Joe Ledger: Special Ops

Chap. 1

The killer descended from the glimmering lights of Paris into a black underworld of rushing water, stagnant pollution, raw sewage, savage rats, and forgotten bones.

He carried no map, but the route was imprinted onto the front of his mind. He went deeper and deeper into the underworld, carrying with him the tools of his trade. A gun, a knife, a silver garrote, and a mind far colder than the waters that rushed through the bowels of the earth.

It had been the work of four weeks to obtain legitimate permits and credentials from the correct departments within the streets management offices, then copy those documents, and return the originals. If anyone ever checked, everything would be in its proper place. The level of proficiency at which the killer worked was both a source of amusement among his peers and the reason this man had never failed in a field mission. The jokes at his expense—“My grandmother’s slower, but she’s old”—were swapped out of his earshot. Or, at least, so the jokers thought. The killer usually heard what was being said, though through means that were only ever supposed to be used on the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans. Never on the home team.

The killer did not recognize most of his peers as being on the same team as himself. He had a separate and entirely personal agenda that he chose not to share.

Even the members of his own team — none of whom were on this particular mission — knew only what he wanted them to know. Just as his superiors knew only what he wanted them to know, and that included many of the details in his personal file. Most of it was a fabrication that had taken years, much thought, and a great deal of money to construct. Everything there — photos of his childhood, his school records, his medical history, even the samples of blood and hair on file for DNA testing — belonged to other men. Dead men whose lives he had borrowed, combined, and then otherwise erased.

The killer was as certain as he could be that his real name existed in no database in any computer on earth.

Except Pangaea.

His computer.

A computer the killer had obtained in the way he’d obtained many useful tools in his personal arsenal. He’d killed the man who built it and the men who guarded it.

And then he completely rebuilt the computer to suit his own needs.

Now Pangaea was a killer, too. Like him in many ways. It intruded where it did not belong and destroyed things that were too valuable to let stand. For Pangaea the path of destruction was through the memory banks of other computers. It sought certain information and retrieved it, often deleting the information on the target mainframes, then it deleted all traces of its own presence.

The killer spent a great deal of time erasing all records that a computer system called Pangaea ever existed.

One of Pangaea’s secret weapons was a new feature that the killer had developed and added to its operational system. A subroutine called “Kreskin,” designed to search for patterns and collate any relevant information into a set of projections as close to human intuition and guesswork as a binary computer mind could achieve. At least with the current technology.

That pattern search had located a target the killer had sought for a long time.

It was why he was down here in the sewer.

It was why he was hunting in the darkness like the predator he was.

He moved as quietly as possible, running lightly along the narrow ledges to avoid splashing through the sluggish runoff from last night’s rain. The storm drains were vast, stretching for twenty-one thousand kilometers beneath the sprawl of the city above. These tunnels held the drinking and non-drinking water mains, telecommunication cables, pneumatic cables, and traffic light management cables. Following the tunnels took planning. Getting lost was simple. Dying down here was common.

He took care. He planned every step.

If his information was correct, he was near the target.

The killer slowed to a walk and then stopped at the entrance to a chamber that was part of the channeling system that took water from dozens of culverts and combined it in a larger chute that flowed to the Seine. He crouched in the shadows, silent and unmoving, allowing his senses to fill him with every bit of detail about where he was and what was here. He was not a man to make assumptions, even about an empty tunnel.

There was a rusted service door in the far wall. A weak bulb in a grilled cage mounted above the door threw dirty yellow light over the churning water. A child’s ragdoll bobbed in the current, and the killer paused for a moment to look at it. The doll was dressed in the checkerboard clothes of a harlequin jester, with bells on its hat and a broad smile of stitched red silk.

It was an expensive doll and it looked well-worn, and not just from the passage through the drain. This was a doll a child had held close for many nights. Something loved, something treasured. And now it was lost here in the darkness, on its way to oblivion in the ocean. Perhaps if the child knew where it was then he, or more likely she, might imagine her tattered friend to be off on some grand adventure. Otherwise…it was a friend who was lost and would never be found.

That thought came close to breaking the killer’s heart.

So many of his friends were lost to him.

So many.

He almost reached for the doll, almost pulled it from the water as the thing bobbed past, but he did not. He remained as still as the shadows and the grime-slick walls and the bones of dead rats. Instead, he watched the harlequin doll drown in the froth of converging sewer water and rush away into the great nothingness.

After a moment, he turned his attention to that rusted door. According to the records Pangaea had filched for him, that door led to a disused valve station whose purpose had been superseded by a more modern system controlled in an office on street level.

At a glance the door appeared to be forgotten, with years of rust crusted to the hinges and knob. The low-wattage service light was there to aid with routine inspection of this rechanneling chamber.

That was how things looked according to all official records and even on the service logs of the men who worked these tunnels. They knew the door was there, but they ignored it as they ignored hundreds of similarly disused doors, tunnels, chambers, holding tanks, ladders, and other detritus of an older age of public sewage. Like the subway systems in New York and London, here there were layers of new built on forgotten bones of the old.

However the killer had a separate source of intelligence that insisted that this door was not at all what it seemed. And that there were more than rust-frozen valves on the other side.

The killer was about to rise from his crouch when he heard something.

Very faint, very soft.

A footfall. A scuff.

Not an animal sound.

Human, though he could not tell more than that.

He did not move, aware that he was so deep inside a bank of shadows that he was invisible. His clothes were as black as his balaclava, and he had black greasepaint around his eyes. Only the whites of his eyes were visible in the light, and no light touched him where he crouched. The gear he carried — grenades, knives, and more — was arranged on his belt with cushions so they didn’t clink or rattle.

The sound came from a side tunnel to his left. From the memory of the tunnel schematics in his mind, he knew that the closest street access to that tunnel was at least a mile away. A long way to go in the dark. He raised the black cover of his watch and touched the face, reading the position of the arms. Three minutes past four in the morning. Far too late for the evening maintenance crew, two hours early for the day shift.

He waited.

There wasn’t another scuff. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly. The scuff had probably been a rare accident. An unseen patch of slime.

The killer drew his pistol. A .22 with a sound suppressor. It was poor at long range, but this man never killed from a great distance. He was selective and careful. It was not because killing up close provided some men with a physical thrill. That was not a factor in the function of either his heart or mind. It was a matter of not liking to make errors. Distance, especially in the dark, increased the risk of errors.

Errors were the result of sloppiness, nerves, or poor process.

He crouched, the pistol held in both hands, barrel pointed down, his forearms resting against his bent knees to keep the muscles from fatiguing.

