Joe Ledger: Special Ops

NOTE: This story takes place after the events of Assassin’s Code. There are some spoilers if you haven’t read that book.

Chap. 1

We came in with the whole Mission: Impossible thing.

Dropping through on wires, black clothes, whole bag of high-tech gizmos.

No cool theme music, though.

The ultraclean, ultrasecure lab was supposed to be making pills for old ladies with bad backs and men who wanted marathon erections.

But an undisclosed source whispered something very nasty into the right phone. She said that someone at Marquis Pharmaceuticals was cooking up something very, very nasty. The kind of thing that gives any sane person a case of the shakes. Something that no one inside U.S. borders was supposed to be working on, and something world governments had agreed to ban under all circumstances.

Two words.

Weaponized Ebola.

Yeah, sit with that for a moment. The black duds I wore were a modified Level A hazmat suit manufactured specifically for special operators. I didn’t look like the Michelin Man. More like a high-tech ninja, but there was no one around to tell me how badass I looked. Besides, I wasn’t wearing it for the cool-factor. Like I said…Ebola.

This is what the caller said: “They’re working on QOBE — quick-onset Bundibugyo ebolavirus. They already have buyers lined up.”

Quick-onset Ebola.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Ebola that works really freaking fast. Aerosolized for tactical deployment and married to nearly microscopic airborne parasites that act as aggressive vectors. This is not science fiction. This is science paid for by people who have had time to sit down, calm down, and think it over…and who still want to write a check for a bioweapon that, once introduced, will hit and present within hours. The idea was to use it in confined areas to remove hostile assets. Introduce it into a bunker or secure facility, and everyone in there would die. Without living hosts, an insertion team in combat hazmat suits can infiltrate and gain access to computers and other materials. Infection rate is ninety-eight point eight percent; mortality rate among infected is one hundred percent.

Our people worked on this until the DMS found out about it and shut the facility down.

Now someone else was screwing with it.

Which is why I was hanging from wires ninety yards down an airshaft, wrapped in a nonconductive and nonreflective Hammer suit, armed to the teeth, and scared out of my mind.

Oh yeah…and cranky.

This one was making me very, very cranky.

Chap. 2

I had a handheld BAMS unit that I used to check the viral load in the air around me. These units were portable bio-aerosol mass spectrometers that were used for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. They have a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key particles like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. As I passed it in a slow circle all the little lights stayed resolutely green. Nice.

I unfastened the airtight bioseal, peeled back the flexible hood of the modified Hammer suit I wore, and tapped my earbud to open the channel to Bug, our computer guy. He provides real time intel for gigs like this.

“Talk to me,” I said quietly. “You crack their encryption yet, or am I hanging here just for shits and giggles?”

“Yeah, Cowboy,” he said. “We’re in. Downloading a set of revised building schematics to you now.”

I wore a pair of what looked like Wayfarers with slightly heavier frames. The frames contained micro-hardware that allowed the lenses to flash images invisible to anyone else but which displayed in detailed 3D to me. Suddenly I had an entire office building around me, floating in virtual space. A tiny mouse was built into my right glove, and I used the tip of my index finger against the ball of my thumb to scroll through the schematics.

First thing was to orient myself. We’d pulled the building plans they’d filed with the proper agencies, but now that Bug used MindReader to hack the facility’s computers, we had the actual plans. The aboveground building was the same, but down where I was, four stories below street level, nothing looked the same. The ‘basement’ in the original plans was on the first of twelve sub-floors built into the bedrock of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.

“Tell me about the floor,” I said.

“It’s wired nine ways from Sunday,” said Bug, “but that’s not the bad news.”

“It’s not? Then have MindReader go in there and kick over some furniture.”

MindReader was the supercomputer around which the Department of Military Sciences was built. It was a freak of a computer, the only one of its kind, and it had a super-intrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One was to look for patterns by drawing information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing: MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to erase all traces of its presence.

“Can’t—” began Bug, but I cut him off.

“Don’t tell me ‘can’t.’”

“Cowboy, listen to me. Their security runs out of a dedicated server that isn’t wired into their main computers. Not in, anyway — no WIFI, no hard lines. Nothing. You’re going to need to find it and plug a router cable into a USB port so MindReader can access it.”

“Ah,” I said.

There were no computers visible in the room.

Not one. I wore a high-definition lapel cam, so he could see that, too.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

That’s when another voice said, “I got this.”

It should have been Top’s voice. He was suited up to follow me down. Or, if not him, then Bunny. We were the only three agents authorized to be here.

It wasn’t them.

It was a woman who dropped down on a second set of wires. Slim, gorgeous, with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. No hazmat suit. She used the hand brake on the drop wire and stopped exactly level with me.

She smiled.

It was a big smile, full of white teeth and mischief.

“Hello, Joseph,” she said.

“Hello, Violin,” I said. “What in the wide blue fuck are you doing here?”

Chap. 3

Her smile didn’t waver.

“I’m on a case,” she said.

“You’re not supposed to be on this case,” I fired back.

“You’re intruding into my case.”

“Sorry, babe, this is U.S. soil, and I’m the one with official sanction.”

“Really?” She pretended to pout. “You’re going to throw proper procedure at me? After all we’ve—”

I cut her off. “Uh-uh. Don’t you dare give me the ‘after all we’ve been through’ speech. You’ve used that too many times.”

“I have not.”

“Excuse me? Paris? Cairo? Rio? Any of that ring a bell?”

She dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “You sound like a shrewish old woman, Joseph. It’s really unattractive.”

“And you’re wanted on four continents, including this one, darlin’. So how much do you want to push this?”

