Predator One

Chapter Twenty-one

Nobody is allowed to die on the opening day of Major League baseball.

If it’s not an actual rule, it should be.

We can all agree on that.

The sky over Philadelphia was so blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. There were a few clouds up there. I figured that God and all his angels were sitting on them, harps tossed aside, schooners filled with ice-cold lager. That’s the way the universe is supposed to work.

Since joining the DMS I haven’t made one opening day. Not one.

This year, I had tickets. Rudy was with me in a box that Mr. Church finagled from one of his friends “in the industry.” I was on my second big red cup of Yuengling. Ghost was in his service-dog disguise, drinking covertly from some beer I accidentally spilled on the ground right in front of him. Twice. The dog’s a lush, but he loves baseball.

My buddy, Patrick Seiler, was with us. He is a former San Diego cop who is now a financial advisor. My advisor, actually, which is weird. I never had much beyond checking and a lot of bills. But Church pays his people well, and my lady, Junie Flynn, has some money. Patrick’s helping us grow it in case I live long enough to retire.

Patrick had on a Phillies home-game jersey. Rudy and I were both wearing Baltimore Orioles away-game shirts to show our solidarity with the city that would be our home for six more days. This was our way of saying good-bye.

Patrick, Rudy, and I were making professional-grade headway into the stadium’s supply of cold beer. We were telling jokes and telling lies, and the cares of the world were a million miles away. We could have been anyone. We could have been three old high school friends meeting for a day of balls and bats. We could have been business friends taking a day off.

We could have been happy, and we were.

Beer and baseball, sunny skies and laughing crowds. There are a lot of good reasons to be in great seats at a baseball field on opening day. If I have to list them all, you’d need help or some kind of cultural intervention. But on that particular day there was an added bonus. Colonel Roger Douglas was going to throw out the first ball.

Douglas is The Man — capital T, capital M.

He’s the guy who saved all those soldiers during Operation Anaconda back in March 2002. It was the second large-scale battle of the Afghan war. The biggest one to use mostly regular ground troops instead of special ops teams. A collaborative op of the U.S. military and CIA paramilitary teams, along with allied Afghan military forces and both NATO and non-NATO forces. The drama played out in the Shah-i-Kot Valley and the Arma Mountains southeast of Zurmat. Seventeen hundred U.S. troops led the way to take control of the valley. It became an instant shitstorm. The Taliban and al-Qaeda, dug in like ticks, were firing mortars, antitank weapons, and heavy machine guns.

Colonel Douglas — then a captain — was flying an A10 Thunderbolt, and he’d been in the thick of it. He was returning to refuel when a call came in about a platoon that got trapped deep in the badlands when a Taliban push cut them off. The soldiers were surrounded, low on ammunition, and taking heavy fire. No other resources were available to rescue them. Douglas’s bird was low on fuel, but he requested permission to make a run to lay down some cover fire for the platoon. Permission was denied, and he went anyway. There’s been a lot of debate in the press about just how badly damaged Douglas’s radio was, or if it was damaged at all. He claimed that he heard only static and never received the recall order.

Instead, he peeled off and flew back, emptying everything he had: his last missiles, his last rocket, and a whole bunch of machine-gun rounds. He all but popped his canopy to throw his watch and shoes at the Taliban. His assault opened a very small, very narrow window, and in the last few seconds before he reached the point of no return in terms of fuel, the platoon sergeant radioed that his men were clear.

The Thunderbolt limped home on fumes and set down on a secure strip in the staging area.

There were some who wanted to hang Douglas for insubordination and a list of violations a mile long. There were others, wiser and saner people, who decided that heroism should be rewarded, not discouraged.

Colonel Douglas flew thirty-one subsequent missions. No one has a better record for doing damage to the enemy while protecting civilian and military lives.

I think the guy’s a frigging saint. If I had a daughter, I’d let her marry his son. Patrick thought so, too. He had friends who’d been part of Operation Anaconda.

So, having Colonel Roger Douglas step out onto the pitcher’s mound to throw out the first ball? Oh hell yes. We toasted him with fresh cups of beer.

When they announced Douglas, the whole damn stadium went totally batshit crazy. He’s that kind of a guy. Tall and good-looking. Denzel Washington is going to play him in the movie. Huge white smile, and darn if he didn’t look good in his uniform with all those medals and ribbons. The air force color guard was with him, and Beyoncé was there to sing the national anthem.

On a day like that, no-damn-body needs to die.

The Goodyear blimp was overhead, and its whale of a shadow moved across the field. Douglas shook hands with the umpire, with the presidents of both ball clubs, with the mayor of Philadelphia, and with James Wolcott Ledger, who was the two-term mayor of Baltimore and its former police commissioner.

My dad.

For me, watching dad shake hands with Douglas was like watching Superman high-five Captain America.

I knew my brother, Sean, and his son would be watching the game on the big-screen TV I’d given them for Christmas. Top and Bunny would be watching, too. Probably most of my guys would be.

As the press swarmed around to take the photos that would lead the news stories around the country, I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

At first I thought someone had jumped from one of the upper tiers of the stadium on the far side from where I sat. But that wasn’t it. The shape did not plummet but rather soared outward, and for an insane moment my fear of a man falling changed into a delusion that I actually was seeing Superman. It wasn’t that, either.

It was a plane.

As the plane soared over the tops of the cheering crowd, I could see the long body and fixed wings, the bulbous cockpit, and the two barrels of the engines mounted high on either side of the tail.

It was far too small, though.

A toy plane.

A toy jet.

“Hey,” said Patrick, “look at that.”

The plane swooped down toward the field and then began a high, climbing turn around the mound. As it passed third base, I could see that it was even smaller than I thought. Maybe forty inches across at the wings, thirty-five in length. Gray. Sleek. You see them in fields or over beaches where crowds of enthusiasts fly them. Perfect replicas of full-sized planes.

I heard people laughing. I heard Rudy laugh. Patrick, too.

Even Colonel Douglas looked up and smiled as a remote-controlled model version of his own A10 Thunderbolt circled above him.

After a moment of surprise, Douglas began to applaud.

The crowd erupted into thundering applause.

The plane waggled its wings, and the audience laughed.

The plane buzzed the commentators’ skybox. It buzzed both dugouts. It circled completely around Beyoncé, who curtsied to it.

Everyone was clapping and laughing.

Except me.

I grabbed Rudy’s arm, and the face he turned to me was one of the happiest and least stressful I’d seen on him since he was hurt a couple of years ago. It was uncomplicated and a million miles away from the hurt and harm that is our daily lot.

Except I didn’t think we were as far away as we needed to be.

When Rudy saw the look on my face, the joy on his crumbled into dust.

“Cowboy — what’s wrong?”

I pointed at the plane. “That shouldn’t be here. Not here.”

“What do you mean?” asked Patrick, setting down his beer and getting to his feet.

“Stay here,” I said. “Keep your eyes open. I’ll be right back.”

“Why?” demanded Rudy. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, Ghost and I began fighting our way through the crowd. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket, punched in a three-digit speed dial, and immediately got the duty officer at the Warehouse. Ghost barked at people, and those who didn’t move out of my way got immediately out of his.

“DeeDee, this is Joe,” I yelled and told her to check with the FAA and the baseball commission to see who authorized the use of a UAV at Citizens Bank Park.

Unmanned aerial vehicles were everywhere these days. More and more companies were winning their legal battles with the FAA to use them to deliver food and products. But they were damn well not licensed to fly inside a packed arena like this.

Maybe I was being paranoid, but my tolerance level for drones had bottomed out back in October.

“DeeDee, get me whoever’s in charge of this field and patch in the head of security here. His name is Tom Rollins. He knows me. I want everyone on the line right now.”

I’d struggled through the press all the way to the entrance to the inner corridors of the park. The noise was like thunder. The park seats nearly forty-four thousand people, not to mention staff, teams, and the press. Everyone was yelling. Everyone was clapping and whistling.

As I waited for the connection, I could feel my heart pounding. My dad was down on that field. My dad. Sweat popped out all over my face, and I had to paw it out of my eyes.

Maybe this was a prank. A couple of guys snuck in the pieces of an F10, assembled it on the sly up in the nosebleed seats, and decided to launch it as a tribute to a great man. Maybe that was it. Maybe they were soldiers, or family members of soldiers who had been saved that day. It could have been that. I wanted to sell that to myself.

I tried real hard.

Tom Rollins came on the phone. Head of security and an ex-cop. A good guy I’d known for years.

“Tom, are you seeing this?” I bellowed.

“Yes, I am,” he growled back. “We’ve got people working their way up to where we think it was launched.”

“You need to clear the field.”

“We can’t do that, Joe. It would cause a panic.”

Ghost stood at the entrance, barking at the buzzing plane, the white hair on his back standing straight.

“C’mon, Tom, you know this isn’t right.” Through the open mouth of the third base tunnel, I could see the F10 take another spin and then head upward, coming toward home plate, rising toward the control box high overhead.

“Joe — it’s a prank. We’ll find out who did this and let them spend a couple of nights in jail. Then we’ll sue their asses and—”

That was as far as Rollins got.

It was the last thing he said. The last thing he ever would say.

He was in the control center. I was in a corridor, so I didn’t see the actual blast.

I heard it, though.

I felt it.

And then I heard the screams.

Chapter Twenty-two

Junie Flynn stood on the balcony and looked out at the ocean. It was a deep blue, and it went on and on forever. The sky was flawless. Far out to sea, a flock of seagulls was settling down onto a kelp bed to hunt for the small fish that swam among the flowing plants.

“It’s perfect,” she murmured.

“Yes, it is.”

She turned to see two women come out onto the balcony. One was tall and pretty, with dark hair and pale eyes. Donna Strauss, a longtime friend of Junie’s and her travel companion for this house-hunting trip. Donna was a healer from Pennsylvania.

The other was a newer friend — Doctor Circe O’Tree-Sanchez. She was a lovely woman with a heart-shaped face and curly black hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. A pair of glasses was perched on the end of her nose. She was shorter than Junie and of a different physical type. Circe was rounder, with more voluptuous curves and olive skin. Junie was tall and lithe, graceful in the way dancers are, with long, wavy blond hair that fell down her back and danced whenever she moved. Both women were beautiful but in such different ways that there was no tendency to compare them.

One difference, though, seemed to fill the air all around them. Circe was pregnant and close to her time. Donna had joined them on this round of visits to prospective apartments in case someone with medical knowledge was needed. And because she had a good eye for beauty and value.

This was going to be Circe’s first child.

It was an experience Junie ached to share but never would, thanks to an assassin’s bullet that had done wicked damage to her uterus. The wound had healed; the ache had not.

Even so, Junie wanted to be happy for her friend in the most supportive and uncomplicated way. But it was hard.

It was so hard.

The bullet she’d taken last year had done terrible damage inside her. And though all the surgeries and physical-therapy sessions were done, there was an ache in her heart that no amount of physical healing could ever remove.

Circe must have caught a flicker of something on Junie’s face because she frowned and touched her arm. “What is it, honey?”

“Nothing,” said Junie, dialing up the wattage of her smile. She knew full well that she had a great smile. She’d used it as both a shield and a distraction her whole life. She could stall almost any man to a mumbling confusion with it. She could charm her way out of a traffic ticket or make a barking dog begin wagging its tail. Knowing one’s gifts and using them was a quality of controlled self-awareness, and Junie was very aware of who she was and how people were reacting to her. Even smart, perceptive people like Circe could be deflected by that smile. “I guess I’m dealing with sticker shock,” she lied. “This place is not cheap.”

“Too pricy?” asked Circe, falling in line with the deception.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Donna. “This view is beyond price.”