Forty feet down the tunnel the shadows changed. A slender fragment of the darkness detached itself and crept forward with catlike grace.

In the bad light it was difficult to tell much about the figure.

Small, slight of build, moving with the ease of a dancer or a martial artist. Someone who knew how to move. No visible weapons in the hands; however, the black handles of knives stood up from sheathes on each thigh.

The killer pursed his lips in appreciation.

He watched as the figure approached the downspill of yellow light and paused, becoming as motionless as the killer himself.

Suddenly a sound broke into the moment as the rusted metal door opened. Despite its decrepit appearance, the door opened with a soft click and swung outward on nearly silent hinges. Three men stepped out. Two of them wore boots, jeans, and t-shirts; both wore identical shoulder holsters with .45 pistols snugged into them. The third man wore a hazmat suit with the hood off. The men in jeans drew their pistols and walked to the edges of the runoff trough, looking up and down into the shadows. The killer knew that they saw nothing, that they could see nothing; neither had allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness before trying to look through it. They didn’t see the killer, and they didn’t see the other figure crouched barely six feet from them.

The two thugs nodded to the man in the hazmat suit who reached through the doorway and lifted out a Styrofoam cooler of the type used to transport medical or biological materials. A red biohazard symbol was stamped onto the white plastic side. He walked to the edge of the trough and stood for a moment looking down into the eddying water. Then he set the cooler down.

The killer raised his pistol.

His intel had brought him here to this place, this time. His mission projections had him back at street level within eight minutes from first trigger pull.

Then everything changed.

The figure crouched in the dark moved.

There was a rasping sound, steel clearing leather, but no flash of metal. Like British commando knives, the blade was blackened. The figure rose from a crouch and swarmed among the men. The blade swept right and then left, and suddenly arterial blood geysered, spraying all the way to the curved top of the brick tunnel. One of the thugs reeled back, fingers scrabbling to stem a flow that could never be stopped. The second man staggered away and turned in an almost graceful pirouette, hands reaching out to break a fall that turned clumsy and artless. They collapsed like discarded puppets onto the stone walkway so quickly that the man in the hazmat suit was unaware of their deaths until bone and slack flesh struck the stones behind him.

He twitched and spun and was on the verge of crying out in shock and alarm, but the figure moved past him, sweeping an arm across his throat with such speed that arm and blade vanished into a dark blur. The man in the hazmat suit dropped to his knees and then fell forward, his slumping corpse humped over the Styrofoam chest.

It was the fastest thing the killer had ever seen.

How quick? Three seconds? Two?

The thugs and the other man lay dead. Blood ran in slow lines down the walls.

The shadowy figure stood facing the open doorway, knife gripped in one hand. The cuts had been so fast, the edge so sharp, that no blood clung to the weapon except a single pendulous drop that hung for a moment from the tip and then fell with the softest splash.

The killer watched all of this down the barrel of the .22 he held in hands that neither trembled nor swayed. He was thirty feet away, and if he’d to paint a fourth corpse onto this tableau he could have done it with impunity. Fast or not, the kill shot was his to take.

But the figure turned.

Slowly, with grace and without haste.

Toward him.

A gloved hand reached up and hooked fingers under the edge of a mask. Lifted, pulled it away.

In the weak lamplight the hair which spilled out from under the mask looked yellow, but the killer knew that it was not. He knew that it was as white as snow. Thick and lustrous, but paler than death. The face it framed was nearly as pale, except for a red mouth and eyes so dark they looked black. It was a beautiful face. Regal and cold and cruel. A face unused to smiles. A face like a death mask of some ancient queen, or a temple carving of a goddess of war.

The killer knew that face.

He held his pistol on her for five long seconds.

As always there was a fierce internal debate. His finger lay along the outside of the trigger guard. It would be so easy to slip it inside and take the shot.

The air between them seemed flammable, as if a word or even a thought could ignite it.

She lifted that proud head and looked down her patrician nose at him.

“Saint Germaine,” she said quietly. There was equal parts contempt and admiration in her voice. “Or do you prefer ‘Deacon’? I’ve heard that people are calling you that now.”

He kept the gun on her. “It doesn’t matter.”

It didn’t. Neither was his name, and he was sure that, as smart and as connected as this woman was, she would never know his real name. No one would.

“Deacon, then,” she said. “It’s less pretentious.”

He lowered his pistol and pulled off his balaclava. “And we wouldn’t want to be pretentious,” he said. “Would we, Lilith?”

Chap. 2

Deacon rose to his feet, his pistol still in his hand but the barrel pointed down. It made the statement he intended.

Lilith flicked her wrist the way a samurai would when shaking blood from a katana, and then slid the black-bladed knife back into its sheath. Without taking her eyes from Deacon, she knotted her fingers in the back of the dead man’s hazmat suit and with no apparent effort lifted his body off of the Styrofoam cooler and casually swung it up into the rushing water. It was an act that demonstrated a level of physical strength far in excess of what should have been possible for a woman of her size. A very strong man might have had difficulty lifting so limp and heavy a burden and tossing it aside so casually.

That, too, made a statement, and it was in no way lost on the Deacon.

He moved closer and stood a few feet from her and the cooler.

“Are you here for that?” he asked, then ticked his head toward the open door. “Or what’s in there?”

Lilith took some time answering that. Her expression gave little away, even to someone as practiced at reading expressions as Deacon. She nudged the cooler with the toe of her boot.

“Do you know what’s in here?”

“I might,” Deacon said. “Do you?”

Another pause. “No.”

“Ah.”

They both looked at the open door.

“That’s going to set off an alarm,” he said.

“I know.”

“If they think they’re being raided they’ll dump their hard drives and—”

“It’s an old burglar’s trick,” she said. “Set a smoky fire and watch through a window to see what people rush to save. A good man will save his family Bible. A blackmailer will save his cache of evidence. And a scientist—”

“—Will save his research. Yes, I’ve read Sherlock Holmes.”

Lilith gave him the tiniest sliver of a cold smile. Not at all friendly, but not as hostile as the flat, reptilian glare.

“Why were you waiting over there? You could have picked the door lock.”

“I wasn’t trying to get in. I wanted this.” He squatted down and removed the cooler’s lid. Inside were three aluminum cylinders packed into carved slots. Each cylinder was pressure locked with a tight metal cap.

“What is it?” asked Lilith. “A bioweapon? Some kind of germ warfare thing?”

“A performance enhancing synthetic steroid,” said Deacon.

She actually smiled. “’Performance’? What kind of performance?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking,” he said, returning her smile. “It’s the first generation of a formula that combines the select lean-mass-building steroids with a synthetic nootropic compound that significantly increases and regulates the hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology these drugs are wakefulness promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version is designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the treated person won’t tire and won’t lose mental sharpness.”

