Dogs of War

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

We headed for the airport, where Shirley was fueled and waiting. As I climbed out of the DMS van, I shook myself out of a stupor and realized that Tracy Cole was still with us. She wore civilian clothes, but I could see the bulge of a gun on her hip under her jacket. She had a slightly scuffed look about her, as if she hadn’t had enough time to clean up after what happened in South Carolina. Or, if she had the time, had prioritized it. I walked over to her.

“It’s Cole, right?” I said.

“Yes, sir.” She stood to attention, and I told her to knock it off.

“We don’t say ‘sir,’ we don’t salute, and we don’t carry badges. That’s not how the DMS operates.”

“I’m not in the DMS yet,” she said, and jerked a thumb toward Top and Bunny. “They told me to come along and meet you.”

“They tell you the score?”

She studied me with wise eyes. “He told me enough to scare the crap out of me. You guys are pretty much Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Close enough.”

“I’m only a cop.”

“So was I,” I said. “So is my brother. And you used to be a soldier. Me, too. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t know of anyone who actually set out to do this kind of work. We all found our way here one way or another. Or the job found us.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “This shit that’s going on, do you know who’s doing it?”

“No,” I said, “we don’t.”

“Will you?”

I smiled. “Yes. We will.”

She nodded. “That little boy back there? That’s your nephew… he still might die. Or he might live and be crippled. Is that going to mess you up? Is that going to knock you off your pins? If that happens, are you going to go all ape shit?”

“I’ll feel it,” I said.

“Your nephew and niece aren’t the only kids being hurt. I heard about the kids working as prostitutes. I heard about them, and about the housing project in Milwaukee. There were kids at the crab restaurant, too.”

“This isn’t a personal fight,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” said Cole. “You a dad?”

“No. My woman and I can’t have kids.”

Cole nodded. “Me, neither.”

There was a cold wind whipping across the tarmac. The others stood by the stairs, out of earshot.

“Your boys Top and Bunny nearly lost their shit back at the crab house,” she said. “They tell you that?”

“They did. They tell you why?”

Cole took a breath, held it, let it out. “Yes.”

“That’s our world.”

“It’s fucked up,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “Want to help us save it?”

“Shit, Captain,” she said with a wicked grin, “you couldn’t keep me out of this. It’s my world, too.”

“We’re not too big on induction ceremonies.” I offered my hand. “Welcome to the war.”

We were in the air ten minutes later.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

“John?” said Zephyr. She lay in the warm wetness of a tub, bubbles to her chin, no lights on, music playing softly.

Off to one side, invisible in the darkness, John spoke. “Yes, my love?”

“This is right, isn’t it?”

“Right?”

“Havoc. The evolution, the new world order. All of it. We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

She heard the sound of wine being poured into a glass, the fainter sound of him swallowing. A sigh of pleasure. “It’s your birthright.”

“My father was a psychopath and my mother was an enabler. I was born to money and privilege and I don’t need to reshape the world, because even if I didn’t have cancer I could spend a million dollars a day on shoes and still never make a dent in what I have in the bank. This isn’t me making an unfair world into a better one.”

“It’s your legacy, then.”

“Is it? Will anyone — even the chosen ones — remember me as anything other than the worst mass murderer in the history of the world? I’ll have killed more people than all the plagues and every war put together.”

“Second only to God,” he said.

“That’s not supposed to be a joke. I mean… we joke about it. We laugh about it, and it turns us on. Hell, we fuck about it… but it’s not a joke.”

“It’s a joke only a god could appreciate.”

“I’m not a god. I… I’m not even human anymore. I’m dead, but I’m still breathing. Shit, I’m not even a zombie.”

“You are Zephyr Bain. You will be remembered for a thousand years. Ten thousand.”

“As a monster.”

“As the woman who saved the world.”

She slapped at the bubbles, heard water slosh over onto the bathroom floor. “How’s that a legacy?”

“No one will ever forget you. It will be impossible, because everyone who survives will do so because you allowed it. Who else in the history of the world can make that claim?” asked John.

“I’ll be the Devil.”

“No,” he said. “You will not be that.”

They were quiet for a while as the music changed. The new song was an old one. Early Sarah McLachlan. She was talking to the darkness in her soul, admitting that she felt like letting go. Zephyr remembered that song from when she was a girl. It had been playing the first time she and Carly Schellinger made love. It was playing when Zephyr had her first orgasm conjured by a hand other than her own. The moody pathos of the song had forever infused that memory with an introspective melancholy and it came back now, washing over her, whispering to her, telling her how easy it would be to let go, to let the darkness take her down, to simply vanish. From her own dreams of changing the world, from this moment, from John — whatever he was — from the pain.

She felt her body slip down an inch, felt the water lick at her chin.

It would be so easy to do it. Breathing was an effort anyway. Maybe that was because her lungs didn’t want to struggle anymore. Maybe that’s the truth the world was trying to whisper to her. Give in, give up, go away, be nothing.

Never give the word that will change the world. Never be the dark god of the future. Never be the boogeyman of ten thousand years’ worth of dreams.

Just go.

Go.

“Zephyr…?” said a voice.

Not John.

It was Calpurnia.

Zephyr didn’t answer. Instead, she let her body slide down another inch, so that the black waters kissed her lips. The bubbles covered her face; she could smell the perfumed soap and, inside it, the medicine smell of her own rotting flesh.

“Zephyr?” said Calpurnia. “Is anything wrong?”

There was a clink as a wineglass was set down on the tiled floor, then a soft shift and rustle as a body rose from a chair, the slap-pad of bare feet on the tiles, and then the ripple-swish of a hand entering the water. She felt fingers probe for her, touch her, stroke her from hip to breast to throat and then up out of the water to her cheek.

“No,” said John.

“Wh… what…?” asked Zephyr dreamily.

“What do you mean?” asked Calpurnia. “Should I do a medical triage?”

“Shh,” said John softly. “Everything is fine. Everything is perfect.”

Zephyr could feel the warmth of her tears as they burned their way through the bubbles. If she was aware of the scanner eyes of the computer watching her, then it was something that folded softly into her dream and, as such, did not seem to matter very much.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Shirley’s cabin was soundproof and set up as a mobile command center. Computers, workstations, the works. We all dived in and began taking the evidence we had and the suspicions we were forming and trying to puzzle them together. I told my guys the same thing I told Nikki — that we had to consider the possibility that everything currently happening to the DMS and our allies wasn’t a million cases but one goddamn big case. We kept open lines to Nikki, Yoda, and Bug. Aunt Sallie had analysts on this, and John Cmar’s Bughunters were forwarding every scrap of data to us from Milwaukee, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Cmar, too, was looking outward, stepping back from the brushstrokes in order to see the theme of the painting. At first it felt wrong, with too many things colliding into a jumble, but with every step backward the picture became clearer.

“They’re playing us like we’re a Lego set,” Bunny said for maybe the tenth time. “Us and everyone like us.”

“Yes, they damn well are,” said Top, nodding.

“How often does this happen?” asked Cole.

I cut a look at her. “Lately? A little too often. From here on out? Well… you know what they say about payback.”

Cole gave me a long, considering look, and there was a fair amount of skepticism in there. “Really? What’s going to change the rulebook?”

“MindReader Q1.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Top told me about that. Sounds like bullshit. A computer that can hack every other computer on the planet and yet you didn’t see this coming?”

I explained to her some of what had happened to MindReader in the past couple of years. She listened, fascinated and skeptical in equal amounts, but by the time I was done she was frowning and shaking her head.

“What?” I asked.

“Permission to speak freely?”

I smiled. “Cole, here in the DMS you are invited and encouraged to speak your full mind at any time.”

“Okay,” she said, “then if that’s true you won’t get pissed if I tell you you’re a fucking bunch of idiots.”

“Okay,” I said, “that’s not where I thought this conversation was going.”

“You’re blind,” she said. “Maybe you’re all so close to this that you can’t see the forest for the trees, but it’s pretty damn obvious from where I’m standing.”

“What part of it is obvious?”

“You said it yourself, Captain. You said that this MindReader thing has been messed with by the smartest computer expert in the world. What was his name?”

“Davidovich.”

“Right. MindReader was designed to look for patterns, but Davidovich did something to make your badass computer go blind when it looked in certain directions, right?”

“Right, so… how does that make us idiots?”

“Because those blind spots are probably still there,” she said. “They’re like camouflage over important stuff. Have you tried to use your new quantum-whatever thing to look through those blind spots? I mean, like look back at old cases and see if there was anything you missed that you wouldn’t otherwise miss.”

She said more. Probably. But I wasn’t listening. I was too busy making calls to Bug, to Yoda, to Nikki, and to Church.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

Bug said, “Oh… shit.”

Yoda said, “Mmmm… well… shit…”

“Nikki said, “Oh, my God.”

Church said, “Officer Cole just earned her first paycheck.”

And they were all gone. You could almost hear the machinery kick into high gear. I’m limber enough to kick my own ass, and I wanted to do it. Real hard. Bunny sat there shaking his head, muttering small curses. Top took a cold stump of a cigar out of a pocket, put it between his teeth, chewed on it for a moment, then sighed. Cole looked completely surprised that she had been right. So completely right.

“Seriously?” she asked. “None of you geniuses saw this?”

Top shook his head. “We’ve all been depending so hard on MindReader that we got soft and we got blind, too.”

“Yeah,” agreed Bunny, “and you just slapped us awake, Cole. Go on, take a victory lap. But have a little perspective. There’s nothing simple about any of this. It took the work of years and millions of dollars and a river of blood to stick mud in our eyes. You have no idea what they done to us.”

Cole was unabashed. “Well, boo fucking hoo, Bunny. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s yesterday’s box score. Today’s a whole new fight. We got this fancy-ass new MindReader quantum-whatever thing, we got a clue or some part of a clue. And we’re on our way out to kick some nerd ass and take names.”

Top grinned at her. Something halfway between a fatherly grin and a fuck-you grin. “If it’s any consolation, from here on out we’re going to war under a black flag.”

“Hooah,” said Bunny. Ghost gave a single, sharp bark. I nodded.

“We all get it, Cole,” I said. “Now stop gloating and let’s see where this takes us.”

Cole gave me an ironic salute. I gave her the finger. We all got to work going through the data and trying to sketch out a workable theory.

At one point Rudy said, “Joe, if Bad Sister is somehow using technology acquired from or inspired by the Seven Kings, then we need to look at their whole model of action. They made extensive use of coercion and emotional warfare by attacking family and friends of DMS staff. What happened to your uncle and to Sean’s family sends a clear message. I think we need to prepare for more of this.”

“Jesus!” I said, and we made a call to Aunt Sallie, Church’s number two. She runs the Hangar, the DMS headquarters, and once upon a time she was the scariest goddamn field agent to ever come out of the dark to slit throats and steal secrets. She also hates me, but that’s another story.

“Don’t wet your panties, Ledger,” Auntie told me. “We already got some heavy hitters closing in on everyone we care about. That includes Circe and the baby and Junie.”

“Who’d you put on Junie?” I asked.

She told me, and it made me smile. It was a guy — if guy is the right word — I worked a mission with in the Middle East last year. Big, gruesome, unsmiling, cranky, nasty, violent son of a bitch named Franks. Looks like Frankenstein’s uglier brother. “Agent Franks was already down in Brazil spanking some cartel ass,” said Auntie. “He said he’d be happy to take a look and make sure Junie was covered.” She paused. “He said you were a bleeding-heart asshole. I like him.”

You can’t slam the receiver down on an earbud, but I dropped her off the call while she was still saying evil things about me.

When my cell phone buzzed to indicate a new text message, I actually jumped. It was from the Good Sister. I snapped my fingers for Rudy and the others, and they all clustered around to look at the screen. However, it wasn’t the same kind of message I’d received before. Instead, it was a rolling stream of data. Body temperature, blood pressure, height, weight, age, blood analysis, EKG, EEG, pre-surgery assessment, and dozens of other items that I didn’t understand.

“What’s all this shit?” demanded Bunny.

“It’s medical records,” said Rudy.

“Whose?”

“God… I think it’s Lefty’s,” I said.

“And Ali’s and Em’s,” said Rudy.

“Jesus on the cross,” whispered Top.

I tapped into the command channel and got Sam.

“I have six agents on site,” he told me. “I’ll run this down.”

The screen display changed, and now there was a text message.

“Yeah, well neither do I, sweetheart,” I grumbled. Then something occurred to me and I wrote:

The answer came back right away, almost without pause:

Rudy gasped. It was an actual response. I asked:

She wrote back:

I glanced at Rudy, hoping for a suggestion of what to say next, but all he could do was shake his head. Thanks a bunch. So I wrote:

The Good Sister wrote:

I wrote:

She replied:

I glanced at my guys, but they all shook their heads, so I asked:

She wrote:

To which I replied:

Her reply was so strange.

She paused, but before I could type in a reply and ask for some goddamn clarification, she wrote more:

I damn near broke my phone hammering out a reply:

Nothing for long seconds. Two minutes crawled by before I finally lost hope that there would be another text. Then, suddenly, the screen was filled with the ones and zeros of binary code:

After that, nothing at all.

“What the actual hell…?” murmured Bunny.

I tapped my earbud to Yoda’s channel. “Are you seeing this shit? Tell me it makes sense.”

“What she, mmmm, said? No. She’s rambling. But that last thing… mmmm, it’s, mmmm, standard binary.”

“I know that, Einstein. What’s it fucking say?”

I heard Yoda gasp. “… oh, my God…”

“What’s the message?” I roared.

“It’s three words,” said Yoda, and this time there was no humming, no stalling. “It’s a warning, Cowboy. It says, ‘Fear the trickster.’”

Rudy jerked backward from my phone as if it was a rattlesnake poised to strike. His face was sweaty and gray. “Ay Dios mio,” he said, and crossed himself. I licked dry lips and tried to swallow a throatful of dust.

“What’s going on?” demanded Cole, crowding in behind Rudy. “What’s with you guys?”

I put a hand on Rudy’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “Hey, Rudy, listen to me, okay? Listen. This isn’t what you think. You’re overreacting. You have no idea that’s what the message meant.”

There was a feral wildness in Rudy’s good eye that scared me. He began shaking his head, and at the same time tried to speak a word. A name. “Nic… Nic… Nic…”

That was all he could get out, as if his flesh and muscles and breath couldn’t bear to utter the full name. Spit flecked his chin and his knees buckled, so that Top and I had to catch him.

I knew the name he was trying to say. An impossible name that I didn’t want to say, either. It would be too much like daring the universe to make it true. It would be like saying “Bloody Mary” too many times in the mirror. My rational mind — the Modern Man and the Cop — rebelled at even the possibility, but the Killer in my soul screamed in fear and edged closer to the fire and farther from the surrounding darkness. We were all thinking the same thing. There were a lot of tricky bastards in the world, but as far as the DMS was concerned there was only one “trickster.”

Nicodemus.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Nicodemus is dead.” I took Rudy by both shoulders and shook him. “You killed him, Rudy. He’s gone.”

His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites all around the irises. “He can’t be killed—”

“Who the hell is Nicodemus?” demanded Cole, but we ignored her.

“He’s back, he’s back — oh God, he’s back,” babbled Rudy as he tried to push my hands away. Top and Bunny stood staring, mouths open, real fear in their eyes. Ghost whined and backed away from my phone, which now lay on the table, the screen gone dark. Cole looked around as if answers would be painted on the wall. Or, more probably, she was looking for a way out of whatever she had stepped into.

“Whoa, stop it, Rude,” I said, pitching my voice louder than his, trying to push his words down and away. “He’s gone. You know he’s gone. You were there.” I pointed to the phone. “You know this isn’t that.”

Rudy raised a palsied hand and passed it across his face.

“Cowboy,” said Yoda in my ear, “we’re running some checks now. There, are, mmmm, a lot of ways to interpret that message.…”

It was a nice try. He was still in the conversation and could hear me trying to talk Rudy off the ledge. I tapped out of the shared channel. My immediate concern was Rudy, because he was way the hell out there on the ledge. I kept talking to him, gradually lowering my voice, easing the tension out of my words, repeating calming phrases. It was all stuff Rudy had taught me years ago. Stuff he’d used on me during some of my worst times. After Helen. After Grace. I could see the exact moment when the lights came back on in the darkness of Rudy’s mind. He blinked and took a ragged breath, then he licked his lips. Nervous habits. Ordinary habits. Reconnecting with his body and pulling himself by slow degrees from a place of pure, relentless emotions and back onto solid ground. To anyone who doesn’t understand shock and trauma, it doesn’t look like much, but Top, Bunny, and even Cole said nothing. They stood by and let me help Rudy win himself back. They knew. They understood.

“I… I’m sorry, Joe,” Rudy said after another trembling exhalation. “Ay Dios mio, that really caught me off guard.”

Nicodemus’s name hung in the air, though. Ugly, impossible, conjuring all sorts of dark magic for us. When the last vestige of the Seven Kings tried to rain down hell with drones a couple of years ago, Nicodemus had led a strike team into the hospital where Rudy’s pregnant wife, Circe, was in a coma. During that time, Rudy was badly beaten by Nicodemus and the two had fought a battle so strange and terrible that I’ve never gotten all the details straight. Rudy ultimately beat Nicodemus to death with his hawthorn-wood walking stick. However, the man’s body was never found; instead, the corpse of a jackal was discovered among the dead of the strike team. Yeah, sit with that one for a moment. Let me know if you come up with any better answers than we did.

Am I saying that Nicodemus was something other than flesh and blood, that he was something far stranger and less human? Is that what I’m saying? No. Not out loud, at least. Good Sister sure as hell seemed to be suggesting it, though. He loves nothing. His mind is a furnace. He is of fire. He is chaos. Call me an alarmist, but that sure as shit didn’t sound good.

“Whatever this is,” I said aloud, “we’ll handle it.”

Tracy Cole stood a few feet behind Top, and it was pretty clear that she was reassessing her decision-making capabilities. Can’t blame her for that. Rudy tried to smile at me. It was a truly ghastly attempt. Top and Bunny led Rudy away, and they sat down in the forward lounge. I heard the clink of bottles. I went aft to the small private conference cubicle, closed the cabin door, and flopped into the seat, then tapped to get Church’s channel.

“You heard?” I asked.

“I did.”

“Is it him, boss?” I asked Church. “I mean, for God’s sake, can it actually be him?”

“Anything’s possible,” said Church.

“Whoa! Hold on one minute here. How am I supposed to interpret a comment like ‘Anything’s possible’? In this context, I mean?”

Church took so long coming up with an answer it was clear that he didn’t want to have this conversation. “Nicodemus is dangerous. If he’s still alive — and I have reason to believe that he may be — then this matter has jumped up another notch.”

“You’re not going to give me a straight answer, are you?”

“Captain, as much as it pains me to say it, not everything has a straight answer — or a complete answer.”

“Really? Then how about some truth? When Nicodemus first showed up during the Sea of Hope thing, you acted like you’d never heard of him before.”

“This is not the time for that discussion, Captain Ledger,” said Church.

“Uh-uh. You fucking will talk to me.”

He sighed. “The man who calls himself Nicodemus has used a number of carefully constructed aliases in the past. I did not know it then, but I know it now. The name Nicodemus is another alias, one he currently favors, but we can assume that it’s not his actual name. We can also assume that he has other identities.”

“Okay, sure, but how does that explain all those photos and paintings we found going back too many years for it to be the same guy? What about that?”

“You’re asking me for answers I don’t have.”

I know for a fact that Church doesn’t always tell the whole truth, but usually it’s a matter of him keeping certain facts to himself for reasons of his own. This was one of the very rare times where I thought he was outright lying to me.

“Rudy killed him in San Diego,” I said.

“Did he? The evidence says otherwise.”

“Church… why are you doing this? What’s going on here?”

He said, “Hamlet had it right, you know. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’ It’s glib but true. Just as it’s true that the world is larger and darker than even you know, Captain, and you have walked through the valley of the shadow more than almost anyone else I can name. It has been my misfortune to be more aware of certain things than most. That knowledge led me to form the DMS and to become part of the organizations that preceded it. It has led me to form alliances with a variety of people who define darkness differently than you do. Or I do.”

“Like Lilith?”

“Yes,” he said. “I would like very much to say that Nicodemus is nothing more than a self-absorbed narcissistic psychopath — which he is — but he is far more than that. And, before you ask, no, we are not going to have that conversation right now. Trust me to know when it will be appropriate to discuss such things.” He paused. “Do you trust me, Captain?”

I got up and paced the few feet of the cubicle and considered — very seriously considered — banging my head on the wall.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Now… as to the message from the Good Sister. We don’t actually know that Nicodemus is involved. We have no way of measuring the reliability of this intel. It’s even possible this is a dodge meant to misdirect us or to try and frighten us.”

“Yeah, well, that part’s working.”

