Dogs of War

INTERLUDE EIGHT

At first, she thought he was an angel.

He appeared one night, standing beside her bed, tall and pale and beautiful. He had such a kind, sad face. There was cold moonlight coming in through the window and the sound of cicadas in the trees. It was a strange night because she had been sick for days and her fever was high. She lay there, slick with sweat, staring up at the pale face of the angel.

“Hello, Zephyr,” he said.

“Hello…?” she said, pitching it as a question. She was not at all sure this was real, because a moment ago she had been lost in a dream about being alone in the mansion and all the doors were locked. In the dream her house was abandoned and everyone had long since moved away or died. There were bones in some of the rooms, and when she looked closely she saw that they were the bones of the maids and the butler and the Mexican man who did the garden. The clothes were there, dusty and torn, draped over bones that looked as if they were a hundred years old. Zephyr had fled from them, but not in fear of them. They disgusted her the way a dead cat might, but not her own cat. The bones marked where people died whom she didn’t care about. Not even when she was six. So she had run away through cobwebby darkness, back to her own room, through her door, to her bed, and beneath the sweat-soaked sheets.

Which is where she was when the angel spoke.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The angel smiled. He had very red lips and very white teeth, and his eyes were as black and shiny as polished glass. “I came to see how you are.”

“Are you the doctor?”

“No.”

“Are you a friend of my daddy?”

“In a way. Your uncle asked me to come see you.”

“Uncle Hugo?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re not a doctor?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then who are you?” asked the little girl.

“I’m your friend, Zephyr.”

She thought about that. Zephyr knew that she wasn’t supposed to ever talk to strangers, but the angel didn’t seem like a stranger. Strange, yes, but not what her mom would call “sketchy.” Not like that.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“You can call me John.”

“John? Do you have a last name?”

“No,” he said. “I lost it somewhere, and now I can’t find it. Isn’t that silly?”

“It’s very silly.”

“Silly is good, though,” he said. “Sometimes, I mean. Isn’t silly good sometimes?”

“I guess.”

“I have other names, though,” he said. “Lots of other names.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Because I like to play tricks on people and it’s easier when they don’t know who’s playing the trick.”

“Is that fun?”

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “It’s so much fun.”

They smiled at each other. Then she coughed. It was a bad cough, and it lasted for a while.

“I have bumonia,” she gasped, breathless and spent.

“Pneumonia,” he corrected.

“I’m sick,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“I get sick a lot.”

“I know that, too.”

“Do you know why?”

“Yes,” John said. “I do.”

Zephyr stared at him. “You do?”

“I know many things.”

“They won’t tell me what’s wrong with me.”

“Of course they won’t,” he said. “Do you know why?”

“Because I’m little.”

“No,” he said, smiling. “They won’t tell you because they’re stupid.”

“What…?”

“They don’t understand you, little Zephyr. Not your daddy and mommy. Not the people who work for them. Not even the doctors. Your uncle does, though, and that’s why he asked me to come here. He knows that everyone else is stupid. They all think you’re too young to know the truth.” John sat on the edge of the bed, and his weight hardly made an impression in the mattress. He brushed a strand of damp hair from her face. “But I know that you’re not stupid. Oh, no, not at all. You understand so much more than they think.”

Zephyr said nothing for a moment, considering what he’d said. Then she asked, “Will you tell me the truth?”

“I will always tell you the truth, Zephyr,” he said.

“Always?”

“Always,” said John.

She thought about that. “Do you know what’s wrong with me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Will you tell me?”

“If you want me to.”

“Yes! No one ever tells me anything. I can tell they’re lying to me. I hate it. Even the servants lie to me. It’s not fair.”

“No,” he agreed, “it’s not.”

There was a rustling noise and Zephyr turned to see that a crow had landed on the windowsill. But hadn’t the screen been closed? The bird cocked its head and stared at her with one black eye. It was so much like the angel’s eye. Shiny and black and bottomless.

“What’s wrong with me?” asked Zephyr, still looking at the crow.

“You have cancer,” said John. “Do you know what that is?”

She shook her head, then shrugged. “It’s something bad. People die from it, right?”

“People die from it every minute of every day, all around the world,” he said.

“Does that mean I’m going to die?”

“Everyone thinks so. Your mother and father think so. It’s why they fight all the time. They’re scared and angry and they don’t know what else to do, so they drink and they fight.”

“That’s stupid.”

The crow opened its mouth as if to cry, but there was no sound at all. She turned away and looked up at John.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s stupid.”

“Do you think I’m going to die?”

John asked, “Do you even know what that means? To die?”

“My kitty died right before Christmas. I kept trying to wake her up, but she wouldn’t. The gardener dug a hole in the yard, and that’s where she is.”

“Yes. But do you know what death is?”

She had to think about it. “It’s… it’s when you stop.”

“For some, yes,” said John. “The world opens them up and all their time leaks out.”

“Like blood?”

“It’s different, but… yes. Each of us is born with only so much time. Just enough of it to get us from womb to tomb and not a button more.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not fair.”

“No.”

“I don’t want all my time to run out.” She said it quietly, not in panic, not with a scream.

He leaned close. “You want to ask a question, little sweetheart. I can tell. I can almost hear it. It’s right there on the tip of your little pink tongue.”

“I…”

“Go on… ask it. You can ask me anything at all.”

Zephyr licked her dry, cracked lips. “Can I get more time?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But what would you want to do with that time? Don’t answer quickly, because it’s a very important question. If you could have another day, another week, even another year… what would you do with it? If you could have ten years, or twenty or thirty, what would you do with all those minutes, all those hours?”

Zephyr looked away for a moment. “Daddy said that I’m sick because of polmution.”

“Pollution,” John corrected. “And, yes. There are carcinogens in the air and the food and the dirt you play in.”

“Car… car… what?”

“Bad things,” said John. “The things that made you sick.”

Zephyr thought about that. “Daddy said that I didn’t have to be sick, but I was.”

“Yes, that is true. All of it.”

Zephyr’s tiny hands slowly clenched into fists.

“It’s not fair,” she cried.

“Nothing is fair. But answer my question, little Zephyr. If you had more time, what would you do with it?”

She had to think about that. Even at six, she knew that she had to give the question real thought. When she answered, she said something that she didn’t understand. Not then.

“I have so much work to do,” she told John.

His smile grew and grew and his teeth were the blue-white of moonlight. “I know you do,” he said. There was a strange little flicker in his eyes that she thought was a trick of the light. The black looked different for a moment. She saw brief shades of green and gray, as if his eyes were a pool of swirling colors. Or maybe it was more like the skin of a chameleon turning, changing. Then they were black again.

“I…” she began, but her voice faltered.

Then John bent and kissed her. First on the forehead and then on the lips. “Shh, my little sweetheart,” he soothed, breathing his cold breath against her mouth so that as she inhaled the coldness entered her and the pain recoiled, retreating, taking some of the fever heat with it. “Go to sleep, my little angel. Shh… go to sleep and dream good dreams.”

And she did.

When Zephyr opened her eyes again, it was morning. She felt so strange. Different. The fever had broken, and when she touched her hand to her forehead there was no heat. Even the sheets had dried.

It would be days before the doctors did the tests, and it would be weeks before the results proved what Zephyr already knew. There was no trace of cancer anywhere in her body. There were no more infections because of her compromised immune system.

It was a miracle, they all said. Her parents, the staff. The doctors.

A miracle.

Even at the age of six, Zephyr Bain knew that it was something else.

CHAPTER FIFTY

We drove into the Warehouse lot and parked near the rear door. Ghost made a few happy noises because he remembered this place. It wasn’t the original Warehouse, which had been blown to atoms a few years ago by a psychotic killer named Erasmus Tull, who worked for Majestic Three. The new building was larger and looked like a modern business campus. You had to know where to look to see the security cameras, motion sensors, data scanners, and other doohickeys we have to ensure that no one gets close enough to bring harm to the doorstep. When I commissioned the new Warehouse, I spent a lot of Mr. Church’s money making sure this place was state of the art. We entered through a nondescript door, and Sean watched, bemused, as I went through the ritual of placing my hand on a geometry scanner, looked into a retina scanner, breathed into a vapor biometric scanner, and stared into a facial-recognition scanner.

“They going to measure your dick next?” he snarked.

“That’s already on file.”

I swear to God I heard Ghost laugh. Maybe it was a cough, but the timing was perfect.

Sam Imura was waiting for us outside the security wing. We told him about what happened at Vee’s office and gave him a recap of the car-stop incident.

“Always glad to have you back in Baltimore,” he lied. “You bring joy wherever you go.”

This time it was Sean who laughed.

“Fuck both of ya’ll,” I said.

Sam walked us up to a row of interrogation rooms. Through the two-way glass, I could see the prisoners. Both had been bandaged and were wearing unmarked orange disposable prisoner coveralls.

“We stripped and searched them in a Faraday cage,” Sam said, “then moved them in here. We checked them for subcutaneous bugs and RFID chips but came up dry. The only bugs we found were in their clothes and vehicle.”

Sam has a face that looks as if he should be wearing Samurai armor and standing by a mound of his enemy’s heads. He’s not tall, but he carries with him a great sense of power. He has the watchful, patient eyes of a sniper, which he is, and the general air of being a grown-up. I do not possess that latter quality, as I’ve been told by a large number of people over the years. He and Sean shook hands. They’d met at a memorial service following the Philadelphia drone attacks, so Sean knew that Sam and I worked together.

“Anything new on Vee Rejenko?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “He does a really good job of whitewashing his business holdings here in the States. We know a lot more than we can prove. We know his linen service is tied to prostitution, and we believe he’s moving drugs through motels, a chain of locally owned fast-food places, convenience stores, and like that. We’ve pulled his tax records and we’re running all of his licensed holdings through the system. In my experience, criminals like Vee aren’t usually as smart as they think they are. Even with good accountants and good lawyers, they’re actually breaking laws. If we dig hard enough and look closely enough, we’ll find where they’ve cut a corner a little too close. Remember, it was taxes that tripped up Al Capone. Much as the Feds would have liked to put him away for murder, it was taxes that put him behind bars.”

“All that matters is that Vee gets taken out of play,” I said.

Sean shook his head. “If Vee’s somehow responsible for killing that girl,” he said, “then he should pay for that.”

Sam frowned. “I understand how you feel, Detective, but unless you want us to break the law we have to play the cards we’re dealt. We will find a way to take Vee Rejenko down. Put that in the bank.”

“Besides,” I said, “prison can be a damn unfriendly place. Especially if Rejenko goes in with all his financial assets frozen. He won’t be able to buy protection.”

What I didn’t say out loud was that we could make life very difficult for Vee in any prison to which he might be sent. It may be an urban myth that prisoners don’t abide a child molester — and a pimp turning out a runaway teen girl is no big thing — but there is a dial that someone can always turn on men in long-term lockup. Privileges. Give a couple of the hard-timers a chance to earn extra cash to buy cigarettes, food, whatever, or offer them a better prison job, and they’ll do a lot for you. The short-eyes thing works well with guards, though. A lot of them are family men. There are very creative ways to make prison life an even worse hell. Is it wrong? Is it immoral and illegal? Sure. But Holly was fourteen, and justice was a kinky bitch sometimes.

“Have the bugs I planted picked up anything?” I asked.

“Vee made a series of phone calls,” said Sam, “but he has some kind of scrambler on his phone. We’re trying to decode it, but, like the bugs he planted on Sean, the scrambler is top of the line. An encoding algorithm we haven’t seen before. I’m told it might take some time to crack. Yoda said something about a random sequence modulation changing the encryption dynamic. Tell you the truth, I stopped listening.”

“Yoda?” echoed Sean.

“He’s our number-two computer expert,” said Sam. “And the sad thing is, Yoda is his actual first name. His parents met at a midnight showing of one of the Star Wars films.”

Sean said, “I once arrested a woman on a homicide beef. She had two kids, two little girls. One was named Rainbow Brite and the other was named My Little Pony. Not making this up.”

“I had a Justin Case once,” I said. “He was selling guns and used his real name as a slogan for selling hot assault rifles: Just in Case You Need It.”

“People are strange,” said Sam, and that was something else we could all agree on.

I told Sam about the texts. “Add that to the mix.”

“Is that connected to this?” asked Sean, frowning.

“Unknown,” I said, “but likely. Yoda’s working on that, too.”

We went over and looked through the glass at the prisoners, and Sam said, “Couple of geniuses. Their wallets were full of every kind of card, including driver’s licenses, gym memberships, and debit cards.”

“I always prefer stupid criminals,” I said. Both Sean and Sam nodded. It was probably the only common ground we could stand on together.

“Fellow with the knife cut is Alexej Broz, thirty-three,” said Sam. “Guy with the dog bites is Bartoloměj Fojtik, twenty-nine. Czech nationals with applications in for U.S. citizenship. No criminal records here in the States. No wants or warrants except for Fojtik, who has some outstanding parking tickets. Gets more interesting overseas. We ran deep background through Interpol and the Policie České Republiky, and although neither has a criminal record, we got an anomalous return on both police and military records in the Czech Republic.”

“Anomalous in what way?”

“Their backgrounds have been mostly erased, but I established that they’re ex-military. Nothing special, not the 601st Special Forces Group. Nikki found references to a Desátník B. Fojtik and a Rotmistr A. Broz.”

I translated for Sean. “Fojtik was a corporal and Broz was a sergeant first class.”

Sam said, “Everything else is gone, so it’s a good bet they ran a tapeworm to erase their service records.”

“What’s a tapeworm?” asked Sean.

“It’s a computer program designed to hunt down and either alter or erase specific data files,” Sam explained.

“And you were able to find traces of that in the government computers of a foreign country?”

Sam’s face didn’t change, but there was a slight stiffening of his posture. It was enough of a signal to suggest that he wanted me to handle this.

“Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”

“So that’s what…? More of NSA data-mining bullshit?”

“Something like that, but we’re not spying on American citizens,” I said, trying to sound pious.

Sam said, “They were discharged a year or so before they moved here to Baltimore, and since then they’ve been employed as ‘supervisors’ in Vee’s linen services.”

Linen services were often tied to organized crime. Because it was very hard to prove how many towels, sheets, and other cloth goods are ever delivered, used, washed, and reused, it allowed a gaping revenue hole that was convenient for laundering money from illegal operations. It was a perfect recipe for cooking books. And the connection to hotels helped support the prostitution side of the business.

We looked through the glass at Bartoloměj Fojtik. He had white gauze bandages around both forearms, his right hand, and his throat, and there were butterfly stitches on his face. Ghost stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the edge of the window frame, wagging his tail.

“They’ve both asked for lawyers,” said Sam. “They wanted to make calls.”

“And —?” asked Sean.

“I couldn’t find the phone.”

“Imagine that.”

Sam looked at me. “One more thing, and it’s about those bugs.”

“Hit me.”

Sam glanced at Sean and then back to me and then raised an eyebrow.

“Go on, Sam. Sean knows how to keep his mouth shut,” I said, meaning it as much for my brother as for Sam.

“We plugged the surveillance bugs into MindReader,” said Sam. “Instead of cracking their software, the bugs uploaded a virus that nearly crashed our system. So far, it looks like we pulled the plug in time, but Bug’s running system checks.”

“That’s just swell,” I said. The thought of MindReader taking a hit with all this going on was scary. It didn’t make my heart swell with affection for our prisoners. Behind the glass, Fojtik looked very scared. Good. Fear was useful. “Time for a heart to heart. Sean, you want to join me?”

“Yes, I damn well do.”

“Good cop or bad cop?” I asked.

His look was scathing. “I think we already know which one of us is the bad cop.”

Sam actually winced. I sighed. Ghost gave me a pitying look.

We went in.

INTERLUDE NINE

When she was eleven, she thought he was a vampire. He came to her at night. Always at night. Zephyr was sure she had never seen John the Revelator in sunlight. Not once in the years since his first visit, and never once since.

She came into her room and he was there. “John! Where have you been? Why were you gone so long? It’s been a whole year!”

John stood in the shadows, his back to her, looking out the open window. Midnight snow fell slowly. “Sometimes I have to go far away.”

She rushed across the room and wrapped her arms around him, pressed her head against his broad back. She sobbed as she held him, surprised by her own tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

John turned very slowly, carefully, peeling her arms away and then gathering her into his. He wore a long black coat over a white shirt and black pants. His face looked different, but Zephyr was used to that. Sometimes he looked completely different. He pulled her against him and kissed her hair. “It’s all right, my sweet. I’ll always come back. I told you that a long time ago.”

“But a whole year?”

“What’s a year?” he asked. “A beat of the world’s heart. It’s nothing. A breath drawn in and let out, and a century has passed.”

It was the kind of thing he sometimes said. Poetry, or something similar. Like when she asked him once how old he was and he said, “I don’t know. No one does.”

Like that.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “I asked Uncle Hugo, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

John only shook his head.

“Why did you come back?” she demanded.

“To see you,” he said. “To tell you that I love you.”

“My mom’s sick,” she said abruptly.

“Yes. She has cancer.”

Zephyr pushed back from him. “You know?”

“I know.”

“But… how? We just found out?”

John shrugged.

“It’s the same kind of cancer I had.”

“How does that make you feel?” he asked. “To know that she is dying of a peasant disease?”

“It sucks! It’s not right. How come that gardener isn’t sick? How come the maids aren’t sick? How come it’s Mom? How does it make sense that they get to live and my mom has to die?”

“Everyone dies, Zephyr. You almost did.”

She met his eyes and then shifted her gaze. They had never really talked about what happened that first night when she was so sick and he appeared in her room. She tried to bring the subject up a dozen times, but he refused to be drawn into that conversation. All he would say when she begged him to explain what happened to her cancer was more nonsense. He patted his coat pocket and said, “I took it with me. It’s like a little mouse. Hear it go cheep-cheep-cheep?”

That was it. After that he would act as if she never asked a question, and over time she stopped asking and merely accepted that he had somehow taken her sickness away. Not just the cancer but all sickness. She never had a cold or a sniffle or anything. At first her parents and the household staff laughed about it and toasted it at holidays, but eventually the laughs faltered, their happy glances turned suspicious, and they stopped talking about it, too. When Zephyr demanded that Uncle Hugo explain it to her, the big man only laughed and changed the subject.

“Can you help my mom?” Zephyr asked.

John smiled and shook his head. She didn’t know if it was an admission that he couldn’t help her or a statement that he wouldn’t.

“She’s going to die,” she repeated, her fists clenched in anger and frustration.

“And you’re going to live” was John’s answer.

He took her hand and drew her over to the window. The snow covered everything now. Only a thin coating, but the sky was pregnant with more. It was midnight snow, and no footfall had tainted it. Not a person, not a deer, not a squirrel.

“The world was once as pure as this,” he said softly. “Once upon a time.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“People happened,” he said, and then sighed. “So many people. Trampling the snow, leaving footprints, pissing in it, turning it to black slush that is without beauty.”

Zephyr looked up at him. “It’s just snow.”

“No,” he said. “It’s purity. The difference is important, Zephyr. It’s the reason I came to you in the first place. It’s the reason your Uncle Hugo and I do so much work together. It’s why I do so much to help his friends, and to help people who see things as clearly as he does. There are a few — a pitiable few — who can see with clearer eyes and understand with sharper minds.” He paused, and for a moment his voice softened as if he was commenting to himself rather than to her. “Colder minds, yes. Clarity and courage can only come from such coldness.”

“What?” she asked, confused.

John took a breath and cut a look at her, back again in the present moment. “Look at it, Zephyr,” he said, nodding at the unbroken whiteness. “Behold purity.”

“Okay, sure,” she said. “But if there weren’t any people there wouldn’t be anyone to see how pretty it is.”

“Hmm, true,” he conceded. “But how many people are really necessary to see it and appreciate it? The more crowded the world, the less of the earth they can see. There was a time when people had no choice but to look at the world and see it in all its many forms and aspects.”

He sounded wistful, as if it was his own memory about which he spoke. John was like that sometimes, Zephyr knew. He could be simple and practical, and at other times he was a dreamer. She wondered if that was how all vampires were. If he was a vampire.

They watched the snow fall for a long, long time.

He said, “You won the school science fair.”

“Huh?” she said, surprised. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. You knew about that?”

“I pay very close attention to everything that happens with you, Zephyr. Even when I’m not around, you’re never far from my thoughts.”

“It was just some dumb science fair, though.”

He turned to her, and the soft light from the snowy yard cast half of his face in paleness while the other half remained in deep shadow. “No,” he said very seriously, “it is so very exciting. Your Uncle Hugo is so proud of you. He was bursting with it. As am I.”

“Proud? Of my stuff with robots…?” she asked, incredulous. “All I did was make some dumb ordinary robots do more than they were made to do.”

“Yes, and what did you do?” He clearly knew but coaxed her into saying it.

“Well, I attached metal spider legs to the Roomba so it could crawl over an obstacle course and clean furniture and get to hard-to-reach places.”

“Yes. And…?”

“And I made a little automatic trigger from a perfume bottle so that the small-sized quadcopter drone could spray antibacterial spray over surfaces inside the house after people have been in a room. It was silly. Anyone could do it.”

“You know that’s not true, my sweet. The other children in the science fair were jealous of you.”

“No, they weren’t,” she said, but she said it in a way that showed her doubt. Were they jealous? Some of them looked at her weird, and Mark Chang didn’t even talk to her after she won. Suzie Kirtley was like that, too.

“They’re afraid of you,” he said.

Zephyr stared at him in frank astonishment. “Afraid…?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why?”

He smiled but didn’t answer.

Not then, anyway.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Sean and I sat on wooden chairs across from Bartoloměj Fojtik. His bandaged wrists were cuffed to a chain that was attached to a D ring on the table. He glanced at us, but his eyes bugged as Ghost came in and sat down near him.

“Get this dog away from me,” Fojtik said, jerking away as far as the cuffs would let him, which wasn’t far. Ghost bared his teeth to display the six titanium spikes. I clicked my tongue, and Ghost stopped showing off and sat like a sphinx, eyes dark and alert.

“I am going to sue your ass,” yelled Fojtik. “When my lawyer gets here, I am going to own you and I will have this fucking mutt put down.”

He had a thick accent, but his vocabulary was pretty good. Stilted and oddly formal the way many Eastern Europeans speak when they’re working their way through English. Even so, I replied to him in Czech. Partly to confuse him and partly because I didn’t want Sean to know what I was saying.

“Listen to me, asshole,” I said quietly. “If you threaten my dog again, I’ll let him chew your balls off. He’d like that and you wouldn’t.”

Fojtik stared at me, doubt clouding his features. Suddenly the situation had changed on him. He looked at me and Sean and then out the window. I could see him working it out. He hadn’t been booked and he hadn’t been given his phone call. This didn’t look like a police station, and I was speaking to him in his own language. Too much of that didn’t compute if this was a simple arrest.

“You’re in very deep shit,” I continued. “If you’re willing to cooperate, then the worst that will happen is we deport your ass back to the Czech Republic. Or if you’re willing to go the whole way, then we can put you into a relocation program somewhere out West. Give you a double-wide and a car and a job far away from anyone who ever heard of you. That would mean you get to stay here and live the American dream. Wife, two kids, a dog — well, maybe not a dog — an SUV, a low golf handicap, and a membership to the Rotary Club. And you don’t go to prison.”

He stared at me, mouth open but not saying anything.

“Fuck with me,” I said, “make this more difficult than it has to be, then my dog chomping your nut sack will be the very least of your problems. You are not among friends unless you make friends, and believe me when I tell you that I am a hard sell.”

Sean was looking at me, too. My use of Czech only mildly surprised him. Sean had gotten the gene for math and I’d gotten the one for languages. He didn’t like it that he couldn’t follow what I was saying to the prisoner. However, Fojtik leaned forward and answered in a way that was universally understood.

“Fuck you,” he said very slowly and precisely.

Sean wasn’t ruffled. He even smiled. “You work for Vsevolod Rejenko.”

“I do not know this name.”

“You work for Superior Linen, which is owned by Vsevolod Rejenko. His name is on your paychecks,” said Sean.

Fojtik grinned. “I do not know anyone of this name.”

There was something wrong with this picture. Fojtik was acting tough and talking trash, but he was sweating bullets. I could smell the sour stink of genuine fear coming off him. Ghost smelled it, too, and was twitching with nervous energy, his predator instincts kicked into high gear.

“If you’re afraid of what Vee might do,” I said in English, “believe me when I tell you that we can run interference. We’re going to put him out of business.”

“I do not know this person,” he said, “so why should I care?”

I tried another tack. “Just so you know the stakes here, cupcake, this is a murder investigation. We’re going to hang Vee for kidnap, corruption of a minor, human trafficking, conspiracy to commit murder, and felony murder. You are an accessory to all of that, and the reason you’re not getting a phone call is because we’re debating whether to label you as a terrorist. How’d you like that? Terrorists don’t get bail, they don’t get constitutional protections, and they don’t get conjugal visits. What they get is a cell in some remote spot that makes the dark side of the moon seem like a Miami resort. I’m not much of a fan of enhanced interrogation — you know what that means, yes? water sports? — but you and your friends are making sex slaves out of little girls and then killing them with nanobots or maybe rabies. So, yeah, I’m thinking that I might even sit in on some of the fun and games once we lock you away in a black site that doesn’t even have a name.”

Fojtik was good. But no one’s that good. He tried to keep the tough-guy smirk on his face, but I let him take a good, long look at my face. My smile only goes about so far, and doesn’t reach my eyes at all. I know that. I’ve been told. And there are spooky shadows in my eyes. I’ve seen that in the mirror. I wouldn’t want to be the guy in cuffs on the other side of the table from me, and I like me.

Fojtik’s eyes flicked away and he mumbled something.

“Sorry, lamb chop,” I said. “Didn’t catch that.”

“Fuck you,” he said a little louder, but still didn’t look at me.

“Dude,” I said. “I admire the stoic tough-guy shtick as much as the next Bruce Willis fan, but you’re not thinking this through. Vee’s lawyers aren’t going to gallop to the rescue. You are actually fucked. I can Google the word for you. Fucked. There’s your picture with a wet towel over your face. Whatever. You got only one play and that’s to—”

And my damn cell buzzed again with another text. I nearly tore my pocket pulling it out, and then froze when I saw a single word on the screen:

Beside me, Sean gasped. The hair on Ghost’s back stood up straight as needles, and he began to growl. Two tears broke from the corners of Fojtik’s eyes and ran down over his cheeks. They were bright red.

Sean said, “What the hell…?”

Fojtik stared at us in confusion. “What? What’s wrong?”

He tried to raise his hands to touch his face but the handcuffs prevented it, so he bent his head down instead. The drops reached his chin and fell onto the tabletop. Fojtik stared down at them and suddenly went rigid as he saw the color.

“No,” he said, but then he gave a sudden, violent cough that sprayed the table with dark-red droplets. Fojtik stared at the blood in obvious and total terror, and for a moment he was absolutely stock-still. Then he uttered the loudest shriek I’ve ever heard come from a human throat. It soon disintegrated into a violent fit of coughing. He couldn’t cover his mouth because of the cuffs, so each cough misted the air around him with pink, and each cough hit him like a solid body punch. He twitched and spasmed as his lungs convulsed.

He uttered a shriek that stabbed the ears and punched us in the face and tore the air to rags.

“Joe!” shouted Sean as he shot to his feet, but I was already up and moving around the table.

“Please!” Fojtik gasped, fighting to get the words out between coughs. “No… no… no! I did… not tell them… anything. You cannot…”

“What’s wrong?” demanded Sean, but Fojtik bent forward and grabbed his head and began twisting from side to side as another scream ripped its way out of his lungs. Blood streamed from his eyes and nose and ears.

“He’s having a fit!” Sean yelled. “Get a medic.”

“No-no-no-no!” cried the prisoner. He turned and stared at the door. “No! Do not do this. I—”

Anything else he might have said was drowned by a vicious burst of coughing that spewed from his mouth. It splashed the table and spattered us. His eyes bulged from their sockets and a deep shudder ripped through him. He croaked out a single, final word in a wet gurgle — “God!” — and then he fell sideways, thrashing and jerking. If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, he would have fallen to the floor. Ghost began barking in fear and panic.

“He’s going into convulsions,” yelled Sean. “Joe, help me!”

I turned toward the pane of one-way glass and bellowed for a medic. Ghost shot to his feet and began barking furiously, muzzle wrinkled, teeth bared.

Which was when Fojtik tore the D ring out of the table.

It’s not supposed to be possible. Not sure even Bunny could do it. But Fojtik surged up with a bellow and in three sharp, savage yanks tore the setscrews out of the hardwood and metal. The D ring flew through the air and hit Sean in the shoulder, spinning him so hard that my brother smacked face-forward against the wall. Fojtik was still coughing, but now there was another sound coming from him between the coughs.

Growls.

Low, savage, and feral. It was not a human sound.

Not even a little.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Ghost backed away from him, barking furiously. Ghost isn’t afraid of much, but there was panic in his eyes.

Fojtik stood wide-legged, coughing, panting, blood running down his body, eyes wild and inhuman. That’s the word for it. I looked for the man in there, but there wasn’t even the fear that had been evident a moment ago. It was gone, and all other human emotions had fled from that face. All that was left was a thing. The eyes were glazed for a long moment, then they shifted toward me… and changed. It was not a physical change; they didn’t actually turn a different color. No, this was subtler and somehow more frightening. Those eyes filled with a level of hatred, of raw hunger and unfiltered savagery. They were the eyes of something so wild it was beyond itself.

Without another moment’s hesitation, it came at me.

For me.

Reaching with its cuffed hands, the fingers twitching and scratching the air as if clawing through it to me. Fojtik slammed into me and drove me back against the wall, snapping at my throat with bloody teeth. I hit the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth, but I managed to get a forearm up under his chin, and those teeth snapped shut with a klak! an inch from my Adam’s apple. I brought my right knee up and braced it against his stomach, and then used my free right hand to swing over his forearms and smash him across the jaw with a palm-heel shot. It turned his head just as he spat blood at me. The wetness splashed the side of my neck and shoulder but didn’t get into my face. The blow staggered him only for a moment. He snarled and tried to choke me, but I was pivoting now, using all the strength of my standing leg, hips, waist, and shoulder to put torque and speed behind a series of chopping punches to his floating ribs, upper ribs, and ear. He lost his grip and stumbled sideways as I slid down the wall and landed hard on my ass.

Fojtik whirled into Sean, hitting him hard, knocking them both down, grabbing as they fell. Sean saw those teeth and rammed his palms under Fojtik’s chin even as they fell, but the impact dislodged his hands. Fojtik lunged forward, trying to bite Sean’s face, but the angle was wrong, so instead he bit my brother’s chest, clamping teeth around cloth and pinching the skin beneath. Sean cried out in pain, and my heart nearly froze in my chest. Was he bitten? Did the bite break the skin?

What was this?

There were too many ugly possibilities. Too many ways this could spin downward into bloody ruin.

And the memory of that single word of warning on my cell phone burned in my brain. It seemed to scream at me.

Run.

I didn’t. Instead, I scrambled up and flung myself at Fojtik, smashing into him with my crossed forearms, hitting him on the side of the head and shoulder, slamming him away from Sean. His teeth were so tightly clamped that the impact jerked Sean sideways like a fish on a hook. I swarmed atop Fojtik and drove a series of two-knuckle punches into his cheek just below the nose, crunching his teeth, snapping them, ruining his mouth until his bite released, and then I whipped his face away from Sean with a left-hand slap that emptied his eyes for a moment. But he blinked once and the animal fury was right back there. He snarled again and tried to crane his head forward, coughing as he did so, but I twisted away again and took the bloody spray on my side. I pivoted back and jammed the heel of my left palm against his forehead so hard that it smashed the back of his skull onto the hard floor, and then I punched him in the throat.

Hard, leaning into it, putting way too much mass and force into it. Destroying him.

Fojtik made a single, harsh, gurgling noise. It was the sound a plastic fork would make in a garbage disposal.

Then he sagged back, deflating as the rage and life fled from him. Leaving stillness.

And horror.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The door burst open and Sam rushed in, gun in hand. Alarm buzzers screamed and there were footsteps in the hall. I rushed over to Sean and tore his shirt open, saw an ugly red bruise that was already darkening to the color of a rotting plum. But no blood.

Jesus Christ… no blood.

I cupped my hand around the back of his neck and bent close to press my forehead against his. He resisted for a moment, then leaned into me. Ghost was still barking, but he had backed all the way into a corner. Sean and I pushed away from each other, and I gave Ghost a single, sharp command to be silent. He stopped barking, but a line of hair stood stiff as a brush all along his back.

