Joe Ledger: Special Ops

NOTE: This story is set after the events in The Dragon Factory. You don’t to have read that novel, but if you read this story first there are some spoilers.

Chap. 1

The world keeps trying to kill me.

It’s taking some pretty serious shots and as the months and years pass, it hasn’t lost any of its enthusiasm. Or it deviousness.

I keep sucking air, though. Each time I somehow manage to pick myself up and either slap off the dirt and stagger back to the fight, or someone medevacs me to an aide station or a trauma hospital and the doctors do their magic to ensure that I have another season to run.

You know that saying how a bone is stronger in the place where it broke? And the thing from Nietzsche everyone and his brother always quotes — about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger? A lot of that is true.

I’m stronger than I used to be. Less physically vulnerable. Not that I have superpowers. Bullets don’t bounce off my skin the way they do with Superman, and I don’t have Iron Man’s armor. I don’t have spider sense or adamantium bones.

I’m stronger because each time I survive a fight, I learn from it. I become less trusting, less naïve.

Colder.

Harder.

It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.

This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.

That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.

And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you dial the passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak — the prey — to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.

Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.

And yet….

And yet.

There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.

Loss.

Grief.

Call it what you want.

On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother-in-arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe — truly believe — that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.

You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun smoke clears, if you’re still alive, you and the person you love will have a life together. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that, even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.

But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on….

Damn.

That’s where the real monsters are made.

When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.

Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realizing your defeat.

Or….

Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.

Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.

That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.

But it is the monster that survives.

It’s the monster that can survive.

I loved twice in my life. Really loved.

The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.

Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.

Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.

And died doing it.

I held her as she left me. I breathed in her last breath as all of the heat left her through a hole an assassin’s bullet had punched into the world.

My friends and colleagues tell me that I’ve made a great recovery since then. That I’m my old self again. That I look happy.

Which is all the proof I’d ever need of that philosophic belief that we each exist in our own reality, each inside an envelope of a completely separate dream.

I will never be my old self again.

Can’t be. That ship has sailed and it hit an iceberg.

And happy?

Sure, I can laugh. So do hyenas, and it means about as much.

My enemies don’t think I’m a happy guy. When they look into my eyes, they see the truth that my friends can’t see.

They see what I’ve really become.

I know this because I see the fear in their eyes when I kill them.

I used to be a nice man.

The world used to be a place of sunshine and magic.

Monsters, though, don’t thrive in the light.

Chap. 2

My boss, Mr. Church, called me into his office on a May Tuesday. It was one of those days that seems tailor-made for baseball, hotdogs and cold beer, and I was taking a half day to see if the Orioles could earn their paychecks. I had on new jeans and an ancient team jersey, sneakers, and a pair of Wayfarers on my head.

As I entered the office he slid a file folder across the desk toward me. It was a blue folder with a red seal. It looked official.

I said, “No way. I have tickets for a doubleheader, and as far as all of our billions of dollars of intelligence surveillance equipment says, it’s a slow day for the bad guys.”

“Captain….”

“Get someone else.”

He sat back and studied me through the lenses of his tinted glasses. Mr. Church is one of those guys who never has to say much to either piss you off or make you want to check that your fingernails are clean. Frequently both.

“This requires finesse,” he said mildly.

“All the more reason to get someone else. I am finesse-deprived today.”

“This requires your particular skill set.”

I stood there and glared at him. I could almost hear the crack of good wood on a hard ball, the roar of the crowd, the howl of the announcer as the ball arced high toward the back wall.

Mr. Church said nothing.

He opened his briefcase and removed a packet of Nilla wafers, tore it open, selected one. Bit off a piece and chewed while he watched me.

The blue folder lay where he’d put it.

I said, “Fuck.”

Mr. Church asked, “What do you know about the Koenig Group?”

“Yeah, a little.” I shrugged. “It was a think tank based in Jersey. Cape May, right? Alternate technologies…am I right about that?”

“They called it alternative scientific options. ASO.”

“Which means what?”

“A bit of everything,” he said. “They were originally a division of DARPA, but they went private as part of a budget restructuring. Private investors propped them up during the economic downturn in ’09.”

“But they closed, right?”

He tapped crumbs off his cookie. “They were shut down.”

“Why and by who?”

“They were under investigation by a number of agencies, including our own. Aunt Sallie had some people on it, and she lent a couple of agents to a joint federal task force that is a prime example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s become a jurisdictional quagmire.”

“Typical.” American politics are fueled by red tape. Anyone who says differently isn’t on the inside track.

“As to why this has happened,” Church continued, “we’d gotten some word that the administration there was a little too willing to consider offers from foreign investors.”

“Like…?”

“North Korea, China, Iran.”

“Yikes. So we shut them down?”

“So we shut them down,” he agreed. “The task force made arrests, cleared out the staff and sealed the building. Aunt Sallie has been assembling a team of special investigators, forensics experts, and scientific consultants to do a thorough analysis of the work done there and a full inventory of research and materials. Until then, no one is allowed inside, regardless of federal rank. Every agency in the alphabet wants in on it, and as a result the whole place has been sealed for months, pending the outcome of the jurisdictional knife fight that continues as we speak.”

“But the bad guys are out of there?”

“Yes. And that was enforced with fines, termination of licenses, confiscation of some research materials and computer records, charges against two administrators and one senior researcher, and a pending court case that will likely result in prison for at least one of those persons, if not all three. There are also fourteen members of the senior scientific staff as yet unaccounted for.”

“A second site?” I suggested. “Another lab elsewhere?”

“That’s the thinking, but so far we haven’t been able to get a line on where that lab is or even if it’s on US soil — though none of the missing scientists has flown out of any domestic airport. In itself, that means little because there are too many ways to export people from this country without raising a flag.”

“They could be in North Korea for all we know.”

“Agreed. As far as the Koenig facility, the building has been under constant surveillance since the doors were shut. Two-man teams, alternating between foot patrols and in-car observation. That responsibility has been shared on a rotating basis. Every five days another agency takes the job. Currently it’s ATF.”

“Okay. Why am I warming up my helicopter?”

“Our agents were first in the door, so we’re the organization of record that shut it down. By default, it’s up to us to sweep up any debris.”

“So, I’m what? A janitor?”

“Let’s face it, Captain,” Church said dryly, “it’s not the worst thing either of us has been called in this job.”

I sighed. Church shoved the cookies toward me, but I shook my head. There’s no moral justification for a vanilla cookie when every store in the free world sells a variety of chocolate-themed cookies. Like Oreos. It’s closer to an American icon than Mom’s apple pie ever was. Church didn’t have any Oreos, so I sat there cookieless.

“If this place has been sealed for a couple of months, what’s the hurry?” I asked.

“Apparently, when we shut them down they didn’t entirely take it to heart.”

“Naughty, naughty,” I said. “But this sounds like something the FBI should be doing. I know for a fact that they love this kind of bureaucracy. It gives them that tingly feeling in their nice gray wool trousers.”

Church gave me a look that could best be described as pitying. “They haven’t yet won the toss of the bureaucratic garter. If they go in, then someone in congress will be accused of favoritism.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

He nodded. “There are times I envy drive-through window employees at McDonalds. Red tape isn’t a factor when ordering fast food.”

“No joke.”

We gave each other small, bland smiles.

I folded my arms. “Again I ask — why now?”

“There was a police report of lights on inside the facility late last night. Officers on scene found the rear door broken open, but a quick search of the premises yielded no results. The intruders must have fled.”

“Could the intruders have been some of the missing scientists?”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“But why break in? What’s left to steal?”