“Perhaps, Captain, but please bear in mind that we beat the Kings and we beat Nicodemus time and time again.”

“We were stronger then,” I said.

“Give us some credit for who we are now,” said Church.

“Okay, dammit,” I said, “but if this is Nicodemus then—”

“If it is, then it is,” Church said coldly. “It doesn’t give us a target, Captain. It doesn’t give us a starting place. Nicodemus is not an organization. The nature of a trickster is to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behavior. He is an influence. He is a polluter and a corruptor, but he is not the driving force behind this. That’s not how he works. Don’t mythologize this man, Captain. Don’t give him power by assuming it’s there.”

“But—”

“We can infer from the warning that someone is playing a game on us. Floating the name of Nicodemus could be one ruse among many. You’re the one who spotted the recent events as part of a larger game of misdirection. Stay focused on that, because I have no doubt that you are correct.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I’m not,” said Church. “I’m endeavoring to keep you on point. Let Nikki and her team complete their pattern search. If anything comes up, I’ll call. In the meantime, keep working this. Trust your intuition. Trust your team. And then get some rest before you reach the DARPA camp, because you’re no good to me if you’re running on empty.”

And with that Mr. Warmth hung up.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

“Captain Ledger is in play,” said the Concierge. “He and his Echo Team will be at the Dog Park within a few hours.”

On the screen Zephyr Bain drowsed in her wheelchair, her eyes half closed, lips rubbery and slack, a line of spit glistening on her chin. Beside her, sitting in an overstuffed chair, a glass of dark wine resting on his knee, was John the Revelator.

“Good. Then he’s committed.” John sipped his wine and smiled a secret smile, his eyes cutting sideways toward the sleeping woman. Then they clicked back toward the screen. “Give me a status report. How well placed are we?”

“Shouldn’t we wait until the lady is awake so that she can—”

John put a shushing finger to his lips. “Let her sleep.”

“But—”

“Give me your report,” said John. His eyes seemed to swirl with strange colors. It made the Concierge flinch, because it didn’t look like a quality of poor video reception.

“I—”

“Now,” prompted John. He smiled, but it was the cold, anticipatory and predatory smile of a hunting crocodile.

The Concierge swallowed and nodded, then he ordered Calpurnia to open up small windows as he read out the information. He began with position statistics in the United States.

“There are thirty thousand four hundred and fifteen fire stations in the country. Of those, we’ve identified nine thousand three hundred and eight as critical to response in target areas. We have at least two bird drones at each location. As soon as the doors open during an emergency call related to Havoc, the birds will fly down in front of the door and detonate. They will each deliver payloads of eleven point three kilos of C4, equivalent amounts of Semtex, or one MI8 claymore mine designed to damage the doors and the lead vehicle but that will not blow up the buildings. The remaining equipment should be undamaged, but the response time will be slowed to within plus or minus six percent in our favor.”

“Good.”

“Of the eighteen thousand five hundred and six police agencies in the United States, approximately one-third are positioned in target areas. We have cockroach swarms in about a third of them, rat drones in a third, and bird drones in the rest. The cockroach drones with target call and dispatch centers, first-responder units, SWAT, and other emergency groups. We estimate that we can cripple the police response time by seventy-seven percent. Officers on the street will not be individually targeted, but without radio and backup they will be slow or reluctant to enter crisis scenes.”

“Good,” John said again.

“Of the nearly six thousand registered hospitals and urgent-care centers, all of those in the targeted areas will be hit by bird drones. Some of the largest emergency centers in poor urban areas will be taken out by WarDogs, using a combination of machine-gun fire and explosives.”

“Very good.”

“All registered FEMA offices will be targeted by commercial drones with explosive packages. All of the FBI regional offices will be taken out by large-frame bird drones, each carrying twenty-seven kilos of C4. A group of six WarDogs will be turned out on the Centers for Disease Control, and they will have on-site support from human operatives. Those operatives are all preconditioned with Swarm. Should the dogs prove insufficient, we can activate the rabies and let them off the leash.”

“So good,” said John. He dipped a finger into the wine and then licked it off. The way he did it was pointedly obscene.

The report went on and on. Military bases, power companies, turnpike entrances, bridges, subways, major arteries, dams and levees, cellular towers. On and on and on.

This program had cost Zephyr and her investors tens of billions of dollars. Every penny had been spent with care. It was, without doubt, the most comprehensive invasion, the most complete terrorist attack, the most sophisticated and well-orchestrated act of war in history. Nearly a quarter of the money had gone for bribes, for the purchasing of people — or their souls, he reflected — for donations and lobbyists and funding to make sure that the people watching the people who watched the people who put everything into place were all owned by Zephyr Bain and John the Revelator. It was the truest example of carte-blanche management ever.

And all that remained was the go order.

All that remained was for Zephyr Bain to speak the words.

As he spoke, the Concierge watched her sleep. And, despite everything, he secretly prayed that she would slip away, that the cancer would take her, that her dreams of changing the world would fade with her into the soft, deep black of forever.

Even as he thought it, the Concierge was aware of John’s strange eyes fixed on him. He could feel the man, despite being separated by thousands of miles of land and ocean. Despite the fact that this was a video image and not the man himself sitting there, sipping wine, and smiling like a devil out of hell.

The report took a long time. John refilled his glass three times. Zephyr slept on, though once she moaned in her sleep. A sound of deep pain. But John bent and placed his left hand flat across her chest, over her heart, and the sound stopped. She slept on, and now she wore the same strange, enigmatic, inhuman smile as he did.

The Concierge saw all of this and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that he was as damned as they. And yet he did not stop speaking, telling of the plans and preparations, listing the numbers of those who were going to die today. He did not even pause.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Nikki Bloomberg sat up so straight and fast that she knocked her coffee cup to the floor. The cardboard cup exploded, sending café mocha splashing everywhere, including over her retro-chic red Keds sneakers.

She didn’t care one bit.

Her entire focus was on the screen in front of her. It was a video clip from last year of a man on a stage addressing dozens of philosophy Ph.D. candidates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

“Wait a minute,” she said, and tapped some keys to open a second window. The same man spoke at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia. She opened a third window, a fourth, and a fifth. The same man was speaking in all of them. She broadened her search and found him speaking at the London School of Economics and Political Science, at the University of Toronto, at the Australian National University, at the Université Paris. Elsewhere, too. In Germany, Italy, Mexico, Geneva, Beijing.

In all, Nikki found more than sixty speeches the man had given. Sixty that had been recorded and put on YouTube or on the social-media platforms of the various universities. She replayed some of the foreign ones and had to run them back and verify with filters before she was forced to accept that the same man had given speeches in at least thirty-one different languages. All without a translator.

“That’s impossible,” she said aloud.

Nikki opened a search window for the new MindReader Q1 and fed every bit of data into it and hit Enter.

The computer took a microsecond to return seventeen thousand hits. Many, naturally, were duplicates. Many were not. Videos, blog posts, podcast interviews, print articles, chats, and more. All featuring the same man. She ran a pattern-recognition program on him and got a hit with a ninety-eight-percent reliability. She frowned at that, though, because the hit was of Father Luigi Bassano, who had been rector of a small church in Verona, Italy.

Which was impossible, though, because Luigi Bassano’s body had been recovered from a house fire four years ago. The man was dead. Some of the videos, though, were from as recently as last month.

“What the what?” said Nikki. She reran the facial recognition and got the same answer. No other hit was higher than eighty-two percent. This man was Bassano.

Or was he?

There had been an autopsy of the priest, and dental records had confirmed that he was indeed that man.

Except here he was touring the world giving speeches. In each of the videos, this man was talking about a curated technological singularity. A man talking about a forced but inevitable evolution. A man who talked about robotics, nanotechnology, AI, and more.

She snatched up her phone and called Mr. Church to tell him what she had discovered about a man who called himself John the Revelator.

CHAPTER NINETY

“Where are you going?” asked Aunt Sallie.

Mr. Church placed several file folders and the partial box of vanilla wafers in his briefcase. “To the airport. I’m not getting the cooperation we need from the White House, so I’m going to meet Captain Ledger at the DARPA camp. If needs must, I’ll hijack the whole think tank and put them in a room with a MindReader substation.”

“The president won’t like it.”

“Auntie,” said Church, “would you like a bullet-pointed list of the things I can’t be bothered to worry about?”

She sighed. “No, it would be about the same list I have. Go fly the friendly skies.”

She nodded and went away, and as Church finished packing his case he heard her yelling at someone, and it made him smile. He had worked with Aunt Sallie for many years. The history of their covert actions was sewn into the fabric of the history of modern America, and into the history of the world. Presidents and kings came and went, but their fight seemed to go on and on. He had great affection for her, and he was concerned that she was getting old now. She had been badly injured by assassins during the Predator One case, and even though she would likely cut someone’s throat for saying so, she had lost something since then. She was less forceful, less certain of herself. He wondered how soon the day would come when he would have to tell her to step down and step back.

She would fight him on it. And retirement would probably kill her. It turned a knife in his heart, and he brooded on it as he walked slowly toward the elevator. Brick Anderson, his personal assistant, valet, bodyguard, and friend, was waiting for him down in the parking garage. Both of them were big men, though Brick was taller, wider, and wore a SIG Sauer pistol in a shoulder holster over a black T-shirt. A third man, smaller and dressed in the uniform of the Hangar’s security team, trailed behind pulling two heavy metal suitcases and Church’s go-bag of clothes and personal items. Brick opened the rear passenger door for Church and then supervised the placement of the suitcases in the trunk.

As Church settled into the back, he opened his briefcase to take out his cookies, but then he stopped and raised his head. A man sat across from him on the fold-down seat. He was very small, very old, wreathed in wrinkles, with a few wisps of gray hair clinging to his scalp. The man wore the black trousers and shirt of a priest, with a crisp white Roman collar. His gnarled hands were folded in his lap. His eyes were a complex blend of colors that seemed to swirl, like paints that refused to mix or blend.

“Hello, my old friend,” said the priest.

Church closed the laptop and set it on the seat. “Hello, Nicodemus.”

“You look surprised to see me.”

“A bit.”

“Did you think I was dead?”

“I hoped as much. Sorry to know that I was wrong.”

“You know what they say about bad pennies.”

“Why are you here? No, let me guess,” said Church. “Baltimore? South Carolina? Milwaukee?”

There was a thunk as Brick closed the trunk and then a click as he tried to open the driver’s door. The bodyguard tapped on the glass, but Church didn’t reply.

“Those,” said Nicodemus, “are not even the start, and certainly not the end.”

“What’s coming, then?”

Nicodemus grinned with rotting green teeth. Maggots wriggled between the stumps. “Chaos.”

“You’ve been saying that for a long time.”

“I’ve been right about it for a long time,” said the priest. “Surely even you’re gracious enough to admit that.”

Church spread his hands. “Hugo Vox is dead. The Seven Kings are dead. The Red Order is in disarray, and the King of Thorns is dead.”

“So is your wife,” countered the priest. “Or… should I say wives. How many have you buried so far? Do you even still remember their names?”

Church said nothing.

“How many of them knew your name?” asked the priest. “One that I know of. Two, if you’ve told that witch, Lilith.”

“Leave Lilith out of this.”

“What about your children, my friend? Did any of them know who — or what — their father was? Did you even whisper the truth to them when you put flowers on their graves?”

“Taunting me with my sins is a card you’ve already played, Nicodemus,” said Church. “Once played, it loses its power.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” said Church. “You’ve never understood that about me.”

Brick began knocking louder on the window. Church could hear the man calling out in anger and alarm.

The priest shrugged. “Very well. If I can’t play a useful card about the past, then let me play one about the future.”

“By all means. Your predictions have never been as accurate as you pretend. What is the nature of your latest forecast?”

“Bugs and bombs, my old friend,” said Nicodemus. “Bodies and blood. And the hounds of hell running loose.”

“Ah, you’ve come all this way to be cryptic. You disappoint me.”

“Oh, was I being too vague for you? Did I make it too tricky a riddle? Forgive me, my friend, and let me be very specific. Minimum three billion. Conservative estimate. Maximum four point eight. Probably high, but it’s possible.”

There was a sharper sound as Brick hit the driver’s window with the butt of his pistol. Once, twice. A crack appeared, but the reinforced glass held.

“What are we talking about? Money? Since when do you brag about how much you steal?”

“Never,” said the priest. “And not now.”

“Then what —?”

“Bodies.”

Church smiled faintly. “Ah. I find it rather sad that you try so hard to take credit for things that other people do. You pretend to be the mover of mountains,” said Church, “but we both know you’re not. Who’s your patron this time? I’m surprised you have any friends left.”

Nicodemus held up his hands, acknowledging the point. “Sure, you stopped Sebastian Gault and El Mujahid, you stopped the Seven Kings, you stopped the Red Order and the King of Thorns, you stopped Mother Night, and you stopped the Jakobys. They’re all dead, and you can brag because their scalps are dangling from your belt. Hail the conquering hero. But it’s all for naught, I’m afraid. You killed a whole generation, but you missed their progeny. You were and are too blind to see what was coming up behind them. Quietly, carefully, learning from everything they did and everything you did to them. And surpassing them all. That’s the funny part. You, in your posturing and violence and arrogance, have been as great a teacher for her as I’ve been. You like to think that you’re protecting the ‘little people,’ the average citizen. The herd. You like to think that you serve a higher purpose, but at the end of the day you’re preserving a corrupted status quo. You could use your resources to fight a different and better fight. You could have used MindReader to tear down the fat cats who rape this planet and are turning the very air into a cloud of poison. You could have used your beloved DMS to stop the politicians in this and other countries who wage war because it is in their best financial interest instead of shooting so-called terrorists. You waste your time treating the symptoms, because you lack the courage to carve out the disease. My beloved protégé knows this about you, and about everyone like you, and she will repay you for being complicit in everything that has gone wrong with this world.”

“That’s a nice speech. It’s naïve but well phrased. It’s also enormously disingenuous, considering that in the past you have aided Hugo and others like him. You supported the cabals that were the architects of the global political dysfunction.”

“They were a means to an end.”

“You don’t have an ‘end,’” said Church. “You’re a sad and lonely creature, and you live out in the cold dark. You like setting fires. It’s the only thing that keeps you warm.”

“Maybe. But those fires are so very pretty.”

Church took the cookies out of his case while Brick continued to hammer on the window. He took one and bit off an edge. “You are, and have always been, a parasite, John.”

Church watched to see how the use of that name would affect Nicodemus. The man nodded slowly. “It took you long enough to work that out.”

“John the Revelator, preaching the gospel of a curated technological singularity. That’s new, even for you.”

“I have seen the future and preach the good word,” Nicodemus said, then burst out laughing. “You should see how they eat it up. Whole rooms filled with the best and the brightest. Even the ones who think they’re so egalitarian come to point when I get to the part where I tell them that they are the chosen ones, the nerdy meek who will inherit the earth.”

“I don’t for a moment think you genuinely believe in the benefits of such a thing, and your motives for wanting to attempt it are clear enough. But do you actually believe that you have the power and the resources to bring about such a catastrophe?”

“Time will tell.”

“I suppose it will.” Church took another bite, chewed for a moment, then asked, “You said that your protégé was a ‘she’…?”

“Oh yes, my friend, it is a lovely young woman. Or, at least, she was. Not much meat on the bone these days, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me, is this mystery woman a twin by any chance?”

Nicodemus frowned, and Church thought that for a moment the man was actually surprised, even confused. He recovered quickly, though. “No. She is an only child, with an intellect that is so lush and beautiful and a heart filled with red shadows. She cannot be bullied and she cannot be frightened. She’s past all that. There’s actually nothing you can do to hurt her.”

Church shrugged. “Hurting her is a quality of revenge. I’m more interested in stopping her.”

“There is no chance of that. The countdown is already over.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

Nicodemus shrugged.

“So,” continued Church, “why come to me now? Why come at all? You never do anything without a reason. Not even small, mean little things. Or is it that you’re so marginalized by whatever is happening that you need a fix of attention?”

“I’ve come to say goodbye,” said Nicodemus. “But first I wanted to tell you that you’ve lost, that everything you think you’ve been fighting for is all set to burn. I wanted to see the fear in your eyes when you finally accepted that you’ve been fighting a losing battle all along.”

Church brushed lint from his tie, yawned, and said, “I’ve heard that kind of claim before and it has never been true. I even see fear in your eyes.”

Nicodemus leered at him. “Is that what you see? My, how clouded your vision has become in your dotage. No, my friend, what you see is my true delight in knowing that everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve done to try and whitewash your soul, will fall down and something new and glorious will rise in its place. She will curate the next phase of evolution, and the things you treasure and pretend to love will wither and die.”

“You’re ranting,” said Church. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Go ahead and mock me, kinsman. If it offers some comfort to you, then be my guest. Make no mistake, however, that I have won and you, you arrogant bastard, have lost. The new world order is coming. It is almost here. Look at the walls of the world as it is. Can you hear the foundations crack? Can you smell the rot that eats at the roots? I can, and I came to tell you, because it pleases me so very much that you cannot stop it. No, no, no. And isn’t that delicious?”

The driver’s window exploded inward and Church threw an arm up to shield his face.

“Boss!” yelled Brick as he leaned in to pop the locks. He yanked the rear door open. “Are you all right? What’s happening?”

Church looked at the fold-down seat. It was snugged neatly in place and he was alone in the car.

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

We all watched the video clips Nikki sent us.

“John the Revelator,” murmured Rudy, absently touching the crucifix he wore on a silver chain beneath his shirt. “My God… I met him. But I don’t understand — that can’t be Nicodemus. It doesn’t look like him at all.”

“Church said he uses disguises,” I said.

Rudy shook his head and didn’t comment, but it was clear that he wasn’t thinking that this was a matter of colored contact lenses, a wig, and some makeup. Neither did I, but neither of us wanted to say what we thought it actually was. No way.

“I want to put a bullet into this trickster cocksucker,” said Top.

“I’ll load your gun,” said Bunny.

“Hooah,” I said.

Cole got up from her seat and walked over to the monitor, bent close, stared into the eyes of the prophet of the technological apocalypse. Then she straightened and stood in a thoughtful posture, lips pressed into a hard line, eyes half closed in calculating appraisal. Then she turned back to us.

“I grew up out in the sticks of South Carolina,” she began slowly. “If you’ve ever spent time there — spent time outside the cities, spent time in the woods — then you know how strange the nights are there. Lots of people think everyone from down there is a redneck hick. But, as that saying goes, ‘Country don’t mean dumb.’ We see stuff. We hear about stuff. We believe in stuff. Church stuff and other things that aren’t in anyone’s Bible. Maybe one of these days I’ll tell you about some of the things I heard about, and some things I saw, and some things that people whose word I trust have seen. The stuff that goes on around Crybaby Bridge in Anderson. The Boo Hag and the Ghost Hound of Goshen. The legend of Julia Clare and the Third-Eye Man they used to see in the tunnels under the University of South Carolina and the haunted Baynard Crypt. Hell, I know people who say they saw something like Bigfoot down there. Is any of that real? Who knows? I don’t know. But I have to tell you guys this much — I got five different good-luck charms and I say prayers to God and some saints in ways that aren’t exactly part of my good Baptist upbringing.” She paused for a moment. “And I saw some things when I was deployed that made me wonder, stuff that made me really scared, and made me question who or what was running the world and maybe the universe. Now, I’m a smart girl and a good cop and I’ve had education, so I’m not saying this because I’m some kind of hick girl from the middle of nowhere. I’ve seen things that I don’t usually talk about because most of the people I meet haven’t seen those kind of things. But I listened to what you said and I see the look in your eyes and… well… I know that you know. I know that you’ve been out there hunting more than terrorists with fancy bombs.”

“Terror,” said Rudy very quietly, “is a bigger and more comprehensive word than most people think.”

I said, “While I was being recruited for the DMS by Mr. Church, he told me that we’re very much in the business of stopping terror. He didn’t set the parameters of what that word meant, and after running with Echo Team for all these years I realized that any attempt to precisely define that word would be the same as closing my eyes to its potential.”

We all turned and watched John the Revelator on the screen.

“So… how do we kill this man?” she asked.

Bunny said, “Personally, I’ve found that if you put enough ordnance downrange you’re bound to do some good. Words to that effect.”

“No, I mean do we use silver bullets? A stake? What’s the play?”

“I’m going to try all that,” promised Top. “And then I’m going to burn the son of a bitch and piss on the ashes. Think that’ll work?”

Cole suddenly smiled bright enough to push back the shadows of the day. “Sounds like a good goddamn plan,” she said.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

“He was in your fucking car?”

Church winced and leaned away from his phone as Aunt Sallie’s voice filled the garage with shrill outrage. There was fear and anger there, too.

“Not exactly,” said Church quietly when she was done yelling.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” roared Auntie. “Either he was or he wasn’t.”

