The Dragon Factory

Chapter One

“Detective Ledger?” he said, and held out an ID case. “NSA.”

“How do you spell that?”

Not a flicker of a smile touched the concrete slab of his face. He was as big as me, and the three goons with him were even bigger. All of them in sunglasses with American flags pinned on their chests. Why does this stuff always seem to happen to me?

“We’d like you to come with us,” said the guy with the flat face.

“Why?” We were in the parking lot of Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore. I had a bunch of bright yellow daffodils in one hand and a bottle of spring water in the other. I had a pistol tucked into the back of my jeans under an Orioles away-game shirt. I never used to bring a piece to Helen’s grave, but over the last few months things have changed. Life’s become more complicated, and the gun was a habit 24/7. Even here.

The Goon Squad was definitely packing. Three right-handers and one lefty. I could see the faint bulges even under the tailored suits. The lefty was the biggest of the bunch, a moose with steroid shoulders and a nose that looked like it had been punched at least once from every possible angle. If things got weird, he’d be the grabby type. The guys on either side of him were pretty boys; they’d keep their distance and draw on me. Right now they were about fourteen feet out and their sports coats were unbuttoned. Smooth.

“We’d like you to come with us,” Slab-face said again.

“I heard you. I asked, ‘Why?’ ”

“Please, Detective—”

“It’s Captain Ledger, actually.” I put a bit of frost in it even though I kept a smile on my face.

He said nothing.

“Have a nice day,” I said, and started to turn. The guy next to Slab-face — the one with the crooked nose — put his hand on my shoulder.

I stopped and looked down at his big hand and then up at his face. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t move his hand. There were four of them and one of me. The Nose probably thought that gave them a clean edge, and since NSA guys are pretty tough he was probably right. On the other hand, these guys tend to believe their own hype, and that can come back to bite you. I don’t know how much they knew about me, but if this clown had his hand on me then they didn’t know enough.

I tapped his wrist with the bunch of daffodils. “You mind?”

He removed his hand, but he stepped closer. “Don’t make this complicated.”

“ ‘Why?’ ” I said, “is not a complicated question.”

He gave me a millimeter of a smile. “National security.”

“Bullshit. I’m in national security. Go through channels.”

Slab-face touched the Nose’s shoulder and moved him aside so he could look me in the eyes. “We were told to bring you in.”

“Who signed the order?”

“Detective…”

“There you go again.”

Slab-face took a breath through his nose. “Captain Ledger.” He poured enough acid in it to melt through battleship armor.

“What’s your name?” I asked. He hadn’t held the ID up long enough for me to read it.

He paused. “Special Agent John Andrews.”

“Tell you what, Andrews, this is how we’re going to play it. I’m going to go over there and put flowers on the grave of my oldest and dearest friend — a woman who suffered horribly and died badly. I plan to sit with her for a while and I hope you have enough class and manners to allow me my privacy. Watch if you want to, but don’t get in my face. If you’re still here when I’m done, then we can take another swing at the ‘why’ question and I’ll decide whether I go with you.”

“What’s this bullshit?” snapped the Nose.

Andrews just looked at me.

“That’s the agenda, Andrews,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

Despite his orders and his professional cool, he was a little off-balance. The very fact that he was hesitating meant that there was something hinky about this, and my guess was that he didn’t know what it was — so he wasn’t ready to try to strong-arm me. I was a federal agent tied to Homeland — or close enough for his purposes — and I held military rank on top of it. He couldn’t be sure that a misstep here wouldn’t do him some career harm. I watched his eyes as he sorted through his playbook.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

I should have just nodded and gone to visit Helen’s grave, but the fact that they were accosting me here of all places really pissed me off. “Tell you what,” I said, stepping back but still smiling. “When it gets to ten minutes start holding your breath.”

I gave him a cheery wink and used the index finger of the hand holding the bottle to point at the Nose. Then I turned and headed through the tombstones, feeling the heat of their stares on my back like laser sights.

Chapter Two

Helen’s grave was on the far side of the cemetery in one of the newer sections. The whole place was flat as a pancake, but there were enough crypts and monuments to provide nominal cover. My watchdogs could see me, but I had a little bit of freedom of movement if I kept it subtle. Out of my peripheral vision I saw the Nose and one of the other guys — a blond surfer-looking dude — circling the access road in order to flank me.

I smiled. Together the four of them may have had a shot. Separated the only advantage they were leaving themselves was observation. At the current distances I could force a two-on-one situation with either Slab-face and his backup or the Nose and the Surfer. I was comfortable with those odds.

Autopilot took me to the grave. I’d switched the flowers and water bottle to my left hand so I could stick my right in my pocket. I’ve become adept at surreptitious speed-dialing and used my thumbnail to tap a number and a three-digit situation status code.

It always hurt to come here, but it hurt worse to miss a week. In the two years since Helen’s suicide I’d missed maybe four weekly visits. Last week was one because I was busting up a lab in Virginia where a couple of absolute fruitball scientists were trying to create a weaponized airborne strain of SARS to sell to terrorists. We had to dissuade them. I figured Helen would forgive me.

As I laid the flowers on the bright green grass on her grave my cell vibrated in my pocket.

“Excuse me, honey,” I murmured, placing my palm briefly on the cold headstone, “but I have to take this.”

I pulled the cell out and knelt down as if praying, so that my body hid the phone as I flipped it open. There was no name on the display, but I knew it was my boss. “I’m having an interesting morning,” I said. The alert word was “interesting.”

“This line is secure. Sit rep?” asked Mr. Church. I’ve worked for him for almost two months now and I still didn’t know his real name. I’ve heard people refer to him as the Deacon, Colonel Eldritch, the Sexton, and a few other names, but when I’d met him he introduced himself as Mr. Church, so I used that. He was somewhere north of sixty but not where it showed. My boys had a pool going as to whether he was an ex — Delta gunslinger or a CIA spook who’d moved up to management.

“Have we pissed off anybody in Washington lately?”

“Not so far this morning,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m at the cemetery. Couple of NSA stiffs have asked me to accompany them saying it was a national security issue, but they dodged my questions when I tried to find out what the deal was.”

“Do you have names?”

“Just one. John Andrews.” I described him and the others. “They’re not waving warrants around, but it’s pretty clear this isn’t a request.”

“Let me make some calls. Do nothing until I call you back.”

“These goons are waiting on me.”

“Do you care?”

“Not much.”

“Nor do I.”

He hung up. I smiled at the dragonflies that were hovering over Helen’s tombstone and let a few minutes pass. Inside I was churning. What the hell was this all about? Even though I knew I hadn’t done anything bad enough to warrant this kind of thing, I still had that guilty feeling inside. It was weird, because I didn’t think cops got that from other cops.

So far this made no sense. The book was closed on my last mission and I had nothing new on the griddle, and the last time I’d even had a brush with the NSA was last month, but that had been on a job that had ended satisfactorily for everyone involved. No stubbed toes or hurt feelings. So why did they want to pick me up?

My worry meter jumped a few points when I saw two government Crown Vics roll in through the gate and park on either side of my Explorer. Four more NSA agents climbed out and moved quickly to take up positions on logical exit routes. Four exits, four two-man teams. Slab-face was by the cars; the Nose and one other agent were between my car and the exit.

“Aw, crap.”

My cell vibrated and I answered it.

“Listen to me,” said Church. “Apparently we have rattled someone’s cage in D.C. and the situation has some wrinkles. As you know, the President is undergoing bypass surgery, and while he’s out that officially puts the VP in charge. The VP has never liked the DMS and has been very vocal about it. It looks like he’s making a run at dismantling it.”

“On what grounds?”

“He’s somehow convinced the Attorney General that I’ve been blackmailing the President to give the DMS an unusual amount of power and freedom of movement.”

“That’s kind of true, though, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t as simple as that, but for legal purposes the NSA have permission to arrest and detain all DMS staff, seize all of our facilities, et cetera.”

“Can he do that?”

“Yes. He’s the de facto Commander in Chief. Though once the President wakes up and resumes command the VP’s probably going to face some heat, but that will be in a few hours and the VP can do a lot of damage in that time. Aunt Sallie says that the NSA has landed two choppers at Floyd Bennett Field and is deploying a team. They do have warrants.”

Aunt Sallie was Church’s second in command and the Chief of Operations for the Hangar, the main DMS headquarters in Brooklyn. I’d never met her, but the rumors about her among the DMS staff were pretty wild.

Church said, “The Veep is operating in a narrow window here. We need to stall him until the President regains power. I can stall the Attorney General.”

I almost laughed. “This is really about MindReader, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

MindReader was a computer system that Church had either designed or commissioned — I still didn’t know which — but it could bypass any security, intrude into any hard drive as long as there was some kind of link, WIFI or hardline, and get out again without leaving a footprint. As far as I knew, there was nothing else like it in the world, and I think we can all be thankful for that; and it was MindReader that kept the DMS one step ahead of a lot of terrorist networks. My friend Maj. Grace Courtland had confided her suspicions to me that it was MindReader that gave Church the clout he needed to keep the President and other government officials off his back. Freedom of movement kept the DMS efficient because it negated the red tape that had slowed Homeland down to a bureaucratic crawl.

MindReader was a very dangerous tool for a lot of reasons, and we all hoped that Church had the kind of clarity of vision and integrity of purpose to use it for only the right reasons. If the VP took control of it, we’d be cooked. Plus, Church didn’t trust the MindReader system in anyone else’s hands. He had almost no faith in the nobler elements of the political mind. Good call.

“Major Courtland says that three unmarked Humvees are parked outside the Warehouse,” he said.

“What’s the Veep’s game plan?”

“I don’t know. Even as Acting President I can’t see him risking force to stop us. That gives us a little elbow room.”

“So why’s he want me? I can’t access MindReader without you personally logging me in.”

“He doesn’t know that. There are NSA teams zeroing four other DMS field offices and team leaders. They’re going for a sweep. But whatever they’re doing has to be bloodless, which is probably why Agent Andrews gave you a few minutes with Ms. Ryan.”

“Maybe, but he called for backup. Two other cars just rolled in. Lots of Indians, only one cowboy.”

“Can you get away?”

“Depends on how I’m allowed to go about it.”

“Don’t get taken, Captain, or you’ll disappear into the system. It’ll take six months to find you and you’ll be no good to me when we do.”

“Feeling the love,” I said, but he ignored me.