“Unknown. When the Koenig senior staff realized the hammer was about to fall they tried to clear things up in a hurry. A lot of material was destroyed to keep it from falling into our hands and, by association, a congressional committee. The task force recovered melted disks, destroyed hard drives, and that kind of thing. Bug put his team on it to see if there was enough left to determine whether they trashed the actual records or if what we recovered was pure junk. Computer records are small and easy enough to hide. The task force might have missed a flash drive or some disks. If someone was there last night, it’s likely they removed whatever was hidden. However, we do need to check.”

“Swell.”

“What little we did recover,” Church continued, “tied into something that’s clanged a few warning bells for MindReader.”

When the DMS was formed it was built around a real mother of a computer system that was entirely owned by Mr. Church. Aside from being enormously powerful and sophisticated, MindReader had two primary functions. First, it collated information from all major intelligence networks, including some who didn’t know their data was being mined, and then looked for patterns. Often different agencies will have gotten whiffs of things or obtained pieces of information, but MindReader sorted through all of it and began assembling fragments into whole, actionable pictures. A lot of our effectiveness is built on being able to spot trouble before it literally blows up in our face.

MindReader’s other function was actually its scariest aspect. It could intrude into virtually any other computer system, poke around, take what it wanted, and then rewrite the target’s security software so there was absolutely no record of the intrusion. All other intelligence software leaves some kind of scar on the target system; MindReader is a ghost.

“What bells?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“Sadly, it’s vague. The North Koreans and Chinese were both providing funding for a project codenamed ‘Changeling.’ We don’t know the nature of the program, but when nations who don’t always have our best interests at heart are willing to transfer funds in excess of fifty million….”

He let the rest hang.

“Have you talked to Dr. Hu about this?”

Hu was the head of the DMS science division. He was both a super-genius in multiple disciplines and a world-class heartless asshole. We have failed to bond on an epic level.

“Dr. Hu is intensely interested in it because he feels it may be connected to a project we caught wind of last year that dealt with transformative genetics.”

“I don’t even like the sound of that.”

“Neither do it. It’s a radical branch of transgenics in which animals of various kinds are given gene therapy in order to provoke controlled mutations. We saw some of that in the Jakoby labs.”

“Ah,” I said, loading that syllable with as much scorn as I could. The Jakobys were a family of brilliant geneticists. Immeasurably dangerous. Their Dragon Factory laboratory was used to create animals that, at least, looked like mythical creatures. Big game hunters paid millions to hunt unicorns and centaurs. It didn’t matter than the animals were genetic freaks whose DNA was now hopelessly corrupted. Nor did it matter that the resulting mutations were often painful for the animal and virtually guaranteed a short and agonizing life. None of that mattered. The novelty market allowed them to raise money for more destructive projects, including ethnic-specific pathogens intended to fuel a new genocide.

We shut them down. Hard.

It was at the Dragon Factory that Grace died.

“Do these Koenig assholes have the Jakoby research? ’Cause if they do, I’m going to find them and remove important parts.”

“It’s unlikely. MindReader would have flagged that. But it seems that their scientists were working along dangerously similar lines. To what end we don’t know. Once the red tape is sorted out I intend to have our people be first through the door to do a thorough examination of any materials left intact.”

“Must be pissing you off that we’ve had to wait so long.”

He said nothing, and nothing showed on his face, but there was a palpable feeling of tension buzzing around him. Yeah, he was pissed.

When he finally spoke, it was a shift in topic. “Last night’s police report opens a door of opportunity. We have a chance to put someone in the building. Not to remove anything, of course, but to have a quiet look around without eyes on him. I’d like that to be you.”

“And I suppose if there was a file conveniently labeled ‘Changeling’ I shouldn’t let it lay there and gather dust.”

Church snorted. “If life were that simple, Captain, we would be out of jobs.”

“I thought the ATF had feet on the ground there.”

“They didn’t see anything last night.”

“And the cops did?”

He spread his hands. And I had a sneaking suspicion that he had something to do with that police drive-by and any subsequent report. Made me wonder if there was anything to see. ATF boys are usually pretty sharp.

“Besides,” added Church, “the ATF team has declined to break the seal and enter the premises.”

“Why?”

“Because if anything is disturbed or if there is any procedural error when someone does step inside, then that agency takes the political hit.” He shook his head. “If you look too closely for logic you’ll injure yourself.”

“Okay, I get that the bullshit factor is high. But why me? Why send a shooter?”

“Because you were a cop before you were a shooter. If nothing else, you should be able to determine if the place has been broken into. Work it like a crime scene.”

“And if I find someone poking around in there?”

His smile was small and cold. “Then you have my permission to shoot them.”

Nice. You can never really tell when he’s joking.

“One more thing,” said Church as I stood, crossed the room, and reached for the doorknob. “Our friends in the U.K have expressed some interest in this matter. They red-flagged some of the negotiations between the Koenig Group and North Korean buyers, and they’ve been hunting for any possible information on Changeling. They’re sending a special agent to liaise with you. Her name is Felicity Hope. Expect her call.”

“She’s with MI6?”

“No,” he said, “Barrier.”

Barrier was Great Britain’s so-secret-we’ll-bloody-well-shoot-you group that was the model for the DMS. Church had helped set it up, and once it proved to be invaluable against the new breed of 21st Century high-tech terrorist, he was able to sell Congress on the Department of Military Sciences. But just hearing that name was the equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts for me.

Grace Courtland had been a senior Barrier agent. She’d been seconded to the DMS at Church’s request, and for a few years she was Church’s top gun. Maybe the world’s top gun. I worked alongside her, respected her, fell in love with her. And then buried her.

The pain was too recent and too real.

Church adjusted his tinted glasses. I knew that he was following my line of thought and gauging my reaction. I also knew that he wouldn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of guy who engaged in heart-to-hearts. What he gave me was a single, brief nod, just that much to acknowledge the memory. He loved Grace like a daughter. His pain had to be as intense as mine, but he would never show it.

It cost me a lot to keep it off my face.

Chap. 3

Twenty minutes later I was in a Black Hawk helicopter, heading away from Baltimore’s sunny skies toward the coastline of southern New Jersey.

The rest of my team — all of the two-legged variety — were scattered around the country looking at potential recruits. We’d lost some players recently, and we had the budget and the presidential authority to hire, coax, or shanghai top shooters from law enforcement, FBI hostage rescue, and all branches of Special Ops. For guys like us it was like being turned loose in a candy store with a credit card.

We flew through sunlight beneath a flawless blue sky.

When the Koenig Group had gone private a few years ago, they moved out of a lab building on the grounds of the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, an air force base sixteen miles southeast of Trenton, and purchased several connected buildings once occupied by a marine conservation group that had lost its funding. I pulled up the schematics of the place on my tactical computer. The place looked like it had been designed by whoever built the Addams Family mansion and the Bates Motel. The centerpiece was a faux Victorian pile that was all peaked roofs, balconies, widow’s walks, gray shingles, and turrets. Almost attractive but overall too austere and grim-looking. To make it worse, the conversion people had added wings and side buildings to the main structure, all connected by covered walkways that gave the whole place a haphazard, sprawling appearance. Unlovely, unkempt, and supposedly unoccupied. Seen from above via satellite, it looked like several octopi had collided and somehow melded, then were covered with shingles and paint. Charming in about the same way a canker sore is appealing.

