Kill Switch

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Junie Flynn stepped onto the elevator, pushed the button for the parking garage, and was tugging her cell phone out of her pocket to make a call when someone yelled for her to hold the car. A hand shot between the doors and the rubber buffers bounced back from the wrist of Harcourt Bolton.

“You’re fast,” she said as he stepped inside.

“Old but not dead yet,” he said, grinning and puffing a little from having run down the hall.

“Parking lot?” she asked.

“Yes. Been a long day and we old duffers need to take naps or we fall asleep in meetings.”

“It’s only a little after one.”

“I was up all night,” he said, and reinforced it with a yawn that made his jaws creak. “God, excuse me.”

They got off in the parking garage, but Bolton touched her arm before they went their separate ways. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Junie. You’re quite an impressive woman. You’ve overcome so much. You’ve dealt with hardships and obstacles that would have crippled most people, and yet here you stand. A radiant woman of intellect and power. Compassion, too. FreeTech is a testament to good intentions.”

Junie was surprised. “You know about FreeTech?”

“Mr. Church tells me that your company is repurposing many of the technologies Joe took away from Howard Shelton’s Majestic group.”

“I’m surprised he told you.”

Bolton’s smile was rueful. “The Deacon and I go way back. I won’t lie and say we’ve always been friends, more like friendly rivals, but we play for the same team. We both want to save the world from itself.”

“I suppose that’s how we all feel.”

“Not all of us,” he said, his smile dimming. “I heard that your offices were robbed. Such a frightening invasion. Thieves these days wouldn’t bat an eye about hurting someone. There are so many bad people in the world. So many people who have darkness in their hearts. So many people who want to turn out the lights on everyone else.”

“Yes,” she said. “And it hurts me to see how often they win.”

“You think they’re winning?”

“Don’t you?” she asked, surprised. “With what ISIS or ISIL or whatever they’re calling it now is doing? With what those people down at Gateway tried to do?” She shook her head. “It shows how sick the world is.”

“Sickness can be cured,” said Bolton. “And bad people can be redeemed.”

“Sometimes, I suppose.”

“Look at your own company. As I understand it you are taking technologies that could do unimaginable harm and are using them to save lives. And, if you want to talk about redemption, I hear that Alexander Chismer — or should I call him Toys? — is one of your employees. Or is he more than that? He has unusually high DMS-approved security clearance for a person who, by all accounts, should be serving multiple life sentences for murder, terrorism, and a laundry list of other crimes. If you have been able to reform someone like him, then perhaps there is hope for us all.”

“How do you know so much about Toys?”

“You ask how and not what I know?” Bolton chuckled. “Come now, Junie, don’t forget who I am. I’m a spy, don’t forget.”

Junie took a small step back from him. “I don’t think I want to talk about Toys or FreeTech,” she said. “I have to go.”

He began to reach for her and caught himself. “God, I didn’t mean to spook you, Junie. Truly I did not. I’m trying to tell you how much I admire what you’re doing.”

“I really have to go,” she said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

She backed a couple of steps away and then turned and hurried over to her car. When she got in and locked the doors, Junie turned to see him still standing there. Watching her as she started the car and drove away.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

He lived like a monk in paradise.

The resort was gorgeous, with sculptured gardens in which stands of green bamboo framed ponds of brightly colored koi. Parrots in lovely ornate cages chattered to one another, and ducks waddled in and out of a series of lazy streams that were also home to turtles and bullfrogs. Totem poles hand-carved in Bali seemed to encourage meditation in the gardens. And guests could wander beneath the cool canopy of leaves formed by over a hundred species of palm trees, with a thousand species of flowers and plants filling the air with a subtle olio of fragrances.

The Polynesian-themed hotel had over three hundred guest rooms and suites, each with a private balcony or patio. One wall of them looked out over the blue perfection of Mission Bay. From the top floors on the other side the guests could see the deeper blue of the vast Pacific.

The sad young man sat on a beach chair outside one of the ground-floor garden apartments. His was the least ostentatious of the rooms and it had the least enchanting view. That was fine with him. It was remote and it was quiet. The fact that he owned the hotel was something no one at the Catamaran knew. The staff knew that he was a permanent resident — the only such person at the place — and they mutually assumed that he was a relative of the owners.

He wasn’t. He had no relatives anywhere. They were all dead. So were most of his friends.

He wished he was, too, and though suicide was always easy enough to engineer, it was never an option for him. Some of the residents of purgatory took their penance seriously. He certainly did.

Living at the resort offered him solitude when he wanted it. Tourists were notoriously clannish in places like this. There were very few of the raucous party types there, and the rest of the guests seemed to sense that they would not find a companion for idle chatter in the unsmiling young man. They were correct in that. He was never rude, but he seldom gave more than one-word answers. The only conversation he ever sought was with the resort’s five parrots, Bianchi, Chadwick, Cornell, Mercer, and Scooter. They never asked complicated questions and he found them to be agreeable company even in his darkest moods.

He also had a cat.

Or, perhaps it was more true to say that the cat had adopted him.

On a chilly April night the gray-and-black tabby had come in through his open French window, jumped up on his bed, and gone to sleep without comment. The young man allowed it. After all, who was he to tell a cat where he could or could not sleep?

After a week of sharing his room, his bed, and his meals with the cat it was clear it had no intention of leaving. It was also clear that it had once been a well-cared-for housecat but had now fallen on very hard times. It was scruffy, underfed, and badly scarred from claw and tooth. No collar or tag. Only after the man received a couple of fleabites did he scoop him up and take him to an animal hospital. The cat was given a thorough examination, received all the proper shots, had a chip inserted under its skin, was washed and groomed. When the woman at the desk asked him what the cat’s name was, the young man considered for a moment, and finally said, “Job.”

And Job he was.

Job and the young man kept company with one another. The cat liked being petted, so the man petted him. The cat liked grilled fish instead of cat food, and so the man requested that from the kitchen. The cat didn’t like to use the cat box inside the apartment, so the man put one on his deck. It was the cat’s life, after all, and the man had no desire to impose his will on it. Every once in a while, in the darkest hours of the night, the cat would allow the young man to wrap his arms around the small furry body. If it minded the salty tears that fell on its head, it did not complain.

That was how it was for the cat named Job and the man who had been born as Alexander Chismer but was never called that except by Mr. Church. Everyone else called him Toys. He hated that nickname because it reminded him of his sins. He never told anyone that he hated it, though. He knew that some of them — Junie Flynn, Dr. Circe O’Tree-Sanchez, Helmut Deacon, and a few others — used it with affection. That was hurtful in its way, though he accepted it as a necessary part of the comprehensive plan of his punishment. The damned do not have the right to complain.

Toys and Job lived quietly. Sometimes Job decided that he wanted to accompany Toys when he went to work. He accepted a collar and leash and walked right at Toys’s heel. In the car Job slept in a soft cat bed. At the office, he had his own carpet-covered perch that had several levels and allowed him to perch like a vulture up near the ceiling. From that vantage point he could look down at the people with whom Toys worked, and he could keep an eye on the monstrous gray Irish wolfhound that was always with Circe. Once in a while Junie would bring Joe Ledger’s cat, Cobbler, into the office. The two cats invariably ignored each other, though Job allowed the marmalade tabby to sit on one of the lower levels of his perch.

Toys did not love many things in this world, but came to love Job in a way that was unsullied and uncomplicated. They accepted each other on their own terms and without judgment.

Perhaps there was some cosmic message or lesson in the fact that it was the cat that saved his life.

Toys was asleep, slumped in a rattan chair with his feet propped on the edge of the bed. The TV was on but the Netflix movie he’d been watching had long since ended, to be replaced by a bland information screen. The cat was asleep on his lap, stretched across the tops of his thighs. The hotel grounds were quiet except for crickets.

Then suddenly Job was awake. The cat stood up, hissing, his claws flexing to stab into Toys’s leg.

“Ow, bloody hell!” cried Toys as he came suddenly and painfully awake. He shot to his feet. “What the hell are you playing at, you little bugger?”

Then Toys understood.

The French door had been opened and in the pale glow from the TV he could see figures inside his room. Four of them, and they’d all turned toward him when he’d cried out.

They were dressed in black suits, with white shirts and dark ties. Each of them held a small flashlight. One was bent over the chair on which Toys had placed his briefcase. Two others were hunched down over his laptop. The fourth was by the door, acting as a lookout.

They stared at Toys, and he gaped at them.

The cat hissed again.

The figure by the chair said only two words.

“Kill him.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Mr. Church locked the conference room door and walked over to the big windows. The San Diego night was huge and starless. Bastion meowed softly and Church bent to pick him up and stood with the cat tucked into the crook of his left arm while he stroked him with his gloved fingertips.

After a few minutes of silent contemplation, Church lowered the cat gently to a chair, picked up his cell phone, engaged the twenty-eight-bit encryption scrambler, and made a long-distance call. It rang five times before it was answered.

“St. Germaine,” said Lilith. She sounded winded.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m on a job.” In the background he could hear the faint but unmistakable sound of a voice raised in sudden agony. The scream rose and rose and then died away. It was a male voice, and there was a quality of weariness in the scream, as if this was not the first time he had been made to cry out.

“Does this have anything to do with what happened to Violin?”

“It might.”

“Lilith…”

“The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum tried to kill my daughter. I want to know why. Do you expect me to sit at home and knit comforters?”

There was another scream. Briefer, but more intense.

“Have you learned anything?” asked Church.

“I learned that men are weak,” she sneered.

“It occurs to me that you already knew that.”

“It is important to reinforce one’s perspective,” said Lilith. “Though there is also a measure of disappointment in always being right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that the Brotherhood had become active again?”

“I don’t remember any agreement where I tell you everything that happens in the world, St. Germaine.”

Church sat on the edge of the table. Outside, on the moonlit beach, a group of teenagers were playing volleyball in the dark. On the missed shots, when the ball was lost in shadows, they collided and tripped, and they never stopped laughing. Near them a couple lay on a blanket, kissing with obvious passion. Farther up the beach a blond-haired man was helping a teenage boy — almost certainly his son — sort out his night-fishing rig. Life was happening. It was moving forward with vigor and even a measure of joy. It was clean and the moon was bright and there was a purity in the starry sky and the silver-tipped waves.

“Lilith,” he said slowly, “the power outages occurring here in the States are being perpetrated by ISIL. The technology was somehow taken from a program associated with Majestic. The scientists at that program had been attempting to obtain copies of the most restricted books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”

There was a heavy silence at the other end of the call. No more screams. Not even the sound of her breathing.

“Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” said Lilith.

“You know that the DMS has been weakened.”

“I heard.”

“We are at a crisis point and I am asking you to tell me if there is anything you know or have heard that could help us.”

Lilith said, “This matter that you are working on, does it have anything to do with an attempt to construct and operate an interdimensional gateway? An Orpheus Gate.”

“It would appear so. Do you know something about it?”

“Yes,” said Lilith. “I know a lot about it. This is old, old science, St. Germaine. You understand me? This is very old.”

“Believe me when I tell you that I can appreciate that.”

“Good. Do you know about the side effects?”

“Yes.”

“Going into dreams? Traveling with just the mind?”

“Remote viewing. Yes. How do you know so much?”

There was another of the protracted screams. “People talk,” she said. “If you know how to ask the right questions, and in the right way.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“St. Germaine… do you know about the Mullah of the Black Tent?”

He said, “No, I do not.”

“I’m surprised,” she said. “The CIA are investigating him. I wonder that they haven’t told you.”

“I have been cut out of several information loops. Who is this person?”

She told Church a strange story about a simple cleric from a tiny mosque in an unimportant town who had, almost overnight, become a powerful force among the fighters of the Islamic State. Lilith’s Arklight team had been doing hits against ISIL for months, ever since they officially enshrined the rape of the Yazidi girls and women. Some of the ISIL fighters her sisters had taken had spoken of the Mullah as a new prophet who would lead a true global jihad. To speak of him to anyone was viewed as a sin against God, and even the slightest transgression, the most offhand mention, was punished by death. Not just of the sinner but of his family.

“That’s an effective security protocol,” said Church.

Lilith’s laugh was ugly. “I’ve found that every man is willing to tell everything if you ask in the right way. One of my sisters asked the right way. Unfortunately the person we asked isn’t high enough to know much.”

She said that the Mullah of the Black Tent was working to unite the various factions of Islam under one banner, promising that the caliphate had a great weapon that was going to bring America to its knees. Normally such claims would be met with skepticism, hostility, or indifference, because there had always been threats like that.

“They started paying attention when there was a terrible accident at a racetrack. I think you call it NASCAR? The Mullah predicted that event and it happened exactly as he said it would. Then there was a similar event at a presidential debate. It is one thing to step up and try to claim responsibility for an event but it is entirely different when the event is predicted.”

“So this prophet has insider knowledge of the impending events,” said Church.

Lilith’s voice became intense. “Arklight is no more at war with true Muslims than we are with true people of any faith, as long as religion is not used like a knife. But this Mullah is dangerous. He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive today, because when he speaks there are Shiites and Sunni who stop to listen. Not merely a few, but many, and each time one of the Mullah’s predictions comes to pass his following grows.”

“Thank you for telling me this, Lilith. I will put resources on it and—”

“There’s more, St. Germaine,” she said. “Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“The Mullah has made several predictions about a much bigger attack. Something so big it will bring America to its knees. Now, I know we’ve both heard threats of that kind before, but this is different. I did not know what it could be until my sources told me about the incident at the research laboratory. About the theft of the weaponized smallpox. SX-56, yes?”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was faint. “What have you heard?”

He heard her take a breath. “The Mullah has prophesied that the hand of God will reach down from heaven and scatter pestilence across the land of the great Satan. The faithful need only watch, and from each finger of God will fall the seeds of punishment that will wipe out a generation.” She paused. “Do you understand what that means? Ten fingers, ten points of attack. Ten cities. And this pestilence has to be the SX-56.”

He said nothing.

“St. Germaine,” said Lilith, her voice softer now but more desperate. “You know who is most vulnerable to that disease. You know how fast it spreads. This weaponized strain is the Devil’s own design. Goddamn the men who conceived it it. Be damned to the people in your government for allowing it to exist. The Mullah and his army are going to launch a plague upon ten cities and slaughter a generation of children.”

Church closed his eyes. “Do you know when this will happen?”

“No. The men we interrogated did not know.”

“Can you find someone who does know?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps.”

“Will you?” asked Church. “I know it is a lot to ask.”

“I will not do it for you,” she said. “But tell me, St. Germaine, what do you think I would not do for those children?”

She did not wait for his answer. The line went dead.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

It was four to one.

Toys was in pajama bottoms and a plain white undershirt. No shoes, no weapons. The four intruders had guns, Toys could see the bulges under their jackets, but they came at him barehanded. Quick, quiet, deadly, all in a rush, wanting to smash him down and shut him up before he could call for help.

Toys never shouted.

He never called for help. It didn’t occur to him.

The man closest to him tried to end it with a vicious front kick to the groin.

Toys twisted and crouched, and as he did so hooked the attacking foot with the crook of his left arm and chopped down on the knee with his right elbow. The joint disintegrated and the attacker shrieked. Still holding the shattered leg, Toys rammed him backward into the others. There was an instant confusion of arms and legs as they tried to catch their friend and push him out of the way at the same time so they could kill their enemy. Toys didn’t give them the chance.

He jumped at them, using a leaping hip check to drive the wounded man more solidly into the others while lashing out at the two closest masked faces. He caught them both with solid palm-heel shots because there was no room for them to dodge. They crumpled under the force of the blows and the weight of their friend, and Toys landed beside the mass, pivoted to engage the fourth man, slapped the intruder’s hand away as he sought to draw a pistol, and chopped him solidly across the Adam’s apple. The man reeled backward, clawing at a crushed throat, trying to gasp in even a spoonful of air and utterly failing.

Toys turned again and kicked at the closest of the others, catching him on the temple with his bare heel. Toys was thin and looked skinny in clothes, but his body was all wiry strength and he knew how to hit and how to hurt. He rechambered his foot and swung a very short, very fast heel kick at the opening of the last attacker’s mask, catching the man in the left eye. Now there were three injured men on the floor, groaning and crying out in pain and surprise.

For the tiniest fragment of a moment Toys paused, not really wanting to do what had to be done. Not wanting to do what he’d already done. But behind him Job hissed once more, in mingled fear and anger, and that turned a switch in Toys’s head. A veil of dark red seemed to drop over his eyes and there was a sound in his ears like green wood being pulled apart.

He did not lose himself in the moment. His mind did not go black and he never for a moment lost control of himself or what he was doing. Not once.

Nor was he lost to some savage joy. No inner darkness took hold of him or owned him.

He beat them all into silence.

He broke them apart.

All the time he was aware that his cat was watching him.

And that maybe God was watching him, too.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Mr. Church spent the rest of the evening on the phone, disturbing some people as they settled in for the night, getting others out of bed, catching some late owls at their desks.

He called the White House and was told that the president was not able to take his call. He called thirty-four separate members of Congress and nine high-ranking military officers. He had friends who listened, and he spoke with friends who clearly did not believe him. And he spoke to many who were afraid of even talking on the phone with him. Many of them reacted with the guarded caution people reserve for the hysterical and the insane, proof that his credibility had been eroded.

He made calls to the Centers for Disease Control, to the National Institutes of Health and FEMA. He spoke with various friends in the industry. The ones he expected to have courage and vision listened and promised to help, but it was a smaller number of allies than he expected to find.

Aunt Sallie promised to put every available resource on it, but many doors had been shut to the DMS. Walls had been built.

With great reluctance Church brought Harcourt Bolton into the loop, and his new codirector surprised him by believing in this horrific new intel. Bolton hurried back to his office to see if he could get through to the people who had rebuffed Church.

Hours burned away.

Lilith did not call back.

No one returned his calls.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

It would soon be a problem of logistics. Of concealment and disposal. Of constructing explanations in case anyone heard the scuffle.

Toys was aware that there were now so many details to be handled.

He was aware of it, but he didn’t care.

What mattered to him was the man who sat bound and bleeding on the floor. The man’s legs were wrapped with an extension cord. His wrists were tied with strips torn from Toys’s undershirt. He sat in a pool of his own blood. Not too big a pool, but enough. Pain had carved his face into an inhuman mask; fear had turned that mask to stone.

Toys sat on the small, wheeled desk chair. Job perched on the edge of the bed, watching like a vulture, or a jury. Also on the bed were four very strange pistols, all identical, all with a cluster of prongs instead of gun barrels. There were also four disposable cell phones, four rolls of twenty-dollar bills totaling two hundred dollars each. And four short fixed-blade fighting knives. Good knives, too.

The moment had stretched thin, quivering like a frayed guitar string that needed only a feather-light touch to snap.

Without saying anything, Toys reached back, stroked Job’s fur for a moment, then reached past him and picked up one of the knives. He weighed it in his hand, getting the feel of its size, its balance. Its potential. The blade was like many that he’d handled over the years and the bound man watched as Toys moved it in his grip, reversing the hold, learning it, making it his own. Then he bent forward and set the knife on the floor near the man’s right foot.

Toys sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and settled his bloody hands in his lap.

“You know the bloody drill, mate,” he said quietly. “The whole ‘there are two ways we can do this’ thing, right? We both know you don’t want it to be the hard way, so do us both a favor and let’s skip to the part where you tell me what the bloody hell you’re playing at. Why did you and these effing twats break in here, what are you looking for, and who sent you?”

The man clamped his jaws shut as if afraid that all of those answers would tumble out against his will.

Toys sighed.

“If you make me pick up that knife it’s going to force us to go down some very bad roads,” said Toys quietly. “If you know who I am, then maybe you know what I am. Is that true? Have they briefed you on me?”

The man tried not to respond, but his head nodded anyway. Just a little. Enough.

“Then why do you think that this will end any way except my way?” asked the sad young man.

The wounded man stared up at him, eyes wide, growing wider, filling with a dreadful understanding.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

“Deacon,” said the president, leaning back in his chair and holding the phone to his ear, “sorry to call you so late, but I just got off the phone with Harcourt Bolton. He warned me that you wanted to talk about something earthshaking.”

“Warned?” asked Mr. Church.

“A joke. Personally I thought you’d be licking your wounds and keeping a low profile.”

“Is that what you thought, Mr. President? I’d have guessed that a comment of that kind would be beneath you. I will adjust my expectations henceforth.”

“Now is not a good time to get high-assed with me,” snapped the president. “You don’t have the political currency needed to buy much goodwill. Not from this administration. I know you enjoyed a great deal of freedom with my predecessors, but times have changed. Your team in Wisconsin was supposed to find out who stole the SX-56. A simple interrogation. Instead what happened? They went crazy and killed our only suspect and then themselves. Now God only knows where it is. If it’s released, then any civilian deaths are on your head. Let’s be clear about that.”

“That is precisely why I wanted to speak with you directly. I have received reliable intel about the SX-56.”

“Sure,” said the president, “we heard about some of that. It’s rumor-mill garbage.”

“I assure you it’s not. I need you to act.”

“You need? You? Really?” The president sighed. “You used to be the best in the business, Deacon, but times have definitely changed.”

“Have they?”

“Yes, they have. I don’t have skeletons in my closet,” said the president, “which means you don’t have any dials to turn on me. Everyone seemed to want to give you a long leash and let you do whatever you wanted to do. That’s not going to happen. I’ve gone over the wording of your charter. It was created by an executive order and it’s a stroke of my pen to cancel that charter.”

“So you keep telling me,” said Church.

The president made a rude noise. “Harcourt tells me that you’re trying to establish a connection between the power outages and that Gateway debacle.”

“We believe we have.”

“Are you calling to get me to put you back in charge of that case?”

“I am. We have intelligence from a reliable source that the attacks are being directed by an ISIL leader who goes by the code name of the Mullah of the Black Tent. In the last few hours I have managed to obtain copies of two different sources, one in Central Intelligence and one in Barrier, that have mentioned this man. I can find no evidence that either report was taken seriously or that any actions were taken to pursue the investigation.”

“We’re looking at him,” said the president.

“We as in who, exactly?” asked Church.

“That’s none of your business. It’s not your case.”

“It is if the agencies looking into this are not filing reports or taking appropriate actions. Why don’t we have a detailed file on this man in the shared database?”

“It’s a developing case. We don’t know much about him yet.”

“Mr. President, would you care to wager how much information I can amass in the next twenty-four hours?”

“Let me say it again more slowly so you can catch the words,” said the president. “It’s. Not. Your. Case.”

“I see.”

The president wanted to hurl the phone out the window. “You heard me that time. Good. Is that all?”

“No. I have obtained additional evidence that may connect Gateway with the Majestic program. This evidence may also connect the Stargate project with Gateway, as well.”

The president laughed. “God, you’re really losing it. Why are you wasting my time with this crap?”

“Because I have reason to believe that Stargate was never shut down. I believe it was transferred internally to Majestic and from there to Gateway. And I believe the technology is being used to attack the intelligence community of this country.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“And you’re being obstructive.”

“I’m sorry… what did you just say?”

“Mr. President, I’m coming to you with new intelligence that, at very least, must make us reconsider our response strategy to a national crisis. We are talking about the pending release of a dangerous bioweapon on ten American cities. Even if you think I’m off my game, I can’t think of a single valid reason for you to dismiss it out of hand. Why would you, of all people, risk it? And yet you do. I find it curious that your response is to dismiss and mock.”

“Want to know what I find curious?” said the president sharply. “That you have the brass balls to talk to me in this manner. Perhaps I need to remind you who is commander in chief and who is a subordinate.”

“I am very much aware of the Washington power structure, Mr. President.”

“Are you? That may require a formal review. If you thought that by calling and insulting me you would somehow reclaim what you justifiably lost, Deacon, then you are very much mistaken. You’ve mismanaged the powers and authority granted you by my predecessors. If I had any doubts before about putting Harcourt in charge of the DMS, I have none now. In fact I wonder if he’s not the most appropriate person to take exclusive directorship of the DMS.”

Mr. Church said, “Since you are being frank with me, Mr. President — and as it seems I can’t get further onto your bad side — let me be equally frank with you.”

“Oh, please do. You’ve got a little bit of rope left.”

“I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you made a decision based on your understanding of the situation as it stood prior to this conversation. I called to help you clarify your vision. We are at a crossroads, you and I. I would hate to see you take the wrong path merely because you dislike me. I would hope your integrity, political sobriety, and good judgment will keep you from making choices that could have unfortunate consequences for the nation we are both sworn to protect.”

“Don’t you dare threaten me, you arrogant son of a bitch,” growled the president.

“That was not a threat, Mr. President, though I find it significant that you’ve chosen to take it as such.”

The line went dead.

The president stared at the phone for a moment.

“Asshole,” he muttered.

Then he bent forward, cleared the line, and made a call.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

I had high hopes for a quiet night.

I got home very late and had a nice dinner with Junie. Fish tacos and dirty rice. Then we put the dishes in the sink and moved to the balcony to watch the stars over the ocean. It had been cloudy earlier but now there were stars by the billion.

Junie was in on the case now, and I was free to share the rest of what had happened with her. I told her about Lilith calling Mr. Church with a tip about a new and very mysterious ISIL leader she called the Mullah of the Black Tent.

“I thought that case was taken away from you,” she said.

“Church said he was going to talk to the president about that. Maybe he’ll have some good news for me tomorrow.”

She touched my face. “I know you want to get back into this, Joe, but you have to give yourself time to rest.”

“I’ve had enough rest, thanks,” I said. She didn’t like that answer, but she knew how to pick her fights.

The evening rolled on toward night. We talked about Majestic and Gateway. We speculated about Prospero Bell. What was he like? Did he know about her and the other hive kids? She said that Greene seemed to suggest that maybe Prospero wasn’t dead, that his death had been faked. It was only an impression, though; she had nothing to base it on. My middle-aged marmalade-and-white tabby, Cobbler, came and sprawled in my lap. Junie was still on her first glass of wine because she had no tolerance at all. I forget how many glasses of bourbon I’d put away. More than my share, but on the whole not enough. Junie wore one of my flannel shirts over a skimpy top and leggings. Her feet were propped on the rail, toes touching mine. We were drifting toward a lazy, let’s-go-to-bed silence when my cell phone rang. I grunted in surprise when I saw who the caller was. He wasn’t someone who called me except in very rare cases when he couldn’t otherwise find Junie. Bemused, I punched the button.

“Toys,” I said.

“Ledger,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, which is how a lot of our conversations start. A moment to assess. I hated him for a long time, and with very good cause. Last year, when the Seven Kings — led by that monster Nicodemus — invaded a hospital in San Diego with the intention of killing Circe O’Tree — Rudy’s pregnant wife and Church’s daughter — Toys nearly died to protect her. In doing so he helped save Junie’s life. Toys was nearly cut to ribbons by broken glass. His body is covered with scars. Afterward, when he was leaving the hospital, I told him that while I still didn’t like him and would never forgive him for the crimes he’d committed, he and I were no longer at war.

“Junie’s right here,” I said, “hold on and—”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t call for her. I called for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“I need your help. I just killed four people,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Toys was sitting on a deck chair outside of his room but stood as we approached. He was dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, looking exactly like a vacationing tourist unless you looked into his eyes. If eyes are the windows of the soul, then beyond those panes was a bleak and wasted landscape that was devoid of all hope.

“Are you okay?” asked Junie as she hugged him and kissed his cheek.

“I’ll live.” He looked at me. “Ledger.”

“Toys.”

No handshakes. We weren’t touchy-feely with each other and probably never would be. He didn’t try to pet Ghost, either, because Toys is not that stupid.

On the chair next to him was his ragged-looking cat, which eyed Ghost with such obvious disdain that the dislike between them was immediate and palpable. Ghost barely tolerates Cobbler, but his general opinion of cats is that they are chew toys. The cat on the chair probably considered all dogs to be scratching posts. Ah, love.

Toys introduced the cat as “Job,” explaining that the scruffy animal had been through the wringer.

“Lot of that going around,” I said.

Junie reached out a hand to Job, which he sniffed and then rubbed his head against. Ghost looked disgusted and walked over to the closed door of Toys’s apartment, took a sniff, and immediately began to growl softly.

I drew my gun and nodded to the door. “Shall we?”

“You won’t need that,” said Toys. “All of the drama is past tense. It’s not pretty, though.”

“I promise I won’t faint,” I said as I reholstered my Sig Sauer.

He gave a half smile. “I meant that for Junie.”

Junie patted his arm. “I’m pretty sure I’m unshockable at this point.”

Even so, Toys shifted to stand in front of the door. “Let Joe go in. Even if you are the Iron Lady, you don’t need to see that. I had to, um, encourage one of them to talk to me.”

“I got this,” I said, and pushed past him. The door was unlocked, the lights turned low. I stepped inside and stopped, with Ghost lingering on the threshold, a ridge of hairs standing up along his back. The entire room was a mess and there was blood everywhere. He said that he’d had to encourage one of them. I spotted who that unlucky bastard was right off. He was the one who didn’t look human anymore. There was only a small patch of unbloodied rug to stand on and I went no farther in. Everything that could be read was splashed on the walls and written in the taut lines of pain etched into four dead faces. The distinctive freshly sheared copper smell of blood was masked by three burning sticks of temple incense.

The men were dressed in dark suits. On the bed were four microwave pulse pistols.

Closers.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered. I squatted down beside one of them and tore open his shirt, then repeated that on the others. As I suspected, this guy and his chums weren’t wearing the super-skivvies. If they had been, Toys would probably be dead. Without touching anything else I withdrew and closed the door behind me. I took a moment to breathe the fragrant night air.

“I told you,” said Toys quietly.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, and he went through all of it, speaking quickly and in low tones. When he got to the part where he questioned the last of the four assassins, he paused and looked down at his hands. They appeared to be very clean, the way flesh looks when it’s been scrubbed with furious vigor. My own skin has had that glow a few times over the years. When Grace Courtland died in my arms it took weeks before my hands felt clean of her blood.