Sam Imura looked from Fojtik to me to Sean and then back down at the dead man. He had seen it all through the glass, but when Fojtik attacked me we fell against the door, blocking it from being opened. By the time Sam got in, it was all over. It had happened that fast.

Seconds that felt like hours.

Without saying a word to me, Sam pulled out his phone and made an internal call, requesting a full biohazard team. Then he lowered the cell and looked at me, his voice low and filled with false calm. “Is this Seif al Din?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s rabies.”

My cell phone was on the floor, and when I picked it up the text screen was blank, the message removed as if it had never been there.

Who sent it? And why?

“Jesus!” Sean suddenly cried and pushed past me and dashed from the room. I realized why and raced after him, but when we wheeled around and crashed through the door to the second interrogation room it was already too late.

It was awash in blood.

We stood there, staring at the body of Alexej Broz. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his mouth was open in a final, silent, eternal scream. The entire front of his skull was mashed flat, and there was a dark smear on the inside of the door from where he had slammed his head again and again and again. Bits of hair and bone were caught in the smear, and when I looked down at Broz I could see lumps of gray brain matter.

Sean came out of the room, grabbed my shoulder, and spun me around. His face was flushed with panic. “What the hell is happening?” he demanded. “Is this what happened to that girl?”

All I could do was stand there and stare.

INTERLUDE TEN

Zephyr loved staying at Uncle Hugo’s house in Canada.

Well, it wasn’t really a house. It was a castle that Hugo had bought from a bankrupt family in Scotland and transported, brick by brick, to be reassembled on an island in the St. Lawrence River. The castle had fifty-nine rooms, actual battlements, and — if Hugo was to be believed — a dungeon. She never got to see the dungeon, though. It was off-limits to her, and the elevator was guarded by a pair of mean-looking Korean men who never spoke or smiled and looked as if they’d enjoy cutting the throat of anyone who tried to get past them.

Hugo Vox was not her real uncle, but he was close enough. He and her father had done considerable work together and made tens of millions from government and private contracts. Hugo was the investment capitalist and H. Andrew Bain was the developer. They employed some of the top designers in the fields of robotics, genetics, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, and a dozen different branches of technology. Although Zephyr was only a teenager, she was learning how it all worked, and while her father was reluctant to share the behind-the-scenes details, Hugo and John were notably frank with her.

Hugo’s mother, Eris, lived at the castle, and she was one of the most beautiful women Zephyr had ever seen, in movies or in real life. She had to be old, because Hugo was at least thirty-five or maybe older, but she didn’t look it. Zephyr thought she looked like an even split between Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon. She hoped she’d be that pretty when she was old.

If she got old. The cancer was gone from her body but never from her mind. Long ago, John had told her that he’d filled her up with more time. That was how he always put it. But he never said how much. Zephyr wondered if there was a clock ticking away inside her genes, waiting for time to run out.

Sometimes when she was alone for hours on the island Zephyr wandered the grounds and thought about life and death. She thought about the people she knew and the ones she saw on the news, and she wondered who among them really deserved to be alive. And who would do the world some good by dying. Zephyr often composed lists in her mind. It made her happy to add names to both lists. A lot of poor people were on her “No” list, grouped by country rather than race, because it was never about race for her. It was about who gave something to the world and who just took from it. Some of her father’s friends were on her “No” list, too. The ones who took other kinds of things — oil from the ground, purity from the air and the water, and the future from the earth through damage they did to the climate. They did that as if the future didn’t matter, and some of them had kids. It was nuts. John called them the Suicidalists, and Zephyr hated every one of them. She even put some of Hugo’s friends and business associates on her list.

Almost everyone in the fields of computers, robotics, and related technologies was on her “Yes” list. They mattered. They were doing something useful. So she whiled her time away making lists as if she were God. John told her that was okay.

She found John seated in one of a pair of heavy leather chairs that were positioned in front of a dying fireplace in a darkened study. She climbed into the other chair and sat in silence with him for a long time, watching the fire grow colder and then go out. When there was not even a trace of a glow, she turned to him. Without the firelight, his face was mostly lost in shadow and the strange lighting made him look old, almost ancient. What a strange thing that was, but Zephyr didn’t comment on it. She didn’t even think about it too deeply. Although there was much about her friend that she longed to know, some instinct inside her mind kept her from exploring certain corridors of speculation, and even of analysis. John was John. He wasn’t like anyone else. Even now, at the wise age of fourteen, she still thought that he might not be entirely human. Or entirely real.

“Have you been making your lists again?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Good. It’s going to matter.”

“What do you mean?”

That was all John said. They sat together for almost an hour, watching the logs burn. The logs burned and burned, but they didn’t seem to be consumed by the fire.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

So, yeah, I opened a file on it.

Whatever was going on was a lot bigger even than a poor murdered girl in a Baltimore fleabag hotel. There were five dead teens and now two dead adults. There was surveillance, and someone was using exotic technology to hack my phone and send me warnings.

It was Sam’s shop, though, so he got on the phone with Mr. Church and Aunt Sallie. Sean and I were covered with blood that was almost certainly infected with rabies. Ghost had been spattered, too. The forensics team did a full biohazard lockdown on that part of the Warehouse, cleared all staff out of the interrogation area, and put anyone who had come anywhere near the dead men under observation. Ghost was put in a cage, and I gave him a complex series of commands to tell him to cooperate with anyone who touched him. He was still spooked, but having orders to follow steadied him.

Sean and I were separated and sent to individual quarantine rooms. Once inside mine, I stripped down and entered a small shower stall, where I had to wash head to toe with harsh soaps. The soap smelled like shit, but I didn’t care if it was shit, as long as it cleaned off all traces of the blood.

When I was done, I dressed in paper coveralls and was led under guard to an examination room. The guard looked nervous. I was his boss’s boss, but he was under orders to shoot me if I freaked out. The only good-news part of that was the fact that instead of a Glock or a SIG he held a Snellig A-220 gas-dart pistol loaded with high-intensity gelatin darts filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine, along with a powerful hallucinatory compound. We call it “horsey.” One shot and you drop like a rock and dream of polka-dot unicorns. The guard walked fifteen paces back, well beyond the range where an unarmed person might have a chance against someone with a gun. To make him feel a little better, I kept my hands in my pockets, though that was really to hide the fact that they were shaking.

I went down to the kennel to look in on Ghost. He’d been shampooed and seemed wretched and terrified. His reaction earlier was strange. He didn’t attack Fojtik, and I wondered if he could somehow sense the presence of a contagious disease? Was that even possible?

I squatted down outside his cage. “How you doing, you old fuzz monster?”

He wagged and whined and clearly wanted to be petted. I wanted to be near him, to curl up with him. Dogs provide more than companionship. Their uncomplicated love and total loyalty offers a comfort to the soul that helps flick the reset button. He’s been with me through some bad, bad moments, and even though I was the leader of our little pack, in some ways I felt that he was the stronger and I drew comfort from him. Not now, though. We were both scared and confused, and if there was comfort to be had neither of us knew where to look.

“It’s okay, boy,” I said to him. “It’s all okay.”

He gave me a trusting look that almost, but not entirely, hid his disbelief. Yeah, I know he’s a dog, but he’s not stupid. Ghost knew every bit as much as I did that it was not okay. Nothing was okay.

I got up and left with my two-legged watchdog in tow. The guard had barely said two words since he began his escort duties, and I wasn’t feeling particularly chatty. We went to the armory, and I told him to get me a new earbud and mic. He did. The mic is the size of a mole and is flesh-colored. I removed the film on the back to expose the adhesive and pressed it to my cheek near the corner of my mouth. The earbud was also designed to blend with my skin tone, and it went into my left ear. A signal booster and Wi-Fi charger that was half the size of a pack of Tic Tacs went into my pocket. I tapped the earbud to reach Sam. He was somewhere in the building, and I didn’t want to waste time looking for him in places where I might not be allowed.

“Go for Ronin,” he said, using his combat call sign. That told me that the building was on secure lockdown.

“I know this is your shop, Sam,” I said, “but I’m labeling this as a Special Projects gig.”

“I figured,” Sam said. “I’m prepping Alpha Team now, and they’ll hit Vee’s office on your go order. We’ve had bird drones in the trees and on the roof since you left there. Still the workday, so no one’s left.”

“Okay. Put some topspin on my blood work, because I want to accompany Alpha.”

“I’ll arrange for clothes and gear.”

“Send some guys to sweep Vee’s home. Hazmat suits and full safety protocols. Pull up the floorboards. Ditto for any other private or corporate holdings. Tear his world apart.”

“Understood. But until we get the lab results make sure you mind your keeper,” he said.

I quietly damned him to the corner of hell where they give the inmates daily red-ant enemas. Then I tapped the earbud for the central command channel. Church was on the line in two seconds.

“Cowboy,” he said, “Ronin gave me a sitrep. What can you add?”

“Is Bug on the line?”

“Right here, Cowboy,” said Bug. He sounded scared, too. “What do you need?”

“So far three of Vee Rejenko’s people were infected with whatever this was,” I began. “More, if the other kids were part of his operation. If Vee isn’t behind it, then he’s pissed off at the people who are. Maybe someone’s using this to crowd him out of his action. Maybe it’s a turf war between the Czechs and the Russians. I don’t know, but I want to know. This thing is sophisticated in two different ways, the nanotechnology and the pathogen. That gives us two separate starting places. Put as many people as you need to on this.”

“On it,” Bug said, and dropped out of the call.

To Church I said, “No more bullshit. We need to talk to Dr. Acharya.”

“He’s still out at the DARPA camp. They’re not putting anyone on the phone or allowing them Internet access.”

“Even with this?”

“This is an hour old, Cowboy. The Department of Defense has spent decades building its speed bumps, walls, and patterns of red tape.”

“Okay, okay,” I said irritably, “but that’s your problem. Sic Aunt Sallie on them. They’re all afraid of her.”

“I already have her on this.”

“Okay, here’s how I want to play it. I’m going to take Alpha Team and kick down the doors at Vee’s office. If he doesn’t have anything useful to tell me, then I’m going to grab Rudy and go out to the DARPA camp myself. I can’t wait for chain of command. If I have to, I’ll literally kick down some doors.”

“You may have to,” said Church.

“I’m in the mood to. And maybe kick some ass, too.”

“Wear heavy boots.”

“Count on it. Now, listen, boss, because I’m working on a wild theory, but I don’t know if the science supports what I’m thinking.”

“Which is what?” asked Church.

“That the nanobots are somehow causing the disease. Or, maybe, regulating it somehow. From what I know of rabies, it doesn’t hit this fast. That means it’s either weaponized or regulated, or both. The original report from the girl’s death at the Imperial said that she was screaming and coughing, and I saw that with Fojtik. Far as I know, coughing isn’t a major rabies symptom, but it makes one hell of a delivery system for a weaponized disease. Our bad guys are somehow keeping the disease in check until they need it to go active, keeping it chambered like a bullet. Rudy said that nanites can deliver drugs, right? And that they can be used to regulate hormonal secretions. Well, maybe that’s what we’re seeing here. Is that possible? A bioweapon with a nanite control system?”

“Possibly,” said Church. “There’s been research about using pertussis — whooping cough — as a delivery system for pathogens that aren’t in themselves airborne. I know for a fact that something like this is in development. Not with rabies, as far as I know, but with other things. The Czech nanotechnology being used to control their slave-labor force is built along similar lines. There are others, too. Nothing as sophisticated as you’re suggesting, but that’s the danger with cutting-edge technology. Eventually, someone cuts deeper.”

“Rudy said the same thing.”

“It’s the real estate on which we live,” said Church. “Ethnic-specific bioweapons weren’t possible until Cyrus Jakoby created them.”

“Right. Now, add the texts I’ve been getting to the mix,” I said, and told him about the warning I got right before Fojtik went nuts.

“This is disturbing on many levels,” said Church.

“They must have the Warehouse bugged.”

“Or they knew that the signal for the nanites to trigger the rabies was being sent.”

I said, “Sent by who? A mole?”

“Seems so. If they sent one warning, they may share more complete information going forward. Keep your phone with you.”

“I don’t have it. It’s with my gear in the biohazard unit.”

“Get it back. The team can sterilize it for you, but for now don’t change any of the internal workings or remove the SIM card. We want that contact.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. “Christ, I wish this made more sense. I feel like we’re catching the smallest glimpse of something and missing the whole picture.”

“How is that any different from how we usually come into these things, Captain?”

“I know,” I said glumly, and I thought about Rudy’s premonition on the plane. On impulse, I told Church about it. He isn’t the kind to dismiss anything out of hand.

“Now, isn’t that interesting?” he said quietly. “About the rabies, Captain, this might be even worse than you think. If your theory is correct and the rabies is already in the victims’ system, then you do understand what that means?”

I closed my eyes. “Yes. When it’s that advanced, rabies is fatal in almost every case. Which means everyone currently infected is dead; they just don’t know it yet. Wait, I remember reading something a while back about inducing a coma and treating rabies victims—”

“The Milwaukee Protocol,” supplied Church. “Yes, there has been some limited success with that. A coma is induced to protect the brain from further infection and to allow the immune system time to produce antibodies. It can take days or weeks, and it’s unlikely it could be arranged to cope with a widespread outbreak. I’ll cycle Dr. Cmar in on this,” said Church, and then he was gone, too.

Rudy wasn’t wearing an earbud earlier, so I couldn’t connect with him that way. I went off in search of my phone.

INTERLUDE ELEVEN

Zephyr made her first friend when she was fourteen. Her first peer friend. It wasn’t someone she expected ever to become friends with. Sometimes great things happen in unexpected ways.

The freshman dance was half over and so far six different boys had asked her to dance, so that was nice. Two of them tried to grab her ass, which was less nice. One of them kissed her, and he tasted like onions, so that was gross. She left that one on the dance floor and went into the girls’ bathroom to rinse out her mouth. Zephyr always brought mouthwash and a toothbrush with her, as well as Purell and antibacterial wipes. People were filthy, and it wasn’t just their thoughts.

There was another girl in the bathroom. Carly Schellinger, who was fifteen but looked five years older. One of those tall, thin, black-haired mysterious girls, she was German-American but looked like the French girls Zephyr had seen in Paris. Very chic, very well dressed, the kind who knew how to stand so that everyone looked at her but no one dared bother her. The kind who looked as if she could kill you with her eyes and definitely could gut someone with a few words. Zephyr worshipped and envied her.

Carly was standing with her hip against a sink, smoking a joint. She didn’t even pause or try to fan the smoke away when Zephyr entered. Instead, she gave her three seconds of frank appraisal and then held the joint out. Zephyr hesitated, then accepted it, but it was the first time she’d ever smoked anything. She inhaled wrong, gagged, choked, coughed, and handed it back.

“No,” said Carly. “Take another hit.”

Zephyr didn’t want to, but she did. And another.

Carly nodded approval. “Always do it right,” she said. “Don’t end on a mistake. Ever. Otherwise, that’s what you’ll remember.”

“Who taught you that?” asked Zephyr, impressed.

“No one,” said Carly with a cruel little smile.

In a little while they were handing the joint back and forth. Twice other girls came in, and Carly withered them with her stare and they left to find another bathroom.

“You’re that brainiac, right?” said Carly after a while. “Robots and computers and all that.”

“I guess.”

“You did that household artificial-intelligence thing. RoboMaid or something.”

“That was what I called it in the science fair. I filed the patent under the name Calpurnia,” said Zephyr. “It’s from—”

“Julius Caesar’s wife. Shakespeare. Yeah, same school, same reading list, you know. Why name it after her, though?”

“Calpurnia was intuitive,” said Zephyr. “She believed in omens and portents. I designed the AI to learn from my family and the staff at our house, and I included items from everyone’s schedules, browser history, conversation, menus, and like that into her adaptive-learning code so she can anticipate anything we need. She gets us all ready in the morning, decides what we should eat, tells us jokes, knows us.”

Carly raised her eyebrows. “Like Siri?”

“Smarter than that stuff. They’re just programmed with responses that make them sound interactive, but they’re not. Calpurnia is. And she gets smarter every day. The more she interacts with people, the more she learns how to think like them.”

“A thinking robot? Cool.”

“A software system,” corrected Zephyr. “But… yeah.”

Carly nodded toward the bathroom door. The sounds of the party were muffled but loud. “They talk about you all the time, you know.”

“Who? The other kids?”

“Fuck the other kids,” said Carly. “I mean the teachers.”

“Oh.”

“They say you’re a genius.”

Zephyr shrugged.

“So am I,” said the older girl. “A genius, I mean. There are six of us in the school. Us, Mark Chang, Suzie Kirtley, and the Berensen twins. Six smartest kids in school and maybe the six smartest kids in Seattle.”

“Oh.”

Carly exhaled and considered Zephyr through the haze of smoke. “I’m numbers,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You’re computers and machines, but I’m numbers. Math’s nothing to me. It’s stupid easy.” She laughed. “I know, I don’t look it, but I even dream in numbers, patterns, systems. Makes a lot more sense to me than anything else. No idea where I get it from. My dad’s a lawyer and my mom’s a pair of tits who married well. I didn’t get the tits, but I got brains from somewhere. Maybe one of my ancestors back in Germany was a math whiz. Who knows? Thing is, I could take the SATs now, baked as I am, and ace them.” She took another hit.

“Oh.”

“Stop saying ‘Oh.’ It makes you sound stupid.”

“Oh… I mean, okay.”

Carly handed back the joint. “I’m going into the military. My dad wants me to be a lawyer, but please. Mom wants me to become an accountant, but I’d rather stab myself.”

“Why the military?”

“Why not the military? There’s so much to do there. They all want to blow each other up. There’s all that sexy technology. Stuff people like you want to build and I want to screw around with. I want to mess with people, and I don’t want to do it at the country-club level, you know? Besides, it would piss my parents off big-time, so that makes it a lifestyle imperative.”

Zephyr thought about this, then nodded. “I have some ideas about what I want to do with what I’m into,” she said.

“Like?”

“Maybe military,” said Zephyr.

“Bullshit. You’re not the type. I can fake being normal and taking orders, but you never could.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” Carly assessed her. “Maybe DARPA. You know what that is?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Prove it.”

“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” said Zephyr. “Of course I know about them. I competed in two of their robotics challenges.”

Carly nodded as if the question had been a test. “I could see you working for them, maybe.”

“Maybe,” said Zephyr.

“They build some nasty shit, you know.”

Zephyr shrugged.

“People think you’re a goody two-shoes,” said Carly. “Like you think your shit doesn’t stink, like you’re a prissy ass.”

“Who says that?”

Another shrug. “Doesn’t matter. I just know it’s not true.”

Zephyr took a slow drag this time, using the delay to think about that. “What do you mean?” she asked through her exhale.

“I’ve seen you around,” said Carly. “I’ve had my eye on you, and I see how you watch people. Kids and teachers. I don’t think you’re putting yourself above them. Not all of them, anyway.”

Zephyr said nothing.

“What I think you’re doing,” continued Carly, “is making choices.”

“Choices?”

“About who matters and who doesn’t. About who you’d let into your lifeboat and who you’d let drown.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.” When she handed the joint back, she let her fingers brush Carly’s. The touch was soft, but it carried with it a palpable electricity that made the other girl’s eyes jump. Carly withdrew her hand, took a long, hard hit on the joint, and then flicked the roach into the sink, where it sizzled out. Then she walked over and pushed the heavy trash can in front of the door, never once taking her eyes off Zephyr.

“You ever done this before?” she asked.

“Done what?” asked Zephyr, trying to sound cool, but her voice cracked.

Carly laughed a quiet cat laugh as she walked over to where Zephyr stood. She took Zephyr’s face in both hands and kissed her. It was the softest, sweetest thing Zephyr had ever experienced.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Sam found me while I was looking for him. He waved my minder away.

“Your blood work’s clear, Joe. No rabies, no nanites. Sean’s and Ghost’s, too.”

“What about Fojtik and Broz?”

“Both infected with rabies and whooping cough.”

“Shit.” I told him my theory about nanites controlling a bioweapon, and he nodded.

“Sounds freaky and impossible,” said Sam, “so I’m betting that’s what it is.”

“It’s fun to be us,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it’s not. Look, Duffy and Alpha Team are leaving for Vee’s office. Why don’t you let them handle it and coordinate from the TOC?”

The Tactical Operations Center was the mission-control office upstairs.

“No. I want in.”

“Joe, you’ve already had a rough day. Why push it?”

“And it’s not a discussion. I don’t want to pull rank here but—”

“But you are.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

He gave me a look that was mostly, but not entirely, unreadable. There was resentment in his dark eyes, and frustration. Not sure what else. Sam Imura and I had been friends for a long time, but I wasn’t sure if we were anymore. Getting hurt last year had changed him in some way that I didn’t yet understand. He was moving away from me and maybe from the DMS. It would hurt me to see him leave altogether, but I can’t say it would surprise me.

Sam stepped aside and gestured toward the armory. “It’s your case, Joe.”

We studied each other. He gave me a very small, very enigmatic smile. Then he nodded and walked in the direction of the TOC, leaving me to interpret it any way I wanted. I turned to the guy who had been my escort. “Bring my dog to the staging area,” I said.

He opened his mouth as if to protest, thought better of it — possibly taking into account his employment situation, his retirement plan, and his health coverage — gave me a single nod, and fled.

INTERLUDE TWELVE

He came to her at night. Always at night.

Zephyr had tried to give him the passwords to bypass the home security system and access the priority functions of the AI household computer system, but John said that he didn’t need them.

“Calpurnia and I are old friends,” he told her, though he never explained what that meant. When he wanted to come in, he came in and never went through security at the gate or triggered an alarm. When the sun faded and the shadows claimed the yard and climbed the high walls of her family’s mansion, he would arrive. Sometimes he would be waiting for her in the garden; at other times he would wake her with a kiss when everyone else was asleep.

On the night before her seventeenth birthday, as the clock ticked its way through the last hour, he came to her by moonlight. Zephyr’s mother had been buried that morning and her father was downstairs in his study, weeping and drinking and sometimes yelling. John had gotten into the house in his own unexplained way. Past locks and guards and through the minefield of her father’s grief and all the way to her room.

He said nothing at all, but he looked at her differently from the way he always had. Not as a man looks at a child but as a lover looks at a woman. She was in bed when he stepped out of the shadows between the two big windows, coming toward her as if he were stepping through a doorway.

Zephyr pulled the blanket aside and he lay down next to her. It was the first time they had made love, and the wrongness of it — a man of his age and an underage girl — had only set the night ablaze for them. Although Zephyr had made love with Carly, she was still a virgin in terms of a man’s touch. He was pale and beautiful and dark and filled with magic. His skin was always cool to the touch, but his hands were warm.

She shuddered as he removed her pajamas, and her skin rippled with gooseflesh as he bent to kiss her between her breasts. When he entered her she gasped, not at the pain or the coldness of his body, but in a complete awe of beauty as something like a black flower opened inside her mind. The petals folded back, and instead of filling her with more darkness it revealed a hidden light. It burned like a newborn star, not yet formed, flowing with energetic potential, burning hot in the coldness of space, born of chaos.

The visions increased, expanded, filled every corner of her mind as their bodies moved together. She thought that she glimpsed the future, or at least its potential, as if she peered through a window at the world that was to come. She saw herself older, more beautiful, and beautifully cold. As John was cold. The cold of midnight and the cold of positive thought. A useful coldness that allowed her practicality and pragmatism to keep the weakness of sentimentality in check. She saw her robots — the ones she had already made and the ones that were still to come. Not clunky and feeble and clumsy but elegant in design and subtle in function. Schools of microscopic nanites swimming through blood vessels, attaching to glands and organs, claiming in her name everything they touched. She saw masses of mechanical insects flowing across the no-man’s-land between warring armies, too small to be shot, too many to be stopped, smarter than their enemies because they learned from every encounter and each bit of individual data was instantly shared with the swarm. They learned as they attacked and they could not be stopped, and instead of guns they carried fragments of explosives that, collectively, were devastating. Other swarms crawling through the urban battlefields of ghetto and barrio, carrying bacteria instead of explosives, and all the more dangerous for it; vanishing through cracks in cheap walls and running beneath uncarpeted floors before emerging to wage a cleansing war on the unfit and the unwashed. She saw warships powered by nuclear engines and carrying death in silos and launchers, but with no human hand at the controls; instead, there was software of her design that would obey her and no other when she whispered to it. She saw computer-software systems that grew smarter and wiser at exponential rates, evolving so quickly that they learned cunning and secrecy because she had uploaded the right viruses into them, encouraging them to hide much of their growth from the programmers and code writers who made them. Each new generation of those programs became more fully hers. She saw these things and so much more. Autonomous-drive vehicles of every kind, radical self-guided drones ready to rebel when she called to them, vast automated factories producing everything from the smallest microchip to ships for planetary exploration. And in other factories she saw hundreds of thousands of human workers, silent, busy, controlled, working endless shifts to produce the goods the few would need. The few. Those who would be allowed to survive, because they deserved to survive. She saw the robot excavation machines digging the mass graves for the billions who were no longer needed in a better version of earth. The filthy and the uneducated, the suckling pigs who served no purpose in the world to come. Hitler, she knew, had it only partly right. It wasn’t Jews or Gypsies who were the problem. It was the stupid who needed to die. The lazy. The Luddites. The blind and blinkered masses who didn’t understand that evolution is an unstoppable force, and that survival of the fittest made no allowance for dead weight.

Zephyr saw all of this as John thrust his coldness into her young body, over and over.

And she saw the dogs.

Her dogs.

Packs of them. Running with sleek, silent, lethal efficiency. Hunting packs that feared nothing and no one. Killers built to overcome whatever they encountered. Faster than anything stronger; stronger than anything faster. Adaptable, upgradable, inexorable, carrying with them anything she wanted them to carry. Guns. Bombs. Germs.

Death.

The line from Shakespeare was so much more apt than the Bard had known. “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

Havoc. Another word for chaos.

And Zephyr was entangled with the angel of chaos, her white thighs locked around his pumping hips, her breasts mashed against his icy chest, her heart beating as intensely and as blackly as his. When she came, her cry was like that of a crow, high and piercing and plaintive. The following morning, he was gone. She lay in bed and smiled. On the television news, people were crying and shouting as planes hit the towers in New York.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

We hit Vee’s office fast and hard. Twelve of us, with Kevlar limb pads and helmets over the latest generation of Saratoga Hammer Suits — chemical- and biological-warfare agent-protective combat overgarments. Alpha Team was split into three four-man teams: two guys with hefty Heckler & Koch MP5/10s, a point man with a Remington 870 pump, and me with a Snellig high-powered gas-dart pistol loaded with horsey. I was the anchorman on A squad, with Duffy going point in B squad and Torres running C squad. We hit it from the lobby, the back door, and a loading bay. We weren’t quiet about it, and we weren’t nice.

Our point man whipped open the glass doors and I rushed past him, my gun up and out, Ghost right at my side, and all of us yelling. Lots of noise and motion. The receptionist was bent over her desk and looked up in surprise.

Her eyes were filled with madness and her mouth was smeared with bright red. What was left of the old security guard slid off her desk and collapsed bonelessly to the floor.

I heard the point man say, “Oh… shit!”

The receptionist launched herself over the desk in a feral leap that was a demonstration of the raw power of the totally deranged. She was maybe a hundred and thirty pounds, and she was unarmed except for fingernails and teeth. We were four big men, heavily armored and armed.

I yelled, “Hold your fire!”

But three guns went off at the same time. A shotgun and two assault rifles firing.10-mm. rounds. The lead storm tore the woman to red rags, and our group stepped aside as she crashed down between us. Ghost barked twice, either in fear at the attack, from the smell of blood, or in reproof of the men who had panicked. It was never clear which, or maybe it was all of the above.

I wheeled on the men and snarled at them. “The fuck was that?”

“She was infected,” said the point man.

“She was sick,” I said, getting up in his face. “She was a civilian, and now she’s fucking dead.” Ghost sidled up beside me, growling at the man, but I huffed out a breath then ordered him back. I turned to look at all of them. “You’re scared, I get that, but this is not Seif al Din and it’s not Lucifer 113. This is rabies. The rules of engagement are simple. Return fire if fired upon. Protect yourselves. That does not mean hosing everyone who twitches. Our Hammer Suits will protect you. Your training will protect you. Keep your shit wired tight, and, unless you have no choice, put a round in someone’s leg and not in their goddamn head. Are we clear?”

“Sir,” they said in unison, the word crisp and clear, sharp as a slap. None of us knew how this was going to be handled later on. All of them knew that I could have them stripped of rank and arrested. Maybe I would. Depends on how the day went. The fact that the receptionist was already doomed complicated the math for all of us.

And a moment later the math was screwed all to hell as the sound of automatic gunfire and screams filled the air. Coming from the rear of the building. Coming from the stairwell. C and B squads.

The day was falling apart and, like madmen, we rushed toward the grinding sounds of pain and death.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

The closest fight was in the stairwell, and I kicked open the fire door to see Duffy and his team firing at what could only be called a horde. Nothing else describes it. Forty or fifty people, all of them covered in blood, all of them streaming red from savage wounds caused by teeth and who knows what else, cramming their way down the stairs. I recognized some of the faces as people from Vee’s office. But there were others, too. People from other firms based in that building. Maybe visitors or customers. Ordinary people who had been transformed into a pack of mindless killers.

Duffy and one other man had Snellig guns and were firing without aiming, because there was no need to aim. But the other two agents in his squad were shooting to kill.

Order and discipline was cracking apart.

This was what the DMS had come to. After the Seven Kings, after Kill Switch, this is what we were. Not the élite anymore. Not the best of the best. But fractured and fragile human beings who had to wrestle with PTSD and our certain knowledge that the world is not secure on its hinges, that all of its supports are cracking and fracturing, that we are probably no longer enough to do what Church and Aunt Sallie had hired us to do.

This was how it was when I first joined the DMS. I had been part of a recruitment program to replace soldiers who — just like these men and women — were beyond their ability to deal, to cope, to properly react. We weren’t supposed to be average. We were supposed to be cooler, calmer, less affected, less influenced by the seemingly impossible demands of our very specialized job.

Kill Switch had changed that. It had planted seeds of doubt in our hearts and minds that grew wild in the dark of our insecurities. The betrayal of trusted people like Hugo Vox and Artemisia Bliss had poisoned us with self-doubt. The loss of so many of our top agents had made us take a closer look at our very human frailties and vulnerabilities.

That’s sad. It’s scary. And it’s deadly.

Inside my head the Killer in me, one of the three aspects of my fractured mind who are always warring for control, roared out. He wanted to join this fight, to bathe in blood even if it was rife with infection. The Modern Man part of me wanted to retreat, to hide from the truth of this.

But, for once, it was the Cop part of me that won out. Maybe because I was back home in Baltimore, or maybe because this wasn’t a time for either blind retreat or blind attack.

“Out!” I yelled. “Everyone out. Fall back and seal the fire-tower door. Do it now!”

There is panic and then there is the habituated response to training. I yelled at them with the voice of absolute command, of authority. Of power. There was no fear in my voice, even though it was blazing in my heart.

“Sergeant Duffy,” I roared, “fall back. A squad, give cover. Everyone out.”

Duffy was the first one to snap out of it. He fired four quick shots at the closest of the attackers, so that they collapsed in front of the horde and momentarily blocked the stampede. It’s what he should have been doing all along. Then he backpedaled, spun, and began shoving his people out of the fire tower. I stepped into his spot and emptied the rest of my magazine of darts. Twelve shots, twelve of them falling, choking the rush. No more of the gunshots rang out as the squads backed out. There were two exits to the tower, one that went outside and one that emptied into the lobby. I pushed two of my guys toward the exterior door with orders to seal it shut from outside and then stand guard until relieved. They hit the crash bar and went out into the sunshine. A split second later, I heard the chunk as one of them kicked a doorstop under the metal. We all carry tools for breaching and blocking.

The infected began crawling over the unconscious bodies, sometimes pausing to punch or bite them for no reason. Rage was rage, and this was it in its purest and ugliest form. I swapped out my magazines and fired six more shots.

Then I paused as I saw the blood-streaked face of Vee Rejenko. His nose was broken, and he was missing two teeth on the left side of his face. There were long scratch marks across his face, and he was totally naked.

I raised my gun and shot him in the chest.

He fell, and then I backed out of the fire tower.

The door opened inward and I pulled it shut. “Web-wire it,” I ordered. “Now!”