The files on the research being conducted at the Koenig Group were sketchy. On the books, the teams were collating and evaluating data from several thousand smaller biological and genetic projects from around the world. Dead-end projects that had been canceled either because they were too expensive when measured against predicted benefits or because they’d hit dead ends. The Koenig teams had scored some hits by combining data from multiple stalled projects in order to create a new and more workable protocol, largely influenced by recent advances in science. A transgenics experiment that was infeasible twenty-five years ago might now be doable. The original hypotheses were often well in advance of the scientific capabilities of the day. The Koenig people sometimes had to sort through mountains of old floppy disks — back when they were actually floppy — or crates filled with digital cassette tapes, and even tons of paper to put a lot of this together. It was painstaking work that was often frustrating and futile…but which now and then yielded fruit.

Shame that those bozos didn’t share all of that fruit with the U.S. of A.

Dickheads.

The frustrating thing for us, though, was that we really didn’t know all they’d discovered. When the task force kicked the door in, they found a lot of melted junk and very little else. And the management team at Koenig apparently kept their employees compartmentalized so that few of them knew anything of substance. Probably because most of them would have made a call to Uncle Sam if they were in on it. Or they’d want the Koenig people to pad their paychecks. Either way, from what I read in the file, there were only three genuine villains, and they were under indictment and under surveillance.

So who was messing around inside the building? And what were they looking for?

Church didn’t think this was anything more than a look-see by someone who used to be a detective. He didn’t offer backup except for a Barrier agent who would liaise with me. Whatever that meant, given the circumstances. Maybe whenever she landed Stateside we’d compare notes over diner coffee and that would be that.

But as I looked at the satellite photo of the sprawling, ugly building I began to get a small itch between my shoulder blades. Not quite a premonition, but in that neck of the woods. What my grandmother used to call a “sumthin’,” as in “sumthin’ doesn’t feel right.” My gran was a spooky old broad. In my family no one laughed off or ignored her sumthin’s.

I gave myself a quick pat-down to make sure I’d brought the right toys to this playground. My Beretta 92F was snugged into its nylon shoulder rig; the rapid-release folding knife was clipped in place inside my right front pants pocket. There was a steel garrote threaded through my belt, and I had two extra magazines for the Beretta.

The sad part was that this was how I dressed all the time. I had this stuff on me when I went to Starbucks to read the Sunday papers. I would have had it on me at the ballpark watching the Orioles spoil the day for the Phillies. I would like to be normal. I’d like to have a normal life. But when I joined the DMS, I left normal somewhere behind in the dust.

The Black Hawk flew on through an untroubled sky.

Chap. 4

While I flew I read some reports from Dr. Hu. Even though he hadn’t yet gotten concrete information on the Changeling Project, MindReader had compiled bits of information that added up to a pretty disturbing picture of what they might be doing at Koenig.

Transformational genetics is a branch of science that scares the bejesus out of me. It has some benign and even beneficial uses, but the DMS doesn’t go after doctors trying to cure a genetic defect. No, the kind of scientist we tend to encounter is often best visited with a crowd of torch- and pitchfork-bearing villagers.

Here’s an example, and this is why palms were sweating as I read those reports. Hu found clear evidence of several covertly funded studies to create an “elastic and malleable genetic code.” One that was able to “withstand specific and repeatable mutagenic changes within desired target ranges consistent with military applications.” These programs have an end goal of “at-will theriomorphy.”

Yeah.

Short bus version of that — included courtesy of Dr. Hu, who has little faith in my ability to grasp basic concepts — is that the North Koreans and Chinese have been funneling money into research for practical science that would allow a soldier to change his physical structure at will and at need. To transform from human into something else.

Hu could only speculate on what that other shape might be. His speculations included an insectoid carapace, gills, resistance to radiation and pollutants, retractable feline claws, enhanced muscle and bone density, night vision. Stuff like that.

True super soldiers. But not entirely human super soldiers.

You see why I occasionally have to shoot people?

Before I joined the DMS this was science fiction stuff, comic book stuff. Now, it was nightmare stuff because the science was out there. All it required was enough funding, little or no oversight from either Congress or human rights organizations, and a flexible set of morals. Sad to say, all of that is possible.

We are living in a science fiction age. Or, maybe it’s a horror story.

Mad scientists like Frankenstein? That’s almost a joke. Frankenstein, at least, was trying to do some good for humanity. He was trying to conquer sickness and death.

Guys like the Koenig Group…well, what the hell do you even call men like that?

Chap. 5

I had the pilot do a slow circle of the Koenig place and then set me down in the parking lot. The building extended onto a wharf in the bay. There were slips for six small boats and one large one, but nothing was currently tied up. No cars in the parking lot, either. The left-hand neighbor was an industrial marina for craft that serviced the big dredging platform six miles off the coast which kept pumping sand back to shore to replace what Mother Nature and global warming were taking away. The right-hand side was protected marshland. A billboard proclaimed that an exotic animal park would be opening soon, but the paint was peeling and faded, and the board looked twenty years old. The only exotic animal I could see among the marsh grass was a Philadelphia pigeon looking confused and out of place.

There was a single car parked on the street, a dark blue Crown Victoria. It was unmarked but it was so obviously a Federal vehicle that it might have had FEDS stenciled on the doors. One of these days the government will grasp the concept that plainclothes and undercover should include a component of stealth. Just a tad would go a long way.

I jumped down from the open side door, bent low, and ran through the rotor wash as the Black Hawk lifted away. The pilot would take the bird to a helipad near the Cape May lighthouse and wait there. We have several Black Hawks at the Warehouse, and we used this one for jobs that required less of a shock-and-awe effect on the locals. It was painted a happy blue and had the logo of a news wire service on it. No visible guns or rockets. Not to say they weren’t there, but this was not a time to show off. We already had some rubberneckers slowing their cars down to look at the big blue machine.

I let the helo vanish into the distance and silence return before I approached the building. The ATF agents were standing beside their car, both of them in off-the-rack suits and wearing identical expressions of disapproval. They both began shaking their heads as I approached.

“You can’t be here,” said the taller of the two.

I held up my identification. The DMS doesn’t have badges or standard credentials. When we needed to flash something we picked whatever would get the job done. I had valid ID for CIA, ATF, DEA, FBI and every other letter combination. The one I showed them was NSA. It was as close to a trump card as you can get, and they were the only organization that didn’t have boots on the ground during the raid on the place. Church was working with the director to use them as referees for the jurisdictional dispute.

The ATF boys glanced at the badge and at my civilian clothes — jeans and an Orioles home-game shirt — and gave me looks that said they didn’t give a cold shit.

“Need to go inside,” I said.

“Show me some paper,” said the shorter of the two.

I dug into my back pocket and produced a letter Church had prepared for me. It was a presidential order allowing me access to assess the integrity of the scene. They read it carefully. Twice.

“You can’t take anything out,” said the tall one.

“Don’t want to,” I said.

“We’ll have to search you when you come out, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t fuck with anything in there.”

“I won’t.”

“We don’t want trouble,” said the short one.

“I’m on your side, guys.” I pasted on my most charming smile.

The short one gave me another up and down inspection. “NSA recruiting ball players now?”

“It was my day off,” I said, leaning on “off” enough to convey irritation. Not at them, but at the system. “I had tickets for the doubleheader.”

That did the trick; they relaxed and nodded.

“Sucks to be you,” said the tall one and gave me half a mean grin.

“We have the game on the car radio,” said the short one. He wore the other half of that same grin. “Phils are up by two in the second.”

“I’m from Baltimore.”

“Like I said, it sucks to be you,” said the tall one. Laughing, they turned and walked back to their vehicle.

“And a hearty fuck you, too,” I said under my breath as I headed to the building.

