Predator One

Chapter One

When the technology of war becomes so easy anyone — and I mean anyone — can use it, then we are in deep shit.

And we are in deep shit.

Chapter Two

We dropped like dead birds from the clouds.

Four of us.

Me.

Top and Bunny. My right and left hands. The guys who have been with me since I started this game. Brothers who have walked through the valley of the shadow with me so often we’d carved our initials in the landmarks.

And Sam Imura. Our sniper. Cool, quiet, lethal at any distance. Handgun, long gun. If he wants to punch your ticket, then don’t double-park your car.

Four of us.

Falling.

Falling.

“HALO” is a nice word. Calls to mind angels and the glow around the heads of saints in old paintings.

In military parlance it’s an acronym for a specific kind of parachute jump. High altitude, low open.

Those are two concepts that are antithetical to a quiet life. I am not, as I believe I’ve told you before, a fan of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. Neither God nor evolution saw fit to give me wings. I’m not made of rubber, so I don’t bounce worth a shit. Skydiving is a sport for madmen. Anyone who says different should switch to decaf. Diving from so far up that you can’t even breathe, so far up that you need to wear an oxygen tank? That’s just nuts on too many levels to contemplate.

The “low open” part of this was just as bad. The whole science of landing safely after you throw yourself out of that nice, safe airplane is to open your chute in plenty of time for physics to waft you down like a goose feather. That is the only reasonable way it should be done, right? Oh, not so. Some genius in the military long ago reasoned that if you fly the plane so damn high that radar can’t see it and then you fling yourself out and wait until you’re close enough to the ground so you can count the cigarette butts in the gutter, then no one will detect you. Personally, I think they’d hear the big splat when you hit the ground. It took some convincing at jump school to prove to me that low-open jumps can be done safely. Or, as they added with tight little smiles, with a measure of safety.

We needed to get onto this piece of real estate without being spotted. There were radars looking for us. There were guards and watchtowers and all that shit. The people at the facility did not want visitors and were willing to be real damn nasty if any showed up.

We were on our way to showing up.

I hate my job.

Before a jump like this, you do forty minutes of breathing pure oxygen to chase the nitrogen from the bloodstream. You also have to dress for it. It’s about minus forty-five up there. Frostbite is a real risk, even though we were dropping down toward Chile. I had a set of polypropylene undies under my battle-dress uniform and other gear.

We dropped from thirty thousand feet.

Six miles.

They call the rate of fall “terminal velocity.” Unless the word “bus” or “train” is in the mix, no phrase using the word “terminal” offers any comfort. Not to me. In regular jumps there’s a margin for error, time to open the backup chute if there’s a failure with the main chute. In HALO drops? Not so much.

Despite all of that, we rolled out and fell into the midnight blackness at 122 miles per hour.

We deployed our chutes, and there was that moment when the differential between your mass falling at uncontrollable speeds meets a degree of resistance. Slam your necktie in the side door of a race car and see what happens when it goes from zero to sixty. Feels about the same.

The ground still seemed to be coming up way too fast.

Too fast.

Too fucking fast.

It never feels like the chute is doing enough of its job on a HALO drop.

I shifted my position and tried to land the way Top and Bunny landed. Like a professional who isn’t afraid of heights and isn’t a hiccup away from crying for his mommy.

You’re a big, tough, professional soldier, Ledger, I told myself. Stop acting like a pussy.

I told myself to shut the fuck up.

And then I was down.

I went limp and fell sideways, doing everything right. But I was convinced I’d ruptured everything, including the tonsils I no longer had.

But I was down.

Sam Imura touched down twenty feet away. He landed at a walk, turned, gathered his chute, detached, bunched it up. All with complete calm. I wanted to shoot him.

I didn’t think kissing the ground beneath me would do anything to inspire confidence in my subordinates, so I scrambled to my feet and stowed my chute and began a rapid postlanding equipment check. Top and Bunny appeared out of the gloom, and the four of us knelt, each facing outward in a different direction, flipping on our night-vision goggles. We were using a new prototype developed for the Department of Defense by, of all people, Google — an advanced variation on their Google Glass. The goggles had interchangeable lenses for different kinds of light and could be controlled by light touches to the temple, a trackball on our belts, or — in a pinch — voice control. A nonmilitary version is scheduled for the public market under the name Google Scout. However, we had them exclusively for eighteen months.

Developed by one of Mr. Church’s friends in the industry. He seems to have friends in every industry.

We each scanned 120 percent of the area around us, which meant there was a significant overlap with what the guys on either side of us were seeing. The Scout glasses recorded everything and fed it via secured uplink to a satellite that in turn bounced it in real time to the TOC — the tactical operations center at the Hangar, the main DMS headquarters located at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Church was there, along with Aunt Sallie, Bug, and all the senior staff. This was a very important mission.

It was also highly illegal.

It was unauthorized and prohibited, and, if we were captured or identified, would result in the shutdown of the DMS and lengthy jail terms for all of us. Unless the mission was successful, in which case we’d all be heroes with the thanks of a grateful nation. The middle ground between those two possibilities was about an inch wide.

So, no pressure.

The Scout glasses threw data streams onto the edges of the goggles, giving us a mission clock, temperature, info from thermal scans, specs and intelligence details sent to us from Bug, and other spiffy stuff. Remember the screen display from the Terminator movies that showed what the cyborgs were seeing? Like that. Only we weren’t robot assassins from the future who had, for inexplicable reasons, Austrian accents. Instead, we were government agents going way, way off the reservation.

Breaking the law.

About to break a lot of them.

Chapter Three

His name was Doctor Michael Pharos and he was a monster.

A very select kind of monster.

He knew it. He was aware of the shape and dimensions of the thing that he’d become. He knew exactly how ruthless he was, and how ruthless he was willing to be. He understood the ways in which old splinters of regret and conscience still jabbed at him. He was fully cognizant of the steps he’d descended from the Hippocratic Oath and the rule of “First do no harm” to his present state of “Do whatever harm is necessary to get the job done.”

For the last twenty years, his job had been enabling even worse monsters to do great harm to a vast number of people. Although he was a medical doctor by training, he had discovered that his genius was in organization. Management.

He seldom devised a moneymaking plan — he knew that he was not particularly inventive — but he was the man everyone counted on to make sure the plan was carried through. Dot all the Is, cross all the Ts, bury all the important bodies.

That’s what Doctor Pharos did.

He managed the machineries of corruption, terrorism for profit, extortion of key figures, the transfer of stolen monies, and all the other cogs and wheels. Pharos specialized in that, and he did it, he was sure, better than anyone alive.

And he did it on a grand scale.

Global.

Historical.

Not an exaggeration, though he was aware that at no point was his name ever the one to appear on a Most Wanted list, or the evening news, or a CIA kill order. He was a ghost. The password for his laptop was even zeitgeist.

The ghost in the machine.

For most of his adult life he had been managing an engine of great cultural destruction and enormous financial expansion. The people for whom he worked — the ones who designed and built the machine — asked that he ensure that the machine would continue to run despite any foreseeable disaster. Even in the event that the creators themselves were removed by death, flight, or imprisonment. Pharos did that, though he never expected such a catastrophe to occur.

When it did, the machine he’d managed kept running.

Running.

Running.

Bills were paid, paychecks cut, employee benefits seen to. Equipment and supplies were regularly purchased and shipped. Tier upon tier of lower-level management kept everything greased and tuned. The great destructive machine functioned as it always had, even though there was no one at the controls anymore. The designers, the creators, the planners were gone. The worst-case contingency had, in fact, come to pass. None of them were in prison, none were in flight.

They were dead.

All but one.

And there was barely enough of the last one to even call “human.” Just a burned and crippled lump of diseased flesh hooked to devices that breathed and excreted and pumped for him.

The organizational machine did not falter. It never so much as hiccupped.

Pharos had managed it too well to allow mistakes.

It ran and ran.

And ran.

Primed and ready.

Ticking like a bomb.

Ticking.

Ticking.

Ticking down to boom.

Chapter Four

“Clear,” said Top, and the others echoed it.

“Clear,” I agreed.

We were in a field of tall grass near the rocky coast of an island off the coast of Chile. Just far enough off the coast so that it rested in international waters. Way, way outside any claim of American sovereignty. Technically you could do almost anything out here and get away with it.

There were exceptions, of course. You couldn’t build a nuke. You couldn’t set up a lab to create doomsday pathogens. NATO would frown on it. UN peacekeepers might crash your party.

But that left a bunch of things you could do. Start a space program. Develop drugs of all kinds that could be sold to countries that don’t regulate that stuff. Set up the world’s biggest meth lab. Engage in illegal cloning. Build a sweatshop and use slave labor to make brand-name sneakers. Participate in the global sex trade. Establish a totalitarian dictatorship and oppress your own people. Stuff like that. Stuff that doesn’t generate enough political backlash to make the superpowers feel they have to act. After all, as they see it, defending oil wells and keeping their fellow nations from becoming nuclear powers have always been far more important than freeing the twenty-plus million people who currently live as slaves here in the twenty-first century.

The whole world is bug-fuck nuts. Don’t try to make sense of it or you’ll hurt yourself.

Sadly, none of those things were the reason the four of us fell out of that airplane. We were not hunting mad scientists with the next superweapon. We weren’t here to liberate the oppressed or overthrow a murderous dictator. That would have been much more fun. We might have even been able to get a grudging go-ahead nod from Washington. It would have made good press, and there are always elections coming up.

No.

This island was owned, through dozens and dozens of arcane removes, by a private corporation that was actually a front for Uncle Sam.

Or, at least, a seedy, jackass nephew of Uncle Sam.

This place was a prison.

Think Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and then lower your expectations. Go farther down the crapper. Remove all traces of sanity, compassion, common decency, and humanity. Then double that, and you have this place.

They called it the Resort.

Not sure if that was done as a joke or as cover. Either way, it made me want to hurt whoever came up with the name.

The Resort.

The island was three miles long, two wide, and most of it was nearly impassable volcanic hills, dense rain-forest growth, noisy parrots, and every son-of-a-bitching biting insect known to the fossil record.

We were seventy yards inland on the east side, having come in on the angle our computer models picked as the one with the worst visibility for security. The terrain to the west would have frightened a mountain goat, and foot patrols were infrequent. There were tower posts with motion sensors, but Bug made short work of those. He used MindReader to hack the feeds, created a forty-minute loop, and, as soon as we were within a thousand yards of touchdown, fed the loop into the system. Their security guys were essentially watching a DVR’d version of a quiet night. Bug did the same with the motion sensors and thermal scans. Bug loves this stuff. He’s better at it than anyone, and it’s a very, very good thing that he’s on our side.

Even so, we moved with great caution.

“Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, using the combat call signs for me and Mr. Church. “Down and safe.”

“Proceed,” said Church’s voice. We were on a team channel, each of us with an earbud tuned to the mission channel. “Good hunting.”

“Hooah,” murmured Top and Bunny. Top’s full handle was First Sergeant Bradley Sims, former Army Rangers. His call sign was Sergeant Rock. Bunny was an ex-marine by the name of Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit. Real name. His father is a bit of a prankish asshole. We all called him Bunny except on a mission, and then he was Green Giant.

Sam Imura was Ronin.

Bug was Bug. He was monitoring the security room, so he’d give us a heads-up if they tumbled to our presence.

“Everything’s copacetic,” he said in our ears. “Two guards on duty. They’re talking football.”

“Foot patrols?” I asked.

“Sending you their locations, Cowboy,” he said, and immediately one lens of my goggles showed a soldier walking a perimeter line. This faded back to a white dot on a satellite map of the compound. We had markers on every warm body on this island.

Nice.

Top, Bunny, and Sam are all experienced operators. Each of them could lead any team of first-chair shooters anywhere in the world. The fact that they were my team, key players of Echo Team, always gave me confidence. They didn’t need to be told what to do. We had rehearsed this mission fifty times, with the other members of Echo throwing all kinds of variables at us. We had it down, we knew our jobs, and we went about it like professionals.

And, yes, that still means we knew that things could, and often did, go wrong. If you do this kind of thing for a living, you accept that as part of the mission planning. You’re never locked into one way of doing things. Reaction and response is every bit as important as intelligence and planning.

Like four ghosts, we left the grassy field and moved into the foothills of broken volcanic rock, following a path picked for us by a geodetic-survey software program. The easiest safe path. The path that wouldn’t burn us out. Safety takes time, so we moved only as quickly as common sense allowed.

I saw an armadillo waddle into a hole, and I stepped around it, not wanting to disturb the animal. A few minutes later a chinchilla shot out from in front of Top, and he very nearly put a hot round into it.

“Fucking thing wants to be dead,” he muttered.

Farther up the mountain slope a vicuña raised its ugly head and watched us go past, munching on a midnight snack of green leaves. Bunny stopped for a moment and stared eye to eye with it. The animal didn’t move except to continue its slow mastication of tamarugo leaves.

Bunny blew it a kiss, and we moved on.

It took an hour to go one mile inland. Serious rocks. A lot of caution.

We fanned out to preselected spots and considered the compound.

There was a fence, which was no problem. There were guards on patrol. That was problematic. We weren’t here to kill anyone.

Absolutely no one.

Let me tell you why.

We were here to break one of the world’s worst terrorists out of a secret prison.

But it was a prison run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Chapter Five

Sam Imura faded off to the north and vanished. He had two rifles slung over his back. Aside from his usual sniper rifle, he had one retrofitted to fire tranquilizer darts at ultrahigh rates of speed. The tranqs would drop anyone in their tracks. The darts could do some damage, but nothing that wouldn’t heal. They were filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine mixed with a mild psychotropic. No one who wakes up from it is a reliable witness for anything within a couple of hours before or after being juiced. It has a long technical name. We call it “horsey.” So, whoever got darted with horsey would waft off to la-la land and probably dream of sexy rainbow-striped unicorns. Something like that. Haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard stories.

I nodded to Top and Bunny, and they peeled off to the south, then split up to go over the fence at two different points. I went more or less straight in.

As I ran low and fast toward the fence, I removed a device approximately the size of a deck of playing cards. One of the wonderful little gadgets developed by Doctor Hu’s science supernerds. Just as Bug inserted a video loop into the cameras, this more or less did the same thing for the juice in the electrified fence. Bunny and Top each had one, and on my word we simultaneously held them toward the metal chain links. Strong magnets jumped them from our rubber-tipped gloves and attached them to the metal. There was a microsecond of static and then a meter display on our glasses told us that we had a controlled gap in the electricity. The delay lasted thirty seconds. We were up and over in ten. Then the units overheated and fell off. Dead. The electricity on the fence resumed its normal flow.

Nice.

Inside the compound, in the security room, all that would show would be a single, momentary blip. The kind that happens if a small bird gets fried. Happens all the time.

The three big birds were already inside.

That was phase 1.

Sam was high up a tree with his rifle ready, cold eyes searching for targets through a nightscope.

“Talk to me, Bug,” I said very quietly. When you don’t want to be heard, you speak quietly. If you whisper, the sibilant S sounds carry.

“Cowboy,” he responded, “there’s a two-man patrol sixty-two feet to your … no, wait — they’re down.”

And almost as an after-echo, I heard Sam quietly say, “Got ’em.”

“Another one on your two o’clock,” Bug advised. “He’s walking the inside of the fence.”

“Mine,” said Bunny.

On the small display inside the glasses, I saw one white dot moving at a slow walk and then a yellow dot coming at him from behind. After a moment, the yellow dot moved off and the white dot did not. I hoped Bunny hadn’t dented the guy too badly. Bunny is six and a half feet tall and can bench-press one or both of the Dakotas depending on whether he’s really trying.

“Got movement by the first building,” said Top.

I moved quickly across the trimmed lawn toward a vantage point beside a parked jeep. From there I could see the buildings. I switched from night vision to my own eyes because there was a row of lights mounted just below the roof level. I kept the glasses on, though, because they still fed the intel and data to me. The compound had three structures on it. The first building was a combination barracks, mess hall, and rec room for the sixteen soldiers and nine technical staff members here on the island. To the right and slightly behind that was the main building, which was a two-story blockhouse that we figured for labs and administration. Then to the right of that, set apart and surrounded by a second electrified fence, was a ten-cell miniprison. Because the wall of an extinct volcano backed up against the compound, there was only a need for two guard towers, and we’d chosen angles of approach that kept us off their menu.

I couldn’t see the target Top was closing in on, but then I saw a white dot detach itself from the tracery that gave us the floor plan of the buildings. Must have been someone leaning against a wall. He moved out into the lawn, and I saw that his pace went from slow hesitation to a quick walk.

“Careful, Sergeant Rock,” I warned, “he may have spotted you.”

There was a moment of silence before Top answered. “Yeah, he did,” he said. “But I noticed him first.”

On my screen his yellow dot moved smoothly away from another unmoving white one.

Four down.

That still left twelve soldiers and the nine techs.

“Ronin,” I said, “what about those towers.”

“Gimme a sec,” he murmured. There was no sound, no crack of a rifle. His weapon was a highly specialized, max-pressure air gun. “One down.” Two seconds later he said, “Two down.”

“You are one spooky fuck,” said Bunny.

“They don’t pay the man to be nice, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Cut the chatter.”

I said, “Go to phase two.”

Top and Bunny headed toward the barracks making maximum use of cover. I peeled off toward the lab building. Even though this was a covert and illegal base, it was run with military efficiency. Vehicles were parked in their appropriate slots, the grass had been mown, the trees were pruned back from the fence, and all the doors, as I found out, were locked.

No problem.