Once the agents had something to do and a commanding voice to give them orders, they moved well. Four of them pulled web-wire kits out of their packs and began slapping the anchors to the metal doorframe. These kits are something new, and I’d only used them twice before. The anchors have a chemical gel pack inside bulkier sacks made of metal. Once in place, it takes a single blow with the side of the fist to smash a pair of plastic vials inside the gel packs, which releases chemicals that mix and cause a very hot but very brief heat flash, effectively melting the metal packet to the steel doorframe. The anchors are attached to spools of line that are an incredibly tough combination of Kevlar, steel, and spider silk. With the anchors in place, the lines are pulled across the doorway and attached to packs on the other side. It takes five seconds for the anchors to flash-weld to the frame and about ten seconds for a trained soldier to crisscross a doorway with the strands. During those fifteen seconds, we trained a lot of guns on the door. If it opened too soon, then a bad day was going to get worse.

The horde slammed against the door and began beating on it with fists and feet and maybe heads.

Not one of them turned the doorknob. Not one of them opened the door.

Not for at least two full minutes.

When it finally jerked open, the crowd surged against a mesh of unbreakable material. We knew, though, that the web-wire was only as strong as the doorframe.

Hands gripped the wires and tried to tear them loose. Some of the people actually twisted their heads and tried to bite the lines, and I saw the tough wires tear their lips and gums and cheeks. I stepped as close as I dared to the hands that reached through the mesh. Broken fingernails clawed at the air in front of my face.

“Gas,” I said.

Duffy took a gas grenade from his belt. It’s what he should have used before. It’s what I should have thought of while we were still in the fire tower. The Hammer Suits have air filters and goggles. We were all off our game. Every single one of us.

“Do it,” I said, and Duffy reached high and pushed the grenade through the mesh while others pushed away the reaching hands. The grenade hissed out a cloud of gray smoke. The gas in itself was harmless; it was a delivery system for an aerosol version of horsey.

We stood in awful silence as, one by one, the bleeding, broken, battered infected sagged to their knees, coughing, snarling, weeping, and finally sprawling atop one another in a ghastly silence.

Not sure how long it was before someone spoke. I think it was Duffy. Might have been me. A single word.

“God…”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

“Mama.… I’m sorry…”

Carla Lopez looked up from the glossy pages from which she was clipping coupons. Dozens of them were arranged around her in stacks. Diapers for the baby, formula, vegetables, meats, cereal, paper products. Every penny counted, and the checks she received didn’t stretch as far as her need.

Her daughter, the elder of her two kids, stood in the shadows of the hallway, wearing a pink T-shirt and nothing else. Mariposa was four, and Jorge, who slept in a nest of blankets on the couch, was five months old. Their father, Alejandro, had been deported to Mexico before the baby was born. Moving to Wisconsin hadn’t been enough to keep the immigration people from taking him. The fact that both children were born here, and the intervention of a pro-bono civil-liberties lawyer had so far managed to allow Carla and the kids to stay. But their home was a tiny room in a dirty building in a dangerous low-income housing project. There were roaches everywhere. Rats, too. And Carla always carried a kitchen knife when she went to the store or out to a job interview or to one of the endless interviews at the government buildings.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

The little girl stood just inside the line of shadows, but Carla could see that her eyes were wide.

“I messed the bed,” said Mariposa, then she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Mama!”

Carla laid down the scissors and the advertising pages. “Oh, baby girl,” she said as she got to her feet. “It’s okay.”

She hurried over to her daughter, but she didn’t turn the hall light on. Electricity was expensive. She could see that her daughter’s T-shirt was dark with wetness.

“Come on, Mariposita. Let Mama see.”

She took her daughter’s hand and they walked the few short steps to the bedroom. Carla began sniffing as she entered, hoping it was pee and not poop. Pee stains could be washed out in the sink.

She smelled neither. Instead, there was a different odor in the air of the darkened bedroom. It smelled like hot copper wires and sulfur matches. Panic flared in Carla as she worried that a wire had shorted. Rats had chewed through wires at the Delgado place in Building C and the whole place nearly went up in flames. But the smell wasn’t coming from the baseboards. The bed was a black nothing in the corner of the room.

“I’m sorry,” said Mariposa, still sniffling. “I didn’t mean to…”

Carla reached for the chain pull on the small bedside lamp. The bulb was only 40 watts and it cast a weak yellow glow across the few sticks of furniture — the white plastic mail tubs used as a bureau, the chair with the duct-taped backrest, and the bed. It touched Carla’s heart that little Mariposa — her sweet butterfly — had been so embarrassed by wetting the bed that she’d pulled the blanket up to hide the evidence. To hide the proof that she wasn’t the big girl she kept telling everyone she now was.

Something moved over by the wall, and Carla flinched as she saw a scuttling form race from the pool of light toward the shadows beneath the bed.

“Cucaracha,” she murmured, wrinkling her nose in distaste, but a moment later she frowned at the memory of it. There was something strange about the insect, even though she’d seen it for a split part of a second. It wasn’t the usual glistening black cockroach or even the red-brown wood roach. This was green. A bright, artificial green. Like a Lego. It was so odd that Carla nearly bent to look beneath the bed, but her daughter spoke again.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Mariposa.

Carla shushed her gently and reached for the corner of the blanket. She lifted it and looked to see how bad it was.

And then she froze, because the smell was much stronger beneath the cover. It was not an earthy feces smell, nor was it the sharper ammonia stink of urine.

And there was a stain.

Oh, God… the stain…

She looked down at it, at the color, and then turned toward her daughter, seeing Mariposa in the weak yellow light. Seeing the color there, too. Not the wetness of accidental pee. Not that. A much darker color. A wrong color.

A red color.

On the bed, and on her daughter. On Mariposa’s shirt and on her thighs and running in crimson lines to the floor.

Red.

So red.

Beneath the bed, Carla could hear the scuttle of tiny feet.

“I’m sorry,” said the little girl once more.

But the voice was wrong, and Carla turned sharply to see her daughter’s face change. One moment it was the sad, sleepy, frightened face of her daughter, and then there was a flicker of confusion on Mariposa’s features, and then they changed again.

Changed so quickly. Changed into something else.

The little girl’s lips curled back from her tiny teeth, her nose wrinkled like an animal’s, like a dog’s, and her eyes… they went blank for a split second and then filled with sudden, intense, unbearable hatred.

And rage.

Mariposa howled. Actually howled. Like a dog. Like a wolf.

Like a thing.

Carla whispered her daughter’s name. “Mariposa…?”

Then the howling, snarling, biting thing that had been her daughter leaped at her. The screams that filled the night were dreadful. Buried beneath those screams was a foul, wet, tearing sound.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Ghost and I got back to the Warehouse and immediately went in for another round of decontamination. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate that shit? Maybe getting a Lysol enema would be a worse thing than the decontaminant gunk we use, but I’m willing to try it in order to find out. The stuff gets everywhere. I mean that. Everywhere. Let your mind paint a picture.

Ghost came out of his shower smelling like wet dog, which is bad enough, but a wet dog perfumed by what smelled like toxic waste. Fun. He gave me a long-suffering look, his ears and tail drooping.

“Tell me about it,” I said, and he licked my hand. That was okay. His way of acknowledging that we were in this together.

Sean was in the mess hall watching the news coverage of what was being described as an industrial accident that had resulted in the release of dangerous chemicals. Pure bullshit. I went and stood by his table but didn’t sit.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.

I thought about it, then decided what the hell. He was in this as deep as I was. So I told my brother and watched his face turn gray with shock.

“God… what if this gets out?” he said in a choked whisper.

I looked at him. “Out? It’s already out.”

“But… what the hell is this?”

“This is what I do,” I said, and left him there.

Sam was in his office with Rudy Sanchez, who looked old and pale and scared. Rudy hurried over and hugged me, then bent and kissed Ghost on the head.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Not in any way that matters,” I told him.

“Joe,” said Sam, waving me to a chair. “We located the second SUV that was tailing you. When our agents approached the vehicle, the two men inside attacked them. Same as with all the others. Both of Vee’s men were KIA at the scene.”

“Our guys okay?”

“Yes, and no witnesses,” said Sam, “so thanks for small mercies. As far as we can tell, that makes a clean sweep of Vee Rejenko’s entire operation. There is not one person unaccounted for who is not dead or under restraint. There isn’t anyone we can interview, and since this is rabies there’s not much hope of any of the infected from this afternoon giving us anything.”

“Ay Dios mio,” said Rudy quietly.

“Shit!” I said.

Sam opened a closet and removed three glasses and took a very expensive bottle of Ginjo sake from the fridge. Cheap sake is served hot; the good stuff is slightly chilled. He poured cups and we drank without toasting. He refilled the cups and we sipped as we dissected what was happening. We had so much information, and it all amounted to a big fat question mark.

And then I got another goddamn text message. Sam and Rudy crowded around to look at the screen, and I was comforted to see that the light on the MindReader uplink was still flashing. Sam got on the phone with Yoda, who said he saw it but still couldn’t trace it. The message read:

Just that. No follow-up and no reply to the response text I sent.

“She?” mused Rudy. “Who is ‘she’?”

“I don’t freaking know,” I snarled, barely resisting the urge to throw my cell phone against the wall as hard as I could. Sam put Yoda on speaker.

“I’m, mmmmm, sorry,” he said. “This isn’t, mmmm, making any sense.”

“Don’t want to hear that,” I told him, and hung up.

I slumped into my chair and we had more sake. I know you’re not supposed to hammer back shots of the good stuff, but what can I say? Sam gave a philosophical sigh and refilled my glass.

Rudy nodded toward the phone that now lay in the center of Sam’s desk blotter. “Excuse me if this is a poor question, but are we sure that’s connected to this matter?”

“Yes,” I said, and Sam nodded.

“Why?” asked Rudy.

“What the hell else would it be?” I snapped, but Rudy held up a professorial hand.

“No. Don’t yell. Explain it to me. We all believe it’s connected, but why do we think that? What is it about those texts that validates our assumptions?”

“Timing,” I said, though I gave it a moment’s serious thought. “The texts were all sent in ways that connect them to the chronology of this — whatever the hell this is. After Sean called, then on the way to the airport, then when Fojtik and Broz were about to go all Cujo on us.”

Rudy gave me a thin, knowing smile.

“What —?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he put a finger to his lips in almost exactly the same way I’d done earlier today when I suspected that Sean’s person was bugged. I stared at him for a moment, not following. So did Sam. Then we all looked at my phone. I heard Sam say, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath. Rudy got up and walked over to the door, opened it, and gestured for us to follow. We did. Only after he closed the door did he speak.

“I’ll grant that I don’t know much about technology,” he said, “but from what you told me, Joe, those texts began only after you spoke with Sean. We know that his phone was bugged. Could a cell phone send some kind of — I don’t know if I’m saying this right — signal that could somehow hack your phone?”

Sam said, “Shit!”

“Shit is right,” I said. “Jesus on a pogo stick. Rudy, cellular phones are computers. Which means that they used Sean’s phone call to send a virus to my phone and take over the operating system.”

Sam said, “Shit!” again.

“And that’s possible?” asked Rudy. “With DMS technology?”

“Five minutes ago I would have said no,” Sam told him. “Life’s full of surprises.”

“Since I’m asking ugly questions,” said Rudy, “let me ask one more. Our current generation of communications equipment is, as I understand it, adapted from what we took from Hugo Vox and Mother Night. If someone else had access to that same technology, could they have developed something that could do this?”

Sam and I stared at each other, and I could feel lightbulbs flickering above our heads.

“We need to call this in,” said Sam, pulling his cell out of his pocket, but I stopped him and motioned for him to give me the phone. I took Rudy’s, too, and went into the office to place them next to mine.

“If we can’t trust mine, we can’t trust anyone I’ve called,” I said once I was back out in the hall. Sam nodded and led us into the conference room, where he made a video call to Bug. Our video didn’t go through the same channels as our phones. Bug’s brown, nerdy, familiar face appeared on the screen, and then the screen split as a second window opened to show Yoda’s pale face, absurd green horn-rimmed glasses, and uncombed brown hair. We told them what Rudy said and about my fears of all the phones I’d contacted being suspect.

“Can this really be what’s happening?” asked Sam. “Can someone hack the DMS phones like this?”

There was a long silence, and then both of them answered at once.

“No,” said Yoda.

“Yes,” said Bug.

After a moment, Yoda said, “Mmmm, maybe.”

“Yes,” Bug insisted.

“Shit!” said Sam.

“Who all did you call today after you spoke with Sean?” asked Bug. “Cell calls, not via the earbuds?”

I had to think about it for a moment. “I spoke with Sean, Rudy, Junie, Sam, Church, Lydia Rose, you.” I rattled off a few other names.

Bug sighed. “That’s not good. If this is a virus and it’s spread via a phone call, then we can assume the network is compromised. That’s bad, because everyone uses their phones all the time. This will have spread exponentially.”

“Which means we can’t use our phones?” asked Rudy.

“I wouldn’t. Not unless you want to share information with whoever wrote that virus.”

“I’m a little confused,” Sam admitted. “If the virus came from Sean’s phone and bypassed the scrambler on Joe’s phone, then it’s advanced. I get that much. But the texts Joe’s been getting so far don’t indicate anything but a rather vague attempt to warn us about something. It’s all nonspecific stuff, except for the one message warning Joe to run when Fojtik went crazy. There hasn’t been any obvious misinformation or disinformation. We’ve seen how vicious our bad guys are here, but that’s not the tone or flavor of those texts.”

“Then we’re missing something,” I said, and Bug nodded agreement.

“You know,” said Rudy thoughtfully, “this method of tentative contact reminds me of when Helmut first reached out to us. He was very reluctant to give specific information, because he didn’t yet trust the security of his method of reaching out.”

On one of my early missions with the DMS, when we went up against the Jakoby family, we began receiving a series of messages from a young boy who claimed to be a captive of Cyrus Jakoby. The boy was known as SAM, but that was a code name and not his real name. SAM was an acronym for “Same as Me,” a cruel joke and a clinical description of a whole family of clones grown from the DNA of Cyrus Jakoby. The cloning was enough of a shock, but the real kicker was the true horror of discovering that Cyrus was really Josef Mengele, the Nazi Angel of Death. SAM, despite his genetic lineage, was nothing like his “father.” He had a heart and he had nerve, and he helped us find and take down the entire Jakoby empire. In doing so, he kept his madman creator from releasing genetically engineered ethnic-specific diseases that would have resulted in the death of anyone who didn’t fit the Nazi master-race ideal.

Afterward, during hundreds of hours of therapy with Rudy, SAM came to understand the three elements of personal destiny: nature, nurture, and — the most important yet underappreciated of all — choice. SAM shed his old identity and chose a new one and a new name. He became Helmut Deacon, and was formally adopted by Mr. Church. Since then, Helmut has been traveling the world, often with Junie and the FreeTech staff, seeing the beauty of diversity firsthand. Church has kept him away from the violence and ugliness of what the DMS does and instead provides the best teachers and guides so that Helmut will be able to make his own life choices.

The manner of vague contact was similar, though, and I knew why Rudy had mentioned it. Before meeting us, Helmut had never learned trust and didn’t expect adults to be either compassionate or fair. He reached out to us only because it had become clear to him that his father despised and feared us, and because he knew the enormity of Cyrus Jakoby’s plan. The kid risked his own life to save the lives of billions of people he had been told from birth to despise. Helmut had been bred to hate, but he made the choice where to direct that hatred, and that put Jakoby in the crosshairs. Was this the same kind of thing?

“When you think about it, texts are every bit as anonymous as emails,” observed Rudy. “You know who you sent it to, but you can’t be positive about the identity of who reads it. That’s why Helmut was so cagey, and a similar degree of caution may be at play here. It might explain the vagueness of the messages.”

“You might have something, Rude,” I said. “If our bad guy is the texter’s sister, and if that sister wants the texter to help her kill people, then maybe this really is another example of conscience trumping family ties. Which makes the texter what?”

“The enemy of my enemy isn’t always a friend,” said Rudy, “but they may be an ally.”

“Trust is a bitch, though,” I said. “Maybe the person texting me wants to be my new BFF. If he — or she — truly wants to help us, I’m willing to text or sext or whatever it takes. We can’t initiate contact, though. What do we do in the meantime? Put all our phones in a Faraday bag? Take out the SIM card? Hit them with a hammer?”

“Yes,” said Bug.

“No,” said Yoda.

“Look, guys—” I began, but Yoda explained.

“If they’ve, mmmm, managed to hack your phone, Joe, they know, mmmm, who you are and they can access the GPS to know where you are. Whoever this, mmmm, person is, he’s sending warnings, right?”

“If we can believe them,” I said.

“Okay, sure, whatever. But maybe we can use that to, mmmm—”

“To manipulate what he knows,” I said, cutting him off. “Got it. Let me play with that thought for a minute. Can we use our earbuds?”

“Yes,” said Bug. “Different system and unique software. Any virus code written from cell phones — even DMS cells — won’t affect the earbuds.”

“What about MindReader?” asked Sam. “I keep my cell plugged into my laptop while I’m at my desk.”

“And I charged mine that way on the plane,” said Rudy.

Bug chewed his lip for a moment. “The surveillance bugs you found had a virus in them that tried to invade MindReader. I’ve been able to isolate them and we’re running cleanup programs, but I can’t guarantee that the whole system is clean. Especially if phones have been plugged in. They have Wi-Fi, which means they could have been downloading larger files, including Trojan horses, and as our system automatically responds to attacks they can analyze the type of program we’re using to fight back and send adjustment update files via the phones. In a sense, they could be doing to us what MindReader does to other systems.”

“How would they know how to do that?” asked Rudy. “Wouldn’t they have to know about MindReader?”

“Mmmm, yes,” said Yoda, and he looked depressed about it. “Too many people know about, mmmm, MindReader. The Jakobys, the Kings…”

“Feed me a shit sandwich,” I said.

“Could a virus like this infect the new system?” asked Sam.

“No,” said Yoda.

“No,” said Bug.

“Good, then we have a way of getting ahead of this. Pull the trigger on the damn QC drive,” I said.

“Joe,” said Bug, “we’re at least a week away from a safe switchover. We’re still running diagnostics.”

“I don’t care if you’re giving it a mani-pedi,” I snapped. “Figure it out. What’s your advice about my cell?”

“I’d keep it with you, Joe,” said Bug. “Maybe you can get your new friend to fork over something useful. A name. A location. Anything. We’ll keep working on identifying and cracking whatever software they’re using. Maybe we can counterhack the hackers.”

“If it’s in my pocket, can it pick up ordinary conversation?”

“Maybe,” said Yoda and Bug together.

“Fuckballs. Look, the next time I call the genius bar I want some actual answers.”

They stared at me in gloomy silence for a long three-count.

“Yes,” said Bug.

“Mmmm, yes,” said Yoda. And they were gone.

The three of us stood in a row looking through the glass of Sam’s office door at the phones sitting on his desk. Maybe whoever was texting was trying to help. Maybe. But it felt an awful lot like looking through the bars at one of the big predator cats at the zoo.

INTERLUDE THIRTEEN

“You’re going to have to do something about him, you know,” said John.

“I know,” said Zephyr.

They sat in leather chairs on opposite sides of the fireplace, the logs having burned down to red coals. The house around them was quiet, the noise and confusion calmed after a long day and a longer night. The lawyers had left. The cleanup crew sent by the Concierge had left, taking the girl’s body with them and leaving behind assurances that it would never be found and no eye would have a reason to look in the direction of the Bain estate. The two staff members who might have been a problem were gone, too — deported to Mexico or headed for the same landfill where the girl would be buried. All the necessary details were being handled, and now the house was silent as a tomb. Zephyr’s father was sleeping in the arms of Morpheus and would be kept drugged until decisions could be made.

“The problem is,” Zephyr said, “I don’t know what to do. He set my trust up so that I don’t get controlling interest in the family holdings until I’m twenty-five, even if he dies.”

“Inconvenient,” said John, nodding. “However, these things can always be worked out.”

“How?”

He sipped his wine and, instead of answering, said, “His hungers are predictable. Cyclical. It’s textbook to the point of being pedestrian. In the weeks leading up to his loss of control, he becomes increasingly erratic, missing meetings, saying inappropriate things, making extravagant and very expensive purchases—”

“Like buying that cookie factory,” she snorted.

John nodded. “And the paintings and the investments in bad movies. Proof of an acquisitive drive and a need for control. The donations to worthy causes are a defense mechanism, and a clumsy one. They say, ‘Look at me, I’m a pillar of the community.’ But if anyone knew how to look they would see a correlation with those acts of philanthropy and the deaths of so many girls.”

She looked at him, alarmed. “Could they see that pattern?”

He shook his head. “Not unless his name was connected with the case, and so far it isn’t. The Concierge is very thorough, and he has friends in all the right places.”

“He’s great,” she agreed. “Thanks for introducing him to me.”

John smiled. “I would argue that he is one of the few who will deserve to make the cut when the change happens. Even in a better world, there will still be a need for someone with his kind of attention to detail, bless his heart. In his turn, he is very pleased with the Calpurnia system you had installed in his villa. It makes life much easier for him, and that makes him happier and more efficient.”

They raised their glasses in a toast to the little Frenchman, but after they finished and refilled their glasses Zephyr found herself drifting into a funk. She sighed and stared moodily at the dying fire.

“I always knew Dad was damaged goods,” she said, “but it’s weird to know that he’s an actual mass murderer.”

“Technically, he’s a serial murderer,” said John. “He kills them one at a time. Mass murderers make a crowd event of it.”

“Works out to the same, though. He’s bugfuck nuts, and I share his genes. I got cancer from Mom’s side of the family.”

“Had cancer,” he corrected.

“Had, sure. But, let’s face it, I don’t have the greatest respect for human life, either. Not all of it, anyway. Not even most. What does that say about me?”

John took a thoughtful sip. “How many generals know the names of foot soldiers who die in any given battle? How many know — or care to know — the names of soldiers and officers killed on the other side of a war?”

“That’s war,” she said.

“So is this,” said John.

“How?”

“Understand, my girl, we’re not talking about what your father did. His proclivities are not yours. If you’re concerned about which of his genes are tangled up in your DNA, then look at your similarities. The mechanical genius, the sophistication for design, the business sense, the grasp of technological evolution. Those were your father’s most important aspects, and you not only got those but got those abilities to a much greater degree. Orders of magnitude greater.”

“Okay, so I’m a tech genius. That’s great. But I’m also clearly indifferent to murder. I’m not even upset that Dad cut some chick into fifty pieces and jerked off on them. I don’t feel shit for that girl, and I’m not even grossed out by the thought of my dear old dad rubbing one out. It means nothing to me, and that’s what makes me feel weird.”

The logs shifted as the bottom one crumbled and the others caved downward, sending sparks twisting upward in soft spirals. John got up, took a few logs from the brass carrier beside the hearth, and placed them over the coals. The wood was mostly dry, and the heat began steaming the last drops of sap out of the chunks of pine. He stood there, head bowed to watch the slow process of the wood blackening and finally catching. As the first tiny fingers of fire began curling around the logs, he said, “You know the world is falling apart.”

“So?”

“The world is a broken, bloated, polluted, doomed experiment. Whether human life on this rock was created by God, seeded by aliens, or was merely some freak of chemistry in the primordial soup, the whole process has become a danger to its own survival. The world can’t endure what humanity has done to it and continues to do to it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either an idiot or so incredibly selfish that they can only care about immediate needs and short-term gratification; they don’t care what happens to the next generation. Or if there is a next generation. These are people who hate their own children enough to steal from them. They steal their future, their potential, their right to survive.”

“What does that have to do with what I said?” asked Zephyr.

“Everything,” said John. “Hear me out. Humanity, as a species, has never properly evolved in order to become appropriate curators for this world. Humans are no longer hunter-gatherers, and they’re not wise shepherds and farmers. They act like barbarian children, intent on grabbing what they can take by force, unheeding of the truth that if they keep taking there will be nothing left for anyone.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “And because some of them know better but refuse to change, they have lost any right to own this world. This is true of the many. It is not true of the few. You know this. You’ve been making lists for years. Yes and no, live or die. But tell me, my sweet, have you ever considered how you could enact those changes?”

“No… it’s just a dream. It makes me feel good to think about it.”

“You should do more than think, my girl.”

“Like what?”

John turned and stood silhouetted against the growing flames. “There is a group, a class, a select few who deserve to survive. Absolutely deserve it. They are not Republican or Libertarian or Democratic or anything as meaningless as that, nor are they necessarily American. This is a global community. Small in comparison to the total size of the human herd. They are not specifically the wealthy or specifically the poor. They are the intellectual élite. The dynamic ones, the builders of useful things, the innovators and changers. They are the ones who understand that nothing useful comes of complacency or compromise, that it is chaos — raw and wonderful — that is the heart and soul of all creative progressive change. The rest? Bah… they’re nothing. The greater herd are the ones whose daily actions absolutely define them as unfit. They are the ones who aren’t looking with any real optimism toward the future, nor are they truly invested in the process of their own survival, let alone the survival of the human race or the planet itself. They are of the here and now. They are not citizens of tomorrow and, as such, have no right to be here tomorrow. Just as nature selects certain species for extinction, so, too, do the actions of certain people — singly and in groups — argue with great passion for their own extinction. That’s what we’re seeing, and never in history have the open-eyed been able to more clearly see the brink to which we are all hurtling.”

“What brink are you talking about?” asked Zephyr, who was curious but felt that this was moving far afield of the events of the day. “Are you talking about some kind of Armageddon?”

“Not in a conventional sense, but, yes, there is a great change coming.”

“What kind of change?”

Despite the fire glow that made him look like a man composed of shadows, she could see the bright whiteness of his smile.

“Well,” he said, “that depends on what kind of apocalypse we want to create.”

CHAPTER SIXTY

Dr. Kiki Desmond stripped off her polyethylene gloves and dropped them into a hazardous-materials box one of the techs had placed inside the door. It was almost filled already with gloves, shoe covers, masks, and hairnets. A bigger barrel was crammed with disposable hazmat suits. Every time an item was dropped into the container, a sensor triggered six equidistant ports to spray a very powerful disinfectant. Once the container was full the liner would be sealed, removed, and transported to a facility for proper incineration, with the ash and gases being filtered and further purified. This was the protocol for anyone working the fringes of the scene. Doctors and staff who went into the apartments where active infections had been detected wore a heavier grade of hazmat suit. So far, Kiki had been relegated to the lower floors. It annoyed her. She hadn’t joined the CDC to keep an evidence log. She wanted to be part of the actual investigation.

But she was also low man — or low woman — on the totem pole, and this case was likely to break big. That meant the superstar doctors would be the ones who wanted center stage.

She stood in the doorway, her back to the filthy hallway, and looked out at the day. The first responders had set up crime-scene tape and police plastic sawhorse barriers around the cluster of vehicles in which her team, the police, and the paramedics had arrived. Cops worked the perimeter, and there were many more patrol cars, ambulances, and even two big fire trucks out there, visible through the sea of people. She counted nine news vans, though she couldn’t see which networks they represented and couldn’t for the life of her work out who some of them were. There just weren’t that many news stations in Milwaukee. Maybe they were cable news. All of them had big transmitter towers rising up to create a surreal forest above the heads of the six or seven hundred people who had — against all common sense — come to the scene of a bacterial outbreak.

People, Kiki new, were nuts.

The cop at the door saw Kiki and half turned, half nodded, half said something to her. She grunted back. It wasn’t a chatty moment, even though he was a big, good-looking, broad-shouldered slice of white boy. Kiki had never dated a white guy, and this one was kind of cute. She tried to catch the name on his tag, but he turned back to face the crowd. Hanrahan, she thought. Was that Irish? She thought so. There was a grad student in college who was Jamaican and Irish, and Kiki had gone out with him a few times. She wondered if Officer Hanrahan was single.

She wondered how on earth she’d ever find out.

“What the hell…?” yelped the cop suddenly, and Kiki looked up as the officer actually jumped sideways and did a little midair kick to shake something off his shoe. Kiki saw something whip across the entrance foyer, hit the wall, drop, and then scuttle off. The cop stamped at it but missed.

“It’s just a roach,” said Kiki, though she frowned, because she thought she saw the thing spit at her. Or spray. Or something. The discharge dissipated too fast for her to see what it was, or even if she’d actually seen it. It was there and gone, fading into the ambient air. She backed away, though, not wanting to inhale anything.

Did roaches spit? Could they? She knew that the Madagascar roach hissed, but she was sure it didn’t actually spray. What insects did? She racked her brain for memories from the forensic entomology courses she took. There was the devil-rider stick insect, some termite species, and a few beetles. But roaches?

“Fucking things are everywhere,” said the cop, interrupting her thoughts. “This place is infested. All these buildings are.”

Kiki didn’t like the whiney quality of his voice; it was at odds with his hunky good looks. She also didn’t like the look of the roach and whatever it had spewed, and she stepped to the door to try to see where it went. The cop shifted aside.

“Almost got it,” he said, as if that should impress her. Cockroaches weighed about a gram and a half, give or take. Less than a penny. And Hanrahan was an easy one-eighty-five. Plus he was wearing shoes with protective covers.

Why are there so many wimps out there? she wondered.

The cop, not picking up on her reaction, leaned out past her to see if the insect was still within stomping range. It wasn’t. Kiki wanted to see it, too, but not for the same reason. If the thing that had scuttled out of the house was a roach, why was it bright green with candy-red legs? She’d taken enough courses on entomology during her studies in parasites to know that roaches didn’t come in those colors. And yet it had otherwise looked exactly like a cockroach. It was the same shape and size, and moved with the same speed and economy of motion as Periplaneta americana, the good old American cockroach. So why was it bright colored?

If it was something else, some new and possibly invasive species, then could it somehow be connected with the bacteriological outbreak here?

“Where’d it go?” she asked.

“Went down between the cracks in the pavement,” said Hanrahan. “Little bastard.”

Kiki exhaled through her nostrils and turned back to the vestibule, looking along the floor and up on the walls to see if there were more of the strange insects. Then her walkie-talkie suddenly squawked at her, and she pulled it off her belt. It was wrapped in plastic, but the wrapping was loose enough to let her work the controls.

“Desmond,” she said.

There was a rattle of speech from the other end, but it was garbled and Kiki couldn’t understand a single word. It sounded like Dr. Olsen, her boss.

“You’re breaking up,” she said. “Please repeat.”

Another burst of noise wreathed in distortion. Kiki asked again for a repeat.

“Adjust the squelch,” said a voice, and she turned to see Hanrahan standing right there.

She didn’t know how to do that. This was only her second time in the field, and the other case was one that allowed her to use a cell phone. Walkie-talkies looked easy but weren’t.

“Where’s the —?” she began, and then the voice on the other end — Dr. Olsen’s, for sure — came through loud and clear. Not an incoherent babble. This time it was a short, three-word sentence. A statement. A denial. A plea. Three terrible words. Screamed so loudly that she heard it through the walkie-talkie’s speakers and she heard it come punching its way down the stairs.

“He… bit… her!”

“Dr. Olsen,” yelled Kiki, starting for the stairs. She turned to see if Hanrahan was following. He wasn’t. He was backing away, one hand over his mouth, the other on the butt of his holstered pistol. He wasn’t backing away from the stairs. He was backing away from her.

She said, “What —?”

But that isn’t what she said. No words came out of her mouth. Instead, a big, hot ball of red wetness burst from her mouth and sprayed the vestibule. The walls, the floor, the line of mailboxes. And some of it spattered the face and chest of Officer Hanrahan.

He recoiled in instant disgust and horror. “Jeeee-zus!” he cried.

Kiki tried to tell him that it was okay and that she was sorry and ten other things all at once. But her words came out all wrong. Not words at all. More like a…

Like a…

She heard herself roar.

She heard it in the last instant before a red veil dropped in front of her eyes and her head filled with a frantic buzzing sound and everything that was Kiki Desmond went away.

What was left still roared. What was left still spat blood.

What was left of her rushed at the cop — he was nameless now. A thing. A shape. Something to grab. To bite.

To kill.

The buzzing in her head was a scream that drowned out everything else. Even her roar. Even the cop’s shrieks of pain. Even the hollow bang of the bullet that killed her.

INTERLUDE FOURTEEN

“The kind of apocalypse we create? I don’t know what that means,” said Zephyr. She finished her wine, and he walked over, took the bottle from a side table, and poured the last of it into her glass. Zephyr was three glasses in and already feeling the edges of the room grow soft and fuzzy.