“To what end? Super soldiers?”

“Hardly. Indefatigable factory workers.”

Lilith blinked. “Factory…?”

“These drugs are intended for use in third-world countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who can work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output.” He sighed. “It’s a new tweak on legal slave labor because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human rights presence and where governments are easily bought. Earlier versions of these drugs are already being used in Southeast Asia and some places in Africa.”

A sneer twisted her mouth. “The new face of slave labor.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“You’re American,” she said. “Most of the companies that would use this sort of thing are American.”

“Many are, yes.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you here with official sanction?”

He shrugged.

Lilith shifted to get a better look into his eyes. “Why do you care?”

She leaned on the word you.

Deacon didn’t answer. Instead he closed the cooler and replaced the lid. Then he took the container and placed it in the shadowy spot where he’d been crouching. It vanished from sight as if it ceased to exist.

“I didn’t see you in the dark over there,” said Lilith after a few moments. “Not until you pointed your gun at me.”

“Your back was turned when I raised my weapon. You could not have seen the movement.”

She shrugged.

“One of these days,” said Deacon, “I would like to obtain a drop of your blood.”

“To test?”

“Of course.”

“You wouldn’t understand the results,” she said.

“I might.”

“No.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Her tone was flat. “Because I’m not like you. Not like anyone you know. You’d see the numbers and the chemistry, and maybe if you had the funding you would run some tests on my DNA, and all it would do is confuse you. Maybe scare you.”

“Fear is seldom a deterrent,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that depend on what there is to be afraid of?”

“Generally not.”

She made a moue of irritation. A very French thing, although Deacon knew that she was not French. He did not know everything about Lilith’s heritage — and some of what he’d been able to piece together was apocryphal or at least doubtful — but he knew that her mother had been a Warsaw Jew who had died badly at Sobibor. Deacon had no information beyond wild rumors as to who her father was. The only other family member Deacon could reliably identify was a daughter whose real name, like Lilith’s own, was buried beneath layers of secrecy and obfuscation. Although he would never say so, to her or anyone, it was the fact of having one genealogical foot planted in horror and the other planted in obscurity that engendered within him small feelings of kinship for her.

And, like his own history, there were questions about her past that most people would find difficult to answer and, if answered, challenging. Life, however, is far stranger than the greater population of this troubled old world would readily and comfortably accept.

While Lilith watched, Deacon dragged the two dead thugs, one at a time, to the stream and rolled them in. It was clear to them both that it required more effort on his part than she’d used to dispose of the man in the hazmat suit. Neither felt the need to comment on it.

When the last man vanished into the swirling waters, Deacon consulted his watch, glanced upstream and then over at the still-open door, and pushed his sleeve down to cover the watch.

Lilith said, “Those men were out here to hand that cooler off to someone.”

“Yes. A four-man team. Two Americans, a Brit, and their local contact.”

“When are they due?”

“Five minutes ago,” said Deacon.

She opened her mouth to ask for clarification, then thought better of it. She glanced at the rushing water as if expecting to see four bodies float by.

“Ah,” she said.

He nodded.

“So, your part in this is over?”

“I did what I came to do,” he answered. “Now tell me…what’s your interest here? Arklight has never expressed an interest in this area of human rights.”

Deacon, for his part, leaned on the word human. Making the point and leaving much understood but unspoken.

It seemed to both amuse and annoy Lilith, since various partially formed expressions came and went on her face in rapid succession.

He noted that Lilith did not flinch or rage at his mention of “Arklight.” Once before she had tried to kill him for speaking that name, for even knowing it. The fact that she had been unsuccessful formed one of the somewhat shaky pillars of the truce between them. The truce, he knew, was as substantial as vapor and existed only because they had yet to have directly conflicting agendas. Her tolerance of his use of the name of the highly secret and extremely dangerous group, of which Lilith was nominal head and chief operative, was as close to an olive branch as he ever expected to receive from her.

Finally she gestured to the open doorway. “The lab in there is partially funded by Ordo Ruber.”

Deacon said, “Ah.”

The Red Order was something that he had on his to-do list but which he currently lacked the funding and manpower to tackle. If his intelligence could be trusted, it was an ancient order along the lines of the Templars. Secretive and dangerous, with tendrils tangled into the underpinnings of several world governments, the OPEC nations, and the Catholic Church. He had not yet had the time to verify much of what he had heard and therefore had no framework for a cohesive case he could make to the President and Congress.

Lilith said, “There are rumors that the Order has been hiring scientists of all stripes — molecular biologists, geneticists, and others — to try to rebuild the genetic lines of the Red Knights. You know who they are?”

The Red Order was rumored to employ a group of special operatives known as the Red Knights. Like the ninja of ancient Japan, however, there was layer upon layer of misinformation and deliberate disinformation about who and, more importantly, what the Red Knights were. Some of the stories were preposterous. Others merely frightening.

“Rumors only,” admitted Deacon. “Feel free to share.”

She ignored that. “They want the Knights to become a more powerful and effective organization than ever.” Something, some strange fire, ignited in Lilith’s eyes. “I can’t allow that.”

“Then this is a straight hit?”

“No. This isn’t the central lab. We don’t know where that is. This is more of a processing and distribution center for research materials to be sent to researchers in the Order’s pocket.”

Deacon nodded. “And you mean to do what? Get hold of their bulk research materials and notes and use them to find leads to the scientists working for the Order.”

“You were always cleverer than the other little spies, Deacon. Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“Do you have a team coming to help you?”

“It’s only a small lab,” she said. “Staff of ten or twelve.” A pause. “These are scientists, lab techs, and a few foot soldiers. Three are already down.”

“What about the Red Knights?”

Lilith shook her head. “They don’t do guard duty. They won’t be here.”

Deacon looked at the gun he still held. He was about to say something when a buzzer suddenly sounded from inside the open doorway. Loud and insistent.

“Finally,” she said, resting her hands on her knives. They could hear shouts and running feet. “This part is mine.”

Deacon smiled and shook his head. “To be fair,” he said mildly, “you helped me when you eliminated the three men who came out here. I feel as if I should return the favor.”

But Lilith shook her head.

“I don’t want your help,” she said. “Be a nice little spy and go play James Bond somewhere else.”

The shouts grew louder.

Deacon took a breath and let it out slowly. Then he holstered his pistol and turned away. He picked up the cooler and faded into the shadows, watching over his shoulder as Lilith drew her weapons and moved like a blur of shadows and steel through the open doors. The tunnel immediately echoed with the rattle of automatic gunfire and the screams of men in terrible pain.