“They’re Closers,” I said.

Toys nodded. “New to it, though. They hired on a few months ago.”

“Hired by who?” I asked, but then my cell rang. It was Bug.

“Kind of busy at the moment,” I told him.

“Unless you’re taking fire, Joe,” he said, “this is more important. I’ve been searching through all those papers for more on that book inventory. The Unlearnable Truths. And I think I hit gold.”

“I am definitely listening,” I said, holding my hand out to Junie and Toys to be quiet. “Hit me.”

Bug hit me. “This kid Prospero Bell believed that there is a mathematical code hidden in the unlearnable books, right? Well, he wasn’t joking. That code is there, and it tells you how to program the power flow so that the God Machine works the way it’s supposed to.”

“To open a dimensional gateway,” I supplied, and Toys stared at me, eyebrows raised so far they nearly vanished into his hairline. Junie put a finger to her lips.

“Right,” said Bug, “but it does more than that. With the sequencing code you can regulate any of the Kill Switch devices on the same network. I ran this by Bill Hu and he says that what this means is that if you made a bunch of the Kill Switches, you could position them around an area, switch it on, and everything inside is switched off. Hu thinks that they’ve been doing this already. Houston and the debate and like that. But Dr. San Pedro’s records indicate that these smaller devices are single use. They melt down completely after a few seconds. Now, if you have the master control sequence code, those devices won’t overheat. You can place them around, say, New York City, switch them on so that everything goes dark, switch them off again, and keep doing that as much as you like. No one has to even be there to run them. And you can keep doing it when the emergency responders get there. You can make this go from bad to worse with the flip of a switch, but only if you have the sequence code.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. Sweat had begun to pop out all over my body. The implications were… well, staggering. I actually felt the floor tilting under me. And I immediately knew — absolutely 100 percent knew — that we hadn’t seen how bad this could get. Not even close.

“You okay, Joe?” asked Bug.

“Not even a little.”

“Well, it gets crazier,” he said, his excitement raising his voice to a mouse squeak. “We’re eighty percent sure that Gateway had a spy in Oscar Bell’s organization. A guy who Bell hired to obtain the Unlearnable Truths for Prospero but was actually on the payroll for Erskine and company. He used ‘Mr. Priest’ as his cover name, but we were able to lift prints from reports he filed, and even though the prints were degraded we ran them through—”

“I don’t need the science,” I said. “Give me the damn name.”

“Esteban Santoro. Joe, he’s Rafael Santoro’s brother.”

Rafael Santoro was the chief assistant — the Conscience — to the King of Fear, Hugo Vox. Santoro was one of the most brutal, sadistic men I’ve ever encountered. A man who raised coercion to a dark art form. He was also the man who formed and personally trained the Kingsmen, the elite special ops fighters who worked for the Seven Kings. I’d fought the man and he’d nearly killed me. Church made the guy disappear. Not sure if he was alive or dead.

Now we had to deal with his brother.

I said, “You’re going to hurt me, aren’t you, Bug?”

He cleared his throat. “Esteban Santoro, or Mr. Priest, used to be one of the field operators for the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. And when he left them he went to work for Howard Shelton. He was a Closer.”

“Shit.”

“And this guy Priest apparently acquired all of the books on Prospero’s list.”

“Right, but they were destroyed along with Gateway.”

“The books maybe,” said Bug, “but not the scans.”

I stiffened. “What scans?”

“That’s what we found. Priest oversaw a complete scan of the Unlearnable Truths. It was part of their search for the sequencing code.”

“Where are those scans?”

“I’m working on that now. It was outsourced to one of the contractors who worked with Erskine, but we don’t know which one. Nikki thinks she’ll have that figured out by this morning. Noon at the latest.”

“That’s incredible, Bug. You’re amazing.”

“No, I’m not. I’m slow. I should have figured this out before now.”

“No, you’re amazing. I could kiss you.”

“Please don’t.” He paused. “But that lady who works for you…? The one with all the stuffed pandas on her desk? Lydia-Rose? Maybe you could put in a good word for me…?”

I laughed. “Done.”

“Just so you know,” said Bug, “I called this in to the Pier. Mr. Church was busy so I told Mr. Bolton. He’s already working on it, too.”

“Nice. Thanks!”

I disconnected the call and turned to Toys. “You were the Conscience to the King of Plagues. You knew Rafael Santoro.”

He flinched and went pale. “Yes.”

“The name you were about to give me when Bug called… was it Esteban Santoro?”

Instead of being surprised he merely looked old and sad. “Yes.”

“What I don’t get,” said Junie, touching his arm, “is why they went after you.”

“They wanted my laptop.”

“Right, but why?”

Toys said, “The Closers were supposed to look for any files related to Majestic.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

I ordered a team to come and clean up for Toys. The bodies were taken away in discreet laundry hampers and everything was smoothed over with the night manager. Then I called Church to bring him up to speed.

“First Junie’s office was robbed, and now they came after Toys’s laptop, looking for anything connected to Majestic,” I said. “Our bad guys know a lot of stuff they shouldn’t know and it’s pissing me off. I mean, how do they know?”

“That is perhaps the most important question we need to answer,” said Church.

“Boss,” I said, “that Project Stargate stuff. I’m beginning to think we need to take a closer look at that.”

“To make a bad joke, Captain, you’re reading my mind.”

He hung up. My next call was to Harcourt Bolton and I woke him from a sound sleep. He was drowsy and grumpy, but he perked up when I explained why I was calling. Like Church, Bolton said that he needed to make some calls.

Junie called Christel Sparks, the former cop who now ran security for FreeTech, and gave her a rough idea of what happened at Toys’s place. Christel was smart and capable, and Junie trusted her. Security would be doubled around all FreeTech facilities and senior staff.

Toys came home with us and stayed in our guest room. Job came with him, which Cobbler seemed to like and Ghost did not. The two cats sat on the balcony and looked at things only they could see in the darkness before dawn. I tried to get some sleep, but I was too wired, and barely closed my eyes. So I got up early and left Junie and Toys at home. There’s good security at our place, but I called Brian Botley and asked him to swing by and camp out until Junie went into work.

Church told me about his call from Lilith, and about the Mullah of the Black Tent. I asked him when POTUS was ordering a full-team hit on the Mullah and got punched by the news that the president did not believe Lilith’s intel was real. Balls.

So, I spent the morning working my own networks and calling in favors with my friends in the other intelligence services trying to find out something—anything—about the stolen vials of SX-56.

But everywhere I went I hit walls, too. Friends were being cagey and evasive. Others were treating me like a leper. Or like the DMS was itself a leper colony. A few truly good friends confided that they had nothing to share because no one had a clue, and they warned me to stay out of it. Word had come down that Church and all of his people were politically toxic. We were being shut out and we were being blamed. It made me feel sick and lost. I ached to be back in a coma.

It wasn’t much better when I trolled for information inside our own group. Bug’s team was still wading through the papers and, after the first news, had found nothing else new. And Hu was getting absolutely nowhere with trying to understand the effects of the mind control. He’d obtained some of the old Stargate records, but they were incomplete and, as he phrased it, “as useless as hairy nipples on a velociraptor.” Dr. Hu is weirdly specific.

At eleven Lydia-Rose buzzed me to say that Violin had arrived and that she was in with Mr. Church. I didn’t bolt and run to the conference room, but I’d have won a speed-walking competition. Once upon a time Violin and I had something very special going on. We weren’t a couple, but what we had was pretty steamy. Very intense. But then I met Junie and the course of my romantic life shifted gears and changed lanes and that’s the only road I’ll ever take. Not sure that’s a good metaphor for falling in love, but it’s what I have. Violin did not take it as stoically as she’d have liked, and for a while I was almost afraid for Junie’s safety. Violin isn’t often like her mother, but she has her moments.

Then an assassin went after Junie and Violin was there. Junie was hurt, though. A bullet that destroyed any chance we’ll ever have of having kids. Even though Violin killed the assassin, I knew she blamed herself for what happened to Junie. It was a special kind of blood debt that is entirely self-imposed. The way I see it, Junie is alive because Violin was there, and that’s a debt I can never repay.

Life is so very complicated for those of us who live out in the storm lands. Maybe it’s that way for normal people, too. I wouldn’t know. It’s been too long since I’ve been normal. I wouldn’t even know how to breathe in that world.

So now Violin was here. She’d been on the run from killers, fighting for her life while I was in a coma. Maybe if I’d been awake there might have been some way for me to reach out, to help her come out of harm’s way. An egotistical male chauvinist thought? Not as much as it sounds. It’s one member of a family wishing he could have been there for his dearest sister. Ghost, a member of our pack, was right at my heels, excited because he had heard Violin’s name.

I whipped the conference room door open and rushed inside. And immediately tripped over someone who was bent down in front of me. We both went tumbling and clunking down onto the floor in a comedy-act sprawl of arms and legs. I landed better than him, but also on top of him, and the back of one of my heels thumped down into his crotch.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

No one makes an entrance as graceful as Joseph Edwin Ledger. Seriously, folks, hold the applause until after the show.

We got ourselves untangled and I reached over and grabbed a fistful of shirt from somebody I had never met and wanted to punch. “Who in the wide blue fuck are you?”

The guy was ten years younger than me, a little chunky, with a round face and bright blue eyes and a mouth that was puckered with pain. He said, “Eeerp.” Very faintly.

I hugged Violin. Ghost jumped all over her and got kisses on his furry white head. Violin reached down and pulled the kid to his feet and helped him into a chair. He moved with the kind of delicacy men use when a brute my size heel-kicks them in the wrinklies. Too bad.

“Joseph,” said Violin, “meet Harry Bolt.”

“Why’d you frigging trip me?” I demanded.

It took him a moment to get his voice back and it came out as a mouse squeak. “I… dropped my… cell phone. Bent to pick it up. You… attacked me.”

“If I’d wanted to attack you,” I began, and then caught identical looks from Church and Violin and snapped my mouth shut. Violin patted the groaning stranger on the shoulder.

“Harry is with the Agency,” said Church. “I believe I mentioned him earlier.”

I gaped at him. “Wait… you’re Harcourt Bolton, Junior?”

“Um… yeah. I guess?” It came out almost like a question. “I… um… prefer Harry, though. Harry Bolt.”

“What, is that some kind of cool superspy name? Bolt. Harry Bolt?”

His face, already flushed with pain, burned a deeper crimson. “Pretty much the opposite.”

Then a voice spoke from the open doorway. “He changed it because he doesn’t want to smear the family name.”

Everyone turned to see Harcourt Bolton, Senior, standing there. Tall and good-looking, powerful, cultured. Annoyed and disappointed.

“Dad!” cried Harry as he launched out of his chair and rushed to hug his father. Bolton endured the hug. That was the best thing you could say about it. Endured. Harry hugged him and Bolton gave him a single, small pat on the back, then he pushed his son away and appraised him.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked. I know he was asking about Harry’s disheveled appearance and flushed face, but there was an implication of a deeper, perhaps existential question. I caught it, and from the flicker of disapproval that pinched Violin’s mouth I saw that she did, too.

Harry immediately began trying to smooth down his hair and straighten his clothes. “It’s been a little crazy, Dad. Violin and I had to go dark and—”

“Your entire station was wiped out,” said Bolton coldly. “Your infil team was cut to pieces, Harry. I saw photos of their severed heads and yet you don’t have a scratch. How did you escape a team of Closers?”

He leaned a little too heavy on the word “you.” As if such a thing was beyond understanding.

As I believe I’d said, I’m pretty much captain of the Harcourt Bolton fan club, but right then I wanted to punch him. He was being a dick to his kid and he was doing it in front of other professionals. Not cool.

“Your son has brought us valuable intel, Harcourt,” said Mr. Church. He rose and walked around the table to stand beside Harry. He never does things by accident, so that had to make a statement. Wish I’d thought of it.

Bolton sniffed. It was a snobbish, fussy thing for him to do and I could feel some of my affection for him beginning to bleed away. He’d been kind and considerate to me, but I did not like the way he treated his son. There’s a saying that in order to understand someone you need to see how they treat their children. Or maybe it was their dog. Not sure. Worked out to the same thing in this case because Bolton seemed to treat Harry like a dog that had just shit on the rug.

“What intel?” asked Bolton, directing the question to Church.

“This,” said Violin. She placed a heavy suitcase on the conference table, opened it to reveal a bulky item wrapped in a thick comforter. We all crowded around to watch. Inside the comforter was a book. Very large, very old, covered in strange markings and sealed with iron bands and heavy padlocks.

“Jesus,” I said, “is that what I think it is?”

It was. One of the Unlearnable Truths.

“Hate to break it to you,” I said to Violin and Harry, “but Bug thinks that there are complete scans of all these books in the Gateway records. He’s working on locating them now.”

“Impossible,” said Violin. “This book has not been opened in years.”

“Let’s see,” I said, and bent to pick it up, but Violin caught my wrist.

“Joseph, don’t,” she urged. “It’s dangerous.”

“It’s only a book.”

“It’s much more than that, Joseph. It has power.”

“I have a vault,” said Bolton. “Hell of a sturdy one. We could lock it away.”

“I don’t think that would be our best choice,” said Church, and he surprised everyone by picking the book up. Violin and Harry gasped and stepped back. Bolton looked like he wanted to grab it out of Church’s hands and maybe throw it out of the window. Church turned it over, smiling faintly. “An ocean of blood has been spilled over this.”

“You shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands,” cautioned Violin. “My mother says—”

“Your mother is a bit more superstitious than I am,” he said. “I’ve found that things like this only have the power you give them.”

Harry Bolt shook his head. “I picked that thing up and my head went blank. Like… a couple of times.”

“You were probably hungover from partying,” said his father in a caustic and emasculating way. Harry’s face went beet red.

“Please, Harcourt,” said Church. To me he said, “Remind you of anything?”

“Too many things,” I said. “Apparently Project Stargate wasn’t a total failure. Imagine that.”

“No way,” said Bolton, disgusted. “I told you that Stargate was scrubbed.”

Church ignored him and gave Harry an encouraging smile. “Tell me everything that happened.” Tell me, he said. Not us. It was the right thing to say. After a moment’s hesitation, Harry told his tale. His report was hesitant at first, but I saw him visibly shift his focus from his father’s disapproving scowl to Church’s encouraging smile. When he got into gear he gave a clear, concise, and surprisingly insightful report of what he and Violin had experienced.

Church nodded and placed the book on the conference table. We all clustered around, and as Church bent to examine the locks and the binding, I saw him frown. He ran his fingers over the parts of the cover not blocked by the metal bands, then he licked his fingertips and wiped at the leather. Church grunted and straightened. “Now, isn’t that interesting.”

“What?”

“Captain,” he said to me, “you’re good at this sort of thing. Do you think you could pick those locks?”

“I’m better at kicking down doors,” I admitted, “but I can try.”

“No!” said Violin.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Bolton.

“I can do it,” suggested Harry. We all looked at him. He produced a small leather toolkit from his pocket and opened it to show as sweet a set of lock picks as I’ve ever seen. “Really, I’m pretty good with locks. I opened the chest this was in.”

“You opened a chest sealed by the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum?” said Bolton, his skepticism evident and intense.

“Um… sure.”

Church stepped back. “If Captain Ledger has no objections.”

“Knock yourself out, kid,” I said to Harry, clapping him on the shoulder in a way that pushed him a couple of steps toward the table. “It’s all yours.”

Actually I didn’t want to touch the thing. If it was going to explode or open a gateway to a hell dimension or whatever, better him than me. Selfish, I know, but there it is. I’m a good guy but I never claimed to be a nice one.

Harry Bolt set himself in front of the book, selected his tools, stuck his tongue partway out of his mouth the way some people do when they’re concentrating, and set to work. The kid was good, I have to give him that. He had each of the locks open in seconds.

“Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy,” he said. Bolton made a disgusted grunt. Violin blew Harry a little kiss. The dynamic in the room was getting kind of strange.

Church placed a flat palm on the book to prevent Harry from opening it.

“Here’s the issue,” said Church. “I have some experience with ancient books. Perhaps not as much as Circe O’Tree, but enough. From what you’ve told me, Violin, and from what your mother has said, the Brotherhood and the Closers were both after this book because it is the last of the Unlearnable Truths. All of the others, according to the inventory sheet we found among the Gateway papers, have been accounted for. They were all obtained by Gateway, and it is presumed they were destroyed along with the lab.”

That earned me a few chilly looks but I managed not to fall down. That bell was already rung and couldn’t be unrung.

“Apart from some aspects of their subject matter,” continued Church, “one of the few things that each of those books shares is that they are all examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy.”

“What the heck’s that?” asked Harry, beating me to the question.

It was Violin who answered. “He means that each of those accursed books is bound in human skin.”

“Okay,” said Harry, “I may throw up.”

“Be a man,” his father said under his breath.

“This book,” said Church, tapping the cover with a forefinger, “is bound in leather. Ordinary bovine leather.”

Harcourt Bolton pushed past his son and peered suspiciously down at the book. “I don’t understand.”

“People have gone to great lengths to obtain De Vermis Mysteriis,” said Church. He flipped open the cover and then fanned through the pages. They were all blank. “This is not it.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

“And that, sir,” said Dr. Kang, “is the long and short of it.”

Across the desk from the director of the computer lab sat a man with a visitor’s badge clipped to his lapel and an NSA identification card hung on a lanyard around his neck. The name on the card was Special Agent Stephen Priest.

“You’re entirely confident in your computer and Net security?” asked Mr. Priest. He was slim and tall, and even in his bland black suit and plain dark tie he seemed to exude a tigerish strength. It made Kang as uncomfortable now as it had when they’d begun this tour.

Kang was certain that Mr. Priest was a very dangerous man. He had the look. His smile was warm but his eyes were cold. Very, very cold. And though he always laughed in the right places — even at Kang’s lamest jokes — there was something creepy about it. As if the laughs were faked to present an air of affability instead of being genuinely good-natured.

“Our security team is second to none,” said Kang. “We’ve worked very closely with DARPA since the beginning, and, after all, DARPA invented the Internet.”

“Not Al Gore?” said Mr. Priest, smiling.

They shared a laugh.

“Hardly. My predecessors here at the AEL, along with their colleagues at MIT’s Lincoln Lab and in our main offices in Virginia, developed the prototype military networks — ARPANET, MILNET, and then the Defense Data Network — before—”

Mr. Priest held up a hand to stop him. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Dr. Kang, but that was decades ago. I don’t need a history lesson. My concern is how your research is being protected right now.”

Kang took a breath and nodded. “With the Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and North Koreans working so hard to hack our systems, as well as the power grids and everything else, it’s—” He paused and twirled a finger as he fished for the right word. “It’s encouraged us to make some radical jumps forward in cybersecurity to protect our vulnerabilities. We have whole teams dedicated to protecting us against malware, worms, viruses, and targeted attacks, as well as soft-probe and no-footprint intrusions. We’ve built firewalls, counterintrusion software packages, alert systems, and more. We’re impregnable.”

“‘Impregnable’ is a risky word choice, Doctor,” said Mr. Priest. “It smacks of hubris.”

Kang felt himself stiffen. Mr. Priest had been smiling when he said it but now there was no trace of evident humor. Certainly no affability.

When Mr. Priest’s visit had been arranged, Kang had made sure his people did a thorough background and authority check, and the pingbacks had come from deep inside the intelligence community. Everything had been triple verified and memos had been sent by all the right people to grant Mr. Priest an unusually high level of clearance. That meant he was allowed to ask these kinds of questions and make these kinds of statements. Even the uncomfortable ones.

Kang felt his face redden and swallowed nervously. “I can assure you, Mr. Priest, that I’m not overstating things. Our system is ultrasecure. It’s updated all the time. Even our own design and cybersecurity staff have to go through special procedures in order to log on. Codes are changed randomly, we have filtering systems, self-monitoring security subroutines, and—”

Mr. Priest held up his hand again. “What’s to stop a terrorist from breaking in here, putting a gun to your head, and forcing you to log on and download one of your research projects?”

“Can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because the master control programs require typed and verbal codes, and a retina scan and thumbprint.”

“All of which could be coerced from you.”

“No, sir,” said Kang, shaking his head. “If any of our team were under coercion we would input a false command that would appear to access the system, but which would really only access a self-limiting clone. At the same time it would send out a system-wide alert that would result in all other users being asked to verify their status. They also have fail-safe codes. If two or more users indicate that they’re under duress, the fail-safes crash the network.”

“Wouldn’t that take crucial services offline from the defense community? If you’ve seen the news you know that we are in a time of national crisis.”

“Under those circumstances, key individuals would have to input today’s command codes. Very similar to the way missile codes are handled. The codes are sealed in snap-cases that send an alert when opened, and the codes must be input only after thumbprint, personal code, and retina scan verification.”

“Cumbersome,” observed Mr. Priest.

“Necessary,” countered Kang. “Otherwise a coordinated terrorist attack could overwhelm the system by physical force.”

Mr. Priest nodded and picked up the teacup that had remained untouched on his side of the desk. He sipped, nodded again, and set the cup down. “And you don’t see any holes or soft spots in this process?”

“No. If I did they’d be fixed immediately. We have our own team of cyber-hackers whose only job is to try and crack our security. Every time they do, we use that as a guide to upgrade.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Priest.

“Excuse me, sir, but what does that mean?”

Mr. Priest sighed. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I can see at least two major holes in this system. I’m rather troubled that you don’t.”

Kang leaned forward and rested his forearms on his desk. His nervousness was quickly being trumped by irritation and anger. “I wasn’t aware that you are an expert in cybersecurity.”

“I know my way around. However, I’m surprised someone with your limited skill set has been given control over so many sensitive projects.”

“What is that supposed to mean? What do you know about what I do?”

Mr. Priest spread his hands. “You’re an electrical engineer and a mathematician. Essentially a glorified code-breaker who also writes security system code under contract to the Department of Defense. You work on operational systems including firing controls for missile systems, nuclear plant security regulation codes, and so on. How am I doing?”

Kang stared at him, lips parting in surprise, shocked that Mr. Priest knew all of this. And he did a very fast reevaluation of this man and his potential status in the intelligence network. He cleared his throat. “The security of this office and my teams is, naturally, of the highest concern.”

“Naturally,” agreed Mr. Priest. “However, I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘concern’ is a quality of intention rather than action.”

“I—” Kang stopped himself and tried again. “I would value any input you have, Mr. Priest. If it’s your opinion that there are problems with our system, then please explain. Maintaining the strictest security is absolutely crucial.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

Kang nearly winced. He said, “If you wouldn’t mind explaining our faults, as you see them. Perhaps walk me through them?”

“It would be my pleasure,” said Mr. Priest. He raised his hand and pointed his index finger like a gun. “You say that under direct coercion you would input a false entry code, correct?”

Kang looked at the pointed finger. The gesture was borderline rude, but he dared not say anything. “That is correct,” he said.

Mr. Priest nodded and then moved his hand slowly over to the row of framed photographs on the right side of Kang’s desk. There were five pictures in unmatched frames. His wife, Mary; their wedding picture; three school photos of fifteen-year-old Ashleigh, nine-year-old Kimmie, and three-year-old Jason.

“And what if someone pointed a gun at someone you loved?” asked Mr. Priest.

Kang did not answer. Such a question, such an action, even in a discussion of hypotheticals, was appalling. It was incredibly rude and violative.

“Sorry, Doctor,” said Mr. Priest, “I didn’t hear your answer.”

“This is hardly a proper—”

“Doctor, I want you to answer my question. I know the lengths I would go to to protect my brother, and he is something of a disappointment to me. By all accounts you genuinely love your family. So, my question stands. If there were guns pointed right this minute at the heads of your wife and each of your three very lovely children, are you going to sit there and tell me that you would still input a false code? Would you actually risk such appalling harm coming to your entire family? Could you stick to your protocols and let them die?”

Kang said nothing. He was far too horrified to risk saying the things that rose to his tongue. And he was also trying to determine exactly who he should report this to. National security spot checks and unscheduled evaluations were all good and well, but this interview had crossed a line. Anyone would see that.

“I’d really like an answer, Doctor,” insisted Mr. Priest.

“This is ridiculous and I think we’re done here.”

“No, I don’t think we are.”

Kang stood up. “Yes, we are. If you want to file an official report, then please do so, but this discussion is closed and this interview over. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

Mr. Priest lowered his hand and leaned back in his chair. “Dr. Kang, if you don’t sit down right now I will kneecap you.”

“I’m sorry — what did you say?”

Mr. Priest opened his jacket and produced a pistol. He did not point it, but instead laid it on his lap. “Do you know what ‘kneecapping’ is? Can you imagine what it would feel like? A bullet punching through your knee, through bone and tissue. The shock of the entry wound, the red splatter as it exits the back of your knee, carrying pieces of tissue and nerve and tendon with it. The pain, Doctor. The searing agony.”

Kang felt the blood drain from his face. “Get the fuck out of my office. Right now.”

“No,” said Mr. Priest. His tone was mild, conversational.

“I’m calling security.” Kang reached for the phone.

“Make that call, Doctor, and you’ll kill your wife.”

Kang froze, his fingers an inch from the phone. His heart seemed to freeze, too. The world had suddenly become surreal. When he spoke his voice was barely a whisper.

“What… what did you say?”

“For a smart man you are moderately slow on the uptake, Dr. Kang. Let me make it clear, and since you’re likely in shock I’ll use small words, yes?” Mr. Priest looked amused. “Right now, even as we’re having our chat, there are four teams in play. One has been following your wife since she dropped Jason off at preschool. Another is in the preschool. A third team is at Los Angeles Elementary School, and the fourth is inside University High School. Go, Wildcats.” He paused for a small laugh. “If I don’t send a coded signal at the appropriate time, four bullets will be fired. Five, counting the first round I fire, which will be through your left kneecap.”

Kang collapsed into his chair, landed badly, and began sliding out onto the floor.

Mr. Priest made a disgusted noise. “Show a little self-respect, Doctor. Sit up like an adult.” He waited while Kang wrestled his slack and clumsy limbs into the chair. “That’s better. Now, I think even taking into account the degree of shock and anxiety you’re feeling right now, you can predict what’s coming next, yes? Indulge me, though. Tell me, just so I know your brain hasn’t actually shorted out. Why is this happening?”

It took a lot for Kang to say it, to organize it into a simple sentence, but even then it stalled as he tried to force it out. “You… you… you…”

“Take a breath, Doctor. That’s it. Now try again.”

It cost him so much. Tears sprang into his eyes. “You… want the nuclear reset codes to—”

“No. Try again. Think of something a bit more outré.”

Kang’s eyes brightened as he understood, but then he frowned. “The book code? This is about that silly book code?”

Priest smiled. “Very well done. Yes, I want the book code. I want, in fact, access to your computer here, since it has the administrative authority to access any project. Who knows what other delicious things I will find? You’ve done considerable work for Dr. San Pedro and Dr. Erskine, I believe? Yes? Then I want everything connected with them, no matter how small or tangential.”

The tears began rolling down Kang’s cheeks. “Please don’t hurt my family.”

“That is entirely up to you. If you do what I want, absolutely nothing will happen to them. And just to comfort you, here is how it will play out. You log me in, I do what I came here to do, then I leave. You will sit here and do absolutely nothing for one hour. You won’t answer the phone, you won’t make any calls, you will not touch a single key on your computer. Those are the rules, and believe me that I will know if you break any of those rules. At the end of one hour I will call you on this.” Mr. Priest produced a small disposable phone and placed it in the center of Kang’s desk blotter. “This is what we call a ‘burner.’ Untraceable. It has been configured to receive a single phone call. Once you get that call, I will tell you whether I need more time or if everything is all clear.”

“All clear—?”

“Yes. At that point you may ring all the alarms, call the authorities, and do what you like. At that point you will also know that the teams overseeing the welfare of your family have been withdrawn.”

“How… how…?”

“How do you know you can trust me?” Mr. Priest gave a small wave with his free hand. “Trust is such a difficult thing to ask, but I insist that you trust me.”

“How do I know you haven’t already…?” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence.

“You don’t. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? It’s all about trust, and you have no choice at all whether to trust me.” Mr. Priest reached into the side pocket of his trousers, removed a sound suppressor, and without hurry began screwing it onto the barrel of his gun. Kang sat there, tears rolling down his face, staring in dreadful fascination. When Mr. Priest was done he once more laid the pistol on his lap. “Shall we begin?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

Church and Bolton got into an argument about what to do next. Bolton wanted the book tested to see if invisible ink or some other kind of concealed text had been used. Church tried to convince him it was a waste of time. Violin looked absolutely devastated, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d fought and killed for this book, and she’d been hunted halfway around the world by Closers and the psychopaths from the Brotherhood. To find out that it was all for nothing crushed her. It also pissed her off. A lot.

I called Bug to try and get some news, but got nothing.

I saw Harry standing like a lost soul by the window and I went over to talk to him. “Hey,” I said, “buy you a cup of coffee?”

He looked down at the coffee cup he was already holding. “I…”

“Just an expression, kid. C’mon, let’s get some air.”

With only a flicker of doubtful reluctance he followed me out of the conference room and up to the back deck that overlooks the ocean. Harry Bolt did not look like a spy. He didn’t even look like the kind of spy who wasn’t supposed to look like a spy. At a distance he looked like a frat boy who’d had a few too many pizza and beer nights and too few afternoons at the gym. But at closer range you could see that there were some cracks in the shallow-rich-boy-jerk façade. There was a furtiveness in the eyes that spoke to a life spent dodging sharp criticism, and a sad resignation that I’ve seen in kids who know that they are disappointments. Some excitement because all of this was big, and a lot of the kind of fear a passenger has on a sinking ship; the kind of person who doesn’t know how to work the lifeboats and who’s sure he won’t make the cut for bench space on the boats being lowered into the water.