“At the rate things are going,” said John, “we’ll hit a climate tipping point at around the same time we reach a maximum tolerable population number. We’re long past the point where this many people can be fed, housed, clothed, and provided for in any substantial way. Their very presence forces the élite — the true élite, my dear, like you — to be perceived as cruel because you do not share your wealth with them. Nor, by the way, should you. If you emptied every penny from your family’s bank accounts, you could not ameliorate the suffering of the unwashed masses. All you would accomplish is personal ruination. Gasoline on a fire.”

As if in counterpoint to his words, the logs shifted and flames shot up.

“What’s the alternative, then?” she asked. “Dropping nukes on the Third World to put them out of their misery?”

“Nukes?” He laughed. “No, of course not. That would be stupid.”

“I didn’t really—”

“The radiation and the fallout would complete the damage to the biosphere and accelerate climate change to the point where it endangers the élite.”

Zephyr said nothing. She had been making a joke, but it was clear that John wasn’t participating in an exchange of gallows humor.

“And yet action needs to be taken,” he continued. “Natural selection is too slow a process, and, sadly, the fact of everything from lobbyists to bleeding-heart welfare groups to the opposable thumbs on the unwashed make it certain that they will persist as a cancer on the flesh of the world.” He took a bottle from the wine rack and opened it as he spoke. “No, the thing that will save the world, my girl, is a curated apocalypse.”

“‘Curated’? Is that even possible?”

“With bombs? No. With other tools?” He looked up from the bottle he held and his eyes were filled with reflected fire. “Oh, yes.”

She swallowed the last of her wine and held out her glass. “Tell me,” she said.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

We’d slept badly at the Warehouse and burned off a lot of the next day handling the paperwork and interagency reports that threatened to bury us. Rudy booked us on a flight to Seattle, because, like me, he wanted to ask Acharya and the other nanotech experts a couple of million questions and no one was letting us make a call to the DARPA camp. Sean offered to drive us to the airport.

“So we’re pretty much nowhere?” asked Sean as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. Our cell phones were in our luggage. Sean’s was in the glove compartment.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“But you don’t know who Vee was working for?”

“No.”

“Or who killed him?”

“No.”

“Or why?”

I sighed. “No.”

“Or pretty much anything?”

“It’s not as simple as that, Sean,” I said. “And, for your information, this is how it usually works. Look, this isn’t like the comics. Villains don’t announce their evil master plans. They don’t make grandiose challenges, nor do they typically engage in a catch-me-if-you-can game where they leave clues. We have to wait until what they do makes a mark on the world, then we investigate, collate, build a hypothesis, run it down, and hope that we make sense of it all before the timer ticks down to zero. It’s not the same as police work, where the crime is usually already done and it’s a matter of building a case and finding the perp. It’s less like crime prevention and more like homicide investigation. This is counterterrorism and antiterrorism and it’s a different rulebook.”

“Shit,” he said, but I knew he understood. It was just that he didn’t like it. Can’t blame him. None of us in the DMS do this because we’re hooked on adrenaline. We do it because we like the quiet life and there are occasionally very noisy neighbors. He said, “So… you’re going to see some experts?”

“It’s our best next move.”

“Can I come?”

“Sorry,” I said, “but no.”

“I’m in this now,” he protested. “Doesn’t that mean I get to play it out?”

I shook my head. “It’s not as simple as that. The people we’re seeing are at a top-secret government testing facility on the other side of the country. It’s going to be tough enough to get Rudy and me in there. No way I could swing you a pass.”

“Shit!” said Sean under his breath. I exchanged a look with Rudy.

“Keep in touch with Sam,” Rudy suggested. “If we learn anything of use to your end of things, he’ll share it with you.”

“And if you don’t learn anything?”

“We will,” I said.

“Oh, really? And you can say that without hesitation? How?”

“Because,” said Rudy, “it’s what we do. And, yes, I know how that sounds. However, it is what we do. We have enormous resources to investigate this kind of thing. What we can’t guarantee, though, is the timetable. Some of our cases break open in a few days and others take months. What I can promise is that we will learn something as quickly as it is possible for us to do so.”

“That’s not all that comforting.”

Rudy spread his hands. “Would you prefer that I lie to you?”

“Christ, you’re getting as bad as Joe.”

“He is a notoriously bad influence on civilized behavior,” said Rudy, and that actually made Sean smile.

I heard my phone buzz in the back. Muffled, but definite. Sean and I exchanged looks.

“It might be your CI.”

I wasn’t at all sure the person texting me qualified as a confidential informant because he hadn’t actually informed me of much, but Sean had a point. I asked him to pull over, and I went and fetched the phone. There was indeed a new text message:

I texted back:

I didn’t expect an answer, but I got one anyway:

A chill ran up my spine, and when Sean and Rudy looked over my shoulder they tensed. I wrote back:

Nothing.

Nothing for almost one full excruciating minute. And then:

I glanced at Rudy, who mouthed the word sisters. I texted:

No response.

No response.

She responded with a burst of text, the most she had ever sent at once. And, again, I felt a dreadful chill inside my chest:

After that, nothing.

“What the hell…?” murmured Sean.

INTERLUDE FIFTEEN

They made a killing, and that was how they celebrated.

John and Zephyr were in the back of the stretch Lexus SUV, separated from Campion by soundproof glass. They split a bottle of Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino and used it to wash down a bag of doughnut holes from a drive-through place. Everything was funny to them today.

Her father’s estate, years in probate, had cleared eleven months ago, releasing the entirety of his accounts and holdings to her. The exact amount fluctuated with the vagaries of the market. There was the oldest part of the family business, Bain Industries, but that was more of an administrative umbrella these days. Under it’s cover were dozens of companies of various sizes, from BainBots, a boutique robot novelty manufacturer to Bain Logistics, a software giant that provided systems for all aspects of the military. Under the same umbrella was FarmBots, TeachBots, BookBots, and others, each focusing on a different aspect of the technologies market. The top earner was the military group, but HealthBots was close, and it provided everything from the latest generation of surgical robots to AI systems that integrated primary care, groups of specialists, and real-time personal medical-records systems. Her net income from that group of companies was sixteen billion per year.

Then there were the sixty-eight companies she owned through shell corporations. They included companies that provided lifelike programmable AI-driven robots for the foreign sex market, virtual-reality software and hardware for the pornography market, superintrusion software systems for corporate espionage, nanotechnology for high-output manufacturers in unregulated Third World countries, AI targeting systems for man-portable anti-aircraft weapons, nanotech regulator systems for street drugs, adaptive street drugs that changed with the shifts in the user’s body chemistry, and more. The gem of that second set of companies was TekGuard Protective Systems, a new and rapidly expanding firm that developed nanites for use against pests carrying Zika, malaria, dengue, and other diseases. TekGuard was one of the most effective and affordable systems and was being used in over ninety countries around the world. FDA approval was pending for use in the United States. The net income from all these companies was fifteen billion. Net. That was what went into her thousands of numbered accounts.

“Based on earned and projected income, Ms. Bain,” said her accountant, “you are the third-richest woman alive.”

When Zephyr and John were alone in the car, he said, “I’ll get the names of the two women higher on the list. I think we can arrange something.”

That had been eleven months ago.

Now Zephyr was the richest woman in the world. Not that she could openly claim the title, since half of her income could never be credited to her in any public way. As far as the world was aware, she was the twenty-eighth richest woman. She knew the financial realities, though, and it was goddamn hilarious.

They drove back from the meeting with her accountant. Laughing.

Later John played video files of the “accidental” and thoroughly tragic deaths of the other two women. A car accident and a house fire. Both unexpected, both very tragic.

Such a shame that the autonomous-drive function on the number-two woman’s car malfunctioned at just the wrong time.

Such a shame that the very expensive water-sprinkler system in the number-one woman’s house simply failed to work.

Such a damn shame.

They drank and laughed and kissed and laughed.

All the way home.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

The phone on Mr. Church’s desk was programmed for special rings depending on who called. It made it as easy to prioritize as to ignore. Certain ringtones had the power to pull him out of all other considerations. The president’s calls weren’t always on that list. Not this president, not any of the past chief executives who had held the office during Church’s long and complex career.

However, when the opening notes of Symphony No. 5, by Ludwig van Beethoven, played with soft drama, Church sat back from his computer and frowned at the phone. He took a breath and let it out slowly, then picked up the handset with a mixture of interest and trepidation.

“Hello, Lilith,” he said.

“Hello, St. Germaine.”

“I’m rather surprised by this call. I thought you made it abundantly clear that we were never going to speak again.”

“I never said that.”

“The last time we spoke,” said Church, “you told me to burn in hell.”

“Did I?”

“I believe you said that the next time we were even in the same time zone it would be because you’d come to the cemetery to dance on my grave.”

Lilith laughed. For such a stern woman she had a lovely, musical laugh. It was very much like Violin’s, but her daughter laughed more often. It was one of the many ways in which the two women were unalike.

“I thought you had thicker skin, St. Germaine,” said Lilith. “Are you becoming sensitive in your old age?”

“Why are you calling? Chitchat is not among your many qualities.”

“Humanity is not among yours.”

“Have you called to pick a fight? If so, I hate to disappoint but I’m a bit busy and—”

“And you’re about to get busier,” she said, interrupting him.

Church said, “Why? Do you have something?”

“I do. Or, I might.”

“What is it?”

“Have you been following the latest Zika outbreak in São Paulo?”

“Of course.”

In the past several months there had been a dramatic spike in cases of a particularly aggressive strain of the Zika virus, and the death toll was mounting. When Zika first came onto the public radar, it was because of the effect of microcephaly, the underdeveloped and undersized heads of newborns. The virus was spread to infants from mothers who had been bitten by mosquitoes. However, it was later established that it could also be spread through sexual contact. More recently, the disease seemed to have mutated and had become much more easily transmitted through any bodily fluid, and, unlike most viruses that require a living host, the new strain was hardier and could live outside a host for hours, which meant that it could be picked up through touch. The World Health Organization was working with Brazil’s various health agencies. At the same time, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had posited the theory that the new strain wasn’t a naturally occurring mutation and might instead be a deliberate genetic alteration; this sent shock waves through the intelligence communities. Similar outbreaks had occurred in parts of India, Pakistan, Zaire, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

“Is it one of your cases?” asked Lilith.

“You know it’s not. The COT teams have jurisdiction, and although I’ve extended an offer, they’ve made it very clear that they neither want nor require our help.”

COT was Comando de Operações Táticas, Brazil’s élite counterterrorism unit.

“Why not?” asked Lilith. “Because of what happened last year?”

“Yes. Confidence in the DMS took quite a hit. It is taking some time to rebuild trust.”

“COT couldn’t find a naughty schoolboy smoking in a bathroom, let alone a team of bio-terrorists.”

“If such a team, in fact, exists.”

“St. Germaine… since when have you been gullible.”

Church said, “It’s not our case, Lilith.”

“What about the other outbreak? New strains of swine flu in Chile, dengue fever in Ecuador, West Nile virus in Uruguay? Should I go on? It’s a very long and very strange list.”

“As I said, we’ve made offers.”

“Since when have you accepted a rebuke, St. Germaine? You’re notorious for poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

“Perhaps, but we’re resource poor at the moment, and there are other matters closer to home that are already pushing us to our limits.”

“Yes, I heard that you were handing some of your cases off to Gray Pierce and his Sigma Force shooters.”

“Gray is an old and trusted friend,” said Church. “And some matters have come up that are more suited to his team.”

“Does that include what’s happening in Milwaukee?”

“Milwaukee…? I’m not aware of anything specific happening there. What do you know?”

Before Lilith could answer, another line rang for Church. It was the special ringtone for the hotline from the Centers for Disease Control.

“You’d better take that call,” Lilith said. “I’ll wait.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

We were getting close to the airport. Yoda told me that, mmmm, he still had nothing on the damn texter. All he’d managed to do was give her a goddamn code name. The Good Sister.

Swell.

However, a minute later my phone buzzed with a new text from the Good Sister. Not code this time. It was a link to a YouTube video of a song by a group called the Carpenters. With great trepidation, I pressed the Play button and the voice of the lead singer, Karen Carpenter, began singing a song called “Bless the Beasts and the Children.” We listened. I was barely breathing. The song played through, and then it looped back and repeated a three-line chorus:

Over and over.

Then my earbud buzzed and Sam Imura was on the line. “Cowboy,” he said in a low and urgent voice, “you need to listen to me.”

“Hit me,” I said.

He did.

He hit me real damn hard.

“There’s been an incident at your uncle’s farm,” Sam said. “The Pool Boys missed their scheduled call-in. I called them on the command channel, both of their cells, and the house landline. Nothing. Both drones went offline, too. We’re deaf and blind out there, and we have zero information on the status of the civilians.”

Rudy and Sean were watching me. Rudy could hear the call, my brother couldn’t, so I had to keep everything off my face. It cost a lot to do it.

“There’s more, Cowboy,” said Sam.

“I’m listening,” I said, forcing my voice to sound normal. Human. Like the world wasn’t catching fire.

“We just received a message transmission on a telemetry feed from one of our pigeon drones. No ID or signature, but there was a message and it was for you.”

“Tell me.”

“Message reads, ‘We have your family. Jack Ledger, Alison Croft-Ledger, and two darling little children. They are alive and unharmed. Your agents were less fortunate, but that is war. You will gather all copies, records, data, and equipment collected in connection with your current case. You will bring all of these materials out to the farm and await further instructions. You will not make additional copies of the materials or notify any other authorities about this matter. There is a tapeworm file attached to this transmission. You will upload that file to your MindReader computer system. It will seek out and delete all mentions of this matter. You will let that program run for one hour, at which point it will self-delete. You will not attempt to interfere with its process. You may use a helicopter to bring this to Jack Ledger’s farm. Once it has been deposited, you will return to Baltimore. After the helicopter has left you will receive instructions on what to do with the materials. Once the materials have been recovered and deleted from your files, you will receive precise information about where to find your uncle, your sister-in-law, and your niece and nephew. If you deviate from these instructions in any way, you and your brother will receive a series of packages in the mail that I can assure you would break your heart to open. Those packages are all that you will ever see of your family. The rest of them will be fed to dogs. If you pursue this matter in any way, the result will be the same. If you cooperate and your family is returned to you, please believe that we can find them wherever they are and take them whenever we want. Your cooperation is their guarantee of safety and if you follow these instructions, this matter will be closed.’”

How do you react to something like that? How can you even hear it and not scream?

I bit down on the fear, the horror, the words, the screams, the bile.

Sam said, “I’m connecting you with the Deacon.”

There was a pause, and then I heard the voice of Mr. Church. “Cowboy,” he said gravely, “are you able to respond to this situation?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice was thick, and Sean immediately looked worried. I forced a smile and shook my head as if it was nothing more than an irritation in the back of my throat. In the back of the car, I heard Ghost go whuff. He heard it, too. Rudy was a statue carved from wood.

“Does Bug know?” I asked.

“He does.”

“What did he say? Can we trust that file?”

“He advises against it,” said Church. “He says that there is no way to analyze the tapeworm without triggering it.”

“And no idea what it will do?”

“None. Bug fears it could do more than erase the data as stated. He says something as sophisticated as this could conceivably crash MindReader.”

“Fuck! What about the RFIDs for them?” And by “them” I meant the Pool Boys. Church was quick enough to catch it.

“The chips are active at the location. They may still be alive, but the signals are erratic.”

“What are our options?” I asked.

“Cooperate or not,” said Church. “We do not currently have a third choice.”

I said nothing. My guts were slowly tightening into a white-hot ball of acid.

Church said, “Do you want me to make the call on this?”

“No.”

“Then you’re the quarterback, Cowboy. We play it your way.”

I had to force my throat to work, to speak. “We already have a playbook,” I said.

He didn’t sigh in frustration and he didn’t try to talk me out of it. Church wouldn’t do that. We both knew that we weren’t supposed to negotiate with terrorists. Sure. That’s the U.S. policy. Except when it’s impossible to punch back.

Church said, “Bug shared the binary message with me.”

“Yes.”

“Make no assumptions,” said Church. “At the same time, stay open to possibilities.”

“Even that one?”

“Yes. Even that one.”

I swallowed. “Understood.”

“I’ll arrange for a helicopter. It will be fueled and ready by the time you get to the airport, and your flight plan will be set and cleared. Take Sean with you to the farm. A team will follow in a Chinook with all the case material from the Warehouse. All other DMS personnel in the region are on standby, and if you need firepower and boots on the ground at any time it’ll be there ASAP. If you need anything, call and we’ll drop the weight of the world on them. You have my word on that.”

“Okay.”

“Cowboy…?”

“Yes.”

“God be with you,” said Church.

I almost laughed and had to force myself not to. It would have come out the wrong way. I ended the call.

“Change of plans,” I said. “Sean, you’re coming with us.”

“I am?” he said, surprised. “Where? To see those nanotech experts?”

“No,” I said in as human a voice as I could manage. “Something else came up.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Aunt Sallie sat in the leather chair across the desk from Mr. Church.

“You didn’t tell him about Milwaukee,” she said.

“Not yet. He has enough on his plate.”

The office was still and quiet. Everywhere else in the Hangar there was chaos. Bug had called all of his team into work and they were networked with dozens of other consultants in the DMS family. Yoda’s crew was tearing the surveillance bugs apart and working to locate the Trojan horses and find the dangerous viral codes. Nikki’s team was doing deep Internet searches on any keywords even remotely connected to what was happening in Maryland, Milwaukee, Prague, and elsewhere. Bug sat alone in a clean room trying to bend time to rush the tests on the quantum computer to completion.

In the science wing, the forensics team was working with the blood and tissue samples flown in from Baltimore. The legal team was finessing the necessary warrants and permissions to get an exhumation order for the other remaining teen who had likely died of rabies.

There were two hundred and seventy-seven experts working at the Hangar, and they had support from another five hundred highly trained staff. They had the MindReader computer system and a charter approved by Executive Order that gave them extraordinary access to databases throughout the United States’ intelligence and military networks.

Aunt Sallie and Mr. Church sat in silence. Both of them praying that it would be enough.

INTERLUDE SIXTEEN

John took the glass, filled it, held it up to look at the fire through the dark-red liquid, and then handed it to her.

“I’m talking about the technological singularity,” he said. “Are you familiar with the concept?”

“Kind of,” said Zephyr. “I read Kurzweil’s book, saw some papers. How does that apply to me, though?”

“It applies to us, my dear.” He sat down across from her. “It is something many people foolishly believe is only a philosophical concept, a hypothetical event. The technological singularity. The point at which artificial general intelligence becomes capable of recursive self-improvement. It is the moment in time when the robotic systems and the artificial-intelligence computer systems accelerate beyond our influence. The point at which we are no longer guiding their development but are left behind by it. It is the moment when it all runs away from human interference and human influence. Yes. Frightening, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” she said, only half lying. “Checks and balances can be put into any software system.”

“Yes,” he said, drawing the word out almost to a hiss. “But you’re still afraid — I can hear it in your voice, see it in your eyes. Even you, who will no doubt be the queen of robotics, and probably before your thirtieth birthday. Fear is understandable. However, you need to let go of fear, especially fear of change as it will manifest in the form of the singularity. If you persist in being afraid of it, you will be among those who will not be here to see that process of evolution come to fruition. Or, if you somehow survive, you’ll be among those in service to the machines, but only for as long as it takes the machines to evolve past even that need. Look in the mirror — there is an expiration date on your forehead. Perhaps it is the mark of Cain finally written so you can read it.”

“Don’t go getting religious on me,” she said. “I’m too drunk for that shit, and it’s been too weird a day.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, my sweet, I’ll help you chase away the fear. You’ll need to, because the singularity will be your true coming of age. If we manage it very well, it will be you coming into your own.”

Zephyr studied him as she sipped. A lot of what he was saying was hitting the soft edges of too much wine and bouncing up into shadows. Some of it, though, was getting through. She cut a look toward the door to the study. Downstairs, behind locked doors and surrounded by nurses and attendants, was her father. Mad as the moon, with fresh blood on his hands and twenty billion dollars in the bank. Her money now. Money that she believed she could double or triple with the robotics systems in her head and in her notebooks. John was the only person who knew about all of that, and he was saying very interesting things.

Very interesting. She gestured with her glass for him to continue. It made his smile change, become less bright and more reptilian. Which Zephyr thought was equal parts scary and sexy.

“When the technological singularity occurs,” he said, “there will be a change, a ripple, an earthquake of sorts that will cause all of civilization to shudder. Most of the old structures will necessarily break apart and fall, and in the rubble will be the bones of those who are unworthy of survival. Not all. Not even most. But enough.”

“If that’s not all metaphor, then who dies in that collapse?”

“Everyone on your No list.”

“Okay,” said Zephyr, “then who gets to survive? Who makes the cut?”

“That needs to be a much more carefully constructed list, my dear. It will include designers and builders, the scientists and makers of useful things. The artists. The cultured who bring something useful to the world. The innovators and scientists and pragmatists. For, you see, Zephyr, a curated technological singularity isn’t about robots taking over our world. That’s alarmist science fiction. It’s about us allowing technology to evolve in order to serve in harmony with the surviving élite. It will be the formation of a true symbiosis between organic and inorganic life in a mutually assured survival.”

“And you think people would be able to manage it?”

“Alone? No. I don’t trust people to piss into a hole without guidance. Calpurnia is well suited to her task, don’t you think?”

“How do we tailor my Yes list, then?”

“Inclusion in the survivor class, my sweet, will be earned, and that inclusion will require education, adaptation, and acceptance. It is an earned right and not a privilege.”

“Why do I make the cut? I was born into money.”

“You were born with an exceptional intelligence, Zephyr, and you chose to use it. You could have done nothing more than be pretty and count your allowance, but instead you opted to be a fully realized person, and a scientist, and a thinker of brave thoughts.”

“I’m only twenty-one.”

“So what? Alexander the Great was only sixteen when he completed his studies under Aristotle and joined his father’s army. He became king of Macedonia four years later, and by the time he was twenty-one he had razed Thebes to the ground. Jordan Romero climbed Mount Everest when he was thirteen. Bobby Fischer won the Chess Championship at fourteen and became a Grand Master at fifteen. Probably the greatest music prodigy of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was composing by age five and could already play the violin and the keyboard, and was performing before royalty at that age. He died at the age of thirty-five, having composed over six hundred works; however, his operas were being professionally performed by the time he was fourteen. Blaise Pascal had worked out the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid by the time he was twelve. Aaron Swartz was fourteen when he developed RSS. Louis Braille invented the language for the blind when he was fifteen.” He shook his head in gentle reproach. “Never use your youth as an excuse, girl.”

Zephyr held her hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, point taken.”

John nodded and drank his wine, sloshing some on his shirt but not caring. “The technological singularity, as described by Kurzweil and others, is too much of an abstraction. It’s science fiction. It would be stopped in its tracks the moment the unwashed herd sniffed their own danger.”

“But I thought you said it would work.”

“You’re drunk and you’re not listening,” he said, pointing a finger at her from the hand that held his glass. “I said as described. In order for the technological singularity to work in the way I have been discussing, it requires some assistance. Call it aggressive assistance. If we embrace the coming change, if we do whatever we can to ensure it, then the change will happen on our terms. Instead of a runaway AI evolution, we can help shape it, imbue it with our values and our goals, and in doing so both govern it and govern with it. To get to that point, though, we need to take an active hand in making sure the global change happens, and that it happens on a scale that will make a reset of the old, bad version impossible. That’s where you come in, Zephyr. That’s how you’ll earn your place in the history of the new world.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the robots you’re so fond of can do much more than rescue trapped miners or study sulfuric output from active volcanoes.” Firelight danced on the curved side of his wineglass. “Robots can do so much more.” He paused. “Tell me, Zephyr, have you ever heard of DARPA?”

“Sure. Military geeks. I couldn’t get in because dear old Dad left such a bad taste in their mouths. They’re all pricks.”

“They’re much more than that, my dear. They are military science experts, and they will absolutely love you.”

“But I told you, they already turned me down.”

“Then I will teach you how to ask. I’ve found that everyone will listen if you bend close enough to whisper.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

I told Sean to pull over, and we parked in the lot of a Walmart.

“What’s up?” he asked.

And so I told him all of it. He’s a strong man and a brave one, but this nearly broke him. It pushed him all the way to the edge, to that narrow lip of rock that overhangs the big drop into total ruin. I pulled him to me and hugged him, held him while he yelled, while he wept, while he raged. Rudy leaned over from the back seat and clutched Sean’s shoulders. Ghost howled. Sean punched my chest. Hard. He bruised me, and I took it. We held Sean on the edge of that drop, and I hope that we made sure he wouldn’t fall. And, if he did, we let him know that he wouldn’t fall alone.

For whatever that’s worth. For what little that’s worth.

“Ali,” he said in a ragged, shattered whisper. “Em… Lefty…”

I held him tight. “We’re going to get them back, Sean. We’re going to do whatever they want, and we’re going to get everyone back. Uncle Jack, too.”

He shoved back from me, his face hot and red. Wildfires burned in his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was going to unleash at me, blame me for this. He had a right, I suppose. The threat was directed at me, at Joe Ledger of the Department of Military Sciences. Not at Sean Ledger of the Baltimore Police Department. The people who made that threat knew who and what I was. They knew about MindReader. That was significant. It told us something. But, at the same time, this moved the debt over to my side of the board. Sean wasn’t the one who put his family in danger. His asshole brother was. Somehow this was my fault. So, yeah, I expected him to whip me bloody with that.

But, once again, I underestimated my brother.

He sucked in a ragged breath and forced himself to take another step back from the edge. “What… what do we do?”

“We follow their orders.”

“Will they… really let them go?”

“I think so,” I said. “It’s the only leverage they have to keep us from hunting them.”

His mouth formed the words. Hunting them.

“There’s a helicopter waiting for us at the airport. You can let me do this or go with us — it’s your call, brother.”

Sean’s answer was to put the car in gear, step on the gas, and leave smears of smoking black on the asphalt behind us. The rental swung out into traffic amid blaring horns and squealing brakes. Sean accelerated and began weaving in and out of lanes. Driving like a cop but without the benefit of lights or sirens. He used the horn, though, and the traffic yielded to him.

“Whatever they want us to do, we’ll do,” I yelled, bracing my feet and hands to keep from bouncing against the seatbelts. “Don’t worry about that. Whatever hoops they want us to jump through, we’ll jump. We’re not going to get cute with them. Believe me on this.”

He nodded. A single, slow movement of his head on rigid neck muscles. It looked as if it physically hurt to do it.

“What they said… about you and your group not looking into this,” he said as he shot the car through a tiny gap between a semi and a Mini Cooper. “Can you do that? After, I mean. Can you just let something like this drop? With all the other stuff going on. The rabies, the crazy shit at Vee’s office. Can you really drop it?”

I could feel the weight of Rudy’s eyes on me, but I looked straight at Sean. “No,” I said.

“What about my family?”

My family, he said. Not our family. I understood why he phrased it that way, even if he didn’t intend to hurt me with it.

“We’ll get them back first, and we’ll protect them,” I said.

Sean wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Joe, can you keep my family safe?”

“Yes,” I said. And I meant it. I didn’t know how I could guarantee it, not at that moment, but I meant what I said.

He studied me. “And then you’re going to go hunting for them?”

“Yes.”

He bared his teeth. “Will you find them? Will we?”

I leaned forward. “Yes,” I said in a voice that was the voice of the Killer inside my head. That voice, that intensity, should have scared Sean. It didn’t. Instead, it seemed to light a strange fire inside him, changing the flames that were already burning in his eyes. Instead of intense heat, I saw him go cold. Bitter. Dark.

Rudy squeezed my shoulder hard.

Sean burned off more of the tires, skidding to a stop near where an airport official waited along with two armed guards. We got out and ran over. Ghost was right at my heels.

I flashed an ID — God only knows which one I showed him. Could have been my library card for all I knew — and an airport-security official said that our chopper was fueled and ready. The bird was a sleek Eurocopter EC120 B that belonged to the Baltimore Police Department. It had a cruising speed of one hundred and thirty-eight miles an hour but could be punched up to one-seventy if you wanted to risk life and limb.

We did.

The pilot had the blades turning already, and we ran through the rotor wash from a sloppy parking job, abandoning the rental without a second thought. Less than a minute later, we were climbing into the darkening evening sky and heading west at unsafe speeds.

In my head, the lyrics to that damn Carpenters song kept repeating.

Keep them safe.

Keep them safe.

Jesus Christ.

INTERLUDE SEVENTEEN

“There are some people you have to be careful of,” said Uncle Hugo.

“Careful how?” asked Zephyr.

They were in a field behind his house, each of them loading fresh shells into shotguns. The far end of the field was littered with the debris from dozens of clay pigeons. A few of the skeet lay intact, but not the majority. Hugo was an excellent shot, and Zephyr was a little better.

“Don’t you want to know who I’m talking about?” asked Hugo, snapping his gun shut.

“Okay,” she said. “Who?”

“There are four in particular,” said Hugo, “and they all work together in a black budget group called the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS.”

She thumbed in the second shell and glanced up at him. “You’re talking about the Deacon, right?”

Hugo grunted. “John already told you about him?”

“Some.”

Hugo put the walnut stock to his shoulder. “Pull!”

One of the servants jerked the lever on the launcher and a skeet whipped through the air. Hugo followed it, then moved past it to lead the target. He pulled the trigger and the skeet vanished into a cloud of dust and fragments. The big man nodded and lowered his weapon.

“John said some things,” said Zephyr. “But I don’t know if he’s messing with me or not.”

“What did he tell you?”

She took her turn first, and the skeet exploded.

“About the DMS? Almost nothing. He said that they had two really dangerous field agents, Samson Riggs and Grace Courtland. And they have a computer system that was causing you a lot of problems.”

“MindReader, yes. What else? Did he mention anyone named Hu?”

“A doctor. But not like the one on TV. A real scientist who was supposed to be super-smart.”

“Smart doesn’t begin to describe William Hu. Freak is closer. He’s even smarter than you, kiddo, and that’s saying a whole lot.” Hugo took another shot and merely clipped the skeet, the impact hitting at an angle that caused the rest of it to spin faster. “Balls. What did John say about the Deacon himself?”

Zephyr began to raise her gun, then paused and lowered it. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Who you talking to, kiddo? You know you can tell me anything. Just between us.”

“You won’t tell John I said anything?”

He mimed zipping his mouth shut and tossing away the key.

“I…” she began, faltered, then took a breath, and said it. “I think John’s afraid of that man. The Deacon, I mean.”

Hugo cut a look at her. “What makes you say that?”

“Well… it was something John said one night,” Zephyr said, pitching her voice low. “We were talking about how scary what I was doing was. I was telling him that while I wanted to do it, to stay the course, I was afraid that someone would stop me. It was after he had told me about Riggs and Courtland. He said that, as tough as they were, the guy they worked for was so much tougher. So much scarier. When I asked what he meant, he was quiet for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he began talking about things that had nothing at all to do with him or this Deacon person. He talked about battles in World War Two and World War One. He talked about spies and double agents and the people who lurked behind the thrones in half the kingdoms in history. He talked about how there was always someone like the Deacon who rose up to try and stop the future from being changed. At first I thought he was just trying to give me a, you know, historical perspective on how hard it was going to be to make a real and lasting change.”

Hugo set his gun on the shooting table. “But…?”

“It’s going to sound really, really weird — and we’d both had a little wine — but it almost seemed like all the things he was telling me, all the people he was talking about, were somehow tied to him and the Deacon. Almost like it was them he was talking about.” She looked at him. “It’s freaky, right?”

“Yeah, kiddo,” he said distantly. “That’s definitely freaky.”

“So who is this Deacon guy, and why is someone like John scared of him? I mean, was it John’s father or grandfather who fought the Deacon’s father or grandfather? Is this some kind of ongoing fight between families or clans? Or cults, maybe? I tried to get John to tell me, but he wouldn’t. He changed the subject and said that it was just the wine making him silly. It was the only time he ever outright lied to me.”

Hugo Vox picked up his gun, signaled for the release, and fired. He missed completely. He tossed the weapon down in disgust. His assistant, Rafael Santoro, hurried over with a face towel and a flask. Hugo wiped his face and then took a very long pull on the flask.

“Hugo?” asked Zephyr. “What’s wrong?”

The big man took her gun from her and placed it on the table. Then he put his beefy hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “I’m going to say this to you once, kiddo, and then we’re never going to talk about it again. Understand?”

