Predator One

Interlude Eleven

Caren Fallowfield was texting and parking, but she wasn’t driving.

The car was doing that for her.

She typed furiously to her best friend, Meka, who was already inside Princess Hands having French tips put on. Caren’s car was working its way into a slot outside. The senior dance was tonight. Both girls had devastating dresses. Meka had one in electric blue with a hint of sparkles that made it shimmer when she turned. There was a tulle sheathing that turned the blue magic of it into smoky mystery. Caren, who had the better figure and they both knew it, went with a red that was so dark it looked black except where it stretched over bust line and hips. And the neckline plunged so far down that she was going to have to use a lot of tape to keep from giving everyone a show. The dress was show enough, thank you very much.

The onboard system did not require anything from her. The sensors judged the distance to the cars in front and back, to the curb, and to the traffic whipping past. It made all the necessary calculations in a microsecond and began shifting gears and turning the silver machine at a sedate rate of speed. It was a tight spot that Caren would never have attempted without Optimus Prime, which is what she called it.

The car stopped.

Suddenly and with a jolt. The cell phone fell from Caren’s hand, and for a moment she was torn between looking to see what was wrong and grabbing for her phone. She looked around. The car was stopped halfway into the spot. Caren checked the car in front. Still parked, no one in it. She looked in the rearview to see if Optimus had stopped to let the car behind pull out. But it was empty, too.

She tapped the button for the voice controls.

“Continue parking.”

“I will continue to park,” replied the silky female machine voice.

The car did not move.

Caren snatched her phone up and waited. Nothing.

Another tap on the button. “Continue parking,” she said again. With irritation, spacing each syllable.

“I will continue to park.”

Nothing happened.

Caren’s phone tinkled, indicating a new text.

The car suddenly moved.

Caren huffed out a breath that was half relief and half lingering annoyance.

The car changed its angle to the curb, picking one that much sharper. Caren frowned but did not interfere. She was, she knew, a terrible parker. She could drive as well as anyone, she believed, but parking was not her thing. And not in spots this tight. Optimus was always good at it, so she trusted him. If he needed a different angle, even one that didn’t make sense to her, then that was fine. Everything was fine if she could get out of the damn car and inside to get her nails done. They had a dark red polish that would go perfectly with the vampire-red dress. The polish shade was called Secret Passion.

That was fine, because maybe tonight Jacen was going where no man had gone before. The Victoria’s Secret thong she had in a bag in the backseat might see the light of — well, night — if everything went well. Jacen wasn’t the sharpest or most reliable guy in the world, but he looked like Theo James and she’d seen him in his gymnastic tights, so there was that. Those tights left nothing to the imagination. She was pretty sure the reason he was called the Hammer had nothing to do with what he did on the rings or uneven bars.

The rear wheel tapped the curb and the car rocked gently. That deepened Caren’s frown. The auto-park system wasn’t supposed to hit curbs. Ever. That was one of the selling points. She’d read the brochure before she talked her dad into buying it for her. Safer parking. No tire damage. All that.

Then something happened that shifted Caren from doubt and annoyance to nervousness.

The engine revved.

Like hitting the curb, it should never do that.

Except that it did. She saw the little needle that indicated RPMs swing way up and then drop down. Up and down. Then up and farther up. The engine roar filled the cabin.

“Stop,” she commanded. Nothing happened.

Then she remembered that she had to hit the button. She punched it.

“Stop.”

“Stopping.”

The engine revved even louder. The whole car was vibrating with the power. Smoke plumed up from the tailpipe. Caren saw people stopping to stare at her. She flushed with embarrassed anger.

Caren punched the button again. “Stop auto-park.”

“Auto-park disengaged,” said the silky voice. Pleasant. Always pleasant.

The engine roar increased.

“Stop!” yelled Caren, banging on the button. “Stop auto-park.”

“Auto-park disengaged.”

The radio suddenly switched up. It began cycling through the preset channels as the volume rose from her usual setting of sixteen to twenty-five, to forty-five, to a screaming and intolerable maximum that blasted everything from her except a shriek.

The steering wheel turned sharply to the left, pointing the wheels away from the curb.

The engine roared.

The radio was a sonic wail so loud that it was no longer music.

Caren’s scream was buried inside that cacophony.

Then the autonomous system released the brakes, and the car shot away from the curb and into a narrow gap between the Toyota Camry that had just passed and the UPS truck that was following at forty miles an hour.

Caren tried to hit the brakes.

The brake functions had been disabled by the onboard computer.

There was no time for the truck to stop.

The right front bumper of the truck hit the driver’s door at full speed. All those tons of metal punched the door inward against Caren. The airbag did not deploy, its circuits having been switched off by the computer. The seat belt held Caren in place, so all the colliding steel, aluminum, fiberglass, and safety glass had nowhere else to go.

In the same instant across America, twenty-three thousand vehicles with autonomous systems malfunctioned. Parked cars started in lots and garages and slammed into walls and other cars. Vehicles on streets and highways accelerated or simply switched to park while traveling at road speed. Scores of them hurtled at other cars as if the machines themselves had suddenly gone into a suicidal frenzy.

Chapter Forty-two

“Hey, Boss,” said a voice. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

I heard him before I saw a face. But I knew who it was.

I pried open one eye.

The man seated in the visitors’ chair looked like a taller, broader, more muscular version of Thor from the comic-book movies. He wore black BDU pants, boots, and a charcoal-gray T-shirt that was a size too small for his bulk. The slogan on the shirt read STERCUS FIT. Latin for “Shit Happens.” He had a pair of wayfarers pushed up on his blond hair. His youthful face was creased with concern and offset by a smile that was one part stress, one part exhaustion, and two parts false good humor. He’d been eating Chinese noodles from a white cardboard takeout container. He lowered his chopsticks and smiled at me.

“Bunny…” I croaked. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded like an old man’s. “Where—?”

“Jefferson Hospital in Philly,” said Bunny. “It’s tomorrow.”

“Huh?”

“That shitstorm at the ballpark? That was yesterday.” He looked at his watch. “It’s four eighteen in the afternoon of the thirtieth. You’ve been out for about a full day.”

He jabbed the chopsticks deep into the container and set it on the night table.

“Glad to see you awake, though. Been sweating large-caliber bullets waiting to see if you were going to wake up.”

“How bad am I?”

“Probably not as bad as you’re gonna feel, Boss. Mild concussion, but your skull isn’t cracked. I could make a joke about hard heads.”

“But you won’t ’cause you don’t want to die young.”

“Which is my point,” he said, nodding. “Let’s see what else. You have about a zillion small cuts. Thirty stitches here and there. Mostly those faggy little butterfly stitches except for the ones on your forearm. All the rest is bruising. The doctor said he had never seen someone with a bruised liver, pancreas, and spleen before. Not a living person, he meant. Said he usually only sees that stuff in autopsies of people who were run over by cars.”

“Lucky me.”

“Yeah,” said Bunny, this time with no trace of humor. “Lucky you. Lot of people weren’t so lucky.”

It took me a few seconds to understand what that meant. I had been going on the assumption that I’d been hurt on a mission, but the jumbled pieces of memory began falling back into place a piece at a time.

The ballpark.

The drones.

The bombs.

“Jesus Christ, Bunny,” I said, and tried to sit up, to get out of bed, to find clothes.

He got up and body-blocked me. Not that it took a lot. I was empty. No strength at all. I sagged back.

“The bomb?” I asked.

Bunny raised his eyebrows. “Which one?”

“The last one. The timer.”

“Oh,” he said tiredly, and there was such deep bitterness in his voice. “Yeah. It wasn’t one bomb. It was seven of them. In trash cans in different places. Near the exits that the EMTs and emergency trucks were using.”

“God.”

“Forty-three dead. The bombs were there to hit the emergency responders. Tack those deaths on to what the drones did … shit … it’s so goddam awful.”

“How … how many all told?” I asked.

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Two hundred and thirty-four dead. At least thirty-eight of them were people who got trampled to death trying to get away from the drones. They’re still sifting through rubble. There are a bunch unaccounted for, but we don’t yet know if they’re buried or just haven’t reported in with anyone if they got out. Eight hundred and sixty hospitalized. Fifty on the critical list. Another thousand or so treated and released. Every hospital in the region is jammed.

If he’d grabbed me by the front of my hospital gown and punched me with all of his strength, it wouldn’t have hit as hard or hurt me as much. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself back into unconsciousness.

I asked the question I was afraid to ask. “My dad?”

“He’s going to be okay. Caught some flying debris, a few cuts. He’s at U of P. He keeps calling. But those fuckers killed Colonel Douglas, too.”

It felt like there wasn’t enough air in the room. Douglas. My god.

“What about Rudy? And Ghost?”

“Ghost’s at the vet’s. He’s banged up like you, but he’ll be okay. Rudy’s good, but, um…”

“What is it?” I asked sharply.

“Look, Boss, Rudy’s on a plane to San Diego. Actually, he’s probably there by now, or just about. It’s, um, his wife. She’s in the hospital.”

“Circe? Why? What’s wrong? It’s too early for the baby—”

“Details are way sketchy, but Bug said that she was house hunting with Junie and she collapsed. She’s totally out of it. I don’t know if it’s a coma or what. With all the shit that happened here, it’s hard to get straight intel. The doctors are running a bunch of tests, but they don’t know exactly what’s wrong.”

“The baby?”

“No, it’s good. She didn’t miscarry or anything like that. It’s just that she’s unconscious. But … here’s the kicker, Boss, and this is the part that’s messing a lot of people up.”

“Do I want to know?”

“I doubt it,” he said, “’cause it’s some weird-ass shit. But based on the timing of Junie’s call to 911, Circe collapsed at the same time as the bomb went off in Philly. And I mean the same exact time. Down to the second.”

I stared at him. And then I tried to get the hell out of that damn bed.

Bunny put a hand on the flat of my sternum and pushed me right back down. Under ordinary circumstances, he’s twice as strong as me. Right then, he was Godzilla and I was Bambi.

“Take your hand off me, Sergeant, or so help me God I will—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Boss. I’m under orders from Mr. Church to keep your ass in bed, and in bed is where your ass is staying. End of discussion. I can get some help in here and can put restraints on you.”

I called him a bastard and a bunch of other things. He took it and he held me down and he waited me out. Finally I sagged back, exhausted and hurt. When Bunny met my eyes, I let out a breath and nodded. He removed his hand and stepped back.

“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded.

“Yeah, well, we’re all real short on answers. Kind of our thing lately. Our new logo’s pretty much, ‘The DMS: We Don’t Know Shit.’”

“Hey, does Junie know what happened out here?”

“Everyone knows. There’s no other story on the news. Don’t worry, though, Top called her, and so did the Big Guy. Told her you were okay, just scuffed up a bit. She’s still in California with Circe. I think she tried to come out here, but there’s a no-fly zone around Philly right now except for military craft. We sent Rudy out on Shirley ’cause your bird’s got an all-access pass. Besides … the Big Man wanted her to stay with Circe. I guess he didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No … no, of course not.”

Bunny sat back down. “Boss, do you know anything ’bout what happened? Beyond what you told Bug and Mr. Church before you went looking for that jammer?”

“I keep seeing pieces of it in my head,” I admitted, rubbing my eyes. “But that’s all it is. Pieces. Debris. It’s hard to put it together.”

“You got anything?” persisted Bunny. “Even something small just so we can start doing something other than sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”

“I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“Try harder,” said a voice.

Bunny and I turned to see a tall broad-shouldered man standing in the doorway. Three-thousand-dollar suit, quiet tie, tinted glasses, face devoid of all humor and tolerance.

Mr. Church.

Chapter Forty-three

There were hundreds of them now.

More came all the time.

They’d begun arriving within an hour of the attack.

The first wave had been gawkers, drawn like flies to the smoke and flame, to the echo of screams, to the possibility of seeing the kinds of things they usually only saw on TV.

That was the first wave, and some of them were still there.

The second wave was different.

They arrived more slowly, moving tentatively toward the stadium. They stopped at the police barricades. Most of them said nothing, even to their own companions.

They brought flowers.

They brought photos in frames.

They brought candles.

A few brought toys. Teddy bears and dolls that would never again be cuddled. A baseball glove. A hooded sweatshirt with a middle school logo. A birthday present that had been wrapped but would remain unopened.

There was no plan, no agreement. The first of the people in this second wave showed up before midnight. She knelt and placed her flowers on the pavement. Out of the way of the emergency vehicles. She arranged the flowers so that the brightly colored petals were toward the building. That seemed to matter to her. She was unaware of the tears that fell like rain. The ache in her chest was too big, the chasm in her soul too deep to pay attention to anything as mundane as tears.

She got to her feet and … stood there.

Just stood.

Two people joined her a few minutes later. Grandparents who walked on unsteady feet, bearing the impossible weight of loss. Loss of son and daughter-in-law. Of grandson. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for the magnitude of this burden. They laid their flowers near the first bunch and stood staring with eyes empty of all hope and optimism. Too shocked to cry.

Others came. Alone. In pairs. Sometimes in a group that clung together and wept and sometimes screamed.

By noon of the following day, there were more than a hundred of them.

They stood without speaking.

Hours crawled by. The police and firefighters saw them and tried not to meet their eyes. No one tried to move them. No one wanted to engage them.

Twice, reporters tried to interview them, but a police officer working the barricade growled them back. Her rage was so towering that even the sound-bite-hungry ghouls of the press shrank back. They didn’t leave, though. The reporters aimed their cameras from a distance and did their stand-ups and drank the pain.

The people gathered around the mound of flowers did not care. Most of them did not even notice.

They lingered because they had nowhere else to go.

Not anymore.

The paths of their lives seemed to have led here.

And ended here.

Chapter Forty-four

The receptionist at the front desk was a bright-eyed Asian woman with lots of colorful cloisonné flowers pinned to her sweater. Her name tag read CAROL. She looked up as the small man approached. She hadn’t seen him enter the hospital. The man was bent and old, with a deeply seamed face and a tan topcoat over black clothes.

“Hello,” she said brightly, “may I help you?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the man in a soft southern accent. He loosened the belt of his coat and let it fall open to reveal the black shirt and white collar of a priest. This was done casually, without drama. “I’m here to see Reverend Sykes. Do I need a visitors’ pass for that?”

Beverly Sykes was the interfaith chaplain at the medical center.

“Oh, no, not at all.”

The priest looked around. There were two city policemen standing by the elevators. City police, and with them was one of the hospital’s security guards.

“Is there something wrong?” asked the old priest. “Something going on?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s nothing,” Carol said, lying easily.

The priest studied the officers for a moment and then turned to look at her. He had the strangest eyes. She couldn’t tell if they were brown or green. And his smile, though friendly, was odd in a way Carol could not explain. Later, when police and federal agents interrogated her about this encounter, she would not be able to explain the feelings she got from that smile. All she knew was that it “wasn’t right.”

That’s how she felt about it.

The smile was simply not right. No sir.

Carol would dream about that smile. For years.

But the feeling that the smile was somehow wrong increased with time after she’d given him directions to the chapel and watched him walk down the hall. It wasn’t until he was out of sight that she felt her mouth turn into a frown. It surprised her, because the man had neither said nor done anything unusual.

But that smile.

That smile.

Carol Chang had not had a drink in seventeen months.

But for the rest of the day she thought about the bottle of tequila she was going to buy on the way home. That thought was the only thing that kept her from screaming.

Chapter Forty-five

“Sergeant Rabbit,” said Church, “give us the room. No visitors.”

“Yes, sir.” Bunny exited and closed the door behind him.

Church picked up my medical chart and browsed it, nodded to himself, rehung it on the end of my bed, and then sat down. “Are you lucid?” he asked.

“Don’t you mean, ‘How are you, Joe? I’m delighted to see that you’re not crippled or dead’?”

He crossed his legs and gave me a long, flat stare. I was welcome to interpret anything I wanted from it. Assuming it was an outpouring of the warm fuzzies would probably be my weakest guess.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I want to get out of here so I can start hunting these—”

“Hunting whom, exactly?”

“Whoever’s doing this. Bombs here, and whatever’s happening to Circe.”

He held up a hand. “First, Circe is receiving the best medical care possible. I have experts flying in from eleven countries. Friends of mine.”

I looked at him, searching for some flicker of humanity. Circe was, after all, his daughter, his only blood relative as far as I knew. His other daughter and her mother had both died violent deaths, and I was one of the few who knew that their murders had been perpetrated by people who were trying to get to Church. He had many enemies, and many of them would stop at nothing — truly nothing — to break or weaken him. So far, all that those murderous bastards have accomplished was to strengthen an already-iron resolve. I don’t know what happened to those killers, but I do not believe for one moment that they are still alive. I also suspect that they died in very bad ways.

Not that revenge brought back the dead or healed a broken heart. And Church’s heart had to have been broken. Over and over again. Rudy has tried for years to decode this man, to unlock the mysteries of his emotional and psychological makeup. Since Rudy is a doctor and a man of great personal honor, he hasn’t shared with me his professional insights.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She is undergoing tests and appears to be stable. That’s all they can tell me at the moment.”

“You going out?”

He took a moment on that. “As soon as I can.”

“Bunny told me about the timing. That can’t be a coincidence.”

There was the slightest curl of his lip at my use of the word “coincidence.” He detests coincidences. They offend logic. For him, everything is cause and effect.

“We do not yet know how the two incidents are related. Now, as to that, what can you tell me? What is the last thing you remember? Walk me through it.”

I did my best. My last clear memory was standing with my dad out in centerfield. I remember telling Church about the drones and the guys I’d fought in the hallway. And about the jammer. And …

Something flickered past the window of my mind. I stopped talking. Church waited, letting me work through it. I raised my right arm and looked at the thick bandage wrapped around it. When Bunny had mentioned the stitches there, I hadn’t reacted beyond thinking they’d come from the same source as my other injuries. The drone explosions. Now, though …

“I think I was in a fight,” I said. “A second one, not the one I called to tell you about. Bunny told me about bombs connected to the jammer. That’s all tangled up in my head. I thought he was saying it wrong. But he wasn’t, was he?”

“No.”

“Bug located the jammer, right? And I … went to find it. Me and Ghost.”

“And—?”

It was coming back, bit by bit.

“I did. But there were five men. Four paramedics. One cop.” I told him about using my father’s gun. About fighting one of the men. As I recalled and told him one detail, another would emerge. Until I got to the point where I knelt over a dying man and asked him to tell me …

And he did.

I sat bolt upright.

“Jesus Christ,” I hissed, gasping in pain and shock.

“What is it, Captain? What did he tell you?”

And it was suddenly all in my head. Every last detail. “I know who’s behind this.”

“Tell me.”

“The Seven Kings,” I said.

Chapter Forty-six

Toys sat cross-legged on the floor beside Junie’s chair. There was another visitors’ chair available, but it was the one Rudy had been using. Toys felt awkward taking it, even temporarily. He had a Diet Coke resting in the circle formed by his legs and was chewing on a plastic straw.

Rudy was off trying to get his head straight.

Good luck with that, mate, mused Toys. This bloody thing makes no sense at all.

It was true. Toys was not a scientist or doctor, but he’d been Sebastian Gault’s right-hand man for years, and Gault had been one of the world’s most brilliant pharmacologists. Toys had also spent considerable time — albeit reluctantly — with Amirah, Gault’s former lover and the head of his science division. Toys had been there for most of the serious discussions about the development of the seif al din pathogen. He had a solid working knowledge of medicine and could generally follow even the more arcane conversations between doctors. However, listening to the medical team here go through the battery of tests they’d performed on Circe, it was clear that there was simply no answer. None of their tests could begin to explain why a healthy young woman like her should collapse and then slide into a coma. So far, the tests supported the one encouraging bit of knowledge — that the baby Circe carried appeared to be unaffected.

But Circe was circling the drain, Toys was sure of it.

Rudy had taken the news very hard. He was already worn thin from having actually been at the ballpark during the drone attack. Now this, plus the strain of a cross-country flight in a military transport jet.

The room was quiet except for the machine noises.

Junie sat with her eyes closed, either sleeping or meditating. Toys couldn’t tell.

He wanted to close his own eyes and drift away, but he dared not. Someone had to keep eyes on Circe.

Even as he thought that, he knew it was an irrational thought. Circe was in a hospital, hooked to every kind of monitor in the catalog. There were nurses and doctors coming by every few minutes. There were armed DMS agents standing outside the door.

The place couldn’t be safer.

Nothing could possibly happen here.

But as he thought that, an older version of him whispered ugly secrets into his ear. Six years ago, the Seven Kings had launched their Ten Plagues Initiative in a hospital. In a manner of speaking.

They’d blown up the London Hospital.

Killing everyone inside. Darkening the skies over the old city.

Proving to everyone who stood on the street and watched or who followed the news on TV that there was nowhere — no place at all — that was truly safe from the Seven Kings.

Get out, whispered the old Toys. The malicious lackey of Sebastian Gault. The toady of Hugo Vox. The Toys who had been a killer and an enabler of killers. Leave now. Get out before it happens. Get out before you die with these people.

Toys raised his head and looked at Junie, her face lovely and serene, and at Circe, who struggled to stay alive, for herself and her baby.

“Leave…?” he murmured, his voice as soft as a whisper.

Leave while you can. Save yourself.

Toys looked away, out the window at the scudding clouds.

“Never,” he said. Then, a moment later, he repeated it. “Never.”

Chapter Forty-seven

“The men you faced,” said Church, “were they regular troops or Kingsmen?”

I had to think about that. The Seven Kings had used a lot of different kinds of fighters over the years, including security specialists — aka mercenaries — from Blue Diamond and other companies. But their elite shooters were called the Kingsmen. These were men trained to be as dangerous and capable as U.S. special forces operators. Most of the trainers and some of the soldiers were, in fact, former special ops players. Fighting them was how I imagined going to war against Echo Team might be.

I shook my head slowly. “Not Kingsmen. They were tough, but I took them out too easily.”

Church called Aunt Sallie in Brooklyn to tell her about the confirmation that we were dancing with the Kings. She was on her way to her townhouse for fresh clothes because it looked like she’d be pulling back-to-back shifts at the main DMS headquarters, the Hangar. I overheard her say that she’d pass the info along, initiate the proper protocols and ring all the alarms.

Church ended the call. “Captain, I think we can now agree that this event is tied to what Echo Team discovered at the Resort.”

“No kidding,” I said sourly. “But it doesn’t tell us who’s running this. I mean, sure, the Seven Kings … but at last count all seven of them were dead. Who’s filled their slots?”

Church shook his head. “To be determined. What concerns me most is their use of drone technology. We’ve had too many cases involving them. There have been some disturbing developments in the world of UAVs. Bug can explain it better than anyone, and I think you’ll want to hear this.”

Chapter Forty-eight

“There’s really nothing you can do at this point, Doctor Sanchez.”

The nurse wore one of those smiles that told Rudy what she really meant was “You’re being an obstructive pain in the ass, but I can’t say that because you’re too important.” The message was clear, though.

“I’d like to stay anyway,” said Rudy.

The nurse shifted slightly to her left. She did not actually plant herself between him and the door to Circe’s room, but the motion was every bit as eloquent as her smile.

“They’re doing everything they can, doctor,” insisted the nurse, “and they are the very best.”

It was framed to leave no reasonable room for objection or argument.