There were lights on in the lab building despite the hour. That would mean the main door alarms wouldn’t be active. Only the break-in security would be armed. The keycard reader beside the front door was state-of-the-art, and all the little lights burned red. Not that it mattered, because I had my full junior James Bond kit with me. In the DMS we have a whole different take on what “state-of-the-art” actually means.

I produced another gizmo from a thigh pocket of my BDUs. This one was small and had an adhesive strip on the back. I peeled it off and stuck it to the underside of the card reader. It went to work immediately, hacking into the reader using the full intrusive oomph of MindReader. Our computer system is unique and very dangerous. It has two primary functions. First, it’s a superintrusion system that can enter and interpret any other system and then rewrite the target software so that there is absolutely no record of the hack. The second thing it does is look for patterns. Codes are a kind of pattern, and key codes are merely mathematical patterns stored on magnetic strips. Joe Ordinary gets stymied by them. A computer that can hack NASA or the Chinese Ghost Net? Not so much.

In my ear, Bug said, “Go.”

I took a blank keycard from my pocket and ran it through the slot. The little red lights turned green, and I heard a faint click.

Easy as pie. I pulled the door open very carefully and eased inside smoother than a greased weasel.

“Inside,” I said. “Wait for my word.”

“Hooah,” said Top and Bunny quietly.

The entrance foyer was short, and there was a second keycard reader inside. I didn’t trust that it would use the same keycode, so I repeated the process and used a second blank card. Green says go.

Beyond that door was a hallway with half of the lights turned off. Four doors on the right, three on the left, all closed. None of them had card readers. I drew my sidearm, a Snellig gas pistol. It was a weapon originally designed by some very bad people, the Jakobys, but since they’re dead and we swiped all of their technology, we’ve started using these guns. Like Sam’s rifle, it uses compressed gas to fire a dart with a thin shell of a material that structurally acted like glass but that was really a kind of cellulose. Nontoxic and biodegradable. We are nothing if not environmentally conscious here at the DM of S.

The only downside of the guns is range. Handguns as a rule are short-range weapons, but the gas pistols have an effective range of thirty feet. Beyond that it’s better to throw the actual gun at your target. Inside that range, though, even a flesh wound will drop your bad guy. Each shell was loaded with horsey.

I ghosted along the hall, stopping at each door, opening it slowly, peering in, finding no one, moving on.

Until door number 5.

Two people sitting at a table, coffee cups nearby, their faces lit from the glow of a pair of computer monitors. I stepped into the room.

“Hi,” I said, and shot them both.

A man and a woman. He was in a lab coat; she was in a uniform with lieutenants’ bars. The gas darts whispered through the air, and in nine one-thousandths of a second after impact they were out.

Horsey does not horse around.

Bad joke, real assessment.

The woman fell sideways out of her chair. The man did a face plant on his keyboard. As I hurried over, I pulled two uplink drives from my pocket. I pushed the lab guy off his chair and quickly plugged the uplink drives into USB ports on each computer. MindReader stepped right in and began copying everything. Every file, every e-mail, every instant message, every URL. The uplinks had microcharges of thermite buried inside. As soon as the uploads were complete, they’d pop, killing the computers and melting their own innards. No one could trace slag, and no one could duplicate our tech.

We’re stingy like that.

I took wallets and ID cases from both sleeping beauties and shoved the stuff into an empty canvas bag clipped to my belt. For later. For after-mission follow-up. Maybe for federal prosecution, if we found what we were looking for. And maybe for quietly disposing of if we didn’t.

Then I moved through the rest of the building. In various rooms, I encountered one more soldier and the other eight technicians.

Horsey, horsey, horsey.

Everything was rinse and repeat. Hacking computers, slagging them, taking IDs.

Until I got to the security room.

The room was locked, and I had just begun the process of placing another scanner on the card reader when the door opened and a burly guy with sergeant stripes stepped out. He looked almost exactly like Mr. T, except for the Mohawk. Same face, same muscles. Same attitude.

Sergeant T looked at me in my black BDUs, camouflage greasepaint, and weapons. He did two things at once. He went for his sidearm and he started to yell.

Balls.

Chapter Six

My pistol was still in its holster, so all I had in my hands was a tiny scanning device.

So, I hit him with that.

Hard.

On the nose.

Small or not, the scanner was metal. Sergeant T’s nose was cartilage. No competition.

He reeled back, blood exploding from both nostrils. I followed him, hitting him with a palm shot under the chin and a big front kick to the belly. His gut was rock-hard, which was fine because it gave me more to kick against. Sergeant T flew backward into the room and slammed into a second noncom who was rising from his chair, hand already closing on the butt of the Sig Sauer at his hip.

I planted one hand on Sergeant T’s chest, used it to launch myself into the air, and delivered a flying punch to the second sergeant’s face that broke a whole lot of important stuff. He crashed, bleeding and dazed, into his security console as I landed hard atop the man who was atop him. I hit the sergeant with palm shots to the temple. Again and again. Hard as I could.

He had a head like a bucket and a neck like an oak tree.

It took four palm shots to knock the lights out of his eyes. He began to slump down, dragging the groaning Sergeant T with him.

I staggered back, drew my Snellig, and darted them both.

I was breathing hard. Even a short fight can take the wind out of you. My pulse was jumping all over the place, and I could feel that old familiar adrenaline rush. The room became brighter. Sounds became sharper.

The two security guys were out, but they were hurt. I wasted three seconds repositioning them so they wouldn’t choke to death on blood. They were here, and that made them part of something very naughty, but killing them was not on my day planner. There was no way to tell if they were bad guys or merely following orders from bad guys. That was for people above my pay grade to sort out.

Mr. Church would be part of that process, so this was going to get all the attention it deserved. Nobody’s going to be putting this on their résumé.

I stopped to listen and assess.

No alarms sounding, no one coming that I could see. There were twelve security cameras in operation around the compound, and each had a dedicated screen there in the security office. I studied them. Most showed nothing except stillness.

One showed the mess hall filled with people.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock. All quiet on the western front,” I said. “Go.”

Something small and metallic suddenly flew in a slow arc over the main table of the mess hall. Several of the soldiers looked up in surprise. Their faces were just registering shock and fear when the gas grenade exploded.

Horsey, horsey.

All fall down.

“Clear,” said Top. “Nap time here.”

“Shutting down the power to the fence,” I said, hitting some switches. “All security systems are now down. Meet me outside the detention building.”

I ran down the hall and out through the front door just in time to see Top and Bunny come pelting across the lawn. In a small pack we jogged over to the detention building.

“What have we got, Bug?” I asked.

“Thermals indicate nine people. Two guards in the outer room, one person in each of four cells, and then three signatures in cell six.”

“Is that the one with our boy?”

“No way to tell.”

Mr. Church’s quiet voice said, “Echo Team, proceed with caution.”

Bunny knelt by the front door and used the same kind of scanner I’d used earlier to create a keycard.

“Ready, Boss,” he said.

I finger-counted down and emphasized the go order with a clenched fist. Bunny swiped the card, and Top pulled open the door.

I stepped inside. “Hey, guys,” I said, and shot the closest soldier in the chest. Bunny was right behind me and took the other one.

Everything was going like clockwork. No alarms sounded, no fatalities. Not a single shot fired in response.

We approached the door to the cellblock, once more bypassed the keycard reader, and walked inside, moving on quick, silent feet, guns up and out. There were several prisoners sleeping on cots. The first two were too young. The third was a woman. The fourth was a very fat man.

We found who we were looking for in the last cell. The one where Bug had said there were two other thermal signatures.

And that’s when the whole thing went to shit.

The man we were looking for was secured to a sturdy wooden chair with zip ties. He was naked except for a soiled pair of boxers. His body was lean and long-limbed, with graying hair and a whole lot of bruises and cuts. Some of them old, some of them so recent they glistened with blood. The chair was tilted so that the back of the man’s head hung over the lip of a big industrial metal sink. There was a towel bunched over his face. There were pails of water on the floor, and a lot of puddles. There were two men, sweaty and angry, standing on either side of him.

It was clear what had been going on.

The spin doctors like to call it enhanced interrogation.

The press calls it what it is. Torture. In this case, waterboarding. Where they pour water over the towel that covers nose and mouth. You can’t breath, but you don’t drown right away, either. You drown by inches, slow. With great pain and terror.

I know. I’ve had it done to me. Twice during training, three times by guys who were as ruthless and dedicated to my discomfort as these guys were. I survived it, but I can tell you, when you’re bound and brutalized and gargling like that, you take serious stock of what you’d do or say in order to make it all stop. If it goes on long enough, you think about selling out your family, your honor, your values, and your country.

Everyone thinks that.

Not everyone cracks, though.

I didn’t.

A lot of guys don’t. Waterboarding doesn’t work as well as the torturers want. But they keep trying it, because it doesn’t leave a mark. And it’s a reusable torture. Tearing out fingernails isn’t.

These guys looked like they’d been at it for a while. They were stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat. The room was awash.

They heard the door open and turned to us. One in irritation at the intrusion, the other in surprise.

But there was fear in the eyes of both men.

The guy in the chair, though …

Yeah. Well, that was the problem.

He wasn’t breathing.

“Take ’em,” I said, “but keep ’em awake.”

Top took the guy on the left, kicking him in the nuts and then clubbing him to the ground with the stock of his M4. Bunny grabbed the guy on the right and literally picked him up and slammed him against the wall. It shook the whole place.

I rushed to the guy on the chair.

I checked his pulse. Nothing.

I turned him and cleared his airway, then I slashed the flex-cuffs and lowered him to the floor. And began CPR.

Breathing. Doing the chest compression. Doing it right.

Doing it for a long time.

Wasting my goddamn time.

The guy Bunny slammed into the wall groaned and shook his head. “We didn’t mean to,” he whined. “He just … stopped breathing. We didn’t mean to.”

They hadn’t meant to.

But they had.

I sagged back, gasping, sweating. Defeated.

The man was dead.

I looked down at him. Late fifties. Six four. Wasted down to a skeleton. Head and beard forcibly shaved. Beaky nose. Dark eyes that looked up at me, and through me, and into the big black.

Dead.

There was a little bit of irony to it. Just about everyone else in the world already thought he was dead. I’d have been A-OK with that being the truth, too. I’d believed the fiction along with everyone else. I’d celebrated it. Bought a round of Kentucky bourbon for everyone at a military bar. Cheered with the news reports.

Right now, though, I didn’t want him dead.

He had information I wanted. Needed.

He had been a link to something so big that a lot of people might now die because this source was dry, this door was closed.

Because this man was dead.

We stood there, Bunny, Top, and I. Looking down at him. At that face.

Helpless and defeated.

Staring at the slack, dead features of Osama bin Laden.

Interlude One

Jean-Luc Belmont was a mediocre sailor and he knew it. He’d taken the courses, passed the tests, obtained his license, but in anything except a calm sea on a mild day, he was hopeless. Luckily for him, he had clients who loved to fish, and many of them seemed eager to take the helm and pilot the Astrid, a lush Cabo 44HTX.

The boat had a hardtop enclosure — no pesky canvas — that provided climate-controlled comfort, nice ventilation, and a lovely hull profile. The Astrid could pave a smooth road through five-foot waves and do so in excess of thirty knots. All of which made for an impressive outing with clients who brought their checkbooks along with their Abu rods and Gander reels.

What Jean-Luc lacked in understanding of boats he more than made up for in his understanding of clients. He worked for Belasco Arms, an up-and-coming weapons manufacturer that was making a dedicated run at becoming a real threat to Colt Canada. The Belasco B9C assault rifle was outselling Colt’s C8A1 carbine and their C8FTHB special forces weapon in several key markets. Jean-Luc found that a day on the water hauling in northern pike and other sport fish, combined with lots of very good alcohol, was a great way to do business. Once they were back and showered, there would be steaks and more drinks, as well as some female entertainment for those guys who wanted to leave their wedding rings in their hotel safes.

The four men aboard the Astrid with Jean-Luc were all experienced fishermen and boat handlers, and they seemed to accept as a gift his willingness to turn the boat over to them. They worked the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, and one of the men pulled in an astounding forty-one-inch pike that weighed twenty-six pounds. It wasn’t one for the record books, but it was the biggest of the species any of them had pulled in. They were all jazzed about it, and that amped up the general air of holiday.

Jean-Luc was delighted. All three of the potential buyers worked for companies that provided security specialists and private contractors. Jere Flanders, COO of Blue Diamond Security, was the man who caught the fish. The others were Bill Allen, of Blackwater, and Huck Sandoval, of The Martinvale Group. Technically competitors, but not really. There was a heavy demand for private contractors these days, especially since the Americans pulled most of their people out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The regular soldiers had gone home, but there was a great need for competent field operators who could — and would — pull a trigger.

The fishing party had set out from Gaspé before first light and was well past Forillon National Park on the end of the peninsula. When they saw the humped silhouette of Brion Island, they dropped a sea anchor and broke out their rods. The island was a bird sanctuary and mostly uninhabited except for some government parks people. The day was quiet, the air crystal-clear. The men spent hours fishing, telling lies about past catches, hauling in pike, taking photos with the big ones and then throwing them back, drinking, talking some business.

They were all pretty well hammered when they saw the flash.

“Hey,” said Flanders, tapping Sandoval on the arm. “You see that?”

“Yeah,” agreed Sandoval. “Big flash.”

The sun was in a different part of the sky, and there was no chance this was lightning. They all agreed on that.

They listened and heard a faint throb of noise. Almost felt more than heard.

“Was … that an explosion?” asked Jean-Luc.

Allen nodded. “It damn well was. On the water, too, I think.”

The others nodded, too. They all knew what a blast signature sounded like, and that’s what they’d heard.

“I think that was Semtex,” said Sandoval, but then he shook his head. “No. Too heavy.”

“C4,” said Allen, and again the others nodded.

“Lot of it, too,” said Flanders.

They stared across the water, but there was nothing to see except a small and fading glow.

“Boat?” asked Jean-Luc.

Instead of answering, Sandoval climbed up to the bridge and started the engines. The others pulled up the anchor and stowed their rods. Within two minutes they were smashing through the small waves, racing toward the horizon line. Jean-Luc used the shipboard radio to call it in to the Canadian Coast Guard.

They did not find a boat, and, given the heft of that explosion, none of them expected to. That had been a lot of bang.

What they found were pieces of a boat. Splinters. A lot of pieces spread out over a half mile of water. The closer they got and the longer they looked, the more they were convinced that they weren’t going to find anything. Or anyone.

They were wrong.

It was Jean-Luc who spotted the body.

If it was a body.

It bobbed in the choppy water like a lump of greasy red chum.

Sandoval slowed the boat and swung around broadside to the corpse.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured.

The body had ragged stumps for legs, one ending midthigh, the other gone below the knee. The left arm was a mangled slab of nothing. The right hung down into the water. What face there was had been burned hairless; the heat had melted its features so that they no longer resembled anything human. It was impossible to tell much about it, except that it had once been male and that it had died badly.

“Poor bastard,” said Allen. “At least it was quick.”

He was wrong about that. They all were.

The bobbing chunk of meat turned over in the water. At first Jean-Luc thought that a predator fish was hitting it from below. A shark maybe. There were more than two dozen species of shark known to visit or live in these waters, though shark attacks were rare. Jean-Luc had seen a brute of a Greenland shark, as well as an eight-meter-long basking shark and a four-meter-long great white. Mostly farther out on the salt, but sometimes here in the more brackish waters.

But that wasn’t it. The body didn’t pitch and jerk the way it would if a shark was hitting it. Instead, it … rolled over.

The remaining arm broke the surface tension of the water and flopped toward the Astrid.

The hand, blackened and raw, opened and closed.

Reaching for the boat.

Reaching for life.

Using the last of his strength to find anything that would let him cling to the world.

The men in the boat cried out. Shocked and stunned. And repelled.

And then Jean-Luc kicked off his shoes, threw his watch and wallet onto the deck, pushed between Sandoval and Allen, and dove into the water. He was no good at piloting a boat, but he could swim. He reached the dying man in eight quick strokes and wrapped his arm around the burned torso.

The man screamed.

It was a high, shrill, and inhuman shriek of agony.

Then his grasping fingers closed around Jean-Luc’s shoulder and clung on as the salesman kicked out toward his boat and the reaching arms of his customers.

The Astrid was already punching its way toward the mainland when the Coast Guard arrived.

Chapter Seven

My guys stood and watched me make the call. I’d rather have knee-walked across broken glass.

“Cowboy to Deacon,” I said.

“Go for Deacon.”

“The tires are flat. Repeat: the tires are flat.”

There was a long pause. Heavy. Pregnant. I could imagine the faces of everyone at the TOC staring at Mr. Church. Via the lenses of the Google Scouts, they’d have already seen it anyway, but this needed a verbal confirmation. Someone had to own it, and that someone was Mama Ledger’s firstborn son.

If I expected Church to fry me, though, I was wrong. Maybe he was bigger than that, or maybe he was saving it for a face-to-face. Or maybe he was simply enough of a realist to accept that this happened. The man was dead before we entered the building. If there hadn’t been the very real risk of a no-win firefight, we could have tried for this building first and maybe gotten here before the interrogators accidentally killed him. We’d X’d that out during the planning, though, because finding him had been half the job. Getting him off the island alive was the other half, and that could not have been accomplished with all those troops awake and trigger-happy. No, it had to play out the way it had. This ending was unfortunate.

Damn unfortunate.

Church even said that. “This is unfortunate.”

“Copy that,” I muttered. “Call the play.”

“Secondary objectives are now in effect, Cowboy,” he said. “A helo is inbound. LZ is the front lawn. Thirty minutes.”

That was that.