“This is fragile,” Church cautioned. “Anyone pulls a trigger and they’ll use it to take the DMS apart.”

“I may have to dent some of these boys.”

“I can live with that.” He disconnected.

As I pocketed my phone I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. My ten minutes were up. Andrews and his Goon Squad were closing in.

These guys shouldn’t have come out here. Not here.

“Okay,” I said to myself, “let’s dance.”

Chapter Three

It’s refreshing to be insane. Just as it’s liberating to be aware of it.

Cyrus Jakoby had known that freedom and satisfaction for many years. It was a tool that he used every bit as much as if it was a weapon. In his view it was in no way a limitation. Not when one is aware of the shape and scope of one’s personal madness, and Cyrus knew every inch and ounce of his own.

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Cyrus?”

His aide and companion of many years, Otto Wirths, was a stick figure in white livery, with mud-colored eyes and a knife scar that bisected his mouth and left nostril. Otto was an evil-looking man with a thick German accent and a body like a stick bug. He was the only one allowed to still call Cyrus by his real name — or, at least, the name that had become real to both of them.

“Quite comfortable, Otto,” Cyrus murmured. “Thank you.”

Cyrus settled back against a wall of decorative pillows, each with a different mythological animal embroidered in brilliantly colored thread. The newly laid luncheon tray sat astride his lap glittering with cut glass and polished silver. Cyrus never ate breakfast — he thought eggs were obscene in every form — and was never out of bed before one o’clock. The entire work, leisure, and sleep schedule here at the Deck reflected this, and it pleased Cyrus that he could shift the whole pattern of life according to his view of time.

While Cyrus adjusted himself in bed, Otto crossed the room and laid fresh flowers under a large oil painting of a rhesus monkey that they had long ago named Gretel. There was a giclée print of the painting in every room of the facility, and in every room of the Hive — their secret production factory in Costa Rica. Cyrus virtually worshiped that animal and frequently said that he owed more to it than to any single human being he had ever known. It was because of that animal that their campaign against blacks and homosexuals had yielded virtually incalculable success and a death toll that had surpassed World War II. Otto fully agreed, though he personally thought the hanging of prints was a bit excessive.

On the table below the portrait was a large Lucite box arranged under lights that presented it with the same reverence as the painting. A swarm of mayflies flitted about in the box. Tubes fed temperature-controlled air into the container. The tiny insects were the first true success that Cyrus and Otto had pioneered. That team at the Institute for Stem Cell Research in Edinburgh was still dining out on having found the so-called immortality master gene in mouse DNA, though they hadn’t a clue as to how to exploit its potential. Otto and Cyrus — along with a team of colleagues who were, sadly, all dead now — had cracked that puzzle forty years ago. And they’d found it in the humble mayfly.

“What’s on the schedule today?”

Otto shook out an Irish linen napkin with a deft flick and tucked it into the vee of Cyrus’s buttoned pajama top. “Against your recommendation Mr. Sunderland allowed the Twins to persuade him to try and capture the MindReader computer system. Apparently they feel they’ve outgrown Pangaea.”

“Capture it? Nonsense… it won’t work,” Cyrus said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

“Of course not.”

“Sunderland should know better.”

“He does know better,” murmured Otto. “But he’s greedy and greed makes even smart people do stupid things. I imagine, though, that he has a scapegoat in place in the event that it fails. Which it probably will. It won’t land on him and it won’t land on us.”

“It could hurt the Twins.”

Otto smiled. “You bred them to be resourceful.”

“Mm. What else do we have?”

“We’ve successfully launched test runs in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Benin, and Kenya; and on the domestic front, the Louisiana test should be yielding measurable results soon.”

“Not too soon,” Cyrus said. “We don’t want the CDC involved—”

Otto tut-tutted him. “They’ll be out of action long before this comes onto their radar. Not that they’d be able to do much once our Russian friends crash their system.”

“Russians,” Cyrus sniffed. “I don’t know why you have such affection for those blockheads.”

“Affection?” Otto smiled. “Not the word I’d choose, Mr. Cyrus… but you have to admit that they’re enthusiastic.”

“A little too enthusiastic, if you ask me. You used to be capable of such subtlety, Otto. Using the Red Mafia is… I don’t know.” He waved a hand. “It’s cliché. And it’s not ‘us.’ ”

“It’s affordable and if the assets are taken out then so what? We lose no friends. And who would ever think that we, of all people, would rely on ex-Spetsnaz thugs? No matter how heavy-handed the Russians get, no one will look in our direction. Not in time, anyway.”

Cyrus made a sulky face. “I wish we had some of the Berserkers. That was the one thing I have to admit that the Twins did that was a step ahead of us.”

“Maybe. My sources say that they’re having some behavioral issues with the Berserkers.” Otto looked at his watch. “The North Korean buyers are waiting to leave and wish to say good-bye.”

Cyrus shook his head. “No, that’s boring. Send one of my doubles. Send Milo; he has good manners.”

Otto tidied the cutlery. “You shot Milo two weeks ago.”

“Did I? Why?”

“It was a Tuesday.”

“Oh yes.”

Cyrus believed that Tuesday was the dullest and least useful day of the week and he tried to liven the low spot of each week with a little spice.

“Shame about Milo,” Cyrus said, accepting a cup of tea. “He was good.”

“That he was. But that’s water under the bridge, Mr. Cyrus,” murmured Otto. “We’ll send Kimball.”

“Are you sure I haven’t killed him yet?”

“Not so far.”

Cyrus shot him a look, but Otto gave his master a small wink. No smile, though.

“Maybe I should kill you next Tuesday.”

“Mm, when you’re done threatening me I’ll go find a broom cupboard to hide in.”

“What else do we have today?”

“The latest batch of New Men has been shipped to the Hive. Carteret and his lot are conditioning them. We have orders for sixty females and two hundred males. We can fill those orders with the current batch; however, if we get the heavier requests you’re expecting then we’ll have to up production by twenty percent.”

“Do it. Speaking of the New Men — did that idiot van der Meer try to haggle on the per-unit price?”

“He tried.”

“And—?”

“This isn’t a buyer’s market.”

Cyrus nodded, pleased. He already had the money earmarked for a new research line. Something he’d been thinking about during those long hours in his sensory dep tank. He always did his best thinking in there — a place where he felt connected to the whole of the universe, a place where he could unlock every chamber in his infinite mind.

He lifted the heavy lid of the serving dish and studied the meal. Four slices of white breast meat were fanned out like playing cards in a thick cream sauce. He didn’t recognize the grain of the meat, though the accompanying vegetables were from a more familiar group of exotics — fingerling potatoes, whole crowns of dwarf broccoli, and a spill of hybridized spinach-carrots. Otto took the lid from him.

“Something new?” Cyrus asked.

“Something old, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Breast of dodo in a white wine cream sauce.”

Cyrus applauded like a happy child. “Delightful!” He reached for a fork, then paused. “Have you tried it?”

“Of course.”

“And…?”

“It doesn’t taste like chicken.”

Cyrus laughed.

Otto pursed his lips. “It’s a bit more gamey. A bit like bald eagle, though less chewy.”

Cyrus picked up his knife and fork.

“And, not to spoil your appetite, sir,” said Otto, “but I wanted to remind you that the Twins are on their way for their regular visit. Almost certainly to discuss the Berserker issue.” Cyrus began to protest, but Otto held up a calming hand. “Don’t worry; we’ve taken the usual precautions. They’ll see and hear exactly what they expect to see and hear.”

Cyrus cut a slice of the dodo meat and chewed it thoughtfully. Otto waited with practiced patience.

“I want them thermal-scanned during any conversation.”

“We’re already on that. The chair sensors in the private garden have all been checked. With the new vapor density scanners the doctor thinks we can expect a seventy to seventy-three percent confidence in the readings. If they lie, we’ll probably know it.”

“They’re smart, those two,” warned Cyrus.

“They would have to be,” said Otto, then smiled. “And no, sir, that’s not as obsequious as it sounds. I actually have a lot of respect for the Twins.”

“As far as it goes,” corrected Cyrus.

“As far as it goes,” agree Otto.

“My young gods…” Cyrus looked into the middle distance for a long moment, a half smile playing across his lips. He blinked his eyes clear and cut a look at Otto. “What about the SAMs?”

“One Sixteen and One Forty-four are coming along nicely. They’ll be getting their fourth round of psych evaluations today, and if we like the results we can process them into the Family. Ninety-five is getting high marks in surgical classes, and he seems to have a taste for it. A family trait. Most of the rest are coming along.”

“Make sure they’re out of sight. I don’t want Hecate or Paris to see them.”

Otto nodded. “As I said, they’ll see only what we want them to see. The only child the Twins have seen — or ever will see — is Eighty-two, and he’s still at the Hive.”

Cyrus paused. “And… what about Eighty-two?” When Otto didn’t immediately respond, Cyrus said, “I still have hopes for that one. I feel more… kinship with him than any of the others.”

“I know, but you’ve seen his psych evals, Mr. Cyrus. You know what the doctors have been saying about him.”

“What? That he can’t be trusted? That he’s warped? I goddamn well don’t believe it,” snapped Cyrus with a sudden viciousness. “The doctors are wrong in their conclusions!”

His valet crossed his arms and leaned against the footboard. “They would be the third set of doctors to come up with exactly the same set of erroneous conclusions. How likely do you think that is?”

Cyrus turned his head and glared across the room at the dozens of floral arrangements that lined one wall. His chest rose and fell and several times he began to speak, but each time he left his thoughts unspoken. This was an old argument, something he and Otto had been wrangling over for nearly three years. Cyrus’s rage over the findings about Eighty-two had been towering, destructive. All six of the previous doctors had been executed. Cyrus had done it with his own hands, garroting each of them with cello strings he’d ripped from Eighty-two’s instrument.

“Have them run the tests again,” he said quietly, and in a tone that left no opening for discussions. “Have them run every single fucking test again.”

“I’ve already ordered it,” said Otto. “I sent a new team of specialists to the Hive and they’ll run everything. As many times as it takes.”

Cyrus turned to look at him and then turned away again.

“Oh, and this should make you happy,” Otto said with a deft shift of gears. “That new Indian fellow, Bannerjee… he was able to solve the gas erosion problem with the jellyfish sensors. We’ll pump a dozen of them into the Twins’ jet while it’s being refueled.”