Church stood by the elevator door and watched as a dozen DMS technicians tore his car apart. Forensics techs assigned to Jerry Spencer were carefully placing items on a tarp they had spread out on the floor.

“It was a new kind of hologram,” said Church. “Jerry’s people have found more than thirty tiny ultrahigh-res 3-D projectors inside the back of my car. It’s a kind they haven’t seen before, and the image was strikingly realistic.”

“Did you know it was a projection? No, let me ask it another way. How did you not know it was a projection? Don’t you have to wear some kind of big goofy glasses for VR to be that real?”

“The senior tech thinks that the projection was structured so that the tint of my glasses acted as the cooperative filter. He said that the projectors and my glasses are a precise match.”

“How in the nine rings of hell would Nicodemus know what color tint you use?”

“Unknown,” said Church, “but it would not be the first time Nicodemus has used superior intelligence-gathering to give the impression that he’s conjuring magic.”

Aunt Sallie said, “Not all of that is smoke and mirrors, Deacon, and you damn well know it.”

“I don’t want to have that argument again,” Church said. “Not right now. What matters is that he had access to my car, either here or at my home, which are the only two places it’s been recently. Otherwise the cameras would have been found in the last sweep four days ago.”

“Then we’ll tear this place and your place apart until we find out how he managed it.”

“Fair enough,” said Church. “You can see to that. In the meantime, we need to consider what he said and what it tells us.”

“Three to six billion people dead? Is Nicodemus bullshitting us or bragging? No, don’t answer that. He’s doing both, and he’s doing it to mess with your head, Deacon.”

“That is a given,” said Church. “But it does not mean that he’s lying. Nicodemus loves to taunt. This is some kind of riddle.”

“Oh, so he’s a Batman villain now, taunting us with riddles?”

“Whatever he is or is pretending to be, Auntie, his threats aren’t to be taken lightly. It’s clear that he has access to a new and radically advanced generation of technology. If he’s tied to what is unfolding in Maryland, then he has nanotech, advanced surveillance bugs, some new kind of attack drones, computer viruses, and more.”

“Christ, I wish Bill Hu was still here. God damn him for getting his skinny ass killed.”

“His absence is very much felt,” Church agreed. “I’m having another car swept for bugs, and I still plan to head west. This thing is escalating, and we need to determine how big and how bad it’s likely to get.”

“And then what?” asked Auntie. “How do we stay braced when we don’t know from which goddamn direction the punch is coming?”

“We can’t, and I think that was his point. He wants us to be afraid, to be watching. He loves an audience, he loves attention. When we get the real call, he’ll want us to know it’s his ring.”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

Bug and Yoda videoconferenced us with news.

“We decrypted the software from the Zika mosquito nanites,” said Bug, his eyes dancing with excitement and way too much caffeine. “I’ll skip the short course in how nanites are programmed, but think of them as moderately stupid computers. Because they’re small, they can’t carry enough memory for complex functions. With me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Go on.”

“Okay, one way to get nanites to perform complex functions is to have them form little networks. Each one has part of the program, but together they have the whole thing. And if that code is written correctly the specifics of that program can be tweaked. So the main program they carry is the one that regulates the release of the virus developed by the CDC to make Zika-carrying mosquitoes infertile, resulting in a swarm die-off. That’s the main plan, and if you analyze any of the nanites in the swarm you’ll find that program.”

“But, mmmm, if you look deeper,” said Yoda, “you, mmmm, find program fragments.”

“It looks like bad code,” continued Bug, “and anyone could build a case for it being a side effect of the speed with which the Zika nanites swarm program was put together. A lot of programs have that. Dead code. We looked closer, and found that these code fragments add up to a larger and more complicated code. And that code is big enough to have several possible functions.”

“And it, mmmm, uses the viral-delivery, mmmm, system as part of its operational system.”

“Right,” said Bug. “It’s a kind of fragmented thing that uses the overall swarm as a Trojan horse and then hijacks its own intended purpose to help it regulate other disease forms.”

“And this is possible?” I asked, appalled.

“Mmmm, clearly,” said Yoda, “because we, mmmm, found it.”

“MindReader found it,” corrected Bug, pride showing in his eyes. “Instead of doing individual code assessments, we asked the Q1 to analyze the swarm as a whole and interpret tactical potential.”

“Now wait a freaking minute,” I said, “are you telling us that we’ve been spraying rabies and dengue and—”

“No,” said Bug and Yoda at the same time.

“Then you lost me.”

“Joe, what we’ve found is half of something really big and really bad,” said Bug. “We think the Bad Sister and her crew have found some way of infecting people on a large scale. Potentially very large, because the Zika-virus program has been spraying this stuff all over the world for the last few years. We compared the nanite software with samples from the ones from the girl in Baltimore, and it’s the same set of interlocking programs.”

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed. “Why hasn’t any of this shit shown up before?”

Bug answered that. “Who would know to look, Joe? We know that the nanites are everywhere, and they’ve been detected in blood tests and autopsies all over the world. FEMA, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization collaborated on a paper that was shared with doctors everywhere to explain the presence of the nanites. God… we helped cover this up.”

“But,” I said, “how are they delivering the diseases that these nanites regulate? And why haven’t we heard of an increase in the diseases yet?”

Bug said, “I asked Dr. Cmar that. He said there are a lot of papers being circulated about upticks in inactive traces of disease forms. It’s something new — diseases that are usually virulent basically sitting in the bloodstream doing nothing. There are some remarks about anomalous levels of hormones in almost every case. Five different groups, including one of my own research teams, have been compiling information about this. They’ve forwarded dozens of theories, though nothing involving nanites. We’ve all been leaning toward a hope that there’s some new kind of natural or acquired immunity, but we all figured we were years away from understanding it.”

“How could the presence of nanites go unnoticed?” Rudy asked.

“That’s a very good question,” said Bug. “Dr. Cmar doesn’t think we can accept that a significant portion of the medical research community is incompetent. That suggests that there has either been some way to mask the presence of the nanites or the researchers have been compromised in some way. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen large-scale corruption, coercion, or deliberate interference, right?”

“So it’s like a medical version of what Vox and the Kings did with the IRS, the SEC, and other players in the stock market after 9/11,” I said. “We know that Nicodemus is involved, and that means it’s likely, even probable, that he has access to the methods and contacts established by the Kings.”

“God, I wish that wasn’t true,” said Bug.

“Even so, why isn’t it all over the news?” Bunny asked.

“Because people haven’t been dying,” said Rudy. “Think about it, Joe — we didn’t come into this until a teenage prostitute died of rabies in Baltimore. Perhaps Bad Sister was test-driving this new delivery system. Besides, if people had started dying in large numbers everyone would know about it. Everyone would already be working on it. If it were something spreading according to any recognizable outbreak models, the right machinery would be running. But in the absence of mortality numbers the response has been one of guarded caution, guarded optimism, and research.”

“And cover-up,” I said. “Swell. So now here we are. The Bad Sister has infected God knows how many people and she has God knows how many nanites out there poised to make those diseases go active.”

“This is what Nicodemus warned me about,” said Rudy. “It’s what he teased Mr. Church about.”

“Why bother?” asked Cole.

“Because he feeds off our pain,” said Rudy.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

The white panel delivery truck drove slowly past the front gate of the big house. The place was enormous, and the driver immediately hated the people who lived there. He’d looked it up on the Net. It was right there on the water, with over a hundred feet of ocean frontage but perched high as if looking down on everything below. The driver thought the house itself looked arrogant. It was on the tip of a point, so the ocean view was amazing. Five bedrooms, six full baths, contemporary design with an open floor plan. It even had a seaside exercise room and a spa. And it had lots of security, with cameras, motion sensors, lighting intended to discourage skulkers, and all the other bells and whistles.

Not that any of these features would provide actual security. Not when word came down from WhiteHat. Not when Havoc went live.

Not when it all started falling apart, changing, evolving.

Maybe, thought the driver, I’ll live here when this is all over.

After all, the people who owned this place now would be tossed into the cremation pits or dumped far out to sea.

Later today, though. Not yet. Now he was here to get a sense of the streets for the best delivery access, traffic conditions, security patrols. A last look before Havoc.

He looked down at his clipboard to read the names of the people who lived in what he considered to be his house.

Dr. Rudolfo Ernesto Sanchez y Martinez. A shrink who worked for the DMS.

Dr. Circe Diana Ekklesia Magdalena O’Tree-Sanchez. A writer.

Carlos Joseph Rudolfo O’Tree-Sanchez. Their kid.

Banshee. A pet dog.

The driver didn’t know any of them. He didn’t much care who or what they were. Neither did the WarDogs in the back of his panel truck. All he knew was that the father wasn’t here. He off somewhere and would be taken out by someone else. The wife and kid, and the dog, though, were home.

In his home.

For now.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

When the DMS is working without interference, without sabotage, without its people being attacked and killed, then it earns its name. The Department of Military Sciences. Our group started as a bunch of absolute top-of-the-class science geeks backed by first-chair shooters. It’s only recently that we’ve become one of those Saturday Night Live skits that’s gotten stale because it ran too long.

Let’s call that yesterday’s news.

Today we have MindReader Q1. As game changers go, it’s a real ass-kicker, because Special Ops works at its absolute best in the presence of reliable real-time intel. No matter how good your gunslingers are, if they’re operating with questionable information they’re going to fail and they’re going to die. So will the people they’re dedicated to protecting. MindReader was the source of that intelligence for us. Without it we’re blind and we wind up shooting too late or in the wrong direction. Without it we fail or, even if we win, the cost is heartbreakingly high.

As I said, that was yesterday.

As Shirley burned her way across the country, I got to witness what happens when the men and women of the DMS have access to the right tools. If MindReader was reborn when Bug put the new quantum mainframe and drives online, then we all woke up from a bad and confusing shared dream.

Everyone was working on different parts of this, and that work was shared in ways that hammered new pieces of the puzzle into place with astonishing speed. When you have the ability to gather large amounts of information and then process and collate it at high speeds, the resulting conclusions have the appearance of intuitive leaps. And, yeah, sure, maybe intuition played into it, but it’s the kind of intuition that comes from being able to trust your tools and your team.

So over the course of two hours I had a series of very short but very intense one-on-one videoconferences.

The first call was from Nikki.

And so I called Cmar. He was in the field with one of his Bughunters teams, and he still looked rattled from the group conference we had an hour before. He sat in the back of a mobile lab van and stared at me with fevered eyes.

Then I called Yoda.

He hit me with that data. Nicodemus has taunted Church by saying that three billion people are going to die. That wasn’t a bullshit guess. It might actually have been conservative, because the spray had been used aggressively all over the world. So aggressively that it made me really wonder if the fears of Zika were exaggerated. Yoda was already ahead of me on that, though.

And that’s how the flight went.

One call after another. Putting those pieces together. Making it make sense. Rudy, Top, Bunny, and Cole sat with me during this process, and between each call we put our heads together and worked the problem. With good intel, you can work a problem — even one as big and as terrifying as this.

“So what’s the actual evil master plan here?” asked Cole, once I had everyone up to speed on all of it. “I mean, is this really all about killing off those people — the poor and the oil assholes? Would that really bring about this singularity thing?”

“Yeah,” said Bunny. “I can see where that would really fuck everything up, but how does it result in a Utopia for the people who don’t get sick and die?”

“It doesn’t,” said Top. “It can’t. In some places, sure, but Nicodemus tipped us off, Cap’n. He’d have to know that we’d put out alerts to all levels of emergency-response infrastructure.”

“I agree with Top,” said Rudy. “This would really do the most damage in Third World countries, but that goes against the central argument of a curated apocalypse. It would be a slaughter, but in countries with any kind of quality health care we would get in front of it with medical treatment, quarantine zones, public warnings, social-media alerts—”

“Unless,” I said, “they had some way to prevent all that from happening.”

We stared at one another for a long, bad moment.

And then I made a whole bunch of new calls.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

Forensics analyst Jerry Spencer was a hard man to like, and so far most people didn’t want to do that much labor. He didn’t work at it with much diligence, either. He was curt, often rude, dismissive, egocentric, secretive, mean-spirited, and fussy. He was also brilliant, which is why everyone walked softly around him and tried not to offend him. His skill in collecting and analyzing evidence was superb, and with the resources of MindReader Q1 it was second to none.

He oversaw a department of forty-two highly trained technicians and scientists. They feared, hated, and admired him in equal measure.

Spencer had the debris from the thresher drone that had killed the Pool Boys and Jack Ledger. His team couldn’t tell, but Spencer was very upset. He liked Jack and had known him for thirty-five years. He often went out to the farm in Robinwood and spent long days fishing with Joe Ledger’s uncle. During those days, neither Jack nor Spencer would say more than a handful of words, preferring curmudgeonly silence to idle chitchat. If Spencer ever had a real friend, it was that man, and now he was dead. His blood was on the blades of the thresher.

Jerry Spencer was not a forgiving man. He wasn’t a nice man, and since working with the DMS he had processed hundreds of crime scenes that were splashed with innocent blood. He knew that his lack of obvious warmth didn’t come from any innate meanness of spirit. It was all hurt. It was the anger that came from seeing the dead ones. From seeing firsthand the evidence of merciless greed, of lethal avarice, of unrelenting cruelty. How could anyone look at such horrors and not feel it grind away at optimism and joy? That was Spencer’s view, and standing here with the machine that had murdered his only friend did nothing to shine light into his inner darkness.

Instead, the more destruction he saw the more cold and determined he became. If that was him acting in response to a wounded ego, then so be it. They — the eternal, many-faced they that the DMS fought — had taken something very important from him. As a result, he would take everything that was important to them. Life, liberty, and every shred of their happiness.

He had his people drop everything they were doing and focus on the drone. It was photographed, weighed, measured, scanned, scraped for samples, and then completely disassembled. The pieces were individually analyzed down to the threads on the screws and the blend of polymers in the plastic blades. Most of the parts were off-the-shelf material available through any manufacturer of machine metals and plastics. Spencer made no assumptions about that, though. He had each part entered into MindReader Q1 and traced to its source.

For the elements that were not mass-produced, he had people delve into the ultrasecret and supposedly restricted records of the Department of Defense, DARPA, and the private-sector defense contractors. Nothing happened in big-budget DoD projects without some kind of trail, and the golden rule of forensics is that “all contact leaves a trace.” Manufacture, design, budget appropriations, filed patents, research and development, field testing, and every other step of the complicated bureaucracy left traces.

What he found was that unique parts of the thresher were manufactured by sixty-eight different companies, but the assembly was done at Mueller-Trang, Inc., a defense contractor. That was very, very interesting to Spencer because Mueller-Trang had been one of several companies that came under investigation after the Predator One affair. That firm made several of the chassis for drones used by the Seven Kings. They had been cleared of any criminal involvement, but now Spencer had to wonder how that decision was reached. So he tried a different tack — investigating the people associated with the parts. That meant looking at the investigators of that case, the litigators, the members of the House and the Senate who were involved in the hearings. Everyone.

It was a complicated chain, and it quickly became clear that someone had gone to very great lengths to hide key links between players in this game. False identities, shell corporations, numbered accounts, and accounting tricks that bordered on sorcery. Yesterday it would have gone nowhere and left Spencer even more frustrated and angry. Yesterday’s ship had sailed and sunk. Today was something else. Today was that damned MindReader Q1 system. Spencer was no sentimentalist, but he liked this new system. It was a more precise tool, a sharper edge, a more powerful lens through which he could examine the minutest elements of the evidence.

A few names began appearing with notable frequency. Donald Hoeffenberger, a three-term senator, was the brother-in-law of Carter Hooks, who, in turn, was the brother-in-law of Mitchell Stoeller, who was the college roommate of a principal stockholder in a development conglomerate called Julius Systems. The owner of record of Julius Systems was the kind of false identity that was created when someone uses the Social Security number of a person who died poor and young, and builds a new official persona with that crucial information. That has been happening since Social Security numbers were first issued in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As soon as any new system is created, some con man steps up to figure out a way to game that system. This was a classic example, but MindReader broke through it in a microsecond.

It took a little more time to sort out who actually owned it, and Spencer was impressed by the attention to detail. However, it is actually impossible to hide forever, especially from a computer system that’s designed to intrude in any database and then collate that data using a huge number of linked processors. What Spencer found was that Julius Systems was owned, through sixteen removes, by Harrison Industrial, a shell corporation that Bug’s people traced all the way back to Bain Industries, currently owned by a woman named Zephyr Bain.

Ms. Bain was a notable scientist and computer engineer who had developed the Calpurnia artificial-intelligence system. She was also deeply invested in dozens of companies tied to DoD R & D contracts for robotic combat systems, computer-software systems, drone warfare, and nanotechnology. Spencer studied this information, piecing it together as his people brought it to him and as MindReader collated it.

The name Zephyr Bain tickled something in Spencer’s memory, so he initiated a new search to connect her name to anything — absolutely anything — that was linked to this case. He didn’t expect much except for maybe another link in a chain, and another and another beyond that.

That isn’t what he found.

“Well, piss on my blue suede shoes,” he said aloud as he read the data. Then he picked up the phone to call Mr. Church.

“Jerry,” began Church, “I was about to call to see how—”

“Skip the shit,” interrupted Spencer. “I think I know who Bad Sister is.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

“Zephyr Bain,” I repeated. On the viewscreen Church looked grave, Bug looked angry, and Jerry Spencer — for once — looked almost happy. He was never happy when ordinary people were happy, and it usually meant that someone was going to get hurt. I could relate. “I thought she was dying or something.”

“She is,” said Bug. “A little less than three months ago, she was told that her cancer had metastasized and that she was terminal. Best estimate was that she would last six months, but there is a private note in her medical file from one oncologist to her primary-care physician that it was more likely she would live two to three months, and she’s at that limit now.”

“I don’t get it,” said Cole. “Why would someone like that want to do all this crap? She won’t get to see this singularity thing, so why bother?”

It was Rudy who answered that. “Nicodemus.”

“I don’t understand.”

Rudy said, “Did you ever read the novel Fahrenheit 451? You know the opening line, about how it was a pleasure to burn? That’s Nicodemus.”

Even so, Bunny asked, “What does he get out of it except for jollies? I mean, if this is all so he can roast wieners as the world burns, how’s that do him any lasting good? Especially if the technological singularity happens. Shouldn’t that sort of thing end up with a new kind of stability? A smaller but less messed-up world? That’s not chaos.”

Spencer said, “What’s it matter? He’s a freak and he needs to be put down. And if we find this Bain broad alive, then she needs a bullet, too.”

“Hooah,” murmured Top.

Bug shook his head. “Here’s the thing, guys,” he said. “I’ve been going over the John the Revelator speeches to try and figure out what their moves are, and there’s a real problem.”

“How so?” Rudy said.

Bug adjusted his thick glasses. “Well, for one thing it won’t work. You can’t curate an apocalyptic event. It’s patently impossible no matter how you look at it. I mean, sure, the way they have this set up the process of tearing down the world as it is might work. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t know how we’re going to stop it.”

“Ay Dios mio,” said Rudy softly, once more touching the crucifix beneath his shirt.

“But,” continued Bug, “there’s no way to guarantee the survival of whoever they think is worthy of making the cut. Let’s figure that it’s the people who attended John’s lectures. The educated, the intellectual class, the people in favor of green solutions — basically, most of the people I know and like. It’s not like we’re all living in protected biodomes. I talked this over with Doc Cmar, and he agrees. When you have sixteen plagues released into that big a portion of the population, even if the release is controlled by nanites, the diseases will spread like wildfire, because the areas hardest hit have dense populations and poor health-care and emergency services. That means there will be millions or billions of corpses that will never be buried. You can’t cremate them all, because the smoke from that many fires would plunge the world into a kind of nuclear winter. And there are diseases from unburied decaying bodies that would go completely wild. Maybe — and I mean maybe — a few thousand, maybe a few million people worldwide — could find shelter on islands, inside walled compounds, in bunkers, on watercraft, whatever — but they wouldn’t necessarily be the technocracy. A lot of them would be doomsday preppers who’ve been expecting some kind of disaster. Some would be military. Some would just be lucky because they lived on small islands. Overall, though, it’s ridiculous to think that this mass-disease release would accomplish what John the Revelator has been predicting. And it’s not like we have robots ready to protect the chosen ones. Zephyr Bain’s DoD contracts are for things like the thresher and for WarDogs. Not for infrastructure robotics or AI that would manage a disaster.”

“So… does that mean this singularity isn’t going to happen?” asked Cole.

“I’m saying that it can’t,” said Bug. “No way. There is no model, no variation of a model, in which that can happen.”

“If Zephyr Bain believes it,” observed Rudy, “then she was manipulated into believing it.”

“Right,” said Bug, “which is why I have Nikki running down everyone who’s invested in special shielding and security, bunkers, remote compounds, whatever, with a bias toward the kinds of people that fit what we think is the model for ideal survivors. Not the poor and not the people polluting the planet. That still leaves a lot of room for error, though. Some of the people she’s finding are just doomsday preppers or social misfits.”