I tapped my earbud to leave the mission channel and nodded to Top and Bunny to do the same. Sam would remain in position until the chopper got here.

We squatted down and made a huddle.

“This is messed up, Boss,” said Bunny.

“Yes it is.”

Top pinched bin Laden’s chin with a thumb and forefinger and moved his head side to side.

“Wouldn’t a minded killing this fucker my own self,” observed Top dryly.

“Word,” agreed Bunny.

“Yesterday’s box score,” I said.

Bunny shook his head. “Still can’t believe this is him. I mean … holy shit. You know?”

We all knew. Everyone at the DMS knew. And we were freaked out and furious.

When SEAL Team Six entered Pakistani airspace and breeched the compound in Abbottabad, they thought they were hunting the real deal. The guy who’d orchestrated 9/11. Those heroes went in to do a job, and they did it and earned their places in the history books. Unless this all became public knowledge, they would go on believing it.

Hell, even the president of the United States thought he’d dropped the hammer on bin Laden. We all did, except the conspiracy crowd, who kept ranting that we’d faked bin Laden’s death. They supported this claim by openly wondering why there were no pictures of bin Laden’s corpse.

I could answer that. The semiofficial story was that bin Laden didn’t die from the head shot and was thrashing and twitching on the floor, so they capped off a bunch of rounds to finish him. Those rounds tore up the body to the point that photos would be very nasty. That was only partly true.

Except that there is a different chapter to that story because a bunch of ass-hats from the CIA have been running a long game on everyone.

On the whole world.

Short version is this: The real Osama bin Laden was more than the point man for al-Qaeda. He was also a member of a group of what could, for lack of a better word, be called “financial terrorists.” Or maybe “global criminals” is a better phrase. Not sure. They both seem to apply. The group had set themselves up as a secret society. Called themselves the Seven Kings. And they deliberately and carefully hijacked much of the mythology of other real or imagined societies like the Illuminati, Order of the Temples of the East, the Fraternitas Saturni, the Arioi, the Carbonari, the Ethniki Etaireia, the Palladists, the Order of Heptasophs, and others, including some outright fictional groups like the Priory of Sion, the Millennium Group, and — according to Bug — the Order of the Phoenix from the Harry Potter books. They used the Internet and a disturbing level of computer-hacking savvy to seed their pseudo histories into the pop-culture conspiracy-theory ocean. With all that, a woman who called herself the Goddess began making predictions of disasters. Each of her predictions came to pass. Why? Because the Seven Kings were making them happen. But because the predictions were couched in religious ambiguity, they had the odor of prophecy rather than guilty knowledge. At least as far as the conspiracy-theory crowd went.

The Kings’ go-to model for making a lot of money was to covertly fund radical political and religious groups, nudge them toward committing large-scale terrorist acts, and then make billions from the resulting swings in the world stock markets. There are always a lot of people who run for cover as soon as anything happens. “Flight to safety” it’s called. If you knew in advance when something as big as the attack on the Towers was going to happen and were already in position with buy orders and calls, then as soon as the shock waves hit, you start shoveling Franklins into a wheelbarrow.

The attack on 9/11 was theirs.

How’d they orchestrate that so smoothly?

Real simple.

One of the Seven Kings, specifically the King of Lies, was Osama bin Laden.

Yeah. Take a moment with that.

Thing is, that ole Uncle Osama wasn’t doing it for Allah. And he wasn’t doing it in order to further a religious movement. This wasn’t fatwa or jihad for him. And he did not give a naked mole rat’s wrinkly ass about the followers of Islam. For him, it was all about the money. Lots and lots of money. All those deaths, the resulting wars, the ongoing “war on terror”? Shit. Every new death, every new headline, every instance of political divisiveness put more money in his pockets.

His pockets, and those of the other Kings.

Bin Laden, and the other Kings, were essentially apolitical. For them it was all a running con, albeit the most dangerous one in history. Fighting the Kings was a bitch. They were a massive organization, built over decades, with thousands of operatives seeded carefully into world governments, multinational corporations, and law enforcement agencies. They constructed a kind of bureaucracy so sophisticated that any single one of the Kings could run it all. Hell, it could probably run without any of them. As long as the money trickled down from the top — from well-established bank accounts — then the agents buried into society would continue to do their jobs. Which meant that they were always ready to strike, to disrupt, to do damage. All it took was a phone call, a coded e-mail, a text message.

And they have continued to stay busy. Kings operations have been ongoing, and we see their fingerprints in terrorist attacks, suspicious oil spills, domestic insurrection in countries that produce key commodities, and so on.

The DMS has been working very hard to tear the whole damn thing down. The King of Plagues, Sebastian Gault, was presumed dead along with the Goddess. The founder of the whole organization, Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, was definitely dead at Mr. Church’s own hand. Two reliable informants — the former assassin Rafael Santoro and a former aide to the King of Plagues, Alexander Chismer — provided us with enough actionable intel to go after the others. I’d spent a lot of time over the last few years making some pretty serious house calls.

The King of War had been a high-level member of the Israeli military. We sent a team to extract him, but he didn’t want to come quietly. He was killed during a mother of a gunfight. Pretty much the same thing happened with a Russian manufacturer who served as the King of Famine. Right around the time we breached his defenses in a remote site in Siberia, he ate his gun. The Italian banker who called himself the King of Gold swallowed eighty Vicodin when his sources told him we were closing in.

We were able to arrest the King of Thieves, a French commodities broker, but he managed to get himself killed while in custody. Exactly how that happened is a matter of some concern, and there’s a hunt for a spook within the marshal’s office.

Bin Laden was the last.

We didn’t want him dead, though. If our theory was right and the Kings organization was essentially running itself, then we needed insight into the infrastructure. We wanted to stop the runaway machine. We placed a lot of stock in swiping bin Laden from the Resort and encouraging him to help us with that.

Now, though.

Damn.

When SEAL Team Six went to Pakistan, much of the intel upon which they acted came from MindReader searches, from clues provided reluctantly by Santoro and willingly by Chismer, familiarly known as Toys. We shared that intel with the CIA, and the mission was set.

What we didn’t know then and found out the hard way later was that there is a splinter cell buried like a tick within the skin of the CIA, and it wanted bin Laden alive. They knew that bin Laden had at least five surgically altered and very well trained stand-ins. Much like the ones used by Stalin and Hitler. And, if the rumors were true, by William Taft. The stand-ins were either true believers who were happy to surrender to the knife in order to further Osama’s cause. Or they were on the payroll. Some of bin Laden’s family knew about the switch. Some of those were believers. Others were agents of the Seven Kings. It’s a complicated mess of duplicity and intrigue. The guy living in the cave in Afghanistan was only one of the fakes. So was the guy on dialysis. Funny thing is, the real Osama had been healthy and fit and hadn’t been inside either Iraq or Afghanistan since May of 2001. He hadn’t been in Pakistan since 2008.

The CIA splinter cell knew this. They knew it because eighteen months ago they located and apprehended the real Osama bin Laden. It was done very quietly, with their captive taken from a sprawling banana plantation in Guatemala and brought to this island for interrogation. Osama had been living under the false identity of a retired textbook publisher from Tel Aviv. Funny, huh? He had a Guatemalan wife, and he had four children who believed themselves to be half-Israeli. The CIA team raided his plantation in the middle of the night and whisked him away. To cover their tracks, they even sent a series of ransom demands as if they were local thugs. No one suspected a thing.

If I didn’t hate those pricks so much, I’d applaud them for their investigative brilliance.

Since then, the CIA has scored a surprising number of big-ticket arrests of actual al-Qaeda terrorists, thanks to information coerced from bin Laden by the splinter cell. This resulted in a new veneer for an agency that has taken a lot of drubbing over the last — oh, I don’t know … forever. Congress was so happy with them that when it came time to review the annual budget, they pretty much handed the Agency a blank check.

When Mr. Church and our crew found out about this through some creatively targeted computer hacking, we decided that Osama should come live with us. We weren’t here to “rescue” him per se. Hardly. Nor were we unduly concerned about the violations to his civil and human rights. Normally, that kind of thing torques my shorts. Less so in this case.

All we wanted was to turn him into an information source for us. There have been rumors in the intelligence pipeline for a couple of years now that something big was coming. Something massive. Something tied to the Seven Kings. The CIA splinter cell caught wind of it, too, but they dismissed it. The Kings were not on their to-do list. The Kings case belonged to the DMS.

So close.

So damn close.

What was the big project they had in development? Was there, in fact, a project at all? Bin Laden would have those answers. The King of Lies would know the truth.

If he was alive to tell us.

Now he was cooling meat.

Balls.

Interlude Two

The girl’s name was Boy.

It was the only thing anyone ever called her. If she had a real name, it was buried in the dirt of the past. She wouldn’t answer to anything else.

Boy.

She was closing in on her twenty-fifth birthday. The last ten years of her life were the only years she cared to remember. The decade before that belonged to a different person. The decade before that belonged to a different story. A horror story.

No one sane mentioned her early years. No one smart asked her about them.

Doctor Pharos was the only one who could have that conversation with her, but he never did. He’d been the one to take her away from it, so he didn’t need to comment on it.

Because he’d taken her away from that life, and because of the things he had done while taking her away, they were connected. Bonded.

Family.

Doctor Pharos and Boy.

Not the Boy. Just Boy.

They shared no other obvious connections. Not gender, not race, not cultural background. Certainly not any religious ties, except that neither of them prayed to a god or believed one existed.

The reality of their connection was something about which they never really conversed. Not a philosophical dissection of it. Not a deconstruction of motive or sources of gratifications. It existed, and they knew it. It worked, and they worked with it. It grew, and they cultivated it.

Their connection was terror.

It was something Doctor Pharos required of her.

It was something she existed to provide for him.

And it was the source of her joy.

Doctor Pharos loaded her like a bullet in the weapon of his intention and fired her over and over again at the targets of his need. He did this in the past in the service of the people they had both served. That time had passed, and now he did it to serve his own needs.

Today he had fired her in the direction of a scientist and college professor who probably thought his life was good, his job satisfying, and his future assured.

In this he was mistaken because he did not know that he was the target of the bullet fired by Doctor Pharos.

Boy waited in the dark.

She liked the dark.

It was like a glove that fit all of her curves and extrusions. It kept her safe and reminded her of her power.

She sat cross-legged on the dining room table in a nest of steel. Each of the eight steak knives and eleven assorted cooking knives had been driven into the tabletop. She had taken great pains to make sure they stood perfectly straight, a precise half circle. She didn’t use forks. Forks were stupid. Who would use a fork?

Knives, though.

She got wet thinking about knives.

Her flesh trembled as she sat in her nest.

Waiting.

Waiting.

The man was late tonight. That was okay, though. It was a variable in a predictable pattern. He was sometimes late. A drive through for take-out. Dry cleaning. Sometimes a trip to the bookstore for magazines. She thought it strange that he only read magazines. There wasn’t a single book in the house.

People were strange.

She waited.

The music coming through her earbuds was pinpeat. Elegant Cambodian ceremonial music that once played in the courts and temples. Ten instruments collaborating to form a sensual cloud of beauty that was unlike anything Boy had ever heard except the pihat ensembles of Thailand. So lovely. So serene.

She liked playing it very loud at times. It was more appealing than the sound of screams.

Now it played softly. A whisper.

Her heart fluttered with the tinkling notes of the renard-ek, the high-pitched bamboo xylophone. Her breathed flowed in and out with the extended notes of the srelai thom, the large quadruple-reed flute.

So lovely.

Her eyes wanted to drift shut, but she knew that if that happened she would fall asleep. This music could do that to her too easily.

Instead, Boy kept her eyes open and slowly, methodically counted the lines of wood grain in the tabletop.

When the key turned in the lock, she was awake, alert, and calm.

The table was not in line of sight with the front door, else she would not have chosen it as her place to wait. The man entered the house. Boy heard him toss the keys into the ceramic dish he used for that purpose. She heard him turn the lock. The whap of mail landing on the coffee table. One thump, two thumps as he kicked off his loafers. A click, and the TV was on. CNN. Wolf Blitzer was talking about something nobody cared about. He sounded desperate to be relevant.

The man — Professor Harry Seymour, chairman of the experimental aeronautics department at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi — came around the corner and into the dining room. Looking over his shoulder at the TV. Looking the wrong way.

Boy smiled.

She waited until he turned around. Waited until he saw her.

Waited until he stiffened with shock and fear and outrage.

Waited until Professor Seymour began to yell.

Attempted to yell.

She did not actually permit him to get a shout as far as his mouth.

As Seymour opened his mouth, she pivoted sideways, supple as a dancer, and kicked him in the throat.

The professor crashed sideways into a breakfront, fell heavily and badly, and hit his head on the way down. He slid all the way to the carpet, choking and gagging, trying to speak, trying to yell, trying to groan, trying to cry out.

In all of those things he failed.

Boy slid off the table and landed on cat feet. She bent over him and punched him in the face three times using a single-knuckle punch that was delivered with a whip of the wrist. No thrust. A thrust would injure her hand. A whip injured only him.

One blow to his left sinus. One blow to his right sinus. A third to the bridge of his nose. His head snapped back from the foot pounds of force lurking within the speed of her punch. The back of his head hit the breakfront.

She knelt quickly and struck Seymour again. A loose slap with the pads of her fingers upward beneath his testicles. A harder blow would galvanize him, coax a scream from him. A loose slap has an entirely different effect. Immediate and comprehensive nausea.

He rolled over onto hands and knees and vomited.

She stepped back and let him.

Vomiting was good. It reduced a man of this kind to shame and the helplessness that came with shame.

She walked behind Seymour and used the tip of her sneaker to kick him in the perineum, exactly between scrotum and anus. The blow was delivered at a slight angle so that the correct nerve clusters would be stunned.

They were, and immediately his bowels let loose. The rich stink of feces filled the room. The man groaned. Another wave of pain and shame.

Those were two of Boy’s favorite tools.

Combined, they were far more effective than agony and fear. Pain — controlled, specific, and moderate — was one key, one dial she turned on people. If the pain was too big, then system-wide shock set in. The body released the wrong chemicals; it sparked a different psychological reaction. It was why classic torturers put bamboo shoots under the fingernails rather than cut the fingers off.

The professor began to cry.

Boy nodded, satisfied.

The man on the floor was big. Two hundred and fifteen soft pounds. She weighed ninety-eight. She was as slender and hard as the knives she loved so dearly.

Boy knelt beside the man and bent close. She kissed his cheek. She ran a tongue around the curve of his ear. He cringed and tried to close into himself. Boy leaned so close that her breath was hot in his ear.

“It doesn’t have to get worse than this,” she said.

Professor Seymour almost stopped breathing. He lay there, rigid, hanging on whatever she would say next.

“You want to talk to me,” she continued. “You want to whisper to me. I know you do. I can feel it. You want to share things with me.”

She reached a hand and gently stroked his crotch, letting each separate fingertip find and caress his flaccid length. His penis twitched.

And what a wonderfully mixed signal that would send to this man’s brain. Boy knew that. Even laying there, beaten, his underwear filled with his own shit, he had just reacted to a woman’s touch.

Exactly as other men had done before this one.

Exactly as Doctor Pharos had said they would when he taught her his methods.

As she continued to touch him, the shame of defeat, the worse shame of having soiled himself, the pain in his nose and sinuses all triggered the first flow of tears. Injuries to the nose always made the eyes water. To the overwhelmed it is impossible to tell the difference between the body’s automatic reaction to facial injuries and tears that are shed as a response to personal weakness. It is because of this unavoidable reaction that so many brave people doubt their courage and believe in a previously unknown cowardice. It’s a way in which the mind breaks itself.

Seymour began to cry.

To sob.

And it was then that Boy knew he would tell her anything.

She stroked him. And she felt him, against will and circumstance, grow hard. If she had started with sexual touch first and proceeded to pain, he would not be able to get hard. One had to know the patterns of things.

Boy knew those patterns so well.

“Please,” begged the professor. And in that moment he probably did not know what he was begging her for.

She smiled.

Yes, this one would tell her anything.

Everything.

Chapter Eight

“Let’s do this and go home,” I told my team. “Gather all intel. Anything on paper goes with us. Maybe they have some Kings stuff. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Maybe blue pigs will fly out of my ass,” muttered Bunny. I ignored him.

“Double-check that we have IDs on everyone. Disable all weapons. Collect all cell phones, trash any hard lines or radios. Basically, vandalize the crap out of this place.”

“Hooah,” said Top. He stepped out of the cell for a moment, then hurried back. “The other prisoners are in moderately poor shape. Lot of obvious wounds. Untreated cuts. Dislocated fingers.”

“Some ‘resort,’” said Bunny, and then he shook his head. “I am having some weirdly conflicted feelings here, guys. I mean, our intel says that most of the prisoners here are actual scum suckers. Really-bad bad guys. And if I thought there was a bomb about to go off and any of these pricks knew where it was or how to de-arm it, then, well … shit. I guess I’d put my conscience on a back shelf and go all Jack Bauer on them. But that’s, you know, heat-of-the-moment stuff. Needs of the many and all that stuff.”

“You walking in the direction of a point?” asked Top.

Bunny looked at the door to the hallway. “Not sure what I’m saying.”

We all got it, though. We were all warriors. We were all killers. But we were all, each in our own way, idealists. Working for the DMS will do that. It’s nudged us away from either the right or the left side of politics. I had my left-wing, bleeding-heart-liberal moments, and I had my hard-line conservative moments. Pretty much in equal measure these days. It didn’t exactly make me a centrist, and it certainly didn’t make me a libertarian — besides, soldiers shouldn’t play politics. I occasionally did appalling things because the situation was fragile and innocent lives would be lost if I didn’t act. All three of us had. Sam, too.