Rudy, defeated, turned and trudged away, leaning heavily on his hawthorn cane. A thin, dour black man he didn’t know very well followed him at a discreet distance. His name was Cowpers, and he’d met Rudy at the airport. A watchdog provided by Mr. Church. A new hire for the Pier. Rudy had tried to engage the man in conversation, but it had been a nonstarter. Cowpers was his minder, not his buddy.

So, with the lugubrious bodyguard in tow, he walked the halls of the hospital.

He hated to leave his wife.

Since flying out from the horrors at the Citizens Park disaster in Philadelphia, he had hardly been away from Circe for more than a few minutes. He was jet-lagged, traumatized, and frightened.

So terribly frightened.

He also felt like a coward for leaving Philadelphia. His specialty within psychology was trauma, and he knew that he was needed there. Probably more than he was needed here in California. People had died. People had experienced actual terror during and after the bombs. His best friend had nearly died. Rudy’s place was out there, helping to address the wounds cut into the minds and hearts of all those people, including the hundreds of professionals and volunteers who were working around the clock to sift through the debris.

That’s where he should be.

But that wasn’t where he could be.

Circe was here in California. She was here, and their unborn baby was here.

And so Rudy was here.

For once — just this once — be damned to anyone and everyone else. It was a difficult thing for him to think, but it was his thought nonetheless. His family needed him more.

What, though, did they need him to do?

The doctors would not allow him to participate in the testing or research of her case. The conflict of interest was crystal clear, and although Rudy could mount superbly crafted arguments, he had no conversational foothold. They built a wall, with Circe on one side and him on the other.

So he drifted like a ghost. Wandering the halls with a silent killer for company.

Chapter Forty-nine

Church opened his laptop and tapped a key, and suddenly Bug’s face filled the screen. Bug was brown, young, bespectacled, übernerdy, and smiling. He was born Jerome Taylor but called Bug by everyone, including his mother. He was a thirtysomething computer sorcerer and one of the most trusted people in the DMS. Church allows him — and only him — total access to the MindReader supercomputer. In the wrong hands, that computer could do untold harm. Catastrophic, and that’s not a joke. Bug uses it to help Church and the Department of Military Sciences fight the good fight. It’s possible that Bug believes MindReader to be a person, and it’s also possible he’s in love with it on a level that would be creepy for anyone else. Well, actually, it’s kind of creepy even with him, but Bug is a friend, and he manages somehow to hold on to some of his innocence without being naive. That’s a tough trick.

Then Church turned to Bug. “Tell Captain Ledger about the Regis program.”

“The what?” I asked.

“Regis,” said Bug, jumping right in, “is a variable-autonomous-operations-software package with military and nonmilitary applications. Developed by DARPA in conjunction with twelve independent contractors working with the Department of Defense. The first thing you have to know is that computer-network upgrades all across the Defense Department are about thirty years behind schedule, and something like seven or eight billion dollars overbudget. It’s a mess. We have some jets with next years’ avionics and some with stuff you couldn’t run on a Commodore Sixty-four. The why of this is too complicated to go into.”

“Budgets and bullshit. That part I do understand.”

Church removed a package of vanilla wafers from his briefcase, selected one, and nibbled it.

“The problem,” Bug continued, “is that we’re so big it’s hard to fix our own systems. Smaller countries can do it faster because there simply isn’t as much to do. Which is frustrating, because we’re seeing the arms race become like a dead heat. Not because we don’t have the tech, which we do, but because of the logistics involved. And there are so many different kinds of tech — hardware and software — on any given ship, tank, plane, whatever, that we’re also losing operational efficiency because these systems were designed by the lowest bidders and not built to work in peak harmony with other tech. You following, Joe?”

“Running with a limp, but yeah.”

“Since it’s faster and cheaper to install new software than to replace hardware, the Holy Grail of this whole process has been to develop a new kind of artificial intelligence that can recognize disharmonies between existing tech and write its own code for a workaround so that all software works in harmony.”

“Wow. Sounds a little like MindReader.”

“Similar design theory. A chameleonic system that creates a harmonic alliance with disparate systems.”

“Wait,” I said, “I think I actually understood that whole sentence.”

Church shook his head and tapped crumbs from his cookie.

“Until a few years ago,” continued Bug, “that master AI program was a pipe dream. Then someone figured it out. Aaron Davidovich, remember him?”

“Sure, the guy who was snatched in Ashdod a few years ago. Don’t we think he’s dead?”

“Probably,” said Bug.

“Tell me again why we think that.”

“Because,” said Church, “if he was in captivity, there is a high likelihood that he would have been compelled to complete his design work for a foreign power or to build something new. In either case, his designs are so unique and advanced that they would have his fingerprints all over them. So far, nothing like that has appeared.”

“So, he’s probably dead,” said Bug. “Point is that Davidovich’s research was already being developed for active use by his team at DARPA. He called it Regis, but really it’s three integrated combat systems and one alternate-use system. The first one, code-named Enact, was designed as a smart system backup for manned craft, mostly for instances when the pilot is incapacitated. That one will even try to land a plane — or ditch it safely — after a pilot has ejected. Enact will also interface with the avionics and weapons control systems in the event the pilot is doing something else. One scenario would be a pilot who is injured from battle or midair collision damage and needs to do immediate first aid like stopping arterial bleeding or reconnecting ruptured oxygen. Enact continues to fly the plane and will even, to a limited degree, attempt to complete the mission. It can be deliberately initiated by the pilot, remotely initiated by a ground station via satellite, or switched on if the jet’s internal diagnostics deem it critical.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Then there’s ComSpinner,” continued Bug. “That’s a true high-end, self-guidance system. This is the one they’re installing in missile systems and automated combat satellites. Mostly the weapons are controlled from live operators, but in the event of a catastrophe like the destruction of the command center, the AI will continue to fight the battle.”

“Um … that’s kind of cool, and kind of sick and twisted.”

Church merely smiled.

“The third program,” Bug said, “is BattleZone. That’s your true combat AI. It’s what we’re putting into drones that we need to operate outside of the range of human control or that are in the presence of jammers that would interfere with remote controls. For countries that can’t afford a drone program, developing long-range, high-tech jammers is a growth industry. BattleZone is also being installed into fighters like the QF-16s, the QF-16X Pterosaur superdrones, and a few other birds. There’s even a DoD group in Washington State working on adapting it to a bunch of Apache helicopters so they fly missions without human pilots.”

“Oh, swell.”

“Tell him the truly disturbing part,” said Church.

“Wait — that isn’t the disturbing part? Self-guiding warplanes?” I said weakly.

“Ah, well, that’s the problem with modern cutting-edge tech,” said Bug. “There’s always something creepier in development. That’s where we come to the alternate-use system. It’s called SafeZone.”

“I can’t wait to hear this.”

“Because of 9/11 and other hijackings, the Department of Defense is working with Homeland and the FAA to install SafeZone, which is a version of BattleZone, into every passenger jet. They’ve been doing it on the sly, supposedly so hijackers won’t know it’s there, but really it’s because they know there’d be public pushback.”

“Why install a battle program? I don’t get it.”

“It’s not exactly the same system,” Bug said quickly. “Say a plane deviates unexpectedly from its course. The assumption is either mechanical problems or hijacking. If the pilot is still in control, SafeZone requires him to enter a reset code within two minutes. If he doesn’t — if, say, he’s been hijacked — then SafeZone locks out the controls and flies the plane. It interfaces via coded link with air traffic controllers working for Homeland. The program will land the plane at whatever airfield Homeland dictates.”

“That actually doesn’t suck,” I said.

Bug sighed. “There are countermeasures built into the system. This isn’t public knowledge yet, and probably won’t be unless it gets leaked. Or unless there’s a technical glitch and it fires accidentally. Planes like Air Force One can deploy external countermeasures like flares to attract heat seekers. But SafeZone has internal countermeasures. It can modulate temperature and airflow inside the cabin.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s supposed to limit the actions of hijackers without endangering innocent passengers. They wanted to install some kind of knockout gas, but that didn’t fly. There would be lawsuits.”

“There’s going to be lawsuits anyway,” I growled. “This is a bullshit idea.”

Church nodded. “It has some obvious advantages, but there are too many holes in the operational philosophy. Typical of something designed by engineers at the behest of Congress but without the input of people experienced in the variables of field application.”

“What he said,” agreed Bug.

“I’m no technophobe,” I said. “I love my gadgets — kind of — but giving over that much control to a bunch of ones and zeros does not seem like a particularly bright idea.”

“Not even to me, and this stuff’s kind of my religion,” said Bug.

Church shook his head. “It’s typical of a certain mind-set in both Congress and the military, where an improperly considered response is used because it’s either quicker, faster, or cost-effective. Though, in this case, many of the contractors are tied to corporations and persons who have powerful lobbies. They are owned by companies that make sizable and regular campaign donations.”

“Leaving working schlubs like us to clean up the mess when it goes wrong,” I said.

Church smiled. “That is as workable a description as I’ve heard for the DMS charter.”

I chewed on what Bug had told me. “This is what Davidovich was working on when he went missing? This weapons system?”

“It’s not a weapons system in itself,” said Bug. “It’s only a piece of software that makes everything work more smoothly and efficiently. Something that gets all of the other bits of software that have been designed by, like, a thousand other people over the last forty years to talk to each other. Or, maybe, to put it better, it lets all the software talk in the same language. Once the complete installation is done, it’s going to upgrade U.S. military efficiency by something like twenty-six percent.”

Church said, “You see now why they moved forward with this?”

“Right,” I said reluctantly, “it puts us back in front of the arms race.”

“Way out in front,” said Bug.

“Tell me, though, how thoroughly have they tested this stuff? I mean, what’s the margin for error in field tests and—”

Church sighed.

Bug said, “It’s been running at a field-efficiency rating of 99.001299 percent.”

I stared at him. “That’s…”

“Impossible? Pretty much. But we, um, borrowed a copy of Regis and ran it through MindReader. And I mean really ran it. It came up one hundred percent every single time. Joe, this is really amazing software. This is why everyone said that Davidovich was the Da Vinci, the Einstein, the Hawking of computers. No one — and I mean no one anywhere — has ever come up with anything half as good as this.”

“Not even you?”

“Hey, I’m good, Joe. Maybe the top twenty in the world—”

“Top three,” said Church quietly.

“But Davidovich was way, way out in front of all the rest of us. Guy was a social ground sloth and kind of an asshole to talk to, but he was the best of the best of the best. And Regis is work he started but didn’t complete. Imagine what he would have come up with if he hadn’t been killed.”

“Yeah, I am imagining it, and I don’t like it,” I said. “I distrust perfection except in baseball pitching, craft beer, and short skirts. Otherwise … there’s always something bad waiting to happen.”

“You ever talk to Rudy about that paranoia?”

“Sadly,” said Church, “Captain Ledger is frequently correct in his distrust of perfect models. How many times have we encountered a team who has bypassed unbreakable security? Or hacked untouchable defense computers?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Bug dubiously.

“Could someone have stolen Regis? Or made a copy and then used it to control the drones at the ballpark?”

“That’s almost impossible,” said Bug. “All copies of Regis are stamped with individual ID codes, and all copies are accounted for. And each individual software install has a built-in self-delete subroutine in case one of the planes or tanks falls into enemy hands. If anyone tries to copy or download it without the right permission codes, the CPU erases everything. Davidovich wouldn’t have had either the erase or command codes, and even if he had, they’d have been changed the day he went missing, just as all of his DARPA remote-access and Web passwords were changed.”

“Come on, Bug,” I said, “Davidovich invented this thing, right? You telling me he couldn’t have built in a trapdoor?”

“Back door,” corrected Bug. “Sure, that’s possible, but DARPA’s had years to look for it, and they haven’t found anything.”

“Maybe,” I said, taking a fresh swing at it, “if he’s still alive, couldn’t someone have forced him to re-create it for them?”

“Hey, Joe,” said Bug quickly, “if you’re asking if he could sit down and rewrite the entire Regis software package for someone else … then, no, that’s crazy talk. Davidovich had fifty-some engineers working on different parts of it. We’re not talking something you can upload with a CD-ROM. This is a massive program. The installation process alone takes specialized training. I don’t think Davidovich could possibly rebuild all of that by himself. Second, even if he did, it wouldn’t be exactly the same, and DARPA spent three years on it after Davidovich was gone. It’s not the same program.”

“Okay, one last thing, and then I’ll let this go,” I said. “About a year before Davidovich was taken, there were two computer experts killed down in Texas.”

“What about them?” he asked.

“What if someone had all their research and a living, breathing Aaron Davidovich — what would that do to our Vegas odds?”

Church was silent, considering it.

Bug said, “Oh. Wow. Yeah, I see where you’re going with that. But those guys were killed, not abducted.”

“Their research could have been stolen,” suggested Church. “There was some indication of it, I believe.”

Bug hit some keys to look something up. “Yeah, okay, maybe. Their laptops were found in the ashes, but by that point they were melted slag. Someone could have swapped out their computers for dummies before the place was torched. It’s what I would do.”

“Give us a worst-case of how their research could be applied by a well-funded terrorist organization,” I asked. “Like, say, the Seven Kings.”

“Geez, talk about a can of worms. Milo Harrison was the deputy department chair of applied robotics, and the applications he was developing were the next couple of generations of mechanical autonomy. He had two DoD contracts tied, including the Regis project. He was a hardware guy, though. Integrative adaptive systems. That’s intended to allow multiple autonomous systems to work at maximum efficiency while conserving stored power. A lot of microminiaturization stuff for switches and relays. That was four years ago, and a lot of what he was developing is already in use on just about everything from the latest Apache helicopters to automated systems on submarines. Everyone uses Harrison’s stuff because it smooths out the physical application of software commands. Almost zero lag time between order and execution.”

“What about the other guy?”

“Professor Harry Seymour was chairman of the school’s experimental aeronautics department. Not as much of his stuff is in application, though there are bits of it in BattleZone and in nonmilitary variations like SafeZone. A lot of his research was folded into all three of the Regis software packages. Like I said, pretty much every automated manned combat, flight, or UAV system we have uses one or all of them. And SafeZone’s showing up in CCTV cameras, new versions of OnStar, autonomous parking programs for passenger cars. Self-drive trains. Man, it’s everywhere. This is the age of autonomy.”

“That’s hardly comforting, Bug.”

“You asked.”

“Okay. Now mix Davidovich into that soup. Could any combination of their knowledge be used to take control of one of any of our drones, or anything with Regis in it and turn it against us?”

“Yes,” Bug said with hesitation.

Church said, “I can see where you’re going with this, Captain, and it certainly gives one pause, but we have no indication at all that this is what we’re seeing. It doesn’t tie into the ballpark.”

“Maybe not directly,” I said, and sighed. “But why would we be talking about this if we weren’t all thinking that Regis in the wrong hands could be very damn scary?”

Neither of them commented.

“What happened at the park? That could be the Seven Kings testing out some new toys.”

Church sighed. “Fair enough. Bug, tell him the rest.”

“What ‘rest’?” I asked.

Bug gave me a truly disturbing little smile. “The really scary part.”

Chapter Fifty

The two forensics collections technicians who followed Jerry Spencer around the ballpark were both professionals, both top of their game. The woman, Gina Robles, had spent the last sixteen years working with the NYPD and was heading up her own division when she was offered a better job with the DMS. Her partner, Laurence Hong, had been with the FBI for eleven years before getting the call. Neither of them held expectations of being lackeys for someone else.

Both had become just that.

It wasn’t the official designation, of course. Both of them had impressive titles, breathtaking salaries, nice offices, killer benefits packages. The works. Each of them even had their own teams, ranging from secretaries to dedicated lab technicians to field techs. Each of them believed — truly believed — that they could run the DMS forensics shop.

Just not as well as Spencer.

It’s never a fun thing when an expert meets a genius. Robles and Hong talked about it over cocktails quite often.

“This must be what it feels like to be Inspector Lestrade,” said Robles one night as she toyed with the olives in her martini. “You know, the cop who’s in all those Sherlock Holmes stories.”

“I know who Lestrade is, Gina,” complained Hong. “He’s a fucking idiot.”

“No, he’s not. That’s the point. He’s a good cop. A solid investigator. But…”

She left the rest hang that night, but it was a conversation they returned to in one form or another a hundred times.

Now, they trailed the genius and kept looking for something useful. Something that would break them out of the lackey role and remind Spencer that they were every bit as valuable as he was.

It was Robles who spotted it.

Down on the field near the pitcher’s mound. Explosions had thrown debris all the way out here from the stands. Broken and partially melted chairs, shattered concrete, torn and bloody clothing, a baseball bat, trash. Ambulance crews were removing tagged bits of red meat so ragged that they would require lab analysis to identify which parts of what kind of body they came from. Male, female, young, old. As Spencer, Hong, and Robles passed by, heading toward a spot where a piece of what could be a control circuit had been spotted, Gina Robles saw something.

It was broken and covered with brick dust, but it was there.

“Wait,” she said, touching Hong’s arm. “What’s that?”

They both stopped, looked down. Their hearts jumped a gear at the same moment. Robles knelt and leaned forward, studying the shape that was almost completely hidden by dust and bits of rubble. Almost.

But not entirely.

“Jesus Christ,” said Hong, who stood behind her. “Holy Jesus fuck.”

Robles immediately turned, cupped her hands around her mouth, and yelled at the top of her voice.

“Jerry!”

Chapter Fifty-one

“It gets scarier?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me that the drones at the park were using a proprietary military program?”

“Not exactly,” said Bug. “If that was the case, we could probably backtrack those drones to where the software was stolen from. No, it’s trickier than that. After Regis was developed and sold to the military, DARPA licensed a stripped-down version of it for sale to commercial markets.”

“What? Why?”

“Money. Piles of it. I mean, are you kidding me? Drones are so hot right now. Everyone wants them, and hundreds of companies are building them. It’s a growth market worth billions, and it’s only going to get bigger.”

“And the FAA and FTC have been fighting this every step of the way,” I said.

“Fighting and losing,” said Church. “Though they thought they’d won a major battle when Congress decided that all drones need to have a reset subroutine that can be activated in case of illegal misuse.”

“Right,” said Bug, nodding emphatically.

“I’m not following,” I admitted. “You’re saying DARPA gave them Regis?”

“They gave them a version of it,” said Bug. “A fragment. Actually, it’s a commercial version of BattleZone that’s been retooled for nonmilitary use. It would allow civil authorities to take operational command of a commercial drone under certain specific events. Homeland worked out the details.”

“That’s not necessarily a good sign,” I said.

“Hardly,” said Church. “Bug and his number two, Yoda, were able to crack the security in under ten minutes. They could take over any drone licensed for business or private use.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Which means,” said Bug, “that if we can do it—”

“Yeah, yeah. The Kings and everyone else can do it.”

“Well,” Bug said diffidently, “the talented people could do it.”

“This is nuts. If those drones have Regis, can we track it to point of sale?”

Bug laughed. “Right now, just about everything has Regis. Every jet, every submarine, every tank has the full military package. All commercial drones have the stripped-down SafeZone. And just about every single drone on the shelves at BestBuy, Target, Walmart, Sears, and Brookstone. Hell, Costco has them. Regis is everywhere.”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

Chapter Fifty-two

Church said, “Captain, tell Bug about how the drone evaded the bottle.”

I did.

“Weird,” Bug said, frowning. “That’s too fast for pilot handling.”

“What does that tell us? Is that the commercial version of Regis?”

“Definitely not,” said Bug. “I’m not even sure it’s the full military version.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well … the software used for some drones has a react-respond subroutine, but it’s designed specifically for the bigger UAVs. Raptors, predators, and the retrofitted QF-16’s target drones, and the experimental QF-16X Pterosaur combat drones. Haven’t seen it on anything as small as a pigeon drone.”

“Could it be done? Adapted, I mean? Is that possible?”

“Just about anything’s technically possible, just not probable. But … to clarify,” Bug said, “is there any chance someone on-site was operating it? I mean, right there in the hall with you?”

“No way to know, but I doubt it. There were plenty of Kings goons in the building, but I didn’t see anyone in what you’d call line of sight.”

“Besides,” said Church, “there would have had to be someone operating each of the drones for that scenario to work. We’d have had some eyewitness accounts, and there has been nothing like that. No, I think Captain Ledger’s assumption is correct. This was the drone itself reacting.”

Bug whistled. “That’s awfully fast. That’s like animal-kingdom fast. Wasp-reaction speed, at least. Perception, threat assessment, and action in a microsecond? Damn. If we’re not talking RPA — remote-piloted aircraft — then we are talking some serious software.”

“How serious?” I asked.

He sucked a tooth for a moment. “Not … sure. From what you described, that pigeon would have had to be operating using adaptive-control techniques. We’re talking software that would allow the drone to learn on the, um, ‘fly’ and then strategize based on acquired data and ongoing variables.”

“Can it evade attack?”

“Up to a point. AI software in the Predator drone is adaptive, and this seems to be, too, but it’s not reacting in the same way. Regis is pretty much the cutting edge as we know it.”

“One way or another,” I said, “the drones at the park had to be using some version of BattleZone, right?”

“You’d have to know computers and AI to understand why I don’t think so, Joe.”

“Then give me the short-bus version.”

“Well, you have to start with the nature of UAVs and the software that runs them. There’s a difference between an unmanned aerial vehicle following a preset computer program and something that actually thinks for itself. Most of what is called self-guiding software isn’t really. Mostly it’s programming that allows for a lot of obvious choices. It’s task-driven. Stuff like fly here, drop this, whatever. That’s nothing really new. I have a Rumba in my apartment that follows a set of programs to clean my rugs. And it has sensors that allow it to perform simple react-and-respond functions like not hitting walls and adjusting suction for carpet and hardwood. But that’s not what you described, Joe. You said that it evaded an object thrown at high speed and then seemed to scan the crowd to assess the best possible attack vector. We could be talking AI complete here.”

“What’s that?”

“In the artificial intelligence field there are different classifications for function, for response, for problem solving, and like that. When a computer encounters a problem that it can’t solve — something that requires human intervention or cooperation — we call it AI complete. Or, sometimes, AI hard. This is when simple, specific programming algorithms aren’t going to get the job done. AI-complete problems crop up a lot when vision is required in order to understand a task. Camera lenses, even those that have thermal scans and that operate in a range of visual spectrums, still don’t do what the human eye and its nerves can do. Same goes with what programmers call natural language understanding. You can program a computer to understand anything in the dictionary, but it can’t interpret inflection, sarcasm, or other parts of human speech. Not yet. So, what you described is something a computer probably couldn’t deal with on its own. Selecting you as a threat, evaluating the potential personal harm of what you threw at it and reacting so smoothly, and then planning a counterattack.”

“Even at computer speed? I thought these machines could outthink us. Or close enough.”

“Ha! Computers don’t actually think as fast as humans. Not even close. Look, computers are calculators. That’s what they were designed to do. Every function they perform, from finding a Web site to playing a game is a mathematical process. This plus this equals that. Computers seem smarter because they can do a lot of calculations at high speed. Such high speeds that it looks like it’s doing a lot at once. But the human mind is the ultimate thinking machine. It does trillions of things at once. Everything from the release of hormones to regulating heartbeat to solving a Sudoku puzzle. All of the functions of cells and organs and proteins and all that organic stuff is happening simultaneously. Computers have been built to simulate that by performing calculations at such high rates of speed that it gets to the same result as fast or faster. But we’re not there yet. No computer, not even MindReader, actually works as efficiently as a human brain.”

“Oh,” I said, more than a little confused. “Are you saying it was pure AI or that AI-complete thing?”

