Kill Switch

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

His name was Harry Bolt and he was not a great spy.

He was probably not a very good spy. Or even a moderately good one. He knew that. Everyone who knew him knew that. His boss did, too.

And his father definitely did.

Harry thought about this as he crouched in the dark and tried hard not to get caught, not to get seen, and not to get killed. All very important things on his to-do list. Right at the top of his priorities this evening. Harry was a disappointment to many but he was still his own favorite person. Getting arrested, interrogated, disappeared, or shot would seriously interfere with his motto of “Die Old and Rich and in Bed with a Porn Star.” He wanted to get that translated into Latin and tattooed somewhere on his body.

The night was dark and the rest of his team were taking their sweet time doing their part of this job. This very, very illegal job. Being a third-tier field agent for the CIA did not come with many protections. He was alone now because the two other members of his team, Roy Olvera and Jim Florida, were nowhere to be found. Olvera was supposed to have prepped this lock so all Harry had to do was cut a wire and manually push back the metal service door to enter the underground chamber. But, no Olvera and no prep work. God only knew where Florida was. He’d gone off to upload a neutral video loop to the security cameras, but he was taking his sweet time about it. Or he was lost again. Florida got lost a lot.

That was the problem. Neither of those other two clowns took this job seriously because it was a bullshit assignment. All three of them knew it. Shit jobs like this were only ever given to field operators who had screwed up as badly or as often as the Three Stooges. That’s what the other staffers at the Agency’s Hungarian station called his team. Nice. He wished that it hadn’t been so thoroughly earned, though. Screwups were their specialty, and Harry had to admit it.

He wondered if his father had ever screwed up any part of any mission in his entire life. No. Probably not. Demigods don’t make mistakes. In truth, Harry’s father was a great spy. Maybe the great spy. Absolutely everyone knew that. Dad was Harcourt Bolton, Senior, and Harry knew that nothing he ever did was going to let him live up to that kind of a legacy.

Harry Bolt loved his father. He really did.

Conditionally.

He also hated his father. Conditionally.

Like everything in Harry Bolt’s life, his relationship with his dad was complicated. It was always complicated. Even more complicated than Harry’s love life, which was so weird you couldn’t sell it as a reality show. No one would believe the string of beautiful, artistic, accomplished, and absolutely bug-fuck nuts women who came and went in his life. Harry couldn’t believe most of it and he’d been there, done that, and had all the scars and souvenirs.

His relationship with dear old Dad… well, that was even more of a mess.

Most of those complications stemmed from the challenges associated with living in the shadow of a great man. A better man, as Harry’s fourth consecutive stepmother went to such great lengths to point out. A man who was, as Harry’s superiors in Central Intelligence so often reminded him very quietly, a hero. A millionaire whose net worth was soon going to change its first letter from M to B. And while being the son of someone about to join the billionaire club had its perks, it also came with its burdens.

One of the problems — and there were many — was that there was no actual way to live up to his father. Ask Jakob Dylan, ask Julian Lennon. “Son of a Legend” should qualify one for handicapped parking privileges. His father’s unattainable reputation was the reason Harry shortened his last name. Fewer people made the connection even though they looked exactly like father and son. Except that Dad was a little taller, a little thinner, a little better looking, and had — despite his age — six-pack abs rather than Harry’s shorter stature and kegger gut.

Life, as Harry Bolt saw it, sucked moose dick.

And where the hell were Olvera and Florida? Slacker buttholes, both of them. Harry hated being the third Stooge. He squatted in the dark in a tiny electrical access corridor three hundred feet below the subbasement of the library in Budapest. He was sure that if his father was there he’d have disarmed this frigging lock with nothing more than a lift of one disapproving eyebrow, and he’d be inside already. Getting it all done.

This mission had some fuzzy edges and the best that could be said of the intel that put him down here in the dark was that it was marginally better than deciding policy by flipping a coin. Marginally, and that was Harry being generous. From a distance the job sounded pretty cool, almost glamorous. Almost “dadlike.” Harry’s team was assigned to track an international black marketeer named Ohan who had known ties with ISIL and who was possibly smuggling high-tech weapons to the extremists. The weapon, which had a cool code name — Kill Switch — was something stolen from a covert lab and was being ferried to ISIL in pieces. Harry’s team was supposed to locate one such shipment and verify its contents. If the mission was successful, then the Agency would spin up its engines for an all-out assault on Ohan’s smuggling network. On the other hand, if the shipment the Stooges had been tracking was a lot less important, as Harry’s supervisor implied, then this was something akin to busywork. Something that looked good in any report friends of his father might see — thereby casting the Hungarian station chief in a good light — but which in reality was a big steaming pile of horseshit.

This wouldn’t be the first such case. Not by a long damn way.

Harry would love to have gone up against a real ISIL field team. That would be cool. That would help him make some kind of statement about his career. Instead he was breaking into a museum for no good damn reason. He was absolutely positive that this was a waste of time.

He tapped his earbud to get to the team channel.

“Corndog to Waffles,” he said, using his call sign and trying to reach Olvera. No answer. He tried Florida — Sunstroke. Got nothing. Spent a few moments cursing. Then he sighed and went back to work on the access electronics. He had half a dozen wires stripped, alligator clips rerouting power, and tiny meters providing information Harry didn’t know if he could trust. Sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. His fingers were sweating, too, as he dug around in the junction box trying to snag the blue wire.

“Come on, you scum-sucking son of a canine whore…”

There. Got it. Harry snipped the blue wire and all of the lights inside the control box went dark. He frowned. Were they all supposed to go out? Shouldn’t the light on the circuit reroute he’d patched still be on?

He froze, listening for the sound of alarms. Sweat ran in lines down his face and his fingers were cold with tension.

Nothing.

He touched the Send button on his earbud. “Corndog to Sunstroke.”

Nothing from Jim Florida.

He tapped it again. “Corndog to Waffles.”

Olvera didn’t answer, either.

“Oh, mannnn,” whined Harry. He really hated those guys. Seriously. If ISIL ever wanted someone to publicly cut into lunchmeat, Harry could suggest a couple of names.

Harry tried the calls again. And again. Persistent nothing. That’s when his annoyance began to change to something else. It wasn’t yet fear, because Harry was almost always afraid. No, this was still over on the doubt side of worry. They could both be maintaining radio silence because they weren’t in places secure enough for a verbal response. Which was semi-likely. Not hugely likely, but at least possible.

Harry squatted in a pool of his own indecision for another three minutes, then he thought, to hell with this crap. He wasn’t going to win a commendation or leach approval from his father if he did nothing. The job was to break into the vault beneath the Széchényi Library before the exhibit went live, take photos of everything incriminating, and then get out without getting caught. The actual arrest would be made by the counterterrorism gunslingers of Hungary’s Terrorelhárítási Központ. The CIA did not make those kinds of arrests on foreign soil. No, sir. There was far more political currency to be gained by handing over the collar to the locals. Career-wise, though, if he scored this on his own — without the other Stooges — then he was, on Agency terms, a made man. Harry had seen what happened to the career trajectory of those agents who scored on something like that. He wanted his own elevator up past the glass ceiling.

Maybe even make Dad proud. A faint possibility, but still a possibility. His father, after all, had saved the world three times from major bioweapon releases. Three times.

Balls.

He shifted his position to address the metal panel. It was stiff, but he managed to dig his screwdriver into a gap and lever it open enough to put the edge of his hand against it. It didn’t want to move, but it did. One stubborn inch at a time. And as it opened a puff of air blew out at him.

“Nicely done,” he told himself. You took your back-pats where you could find them.

Then Harry set the panel aside, removed his flashlight, and aimed the beam inside. He saw a square chamber with stone walls. It appeared to be empty except for an old metal chest, bound by straps of iron.

“Bingo,” he murmured. He put the flashlight between his teeth and climbed inside.

It was at this point that the trajectory of Harry Bolt’s life changed.

Completely and irrevocably.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When I could move, I got up and used the head to clean up. The nausea eased up by slow degrees but it didn’t go away. Top and Bunny sat like a pair of shivering old men. They sipped water and ate salty crackers and didn’t say a word or look at anyone.

I’d already called Church while we were still in Antarctica airspace to tell him what had happened, what we’d seen, and what I did when I thought this was a genie that could not be let out of the bottle. Not sure if he agreed with me or not.

Half an hour later Church called me back and hit me with the news about Houston.

The power had gone out. Not the whole city, but enough of it. Too much of it. Planes had fallen out of the sky. Thirteen of them. Some of them crashed on runways at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. That was horrible enough. One went through the roof at Air-Sea International Logistics near Lochinvar Golf Course. One pancaked down between the Budget and Avis car rental offices off Palmetto Pines Road. And one of them hit the top floor of the Houston Airport Marriott Hotel. The jet was fully fueled and every seat was booked. There was a sales convention at the hotel. Two-thirds of the rooms were booked. We wouldn’t know how many were dead. Five thousand was a conservative guess.

Five thousand people.

Gone.

How do you take news like that? What’s an appropriate reaction for a loss of life so dramatic that the world itself seems to wobble as all those souls take flight on burning wings? The part of me that is a decent, ordinary human being — that aspect I called the “Modern Man”—was appalled, shocked to silence, disconnected from coherent thought. The part of me that was a killer wanted to bellow out in rage and denial because this was an attack on the tribe. The human tribe. The Killer wanted to heal hurt by causing harm. And the Cop, that part of me — the central aspect of who I was — wanted answers.

“No one has taken credit yet,” said Church. “However, I spoke with Harcourt Bolton shortly before we got the news and he has been building a case to connect ISIL with the power outages that occurred earlier this year.” He explained about the black marketer Ohan, about Kill Switch.

“What do we know about it? What kind of weapon is this?” I demanded. “Was it some kind of e-bomb?”

“Unknown, but unlikely,” said Church. “There are no reports of any kind of explosion prior to the crashing of those planes.”

“I don’t understand. The power went out and then back on again? That can’t happen with an EMP.”

“I know. This must be something else. I’ve scrambled teams and they’re en route. I have Jerry Spencer and the whole forensics team on a plane. Same with Frank Sessa, though there is no evidence of any kind of explosives. In short, Captain, it’s too soon for us to know what happened. Something interrupted the power inside a roughly circular area around Bush airport. As far as we can tell, everything inside that zone that uses electricity was shut off. We have reports that this includes cell phones and battery-operated devices.”

“Why Houston, though? What’s there that they wanted to hit? What’s the statement? No, wait,” I said, “if this is ISIL, then that might explain it. Most of the commanders in their forces are ex-Iraqi military. George Bush launched the first Gulf War. His son launched the second. Maybe this is a statement. A revenge killing.”

Church nodded, not liking the idea but agreeing with the logic. “You may be right.”

“This is what happened at the NASCAR thing, isn’t it? And the presidential debate?”

“So it seems.”

“Which means they were, what? Test drives?”

“That would be my guess,” said Church. “But, Captain, it seems to me that you experienced this yourself. In your report you said that your equipment shut down and then restarted down in the cavern.”

I was silent. I’d told him that not an hour ago. So why hadn’t I put two and two together?

Church was on the same tack. He asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Bad,” I said. “But I’m going to divert this plane. Find me a safe runway in Houston and we’ll—”

“No, Captain,” said Church. “I was calling to inform you, not to put you into play.”

“Why not? This is why we have a Special Projects Office.”

“I’m aware of that, but you said that you and your men were exposed to some possible toxins.”

I had every intention of yelling at him and demanding that he put us into play. Instead I had a coughing fit that lasted two minutes. It left me spent and weak and feeling as fragile as spun glass.

“Go home, Captain,” said Church. “Let the medical team check you out. I’ll keep you posted.”

The connection went dead.

INTERLUDE NINE

Oscar Bell poured three fingers of scotch into a chunky tumbler and handed it to Major Corrine Sails.

“Thanks,” said the major, sipping it, nodding, and taking the glass with her as she began walking slowly around the big office. There were cases of books, mostly histories of science, histories of war, histories of governments. No fiction, no autobiographies. Nothing that connected the man with other people. There were no framed photos on the walls, no family pictures on Bell’s desk. No trophies of any kind. Major Sails noted all of it as she sipped her whiskey.

“Have a seat,” said Bell, waving a hand toward a pair of rich leather chairs positioned in a window alcove. Outside a pair of catamarans bounced over the light chop, and farther out to sea a big trawler was heading out to the fishing grounds off Montauk Point.

“Lovely view,” said Sails.

Bell nodded, accepting the comment without any visible sense of pride. She wondered if he ever took genuine pleasure in anything. Probably not. Her colleagues in the Department of Defense had warned her that he was a few degrees colder than a Vulcan. No visible warmth, no detectable personality. Not even precisely unlikeable, because there was nothing to like. Nothing really to react to.

She thought he was probably wretched in bed. A get-it-done approach to sex that was probably all about insuring progeny. No wonder he went through wives the way most people went through changes of clothes. The women were attracted to the billions, but not even the hardiest gold-digger seemed able to stay in it for the long haul. Sails couldn’t blame them. Not that Bell wasn’t attractive in his own way. He was lovely in photos and on TV, and when there was a camera he could turn on the charm and produce a winning smile. Off camera and away from the press he was a robot.

“If they sent you,” he said without preamble, “then somebody who doesn’t have their head up their ass took a look at my proposal.”

Sails nodded. “They did. I, in fact, did.”

Bell studied her for a moment. Sails knew that the man would have had her checked out. Her work with DARPA, some of her nonmilitary published works, and maybe even her paper on the probability of interdimensional physics as a valid and emerging field of legitimate study. He was the kind of man known to be thorough. Not exactly judgmental as demanding to a very high degree. He had, at least as far as his defense projects went, a very open mind. And because Bell was a scientist as well as a contractor he generally personally vetted the people with whom he worked.

“And—?” he asked.

“As I understand it this device — this ‘God Machine’—was designed by your son?”

“Yes.”

“Who is thirteen.”

“Yes.”

“He designed this without assistance from any adult?”

Bell sipped his scotch. “Yes.”

“That is remarkable.”

“No kidding.”

They studied each other for a moment. “Mr. Bell,” she said, “I have a few very important questions.”

“I figured you might.”

Sails crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. Bell did not even flick a glance at her legs. Nothing. The man really was a robot.

“I guess we need to start with the obvious,” she said. “Why is it called a ‘God’ Machine?”

“Ask my son.”

“I can’t. You won’t let anyone near him.”

Bell shrugged. “Figure of speech. Look, cards on the table. Prospero is a very troubled boy. You’ve probably read his psych evals and they’re all over the place. Highest IQ ever scored. So high, in fact, it calls the validity of the test into question. Kid’s legitimately off the charts. That said, he’s also deeply disturbed. His shrink says he’s not actually on the spectrum because there are too many ways in which he doesn’t fit the profile for Asperger’s or autism. He doesn’t fit into any slot. I can say without contradiction that he’s one of a kind.”

“Well, Mr. Bell, I don’t know if we can actually say that, can we?”

Bell stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, smiling, “do you think that the Majestic program operates in a vacuum? You look surprised.”

“Shit,” said Bell.

She nodded. “Do you have any current affiliations with Howard Shelton?”

“No.”

“But you know him.”

“Knew him. We had a falling-out. The man’s a psychopath.”

“Maybe, but he’s our psychopath.”

“Cute. My answer stands. I haven’t spoken to Shelton in years. Not since I agreed to adopt Prospero. And let’s be clear on that, Major; Prospero is my son. That’s legal.”

“Does he know he’s adopted?”

“He’s smart,” said Bell. “I’m sure he suspects. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s my legal son.”

“An argument can be made that he is the property of the United States Department of Defense.”

“Is that a fight you want to pick? Because I’ll take it to the Supreme Court. That’d put a lot of dirty laundry on the public wash line.”

“You signed certain papers.”

“And I’d be happy to produce them for public scrutiny. Rolling Stone magazine would do a cover story on them, have no doubt.” Bell snorted. “I invited you here to talk business and you come at me with threats? No wonder people blow whistles on you assholes.”

Sails held up her hands in a placating gesture. “We’re just having a conversation. Nobody’s making threats.”

“I fucking well am. If you try to take Prospero away from me I’ll—”

“Don’t,” she said. “We got off on the wrong foot. Let’s back up and try this again. Fair enough?”

Bell thought about it for a moment, his eyes cool and calculating. “It’s your dime, Major.”

“Howard Shelton,” she said. “You worked with him in the past?”

“You already know I did,” said Bell irritably. “I did two off-the-books contract projects for Majestic Three. A gyroscope mounting and the spherical guidance system for one of his T-craft projects. It went nowhere.”

“Has he invited you into any other projects related to the T-craft?”

“No. I thought that was a dud.”

She did not comment on that. Instead she asked, “Has he invited you to bid on any other projects?”

“No.”

“What is your current relationship with Mr. Shelton?”

Bell almost smiled. “We stopped sending each other Christmas cards, if that’s what you mean.”

“Please explain.”

“Why? It’s a matter of record and if we’re having this conversation, then you’ve read the transcripts. I did some work for Majestic Three and now he’s using other contractors. I lost four major contracts because Shelton got fickle. It took me a while to recover from that.”

“From what I can see from your corporate earnings statements, you haven’t quite recovered yet.”

“I’ll get there. It won’t be with Shelton. No way. End of story. I have nothing to do with him or M3. That whole Majestic project is a black hole into which Uncle Sam is pissing money that would be better spent elsewhere.” Bell snorted. “No, Major, I have nothing to do with Shelton or his mad science games.”

Sails set her scotch aside. “Tell me,” she said, “does your son know who he is? Hasn’t he ever wondered why he is so unlike other children his age? Hasn’t he ever wondered why his intellect is so far above anyone else’s?”

“He knows he’s gifted,” snapped Bell. “He thinks he’s a freak.”

“‘Freak’?” she echoed. “So you haven’t told him? I mean, what on Earth would he say if he ever had his DNA sequenced?”

Bell sneered. “Stop trying to intimidate me, Major. You’re not formidable enough to sell it. Save it for the rubes. You’re acting like you discovered something and are calling me on the carpet for it, but let’s be clear — I called you. As soon as I saw what Prospero was attempting to build I brought it directly to you. Per the agreement I have with the DoD. This is me being a team player, so stop trying to scare me to death.”

They sat and drank scotch for almost a full minute before Sails replied. “You live up to your reputation.”

“Flattery. Nice. What’s next? An offer for a blow job?” He rubbed his eyes. “Jesus, Sails, can we cut through the bullshit? I brought the God Machine to you because I know what it can do. Not what my son thinks it will do. He thinks it’ll open a doorway to a different universe that will allow him to go home. Like I said, the kid’s off his rocker. But in the process of developing it he hit a couple of speed bumps, and that’s what I want you to pay me to develop.”

“Speed bumps?”

“What he thinks are design flaws are actually a golden goddamn fleece. Two in particular.”

“Yes,” she said, almost purring. “A portable electrical null field generator?”

“I nicknamed it Kill Switch.”

“Catchy.”

“Yeah, well,” said Bell. “It’s truth in advertising. We both know there’s nobody who has anything remotely close to this. This is a quantum jump forward in defense technology and don’t pretend that it’s not. If we can work out the kinks and solve the overheating problems and configure a portable version, then we win the arms race. Bang, just like that. Done. You know it and I know it. This is potentially more important than the Manhattan Project. This is a brand-new branch of science and my son created it. My son.”

“My colleagues feel that anything Prospero develops is a by-product of existing military technology.”

“A ‘by-product’? That’s what they’re calling my son now? Jesus. If you’re here to bully me into giving it up without an offer, then you are sadly and sorely mistaken.”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied smoothly. “I’m being frank about what some people in my department think. I didn’t say I shared their view.”

Bell stood up and held out his hand. “You’re empty, give me your glass.” He crossed to the wet bar, poured more of the scotch, came back slowly, handed her the fresh drink, clinked against her tumbler without making a toast, and sat down. Sails considered the amber depths of the whiskey.

“Take a moment to consider everything you know about me,” he said. “With everything that’s probably in my file, is it your considered opinion that I am more likely to be swayed by threats and intimidation or an offer of inclusion and partnership? Go on, think that through. I have plenty of scotch and we have all afternoon.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Harry Bolt climbed into the room, removed the flashlight from between his teeth, and used the powerful little beam to sweep the room. He produced a small device from his pants pocket, thumbed it on, and held it out on the flat of his palm as he turned in a slow circle. The tiny green light did not change to yellow, which meant there were no hidden alarms and no electronics down here. There was a large hatch in the ceiling that had a heavy steel door. No doubt it was securely locked from above. That was okay. He didn’t need to mess with that.

Instead he moved to the chest. It was a big, square box except for a domed lid. Three feet per side, and it sat on a platform of cinder blocks. The chest looked very old, and was made out of iron from which rust had been forcibly sanded off. The box was covered on all sides by a variety of ancient religious symbols. He recognized some of them. Crucifixes and Hamsa hands, an Egyptian ankh, a St. Benedict medal, a Seal of Solomon, an ancient Roman word-square, a mezuzah, a Turkish evil eye — and others that he did not recognize. His first reaction was to smile at the mumbo jumbo because Harry did not believe in very much, but then a cold shiver suddenly rippled through his body and his heart began to flutter. He looked around. The underground chamber was small and filled with shadows that his meager flashlight could not dispel. Harry suddenly felt very alone down there. And very scared.

“You’re an idiot,” he told himself, but his words seemed unnaturally loud. Alarmingly so, and he hushed himself as if someone was listening. As if maybe the box itself was listening. That thought wormed its way through his brain and, try as he might, Harry could not mock it into silence.

He made himself focus on the task at hand. Heavy iron bands held the chest shut and these converged at the hasp, from which hung a remarkable, heavy, old-fashioned padlock. More of the strange symbols were carved onto every square inch of the lock. He bent to peer at the lock, and then nodded. This was better; this nudged him back into his comfort zone. He was mediocre with electronics but he loved to pick locks. His father had hired a locksmith — and former professional thief — to give him lessons. That was a birthday present when Harry was eleven. His dad was like that. His father was never off the clock. He was Bolton, Harcourt Bolton, all the damn time. Even at Thanksgiving. Even on Christmas morning when Harry was a kid. Giving a complete professional forensic evidence collection kit when he was ten. Wrapped by the maid, no doubt. Another year it was a professional disguise and makeup kit under the tree. Always stuff like that.

Most of the time Harry hated his father for trying to turn his son into a clone. But as he removed the leather toolkit from his pocket down there in the dark, he was cool with it. He stepped up to the chest, studied the lock for a moment, then selected a tension wrench from the kit. He inserted it into the bottom of the keyhole and applied slight pressure, then he slipped a pick into the top of the lock and gave very slight torque to the wrench as he scrubbed his pick back and forth. He felt one of the pins move. Nice. He repeated this until all of the pins had shifted, though he was surprised to find that there were double the normal number of them and each moved with rusty reluctance. But Harry had a deft hand and after six minutes of patient work the lock clicked open.

“Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy.” It was a nonsense thing the locksmith had said every time he opened a lock, and Harry had picked it up.

Harry gingerly removed the lock from the hasp and set it aside, then very carefully lifted the lid. The lock and the lid were absurdly heavy, almost as if they were made of lead instead of steel, but when he raised the lid he saw that the underside gleamed with gold and green. Copper. Or an alloy of both. Harry fished in his mind for what he’d learned of metallurgy from the locksmith — who insisted that his pupil understand all of the materials he might encounter. The name came swimming up out of his memories. Molybdochalkos. He grinned at himself for remembering that.

Then, as he looked inside the chest, his grin faded. He expected to find a false top, maybe with some actual ancient relics on it, with the real booty below — IDs and debit cards and maybe some weapons.

Instead he saw a book. That’s it. Nothing else. A book. It was big, two feet long and eighteen inches wide. At least seven inches thick, and it, too, was sealed by metal bands. Six of them running laterally and two more going up and over. Each one was fastened with a smaller but no less sturdy padlock. The bands were covered by a different kind of engraving than had been used on the chest. Instead of the holy symbols of protection, the bands and the book they surrounded were covered by monsters. Prancing goats with too many heads, writhing squids, demon faces with hundreds of eyes, shapeless mounds with too many mouths and worms for hair.

Harry flinched away. It hurt his mind to look at those symbols, and in his creeped-out imagination, they seemed to move. Or to tremble in anticipation of moving. He licked his lips, which had gone totally dry. His tongue felt like old leather and his heart was punching the inside of his chest.

“This is bullshit,” he told himself.

The room threw echoes back at him that distorted his words into meaningless and sinister mutterings. He forced himself to focus on the rust-pitted locks on the metal bands. When he touched them they felt strangely warm. It was more like touching skin rather than metal. Harry recoiled. He did not like any of this. Not one bit. He closed his tool kit and put it into his pocket, closed the chest, reset the lock, and moved over to the small hatch through which he’d entered.

Except…

Except that he did not do any of that.

His eyes seemed to glaze and when he blinked them clear he was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out before him, and the big book resting heavily on his thighs.

Harry said, “What—?”

He had no memory at all of how that happened.

His eyes watered and Harry blinked again.

And he was no longer in the chamber. Now he stood in the entrance foyer to the museum. Again there was no memory of having climbed out through the hatch or of making his way up here. It was as if he had stepped out of his own mind and left his body to run on autopilot.

Except that wasn’t it. And he knew it. He could feel something shift inside of him. In his mind. In a moment of absolute mind-numbing terror Harry Bolt realized that he was not alone inside his own head. There was someone else in there. He flung the book away and ran screaming from the building.

Only he didn’t.

He wanted to. He saw himself doing that.

But he did not.

Harry stared at the book. He no longer held it but he clearly had not thrown it away. It lay on the floor at his feet.

It lay in a wide, dark lake of blood. A puddle of it that seemed to cover the whole floor. There were islands in that lake. Lumps. Red and torn. Covered with the last shreds of clothing. The gray and black of the library’s security patrol.

The all-black of the same kinds of clothes that Harry wore. Soft, nonreflective, nonbinding black.

Roy Olvera.

Jim Florida.

Their eyes stared at him with sightless astonishment; their mouths hung open as if frozen that way as they screamed their last screams. The bodies were…

Gone. No. Not gone. The islands in that lake of blood wore the same kinds of equipment. Parts of it. What was left of it. All of it crisscrossed with knife wounds and punctured with the red dots of bullet wounds.

Harry stared for three full seconds.

Then he screamed.

INTERLUDE TEN

Oscar Bell watched the major as she walked out to her car. Bell leaned against the doorframe and watched her drive off. He was four scotches in and felt more of it than he showed.

Songbirds sang in the trees and overhead a gull whose breast was flawlessly white sailed on the breeze, heading out to sea. Bell stepped down into the yard and strolled across the grass toward the backyard. The expensive play set that had been erected when Prospero was four was still there, cleaned by the yardman but as pristine as the day it was assembled. Prospero had never used it. Not once. Bell took his cell phone out of his pocket and sat down on the saddle of the center of three swings.

His first call was to Dr. Greene. After a quick exchange of meaningless pleasantries, Bell asked, “You mentioned something to me last year and I wanted to clarify it. You said that Prospero had atypical creative drives. Do you remember? You said that there was a definite correlation between his mood and the quality of his creative output. What did you call it? The tortured artist syndrome?”

“That was an off-the-cuff label,” said Greene. “The formal description is—”

“Save the jargon. Explain it to me. Layman’s terms.”

“Well,” said Greene, “it’s a phenomenon that has been observed in certain cases, particularly with people who have demonstrated artistic abilities coupled with savantism. In short, when Prospero is happy he develops a kind of creative lassitude. He doesn’t draw, he doesn’t write, and he doesn’t even go into the laboratory you made for him in the playroom. In other children freedom from stress sparks creativity. With Prospero there is a paradoxical effect. When he is feeling stressed, or has been in a fight with one of the other boys, or, um, has had, um, difficulties with you, then he is significantly more creative in all aspects. Most notably with his scientific pursuits. That is where his truest passion lies, and I suppose we can theorize that research comforts him. Or, perhaps, it empowers him in times when he feels disempowered. There is a theory that Vincent van Gogh experienced the same kind of thing, hence the nickname of the ‘tortured artist syndrome.’ It’s not an official label, as I said.”

“Okay,” said Bell, “I get it. Put that in writing. All of the clinical support that you can find on it. I want a thorough report and I want it in seventy-two hours.”

He disconnected before Greene could protest or ask questions.

Bell used his heels to move the swing slowly forward and back.

His second call was to Gunther Stark, commandant of the Ballard Military Boarding School in Poland, Maine.

When that call was ended Bell sat on the swing for nearly an hour. Waiting for his son to come home from school. He sat there, slowly moving back and forth on the relic from a childhood that had never really happened.

Bell tried to hate himself for what he was about to do. He tried.

But no matter how far down he dug in the cold, hard soil of his soul, all he ever found was more darkness and more dirt.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I told Top and Bunny about Houston.

It hit them like it hit me. Sick as we were, all three of us were ready to lock and load. We sat there, hurting and trembling with impotence as we watched a live news feed on my laptop. I thought it would look bad. It looked worse. Some of the fires were still burning. The power was back on and the sky was filled with emergency helicopters. News choppers, too, even though they were being pushed back beyond a safety zone. God, how many times would we have to look at scenes like this? In America, around the world? How had terrorism become so powerful while we seemed to be dropping to our knees? Or maybe that was the wrong way to put it. How many times could we be forced to our knees and still manage to get back up?

“Funny,” said Bunny bitterly, “but I always thought it would be a nuke. After nine-eleven, after Atlanta and San Francisco, I figured the next step up would be a nuclear detonation on U.S. soil. Something smuggled in by a North Korean team, maybe; or some Russian cell trying to bring back the Soviet Union. Or the Iranians. But I never figured ISIL for being able to hit us this hard at home. Never.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that old thing about assumptions,” grumbled Top. He turned to me. “Did Mr. Church really stand us down for this?”

I nodded. “Right now this is someone else’s job. CIA, State Department, every intelligence agency we have, and Bug’s team. We have Jerry Spencer and Frank Sessa on the ground in Houston doing forensic evaluation, and Harcourt Bolton’s doing deep background for us. We all want someone in the crosshairs, but so far no one from the Islamic Nation has stepped up to own it. The president’s moving assets into play, though. If we can connect the dots to ISIL, then this will change the game.”

“Third Gulf War,” said Top.

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Bunny.

I got up and went into the head for a while because my lower intestines wanted to crawl out of my ass. I sat there on the can and put my face in my hands.

All those people. The fuse lit on another war. Where was the end to it? How could we ever hope to put the pin back into the grenade? Was it always going to be like this?

Bad thoughts for a sick man to have. Bad, bad thoughts.

I went back and dropped onto a seat between Top and Bunny. For a long time we sat there, each of us shivering and sweating. Bunny looked like he was falling asleep. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. Top’s brown skin had faded to a dusty gray. He met my eyes and nodded to me, conveying a truth, making an agreement. Top’s like that. We can say a lot to each other without words.

Aside from the two pilots, we had six team members aboard the plane. Bird Dog and the other equipment handlers, as well as the general crew. All of them were trained as medics, but none of them were doctors. They were clustered together at the far end of the plane, looking at me looking at them. They looked worried, too.

I staggered to my feet and stumbled to the intercom on the bulkhead beside the cockpit door, identified myself, and asked to speak to the pilot.

“I can buzz you in,” he said.

“Negative. Do you have active seals?”

“Yes, sir,” he said crisply.

“Okay, then listen to me, Captain,” I said. “I am initiating a flash-fire protocol. You are hereby ordered to seal the cabin. No one gets in.”

A pause. “Yes, sir,” he said, and despite the typically bland way pilots spoke no matter what was happening, his voice had gone up a full octave.

“I do not want this plane to land in San Diego. They have a biohazard response unit at the Naval Auxiliary Landing Field on San Clemente Island. Get clearance to land us there. But call the Pier and have our big bio-containment module flown over, too. The flight crew will need to be quarantined, too. I don’t know if this thing is contagious but no one is going to take chances.”

“Captain Ledger,” said the pilot, “what’s happening back there?”

I wiped sweat from my eyes. The interior of the plane was filled with too much light and it seemed to be moving sideways.

“I really don’t know,” I said.

INTERLUDE ELEVEN

Oscar Bell did not enjoy writing checks as large as the one that kept Prospero out of jail, or the one that insured that his son would remain as a student and cadet at Ballard. With each zero his pen gouged deeper into the check and left deep impressions on all the checks beneath it.

He tore off the two checks and tossed them onto the desk of the school’s commandant, a withered husk of an old soldier named Gunther Stark.

“He stays,” Bell said flatly. He could afford the repairs, but he’d feel it. He would have to move some holdings around. Ideally he’d find a way to bill Major Sails for it, providing her group accepted his proposal.

Stark glanced down at the checks, inhaled sharply through his nose, and exhaled slowly. Like a man dealing with physical pain.

“Tell me, Mr. Bell,” said the commandant, “have you spoken with your son about this?”

“Of course I have.”

“Did he tell you what he was trying to accomplish?”

“He… may have said something. What of it?”

Stark said, “He used materials and equipment from our lab to build a small-scale particle accelerator. When it was turned on, not only did it destroy a considerable portion of the lab and the surrounding rooms—”

“And you have a check that will make it even better than it was.”

“—that device also knocked out the power in the entire school.”

Bell’s mouth twitched. “What?”

“Oh yes. There was some kind of power surge that canceled out all power. No lights, no computers, no alarms. It even shorted out the halon fire-suppression system and knocked out the cell phones. We couldn’t call the fire department.”

Bell leaned forward. “Really? How long did it last?”

“What does that matter?”

“How long?”

“I don’t know,” said Stark, annoyed. “A minute or two.”

“How much damage was there to the wiring? What about cell phones? Were the works melted?”

“No, nothing else was damaged. The cell phones and everything came back on. So did the lights, but—”

“Everything came back on?” demanded Bell. “This is important. Apart from what was damaged by the explosion, was there any other damage to any electrical device?”

Stark drummed his fingers. “We seem to be getting off the point.”

“No, we’re not. Answer my questions.” Oscar Bell’s tone did not invite further quibbling.

“No, sir,” said Stark, “there was no other damage. You are not liable for further reparations.”

Stark grabbed his checkbook anyway and began writing a third check. This one was large enough to make the commandant stare in slack-jawed amazement. Bell tore it off, leaned across the desk, and slapped it down in front of Stark.

“I–I don’t understand, Mr. Bell,” stammered the commandant.

Bell pointed a finger at the man’s face. “Listen to me,” he said sternly, “and hear what I say. You are going to rebuild your lab and you’re going to get it done in one month. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how difficult that’s going to be. One month. I’ll send some of my own people to oversee it. You will also build an extension that will be dedicated to my son and his work. You hear me? That addition will be Prospero’s. You’ll post two guards on it around the clock. If anyone sets one foot into his lab other than Prospero, his teachers, or you, then you will answer to me. I want you to tell me you understand.”

“I… well, yes. Of course I understand.”

“I will have my people set up a limited Internet access for Prospero. It will allow him to do research and to interface with other labs. I’ll arrange clearances. But understand, Stark, that Net connection passes through my own company’s mainframes. Nowhere else. And Prospero will have to log on and log off. I will give him a password directly. No one else uses that network and Prospero is not to have any access to any other Internet connection. None. That is an absolute rule.”

“What is this all about? If you want your son to do research of this kind, why not move him to another facility? Away from the other boys.”

“Fuck the other boys. And fuck you if you’re too stupid or inept to keep them away from that lab. Prospero is to have anything he needs or wants in terms of what will help him in this research.”

Stark nodded. The check sat on his desk and it seemed to burn with real fire.

Bell leaned back. “I’ll expect regular reports on my son’s activities. I’ll also send people out to inspect his lab and his work. They’ll call ahead to schedule times when Prospero won’t be there to interfere.”

“Of course.”

“If you have questions, ask them now,” said Bell. “Otherwise let’s get this in motion.”

“There are, um… two things, Mr. Bell,” said Stark. “The first is so unusual that I don’t know if I should even mention it, but you’ve made it very clear since the beginning that you want to know everything concerning your son. However, this is somewhat tangential to—”

“Stop pussying around the topic and just say it.”

“It’s about the dreams, sir,” said Stark.

Bell stopped breathing for a moment. “What dreams?”

“It was the night of the explosion. Several of the boys complained the next day that they had very strange dreams. We had the staff psychologist interview them and as far as he can determine there were two very distinct types of dreams. Or, maybe they were hallucinations somehow induced by the energetic discharge of the machine.”

“Who are you quoting?” Bell said sharply.

“Oh. About the discharge? That was Professor Childers, Prospero’s physics teacher. After hearing from all those boys I called a meeting with our psychologist and everyone who had any connection to what your son was working on.”

“Tell me about the dreams.”

“As I said, they took two forms. For most of the boys they had nightmares about some huge monsters. Big blobby things with tentacles. The psychologist has drawings if you want to see them. What’s so strange about it, though, is that the boys mostly drew the same thing. Even boys who don’t socialize with one another. We did interviews to see if they shared experiences, and to determine if that polluted the memories through association. But… no.”

Bell did not comment. “And the other kind of dream?”

“That’s even stranger. A few boys had those. Only six of them out of the whole school. And though the dreams were similar, they were also different. In each case the boys dreamed they were somewhere else. In other places. One was at home in his room. Another was in a poker game in what he believes is Paris, although the boy has never been to France.” He ran through the others. “In each case,” he concluded, “it was like they were suddenly elsewhere, seeing things they could not possibly see. One of them was able to accurately describe the inside of the Tate Museum in London, even to a description of the ticket seller. The psychologist made a call and verified the accuracy of this. Isn’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?”

Oscar Bell removed a pack of cigarettes from his inner pocket, selected one, lit it with a lighter that bore the Department of Defense shield — a Christmas gift from years ago — and smoked. He did not ask permission and he tapped his ashes into a coffee cup that sat beside the NO SMOKING sign. Stark said nothing.

“I’ll want everything,” said Bell. “Copies of those interviews, the files on each boy, the minutes of that staff meeting.”

“But, Mr. Stark, I can’t do that. That is confidential information.”

Bell blew a long stream of smoke over Stark’s head. “You always struck me as a realist,” Bell said. “Do you want to sit there and tell me that in the version of the ‘real world’ as you see it that I won’t get that information? Or let me put it another way. You’re a career soldier. An officer. You’ve been in combat and led men into battle. Has none of that taught you how to pick your battles?”

Stark sat in silent stillness. He did not answer, and they both knew it was answer enough.

After a long time Stark changed the subject. “I have one more, er, question regarding your son,” he said. “Prospero is sometimes a difficult boy, as you are no doubt aware. He, um, acts out, and here at Ballard we have policies in place to enforce discipline and encourage proper behavior.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be such a pussy. I’m not asking you to change how you treat the little shit. As long as he doesn’t have bruises on his face when the human services people come for their quarterly inspection I don’t give a flying fuck what you do to keep him in line. He’s always been an asshole and I have the feeling he always will be. Can’t change that. Kid has some bad wiring. So, sure, if you need to kick his ass every now and then, do it. Spare the rod and spoil the child. My old man had a heavy enough hand and I turned out fine.” He jabbed the air with a finger again. “But no head injuries. And nothing that will keep him out of the lab.”

He stood up and Stark shot to his feet, as well.

“I think we understand each other, Commandant?” suggested Bell, his dark eyes intense. He offered his hand and when Stark took it, they shook.

Like gentlemen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Harry Bolt did not know that he could scream like a movie actress in a grade B slasher flick. It was not something he’d ever be proud of. Though at the moment he gave in to it as the only possible response.

He screamed his head off.

Then one second later he stopped. Because that’s what you do when someone presses the cold, hard, merciless edge of a knife against your throat.