And yet …

The line between immediate need and breaking the law is blurry at the best of times. And I’m not talking about the laws of states or nations. I’m talking about the laws of basic humanity.

It’s so hard to decide how to think about it. When I first joined the DMS, I was appalled when Mr. Church used deception and carefully worded threats to psychologically coerce crucial information out of a suspect. Church broke the man. As a result, we gained information that ultimately saved millions, perhaps billions, of lives.

Not too many months later, I needed to get a certain code from a man who was about to launch a series of designer pathogens that would have wiped out everyone who didn’t conform to a certain standard of acceptable “whiteness.” Again, billions would have died. He was an old man, and he was injured. However, the clock was ticking down to boom time, and so I did what I had to do. The information he ultimately gave to me stopped that genocide.

So, how was this different?

I don’t really know if I can answer that question. A lot of what was being done to these prisoners was part of a fishing expedition. The prisoners were believed to have knowledge of imminent or long-range threats against America. Due process was denied to them by the Patriot Act because the legal method can be used against itself. That’s something I understand, but on the whole I wouldn’t wipe my dog’s ass with the Patriot Act. It was quickly written and is poorly thought out, bad policy. People on both sides of the aisle should be working together a little more diligently to replace it with something smarter and saner.

This prison, the Resort, was illegal. No doubt. Any useful intelligence obtained was, in fact, saving lives. However, it was funneled through certain Agency channels for the career benefit of a select few.

Does that matter if the effect is still the saving of lives? Sure, but how much is something that still needs to be looked at.

Is the systematic and continual torture of prisoners justified if they do, indeed, have guilty knowledge and if that information is crucial to saving lives?

That’s what had Bunny’s gut clenched. Mine, too. And Top’s. Standing there in that cell, with no one around but varying degrees of criminals, it was hard to pin your sympathies to the right wall.

I sighed and called it in. Church said that a medical team was on board the chopper.

“What about the staff?” asked Bunny once I was off the call. He looked at the two men who had been interrogating bin Laden. They cowered against the wall in horrified silence.

“P-please!” said one of them, holding up his hands. Throughout our conversation, he’d been pretending to be a hole in the air. Like maybe he thought we’d forget about him. “Please … we were following orders to—”

“Really?” I said. “You’re going with the ‘only following orders’ thing?”

They began protesting. Then begging.

Top drew his Snellig and darted them both.

“Thank you,” said Bunny.

Top shook his head slowly as he shoved his pistol into its holster. “I could have worked on my uncle’s farm. Getting fat and rich growing peaches.”

“Right now,” said Bunny, “that sounds like heaven.”

I nodded to the unconscious men. “Secure them. They’ve got cells waiting for them back home.”

“Be mighty uncomfortable,” said Top. “Them tied up and all. No food or water. No bathroom runs.”

“You have a problem with that?” I asked.

He said, “Nope. Just noting it.”

We nodded to each other. Each of us aware of the conundrum’s souring our collective moods.

“Feeling the need to vent a little here, Boss,” said Bunny. “Might slash some tires and break some windows.”

“Hooah,” Top said again.

“None of that goes outside of the mission protocols as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Indulge yourself.”

We tapped back into the mission channel. “Tell the helo pilot to brew a fresh pot of high-test, and I don’t want to hear the word ‘decaf,’” I said. “Going to be a long night.”

Chapter Nine

“Home, James.”

It was a running joke every time the president climbed into the back of the Beast, the presidential state car.

The driver, a sergeant in the White House Military Office, was actually named James. The driver grinned, as he always did, even though the joke was as stale as Christmas fruitcake. But the basic rule was that the president’s jokes were always funny, even when they weren’t. The rule applied to any joke told by any president. As a result, a lot of former commanders in chief left office convinced that they were hilarious.

Being seen to visibly appreciate the joke was even more important tonight, because the man sharing the backseat with the president was Linden Brierly, director of the Secret Service. Brierly, though not James’s boss, had unquestioned influence over all matters of security personnel.

So, the driver, Leonard Allyn James, chuckled at the joke and waited until the senior motorcade NCO gave the go signal. The long line of vehicles switched on their red and blue flashers and the procession pulled away from the Capitol for the six-minute drive to the White House.

The Beast was a heavily armored Chevrolet Kodiak — based, Cadillac-badged limousine. It was referred to in most official documents as Cadillac One or Limousine One but called the Beast by everyone in the presidential motorcade.

Another running joke was that the motorcade was longer than the route between the two buildings. Most often there were forty-five cars in the procession, with one or two dummy versions of the presidential state car. All for a drive of one-point-seven miles. For what would otherwise be a nice stretch of the legs.

In the back, the president rubbed his eyes and sank wearily into the cushions.

“Long night,” said Brierly.

“Long damn night,” agreed the president.

The third person in their conversational cluster nodded, but added, “Good night’s work, though.”

Alice Houston, the White House chief of staff, somehow managed to look fresh and alert despite this being the middle of the night. Everyone else who had spent the last fourteen hours hammering away at the budget bill looked wasted. The elderly congressman from West Virginia had drifted off to sleep five times and had to be shaken vigorously to give his opinion on alterations in a bill that would keep the lights on in government facilities across America. Later today, the House would receive the bill and vote on it, hopefully in time to beat the midnight shutdown.

“I think we have something we can all live with,” said the president. It was not the first time he’d said that. Not the tenth. They all repeated it like a mantra. In truth, the bill was a pale shadow of the one they’d tried to pass. The original bill, drafted by a close supporter of the administration, took several hard stances that were fiscally sound. They were also politically indefensible. They required the kind of bipartisan cooperation that only ever happened in heartwarming and naive political comedies. That bill assumed that the phrase “in the best interest of the American people” meant just that.

“I wish we could have taken Donald’s suggestion,” muttered the president.

Donald Crisp was a junior senator whose idealism was dying a quick death in Washington. His suggestion, intended only as sarcasm, was that all further discussion of the merits of the bill be conducted only after every person in the room had been hooked up to lie detectors. That was a riff on a Jimmy Fallon bit about how cool it would be if the participants in political debates were hooked up to polygraphs. A nice idea, but it would cause armed insurrection on Capitol Hill.

Everyone in the room tonight had laughed. A lot.

Even Donald Crisp.

Now, in the car, the chuckles were less jovial. There was more evident regret that the world did not, and never would, spin in that direction.

“Can’t wait to see what the press does with the bill,” continued the president.

“I don’t think it will be too bad,” said Brierly. “Nobody wants to see the government shut down. Again.”

“Sure they do, Linden,” said Houston. “News is news is news. And it’s pretty quiet out there.” She gestured to indicate the world as a whole. With the war in Afghanistan more or less over and things in the Middle East simmering on a moderately low boil, the big story had become the impending shutdown. With a bill that was all compromise, the pundits would have to feed on something, which meant that they would milk the bill — and the participation of the key players — for as much sustenance as they could. “Once the ‘shutdown averted’ headlines have their fifteen minutes, then they’re going to go snipe hunting in D.C.”

“That might be an imperfect metaphor,” murmured the president.

Houston opened her mouth to reply, but the car suddenly jerked to a halt with such abrupt force that they were pitched forward against their seat belts.

Brierly punched the intercom. “James — what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“No threat, sir,” said James. “The brakes locked up.”

The whole motorcade screeched to a stop. Doors opened and sergeants swarmed the Beast. Most of them had guns drawn.

Brierly turned in his seat. “Mr. President, are you okay?”

“Yes, yes, sure. No problem,” said the president, waving him off. He unbuckled his seat belt and reached a hand toward Houston. “Alice—?”

Houston was flustered, but she nodded. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“James,” growled Brierly, “talk to me.”

“Must be a malfunction. Hold on, I think I —.”

Then the car suddenly lurched forward, snapping them back against the cushions. The president had been half turned toward Houston, and Brierly had been leaning in toward him, but the jolt bounced them together. Brierly’s forehead struck the president’s cheek with a meaty crack.

The car stopped and oscillated on its springs. The siren blared on and off. The headlights cycled from running lights to driving lights to high beams to off, and then through the same pattern. Door locks popped up, then down, then up.

“Jesus Christ!” cried the president, reeling back, a hand clamped to his cheek.

“What’s happening?” shrieked Houston, terrified.

“Goddamn it, James!” snarled Brierly. Then he yelled into his cuff mike, calling for a medic.

The car jerked forward again, and once more Brierly and the president collided. The president snapped a hand out to fend off a second collision and accidentally struck Brierly’s mouth. Blood erupted from the director’s mashed lips.

“The onboard computer’s going crazy,” bellowed James. “I can’t turn it off.”

The doors of the Beast were whipped open and hands reached in, closed around the president, and pulled him out. He was immediately surrounded and, in a run-walk, taken to a second car. Two WHMA sergeants piled into the Beast. One released Houston from her belt and began guiding her to the doorway; another slid in beside Brierly, whose lower face was painted with blood. James was pulled out of the driver’s seat.

The car jerked forward again. And again, throwing Brierly and the sergeant to the floor. The edge of the door clipped Houston’s ankle and tripped her, and as she fell, she dragged her escort down.

Then the lights switched off, the horn stopped blaring, and the Beast’s engine growled down to silence.

WHMO sergeants and Secret Service agents assigned to the motorcade pointed guns in a dozen useless directions, including at the car itself. One agent took a risk and leaned quickly in to throw the car into park. But it already was. When he turned, confused, he saw James hold out the keys.

Four heavily armored cars peeled off into a smaller motorcade and whisked the president away. The rest of the vehicles and all of the remaining agents stared at the car, uncertain about what had just happened. The driver had put the car in park, turned off the engine, and removed the key. However, the car had still jerked forward, and its engine had run for several seconds after that.

Linden Brierly, holding a compress to his torn lips, expressed the thought that was on everyone’s mind.

“What the hell—?”

Chapter Ten

“I uploaded a lot of data to MindReader already,” I told my guys. “Do the same with any computer you see. If bin Laden told them anything about what the Kings have running, maybe it’ll be on the drives.”

“You think that’s likely?” asked Bunny. “It’s my impression that the assholes in the splinter cell were still more or less on our side, just going about it the wrong way. If they caught wind of anything, there’s a dozen ways to slip that info to us.”

Top shook his head. “You more trusting than I remember, Farm Boy. I think you been hit in the head too many times.”

We left it at that. Everyone went about their jobs.

The lab building was mine. I placed Bug’s uplink doodads into the USB ports of every computer I could find. MindReader gobbled up all of their data.

“Geez,” said Bug, “there’s a lot of stuff here. A lot of eyes-only and above-top-secret files. Encrypted, but that won’t be a problem.”

“Let me know if you get anything on the Kings.”

“There might be, but you know the Agency. They have code names for everything. They might have reams of stuff hidden under some name we won’t recognize. I’m seeing files labeled Dora the Explorer, Getaway Weekend, Cinco de Mayo, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. These guys are hilarious.”

“Yeah, I’m laughing my balls off. Pull it apart.”

“Sure, just know it’ll take time. Nikki’s doing a simultaneous pattern-and-keyword search as this stuff comes in.”

While that process ran its course, I scouted around for anything else of use. Except for the computers and some personnel records, there wasn’t anything lying around with the word “Evidence” stenciled on it. These guys were careful. Had to keep looking, though. Found a porn stash in one guy’s desk. DVDs with cover images of Asian girls who looked way too young to be in the kind of horror show they were in. Some of those kids couldn’t have been older than ten or twelve. Disks were from some illegal pirating group in Malaysia. I found the name of the person who sat at that desk and matched it to the sleeping prisoners. The guy with the kiddie porn was a big slice of white bread with lots of tough-guy tattoos. I kicked him in the balls. Real damn hard.

Will I kick a man when he’s down?

Nah.

But I’ll kick a pedophile from any angle at any time.

I went back to my search without a flicker of guilt.

Interlude Three

The car idled outside the Imperial Condominiums, engine quiet, driver silent. No radio, no conversation, even though there was a second man in the front passenger seat. They sat and waited.

They were slim men. Midtwenties. Average height. Average weight. Average in every useful way. Forgettable.

The car was a medium blue Ford Focus.

The men were dressed like grad students. The driver wore a print dress shirt and moderately tasteful Dockers. The passenger wore a Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, basketball sweatshirt over pressed jeans and New Balance running shoes. They looked like what they wanted people to see. They did not look like who and what they were.

The man in the Dockers was currently using the name Jacob. It was listed as the most popular name for boys based on statistics from the Social Security Administration. The man in the jeans was using the second most popular name, Mason.

Before coming here they had been at a Starbucks on Ocean Drive. Jacob pretended to read the paper. Mason pretended to surf the net on his iPad. They sat near each other, but not together. When they left, Jacob went out first, walked around the corner, and got into his car. He circled the block and picked up his companion one street away. The driver made sure he was not being followed.

They were both very careful men.

Then they drove over to Edgewater and parked outside the condos. Engine on, both of them waiting.

Jacob had a Ruger SR22 pistol snugged into an ankle holster. Mason had an identical gun in his zippered tablet case. They always carried the same make and model of handgun. It made it easier for sharing ammunition. These were efficient men.

However, both of these guns were their backup pieces. Neither of them preferred to kill with them.

They used something else for that.

The cell phone that rested on the dash vibrated.

The driver picked it up, thumbed the green button, and said, “‘Āllō.”

He listened and then disconnected without a comment, switched the engine off, and got out of the car. The other man removed a small hemp-handled paper bag. The bag was from Starbucks. Two plump one-pound bags of Pike Place blend peeked out of the top.

Together, Jacob and Mason approached the building.

They pressed the call button for unit 6A. A moment later, it buzzed and the door lock clicked.

They entered and took the stairs. They did not go to unit 6A. Instead, the driver led his companion to unit 12B. It was at the end of a short hallway. The hall was completely empty and very quiet. They knocked on the door and waited until a woman answered it. She smiled expectantly at them. They were unobtrusive and well-groomed young men. Everyone in this building worked at the university. Nearly every tenant was a professor. It was not at all unusual for a couple of grad students to visit.

“Yes?” said the woman.

“Mrs. Harrison?” asked Jacob.

“Yes.”

“We work with your husband. Doc Harrison asked us to bring this over.”

He held up the Starbucks bag.

She was still smiling, but there was as much frown as smile on her mouth. “He’s in the shower, but I can—”

Mason punched her.

Once, very hard, in the throat. He used the folded secondary knuckles of his left hand. A leopard’s-paw punch.

The blow crushed her hyoid bone and larynx. It silenced her voice. She collapsed immediately, and he stepped forward to catch her. He smiled at her as she turned purple. Trying to breathe, trying to find even a whisper of breath in a throat filled with shattered debris.

Mason caught Mrs. Harrison and laid her very gently on the floor, holding her down to keep her heels from hammering on the hardwood as she died.

Jacob closed the door. He took the coffee out of the bag and removed a pistol. It was not another .22. It did not fire bullets at all. The weapon looked vaguely like a silvery space pistol from a bad science fiction movie. It didn’t look entirely real.

It was.

The weapon was a Jarvis USSS-2A pneumatic mushroom-head nonpenetrating stunner. Very effective for the quick and humane slaughter of cattle. Unlike the captive-bolt stunners, this one did not even break the skin. No risk of contaminants. No need to meticulously clean the fittings to remove DNA.

“Doris—?” called a man’s voice from down the hall. “Who was at the door?”

They could hear the shower water running.

Jacob nodded to Mason, who rose from the corpse, and together they walked down the hall toward the bathroom.

Sixteen minutes later, they were in the Focus driving away.

The two men were in the front, Boy was in the back. She had been waiting for them in the lobby.

There were three corpses in the condominium.

Professor Milo Harrison, deputy department chair of applied robotics at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, and his wife, Doris. And Professor Harry Seymour, chairman of the school’s experimental aeronautics department.

The car moved at a comfortable pace along Edgewater.

Away from the three dead bodies.

Away from the Imperial Condominiums.

Away from the column of dense smoke that rose from that building.

Several fire engines screamed past them. Five separate police cars roared by. No one took note of the nondescript car with its nondescript passengers.

They drove to a motel outside the city limits and checked into their rooms. They left all of their equipment in the car. A minute later, a silver-gray Toyota Camry and a beige Honda Civic pulled into the lot and parked in front of the rear exit. The drivers of those cars got into the Focus and drove it away. They took it to a scrapyard on Holly Road, got into a black SUV, and left. The Focus was crushed within minutes. Later, it was added to a load of scrap metal that would be taken by heavy truck to the docks and included in a shipment bound for Japan.

At the motel, Boy went into one room and the two graduate students went into another.

Boy stripped off her clothes and stuffed them into a plastic container. All other personal effects went into the same container. Naked, she went into the bathroom, took a shower, dried herself thoroughly, removed an aerosol can from a bag on the sink, and doused herself with a dark spray-on tan. She put contact lenses in her eyes, injected collagen into her lips, slipped on a blond wig and padded clothing. The last thing she did was put on padded shoes that added two inches to her height.

After she left, a cleaning woman came in, took a hazmat suit from her cart, put it on, and proceeded to clean every inch of the room with industrial cleaner and bleach. She poured acid down the drains to dissolve any traces of hair or other DNA. Another cleaner did the same in the room used by the two young men.

The plastic containers of clothing and personal effects were taken to a waste site and dumped into a tub of hydrofluoric acid. The residue was mixed with plastic and ball bearings and allowed to harden. The hardened blocks were dumped from fishing boats out at sea.

All of this took place within a few hours of the three murders at Imperial Condominiums. It is possible, even likely, that more than half of these procedures were unnecessary, even wildly so. They were done anyway. Nothing was left to chance.