I could see all this and know it because I know people, but it wasn’t something to which I could directly relate. My dad had money and my brother, Sean, and I grew up in comfort. Not millionaire comfort, but definitely upper middle class. My dad is mayor of Baltimore, working through his second term. There is a lot of love, support, and respect flowing in all directions. Our Thanksgiving and Christmas family gatherings were fun, easy, without the usual kinds of infighting I often hear about. I’d expected Harcourt Bolton, Senior, to be as good a father as he was a role model, but what I’d witnessed a few minutes ago changed all that.

We were alone on the deck and we stood for a moment watching fleets of clouds sail majestically across the endless Pacific. We’d brought fresh cups of coffee up with us and Harry sipped his, looking up and out rather than at me.

“Sorry you had to see all that,” said Harry.

“Your dad was pretty rough on you.”

“You have no idea.” He stopped, shook his head. “Shit. Forget I said that. Everything’s fine, it’s all good.”

I turned and leaned against the rail, standing more squarely in his peripheral vision until he finally cut a sideways look at me.

“What?” he asked cautiously.

“Can I give you a nickel’s worth of free advice?” I asked. “One guy to another.”

“Let me guess, something like ‘man up’? Or one of those ‘that which does not kill us’ speeches? No offense, Captain Ledger, but I’ve heard a lot of those over the years. I get them all the time from my station chief. Or… well, I used to. He’s dead now.”

“Yeah, well that sucks, too. I didn’t know him,” I said. “I barely know you, and I only met your dad yesterday.”

“And yet you want to life coach me? This should be fun.” He gave me a tentative up-and-down appraisal. “My dad hates you. Did you know that?”

“Bullshit.”

“Hand to God. He’s been talking about you for a couple of years now.” Harry nodded toward the building. “You and what you do? The Department of Military Sciences. You’re the real deal. You are actual superstars in special ops and top-grade espionage. You’ve out-CIA’d the CIA by like… miles. There is no one in Washington who isn’t scared to death of Mr. Church. They all think he has files on them and on the president and that’s why he’s still in power. Everyone knows about MindReader and how it can intrude anywhere. They’re as afraid of that computer as they are of the Chinese Ghost Net and the North Korean hackers. You know what’s happened since word about MindReader got out? People — here and all through the world’s espionage communities — have switched back to verbal orders and paper records. That made my dad’s job a shit-ton harder because he relies so much on computers to keep his Mr. Voodoo vibe going. But you, Joe, you’re the real problem. You’re Dad’s boogeyman. You’re him thirty years ago. You’re what Dad hoped I’d be. That’s why I was born. I was his career equivalent of buying a midlife crisis sports car. He found a trophy wife and got her pregnant and when she gave birth to a son my dad went to work on trying to make me into Harcourt Bolton Two Point Oh. It’s all about the Bolton legacy. For thirty years he was the top spy. Not top ten or top five. The best. No one had a win record like his. Maybe Church did. He was a field operator, but all of the records of his operations have mysteriously vanished.” He fake-coughed and made it sound like “MindReader.” “When the DMS was formed I remember Dad going through a real shit-fit. He took it as a slap in the face that the president chartered the DMS and gave it the autonomy to pick its cases and even cherry-pick jobs away from the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, ATF, and NSA. I remember Dad saying how unfair it was. How it was a betrayal after giving America the best years of his life.”

I said nothing. Pretty sure that henceforth the dictionary entry for “dumbfounded” just shows a picture of my slack-jawed face. Harry nodded, though, as if I had spoken.

“Yeah, the DMS came at the wrong time. Dad was starting to lose his swing. He may know more about being a spy than anyone, maybe even more than Mr. Church. But James Bond versus the villain’s hollowed-out volcano fights aren’t really for middle-aged knees and middle-aged reflexes. Dad’s resentment started with the first real DMS superstar, Colonel Samson Riggs. Man oh man, Riggs came on the scene like a rocket. He was James Bond. Riggs worked two assignments with my dad and I’ll bet if you looked real close at the after-action reports you’ll see that it was Colonel Riggs who made the biggest plays. But because the DMS tends to step away from the spotlight, Dad got the commendation. You guys don’t give commendations, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not. Humility along with nobility,” laughed Harry. “That torqued Dad’s nuts even harder. Maybe you’re one of his cheerleaders, so this might all be coming out of left field, and you might be thinking this is a brat kid dissing his old man, but think again. I’m a fucking disgrace as a spy. I’m done, probably. I got nothing left to lose so I might as well tell the truth. Want to know what my dad did when he got the news that Samson Riggs was killed? He opened a seven-hundred-dollar bottle of French champagne. Didn’t offer me a glass. He sat in front of the fire and drank the whole thing. He never stopped smiling once.”

I couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe.

“And then,” said Harry, “you come along. You even look like Dad. Blond-haired, blue-eyed all-American boy with a good tan and laugh lines and all that hero shit. You could play Captain America. You are Captain fucking America. And now Dad’s older and he’s not a field op anymore. He sits at a desk and has to rely on his contacts and his network to keep putting numbers on the scoreboard. And, okay, so he’s making some big plays. Mr. Voodoo still has some magic, but how long can that last? He’s not out in the field making new contacts. His network has to be getting up there, too. Soon he’ll be yesterday’s news and he won’t be relevant and it’ll absolutely kill him. It’s already eating at him. He’s always taking naps, and my therapist tells me that’s a sign of depression. You sleep to run away. Well, Dad’s taking a lot of goddamn naps, because he’s scared.”

“You are absolutely out of your mind,” I said, finally finding my voice. “I’m just not that impressive. I’m a grunt with good aim.”’

Harry Bolt laughed. A harsh, bitter laugh. “God, you don’t even know, do you? You might actually be that humble or that focused on the prize that you don’t know what people in the intelligence community are saying about you. After the Jakobys? After the Seven Kings? After Majestic? Oh, don’t look surprised. The public may not know who scored those touchdowns, but the intelligence community knows. The DMS was on the clock, and in most of those big wins you were running the touchdown plays. You. Joe Ledger, superjock.”

I drank most of the coffee in my cup without tasting it. “Your dad and I are friends. We respect each other.”

Harry dumped his coffee over the rail. “For a guy who’s supposed to be sharp you are kind of a dumbass.”

He gave me a mock salute and went back inside.

I stayed out there and watched the clouds. Before, they were a gorgeous fleet of magical ships sailing across the sky. Now, like the old song said, they only blocked the sun.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Mr. Priest made Dr. Kang stand in the corner like a naughty little child. He did this after Kang had gone through the complex log-in procedures, which included a phone call to the security officer to give that day’s code. Then Mr. Priest had the scientist remove his cell phone and then turn to face the corner, hands deep in his pockets.

“If you turn around or speak even a single word,” said Mr. Priest, “I will have one of your children shot in the stomach. You’re not a field operative and have never served in combat, but I’m sure you’ve heard stories about the degree of pain associated with a stomach wound of that severity. It’s a slow death marked by unimaginable suffering, though I’m sure you will be able to imagine everything.”

Kang was too terrified to even nod.

Mr. Priest smiled. “Very well. Now do as you’re told. I don’t even want to hear you breathing loud. I have important work to do and need to concentrate.”

Twenty minutes later Mr. Priest sat back from the keyboard and turned to Kang.

“Good lord, man, did you just piss your pants? You did. You’re standing in a puddle of it.” Mr. Priest shook his head in disgust. “Some people have no self-respect.”

He went back to his work.

Downloading the files was time-consuming because they were so large and because there were so many of them. There were only twenty-six project files of interest to him — those for which he already had buyers — but Priest wanted to take all of the active R & D files from the last five years. That would confuse the computer forensic techs who would be assigned to determine the purpose of this theft.

To facilitate the theft he’d brought six ultrahigh-capacity external drives and the necessary cables. He also used the military intranet to transfer large portions of it, routing them to 111 dummy mailboxes he’d created over the last three years. Those e-mail addresses recoded everything and bounced them out to hundreds of other e-mail accounts around the globe. At each step the data would be coded again and again until not even a superintrusion computer like the Department of Military Science’s MindReader could tag it as being what it was. Mr. Priest had spent millions to hire the very best hackers to build his network.

That data would eventually come home to Mr. Priest’s private mainframes, the six Titan supercomputers he’d acquired through many removes from a friend in Russia. That computer, Zarathustra, was protected against all forms of invasion. Mr. Priest had even tested that claim by running programs filled with the kinds of keywords that would attract MindReader. After fifteen months of dangling bait in the water, Mr. Priest was convinced Zarathustra was impregnable.

He paused in his work and sniffed, wondering if Kang had gone another step down into personal degradation, but he shook his head. The man’s bowels were still clutched tight. Good; that would be so unpleasant.

When the process was done, Mr. Priest removed the cables and stowed the drives back into his briefcase. Then he removed another external drive, plugged that in, and sat back, rubbing his tired eyes. The screen display on Kang’s desk flashed with a status bar. The four-hundred-gigabyte Trojan horse was uploading quickly. He appreciated the speed and sophistication of Kang’s computers.

Finally Mr. Priest stood, leaving that last drive in place.

He came over and stood directly behind Kang, careful, though, not to step in the puddle of urine around the man’s expensive shoes.

“Listen carefully now, my friend,” he said quietly. “You know the terms of our agreement. You know what will happen if you break your promises. I’m leaving now. You will sit at your desk and wait for my call. You will not touch the external drive that’s plugged into your computer. If you even touch it, I’ll know. I’ll get a signal and so will my field teams. And you don’t want that, now, do you?”

Again, Kang was too terrified to speak.

Mr. Priest patted him on the shoulder.

“Good-bye, Dr. Kang. Here’s hoping the day ends well for both of us.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

The Mullah sat in his tent and ate chicken and lentils while the men around him argued. This was a difficult meeting. An important one, because these men had brought old hatreds with them to the Mullah’s tent. These were men who had sworn death threats against others seated nearby. No one had been allowed to bring a weapon with them. Only the Mullah’s men had guns. Each of the others had ten hand-picked men outside, seated on the ground under palm trees. They had been instructed to read the same key passages of the Koran and to talk only among themselves. They were told that it would be a great sin against God to break the temporary truce the Mullah had called for. The men obeyed, but they glared their hatred at the others who sat only yards away.

Inside the tent, the Mullah listened to representatives of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. There were Sunnis here seated next to Shiites. There were leaders whose tribal conflicts were numbered in centuries. It was a gathering many of these men and all the rest of the world said was impossible, even unthinkable.

The Mullah had greeted them all as brothers. Seating was arranged by lottery, with no one receiving favored placement. Even the Mullah had drawn a colored stone from a bowl to receive his place.

When he was done eating, the Mullah set aside his food, washed his hands and face. Then he led them all in a carefully chosen prayer, one that had been selected because it did not play into any sectarian ideology but simply worshiped God. When this was done, he asked permission from the group to turn on his laptop computer. They agreed, though some were very cautious and uncertain.

Akbar brought the machine and placed it on a small table beside the Mullah. The old man turned it on and brought up a news update from Houston, Texas. It showed the mountains of rubble of what had once been a hotel a few weeks ago. Towers of work lights had been erected and crews of emergency personnel were picking through the debris while the voice of a reporter said that there were still forty-seven people missing and presumed dead. Rescue workers had found parts of another thirty-two. All of the other dead had long since been removed.

“You see this?” asked the Mullah. “Do you see how much damage has been done to our enemy?”

The others nodded. Many of them eyed him with suspicion or anticipation. The Mullah smiled and placed his hand over the screen.

“I did this,” he said.

There was a moment of dead silence.

Then everyone began yelling. Shouts of praise, harsh denials, accusations, and even threats. The Mullah let it all wash over him. Finally it was his calm lack of response that quieted the tent. They fell silent one by one, and he nodded to each man as they did so.

“Of course you do not believe me,” he said, still smiling. “Why would you? Anyone can point to an event and say, ‘I did that.’ We have in the past, each in our several groups. It is a tool of fear and confusion, and they are both arrows in our quiver.”

No comments, merely silence and a few nods.

“I do not ask that you believe an old man when he makes what appears to be a wild claim. I would never insult you in such a way, my brothers. It would be unseemly.”

A few more nods, but the men seemed to be ready for a trick.

“It is out of my respect for each of you and for all of us in our beliefs that I do not ask for trust but instead offer proof.”

One of the men spoke up at last, a Taliban warlord who had fought at times with and against the Americans and whose father had died fighting the Russians. He said, “What proof is this?”

“Before I show you, my brother, I want to explain why we have not openly declared the attack on Houston to be part of our jihad.” The Mullah gazed around, fixing each man in turn with a serious, penetrating look. “Some of you are here because you are already part of our new caliphate. Others, I believe, have come because you heard the rumors. Speculations in the world media and whispers from the mouths of our own people. You have heard of the Mullah of the Black Tent. You know that I have, because of the grace and guidance of God, directed our forces toward making greater gains and also helped them evade reprisals from our enemies.”

A few nods, some reluctant.

“And some of you are here because you want to know if, in fact, the army of the caliphate has done this great thing.” He nodded, his smile never fading. “Now you are here and you watch an old man eat chicken and show you pretty pictures on a computer. You hear an old fool make claims and you wonder — Is this a trap? Is this a joke? Is this worth the risks you took when coming here?”

“Of course we wonder those things,” said the warlord. “We are not starry-eyed children. We are men who are fighting a war, and as such we do not have time to waste on fantasies and false claims.”

That caused a sudden buzz of argument, but the Mullah raised his hand to call for peace. It fell, slowly and awkwardly.

“There is a saying that one picture is worth a thousand words,” said the Mullah. “So, let me show you something beautiful.”

He tapped a few keys on the laptop and the image of Houston vanished to be replaced by a military base. The image wobbled but it was clear.

“This is Fort Rucker army base in Dale County, Alabama. That is in the southern part of the United States. It is home to the First Aviation Brigade under the command of Brigadier General Michael Lundy. Between military personnel, civilian employees, and families, there are five thousand people on the base. The United States Army Aviation Center of Excellence is located there. Many of the their military policies and procedures that are used against our people are developed there. This is a crucial place. A key target, but one that is unapproachable. This image is from a pigeon drone, but before you ask, the drone is not armed with explosives. It is there to give us a bird’s-eye view, if you will pardon the small joke.”

No one smiled.

As the bird flew, its camera’s eyes showed men and women training, vehicles moving, a Chinook helicopter airlifting a large air-conditioner unit to the top of a building that was under construction.

“The people on this base feel safe,” said the Mullah. “They have numbers, they have gates and guards, they have their training, and we have to accept that their training is second to none. They have advanced technology and they have so many weapons and resources. We are like peasants throwing stones.” He shook his head. “But what if we could reach out and, as if with the hand of God, switch off their lights, still their engines, drop their planes from the sky, silence their communications, darken their nights? What if the great thing that happened in Houston was no fluke? What if it was us? What if this is something we could do at any time? What if we held that power?”

The warlord was the only person who seemed able to speak. “Are you saying that you could do that to a military base in their own country?”

“Yes.”

“Prove it,” challenged the warlord. “I will go back to my people and we will watch the news and we will see if you are a lying old fool or—”

And on the screen all of the power at Fort Rucker went out. The big Chinook suddenly jerked as the rotors died. The machine fell like a dead bird. All across the base the lights went out, the vehicles rolled to slow stops, the people turned, and looked around, and yelled. Some of them screamed. The sound of the crashing Chinook rolled like thunder across the base.

The gathered men cried out in surprise. Some of them leapt to their feet.

The Mullah sat there, smiling.

“And now we give them back a shred of hope,” said the Mullah. On the screen the lights came back on. The engines started up. Sirens began to wail, and only they were loud enough to drown out the screams. “And with hope comes doubt. It is the survivors of a catastrophe who are the victims, for they have seen the face of death and they know it can take them at any time. They will never be free of the memory and the fear for the rest of their lives.”

The warlord wiped spit from his mouth with a trembling hand. “This is how we will win this war. This is the sword of God.”

But the Mullah shook his head. “No, my brother, this is the gun.”

He reached over and tapped keys to change the image. Instead of a view of burning carnage it showed a pair of men dressed in white hazmat suits. They stood in a small, poorly equipped laboratory. As the gathered fighters watched, one of them used an oversized syringe to draw biological transport medium from a heavy vial and inject it into a small device. He repeated the process over and over again until he had emptied all of the metal vials and filled the receptacles on several dozen small but identical devices. Then he and the second man went down the line and closed the lids, forcing them down hard against the springs. As each lid closed a small magnetic lock clicked into place and a green safety light flicked on.

The metal vials were each stamped with the international biohazard symbol.

“And this, my friends,” said the Mullah softly, “is the bullet.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

We sat in horrified silence, watching it all unfold on the screen.

Church and Violin, Harry Bolt and me. The death toll at Rucker was small when compared to Houston, but incalculable when measured against the destroyed lives of each of those servicemen and women.

“We interrupt our full team coverage of the tragedy at Fort Rucker,” said the reporter for the NBC affiliate. “I am told that we have received a statement from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. We are going to play it live. Please be cautioned that we have not had an opportunity to preview this statement.”

The anchor’s grim face was replaced by a good-quality video of a man in a black turban with dark eyes surrounded by wrinkled flesh. His nose and mouth were covered by a black scarf and the flag of ISIL was hung on the wall behind him.

Church hit the Record button.

“I speak to you now as the voice of jihad,” he said, speaking in perfect English. “I speak to you as a mujahedeen, a soldier of God. I speak to you as the voice of the new and eternal caliphate. I speak to you now to tell you that we will no longer accept interference with our culture, our people, our nations, and our faith. You may not have our oil. You may not rape our lands. You may not, with impunity, invade our countries and slaughter our people. That time has ended. God has reached out his mighty hand and drawn the curtain to cast you into darkness. You have seen this. You have cried out in that darkness and wondered why? How? Who?” He held up a finger and wagged it back and forth, the way a teacher might scold a naughty schoolboy. “A great darkness is coming. Ten of your cities will fall into hell. There is nothing you will be able to do to stop this because it is impossible to oppose the will of God. All that you can do is fall onto your knees and pray for forgiveness. You have declared war on the lands and the people and the one true faith. You and your children will pay for your sins. Darkness will fall. Darkness will fall.”

The camera lingered on his eyes for several silent seconds, and it struck me that the man looked dazed, or stoned. Or something. As he’d spoken there was no flicker in those eyes. We could see his mouth move even beneath the scarf, but the eyes were like those of a mannequin. No expression, no flaring as he made his threats. No life.

The video feed ended and the anchor came back and in contrast the gleam in his eyes was equal parts stark terror and dawning realization that this was possibly the biggest moment of his career.

Church replayed the video.

When it was over, Violin said, “The Mullah of the Black Tent. God. ISIL has owned the Houston and Rucker attacks. They’ve just declared open war on the United States.”

“He mentioned the children,” I said, my voice thick, my head filled with hornets. “Jesus Christ, Church, he has the SX-56 and he’s going to use the Kill Switch to hit us with it.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

The call came fifty-eight minutes after Mr. Priest left Dr. Kang’s office. During every second of those fifty-eight minutes Kang sat stock-still at his desk, his hands gripped like vises around the arms of his chair. He was too terrified to move despite the sodden stink in his trousers. The digital numbers on his desk clock had stubbornly refused to hurry through what felt like a thousand years of waiting.

When the burner rang, Kang screamed.

Very loud.

There was no one in the outer office to hear the scream. Mr. Priest had — either by luck or design — chosen a day when Kang’s secretary was out sick.

The ring was not particularly loud, but it shattered the silence in Kang’s office.

Kang snatched it up and then froze again, caught in the horrible indecision of wanting to hear that his family was unharmed and dreading a message to the contrary.

It rang again.

And again.

Then he began stabbing at the green button with numb and trembling fingers. Punched it on and then nearly ended the call. Finally he clumsied it to his ear.

“Yes, yes… are they all right? Please?”

“Dr. Kang,” said the smooth, familiar voice of Mr. Priest, “I appreciate your courtesy and cooperation. You are now free to do as you please. And rest assured, your family is safe.”

“You motherfucker, I’ll—”

“Shhh, Doctor. You’ve come up from the underworld, but don’t assume that you will ever be entirely in the upper world. Now is not the time to turn and look for Eurydice. She is as safe as anyone ever is in such a world as this.”

The reference to the myth of Orpheus was not lost on Kang, even with so much stress burning its way through him. “Orpheus” was the code name for one of the major defense projects in the databanks he had allowed Mr. Priest to plunder. One of many.

“You promised to leave them alone,” growled Kang. “You promised not to hurt them.”

“And I haven’t,” said Mr. Priest. “Good-bye, Dr. Kang. It has been a genuine pleasure.”

The line went dead.

For a terrible moment Kang did not know whom to call first. His wife or the security office.

He called his wife. She answered on the second ring. Kang almost screamed. He told her to get the kids and get out of the house, to come here to the lab, to do it right away.

Kang hung up before she could ask any questions. Then he called his control officer at the Department of Defense.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Harcourt Bolton came hurrying into the conference room.

“Christ!” he yelled. “Did you see it? Did you see that damn thing?”

“We saw it,” I said.

“I’ve been on the phone with the president,” he gasped, breathless from running from his office. “I assured POTUS that we have local teams inbound. Jerry Spencer and his forensics people are on their way, too.”

Church gave him a long, appraising look, but his only response was a small nod.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, standing up. “Echo is ready to rock.”

Bolton looked embarrassed and didn’t meet my eyes. “Captain Ledger… Joe… I think I’d rather have you here for, um, tactical support.”

It was awkward and clumsy. He did not come right out and say that he did not have confidence in me or in Echo Team, but it was right there burning in the air.

“If you saw the whole thing, Bolton, then you have to know they have the smallpox bioweapon. We need to move on this.”

“We are,” said Bolton, and he leaned a little too hard on the word “we.”

“What he’s trying to tell you, Captain,” Church said quietly, “is that this is still not our case.”

“Bullshit,” I snarled. “You’re using our people. My people. That makes it my case.”

“Look, Joe,” said Bolton, “I’m sorry, but the president was very clear on this. I can use DMS resources, and I’m happy to do so, but the Central Intelligence has operational control.”

“Then use me as a liaison.”

“I… can’t…,” said Bolton. He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, but after Gateway, POTUS doesn’t want you in play on anything this sensitive.”

I slapped his hand away. “This is bullshit and you know it. You’re treating Gateway like it was a failure. We shut down a bioweapons program that had gone off the rails and killed the whole staff. We kept it from getting off the leash. And now we’ve proven that Gateway is tied to Majestic. And that they were developing a psychic spy program that Central Intelligence said wouldn’t work. We’ve proven that there are Closers in the field trying to locate more Majestic materials. We’re close to locating the sequencing code to the machine that controls the Kill Switch technology.” I pointed to the screen, where they were rerunning the message from the Mullah of the Black Tent. “Maybe that master code sequence could allow us to stop this shit. Did you think of that? We’re closing in on it. Us, the D-fucking-MS. Not the C-fucking-IA. We’re already doing our jobs, Harcourt. What have you and your Agency boys done that’s worth a shit? Nothing. How can you bench us now?”

Bolton’s face slowly transformed from a look of embarrassed concern to a scowl of red-hot anger. He got up in my face, stepping toward me. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Captain Ledger? I’ve been trying to be civil with you and the rest of the screwups around here, but quite frankly my patience is wearing thin. I’ve run interference for you and you want to throw it in my face? You are every bit as arrogant and pigheaded as everyone says. You think you’re a superhero, don’t you, Ledger? You think you’re the new face of government service, the top of the game, but you know what? You’re a thug who gets lucky sometimes. That’s it. You got too many people inside your head and none of them have any real chance of solving this thing. So, take it from someone who actually knows what he’s doing and stand down.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you, old man. You may have been hot shit once upon a time, but then right around the time you started losing your swing, early humans invented the wheel and you got left behind. And—”

He shoved me.

A really good, incredibly fast two-handed shove to the chest that sent me sailing backward. I lost my footing and fell, hard and clumsy. I scrambled to my feet but Violin and Harry were already up. The kid caught her arm as she went to swing on Bolton, but then Church’s voice cut through everything.

“Enough!” he roared.

Everyone froze.

Church came around the table, hooked a hand under my arm, and hauled me to my feet. He was not gentle about it. Then he put one hand on Harry’s arm and the other on Violin’s shoulder and pushed them to the side so he could face Bolton. Bolton and Church were about the same size, they looked like they were the same age, and I knew they both had years and wars behind them. Bolton stood with balled fists, ready to swing. I thought he was going to hit Church. Or try to, anyway.

In a quiet, cold voice Church said, “I think it would be in everyone’s best interests if you were to go attend to your duties, Harcourt.”

Bolton fixed Church with a look of pure, unfiltered contempt.

“You run a sloppy shop, Deacon. Maybe it’s time you thought seriously about getting out of the game.”

Church nodded. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

They held their ground for a long moment. Any trace of civility and affability was gone from Bolton’s face. He looked at Violin and dismissed her as nothing, and his eyes swept past Harry as if the kid wasn’t even there. Bolton focused on me and raised a finger to point at me. “You’re done, Ledger. You’re a psychopath and it was a mistake to ever give you a job here. Consider yourself relieved of duty. You and your team are to turn in your badges and weapons. Security will escort you out. If you have a lawyer, I’d call him, because we will be filing charges for negligence and wanton destruction of government property because of what you did to Gateway.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I ever tried to be nice to you.”

Then he turned, whipped the door open so hard it banged into the wall, and stalked out.

Violin wanted to go after him. I saw her touch one of the concealed knives she always carried. I wanted to either shoot Bolton or throw myself out of the window. Even split. Poor Harry Bolt looked like he either wanted to run away or cry. He was deeply embarrassed. He sat down on one of the chairs and looked at his hands, and said nothing. Church had a calculating look in his eyes as he walked over and sat down.

My phone rang. Bug.

“What?” I asked listlessly.

“I got something, Joe,” he said, his voice charged with excitement.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Bug laid it on us. I put him on speaker so they could all hear. Mr. Priest, aka Esteban Santoro, the Gateway book sequence decryption, the coercion. All of it.

“Wait, I’m confused. Why would this guy Priest or Santoro or whatever his name is need to steal it?” asked Harry. “Isn’t he part of Gateway?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” I said. “He’s running the Closers who raided FreeTech and hit Toys’s place last night. And the crew that was at San Pedro’s office. If I had to guess, he got left out in the cold when everything went to shit down at Gateway. Maybe he’s freelance or maybe his contract has been picked up by someone else who’s now after the Kill Switch master code sequence.”

“The latter would be my guess,” said Church.

“Dr. Hu thinks there has to be some kind of master control unit,” said Bug. “Maybe it’s a full-sized God Machine like they had down at Gateway. Hu thinks the master code sequence would allow that machine to interface with all the others. That way one person would have control over a fully functional and fully regulated process.”

“Who?” asked Harry. “This Mullah character?”

“I suppose,” said Bug. “I mean, who else? Everyone at Gateway is dead. And I don’t read this Priest guy as brains. He’s muscle.”

“Agreed,” said Church.

“Then the code sequence is our target,” I said. “We need to find Priest and get it from him, and it would be nice if he resisted arrest.”

Church got up and went to a quiet corner of the room to make a call. He spoke for several minutes. When he was done he turned and stood there, lips pursed, thinking for a long moment. “I spoke with Dr. Kang. He did not personally work on the master code sequence from the Unlearnable Books, so he put the project supervisor who did on the line. After scanning and collating the pages from each of the Unlearnable Truths, a numerical pattern did, in fact, emerge. The numbers are coordinates.”

“Coordinates for targets?” I asked. “We can put teams in position and—”

Church shook his head. “They are coordinates for three stars as seen from Antarctica. The Large Magellanic Cloud, Sirius, and Alpha Centauri. If you calculate their positions, you come up with set numbers. The Large Magellanic Cloud is fifty-seven degrees altitude, azimuth one hundred ninety degrees. For Sirius you have six degrees of altitude and two hundred and sixteen degrees of azimuth. And Alpha Centauri is seventy degrees of altitude and three hundred twenty-one degrees azimuth.” Church paused. “However, if we can place any stock at all in the writings of Lovecraft — and so far his work, however fantastical it may appear, seems to be our most reliable source — it indicates that the builders of that city arrived there one billion years ago. References in two of the Unlearnable Truths pin the time down to within half a million years. This changes things considerably. The Large Magellanic Cloud would be altitude sixty-three degrees and two hundred seventy-three degrees azimuth, Sirius would be fifty-two degrees altitude and one hundred thirty-five degrees azimuth, and Alpha Centauri would be thirteen degrees altitude, two hundred sixty-eight degrees azimuth. These are the local coordinates; what you would see by eye, looking up. Astronomers use a different set of coordinates to plug into our telescopes and map the sky. Right ascension and declination. These coordinates are not dependent on location, but are dependent on time. And we have those, as well.” He read off the numbers. “The first set, however, matches the code lifted from the Unlearnable Truths by Dr. Kang.”

“Then we have the code,” gasped Violin. A great smile bloomed on her face.

“But… we don’t know where the God Machine is,” said Harry. “Jesus… we’re screwed.”

“Santoro’s on the run,” I said. “He knows we’re going to be on his ass. If he’s as smart as he’s supposed to be he’ll figure we’ll be throwing a net and putting eyes on roads, trains, airports, boats. That’s going to slow him down. Even if he slips past us, he’s not going to do it fast. And then the code has to be input and his team has to coordinate with the ISIL dickheads. We might have two or three days before they hit us.”

“Can we shut down all the airports?” asked Violin. “Minimize the potential damage?”

“I’ll speak to the president,” said Church.

“Good luck with that,” I said, “but I need to run Santoro down and get that code. If he’s in L.A., then I need to be there.”