We had to keep our voices to whispers, so there was an unintentional hushed comedy to the exchange.

She started grinning right around the time I did.

We hung there for a moment, smiling.

I wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and I’m not sure the term ‘lover’ fit, either. We’d been through some terrible stuff together, and we’d both nearly died. Friends of ours did die. And, no joke, we saved the world. The actual world. So, every now and then, when we found ourselves in the same part of the world at the same time, and providing neither of us had any serious emotional commitments elsewhere, Violin and I celebrated our survival, celebrated the fact of being alive. When you’ve taken the kind of fire we have, you definitely take time for that. Some soldiers go to the Wall in D.C. and trace names. Some visit Ground Zero or sit in a church — any church that’s handy — and they thank their higher power for us being on the good side of the dirt.

Violin and I? We celebrated it in a very primal, very steamy way. Clothes were torn. Furniture was broken. Cops were called more than once.

There was never any attempt at a relationship. Not for us. We were still at war. When our time was over, we — by mutual consent — walked away and went back to the killing.

But, as much as it lifted my heart to see her alive and well and smoking hot, she was not supposed to be here. This was a covert op. It wasn’t an invitational.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”

“Go for Rock,” said the deep voice of my second-in-command, First Sergeant Top Sims.

“Why am I talking to you on the radio instead of face to face?” I demanded in a tone that could burn the paint off an oil drum. “Why, instead, am I down here with a civilian?”

I leaned on the word to piss off Violin.

“Bastard,” she hissed. She stuck her tongue out at me, so I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Wasn’t my call.” Top’s voice was very calm and controlled. “Word came down from the big man. Said to afford every courtesy.”

The big man was my boss, Mr. Church, founder and head of the DMS.

Balls.

I knew that I was being unfair in my assessment that Violin was a civilian. She was hardly that. Violin was a fellow soldier, but not a fellow American. She was born in captivity to a mother who — along with many others — was forced breeding stock in the world’s oldest and ugliest Eugenics program. A group called the Red Order had been using captive women for centuries to ensure that they had enough male members of a weird genetic subgroup called the Upierczi. These were as close to actual monsters as Mother Nature was likely to cook up. They were offshoots of human evolution, unusually strong and fast, and hideous in appearance. They were the reason the myth of the vampire came into our collective consciousness. No, these guys didn’t turn into bats, sparkle, or sleep in coffins. They weren’t supernatural in any way. But they weren’t my idea of natural, either, even if they were technically human.

They were called the Red Knights.

The Red Order used them as assassins in a campaign of carefully orchestrated religious hate crimes going back to the Crusades.

Violin’s mother, Lilith, had escaped from the breeding pits. I don’t know that whole story, but whatever happened left a psychic scar on the Red Knights. They feared Lilith the way people used to fear vampires. She was their boogeyman. When Lilith escaped, she took other women with her — and their children. Violin among them. As soon as they were free, they formed a militant group called Arklight, and they began hunting down the members of the Red Order and their Upierczi assassins.

I met Violin while I was hunting down some rogue nukes in Iran. There was an interesting learning curve before we began trusting each other, but when we realized that we shared the same enemies and a similar agenda, we went into battle together. That one was a doozy. Lots of good people died, including some of my guys from Echo Team. Men who’d walked through fire with me time and again. Arklight lost some heroes — well, heroines, too. And when it was all over we’d formed a rather sketchy alliance. Nothing official, of course, because Arklight did not respect national borders in its relentless search for the surviving members of the Red Order and the Red Knights. The official U.S. stance was that Arklight was a terrorist organization.

My boss, Mr. Church, was working to change that, and so far no one from Arklight had ever spent a night inside an American jail cell. After what they’d been through, Church and I were going to make sure no one put those women into any kind of cage ever again.

All of which explains her, but didn’t explain why we were being Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a bioweapons lab.

“Talk,” I told her.

“Let me get to the computer first.”

I gestured around. “We’re in an empty chamber, honey. Unless I’m missing something….”

She produced a spray can from a Batman utility belt. Shook the can. Sprayed it.

The gas inside was white and almost opaque. There wasn’t enough particulate matter in the discharge to trigger even the most sensitive motion sensor, but the opacity was usually great for revealing electric eyes and laser tripwires.

However, that wasn’t Violin’s purpose. She turned in a slow circle and emptied at least half the can into the chamber. The sluggish air from the shaft above us stirred the gas. All I could see were black stone walls. No hidden doors, no side tunnels, no electrical outlets.

Then I saw how wrong I was.

The gas expanded and diffused outward until it caressed the walls. Except that it didn’t.

It rolled out to touch most of the walls. But to my left, the gas swirled differently. The tendrils of gas seemed to rebound from empty air and eddy, as if confused. Violin ran a laser pointer over that section of wall.

The red beam ran straight for a few inches and then bulged outward at the same point where the gas had rebounded. Violin moved the beam slowly, and I could see that there was something there. The gas knew it, the laser light knew it, but my eyes didn’t.

“What the hell?” I murmured.

She grinned, enjoying my confusion. “Holograph,” she said.

And then I understood. The security system computer access panel was indeed bolted to the wall, but it was masked by a high-density holograph that made it look like empty wall. Without the gas and the laser, I would never have found it.

“Guess that answers the question as to whether this place is crooked,” I said. “Can’t work up any reason a legit lab would have that kind of security.”

“I never trust pharmaceutical companies,” she said with asperity.

I tended to agree. Sure, a lot of them are probably on the up and up, but in my trade I kept running into mad scientists cooking up bioweapons. Some of the most dangerous terrorists I’ve tackled have been pharmaceutical moguls or pharmacologists of one stripe or another. I’d have to watch that tendency toward negative bias, though. Subjectivity is a dangerous thing.