The figure came out of nowhere. One minute he was alone with the dead parts of his team and the next someone occupied the shadows to his right. Dressed in black, holding a knife to his throat.

“Shhh,” she said.

Harry Bolt’s body was a block of ice, but he cranked his eyes sideways to see her with his peripheral vision. Definitely a woman. Young, slim, very fit. She had long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and flexible combat clothes that clung to her. Even in that moment Harry checked her out. That was Harry. She was built like a dancer. Tall, though, with small breasts and long limbs. She was an inch or two taller than Harry, who was five nine. Her features were foxlike, with sharply defined cheekbones, thin lips, and intense eyes. Her clothes were fitted with lots of pockets and crossbelts for weapons. A compact Micro Tavor-21 Israeli bullpup assault rifle with an extended thirty-two-round magazine was clipped to one belt. A pair of sheaths were strapped to each thigh. Both empty. One of those knives was held down at her side, the other was keeping Harry on his tippy-toes.

She said, “Who are you?”

“N-night watchman,” he stammered.

The woman smiled. Very coldly. The knife pressed more deeply into his throat. “Try again. Are you with the Brotherhood?”

“The… who?”

She rattled off something that sounded like Latin to him. “Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum.”

“I–I have no idea what you just said,” he admitted.

She studied him. It was hard to tell if she believed him. Her expression seemed to be a mix of relief and disappointment.

“CIA?” she asked.

Ouch, he thought. “Wh-who are you?” he said, hoping to get a grip on this conversation.

The woman lowered the knife and stepped back.

“A friend,” she said.

“What kind of friend? What agency?” He knew that she wasn’t American because her accent sounded Italian.

“You won’t have heard of us. It’s above your pay grade.” She turned him into the light so she could take a better look. Her eyebrows rose. “Wait, I know who you are. You’re Harcourt Bolton’s son. You’re with the Hungary station.”

“I—”

“You’re one of the Three Stooges.”

Yeah, well, that was like a kick in the nuts, though he tried not to let it show on his face.

“Who are you?” he asked again.

She ignored that and looked past him and he turned to follow her gaze. The heads of Olvera and Florida seemed to glare at him, their dead eyes filled with accusation. Harry’s stomach did a greasy little backflip.

“I’m sorry for what happened to your friends,” she said.

“Christ, did you—?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped. “Of course I didn’t do that.”

“Then—?”

She suddenly froze and stared beyond the blood to where the big ironbound book lay. The sight of it tore a cry from her and the knives were back in her hands as if by magic. She whirled and kicked Harry in the stomach, knocking him backward into the wall, then she was on him, the one blade back at his throat and the other pressed to the underside of his crotch. Her eyes seemed to blaze with fire.

“Did you open the book?” she demanded. “Lie to me and I will gut you like a pig.”

“No! I didn’t open it. I swear.”

She bent close to look deeply into his eyes and he could almost feel her pry open his head to look inside. The moment held, stretched…

And then she sagged back, exhaling and removing the knives. She looked relieved but visibly shaken. “No, you did not look into that book.”

“I…,” he began, but he had nowhere useful to go with that.

The woman sheathed one of her knives but kept the other in her hand as she walked through the blood toward the book. She knelt and used the very tip of the knife to touch it. “Such an ugly thing,” she said. “You have no idea how many people have died because of it. We need to take this book out of here. The men who killed your friends are probably downstairs looking for it. They will be furious when they learn it’s gone.”

“Furious?” Harry pointed to the corpses. “How much madder can they get?”

She shook her head. “You have no idea. They are the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. The Fraternal Brothers of the Lock, sometimes known as the Brotherhood. A sacred order charged with finding and destroying books like that one.”

“Personally not a fan of book burning,” he said. “But I’m considering amending that policy. That thing gives me the creeps.”

“It should,” she said, nodding. “If you truly understood what this is you would run screaming from here.”

“I might anyway.”

The woman smiled at that.

“Look,” said Harry, “will you at least tell me your name and who you work for? Are you with Terrorelhárítási Központ? No, you sound Italian. Are you with the Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza, or maybe NATO?”

“Hardly. You haven’t heard of my group, so don’t ask. For now you can call me Violin.”

Harry grunted. “Violin? That your real name?”

“Don’t be naïve.”

“Well… can you at least tell me you’re one of the good guys?”

She gave him a long, strange look. “You really are an idiot, aren’t you?”

“I—,” he began, but this time it was another voice who cut him off.

A man’s voice. A sharp growl of surprise and outrage.

Harry and Violin turned as five strangers came crowding through the doorway to the inner library. They, too, were dressed in black. And they, too, carried knives. Lots of knives.

Guns, too.

The obvious leader of the group pointed to the book on the floor. Everyone looked at it. Even Harry. Then the men all raised their eyes and looked at the man and woman standing on the other side of the book. The leader pointed his knife at them. He said something in Italian that, once again, Harry couldn’t translate. But he knew what it meant.

The five men howled in fury and came running forward to kill.

INTERLUDE TWELVE

“And all of this is for me?” asked Prospero without even trying to hide the skepticism in his voice. “This lab, all this equipment. All of it?”

Commandant Stark smiled. Prospero always thought the man had a truly oily smile. He bet that if he put that face in a vise he could wring a gallon of grease from it.

“Of course, Cadet,” said Stark, whose voice was icy and hard, quite at odds with his unctuous leer. “You know that your father loves you and wants only the very best for you.”

“Uh-huh,” said Prospero. “Right, because my father adores me. It’s well known.”

Stark’s smile flickered but the lights stayed on. “He has gone to great expense and trouble to make sure that everything in this lab is state-of-the-art. Your father is a great man, Cadet. He is a true American and a patriot. I am proud to call him a friend.”

“And does he call you a friend? Do you go out on man dates? What’s it like to blow a man like dear old—”

The blow knocked the rest of the words from Prospero’s mouth. Stark was old but he was not slow, and he had refined the techniques of punishment and brutality over many years. The back of the commandant’s hand caught Prospero in exactly the right way to knock Prospero in nearly a full circle and detonate bombs behind his eyes. As Prospero staggered, the commandant stepped forward and clamped one hand around the boy’s throat and locked the other around his scrotum. The pain was unbelievable and the force lifted Prospero onto his toes. Stark leaned so close that his lips brushed Prospero’s cheek as he spoke.

“Listen to me, Cadet,” hissed Stark loud enough for only the two of them to hear, “and mark me. If it were up to me I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. I wouldn’t buy water from you if I was on fire. You are a useless, ungrateful, psychologically fractured piece of shit who isn’t worth the calorie burn it would take to stomp you to death.”

Prospero could not speak. The pain stole his voice and left only a tiny squeak in his throat.

“But your father is a great man and he is a patron of this academy,” continued Stark. “For some reason that I simply cannot fathom he seems to care about you. If you had any idea how much money he paid to repair the damage your little stunt caused you would shit your pants. And then he paid double that to have these computers and pieces of equipment flown in from companies all around the world. There is more money in this equipment than it takes to run this academy for five motherfucking years.” He gave the boy’s scrotum a squeeze that tore a scream from Prospero, which Stark stifled by increasing the pressure of his choke. “Now… I don’t know what kind of mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein bullshit he thinks you’ll get up to with this stuff, but he is paying the light bill around here and that’s enough for me.”

Stark used his double grip to walk Prospero back and then slam him hard against the front of a massive mainframe computer. Prospero’s head banged hard off the metal and fresh fireworks burst in front of his eyes.

“You will respect your father and you will goddamn well show respect for me, Cadet Bell. You can have all the access you want to this lab and these machines, and your father even secured positions for four research assistants who have advanced degrees in physics and engineering. Imagine that, responsible adults who are here to work with you and jump when you yell ‘frog.’ But let us be crystal clear, Cadet. You will never again speak ill of your father and you will never — ever — disrespect me again. Your father does not want you marked, boy, but believe me when I say that there are things I can do to you — things I would enjoy doing to you — that would leave no marks at all. Not a one.”

Another squeeze, this time with a sideways twist. Prospero begged him to stop, but the words were again squeezed to silence by the stricture on his throat. The edges of the room began growing dark and indistinct.

“This is my school, my house, Cadet,” said Stark, his spit flecking Prospero’s cheek, “and while you are here you belong to me. Body.”

Squeeze.

“And.”

Squeeze.

“Soul.”

With a grunt of effort Stark rammed him backward once more and then stepped back to allow Prospero to fall. The boy thudded down hard on elbows and knees, gagging and weeping, his forehead pressed against the floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I didn’t know what to expect when we landed. I hoped we’d see the rest of Echo Team standing there. Lydia Ruiz, Montana Parker, Brian Brandon Botley, and Sam Imura. Instead we were greeted by a bunch of marshmallow men. A dozen techs and twice as many armed SPs in white hazmat suits. The shore patrol guys all had their guns in their hands. Not pointing at us, per se, but not pointing away, either. It was a statement.

One of the marshmallow men stepped up and identified himself as the base commander. “Captain Ledger,” he said crisply, “we are glad to see that you and your team are back safe and sound.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words and it hung like a bad smell in the salt air. Pretty sure none of us were either safe or sound.

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re peachy. What’s the drill here? What are your orders?”

“Sir,” he said, “we need to get you off of this airstrip and into the biohazard unit.” He held up a BAMS unit and the lights were flickering between red and orange.

One of his men pushed up a cart on which a heavy steel drum was positioned, its lid tilted back. We knew this drill. Everything we had went into the drum. Weapons, tech, radios, and clothes. Everything. Then the SP closed and sealed the lid and it was wheeled off toward the back of the biohazard unit. Another tech hosed us down with some kind of chemical that smelled like ass and tasted like shit. We stood there buck naked in a hot breeze, shivering as if the Antarctic winds had followed us. They handed us blankets and we wrapped them around our shoulders, achieving neither modesty nor warmth.

“Thank you for cooperating,” said the officer. “I know this is difficult.”

Top mumbled something very foul about the man’s mother, but halfway through it his eyes rolled up and he fell. Bunny caught him and lifted Top’s limp body. Bunny is enormously strong, but he was also sick. I put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. His skin was as hot as a furnace. Doctors and orderlies in heavy-duty white rushed to help us. Accepting the burden of Top Sims, guiding Bunny and me into the chamber, catching us when we fell.

INTERLUDE THIRTEEN

“Major Sails,” said Bell, smiling like a barracuda as his guest came striding across the carpet, hand extended. They shook and he waved her to a seat. “Scotch?”

“Do you have bourbon?” said Sails.

“No. Can’t stand the stuff. I have thirty-year-old single malt.”

“That’s fine, thanks.”

He filled two glasses and handed one to her, then he sat on the edge of the desk, choosing the position so that he was set higher than her, making Sails look up as they spoke. Bell was aware that she knew the trick, but knowing it and not being affected by it were worlds apart.

“So, do we have something to toast?” he asked. “Or are you here to threaten me some more?”

Sails raised her glass. “A toast, definitely.”

They clinked and drank. “I like the sound of that. Tell me.”

“Before I do,” she said, “I heard that your son had a bit of an accident at his boarding school. Something about an explosion?”

“What of it?”

“He’s been continuing to work on his God Machine?”

“Of course.”

“Good,” she said. “Was he hurt?”

“No. He remote fired the machine from another room. Kid’s crazy but he’s not stupid.”

“An expensive failure,” she said.

“Is there a point to this? Do you want to use that to bust my balls on the dollar amount of my bid?”

“I don’t, actually. I was just noting it.”

“What I think you’re doing, Major,” he said bluntly, “is reminding me that you know where Prospero is and that you’re keeping an eye on him. And I’m okay with that as long as you keep your hands off of him.”

“We have no intention of interfering with his research,” Sails assured him. “My concern, if you want to know, is that he remains safe during the, um… more turbulent stages of his research.”

“Like I said, he’s not stupid.”

Sails air-toasted him on that. “My superiors took particular notice of the power blackout that seemed to coincide with the incident at the school. All of Poland, Maine, went dark.”

“Isn’t that interesting as hell?”

“It is. Sadly, one of the local merchants passed away, did you hear that? It seems his pacemaker suddenly stopped working. It happened during the blackout, and local authorities are baffled. I heard they’re blaming it on sunspots.”

Bell laughed. “Sunspots? Nice spin. Anyone buying it?”

“We may have seeded that to the local press,” she said, making it sound offhand. “Sunspots are known to have unusually powerful effects on electrical conductivity.”

“Yeah, how about that?”

Sails set her glass down and reached into her purse to produce a crisp envelope with a sturdy seal. Bell inspected it, arching an eyebrow at the seal. It was a red circle with an infinity symbol. No eagle, no name, no wording. Bell felt his heart quicken. He had heard of this group but had never once come this close to it.

“This isn’t what I expected,” he said.

“Open it.”

He did. The letter was on heavy stationery, the kind rarely used in this digital age. A single sheet. The text was brief and to the point. He was being officially advised that his proposal had been accepted pending his signing nondisclosure agreements and taking certain oaths. Upon completion of those steps half of the proposed and agreed-upon price would be transferred to his account. Upon delivery of a working machine the other half would be deposited. There were notes about bonuses based on early-delivery dates, and penalties for exceeding the deadline. That part was commonplace and there were usually workarounds and compromises to be made.

What interested him most was the name at the bottom of the letter. It was neither a military nor bureaucratic name. The letter was signed by a scientist.

Someone Bell already knew.

Someone Bell used to be related to. He looked up.

“What’s this bullshit?”

“It’s not bullshit,” said Sails.

“This is from Mark Erskine.”

“Yes.”

“Is this a joke? He’s my fucking ex-brother-in-law.”

“Yes. And he’s Prospero’s uncle.”

Bell looked at the name again. “How is he involved in this? He’s not in the Department of Defense and he’s not with DARPA. He didn’t even know what DARPA was when I mentioned it to him.”

Sails smiled. “Believe me when I tell you that Dr. Erskine is very familiar with DARPA and with many aspects of advanced research for the Department of Defense. What you might call off-the-record departments.”

“I don’t believe you….” Bell stopped. “Wait. Are you telling me that Erskine is with Majestic?”

Sails smiled. “We call our division Gateway.”

“Son of a bitch!” swore Bell. He flung the letter at her but Sails plucked it out of the air and folded it neatly.

“Mr. Bell,” she said, “do you honestly think we would not have eyes on children like Prospero?”

“Children like him? What do you mean by that?”

She spread her hands. “Prospero may have many unique and very attractive qualities — as we both know — but he is hardly as alone in the world as he thinks he is.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Sails stood up so that she was eye to eye with him. “Let’s stop the dance, Mr. Bell. May I call you Oscar?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“I’m Corrine,” she said. “The truth is that we recognize that you have been able to find the formula for getting Prospero to work up to his greatest potential. ‘Tortured artist syndrome’? That’s amazing. That report from Dr. Greene started fires all through my department. And while I can’t say that I am comfortable with some of your methods, the results speak for themselves. I’m here to congratulate you and to present our offer. You made it. You’re in.” She paused. “You won, Mr. Bell. Be happy. Dr. Erskine is very excited about the God Machine. He is already making plans to build a full-scale version of it at a secure location we have set aside. More on that after you’ve been sworn in. Erskine thinks that the meltdown problems can’t be solved when working on scale versions. It’s too hard to observe the electrodynamics. So he’ll build a fully functional device, and if — no, when — we solve the power sequencing problems and reach field implementation, you will very likely go down in history as the man who prevented the next world war. Together we could actually save the world. How would that feel, Mr. Bell?” She smiled and held out her glass. “Care to toast to that?”

“Save the world?” he echoed. “Fuck the world.”

But he clinked his glass with hers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They put me in a small medical bay that wasn’t much bigger than a porta-potty. Everything was white and sterile and scary as hell. Doctors and nurses came in wearing hazmat suits, trailing wires and hoses. They took every sample that it is possible to take from a human being, and they did it all very fast. Desperately fast, which was not at all reassuring. They asked me a lot of questions but the more I talked, the more truthfully I answered them, the stranger the looks they gave me. Soon they weren’t even meeting my eyes.

My fever spiked and then dropped sharply. Did that a couple of times. Each time it spiked I saw the numbers on the machines. First time was 100 degrees. Second time was 101.4. My heart was racing. My joints hurt and my glands felt like hot rocks under my chin. Sweat poured down my body. They had me on IVs but I think all of it flowed out of my pores. The lights began getting brighter, sounds became tinny and shrill.

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked, desperate for something to cling to.

“We’re doing everything we can,” someone told me. Or maybe everyone told me that. Not an answer. Even a bad answer is less scary than that.

Then another doctor entered the room. Same hazmat suit as the others, but the face behind the plastic was one that I absolutely wanted to see. Needed to see. It was the face of a man who always seemed to have answers for me.

“Rudy!” I cried, reaching for him, but he stood in the doorway and would not approach within touching distance. Rudy Sanchez looks and even sounds like Raúl Juliá from the old Addams Family movies. A rich baritone voice, intelligent eyes that were filled with wisdom, and a manner of quiet confidence that usually put the pin back into the grenade when I was, psychologically speaking, ready to blow.

But not now. He stood in the doorway, wrapped in the highest-level protective gear in the catalog, and studied me with eyes that were filled with pity, and concern, and fear.

“Rudy—?”

“Cowboy,” he said quietly, “the medical team here is doing everything they can.”

It scared me even more to hear him spout a company line like that. When the doctors say that it is never — ever — a good thing.

“How are Top and Bunny?”

“We’re trying to understand this,” said Rudy. “Joe, please, you have to tell me exactly what happened down there.”

“I already told them, goddamn it.”

“Tell me. Please…”

So I did. I told him every bit of it. Not sure if there was anything that I hadn’t already shared with Church and the other doctors, but I went over it again. Saying it to Rudy, though, helped steady me. At least a bit. He listens with every molecule of his body. He doesn’t miss things and he does not judge. He listens, he disseminates, he works through it, and he understands. Usually. As I spoke I saw the doubt grow in his eyes. And the fear.

“Fuck, Rude,” I growled, “it’s all on the cameras. Check them. Pull the memory cards from the telemetry units on our suits. Upload the memory from the BAMS units. It’s all there. Everything. The video cameras on our helmets. Look at it, Rudy. Look at it and… and…”

I could hear my voice fracture and falter. I could feel my tongue growing thick, muffling my speech, making it hard to breathe.

Hard to think.

Hard to…

The fever came back all at once. It was like someone doused me with gasoline and threw a match. It came at me like a blowtorch, like a flamethrower.

I remember trying to tell Rudy that I was in trouble. I remember reaching for him, and I remember seeing the fear turn to panic in his eyes.

I remember falling.

The floor opened a big, black mouth and I fell into that. Somewhere behind me, above me, elsewhere, I could hear the doctors yelling, nurses yelling, machines yelling. Then there was a long electronic scream. I knew that sound. Knew it too well.

Rudy screamed, too. At least I think he did.

Those screams followed me all the way down into the dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Harry Bolt yelled and backpedaled as he went for his gun.

He stepped into a puddle of blood, his foot shot straight out in front of him, and he went down hard on his ass. Violin leapt over his falling body and he caught a momentary glare of complete disapproval on her pretty face. He saw light flash from the edges of her knives and then she was among the men.

Shots rang out, but Harry did not see Violin stagger or fall. How she evaded the bullets was something he would never understand. Never. Lying on the floor and watching her was like sitting in a movie theater and watching Black Widow or Wonder Woman. It was surreal. She moved too fast, twisted like a dancer, reacted with perfect timing.

It was beautiful.

And it was absolutely terrifying.

Because of the knives.

The men were good. Harry had to give them props. He knew that if it was him in that fight he’d be as dead as Olvera and Florida. Deader, if that was possible. They were brutal and they fought like a well-oiled machine. Practiced, experienced in killing together, merciless.

Violin should have died.

Five to one. Five big, muscular, powerful, and expert killers against a single woman who was at best half the weight and muscle mass of the smallest of them. They should have ripped her apart.

Except that’s not what happened.

As Harry lay there in the puddle of blood, stunned, his pistol forgotten in his hand, he saw the impossible unfold before him.

Violin moved with a coordination that bordered on the supernatural. She danced. That was it, he realized; her fighting style flowed like lovely choreography. She stepped, turned, swept, ducked, leapt, twirled, bent, lunged, dodged, and flowed like honey. Like mercury. Like light.

The air around her was filled with rubies.

That’s how it looked to Harry.

Rubies.

Bright droplets that glowed with heat as they flew.

The men yelled, and growled, and bellowed, and screamed, and cried out for their mothers.

As she cut them to pieces.

Not with the brutality that they had used on Olvera, Florida, and the library guards. No. If murder could have an aspect of beauty, if the act of killing could become an art form, then this was what he was seeing.

Pieces of them fell.

And they fell, and even in their deaths they seemed to swoon to the ground like danseurs whose moment of dramatic demise was demanded by the music, by the narrative of the dance.

One of the men danced backward. The leader. He parried her cut and reeled away, bleeding but not mortally wounded. He flung down his knife and reached for the Tanfoglio pistol in his shoulder holster, and for a moment Violin was engaged with two other men. It was in that single moment that Harry realized that Violin, despite everything, might lose this fight. That she might die.

The man raised the pistol.

And Harry fired his gun.

He emptied his entire magazine at him. He carried a Sig Sauer P220 with a seven-round flush magazine. All seven rounds punched through the air. The distance was nearly point blank.

The leader of the killers wheeled around and stared.

Harry stared back.

Not one of his goddamn bullets had gone anywhere near him. They’d struck the wall, the door, and two rounds had gone through into the main hall.

Harry Bolt was a lousy shot. Always had been.

The man gave him a quizzical look. A kind of battlefield “are you serious” look. Nearly a smile. Then he raised his gun toward Harry.

Violin whirled and cut his hand off at the wrist. She checked the swing and slashed him across the throat. All in the space of a frenzied heartbeat.

The leader dropped to his knees only a second before the other two men pirouetted away from the angel of destruction, took sloppy wandering steps, and fell.

The room became a tableau.

Like a superwoman in an action movie, Violin stood with both hands held out, almost crucified against the reality of what she had just done. Her knives dripped red; her body was splash-painted with red. All around her were the men who should have ripped her apart. A faint wisp of gun smoke lingered in the air.

Harry stared up at her in awe, in shock, maybe in love.

She snapped her wrists down and the blood went flying from the oiled blades. She reversed the knives and slid them into the thigh sheaths.

All in a moment.

All in a dream.

Yeah. Harry Bolt was in love.

She looked down at him, at the slide that was locked back on his gun.

“You’re not only an idiot,” she said. “You’re a useless idiot.”

Outside there was the sound of sirens. Someone had heard the gunshots. Or maybe they heard the screams. Violin bent and pulled the black shirt off of the dead leader and then carefully but quickly wrapped it around the book.

“Get up or go to jail,” she snapped. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”

With the book clutched to her chest, she whirled once more and dashed for the front door.

Harry Bolt staggered to his feet and, because he had no idea what else to do, ran to catch up.

Harry did not look back and therefore did not see the dark SUV pull up outside the library. He did not see the six men in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties enter the library. He did not see them hurry back out only a few seconds later.

Because Harry did not see any of this he did not pay much attention to the fact that he was leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind as he ran.

He did not see the six men begin to follow those prints.

Harry Bolt, after all, was not a very good spy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Junie Flynn was asleep, lost in a dream of strange creatures that blossomed like flowers from twisted trees, then broke off and went flapping on gossamer wings. The landscape was filled with discordant images of intense beauty and ferocious ugliness, and in her dreams Junie was one of the newly hatched creatures who flew over forests of living plants, along beaches of jagged glass sands that ran beside oceans of boiling mercury. When she cried out, her voice was a piercing shriek that sounded like the dying wail of a wounded seabird. Or like a child who was lost and knew she would never again be found.

It was a dreadful dream and this was the third consecutive night she’d had it.

That was how sleep was for her. Her dreams were seldom about Joe or their life here in California. She rarely dreamed of things that had happened during the day, or of the incidental mundanities of life. Her dreams flowed like a river between fantastical and nightmarish.

As did her life.

She seldom shared those dreams with Joe and never with anyone else.

Never.

On those nights when she woke shivering and bathed in fear-sweat, Joe calmed her and comforted her, and from the soothing things he said it was clear he thought that her sleep had been troubled by the cancer she had beat two years ago, or the baby she had lost when an assassin’s bullet destroyed her uterus. Or of the things she had witnessed while coasting the edges of the violent world of the DMS.

But that wasn’t it.

That was never it.

Her dreams took her to strange worlds that Joe would never understand. Junie thought she did, though. After all, her DNA was so complicated and it belonged, at least in part, to other worlds than this one.

Was that where her dreams took her? she wondered. Did this fractured and surreal landscape exist in some other place, and were images of it somehow stored in her cells?

She hoped not, because it was a dreadful, dreadful place.

If that was true, though, then she found it strange that she never saw people in those other worlds. Not once.

Or, maybe it was that the creatures who lived there did not fit any definition of “people” that her senses would recognize. There were plenty of creatures here. Bizarre forms that seemed to change shape the moment she looked away from then, as if it was a game for them to hide from her through transformation. Flesh — if flesh it was — flowed and shifted and assumed improbable forms. Some of them were devilishly similar to things that triggered recognition but did so imperfectly. It was like trying to read a book written in Rorschach inkblots. Other forms were simply devilish in their own right, and when the creatures were in these forms they looked up at her as she flew overhead and they smiled with mouths that were filled with row upon row of teeth.

Tonight, though, the dream changed and in doing so found a new level of strangeness. A new level of horror.

This time she saw a human form running naked along the beach.

A man.

The soles of his feet were shredded from the jagged glass sand and there were awful gashes on his knees and palms from times when he fell. His body was crisscrossed with scratches from plants that reached for him and claws that sought him with pernicious delight.

He ran and ran.

Despite the pain, he ran.

Despite the damage, he ran.

Junie flew above him and tried to call out his name, tried to tell him where to go to escape the things that bit and the things that tore. But her voice was a wail and she had no words.

She could not speak his name even though it screamed inside her mind.

Joe.

Her lover ran from shambling, twisting, metamorphosing beasts that chased. But he also ran toward a great, gray storm cloud that hung strangely low over the horizon.

Except that it wasn’t a storm cloud.

No. It was something far more dangerous. Something far worse.

Joe ran in a blind panic toward it, and the cloud — that shapeless mass — lifted itself from the horizon and rose into the sky. Silent, powerful, indifferent to gravity, acknowledging no physical laws at all. It rolled backward, exposing a face. Eyes that burned with black fire and a snarling mouth wreathed by wriggling tentacles.

As it turned its face upon the world, every single creature below, from the shape-shifting monsters to the sentient trees, screamed out in a language that did not belong in this or any world.

She screamed herself awake.

INTERLUDE FOURTEEN

Dr. Greene was not expecting visitors and it was too late for clients. His secretary and nurse had already gone home and the office was locked. He liked working into the evening because the quiet gave him time to reflect on his day’s sessions and dictate case notes. His iPad was snugged into the speaker dock and Miles Davis was blowing soft, sad, complex jazz and blues at him.

When the door to his inner office opened, Greene yelled in shock. A high, sharp, almost feminine sound. He half jumped up but succeeded only in shoving his chair back so that it struck the wall hard enough to knock a framed certificate from its hook.

Two men stepped into the office. One was black, the other was white. They were both in their middle thirties. Tall, fit-looking, and wearing identical black suits, white shirts, black ties. Both of them had wires behind their ears.

Neither of them was smiling.

“Who the hell are—?” began Greene, his anger shooting up to match the level of his shock. But the black man silenced him by placing a finger to his own lips in the kind of shushing gesture an adult might use on a child.

The white man raised his hand and pointed a gun at Greene. Or, at least some kind of gunlike weapon. It had a handle and trigger, but instead of a barrel there was a blunt snub of an end with no opening, and around it were four steel prongs that curved inward so that the metal balls on the end nearly touched.

“Dr. Michael Greene,” said the man with the gun. It was a plain, uninflected statement, not a question.

“Who… who are you?” gasped Greene, his voice subdued as much from the shushing finger as the strange weapon. “How did you get in here?”

“Dr. Greene,” said the black man, lowering his hand, “we need you to turn over to us all of the materials you have on one of your patients.”

Greene bristled. “That’s absurd. Are you with the government? Let me see your identification. Let me see a warrant.”

The white man and the black man said nothing, did nothing except stare at him. They both had brown eyes that were as flat and uninformative as the painted eyes of mannequins.

“Doctor-patient confidentiality is—”

And that was as far as he got.

The black man suddenly raised his foot and kicked the side of the desk. Greene’s office furniture was all made from heavy hardwood, seasoned and sturdy, with steel reinforcements and a dark cherrywood glaze. The desk weighed nearly 350 pounds. So when it shot backward, propelled by that single kick, the desk struck Greene with shocking force. The desk’s legs were buried deep in the carpet, without casters or wheels, and yet that kick moved it like it was made from balsa. The footwell engulfed Greene’s knees, but the desktop crunched into his gut so forcefully that it snapped the doctor forward with such speed that he had no chance to get his hands up to protect his face. His nose, chin, and forehead slammed down. Pain exploded in his head and blood splashed outward to form a rude Rorschach pattern on the open file folder for one of his newest teen patients.

Greene rebounded from the desk and sagged into his chair, bleeding and dazed. The lights in the room seemed to flare to white-hot brightness, but that was only in Greene’s head because immediately darkness seemed to cover him like a blanket.

Then the desk was gone. Through a haze of blood and stars, Greene saw the black man grab the corner of the desk and yank it out and then shove it sideways. Both men closed on the sprawled doctor. The prongs of the gun dug into the soft palate under his chin. The men leaned close. He could smell their breath. It was like smelling the heated breath of a pair of predator cats. Foul and fetid.

“Dr. Greene,” said the black man in a voice that was somehow more frightening than the violence for its softness and lack of emotion, “you will give us all of your files — hardcopy, digital recordings, and computer files — on one of your patients. You will do it now and you will hold nothing back. If you have any duplicates of this information you will tell us where it is and how we can obtain it. You will not hide anything from us. And when we are finished with this transaction, you will never speak of this to anyone. You won’t mention it. You will not tell the police, your family, your rabbi, or your friends. You will tell no one. If you need medical assistance, you will tell the doctors that you tripped and fell. They will believe you because you will want to be very convincing. If you fail to comply with us now, or discuss this incident with anyone later, we will kill you, your wife, your children, your parents, and both of your sisters. Do you understand me, Dr. Greene? No, do not nod. Tell me that you understand. Tell me that you are willing to comply with all of these requests. Assure me that you will obey every rule we have set forth.”

Blood ran down the back of Greene’s nose, filling his throat, making him gag and choke. The pressure of the prongs eased so that he could turn his head and spit blood onto the carpet. He coughed and spat again. Fireworks seemed to detonate all around him and he was nauseous and dizzy.

“Dr. Greene,” said the white man, “my associate has asked for your compliance.” He placed the prongs against the top of Greene’s left knee. “You do not need either of your legs in order to assist us. A legless man can still direct us to the information we request. So can a man with one hand and one eye.”

His voice never rose beyond a soft, conversational tone.

Greene began to weep. But he also began to nod.

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please… don’t.”

“Will you cooperate, Dr. Greene?” asked the black man.

“Y-yes!”

“Will you obey all of the rules we have agreed upon?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And you will hold nothing back? You will give us every bit of information, every record, every copy of tests, and all case notes on this patient?”

“Yes.” Greene was trying not to sob. Failing. Bleeding. Losing himself into this moment. “Which… which patient?”

The pressure of the strange gun left his knee.

The black man said, “Give us everything you have on the patient coded in your case notes as number three-three-six-P-eight-one.”

Greene stopped breathing for a moment and stared at them, and in that moment he knew what this was about.

“Give us everything you have on Prospero Bell,” said the white man.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I don’t know where I was. Or if I was anywhere.

I’ve always wondered what happens to our minds when we die. People talk about seeing their life flash before them. That happened to me, but not in the right way.

It wasn’t my life I saw.

It was the people in my life.

I saw Junie. My lady, my best friend, the love of my life.

She was in our living room in our condo in Del Mar. I watched her drop the phone and slide off the couch onto the floor. She was screaming.

Screaming.

I could hear the voice on the other end of the phone.

Rudy Sanchez.

Junie’s screams drowned him out. Drowned out the world.

Ghost was there. My big white shepherd. Fierce combat dog, veteran of many of this world’s killing fields. He came to her, whining, his tail drooping, pressing his muzzle against her as she curled into a ball, knees up and arms wrapped around her head.

A man came rushing down the hall. Slim, young, scarred, familiar. Alexander Chismer. Known as Toys. Her close friend. My former enemy and now a kind of ally. A man who had saved the lives of Junie and Circe and maybe a good portion of the world. He still held the hand towel with which he was drying off. He hadn’t even dropped it when she screamed.

“Junie!” he yelled, and vaulted the couch rather than run around it. He dropped down beside her and pulled her into his arms. Like a friend, like a brother. “What is it, love? What’s happened? Jesus Christ, tell me what happened?”

She kept screaming a single word.

“No!”

Over and over again. Ghost howled every time she did.

No.

Or maybe it wasn’t “no.” Maybe it was a name, something that sounded similar.

Joe.

When someone screams like that it’s hard to tell.

I heard a sound. No, sounds.

“He’s coding, damn it.”

Another voice. A stranger’s voice.

“Charging… charging… clear…”

And then my mind and my body and my soul were filled with hot light.

I stood on a hill that swept down toward a mansion that had been built to imitate an English manor house, though I knew I was in America. Somewhere.

The house was burning.

Bodies littered the lawn.

I saw Ghost. His white fur was splashed with blood and he was limping badly. Some of the bodies down there were dressed in the unmarked black battle-dress uniforms that we wear when the DMS goes on a job. The clothing was badly torn. The bodies inside had been ripped up by shrapnel and gunfire.

Suddenly there was a man standing next to me. Tall, strong. Familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. He wore the same thing as me. Exactly. Even down to the bloody bandage wrapped around my upper arm.

His face, though…

Even though he was three feet away I couldn’t see his face. It was blurred, indistinct, like the face of someone who moved at the wrong time when a photo was being snapped.

He spoke to me.

“Did you honestly think you’d win, Joe?”

I tried to speak, to tell him that of course we’d win. That I would win. But the only thing that came out of my mouth was a torrent of dark blood.

He stood there and laughed as I sank down and died.

I felt a needle go into my chest.

And I was somewhere else.

I stood in a darkened room. Another living room. Sea air blew through the window and cold moonlight traced the edges of another man and woman who huddled together in their grief. A big dog whined and howled.

Not Junie, though. Not Toys. Not Ghost.

Dr. Circe O’Tree-Sanchez sat on the couch and held the weeping form of her husband, Rudy. Their dog, the monstrous wolfhound Banshee, sat by the window and howled at the moon. In a bassinet ten feet from them a baby slept through it all.

Circe said, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m so sorry.”

I tried to say something. I couldn’t let this moment stand. The script was wrong and the actors were all reading the wrong lines. I yelled at them. Rudy and Circe did not hear me. Could not. Of course they couldn’t.

But Banshee…

The big dog stopped howling and turned her head toward me. Toward where I thought I stood. Or hovered. Or whatever a dead man does.

Banshee’s eyes met mine.

She saw me.

They say that dogs — some dogs — can see things in the unseen world. Junie tells me that kind of thing all the time. Dogs can see spirits. And ghosts.

Banshee could see me.

Me.

I screamed.

And a voice said, “Hit him again.”

“Charging… charging… clear!”

I blinked and it was bright daylight.

Mr. Church stood in the shadows thrown by a huge old oak tree. Autumn leaves blew gently across the tops of the autumn grass and between the rows of headstones. In the trees, birds sang songs of leaving and of farewell; the songs they sing before they all fly away because winter is coming.

The cemetery was quiet and still green. Church wore a topcoat and he had one gloved hand in his pocket. The other held the hand of a tall, stern-faced woman who wore a ruby red cloth coat and a broad-brimmed gray hat.

Lilith. She looked older than I remembered. Not much, just a little. Not Church, though. He never seems to change. His face was hard, though, without trace of humor or hope.

They stood looking down at a gravestone. I didn’t need to read the name on it to know what I was seeing. They did not speak for a long time and I thought they wouldn’t. Then Church broke the silence.

“I did not see this coming,” he said. “I should have. This is my fault.”

“How many times will you be betrayed before you realize that you should never trust anyone? You believe in people, St. Germaine. That will always get you hurt. It always has.”

“This war is to protect people.”

“We’ll never agree on that,” she said.

Church looked at her. “What can we agree on?”

“The war is the war,” she said softly. “No matter how many of our family we have to bury, we still have to fight.”

Church drew in a breath, sighed, nodded.

Then he stiffened and turned, his eyes searching the graveyard as if he’d heard something.

“What is it?” asked Lilith, releasing his hand and reaching under her coat, half-drawing a concealed pistol.

Church said nothing. His roving eyes stopped and fixed on one point.

He looked directly at me.

Like Banshee, I think he could see me.

But how? What did that mean? What does something like that mean about a person? How could any ordinary person see me?

I was dead, after all. I was dead and time had passed. The grass on my grave looked old.

White-hot light blasted me out of that moment.

I saw Bug in his office. The threadbare goatee he’d been trying to grow these last few months was now a full beard. Scraggly and unkempt. Like the rest of him. Bug was a small guy, thin and nerdy, but that had changed. Now he was a skeleton, a stick figure. Gaunt, with hollow cheeks and dark smudges under his eyes. His hair was badly brushed and his nails were bitten down to raw flesh.

He was at his console in the MindReader clean room. Except it wasn’t clean. His desk was a mess, littered with pizza boxes and plastic plates on which half-eaten food was going bad. Cans of Red Bull and empty coffee cups were everywhere. Amid the detritus was a framed picture of his mother, murdered by the Seven Kings. There was a picture tacked to a wall-mounted corkboard. Grace Courtland, my former lover and a victim of the Jakobys. That corkboard was crammed with photos, many of them overlapping like a pile of dead leaves. I saw my old teammates John Smith and Khalid Shaheed. I saw Colonel Samson Riggs and Sergeant Gus Dietrich. I saw so many of the people I’d known and fought alongside. The people I helped bury.

And there, in one corner, was my own face.

And Top Sims and Bunny.

Lydia Ruiz was there, too. And Sam Imura.

All of us.

All of the dead.

I wanted to yell at Bug, to tell him that Lydia and Sam and a lot of the others weren’t dead, that he was wrong.

But he wasn’t wrong. This was Bug but this wasn’t now. This was what the world was going to do. To us and to Bug. There was none of the innocence left in his face. All of the joy of life had been bled out of his eyes and all that remained was fear and hate.

So much fear. So much hate.

If the world could destroy someone like Bug, if the things that bad people do could erase the powerful innocence of a person like him, then what hope was there for anyone else?

I wanted to say something to him, to warn him to step back from the abyss, to find an anchor for his hope. To continue being alive while he was alive. But I wasn’t Jacob Marley and this wasn’t a Christmas story with a happy ending.

Blast. The bright heat.

Again.

I saw something else, something that shifted my brain into another gear without bothering to use the clutch.

It was me.

In bed. Hooked up to fifty kinds of weird machines that beeped and pinged and insisted that I was still alive. Some kind of alive. Not the good kind. I looked thinner, wasted, smaller, deader.

But not dead.

I was in an oxygen tent and there was a man with me. He wore a hazmat suit, but I could see his face. I knew him.

Dr. William Hu.

He sat in a chair beside my bed, bent forward as he read through a thick stack of medical test reports. His face was drawn but his eyes were intense. The floor around him was littered with papers.