“My dad just grounded you,” said Harry weakly.

Church picked up his phone and called Brick. “I want you to locate Director Bolton. He’s in his office? You’re sure? Good. Prep Captain Ledger’s helo. Do it as quietly as possible. If anyone asks, it’s for me and I’m heading to the airport to fly back to New York No, that’s a cover. Have Bird Dog on board with a full field kit. I want it fueled and smoking in five. Contact any Echo Team members currently in the building and have them meet the captain on the roof. We’re going off the reservation. Thank you, Brick.”

Church turned to me. “I’ll reroute ops from here to the Hangar. Bug can hack into CCTV to try and locate Priest.”

I smiled, and maybe in the back of my head I heard the Killer turn over in his sleep. “You trust me to do this?”

“I never lost faith in you, Captain.”

Violin said, “Wait, what about me?”

Church smiled. “I have something else I’d like you to do.”

Harry Bolt looked very much like the fifth wheel he was. “Okay… well, what about me?”

I walked over to him. “A lot of that will depend on whose side you’re on. Your dad seems to want to tear the DMS down. Maybe you hit the nail on the head when you said he was jealous. Whatever. He’s going to drag his feet and play this wrong and a lot of people are going to die. So, ask yourself, kid, where do you think you fit?”

There were a lot of ways Harry Bolt could have played it. He was a schlub, so he could play dumb and sit it out. He was CIA, so he could side with the home team. He was Harcourt Bolton’s son, so maybe blood was thicker than water.

He straightened and although he was seven or eight inches shorter than me he did his best to look me in the eye.

“My father’s wrong,” he said.

“So where does that put you?”

His gaze shifted from me, to Church, and then settled on Violin. She gave him the kind of smile I’d only ever seen her give to me. Once upon a time. It jolted me.

Then Harry Bolt looked at me again and held out his hand. “Good hunting, Joe.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

“There they are,” whispered Bunny.

He eased away from the narrow slot in the curtains so I could take a look. We were in the marina office. Bunny, Top, and me, each of us dressed in black BDUs and balaclavas. We were the only field agents at the Pier when the call came in.

“We can take them right now,” said Top. He had his Heckler & Koch HK416 in his hands, the barrel lowered, finger laid along the curve of the trigger guard. The effective range of the HK416 is four hundred yards. The cluster of men was less than fifty feet from where we crouched. If I gave the word, Top would send them to Jesus without so much as a flicker. “Say the word, Cap’n, and we can all clock out early.”

There were seven men on the dock. All dressed in boating clothes, or some approximation of them. Shorts, boat shoes, Polo shirts or lightweight Windbreakers. One of them wore a Hawaiian shirt with brightly colored tropical fish on it. Sunglasses and ball caps. Looking like people who belonged among all these expensive seagoing play toys. Looking ordinary. They didn’t look like Closers.

“Not until we’re sure,” I murmured. We were all killers, but we were soldiers, not assassins.

Dr. Kang’s report was that Priest had exited the building carrying a metal briefcase in which were several portable high-capacity external drives. One with the scans of the Unlearnable Truths and the master code sequence Kang’s people had interpolated from the books; and several others with lots of information related to projects owned by either Erskine or San Pedro. None of them, according to Kang, said either “Majestic” or “Gateway” on them. Nothing labeled “Kill Switch,” “God Machine,” or “Dreamwalking,” either. We didn’t know what the data was, but we damn sure didn’t want it to get into the hands of whoever was behind all of this. ISIL or someone else. My guess was that it was going to be “someone else,” and I was beginning to get a nasty idea of how this was all being managed.

Priest’s photo had been fed into the facial recognition feeds of security cameras all over this part of California, with MindReader interpreting the data. The target used some of the most devious tricks in the evil bad guy playbook to avoid capture and make it from Los Angeles all the way down to the marina here in Oceanside. By car in good traffic that’s two hours, but when you’re trying not to get arrested and sent to Gitmo it can take a lot longer. In this case five and a half hours, with long heart-stopping gaps when we all thought he’d slipped the leash.

If that happened, and the Mullah or whoever was in control of Kill Switch got their hands on that control code, then America was going to experience a new Dark Age. And if our worst fears were realized, inside that darkness the SX-56 pathogen was going to spread every bit as aggressively as the Black Plague had, as the Spanish flu had. Why? Because every aspect of emergency response, from cops to doctors, depended on electricity. Shutting off the lights would give us no chance to get in front of the bioweapon. So, yeah, I almost told Top to take the shot.

Almost.

But we needed the drives and we needed to ask questions and you can’t ask those questions of a corpse. I wanted a name and I was damn sure Mr. Priest — Esteban Santoro — was going to want to tell me. I planned to ask very nicely. In a manner of speaking, “nicely” being a relative term. I am not a fan of torture, but these bastards wanted to kills thousands — perhaps millions — of children. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to prevent that from happening. Nothing.

I kept expecting the Killer in my soul to roar out his blood challenge. He was the ultimate protector of the innocent because to his primitive sense of survival, the young were a guarantee that the tribe would survive. You had to protect them, and I remember the things that part of me has done when the bad guys have targeted kids. Those memories will haunt me until I die. Letting those children die, though, would kill me.

We’d arrived at the dock in a boat belonging to a close friend of Mr. Church. It was a very expensive XSR high-velocity speedboat. If this came to a sea chase we had a clear edge.

“Call the play, Boss,” murmured Bunny. He had an AA-12 drum-fed shotgun. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny is working out some issues. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.”

“We need him with a pulse,” I said. “No one’s clocking out until we get those drives, feel me?”

“Hooah,” said Bunny, the disappointment clear in his voice.

“Hooah,” said Top, his tone more workmanlike and philosophical.

I tapped my earbud to get the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon,” said the voice in my ear. Mr. Church was in one of our mobile tactical operations vehicles, with all communications routed to him rather than through the Pier. “Give me a sitrep.”

“Target is acquired,” I said. “Santoro plus six. We are about to make our run.”

“Do you have eyes on the package?”

I began to say no, but then another man came walking along the dock with something tucked under his arm. He stopped in front of Santoro, his back to me so that what they were doing was briefly obscured. I heard a faint murmur of conversation and when he stepped aside I saw that Santoro now gripped the handle of a small waterproof black plastic case. They must have transferred the drives to something safer for boat travel.

“That is affirmative,” I said. “I have eyes on the package. Repeat, I have eyes on the package.”

“Copy that. Bring it home.”

“Roger that,” I said.

I moved away from the window and knelt on the far side of the door. Top took up station beside the door and Bunny squatted like a linebacker.

We counted down and moved.

Top opened the door quickly and we went out. I went left, Top went right, and Bunny moved straight toward the men. The gas dock was wood and concrete, with three benches, a trash can, and a long row of fuel pumps stationed at the ends of a line of finger piers. There were several boats in slips, their bumpers nudging the dock in the mild swell. A dockhand was swiping the credit card of one of Santoro’s men. Nice that they were paying for the gas. Made it almost seem like they were ordinary citizens.

Almost.

We moved instantly into concealed shooting positions before the bad guys could turn and draw their weapons. We yelled real damn loud. “Federal agents! Hands on your heads. Get down on your knees with your hands on your heads or we will kill you.”

Santoro turned toward us. Slow. Without hurry, without much surprise. His expression was on the amused side of bland, his body language calm. He gave us the kind of look you’d expect to see on someone like… well, on someone like me. But only when I was being fronted by a pack of cranky Cub Scouts. He looked at us as if we were expected though unwanted.

“Let me see if I can guess,” he said, his voice a soft and cultured baritone. “Not FBI. Not NSA, either. So who are you? Definitely not SEALs.” He nodded toward Top. “You’re too old.” At Bunny. “You’re too big.”

“And I’m too charming,” I said. “Put your hands on your head, asshole, and get down on your fucking knees.”

His eyes clicked toward me. “Ah,” he murmured, “now I know who you are. Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger. The Deacon’s pet scorpion. I believe you knew my brother. What a pleasure.” He glanced again at my guys. “Top Sims and Bunny Rabbit. Your right and left hands. The two cornerstones of Echo Team. I’ve heard some interesting reports about you fellows.”

“You read anywhere that we’re known for taking bullshit? No? Then get down on your knees and keep your hands where I can see them or I will kill you.”

The rest of Santoro’s team was still frozen where they were, and right then they looked more like confused bystanders than a crack team of henchmen. There was a glazed look in their eyes. Not exactly blank, but off somehow. Like nobody was home. That sent a chill up my spine.

Santoro looked at me. His eyes were sharper than the others’, more intense. On the docks and in some of the boats people were watching. Scared, surprised, and fascinated despite the presence of big men with guns.

“You can’t kill us all,” he said.

I shifted my aim downward, confident that I could put one through his thigh without endangering the onlookers. We had them dead to rights. We were holding every card.

It was perfect.

Absolutely perfect.

Which is when it all went wrong.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Bunny yelled, “On your six!”

I spun and had a millionth of a second’s peripheral vision warning as someone swung a boat paddle at me. It was light aluminum with a plastic blade, but it hit like a Louisville Slugger. My gun went flying, hit the deck, bounced once and hit our borrowed XSR, and then dropped like a stone into the salt water. I spun and blocked a second swing, caught the oar with my other hand, snapped out a low kick, and as my heel smashed his knee to junk I saw with mingled shock and horror that my attacker was the sixty-year-old dockmaster. He screamed and collapsed against one of the pumps, clawing at the ruin of his knee.

I whirled toward Santoro, who had spun around and was running flat out for one of the boats moored to the dock. A slate-gray Picuda that was two slips down from the big XSR that we’d come in. Santoro tossed the briefcase into the boat and jumped after it.

His crew was still standing where they’d been, hands half-raised, eyes blank as zombies’.

“He’s mine,” I snapped, and pelted after him. But I got maybe six steps before another figure rushed out of nowhere and attacked me.

Wasn’t one of Santoro’s goons. Wasn’t the crippled dockmaster, either.

It was a teenage girl. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, dressed in flowered shorts and a bikini top, sunglasses, and a cute straw sun hat. She had no gun, no oar, no weapon except a cell phone, but she did her level best to brain me with it.

Yeah. A kid. With a cell phone. The day had already tilted sideways and now it was sliding down the rabbit hole.

I slap-parried the swing, which was surprisingly fast and skillful for a kid, and I backhanded her across the mouth. Blood flew from her mashed lips and the force spun her halfway around, but instead of falling down dazed and weeping, she used the momentum of her turn to fire off one hell of a kick. A short, chopping side snap with the blade of her right foot. I bent my knee and took it on the big muscles of my thigh, then when she tried to rechamber for a second attack I swept her standing leg. She went down hard enough for her head to bonk on the hard surface of the dock. That turned her lights off for a moment and she fell over on her back.

I spun toward my quarry.

That’s when Santoro’s crew joined the fight. One moment they were statues with Top and Bunny holding guns on them, the next they swarmed at me. It was crazy. They didn’t go for my men. Just me. Three of them tackled me with all the force and aggression of defensive tackles at their own five-yard line. As we crashed down I heard the roar of Bunny’s shotgun. One of the men still standing was plucked off the ground as buckshot tore him to red rags. Almost in the same instant Top opened up with the HK416 and I heard the distinctive sound of hot rounds punching through living flesh.

No screams, though. Not a one. It was the same with the guys who’d piled on me. There were grunts of effort, but not a yell, not a curse. Nothing. All three of them were swinging wild, full-power punches, just like the surfer boys had done. Like Rudy had done. I wrapped my arms around my head and let them break their knuckles on my elbows and forearms. They went totally batshit, hitting each other as much as they were hitting me. Their eyes may have been dead but they fought with a frenzy that bordered on mania.

It’s nearly impossible to defend against that kind of assault. Even by defending I was getting hurt, and several times those wild punches had slipped through my defensive cage of bones. One shot caught me on the side of the head hard enough to fill the air around me with fireworks. I had to get out before they beat me to death. I roared and shoved upward with my hips, then twisted hard to one side like a bucking bronco. That tilted them and their combined weight dragged them sideways, and I helped by looping four fast, tight overhand lefts into shoulder and ear and side of neck. They crashed down and I kicked my way out, pivoted on my knees and started to come up, but the closest guy lunged at me, flopping forward like a dolphin trying to beach himself. He grabbed my ankle, hugged my whole foot to his chest, and tried to bite me.

Bite me.

So, yeah, I guess I lost it. You see, I’ve had people try to bite me before. Some living, some dead. It’s how I got into the DMS in the first place. I’ve fought infected walkers, I’ve fought genetically engineered Berserkers and Red Knights. I am not a fan of things that bite. My brain went into a different gear and I fell onto my hip so I could use both feet. My gun was long gone, lost during the ambush, but I didn’t need it for this. I drove my heel into the man’s face, flattening his nose, breaking teeth, smashing the jaw out of shape. The pain and damage I inflicted in under two seconds should have been enough to turn him into a dazed and screaming wreck.

That’s not what happened, though. Instead it seemed to galvanize him. He kept trying to bite my leg, and for one terrible moment those broken teeth clamped shut around my calf. The pain was immense. Absolutely fucking immense.

I sat up and drove my thumbs into his eyes, bursting them. His mouth opened. Not in pain, but to try for a better bite.

Jesus Christ.

I screamed at him as I clawed the rapid-release folding knife from its holster inside my right pocket. The short, wicked blade snapped into place with a flick of my wrist and then cut a red line across his throat. Blood sprayed me and the dock.

He tried one last bite, but he was fading. Finally. Fading and then gone.

I rolled away and ran on fingers and toes away from the others, aware of searing pain in my leg. No idea how bad it was. Not in terms of structural damage but in potential. Was he one of them? A walker, someone infected with a pathogen like seif al din? If so, had he broken the skin? Had his saliva gotten into the wound? Had I survived the moment only to become a zombie myself? Was this it?

As I turned to face the other men I saw everyone on the dock and it burned itself into my brain in a series of images. Not a tableau, but a collage of moving nightmare images.

Bunny was standing twenty feet from me, his big shotgun held in his hands as he fired at one of Santoro’s men who lay sprawled on the ground. Bunny stood there and fired blast after blast with the twelve gauge, the buckshot tearing into dead flesh, ripping it apart, destroying all semblance of humanity. Over and over and over again. And in Bunny’s eyes… I saw nothing. They were empty and glazed and his face was totally slack.

Nearby, Top was firing at the people along the dock.

Not the henchmen, but at everyone.

I saw an old woman fall.

Then a skateboarder.

“Top—noooooo!”

He ignored me, or didn’t hear me. I saw a young couple running with their baby. The father went down with five or six bullets in his thighs. The woman and the baby vanished out of sight behind the utility shed. I’m pretty sure she was bleeding, too. No way to tell about the baby. The expression on Top’s face was inhuman and his muscles stood out like he was carved out of volcanic rock. He strove against the weapon in his hands as if it fought him, as if it wanted to kill and he was losing the fight to stop it. The civilians on the dock and inside the boat screamed. Some of them. A few were down, clutching at red bullet wounds. Some were running away as fast as they could. The rest stood there with empty eyes and empty faces.

Between the crowd and Top was the row of boats. Santoro was untying the lines to free the Picuda. In five seconds he would be able to push off. If he got away, then whomever he worked for would have what they needed to launch a catastrophic plague. A doomsday weapon. But there were the people on the dock. Here, now. In immediate need. I was totally torn. Closer to me, the last two of his men rushed in, punching the air even though they weren’t yet within range.

It was all so insane. The Killer in my head had not awakened. He was not in this fight at all. Hesitation was going to get me and everyone killed, and I knew it.

I tried to run around them, to get to Santoro despite Top’s wild gunfire, but my feet felt sluggish, clumsy. I tripped and nearly fell into the two henchmen. They threw themselves at me. The knife in my hand moved, maybe more from muscle memory than conscious will. The blade reached out to the hands that reached for me, and in that rapidly diminishing space it did awful work. Fingers flew into the air, chased by lines of red rubies. Pieces of their faces fell away to reveal muscle and bones. Veins opened like hoses. Then they were falling like discarded puppets, and I was running toward the Picuda as bullets buzzed like furious bees.

How I did not get killed is something I’ll never know. It wasn’t the Killer at work. You couldn’t call it luck, either, because no one on that dock was lucky. Not that day. If anything, my survival was the result of a perverse god who wanted more entertainment.

With a howl of animal rage I jumped into the Picuda, which had swung on its last remaining line and came thumping sideways into the dock. My leap was clumsy and mistimed, and my left shoe caught the edge of a locker, sending me crashing down hard enough to knock the knife from my hand. I saw it bounce off the corner of the small black briefcase. Santoro was on the forward bow untying the line from the cleat. The second I landed he dropped the rope, swarmed over the windscreen, and came at me with blinding speed. No weapons, but he didn’t need them. He should have — even off my game with the Killer gone or dead I was still a first-chair special operator. Suddenly I was backpedaling from a flurry of short, precise, vicious, and insanely fast blows. They came in at all the wrong angles and I wasn’t balanced yet for a solid response. The boat wobbled as once again I tried to hide inside a nest of forearms, elbows, and shoulders. If he’d been going for face or body hits he’d have busted his hands on my skeleton.

That’s not what happened.

He was a brilliant fighter. Not good, not great. Brilliant.

He used one- and two-knuckle snaps and corkscrew punches to the nerve clusters and connective tissue on the key points of my arms. Mashing nerves, deadening muscles, exploding white-hot pain.

I can deal with pain. I know pain. Experience has taught me that pain can be thought through and fought through in the heat of the battle, that it can even make you stronger and faster and better. The Killer who lives inside my head feeds on pain and all it ever does is make him roar; it makes him hunger for blood.

But the Killer was still asleep. And I felt like I wanted to sleep. When I tried to block, my arms moved too slowly and in the wrong ways. When I tried to hit him, I was clumsy and my blows packed no power.

Santoro laughed as he slapped my feeble punches aside.

“This is for my brother, yes?”

He had the same accent as Rafael. The same cruelty in his eyes as he set about dismantling me, attacking with a savage precision that made a joke out of my counterattacks and ignored my defenses.

This wasn’t about pain. It wasn’t even about winning.

It was about revenge. About punishment.

If you know where to hit you can dismantle an opponent, you can take away his weapons and tear down his defenses and turn a formidable enemy into the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

That’s what he did.

No one’s ever done that to me before. Not since I was a kid. Sure, I’ve lost fights before, but no one has ever outfought me so thoroughly that I felt like a punching bag. He got inside my guard and jabbed me in the right sinus, boxed my ears, smashed the nerve clusters on both elbows, hit me in the top of the left thigh, stuck his thumb in the hollow of my throat, elbow-chopped my inner forearms, hit me over the heart with a one-two combination, and head-butted me. Then he caught me with hard knuckle shots to radial and ulnar nerves and my left arm went dead. I ducked down to try and take his next punch on my skull, hoping to break some of his hand bones with the famous Ledger hard head. But he changed a knuckle punch into a slap that felt like a donkey kick to the brain. I threw myself at him like a losing boxer would do, hugging him to stifle the flurry of hits.

Santoro pivoted as I grabbed him and he used my momentum and mass, plus the tilt of the boat, to hip throw me into the cockpit. I hit the steering wheel, the seat back, every knob and control including the little fire extinguisher tucked into the metal clamps. Hit the goddamn clamps, too.

Then he jumped on top of me, catching me in the solar plexus and floating ribs with his heels, and as I folded in half, he chop-kicked me under the chin. My whole body went limp but my consciousness hung by its fingernails on the crest of the abyss.

In the movies, fight scenes are ten minutes long. In the real world they’re over in seconds. Someone wins, somebody loses.

I lost.

He beat me to the edge of consciousness.

All the way to the edge.

But… only to the edge.

I had nothing left and it would have been nothing for him to end me with a blow to my throat. He could have stomped me to death. He had all the cards and I was a wrecked heap.

Then I saw him straighten and his eyes went momentarily as dull as his men’s had. He stared right through me, but while the eyes remained dead and expressionless his mouth curled into a joyful and terrible smile.

“Sucks to lose,” he said, “doesn’t it? It hurts. It’s humiliating.”

He backhanded me across the face. Not a killing blow. It was punctuation and it was belittling. I tried to block it, tried to turn away, but my body felt like it was made of broken stone. Too damaged, too heavy.

“You don’t get to win this time, Ledger. You don’t get to be the hero and you don’t get to save the day.”

Another slap.

“You get to lose. But here’s the thing, here’s the fun part,” said Santoro in the voice that was not his own. “You get to watch. You’ll be there when the lights go out. You’ll be there when the screaming starts. And you’ll be there as all of those children start to die. You. Joe Ledger, America’s shining hero. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll let you push one of the death carts. Maybe your penance will be taking all of those small, diseased bodies to the fire pits. Won’t that be fun?”

Another slap.

The world winked out for a moment. Maybe it was damage or maybe it was me wanting to crawl into a hole deep inside my head and not hear any of this. To not know any of it.

Then I saw the glazed look fade from Santoro’s eyes. He blinked and looked around, nodded to himself, and bent to pat me down, tear my pockets open, and basically mug me. My DMS gadgets and other items clattered to the deck. He looked down at the stuff, paused for a moment, then quickly bent to scoop something up.

Then he cut a look at me, smiled once more. “Adios, my friend. It’s been a pleasure, yes?”

His accent was back in place. I saw his foot move but there was no way for me to avoid the kick. It knocked me out of the world.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

When I forced my eyes open I was alone on the boat.

There was an engine roar to my left. My body hurt worse than I can describe but the leaden heaviness was gone, and when I dragged my bruised head and shoulders up high enough to see, I saw Esteban Santoro go roaring out of the gas dock in another boat. It was the XSR. It’s not a fishing boat or a motorized play toy. The XSR is a military interceptor, a British-built super-speedboat that can hit eighty-five knots. Santoro had stolen my keys and was roaring off in the boat, taking the drives with him.

The XSR kicked up a bow wave that threw the Picuda against the dock and sent me tumbling back down into the bottom of the cockpit.

There was a crackle of gunfire and I turned to see Top and Bunny, both of them bloody, firing at the XSR.

Firing and missing.

Missing by a mile.

Like they weren’t even trying to hit it.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

I staggered drunkenly to my feet, unsure of how badly I was hurt. Not giving much of a shit. The key to the Picuda was in the ignition.

The goons were all dead or dying. And Santoro was getting away.

All around the dock people were screaming. A minute ago they’d been mostly staring like zombies, now they were shrieking in pain, in fear, in horror. I couldn’t even count the dead and wounded. Everyone seemed to be covered with blood. Top stood there, shaking his head and blinking his eyes. He stared at the gun in his hands and then with a cry of disgust hurled it into the water. Then he slapped himself. Very fast and very hard. Again and again.

“Stop it!” I bellowed.

He froze, mouth open, teeth bloody, eyes filled with panic and pain.

“What did I… What did I…?” It wasn’t a statement he was able to finish. What he did lay bleeding and screaming all around him.

In the distance I could hear the wail of police sirens. Behind me was the growl of the XSR.

“Get in the boat!” I roared as I unwound the bowline.

Top lingered for a moment, still caught inside the bubble of horrified realization. Then he took a wobbly step forward. Bunny was a statue, gaping at the red inhumanity on the ground before him, the shotgun hanging limply from his right hand.

“What?” he asked. “What?”

“Get in the fucking boat!”

Like a couple of men woken from a drugged sleep, they came limping over.

Top jumped in and landed clumsily, hardly trying to break his fall. Bunny fell over the gunnels as I moved away from the dock. When the boat was clear I turned the wheel and hit the gas. The Picuda threw a bow wave high enough to drown the NO WAKE sign and rock every other boat at the dock.

I tried not to hear the sounds of misery and outrage that chased us from the dock. When we were clear of the dock I pointed her nose toward the water that still thrashed from the XSR’s passage, opened up the throttle, and went for it.

Bunny and Top clawed their way to their feet and pulled themselves along the rails, fighting the drag as I cranked the engine higher and higher. Top managed to get into the copilot chair. His face was streaked with blood. I had to shout to be heard over the engine roar.

“What the fuck happened?” he demanded.

But we both knew. Someone had been inside our minds. Someone who had access to the Dreamwalking technology, the Stargate technology. It was the worst kind of rape because the violation forced us to become complicit in murder and mayhem.

Top put his face in his hands and his shoulders trembled as heavy sobs broke like waves on the shores of his soul.

Out on the salt the XSR was pulling ahead.

“Top, we need air support,” I barked.

No answer.

“Top!”

Nothing.

I punched him hard on the shoulder. Once, twice. Finally he snarled and fended off the third punch. He glowered at me with eyes that were rimmed with red and filled with the awful awareness of things he could not undo. I think that if he still had his gun he’d have blown his own head off.

“First Sergeant Sims,” I bellowed, “get your head out of your ass and get me some air support. Do it right fucking now. That is an order.”

That got through to him. Don’t ask me how. Years of training, maybe. Or perhaps the mind intrusion was over, the invaders abandoning the minds they had wrecked, their job done. I don’t know, but Top bent instantly forward into the cockpit so the wind didn’t snatch his words away and tapped his earbud. I heard him yelling to Lieutenant Flaherty at San Nicolas. Then he straightened and turned to me. “They’re putting a couple Jayhawks up. Two more on deck if we need them. And I scrambled a team for cleanup back at the gas dock.”

His voice broke on that last part, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I punched his shoulder again. “Are you here?” I demanded. “Are you with me?”

He ran a palsied hand over his face, then nodded. “Yeah,” he gasped, then took a breath and said it with more conviction. “Yes, sir. I’m with you.”

I had the throttle wide open and the engine howled at us. Bunny was still sitting like a zombie except for the tears that ran down his flushed cheeks. Top turned and without preamble belted the big young man across the face. Bunny slammed into the wall, rebounded, and Top stopped him with a flat palm on the chest.

“You good, Farm Boy?”

Bunny started to say something, stopped, squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath, then looked at Top. The glaze was gone. Only pain and confusion remained. And anger. So much anger.

He turned to me as if seeing me for the first time, then he glanced at the XSR.

“Let me drive,” said Bunny thickly.

“I got it,” I said.

“He’s getting away.”

“I can drive,” I snarled.

“You drive like an old lady, Boss, and you’re losing him. I know boats, you don’t.”

He was right about both. Bunny grew up in Orange County and he knew boats. I’m from Baltimore and I’ve seen boats. Not the same thing. It was a comedy act getting me out of the seat and getting his bulk into it. We managed with a lot of cursing, yelling, and a few threats. Finally I was kneeling in the gap between the two seats, holding tight to the seat backs. Top was mumbling prayers to the Virgin Mary. Or maybe Buddha or Odin. Whoever the hell was on call. I was beyond the capacity for rational thought. I held on and hoped we wouldn’t hit anything harder than a lazy pelican, because at that speed we were going to die.

“He’s getting away,” yelled Bunny for like the fifth or sixth time. If he wasn’t driving I’d have kicked him overboard.

Top drew Bunny’s sidearm but the range was too great. Even if we had our team sniper, Sam Imura, here, I doubt he could have tagged Santoro. Distance and moving boats made for piss-poor accuracy. Maybe Top did the same math or maybe he could not bear to discharge the weapon, but he lowered it and punched the dashboard with his other hand. Very damn hard.

The sky above us was clear. Which pissed me off. There were supposed to be two angry birds from San Nicolas up there. Helicopters with machine guns and rocket pods would have been mighty damned useful right about then.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where’s my frigging air support?”

What I got in return was an earful of static.

“Yo, Cap’n,” yelled Top, nodding to the horizon, “we got company.”

Far ahead, beyond the fleeing boat, a dark bulk was skimming along only a dozen feet above the wave tops. For one moment my heart lifted as I thought that we’d managed to close the trap on Santoro after all.

A chopper.

Then the smug I-got-you smile that was forming on my face froze in place and began to crack. The sun was still high and shone down on the bird with clear light. The paint job was wrong. It was black, with no visible markings.

Beside me, Top said, “Shit.”

The chopper turned and a figure leaned out of the side door with something big and nasty. There was a bloom of smoke as he fired.

The rocket-propelled grenade whipped over the waves, arching over the XSR without pausing, and then sweeping down toward us.

Bunny tried to turn, tried to evade, but it was the wrong call.

“Move!” I screamed, but Top was already in motion. He hooked an arm around Bunny and went over the side. At that speed it was like falling out of a moving car. I had a brief glimpse of them bouncing and flopping across the waves like rag dolls, then I was diving into the drink on the opposite side.

Yeah, just like falling out of a car. You can’t really appreciate how hard water is until you slam into it at close to fifty miles an hour. I hit the way you’re supposed to, which didn’t seem to matter a damn bit. The water hit me with the fists of giants.

And one millisecond later the RPG blew the Picuda into a million pieces. The fireball shot upward and the blast shock wave whipped outward through the water. Catching us.

Punishing us.

Pushing us down into the big blue.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” yelled Lieutenant Mick Flaherty as he and his crew bent to run through the rotor wash from the big Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawk. The pilot was already at the stick and the big General Electric gas turbines were filling the air with an urgent whine.

The normal crew of four ran with two extra men, both of them sharpshooters from the SEALs. A second crew ran toward the other helicopter. Both birds were painted with the red and white of the Coast Guard, though neither was actually attached to that service. This joint special operations group worked as extensions of the DMS Special Projects Office. They extended the reach and added extra muscle to the field teams based at the Pier and at Department Zero, the big office in Los Angeles. Most of the men and women in this unit were candidates for promotion to the DMS. Each of them had flown combat missions many times.

And all of them understood the severity of the current assignment.

Capture or kill Esteban Santoro.

Failure was not acceptable.

Flaherty slapped his people on the back as they climbed inside, then he went forward and slid into the copilot’s chair, put on his headset, and twirled his finger.

“Don’t take the scenic route, Duffy,” he yelled.