Cyrus smiled and turned back. He cut a piece of meat and resumed his lunch. “Give Bannerjee a bonus. No… hold off on that until we’re sure we can track the Twins to wherever the hell they hide from me. If we can find the Dragon Factory, then Bannerjee gets double his pay as a bonus on top of his contract.”

“Very generous, sir.”

“And tell him that he can own the patent on whatever laminate he cooked up for the sensor, though I would appreciate fifteen percent as a tithe.”

“ ‘Tithe’?”

“Oh, call it what you want. Kickback, whatever.”

“I’m sure Dr. Bannerjee would be delighted to give you twenty percent,” said Otto.

“You’ve become greedy in your old age, Otto.”

The German bowed. “I learned at the feet of a great master of the art.”

Cyrus laughed until he choked and then laughed some more once he’d coughed up the unchewed piece of broccoli. Otto turned on the TV, adjusted the channel to a split screen of BBC World News and CNN, with a continuous crawl at the bottom of stock prices on the technologies and biotech markets. He tidied the pillows around Cyrus, straightened the flowers in the twenty-seven vases scattered around the room, and made sure to check that the bedside pistol was unloaded. No sense taking chances.

Chapter Four

“Mr. Vice President,” said the aide, “all teams have reported in. Everyone’s in position.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, sir, and the teams assigned to solo pickups have already moved in; the main teams are at the gates of each facility. I issued the go order.”

William Collins, Vice President and Acting President of the United States, nodded and sat back in his chair. He used his palms — the callused steelworker’s hands so often remarked upon in his press — to vigorously rub his face until his cheeks glowed. He let out a sharp sigh and clapped his hands together. The aide flinched.

“How soon before we know anything?”

“The Agents In Charge will call in on an individual basis once they’ve secured their objectives. Every situation is different and I’ve impressed upon them the need for delicacy, the need to get this done right rather than fast.”

The Vice President shot him a hard look. “Fast is pretty goddamned essential, don’t you think?”

The aide was immediately conciliatory. “Of course, sir, but it has to be done right. To the letter of the law.”

“Yeah, yeah… okay. Keep me apprised.” He sat back in his chair and waited until the aide left; then the Vice President turned to the other man in the room, an old crocodile in a five-thousand-dollar suit. The man’s face was fat, wrinkled, and flushed with hypertension, but his expression was calm, his eyes calculating and amused.

“Christ, this had better work, J.P.,” muttered the Vice President.

Jonas Paul Sunderland, the senior senator for Texas and one of the most vocal advocates of biotech development, smiled. “It’ll work, Bill. Don’t get your nuts in a knot.” He rattled the ice in his Scotch and took a pull. “We have good people well placed.”

“I have a lot at stake here, J.P.”

Sunderland gave him a bland smile. “We all do. But even if this tanks, you’ll come out looking like Joe Patriot and I won’t even be in the picture. This is well planned and you have the law on your side… which is nice. We’re actually the good guys here.”

“On paper,” Collins said.

“Sure, on paper, but that paper is the Constitution, so calm down. If you look stressed you’ll look guilty.”

The Vice President shook his head. “You don’t really appreciate this President, J.P. You think he’s a green kid with his head up his ass, but he’s a lot sharper than you think.”

Sunderland did not speak the string of racial invectives that rose to his lips. He said, “You think too highly of him.”

“Maybe. If I do it’s because he has Church behind him. Or… maybe Church really is controlling him. Either way it brings Church into the picture. We’re directly attacking him and the President.”

J.P. Sunderland shrugged as if Church and his influence was a non-issue, though in truth he knew Church — and his potential — with greater scope and clarity than the Vice President could ever hope to possess. Sunderland finished his Scotch, hauled himself out of his chair, and waddled to the side table to pour a refill, heavy on the Scotch with a nominal spritz of soda. Then he made a fresh drink for the Vice President. The order in which these things were done was not lost on Collins.

“God, I just want this over with.” The Vice President jerked the glass out of Sunderland’s hand, sloshing some on his desk blotter. He scowled as he threw half of it back too fast and coughed. Sunderland looked amused as he tottered back to his chair and sank down with a sigh. Collins glared into his drink. “And I want that fucking computer.”

“We all want something, Bill. You want to get your office back to the level of power it had during Cheney’s time, and I want what I want.”

And what I want, Sunderland thought, is to take that computer system out of the equation.

MindReader was the key for both of them. For Collins, acquiring it was less important than silencing it. Sunderland saw it as a short path to a veritable license to print money. His current business partners, the Jakoby Twins — those brilliant albino freaks — could use MindReader to filch even the most heavily encrypted research records from every other genetics lab in the world. The Twins had sidestepped most of the normal limitations most geneticists faced — an insufficient annotation of the genome — by stealing bits and pieces of annotation from different sources. As a result they were already miles beyond anyone else, but they’d hit a wall with what their current computer — Pangaea — could steal. The Jakobys were willing to pay absurd amounts of money to possess MindReader, but as he sipped his Scotch Sunderland toyed with the idea of only leasing it to them. Why give away the cow?

That way he could also lease use of the system to their father, Cyrus Jakoby. Sunderland greatly admired the elder Jakoby and shared many of Cyrus’s political, ethnic, and societal views. MindReader could push Cyrus’s plans ahead by an order of magnitude. And Cyrus would pay for that advantage, no doubt about it.

His other concern was his own brother, Harold, who was close with the Jakoby Twins and often went hunting with them or their friends. Harold was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and if MindReader was ever aimed in the direction of the Jakobys then it would find Harold — and that would lead right back to J.P. and the bills he wanted passed. Harold was really the only traceable link, even though he wasn’t really a player himself. But more than one good scheme had been sunk by the presence of an idiot relative.

He shared none of this with Collins. Sunderland believed in the “need to know” philosophy, and if Collins knew, he’d either chicken out or want a huge cut.

Sunderland sipped his Scotch and watched the Vice President fret.

The things in which they both shared interest were the four biotech bills moving through Congress. At the moment there was absolutely nothing that could connect the bills with Collins’s personal interests or Sunderland’s private holdings. MindReader, if aimed in that direction, might change that. Any clear connection that came to light would ruin Collins, trash his political career, and make him a pariah in the business world. It was the lever Sunderland had used to convince Collins to take this action. If the bills were stopped because of some taint of insider knowledge or personal interest, then money would spill all over the place. Without approval of the bills a lot of research would have to go offshore, and that could be costly and time-consuming. Domestic licensing and approval for research led to faster patents, and that got drugs, cell lines, and procedures to market much more quickly.

Sunderland sipped his drink and hoisted a comforting and comradely smile on his face for the benefit of the Vice President.

“This had better work,” the Vice President said again.

Sunderland said nothing.

They sat in their leather chairs, separated by a big desk and an ocean of personal differences, and they sipped their Scotch, and they waited for the phone to ring.

Chapter Five

The NSA guys had split into four teams, taking the corners of a big box with Helen’s grave as the center point. Not imaginative, but not bad. I made sure they saw me checking them out, which in turn made them front me a bit more. They stood tall and tried to look tough as nails from where they stood. Believe me, I was impressed.

Even so, I play a pretty good hand of poker, and the game’s as much about what’s on your face as what’s in your hand. I got up and as I walked toward Agent Andrews I let my shoulders sag a bit and deflated my chest so that I looked a good deal smaller than I was. He’d already seen me up close, but there’s a lot to be said for second impressions. Along the way I took a couple of sips from the water bottle.

“Are you ready to come with us, Captain Ledger?” he asked.

“Still waiting on a ‘why’ or a warrant.”

Andrews’s face was harder and I guessed he’d been in contact with his seniors. “Sir, we’re here by Executive Order on a matter of national security. We are not required to explain ourselves at this time.” Andrews’s partner shifted a bit to the right; I guess he wanted to show me how big his chest was.

I made a show of surprise at this pronouncement, stopping the water bottle halfway to my mouth and looking over the rim at Andrews. “You’re saying that the President himself ordered this pickup?”

Andrews didn’t blink. “Our orders come directly from the White House.”

He was being cute, which told me that he knew about the Vice President’s little maneuver. He was being very careful in how he phrased things.

“Okay,” I said as I took a sip.

Andrews blinked, surprised.

I spit a mouthful of water into his eyes, then threw the bottle at the other guy — not that it would hurt him, but it made him flinch and evade. Before they could recover I was on them. I grabbed Andrews by the hair and one lapel and pivoted him around into a foot sweep that caught him on the shin. My foot acted like a fulcrum and with his mass and the force of my spin he came right off the ground like he weighed nothing. I threw him into the second agent’s big flat chest and the two of them went down in a heap. I heard a huge whoof! and a cry of pain as the second guy fell with all of Andrews’s mass atop him. Andrews was no lightweight.

I wasted no time and sprinted for the parked cars. I had my Rapid Response folding knife in my hip pocket and with a loose wrist flick the blade locked into place. I ran past Andrews’s Crown Vic and did a quick jab job on one tire, and then knifed the tire of a second government sedan. But before I could run back to my Explorer, the Nose and the Surfer cut me off. Nose could run like a son of a bitch and he reached me eight strides before his backup. Dumb ass.

When he was three steps out I pocketed my knife and jagged out of my line of escape to drive right at him. He had a lot of mass in motion; he was coming in to sack the quarterback and he’d built up such a head of steam that there was no way for him to sidestep. I jerked left and clotheslined him with a stiffened right forearm across the base of the nose. There’s an urban myth that hitting the base of the nose can drive bone fragments up into the brain — even some karate instructors insist it’s true, but it’s not physiologically possible. However, a smashed nose, especially at high speed, can give whiplash, fill the Eustachian tubes with blood, set off fireworks in the eyes, and generally make you feel like your head’s in a drum and a crazy ape’s beating on it with a stick.

The Nose flipped backward like someone pulled the rug out from under him and he was out cold before he hit the deck. He’d need a lot of work on that nose of his, but he should never have put his hand on me. Not ever, and especially not here at Helen’s grave. I take that shit very personally.

As he fell the Surfer closed in at a dead run and he made a grab for his gun, but I pulled mine and pointed it at him. He skidded to a stop.

“Pull it with two fingers and throw it away,” I ordered. “Do it now!”

He did it. Four other agents were closing on us, the closest nearly fifty yards out. I kicked the Surfer in the nuts, then knotted my fingers in his short hair and used him as a shield while I backpedaled to my Explorer.