No trace was left.

Boy drove her new car to New Orleans. The trip took nine hours.

Mason and Jacob drove a more leisurely route along I-10 west to Alamogordo, where they checked in to the Holiday Inn Express. And waited.

They had no idea how long they would have to wait. Nor did it matter.

Instructions would come.

Instructions always came.

They spent the time swimming in the hotel pool, watching pay-per-view movies, playing video games, and making love to each other.

In New Orleans, Boy checked in to the Hotel Monteleone, ate room service food, and read three novels. When she wasn’t actively working, Boy read all day and into the evening. She was currently working her way through the entire works of Elmore Leonard, having just finished all the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. Reading calmed her. It allowed her energies to idle in neutral.

She did not make any calls. She did not feel the urge to check e-mails. She had no Facebook or Twitter pages. She was patient and in her patience was content to wait. Doctor Pharos would call her.

He always called.

There was still so much left to do.

The world was still on its hinges.

For now.

Chapter Eleven

“Cowboy,” came Bug’s urgent call, “be advised we have incoming.”

“Incoming what?”

“Looks like a UAV coming in low and fast.” UAV was shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicle. A drone.

He read off the coordinates and vector, indicating that it was coming from the west. From the seaward side of the island. I hurried outside. Top and Bunny were already there, each of them fitting on their night vision.

“What’s this shit?” asked Top.

“This some Agency thing?” growled Bunny. “They have a second location out here? Another island we don’t know about?”

“Nothing on the satellite maps,” I said. “Bug, give me something. Who’s toy is this?”

“Unknown, Cowboy,” said Bug. “Definitely not one of ours. The only drones we have are running surveillance between here and the mainland. This one just appeared on the radar. Probably launched from a boat.”

“Boat,” echoed Bunny nervously. “Chilean navy? They could have launched one from a submarine out of Talcahuano. They got a couple of those Type 209 German-made boats.”

“Got Exocets on ’em, too,” said Top. “Don’t want to overstay our welcome and get a missile shoved up our asses, Cap’n. We ain’t supposed to be here.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bug. “This is a small signature. Don’t think it’s military. Not big enough to carry heavy weapons. Coming right at you, though. Seven miles and closing. We have two helos heading to intercept, but the UAV will get to you first.”

“Frigging drones are a pain in my ass,” said Top.

I had to agree. These days they were everywhere. The military had a lot of them, but they were also being used not only to map streets and, by law enforcement, to conduct aerial surveillance and patrol the border but also to film sports events, take real-estate photos, and even deliver goods. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Domino’s, Taco Bell, and hundreds of other companies had applied for licenses. The FAA kept trying to fight it, and for very good reasons. UAVs could be used to deliver a lot more than chalupas or the latest Janet Evanovich novel, but the agency was losing most of their cases.

“Still not seeing it, Bug,” said Bunny. He held a muscular AA-12 shotgun with a drum magazine. It was a monster. Fully automatic and drum-fed, it fired five 12-gauge shotgun shells per second. Very reliable, very little recoil. I’ve seen Bunny fire it one-handed. And for times when a hail of hot buckshot isn’t enough of a crowd-pleaser, he could swap in another drum loaded with Frag-12 high-explosive or fragmentation grenades. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny has issues.

We listened.

Drones are very quiet. Maybe if there weren’t a million crickets and cicadas filling the night air with their steady whistling pulse, maybe — just maybe — we’d have heard it. Maybe not.

“Infrared,” I said, and we cycled through the Scout’s lenses until the world was painted scarlet.

“There it is,” said Top as he raised his M4. “Two o’clock. Fifty feet above the trees.”

“C’mon, Bug,” I said, raising my own rifle. This wasn’t the time for horse tranquilizers. “Tell me something useful or we’re going to blow this thing out of the air. Not in the mood for surprises.”

“I got nothing on it, Cowboy. Satellites are not picking up an active weapons system.”

“Doesn’t mean it ain’t a bomb,” observed Top.

We all saw it then. A pale blotch of heat painted against the fifty thousand shades of red and gray that made up the forest. It was a four-rotor quadcopter and it was bigger than I thought. Maybe six feet across. It wobbled slightly as it flew, pushed out of true by a freshening easterly breeze. It flew just above the tree line until it hit the clearing between trees and fence.

“I don’t see a payload,” said Bunny.

“No rocket pods,” agreed Top.

“I got it,” said Sam Imura’s voice over the radio. “Call it, Cowboy, and I’ll switch off the lights.”

“Everyone hold fire,” I said. We kept our guns on it as it flew closer.

“It’s slowing,” Bunny said.

It was. The machine crossed the fence line very slowly indeed and drifted over twenty feet of lawn, coming straight for us. Then it stopped; hovering there as if painted on the night sky.

“Cowboy,” said Bug urgently, “be advised, we’re picking up a strong, active video feed. It’s going up to half a dozen satellites.”

“Who’s satellites?”

“It’s crazy — it’s hacking into every communication satellite in range and bouncing them all over. This thing is broadcasting this live. It’s showing up on TV and the net.”

And there, lying on the ground at our feet, was the corpse of Osama bin Laden.

Dead and in color.

“Jam the signal!” I shouted.

“Can’t do it, Cowboy — it’s already out there.”

The drone hovered there. Mocking us with what it could do. Mocking us with what it was already doing.

“Take it out,” ordered Church. “Right now.”

Sam fired first, but I think we all hit it. We blasted the drone out of the sky and into a thousand fragments of metal and plastic. The motor core exploded and shot firework sparks into the dewy grass as the parts rained down.

I could hear the beat of helicopter rotors far off to the north, as our evac bird came hustling through the shadows to take us home. We stood and waited, watching the last of burning sparks drift down to the lawn. None of us said a word. What was there to say?

The video feed was out.

“Well, fuck me,” breathed Top.

It was damage done. We pulled off the Scout goggles, but I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes.

Very quietly Bunny said, “Without the beard and hair … maybe no one will know who it was.”

Top gave him a withering look. “You’re out of your damn mind, Farm Boy. Hope you had all your shots ’cause we are about to be well and truly fucked.”

Our Black Hawk swept over the trees accompanied by a big Chinook transport helicopter. They descended like monstrous birds from the night sky. But even their combined and powerful rotor wash couldn’t sweep away the weeds of doubt that were trying to take root in the soil of my soul.

Interlude Four

The sign outside said it was a hardware store. The store was open, fully stocked and staffed, and did good business.

The three floors above the store were not used for stock, offices, or employee break rooms. They were nicely furnished apartments. The doors were of the best quality, the security systems state-of-the-art, the staff fully trained. Two of the agents on each shift were Israelis on the payroll of the CIA. The other two were MOSSAD agents. Three men, one woman. They spent a lot of time together. They talked shop, they played cards, they surfed the net, they watched a lot of TV. Mostly, though, they read reports. This station was one of several joint operations that formed small but valuable links in the intelligence chain that was looped through every town and country in the Middle East.

The lead agent was named Dor Ben-Shahar. His mother was a Tel Aviv Israeli; his father was from Brooklyn. Both of them were experienced agents, both second generation Agency operatives, which made Dor a third-generation spy. He treasured his agency legacy as much as his ethnic and religious heritage. His grandfather had fought in the Six Day War. One of his uncles was at Entebbe. His great-aunt had been part of Operation Wrath of God following the Munich Massacre. There was no one in his family, on either the American or Israeli side, who hadn’t seen active combat. Not one.

Dor Ben-Shahar was different only in that he never wore a uniform, but he’d seen his full share of dirty little actions. He had blood on his hands, and most of it was guilty blood. Bad guys who needed to die. A few drops of blood were from civilians caught in the cross fire. Collateral damage. Unfortunate but unavoidable.

Lately, though, Dor hadn’t had to use his gun or any of the skills he’d learned from the Agency trainers or from his friends here in Israel. He hadn’t touched his gun at all except to clean and oil it. Lately he’d put on three pounds from eating too much falafel and doing too few crunches.

Lately, he had become a babysitter.

Part, in fact, of a team of babysitters.

All for one man.

A little pip-squeak of a guy from New Jersey. An egghead. A scientist.

Doctor Aaron Davidovich.

Dor thought the guy looked like a tailor. Or maybe a bookie in a 1960s New York gangster movie. Beard, big nose, thick glasses, delicate hands, bad breath. Not the kind of guy you’d want your sister to marry, unless you didn’t care much for your sister. Dor’s sister, Esther, was in Army Intelligence. He did like her, and her taste in men tended toward Navy SEALs or Delta gunslingers.

Not creepy little guys like Davidovich.

Dor’s job was to protect the scientist and guarantee that he would be fit, healthy, and whole so he could make his presentation to a joint panel of military strategists from the United States and Israel. All very hush-hush. All tied to a new phase of the drone project. All part of a new level of warfare that would — if Davidovich was as good as his promises — significantly increase the tactical effectiveness of UAVs used in surgical strikes while decreasing collateral damage among civilians. Bystanders were martyrs waiting to happen, children doubly so. Nobody wanted them killed. Not even the kind of people who didn’t give a cold, wet shit about Muslim children as long as the target was secured. Those ultrahawks weren’t motivated by compassion. Not even a little. Any concessions they made to reducing civilian casualties were measured against negative political pressure because political pressure was often tied to defense-budget purse strings.

Dor, though a warrior and son of warriors, was a family man. He considered himself to be a good man. Not really as devout as he might be — his wife had to all but threaten him at gunpoint to get him to synagogue except on the High Holy Days — but he believed that warriors were defined by their skill, not their body count. If it took a little more work and time to reduce unwanted nonmilitary casualties, then so be it. Otherwise, a warrior became a barbarian. A Philistine. Dor took pride in what he did.

If Davidovich could accomplish both goals — increasing the likelihood of killing high-level targets while decreasing unwanted casualties — then Dor was more than happy to do his part to keep him safe.

Shame the guy was such a drip.

“You want to play cards?” asked Dor.

Davidovich didn’t look up from his laptop. “I’m busy.”

He wasn’t working. Dor could see that easy enough, even without the laptop beeping and booping as the guy battled his way through some old retro arcade game. Ms. Pacman for god’s sake. Guy writes artificial intelligence software for drones and he can’t play anything more challenging than Ms.-fucking-Pacman? Seriously?

“You want coffee?”

Davidovich ignored the question. He paused his game play, put earbuds into his ears, turned up the volume on his iPod and resumed chasing energy dots and fleeing from ghosts.

Dor sighed. He shared a look with the other agent working this shift, an Israeli national named Tovah. She made a face and shook her head. She understood.

Dor went to the kitchen to make coffee for himself. Tovah was drinking Coke.

The coffeemaker began beeping, and at the same moment there was a knock on the door. Dor and Tovah exchanged another look, and this was of an entirely different frequency. Without saying a word they both stopped what they were doing, drew their guns, and took their positions. Tovah hooked Davidovich under the arm and pulled him gently but firmly up from the couch and away from his game, then guided him quickly down a short hall to the bedroom that had the reinforced door.

Meanwhile, Dor went to the door, standing to its left side, which was the wall with the steel sheeting hidden beneath the drywall and wallpaper. Without opening the door, he said, “Who is it?”

“Delivery for Yev,” said a voice.

Dor relaxed. That was the correct day code.

He replied, “Mr. Yev is not here.”

“This is for his mother.”

All correct, and the voice sounded familiar.

Even so, he kept his gun down at his side as he disengaged the lock and, with the chain still on, opened the door one inch so he could peer outside. As he did so, he asked the final verification question.

“Is it still cloudy?”

“No, the sun is shining. It’s a nice day.”

Dor exhaled and grinned. “Simon,” he said, “you’re early.”

Simon Meir was his relief man.

“Let me in,” said Simon. “I have to use the john.”

Dor closed the door, slipped off the chain, opened it, and died.

Just like that.

Simon’s gun was fitted with a sound suppressor. The bullet entered under Dor’s chin and punched a hole at an angle that blew off the crown of his head. Dor stood straight and still for a moment, his head raised as if listening, though he was already past hearing. His body was caught in a moment when it was balanced only by skeletal alignment, the muscles not yet responding to a lack of signal.

Then Dor’s knees buckled and he puddled down.

By then Simon Meir and his companion were already inside the apartment. Simon closed the door while the second killer — smaller, slimmer, female — hurried down the hallway toward the secure room.

From the mouth of the hallway, Simon called, “Tovah. I brought some falafel. You hungry?”

From inside the room, Tovah laughed. “I’m always hungry,” she said as she opened the door. “Hope you brought enough for—”

And she died.

Boy put three rounds into her: one in the heart, two in the head. Boy used a .22 with a Trinity sound suppressor. The shots made only small, flat noises. There were no exit wounds. Almost no mess. Tovah staggered, tried to catch the wall, failed, and fell.

Then Boy and Simon entered the secure room, guns up and out. Doctor Davidovich began backing away from them, his eyes wide and filled with the sure and certain knowledge that his world — everything in his world — was going to change. That everything had already changed.

He held up his hands. Tears sprang into his eyes. He sank to his knees.

He said, “No … please, no…”

Boy smiled as she holstered her pistol and removed a syringe.

“Please…,” whimpered the scientist.

Boy liked it when they begged.

Chapter Twelve

The president sat slumped on a sofa in his apartment in the White House. The room was filled with people. Secret Service agents, senior staff, his body man, a military doctor and nurse, and Linden Brierly, who had four stitches in his lower lip. The first lady was in Detroit on a speaking tour.

Brierly, despite the pain and discomfort of his injury, was doing most of the talking.

“We’re tearing the car apart,” he explained. “So far, we’ve eliminated simple mechanical problems. The senior mechanic thinks that the onboard computer system is the culprit.”

“The car was turned off,” said the president. “Isn’t that what you told me? James had the key in his hand.”

“He did, and I’m not trying to protect one of my own when I say that I don’t think he is in any way to blame for—”

The president flapped a hand. “Oh hell, of course not. And I don’t want to hear about James being transferred to the dark side of the moon. I can’t see how this is his fault. He’s a good kid.”

“We think the problem is in the autonomous vehicle software.”

“The what?”

“Autonomous—”

“I heard you. I mean … since when do we have that installed in the Beast?”

Alice Houston answered that. “Eighteen months ago, Mr. President. You, um, were briefed on it when you took office.”

“Oh,” said the president. “Right.”

Brierly said, “The systems were installed to allow the car to operate in a defensive and protective manner, sir. Even if the driver were incapacitated, the car would use its GPS and other software to get you out of there. It’s tied to all of the internal security systems and countermeasures and is in constant contact with the White House Communications Agency. The idea is to make sure you’re never sitting in a dead or driverless car.”

The president gave a sullen nod. He was a year and a half into his presidency, and the glamour of the gizmos and geegaws had long since eroded, revealing a set of security protocols that were ponderous and annoying. Necessary, sure. But annoying. The Beast was a perfect example of what he considered overpreparedness. It was sealed against biochemical attacks and had a full medical kit in the trunk, including pints of blood in the president’s type — which he found deeply unnerving. It even had its own oxygen supply. And it was so heavily armored that it barely got eight miles to the gallon.

Now this. An autonomous driving system.

“I would have assumed,” he said acidly, “that someone was supposed to vet this system before we paid whatever we paid — probably fifty times what we should have — to have it installed?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Brierly. “The operating software package has been thoroughly tested by DARPA and some independent labs.”

“Then explain to me why and how this happened, Linden.”

Brierly had no answer to that.

No one did.

The president got wearily to his feet. Everyone else got to their feet as well. “I can’t do this anymore. I need some sleep. Alice, you kick whoever you need to kick, but by the time I wake up, I want to know why my car turned into a Transformer. Are we clear? No excuses, no buck passing. I want a clear and cogent answer. Capisce?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” she said.

The crowd began edging toward the door, with the president walking behind them, arms wide, like a shepherd driving his flock into a pen. When they were outside, he closed the door and turned and leaned back against it, blowing out his cheeks.

“Damn,” he said, sighing out the word so that it was stretched as thin as he was. After a moment, he pushed himself upright and had just hooked his fingers into the knot of his tie when someone knocked on the door.

Very hard, with great insistence.

“Jesus H.…”

He bellowed, “Come in, damn it.”

The door opened and two heads leaned in. Alice Houston and Linden Brierly.

“It’s too soon for good news,” grumped the president. “So, if it’s bad news, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Mr. President,” said Houston, pushing past Brierly to come in. She crossed to the TV, snatched up the remote, and clicked it on. “You have to see this.”

The screen filled immediately with a video already in progress.

Three hulking armed figures in dark clothes stood in a tight cluster around the nearly naked corpse of a man.

One of the men barked out a command in American English.

“Jam the signal!”

The president said, “What the hell is this?”

Chapter Thirteen

The oncologist had the kind of face that always seemed to be in pain. His expressions shifted from one version of a wince to another. Even his smiles looked pained, though he rarely smiled. It seemed to be a trick of a perverse god or one of life’s little ironies that the doctor’s name was Merriman.

Emerging from the big private suite’s master bedroom, he closed the door quietly and was ushered onto a balcony by the patient’s personal physician, Doctor Michael Pharos. It was an unseasonably warm morning, and the balcony faced the sun. A silent maid poured tea for Merriman and coffee for Pharos, then retreated inside and pulled the balcony doors shut. Birds sang in the trees, and the sunlight glittered on the countless wavelets on the waters of the Saanich Inlet. Down at the dock, a cluster of expensive boats rocked gently against their fenders.