Violin adjusted the wires so that she tilted in the direction of the invisible box. It was slow work, and it took her some time to find the cover plate lock, disable it with a little electronic doohickey — that looked a whole lot like the doohickeys that only the DMS is supposed to have — and finally locate the USB port.

“Router?” she said, holding out a hand.

I sighed and handed it over.

Violin plugged it in, making sure not to touch any part of the panel with her hands. It probably had passive security, like contact and trembler switches. The router’s cable slid easily into the port and a tiny green light flashed on.

“Bug,” I said, “we’re—”

“Got it,” he said. “Acquiring the security system now. Hm, nice stuff. Too bad MindReader is going to bitch-slap it.” He actually sang that last part in a mocking falsetto.

I work with some pretty strange people.

We hung there and waited. The white gas swirled around us, obscuring the wires so that it looked like we were flying.

“So,” I said, “want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

Her mouth kept smiling but her eyes held no trace of humor. “Hunting vampires.”

My mouth went dry and my nuts tried to crawl up inside of my body. “Red Knights? You’re saying they’re here?”

“No,” she said. “But somebody who works here is helping them, and I—”

Bug cut in. “Okay, Cowboy…we own that place.”

“Copy that.”

I swung my feet down toward the floor and hit the cable release on the wires. A moment later Violin dropped silently beside me. The wires swayed around us like web threads from a giant spider.

The hologram projectors that hid the computer access panel clicked off, revealing a flat gray box the size of a hardback book. The router no longer looked like it was floating in midair. But when the holograms vanished, we discovered that there had been a second bit of misdirection. Right below us, set into the precise center of the concrete floor, was a steel hatch. It was very well made and was designed such that it was perfectly flush with the concrete. It had a touchscreen keypad that was currently displaying: “RESTRICTED ACCESS.”

“So far the intel is good,” I murmured. “We were told that this air vent was the way in. Looks like it is.”

Violin and I knelt on either side of it. I removed a flat gadget about the size of a pack of playing cards and pressed it onto the hatch. It connected to MindReader and began cycling through the hundreds of millions of permutations of the locking combination.

While we waited, I turned to Violin. “Okay, spill.”

She spilled.

Arklight spies had gotten wind of a hitherto unknown cell of Red Knights operating out of the Philly suburbs. It was unclear if the cell was preparing to strike Philly or if they were simply using the city as a base for recruiting and training. The Knights preferred cities that had elaborate subways and tunnel systems.

“Why Blue Bell?” I asked. “The subway doesn’t come all the way out here.”

She shook her head. “They have a contact here at Marquis Pharmaceuticals. A developmental chemist named Ryerson.”

“And what’s Ryerson doing for the Red Knights?”

“I don’t know. But my mother did a thorough background check on him. Ken Ryerson is forty-one, unmarried, no family, no apparent politics, has not voted in any recent elections, no police record.”

I waited. She wouldn’t give me that much if there wasn’t more. Violin liked a little drama.

“Mr. Ryerson gambles.”

“Ah,” I said.

That was it. She laid it out for me. Ryerson had been a three-times-a-year gambler when Atlantic City was the only place you could lay down a legal bet unless you flew to Nevada. Then the Native Americans opened casinos in the Poconos, and that made him a once-a-month man. A few years ago they turned the racetrack in Bensalem into a casino, twenty minutes away on the Turnpike. Ryerson started going once a week, then three times a week. He wasn’t a card player. From the way Violin described him, it was doubtful the man knew a straight flush from a toilet flush. Ryerson needed a more constant and predictable fix. He played nickel slots. A lot of nickel slots. Started getting later and later on his utility bills and car payments. The third time he was late on the rent, he had to move to a smaller apartment in a less attractive suburb. He gave up the leased car and bought a hooptie. Ate a lot of cheap takeout food. Didn’t stop plugging nickels into the one-armed bandit, though.

As she talked I thought about what it must be like to be Ryerson. What specific bit of damage makes a man tear off tiny chunks of his life and feed them into a machine that everyone knows is specifically designed to give a debit on any long-term investment? Old ladies play the slots out of boredom and because they socialize with the other pensioners. The uninformed play them because the casino hype yells about the million dollar jackpots. Guys like Ryerson have to know that there’s no happy ending because even a jackpot on the nickel slots is small change, comparatively speaking. This man was either a loser or he was sick, and he almost certainly knew it.

The first digit pinged on the combination.

“So what changed?” I asked, knowing that there had to be a second act to this sad story.

“He bought a new car,” she said. “He cleared all his credit card debt. And he booked a vacation in Las Vegas.”

“I’m guessing that he didn’t win big at the slots.”

“His largest jackpot to date is forty-eight dollars and fifty cents. However over the last month, he’s made five cash deposits between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred dollars.”

“Ah,” I said. Banks are required to report deposits over a certain dollar amount. “Why doesn’t he just take out an ad in the paper saying he’s been bought?”

“He might as well have,” she agreed.

“Bug,” I said, “take a look at this guy Ryerson. See if he looks good as our informant. Hit me with anything that comes up.”

“Copy that.”

The second number pinged. Four to go.

“Why were you looking at him in the first place?” I asked Violin.

She shook her head. “We were looking at this facility. At everyone here. It’s been on our list for years because two of the shareholders have business ties to known members of the Red Order. Strong ties. One of those shareholders also owns points in BioDynamics out of South Africa.”

I nodded. I knew that from our own intel. Without the BioDynamics connection, our people might not have taken the nameless informant very seriously. But you can’t ignore that kind of red flag.