With the cooler under his arm, Deacon began walking back the way he’d come, a frown etched on his face.

He got almost a hundred yards before another scream split the air.

It wasn’t the dying scream of a man.

It was the shriek of a woman in terrible pain.

And in terrible fear.

Deacon dropped the cooler, tore the pistol from its holster, whirled and ran back along the edge of the black water as fast as he could.

Chap. 3

As he ran toward the door a man staggered out, blood streaming from deep crisscrossed cuts that gouged him from shoulders to hips. His belt was severed and with each step his trousers slipped further down his bloody legs. But he still held an AK-47 in his hands, finger jerking spasmodically on the trigger, bullets punching into the chamber beyond.

Deacon put a single .22 round into the back of the man’s head and shoved him out of the way.

He jumped through the doorway, pivoted as he dropped into a crouch, gun up and ready in both hands, eyes taking in the scene. He was at the end of a short tunnel that doglegged to the left and opened onto a large stone room that had been converted into a rough field lab. There were long work tables, banks of computers, and various kinds of processing machinery. Blowers pushed cool, clean air into the room and pulled dust out. Two men lay in a red tangle at the mouth of the tunnel. Automatic rifles lay inches from their dead hands. Three other men, a guard with a handgun and two men in white lab coats, were down inside the room, their faces and throats slashed to ribbons.

Inside the chamber there were seven uninjured men. All of them had weapons — guns, a fire axe, and a burly man with a black t-shirt held one of Lilith’s daggers. They were strung out in a wide half-circle around three figures who fought and tore at each other in the center of the room.

Lilith and two tall, pale-faced men dressed in dark clothes.

All of them were bleeding.

But Lilith was limping as she backpedaled from them. Her left arm curled gingerly around her middle. At first Deacon thought that the arm was broken, but then he saw the lines of bright red running down her loins and thighs.

She had her arm clamped over a stomach wound.

The men surrounding her were yelling and pointing weapons.

Lilith coughed, and there was blood on her lips.

The two men in dark clothes laughed.

Lilith’s invasion had gone horribly wrong.

Deacon took all of this in within the space of a heartbeat.

He did not pause, did not waste time processing or strategizing. He tore a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, hurled it.

It was a flash-bang, a stun grenade developed by the British SAS. Deacon dropped into a crouch and covered his head with his arms. Even so the bang was almost unbearably loud. The burst of light stabbed him through his shut eyelids.

The men in the room screamed.

Deacon immediately opened his eyes, took his guns in both hands again and began firing as he rose. He was peripherally aware that the two men with Lilith were beyond the effective range of the flash-bang and yet they had their hands to their ears, hissing in pain.

He noted it, but it was far from a matter of first importance as he felt his gun buck in his hands.

His first shot took a scientist in the side of the face. It was not intended as a kill shot, though the bullet punched a wet hole through cheekbone and out through the opposite cheek. The intention had been to drive that man into the men beside him. The collision took three of Deacon’s opponents out in one second. He swung his pistol and fired four shots, two each to guards, hitting them as they turned toward him, the first shot to each hitting bodies to jolt them to a stop and the second hitting them in the head. Small caliber rounds lack the power to exit the far side of a skull, so instead they bounce around inside and destroy the brain. It was why the caliber was the preferred weapon of assassins.

That left two men immediately able to respond.

One man had the fire axe.

The other had a pistol.

Deacon shot the second man in the face and then put the axeman down with a head shot.

He calculated his ammunition. Eight shots fired. Four dead, one wounded, two recovering from the collision with the scientist. That was a full magazine and the one he’d chambered. He dropped the magazine and reached for a second, but one of the two survivors rushed him so fast he had no time to finish the reload.

Deacon stepped into the attack, pivoting his body as he tilted his weight onto his front leg. Both hands moved out as he simultaneously blocked with his left forearm and rammed the unloaded pistol into the attacker’s face hard enough to jolt the man to a stop. Deacon recoiled his gun-hand and chopped the man in the Adam’s apple with the gun.

The man dropped at once.

But now the second man was up and in motion, bringing his rifle to bear. If he’d dropped the gun and used his hands, or if he’d swung the rifle stock at Deacon, he might have had a chance. Instead he tried to aim the weapon.

Deacon stepped into him, dropping his own pistol as he intercepted the swing of the barrel and grabbed the long-gun with both hands. He turned his second step into a flat-footed kick that shattered the man’s knee so badly the leg buckled and bent the other way. Deacon tore the gun from his hand, reversed it and pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked as two rounds hit the man in the chest, but then the slide locked back.

Empty.

Deacon tossed the gun aside.

Twenty feet away the two men in black and Lilith had all turned toward him.

Her eyes were filled with pain and hate.

Their eyes were filled with a pernicious delight that was appalling to behold. And those eyes were all wrong. The irises were not brown or blue or green. They were red. As red as the blood that painted this room. Instead of round pupils, theirs were slits. Like the eyes of reptiles.

The two men smiled at him.

Deacon felt the blood in his veins turn to ice.

The intelligence reports, the rumors about the killers called the Red Knights…so much had been beyond belief. Horror stories. Crazy lies.

Except….

Except now the truth was like a punch over the heart. It stopped the world for a terrible moment. It tore the mind open and jammed in like daggers.

As their lips curled back, Deacon saw their teeth.

So white.

So long and sharp.

They had teeth like dogs.

Like wolves.

Like monsters.

“They’re Red Knights,” screamed Lilith. “Deacon, they’ll tear you apart. For God’s sake…run!”

Chap. 4

He could have run. He was closer to the door than the Red Knights. He could be outside, reloading as he ran, safe in darkness.

He should have run. This was Lilith’s fight. His government — even the small, clandestine groups that endorsed Deacon’s personal agendas — had in no way sanctioned any contact with Arklight. The few people in the U.S. government who even knew of Arklight considered it a borderline terrorist organization. So this was not his fight, and Lilith was not his ally.

He would have run. But that would have meant that he was a different person than he was.

Instead, Deacon let the empty assault rifle clatter to the floor.

“No,” he said.

The Red Knights — whatever they were — smiled with their wicked teeth. Their red eyes flared with the joy of a coming slaughter.

One of them stepped closer to Lilith. He had black fingernails, and blood dripped from them. Was that the weapon that had torn the screams from Lilith? Deacon was sure it was.

“I’ll finish the whore,” said that one, speaking in thickly accented French. He pointed at Deacon. “His blood is yours, my brother.”