“You can speak frankly, doctor,” said Pharos, getting right to it. He was a very direct man most of the time. Less so in the presence of his last remaining employer, the sick man in the master bedroom. “I suspect you’ll have few surprises for us.”

Merriman sipped his tea and nodded as he set the cup down. “The results from the needle biopsy bear out what we expected to find, I’m afraid. We found a malignant neoplastic growth and—”

“So, it’s bone cancer.”

Merriman nodded. “Yes.”

“Has it metastasized?”

The oncologist sighed. “Yes.”

“Ah,” said Pharos. He placed two cubes of raw sugar into his cup and stirred thoughtfully with a tiny silver spoon. “He has been in a great deal of pain. This explains it.”

“Sadly, yes. The invasion of bone by cancer is the most common source of cancer pain. Tumors in the marrow instigate a kind of vigorous immune response that enhances pain sensitivity. As the cancer continues to spread, the tumors compress, consume, infiltrate, or cut off blood supply to body tissues, which is what causes the pain.”

“Yes,” said Pharos. “I am aware of the process.”

They sat for a moment, letting it all sink in. Merriman finally sighed and shook his head.

“May I speak frankly, doctor to doctor?”

“Please do.”

“Patients and those who care about them so often rail against the unfairness of it all. They react as if humans were meant to last, forgetting that we are already outliving what evolution intended. Medical science is extending life beyond what is natural. As a result, we have new kinds of protracted illnesses and new degrees of suffering. Even as little as a hundred years ago, most people over seventy-five would have passed. Most of us simply do not have the tenacity, the constitution, or the will to live in the face of catastrophic injury or debilitating illness.”

Pharos nodded.

“And then we have cases like this one,” said Merriman, nodding toward the house, where the dying man slept. “Here is a man who received injuries that should have killed him. An explosion like that, with the accompanying forced amputations and comprehensive burns. The pain. The constant infections. The damage to organs, the progressive deterioration. And now the cancer?” He shook his head again. “Any of these things would have killed most people, and yet he not only holds on, he fights back with more…”

He fished for a word.

“Determination?” suggested Pharos.

But Merriman shook his head. “Many people are determined to live. I’m not even sure he wants to. He knows that he has no real future, no chance of recovery. And no quality of life if he somehow were to go into remission.”

“Then what, doctor?”

Merriman turned and gazed toward the closed door. “I believe that the driving force, the sustaining force, in our patient is not determination or pride, not a lust for life or anything like that. No … If I were to put a label on it, I would say that he is driven by rage.”

“Rage.” Pharos echoed the word, not quite making it a question.

“Or something very like it. At the risk of sounding melodramatic,” said Merriman, “from the things he says, from the passion in his voice at times, it seems as if he has given himself over to a very specific kind of rage.”

“And what kind is that?”

Merriman’s eyes shifted away from the closed door and locked on Pharos’s.

“Malice, doctor,” he said.

Pharos smiled very thinly. And he nodded.

Merriman cleared his throat and sipped from his cup, avoiding his colleague’s eyes, embarrassed by his own observations.

Pharos waved it away. “What is his prognosis? How long does he have, and how long will he be lucid?”

“Ah,” said Merriman, setting down his cup. “First, please understand that this diagnosis is severe. He has G4 bone cancer. It’s fully metastasized. He’s far beyond the point where we could explore surgical options such as additional amputations. Nor do I think he’s a candidate for radiation and chemotherapy. The cancer is so widespread that all the trauma of chemo could accomplish is to hasten the end. It is extremely unlikely that even the most radical measures could do more than cause him additional discomfort.”

“Give me a timetable.”

“A few months? Four, possibly six. Or it could be weeks.”

“I see. What about the issue of lucidity?” asked Pharos. “This is something very important to him. He has many business holdings as well as private monies, and he wants very much to be able to make important decisions before he is too far gone. To protect his family and employees, you understand.”

“I certainly understand, and that kind of thinking is commendable. However, lucidity varies. The patient is a very strong-willed man. Remarkably so. And highly intelligent. But, tell me … has he been tested for dementia? Or Alzheimer’s?”

“He has.”

“And—?”

“He has been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Early stages, of course.”

Merriman looked aghast. “How on earth did he contract that?”

Pharos gave him another thin smile. “A dangerous career side-effect.”

“I don’t understand. Was he in the medical field? Did he work with the brains of other infected—?”

“He was in pharmaceutical research. Prion diseases were part of that research, and apparently there was an accident or protocol error that he was unaware of. In any case, we can add that to the list of things he has had to deal with.”

“Does he know?”

“About the prion disease?” Pharos pursed his lips. “We thought it prudent not to burden him with too many things. He is already quite … distraught.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” said Merriman hastily. “But Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. God. I can understand your need to resolve the financial and business matters. That disease is very aggressive. It progresses so rapidly.”

“It does. So, between the effects of that,” said Pharos, “and the loss of physical and mental acuity from the bone cancer, we need to decide how long he has before his decision-making capabilities are no longer reliable.”

“But … they are probably being affected now. During my examination this morning, he referred to me by several different names. And he asked if President Bush had invaded Baghdad yet. He’s clearly disconnected with current events.”

Pharos sipped his coffee and studied Merriman over the rim of his delicate porcelain cup. Michael Pharos was a Greek national who had lived all over the world. And although he was very cultured and highly educated, he was also very large and had a face that looked like it had been cut from rough stone. Big hands with callused knuckles. Not a surgeon’s hands. A precisely trimmed beard, through which the pale shadows of old scars meandered like small rivers in a black forest.

“Which other names, exactly?” he said, showing a lot of very white teeth.

“Pardon?”

“You said he called you by other names. I’m curious as to which names he pulled out of his memory.”

Merriman shrugged. “Does it matter? They were just names. They probably don’t even connect with his current life. They could be names he heard on television. Or names of old friends from school.”

“Which,” said Pharos slowly, “names?”

Merriman sat back in his chair, clearly unnerved. He fumbled for a moment, waffling his way through some pointless nonsense. Stalling while he tried to make sense of Pharos’s question, and while trying to remember the names.

“I don’t see how it’s important, but … if you really think it’s relevant.”

“Indulge me.”

“He called me by your name once or twice.”

“He calls the nurse and the pool boy by my name. It’s currently the one he’s most familiar with and therefore irrelevant. What were the other names?”

“Um … well, one was an Arab name of some kind. I only caught part of it. Mohammed bin Awad. Something like that.”

“I see. And the others?”

“Hugo and — what was the other? It wasn’t really a name. Oh, yes — he called me Toys. Is that strange?”

Doctor Pharos turned away to pour himself more coffee. He watched the boats for a long moment. He mouthed those two names.

Hugo.

Toys.

Merriman cleared his throat. “The, um, patient is very likely hallucinating. He is also probably in great fear. Is he a religious man?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Toward the end, as I was finishing up, he kept staring past me into a corner of the room and smiling. When I asked him what he was smiling about, he said that he was happy that his friend had come to visit. I turned to look, but the only thing in that corner of the room was an overstuffed chair. But the patient kept smiling and nodding as if in conversation with someone, even though there clearly was no one there. Every once in a while, he’d say a name. You know, a clerical one.”

“What name?” said Pharos, putting a bit of edge into his voice. “What exactly did he say?”

Merriman took a breath. “Every once in a while, after a few seconds of appearing to listen and nod, he would say, ‘Thank you, Father Nicodemus.’”

Pharos jerked upright and spilled hot coffee onto his thigh.

“God, Doctor Pharos,” said Merriman, half rising in alarm, “are you all right? Your leg…”

Pharos came to his senses and hastily brushed at his thigh. The dark coffee steamed as it spread in a big brown stain on Pharos’s white duck trousers.

“How clumsy of me. I’ll need to clean this up.” Pharos stood. “Please excuse me, doctor. I believe you can show yourself the way out.”

With that, he whirled and pushed through the balcony doors.

Doctor Merriman set his teacup down, stood, looked around as if the empty balcony could somehow explain what just happened, then picked up his case and left the suite.

His car was brought by the valet, and then he drove toward his office in Black Creek.

Doctor Merriman did not arrive at his office.

His car was later found in the parking lot of the Old Farm Bed and Breakfast on Cowichan Bay Road, near the Theik Indian Reserve. The vehicle was locked, and the interior had been wiped clean with bleach. Doctor Merriman’s body was found many months later in a shallow grave farther south at Dougan Lake. He had been shot twice in the back of the head with a .22 pistol. No evidence was ever found, no suspects named.

The strangest part of the case, however, were the footprints found all around the shallow grave and again in the soft dirt near the abandoned car. At first they were dismissed as dog tracks, and there are a lot of dogs in Canada. One of the camping guides from the Est-patrolas Indian Reserve near Dougan said that they were not dog prints, nor were they coyote. It wasn’t until casts of the prints were shown to an exotic-animals expert at the Greater Vancouver Zoo that the identity of the animal was determined. The prints belonged to Canis aureus. The golden jackal.

The case remains open and unsolved.

Chapter Fourteen

We were on a Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules, cruising at twenty-eight thousand feet. In Chile, we’d switched from the Black Hawk to the plane and had left the resort far behind us. Now the Panama Canal was fading behind us as we headed northeast for the long haul to the Hangar in Brooklyn, where Aunt Sallie’s team would be waiting for our payload.

Waiting for a corpse.

While we flew, Top, Bunny, Sam, and I sat in a pressurized conference cabin in the rear of the plane and watched the fallout on TV.

The video footage had gotten out and gone viral.

The clip was forty-seven seconds long. It showed three big men in unmarked black military uniforms, face masks and goggles, all of them armed, standing over the nearly naked corpse. The marks of beating and torture were clear, even in the low-light video footage. The clip included me yelling “Jam the signal!”

However, the drone’s camera either stopped taping before it obtained a close-up of bin Laden’s face, or whoever controlled the drone deliberately ended the broadcast at that point.

“I don’t get it,” said Bunny. “They had it. No way they didn’t get his face.”

“They got it,” agreed Top, “but they don’t want to show it.”

“How’s that make sense?” asked Sam. “This is the biggest news story since … shit, since they killed bin Laden the first time. Maybe bigger. This is political currency. This could bring down the presidency and maybe put the last two presidents on the hot seat. There’s so much damage they could do with this.”

“So why aren’t they doing it?” said Bunny, nodding. “Why are they holding back?”

I shook my head. “Been trying to work that one out since it happened.”

I tried getting Mr. Church on the line, but he was having what I imagined was a very unpleasant phone call with the president.

So, instead, I got Bug on the line for an update on the public reaction. When his face popped up in a window on our conference room TV screen, he looked like he’d just had a lime-juice enema.

“That bad?” asked Top.

“Worse,” said Bug. “We hit a wall trying to trace the drone. Was there really no way you could have not blown it to tiny little pieces?”

“Seemed like a good thing to do at the time,” I suggested.

“Yeah, okay, but from the pieces you recovered, we got exactly nothing. No serial numbers, no recoverable software, nothing. Maybe when the CPU is delivered here I’ll be able to do something with it…” He trailed off to suggest that short of performing actual magic on it, the odds of his getting anything of use were somewhere between slim and none.

Sam Imura gestured at the screen with his coffee cup. “What about the video itself? Can we get anywhere with that? Does it tell us anything?”

“Not much,” Bug admitted. “The postings were sent from the drone to the net via hacked links to communications satellites. There was no other address or identifying server attached to the feed. Like I said, by destroying the machine, we actually slammed the door in our own faces. The drone uploaded a Trojan horse to each satellite, and that allowed the drone’s owner to force the video into the broadcast stream. That made it pop up on everything from YouTube to the morning farm report in East Workboots, Idaho. Everyone’s talking about this.”

“Okay, but so what?” asked Bunny. “They don’t show his face.”

“No, but the video feed was encoded with a GPS tracker. It shows a covert military op on an island a couple hundred miles off the coast of Chile. They have time, place, and someone speaking with an American accent.”

“In international waters,” said Sam.

“The way this is being positioned,” said Bug, “it’s saying that our special ops guys are out there doing illegal hits. They don’t need to prove that. The video footage sells it. Remember, social media’s all about the instant buzz. This already has hashtags that are trending pretty heavily.”

“The fuck’s a hashtag?” demanded Top.

Bunny gave him a pitying look. “Damn you’re old.”

“Old people kill young idiots while they sleep. Why don’t you go take a nap?”

Bug grinned. “A hashtag is what they use on Twitter so people can follow a specific conversation or topic. Right now there’s #SpecOpsKillers and #AmericanKillList and #USKillersWhoDiedNow. Like that. People are posting all kinds of theories about who the dead guy is.”

“Anyone calling it right?” I asked.

“Not even close, thank God. Pretty much everyone still thinks bin Laden is dead.”

“He is dead.”

“You know what I mean. No one would look at what’s on the net and think it’s Uncle Osama.”

Top shook his head. “Don’t make sense. Why not just show his damn face?”

“Because that’s a different trick,” said Bug. “First you have to build the need to know something so that it grows as big and as demanding as possible. Then you start dropping clues. I bet you that’s what we’re going to see next. Whoever took that footage is building toward something, and they’re going to ride a social media wave until they’re ready for their reveal.”

The images on the screen were abruptly replaced with the unsmiling face of Mr. Church. He’s a big guy with an even bigger presence. North of sixty, but not in any way that sanded off his edge. Blocky body, cold eyes, dark hair with some gray.

He said, “There’s been a development.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said.

He ignored that. “Someone has stepped forward to take credit for the video.”

I nearly came out of my chair. “Who?”

“They call themselves the Friends of the Truth.”

“Catchy,” said Bunny. “Look real nice on a travel mug.”

Sam asked, “We ever heard of them?”

“Not until now,” said Church.

“I’ll run a search,” Bug said, then turned aside to speak to someone off camera, firing off a string of orders in computerese.

“I doubt you’ll find much,” warned Church. “We got this from a call to the White House switchboard. It seems that they are being very careful not to leave an Internet footprint. I’ll play the message for you.” He tapped a button on his laptop, and a voice began speaking. It was a distorted machine voice.

“We are the Friends of the Truth. We are the servants of justice. We have taken actions that will force you into the light so that everyone will know who you are and what you have done. You have lied to your own people. You have lied to the world. You have lied to God. How much will He punish you? How much should the whole world punish you? You think you have seen fatwa? You think you have seen jihad? You have not. But you will.”

The call ended.

We sat in silence for a moment. Only Top spoke, and it was a quiet, “Well fuck me blind and move the furniture.”

Chapter Fifteen

Doctor Michael Pharos sat beside the hospital bed until the burned man woke up. He then adjusted the bed to approximate a sitting position, offered the man some water, and then settled himself back into the leather visitors’ chair.

“Where is Doctor Merriman?” asked the burned man.

“Gone.”

“When will he be back?”

“He’s not coming back,” said Pharos. “He’s gone.”

“Ah.” A long pause. “Why?”

Pharos considered how best to answer the question and ultimately decided on the truth. A species of it, at least. “You were half asleep during part of the examination. You spoke in your sleep. You mentioned some names that Doctor Merriman did not need to hear.”

The burned man was not able to blush. The artificial skin that had been grown over his scars did not permit that. But he looked away for a moment.

“I see,” he said. Without turning, he added, “What names?”

“A few of note,” said Pharos. “Hugo Vox and—”

“Gault is dead.”

“Toys—”

“He should be dead, the little shit.”

Pharos inclined his head. “And you mentioned Father Nicodemus.”

The burned man hissed as if scalded. “I did not!”

“It’s unlikely Doctor Merriman could have invented that name.”

Finally the burned man turned back to him. “He’s a monster, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pharos. “I know. Don’t forget, I knew him long before you did. I’ve seen what he’s capable of.”

“Some,” corrected the burned man.

“What?”

“You’ve seen some of what he’s capable of.”

“I saw and heard enough.”

The burned man stared at him, and something seemed to shift behind his one remaining eye. “Not me.”

“Pardon?”

“I haven’t seen enough of what he’s capable of. If we’re going to complete our project before I’m effing worm meat, then maybe we need someone like him to help move things along.”

“Surely you can’t be serious.”

“Why not? We’ve used him before.”

“And look where it’s gotten us. The Kings have fallen. You’re all that’s left. One king. Hugo Vox practically worshipped Nicodemus, and now he’s dead and his fall nearly crashed the entire system.”

“The system, Pharos, cannot be crashed. Isn’t that what you’ve bloody well told me a thousand times? It’s on autopilot. It’s a perpetual motion machine. Those are your words.”

“I know, but—”

“But what? Don’t give me another speech about how this will all work without further influence or action from the executive level. I’m not denying that. But look at me. I’m more dead than alive. Those tests Merriman did? They were cancer screens. He’s been testing me for bone cancer, and the very fact that you haven’t leapt to give me good news lets me know that the news is all bad. I’m dying even faster than we thought. And you know as well as I do that there’s something happening inside my head. Dementia, early-onset Alzheimer’s. Something. My cognitive functions are dicey at best. My memory is for shit. I can’t remember your name half the time, and the other half of the time I don’t remember what happened to me or how I got like this. No, no, Pharos, your perpetual-motion machine might succeed in bringing down the American government — and it probably will — but I won’t live to see it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Fuck if I don’t,” snapped the burned man. “If I live until May or June, it’ll be a sodding miracle. Don’t treat me like an idiot, Pharos. Don’t you dare do that.”

The words disintegrated into a spasm of wet coughs that shook the ruined body and made bloody tears leak from the corners of both eyes — the sighted one, and the dead one. Pharos began reaching out to help, but the burned man snarled at him between the coughs, damning him and ordering him back.

Pharos sat rigid and still and waited for the burned man to be able to speak again.