Junie shrugged. In truth, she could afford the place pretty easily. She had quite a lot of money squirreled away in bonds and stocks, and there was still a big chunk left untouched from her father’s estate. She never mentioned any of that to Circe. Like most people, Junie didn’t talk about money. Joe didn’t even know how much she had, and he’d never asked.

“No,” said Junie after a moment, “I think this is just right. Joe will love it. I can already see him and Rudy sitting out here with beers, watching the dolphins and talking baseball.”

“Rudy’s been making a slow change from beer to martinis,” said Circe. “I think he’s trying to convert Joe.”

“Good luck with that. The only thing Joe likes more than beer is coffee. I sometimes think I should wear eau du lager perfume. He’d go wild.”

They laughed about it, and if Junie’s laugh was forced, Donna and Circe didn’t seem to notice. Or, if they noticed, they were too polite to call her on it.

“Quite a view, isn’t it?” asked a fourth woman as she came out to join them. Slim and wearing stylish business clothes, she had a long fall of dark hair brushed back from her face. Irene McCann was a real-estate agent from the Coldwell Banker office in La Jolla and a longtime friend of Junie’s. This condo was the eighth property she’d shown Junie, and it was clear from her smile that she knew she’d saved the best for last.

Junie leaned on the rail and looked down. There was a pool and hot tub below, nearly hidden among the green succulents and palm leaves of the sculpted garden.

“It’s really spectacular,” said Donna, and that was no lie. The place was perfect.

Irene smiled, and for a few minutes the four of them stood on the balcony watching the ocean and said nothing.

“Really spectacular,” Junie echoed after a moment. Almost to herself she said, “I think we can make a life here.”

There was movement down on the bluffs as something broke from the bushes and darted along the footpath.

Half smiling, Circe said, “Is that a coyote?”

The other women looked. The animal was silhouetted against the glare coming off the waves.

“It’s too small,” said Donna. “Might be a fox.”

“Del Mar is a very dog-friendly town,” said Irene. “A lot of mixed-breed rescue dogs. Could be anything. If you meet the owner, they’ll probably give you the whole story. A lot of them even do DNA tests on their dogs.”

The animal vanished into another patch of brush and did not reappear.

Junie nodded. “Joe’s dog, Ghost, is a big goof. He’s a white shepherd. He’ll be our ambassador of goodwill. He’ll help us make a lot of friends out here.”

Circe took her hand and squeezed it, and for a moment Junie thought it was a girlfriend thing, a congratulations thing, an encouragement thing on the brink of a new and bold decision.

Then Circe’s grip tightened to crushing force.

She cried out so sharp and loud that it sounded like a seagull.

Junie and Irene turned and lunged forward as Circe O’Tree-Sanchez’s eyes rolled back in her head, and then her knees buckled and she pitched forward. Her swollen belly hit the metal rail, but Donna caught her before she could fall over and down.

Chapter Twenty-three

The animal stood in the shadows beneath a twisted eucalyptus tree.

Watching the figures a hundred yards away. Listening to the cries of fear and panic.

Eating the pain in their voices.

Savoring the separate flavors.

It stood unmoving for many minutes and only turned away when the air was split by the wail of an ambulance siren.

Another delicious sound.

The animal’s eyes swirled with colors. Browns and greens and grays that had no correlation to things that grew and prospered in sunlight.

Then with a small bark that might have sounded like a grunt of satisfaction had anyone heard it, the jackal turned and trotted along the bluffs.

Chapter Twenty-four

If a giant had reared back and then punched the stadium with all of his strength, it would feel like this.

A single massive WHUMP!

The concrete floor beneath my feet shuddered, and I felt myself falling sideways. Ghost began barking hysterically. People everywhere were screaming the kinds of screams that were torn from deep places in the chest. Raw, ragged, absolutely terrified.

I staggered out of the tunnel as the whole building continued to tremble from the rebounding shock waves. As I emerged, I turned and looked up to see a cloud of fire expanding outward from where the control box had been. Then I turned and covered my head with my arms as debris showered down.

The crowd went insane.

There’s no other word to describe it.

Insane.

They panicked, recoiling from the blast. Pieces of masonry, pieces of melted chairs, pieces of burning plaster fell onto the seats below. Pieces of people, some of them still screaming, flew as far as home plate. The crowd slammed into the entrance ways, and I could actually hear bones break as thousands crushed dozens. People fell, and the crowd surged over them, everyone becoming savage in their terror. I saw a mother punched in the face so that she fell away from her screaming six-year-old. I waded into the crowd to try and help and was immediately shoved and clubbed and kicked from every possible direction. Ghost leaped and barked, but then I heard him yelp as someone kicked him in the ribs. An instant later, I heard a very human shriek buried beneath a canine snarl of reciprocal fury.

Something hit me on the temple, and I pitched sideways, and before I could regain my balance the human tide carried me halfway into the tunnel. I tried everything I could to fight against the current, but, tough as I am, there’s no amount of martial arts or military or police training that offers an adequate response to thousands of people moving in blind panic.

I lost all track of Ghost.

The crowd spun me and turned me and pummeled me. Then I was falling backward through an open door into a small service corridor. I landed badly but scrambled instantly to my feet, calling for Ghost. There was no sign of him as a torrent of screaming people rushed past the open doorway.

There was another bang. Smaller, hollow, and in my disorientation I could not at first understand what it was. Then I saw one of the panicking people in the hallway go down, the side of her face blooming with bright red blood.

Then I understood.

I whirled and saw that the hallway behind me wasn’t empty.

There were two men there.

One of them had a big wooden crate on a hand truck.

The other was pointing a gun.

At me.

His first shot had missed me and hit a woman trying to run to safety.

The hall was sixty feet long and ended at a T junction. A service corridor for event staff. These guys were in the kind of nondescript coveralls you’d expect of maintenance staff or equipment handlers.

Except that they both had ski masks pulled down over their faces.

Oh shit.

The guy with the gun fired again. And again.

He emptied a whole clip at me.

I dove through the doorway of a broom closet, but the rounds passed me and punched into the people in the main corridor. I couldn’t see the hits, but I heard the screams.

Rage ignited inside my chest.

I spun as I drew my off-duty piece, knelt, reached around the doorjamb, and fired blind. Most rounds fired in any firefight do not hit a useful target. Ask any soldier. Especially when firing from cover. You can slant the odds in your favor by aiming center mass at average height.

I heard the scream as at least one of my rounds found something meaty.

The gunfire paused.

Then I was up and out, swapping magazines, bringing my gun up into a two-hand grip as I broke from the broom closet and ran toward the guys in ski masks. I saw one guy down on his knees, both hands pressed to his lower abdomen in a vain attempt to stop blood from pouring onto the floor. His gun lay in a spreading pool.

The other guy had abandoned the hand truck and was unzipping his coveralls to get at his pistol.

I ran at them full speed. Powered by rage and fear.

I shot him in the chest. Twice.

I shot the other guy in the face.

Fuck it.

As he pitched back, I jumped over him, skidded to a stop at the T juncture, and looked up and down the hall.

There were more of them.

Five more, pushing two more big crates on hand trucks. All of them in coveralls and ski masks.

Technically, I should have used the edge of the juncture as cover, identified myself as a federal agent, pointed my gun at them, and told them all to give up.

I didn’t.

I opened up on them.

Why? Because fuck it, that’s why.

People were still screaming, running, hurting, dying. The echo of that explosion was burned into my eyes. My father was here. So was my best friend. And so were a lot of innocent people, some of whom were now dead or wounded.

So, yeah. Fuck it.

They were thirty-five feet away. We were in a concrete corridor. Missing the target was harder than hitting it.

I hit what I aimed at.

Body shots. I wanted them hurt. I wanted them to scream. But later I would want them to talk. I would want them to give me some goddamn answers.

Two of them returned fire, but I had the advantage.

They all went down.

And, yeah, they screamed, too.

Suddenly, bullets whipped down the hall and chipped the wall a foot above my head. I threw myself backward, but my mind was replaying the flash image of two more men coming out of another door. Same kind of guys.

I dropped my magazine and fished for a replacement.

Which I did not have.

This was my day off. One loaded magazine in the gun, one spare. Both spent.

I heard the men running.

I took a risk and bent low to sneak a peek. They’d stopped beside the tangle of their bleeding comrades, but they weren’t offering first aid. Instead, they were tearing at the fastenings on the crates.

One of them saw me looking, and he whipped his gun up and fired. I ducked back with no time to spare as bullets tore the corner of the wall to gravel. Stone chips chased me backward. Then I got to fingers and toes and launched myself the way I’d come. The gun from the first guy I shot was useless. It was soaked with blood. I pulled the other guy’s coveralls open and stole the gun he’d failed to pull. A Glock 26. Two spare magazines. Nice.

As I turned back to the T junction, I saw something that made no sense at all.

A pigeon flew around the corner.

Then another.

And another.

Gray pigeons. Like you see everywhere in Baltimore and Philly and New York.

They flapped at full speed right past me, and I ducked backward out of the way. Three of them.

And then nine more.

I said, “What the fuck—?”

Four more flew past, rounding the corner from where the last two guys had been.

Raising the new pistol, I raced back and dropped to a crouch, leaned out, and pointed the barrel.

At nothing.

The two men were gone.

The two crates lay open and empty.

The men I’d wounded lay there, but none of them moved. Or ever would.

Each of them had been silenced with shots to the head. Cold, efficient, brutal.

It made no sense.

I tapped the earbud I always wore and tried to get Bug, but all I heard was static. Damn it. Probably damaged in the struggle outside. So, I pulled my cell and tried to call my office, the Warehouse.

I got no signal at all.

Nothing.

There was no way a professional stadium would have cell-phone dead spots, so this had to be something else. It had to be deliberate. Someone jamming the cell signals. Ditto for my DMS transmitter.

Shit.

Far behind me, nearly lost in the roar of the frenzied crowd, I heard a dog barking in wild panic.

Ghost.

I whirled and ran.

Chapter Twenty-five

The Gentleman hung like a spider in a web.

Sickly but venomous. Consumed by hate, but fed by it as well.

Diseased. Burned. Wasted. Repulsive even to his own eye.

The Gentleman. A joke that he had come to appreciate as much as Pharos and the rest of the staff did.

Gentleman. A shared absurdity.

He was neither gentle nor still a man. Not anymore.

He knew that he was a dead man. A pernicious ghost that would not fade until the blackest desires of his heart were fulfilled. It was melodrama, certainly, but it was a glorious melodrama. Operatic. The only thing he had left. The one thing he had to live for.

His bedroom was silent except for the screams that came from the television speakers. The wall in front of him was lined with HD screens, each turned to a video feed from a separate tiny camera. The images jumped and shook as the drones in which they were mounted flew, wheeled, turned. Exploded.

Some of the screens had already gone dark, their feeds terminated in just the right way.

Others kept running with real-time images.

People running.

People screaming.

People flying apart into crimson nothingness.

And there, running along a corridor, gun clutched in a bloody fist, was a man.

Big and blond. Healthy and whole. Cold eyes and a brutal mouth.

Running toward the sound of screams.

The burned man raised a withered arm and extended one skeletal finger. “You see? That’s him.”

Beside him, his only companion leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“Oh, yes,” said Doctor Michael Pharos. “I see him.”

Chapter Twenty-six

The crowd hadn’t thinned much when I reached the doorway to the main corridor. The stadium had been packed, and there were thousands of people fighting their way from the stands through the halls that led to the parking lot.

As I pushed my way out of the corridor, I saw that many people were bleeding and bruised. How much of that was because of the blast and how much was because of panic was anyone’s guess.