If you don’t remember the story, it was four years ago. BioDynamics made a name for itself by developing technologies that allowed groups like Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization to collect and process biological samples while still in the field. That was a godsend because it allowed the doctors to identify diseases and classify disease mutations without the time lag of sending samples to labs in Europe or America. Lives were saved every day because of that technology.

Here’s the kicker, though: the biosampling equipment was also collecting a great deal of information about virulent strains of exotic diseases and storing it in concealed clean compartments within the machine housing. When BioDynamics techs went into the field every few months to collect the machines and replace them with fresh units, all of those samples were taken back to the main lab in Modderfontein, in the Gauteng province of South Africa. There, the diseases samples were processed, studied, weaponized, mass-produced, and sold to groups who intended to distribute them in the poorest black towns throughout the country. The strains they tried to release were designed to resist all known antibiotics. The goal? Win back South Africa for a small ultraextremist group of whites by simply eradicating the majority of the blacks. Simple, direct, utterly ruthless, and very effective. Similar distribution plans were in the works for Somalia and other countries with a high percentage of black Muslims.

It would have been effective if not for a joint action taken by the DMS, Barrier — the UK counterpart of the DMS — and a hotshot Recces team from the South African Special Forces Brigade. The facility was seized, and the staff arrested and put on trial for a list of crimes that was so long that the world court judges asked the prosecution to summarize. The courts had to make an example of the perpetrators because to not do so would be to ignite the fuse on a global race war.

It didn’t surprise me that Red Order members were involved. They pretty much invented the concept of hate crimes back in the thirteenth century. Freaks.

The third and fourth digits pinged at the same time.

I went through my habitual self pat-down, quickly and lightly touching the handle of the Beretta 92F snugged into a nylon shoulder rig, the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the inside of one pocket, the BAMS unit hanging from my belt.

The fifth light pinged.

I glanced at Violin as I pulled my hazmat hood into place.

“You’re underdressed for this party.”

“I hope not.”

“Hey, I’m serious, Violin,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know what I’m hunting down here.”

“Protocols for developing a weaponized viral hemorrhagic fever. Arklight has been aware for some time of plans to sell a developed protocol along with viable samples of a crude prototype to several terrorist groups, including the Knights.”

I stared at her. “You think you’re down here to steal some computer files?”

“Sure.”

“You do realize that MindReader is currently hacked into that system and whatever they have, we now have.”

“You have MindReader, Joseph,” she said, “but Arklight doesn’t. And the Oracle system Mr. Church gave us is a poor substitute.”

“Horse shit. Oracle is the second-best hacking system in the world. Besides, if you’d have brought this to us, Church would have Bug on this.”

Violin’s eyes shifted away, and I suddenly knew why she hadn’t reached out.

“Your mother didn’t want to ask Church for a favor,” I said.

“No,” she said, and sighed.

There is apparently a very long and complicated history between Mr. Church and Lilith. It is, however, a tightly closed subject. Also…given her history, I would imagine that it would gall Lilith to ask for help from any man. I did not blame her one bit.

On the other hand, that lack of communication came with its own problems.

“Listen to me,” I said, taking her by the arms, “I didn’t come down here to hack a file any more than I’m here to intercept a sample. We have an informant who said that this thing is already fully developed and that they are mass-producing it for an established client.”

That news hit her pretty damn hard. The way you’d expect it to hit someone. Her eyes flared and she recoiled from the hatch as if it was a coiled rattlesnake.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure? No. We have an anonymous voice on the phone. The call was made from a disposable phone that was purchased at a strip mall near here.”

She considered this, then shook her head. “All of our intel indicates that they are months away from a stable bioweapon. Besides, this is a development facility, Joseph. The viruses will be in sealed containers in secured vaults. It’s not going to be floating around.”

“Under ideal circumstances, sure, but what if they realize that they’re being infiltrated? Accidents happen. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen a lot of monsters, big and small, get off the leash.”

Violin chewed her lip. It was an unconscious action with no hint of flirtation in it, but I still found it incredibly sexy.

Yes, even crouching in an airshaft over a lab that made weaponized Ebola, I’m still a horn dog. Not a news flash.

The last number pinged.

“You can’t go in,” I said.

“There’s no way I’m staying out here.”

“I can bring Top and Bunny down here and you can stay topside and watch our backs.”

“Not a chance, Joseph.”

“It’s fucking dangerous in there, Violin.”

“Well,” she said with a coquettish smile, “then I’ll have to be very careful, won’t I?”

I didn’t answer that. But I pulled the hood on and made sure the seals were perfectly tight. I don’t mind taking risks — that’s kind of a professional responsibility, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve taken some really dumb risks over the years in situations where I didn’t have the time to think up a better plan. But give me a few minutes to plan and I’m the most cautious guy you’d ever want to meet. There are no second chances when it comes to accidents involving one of the world’s deadliest pathogens.

Violin and I drew our guns. We shared a nod, then I lifted the hatch.

Chap. 4

Bug fed us the route.

Down a metal ladder, along one corridor, through a doorway, down some stairs, through more doorways and more corridors. At each point we encountered a security barrier — a retina scan, geometric hand scanner, keycard box. MindReader was deep inside the system now, though, and as we approached each doorway the scanner lights went from red to green. Nothing and no one stopped us. Not surprising, since the first three levels were administrative. Funny that even evil and corruption generate a lot of mundane paperwork.

I tried to imagine who would come to a place like this to fix the copier.

Did they have evil copier companies?