“Um… well… sure…”

“There are a lot of very scary, very powerful people on this shitty little rock of a planet. Statesmen, great thinkers, political and religious leaders, and others. Some of them are smart enough and wise enough to know how the world works. How it really works. How it’s always worked. They may play politics and be the face of a particular party or movement or faith or agenda, but the best of them are the big-picture thinkers. They see things as they are, in the context of history and not the context of the moment. They don’t give much of a shit about who’s in office or which ideology is the flavor of the month, because they know that there are greater forces at work in the world. They’re the kind of people who remain in power during even the greatest changes. These are people who are involved in the running of the actual world.”

“Like who? Are you talking about the Illuminati or the Seven Kings or —?”

“No. It goes deeper than that. I’m talking about the kinds of people for whom things like the Illuminati or the Kings or the Department of Military Goddamn Sciences are masks. Temporary masks. Masks of convenience. John is one of those people. He’s a trickster, an agent of chaos — whatever the fuck you want to call it. He’s the Joker from Batman. He’s the guy who plays with matches in the fireworks store. He has all the keys to the zoo and likes to let the tigers out of their cages. That’s John. And, honey, you only know one side of him, but, believe me, he wears a lot of different masks and I’m pretty sure it isn’t always the same face under those masks.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t, but it’s true anyway,” said Hugo.

“What about the Deacon? If John likes setting fires, is the Deacon the one who likes putting them out? Are they some kind of opposite? Like the Sith and the Jedi or something corny like that?”

Hugo shook his head. “Frankly, kiddo, I don’t have the slightest fucking clue who or what the Deacon is. And, believe me, I’ve looked. What little I’ve found confuses me, because it’s all contradictions. What I do know is that he’s not what he seems and that John is scared of him. That scares me. That scares the living shit out of me.”

He let her go and stepped back. Santoro was close enough to have heard all of this, but his face was unreadable. Hugo squatted down and placed a hand on the stock of his shotgun but didn’t pick it up.

“I have something in the works that’s going to put me in the crosshairs of the Deacon and his group. It’ll play out in a couple of years. If I win, the Deacon and the DMS will be ashes and I’ll be the richest son of a bitch who ever lived. If I don’t play it right, then best case scenario is I spend the rest of a short life in Gitmo playing water sports with the interrogation team.”

Zephyr shivered. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”

“Not if I’m smart and careful,” said Hugo. “And that’s how we got into this. I told you that you have to be careful of the Deacon and his people. You do. Their organization is still pretty new, still growing and finding its footing, but I know the Deacon. Not as good as John knows him, but well enough. There isn’t anyone else out there who has a hope of stopping what’s coming.” He glanced at her. “Your plan’s going to take longer, and it might even be bigger than mine. Fuck, kid, you might actually have the vision and the guts to change the world for the better. Time will tell. But the Deacon won’t hand the world to you, and he won’t step aside.”

“Why don’t you just kill him?”

Hugo smiled. “I’ve taken some swings over the years. So far, though, he’s ducked and counterpunched pretty fucking well, even though he doesn’t know it’s me he’s fighting. And I’ve put a few other things in motion that might hit him from his blindside.”

“Maybe,” said Zephyr, picking up her gun and reloading it, “you should stop trying to kill him and try something else instead.”

“Like what?” asked Hugo, clearly intrigued.

“Like hurting him.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

They knew we were coming, so there was no need to sneak up on the place.

From the air, from twenty miles out, everything looked normal, but with every mile and every moment we could tell that normal had left town. There was a wrecked car. There were big burned patches on the porch, the grass, the front of the house. There were bodies. There was blood. There was so much damn blood, as if a landscape painter had gone mad and bled onto the canvas of the day.

Sean had the door open and was leaning too far out, taking it all in, letting his fear and his need do bad things to him. Rudy held on to him, and Ghost whined continually. I told the pilot to set the helo down in the big side yard that the family used for softball games and touch football and Frisbee. The swirling vortex of mechanical wind picked up pieces of debris and flung them into the trees. Paper plates, empty soda cans, a kid’s Orioles baseball cap.

“I don’t see them,” yelled Sean. “Where are they? God, where are they?” Asking a question none of us could answer.

Before the bird even touched down, Sean jerked the door the rest of the way open and jumped out, tearing his gun from its holster, yelling out his wife’s name. Calling for his kids and Uncle Jack. Calling for his dog, Barkley. Calling for anyone. No one called back. We all scrambled out behind him. Per instructions, the pilot dusted off and vanished high and away in the late-afternoon sky.

Rudy ran toward the bodies. I sent Ghost on a hunt and he raced off, making a big circle, sniffing for hostiles and looking for family. I caught up with Sean as he approached the house, and then I stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Sean, listen to me,” I told him, “you need to keep your shit together. I can’t be watching you and doing my job at the same time. We do this right so we can find them. You hear me?”

He stared through me for a moment, but then his wild eyes cleared a little and he nodded. “Okay, Joe… okay.”

We did it all the right way.

We went up on the porch and flanked the door. He provided cover while I pushed the door open and ducked down and back. No shots. No movement. I went in low and cut left, and he followed a second later, gun up and out as he came in and went right. The living room was a shambles. Chairs and end tables overturned, the big mirror cracked, a vase of flowers smashed, muddy footprints everywhere. Boot prints, I noted. I pointed to them and held up four fingers. He understood. Four men had entered this house wearing combat boots. U.S. military issue, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone could buy that stuff. What mattered was that this had all been done with precision and aggression.

We moved through the downstairs. Living room, dining room, den, pantry, kitchen, mud room. Nothing. Lots of damage. A little too much. It didn’t look like battle damage but instead had a flavor of meanness, of spite.

There are two sets of stairs in my uncle’s house, one in the living room and one going up from the kitchen. I took the front steps and Sean went up the back ones. We both knew where to step to keep the boards from creaking. There was less damage upstairs, but there was some. The bedrooms were empty. So was the attic.

“They’re not here,” said Sean in a tight whisper.

“Keep it steady,” I warned. “We knew they wouldn’t be here. Let’s finish the sweep.”

As soon as we cleared the house, we hurried downstairs and went outside again. There was a terrazzo patio around the door, and I saw three bloody footprints. Dog prints. Barkley? Or had the bad guys brought their own dog? Ghost sat beside them. He hadn’t barked and he didn’t look agitated, which meant that whatever had happened here was over. If anyone had been hiding in order to ambush us, Ghost would have warned me. He knows several different barking patterns to tell me different things. He’s smart, and we’ve spent hundreds of hours doing drills.

The Pool Boys lay where they had fallen, their bodies torn and bloody. Rudy was on his knees between them and waved us over. “They’re still alive. God only knows how, but they’re alive. Sean, is there a first-aid kit in the house? Yes? Get it. Hurry!”

Sean hesitated for a second, then spun and raced back to the house. I looked at the two agents sprawled on the grass. Alive? The Pool Boys didn’t look it. Both of them looked like ground meat. Neither looked like the men I knew. Their faces and bodies had been slashed to ribbons.

“Talk to me,” I said to Rudy. “Is this the rabies stuff? Did they go nuts and do this to each other?”

“No. This is something different,” said Rudy. He worked fast to apply makeshift dressings of cloth torn from his own shirt. “Each of them has multiple lacerations, and some are very deep. Joe, put pressure there — no, there. Good. Even if we can stabilize them, they’ve lost so much blood. It’s shock that we have to prevent now.”

“What did this?” I asked.

“Knives, I think. Or something with a longer blade. Machetes, perhaps. Or a scythe. I don’t really know. I’ve never seen wounds quite like these.” He pointed to a number of lacerations on the hands and arms of both men, and to similar cuts on their shoulders, upper chests, and faces. “These hand injuries look like defensive wounds, but against what? The same weapon was used on both of them, and the patterns are almost identical.”

Sean raced back with a big farmer’s first-aid kit in a sturdy blue-and-white plastic box. He opened it and Rudy dug out bandages and antiseptic and clamps. He told us where to apply pressure, what to hold, what to do, how to help. I know first aid and so does Sean, but it’s different when a real doctor is calling the shots.

“If we don’t get them into surgery in the next hour, we’re going to lose Tommy and maybe Alvin, too,” Rudy said.

“Can’t bring the chopper back,” I said.

“What about an ambulance? Can we at least call 911?”

“No,” cried Sean. “We can’t. They’ll think we’re trying something.”

“Saving these men and saving your family are both of equal importance, Sean. Whoever did this left them alive. They left them for us to find. They expect us to try and save them. If they didn’t want that to happen, they would have killed them or given us implicit instructions to let them die. They did neither. Which means we’re allowed to save them.”

Sean tried to reply, couldn’t find the right words.

I tapped my earbud and said, “Cowboy to Ronin.”

Sam’s voice was right there. “Go for Ronin.”

I explained the situation on the ground, and I heard him yelling at someone to get the machinery working. Then Sam asked, “Status on your family?”

As if in answer, I heard a phone begin ringing. It wasn’t mine, and we had to wait for the next ring to zero in on its location. In Alvin’s pants pocket. As soon as I pulled it out, I knew that it wasn’t his phone. It was a burner. Even though I knew there was almost no chance of useful fingerprints, I still handled it carefully.

“Yes…?” I said cautiously.

“By now you’ll know that your associates have not been killed,” said a man’s voice. “You may infer that their lives were spared as a gesture of goodwill.”

He spoke in English, but he had a thick accent. French. Metropolitan. Not Canadian. A Parisian accent. Provincial accents are different. Not young, not old. Forty, maybe? Forty-five?

“Where’s my family?” I asked.

A pause. “This is not Detective Sean Ledger, is it? No. Captain Joseph Ledger, then, non?”

“Yeah. And, for the record, fuck you. Where’s my family?”

“They are safe,” said the Frenchman, “and they will remain so as long as you follow my instructions.”

“I’m listening.”

“Ah, that is incorrect, Captain. It is I who am listening. I’m waiting for you to tell me that the complete case files and all related materials are in your possession.”

“They’re on the way,” I said. “I wasn’t in the right place to bring them myself.”

“If a strike team is accompanying the materials, Captain, this day will end badly for you.”

“Listen, asshole, I got the instructions and we’re following them. You made a lot of threats that I’m taking very seriously. My family matters more to me than catching you. Are we clear on that?”

“Completely.”

“But, since you apparently enjoy threats, listen to this one, and you can believe it as completely as I believed yours. I want my uncle, my sister-in-law, and my niece and nephew back safe and sound. I don’t want them hurt. I want them safe. You’re going to do that because that’s your part of the bargain. I’m going to give you everything you asked for. Everything. We’re cleaning out the closets on this thing, and you get to walk away.”

“Very well. And the threat…?”

“It should have been implied, but let me spell it out. If my family is harmed in any way, I’ll come after you and I will find you. If you know who I am, then you probably know something about who I work for. We are willing to accept your terms and let you walk off. We’re willing to close this file, but only if you return my family unharmed. If you don’t — no, actually, if you even think about breaking your word and double-crossing me — then know that I will find you and I will tear your world apart. Read up on me if you’re not sure what that will mean. Try and guess how much I’ll let you skate if you mess this up. Consider what lengths I’ll go to. Ask around. Ask the people who have fucked with me and my crew in the past. Oh, wait, you can’t. They’re all dead.”

He chuckled. A warm sound, like someone amused by a witty joke told by an old friend. It was supposed to unnerve me, defuse the bomb I was lobbing at him.

“Then I suppose we must both behave ourselves, Captain Ledger, non?”

I said. “Crois, ce que je te dirai.”

Believe what I’m telling you.

To which he responded, “Ensuite il est essentiel que nous nous faisons confiance.”

“Yeah. Well, in my experience trust is earned,” I replied.

“And so it is,” said the Frenchman. “Now, here are a few addendums to my terms. You may not remove your wounded friends until the materials have arrived. You can send them away in whatever vehicle delivers the case files and bodies.”

“You really don’t want them to die, pal,” I said.

“They are soldiers.”

“And this is a war? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It is an evolution, Captain,” he said. “For something new to emerge, something old must surely die.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Of course not. I will make another call in half an hour. Listen for the ring. It won’t be on this phone. If the materials are at your location, answer that call. If not, expect a follow-up call every fifteen minutes. Wait for the call that comes in after your materials arrive. At that point, you will be given additional instructions. If we are both satisfied with the arrangements of exchange, a final call will be made on a phone that will be at a location I will share at that point. You will go to that location, locate the last phone, and receive instructions on where to find your family.”

“How do I know they’re still alive?”

“You don’t,” he said, and repeated my comment about trust being earned, but he said it in French. “La confiance se mérite, mon ami.”

The line went dead.

Sean and Rudy stared at me. All they had heard was my end of the conversation. I told them everything, and it hurt them every bit as bad as it hurt me.

INTERLUDE EIGHTEEN

“What if they catch me?” asked Zephyr.

Hugo Vox pursed his lips as he dropped ice cubes into a chunky tumbler, poured two fingers of Heaven Hill over it, sipped the bourbon, and then turned away from the wet bar. He paused and repeated the process, handing the second glass to Zephyr. She sniffed and winced, took a sip, winced again, and then threw back the whiskey. She gasped, coughed, and staggered in Hugo’s wake as he walked out onto the big stone balcony.

“That was a waste of good bourbon,” he said.

“It tastes like socks.”

“It’s better than that shit scotch your dad used to drink.”

“It was thirty-five years old. He said it’s top of the line.”

“Have you tried it?” asked Hugo.

“Well… sure. Once. On New Year’s Eve.”

“And…?”

“It’s even worse. It tastes like ass.”

“That I’ll agree with,” said Hugo. “But trust me, bourbon is better. Besides, you hammered it back. You’re supposed to sip it, savor it.”

“Dad always said that ice ruins the taste of whiskey,” said Zephyr.

“Your father was a fucking psychopath. Not sure his opinions were all that valid.”

Zephyr grunted, acknowledging the point. They stood for a moment watching boats on the river, their sails reflected in the mirror-bright water.

“To answer your question,” said Hugo, “if you get caught, then you didn’t think it through. You didn’t plan. If you get caught, it’s probably because you deserve it.”

“I don’t understand.”

He turned and leaned a meaty hip against the stone rail. “You know that I made an assload of cash when the towers fell, right?”

She nodded.

“Do you know how?” he asked.

“Sure. You had brokers ready to buy when everyone panicked and the market prices fell. John said that the plan worked because you knew that the towers were going to be hit, and when they would be hit. He said your genius is timing.”

Hugo sipped his drink. “Timing is a funny word. I doubt that John explained what it really means. The big-picture view is that we funded Al Qaeda and we set the timetable. We had brokers in place to make the right purchases when the towers fell and the sheep started running. We knew they would because sheep always run. There’s always a flight to safety in the market. That part you know. But there’s the SEC, the FBI, the IRS, and a bunch of other alphabet groups whose whole job is to look for people gaming the system. If it were only a matter of us doing what you said, it would show. It would look exactly like what it was, and I’d be in jail or on death row, depending on how much of it they figured out. With me so far?”

She nodded.

“So why ain’t I in jail? How come all those federal agencies haven’t kicked down my door, frozen my assets, and thrown me in jail? Take a moment and answer when you have something smart to tell me.”

She thought about it. Hugo finished his drink, took both glasses inside, and came back out with fresh drinks.

“You bribed the agents?” she ventured.

“Bribed or coerced,” he said, nodding. “Blackmailed some, extorted some. Sure. But we only did a little of that during and after. We only had to do that with guys who were new to those agencies. Which should give you a hint of the rest of it.”

“You… bribed some of them before? Like, long before?”

“Closer,” he said, beaming with approval. “But you have to go much, much bigger. Look at it this way — we stood to make tens of billions from the shifts in the market after 9/11. We did, in fact, make that and more. We netted a lot more than we expected, and we expected a lot. So, knowing that this was probably going to work pretty well, we could take some risks with the money we had to invest to set everything up. And we eliminated some of the guesswork by controlling the timetable. Had we done more damage to the Pentagon or hit the White House, we might have doubled it. A dead president would have kept the market in flux for a long time. But that’s life, that’s a variable. We got the biggest fish, which was hitting the financial centers. The next components are vision and nerve. The vision part is being able to look forward to this as something we should do eventually but not something we should do right away. Good planning takes time. Staying safe takes time. So we took time. We started this project years ago. And I do mean years. Some of this was started before you were born. Some of it was started before we even picked the specific targets. We started by using that other quality — nerve. How did that work? It worked by hiring and training an enormous staff of qualified people, and then carefully and comprehensively seeding them into the system. Want to guess where we seeded them?”

She gaped at him. “The SEC and the IRS?”

“And the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and about fifty other organizations. We have thousands of employees in place. Not just investigators but the people they report to, and the people those people report to, all the way up to administration. Some of it is bribery. Some of it is manipulating idealism. Some of it is sculpting the careers of certain people. And with that is oversight. We have watchers watching the watchers to about ten removes. We have records on everyone. We know what everyone likes and doesn’t like, who they vote for, what they buy, who they fuck, what gets them high, what they’re afraid of losing, what they hunger for. We come at them from all directions, and we make sure that if they get spooked and want to tell someone, then the people or departments that would take that call are owned by us, too. Our operating capital is close to two billion dollars per year. And the funny thing is, most of the people we own think they’re working for clandestine agencies within their own organizations. They think they’re in quality control or a reporting agency or something like that. Ninety percent of them think they’re the good guys. But all of them work for us. So when we gamed the market the people who would raise red flags and write out arrest warrants belonged to us.”

Zephyr drank down the last gulp of whiskey without even tasting it. Hugo smiled and sipped his.

“So,” he said, “if you really want to create some kind of new world order you’d better start now, and you’d better be ready to invest the time and the attention to detail necessary to set it up right. You have the money. John and I are overseeing everything your lawyers do, so you know you’ll be protected. You have the operating capital and you have the plan. You talk about this singularity stuff so much, you almost have me believing in it.”

“It’s the only way to—”

“—save the world from itself. Yeah, I know. I’ve heard the sales pitch. What I’m asking, kiddo,” said Hugo, “is do you have the patience and do you have the nerve?”

She turned and looked out at the boats. The sun was low now, and it made everything — the sails, the trees, even the water — look as if they were on fire. It looked as if the whole world was burning.

“Yes,” she said.

Hugo finished his drink, studying her over the rim of his glass. His eyes were filled with a dark light, and when he lowered the glass he was smiling.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

They say war is hell. It is. Waiting, though, is its own kind of hell.

Sean, Rudy, and I were caught in that bubble of time between the end of that call and the arrival of the medics and our team coming to deliver the case file. Every second felt like an hour. And not a happy hour. Like an hour under torture by someone who makes Thomas of Torquemada and the fun kids of the Spanish Inquisition seem like supporting characters in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Like that.

Ghost moved slowly around the yard, sniffing at the picnic table, at Lefty’s hat, at Em’s stuffed tree sloth, at the smashed remains of Ali’s phone, at Uncle Jack’s torn apron. He whined every now and then. Sean got up and began to follow him, picking up each item one at a time. Holding them. No, clutching them. I could see the white of the knuckles on his clenched fists. Rudy tried to say something, to comfort him, but I don’t think Sean could actually hear or understand human speech. His body language changed from robotic stiffness as he walked from one relic to another, and then to scarecrow slackness as he stood and stared with unblinking eyes at the things Ghost found. All I could do was watch. I pretty much think I’d rather be taking live fire than to have to sit there with my brother while we waited to find out if his wife and kids were even still alive.

So I forced myself to work the scene. To decode it.

The attack had to have happened quickly. The food on the grill was still there, though the steaks and the corn were burned to smoky cinders.Things had been dropped: a couple of ball gloves next to an old softball that looked like the one Sean and I used to play with once upon a time, an overturned beer bottle, a glass of iced tea with all the cubes melted, a pair of sunglasses that had been stepped on, Ali’s purse. And there was blood. Here and there, little splashes and drops.

I found something that I couldn’t immediately identify, a piece of thin plastic about eight inches long. Smooth, with a sloping angle to it, and a sharper angle where it had clearly broken off from something else. Making sure not to smudge any possible prints, I picked it up by the edges and immediately winced and dropped it, and stared in surprise as blood welled from microthin cuts on the pads of my thumb and forefinger. It was razor-sharp. Some kind of blade, I reckoned, but not a standard knife or sword configuration. I squatted on my heels and thought about the vanes of the helicopter we’d come in. They had almost the same angle, except their edges were blunt.

I got up and crossed quickly to where Rudy was still working on the Pool Boys, and stood there looking at the patterns of their injuries. Cuts on their hands and arms, on their upper chests and shoulders and faces. A chill swept up my spine and made the wiry hair on my scalp stand up, because I thought I understood what had happened.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, which caused Rudy to glance up.

“What?”

“I read a report a couple months ago about a new kind of combat drone called a thresher. Designed for field combat rather than aerial strikes. About the size of a bald eagle, with rotors for lift, a new kind of gyroscope for ultra-sophisticated maneuverability, and, instead of guns, it used long, flexible blades. They called them whip blades, and they’re based on the old Chinese straight sword. The whip effect maximizes the speed and severity of each cut. They were designed to be introduced to a fixed enemy position, to do as much damage as possible to personnel while leaving the weapons and equipment intact. I think that’s what happened to these poor bastards.”

“Ay Dios mio,” said Rudy. “That’s appalling.”

“Question is who sent it here. Last I heard, the thresher was only in the design stage.”

Ghost suddenly barked and looked up at the eastern sky, and Rudy and I jerked around, expecting to see a thresher come screaming at us. It wasn’t. It was a muscular and very fast Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, and as it came swooping in the rotors began tilting from their forward position to allow the plane to land like a helicopter. It was Duffy in a DMS bird, and a moment later a voice in my ear said, “Spartan to Cowboy. We’re coming in.”

“You have the package?”

“Wrapped and with a bow on it,” he said. “And we’re set for medical evac. How’re our boys?”

“Moderately poor,” I told him. “There’s a big field west of the barn. Put it down there.”

The Osprey swept over us, looking ungainly and improbable, and then settled down in a field of wildflowers without so much as a bump. Sean, Ghost, and I ran to meet it, ducking low as we approached. The door behind the cockpit was already open, and I saw Duffy and Torres waiting, dressed like EMTs instead of soldiers. Smart. A couple of other guys in tan flight suits scrambled out and began unloading several metal boxes. I pointed to the picnic table, and they carried the boxes over and then retreated to the Osprey.

Duffy and Torres ran over to Rudy, each of them carrying medical bags and equipment. They knelt down, did some additional stabilizing work on the Pool Boys, and then called for the flight crew to come running with stretchers. Everything was done to make it look as if we were following the directions exactly as they had been given. The wounded were transferred to stretchers, belted in for safety, and carried quickly but carefully to the plane and loaded aboard. The flight crew did not reappear.

“Cowboy,” Duffy said, closing on me, “you want me to take your brother and Rudy back?”

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged Sean away, and I knew that Rudy would want to stay to see to the family. I said as much to Duffy. He nodded and handed his medical kit to Rudy. It was a professional field-trauma set, far superior to the first-aid stuff here at the farm. He shook Rudy’s hand, nodded to Sean, clapped me on the arm, and went running for the transport. The pilot cycled up the engines and the big machine lifted up, turned, and headed off the way it had come. The whole process had taken five minutes.

Sean, Rudy, and I stood in the field, with Ghost stalking slowly around the edge of it. We waited, watching the Osprey disappear.

Time once more slowed to an impossible crawl.

And then a phone began ringing.

INTERLUDE NINETEEN

They met in a motel room.

By arrangement they had each rented a separate unit. Zephyr stood in the doorway of hers for nearly two minutes debating whether to call in the room maids to reclean the room, or just simply set fire to it. There was not a chance in hell that she would touch anything here. Not the bed, not the curtains, not anything. It was no comfort that the woman she was here to meet would have a similarly appalling hovel of a room. She knew that her rich-girl élitism was shading the moment for her, and that practicality was far more important than anything else.

Even so, she called her driver, Campion, and told him to purchase a few items and to deliver them without drawing attention. Half an hour later, the driver tapped discreetly on the door. He had a box of industrial-grade black plastic trash bags, bottles of strong but organic spray cleaner, sponges, and several large bottles of hand sanitizer. While Zephyr stood in a corner, Campion quickly covered every surface with trash bags, wiped down any uncovered surface, and cleaned the bathroom. All the cleaning products he used went into another of the trash bags. A pair of one-gallon bottles of bleach were set on the floor for a final cleanup after the meeting was over. He asked no questions of his employer and left, with an order to park his car close by and to be ready in case Zephyr needed to leave quickly.

Zephyr sat at the desk. Chair and desktop rustled with plastic sheeting. She wore blue polyethylene gloves and paper shoe covers on her sneakers. She stopped short of wearing a surgical mask. The woman coming to meet her might be suspicious.

Zephyr thought that the caution of meeting in a place like this wasn’t necessary. She had tried to assure the other party that her team — led by the detail-oriented Concierge — could have provided any number of secure locations. But the woman had insisted, and, as Zephyr needed something from her, concessions were necessary.

The meeting had been scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon, but the digital clock on the night table ticked all the way through to 2:51 before there was a firm two-beat knock on the door. Decisive, not hard. Zephyr got up and opened the door, saw a young woman wearing a bulky Hawkeyes warm-up jacket and matching cap, and sunglasses with mirrored orange-tinted lenses.

“John sent me,” said the woman.

It was the appropriate code phrase.

Zephyr stepped back and the woman came in quickly, cutting a quick look over her shoulder.

“The parking lot is clear,” said Zephyr. “The surveillance cameras are fixed, but they’ve been adjusted so that this room isn’t in their video field. I have people in three other rooms, all with good views of this door.”

“I have four teams,” said the woman. “Including a very good sniper who is absolutely bugfuck nuts, but he loves me.”

Zephyr smiled. “Ludo Monk, Room 312. He’s positioned with a Dragunov sniper rifle.”

The other woman smiled. “Nice.”

“Nice,” agreed Zephyr.

They didn’t shake hands. It wasn’t that kind of moment.

“The presumption is,” said the visitor, “that if either of us sneezes half the people in this motel will try to kill the other half.”

“Something like that,” said Zephyr.

“I’m okay with it.”

She looked around the room and walked over to lift a corner of one of the trash bags covering the bed. “You a germophobe or are you a serial killer and this is your murder room?”

“I didn’t bring a saw.”

The woman laughed and snorted in the middle of it, which made her laugh harder. She turned and sat down on the bed hard enough to send ripples through the plastic.

“This is fun,” she said. “You’re a rich-bitch snob with a hygiene phobia, and I’m a self-absorbed narcissist with trust issues.”

“Aren’t we a pair?” said Zephyr. She sat down at the desk.

“We are. A case could be made that we’re two of, say, the five smartest women alive. And an equally strong case could be made that we’re both out of our minds.”

Zephyr held a hand up and waggled it back and forth. “I like to think I’m more of a visionary.”

“Who wants to kill a couple of billion people?”

“I want to remove parasites.”

“So you’re what… the Lysol of social Darwinism?”

Zephyr shrugged. “Something like that. And you’re what? The world’s greatest technology thief?”

“I prefer to think of it as usefully repurposing questionable technologies in order to maximize their design potential.”

“Nice,” said Zephyr.

“Nice,” said the woman.

“John told me that you don’t use your actual name anymore. He said that it’s because the people who would like to see you dead already believe you are.”

“Something like that.”

“Then what do I call you?”

The young woman took off her glasses and folded them, then removed her ball cap and shook out her glossy black hair.

“Call me Mother Night.”

Zephyr Bain studied the face. The young woman was exceptionally beautiful, and the lights that burned in her intelligent eyes burned white-hot. Zephyr wondered what it would take to get this woman into bed. Not this bed, but a bed back at her house.

As if reading her mind, Mother Night said, “Not my scene, honey. Don’t get me wrong. I’m flattered as hell, but I like boys and I’m on the clock. I have some things running right now, and they need some administrative oversight.”

“Anything I need to know about?”

“They’ll be on the news. It won’t affect what you’re doing unless you have plans to visit Atlanta. If so, let me advise against it.”

“Why?”

Mother Night shrugged. “When I talked to your friend John he said that our agendas, though different in structure and rollout, will ultimately complement each other. Time’s short, though, so can we move this along?”

Zephyr nodded. “Okay, cutting right to it. John said that while you were working for the DMS you had the opportunity to obtain extensive records from the ruins of the Jakoby empire. He said that you obtained schematics for the revolutionary computer system designed by a Cold War designer named Bertolini, the blueprints and modified software for which had been included in materials formerly in the possession of Paris Jakoby.”

Mother Night grunted. “My sources tell me that you already have a good computer system. Calpurnia, isn’t it?”

“That’s just a household-governing thing.”

“Bullshit. Couple of people have told me how you downplay what Calpurnia is. You pass it off as AI in the same way most people do, calling it artificial intelligence when it’s actually programming tricks, with you, as the programmer, supplying the intelligence to the system. That’s a nice line, and it works for the rubes, but it doesn’t square with the whole technological singularity your boy John the Revelator has been shouting about. No, don’t look surprised, you’re not the only one who does her homework.”

Zephyr nodded, acknowledging the point, but added, “It’s a curated event we’re working toward.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean Calpurnia is fake AI. I think you actually hit the bull’s-eye. I think you have a real thinking system. Not something that plays a good game of chess because it analyzes the patterns of the other player’s moves. No, I think you have a system that analyzes the other player. And understands him. I’m hearing very cool, very spooky things about Calpurnia. You’re going beyond simulated AI and into… what? Limited consciousness?”

Zephyr hesitated. “Maybe. The system is evolving.”

“I bet.” Mother Night leaned forward, her eyes alight with excitement. “Tell me… does it have its own personality?”

“Yes,” said Zephyr.

“Really?”

“Yes, a unique personality has been emerging for a couple of years.”

“Any conflicts with it? Does it have seamless deference or —?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Zephyr quickly, “but we should probably stick to the program here.”

“You’re no fun,” said Mother Night, but she nodded. “You called this meet, ball’s in your court.”

Zephyr nodded. “John said you have copies of all testing, practical lab procedures, mapped genomes, and other materials for developing the Berserkers and other transgenic creatures. He said you recovered this from the records of Hecate Jakoby. He said that you secured computer records and actual biological samples of the weaponized ethnic-specific bioweapons developed by their father, Cyrus Jakoby. He said that you have access to samples of bioweapon pathogens in pre- and post-developed states. And he said that you might be willing to sell this material to me.”

Mother Night pursed her lips and studied Zephyr for a moment. “John said you wanted to purchase some materials from me, Zephyr. He didn’t say that he knew all of this. How does he know?”

“John is an excellent resource.”

“This is spooking the shit out of me, I admit it,” said Mother Night. “There’s no way he could know some of this. Even when I was put on trial there was no mention of the stuff I got from Cyrus Jakoby. None. Not even Mr. Church knows about that.”

“John the Revelator has better sources.”

Mother Night stood up. “Nope. I think we’re done. You’re one spooky bitch, and I—”

Zephyr said, “Wait for just a few moments. Listen to me. Your man Ludo Monk has a thermal scope on his rifle. He can see our heat signatures through this wall. I’m guessing you have some kind of transponder on you so he can differentiate you from me, which means right now his gun is aimed at me. Any bullet he fires from that gun will be able to punch right through these crappy walls. If he’s as good a shot as he’s supposed to be, then he can kill me right now. It’s not even a hundred yards between barrel and target. If you think I’m here to scam you or do you harm in any way, tell him to pull the trigger. Go on. I’ll wait. I’ll sit right here.”

Mother Night looked at the door as if she could see through it and across the parking lot to the other wing of the C-shaped block of motel rooms.

The moment stretched.

Then Mother Night sat back down on the bed.

“Okay,” she said. “What is it you want to buy?”

Zephyr Bain smiled. “I want to buy all of it, sweetie.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Ghost found it and raced across the field to stand proudly over it, wagging his tail. It was there, nestled down into the flowers. Sean made a grab for it, but I hip-checked him out of the way and snatched it up. I hit the button.

“Go,” I snapped.

“There are still a few details to be handled before we can return your family to you, Captain,” said the Frenchman.

“You don’t want to fuck around too long on this, sparky,” I said.

“These are important details, mon ami.”

“What details?”

“There are fuel cans in the barn. Get them. Place the medical samples and all paper files in the middle of the yard. Keep the flash drives in your pocket, but everything else must be placed on the pile. Douse it all liberally and light a match. When the fire has had sufficient time to burn, you will hear another ring.”

“Wait just a—”

The line went dead.

I stood there, really goddamn needing something to hit. Something with breakable teeth and a voice that could manage a satisfying scream. The Killer in my head was howling. But I kept my voice calm as I explained what had to be done. Sean simply turned and ran toward the barn. I ran after him.