I spun Surfer-boy around and gave a palm shot across the chops that would put him in a neck brace for a week, and as he crumpled I popped the lock on the Explorer and dove behind the wheel.

From the time I dropped my human shield to the moment I roared through the exit of the cemetery they had maybe six separate opportunities to take a good shot at my vehicle or me. They didn’t.

I found that very interesting.

Chapter Six

Hecate Jakoby sat naked on the edge of the bed and stared out of the jet’s window at the rolling mountains of clouds below. She loved the contrast of purest white and ten thousand shades of gray. It was a kind of mirror for her.

Her brother, Paris, stood in black silk boxers that were a much sharper contrast with his snow-white skin. Paris always dressed in dark colors to highlight the albino richness of his lean and muscular body. Hecate preferred softer colors; she was less comfortable with her white skin than he was, though in truth both of them were absurdly beautiful. Even the people who hated them thought so.

The woman on the bed moaned and turned over in her sleep. The drugs would wear off in an hour or so, but by then the jet would be on the ground in Arizona and the flight crew would take care of the girl. She’d be fed and paid and given all of the proper instructions. If Hecate and Paris liked the report from the staff, maybe they’d treat the girl to another round of play on the flight back. If not, the bitch would be ferried to the closest town and given enough cash for a bus ticket.

The digital recording of their sexual encounter would be burned to disk and added to the Twins’ library. The library was indexed by gender, hair color, race, and number of partners. There were three — so far — disks in elegant black cases. Those were special — records of encounters in which their lovely playthings had been cremated and their ashes scattered over the ocean. Not for ceremonial purposes; it was simply an efficient disposal method.

“That was fun,” murmured Paris. “She was spirited. Do you want a martini?”

“Please,” said Hecate. “A double.”

Paris glanced at her from the wet bar, saw that she was staring down at the sleeping woman. “What’s with you? You falling in love?”

“No… just admiring the architecture,” said Hecate distractedly. “Two onions in the martini.” The girl was twenty, buxom, tan, with foamy masses of curly red hair. She had freckles and several ornate tattoos — Chinese characters and Celtic knots. She was everything Hecate was not. Although Hecate was beautifully made — tall and slender and ice pale, with snow-colored hair and eyes as dark as ripe blueberries — she wasn’t a California blonde. Her own breasts were small, her nipples the color of dusty roses. The only mark on her otherwise flawless skin was a small scar in the shape of a starburst that was the same dusty rose color as her nipples. That… and a small tattoo on her left inner thigh of a caduceus on which two fierce dragons — not ordinary serpents — coiled around the winged herald’s staff. The scales of the dragons and the symmetry of their bodies suggested a double helix.

Paris had an identical tattoo on his left upper calf and the same starburst scar on his chest. The scar was their personal mark. A bond in the flesh, as their father often called it, a sign of their greatness and a reminder of what Dad called their celestial heritage. They had been marked at birth when the doctors performing the emergency C-section on their mother had discovered twins locked chest-to-chest in an embrace, their blood-smeared cheeks pressed together. At first the doctors had feared that the twins were conjoined in some surgically challenging way, but as they were carefully lifted out of their dying mother’s womb and laid in the incubator the infants rolled apart, an action that tore the fragile skin over their chests. That had been the only conjoined point, and it did them no harm except to leave a star-shaped scar on each child’s chest. The star never faded.

The delivering doctor, a deeply Catholic obstetrician at the Cancún hospital where their mother had been rushed following a collapse at a Christmas party at one of the bigger resorts, saw the mark at the moment when the delivery nurse announced the official delivery time. Twelve-oh-one on Christmas morning.

“Milagro!” the doctor had declared, and crossed himself. A miracle.

The story made the papers worldwide. Twins, albinos with shocking blue eyes, born at the stroke of midnight as Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. The first birth of the holiday, and each child was marked with a star like the Star of Bethlehem. The story, nonsensical as it might be, was picked up by wire services around the world. The death of their mother and the coincidence of her name — Mary — fueled the story into one of beauty from tragedy. Before the Jakoby Twins were a minute old they were already legends.

Hecate touched her scar with one hand and with the fingers of the other traced the smooth and unmarked valley between the sleeping girl’s breasts. What would it be like to be ordinary? Hecate mused. Not for the first time.

Even deep in her sleep the girl felt the touch and moaned again. Hecate bent and kissed the smooth place between the girl’s breasts, paused, and then licked the skin, tasting the olio of sweat, perfume, and natural musk. Hecate wondered what her flesh would truly taste like if she could ever work up the nerve to bite. She wondered how blood would change the taste.

“Good God,” said Paris as he came over with the drinks, “are you never satisfied?”

Hecate raised her head and smiled. Her brother never quite understood her, and that was okay. There were plenty of things about her she didn’t want understood. She accepted the martini and sipped it.

“Mmm, perfect.”

Paris sipped his drink, set the glass down on the deck beside the bed, and began pulling on his clothes. He put on black slacks, a charcoal shirt, and loafers without socks, his clothing choice conservative to suit the occasion. This was the second of their twice-monthly visits to their father’s laboratory in Arizona. It was really a prison, but they’d sold their father a line of propaganda stating that he needed a safe haven to protect him from the mud people and the government — or at least those parts of the government that weren’t sucking on the Jakoby tit. Cyrus appeared to be convinced of the necessity for a hidden base and they’d coddled him by allowing him to design it according to his “vision.” The base he created was in the shape of a dodecahedron — which Cyrus said was a crucial form in sacred geometry — and became familiarly known as the Deck. The Twins had built hundreds of security and surveillance devices into it, some of which they let Cyrus know about — they were sure he didn’t know about the others.

“I wish to hell we’d built his lab somewhere closer,” Paris complained. “Fucking Arizona? In August? Besides, it lacks style.”

“Style?”

“C’mon,” he said, “it’s a secret lab with an actual mad scientist. We missed an opportunity to be cool.”

“Secret lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes are so five minutes ago.” Hecate sniffed. “Besides, Dad’s hardly Dr. No.”

“He’s smarter. And eviler. Is that a word?”

“No. But it’s true, Daddy certainly puts the ‘mad’ back in ‘mad scientist.’ ” She and Paris laughed and clinked glasses.

“What have you heard from him lately?” asked Hecate, sipping her martini and continuing to stare at the woman she had shared with her brother for the last three hours. She could still smell the woman, still taste her, despite the vodka. The girl had tasted like summer and freedom.

“His man Otto’s called me a dozen times in the last week. Hmm… I wonder if Otto qualifies as an evil assistant or henchman?”

“Evil assistant, definitely,” decided Hecate.

“I suppose. Anyway, he said that Dad wants the new generation gene sequencer, the Swedish one that was on the cover of Biotech Times.”

“So? Let him have it,” said Hecate.

“He wants two of them, and I think he wants them just because they were on the cover.”

“Who cares? Buy him a roomful.”

“He already has a roomful of Four Fifty-four Life Sciences sequencers,” complained Paris. “He says they’re garbage and his attendants had to restrain him from having a go at them with a fire axe.”

Hecate shrugged. “Why are you making an issue of this? If Alpha wants twenty new computers then let him have them. We can debit his allowance for it. God knows he’s been enough of a cash cow lately to allow him some toys. What’s it to you?”

Paris sneered at his sister’s use of “Alpha.” Dad had started calling himself that a month ago and insisted that his children only address him by that name. Their father’s staff had to address him as Lord Alpha the Most High. For two years before that he’d only answered when addressed as the Orange, which was a vague reference to some alien race whose origins and nature seem to be in some dispute among UFOlogists. Paris was grudgingly indulgent; he had a vein in his forehead that started pulsing every time he had to shape his lips around one of those names. The only one of his father’s names Paris had ever liked was Merlin, which Cyrus had used for most of their teenage years.

Hecate raised one delicate eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Paris snapped. “I’m not being cheap or, god help us, ‘thrifty’… it’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between necessary requests and his go-nowhere whims. Like the swimming pool filled with mercury.”

Hecate finished her martini and stood up. She was exactly as tall as Paris — six feet on the dot — and had legs that been commented upon everywhere from Vogue to Maxim. The most common phrase in the magazines was “legs like alabaster.” Crap like that, which Hecate had found flattering when she was in her teens but now found trite. Her silver-white pubic hair was shaved to a tiny vee, and when she raised her leg to step into her panties the cabin lights sparkled on the golden rings in her labia. Her nipple rings were platinum. For her twenty-seventh birthday she was considering having her eyebrows pierced, though she was absolutely certain it would give Dad a coronary. As far as he knew, the Twins were completely without marks except for the starburst scars. He told them over and over again that purity was important, though none of his explanations as to why it was important made any rational sense. Something about keeping the channel open for the celestial god force that was supposed to flow through them.

She pulled on a short pale green skirt and a white satin blouse that caught stray flickers of light when she moved. She sat down, snugged back into the deep cushions in one corner of the Lear, legs crossed, dangling a sandal from her big toe.

The reference to the mercury pool was fair enough; it had been absurdly expensive—$5.35 per hundred grams — and yet startlingly beautiful. Ten thousand gallons of swirling liquid metal. The purchase of it through various companies they owned had caused a brief stock market run on the metal, and there was still speculation in some of the science trade journals that someone somewhere was developing something new that would wow the world.

Hecate said, “By the time he’d gotten tired of the metal consciousness experiment the market price had gone up twenty-six cents an ounce. We made a killing.”

“That’s hardly the point,” Paris said irritably. “It’s part of a pattern of deterioration and excess that’s making it harder and harder to separate his crazy bullshit from actual research.”

“Which is why we pay Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to validate his work.”

“The Three Stooges? They’re idiots.”

Hecate gave her brother a tolerant smile and a mild shake of the head. “They’re not and you know it. They’re the best of the best.”

Paris made a rude noise and threw back the last of his drink. “With Otto always at Dad’s side our three idiots can never get close. I think we need to invite him down to the Dragon Factory for a few days.”

“Are you nuts? He’s been trying to find out where it is for years now. No way we can bring him there!”