“That’s just it,” Bug admitted, “I don’t know. It’s strange. If this is only the drone, then were not really talking about AI. Maybe what we’re talking about is actually AGI. Artificial general intelligence.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, for one thing, AGI doesn’t exist yet. It’s a hypothetical kind of artificial intelligence that is supposed to one day perform any task that a human being can perform. A true thinking robot or thinking computer. AGI is also known as full AI, and it’s a computer mind that crosses the line from ultrahigh simulation of the human mind to something that is a machine parallel. Something that can actually think for itself. Something sapient and sentient. Something that’s self-aware.”

“Bug,” I said, “I know that the drone evaded faster than it should have. So it’s either one of these self-aware computer systems or there was someone at the controls who had some spooky-fast reflexes. Not really crazy about either of those scenarios being the case.”

“No argument,” Bug said quickly. “Tough to know which one, though. Right now, the main focus of drone R and D is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. However, with the complexity of target acquisition in remote areas like, say, the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Mexico and down in South America, some generals at the Department of Defense have been putting pressure on the guys at DARPA to come up with AI programs that will allow an automated system that can select and eliminate its own targets.”

“How?”

“That,” said Church, “is the question at the center of the debate. The science is called neurotechnology. The argument for these kinds of machines is that they could be programmed with a specific set of the rules of war, which would include facial recognition and other identifying software that would allow the UAV to identify targets with a high degree of probability and then selectively remove them. It’s an attempt to realize true AGI and marry sentient computers to independently operating military machines.”

“You don’t sound like a fan,” I said.

“Hardly.”

“The conspiracists out there,” said Bug, “say that because the government has not officially sanctioned that kind of program, some black-bag organization went off the reservation and is funding it under the table.”

“I want to throw the name Seven Kings out here and see if anyone thinks they’re good for it.”

“It would take their kind of money,” said Bug. “We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars in R and D.”

“It’s in keeping with their level of sophistication, too,” agreed Church.

“Which,” I said, “makes me want to circle back around to the idea that someone has Aaron Davidovich’s research.”

Bug sighed. “That would seriously suck.”

“The other possibility we have to brace for,” said Church, “is that the Seven Kings have Doctor Davidovich himself.”

I nodded. “Which makes me wonder if we shouldn’t ask our pet tarantula about that.”

“Who?” asked Bug.

“He means Toys,” said Church.

“How would he know? Davidovich was taken a couple of years after Toys, um, had his change of heart. Or whatever.”

I made a rude sound that Church chose to ignore.

Church gave me a considering look, however. “It seems like a cold lead, but I’ll call and ask.”

Chapter Fifty-three

The gathered students and faculty members joined the president in a moment of silence. On the big screen that covered the rear wall, there was a live but silent feed of people standing vigil before a growing mound of flowers, children’s toys, and photographs.

The president raised his head and said, “Thank you.”

The quiet persisted, however. The hall was packed, and this gathering was as somber as the one on the screen. The continual flashes of the press cameras gave the scene a strange strobe quality that seemed to enhance the stillness rather than add an element of movement.

There were synched teleprompters on either side of the podium, but the president didn’t look at them. Instead, he gazed out at the sea of faces.

Finally, he nodded and began to speak. Ignoring the script. Speaking for once truly from the heart.

“I’m standing with you here,” he said slowly, “and together we stand with the families and friends of the people in Philadelphia who have suffered terrible losses. Just as all America has stopped to look east, to the birthplace of our nation and the cradle of our liberty.”

He shook his head.

“America is the most powerful nation on earth. In terms of our economy, our military, our potential. We all know this. The risk of being so strong, however, is that we sometimes fall into a dangerous complacency. We begin to believe our own fiction, our hype that we are not only unbeatable but untouchable.”

He paused and looked at the faces who watched him.

“After Pearl Harbor, when America was delivered a crushing blow in a cowardly sneak attack, we got up from where we’d fallen, we brushed off the dust, wiped away the blood, and stood together to rebuild, improve, arm, and react. We became the world’s first true superpower. And from then until the end of the twentieth century, we were that powerful. No one struck us. No blow landed on us.”

He shook his head again.

“And then on September eleventh, 2001, early in the twenty-first century, we were struck again. Not on an island thousands of miles away from the mainland. But we took an arrow to the heart. New York City. Hijacked planes flew across our skies and struck the World Trade Center. The Towers, symbols of American power, trembled and fell, and that sent a shudder of fear through the veins of this nation. Another plane hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a field, taking with it heroic citizens who, in the moment of crisis, stood together to fight back. On that terrible, terrible day, the belief that we could not be hurt was proven to be a lie we, in our vanity, told ourselves.”

He looked around.

“And what was our reaction? Did we lay down and give up? Did we lose hope in our strength? Did we lose faith in our God?”

He smiled. A small, sad smile.

“Of course not. We stood up again. Now — I will not discuss whether all of the actions we took in the wake of 9/11 were the appropriate ones. Second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking are for historians. When that happened, I was a small-town mayor making a run at the governor’s office. I was not called upon to vote for or against the policies of that time. It would be unfair of me to criticize anyone who had to think through their own shock and hurt in order to make a decision. No, I won’t throw that kind of punch.”

A fresh flurry of camera flashes bathed him in light.

“I am the president now. Today. And yesterday our country was struck again. Bombs were detonated at a baseball stadium in Philadelphia. Citizens — our fellow citizens — died. Many more were injured, some critically. This time, I must react. This crisis is mine. Possibly the defining moment of my presidency. I wish it could be different, that I would be offered a better choice. But one thing that the powers of the presidency does not include is choice. Not that kind of choice. This is mine, and I accept it. Now I must make decisions that will determine how America responds to this crisis. Tomorrow morning I will be in Philadelphia. I am in constant contact with all of the emergency-response teams and investigative agencies that are already on the ground.”

He leaned on the podium and stared into the burning lights of the press cameras.

“We don’t yet know who is behind this attack. I have placed all of the resources we possess — our military, our intelligence networks, our federal, state, and local law enforcement — to determining who is responsible. For now, those cowards are hiding from us. They will not be able to hide forever. They will not be able to hide for long. We will find them. We will learn who they are and where they are. And we will hunt them down.”

He spaced those last three words so that they hit like punches.

“Right now, this moment, I am speaking to the people who did this and to anyone working with them, helping them, or hiding them. Listen to me. Hear me. We are coming for you. Don’t think that you are too small to slip between our fingers. You are not. Don’t believe that you can hide. You cannot. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you can hide inside the borders of a sovereign nation, or that we will not cross those borders to find you. We will. I tell you now, before the people gathered here, before my fellow Americans who are watching, before the world, which has paused to listen, we will find you.” He paused and his lip curled for a moment, giving his face a feral cast. “America is coming for you.”

There was a moment when nothing happened.

Then thunder shook the hall as everyone leaped to their feet and applauded. The crowd shouted. They yelled. The flashes pulsed.

Every reporter began screaming questions.

The president of the United States stood there and glared, his face as hard and unforgiving as stone.

And then the tone of the audience changed. There was a moment when every reporter froze, most of them touched earbuds or pressed cell phones to their heads as they listened to something. Many of them stared into the glow of their smartphones or tablets. Eyes bugged wide, mouths dropped open.

Silence held the room in its fist for just over seventy-one seconds.

The president leaned toward his chief of staff. “Alice, what’s going on?”

She touched her own earbud, and her face went dead pale.

That’s when the reporters began raising their heads. They were like a pack of jackals who suddenly smelled blood in the air. Their eyes raised toward him, and the look the president saw on each face was filled with anger, hurt, outrage. And hate.

They all began shouting at once.

They actually rushed forward in a pack, and for a moment the president had the bizarre feeling that the crowd was going to fall on him, to drag him down and tear him to pieces. Everyone was screaming. Alice Houston was yelling at the Secret Service to get the president out of the room. Agents were closing in to body-block the president from the pack of reporters.

Through it all, two words kept slashing through the din. And as the president heard them, he understood.

And he realized that the world was going to catch fire.

Right now.

His world.

The whole world.

The two words were bin Laden.

Chapter Fifty-four

“If the Kings have Davidovich,” said Bug, looking genuinely scared, “then we also have to bear in mind that he’s had four years and an unlimited budget to develop his programs. Remember, Joe, he’s the Einstein of the computer world. And he knows his hardware, too. If he’s actually out there and he’s somehow working for the Kings? Jeez … Just knowing what I know about what he had on his to-do list scares the crap out of me.”

“You mean Regis?” I asked.

“No, I mean what he said he was planning to do after Regis was done.”

“I know I don’t want you to answer this, but … what was he going to do?”

“In his lectures and articles, he said that he was going to try and crack the science of building a quantum computer.”

I said, “I know I keep asking this, but … what is that?”

“I sent you a report on this three years ago.”

“Which, clearly, I didn’t read. Just bring me up to speed.”

“Okay, okay. Digital computers have memories made up of bits, right? Each bit represents either a one or a zero.”

“Yeah, I get that much.”

“No, let me finish. A quantum computer has quantum bits. These are made out of quantum particles that can be zero, one, or some kind of state in between. In other words, they can be both values at the same time. A quantum computer maintains a sequence of qubits. A single qubit can represent a one, a zero, or any quantum superposition of these two qubit states. A pair of qubits can be in any desired quantum superposition of—”

“Stop. I’m not following any of that. I have a head injury, son. Have a little mercy.”

Bug gave me the kind of pitying look highly intelligent people tend to give to the mentally challenged. Not mean, just exasperated. “Okay. Look, Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every eighteen months, so within a decade or so circuits will need to be on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale. So, the logical next step will be to create quantum computers, which would harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks. Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain calculations significantly faster than any silicon-based computer. Like insanely fast.”

“Sure, but how does that make for a more dangerous computer?”

“Because a normal computer has to go through all the different possibilities of zeros and ones for a particular calculation. But because a quantum computer can be in all the states at the same time, you just do one calculation, and that tests a vast number of possibilities simultaneously. That speed not only gets you a faster answer, it gets one based on better statistical probability of being the right one for your needs. Remember, we’re talking AI. You match the need for autonomous decision making in the field with a computer that can perform faster and with more creativity than your opponents and, well … you get the picture.”

“Okay, now you’re scaring me.”

“It gets worse. The biggest and most important potential use for a quantum computer would be its ability to factorize a very large number into two prime numbers. The reason that’s really important is because that’s what almost all encryption for Internet computing is based on. A quantum computer should be able to do the same kind of superintrusion stuff that MindReader does. And it would do it a whole lot faster.”

“Could it attack MindReader?” I asked.

Bug didn’t answer.

Church said, “Yes.”

I said, “Shit.”

“It could do worse than attack it,” Church explained. “It could hide from MindReader.”

The room seemed to be getting colder, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the thermostat. “Doesn’t that open the door to the possibility that the reason we haven’t been able to find anything about this is because a quantum computer is blocking our play?”

“That’s always been a potential danger,” said Church.

“Yeah,” said Bug. “But I don’t think we really have to worry about it yet. Some labs have already built basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations; but the common thinking around the computer geekverse is that a genuinely practical quantum computer is still years away. Decades.”

“Even if Davidovich is working on it with unlimited funds and a gun to his head?” I asked.

Bug chose not to answer that question.

“The drones at the ballpark,” I said. “How much of one of them would we have to recover in order to determine if it’s using a quantum computer?”

“A whole one. Undamaged.”

“Oh,” I said. “Crap.”

“Thanks, Bug,” said Church, and ended the conference. Before I could ask him any questions, his phone rang. He held up a finger to me as he took the call. He said very little, listened, and closed with, “Send it to Doctor Hu and let Bug know it’s coming. This is very encouraging. Good work and—”

He stopped abruptly, the other party clearly having hung up on him midsentence.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Jerry Spencer”

“Yes.”

“He hang up on you again?”

“He did.”

“He have anything?”

“It seems that he does, and we may have caught our first significant break. I know Bug will be happy.”

“What did he find?”

“A complete pigeon drone with its CPU intact. Someone apparently knocked it out of the air with a baseball bat, and that canceled out the detonation codes. Jerry said that the onboard computer looks like nothing he’s ever seen.”

“Are we talking a quantum computer?”

“Bug will tell us. It’s already on its way to him.”

“Maybe God doesn’t actually hate us,” I said.

Chapter Fifty-five

Rudy Sanchez haunted the cafeteria for a while, aware that Cowpers was loitering nearby. Never at the same table. Never actually next to him, even on an elevator. Rudy drank six cups of incredibly bad coffee and ate yellow lumpy mounds of hot mush that were supposed to be eggs. Then he went into the bathroom and threw most of it up.

He wasn’t sick, but his imagination was conspiring with his medical knowledge to conjure terrifying scenarios to explain what was happening to Circe. When he came out of the toilet stall, Cowpers was there, leaning against the closed bathroom door, blocking anyone else from coming in.

“You need me to do anything?” he asked. It was almost the only thing he’d said since meeting Rudy at the airport.

“N-no,” gasped Rudy. He lumbered to the sink and splashed handfuls of water on his face.

“You sure? I can get someone.”

“I’m fine.”

Cowpers nodded, folded his arms, and said nothing else.

Rudy leaned on the sink and for a full minute did nothing more complicated than breathe. When he raised his head and studied his face in the mirror, he saw a man who looked old and unfamiliar. His hair was tousled, droplets of water glistened in his mustache, and his eye patch was slightly askew.

Ay Dios mío, he thought. If I saw that face on the street, I’d cross to the other side.

He tried to smile at the joke, but the effect was ghastly.

Rudy straightened; took a long, deep, steadying breath; then spent a few minutes washing his hands and face, combing his hair, and straightening his clothes. It was odd to do all this with someone watching him, but he pointedly ignored the agent.

Then he stepped back from the image in the mirror as if he was backing out of a suit of clothes that didn’t fit. He turned and headed for the door, paused to allow Cowpers to open it for him. He did not look back to see if the man followed. Of course he did.

Rudy asked the first nurse he saw where the chapel was, and was given directions. It was only when he reached the small room that he stopped and faced Cowpers.

“I would prefer to go in there alone.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Make it happen,” said Rudy.

Cowpers studied him for a moment, though his face showed nothing of his thought process. Then he nodded, pushed past Rudy, and walked the length of the chapel, poked into the small confessional, and finally came out.

“It’s clear,” he said. “I’ll be right here. Call if you need anything.”

Rudy shook his head and went inside.

At first the chapel appeared to be empty. Then he noticed that a man sat to one side. He was small and dressed in black. As Rudy approached, he saw that the man wore a Roman collar.

A priest.

“Father?” asked Rudy quietly.

The priest looked up. He was a white man with a Mediterranean complexion, dark hair, and green eyes that were older than his face. Worldly eyes.

“Hello,” he said, smiling and rising. “May I be of some assistance?”

“I hope so,” said Rudy. “I could use someone to talk to.”

The priest gestured for him to have a seat. “This seems like a good place for a conversation. Please, make yourself comfortable and tell me what’s troubling you.”

“It shows?” Rudy said as he sat down.

“It shows.”

Rudy looked at the altar. There were items representing Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and some generic protestant iconography. A generic all-purpose hospital chapel.

“Are you a multifaith chaplain?” asked Rudy.

“I’m a priest. Several of us share this place.”

“I see.”

“Would you prefer to speak with someone else?”

“No, no, that’s fine. I’m Catholic.”

“Did you want to make a confession…?”

“No. Just to talk.”

The priest nodded encouragingly. “I’m a good listener.”

Without naming names or mentioning any connections to the DMS or the bombings in Philadelphia, he talked about the high level of stress in the work he and Circe were engaged in. He referred to her job as a consultant, which was true enough in its way. She consulted on the politics and theology of terrorism, with related observations on symbology and anthropology. Circe was a complex woman. Brilliant, multifaceted, and insightful. Rudy found it challenging to skirt around specifics, though. The priest listened patiently, nodding occasionally. He seemed too savvy to ask probing questions when clearly Rudy did not want to open certain doors. That kind of attitude made it increasingly comfortable to talk with him. Then Rudy circled around to Circe’s pregnancy and her collapse.

When he was finished, they sat in silence for a moment, both of them considering what Rudy had said and how he’d phrased it. In his own review, Rudy knew that he was being very careful in his word choices, building Circe’s collapse and coma into a temporary thing that would prove to be nothing of note and that had no dire implications for the baby or mother. He knew that if he’d heard a patient say this to him during a session, it would not come off as optimism but rather bald desperation, as a declaration made to try and convince the speaker by trying to convince the audience.

The priest clearly had the same thought. “And how do you really feel about what’s happened to your wife?”

Rudy almost blurted out more of the rationalization. Instead, he made himself take a moment. “I — don’t know what I feel.”

“Is that the truth?”

Rudy sighed and shook his head. “No … no, Father, it is not.”

The priest reached out and gave Rudy’s hand a squeeze. His hand was surprisingly strong, and his skin was oddly hot.

“No,” he said, nodding. “You’re afraid she’s going to die.”

Rudy almost jerked his hand away. “No,” he said quickly. “No, I don’t think that.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you afraid that she and the baby are going to die.” The priest continued to squeeze his hand. His skin was so hot that it burned. The contact was painful.

“Father … please, you’re hurting my hand.” He tried to take his hand back, but the priest’s grip was like hot iron.

The priest smiled at him. He had very white, very wet teeth. “You not only think they’ll both die,” he said, “you think they deserve to die.”

“No. Father, please…”

The priest increased the pressure of his grip. “You know they’re going to die, don’t you?”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, Doctor Sanchez,” said the priest. “Don’t you know it is a sin to lie to a priest? It’s a sin to lie in church.”

Rudy stared at him, suddenly very afraid. “How … how do you know my name?”

“You come to the house of God and you commit sins. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Father, I did not tell you my name. How do you know my name?”

“You told me, Doctor Sanchez. You told me your name.”

“I did not.”

“Oh — not today,” said the priest, squeezing so hard now that Rudy gasped. “You told me when we met before.”

“That’s a lie. We’ve never met before.”

“I warned you about being disingenuous.”

“No. Let go of my hand.”

“You don’t remember me, doctor?” The priest’s voice seemed to change. It slurred into a kind of southern drawl. But not a real one — a cartoon one. Like someone pretending to be southern. “Don’t you remember me at all? We had such a lovely conversation, oh yes we did. We spoke of many things. We spoke of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Surely you remember that.”

The light in the chapel seemed to shift and change, and with it the color of the priest’s eyes changed. They were no longer a medium green, but instead seemed to swirl with colors. Bad colors. Ugly colors. The green was now the sickly green of toad skin, and eddied with a fecal brown and infectious yellow. A sudden stink permeated the room. An outhouse stench of putrescence and human waste, of methane and sulfur.

Rudy recoiled and pulled furiously to free his hand, but the priest held on to it. Easily. With no visible effort, even though he was much smaller and slighter than Rudy. The heat of his touch increased, and now Rudy could feel his flesh begin to blister. Steam rose from between the priest’s fingers. The pain of that burning grip was intense.

“I weep for you,” said the priest. “I deeply sympathize. To lose everything that you love. To have them taken from you so cruelly, so completely. How will you ever survive it? How will you live, Doctor Sanchez, when your whore and that insect that curls asleep in her womb have turned to rot and ashes?”

Rudy’s cane was hooked over the back of the pew, and he snatched it up with his free hand, raised it, and brought it whistling down on the priest’s forearm. The shock of that impact was incredibly, insanely powerful. Pain shot like electricity through Rudy’s wrist and up his arm, and his hand spasmed open. The cane rebounded and flew from Rudy’s hand, falling with a clatter on the seat of the pew.

The priest looked at the hand-carved cane. He bent and sniffed at the wood, then winced and swatted it away from him as if it was something vile.

“Hawthorn and silver,” he said. “You must think I’m a witch. Or a vampire.”

He opened his mouth and laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

As he laughed, his mouth seemed to open wider and wider. Far too wide. And that laughing mouth was filled with far too many teeth.

Rudy screamed.

The shriek was torn from deep inside his chest, and it boiled out of him to fill the chapel. On the altar, the silver crucifix toppled and fell so that the dying Jesus landed on His face. The flickering lights of the candles were instantly snuffed out.

Rudy felt himself suddenly falling.

Backward, out of the pew.

Onto the floor.

His hand slipped free from the priest’s burning grip.

His head struck first the edge of the seat and then the floor, each blow feeling as hard as a kick. Lights detonated in Rudy’s eyes, and the whole of reality seemed to cant sideways and fall off its hinges.

He tried to call for Cowpers. He couldn’t understand why the agent hadn’t already burst into the room. But the man did not come. Instead, Rudy lay sprawled and helpless as the little priest bent over him. Those strange, strange eyes seemed to glow as if lit from within. Lambent and so wrong. The priest reached out and caressed Rudy’s cheek with the familiarity and intimacy of a lover.

“Listen to me, Rudolfo Ernesto Sanchez y Martinez,” the priest said in an accent unlike either he had previously used. This was the creaking voice of an old man. Dry and dusty and filled with malevolence. “We have met before, and we are ill met now. We will meet one more time, and it will be on the day of justice, when the conquerors are conquered and those who steal the blood of the earth are brought low by their own greed and hubris. Then I will come and take everything you love and leave you with bones and dust.”

Rudy cringed back in horror. He beat at the priest’s face and felt his hand bones crack and the skin of his knuckles split, but he did no damage to the man — to the thing — that crouched over him.

“What are you?” cried Rudy.

In answer, the priest bent closer still and, with his hot, wet tongue, licked Rudy’s face. First his chin, then over Rudy’s lips and nose, up his check, over his one good eye, through the bristle of his eyebrow, and up his brow to his hairline.

“The whore and the maggot are mine, doctor. Mine. There is nothing you can do to save them.”

Rudy Sanchez screamed.

The priest straightened and stood over him.

“They are mine.”

He raised his foot, and, though Rudy tried to turn away to protect his face, the heel filled his vision as the priest stamped down.

Everything went black, and Rudy felt himself falling.

He never felt himself land.

Chapter Fifty-six

The president of the United States wanted to hit someone. Anyone. It didn’t matter to him. He sat in a stuffed armchair, fists balled in his lap, jaw clenched, his people clustered around him as they all watched his political world come crashing down.

Even though he had not been president when Osama bin Laden — through his involvement with both al-Qaeda and the Seven Kings — had sent planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, this was on him. Even though he had not been president when SEAL Team Six breeched the compound in Abbottabad and killed the man everyone believed to be bin Laden, this was on him.

It was all on him.

He was the captain of the Titanic, and the ship had just hit the iceberg.

The so-called Friends of the Truth had fired their shot.

They had released the video from the DMS hit on the Resort. Seventy-one seconds that showed three big men in the distinctive black clothes of covert special ops standing around the nearly naked and thoroughly abused corpse of Osama bin Laden.

Already, news channels were using facial recognition software to confirm the identity of the dead man. The video footage was in ultra-high-definition, which allowed them to focus tightly on the smallest mole and scar. On the shapes of the nose, ear, eye, and mouth. On the precise distances between the landmarks of that hated face.

Experts were being added to the hysterical conversation. Everyone was on the same page.

This was Osama bin Laden.

They could see this corpse.

No one had seen the body of the man killed in Pakistan. The corpse had been mangled by gunfire, bagged, shipped, and then buried at sea. All of the conspiracy theories that had begun burning after Abbottabad now caught like brushfire, the flames driven by winds of doubt and what seemed incontrovertible proof.