It was no less ugly from ground level and perhaps a little less appealing. It was bigger than I expected. Three stories in parts, with lots of shuttered windows and reinforced doors. A discreet sign on a pole read, THE KOENIG GROUP, with a phone number for information.

I removed a small earbud, put it on, and attached an adhesive mic that looked like a mole to the side of my mouth. Two taps of the earbud connected me to Bug, the computer über-geek who provided real-time intel for all fieldwork. Even though this was a low-profile job, DMS protocol required that I use my combat call sign.

“Cowboy’s online.”

“With you,” said Bug.

“What’ve you got?”

“We did a thermal scan on the place, but it’s cold. No one home.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

I walked around the building. It really was a large mess. The additions and walkways looked almost like they’d grown organically, expanding out of need like a cramped animal. The paint jobs didn’t match section-to-section, and for a company with a lot of private funding the exterior of the joint was poorly maintained. Weeds, some graffiti, trash in the parking lot.

“Place is a dump,” I said.

“Better inside, from what I hear,” said Bug. “Some cool stuff.”

A red DO NOT ENTER sticker was pasted with precision to the center of the front door. I ignored it and used a preconfigured keycard to gain entry.

“Going in,” I said quietly.

“Copy that,” said Bug. “Watch your ass, Cowboy.”

“It’s on the agenda.”

The entrance lobby was small and unremarkable. A receptionist’s desk, some potted plants, and the kind of framed pictures you can buy at Kmart. Bland landscapes that probably weren’t even places in New Jersey. The lights were out, which was surprising since the key-reader was functional. The entrance hall was dark, and daylight didn’t try too hard to reach inside. When I tried the light switches all I got was a click. No lights.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, I thought the power was still on.”

“It is.”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“Let me check.”

I removed a small flashlight from my pocket and squatted down to shine the light across the floor. The immediate entrance hallway had a thin coating of damp grime on the floor — a side effect of the building’s position near a bay and a swamp. There were footprints in the grime, but from the size and pattern it was clear most of them had been left by responding police officers. Big shoes with gum-rubber soles. The prints went inside and then they came out again. If there were prints by an intruder, they were lost to the general mess left behind by the cops. Pretty typical with crime scenes, and pretty much unavoidable. Cops have to respond and they can’t float.

I tapped my earbud again, channeling over to Church. “Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“Did anyone have eyes on the cops who came out of the building last night? Are we sure they weren’t carrying anything? Or had something in their pockets?”

“The ATF agents on duty last night searched each officer,” said Church. “It was not well-received.”

“I can imagine.”

And I could imagine it — responding blues getting a pat-down by a couple of Federal pricks.

“Why didn’t the ATF agents accompany them inside?” I asked.

I could hear a small sigh. “The ATF agents had left the scene to pick up a pizza.”

“Ouch.”

“Those agents have been suspended pending further disciplinary action.”

“Yeah, fair call.”

“Which is why the ATF is rather prickly about your being there.”

“Copy that.”

I channeled over to Bug.

“Where are we with those lights?”

“Working on it.”

The lights stayed off, though.

There was a closed door behind the reception desk, so I opened it and entered a hallway that was as black as the pit. There was no sound, not the slightest hint that I was anything but alone in here, but regardless of that I drew my pistol. It’s hard to say if, at that moment, my caution was born out of a concern not to accidentally disturb any evidence left behind or because the place was beginning to give me the creeps.

The hallway hit a t-juncture. Each side looked as dark and uninformative as the other, but I took the right-hand side because that was my gun-hand side. I know. I’m a bit of a superstitious idiot. Sue me.

The side hallway wasn’t straight but jagged and curved and turned for no logical design reasons that I could see. Maybe there was something about the foundation structure that required so unlikely a design plan, but I couldn’t imagine what. The result was something that — as I walked through the shadows — triggered odd little thoughts that were entirely uncomfortable. The unlikely angles combined with the mildly curving walls and low gray-painted ceiling to give the whole place a strangely organic feel. Like a building that hadn’t so much been designed as allowed to grow. Like roots of a tree. Or tentacles.

Yeah, I shouldn’t be in here. I should be out in the bright sunlight watching a bunch of millionaires in white, black, and orange stretch pants hit a small white ball around a grassy field.

“You’re a fruitcake,” I told myself, and I had no counterargument.

I followed the flashlight beam down the crooked hallway until it ended at a set of double-doors made out of heavy-grade plastic. The kind meant to swing back when you pushed a cart through them, like they have in meat-packing plants.

A charming thought.

I pushed one flap open and peered into the gloom. The beam of the flashlight swept across a storage room stacked high with boxes of equipment and office supplies. There were bare patches on the floor where I assumed boxed files once stood, but they’d been confiscated by the task force. Motes of dust swirled in the glow, spinning like planets in some dwarf galaxy. They looked cold and sad.

As I began to let the flap fall back into place something caught my attention.

Nothing I saw or heard.

It was a smell.

A mingled combination of scents, pleasant and unpleasant.

A hint of perfume, the sulfur stink of a burned match, old sweat, and spoiled meat.

The movement of the swinging door somehow wafted that olio of scents to me, but it didn’t last. It was there and gone.

It was such an odd combination of smells. They didn’t seem to fit this place. And they were transient smells that should long ago have faded into the general background stink of dust and disuses. Except for the rotten-meat smell. That, I knew all too well, could linger. But this was a research facility not a meat-packing plant. There shouldn’t be a smell like that in here.

My brain immediately started cooking up rationalizations for it.

An animal came in here and died.

The staff left food in the fridge when the place was raided.

And….

And.

And what?

I tapped the earbud.

“Bug, what’s the status on those damn lights?”

There was a short burst of static, then Bug said, “—er company.”

“You’re breaking up. Repeat message.”

“The power is on according to a representative of the power company.”

I moved through the swinging doors and found a whole row of light switches. Threw them.

Stood in the dark.

“Negative on the power, Bug. Call someone who doesn’t have his dick in his hand and get me some lights.”

He paused, then said, “On it, Cowboy.”

The storage room had two interior doors, one of which opened into a bathroom so sparkling clean it looked like it had never been used. The only mark was a smudged handprint on the wall above the toilet. The smell hadn’t come from here.

The other door opened onto another jagged hallway that snaked through the building. The walls were lined on either side with closed doors. A lot of doors. This was going to take a while.

Dark and spooky as the place was, it seemed pretty clear that nobody was home but me. I snugged the Beretta into the padded holster but left my Orioles shirt open in case I needed to get to it in a hurry.

For the next half hour I poked into a variety of rooms, including storage closets of various signs, a copy center, a staff lunchroom, offices for executives of various wattage, and labs. Lots and lots of labs.

I entered one at random and stood in the doorway, doing what cops do, letting the room speak to me. There were rows of black file cabinets, sealed with yellow tape that had an ominous-looking federal seal from the Department of Justice. A dozen tables were crowded with computers and a variety of scientific instrumentation so sophisticated and arcane that I had almost no idea what I was looking at. The floor was littered with papers, and here and there were fragments of footprints on the debris.

Watching the room told me nothing.

I backed into the hall and did a quick recount of the laboratories just in this wing of the building. Nine.

“Bug,” I said, tapping the earbud.

“Cowboy, the power company insists that there is no interruption to the Koenig Group facility. They are showing active meters.”

I grunted and filed that away. Maybe it was something simpler, like breakers. To Bug I said, “How many labs are there in this place?”

“Twenty-two separate rooms designated on the blueprints as laboratory workspaces.”

“Jeez…”

“And one designated as a proving station.”

“Proving what?”

“Unknown. None of the employees interviewed by the task force has ever been in there, and the three executives under indictment aren’t talking.”