The second Knight laughed, every bit as coldly and cruelly as a villain from an old-time movie. A stage laugh, and it should have been comical, should have inspired laughter or groans from the audience. And, in any other place, under any other circumstances, it might have. But this was a monster laughing at the thought of red slaughter. An actual monster.

A fanged killer.

A drinker of blood.

A thing that should not exist outside of fiction or nightmares or the tortured dreams of lunacy.

One vampire said something to his companion, rattling off a few terse sentences in a strange language that sounded vaguely like Latin but wasn’t. It gave no clue to the nationality or ethnicity of these Red Knights.

These things.

Deacon neither needed nor wanted a translation. Death was coming for him. That was the gist; he didn’t require details.

The Red Knight began moving toward him. Not fast, not using its speed. It stalked him, anticipation twisting the smile on its face. This was what it enjoyed. The hunt. Maybe more than the kill.

The Knight held out his hands and flexed his fingers, displaying thick fingernails as sharp as bear claws. Claws for tearing the humanity from a person, claws for rending to the bone.

Deacon began backing away.

This made the Knight laugh. A low chuckle, echoed by his companion. Lilith sagged to her knees, blood streaming from between the fingers of the hands she pressed to her stomach.

“Run,” she said weakly. “Run….”

Deacon turned and ran.

The Knight howled with delight and ran after him.

It took only six steps for the monster to catch the man.

Suddenly Deacon dropped to the ground, arms wrapped around his head, knees drawn up into a fetal ball.

The Knight paused, confused.

Not at that, but at the thing that floated toward him. Something his prey had thrown as he twisted and fell.

There was only a fragment of a moment to react.

The Knight said the same thing Deacon himself had said a few moments ago.

“No.”

It meant something entirely different.

The object exploded.

With a flash.

With a bang.

Six inches from the vampire’s face.

The Red Knight screamed. Caught point-blank inside the blast zone, the Knight was slammed backward, blood bursting from his nose and ears. Red tears fell from its traumatized eyes. It staggered sideways, clawing at its face, shrieking in its strange, alien language.

The second Knight was thirty feet away, outside of the blast zone, but even so, he staggered, too. Extraordinary hearing and eyesight were powerful tools in the quiet and in the dark. Less so in the presence of a light-amplified concussion grenade.

Deacon rolled out of his fetal ball and snapped a kick at the closest Red Knight’s knee.

The scream of pain from the flash-bang and the scream of pain from the shattered knee hit different notes. The second was sharper, higher, and as filled with fear and surprise as it was with agony.

Deacon came up off the floor and attacked the Knight. He did not enjoy fighting. There was no sense of style to what he did, he made no comments, he wasted no time.

As he rose, he hooked an uppercut into the monster’s groin. That folded the Knight forward, and Deacon met the sudden bend by grabbing the thing’s head and yanking him face-forward onto a rising knee. As the Knight rebounded from that impact, Deacon punched him three times in the throat with the extended knuckles of both fists, left, right, left. Cartilage collapsed. Deacon did not know how strong this thing was; he didn’t know what kind of damage he could sustain or how fast he could recover. Centuries of lies and half-truths and myths masked the truth. All he knew, all that he had to work with, was that the Red Knight could be hurt and could bleed and needed to breathe.

That was enough.

He attacked the Knight, giving him no chance, no advantage, no mercy. He blinded him and broke his arms, he stamped again on the shattered knee, destroying the leg completely, then he used a kick-sweep to cut both legs out from under his screaming enemy. As the Knight fell, Deacon twisted and followed it to the floor so that his punch to the solar plexus landed at the same instant the man’s weight hit hard ground. The effect was to drive whatever air was trapped in the Knight’s throat upward against the wreckage of his throat. The extra force tore apart whatever was left of the structure of the throat — using the fragments of the hyoid bone as razors. Blood immediately began filling the Red Knight’s lungs; he began thrashing and flopping around with hysterical force.

Deacon hurled himself backward and spun away from a dying enemy to face the other vampire.

He froze at the spectacle before him, and he knew immediately that it would live forever in the darkest parts of his mind.

The second Red Knight was down.

Lilith sat astride him.

She had not been at the point of death from the wound in her stomach. It was immediately clear that she’d been faking, exaggerating the severity in order to find a moment to make her move.

In the confusion, while Deacon killed the first Knight, Lilith had attacked the other.

Not with her hands.

Not with her knives.

She crouched over him, her mouth buried in the side of the vampire’s throat. For the oddest little fracture moment, Deacon thought she was kissing the Knight.

But, of course, that was wrong.

Everything in this moment was wrong.

There was a feral snarling, tearing, ripping sound. The Red Knight thrashed beneath her, tearing at her clothing and flesh with his nails. Weakly, though.

And weaker still with each pulsing moment.

Blood pooled beneath the Knight’s head.

Then, with a terrible spasm, the creature shivered and flopped and lay utterly still. Lilith still bent over him, her face buried beside the Knight’s neck, half-hidden by the corpse’s profile.

“Lilith…,” murmured Deacon.

Nothing.

Only the sound of a wild animal. Wet and awful.

“Lilith,” he said again.

Nothing.

He bent and picked up his fallen pistol and the second magazine he hadn’t been able to use. He slapped it into place. The sound was loud, harsh.

Lilith froze.

The sounds stopped.

“Lilith,” Deacon said once more as he raised the pistol and racked the slide.

Only then did she lift her head. Her face was completely covered with dark red blood.

And her eyes.

Her eyes.

They were entirely black. Without pupil or iris or sclera.

Black within black within black.

Deacon pointed the pistol at her.

“Come back,” he said.

His voice was gentle. The barrel of the gun was a promise.

Blood dripped from Lilith’s chin and lips.

“Come back.”

She blinked at him.

Once.

Twice.

And then her eyes were human again.

No, thought Deacon, that was an imprecise way of understanding what had happened. She was not human again, not even more human.

In that moment, as Lilith stepped back from the edge of the abyss, it was simply that for now she was less of a monster.

They stayed like that for a long moment. She, kneeling astride a savaged corpse, he standing with a gun in bloody hands. The world ground on its gears around them.

Lilith spoke a single word, and it came out thick, and wet and harsh.

“Deacon.”

His heart beat many times before he lowered his gun.

Chap. 5

I was ankle-deep in water that smelled like shit and garlic.

Charming.

It had been dry in Paris, and the only thing sloshing around in the sewers came from toilets and bidets. Which made me weigh my pay scale and benefits against the benefits of saving the world. I’m pretty sure I was being shortchanged.

And I was pretty sure I was lost.

The Paris sewer system was a bitch. It would have given Daedalus a boner.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where in the wide blue fuck am I?”

Bug said, “Two turns to go, Cowboy.”