“Bloody hell…” gasped the dying man. Then he stabbed a finger toward Pharos. “Don’t ever try to tell me a lie about what’s happening to me. So help me God if I find out you’re hiding things from me, I’ll have you skinned alive. You know I’ll do it, too.”

Pharos said nothing. He waited through another coughing fit.

When it was done, the burned man’s lips were flecked with new blood, and he looked a thousand years old.

“I … I … want him,” he gasped. “I want him right fucking now.”

Pharos did not ask who. He closed his eyes and sighed. Instead, he got heavily to his feet. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll make some calls.”

“Don’t fail me on this, Pharos.”

“I won’t.”

With that, he turned and shambled from the room, heading toward his office. Going to make the call that would bring Father Nicodemus there.

Chapter Sixteen

Linden Brierly met with the head of the White House Military Office, the chief of staff, two representatives from DARPA’s autonomous-vehicle-design program, and the senior mechanic from the White House motor pool. They spent a grueling two hours going over the data from the complete inspection of the presidential state car.

No obvious problems were found.

“We’ve pulled the vehicle’s CPU,” explained one of the designers.

“And?” asked Brierly. It had been a long night since the incident with the Beast and the far worse revelation that a CIA splinter cell had been committing a very bizarre form of treason. Even though the media sensation of the short video clip had calmed down, no one in the White House was getting much sleep.

“Well,” said the designer diffidently, “there’s not really much that we can find wrong with it. A little code error, sure, but we don’t really see how that could have resulted in the vehicle doing what it did.”

“No,” agreed the second designer. “Nothing in the actual programming should have been able to do that.”

“I was there,” said Brierly. “So was Ms. Houston.”

“Oh, we believe you,” said the first designer quickly. “It’s just that we can’t really understand how this happened.”

“You’re telling us,” said Houston slowly and with no warmth, “that you don’t understand the quirks of a system you yourselves installed in the president’s car?”

Neither designer wanted to tackle that. They looked everywhere but at her.

Finally, the second one said, “We’ve, um, replaced the whole computer and installed a brand-new software package.”

Alice Houston narrowed her eyes. “When you say ‘new,’ do you mean a different version of the same software?”

“No. A totally different system,” said the first designer. “The one that we’d originally installed was the SafeZone version of BattleZone, which is a part of our Regis program. This isn’t the combat-software package, though. It’s essentially the same autonomous-control program we developed as a smart-system backup for manned aircraft. Like for when the pilot is incapacitated or the plane’s been hijacked. It’s a backup system.”

“But,” said the second designer, “the version in Cadillac One only has about a hundredth of that code. It was redesigned for that car. We did five thousand hours of test drives and simulations with it. It’s a good system. It’s pretty much foolproof.”

“Tell that to my lip,” said Brierly.

The designers avoided his eyes this time.

Houston said, “So, what did you replace it with?”

“Ah,” said the first designer. “Something really cool.”

“Cool?”

“Um, what I mean is, something better. It’s a brand-new AI program that is about four jumps past SafeZone. Really sophisticated, but also simple. The driver has a kill switch, too. And there’s a voice command that we’re synching with the senior NCOs on the motorcade detail. If anything ever happened—”

“And it won’t,” assured the other designer.

“—one command phrase will initiate an immediate code reset. Bang, the whole system becomes passive and the AI goes off-line.”

“You’re sure?” asked Brierly. “We don’t want another fuckup.”

“Absolutely sure,” they said in unison. “This new system is the best of the best of the best.”

“What’s it called?” asked Houston.

They grinned.

“It’s the absolute king of autonomous, self-guiding software. The king.”

The first designer said, “We call it Solomon.”

Chapter Seventeen

Church called back to give us an update. Mostly to say that the news media was trying to build something out of the video, but there wasn’t enough of it for them to use.

“Does the president know about this?” I asked.

“He does.”

“And—?”

“He is not a happy person,” said Church. “POTUS had wanted to stay out of the loop on the Resort operation until it was done and we had a clean case to take to the attorney general and Congress.”

“Plausible deniability,” I said in exactly the same way you’d say “jock itch.”

Church didn’t comment. “He is very much in the loop now. I shared the mission specifics with him. We cycled the AG and the judge advocate general into the conversation. It was not the most pleasant half hour I have spent.”

“I can imagine. Will the DMS take the hit for this?”

“No. However, this will be very bad for the Agency. Probably bad enough to damage their effectiveness.”

I nodded glumly. While we all despised the splinter cell within the CIA responsible for the bin Laden con game, the Agency as a whole did a lot of good. This could — and probably would — crush it. Maybe to the point of having it replaced by another department. That would be a logistical nightmare, and it would very likely open up a lot of vulnerable holes in our intelligence-gathering process. If that came to pass, people would die. No question about it. From the grim look on Church’s face, he knew it, too. Our operation had been intended as a bit of surgery — cutting off necrotic tissue in the hopes of saving the healthy flesh. Now … this might become one of those instances where the surgery was a complete success but the patient dies.

“Mind playing that one more time?” asked Top. Church did, and we all listened to the mechanical voice make its threats.

When it was done, Bunny asked, “So … this is who? Al-Qaeda? Hezbollah? The frigging Taliban?”

“If it’s any of them,” I said.

They all looked at me. Church said, “Go ahead, Captain. What are you seeing?”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not seeing this for what they intend,” I said. “I mean, come on, they get the most damning footage imaginable, but they release it in bits? Bug was explaining to us about building a viral message with social media. They’re doing that.”

“Clearly,” agreed Church. He reached out of frame, took a vanilla wafer from an unseen plate, and bit off a piece. “Go on.”

“We’ve dealt with every kind of religious nut in the world. Extremists of all faiths, every splinter group, sect, and cult that thinks their version of god needs to kick everyone else’s god’s ass. And one thing that marks genuine religious extremists is the clarity of their message. When they make a statement, they make it big, and they shove it up the ass of everyone else. Doing that not only scares the crap out of their enemies, it also serves as a clear rallying call to their followers. We’ve seen that with al-Qaeda. We saw it with the Soldiers of Jesus. We saw it with that Buddhist kill squad. Religious nuts are not particularly subtle. They can’t afford to be, because if they do anything that makes it look like their agenda is anything other than a mandate from God, then they know how much public support — active or tacit — they’ll lose.”

Church ate more of his cookie and waited.

“So, we have this message. It appears to be another call to arms for a militant group within Islam. They drop the right words. ‘Fatwa’ and ‘jihad.’ Everyone knows that those words are scary as hell. Not just to non-Muslims, but to the bigger part of Islam, to the Muslims who don’t want to burn down the rest of the world.”

Bunny frowned. “How’s that not this?”

“’Cause,” said Top, stepping in, “they didn’t hit us with the full punch. They put part of the video on the net, and they made their statement to a switchboard. No, I’m with the cap’n on this. It’s too calculated and restrained for outrage. You know what would be going on right this damn minute if they tagged that message onto the full video and put that on the net?”

“Sure,” said Sam with a shudder, “there’d be blood in the streets. Cities would be on fire. All over the world. But none of that is happening.”

Church nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly, “and isn’t that interesting?”

Chapter Eighteen

After he had made the call and finalized arrangements, Doctor Pharos returned to the burned man’s chambers. He opened the door very quietly and looked in on the twisted lump of a thing on the bed. A nurse came out with a clipboard.

“The Gentleman is sleeping,” she said.

“Good,” said Pharos. “Send someone in to clean him up. He’s likely to have a visitor.”

She nodded and left.

When he was alone, Pharos walked over and studied the sleeping man. Despite the frequent hostility between them, it saddened Pharos to see the once-powerful man so badly wasted. The Gentleman was a lump. His face and torso were a red landscape of melted flesh. He had one eye with minimal vision; the other was gone, as was one ear and most of his nose. His legs were gone, victims of the boat explosion that had nearly killed him. His left arm was a stub, amputated at the elbow. There were bags attached to his penis and rectum and wires of every kind snaking in and out of his sickly gray flesh.

It was science, and not the grace of any god, that kept the man alive. Science and the will of so many devoted people. Many thousands of them, hidden in plain sight inside the government, in the military, in banking systems and universities. Hidden everywhere. Some of them knew about this man, but most of the cogs in the great machine had no idea they were involved in something illegal. A culture of secrecy and lies, of misinformation and disinformation, of corruption and coercion.

And this dying madman was the heart of it all.

The last beating heart, at least.

Most of the employees in the upper tiers thought that there were several people running things from the top. If not Seven Kings, then at least a majority of them. Doctor Pharos made sure they kept believing that. It was a useful fiction; just as it was useful not to let them know that their hopes and dreams, their plans of financial security and benefits, rested on the thready pulse of a rotting piece of meat tethered to life by eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of medical equipment.

And by Doctor Pharos, of course.

The loyal servant. The faithful and attentive doctor. The doting friend.

He had to fight to keep a sneer from his mouth.

The Gentleman was losing it; that was clear.

But he had not lost it all quite yet. Pharos knew for certain that the charred bastard still had certain secrets locked away. Not in vaults or encrypted onto computers. No, the bastard had them memorized. Long strings of numbers. Banking access codes and routing numbers. Beyond the millions on the organization’s operational accounts, there were billions — tens of billions — in offshore numbered accounts. And as the Regis project unfolded, many more billions would flow in as the global stock markets tore themselves to pieces. All of that money would flow into the accounts controlled by the burned man. After all, he was the last man — Pharos paused here in his musings. The burned man was hardly the last man standing. Merely the last man. His value as a human being, his total value to Pharos, and his sole protection from Pharos were in that set of numbers. Those banking codes.

Once Pharos had those — or even some of them — the burned man would be far less important. Pharos had a splinter of sentimentality left for him. So, maybe he wouldn’t actually abandon him to rot and starve. A bullet or an injection would be the merciful, compassionate, and companionable thing.

Once he had the fucking codes.

For now, though, they were all in that dying, demented brain. In the lump of gray that was being turned into Swiss cheese by the relentless march of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Spongiform encephalopathy. A degenerative neurological disorder, a human variation of mad cow. Prions. Misfolded proteins that led to rapid neurodegeneration, causing the brain tissue to develop holes and take on a spongelike texture. Incurable, untreatable, and fatal.

The fact that this man, in particular, should be dying from a prion disease was all the proof Pharos ever needed that there was not only a God but also one with a wicked fucking sense of humor.

Despite how amusing it was, it was also dangerous. If the Gentleman descended too far into madness, then those codes would go with him. Much would be lost.

Many billions.

And the world…?

The great plan, the project, would still unfold, even without this last King. It was a time bomb of procedure and process. When it detonated, this ugly world would continue spinning; however, the American government would cease to exist in any recognizable form. The dollar would be relegated to a footnote in history. There would be global war. There would be chaos, and therefore a delicious opportunity to plunder more wealth than had ever been taken in the history of larceny.

“The codes, the codes, the goddamn codes,” he muttered to himself.

Two nurses — one male and burly and the other small and delicate — came padding up, and he waved them inside. Then Pharos crossed his arms and watched as they managed the padded straps and pulleys as they moved the Gentleman from his bed to a special bathtub. They washed him with chemicals that soothed his burns and disinfected his entire body. Then they hoisted him out again. Water dripped from the man’s slack flesh, and steam coiled up from his chest like the heads of pale snakes. Pharos removed a package of cookies from an inner pocket of his sports coat. A small six-pack of Nilla Wafers.

It made him smile to eat them.

It reminded him of the people who were going to suffer — so much, and for so long.

It also calmed him, and he needed to be calm because of the impending arrival of Father Nicodemus.

“Good God and all His angels,” murmured Pharos as he chewed. He did not speak loud enough to be heard by the nurses or the bastard they were now arranging in the bed.

Father Nicodemus.

If there was ever a real boogeyman, then the little Italian priest was it. Pharos remembered the first time he had met the man. The priest had been staying at the house of Hugo Vox. Pharos had been introduced by Vox and had made the mistake of letting manners get in the way of his instincts. He’d offered his hand, and the priest had taken it.

It was the single most disturbing memory that Pharos possessed. The priest had clasped the proffered hand in both of his, and his hands were small and delicate and damp. And they were different. One hand, his right, was as hot as if he’d been holding a steaming cup of coffee; the left was cold, the skin icy.

Pharos had instinctively jerked back, but the priest, a man half his size and twice his age, had tightened his grip and would not release his hand. Instead, he pulled Pharos’s hand forward and pressed it to his own chest. Pharos could remember how that bony, meatless chest felt through the thin fabric of the cleric’s black shirt.

“Feel that?” asked Nicodemus, smiling at him the way the snake probably smiled at Eve on that distant misty dawn morning. The way the Roman soldier had before he unlimbered his whip as he approached a kneeling Jew in the governor’s court. As the German technicians had as they closed the iron doors to the gas chamber. Even at his most corrupt, Pharos had never before seen such a smile look back at him from the mirror. “Do you feel that, boy?”

Boy? Pharos had been thirty-five at the time. Tall and powerful.

“Stop messing with him,” said Vox from the wet bar, where he’d been building himself a Scotch. “He doesn’t understand your jokes.”

“Oh, he understands,” said Nicodemus, using his grip to pull Pharos closer. He dropped his voice to a whisper. His voice had been cultured and accented, but in the next sentence it changed to a backwoods drawl. “There’s a darkness in this one, Hugo. It’s a twisty-turny kind of darkness. You better watch this one, or he’ll be sitting on your throne one day.”

That’s when Hugo turned away from the wet bar and crossed to stand next to the priest. The big American and the strange little priest had studied him for a long, terrible time. Pharos felt as if his hand was simultaneously burning and freezing. Sweat ran down his face, and he almost cried out, almost begged for the priest to let him go.

Almost.

But he had not.

Instead, he ground his teeth and took the pain, endured the stares.

Survived the moments.

Then Hugo Vox reached down with his free hand and touched Nicodemus’s thin wrist. The priest looked disappointed, but then he smiled, shrugged, and released the grip. He turned away and began placing kindling into a cold and darkened hearth.

Pharos winced as he cradled his hand to his chest. Vox sipped his Scotch and regarded him.

“More things in heaven and hell,” he said. Then he winked and turned away.

That was the only time Pharos had spoken with Father Nicodemus. It was enough. He knew that he had been scarred by the encounter. Exactly as the old priest had intended.

Pharos ate the six cookies very slowly. Then he wiped the crumbs from his tie. The Gentleman was in his bed now. The burly nurse had switched on the iPod, and soon the subtle violin stylings of Gehad al-Khaldi flowed from the speakers. Violin Concerto no. 2 in E Minor, by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The Gentleman had no particular passion for Mendelssohn, but this piece had been playing at the bank in the Seychelles when Pharos had accompanied the man there. Perhaps it would help him remember the routing numbers.

It was worth a try.

If it was a good day for the Gentleman, maybe today Pharos would coax him into giving one of the bank-account routing numbers.

Wouldn’t that be delicious?

Interlude Five

“Scream if you want to,” said Boy. “Scream as loud as you want to. It’s okay. You probably should.”

Doctor Aaron Davidovich did.

He screamed.

He yelled.

He thrashed against the zip ties that bound him to the heavy wooden chair.

Boy sat crossed-legged atop the kitchen table. Jacob and Mason sat together on the couch. They were holding hands, fingers entwined. The CD player was working its way through a mix. Mostly electronic dance music, with a bias toward Deadmau5 and Daft Punk.

There was an open bottle of water on the floor in front of Davidovich.

He had not been given water or food for thirty-two hours. He had not been allowed to use the toilet. His legs, hips, and the chair on which he sat were streaked with urine and feces. The stink rose around him and filled the room. Boy, Mason, and Jacob occasionally rubbed mint ChapStick on their upper lips to kill their sense of smell.

The three of them waited with calm patience as Davidovich fought to get free and cried out for someone — anyone — to help him.

No one did.

Not that time, and not the five other times he’d been brought to consciousness.

The apartment was soundproofed. None of the people who came and went to the falafel shop downstairs heard a thing.

When Davidovich could scream no longer, when his throat was so raw he spit droplets of blood onto his naked thighs, when he slumped forward, weeping and spent, Boy nodded to the two men.

They rose as one, graceful and silent. Jacob picked up another of the heavy wooden chairs and carried it into the living room. He set it down in front of Davidovich. Mason went into the smaller of the apartment’s three bedrooms and returned carrying a body over his shoulder. A man who was secured by the wrists and ankles.

Jacob went and helped lower the man into the chair. They tied him in the same way as Davidovich, using the plastic ties to secure him firmly to the arms and legs of the chair. The man wore only striped boxers and a ribbed tank top. Both undergarments were stained with blood and spit, though the man did not look to be seriously injured. Merely unconscious.

“Wake him up,” said Boy, and Jacob nodded. He went to a closet and removed two items. One was a leather gladstone bag of the kind doctors once carried when making house calls. The other was a slim zippered vinyl case. Jacob handed the doctors’ case to Mason and unzipped the smaller case himself. From it he produced a prefilled disposable syringe. Jacob squirted some of the liquid into the air, tapped the barrel of the syringe with a fingernail, and then jabbed the needle into the unconscious man’s arm.

The effect was nearly instantaneous. The man jerked as if shocked, then began blinking and sputtering. He raised his head and looked wildly around.

“Oh God,” he said in a voice that was already cracking with fear. “No. No more. Please, for the love of God, no more.”