“So we have no real idea what they were doing there?”

“Not really,” he said, and he sounded wistful about it. “I wish we could have gotten those computer records. I’ll bet there was some cool stuff there.”

Cool.

Much as I like Bug, he shares a single characteristic with Dr. William Hu. The two of them have an absolutely unsavory delight for any kind of bizarre or extreme technology. For Hu, the head of our Special Sciences Division, it bordered on ghoulishness. Hu loves to get his hands on any kind of world-threatening designer plague or exotic weapon of mass destruction. A few months ago, when Blackjack Team out of Vegas took down a Chechnyan kill squad who had a hyper-contagious version of weaponized Spanish Flu and were planning on releasing it into the water supply of a large Russian community near Reno, Hu was delighted. A total of fifty-three people dead and an entire water supply totally polluted for God knows how many decades, and he was like a kid with a new stack of comics. He actually admires the kind of damaged or twisted minds that can create ethnic-specific diseases, build super dirty-bombs, and create weapons capable of annihilating whole populations. I’ve wondered for years how much of a push it would take to shove Hu over to the dark side of the Force.

Bug, though, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. For him it was a by-product of a life so insulated from the real world that nothing was particularly real to him. Only his beloved computers and the endless data streams. Something like this lab was probably no more real to him than a level in the latest edition of Gears of War or Resident Evil.

For my part, I am not a fan of anyone who would put extreme weapons into the hands of people so corrupt or so driven by fanaticism that they would turn the world into a pestilential wasteland just to make an ideological point.

Fuck that. For two pennies I’d call the Black Hawk and see what twelve Hellfire missiles and a six-pack of Hydra-70 rockets could do to sponge this place clean.

“Where’s that proving station?” I asked. He sent a step-by-step to my mobile phone.

As I made my way along corridors lit only by the narrow beam of my flashlight, I thought about the work that went on here. During the flight I’d had time to go over some of the background on the Koenig Group. They were originally a deeply integrated division of DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for developing new technologies for the military. Koenig Group people worked on every aspect of DARPA before they went private, and that meant that they had the opportunity to see not only what was currently in development for modern warfare and defense, but also what was being looked at for future exploration.

Of late I’ve come to realize that when it comes to keeping in front of the global arms race, there is virtually no line of exploration that’s definitely off the table. So, without government oversight, where had the twisted minds here at Koenig gone?

I reached the end of one hallway and passed through a security door that lead to another corridor lined with doorways that looked exactly like the one I’d just come from. So much so that I actually went out the door and stood looking at the doors and then turned around and looked at the new set. The absolute similarity was unnerving and disorienting.

I called up the floor plan on my mobile and studied it.

“Bug,” I said, “somehow I made a wrong turn.”

Bug didn’t answer.

I tapped the earbud.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static.

I tapped my way over to the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, trying to reach Church.

Still nothing.

I turned around and looked down the hall. The beam cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much.

Suddenly I caught the smell again.

Sulfur, human waste, and spoiled meat. And the aroma of perfume.

I don’t remember moving or pulling open my shirt, but suddenly my gun was in my hand. Even though the whole place was absolutely still and quiet, I yelled into the darkness.

“Freeze! Federal agent. I’m armed.”

My words bounced off the darkened walls and melted into nothingness.

Then, from behind me, someone spoke my name.

A woman’s voice.

Soft.

Familiar.

Achingly familiar.

An impossible voice.

“Joe….”

I whirled, gun in one hand, flash in the other, pointing into the darkness.

A woman stood ten feet behind me.

She was dressed in black. Shoes, trousers, jersey, gun belt, pistol. All black. Dark hair, dark eyes.

Those eyes.

Her eyes.

My mouth fell open. Someone drove a blade of pure ice through my heart. I could see my pistol begin to tremble in my hand.

I stared at her.

I spoke her name.

“Grace….”

Chap. 6

I don’t know what time does in moments of madness. It stops or it warps. It becomes something else. Every heartbeat felt like a slow, deliberate punch to my breastbone, and yet I could feel my pulse fluttering.

She held a pistol in her hand, the barrel raised to point at my chest, and I had an insane, detached thought.

You don’t need a bullet to kill me. Be her and I’ll die.

Not be her, and I think I’ll die, too.

She licked her lips and spoke.

“Who are you?”

The accent was British. Like Grace’s.

But….

But the tone was wrong.

It didn’t sound like her.

Not anymore. It had a moment ago when she’d spoken my name. But not now. Not anymore.

“Grace,” I said again, but now I could hear the doubt in my own voice. “I….”

She peered at me over the barrel of the gun, her eyes dark with complex emotions, fierce with intelligence.

Slowly, carefully, she raised her gun until the barrel pointed to the ceiling and held her other hand palm-out in a clear no-threat gesture.

“You’re Captain Ledger, aren’t you?”

I kept my gun on her.

“Who are you?” I asked, but my voice broke in the middle, so I had to ask again.

“Felicity Hope,” she said. “Barrier.”

I stood there and held my gun on her for another five seconds.

Then….

I lowered the pistol.

“God almighty,” I breathed.

She frowned at me, half a quizzical smile. “Who did you think I was?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Felicity Hope holstered her piece and came toward me. “You called me Grace.”

I said nothing.

“You thought I was Grace Courtland, didn’t you?”

“Grace is dead.”

“I know.” She stood there staring at me.

Up close, I could tell that it wasn’t her. This woman’s hair was paler, her eyes darker, her skin had fewer scars. But the height was the same, and the body. The same mix of dangerous athleticism and luscious curves. The movement was the same, a dancer’s grace. And the keen intelligence in the eyes.

Yeah, that was exactly the same.

Damn it.

When the universe wants to fuck with you it has no problem bending you over a barrel and giving it to you hard and ugly.

I cleared my throat. “Did you know her?”

She nodded.

“Was she…a friend?” I asked.

Felicity shrugged. “Actually, we weren’t. Most of the time I knew her I thought she was a stuck-up bitch.” She watched my face as she spoke, probably wondering what buttons she was pushing. Then she added, “But I don’t think I really knew her. Not really. Not until right before she died.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How could you know what she was like right before she died?”

“Oh…we spoke on the phone quite a lot. She was officially still with Barrier and had to make regular reports. I was the person she reported to.”

“You were her superior officer?”

She looked far too young. Grace had been young, too, but Grace was an exception to most rules. She’d been the first woman to officially train with the SAS. She’d been a senior field team operative in some of the most grueling cases on both sides of the Atlantic. There was nobody quite like Grace and everyone knew it.

Felicity shook her head. “Hardly. I was a desk jockey taking field reports. I know I’m not in Major Courtland’s league.”

“No,” I said ungraciously. “You’re not. Tell me why you’re here.”

She said, “Changeling.”

“Which means what exactly? The name keeps popping up in searches but no one seems to know exactly what it is.”

“What do you know about transformational genetics and self-directed theriomorphy?”

“Some,” I said, dodging it. “What do you know about it?”

“Too much.”

“Give me more than that.”

“They’re making monsters,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not in the mood for banter, honey, and I’m never in the mood for cryptic comments, especially not from total strangers I meet in dark places. This is American soil and a legally closed site. Spill everything right now or enjoy the flight home.”

She took a breath. “Okay, but I’ll have to condense it because there’s a lot.”

“So,” I said, “condense.”

“Can you take that flashlight out of my eyes?”

“No,” I said, and I didn’t. The light made her eyes look large and moist. If it was uncomfortable, then so what? I was deeply uncomfortable, so it was a running theme for the day.