Although this was in no way a high-profile mission we were using combat call signs. Well…I was, at least. Bug was Bug at all times.

“You said that before the last turn.”

“No, that was a bend, not an actual turn.”

“Yeah? When I get back I am going to bend your head and shove it up your actual ass.”

Bug chuckled. He’s the computer guru for the Department of Military Sciences. And a world-class geek.

And a friend, so the threat was only half serious.

If I couldn’t find my target soon, it was going to get a lot more serious. I’d been down here in the smelly darkness for too long, and I was beginning to suspect that this whole thing was a wild goose chase.

The mission briefing went like this….

My boss, Mr. Church, received intel about a new player in the international black market for stolen technologies. The guy’s actual identity was unknown, but the rumor mill said that he was paying top dollar for certain kinds of software, bulk research, or hardware. Interpol had formed a task force to hunt the guy, but so far he’d been as elusive as Professor Moriarty. A few associates had been bagged, but the big man himself always seemed to vanish like smoke. Barrier, the British equivalent of the DMS, reached out for our help — mostly to have our super-duper computer system, MindReader, interface with their computers and collate data from a dozen enforcement agencies in Europe, looking for useful patterns. MindReader got a whole bunch of hits, and since then every police department and intelligence service on three continents had been running down leads.

I got into this because I was on vacation at Argentière in the French Alps and was therefore officially “not doing anything.” Vacationing shooters get no respect. No respect at all.

Thirty-one hours ago I was swooshing down a ski slope.

Now I was sloshing through French poop.

Happy? No, I wasn’t.

Mr. Church had called me to ask if I could check a place under Paris that had once been used as a processing facility for bioweapons and similar threats. The place had been emptied of anything dangerous and sealed off and, apparently, forgotten and left to rot way back in 1983. I was learning how to play with Legos in 1983 and never thought that I’d grow up to be a spotless hero for truth, justice, and the American way. I kicked a dead rat out of my way and plodded on, wishing all kinds of horrible deaths on Mr. Church.

“Fifty feet and left,” said Bug.

“Yeah, yeah.”

I’d asked Church why I had to go and not the French Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre. This was, as I remembered it, their fucking city. Church took a moment before answering, and when he did that I knew that he was sorting through all the things he knows about something to decide what little sliver of the truth to tell me. Especially about things that happened — or that he might have been involved in — prior to his forming the DMS. I don’t know a lot about his past other than that he was some kind of spook and almost certainly either Special Ops or the equivalent for some deep-cover black ops group. You know the expression “he knows where the bodies are buried”? I made that joke to him once, and he gave me a sad, old smile and told me that, indeed, he should know where they’re buried…he’d buried a lot of them. Anyone else makes a comment like that, you think they’re talking trash.

You never—ever—think Church is talking trash.

I don’t know that he’s ever outright lied to me, but if I had to live on the tiny scraps of information he fed me…I’d starve to death.

What he actually said was, “Captain Ledger, there may be nothing left of value to anyone. However in the remote chance that there is something to find at that lab, we need to put eyes on it first and then either retrieve it or destroy it. This needs to be handled with secrecy, immediacy, and finesse.”

I have seldom been accused of possessing finesse, but I understood his point. This was never going to make it into an official report — even for the eyes-only crowd; and I suspect that his initial involvement back in the eighties likewise was never filed.

I came to the end of one branch of the sewer system. There was a big tank-like chamber from which six side tunnels branched off.

“Bug,” I said, “talk to me.”

“Take the second tunnel on your left,” he said. “Follow that for a hundred and twenty meters, make another left and you’ll be there.”

“You’re sure?” I put just a little edge in my voice. Bug was like a little brother to me, but if I got lost one more fucking time I was going to feed him to the tigers at the zoo.

“The intel’s rock solid,” said Bug.

I followed the second tunnel, took that second left, and found myself in another chamber, this one a reverse of the one I’d just left. Dozens of smaller tunnels seemed to converge here into a larger waterway. If there had been even a light rain, this would probably be a fairly brisk stream. As it was the filthy water merely rose above my ankles to midcalf. Thank Christ, Church gave me enough of a heads up so that I wore a waterproof Saratoga Hammer suit. It was a biohazard rig designed for combat troops. I wasn’t wearing the hood, though, because I needed to see where the hell I was going. As a result I had the full snootful of the aroma of human waste smacking me in the face with every step.

I know, my life…just like James Bond. Beautiful women, clever gadgets, dinner jackets, and martinis.

I climbed onto a narrow stone ledge that ran along the edge of the water. It was wider here than in the tunnel, allowing me to be on moderately dry land. Less noisy, at least. I knelt at the shadowy edge of a spill of yellow light thrown by a bulb in a rusted cage. There was a niche in the wall with a door set into a frame of bricks. Black mold and lichen coated the bricks, and the door was completely covered in dark red rust. The door was at the far end of a small concrete pad just big enough for half a dozen people to stand on, though right now I was the only person down here who wasn’t a rodent or cockroach.

“Cowboy to Bug,” I said. “Target acquired.”

“Proceed with caution,” said a voice in my ear. Not Bug this time. Church.

“Roger that, Deacon,” I said, using his combat call sign.

“Good hunting, Cowboy,” he replied.

Yeah, I thought, hunting for what? E. coli?

I squatted, studied the ground in front of the door, and felt the first tickling of alarm.

A fine sheen of moist grime covered the light gray concrete, and as I bent close I could see the impressions of shoes. Several pairs of shoes, the prints overlapping and partially obscuring each other. Impossible to tell how many.

“Rut-roh,” I said in my best Scooby-Doo voice.

Then I heard voices.

Men’s voices. And, I think, a woman.

Muffled, distant. Impossible to understand.

Any sewer is an echo chamber, and the sewers of Paris are virtually endless stone tunnels in which sounds are distorted, carried for miles, buried, or combined into an auditory mélange that can drive you nuts. I cocked my head to listen, trying to determine from which side corridor or tunnel the voices were coming from.

Then I realized that they were not coming from the tunnels.

The voices were coming from the other side of the rusted door.

I crept toward it, and as I did so it was clear that the door, though closed, was not shut tight. It was slightly ajar, not even enough to slip a business card through but enough for voices to slip out. As I drew closer I could tell why.

The voices were shouting.

Yelling.

And, then one of them started screaming.

The woman.

Before I knew it, my knife was in my hand. There was too much raw methane in the foul air to risk sparks from a pistol.

I pushed the door open and moved inside, fast and quiet, keeping low, taking in everything I could. Church had given me the basic layout of the lab: a short tunnel and then a larger chamber, with many small cubby holes used for storage, bathrooms and utility.