Then we reached the bottom level and stood inside the stairwell, stealing covert glances through a small wire-mesh window in the door. Twenty feet away was a heavy-gauge steel door, and outside stood a guard. Big, tough-looking, and alert. He had a Sig Sauer in a belt holster and a Heckler and Koch rifle slung from one muscular shoulder.

Bug said, “Okay, Cowboy, we have sixteen rooms at that level. Employee records indicate a security staff and lab personnel working on all shifts. You’re too deep for thermal scans, but figure anywhere from nine to fourteen people.”

“We see one guard,” I said. “How many others?”

“Four on the schedule. You want me to send backup?”

I cut a look at Violin. She was a superbly trained assassin. A world-class sniper and one of the deadliest knife fighters I’d ever met. Faster than me, and I’m really fast.

“We got it,” I said, “but don’t let anyone upstairs fall asleep.”

I nodded to the door. “You as good with a pistol as you are with a sniper rifle?”

Violin cocked an eyebrow. I told her why.

Chap. 5

As soon as I opened the door the guard whipped around in my direction and brought his rifle up. What he saw was a man in a black hazmat suit.

Specifically, he saw a man in a hazmat suit who took a single wobbly step before collapsing as if dying.

The soldier stared in horror for half a second, caught between needing to know who I was and yelling for help.

Violin leaned out the door and put two bullets in him. One in the heart, one in the head.

Perfect shots, nearly silent, the pfft sounds following each other so quickly they almost sounded like a single report. The guard went down. Without a sound, without a pause. One moment he was alive, and the next he was meat slumping to the ground.

There is a part of me that is constantly appalled at the fragility of life and the grim candor with which an invitation to die is spoken to total strangers. I did not know this man, and it was likely that I’d never know his name or anything about him. Somebody else in another enforcement agency would handle clean up on him. Another person I didn’t know would sweep this man’s life into the trash can.

As I got up I glanced at Violin. There was no flicker of mercy or regret or anything on her face. I had the tiniest flicker of distaste at that before I reminded myself of where she’d been born and under what circumstances she’d been raised. In light of that, it was amazing that she was not, herself, a monster.

I checked the BAMS unit. The lights were still green.

I tapped my earbud. “We’re at the door, Bug. Let us in.”

The security locks clicked.

I took the lead as I nudged the door open with my shoulder. Directly inside was a small room with rows of hazmat suits on hangars, a sign-in log, and a pressurized door. We had to let the hall door close and seal before the inner door would open. The air had that distinctive smell of ultrafiltered air, which never smelled quite right to me. I guess I’ve become habituated to pollutants.

Still had green lights on the BAMS.

We went through the pressurized door and found ourselves in a kind of central courtyard that had three short corridors leading to big doors marked — I kid you not — One, Two, and Three.

Violin turned to me. “Do you know which lab has the Ebola?”

“Nope. Want to see what’s behind door number one?”

She nodded without a smile. I doubted she watched many game shows. I let it go.

We crept toward that corridor, flanked the entrance, and were just about to make the short run to the door when it opened.

A small man in a white lab coat stood there.

He should have been shocked. He should have shrieked and yelled and called for backup.

Instead he smiled.

A small, cold smile.

The four security guards behind him all had guns; all of them had laser sights on me.

“So,” said the small man in the lab coat, “this is fun, isn’t it?”

I recognized his voice.

It was my informant.

I said, “Ah, balls.”

Chap. 6

“Drop your guns,” said the little man.

“Not a chance,” I said, pointing the barrel at his face. He was almost close enough to grab and use as a shield; definitely close enough to kill with my first shot.

The guy seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Shoot me and my guys will kill you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “maybe. But you’ll be deader’n shit.”

“True.” He contrived not to look impressed. I wondered why. “So where’s that leave us?”

“Having a chat.”

“What would you like to chat about?”

“It starts with an ‘e.’”

He chuckled. It made his eyes crinkle, and I realized that he looked exactly like Mr. Rogers. Swap the lab coat for a cardigan and it’s him. It gave this whole thing an extra layer of surreal weirdness.

“Can we pause to appreciate the wonderfulness of my trap?” he asked.

“Yes, hooray, I’m sure you’ll get your Mad Scientist merit badge.”

He pursed his lips. “Sadly you won’t get the Be Prepared badge. You came in here alone?”

“He’s not alone,” said Violin. “He brought a date.”

We all laughed about that. The laser sights never budged, though. Not theirs, not ours.

“You want to cut to it, friend?” I said. “You set a trap and we walked into it. Now we have a standoff. What’s the punch line here?”

“Oh, it’s pretty simple,” he said. “I’m in charge of quality control here. Our clients had some questions about our security. Despite all of our assurances that we have excellent security as well as redundant, fail-safe and alternative systems, they were still jittery. So I arranged a practical demonstration. We, um, leaked some information to several law enforcement agencies, domestic and foreign, over the last fourteen months. Different information to each agency, and leaked in ways that would encourage them to keep that information in-house. You know how you fellows in the alphabet agencies hate to share. Since then we’ve had the FBI, the CIA, Homeland, the DEA, and a few other groups come poking around. Not here, of course, and never the same company twice.”

“You’re not Marquis Pharmaceuticals?”

“Oh, hell no. And, by the way, Marquis doesn’t actually know we’re down here. At least, no one in authority does. We own key members of maintenance and security, as we do with fifty or so other companies, including the construction company that built this place, the zoning board, and the various federal offices that watchdog facilities of this kind. That’s the real way to get things done, you know. Forget about corrupting the high-profile executives. They’re always being watched and audited. No, the secret is to own the blue-collar grunts and the watchdogs because nobody of consequence is looking at them. It’s the same way with some of the financial games we have running — we have our people in the IRS, the SEC, as well as Wall Street. We own the people who are paid to look for the bad guys.”