Then I spotted Ghost. He was on the far side of the hallway, crouched down beside a pretzel cart that had been toppled onto its side. Ghost was barking at everyone and everything. There were some smears of red on his shoulders and muzzle. He saw me and became hysterical, snapping at people as he tried several times to enter the flow. Each time he shied back. Several people took swings at him. Nobody got near to his teeth. Ghost had lost several teeth during a mission in Iran. They’d been replaced by gleaming titanium fangs, and his broken jawbone had been surgically reinforced and strengthened. People couldn’t know that, but a hundred-plus pounds of shepherd with metal teeth wasn’t something to mess with. Not even when running for your life.

Getting to him would be like trying to cross a raging river.

I tried to yell at him to stay there, to hide in the shelter formed by the fallen cart and the wall, but he was too deep inside his own wildness. He lunged into the crowd in a mad attempt to get to me. Immediately, people collided with him and accidentally kicked him and fell over him. Ghost instantly turned and bit, more out of reflex and fear than anything. I saw blood.

I saw Ghost go down under the feet of the crowd.

I very nearly fired into the crowd.

No joke. I’m not proud of it, but I almost shot the people who were trampling my dog. He means that much to me. Brother in arms. Pet. A member of my family.

So, instead of committing wholesale murder, I flung myself into the throng and began fighting my way to him.

Within seconds, I was beaten down to the ground.

Kicked. Stepped on. Stomped. But I reached Ghost and wrapped myself around him to keep him from being stomped. And to keep him from killing anyone, because he was as far out on the ragged edge of panic as I was. We folded down, and the crowd crammed us into a cleft of wall and floor.

It was like being caught in a riptide and dragged through a rocky reef.

I screamed.

And I could not do a fucking thing about it.

The tide roared as it surged past.

All I could do was ride it out and wait for it to be over.

But it was not over.

Not even close.

Interlude Eight

Aaron Davidovich sipped coffee and studied the code he’d just written, tapping a key to scroll the page. The coffee was excellent, better than any of the piss water his Agency watchdogs had provided for him at the safe house. The croissant he’d just finished was top quality, too.

He sipped his coffee and read.

One small part of his mind was detached from the meticulous process of reading computer code. That part stood to one side and observed. He was aware of it. Davidovich had always been aware of that part of his mind. The part that watched and evaluated everything he did. The nature of the observer shifted depending on mood. For a long time he imagined what Sherlock Holmes, with all of his deductive and inductive reasoning, would make of the little things that Davidovich did. Would Holmes properly interpret the smooth patches of dry skin on his wrists as the result of countless hours of resting on the metal deck of his computer? Would Holmes deduce his general fitness was the natural result of the sedentary habits of a member of an office-based nerd hive?

Sometimes the watcher in his mind was a cop. As when he was clearly over the legal limit of appletinis and was walking from bar to car.

Lately, though, since he’d come to live here with Boy, he imagined that they were watching him all the time. They. Whoever they were.

Even now, six months into his captivity, he didn’t know if he worked for terrorists, criminals, or a foreign government. Boy was not an American. Nor, he was convinced, were Mason and Jacob. That left a long list of possibles.

Over time, it mattered less who was watching and more that he give a good impression regardless of whether anyone was watching. He was very careful. He constructed his habits to convey acceptance of his new life, resignation to the situation, and diligence to his tasks.

Even now, sipping coffee and proofreading his code, he arranged his body so that he looked relaxed but alert, showing neither tension nor any of the physical tics of fear. By acting that role, he found, over time, that he actually was relaxed.

It was nice.

After that first horrible day, the whole situation had become …

He took a long sip of coffee as he fished for the word.

“Comfortable.”

He stiffened and set the cup down, staring at the screen but suddenly not seeing it.

“Comfortable”?

Really? Was that the word? Was that actually what he was feeling?

Suddenly conscious of his inner watcher and the real possibility of hidden cameras and actual watchers, he pinched his nose as if trying to prevent a sneeze. He made a presneeze mouth and took in a breath. Held it. Then sighed, long and with obvious satisfaction of having prevented the sneeze.

All good theater.

All to hide his reaction to his own thought.

Davidovich picked up his cup again and took another sip. It was damn fine coffee.

And, yes, damn it, he was comfortable.

He looked inside to try and read the expression on his inner watcher’s face. Would there be disappointment? Contempt? Self-loathing?

Shock and horror?

There should have been.

There probably should have been.

This should absolutely be a crisis moment, the precursor to a dark night of the soul.

Yes, sir.

Aaron Davidovich got up, crossed the room, and got a fresh cup of coffee. Added soy milk and sugar. Sipped, sighed, smiled.

And went back to work.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Ghost screamed.

Actually screamed.

It was a sound I’d never heard from a dog before.

Pain and fear, blind panic, and a total loss of faith in his pack leader to make sense of the world.

Then there was another sound.

Was it another explosion?

The whole crowd seemed to freeze for one moment to hear. It wasn’t behind them, not outside in the stands.

It was inside, in here.

Ahead of where the crowd was trying to go.

In that shocked half second, I struggled to my feet, the gun loose in my sweaty hands.

That sound could have been a gunshot.

Except it wasn’t.

There was a faint buzzing noise, and then there was a second bang.

Closer. Louder. A bigger and more hollow sound than either a pistol or rifle round. Way too small to be a shotgun.

It was somewhere ahead. Thirty, forty yards.

The crowd screamed again and sagged back.

I couldn’t see what it was, though.

The tide of the crowd was caught between those still pushing from outside and the rest inside, who were trying to avoid whatever was ahead of us. So, I decided to make my move.

I raised my stolen gun and yelled, “Federal agent! Move, move, move!”

The people around me shied away. Ghost got to his feet, shaking and scared, but he was drawn by my attempt to take control back.

“Let me through,” I bellowed. “Federal agent, let me through.”

This time, with no clear direction in which to flee, they did. Now they needed an answer, and I was the only possible authority they could see.

Bleeding, battered, and wearing a baseball shirt from a different city. Didn’t matter. I had the gun, and I was using my best cop voice.

“Let me through,” I growled again.

Someone — a woman — screamed, “There’s another one!”

I couldn’t see what she was pointing at, but above the sudden upsurge in shouts I heard another motorized buzz.

And then …

Bang!

Forty yards in front of me, something exploded. I could see the flash and hear the bang, and then I saw blood and red pieces fly as high as the ceiling.

The crowd spun and slammed into me.

I went down again. Harder. Much harder. My head hit the concrete wall.

My gun went flying somewhere.

My legs buckled, and I slid down to the cold ground.

I felt feet running across my chest. My thighs. My groin. I curled into a ball and tried not to die.

I prayed that my dad was okay. Rudy and Patrick, too.

There were more buzzes.

There were more explosions.

And there was more death.

Maybe none of us were going to be okay.

Chapter Twenty-eight

James Wolcott Ledger stood his ground.

The mayor of Philadelphia knelt behind him, his face streaked with blood, his suit torn and covered in soot. Colonel Douglas lay sprawled. Maybe unconscious, maybe dead. All around him, the stadium seemed to blossom with vast red flowers. Pillars of smoke reached toward the blue sky like the arms of demons. The air was torn by screams, by explosions, by shouts.

He was aware of all of it, but at the moment — inside that moment — his entire body, his reflexes, and all of his heart and soul were focused on the thing that hovered in front of him.

Small.

Shaped like a bird.

Not a bird.

Others just like it flew into the stands and exploded.

This one had swooped down from the upper tiers, canting slightly on a damaged wing but still able to fly. A thin streamer of smoke trailed behind it.

James Ledger ground his feet into the dirt on the pitcher’s mound and raised the Louisville Slugger that had been signed by both teams as part of the presentation to Douglas. The bat felt good in Ledger’s hands. He’d played ball in college and used to knock the hide off fastballs for the Baltimore Police League. Both his sons had the knack, and his grandson, too. All of them could hit sliders and breakers and break the heart of overeager pitchers.

The drone was moving slower than a fastball. As it swept toward him, Ledger stepped into its path and swung for the bleachers.

The drone darted up and left, and the bat slashed empty air with such ferocity that Ledger was spun three-quarters of the way around. He staggered off balance, took a quick step to catch his balance, turned, and swung again.

Again, the drone flitted out of the way.

A third time.

A fourth.

“Come here, you little cocksucker,” snarled Ledger, spitting with fury and feeling, his anger rising even above the level of his terror.

He faked a thrust, faked again, and then leaped forward to bunt the drone. The ash hit the machine and knocked it backward, where it wobbled, trying to level out.

Tried a second too long.

“Up yours,” growled the mayor of Baltimore as he swung the bat at full force.

Interlude Nine

Aaron Davidovich lived his life in that apartment above the falafel shop. He worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, a schedule broken up by meals and exercise. Boy and her two male companions — known as Jacob and Mason, though Davidovich was positive those were not their real names — brought in some gym equipment. A Bowflex, small free weights, a jump rope, chin-up bar, push-up handles, TheraBands, a physioball, and a yoga mat. Boy began teaching Aaron how to use the equipment, and, as the weeks passed, Davidovich began losing flab and putting on muscle. After weeks of nightmares, he began sleeping soundly and woke refreshed. Boy made sure that his food was a balance of healthy and enjoyable. Almost no alcohol, though. A few beers a month, usually as a reward for finishing a new section of the design on which he was working.

They arranged to have messages sent to his family. Assuring them that he was alive and being well cared for. None of their messages were ever sent to him, though Davidovich was able to watch them at various times on computer monitors. They were well. They were healthy.

But they grieved.

Even though he was now in high school, Matthew sometimes cried at night.

Davidovich’s mother did, too.

His wife…? Not so much.

After seven months of solitude, she began to go out and lie to her son about where she was going. Sometimes she was out all night. Boy’s video surveillance showed him what she was doing. And whom she was doing it with. Meeting with a divorced man they’d known for years. Meeting in a motel. Hidden cameras recorded everything.

So, instead, it was Davidovich who wept for her. For the loss of her.

He ached to hold his son. To take him out to basketball games. To talk with him.

It was Matthew who kept him going.

His mother, too. But mostly his son.

Sometimes in the night he secretly wished that Boy would do to his wife the things she’d originally threatened.

The first time Davidovich had that thought, he immediately rushed into the bathroom and vomited.

The second time he had that thought, he just lay there in bed and let the thought play out.

It was the same the third time. And every time after that.

It got easier each time he watched the video feed of his wife in bed with Harvey Cohen. Screaming as she came. Like he was fucking a porn star instead of a goddamn dentist. Doing things with him that had fallen out of the repertoire of activities she’d shared with her own damn husband.

It made Davidovich so mad.

On the days following those moments of video voyeurism, Davidovich found himself working harder at his new job. He threw his anger and frustration into the Regis program. He was even aware that he was channeling his anger and hurt in the worst possible way.

But he didn’t care.

It was the only kind of payback that was open to him.

If you can’t hurt the one you love, then you hurt anyone you can reach.

Boy watched Doctor Davidovich all the time. She even played back video footage of him from when she was away on assignment or sleeping. She knew every movement, every tic.

Boy saw the way the infidelity of the doctor’s wife stuck knives in him. She saw how it changed his sleeping and eating patterns. His workout intensity. She noted how it changed the quality of his work. Boy noted it all down.

Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman, she knew, would be very happy. It was unfolding exactly the way they said it would. Exactly according to plan.

Davidovich would, of course, never be allowed to know that his wife’s lover belonged to Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman. Body and soul. Paired very well to seduce the doctor’s wife.

So, Boy watched him watch them, and she grew excited. It was as if she could actually see, hear, and feel a great switch being turned on in Davidovich’s soul.

From light to dark.

Chapter Twenty-nine

It seemed to last a long, long time.