“No,” he said, and flung a file folder away. He read through the next one, growled the same thing. “No.”

It went soaring across the room.

“No.

“No.

“Goddamn it, fucking no.”

He was alone and I was sleeping. Or in a coma. But somehow I knew he was talking to both of us. He flung down another report.

“Don’t you goddamn die on me, Ledger. Don’t you do it. I won’t let you die, you son of a bitch.”

I watched him search for answers. I watched Dr. Hu fight for me. As if my life actually mattered to him. Maybe it did. I can’t stand the guy. Never could. He hates me, too. So not once have I ever wondered how deep that animosity ran.

Perspective is every bit as sharp a knife as assumptions are dull.

“Shit,” he snarled. “No, no, no.”

Blast.

I was elsewhere.

And somewhere else again. And somewhere else after that.

Was this the same thing that happened back under the ice when I was in the bedroom of the cottage shared by Bunny and Lydia? Was I walking through someone else’s life again? Is that what the dead do? Is a haunting some kind of perverse peeping Tom show that never ends?

I saw the man with the blurry face several more times. Nearby. At a distance.

And I realized that I’d seen him once before. When I was awake. When I was alive.

Down in the ice. Down in the frozen cavern of Gateway. He’d been there, ducking out of sight right as everything started going to hell.

Who was he?

What was he?

Blast.

Elsewhere.

This time I didn’t know where I was.

For a moment I thought I was back inside the cave down in the Antarctic. It was a cave and it was huge, but…

It was hot. Geothermal heat. I could see steam rise from vents off to my right. Huge columns rose twisting toward a ceiling that was so vast it was lost in shadows. Every once in a while static lightning flashed within that smoke, and in the strobe bursts of light I saw things.

There was a machine. The same one we saw in the ancient city. A massive ring of steel and copper and glittering jewels.

Except it wasn’t the same. This one was even bigger. Two or three times the size. Monstrous. And it was glowing. It was alive.

I thought about that word. Alive. Felt it. Tasted it. Knew it to be true. The machine was actually alive. It pulsed. Throbbed. Breathed. Lived.

But that was only part of what I saw. As troubling and frightening as that machine was, it paled almost to insignificance by what hung in the air above it. I’d glimpsed it before, but now I saw it. It was titanic. It stood there, miles high, dominating the sky. More powerful than the tortured landscape of the fuming vents of superheated steam.

It was a thing. A creature. Maybe a god. I don’t know and even though I was already dead and insubstantial, I knew this monster could hurt me. It could consume me. Its legs were like towers, like skyscrapers, and the body was vaguely humanoid. But the head… Jesus Christ. The face was covered by thousands of wriggling feelers that knotted and twisted like gigantic gray-green worms. Long worms surrounded its mouth. But… no, they weren’t worms, they were more like tentacles, but each one was bigger than the largest arm of the greatest squid or octopus that ever lived. The creature tore at the air with scaly claws that looked like they could slash through plate steel, and behind it, stretching out from its back, were leather wings.

That’s what I saw standing above the machine. A god from some drug-induced nightmare universe.

I hoped.

I prayed. I screamed. I begged the world to make this thing nothing more than a fantasy of a dying mind. Or a dead man’s nightmare.

The godlike creature threw back its head and from that mouth, hidden by those writhing tentacles, came a roar so impossibly loud that it shattered the ground on which it stood. I saw vast pillars of lava leap up and then everything was covered with smoke and fire.

The flames wrapped around me, around my ghost, and burned me down to nothing.

INTERLUDE FIFTEEN

“Christ, Corrine,” gasped Bell as soon as she entered his study, “you look like shit. What happened?”

“I need a drink first, Oscar. Bourbon. Hit me hard.” She sank into a chair and held out a hand, grunting her thanks as he gave her a tumbler he’d filled with four fingers of Pappy Van Winkle. It wasn’t his usual drink, being more of a scotch man, but Sails had brought the bottle on one of her previous trips. She preferred the rougher taste of bourbon to the smooth burn of single malt. Sails took a huge gulp, forced it down, gagged, coughed, and nodded her thanks.

Bell set the bottle down on the edge of his desk and pulled a chair close to hers. Sails looked like she’d aged ten years; she was grainy and pale, with dark smudges under her eyes and a nervous twitch in her hands. She took another substantial mouthful.

“That fucking machine,” she said.

“What about it? Was there an explosion or something? I told Prospero he needs to make that regulator work or—”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not that. I mean… maybe it’s that, too. But this was… this was…”

And she began to cry.

Oscar Bell came out of his chair, pulled her out of hers, and held her close. It pissed him off that he had fallen in love with her, that they were in love with each other. That was inconvenient and it went against one of his strictest rules: never let sentiment interfere with business. But, it had happened, and now it was a fact. He loved this cold, vicious, brilliant monster and she loved him.

He held her close and let her cry it out, let her cry herself to the point where she could find her voice again. It took a while. It required more of the bourbon, and by the time she was calmer and they were seated together on the big sofa by the fireplace, her voice was thick from weeping and slurry with alcohol.

She spoke and he listened.

“It’s the God Machine,” she said. “I hate that godforsaken thing….”

The Gateway team, led by Marcus Erskine, had built two scale models of Prospero’s machine. Each one had cost upwards of forty million dollars. The first one, Bell knew, had been a spectacular failure that had exploded seconds after it was turned on. Five technicians had been killed, eleven others injured, and the lab destroyed. It was almost exactly the same thing that had happened at Ballard Academy when Prospero had fired his first prototype.

The first Gateway test had yielded other effects, as well. It generated an electrical nullification field — one of the “side effects” that irritated Prospero — that was far more powerful than anticipated. It was so strong that it blanked out power on half the continent. The Russian and Chinese research stations had gone dark for an hour and when they came back online there was a massive exchange of furious communication with Moscow and Beijing. Diplomats had to scramble to keep everyone from going to a high state of combat readiness. Not that America ever accepted blame for it. They claimed to have been victims, too. Luckily there had been some sunspot activity and in the end everyone blamed that. It was the “Kill Switch” Oscar Bell had promised, but it was still uncontrollable.

That was bad, but it was fixable. Erskine had anticipated some kind of problem along these lines, though not as massive. The null field was the golden egg at the end of this hunt. A controllable, predictable, reproducible electrical null field was the whole point of Gateway. Erskine had been putting increasing pressure on Bell to obtain the last component for safe management of the device — the crystal firing regulator — but so far even though Prospero now had three of the Unlearnable Truths he had failed to discover exactly what that was. Prospero said that it was a numerical code for passing the God Machine’s power through transformers attached to each of several large gemstones, but there were thousands of possible patterns, and experimentation to try and crack the code had resulted in damage ranging from explosions to true electromagnetic pulses that fried the machines at Gateway. It was becoming cost prohibitive to do anything more than keep the God Machine in idle mode, and the whole program was millions over budget. Erskine and his superiors were looking to hang the blame on Oscar, and there had been thinly veiled threats about consequences. Bell could lose the contract and there was an outside chance that if it all failed Gateway would require Bell to pay penalties to the government. That would ruin him. Bell had coerced Stark and his staff at Ballard to turn the screws on Prospero and he’d railed at Mr. Priest to find the rest of the books. He was bleeding money.

And now Sails was here, talking about how much she hated the God Machine.

Oscar Bell wanted to scream.

“What’s the problem?” he asked cautiously.

“Side effects,” she said.

“What are you talking about? This whole thing is about exploiting the side effects. The whole Kill Switch project is a fucking side effect.”

“No,” she said. “Not that. It’s the dreams. Those terrible dreams…”

Bell’s heart nearly jumped into his throat. Memories of what Stark had told him after Prospero’s machine blew up the first lab at Ballard. Oscar had never shared that part of the God Machine with Sails. Until now he’d thought it was only tied to that one test. “What dreams…?”

“It started that night,” said Sails. “Bad dreams. Jesus, Oscar…”

She told him about a problem that was not reported at first, and not taken seriously even after people started talking about it. Everyone put it down to stress and grief over the disaster. It was only after the second machine was fired that Dr. Erskine and his staff started paying attention to those dreams. And to their effects. The second machine ran for three weeks before failing. The Gateway scientists had done a lot of work on the sequencing of the power regulators, and though they were far from perfect, they seemed to allow the God Machine to run in idle mode, at 5 percent capacity.

The night of that first day erupted into screams.

“Why?” demanded Bell. “What was happening?”

That night several members of the staff reported extremely strange and unusually vivid dreams. It took the base psychologists nearly a week to put together a cohesive story and even longer to cross-check it. The upshot was that during the time the energy from the God Machine was active in low idle, several staff members claimed to have been inside the dreams of their friends and coworkers, and two of them swore that they had been home. One in Saratoga Springs and the other in Cheyenne. During those dreams they were able to see things at those locations with incredible clarity, and one of them remembered what was on TV. When this was checked out, the substance of those observations matched reality with eerie precision.

So far they determined that one in eleven people tended to have dreams while the machine was idling. However, two in fifteen had the kinds of vivid dreams where they appeared to have “traveled” to other locations and witnessed events there.

At first Sails couldn’t believe it. No one could. Until they had no choice. The machine was left idling for a week, and during that time several members of the team, including Erskine, went “dreamwalking,” as it came to be called. Occasionally their dreaming selves roamed far away from Gateway, but more often inside the dreaming minds — or even the wide-awake minds — of other people at the base. Everyone was rattled. Sails could understand that. Everyone down there had secrets. Everyone who worked in that program had made compromises and decisions that perhaps they did not care to have scrutinized.

One industrial spy was outed and was shipped off to a black site for fun and games. One of the soldiers was discovered to have committed two rapes of women during his time in Afghanistan. One of the women was a local, the other was a female soldier. The rapist was scheduled to return home for court-martial but was found outside in the snow with his ankles and wrists tied. It was seventy below.

Paranoia ran high at Gateway. People began taking sleeping pills, which seemed to work pretty well as a block against invasion. Unfortunately the quality of work product dropped. The pills were banned; everyone’s locker was searched.

The suicides didn’t start for nearly a month.

Bell kept his face bland. He’d heard of this sort of thing before. At Ballard after Prospero’s machine blew up, and elsewhere. Howard Shelton of Majestic Three had said that they were working on something like this for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. That line of experimentation was labeled Project Stargate and had ultimately failed. It was subsequently handed off to the CIA for evaluation and then terminated.

Bell thought about his son, and about Prospero’s complex genetics and parentage, if that word could even apply. Prospero was born in one of the M3 labs. The connection couldn’t be coincidental. That offended logic.

“This dream stuff is real?” asked Bell, careful to keep his excitement out of his voice.

“Yes,” she said. She sipped more of the bourbon and set the glass down. “They’ve been doing exhaustive tests.”

“Have you done this? Dreamwalking, I mean.”

Her eyes slid away. She said, “They sent someone down to interview everyone at Gateway.”

“Who?”

“Someone from the CIA,” she said.

“Christ. Have they reopened Stargate?”

Sails’s head whipped around and her eyes flared with suspicion and shock. “What? How do you even know about that?”

“I don’t know much,” he lied. “Howard Shelton’s people were working on it before the project was terminated.”

“Oscar… has anything like this ever happened with Prospero?”

“Of course not,” he lied. “I would have told you about that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

It took a while for the doubt to drain away from her eyes. Then she sagged back against the cushions. “I’m afraid to sleep,” she said.

“Because you’re afraid of dreamwalking?”

She shook her head slowly. “Because there are so many places you never want to go.”

“What do you mean?”

Without turning, Corrine Sails said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Which is when Oscar Bell woke up.

He was in his bed. Alone. In a silent house.

He stretched out a hand to the other side of the bed, but the sheets were smooth and cool, the pillow undented.

Bell got up and went through every bedroom on that floor, opening doors, looking for her. Calling her name. Then yelling it. He called the guard at the front gate and asked when Corrine Sails left.

“Left, sir?” asked the guard. “I don’t understand. I can check my logbook, but I’m pretty sure Major Sails hasn’t been here for three or four weeks. Do you want me to—?”

Bell hung up. He pulled on a robe and ran downstairs to his office. The fire had burned down to a few orange coals. The couch was empty. However, the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle stood on the edge of his desk. There were two glasses on the tables on either side of the couch. His, drained down to a last sip.

Hers. Filled nearly to the brim with four fingers.

Untouched.

Oscar Bell stood there for a long, long time.

In the morning he called Commander Stark at Ballard and told him that he was upping the budget for Prospero’s lab.

“Sir,” said Stark, “your son seems to have found a comfortable niche, even made a friend. He isn’t spending as much time as he used to in the lab.”

“Listen to me, you stupid motherfucker,” said Bell in a nearly inhuman tone, “I’m not paying you to make my son comfortable. I don’t want him fucking comfortable. I want him in that goddamn lab. I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care what you have to do, but you get him in there. You do it today. And if his productivity ever drops again, if I don’t hear about a jump in his productivity, then I will come down there and rip your fucking lungs out. Do you hear me, Stark? Am I making myself crystal clear?”

“Y-yes…”

“Yes… what?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bell slammed down the phone. The glass of bourbon was still where he’d found it. Bell went over to the couch, sat down, picked up the glass, and stared into its depths.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Harry Bolt caught up to Violin half a block from the library and dogged her heels as she ran down a side street, zigged and zagged through alleys and courtyards, followed her into hotels and out through different exits. When there were people around the woman slowed to a very casual and convincing stroll. She took Harry’s arm as if they were old friends or lovers and she laughed as if he’d said something clever. Once, when a police car was passing, Violin took his face in both hands and kissed him with such fierce intensity that when they were clear and began walking again he had a large and very inconvenient erection.

After fifteen minutes of random changes of direction, Violin stopped by a parked two-year-old Ford Modeo, produced a key, unlocked the car, and when they were both belted in she drove away at a sedate speed.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Shut up,” she said. Twenty silent minutes later, when they were at the very fringes of a middle-income residential district, Violin pulled into a garage beside a pleasant two-story home. The house was furnished and clean, but empty. Violin brought the book with her and went upstairs with it, leaving behind an order for him to sit down on the couch and touch nothing. He obeyed.

She came back fifteen minutes later without the book. She had cleaned herself up and changed out of her black clothes. Now she wore a soft crimson wool sweater over charcoal slacks. No shoes. Her long dark hair was still wet and hung loose down her back.

She carried a pistol in her hand. “There is a guest bathroom through there,” she said, pointing to a hall that ran between living room and kitchen. “There’s some clothes in a closet. Don’t take long.”

“But—”

She sat down with the pistol on her thigh. Violin didn’t say anything else.

Harry went into the guest bathroom, checked it for bugs and cameras and found nothing. The window was block glass and could not be opened. He peed, then got undressed and started the shower. While he waited for the water mix to adjust, he stared at his face in the mirror. He was not a bad-looking man, he decided. Like a slightly chubby Matt Damon. Not actually fat, but not built for the kind of things he’d had to do tonight. Not built for running, that was for sure.

He saw that his thighs, buttocks, and back were stained dark with red from the pool of blood he’d fallen into. Olvera and Florida’s blood. Harry’s stomach did a few backflips and he thought he would hurl. He didn’t.

When the nausea ebbed, he climbed into the shower and dialed up the heat to see if he could boil this all out of his brain and off his skin. Even though his skin glowed pink and spotless when he toweled off, he knew that there were some things that can’t be scrubbed away. He folded the towel and looked through the closets for something to wear.

He found a pair of bright yellow bike shorts and a concert T-shirt advertising the 2012 This Is Desolation Tour for the Hungarian heavy metal band Shell Beach. The shorts and the shirt were one size too small. He studied himself in the mirror and decided that he looked like a black and yellow sausage.

When he returned to the living room, Violin was tapping away on a small laptop. She looked up with her stern face.

And burst out laughing.

“Bite me,” Harry mumbled as he crawled onto the couch, his face burning. He snatched up a decorative pillow and placed it over his lap.

Violin dabbed at a tear at the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bolt, but I know your father and I suppose I’m guilty of being unfair to you by expecting you to be like him.”

He frowned, uncertain as to whether that was a compliment or a slam. Either way he didn’t like it. “You know my dad? How? Have you been on a case with him?”

There was a flicker of something in her expression. Distaste? That’s how it looked to Harry. “Harcourt Bolton is an intense individual. He is a hero of your country.”

“Yeah, he’s the cat’s balls.”

Violin frowned. “I do not know that expression.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s not here and I am, even if that’s a disappointment. Can we focus on what just happened instead of who I’m not living up to?”

She shrugged. “Certainly, let’s do that. Tell me what you know.”

“Um…,” he began, and suddenly realized that he was in a conversation with someone who, at best, was an agent of a foreign power. Even if her government and his agency were allies, that seldom formed an invitation to be chatty. She nodded, clearly aware of the speed bump he’d just hit.

“Then let me tell you what my people found out,” she said. “You are hunting a black marketer named Ohan who you believe is smuggling a portable EMP weapon called Kill Switch into the United States on behalf of ISIL. How am I doing so far?”

“Go on,” he said in a voice that cracked only a little.

“Your intelligence,” she said, leaning on the word hard enough to make it bend, “is faulty. But not entirely. The materials Ohan is shipping do, in fact, originate with ISIL. But these are not, as we’ve seen, materials to support new ISIL recruits in the States.”

“So it’s what? The Islamic State Book-of-the-Month Club?”

She laughed. “You know, you remind me of a friend of mine. Another American agent.”

“Oh, and is he a figure of fun, too?”

“Hardly. He is the single most dangerous man I have ever met.”

This time she leaned on the word “man,” as if the fact that this guy was dangerous did not mean that he was the most dangerous person. After what Harry had seen back at the library, he was willing to bet that whoever was at the top of her list had two X chromosomes. Fair enough. Harry considered himself a progressive modern male. He was the last guy to try and prove that men always had to be tougher than women. He knew better.

“Who killed my team? Was that ISIL? Because none of them looked Middle Eastern to me.”

“They are not. They had nothing to do with the shipment. They do not work for either the black marketer or for the ISIL team involved in this project. In fact they were there to make sure that shipment was never delivered.”

“Yeah, but who are they?”

“I told you who they were.”

“Right, something about a bunch of locksmiths who burn books for fun. I don’t know what that means.”

“The Fraternal Brothers of the Lock,” she said. “The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. They were a kill team sent by the church to destroy that book.”

“Whose church?”

“The Catholic Church, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’? Last I heard the Catholics weren’t sending kill teams out.”

She snorted. “You don’t know much about the world, do you, Mr. Bolt?”

“It’s Harry… and what do you mean?”

“The church is a political organization as well as a religious one. It is ancient and very powerful and the Vatican has many rooms. Many ‘cells.’ Not even the pope knows a tenth of what goes on inside the church.”

“So these guys are, what? Militant censors?”

“A bit more than that, Mr. Bolt. The agenda of the Brotherhood runs very deep,” she said. “It is their belief that certain books contain more than heretical or blasphemous writing. They believe — truly believe — that these books have actual power.”

“Power? Like what kind of power? Are we talking magic here?”

She pursed her lips. “‘Magic’ is an imprecise word, Harry. It suggests the supernatural, and my people do not agree. This is not a world of ghosts and goblins. Not in the way most people think. Think of it more like science. What most people consider to be supernatural is actually an aspect, or perhaps many aspects, of science that has not yet been properly studied, measured, or named. Are you familiar with science at all? The belief among certain quantum physicists that there are other dimensions? Possibly many others?”

“I may have read something. Saw a few specials on Discovery Channel.”

She made a mouth of mild disapproval. “You do realize that science and technology are the major stakes in all important espionage, don’t you? This is the twenty-first century, Harry. The key battles of our age will be fought in cyberspace and in labs.”

“Fine, and when you’re done blowing Neil DeGrasse Tyson maybe you can explain what the frak you’re talking about.”

She laughed. “You really do remind me of my friend. A shorter, dumpier, less intelligent, and less attractive version of him.”

“Hilarious.”

Then he saw the laughter in her eyes and realized she was actually making a joke rather than directly mocking him. It pulled a small, faint smile from him.

“That book,” she said, “was removed from a temple in Syria. One of the many archaeological sites where treasured artifacts have been stored or placed on display for the benefit of humanity. ISIL has gotten a lot of press because of the destruction they’ve leveled on those sites. Not merely UNESCO sites, but mosques, temples, shrines, great ruins, and more.”

“I’m sure that sucks to someone who gives a wet fart, but so what?”

“So some of those sites have a second purpose,” said Violin. “Some of them have been used to store dangerous objects for many years. Often the staff is seeded with soldiers or special clerics ordained for the purpose of protecting the world from the objects they guard.”

“You’re shitting me,” said Harry. “This is a joke, right?”

“It’s not. The world is larger, stranger, and darker than most people know. There are wars being fought on all levels, and many of them are very old wars in which blood has been shed for hundreds, even thousands of years. Maintaining the security over those items is critical, but the power of ISIL is so great that they have been able to overwhelm the guardians. The Brotherhood was quick to act and they sent teams into the field to try and reclaim these objects.”

“If this stuff is so dangerous, why not let ISIL just destroy them?” asked Harry, then he added, “And I can’t believe I’m building a case for those fucktards to do even more damage.”

“If these were ordinary books,” said Violin, “then the Brotherhood might have done just that. However, these books are not ordinary and it is possible, even likely, that an attempt to destroy them would result in a catastrophic release.”

“A release of what?”

She shook her head. “I… don’t know. There are so many different opinions on the subject because no one has ever opened some of those books. Not in many hundreds of years. In many cases the books themselves, the materials used to make them, and the inscribed metals that bind them were carefully constructed to contain the knowledge, to confine the power.”

“This is nuts,” said Harry. “We’re talking about books. I mean, c’mon, I read explosive thrillers but it doesn’t mean they actually blow up. You tell me this isn’t magic but then you tell me this crap?”

Before she could answer, the front door exploded inward.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Alexander Chismer — known as Toys to everyone who knew him — poured more wine into Junie Flynn’s glass, considered, added more. Then he refilled his own. The wine bottle was nearly as empty as its two predecessors and they were both well over the line into being drunk. They drank. She cried a little and he held her. They talked off and on. Sometimes they even laughed.

The TV was on but the sound was muted. On the screen a trio of thirty-something real estate brokers were backstabbing each other in pantomime as they fought for multimillion-dollar listings of Southern California properties. Toys had turned it on because the men were pretty, but he had no interest in the show. He had even less interest in the god-awful Enya music she had on an apparently endless playlist. He endured it, though, and the middling wine. At least in terms of the latter there was a lot of it.

Apart from the TV the only lights were a few votive candles and the starlight visible through the open French windows. The music was low enough so that the soft, rolling whoosh of the waves was not drowned out. Tibetan temple incense perfumed the air, and that was okay. Toys had bought that for Junie at a shop in Encinitas.

“I wish somebody would call,” said Junie. Toys figured it was the tenth time she’d said it.

“They can’t,” he told her. As he had before. “You know the drill with these spy chaps. Everything is hush-hush and need to know, and sweetie, we do not need to know.”

“I do, damn it,” she said, too loudly and with an emphatic swing of her glass that sloshed good Riesling on the couch. She yelped, lunged for it as if she could catch the spilled wine, and slid right off the sofa. She landed with a thump that spilled more of the wine.

Toys plucked the glass from her hand. “Oh, you silly cow, you are shitfaced, aren’t you?”

Junie looked down at the mess and began to cry.

Toys set his glass on the coffee table and joined her on the floor, wrapping a wiry arm around her and pulling her close until she laid her head on his chest.

“Oh, my little Junebug,” he said. “You are going to be a right mess tomorrow, you know that? Joe will come home and you’ll be tits up on the carpet. Very exciting.”

She punched his chest, and a snort of laughter bubbled out through the sobs.

“You’re snorting now,” he said, arching his eyebrows. “You’ve now become actual American trailer trash. Congratulations.”

“You are a total bitch,” she said as she pushed back from him. Junie swiped at her tears.

“You didn’t expect me to slog all the way over here to braid your hair and have a pillow fight, did you?”

“Bitch,” she repeated.

“Drunken sow,” he said.

They had some more wine.

Ghost was curled up asleep in his big dog bed in the corner behind the dining room table and as they laughed, and drank, and wept, the dog twitched and grunted softly. His legs moved as shadows flitted through his dreaming dog mind.

Then Ghost snapped awake and sat up, looking around at the room, at the people, and then through the window at the night. He sniffed the air and whined softly. He got up and walked over to the French doors, paused for a moment to sniff again, taking in the scents on the night air, then he went out onto the balcony. Toys and Junie did not notice any of this, nor did they see Ghost stand up on his hind legs with his front paws on the edge of the wrought-iron rail. They did not know he was even awake until the dog raised his muzzle to the sky and let loose with a howl that was high, plaintive, sad, and entirely wolflike.

INTERLUDE SIXTEEN

Mr. Priest declined the offer of a scotch.

“Sit,” said Bell, and they both settled into comfortable leather chairs. It was late and the estate was quiet. Most of the servants had gone for the day except for the live-ins, and they had been told to stay in their wing of the house. That part of the house did not have a view of the driveway.

“Where’s Dr. Greene?” asked Bell. “Should I start looking for an obituary?”

Priest did not smile. “No, sir. He’s alive and well.”

“Where?”

“He owns property in Washington state. He’s living in a Winnebago. You might be interested to know that he removed the tires and has it resting on blocks. He bought enough supplies to last him for months.”

“Does he know you know this?”

“No,” said Priest. “Nor does he know that we’re tracking his purchases and Internet usage. He drives to several local towns to use the free Wi-Fi. He’s visiting conspiracy theory Web sites. A lot of them. And he’s e-mailing some of the people who run those sites. He’s spoken to George Noory, Whitley Strieber, Junie Flynn, and several others. UFOs, alien races, secret societies, and government cover-ups.”

Bell grunted.

“He’s also been doing a lot of research on the various books that comprise the Unlearnable Truths. He’s bought copies of some, but alas, they are fictionalized or pseudo-nonfiction. He’s nowhere near obtaining a real one, of course,” said Priest. “I’ve made copies of all of his Net searches and obtained duplicates of every book he’s purchased or checked out of a library. I sent a complete report to your Drop Box account.”

“Good.”

“Our Dr. Greene seems to think he’s dropped off the grid.”

“Have you figured out who it was who came to his office and scared him off?”

“Yes and no,” admitted Priest. “That they are Closers is unquestioned.”

“Closers? Really? So they’re working for Howard Shelton or someone at Majestic Three?”

“The man I had watching Dr. Greene’s office followed them to a military airbase in New Jersey. It is my understanding that the Majestic program no longer uses military transport for its operatives.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Perhaps they are working for Gateway,” said Priest. “I know you are in business with them, but surely you don’t trust them. Who else would want the case files about your son?”

Bell nodded. “Yeah, dammit. That’s what I’ve been thinking, too. When you told me about Greene I figured Gateway was trying to do an end run around me. They’re having some problems with their machine.”

“So you led me to understand. I wonder, though, why they haven’t simply taken Prospero.”

“I have a whole military academy keeping an eye on him.”

Priest said nothing, but his skepticism was there to be read in his bland smile.

“Okay, okay,” growled Bell, “I’ll have Stark add more people.”

“If you like, sir, I can have some of my people keep an eye from a distance. Watch the watchers, as it were, yes? If anyone makes a move on Ballard we will make a move on them.”

“What if they send Closers?”

Priest shrugged. “My people are second to none. They were trained by my brother.”

“Your brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“We are not that close, but you know how family is. Besides, Rafael has found religion. He has convinced himself that his employer’s mother is a goddess and he worships the very ground on which she walks.”

“And yet you think he is fit to train top mercenaries?”

Priest laughed. A rarity for him. “No one is better at turning men into murderous fanatics than Rafael. No one. He calls his elite operatives ‘Kingsmen,’ and they are as dangerous as anyone you would ever hope to meet. Or, to not meet.”

“Good. Put them on it.”

“There is a cost element.”

“I know,” said Bell. “Whatever it takes. But do not let any of those Closers come anywhere near my son. You understand me?”

“Perfectly.” Priest cocked his head to one side. “Out of curiosity, sir, why is Dr. Greene even in the picture? With what he knows I would think it would be more useful to close that particular door.”

“Not yet. He’s the only person my son will open up to. Him and a kid at his school. Leviticus King. A juvenile delinquent with rich parents.”

“Anyone we should look into?”

“I don’t think so. The commandant of the school is keeping an eye on them, but it looks like they bonded out of need. King has been keeping the school bullies at arm’s length, and my son is providing him with some recreational party favors. I make sure Prospero has access to a few things. It helps him unwind after sessions in the lab. Kid blows a few joints, then goes back in next day, drops some speed, and he’s raring to go.”

Priest nodded, then changed the subject. “You already have the first of the Unlearnable Truths, The Book of Eibon. Has it been useful?”

“Prospero nearly creamed his jeans when he got it. But then two days later he freaked out when he said it only had some of what he needed. He needs all of them to solve the sequencing problems.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Priest, “but your son is a physicist, yes? These books deal with magic and ancient belief systems. Other worlds and strange gods. I’m not sure I understand how they will help Prospero solve a mechanical problem with his machine. I ask only because it might help me determine if there are other books, or perhaps more contemporary books that might be of greater value.”

Bell considered, nodded. “Prospero believes that this God Machine of his is not something new and he doesn’t think it’s even his original idea.”

“I do not—”

“The kid thinks that this is sacred knowledge given to a special few by what he called the Ancient Ones. Yeah, I know how it sounds, but it’s not the nuttiest stuff I’ve heard. I mean, go read the Book of Mormon or the handbook of Scientology before you judge. Fuck, read Ezekiel and all that Old Testament shit.”

Priest held up his hands. “No judgment, just curiosity.”

“Okay, okay. This ancient knowledge is kind of a test. Solving it accomplishes two things. It proves that you belong to the race of people from wherever these fruitcake Ancient Ones are from. Not another world, not somewhere out in space, but in another dimension, follow me? Good. The other thing you accomplish is to build a doorway that will take you home. Or, that’s what Prospero thinks. He believes that the knowledge of how to build the machine is encoded in his DNA. That it is there as a kind of race memory for those of his species.”

“Sacred knowledge,” suggested Priest.

“I suppose that’s as good a term as any. It’s sacred to Prospero. The kid believes this shit with his whole heart. Always has,” said Bell. “Just like he believes that these Unlearnable Truths were written by people who are either from the same race as the Ancient Gods, or who recorded what they learned from people who are. I think a little of both. Now we get to the tricky part. The science of the God Machine is amazing. I told you some of it. Absolutely brilliant. But there are some flaws in the system, and my people tell me that the flaws look deliberate. Like fail-safes.”

“What are they safeguarding?”

“Use by the unenlightened,” said Bell. “Prospero’s words. He said that they were put there so that only a true believer could solve them. He said that other people like him have built God Machines before and that they were able to go home. Funny thing is I did some research on it and the kid may be on to something. There’s a really good chance that Nikola Tesla built one. It fits, too, because right after that there was a rash of people who had some of the known side effects. Unusual kinds of dreams, visions of fantastic places. Almost a one hundred percent chance the entire surrealism art movement started because of the effect of the ‘god wave.’ That’s Prospero’s name for the energetic discharge of the machine when it’s in idle mode. Are you following any of this?”

“I am following all of it, Mr. Bell,” said Priest. “And it’s very useful. It corresponds to some of what I’ve discovered while researching provenance of the Unlearnable Truths. And I think I can add to what you know. You say that the surrealism movement in Europe was a possible side effect? I’m almost certain that Mr. Tesla may have built two God Machines, the second one being here in the United States. The sudden and dramatic explosion of a very specific kind of dark fiction and fantastical art in the twenties and thirties is not only similar to the surrealist movement; those stories are where we see mentions of these books.”

Bell considered that. “That fits. I’m more than halfway sure the Russians tried to build one in Poliske in Ukraine. A full-sized one, too. That’s probably why Chernobyl blew up. And the Nazis almost certainly did. Their Thule Society, those freaks. God knows that might explain a lot. For all I know the Ark of the Covenant might have been one. At this point I’m keeping an open mind. So, this isn’t new, Mr. Priest. It’s a matter of Prospero being the only person we know of who is able to build one now. He can’t finish it, though, without a code hidden in certain passages and spells in those goddamn books. So, crazy as it sounds, we need to get the rest of them for him.”

“Some of them may have been destroyed,” said Priest.

“I don’t want to hear that. Maybe there are copies. Find out.”

“This is getting expensive, Mr. Bell.”

Bell gulped some scotch. “No kidding.”

“I have to ask… but is it worth it?”

“Christ,” said Bell, “I hope so.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The force of the blast plucked Harry Bolt off the carpet and slammed him into the wall. He rebounded and fell hard, his head ringing with the blast, eyes stinging with smoke, and flesh screaming from where a dozen splinters had stabbed him. Violin was on her knees, face twisted in pain, one hand clamped around a splinter as thick as a pencil that was buried in her chest above her left breast. Red blood boiled out around the wound and ran over her fingers.

Harry looked up to see glowing red lines bobbing through the pall as dark figures clogged the shattered doorway.

“Move!” he bellowed as he launched himself from the floor and tackled Violin as the first barrage of bullets ripped through the smoky air. They fell together, but she pushed herself away and with her free hand swept her pistol from its holster. As the first of the men entered the room, she shot him in the face.

Harry clawed his own gun free and rose to a kneeling position, bringing the gun up in both hands, and fired. The doorway was packed with men. Missing was impossible, even for Harry. He aimed for center mass on the next man in line, missed but hit him in the shoulder. The impact spun the man, jerking him backward toward the shooter behind him. It caused a chain-reaction collision as the men behind bumped into the man he’d shot.

The smoke eddied as the men pushed through, and Harry saw that these were not the Brotherhood. They were dressed differently, in dark suits with white shirts and sunglasses. They looked like Secret Service men, though that was impossible. Some kind of government goon squad. If that was the case, then they might be official agents and not actual murderous bad guys. That thought stalled him because he did not want to murder Hungarian cops.

Violin had no such qualms.

Even with a chunk of wood buried in her chest, she rose and fired, attacking them as they tried to untangle themselves. She went for headshots only, and pressed her attack because Harry’s poor aim had created a momentary advantage.

There were five men in the entrance.

She killed them all.

Ten shots, two into each man.

They died.

All of them died.

Harry knelt there, horrified and dumbfounded, his gun nearly forgotten in his hands. Violin ran outside and then came hurrying back.

“The street is clear but there may be more,” she barked. “Be ready to move.”

Without waiting for him to reply she ran upstairs and returned seconds later with an oversized suitcase. Harry knew what had to be inside it. He could almost feel the cold power of that damn book.

She also had a medical kit tucked under her arm and let it fall in front of Harry. “Grab that,” she said, pain flickering across her face. “We’ll need it. Come on.”

She paused long enough to scoop up her small laptop and tuck it into an oversized pocket on her left pants leg. Then she ran from the house.

Harry Bolt stood up slowly, blinking from the smoke, his ears still ringing.

“What…?” he asked the room. But there were only dead men to answer.

Then he heard a thump from the rear of the house. The crack of wood, the crash of breaking glass. There were more of them.

He turned and ran.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

How do you know if you’re asleep and dreaming that you’re awake or if you’re actually awake? After all the things I’d seen and felt, all the places I’d been, I did not know.

Maybe it was the pain that woke me. I became gradually aware of a leaden heaviness in my limbs and a pervasive ache that went all the way to the bone. In dreams I’d felt pain, but it was always big pain. The sear of flames, the white-hot burn of a knife across flesh, or the volcano heat of a bullet buried deep in my skin. Those were phantom pains or distortions of remembered pain.

This felt real.

It was not as intense, but it did not flash on and off like dream pain.

I hurt. My body was wrong and the pain owned me. It weighed me down like chains even as my senses came awake.

I opened my eyes, surprised that I had been asleep and not dead. Really surprised, actually. I was surprised I still had eyes to open.

The room was different.

It wasn’t the little biohazard cubicle. It wasn’t an intensive care unit, either. This was bigger. Less threatening, less dire. More normal.

If “normal” was a word I could ever apply with any accuracy to my life anymore.

It was a hospital room. A real hospital, too. It had the look, the smell.

I lay there and tried to understand what was going on.

Where was I?

What was left of me?

And… what were those things I saw? Was I able to go somewhere else, or were they simply bad dreams?

How does one tell?

Well… you ask.

I turned my head and saw that I was not alone.

A woman was curled into a leather chair positioned beside my bed. She had a blanket pulled around her, covering her to the nose. Her eyes were closed and for a long time I lay there and watched her breathe, watched her sleep. Saw the spill of curly blond hair rise with her chest, saw the down-sweep of lashes against the sun-freckled cheeks. Saw the woman I loved more than any person on this planet.

Junie.

I didn’t want to wake her. She looked so peaceful and if she woke, would it be to the news that I was, in fact, dying?

Or would waking release her from the dread of believing I was already gone?

Such questions to fill the mind of a man who thought he was dead and in hell. Actual filled-with-monsters hell.

I rolled onto my side as far as tubes and wires would allow. There was no muscle tone left as far as I could tell and even that simple action was like bench-pressing a Volvo. But it brought me marginally closer to her. I reached over to her, lightly — so, so lightly — touched her hair. Whispered her name.

“Junie…”

Her eyelids fluttered.

And opened.

Junie looked at me with fear, with wonder.

With joy. She flung off the blanket and surged up from the chair, bending over me with equal parts passion and need and care. Being gentle with me, as if I was a fragile and easily breakable thing. Which I was.

I was almost nothing.

But I was alive.

We were alive.

And this was definitely not hell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I kept falling asleep and waking up. Kept dreaming wild dreams in between. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was dreaming even though I was awake. Or thought I was. The room stayed the same, though. There were flowers on the table and half a dozen get-well cards taped to the walls.

The hard lines of what was happening and what I thought was happening had grown fuzzy while I slept, and it was almost as if my long sleep was reluctant to let me go.

“It’s okay, honey,” said Junie. “Don’t force it. Don’t fight it.”

When I looked at her, she was not Junie. She was a corpse, withered and burned. The shadowy man with the blurred face stood beside her chair. The only part of his face I could see was his mouth. He was smiling, smiling. Big white teeth.

“You’re a self-righteous thug, Ledger. I’m going to take it all away from you. Everything you have, everything you love. All of it.”

“Who are you?” I croaked.

He reached up and dug his fingers into the gray swirl of nothingness that was his face and slowly peeled it off, revealing it to be a mask.

The face beneath the mask was my own.

I screamed.

And woke up.

“It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie. Again. Exactly the same way, except this time when I looked at her she was alive and whole, and she was alone.

I blinked and I was alone. Her chair was empty and the light falling through the window was gray.

“Please.” Not sure whom I was talking to or what I was asking for.

There are times, when my inner psychological parasites are at their worst, that I wonder if any of my life is real. Maybe I never survived the trauma of my teen years, when my girlfriend Helen and I were attacked by a gang. I was beaten nearly to death and she was brutalized in other ways. Maybe I never lived past that day. Maybe this is all some kind of purgatory. Or maybe my body survived but my mind snapped. There’s a lot of evidence for that; I could build a case. After all, the things I’ve seen and done since possess the qualities of nightmares. Zombies, vampires, mad scientists, secret societies, clones, genetic freaks. Has the world gone mad or was I batshit crazy? Or some combination of both? Doubt of that kind is a terrible thing. It holds a match to the high explosives of paranoia and then everything you believe in, everything you trust, goes boom.

“It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie’s voice. I turned toward her once more, blinking tears from my eyes. Except it wasn’t Junie. It was Rudy Sanchez.

My friend.

My shrink.

Fellow veteran of the wars. A fellow traveler on the fun-show ride that was the Department of Military Sciences and the fight against terrorism in all its many forms.