The chief of staff and the top advisors were bent together in a cluster, firing verbiage back and forth, trying to construct a response that would not put them all on the public chopping block, not to mention the unemployment line.

“Fix this,” muttered the president. Everyone looked up at him, and for a moment the only sound was the chatter from the TV. The president repeated it. Again and again. Whether he was talking to his staff or himself was unclear.

Chapter Fifty-seven

Boy sat alone in the cabin of the Boeing 747–8 VIP. The cabin was a demonstration of absolute excess and vulgar luxury on an aircraft with a sticker price over $230 million. Boy did not need or even enjoy such luxury. Her tastes were simple, but this was the closest Kings jet available at an airfield outside the Philadelphia no-fly zone. She’d driven to Virginia to catch this flight.

The jet had once belonged to Hugo Vox and was one of three different ultra-high-end aircraft that still remained in the inventory of the Seven Kings. She looked around at all the wasted space. At the piano and winding staircase and heavy furniture. All of it requiring so much fuel to lift. Thirty thousand per trip, minimum.

Now the jet shot through the American skies.

There was an elaborate computer setup aboard the plane with a big high-end, flat-screen TV whose display was broken into several smaller windows. One window was a continuous feed from the ballpark in Philadelphia. Another looped the president’s speech and the resulting hit of the full bin Laden video file. A dozen smaller screens showed the media firestorm that had resulted, including footage of riots in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon. Another cluster of windows showed a burning house in Fort Myers, Florida, a townhouse in Brooklyn, a hospital in San Diego, a house in Chula Vista, and other locations. Some events were past tense. Others were in progress. Everything was running according to a timetable that no longer needed her oversight. No orders needed to be given. Not for this phase. From here, it was the great machine of the Seven Kings grinding away the old version of the world to make room for whatever was next.

After the fires and explosions.

After the deaths.

After the chaos.

The jet flew on through sunlight and clouds.

She wondered how long it would be before no planes flew over this country anymore?

Soon.

So soon.

Chapter Fifty-eight

“Will you need me, Auntie?” asked the DMS agent as he held the door open for his boss.

Aunt Sallie shook her head. “No, that’s okay, Tank. Just want to grab a change of clothes. I’ll only be a minute. Go wait in the car.”

Tank, who was a tall, wide, muscular man with no visible neck and the cold eyes of a reptile, nodded. He was one of three agents on permanent detail to protect the woman who was second in command of the Department of Military Sciences. He’d worked for her since the DMS scouts recruited him from the army military police. Tank’s partners, Colby and Kang, were on the street. Colby stood by the open door of the Escalade, her humorless face turned toward the foot traffic. Kang was looking at the traffic. Every few moments, they would shift position to check the other direction, overlapping their line-of-sight surveillance.

“I can carry the stuff for you,” offered Tank.

“And I can carry it my own damn self,” she fired back. Aunt Sallie was in her midsixties, short, heavier than she used to be, but still capable of pulling a suitcase. “Now go down to the street like a good dog.”

Tank did not take offense. He was too practiced at working this detail. No one made the cut for Auntie’s team unless they had thick hides, a balanced ego, and the ability to keep their opinions and reactions to themselves.

“Of course,” he said.

Once, when he first joined the detail, he’d made the grave mistake of calling Auntie “ma’am.” She had promised to kneecap him if he ever — ever — called her that again. Not only had her glare been convincing, Colby and Kang, who were already on the detail and who stood behind Auntie, shook their heads in warning and silently cut their hands back and forth across their throats. The look of alarm on their faces was eloquent, and Tank was quick-witted enough to jump in the right direction when he thought there was a land mine.

He waited until she was inside the townhouse, then retreated down the steps to stand on the pavement. He would not wait in the car.

Inside her home, Auntie tossed her keys on the table by the door, picked up the mail from the rug and threw it in on the couch without looking at it, and headed upstairs. Her house was lovely, understated, nicely appointed, and virtually unused. Most of the time she slept in her suite at the Hangar, the main DMS headquarters buried under a hangar at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. But she’d been there for three days straight now, and she needed fresh clothes and a few of her prescriptions. Valsartan for her blood pressure. Celebrex for her arthritis. Extra syringes and insulin for her diabetes. It annoyed her to be a slave to both age and medicine, but there wasn’t much she could do about either. Well, maybe she could cut down on the sweets and lose a few pounds. But, as she often said to her doctor, fuck it. Life was too short to live small.

She stood for a moment at the base of the stairs, listening to the quiet. It was nice. And for her it was rare. The DMS was a loud place. Hundreds of employees, lots of machines, conversation, videoconferences. This place, though somewhat sterile, was soothing and quiet.

She sighed, rubbed her tired eyes, and began climbing the stairs. With the mess in Philadelphia now tied to the Seven Kings, she knew that once she got back to the Hangar, she’d probably be living there for at least a week. She hoped she had enough clean clothes.

The wall beside the stairs was lined with paintings. All original — some valuable, some not. Each was important to her, though. Not in terms of the art — something she understood but didn’t treasure — but because each piece reminded her of something. Or someone. The small Picasso litho midway up was bought after the death of her first husband. Simeon. Every time she passed it, Auntie remembered him and smiled. He’d been a man’s man. And an agent’s agent. An American version of James Bond. Suave, sophisticated, deadly as a pit viper. Great in the sack. He’d been part of one of the Deacon’s early teams. Way back when. But, sadly, he’d been ambushed in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Forty-nine bullets and a closed coffin. Simeon had loved Picasso.

The piece above that one was a framed piece of Nigerian beadwork. Another memory. Callisto. The entire time they were lovers, she hadn’t known his real name. She found out when the State Department told her he was dead. Anton Michael Gunn. A Scot who worked for MI6 and who died with a Russian bullet in his brain.

There were others. All tied to memories of people whose faces could never be put on her walls. Security, ethics, politics. They had to remain anonymous except inside her memories. The most bittersweet was the one at the top of the landing. A big framed piece with its own small light. A moody surrealist landscape in which nothing appeared to be present except dust blown by colored wind. To the discerning, attentive eye, however, there were shapes suggested by deft brushstrokes. Lions and prey animals, carrion birds and jackals. But you had to know how to see them. It was subtle and powerful. So powerful.

That piece was the only one that was not tied to a ghost.

The man was alive, but he was as unreachable as the surface of an alien world. A man who was layered in mystery, just as the theme of the painting was layered.

She paused, as she often did, and studied the painting, a faint smile on her lips that she was totally unaware of.

She did not speak his name aloud. Not even here. Not that she thought her place was bugged or that he was watching. No, her life was built around habits of good security. Repairing damage was not preferable when damage could be avoided.

So, she never spoke his name here.

Not his real name or any of the many names he used. Now and over the years. Instead, she sighed and reached out to touch the lion hidden by the swirling clouds of color.

She never heard the bedroom door open.

She never heard the silent footfall on the carpet.

She never knew how close to death she was until the point of the knife buried itself between her ribs.

Chapter Fifty-nine

I lay there like a lump while Church called Toys. Church put the call on speaker, and I heard both sides of the conversation. Toys’s voice was subdued, nearly uninflected. I could imagine why. After the fall of the Seven Kings and the destruction of the Red Order, Church had taken Toys on as some kind of project. He gave him access to a lot of the Kings money and encouraged him to do some good with it. Maybe it was some kind of social-engineering project. Maybe the big man liked to study insects. Not sure, and I don’t much care. If Toys stepped in front of a crosstown bus, I wouldn’t much care, either.

Perhaps I need to learn to be more forgiving.

Perhaps I don’t want to.

Toys represented the kind of human animal that was preying on the rest of the herd. I don’t bond with predators. Never have. My life was ruined by a gang of predators who raped my girlfriend and nearly beat me to death. If that’s made me unfair or intolerant, then fuck it.

Church had his own agendas, his own motivations. He thought Toys was worth trying to save.

Everyone needs a hobby.

On the other hand, some of what Toys was saying made me sit up and pay attention.

“I’ve been putting this all together. The drone attack at the ballpark in Philadelphia, the secondary set of bombs. That almost fits a pattern,” said Toys.

“What pattern would that be, Mr. Chismer?”

“It was something Hugo Vox had put together years ago. He was working on a way to follow up 9/11 and one-up the game. He wanted a bigger hit, with longer-lasting effects on the U.S. and world stock markets. He wanted to essentially crash the American infrastructure. At the same time, he wanted to disable the DMS via a series of attacks that would have an emotional impact on the key players.”

“You’re saying you knew of this plan and have waited until now to share it with us. I find that very interesting.”

“No,” Toys said quickly, “you don’t understand. This was something Hugo had wanted to do, but he’d shelved it because the rest of the Kings opted to go with the Ten Plagues Initiative instead. Hugo told us about it one night over brandy and cigars.”

“Us?”

“Well … Sebastian and me. Hugo was thinking out loud. Being expansive, the way he liked to do. Showing how easy it would be to work a big con on the rubes. His words. Hugo laid out exactly how it could be done using drones. And that was before drones were as sophisticated as they are now. Hugo anticipated their development, even estimating a timetable for it. He was brilliant like that.”

“Sing me his praises another time,” said Church. “Right now, I’d like you to tell me what he said.”

“Okay, but you need to understand that I don’t think anything was ever put into play, because it wasn’t long after that the Kings were torn down by your lot. And now Hugo and the other Kings are all dead.”

“Understood.”

“Well, Hugo said that a strike at a sports arena would be hugely successful. Security is never as good as they think it is. Materials and weapons could be brought in any of a dozen ways. Hidden in parts for an industrial air conditioner, for example. Like that. He said if you did it right and planned ahead, you could manage it quite easily. And then it would be a matter of picking the right event. Hugo favored baseball over any other sport because it’s known as the national bloody pastime. It’s more American than hockey. Even more than football, as he saw it. And opening day would mean a greater sentimental attachment and better media coverage. His second choice would be the World Series, but since you couldn’t know which teams would be playing, it would be more difficult to plan ahead.”

“I see,” said Church. “And it’s your opinion that someone has taken Hugo’s idea and put it into play?”

Toys laughed. Short and ugly. “Junie told me what you think of coincidences. I never thought much of them, either.”

“Is there anything else?” asked Church.

“Nothing specific, but … if someone’s taken Hugo’s idea, doesn’t that mean they have access to Seven Kings’ information? I mean, I know Hugo’s island was destroyed, but Sebastian and the others were clever bastards, and they were bloody paranoid. They could have made duplicates of their records, contacts, research … Someone could do a lot of harm with even a fraction of that.”

“Yes,” said Church dryly, “that had occurred to us.”

He glanced at me as he said this. I’ve spent a lot of the last few years of my life hunting down groups that had been using pieces of the Kings’ science and fragments of their infrastructure. They’re a bit like genital herpes. They never quite go away.

“Look,” said Toys, “I’m sorry that I don’t have something more concrete. I left that all behind, and Hugo shut the doors pretty heavily after the Ten Plagues Initiative. All I bleeding well have are suspicions and a few things I remember. Would you rather I didn’t call?”

“Of course not,” said Church mildly. “And we do appreciate this information. Truly. Did Hugo say how he planned to make that attack? Would he have used drones for this attack?”

“Not exactly. Not back then, anyway. Drones weren’t that practical back then. The technology’s come a long way since he told us about it, but he did say that one of these days drones would be the primary weapon of terrorism. He said that they’d be practical.”

“Practical,” echoed Church.

“His word.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chismer. Let me know if you remember anything else.”

He disconnected the call.

I glanced up at him. “And you’re absolutely sure Hugo Vox is dead?”

He didn’t answer. A few years ago, Church said that he’d personally killed Vox. I doubted Church would make a claim like that unless he was sure.

Even so, I felt like Vox’s ghost was standing just out of sight, laughing at us.

Chapter Sixty

“They’re bringing him up!” shouted Lydia, and immediately Junie and Toys burst from Circe’s room and ran to the elevators. The doors opened as they got there and a team of nurses and doctors came hurrying out, pushing a gurney on which Rudy Sanchez lay moaning and bloody. DMS Agent Cowpers was with them, his sidearm drawn but held down beside his leg. He stepped out and waved everyone back to clear the way.

“Rudy!” cried Junie, reaching for the injured man’s hand. Rudy flapped his hand at her, clawing the air as if trying to tear through some envelope of pain in order to reach her. Their fingers met, entwined, and then she was running alongside the gurney, holding his hand. They rushed to the empty ICU room next to Circe’s.

Lydia Ruiz and Sam Imura grabbed Cowpers and pulled him aside, and Toys was bemused to see that the agent was thrust against the wall with no more force than Lydia had used on him.

“What the fuck happened?” demanded Lydia. A nurse tried to tell her to watch her language, but Lydia fried her with a glare.

While Cowpers began recounting what appeared to be a contradictory story about an empty chapel and a surprise attack, Toys ghosted up to stand outside the ICU room. He watched as the medical team began examining Rudy. From what Toys could see, the injuries did not look too bad. Some cuts and bruises on his face and what looked like burns on his hand. But Rudy thrashed and moaned as if in great agony. It was clear that he was delirious and maybe on the edge of a psychotic break. His eyes were wild with shock or madness.

Junie tried to soothe him, and she had to fight to keep her place beside him. The nurses did not seem able to shake her. That amused Toys. He always liked Junie, but his respect for her strength was growing.

Fierce little bitch, he thought. A good match for that thug, Ledger.

Then his attention was torn away from thoughts of Junie, of Ledger, of anything. A word hung on the air as clearly as if it had been painted there. A word. A name. Something Toys heard only as an afterthought as Rudy Sanchez, in his delirium, mumbled it.

Toys reeled.

Rudy said it again.

And again.

That same name.

That dreadful, impossible name.

He watched Rudy’s bloody lips form it again. Speak it again.

“Nicodemus … Nicodemus…”

Chapter Sixty-one

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“For the moment, nothing. Because of your concussion, the doctors want you here for at least another day.”

“The doctors can kiss my—”

The door jerked open, and Brick hurried in without waiting. “Boss, turn on the TV. Shit is hitting the damn fan.”

I snatched up the remote and hit the button. It wasn’t necessary to ask Brick which channel, because there was only one story and it was on every channel. As soon as the screen came to life, we all looked into listless, dead eyes. The reporters were yelling. Actually yelling. They were that excited.

Brick and I looked at Church, expecting him to be as rattled as us. We should have known better. He sighed, removed his glasses, cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief, put his glasses back on, and then folded the handkerchief and tucked it neatly back into his jacket pocket.

“It is not generally my policy to say, ‘I told you so,’” he murmured, “but I did advise the president to disclose this and make a full statement to the nation.”

“Too late now,” I said.

“Yes,” said Church. “Months too late.”

“What’s going to happen?” asked Brick.

Church shook his head. “A witch hunt. And very likely criminal charges. The CIA in its present form will be finished. Done. There’s no way they can recover from this.”

“Will the president?” I asked.

Church gave a small shrug. “If he’d revealed this within hours of Echo Team hitting the Resort, he’d have come out of it as a hero. A sure thing for a second term. Now … his only chance will be to throw the CIA under the bus and hope that his delaying of this information doesn’t result in impeachment.”

“Will it?”

Church nodded. “Oh yes. He’s done, too. And the previous administration may face criminal charges. Some members certainly will, though some people may fall on their sword to keep the former president from having to take any direct blame. Plausible deniability is elastic.”

“Damn,” said Brick.

“What’s our play in this?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Our play? We have no play, Captain. We did a very specific mission, we accomplished as many of the goals of that as were possible, and we turned all of the evidence and materials over to the White House, the NSA, Homeland, and other relevant authorities. We were out of it once your team left the island. We have no part in this. And, quite frankly, I can’t waste much time on it. I made my recommendations when there was time to do this all the right way.”

He said it with a note of inflexible finality. Brick and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. He mouthed the words, “Oh boy.” Shaking his head, he went back out into the hall.

“Got to ask, though,” I said to Church. “What do you think of the timing of this? The video being released today, while all this is going on.”

“Seven Kings,” he said. “Without a doubt.”

“Is this the other shoe you thought they were going to drop?”

“Hard to say. It’s a considerable punch. There will be shock waves around the world. Embassies will need to be put on high alert, and some will probably need to be evacuated. We’re fortunate that the attack at the ballpark happened on a Sunday rather than a business day. The president was able to keep the market from opening. I only hope POTUS is cautious enough to keep the stock exchange closed for the rest of the week. This could crash the economy.”

I nodded. “But is this it? Is this the endgame for the Kings and does that mean we’ve lost the whole damn fight? The attack in Philly and then this to take down the president. I mean … this is bad. This could do more damage to the economy, world opinion, and our standing in the global community than the fall of any dozen towers. I’ve got a bad case of the shakes happening here because it looks like the Kings picked the kind of fight the DMS isn’t set up for.”

As if in answer, Church’s phone rang again.

He looked at the display and walked out into the hall to take the call. I could see him stiffen as he listened. Then he spoke very quietly for several minutes. His body looked incredibly tense. Beside him, Brick looked on with growing concern. Brick shot me a brief, worried look.

Few things worry Brick.

Church ended his call and spoke with Brick for a moment. Then the big soldier went hurrying off. I watched Church take a moment to compose himself before reentering my room. He is not a man who rattles easily. Or, like, at all. But he looked rattled now. You had to know him to tell, though. He came in and sat down, crossed his legs and drummed his fingers very slowly on his thigh. That’s his tell. He only does that when he’s been pushed out of his calm space. He does it very slowly and deliberately, as if each tap hammers another nail back into his calm. I said nothing, waiting him out, and dreading what he was going to say.

Finally he took a breath, exhaled, nodded as if agreeing with a thought. “That was Chief Petty Officer Ruiz. There has been an incident at UC Medical Center in San Diego. Doctor Sanchez has been attacked.” He held up a hand to stop me from jumping out of the bed. “Hear me out. Doctor Sanchez is alive and is not in danger. He has a concussion.”

“How’s that possible?” I demanded. “You told me you had a man on Rudy. Cowpers, right?”

“Agent Cowpers escorted Doctor Sanchez to a chapel at the hospital where Circe is staying. He cleared the chapel before letting Doctor Sanchez enter. However, he heard the doctor cry out. And when he went back into the chapel, he found Doctor Sanchez unconscious on the floor between two pews. He had been beaten by a man dressed as a priest. He has a head injury and some burns.”

“Burns?”

“On his hand.”

“Who did this?” I demanded. “Who the hell is this priest?”

“When he was brought upstairs, Doctor Sanchez was semiconscious and murmuring a name.” He paused to take a steadying breath. “Nicodemus.”

Chapter Sixty-two

The little camera on the wall of the black woman’s townhouse captured everything.

The silver flash of the knife as it moved.

The intense and lovely red of blood. Always darker than people expected. Rich.

The slithery sound of steel stabbing through clothes and deep into muscle and organs.

The piercing shriek of pain.

Boy watched it all and felt her pulse quicken. She felt herself get wet and ached to touch herself, to stroke herself to orgasm as the murder unfolded before her on the big-screen TV.

Chapter Sixty-three

“Taking a long time,” said Kang. “She’s usually in and out.”

“You want to tell her she’s wasting our time?” asked Tank.

Kang snorted. “No thanks. I like my nutsack attached, thank you. I was just saying—”

They suddenly turned at the sound of shattering glass. Tank’s gun was in his hand before he completed the turn, and he looked up to see the bloody figure fly outward from the second-floor window. It fell, trailing a comet’s tail of glittering fragments and shreds of curtain as Kang and Colby both cried.

The body slammed down on the roof of the Escalade with enough force to blow out the windows. Tank spun away, shielding his eyes from the safety glass.

“Auntie!” he bellowed.

The body had landed solidly and was sprawled like a broken doll in a crater of black metal. The head hung down over the cracked windshield. Eyes vacant, mouth open. Throat cut.

It was a man.

Had been a man.

Now it was meat.

Through the open second-floor window, Tank heard a shriek of terrible agony. And then two gunshots.

Tank charged up the steps and threw his shoulder against the door, which splintered inward with a huge crash. Colby and Kang were right behind him.

They almost tripped over the body at the foot of the stairs.

This one was a woman.

She wore black clothes and a ski mask. Her broken right index finger was twisted inside the trigger guard of a .22 automatic pistol. A knife was buried to the hilt in her eye socket.

There was a third shot from upstairs.

A fourth.

“Federal agents,” bellowed Colby, but Tank saved his breath for running. He jumped over the corpse and took the stairs three at a time. The entire second-floor landing was painted with blood. On the floor, on the walls, splashed over the big painting at the top of the steps.

There was a third body there. His arm jagged to the right, and a vicious compound fracture had sent the ends of his humerus through the meat of his biceps. His throat looked wrong. Flattened. As if the entire trachea and hyoid bone had been crushed.

The left-hand hall was empty. But a trail of blood led to the front bedroom, and inside were the sounds of a violent struggle. Screams and curses. Tank and the others barreled down the hall and burst into the master bedroom. Two figures stood locked in a deadly struggle. A man dressed in the same dark clothes as the other assassins, and Aunt Sallie.

Both of them were hurt. Both were bleeding. The handle of a knife protruded from Auntie’s lower back, and blood streamed from both nostrils and bubbled over her lower lip. She had one hand locked around the wrist of the man, and his hand held a smoking pistol; his face was a torn mask of ruined flesh. One eye was gone, burst and dripping, and his nose was shattered, but he had Auntie’s throat in his other hand and was driving her toward the smashed-out window. The figures were locked in a terminal dance.

Tank reached the man in two long strides. He grabbed the wrist of the gun hand and tore it out of Auntie’s grip, clamped another hand around the back of the man’s neck, and, with a savage grunt, dragged him backward. Tank lifted him into the air and slammed him down as he quickly knelt. The man’s spine struck Tank’s knee and broke with a sound as loud as any gunshot.

With a grunt of fury, he shoved the man aside just as Colby and Kang were lunging to catch Aunt Sallie before she fell out the window. Kang muscled in between them and scooped her up.

“Call 911!” he roared.

In his arms, Aunt Sallie’s face was knotted with pain.

Then her eyes rolled high and white and she went totally slack.

Chapter Sixty-four

The day was far from done with us. Just as Church finished telling me about Rudy, his phone rang again. I could tell that he didn’t want to answer it. His face was a stone mask.

He listened, and I saw the color drain from his skin.

It was bad. Worse than bad.

“Is she alive?” he said.

Those are not good words, no matter who they’re attached to.

She.

There are a lot of women in my life. In Church’s. All of them are precious. All of them, in one way or another, are family.

There was pain on Church’s face, in his eyes. He listened.

Then he said, “I am initiating a Level One-A-One security protocol. Alert all stations. Activate the Red Blanket. Do it now. Call me when it’s done.”

Church lowered the phone and sagged back.

“Christ,” I said, “what happened?”

He had to take a moment to collect himself. Whatever the news was, it was hurting him. “There has been another attack on our people,” he said in a ghostly quiet voice.

I tensed, actually gripping fistfuls of the sheets as if they could keep me braced for what was coming.

“Aunt Sallie is in critical condition with a knife wound to her right kidney,” he said slowly. He paused and pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting, getting a grip on his emotions. “The emergency surgeons are not optimistic.”

Chapter Sixty-five

“Your daughter,” said the Gentleman. “You know she’s totally daft, right?”

Pharos shrugged. “Look at us. How many people do either of us know who could be cited as a paragon of mental stability?”