“That has a familiar ring to it,” I said.

His smile turned into a grin.

“I’ll bet it does.”

“You’re the Seven Kings,” I said.

His grin kept getting bigger.

Oh fuck.

The Seven Kings were the world’s most powerful and elusive organization. They pretended to be an ancient secret society and reinforced that by hijacking the history and urban legends of other secret societies, from the Illuminati to the Neo-Templars. They also pretended to be terrorists, but in truth they used terrorist groups as pawns, funding and supporting them and ultimately aiming them at specific targets. Terror, however, was only a byproduct of their game, and they weren’t in it for God or to further a political agenda. They were in it for the money. If you knew exactly when a major terrorist attack was going to happen, you could make an incredible fortune during the flight-to-safety stock market panic that always follows. The Kings were behind 9/11 and the 2009 economic crash. Three of the Kings — Osama Bin Laden, Sebastian Gault, and Hugo Vox — were dead. That left four of them, and any replacements they might have recruited.

“I am a very small cog in the machine that is the Seven Kings,” he admitted. “The organization, however, is always growing. And in case you’re wondering, we’ve filled all outstanding vacancies. Killing me won’t stop this project, and it won’t prevent our clients from receiving the fruits of our research.”

“Let’s see if that’s true after I blow your nutsack off.”

He just grinned.

“Okay, Sparky,” I said, “so you duped me here with an anonymous phone call. You also put out the stuff about Ryerson?”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Mr. Ryerson is one of ours. Very low level, but like I said, that’s where the action is.” He turned his smile toward Violin. “We were hoping for Interpol or a Recces operative from South Africa. But I don’t think that’s who you are.”

“She’s a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said. “She wants to know if you heard the word of God today.”

“Cute.”

Violin thought so, too. She laughed. There was a bit of a threat in the laugh, too. And a bit of fear.

“I wasn’t clear on something,” said the guy, “so let me correct that. When I said that I didn’t know who you were, miss, I meant personally. I know which organization you belong to. Arklight has become quite a troublesome little sewing circle. That’s why I invited representatives of our newest client to join us.”

“Joe…,” murmured Violin, and even as she said it I heard a soft scuff behind us. I turned. Door number two stood open, and two Red Knights stood there.

They were also smiling.

Their mouths were filled with jagged teeth. You see teeth like that in monster movies, but in the movies they’re fake. They’re special effects. That’s not the case with the Knights. Those teeth are way too real. Both of the Knights carried weapons that looked like ice axes. Dagger-tipped on one end, hatchet blade on the other.

The Knights looked at me with their rat-red eyes and dismissed me with sneers. The looks they gave Violin were different. Women in general were less than nothing to the Red Knights, which was a viciously patriarchal society. Women were slaves and breeding stock. But Arklight was different. Those women had killed many of the Knights and hunted them around the world with the same ferocity as Nazi hunters after World War II. It was kill on sight on both sides, and I knew that they would go after Violin with every intention of killing her while making the torment last.

The fact that they didn’t attack her immediately suggested that they didn’t know who she was. If they knew that she was Violin, daughter of Lilith, there would already be blood on the floor.

I jerked my head toward the Knights. “And them? The Seven Kings are recruiting monsters now?”

“Oh, hell,” said the scientist, “we’ve always recruited monsters. I believe you’ve encountered some in the past.”

“So, what’s the play?” I asked. “We all know how this ends, so tell me why we’re still chatting.”

He nodded. “You’re right, we do know how it ends. Ideally I live, you die, my clients are satisfied that we know who’s looking at us and, more importantly, how they’re looking and how they typically respond. So far there have been no surprises. The administrator in me appreciates that, because it allows the Kings to continue working the way we’ve always been working, knowing that the blunt predictability of the United States government’s various law enforcement agencies actually contributes to our success. However, the sociopath in me — and, yes, I admit it; in the Kings that’s both a job requirement and pathway to promotion — that part of me is disappointed in how clumsily you’ve walked into this trap. I thought that the DMS would send someone of greater skill.”

I shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes.”

He gave a sad nod of agreement. “So true. Anyway, to answer your question, the ‘play’ is that you get a choice. We want to know exactly how the information we leaked was disseminated internally by your organizations. Who received it, who processed it, who had eyes on it, how and to whom was it shared. That sort of thing. A complete rundown.”

“Let me get right on that,” I said. “We betray our people and then you kill us. I have to tell you, Sparky, that your sales pitch eats dog turds.”

“No, wait, hear me out,” said the guy. “That’s not the choice I was talking about.”

“This should be good,” murmured Violin. Behind her the Knights growled like dogs.

“It is,” insisted the guy. “There are three possible scenarios. In one scenario — the one I think we can all be happy with — we sit down over coffee and you talk, and that talk will be viewed as part of the application process for joining our organization. In that scenario we’re all friends and nobody gets trigger-happy. Nobody dies.”

“Very generous,” said Violin.

“Isn’t it?” the guy said, nodding. “And your safety would be guaranteed. You become part of our team, and believe me, the pay and benefits are spectacular. We take very good care of our people and we reward loyalty. Loyalty to us, I mean. Sure, there’s a vetting process and a probation period, but once you prove yourself, you’re really part of the family. No threats, none of that. It’s how they recruited me. Now I’m on the administrative level. You can be, too.”

“Why do I get the feeling that your nose should be growing a foot every time you open your mouth?” I asked.

“I’m dead serious.”

“Unfortunate choice of words,” said Violin.

