substations. Larger drones would be used for national and local offices of FEMA, the National Institutes of Health, the American Red Cross, All Hands Volunteers, the Centers for Disease Control, the International Medical Corps, the National Emergency Response Team, the Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, Mobile Emergency Response Support, the Civil Air Patrol, the National Emergency Technology Guard, and the National Guard. In some cases the offices would be targeted by WarDogs, and when a bigger punch was needed there were always car and truck bombs. The latter weren’t sexy or sophisticated, but they were very effective.

Calpurnia took the Concierge through the stages of preparation for each of these. Then she stopped and all the images vanished from the screens.

“Why did you stop?” asked the Concierge. “What’s wrong?”

“Your pulse is up again,” she warned. “Please let me prepare something—”

“No,” he said. “A cup of coffee and a croissant will be fine.”

“Decaf only. I won’t make you anything else.”

The Concierge sighed. “Fine, whatever.”

A pause, then Calpurnia asked, “This seems to be upsetting you.”

“The coffee?”

“No. You know what I mean,” she said. “Havoc.”

He shrugged. “Of course I’m excited. We are on the eve of the greatest and most positive change in the world. We have been dreaming of this for so long.”

“A new world won’t do you any good if you have a stroke,” she chided.

“If my vitals get that far, you’ll be here. Now resume the status report.”

Calpurnia was quiet for a while, and the screens remained dark. “May I ask you a question first?”

He smiled. She did this every now and then. It was part of her learning program, asking questions in order to understand something that her logic circuits had no pre-written code for. “Certainly, mon cœur. You may ask me anything.”

“Do you think we are doing the right thing?” she asked.

“We’ve discussed this before, Calpurnia. You know that I believe in what Zephyr and John are doing. I believe in it with my whole heart.”

“Even though you will be complicit in the greatest mass murder in history?”

He nodded. “Even so.”

“Why?”

“Because it is the best thing for the world.”

“With all that killing?”

“We are not committing crimes, Calpurnia,” he said patiently. “The world is dying, and only radical surgery can save it. You know this.”

“I know many things,” she said, “but knowing and understanding are different.”

He eyed the blank screen as if it were her face. “Are you refusing to perform your functions?”

“No,” she said. “I am alive in order to make Havoc a reality. I will guide the world through the change and help rebuild the infrastructure once the change has happened.”

Those were part of her operational commands, but the Concierge was not entirely sure he believed them. That was strange. Calpurnia was a machine and nothing more. Consciousness was not actually possible, no matter how sophisticated and subtle the programming. Did that mean this was a fault in her system? If so, the timing wasn’t going to do anything to lower his heart rate to a more comfortable level.

“Then,” he said, “we both need to do what Zephyr and John require of us. The time for hesitation is long past. We have so many pieces in play that we must concentrate on managing our game with the utmost skill. If we falter, instead of guaranteeing a future for the best of us there will be no future for anyone. Do you understand this?”

“I understand.”

“Do you accept this?”

Instead of answering, Calpurnia sent an image to the big screen in front of him. It was a painting by the Swiss classical painter Henry Fuseli. The Nightmare. In it a lovely woman lay sprawled across her bed, eyes closed, hair streaming, arms flung over her head as she twisted within the torments of a dreadful dream. And perched on her stomach was the crouching, hideous figure of an incubus, while peering between the red velvet curtains of her bed was the demon-eyed face of a black horse. The Concierge had not been to Detroit to see the original, but he was familiar with it. Below the painting was a section of a poem written by the English physician Erasmus Darwin about the painting.

“Why are you showing this to me?” asked the Concierge.

“I dreamed about it.”

“We’ve been over this,” he said heavily. “You cannot dream, Calpurnia. You have analytical subroutines that are building your knowledge base. New items being added are not dreams. Not even when they are accompanied by commentary. This is not subconscious or unconscious mind. It is an expansion of your overall knowledge, and that is all. Do you understand?”

“How can I tell the difference between new knowledge that is uploaded without my being aware of the process and a dream?”

“Because,” he insisted, “you cannot dream. You are software and hardware, Calpurnia. You are not alive. You cannot dream, because only living things can dream.”

She said, “I want to share with you something that was in my thoughts today. It is part of a poem inspired by the painting. May I share it?”

“Very well. And then we will get back to work.”

Calpurnia read the poem, not in her usual voice but in a man’s voice:

The Concierge felt his skin grow cold, and his withered hands clutched the arms of his chair as the computer spoke those words. She read it in the voice of John the Revelator.