Boy unfolded her legs and walked over to the man, who cringed back from her. The man was in his early forties, with an intelligent face and bright blue eyes that were wet with unshed tears. Boy cupped his chin and raised his face to hers. Then she quickly bent and kissed him. It was a long kiss. She pushed her tongue against his teeth until the man opened his jaws, and then she stabbed her tongue deep into his mouth. She straddled him and ground her pelvis against his crotch. Despite everything — despite his terror and the bizarre circumstances — the man grew hard. His penis poked out through the opening in his boxers. Boy broke the kiss and slid off of the man’s thighs, sinking to her knees in front of him. She kissed the swollen shaft and then took it in her mouth, working up and down to make him harder still. Her head bobbed faster and faster, and the bound man moaned in equal parts fear and passion and horror and shame.

Then Boy raised her head, letting the engorged glans pop from between her lips, though she continued to stroke the man’s hard length. She turned and smiled at Davidovich, her lips wet with spit, her eyes smoky and glazed.

Her smile was a devil’s smile. Filled with the promise of so many wicked things. Her hand moved up and down, up and down.

“Now,” she said softly.

Behind the bound man, Jacob and Mason opened the gladstone and began removing their instruments. Skinning knives. Scalpels. Bone saws. The bound man saw none of this. Only Davidovich did. He began to scream a warning, but Boy put a finger to her lips.

“Shhhh,” she said.

Her other hand continued to move up and down, and the bound man’s back was beginning to arch as he neared an impossible, improbable, and entirely unwanted orgasm.

“Now,” she said again.

Jacob and Mason approached the man. Both of them wore identical expressions of complete indifference. The knives gleamed in their hands, reflecting the twisting figure.

Boy’s hand was a blur as it moved up and down, and the bound man cried out as he came.

He threw his head back.

And he saw the knives.

His scream changed in frequency and volume and emotional content.

Davidovich screamed, too.

He screamed so loud.

He kept screaming and screaming and screaming as the knives did their work.

The bound man screamed, too. He was able to, because he did not die.

Not for a long time.

Not for a terrible, long time.

Chapter Nineteen

“Is he here?” asked the burned man.

“Yes,” said Pharos. Fear sweat ran in lines down the sides of his face and gathered in pools inside his clothes. His hands were clasped with knuckle-hurting tightness behind his back. His buttocks and stomach muscles were clenched. His single word of reply came out almost as a squeak.

The burned man smiled. “Good. Then send him in.”

Pharos did not risk saying anything else. He was afraid a scream might bubble out. He bowed and scurried toward the door.

It opened before he got to it.

And he was there.

Smaller than Pharos remembered. Older. His skin as dry and withered as oak bark. Eyes whose color seemed to flow and change. A smile like some hungry thing from the pit. Pharos stood aside, and, as the old priest entered, he bowed again. It was more appeasement than respect, and in this one case Pharos did not castigate himself for acting like an obsequious toady. He kept his eyes averted until the priest had passed into the room. Then Pharos exited quickly and pulled the door shut behind him. The click of the lock was like a splash of cool water on his hot face. He leaned against the door, chest heaving, heart pounding, sweat running.

Then he licked his pasty lips, pushed away from the door, took two staggering steps, and stopped, fighting to pull the pieces of his armor back into place.

No one ever affected him like this.

He doubted anyone could, even if he was brought in chains to a private meeting with Mr. Church.

No … this man was different.

This little priest.

This monster they called Nicodemus.

Whatever he was.

Pharos, feeling faint, hurried away.

Interlude Six

Boy sat on the floor.

The floor was awash in blood, and she sat in that. In a lake of red.

Davidovich sat on his chair six feet away. Blood spatters painted him from hairline to toes. Mixing with his tears and with the muck that ran down his chair legs. He panted like a man who had run up fifty flights of stairs.

Behind Boy, the lumps of things that had been the bound man sprawled on, and over, and around the chair.

Jacob and Mason were in the shower, cleaning each other off. Their laughter and snatches of song drifted through the noise of the spray. They were always happy. After.

Davidovich was no longer screaming. That time had passed. All he could do now was stare. Not at the ruin of the stranger. At Boy.

“You understand now?” she asked.

The scientist was so terrified that he did not dare answer.

“Do you understand?” she repeated.

He nodded. Shook his head. Nodded. His expression told her that he was trying to tell her what she wanted, to agree to anything. A stalling tactic, but understandable.

She pulled her crossed ankles under her and rose. Blood dripped from her shorts and ran in crooked lines down her slim legs. She did not have any on her hands. She padded across the room to the entrance to the kitchenette, took her laptop from the table, and brought it over. She turned it toward him so that he could see the pictures on the screen.

Three people in small video-feed windows. An old woman seated at her kitchen table doing the newspaper crossword with a blue ballpoint. A woman soaking in a tub, a wet rag across her eyes, a glass of wine on the flat rim. A fifteen-year-old boy walking beside a school soccer field while he read text messages on his cell phone. It was obvious that they were being filmed, just as it was obvious they did not know it.

Davidovich goggled at them.

He found that he could scream again after all.

The three people in those three little video squares were his mother, his wife, and his son, Matthew.

The only three blood relatives Aaron Davidovich had in this world.

Boy stood next to the destroyed red debris that had been a man and showed the images to Davidovich.

“Do you understand?”

“Please…” His voice was barely a croak.

“They have not yet been harmed, but if you do not do exactly what we want, you will sit there and watch what happens to each of them. This,” she said, nudging a piece of meat, “is not the worst thing that can happen. Do you understand that?”

He stared at her, his horror so great that it detached him from any possible intelligent reply. Boy understood this. The man needed some help. She shifted the laptop to one hand and dug her cell phone out of her shorts pocket, punched a number in, and waited for an answer. She put it on speaker.

“Yes?” said a male voice.

“Take Matthew Davidovich. Send me his balls and his eyes but leave him alive.”

Davidovich launched himself at her with such fury that he stood up, the heavy chair still attached to him.

“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “You motherfucking bitch!”

Boy kicked him in the chest. Very fast, very hard. A ball-of-the-foot thrust to his sternum. It knocked him backward so that the four chair legs crashed down and pulled him with them, back into almost the exact spot where he’d been.

“Not my son,” moaned Davidovich. “Please don’t! Please, please…”

“Wait,” Boy said into the phone.

“Please don’t hurt my son. He’s only a kid. You can’t.”

Boy yawned and held out the phone toward him. “Would you prefer we take your mother? She’s old. She probably wouldn’t last more than three days. Or do you want to kill your wife? I can have a dozen men over there in half an hour. They can make her scream for days. For weeks. And then they will begin cutting parts off of her. They’ll mail them to me here. By the time they arrive, I bet you’d be so starved that you’d eat them.”

Her voice was soft, quiet, almost without inflection.

Which made it all so much worse.

“No,” begged the scientist. “No, no, no, please God, don’t hurt them!”

She squatted down and looked up at him. “You have the power to kill them,” she said. “Or to save them. You have that power. You say the word, and I will tell my people to do whatever their imaginations can conjure. Can you imagine what we could do to a little boy? Picture it, doctor. Put those thoughts in your mind.”

“No, no, no, no, no…”

“Or,” she said, and watched how that one little word made Davidovich freeze and listen with every atom of his being. “Or … you help us. You do some work for us. Freely, without hesitation or reservation. You do exactly what we want. You come to work for us. You become part of us. You do that, and your mother, your wife, and your son, Matthew, will never be harmed. They will prosper. They will be protected from any harm. That tenth grader who has been tormenting your son? We will make him go away. We will keep them all so safe. Safe.” She leaned closer. “But it’s all up to you. What orders will you let me give? How will you use your power, Doctor Davidovich?”

Davidovich began weeping.

And nodding.

And begging.

Boy smiled and smiled and smiled.

Into the phone, she said, “We’ve reached an understanding. Remain on station. Wait for my next call.”

Chapter Twenty

The little priest came and sat in a visitors’ chair beside the hospital bed. For a few moments he said nothing, did nothing except look at the machines, following each pendulous plastic tube, each trailing wire.

The burned man watched him with his one good eye.

“You came,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Thank you. I — didn’t know if you would. After all, we never actually met. You were in prison when I—”

“I was never in prison.”

“What?”

“Someone was in prison who wore my name,” said Nicodemus, “but that wasn’t really me, was it?”

They studied each other for several burning moments.

“No,” said the Gentleman. “No, I suppose not.”

Nicodemus glanced at the closed door. “Your keeper is out there.”

“Pharos? He’s my doctor.”

“Don’t be an ass. He’s a vulture sitting on your tombstone.”

The Gentleman flapped his hand weakly. “Maybe. He’s harmless, though. He takes care of me because he wants something I have.”

“Routing and account numbers?” asked Nicodemus, arching his eyebrows as if surprised at what he was saying.

“How do you know—?” began the burned man, but let it hang. “Yes.”

“Will you give them to him?”

“If I do, he’ll pull the plug on me.”

“Maybe he won’t.”

“Why on earth would you say that?”

Nicodemus smiled. His lips writhed and twitched when he smiled. “He still has some conscience left. Not a lot. But some. I think he actually cares for you.”

“Bullshit.”

“No,” said the priest. “He cares, but he isn’t really aware of it. It makes him feel conflicted.” He spoke that word as if it tasted delicious.

The burned man shook his head. “He’ll leave me to rot if I give him the numbers.”

Nicodemus shrugged. “Or giving him one or two would be a gesture.”

“Of what? Of kindness?”

“To him, probably. For you, it would be control.” He chuckled. “Think about it. People can surprise you.”

“People disappoint me.”

“That’s why you’re miserable,” said Nicodemus, licking his lips. “I find people so … mmmmm … satisfying. And entertaining.”

“Yes…” said the burned man distantly. “Hugo said that you had certain appetites.”

The priest nodded approval. “Do you know who I am?”

The word “who” hung twisting in the air between them — as if it was the wrong word, deliberately chosen. The real word remained unsaid, but it screamed in the burned man’s mind.

Not who.

What.

“I think I do.”

“Do you?”

Instead of directly answering, the burned man said, “Do you know that I was in infernos twice? How many men can say that? The first time was in Afghanistan. The sands were melted to glass, and they stabbed me through the flesh, into my bones.”

The priest nodded.

“Then there was the explosion on the boat. I was on fire, burning like a torch, as the force of the blast sent me flying through the air. My skin kept burning even after I fell into the salt water.”

“Yes.”

“That was six years ago. Do you think that I have stopped burning yet?”

“No.”

The man in the bed fixed the priest with his one fierce eye. “Everyone who burns knows your name.”

“Everyone?”

“I dare say the effing saints knew your kiss in those last moments when the flames reminded them that they were not angels yet.”

The priest stood, bent, and kissed the burned man on both cheeks and then on the forehead.

The kisses were scalding.

The burned man hissed in fresh pain.

As he sat, the priest was smiling.

“You asked me to visit you, my son,” said the priest. “What is it you want from me?”

“You know what I want.”

“You have to tell me.”

The burned man ran a tongue over his melted lips. “Church. Ledger. The DMS. All of them.”

“You want them dead? Don’t disappoint me now that we are getting so close. You have an army of thugs to do scut work.”

“If I’d just wanted them dead, they would be dead,” snapped the burned man. “You know that’s not what I want.”

“Then tell me.”

The Gentleman’s one remaining hand snapped out with reptilian speed and clamped on the priest’s wrist. He pulled himself half upright, and through clenched gray teeth hissed out his reply.

“I want them to suffer. That’s what I want. Can you do that for me?”

The priest placed a hand over the burned man’s. For a moment, for just a fleeting moment, the shrieking nerve endings all over the dying man’s body fell silent. For just a moment there was no pain. For just a moment his mind was clear again, sharp again. He could even, in that fleeting moment, feel his missing legs and lost arm; and his dead eye could see.

For a moment he was himself again. Whole. Powerful.

Alive.

He screamed. Not in pain but in sudden, overwhelming joy.

And then the priest pushed the burned man’s hand away and released him.

The moment passed.

Everything came crashing back. All the pain, the weakness. The darkness at the edge of his perceptions.

Everything.

It was a terrible, terrible thing.

It crushed the burned man against his mattress like a bug.

It left him gasping and whimpering.

The priest sat like a gargoyle on his chair, watching, watching.

“Can I make them suffer?” he asked. “Why don’t you tell me?”

The burned man said nothing.

With a satisfied grin on his ugly mouth, the priest leaned back and crossed his skinny legs. “Besides … I’ve already got a dog in this hunt.”

“What does that mean?”

The priest shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’m already invested in this particular matter. The games, as they say, have already begun.”

Interlude Seven

Doctor Aaron Davidovich stood naked in the shower. He’d been in there for almost thirty minutes. Lathering furiously, scrubbing at his skin, rinsing, repeating. Nothing he did, no amount of soap and hot water he used, seemed able to wash him clean. First his own shit and piss. Then the blood of that man.

Then the images that still burned in his mind.

His mother.

Clara, his wife.

Matthew, his son.

Each of them in little windows on a laptop. Innocent. Unaware. Untouched.

Unsafe.

Vulnerable on a level that Davidovich never imagined.

He snatched up the bar of soap and began once more working up a lather on his skin, on his chest, over his heart.

He was so hungry, though he could not imagine eating. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d imagined.

Not after what he’d agreed to.

I am in hell.

Those four words burned in his mind.

He scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.

When he staggered from the shower, gasping and weak, he saw that they had laid out clothes for him. His own clothes, taken from the safe house. Davidovich dressed in clean underwear, khakis, a checked shirt. No belt, no socks, no shoes.

“You won’t be going anywhere,” said Boy. “It’s warm enough in here without shoes. If you get cold, we can get you slippers. Would you like that? Some fuzzy slippers?”

He said nothing.

Boy smiled as if had. She stood and watched him get dressed. The woman was about five feet tall and couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Davidovich thought he could take her in a fight. He’d taken some aikido classes in college. He had a yellow belt, though he hadn’t been inside a dojo in fourteen years.

The woman clearly knew some martial arts. Could he take her?

These were stupid questions, and he knew it.

He turned away to finish buttoning his shirt. It took a while. His fingers kept losing the buttons. He wished his hands wouldn’t shake so much.

The bedroom in which he dressed was the smallest of the three in the apartment. Just a twin bed, a cheap dresser, and a window that was sealed with heavy wooden panels bolted to the walls.

When he had wrestled the last button through the hole, Boy led him out of the room and across the living room to the second bedroom. Davidovich did not look at what Jacob and Mason were doing. They had black plastic trash bags, mops, and a bucket of hot water and bleach. A fan blew vapors out a window.

In the other small bedroom, there was a mission table and two comfortable leather office chairs with wheels. On the table were three computers. Two laptops and one heavy-duty, high-end unit of the exact kind he used in his own office back in D.C. Along the wall were other machines, including a sophisticated portable supercomputer. Davidovich knew the model. It had a 12-core, 24-thread 2.7GHz Intel Xeon processor that turbos to 3.5GHz and up to 32GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory. A row of expensive, networked, thirty-petabyte external drives lined a shelf.

“This is where you will work,” said Boy. “E-mail and Internet access is restricted. All of your work will be monitored. There are many people working on this around the clock. You will always be monitored, Doctor Davidovich. Please remember that. At random times throughout each day and night, I will need to make a call to tell our field teams not to do the things to your family that you know we will do. Do you understand this?”

He did not dare speak. Instead, he nodded.

“It will make everything so much easier if you bear it in mind and act accordingly. There is no way to bypass our security. We are too good at it, and we have been doing this for a long time. You cannot break our pattern without killing your family. Please grasp that concept, doctor. Your cooperation and enthusiastic dedication to your job will keep your family alive and safe. Only you, through some act of stupidity, can guarantee that your family will suffer and die. If you accept this, then your life will not be filled with horrors. When you are done doing what we ask, you will be released unharmed. Your family will never know the danger they were in. You will be given your life back.”

“How … how can I trust you?”

Her smile was radiant. “Why would we need to lie to you? We own you now, doctor. We own your family. You have already agreed to work with us. It would be petty to lie to you at this juncture. We are many things, doctor, but we are not petty.”

“Who are you?”

Boy cocked her head to one side. “I could answer that question. I will answer it, if that’s what you want. But, tell me, which of your loved ones will I kill in exchange for that information?”

Davidovich nearly fell down. “No! No, I take it back. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“I know you don’t.” She reached up and stroked his cheek. A gentle touch that was perhaps the most perverse thing he’d so far experienced. He shivered with revulsion.

Boy stepped away from him and gestured toward one of the chairs.

“There is a folder with your name on it stored on the laptop. In it are PDF files with instructions and a list of tasks. You will read those instructions very carefully and thoroughly, and then you will get to work. If you have any technical questions, we have a coded e-mail address for you to use. That e-mail will only go to one destination. If you attempt to use it in any other way … well, we don’t want to explore that, do we?”

She spoke with perfect phrasing and word choices despite her Cambodian accent. Davidovich found himself hanging on her every word.

“Let me know if there is anything you need,” she said, then made a kissy mouth at him and, laughing, left the room.

Aaron Davidovich sagged back against the wall, feeling the knives of despair and defeat stab him through the heart. He stayed there for a long time. As long as he dared.

Maybe a full minute.

Then he sat down at the laptop, booted it up, found the folder with the PDFs, and began reading. The longest of the files was marked REGIS. As Davidovich read it, he discovered the full extent of what they wanted. The last page of the Regis file had a long list of tasks. Each one was something that he knew he was uniquely qualified to accomplish. So much of this was built on a scaffold of his own work for DARPA.

He printed the task list and held it in his hands for nearly five full minutes. Tears rolled down his cheeks and fell onto the page.

Then Aaron Davidovich placed the list on the table near the keyboard, flexed his hands, took a breath, said a prayer to a god he feared had abandoned him, and began typing.

Writing code.

Taking the first steps down into the valley of the shadows.