“R-Rudy…?” I asked, doubting this. Doubting him.

“Good morning, Cowboy,” he said.

“Am I alive?” I asked.

He smiled. “You are. And thank God for that.”

I looked around. It was the same room but something was different. The flowers on the table looked older. There were more cards taped to the wall.

“Where’s… where’s Junie?”

“I sent her home to get some sleep,” said Rudy. “She was completely exhausted. She’s been here every day.”

Every day. Not sure what that meant. Not yet.

“Top? Bunny…?”

He nodded. “They made it through. Thank God for that, too. They’ll be fine.”

Made it through. It was meant to be comforting, but somehow it wasn’t.

“The rest of the flight crew is fine, too,” he added. “They didn’t get it as bad.”

Get it.

It.

I licked my dry lips. “What… happened?”

Rudy took too much time girding his loins to deliver bad news. I know him, I know his face, so there was no chance he was going to say something I wanted to hear. He pulled his chair closer. He looked haggard. Unshaven and unkempt, and Rudy was always a meticulous man. The kind of guy who would take time to trim his mustache and comb his hair before leaving a burning building. Not now, though. He looked like he’d been mugged with enthusiasm, dragged by his heels through an alley, and kicked awake by homeless people. He smelled of sour sweat and too much coffee.

“Joe,” he said, laying a hand cautiously on my shoulder, “you’ve been in a coma. You understand that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sleeping-fucking-beauty. How long?”

“Two weeks,” he said.

That hit me really damn hard. Two weeks? Gone. Simply erased from my life.

I said, “Tell me.”

He did. It was the flu. Not just any flu, not SARS or MERS or anything like that. This was what you might call “old school.” The simple truth was that Top and Bunny and I were infected with the Spanish flu. Yeah. That one. Or at least a mutated strain of it. The disease that swept Europe, Asia, and North America in 1918 and ’19. During that outbreak over five hundred million people were infected, and of those one in five died. Eighty to one hundred million people. Dead. It remains as one of the worst pandemics in human history, with only the Black Plague having verifiably killed more people.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, fighting to sit up. “Didn’t they cure that shit like forever ago?”

“Not exactly,” said Rudy. “It ran its course but there were complications. This was the end of the First World War, whole populations were displaced, and medical services were taxed and…” He stopped and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, there are vaccines available for this and other strains of avian flu; however, the particular strain that infected you and your men was, until now, unknown to science. It looked like the Spanish flu and even acted like it in laboratory tests, but there were subtle differences, including the presence of unknown forms of bacteria that somehow bonded with the virus. That presented Dr. Hu’s medical team — and a great number of experts we consulted — with a genuine challenge. Not that it will give you much comfort, Joe, but books and papers will be written about it.”

“Um… hooray?”

“You should probably buy Will Hu a beer. You’ve become his favorite lab rat.”

I tried again to sit up, and failed. “I feel like I’ve been mugged by the Hulk. How bad am I?”

“Weak,” he said. “Once you were out of danger they transferred you here. At Mr. Church’s request they began some muscle massage, passive movement, and a few other therapies to slow the rate of muscle atrophy. You’re going to have to take it very slow, though, and be very careful. You’ll need a lot of rest and a lot of physical therapy.”

“Fuck that. I want to get the hell out of here. Right now.”

“You’d fall on your face.”

“Then get me a wheelchair and a protein shake. Come on, Rude, I need to talk to Church. Houston—”

“Houston is a tragedy, Joe, but it’s being handled. I’m sure Mr. Church will fill you in.”

“Good. He can do that at my office. Where are my pants?”

“You wouldn’t make it to the door. You’ll need time, therapy, and some medicines before you’re fit to walk.”

“Don’t bet on it.” I swung my legs out of bed and went to stand up. The room took a half spin and I could feel myself falling backward. When I woke up Rudy was eating a fish taco off of a paper plate. It was full dark outside.

“Did you have a good rest?” he asked, dabbing at sauce on his mustache.

“Fuck you,” I said.

He smiled and took another bite.

“For a doctor you’re not a very nice man,” I told him.

“You are incorrect. I am well known for my courteous bedside manner.”

I wanted to say something smartass. Nothing came to mind. I tried to blink my eyes clear.

The room was empty.

Rudy was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Harry Bolt knew how to steal a car. It was one of the things he did very well. He found a Volvo that looked old enough not to have an alarm, jimmied the door, and hot-wired it. Violin slid into the passenger seat with the suitcase tucked into the footwell behind her. Her clothes were smudged with soot and they glistened with blood. Some of it was hers.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” he said.

Her look could have peeled layers of metal off a tank. “Don’t be a child.”

“But—”

“Drive. Look for a tail, can you do that?”

“Sure, but—”

“Then go. No destination. Don’t get us pulled over and don’t draw attention.”

“Where are we going?”

She ignored him and removed her small laptop and opened it. She did not hit any keys, but instead spoke to it. “Authorize Arklight field protocol five.”

The monitor flashed several times and then settled on a screen saver with the smiling face of the Mona Lisa. Harry nearly sideswiped a car looking at it.

“Pay attention,” snapped Violin.

The Mona Lisa spoke. “Oracle welcomes you.”

“Oracle,” said Violin, “I am in company. Friendly. Not family. Confirm.”

“Confirmed. All secure data is shielded.”

Violin then switched to a language that Harry did not recognize even one word of. It sounded a little like Italian, but then most European languages sounded a little like Italian to Harry, and he could not speak Italian. Harry drove aimlessly, constantly checking the traffic patterns. If they were being followed he could not spot it, and he did not think so. Beside him, the strange woman’s tone became sharper, more agitated, and she said some other words he didn’t know but that he was positive were curses. They had that quality.

“Pull over,” she barked. When he pulled to the curb she turned the screen to him. The Mona Lisa was gone and now there was a diagram of a hand with splayed fingers. “Place your hand here.”

“Why?”

“Do it.” It was not a request, though not exactly a threat, either, but he took it that way and placed his hand on the screen. A scanner bar lit up and ran from top to bottom, mapping his palm and fingerprints. Suddenly Harry’s driver’s license, passport information, and birth certificate popped up in different windows on the screen.

“Hey!”

“Drive,” she said, and this time gave him directions. She spoke once more in the strange language to the computer and then signed off. He caught glances of her out of the corner of his eye. She sat there, chewing her lip, looking troubled.

“You want to tell me who the heck you are, what the heck is going on, and where the heck we’re going?”

“I have bad news,” she said.

“Really? Why spoil such a great day?”

“Your team is dead.”

“I know that. Both of them were—”

“No,” she said, cutting him off. “Your station office. There was a fire. Everyone is dead.”

Harry screeched to a halt in the middle of the street. Horns blared at him.

“What?” he bellowed.

“Drive the car,” she hissed. “You’re going to draw attention.”

He started driving, but he felt like he was in another world. Dazed and confused. “What happened?” he asked softly. “Was it those Brotherhood assholes?”

“No. Closers, I think,” she said. “Oracle gave me the story from the news services. Authorities suspect a gas explosion of some kind. The entire building went up.” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

Harry nodded and wiped tears from his eyes. “I hated those guys.”

“The Closers?”

“No, the guys at the office. Total bunch of dickheads.” Tears ran down his cheeks. Then he bristled as her words finished processing in his shocked brain. “Wait… whoa, hold on just a damn second. Closers? Closers? How the hell are Closers involved in this crap?”

“Do you know who the Closers are?”

“I’m in the fricking CIA, of course I know who they are. Men in freaking black who used to work for Howard Shelton and those ass-pirates at Majestic Three.”

“What is an ass-pirate?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is why there are even still Closers anymore. I thought the DMS chopped them all up. How are they back and why did they target my station? And why did they try to kill us?”

Violin stared out the window for a moment, then turned and looked over the seat at the suitcase. “We are in a lot of trouble.”

Harry just rolled his eyes.

“The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum — the Brotherhood — are bad enough. They are dangerous but they’re few. I can handle them, but—”

“I saw. You did pretty good against those Closers, too. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

“My mother taught me.”

“Geez. I bet you cleaned your room when you were a kid.”

She studied him. “When I was a little girl my room was a filthy cell in an underground prison. My mother had to kill a dozen men to get me out.”

Harry blinked at her. “Is that a joke?”

“I wish it were.”

“Holy…”

“It’s in the past where it belongs,” she said. “Right now we are in deeper trouble than I thought. If these are Closers, then they will have resources we can’t match. Not the two of us, and you have no station left to help us. The Closers will have people inside your embassy and in local police.”

“I can make some calls. My dad knows—”

“We cannot trust anyone on your side of this, Harry. Not even your father. If the Closers are after you, then they will have people on him, tapping his phones, hacking his computers. Reach out to him and they will backtrack to you. It’s what I would do.”

Harry swallowed. “You have to be wrong about that. If we go directly to the American ambassador, he’ll give us a marine detail and—”

Violin shook her head. “You know so little about your own profession, Harry. How is that possible for someone who works as a spy? How did you even become a spy?”

“Nepotism and bad choices,” he suggested.

Violin gave him a faint smile. “We need to get this book into the hands of someone who can protect it.”

“Your mother, maybe?” he asked.

“No. She is in the field and out of touch.”

“How about my dad? Nobody’s going to take anything away from him.”

Violin thought about it. “Maybe. But first we need to get out of the country without being spotted. That won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. We will have to use some back routes that I know about. This is one of those times when slow is safer than fast.”

“Before we do this,” asked Harry, “tell me why the Closers, if that’s who they are, would want an old magic book? Majestic was all about some kind of UFO bullcrap, from what I heard. Howard Shelton was into the arms race, not voodoo.”

“It’s not voodoo and it’s not magic,” she said. “It’s science.”

“Science? That book’s a couple of hundred years old at least.”

“Older than that.”

“Then how’s that going to be useful to some black budget government agency trying to build weapons of war?”

Violin shook her head. “You clearly don’t know anything about war, Harry Bolt. Now… drive.”

INTERLUDE SEVENTEEN

They sat in the dark and talked. They were unalike in almost every way. Prospero Bell was very tall, thin, pale, blond, with piercing blue eyes and a full and sensual mouth. His cheeks and nose were dappled with freckles that had paled in captivity but not fled with boyhood.

His friend — his only friend in the whole world — was completely different. Shorter, bulkier, with hard muscles and a deep tan. Hair that was as black and glossy as crow feathers, and a hairline that plunged down his forehead in a dagger-point widow’s peak. A saturnine face, thin lips, and eyes as dark as midnight. His given name was Leviticus Kingsley Grant, but he called himself Leviticus King. Like Prospero, Leviticus hated his father, and unlike his friend he had gone a step farther and forsworn the use of the family name.

They had met in “re-training,” which was the Ballard academy’s soft-soap nickname for the punishment room. Both boys had given up keeping track of the number of times they had been beaten, or made to kneel on grains of rice, or forced to stand barefoot on the hard rims of metal barrels hour after hour. None of these tortures were ever reported to their parents, and both boys knew that if they tried to report them, their fathers would not care and the punishments would likely intensify. It was a locked system, a no-win scenario until they were eighteen. And even then Prospero did not believe they would escape. Paperwork was already on file to induct them into the military, and though conscription was technically illegal, all the right hands had been greased. They would go into the army and any attempts to escape that machine would result in federal prison. It was a trap and they were fully aware that they were not the first sons of rich men to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and offered up to the gods of profit. Nor were they the first blue blood embarrassments to be hidden away from public scrutiny and paparazzi cameras. Not by a long shot. Some of the older boys and instructors bragged of having gone through these tortures themselves and having “seen the light” in the process.

The light.

Seeing the light was a big thing at Ballard. It was all about seeing the light, the light, seeing the goddamn light.

Which is why Prospero and Leviticus sat in the darkness.

They had a couple of joints King had stolen from the locker of one of the grounds crew, and the marijuana was laced with chemicals Prospero cooked up in his lab. They were edging toward being nicely baked. Getting high helped. Anything that sanded the edges off the world helped.

Prospero took a long hit off the joint, elbowed King lightly, and handed it to him. He held the smoke until they were both ready to burst and then they blew the smoke into the cold furnace behind them. It was summer and the big iron beast was off, and this late at night no one would see the smoke rising from the chimney many floors above them. This was a practiced routine, one they’d thought through and knew was safe.

“Evil is just a word,” said Prospero, picking up the thread of their meandering conversation. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah,” said King. “That’s the part I don’t get. You’re saying there’s no such thing as evil?”

“No, I’m saying it’s the wrong word to use. It’s too broad, too easy.”

King took a hit and passed the joint. “How is ‘evil’ easy?”

“Because it’s not a real thing,” said Prospero. “Think about it. You and I use the word the wrong way. We call our dads evil. We call the sergeants and the cadet trustees evil because of the things they do to us, but are they actually evil?”

King took another deep hit. “Yeah, I’m half-gone, man, so you’re going to have to explain that to me. Because they seem pretty goddamn evil to me.”

“Maybe,” said Prospero. “Okay, context. As a society we call people like Charlie Manson evil. We call serial killers evil, and we call Hitler evil. But at the same time people use that word to describe everything from cancer to a natural disaster.”

“Okay, some of that I get,” said King. “People calling cancer evil is stupid.”

“It’s imprecise,” corrected Prospero. “The word loses its meaning when it’s applied to anything natural.”

“Okay, sure. So?”

“Go the next step. We use it to describe moral crimes.”

“Like mass murders.”

“Sure, like mass murders, but then you have to step back and look at the nature of morality. Killing a dozen people and cutting out their hearts is wrong because the current set of laws in America says it’s wrong, right?”

King blinked in confusion and then got the point. He nodded.

“But go back through history and you’ll understand where I’m going with this. Take ancient Egypt,” said Prospero, warming to his topic. “It was a common and accepted practice for the retainers of a pharaoh to be sacrificed in order for wealthy nobles and pharaohs to enjoy the same kind of lifestyle after death that they had during their lifetime.”

“Harsh,” said King. “But I get what you’re saying. It was okay back then. Okay for the pharaohs, I mean. I don’t think the staff was all that jazzed about it.”

“Probably not,” agreed Prospero, “but the culture did not take their opinions into consideration. What the rulers did was culturally acceptable and therefore not evil. Same thing for the Aztecs.”

“Yeah, those cats loved cutting hearts out. An Aztec? Shit, he’d cut out a heart just for shits and giggles. No big thing to them.”

“Not evil to them,” said Prospero, nodding. “Even though it’s exactly the same action as other kinds of ritual killing.”

King took a hit and passed the joint back. “So… you’re saying that serial killers aren’t evil because they believe that what they’re doing is correct as they see things?”

Prospero patted him on the thigh. “Yes. A lot of them are in their own headspace. For some it’s damage from their upbringing, for some it’s bad brain chemistry. Whatever. The point is that the act of killing is not evil to them.”

His friend was silent for a moment, looking deep into the shadows around them. In a quiet, almost cautious voice he said, “They still hide their crimes, though. They do a lot of stuff not to get caught. They know they’re breaking laws.”

“Which only shows that they have cunning, and in some cases intelligence. They know that there are people around them who believe in an entirely different set of laws, or a different moral code, or even a different religious viewpoint. Knowing that, and understanding that these people feel that theirs is the only valid viewpoint and that they are willing to impose those rules and the accompanying punishment on anyone who doesn’t share those views is common. That happens all the time. Salem witch trials. The way the Puritans persecuted the Quakers. The way whites treated the blacks — and still do. Persecution and violent enforcement of a self-created set of rules does not make the persecutors ‘good’ any more than it accurately defines the rule breakers as evil. If it did, then the Founding Fathers would be considered ‘evil’ because they violently rebelled against the rule and laws of England. But nobody here calls their killings ‘murders’ and they don’t label them as evil.”

“Where are you going with this, man, ’cause you’re harshing my buzz.”

“First, I’m trying to establish that evil is not really a religious concept. It’s entirely secular.”

“Why? Because religion is for shit? Because the whole ‘God’ thing is total bullshit?”

“No,” said Prospero quickly. “I’m not saying that at all. We’re not talking about the existence of God. Or gods. Or anything like that. We’re talking about evil as a cultural concept. As I see it — and history supports this view — evil exists as a label used by one side in an unequal dispute over behavior.”

King smoked and thought about that. “What about Nazis?”

“If they’d won the war and conquered the world,” said Prospero, “the widely accepted belief — or at least the dominant social policy — would be that their actions — things like the Final Solution — were a means to an end, and that end was the unification of the world. They might even have ended war and future historians might have looked back on them with admiration.”

“They killed all those Jews and Polacks and Gypsies and shit.”

“Sure, but then they lost the war. The winners, the Allies, became the dominant social group, and in their view, the Nazis were evil. This isn’t new. Rome was corrupt, but because there is more well-documented Roman history, the historians who wrote the history books talk about the ‘sack of Rome’ as if it was an evil act by barbarians. You get where I’m coming from?”

“Sure,” said King. “But so what?”

“So,” said Prospero after a very long toke and an even longer withhold, “so why should we — the two of us — have to accept being the school’s bad boys? Why do we have to accept being the black sheep of our families? Why do we have to feel guilty whenever we get caught doing things?” He paused, watching the smoke swirl and tangle like the tentacles of some amorphous sea creature. “And why do we have to feel that we’re sick, or mentally imbalanced, or socially fractured just because the school therapists tell us we are?”

“Well, dude,” said King with a laugh, “let’s face it — we’re not normal. They busted me for setting cats on fire. I had to pretend I was sorry, but you know I’m not. And they don’t get it that I like cats. I really do. I wouldn’t burn them if I didn’t. It felt so right. Hell, it was right. They’re just too stupid to get it.”

Prospero turned to him, his face lit by the glowing coal of the joint. “That is exactly my point. It is right for you. It isn’t evil for you. It’s not even wrong for you. You understand what happens when something that’s alive burns. You can see into that fire and you know.”

Leviticus King sat up and looked at him. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and even the glaze in his eyes seemed to harden. “Yes.”

“When I tell you about the things I see in my dreams, you don’t make fun of me.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?” asked Prospero.

“Because that’s your stuff. It’s in your head. It belongs to you.”

Prospero nodded. He wanted to hug King, but this wasn’t that kind of moment. “You know what those things in my dreams tell me, right? You know what they want me to do. What I must do… right?”

“Yeah, man, I know.”

“If I did them… would you think I was wrong?”

King took a moment with that. Then, very carefully, said, “Not if you did it because it was right. For you, I mean.” Then he stopped, paused as if listening to a thought, and he smiled, too. “Oh. That’s what you mean by all this good and evil shit. If you believe it, then it’s not evil. Even if someone else thinks it is.”

Prospero gripped his friend’s arm with both hands. “Yes!”

“Wait, wait,” said King quickly, “there’s something else, isn’t there? If you believe this stuff—”

“And I do,” swore Prospero. “You know that I do. I have to.”

“—then what your old man did… that was evil. He took the God Machine away from you. He — what’s the word? Sinned? He sinned against your beliefs. And he made it worse by taking something from your, um, church, and selling it to the fucking Department of Defense. Shit. And he keeps you in here so you keep working on new stuff, and he knows that you have to because it’s part of what you believe. That you have to keep working on the God Machine project.”

“Yes,” said Prospero.

“So he’s exploiting you and pretty much pissing on your religion and waving his dick at your god. And he’s doing it to make money. From your perspective that makes him evil as shit.”

“Yes.”

“And we both know he’s leaning on Stark to make you keep working in the lab. He’s turned you into a slave. That’s some evil shit right there.”

“Yes,” said Prospero again.

King nodded. “Same goes for my dad when he beat the shit out of me after I torched my middle school. I was doing something important and he didn’t see it. Or couldn’t see it. Or whatever. He hurt me because he doesn’t share the same perspective. He sinned against me.”

“Yes.”

“So, what we’re saying here,” continued King, working through it slowly but definitely getting there, “is that they are sinners and by our personal standards they’re evil.”

“Yes,” said Prospero once more. “And history shows that anyone has the right to create a new moral, societal, or religious code as long as they have the power to enforce it.”

“Which we don’t have,” sighed King.

Prospero laughed. “That’s because we’ve been in here rotting. It’s because even we’ve half believed that we’re the freaks and they’re the righteous ones.”

“I’m not sure I ever really believed that.”

“Sure you did. So did I,” said Prospero. “If we truly believed all along that we had been sinned against and that whatever gods we each pray to empowered and sanctified us, and demanded of us that we assert our rights… then nothing would have stopped us from breaking out of here.”

“Dude,” said King, “this place is a military academy. They have armed guards. Soldiers. There’s no way we’d ever get out of here without killing someone.”

He laughed as he said it. But the laughter faded when Prospero did not join in. After almost a full minute, Prospero Bell said, “And that is the next thing we have to talk about.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I slept and the nightmares came back.

This time I was there in my hospital bed, feeling sick and strange, staring at the darkness on the other side of the room’s single window. There were orange sodium vapor lights in the parking lot and they painted the undersides of a row of palm trees in Halloween colors. The palm fronds looked like the talons at the end of black arms.

It was an odd dream because it felt exactly like being awake, and I couldn’t figure any way to tell if I actually was awake or if this was truly a dream. Ever since I’d been hit by the blast of air from that machine there seemed to be no way to pin certainty about anything to the wall.

When my door opened and Rudy Sanchez stepped into the room, I felt immediately relieved and reassured. If anyone could help me through this and guide me back to solid ground, it was Rudy. Stable, reliable, practical, wise Rudy.

He came over to the side of my bed and smiled down at me. He wore a summer-weight suit and a Jerry Garcia tie I’d bought him for his last birthday. He leaned on his walking stick, the silver wolf head newly polished and gleaming.

“Joe,” he said.

“Hey, Rude. I had a weird night,” I said. “I keep thinking I’m dreaming. It’s freaking me out.”

Rudy raised his cane and laid the heavy silver head over one shoulder as he studied me. “Do you think you’re dreaming now?”

“I… I thought I was. I mean, until you came in.”

“But now you believe you’re awake?”

“God, I hope so.” I laughed. “I can’t tell which way’s up.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. It takes at least minimal intelligence to understand what’s happening.”

I grinned. Rudy seldom makes jokes at my expense, but he got in a good one every once in a while.

“I am awake, though,” I asked him. “Right?”

He canted his head to one side, appraising me. “Do you know why things went wrong down at Gateway?”

“I—”

“It’s because the Deacon sent the wrong man down there,” said Rudy. “He should have sent the best, but instead he sent you.”

“What—?”

“Instead he sent his pet thug.”

I sat up, frowning, not understanding what was happening here. “Hey… Rude… what the hell—?”

And Rudy Sanchez swung his cane at my head.

CHAPTER FORTY

He swung hard and fast but it was the surprise that nearly got me killed.

“Rudy—no!”

I flung a hand up to save my face, but I was slow and the heavy lump of silver punched into my hand and slammed it back against my face. He growled like a dog and whipped the cane back and chopped down again. I bashed it aside and rolled away from him as he tried for a third hit. The cane chunked into the pillow hard enough to make the bed jump, but this time I was out of range, rolling off the far side, dropping down, trying to land on my feet, failing, falling hard. His shoes clacked on the linoleum as he raced around the end of the bed. I grabbed the corner of the wheeled bedside table and shoved it toward him, jolting him so that his next swing missed, too. But it was a near thing. The cane whistled down past my ear and thumped against the edge of the mattress.

“Rudy!” I yelled. “Stop it. What the fuck are you doing?”

Rudy laughed. A brutal, vicious laugh. It was his face, his voice, but that laugh did not belong to my friend. And it occurred to me that his accent was wrong. American without the cultured edge of the Mexico City in which he was raised.

“You’re a piece of shit, Ledger,” he said, spitting the words as he fought to push the cart out of the way so he could get to me.

I was so weak, so clumsy, that I couldn’t rise to fight him. My knees wouldn’t hold me and I collapsed down as I tried to rise, but I used the momentum of that to kick out and ram the table into his thighs. He staggered back and then grabbed at the lip of the table to wrench it out of his way.

Was this a nightmare? If so, then I was free to act, to fight, to destroy this distorted version of my best friend.

Or was it real and was Rudy the victim of some kind of psychic fracture? Had he been doped? And… how could I save myself without hurting him?

I yelled for help as loud as I could.

The table went crashing onto its side as Rudy forced himself past it to get to me. The cane rose again and this time I had nowhere else to go. There wasn’t enough clearance for me to roll under the cumbersome hospital bed. I was in a narrow chute formed by the bed and the wall, with the night table behind me and nothing to use as a shield.

“Fucking die!” bellowed Rudy as he brought the cane down again.

What choice did I have?

Really, what choice?

The heavy silver wolf flashed toward me, driven by Rudy’s strength and his rage. And I kicked him in his bad leg.

I kicked him hard.

There was a sound like a gunshot. Brittle, huge, terrible.

His leg buckled backward, folding in a sickening way. The cane cracked me on the bunched muscles of my shoulder. Rudy fell, his face twisted — not with the agony he had to feel, but with hate. Raw, unfiltered hate. He crashed against the window, striking the heavy glass with one elbow and the side of his head. I rose up to one knee and tore the cane out of his hand, flung it across the room, tried to catch him as he fell.

Rudy lunged forward and tried to bite me.

Bite. Me.

His teeth snapped shut an inch from my Adam’s apple as I reeled backward.

“Stop it,” I begged. He punched me in the chest, the ribs, the face. He grabbed my hair and tried to pull me toward his snapping white teeth.

I ducked forward, dropping my chin, and head-butted him, smashing his nose, hearing the cartilage snap, feeling blood burst against my skin. Rudy sagged backward and I whipped a flat palm across his jaw that snapped his head around. His eyes flared once as the extreme angle stretched his brain stem and short-circuited the electrical conduction from brain to body. It happens to boxers and martial artists. It happens with whiplash victims. It’s happened to me.

His body slumped immediately, sagging atop me in a boneless sprawl. I caught him, wrapped my arms around him, hugged him to me to prevent him from forcing this fight any further.

But he was done.

Out.

We lay there in a strange, bloody, awful embrace while I screamed for someone to come help us. I begged to wake up.

But I was already awake.

This was a nightmare but it was not a dream.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Rudy and I were players in a midnight circus. He was a trained tiger who’d slipped his leash. I was a clown. None of it was real, none of it was funny.

The nurses and orderlies came running. It was probably only seconds since the fight started, but it seemed like hours. They swarmed into the room, yelling, demanding answers as if I had any. They stabilized Rudy with a neck brace and four of them gingerly lifted him onto a gurney to wheel him down to emergency. I was helped up and back into bed, but then a hospital cop came in and stood there with one hand on his sidearm as a frightened intern tried to make sense of my story. Then the doctors came with harsher questions. Then more cops showed up.

I had no answers that made any sense and it was abundantly clear that no one believed a word I said. The cops wanted to put me in four-point restraints. I told them to contact someone at my office. They produced a set of handcuffs and decided that, at the very least, I should be cuffed to the bed rails. I made it clear that I would shove those cuffs up someone’s ass so far they’d chip molars on the way out. Two of the cops drew Tasers and it took the direct intervention of the hospital administrator to keep my room from turning into an MMA pay-per-view brawl.

Then Sam Imura arrived.

He is the sniper on Echo Team and one of my most reliable operators. Cool, calm, intelligent, and authoritative. He flashed impressive credentials that identified him as a special agent of the National Security Agency. He isn’t, but the DMS doesn’t have badges. We’re allowed to borrow what we need.

Sam is a hard guy to stare down. He looks every bit like one of his Samurai ancestors — and that’s no joke, the Imuras were Samurai going back nine hundred years. He had that flat stare that lets you know nothing about him except that he was in charge. Sam also brought two junior DMS security people with him and positioned them outside my door. Another two were sent down to the emergency room to keep an eye on Rudy.

When we were finally alone, Sam turned to me and his poker face dropped like a brick. “What,” he said, “in the hell happened?”

I told him.

He called it in to Mr. Church, explained it, then handed the phone to me. I went through it again. Church said next to nothing and I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. Rudy is, after all, Church’s son-in-law and the father of the big man’s only grandson. So, there’s that.

“Keep me posted,” said Church, and disconnected the call. I stared numbly at the phone, then handed it to Sam.

“That was helpful,” I said.

Sam pulled a chair close to the bed and sat there while we picked through it moment by moment. Even after careful, considered analysis it made no frigging sense. Then he left for almost an hour. When he came back he resumed his seat. His poker face was back in place.

“How’s Rudy?” I asked.

He took so long in answering it was clear he didn’t want to tell me, but I pressed him. “You broke his leg, shattered his nose, and sprained his neck. He’s in surgery.”

I closed my eyes. “Has anyone called Circe?”

“No. Mr. Church doesn’t want her to know until we have some answers.” He sat back and folded his hands on his lap. “Do we have any answers, Boss? You come up with anything while I was out?”

“Not a goddamned thing.”

We sat with that for a while.

“Poor Rudy,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It was a long night.

INTERLUDE EIGHTEEN

Prospero’s birthday was tomorrow. He would be eighteen, and by law that would mean he should be able to walk out of Ballard without Commander Stark or any of his goon squad saying a word.

Should.

Not would.

Stark had made it very clear that he would not be leaving Ballard anytime soon.

“Sorry,” replied Prospero, “but in sixteen hours your tenure as my keeper ends. If you want to get in a few last cheap shots, go right ahead. And tomorrow, when I take possession of my trust fund, I will bring ten kinds of lawsuits down on your head. And I’ll be filing legal charges for child abuse, physical abuse, assault and battery, and a few dozen other things. If you think my father will step to your defense, then you are sadly mistaken. I’ll have you and the rest of the Ballard Neanderthals in prison within a week, see if I don’t.”

Stark, however, kept smiling. They were in the commander’s office. Alone, though there were two sergeants outside, ready to step in if needed.

“Tell me, Prospero,” said Stark, “aren’t you even a little curious as to why I am not shivering with fear right now?”

“I already know. It’s because you’re too stupid to know when you’re beat. I’m holding all the aces, motherfucker.”

“Such language,” said Stark. “However, I like a challenge. You have aces, you say? Hmm, let me see what kind of hand I can play.” The commander opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a folded sheet of paper. He waggled it between his fingers for a moment, then handed it across to Prospero. “Read it.”

Prospero hesitated, not liking this at all. But he plucked the letter away and opened it. He read it through. Then read it again. His hands were shaking by the time he finished the second pass.

“This is bullshit,” he said, slapping it down on the desk. “No way this is legal.”

“And yet it is,” said Stark pleasantly. “Signed by two psychiatrists and countersigned by the judge.”

“What doctors? I haven’t had any fucking psychiatric evaluations.”

“No?” said Stark with mock alarm. “But it says so right here, right above where it says that Judge Bernstein has remanded you to my custody until further notice.”

Prospero shot to his feet. “No! I’m leaving tomorrow and you can’t stop me. This is bullshit. This is my asshole father and you involved in criminal conspiracy.”

“This,” said Stark, reaching to take the paper back, “is legal.”

Prospero sat there, frozen, unable to think. “Why…?”

“Ah, a fair question. Let me tell you how this works,” said Stark. “And understand, this comes straight from your father, so if you need to hate someone, hate him. He has been remarkably frank with me because, you see, he trusts me. He knows that I can get results. Your father is very generous with people who are able to get him what he needs.”

“My… research…,” whispered the boy.

“Of course. From what I gather, your father obtained something very important from you a few years ago. The God Machine, I believe it’s called. That made him very happy. You were sent to me, however, because you tried to sabotage his work and punish him for taking your little toy. Even though as your father he had every right to anything of yours. Every right.”

“No,” said Prospero, but Stark ignored him.

“Your father needed you to be somewhere safe. In a place where you could continue your little science projects, but well away from him. He loves your mind, Cadet, but I fear he does not love you. So sad. Understandable, of course, because apart from your knack for science you are a psychotic, worthless pile of cold shit.”

“Go to hell,” said Prospero, but without emphasis. He felt like he was dying inside.

“As long as you continued to do research, your father was happy with the arrangement. But then you had to go and screw up the arrangement. Maybe it’s true that genius has a short shelf life, or maybe you just don’t have what it takes to be a superstar, but you seem to have peaked. Your father has become more and more disenchanted with the work you’ve done. He’s even gone so far as to speculate that you might be deliberately sabotaging your own progress so you’d burn off your last few months until you turned eighteen. And then you’d be out of here, thumbing your nose at your father and all of your friends here at Ballard.”

Prospero said nothing. They both knew it was true.

Stark nodded, however. “You are not, as it turns out, as smart as you seem to think you are. No, Mr. Bell, not by a long mile.” He tapped the sheet of paper. “This is proof. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you, my young Einstein? Bet you never even considered that there was a card we could play that would trump anything in your hand. Oooo, it must sting to be out-thought by the Neanderthals. Now, the way this works is that you will continue your research but you will light a fire under your own ass. You will no longer drag your feet, and you will produce whatever it is your father wants. You will do this as quickly as humanly possible and you will make sure that everything you do is exactly to your father’s specs. He will have his people test it. Then, and only then, will he consider having the doctors and the judge reexamine your court-mandated commitment.” Stark leaned forward. “Screw with me, Cadet, or make me look bad in front of your father, and I can promise you that there are things we can do to you that will make you believe that you are not in a nice, comfortable military academy but are, in fact, in one of the inner rings of hell itself. Have I made myself absolutely clear?”

That’s when Prospero bolted from the room, blew past the two sergeants, and tried to lock himself inside his lab. He hadn’t even managed to inflict any significant damage to the mainframe when the sergeants broke through the door and fell on him.

He barely remembered the beating.

All he knew was that Stark and the two sergeants seemed to enjoy it. He did not remember when it ended. Maybe they got tired. He had no recollection of how he got out of the lab. There was a tiny fragment of a memory of being dragged.

His next fully conscious moment was the water.

Shower water falling on the side of his face, and a familiar voice saying, “Jesus,” over and over again. Which was strange because that wasn’t his name. Or even the name of his god.

Darkness again.

The sound of dripping water found him in the dark. He was wet, he knew that much. But there was something around him keeping him warm. A towel. Several towels.

Prospero was afraid to open his eyes. He’d never been beaten this badly before. Never. Not by his father and not by anyone at Ballard. This time, though, they’d kept at it. Hitting him with telephone books because that wouldn’t leave marks. The damage was all shock wave, all internal. Slapping his testicles with loose hands. No bruises there, either. Just pain and sickness.

Other stuff. His rectum hurt again. Another kick? Something worse? There were sadists among the sergeants. Artists at pain and humiliation.

It felt to Prospero like all of it had been done. Like Stark and his Gestapo no longer cared what they did.

It took a long time before the lights came back on inside his head. He was not in the infirmary, not in a local hospital. He was in one of the big communal showers. Fully dressed, soaked, wrapped in those towels.

“Jeezz-us,” said a voice. “I thought I was going to lose you for a while. You look like shit.”

Prospero turned his head very slowly and carefully. The lights were low and the locker room was empty except for him and Leviticus King. The other boy sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, elbows propped on his knees, the neck of a Coke bottle dangling from between his index and forefinger.

“How… how bad is it?” asked Prospero, his voice thick with pain and shock.

“Your face is still pretty, if that matters,” said King.

“It hurts,” moaned Prospero. “You got anything?”

King held out the Coke bottle. “It’s high octane.”

He helped Prospero sit up and steadied the bottle while his friend sipped. Prospero gagged at first. It had to be at least three-quarters vodka. But he took a breath and took a second sip. And then a couple of gulps.

King sat back and took a pull, too.

“El Comandante told me that you won’t be leaving us tomorrow,” he said. “I think he had a boner when he said it. Your dad must have written him another check.”

Prospero nodded.

They passed the bottle back and forth.

King sipped some booze. “What exactly is the God Machine anyway? You said it was some kind of EMP thing?”

“That’s only part of it. It’s not an EMP, it’s a null field. It interrupts electrical conductivity above a certain level. Anything stronger than the central nervous system of a person. Machines.”

“He already has that, though. I mean… isn’t that what he took when you were a kid?”

Prospero nodded again. He felt like something was broken inside and could not tell if that was true or not. It felt like he was dying.

“He stole a prototype. It was the best I could do at the time, but it wasn’t right. I’ve… learned so much since then.”

“And—?”

“And it doesn’t work. There is a brief null field when you switch it on, but the core processors melt down. It’s useless. I’ve been working on fixing it, and I’ve been giving him bits and pieces of it. What I really need are the last of the Unlearnable Truths. There’s a code hidden in some of the books. I think I’ve figured out how to find it, but I don’t have all the right books.”

“A code for what?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me anyway,” said King.

Prospero wiped a trickle of blood from his ear. “The God Machine is built like a particle accelerator, only instead of colliding particles it superaccelerates them to open a doorway.”

“To—?”

“Another world,” said Prospero. “If I’m right, then maybe to an infinite number of other worlds.”

“You lost me. You talking like Mars and Jupiter and shit?”

“No. I said it wrong. Imagine that there are an infinite number of worlds. Each is almost identical to Earth except in one little way. Like in one world I have blue eyes instead of green. Like that. Some of the differences would be so subtle that you could never tell. You might never see where the difference is. But some would be radically different because of cause and effect. If the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had hit another chunk of space rock first it might have broken up and been smaller, which wouldn’t have killed all the dinosaurs. Or it might have been bigger and destroyed the world. Or it could have hit later in the day and because of planetary rotation hit a different part of the world. You see how many possibilities there are? It’s chaos theory applied to interdimensional physics.” Prospero took a ragged breath. Talking was helping him regain control. His knowledge was the level place on which he could find balance. “Now, imagine the possibilities. If we can access all these worlds, we can find worlds where, for whatever reason, humans never evolved. Those worlds would have no pollution and all of the natural resources would be untouched. You could mine them for minerals or you could move there. Or just let humanity expand outward through an infinite number of worlds.”

“Wow. And that’s what your dad wants?”

“I wish. Right now he wants to use the side effects. The null field and some other stuff. I don’t know that he even believes in the omniverse.”

“But you do?”

“Yes. I think I came from one of those other worlds. Somehow. I don’t know how. But I believe it. And I think my god is not the god of this world, but the god of some other universe, and I can feel him calling me home.”

King took a sip, thought about it, took another, and handed the bottle back. “That is some deep, deep shit.”

“I know. It’s the fundamental belief in my personal faith.”

“Um. Sure. So what’s the problem? Why not just finish the machine you built here and go the fuck home?”

“I wish. The problem is that in order for the God Machine to cycle high enough to open the door, the power has to be very precisely regulated through a network of crystals. Gemstones.”

“Like the ones you have to check out of Stark’s office every morning.”

“Yes. But having the gems doesn’t solve the problem. The sequence of channeling power through the crystals is the key. There is only one way to do it to allow the God Machine to cycle up to full power. Use the wrong sequence and as soon as you rev above a low idle there are catastrophic errors.”

King grinned. “Like when you blew the ass off this place?”

“Like that, yes.”

“Have you figured it out? Do you know the sequence and are just keeping it from your old man?” asked King. “I mean… have you actually solved it?”

Prospero turned and took a long, hard look at his friend. “Why are you asking me this?” Fear suddenly leapt up in Prospero’s heart. “Oh my God… please don’t tell me you’re in on it….”

“In on…?” Then King stopped and smiled. “You think I’m a snitch for Stark? You think I’m a snitch for your dad?”

Prospero was too frightened to say anything. He felt lost. Totally lost. He wished he still had the stone carving of his god, but Stark had taken that from him on his first day at Ballard.