I crawled into a corner behind a trash can. This time, it was Ghost who found me. He was limping. His face and shoulders were streaked with blood. His tail was curled under his body, and he shoved himself against me, whimpering, lost and scared.

I felt exactly the same way.

My head was spinning. I know I’d been kicked several times. Maybe a couple of cracked ribs. My groin was a ball of fire. My stomach was in knots.

In those few seconds, at the hands and feet of a crowd of ordinary people, I had taken the worst beating of my life. It was comprehensive, and I had no idea how badly hurt I was. There was blood in my mouth.

I fumbled for my cell phone, but it was gone. I didn’t remember dropping it.

There were more explosions. Smoke curled along the top of the curving corridor. It looked alive, like a writhing dragon. Sinister and hungry.

More bangs.

I lost count at ten.

I lost consciousness, too.

Not sure how long I was out. I don’t think it was that long.

When I opened my eyes, Ghost was licking my face. He had a crazed look in his eyes, and he was panting way too fast. I pulled him against me, stroked his fur, said meaningless words in a soothing tone into his ear as an ocean of people ran past.

Then I saw what was blowing up.

It was small. No bigger than a …

“Oh, shit,” I said.

It was a pigeon.

Except that it wasn’t, and now I understood what the killers had brought to the stadium in their wooden crates. Not boxes of birds.

These were drones.

Small, perfectly crafted to blend into the environment and call no attention to themselves. I’d seen this type before. I’d worked with similar unmanned aerial vehicles.

Pigeon drones.

Not sent out for surveillance.

These were packed with explosives. That’s what I’d heard. That was the only thing that made sense.

The fake bird flew toward me, its wings beating at a tremendous rate, more like a hummingbird than a pigeon. Glass eyes seemed to stare at me as it buzzed past.

There were four people between me and the drone. I shoved Ghost to one side and scrambled to my knees despite the sickness in my head and gut. The world seemed to tilt sideways.

“Get down!” I yelled, my voice hoarse and thick.

The people closest to me turned, and I immediately began shoving them toward the walls. I tripped a few, foot-swept a couple of others, knocking them back, knocking them down, trying to get them out of the possible debris field of the drone. Taking shrapnel in the back while laying down would do a lot less damage than taking it in the face. In the eyes.

The drone suddenly stopped in midair, its wings flapping with blinding speed. It seemed to be watching what I was doing. Assessing it.

Which meant that the machine had a camera and someone was watching.

That was not good.

I snatched a bottle of Mountain Dew from someone’s hand and hurled it at the drone. It instantly shifted out of the way.

That wasn’t good, either. That meant whoever was at those controls had some goddamn fast reflexes. There should have been a lag. I should have knocked the thing out of the air before the video signal could go back to base, be observed, and be reacted to and before a response movement could be sent back to the drone. My bottle should have hit it faster than a person at a remote pilot station could react.

But the drone swerved to avoid the bottle.

It’s stupid, it’s crazy, but I had the horrible and irrational feeling that it was the machine itself that had reacted. Doing it at machine speed. At computer speed.

The drone rose to the ceiling and turned in a quick circle.

Reassessing?

Accumulating data?

Or picking the best target?

I saw my gun on the ground being kicked as a flood of people ran for the exits, colliding with one another, cursing, screaming.

I aimed my shoulder and drove into the crowd, battering people aside, yelling at them to let me through, shouting “Police!” and “Federal agent!”

Someone to my left yelled back, “Fuck you!”

And he punched me in the side of the head.

It was one of those big, lazy, looping haymakers that, on any other day, would have allowed me to have a sandwich and coffee before yawning my way through a block or evasion. This wasn’t one of those days. The guy could hit, too. Damn him.

I went right down.

Even as I fell, though, through the fireworks in my eyes I saw my gun. I stretched out for it as I crashed down. My fingers fumbled over it, and my fingernails caught on the fittings. I gathered it into my hand, turned, rolled onto my back, and brought it up to aim at the drone.

Then it blew up.

A big, solid bang that shook the floor on which I lay.

The people above me seemed to fly apart like corn dollies. Clothing and skin, muscle and bone. It all splashed me. Their deaths prevented mine, but I wore their blood. I heard someone screaming and screaming. Whoever it was tottered on the precipice of a never-ending fall into black madness.

I was so afraid it was me.

It was me.

And I fell.

Chapter Thirty

“Are you watching the news, Father?” asked Boy, the phone pressed to her ear. Her tablet lay on her thighs, the screen filled with images of smoke and blood.

“I am,” said Doctor Pharos. “It’s very entertaining. I’m very proud of you.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased.”

“Very much so.”

“Has the Gentleman seen it?”

“He has. And he was also very pleased,” said Pharos. “You know that everything you do pleases us. We’re both so proud of you.”

She felt her face burn, and she mumbled a reply.

“Boy—?”

“Yes, Father?”

“Are you all right?”

“I…”

“What is it?” he asked, his tone gentle. “You can tell me.”

“I want to come home.”

“Ah.”

“I haven’t see you in so long. I can’t … I can’t stand it.”

“Boy — is it the work? Is it getting too difficult?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Everything is perfect out here.”

“Is there a problem with your people?”

“No. Everyone’s doing their job, but—”

“Are there any glitches in the operation?”

“No, it’s not that. The machine is the machine. It’s perfect the way you made it. That’s just it…”

“What do you mean?” asked Pharos.

“I don’t need to be out here anymore, do I? Davidovich is with you now. I don’t understand why I’m even out here. All I’m doing is watching. And … I mean … couldn’t I do that there? With you?”

There was a pause. Then Pharos said, “Believe me, sweetheart, that there’s nothing more important to me in the world than you. You are my family. We are family. You and I.”

“And the Gentleman?” She asked the question but tensed against the answer. To her the Gentleman was an almost godlike figure, the last of the Seven Kings. On the other hand … Boy almost cringed at the truth in her heart. The Gentleman was dying, and he was crippled — and that made him a burden. If, against all logic, odds, and planning, something went wrong and they had to flee, Boy knew that her father would try to take care of the burned man, try to find some way to flee with him. Boy understood fieldwork better than her father. He had his genius; she had hers. There was no way to flee with an anchor, and the burned man was an anchor. It hurt her heart to think of him that way, but it was true. And, as devoted as she was to the family that was the Seven Kings, if it came down to a choice between saving her father or letting him get taken because of that anchor …

Boy knew full well she could put a bullet through the seared flesh of the Gentleman’s head. Without a moment’s hesitation.

There would be regret later, sure — and maybe reproach from Father. But hesitation? Boy did not possess that particular flaw.

Her father was a long time in answering her implied question about the Gentleman. She knew that he must be conflicted and filled with sorrow at the ill health of the great man.

“Our dear friend,” began Pharos, “is a realist.”

And that was answer enough.

“I understand, Father.”

“I know you do, my sweet. Now … is everything in place for the rest?”

“Yes.”

“Good. As soon as things are concluded there, I’m going to need you in San Diego. I’ll send flight details. It will be outside the no-fly zone. You know where.”

“Yes, Father.”

“One last job to do,” said Pharos. “After San Diego, you come home to me.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Thank you!”

“No, my love, thank you. No father has ever been more proud of a daughter than I am of you. Once this is done, then we will slip away like birds on the wind.”

It was a line from a very old Cambodian song. He used to sing it to her after her therapy sessions in those days after he took her from the brothel.

“Like butterflies on a spring breeze,” she said softly, repeating the last line of that old song. One tear curled over her cheek and found the corner of her mouth. She tasted the salt. Her tears were always so cold. They tasted like seawater.

“I’ll send you the details,” said Pharos. “You’ll need to be strong, and you’ll need to be brave. This will be dangerous.”

Boy sniffed sharply and swallowed those tears. “I’m ready,” she said. “You know I’m ready for anything.”

“Yes, I do,” said Pharos, a smile in his voice. “But first things first. Finish up there. The Gentleman is counting on you. As am I. Remember that I love you, my daughter.”

The line went dead.

Boy pressed the silent phone against her cheek, closed her eyes again, and conjured images of her father. Tall and so handsome. Powerful. Brilliant. Not a King, but kingly in his way.

Then she closed the tablet, turned off the car engine, got out, put her earbuds in, and walked back to the stadium while emergency vehicles and crowds of rubberneckers raced toward the pillars of smoke.

Chapter Thirty-one

The president of the United States was giving a speech at a brunch for a group of celebrity vintners in Napa Valley. The speech was virtually the same one he’d given to the Deep Sea Fishing Association, the Art Alliance of Berkeley, a group of Silicon Valley billionaires, and a charitable foundation created by the wives of professional football players.

The speech was going well, as he and his team expected. This was one of his party-platform speeches that was flexible enough to allow for subtle changes to make it relevant to any specific target audience. The president had the rhythms of it down, and he’d watched enough playbacks to know when to make lingering eye contact, when to give that confident smile, when to glower like a tough commander in chief, when to beam like the proud father of the nation. It was all theater, but so was all of politics. It didn’t make it meaningless, though. The president believed in most of what he said and accepted the necessary compromises of the rest. No president who ever served managed to get everything he wanted. Not even close.

He was just warming to one of his own pet themes, a project to work off college loans built on elements of FDR’s New Deal, when Alice Houston came from offstage and bent close to speak to him. It sent an immediate ripple through the audience.

“Mr. President,” said Houston, “there has been an attack in Philadelphia…”

Out in the audience, people were pulling their cell phones to look at the text messages and Twitter screens.

The news was reaching everyone at once.

Interlude Ten

It was a three-mile commute across Puget Sound from the mainland to the small island. As the boat approached the island, Doctor Pharos gestured to the pilot to circle it. The boat began a slow circuit. The craft was a Sea Ray 350 Sundancer. Old, but in excellent condition, with quiet engines and a pilot with a subtle hand. Water creamed along the fiberglass hull and foamed out behind in a widened V.

Tanglewood Island was tiny, like a crumb that had fallen from the vast bulk of Fox Island. It was only eighteen hundred feet long and six hundred wide but densely wooded, with lush growth even this early in the year.

“We’re coming up on it, sir,” said the pilot.

Michael Pharos nodded. “Circle around so we can take a look at it. Take your time. Let the Gentleman see it.”

Beside him, the burned man hunched in his wheelchair, wrapped in layers of blankets, warmed by a portable heater, sustained by the machines fixed to the chair’s frame. He wore a fur-lined hat with the earflaps pulled down and heavy protective goggles to shield his eye. The lenses were flecked with spray, and he had to squint to see anything.

“What do you think of our new home?” asked Pharos, nodding to the island.

They both knew that it was very likely the last home in which the Gentleman would ever live. They knew he would die there, and that day was not far away. A matter of months now. The treatments, the surgeries, the mind-clarifying cocktails by Pharos’s pet mad scientist, a disgraced chemist named Doctor Rizzo. The man had been fired from Merck for using the R & D facilities to concoct street drugs, and Rizzo had avoided jail only because the company didn’t want the scandal. Instead, they’d released him and made him sign papers swearing that he would not seek employment in big pharma for at least ten years. No one but a guilty man who’d been caught red-handed would ever sign a paper like that. Doctor Rizzo had, and three weeks later he’d been recruited by one of Pharos’s street scouts.

The chemist had been working on a new cocktail that was part psychic stabilizer and part painkiller. It also had small amounts of different so-called psychoactive “truth” drugs developed for interrogators in various countries: narcoanalytics like scopolamine; potent short- or intermediate-acting hypnotic benzodiazepines such as midazolam, flunitrazepam, temazepam, ketamine; and various short- and ultrashort-acting barbiturates, including sodium thiopental and amobarbital. Pharos could barely make sense of the chemistry.