The burned man thought about it. “Fair enough.”

After a moment, the Gentleman added, “She’s good, though. I’ll give her that. Mad as the moon, but she’s bloody good.”

Pharos smiled, his heart swelling with pride.

They watched the news stories tumble and spin.

A few small windows on the big screen were data feeds that provided text-message updates from field agents. Some of them even included digital images. They were every bit as entertaining as the news stories.

Below the cluster of windows was a stack of news crawls, each showing information from different markets. Not the American stock market, of course, which had been closed following the ballpark bombings, but real-time feeds from commodities markets around the world. Asia, the EU. Elsewhere. Even smaller markets controlled by China and Russia. Gold, wheat, pork bellies, orange juice, rice, technologies, pharmaceuticals. Many others. And oil, of course. Always oil. With each new story, each update from reporters who shared the latest death tolls, the prices shifted. Up and down, up and down.

Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman owned hundreds of people in the world markets. Commodities buyers and sellers who scrambled to find the profit foothold. Many people were panicking, thinking that another 9/11 was happening. Pharos had primed the pump with the release of the partial video; and now they let that engine run wild. The machine purred, and the product it manufactured was fear. No one wanted another Iraq, another Afghanistan. Not America or its allies. Not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, who, despite their bluster, had been devastated by the wars. America had withdrawn the bulk of its forces from Afghanistan and ended the thirteen-year-long war. No one wanted them to rearm and return. Especially not with their new generation of autonomous UAV weapons of war. Shooting down a drone doesn’t make the same kind of emotional statement.

So, the market shuddered and jerked as if continually punched.

With every staggering step, the brokers and bankers, buyers and sellers working for the burned man and Pharos made a profit. They bet on rises and falls, or steep swoops and terrified plummets. It was all a matter of being positioned long before the first tremor.

“As the American expression goes,” said Pharos, “buckle up. It’s about to get bumpy.”

There was a small sound from the other side of the room. A soft gagging sound. They turned.

Doctor Aaron Davidovich sat on a metal folding chair. Two broad-shouldered Blue Diamond Security men flanked him. Davidovich had one hand over his mouth and the other flat against his chest.

“Christ,” growled the burned man, “if you’re going to vomit, don’t do it in here.”

Davidovich’s face was the color of old milk, but he shook his head. The only sounds he made were tiny squeaks as his eyes darted from screen to screen to screen.

Pharos and the Gentleman exchanged a glance.

“I told you,” said the Gentleman. “I bloody well told you.”

Pharos raised both hands and made small pushing motions with his palms. “Wait, wait, let’s give him a chance.”

He got up and walked over to the scientist. Davidovich flinched back, but one of the guards clamped a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Shhhh,” said Pharos, holding a finger to his lips, “shhhh, it’s all right, my friend. You have absolutely nothing to fear from us. Nothing at all.”

“I–I — I’m not af-afraid,” stammered Davidovich.

“No, of course not. We’re all such good friends here. Everything is perfectly fine.”

Davidovich said nothing. He was sweating heavily and smelled sour and stale.

Pharos squatted down in front of him, still smiling warmly. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and looked at the screens behind him, then turned back to the scientist.

“Does all of that bother you?”

Davidovich said nothing.

“Does it?” prompted Pharos.

“N-no…”

“Doctor, please … if we can’t be frank with each other, then what do we have? Nothing. So, come now. There is absolutely nothing you can tell, nothing you can say that would offend or upset me. Truly, nothing.”

Davidovich said nothing.

“Doctor … listen to me and, please, hear me. I do understand what you’re going through. I am also a scientist. A doctor, not of computers. Of medicine, but even so. We are men of science. We were not trained for this. When we began our schooling, we did not have this in mind. I did not, and I’m sure you didn’t, either. Can we agree on that?”

Davidovich paused, then nodded. A small nod.

“We can also agree, I’m sure, that the view we held of the world when we were younger was much different from what the world actually is. Yes?”

Another small nod.

“Over the years, I became much less naive about the way things work. I looked at the play of politics. Right and left, one party and another, and I’m sure you know what I discovered when I stepped back to view it with perspective. There is no difference. Liberal and conservative, capitalist or socialist, first world or third. All of the rhetoric amounts to something less than a pile of old shit. We can agree on that. The promises of politicians has value only to them and the people who expect to benefit from seeing them get into office. The policies of governments are never actually for the betterment of anything but are truly only grunts of effort as they jockey for position and advantage in a giant global polo match. Even the so-called nonprofit organizations are either covertly funded by governments who want to exploit their access or resources, or they are even more naive than I was and are therefore inconsequential.”

Davidovich was listening. There was even a trace of a nod once or twice.

Pharos remained in a squat, positioned so that Davidovich was higher than him, ceding the nominal power within their shared envelope of confidence. It was a very useful trick. That and making statements laced with truisims tailored to encourage Davidovich to agree. It trained the scientist like a dog to agree and to feel powerful, moment by moment, because of those agreements.

“I did not set out to become a criminal, doctor,” said Pharos. “Truly I did not. Even now I don’t think of myself in that way. I don’t look into my shaving mirror and say, ‘You’re evil.’ Who does? A madman, perhaps? Or someone in a movie? No, what I see when I look in the mirror every single day and night is a man who has come to understand the way in which the world works, the structures that underpin what we call society, and the true meaning of our existence here. I know for a fact, from your reports, from what Boy has told me, from what you’ve done for us, that you see the same things when you look at yourself. You do not see a weak man. You certainly don’t see a failure. What you see, Doctor Davidovich, is a man who has awakened into the reality of this world. A man who has studied the systems, the blueprints, the schematics of society and decided that he would rather be a master of this game than merely a factor. You are not a subroutine of someone else’s game, Doctor. You are the game. You see that in the mirror. You look at that face, into these eyes, and you know the secret to winning this game. Because, oh yes, men like us have in fact discovered that secret. We know it and we act upon it. That secret, doctor, is power.”

Davidovich probably did not know he nodded. But he did.

“Power is what it’s all about. Money, of course, is the fuel that runs the great generator of power. Money protects us, it empowers us, it provides for us and those we love. Money is also the great truth serum. It opens hearts and minds. They say that everyone has a price. They do, that’s an old, old truth. If they have that price, then the so-called values and morals that they claim to prize are meaningless. If morality was a genuine and powerful thing, then there would be no price at all to make men turn away from it. And yet every man and woman knows that they would if the price was high enough. I did. Boy did. The Seven Kings did. Everyone who works for us and with us did. Just as you did, doctor, when you realized that you were not a captive … no, hardly that. You realized that your brain, your talents, your insight were all demonstrations of the vast power waiting within you.”

Pharos touched Davidovich on the chest and then on the forehead.

“In here and in here. So much power,” said Pharos, shaking his head as if in wonder. “So much more than anyone else you’ve ever met. Until now. Until you met my daughter, Boy. Until you came here to this island. Until you met the Gentleman and met me. And what does that tell you? What does it say that you are here with us? With us, you understand? Not a prisoner. Not some lackey. You are here, at this time, in this place, at this moment, with us. With the last of the Seven Kings and with the man who runs their entire operation. Two giants. And you … a giant as well. A towering intellect. A person who should not ever allow his genius to be contained or marginalized by lesser, jealous, weaker people.”

Davidovich was listening. And panting. His eyes were fever bright.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” said Pharos. “Tell me I’m wrong about you.”

Davidovich said nothing, but his lips were wet and parted.

“Tell me that you’re a small man, a lesser man, a weak man. Tell me that you’re incapable of embracing power. Tell me that you are unwilling to taste it. Tell me that you are not a giant. A legend.” Pharos bent closer. “A King.”

Davidovich’s fists were clutched into white-knuckled hammers on his lap. His mouth worked and worked and finally spoke a single word.

Pharos loved that word.

It was the only word he could hear, the only word he wanted to hear, the only word that he would allow. And so, to his ears and to the Gentleman’s, it was a word of beauty.

“Yes,” said Davidovich.

Chapter Sixty-six

DeNeille Taylor-Williams was on her exercise bike but her mind was racing far away from her house in Fort Meyers.

The bike, like the other gym equipment, the big-screen TV, and the whole house, was a gift from her son, Jerome. Known as Bug to her and everyone. He’d moved her out of the small house in which she’d raised Bug, asked her where she wanted to live, and then handled all the arrangements to move her to Florida. Bug’s stepfather, Terrence, had moved down here with her, though his health was bad and the good Lord took him last summer. DeNeille had grieved for him, but there were so many widows here in Fort Myers that she had a flock around her nearly all the time.

Bug, though, was rarely with her, and she missed him. Her son worked for the government doing something important and secret with computers. She didn’t know what it was, but the government must pay him very well. DeNeille never had to pay a bill, and Bug’s sisters were working on their advanced degrees on scholarships she was certain Bug had arranged.

The house, though, was quiet. DeNeille missed her husband, missed her daughters, missed her son.

As she pedaled the recumbent bike, she watched the travel channel and thought about where she would like to go. She’d never traveled with Terrence. He’d been a hardworking man who ran a dry-cleaning store, but right around the time he’d begun talking about retiring and going overseas with her, or on a cruise, the cancer had taken him. So fast. Too fast. The chemicals from the dry-cleaning. In May of last year, he was a two-hundred-pound man. Tall and proud. In August he was a stick figure who didn’t even know her name. Now his ashes floated on the waves, and DeNeille was alone with memories, money, and an empty house.

The show currently running was about the Viking Cruises. There was a woman at the hair dresser who’d been talking about taking one. Another widow. What would she think about taking a cruise together?

That’s when DeNeille heard glass break in the other room.

You get so you know what something is from the way it breaks. A falling vase sounds different from window glass.

This was a window.

She got off the bike and listened, but she did not immediately run into the other room. She’d spent too much of her life in neighborhoods where drive-by shootings were a fact of life. Her hand strayed to the locket she always wore. It was an Eye of Horus that Bug had given her a few years ago. Very pretty, very expensive, and very deceptive. The central jewel was actually a button. Like one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” devices, except this sent a signal to the people Bug worked for. He told her that it was a standard security precaution, though DeNeille knew plenty of other people who were family to government employees. None of them had something like that. Normally she scoffed at it even while making sure to wear it, but now … Her fingers closed around the pendant.

There was no sound now. No sound of gunshots. None of the shouts or laughter of gangbangers. Nothing.

She relaxed only a little bit.

What was it, she wondered. Had a bird hit the window? There were certainly no street gangs here in Fort Myers. No one who would throw a rock.

The gym was in the back of the house in a big Florida room that looked out over a large garden of palms, ferns, and succulents. This noise had found her all the way down the hallway. It sounded to her like it had come from the living room?

“Come on, woman,” she murmured aloud.

She nodded to herself and hurried along the hall, past open and empty bedrooms filled with boxes she had never bothered to unpack. She saw the glass glittering on the carpet before she’d even reached the living room.

She felt the fresh breeze from outside.

The window, for sure.

DeNeille came quickly into the room and saw that the big picture window was gone. Pieces of glass covered her couch, the coffee table, the rug, the side tables. It was everywhere. Only pieces stuck out of the frame like jagged teeth.

“Oh God…”

She did not enter the room any further, fearful of the glass. It was going to be a hell of a job cleaning it all up. Especially little splinters in the fabric of the sofa.

Thoughts of what to do and why it happened suddenly stalled as she saw something lying on the floor across the living room, jammed up against the TV cabinet. At first she thought it was a toy of some kind. A kid’s remote-controlled airplane. That’s what it looked like. She glanced out the window, looking for the kid who owned it. The kid whom she would be dragging to his parents in about five minutes.

The street was empty.

No kids.

“Ran away, the little bastard,” she concluded.

DeNeille stood there, angry and indecisive. Her hand fell away from the Eye of Horus. She didn’t call for help. She didn’t call Bug to tell him about this. It could wait until some other time. Her son worked for the government, and there was so much going on right now. That horrible thing in Philadelphia yesterday. More terrorists. She shook her head.

No, there was no need to tell Bug about this.

Except …

The news stories said something about the bombs yesterday being inside little machines. Like birds. Pigeon drones. That’s what Anderson Cooper called them.

This wasn’t one of those.

This was a little airplane.

But … even so.

She stood there, confused, trying to decide whether to worry or simply start looking for some kid in the neighborhood.

DeNeille Taylor-Williams was still fretting about it when the crumpled little airplane exploded.

Chapter Sixty-seven

I got out of bed and began pulling on clothes. The only thing available was a set of scrubs, so I put those on. I could change later.

“I think I should head out to San Diego,” I said. “Two attacks out there, and Nicodemus is on the loose. I want to bag him and have a meaningful chat. Unless, of course, you think I’d be more useful at the ballpark?”

“No. That part’s over. Jerry Spencer and his team are doing good work. I’d rather you followed your instincts and went to California.”

I nodded and pulled on the cheap hospital slippers.

Church said, “Not sure if you caught Bug’s passing reference to the QF-16 program.”

“Didn’t want to interrupt him at the time. What is it?”

“The air force has been experimenting with AI and various software and hardware upgrades to retrofit decommissioned F-16s and turn them into drones.”

I stared at him.

“The initial idea was to have them remote-piloted so that more advanced fighters could practice aerial maneuvers against real aircraft. That part’s a good idea. The part we don’t like is that there is a deeper level to the project involving armed-combat fighter drones.”

“Armed but remote-piloted, right? I mean, they wouldn’t be that stupid…”

Church’s wordless look was enough.

“I hate this job,” I said. “What do we do about that?”

“There’s a unit testing them down at Eglin in Florida. Sending Top and Bunny down there to observe the test. They’re both sharp. If they see anything amiss, we need to know about it immediately.”

“You think the Kings would try and hijack some drones while every eye is on them during a testing phase?”

“These drones have the full Regis package.” He stopped me before I could say anything. “I’m not saying Regis is corrupt. So far, we don’t have any genuine proof of that. However, Regis is becoming a common factor. Due diligence and common sense require that we have eyes on this.”

I didn’t like it, but I made the call. Top and Bunny didn’t like it either. They were downstairs, and we’d all go the airport together.

Church nodded gravely. “I’m going to Brooklyn. Then, depending on how things go, I’ll meet you in San Diego.”

“Who’s running the Hangar?”

“I pulled Juan Esposito from Boston.”

I nodded. Juan was a good guy who ran three teams out of Beantown. Former Army Intelligence. Very solid.

Church started to go, but I touched him on the arm.

“Church,” I said, “I know the world’s on fire, but take a moment. If Rudy was here, he’d tell you to—”

“Let me head you off at the pass, Captain. I am well aware that all of this puts a great deal of stress on me. I know that there is a danger of my judgment and clarity of mind being compromised by what’s happened to Circe and Aunt Sallie. This is not my first rodeo. This is hardly the first time I’ve had to deal with personal issues while still working a case. It would be nice to say that I am inexperienced at this sort of thing, but we both know that’s not the case.”

“Okay, so you got that part. Rudy would approve. But here’s the other thing. Circe is down, Rudy is down, Aunt Sallie is down. I was down for a day. This is more than a matter of us having to function under stress. I think that is part of the point. We know how devious the Seven Kings are. I see all this stuff happening, and I have to look at the timing. It’s more than a series of punches. They know we can take punches. Who better? No, this is like dodging punches while somebody is throwing firecrackers into the ring. It’s shock an awe.”

Church went over and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You think this is more than an attack on us?”

“I damn well do. Everything we know about the Kings’ MO is that they always have a hidden agenda. They love misdirection. They love coercion, and even though they aren’t strapping us to chairs with electrodes on our nuts, this is coercion. They’re hurting us by hurting the people we care about, and they know it has to have an impact.”

“Get to your point,” he said. “You’re drifting.”

“Maybe I’m not. I think they are trying to take us out of the game so that whatever they’re planning is something we won’t be ready or able to stop.”

Church nodded, and for a moment he seemed to go into his own head. I know that he would never admit to being shaken, but he was. So was I. Finally, he nodded to himself and stood, and he stood very tall. His energy seemed to fill the room, and the look in his eyes was as vicious and inflexible as a knife to the heart.

“Captain Ledger, if their intention was to remove us from the chessboard,” he said mildly, “they have failed.”

“Then let’s go kill the evil sons of bitches.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Let’s.”

I offered him my hand. “Good hunting,” I said to him.

He took my hand and shook it, and held it for a moment. “This is a time for clarity of purpose,” he said. “Not for mercy.”

He gave my hand a final squeeze.

With that, he left.

Chapter Sixty-eight

“I need to go to the bathroom,” said Doctor Davidovich.

The Gentleman ignored him; however, Pharos turned and smiled. They were sitting in a row — the burned man on the far end, swathed in bandages and connected to his wires and tubes, and Pharos and the scientist on his left. The two mercenaries stood fifteen feet behind the row in postures approximating parade rest. The screens on the walls were alive with noise and movement as the day continued to crack apart.

“Do I go by myself?” asked Davidovich. “Or—?”

Pharos allowed a slow smile to form on his face. “You’re one of us now, doctor. You don’t need to ask permission. Merely directions.” He gestured to the door. “Go out and left. Third door along the passage.”

Then he turned back to watch the screen.

He did not see Davidovich, but he could imagine the uncertainty, the fragile trust warring with horrible doubts on his face. That was fine. This was a teaching moment.

Pharos heard the scrape of the scientist’s chair, the hesitant footfalls as the man walked toward the door. The steadier, more confident pace as no one said anything or did anything to stop him. The door opened and closed.

After a moment, the Gentleman said, “You think he’s actually buying it?”

“Certainly,” said Pharos. “And why should he not? He is one of us.”

The Gentleman snorted. “Whatever that means.”

“Exactly,” agreed Doctor Pharos. “Whatever that means.”

They smiled at one another for a moment, both of them in perfect agreement for once. Then they turned back to watch the drama.

Chapter Sixty-nine

Church wasn’t halfway down the hall when I saw him stop to take another call. He looked at his phone like it was a friend who was betraying him.

He listened and then lowered the phone as if unable or unwilling to hear the rest of it. He stood that way for a long two seconds, then finished his call.

Finally, he turned and came walking back, his steps heavy, his face stern and sad.

“There’s more,” said Church.

“Circe—?”

“No. And not Junie, either.”

“Then—?”

“A bomb went off at the home of Bug’s mother,” he said. “She’s dead.”

I stared at him.

What do you say to that?

What can you say? Church told me what he knew. It wasn’t much, but it was too much. The most telling part was that one of the neighbors saw something fly in through her window. It wasn’t a bird. A model airplane.

A goddamn drone.

“Does … Bug know?” I asked.

Church shook his head. “I have to tell him.”

He stood up slowly and walked into the hallway again. For a moment he stood there, looking at his cell phone like it was something hateful. Something he wanted to smash and grind underfoot. Then he leaned one hand against the wall and made the call. I watched him, watched how pain and a shared grief changed his posture. He was the strongest person I knew, but no one is really Superman. No one. Aunt Sallie was his closest confidante and oldest friend. I didn’t like her at all, but at that moment I was feeling pain, too. I could only imagine what Church was going through. The doubt, the fear, that clenching of the soul as you prepare for the worst.

And Bug.

Christ.

We all loved Bug. He was the kid we all wished we could still be. He was the innocent heart and soul of the DMS. This was going to kill him. Crush him. Maybe extinguish the light that burned in him. The light we all hovered next to in order to rekindle our own optimism.

I’d only met his mother once, briefly, at his sister’s wedding. His mom kept getting my name wrong. Called me Jim. It didn’t matter. She was a sweetheart. She loved her son but had no idea how much he had contributed to a nasty war. Bug’s genius had helped save the lives of every field operative in the DMS, which meant that we were able to go save the world. Over and over again. Bug owned a major piece of that. His mother had died without really knowing what kind of a hero her son was.

I had no cell phone and no earbud. No way to reach out to anyone. Then I saw Bunny in the hall, and I waved him in. From the look on his face, it was obvious he already knew.

“How’s Bug?”

Church sighed. “Hurting. That poor … poor young man.” He shook his head. Even for him this was getting to be too much. “He wanted to stay on the job, but I told him to fly to Florida. Yoda and Nikki can handle things.”

“Not to be a prick, Boss, but can they? With everything falling apart…”

His look and, I suppose, my conscience stopped me from saying the rest of that statement and thus from showing how insensitive and stupid I can be. Church shook his head, dismissing it.

I said, “Are you sending someone with him?”

“Of course. We take care of our own.” He paused. “Except when we can’t.”

“Church, about what I said earlier, about the Kings targeting us on a personal level? This is proof of that. But there’s something else. Hugo Vox had the list of DMS employees and their families from back when he used to be a good guy. Or pretended to be a good guy. Whatever. He was willing to give that list to the Red Order and their Red Knights. We have to go on the assumption that the list is now in the hands of the Seven Kings. They know they can’t take us in a stand-up fight … so they’re doing this instead. Hurting us.”

Church nodded. “I’ve already initiated the protocols to protect our families, but—”

I knew what he was going to say and cut him off. “I know. The resources. We have how many people in the DMS now? Eleven hundred?”

“Closer to twelve.”

“And all their families. That’s a lot of people they’re making us spend on protection. It’s taking most of our chess pieces right off the board.”

He nodded. “Local law can handle some of the protection, but we have to face the possibility that we might not be able to protect everyone. There is a national crisis and we’re already hurt, Captain. I don’t yet know what this will do to our operational efficiency.”

“The hit on Auntie didn’t involve drones, but they used one to kill Bug’s mom. Drones are at the heart of this. It’s got to be Regis. Can we shut it down? I mean, is that even possible?”

“I doubt it. There is a reset code built into the system, but to shut it down would mean shutting down more than three-quarters of our mechanized military.”

“Why? It’s just one program—”

“It’s one program built to oversee them all. To uninstall it means shutting down each piece of equipment — each ship or plane — while the software is stripped out. And then some kind of other software would need to be installed as a placeholder.”

“Christ.”

“This is why some of us advised against using Regis at all.”

“Okay,” I said, “but even with all that, we’re going to have to do something, right?”

Church gave another shake of his head. “The Department of Defense committed itself to Regis with a will. It is universally viewed as the central solution to our military problems. Even now, we only have a suspicion that it might either be infected or vulnerable to outside manipulation. We have no solid proof, and no one is going to act on a suspicion.”

He turned, and I watched him square his shoulders slowly, take a breath, and go out. I wondered if he was dreading the ringing of a phone as much as I was.

Probably.

More so, I suspect.

Chapter Seventy

While Davidovich was gone, Doctor Pharos had the Gentleman wheeled out onto an enclosed patio where they could sit together and watch the shorebirds. The wind was cool, but the nurses had bundled the burned man up nicely, and one of Doctor Rizzo’s cocktails was buzzing its way through his bloodstream.

The Gentleman even smiled.

If the twist of mangled lips could accurately be called a smile. Pharos had his doubts, though he gave the burned man points for effort.

They watched a brown gull float on the wind.

The burned man started to say something, stopped, tried again, stopped again. Pharos waited for him to get around to it.

“About our new ‘family member,’” said the Gentleman. “About Davidovich…”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you were right about him after all.”

Pharos turned, always suspicious of anything that sounded like a compliment. Few things coming from this man were. But this time the Gentleman seemed in earnest.

“You said he would turn.”

“I thought he might,” Pharos gently corrected. “I hoped he would. There was enough of a tendency toward sociopathy in his psych profiles to suggest that he was not welded to his moral compass.”