She said, “Ever since the dawn of gene therapy and transgenic science it’s become clear that DNA is not locked. Evolution itself proves that DNA advances. Look at any DNA strand and you’ll see the genes for nonhuman elements like viruses hardwired into our genetic code.”

“Part of junk DNA,” I said. “What about it?”

“Transformational genetics is a relatively new branch of science that is searching for methods of changing specific DNA and essentially rebuilding it so that a new tailor-made code can be developed.”

“That’s not new,” I pointed out. “The Nazis tried that, and the whole Eugenics movement before that.”

“That’s selective breeding. That’s cumbersome and time-consuming because it requires eggs and host bodies and so forth. This is remodeling, and recent advances have opened developmental doors no one imagined would be possible in this century.”

I didn’t say anything. During the firefight at the Dragon Factory we’d encountered mercenaries who had undergone gene therapy with ape DNA. And there were other even more hideous monsters there.

“The word theriomorphy keeps showing up. What’s that?”

“Shapeshifting.”

“Shape…?”

“The ability to change at will from one form to another.” She smiled through the blinding flashlight glow. “From human form into something else.”

“At…will?”

“Oh yes.”

“Like from what to what? You’re making this sound like we’re hunting werewolves or something.”

Her smile flickered. “Who knows? Maybe we are.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I know.”

“Wait…hold on…are we really standing here having a conversation about werewolves? I mean…fucking werewolves?”

After a three count she said, “No.”

“Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar, then why—”

“Werewolves would be easy,” she said, cutting right through my words. “Werewolves would be a silver bullet and we’d take the rest of the afternoon off for a drink. I wish it was only werewolves.”

I gaped at her.

Seriously…what do you say to that?

Chap. 7

“Okay,” I said, “before I pee my pants here, how do you know about this and what can we do about it? This facility is sealed.”

She flashed her first real smile, and it looked so much like the battlefield grin Grace used to give me that I almost turned away.

“When your task force shut down this place,” she said, “they made a thorough video inventory of everything. High-res footage from where every piece of paper was all the way down to the way pencils sat in a pot on each desk. Everything, with a second camera filming what the first camera was doing in order to firmly establish the integrity of the scene and contribute the first real link in the sacred chain of evidence. Am I right?”

Church had told me about that, but I hadn’t seen it. I nodded anyway.

“So we can take or touch anything recorded on that video.”

“That’s the size of it,” I agreed.

“The federal order sealing this place contains an authorized copy of that video.”

“Yup.”

“And the teams who were here agreed that absolutely everything has been documented — at least in terms of its existence and placement.”

“Sure.”

Her smile brightened. “Therefore, anything that isn’t on the video technically doesn’t exist in terms of that federal order.”

“Sure,” I said again, “but how does that put us back in a discussion about werewolves? ’Cause, quite frankly I’m having a hard timing shaking loose of that conversation.”

The smile dimmed but did not go out. “Not werewolves,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“They’re not werewolves. That’s not what they were doing here.”

Felicity turned and walked a few paces away, going along the hall in the direction I’d come. She stopped, looked through the shadows. “You were in the storage room?”

“Maybe.”

“You were in the storage room,” she repeated, not making it a question this time. “Did you look inside the bathroom?”

“Sure. Nothing there.”

She sighed audibly.

“I wish I could say you were right about that, Captain.”

Without another word she began walking down the hallway toward the storeroom. She didn’t have a flashlight, and my beam was currently pointed at the floor in front of me; however, she seemed quite at home in the dark.

I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play for which I had no script and no stage direction.

She paused once in the very outside edge of the light and looked back at me. I had seen Grace turn that way, stand that way.

Look that way.

Then Felicity Hope turned and vanished into the black.

My eye tingled at the corners, and I knew that given half a chance I was going to break down and cry.

“Oh, Grace…,” I said very, very quietly.

Chap. 8

I caught up with her at the entrance to the storage room and followed her over to the small bathroom. As she approached the door she drew a small gun from a shoulder rig.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting ready,” she replied crisply, “and I suggest you do the same. I don’t know exactly what’s down in there, but things could get very bad very quickly.”

I almost smiled. “In a toilet?”

“I trust you have enough faith in Barrier agents to know that we don’t typically feel the need to arm ourselves to take a piss.” She opened the door and we looked inside. Toilet, sink, white-tiled wall, plastic trash can. And the partial handprint on the back wall.

I said, “Secret door?”

“Secret door,” she agreed. “And your federal task force missed it.”

“Balls.”

With her pistol in her right hand, she placed her left on the back wall, over the partial print. She moved her hand to one corner and pressed. The tile tilted inward with an audible click.

The whole rear wall swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a set of metal stairs that went down into blackness. A smell wafted up at us.

Rotting meat.

Human waste.

And… something else.

A fish stink. Not actually unpleasant, like the way an aquarium supply store smells, or the kitchens at a low-end fish-and-chips restaurant.

There were sounds, too.

Machines. Whirring motors. Rhythmic pumps. Other mechanical sounds, all soft, all muted.

“How do you know about this?” I asked quietly.

Felicity shrugged. “This information was hard won, believe me. Literally blood, sweat, and tears.”

She moved to the top of the steel steps.

I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England, and I was out of the stylistic loop.

Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally nonsexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

And yet….

Standing this close to her there was something wrong about her.

Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not….

Not what?

I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

And no time.

Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness, and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

The stairs zigzagged down two levels, and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.

Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people, and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.

Changeling.

What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?

Since I signed onto the DMS, my optimism for common sense and bioethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?

And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?

Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.

Bad questions.

As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

It was massive, as solid and ponderous as a bank vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it, and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.

The door stood ajar.

It was held open by a corpse.

I think it had once been a man.

But it was impossible to tell.

The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.

And…it had no face.

The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.

This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.

By teeth.

Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.

“Christ,” I said. “What did that?”

Her voice was very small.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “They’re out….”

Chap. 9

“What’s out?” I demanded, but she shook her head.

“I…don’t know exactly. We’ve only had rumors. But….” Felicity shook her head and set her jaw. Tiny jewels of sweat glistened on her forehead. “Cover me.”

“Hey, wait, dammit….”

But she was already in motion, stepping over the corpse, squeezing through the opening, disappearing inside. With a growl I gripped the edge of the massive door and hauled on it, swinging it wider to give me room to follow.

There was light inside, and I ran forward, gun up and ready, into a lab that looked like it was born in the fevered mind of Dr. Moreau. The vast chamber must have stretched hundreds of yards under the streets of Cape May and outward under the waters of the bay. The ceiling was twenty feet high, supported by massive steel pillars. The floor was pale concrete, stained by dried seawater, rust-red old blood, and a dozen chemicals of various sickly hues. There were ranks of computers — the high-end supercomputers used for gene sequencing — tables of arcane scientific equipment, and a dozen stainless-steel dissecting tables. There were also bodies in the room.

Many bodies.

Most of them were human, and none of those were whole. Legs and arms, ragged torsos, bodiless heads lay scattered across the floor.

I knew without counting that the bodies down here and the corpse blocking the door upstairs would add up to an even dozen. The missing scientists.

Not working at a separate site or in another country.

All of them here.

Forever here.

Each missing scientist…but not all of any of them.

Felicity and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the slaughter.

But then, even with all of that carnage around us, our eyes were drawn to the far wall. How could we not look? How could anyone not stare at what was there?

Row upon row upon row of glass cylinders, each ten feet high and as big around as elm trees. Each filled with murky water that smelled of brine and decay.

And in nearly all of the tanks a body floated.

They were all naked.

Men and women.

Tall. Powerfully built, with corded muscles under layers of gray-green skin.