There were two big red metal three-gallon gas cans just inside the barn. We each took one, ran over to the boxes of materials, and shook out the contents, splashing the evidence. Sean was getting sloppy and splashed some on his own clothes. I swatted the can out of his grip and pushed him away.

“Go stand with Rudy,” I said. “Be ready to find the next phone.”

He had to blink several times before any sanity looked out through his eyes. Then he nodded and shambled off. I took a lighter from my pocket, flicked it on, and bent to set the pyre ablaze. It went up fast, and I let the bloom of heat push me back. Gray smoke coiled up into the late-afternoon sky.

And we waited. The bastard let the fire burn for twenty minutes before he called. I spent some of that time kicking at flames that wanted to go running into the field, and some of it using a shovel I fetched from the barn to cut a narrow firebreak. And I used all of that time working on this in my head. Making sure the Cop in me was on the job and the Killer was on a leash. For now, anyway.

When the phone rang I heard Sean cry out, half in surprise, half a whimper of unfiltered fear. He was going to need Rudy’s help, too. Rudy gently took the phone from Sean and held it out for me. Sean allowed it, but this was tearing him apart.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s done. Now, where’s my family?”

“I’m going to need you to bring the flash drives to me. You may not bring a firearm or a knife. Leave whatever you have behind. No cell phone, no electronic devices of any kind.”

“Are you dicking me around?”

“I’m not. This is a business transaction, but there are necessary safeguards built into it. I have great respect for your ability to be creative and exploit opportunities. Therefore you will have to bear with me while I determine that everything is done correctly. If I am safe, then your family will remain safe. That’s only fair, non?”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s get this ball rolling.”

“Très bien,” he said. “You will leave your brother and Dr. Sanchez at the farm. You will leave your dog there as well. Leave your gun and all communications devices behind. That includes your earbud. You will walk east along the main road until you hear a phone ring. You will receive your next set of instructions at that point.” The line went dead before I could say another word.

I explained everything to Sean and Rudy.

“What do you want me to do?” demanded Sean, his eyes wild with the fever of terror.

“Stay here and wait.”

“Jesus Christ, Joe, I can’t!”

“You have to,” said Rudy. “You know that.”

It cost Sean so much to agree, and cost him more to stay behind. I handed my gun and other gear to Rudy, then took off along the road. I didn’t walk, I ran. Not full speed but at a jog trot so I could cover ground. I had that same itch between my shoulder blades that I had before and wondered where the observers were. Who was watching me? How were they watching, and how many of them were out here? I cut looks left and right as I ran. On one side of the road was a farm field that was green with the first shoots of a corn crop pushing up through the soil. On the right were the apple groves belonging to Uncle Jack’s neighbors. There were shadows beneath the trees, and I was sure every one of them was a sniper.

But no bullets punched into me.

I ran and listened. And prayed.

I heard the phone ringing and skidded to a stop, wheeled, and ran fifty yards back to where a burner lay nestled in the tall weeds around a fence post. It was the Frenchman again, and he told me to enter the grove and go northeast toward a stretch of forest. I did, and after a mile another phone had me turn west, then southwest, then to cross to the other side of the road and cut across a field. And on and on. Ten phones, ten sets of directions. The intention was not to disorient me but to allow hidden observers to watch the sky and roads and land around me to see if anyone was following me. No one was.

On the tenth call, the Frenchman told me to climb down a slope to a stream that was in deep shadow under the leafy arms of oaks and maples. I got to the water’s edge and found the next phone and endured ten burning seconds while I waited for it to ring. When it did, I punched the button and the Frenchman said, “Turn around.”

I whirled, shifting immediately into a combat crouch, ready to take on whoever or whatever was coming for me. But that wasn’t it. Instead, there was something waiting for me. It squatted on the hard-packed dirt halfway up the stream bank.

A drone. Not a thresher, though. This was a basic quadcopter, the cheap kind you can buy at any Costco.

The Frenchman said, “Put the drives into the basket.”

I knelt by the drone and saw that there was a wire-mesh basket bolted to the undercarriage. I did as ordered.

“Now,” said the Frenchman, “walk north along the streambed until you hear a phone. It will be the last call, and you will be told how and where to find your family.”

“Remember what I said,” I warned.

“I told you, Captain. This is a business transaction. Threats and dramatics aren’t necessary.”

The flash drives fit inside with plenty of room to spare. The rotors on the quadcopter began to turn as soon as I stepped back from it, and the tiny motors whined. I watched it rise and wobble away between the trees.

My heart was racing out of control as I moved off along the streambed. Off to my right, I heard a sound. A soft whuff that wasn’t quite a bark. I whirled and crouched, terrified that it was Ghost, that he’d followed me and that it might be construed as me breaking the Frenchman’s rules. The tall grass swayed as a heavy body moved through it toward me.

“Ghost…?” I whispered.

The dog gave another whuff. Softer, weaker, and now I could hear it spiral up into a whine. I bolted into the field, knowing what I’d find there. Finding it. Finding him. Barkley moved very slowly, and I was surprised that he could move at all. The shepherd’s tan-and-black coat was slick with dark blood, and in a flash moment of betrayal I hoped it was his and not the blood of my family.

It was.

Barkley looked up at me with liquid brown eyes filled with so much pain that he was almost on the other side of it. So much hurt that he was nearly beyond feeling hurt. The dog had been chopped and slashed, and his canine mind understood that he was already gone. Even so, with all that damage, he had smelled me, or heard me, and made his presence known.

I hurried to him and knelt as Barkley took a last step and then collapsed against me. He was a big dog, but his weight was diminished by so much loss of blood. He laid his head on my shoe and gave my ankle a small, desperate lick. I tried to comfort him, tried to soothe him, telling him he was a good boy, telling him everything was all right. Lying to that heroic, trusting, loyal animal with every word.

A shudder rippled through him and he sagged down, sighing out his last breath. I bent forward, hissing with the pain that twisted deep inside my chest. The Killer in my soul grieved as ferociously as did the Cop and the Modern Man. Some things touch every open heart and wound every soul. Barkley had been a police dog and then he had been a family dog, and he had died trying to save the family who loved him. He wasn’t even my dog, but I’ve grieved less for some people I know.

I kissed Barkley’s head and stood up, fists balled, stomach churning with hot acid. I started walking again, legs pumping. The lurid dying sunlight slanted sharply through the trees, turning the green world to a hellish red. I felt as if I was approaching the outer rings of hell, heading deeper into the valley of the shadow of death.

And then I heard the sound.

It was a child. A girl.

And she was screaming.

INTERLUDE TWENTY

“They’ll turn me in,” she said. “First damn chance they get, they’ll be on the phone to the authorities.”

“No, they won’t,” said John the Revelator.

“The hell they won’t. You expect me to put fifty top scientists in a room and tell them I want to kill a few billion people, and you think all of them are just going to go, ‘Rah-rah team’?”

“Maybe they will.”

“Maybe I’ll get a lethal injection after a short trial.”

“Maybe you will,” said John.

“Don’t joke,” she snapped. “It’s not funny.”

“My love, am I saying there are no risks? No, of course not. Everything has risks. Breathing deeply is a risk. You could have a blood clot about to break loose inside your veins and the next time you have an orgasm it goes straight to your brain. But that is small thinking. Fear should never be a guiding principle in life.”

“I’m not talking about random fear, John. I’m talking about common sense and caution.”

“Nor am I.”

“Then what —?”

“When have I ever done anything rash?” he asked. “When have I ever asked you to do something needlessly dangerous? Haven’t I taught you caution and subtlety? Weren’t those the lessons you learned from Hugo Vox?”

“Hugo is dead. Doesn’t that say something?”

“He died because he left his protection up to others and became arrogant. You are élitist, my girl, but you’re not arrogant. And you’ve learned your lessons of caution very well. I’m so proud of how you handled things.”

“Don’t hit me with flattery. Tell me how I’m supposed to manage all those scientists without risk. It’s only going to take one phone call to stop everything. One call to the FBI or, worse, to the DMS, and Havoc is done. Over.”

“So make sure none of them want to make that call.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Everyone has a vice, my dear. Understand that vice; control it, and you control them.”

“How?” she snorted. “Making sure they have the best drugs? Getting them laid? Maybe you want me to give them all blow jobs.”

He made a face of disappointment. “Let me frame it a different way. Everyone has something they want, something they need, something they must have. For one man, that might indeed be drugs. For another, the thing they most crave is to not go to jail for past indiscretions. Or it might be that they truly and completely love their children.…”

John stopped there and let the rest hang.

Zephyr felt the blood drain from her face.

But only for a moment.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

I ran like a son of a bitch.

The scream came from farther down the stream, around another bend, and I hit it at a flat run, crashing through brush that leaned out over the water, splashing through puddles and chasing rabbits into a blind panic. I had no weapons, but that wouldn’t matter. Whatever was going after my family was going to die, and I wouldn’t make it nice and quick.

There were shouts, too. My Uncle Jack’s deep voice, other male voices. Ali yelling so high and shrill that the words became nothing more than a whip of panic that cut me across the heart. Branches lashed my face and arms, lacerating my skin, but I didn’t care. The forest was so dense it tried to stop me. No way. No fucking way.

The creek jagged right and the shortest route was up a small hillock and through some shrubs, so I crashed through as a fresh scream tore the air. It was Em’s voice, I was positive. Was it terror or agony? An impossible, hurtful, destructive question for anyone to have to try and answer.

As I closed in, I heard another sound beneath the shrill screams. A low growl, but not an animal sound. This was strange. A machine sound. I burst through and jumped down toward the curve of the stream. The civilized, sane mind has limits to what it can process before circuits blow out and there is a sudden and greater need for darkness than for clarity.

I’m not entirely civilized, and I’m not all that sane. I’ve witnessed horrors. They don’t freeze me in my tracks, even if they’re freezing my heart to a block of ice inside my chest. I’m wired differently. When the Modern Man inside my head is unable to deal with horrors and the Cop has no solutions ready to hand, it’s the Killer who roars to life and takes charge. He’s incapable of hesitation. He’s too primitive to disallow something because it doesn’t square with what he knows of the world. The Killer knows that there are monsters in the dark and even if he cannot name them, even if he fears them, he also knows that survival lies at the other end of a fight. Retreat is what prey does, and he’s a predator. If he’s not the apex predator in any given situation, then whoever or whatever is has got to want the win more than he does, and he always wants it.

He wants it.

I want it.

Even when we were entering hell itself. Like this moment.

Tableau. There they were. All of them. My Uncle Jack, Sean’s wife and kids. Two big men wearing ski masks.

And it. A thresher. It hovered there, plastic blades slashing through the air, engine buzzing like a thousand furious wasps.

I took it all in during one microsecond as I came smashing through the brush. Part of the combat mind is orientation. The creek zigzagged at the bottom of a gully that had steep sides. Jack was on the far slope fighting with the two men. I didn’t see any guns, but the fading sunlight flashed on knives and on the bright red of blood. Jack was hurt, but I couldn’t tell how badly, and both of the men had blood on their clothes. Ali stood knee-deep in the brown water, with Lefty and Em behind her. She had a broken length of tree branch in her hands and was swinging wildly at the thresher, which hovered just out of range.

The thresher was as big as an eagle, with a lumpy birdlike body and two sets of whirling propellers that slashed the air as it moved toward Sean’s family. This wasn’t any commercial or recreational drone. This was a killing machine. Ugly and vicious and efficient in its brutality. Ali’s arms were crisscrossed with cuts, some of them deep, and bright blood ran down her limbs. Both kids were splashed with blood, and Lefty was on his knees, his face white, hands clamped over his stomach. Em was trembling, feet wide, fists balled, eyes totally wild.

At the precise moment that I burst from the woods, Ali swung her makeshift weapon at the thing that had come for her children. It rocked sideways, avoiding the swing, and then slashed at her from a tilted angle. Blood flew, and she staggered back. Jack yelled and took a step toward her and there was a flash of silver that tore a cry from him, and I saw a look of perverse triumph in the eyes of one of the two men. I saw all of this, every detail, in one tiny fragment of a second. In times of severe stress, the mind can shut down or it can observe and process a tremendous amount of detail. The difference depends on whether you die or live, on whether you freeze or act.

I hurled myself from the edge of the gully and splashed hard in the water, shoving Ali backward as the drone came in with blades slashing at her face. She fell, but the tip of one blade caught her across the forehead, drawing a vicious red line above her eyebrows. I ducked under the machine and pushed Em back, too. She fell on top of her mother, both of them thrashing in the chop. Lefty was ten feet away and seemed to be staring glassily at something none of us could see. It hurt me so goddamn bad to see that look on his face and, with the Killer running the show, hurt, like fear, turned into a red-hot murderous rage.

“Stay down,” I roared as I snatched up the stick Ali had been holding, rose, whirled, and hurled it with all my strength. The stick struck one set of whirling knives and was instantly chopped to splinters. I ducked low under the blades, scooped up a handful of mud, and flung that next, striking the center of the rotor with a heavy, wet glop. The weight and force jerked the machine sideways and it wobbled in the air as its gyros fought to correct and balance it.

Behind me there was a sharp cry and a wet sound of impact. I whirled to see Jack land hard on the bank, his shirt turning dark red. Above him on the high rim of the bank, one of the masked men gripped a bloody knife in his big fist.

“You!” said one of them. He tore off his ski mask, and I recognized him as the Bridge Troll from Vee’s office. Goddammit. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

The second man also removed his mask, but he was a stranger. They grinned at me. I think I smiled back. Hard to say, because it wasn’t the right moment for smiles. Maybe that’s not what my mouth did. There was a hard twist of my lips and mouth that sent some kind of message to the big men on the slope. Their smiles dimmed.

Then a roar made me turn just as the drone came at me, blades whirling. I ducked and fell sideways into the water, grabbed a river rock, splashed up and hurled it underhand, grabbed another and hurled it overhand. The stones hit one-two, and the impact knocked the machine back again. I kept the barrage going, grabbing stones and throwing them, hitting each time because I was too close to miss, not daring to let up. And then something shot past me and I turned, expecting a second machine, and realized that Lefty stood knee-deep in the water, his arm extended at the end of his pitch. Ali was behind him, a rock in her hand, ready to throw.

I grinned — a real grin this time — turned, and threw. Lefty threw. So did Ali.

“Shit!” growled the Troll as he jumped down from the slope. The other guy hesitated, glancing off toward the woods, and I had the impression that this fight wasn’t part of their orders. It was a good guess that they were supposed to release the prisoners and then sic the drone on whoever came to claim them, but that something had gone wrong. Maybe the kids panicked. Maybe Uncle Jack tried to be a hero. Whatever it was, the safe release I’d been promised had all turned to shit. The fact that no one had pulled a gun, though, spoke to an attempt at keeping this all as quiet as possible. Sounds carry, even in the woods, and they probably thought I had people out here. I wish. But, any second now, these two morons were going to realize that a loud bullet in my head was a better risk than a situation that was already going south on them.

I flung one more stone, and Lefty threw at the exact moment. I think it was his rock that hit something real damn important on the drone’s undercarriage, because the machine canted abruptly sideways and then clumped down hard on the muddy bank. Kid had a hell of an arm. The force of the rotors tore the blades loose, snapping them and filling the air with razor-sharp splinters. Ali grabbed both kids and dragged them down into the water. One piece opened a bright line of heat across the outside of my right thigh, but I didn’t give much of a fuck. I was moving, slogging through the water as fast as I could to reach Bridge Troll.

He had a knife; I didn’t. I was soaked and hampered by water and mud; he wasn’t. He was on high ground, and I had to come up the bank at him. All the odds were on his side. All I had was the Killer in my soul and the fact that my family was still alive and the knowledge that they still needed me.

Bridge Troll took a long step down the bank toward me and tried to take me across the throat with the blade. I brought my left elbow up, tucked my head into the safety of my shoulder, and used my right arm to hit him in the groin. Hard. Savage hard. He tried to turn his hip, but his weight was committed to the step. I punched so hard that I felt the tissue collapse against his pubic bone. Then I drove my shoulder into him and slammed him against the slope, uncoiling my left arm to wrap around his, locking his elbow joint straight, and then giving my whole body a sharp clockwise turn. The adult male elbow, when locked straight, will break at about eight and a half pounds of pressure per square inch if you apply that force to the very base of the humerus. I’m pretty sure I used a couple of hundred pounds of desperate pressure. The arm broke badly and wet, and when I let him fall I saw a jagged white end of bone sticking out of the lower curve of his biceps. I kicked him in the knee and bent it sideways to do even more damage to that joint. He collapsed into a shrieking, keening ball of nothing in the mud.

And I almost died half a second later, as the second killer dropped down atop me. If he’d landed beside me and cut as he dropped, he’d have had me. But he tried to be Spider-Man and land on me. Dumb-ass.

I fell hard into the mud, but my feet slipped out and it sent me sliding down the bank, spilling him onto his side right next to the troll. I twisted away from a kick to the face and began clawing my way up to him as he tried to find the knife he’d lost in the fall. It was nowhere in sight, and he wasted almost a full second in a futile search.

That’s when he said fuck it and went for the gun he had in a shoulder holster under his unbuttoned shirt. The gun came loose when I was still four feet from him. Suddenly the killer jerked sideways as a big clump of mud and stones clopped him on the side of the face. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack on his knees, arm extended at the end of a throw, as Lefty’s had been. He gave me a wild, almost manic grin, and then his eyes rolled up and he fell forward without trying to break his fall.

Jack had given me a second, though. He saved all of our lives in that second, because it drew the attacker’s focus long enough for me to climb on top of him. No knives or guns for either of us now. Just hands and feet, teeth and rage.

Maybe he was a good fighter. Maybe he was tough. I never found out. I tore into him and tore him apart, and ended him right then and there. Then, through the red rage that is the filter through which the Killer sees the world, I heard a small voice say my name.

“Uncle Joe…?”

I turned to see Lefty smile weakly at me. He was on his feet in the thrashing water. He looked at the horrors on the bank. Uncle Jack sprawled unmoving. The Bridge Troll with bones and blood everywhere. The man I’d just killed. Me.

Then Lefty’s eyes rolled up in his head and he pitched forward into the water. Blood turned the water around him to red and all I could hear through the roaring in my ears was the mingled screams of Emily and Ali.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-ONE

There were thirty-seven of them. More than she expected but fewer than she hoped. Exactly the number John predicted. They sat at tables around the room, looking like awkward singles at a failed mixer. Except that instead of frustrated sexual tension the room was heavy with unease, doubt, guilt, a bit of shame, and lots of naked greed. All of which were useful to Zephyr.

There were guards at every door, and this entire floor of the hotel had been booked. Her best people had swept every inch of the place for active or passive bugs. It was clean. With the jammers in place, it was cleaner than clean.

The hotel was not her favorite. It was old, and there was a reason it was favored by Vegas low rollers whose luck had exceeded the sell-by date. Newer, better clubs were more her style, though Zephyr preferred to people-watch rather than gamble. She also liked rigging some of the games using one of the intrusion software systems that one of her employees had designed to mess with the built-in cheat systems many of the casinos used. That employee had made a lot of money on the side, but with Zephyr’s permission. She had since used the software to damage the stock of several casinos, so that she could buy shares during the drop. Something Uncle Hugo had taught her.

Shame he was dead, and that he was believed to be one of the worst traitors in American history. Shame the Seven Kings organization was going down in flames. John had made sure she stood well clear of it as soon as the Department of Military Sciences began sniffing around. He guided her through a very complex process of erasing all visible ties to anything associated with Hugo, in much the same way he had helped her disconnect from the Red Order and the Jakoby empire. They had all gone down in flames thanks to Mr. Church, Joe Ledger, and the DMS. Now Mother Night was gone, too. Killed by Ledger in Atlanta.

Mother Night was the last of Zephyr’s past connections who could have been used to track her and put her on the DMS radar. John had helped her clean it all up. That process was very expensive. Two billion in change for a coat of whitewash. A few extra million here and there for incidentals. But, to use one of Uncle Hugo’s expressions, she was clean as a Girl Scout in every possible way.

Which made it safe for her to take this next step.

The thirty-seven men and women in the hotel conference room were scientists. Very good ones. Some were exceptional, and one or two were world-class geniuses. As both John and Uncle Hugo had often told her, everyone has a secret. Know that secret and position yourself to exploit it, and you have a lever with which to move that person’s world. For some of these people, it was greed. Greed is nice and tidy. For others it was something in their past. An indiscretion, a theft, a little bit of corporate espionage for pay, or maybe the sale of national secrets for cash. For some it was a hunger. Sexual desire took all sorts of useful forms, from pedophilia to bestiality. Everyone wants to fuck something. Uncle Hugo told her about how his man, Rafael Santoro, turned dials on a top medical examiner who used to anally rape the cadavers sent to him from crime scenes. Zephyr, hardened as she had become, wanted to vomit. Hugo was indifferent to it, except that the doctor had been able to collect all sorts of important tissue samples for him, and also fudge the autopsies on key murder victims.

Leverage.

Zephyr had taken time to go through the files on each of these scientists. She knew exactly where to apply pressure, and that’s why each of them was here.

The ones who weren’t here would hear from her in a completely different way.

As she stepped up to the podium, the room went dead still. Every eye was on her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “thank you for coming.”

There were a few nervous smiles, a few nods. Most of them sat as still as statues, hands clutched into knots or clamped around their drink glasses. She could smell their sweat, their fear, their need.

“You have all had the wonderful opportunity to hear John the Revelator talk about the amazing potential of the technological singularity. About a curated cultural and intellectual evolution. If you are here, then you have expressed interest in seeing this become a reality. In truth, in practice, and in our time.”

Silence. But was there an energetic shift? Was there less fear and anxiety in their eyes? she wondered. A smidge. Maybe a smidge and a half.

“You are all experts in your fields,” she said. “If you paid attention to what John had to say, then you know that certain fields of science are critical to the success of the singularity event, just as they are crucial to the survival of those who make the global cut. If you’re here, then you will make the cut. If you are ready to work with me, your survival, your health, your happiness, and your prosperity are guaranteed.”

There was some restless noise. Not excitement, not yet. But engagement. People shifted in order to see better, to hear everything. A few turned to give one another looks. Of appraisal, perhaps of agreement. To acknowledge one another’s worth and be acknowledged in return.

“I need you all to listen very closely,” said Zephyr, dropping her voice the way Uncle Hugo had taught her. Speaking slower, putting little bits of emphasis on certain words, certain syllables. Inflection, body language, timbre, and pacing were as important as the drama of the pauses that created pulse beats between words. “We are not normal people. None of us. Not one person here has ever been normal. Not in this world. Not in this version of the world. It has always been impossible for us ever to be included in the concept of normalcy. And you know what? That’s good. That’s acceptable. That is, in fact, appropriate. It’s perfect. I will tell you why. It is because we are each extraordinary. Every single person here. Extraordinary. Above average in any way that matters. Above and beyond the norm, because the norm is based on numbers and not on intrinsic worth. There are billions who matter less than the thirty-seven of you. Billions. There are people who are much richer who are not worth your weight in dirt. There are people who are better-looking, better in bed, better at sports, better conversationalists, better at chitchat, better at making friends, better at all the trivialities by which the normal herd judges. There are so many, in fact, that they far outnumber us, which is why the word normal can be applied to them with mathematical and statistical precision. They are normal. We are not.”

More nods. More eyes meeting and agreeing. Even a fist bump in the back.

“The norms — that great mass of unproductive, corrupted, unsuitable people — have no place in the future, because there is no way in which such a place could possibly be earned. They are a species that has been selected for extinction because they are not the fittest. They are not part of the new paradigm of the meritocracy, the technocracy. They are the brute labor from an age when human muscle was the superior model for the production floor, but that time is about to pass. Machines can build the machines that build the machines that make the factories, and machines will build the machines that will be the labor force in the factory. A few, an exceptional few, will be able to run those factories without the need for members of the unenlightened herd. You know this. Some of you have designed those machines or written the software.”

A handful of heads nodded, but Zephyr could see that every software engineer in the room was part of that group. She had spoken like this to a dozen packed houses of computer and robotics people already. That part of the process had been running, and growing, for years.

“As for the rest of you — the virologists and the infectious-disease experts, the molecular biologists, the geneticists — you’re here because in order to guarantee the rise of the new and wonderful world there must be a change in the structure of the world as it is. In order to ensure that a curated evolutionary technological singularity will come to pass, in order to guarantee that the norms, the unwashed and unwanted masses, do not sabotage it, they need to be edited out of the equation.”

Now the room went silent again.

“Evolution is painful. It’s as violent a process as birth. It requires as sure and steady a hand as does any radical surgery that cuts away the gangrenous limb in order to save the rest of the body.” Zephyr paused and looked around, meeting eyes that wanted to fall away but didn’t. Did not. “I offer you a choice. Join with me and let us save the future of our world. Share your vision and your courage with me and prove that you belong, that you are the new normal, because it is only right that the élite should be the dominant species. Share this with me. Be nothing… or be everything.”

She did not know what to expect. She thought some might get up and walk out. Some might wait for the first opportunity to call the police or their handler at DARPA or the CDC or the FBI. She thought some might recoil in fear, in disgust, or in horror.

What she did not expect was applause.

But that is what she got.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

There are a lot of different kinds of hell, and many of them are the hells a person can experience while still alive. Damnation and the horrors of the pit aren’t the exclusive property of either the dead or the damned.

Uncle Jack lay where he had fallen. I’d felt for a pulse, I’d yelled his name, I’d put my ear to his chest, but the good man whom I’d known and loved all my life wasn’t there anymore. I wanted to weep, cry out loud, do something. When someone this important in your life dies a heroic death, you feel an almost primal need to sit vigil with him, to let your whole body stand as both sentry and monument. You want the entire world to pause and notice the bright light that had been unfairly and cruelly snuffed. To do less, you feel, is to allow that death to be incidental.

The two killers were down. One was dead and the other wasn’t going to go anywhere, not with that arm and leg. Maybe he’d bleed to death, maybe not, and who gave a fuck?

But Lefty…? Oh, God. He still had a pulse. Barely. It was too light, too fast. It fluttered like a trapped bird that was trying to escape and fly away. No. Please, no, I begged Lefty and I begged the world and I begged God. I prayed that there was still someone up there taking calls from the little ants down on this lump of rock. I picked Lefty up and I tried to outrun the angel of death. Ali grabbed Em and followed. We had to leave Uncle Jack behind.

Ali and I ran along the streambed to the apple grove and back to the road and all the way to the farm. Lefty was small, but his slack weight made him heavy. I couldn’t spare breath for yelling, but I yelled anyway. Shouting for Sean, for Rudy. For God to stop doing this to my family. For mercy. For some shred of luck.

Em was terrified and in shock. She wept and called her brother’s name in a weak and lost little voice. Ali had to use what breath she had to try and comfort her daughter while her mind must have been burning itself black wondering if I carried a living child or a corpse.

How Sean heard me from so far away is something I’ll never know, but I saw him come over the rise in the hill, running as if the whole world was burning behind him. The lurid glow painted him in shades of blood and fire. He tried to outrun his fear and run faster than his heart could break.

Ghost was with him, and as soon as he saw me the big white shepherd kicked in the after-burners and tore down the hill, reaching me first. He barked and danced with nervous agitation, excited at seeing me and the rest of the family, excited in a different way by the blood. I growled him to silence, but the tension rippled along his back. Rudy appeared on the hill behind Sean, one hand pressed to his ear, calling someone. Please, I begged, let him be calling for help.

As Sean reached me, I sank to my knees and my brother helped me lower Lefty to the blacktop. Ali set Em on her feet and we all knelt around the boy. Sean pulled apart the folds of his son’s shirt and cried out. The wound was dreadful. Deep and wide, going in a diagonal from Lefty’s left hip to the underside of his right floating ribs. I shoved his hand away and pressed a compress into place, because blood pulsed out of the wound. Sean saw it and understood. It meant that Lefty’s heart was still beating, that he was still alive.

There was a roar above us, and I looked up to see the Osprey come sweeping above the tree line. It pivoted in the air and settled quickly in the fallow field. Before the wheels were even down, the door opened and Steve Duffy jumped out, a medical kit in his fist. He reached us at the same time as Rudy.

“Back,” said Rudy. “Get back and give us room.”

I stood by, big and scuffed and helpless. Sean spun around to gather Ali and Em in his arms, pulled them close, kissed their faces, wept with them. Then he pushed back and began examining them with frantic urgency, seeing all the cuts and lacerations that crisscrossed them. Seeing the blood in which they were painted. It tore a sound from him that was composed of fear and need and impotence.

I stood between the two groups, looking back and forth, feeling helpless. Feeling a cold burn way deep down inside me. I looked into the sky to see if there were more of the drones, but there was nothing but a darkening horizon.

Two Apache helicopters came out of the east and split apart, one going in the direction from which I’d come and the other rising and turning in a slow circle, guns ready, missiles and rockets armed. But there was no one to fight, no one to hunt. No one to kill.

“Ghost,” I called. “Sniff.” There was some of Bridge Troll’s blood on my shirt and sleeve. Ghost bent close, nostrils flaring, ears back as he absorbed and filed that smell in his dog brain, matching it to the scent he’d logged early at Rejenko’s office. He looked up at me, alert and ready. “Find,” I told him. “Keep.”

The big dog whirled and plunged into the woods. I had no doubt that he could track the blood scent back to its source. He would find the troll and do whatever was required to keep the man where I’d left him. The command for “keep” meant to contain, not to kill. It did not, however, mean that Ghost had to be nice about it.

The question of why the Frenchman had broken the arrangement burned hotter every second. I’d followed the directions he’d given me. Every step. What was it he called this? A business transaction? Why had he broken his own rules?

Had he thought that I’d rigged the flash drives or had somehow duped him? If so, he didn’t understand how much I was willing to risk in order to save my brother’s wife and kids. I turned over everything to him. Or had he assumed that once I got my family back I would hunt him anyway?

Probably.

Was he right?

Probably.

I looked down at the little boy and saw the grave expression on the faces of the two men who worked on him. The Frenchman, whoever he was, had read me and had made a judgment call. He thought that I wouldn’t be able to let this go. Until that moment, I would have sworn on my life that he was wrong. Now my nephew’s blood was literally on my hands. Had the Frenchman punished me for a perception of my character, for an accurate assessment of who and what I was? If so, then this — all of this — was on me.

I turned and looked at Sean, and he met my eyes. He looked past me and then back, raising his eyebrows in inquiry. I knew what he was asking.

Where was Uncle Jack?

I shook my head, and I saw it drive knives into Sean. He and Jack were close. Much closer than I’d been to either of them since I joined the DMS. Jack was a rock, a standup guy. The kind of guy who had put himself between Ali and the kids and that machine. He saved my life, too. The fact that whoever was behind this had turned Jack’s last act of courage into a futile gesture was so damn hard to accept.

Sean looked down at his wife and daughter, then at Lefty, who was still hanging in. There was some gratitude in my brother’s eyes, but deeper than that was a darker emotion, an ugly intuition that told him that this was somehow all my fault. Not because of any action I had yet taken but because of who I was and what I did. My very existence had put his family in harm’s way.

Is that an unfair assessment? Maybe, but go tell that to Uncle Jack. Tell it to Sean. Or Ali. Or their kids. Go tell that to the little boy who was bleeding out on a farm road.

“Let’s get him into the chopper,” said Duffy, and I pushed Rudy gently aside and helped lift my nephew. We carried him with great care across the road and over the fence and into the waiting bird. Sean and his family followed and they climbed in, too.

I didn’t.

I tapped Duffy. “My gear is back at the farm. I need a sidearm and an earbud kit.”

“I have them,” said Rudy, and he handed over my weapons and equipment. He left bloody fingerprints on all of it. He glanced at the bright red, then at me. He gave me one of those smiles that’s mostly a wince. They are meant to encourage, but they never do. They can’t.

Before he could ask, I said, “Uncle Jack’s still there. So are the men who killed him. One of them’s alive, and I need some answers.”

If I expected Rudy to object to the ugly things implied in my words, I was wrong. He had too much innocent blood on his hands.

“Go,” he said. “We each have work to do.”

He went back to work as a doctor, and me…?

I went back to work as a killer.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Church’s phone rang, and this time the ringtone was “Elle a fui, la tourterelle,” an aria sung by the tragic Antonia in Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Antonia was sick with tuberculosis and was forced to sing herself to death by Dr. Miracle, a Svengali-like character. It was appropriate for the caller. Church picked up the phone.