“Apparently not.”

They watched the gull. A second shorebird drifted on the same current half a mile beyond it. They seemed frozen against the sky.

“Your, um, daughter,” began the Gentleman. “Boy. How much do you trust her judgment?”

“Quite a lot. She’s turned other hard cases before.”

“Mmm. No one of Davidovich’s intellect, though.”

“There are very few people in the world of Davidovich’s intellect. But intelligence, even genius, doesn’t necessarily come with a high emotional IQ, and it certainly doesn’t automatically come with built-in loyalty or ironclad ethics. History tells us that much.”

The burned man nodded. Pharos made a mental note to give Doctor Rizzo a bonus. The latest cocktail seemed to have balanced the man out nicely. This was the most genial conversation they’d had in five or six months.

“What about his family ties? He had a wife and son. A mother, too.”

Pharos smiled. “Ah, but that’s where Boy shows her genius. She’s made sure that good things happen to Davidovich’s family. The mother is in a very expensive retirement community in Boca Raton. She has many friends, and even some suitors.”

“How many of them do we own?”

“Nearly all of them. Though she’s an attractive woman for her age, and she appears to be moneyed, so some of the suitors are genuine. Possibly gold diggers, but nonetheless genuine.”

“Nice. The son…?”

“Matthew’s GPA has improved, thanks to some computer hacking and a little money shifted to the right bank accounts. Teachers are poor, and some of them can be purchased for far less than you’d think. The same goes for sports coaches. His son has become a starter in two sports and gets a lot of extra coaching, which also gives him good male role models. He’s prospering. The boy is prepping for college, and will be accepted into any college to which he applies. That’s been taken care of. He thinks his father is dead, so he’s completed his grief process and is very well-balanced. We steer some girls his way, and he has earned a reputation as a ladies’ man.”

“Teen hookers? I thought that wasn’t your thing.”

Pharos sighed. “It’s not. Each of these girls looks like a teenager but is actually older. One is twenty-six but can pass for seventeen.”

The Gentleman chuckled. “You have that ridiculous soft spot. Bloody silly, if you ask me.”

I didn’t ask, you poached asshole, thought Pharos. Fuck off and die.

“And the wife?” asked the burned man.

“We corrupted her, of course. Lovers and pills. She’s a train wreck, and that seems to be a comfort to Davidovich. He likes to watch videos of her throwing up or lying passed out in her own piss.”

The Gentleman grunted. “Even so, Davidovich has to remember that we kidnapped him and threatened to murder his family if he didn’t—”

“He remembers. But he also understands,” said Pharos. “He’s come to embrace our philosophy. And he has more than demonstrated his willingness to participate in his own corruption. He has not only done more than he was asked, he made improvements on the project without being told. He made suggestions for ways to increase operational efficiency. He’s been innovative. He’s clearly taking pride in our version of his Regis project. You can track his progression in the interviews and transcripts of the conversations Boy taped, including those done when he didn’t know he was being taped. Casual dinner chatter. At first he referred to it as ‘that thing you want me to do.’ Then it was ‘your project,’ then ‘the project.’ Then ‘this project’ — a change that suggests a connection to something immediate. Last summer, he began slipping, calling it ‘our project.’ That was a major jump forward. Major. But the real change began occurring around the first of this year, when he several times called Regis his project.”

“Well, technically, it is…”

“Only technically. On one hand, he built it for DARPA, and on the other, he knows that we hijacked it. It was taken away from him. What he’s proved, though, is that he not only wants back in, he wants to remain lead software engineer. Permanently. I think it’s clear the man has crossed his own personal Rubicon, that he’s embraced a new life. That he’s accepted that he is a part of this.”

“Even though he’s still a prisoner?”

“Yes,” said Pharos. “Though I think he hopes that our bringing him here is a step toward changing that relationship.”

“Even though he knows that if he betrays us even now his family will suffer?”

“Even so. He’s at that stage of acceptance and rationalization when he views this as protection for them rather than a threat.”

The burned man shook his head. “Bloody hell.”

They sat and watched the birds, sipping tea, enjoying each other’s company for the first time in a very long while.

“So,” said Pharos, “what do you think about bringing Davidovich into the family? To let him become an employee rather than a caged bird?”

“If we did, I would still want him watched.”

“Of course he’ll be watched. And even if we tell him that his family is no longer in immediate threat, he’s smart enough to know that it won’t mean they’re safe from us. By now he has to have an excellent sense of the kind of power, the kind of reach, we have. A man as smart as him would make sure that he is always of use, always valuable, and therefore his family, by extension, is too valuable to hurt. Just as he’ll know that a member of our group, rather than its victim, would be able to do more direct and obvious good for his son and mother.”

“And the wife—?”

“How much would you like to wager that within a year of joining us Davidovich would ask a special favor of Boy?”

“What? Have her killed?”

Pharos spread his hands. “We’ve seen that pathology before.”

The Gentleman nodded. A nurse came and refilled their cups and brought a plate of nutrient-rich cakes. Pharos knew that the Gentleman’s cakes were laced with more of Doctor Rizzo’s cocktail.

It was the Gentleman who finally broke the silence.

“It’s all going to start soon,” he said, and then a moment later amended that statement. “It’s all going to end soon.”

Pharos said nothing. He nibbled a cake.

“When I go,” continued the burned man, “I want to leave something behind. A legacy.”

“What kind?” asked Pharos.

“A changed world.”

“Ah. I can pretty well guarantee you’ll have your wish.”

The Gentleman looked at him, and there was an honest, clear light in his remaining eye. “Listen to me, Michael,” he said. It was maybe the second time since they’d known each other that he’d used Pharos’s first name. “Listen to me. I know I’m a monster. I know that in a lot of ways I’m a parasite. You tolerate me because you want the banking codes. No, don’t deny it. We both know it’s the truth. Just as we know that as long as I hold on to them, I get taken care of and washed and drugged. Let’s be effing adults and leave that on the table.”

Pharos said nothing.

“We both know that I’ll never live long enough to see the whole project come to fruition. This is too big, and it will go on for a long time. This is the machine that you used to talk about with Hugo. The well-oiled perpetual-motion chaos engine. Once it’s fully engaged, then it’s going to grind a hole through the heart of this sodding country, and when America goes down, then a whole lot of the rest of the world will go down with it. Chaos for sure, which should please Hugo — whether he’s in Valhalla or the Pit.”

Pharos said nothing.

“But you, Michael, are going to outlive me. You’re going to be there when it all falls down, and you’re going to live a long time in whatever world will come after this one. You know that most of the currency in my accounts will be worthless. Only those currencies tied to moderately stable nations and international banks will be worth something, and even then it’ll be pennies on the dollar. Which doesn’t really matter to you if you get those codes, because pennies on the dollar still adds up to more money than you can ever spend when you’re talking about more than a hundred billion dollars. I’ve seen projections that could put that figure at four hundred billion. You could walk away and retire with fifteen to twenty billion. You’d be able to buy an island, hire an army, and live like a king for the rest of your life, while all around you the world tries to find the reset button.”

The burned man leaned slightly forward in his wheelchair, wincing at the pain. “I want to make you an offer, Michael,” he said. “I want to make a deal.”

Pharos cleared his throat. “What kind of deal?”

“Care for me. Treat me with respect, treat me like a friend, make sure I’m comfortable until I’m ready to die. We both know it’s a temporary job. A few months at most. Maybe only a few weeks.”

“I do that now…”

“No, you go through the motions in the hopes that I get soft in the head and tell you the codes. I’m asking you to be my friend, my last friend, for whatever time I have left. Give me that, and in return I will make sure that you get all of it. There’s more than you think, Pharos. There’s more than currency in numbered banks. There’s gold, too. Do you understand what the value of gold will become when paper currency and electronic banking collapses? This morning, gold was twelve hundred ninety-two dollars and forty-two cents per ounce. In a collapsed economy, gold would be worth five times that. Ten times. More. Do you know how much gold I have? How much I inherited when I became the last surviving member of this organization? Want to take a guess?”

Pharos shook his head.

“I can tell you where you can find three and a half tons of it. In bars. Untouched. Do the math.”

Pharos didn’t need to. His heart was beating so fast, he thought he was going to faint.

“Now listen to me, Michael,” said the Gentleman, his voice hoarse and low. “I will give you the banking codes before I die. I promise. If you’re kind, I promise that. All those billions. But if you swear to me, right here and now, that you will take care of me, be a friend to me, protect me until then … I will give you the location and access codes to the gold vault right now.”

Pharos could not speak.

He absolutely could not.

The Gentleman smiled and held out his one remaining hand. Wizened, scarred, twisted.

“Tell me if we have a deal,” he said.

Chapter Seventy-one

Toys stood apart from the group, feeling small and useless and alien.

He listened as Lydia told her team and Junie about the murder of Bug’s mother and the attack on Aunt Sallie. Junie wept. No one else did. Toys looked at the faces of Lydia and Sam Imura, Montana Parker and Brian Botley. And at other soldiers he didn’t know. Their faces were hard. Not without emotion, but completely without mercy.

He expected to hear trash talk, threats, the kind of threats and promises all soldiers make when they learn about a fallen comrade. There was none of that. When Lydia was done relating the news, they all stood there. Toys wasn’t even sure they were looking at each other. They were just — there. As tall and straight and silent as chess pieces.

Without saying a single thing, the DMS agents turned and went back to their posts. Junie stood alone, weeping openly into a crumpled tissue. Toys wanted to say something to her, to offer comfort to her, but he did not have the courage to approach. Not in a moment like this.

After all, what comfort could a monster give when human hearts were breaking?

Chapter Seventy-two

Mr. Church exited the hospital and got into the Cadillac waiting at the curb. Brick shot the locks, lit up the lights and sirens, and bullied his way into traffic. Two city police cars fell into place fore and aft, and they headed toward I-95 and the airport.

“Sorry about Auntie,” said Brick. “But she’s a strong old vulture. No way this is canceling her ticket.”

“When she recovers, I’ll tell her you called her a vulture.”

“If she wants to kick my ass, she’d better recover. But give me warning so I can get out of town.”

He smiled at Church in the rearview mirror. Church gave him a small smile in return. Neither smile was any more real than the banter.

Church’s phone rang, and when he looked at the display, it showed a symbol rather than a name. A poppy. Deadly and cold. The signature of a very specific person.

A woman of great power. Not exactly a friend. Nor always an ally.

He smiled faintly as he answered the call.

“Hello, Lilith.”

“I heard about the attacks,” said a stern female voice. “They killed a civilian? Your computer man — Bug, is it? They killed his mother?”

“Yes.”

Her reply was a vile curse in an old language known for its eloquent obscenities. “And Auntie? They tried to kill her.”

“They tried.” He didn’t ask how she knew. Neither Aunt Sallie nor Bug was named in any of the news stories, but Lilith had her sources.

“Who did it?” asked Lilith.

“Five-man team,” said Church. “Almost certainly a Seven Kings hit.”

“Kingsmen?” she asked.

“Likely. They were tough.”

“Interrogation?”

“Sadly, no longer an option.”

“Pity,” said Lilith. “Will she die?”

“I don’t know.”

A pause. “I never liked her, you know,” said Lilith.

“There was never love lost between you two.”

“Even so, it’s better to have her in the fight.”

“Yes,” said Church. “It is.”

“And … Circe? I heard about that, too. No suspects. No apparent cause. But the timing is suggestive. So the Kings are targeting the DMS and their families?”

“Apparently.”

“If they’re after Circe, then they know too many of your secrets.”

“Of course.”

“Them hitting you now, while the stadium in Philadelphia is still burning, that’s no coincidence. They’re trying to weaken you or distract you, or both, while they make their play.”

“Of course,” he said again.

Another pause. “I’ve got people on this, Saint Germaine.”

“That isn’t my name.”

“It was.”

“And I left it behind.”

“As you left so many things behind. When you’re done with them. When they’re of no use to you.”

“Did you call to try me for old crimes? Your timing is questionable.”

“No,” barked Lilith. Then she sighed. “No … I did not. So, what should I call you? Deacon? Does that still work?”

“It will do,” said Church. “Why are you calling?”

“I don’t want to bore you if it’s something you already know.”

“You are many things, Lilith,” said Church, “but you are never boring.”

“Charm? And a compliment? From you? Pardon me while I faint.”

“Do it later,” he said. “I’m on the way to the airport.”

“Ah. I heard a rumor about the doctor who works for you. Sanchez. My people say he was attacked by a priest. Sanchez was overheard saying a certain name.”

“Yes.”

“If he’s involved in this, then you are all in trouble. But … you already know that. Who’s guarding your people in San Diego, then? That thug Ledger?”

“His team. Ledger was injured in the attack on the stadium.”

“Mmm, I heard. Didn’t die, though. Ah, well,” Lilith said, then added, “Violin is in California. She’s on a job for me, so I can’t station her at the hospital, but she has Banshee with her.”

“Banshee? Who is that?”

“She’s the great-granddaughter of an old friend. Do you remember that cave we found in the Hoia Baciu Forest in Romania? Do you remember who was with me?”

“Everyone who was with you died.”

“Not everyone.”

Church said, “Ah. Strega.”

“So,” said Lilith, “you do remember.”

“I was always very fond of Strega. This is her great-granddaughter? Banshee?”

“Yes.”

“She’s with Violin?”

“Yes. And I can have my daughter leave Banshee to guard Circe. And, just to be clear, Deacon. I don’t make this offer for you. This is only for Circe. Not for you.”

“I understand that.”

“Circe’s pregnant, I hear. Near her time.”

“Yes.”

“Let me help her.”

Church closed his eyes. “Thank you, Lilith.”

The line went dead.

Chapter Seventy-three

Doctor Davidovich was in the bathroom a long time. Longer than he knew was wise, which was the point. He was waiting to see how far this new trust would stretch. How long before Doctor Pharos and that burned freak in the bed would send men looking for him?

He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and stared at the wood grain of the stall’s door. The bathroom and all of its fittings were of the highest quality. Expensive wood, polished brass, imported marble. Incense burning in a discreet niche. Egyptian cotton hand towels.

The degree of conspicuous wealth just in this bathroom was impressive. Everything that he’d seen so far at Tanglewood was designed to overwhelm ordinary senses. Pharos seemed to disregard it, which, Davidovich believed, was a sign of privilege. To be so rich that luxury was ordinary … that was very appealing. He was aware that his level of genius would ultimately bring him to this point. That was inevitable in a technologies-rich market. He had insight and ideas that no one else had. His QC computer was years in front of the competition.

Years.

His fault had been signing that contract with the Department of Defense to work exclusively for them for six years.

Six years.

He’d been four years into that stretch when he’d been abducted by Boy. Four years during which his paycheck wasn’t worth lining his cat’s litter box with. Sure, it was six figures, but it should have been eight. Or nine. Maybe the high nines. Ten was not out of the question. Ask Bill Gates.

The QC was the personal computer of this century. It was the new direction.

Even his software was radical. God, if he’d developed Regis in the private sector and then sold it to the military …

Shit. He’d be worth billions now.

Instead, where was he?

Sitting on a toilet on an island somewhere, while absolute fucking madmen waited for him. While maniacs used his software and quantum technology for what? A stock market and commodities scam? Okay, sure, it was on a global scale, but still. It was a scam. Doctor Pharos was basically a bureaucrat turned big-time con man. Somewhere on the larceny scale between Bernie Madoff and the old robber barons. White-collar thieves. Diamond-cuff-link gangbangers.

Which made him — what?

An accomplice?

A tool?

A lackey?

The speech Pharos gave him back there was impressive. So impressive that Davidovich was tempted to buy the con. But the man was really a bureaucrat and not a salesman. He was good at pitching, but he wasn’t great at it.

And Davidovich knew that the man wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

Pharos believed the hook was set, that all he had to do was jerk the line to reel Davidovich in.

The scientist got up and washed his face. Thoroughly. Then he wet his fingers and ran them through his thinning hair. He leaned on the edge of the expensive sink and looked into the eyes of a man he did not truly know. An absent father. A husband who despised his wife. A failed son.

A brilliant scientist.

An innovative genius.

A captive.

A slave.

All of those things.

And people were dying because of him. He looked — as he had looked so many times since Boy captured him — deep inside his soul for some faint flicker of conscience. That inward look had always been like looking through black glass. There was never any light to see.

Never.

Never.

He sank to his knees and wrapped his arms over his head.

Why the fuck was there nothing in there to see?

Chapter Seventy-four

The woman entered the hospital wearing a hat with a floppy brim and oversize sunglasses. Not at all unusual in Southern California. She was tall and slim, with an olive complexion and good bones. Men noticed her, even wearing a belted trench coat. She was the kind of person who got noticed. She was aware of it, and she used it.

At her side walked an enormous dog. An Irish wolfhound. Forty inches at the shoulders. Two hundred pounds of muscle and bone covered in wiry smoke-gray hair. Eyes that swept left and right and missed nothing.

The dog wore a blue vest belted with Velcro and printed with the words SERVICE DOG — ALL ACCESS in friendly letters. A caduceus was embroidered on the top.

The woman and the dog crossed the lobby, and every eye was on them. The security guard looked first at her, then at the dog, then at the vest, then at the woman’s legs, and then back to the dog. He moved in to intercept her before she got to the reception desk.

“Excuse me, miss? Is your dog registered?”

The woman turned slowly toward him. She smiled a faint, tremulous smile. A cautious smile.

“Yes, she is,” she said. “Do you want to see her license?”

“Please.”

The woman fumbled in her pocket, and as she did so she became less of an exotic beauty and more of a woman with clear disabilities. Not blind, but vision impaired. She went through several pockets of her trench coat before producing the proper license issued by the state of California. The guard barely glanced at it. He already felt enormously awkward, a reaction triggered by the woman’s obvious discomfiture.

The dog sat and waited with quiet patience, her dark brown eyes seeming to take in everything in the lobby without appearing to react to anything. Like a good service dog is trained to do.

“That’s okay, miss,” he said quickly. “Can I be of assistance?”

“Oh,” said the woman, “I–I’m here to visit a friend of mine. She was brought in yesterday.”

“I can help you with that,” said the guard, taking her elbow — the one farthest from the dog — and guiding her to the reception desk. The dog, prosaically, stood and followed. People in the lobby pretended they weren’t watching.

“Thank you,” said the woman. She had a soft voice and a mild Italian accent.

“Carol,” said the guard to the receptionist, “could you help this lady?”

“Sure,” said a bright-eyed Asian woman. “Who did you want to see, miss?”

The woman smiled a warm and grateful smile. “My friend’s name is Doctor O’Tree-Sanchez. She was brought in yesterday. She’s pregnant.”

The receptionist’s smile flickered. “I’m afraid Doctor O’Tree-Sanchez is not allowed to have any visitors.”

“Is Ms. Flynn with her?”

“Um…”

“She called me this morning and asked me to come by. Junie Flynn,” said the woman. “Could you contact her and say that I’m here?”

The receptionist and the guard exchanged a look. The woman, behind her big sunglasses, appeared to be staring in the wrong direction. The dog looked bored.

“Okay,” said Carol. “But I can’t promise anything. We have strict orders.”

“I understand.”

“Who should I say is here?”

The woman said, “Maria Mandocello.”

The receptionist nodded and made the call. She spoke to the federal agent guarding the patient and was surprised to have the call passed to Junie Flynn, who was some kind of liaison to the agency overseeing Doctor O’Tree-Sanchez.

“Put her on, please,” said Junie Flynn. Carol handed the phone to the guard who placed it carefully in the blind woman’s hand. There was a brief conversation that Carol couldn’t quite hear, and then Ms. Mandocello handed the phone back to Carol, though she extended it in the wrong direction. Carol, tolerant and experienced, reached over to intercept it without comment. She put the phone to her own ear.

“Is everything okay, Ms. Flynn?”

“Yes. I’ll be right down,” said Junie Flynn, and disconnected the call.

They waited there for almost three minutes. Saying very little. Talking nonsense stuff. The weather. The terrible events in Philadelphia. Like that. Then the elevator doors slid open and two figures stepped out. A Japanese man with a hard, flat face and eyes that appeared to be absolutely lifeless, and a woman with wild blond hair and blue eyes that were filled with light.

And with pain.

The blonde spotted the woman at once and immediately rushed toward her. She saw the dog and her stride faltered, but the blind woman held out her hands and took the other woman into her arms. They embraced like friends who loved each other but had been apart for far too long. It was so genuine a thing that Carol the receptionist and Myron the guard smiled at each other. The dog sniffed the blonde and turned away, as if to say, “Noted and filed away.”

“God!” said Junie, “it’s so good to see you.”

“Sorry it’s for this reason.”

“I know. But thanks for coming. It means a lot.”

“Anything for the family.” She glanced toward the elevator. “I can’t stay long — I’m in the middle of something that won’t wait — but I brought a friend. This is Banshee.”

Junie bent and ruffled the head of the gigantic dog. Most people would never dare do something like that. Not to a dog who looked like she would not enjoy that sort of thing from strangers. But the big wolfhound gave a couple of brief wags of her tail.

“She likes you,” said Ms. Mandocello.

“I like her. She has a big spirit.”

“She does.”

“There’s a lot of light around her.”

Ms. Mandocello only smiled at that.

Junie turned to the receptionist. “It’s okay, Carol. I’ll take her up.”

“She’s not on the list, Ms. Flynn,” said Carol hesitantly.

Junie flashed her a big smile. “Check again.”

“Don’t bother,” said the Japanese man. He opened his identification wallet and flashed a National Security Agency badge. The name on the adjoining card read SPECIAL AGENT SAMUEL THOMAS IMURA. “Ms. Mandocello is approved.”

Carol nodded. The security guard relaxed.

Agent Imura shook hands with the visitor, then held his hand out to the dog.

“What was her name again?” he asked.

“Banshee,” said Ms. Mandocello.

“Nice.”

“She isn’t.”

Sam smiled. “I mean the name.”

Ms. Mandocello smiled, too. “It’s good to see you again, Sam.”

“Good to see you, too, Violin.”

He did not say that name loud enough for anyone but Junie to hear.

The two women, the DMS agent, and the Irish wolfhound named Banshee headed over to the elevators.

Chapter Seventy-five

I tried checking myself out of the hospital, got as far as the nurses’ station, and then the shakes hit me. I staggered, dizzy and sick. Nausea was like a fist to the gut, and when I opened my mouth to tell the nurse I wanted to leave, I vomited all over the counter.

The nurses hustled me back to bed, cleaned me up, and, despite every protest I could make, shot me up with something that dropped me into a big, dark hole.

I slept badly and dreamed of monsters. Of fleet-footed scavenger animals that ran wild through the brush. Of a man with the body and clothes of a priest and the laughing head of a demon.

I dreamed that everyone I loved was dead. Not dying … already gone.

I woke in the dawn’s early light, shaken and afraid.

When I got out of bed, I expected to fall down, but even though the floor did an Irish jig for a wild moment, the world steadied. My stomach no longer felt like it was filled with greasy dishwater.

So, I found fresh scrubs in a hall closet and this time managed to convince the nurse that I was leaving. They can’t legally keep me. They tried, though. Got to give them that.

I grudgingly accepted a wheelchair ride to the front door, then tottered to the front door like an old man who’d lived a hard life. Every single inch of my body hurt. My hair hurt. My shoes hurt.

My heart hurt.

Top was waiting in the lobby, scowling and chewing on a wooden matchstick.