They floated in the water, tethered by cables and wires attached to electrodes buried in their chests and skulls. Pale hair floated around their faces. Pale eyelids dusted their cheeks.

There were at least fifty tanks.

Three of them were empty, the glass shattered, the wires hanging limp and unattached. Every other tank was full.

Each of the bodies was naked.

None of them were human.

“Holy Mother of God,” murmured Felicity.

I felt myself moving forward, taking numb steps like a sleepwalker. My eyes were wide, burning from not blinking. The sight before me was hideous, appalling in its implications, but I couldn’t look away. I stopped in front of one of the tanks and reached to touch the glass. The body inside floated on the other side of the thick glass, inches away from me, but worlds apart in so many ways.

The people — the things inside the tank — did not have hands.

Not as such.

They had long flat panels of flesh with segmented bony structures that had once been fingers, each connected by rough webbing. The feet were the same. And all along the waterlogged limbs, the flesh glistened with scales.

In movies, in Disney pictures, creatures like this are beautiful.

In these tanks, here in the real world, they were hideous.

I looked into the face of the body floating inches from me. The mouth was little more than a slash with rubbery lips, between which I could see row upon row of serrated teeth.

The creature’s eyes were half-open. There was a trace of white around large, black irises.

On the sides of the creature’s face, below stunted and useless ears, were gills.

The sound of a footfall in water startled me, and I suddenly whirled, bringing my gun up, but it was Felicity.

She was standing ankle deep at the edge of what I’d first thought was a large puddle but I could now see was a pool. It ended at a wall, and when I shone my flashlight at the water, we could see that the wall ended a few feet below the surface. Tendrils of seaweed wafted back and forth, and there were small fish in the water, darting here and there.

“It must lead to the bay,” said Felicity.

We looked from the pool to the three broken cylinders and then at the decaying bodies.

“Three of them must have escaped somehow,” she said. “They killed the staff and escaped.”

I nodded. And though I was almost too sick to speak, I asked, “Do you know what this is?”

She gave me a quizzical look. “I should think it’s effing well obvious.”

“No…I can see what they’re doing. Transformative genetics…theriomorphy…they’ve turned test subjects—”

“—or volunteers,” she cut in.

“—or volunteers…into monsters. Into water-breathing….” I fished in my mind for the word.

“Into mermen,” said Felicity Hope. “And mermaids.”

“I thought mermaids were supposed to be beautiful.”

She gave a short, ugly laugh. “You don’t read your folklore. The mermaids of legend were monsters who lured men to terrible deaths. They drowned them and fed on them.”

“So these madmen created genetically engineered…what’s the word? Mer-people?”

“Close enough.”

“But…for Christ’s sake why?”

She cocked her head appraisingly. “What is your nation’s primary weapon of response to deliberate aggression from either China or North Korea?”

“Generally speaking, lots of missiles.”

She shook her head. “Which are launched from…?”

“Ah,” I said, “our fleet.”

“Top marks. The U.S. fleet in the Taiwan Strait is the most powerful weapon of war in existence. Aircraft carriers ready to launch the world’s most sophisticated and lethal fighters and helicopters, battleships and cruisers, and nuclear submarines capable of launching nuclear and non-nuclear missiles. China is working on building a blue water fleet, but beyond hype, they are many years away from anything comparable, and it’s doubtful they ever will achieve it. That’s why they’ve worked so hard on their missiles and on a submarine fleet capable of slipping past your surface ships. It’s why North Korea is developing its nuclear capabilities and building long-range weapons of mass destruction.”

“What’s your point?”

“No nation on earth can face your fleet in any version of a surface battle. You have more ships and better military technology, and you can call in far more resources. Everyone knows this. But consider how the Taliban has been able to wage so long and costly a war with your army in Afghanistan, and how they fought the Russians to a standstill at the height of Soviet power. They have no army, no technology. So what do they have?”

“Hit-and-run terrorists who hide among the civilian population and comes at us in small and very mobile groups.”

“Bloody right. It’s the exact kind of warfare that greatly helped you Yanks fight off our larger and better-trained armies during your Revolution.” She spread her arms to indicate the massive tanks, and the bodies floating inside. “Now imagine the hit-and-run terrorists needed for a war against a fleet. A fleet that can detect any metal ships and that can sweep away any network of mines. Imagine teams of merpeople who could swim undetected into the heart of your fleet, carrying small satchel charges and nonmetallic limpet mines. Enough of them, with the right equipment, could destroy your fleet without North Korea or China launching a single missile. And what defense could you offer? You can’t patrol beneath the surface for something this small and mobile. It’s impractical to the point of impossibility.”

I wanted to tell her that she was out of her mind. That she was delusional. That such a plan was far too wild to ever work.

But the faces of the dead scientists mocked my denials. The powerful bodies floating in the brine told me that my view of the world was relevant to yesterday. Today was a different and much more terrible day.

“I have to call this in,” I said. “I need to get someplace where I can get a clean signal and get every-fucking-body out here.”

She looked at me with her dark eyes.

“Captain,” she said, then amended it. “Joe…you do understand that if this technology is acquired by our people — yours and mine — they’ll do the same thing, continue the same research.”

I said nothing.

“They’ll make monsters, too,” she said, “because the proof is right here that monsters are the next viable weapon of war.”

“Monsters,” I said, echoing the word. It tasted rancid in my mouth. “But what options do we have? The Koenig people are in custody, their research is either slag or it’s in these computers, and we don’t know if they’ve already shared their secrets with the Chinese or North Koreans. If our enemies have these weapons, won’t we have to….”

I heard what I was saying and knew that it was absolutely true and absolutely wrong. It was the trap that has escalated warfare since the invention of the longbow. Since the gun. Since the first nuclear bomb.

It was keeping up with the Joneses in a very real and very ugly way, and unless everyone suddenly came to their senses, how could we avoid committing sins of conscience to defend our people?

What’s the answer to that question?

Where’s the path that leads us away from ever escalating the arms race?

“Joe,” she said as she walked over to the bank of supercomputers, “the Koenig people haven’t sold the information yet. The secrets are all here. The research that was burned was a decoy. All of it is here.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I can. I do know it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Without turning she said, “I’m sure, Joe.”

And she said it in Grace’s voice.

Exactly Grace’s voice.

My mouth went dry.

I took a small step toward her. “Grace…?”

“If we destroy these computers, it stops here.”

I licked my lips. “The senior Koenig people are—”

“It stops here. This abomination goes no further.”

I wanted her to turn around. I wanted to see her face. I needed to see the light of Grace’s soul shining out of her eyes. If that was an impossible wish, who cares. We stood in an impossible place.

“Grace…,” I whispered again.

And then a sudden violent sound of splashing water broke the moment. I spun around as three monstrous shapes rose from the pool.

Gray-green skin.

Black eyes.

Rows of teeth.

And webbed hands that ended in terrible claws.

Two of them rushed at me, and one launched itself at Felicity and slammed her against the computers. Felicity screamed. It sounded like the call of a wounded seagull.

I heard myself yelling. Screaming, really. But the sound was lost beneath the roar of the mermen who ran at me and the thunder of my gun as I fired and fired.

One of them abruptly spun sideways, his face torn away by a bullet that went on to strike a cylinder. The glass shattered in a spray of jagged pieces and gushing water. The occupant of the tube tore loose of the wires and fell heavily to the floor.

I saw this only peripherally as the second creature slammed into me.

He was enormously strong and drove me ten feet backward and nearly crushed me against a concrete wall. Even with the impact I managed to keep hold of my gun, but the monster twisted its head and clamped its jaws around my forearm. Blood spurted, and I heard my wristbones break. Pain exploded with inferno heat inside my arm, and I almost blacked out.