“It’s not like we’d send him a plane ticket, Paris. We’d go get him and control what he sees and knows. We could block out the windows on the jet, maybe slip him something so he’d sleep through the trip — something so that he wouldn’t know where the Dragon Factory was. But I really think some tropical air would do him good, and we’d have a chance to get some actual quality time with him. And maybe see if we can figure out if he’s totally bonkers or just half-crazy. We could show him the Berserkers and the stuff we have in development for the work camps. He’d—”

There was a soft bing! sound, indicating that their plane was beginning its descent. A moment later Paris’s cell phone rang. He paced the length of the cabin, mostly listening, grunting now and then. He said, “Shit!” and disconnected. His face was flushed red.

“What’s wrong?” asked Hecate. “Who was that?”

“Sunderland,” Paris said. “They’re having problems getting the computer system. Apparently they’re meeting more resistance than anticipated.”

“He has the entire NSA!”

“I know; I know.”

Hecate bit her lip and looked out of the window for a long moment. “We need that system. Pangaea’s not good enough for the next phase. We need MindReader.”

As brilliant as the Twins were, they could not take full responsibility for much of their transgenic work. Most of it was stolen. Pangaea, a computer system given to them by Alpha, was an advanced intruder model, and with it they had been able to infiltrate the mainframes of many of the world’s top genetics research labs and clone the databases. This gave them a bank of knowledge broader than anyone else’s, and broader by a couple orders of magnitude. However, Pangaea was not a new system and some of the modern firewalls were starting to give them trouble. The only computer system capable of slipping through those firewalls was MindReader, and it could more easily decrypt the data.

They’d already tried putting a mole in the DMS to try to steal a Mind-Reader unit or obtain specs on it. They acted on a tip that there were some security holes in the organization, but they hit only brick walls and wasted over a million dollars that they would never see again. Using the Vice President had been Sunderland’s grand scheme, and he’d already banked a lot of Jakoby cash just to set it in motion. If the plan failed, there was no chance in hell of getting a refund from the fat blow-hard. That, they both agreed, was one of the downsides of being criminals. Unless you could pull a trigger on someone there was just no accountability, and Sunderland was not someone they could dispose of.

“Well, there’s still the Denver thing,” Paris said after a long silence. “The way Dad reacted when we told him about it… there must be something amazing down there. Maybe even the schematics for Mind-Reader.”

“More likely it’s early genetics research,” cautioned Hecate. “Could be a complete waste of time for us.”

“Maybe,” Paris said diffidently. One of the many goals of Sunderland’s gambit with the Vice President was to keep the DMS too busy to notice anything happening in Denver. The discovery of a trove of old records belonging to one of Alpha’s oldest colleagues was huge. The Twins had long suspected that Alpha had ties to groups who had pioneered genetic research, and the existence of a legendary trove of data based on covert mass human testing had long been the Holy Grail of black market genetics. No one knew exactly what was in it, but since the 1970s more than a dozen people had been murdered during the search for it. Alpha had mentioned it several times and had slyly gotten the Twins to look for it, but when they said that they thought they had a solid lead on it in a records storage facility near Denver, Alpha had tried to play it down as a whim that had passed. The Twins hadn’t believed him. There had been a moment of naked hunger in Alpha’s eyes that had electrified them.

The Twins were using this trip to visit Alpha as a way of distracting him and the Sunderland gambit as a way of distracting the DMS. If everything went according to plan, then Paris and Hecate would have the contents of those records by the time they returned to the Dragon Factory.

“You’re right. When it comes right down to it,” Hecate said with a smile, “it’s not like we don’t have a Plan B. Or a Plan C.”

“Or Plan D,” he said brightly.

She held up her glass and he reached over to clink.

Paris took her glass and refilled it.

“Why does Dad need the new sequencers?” asked Hecate.

“He wouldn’t say, of course. He never does unless he can stage a big reveal. God, he treats this like a fucking game show sometimes. When I pushed for an explanation he just rattled off some mumbo jumbo that wasn’t even real science. He refuses to tell me anything specific unless you’re there. He wants both halves of the Arcturian Collective to bear witness.”

“ ‘The Arcturian Collective’? Is that our new name?”

Paris nodded and sipped his vodka.

“Well,” Hecate said, “it’s better than the Star Children. That one sounded like a late-seventies glam rock band. I keep hoping he’ll settle on Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

Despite his sour mood, Paris grinned. “How about the Space Oddities?”

“Now that,” Hecate said, “would be too close to truth in advertising.”

They both burst out laughing. The girl moaned and turned over in her sleep. Hecate got tired of looking at her and pulled a sheet over her, a sneer touching the corners of Hecate’s mouth. How could she have thought those big cow breasts were attractive?

Paris made fresh drinks and handed one to her.

“You don’t think he suspects,” Hecate asked softly, “do you?”

“Suspects what we’re doing or what we have planned for him?”

“Either. Both.”

Paris shrugged. “With him it’s hard to know,” he admitted. “Dad thinks he’s still in charge. But really — does it matter? By the time he could find out for sure it’ll be too late for him to do anything about it.”

Their jet dropped its flaps and began a long, slow descent toward the desert.

Chapter Seven

Dr. Panjay stepped out of the tent and pulled off her mask to reveal a face that was deeply troubled and deeply afraid. She peeled off her Latex gloves and her hands were shaking so badly she missed the biowaste bin on the first try. She heard the tent flap rustle and turned to see her colleague Dr. Smithwick come out into the dusty afternoon sunlight. Despite his sunburn, Smithwick was white as a ghost. He stood next to Panjay and removed his blood-smeared gloves and threw them, his mask and apron into the biowaste bin.

“You see why I asked you to come here? To see for yourself?” Panjay looked up into his face. “Thomas… what are we going to do?”

He shook his head. “I… don’t know. Aside from sending samples and our notes… I don’t know what we can do. This is beyond me, Rina.”

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “But… perhaps I should have prepared you better.”

Smithwick looked back at the big tent. With the flap closed he could not see the rows upon rows of cots, each one occupied by a farmer from the Ouémé River basin. Sixty-two people.

“Is this every case?” he asked.

She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. These are the healthiest cases.”

“I… don’t understand…”

“Since I came here three weeks ago we’ve had three hundred people present with symptoms. Most of them have hemoglobin levels in the range of six to eight grams per deciliter with a high reticulocyte count. Some have demonstrated features of hyposplenism Howell-Jolly bodies.”

“You tested them all?”

“Yes… and five hundred other people chosen at random from the same towns or farms. Every single one of them showed signs of sickles hemoglobin. I tested their Hb S in sodium dithionite, and in every case the Hb had a turbid appearance.”

“Christ!”

“Not everyone has active symptoms, but when symptoms present we’re seeing a wide range of them. We’ve seen ischemia resulting in avascular necrosis; there have been cases of priapism and infarction of the penis in males of all ages; bacterial bone infections… the list is endless. Every symptom in the book. Even symptoms typically common in different strains are showing up in the same patients, including strokes due to vascular narrowing of blood vessels. There have been nineteen cases of cerebral infarction in children and widespread cerebral hemorrhaging in adults. And we’ve had increased occurrences of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae in any patient who had undergone surgery. And not just splenectomies — I mean any surgery.”

“What are the primary causes of death?”

“Renal failure,” she said. “Across the board.”

Her words hit Smithwick like a series of punches. He staggered back and had to grab a slender tree for support.

“All of them?”

“Every one. Every person.”

“That’s not possible.” He licked his lips. “Do you have a map? Can you show me where the cases were reported?”

She nodded. “I knew you’d want to see it, so I have it already prepared.”

Rina Panjay led the way through the nearly deserted village. The only sound they heard was that of quiet weeping from people huddled around fresh graves in the cemetery and a single high keening moan of loss echoing from a child’s bedroom where a desolated mother sat clutching a doll to her chest as she rocked back and forth. Panjay’s eyes were red from all the tears she had wept for this village over the last few weeks. She felt used, destroyed, totally helpless.

They entered the small World Health Organization blockhouse that normally served as the hospital for this rural corner of Ouémé. There were no patients in the hospital now — everyone had been moved to the big tent that had been erected in the middle of a field far from town and well away from the water supply.

There was a large map of the district that was littered with hundreds of colored pins tacked to the wall. The rest of that wall and some of the next was covered floor to ceiling with printouts of digital photographs of the victims. These, too, were color coded by pins. Victims without active symptoms had white pins. Victims with active symptoms had red pins. The dead were marked with black pins. Panjay pointed to a spot on the map. “This is where the first case was reported. The next was here, the next here.” She tapped the pins as she spoke and Smithwick’s face, already ashen, went paler still.

“No…,” he said.

Panjay lowered her hand. The pins on the map said all that was necessary. The pattern was clear. A first-year medical student could understand the implications, though to a seasoned WHO epidemiologist like Thomas Smithwick it was so clear that it screamed at him.

“This is impossible, Rina,” he said. “What you’re describing can’t be sickle-cell. You must have made a mistake. The samples must have been contaminated.”

She gave a weary shake of her head. “No. I had the results checked at three different labs. That’s why I called you. I don’t know what to do… this isn’t something I’m trained for.”

It was true, Rina Sanjay was an excellent young doctor, fresh from her internship at UCLA Medical Center and a brief stint as an ER doctor in Philadelphia’s Northeastern Hospital. She could do anything from deliver a baby, to diagnose HIV, to perform minor surgeries for wound repair. But all of the tests said the same thing: sickle-cell anemia. A genetic disorder.

Smithwick on the other hand had spent twenty-six years with the World Health Organization. He had been in the trenches in the fight against the spread of HIV throughout Africa. He’d worked on two of the most recent Ebola outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In any other circumstance he was the wrong specialist to call in for something like this.

“What you’re describing is impossible,” he insisted. “Sickle-cell is not a communicable disease. It’s strictly genetic. But this… this…” He waved his hands at the map. “This map suggests the spread of a communicable disease.”

Rina Panjay said nothing.

“It’s impossible,” Smithwick said again. “Genetic diseases are not communicable.”

“Could it have mutated?”

“So fast? And to this degree of virulence?” He shook his head. “No… there’s just no way that could happen. Not in ten thousand generations of mutation.”

“Then how could it happen?” she asked.

The air between them crackled with tension as Smithwick fought against the words that were forming on his tongue. The answer was as simple as it was preposterous. As simple as it was grotesque.

Smithwick said, “It’s theoretically possible to do it. Deliberately. In a lab. Gene therapy and some host, perhaps a virus… but there would be no point. Gene therapy has a purpose, a goal. This doesn’t. This is…” He fished for a word.

“Evil?” she suggested.

He was a long time answering, then nodded. “If this is something someone has done… then it could only have been created for one purpose. To do harm. To intentionally do harm.”