All of the action was happening in the main room.

And I walked into a weird tableau.

Truly weird.

There were ten people in that room. All dressed in black. All men.

Well, all of the people left alive were men. There were three dead people on the ground in space around which ten men knelt. One of the corpses was a woman. From her clothes — satin shorts and a tiny halter — it was pretty evident she was a prostitute. The woman lay in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear.

On either side of her lay skeletons dressed in the rags of old black clothing. Even from where I crouched I could see that one of the skeletons was busted up — clear breaks in one leg and both arms. The other had a broken neck. From the condition of the bones and the scraps of old clothing, it was evident they’d been here for a lot of years. The vermin in the dark had been busy with them. Now they lay on either side of the murdered woman so that the pool of blood under her touched both sets of bones.

The men wore nondescript clothes — black shoes, pants, and sweatshirts, but they also wore turbans with scarves covering the lower halves of their faces. The turbans were loose and wrapped in the same fashion. I’ve been in the Middle East enough to know that there are a lot of methods of wrapping a turban and that each method usually denoted a different ethnic or religious group. A Sikh’s turban and one worn by an Afghani village headman are entirely different. These guys, though, didn’t fit any group catalogued in my head.

This whole thing appeared to be a weird kind of religious ritual and that matched no part of my mission objectives. The gathered men stared at the blood and bones with absolute intensity, wide-eyed, as if they expected something miraculous to happen.

They watched.

I watched.

Not a goddamn thing happened.

So far no one spotted me, and since the odds were ten to one I was thinking about the many benefits of running away. The woman was beyond help, and none of this made a lick of sense, so I backed out of the entrance corridor and crept a dozen yards down the walkway to call Mr. Church.

Chap. 6

I described everything I’d seen.

“Cowboy,” he replied, “verify that there are two skeletons. Describe their clothing.”

I did. I expected him to tell me to bag it and call this in to the locals.

“Captain,” said Church very tersely, “listen to me very closely. The two skeletons are the remains of Red Knights. Confirm understanding.”

I think I actually staggered. I remember the wall slapping me in the back.

Red Knights.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

I’d encountered Red Knights before. Fought them. Killed some of them. Watched them slaughter some of my team.

They almost killed me.

It came close.

So close.

The Red Knights were genetic aberrations. Monsters. Not entirely human. They are the descendants of a freakish schism in the evolution of our species. Like Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo floresiensis, these were members of a race of cousins to Homo sapiens.

They’re proper scientific designation appears in no medical or scientific textbook. It exists, as far as I know, in only three places — the archives of the Department of Military Sciences, in the secret traditions of the Red Order, and in the bloody history of the covert group called Arklight.

That scientific name?

Homo vampiri upierczi.

Vampires.

No, these weren’t pasty-faced noblemen in opera cloaks. They couldn’t turn into bats and they weren’t in any way supernatural. These bastards — the Upierczi, as they called themselves — were all too real. Relatives of humanity but set apart. First as slaves of the Church and assassins for the Red Order, later as their own self-governing shadow kingdom.

The world doesn’t know about them. The truth of what they are, the fact of their existence, is buried beneath layers of false histories, folklore, myths, lies, and legends.

Last year the DMS teamed up with Arklight to bring them down. It was not a war of our choosing. They started the game and were playing by some nasty rules. If they’d won…?

Well, if they’d won, I wouldn’t be here up to my ankles in shit beneath Paris because there wouldn’t be a Paris. There wouldn’t be much of anything left except a wasteland suffering through an unending nuclear winter.

The fact that the two Red Knights down here with me were dead — and had been dead for a long time — was no fucking comfort at all.

When I could speak I said, “Any idea who the guys with the turbans are?”

But even as I asked it, I think I knew. Church confirmed it, though.

“Hashashin.”

Yeah. Fuck me.

The Red Knights were killers for the Red Order, an illegal and unsanctioned group operating on behalf of Christianity. They were formed during the Crusades. Their enemies — and in many sick and twisted ways their co-conspirators — were the Hashashin, a sect of superb killers formed in 1080, before the First Crusade. The Anglicized version of their name is assassin.

You can see why I was sweating bullets.

One of me, ten world-class assassins. The bones of two vampires.

“What the hell have I stepped into here?” I demanded.

“Something that should have been entirely past tense,” said Church, and there was definitely sadness in his voice. “It was a mistake not to have cleaned up the leavings.”

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Church admit to a mistake before. Rather than humanizing him, it gave me the chills.

“I’m wide open to suggestions,” I said. “As long as they don’t involve me going back in there. I’d like to see the cavalry come riding in pretty damn soon.”

“Is now fast enough?”

It was not Church speaking in my ear. Or Bug.

The voice came from behind me.

There are very, very few people who can sneak up on me.

But she….

Yeah, she manages to do it all the time.

And despite everything, I was smiling as I turned around.

She stood there. Lean, fox-faced, with erect posture and the slightly splay-footed stance you see in ballet dancers. Thick auburn hair pulled back into a pony tail. Black form-fitting fatigues. Lots of weapons.

I said, “Hello, Violin.”

She said, “Hello, Joseph.”

Chap. 7

Violin beckoned for me to follow her down the tunnel, away from the rusted door and the room filled with killers and death. I was happy to follow.

In the shadows, as we stood precariously on a one-brick-wide ledge, she grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me into a ferocious kiss. It was immediate and scalding, and it filled all the dark spaces — inside my head and here in the tunnels — with fireworks.

Then she pushed me back. I wobbled unsteadily and her strong grip kept me on the ledge.

I said, “Wow.”

She said, “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?”

Violin shrugged. “My mother sent me.”

I told her about the routine scut work for Interpol.

She looked past me to where the dirty light splashed down over the metal door. “Do you know what’s in there?”

“Some,” I said and told her what I saw. “What do you know about it?”

Violin’s eyes are difficult to read at the best of times. I saw shadows flit and dance. Eventually she said, “A long time ago, when I was a little girl, my mother came down here.”

“Your mother? Lilith? Why?”

It was a dumb question to which I already knew the answer.

But Violin answered anyway. “Hunting monsters.”

She didn’t have to explain. The women of Arklight were survivors of the hell that was life in the Shadow Kingdom of the Upierczi. The vampires were all male. In order to breed, they stole women. The tales I heard about the immense suffering of women trapped in the underground breeding pens still gives me nightmares. Lilith had been a prisoner for twenty years. She had ultimately led a rebellion and took more than thirty women with her to freedom. Some of the women left their babies behind, unable to bring themselves to suckle the children of rape. Others brought their children out.