But part of me is as cold and inhuman as these monsters. It’s the part of me that survived the trauma of my childhood by being too vicious to die. It’s the part that somehow allowed me to complete the mission that Grace had died to accomplish, even though it meant facing impossible odds. It was the part of me that could kill despite idealism and compassion. It was the part of me that, on some level that I have never wanted to examine with total clarity, enjoys all of this. The pain, the violence.

The killing.

As my flesh ruptured and my bones broke, that part of me shoved the civilized aspect of my mind to one side. In that moment I stopped being a man and became the thing I needed to be in order to survive this encounter.

I became a monster.

With a snarl as inhuman as the thing that attacked me, I drove my knee up into its crotch, then head-butted the thing so hard I could hear cartilage and bone shatter. I drove my stiffened thumb into its eye, bursting the orb. Then I kicked its screaming, writhing body backward.

My right arm flopped bloody and limp, the fingers feeling like swollen bags of blood. My gun was gone, I had no idea where.

I ran at the monster that now lay twisting on the floor, hands pressed to its bloody eye socket. Its other eye stared at me with uncomprehending horror. It had killed the scientists in this room. It was a predator thing, designed for slaughter, and now it was hurt and helpless and being stalked by something that did not fear its power.

It raised one hand in defense and I kicked it away, then stamped down hard on its throat.

Without even pausing to watch it die, I whirled toward Felicity.

She was not there.

Instead I saw the third merman sprawled in a growing lake of blood, its body torn apart so savagely that its arms and legs were only attached by strings of meat.

Something bulky and gray shot past me, brushing close enough to strike my uninjured arm. It moved so fast I could barely see it.

It plunged into the water and was gone.

It was not a woman, that much was clear.

It looked like an animal.

Almost like an animal.

Its gray fur was crisscrossed by jagged cuts and streaked with blood. Within a moment all that was left was a stain of blood on the eddying waters.

I stood alone in the cavernous lab.

Twenty feet away, the merman who had fallen to the floor when my bullet smashed its tube was beginning to stir.

I bent and picked up the pistol dropped by Felicity Hope.

With blood falling from my shattered arm, I walked over to the creature as it struggled to get to its misshapen feet.

I raised the gun.

Fired.

For a long, long time I stood there. Arm cradled to my body. Pain and adrenaline washing back and forth through me like tidewaters.

There was no sign of Felicity Hope.

I knew there would not be.

Though…I did not understand why.

As the monster in my mind crept back into its cave and the civilized man staggered out again, the mysteries of this place — of this afternoon — rose up above me like a tsunami and threatened to smash me flat.

In my mind I heard the echoes of her voice.

“Joe…it stops here.”

I looked around at the computers. And at the tables piled high with equipment.

And chemicals.

And reams of paper.

With my good hand, whimpering at the agony in my arm, I reached into my pocket for my lighter.

Chap. 10

The fire burned the building to black ash.

I leaned against the fender of the ATF agents’ Crown Vic and watched it burn. They both yelled at me, demanding to know what happened, threatening to arrest me, trying to get me to react to them in any way. But all I did was watch the place burn.

When the firemen and cops asked me how it started, I spun a bunch of lies.

I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital where they had to do surgery to repair my arm. The doctors had a lot of questions about my arm. I told them that there had been a moray eel in a tank and that I was dumb enough to put my arm inside. They didn’t believe me. Mostly because they weren’t stupid enough to accept that story. And because the wound signature was wrong for an eel. Then Mr. Church showed up and people stopped asking me questions.

The only one who heard the real story was Church.

He listened the way he does — silent, without expression, cold. When I was done, he used his cell phone and, with me sitting right there in the E.R., ordered a full battery of physical and psychological tests for when I got back to Baltimore.

Even a lie detector test.

Our forensics people lifted blood samples from my clothes. Dark brick red blood from my shirt. The blood of the mermen.

And brighter red blood from my sleeve.

Her blood.

They also lifted a full handprint from the back wall of the bathroom. The techs promised DNA and other lab work back as soon as possible.

Dr. Hu spent days picking through the ashes of the Koenig building, his face alight with expectation, hoping to find something he could play with, but I’d built a very hot fire.

He finally gave it up, defeated and mad at me.

The doctors ran their tests.

I passed them all. No hallucinogens or alcohol in my system.

The shrinks ran and then re-ran their tests, and when they got the same answers they began looking at me funny. Then they stopped making eye contact altogether.

On a warm summer evening ten days after the fire, Mr. Church called me into a private meeting. There was a plate of cookies — Nilla wafers and Oreos — and a tall bottle of very good, very old Scotch. There was also a stack of color-coded folders. I didn’t touch them, but I could see that some folders were from other agencies.

After we sat and ate cookies and drank whiskey and stared at each other for too long, Church said, “Is there anything you would like to add to your report?”

“No,” I said.

“Is there anything about the report you would like to amend?”

“No.”

He nodded.

We sat.

We each had another cookie.

Church picked up two FBI fingerprint cards and handed it to me. I looked at them and read the attached report. The conclusion was this: “Both sets of prints are clearly from the same source. They match on all points.”

I sighed and set the report down.

“Fingerprints can be faked,” said Church. “There are various polymers which can be worn over the fingertips, and even the whole hand, that can carry false prints.”

“I know.”

“The FBI report is therefore inconclusive as far as we’re concerned.”

“Okay,” I said. He studied my face but I was giving him nothing to read. My face has been a stone since the fire. I didn’t want to show nothing to nobody.

Church removed a report from a DNA lab that we often used. He studied it for a moment but didn’t pass it to me.

“The lab says that the blood sample from your sleeve was contaminated. They pulled two blood types from it, one human and one animal.”

“Which animal?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Halichoerus grypus,” he said. “Commonly known as the Atlantic gray seal.”

I said nothing.

“The blood was thoroughly mixed.”

“Yes.”

“So thoroughly mixed that they were unable to entirely separate the DNA strands. In fact the only complete DNA they’ve recovered is an even mix of human and seal genes.” He placed the report on the desk and laid his palm on it. “The scientists are floating various theories which could account for that level of genetic degradation. The leading theory is that the heat somehow fused the DNA.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked quietly.

He smiled. “No.”

We sat there.

The wall clock ticked away two full minutes before he spoke again.

Church said, “There’s a legend in Ireland and elsewhere about a magical creature called a selkie. They’re mysterious women who are actually seals.” He selected a cookie but didn’t eat it. Instead he rolled it back and forth on his desk top. “But that’s myth and legend.”

“Yes.”

“This is the real world.”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t — or can’t — believe in the impossible,” he said. “Can we, Captain?”

I said nothing. Three more minutes burned off the day. The office was absolutely quiet. Beyond the big picture window the brown waters of the Baltimore Harbor flowed and churned as boats passed by.

“She’s dead,” murmured Church after a while.

“I know.”

“As much as both of us want her back, as much as each of us wants it to be untrue, Grace is dead.”

“I know,” I said.

Church finished his whiskey, got up and walked over to the window and stood there, hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the water.

I looked at the fingerprint card.

The partial palm print was matched against an official fingerprint ten-card used to record a full set of prints when anyone enters government service. The card they’d compared the partial to was old. Someone had affixed a small gold star sticker to one corner. They don’t give gold stars when you do something great or if you score on a test. They add that to your record when you die.

The name on the card was a familiar one.

Looking at it twisted a knife in my heart.

The name was GRACE COURTLAND.

I poured myself another glass of whiskey.