Dr. Panjay looked at the map and then her eyes moved across the hundreds of color photographs pinned to the wall. Many of the pictures were of people she knew. Over fifty were from this village. Everyone in the village she had tested had come up positive for this new strain of sickle-cell. Every single person.

“We have to inform WHO,” Panjay said. “We have to warn them—”

“No,” Smithwick interrupted. “We have to warn everyone.”

He stared at the pins.

“Everyone,” he repeated softly, but in his heart he was terrified that they were already too late. Far too late.

Chapter Eight

Things are seldom what they seem. After leaving the cemetery I drove eight blocks, doing double backs and sudden turns and all of the other stunts that cops learn from crooks about losing a tail. Nothing. Nobody was tailing me. I was sure of that.

“Ah, shit,” I said aloud, and immediately pulled off the street into a parking lot of a big strip mall. Couple of things to remember about the NSA: they weren’t stupid, not on their worst days… and they weren’t clumsy.

I got out of the car, locked it, and ran like a son of a bitch.

They weren’t tailing me because they didn’t need to. I hadn’t seen one or heard one, but I’d bet my complete collection of Muddy Waters on vinyl that one of Slab-face’s boys had put a tracer on my car. Either they were tracking me in the hopes that I’d lead them somewhere sensitive to the DMS or they were herding me toward an ambush point. I didn’t wait around to find out. I ran.

They were already closing in on me. Two blocks from where I dumped the Explorer I rounded a corner and there was a black car cruising the street, heading in the direction I’d just come from. As it passed I flicked a glance at it and looked right into the surprised face of Agent John Andrews. Slab-face.

Shit.

I only saw him for a second, but it was long enough for his scowl of frustration to blossom into a big smile like a happy bloodhound. He was yelling at the driver as I jagged left and raced down an alley. I heard shouts behind me and Andrews and his buddy were pelting after me with alarming speed.

Okay, I thought, if you want me bad enough then see if you can keep up.

I poured it on, leaping over garbage, ducking through a rent in a chain-link fence, vaulting a green Dumpster, and spider-climbing up a fire escape. I’m moderately big, but I can run like a cheetah on speed when I’m motivated.

Andrews, for all his size, was even faster than me.

He was less than ten yards behind me as I tore down a garbage-strewn alleyway toward a dead end. If he hadn’t wasted breath yelling at me he might have grabbed me before I could make it to the end of the alley. Mistake. I leaped as high as I could and grabbed the chain-link fence three-quarters of the way up and scrambled up and over like a nervous squirrel. I swung over the top pole and did an ugly somersault, spilling the change and car keys out of my pocket, and landed in a crouch, fell sideways, and used the momentum to get back to my feet. It wasn’t pretty, but I was up and running.

I didn’t look back. I heard Andrews slam into the fence, but his dress shoes weren’t made for climbing and he fell. I heard him land, and his curses followed me all the way down the alley.

Andrews yelled at me to stop, but he still hadn’t pulled his piece. Curiouser and curiouser. I didn’t want to know how he’d vent his frustrations if he ever got me cuffed to a D ring in a quiet interrogation room, so I ran and ran and ran.

The rest of the alley was clear and I poured on the juice, but just as I was about to make a break for daylight a second Crown Vic screeched to a stop in front of me, tires smoking, its bulk entirely blocking the alley. Two agents started opening their doors, but I didn’t stop. I threw myself into the air, hit the hood of the car, and slid on one ass cheek across the hood. As I landed, the agent on the passenger side made a grab for me, but I spun into him, head-butted him, and then threw him onto the hood as the other agent tried to slide across like I’d done. The two agents hit hard and slid off the front of the car into the street.

I hated messing these guys up, but Mr. Church’s words were banging around inside my head. Don’t get taken, Captain, or you’ll disappear into the system.

Call it an incentive program.

A third agent came out of nowhere, jumped over his pals, and pounded after me. Slab-face and the other agent were too far back now, so I let the driver catch up to me two blocks away. I cut diagonally across a basketball court, scattering black teenagers out of my way as I went. They yelled at us the way kids will and then I gave them something to yell about. As I reached the foul line of the far court I angled for the thin metal pole that supported the rusted hoop from which only tattered threads of a net remained. I leaped at the upright, grabbed it with both hands just as the driver caught up, and I flagpoled around it like a vertical version of a spin on a high bar. My sneakers slammed into the driver’s chest and knocked him flying into a row of overflowing trash cans. It wasn’t a dangerous fall for a fit adult, but it was loud and messy. As I ran, I heard the kids behind me cheering. At least someone appreciated me.

I knew that I’d been lucky, and that was okay. I’d go light a candle in church next chance I had. Right now I had to run the luck as far as it would go.

I wished I had the time to cut one of these goons out of the pack, drag him into an abandoned room, and see if I could convince him that confession was good for the soul. But I doubted any of the agents would know more than Church could find out, and besides, the possible reward wasn’t worth the risk.

So I cut left into a low-rise apartment building, ran down hallways and out the back door, vaulted a couple of backyard fences, nearly got my ass bitten off by a startled bull terrier, made my way to another set of alleys, and zigzagged my way through West Baltimore. I was a white guy running through a rough black neighborhood, but I looked crazy and I looked like a cop, and those were two things nobody of any color wants to mess with.

After another two blocks I slowed to a walk and paid a teenager fifty bucks for his Orioles cap. Sweat ran down my body and pooled in my shoes; my shirt clung to me, outlining the shape of the pistol clipped to the back of my belt. I could feel the eyes of everyone on the street on me, but I knew that no one was going to drop a dime on someone running from the cops — even if he looked like a cop himself. I went into a convenience store and bought an oversized souvenir Baltimore T-shirt. I squatted in the street and rubbed it against the macadam until it was filthy and torn, then pulled it on over my Orioles shirt. With the hat sitting askew and a baggy shirt that looked like it hadn’t been washed since Clinton was in office, I looked like a homeless person. Every time I turned a corner I dropped a little more into that role, lowering my head, changing my walk into a meandering shuffle, twitching and mumbling to myself in a variety of languages. Eventually anyone who saw me would have sworn I was a junkie looking to score. Somewhere along the way I picked up two actual junkies, and the three of us moved in a haphazard line deeper into West Baltimore until there was no trail at all for the NSA to follow.

Half an hour later I stole a car and drove out of town.

Chapter Nine

Otto and Cyrus strolled through the hallways of the Deck, smiling and nodding at the workers and technicians. Except for three scientists in the laboratory — all Indian — every face was white and every lineage could be traced back to Aryan origins. In some cases, because the worker was particularly valuable, allowances were made for indistinct bloodlines. In the end, as both men knew, it didn’t matter, because no one here, not the workers or lab staff, not the SAMs, and not even Otto and Cyrus themselves, was part of the future. They were the shoulders on which the next evolutionary level of mankind would stand. Otto and Cyrus were content and delighted with that; the others simply did not know.

“How are things going in Wilmington?” asked Cyrus as they stopped at a viewing stand built to look down on the zoo. There were forty separate cages, and the screams and calls of animals filled the air. The rich scent of earth and animal dung and musk clung to the water vapor in the humid biosphere. The zoo was a hundred yards below the Arizona desert, but it felt like a tropical rain forest.

“The Russians were able to get the information from the man Gilpin — the computer nerd who used to work for the Twins. He was able to confirm the content of the Haeckel records.”

“Is Gilpin alive?”

“I doubt it. The Russian team commander downloaded the information to us just a few minutes ago. However, Gilpin was able to confirm that the Haeckel records are at a storage facility called Deep Iron, near Denver.”

Cyrus looked pleased. “Who do we have in the area?”

“In Denver? No one, but I sent a team.”

“More Russians?”

Otto shrugged. “Better them than our own.”

They watched the animals. A juvenile mammoth was trumpeting and banging its massive shoulders against the sides of its cage. The air above them was filled with a flock of passenger pigeons. Cyrus leaned his forearms on the pipe rail and watched as handlers used winches and slings to carefully off-load a sedated dire wolf from an electric cart. The female had received in vitro fertilization but had miscarried twice already. The embryologist — one of the Indians — thought they’d solved the problem. A gene that was coding for the wrong hormone sequence.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Otto grunted. He had almost no interest in reclamation genetics. To him it was an expensive hobby that drained time and manpower from more important work, but for Cyrus it was a lifelong passion. To reclaim the past and then improve it so that what went forward was stronger and more evolved.

“This is how God must feel,” murmured Cyrus. It was something he said at least three or four times a week. Otto said nothing.

In the adjoining cage a saber-toothed cat sat and watched the handlers with icy patience. Even from here the cat reminded Cyrus of his daughter, Hecate. The same eyes, the same arctic patience.

He glanced at his watch, which was not set to real time but synchronized with the Extinction Clock. As the numbers ticked down, second by second, Cyrus felt a great happiness settle over him.

Chapter Ten

I was scared. I admit it.

I’d been in worse physical danger before. Hell, I’d been in worse physical danger two days ago, so it wasn’t that. But as I drove I started getting a serious case of the shakes because the NSA — the actual National Security frigging Agency — was trying to arrest me. If they hadn’t had just cause beforehand, they certainly did now, and I was beginning to regret how I had played it.

Sure, Church had warned me not to get taken. Message received and understood; but I know that I did more collateral damage to those guys simply because they braced me at Helen’s grave. If they’d come at me in the parking lot of my apartment building they might have gotten off with a couple of bruises. But I was pretty sure that at least two of them were in the hospital and a couple of others would be carrying around bruises that would be daily reminders of Joe Ledger, world’s oldest adolescent.

I took a bunch of random turns, double- and triple-checking that I had no tail.

My best friend, Rudy Sanchez — who’s also my shrink and used to be Helen’s shrink right up until she killed herself — has been working with me for years to control some of my less mature urges. He calls them unrefined primal responses to negative stimulation. I think he gets wood when he can toss out phrases like that.

My boss may think I’m hot shit and even the guys on Echo Team might think I’m cool and together, but Rudy knows the score. I’ve got enough baggage to start a luggage store, and I have a whole bunch of buttons that I don’t like pushed.

Disrespecting Helen — even through ignorance of her existence — did not play well with me. If they’d pushed harder I would like to believe that I wouldn’t have gone apeshit on them. There are a lot of things I’d like to believe in.