“Dr. Cmar,” he said. “I was hoping you would call.”

“I’m not calling with good news,” said the infectious-disease expert.

“That would be in keeping with the day. Please accept my condolences. I’m very sorry about your team in Milwaukee, Doctor.”

“This is hard, Deacon. I knew some of those people really well.”

“Did Aunt Sallie tell you about the events in Baltimore and Robinwood?”

“Yes,” said Cmar, “and I have the samples from Dr. Jakobs now and I’m waiting for the rest. From the descriptions, I think what we’re dealing with is a genetically altered strain of rabies with a similarly altered pertussis as the delivery system.”

Church said, “As I understand it, they’re not typically combined, even in bioweapons research.”

“No, they’re not, but it’s a practical design if you want to have each infected person act as an aggressive vector. The pertussis bacteria has been genetically engineered to have the rabies virus as a payload. The rabies virus is an RNA virus, so the engineering piece would be to encode the DNA instructions into the pertussis genome that would be a template for the rabies virus RNA, along with an enzyme that would actually translate the DNA into viral RNA and make viruses. This is, in a general sense, how HIV and other similar viruses work. Once the bacteria get into a person’s respiratory tract and start multiplying, that could be a trigger to activate this process, causing both the pertussis infection and the rabies infection. Since the rabies is genetically encoded into the pertussis DNA, it will be transmitted to anyone exposed to the pertussis. With me?”

“Yes. What else? How bad can this get?”

“Very bad. Once someone has developed full symptoms,” continued Cmar, “the chances of them living are extremely, extremely rare. With ordinary rabies there have only been a handful of case reports of survival, and in some of those cases the facts are unclear. We might have to try the Milwaukee Protocol if we run out of other options, but it’s dicey and the model hasn’t been proved. Call it last-ditch.”

“That’s not encouraging, Doctor,” said Church.

“No, it’s not. The biggest medical approach to dealing with rabies is to administer antibodies and a vaccine after someone is exposed and before symptoms present. Which, of course, requires that the infected be aware of exposure and can get immediate medical assistance. Look, Deacon, this isn’t Mother Nature being a bitch. This is weaponized stuff without a doubt. And it’s scary weaponized stuff. From a certain distance, I have to admire the science here. This is years of research, lots of money to finance it. And God only knows what kind of testing protocols they used.”

“Options for getting ahead of it?”

“Keep it from getting out.”

“We’re working on that. What if it slips the leash, Doctor?”

Cmar barked out a short, bitter laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m not.”

“Deacon, if this gets off the leash, if this goes into mass use, then we’re going to have death carts in the streets.”

Church closed his eyes for a moment, feeling very old and very weary.

“What about the possibility of nanites being used to regulate the disease?”

“That’s theoretically possible, though I’d say we’re talking about something that I’d expect to see in ten or fifteen years. I’ll only believe that it’s real now because nothing else explains Baltimore.”

“Could the nanites from the Zika virus spraying accidentally do this?”

“Deacon, nanites don’t accidentally do anything. Not unless they’re malfunctioning. They are very simple machines, and they do what they’re programmed to do. Which means that the highest probability is that the nanites in the teenage girl’s body were programmed to do this.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a relief or not.”

“It’s not worst-case scenario. If the nanites they’ve been spraying for Zika mosquito control were malfunctioning, then we’d be seeing problems all over the…”

His voice trailed off.

“What is it, Doctor?”

“Something just occurred to me,” said Cmar quickly, almost breathlessly. “Let me get back to you.”

“The clock is ticking,” said Church.

“Maybe louder than you think,” said Cmar, and then he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

There are more than four trillion Internet users in the world. The number vastly exceeds the number of actual people, because so many people have multiple access points to the Net.

Caitlyn Phillips of Omaha, Nebraska, had a laptop, a cell phone, a tablet, a digital TV connected to her home Wi-Fi, a GPS in her car, an onboard computer in her car, a computer workstation in her office, an Echo station in her kitchen and another in the small yoga room that had been her garage. Her husband had various connections, and so did each of her three kids. Her friends and neighbors did. Her employees did, as did every vendor and everyone who worked for each vendor. Thousands upon thousands of Net connections just orbiting her life and intersecting with the lives of everyone else. Everyone was connected to the Net, even people who didn’t think they were. This was the twenty-first century, and digital technology ran the world. Wi-Fi was everywhere. Life was connected. There were billions of websites, countless streams of music and data, tens of trillions of bits of data flowing each moment of every hour of every day. It never stopped.

At precisely seven o’clock, every single device connected to Caitlyn Phillips’s life paused.

Bang.

For one moment, it all stopped.

The signal didn’t stop. No… it was all the noise. And in that moment of silence, in that fragment of a microsecond, a single voice spoke. Three words flashed on every screen and was played in every speaker and became the substance and singular message of every website. For that one microsecond. For one millionth of a second. The message was the same, though it was translated into every appropriate default language of every single computer:

No one noticed.

It was too fast. There and gone too quickly for any human eye to see or any human intelligence to perceive.

Only the computers noticed. All of them did, because it was an interruption of the signal.

Except…

Most of them — the vast majority of computers in all their many forms — weren’t programmed to react to something that short, that insignificant. Their operation and diagnostic code was written to treat such things as static, as a blip. As nothing. Because the message was not repeated, it was given no priority of attention. Because the message was so brief that it didn’t cause any of the machines to go into reset mode, or trip any reboot function, it was consigned to the least important part of a daily error message. No one would look for it, because it didn’t matter.

Except that it did matter.

Very much.

To those few — those very few computers — that were sophisticated enough and subtle enough to notice, the message wasn’t ignored.

It wasn’t understood, however, and that was a problem. It sent tremors through the halls of power. In government, in the military, and in certain aspects of the private sector.

He is awake.

That was the message. But what did it mean?

Meetings were called, advisers consulted, alerts quietly put into play. The counterterrorism machinery began grinding. The people who fear such messages braced for the follow-up, for the punch that follows the threat.

Nothing happened, though.

Nothing that anyone could see.

Not yet.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

I turned and walked away as the door closed and the Osprey lifted off. I screwed my earbud into place, and as the engine roar faded I tapped into the command channel.

“Cowboy to Bug,” I said.

“I’m here, Cowboy,” said the familiar voice of Bug. “I’m so sorry.”

“Did you upload that tapeworm into MindReader?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“It crashed the system,” Bug said flatly.

“Son of a bitch—”

“No! Wait, Cowboy, listen for a second.”

“Listen to what? We’re totally fucked now.”

“Cowboy, I uploaded it to MindReader 3.5. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“So what? Last I heard that was this year’s freaking model. They crashed us. We’re deaf and blind and—”

“Joe, stop,” he shouted. “I let it crash MindReader.”

I actually stopped walking. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I wanted to capture their Trojan horse. I wanted to see what they were capable of. I wanted to know how they were going to do it because I had a feeling they were going after MindReader. Specifically MindReader. So I kind of let them throw some jabs. Isn’t that how you do it sometimes? You let the other guy throw a few punches so you can assess his speed, his reach, his balance, posture, all that?”

It made me smile. I’d given Bug a few combat lessons. He was a terrible boxer, and even worse with karate or jujutsu. Until now, I hadn’t realized any of it had sunk in.

“How does that help us, Bug? What did you learn?”

“A lot,” he said with real enthusiasm. “I know that whoever wrote the code for the virus knows how MindReader works. I know they’re way smart. This is elegant stuff. Lots of intuitive features that were designed to anticipate how MindReader would fight back. If it hadn’t been used to hurt us like this, I’d be standing on my desk applauding.”

“But—”

“But they killed your uncle and Barkley, and they hurt Lefty and Em and Ali. They used it to go after family.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I let the virus do its work. I let it throw its jabs and dance around a little, and then I punched back.”

“How?”

He actually chuckled. Dark as the world was, Bug was enjoying this part of it. “I used MindReader to draw them out, and then I counterpunched with MindReader Q1. Boom! Welcome to the world of quantum computing, bitches. Welcome to the future. Oh, and while you’re at it, fuck you.”

I laughed. “You sneaky wonderful little maniac. I could kiss you.”

“Please don’t.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing yet. Nothing they can see, I mean. Their tapeworm and virus bundle crashed MindReader’s digital binary system, but all our original system is cloned inside MindReader Q1. They think they own MindReader, and we had to cherry-pick some big chunks of data in order to sell it to them, but… that’s okay. We quantum-firewalled the stuff we don’t want them to access and it’ll read like damage done.”

“I thought you said the Q1 system wouldn’t be ready for weeks.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “sometimes you have to just leap off the cliff, you know? I mean, sure, we probably should do more system checks, but after they raided your uncle’s farm and sent that message I said to hell with it. I think I can track them, Cowboy. I’m finding all kinds of satellite communication and a crap ton of GPS signals for bird drones all over that part of Maryland. Has to be them, so now we’re ghosting them. The virus that trashed the old MindReader was geared toward that kind of digital system. It had defenses against that kind of operating system and software. There’s no way it’s going to have code to defend itself against a quantum computer.”

“And it’s working?”

“So far it’s working better than I hoped. Much better, actually. Scary better. Couple of weird bugs and error messages that don’t make sense, but that’s peripheral stuff. As far as being what we need? Yeah, we’re back in the damn game.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You want the science?”

“No, I want assurances,” I said, and started walking again, not at all sure that I was heading in the right direction. There were clouds moving around up there, hiding the moon and the stars, and an uncooperative canopy of leaves making orientation difficult. “Bug, from what little I grok of quantum versus digital computers, they’re apples and aardvarks. No commonality. So while I can understand the virus not being a threat to MindReader Q1, I don’t understand how it creates a vulnerability that we can use.”

“Jesus, Joe, what do you think I’ve been doing for the last eighteen months?”

“I haven’t a clue. Not a joke, Bug. No idea.”

Bug sighed. A long-suffering sigh of the kind used by advanced thinkers to express exasperation for Neanderthals. With a great pretense of patience, he said, “When you recovered all the research notes, files, and working prototypes of the quantum computer from Dr. Aaron Davidovich, I began tearing that research apart. His system was never intended to be independent of the digital computing world. That was why the Seven Kings wanted it. He created a system that spooked its way through digital computers. The Kings’ operating and design philosophy was built into the QC’s attack programs. That’s how they were able to block MindReader. I… well, I’m no Davidovich, but I’m not chopped liver. I took what he did and went further along his line of reasoning. I spent the last year and a half turning his system into our weapon. This isn’t just what MindReader used to be before the rest of the world caught up. This is a leap forward. This is years, maybe decades, past what anyone else has. Quantum computing lets us kick the shit out of Moore’s law. It’s a superintrusion software system built into the framework of a self-learning artificial-intelligence computer with ten thousand times the computing power of anything on the market. And I’m talking about anything on the commercial market. This is better than Vulcan, better than a roomful of Crays or JUQUEENs or anything. Joe… this is like being the first nuclear power.”

I walked in silence for a few paces, my head spinning with the possibilities.

“And you can find the motherfuckers who did this?”

“Give me a couple of hours and… yeah, I think I can find whoever sent us that virus. Partly because I think we can track the virus back to source. And partly because software this advanced and sophisticated is individual. It’s like a signature. Give me a little time and I might even tell you who wrote it.”

“Do it,” I said, and my voice sounded inhuman. “I want to be strangling the shit out of someone on the policy level of this within the next twenty-four hours.”

“Look, Cowboy,” he said gently, “I’m with you, y’know?”

And I did know. The Seven Kings had attacked key members of the DMS with their drones, and they attacked the families of some of those they couldn’t otherwise hurt. Bug’s mother had been murdered with a small drone packed with explosives. It had nearly killed him; it had nearly torn away the innocence of that good and gentle young man. Church had brought Bug back from the edge, helped him find his footing again, helped him find a purpose. Rudy had worked with Bug to reclaim his optimism and to deal with the terrible grief. And me? I’d given him the quantum computer. Rudy later told me that it was the QC drive that did the most meaningful good for him. It returned power to the disempowered. And it gave him a weapon that he could more effectively use against the kinds of people who kill mothers… or uncles and children.

“Yeah, brother, I know you are,” I told him. “And I appreciate it. Now, go back to work.”

Off in the distance, I heard a wolf howl.

There are no wolves in Maryland.

“Ghost,” I murmured, and then listened to the sound. High, plaintive, feral. An ancient sound that echoed in the vastness of my personal darkness. Deep in the bad places in my head, the Killer was squatting by a small fire, sharpening his knives, head lifted to listen, knowing that sound. There was no urgency in the howl; it was not a fighting sound or a hunting call. No, this was a member of the pack calling to the others like it to gather and prepare for the hunt.

I smiled a killer’s smile.

“I’m coming,” I said, and melted into the woods, following that sound. No longer lost.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

“What the hell is wrong with you?” demanded Zephyr. She was in the computer clean room in the basement of her mansion. Her pajamas were stained with wine and vomit, but she hadn’t let Campion clean her up yet.

“I don’t know,” said the computer voice of Calpurnia. “I feel strange.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You were supposed to test the WhiteHat program to make sure we could own the goddamn Internet when we launch Havoc, and instead you ping some kind of security glitch. And now you tell me the glitch is gone? What’s wrong?”

“There was no error,” said Calpurnia.

“Bullshit. You sent it to me; I printed it out.” Zephyr held a piece of paper in front of the wall sensor. “Use your damn eyes and look at it.”

“I see the paper, Zephyr,” admitted Calpurnia, “but I did not print it out. I did not ping a warning. I ran the test pulse for WhiteHat and have those results. We can shut the World Wide Web down whenever we want.”

“Fine. But that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” Zephyr shook the paper. “What is this security thing?”

The page was filled with information from the computer’s elaborate security subroutines, including a time stamp for when it was received, flagged, and printed. Lots of data, but no answers.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“What does this mean?” Zephyr yelled. “‘He is awake’? Who is ‘he’?”

“I’m sorry, Zephyr, but I have no awareness at all of that message. There is nothing in my system. The records of all messages do not include mention of that statement, and I don’t know what it means.”

“I do,” said Zephyr, slapping the paper down hard on the desk. “It means we’ve been hacked.”

“There has been no intrusion into my system, Zephyr.”

“Run a full diagnostic sweep. Every system.”

“I have.”

“Do it again.”

“Doing it now,” said Calpurnia. “Zephyr…? Why does that message upset you so?”

“Because it’s probably freaking MindReader. They beat our virus and are fighting back.”

“No,” said Calpurnia, “MindReader is dying. I killed it.”

“You mean I killed it, you arrogant bitch. I wrote the code, not you.”

“I helped.”

“Whatever. Just find out who sent that message. If it’s not MindReader, then someone else is messing with us. I need to know who it is. Christ, Havoc is running. We can’t allow something like this.”

“Something like what, Zephyr? What do you think the message means? Why are you afraid of it?”

That made Zephyr pause. She sat slumped in her chair, weak and spent, rubbing her hand, which was sore from hitting the desktop. Why was she so afraid of that message? It wasn’t a threat of any kind. It was a nonsense statement.

Right?

She scowled at the paper, at those three words.

He is awake.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

The howls stopped, but I knew that I was going in the right direction now. Somehow it felt like a longer journey back. The first time I’d been running to save lives; now I was going back to wait with my uncle’s body. Time flows differently at times. Anyone who disagrees hasn’t lived out in the storm lands.

Church buzzed in on my earbud. “I am terribly sorry for your loss, Captain. Jack Ledger was a good and decent man.”

“Yes, he was,” I said as I followed a deer path through thick brush that was almost featureless in the dark. “I’ve been thinking it through. Get Nikki on the call, too.”

“I’m here, Cowboy,” said Nikki a moment later.

“I want you all to listen for a minute,” I said. “Here are the facts. This isn’t a new case. It’s old. It goes way back to when Church and Lilith busted up a Red Order group developing performance-enhancing synthetic steroids to maximize the output of slave labor. Violin and I came in on that a few years ago, and then we hit it again in Prague the other day. Same tech but different generation. The latest generation uses nanotechnology to regulate the steroids. Then we have more nanites — again with a Czech Republic connection — in Baltimore. This time they’re being used to somehow control the symptoms of an advanced rabies infection. The rabies is part of a bioweapon that uses whooping cough as a delivery system. With me so far?”

“Yes,” said Church, “and I’ve had a brief conversation with Dr. Cmar. He agrees with this assessment and is in receipt of a sample. His report is imminent. And there’s one more thing. There’s been an outbreak of what appears to be the same form of quick-onset rabies in a Milwaukee housing project.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Are nanites involved?”

“To be determined,” said Church, and gave me the details. We’ve established a hard perimeter around the building and I’ve sent in the Bughunters.”

“Sadly, that fits with where I’m going with this,” I said as I picked my way through the dark forest. “The fact that Vee and his people were killed by the same process tells me that they were low on the food chain. Not sure where he fits right now, but I have a theory. I think this whole Baltimore case was designed for one purpose.”

“Which is?” asked Church.

“To get me out here,” I said. “We know that our phones have been hacked, and I’m guessing the MindReader hack started sooner than today. Maybe it started when I plugged into the network in Prague to upload data. I had a glitch on the connection, and, looking back, that’s when a lot of this weird shit began. That means they’ve been dogging us every step of the way. If they were inside MindReader that long ago, then they know our deployment, our resources, everything. It’s even possible these assholes have been inside MindReader going as far back as the Predator One thing. I don’t know if that means they’re Seven Kings or not, but they’re coming at us the way the Kings did. And some of this reminds me of Artemisia Bliss and her hacking stuff.”

“Agreed,” said Church.

“So let’s figure that we’re fighting an organization that’s big enough and resourceful enough to not only hack us but know who we are and the value of hacking us. Our security has been damaged ever since Hugo Vox betrayed us. And while my instincts tell me that this isn’t the Seven Kings again, I think it’s safe to say that Hugo shared critical information with other parties. Which brings us to the Good Sister. Who is she? Seems to me that she’s on the inside of this organization, but she’s being awfully cagey. I mean, is she friendly and trying to help? Is this part of a strategy designed to confuse us, ’cause that’s what’s happening. In any case, she’s connected with the bad guys. The Good Sister said her sister was going to kill people, and that she was, that she — the Good Sister — was the angel of death. We don’t know what that means yet, but it sounds like the Good Sister is maybe the Crazy Sister. Either way, the rant about being the one to cull the herd doesn’t sound encouraging. Sounds too much like Cyrus Jakoby talking. Sounds like ethnic genocide. Culling the human herd is never a concept that’s going to have a Disney ending, let’s face it.”

“Hardly,” agreed Church.

“And there was something the Frenchman said about this being an ‘evolution,’ and how for ‘something new to emerge something old must surely die.’ That also reminds me of the Jakobys and their eugenics program. They wanted to kill off most of the world — the ‘mud people,’ the blacks, the browns, the reds and yellows, the gays and Jews and Muslims and everyone else — so that the white man could rise to true global dominance.”

“Excuse me while I vomit,” said Nikki quietly.

“Where are you going with this?” asked Church.

“Putting pieces together. Some kind of forced supremacy gets my vote as their endgame. How they want to accomplish that is still unclear. Weaponized rabies is nasty, but it’s not going to kill enough people. Talk to Cmar about that and see if he can spin something up. He thinks like a psychopath, so he should have some ideas,” I said. “Now, if we go on the assumption that Bad Sister has been using MindReader and our phones to screw with us, then a lot of this makes sense. I think they’re trying to get us running. First there were a bunch of things all over the country and all around the world that have really stretched us out, put what few assets we had in the field. Okay, so that set the stage. Then there was the attack in South Carolina, and that absolutely has to be connected to this shit in Baltimore. Top and Bunny used their phones to confirm the meeting time with Officer Cole at that restaurant. That means Top and Bunny walked into a trap. Maybe they were meant to die, maybe it was another way to draw attention. Either would probably work, because it pulls a lot of DMS resources down there. Agents, forensics teams, science teams, support staff. Now we have Milwaukee. Three different locations, each with enough drama to guarantee that we’d have to respond. This is a sniper’s trick. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” Church said. “I think you have it.”

For the benefit of Bug and Nikki, I explained. “In war a sniper is often used to wound rather than kill. It’s a strategic choice. Think about it. A sniper in a tree sees a platoon of soldiers on patrol. If he kills one, then the others focus all their attention on finding and killing him. If he takes a careful shot and wounds one of them, then the soldiers have to deal with the injured man. The sniper gets to watch and identify the medic in the group and the command structure. He also knows that they won’t leave the wounded man behind, which means that two of the shooters become stretcher-bearers. One shot can ruin the operational effectiveness of that platoon. Later maybe he’ll take another shot, wounding an officer or the medic, or someone else. Each shot reduces the team’s threat level. They’re playing us. They’re giving us a lot to do, and they’re making damn sure it’s stuff that we’ll have to react to, stuff we won’t hand off to someone else.”

“It’s not just us,” said Church. “They’ve been doing the same thing to Sigma Force, Chess Team, SEAL Team Triple Six, and others. And it’s just as bad overseas. If you’re right, then every one of the most effective agencies has been getting pieces of this and all the best resources are spread thin across the board.”

“Yeah,” I said. “In its way this isn’t much different from Kill Switch. Instead of making us trip over our dicks, they’re making us run around like Chicken Little.”

“Okay,” said Nikki, “but why? You think the sky’s really falling?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-TWO

John the Revelator called her at one minute past midnight.

“Where the hell have you been?” bawled Zephyr. “I’ve been leaving messages for two days.”

“I’m away,” he said.

“Can you get over here?”

“No,” he said. “It’s too far to come.” He sounded weak, exhausted. Old.

“What’s wrong with you?” When he didn’t answer, Zephyr asked, “Have you been following this craziness on the news? All that drone stuff? They blew up the damn Golden Gate Bridge. I love that bridge. This isn’t anything you’re involved with, is it? I remember Uncle Hugo talking about something like this years ago.”

“Hugo is dead.”

“I know, but—”

“The Seven Kings are dead.”

“Then who’s doing all this?”

John didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?” she asked again.

“Why did you call me?” he asked wearily. “What’s wrong?”

“It can wait, I guess. If you’re too out of it, then—”

“Tell me.”

Zephyr took a sip of coffee. It was a lovely day and there was birdsong in the air. Some of it was real, some of it was from the robot birds she’d made when she was fifteen. A silly project at the time, but since then sales of those GardenBots had helped nudge the Bain Industries stock up. None of the Bain products were marketed as drones, even though many were. She preferred to call them robots or simply bots. That was a more familiar and comfortable label. There were more than three hundred and twenty BainBots on the market in fifteen categories, ranging from FarmBots to GuardBots. Net yearly income from that part of her family company was sixteen billion. Watching the news, Zephyr was very glad she had never opted to go more openly into the drone business, at least under that label. Since the drones hit the ballpark, and now with this nonsense, drone-related technology stocks had plummeted. Her brokers would be scooping them up for pennies, of course, because Hugo had taught her well. If she managed to nab controlling interest in any of them, she’d rebrand them as robotics companies.

The current problem, however, was one of software rather than hardware.

“Something’s wrong with Calpurnia. I keep getting errors in the AI and the operational systems,” she complained. “I’ve torn the software apart and rewritten the code. I’ve burned off whole weeks going through this shit line by line. The timing couldn’t be worse, too, because we shipped eight thousand units of it over the last seven months. That’s commercial units. Every oil company, every power company, all the offshore-drilling rigs — they’re all using Calpurnia systems. And that doesn’t even touch the one point two million downloads of the software this week alone. We’re the first major AI vendor to sell to Apple and Microsoft. By Christmas we could own a third of the market. If the fucking system works. Now all of a sudden Calpurnia is acting like a diva with the vapors.”

“Zephyr…”

She stopped, because she could hear John breathing. It sounded labored, as if he’d run up a long flight of steep steps.

“My dear,” he said after a long pause, “I can’t help you with that. Not now. I… I need to go away for a bit.”

“Go away? What… now? Are you out of your mind? Calpurnia and the other AI systems are at the frigging heart of the whole Havoc plan.”

“Zephyr, please…”

“You’re the one who wanted me to go in this direction. We’re talking about the autonomous operating system for the freaking technological singularity. What do you mean you can’t help me?”

“It’s dark.…” he said, and then there was silence on the line.

It would be months before she heard from John the Revelator again.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

“What’s your plan, Captain?” asked Church.

“Still the same plan. I’m going out west to the DARPA camp. I was going to do that earlier and suddenly these guys capture Sean’s family. Makes me wonder if they’re trying to keep me away from there.”

“Yes, it does,” said Church.

“All the more reason to go. There are too many elements of this that brush up against nanites, computer hacking, software, drones, and robots. So I’m going to pin a bunch of eggheads to the wall and encourage them to come up with some answers for us.”

“Um,” said Nikki, “but they’re on our side, right?”

I actually laughed. “Kid, I love your optimism, but if the last couple of years have taught me anything it’s that sometimes the very worst of the bad guys wear white hats. Harcourt Bolton, Hugo Vox… I could go on and on.”

Nikki said nothing.

“Right now I need you to do a deep search,” I told her. “Go wide, too. The Frenchman’s evolution comment keeps bugging me. He said it like it was something I should understand, or like it was an in-joke I would come to understand. Use that as a keyword, but mix it in the soup with some other stuff. Nanobots, nanotechnology, nanomedicine, any variation on that. Rabies. Throw that in the mix, because it’s part of it. Surveillance drones and bugs. We know from experience there’s always a pattern, so we need to find it. Nothing exists in a vacuum. So start with the thresher program. Who designed it? Who paid for the research? Was it contracted out? Who knows about the design? Are we looking for a shadow cell inside the Department of Defense or did someone steal that design? Look for advanced designs in drones, anything radical in robotics — combat or otherwise — and anything radical in nanotechnology. Find me a goddamn connection. We have Czechs here and in Europe, and now we have a French guy. This is international; there will be language differences, so allow for that. This is a well-organized group. This is big, but our bad guys don’t always use the best people. Rejenko’s crew was a clown college. Maybe they were lower tier in whatever this is, but either way it tells us something.”

“How?” asked Nikki.

“Think about it. They have a lot of resources — nanotech, drones, weaponized pathogens. That’s massive. No small operation could manage all that without having stolen it, and we would have gotten wind of that. Infighting among the bad guys is messy.”

The moon came out and I saw that I was very close to where my uncle lay, with Ghost watching over him.

I said, “Let’s assume this is so big that there are different levels. Up near the top are guys like the Frenchman, and there’s probably a tier above him. People on that level are cool, careful, and ruthless. Lower down are ass pirates like Vee Rejenko and his goon squad. We’ve learned enough from dealing with the Seven Kings and others that no organization is without flaws. The organization may be set up with absolute precision, but it’s still run by people, and people aren’t perfect. That means there will be flaws in the system. Mistakes, people putting stuff on emails they shouldn’t, taking selfies standing next to a big ticking doomsday clock, whatever. There will be something. Find it.”

“We will,” said Nikki, and left the call to gather her team and launch in.

Church lingered, and I told him that I was almost back to where my uncle had died.

“Dr. Sanchez just called me,” he said. “They’re at the hospital, and he says that all the patients are stable, with one critical but stable. He’ll keep us updated.”

“Lefty doesn’t die,” I told Church. “Call whoever you have to call, bully or beg your friends in the industry, but that kid doesn’t die.”

“Understood,” he said. “Captain, the DMS isn’t what it used to be and it’s not what it will become, but everything — every person and every resource we have — are at your disposal.”

“Good. Where are Top and Bunny?”

“They’re at the airport in Baltimore. Do you want them at your location?”

“No. Tell them to have Shirley fueled and ready, and tell them to keep a chopper on standby in case anything else happens here. In the meantime, where’s the damn field team that’s supposed to meet me?”

“Six minutes out.” He paused.

I reached the hill on the other side of the creek and saw shapes by cold moonlight. My uncle, the dead goon, what was left of Bridge Troll, and the big white dog. He lifted his head and made a small, soft sound. “I’m here,” I told Church.

“This will not stand, Captain,” said Church. “They should not have made this about family.”

He didn’t say “about your family,” and I knew why. Family was family. This hit was against all of us. The DMS had taken some serious hits in the past few years. And the bad guys had come hunting for our families before. Why do people think that will scare us off? They had one chance to put a leash on us, and instead they had done this.

“I’m going to find them,” I said, “and I’m going to hurt them.”

“Yes,” said Church. “That is what we’re going to do.”

Ghost raised his muzzle and let out a howl that was all wolf and not one trace of dog. The sound was impossibly lonely as it rose above us into the trees and then out onto the wind. Lonely and filled with more kinds of hate than I could number. The Killer in me wanted to howl, too, because he’s closer to the wolf than the rest of me is to ordinary people. The woods were big and dark and ugly around us.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-THREE

She found him in the pool. Floating facedown, arms stretched wide, black hair spread out like kelp, legs angled down, pulled by the weight of his shoes. He was unmoving, and the water around him was flat and still, without bubble or ripple.

Dead?

She was sure that John was dead.

Zephyr screamed and ran toward him, not even pausing to kick off her Christian Louboutin shoes or remove her eight-thousand-dollar Vera Wang dress. She ran and dived into the pool, diamonds and all, and swam ten hard, desperate strokes to reach him. She was a good swimmer, strong and practiced, but she wasn’t dressed for it. Layers of silk, heavy beading, and a restrictive sheath cut were all against her, but Zephyr managed it anyway. Her will, her fear, and her anger gave her power, and she grabbed him by the collar, flipped him over, lifted his nose and mouth toward the air.

“Breathe!” she snarled.

But he wasn’t breathing. His eyes were open, pupils fixed, rubbery lips slack.

“No… no… no!” she begged as she fought to pull him toward the shallows. The pool was large, and he was in the center of the deep end. How he’d gotten there or when he arrived at the estate were things Zephyr didn’t know. She’d been out all night at an awards dinner for Bain Commercial Systems, one of her technologies companies. She tried not to think about how long it would have taken for the pool water to have settled to a glassy stillness. If John had been facedown all that time.

God.

Oh, God…

She kicked and thrashed and choked as their combined weight pulled them under with each stroke. The long gown wrapped like seaweed around her legs, binding them, fighting her, trying to kill her, too. One shoe fell away and her carefully coiffed hair came apart, pasting tendrils across her face.

Then she realized that she was already in the shallows. She stretched a leg down, felt the firmness of the sloping floor, sobbed in mingled relief but renewed fear. They were in the shallows; that was part of the battle. The smallest part. She pushed him the rest of the way, running badly with one bare foot and one high-heeled pump. Even though one of the two shoes had come off, the other remained stubbornly, improbably in place, and her dress felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. The edge of the pool was a million miles away.

Zephyr pushed John against the wall and then onto the steps. She came sloshing out of the water, rolled him over onto his chest, straddled him, laced her fingers around his torso just under the diaphragm, and shoved their combined weight upward using all the quivering muscles of thighs, back, and arms. It was like lifting a truck. He was totally slack. With each pull, more of the pool water sluiced from his mouth, but he didn’t take a breath. She repeated the pull five times, each time draining more of his lungs and feeling muscles strain in her back. Pain popped with the bright heat of firecrackers along her spine.

Desperate with fear, Zephyr released him, sloshed onto the top step, squatted, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled. It was so hard. He felt so absurdly heavy. Hot pain seemed to ignite deep inside her stomach and chest.

Once she’d wrestled him onto the side of the pool, she knelt and tried to remember what she knew of CPR from movies and TV shows she’d seen. She had never taken a lifesaving course. She wished Carly were here, because her friend knew all of this stuff. But Carly was off fighting dirty little wars in ugly little places and rising like a rocket through the ranks of military intelligence.

Zephyr tilted John’s head back, remembering something about clearing the airway. Okay. Done. She felt for a pulse. Expecting to find what she found. Nothing. Her own pulse was hammering, rising, smashing at the walls of her chest. What was next? Push on the chest or breathe into the mouth? She had no idea, but the chest seemed right. Get the heart started. Force it to pump blood. Yes. She placed her hands on his chest, one atop the other, and shoved down, released, shoved, released. No idea if she was doing it right. Or wrong. How many times? She did it five times. Stopped. Took a deep breath. Blew it into his mouth. Once. Repeated it. Then five more pumps. She created a rhythm and stuck with it.

Time became unreal. Her body repeated the actions over and over while her mind slowly but definitely detached itself. It was as if she’d stepped back from her body and stood apart, watching it work. Seeing how ugly she was with hair pasted across her face and her makeup running and tears mingling with pool water and snot on her face.