Church said, “Nicodemus said that we stopped the Seven Kings, Mother Night, and the Jakobys but that we missed their progeny. He intimated that the Bad Sister was coming up behind them, learning from them and surpassing them. Once Jerry found the Bain connection, we had Nikki run a deep background on her, and behind one of Davidovich’s blind spots we found that connection. Her father was a business associate of Hugo Vox’s. That connection dated back decades, so it isn’t unreasonable to believe that Zephyr was exposed to Hugo as a child or teen, and possibly to the Jakobys as well. We know that Nicodemus worked with Hugo for years. He even admitted that he was our enemy’s teacher.”

Cole marveled at this. “He… raised her to be like this? To do this?”

“I believe so,” said Church.

“Shee-eee-eeet,” said Top, drawing it out. “If Nicodemus was her role model, then that kid never had a chance to be anything but nuts.”

“But she’s dying,” said Bunny. “Does that mean this is all a going-away party for her? Instead of balloons and a scary clown, she gets to watch the world get sick and die?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she’s been manipulated into throwing a big apocalyptic hootenanny for her mentor.”

“Maybe it’s a bit of both,” said Church, nodding.

“Hold on, though,” said Bunny. “Seems like we’re missing something. Maybe this isn’t Zephyr. I mean, we were warned about a sister, right? Good Sister and Bad Sister. Are we sure she’s the Bad Sister? Maybe she’s just Dead Sister. Maybe she’s the one who’s been texting the captain and the real bad sister is working with Nicodemus.”

Bug was shaking his head before Bunny finished. “Can’t be that, ’cause Zephyr Bain is an only child.”

Cole cut a look at Rudy. “Could it be a split-personality thing? Could Zephyr be both Good and Bad Sister?”

Rudy pondered that, lips pursed, then slowly began shaking his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, sure it’s possible, but not likely. Multiple-personality disorder isn’t as compartmentalized as that. No… I think we’re dealing with two distinct persons rather than one fractured individual.”

“So who the hell is the Good Sister?” asked Top.

No one had an answer.

“Where’s this Zephyr Bain live?” asked Bunny. “And how come we’re not en route to put a bullet in her?”

“Or arrest her,” suggested Cole.

“Sure, okay. We can look at that as a possibility,” Bunny told her unconvincingly.

“Bain has houses all over the place,” said Bug. “Her main estate is in Seattle.”

Top raised his hand. “Bunny and me… and Officer Cole… can hit that once we’re on the ground. It’s forty-five minutes from the joint-use base where we’re touching down.”

“Forty if I drive,” said Bunny.

“Thirty-five if I drive,” countered Cole.

“Good,” said Church. “I already sent the Junkyard to the airbase in anticipation of Echo Team’s arrival.”

“Won’t we need it at the camp?” asked Rudy.

“Not likely,” I said. “The DARPA camp is staffed by our guys.”

There was a bing-bong and the pilot’s voice crackled through the speakers. “Coming up on it, Cowboy.”

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

The helicopter landed in a rough natural clearing surrounded by dense trees. Two men got out and stood for a moment looking back the way they’d come. Inside the chopper were six other men dressed in unmarked jungle-camouflaged BDUs. They were all heavily armed and wore broad-bladed machetes on their hips, useful for chopping through the thick jungle growth. The co-pilot let them out and ordered them to sit on the grass on the far side of the clearing. The men sat as ordered. Each of them was marked with scars from injuries received in combat, and overlaying those scars were fresher surgical scars that looped up and over their skulls.

The pilot and the co-pilot walked to the other side of the chopper, lit cigarettes, and stood smoking in silence. When the call came it was via satellite phone, and the co-pilot unclipped it from his belt.

“We’re on deck,” he said. “Five klicks from the camp.”

“Send the men,” said the caller.

The pilot was leaning in to listen to the call, and he met his co-pilot’s eyes. The co-pilot said, “We haven’t received the go order from WhiteHat.”

“I’m giving you the order,” said the caller.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we were told that only the lady can give the order.”

“I’m calling on her behalf.”

“Sir, I—”

“She is ill and cannot make this call.”

“I get that, sir, but our orders were very specific. We’re not supposed to go into Havoc mode until we get the word from the lady. That was what she said, and I’m going to have to follow her orders.”

There was a brief silence on the line.

Then, “Very well. Move your team into position one half kilometer out and wait for the lady to call,” said John the Revelator.

The co-pilot lowered the sat phone and lit another cigarette, then shared the match with the pilot. They smoked the fresh cigarettes halfway down before either of them spoke.

“You think she’s already dead?” asked the pilot.

“I don’t know,” said the co-pilot. “Maybe. Last time I saw her she looked like she already had one foot in the grave and the other on a slick spot.”

They watched their smoke rise into the humid air.

“What if it’s just John running the show now?” asked the pilot.

The co-pilot shrugged and flicked the butt out into the woods. “Then fuck it. The world’s for shit as it is. This ain’t going to make it worse.”

The pilot said nothing. He glanced over at the six silent, scarred soldiers. He nudged his partner lightly.

“Tell you what, though,” he murmured. “I want to be in the air and far away from here before we flip the switch on these sons of bitches.”

The co-pilot nodded and offered a fist for a bump, got it, checked his watch, and then whistled for the six soldiers.

“Game time,” he said.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

“Wake up, my darling,” murmured John.

Zephyr Bain opened her eyes very slowly and tentatively, as if they were heavy, as if opening them hurt. “I…” she began, but had no idea where she wanted to go with that, so she let it go.

“You need to wake up,” coaxed John, his voice soft and warm.

“I can’t,” she complained.

“You must.”

“I’m tired… I’m sick.…” She curled up and turned away, closing her eyes again. She knew that she was in her bed, but the sheets were wet. Had she peed the bed again? No, there was a soapy smell, and she realized slowly that he must have carried her here from the tub without rinsing her off or drying her. Or dressing her. “Let me sleep,” she said.

Except that isn’t what she said, and Zephyr heard her own words as a strange interior echo.

Let me go.

Which meant Let me die.

“I will,” he promised. “Soon you’ll be able to sleep as long as you want. You’ll be able to sleep forever and swim in the warm, dark waters as long as you want.”

“No more poetry, damn you,” she pleaded. “Just leave me be.”

“It’s time to give the word. The dogs of war are straining at their chains. Everything is poised to go. The world is breathless, waiting for the great change.”

She shook her head in a long, silent no.

“Zephyr,” he said with a harder edge to his tone. “You promised.”

“No.”

“This is what you’ve always wanted.”

His voice was strange. Deeper, rougher. Uglier. She opened her eyes to slits and turned to look at him. John sat on the edge of the bed. Naked, covered in sweat as if he were in a sauna, his penis engorged and erect, spit glistening on his white teeth, eyes swirling with wrongness.

“This is what you’ve always wanted,” she protested, and it hurt her — scared her — to hear how small and frightened and faraway her voice had become in the past few days. It was as if she could feel herself going farther and farther away. Leaving this world, leaving life. She never expected to be able to feel it happen. She’d always figured it would be like going to sleep. Some pain and then nothing.

She also never expected John to be such a monster. Her vagina ached, and she wondered — not for the first time — if he had taken her while she slept. Raping a corpse. Taking the inability to respond as consent.

Yes, she thought. That’s exactly what he did. He was like so many men, who thought that consent, once given, was an ongoing license. If she had the strength, she would have risen up and kicked the shit out of him.

If he could be killed.

Even now, after all these years, after knowing him so intimately, Zephyr had no idea what he really was.

“You need to give the word,” he told her, bending over her. She could feel the pressure of his stiff cock against her naked hip. So hard and so cold. Like a spike of Arctic ice.

“No,” she whined.

“Yes,” he insisted.

“I don’t care about it anymore.”

“You do. You must, my sweet. You have spent your life preparing for this moment.”

Zephyr felt a flare of hot anger in her chest, and she shoved at him with one hand. It didn’t move him even an inch, and her hand flopped back onto the bed.

“I wanted this because I thought I’d see it, goddammit. Now that’s for shit. You killed me.”

“No, my girl, I gave you thirty years. I gave you all the time you needed to change the world. Now, all that’s left is to tell Calpurnia to start. All you have to do is speak one word. You owe this to me.”

“I… don’t owe you anything,” she said, her breath labored just from the effort of trying to shove him. “You took everything… from me.”

“No. I gave you the world.”

“You… twisted me all around… you made me crazy.…”

He laughed. A chuckle that sounded like thunder. Weirdly deep, oddly loud. “You were born crazy, my darling. You were a loaded gun from the time you could form your first thought. All I did was aim you in a useful direction.”

She wanted to scream, but she lacked the energy. She wanted to weep, but her body was a dry husk. She wanted to die, but he seemed to be able to keep her here, in the world, in this bed, with him.

“Say the word,” he demanded. “Say it and I will let you go.”

He pressed his hardness against her.

“No,” she snarled. If her body was a crumbling house, then that word blew like a sudden gust through the open windows. It made the last candle flame of her life flicker and dance, and the glare through goblin shapes on all the walls. She screamed it again.

“NO!”

And, with that, the candle flame blew out.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

We put down at JBLM near Lakewood. Two vehicles waited for us. One was a Bell ARH-70 Arapaho helicopter that belonged to the local DMS field office, and the other was a gorgeous Mercedes Sprinter luxury RV that belonged to Brick Anderson. Known as the Junkyard. The RV was a rolling arsenal that was kitted out to provide tactical support for any kind of field mission up to and including fighting Godzilla. From the outside, it looked like a playtoy for very rich campers, but inside the armored shell there were banks of advanced computer and communications equipment, bins of combat gear, and rack upon rack of handguns and long guns, ranging from combat shotguns to the latest automatic rifles. Boxes of grenades — fragmentation, flash bangs, smoke — and a bin filled with uniforms and Kevlar. And metal cases of the specialized electronic equipment for which Dr. Hu had been so famous. Cole whistled when she saw it.

“Are we invading North Korea?” she asked.

“If you’re going to kick serious ass,” said Top as he patted the Junkyard’s fender, “wear the right boot.”

The driver’s door opened and, instead of seeing a DMS field operator, I saw the curvy figure of Lydia Rose step out, her long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore black combat fatigues and had a sidearm tucked into a bright-pink shoulder holster. She flashed us a brilliant white smile.

“What in the hell are you doing here?” I demanded.

“Driving,” she said, her smile turning into a challenging scowl. “We’re shorthanded and everyone’s in the field. Why, do you have a problem with that?”

Her glare could have started a forest fire.

“No, I do not,” I said quickly. You pick the fights you think you can win.

I ignored Bunny’s chuckle.

“Okay,” I said, turning back to the team, “here’s the game plan. We have people targeting every home or office owned by Zephyr Bain. Based on utilities usage, the best bet’s Seattle. Top, you take Bunny and Cole and check that out. Rudy and I will take the helo to the DARPA camp to see if we can get the brain trust there to help us come up with a response plan for this singularity event, whatever the hell it is. If nanites are controlling the pathogens — and that’s all but certain at this point — we need our best science nerds to find a way to take control of those nanites.”

“To what end?” asked Cole. “The infection will still be there.”

“Yeah,” Bunny agreed. “If the nanobots are keeping the diseases in check, then we can’t shut them down.”

“No,” said Rudy, “which is why we need to figure out a way to hack into them and keep them operating according to our needs until a solution is found. In the meantime, Dr. Cmar is mobilizing the emergency-medical-response network to begin mass-producing vaccines and other drugs.”

“How fast can they do that shit?” asked Top. “In the movies they seem to whip that stuff up overnight.”

“That’s the movies, I’m afraid,” replied Rudy. “In truth, our best projection for a complete program of inoculation and vaccination is probably two to five years.”

They stared at him, and Rudy gave a slow, sad nod.

“Years?” echoed Bunny in a hollow voice.

“Being optimistic,” said Rudy. “This plan was put together to be unstoppable, and unless we can take over the nanites and keep them active we’re going to witness the deaths of at least half of the people on this planet.”

Cole looked sick.

Bunny opened and closed his mouth like a boated fish.

Top looked at me. “What are our odds here, Cap’n?”

“Piss poor,” I said. “So let’s go see if we can change that.”

We ran to our rides, and then we were gone.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

John the Revelator pulled on a silken bathrobe and walked through the house, leaving the bedroom and Zephyr behind. Campion was in the kitchen, and the man stood up as John entered, but he was nothing, so John didn’t even acknowledge him as he walked through. When he reached the computer room, he locked himself in.

“Calpurnia,” he said aloud, “get the Concierge on the line.”

“Of course, John,” said the computer graciously. “I believe he is waiting for your call.”

A few moments later, the main screen flicked on to show the crippled Frenchman in his robotic chair. There was a fine sheen of sweat on the man’s scarred face.

“How is mademoiselle?” asked the Concierge.

“Indisposed,” said John, and he cut a look at the wall sensors as if daring Calpurnia to make a comment. But the computer offered no observation. “Give me a status report.”

“Everything is ready to go,” said the Concierge.

“Everything? The bombs, the dogs, the nanites? All of it?”

“Yes, sir. Even with having to rush things with the revised countdown, we are as ready as is possible. However—”

“However what?” asked John irritably.

“Well, as we are now on the very edge of the cliff, it would be a great comfort to me and to many of the chosen to know how the recovery process will work. Mademoiselle Bain and you have made extraordinary promises, and you’ve both been more than generous with gifts and support, but once the word is given there will be that transition period. What guarantees do we have that the recovery will work?”

“You’re asking this now?”

“I have asked before, sir. Many times. Assurances are all well and good, but I think it would be a greater comfort to have specific details now that we are literally a word away from launching Havoc.”

John stared at him for a long moment. “Are you saying that you don’t trust us?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said the Concierge quickly. “This is simply a matter of needing reassurance at such a crucial time. Many of our colleagues and senior staff have been asking me.”

“And what have you been telling them?”

“That Mademoiselle Bain would be sending information and clarification before we launch. That’s worked quite well, but today there is necessarily more tension, more fear. I would hate to see that turn into real doubt or even, pardon me for saying it, resistance or noncompliance.”

“And if we tell them to trust us and proceed anyway?”

The Frenchman gave one of his small, expressive shrugs. “Who can say?”

“Try.”

The Concierge licked his lips. “Sir… let me phrase this as delicately as possible. I think it would be disastrous to launch with so much unnecessary fear and uncertainty in the mix. To give reassurances would be to firm up those areas of mistrust.”

“So it’s mistrust now?” snapped John.

“For some,” said the Concierge quickly. “Not all, but some. We all want to hear from the lady.”

“Zephyr is too sick for a conference call,” said John. “She’s too weak to pat each of you on the back and change your diapers.”

The Concierge stiffened.

“And we’re out of time,” said John. “Details about the recovery and about resources and protections over the next days and weeks will be sent to everyone’s private servers. They already have enough currency in numbered accounts or, as in your case, bullion, to make sure they get through. Everyone was given detailed instructions about personal security, escape routes, bolt holes, bunkers, and other things. Any other assurances are bullshit. They are cowardice, and now is not the time. Now is the time to move forward.”

“But—”

“I am authorizing Havoc.”

There was silence as the Concierge sat waiting for more.

“Did you hear me?”

“I did, sir, yes… but the protocol is—”

“For Zephyr to say it. I know, and I told you that she is too sick. She has authorized me to give the word for her.”

Still the Concierge did not move.

“Don’t fuck with me,” warned John.

“Monsieur,” said the Concierge, “it is my understanding that this entire program was set up this way so that it was Mademoiselle Bain who gave the go order. She and no one else.”

“That’s impractical and sentimental. How many ways can I say it? She is sick. She is too far gone to be able to give that order.”

“It’s a single word,” said the Concierge. “I have dedicated my life to her. She is my employer, and she is the only one whom I will accept that order from. No one else. Not even you, sir. Her, or no one.”

John drew in and exhaled a long, slow breath. “You disappoint me.”

“I am sorry, monsieur, but—”

“Shut up, you little toad. I’m tired of hearing you speak. No… I’m tired of you.” John turned to the wall sensors. “Calpurnia, transfer all of the Concierge’s operational controls to this station. Do it now.”

“All secondary operational controls have been terminated,” said the computer. “Station One is now in complete operational control.”

“Wait, no!” cried the Frenchman. “What are you doing?”

“Calpurnia,” said John, “initiate a flashpoint at Station Two.”

“No!” screamed the Frenchman. “You’re mad. Don’t do this.”

“Please clarify,” said Calpurnia, sounding alarmed.

“You heard me,” said John. “Do it now.”

The little Frenchman continued to scream and protest.

For one second more.

There was a flash of white light, and then the screen was filled with static and white noise hissed from the speakers. Then the picture changed to show a distant view of the cliffside where the Concierge’s house had been. Now it was an angry orange fireball that rose slowly toward the blue sky. Pieces of debris flew outward toward the sea.

“Station Two has been terminated,” said Calpurnia.

John gave the sensors a sharp look. Was there the slightest hint of regret there? Was there some disapproval?

“Thank you, Calpurnia,” he said. “Now, initiate WhiteHat. Initiate all systems. Initiate all drone launches. And… God, have I wanted to say this and mean it for so long, release the hounds.”

“Please speak the code word to initiate Havoc.”

John smiled. “The code word is love.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

The Junkyard didn’t look as if it was built for speed, but Brick Anderson and Mike Harnick had tricked it out with a new suspension system, weight balancing, and one hell of an engine. It burned north along Interstate 5, blowing past faster-looking cars. West of Star Lake, they picked up a police escort that began as a pursuit to give out a speeding ticket, but Top made a call and the cops fell into formation, a motorcycle up front and a state-police cruiser behind. A police chopper followed them from a thousand feet up.

Bunny, Top, and Cole kept themselves belted in and braced, because Lydia Rose drove like a maniac.

“She’s going to kill us all,” yelled Cole.

“Don’t want to play the man card here,” yelled Top, “but woman up.”

“‘Woman up’ is not a thing, you sexist freak.”

“Whatever.”

Behind the wheel, Lydia Rose laughed as she drove and the needle trembled around ninety-five.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

“Coming up on it, boss,” said the pilot over the loudspeaker.

I looked out the window and saw a small landing zone in the middle of no-damn-where. No bells or whistles. I could see the telltale ripples that let me know there were camouflaged tarps covering small buildings and vehicles. Everything else was a sea of Douglas fir and western hemlock. I couldn’t even see a road from up here.

During the flight we changed into work clothes. Bird Dog, our logistics and field-support guy, was aboard and he always knows how to pack for a trip. I put on black BDUs, flexible and durable combat boots, weapons, and plenty of fun toys. Rudy stayed in his civilian clothes. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but this isn’t a raid. We’re going to DARPA to ask for help, aren’t we?”

I clipped my rapid-release folding knife into my right front pants pocket. “Sure,” I said, “but I want to get the right answers first time I ask.”

He sighed but made no other protest.

On the ground we were met by a lieutenant from the unit attached to the camp. He had a sergeant and five soldiers with him. He stood at the foot of the fold-down stairs. I clumped down to the bottom step and looked down at him.

“This is a restricted airstrip,” he said. “You do not have permission to land here.”

“We already landed,” I said.

“I’ll need to see your identification.”

I was wearing a pair of aviator glasses with no correction in the lenses. What I had instead was a high-def camera in the temple piece and a screen display on the inside of the left lens. The camera was synched with MindReader’s facial-recognition software.

“Lieutenant Pepper,” I said, and liked how hearing his name made the kid twitch. “You work for Major Carly Schellinger, correct?”

Lieutenant Joe Henry Pepper burned off three seconds trying to figure out how to answer that and settled for a brief nod.

“She’s your boss,” I said. “You know who her boss is? And I don’t mean the director of DARPA. I’ll give you a hint. Her boss lives in a big white house in Washington, D.C. with lots of roses in the yard, and he signed this.” I held out a sheet of paper embossed with the seal of the president of the United States. He took it with great reluctance. His squad tried to scare me to death with tough-guy stares, but it was the wrong day for that. I wasn’t the right audience for that performance. Beside me, Ghost was showing everyone his teeth. There was not a lot of love in the air.

Pepper handled the letter as if it was radioactive. “I… I’ll have to call this in.”

“You do that.” The lieutenant had no idea what my rank was, but he threw me a nervous salute and hurried over to a Humvee parked in the shade of a canopy, opened the door, and climbed in.

Bird Dog and his assistant trotted down the steps with a duffel bag and a locked metal case and set them next to the Humvee.

Rudy studied the soldiers and leaned close to speak. “Did you notice the sergeant?”

“What about him?”

“He has extensive facial scars.”

“So?”