Violin had been born in captivity. Now she, like her mother, was a practiced hunter and killer. Part of Arklight.

I’ve had a long, bad life, and I’ve suffered some terrible tragedies. But when I think about what Lilith and the other women endured, I am humbled. And I’m also filled with a dark red, murderous rage. Together, Violin and I had vented some of that rage when we stopped the rise of the Red Knights. But, like most wars fought against a concept rather than a nationality, the struggle continues.

“Those are hashashin in there,” I said. “What are they doing with the bones of Red Knights?”

Violin made a face. “They’re superstitious,” she said. “The Shadow War created by the Red Order and their counterparts in Islam is out of balance. The Red Order is in ruins, the Knights are scattered, the goals of the Shadow War are threatened.”

“So?”

“So, they think they can resurrect the Red Knights with a blood sacrifice.”

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“You saw it, Joseph.”

“No, tell me that it can’t work.”

She punched me in the chest. Hard. “Don’t be an idiot. Of course it can’t work.”

I was relieved. Kind of.

“But,” she added, “I sincerely doubt that blood ritual is part of their mission objectives. That’s something the assassins might think up, something fed by their own mystical beliefs, but if they’re here, then they must have been sent by their masters who in turn must have intelligence from Red Order operatives.”

“Again…so?”

“So, they want the bones of the Red Knights.”

“Why?”

“DNA. The Red Order has no intention of letting their pet monsters become extinct. Not if they can find a way through some avenue of science to strengthen the Knights they have left or somehow create new ones. My mother thinks they are planning on using gene therapy to transform human operatives into Red Knights. A new and improved model, so to speak. They want to borrow the best genetic qualities of the Knights and graft it to humans who can otherwise be trusted. After all…the Knights did ultimately betray the Order.”

Five years ago I would have laughed at her. Gene therapy to build super soldiers was science fiction, right?

Over the last few years I’ve encountered that kind of madness in several forms. Science was growing faster than sanity or common sense.

I looked past her.

“I don’t suppose you have an Arklight strike team back there waiting for a go-order?”

She grinned. “I don’t suppose you have Echo Team locked and loaded.”

We both smiled as if this was all funny. Like it was a sunny day and we were looking at kids playing on the beach. Like the world made sense and we were ordinary people.

Except that neither of us would ever be ordinary.

And the world was totally mad.

I kissed her again.

Who knows if I’d ever get the chance again?

We crept back along the edge and moved to flank the rusted door. Quietly I asked, “Do you have a plan? ’Cause as tough as we are, darlin’, there are ten of them and two of us. I am not hugely sold on those odds, and last time I checked I did not have a big red S on my chest.”

“It’s not about being tougher than your enemies, Joseph,” she said. “After all, the Red Knights are bigger, stronger and much faster than anyone. Certainly much more powerful than my mother, and she’s personally killed thirty-one of them.”

“Christ.” I glanced at the closed door. “That still leaves ten of them, two of us, and an explosive environment, honey.”

“The reason my mother has survived this long is that in combat she was always smarter than whoever she fought. Always.” Violin placed her palm on my chest, right between the two flash-bang grenades clipped to my Hammer suit. “One of these days, ask Mr. Church how he killed his first Red Knight.”

“Huh?”

“He and my mother would have made a very good pair.”

She removed one of the flash-bangs.

“Whoa, now. Wait, we can’t,” I said. “Too much methane.”

Violin ignored me. She pulled the pin on the grenade but left the spoon in place. Then she carefully fitted the flash-bang into the space between the doorknob and the frame.

It was so simple an idea that I felt like kicking myself.

Violin stood on her toes to kiss my cheek. “Time to go.”

We stepped slowly, softly and quietly away. We didn’t start to run until we were fifty yards down the tunnel. And then we ran like hell.

It was just beginning to rain as we emerged from the darkness via a duct near the Seine. The water was stingingly cold, but it washed the filth from us.

We knew exactly when the assassins left the chamber with their stolen bones. We could tell down to the second. The blast blew manhole covers into the air for twenty blocks. Towers of flame shot a hundred feet into the air, transforming the City of Lights into a city of fiery red and gold and yellow. The earth shook beneath us. Windows exploded outward all along the avenues. People screamed and panicked and ran as if the world itself was exploding.

Violin and I sat on either side of the open duct as a fireball belched out between us. We were laughing like fools.

Like lunatics.

Like children.

I tapped my earbud and called it in. Church only said, “Good work.” Nothing else. Some instinct told me that he wanted to say more, but I knew he wouldn’t.

Bug said that he would make sure that no trace of DMS involvement hit anyone’s radar. As for the lab down in the sewers? Tomorrow someone would go in.

The fire brigades, the police.

Maybe the Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre.

Who knows, maybe even Interpol.

They’d go in looking for the source of the explosion. If the right people went in, there was a marginal chance they’d find the bones. Many bones now. Charred beyond recognition. The DNA in the marrow utterly destroyed, and all the potential for corrupt science to borrow the unnatural power there gone.

There would be nothing worth salvaging. And nothing worth learning. No secrets, no horrors, no nightmares.

And for once I’d come out of it whole.

It was a strange fact of my life that when I went to work I seldom came away with a whole skin. This time…I hadn’t so much as skinned my knee.

It felt weird.

When the flames died down, I crossed the open duct and sat down next to Violin. The night was alive with sirens and car alarms and shouts. None of that mattered. The danger was over for now, even if we were the only two people in Paris who knew it.

“Look,” she said, pointing.

Far above us a falling star carved a white line across the sky.

It was so corny that we both laughed. So poignant that I sought out her hand and when I took it she gave me a squeeze.

“Make a wish,” I said.

I expected her to laugh at that, too. But instead she turned away, and in the light of stars and moon and Paris I caught the tracery of silver tears on her cheeks. I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her against me.

“The war never ends,” she whispered. Softly, more to herself than to me.

For that I had no answer.

What response is really adequate when we both knew that, for us and those like us, the war could never really end? Ever. I thought about Lilith, the hell she lived in and the war she fought. I thought about Church, whose war was ongoing, fueled by some personal reasons I doubted I would ever fully comprehend.

Violin was a child of conflict and atrocity, bred as a slave, forged into a weapon.

I had been reshaped by horror and loss into a killer.

People like us were meant for war, and that is a tragedy I can’t look too closely at or I start to really lose it. Four people who craved peace — and who understood both its cost and its vulnerability — but who would never be allowed to share in it. Even if we somehow managed to win this unwinnable war.

Violin leaned into my arms, and I bent and kissed the silver tears on her face.

We sat there on the edge of the river and above us the wheel of night turned from this day toward the next.