“Bunny’s bringing the car around,” he said, then gave me a sour up-and-down appraisal. “You up for this, Cap’n?”

“Sure.”

“You lying to me?”

“Sure. Still going, though.”

“Okay. But if you look like you’re going to fade on me, I’m going to put you on the bench, you dig?”

“Yes, mother.”

Top showed me his teeth. Not sure if you’d call it a smile.

He smile faded as he studied my face. “What is it?” he asked. “Did something else happen?”

It was a simple question with a terribly complex answer.

“Not here,” I said. “In the car.”

Black Bess pulled up outside and Top helped me into the back. He climbed into the shotgun seat.

“You guys have your go bags?” I asked.

Bunny ticked his head to the back bay. “Always. Where we going?”

“Airport first, then Florida.” I licked my lips, which were as dry as my throat. Then, as Bunny pulled away from the curb, I laid it on them. Rudy and Nicodemus. Aunt Sallie. Bug’s mother.

Regis.

My fears about Davidovich and the Seven Kings.

All of it.

They’re good friends, and this was a bad thing to do to them. I watched what it did to their faces, how it changed them. Bunny’s face fell into sickness; Top’s turned to stone. We all have our own ways of processing hurt and anger.

Top, Bunny, and I — we were all feeling it. We grieved for Bug and feared for Auntie, but none of us knew what we could do to help them. We were killers, not healers. And as much as we wanted to, we couldn’t raise the dead.

They asked a lot of questions as we crept through traffic. I gave them what few answers I had. Then we fell into a bitter silence that lasted from when Bunny got onto I-95 in Old City to when we pulled into the security lot at the airport. I saw my jet on the tarmac and a smaller one standing apart, waiting for Top and Bunny. I saw Birddog standing by my ride, and there was Ghost sitting beside him. Battered and bandaged but alert.

Bunny killed the engine and we sat for a moment longer, saying nothing, thinking bad, bad thoughts.

Nobody wanted to say it, so I said it. “We’re going to find these sons of bitches, and we are going to wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Bunny grunted. A low, dangerous sound. “For Bug, for Aunt Sallie. For Circe and Rudy. For everyone at the ballpark.”

Top said it best. “We been sidelined watching the world burn, Cap’n. That shit’s got to stop.”

“Hooah,” I said softly.

“Hooah,” they echoed.

“Nico-fucking-demus?” said Top slowly. “Shee-e-e-e-e-et.”

“How’d he get to Rudy?” said Bunny. “Cowpers said he cleared the chapel?”

“That’s what he said,” I said. “Our guys are reviewing the hospital security footage. So far, nothing. He slipped past us.”

“I’m going to have me a long and meaningful chat with Cowpers,” Top said. “I’d like to know how the fuck he could miss someone hiding in a room as small as a hospital chapel?”

“Cowpers is pretty sharp. Wouldn’t be like him to miss something like that.”

“All I’m saying,” muttered Top, “is he better have a damn good explanation, or I’m going to put my whole foot up his ass.”

We got out of the car. They took their gear and headed toward their jet. I leaned against the fender and dug my cell phone out of my pocket.

Called Junie.

I needed to hear her voice. Not only to know that she was okay, but because she was my tether to hope and optimism and all the things I fight for.

“Joe!” she said as she answered. I could tell from her voice that she’d been crying. “I just called your room, and they said that you were discharged. What are you doing?”

“It’s okay, baby,” I soothed. “I’m fine. Dented but that’s all. Look, Junie,” I said, “Church told me about what happened to Rudy.”

“Oh God, I know. Poor Rudy!”

“How is he?”

She told me everything she knew, but it didn’t add much to what Church had said. The same with Circe. No changes. No news.

No goddamn answers.

Junie started to cry again. Deep sobs that threatened to break my heart. Unlike me, Junie got along with Auntie. They often spent hours talking on the phone. And, like me, she loved Bug.

“I’m coming out there,” I told her. “Until I do … who’s there with you? I mean right there, right where you can see them?”

“Montana’s here. And the rest of the team is patrolling the hospital,” said Junie, sniffing. Montana Parker was the second woman on Echo Team. She’d joined a year ago during the Mother Night operation. A former member of the FBI’s hostage-rescue team. Tough as nails. I trusted her to look after Junie, and felt relieved that she was on the clock.

“Good. You don’t go anywhere without Montana, you understand? Not even to the ladies’ room. Nowhere.”

“I know how this works,” said Junie.

I had to smile. Junie looked like a throwback to the era of flower power and love beads, but she had a complicated history that had made her neither naive nor weak.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tell Rudy that I’m coming out there, too. Let him know.”

“I will, Joe.”

When the call was over, I limped toward my jet. Ghost broke from Birddog’s side and came limping toward me. I knelt and hugged him to me, buried my face in his fur, and tried very hard not to weep like a child.

Chapter Seventy-six

Jorge Quiñones dug a fresh beer from the fridge, used his retro Star Trek Enterprise bottle opener to pop off the cap, took a long pull, and sighed. Life was good. So good.

He opened the sliding screen door and stepped out onto the concrete pad that served as a deck. His girlfriend, Jill, was stretched out on a chaise lounge, earbuds in, sunglasses on, little rubber things separating her freshly painted toes. Jorge turned around and went back inside to fetch her a beer, too. He came up on her blind side and began to move the icy bottom rim of the bottle down onto the bare brown skin of her thigh.

Jill had great thighs. She had great everything. She was far and away the best-looking girl he’d ever dated. Maybe the best-looking girl he’d ever spoken to. All the goodies in front and in back, eyes as black as coal, and lots of wildly curly hair. Greek-Spanish. Real Spain Spanish, too. Not the Mexican Spanish in his genes, which was probably half Indio anyway. She was fine.

He tried to see through her sunglasses to tell if she was asleep or not. If she was asleep, then she’d jump ten feet in the air when the glass touched her. It was hot for late March. Some kind of global-warming thing, according to the news. Eighty-five degrees, and tomorrow was supposed to be eighty-seven. Nice.

Jill wore white short-shorts and a bikini top that was so skimpy he could see the little ladybug tattoo she had near her right nipple. He loved that tattoo. She had a hummingbird on her lower back. Jorge would never call something so delicate a “tramp stamp,” though sometimes Jill joked around and called it that. He loved that hummingbird, too. He stared at it when she was on all fours and he was kneeling behind her. Her skin flushed when she was ready to come, and that changed the colors in the hummingbird’s wings.

Thinking about those two tattoos made him hard, and he paused in the act of commission, the bottle not yet touching. She would be furious with him. No doubt about that. Yeah, he could charm her and they’d laugh about it, but was the laugh worth the yelling?

Nah.

He began to lift the bottle when Jill spoke, “And now I don’t have to cut your balls off while you sleep.”

He jerked backward. “Oh. You’re awake.”

She raised the sunglasses and squinted up at him. “You know I’d kill you, right?”

“I wasn’t going to do it.”

“Yes you were, bastardo.”

“I swear,” he protested. “I changed my mind.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She glared at him, but she was smiling, too. “Anda que te coja un burro.”

“Hey, you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“That’s not all I do with that mouth,” she said, and darted out a hand, hooked a finger in the elastic waistband of his sunflower-pattern swim trunks, and pulled them down far enough so the tufts of his pubic hair popped out. He danced backward, pulling them up, flushing red, spilling a little beer down his thighs.

“Crazy bitch,” he said, but now they were both laughing. “This is a family neighborhood.”

She batted her eyelashes at him. “How do you think families are made, Romeo?”

Jorge shook his head and circled the chaise so he could sit down on his. He handed her the beer, tapped his bottle against hers, and they drank.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“I know. Me too. I ordered some stuff, though.”

“Oh?” she asked, interested. “Did you try that new place?”

“NachoCopter? Yes, ma’am. Couple of beef and bean burritos, nachos and salsa, and four fish tacos. Got two wahoo and two tilapia.”

“Jeez, are you trying to get me fat?”

“More cushion, less pushing.”

“Ugh. That’s crude.”

“Says the chica who tried to pants me in my own yard.”

There was a buzz high away and to their left, and they both turned, shading their eyes with their hands, looking for the delivery drone. It came wobbling through the sky on four small rotors. It was an ungainly device, but it buzzed along at a good pace.

“It’s stupid-looking,” said Jill. “Looks like a lawn mower had sex with a helicopter and this is what came out.”

“Can’t argue with that,” agreed Jorge. “But it’s bringing us our lunch. We don’t have to drive anywhere.”

“Works for me. Now if you can get one that delivers ice cream, I wouldn’t care if it looked like a Decepticon.”

He grinned at her. “You made a pop-culture reference. You made a correct pop-culture reference. I think I love you.”

She snorted. “You love me for my tits.”

“You have great tits.”

“I do.”

“Great tits on a gorgeous girl who can drop Transformers references while wearing a bikini … that’s pretty much my definition of heaven on earth.”

She returned his grin, looked around for a moment, then hooked her fingers in the cups of her top and flashed him. Just for a second. Two beautiful brown nipples.

“Oh, mama!” he said as he set his beer down and leaned over to kiss her on the lips and the side of the throat. “You are in so much trouble.”

“I’d better be,” she purred.

The NachoCopter soared toward them. Jorge’s cell phone buzzed to indicate a text. It read:

It was the same every time. The little drone began flashing red lights on each of its four whirling blades. It hovered for a moment until Jorge replied.

Jorge did exactly as requested. He waited until the machine descended to the grass on the far side of the yard, released its clamps on the canvas carry bag, then rose slowly, exposing the cardboard delivery container. With the empty canvas flapping, the drone rose into the air, buzzing like an overgrown bee, and headed back to the store ten blocks away.

Jorge retrieved the food, which was so fresh that the cardboard was almost too hot to touch. He carried it to the picnic table, and when Jill joined him, they clinked bottles again and dug in. They ate almost all of it.

They slept in the sun for a while.

Then they went inside and made love for a lazy twenty minutes before falling asleep.

It wasn’t until the sun was sliding down over the western horizon that the convulsions began.

Jill fell out of bed, naked, shivering, her body covered with furious red welts. She tried to scream, to call out his name, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was a torrent of dark red blood.

Jorge could not help her. He couldn’t reach her. All he could do — the very last thing he could do — was to dial 911.

He said one word, “Help.”

It was wet and thick and nearly unintelligible. But it was enough to get the machinery in motion.

However, when the police arrived, there was nothing to do but wait for the EMTs.

When they arrived, the EMTs immediately backed out of Jorge’s house and called their supervisor, who called the doctor at the local hospital. And it was the doctor who called the Centers for Disease Control. He forwarded a cell-phone picture of the two bleeding, nearly shapeless lumps that had been Jorge Quiñones and Jillian Santa Domingo.

Chapter Seventy-seven

Top and Bunny flew out, but I had to wait several hours for my pilot to replace some pain in the ass little part and then get the jet fueled.

I watched it roll along the tarmac. It wasn’t a fighter, but it looked sleek and somehow dangerous.

Being the Big Kahuna of the Special Projects Division came with perks. I now had my own personal jet, a sleek Gulfstream G650. It could carry all seven members of Echo Team, along with two logistics guys and the flight crew. It had a range of seven thousand nautical miles and could hit a maximum speed of Mach 0.85. It was soundproofed and had leather seats, and the interior looked like a yacht that might have belonged to a porn-industry mogul. Gold filigree, expensive paintings bolted to the walls, a full-sized toilet stall.

It had once belonged to a Colombian billionaire who ran a bioweapons shop in the same lab he was using to make coke and heroin. He’d begun providing drug cartels with weaponized pathogens designed to kill ATF and Border Patrol agents and their families. Despite the fact that so many people flew high on his drugs, the billionaire plummeted like a rock when I threw him out of the forward hatch. We’d had a disagreement over whether he needed to remain alive. Apparently, the world could still turn without him. Imagine that.

I loved the jet. I named her Shirley. Don’t ask why.

Usually being aboard her made me smile. Not today, though.

As I climbed the stairs to the hatch, I heard a voice in my ear.

Small.

Distant.

Lost.

So lost.

“Joe…?”

I stopped what I was doing and sagged back against a burned wall.

“Bug,” I said, and tapped my earbud to bring up the volume.

“Joe?” he repeated.

“Jesus, kid, I’m so goddamn sorry.”

It was true, but it was lame. Though, really, what part of the human vocabulary has words that will make a moment like this make sense? Which words, which phrases, actually help? How can sounds pull the knives out of the human heart? What clever catchphrases or wise aphorisms can address in any adequate way the unchangeable reality of death?

Go farther. What can you say to a friend whose mother has been murdered?

Tell me.

What can you say?

He wept. A voice in my ear.

I sank down in one of the leather seats, put my face in my hands, wept for him and with him.

Chapter Seventy-eight

Top and Bunny leaned against the side of a Humvee parked on the grass at Eglin Air Force Base. They had cups of coffee provided by one of Top’s oldest friends, Chief Master Sergeant Dilbert Howell of the Ninety-sixth Test Wing. The sky above them was a flawless dome of dark blue. Around them, the trees of spring were coming alive after a hard winter. The temperature was in the midseventies, and there was a breeze filled with the mingled scents of pine and flowers.

It was the kind of day that could put a smile on a sad man’s face, but none of the men were grinning.

Top had explained why they were there. Even if the ties to Philadelphia were tenuous at best, it soured the day.

Howell sipped his coffee. “Your captain,” he said. “Ledger? He seems like a good man.”

Top nodded. “He’ll do.”

“From what I’ve heard,” continued Howell, “he really got into the thick of it at the ballpark. Took out several hostiles without backup? Is that right?”

“He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty,” agreed Top. Bunny snorted.

Howell nodded. “You guys been with him for a while now?”

“For a bit, Dil,” said Top.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for that kind of stuff?”

Bunny was in the middle of taking a sip, and a single laugh exploded out. He tried to hide it with a fake cough.

Top pointed a finger at him. “You secure that shit right now, Farm Boy.”

Bunny held up his free hand in a no-problem gesture. “I just swallowed the wrong way.”

“I’m just saying, Top,” Howell went on. “You’re almost as old as me, and I stopped doing that yee-haw crap a while back.”

“You ain’t that old, Dil.”

“You know what they say. It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage. These knees can’t take the jumps anymore. Lower back’s a bitch ever since Iraq. And those early mornings? Nah, not for me anymore.”

“Which is why you’re getting fat,” observed Top.

Dilbert Howell had a stomach as flat and hard as boilerplate. He slapped his gut. “Yeah. This is me getting soft.”

“The waistline’s the first thing to go,” said Top, shaking his head. “Then it’s the hair, man boobs, and suddenly you got no barrel left in your long gun. Keeping in the game is the way to keep Father Time from bending you over a—”

“Hey! What’s that?” interrupted Bunny. He straightened and squinted toward the water tower on the other side of Boatner Road. The others looked, too.

There was a speck in the sky. Bigger than a bird. Much bigger. Nearly airplane-sized. Sleek and silver-gray. It was coming toward them fast.

“That,” said Howell with obvious pride, “is what you boys came here to see.”

“Oh shit,” sighed Bunny. “Tell me that’s not another goddamn drone?”

The drone flew past the water tower and resolved itself into a machine they all recognized. Forty-eight-foot wingspan and a twenty-seven-foot body that was smooth and bulbous and sinister.

“Fuck me,” murmured Top

“Modified MQ-1-AI Super Predator,” said Howell. “We got six of them in last week. Same hull design as the old MQ-1s but with upgraded avionics, an advanced aerial-evasion package, a new generation of the Multi-Spectral Targeting System, that new Robinson-Landau targeting radar. All sorts of goodies.”

“And the Regis-integration software package,” grumbled Top.

“Sure. Which is why it works so damn well,” said Howell. “Only downside is that by using the old hull design, they had to more or less keep the speed the same. It buries the needle at one-three-seven miles per hour. But that more or less works in our favor. Anyone spots it, they think it’s one of the older birds, until this flies right up their ass.”

“Man’s in love,” said Bunny. “Hope you’ll both be very happy.”

Howell ignored him. “All this week we’re testing the AI guidance system.”

Top nodded. “It’s science fiction bullshit.”

“It’s the future of warfare,” Howell said, and seemed to swell with pride. “Artificial intelligence is at a breakthrough stage. These new models are designed for independence and coordinated action, largely without human interaction or remote piloting. You should see them work as a team, communicating with each other at ultrahigh speeds. Sharing tactical data with reaction times that make us look like cavemen. DARPA’s got these birds doing everything but keeping diaries and braiding each other’s hair. They have these things picking their own targets, making decisions to change their own mission protocols.”

The predator did a circle around the water tower and then flew up and over the trees.

“Nimble little minx,” observed Bunny.

“Very. And what you’re seeing is a UAV teaching itself to fly in unpredictable patterns in order to make maximum use of the terrain.”

Bunny looked at him. “Wait, you’re saying there’s no remote pilot at the controls of that thing?”

Howell chuckled. “Settle down, son. This isn’t the movies. It’s not going to suddenly develop a personality and decide that all humans must die. AI isn’t like that. It’s a program.”

“Self-learning,” said Top.

“Sure, but that’s not the same thing as actual consciousness.” Howell nodded at the Predator, which had reappeared sixty yards over the field that ran alongside the road. “There are limits written into the software to keep it from making mistakes. And they installed subroutines that will always give active control back to human remote pilots. And, just in case your nuts are up in your chest cavity, boys, there’s a whole team sitting in a command truck right now, hands on the controls, ready to throw the right switches. They can remote-detonate it, force it to land, or even cut its engines off and make it ditch into the water.”

“Still scary as hell,” said Bunny.

“Only if you’re the bad guy,” said Howell. “No … these things are safe. You can tell your captain that. He may have a bug up his ass about Regis, but I think he’s looking in the wrong direction. Regis is rock-solid. And the UAV program is going to save American lives. The whole point of using them is to reduce the risk to human life. To make warfare safer.” He turned and pointed to a truck parked on the field. A complex array of antennae sprouted from it. “Mobile command unit. Everything needed to support and manage the Predator fits into four suitcases. Not counting missiles.”

“It’s not carrying missiles now, is it?” asked Bunny. “’Cause I am going to leave a mile long shit stain getting out of here.”

Howell shook his head. “It has dummies. Same weight as four AIM-92 Stingers and six Griffin air-to-surface missiles, but no warheads. And even the dummies are bolted on so they won’t drop during testing. Ditto for the guns. Ammunition is deadweight, nothing hooked up to fire. They’re testing aerodynamics with simulated full weight of armament but with zero threat in case of error. Hey, I’ll never claim that the air force is sane, but we’re not so crazy we arm self-guided drones on a test flight. Not yet. And when we do, we won’t let them fly around like this. It’ll be a test range with no one loitering around where they can get their wieners blown off.”

“And this sort of thing will never slip the leash and bite us on the ass?” said Bunny with obvious skepticism.

“Could be worse,” said Howell. “They’re retrofitting a bunch of F-16s to turn them into UAVs. They call ’em QF-16s. You heard about that?”

Top nodded. “Sure. Back in 2013.”

“Still doing it. Got a mess of them. They’re doing that down at Tyndall.”

Top nodded. He’d been to a demonstration of the F-16 drones at the air base near Panama City. “I thought they were using those birds for target practice. So pilots could fight real jets but without anyone getting killed.”

Howell gave him a knowing look. “Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia, Top. The QF-16s are aerial targets, but the QF-16Xs are what we’re calling superdrones. It’s a new class. They call them Pterosaurs. You boys know what that means?”

“Sure,” said Bug. “Flying dinosaurs.”

“Don’t confuse flying dinosaur with something old and clunky. These Pterosaurs can fly right up your colon and deliver air-to-air, air-to-ground, and air-to-ship missiles and then drop Paveway IIIs and Gator mines. And they have M61 Vulcan six-barrel Gatling cannons.”

“You don’t need to sell us, Dil,” said Top. “We’re not shopping for Christmas presents.”

“Just making a point, fellows. Everyone hopes that we can put these birds in the air as fully functional, totally autonomous frontline fighters.”

“Jeeee-zus,” said Bunny.

“We got a bunch of them ready to go into actual combat,” said Howell with pride. “Some at Tyndall and a whole flight of them up at Beale in Marysville, California. They’re running tests around the clock up there.”

“Even today?” asked Bunny, appalled.

“Especially today,” said Howell. “If this is going to turn into another 9/11, we need a response that delivers a new kind of shock and awe. And one that doesn’t put a lot of U.S. servicemen in the fucking ground. We want the bad guys to start digging graves, because we’re going after them with a fully armed, automated response.”

“Yeah,” sighed Bunny. “I know. Not a fan of that, either.”

“What’s wrong with you, son?” asked Howell. “Would you rather put American pilots and ground troops in harm’s way instead of a couple machines?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” said Bunny. “I’m all for the drone program. Predators and Reapers have saved my ass more than once. I have friends who are alive because drones were in the air. There are a lot of bad guys who have been sent to the showers because of drones. And don’t get me started on surveillance, low-risk intel acquisition, and using them to find lost troops. No, I’m good with drones. I loves me some drones.”

“So…?”

“I just don’t want to be a day player in the next Terminator film. That whole self-guided, self-determining thing? Not a fan. I’d rather see Uncle Sam offer employment to a whole shitload of remote UAV pilots. Keep a human being at the stick. At least on anything flying around with fucking missiles on it.”

Howell shrugged. “Opinions differ. Case you haven’t checked, we’re more than halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first century. Science marches on.”

“Yeah, yeah, wave of the future,” Bunny said, shaking his head. “I get it. But I don’t like it. There are too many things that can go wrong.” Howell began to say something, but Bunny added, “And before you tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about or I’m behind the learning curve of military science, trust me when I tell you that we’ve” — and here he jiggled his cup to indicate Top, and by association all of the DMS — “seen what happens when this shit goes off the rails. That’s our day job, and it is not pretty. Worst-case scenario is pretty much our job description.”

“Put it in park, Farm Boy,” said Top quietly.

“No,” said Howell, “it’s okay. I don’t entirely trust this stuff myself. That’s why we’re here to test it. We’re going to put these birds through the wringer to make damn sure that they work exactly and only as intended.”

“Hey,” said Bunny, “I didn’t mean—”

He stopped as the faint buzz of the drone’s engine suddenly changed. They all turned to look at it.

“Uh-oh,” said Bunny. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”

The drone was accelerating and was now flying toward them at a much higher rate of speed. It whipped over them at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Forty miles short of its top speed, but fast enough to drag a lot of air behind it. The gust fluttered their clothes, and three of the four men ducked. Only Howell didn’t move, though his grin dimmed a bit. The Predator hurtled off into the distance, diminishing to the size of a condor, then a hawk, then a sparrow, and then it was gone, circling wide and low behind the trees.

“Christ!” gasped Bunny. “Is it supposed to buzz noncombatants?”

“Does that fancy AI software give it a smart-ass personality?” asked Top.

“Nah,” said Howell. “It wouldn’t buzz us unless someone in the control vehicle took over and is deliberately screwing with us.”

“Cute,” said Top. “I’d like to deliberately kick that person’s ass.”

“Hooah,” agreed Bunny.

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch, big man,” said Howell, “that’s not SOP. Don’t worry, I’ll find out who the joker is, and I’ll kick his ass for you.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Not ’cause of making you shit your pants,” continued Howell. “He’s flying too close to the road. Big no-no. I expect someone in that truck is telling him about that right now. They’re just messing with the hotshot special ops pistoleros. But … have no doubts, he will get read the whole riot act. That bird will be heading over to the test range to fly an obstacle course.”