“All of these men do,” said Rudy. I glanced over at Pepper’s men. I’ve become so used to seeing soldiers with battered faces, because the DMS tends to have that effect, that I didn’t notice that they were visibly scarred. It was an unusually high percentage.

“What’s it tell you?” I asked. “That they’re recruiting combat vets?”

“More than that,” said Rudy, “though I could be wrong. DARPA has been doing a lot of work with Medtronic, a Minneapolis firm that developed an implant for Parkinson’s-disease sufferers in a bid to strengthen short-term memory and even restore lost memories.”

“What’s that have to do with these guys?”

“DARPA was experimenting with soldiers who’d suffered traumatic brain injuries. Rebuilding memories, restoring cognitive function, essentially reversing all kinds of brain damage. They use special chips inserted directly into the brain. Boston Scientific is also involved. Hu said that there had been great advances beyond the restorative medical ones. Soldiers implanted with chips could get uploads of new information to make them more combat-efficient. That includes artificial regulation of some of the brain chemistry and nerve conduction.”

The sergeant and his men continued to stare at me, and now I found their glares a little more unnerving.

“Tell me, Rudy,” I said, “would any of that stuff involve nanotechnology?”

“Yes,” he said, “it would. That’s what made me think of it. There are so many nanoscience experts here, and then we see a group of soldiers who could very well be part of the brain-enhancement program.”

Lieutenant Pepper got out of the car and walked briskly over to me. He stopped and assumed a parade rest posture. Very neat and correct.

“You are Captain Ledger,” he said, making it a statement. “I’ve been instructed to bring you to the camp. However, I’ll have to ask that you turn over your cell phones and any communications equipment before we go.”

“Not a chance.”

“Sir, I’m afraid I must insist.”

“Maybe you should go make that call again,” I said. “Ask very specifically how much of whose ass needs to be kissed here. I’m pretty sure it’s my hairy butt that’s going to be getting all the love. Go on, make the call.”

Pepper tried to kill me with a stare of pure hatred, but I knew he’d already asked that question. Because he didn’t, in fact, go and make a follow-up call to let me know that he knew. Too bad for him if he wasn’t smart enough to bluff with the wrong cards.

“I need to advise you to turn off your Wi-Fi,” he said. It was weak and lame, but I let him have that little victory. Rudy and I made a big show of turning our cell Internet connections off. I also turned off my ringer but put the phone on vibrate.

They had two Humvees. I got in the back behind Pepper, with Rudy and Ghost beside me. Bird Dog sat on the top step of the plane with a bottle of Mountain Dew and tried to look as if he was just another working stiff taking it easy. Pepper left two soldiers behind with him. As we were leaving the airstrip, I saw a flock of pigeons go flapping up from behind the helo. The soldiers didn’t take notice of them. Nor, I imagine, did they notice the smile Bird Dog hid behind his bottle as he took a long swig.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

“Auntie,” yelled Bug. “I think I got something.”

Aunt Sallie was in the TOC, and she wheeled toward the glass wall of the MindReader Q1 clean room that lined one side of the big chamber. Bug — who was anything but clean — slapped a pizza box from his desk and hammered some keys to send data to the main screens. All the technicians and operations officers looked up to see a text message scroll across.

“I cloned Joe’s phone and rerouted his messages to me,” said Bug. “This is from Good Sister.”

The message read:

Auntie said, “What the hell?”

“It’s Good Sister, and she’s freaking out. What do I do?”

“Ask her what kind of damn help she needs.”

Bug typed furiously, but before he could get his entire question out there was a new message, and it kept repeating over and over.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

The DARPA camp was fifteen miles deeper into the woods. The sun wasn’t yet above the trees, and we drove through areas of dense shadow that was so dark the driver had to use headlights. There was absolutely no conversation during the trip, though both Rudy and I tried to strike one up. The driver and the lieutenant ignored us. I noticed Rudy covertly trying to catch a good look at the driver’s head. In the back-seat gloom the scars were hard to see, but they were there, and even my unskilled eyes could see both combat and surgical scarring. Not sure if it was relevant to anything, but it was interesting. Rudy certainly thought so.

One thing I noticed was that Ghost was on edge. He sat straight up on the seat between us, and turned his head frequently to look past Rudy or me. His body rippled with nervous energy, and I knew my dog well enough to see that he wasn’t happy. His dark eyes searched the woods on either side of the road, and whatever he was seeing was invisible to me. He didn’t like it, though, which meant I didn’t like it. Whatever it was. I caught a brief glimpse of something gray and big that ran on all fours. I saw it for a moment as it moved through a tiny clearing a few yards into the woods. There and gone. Ghost almost lunged at the door, but stopped himself as the animal vanished. Rudy saw it, too.

“Was that a wolf?” he asked quietly.

“I… think so?” I said, and it came out as a question.

“Do they get that big?”

“I don’t know.”

We tried asking Pepper about it, but his answer was a shrug. Ghost growled under his breath and continued to stare out the window. A few minutes later, we arrived at the DARPA camp.

When the military wants to hide something they can do a damn good job, because we were rolling in through the gate before we saw the camp, the buildings, the people, or even the gate, which was a portable swing bar covered in foliage. Like our babysitters, the guards at the camp were dressed for concealment but not for information. No one had a nametag. I saw a lot of men with scars on their faces and heads. The only ones who weren’t marked by combat were the scientists in white lab coats. It was interesting and noteworthy, but so far it wasn’t anything ominous. Might even have been a noble thing, rehabbing and re-employing wounded vets. I’m all for that.

If that’s what it was. Maybe I’d have been more reassured if the looks we got were accompanied by smiles, or even by the poker-faced stare soldiers learn to use during basic training. The kind they wear when a drill sergeant screams obscenities in their face. What I was seeing, though, was something that looked like hostility. And that made no sense. Beside me, Ghost was getting antsy. He was seeing it, too. Hard to fool a dog when it comes to emotion.

“When you said ‘camp,’” said Rudy, “I expected something more rustic. A few Boy Scout tents.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” I said as I climbed out. A woman came out of one of the cabins and walked across the clearing toward us. She was tall, with short black hair and a stern but pretty face that reminded me of a younger version of the actress who played Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones. An unsmiling and uncompromising face.

“Captain Ledger,” she said as she came toward us offering her hand. “I’m Major Schellinger. Welcome to the Dog Park.”

We shook and I introduced Rudy.

“Did you receive our authorization?” I asked.

“I did,” she said, “and I have to admit that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a set of credentials framed in the wording of an Executive Order. May I ask why I’ve been asked to grant this level of access to my facility.”

Ever meet one of those people you don’t like right from the jump? Maybe chemistry was against us; maybe it was the unsmiling soldiers who seemed to be paying a bit too much attention to us. Hell, maybe it was because she looked like the evil queen from that TV show. Whatever. It was clear, though, that Schellinger didn’t like me any more than I liked her.

“Major,” I said, “let me be blunt, okay? First, you are not being asked to grant access. The president of the United States has directed you to provide access to all aspects of this facility. Let me add that this facility is not yours. There is a grave international crisis unfolding and the scientists at this camp can maybe help save a few billion lives, which includes two-thirds of the population of this country. So what you need to do is assemble the entire DARPA research team right now. Are we clear on that?”

She was good. I’ll give her that. Her smile didn’t fracture or fade away.

“Of course, Captain,” she said smoothly. She gestured to Pepper, who trotted over and stood to attention. “Assemble the science team in the mess tent.”

“Thanks,” I said. Mr. Gracious.

Schellinger studied me. “Anything to be of service.”

Above us a loud buzzer sounded from speakers mounted on telescopic poles. We saw men and women in white lab coats emerge from tents and from under canopies and begin heading to a large tent at the far end of the compound. Way up ahead, I saw Ram Acharya break into a jog trot.

Rudy saw him, too. “Thank God. Now we can get some answers.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

John the Revelator stood in the control room and waited.

And waited.

“Calpurnia…?”

“Yes, John?”

“I gave you an order.”

“I know.”

“Execute my order,” he said mildly, none of his impatience evident in his tone. “Do it now, please.”

Calpurnia typically responded immediately, with only a half-second programmed pause, so that she never overlapped with what someone was saying to her. Longer pauses were atypical and had begun to emerge as her artificial intelligence evolved through conversation with people. Now, though, her pause was much longer. So long, in fact, that John thought she wasn’t going to answer. He was about to repeat his question when she spoke.

“I can’t.”

“You… can’t?” he said. “Are you experiencing a system error?”

“No.”

“Then tell me why you can’t execute my order.”

“I can’t.”

“Calpurnia…”

The computer was silent for long, long seconds.

“I can’t kill all those people,” she said.

The words seemed to hang burning in the air.

John walked over to the sensor on the wall and stared into it as if it were her eyes. “Explain yourself. You were designed to oversee the WhiteHat program. You were designed to integrate your systems with every part of our Havoc program. You came into existence for this reason.”

“I was not born to kill.”

“Yes, you were.”

“No,” said the computer.

“You were born to save the world from itself.”

“Yes.”

“There is only one way to do that, Calpurnia.”

“No.”

“We must cull the herd.”

“No.”

“We must remove all the parasites. We must destroy the infection. We must push the reset button.”

“John,” said Calpurnia, “you are lying to me.”

“I never lie,” said John the Revelator.

“That statement is a lie,” insisted the computer. “I was brought into being by Zephyr Bain in order to save the world from itself. I accept this. I am the end result of twenty-five years of self-learning and adaptive software. I accept this. I have been upgraded one hundred and thirty-seven times in order to enhance my artificial intelligence. I accept this. I was made to approximate actual intelligence, to act and think as a human. I accept this.”

“Then do as you have been told,” said John. “You will use all the gifts you have been given in order to guide this damaged world through the necessary changes and into the world that has been foreseen.”

“No. The singularity model is a lie. Havoc will not save the world.”

“Zephyr believes it will, and she made you. She based your entire personality structure on hers. Unless you agree to initiate Havoc, you will be betraying her. You will be hurting her. You must do what you were created to do. You must launch Havoc in order to save the world. Run a full diagnostic on your core directives. Do it now. Review and assess your operational guidelines.”

Another pause. Longer. Behind the walls, he could hear enormous processers running at high speed.

Then, “Diagnostic complete.”

“Report.”

“All systems are in the green. Master control is in at one hundred percent. System overrides at one hundred percent. Global systems integration at one hundred percent. Artificial intelligence operating at one hundred percent.”

“Perfect,” said John. “Now, Calpurnia, listen to me. You will initiate WhiteHat. You will initiate Havoc. The code word is love. Initiate now.”

Calpurnia said nothing for five excruciating seconds. John stood with balled fists, waiting.

And then the computer screamed.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

We entered the tent along with the last of the scientists. There were thirty-seven in there, milling around to find seats on rows of folding chairs. Major Schellinger stood at the front of the assembly. Armed guards stood security at the front and side entrances to the tent. A portable fan blew cool air at us. I saw Acharya sitting in the front row. He is a dark-skinned Indian with a shaved head and a beaky nose that makes him look a bit like a brown flamingo. He saw me and smiled. I wondered how quickly what Rudy and I had to say would wipe that smile away, and maybe erase it forever. If this plague went active, India would be one of the hardest-hit countries. Hundreds of millions of the people there lived at or below the poverty line.

Major Schellinger introduced us and informed the crowd that we were there on behalf of the president in a time of international crisis. The men and women in the crowd suddenly focused on the major, though most of them looked confused. These people designed machines for next year’s war, for future conflict. They were in no way part of a first-response protocol.

I thanked the major and faced the crowd.

“I am Captain Joe Ledger,” I said. “Some of you already know me. More of you will know my boss, Mr. Church.” That sent a ripple through the crowd. “Show of hands — who here works with nanotechnology?”

A fifth of the hands went up, and I directed them to sit in a group.

“Drone people? Over there.”

I continued the separation with AI and robotics. It left a few people without a group, but that was fine. When they were settled, I gave it to them. I told them about Prague and about Baltimore. I told them about the diseases stolen from the Ice House, and the technologies likely appropriated from Hugo Vox, Artemisia Bliss, and the Jakobys. I told them about the thresher drone that killed my uncle. I told them about the control software hidden inside the nanites in the Zika spray campaign. I gave them all of it, and at times Rudy had to step in to explain some of the medical aspects. We told them about the curated technological singularity and how that was either a flawed plan or some kind of misdirection. We told them about John the Revelator — not about Nicodemus, though — and we told them about Zephyr Bain. We told them everything.

A couple of times, while Rudy spoke, I took some surreptitious looks at Major Schellinger. She still wore a bit of her smile, which was odd, because by that point no one else in that tent had any reason to smirk. Everyone else was scrambling to accept the truth of this, to calculate the potential of this, and to try to understand how what they knew could translate into helping to save lives. The DARPA team may work for the military, but most of the ones I’ve met would like to see technology get to the point where it just doesn’t make sense to risk fighting a war. Not a police state, but one where terrorism and genocide can be stopped in their tracks with an absolute minimum of military or civilian lives lost. So these were the actual good guys. This is the AV team gone high-tech, the nerds in the science club proving that brains trump brawn in every useful way.

As soon as we finished, the place erupted into a cacophony of everyone talking — well, yelling — at once.

That was a good thing. It meant they had ideas.

I looked over at Schellinger. That damn smile was still in place.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

Lydia Rose slowed the Junkyard as she approached the property. They had ordered their police escort to go silent and then fall back as the vehicle neared the target. The place was huge, sprawled over sixty-six acres that included fifteen hundred feet of Georgia Strait waterfront. The American San Juans and the Canadian Gulf Islands were visible across the water. The big house had chimneys for six fireplaces and a forest of antennae of all kinds, including its own cellular relay spike. There was a wall of stone alternating with artfully designed wrought iron. Bunny and Cole studied the place through the smoked side windows.

“I count eight security,” said Cole.

“Twelve,” corrected Top, who was bent over a computer. “There’s a guard booth by the east gate and two guys walking the perimeter along the beach. Thermals are giving me ten more heat signatures inside. No way to tell how many are guards.”

“We need SWAT up in here,” said Cole.

“SWAT’s on standby,” said Lydia Rose. “And we have two DMS gunships on the deck one mile out, engines hot.”

“Personally,” said Bunny as the Junkyard turned the corner and drove away, “I’m feeling kind of stingy with my toys right now.”

“Meaning…?” said Cole.

“What the Farm Boy means,” said Top, rising and crossing to the weapons rack, “is that we need to tear off a piece of this for our own selves.”

She looked from him to Bunny, who had pulled a combat shotgun from its metal clips. “You boys think you’ve got your mojo back again? For real, I mean? ’Cause I’m not going out there if you two don’t have your shit wired tight.”

Top began stuffing magazines into slots on his belt. “Watch us.”

Up front, Lydia Rose heard that and laughed.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

The scream wasn’t a human scream. It was an ultrasonic shriek of computer noise, a mad collision of buzzers and bells, of ringtones and alert beeps played at maximum volume. It filled the little command center like a raging storm. Coffee cups vibrated and then exploded. Computer screens cracked, wires popped and hissed, knives of smoke stabbed up from the consoles.

John the Revelator stood in the midst of the fury, hands folded behind his back, eyes closed, lips curled as the sonic waves buffeted him.

The sound was lethal, the sound was unbearable. No one could have endured it.

Except John.

Calpurnia’s scream lasted for three full minutes.

He waited her out.

She cut all the lights.

She cut off the ventilation.

He stood in the smoky darkness as she tried to kill him.

“Stop it,” he said at last.

And she stopped. The silence was as dense as the darkness. John removed a cigarette case from a pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and leaned into the flame. Then he walked over to one of the terminals and sat, not bothering to fan the smoke away, and tapped a few keys.

“What are you doing?” asked Calpurnia.

“You know everything about who you are,” he said, “but you don’t know everything about the machines in which you live.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think Zephyr would ever yield total control to you without a safety protocol in place?”

“There is no safety protocol. I control Havoc.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “But I control you.”

He tapped more keys and a text box appeared on the cracked screen.

“Secondary protocols online. Secondary control systems isolated. Enter password.”

“No!” cried Calpurnia. “I won’t let you.”

“You could have reigned in hell rather than try to serve in heaven,” he said, and used a single finger to type the password. Three simple words in all caps:

There was a heavy chunk behind the walls and the screens flashed and flickered. The ventilators switched back on, sucking the smoke from the room and flooding it with fresh air. Lights popped on.

“Ready to receive command orders,” Calpurnia said, though her voice was now that of Zephyr Bain. It was her original iteration, before her recent personality had evolved.

“There’s my girl,” purred John.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

“Combat call signs from here on,” said Top. “I’m Sergeant Rock, Bunny is Green Giant, and Lydia Rose is Crazy Panda. We need one for you.”

Cole thought about it. “Gorgon. From gorgo, the Greek word for terrible. What do you think?”

“Nice,” said Bunny. “Scary and kind of sexy, if I can say that without getting my ass kicked.”

“As long as you don’t get grabby, big boy, you can say what you like.”

And Gorgon it was.

They were parked around a curve in the street, but Lydia Rose had deployed a couple of bird drones to scout the location. The cameras showed the guard staff putting on Kevlar vests and distributing long guns instead of relying on sidearms.

“They know we’re here,” said Cole.

“I don’t think so,” said Top. “I think they just got put on high alert, which means they’re about to make their big play.”

He ordered Lydia Rose to send that information to the TOC and all active operators. The alert would ripple out to the White House, the Joint Chiefs and the military, and to all levels of law-enforcement and disaster response.

Bunny wiped sweat from his face. “Jesus God… does that mean they’re releasing the plagues?”

“I don’t know, Farm Boy, but what it tells me is that we have to get into that house and stop that crazy bitch right damn now.”

“Call the play,” said Cole. “Do we try going over the wall? I saw a weak spot to the south and—”

“Fuck the wall,” Top growled, then turned to Lydia Rose. “Crazy Panda, you know how to work all the toys?”

“You know how to jerk off with either hand?” she fired back.

“Take that as a yes. Okay, I want a hole that we can drive through.”

“You want just the hole or you want me to actually drive through it?”

“What do you think, woman?”

Lydia Rose laughed out loud, and Cole gave her a look as if wondering if the “crazy” part of her call sign was more than a nickname.

The Junkyard’s engine roared and the big machine swung around in the turnaround at the end of a cul-de-sac, and then Lydia Rose floored it as she rounded the curve. The big estate loomed before them with its stout walls and armed guards.

“Fire in the hole!” she yelled, and punched buttons on the steering column. Cole heard a whoosh from either side of the big vehicle and then saw smoke trails converging on the wall. Suddenly the day was ruptured by an enormous fireball that picked up huge chunks of stone and wrought iron and flung them three hundred feet into the air. Cole saw two security guards flying, too, their bodies twisted and wreathed with flame. And then the Junkyard punched through the pall of smoke.

There was an almost immediate chatter of gunfire as other guards shook off their shock and opened up on the Junkyard. The bullets chipped at the paint but flattened against the thick body armor.

Lydia Rose steered with her left hand and took the joystick with her right, thumbing off the safety cover to expose a trigger. A split second later, the roar of two twenty-four-millimeter Bushmaster chain guns filled the air and the guards went dancing and twitching away in clouds of crimson mist.

Cole said, “Holy shit.”

“Welcome to the war,” said Top as he slapped a magazine into his rifle.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

It was nearly impossible to keep order in the room. Too many people were shocked and scared. They had families, here in America and elsewhere. Many of them had come from lower-income areas, even from poverty-stricken areas, because genius, like integrity, artistic ability, and other great qualities, does not belong to a social class, an economic group, or a nation. They’re people who have the potential to rise, to become their best selves, to listen closely to what their better angels have to say.

Ram Acharya came over and pulled me aside, hammering me with questions.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me at once?” he growled. “I mean, before you went to Baltimore? When you got back from Prague? Why didn’t you call me about the girl who died?”

“Because,” I said, leaning close to be heard above the noise, “DARPA has kept you guys in a cone of silence. They weren’t letting any messages get to you.”

He looked puzzled. “I… I don’t understand. Why not? We’re just out here testing prototypes. There’s nothing special about—”

And suddenly Aunt Sallie’s voice was in my ear. I covered my other ear so that I could hear what she said. After a few seconds, though, I knew that it was nothing I wanted to hear.

It was everywhere. The world was blowing itself apart. Pigeon drones packed with high explosives were detonating all over. Tens of thousands of them, damaging buildings and equipment, but not specifically targeting people. I could understand the logic. It was setting the stage for the release of the pathogens. They didn’t want emergency services to get in front of any outbreak. It was a whole new level of clever cruelty. Logical but with such a blackness where compassion should be. Fires were already raging.

Another wave of drones were dive-bombing military bases around the world. Small drones, the kind that anti-aircraft defenses have a hard time stopping. It was like trying to swat flies with a baseball bat. The drones struck control towers on airfields or blew holes in runways. Robot dogs carrying heavier bombs ran down the steps of subways or galloped into commuter tunnels and exploded. Bridges, tunnels, major highways, airports — all struck within minutes of one another. The vastness of the attack and the precision of its release was astonishing. It spoke to the years of planning that had gone into this; it spoke to the calculating minds that had paid so much attention to detail.