It was a dangerous brew, but Rizzo said it was all about balancing the trace elements and keeping a bunch of rescue drugs primed and ready. Rizzo was probably certifiable, but he knew his chemistry.

Maybe that would do the trick. Even though Doctor Rizzo had very likely extended the Gentleman’s life, there was a line between cutting-edge science and wishful thinking. They all saw that line very clearly.

Pharos wondered if the burned man thought the line was drawn along the dock of the island.

The trip here from the resort in British Columbia was almost too much. No, it probably was too much. Pharos was deeply concerned about how hollowed out the burned man looked. How vacant he seemed to be. Not all the time, but too much of the time. The Gentleman seemed to quiver like a match in a strong breeze.

Seeing the process filled Pharos with moody thoughts about the finite grains of sand in the human hourglass. It made him consider his own span here on earth. Sure, there would be decades allotted to him so he could play with his billions in whatever version of the world existed by this time next week, but there would be an end to it. It was sad.

Life was so unfair. So fragile.

So easily stolen away.

The Gentleman did not answer the question, so Pharos repeated it. “What do you think? It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

Instead of answering, the Gentleman asked, “What about the others? Are they all here?”

“The ‘others’?” It took him a moment before he realized that the Gentleman was having a moment. The burned man thought that they were going to a meeting of the Seven Kings. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time in a while. It caught him off guard, though he recovered quickly. “Ah … yes. They’re waiting for you. I’m sure they’ll be happy to see you, sir.”

The Gentleman suddenly peered at him. “You think I’m already out of my mind, don’t you?”

“Absolutely not.” Pharos even managed to smile as he said it.

“You’re a lying piece of shit, Hugo. You always were.”

Pharos did not correct the Gentleman. He waited instead, knowing that the burned man would catch his own mistake if he was at all lucid. The moment of realization came as a twist of self-disgust on the Gentleman’s face.

“Pharos,” he muttered. “You know that’s what I meant.”

“Of course. We all make mistakes … and besides, sir, it’s been a long trip. I’m sure you’re exhausted.”

The rheumy eye of the Gentleman studied him. “You’re a complete bastard, you know that, don’t you?”

Pharos shook his head. “I am your friend and physician. And I am the last person on earth to judge you. The great are not to be judged.”

“Such a bastard.”

They lapsed into a bitter silence.

The boat completed its slow circuit of the island.

“It’s nice to be going home,” said Pharos.

The Gentleman said nothing at all, and there was a tear in his eye.

“Very well,” Pharos said to the pilot, “take us in.”

The pilot nodded and stood with his hand lightly touching the wheel, letting the craft find its way into the boathouse and out of sight of the mainland. He killed the engines and used a remote to close the big wooden doors. Even three miles from land, there was always the possibility of a casual eye looking this way. When the door was shut, lights came on automatically. A man in a black combat-dress uniform was waiting on the dock to make the bowline fast to a heavy cleat.

Silence settled over the boathouse except for the soft slap of water against the exterior walls. Four strong men clambered over the side and, at a word from Pharos, lifted the wheelchair and carried it onto the dock. Embarrassed and angry, the Gentleman tried to turn his face away, but they were on all sides of him. So he glared down at his folded, liver-spotted hand. He did not offer a word of thanks. These men would not expect it of him, and he was too humiliated to want to create that kind of conversation.

Pharos leaped nimbly onto the dock. Showing how fit and strong he was. How young he was. Making a statement to the Gentleman in a way that could not be taken as a direct insult, but which clearly was.

Pharos jerked his head back toward the boat.

“Escort our friend inside,” he said.

The guards looked past him and down into the hold. A man sat in a corner, hands bound, a black hood pulled down over his head.

Without another backward glance, Pharos began pushing the Gentleman’s wheelchair along the dock to the elevator.

Chapter Thirty-two

It was Rudy who found me.

Rudy.

I felt hands on me, fingers pressing into the side of my throat. Fingers spreading my eyelids open, and vague shapes leaning close.

“Over here!” he yelled. “It’s Captain Ledger. He’s alive!”

Alive, I thought. Maybe. Not sure I wanted to be. I felt closer to dead, and death offered an escape from the pain that overwhelmed me.

Rudy.

I tried to say his name. Failed, because it required too much of me.

“Ay Dios mío,” he muttered, then he rattled off a longer prayer to Mary and Saint Francis, and, I think, Saint Jude. The prayers were not even a little comforting if they meant he thought I was a lost cause. I wanted to smile, to comfort him. He wasn’t a soldier, but he’d come into the smoke and ruin of this building to find and rescue a man who was.

I blinked up through dust and blood and tears and saw his face. Caked with dirt, his one good eye filled with dangerous lights. His lips trembling with stress and horror.

“Joe!” he said urgently. “Joe, can you hear me?”

I couldn’t answer his question. It was too difficult. I didn’t know which words to use.

The explosions had stopped.

No telling when. I wasn’t here for that. I’d checked out and didn’t recall anything other than a dream of falling, falling, falling …

There was something big and soft pressing against me. I fumbled for it, tried to push it away, afraid of it. Then something wet on my fingers. A kiss? No, a tongue. Licking me. Small, frantic licks.

I knew there was a name that should occur to me.

It came so slowly and from the wrong closet in my broken head.

“G-Ghost…?”

He barked once. Weak, but certain. I heard a scuffling and saw him crawling toward me. His coat was bloody, and drool flecked his muzzle. I reached out to him, and he nibbled my fingers. I touched his face, his head, his ears. Scratched them. There was a thump-thump of his tail hitting something I couldn’t see.

“He’s okay, Joe. He’ll live.”

Those two statements weren’t as comforting as they were intended. People don’t say “he’ll live” when “he’s okay” means exactly that. It meant that Ghost was hurt, but not fatally. That still left it open to his being seriously hurt. I flapped out a hand and found a furry shoulder. My fingers came away slick and wet. I knew what that wetness had to be.

Blackness came and went in my eyes and, I think, in my mind.

During one moment of clarity, the shape in front of me moved back, and I could see it now. A man’s face. Covered with soot, lined with worry. A black eye patch and tousled black hair, thick mustache.

“Rudy?” I gasped.

“Me lleva la chingada, Joe,” he said in a quick, nervous voice. “You scared the shit out of me. Are you hurt?”

“I–I don’t know. How do I look?”

“You’ve looked better.”

“Great.”

I tried to sit up and set my teeth against an expectation of terrible pain. Like splintered ribs or internal injuries, both of which I was positive I had. But my body moved without the grating of broken parts. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed fatal.

“I don’t think you should move, Joe.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I should lie here.” I sat up and then sagged back against the wall, panting. There were little white explosions going off inside my eyeballs.

The fog in my head began to thin. I gasped and caught Rudy’s wrist. “My dad—?”

“He’s okay, thank God,” said Rudy. “Patrick, too. He’s helping with…”

His voice trailed off.

“What is it?”

“Joe … there are a lot of casualties. The police and fire department are still searching for bodies.”

“How’d they … get here … so fast?”

He shook his head. “You’ve been out for almost an hour. We just found you. The police had you tagged as one of the dead.”

“Shit. Help me up.”

“No way. Not without a stretcher and—”

“Goddamn it, Rudy, help me the fuck up.”

He insisted on checking me for broken bones first. His probing fingers found a lot of places that detonated hand grenades of pain, but nothing moved the way it shouldn’t. Rudy stood and pulled me to my feet.

It took a long time and a lot of effort. The corridor tilted and spun, and I nearly fell.

Nearly.

Didn’t.

Ghost got up slowly, too. Just as carefully, every bit as shakily. He looked up at me and gave me half a wag as if to assure me he was alive. For some reason, that made me want to cry. I squatted down and pulled him to me, running my fingers through his fur to see how badly he was hurt. It looked worse than it was. A bunch of cuts, but he yelped and whined when I touched different places, clear evidence of the kind of bruises I had. I hugged him and kissed his head, and he licked my chin and nose.

Rudy’s words were starting to sink in. Without turning to Rudy, I said, “How … how many people?” I asked.

When he didn’t answer, I straightened and looked at him. He looked stricken.

“Rude —? How many?”

“They’re … not sure. A hundred. Maybe more.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

“God almighty.”

“Yes.”

I looked around. Now that I was on my feet, I could see how bad things were here in the corridor. Bodies lay everywhere. Some of them had been covered with white plastic. Others lay where they’d fallen. There were whole bodies and there were parts of bodies. It was a sickening sight. Not just because of the blood and torn meat, but because these were people.

Ordinary folks. Not combatants.

This was the opening day of the baseball season. We’d all come out to have some fun. Maybe get drunk. Have a hot dog or a soft pretzel. Maybe catch a foul ball. This was all supposed to be fun. A day to remember.

And I guess that’s what it was. That last part. A day to remember.

An unforgettable day, for all the wrong reasons.

I tapped my earbud to see if it was working yet.

“There’s no radio in here,” said Rudy. “Cell phones won’t work, either.”

“Shit,” I growled. “I need to get out of its range. Those sonsabitches might still be in the building.”

“Who? Did you see something?”

“Yes,” I said, moving as quickly as my battered body would allow, “I damn well did.”

Chapter Thirty-three

I had to fight my way over rubble and around too damn many bodies. Ghost was beside me, and despite his being an experienced combat dog, the blood and death was hitting him hard. His tail was tucked under, and he kept twitching and jerking away from things we found. I made reassuring and encouraging noises and hoped that I wasn’t wasting my breath. Just like humans, combat dogs have complex psychologies, and they have their breaking points. I didn’t want this to be Ghost’s. He was a hell of a lot more than a service dog. He was family.

Rudy was somewhere behind me. He said he needed to help the medical teams. He’s a doctor, and that was fine. I was a fighter, and I needed to share intel with other soldiers so we could start to hit back.

If it wasn’t already too late for that.

When we reached the main field, I stopped as if I’d run into a wall.

It was like stepping across one of the rings of hell.

The crowd was gone, of course. Many of them had fled. The rest, I suppose, had been ushered out by surviving staff and responding police.

Too many of them, though, were still here.

In the shattered stands.

On the field.

Smoke drifted upward from dozens of spots. Whole sections of the bleachers had collapsed down. The green grass of the field was torn up and splashed red. Scores of emergency vehicles were parked at haphazard angles. Hundreds of emergency specialists were down there. EMTs, firefighters, cops. Volunteers.

It was a scene of stunning horror.

I saw a familiar figure on the field, and he was talking on a cell. There must have been coverage down there.

“Come on,” I said to Ghost, and we began making our way to an undamaged set of stone stairs.

The man on the phone heard me calling his name, turned, and saw me coming. He lowered the phone and stared in shock. Even from fifty yards away, I saw the sob that hitched his chest.

Then he was running. Calling my name.

And I called his.

“Dad!”

James Wolcott Ledger pushed past his own police escort and grabbed me in a fierce hug. The hug hurt every damaged inch of me, but I didn’t care. His face was wet with tears.

“Oh my God,” he said as he held me close. He kissed my head. “Oh my God, Joe, they told me … they told me…”

“Thank God you’re all right, Dad.”

He pushed me back and held me at arm’s length. Dad is about my height, a little over six foot two, and as trim and fit as when he walked a beat in West Baltimore. Blond hair gone gray and piercing blue eyes. At that moment, though, he looked old. “Christ, you’re hurt? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

His questions ran together, and before I could answer, he bellowed for a medic.

Ghost wagged his tail and pressed himself against my dad’s leg.

“Dad,” I said, “your phone? Are you getting a signal?”

“Yes,” he said, “but only out here. Can’t get anything in—”

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug! Come on, goddamn it. Bug, are you—?”