“Oops. Yeah, sorry. We really do want you to join, and if you do then you have a real future and a great life. Look at me, look into my eyes. Do I look like I’m lying to you?”

I did, and I think he was genuinely serious. He held a lot of good cards, so there wasn’t much reason to lie to us.

“But the alternatives aren’t as much fun,” he continued. “In scenario two you still tell us everything we want to know, but you make us work for it. Make no mistake, you will tell us everything, but the process of encouragement is extreme, and what they bury afterward won’t even look like people.”

“Not a fan of that one,” I said.

“No, of course not,” said the guy. “Though my friends from the Red Knights are particularly fond of it.”

“We will rip the truth from you,” said one of the Knights.

“Shove it up your ass, Count Chocula,” I said.

Violin laughed so hard she snorted. Even the guy chortled.

“What’s the third scenario?” I asked, even though we all knew what that one would be.

“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” said the guy.

I took a long breath and let it out slowly. “There’s a fourth scenario,” I said.

“Oh? Does it involve me suddenly coming to my senses and letting you arrest me?”

“Not exactly. It involves you unburdening your soul to me. You tell us everything you know about the Seven Kings, including the identity of each King, the names of your customers, and the locations of any bases you have.”

He goggled at me for a moment, then he burst out laughing. Even his guards looked amused, and until now they’d been stone-faced. I laughed, too. Violin turned to the Knights and gave them a saucy wink.

“That’s really funny,” said the guy.

“I know, right?” I said.

“It’s also the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Not entirely.”

I cut a look at Violin, and she wore a small, confused frown. She had no idea where I was going with this. I put a bland smile on my face.

“I will go this far,” I said. “I’ll tell you our names. It might matter in the way this all plays out.”

“Please do.”

“I’m Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.”

His face went slack for a moment and he lost some color. But he recovered fast and cleared his throat.

“And the, um, young lady?”

The young lady straightened, her chin lifting imperiously. “You can call me Violin, daughter of Lilith, senior field operative of Arklight.”

You really could have heard a pin drop. I think I heard the Red Knights grinding their fangs together. The Seven Kings guy’s face kept vacillating between horrified shock and the delight of a kid on Christmas morning who thought he was getting socks and underwear and instead discovered a pony with a bow tied around its neck.

“Oh my God,” he breathed.

“Yeah. Bit of a jackpot moment,” I said.

“This slut is ours,” growled one of the Red Knights. “We will use her until she screams for death and then send her eyes to the demon Lilith.”

“You are welcome to try,” said Violin. “I’ll break your teeth out and add them to my collection.”

They hissed at her. Actually hissed, like cougars. The sound made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight out from gooseflesh skin.

Into the ensuing silence, I said, “I’m going to give you two choices, Sparky. In scenario one, you tell your guys to lay down their weapons and you come and have a confessional moment with my boss and me.”

He just stared at me as if I’d suggested he pour live scorpions into his tighty-whities.

“Scenario two,” I said, “a whole bunch of people die, and you’re the first to hit the deck. If you’re really, really lucky, you die before I turn you over to my boss.”

“You do realize,” said the guy, “that there are four laser sights on your chest. Four.”

“Sure. And there are three of ’em on your chest.”

His smile flickered. I had my gun on him and Violin had her pistol on the closest Knight. “Three? But….”

The guy’s voice trailed off as he looked down. My laser sight was rock-steady on his sternum. But two other dots flanked it.

“I don’t…,” he began, then he raised his eyes and looked at the doorway. The snouts of two rifles protruded only an inch into the chamber. An inch was enough.

“Call it, Boss,” said Bunny in my ear.

The Knights whirled and snarled.

“Nine, three, go,” I snapped.

The other laser sights shifted and found new targets. There were two pffts of silenced rifles and the guards on either side of the guy flew backward as 5.56 × 45 mm NATO rounds exploded their heads.

There was perhaps a single fragment of time when no one moved, when the realities of this new version of the game were painted in the air for everyone to read. Then it all became very fast and messy.

I kicked the guy into the two guards behind him. It was a hard damn kick, and they all staggered backward, but both guards fired at the same time. Wild shots that pinged and whanged all over the place. I dodged and drove forward as bullets burned around me. I felt one round tug my sleeve and another ricochet off the floor and clip my heel.

Behind me, Violin emptied her gun at the Red Knights. One of them slammed into her in a diving tackle that should have crippled her. It would have broken the bones of any ordinary person. But Violin was born in the breeding pits. That meant she was half human and half Upierczi. She’s stronger, faster, and a hell of a lot more durable than anyone I ever met. She could bench press me. She did it once in bed just to prove she could.

I heard a scream, but I don’t think it was hers.

The other Red Knight whirled and tried to find cover from the gunfire that had erupted from the doorway. But Top and Bunny were on their feet, running into the room, taking lots of quick little steps so as not to interfere with their aim. Their aim was superb. Rounds punched into the Knight and tore blood and screams and life from him. The rounds made him judder and dance, and the wall behind him became a splash painting of bright crimson.

I elbowed the Kings guy out of the way, and he rolled into the corner, spitting teeth. The two remaining guards were good. Tough, highly trained. Instead of trying to bring their long-guns to bear in what was becoming the most violent episode of WrestleMania, they tried to hammer me with kicks, catching me on the forehead, the shoulder, and the elbow of the arm I raised to block the barrage. I rammed my pistol up as one kick came at my face and shot the guard through the sole of his foot. The boot and the foot inside of it didn’t even slow the nine millimeter round down; it punched through and hit the man on the point of the chin, blowing out the back of his head.