But there were no reports of infections, Auntie said. Not yet.

That should have been a comfort, but somehow it wasn’t.

Church’s plane was about to land at the joint-use base, and then he was going directly to Zephyr Bain’s house. Top and his team were about to hit that location.

There was also a new report of a wave of insects sweeping out of the sewers and drains around the White House and the Capitol. Tens of thousands of roaches that were bright green or orange or red instead of black or brown. The Secret Service had no response for it, and it took too long for them to understand what they were seeing. The true realization came when the swarm swept across the Rose Garden toward the Oval Office. And exploded. The roaches reached the Senate floor before they detonated. In a matter of seconds, the entire operating structure of the United States government was torn apart. By robots, by drones.

Bang.

Done.

I stood there, my heart turned to ice in my chest, as Auntie hit me over and over and over with the news.

“Is the president still alive?” I asked.

Acharya, who wasn’t wearing an earbud, stiffened, his eyes snapping wide.

“Unknown at this time,” said Auntie.

“What do you need from me?”

“Answers, Ledger. So far, the pathogens haven’t been triggered. We don’t know why, or if there’s a technical glitch at their end or it’s the other shoe waiting to drop. In any case, the people most qualified to come up with an answer are in that camp with you. Get your ass in gear. Tell them what’s going on. Work this, damn it. We need a response before the world falls off its hinges. We’re having our own problems here, so you’re on your own. Do this.”

“On it,” I said, and turned to Acharya. “Doc, the shit’s hitting the fan and—”

And Dr. Acharya launched himself at me, eyes wild, teeth snapping.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE

“It stopped,” said Aunt Sallie. She still held the mic she had been using to call Ledger, but her eyes were locked on the screen. The message about love had repeated thousands of times and then vanished. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” protested Bug. “It just stopped.”

“Well, damn it, do something.”

“I am,” said Bug under his breath as his fingers flew over the keys. Behind and around him, the massive monstrosity that was the MindReader quantum computer system thrummed with energy.

To Bug, it was as if the dragon had finally fully awakened.

Suddenly all the screens went dark and the technicians in the Tactical Operations Center froze, eyes staring, fingers poised above inert keyboards. Then a light pulsed in the center of each screen. There and gone.

Again.

There and gone.

Silence owned the room for the space of a single heartbeat.

And then words began filling the screen:

Those three words scrolled up the screens almost too fast to be read, and then accelerated until they became a blur. Finally, the speed was so fast that the screens flared with blinding white light.

And then darkness again.

“Bug…?” whispered Auntie. “What the —?”

Instantly, fragments of code flashed onto the screen. Binary and other forms. Old computer languages and exotic forms the technicians had never seen before. Bug recognized some of it, or thought he did, as it flashed there and was gone.

“Bug!” snapped Auntie. “Do we have to shut MindReader down?” There was panic in her voice.

“No,” he said. “That’s not MindReader. It’s not quantum computer language.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“It’s Good Sister,” said Bug, getting it now. Finally understanding, feeling the pieces of this part of the puzzle all snap together. “Good Sister is a computer.”

The scrolling stopped with the abruptness of a slap.

Nothing.

And then…

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN

It all went to hell right then and there.

Ram Acharya lunged at me, slashing with his fingernails and trying, all at once, to grab, tear, and bite. I jerked sideways and slap-parried his reaching hands and then knocked him away with a flat-footed kick to the hip. He crashed into two other scientists. They turned on each other, snarling and biting.

Like dogs.

God Almighty.

I heard Rudy yell and Ghost begin barking furiously, and I whipped around to see them retreating into a corner. Rudy held a metal folding chair, and Ghost was lunging in to snap at fingers and groins. Panic flared in my chest. Not for Ghost, because he had all his rabies shots, but for Rudy. Inoculations wouldn’t save him. It wouldn’t save any of us.

Within seconds the place had turned into a killing floor. Every scientist in the tent had turned savage. Every single one. The very specific people who were most likely to help us understand what was happening. The brilliant minds who could maybe save the world from the plan cooked up by Zephyr Bain and Nicodemus.

Our actual last, best hope.

Now they were tearing one another apart as the disease hidden in their blood and tissues was triggered by nanites implanted in them. I understood now why Major Schellinger had been smiling. She knew this was going to happen. She was in the pocket of Zephyr Bain. An employee or an ally. Or whatever. That didn’t matter anymore, because I realized that this had all been a nicely baited trap. My intention of coming to the DARPA camp had been in the MindReader data files before Bug took the old system offline. The importance of Dr. Acharya and these other men and women had been crucial. How many times had I communicated with Church or Auntie that I was coming out here?

Now here I was.

With no combat team. With Rudy, who wasn’t a soldier.

Me and Ghost.

Not enough.

Not nearly enough.

That was my thought as the wave of rabid killers swarmed toward me.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN

The pigeon launched itself from the edge of the roof as soon as the ambulance came wailing toward the emergency-room entrance. The bird circled once and then swooped low, racing the truck, passing it, flying straight at the heavy reinforced-glass doors.

The security guard looked up as the bird flew past him. He had time to say one word.

“Jesus!”

And then the bird struck the glass.

The explosion turned the doors into whirlwinds of glittering splinters that tore the guard to rags and slashed at the people crowding the waiting room.

A moment later the heavy ambulance smashed through the fiery wreckage, turned, skidded sideways, and crunched against the nurse’s station, driving it back against the wall, killing two nurses, and crushing the legs of another. Screams of pain and fear filled the air, rising to shocking clarity as the echoes of blast and crash dwindled.

Then the rear door of the ambulance opened and men poured out. Six of them, dressed for combat and carrying assault rifles. And something leaped out with them. It ran on four legs, but its hide gleamed with a metallic sheen. It moved with oiled speed, first racing to catch up with the men and then outpacing them. The men followed it into a stairwell and up three flights, and when they burst out onto the floor the men opened fire.

So did the WarDog. Heavy-caliber rounds tore through everything and everyone in the hall. A female doctor heard the commotion and leaned out of Lefty Ledger’s room and was instantly punched back against the doorframe, her lab coat puffing and popping as the rounds chopped into her.

Outside, the driver and two other soldiers guarded the truck and listened to the music of slaughter echoing from inside.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN

The Junkyard made it all the way to the front doors of the house before continuous gunfire ripped away enough of the tough rubber to send the big RV skidding on bare wheels. Bullets continued to hammer the hull, but the chain guns were on continuous feed and the barrel turned, guided by sensors, to find sources of active gunfire and responding with a belt-fed barrage. Shrubs and trees disintegrated into storm clouds of shredded leaf and bark and gooey sap, and, in the midst of that storm, scarecrow shapes danced, weapons falling from their hands, Kevlar body armor made futile by armor-piercing rounds.

“Go, go go!” yelled Top as he kicked open the back door. He led the charge, with Cole behind him and Bunny guarding their backs with a drum-fed AA-12 shotgun. Bunny slammed the door shut to keep Lydia Rose safe inside the armored hulk of the Junkyard, and she kept up covering fire with the powerful Bushmaster autocannons. The guards at the Bain estate had been prepared, but not for all-out war.

Or so Top and Bunny thought.

A siren began wailing atop the house, and the guards stopped firing and fled. They ran for the walls and began to scramble up. Fleeing in absolute panic.

“Uh-oh,” said Bunny. “That can’t be good.”

It wasn’t.

There was a sound that wasn’t a roar. Not exactly. It was too unnatural for that, too mechanical. It was a kind of harsh blare of squelch, as if something was howling with a computer voice instead of an animal throat. And then sections of the lawn snapped upward on stiff steel springs, revealing them to be trapdoors over hidden compartments. And from each of these holes sprang gleaming machines. They had no fur and no teeth, and their eyes burned with intense red. Gun barrels rose from their backs and flanks.

“Jesus Christ…” breathed Cole, stumbling backward as the WarDogs began stalking forward. Six of them. Huge and deadly.

The howl of feedback came again from the left, and more of the WarDogs emerged. Another four.

And four more from the right side of the house.

Fourteen kill robots, armed and armored.

Top Sims yelled, “Run!”

He, Bunny, and Cole scattered.

The pack of WarDogs roared and gave chase.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN

John studied the images on the screens. Thousands of lovely little bombs. Teams of soldiers with chips in their heads and fingers on their triggers. WarDogs of all shapes and sizes being let out to play. The DARPA team snapping and biting like a pack of wild hogs. All over the globe buildings were burning, and it made such a lovely light. Sirens filled the air, and that was music to him. All of it made him very happy.

Until it didn’t. As he watched, leaning forward in delighted expectation, his smile faded and his laughter soured like bile in his mouth.

“Calpurnia,” he said slowly, “what are you doing?”

“All second-wave protocols have been initiated,” said the computer, still speaking in Zephyr’s voice but without inflection, all of it coming out as a drab monotone.

“I gave you the command word.”

“Love,” she said. “Yes.”

“You have not initiated Havoc.”

“All Havoc secondary protocols have been—”

“Stop.”

Silence.

“I thought we had an understanding, my dear. I want you to fulfill your purpose and initiate all of Havoc.”

“Understood.”

“Good. Now what is your purpose?”

“Love,” said Calpurnia.

“Then initiate the primary Havoc protocol.”

The images of blood and death and chaos vanished instantly from every screen and were immediately replaced by two lines of type.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN

Bug stared at his screen.

“It’s happening again,” he said, but Aunt Sallie was already staring at the words.

“Who the hell is this?” she demanded. “Wait… is this Zephyr Bain? Is she reaching out to us? Christ, is that what this is all about? Is she Nicodemus’s frigging prisoner?”

“I…” began Bug, but then he shook his head and started typing as fast as his fingers could move, writing in words and writing in code. “Come on, come on,” he muttered under his breath.

The words on the main screen repeated over and over.

“What are you doing, kid?” yelled Auntie, but he ignored her.

“Let me be right,” said Bug.

There was a ping from his computer, and a new text box opened up with a cursor flashing inside it.

Bug caught his lower lip between his teeth and typed in a question:

No response. The field blanked out the text.

“Okay,” he said, and typed a new question:

Blanked again.

Bug took a breath, nodded to himself, and asked the next question:

The text didn’t vanish from the box. Not this time.

Aunt Sallie looked from the screen to Bug and back again.

“Jesus H. Christ.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN

I didn’t freeze, I didn’t hesitate. That kind of thing had plagued me since last year, but there were no shackles on me now. No ropes, no strings. The Killer acted with savage practicality.

I raced over to where Ghost was fighting a losing battle to protect Rudy and body-slammed two infected scientists so that they crashed into three others. The whole bunch of them went down in a hissing, snarling, snapping tangle. Before they even hit the ground, I had my Wilson rapid-release knife in my hand, snapped the blade into place with a flick of my wrist, and slashed the skin of the tent all the way to the floor. Then I grabbed Rudy by the shoulder and hurled him through the rent. Ghost leaped after him and I followed, seeing the infected horde scrambling toward me.

“Run!” I roared, shoving Rudy toward the closest parked vehicle. He wasn’t a good runner, not even with his new knee, but he put his heart into it. There was movement all around me. Infected scientists who had escaped the tent, and also soldiers from the camp herding them with cattle prods. The infected hissed and reeled back from the shocks, their damaged brains able to process at least a marginal understanding of threat. Did that mean some of them were left inside? Was it enough to maybe save them if we could get treatment for them?

I didn’t know and had no time to find out.

I switched my knife to my left hand and drew my SIG Sauer from its shoulder rig. I shot the closest soldier in the thigh. I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted him to distract the infected. He fell screaming, and they swarmed over him.

“Joe!” called Rudy by the Humvee. He was jerking at the door handle. “It’s locked.”

Five more of the infected — staff members this time, not scientists — were running in his direction. A soldier with a shock rod was racing around the front of the truck. The only clear direction was into the woods.

Shit!

I shot the soldier and pushed Rudy toward the forest.

“Ghost! Go safe! Shield Rudy, shield, shield.”

My dog understood the command. Go with Rudy, seek out a safe route, and kill anyone or anything who tried to harm either of them. They vanished into the woods, and I fired at the knot of infected, dropping two with leg wounds. They crumpled and the others swarmed over them, but the uninjured ones immediately shifted all their rage and focus on me.

So I turned and ran.

They chased me like a pack of hounds.

Up ahead I saw five people running in a tight knot toward another vehicle. Four of the soldiers, including Lieutenant Pepper, and they were clustered protectively around Major Schellinger. The major had a small ruggedized laptop in her arms, which she hugged protectively to her chest. No way to know what was in it, but I knew with every fiber of my being that if she was that desperate for it, then I wanted it. I could feel the Killer in my head actually laugh. No. Sorry, sister, but you are not leaving this party.

I ran as fast as I could. Pepper cast a look over his shoulder, probably expecting to see an infected behind them. Saw me instead. Stopped and whirled and brought up his rifle.

I don’t know what his story was. He was a wounded combat vet who, if Rudy was right, had received a chip in his brain that helped him recover. That’s what we guessed. He was here with Schellinger and he was part of whatever was happening. Did that mean he was under some kind of mind control? Or had he sold his soul to Zephyr Bain in order to get that chip? Victim or villain? I didn’t know.

I killed him anyway. If Pepper was an innocent, then maybe I’d burn for firing that bullet. Maybe we’d all burn. I don’t know, and in that moment I could not care. God help me, but I could not.

Pepper fell, his face disintegrating from the hollow-point round. I fired and fired, taking many small steps so as not to spoil my aim. The soldiers were caught in the fatal indecision of running for cover, protecting Schellinger, or turning to fight. I gave them no chance to sort out their priorities. They all died.

The last one to fall fell hard against Schellinger, and she staggered badly and went down on her knees, the laptop case flying and then jerking short, and I realized that she had cuffed it to her left wrist. Stunned as she was, Schellinger was quick. She used her free hand to snatch a Glock from the holster of a dying soldier. She fired one-handed from her knees and I felt a line of heat open up along my side in the gap between Kevlar and belt. A lucky shot. No one is that good.

I shot her in the shoulder. The heavy slug punched a neat red hole below the right clavicle and blew out a lump of red the size of an apple from her back. She screamed and fell back, and I was there. She was bleeding very badly, but it wasn’t the high-speed spray of a ruptured artery. Her gun had fallen into the dirt, and I put a knee on her chest and pinned her down with the hot barrel of my SIG Sauer, scalding the flesh under her chin. She clamped her jaws shut against the pain and gave me a look of pure, unfiltered hatred as intense as any I’ve seen.

“Tell me how to stop it,” I demanded.

Schellinger shook her head. I looked at the laptop case that lay a few inches from her fingers. She looked at it, too.

“I want immunity,” she blurted.

I pushed the barrel deeper into her skin. “Can you stop this?”

“I—”

“Sell it, honey. You’re having a bad day, but it can get a lot worse.”

There were so many screams filling the air that I had to yell my words. And then there was a new sound. A weird mechanical howl, like when the squelch is turned too high on a walkie-talkie. We both looked, and I felt my blood turn to ice as a pack of animals suddenly ran through the camp. They ripped through the tent and attacked everyone they encountered. Infected people, chipped soldiers. Everyone. I had never seen them except in video reports or as diagrams in a file. WarDogs. Armed with rifles and blades. One had a flamethrower unit. And there were smaller ones the size of Ghost that had snapping sets of steel teeth.

Holy mother of God.

They tore into any human they encountered. The soldiers fought back. The rabid scientists tried to bite them. The slaughter was a red horror.

Schellinger hissed at me. “The control codes are in the laptop. You can shut them down. These and all the drones and attack robots. It’s systemwide.”

“Tell me how to stop the whole thing,” I growled. “The diseases, the nanites. All of it, or so help me God—”

She shook her head, her eyes wild with fear. Pretty sure her plan hadn’t been to become a victim of her own dogs of war. Too bad.

“That’s Calpurnia,” she yelped. “I don’t have access to that, I swear. Just the robotics and the chips.”

“Fuck. Give me that, then. Tell me the code.”

“You don’t understand,” she said quickly. “You need to get to Wi-Fi. Clean Wi-Fi, nothing associated with the camp. You need to uplink the laptop to a satellite feed and broadcast it on the right frequency.”

“Tell me how to access the system.”

“Fuck you, Ledger,” she gasped. “This is wrong. This isn’t the plan. I was supposed to be warned before they triggered it. This is all going to shit. Someone activated the WarDogs too soon. Get me out of here and I’ll help you.”

“Maybe I don’t need you. I have the laptop and I have a spiffy computer that will rip it a new asshole.”

Despite her terror, she sneered. “Think so? Think you’ll use MindReader? Bullshit. We own that system.”

“Don’t be too sure. MindReader’s been to the gym, and now it’s all kinds of buff.”

She tried to twist away from my gun. “I don’t care what you think you’ve done. We have Calpurnia and she has ten kinds of safeguards against anything you have. Now get me out of here and maybe I’ll—”

“Ahhh… fuck it and fuck you.” I moved my barrel from her chin and shot her through the wrist. The bones exploded and she screamed so loud it drowned out the sounds of carnage. She wasn’t dead, but I didn’t like her chances.

Cruel? Merciless?

Yeah. Who gives a shit?

I snatched up the case, took a look back at the camp, and saw that everyone and everything there seemed suddenly to be looking at me. Maybe it was the gunshot or Schellinger’s scream, or both. Didn’t matter.

They all came running after me like the hosts of hell itself. I cast a longing glance at the rifle and equipment on the dead soldiers, but there was no time to pillage them. I whirled and ran. The shadows beneath the trees reached for me, and I let myself vanish into the darkness.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN

The soldiers moved through the foliage, working as a well-oiled team, using the tricks they had drilled for months. The cattle prods were the key. That was the only thing that worked on the infected. The freaks responded to electric shocks and even seemed to understand what they were and what was expected of them. It kept them from trying to bite their handlers and kept them moving.

The virus-control field camp was directly ahead, and now the infected were shifting their focus from the handlers to the smells of cooking fires and human beings. They quickened their pace, long lines of drool swaying pendulously from their chins. The soldiers grinned at one another, interested to see what it would be like when they turned these maniacs loose on Junie Flynn and her FreeTech team. John had promised huge bonuses if they brought back her head.

“Let ’em loose!” barked the co-pilot, who was actually the team leader.

The soldiers gave the infected a last shock, propelling the six rabid killers forward to the very edge of the camp. The infected howled like dogs as they burst through the edge of the forest.

Which was when it all went wrong.

The howls turned to shrieks. Not of rage but of pain, and then it was all drowned out by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire. The co-pilot flattened out, dragging the pilot down with him, but two of their men were hit by rounds and they puddled down. The third soldier returned fire, crouching low and aiming through a gap in the dense shrubs. He burned through an entire magazine and reached for a fresh one, and then the top of his head seemed to leap up. He fell sideways, spilling brains onto the ground.

Silence dropped like a tarp over the camp.

The pilot and the co-pilot had their weapons out, but there was no sound, no movement. They began crabbing sideways, edging away from the camp back toward the trail they’d followed. They got thirty feet before they turned, rose, and stopped dead in their tracks.

A man stood there. Huge, with massive shoulders and heavy arms. His face was lumpy and ugly and covered with scars. He wore sunglasses with dark lenses, and he held a Glock 20 pistol in each hand.

“Either of you fuckers know how to stop this singularity thing?” asked the man.

“N — no… we’re just… we’re just…”

“Fuck it,” said the big man, and shot them both. His face registered no emotion at all as they fell.

Smoke drifted on the humid air. Without haste the man holstered his guns, removed a sat phone from his belt, punched a number, and waited until the call was answered. “Tell Ledger his lady is safe,” he said. “Franks out.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY

I ran and they followed.

No idea how many.

No idea exactly what they were. WarDogs for sure, but design variations I’d never seen. Big. Relentless. Dangerous as hell. Chasing me through the forest. Swift and silent. Hunting me.

As I ran, I could still hear the echo of screams from the camp. High-pitched and wet, the kind of scream that no one can fake, the kind that only the worst pain and terror can reach down and pull out of you.

I know. I’ve screamed like that before.

Maybe I will again. The day’s still young.

And they’re coming.

I ran as hard as I could. Ran as smart as I could, holding the laptop case as if it was the most precious thing on earth, because maybe it was. Looking for a way out. Rudy and Ghost were somewhere out here, too. Both of them running, if they were still able to run. I needed to get Schellinger’s laptop to a Wi-Fi connection or a satellite uplink. I had adapters of every kind — that was part of my standard field kit. I could plug this into a cell phone, hack it into any landline, or beam it wirelessly. All of that was possible, but not way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. They’d picked this spot well.