“Cowboy? Jesus, you’re alive. Oh, man, I—”

“Bug, listen to me. I’m at the stadium, and I have intel.”

“Cycling in the TOC,” he said quickly. “Deacon is on the floor.”

“What have you got, Cowboy?” said Church’s voice.

I told him what happened in the hallway with the masked shooters.

“Copy that, Cowboy. I have two full teams inbound to you. Echo One and Two are twenty minutes out.”

Echo One was Top; Two was Bunny. If they were that close, then they were coming via helicopter, which must be burning its way through the sky.

“I’ll secure a landing spot,” I said.

“Negative, that’s already in hand. SWAT is at your facility. I want you to coordinate with them for a full sweep.”

“Haven’t they done that already, for God’s sake?”

“They have,” said Church. “You have not. Take them in again. I’ll clear it.”

“I’ll need a weapon.”

“They’ll provide.”

“There’s no radio or cell anywhere but in the center of the field. Must be a jammer. Bug, find it for me.”

“Targeting it now, Cowboy. Okay, got it. Looks like the source is inside the Hall of Fame meeting room.” He gave me a set of directions.

“Wait for backup,” warned Church.

I didn’t.

“Dad,” I said, “you still have your little friend?”

“Joe, I don’t think…” But he stopped himself when he saw the look in my eyes. He knelt, tugged up his trouser cuff, and removed a small revolver from an ankle holster. He handed it to me, and I felt the familiar weight. A .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. Five shots. I knew better than to ask about extra rounds. He was no longer a cop. He was the mayor of Baltimore. He carried the gun out of habit but didn’t need extra rounds.

I hoped I wouldn’t need them, either.

Or maybe I hoped I would.

“Tell SWAT to find me,” I said as I broke into a lumpy, limping run-walk toward the same corridor I’d just come out of. Ghost ran after me, and I was heartened to see that his tail was no longer tucked.

As I ran, I passed by a row of bodies under white sheets. The arm of the closest body lay partially exposed. I saw a brown hand and a blue sleeve. Military blue. Air force blue. Torn now, exposing skin that was already going pale with lack of circulation.

I almost stopped running.

I almost stopped everything.

I knew whose sleeve that was, and it broke my heart. Absolutely crushed it.

Colonel Roger Douglas.

Hero.

Victim.

Tears burned in my eyes, nearly blinding me as I ran.

Chapter Thirty-four

Doctor Pharos would never admit it, but he was hiding in his office. Nicodemus had come to Tanglewood and was locked in private conversation with the Gentleman. Pharos wanted no part of it.

Spooky old freak, he thought.

He tried to throw himself into his work. Much of it was mundane, even though it dealt with catastrophic events like what was unfolding at the ballpark in Philadelphia. And all of the other things the machine was primed to process. However, even with all the work, there wasn’t enough to capture his whole attention. There was something wrong. There was a flaw in the system. In his personal system.

None of it really mattered to him.

Since the Kings organization collapsed, Pharos felt like he was the night watchman in an empty factory. All the machines and computers kept running, but without people at the top to give the organization a sense of grandeur, there was no drama. No excitement.

There was only process.

Sure, there were some things that entertained him to one degree or another. Boy was a lot of fun. Her excesses were legendary, and her degree of efficiency pleased Pharos.

Even some of the byplay between him and the Gentleman was amusing. In a twisted way. Managing the man’s deteriorating mind, his rages, his bloodlust, and his secrecy were challenges. Nuts to be cracked, problems to be solved.

Pharos wondered if obtaining the bank codes would energize him.

Hard to say.

Pharos spent most of his time inside his own head. He disliked sharing his insights with others, and certainly never bared his soul to any subordinates. Certainly not to the Gentleman, either. He wondered, though, how much his ennui was clouding his usually sharp inward eye.

“The codes,” he murmured aloud. “It’s all about the fucking codes.”

Which were, sadly, locked in the brain of a madman.

The good news was that Doctor Rizzo had given that madman many new versions of his chemical cocktail to try.

As Pharos shuffled through the papers, he found reports from his training teams about the progress of the field teams. The Kings organization had recruited many hundreds of field operatives. Some had been killers before the Kings offered them employment, while others were introduced to murder for pay after they’d come to work for the group. The bottom line was that no one went out on a field op without already having some blood on his or her hands.

It was important to establish this. Even Pharos had gotten his hands very dirty over the years.

Pharos’s phone buzzed softly. The caller ID showed a stick figure. He smiled and punched the button. He’d committed several murders during his rise to power. And it had been Hugo Vox who’d suggested that Pharos cross that line.

“Why?” Pharos had asked him several years ago. “We have people for that kind of thing.”

“Right, and they look to us for inspiration and motivation. Manage from the ground up, kiddo,” Vox told him. “Go get some grease on your hands and shit on your shoes. Show the people who work for you that you’re willing to get dirty and, more important, that you understand that they get dirty. If they know that you get them, then they’ll hand over the pink slip on their souls. Besides … I’ve had my eye on you, kiddo. You got heart and you got feelings. You have to watch that shit. You have to learn how to control it, to shut it down, to turn it off. No better way to pull the plug on your morals than to slowly strangle the fuck out of someone while you look right into their eyes. Do it right and you don’t go all psycho. You don’t want to wind up with a boner ’cause you’re doing a murder. That’s weak. No, you want to own yourself. You want to be able to turn on the cold-water tap in your heart whenever you want. No emotional surprises. If you don’t do it, then you’re setting psychological bear traps, which is also weak, and it’s poor process. Take the time now, while you’re just getting into all this, and own your power, own your soul.”

That’s what Pharos had done.

First with men who were criminals standing in the way of the organization. It was easier to start by killing people who had blood on their own hands. It hurt less. But it did put a coat of thick paint over his conscience. With each killing, the paint job became more opaque, so that when he killed someone who wasn’t a criminal — just someone who was inconvenient to the organization — there was far less trauma than Pharos expected.

Along the way, however, Pharos learned what most criminals learn who pay attention to the movie projector in their heads. He had limits. He had boundaries. He might participate in programs that would kill mass numbers of civilians, including children, but he would not take a child’s life himself. No. That was a door he wouldn’t allow himself to open. Pharos had been an abused child in a nightmare of a family life. Although his family’s psychodynamics caused him to make the life choices he made, they also etched a line in the sand. A line he would not cross.

When he encountered child abusers, he tended to treat them harshly.

Very harshly indeed.

At one point, the organization collided with a sex-trafficking ring. A big one based in Thailand. Removing key players in the ring was useful to a project the organization had running in Asia at the time. However, freeing the girls and women in the brothels was not part of the agenda, and there had been no reason to place assets or attention on doing so. It would have been enough to crush the organization and let the pieces fall where they may.

Except that Pharos was on the ground during that operation. He was there in Thailand. He saw the brothels. He saw the girls.

One girl in particular. A slender eleven-year-old who had been forced into prostitution when she was eight.

Eight.

That was when Pharos opened a different door in his head. That’s when he discovered not only that he could kill but also that certain kinds of killing were very satisfying. Not in a sexual way, as it was with some of the murderers and mercenaries he employed. No, this touched his soul. It made him feel like his life mattered. He knew that this was a damaged form of rationalization, but it didn’t matter.

He took a team of shooters from Blue Diamond Security, one of the companies covertly owned by the organization, and he tore the infrastructure of the sex-trafficking ring apart.

And he, personally, tore the senior members of that ring apart.

Tore them to red rags.

Killed most of them.

Left a few alive as blind, limbless, disfigured wrecks so they could scream to anyone who would listen that there would be a price for turning little girls into whores.

By the time the organization was done, 179 people were dead, and 418 girls and women had been driven in trucks to hospitals or clinics run by the Red Cross, Catholic missions, and the World Health Organization.

And one child had been taken away by Pharos.

That eleven-year-old girl.

Taken, cleaned up, given medical treatment, given a home, given a life and a future.

Boy.

A name she’d chosen for herself and would not change.

Boy.

His daughter.

Pharos was not sure he actually loved her. Not in the way she loved him. She believed herself to be his daughter on a karmic level. To him, she was proof that his soul was not entirely damned. Pharos believed in God, and when he stood at the gates of judgment, he would point to Boy and those other women and ask to be judged according to that rather than what he’d done for the organization.

He thought he had a shot.

Chapter Thirty-five

I found the Hall of Fame meeting room before the SWAT team found me.

It was in a wing of the stadium that had been mostly empty during the game and the catastrophe that followed. Ash and brick dust covered the floor, and I could see a myriad of footprints. All recent. Most were the shape and tread pattern of police shoes. The gait pattern matched that of officers moving in pairs to investigate and clear a room in haste.

But one set of prints overlaid these.

Sneakers. Small. A young teen or small woman. I knelt and studied the tread pattern. From a closer angle, I could see that the person had come in carefully, walking inside the footprints of one of the cops. Only one step was askew, and that’s the one I saw first. This person was very careful.

Unfortunately, the print was going away from the room I was heading to.

I tapped my earbud to see if the jammer had been turned off, possibly removed. But it was still operating.

Interesting.

I hand-signaled Ghost to move ahead and check for people. I reinforced that with a signal for no noise. Ghost is superbly trained, and having specific orders to follow seemed to help bring him back to himself. His body language was shifting from nervous victim to hunter.

Like me, his hunter aspect was very close to a deeper and more savage aspect. For him, the wolf lived beneath the dog hide. For me, the killer — one of the aspects of my fractured persona — was inside my mind, hunkered down in the tall grass, knife drawn, teeth bared, eyes cold.

I faded to the left side of the hall that led to the closed doors. Ghost went right and ahead, sniffing the ground. Not sure how much the prevalent stink of dust, explosive residue, and death affected his senses, but he was still a dog with a dog nose.

He reached the closed doors, abruptly sat down, and looked at me.

That was his signal.

It was what I wanted to see.

It meant that there was someone inside.

I gestured for him to stand and move back from the door, and he took his position behind and to one side of me. Muscles rippled along his flanks as he crouched, ready to spring. The little revolver felt tiny in my hands. I’ve been carrying an automatic so long that I’m spoiled by having all those extra bullets. Now I had no extra rounds. My only backup was the rapid-release folding knife I always carried clipped into my right front pants pocket. And Ghost.

So, it’s not like I was walking naked into this thing.

I squatted and duck-walked to the door, keeping my head below the level of the frosted glass. SWAT seemed to be taking its own sweet time getting here, but I was still cruising on that edge of combat greed where I wanted to be the one to deal the entire play. I wanted to kick some ass and take some names. Literally, take names. I still had no idea who was behind this.

The rules say I should have waited for backup.

Yeah.

Fuck the rules.

Chapter Thirty-six

The man was seated at a small table in the corner of a family restaurant on the boardwalk in Mission Beach. He had a plate of eggs and potatoes going cold in front of him. A smaller plate of whole-wheat toast sat adjacent, with one small bite missing from the top slice. Ice melted in a glass. Only the coffee cup was empty, and the waiter came to fill it for the third time.

“Thanks, mate,” said the man without looking up. His focus was on the small electronic tablet on a foldout stand. His eyes flicked back and forth as he read one news report after another about what was happening in Philadelphia. It was not technically his business; however, there were aspects of the tragedy that caught his attention.

No, it was less than that. They tickled the edges of a fragment of a memory. Enough that it bothered him and kept him watching the news feeds.

He occasionally toggled over to a special search engine called Xenomancer. It was proprietary software used only by the board of directors and senior staff of FreeTech, the nonprofit company run by Junie Flynn. The firm was dedicated to taking military technologies and repurposing them in humanitarian ways. Hydration projects in draught-stricken areas. Clean water. Renewable clean energies. Sustainable farming sciences. Medical research to eradicate the diseases of poverty. And dozens of other projects. It was an expensive company to run, but private funding kept it going very nicely. Some of those funds were also used for lobbyists, scholarships, lawyers, media campaigns, advertising, and administration for a network of more than six thousand employees.