“Really?” asked Bunny, pointing with his chin. “’Cause here it comes again.”

Howell was smiling when he looked up to see the Predator circling back toward the road. It dropped down to fifty yards and leveled off, cruising right over the centerline on the blacktop. His smile faded slowly and, like a burned match, went out.

“What the hell…? It’s not supposed to be over the road.”

Suddenly the air was split by the shattering blare of warning sirens. Doors burst open, and people erupted from half a dozen buildings. The rear hatch of the big mobile-control vehicle flew open, and an officer jumped out. He pointed up to the drone while yelling over his shoulder at whoever was inside the truck.

“What’s happening?” shouted Bunny.

“Nothing good,” replied Top, unsnapping his sidearm.

Chief Master Sergeant Howell glanced up at the drone, back at the vehicle, at the people running out of the buildings, and back at the drone. “Stay here,” he snapped, and then bolted across the road toward the command vehicle.

The drone accelerated, its motor buzz rising to a scream.

“Oh … shit,” said Bunny. “It’s coming right at us.”

They started to disperse, but Top stopped him with a hand on his arm. “No, it’s turning.”

He was right. The drone veered sharply from the road and rocketed above the lawn. Howell was pelting across the field toward the truck.

“It’s following Dil!” he shouted. Top drew his M9 Beretta and brought it up.

“You can’t hit it from here,” warned Bunny, though he brought his gun up, too. The drone was forty yards above him and three hundreds yards behind.

They began running.

Hard.

Tearing across the field. All of them yelling, even though their cries were lost beneath the crushing weight of the alarm sirens.

Across the field, the officer who had exited the truck stood frozen in horror.

Howell turned and looked up as the drone closed the distance in mere seconds.

The Predator could not fire on Howell. It could not launch missiles at the truck. It carried no live weapons.

What it did instead tore screams from Top and the others.

It swooped down to the field so that its landing legs were five feet above the grass.

Top could not hear the sound of the drone’s engines firing to maximum speed as the machine came up behind his friend at 135 miles an hour.

But he could see the effect.

It was sudden.

It was red.

And it was unspeakable.

The front landing leg hit Dilbert Howell in the back, directly between the shoulder blades: 2,250 pounds of mass traveling at high velocity impacted two hundred pounds running at eight miles an hour. The body of the running man seemed to fly apart. To become inhuman in a terrible instant.

The wheel strut crumbled and folded back, and the shock tilted the drone downward. The onboard avionics did their best to correct the pitch, but there wasn’t time before the drone slammed into the second figure — the yelling officer — and then the truck that was four feet behind him.

The sirens did not stop blaring.

Top did not stop screaming all the way across the field.

Chapter Seventy-nine

Doctor Pharos stood in front of the wall of TV screens, arms held wide. He turned slowly toward the Gentleman. On the screens there were reporters speaking from outside a collapsed house in Fort Myers. Other reporters speculated as to the nature of a violent confrontation in Brooklyn. News feeds from Chula Vista showed men in hazmat suits removing two body bags from a small house. The rest of the screens showed views of the mourners, police, and emergency workers at Citizens Bank Park. The bulk of the news was now an even split between the drone attack at Citizens Bank Park and the video of Osama bin Laden.

The digital crawls along the bottom of each news feed asked hysterical questions and made bold statements.

“And that,” said Doctor Pharos, his arms still wide as if he could embrace the whole of the pain and suffering, “is what magic looks like.”

On a metal folding chair placed a dozen feet from the hospital bed, Doctor Aaron Davidovich nodded and smiled.

Nodded and smiled.

Nodded and smiled.

If Doctor Pharos took note of the fact that the scientist’s hands were clutched into fists in his lap, he did not care to comment.

Chapter Eighty

Mr. Church spoke with the medical team for a long time. He was not given the usual soft-soap responses common with family or friends of someone undergoing surgery. Even though he did not flash credentials, the doctors responded to him as if it was right and proper to disclose everything. Nor did they give him the layman’s version. The content of his questions set the tone.

When they were finished with their report — which was guardedly optimistic but in no way enthusiastic — Church outlined several resources he was willing to make available to them. Protection, of course, but also access to advanced technologies and top specialists from around the world.

“Whatever you want or need will be made available,” he said. “No questions and no red tape.”

The doctors accepted this. Some people boast and make dramatic statements in stressful moments. Others simply set a higher bar for the truth.

Church shook hands with them and gave them each a card with his private cell number and a second number should he be unavailable. That other number, he assured them, would be answered twenty-four hours a day.

Then he went with Brick up to the hospital helipad, where a bird was waiting. Within forty minutes they were on a private jet heading west.

Heading to Circe.

All the way to the airport and throughout the entire flight, Church’s phone kept ringing. Not from the doctors he’d just left. These were calls from the president, the chief of staff, generals, the NSA, Homeland, the CIA, the FBI, the ATF, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and a dozen other groups.

Brick took some of the calls, triaging them, responding to some, connecting callers with resources, providing access to teams and assets, sharing the workload with Church. Brick did not like the way his boss looked. Pale and strained. Tense. He wondered how much more of this even Mr. Church could take.

The attacks kept coming.

Eglin Air Force Base was the latest. That one alone would have poisoned any given day.

But the day had so much more to do.

One call in particular made Brick stiffen. He immediately handed the phone to Mr. Church. “You better take this one, Boss. Something weird just happened in Chula Vista.”

Chapter Eighty-one

Lydia Ruiz saw the dog first and stiffened, her hand going immediately to the handle of her holstered Beretta. Then she saw Junie and Sam. And then Violin.

She did not exactly relax at the sight of the strange woman she’d first met during that mission in Iran. Lydia liked Violin, but she was also afraid of her. Genuinely and, she felt, justifiably afraid. Violin was not normal. Not in any way that Lydia reckoned. Violin was undoubtedly the second most dangerous woman Lydia had ever met. The first most dangerous being Violin’s mother, Lilith. A demon if there ever was one.

Which made Violin … what, exactly?

There was a lot of debate about that among the members of Echo Team. Never, though, when Captain Ledger was around. Violin was more or less the captain’s ex, and he considered her part of the family. His own family and also the extended family of Echo Team.

And she was here to help.

With the insanity of what had happened in Philadelphia, it was difficult even for Mr. Church to keep his top-tier team working guard duty. The captain was banged up from the attack on the ballpark, but Lydia knew it wouldn’t matter much. It was hard to keep Captain Ledger out of the fight. And he’d absolutely want to be in this fight. In this hunt. If the man had two broken legs and was stepping on his own intestines, he’d want to be in this fight. He was that kind of guy.

It was why Lydia Ruiz would have walked through fire for him.

She stepped outside Circe’s room to intercept the party at the door. Violin offered her hand, and Lydia took it. The Italian woman’s grip was always so much stronger than it should be. Always a surprise. Hard, dry, and holding within it the promise of a great deal more strength. Never, however, a challenge. It wasn’t a bully handshake; she wasn’t trying to prove anything. The power was simply there.

Toys gaped at the dog. “Bloody hell.”

No one acknowledged his remark.

“Lydia,” said Violin.

“Hey.”

Violin looked past her to where Circe lay amid a cluster of arcane machines. She glanced at Toys and then away, as if noting but otherwise dismissing him. She took a step toward the comatose woman.

“May I?”

Lydia flicked a glance at Junie, who nodded. Lydia was nominally in charge of this room and this detail, but somehow Junie Flynn seemed to be in actual charge. Nothing was ever said; no orders were given to that effect. But it was the case, and everyone knew it.

Lydia looked from Violin down to the dog and up again. Then she stepped aside. Toys gave the dog a very wide berth, retreating all the way to the nurses’ station. Behind the desk, the nurses and a doctor gaped at the dog, but the day had already changed it’s frequency so completely that they no longer tried to impose rules and restrictions on anything that happened. And all other patients had been moved from this floor.

The Italian woman entered the room with Banshee following silently behind. For so large a dog, it made no sound. Not even the click of nails on the tiled floor. Violin went over to the bed, picked up the chart that was hung on the end, read it, replaced it, and then bent and kissed Circe’s forehead. Then she did something Lydia did not understand at all. Violin then turned, bent, and kissed Banshee’s forehead in exactly the same way. She spoke very softly and slowly to the dog, and Lydia would later swear to Bunny and anyone else who would listen that the damn dog actually nodded.

Then Violin turned and walked out of the room, shepherding Junie out as well. The dog, however, did not follow. It suddenly raised up and placed both front paws on the side of the bed.

“Bloody hell,” Toys said again.

“Whoa!” growled Sam.

“Get her down,” snapped Lydia, starting forward, a hand on her sidearm.

Violin merely shook her head. Junie shifted to block the two soldiers from entering the room.

“Wait,” she said. “It’s okay.”

The dog stood there, looking down at Circe with dark, intense eyes. It did not try to lick her. It didn’t even sniff her. All Banshee did was stare at the comatose woman as the seconds peeled off the clock and dropped slowly to the floor.

Banshee abruptly pushed off and dropped to all fours. She gave Lydia and Sam a long and penetrating stare. No one spoke. Then the wolfhound walked over to the corner of the room and sat.

She remained there, as still and silent as a statue.

Violin touched Junie’s arm. “I have to go. I have a team waiting for me. Banshee will stay here.”

“Thank you,” said Junie. She kissed Violin’s cheek. “Please be safe.”

A troubled look flickered on the Italian woman’s face. “There is something very bad coming.”

“What have you heard?”

“It isn’t anything from our sources, nothing like that. This is more of a feeling.” She paused. “There is evil abroad in the land, Junie. That is not melodrama. Real evil is out there, and it’s coming for all of us. It hurts me that I can’t be here to stand with you. Look to Banshee. She was born on the night of new moon when the doorways between worlds are at their thinnest. She can see through shadows. Do you understand?”

Junie chewed her lip for a moment, then nodded. “I think I do.”

Violin nodded. “If my team and I finish our job, I’ll try to get back here. Until then, stay vigilant and stay safe.”

With that, Violin turned and left

After a moment, Junie went into Circe’s room and closed the door.

Outside, staring through the glass, Lydia and Sam stood together in a pool of profound confusion.

“What,” said Lydia slowly, “the hell was that all about?”

Sam Imura shook his head. “I really do not know.”

Before either of them could say anything else, Lydia’s phone rang. It was Mr. Church.

Chapter Eighty-two

Doctor Davidovich followed the guard back to his room.

The guard said nothing at all, even when Davidovich asked casual questions. The halls of the island resort were immaculate and lifeless. The dark hardwood wainscoting had been polished to a high gloss, the runner carpets were the very best quality, the Tiffany shades on the wall sconces were lovely. But there was absolutely no personality to the place. It was like stepping into a catalog page. Attractive down to the last detail, but unreal and unrelatable.

Like so many other aspects of his life.

Like the two men he had just spent the last hours with. Doctor Pharos and the cripple. A mad doctor and a freak. That’s how he thought of them. Both hideous in their way. Both of them claiming to be part of the same family as him. Both of them believing that he was part of their world, that he was as corrupt, as demented, as vile as they were.

Two monsters.

Two, or three?

That was such a terrible question.

While he’d been in the bathroom, Davidovich had despaired over finding no faint sparks of conscience or morality in his own head or heart. Now, realizing that they were gone, that he had participated in the extinguishing of that heat, it left him feeling strange.

It should, he knew, have made it easier to step completely out of the world as he’d known it, even out of the capsule world in which he’d lived for the last few years. It should have made it a snap to become one with the darkness. As those two men were in tune with it.

That should absolutely have happened.

In the absence of conscience, there can be no genuine regret.

None.

As he walked, Davidovich wondered how sane he was. Because, despite the absolute darkness within, he felt an acid burn in his esophagus, right behind his heart.

Chapter Eighty-three

I keep several sets of clothes aboard Shirley. I changed from the borrowed hospital scrubs into jeans, a tank top, and a Hawaiian shirt with sailboats on it. Usually, those shirts remind me of happy, peaceful times. Today, I felt like I was wearing a clown suit to a funeral. But it was the most sedate thing I had.

Then I got the call from Top.

Jesus.

I spent some long, bad minutes on the phone with Top and Bunny. Mostly Bunny. Top was hurting. Dilbert Howell had been a friend of his for many years.

“Has to be the fucking Seven Kings,” he said.

“Has to be,” I agreed.

I next called Glory Price, the top kick of the Miami field office. She and her people were already on the way in a couple of Black Hawks. We discussed the matter at some length, and I filled her in on my conversations with Bug and Church. She already knew about the rest. About the Kings targeting the DMS.

“I knew it was going to be a strange day from the jump,” she told me.

“Why, because of Philly?”

“No,” she said. “Because this morning on the way into the office I hit a dog. Or … I hit what I thought was a dog.”

“You okay?”

“Me? Yeah, just shook up. It really rattled me. The thing came darting out between two parked cars.”

“What kind of dog was it?”

“That’s just it,” said Glory, “it wasn’t a dog at all. Not really. When I took a look, I thought maybe it was a coyote. But it wasn’t that, either.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Joe,” she said, “the thing I ran over was a jackal.”

“A what?”

“A jackal. A fucking jackal. The animal-control guys had to send a picture of it to a zoo to get a proper ID. It was a Canis adustus, a side-striped jackal from southern Africa. And, get this, there aren’t any in any zoos closer than Philadelphia. None known to be in private collections, either. So weird.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and I’m not really in the mood for today to get any weirder.”

“Well, buckle up,” she said, “’cause there’s one more thing. And that’s what really has me freaked out.”

I didn’t want to hear it, but I told her to tell me anyway.

“When the animal-control guys loaded it onto their truck, one of them spotted something. A dark mark on the jackal’s gums.”

“What kind of mark?”

“A tattoo. Two letters and some numbers: I, S, period. Then, thirteen, followed by a colon and twenty-one. At first we all thought it was some kind of identification tag, like they used to have on racehorses before they started using RFID chips. But it wasn’t. I had Nikki run it for me, and it came back as a Bible reference. Isaiah 13:21: ‘But desert beasts will lie down there, and their houses will be full of howling creatures; there owls will dwell, and goat-demons will dance there.’”

“Well … shit,” I said.

“I know. So freaky. I mean … this has to be tied to what happened to Rudy. This has to be tied to that guy Nicodemus, right?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

Operative word: “afraid.”

My next call was to Church, but I couldn’t get through. So I called Yoda at the Hangar. He was Bug’s second in command.

“We’re, ummmm, all over this.” He is one of those people who always makes some kind of noise. Mostly a strange little humming sound. He always sounds like a pedantic bumble bee. Charming for about half a minute and then intensely irritating thereafter.

“I want more than that, Yoda.”

“Mmmmm, meaning what, mmmm, exactly?”

“I have two guys heading to the airport for a direct flight to Eglin. They’re taking a MindReader station with them, and we’re going to take over control of the investigation. At least as far as the software and hardware goes. Mr. Church doesn’t want us to interfere with the military’s investigation.”

“Top will oversee that,” I said, but Yoda told me I was wrong.

“Mmmmmm, Mr. Church ordered Top and Bunny to, ummmm, head to San Diego.”

“Why? They’re needed at Eglin. I was just talking to them an hour ago.”

“They’re already on a, ummmm, plane.”

“What’s happening?”

He took another breath. “We have another, ummmm, drone thing,” he said. “I, ummmm, think the Kings are using food-delivery drones to target citizens.”

Chapter Eighty-four

Doctor Davidovich sat in his room and stared at nothing. The room’s lights were off, and he sat in an envelope of darkness.

Without and within.

He was trying to detach his mind from the strangeness of the moment, from the bizarre theatrics of his encounter with Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman. The lights were off so that his attention could not be pulled toward his computer or the stacks of notebooks that had come with him from his years in captivity.

He wanted to think. To take stock. To lay out the chronology of his personal descent from the man he thought he’d been to the man he clearly was. Aaron Davidovich was neither religious nor sentimental enough to view this process as his “long, dark night of the soul.” That was a laughable thought.

A dark few hours in a posh resort on one of the outer rings of hell. It would make a good reality show. Life in Hell, with Aaron Davidovich.

The truly sad thing was that he would probably watch that show.

He wished he had it on DVD now so he could binge watch it. He wanted that kind of telescoped perspective. All of the seasons of his life. Teen nerd. College wunderkind. Hot prospect scouted by top universities. The man Scientific American called the “Computer Einstein.” Then, the DARPA years. The government’s excitement about Regis.

Then Boy.

Then the years as a prisoner.

The new work. Regis. The master-control program. The masterpiece of the quantum computer.

Boy.

Those days with her. The nights.

There were such tangled memories there. Horrible and …

And what?

His mind had been going for alliteration.

Horrible and … hot.

So hot.

Those nights when she came to him in the blank hours between a dying midnight and a mysterious new dawn.

The first time was after a meal with Boy. She’d made quinoa pasta with turkey-meat sauce, broccoli, and crusty whole grain bread. They washed it down with a good Italian red, and all during the meal Boy sat close to him, her knee touching his thigh. They’d listened to Cambodian music and talked about the scientific and artistic requirements of performance. Sometimes they laughed. They never talked about work over meals. Never.

That night, she crept into his bed and made love to him. If “love” was a useful word for what happened. Boy never spoke when they were in bed. The lights were always out, the room in total darkness. She never let him touch her. He had to lie there and experience what she did with her small, clever hands, with her mouth, with her skin, with her wetness. Over the years, she’d come to him seven times.

Seven.

That first time, it seemed utterly random, a product of too much wine and the enforced closeness in the apartment. But then Davidovich realized that it had to be a response to what had happened earlier that day.

Had to be.

That was the day he’d cracked the encryption that DARPA had put on Regis in the days following his abduction. Davidovich cracked it and used one of several back doors he’d built into his system to intrude and access passive programs hidden within the code. The fact of those back doors and the passive codes were something the Seven Kings seemed to already know about. Or maybe they presumed they would be there. Davidovich was known for being possessive. It was a character trait they had clearly expected to exploit when they’d taken him. It might have been as important to them as the nature of his genius. Though it was also well known in the world of advanced software design for the creator to build such deliberate portals into their work. Partly as a way of accessing the system should there be a failure in the primary control software, and partly because they could. The only real trick was to design a back door that could not be discovered by the aggressive security software used to find such things.

Davidovich found even the most belligerent hound-dog security programs to be both a personal affront and a challenge. He was absolutely positive that no one — not even the top tier of computer experts like Bug at the DMS, even with MindReader — could find his escape hatches.

On that day, when he’d cracked the encryption, Regis lay back and spread its legs for him, welcoming him like a familiar lover. Davidovich had gone into the system, touching subroutines with knowing hands. This was his. It did not matter to him that it was a work for hire for the Department of Defense. Who were they? At best, they were patrons. How many people could name Da Vinci’s patrons? One in ten thousand? How many knew Da Vinci? Everyone.

That night, Boy had come to him and did things to him that Davidovich’s wife never even did with her dentist lover. She’d left him sprawled on the floor, one leg hooked on the edge of the bed, the sheets soaked and torn. The next morning, when he tried to talk about it, Boy did not respond. After he tried several times to engage her in playful next-day postcoital banter, she’d kicked him in the groin. Very fast, though not very hard. Enough to bend him over and make him nauseated for hours.

After that, he learned his lesson.

It was four months before she came to his bed again.

That time, and every time thereafter, he followed her unspoken set of rules. Not merely because he was afraid of her beatings. And not entirely because he hungered for her touch and all the physical mysteries she shared with him on those dark and silent nights.

No, what he wanted was her approval. He knew that about himself; he understood it. He wasn’t proud of it, but he accepted it.

Sex wasn’t the only way she showed her gratitude and approval. Eighteen months ago, after he’d devised a simple hacking virus that would allow Regis to infect any autonomous automobile program with a new version of Enact, Boy gave him a DVD to watch. On the DVD, Davidovich saw surveillance footage of two people being mugged. His wife and her lover. The attack happened in a parking garage. One man came out of the shadows, clamped a hand over his wife’s mouth, and wrapped an arm around her throat, while two other men — both of them in black clothes, gloves, and ski masks — systematically beat the dentist into a red heap. They didn’t kill him, but they paid particular attention to his groin, his hands, and his knees. And they knocked out every one of his teeth. They did not injure Davidovich’s wife, but she was a screaming wreck when they finally released her and melted away.

Davidovich was positive that the two men doing the beating were Mason and Jacob.

Davidovich wanted to be shocked, horrified, appalled.

Instead, he watched it again.

Then he went into the bathroom and masturbated.

Afterward, he threw up and sat in a hot shower for an hour, boiling away his shame. He never commented on the DVD, nor did Boy.

Another time, after he had presented the schematics for a miniature version of the QC he was building and explained that it could be used in drones as small as a common pigeon, he’d received another gift. An extremely pretty girl asked his son to the dance. It did not matter to Davidovich if the girl was actually a twentysomething passing for a teenager. It didn’t matter that she was a Seven Kings employee, probably a prostitute, who was part of the team keeping tabs on Matthew. All that mattered was the sheer joy on his son’s face.

Davidovich was certainly smart enough to know that he was being manipulated. Threats first, then a show of consideration. Then sex. It was all part of a careful but — to him — obvious plan of corruption. He had, in fact, been corrupted by it. He was thoroughly corrupt now. His postabduction work with Regis, the other software he’d written over the last few years, the QC, the drones, the takeover of autonomous vehicle software — all of that proved that he was every bit as much a monster as Pharos and the charcoal briquette. Each of those things was another drop of water onto the smoking embers of his soul. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

And yet.

As he sat there in the dark, he thought of two people.

The first was Boy. He wanted her. He ached for her. Even though he was only ever a passive lump of flesh to her. Although he was never allowed to touch her, not even in the fiercest moments of their coupling, he wanted her. He felt something suspiciously like love for her. And it did not ameliorate it one whit to know that this was some perverse spin on Stockholm syndrome. Understanding a thing did not necessarily mean that you were free of it. Ask any addict. Ask an alcoholic who has been ten years dry but who reaches for a bottle after a few consecutive personal setbacks. They understood.

He thought of Boy and wondered how far into hell he would go if he knew that she would come to his bed one more time. Just once.

Davidovich knew that he would shovel coal into the devil’s furnace for one more touch.

In the darkness he shook his head.

Then, in the next moment, he thought of the other person who was never far from his thoughts.

Matthew.

His son.

“Goddamn it,” breathed Davidovich. In the darkness, he spoke his son’s name.

“Matthew.”

Matthew.

The tears started then.

“I did it for you,” he told the image of his son that he kept safe in his mind. Not the teenager, not the college-bound young man. The picture in his mind was his son as he had been on the day he was born. A tiny thing. Pink and helpless. Crying because he had no power at all in the world. Crying because everything was strange and new and he didn’t understand anything.

Davidovich had taken him from the nurse and kissed the squalling face. Each cheek. The forehead. The little heaving chest, over the fluttering heart. Then Davidovich had cuddled the infant to his own chest and soothed him and whispered to him. Promises of love. Promises of protection. Promises of always being there.

Promises.

Gone, now. Cracked by Boy and her thugs, but comprehensively ground into dust beneath Davidovich’s own feet. Month by month, day by day since the CIA safe house.

Maybe before.

“Matthew,” he said. Davidovich did not recognize his own voice. He was certain it was not the same voice that had whispered those promises to a newborn a million years ago.