The pilot powered up and the heavy machine lifted free of the tarmac, then it swept around in a high-climbing turn, heading toward Oceanside.

There was a sudden piercing burst of static on the radio that stabbed Duffy and Flaherty and both men flinched back from it.

“What the hell was that?” demanded the lieutenant.

But the pilot didn’t answer. Instead he began yelling into the microphone.

“Power’s out,” he roared. “I’ve got a dead stick, repeat, I’ve got a dead stick.”

The engine stopped.

Just like that.

The blades continued to whip around, pushed by their own momentum, but then they stopped, too, as the helicopter suddenly tilted down toward the earth.

Like a dead bird, it fell.

Duffy screamed as he fought to restart the engines.

Flaherty screamed as he tried to help.

Inside the chopper, all of the men screamed.

All the way down to the unforgiving ground.

None of them saw the other helos cant sideways and fall, too.

Like dead things.

Both of them.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

I wasn’t dressed for swimming. Black battle-dress uniform, military-design cross-trainer shoes. All of it soaked and heavy and conspiring to try and drown me.

My head was ringing from the explosion and every inch of my body was bruised from the punishing collision with the water. Drowning would probably feel better. And there are times that it’s tempting to let it go, to give in to the darkness. That’s a battle I’ve been fighting for a lot of years, and more than once I’ve had to struggle to come up with good reasons to stay on this side of the big black. Far as I can tell there’s no pain once you take that step. A little fear, sure, but it would probably go away once the lungs stopped trying to breathe and the heart stopped pushing all that blood around. Then it would be the long, slow, easy slide down into the void.

Yeah, so damned easy. And I would pretend that I didn’t have those thoughts. Even while I was kicking off my shoes and fighting my way out of pants and shirt.

Even then a little voice in the back of my head kept telling me that I should let go, that it was time to stand down. To rest. It used some dirty tricks, too, telling me that I would see old friends who were long gone, and that I’d see them happy and whole. And healed. Helen and Grace. My mom. Khalid and John Smith and all of the brave men and women who’d been insane enough to follow me into battle and who fell along the way. Others, too. As I sank lower and lower into the brine I could hear them whisper to me, calling me, telling me that it was better, that it was safe.

I closed my eyes.

I almost let it happen.

Almost.

But there was another voice in my head, and it found me down in the salty, deadly darkness. A soft voice that spoke only a single word.

“No,” she said.

No.

She was up there. Close. Probably in our condo in Del Mar, or in her office in La Jolla. Close. And maybe in that moment, maybe as I fell, she knew it. I could even imagine her stopping as if touched, closing her eyes as she listened to the things only she seemed able to hear. Maybe listening for my heartbeat. I don’t know. She’s my lover but even I don’t know everything that goes on inside her. No one does, I’m sure of that. Maybe no one could. She’s not like anyone else I ever met or ever expect to meet.

Junie Flynn.

“No.”

It was as clear as if she whispered it in my ear.

Funny thing is, I didn’t hear it as “no.” Not really. I heard it as “yes.”

As in, yes, stay with me. Yes, be alive.

Yes, there is a reason to keep going.

Which is really all you ever need.

One reason.

One good reason.

I kicked off my trousers, let them fall, taking my gun belt into the deep, and kicked upward. Free of the weight I shot toward the surface. It seemed like a long, long way.

It was.

When you suddenly realize you want to live, that’s when the panic tries to set in. The world with all of its perils wants to make a fool out of you, it wants to cheat you of that glory of survival. It wants to steal everything from you at the moment when you understand the value of what you have, and what you have to live for.

So I kicked.

Kicked harder.

Fought my way up.

And up.

Until I broke the surface like a dying seal. Gasping, vomiting seawater, blind from the black and red fireworks that were detonating behind my eyes. Choking and coughing and trying to be alive.

Something splashed in the water and I turned, pawing the water from my eyes, expecting to see Top or Bunny come porpoising up.

It wasn’t.

A double shot of spouting water vapor burst upward past me like a V-shaped geyser as something monstrous rose from the churning waves. It was simply fucking vast. Forty-five feet long if it was an inch. Gray and white mottling on slate-gray skin. Two blowholes. Barnacles crusted onto its sides.

A gray whale.

So close that as it rose to the surface the displaced water shoved me backward. I was actually close enough to see a line of stiff hairs on its upper jaws.

The impetus washed me hard into a second bulky creature.

I thrashed and spun, filled with mingled terror and wonder, to see that I’d collided with a much smaller whale. Maybe sixteen feet long with no trace of barnacles or mottling. A newborn.

A shadow fell across my face and I saw Big Mama turning toward me. Or rather toward the thing that was swimming between her and the newborn. I’m no ichthyologist but I’m pretty damn sure this was not the place I wanted to be. There was a great surface turbulence and her flukes broke from the water and rose above me. Ten feet across and more than massive enough to smash me into chum.

I dove and swam the opposite way from Big Mama and Junior. I wanted no part of maternal rage. I wanted no part of any of this. Pretty sure I was going to smash my Free Willy DVDs if I ever got the hell out of this.

I swam as hard as I could and didn’t care which direction it was, so long as it was away from them. No idea where Top and Bunny were and, truth to tell, right now I’d have fed them to the whales if that’s what it would take. The sun above me was hot but the water felt frigid and no matter how hard I swam it felt like I wasn’t moving. Behind me I could hear the explosive spouting of the whales. Sounded so damn close. I knew that gray whales eat mostly crustaceans. They weren’t like killer whales. But they were supposed to be very defensive. One of my friends in San Diego told me that the grays used to be called “devil fish” because of how aggressive they got when hunted. So I tried to telepathically assure Big Mama that I was the furthest thing on planet Earth to something that might want to do harm to any member of her species.

I swam.

And prayed.

And swam.

And prayed.

Until…

The seas grew quiet around me.

I didn’t slow down. Not right away. Panic owned me.

Guess it’s fair to say that I stopped swimming when I didn’t die. Sounds stupid, but not in the moment. My muscles were burning with lactic acid, my lungs seared by salt water and exertion, my brains scrambled. Also, in the absence of a modern sequel to Moby Dick, the realities of my situation were beginning to float to the top of my brain.

We didn’t catch our bad guy. Someone blew up our boat. We were fifty miles away from the nearest land. And by “we” I meant me and the voices in my head, because when I stopped and looked around at the top of each rolling swell, I didn’t see another person.

Not Top. Not Bunny.

No one.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

I floated.

Drifting. Drowsing. Dreaming.

Trying not to die.

Several times I rode a swell to its highest point, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called out.

“BUNNY!”

“TOP!”

“ECHO, ECHO!”

Loud as I could.

The wind took my shouts and shredded them over the tops of the waves. Each time I sank down and had to fight back to the surface.

After twenty minutes, maybe more, I found a seat cushion from the Picuda. Burned, soaked, but still afloat. I snatched it and hugged it to my chest and nearly wept. Spent the next ten or fifteen minutes emotionally bonding with the cushion. It was my best friend and I loved it. We bobbed together in the salt water as I oriented myself and went through my options. The math was against me.

I was maybe forty miles west of Oceanside. Maybe less, but that’s a long damn swim at the best of times. Which this wasn’t. I had no idea if the tide was going in or out. Layer that on top of the fact that I’d gotten the living crap beaten out of me. Everything from mid-chest down was waterlogged and turning into a frozen prune. Everything from the chest up was broiling. No hat, no sunglasses. No food. No drinking water. What was that line from Coleridge? Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

I think I yelled some curses at the ocean, the water, the salt in the water, the waves, the sky, the puffy fucking clouds, and the universe as a whole.

Drifting, drifting.

Thinking about the man who did this to me.

Thinking about how much I wanted to kill him.

Thinking about how he’d probably killed me.

Trying to make sense of it. That he was Esteban Santoro was beyond doubt. So, how did that explain his sudden change of body language and accent? Had someone at the Dreamwalking project taken over Santoro, too?

My gut told me I was right about that, although I didn’t really understand it.

The same thing had obviously happened to Top and Bunny. If they were alive, if they survived this, how would they ever be able to get past it? Someone had made them commit wholesale murder. Innocent civilians. Children. It was their hands who held those guns, their fingers on the triggers.

Living past a thing is not the same as surviving it.

I drifted.

What had happened to me? I couldn’t feel the presence of anyone in my head. Not really, and remember I have some experience with sharing the real estate inside my skull. I hadn’t turned my gun on the crowd and I hadn’t shot myself.

So what had happened? What had turned me into a clumsy, ineffectual nothing in that fight? What had slowed my reflexes and turned me into a punching bag?

What indeed?

If it wasn’t the psychic possession of Dreamwalking, then what was it? Until now I’d been blaming it all on the fact that the Killer aspect of me had either gone to sleep or gone away. Now I wondered.

Was he gone because someone had gone into my mind and killed him? Or, was he in some kind of psychic cage, shackled, of no use to me? And did that mean without him my usefulness as an operator was nil? Worse than nil?

The sea and the salt spray offered no answers.

I floated and tried to coax the Cop forward to analyze the details, to make sense of it the way he always makes sense of things.

I wished Top and Bunny would find me. Or me them. Where were they now? Had Top and Bunny paid for their actions by going down, down, down into the watery deep? If so, despite what had just happened, this world had lost two of its heroes. Actual heroes. The best of the best. Which means that Santoro had done what no one else had managed to do. Not walkers or berserkers, not mad scientists or ancient cults, not hired killers or soldiers of foreign flags. That rat bastard had killed Top Sims and Bunny.

I did not want to weep; I couldn’t spare the moisture. But the tears came anyway. Anger followed soon, though, and its heat burned those tears to dry salt on my face.

Questions, questions everywhere and not an answer to be had.

Above me the sun fell in slow defeat over the walls of the world, dragging behind it a beggar’s cloak of shameful darkness.

CHAPTER NINETY

Night.

Black and wet and cold.

The sky above me was ablaze with more stars than I could ever remember seeing. I could see the soft, pale sweep of the Milky Way. There were constellations I knew and others that in my semidelirium I believed had been created just for me. To mark the event of my death.

How’s that for an ego trip?

I blame it on the beating Santoro gave me. My head felt like it cracked open and fiddler crabs had taken up residence. Not sure how many hours I was out there with only a burned seat cushion and my own questionable thoughts for company. My imagination conjured an endless string of worst-case scenarios for what Santoro was going to do with all the technology he stole. He could start a war. Or wars. He could unleash plagues. He could disrupt the power grids. He could open the door to terrorist attacks that would make what Mother Night and the Seven Kings did pale in comparison.

I could have stopped him. I should have been able to. It played out wrong. Why?

Consciousness came and went, and each time I went out of my head I went all the way out. Back into the kind of dreams I’d had after being exposed to the God Machine. The kind of dreams I had when I was in my coma.

So strange, and yet so goddamn real.

In one dream…

I was back on the dock, but instead of fighting Esteban Santoro I was duking it out with a man I’m sure was a complete stranger to me. I’d seen him before. He was taller and more heavily built than Santoro, but with a face that was totally obscured as if covered with smoke. He fought with superb skill, top of the line, with blood on his hands and black ice in his soul.

“You’re a joke, Ledger,” he told me as he smashed down my guard and pummeled my face. “Maybe you were good once upon a time, but now you’re only a worthless thug.”

That dream ended when he grabbed my hair and chin and snapped my neck. I heard it break and felt myself die….

I woke from that to find myself in the water again.

But the water was suddenly ice cold. No, it was worse than that. The water was absolutely freezing. Insanely cold, and it stabbed into me like knives. I cried out in fear and pain, thrashing to get away from where I was, impossible as that sounds. The light had changed, too, and off in the distance I saw huge mountains rising above me. Not the green and brown coastal mountains of Southern California. Somehow, impossibly, this was a massive mountain range of solid ice.

Incredibly high, blue-white in the pale sun of some nameless day. And deep inside the ice, revealed only by some trick of the light, was a wall. Or walls. Towers, too, but in strange shapes. Gigantic cones and cubes the size of cathedrals. Towering stairs too vast and grand to have been constructed for humans to climb. And even though this was buried behind walls of ice, I could see figures move.

Shapes.

Things.

And wafting toward me over the freezing waves was a plaintive call from some animal I could not name. It cried nonsense words.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Over and over and over and…

Something dark and mottled rose suddenly out of the water. Not a whale this time. No, this was more like a tentacle, but one that was too big to comprehend. It rose and rose, taller than a building, taller than a mountain, tearing upward through water and sky until it blotted out the sun. Ice water sluiced down its length, raining killing sleet over me.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” came the call. Not from it, but because of it. Maybe calling to it. Begging it for something I could not, and never would, understand.

Then the tentacle fell.

Toward me.

Over me.

Smashing me down once more into the icy waters….

A dream.

Only a dream. I floated now in waters that, while cold, were not the lethal waters of the arctic or Antarctic. It was dark again. The stars above me were the ones I expected to see. Needed to see. I listened for that plaintive voice and heard only the faintest of echoes.

“Tekeli-li… Tekeli-li…”

My wakefulness, though, was no more securely anchored to those waters and those stars than was my sanity. Blackness wanted me so badly, and it claimed me over and over again. There were other dreams. All strange, all violent. I wanted to dream about Junie, about being in her arms, about holding her warm body to mine, about clinging to her. But she could not find me in those dreams. Only pain and horror and strangeness knew where I was.

So I drifted and dreamed, dreamed and drifted.

A few times I heard that same strange voice again — more animal than human — crying out in an unknown language. It kept repeating Tekeli-li. And in one deep, deep dream I crawled out of the water onto a coastline that was muddy and choked with slimy weeds. The message of that voice persisted and I yelled at it to shut up, but the words that came from my own mouth were equally strange.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

And then a thousand voices rose up out of the darkness to echo those words. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Beneath me, the very mud on which I knelt began to shift as if it was the skin of something vast that had been called to wakefulness by the content of that chant. That… prayer.

I screamed myself out of that dream.

And then I stood in a corridor in a subbasement. Not sure how I knew that, but there was no doubt. A subbasement built years ago.

I walked along the basement, beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, and I stopped and looked into each one.

I found laboratories with equipment I didn’t understand.

I found one room filled with TV monitors and advanced computer equipment. There was a security guard sitting on a folding chair, his chin on his chest, eyes closed as he slept. He wore a comical peaked hat made from shiny aluminum foil. On a table beside him were dozens of similar hats. All made from aluminum foil. Above the table was a printed placard that read:

I looked around. It was a room — a big room — which was lined with rows of coffins. Only they weren’t really coffins. Funny things to have in a place called the Playroom. They were capsules of some kind. On a small metal stand beside each one was a miniature version of the God Machine, exact in every detail except that it was no bigger than a camp stove. The machines hummed quietly and on their faces a row of tiny gemstone chips flashed on and off in a random sequence. First the diamond, then two flashes of the ruby, then the topaz, the diamond again, the emerald. Over and over, and I stood watching, transfixed, almost hypnotized, lulled to the edge of sleep. In my mind, though, a voice that was not my own whispered, “The pattern is wrong. The more they dream this way, the greater the neurological damage. We’ve lost so many dreamers already.”

It was the voice of Dr. Erskine. When I turned to look, though, he was not there.

Another voice spoke. One I almost recognized, but it was strangely distorted, almost mumbled. “You can’t expect to look at the face of God and not go crazy. It stands to reason.”

There was no one there.

But I was wrong. When I went over to one of the capsules I could see that there was a person inside. He wore pajamas. How strange was that?

I realized that he wasn’t dead. The man was sleeping. He wore a metal cap with all sorts of wires attached to it, and he was sleeping an electric sleep. His face twitched and his mouth moved as if he was speaking, but there was no sound. There was another person sleeping in the next capsule, and the next. More than twenty people. All of them sleeping. And when I got to the last one I saw that the person asleep in the tube…

… was me.

Frightened, I ran from the room.

Across the hall there was another door and I ran through it.

I stopped because I smelled something bad. Like burned meat. I was in another laboratory, but this was much bigger. And stranger. There, in the gloom at the far end of the laboratory, I saw it. A God Machine. Huge, gleaming. Bigger than the one I’d seen down at Gateway. It hummed and pulsed with power.

Standing before it was a twisted shape that almost — but not quite — looked human. He wore white pajamas that were smeared with food and snot and piss and blood. His skin was wrinkled and puckered and blistered. He heard me and turned to look at me with emerald green eyes.

“You’re not wearing your hat,” said the man.

When he smiled his teeth were white in his burned red face.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“They killed me,” he said, “but I didn’t die. Now I’m going home.”

And then something came whipping out of the mouth of the God Machine. Huge, twisting things with suckers and claws and spikes and…

… and…

I woke in the cold water.

Alone and dying. Lost and forgotten.

Terrified beyond belief.

And… angry.

I was so goddamn angry.

Because I knew.

Son of a bitch.

I knew.

It’s a bitch when clarity comes so sharply but so late. In dreams we are so receptive to the truth, even when it comes to us wearing a disguise.

I knew who we were fighting.

I knew.

ISIL, Santoro, the Closers… they were like arms, like tentacles attached to the same monster. As I drifted out there I thought I knew the name of the monster. And I was going to die out here and never be able to tell anyone. I was going to float into oblivion, a useless piece of flotsam drifting out on the tide. And because I was too slow to understand, everyone I loved and everything I cared about was going to die when darkness fell. All of those children would scream in the darkness and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing to save them.

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

There was a sound in the darkness.

Not a weird cry or my own voice talking nonsense words. This was different. A mechanical sound. Or was that my mind breaking further open? When you first hear something like that it’s so easy to doubt your senses, to believe that it’s a fiction created by desperation, wishful thinking, and a failing psyche.

It was faint and far away, both muffled and distorted by the sound of the ocean. I made myself go still in order to hear it, to try and determine where it was. Not east, I thought. Probably not a Coast Guard rescue craft unless they’d gone out looking and were on the way back to the barn after giving me up as shark food. Wasn’t west of me, either. I found Venus and used that to orient myself. The motor sound was off to the south. How far off, though?

In this gloom there was no way in hell anyone could see me. Could they hear me? The engine, though a ways off, had a throaty rumble. Something powerful but small. A boat engine, not a ship engine.

Going slow.

Slow.

In these waters at this time of night a slow engine could be a night fisherman out for yellowtail or bluefin tuna. Or maybe there were squidders. I rode a couple of swells upward and looked in that direction.

There.

A light.

Two lights. A bow light and the harsh white glow of a searchlight.

Someone was out looking for us. Had they found Top and Bunny? Please, please, let that be the case. Those men had followed me through hell and today they’d followed me into an ambush. If there was blame, then it was totally on me. They deserved better.

The boat was a couple of hundred yards off and it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. To them I’d be a dark dot on a dark ocean.

On the next swell I yelled as loud as I could.

“Ahoy the boat!”

Did it again on the next, and the next.

Kept doing it until my voice was sandpapered away.

Kept at it, though. Kept yelling. Hailing them. Begging for help.

When the engine noise changed from a rumble to a roar, I had that terrible feeling all survivors get when they see rescue within reach and then it begins to pass them by. I screamed and waved my arms, and the motion pushed me right down into the drink where I took a mouthful of water.

Then light filled the world. Bright as the sun, pure and perfect. And a voice bellowed louder than the motor.

“There!”

And another voice roared back, “Goddamn it, I can see him, Farm Boy. Why don’t you drive the boat like you ain’t drunk?”

I knew those voices.

Impossibly, I knew them.

When they got closer I knew the boat, too.

It was an XSR military interceptor. The boat Church had lent me, which had been stolen out from under me by Esteban Santoro. As the engine slowed to a muffled idle and the boat swung sideways toward me, I saw the faces of Top Sims and Bunny. Battered, worried, panicked, and relieved. I saw hands reaching toward me.

And they were real. No illusion, no wishful thinking. They were actually here. Somehow, impossibly, after all these hours and in all of this darkness, they’d found me.

I wanted to scream out their names.

A sudden swell picked me up and flung me toward Top and Bunny.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

Top and Bunny told me the story of how they found the XSR drifting in the water, the key still in it. They called in for help and there were at least a dozen other boats out looking for me. How the hell I managed to drift right through them is a logistical puzzle none of us will ever figure out. Top used the radio to call Church. He told him everything. And during that call he learned about what had happened to our air support.

Church directed them to a private marina in San Diego owned by one of his friends. DMS support team members helped us ashore and took each of us into a different cabana, where medical teams treated our wounds but asked no questions other than what they needed to know. My soaked and salt-caked clothes went into a trash can and an EMT brought me a Walmart bag with fresh clothes. New stuff with the tags still on them. Socks and shoes, too. I just finished dressing when there was a light tap on the door and Mr. Church came in. It was a small room with a shower stall, a dressing table, and two chairs.

He came and stood in front of me, studying my face, looking deeply into my eyes. I knew what he was doing.

“I’m me,” I said.

Church made a small noncommittal sound and sat down on one of the chairs, waving me to the other.

“Tell me,” he said.

“We don’t have time.”

“Brick is on his way here with a tactical support vehicle. Until he gets here we cannot and should not act. And I need to know what happened yesterday. Tell me what happened, and I do mean everything, Captain Ledger.”

So I told him. Every single detail of what happened on the gas dock and on the salt. He listened without comment. When I was done he studied me for a long, uncomfortable time. Seconds cracked off and fell around us and the cabana was dead silent.

“And it is your assertion,” Church said at last, “that you were not in full control of your actions?”

I shook my head very slowly and decisively. “I’ve been in enough fights to know the difference between losing my shit in the heat of the moment and not being in my own right mind. I know what happened.”

Church nodded. “And what should we infer from that?”

“I had a lot of time to think out there,” I told him. “There are a lot of pieces to this, so that so far it’s felt like we were cruising the edges of things. Like we were catching glimpses of several different cases. ISIL and the Kill Switch. Gateway and all that interdimensional shit. The breakdown of the American intelligence community. The theft of SX-56. The Mullah of the Black Tent. The Unlearnable Truths. The Closers. The plague of… whatever you call it. Insanity, treason… the DMS falling apart.”

“Yes,” he said slowly.

“It’s not a dozen cases,” I said.

“No,” he agreed.

“This is all the same goddamn thing.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it. I maybe even know why. It’s just that it’s crazy… and… I’m not sure I can trust my own judgment on this.”

“Even after all of that time floating and thinking?”

“Don’t joke,” I said.

“Believe me, Captain, I am not joking. There are eleven dead in Oceanside, and another sixteen injured. Three of the injured are critical, including a six-year-old boy.”

I closed my eyes because that hurt worse than any punch, knife cut, or bullet wound I’ve ever had. Much worse. I wanted to turn away from him, from those numbers, from the horror. But no matter where you turn, the truth is going to be right there in clear line of sight.

“There are videos of it on the Net,” said Church. “You three were wearing balaclavas, which means your faces are not out there. Police are looking for three men matching your approximate physical descriptions. Luckily for us there are conflicting statements and the cell phone videos are shaky and unreliable. If need be, Bug can create a tapeworm to find all copies of these videos and erase or modify them. He’s prepping that in case we need it.”

“Jesus.”

“I interviewed First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit. They are both in shock and say that they don’t remember much about what happened. Dr. Hu can test them for drugs and neurological damage, but I don’t expect he’ll find much. Will he, Captain?”

“No.”

Church took his glasses off, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, and polished the lenses very slowly. He has very dark eyes. Brown with flecks of gold and green. They are not kind eyes. They are not forgiving eyes. And they are not young eyes. You can look at him and know — as I knew the first time I ever got a good look at him — that he is a man who has seen too much and who knows exactly how the world is constructed. He’s studied the materials used in construction and he knows when and where it will break.

“The person you’ve encountered in your dreams,” he said as he put his glasses back on. “You never saw his face.”

“No.”

“Do you think this is a real person?”

“Yes.”

“Key question. Is this the person who you believe has been influencing your actions?”

“Yes.”

“Is it your belief that he, and perhaps others like him, have used this technique to influence the actions of Sergeants Sims and Rabbit?”

I swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“Is it your belief that this technique is responsible for the failure of other DMS field operatives?”

“Absolutely fucking yes.”

“Speculate for me, Captain,” said Church. “If such a thing as dreamwalking is possible, might it also be used to negatively influence field commanders and soldiers deployed in the Middle East?”

A day ago that question might have startled me. This wasn’t yesterday. I said, “Yes. And I think this explains why our entire intelligence network is for shit. This dreamwalking thing may have been developed as a weapon to let us spy on our enemies, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s being used against us. It’s destroyed the operational effectiveness of the DMS and it’s opened us up to ISIL and whoever else might be on the inside track of this. Can I prove it? No. Not yet. But do I believe it? Yes, I do.”

“So,” said Church, “do I.”

“And I’ll go you one better,” I said. “That guy on the ISIL video, the Mullah of the Black Tent…? Did you see his eyes?”

“I did.”

“That was the same expression — the same lack of expression — I saw in the eyes of Top and Bunny. The same blankness I saw in Rudy and those surfer boys, and on some of the people on the gas dock in Oceanside. I caught a glimpse of it in Santoro’s eyes, too.”

“You think this is a signature?”

“Or a side effect of the dreamwalking,” I said. “Yeah, I do. I think it shows that the conscious mind of the hijacked body has been — not sure what the word is… displaced, shoved back. Something like that. I think our Big Bad stepped into Santoro’s body during the fight. I told you that his accent changed. That would make sense if the person doing the dreamwalking didn’t have the same accent.”

Church crossed his legs and then smoothed his tie. He nodded slowly. “Agreed. The Mullah was a cleric in a small village and his rise to become a leader and an effective military strategist happened too quickly to be reasonable. I would not be surprised to learn that the man himself is surprised by what he is doing. It’s likely he thinks he is having religious visions. The clarity and veracity of these visions, coupled with the undeniable military gains, has cemented him as a prophet of jihad. This is a very dangerous thing, because most of Islam is not unified in their hatred of the United States. Until now it has only been a vocal and violent minority. The emergence of someone who demonstrates knowledge and abilities that are seemingly impossible outside of religious visions could — and very likely will — change that. Even our staunch Muslim allies might question their alliance with us, and more so with neutral Muslims. Our enemy has found a unique way to shove the world toward an actual war with Islam.”

“And we can’t prove that he’s not a prophet,” I said.

“No. Dreamwalking and the whole Stargate project isn’t something the general public would either accept or believe.”

“But they’ll believe in a guy saying he’s speaking for God.” It wasn’t a question. We have about eight thousand years of history to tell us how effective religion — or its manipulation — has been in starting wars.

I sat up. I was windburned, sunburned, and sore, but I managed. Anger is a useful fuel. “You need to get on the phone with the damn president and—”

“Oh, believe me, Captain, I’ve had several long conversations with the president,” said Church. “As of two hours ago I am no longer the director or codirector of the Department of Military Sciences. I am no longer, in any capacity, an employee of the federal government. I am, in fact, likely to be under indictment by this time tomorrow.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

He said, “The DMS and all of its staff and resources are now under the management of the Central Intelligence Agency. Harcourt Bolton has been promoted to interim director pending reorganization. He will likely become full director of whatever the DMS will become, and it is likely to either be dissolved or folded into a minor department of the CIA. Our charter has been officially revoked. Federal marshals have been sent to each of our field offices to oversee the removal of personal items belonging to staff members. All employees and field agents are on unpaid suspension. Cleaning out desks and lockers was the only concession the president afforded me. Aunt Sallie has initiated a snowstorm protocol, which locks everyone out of MindReader except her, Bug, and me. Aunt Sallie and Bug are currently operating out of a safe house in Brooklyn.”

He could have stood there and pummeled me with a baseball bat and done less damage to me.

“No…,” I breathed.

“Oh yes.” Church gave me the strangest of smiles. “According to the president we are the bad guys, Captain Ledger. He has promised to file charges ranging from first-degree murder to conspiracy to commit treason. A warrant is already out for your arrest. Sergeants Sims and Rabbit will likely be charged, though right now POTUS does not know it was them on the gas dock. As team leader, you are in the crosshairs of a federal investigation.”

“This is bullshit.”

“It’s a reality. The Department of Military Sciences, as we have known it, no longer exists.”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

“What are we going to do?” I demanded. “Are we just going to bend over and take it? Jesus Christ, Church, we keep getting blindsided. First Hugo Vox turns out to be a traitor, then we find out that Vice President Collins is in bed — literally in bed — with Mother Night. It seems that no matter which way we turn, we get stabbed in the back. Now someone is messing with our minds. How are we supposed to fight this? I mean… is this it? Have they won?”

Church smiled. He seldom did that, and it was almost never a comforting thing to see.

“Tell me, Captain,” he said calmly, “since coming to work for me, have you ever noticed in me a tendency for passive acceptance? Have you, in fact, ever known me to accept failure as an option?”

“No, but that’s because you had the DMS and MindReader and…” I trailed off. It was the wrong answer and we both knew it.

“Presidents come and go,” he said. “The war remains. I’ve been fighting this war for a very long time. Longer than you know. Over those years the war has taken a lot of different forms. Betrayal is not an uncommon occurrence. It is discouraging and it hurts, because the same optimism that gives us the will to fight also allows us to believe in the goodness of others. It is a tactical error to accept our own faith as a failing. That failure — the moral crime implicit in the betrayal — is owned entirely by those who betray our trust. By those who turn and stab the soldier fighting beside them. By those who take the sacred trust given them by the people they serve and use it as a sword against them. We can sit here and feel foolish and stupid for not having seen it, or we can waste time being awed by the sophistication and subtlety of our enemy. Neither choice, however, helps us get back up off the mat. And I, for one, have never been comfortable on my knees.”

The room was very quiet.

He said, “We have been forced outside of our comfort zone before, and we’ve been forced to operate outside of the law. In those times I tend to look at the bigger picture, serving justice rather than a statute. It’s been my experience that in moments of need you will bend a rule in order to accomplish what you know is right.”