Xenomancer had been designed by the computer team that worked for the Department of Military Sciences and was given as a gift to FreeTech by Mr. Church.

Life was so weird.

That thought, in one form or another, flitted through the man’s head a dozen times every day. Usually when he stopped and mentally stood back to watch what he was doing at any given moment. Writing reports. Attending meetings with administrators of free health clinics. Sending anonymous donations to charities all over the world. Being a good person.

So weird.

He did a lot of his most philanthropic work from that restaurant. The waiters here knew him. He was a regular who tipped very well and kept to himself. They left him alone even though he often sat at that table — a prime spot with a superb view of the rolling Pacific waves — for hours on end.

None of the staff there — not even the manager — knew that the young man owned the restaurant. They did not know that he owned the whole block and all of its businesses. The fair-trade gift shop, the free animal clinic, the sea-conservation museum and lab, the walk-in clinic that provided a variety of free services for women in crisis.

The young man made sure that his involvement with those businesses was never connected to him. This same policy extended to more than seven hundred businesses, organizations, corporations, and foundations that he owned or privately funded. Including FreeTech. He took particular pains to remain invisible to anyone who might want to show gratitude.

Gratitude was something he feared.

Something he dreaded.

To have to accept the heartfelt thanks of an innocent who received his help would kill him. He was positive of it.

It was probably already killing him. He was certain that there was some kind of cancer eating at him in the darkness of his own tainted blood.

That’s how he saw it.

Tainted blood.

When he went to church, he spent a lot of time on his knees, praying. He never took confession. He feared what the priest would say.

He was certain that any priest would kick open the door of the confessional and drag him out, beat him, and throw him into the street. That the priest would damn him.

As he deserved to be damned.

As he expected to be damned.

But he went to church often. Nearly every day. Mostly Catholic churches because he had been raised in that faith. Sometimes he went to a synagogue. Or a mosque. Or a fire-and-brimstone country revival.

Any church that was open.

Any church that would let him pray in silence.

In none of those places did he beg forgiveness from God in all His aspects.

That, the young man was sure, was an even faster path to hell.

No. He did not want forgiveness. He believed that it was not his to have. Not even from God.

Because there was no way to actually undo the harm he’d done, he didn’t see how forgiveness of those sins was valid. Not to a person who had done as much damage as he had. The blood on his hands could not be washed off with holy water and some token acts of contrition.

He wanted something much different than that.

Much different.

He wanted to be of use. To be used. To be useful.

Until he died.

And then he wanted to be forgotten. It was the greatest thing he could hope for.

Now, he sat at his table, his food abandoned, and watched the drama that was unfolding. He listened to the reporters become increasingly ghoulish in their excitement over the disaster and the body count.

It was a bad day in America.

It was another 9/11, they said.

It was another Mother Night Day, they said. Like last year when anarchists set off bombs and released plagues all over the country.

Except that there was something about the attack at the ballpark that made the young man wonder if it wasn’t something else entirely.

Something he’d heard about once. Something very much like this. Drones at a ballpark.

His rational mind told him that the thing he’d heard years ago couldn’t be connected to this, because everyone involved in that earlier discussion was dead. As far as he knew, he was the only survivor of that group. The only one who was alive to remember the conversation and its grim contents.

Drones.

And a ballpark.

He kept telling himself that this couldn’t be that.

“Has to be something else,” he said to himself, his voice barely a whisper. “After all, there are a lot of bloody-minded maniacs in the world.”

On the screen, they were bringing out the wounded. Many of them were horribly mangled.

“Bugger this,” he said, and reached for his phone. He debated whom to call. Mr. Church?

No. This was terrorism that used advanced technology, which meant Church and his people would be involved. Getting the man on the phone was difficult at the quietest of times.

Who then?

His fingers punched buttons as if on their own. The phone rang four times, and he was about to give it up when the call was answered.

“Hello?” said a soft female voice.

“Junie,” he said.

“Oh,” said Junie Flynn, “Toys. Look, I can’t talk right now. Things are bad here.”

“Bad where? Are you in Philadelphia?”

“What? Oh, no. I’m in San Diego. At the hospital.”

“Why?” demanded Toys. “What’s wrong? Are you—?”

“It’s Circe,” said Junie. “She collapsed. God, Toys, I think she’s in a coma…”

Junie quickly explained about Circe’s collapsing while they were house hunting. Since being brought to the hospital, the doctors had not been able to revive her.

“They’re doing all kinds of tests.”

“The baby—?”

“They don’t know yet. Oh God, Toys, this is so terrible. Rudy and Joe are in Philadelphia, at the ballpark.”

“Oh my God.”

“Rudy called. He’s okay. Joe’s hurt, but Rudy says it isn’t bad. But they’re so far away.”

“Stay right there,” Toys said. “I’m on my way.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

I listened at the door.

Heard muffled conversation. Men’s voices. Low. Speaking quickly. Like people in a hurry.

Not speaking English.

I’m pretty good with languages. I took the door handle and turned it very slowly, met no resistance, opened the door a fragment of an inch. Listened closer.

At least three people speaking.

Definitely not English.

Farsi.

It was the most common language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.

Not entirely uncommon in the States. Lot of immigrants here. Melting pot and all that. So it wasn’t the language by itself that let me know I’d found my bad guys.

It was what they were saying.

Like I said, I’m pretty good at languages.

One guy said, “Your jacket is buttoned wrong.”

Another one said, “Let’s go. The timer is running.”

Then there was the sound of footsteps.

The killer inside my head was growling.

Or maybe that was Ghost.

I whipped the door open and went in low and fast, bringing the little gun up into a two-handed grip, searching for targets. Finding five men, not three.

None of them looked Middle Eastern. No one was an Arab. No one was Persian. They looked like average Americans.

They were all dressed in uniforms.

Four wore the blue shirts and navy trousers of paramedics.

The fifth was dressed in the uniform of a Philadelphia police officer.

If I’d seen them in the hall, I might have bought the con. If I hadn’t heard them speaking in Farsi. If I hadn’t heard that comment about the timer. Yeah, I might have bought that they were here to help. That they were good guys.

But … that ship sailed.

Ghost bared his teeth at them. I pointed the gun and yelled, “Federal agent, freeze!”

Knowing they wouldn’t.

Hoping they wouldn’t.

They didn’t.

One of the paramedics grabbed the man closest to him and shoved him at me. As the man staggered forward, the first man yelled, “Kill them!”

I fired. The guy staggering toward me took the round above the right eye. His head snapped back, but his body continued forward, crashing into me, knocking me back.

I yelled to Ghost, “Hit! Hit! Hit!”

He moved like a white blur, snarling, rising, slamming into the cop. I heard terrible screams as I pivoted to shake off the dead man. But the body shuddered as if punched, and as an aftereffect I heard the pop of a handgun.

With the corpse still atop me, I reached around and fired at movement.

Another scream.

I shucked the body off me in time to see one of the paramedics sag back, his stomach pouring red, the gun falling from his hand. I fired two more shots. And another man went down, his lower jaw shot away.

Ghost had the cop down and they were trying to kill each other. No idea who was winning.

Then the fourth man was the only uninjured guy left. I fired my last bullet at him, but he was in motion and the round missed him by half an inch. He tore open his shirt and clawed for a Glock.

I hurled my empty gun at him, and as he dodged I came up off the floor and drove my shoulder into his gut, driving him backward. But the son of a bitch was spry. He took my momentum and twisted, whipping me around his hip. I flew into the wall, rebounded, and crashed down.

The killer dove for his gun, but I snapped a kick out and knocked him down. Then I was on my knees, my right hand going for the rapid-release folder. It was ultra-lightweight and had a small 3.375 blade that popped out with a flick of the wrist and locked in place.

My opponent had a surprise of his own. He slipped a scalpel out of a barrel sheath and rushed me.

In the movies, a knife fight takes five minutes, and the players dance around each other like they’re extras from the Michael Jackson “Beat It” video. In real life, knife fights are short, brutal, and messy. The better fighter usually wins right away, and the other guy goes down in pieces.

This was different. The guy with the scalpel was good.

Real damn good.

He body-feinted left and snapped a short circular cut right that traced a burning line from my wristwatch almost to my elbow. Scalpels are wickedly sharp. You don’t need muscle to cut deep. I jerked my arm down in the direction of his cut, letting it push me, but even so blood burst out of the wound. It was so slender a cut that it burned like an acid sting.

I twisted my body and hit his elbow with my open palm, then whip-changed back and slammed my right elbow into his biceps. A big torsion-driven one-two. He tried to turn inside the combination, but I checked him again with my left and rebounded my right up and over his deltoid for a very fast left-to-right lateral slash.

My blade caught him on the back side of the big tendon in the neck. It was a big, deep cut. I checked again and corkscrewed the tip into the socket of his throat, punching through trachea and hyoid bone all the way to the spine.

And that, as they say, was the ball game.

He made a terrible wet coughing sound as I twisted my hand to pull the blade free. Just for fuck’s sake, I bent and slashed his right knee tendon, sending him crashing and dying to the floor.

Then I wheeled around.

Ghost stood over the cop.

What was left of the cop.

From chin to breastbone, there was only a red ruin. Blood dripped from Ghost’s jaws, and in his eyes I saw only wolf. Primal, feral, victorious.

His eyes snapped toward the other two men.

The guy whose jaw had been blown off was thrashing and screaming in a muted parody of a human voice. He might live, but interrogating him was for shit.

That left the second guy I’d shot.

He lay on the floor, hands clamped to the bullet hole in his gut. There was no exit wound, which meant that the round was still in him. He was in terrible pain. Gut shot. Hurts like a mother. Ask anyone.

My sympathy level for him was a few hundred miles below don’t-give-a-shit. He could see that in my eyes. I could tell, because I could see the fear expanding in his eyes as I stalked toward him. Ghost crept forward with me, his muzzle wrinkled, bloody drool falling from between his titanium teeth.

The killer knew he was in trouble that went a lot farther down a dark road than a bullet in his brisket. He could see the killer in my head glaring at him. I could tell, because I could see the awareness of it blossom in his eyes.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Not in English. In Farsi.

“Who do you work for? Who did this?”

He licked his lips and shook his head.

“Is there another bomb?” I yelled.

He told me to go fuck a camel. He said it in a way that suggested the camel was also my mother.

I put the tip of my knife against the ragged edge of the bullet wound. Just laid it there, and looked at him while I did it.

“Do you want me to be creative?” I asked.

That’s an inexact translation. What I said is probably closer to “Do you want me to do magic?”

He did not. His line of bullshit and resistance only went so far, and then it was he and I in a small room, and we both knew I could make his last minutes on earth last for a thousand years.

He said five words. One short sentence. One name.

The sentence was eloquent in its simplicity.

“It’s too late.”

And then he clamped his jaws shut. I heard the crunch and knew it for what it was, what it had to be.

Bloody foam bubbled from between his lips. It smelled like bitter almonds.

Hollow tooth.

Suicide capsule.

Cyanide.

Shit.

He went rigid and then collapsed back.

Dead as dead will ever get.

“It’s too late.”

As much as those words terrified me, it was the name that made it all so much worse.

The name hung burning in the air. Two words that explained everything and told me nothing.

Two words that scared the living hell out of me.

Two terrible words.

“Seven Kings.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

I staggered to my feet and began hunting through the room, looking for something very bad. Something with a timer.