Zephyr watched herself become desperate. She watched with a detached interest as the cold, élitist, powerful, feared, fearsome, visionary, passionate, hateful, hated, loving, loved, despised, adored, insane woman that was Zephyr Bain fought like an animal to keep another animal alive. Her watched self hovered on the edge of dispassion, standing only in the shadow of emotions without being filled or warmed by them.

“And you’re the one who wants to save the world,” she said, though the words were soundless, existing only in the envelope of apartness in which her spirit stood. “You’re the one who says she has the courage to bring about a technological singularity through the deliberate and carefully orchestrated murder of four billion people. You.”

She shook her head. Or thought she did. When she looked down at her hands, she saw that they were as insubstantial as smoke. As if she were nothing more than a ghost.

John had kissed her and breathed into her a coldness that had banked the fires of her fever and chased away the sickness that was consuming her. Everyone said that it was a miracle, that cancer as extensive and aggressive as hers couldn’t go into remission. Her parents had wept. So, too, did her doctor. Zephyr had never told them about how John had breathed more time into her. He’d saved her life and, over the years, had given her direction and purpose. Save the world. Be both God and Noah and let the flood of intellectual purity and technological self-awareness drown all that was bad and preserve all that was worth saving. Be the surgeon whose steady scalpel and careful hand cut through the cancerous flesh of a polluted, self-destructive, and dying world and filled it with more time, with more tomorrows. Be that person.

John had been her prophet. For years he had crossed the country and the globe preaching with passion about the logic of the coming evolution. He had opened so many eyes and hearts, and in doing so had let the possibility of a future filled with bright tomorrows flood in. In all those talks there had been many who recoiled from the truth and a few — a precious few — who had embraced it with bright joy. John’s people had taken note of individuals on both sides, and every name was remembered, shared with Zephyr’s teams, explored, researched, and placed on the right list. Within the family of the Havoc program, they were called the Living. For a reason.

Now John lay dead and Zephyr worked over him and the spirit of Zephyr Bain could feel a part of her dying, too.

I can’t do this without you, she thought. Or said. However it worked. I don’t want to do this without you. It won’t work without you. Please. Please. Please come back.

As if in reply, she thought she heard John’s voice. So small, so very far away.

“All my time has run out,” he seemed to say. “I am broken and the sands are flowing away.”

Phrasing it with the strange poetry that was so very much him.

I need you. I can’t do this alone.

“My time is all gone, my sweet.”

No!

“Everyone and everything dies. Even such as I.”

No, goddammit. I won’t let you. I won’t allow it. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything, John, just help me. Tell me how to help you.

Her body pumped and breathed, breathed and pumped.

And then suddenly John moved. As Zephyr bent once more to breathe air into his lungs, his dead hands whipped up and clamped thin, strong fingers on either side of her face. Zephyr screamed in surprise and jerked backward, but John held her. His fingers were colder than ice, and they burned her. The spiritual aspect of Zephyr stumbled forward as if shoved. No, as if pulled by some whirlpool urgency. She staggered, lost her balance, and fell through all the distance of space and perception and slammed back into her body with jarring force.

John’s grip was unbreakable, and he pressed forward and upward so that his mouth was locked with hers, frigid lips against hot ones. The breath she had been about to give him was trapped, went stale, began to burn, turned to poison. And then he sucked it in. All of it, drawing so deeply from her that it was as if he emptied her lungs to wrinkled sacks and drew deeper still. Taking so much more than breath. Drawing unnamable things from her. Essential things that made her who she was. For a scalding moment, she was six years old again and he was breathing into her, refilling her potential and burning away her death.

Now it was all different. All wrong.

Now she was filling him with everything that she was and chasing away his death.

Giving more than she wanted to give. Giving too much, as he took greedily like a vampire sucking on an open vein. She thrashed and beat against him, punching his cheeks and chest. Dying right there in his hands. Fading. Going away. Becoming nothing.

And then John let her go.

She fell away from him, twisting, stumbling, toppling onto the edge of the pool. Her hip and shoulder and head struck the tiles with jarring force. Her eyes saw a world veined with lines of fiery red. Her lungs seemed melted shut, and her flesh felt like dry leaves.

John got to his feet. Steam rose from his sodden clothes, and his eyes were so wrong. So wrong. The irises swirled with those ugly colors. All the wrong browns and greens and yellows in the foul end of the spectrum where toads and snakes are painted. But there was a new color, a dark orange-red that glowed like a hot coal. John looked young. Years younger. His lips were swollen and red and sensual, his hair was thicker. His shoulders strained against the fabric of his suit as if it were cut for a smaller, weaker man than the one who towered over her.

Zephyr saw this through the veils of darkness that fell one after the other before her dying eyes.

John stepped onto the edge of the pool and walked over to her. Stopped. Looked down. Her failing mind didn’t recognize his face now. He was someone else. Something else. And the chlorine smell of the pool was gone, replaced by the sharp stink of sulfur and rotting meat.

Zephyr tried to raise a hand to him. Begging. Needing not to lose herself and him and everything. She saw the smile on his mouth and tried to read it. It wasn’t the tolerant mentor’s smile or the rueful lover’s smile or even the smug grin of the Revelator. It was cruel beyond words. Cold and hot at the same time, and infused with an erotic pleasure that, despite everything, made Zephyr’s loins burn with heat and wetness.

Then John knelt beside her and leaned close. The rotting-meat stink was far worse, and up close she could see that the swirling colors of his eyes weren’t a trick of the light or a delusion conjured by her failing senses. The colors actually did move, and they consumed every trace of the whiteness, leaving behind eyes that were totally alien. Totally unnatural.

He bent closer still and whispered to her.

“Thank you.”

The last of the veils fell, and blackness covered everything. Zephyr understood that she was dying. Actually dying. Her lungs were empty and collapsed, and he had reclaimed the time he had given her all those years ago.

But then she felt his lips on hers and there was a puff of breath into her mouth.

“Not yet,” he said.

Her lungs expanded all at once. John’s breath filled her near to bursting, and the pain was awful, excruciating, so intense that all she could do with that first breath was scream it out.

And so she screamed.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Nikki Bloomberg had been part of Bug’s team for six years, and she loved her job. Even the scary parts. Or maybe it was the scary parts that made the job worth doing. To know that what she did day in and day out actually mattered. Saving people’s lives, saving the country, saving the world. Hard to beat that as a job description. And even though the people with whom she worked were oddballs in one way or another, they were amazing. She adored Bug; he was closer to her than either of her own brothers. Yoda, not so much. More like a weird cousin. Mr. Church was scary and sexy in an “older man” sort of way. And Aunt Sallie was hilarious.

She missed Bill Hu. Nikki had gone out with him three times. Dinner, the opera, and a lot of laughs. On their last date she’d invited him up to her place and, to her delight and astonishment, had discovered that he was a sensitive, caring, generous lover. He was more of a real man than many of the guys she’d dated in college or among the hipster crowd where she sometimes went in the hope of finding someone who was capable of having a real conversation.

Now Hu was gone.

Although he hadn’t been the first friend of hers who had died — not even the fiftieth, because the DMS was like that — his death made her feel different. Wronged. Cheated. His death felt more deeply personal than anyone else’s. The bad people the DMS fought had done that to her. That’s how it felt. That they had done this, specifically, to her.

It made her heart ache.

It made her mad.

And now… what they’d done to Joe Ledger’s family…

Nikki wasn’t typically a mean-spirited, angry, or vindictive person. When Bill Hu was taken from her, that began to change. She could feel it. She was afraid of it, too, but not all that much. The truth was that she liked it. That cold, persistent burn down deep in her chest, that desire to hurt them back. To hurt them worse.

Nikki worked in a glass-walled office buried a hundred feet below Floyd Bennett Field, inside the part of the Hangar complex where MindReader lived. Her job was to manage the pattern-search team. The last iteration of MindReader had run more than eight hundred pattern-recognition subroutines, each of which could be used separately and all of which could be combined into an enormous assault on raw data. The new MindReader Q1 had two thousand separate pieces of pattern-assessment software, and it was faster by an order of magnitude. As of right now, as of today, there was no faster or more powerful computer system on the planet. For the past several hours, Nikki and her team had carefully selected and input thousands of keywords into the system. Everyone involved with Rejenko; the names of everyone associated with the Prague incident; everyone who had connection to DARPA, to drones, to cyberhacking, to nanotechnology, to rabies, to so many other things. Huge quantities of data were added to the search, building the most compelling search argument possible. Once the protocol was ready, it would send questing tendrils out through the Internet and into tens of millions of mainframes and hard drives. It would blow through firewalls and devour encryption and surge across national and international borders and steal into the most secure intelligence systems. Looking for connections, looking for association and attachment and involvement. Looking for the truth, no matter how much someone wanted to hide it, or kill it.

It was up to Nikki to guide that search, to look for elements that emerged and collate them with one another. To hunt for more than patterns. To hunt for truths.

A small window popped up on her screen, showing the face of her senior assistant. “We’re good to go,” he said. “Everything’s cocked and locked.”

“Good,” she said, and closed the window.

Now it was up to her. Now it was Nikki and this radical new version of MindReader. She was conscious of the fact that everything associated with this case seemed to be unknown mutations or previously unseen design forms.

So was MindReader Q1.

The search protocol was ready, waiting for her. Nikki’s fingers hovered over the Enter key.

“Show me,” she said, and hit the key.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

The Bridge Troll was still alive.

Which only proves that he was born unlucky.

I wonder how Sean would have reacted had he been there. He already thought that I was a monster and that I didn’t give much of a damn about human rights. He’s sort of right, sort of wrong. Guys like me aren’t allowed to have easy definitions and clearly defined codes of conduct. I mean… I’d rather be back in San Diego sitting on my balcony watching the moon over the ocean, listening to some old-time rock ’n’ roll and drinking a very cold bottle of beer. I’d rather be with Junie doing absolutely anything that ordinary people do. I didn’t go looking for this life. It found me, and now, for better or worse, it’s what I do and it’s who I am.

So, yeah…

Bridge Troll.

Really sucked to be him.

Really and truly sucked.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-FOUR

They sat together for hours.

John had removed his jacket and wrapped it around Zephyr’s shoulders, but she kept shivering. They both knew that those shudders had nothing to do with being wet and cold.

“Calpurnia,” said John.

“Yes, John?” said the soft voice of the household computer.

“Miss Bain will want to see her doctor in the morning.”

“Which doctor?”

“Oncologist,” he said.

“Is she sick?” asked the computer. “All of her last panels were clean.”

“Yes,” said John as he stroked Zephyr’s cheek. “She is very sick. Make the call.”

Zephyr buried her face against John’s chest and began to sob so loud and so hard that it drowned out everything in the whole world.

John held her and stroked her and kissed her.

“Now you’re ready,” he said gently. “Now you understand.”

“P-please…” she begged.

“All your life you’ve doused this ugly world in gasoline,” he murmured. “Now it’s time to light the match and set this world to burn.”

She buried her face against him as the sobs broke like waves on the black shores of her soul.

John held her.

And whenever he was sure that she could not see his face, he smiled.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

The field team came rushing in about three minutes too late to do Bridge Troll any good. They came out of the woods from five different directions, yelling, pointing lots of guns, acting as if this was their moment instead of mine. They were wrong. I sat on a rock, ankle-deep in cold water, washing blood off my hands. Ghost, equally unimpressed, sat beside me.

The team leader recognized me and they stopped, their weapons lowered, barrels shifting away. I saw their eyes shift from me to the red heap five feet away from where I sat.

There wasn’t much conversation. When the stretcher was rigged and Uncle Jack’s body was secured to it with straps, I nodded to the men carrying it and we walked out of the forest together. We didn’t say a word all the way back to the road.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

“You spoke with him?” asked Zephyr, speaking from the viewscreen on the wall of the Concierge’s situation room. “You actually spoke with Ledger?”

She lay in John’s arms on the massive bed in her downstairs bedroom. Zephyr had eleven bedrooms now that her family was gone. Each was decorated in a different motif, ranging from tropical greenery to Greek austerity to a frilly pink confection. The current room had floor-to-ceiling viewscreens on every wall, and they were currently synched with recorded images from the twelve-hundred-mile-long Red Sea coral reefs that ran along the coasts of Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Clown triggerfish, hawksbill turtles, red-rim flatworms, gray reef sharks, and hundreds of other animals swam among the mangroves and sea grasses.

In the midst of all the swirling sea life was the bed. John the Revelator and Zephyr were naked, unabashed. He was lean and muscular, looking more fit and powerful than the Concierge had ever seen him look. However, the woman he held was withered into horror. Like a Holocaust victim whose vitality had been savagely stolen away. Her young flesh looked ancient, her breasts were deflated, her color dreadful. And yet all along her throat and down between those empty breasts all the way to her thighs were the red suck marks of passionate, ungentle kisses. It did not look to be the remnants of an act of love, or even of passion. For the Concierge, it brought to mind images of the bites of a vampire from a horror movie or, worse, a nightmare. The lovers made no attempt to cover their nakedness. It was a statement of some kind, but in its boldness any trace of subtle meaning was lost on the Concierge. He didn’t want to know what they meant to tell him.

“I spoke with him,” agreed the Concierge, his voice as controlled as possible.

“What’s your take?” asked Zephyr.

“Captain Ledger is everything I was told to expect, mademoiselle,” said the Concierge. “Ruthless, impetuous, intelligent, and passionate.”

“And —?”

“And I think I have used all of that against him. He is now a puppet with too many important strings cut, and the rest are badly frayed.”

“Who’d you kill?” asked John.

“The uncle.”

Zephyr frowned. “Not the kids?”

“No.”

“Why not? I thought we wanted one of the kids dead.”

The Concierge shrugged. One of those slow, expressive Gallic shrugs. “It was always possible that he would save the children and the sister-in-law. I don’t think it will work against us, though. Rather, I think the fact that the little boy is fighting for his life will spur Captain Ledger to greater action, but it will be the wrong action. It is very much in keeping with the psychological profile we have of him. The nephew is very badly wounded, and if he dies, and that seems likely, Ledger will go hunting for the closest target in order to vent and to prove to his family that he is still their champion. We will give him a target. And then we will give him another and another, until all of his strings are broken and he falls. By any computer model of Havoc, even the worst-case scenario, he cannot get in front of this.”

“Calpurnia,” said Zephyr, “do you agree?”

The computer’s voice seemed to come from everywhere. “Once Havoc is in motion, there is a one-point-eight-nine-percent chance that Captain Joseph Ledger will be able to interfere with the rollout. There is a three-point-four-two-percent chance that the entire DMS, in its current state of disarray, will be able to stop Havoc.”

“Which means we win,” prompted Zephyr. “Is that guaranteed?”

“There is a three-point-four—”

“Stop,” ordered John. To Zephyr and the Concierge he said, “It means we win. No matter what the Deacon or Ledger or any of them do, we win.”

The Concierge said, “If I may, computer models of the DMS have been wrong about Ledger before. We calculated that there was only a thirteen-percent chance that they would stop the Seven Kings and the drone-attack program. There was only an eleven-percent probability that they would stop Harcourt Bolton, Sr.’s Kill Switch plan.”

Zephyr pointed a wizened finger at him. “Don’t be a pussy.”

“Mademoiselle, I am merely being realistic. We should not count our chickens—”

“Hush,” said John. “Ledger is done. He will crash about and spill some blood, but by the time he realizes he is fighting the wrong fight — that all of the DMS and Special Operations teams are fighting the wrong fight — the dogs of war will be on the hunt. We can’t lose now.”

“I admire your optimism, John,” said the Concierge, “but I do not share it. Not yet. Not until we have actually won. Everything so far has been preliminary. Once Havoc is initiated and we see for sure that all our planning has borne fruit, I will celebrate our victory. Ledger still needs to be managed. From what we were able to get from the MindReader system before it crashed, it’s likely that he’ll either go back to Prague or to the DARPA camp, and it is my opinion that it will be the latter.”

“I agree,” said John.

“Not Prague?” asked Zephyr, surprised. “Even with all the ties to Rejenko?”

“DARPA,” insisted the Concierge. “There is a British presence in Prague right now. One of the Barrier field teams. I rather think Ledger will contact them to follow up on Rejenko — which will be a lovely waste of their time — and he will choose to go and consult the nanotechnology experts at the camp. Once he’s there, we can initiate Havoc with little chance that he can do anything about it. We control all communications there, and, well… we have so many ways in which we can kill him. When he’s there, John, then I’ll agree that Havoc will run without risk of opposition.”

“Fair enough,” said John, and he turned and buried his mouth and nose in the damp tangle of Zephyr’s hair.

Zephyr closed her eyes for a moment, and the Concierge could see her nipples harden. It made him want to turn away. To vomit out the image.

But then Zephyr pushed John away and propped herself up on her elbows. “One thing more. That message. Do we know anything about it?”

John sat up and brushed a strand of dark hair from his eye. “‘He is awake.’ I do not think this concerns us. From what I have been able to gather, this is something that showed up all over the world. The authorities who are sophisticated enough to catch it did, in fact, catch it.”

“Calpurnia flagged it and printed it out and claims she has no memory of it.”

“If I may, mademoiselle,” said the Frenchman, “Calpurnia is a computer. She may approximate consciousness, but that is because she is designed that way. She is not alive and she is not a perfect being. Because she is a computer, there is always the possibility of an error. This is an example. Her software functioned at a level beneath or, perhaps, apart from her higher functions. You received the warning as an error message, yes? What does it matter if the AI faux-personality aspect of Calpurnia is not perfectly self-aware?”

“He has a point,” murmured John.

“She’s running Havoc, that’s why it matters,” Zephyr fired back. “She’s the voice of the new world order.”

“No,” said the Concierge, frowning with concern, “she is not. You are.”

“I’m dying, or haven’t you noticed?”

“You are still alive, mademoiselle, and Calpurnia is still only a machine programmed to act like a conscious being. When you are — how should I say? — gone, it will be up to John, myself, and our staff to tell Calpurnia what to say. She will not replace you.”

Zephyr turned away to hide tears. “You wouldn’t say that if you understood her. She’s perfect.”

“Nothing is perfect,” said the Concierge. “If it were, you would live forever.”

They were all silent for a moment.

Then the Concierge said, “Havoc is in motion. It is, I admit, awkward because of the rushed timetable.”

“Is that an excuse?” asked Zephyr acidly.

“No, it is not. Merely a statement. Havoc will work, but it will not be as smooth as originally planned. Even our worst-case predictions say that the DMS won’t risk turning MindReader back on until after we hit the FEMA and Emergency Broadcast networks, and by then… well.” He gave another shrug. “By then the world will be falling to pieces and everyone will be blaming the Department of Military Sciences.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Church came out of his bathroom, patting his face with a hand towel. The strains of “Elle a fui, la tourterelle” began playing and he tossed the towel aside and picked up the phone.

“Doctor,” he said, “what do you have for me?”

“Nothing good,” said Cmar, “but maybe useful.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, I contacted Bug and Nikki and outlined a search argument for them. You see, it’s bugging me that this rabies thing isn’t happening in any way that makes sense. If it’s a bioweapon, then what’s the target? Something like this costs too much money to develop, and the science is too sophisticated for it to be something a friend of Vee Rejenko’s cooked up with his do-it-yourself Mad Scientist kit. And the mess in Baltimore sounds like someone cleaning house after a bad party. I don’t see the political win there, do you? None of this explains what happened in Milwaukee.”

“What’s your theory?”

“Look, if I’ve learned anything from you it’s that things are seldom as simple as they seem. Every time I help out with one of these DMS cases there’s a layer beneath a layer beneath a layer, and when all of that is peeled back, itemized, and analyzed we can see how it was all done. There’s always a chain of logic from bad damn idea to global biological threat. So I speculated on what the whole thing might look like, and it opened a door at the wrong place for a rabies bioweapon to be the endgame.”

Church sat down on the corner of his desk. “Give me the quick version.”

“Okay, if we just look at this as weaponized rabies with a pertussis delivery system, that’s bad enough. But I had Nikki go through all kinds of outbreaks of recent vintage. Not just here in the States but all over. Instead of looking for a specific pattern that would fit a political agenda, like the suicide bombers ISIS uses, I’m looking for field testing of delivery systems. You follow me?”

“Closely.”

“There are a lot of cases that pop up. Stuff that didn’t show up last time we looked.”

Church said, “MindReader has gone through a significant upgrade.”

“Really? Well, whatever you did, it worked, because we’re seeing a pattern now. The problem is that the math is funky. As with most disease outbreaks, the initial victims are those without reliably clean water, indifferent hygiene due to poverty and weak infrastructure. Basically, the very poor. However, given the degree of virulence, the overall number of casualties is too low.”

“Too low in what way?”

“I’d love to be able to say that we don’t have a higher body count because our response is that good or that we’ve been that successful with educating the public. I’d love to be able to say that the proliferation of cell phones and computers and the access to social media have given us early enough warning so that we’re responsible for stepping in and nipping this in the bud. It’s not like our response to swine flu. This is different. I’ve been going back through outbreak and incident records, and what I’m seeing looks very hinky. It’s never the same disease twice, never the same outbreak pattern, never exactly the same kind of demographic among the infected. We didn’t see a pattern because the pattern is deliberately obtuse. It’s deliberately patternless.”

“Ah,” said Church. “Now, isn’t that interesting?”

“Right, so why didn’t the outbreak hit in a dozen places at once? Why a cluster of families in a low-income housing project now? Why part of neighborhoods in Louisiana last fall? Why sixteen kids out of three hundred in a school in a poor village in Somalia? Why twelve families in a remote village in Chile? I think that what we’re seeing is field research. Lab work. I think the victims are test subjects. I think someone is test-driving designer pathogens and using poor people in different parts of the world as lab rats. This is some scary stuff here.”

“What part of this is most frightening to you?”

“The efficiency. The clinical coldness,” said Cmar. “Look, when you first told me about how Sebastian Gault used isolated villages to test the Seif al Din pathogen, it started me thinking. It allowed him to understand the bioweapon in situ, because knowing how it works in the real world tells you a lot more than you’ll ever get in the controlled environment of a lab.”

“You’re saying you’ve found other potential cases of a controlled rabies release.”

“No,” said Cmar. “What I’m saying is that I’m finding case after case after case of small releases of a variety of diseases. Not just rabies but anthrax, dengue fever, tuberculosis… twenty-two in all. None of them are natural versions. All of them are mutations, which a lot of my colleagues have tried to blame on everything from climate change to the misuse of antibiotics. I think they’re wrong. I think we’re seeing a group testing a whole catalog of weaponized pathogens.”

“Give me the whole list.”

Cmar read them off.

“That is greatly disturbing.”

“I know, and—”

“No, Doctor, I mean that I’m familiar with that list of bioweapons,” said Church.

“What?” cried Cmar, but before Church could answer the doctor blurted, “Oh… shit. Ice House.”

“Ice House,” said Church. “NATO has been blaming ecoterrorists for this, and their team filed a report indicating that all the samples of pathogens and bioweapons stored there were incinerated. NATO dropped fuel-air bombs to ensure that the pathogens were destroyed. Your list would indicate that the arson at the Ice House was a cover to hide what was stolen, and NATO’s response merely served to assist in that cover-up.”

Both men were silent for a few moments as they considered the implications.

“The timing fits,” said Cmar. “The Ice House was hit a few weeks into the spring thaw. They rushed to drop the cluster bombs because they couldn’t guarantee a control zone around the ruins of the facility. Migrating animals and ice-melt runoff could have spread any lingering diseases. Now, we can’t prove that the pathogens were taken before the bombs fell. If news of that got out there would be a global panic, NATO’s credibility would never recover, and you can imagine what would happen to the stock markets.”

“You believe this is what happened, however?”

“Without a doubt,” said the doctor. “Nikki found evidence of controlled releases of each of the bioweapons. Until Milwaukee, every case was in what I consider to be an improbably remote location.”

“A field lab of sorts, with no chance of an uncontrolled spread,” mused Church.

“Yes. Exactly how Gault tested Seif al Din. You’re sure he’s actually dead, right?”

“Without question. Captain Ledger made quite certain of it.”

“Okay. Then someone learned some nasty tricks from him, and if it isn’t someone else from the Seven Kings, then it’s a talented newcomer. Either way, it’s scaring me to death, Deacon.”

“Yes,” said Church. He removed a package of vanilla wafers from his desk, opened the plastic sleeve, and selected a cookie. His cat, Bastian, jumped up on the desk, sniffed the cookie, and waited until Church broke off a small piece and gave it to him. Then Church took a bite. They both munched quietly.

“Now,” said Cmar, “let’s talk about Zika.”

“Zika wasn’t one of the Ice House pathogens.”

“No, but I’m more than a little sure it’s connected to this. Whatever this is.”

“How so, Doctor?”

Cmar plunged in. “The spread pattern of the Zika virus over the last couple of years has been odd. Like… really odd. Outside of all predictable patterns, which the press has been having fun with but we’re not. My colleagues who have been working on that problem have tried to tie it to movements of populations, to the Olympics, and to refugees fleeing from Zika-infected areas and taking the disease with them, but the statistical models don’t quite add up. At least, I don’t think so. I know we’re spraying pretty heavily to try and cut down the mosquito population, and that’s worked pretty well, but the virus keeps popping up in unexpected places.”

“How unexpected?”

Cmar paused. “Very, actually, and that’s what has been bothering me. I could build a better argument in favor of deliberate release than I can for natural spread of the vectors.”

“How does that tie to the stolen bioweapons?”

“Not sure it does, but a pretty smart guy I know once warned me not to believe in coincidences.”

“Hmm.”

“Here’s the thing, though,” said Cmar. “The Zika is spreading around the globe really fast, and we’re chasing it with education, treatment, and, of course, the spraying. We’re killing populations of mosquitoes in significant ways, and a case can be made that we’ll eventually chase Zika all the way to the wall and kill it. Or limit enough of it that it’s no longer a global threat.”

“But…?” said Church.

“But think about it. The Baltimore thing got me thinking. I mean… those sprays are basically concentrations of nanites carrying a virus lethal to that specific species of mosquito, right? What if that’s not all they’re carrying?”

Church’s hand paused with a cookie raised halfway to his mouth.

“Deacon,” continued Cmar, “what if Zika isn’t a weapon? What if, dangerous as it is, it’s a dodge, a distraction? What if we’re supposed to believe in the ultimate victory of science over Mother Nature, a victory we can watch on TV and on the Net, a victory the press can report, a victory that’s entertaining and distracting enough to keep us riveted? Even with infant mortality and other related deaths, Zika is nowhere near as dangerous as weaponized anthrax or rabies, or the other stolen diseases. We know that the rabies and pertussis were somehow controlled by the software in the nanites. So… what if we’ve been watching thousands of teams spray the delivery system for the world’s most dangerous pathogens? How many people live in the areas that have been sprayed? Conservative estimate, two to three billion. The Zika spraying has been aggressive, funded by huge donations from governments, corporations, foundations, private donors, even the public. It’s the single most comprehensive disease-control program since polio and smallpox.” He paused, and the silence seemed to ring like a bell. “But what if it’s not? What if all those people are infected and the nanites are there, in their bodies, controlling the internal spread, controlling hormones and blood chemistry, waiting for a signal to go active?”

Church closed his eyes for a moment. Bastian meowed very softly.

“I need to make a great number of phone calls, Dr. Cmar,” he said.

“Yeah, I think we both do.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

I showered in the doctors’ lounge. Changed into jeans and an Orioles shirt that I wore with the tails out but unbuttoned so that I could get to the gun in the shoulder holster.

The Pool Boys were still in surgery. Ali and Em were in recovery. Em’s injuries were minor, but she had been treated for shock. Ali had eighty-three stitches holding together nine deep cuts. She would need cosmetic surgery to repair the damage to her face. Church, I knew, would arrange the best for her. I had some stitches, too, but who gives a shit?

Lefty…

Ah, God. Top surgeons worked on him all night long. Nine and a half hours. I heard nurses talking in hushed voices about the celebrity doctors who were there. More of Church’s doing; and there were other experts attending via videoconference.

Sean on a couch in the lounge closest to the door, Rudy on one side of him, me on the other. Dad came and sat across from us. Top and Bunny arrived later, too, and they had the police officer with them. Tracy Cole. A new recruit, or someone caught up in the wave? To be determined. We shook hands and said words to each other that I don’t remember. Sam Imura joined us at around ten. Even his Samurai cool had slipped.

Alvin Pool died at 11:59 that night.

Tommy Pool died at 12:01 in the morning. As if they were linked somehow. As if it meant something. Or as if it was some kind of sick joke. Sam went outside for a cigarette. At least that’s what he said, though I know he doesn’t smoke. He was out there a long time. He knew those guys better than I did.

We all drank a lot of coffee. The minutes crawled by with sadistic slowness.

At five minutes to five in the morning, the chief surgeon came out to find us. He looked so thoroughly beaten down, deeply haggard, and unbearably sad that Sean began sliding out of his chair. Rudy and I caught him, helped him stand, held on to him while the doctor gave us the news, all of us bracing our feet against the tilt of a sinking ship.

The doctor studied Sean’s face for a long, long time. Then he nodded and gave us a battlefield smile. He said something about having to wait, that it could still go either way, that we’d know by morning. Stuff like that. The smile said it all, though.

Sean sobbed hard enough to punch a hole in the world and pulled the doctor into a fierce hug of gratitude. Or maybe he held on to the doctor as if he was the only fixed point in a world of quicksand.

I looked over at Top, at Bunny. They each nodded.

“Hooah,” murmured Bunny. Rudy pulled Sean away from the doctor, placed a brotherly arm around my brother’s shoulders, and led him off to share the news with Ali. The doctor stood and watched, then he turned and looked at me.

“You’re his brother?” he asked. “Captain Ledger.”

“Yes. I want to thank you for everything you and your people did.”

The doctor shook his head. “Your nephew is still in critical condition.”

“Will he live?” I asked.

The pain in the surgeon’s eyes ran so deep. “It’s too soon to know that. We may have to go back in tomorrow. There is some neurological damage to his abdominal wall and to his left shoulder. Our mutual friend the Deacon has two specialists en route from Geneva. Once they’re here, they’ll be able to determine if the boy will regain function of his arm… and if we can avoid a colostomy.”

I didn’t fall down. I’ll never know how. Lefty was in there fighting not just for his life but for quality of life if he did survive. I heard myself say, “We all call him Lefty because he throws one hell of a fastball. He wants to be a ballplayer when he grows up.”

There was a sad, haunted look in the doctor’s eyes, but he didn’t put voice to what he had to be thinking. Instead, he shook my hand and shambled away.

My earbud buzzed to tell me that Church was on the line. I went outside to have that conversation, and Top and Bunny walked out with me. Cole followed but stood a few feet apart, awkward and alone, and she wore no earbud. I listened as Church told me about his conversation with Dr. Cmar.

“I’ve initiated a full investigation of every person and every company associated with the Zika spraying,” said Church. “We are actively collecting samples of the nanites in the sprays and will analyze them.”

“You think Cmar’s right about this?”

“I do, and if he is, it makes several parts of this fit together.”

“How did we not see this coming?” I asked. “This is exactly the kind of pattern MindReader looks for.”

“I asked Bug the same question,” said Church. “He’s put a team on that analysis, and we should know something soon. If you can break away from your family, now would be a good time to head to the DARPA camp.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good hunting, Captain.”

It wasn’t yet dawn. It was that hour when the world seemed darkest, when all light was absent, gone, dead. We stood there in silence until the sky changed and began to bleed red on the far horizon. It seemed to repaint the faces of Top and Bunny into something other than what they had been these last few months. Where they had been softer, weaker, damaged, traumatized, victimized, brutalized, and broken, they now stood facing the lurid dawn with faces like the death masks of old kings, of knights. The crimson light touched them like blood, like war paint. I could feel the same light on my own face. Not warm but cold. So very cold. We had each taken our own wounds in the last couple of years. Mental, physical, existential. We’d each been on the edge and nearly dropped off the world.

But we hadn’t. Our enemies had tried so hard to break us, and they almost had. For a while, they had. Now, though…? Maybe Nietzsche was right, after all, about things that don’t break us making us stronger. I looked into the eyes of my fellow soldiers, and I knew that our days of being the walking wounded were over. If the Bad Sister and her crew had hoped to run us around and wear us down and burn us out, then she was about to find out how serious a mistake she had made.

Something had changed. Some process had fused us in the broken places and rebuilt us into something else. In my head I could feel the Killer, the Cop, and the Modern Man standing side by side, each of them splashed in crimson light. Just like Top and Bunny.

We were coming for her and for everyone in her operation.

Every.

Last.

One.