King nodded. “Yeah, I can see how shit-scared you are right now. You’re paranoid as fuck and I don’t blame you. Your dad — your own dad — sold you out and he’s keeping you here as a slave. That’s some rough shit. And you’re a cash cow for Stark. Your dad must be shoveling gold at him.” King shimmied closer. “Now, you listen to me, man, and you listen good. I don’t give a high-flying shit about much. I hate my family and I hate everyone in this shit hole of a place. I’d burn it to the ground if I had somewhere else to go, and yeah, that’s fucked up because I don’t have anywhere else to go. You want to know how many times I laid in my bunk and thought of killing myself? I could do it, too. There are a lot of ways to do it right and I know them all. Here’s the thing, though; you want to know why I haven’t hopped the night train? You want to know the only goddamn reason I’m still alive and still want to be alive?”

He leaned forward and poked Prospero in the chest.

“You. Laugh if you want to. Make fun of me, or do whatever, but it’s true. You are the only friend I’ve ever had. That’s sad, too. Cry me a river, but there it is. Since you came here it’s been you and me. I don’t like anyone else and I sure as shit don’t trust anyone else. You and me, Prospero. A couple of rejects kicked to the curb by everyone who is supposed to give a damn. Sad, sad story. Someone should make a movie. Girls would cry buckets.”

He poked him again.

“Now, you want to start thinking I’m with them? Really? Me? Holy fuck, Prospero, you want to go and do that to me?”

There were tears in King’s eyes.

“You’re my brother,” he said, almost snarling the words. “You’re the only one who ever gave a shit about me and you’re the only one I ever or will ever give a shit about. We live out in the storm lands, man. Don’t cut me loose now. Don’t let me drown. Fuck… I’d die for you.” He caved forward and pressed his forehead against Prospero’s. “I’d fucking die for you.”

It took a lot for Prospero to move, or to want to move, but he did. He lifted his aching arms and wrapped them around the weeping boy’s shoulders. He held him.

And it occurred to him that he had never held anyone like this before. Not even his mother.

King kept repeating what he’d said.

“I’d die for you.”

After a long, long time, Prospero whispered something to him. A statement and a question. A counter to King’s promise.

“I don’t want you to die for me,” he said. “But would you kill for me?”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The following morning Sam told me that Rudy was stable and resting. Church had arranged for the top orthopedic surgeon in California to fly in and do the repair work, but the prognosis was that Rudy would likely need more work later. Sam said that he heard them talking about a total knee replacement. That was the leg Rudy had smashed in a helicopter crash a couple of years ago. A replacement was inevitable, so they’d schedule it as soon as his other injuries were healed.

The neck sprain was bad because neck sprains are always bad, and they were keeping him heavily sedated while they assessed it. His nose was a mess and he’d probably need to get some work done on that, too. I felt absolutely horrible. Rudy was my best friend. He was a gentle person and a far better man than I’ll ever be. No one had a clue as to why he’d gone crazy. Sam said that the blood tests they’d taken all came out negative. We were waiting on results of a CT scan and other tests.

Except for Sam, I was not allowed to have any other visitors. The DMS lawyers had to earn their retainers by keeping me from being arrested. You know the expression “cluster-fuck”? Yeah, well this is pretty much going to be the gold standard example of that henceforth.

I tried to pump Sam for news about Gateway, but he parried my questions by claiming ignorance — which was probably bullshit — and by saying that Mr. Church planned to debrief me personally. That meant that he was probably told to play dumb, and you can’t trick information out of Sam Imura.

The only good news was that they decided to let me go home. Or, maybe it was that they were happy to get rid of me. I’m a terrible patient. Lots of bitching, yelling, threats, escape attempts. I don’t make life easy for anyone and the staff seemed happy as hell to wheel me down to the front door. Pretty sure the orderly thought long and hard about shoving my wheelchair into traffic.

Junie was there, waiting for me at the curb. She came running to grab me, hold me, damn near squeeze the life out of me, showering my face with dozens of small kisses, tears in her eyes. Ghost was with her and he barked very loudly and bounded around like a puppy until I gave him a big hug and a kiss on his furry head. From the haunted look in Junie’s eyes I could tell that she knew some of what had happened. Maybe not the Gateway stuff, but about the flu and about Rudy. I heard her whisper to Sam and heard him tell her that Rudy was stable.

“Stable” is a nice word but it’s often used as a lie, a comfort pill.

Sam drove me home, with Junie holding me in the back of a DMS SUV and Ghost staring at me from the front shotgun seat. At home, I had to lean on Junie and Sam to make it from car to elevator and elevator to bed. After Sam left I used a cane left over from a previous injury to thump my way onto the balcony. The Pacific was a gorgeous blue and there were spouts from whales migrating north. Seagulls and pelicans floated on the breeze. Junie made coffee and kept feeding me high-protein foods. I’d lost weight and energy and she was doing her level best to fatten me up and bring me back to life.

It was working, too. I felt better as the day went on and by the following day the cane went back into the closet. Let me clarify that… I felt physically better but my head and my heart still hurt.

Rudy. Damn it.

The tough part was trying to fill in the blanks of everything that had happened while I was out. And a lot had happened. I got some of it from Junie, and Sam had doled out a few thin slices of news, and some of it came from my secretary, Lydia-Rose, who kept calling every five minutes to make sure I hadn’t wasted away and died.

Top and Bunny were okay. Both of them had come out of it sooner than me. Bunny was back in the gym as soon as he could walk, and when the physical therapists asked him to do ten reps he did twenty. He’d already put back a lot of the weight he lost. Lydia was taking very good care of him. Bunny and Lydia had maintained a relationship for years that was technically against DMS protocols. But since I’m his boss and I broke that same fraternization rule within two weeks of signing on I was not about to throw stones. Top and I gave him a big-brother chat once, and he told us to go fuck ourselves, so there was that. Since moving to San Diego he and Lydia had bought a cottage on the beach in Encinitas. Cute little place. Never would have figured Bunny for having a green thumb, but he does the gardening. He taught Lydia how to surf and she taught him how to dance. Love, baby. It keeps the old world spinning.

Top was another matter. He’s not as young as Bunny. He was almost ten years older than me and I was eight years older than Bunny. None of those had been easy years for Top. He’d been marked by our war. Marked by bullet and blade, fang and claw. And now by disease. He was back to work at the Pier, but on light duty.

I kept trying to get Church on the line but he was always busy. Lydia-Rose and Sam had both been evasive about why. Something was going on and they had clearly been instructed not to tell me. Maybe it was because Church didn’t want to overload me before I was well enough. Or maybe not. I learned that he was at the Pier, and so I informed Junie that I was going into work the next day.

We had a big fight about that. Shouting, throwing of things. Some tears. Some very careful make-up sex.

In the morning she gave me the car keys she’d hidden. Along with a paper sack filled with protein bars, vitamins, and lots of other healthy crap. She made me swear, hand to God, that I wouldn’t toss it in the Dumpster in the parking garage.

That night, while we were lying there, naked and sweaty and entwined, I found out that Junie was dealing with problems other than her drowsy and frequently irritable boyfriend. Someone had broken into FreeTech, the company she runs. Church set the company up and hired her to run it, and mostly she takes some of the less lethal technologies the DMS confiscates from the bad guys and mad scientists we fight and then repurposes them for humanitarian aid around the world. Funny how there are useful side effects even from evil science. Crazy old world. In any case, when Church sent me to San Diego to open the Pier, he moved the headquarters of that company out here, as well. Junie now has seven hundred employees in forty-six countries, but only a handful of them know the source of these radical technologies.

Junie told me that two nights ago — the night I woke up — two of her most trusted employees, a scientist and a lieutenant who was second in command of FreeTech security, brought big canvas laundry carts up from the basement, loaded them up with computers and reams of technical papers, and rolled them out of the building at around three in the morning. The two thieves had since vanished.

“What did they get?” I asked.

“A lot of research,” she said, “but nothing we don’t have backups for. It’s just so scary that they came in at all. Why would someone steal that stuff?”

“Anything from the Majestic program?”

She shrugged. “Sure, a lot of our stuff originated there, but none of it’s labeled ‘Majestic.’ There are no direct links to the overall program or to M3. All we have in our records are the things we’re doing with that tech.”

“Don’t you have some of the Majestic stuff on your computer?”

“Well, of course I do, but my computer is always with me. I never leave it at the office unless I lock it in the safe. Same with Toys.”

I grunted. Toys — aka Alexander Chismer — is a former career criminal, terrorist, and enabler of terrorists who has inexplicably become Mr. Church’s pet project. Church is apparently convinced that even someone with as many crimes on his soul as Toys can find genuine redemption. It makes me wonder why Church cares. I once suggested to Rudy that Church has so much blood on his own hands from things he did in the years before he started the DMS that maybe he needs proof that redemption is possible. Rudy offered no comment. He’s Church’s therapist, too.

In any case, Toys was put in charge of an obscene amount of money and charged with the task of making sure that it was used for the betterment of mankind. The money was stolen from Hugo Vox and the Seven Kings. How Church obtained it and why he risked giving it to Toys is beyond me. On the other hand, I have seen Toys in several situations where he could have done the easy thing or the wrong thing and instead he chose to put his life on the line to try and accomplish the right thing. Last year he saved the lives of Junie, Circe, and Circe’s unborn baby. So, right now I have a no-murder policy in place for Toys. It is subject to change.

He is the financier beyond FreeTech and is Junie’s confidant in that enterprise. He’s one of the very few people who have access to some of the information once contained in the Majestic Black Book.

“Where does Toys keep his data?”

“He has a laptop he brings home with him, but it’s one of the Xenomancer units built by Bug. Totally secure. And he has to contact Bug to get access whenever he logs on. It wasn’t at FreeTech that night,” Junie said. “So really, they didn’t get much that they could use.” She laughed. “It’s weird, but I’d uploaded my old podcasts once when I was upgrading my computer. I backed up everything to my office hard drive and never deleted that part of it. I… well, I listen to them sometimes. Those were copied, too. How weird is that?”

When I met Junie she was running a very popular conspiracy theory podcast. UFOs, secret societies, hidden agendas, shadow governments. Like that. Nonsense stuff… except that all of it was true. Junie was born into the Majestic program and raised by foster parents who worked for Majestic Three. She knew whereof she spoke.

“What’s Church doing about it?”

“He put some people on it, but as far as I know they haven’t found anything yet. I’m just glad no one was there to get hurt,” said Junie, but she had tears in her eyes. “I just can’t understand why they’d do something like this. I know them both. We’re friends. They don’t have criminal records, there’s never been a complaint about them, and I’ve certainly never had to reprimand either of them. It makes no sense at all.”

We talked it through but there was nowhere to go with it. Like everything else in my life lately it was an inexplicable mystery.

Around midnight I got a call from Sam to say that Rudy was awake and lucid, but that he did not remember anything about what happened. Nothing. His last memory had been of driving to the hospital to see me.

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

“I did. He’s deeply troubled by what happened,” said Sam. “I’ll stay here at the hospital until they transfer him to a private room. The big man told Circe what’s going on and she’s sitting with Rudy now.”

“Look, Sam,” I said, “when you see Rudy next… tell him how sorry I am. Please. Let him know.”

Sam sighed. “Cap, you want to know what Rudy told me tonight? He asked how you were doing and told me to tell you that he’s sorry. He said that he sends his love.”

We were silent for a long time.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“I know.” Sam hung up and I clung to Junie for a long time as my heart broke and broke.

In the morning, I got dressed without help and over breakfast I caught up on the news. No one had yet stepped up to take responsibility for the disaster in Houston. Even the most radical right and left pundits had begun to question whether this was, after all, a terrorist attack. There was no evidence of any kind of explosion, no strange devices found at the scene. All they could find was wreckage and dead bodies.

I didn’t buy it, though. No way in hell. Houston was only the most recent bizarre and destructive power failure.

Well, just call me paranoid. And you know that old line from Catch-22. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

The next morning I drove to the Pier.

I still felt like crap, but it was time to get back to work.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Junie wanted to drive, but I insisted that it was no longer beyond me. And I was right. This morning I’d come awake with real energy. The high-protein diet, the massages, the meditation, the good loving with an astounding woman — all of that did wonders for me. I felt alive again. And with the vigor came anger and a fiery determination to figure out what the hell was going on.

I arrived at the Pier with Ghost as my wingman. Wing-mutt. Whatever. We hit the Starbucks drive-through. Venti Pike for me, couple of egg and sausage sandwiches for the fur-monster. Like old times.

The Special Projects Office is a big building built onto the end of an old amusement pier, hence its nickname. Our engineers dug into the bedrock under the seabed, too, so we had plenty of room for offices, labs, a massive fitness center, an even bigger training hall, storage, a garage, and more. I’d moved some of my most trusted staff out here from my old shop, the Warehouse, in Baltimore. We had 209 people working at the Pier and I’d been dreading a welcome-back party of some kind. I was wrong, though. The place was empty except for a few of the support staff.

My secretary, Lydia-Rose, met me at the front door, fists on hips, glaring at me. She’s short, very curvy, very energetic, with lots of wavy black hair and the brightest smile in Southern California. Normally. She wasn’t smiling now and as I got out of the car she was wagging a stern finger at me.

“You should still be in bed,” she snapped.

“Happy to see you, too,” I said, and kissed her cheek. Then her scowl melted away and she gave me a hug that nearly snapped my spine. Lydia-Rose’s hugs straddle the fine line between hugging and mugging.

“I was so worried!” she cried as I disentangled myself from her with considerable effort.

“Where’s Church?”

“In the big conference room. But he’s in a mood. Maybe you should rest first.”

“Maybe I’ll take a buddy nap with the boss.”

She gave me one of those looks, like she wasn’t sure if I was joking. Or nuts.

The conference room was empty when I came in, but it was set with pitchers of water, coffee, tea, and two plates of cookies. A plate of Oreos and animal crackers on the near side of the table, and a plate of vanilla wafers on the other.

I looked at the cookies, then heard the door open behind me. “I sense a disturbance in the force.”

“Yes,” said a voice, and I turned to see Mr. Church.

Church is a big and blocky man, somewhere well north of sixty but looking like age didn’t matter much to him. Dark hair going gray, eyes mostly hidden behind tinted glasses, and he wore very thin black silk gloves. All the time. His hands had been badly damaged during the drone thing a few months back. Company rumor says that they did some kind of radical procedures on him, and from what I can see he has full use of them, but he always wears the gloves now. Bunny has a pool going that Church has some kind of cyborg Darth Vader hands under the silk. I don’t know if I agree. Maybe it’s just that he has one flicker of vanity and doesn’t want to show scars. I’ve asked Rudy about it, but he declined to answer. Rudy’s more of a grown-up than the rest of us and prefers not to speculate about someone else’s pain.

Church did not offer to shake hands, because he doesn’t do that anymore. But he did something he’d never done before. He placed a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s good to have you back, Captain,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder once and then walked around to the far side of the table, pausing briefly to scratch Ghost’s head. Ghost wagged at him, too.

I asked, “Rudy?”

“Resting,” said Church. “However, if you’re looking for an explanation as to what happened at the hospital… we don’t have one. I’ve had three top psychologists interview him and I sat with him myself this morning.”

“Sam said he doesn’t remember what happened.”

“That’s not entirely true. Dr. Sanchez remembers almost everything, but he said it was like remembering a dream. He said that he was aware of what he was doing but he described it as watching events on TV. There was no direct connection to his actions.”

“So what are we talking here? Is he possessed? Is he going to spit green soup and levitate now?”

Church did not smile. No reason to. “I have reached out to a number of experts — friends in various industries. They are flying in from all over the globe. We will get to the bottom of this.”

I touched his arm. “Look, Rudy is my best friend. He’s a better man than either of us. We need to help him.”

Church nodded. “We do and we are. Now, please, sit. We have much to catch up on and time is not our friend.”

“Is it ever?”

“Sadly, no.”

I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee, added milk but no sugar. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Brick Anderson, Church’s personal aide and bodyguard, and I commented on it.

“He’s picking up my cat,” said Church.

I waited, expecting there to be more. A punch line maybe. When he did not offer further explanation I said, “Um… cat? As in pet?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Why do you sound so surprised? People own pets.”

“You don’t.”

“I do, actually.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “it’s a white-haired cat and you’ve decided to name it Blofeld.”

Church selected a vanilla wafer from the tray, broke it in half, and nibbled one piece. “No,” he said.

“Well, what is—?”

Before I could finish the question the door opened and in walked Brick with a plastic pet carrier. Brick is roughly the size of Nebraska. He used to be a top field operator before he lost a leg in combat. His new one is ultra-high-tech and hard to spot beneath his clothes. Church always takes care of his people. Actually, a lot of the DMS support staff is made up of former field agents who fell in battle but did not fall off of Church’s radar. Family is family.

Brick is special, though, and we all knew it. Church trusts few people, and even among his inner circle there’s almost no one who he shares his personal life with. When Church’s former aide, Gus Dietrich, was killed during the Majestic Black Book case, Brick stepped up to fill that gap. He is a very smart but very quiet man, and he is fiercely loyal to Church. He is valet, butler, driver, confidant, and bodyguard. A friend, too. He has his own apartment in Church’s house and his clearance level is actually higher than mine.

Brick smiled at me. “It lives.”

“Kind of.”

We shook hands, and I watched as he set the pet carrier on the table and opened the door. The cat that emerged was big and blocky like his owner, with smoky blue-gray fur and eyes as dark and round as ripe pumpkins. He had small ears that bent forward, and walked on short, strong legs. I recognized the breed, a Scottish Fold.

“Bastion,” said Church.

The cat walked across the table and I offered my hand for him to sniff. He did, then looked away with typical feline disinterest. I was noted but not deemed worthy of further interaction. My own cat, Cobbler, seldom treats me with any more enthusiasm, and I feed that little bastard. Ghost would walk through fire for me. So, on the whole I’ve become a dog person.

Ghost watched the cat with undisguised contempt. He’s not a cat person, either. Bastion eventually settled onto the chair beside Church.

Brick said, “Got a call from Circe. She is not happy that you have Rudy in quarantine. She said that you are due for dinner tonight because someone has to eat the lamb chops she bought for her husband, and she doesn’t want to hear any excuses about the world coming to an end. Her words. Oh, and she said to bring wine. Something that goes with lamb chops.”

“You told her that there is a grave national crisis and that I don’t have time to socialize?”

Brick grinned. “Sure. Want to hear exactly what she said to that?”

Church sighed. “No, I believe I do not.”

“She said she wants you to bring a complete copy of Rudy’s medical file. Nothing left out. I’ll get one, so we’re good there.”

“Will you please pick up the wine, too?”

“Already did,” he said. “Got a couple bottles of the 2009 Bodegas A. Fernández Tinto Pesquera.”

Church nodded. “Very good choice. Thank you.”

To Brick, I said, “Wine? Isn’t Circe breast-feeding?”

Brick gave me an ironic smile. “I’ll tell you what she told me, and I quote, ‘I have a week’s worth of breast milk in the fridge and a husband in intensive care. If I want to get hammered, then anyone who tries to stop me is going to get a bullet in the kneecap.’ Unquote. And for the record, Joe, I don’t think she was joking.”

I exchanged a look with Church. He clearly didn’t think she was joking, either.

“Enjoy your lamb chops,” I said to him.

Church never uses foul language, but the look he gave me probably burned off five years of my life.

Brick left, chuckling and shaking his head. Church ate more of his cookie. The cat watched him and I watched the cat.

“So… cat,” I said, shifting back to safer ground. “Never figured you as a cat person.”

He shrugged. “Bastion was a gift from a friend.”

“Oh?”

“Lilith.”

“Oh,” I said, putting a totally different inflection on it. It brought to mind that dream fragment I had of the two of them standing by my tombstone. Holding hands. Lilith was a mysterious woman with a horror show of a past who escaped a particularly brutal kind of sex slavery to form a female intelligence network called the Mothers of the Fallen. She also spearheaded Arklight, the militant arm of that group. She was one of those women who seem to exude power and at the same time be untouched by time. Spooky but beautiful in a harsh Queen of the Damned sort of way. Her daughter, who I knew only by the code name of Violin, was a former lover of mine. Violin is an occasional ally and a trusted friend. Lilith, not so much. The memory of the dream fragment I had of Church and Lilith at my grave went skittering across the front of my brain like nails on a blackboard.

Church said, “Lilith is apparently of the opinion that I am best suited to relationships requiring minimal emotional give and take.”

“Ah,” I said.

Despite the long history Church clearly had with Lilith, there was also a lot of animosity there. Far as I can tell it’s mostly on her part, but that’s a guess. I don’t know the details. Even so, Lilith seemed to have genuine feelings for Church’s daughter, Circe, who was a new mother. Lilith was also one of a select few who knew that Circe was Church’s daughter. Circe was, as far as I knew, Church’s only living blood relative. Bad guys had killed the big man’s wife and other daughter, so he kept Circe close but also kept their relationship a secret. I’ve seen what happens to people who have tried to leak that secret, and to people who have tried to hurt Circe and her baby. If I wasn’t a manly man, those memories would probably give me nightmares. As it is, being in fact a manly man, I have a great collection of top-notch bourbons that can insure dreamless sleep. Just saying.

Church said, “Bastion was her second choice. I declined the first.”

“Which was?”

“A Reduvius personatus. An unpleasant insect more commonly known as an ‘assassin bug. ’”

I winced.

“She sent Aunt Sallie a mated pair of hissing cockroaches for Christmas.”

“Wow.” I cut a look at Bastion. “So this is, what? Her mellowing? Or does the cat have a poisonous sting?”

Church took a moment with that. “I reminded Lilith that I frequently visit my grandson. Even Lilith had some boundaries.”

“Ah,” I said again.

He finished his cookie and took another from the tray. I sipped some of my coffee, which had begun to cool.

Church looked at me and said, “A lot has happened while you were ill.”

“No kidding. A lot’s happened since I woke up. But… seriously, Boss, is it as bad as it seems?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a great deal worse.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Nate Cross left his house at exactly 6:30 in the morning. He went through the kitchen door into the garage, unlocked his car, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine. It was while he was buckling his belt that he saw the dashboard clock change to 6:31.

He punched the button for the garage door, put the car in gear, and as the door rolled up to let the rich morning sunlight in, he drove onto the street. He lived near the end of a cul-de-sac that was shaded by elm trees most of the year and kept green by pines in the winter. A lawn care team was unloading its truck to do the first round of leaf removal. Nate nodded to the crew foreman, who was a kid from the neighborhood.

At the corner, Nate turned onto County Highway MS, heading for the on-ramp to West Beltline Highway. The commute was an easy one, especially this early. It was why he left the same time every day. There was a window that he could use to beat the rush-hour traffic.

It took him only sixteen minutes to get to his place of employment, Bristol-Hermann Laboratories. He drove through the two security checkpoints, swiping his card at one and letting the guard examine it at the other. The guard did that every day even though he knew Nate and had been to parties at his house. Nate parked in the underground lot, in his usual spot, locked his car, and used his keycard again to gain access to the elevator. He got out on the fifth floor and had to swipe his card twice more to gain access to the cluster of offices reserved for his team and then to enter his own lab. Throughout a normal day he would swipe that card over two dozen times. Anytime he left the lab, when he went from one office suite to another, when he went to the cold room, when he used the elevator to go down to the cafeteria. Lots of swipes, lots of security steps, lots of electronics watchdogging Nate and everyone else at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin. Today was no different from any other day in any other week or month in the eleven years he’d worked there.

He was mindful of the security steps and occasionally found them tiresome, but he never tried to do an end run around them. No one there did. It wasn’t the kind of place where an employee would have that kind of thought. Security was, as all the signs and posters in the building said, everyone’s responsibility. Even if there weren’t cameras watching and guards everywhere, the nature of the work kept everyone on their feet.

At 7:43 Nate went down to the cafeteria. He had his silver coffee thermos with him, as he usually did. The cafeteria was empty but Nate could smell the rich aroma of fresh coffee as soon as he walked inside. He crossed to the two big silver urns that stood on a table against the far wall. Above the urns was a big flat-screen TV. The reporter from the local ABC affiliate was giving a stock roundup from the previous day’s trading. The DOW was down thirteen points but the NASDAQ had closed high. Apple was up, too, and the S&P 500 was trading in the same solid flow as it had for a week. Nate glanced at it as he slowly unscrewed his thermos, then he stepped up to the first urn. He removed the lid and sniffed the billowing steam. Colombian. Very nice. Without pausing or looking at the security cameras, Nate reached up and poured half of the contents of his thermos into the urn. He replaced the lid and repeated this with the decaf. Then he screwed the lid back on, filled his thermos with hot water, dropped in a teabag, and went back upstairs to his office, where he sat at his desk and logged on to the company intranet. He spent the next hour reviewing test results from yesterday’s field tests.

Nate Cross was not a scientist but he understood quite a lot about various areas of science. Viral outbreaks, flu epidemics, and bioweapons. His job at Bristol was to coordinate the flow of information from various agencies, process disease samples flown in from outbreak sites around the world, and assign technicians to process and analyze each sample to determine the strain. His reports would then be prioritized and sent to his direct supervisor, who would in turn share the information with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, as well as more than a dozen government agencies. Many of those reports would be forwarded to corresponding agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization. His work product helped keep the global disease response network functioning. If there was a outbreak of tuberculosis in a village in Uganda, Nate Cross processed the samples. If a new strain of mumps presented in the fishing villages in the poorer sections of Ireland, Nate was in the loop. That was his job.

He also worked with the processing of samples of weaponized diseases, which was one of the reasons security at his company was so tight. Aerosol anthrax, samples of the old Lucifer 113 Russian Cold War bioweapon, the airborne Ebola that had very nearly been launched on a cruise ship a few years ago — Nate handled those samples, as well. He collected and registered them and made sure they were forwarded to the agencies responsible for both antibiological warfare research and disposal of unwanted bulk amounts.

Nate was good at his job and although from a distance his job looked terribly exciting and dangerous, it was actually rather tedious and bland. Samples arrived in heavily sealed containers and were transported by federal agents. Security, when it functions at a prime level, does not allow for excitement.

After he was finished in the cafeteria, Nate returned to his office and began reading e-mails and filling out the stack of paperwork in his in-box.

He only stopped when the screaming started.

He sat back in his desk and stared at the wall. Listening to the sounds. The shouts, the weeping, the shrieks. Then, later, alarms. And finally, gunfire.

At 9:19 he got up from his desk, closed his laptop, opened his office door, and walked out into the hall. His assistant, Miriam, was standing by her desk, eyes wide, her clothes torn, her scalp glistening red in places where she’d torn out handfuls of her hair. If she recognized him it did not register on her face.

Down the hall, one of the junior lab technicians was slowly removing his clothes, folding each piece, and placing them on a neat little stack. He’d begun with his shoes and now wore only a shirt and tie. His penis was fully erect and he was singing an old Backstreet Boys song. His lab partner, a short Indian woman, lay sprawled at his feet with half a dozen pens and pencils buried in her eye sockets. She still breathed, but shallowly, and her body twitched and shuddered, heels rapping an artless tattoo on the carpet.

Nate Cross walked past them, and past a dozen other employees. Some alive, some dead. One of them was on fire, seated at her desk, flesh melting, hair blazing, eyes wild. When she opened her mouth, flames rushed in.

The fire alarms went off and a moment later the sprinklers kicked in, twitching and pulsing as they sprayed water over everything. Nate ignored it as he walked the length of the building to the office of the senior virologist, Dr. Shaw.

Dr. Shaw had swept everything off of her desk and was copulating madly with a male temp half her age. Her hands were locked around the temp’s throat and as she screamed herself into an orgasm she crushed his windpipe. The temp had made absolutely no attempt to resist her.

Nate watched a moment. Dr. Shaw was wrinkled and fat and ugly. He picked up a wooden chair, hefted it, and very quietly and efficiently beat her to death. Then he took her keycard, which provided access to parts of the building that were off-limits to anyone but the most senior research staff. He took the stairs down to the high-security floor, using the keycard at every point, entered the lab, and went to the hot room. The lab staff was gone, but there were splashes of blood, broken equipment, feces, and torn pieces of lab coats everywhere. Nate used Dr. Shaw’s keycard to open the hot room.

When he left the building five minutes later, the fire companies and police cars were screaming into the parking lot. Nate walked to his car, opened the trunk, removed a commercial Blade 350 QX3AP quadcopter drone that he had bought from Ace Hardware, opened a small metal container that he’d installed where a camera was usually affixed, placed sixty-five vials inside the container, sealed it, started the drone, and let it fly.

A policeman saw it rise and came running over, yelling, his gun already in his hand. Nate Cross watched the drone go up and then saw the shift in vector as the drone’s controls were taken over by someone else. The drone rose and turned and vanished into the morning sky as the police officer wrestled Nate to the ground.

INTERLUDE NINETEEN

The heat from the burning building chased them all the way to the fence.

The two of them were flash-burned, dazed, caught off guard by the intensity of the blast. The school itself was dark, though, except for the fire. The God Machine had consumed the lights, the power, the alarms.

Despite the pain of the burns, King and Prospero laughed as they ran.

Behind them there were shouts. Yells. The deep-throated barks of the pursuing dogs.

When they reached the wall, King pushed Prospero up, steadied him, helped him climb, shoved him over into the bushes on the other side.

King was nearly to the top himself when he lost his footing. His sneaker slipped out of the toehold in the chain link. King wailed as he plunged backward.

The sound he made as he fell was horrible. Like a wet stick breaking.

“No!” screamed Prospero as he lunged toward the fence to climb back.

The dogs were coming. Four of them. Big shepherds racing far ahead of the guards.

“R — run…,” gasped King. He flapped one arm to wave Prospero away. “Go…”

Then his arm and head fell backward as the dogs swarmed in.

Prospero screamed.

And screamed.

And he ran.

The gates opened.

The dogs ran so much faster.

But the fire ran faster still.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“Give it to me without the candy coating,” I said.

Church frowned. “You’ve been gravely ill, Captain. How sure are you that jumping back in is the best call?”

My answer was a glare that boiled a few degrees above nuclear.

“Fair enough. Where would you like to start?” he asked. “Gateway?”

“No, Houston. How many of our teams are on the ground? Where are we with the investigation? I want to head out there as soon as we’re done here.”

Church shook his head. “It’s under investigation. No one has taken credit, though ISIL is at the top of the list of likely suspects. The president convened a special task force that is currently being headed up by Harcourt Bolton. We are assisting as needed.”

I shot to my feet. “Whoa, wait a goddamn minute… we’re assisting? Since when are we anyone’s water boys? I mean, even for Bolton.”

“It’s fair to say that POTUS is less enthusiastic about the DMS than I’d like.”

“Why? Because of Gateway? I already told you I made a judgment call and—”

“No, Captain, Gateway is significant, but a number of our recent cases have had unfortunate outcomes.”

I slumped down into my chair. “First I’m hearing about it.”

“It’s been a busy week while you’ve been out of it.” Church tapped crumbs off his cookie. “I don’t much subscribe to ‘luck,’ but this has had the earmarks of a losing streak. Gateway is just one of several instances of coming out on the wrong side of a critical play.”

I held up my hand. “Oh, really? And how exactly is Gateway an example of us dropping the ball? All that weird stuff that happened down there? Those clones or whatever they were? That machine? And the city? You saw the videos, man, you saw the photos, you have all of our field telemetry. What do you think was going on down there?”

“Captain,” he said slowly, “there was absolutely nothing stored on any of your cameras. There was no telemetry from the body cams. There is not one shred of evidence to support what you claim to have witnessed.”

I stared at him in open-mouthed shock. “What the hell are you talking about? We documented everything. Everything.”

“It appears,” said Church, “that all of the data has been wiped.”

“Wiped? No,” I said, rebelling at the thought. “No, no, no. No way. How’s that even possible?”

“I had your verbal report following your departure from Gateway,” he said. “Since their recovery, First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit have prepared extensive and detailed after-action reports. All three of you said there was a power outage of some kind, so it’s possible, however unlikely, that this is our culprit.”

“It hit us like an EMP,” I said, searching my memories. “Knocked everything out, even the flashlights. But then the electronics rebooted without signs of damage. Doesn’t that ring a bell? You want to tell me the president doesn’t think that’s somehow connected to Houston? Or the NASCAR thing? Or the damn presidential debate?”

“He does, in fact, think those events are connected,” said Church. “However, we have no proof of any kind that it is the same technology Dr. Erskine was working on at Gateway. Bug has not been able to find any records explaining what the Kill Switch project was.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I bellowed as I leapt to my feet, “it was called fucking Kill Switch!”

Church waited for me to sit down. I did. “First things first. I had our tech team go over all of your equipment and it is in working order, so that rules out an EMP. Dr. Hu’s electronics team is working up some theories on how this might have happened. He has been following a few promising leads and his report is pending. So, let’s table that part of it for now. For the moment we are left without photographic or telemetric reference. There is nothing, in fact, beyond your own testimony.”

I closed my eyes.

“If this is too much for you, Captain, I can have someone take you home,” said Church, gesturing toward the door.

“Don’t,” I warned him, and he nodded. We both knew that too much time had already passed. We had to get somewhere with this. I drank the tepid coffee and poured a fresh cup. “Okay, okay, then tell me what you think. Do you believe my account of what happened down there?”

“I have no way of knowing what to believe.”

“You can trust my word, for a start.”

“This isn’t a matter of trust, Captain. I believe that you are telling the truth as you know it. The same goes for your men. I do not now, nor have I at any time, believed you were lying to me. However, all three of you were exposed to a virus and other biological and chemical agents that have yet to be identified. You were also struck by some kind of energy wave from the machine you discovered. There is no way to theorize on how these things may have affected your perceptions. The lack of corroborating information did not wash well with the president.” He paused and sighed. “The subsequent failure of several other missions by DMS teams hasn’t helped.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What failures?”

He briefly explained some of what had happened, and hearing it was like getting hit by a series of very hard punches.

Broadway Team had gone after Somali pirates who were doing some contract work for an ISIL group out of Nigeria. The pirates were planting limpet mines on ships. Broadway went after them in what should have been an easy hunt-and-kill mission. Instead they got lost at sea and wrecked their Zodiac on a sandbar. Two bombs went off and two ships went down.

Then Scorpion and Rattlesnake Teams signed on with an ATF squad to rip down a cartel that was using drug mules to smuggle military drone parts to a radical militia crew in San Antonio. One of the shooters from Rattlesnake accidentally discharged his weapon at exactly the wrong moment. The result? Nine dead, including three ATF agents. Sure, they got some of the bad guys, too, but not all of them. The drones made it to San Antonio and the FBI had to step in and stop the militia men from blowing up the Alamo.

In Florida the Tiger Shark Team commander, Glory Price, apparently lost her mind in the middle of an operation. She turned her gun on her team, killing two and wounding four before finally shooting herself in the heart. Glory was a friend of mine and that was hard to hear. Damned hard.

In Washington state Wolfpack Team fumbled a mission and let a semi loaded with stolen military ordnance slip right through their fingers. Within two days terrorist kill teams were firing rocket-propelled grenades at civilian targets in Seattle.

Like that.

It was insane. In all, out of the last seventeen DMS missions, there were only two that were successfully completed. The others failed in whole or part, and we were burying a lot of our friends. This is what had happened while I slept. It was so much. Too much. I sagged back against my chair, too heartsick to even throw something at Church to make him stop, but he told me all of it. Every case, every failure, every civilian death, every death or serious injury incurred.

I wanted to laugh this off with a snarky comment and defuse it and make it go away. I wanted to dismiss it as another one of my bad dreams. But you can’t do that. Not when it’s this real.

I gradually became aware that Church was staring at me with great intensity.

“What?” I asked, my tone belligerent and defensive.

“You have no comment? No observation?”

“What the hell do you expect me to say? I was in a coma and—”

“Stop,” he said, holding up a hand. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me reevaluate the decision to allow you to come back to work.”

“What are you talking about?”

Church laced his gloved fingers together and said one word. A name. He said, “Rudy.”

And then I got it. He saw me get it.

I said, “Glory…?”

“Something is happening, Captain. People we trust are acting in irrational and unpredictable ways. We don’t know why and we certainly don’t know how. I had asked Dr. Sanchez to study the recent reports to see if he could identify any pattern of behavior. Sadly he wasn’t able to complete that report. When possible I’ve had Dr. Hu perform a variety of medical tests on our people, including blood work from Glory Price and some of the others. So far there is nothing, no causation, no presence of chemicals or brain damage. We’re testing for parasites and other biological agents that might be affecting behavior. So far… nothing.”

We sat there and stared bleakly at each other across miles of hurt and confusion.

When I could talk, I said, “Six of those cases… they were against ISIL?”

“Six confirmed, with three others as possibles.”

“Since when are they players on this kind of scale?”

“Times have changed,” said Church. “They’ve stepped up their game by embracing other kinds of weapons. Our allies in the global counterterrorism community — notably Barrier in the UK — have been tracking ISIL involvement in computer hacking, the sale and transport of bioweapons, and even multiple attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. And they’ve been forming dangerous alliances with small and large extremist groups in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. They’ve even buried their differences with al-Qaeda. They are growing at an exponential rate.”

“How? I mean, how are they getting that kind of traction so damn fast?”

“Unknown. Aunt Sallie’s analysis suggests that they have managed to either place their people in our intelligence services or they’ve turned some of our people. Ours and our allies. They have made a series of strategic moves that have been so successful that we have to accept that they have people inside. Nothing else can explain it. They’ve avoided traps, vacated before carefully guided drone strikes, and surged into areas of weakness, and they’ve done this over and over again. They are, in fact, winning this war.” It looked like it hurt Church to say that. “And the DMS is not contributing to a response in any useful way. In fact, as the president has taken pains to point out to me on a daily basis, we are functioning at such a low level of effectiveness that we are helping our enemies. It is not unlikely that our charter may be revoked.”

“Can he do that?”

“He is the president.”

“Will he do it?”

“If this trend continues to slide downward, then yes.” He looked away. “Perhaps he should.”

I have never once heard Church say something like that. It scared the hell out of me. I expected my inner Killer to wake up and begin roaring for blood. He didn’t. For whatever reason that part of me was sleeping. Nice fucking timing.

I shook my head. “How could all this happen that fast?”

“It had to have been in motion for a long time,” said Church. “To have planted enough agents inside our intelligence services to do this much damage and provide that much information to our enemies speaks to a massive campaign. Something on the scale of the Seven Kings.”

I jerked upright. “Is it them? Are they never going to lie down and die?”

Church stroked Bastion’s silky fur. “No, Captain, I don’t think there’s anything left of the Kings. This is not them. This is almost certainly ISIL, and we are witnessing an evolution of that organization. Somehow they have put together a network of spies that rivals or exceeds anything we have ever encountered.”

I sat there, numb, uncertain how to even think let alone sure of what to do.

“I hate to kick you when you’re down, Captain,” said Church, clearly meaning to, “but there’s more. The president has officially given the power outage case to the CIA. It’s theirs and we are out except as intelligence support and some minor logistics.”

“Why would he do that? The Agency is a dinosaur. Even if we’ve dropped the ball a few times, we still have the best overall record for success in cases like this. We even beat Harcourt Bolton’s clearance record. So how the hell does the CIA get put into play and we’re making coffee for them?”

“The decision was made by the White House.”

I slapped my palm on the table so hard it made Bastion and Ghost jump. “It’s a bad damn decision.”

“It’s worse than that, Captain,” said Church. “Harcourt Bolton has been asked to step in as ‘special director’ for the duration of this crisis.”

“Special director of what?”