As he slumped, the second guard kicked the pistol out of my hand. I let it go and hurled myself at him, punching my way up his body, hitting him in thigh, groin, stomach, floating ribs, and throat. He managed to smash me in the side of the face with a knee, but I rolled with it and then twisted and bit hard on the inside of his thigh.

His scream hit the ultrasonic, and he twisted so hard I nearly lost my teeth.

I let go, reached up, grabbed his tie, and yanked it as hard as I could, which peeled him off the floor so that he sat up. I threw my weight sideways, spun on my right hip, and kicked him in the face with my left foot. I held onto the tie as I kicked him four more times.

I think two were enough, though. There was no resistance at all after that. He slumped back, his head lolling way too loosely on his slack neck.

I cut a sharp look over my shoulder and saw Violin and the Knight in the last moment of their encounter. The Knight had his axe; Violin’s gun was gone, lost in the heat of the fight, but she’d drawn two slender knives from inside her clothes. I’d seen her use those knives twice before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as fast, as horrible, or as combatively balletic. She moved with a kind of athletic grace that I knew I could never possess, dancing around the swings of the axe, flicking out with the blades, seeding the air with rubies that splatted against the floor and wall and ceiling. The Red Knight seemed to disintegrate within the whirlwind of her dance. Before Top and Bunny could cross the room to give her backup, there was no need for any assistance. The Knight crumpled into red madness on the floor. He hadn’t looked human before, and now it was hard to tell that he had ever been a living thing.

I caught movement to my left and scrambled to my knees just in time to see the Kings guy make a dive for my pistol. He snatched it up but didn’t try to shoot me. He tried to eat the barrel, but I made the long reach and swatted the gun out of his hand. He even tried to fight, but he wasn’t a fighter. I only had to dent him a little to quiet him down.

And then it was over.

Gun smoke hung in the air, tinged by red. The air smelled of cordite, copper, and pain.

I got to my feet as Bunny came over to grab and cuff the Kings guy. He patted him down for weapons and to make sure there were no suicide devices planted anywhere. There weren’t any, and that was going to seriously suck for him. Life was not going to be much fun from now on.

Top and Bunny were both dressed in full hazmat Hammer suits. Just like me.

“I feel overdressed for this party,” said Violin as she cleaned her knives.

“More like we’re overdressed. I don’t think there’s anything here.” I waved the BAMS around. Everything was in the green.

The Kings guy said, “There’s nothing here. No protocols, no samples. This facility has been thoroughly stripped of everything.”

He said it with an attempt at a grin. Bloody teeth spoiled the effect. Top and Bunny each had a hand under an armpit, holding the man on his feet. He was dwarfed by them. I got up in his face.

“This is what’s going to happen, Sparky,” I said. “You are about to disappear off the face of the earth. We know how long a reach the Kings have, so you’re not going to go into the system. No prison, no vacation at Gitmo. The Kings will never find you.”

“So what? You think I don’t know about ‘enhanced interrogation’? I’ve been conditioned against it. I don’t care what you try and do to me, I won’t say a fucking word.”

Violin said, “Let me have him. Let me take him to Arklight. I’ll bet my mother could open him up.”

The little guy tried to smile his way through that, tried to construct an expression that said that her threat meant nothing. We all knew different. The Red Knights feared Lilith, and they were fucking vampires.

I sucked my teeth.

“You’re not seriously considering this?” demanded the guy.

I turned to Violin.

“On one condition,” I said. “You share one hundred percent of what you learn. No holdbacks.”

She nodded. “I’ll film the interrogations if you want.”

“Christ,” murmured Bunny.

“No thanks,” I said. “A transcript would be fine.”

The guy looked from Bunny to Top to me. “You can’t do this. I’m an American citizen. Goddamn it, Ledger, I have rights.”

“Too bad.”

“You can’t do this.”

“Sure I can.”

“You’re bluffing,” he said as tears broke and ran down his face. All throughout history there are stories of what happened to enemy men when they fell into the hands of the women. Women, as a rule, don’t start wars, but anyone who thinks they’re the weaker and gentler sex is seriously misinformed. “You’re just saying this to make me talk.”

“We both know you’re going to talk, Sparky,” I said. “If I give you to Arklight, it shortcuts the process. And it means no blood on American hands. Nice solution.”

“You’re only saying that…you’re playing a game with me.”

“Look at me, look into my eyes,” I said softly. “Do I look like I’m lying to you?”

Hearing his own words was the trick. I think that’s what broke him. That, and the fact that he did take a look into my eyes. A good, deep look.

He began sobbing.

He swore on his life, his mother, his children that he would tell us — and only us — everything. Freely, without coercion. He’d crack the Kings apart for us. He’d tell us where we could find the real lab that was manufacturing the weaponized Ebola. He’d tell us where the Kings’ training camps were. Anything we wanted to know, he’d tell us — if we wouldn’t turn him over to Violin and the women of Arklight. Tears and snot ran down his face, and he pissed his pants.

I felt a wave of disgust — at him and at myself.

“Okay,” I said to Bunny, “take him out of here.”

Bunny looked relieved. He was almost gentle as he led the sobbing man away.

When they were gone, I turned to Violin. “You played that well.”

She gave me an enigmatic little smile and walked off to begin searching the facility.

It left Top and me standing there surrounded by dead people.

“Nice play, Cap’n,” he said. “He really thought you were going to hand him over.”

“Yeah.”

Top started to go, then paused, glancing back at me. “You…were joking, right? I mean, that was all bullshit. You’d never have let those women have him. You’re not that crazy…right?”

I smiled at him.

“Of course not,” I lied.