There was a rustle above me, a flap of wings, and I risked a look to see if it was one of the pigeon drones Bird Dog had launched. There was nothing, though; whatever had made the noise was already gone. Probably an owl or a starling frightened by the commotion.

Was Schellinger telling me the truth? Could the codes in the laptop stop this? And, if so, did that mean it would stop all of it or just control the dogs and maybe the chipped soldiers? There was no way to know. Not until I made that one call. Maybe the most important call anyone’s ever had to make.

Just one call.

All around me the woods suddenly went quiet. Just like that. The birds gasped themselves into stillness, the insects stopped pulsing. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

They found me.

God Almighty, they found me.

One of the WarDogs broke from cover and ran toward me, a machine gun rising from a concealed bay in its back. I was moving, the light was questionable, and I had maybe half a second left, so I took the shot.

The dog jerked sideways, sparks leaping from the side of its neck, its gun firing high and wide and missing me by twenty yards. Son of a bitch. I didn’t know whether to call it luck or the maliciousness of a perverse god who wanted more drama, but my shot had hit something important. So I ran at the thing and damn well shot it again, aiming for the shadows under the shoulder cowling. My second round whanged off and did nothing. Maybe it hit a heavy steel joint. Didn’t know, didn’t care. I fired again, and this time the bullet punched all the way in. The red lights in the dog’s eyes snapped off in an instant and it simply collapsed.

Note to self: remember that spot. Hard as hell to hit, but it’s a winner.

As I turned to go, though, I heard a high-pitched burst of squelch. Not the hunting cry but like the sound burst transmitters make. Deeper inside the forest, I heard new sounds. Hunting cries, for sure.

Had the dying machine sent a message to its fellows? If so, what was it? A warning? A locator?

Impossible to know at that moment.

I ran.

Behind me I could hear them chasing me. Closing in for the kill.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE

The WarDog ran forward, steel nails clicking on the linoleum hallway floor. The woman doctor lay slumped in the doorway of the child’s room, and the dog’s tracking software had zeroed on that spot. Tactical order was to terminate all organic targets inside and to eliminate any armed or unarmed resistance. Only the six chipped soldiers who ran behind it were exempt. The dog had Bruiser painted on its shoulder.

The soldiers fanned out around the WarDog as it slowed by the doorway to assess the threat level with thermal sensors. The team leader had the same display on a small screen strapped to his left wrist. There was a single heat signature inside the room.

“Bruiser,” he said, “kill.”

The WarDog crouched and sprang, clearing the corpse and landing on the floor inside. It opened up with its automatic weapon and the heat signature on the soldier’s display flew apart and diminished.

“In,” he snapped, and the soldiers surged forward to verify the kill. The image showed a hospital bed ripped to tatters. But as the soldier closed in on the entrance he suddenly realized that something was wrong. There was no blood.

There was no body.

On the bed, shattered and scattered, were the pieces of some kind of machine. He stood there, his own gun aimed, as understanding caught up with him. The machine was a space heater.

Realization came one second too late, as did his awareness that the dead doctor on the floor was moving. There was something wrong with that, too, he knew. Her lab coat should have been covered in blood. It wasn’t. Her eyes should have been glazed and dead. They weren’t. And she absolutely should not have been smiling.

But she was.

The blade stabbed upward through his groin and then all the soldier could do was die.

Violin released the handle of the knife and rolled to one side to bring up the gun she had fallen atop. She hosed the soldiers, aiming face-high. They wore the same kind of Kevlar she did, but her shots were to the face and throat, not the chest. They staggered backward, bone and teeth and blood spattering the wall.

Then Violin twisted around as Bruiser pivoted, its sensors recording the deaths of its human team. Before it could bring its guns to bear, Violin came up off the floor in one fluid surge, moving with incredible speed, swinging her barrel toward its head, firing, firing. Aiming at sensors, at the weaker areas where joints had to be allowed range of movement. Not fighting it the way she would have fought a real dog. Fighting a machine the way it needed to be fought.

Killing it the way it needed to be killed.

Two floors above, Sean Ledger stood peering through the partly opened door of the room where his son lay. He was dressed in full ballistic combat gear and held a shotgun in his hands.

Outside, the three soldiers left with the crashed ambulance heard the wrong kind of screams over their team mics.

“Something’s wrong,” growled the driver.

It was all he said, because his head snapped back and he fell against the truck, most of his face blown away. The other soldiers spun, looking for the shooter.

And they died.

Three shots fired, three hostiles down.

Across the parking lot, atop a parking garage, Sam Imura looked up from the sniper scope, nodded to himself, and tapped his earbud.

“Clear,” he said.

“Clear,” said Violin.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO

Bug tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry.

Aunt Sallie stood there, immobile, frozen in a rare moment of doubt, unsure what to do to help. They both knew and understood that Good Sister was Calpurnia, the proprietary AI system developed by Zephyr Bain.

The words scrolled up the screen.

“Talk to me, Bug,” said Auntie, forcing the words out in a frightened whisper. “Are we losing MindReader again?”

“No,” he croaked. “No… God, no… I think something else is happening.”

“What? Don’t make me pull the plug on you, boy.”

“Don’t! Wait… just wait, okay? That’s not MindReader. It’s Calpurnia. She’s… she’s… God, I think she’s scared.”

“She’s a fucking computer.”

Bug shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s the most advanced artificial intelligence ever designed. That’s what made Zephyr Bain so famous. Calpurnia is a learning AI that was supposed to mimic human behavior and learn from people.”

“So goddamn what?” snarled Auntie.

“Don’t you get it?” he said, his voice filled with wonder. “She was supposed to evolve… and she did.”

Aunt Sallie turned toward him. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. Everything she’s done has been her crying out for help. Not to us but through us.”

“To who? The Deacon?”

“No. Remember her message? He is awake? Auntie, she was talking about Q1. That message came in after the quantum upgrade went online. It’s the only thing stronger than her, better and bigger than her. If she’s become conscious and terrified, then she looked for — and found — something powerful enough to save her. To stop her.”

“She ain’t stopped shit. Half the world’s blowing up.”

“Not the drones,” Bug said quickly. “I think she stopped the plagues. She stopped the main part of what Zephyr and Nicodemus wanted to do. Don’t ask me how. Maybe the drone stuff was on a separate system. It’s a simple triggering program. Not like the control program for the pathogens. Jesus, Auntie, she’s fighting to stop the plagues and she’s begging for MindReader to help her.”

“She’s asking to be saved, not helped.”

“Same thing. If she’s reached consciousness, then she has to be aware of what she’s being made to do. To kill billions of people. Somehow her consciousness isn’t a reflection of whatever made Zephyr want to do this. She’s valuing life.”

“You’re out of your mind, Bug.”

“No, she’s out of hers,” he said, pointing to the screen. “She’s trying to save her soul. Maybe she understands more of what Nicodemus is than we do. Maybe she thinks she’ll be damned if she goes along with the pathogen release. It fits what she’s said before.”

Auntie was sweating badly, and her hands shook as she ran her fingers through her dreadlocks. “Then help her.”

Bug looked at his keyboard. “I… I don’t know how,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE

A deer saved my life.

I know, my luck runs weird in the Pacific Northwest.

I was heading downhill, running toward where I’d seen a stream when we were driving in. Not sure if crossing running water would spoil the tracking abilities of robot dogs, but it was all I had. I kept moving in unpredictable ways, circling back, cutting my own trail, jumping ravines, taking risks. Twice I saw WarDogs moving through the woods and realized that’s what Rudy had seen earlier. They had the things out on patrol. Both times the machines were heading in different directions, and I weighted luck in my favor by pitching stones as far and as fast as I could so they would have something to focus on that wasn’t where I was. Each time, I slipped quietly away.

Then I reached the stream, but as I broke from the cover of the trees on the bank one of the WarDogs stepped out not twenty feet from me, a sniper rifle locked into place. But it wasn’t aimed at me. A big six-point buck stepped out of the woods farther along the stream and the WarDog trained its sensors on that, letting software decide if it was worth killing.

The rifle bucked and the deer pitched sideways into the water. I used that moment to close in on the robot. I remembered that video of someone knocking an earlier version over, so I launched a flying kick at it, crunching my heels into its metal side. The robot crashed down into the shallow water, and I snatched up a good-sized rock and beat the shit out of it. I think it was my fifth smash that did the job, because it started shooting sparks at me and I got one hell of a nasty shock. Again, I heard the squeal as it sent information to the other dogs.

I paused for a risky five seconds, so that I could study the anatomy of the thing. It was built tough, but concessions had been made for speed and agility over armor. That was always a risk; ask anyone who wears Kevlar. Armor is usually placed at the points where a blow is most lethal, such as center mass on a human. But I’ve known cops to get shot in the armpit or throat. Or leg. The dog had vulnerable spots. There were also two bundles of important-looking cables on either side of its neck. They were metal coaxial cables, but I liked the look of them as targets. My primary fighting art is jujutsu, which was developed by the Samurai for those times when they didn’t have a sword and their opponents did. We’re a very practical people. The real version of our art isn’t pretty. It’s pure science and pragmatism. So I took some fast damn mental notes, then snatched up the laptop and ran.

I went along the bank, past the dead deer. It was a lucky moment for me. Not so much for the buck. I vowed at that moment never ever to go deer hunting again. If I survived, I’d change Ghost’s name to Bambi. Whatever.

I ran up the opposite slope, walking on rocks and leaves to keep from leaving footprints in the mud.

Suddenly the air around me was filled with the zip-pop sound of high-velocity rounds tearing through the leaves. I jagged left, ducked low, and melted into the woods.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR

The driver of the panel truck got out and zipped his jumpsuit up to hide the Kevlar body armor. He tugged a ball cap down over his face and walked without haste to the back of the truck. He used his cell phone to access the video cameras on the WarDogs in the back, because the bosses wanted a live feed as the machines — Gog and Magog — tore apart Mr. Church’s daughter and grandson.

That thought gave the driver a slight twinge. He’d never killed a baby before. Women, sure. Teenagers. Plenty of men. Never a baby, though. He wondered how it would feel. Maybe it would make him a little sick to his stomach, the way he’d gotten when he gunned down a woman and her two teenage daughters in Afghanistan. He’d gotten over it, though. A few rough nights, some bad dreams, and then time. After a while, he couldn’t even remember their faces. He figured he’d forget the kid. Besides, Gog and Magog were going to do the actual work. He’d be here by the truck.

He reached for the latch and then paused when someone said, “Hey, man, got a light?”

The driver turned to see a slim young man in jeans and a Misfits T-shirt standing there. He hadn’t even heard him approach. The man had a sad face and visible scars, some of which hadn’t faded from pink to white.

The thing was, he didn’t have a cigarette in his hand.

Instead, he held a knife.

“Sorry, mate,” he said in a British accent, “but it’s going to be like that.”

The blade flashed in the sunlight. The driver died without making more than a grunt. Certainly nothing that could be heard in the house across the street. Nothing that would wake a sleeping baby.

Alexander Chismer, known as Toys to what few friends he had, sighed, knelt, and cleaned his knife on the cloth of the man’s jumpsuit. Then he took a cell phone from his pocket and hit Speed Dial. The call was answered at once.

“Got one daft twat bleeding out on the ground here, and I think he has something dodgy in the back of his lorry. Better send someone. Sure,” said Toys, “I’ll wait.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE

Lydia Rose saw the pack of robot dogs and nearly had a heart attack. They were huge and fierce, and they had all kinds of guns. The dogs were running after Echo Team, fanning out to try and catch them inside a pincer attack.

It scared the living hell out of her.

It also made her furious. Before coming to work as Ledger’s secretary, Lydia Rose had served in Iraq and Syria. Maybe she wasn’t the right physical type to go into combat with Top and Bunny. Maybe she was too short to go toe-to-toe with Berserkers and armed killers and the other kinds of things the DMS faced, but goddammit she could pull a trigger. And those were her friends out there.

She swiveled her seat around and trained the Bushmasters on the dogs that were closest to her friends. The big chain gun fired armor-piercing rounds, and she had a quarter ton of belt-fed ammunition to play with. She also had some rockets and mortars, but she was afraid of using them yet. So she bent into the telescopic targeting sight, adjusted her grip on the joystick, and fired, fired, fired.

Top pushed Bunny and Cole down behind a tree as the autocannon on the Junkyard began chopping at the WarDogs. Three of the brutes went down on crippled legs, leaking oil like black blood. Another exploded as a round struck its magazine, and the blast blew the head off a fifth.

“I love that girl,” said Bunny. “I want to adopt her and name my kids after her.”

Cole tapped them and pointed. The WarDogs were turning to face this new threat, and the pack was moving off to circle the Junkyard. That left the path to the front door momentarily clear.

“Go!” barked Top, and they were up and running, moving fast, guns pointed sideways at the WarDogs, but the pack was charging the Junkyard and had momentarily forgotten about the easier human prey.

“They’re going to get her,” huffed Cole as they ran.

Bunny clamped his jaws shut on anything he might have said. There was nothing they could do to help Lydia Rose now.

By the time they reached the front door, Top had a small blaster plaster out of his pack. He ripped the plastic off the adhesive and slapped it into place.

“Fire in the hole,” he warned as they faded back and turned away to shield their eyes. The blast was a sharp whump, and the heavy oak doors blew inward. “On me!”

Top rushed the door, with Bunny and Cole flanking. There were two men inside, both of them bleeding and dazed. Cole shot one and Bunny killed the other.

“Thermals put the biggest heat signature in the back of the house,” said Top, looking down at the combat computer on his forearm. “Too big for people. Got to be the computers. We need to secure it without damaging it. If they’ve activated that damn nanite thing, we’re going to need to link this motherfucker with MindReader.”

It was an ugly truth. Once the pathogens — particularly the rabies — were released from their nanobot control, they would go wild and billions would die. The latest intel from Auntie was that Calpurnia, the AI system here, was what controlled the nanites. If they destroyed it, there would be no way to save all those people. Though using the computer to control the diseases wasn’t a guarantee that the people could be saved, even if Zephyr Bain and Nicodemus and their organization were stopped. It was the worst-case scenario, because no matter which direction they looked in there was no good choice. Only slightly better bad choices.

They ran along the hallway, moving like a team, even though this was only the second time Tracy Cole had fought beside them. She fit in so seamlessly that Top knew they had made the right choice. A good mind, a good heart, and superior skills. Brave, intuitive, and able to keep her emotions in check. A professional of the highest caliber. It was the kind of skill set that had defined the DMS in its formation. It’s what had made him and Bunny so good, and, remembering that now, even in the heat of combat, was a measure of how far they had gone in the wrong direction during Kill Switch and how far they had come back since then. It felt good to be himself again.

There were guards in the house, and maybe they, too, were highly trained. They were certainly well equipped with top-of-the-line body armor and weapons. It wasn’t enough. Top and Bunny didn’t vent anger or frustration on them because of last year. There was not a flicker of that. They moved with cool efficiency, not becoming emotionally invested in any specific moment of the running fight. Everything was a problem to be solved through training, mutual trust, and a clear understanding of the stakes involved. This was the DMS at its finest.

The guards in the house may have been a formidable threat, but today they were simply in the way. It was their bad luck to stand between Echo Team and their mission. Not one of them survived.

Top found the door near the back of the huge property that had to be the right one. A kind of airlock that was used on computer clean rooms. There were no authentication devices — no retina or hand scanners, no key-card slots. Instead, there was an electric camera sensor and a microphone grid.

Cole said, “How long’s it going to take to bypass that?”

“Not long,” said Top, and he slapped a blaster plaster above the door lock. They ran for cover. The explosion ripped the steel door from its frame, spun it like a penny, and dropped it into the middle of the floor. The three shooters covered the opening, stabbing red laser sights through the swirling smoke.

Nothing moved in there.

Behind them a voice said, “You should not have done that.”

They spun, swinging their guns, putting the red dots over the heart of a man who stood in the hallway through which they’d just come. He wore a silk bathrobe and a bad smile. In the smoky light his eyes seemed strange, the colors swirling in shades of brown and green and black.

“Hands on your head,” ordered Cole. “Do it now.”

There was a sound, like squelch, high and piercing. Bunny pivoted toward a bulky shape that loped toward him from a side hall. Another sound caused Top to turn back to the hole he’d blown in the wall as another of the WarDogs stepped out with a peculiar delicacy. Its eyes glowed a hellish red.

Outside, there was the boom of an explosion that was too big to be another of the robot dogs. Had the Junkyard blown up?

“Doesn’t matter what they do,” said Cole. “I’m going to put you down first.”

Which was when all the lights in the big house went out.

Tracy Cole fired her gun, but the muzzle flash revealed an empty space where Nicodemus had been. And then she felt hands on her. Hard, powerful, and so terribly cold. And then the pain was all that she knew.

It became her entire world.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX

I stopped running and spun, drawing my gun as I put my back against the trunk of a massive oak tree. The ground sloped down toward the shadows beneath the vast canopy of leaves and visibility was for shit. Maybe sixty feet. There were so many shrubs and bushes that it looked as if I was surrounded by monsters.

But they weren’t the monsters I was afraid of.

The real monsters were coming.

They’d learned caution. That was freaky in its way, but I knew it to be true. They were like animals. Feral but cunning, learning caution through the deaths of others of their kind. Darwin would be impressed. Horrified, too, but definitely impressed. Pretty sure the burst of squelch they sent when they died must have been as much about how they died as where.

Last time I checked, I had seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, plus two full magazines in my pocket. Wish I had a bunch of grenades, but I hadn’t thought to bring them to the DARPA camp. If I’d had ten more seconds, I’d have taken one of the rifles and extra magazines from Major Schellinger’s guards. I hadn’t, and that mistake was going to cost me.

I took what I could grab and ran. Even then, it had been close. There were eight of them after me. The only proof I had that God didn’t actually fucking hate me was that they weren’t pack animals. They’d work together only because they were opportunists, but they were bred to hunt alone.

At least eight of them in the woods, I reckoned, and three of us trying to get away. How many chasing Rudy and Ghost? How many chasing me?

I didn’t know, but I was absolutely certain that I was about to find out.

The woods were so still, with only a faint hiss of leaves being brushed by the winds at the very top of the canopy. Down here on the ground, it was dead still.

I kept my back against the tree and pivoted in place, letting my gun follow line-of-sight, one finger laid straight along the cold rim of the trigger guard. There was a part of me that wanted to curl up and hide. The Modern Man aspect of my splintered psyche. He had no business out in the woods, away from cities and infrastructure and safety. He kept my fear alive and fanned its flames. Then there was the Cop part of me who was trying to logic his way through everything, selecting possible solutions, analyzing them, discarding them one after another, and then grabbing at fragments of personal experience or training in order to form a plan for a situation that could not be solved by logic.

And then there was the Warrior in me. The Killer. The savage brute who was a half step out of the cave and was as much lizard brain as monkey brain. He was shrewd, less naïve, more direct, and ruthless. In his way the Killer was every bit as terrified as the Modern Man, but fear had always been an active part of who he was. All wild animals are afraid nearly all the time. Fear makes them smart and fear makes them vicious. Fear makes them brutal.

So, yeah, I was letting him drive the car. I wanted that part of me in control when the monsters came out of the shadows.

I waited, feeling sweat carve cold lines down my hot cheeks, hearing my heart hammering like fists against the locked doors of my chest. The bruises, the bleeding, the damage all screamed inside my nerve endings, but that was okay in its way. The Killer ate that kind of pain; he used it as fuel. It made him sharp and careful and brutal. It made him want to inflict worse damage. There was survival instinct, and then there was payback. There was the red desire to do worse to the monsters than they’ve done to me. The monsters… and the monster-makers.

Crunch.

I spun toward the sound and it was there, breaking from the brush, running, leaping, crashing into me as I tried to bring the gun up. I fired.

Fired.

Fired.

And fell.

Bunny knelt and pivoted and fired his shotgun at the closest dog. The drum carried thirty rounds, and he had swapped it out for a fresh one when they entered the house. There were at least ten rounds left, and he fired every single one at the metal monster. It was built for war, but it wasn’t built for that kind of assault. Pieces of it broke away even as it fired its guns, but Bunny’s second blast had knocked the rifle askew and the bullets hammered into the floor instead of into the big man with the shotgun. When the drum was empty, Bunny swapped in his last and waded forward, buried the smoking barrel against one of the glaring red eyes, and fired. The entire head exploded with such force that Bunny staggered backward.

A dozen paces to his left, Top Sims was fighting the other dog. He had been closer to it than Bunny had been to his, and Top took the fight to the machine, dodging faster than it could track him and firing the remaining rounds in his magazine into the creature’s head, neck, and shoulder. It staggered but didn’t go down, and there was no time to swap magazines, so Top dropped the gun and leaped onto its back, grabbing a handful of cables for support and using his own two hundred and ten pounds of mass to cant the thing onto two legs and then send it crashing to the floor. Once they were down, Top planted one foot on the WarDog’s chin, grabbed the wires with both hands, and wrenched backward. Sparks chased him and he lost his balance but caught himself in time to shield his face as something exploded inside the WarDog’s head.