“Of the DMS. He is codirector with me and is now personally running the Special Projects Office.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

First Sergeant Bradley Sims stepped out of the Expedition and stood looking up at the high-rise. He wore a plain dark blue suit, white shirt, quiet tie. He was aware, however, that he did not look like a businessman. He looked like what he was. Or, at least something like what he was. The people who passed on the street cut looks at him and then looked quickly away, some looking guilty or nervous. Or hostile. Same reactions from men who looked like him and who wore suits like that. Cop, they thought. Local or federal, but definitely cop. Which was close enough to the mark. Special operators sometimes did a few of the things cops did. They made arrests. They took down bad people. Top had taken down some very bad people over the years. A few went to jail. Some went to black sites from which they did not return. And a fair few went into the ground.

The badge in his pocket gave him authority but it was a lie. He did not work for the FBI and never had. Nor did he work for the NSA, the Secret Service, the Supreme Court police, the Housing Authority, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the U.S. Marshals Service, but he had badges and credentials for each in the glove compartment of his Explorer. Just as he had papers proving that he held both noncommissioned and officer rank in every branch of the United States Armed Forces as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and France. He could have a working set of credentials for virtually any police or military organization in the world with a phone call.

The Department of Military Sciences, however, had neither badges nor ID cards. They did not officially exist except by a charter, the details of which were outlined in a sealed executive order.

But he knew he looked like a cop. Nobody on the street smiled at him, which was fine, because Top wasn’t in a sunny mood. The job down in Antarctica had done him some harm. Not physically, and not where it showed, but he could feel it. The fear was there and he caught glimpses of it when he looked in the mirror. There was a slight tremble of the hand, a hesitation in the step that was never there before. Not even after the Red Knights and the Majestic Black Book cases. Not even after the horrors he’d seen in the tunnels beneath the Dragon Factory.

No, all of that was science. Weird science, sure. Bad science, no doubt. But those horrors had been the end results of physics and medicine, genetics and chemistry, structural engineering and radical surgery. At the end of the day — and there had been some very bad days for Top and his colleagues — everything they’d encountered could be mapped out, dissected, dismantled, and explained.

The things that had happened in the Gateway lab could not be.

Not yet.

And now the DMS was falling apart. Instead of providing stable ground for him and Bunny to stand on, the ship was canting down into the watery deep. Top had lost friends on some of the other teams. Other friends were under investigation for mishandling of their cases. A few were probably going to jail.

It was all falling apart and Top felt the timbers splitting inside his head and heart.

Top glanced over his shoulder. Bunny was still seated behind the wheel, hands in his lap, eyes staring at who knew what. Memories? Possibilities? He certainly wasn’t looking at anything on the street. It hurt Top. And it did not help one bit that Top understood what was going on in the young man’s head and heart.

Even so, this was a job and it needed getting done, so he rapped lightly on the side window. Bunny flinched. A rare and ugly thing for him. Bunny was a good kid but he was tough as iron and, in Top’s experience, did not have much “give up” in him.

Unless now he did.

It was hard to say.

It was bad to think about.

Bunny rubbed his eyes, took a deep breath, and blew out his cheeks as he exhaled.

Top tapped on the window. “Come on, Farm Boy, they ain’t paying us to be tourists.”

Bunny got out of the car, closed the door and locked it, buttoned his jacket so the breeze wouldn’t blow it open to show his shoulder holster. He came around the front of the Expedition and stood beside Top. Now the crowds on the street tended to cross to the other side. The ones that didn’t parted like a river around a rock. Top looked up at Bunny.

“You good to go?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Bunny said, and took a step toward the building.

Top shifted around to block his way. “‘I guess’? What kind of horseshit is that? I asked you a straight question. Are you good to go?”

Bunny straightened. He was nearly six seven and had massive arms and shoulders. Blond hair and blue eyes and a dark tan that made his white teeth seem to glow. Top had seen Bunny pick grown men up and hurl them like sacks of potatoes. He’d seen him throw himself into a crowd and batter half a dozen other men down to the ground. He’d walked side by side with him through a hundred vicious firefights. As he searched Bunny’s eyes he looked for that man. The one who anchored Echo Team with muscle and heart.

And Top could see the moment when Bunny became aware of what was going on, when he understood the conversation they were both having with unspoken words.

Bunny took another big breath, and exhaled slowly. “I’m good,” he said.

Top studied him a moment longer, then nodded. “Me, too,” he lied.

They turned and went to the back of the car to remove one briefcase and a metal equipment case. Top took the briefcase and Bunny hefted the equipment. They walked into the building, flashed their FBI credentials at the guard, and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Neither said a word.

Their job was a simple one. The only tenant of the sixteenth floor was the office and private laboratory of Dr. Raoul San Pedro. The office had been shut up except for a twice-monthly cleaner who dusted the furniture. Following the incident in Antarctica, the office had been officially sealed by the FBI and a police detail had been assigned to guard the door pending resolution and disposition of San Pedro’s effects. Top had a federal order in his pocket that would allow him and Bunny to enter the premises and remove anything that might be of use. The order was vague in detailing what they were looking for, but sweeping in the authority it afforded them. The tools in the bag Bunny carried were to help them locate hidden electronics or a safe, and if a safe existed they had what they needed to open it.

Except that isn’t what happened, because as soon as they stepped off of the elevator the whole routine pattern of the job changed.

There was no cop in the hall.

There was only blood.

“Shit,” gasped Bunny as he dropped the heavy case and went for his gun. Top beat him to the draw.

The hall was empty. They pivoted to cover it, up and down, but aside from the elevator there was only a janitor’s closet, the fire stairs, and the double door to San Pedro’s office.

The closet door stood open, the supplies spilled out onto the floor in a tangle of mops, brooms, an overturned wheeled bucket, burst bottles of cleaning fluid, ruptured cans of spray polish, and a roll of black plastic trash bags that was twisted across the floor like the shed skin of some dark snake.

Bunny immediately ran down to the other end of the hall to check the fire stairs while Top crouched and kept his weapon trained on the doors to the lab. One door was closed, the other was ajar. When Bunny returned, shaking his head to indicate that the stairs were clear, Top nodded to the open office door. There was a clear handprint painted in bright red. A line of blood ran slowly down from it. The two men exchanged a brief, knowing glance. Blood is thick and clots quickly. For it still to be wet enough to crawl down the door meant that this was new.

It meant that this was still happening.

Top gave a curt nod and Bunny immediately shifted to flank the door. There were a few different ways to play this. Go in high and low and shoot the first thing that didn’t look kosher. Go in fast and quiet and let the situation dictate what happened next. Or stay in the relative safety of the hall, identify themselves as federal officers, and demand that whoever was in there lay down their weapons and cooperate with the arrest.

Those were all methods Top and Bunny had used many times.

Sometimes a situation was so thoroughly in motion that they didn’t get to call the play.

Like now.

The door opened and a man stood there. A medium-tall white man dressed almost identically to them. He held a weapon in his left hand. Not a Glock like Bunny or a Sig Sauer like Top.

This was a stubby pistol with three converging metal spikes at the business end. No open barrel. Not even something to fire flachettes like a Taser. It was not that kind of weapon, and both DMS agents recognized it at once. It terrified them both as much as it made them furious.

“Federal officers. Drop your weapon!” yelled Bunny, his own pointed center mass at the man. “Do it now or I will kill you.”

The man smiled at them.

He pulled the trigger of his strange little gun.

It made an odd little sound.

TOK!

The air shimmered and the wall behind Top and Bunny exploded.

INTERLUDE TWENTY

Prospero wondered what it would be like to die.

It was coming.

He didn’t fear the pain. His body felt like it was wrapped in barbed wire. Those dogs… their teeth…

God.

They kept biting even while he was stabbing them to death.

Damn dogs.

It hurt so bad.

The fires, though… that had been worse. Smart as he was, it never occurred to him that running uphill from a burning building was a stupid idea. The winds were blowing steadily from the south and the lawn burned, then the shrubs, and then the trees. Prospero could have outrun it if not for the damn dogs.

Was it a blessing that it had started to rain? Was that a gift from his god? Or was that a punishment, extinguishing the flames so that he could suffer longer?

He did not know and that lack of knowledge screamed in his head.

Now he crawled through the grass and left a trail that glistened like the mucus of a great slug. The slime looked black in the moonlight and was only red when another part of the building collapsed and sent a pillar of fire into the air.

Prospero prayed to his god.

He prayed to the dreaming god who slept beneath the waves.

He begged his god to wake, to stretch out a mighty hand and bring him home. God wouldn’t need a machine to do that. It was only the small, the weak, and the helpless ones like Prospero who needed a doorway. Gods didn’t need anything.

He prayed for salvation. He prayed that God or one of his servants would answer his prayers.

“Please,” he begged as he crawled.

In the woods behind him the sergeants began yelling. They’d found the dogs.

They would be coming soon.

Prospero crawled faster.

Then he heard a sound and froze. Not behind him. This was a soft noise as a foot stepped down on the thick grass. Prospero’s heart sank as he raised his head and looked up, looked ahead.

There, between him and the road, was a pair of heavy old willows, one leaning left, the other leaning right, each one pulled into ogre shapes by their age and ponderous weight. Beyond them was the black ribbon of the road.

And there, idling with its lights off, was a car. The driver’s door was open.

Prospero held his breath and tried not to make a sound. Was this one of the sergeants come up the side road to head him off? What would happen? Would it be more kicks, or more of the cattle prods? Would it be a knife or a bullet?

The knife Prospero had brought with him from the school was back there somewhere, stuck in the second dog’s throat, wedged into bone.

There was a second soft noise and a piece of shadow detached itself from the black trunk of the left-hand tree. It moved forward, becoming man shaped. Was there a gun in his hand?

The figure came and stood over him.

“Prospero,” he said. A quiet voice. Cultured. Foreign?

The boy raised a bloody hand, half to ward off a blow and half to beg for help.

“Please…,” gasped the dying boy.

“Prospero,” said the man. Sure now. Prospero could see the flash of a smile. Bright white teeth. Then the figure squatted down and lifted him as easily as if he weighed nothing. No grunt of effort. Nothing.

The boy clutched the man’s dark shirt. “Did he send you? Are you one of his angels?”

The man just smiled and carried the boy to the car.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

So, yeah, kick me while I’m down. Kick me, stomp on me, park your car on me.

Church said nothing as it all sank in. I mean, on one hand, hooray. Bolton is the real deal. All those wins he racked up in the field, all of the deep and crucial intel he’s obtained since then. Still my hero, but at that exact moment I would have gladly chopped him into cat treats and fed him to Church’s cat.

“Well,” I said, “I’m back now. It’s going to get pretty chummy if we’re both trying to squeeze our asses into my chair.”

“It won’t come to that. Harcourt has been very considerate of our feelings,” Church said dryly. “He’s using one of the spare offices and has said, many times, that he will work with us. He didn’t ask for this assignment and I believe he feels embarrassed. It’s possible he even resents being put in this position.”

I nodded. Nobody was winning right now. I said, “You’re old friends with Bolton?”

Church took a moment. “We have worked together in a number of cases that ended satisfactorily.”

“Wow, you couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if you were actually asleep. Why? What have you got against Bolton?”

“Against him? Nothing.”

“But—?” I prompted.

“Captain, this isn’t high school. It’s not required that everyone in our line of work be close friends or confidants. It is enough that Harcourt and I have found a certain rhythm for effective collaboration. He has his way of getting things done and it works for him.”

There was a lot left unsaid and I could read a bit between the lines, but it wasn’t the right moment for a confessional conversation. Not that I thought my chances of prying details out of Church were any good.

“For now,” he said, “please understand that I am not running the ISIL investigation. That is entirely under the directorship of Harcourt Bolton. The president has asked me to finalize our official report on Gateway and then to focus on another matter.”

“Which is what? Some kid stealing lunch money?”

He smiled thinly. “Gateway first.”

“Sure. Fine. Let’s do that. Because as we all know, a pile of rubble is far more important than the threat of a global terrorist organization.” When he made no comment I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes like a Valley Girl. “Where do you want to start?” I asked quietly. Almost demurely, damn it.

“We need to understand what happened down there, and there are a few factors to consider. You described an underground city as well as some of the other elements, notably the oversized albino penguins.”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware that there is some precedent to some of what you described?”

I stiffened. “What are you talking about? What kind of precedent?”

Mr. Church said, “Certain elements of your account — and those of your team — parallel elements of a story that is very popular among devotees of a certain kind of pulp horror fiction. Have you ever heard of, or possibly read, the short novel At the Mountains of Madness by the writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft?”

“Sure, I heard of Lovecraft, but I don’t read much horror. Never read that book. Was there a movie?”

“The novel was written in 1931 and published in 1936 in a pulp magazine called Astounding Stories. It was very popular and has been reprinted in book, e-book, and audio form many times since. Circe tells me that the story helped popularize the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ as well as Antarctica’s place in that cycle of myths.”

I lunged at that. “Well, maybe they’re not myths. We saw that city, and, let’s face it, we’re not exactly as skeptical of little green men in spaceships as we used to be.” I gave him a hard look. “Are we?”

I wasn’t making a joke.

A few years ago we in the DMS had been forced to adjust our thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We no longer had the luxury of being knee-jerk skeptics. Not anymore. Church and I both knew that our world had become substantially larger during the Majestic Black Book case. We’d stumbled onto a covert arms race between a secret cabal within our defense department called Majestic Three and their opposite numbers in China, North Korea, and Russia. They were all trying to reverse engineer exotic technologies from crashed vehicles. And by “vehicles,” I’m not talking about anything with a local license plate. Start with Roswell and work from there and you’ll climb into the same boat. Majestic Three, or M3 as they were more commonly known, were so far off the radar that even the DMS thought they were only some kind of pop culture conspiracy myth.

Not so much a myth, as it turned out.

The three “governors” of M3 were top-grade scientists who were preparing to launch a fleet of triangle-winged super-speed T-craft that they wanted to use to start, and win, a war with the other superpowers. They had lots of weird science culled from those crashed ships, and it gave them a real edge for a while. Echo Team went up against M3’s own special ops guys, a group of — no joke — men in black. Called themselves the “Closers,” and they had all sorts of nasty gadgets including these nifty little microwave pulse pistols. Not exactly rayguns but close enough.

The kicker was that the original owners of that tech — who we never got to actually see — made it clear that they wanted their toys back. Specifically they wanted the design science for the T-craft, which was all kept in a special handwritten journal. The Majestic Black Book. The governors of M3 kept that book well protected, and a lot of the hard science was recorded only in it. They didn’t trust the security of computers, even those that weren’t attached to landlines or Wi-Fi.

E.T. and his buddies bullied us into recovering the Black Book. We did, and the original was turned over. I wasn’t there for that part of the job. I’d taken some gunshot wounds during the big, messy finale. By the time I got out of the hospital the Majestic Black Book case was over. Since then none of us have heard a peep from anyone who doesn’t have “Earth” as point of origin on his passport.

Now… there was this crazy stuff in Antarctica.

Church sighed. “It’s a troubling matter.”

I laughed. “Yeah, you could say that. And you weren’t attacked by a mutant penguin. Have you seen Bunny’s face?”

“I have.”

“Speaking of Bunny… where is he? Where’s Top? Where’s everybody?”

“Most of our teams are out on assignment. You can talk over the specifics with Harcourt later. As for First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit, they are on light duty. I have them out collecting evidence from the offices of the scientists who were killed down at Gateway.”

“They okay?”

Church made one of his rare jokes. “Shaken, not stirred.”

I laughed louder than the joke deserved. Ghost woke up again, looked around, saw there was nothing to eat or bite, farted very loudly, and went back to sleep. Church, without comment, went and opened a window. The sea air was nice. Bastion jumped off his chair, climbed up to the windowsill, and sat there watching the pelicans.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The blast picked Bunny and Top up like the hand of a fiery giant and slammed them into the opposite wall. The force hit the man in the dark suit, too, but he was already falling, struck at the same instant by bullets fired from both DMS agents’ guns. Everyone went down. The gunman toppled backward through the doorway, but Top and Bunny slammed into the wall and then crashed to the floor.

It was all very fast, very noisy, and very painful.

Top coughed and tried to blink his eyes free. His gun was gone and he began frantically slapping the floor to find it. Found it under a piece of burning wallpaper, swatted the flames away, grabbed the gun, fumbled it back into his hands. All in a wild moment while his brain tried to process what was happening. The hall was filled with choking dust and burning rubble. The heat was immense and Top shimmied away from the flames that were spreading across the far wall.

A shape rose in the gloom. Massive and hunched, and it took Top’s dazed brain a second to realize that it was Bunny, staggering to his feet, his gun clutched in his fist, blood streaming down his face from between ruptured stitches.

“Motherfucker!” bellowed the young giant. “Top? Top — are you alive, you old bastard?”

“Kiss…,” gasped Top, “my black… ass.”

Bunny grabbed him with his free hand and pulled Top up. The door to San Pedro’s office stood open, the wood nicked and charred. Both men raised their weapons.

“That was a fucking microwave pulse pistol,” growled Bunny.

“I know.”

“That fucking guy was a—”

“I know.”

“—fucking Closer.”

“I know.”

The fear was there for Top to hear in his own voice.

A Closer.

One of the elite group of trained killers who worked for the warped scientist who had developed the MPP handguns as well as a long list of other even more deadly weapons.

But Howard Shelton was dead.

His organization, Majestic Three, was gone. Torn down by the DMS. Top and Bunny had both been there when that group was ripped apart.

The Closers had been killed or arrested. Employment records from M3 had helped the DMS and the FBI track them all down. There were no Closers anymore. There was no M3 anymore. And no one had MPP pistols.

No one.

Except…

“Fuck me,” said Bunny as he began inching toward the open door.

“No,” said Top, “fuck them.”

His fear was still there, but now anger was burning hotter than the flames that were eating the wall behind them.

“What’s the play?” asked Bunny.

“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” said Top. He reached into his jacket, produced a micro-FB, flipped the arming switch with his thumb, and hurled it side-arm through the doorway.

The new generation of flash-bangs were tiny, less than a fifth the size of the M84 stun grenades used by the military. But the flash and the bang were 30 percent larger.

The explosion rocked the room and made the dividing wall shudder as if it had been rammed by a truck. The sprinklers overhead kicked on and the whole hallway was caught in a rainstorm.

“Go, go, GO!” yelled Top and they were up and running, moving around the edge of the doorway, pointing their guns, following their barrels into the room, cutting left and right, seeking targets.

The Closer who had shot at them was on the floor, his face scrunched up with pain, eyes blinking as he tried to see, his MPP held up in a two-hand grip as he fired blindly.

TOK!

TOK!

TOK!

The superheated microwave blasts tore the room apart.

Literally tore it apart. Desks and filing cabinets exploded into burning clouds of metal splinters and blazing paper. The whole doorway disintegrated into a cloud of superheated gas. Top once more felt himself lifted and thrown like a doll. He crashed into an oak desk, rebounded, and fell hard onto the floor. The world swirled around him like toilet water after a hard flush, and he fought to hang on to his gun and to his consciousness.

Bunny was somewhere on the other side of a cloud of burning dust, cursing and grunting. Top could hear the sound of a vicious fight as vague shapes moved in an awkward ballet.

The Closer got to his feet and swung the MPP toward him. His face was lined with pain from the flash-bang, and blood ran from both ears, but his eyes had cleared and there was a cruel smile on his hard mouth.

He said a single word as he raised his gun to fire.

“Sims.”

Top shot him six times. Three to the chest, but that only staggered the man, and Top remembered that the Closers wore a micro-mesh undergarment that was harder to penetrate than Kevlar and whose structure nullified most of the foot-pounds of impact. The 9mm rounds drove him backward but didn’t put him down.

The next three shots went into his face.

The cruel grin disintegrated into red nothingness and the rounds punched through the back of his skull, pulling streams of blood and brain matter behind them. The Closer went down and Top rolled onto his knees, sweeping around to find Bunny. Immediately he had to throw himself to one side as a figure came hurtling through the smoke toward him.

A big figure with blond hair, and for a terrible moment Top thought that it was Bunny.

But it was not.

This man was a stranger and unless Top read his autopsy report he would remain one. His head was twisted more than halfway around, and his eyes bulged with shocked awareness at how this day had ended so much differently than he expected. The big body landed hard and lay immobile.

By then Top was up and moving, running into the smoke.

He saw the third Closer and he saw Bunny.

The man saw him, too, and Top could see his eyes, could see the quick calculation of his eyes. The man knew he could not win this fight. Or maybe he did not want to roll those dice.

So he did something that Top would have thought impossible.

The man ducked under a looping right from Bunny that would have dropped a bull, grabbed the big young man by the arm and belt, picked him up, and hurled him at Top as easily as Top might have tossed a small suitcase. The man did not even grunt with the effort of lifting 240 pounds of solid muscle.

Top tried to get out of the way.

Tried.

Failed.

And went down.

By the time he and Bunny managed to untangle themselves, the Closer was gone. The office was filling with dense smoke and everything seemed to be on fire. They paused, looking around, trying to decide how to save the moment. The Closer was nowhere to be seen, and the other two were dead.

Top dragged Bunny to his feet and they ran for the elevator, but when the doors were halfway open they suddenly stopped. The lights went out, inside the car and in the hall. In fact the whole building seemed to go strangely still despite the water pulsing from the sprinklers. Then they died, too.

“Stairs,” yelled Top and they blundered through the smoke to a crash-door and into a stairwell.

It was utterly black. Even the battery-operated emergency lights were dark. Far below they could hear the clatter of footsteps.

“Give a light,” growled Top, but Bunny already had his powerful little penlight out. He slapped it into the clip on the underside of his gun. But the light did not flash on. There was nothing, not even the faintest glow. They stood for a moment, confused and disturbed, lit only by the trembling firelight behind them. The stairwell was like the mouth of a dragon, black and deep and treacherous.

Bunny leaned one hand on the rail. “We go down there and he’s waiting…”

No need to finish it.

“How’d he kill all the damn lights?” asked Top. “Don’t make no sense.”

They saw a brief flash of daylight at the very bottom as the killer broke from the fire tower.

“Call it, Top,” said Bunny.

If they had been dressed for combat they would have both been carrying nonelectric chemical flares. Below them the door swung shut and the stairwell was immediately plunged into total darkness.

“Call it in,” said Top. “Let’s get a BOLO out on this son of a bitch. And we need the fire department.”

But, of course, their cell phones and earbuds were as dead as the lights. The fire behind them began to roar.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-ONE

Oscar Bell dreamed of her.

Or, maybe it was that she dreamed of him.

He was in his bedroom, alone in a midnight house, all the doors locked, all the alarms set. Dogs on the prowl, guards with guns. The way it always was.

Not that German shepherds and mercenaries with automatic weapons could keep them out.

No.

Nothing could keep them out.

Not unless he wore one of those ridiculous skullcaps. Jesus, he hated the thought. A grown man, a multibillionaire who owned more companies than he could count, a scientist and defense contractor, wearing a fucking aluminum foil hat. Well, technically a dome-shaped glass and crystal-lined metal alloy hat.

It blocked out most of the intrusions.

It stopped the dreamwalkers from stealing into his head and stealing his knowledge. It kept his slumbering mind from being complicit in the theft of his own technologies.

Shutting the barn door after the cows had run off, though. He was sure of it.

Not that Bell knew who exactly had been sneaking around in his head. Someone from Gateway, for sure. Some of Erskine’s remote viewer spies, those fuckers.

And someone else.

Was it Prospero? Was the boy still alive? If so, what on Earth was he up to? The rumors Bell was hearing terrified and sickened him. ISIL, for Christ’s sake. Selling the null field to a gang of insane murderers. How was that any kind of justice, even from Prospero’s perspective?

How?

If it was true, and Oscar Bell did not have real proof.

Then there was Corrine.

She’d been in his dreams, and maybe inside his head twice now. Both times on nights when he forgot to wear the damn helmet.

Bell hated it. He was no romantic and even if he was, having someone inside his head like that was not romance. It was rape. It was a violation on a level that ran so deep that he wanted to saw open his head and scrub his brain with Lysol.

Damn the woman.

After the first time, he tried to call her, but her assistant said she was unavailable. After the tenth call Bell decided that Corrine was down at Gateway.

Last night’s dream… well, that sealed it.

He’d become aware that he was sleeping. It was like that. You are asleep but then you realize that you’re asleep. You are still inside your body but you are aware the body is sleeping.

That’s how it began. And then she was there.

It was not like meeting her in the flesh. There was no flesh. It was her but it was like he could see her with some sense other than eyes. There is no word for it in the English language. “Sensed” her did not fit because there was no precise sensory input. No sight or smell, no sound or touch. But she was there and he knew it was her.

Corrine Sails. Stripped of everything. No uniform, no face. No skin or bones. No blood or breath.

Just her, whatever “she” was.

Bell knew why so many people had committed suicide. It was a nightmare encounter. Her thoughts were right there, shooting through him like electrical shocks, as if the nerve signals fired by neurons were stun guns. He had no defense against them and the power was raw and immediate. Bell wasn’t sure how exactly his body was registering them. Again, there were no words for this kind of contact. It wasn’t even a purely electrical connection, either. There had to be some of that, of course, or the helmets wouldn’t work, but on the plane of communication there were other rules, other forces yet to be cataloged. Someone at Gateway had tried to coin the term “soulspeak” but it was too silly for the scientific and military minds to grasp.

Bell, despite his cynicism, thought it might be right.

What were souls, after all? If they existed at all, then they were some kind of energy that had no label in science. Yet. Quantum scientists would have to label them at some point, give them a properly sober Latin name, place them in a category, force them into a range, measure them and meter them.

That would come. Science wasn’t there yet.

When Corrine stepped into his mind Bell was sure that the contact dragged them both into another place entirely. The soul level? Maybe.

Or another dimension.

Another world?

Another universe?

After all, the God Machine was Prospero’s attempt to open a doorway that would take him to what he believed was his home. To another world, but not another planet.

To a different universe than this.

Or to a different plane of existence where words like “world” and “universe” and even “dimension” had no practical relevance.

They did not really talk to each other. Conversation is a product of organic machinery. Breath vibrating the larynx, tongue and lips forming words, the jaw hinge moving, and electrical impulses accessing memories and forming thoughts, using syntax and vocabulary. All physical things.

They had no bodies in that place.

But he heard her. Felt her. Whatever it needed to be called.

Corrine was trying to tell him something. He was sure of it.

Warn him?

Maybe. Probably.

But warn him about what? About who?

He couldn’t remember what frightened her, only that something did. It terrified her. It was the only clear thing Bell could remember when he woke up.

However, he woke up naked, on the balcony where they often stood after making love. Except he stood on the stone rail, his toes over the edge, his body swaying as if trying to leap.

It took a lot of scotch to stop the shakes.

He did not know why he crawled under his desk with a gun.

All he knew is that after that night, he never went to sleep without that goddamn helmet.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“The Gateway matter has presented us with a number of complications,” said Mr. Church. “Particularly in the matter of reliable information. Most of the records are unavailable to us through our usual channels, and that includes MindReader. We know that the project was initiated fifteen years ago and the focus of the research being conducted at Gateway has changed many times. We know that Dr. Marcus Erskine was the head of the research and development team down there, and that they were working on several projects that, on the surface, appear to be unrelated.”

“That’s all we have?”

Church removed a folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table to me. “This is something Bug dug up for us from very deep in the records of the black operations file attached to Gateway. It’s a fragment of a project proposal paper written thirteen years ago by Dr. Erskine.”

I read it hungrily, needing answers. Unfortunately most of it was scientific mumbo jumbo that shot way over my head. However, there were footnotes and annotations in the distinctive scrawl of Hu’s handwriting and Bug’s juvenile scribble. The story this all told was bizarre. Erskine hadn’t gone down there with one purpose in mind. Gateway was one of those cluster projects where several ultra-top-secret research programs were being conducted under one roof, with Erskine as overall director. Unfortunately each project had a code name. Kill Switch was the easiest to understand — a weapon that interrupted power. But also referenced — without useful explanations — were projects labeled “Dreamwalking,” “Dreamshield,” “God Machine,” “Freefall,” and “Unlearnable Truths.”

Church was petting his cat and looked way too much like a James Bond villain. Even the gloves creeped me out.

“This is all we have?” I demanded.

“It’s a piece of what was clearly a larger document. Bug said that most of it was scrubbed from the Net and this is part of an editing memo that he was able to salvage. The text is suggestive of certain kinds of projects that surface every once in a while. Psychic phenomena, esoteric espionage, thought projection.”

“Thought projection? You mean mind control?”

“Possibly,” he said. “I’ve put out some feelers for information on any project related to that, with a bias on anything that might explain what happened to Glory Price and Dr. Sanchez.”

I sipped my coffee, realized it had grown cold, and splashed some warm into the cup. “Mind control…? Is that even a real science?”

Church said, “There are a lot of radical projects in the various levels of R and D. Some are improbable, most hit walls and are proven to be unsound, some are merely unlikely, a few stretch credulity to the breaking point. But every now and then we advance the more arcane branches of science by an interesting inch or two.”

I drained my cup and set it down. “We didn’t get close enough to assess the process down at Gateway. And without our body cams and telemetry we got bupkes. Do you have anything else?”

“That was all Bug found. I asked him to dig deeper but so far he hasn’t found anything of use.”

“What about that QC thingie? I thought our new quantum computer could find anything.”

“Bug hasn’t fully integrated that science into MindReader,” Church said quietly. “He has been readjusting.”

I nodded glumly. Several months ago I’d recovered a prototype of a truly practical quantum computer. Normally Bug would have freaked out about it and danced the Snoopy dance, but the guys who owned that tech had made some vicious attacks against us, targeting our families in order to cripple the DMS. Bug’s mother was killed by a small drone packed with explosives. Her murder nearly killed Bug, though in a different way. It took Church a lot to get him to even agree to come back to work. Since then Bug sounds and acts like his old self, but I think a lot of it’s game face. My dad, Church’s daughter Circe — who was pregnant at the time — and other innocents were also targeted. Rudy was attacked and Aunt Sallie nearly died. If Bug needed time to get up and running, then I wouldn’t be the guy standing over him with a whip.

That said, I kind of wanted to stand over him with a whip because I fucking well needed to understand what happened in Antarctica. When, of course, I could actually stand.

I sighed. Very audibly, and Church gave a small, sympathetic nod.

“I’m not sure the QC would help,” he said. “Even if we had all of the MindReader upgrades finished we still might be looking for something that does not exist on any computer.”

“‘Verbal briefing only,’” I quoted, and he nodded. “So what are we thinking about all this?”

“That is still a work in progress, Captain. We need a lot more information. Currently the pieces don’t seem to fit together in any way I find comfortable.”

“Well, join the damn club, Boss.” I rubbed my tired eyes. “So, are we both thinking the same thing? That our friends from outside the neighborhood are the ones who built that city?”

“Ah,” he said wistfully, “if there were only something left to study, then perhaps we could answer that question.”

“You think I shouldn’t have called in an air strike?”

“I wasn’t there, Captain, and I try not to Monday-morning quarterback my officers. The call was made and that’s that. Even if it was the same call I would have made, it still leaves me with regret that we can’t explore that city.”

“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t pick you up a travel brochure, but I was in the moment.”

“Apparently so. Unless we can identify and interrogate any surviving persons involved, we may never know what most of these programs are, or were,” said Church. “Excavating the site is pointless. Have you seen the satellite pictures? Cartographers around the world will have to redraw their maps of Antarctica. To say that the president would very much like to have you skinned alive is not an understatement. He used those exact words.”

“Nice to be admired for one’s accomplishments.”

Church gave me a sour look.

I said, “Well, okay, maybe I was going off the deep end when I tried to order a nuke — thanks for running interference on that one — but the rest? Yeah. You didn’t see what we saw. Maybe it was us hallucinating, but I don’t think so, which means the strikes I ordered kept whatever it was from getting out. Or… if it was some kind of psychic warfare, then this is on them for playing us. Either way, I stand by my call.”

“Have you heard me say otherwise?”

“Yeah, well…” I stopped and changed the subject. “So… what does Bolton make of this? Does he think I’m crazy, too?”

“Harcourt has been very sympathetic to your recent troubles. He has also tried several times to intervene with the president. The fact that our charter has not been terminated is largely due to him.”

“Ah. But what does he think about all of this?”

Church took a moment with that. “He was not involved in the Majestic affair, but he’s been briefed on it. He knows that we are dealing with some extraordinary matters.”

“You’re dancing around it, Boss,” I said. “He doesn’t believe what Top, Bunny, and I saw down there, does he?”

Church picked up a cookie, looked at it, then set it down without taking a bite. “He has expressed some concern that, with a lack of evidence, we should all avoid jumping to conclusions.”

“Sigh,” I said. I got up and stretched my aching muscles and began pacing the room, feeling restless and angry.

“Harcourt is working the Kill Switch angle,” said Church. “Portable directed-energy weapons, particularly jammers and EMP-type devices, are the next hot technology. The science of miniaturization is catching up to both military and terrorist needs for man-portable weapons of that kind. They are very attractive to terrorist groups because of the relatively low cost and ease of transport.”

“Houston,” I said. “That’s ISIL, right? I mean that’s what we all think?”

“It’s a high probability, but they are being coy about taking credit because of the obvious global political and military backlash.”

“Sure, if we knew it was them, then everyone would go on a witch hunt for them. A lot of civilians would get killed in the process, though.”

“Regrettably, yes, but that witch hunt would happen. Nothing could stop it.”

I squatted down to pet Ghost while I thought it through. “Houston was big,” I said slowly, “but it wasn’t enough. It was a stupid risk because of what you just said.”

“But—?” he said, gesturing to encourage me to follow my thought.

“But, I think there’s another shoe about to drop. Houston was a punch but it wasn’t a knockdown punch. Not even close. Same for the racetrack and the debate. They were jabs, but somewhere there’s a big overhand right coming. Whatever it’s going to be, the Kill Switch thing is going to set it up.”

“Agreed.”

I straightened. “What about nuclear power plants? What would happen if they hit one of those with the Kill Switch device?”

“We looked at that,” Church said. “If this was twenty or thirty years ago, then they would have had a real chance at causing a catastrophic nuclear event. But the safeguards built into all domestic nuclear power plants wouldn’t permit it. Older systems were based on the SCRAM method that inserts chemicals into the reactor to effectively negate the reaction and cool down the rods. The SCRAM systems were electronically and mechanically based, and Kill Switch would have been effective against them. However, the newer systems are classified as passive designs, but these still require batteries if AC power is lost. The problem ISIL would face is that the emergency diesel generators on the current designs can be manually started. They use air-start motors. And the control rods are held out by electromagnets, so in the event of a power loss, gravity would let them drop into place, thus preventing overheating and meltdown.”

“Well, that’s a goddamn relief.”

“It is,” he agreed, “but it’s not an answer to our question. What is their play?”

We knocked theories back and forth but it was all speculation. I was just about to get up and go find Harcourt Bolton — half-sure I wanted to fawn on him because he’s my hero and half-sure I wanted to put two in the back of his head for invading my home turf — when Church’s phone rang. I swear sometimes you can tell it’s going to be bad news from the way the phone rings.

This was one of those times.

Church’s phone rang and he took the call and he stiffened with new tension. “Thank you, First Sergeant. Come back here as soon as you are able.”

He disconnected the call and told me about Top and Bunny.

INTERLUDE TWENTY-TWO

Oscar Bell set the phone down.

The sun was behind the trees and it threw somber brown shadows through the window. The sound of birds in the trees was wrong; they sounded like rude people talking in church. The house was still. Empty of children for years now, empty of wives old and new, empty of everyone except the live-in staff who knew not to make noise and not to be seen. The mansion was so big these days. Once, the sixteen bedrooms and eighteen baths, the formal and casual dining rooms, the kitchens, the sitting rooms and libraries and offices had all felt alive. Vibrant.

That was then.

It was different now and Bell could feel the change.

He could hear it. On evenings like these the wind came whispering off the ocean and found cracks in the walls and gaps in the windows, and it howled at him.

Like ghosts.

He wondered if one of those ghosts belonged to Prospero.

Was the boy dead? Or was he alive somewhere in the world, hating him, as Bell knew he deserved to be hated?

Was he even on this world?

Bell had no idea.

Such a loss.

He wondered about Prospero’s mother. Surrogate or not, she had loved the boy as much as a fractured mind like hers could love. As much as a broken heart like hers could love. When she killed herself it was an act of murder and it stole something from this place. From Bell, too. Even from him.

And now Corrine.

Gone.

“Suicide” is such a clinical word but it was safer than the truth. It was a buffer from the details.

Erskine had told him, though. He’d been happy to, the cold-hearted son of a bitch. He’d used the details like a knife to stab him.

“The silly bitch took off all her clothes and went walking out in the snow,” Erskine had said. “She’d shit herself, of course. But that was before she went outside. Stupid cow.”

Erskine had to know that Bell and Corrine were sleeping together. He was like that. He knew. And he had the God Machine. He had those dreamers.

Sadistic sick fuck of a bastard.

Telling him about Corrine was the knife, but it wasn’t the point of the call.

“The project is a failure, Oscar,” said Erskine. “After a careful review we can only conclude that you were aware of the unreliability of the machine. That you knew about the instability and chose not to inform us is nonfeasance. That you were informed by Major Sails of problems at our facility related to the device and still chose not to provide information is malfeasance. You have grossly violated the terms of our agreement and you are in further violation of the spirit as well as the word of the understanding between you and the Department of Defense. Our attorneys are filing actions against you and I have no doubt we will recover all fees paid to you and receive a judgment of penalties for damages.”

The words battered Bell, driving him down into his chair and almost onto the floor.

“Marcus… why are you doing this? We’re family, for Christ’s sake!”

“Family?” Erskine burst out laughing. “Even after all this you really don’t understand how the world works, Oscar.”

That had been the end of the call.

After that it was the lawyers and the process servers. The federal agents who came to seize the property and all his holdings. The bank officers who told him that his assets had been frozen. The IRS account managers who called to schedule audits.

It all came tumbling down.

Down, down, down.

And yet through all of it all he could do was think of Corrine Sails. That mind. That devious, lovely mind.

Gone.

His own mind, always cruel, conjured memories for him. The taste of the side of her throat. The feel of her nipples as they grew hard between his lips. The heat of her when he slipped inside. The sounds she made when she came. Guttural, primal. Ringing now in his ears.

Those memories were like knives to him.

Those memories were like swords.

There wasn’t enough scotch in all of Long Island to drown them away.

It was a terrible, terrible thing to realize that love is in the heart only after the heart itself is too badly broken to contain it.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Top and Bunny wouldn’t be back to the Pier for an hour, so I stumbled down to the office that had been commandeered by Harcourt Bolton. His secretary — one of his people, not one of mine — told me that he was out of the building. I left a request for a meeting when he got back.

“You’re Captain Ledger?” said the receptionist, a busty Nordic blonde with big plastic boobs, collagen lips, and merciless eyes. The name on her desk placard said MUFFY. There are so many jokes I might have made had it been a different day. “You used to run this place, as I understand.”

I wanted to yap at her like a kicked dog and tell her that I still ran the Pier, but I didn’t have the energy for a losing fight. Instead I slunk away with Ghost in tow.

On the elevator I looked down at him. “We are not having a good day, kiddo.”

He wagged his tail at me. So I gave him a dog cookie.

My office was where I left it, and I was thankful I hadn’t actually been evicted from the building. Small comforts are better than none.

“Can I get you anything?” Lydia-Rose asked after giving me a thorough up-and-down appraisal.

“Coffee.”

“Weren’t you finishing a big Starbucks when you got here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have any of the coffee I put in the conference room?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t you think you’ve had too much already? Your hands are shaking.”

“Three things,” I told her. “First, there’s no such thing as too much coffee. Second, caffeine has nothing to do with my jitters. And third, there’s no such thing as too much coffee.”

She sighed and went over to the big Mr. Coffee and began making a fresh pot. I heard her say several things in back-alley Spanish that questioned my sanity, my parentage, and my personal hygiene. I went inside and slammed the door.