I nodded.

“When you told me about your dreams,” he continued, “I found several items of particular interest. Having read the Stargate files, I know that it is possible, even probable, that the mental connection is not necessarily a one-way thing. You have certain aggressive tendencies, Captain, and you are a fiercely individual man.”

“So what?”

“So maybe your dreams are more than that. More than fantasies. You described a place, a laboratory, with people sleeping in capsules. You described scale versions of the God Machines beside each one. What does that suggest?”

I licked my lips and fought to reclaim that dream image. It came to me with surprising clarity. More like a memory than some wild construct of nightmare. And suddenly I understood where Church was going with this.

“There has to be more than one person doing the dreamwalking,” I said. “To control Top and Bunny, to slow me down, to manipulate the people on the dock. There has to be a… well, a team, I guess. A bunch of sleepwalkers.”

“That would be my guess,” Church said, nodding. “And they would have to be practiced at it. Focus your mind and tell me what else was in that lab.”

I told him about the guard wearing an aluminum foil hat, and the other hats on the table. And the sign. Church nodded. “That makes a great deal of sense.”

“It does?”

“During the Stargate project the researchers found that a helmet or skullcap lined with crystals, certain metals of low conductivity, and certain polymers blocked the psychic signals, even when a subject was in the presence of a person with pronounced abilities.”

I had to smile. “So… all that stuff about wearing aluminum foil hats is true?”

“If I had to guess, it was a distortion based on leaked information from the Stargate program. Remember, to most of the people in the DIA and CIA the program was a joke and a failure. Very few people know that it was actually successful.”

“Do I need to go out and buy a roll of Reynolds Wrap?”

“Something can be arranged,” said Church. He made a very fast call to Dr. Hu.

“Is Hu still working at the DMS?” I asked when he was done.

“Bolton offered to keep him on and to promote him to deputy director of the DMS.”

“I’ll bet he lunged at that like a bass.”

Church gave me a disapproving look. “Dr. Hu’s response was to file his resignation. As soon as he was out of the parking garage he sent a coded signal to activate a computer virus that has since frozen all of his records. All of his research, past and present, is now locked. Any attempt to unlock those records receives the response manducare stercore. I believe you can translate the Latin.”

I could. Eat shit.

“Hu did all that?”

“You have always underestimated him. Chemistry is against you both, but Dr. Hu is one of the family, Captain. Never doubt it.”

I thought about my dream, of Hu fighting to save me, and of what Junie said about him. “If we get out of this,” I said, “I’ll buy him a beer.”

“It’s likely he would turn you down. He is part of the family but he still considers you to be a mouth-breathing Neanderthal. His words, repeated often,” said Church. He looked at his watch. “My car will be here soon.”

“Look, if this is all true, then that sleep lab is somewhere underground. A basement or subbasement. I think there’s a full God Machine in there.”

“Do you have any insight into where?”

“No. Maybe. I… I don’t know. But there’s something else,” I said. “And I think it’s really important. Maybe the most important thing. It was something Santoro said when his eyes glazed over. When he was taken over, I guess. He said, ‘You’re nothing but a thug, Ledger.’ Sound like anyone you know?”

“Now isn’t that interesting,” said Mr. Church.

There was a knock on the door. Brick had arrived. Church got to his feet and glanced at me.

“We have been victims too long, Captain. It’s time to go to war.”

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

Brick led us to the marina parking lot where a gorgeous Mercedes Sprinter luxury RV was parked.

“Welcome to the Junkyard,” said Brick, patting the sleek silver-gray skin with real affection. When he opened the door and I climbed in I could see why Brick was so proud of it. The first time I’d met him he was driving a Mister Softee ice-cream truck that was actually a rolling arsenal. He had designed and kitted it out to provide massive tactical support for any kind of field mission up to and probably including a full-scale invasion of Russia. The RV was no different. Inside I saw a bank of advanced computer and communications equipment, but the rest of the interior was basically a gun rack. Rows of handguns and long guns, ranging from combat shotguns to the latest automatic rifles. Boxes of grenades — fragmentation, flash-bangs, smoke — and a bin filled with uniforms and Kevlar.

Brick chuckled. “Mike Harnick helped me trick her out. If it’s not here, Joe, you don’t need it. We got every single one of Dr. Hu’s little electronic gizmos. I got a minigun mounted in the overhead dome, front and back chain guns, and if I press the right buttons I can lay down a nice barrage of mortars that would entertain even the most blasé of houseguests.”

“Jesus H. Henry Christ on a hoverboard,” I said.

“Until further notice,” said Church, “the Junkyard is our mobile command center.”

“To do what?” I asked as I dug black battle-dress trousers out of the bin. “What’s our first move?”

There was a click behind me and the door to the tiny head opened and Harry Bolt stepped out. His face was flushed. “Maybe you should put some biohazard tape over that,” he said as he quickly shut the door. “Oh, hi, Joe.”

“Hey, kid. Where’s Violin?”

“No idea,” said Harry. “Once my dad started evicting everyone I lost track. Dad told me to get the heck out, too. He’s really in a mood.”

I started to say something foul and threatening, but Church cut me off.

“Captain,” he said, “would you please describe to Mr. Bolt everything you can remember about the chamber with the sleep capsules.”

“Everything?”

“Yes,” said Church. “Mr. Bolt has joined the family.”

So, as Brick drove and I went over the whole thing again, Harry listened with mingled surprise, reluctant acceptance, and horror. When I got to the part about the sign on the wall that read: PLAYROOM SECURITY NOTICE, Harry Bolt suddenly burst into tears. He caved forward and put his face in his hands and wept, and through his sobs I heard him say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”

It didn’t sound like denial, though. Not really. It sounded like the thing you say when your worst fears are realized. I sat down next to him and wrapped my arm around his quivering shoulders, and like a little kid he turned and buried his face against my chest. He kept saying no.

We both knew he meant yes.

I’d known it since that moment of dreadful clarity I had while floating out in the night-black ocean. Maybe I’d even come to suspect it before then, but it seemed so absurd, so impossible.

Except that it was neither. It fit all the facts, confirmed all the suppositions.

When he could speak, Harry told me the origin of that name. The Playroom.

It used to have pinball machines and a handball court and a six-lane bowling alley. Skee-Ball and video games, too. It’s where he played, almost always alone, when he was a kid.

In his house.

In the basement of his home.

In the basement of the Bolton family home.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

We sat in a vehicle filled with guns and pain and drew our plans for war.

Even though I had a strong suspicion that Bolton was our Big Bad, having it confirmed really hurt. Even after everything he’d done to Church, to the DMS, to me, it hurt. It was a betrayal by one of my longtime heroes. I worshiped that guy. I wanted it to not be true. I wanted to wake up, maybe still out in the ocean, and discover that this was all just a dream.

Only a bad dream.

Even if it meant I drowned.

The world needs its heroes. We already have enough villains.

But… Harcourt Bolton, Senior?

Goddamn, that hurt.

“Dad has a big house in Rancho Santa Fe,” said Harry, his eyes red-rimmed, nose running, voice thick. “Huge, really. Too many rooms. It’s built on the grounds of an old Spanish monastery and it has two levels of basements where the monks stored the wine they made.”

He told us that the subbasement was expanded during Prohibition and became a speakeasy for rich locals. That’s when it earned the nickname “the Playroom.” When the Bolton family bought it, Harry’s grandfather had turned the subbasement into a real playroom, installing the bowling alley and handball court. It was Harcourt who purchased the video game machines, because, as Harry put it, those games kept Harry out of sight when his father had business friends, work colleagues, or women over. After Harry went to college, his father closed the subbasement, claiming that it had needed to be overhauled because of asbestos in the ceilings. Once the repairs were done it was scheduled to be converted into a wine cellar, circling around to its original use.

“And you never looked to see if that was true?” I asked.

He gave me a funny look. “Why would I? The video games were long gone by then. Besides… I haven’t been there at all except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and those were always pretty dreary. Nothing lifts the soul more than having your superstar father go point-by-point through your personal and career failures.”

“Turns out you’re a better man than him, kid,” I said.

It only made Harry cry again.

I turned to Church. “I’m thinking an airstrike would be pretty useful right about now. Worked on Gateway.”

“And if the God Machine isn’t actually there?” asked Church. “What then? Besides, right now the president still believes that Harcourt is his white knight. We have suspicions, not proof, and let’s face it, we’re being guided by something you saw in a dream. We have no political cards to play.”

I got up and crossed to the weapons rack. “I’d love to go in guns blazing,” I said. “But after what happened to Top and Bunny… and me…”

As if in answer to that statement, Church’s phone rang. He answered it and I saw relief on his face. “How long, Doctor?”

He listened. I could feel my gut clench like a fist.

“Go to FreeTech. Tell Junie you need access to the model-making room. They have a full shop for making prototypes. Go.” He made two more calls, one to Junie to tell her that Hu was on his way, and another to Toys to tell him to offer any support that Violin might need. Then he disconnected and turned to me. “Dr. Hu believes he can make a protective skullcap. FreeTech has the fabrication equipment. We don’t have much time, so it might be crude and uncomfortable.”

“I don’t care if you have to nail it to my head. I can’t go after the God Machine without it. What about my team?”

Church shook his head. “We can’t risk involving anyone else. It will be hard enough for Dr. Hu to make one helmet in time.”

“Shit.”

“On the upside,” said Church, “Ghost is at FreeTech with Junie. From what I read in the Stargate file, the process does not work on animals.”

“He’s been acting really weird around me,” I said.

“More probably he’s reacting to you being weird around him.”

I grunted. “Ah. Okay. Then let’s haul ass.”

Brick hauled ass.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

I came over the hill, moving quickly but quietly. Ghost ranged ahead to find any traps or sentries. I hadn’t given him a kill order so nobody died. Yet. The night was still young.

I was dressed all in black, armed to the teeth, face painted in camouflage colors. And I was wearing an aluminum foil hat.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not aluminum foil. It’s a crystal-infused, polymer-lined, low-conductivity, aluminum-magnesium-alloy skullcap. You can tell me that all day and night, but at the end of the day, I was going hunting wearing a metal hat so people won’t climb into my head. Joe Ledger, American Dweeb. I wanted to kill someone just because of the fucking hat. Let alone the other two or three hundred points on my Justifiable Homicide Greatest Hits list.

Harcourt fucking Bolton. Damn it all to hell. Why did it have to be him?

How could this country’s greatest hero be willing to unleash something like SX-56 and slaughter all those children? How?

Resentment at growing older and feeling marginalized? It couldn’t be that. There had to be a deeper meaning. Insanity, a brain tumor. Something.

His house was a sprawling mansion that looked like it belonged in medieval England. Or maybe Westeros. Gray stone walls that rose above acres of manicured lawn that was dark green despite the drought and the governor’s water restrictions. The richer you are, the more you take laws as suggestions that you can choose to ignore. The house had eaves and turrets and even a suggestion of battlements. You could defend that place against the Normans. Or Saxons. Or whoever the hell the medieval English fought. It’s been a long time since high school history and, as it turns out, I don’t give a shit.

I crouched down and pulled out my Scout glasses. They’re high-tech premarket devices developed for Church by a friend of his who worked at Google. Or possibly owns Google. They have excellent night vision, but the lenses can be cycled so that I can switch to ultraviolet, thermal scan, and even an overlay from a satellite. Nifty. Useful, too. It was still too light for night vision, so I used the heat-seeker function and bam, there they were. Sentries in nicely concealed posts dotted throughout the landscape. Ghost sniffed the air and probably knew their placement, height, weight, and what they had for dinner. He whuffed at me. Asking for the go order.

“Hold,” I said quietly. He gave me a withering look. Telling me I was too timid.

Could he really tell that the Killer in me was still gone, or possibly dead? Maybe. There have been plenty of times when that killer’s eyes looked out of my head and into the wolf’s eyes in Ghost. We’d met on that primal level so many times that in the heat of the fight we didn’t need words or commands. He knew because in those moments we were the same. Predators from an earlier age of the world.

I held my position as pack leader as much for that primitive aspect of my personality as for any of the training we did. Maybe another handler would have forged a different kind of relationship with Ghost. I’m not like other people.

Or… maybe that was changing. Maybe the fact was these dreamwalking bastards had cut the Killer’s throat while they were ransacking the house of my private thoughts. That might be a mixed metaphor, I don’t know. You get the point. There was something wrong upstairs and I was afraid that without that aspect of my personality, I was going to die. I probably should have died already. I’ve been lucky.

Luck has a shelf life; ask any gambler. Ask any soldier.

We were moving through the trees, staying in the deepest shadows. I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug,” I said quietly.

“I’m here, Cowboy,” he said at once. He was at Auntie’s Brooklyn safe house but it sounded like he was standing right beside me. “We just picked up your transponder on the satellite.”

“Where’s Big Daddy?” I asked. We’d given that nickname to Harcourt Bolton. I’d suggested Big Fucking Asshole, but Church overruled me.

“At the beach,” said Bug. Meaning, still at the Pier.

“Okay.”

“I have fresh intel, Cowboy,” he said, and from the tone of his voice I knew it was bad.

“Hit me.”

“I’ve hacked into Big Daddy’s accounts and his personal computer,” he said. It was something he wouldn’t have done half a day ago. Now, all bets were off. “Bolton has been building a shell around himself for years. Layers of it. Shell corporations, offshore holdings, numbered accounts. You name it. Any way you can hide money, he’s using it. No idea how much. We’re hacking our way through it but it’s complicated. Short version is that ten years ago he was borderline broke. He was one of the people really crushed when the economy crashed. His mansion was mortgaged to the hilt, he was behind on payments to a dozen banks. He kept it hidden pretty well, but he was about to lose it all. Then it turned around. He started suddenly making payments on time and paying back the principle.”

“Where’d the money come from?”

“That’s the thing, he reported it to the IRS as consulting and speaking fees and returns on investments in technology corporations. It’ll take a team of forensic accountants to make sense of it all, though. He was very smart and very clever about it. Paid very heavy taxes so that he didn’t raise flags. But MindReader was able to go deeper. A lot of his investments were in dummy corporations. He was using them to launder his own money. And, Cowboy, get this, some of those fake companies are tied to Middle East oil money.”

“We can prove that?”

Bug laughed. “How? With information obtained illegally? Fruits of a poisoned tree.”

“Okay, but—”

Before I could finish, Mr. Church’s voice cut in as sharp and hard as a knife blade. “Deacon to Cowboy,” he barked, “we have fresh intel. We believe we know how Big Daddy intends to use the SX-56.”

“How?” I demanded.

“Freefall.” He said that among the papers Aunt Sallie had obtained from Washington was a proposal for a device designed to work in concert with Kill Switch. The idea was to launch batches of small drones, each of which was rigged with a chemical self-destruct device that was kept in safe mode by electrical current. Stop the current for any reason and the chemicals mix and destroy the drone, but the blast isn’t an incendiary. More like a big pop, seeding the air with the contents of the thin-walled plastic containers fixed to the underside of each drone. Shoot them down and they blow. Try to disarm them and they blow. Cut all power and they blow. Airbursts and prevailing winds are dangerous bedfellows for a bioweapon. Fly the drones over congested areas and let biology do the rest. Let the movements of people do it. Let the natural contact of humans to humans, parents to kids, person to person be the weapon that drives the plague.

And why not just fly the drones over the crowds and blow them up? Sure, that would work, that would spread the disease. But police and EMTs, the fire department, FEMA, the National Guard, and hundreds of other first and second responders would be able to step up and handle it. People would die, sure. Kids would die. But only a few. Not the thousands or tens of thousands that would contract the weaponized smallpox in the hours after the power went out. Kill Switch would do far more than kill the power. It was designed for use against technological cultures where the population relies on speedy and efficient response. The more civilized a person is, the more they panic when the lights go out.

Kill Switch turned off the power and Freefall filled the darkness with monsters.

I crouched in the shadows under the trees and felt my mind clenching into a fist.

Church said, “MindReader is tearing apart Bolton’s accounting. We have been able to track deliveries of drone components to ten cities across the United States. I’ve called the president but he refuses to listen. Bolton apparently already told him that we were going to approach him with some kind of wild cover story. He’s been ahead of us at every step. Erskine designed his drone weapon to operate via the Kill Switch. We’re working on the code sequence but you need to locate the main God Machine or we’ll have no chance at all of stopping this. Go!”

But I was already running.

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

As I ran I called my “backup.”

“Cowboy to Spykid.”

And Harry Bolt said, “I wish you wouldn’t fucking call me that. I need a better call sign. And I don’t want Junior G-Man, Wonder Boy, Bambi, Scrappy-Do, Happy Meal, Fresh Meat, Zombie Bait, Boy Wonder, Shirley Temple, Red Shirt, Bear Cub, Son of a Gun, or any of the other stupid names you suggested.”

“Really?” I said. “Now’s the time for this?”

“I want to be called Jester.”

“Jester? You think this shit’s funny?”

“No,” he said. “Because I don’t think it’s funny. The name’s ironic.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I still want to be called Jester. It sounds cool.”

There are times when banging your head against a tree really feels like the right choice. I said, “Sure. Jester. Whatever. Can we save the world now? Just asking, because we’re not pressed for time at all.”

A pause. “Okay, Cowboy. Jester is on station.”

“Thank Jesus,” I said. “Keep sharp and follow me in.”

If Harry wasn’t my best chance of finding my way into the house and down to the Playroom I’d have given him a lollipop and left him behind. He’s a nice kid and all that, but he has no business being out in the field.

Lilith still hadn’t gotten back to Church with fresh intel, but every instinct I possessed told me that we were fighting the clock. Fighting and maybe losing. Santoro had gotten the drives with the code sequence. He — or one of the other people working for Bolton — could be down in the Playroom punching those numbers into the God Machine. Kids in ten cities across the country could be in the crosshairs right goddamn now.

Add to that the damage from the blackouts. How many people would that affect? Depends on the cities. If it was New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, places like that? Call it millions. Crashes, fires going unchecked, medical emergencies, and no one able to respond. People trapped in elevators and subway cars. People with pacemakers, people on life support, babies in neonatal units, patients in surgery. All of them plunged into darkness.

Or it could be even worse.

This could break us. It would simply be a matter of ISIL winning. This was a situation of terror proving that it was more powerful than sanity. This was a sword against which no shield would ever work. Fear and destruction wouldn’t be something in the headlines. They would be the defining qualities of our lives.

Those of us who survived.

If I didn’t find that code and the God Machine, I wasn’t going to live long enough to see the fall. That’s not a blessing. I’d burn for failing. I’m not particularly religious, but I know that much.

“I’m going in,” I told Bug. “Jester… be ready, you hear me?”

“Ten-four,” he said, using the wrong response. Idiot.

Ghost and I drifted along the line of hedges until we were at the wall. Then I drew my gun. For this part of the job I was using a Snellig A-220, a high-intensity gelatin dart filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine along with a powerful hallucinatory compound. We all call it “horsey.” Dart someone with it and they go down right now and dream of psychedelic lobsters. Or so I’ve been told. Some of the guys have volunteered to try it and they tell wild stories. It’s like a bad acid trip that puts you into a fucked-up version of Alice in Wonderland. You wake up hungover and disoriented. Horsey is designed to attack the nervous system like a neurotoxin, so it works faster than a bullet. You get hit and you go down.

Now, don’t get me wrong… under any other circumstances I’d have been happy as hell to punch the tickets of anyone working for Bolton. But you can’t ask questions of the dead, and if the code wasn’t on the premises, then I wanted to be able to hold meaningful group therapy sessions with the guards. Somebody would know something and with the lives of all those kids in the balance, I wouldn’t be in the mood to ask nicely.

I edged around the curve of one of the turrets. Two guards stood together, eyes roving back and forth across the grounds. Looking in the wrong direction. Watching the driveway, which was the only route in that wasn’t covered by the motion sensors. I raised the Snellig.

Pop. Pop. They fell as surely as if I’d reached into their brain stems and flicked a switch on the nerve conduction.

Ghost bared his teeth at them, and I knew that if I hadn’t given him a stand-down sign he’d have made sure they never woke up. He was in a mood.

Wish to hell I was. My nerves were shot and when I’d raised the gun I was half-sure the shakes would have spoiled my aim. Yeah, it was that bad. I needed my edge. I needed the Killer back.

Even so, even without him, I bent low and ran, dropped one more guard at the front door, and then I was inside. In the belly of the beast. Ghost was with me, but he was drifting farther and farther from my side. I didn’t like the looks he was giving me, either.

Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

Chief Petty Officer Lydia Ruiz pulled into the ten-car parking lot, eased into a slot between a squatty little Fiat and a PT Cruiser with wood side panels and a roof rack for surfboards. She killed the engine and got out of the car. The motor tinkled slightly as it began to cool.

A warm breeze blew off the water and the sun was high in a clear blue sky. Out on the water a boat full of whale watchers was cruising north from San Diego, its hull painted a white so bright and pure that it hurt her eyes to look at it. Lydia took a few steps toward the entrance, then paused and turned back to her car. The passenger door was still closed. Bunny hadn’t moved at all.

Lydia went back to the car and came around to his side. Through the tinted glass she could see his face. Rigid, emotionless, blank. His sunglasses were tucked into the collar of his T-shirt, his blue eyes fixed on something that was not part of anything there in that moment. Seeing him like this twisted a knife in Lydia’s heart.

“¿Conejito—?” she called. Little bunny. A joke because he was so tall and muscular. Except now he seemed small, diminished by the comprehensive loss of confidence in who he was, and total lack of understanding of what he’d done. The intel about Project Stargate and all that mind control stuff did not seem to help Bunny. It had still been his finger on the trigger.

She opened the door and touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. When she did that he always closed his eyes and leaned his face into her touch. It was a thing he’d always done and it never failed to ignite the love flame deep in her heart.

Except he didn’t do it now.

Instead he sat staring through the windshield glass as if it projected a movie he was commanded to watch. And Lydia was wise enough about combat trauma to recognize what was happening. The events on that gas dock had broken something inside Bunny. In his heart and maybe in his head.

Lydia knew that it could happen to any soldier no matter how they were hurt. The ones who were going to stay in the game knew how to manage their own scars, even use them. Doubt made you seek for truth. Fear made you cautious. They were pillars of wisdom and of survival. Except when they became the defining qualities of a person. That’s when a soldier became a kind of landmine that could kill himself or anyone around him. On the battlefield it created fatal hesitation. It soured judgment and clouded focus. It planted poisoned seeds in the heart from which ugly flowers grew.

“Come on, baby,” she said, pulling lightly on his arm.

He got out of the car and let her steer him to their house, but he did it like a robot. It chilled Lydia because it was like the man she loved had stepped out of his own body. She guided him to his favorite chair on their patio, opened a beer and set it on the table next to him, but Bunny didn’t look at it, didn’t take a sip. There were four old men playing bocce on the sand, and half a dozen surfers in black wetsuits sitting on their boards waiting for a wave. A line of pelicans rode on the wind out toward a fishing boat.

If Bunny saw any of it, he gave no sign.

Lydia sat next to him, her chair pulled close, her head resting against his shoulder. She didn’t even know he was crying until she felt a tear fall onto her head.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

The Mullah rose from his narrow bed and walked out of his house. His staff and the gathered senior officers all turned as he approached. Their conversation died off but their faces were alight with expectation.

“Is it time?” asked the warlord who had been a skeptic less than a month ago. There was no doubt left in his eyes.

The Mullah looked at each of them in turn.

“It is time,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

Bolton did not live small, I’ll give him that. This place must have cost twenty million. I couldn’t afford to mow the lawn. Made me wonder how much of it was bought with innocent blood.

The Scout glasses told me that there were no motion sensors on the ground floor or the big double staircase.

“Cowboy to Jester,” I said. “Ghost is coming for you. Follow him in.”

I used hand signs to order Ghost to run back exactly the way we’d come in. He vanished like a puff of white smoke. While I waited for him to return with Harry, I removed a few sensors from my kit and placed them on the downstairs windows and doors. They uplinked to a small drone and both boosted its signal and focused it on the house. Looking for a large electronic signature. So far, nothing, and that was not encouraging. What if I was wrong? What if that whole dream was nothing more than that?

Bad questions. Letting my mind ask them was like throwing gasoline on a fire. I heard a sound and turned to see Ghost moving along the line of hedges with Harry running bent over behind him. The kid was not a good runner. His stride was too short and he did not appear to pay any attention to the irregularities in the lawn. And it was his lawn. When he reached me he was out of breath, his face damp with perspiration.

“Rule one,” I told him. “Cardio.”

“Yeah, yeah, blow me,” he said, mopping sweat from his eyes. He looked around. “Dad really made a lot of changes to the place. Motion sensors, guards.” He crouched in front of the door. “You were right, these are new locks. He didn’t want me coming home and just waltzing in.”

I almost said, He didn’t want you coming home at all. Sooner or later it was going to catch up to Harry that the Closers were working for his dad. All of them. Including the ones who tried to kill Harry in Budapest. Maybe the kid already knew that and wasn’t letting himself think about it. Or maybe he had that truth locked in a closet in his mind.

I removed another of Hu’s doohickeys, peeled off the plastic tape to expose the adhesive, and gingerly attached it to the door. The little green light stayed green. But when I placed a second one on the frame the light turned red. An alarm, and a good one. No problem. I attached wires to the sensor and connected them to another of the signal rerouters, waited until the light turned green, and then let Harry pick the lock. The door clicked open. Easy as pie.

The inside of the house was all dark wood and expensive art, hardwood floors and rugs with complex patterns. Vases sat on little tables and a huge Bolton coat of arms hung over a stone fireplace that was bigger than my first apartment. There was a motto inscribed on the heraldry. Vi et Virtute.

Harry saw me looking and translated it. “By strength and valor.”

He looked like he wanted to throw up. I placed my hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “You’re here, kid. It took courage to come in here. A lot of it. You could have stayed back at the Pier. You didn’t. Hold on to that, it could be useful.”

He nodded and wiped wetness from the corners of his eyes.

Ghost went ahead to sniff for guards and immediately returned to me, looking over his shoulder three times. Three guards down a hall that led to the kitchen. I could smell a faint whiff of grilled cheese and coffee. The entrance to the basement was in the kitchen. No way to avoid it. In other circumstances I’d have tossed in a flash-bang and then let Ghost go to town. But that would be noisy and we weren’t ready for noise.

Not yet.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

Toys stood in the doorway and watched Dr. Hu work. The scientist was bent over a modeling press, making another of the protective skullcaps. Toys wore one already and he hated it. Apart from the fact that it was too small and hurt his head, it looked bloody ridiculous. Junie wore one, as well, as did Christel Sparks, the head of security. The two women stood on either side of Hu. Junie was working the forming press, and Sparks was standing guard, her hand resting on the holstered Glock she wore on her belt.

“How many more?” asked Toys.

The doctor looked up from his work. “I don’t know. I might even be wasting my time. They haven’t been tested yet. I’ve refined the design from the ones I gave Ledger and Bolton’s son. Not sure if I made them better or worse.”

“Wait… we don’t even know if these sodding things will work?”

“No,” said Hu.

“Bloody hell.”

“Actually,” said Sparks, “they don’t work.”

Hu didn’t even glance at her. “And I suppose you’re an expert on such things?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said as she drew her sidearm, “I am.”

She shot Dr. Hu in the back.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

First Sergeant Bradley Sims sat alone at a table in the mess, a coffee cup standing filled and cold nearby, a plate of eggs and bacon untouched. The TV was on and CNN was using its endless news cycle to dredge up every gory detail about the slaughter at the gas dock.

Top had come into the Pier to clear out his locker. The two U.S. marshals were with him throughout, each of them stone-faced. However, Top had talked them into letting him come in here for a last lunch before he left. Montana Parker, Brian Botley, and Sam Imura were also in the building because Director Bolton had wanted to interview them to see where they stood in terms of loyalty to their country and involvement with the recent catastrophes. Federal marshals dogged each of them, too. The rest of the staff had been sent home. It was all over. All crashing down. Top sipped his coffee and felt his heart breaking into pieces.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with his palms. He was so damn tired but he did not dare go to sleep. They would be waiting for him. The ones he’d murdered. They would be standing around his bed and Top knew that they always would be. For the rest of his life. Faces empty of life and painted with blood. Dead eyes watching him, dead hands lifted to point fingers at him.

“Top—?” said a voice. Sam Imura.

“Go away,” he said without opening his eyes.

“Top, look at me,” said Sam. He sounded confused.

“Go the fuck away.”

“Top, what the hell are you doing?”

Anger overtook his remorse for a moment and Top dropped his hands and glared at Sam.

At Sam.

At…

Sam Imura lay on the floor, his face white with agony, his clothes torn. He sat there, legs spread wide, hands clamped over his stomach as red blood poured from between his fingers.

Top stared at him. “Wh-what—?”

This wasn’t the mess hall. He wasn’t even in that end of the facility. This was the hallway outside of the armory and the door was ajar. Sam lay on the floor beside it as if trying to block the exit with his body. Top felt something in his hand and he looked down to see a big serving fork clutched in his fist.

The fork, his hand, and his wrist were soaked with Sam’s blood.

“What?” he repeated.

“T-Top…,” wheezed Sam, then his eyes rolled up and he slid sideways onto the floor and lay in a boneless sprawl.

“First Sergeant Sims,” bellowed a voice, and Top turned to see Montana Parker behind him. A federal marshal lay unconscious at her feet. Another sat on the floor, his back against the wall, eyes closed as if sleeping.

But Montana…

She had her gun held in a two-hand grip, the barrel pointed at Top’s chest.

“Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head,” roared Montana. “Do it now.”

“What?” he asked her.

He heard a sound behind him, half turned, saw Botley behind him, saw the gun in his hand. Pointed at Top.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

He sat on a low cushion, surrounded by the leaders of the groups who had come together because they now believed that he was a holy man. Or, if they did not believe that, they accepted him as a man of power.