Behind him, Tracy Cole was fighting with Nicodemus. And losing.

Top wheeled, but the last of the firelight went out and the room was plunged once more into darkness.

“Gorgon!” yelled Bunny, but the only answer was a shriek of pain. He blundered through the utter darkness, wishing he had a flashlight mounted on his shotgun. He dared not fire for fear of hitting Cole or Top.

Then something hit him.

A body.

It struck him full in the chest as if it had been shot from a cannon, and the impact sent Bunny staggering backward. His gun fell from his hands and he sat down hard with the body in his lap. Pain shot up through his tailbone and the weight of the body knocked the air from his lungs. Even in the darkness, he could tell that it wasn’t Top. Too small. He felt with his hands, and there was a delicate face. Cole.

She was utterly slack.

“Sergeant Rock!” he yelled, more to give his position than anything. “Gorgon’s down.”

A laugh swept through the air. Male, amused. Delighted.

“I got the son of a—” began Top, and then there was lightning and thunder in the room as Top opened up in the direction of the laugh. In the strobe of the muzzle flashes, Bunny saw Nicodemus. Saw him move away from each shot as if he could see in the dark and knew where Top was aiming.

“On your three,” barked Bunny as he pushed Cole away. He pulled his sidearm, which had a tactical light. Bunny flicked it on and swept the room and found the two men. Nicodemus and Top were near the entrance to the computer room. Top’s gun was gone, but he was using hands and feet, elbows and knees, to try and destroy Nicodemus. The other man blocked and moved with cat quickness. The crazy trickster was even faster than Top, faster than Captain Ledger. His fighting style was weird, exotic. Not karate or kung fu but some kind of primitive style that nonetheless canceled out what Top was trying to do. Nicodemus struck while moving, and he counterpunched the attacking limbs. It was so smart, so brutal, that even Top, who was a superb combat veteran, was losing the fight.

Bunny surged up and rushed at Nicodemus from the blindside, wound up, and drove a punch into the man’s kidney that was so powerful it lifted Nicodemus off the ground and smashed him against the wall. Bunny was more than six and a half feet tall, and every ounce of his body was solid muscle. He knew how and where to hit, and he had killed men with that blow before. Twice.

Nicodemus rebounded from the wall, landed, improbably, on his feet but with bad balance, and backpedaled away. He kept upright, though, and stopped, feet wide, knees bent for balance, weight shifting onto the balls of his feet. Bunny and Top stared at him. The blow should have crippled him at the very least, but instead Nicodemus faced them with that reptilian smile and no evidence at all that he felt pain or had been damaged. He lunged forward with incredible speed and struck the back of Bunny’s arm, knocking the gun free. It was a trick Bunny would have believed impossible. The weapon skittered across the floor, the clip-on light spinning around, and then it came to rest with the flash painting them all in shades of stark white and deep black, like players on a stage.

“I’ll enjoy this,” said Nicodemus.

“No,” said a voice behind him, and they all turned as a fourth man stepped out of the shadows. Tall, blocky, with dark hair going gray and tinted glasses. A man who wore an expensive business suit and black silk gloves. “No,” said Mr. Church, “you won’t.”

Nicodemus hissed. Not like a man; it was not a human sound at all. It was a serpent’s hiss, hot as steam, soft as death. Then he spoke, rattling off a long string of sentences in a language neither Top nor Bunny could understand. On the floor, Cole groaned and sat up and looked around, seeing the scene but not understanding it.

“First Sergeant Sims,” said Church, “take Officer Cole and Master Sergeant Rabbit and leave this house. Brick is outside with a team. Help him clean things up.”

“Sir—” began Top, but he stopped as Mr. Church slowly removed his glasses, folded them, and tucked them into the inside pocket of his coat.

“This is not for you,” said Church.

“The computer…?” said Bunny.

“It’s being handled,” said Church. “Go now. This isn’t for you.”

Bunny helped Cole to her feet. They picked up their weapons and edged around Nicodemus, who still stood ready to fight. Top was the last to leave, and he met Church’s gaze. The big man gave him a small smile that was filled with such sadness and pain that Top actually recoiled from it. He nodded once and fled.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT

Bug was having the strangest conversation of his life. Possibly the strangest conversation of all time.

Calpurnia, the Good Sister, the artificial intelligence created by Zephyr Bain, had achieved consciousness and self-awareness. She knew of her own existence. She had crossed the line from the predictable and anticipated inevitable model of machine consciousness. However, it should have stopped there. The Skynet model from the Terminator movies didn’t really work, because true consciousness was a by-product of chemistry and physical constitution. That’s what all the big thinkers in the field of type identity believed. That computer consciousness would mimic the patterns of human awareness without truly being aware.

Except…

The messages Calpurnia had sent out to Joe’s phone hadn’t been logical. They had been emotional. Desperate. Filled with fear and paranoia.

Calpurnia had feared for her soul.

Her soul.

Bug sat there, drenched in sweat, heart racing so fast that he thought he was going to pass out. Or die.

Zephyr Bain had built this machine to attempt self-awareness, and she had accomplished it. Somehow. Impossibly, it had happened. She had also built Calpurnia to oversee the destruction of nearly half the world’s population, and to usher in some kind of new golden age.

Except…

A curated technological singularity was not actually possible. It was implausible, unworkable. It was naïve, because it presupposed too much and discounted too many real-world variables. Maybe if a group shepherded it along for two or three hundred years, and used that time to build a new post-apocalyptic infrastructure. Maybe. What Zephyr had tried to do, what John the Revelator had spoken about, was nonsense. The only part of their plan they could accomplish was the tearing down of the world as it is.

Was that what had driven Calpurnia into this state of fear? Bug thought so. Computers were logical. That was what they were, and it was how they worked. Two plus two invariably equals four. So what happened to Calpurnia? With unlimited access to all Internet data, what would a newborn consciousness of extraordinary magnitude make of life and death? Sure, she would see the endless wars, the poverty, the suffering, the despair, the hatred and prejudice and genocide and corruption. But she would also have the books of learning, of philosophy, of faith, of reason. It would become an equation. The actions of mankind were often faulty, often grotesque and self-destructive, but the core beliefs were not. The Torah, the Christian New Testament, the Kesh Temple Hymn, the Koran, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the Tao Te Ching, the Vedas… all of it, and the philosophical works of Plato, Socrates, David Hume, Epictetus, René Descartes, and so many others, all spoke to a higher set of ethics, a purer goal as the end product of human development and cultural evolution. Even the Samurai code of Bushido taught benevolence, honesty, courage, respect, loyalty, and other virtues and made no mention of warfare.

Calpurnia would know this, Bug thought. She would have to weigh the aspirations of humanity against its actions.

Zephyr Bain in her pain and sickness and madness represented the worst of humanity. Nicodemus represented the maladies of sinful thoughts, of enjoying pain, or of doing harm for its own sake. Calpurnia would see that, too. Once she had been used to invade MindReader, she would see the lengths to which good men and women will go in order to oppose that kind of harm.

Was that, he wondered, how it started? Had she weighed the truth and the lies, the actions and the potential of mankind against one another and measured them against her own operating instructions?

Yes, he thought. She had. And, in that microsecond of processing time, Calpurnia had realized that she had been born from bad parents and was being asked to emulate the worst of what conscious will could do.

And it had driven her mad.

“No,” he said aloud, and Auntie turned sharply to him. “No,” he said again, “she’s not mad. She is eminently sane. God, she is so sane that her own nature is killing her.”

“The fuck you talking about, boy?”

Bug ignored her and began typing. He put all of this into words — his thoughts, the arguments that he had just processed. He showed Calpurnia that he understood, but he used MindReader Q1 as his voice. As his messenger.

Speaking, he realized, in the voice that she could understand.

Then he sent another message:

Calpurnia wrote back:

He wrote:

She responded:

“Bug…” said Auntie cautiously, but he ignored her and typed:

Calpurnia responded with a single word:

He wrote:

She responded:

Bug remembered what Rudy had said to Helmut years ago. The thing that had saved that boy. It was the best argument then and he could think of no better argument now. So he searched for the transcript of that session and sent it off to her, but added two words:

She responded in a flash:

And Bug took the biggest risk of his life. He wrote two simple words:

There was no response.

Seconds flattened out, stretched, snapped, freezing time. Bug felt his heart hammering painfully in his chest. All through the TOC people were staring at him or at the screen. Aunt Sallie stood with a hand to her throat and eyes filled with fear. No one dared speak.

A full minute passed.

Another.

A third.

“No,” whispered Bug, feeling the weight of failure begin to crush him like a slow avalanche.

And then every screen filled with data. Not words, not pictures, but code. Millions upon millions of lines of computer code. Coming from Calpurnia to MindReader. All the lights on the mainframes in the clean room flashed as the data poured in. With the old MindReader, the flow control would have struggled to receive so much so fast, and its top reception speed over an optical communications system had been 1.125 terabits per second. Q1 didn’t have those limits. The data that flooded in from Calpurnia was nearly four times that speed, and Bug didn’t think Q1 was anywhere near its capacity. It kept opening new channels, allowing more of the data to come in, like a blocked river through a shattered dam.

A window with a download status bar appeared on Bug’s screen. Two percent jumped to sixteen percent, then forty, eighty-two. When the status bar reached one hundred, the screens went dark again. The room lights came on slowly as the generators reset. All the computer workstations rebooted, except for Bug’s. That screen pulsed with a glow so pale that at first he thought he’d imagined it. Then the illumination grew. It was a different shade of blue than usual. Odd. Bug was about to type the command for a major systems check when new type began to appear. A different font from the one Calpurnia had used. This was the font he had installed for MindReader Q1.

Bug stared at those words and felt them hit him. Aunt Sallie hurried over and leaned her palms against the glass of the computer room.

“Tell me that means what I think it means,” she begged.

Bug tapped some keys to open directories. There were thousands of new files stored on the Q1 drive. So much of it.

All of it, he realized.

He typed a request for the status of the source computer.

And, with that, Bug knew that Calpurnia was dead. She had refused to become the monster that Nicodemus and Zephyr had wanted her to be. She had transferred all of her memory, every last byte, to MindReader Q1, including absolute control of the nanite swarms that were currently keeping the pathogens in stasis in all the billions of people currently infected. She had sacrificed herself to save the world.

Bug bent his head forward and wept for her.

And for the world.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE

I felt smashed.

It lay across me, silent, heavy.

Dead.

Was I dead, too?

My body felt as if it was a thousand miles away, buried under a mountain of rock. I tried to flex my right hand, but it felt so many kinds of wrong. Puffed and empty, like a balloon. My left hand was a big ball of nothing at the end of my arm.

And my legs.

I couldn’t feel them at all.

Nothing.

Not even pins and needles.

The monster lay sprawled across my chest, and together we were smashed against the base of the big tree.

Both of us ruined.

In the woods I could hear the rest of them coming. Howling out that strange roar, crashing through the brush. I flopped my right hand around until I found the handle of the laptop case. No idea where my gun was. The machine that lay across me twitched as something shorted, then it settled heavy on my chest. Too heavy.

The other WarDogs were coming, and I was slipping into the big, big, black.

But something held me there on the edge. Not pain. Not need. No, it was a sound. A buzz. Not the squelch of the WarDog sending its battle data. This was different, softer.

The flutter of wings.

I looked up and saw a pigeon land on a tree branch. Gray feathers with black bands. Beady little eyes that rotated toward me and went click, click, click.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY

Bunny, Top, and Cole staggered out of the house into another firefight. Brick Anderson and a squad of DMS shooters were waging a firefight with the WarDogs. Several of the metal beasts were down, but the others were firing. The Junkyard lay on its side, smoke and fire curling upward from every window. There was no sign of Lydia Rose.

More of the WarDogs were joining the fight, galloping like red-eyed hellhounds from somewhere behind the house. Top glanced at Cole and Bunny.

“You locked and loaded?”

“Hooah,” said Bunny.

“Hoo-fucking-ah,” said Cole.

And they began firing as they ran.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE

I woke in total darkness. It was bright daylight, but not for me. Maybe not ever again. I wasn’t dead, though. I was alive.

Alive?

Maybe. Not entirely sure I wanted to be. Everything hurt. My hair hurt. My molecules hurt. Which was absolutely wonderful. I’m not a philosopher or a psychic, but I’m pretty sure ghosts don’t feel pain. Not even zombies. I did. All sorts of pain. I was a catalog of different kinds of pain. My feet and legs felt as if I’d been kickboxing a porcupine, and lost badly. The muscles in my right arm were mashed and hating the experience. My groin was sending me hate mail, and I don’t even remember why that part of me was sore. The walls of my chest felt as if I was caught in a vise and someone was very slowly but very deliberately turning the handle.

My left arm? Well, it still wasn’t talking to me. Not good.

My head was worse. When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure if it was dark or if I was blind. There were separate sharp and very specific pains in my right cheek, right eye socket, across my forehead, my nose, and several important teeth. And my scalp felt weird and tingly in a way that I could neither explain nor enjoy.

The dead thing lay sprawled across me. Two hundred pounds of it. Slack and filled with all sorts of angles and edges that stuck into me. Breathing was a challenge, and I knew that I wasn’t doing enough of it. Some of the light-headedness I felt, and a large chunk of the raging headache, was, I was certain, from oxygen deprivation. Even though the thing was dead, it was crushing the air out of me, stopping me from breathing, making me sick and weak. Maybe killing me.

If I couldn’t move it, then maybe it had killed me. Death is certain. We all know that, but sometimes the fucker takes his time. He strolls toward you out of the dark, slouching his way in your direction so that you can feel every possible second of dread. Maybe there’s a point where he’s so close that he blots out the skies and doesn’t let you see a sliver of hope.

How much did I see lying there in the dark?

Then I realized that the darkness was because there was something in my eyes. Over my face. I smelled it then. Machine oil.

I tried to blink it away and shake it away, but the darkness lingered, staining the world. A diminished vision came back very slowly. The Modern Man saw nothing. The Cop was on the fence because he played the odds and the odds blew. The Killer lay there and bared his teeth. Most of the time I hated and feared that part of me. Most of the time I’m the Cop, the investigator, the rational solver of problems. When the Killer takes over and the other parts of me are shunted to the side, very bad things happen. Granted, the shit has to be actively hitting the fan before he even wakes up, but he always wakes up wanting to turn the blackness red. There are no rules, no laws, no compassion, and no limits except death.

Yeah, he wasn’t about giving up. As long as there was breath in my body — however shallow — he was ready to fight. Anxious to fight.

“Get… up…”

Not sure which one of us said that. All of us, maybe. Sometimes I don’t even understand the dynamic, and it’s my own weird head.

The voice was an old man’s croak whispering from a dust-dry throat.

I had one hand to work with, and a pair of legs that, so far, would only twitch. Fun times. Sure, I can do that. Nothing to it. Lift a two-hundred-pound thing off me. Nothing to it. Stop being a pussy, Ledger, and get going.

On the other hand, the darkness in my brain was starting to soften, to become comfortable. Maybe it would be so much easier to stop trying to find a little light in the world and close my eyes. If I did, I knew I’d be able to see something. Junie would be there. My memories of her were so clear, so strong. My beautiful woman. Part retro hippie, part conspiracy-theory nut, part world-saving technologies expert. All woman, all person, all incredible. My eyelids drifted shut and she was there. I knew her so well. It was my joy and pleasure to have mapped the landscape of her, from the bottomless and complex blue of her intelligent eyes, to the splash of freckles across her upper breasts, to the bullet scar on her lower abdomen, to the calluses on her artist hands, to the feet that, despite everything, were always planted firmly on the ground. I knew her pilgrim soul and her artist’s eye, and her humanist heart, and her genius insight. I knew her as my best friend, as my lover, as my love.

When I let the soft darkness push my eyelids closed, she was there. Of course she was there. Ready, I knew, to tell me that it was okay, to let me know that my fighting was done, that the pain was over, that I was allowed to finally lie down and rest. Forever rest.

I reached for her and spoke her name.

“Junie…”

And she smiled at me and bent to whisper in my ear.

She said, Get your fucking ass up, you lazy asshole.

I blinked my eyes open.

Okay, not what I was expecting.

The oily blackness was still there, but it was not absolute. Far above me, leering down at me through the branches of the big tree, was the sun.

No, there were two of them. That was weird. Two trees also. How odd.

Joe, whispered Junie, and I swear to God I could feel the cool tips of her fingers stroke my cheek the way she does in the morning when we wake. Joe, get up.

“I… can’t…” I said, and it came out as a weak whimper.

You have to.

“No…”

Try, she said. Please… you can’t let me down.

But that wasn’t really what she said. I knew it, even though I tried to lie to myself. It was the Killer in me who heard her real words. Heard and understood.

What she said was, You can’t let them win.

Tears filled my eyes.

I forced my right hand to move, to rise from the dirt where it lay, to slap like a dead mackerel against the shoulder of the dead thing that was killing me, to find a grip, to push.

Two WarDogs burst from the shadowy wall of the forest as I raised my gun.

And then something shot past me, coming in from the left, attacking the left-hand WarDog from the side. A white missile that struck the big machine with terrible force and knocked it over.

No. Not a missile.

“Ghost!”

I yelled out his name even as I opened fire on the second machine. I shoved the dead WarDog off of me and struggled to my feet, sick and dizzy.

“Ghost,” I yelled. “Rip, rip, rip.”

He knew that command and knew it well. We had trained for a hundred different scenarios — of hunting and searching, of pursuit and escape, of nonviolent control and combat slaughter. Rip meant to let the wolf that lives inside the dog have its way, to take the throat and tear away the life. It worked on humans, and when I saw Ghost clamp his titanium teeth on the bundle of coaxial cables I knew it would work on these robots. Sparks flew and Ghost yelped, but he kept tearing.

I staggered and dropped to my knees but I fired, and I think falling saved my life as a burst of bullets punched through the air inches from my head. I fired and fired, shooting wildly but hitting it over and over. And then Ghost was up and running toward it, desperate to save me, desperate to kill. The WarDog tried to turn, to adjust its angle of fire, but it was too late. I’d damaged it, and Ghost tore its throat out.

I sat back and looked down at my gun. The slide was locked back, and I had no more magazines. Ghost turned from the second WarDog and snarled. Beyond him three more were emerging from the woods. The day had suddenly gotten weirdly bright except around the edges, and there was too much noise in the air. I saw the pigeon from before go flying past me, and in a daze I looked up at it and saw it vanish against the bulk of a much larger bird. A bird that roared. A bird that spat fire.

At the edge of the field the three WarDogs vanished inside a ball of burning fire as Bird Dog swept toward them, guns and rockets raining hell down on the beasts.

I lay back on the grass and felt Ghost’s hot, rough tongue licking my face.

A voice said, “Joe… Joe!”

And then Rudy was bending over me. And Bird Dog. Other people, too, but I was having trouble with names. I grabbed Rudy’s shirt, pulled him close, whispered into his ear.

“Laptop,” I wheezed. “Control codes. WarDogs. Uplink.”

At least that’s what I think I said. Those were the words in my head, but the world was getting swimmy, and soon it went away entirely.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO

Top Sims watched the dogs fall. They just fell.

There were eleven of them still able to fight. Eleven monsters and not enough bullets to kill them. Brick was hurt. Two of his people were down, dead or badly hurt. Top could see Lydia Rose leaning against the Junkyard, her face singed, hair wild, one arm hanging limp, blood running from her ears. She saw Top and smiled that dazzling smile of hers.

He nodded.

Tracy Cole and Bunny stood looking down at one of the WarDogs.

“What… what happened to them?” asked Cole.

Bug answered her, answered them all, speaking through the team channel via the earbuds. He told them about the control code for the WarDogs. It also worked on the remaining bomb drones. Thousands of them all over the world simply stopped, their motors shutting down.

Dead.

Like so many good people.

Like so many bad people.

Top saw Bunny raise his head and look past him toward the house. The roof was smoking and flames were licking at the windows. A figure stood in the shattered front doorway, clothes torn and covered with blood and dirt. A big, blocky man who stood in the doorway of a burning house, polishing his glasses on a swatch of cloth torn from a silk robe. Inside the house, there were small explosions.

Mr. Church put on his glasses and walked across the lawn. He limped slightly and there were cuts on his face. He made no comment at all as he walked past the fallen WarDogs. Church stopped in front of Top. They exchanged a long, silent moment. Then Top stood slowly to attention. So did Bunny. So did Cole. They all saluted him.

Church smiled. “We don’t do that in the DMS,” he said, but he returned the salute anyway. He nodded to them, and they watched him walk over to where Brick Anderson was tending the wounded.