After a couple of tries I managed to get Bug on the line for a videoconference. When his face filled my laptop screen I saw that he was still trying to grow a goatee. A recent style choice that wasn’t working out all that well. Bug’s in his late twenties but puberty hasn’t completely unpacked its suitcase in his genes. His brown face was dusted with about nine black hairs.

“Looking good,” I told him.

“Oh… bite me,” he said. He wore a baggy gray sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF WAKANDA stenciled on the chest. “How are you doing, Joe?”

“I’ve had better incarnations,” I admitted.

“Should you even be at work?”

“Considering the day I’m having so far,” I said, “I’m thinking about returning to the hospital and asking if they can put me back into a coma.”

“Ouch. Hey, that whole thing down in Antarctica was weird,” he said. “Freaky.”

“You think?”

“No, I mean I’m genuinely freaked. I’m into the whole Cthulhu Mythos thing and—”

“The what?”

“Didn’t Mr. Church tell you about the book, At the Mountains of Madness?”

“Only a little about the author. H. P. Lovecraft, right?”

“You ever read his stuff?”

“A few short stories maybe.”

“Okay, short version is that Lovecraft created a kind of fantasy backstory to his horror stories. Gods, alien races, monsters, other dimensions. Like that. His stories were self-referential. You see, there’s this race of ancient space beings called the Great Old Ones who used to rule the Earth. They lost control of the world over time and some of them left and others went to sleep. One of the biggest and baddest of these gods is Cthulhu, and he’s asleep in the undersea city of R’lyeh. A lot of the stories deal with people who stumble onto a cult who worship one of the monsters, or in some cases have managed to interbreed with them or their even more monstrous servants, or they catch a glimpse of one and go totally gaga nuts. In the stories these creatures either live in places here on Earth that are so remote no one ever goes there — except the poor dumb son of a bitch of a protagonist — or they exist in a parallel dimension. Sometimes Lovecraft kind of confused the two. You’re just lucky you didn’t run into any shoggoths down there.”

“What a shoggoth? Or do I even want to know?”

“Not really. The shoggoths are this race of shapeshifting monsters created by another race of ancient creatures called the Elder Things.”

“Not the Great Old Ones?”

“No. It’s complicated, I know. The Elder Things were more like space travelers who settled on Earth a billion years ago. They built huge cities, and believe me, Joe, I’ve been losing sleep ever since I heard how you guys described the city you saw. It fits.”

I said nothing, trying to let it sink in. Trying to decide what I believed. What I could allow myself to believe.

“This whole cycle of stories is the Cthulhu Mythos,” Bug said. “Lovecraft invited his writer friends to tell their own Cthulhu stories. A lot of them did. A whole lot. People still do. There are thousands of Cthulhu stories, and a lot of them are actually better than the stuff Lovecraft wrote. Even Stephen King. You can see the influence everywhere. You know those Hellboy movies you like so much? That’s inspired by Cthulhu. But, between you and me, Lovecraft was a misogynistic, racist jerk who couldn’t write dialogue worth a darn.”

“Useful to know,” I said. “But, kid, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe any of this shit.”

“You were in the city, Joe. Bunny got his face eaten off by a giant penguin, and Erskine got funding to develop a whole line of psychic weapons. Want to hear a wild theory, Joe?” asked Bug, leaning close to the screen as if afraid of being overheard.

“No,” I said weakly, “I really don’t.”

“I’m kind of thinking it’s real. Or some of it, anyway. Like I said, I’ve read all of this stuff and there have been people over the years who’ve suggested that Lovecraft wasn’t so much making this up as having visions. They did a History Channel special once about how the artists from the surrealism movement believed they were painting images from other worlds they traveled to in dreams. And Erskine had programs called ‘Dreamwalking’ and ‘Dreamshield.’ I’m just saying. There was something down there, and between you and me, I’m really glad you called in an air strike. Imagine what would have happened if terrorists or even a foreign power got their hands on these kinds of weapons?”

I looked around my office for something to drink, but there was no booze. Someone had even swiped all the beers from my fridge. Maybe they thought I was never going to come out of the coma. Inhuman bastards. Ghost came over and leaned against me. To comfort me or maybe to receive some for himself. I ran my fingers through his thick fur. “Bug,” I said, “you’re hitting me with all this, but where does it take us? What do I do with it?”

He shook his head and it was clear my question punched him in the gut. He sagged and looked lost. “Oh, man… I really don’t know. I just look stuff up. You’re the field guy.” He tried on a smile but it didn’t fit well. “Everything’s gotten weird lately, you know? All those screwed-up missions. We’ve faced some big things before, but nothing like this. We took down the Seven Kings, we busted up the Jakobys and Majestic Three and the Red Knights, but man… what’s happened to us? We dropped the ball on so many jobs they’re not letting us anywhere near the ISIL thing. And the Gateway stuff is past tense. That place is gone. Are we just spinning our wheels? God, I never felt so lost before.”

Bug and I studied each other through the digital magic of the teleconference screen, saying nothing for a long time. Then he cleared his throat.

“You ought to talk to Junie, she’s into a lot of this weird stuff.”

“I know, but I’ll have to get clearance from Church. In the meantime, all we can do is work on this. So let’s work it. What have you dug up on Erskine?”

Bug tapped a few keys and scanned the data. “A lot and not much. Erskine was rich and well connected. His whole family is made up mostly of industrialists and defense contractors. They’ve been making all kinds of dangerous toys for the government going back to the Civil War. They were heavily into Pittsburgh steel before that went south, then they moved into advanced R and D.”

“Doing what kind of research?”

“You name it. Radar and sonar systems. Anti-radar and sonar systems. Control systems for tanks and fighters. Aerodynamics for stealth aircraft. New hull designs for attack and missile subs. Composite materials for fighter craft hulls. Erskine had a couple of dozen subsidiary companies, but he directly oversaw the electronics division.”

“Particle accelerators?”

“Not Erskine, but his partner, Raoul San Pedro, worked on some of that. He was down at Gateway, so I guess he’s dead. Pretty much everyone on Erskine’s team was there.”

“San Pedro? Isn’t that the guy whose office Top and Bunny were at today?”

From Bug’s expression it was clear that he knew about the encounter with the Closers. “San Pedro worked on several accelerators. His great-grandfather worked on the nine-inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley back in the early thirties, and contributed to the eleven-, twenty-seven-, and thirty-seven-inch versions. His grandfather helped build Berkeley’s Isochronous cyclotron in 1950. And his dad is on the patent for the super proton synchrotron they built at CERN.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, barely following. “Bunch of brainiacs, got it. What about the machine we saw down at Gateway? Was that an accelerator?”

“I did image comparisons of the drawings you, Top, and Bunny made of the one you saw at Gateway and that thing you saw looked like a hadron collider, but it wasn’t exactly the same. Maybe that’s because your sketches are kind of, well, sketchy. Anyway, I talked to a bunch of eggheads and the thing nobody understands so far is that the one down there was built more like a tunnel that curved down into the earth, right? It wasn’t a circular loop?”

“No, unless it was unfinished.”

“Still wouldn’t make sense. You wouldn’t build one at that angle. These things are circular with no sharp bend, and never upright. And they are massive. We’re talking thousands of tons of material, and they build them flat so gravity doesn’t warp the structure. That’s how they get the particles up to speed, by running them in a circle as close to the speed of light as you can manage, and then you collide them with particles going in the opposite direction. The machine you saw isn’t configured for that. You said that the one down there blew air at you?”

“Real damn hard. That’s how we all got sick.”

He shook his head. “Yeah, that’s not making any kind of sense.”

“If it’s not an accelerator, then what was it?”

“Beats the crap out of me, Joe. And so far it’s beating the crap out of everyone I talk to.”

“Other than Erskine and San Pedro, who else are we looking at?”

He leaned close and dropped his voice again. “Look, Joe, I, um, might have looked into Mr. Bolton’s computer records. A bit. You know?”

“Why? Has he done something naughty?”

“What? Bolton? God, no. It’s just that he has a higher clearance than Mr. Church right now. At least as far as the Kill Switch thing goes. But… well, I guess I got nosy.”

“I ought to hit you with a rolled-up newspaper,” I said. “Did you find anything?”

“Not sure. Mr. Church showed you the stuff I got before, right? The black budget report? Did you see the mention of a project called the God Machine? Well, I don’t know what it is, but there were two names in a footnote. One marked with an ‘I,’ which means inventor, and one with a ‘D’ for developer. Both had the same last names and I think I know who they are. The inventor is P. Bell, and that’s got to be that weirdo Prospero Bell.”

“Who?”

“Son of Oscar Bell? He’s the other name, the developer. O. Bell.”

“Again I say, who?”

“Oscar Bell is Erskine’s brother-in-law. Or he was. He was married to Erskine’s sister. She’s dead, though.”

“There was no Oscar Bell on the personnel list at Gateway.”

“Uh-uh. Oscar’s a private defense contractor. Or he used to be. His company went bankrupt a few years ago and he started drinking. After that he fell off the public radar. I’m running a deep background on him to see if he’s anywhere.”

“What about the son?”

“Oh, man, that’s a really sad story,” said Bug. “Prospero was this genius kid that was supposed to be smarter than Stephen Hawking. Super-freak intelligence. Way off the scale. Incredible inventor, though. Published papers on particle physics and quantum theory when he was a teenager, and from what I can tell from the people I’ve talked to, Prospero was as crazy as he was smart. Some of his theories are groundbreaking and other scientists have been trying to catch up because it’s apparently going to open all sorts of new doors in research. Other stuff he came up with was nutty. But Prospero also had a lot of emotional problems. His dad sent him to a military boarding school to try and straighten him out, and even paid to have a state-of-the-art lab built for him. But that backfired. First he blew up the lab, and then a couple of years later he set fire to the whole school and tried to break out.”

“Tried? What happened to him?”

“Died in the fire. Him and a friend.”

“So how’s his name on a black budget request for Gateway?”

“From the dates on the report, the God Machine is apparently something Prospero came up with when he was still a teenager. From the way I’m reading this, his father took the design, whatever it was, and sold it to the government. At first they paid him for it, and those are pretty big numbers; but then something happened and they took it away from him and sued him to recover the monies paid. That’s what broke him.”

I chewed on that for a moment. “Jesus, Bug, this is the first solid lead we have. Do whatever you have to do to find this guy.”

“Sure, but like I said, you should talk to Junie.”

“Why?”

“Remember that conspiracy theory podcast she used to do when you guys first met? I used to listen to it all the time. She had Oscar Bell on her show once. If anyone knows where he is, it’ll probably be her.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I picked up the phone to call Junie but before I could even push a button it rang and it was she.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Wishing I was still in a coma,” I joked. She didn’t think that was funny. “Look, baby, any chance you can drop what you’re doing and come to the Pier? Mr. Church and I have a few things we need to talk to you about.”

“Is it urgent?”

“Depends. I can hear a helicopter. Where are you?”

“About to fly inland. There’s an environmental engineer I need to see. Linda Higdon. She has a water reclamation process that might work with something we’ve been developing here at FreeTech. Linda’s going to be at a testing facility out by the Salton Sea but only for the rest of the day and then she’s on a flight to Kenya. I’ve been trying to arrange this for months. If her process is compatible, we could maybe reclaim five million gallons a day once it’s up and running. Think about what that would mean to the farmers who are being crushed by the drought.”

“That’s actually kind of amazing,” I said, not joking.

“Do you need me to cancel with her, or—?”

I could tell she wanted me to say no, so I said no. The DMS was warming the bench right now, and even the stuff Church and I were banging back and forth was by-product. It’s not like the president was letting us do our jobs. Damn it.

“No, it’s good. Go talk to your scientist. Will you be home tonight?”

“Yes, but late. If you don’t feel like you can be alone, go over to Sam’s place. He has a guest room.”

“It’s all good,” I assured her. “I have plenty of people to hold my hand.”

She paused. “I hate to do this. You’ve only just come home.”

“I love you, too. Go save the world.”

And she was gone.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Top and Bunny were still at the crime scene, Bolton wasn’t back yet, Church was on the phone being yelled at by the president, and I didn’t have any beer in my fridge. So I checked out, leaving a request for Lydia-Rose to call me the second Top and Bunny got back.

With Ghost trotting beside me I got into my car and went to visit Rudy.

And immediately wished I hadn’t. Rudy looked small and shrunken, paled to a ghost, wrapped like a mummy. He had bandages over his face with a metal brace to hold his nose in shape. He wore a soft cervical collar. His leg was hung from straps and framed by a postsurgical sling. The broken nose had given him two black eyes.

His wife, Circe, had been very reluctant to let me in. Even though it had been Rudy who attacked me, she seemed to regard me as a thug who had attacked and brutalized her husband. Mind you, she didn’t actually call me a thug. That was the word Rudy had used and it hung in my head.

Thug. Weird, but the shadowy figure in my dreams had called me that, too.

It took some time and a lot of promises, but Circe agreed to let me in. She sat on the far side of the bed, holding one of Rudy’s hands in both of hers. Circe is a beautiful woman with masses of curly hair and olive skin. A fierce and uncompromising intelligence glittered in her dark eyes. I was godfather to her son but in that moment I was the man who crippled her husband. I sat across from her and held Rudy’s other hand. The room was silent for a long time. It wasn’t a chatty moment, and it was maybe forty minutes or an hour before I felt Rudy’s hand twitch. His fingers curled to grasp mine. He was weak but there was a desperate strength in those fingers. I got to my feet and leaned over him.

“Hey,” I said gently, “hey, brother…”

Rudy has one real eye and one glass. Another souvenir of violence that came his way during our time at the DMS. Another unfair mark on a good and decent man. Both eyes look real, and I swear both were filled with a pain born of the awareness of what had happened.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “God, Rudy, I’m so sorry.”

He started to shake his head, then winced as the bruised muscles and tendons in his neck protested. He hissed. A tear gathered in the corner of his good eye and fell down past his cheek and ear before melting into the foam of the cervical collar.

“J-Joe…,” he breathed, his voice weak and faint.

“I’m here, Rudy.”

“Joe… that… that wasn’t me….”

“I know, Rude, it’s all—”

“No,” he said with more force. Circe stood up and he saw her, his eyes ticking back and forth between us. “No… that was not me.”

“I know,” I said.

It wasn’t him, of that I was certain. But who — or what — was it?

The pain of his injuries — physical and psychic — began to scream at him. Circe called the nurse and they added something to his IV and Rudy went down into darkness. Like a coward, like a fool who knows nothing, I left him there and went out into the bright sunshine of a day whose rules I had utterly failed to grasp.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

“Why did you do it?”

Senior DMS field agent Captain Allison Craft asked the question for the fiftieth time. Maybe the hundredth. She’d lost count. The man in the chair, Mr. Nathan Cross, said the same thing he’d said each of those times.

“I don’t know.”

They were in an interview room at the Central District building. Captain Craft, topkick of Rimfire Team, the DMS field office in Milwaukee, had commandeered the room and the prisoner. Craft had flashed Homeland credentials and Aunt Sallie had cleared the red tape. The police, who were seldom generous when it came to sharing their prisoners or yielding jurisdiction, seemed happy to let this case go up the food chain. There were seventeen dead at Bristol Labs, and virtually everyone else employed there was either in the hospital — many critical — or in cells. Only a few had escaped without going crazy. Jerry Spencer, the DMS forensics chief, had brought in his team and it was clear that a powerful hallucinogen had been introduced to the staff, likely through the coffee and tea urns. Tests were being conducted, but the nature of the drugs used to cause the outbreak held less critical importance than what Cross had stolen from the lab and sent flying off on a drone.

The drone had been found two miles away in a field near the entrance to the highway. There was nothing in the metal container bolted to its undercarriage.

“Why did you do this?” demanded Craft, who was both scared and frustrated.

Nate Cross sat there, shocked, horrified, tears and snot running down his face, skin blanched white, cuffed hands trembling with a palsy born of realization of what he had done.

“God… God…,” he said, his words tumbling out, lips shiny with spit, “… I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know….”

He could describe some of what had happened, and Craft was confused because the man seemed to want to help. He was desperate to help, but there were huge gaps in his memory.

“It was like I was watching it,” said Cross. “Like it wasn’t me. I could feel it… see it. All of it. But it wasn’t me doing it. I swear to God.”

“You’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that,” snarled Craft. “Do you want to see the video again? Do you want to see what you did? I’ll show it to you again.”

“No!” he wailed, and he looked from her to Davis, her partner, and back again. Sobbing, pleading, begging them to believe what he was saying. “Please, God… it wasn’t me. I swear to God Jesus it wasn’t me.”

Craft’s phone rang. She glanced at the display. “Auntie,” she said.

“Go ahead,” said Davis. “I got this.”

Craft stepped out into the hall to take the call. “He’s holding to it,” she said into the phone. “We’ve been at it for hours and he hasn’t budged. And, I don’t think he’s feeding us a line. Something happened to him and—”

“Listen to me, girl,” said Aunt Sallie in a voice that could blister paint, “you put on your big girl panties and go get me some answers. I’m going to call you back in one hour and I want to hear something useful, do you hear me, sweetcheeks?”

“I—”

The line went dead.

“Bitch,” breathed Craft, resisting the urge to drop her phone and stomp on it. The interview room door was closed and she stood for a moment glaring at it, willing the situation inside to be different than what she’d left a moment ago. She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and reached for the knob.

That was when she heard the gunshot.

Through the door it was a muffled pok.

“Oh, shit,” she cried and tore the door open, drawing her own gun, fearing what had happened. Fearing that Cross had somehow gotten free and…

She froze in the doorway. Nathan Cross sat there with his head thrown back, mouth open, eyes staring up at the ceiling. There was a small black hole above the bridge of his nose. Behind him the wall was splashed with bright red that was speckled with bits of gray and knots of hair.

Phil Davis stood beside Cross’s chair, his Sig Sauer in his hand.

“Jesus Christ, Phil… what have you done?”

Davis turned to her and smiled. “Sorry, Phil’s not here at the moment,” he said. And he shot Allison Craft twice in the face.

He was still smiling when he put the hot barrel under his own chin and blew the top of his head off.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

I’d left my car with the valet people with orders to keep the engine running and air-conditioning up high. Ghost sat in the front passenger seat, head erect, brown eyes watching me, and there was a weird spark of suspicion in his eyes. He even bent to sniff me when I slid behind the wheel. He made a noncommittal huff sound.

“The fuck’s with you?” I demanded.

Ghost flinched back from the severity of my tone and I immediately felt bad. The dog was scared and confused. Maybe it was the smell of the hospital. Maybe it was the stink of my own fear and shame. Either way I had no reason to bark at him. So I twisted in my seat and bent close to press my forehead against his. We do that. Junie calls it a mind kiss. For me it’s a pure animal thing, a communication between members of the same pack. Only this time Ghost pulled back. He turned and looked out the window as if I wasn’t there. Or, as if he was looking for his real pack leader. I stroked his fur but he did not respond at all. It made me strangely sad and disconnected. I put the car in gear, pulled out of the parking lot, and began heading back to the Pier.

I was on Mission Bay Drive behind an old De Soto woody with surfboards on the roof and stickers all over the back from great beaches all over the world. I could see a pair of shaggy blond heads in the front, broad brown shoulders — one set bare, one in a dark tank top. An old Del Shannon tune floated back at me from their open windows. “My Little Runaway.” Ah, it must be great to have nothing to do and be able to surf the waves, work on your tan, romp with the sun bunnies, hoist cold ones with your crew, and listen to that old-time rock and roll That’s what sunny Southern California days are made for. If you have troubles, go drown them in the big blue Pacific. Feed your worries to the fish.

The red light turned green and the small convoy — the surfer boys and me — started up. Road speed was forty and we’d just gotten to thirty-five when the driver suddenly stamped hard on the brakes. I was two car lengths back and I have fast reflexes, but the front of my Explorer still chunked into the back of the De Soto. Not hard enough to deploy the airbags but hard enough to hurl me against the seat belt with enough force to snap my teeth shut and half the breath to be punched out of my lungs. Ghost went flying forward, slamming heavily into the glove compartment and then crashing down into the footwell. He yelped and barked and then began to growl as he scrambled to claw his way back onto the seat.

I threw the car into park, and sat there, neck hurting and head swimming.

Through the window I could see the two surfer jocks open their doors and step out. One wore bright blue trunks and woven hemp sandals, no shirt. The other had a threadbare SURF SAN DIEGO tank top over khaki shorts and flip-flops. Ghost was leaning forward, nose pressed to the windshield, muzzle wrinkled, teeth bared. I was so pissed that I was tempted to let the dog go use his teeth to teach these stoners some manners. Instead I clicked my tongue a couple of times to give him the code for standing down. He continued to growl, so I poked his shoulder with a stiff forefinger.

“Ghost, settle.”

He turned toward me, teeth still bared, and growled again. At me.

My anger turned to a deep and sudden apprehension.

“Ghost,” I said, forcing my voice to be firm, commanding, but calm, “settle.”

We stared at each other for five long seconds. The look in Ghost’s eyes was hostile, feral. His six titanium teeth — replacements after a fight with Red Knights in Iran — glittered like daggers. I love my dog, and my heart was hammering at the thought that this moment might twist its way down into something weird and bad.

Then I saw doubt flicker in those familiar brown eyes. His muzzle trembled, the lips dropping to cover those teeth.

“Ghost,” I said, “settle.”

The tension drained slowly from his muscular shoulders and neck and he sagged back, looking confused and even a little scared by what had happened between us. He whimpered softly and thumped his tail. I reached slowly over to him and he pressed his head into my palm. I wanted to pull him close, hug him, fix whatever was wrong between us.

I never got the chance.

There was a heavy thud on the outside of my door, hard enough to rock the car on its springs. I whipped around to see Blue Shorts cock his leg for a second kick. Ghost snapped back into combat mode, rising, snapping out a warning bark.

Tank Top kicked the window on Ghost’s side of the car. It was a powerful kick that sent a crack running from side to side. It sent Ghost into a frenzy, barking loud enough to burst my eardrums and throwing his body against the glass.

So I thought, fuck it.

I jerked the door open. Ghost whirled and I gave him a command.

“Roll down.”

It was our code for taking someone down but not killing them. He shot past me with a look of wild animal joy in his dark eyes. He shot past Blue Shorts and there was a howl — human, I think — as Ghost launched himself at Tank Top.

Blue Shorts tried to deck me as I got out of the car. He kicked the door, trying to smash my leg, but I jammed it with the heel of my palm, then shoved it open as I got out. He swung a heavy right hook punch at my face, and he put his whole body into it, trying to drop me with a single blow. Even weak and wasted I slap-parried the hit and drilled a single-knuckle punch into the flat meat of his left pectoral. It staggered him, but not as much as it should have. He was muscular and his chest was beefy, but he wasn’t made of stone. That punch should have hurt him, but he shook it off and waded into me with a series of fast lefts and rights, swinging wide but not wild, trying to get torque into his hits so they’d do real damage.

There are a lot of ways to manage a fight. If I thought this clown was a real bad guy, a killer, I’d have put him down in about two seconds. If you’re an expert, killing is easier than controlling. Thing was, though, I didn’t know why he was attacking me. He was dressed for the beach and he looked like an overgrown beach bum. A professional might have dressed like this for surprise but in such a case there would be a gun in play by now. He was just wailing on me. Maybe he was high, maybe he was nuts. I danced backward, tucking my chin, using shoulders and elbows and palms to keep him from doing real damage, and all the time I was yelling at him to get him to stop, to tell me what was going on. He said nothing. His eyes were glazed, almost unfocused, and there was very little expression on his face.

Suddenly an icy hand clamped around my heart. It was exactly the same kind of expression that had been in Rudy’s eyes.

Exactly the same.

Shit.

Ghost had the other guy down, and I could hear growls but no screams. That wasn’t good. All around me cars were stopping and people were gathering, watching, yelling, demanding to know what was going on.

Blue Shorts slipped a nice one past my guard and tagged me solidly in the short ribs, driving the air out of my lungs in a deep whoosh. The Killer inside my soul roared and I could feel his bloodlust, his murderous desires trying to batter aside my conscious control. God, if he took over this fight, then surfer boy here was going to die in a quick and ugly way.

I jumped backward out of range of his next punch, and away from my own ability to reach out with a killing blow.

And then the Killer was gone.

There was a sudden immense silence inside my head. The red rage was gone as soon as it had appeared. The other aspects of myself, the Modern Man and the Cop, were jarred into silence, too.

The next punch nearly took my head off.

I heard someone yell, “Hey—watch!”

I got a hand up just in time, but the blow was packed with everything Blue Shorts had. It crashed into my forearm and sent me reeling sideways into a parked car. I rebounded and he hit me with a straight right hand to the chest that stalled me into a statue. It was like having a mining machine bore a hole straight through my sternum and out through my backbone. Then Blue Shorts closed in to smash me with an elbow across the face.

I fell against him to jam the blow and because I had nothing else. Not in that instant. I was bigger and heavier than him and my sagging weight drove us both backward like a boxer clinching with a better fighter while trying to catch a little air. Lights were exploding inside my head and I knew that I was maybe one hit away from going down.

So I used the clumsy embrace to slam him against the fender of my car. As we hit I drove my knee into his crotch, head-butted him, and then grabbed his hair and jerked his head down as I brought my knee up again. It mashed him. His nose and lips split and the power went out of his knees. Gasping and dazed, I shoved myself back from him and took him down with a sloppy foot-sweep. He landed hard and badly and lay there, curling into a fetal ball.

I staggered back and had to lean on the car to walk around it, afraid of what I was going to find on the other side. Tank Top was down and bloody, but Ghost had been in more control of his fight than I had. His guy was chopped up a bit, but not in any way that wouldn’t heal. Tank Top would be fine after some stitches, some cosmetic surgery, and a lot of physical therapy. He got off lucky, because although Ghost is a loveable goof most of the time he is by nature and training a killer. He has a lot of experience in the hunt and in the kill.

I got some flex-cuffs out of my car and bound both men and then leaned like a sloppy drunk against the door and called the police and the Pier.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

The EMTs took the surfer boys away and I wasted time filling out police reports. By the time I got back to the Pier I could feel each separate place where I’d been hit, and I hurt. A lot.

I went over it with Church, with the duty officer, with Lydia-Rose, with the DMS attorneys. The story did not vary and it did not make sense. Was this a mugging? Was it some kind of drug-induced road rage? Neither of the surfers had a record more serious than parking tickets. Neither had any political ties of any significant kind.

So… what was this?

I thought of Rudy and Glory Price and wondered it if was possible for there to be such a thing as a plague of random violence. Normally that would be the kind of question I’d ask Rudy.

Damn it.

I went into my office bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face and wondered who the hell the old guy was who looked back at me from the mirror. Thin, sallow, with bags under his eyes and a shifty expression. I wouldn’t trust that face if I was seated next to him on the bus.

“Well,” I told him, “are you a lot of fun to be around.”

He told me to go fuck myself.

My phone rang and I hurried back to take the call. It was Church and I could hear the whine of a helicopter behind him. An echo of that reached me through my window and it was clear he was on the roof helipad.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Airport,” he said. “I’m going to Madison.”

He told me about the incident at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories, and the subsequent murder-suicide at the police station. Captain Allison Craft and her partner were dead. So was the only suspect who could explain what happened.

“What did they get away with?” I asked.

He said, “That lab processes rare strains, mutated strains, and weaponized strains of highly infectious diseases. The perpetrator stole samples of several of the most virulent diseases currently in existence. And, Captain… one of them is SX-56.”

I nearly slid out of my chair. The room was suddenly too bright, the edges of everything too sharply defined. It felt like I was surrounded by things that could cut me.

SX-56.

“Jesus Christ…,” I breathed. I’ve faced all kinds of monsters, but it’s not the ones with fangs and claws that scare me. Not really. It’s the ones too small to hit, too small to shoot. Viruses.

SX-56 was a hypervirulent strain of smallpox. The disease has been killing people since at least 10,000 BC. They found traces of it on the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V. At the end of the eighteenth century it was killing four hundred thousand people each year in Europe alone. It ravaged the skin, caused blindness in many of its victims, and even though it was lethal to everyone, it was particularly aggressive in kids, killing 80 percent of those infected. Conservative global estimates of people killed by smallpox in the early to mid-twentieth century? Maybe five hundred million.

Be with that number for a moment. Let it bite you deep enough to bleed.

Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together to produce vaccines that stopped the disease in its tracks. The global eradication of smallpox was declared December 9, 1979. The monster was dead. We’d won.

Except that we didn’t.

Samples of the smallpox virus existed in labs, in viral storage facilities, and in government bioweapons research centers. Yeah… the kinds of labs that are illegal according to all international treaties. But Russia has them, so does China, and every other major power.

So do we.

A few years ago new cases of smallpox began cropping up. Mutant strains that were resistant to the vaccines. They struck and they went away. Over and over again. The press lauded the World Health Organization doctors who descended on the outbreak sites and prevented the spread, and yes, those guys are actual superheroes. But here’s the thing… those outbreaks were deliberate and careful experiments conducted by terrorist groups. It was a pattern I’ve seen too often. I shut down a few of these labs, and in such cases I tended to be moderately harsh. Scorched earth harsh.

The latest and deadliest strain of smallpox was SX-56, developed in Russia by a team officially labeled as “rogues.” I knew better. Everyone in my line of work knew better. They were no more rogue than the Ghost Net hackers who were officially disavowed by the Chinese government.

SX-56 is a monster. There’s nothing scarier. It’s on a par with seif al din and Lucifer 113. Yeah, that kind of scary. It is an ultra-quick-onset weaponized pathogen. Because the virus has a simple gene structure it doesn’t need much incubation time. Unlike anthrax, there’s no specific drug, antibiotic, or antiviral medicine that can treat people who have it. You get it and you die. If you’re an adult you might live long enough to see your children die first. It is an immensely cruel weapon. I knew that research samples of it existed at the CDC, the National Institutes for Health, the FDA, and even in labs affiliated with Homeland Security. The lack of tighter regulations is one of the reasons I never get a good night’s sleep.

And Nathan Cross stole it and sent it off strapped to a fucking drone.

Holy God. Is the entire world insane? I mean, really… tell me that we’re not all out of our son of a bitching minds.

“What the hell is happening?” I demanded. “Why are people going crazy?”

“I don’t know,” said Church. “I’m afraid many of the answers are buried down at Gateway.”

He hadn’t meant it to hurt, but it hurt.

It really killed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Here’s another fine example of the world kicking me when I’m down.

The smallpox case was taken away from us before Church had even made it to the airport. Gone. Bam. Done. Handed over to the CIA. Brick called to tell me. He didn’t say so, but I had the feeling that Church was not in any mood to tell me himself. Church has iron control but no one can take that many punches in a row. They were on their way back to the Pier.

You can sit there and gape in shock or you can do something. I yelled at Bug and at Dr. Hu to get me some actionable information. Bug already had his whole team on it, and he didn’t seem to care any more than I did that this wasn’t our case. Hu, who usually entertains himself by insulting me, had a different take today.

He said, “Believe me, Ledger, I am going to make sense of this. I am not going to be ass-raped by the fucking CIA.”

Then he hung up. I wanted to pat him on the back.

After that, I began tearing through the reports of the DMS failures, looking for patterns and trying to build a case out of scant information. No, let me correct that. It wasn’t that we had insufficient information, we actually had a lot of it, but so far it didn’t make much sense. The Cop part of my brain was offended by that. I needed answers and I needed logic. I’m occasionally an idiot, I’ll accept that, but at the end of the day I am a trained investigator who needs things to make sense. You see, people don’t understand the cop mind. They think we like puzzles. We absolutely do not. We like order. We attack mysteries in order to put disparate pieces back into their proper place. We don’t enjoy the process. It’s the end result that matters. Order out of chaos. It’s not entertainment, it’s who we are.

So the core of this thing seemed to originate at Gateway and the projects Erskine was running. Using what few resources I had, I began to make a list of the things I knew and to draw inferences from them.

Point one, the God Machine. It looked mostly but not entirely like a hadron collider. It had a hatch or opening. Air passed in and out of it. What was it? I had no idea because I lacked enough information.

Point two. Kill Switch. It was a directed-energy weapon that appeared to be able to temporarily interrupt electrical fields. It was nonlethal. Top, Bunny, and I had been exposed to it down at Gateway. People in Houston, at the NASCAR track, and at the debate had all been exposed to it. It stopped everything from digital watches to cell phones to engines. According to the reports it also stopped pacemakers. However, it did not short-circuit the central nervous system of living beings. There were no animal deaths. Not even birds or insects. I called Dr. Hu back and asked him about that. He told me that it was scientifically impossible. He sounded offended by that, too. And he hung up on me again.

Point three. Dreamwalking. The name was suggestive. Could it be some kind of mind control or psychic possession? A week ago I would have laughed at that idea. Now it scared me. I sent another request to Bug to get me any information on known research into mind control or manipulation using mechanical, chemical, or electrical means. As an afterthought I told him to check out research into psychic control.

“Joe,” he said, “Mr. Church already has us working on that.”

Interesting.

Point four. Freefall. So far we hadn’t come up with anything on that. Not a word or a whisper.

Point five. Dreamshield. What was that? A defense against whatever kind of weapon Dreamwalking was? No way to know for sure, but my gut said yes.

Lydia-Rose tapped on my door and leaned in. She does that. Leans. Not sure why she doesn’t actually step into the doorway or come inside. Leaning does it for her. A head, one shoulder, one boob, and a smile.

“Joe—? You have a visitor.”

The door opened and he was standing right there.

Him. The guy that every shooter, every spy, every special operator in the United States intelligence and covert military services pretty much thinks is a god. Our god. Specifically the messiah of the clandestine trade.

Harcourt Bolton, Senior.

CIA superspy. A guy who’s closed more top-level cases than I’ve had cold beers. A man who has saved the world so often that we should consider adding a fifth face to Mount Rushmore. Like that, and maybe double that.

Ever since Church had told me that the president appointed Bolton as codirector of the DMS I’d been privately trying to hate him. But that was for shit as soon as the man walked into my office. I instantly stood up and very nearly saluted. He was tall and handsome in a sixtyish Kevin Costner way. Powerfully built, but built for speed, built for action. Am I gushing? You bet you. I was a fanboy and this was Captain America. This was Batman.

“Mr. Ledger,” I said, hurrying around the desk and offering my hand. “I’m Captain Bolton.”

His smile was warm, amused, and patient. He shook my hand — and, yes, his grip was firm and dry — and he made no comment as what I’d said caught up to my stripped-gear brain.

“Um, I mean I’m…”

“Call me Harcourt, Captain,” he said. “May I call you Joe? It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I’ve been following your career with great interest. The Deacon was right to rely on you as his right hand. You put my record for big-ticket saves to shame. I’m honored to shake your hand.”

It is entirely possible I said, “Eeeep.” Not sure, but let’s not rule it out.

It was in that moment that I became incredibly aware that my office was a mess, with a cluttered desk, stacks of folders everywhere, an open box of half-pawed-over doughnuts on the credenza, and the stale odor of overworked idiot perfuming the air. I wanted to tuck in my shirt and check to see if my fingernails were clean.

“And who’s this?” said Bolton, nodding to Ghost. “That’s a handsome dog. Combat trained, I expect. A beautiful example of the breed.”

He held out his hand to be sniffed. Ghost took his scent but then backed away, ears flattened, eyes narrowed. He even started to growl.

“Stop it,” I snarled, and Ghost jerked backward from me.

“No, no, it’s okay,” said Bolton easily. “I was petting Bastion and your dog probably smells that.”

I ordered Ghost to lie down. He obeyed, but it took me three tries. That was embarrassing, too, but Bolton did not comment on it. Too classy a guy for that.

“So sorry to intrude on you without a call,” said Bolton, “but with everything going on… well, you understand. Do you have time for a quick catch-up chat?”

“Oh, geez, I’ve got no manners at all. Please, come in.” I swept files from a leather guest chair and very nearly pushed him into it. “Rose, bring coffee and—”

“Tea for me, if that’s okay,” said Bolton.

“Tea. Sure. We have tea. Rose, do we have tea? Get some tea. Right now. Milk and cookies, too. And send someone out for pastries.”

“Just tea,” said Bolton, smiling, trying not to be too openly amused by my circus clown performance. I tried to straighten my desk without looking like I was straightening my desk. I opened a drawer and put my old coffee cup and the ham sandwich I was about to eat into it. Sadly, I wouldn’t find that sandwich for days. Then I sat down.

Yes, I am fully aware that I was acting like a moron. No, like a Trekkie who suddenly found himself in an elevator with Captain Kirk. I don’t actually have many heroes, but when I go bromance I go full bromance.

Bolton sat back and crossed his legs. He did it with great elegance. Very nice suit, polished shoes with rubber soles made to look like leather. Great for walking quietly while still looking nonchalant. Those shoes jumped onto my Christmas wish list.

Yeah, I said it. I coveted the man’s shoes.

Bolton said, “The Deacon tells me you’ve been working the Gateway case. Where are you with that?”

And suddenly I was back in the real world. I laid my hands flat, fingers splayed, on the files that still covered most of my desk. “This,” I said, “is a grade-A prime example of a clusterfuck. Pardon my French.”

“I’ve heard the word before, Captain. And as I work for Uncle Sam I’ve had cause to use it more times than I can count.” He paused, looking briefly uncomfortable. “Let’s get this out into the open right from the start, okay? I didn’t ask for this post. Being director of the Special Projects Office. I think this is the president taking a cheap shot at the Deacon. I think it shows a remarkable lack of faith in an organization that has done more measureable good for this country than anyone else. Including the CIA, and that’s my home team. And I am embarrassed to have to act as your boss. That’s wrong.”

I said nothing.

“Between you and me and the wallpaper, Captain, this is your shop and this is your op. You call the shots. I’ll be happy to file reports to mollify POTUS, but I’m not going to come in and piss in your yard and pretend I’m the dog with the biggest dick. Are we clear on that?”

“Thanks,” I said. “That means a lot. More than I can express.”

We shook hands. But I sagged back, feeling how weak and sick I still was.

“I heard you got beat up,” he said, nodding to my bruises.

“It worked out in my favor,” I told him. “But thinking about it hurts my head.”

He nodded. “Another case like what happened with your friend Dr. Sanchez?”

“Yes. If you have any suggestions or theories I am all ears.”

“Sadly, no. This is a strange case.”

“Strange doesn’t begin to cover it. This started off weird and got weirder.”

Bolton said, “You mean the Mountains of Madness and the connection to pulp horror writers? I know, it’s maddening. However, the reference to the God Machine in what your man, Bug, found…? I think I might have something useful on that.”

“What?” I cried, nearly leaping over the desk at him.

“It’s not much, but it’s something I caught wind of ten, twelve years ago. I was working an industrial espionage case that involved one of the tangential players from Gateway.”

“Our case,” I corrected, and he winced.

“Okay. Our case. The espionage thing involved Oscar Bell, who used to be married to Marcus Erskine’s sister. Bell’s files had been hacked and I recovered them because he was working on several important defense contracts. I, ah, may have peeked into Bell’s private files.”

“Naughty, naughty.”

“I know,” he said with a straight face, “I’m so ashamed.”

“And—?”

“And that’s where I first saw mention of the God Machine. Bug probably told you that it was a bit of weird science cooked up by Bell’s son, Prospero. Brilliant kid, incredible IQ, but quite mad, I’m afraid. Died in a fire, I understand. Anyway, from what little I read, the God Machine was designed to facilitate interdimensional travel. And I’m pretty damn sure that’s what Erskine was building down there. I think that’s what you and your team saw. And,” he said, “I’m equally sure that’s why Erskine called his project ‘Gateway.’”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

“Interdimensional travel?” I asked. “Okay, we’re now having a conversation in which interdimensional travel is a thing. Sure. Why not? My day hasn’t been nearly weird enough. But seriously… why? What’s the appeal, I mean in terms of Washington bean counters and Defense Department paranoids?”