I was gripping the steering wheel too hard. The more I thought about it, the more anger rose up to replace the fear. I didn’t want either emotion screwing with my head. It was already a junk pile.

I dug out my cell and tried to call Rudy, but I got no answer.

“Shit,” I snarled, and tossed the phone down on the seat.

And kept driving fast, heading nowhere.

Chapter Eleven

Rabbi Scheiner was an old man, but he had bright green eyes and a face well used to smiling. However, as he walked beside his nephew, Dr. David Meyer, the rabbi’s mouth was pulled into a tight line and his eyes were dark with concern.

“How sure are you about this, David?” the rabbi asked, pitching his voice low enough so that the nurses and patients in the ward could not overhear.

David Meyer shook the sheaf of papers in his hand. “We ran every test we could, and the lab in Baton Rouge confirmed our findings.”

“It’s unfortunate, David… but it does happen. You know more than I do that there’s no cure for this, and that the best we can do is screen young people and counsel them before marriage. Warn them of the risks.”

“That’s the point, Rabbi,” insisted Meyer. “We did those screens. We have a very high concentration of Ashkenazi Jews here, most of them from families that fled the Rhine as things were going bad in the late nineteen thirties. Virtually everyone in Hebron, Tefka, and Muellersville has been screened — we still get grants from Israel to run the polymerase chain reaction techniques, and they’re very accurate. We know the carriers, and we have counseled them. If these occurrences were within the group of known carriers, then I wouldn’t have called you.”

“Then I don’t understand. Haaretz reported that the disease was virtually eradicated. You yourself told me that there had been no babies born to Jewish families here in America with the disease since 2003.”

Meyer took the rabbi by the arm and led him into a small alcove.

“I know; I know,” said Meyer. His face was bright with stress, and sweat beaded his forehead. “However, in the last month clinics throughout the area have been reporting many cases of patients presenting with classic symptoms: slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, unsteadiness of gait, spasticity, sharp and sudden cognitive declines, and a variety of psychiatric illnesses that include psychosis typical of schizophrenia. Individually any one or two of those symptoms in an adult would not suggest LOTS, but when five or six symptoms present in virtually every patient… then what else could I think? I sent nurses out to take samples for genetic testing and we ran our own enzyme assay tests, but they’re not as precise at genetic testing as PCR tests, so I had the samples shipped to a lab in Baton Rouge.” He shook the sheaf of papers. “These are the results.”

Rabbi Scheiner reluctantly took the papers from Meyer and quickly read through them. In the comment notes he read: “Late Onset Tay-Sachs (LOTS) disease is a rare form of the disorder, typically occurring in patients in their twenties and early thirties. This disease is frequently misdiagnosed and usually nonfatal.”

He looked up.

“So you have several patients who have become sick?”

Meyer shook his head slowly. “Rabbi… I’ve had eleven patients here in Hebron, and there were nine in Tefka and six in Muellersville.”

The rabbi caught the phrasing. “You say you ‘had’ eleven patients…”

Meyer gave him a bleak stare. “Three have already died. Two more are… well, they have lapsed into comas. The others are getting sicker almost as I watch. The muscles needed to swallow become atrophic and paralyzed. We’ve intubated them, and I’ve even trached a few, but the paralysis spreads so fast. I don’t know how to treat any of them.”

“There’s no cure…” The rabbi said it as a statement. “God help us.”

“Researchers have been looking into gene therapy and other treatments, but even if we had a genetic option in hand, these people don’t have the time for it.”

“These are all children?”

Meyer shook his head. “No, and that’s what scares me the most. Infantile and Juvenile TSD are both fatal, but not LOTS. And yet every one of these patients is over twenty. Some are in their forties and fifties. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Could… could the disease have mutated?”

“It apparently has,” said Meyer, “but how? It was nearly eradicated. We’d beaten it. We’ve never had a single case here in Hebron, or in the other towns, and most of the people here are second- and even third-generation American born. We haven’t married strictly within the communities of Ashkenazi Jews, which means statistics should be on our side.”

Rabbi Scheiner put his hand on the young doctor’s arm. “Be strong, David. Tell me… what will you do?”

“I’ll have to report this. Now that I have the results from the genetic tests I can reach out to the major university hospitals.”

“What about the disease people?” asked the rabbi. “What about the Centers for Disease Control up in Atlanta? You went to them with the botulism problem a few years ago—”

“No,” said Meyer, “this is a genetic mutation, not a pathogen. It’s not contagious in any way that could cause an epidemic.”

Rabbi Scheiner’s eyes were intense, probing. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” said Meyer. “It’s an inherited disorder. You can’t just catch it.”

The rabbi nodded and turned to look out of the alcove at the patients in the ward. “Are you sure?” he asked again.

Chapter Twelve

After I drove around for twenty minutes I switched on my scramble and tried to make some calls. Church’s line rang through to voice mail. His voice message was: “Speak!” I was tempted to bark, but instead I left a simple request for callback.

Next I called Grace, but she got on the line long enough to tell me that she got outside to “take a butcher’s at a bunch of dodgy blokes with federal badges who have me totally hacked off, so I’d better sort them out.” The more pissed off Grace gets, the more British she becomes. There are times I can’t understand one word in three, and English is my mother tongue.

Finally I got Rudy Sanchez on the phone. A few years ago my dad — who was Baltimore’s police commissioner until a couple of months ago — got Rudy a job as a police therapist, and Rudy’s association with me got him hornswaggled into the DMS. It’s a bit of a sordid soap opera. Rudy still did a couple of days with BPD, and today he’d be at his office near the Aquarium. He was very low profile, so maybe he’d be off the NSA sweep.

“Joe!” he answered, and from his tone of voice I knew that he was already aware of what was going on. “Thank God!”

“You heard?”

“Of course I heard!” he snapped, and said something about the Vice President in back-alley Spanish that was too fast for me to catch anything except vague references to fornication with livestock. When he finally slowed to a crawl, he asked, “Dios mio, Cowboy — are you all right?”

“I’m wearing filthy clothes, I’ve been hanging out with junkies and I’m driving a stolen car that I’m pretty sure someone peed in—”

“Okay, okay, I get it… you’re having a bad day. I hear there’s a lot of it going around.”

“I wouldn’t know, Rude; I’m the spy who can’t come in from the cold.”

“Mm. I guess I’m on the run, too. Sort of,” he said. “Mr. Church told me to go hide somewhere, so I’m sitting in St. Ann’s. They’re painting the place, so it’s just me and a bunch of workmen putting up scaffolding.”

“Listen,” I said. “I called for a couple of reasons. First, to tell you to watch your ass. You’re still officially a consultant psychiatrist for the Baltimore Police. If you get nabbed, play that card. Have them call my dad.”

My father was making a run for Mayor of Baltimore and the pundits were calling it a slam dunk for him. He had friends on both sides of the badge.

“I have him on speed dial,” Rudy assured me. “What’s the other thing?”

“Two other things. The NSA guys came for me at the cemetery.”

“Ouch,” he said. “How are you?”

“I vented a bit by beating on them some.”

“But it’s still with you?”

“Yeah, and that’s the other thing. And Helen’s a part of that, too. In a way. Today started off weird even before I woke up.”

“How so?”

“I know this ain’t the time for this, but it’s weighing on me and I’ve got to kill time until I hear from Church—”

“Don’t apologize. Just tell me.”

“Okay… tomorrow is the anniversary of Helen’s suicide.”

“Oh, dios mio,” he said with real pain in his voice. With everything that had happened over the last two months he had forgotten. “Joe… I…”

“I dreamed about it last night, man. I dreamed about her sister Colleen calling me, saying that Helen hadn’t answered the phone in days. I dreamed about going over there. Every single detail, Rudy, from picking up my car keys on the table by the door to the feel of the wood splintering when I kicked in Helen’s door. I remembered the smell in the hallway, and how bad it got when I broke in. I remember her face… bloated and gassy. I can even remember the bottle of drain cleaner she drank from. The way the label was torn and stained.”

“Joe, I—”

“But here’s the really shitty part, Rude… the worst part.”

He was silent, waiting.

“In my dream, when I walked over to her body, knowing that she was dead and had been dead for days… when I stood over her and then dropped to my knees and pulled her into my arms…” I paused and for a moment I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish this.

“Take your time, Joe…,” he said gently. “It’ll hurt less once it’s out.”

“I… don’t think so. Not this time.”

“Why, Joe? Tell me what happened when you held Helen in your arms.”

“You see, that’s just the thing… I picked her body up and held it, just the way I did back when it happened. And her head kind of flopped over sideways just like it did. But… aw, fuck me, man… it wasn’t Helen I was holding.”

“Tell me…”

“It was Grace.”

Rudy was silent, waiting for the rest, but there was no more. That’s where the dream had ended.

“I woke up in a cold sweat and I never went back to sleep. Stayed up all night watching Court TV and reruns of the Dog Whisperer. Anything to keep from going back to sleep.”

“Joe, this isn’t all about strength. It’s obvious you have feelings for Grace, and both of you are in a highly dangerous line of work.”

“Shit, I knew you wouldn’t get it,” I snapped, then immediately regretted it. “Sorry, Rude… belay that. What I meant to say is that I knew I couldn’t explain it the right way.”

“Then tell me what the right way is, Cowboy.”

“I…” My voice trailed off as I drove aimlessly through the streets. “I… know that having, um, ‘affection’ for Grace is ill advised. Got it, got that filed away. But there was something about this that felt weird and dirty and wrong. Wrong in a guilty kind of way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like… I failed her. The way I failed Helen.”

“Joe, we’ve been over this a thousand times. You were not responsible for Helen’s life. You were not her protector. She had been rehabilitated back into a lifestyle where all of her doctors agreed she was capable of taking care of herself. You visited as often as you could, more than anyone else. More than her own family.”

“But I took the job with the Homeland task force and that kept me away for days and even weeks at a time. Don’t try to tell me that I wasn’t aware of how that job would impact my regular visits to Helen.”

“Which still doesn’t make it your fault. You don’t rule the planet, Joe. And even if you lived with her, if she wanted to end her life — as she clearly did — she’d find a moment when you were asleep or in the shower and she would do what she ultimately did. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”

I didn’t feel like going down that road with him again, so I switched tack. “So why did I see Grace in the dream last night? Are you saying that I feel responsible for her?”

“I hope not.”

“It’s not like we’re in love,” I protested.