I tore open every cabinet, every closet, every drawer. I upended the table. I slashed the sofa cushions and smashed the doors on the trophy case. I looked everywhere a bomb could be hidden.

And found nothing.

Then I started going through the clothes of each man.

That’s when I found the device.

Not a bomb. In the pocket of the dead cop, I found a compact and very powerful jammer. Ultrasophisticated. The kind that would link to many smaller relay stations that were probably placed all around the stadium. In trash cans, stuck to the undersides of seats. Didn’t matter where they were. They were here and this device controlled them.

On the front of it was a digital counter. A timer.

Ticking down from 305.

304.

303.

Ticking down to what?

I held the device out so Ghost could sniff it, but he had no reaction. If it was a bomb, he’d make a certain small whuff. So, it wasn’t a bomb.

It was a jammer.

Which is another way of saying that it was a transmitter.

Icy sweat began running down my spine. When it reached zero, it could do a couple of things. The only good thing I could imagine would be for it to cancel the jamming signal.

I did not believe for one second that this would do only that.

It could also blast out a signal to explosive devices planted in the building. Secondary bombs.

Or …

The SWAT guys came crashing through the door, guns out, screaming at me to drop my weapons, to get down on the ground.

“No!” I yelled. “Federal agent. There’s another bomb.”

They weren’t even listening. Two of them grabbed me and slammed me down onto the floor. Ghost began barking, and I had to scream at the top of my voice to keep him back. To order him to lie down. If he didn’t obey at once, they would have killed him. Guaranteed.

Ghost looked like he wanted to take them all on. Maybe it was shock or doggy adrenaline, or maybe he was as batshit crazy as me.

“Down!” I shrieked. “Ghost — down now.”

He finally sank down. Two SWAT shooters had guns on him, ready to kill. A bad day could have gotten a whole lot worse if they tried.

“Federal agent,” I said, over and over again, raising my hands. “We don’t have time for this shit.”

“Shut up,” snapped one of them and kicked me in the ribs. Hard. Ghost nearly came off the ground at him, but I bellowed him back. Then I craned my head and snarled at the man who’d kicked me. “There’s a fucking bomb about to go off, asshole. If it does and anyone dies, I’m holding you responsible for it. I will fucking kill you, do you understand me?”

If he was impressed, it was impossible to tell through the mask, goggles, and helmet.

An officer suddenly pushed his way into the room. He knelt in front of me.

“What’s your name?” he barked.

“Captain Joe Ledger,” I said. “Your name is Hooper. You were told about me. Listen to me, lieutenant. There is another bomb in this building. See that device? That’s a timer. It’s counting down. We have to stop dicking around and find it.”

He gave me exactly one second of appraisal, and then he grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet.

“Where is it?”

I snatched up the timer. It said 58.

57.

56.

I said, “I don’t know. We have to find it.”

The jammer was still working.

Their radios were as dead as mine.

We all left the room at a breakneck run.

But we all knew that we were already too late.

We tried.

We really tried.

I don’t actually remember the blast. They call it traumatic amnesia. The effect of traumatic shock on the brain. My only splinter of memory was of something white. Just that. A big, white nothing.

I closed my eyes to avoid the glare.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Toys saw Junie Flynn at the end of the hall. She was in an ICU unit, behind a big pane of tempered glass, standing beside a hospital bed. There were two soldiers standing guard outside the room. Toys recognized one of them.

Chief Petty Officer Lydia Ruiz.

Lydia recognized him, too.

She said something to the other soldier and then came hurrying down the hall to intercept Toys. She had a rifle slung on her shoulder and a look of complete contempt on her face. It turned her pretty face into something ugly and ferocious.

“Lydia—” began Toys, but she cut him off with a vicious two-handed shove that slammed him in the chest and knocked him against a wall.

“Chingate,” she snarled. “Yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre.”

Lydia got right up in his face. Her hot spit dottled his cheeks and mouth.

“Listen to me, I—”

“Bésame el culo, maricón.”

“If you’re going to call me a faggot,” he said, “at least have the courtesy to do it in English so there’s no misunderstanding.”

Lydia grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt, pulled him off the wall, and slammed him back again. She was very strong and very fast. In another time and place, when Toys was a different person, he might have risen to this challenge. He might have wanted to make her eat her words. To make her earn the power she was trying to show him. Toys was a pacifist now, but he had been a killer for most of his life. Ruthless, efficient, and cold.

Even now, he had to fight to keep his balled fists down, pressed against his thighs, shackled by will so that he did not commit another sin. Even the sin of defending himself.

“Lydia!” called a voice, and they both turned to see Junie Flynn hurrying down the hallway, her face grave with concern. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” said Lydia with a nasty smile. “I’m thinking of dragging this pinche puta in the stairwell to see if I can bounce him all the way down to the first floor.”

Junie reached out and caught Lydia’s wrist. “Don’t.”

“You got other business, Junie,” said Lydia. “Let me—”

Junie stepped very close, forcing enough of herself between Lydia and Toys so that the DMS soldier had to look at her. “I am ordering you to let him go.”

Lydia blinked at her. “Ordering? Excuse me, Miss Flynn, I know that you’re the captain’s lady, but this is a DMS matter.”

“No, this is a FreeTech matter. I am the director of that company. Toys works for me and with me, and that is by a special arrangement made by Mr. Church. I know that Joe disapproves, but this is no more his call to make than it is yours. Toys is under my protection. Let him go right now, or I will have you removed from this detail.”

Lydia stared at her. So did Toys.

In the space of a few seconds, Junie Flynn seemed to grow to fill the hallway. Her voice was no longer the soft, almost passive and conciliatory one she generally used. Now it was filled with authority. It was filled with command. And with an absolute confidence in that command.

Lydia Ruiz held her stare for three full seconds. Then, with a grunt of disgust, she shoved Toys away from her. The young man thumped into the wall and nearly fell, but Junie darted out a hand and caught him under the armpit. She pulled him upright but then shifted her hand to the front of his shoulder, holding him gently but firmly against the wall.

Then Junie turned more fully toward Lydia. “This is a misunderstanding. A difference of opinion. Tell me, Lydia, are we going to have a problem between us now, or are we done with it?”

It took Lydia a few seconds to orchestrate her response. She sighed and stepped back.

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t give me that ‘ma’am’ crap,” said Junie with half a smile. “I don’t like being called that any more than Aunt Sallie does. I’m asking you a serious question, and I would like the courtesy of an honest answer. Are we done with this?”

Lydia nodded slowly, then said it aloud. “We’re done with it.”

“Good. And … thank you.”

She pulled Toys off the wall and gently pushed him toward Circe’s room.

Lydia Ruiz stood her ground and watched them go. Then, after a moment, she followed.

Chapter Forty

“You need to rest,” said Pharos as he bent over the bed to check the tubes and wires.

“Leave me alone, damn you,” snapped the Gentleman. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

“I dare say,” murmured Pharos, “but unless you’d rather that be sooner than later, you’ll rest now.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can. This is over for now.”

“Over? Over?” The burned man tried his best to come out of that bed. To grab his doctor by the throat. To throttle the man. Instead, he twitched and wheezed, and his grasping hands closed around nothing. He sagged back, gasping, sweaty, defeated, but still filled with anger. “It’s not fucking over. He’s still alive. Christ, what does it take to kill one man? We’ve killed thousands. Tens of thousands. We brought down the sodding Towers. Why can’t we kill him?”

Pharos pulled his chair close to the bed and sat down. “So we had a little bad luck. Let it go. I mean, look at what you’ve accomplished today. You’ve struck them above the heart. You’ve hurt them so deeply. This is the kind of injury that will never really heal. Do you think there will ever be a ball game, a concert, an event in which the echo of this won’t be felt? Metal detectors, heightened security, paranoia, a loss of fun, a diminution of innocence and cultural arrogance. You’ve carved your mark into them. They will be talking about this day for a hundred years.”

The Gentleman spat. He tried to spit in Pharos’s face, but he lacked the lung capacity for that kind of velocity. The lump of yellow phlegm landed on the Gentleman’s chest.

Pharos sighed, took a tissue from the dispenser on the bedside table, and wiped it up.

“You are going to win,” he said as he crumpled the tissue and dropped it into a waste can. “Don’t you realize that? You’re going to win. That’s your genius, my friend. That’s why we all love you.”

“Win?” the burned man stared at him, half smiling. “I sometimes wonder which of us is more insane. I’ve been through trauma, so at least I have an excuse. What’s yours? Is this some congenital thing or have you been taking some of Doctor Rizzo’s special cocktails?”

“I—”

“How can you think, after all this time, that I give a tinker’s damn about winning? Look at me. What good is winning going to be for me?”

“I—”

“Sure, some of you will win. You’ll stroll off with billions. So will any of the senior management who are still alive when it’s all over. And how bloody nice for you. If that’s what you mean by ‘winning,’ then please have the sense and courtesy not to include me in it. It’s rude, and it’s insensitive to brag to a dying man that you’re going to spend the rest of your life — the years and years you have in front of you — spending all that lovely money. Buying yachts. Getting laid by models and movie stars. Living big. And note that the operative word is living, you miserable prick.” The burned man shook his head. “That’s your victory, and it doesn’t matter one drop to me. How can you not know that? More importantly, how could you have worked for Hugo Vox and the Seven Kings for so many years and not understand what this is?”

Pharos was silent for several moments. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

But the burned man only sneered. “I don’t want your apology, Pharos. And I sure as shit don’t want your pity. All I want from you is understanding.”

Pharos rubbed his eyes and nodded. “I do understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then say it. Tell me what I want from this. Tell me what I need from this. Tell me what I will have from this.” Spit flew from the melted lips with each word. “Say it, goddamn you.”

Pharos said it.

The word.

The single word that meant so much to the Gentleman. A word that had meant nearly as much to Hugo Vox, and to so many of the Kings.

A single word that was the ugliest and most damaging word in the entire dictionary of global politics. A word that must beat like a drum inside the head of creatures like Father Nicodemus. An insane word that held only horrors for Pharos but that meant everything to this dying lump of burned flesh.

He said, “Chaos.”

Chapter Forty-one

Toys stood in the corner of Circe’s room and looked at the woman’s chest rising and falling. Her face was totally slack, and if it wasn’t for that subtle movement and the pinging insistence of the machines, he would have thought she was dead. Her olive skin had turned a jaundiced yellow. Pale and papery. Her black curls were disordered into tangles of black wire by sweat and trauma.

Junie Flynn sat holding her hand.

Without turning, she asked, “Earlier, on the phone, you tried to tell me something. What was it?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing,” said Toys, keeping his voice down to a whisper. Like talking in church. “I should never have called.”

“No, tell me.”

He licked his lips, stalling as he thought it through. “Um … before, when I was with … you know…”

“Before when? When you were working for Sebastian Gault or when you were living with Hugo Vox?”

She said it bluntly, and it let him know two things about her. First, that she knew a lot about his past, which didn’t surprise him. Church had to have told her his background before asking her to take him on in FreeTech. Fair enough. The second thing, though, was how matter-of-fact she was. She stated facts but didn’t front-load them with judgment. He couldn’t build a list of people in his life who were able to speak to him without judgment. Certainly no one in the DMS. Even Violin, who liaised with FreeTech, treated him as if he were a hairy little bug. And that was fair enough, too.

Not Junie, though.

She was different.

Though Toys couldn’t tell if it was compassion or simply a mind that ran on pragmatism rather than bias.

“Tell me,” she urged.

Toys opened his mouth to tell her all of it, but at that moment the bedside phone rang. Junie picked it up, listened, said, “Thank God!”

“What is it?” asked Toys.

Junie put the handset down. “That was Sam Imura down in the lobby. Rudy just got here. He’s on his way up.”