Bolton shrugged. “It was sold to the government as a source of cheap, renewable energy and endless raw materials.”

“How so?”

He launched into an explanation of the omniverse theory and how, if such a theory could be proved, it might mean that there are an infinite number of worlds like ours which could be mined for fossil fuels, minerals, clean water, and so on.

“And you believe this?” I asked, smiling.

“I didn’t used to,” he said, “but then I read your after-action report. Something weird happened down there. Something very weird that you and your team — three intelligent, experienced agents and trained observers — could not explain. Something our current science can’t explain. And we know for a fact that Bell and Erskine were tied to a project to explore this. Someone in government believed in it enough to fund it. So… sure, I’m keeping an open mind.” He paused. “That said, if such a technology exists and infinite worlds do, in fact, exist, this whole process is in its absolute infancy. There is no chance in hell they are going to get it right without a lot of things going badly wrong. The fact that the Russian, Chinese, and American stations down in Antarctica all went dark at the same time is suggestive. Maybe they opened a doorway and something bad came out.”

“Something like what?”

His eyes drilled into me. “You said you saw something that looked like a giant monster. Maybe what you saw was some kind of animal. Something from one of those other worlds.”

I said nothing.

“And consider this,” Bolton added. “You were exposed to a strain of the Spanish flu that is unknown to science. Unknown to our science. I asked Dr. Hu about that and floated the theory that this could have been a virus from an adjacent dimension.”

“How’d he take it?”

Bolton laughed. “He threw me out of his lab.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a dick,” said Bolton.

“He is.” I loved it that Harcourt Bolton despised the same cretinous jackass that I did. Made me feel special.

“Tell me, Joe,” he said, amusement twinkling in his eyes, “are you buying anything I’m saying? Does this give us a working theory?”

“My considered opinion,” I admitted, “is that it beats the shit out of me.”

He blew out his cheeks and rubbed his eyes. “I’m right there with you, Joe. I’ve been chewing on the God Machine concept for years now, ever since I recovered Bell’s files… and now there’s the Gateway incident. Quite frankly I don’t know what to believe. Over the last twenty years I’ve seen science twisted into new shapes that I don’t recognize. Makes me almost long for the days when the worst thing we had to deal with were Soviet spies smuggling nuclear secrets and plans for the stealth bomber. Now this stuff? Joe, I’m more than half-glad I’m too old to go out into the field anymore. I sure as hell don’t envy what you went through down at Gateway.”

I said, “Has anyone ever actually proven that alternate universes exist?”

“Oh, hell no. In quantum physics, in superstring theory, they’ve gone pretty far in making a case for additional dimensions beyond the common ones we know. But they’re mathematical constructs at this point. And that’s an attempt to understand complex quantum dimensionality. No one’s crossed the line and done the math to build a credible case for other universes.” He paused. “Except maybe Prospero Bell.”

“And Marcus Erskine believed in it enough to get a gazillion dollars’ worth of covert funding.”

We sat there and stared at each other.

“Shit,” I said.

“Shit,” he agreed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Late in the evening on a hot September night.

Bunch of us sitting around on the back deck of the Pier. Top and Bunny were back and the rest of Echo Team had returned from the make-work assignments they’d been sent out on. We talked about the Closers, about the fight at San Pedro’s office, about Gateway, about Rudy, and about the surfers. We talked and talked and we got exactly nowhere. Junie wasn’t home yet and I really wanted to pick her brain about Prospero Bell, but she was out of cell phone range.

So we sat and let the day burn its way into night.

Bunny was sprawled on a lounge chair, shorts, no shirt, a Padres cap pulled low to throw shadows over the line of six stiches. Lydia sat next to him in a bikini top and cut-off military camo pants. Montana Parker, Brian Botley, and Sam Imura were all in civvies. Top was in sweats and I was wearing one of my most obnoxious Hawaiian shirts — fluorescent toucans and bright blue howler monkeys doing a line dance. Every flat surface was littered with empty beer bottles. An impressive number of them.

Or, seen from our viewpoint, not nearly enough of them.

There was no moon and the sky above us was filled with cold little diamond chips that bathed us in blue-white light. Beneath the Pier the endless waves slapped against the pilings and washed against the beach. The surf roar sounded like faint and distant crowds of people talking, talking, talking, and saying nothing.

Echo Team, there to save the world.

This was the first time we had all been together in weeks.

“Got to go home,” I said for the fifth or sixth time. No one responded. Ghost didn’t twitch. Sam opened a fresh pair of Stone IPAs and handed one to me. We didn’t toast. You do that when you want to remember something.

A bit later Bunny asked, “Is this it, then? Is the DMS going down the crapper?”

I shook my head. Not to deny that possibility, but because I didn’t know.

“How the hell have we managed to drop the ball this many times?” asked Montana.

“I know,” grumped Brian. “When did we become the guys who mess up?”

“Dreamwalking,” I said, putting it out there.

“Which means what?” asked Montana.

“Don’t mean nothing,” growled Top. “Some voodoo bullshit.”

We drank.

Bunny grunted. “At least we stopped whatever the hell was going on down there under the ice.”

We drank some more. The world turned.

“Even so,” said Montana after a while, “you guys pretty much blew a hole in the map.”

Bunny took a long pull on his beer and studied her down the barrel of his bottle. “You weren’t there.”

“No,” she said, “I was not.”

“Kind of glad I wasn’t there, either,” said Brian.

Everyone nodded. Everyone drank.

“Wish we were in on that Kill Switch thing,” said Lydia. “Feels wrong to be watching from the sidelines.”

Far out there over the black horizon a piece of ancient space iron scratched a streak against the darkness. It seemed to last longer than most shooting stars and we all watched it.

No one said a word.

Not about the star.

Not about anything. For a long time.

It was Sam who finally broke the silence. Making a statement that was also a question.

“So,” he said slowly, “penguins?”

No one said anything for a long, long time.

I think it was Top who started laughing. A quiet trembling of the shoulders, and for a crazy moment I thought he was crying. Then, as he shook his head I saw the gleam of white teeth in the starlight. A moment later Bunny burst out with a donkey bray of a laugh.

Then we were all laughing.

Even if we didn’t think it was funny at all.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

I was dead on my feet and was in the parking lot, reaching for my car key, when my cell rang. Church. I leaned against the fender of my replacement Explorer and wondered what would get me in more trouble — throwing the phone against the wall real damn hard or finding out what Church wanted to tell me. Ghost gave me a “don’t do it” look.

I did it.

“Just for once,” I said instead of a hello, “tell me something I want to hear.”

“Would it change the complexion of your day if I told you we had a lead?”

“On what? On who’s hiring ex — SpecOps shooters?”

Church made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Maybe we can turn this around.”

“How?” And I surprised myself by really wanting to know.

“Aunt Sallie sent a team to Washington armed with federal warrants.”

“How’d she get those? I thought we didn’t have any friends left in Washington.”

“She asked nicely,” said Church in a way that suggested that Aunt Sallie did not, in fact, ask nicely. Auntie looks like Whoopi Goldberg but her personality is closer to Jack Bauer from 24, with a little Charlie Manson thrown in to make her more personable. It is very difficult to summon enough courage to say no to her.

“What are the warrants for?”

“Majestic,” said Church, “and anything related to Gateway, Dr. Erskine, and Oscar Bell. The first two came up dry. We probably have all of the Majestic records that exist under that label. As for Gateway, Bug keeps hitting walls. But Bell was married to Erskine’s sister and there is a real chance we can establish collusion because Erskine was working for the DoD when he bought Bell’s God Machine project. A federal judge agreed and Auntie’s team has obtained several dozen boxes of paper records. They’ve done spot-scanning of the paperwork and so far none of it is on the Net or in the computer records of the DoD or DARPA.”

“Ah,” I said, getting it now. “They kept it all on paper to keep it away from us. Shit, that’s smart.”

“We have those records now. Auntie flew twenty-five analysts down to D.C. to join the retrieval team. Bug sent Nikki and Yoda, too. We have every available eye reading and scanning those records. They’ll work through the night and with any luck we’ll have some leads by noon tomorrow.”

“Jesus, I hope you’re right.”

Church said, “Captain… Joe… I want you to have some faith.”

“In what?”

“In me,” he said. “In the DMS. I know things look bleak, and I certainly share your frustration for feeling like we’re closed out of the important cases—”

“We are. I’m a damn soldier, and so far the most I’ve done is beat up my best friend and a couple of surfer boys.”

“You’re not a soldier,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“I didn’t hire you to be a soldier,” said Church. “Or have you forgotten? When I recruited you it was because you were a detective, an investigator. You’re a cop, Captain Ledger. That’s what you are and that’s what you do. The combat, the warfare, the killing… those are unfortunate side effects of our job. Of your job. They are not your defining characteristics. You are tearing yourself apart for the wrong reason. You want to get back into the war, I get that. I do. However, we aren’t being called to fight. Not at this moment. We are being called to make sense of this, to find answers, to build a case.”

I said nothing, but damn if I didn’t feel every single one of the punches he’d slipped under my guard.

“This is what I need you to do,” he said. “Go home and get some sleep. Get plenty of it. Then report to work tomorrow and take over this investigation. I am telling you this as your boss and as your friend. You need to stop being a bystander. You need to refuse to be marginalized. You need to be the cop that you are. You need to solve this.”

The phone went dead in my hand.

I put it in my pocket and walked over to the parking garage window. It looked directly out over the surf. How long did I stand there watching the waves crash down on the sand?

Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.

There are times I’m afraid of Mr. Church. There are times I hate him. Right at that moment, though, I’d have walked through fire for him.

I looked out at the tumbling waves, listened to the hiss as the frothy bubbles popped, watched starlight glisten on the wet sand.

Then I went home and went to bed.

CHAPTER SIXTY

In the morning I got up and kissed a sleepy Junie who had gotten in late and didn’t look like she was quite ready to face the day. I showered hot enough to boil all of the sickness, indolence, and self-pity off my skin, then I shaved, dressed in jeans and one of my more sedate Hawaiian shirts — this one had tropical fish on it — put down bowls of glop for Ghost and Cobbler, washed down a fistful of vitamins with my first cup of coffee of the day, and then set off to work.

On the way I called Bug, who was East Coast time and was already up and at the Hangar.

“You have anything for me?” I asked.

“Yeah-h-h-h-h,” he said, but he stretched the word out so long that it sounded like he wasn’t sure what it was he had. “You won’t believe how much stuff we got. We’re talking seventy-one file boxes, each one crammed with stuff. That’s something like three hundred thousand pieces of paper. Auntie had them bring it all back here and we’re using the high-speed bulk scanners. But that’s just scanning. Then everything has to be processed through MindReader and—”

“Bug,” I said, cutting him off, “I don’t care. Tell me if you actually got something.”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”

“Try harder than that.”

“Well, first, we got a slight hit on one of the Gateway projects. Freefall. It’s vague and it seems to be tied into the Kill Switch thing. Our best guess so far is that it’s some experimental way of knocking down drones, but really, that’s all we have on it so far. The good news is that we have a line on four previous addresses for Oscar Bell.”

“That’s something. I’ll send someone to run that down. What else?”

“Okay, first, Oscar Bell is dead. Murder-suicide. After the DoD sued him he went totally bankrupt and broke. The IRS froze every penny of his assets and he lost his house and everything else he owned. And he drank, too. He apparently went crazy and killed three people at a diner in some Podunk town in Washington state, then turned the gun on himself.”

“Why didn’t MindReader pick that up?” I asked.

“Not sure. We have a copy of what looks like the original handwritten police report and another that looks like it was printed out, probably at the police station where it was filed. But when I checked with the local police department they have nothing at all in their computers. Nothing in hardcopy, either. I’ll send you what I have.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Some of this is freaking me out because one of the other file boxes contained an inventory list of restricted documents. But get this, Joe, I’m not talking like military top-secret stuff. I’m talking Catholic church sort of restricted.”

“Not following you. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Holy Grail? Ark of the Covenant? Jesus’ birth certificate?”

“It was in Latin,” said Bug. “Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I had to look it up. It means ‘List of Prohibited Books.’”

“Okay. So…?”

“So, I called Circe because this is her sort of thing, and she said there were two of these lists. One was stuff that was against church policy or critical or like that. Pascal by Voltaire, Monarchia by Dante Alighieri, Casanova’s memoirs. Like that. Naughty stuff. But when I read some of the titles on the inventory sheet she said that none of them were on that list. She thinks that list is one that was supposed to be a big church secret. Circe knows about it because… well, she’s Circe. She knows that kind of stuff. She told me that there was a group of these psycho monks who used to go around taking these books away from people and sometimes killing them. Like if the Inquisition and the library police had a cranky kid. She called it the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. Anyway, here’s the really freaky stuff. Half the books on the list are ancient books of magic and alchemy. The Greek Magical Papyri, Arbatel de Magia Veterum, the Pseudomonarchia Daedonum, The Black Pullet, Ars Almade, which is book four of the Lesser Keys of Solomon, The Ripley Scroll, The Book of Soyga, an Icelandic book called the Galdabok, and — here’s one you’ll recognize — the Voynich manuscript.”

Yeah, I recognized that one, all right. It’s a weird fifteenth-century text written in an unknown language and kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Experts had tried for centuries to decode it, and even doubted that the language was real. Circe cracked the code, though, with the help of some additional pages we found. As it turned out, the language was that of the Upierczi, a race of very bad people living in caves beneath the Arabian sands. The Upierczi are genetic offshoots, a splinter line of evolution that showed how perverse science can be. They are the reason we have legends about vampires.

“There’s more,” said Bug. “Those books were only half the list. There was a separate part of the list preceded by a long list of warnings and prayers about how the world will end if these books are ever read or even opened. Really wild stuff.”

“I’ve found extreme religious orders, as a rule, are prone toward general nuttiness,” I said.

“No, this is worse than that,” said Bug, “and this is where we run right into the whole Mountains of Madness—Elder Gods stuff.”

I nearly sideswiped a kid on a bike. “Shit,” I said. “Tell me.”

“In those books by H. P. Lovecraft and some of the other writers — August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, and like that — there’s a bunch of books of ancient dark magic. You heard of the Necronomicon?”

“In movies, sure.”

“Right, those were movies based on, or inspired by, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.”

“What about it?”

“The Necronomicon is on this list,” said Bug. “Actually… almost all of those books are. Joe… I don’t think they’re fake. I think all of this is real.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

The things Bug told me about those creepy old books gnawed at my nerves all the way into work. How could they not? But I tried to put them into perspective with what Bolton and Bug had both said yesterday. Maybe it really was a matter of many of the things we believed to be supernatural were actually unclassified aspects of very real science. After all, in my years with the DMS I’d encountered the Upierczi, who were the flesh-and-bone basis for vampire beliefs. And I’d been on a case in the small town of Pine Deep in Pennsylvania where I’d taken down a genetics lab that was trying to create a kind of supersoldier based on another genetic anomaly — lycanthropy. Did this explain all of the stories of werewolves and vampires around the world? Maybe not, but it made the darkness at the edge of town less of a place of magic and more of an area of mystery. The Cop part of me wanted rational answers, and to achieve that I needed a lot more information than I had.

I got to the Pier as fast as I could.

A sleepy Junie called me at ten and I asked her if she could come in, explaining that Church and I wanted to ask her some questions. She said to give her an hour. When Junie arrived she looked apprehensive.

“You’re being very mysterious,” she said.

“It’s been that kind of week.”

“You’ve only been back to work less than two days.”

“Tell me about it,” I said as I opened the door to the conference room. Church was in the same chair but in a different suit, looking fresh and rested. He stood up and gestured to a chair.

“Ms. Flynn,” he said, “thank you for coming in. Please sit. I apologize for the inconvenience but I believe that when you hear what we have to say, you’ll understand.”

As she sat she glanced from Church to me and back again. “Is this about ISIL?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s all over the news. That’s all anyone’s talking about. The power outages. Everyone thinks Houston was because of them.”

“I am going to share some information with you,” began Church, “that is of a highly confidential nature.”

She nodded. Church has never asked people to sign nondisclosure agreements. If he doesn’t trust someone he doesn’t tell them anything. And Junie was family.

“There are a number of things we want to share with you, and some of them may be unpleasant,” said Church. “I don’t think you’d thank us for sugar-coating it, so let’s start with the one that most affects you. We believe the Majestic program may still be active.”

Her face went dead pale beneath her spray of sun freckles, and she put a hand to her throat. “No… oh, God, are you sure?”

“Sure enough.”

We took turns laying it out for her. I started with the Closers who attacked Top and Bunny at Dr. San Pedro’s office. Church told her about the extreme cult of secrecy built around Gateway and how it was hidden in almost the same way as Majestic Three. We told her one of the things Aunt Sallie had learned last night, that the late Oscar Bell had worked on projects for Howard Shelton. Those ties, plus the exotic nature of the Gateway project.

As we laid it out, Junie’s shock was replaced by a critical intensity. Her body became less rigid but her eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s. She is not an ordinary person by any stretch. She has very high intelligence and an eidetic memory — she cannot forget anything she’s learned. Makes it really fucking hard to have an argument with her. Trust me on this.

During our info dump, Harcourt Bolton came in, exchanged silent greetings with Junie, and sat to Church’s right. Bastion jumped into the man’s lap and began cleaning himself. Pretty sure that did not endear either him or Bolton to Ghost, who gave them both the evil eye.

For Bolton’s benefit, Church even filled in some of Junie’s background, after first assuring her that Mr. Super Spy was there on the orders of the president and that all information shared in that room was confidential. I could tell Junie didn’t like it, and there was a damn good reason.

I’d met Junie when the DMS was looking for the Majestic Black Book. At first I thought she was nothing more than a smart and pretty lady who was half airy-fairy hippie and half conspiracy theory podcaster. Even split of both. She’d talked about the Black Book and Majestic Three on her podcast, so I went to see how she knew about them and to see how much of it was, in fact, conspiracy theory bullshit. Turns out… not much at all. Majestic Three had been building advanced weapons of war, including a new generation of ultrasophisticated stealth aircraft, using technologies recovered from crashed vehicles. They had also recovered some biological materials from those wrecks. Nothing alive, but they managed to sequence the DNA. Let’s just say that the DNA was exotic. M3 ultimately discovered that in order to use the technology of these vehicles they had to include an element of that DNA into the mix. That was a big problem for a long time, but they solved it by genetically grafting the alien DNA to human embryos, creating true hybrids. They raised thousands of them in groups called hives. Most of the hybrids died off. A flaw in the DNA made them exceptionally prone to diseases, particularly brain and bone cancer.

When I met Junie she was battling brain cancer.

Yeah. Run with that and you’ll get into the right end zone. Not a comfortable place to be. Does that mean she has antennae or any of that stuff? No. Her DNA is more than 85 percent human. But along with the cancer — which she’s beaten twice now — she got an exceptionally high IQ, perfect recall, and higher than normal aptitude in science, mathematics, engineering, and other related sciences. She had been in one of the last batches of hive kids, and in order to breed more socially adept children, M3 seeded many of those kids into foster homes. Most of the foster parents were employees of M3 or in some way associated with it. Howard was the mastermind behind this whole thing. He’s dead and, hopefully, burning somewhere. Sick bastard.

“And that brings us to the God Machine,” said Church. At that point he turned it over to Bolton, who told Junie what he’d told me. I have to admit, she took it better than I had and she asked smarter questions.

She glanced around at each of us. “You realize that this is not a new theory, right?”

“Please explain,” said Church and Bolton at the same time.

“The God Machine, it’s been around for a long time,” said Junie. “I mean, a device that can open a doorway between our world and another, that’s not a new concept. It’s a scientific twist on the conjuring circle. And, please bear in mind, I said ‘circle.’ It’s always been a circular doorway. Nearly every culture has some version of it. Nikola Tesla was working on something like this, maybe exactly this. There’s a story that’s been floating around the conspiracy theory world for over a century about Tesla building an interdimensional doorway at his laboratory at Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York. According to the story, he was approached by a very rich old man who paid him to build a machine called an Orpheus Gate. The description matches the God Machine, even down to the gemstones, which, according to the story, were somehow used to regulate the power. Tesla told a colleague sometime later that he built two of them. The first one vanished as soon as it was turned on, and it blew out all of the power in the entire region.”

“Well, well,” said Bolton.

“Orpheus Gate,” murmured Church, nodding. “I’ve heard of that, but I did not make the connection. I should have. Apparently we’ve all been off our game.”

Bolton nodded. “Agreed. None of us are at our best right now.”

Junie picked up her story. “When the Orpheus Gate was activated there was some kind of intense energetic discharge — something he called a ‘God Wave.’ It knocked Tesla out and he was sick for weeks afterward. He had a high fever and hallucinated badly.”

“If there’s any more precise description of his symptoms,” I said, “I’d like to share it with Dr. Hu. Maybe match it against the symptoms of what Top, Bunny, and I had. After all, we got sick after an energetic discharge from the Gateway machine.”

Church nodded and asked Junie to continue.

“The whole experience shook Tesla’s confidence,” she said, cutting me a quick look, “and it changed him. That was when he started shifting his focus from sustainable energy and communication systems to weapons of war. Death rays and that sort of thing. Some historians say that he went mad, and maybe we know why.”

“‘Mad’ is a relative term,” observed Bolton.

“There’s more,” said Junie. “In 1918 a constable in a small fishing town in Spain reported that a strange machine appeared in a farmer’s barn. Actually he said that it looked like it exploded through the side of the barn. He found a naked old man near the machine who claimed that he was a traveler who was trying to find his way home. The constable got sick shortly after that, and so did everyone in the town. That’s where the first cases of the Spanish flu were reported.”

Well, yeah, that hit us all like a cruise missile. Junie looked around at our stricken faces.

“What?” she asked.

“Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “did anyone tell you what kind of virus Captain Ledger and his men were affected by?”

“No. Just that it was a rare mutation of the flu.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Spanish flu.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Church immediately called Dr. Hu and Bug and brought them up to speed, and ordered them to run down this information. Almost immediately Bug came back with hits. Even for MindReader, a Net search required the right keywords. The hits he got were not on the “God Machine” but on the “Orpheus Gate.”

He even found pictures.

“On the screen,” I told him and Bug sent them to the big flat screen on the wall. We stared, dumbfounded. It had been there all along but we were looking for it the wrong way.

The Orpheus Gate. Orpheus descended into hell to rescue his love.

“What is hell anyway,” mused Junie, “but a name for another dimension that’s inhospitable to life as we know it? Couldn’t that just as easily be another dimension, another version of the world rather than something supernatural?”

No one told her she was crazy. Incredulity was a boat that had already sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg, and sank. Even Hu, who tended not to believe in much of anything, wasn’t trying to knock this down anymore. Want to know why?

There was a photo, a crisp black-and-white, of a bunch of stern-looking men standing in front of the same goddamn machine I’d seen down in the Antarctic. Same thing. The guy who stood in the center of the front row was shorter than the others, with black hair and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. We could see him very clearly because the Nazis always did take good pictures. The accompanying caption told us that we were seeing Hitler inspecting the development of a new weapon being designed by top scientists of the Thule Society.

A second photograph was in color and was grainy and poorly framed, suggesting that whoever took it hadn’t been allowed to snap that shot. It was of an underground chamber filled with clunky old computers of the kind used in Europe in the 1980s. The photo showed workers installing small dark objects into a panel. Gemstones. The photograph was taken at an underground lab in the Ukrainian town of Poliske. Just a few miles from Chernobyl.

And there were other images, photos of worse quality and even some crude sketches by people who claimed to have seen such a device or worked on it while employed either by the government or a defense contractor.

“Guys,” said Bug, “I am ringing all sorts of bells here. Seriously. Orpheus Gate? Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. Let me put some people on this and I’ll get back to you with the bullet points.”

Dr. Hu stared gloomily at us from a window in the big screen. “Let me study the data.”

His window vanished and we stared at each other.

Junie was thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “You said that this project was under the directorship of Marcus Erskine, right? I know that name. He’s been in the conspiracy theory rumor mill for a while. Back when I was making my list of possible governors of M3, Erskine was always in my top twenty. His sister, Lyssa, was married to Oscar Bell. She was nice but Oscar was a total shit. I think he’s the reason she committed suicide. Poor girl. She never should have married him.”

“Bug told me Bell was on your podcast once.”

“Whoa, wait,” interrupted Bolton, looking completely thrown, “you knew Oscar Bell?”

“Personally?” said Junie. “Not really. I knew Lyssa through the conspiracy community. She was a regular caller on my podcast.”

“And Bell was a guest?” asked Bolton.

“No. He called in once. I didn’t like him very much.”

“Please tell us about it,” said Mr. Church.

She nodded. “I was interviewing a man Oscar used to know. Oscar called in, clearly drunk, and laid into my guest. Accusing him of lying and distorting the truth. He accused him of having driven Oscar’s son, Prospero, to suicide, and then he accused him of keeping his son as a prisoner. Oscar was irrational and contradictory. It really upset my guest, and when Oscar threatened to find him and kill him I ended the interview. I was furious because we were really getting somewhere. We were talking about this amazing dream diary one of his patients had kept, and how the things in it were clear proof that other worlds exist and are accessible.”

Harcourt Bolton leaned forward. “Who was that man? Who was your guest?”

“Dr. Michael Greene. He used to be a psychiatrist in the Hamptons but he closed his practice, sold his house, and went into hiding after he was threatened by men in black. Closers.”

My pulse jumped. “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. His name was Michael Greene? You’re sure?”

“Positive. Why?”

“Because,” I said, “last night Bug found a police report that Oscar Bell walked into a diner in Washington state and killed the only three people in the place. A waitress, the cook, and Dr. Michael Greene. Then he killed himself.”

She stared at me. “Oh my God.”

Mr. Church removed a folder from his briefcase and placed it on the table, drummed his fingers on the closed cover for a moment, and then slid it across to Junie. However, he kept his hand there to keep the folder closed.

“Do you know who Prospero Bell is?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “He was Oscar and Lyssa Bell’s son. He was Dr. Greene’s patient.”

“Have you ever seen a picture of Prospero?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?” asked Bolton.

I said, “Junie has total recall.”

“Why do you ask?” Junie said to Church.

He nudged the folder an inch closer to her. “Because so much of this centers around Prospero, I asked Bug to get me a complete workup This is a photograph taken while he was a cadet at Ballard Academy in Poland, Maine.”

There was something about the way he said this that made Junie hesitate. I hadn’t seen the photo yet, either, so I leaned against her as she opened it. I felt her body go rigid, her muscles tense as soon as she saw the picture. It was a high-res color photo of a seventeen-year-old boy in a military school uniform. Blond wavy hair, blue eyes, a splash of freckles across his cheeks.

He was male and he was twenty years younger, but in every other respect he looked like an almost identical twin of Junie Flynn.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Harcourt Bolton looked at the photo and then at Junie. A deep frown line appeared between his brows. “I don’t understand. Did I miss something? Is Prospero Bell related to you? Was he your brother?”

Junie picked up the photo and stared at it for a long, long time. A tear broke and rolled down her freckled cheek. “Oh God,” she murmured. “There’s another one out there….”

“Another… what?” asked Bolton.

She touched the face of Prospero Bell. “I–I think he’s like me,” she said in a ghostly whisper. Her skin was dead pale beneath her freckles and there were ghosts of old memories haunting her eyes. “I think he was another hybrid. Another hive child.”

Church looked like Church always does. The man could be on fire and he wouldn’t twitch. He ate a cookie, though, and I’m almost positive there’s some kind of subliminal code when he chooses to do that. Bolton, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to jump out of his skin. He almost looked like he was going to leap across the table and kiss Junie.

“Miss Flynn — may I call you Junie? Yes? Great… Junie, can you tell me exactly what Dr. Greene said about Prospero?”

“First off, understand two things,” she replied, “first is that Greene never named him. He referred to him as Patient X. I made the connection only after Oscar Bell accidentally outed his son when he called in to attack Greene. Second, the interview was cut short when Oscar Bell actually threatened Greene.”

“Okay, but what did he say?” repeated Bolton.

She told us a story that was equal parts fantastic, tragic, and horrible. About a genius boy who never believed he was entirely human and who found comfort only in two things. His dreams and science. Prospero said that the idea for his escape machine — that was how Greene referred to it — came to him in dreams. He said that its design was somehow encoded in the parts of his DNA that were not human. In order to find his way home — or to the place he truly believed was his home — Prospero began building versions of a device. A doorway. A gateway. The God Machine.

When Oscar Bell realized the potential for the machine, he took the first prototype away from him and sold it to the military as a new weapon of war. The thing was that the prototype was far from complete and it malfunctioned constantly. But it was those malfunctions that were the basis of the contract the kid’s father sold to the Department of Defense.

“Did he explain the nature of those side effects?” asked Bolton. He seemed very excited by this and was even sweating a little. I guess we all were.

“In general. Dr. Greene was not a physicist,” she said. “And also the Closers took all of his case notes. He had to rebuild everything in his files from memory. But… sure, he said that there were two of these ‘faults’ that Oscar sold to the government. One sounds like what’s happening around the country, like what happened in Houston, though I don’t understand how ISIL could have gotten their hands on it.”

She described the first fault for us. When the machine was first turned on there was something like a reverse power surge. All machinery around the machine — but not including the machine itself — would stop working. This included batteries. It only affected nonorganic electrical conduction. It did not shut down the central nervous system of people inside that nullification field cast by the machine.

“That’s Kill Switch,” I said, slapping the table. “There’s no way it’s not.”

“Agreed,” said Church, and even Bolton nodded.

“This means that we know what they were doing at Gateway, and it means that the ISIL attacks are our case. Boom,” I said. “Get the president on the phone.”

Bolton patted the air with a calming gesture. “Slow down, Joe. This is still theory. We can’t prove any of this.”

I started to say something loud and nasty, but Junie touched my arm. “Let me tell the rest of it, honey,” she said.

“Do we need to hear more?” asked Bolton. “Kill Switch is the thing we need to be afraid of and it’s what we need to stop. My guess is that Erskine was using it to create a weapon to be used against drones. Don’t forget, they had a project in the works called Freefall.”

“And we’ll pursue that,” said Church, “but for now let’s hear the rest of what Ms. Flynn has to share.”

Bolton looked annoyed and impatient. I could sympathize. I wanted to jump right on this. If ISIL had a directed-energy weapon that could knock down our drones, then it would cut our combat effectiveness down by one hell of a lot. I started to say something but caught Church watching me. He gave me a tiny shake of his head.

Junie said, “Dr. Greene said that one of the other faults of the machine was that while it was in idle mode some people — not most, just a small percentage — experienced two distinct types of unusually vivid dreams. The largest majority of those affected had dreams in which they saw monsters and alien landscapes and images that can best be described as psychedelic. Surreal. The boy told the doctor that he believed these people were actually traveling to those worlds, that the energetic discharge transported their consciousness through the dimensional barriers so that what they saw were beings and locations that existed in other worlds than ours. Greene said that the boy was convinced that the entire surrealism art movement was brought into being because certain people had been touched, in one way or another, by this energy. They had journeyed to other worlds in their dreams and then tried to capture what they’d seen in their paintings. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst… artists like that. Greene said that the boy told him that there was a whole group of writers who had been similarly influenced.”

“Let me guess… H. P. Lovecraft and his crew?”

She frowned. “How did you know that?”

“We’ve been chasing pieces of this,” said Church. “Continue, please.”

“Well,” she said slowly, “even though Greene lost contact with the boy and had to flee the Closers, he never let go of this. He did a lot of very quiet research. He thinks the energetic discharge may have been what drove Hitler mad. And he thought that these same kind of dreams might have been what kicked off the psychedelic movement of the sixties. People who’d had those dreams who were using drugs to find their way back to that other world.”

“I don’t see how this is useful to us,” said Bolton. “It’s interesting as a cultural phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem like it poses a threat. The Kill Switch is our primary concern.”

She looked at Bolton for a long, thoughtful moment. “You’re with the CIA?”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“I’m surprised you don’t already know about this stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remote viewing,” she said. “Project Stargate?”

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.

“It was a program started by the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

“Wait,” I said, “I’m lost. Wasn’t Stargate an old TV show?”

“This is different,” said Church. “Project Stargate was a clandestine research project.”

He gave us the lowdown. The Stargate project had been a covert line of research based primarily at Fort Meade in Maryland and overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency and SRI International, a defense contractor. The goal of Stargate had been to determine the authenticity and potential of psychic phenomena. The officer in charge of it was Lieutenant Frederick Atwater, known as “Skip” to his friends. Skip was an aide to Major General Albert Stubblebine. According to DIA and CIA legend, Skip was a “psychic headhunter” for the project, searching for candidates who scored high on the ESP evaluations. People whose abilities might open the door to the first generation of psychic spies.

The project was high concept and, had it worked, it would have changed the nature of espionage. Imagine it. A psychic spy was, according to Stargate, an operative who would not need to physically visit an enemy location or foreign country, but who would instead be able to project his consciousness there and remotely view the enemy, view their installations, overhear conversations, and so on. It was an outlandish idea that everyone took seriously, and the United States was far from being the only nation actively involved in this research. The Russians had gone farthest with it and had spent millions trying to not only get inside the heads of enemy agents and scientists, but to hijack them, to psychically control their actions. It was like carjacking someone’s mind.

Scary stuff. Considering that I have at least three people inside my head at any given time, I knew the terror of ceding control. I was a different person when the Modern Man or the Killer was in the driver’s seat.

Junie said, “The DIA handed the Stargate program to the CIA.”

“And the Agency canned it,” said Bolton, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “It was nonsense and it didn’t work.”

He told us that the Agency officially concluded that ESP was not provable, any results were not reproducible, and it was all, essentially, a waste of time and money. If the Russians got anywhere with their program, which was nicknamed “Remote Control,” it didn’t keep the Soviet Union from collapsing. Bolton said that everyone dropped their research on it. A book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was written about it, published in 2004 and made into a George Clooney movie in 2009. Neither the book nor film actually mentioned Stargate, though conspiracy theories abounded. From the military intelligence perspective, however, it was a failure and it was dumped.

“And yet,” said Junie, “Prospero Bell told his therapist that this kind of thing was a side effect of this machine. This God Machine or Orpheus Gate, or whatever we need to call it.”

“Sorry,” said Bolton, “I’ll buy the electrical null field, because we’re seeing that in play. But psychic projection and psychic possession is too far-out, even for me.”

I turned and studied him. “Then how do you explain what happened with Rudy Sanchez, Captain Craft, Glory Price, and a lot of other people? How do you explain the two surfer boys who attacked me yesterday? No offense, Harcourt, but are you going to sit there and tell me that you’ll believe in interdimensional travel, electrical null fields, and this God Machine and not the psychic projection stuff? I mean, come on, Erskine had a project division coded Dreamwalking. What the hell else could it have been?”

He gave me a tolerant smile. “For the record, Joe, I never said that I believed that the God Machine did anything more than disrupt electricity. I certainly don’t think we’re dealing with cross-dimensional travel, and I’m sorry, but psychic warfare was researched ad nauseam and all they discovered was a way to squander a whole lot of taxpayer dollars. No… I’ll buy a lot, but that doesn’t work for me.”

He stood up, smiled and glanced around, then gave another shake of his head.

“Junie,” he said, “you are a remarkable woman and you’ve brought us some incredibly valuable information, but we need to stay focused. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I need to get on the phone to the president. I have to try and convince him that the DMS hasn’t lost a step getting to first base and you, Captain Ledger, have to be taken off the bench.”

He left behind a big and very pregnant silence. Church sat for a moment considering the door that Bolton had closed behind him as he left. He slowly ate a Nilla wafer and made no comment about Bolton’s parting remarks.

Something occurred to me and I dug a sheet of paper out of our case notes and placed it in front of Junie. “Bug said that there was a list of ancient books among the papers of one of the Gateway team. He ran it by Circe and she said that it was part of something called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”

“Oh, sure, the Pauline Index. What about it?”

I told her about the inclusion of the supposed fictional works by H. P. Lovecraft and the others.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re talking about the Unlearnable Truths.”

Church stiffened. “How is it you know that phrase?”

Junie shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Greene called those books. When Oscar Bell called, one of the things he ranted about was how he’d ruined himself by trying to find those books.”

“Did he say why he wanted them?” asked Church, and maybe there was some actual human emotion in his voice. Some real excitement.

“Prospero seemed to believe that these books contained some kind of mathematical code that would help make his machine run correctly. And by ‘correctly’ he meant that it would open the door to his world. The conversation never got farther than that — that’s when Oscar Bell started making threats and it all fell apart.” She touched Prospero’s photo. “I heard rumors that there were experiments with certain cell lines. Not clones exactly, but what they called ‘birth pairs.’ Until now I never knew if that was true.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Now I know. God… Prospero Bell was my brother.”

We sat there in silence for a while, each of us deep in speculation as to what this all meant. Then two things happened that changed the course of the day. Maybe the course of the world.

A call came in on Church’s private line. He didn’t put it on speaker, so I only heard his half of it. “Violin,” he said, “it’s good to hear from you. Your mother said that you’ve been off the radar for quite a while. She was concerned.” He listened. Listened some more. Then he said, “You should have called me. I would have been able to bring you in. No, I don’t care what your mother has been telling you about us. The DMS is not falling apart.” He shot me a look that dared me to contradict him. I mimed zipping my mouth shut. To Violin he said, “Where are you now? Very well. Go to the Hangar. Aunt Sallie will arrange transport here.” He paused. “I’m sorry, who did you say you were with? Really? That is very, very interesting. Yes, bring him along. I would be extremely interested to meet him, too. Fly safe and don’t worry. Bring the item with you.”

He said something else to her in the language of Upierczi, which is also the private language of Arklight and the Mothers of the Fallen. Church probably doesn’t know that I’ve managed to sort out a lot of that language. I’m very talented with languages.

What he said was, “Be safe, sweetheart.”

He said it the way a father might. Yeah. So… there’s that. Which is confusing, since both Lilith and Violin told me her father was Grigor, the so-called King of Thorns, head of the Upierczi. I’d killed Grigor in the tunnels under an Iranian power station. How, then, did that explain Church’s connection to Violin? An adopted daughter? I don’t know and I doubt he’d tell me under torture.

When the call was done Church stared into the middle distance for a long time. When his eyes came back into focus he looked at Junie.

“As you overheard,” he began slowly, “that was Violin. She has been on the run from two competing groups of operators. One is a religious order I’ve run into once or twice over the years. The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Junie said. “There are a lot of stories about them. The conspiracy rumor mill is rife with them. They’re supposed to be pretty scary.”

“They are,” said Church. “The Brotherhood, as they’re also known, is very real and highly dangerous. But they’re only half the problem. The other team that has been chasing Violin are Closers.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “Violin has obtained one of the books from that list. De Vermis Mysteriis. The—”

“The Mysteries of the Worm,” said Junie. “That’s one of the books Lovecraft mentioned in his stories. It’s… real, isn’t it?”

Church nodded gravely. “So it would appear. Violin has had a great deal of trouble getting it out of Europe. The Closers and the Brotherhood have been very aggressive, and she and her partner have had to go to ground to keep themselves and the book safe.”

“Her partner?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Church slowly, “she has partnered with a young CIA field agent formerly of the Hungarian station. His name is Harry Bolt.”

I shook my head. “Don’t know him.”

“You know his father,” said Church. “Harry shortened his name some time ago. His birth name is Harcourt Bolton, Junior.”