Houston was still burying its dead.

The soldiers at Fort Rucker were preparing to bury theirs.

The staff at the Naval Auxiliary Landing Field on San Clemente Island were picking their dead out of the wreckage of the crashed helicopters.

Each time the Mullah said that he could reach out and switch off the power, he had done exactly that.

Now they gathered to watch the greatest stroke. The crippling blow. The streets of ten cities would be choked with the dead.

Burning with fires so hot that it would melt the hope and the hubris of the Americans.

The Mullah sat before them but he did not look at anyone. His eyes had gone totally dead and they each believed that he was in a spiritual trance. When he was like this, they knew, great things were about to happen.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

I swapped out the magazine of the Snellig and, with Ghost behind me and Harry behind the dog, we drifted down the hallway to the kitchen. The hall connected to the kitchen at the corner, which meant that they couldn’t see me until I reached the doorway. I held up a fist to signal Ghost and Harry to stop. I took a breath, let it out halfway, then wheeled around the corner. I saw three men in white shirts and loosened ties, jackets hung over the backs of chairs, microwave pulse pistols tucked into shoulder holsters, coffee cups and plates and an open bag of Cheetos. They were all looking at the TV hung on the wall. They were watching the news. A panel of experts was arguing about the Mullah’s message, the threats, the predicted U.S. response, and the probable location of the ten target cities. One of the men was chewing a big mouthful of the grilled cheese sandwich he held. Another was standing by the stove making another sandwich. The third man was sitting there sipping his coffee.

I did not shout or yell or announce myself. That’s stupid.

Instead I fired.

Gas darts caught both seated men on the back of their necks. They sprawled forward. Before the third guy even knew what was going on I was in motion. I put one hand on the table and launched myself, pivoting and bringing my feet up to kick him in the thigh and the side of the head. He caromed into the stove, rebounded and fell sideways, pulling the frying pan with him. As he fell he tried to bring the pan up to ward off my next kick. I stamped down on it and drove the scalding metal against his face. He started to shriek but then I kicked the pan away and pistol-whipped the scream right out of his mouth. His head hit a table leg and bounced back, and I hit him again. He flopped back, dazed and bleeding, burned and in pain, but not out.

I hadn’t wanted him out.

“Ghost, watch!” I called, and the big dog swung around, crouched and — I think — prayed for someone to come along that he could bite. Harry stood there looking numb, his gun hanging limp in his hand.

I dropped onto the Closer, pinning his arms, caught his throat with one hand, and stuffed the barrel of the Snellig into his mouth. I wasn’t nice about it. Teeth broke.

“How many?” I snarled.

He didn’t want to tell me. Not how many, and not where. Too bad, because I really wanted to know.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

Dr. William Hu staggered sideways, grabbed the side of the molding press, missed, and fell hard. Junie stood there, eyes wide, mouth open, her face and throat and chest splashed with bright, hot blood. Christel fired again and Hu twisted around, crying out in agony as blood exploded from his shoulder.

Junie screamed.

And then Toys flung himself across the room in a rugby tackle that drove Christel into a workbench. Tools and materials flew everywhere. Toys chopped down on Christel’s wrist, smashing her bones against the edge of the table, sending the gun flying. Despite the agony she had to be feeling, Christel drove her other elbow into Toys’s face. He twisted to take the blow on his cheek rather than his nose, but it still rocked him. Christel was a tall and powerful woman and she knew how to hit. She hammered backward again and again, driving him away from the table, forcing him to use his forearms to shield his face. As soon as he covered up, she kicked Toys in the groin with such savage force that it tore a whistling scream from him. He staggered backward and she followed with a series of vicious, powerful kicks. Toys threw his body away, dropping and rolling partway under the table to avoid her feet.

Christel used her good hand to snatch the fallen pistol from the floor, but as she raised it, Toys lashed out at her shins with both feet. The shot was powerful and very fast, and it completely knocked her legs backward, tilting Christel forward into a belly flop. She landed hard, striking knees and chin on the floor. Toys wheeled around, got to one knee, and kicked the gun out of her hand. Then he dove for it, came up with the pistol, and pointed it at the security woman’s head.

“No!” cried Junie, rushing forward and slapping his hand away. “Don’t. Toys — look at her eyes.”

Christel was struggling to get up and come after him, and though her mouth wore a grimace of bloodlust, her eyes were totally dead.

“She’s been taken over,” said Junie.

Toys lowered the gun, then thought better of it, and reversed it in his grip. “Sorry, love, but needs must.”

He whipped the butt of the pistol across the base of her skull. Christel’s blank eyes rolled white and she collapsed. Toys, panting, stared past her to where William Hu lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood.

“Christ!” bellowed Toys as he rushed forward. “Junie, call nine-one-one. Get me the medical kit, and—”

Before he could finish, Junie Flynn stabbed him in the back with a screwdriver.

He coughed, staggered, dropped the gun as he fell to his knees. He tried to reach behind him, tried to understand. Tried to beg for help. As he turned to reach for the handle of the screwdriver, Junie tore it free. He looked past the bloody tool and all the way up to her eyes. Her dead, dead eyes.

“No…,” he whispered.

She raised the screwdriver like a dagger and rushed at him.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

The Closer told me that there were fourteen other operatives in the house. That did not count the men outside. Most of them were down in the basement.

“Doing what?” I demanded.

“M-managing assets.”

I cut a look at Harry Bolt, who was standing in the kitchen doorway with Ghost. Harry’s face had gone a pale gray-green at the sight of the blood.

“Where’s Santoro?” I asked the Closer, but he didn’t know anyone by that name. I tried it a different way, reinforcing my request with a jab of my gun against his mashed lips. “Where’s Priest?”

“Down… there,” he said, and then he choked on the blood in his mouth and began coughing. Terrible coughs, that made his whole body twitch. I stood up, looked around the kitchen, sighed, and shot the man with a gas dart.

Harry came over and knelt to reposition the man and clear his airway. “He could choke to death,” he said.

“He’s lucky I didn’t put a bullet through his brain pan,” I said, then in a flash of anger I grabbed Harry’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet, shook him like a rag doll, and thrust him backward against the table. “This is war, kid, grow the fuck up. Now get your shit together and find me a way down to the subbasement.”

Harry pushed away from me, smoothing his clothes and looking scared and hurt. As he crossed the kitchen he shook his head as if unsure how someone like me could be one of the good guys. He had a lot to learn about how good guys win wars. It was always a mistake to confuse good with nice.

The cellar door turned out to be a fake. Beyond the wooden one was a steel security door. Top of the line and with a high-tech keycard scanner of a kind that is very tough to bypass.

A lot less tough, though, when you can pick the pocket of the assholes who were supposed to be guarding it. I used a bloodstained keycard to open the hundred-thousand-dollar lock. The door opened. No alarms rang.

“Ghost,” I said, “ready.”

The dog shifted to an angle where he could spring at anything or anyone who came out of the door I was about to open. He crouched, muscles etched like stone beneath his fur.

“Jester, watch my back.”

“Ready,” said Harry. He had his gun pointing down at the floor and he was sweating badly.

Chilled air wafted out at me from the stairwell and it carried a strange blend of machine oil, old meat, ozone, and mold. Ghost bared his teeth in a silent snarl. Fear or anger, it was impossible to say. Probably both.

Beyond the door was a lighted hallway that ran six feet to a set of stairs. I went in first, taking the steps quickly and silently, watching the corners as the stairs reached a landing and turned. Ghost swarmed down after me. I quick-looked around the bend and saw that the second flight took us down to a stone floor. The lights were on down there but I heard no conversation. Ghost came abreast of me and sniffed, then wagged his tail twice. No one in the immediate vicinity.

We went down into a room that was set up as a computer center, with twenty workstations and high-end electronics. Comfortable wheeled office chairs, a full coffee bar, area rugs over the stone, and even discreetly positioned speakers from which Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A Minor played softly. Nothing but the best for the employees of a supervillain.

We moved over to the computers. The screens all had the same display. It chilled me to the bone.

And beneath that was a digital clock.

Yeah. Actual ticking clock? Check.

Shit.

As I watched, the clock went from 14:29 to 14:28.

Harry grabbed my arm. “Wait, does that mean they input the code?”

“Yes,” I said. “It damn well does.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

Akbar had arranged ten laptops in a row, positioned so they could all watch as history unfolded before them. Each screen showed an image sent by a small fixed camera. Each of the video feeds showed cities viewed from a distance. Akbar had written the names of each in ink on the frame of the laptops.

Ten American cities. Ten fields to be sown with the seeds of retribution, each by one touch of the fingers of God. On the bottom of each screen was a small digital counter. They were all in sync. 19:01:08. In less than twenty minutes the world was going to change. It was like raising a veil. A different world existed on the other side and nothing would ever—could ever — be the same again.

It made Akbar want to weep.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

His name was Trey Willis and he had worked as building supervisor since the tower opened in 2008. He had a staff of thirty and they kept the building clean, fully functional, and efficient. Trey had worked in maintenance and building supervisions for nearly twenty-two years and taught management courses three nights a week at Philadelphia Community College. He had a wife and three daughters, the eldest of whom was pre-med at Jefferson. His wife was a nurse practitioner in the neonatal unit at Children’s Hospital. Trey had no criminal record and an honorable discharge after serving four years in the air national guard. He paid his taxes, went to church, had middling interest in politics, and planned on retiring to Ocean City, New Jersey, in five years. He already owned a little place there not two blocks from the beach.

Trey was absolutely the wrong person for the job he was undertaking. Which made him the right man.

All day he had felt a little uneasy and wondered if he was coming down with another migraine. He hadn’t had one in years but something was definitely wrong with his head. Concentrating on anything, even little tasks, became increasingly difficult as the day wore on. Eventually it got so bad that he told his assistant to take over and Trey went to his office to close his eyes for a moment. Leaving early was never his plan. He hadn’t taken a sick day in eleven years and wasn’t going to let a headache break that record. So he locked his office door and stretched out on his couch.

It was the wind that woke him up.

Not the breeze from the air-conditioner. It was wind.

He opened his eyes and very nearly screamed.

He was no longer in his office. He wasn’t even inside the building. Nor was he lying down.

Instead he found himself standing on the observation deck many stories above the busy traffic. He was alone.

Except…

Except that all around him were drones. The small kind that they sold at Target and Walmart. What were they called? Quadcopters? Like the kind that caused all that trouble last year.

Just…

… like…

… those.

And all of the little motors were humming.

Trey blinked, more than half sure that this was a dream, that once he woke up he’d still be down in his office. He blinked and blinked.

He was still on the deck but the drones were gone.

Of course they were. Why would he have drones? Where would he have gotten them? It was ridiculous.

Which is when he heard the buzz. When the sounds that were there registered in his stunned and startled mind. Trey turned and looked over the edge of the deck wall. The drones were there. All of them. Hovering like a swarm of hornets.

And then one by one they drifted away, going in different directions, flying to different parts of the crowded city. Trey felt something and looked down. Saw his hands. Saw his hands as they worked the controls of a device he held. He watched his hands move, saw his fingers manipulate the controls.

But try as he could Trey Willis could not stop his traitor hands from sending the drones out into the skies above Philadelphia.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE

“Stand down!”

Three U.S. marshals came pelting down the hall, guns up and out. Top spun toward them, the bloody fork still clutched in his fist. Montana Parker and Brian Botley stood on the other side of him, each pointing their guns. Sam Imura lay on the floor, bleeding to death. The world had torn loose from its hinges and was tilting, falling, going sideways and down.

Then Montana shifted her gun away from Top and pointed it at the first marshal.

And fired. The bullet caught the man in the chest and knocked him backward. There was no blood even though the marshal wore no visible Kevlar.

“Top!” screamed Montana. “Run — they’re Closers!”

The other marshals raised their weapons and Top saw that these were not ordinary guns. They were MPPs. Microwave pulse pistols.

Tok!

Tok!

The world seemed to explode into flames.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN

I tapped my earbud for Church’s. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I barked.

“Go for Deacon.”

“I am on site and have located a timer for the God Machine. We are on active countdown. Current reading is twelve minutes and fifty seconds.”

“Understood,” said Church crisply. “That confirms fresh intel from overseas.” That was the code for Arklight, for Lilith. “We have a list of targets.”

He read them off. He might as well have shot me. Those were the ten cities with the largest populations. The cities with the largest number of children. Total estimated population? Call it twenty-five million. How many kids? Half that, give or take. How many would be infected? How many would get sick? How many would die if the power was out? My mind did some ugly math. Conservative guess… a million kids. If we were lucky.

Lucky.

Good God in heaven. Ghost caught the fear that had to be surrounding us like a cloud. He whined. I plugged a MindReader patch into an open USB port on the console. The device flashed green.

“Deacon, is Bug online? Can he hack this system and shut it down remotely?”

Bug was right there. “Accessing it now, Cowboy.”

“Tell me something good.”

“Jesus, Cowboy,” said Bug, “they’ve got a lot of anti-intrusion software in here. I mean… this is cutting-edge stuff. Wow. Nice code. This is sweet.”

“Bug, do you see the timer?”

“Oh… crap. Yeah.”

“Tell me you can stop this countdown.”

He didn’t tell me anything for ten seconds. Felt like ten years. My heart was rattling like machine-gun fire.

“No,” Bug said. “There’s a firewall that’s going to take time to break through.”

“How much time?”

His voice was weak. “Too much. Three, four hours. Joe, you’re going to need to find Santoro or someone who knows how to turn the God Machine off.”

“What would happen if I blew the goddamn thing up?”

“How would I know? But if it comes down to the wire, Cowboy, go for it. By then we’d have nothing to lose.”

“Deacon,” I said, “if I can’t switch it off, I need you to back my play.”

There was the slightest pause. “I have two of our Apaches on station, but understand this — you’re too far underground. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“Shit,” I said. I holstered my gas gun and drew my Sig Sauer. There are times for subtlety and there are times to put hair on the walls. “Harry, how do we get to the damn Playroom?”

He spun and ran. I followed, setting my Scout glasses to show me the countdown. We ran as fast as we could.

And hell seemed to follow us all.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN

Toys tried to crawl away, but Junie ran after him, chopping at him with the screwdriver. He stabbed back with kicks, knocking her off balance, knocking her down, but each time she got back up and charged again.

Her eyes were dead and empty, but her lips were pulled back from her white teeth. Drool swung in pendulous lines from her lips, and she was muttering a guttural, wordless noise.

“Gah… gah… gah… gah…”

The screwdriver rose and fell, rose and fell.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

We ran down a series of halls, through multiple rooms. Wine cellar, bulk storage, a woodworking shop, another for metalwork, two laboratories.

We found two Closers in the fifth room. Neither was Santoro. I pushed Harry behind.

“Ghost,” I yelled. “Hit! Hit! Hit!”

He was a white missile. Fangs and claws and rage. It had been a long time since Ghost had been in a real fight. He was filled with nervous energy and the power that came with it. Speed born of fury and bloodlust. If you are on the receiving end of it, that is a nightmare beyond imagining. Ghost hit the nearest Closer and there was blood in the air before they struck the ground. Reinforced protective undergarments be damned. Ghost went for the throat. I shot the other Closer through the bridge of the nose. Protective undergarment, my hairy white ass.

I jumped over his body as he crashed down. Ghost straddled the flopping body of the first man. The Closer hadn’t been able to so much as scream.

I didn’t even look back to see if Harry was following. In the lens of my Scout glasses the digital numbers went from 10:45 to 10:44.

Ticking down to darkness.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

The wall beside Top burst outward in a fireball of burning plaster and brick, showering him, driving him back, burning his hands and face and arms. Montana lay on the floor where she’d fallen, but she rolled onto her belly and aimed her pistol, firing, firing, firing. The ankle of one of the Closers exploded into a red mess as the heavy slugs destroyed bone and ligaments. He screamed as he toppled sideways, and his timing was tragic. He fell directly into the path of his partner’s next shot.

Tok!

The entire upper torso of the wounded Closer burst apart, hurling flaming meat everywhere. The flames slapped against the second Closer’s thighs and his pants caught fire. Montana changed her angle and shot him in the mouth, blowing out the back of his head.

Top slapped at the flames on his own clothes, stepped on a piece of debris, lost his balance, and fell heavily against the opposite wall. A bullet burned past him, missing his neck by an inch. Top whirled to see Brian Botley, his eyes glazed as he raised his pistol and pointed it and fired. Top was moving, ducking, rushing. And then Brian was falling, and Top saw that the fork he’d dropped was now buried into the instep of Brian’s foot. Brian kept firing as he fell…

… and he fell on the bucking gun. His body twitched once and then there was silence as a pool of dark red spread out beneath him.

Sam Imura, dazed and bleeding, lay there, his arm stretched for the long reach and stab. He reached over, rolled Brian onto his side, and took the gun. The weapon was smeared with blood, but Sam raised it anyway. His eyes were beginning to glaze over. Sam pointed the gun and had time to force out two strangled words.

“Top… Run…”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

07:19

We reached the stairway down to the subbasement. There was another steel door, another keypad. And four more guards.

They were ready for us. No way they hadn’t heard the shots and yells. Four Closers, four pulse pistols. Me and a dog.

Short version.

They died.

I took a keycard from a dead hand and swiped it. The door opened. Ghost and I, both of us covered in blood, rushed inside. It burned me to know that the clock was ticking. It burned that I had no idea if there was even a way to stop this.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

SEPTEMBER 10, 2:44 P.M.

Sam’s shots were wild, hitting walls and floor and missing Top by inches.

Top dove, rolled, and came up with a pulse pistol, pivoted on his knees, fired. The wall beside Sam exploded, barraging the wounded sniper with burning chunks of sheetrock and shattered pieces of wooden studs. The force picked Sam up and flung him against the wall so hard that the sound of breaking bones was horribly sharp.

Then the air above Top sizzled as another Closer fired on him. He flattened out and rolled like a log, trying not to die, trying to bring the pulse pistol to bear. Nearby, Montana Parker crouched, the slide locked back on her weapon. She wasted precious seconds to swap out a dead magazine for one that might keep her alive.

Top saw the blast hit her.

One moment his friend and fellow warrior was there, raising her gun, ready to fight and kill, and the next she was gone.

Just gone.

The blast caught her dead center and exploded her. She never had time to even scream. Superheated blood and pieces of meat slapped against Top, getting in his mouth, burning his skin.

He screamed and screamed, even as he turned and brought up his own gun.

“Die, motherfucker!” he roared as he emptied the entire magazine into the Closers. Two of them went down, but more were coming.

More.

So many more.

And then the door at the far end of the hall burst open as a Closer came flying through, his limbs twisted, head twisted more than halfway around. The man struck the backs of the other Closers and dragged three of them to the floor. Everyone turned — the Closers and Top — to see two new figures enter the hallway.

A man and a woman. She was tall, with dark eyes that glittered like polished coal. He was a big and blocky man with tinted glasses and black gloves. She had two knives, one in each of her slim fists. He carried no weapons.

They each wore ungainly metal helmets.

The Closers raised their weapons.

And Violin and Mr. Church were upon them.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

06:47

The corridor was exactly the same as the one in my dream.

That was freaky on a level that shook me to my marrow.

But at the same time it gave me a splinter of hope.

“This way!” yelled Harry, running ahead, but I was already going that way, running beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, but unlike in my dream I did not stop to look in each one. I knew now where I was going. Maybe better than Harry did. He hadn’t been here since this was actually his playroom.

The door to the laboratory was on my left. Another wasted second swiping a keycard. As the lock clicked I heard Ghost growl. I turned, bringing the Sig Sauer up.

The door directly opposite the lab opened and he was there.

Mr. Priest.

Esteban Santoro.

Closers crowded the doorway behind him. A lot of them.

And it was in that moment, when the odds were absolutely impossible, when it was three of us against eight of them, when the clock was running down and there was pretty much no chance I could win, that something happened. I could feel it. Way deep down inside.

It was not a battle heat. It was not fear. It was not any emotion that modern science or advanced psychology has a name for. It was something too old for that. Too primitive. Too elemental. As Santoro came at me, I felt the Killer awaken in my head. He had slept too long and we both knew it. Maybe he’d been driven into some kind of coma by the things we’d seen at Gateway, by illness, or by the rape of our shared mind by Bolton and his psychic vampires.

Who knows?

Who cares?

He came awake all at once. A killer, a monster, a beast. Beside me I heard the sound of Ghost’s snarl change, too, as the dog — in the presence of his true pack leader — yielded control to the wolf within.

The hallway was narrow. Close quarters favors the few over the many.

It favors the savage over the civilized.

With a howl of inhuman fury and red delight, the Killer attacked, and the wolf charged with him.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

Top Sims heard the screams and forced himself up. He was covered with hot debris from where the microwave blast had destroyed Montana Parker. His skin was flash-burned and most of the hair on his head was singed down to the scalp. He had to wipe blood and soot from his eyes in order to see what was happening, but when he did see it Top could only gape.

Violin and Church had entered the fight.

Violin moved like a dancer in a ballet whose story was about the end of the world. She lunged and pivoted, swept and leapt, ducked and pirouetted with a grace that made what she did both beautiful and appalling. Men screamed as she opened them and let their futures spill out. The walls seemed to almost glow with the bright red that flew like paint from the edges of her knife.

Beside her was Mr. Church, and never once had Top seen the big man fight. Church looked too old and too bulky to move with any kind of speed. A man Top always thought was well past the prime of life, past the point where he could wade into a battle and do anything but become collateral damage. As he watched Church fight, Top knew how very wrong he was. Top had never seen anyone fight like that. It was not karate or kung fu. If the fighting style had a name, Top was sure that it would be clinical. Mathematical. It was the opposite of Violin’s elegant destruction because Church fought with no visible sense of style. His movements were machinelike, cold, and ruthlessly efficient. They were equations of deconstruction that took the problem of an armed attacker and subtracted all of the things about the opponent that allowed him to be a threat. What was left was no man at all. It was a broken thing that was permitted to fall because even his usefulness as a shield was gone.

Violin’s face bore a smile of savage delight, and it was clear that she enjoyed the art of combat. For her this was gorgeous and she wrote a symphony in the screams she coaxed from horrified throats. Church wore no expression at all, except a cold disapproval etched into the lines around his mouth. These men stood between Church and what he wanted. That was it, that was the extent of the emotional connection.

And they died.

Closers. Fierce and deeply trained. Armed and armored.

They outnumbered Violin and Church five to one.

And it did not matter at all.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

The Mullah and his people bent forward to watch the flocks of drones fly from rooftops in New York and Philadelphia, in San Diego and Boston, in each of the ten cities. There were four operatives per city and each operative released ten drones. A total of four hundred tiny machines fitted with tubes of SX-56—with the wrath of God.

The operatives were being released now, one by one, and the looks of confusion and horror on their faces were beautiful. The gathered warlords and generals saw them as the expressions of men and women who had been forced to do holy work and were now realizing it.

The Mullah knew different.

Or, at least, the Dreamer who squatted like an imp inside his mind knew different. The looks on those faces were fear and uncertainty, self-doubt and dread. They knew they had done something wrong, something bad, but they did not understand how or why. Most of them probably wouldn’t even connect the launch of these drones to the power failure that was coming soon. So soon.

The Dreamer wished he could be there with each of them in the coming days to see how they reacted as the first news stories broke about the spread of a new and nearly untreatable form of a disease everyone in America thought was extinct. Seeing that would be nice, it would be fun.

But the Dreamer knew he would be too busy by then.

When the plague began sweeping the country, this fine and sterling nation would need the services of its greatest spy, its greatest warrior, its one unfailable hero.

While he slept in the back of his car in the parking lot of the Pier — slept and walked far in his dreams — Harcourt Bolton, Senior, smiled the contented smile of a happy man.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

Microwave bursts turned the doorway into fire clouds of burning debris, but I ducked down and fired through the smoke. More by luck than skill I hit two of the Closers in the face; Ghost hit another with such force it drove the others back into the room. Harry Bolt fired his gun but God only knows what he was aiming at. Bullets binged and whanged down the hall, killing two of the overhead lights.

Santoro tried to shoot me but I was too close. I knew I couldn’t kill him, because I needed something from him. That didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt him. I buried the barrel of the pistol against his belly and fired four shots. I figured he’d be wearing the same body armor, but at that range no protective padding in the world is going to keep you from feeling the foot-pounds of impact. It folded him in half. As he bent forward I kneed him in the crotch and then punched him four times in the face, breaking his nose, cracking an eyebrow. He’d beaten me once because someone had been in my head holding me back, keeping the Killer on a leash.

That wasn’t going to happen now. Oh, hell no.

I swept his leg and hammered him to the concrete floor with an overhand knuckle punch to the floating ribs.

“Stay down,” I roared, then I grabbed Harry by the collar and flung him away from me. Inside the room Ghost was rolling around on the floor tearing red chunks out of a guy. A second man sat nearby trying to hold his throat in place, and failing. The other Closers were climbing to their feet, raising their guns, caught in a moment of indecision between killing Ghost and killing me.

One of them swung his gun toward Ghost’s head, but I put two rounds through the man’s face. Then I emptied the magazine into the others. When the slide locked back I used the gun to crush the throat of one of the others. That left two. There was no time to reload, no time to even draw my knife. Fuck it. I’d been training for moments like this since I was fifteen. If the Joe Ledger I’d been as a kid died the day those older teens attacked Helen and me, then the one who was born on that day has no mercy in his soul. Not in moments like these.

I leapt over a dying man and hit one of the two remaining Closers with a leaping palm shot on the point of the jaw that spun him halfway around, but it spun his head farther. Too far. He corkscrewed into the ground, dead or dying. The last man tried to make a fight of it. He lashed out with a short chopping roundhouse. One of those devastating Thai boxing kicks that would have shattered my leg had it landed right. But he put too much hip into it, trying for torque power instead of whipping snap. It should have been a follow-up move, or maybe it’s that he’s used to fighting slower opponents. I shifted right into the path and took his shin on my bent thigh. It hurt, sure. But in the middle of a fight it’s not pain that matters — it’s damage, and he didn’t do any. I did. I punched his forearm muscles hard enough to lame them, chambered, and short-punched him in the chest. That turned him and lifted his chin and I used the open Y of my other hand to smash him in the Adam’s apple. He staggered backward, making dying fish sounds.

“Joe!” cried Harry, and I turned to see Santoro pulling him backward, one arm wrapped around the kid’s throat, the other trying to reverse the grip on the gun he’d just ripped out of Harry’s hand. I grabbed the guy whose throat I’d just crushed, spun him, and used him as a shield as I drove toward Santoro. The assassin fired five shots and each one of them pounded into the dying guy’s back, but the undergarment kept them from passing through to me. The slide locked back just as Harry stamped down on Santoro’s foot. The kid pivoted and drove an elbow into the man’s face. Santoro stumbled back, stared at me as I threw my now-dead shield away, and then he turned and bolted down the hall.

I pelted after him, yelling back at Harry, “Get into the lab! Call Bug. Find the God Machine. Ghost, go with!”

Santoro ran from me and I ran after.

I caught up to him as he fumbled a swipe card through the slot on a reader to open the last door in the hallway. I hit him hard with a flying tackle and we both went crashing into the room.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

Top staggered out of the armory as Church came hurrying over. The big man’s clothes were spattered with blood, his mouth hard, eyes filled with fire. Church knelt by Sam Imura and placed two fingers against his throat and raised an eyelid.

“He’s alive.”

Top was closer to Brian Botley, but when he felt for a pulse he found nothing at all.

“Where’s Bolton?” demanded Church.

Top licked his lips. “I… haven’t seen him.”

Church half turned to Violin. “Find him. Go.”

She leapt over the dead like a gazelle and vanished down the hall.

Church tapped the helmet he wore. “If you can walk, there’s a duffel bag with more of these. It’s in the hall outside of the conference room. Don’t pick up a weapon until you put one on, understood? Bring me one for Sam, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Top was in no shape to run, but he ran anyway.

Church settled Sam against the wall and applied pressure to his wounds. Top came shambling back with the duffel bag, a helmet pushed down on his own burned scalp. He handed a cap to Church, who fitted it carefully over Sam’s head. Then Church bent and picked up a fallen microwave pistol.

“Stay with him,” he said as he rose.

Top caught a brief glimpse of Church’s face as he turned to continue his hunt. The man’s expression was not the detached and mechanical face he’d worn when fighting the Closers. There was emotion now. There was desperation and there was hate. Few things frightened Top Sims. The look in Church’s eyes did.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

The room we entered was one I had been in before. I knew it even as Santoro and I went crashing and thrashing along the floor, rolling among lengths of pipe, knocking over worktables and scattering tools. The chamber was massive, and from the leftover fixtures on the walls I could tell that this used to be the Bolton family bowling alley. A place of fun, a place to relax.

Except now the room was dominated by something huge that gleamed with silver and copper and gold and steel.

The God Machine. Huge, real. Glowing with power. I kicked Santoro away and back-rolled to my feet. It reeked of wrongness. It was as alien a thing as any monstrosity I’d seen in my dreams.

Santoro rose, his face dripping with blood. He stood near the circular mouth of the machine, and behind him were dozens of gemstones. A fortune in cut diamonds, topazes, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. They were socketed into the copper sheeting, and behind each a bright light flashed in sequence. Santoro saw me gaping at it and he grinned at me with red-streaked teeth. “You’re too late, Ledger. The code has been input and our weapons are already in the sky. Even if you killed me now there’s nothing that can stop this.”

I whipped the rapid-release folding knife from its pocket clip and with a flick of the wrist the blade glittered in my hand. “I’m going to keep cutting parts off of you until you tell me how to shut it down. How’s that sound, motherfucker?”

Santoro beckoned me with little flips of his fingers. “You have to beat me first. We’re one and one, my friend. Let’s see who wins the final round.”

Off to my left I heard a sound and risked a slanting look. It was a twisted shape that almost, but not quite, looked human. He wore white pajamas that were smeared with food and snot and piss and blood. His skin was wrinkled and puckered and blistered. He was exactly as I’d seen him in my dream.

I said, “Hello, Prospero.”

What was left of Prospero Bell smiled at me with white teeth in a burned red face. His eyes glittered with emerald fire every bit as bright as the gems on his machine. There was pain in those eyes, and wildness, and absolutely no trace of sanity. As he stepped forward I heard a tinkling sound and realized that the boy had a metal cuff locked around his ankle, and a chain that trailed back to a squalid corner of the room where there was a soiled cot, a filthy toilet, a card table, and a chair. Beyond that was an elaborate computer workstation that was as clean as the rest of Prospero’s cell was dirty. And I understood how it worked. The young man was a prisoner here, a captive of Harcourt Bolton for God knew how many years. Since the Ballard academy had burned down, maybe. He was allowed to continue his work but the chain did not allow him to reach the mouth of the God Machine. A slave forced to toil in the shadow of what he believed was his salvation. I felt so bad for the kid, but the clock was ticking.

04:18

“You’re wearing your hat this time,” said Prospero Bell, pointing at my skullcap. “You’re safe from the monsters.”

Prospero took a step toward me, but the chain brought him up short.

“Get back, boy,” snarled Santoro. “This man is dangerous.”

“Prospero,” I said quickly, “I know you want to go home.”

“They won’t let me,” said the prisoner.

I took a chance. “I will. Do you know what they’re going to do with your God Machine? They’re using it to control Kill Switch devices in ten cities. They have hundreds of drones in the air, each one rigged to blow when the power goes out. Each of those drones is carrying weaponized smallpox. Do you know that? Did they tell you that’s what they were doing with your machine?”

“Don’t listen to him,” snapped Santoro. “He’s just trying to confuse you.”

“No,” I said, “Harcourt Bolton has replicated dozens of the Kill Switch devices. They’re in the ten biggest cities in America. He’s going to kill millions of people, Prospero. Most of them are children, like you were when your father stole the God Machine from you….”

But the prisoner shook his head. “Children like me? No… there are no children like me. And what do I care? They said that once the sequence is finalized they’ll let me go home. I want to go home. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”

“Prospero, listen to me,” I said, feeling each tick of the clock like a crack of thunder, “they’re never going to let you go home.”

“He’s lying,” warned Santoro.

“The machines will kill millions of people, Prospero. Millions.”

Prospero shrugged. “They’re not my people.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. “Some of them are.”

The boy stared at me. “What?”

“He’s lying,” said Santoro. “You know you’re unique. That’s why we love you. That’s why we keep you safe, yes?”

04:16

“Prospero… I know someone who’s like you,” I said. “Her name is Junie Flynn. She was born in the same place as you. They called it a hive. She looks just like you. She could be your sister. Or maybe she is your sister.”

Prospero’s eyes went wide. “Sister…? Yes… I dreamed I had a sister….”

“He’s trying to confuse you,” said Santoro. He began shifting toward my blind side. I saw it and compensated, but I kept between Santoro and Prospero.

“I’m telling you the truth, kid,” I said. “She does look like you. And she knows about you. She wants to meet you. She wants to share her secrets with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Junie knows she’s not from here, either,” I said. “She knows she doesn’t belong here. She knows she’s from another place.”

“He’s making it up,” snapped Santoro, but Prospero was listening to me. Very closely.

I fished inside my head for something, some way to prove it. And those strange words floated to the surface of my need. In as clear a voice as I could, I looked at Prospero and said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

I have no idea what it means, or if it really means anything. Lovecraft wrote it into one of his stories, and I heard it in my head. I had to take a chance.

Prospero Bell closed his eyes. “Please,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”

“Then help me,” I begged, “and I’ll help you. How do I stop it? Help me save your sister and I will help you go home. I swear it by everything I love. Give me the reset code.”

Tears glittered in the corner of those burned eyes, and Prospero said, “The reset sequence is—”

“No!” cried Santoro, and he attacked. He hooked a toe under one of the lengths of pipe, flipped it up, caught it, and swung it at my head with shocking speed and power. I ducked fast, but the pipe still caught me a glancing blow. I staggered, bells exploding in my head. I ran sideways, fighting for balance, trying to clear my eyes, and saw him come at me again. I jumped forward this time, crashing into him and slamming his shoulders hard against the side of the machine.

It was the wrong thing to do. The impact hit something and suddenly all of the lights flashed at once and there was a heavy, bass whoooom. The lights ringing the gateway flared so bright it stabbed my eyes. I shoved Santoro away and tried to run, but it wasn’t something that could be outrun. It was like trying to outrun the sound of a scream. It was like trying to outrun a tsunami. It rose above me and wrapped around me and smashed down on me and it took me. It was at once totally alien and yet disturbingly familiar.

I’d felt this before. Down, down, down in the cold bottom of the world. When the machine Erskine had built in the ancient city had pulsed and then exhaled its foul breath all over Top, Bunny, and me. The breath of something evil and hungry and strange. Then it had only been a puff of that air. Now it was a roar.

Now it was a scream that burst from the mouth of the gate and slammed into me, lifting me physically off the ground, hurling me across the room like I was nothing. Spitting me out like a piece of gristle. The wall was there. It seemed to reach for me. To want to hurt me.

And it did.

I spun, curled, tried to position myself to take the impact in a way that wouldn’t ruin me. I hit. God, I hit. Shoulder. Head. Hip. The pain was like falling into boiling water. It was everywhere. Inside and out. I collapsed onto the metal floor as the God Wave washed over me and filled the room.

And filled me.

The lights in the room stayed on. The lights inside my head went out. The last thing I saw was the digital display on the inside of my goggles.

03:59

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO

Lydia left Bunny on the patio while she went in to take a shower. She was quick about it, though, and pulled her robe on over wet, bare skin. Her attempts to entice him into the shower with her had been answered by a single, slow shake of the head. No words.

As soon as she stepped into the living room, though, she knew something was wrong. Badly wrong. The couch cushions were missing and the gun safe hidden beneath them had been opened. Boxes of ammunition, spare magazines, cleaning kits, rags, and three handguns lay scattered across the floor. A six-shot nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Special lay in a growing pool of gun oil that ran from a plastic bottle that had been stepped on. Oily footprints led in a wandering trail out to the patio, but when she ran to the French doors, the patio was empty. One of the guns was missing. A Glock 26. The trigger lock had been removed and lay where it had fallen. There was no time to count the magazines to see if one was missing, but a box of.9mm shells had been torn open and bullets littered the floor.

“¡Ay, Dios!”

Lydia ran to the slat-wood rail and looked wildly up and down the beach. The bocce players were still involved in their game and the sound of their laughter floated to her on the breeze. Somehow the normalcy of that sound and the accompanying ordinary happiness twisted the day into an even worse shape. The oily footprints ended at the patio rail and she leaned out to see deep prints punched into the sand. They started toward the water, then turned sharply and vanished around the far side of the apartment complex. Lydia vaulted the rail, not caring that she was unarmed and wore only a damp bathrobe. What did that matter? She landed running, pivoted in the sand, and tore along the side of the building. Even then, even as panic turned her heart to ice and exploded red poppies before her eyes, she did not lose herself. She didn’t scream Bunny’s name. She knew that it could have the exact opposite effect. Her screams would be filled with fear and all that they would become was a starter pistol for whatever Bunny was going to do.

At the corner of the building she skidded into a turn and then froze.

Bunny was there, kneeling on the sand between two decorative bottle palms. The barrel of the Glock pushed up hard into the soft underside of his chin. He did not look at her. His eyes were glazed, empty, like glass. There wasn’t even an expression of pain on his face. There was absolutely nothing.

Lydia was very still. “Bunny,” she said in as calm a voice as she could force past the stricture in her throat. “Listen to me. I need you to put the gun down.”

She repeated it several times, making it a statement of calm command. Not asking questions, not asking if he could hear her. Bunny was too close to the edge to allow him a choice. She needed him to obey. That was all. It was the only thing tethering either of them to the world.

“Put the gun down, Bunny,” she said as she very carefully edged closer. Her heart wanted to add a plea, to beg, to call on his love for her, but she knew better. This was a tightrope stretched across the abyss and it needed only a single breath to make him fall. His face was as red as flame, his hand glistened with sweat, and his huge muscles were rigid with some kind of awful internal conflict. Each separate muscle stood out in sharp relief as if he had committed himself to a total struggle against some opponent of monstrous strength. His blond hair hung in sodden spikes over his brow; beads of moisture covered his face like rainwater. Bunny’s body shuddered with the strain. And yet there was still no trace of expression on his face.

“Master Sergeant Rabbit,” she said, putting steel in her voice, “you will lower your weapon right now.”

That did it. Somehow, that reached him. The pressure of the barrel eased, the hand holding it seemed to fall as if the weight of intent was too much for even those muscles to bear. The Glock came down, down, down…

And then Lydia moved.

She stepped in, clamped one hand over the gun, wrapping her fingers tight to provide resistance to the slide in case he fired, aware that it probably wouldn’t work. But at the same moment she used her other hand to strike the nerves on the top of his wrist. Lydia was very strong and she knew how and where to hit. She was certain that never in her life, not in all her years of combat, had she moved faster or hit with greater force and precision. She leg-checked his arm, using body weight to jerk his arm straight, to weaken the elbow in a moment of hyperextension; then she pivoted and took the gun from him. She put everything she had into the movement because she knew how strong this man was, and how quick.

With the gun in her hand she pirouetted and danced backward, releasing the magazine, racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber, doing everything right because there was so much to lose if she did anything wrong.

Except that Bunny never moved.

Never resisted.

Did not try to hold on to the weapon.

He knelt there, staring at nothing. Saying nothing.

Being nothing.

And then he fell face-forward onto the sand without even trying to break his fall.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

I woke to the sound of weeping.

At first I was afraid it was my own sobs I heard, that I was broken. But as I struggled to come fully awake it was clear that the sobs were not inside my head or in my chest. They were close, though. And male.

I forced my eyes open. The lab was gone. The walls were gone. Maybe I was gone. My brain was too battered to tell. The guy kept weeping. After a minute or maybe an hour, I rolled over onto my hands and knees, coughed, spat, blinked my eyes clear. Looked around.

He was there. A dozen feet away, huddled into a quivering ball against a stone wall. Long, jagged cracks ran from ceiling to floor and a few zigzagged out across the ground. The place was ruined, dying. Big chunks of masonry were heaped around, dust drifting like pale ghosts from the impact points. The computers at the far end of the lab were smoking and as I watched, a few small tongues of fire began to lick at the metal housing. The stink of burning plastic and rubber filled the air. Other smells, too. Cloth. And… flesh. That was one of the odors I wish was not stored in my personal inventory, but it was. And I knew it well enough to recognize it now. Someone was burning. People smell different than animals when they burn.

This was a person. Or maybe more than one. I sat back on my heels and tried to make sense of what happened. The lab was wrecked as if it had been struck by something worse than the God Wave. Maybe an earthquake? The lights around the inner rings of the gate were still glowing with hellish light. Steam curled out of the mouth of the tunnel and roiled against the rough stone of the ceiling. Several of the fluorescent lights had torn loose from their bolts and hung precariously by wires.

I turned to the man who lay against the wall. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat and he wasn’t dressed like a Closer. For a crazy moment I thought it was Toys. It looked like him, though that was impossible. Toys was in San Diego. A thousand miles from here.

But… he wore the same clothes Toys had worn when he stayed at my house. Same shirt and pants. Same sandals. Same wristwatch. My brain seemed to slip out of gear. How could Toys be here? How?

I crawled to him. He was facing away from me, arms wrapped around his head. I could see pale scars crisscrossed on his hands and wrists. Toys had those same scars. He’d gotten them when he’d thrown himself across Circe O’Tree at the hospital when Nicodemus and his Kingsmen stormed the hospital to try and kill Church’s pregnant daughter. Toys and Junie had shielded her with their bodies and both would carry those scars forever.

I said, “Toys—?”

The sobs instantly stopped at the sound of my voice. Or, maybe, at the sound of his name.

Then the weeping man rolled over, his body whipcord taut, and past the shelter of his protective wrists he stared at me with familiar eyes.

“L–Ledger…?” he whispered in a voice thick with fear and surprise. “How…?”

“Toys? How the hell are you even here?” I demanded. “How did you get here? What are you doing here?”

Tears streamed from his fever-bright eyes. “I tried to save her, Ledger. God help me, I tried. Please… please… I tried.”

I hauled myself to my feet. The room swung around me, refusing to settle. There was thunder in my head and blood in my mouth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He tried to answer, but he simply could not. Instead he stretched out his arm and with a hand that shook with the palsy of absolute terror, he pointed to something behind me. I did not want to turn. No fucking way. Whatever was happening here was all wrong. I’d hit my head, I knew that. Nothing was probably what it seemed. Everything was suspect. Nothing that I’d done since Gateway was to be trusted. I knew that. The mycotoxins. The viruses. They were messing with me. Rudy said so. Hu said so. I was delusional. Everything was a bad dream.

That’s what I told myself as I turned to follow the direction of his pointing finger. No matter what was there, no matter what it was that had torn Toys down like this, no matter what horror my concussed brain wanted to show me was going to be a lie.

I turned.

I saw.

I screamed.

She was there. Across the room. Against the wall. High on the wall. Heavy iron spikes driven all the way through the precious, familiar flesh. Bloody spike-heads sticking out from wrists and ankles and stomach and breastbone. Long, tangled blond hair hung in sweat-soaked twists down her naked body. Her breasts, empty of blood, sagged. Her head hung down so that I could not see her face. I didn’t need to. I knew those lines, those curves. I was more intimately familiar with the landscape of that woman than with anyone I’d ever known. The pale flesh, the paler scars. Each freckle and mole.

“I’m sorry,” said Toys, his voice filling with fresh tears. “They needed a sacrifice and I had no choice. No choice.”

My scream drowned out his words. I did not scream at him. I did not scream his name, nor did I howl out a denial. No, the shriek torn from my chest was a single word. A name. Her name.

Junie.

On the other side of the room the God Machine pulsed.

And the God Machine pulsed again. A fresh wave hit me.

Someone shook me awake and as I came up out of blackness a hand clamped itself over my mouth and a voice whispered directly into my ear.

“Quiet. They’ll hear you. They’re right outside.”

A female voice. Not familiar, no one I knew, and yet…

Somehow I did know her.

I opened my eyes. We were inside a school bus. A big damn yellow school bus. Small, pale faces peered in silent horror over the backs of seats. Dozens of them. Scuffed and dirty, some of them streaked with blood. So many young eyes, each filled with bottomless horror. In some I saw the dangerous vacuity that spoke of shock and trauma that may already have run too deep.

The woman who spoke removed her hand from my mouth and shifted to help me sit up. She was a cop, but no one I knew. A big blonde with lots of curves and a beautiful face that was set into hardness. Blue eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. Blood and dirt smeared on her clothes.

“You good?” she asked, her voice low but not a whisper. Whispers carry. Cops and soldiers know that. She was a cop, but she had the soldier look. Battle horrors leave a certain stamp on a person, a particular light in the eyes, and she had that. There was a small black ID badge pinned to her breast. It said FOX.

“What’s going on?” I asked, pitching my voice low, too. “Where am I? Who are these children? And who are you?”

I saw doubt flicker over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me you got some kind of amnesia bullshit. You didn’t get hit that hard, you pussy.”

There was a dull ache on my forehead and I touched it. My fingers came away red with blood. “What happened?”

Officer Fox took a single short breath before answering, as if she needed the moment to control her anger. “How much don’t you remember? Do you know who the fuck you are, at least?”

“Captain Ledger,” I said.

“Captain? You demoting yourself?”

“What?”

“Last I heard you were a full bird colonel,” she said. “But we can run with captain. Whatever. I don’t fucking care as long as you know who you are.”

“It’s captain,” I said. “You’re Officer Fox?”

“Then you do remember?”

“I read your name tag.”

“Balls. We’re trying not to die and you’re checking out my tits.”

“Your name tag,” I repeated. “Who are you and what’s happening?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

There were sounds outside. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, a few hollow pops of small arms. Growls.

Growls?

“I was in the Playroom,” I said. “Got hit with a God Wave and—”

She punched me. In the chest. Hard.

“No,” she snapped. “Don’t go getting stupid on me. I don’t know what the shit a God Wave is, but that’s not part of what’s happening. This is here and now. This is Stebbins County and we are in deep shit. Can you remember anything about that? About Lucifer 113?”

Yeah, I knew about that microscopic monster. It was the bastard child of a Cold War bioweapons program. But all that knowledge was from a report. One of thousands I had to read over the years to keep track and get perspective. Nothing from an active case.

“It’s the God Wave,” I insisted. “It’s screwing everything up.”

“Come the Christ on, Ledger,” growled Fox. “Sam talked about you like you had the biggest dick in Special Forces and you’re babbling about some religious surfer bullshit? I need you to get your head out of your ass and get back in the game, because we are in deep shit.”

“Sam? Sam Imura? Is Sam here?”

A shadow crossed her face. “He… was. I told you what happened at the food depository. He fell… they…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here and we need to do something.”

The gunfire was trailing off. There were fewer shots but the growls were getting louder. Closer.

“They’re coming back!” cried one of the children, and they all started crying. Too much, too loud. I could hear the way those sounds changed the noises from outside. The growls got louder, more insistent.

No. They weren’t growls. They were moans. And that fast I knew what they were. Even though it was impossible, I knew.

I caught Fox’s wrist in a tight grip. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “I have a head injury and I can’t remember much. But if those are walkers out there, then you need to bring me up to speed real damn quick. I need a sitrep and don’t paint it with pretty colors.”

She gave me a strange look. Almost a smile. A little relief, maybe. A small warrior’s smile. She nodded.

“Short version of a bad story,” she said. “I’m Officer Desdemona Fox. Dez. We’re south of Roanoke and we’re trying to get to Ashville. We have three school buses. Used to have more but…” Tears glistened in her eyes, hard as diamonds. She pawed at them and plunged ahead. “Sam and his team helped us get out, but we lost most of them. We had to go off the main roads because of the traffic jams. A whole wave of those dead bastards hit us two hours ago. You and your boys came out of no-fucking-where and we made it ten more miles down the road. Then we got hit by another surge of them and you got nailed by debris when you didn’t duck fast enough when the grenade went off. What’d I leave out that you need to know?”

“How bad is it?” I demanded. “How far has it spread?”

The look she gave me was one of hard, unflinching fatalism. It was the reason there was no trace of hope or optimism in her eyes. “It’s everywhere, man. How can you not know that? This is the actual end.”

Suddenly hands began pounding on the outside of the bus. Heavy, soft, artless thumps. Nothing fast, nothing precise. Just the battering of mindless need. I knew that sound. The hungry dead. The relentless dead.

I’d fought this before. It was how I got into the DMS. Sebastian Gault had developed a prion-based pathogen that turned people into something straight out of The Walking Dead. Except this wasn’t TV. This was the world and we’d had to do terrible things to save it. So many people died to put the monster back into its cage. Then it surfaced again after Artemisia Bliss stole the seif al din pathogen from the secure facility where it had been locked away. She’d unleashed it on a subway train in New York, at a Best Buy in Pennsylvania, and at a science fiction convention in Atlanta. Worst day for civilian deaths in American history. Again, my team and I had been forced to pull triggers and cut throats in order to save the nation — hell, the entire world — from consuming itself. No joke, no exaggeration.

So what happened? How was I on a school bus with all these kids and a cop telling me that some other bioweapon, Lucifer 113, had slipped its chain? How could I not have prevented this? Where was the DMS when the Devil got out of its cage? How was it possible that the apparatus of defense that Church had built could have failed on so spectacular a level?

How? The dead hammered on the bus. The children screamed.

“This isn’t real,” I told her.

“Fuck you,” she said, and punched me again. Harder. “Look around you. These kids are all that’s left of my town. Every bus is filled with kids. Kids. Look at them. Listen to them, for Christ’s sake. Not real? God, I want to kick your teeth down your throat. This is happening and it’s happening right now. You’re supposed to be a genuine goddamn American hero, Ledger. Why don’t you Velcro your nutsack back on and act like it.”

The dead began hammering on the side of the bus with renewed intensity.

I struggled to get to my feet.

And the God Wave hit me again.

I stood on the side of an overturned school bus.

Dez Fox was gone. The bus was years old, wrapped in creeper vines, rusted and dead. There was a sound behind me and a young man climbed up to stand next to me. At first I thought it was Sam, but I was wrong. He was younger, taller, slimmer. His eyes were sadder. He had a katana slung over his shoulder, angled for an overhand draw. His name was Tom, but I don’t know how I knew that.

“There’s a trail through the trees,” Tom said, nodding off to my left. “Heads up into the hills. Zoms won’t go uphill unless they’re chasing something.”

“I taught you that, kiddo,” I said. My voice sounded different. Older, filled with hard use and gravel. The kind of voice you could get if you screamed enough.

Far ahead we could see movement on the road as first one and then several emaciated figures staggered out of the tall weeds.

“Time to go, Tom,” I said.

We turned and walked the length of the school bus. He dropped lightly to the ground and then offered a hand to help me down. It was disconcerting to realize I needed it. In the distance on the other side of the bus the dead had caught our scent and they began to moan. We faded into the trees, heading uphill.

The God Wave took me away before I saw where we were going.

And then I stood on the shores of a black ocean.

Creatures roiled and twisted in the surf. Dark shapes that made no sense to a sane mind. Out on the horizon there was a mist, white as milk, rolling in. It churned, too, as if there were things moving inside it, approaching where I stood. If it reached me while I stood there they would consume me. No question about it.

“It’s beautiful here,” said a voice, and I turned to see a handsome young man standing beside me. He was whole and straight. No burns, no madness flickering like candle flame in his eyes. And he could have been Junie’s twin brother.

“I guess you’d have to know how to look at it,” I said.

Prospero nodded. “It’s not your home.”

“No.”

There were storm clouds above us and something moved inside of them, too. Not animals, not beasts. Machines. As I watched, a half dozen of them broke from the clouds and soared above us. Two groups of three. Each of the machines was triangular in shape. They were elegant and they soared above us toward a row of mountains that towered miles and miles into this impossible sky.

“Not outer space,” said Prospero. “You know that, right?”

“I guess I do.”

“That’s too far to travel.”

“Yes.”

“But here,” he gestured to the nightmare world around us, “my home is right next door to yours.”

“Prospero,” I said, “my world is dying. My people are going to burn when all the lights go out. Children are going to get sick and die. I can’t do this without you.”

He said nothing as he turned to watch the triangular craft dwindle into tiny dots.

“Your father and Harcourt Bolton have stolen your machine and they are using it to destroy everyone I love.”

He smiled. “My father is dead. He shot himself, did you know that? They broke him up and threw him away. Poor Daddy.”

“Okay… but Bolton is still trying to steal what you made. He’s turning you into a monster by exploiting what you built.”

“I am a monster. I come from a world of monsters.”

I turned to him. “Maybe that’s true, Prospero, but you’re not evil. You never were. In my world Bolton is the monster. And he is definitely evil. He keeps you in chains. You’re the monster in his basement. And he will never let you go home.” I gestured to the world. “You’re dreaming this, but you’re still a prisoner in that basement.”

Tears broke and ran down his face. “All I ever wanted was to go home.”

“Help me stop Bolton and I promise you that you can go home.”

He looked at me shrewdly. “You’re really in love with someone who comes from here? A woman like me?”

“Her name is Junie Flynn. She’s your sister, Prospero, and I love her with my whole heart and soul. That has to be worth something, Prospero. It has to mean something.”

He opened his mouth to speak but then the God Wave hit me again.

And I was gone.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR

Harcourt Bolton slept and dreamed and smiled as the seconds ran down.

He did not see the elevator doors open there on the parking garage. He did not see the woman and the man step off. Did not see her point with a knife toward the parked SUV. The windows were smoked and he was content that he could not be seen.

He had forty Closers in the building. The last of the DMS was being exterminated here, and soon, with federal marshals, FBI agents, NSA, Secret Service, and Homeland to work with, he would shut down every last field office. It was already in motion. Nothing could stop it now.

He lay on the seat he’d put back, and he floated inside the mind of the Mullah, and he was content.

Until the window beside him exploded inward.

The sound, the flying safety glass, the sheer shock of it tore him out of the Mullah’s mind and out of the dream state. Then hands reached through and tore him out of the car, dragging him through the window as teeth of glass ripped at him. Violin and Mr. Church dumped him on the hard concrete and squatted down in front of him.

“Harcourt,” said Church, “you disappoint me.”

Bolton went for his gun. Church took it away from him and handed it to Violin. She removed the magazine, ejected the round, and then threw the weapon away.

“Harcourt, you have one chance here,” said Church. “Tell me how to stop the countdown. We have the code, but we need to know what to do with it.”

Bolton pulled himself up so that his back was against the car. His clothes were torn and he was bleeding from a dozen cuts.

“Oh really, Deacon?” he said, laughing in Church’s face. “And what will you offer me? A plea bargain? My life? What?”

“What do you want?” asked Church, his voice soft, almost gentle. “What can I offer you that would mean anything to you? Just ask. Tell me what will get this done.”

Bolton spat in Church’s face. “You’re a monster, Deacon. You know that? I even tried to crawl inside your head. Jesus Christ, that was scary as hell. But I know who you are. I know what you are.”

“Then we both know,” said Church as he wiped the spittle from his face. “How does that help us help each other?”

Bolton sneered. “Even if I told you what to do, you couldn’t do it.” He looked at his watch. “You have less than two minutes.”

“Tell me and we’ll try.”

“No, you ass, you have to be there, at the God Machine. You have to input the first ten values of pi. That code cancels out the first one and—”

“No,” said Church.

A slow smile formed on Bolton’s face.

“You’re lying to me,” said Church as he straightened. He tapped his earbud. “You heard?”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE

01:04

“I heard,” I said.

I stood in front of the God Machine. My clothes were torn and streaked with black muck from that alien ocean. Blood leaked hot and wet from my ears and nostrils and from the corners of my eyes. My hands were shaking with palsy. It felt like I’d been away for hours or days, but it had been seconds. Even time seemed fractured.

I turned to Prospero Bell.

“There is no way to stop it. Not even Bolton can do it now.”

Prospero, burned and crooked with damage and disease, smiled at me. His clothes were filthy but his teeth were so white.

“If I do this,” he said, “you have to promise me.”

“Anything,” I said, “I swear.”

“Swear on her. On my sister. On Junie,” he said. He looked down at the broken length of chain that was still locked to his ankle, and at the pipe I’d used to smash two of the links. Then he looked up at me again. “Swear on her.”

I was about to fall down. “I swear on my love for her. I swear, Prospero. I swear on Junie Flynn.”

“Okay,” he said.

He hobbled over to the machine. We were alone there. When the God Machine swallowed us, I went one way and Esteban Santoro went somewhere else. I came back and, so far, he hadn’t.

“Hurry,” I begged.

Prospero bent and kissed the metal skin of the God Machine. The jewels were flashing faster and faster now as the thing cycled up to send the signal to all of those other machines.

00:31

His fingers were crooked from damage, the tendons shortened by the fires that had burned him. But they danced over the surface of the jewels. He touched the emerald first, and then the topaz twice, then the diamond, then the ruby five times. Moving faster. “There is an operational code,” he said, “and that’s the one I gave to Bolton. It’s the calculation of three stars that can be seen from Antarctica. To use the God Machine as a global device, you input those coordinates.”

I nodded. I knew this. My legs buckled and I dropped to my knees.

00:25

“But there is a master code. That resets the entire system. It’s the coordinates of those stars on the day my ancestors first came here,” he said. “A billion years ago.” He turned to me. “That’s how you’ll send me home, too. You understand?”

00:14

“For the love of God, Prospero…”

“And then you put in the coordinates for the stars today. That’s the secret. That completes the energetic circle.”

He smiled and tapped the last numbers in. The same numbers Dr. Kang had found, and then the other set.

00:00:07

The lights all went off and we were plunged into darkness.

Total darkness.

I seemed to swim in it.

The only thing I could see was the digital display on the inside of my goggles.

00:00:02

Steady, unblinking. Burned into the moment.

I bent my head and wept.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX

Trey Willis stood on the deck, staring in blank wonder as the small quadcopters drifted back toward him. He almost ran, but he didn’t. Not because something held him in place — he was free now. But because he had to know what was going to happen.

The little machines flew back toward him, toward the control device he held.

One by one they settled back onto the deck in exactly the same place where they’d been before they’d swarmed off. It took a lot of courage for Trey to set down the device and pick up one of the drones. When he saw the plastic tanks on the bottom he recoiled, set it down, and went running for help.

The only thing he did first was to place the control device on the ground and smash it with his heel.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

I sat on the edge of a filthy bed, my head in my hands. Alone. All alone.

It was Ghost who found me. He led Harry Bolt down the hall and into the chamber. Harry was covered in blood and soot, and his eyes were crazed. Harry stopped in the doorway and looked around, confused. I sat against the wall of a vast and empty chamber. Prospero’s bed, chains, and a few pieces of debris were the only things in there with me.

“But… but…,” stammered Harry, confused and frightened, “I thought the machine would be in here. There’s nowhere else it could be.”

I raised my head to look at him. “It was here. So was Prospero.”

“But, where’d it go? I mean… how’d they get it out of here? And where’s Prospero?”

Ghost went over and sniffed a spot on the floor where some of Santoro’s blood was spattered. He cocked a leg and pissed all over it. Then Ghost came over and began licking my face. I wrapped my arms around my furry friend and buried my face in his ruff and left Harry to answer his own questions.

I don’t remember passing out at all.