Rudy said nothing, and then his phone clicked. “It’s Mr. Church calling me, Joe. I’d better take this.”

“Okay.”

“But Joe…?”

“Yeah.”

“We need to come back to this.”

“Sure, Rude… when the dust settles.”

And it starts snowing on the Amazon, I thought.

I closed my phone and drove, aware that I was driving myself a little crazy.

Chapter Thirteen

It was a routine pickup, a classic no-shots-fired thing where the afteraction report would be short and boring. Only it wasn’t.

First Sgt. Bradley Sims — Top to everyone who knew him, and second in command of Joe Ledger’s Echo Team — was on point at the door knock. Like his two fellow agents he was dressed in a nondescript navy blue government-issue suit, white shirt, and red tie. Flag pin on his lapel, a wire, and sunglasses. The motel hallway was badly lighted, so he removed his shades and dropped them into his coat pocket. He might have been NSA, FBI, or an agent of any of the DOJ’s domestic law enforcement agencies, maybe a middle-grade agent in charge of a low-risk field mission. He dressed for the part. He had FBI credentials in his pocket, though he’d never so much as set foot in Quantico. He also had badges for the ATF and DEA in the car.

The Department of Military Sciences did not operate under the umbrella of the Department of Justice, nor did it fall into the growing network of agencies under the Homeland charter. The DMS was a solo act, answerable to the President of the United States. They didn’t have their own badges. They weren’t cops. The credentials Top Sims carried, however, were completely authentic.

He knocked on the door. “FBI!” he announced in the leather-throated roar of a lifelong sergeant. “Please open the door.”

Out of habit he stepped to one side so that the reinforced frame rather than the door was between him and whoever might be inside. Cops did that; so did soldiers. Top had been a soldier since he enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, and that was twenty-two years ago and change.

Both of the agents flanking him were bigger and younger than Top. They looked like a pair of giants. To his left was Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who stood six-five and had massive biceps that strained the fabric of the off-the-rack blazer. To Top’s right was Bunny — born with the unfortunate name of Harvey Rabbit — who had joined the DMS after eight years as a sergeant in Force Recon. Bunny was two inches taller than Faraday and though he was also heavily muscled, his build was more appropriate to volleyball, which until recently he’d played at the Pan American Games level. His service in Iraq had kept him out of the Olympics, but he didn’t hold a grudge.

There was no answer at the door.

“Maybe he ain’t home,” suggested Bunny.

“It’s Saturday morning,” said Big Bob. “Guy’s got no job, no friends. He’s here or he’s at Starbucks.”

“Maybe I’ll just knock louder,” said Top.

He did. No answer.

“Let’s kick it,” Top decided.

“I got it,” said Big Bob, moving past Top to front the door. Big Bob had thighs like bridge supports and could bury the whole rack on the Nautilus leg press. Twice now he’d kicked doors completely off their hinges. He wanted a hat trick.

Top shrugged and stepped aside. “Entertain yourself.”

Top and Bunny drew their weapons and quietly racked the slides. The man they were there to arrest, Burt Gilpin, was a middle-aged computer geek who had figured a way to hack into the mainframes of several major universities that were involved in medical, viral, and genetic research. He’d constructed elaborate Web sites with phantom pages and rerouted e-mail drops so he could advertise the stolen data and accept bids from interested parties. Gilpin knew his computers and he understood security, but MindReader was designed to spot certain kinds of patterns related to key topics. Genetics and virology were major red flags and it zeroed him in a nanosecond, and Church had taken a personal interest because the method Gilpin used to hack the systems bore some similarities to MindReader. Nobody else was supposed to have that technology, and Church wanted to have a long talk with Gilpin.

Top drew the pickup detail and tagged the first two members of Echo Team to report that morning to go with him. Gilpin had no police record apart from parking tickets; he had never served in the military, never belonged to a gun club or registered a firearm, and didn’t even go to a gym. Sending Top, Bunny, and Big Bob was overkill, but it was also an excuse to get out of the shop for the day.

“Kick it,” said Top.

Big Bob raised his leg and cocked his foot, but just as he was about to kick, Bunny saw a shadow move past the peephole on the motel door.

“Wait!” he started to say, and then the door seemed to explode as heavy-caliber bullets ripped through wood and plaster and slammed into Big Bob Faraday.

The big man screamed as two bullets tore into his leg; one smashed his shin and the other struck the underside of his kneecap and then ripped a tunnel through the meat of his thigh, tearing muscle and tendon and missing his femoral artery by three one-hundredths of an inch. Three additional rounds struck him high in the abdomen. The Kevlar vest is designed to flatten bullets and stop them from penetrating the body. The foot-pounds of impact still hits like a hammer, but the wearer can live with broken ribs.

Kevlar is not designed to stop steel-core Teflon-coated rounds. Street thugs and gangbangers call them cop killers for a reason.

The bullets chopped through Big Bob Faraday like he’d been bare chested. The combined impact slammed him backward with such force that he hit the door of the motel room opposite and tore it out of the frame so that he fell halfway into the room.

All of this happened in a second.

In the next second Top and Bunny threw themselves down and out of the line of fire as bullets continued to rip the doorjamb apart. Hundreds of rounds tore chunks of cement and pieces of lath out of the walls and filled the air above them with a hurricane of jagged splinters. They both knew, even as they were diving for cover, that Big Bob was down. Down and maybe dead.

Top flattened on the floor and reached his arm out to point his gun into the room. He opened fire, knowing he had little chance of hitting anything, but return fire can disrupt an attack and he needed to buy time.

A voice yelled, “Perekroi dver!” And though Top didn’t understand the words, he could recognize the language. Russian. It made no sense.

He unloaded his full magazine and there was a sudden shrill scream from inside. He’d gotten a lucky hit.

“Bozhe moi!”

Top saw that Bunny had squirmed around and was ready to imitate his blind shooting trick. Their eyes met and Bunny mouthed the word Russians? Top nodded and there was no more to be said. His receiver locked back, and as he withdrew his hand Bunny reached around the shattered jamb, his hand angled up, and began firing. The return fire was fierce and when Top whipped his hand back his skin was a cactus plant of tiny splinters that covered him from knuckles to wrist.

As Top dropped his mag and slapped in another, Bunny cut a lightning-fast quick-look through an apple-sized hole in the wall. He immediately moved away from the spot as bullets reamed the hole. The afterimage of what he’d seen was burned into his brain. He hand-signaled to Top. Four men in a firing line. One injured. What Bunny couldn’t convey was that a fifth man was duct-taped naked to a chair, his limbs streaked with blood. Gilpin.

Top signaled to Bunny to go high and left while he went low and right. He finger-counted down from three and then they spun into different quadrants of the ruined doorway and opened fire. Neither hit anything with his first shot, and they hadn’t expected to; the first round was fired to cover them as they came into position and to give them a fragment of a second to locate their targets. Four men in a small room. Very little in the way of cover. They both saw what they needed. Their next shots punched into the four Russians, hitting legs and groins and torsos and heads, the bullet impacts dancing them backward so that they looked like a film of people walking played in reverse. The heavy automatic weapons of the Russians filled the air with bullets, but Bunny’s and Top’s bullets spoiled all aim and accuracy. It was a perfect counterattack and it turned the apartment into a shooting gallery.

The slide locked back on Bunny’s gun and Top spaced out his last two shots to give Bunny some cover and time to reload. Then Top dropped his mag and slapped in his last one.

But it wasn’t necessary. The gunfire from inside had died.

Bunny and Top got to their feet and spun around the smoking edges of the shattered wall and entered the room hard and fast, guns up and out. Nothing moved except the pall of smoke eddying around them like a graveyard mist.

Bunny kicked open the bathroom door. “Clear!”

“Clear!” Top yelled as he checked all points of the small main room. He kicked the weapons away from the slack and bloody hands of the Russians. “Secure this and call it in,” he ordered as he pivoted and ran back out into the hallway to check on Big Bob.

Bunny called a man-down report to the DMS command center, who in turn notified local police and EMTs. He checked Gilpin, but the little computer hacker was as dead as the Russians, his body covered with the marks of savage torture, his throat cut.

“Damn,” Bunny said, and then joined Top in the hall.

Top had used a switchblade to cut away Faraday’s jacket shirt and the straps of his Kevlar vest. Bunny tore the shirt into pieces and they used it to pack the three entry wounds in Big Bob’s chest and the three much larger exit wounds in his back. Top used Faraday’s tie as a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding in his ruined leg.

Big Bob was unconscious, his eyes half-closed and his lips beginning to go pale with the massive blood loss and the onset of shock. Both agents peeled off their own jackets and used them as a makeshift blanket. In the distance they could already hear the wail of sirens.

“Christ, this is bad,” Bunny said as he cradled Big Bob’s head in his lap.

Top was a lifelong expert in karate and knew a great deal about anatomy. He studied the placement of the wounds and shook his head. “I think the rounds clipped his liver and one kidney. There must be lung damage, but it’s not sucking.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good. Lung could be filled with blood already.”

The sirens were louder now, outside. He heard people yelling and then the pounding of feet as EMTs and uniformed cops ran down the hall toward them. The EMTs pushed past them and began their own wound care, but they listened to Top’s professional assessments.

“We’ll take over from here, sir,” they said, and the agents backed off.

The cops circled them and Bunny flashed his credentials. Somebody at the DMS must have made the right call, because the police deferred to them, even to the point of staying outside the crime scene. The DMS operator had assured Top that Jerry Spencer, the head of the DMS’s high-tech forensics division, would be on the next thing smoking.

Top stood in the doorway and looked at the carnage.

“This don’t make sense,” Bunny said, looking over Top’s shoulder. “I mean, am I crazy or were these clowns speaking Russian?”

“Sounded like it to me. Or close enough.”

“Russian Mafia?” Bunny ventured.

“Shit if I know, Farmboy. But these guys were pros of some kind. Ex-police or ex-Russian military. They knew how to ambush a door knock.”

On the floor by the overturned table was a device that looked like a PDA. Someone, presumably one of the Russians, had attached it to Gilpin’s hard drive with narrow cables.

“Looks like they were downloading his shit,” said Bunny. He nudged the device. The PDA and the hard drive had been smashed to junk by gunfire.

“No way to know if they were downloading the data to take it or forwarding it on. Maybe they tortured him to get his passwords.”

“All this for a computer hacker?”

“I think we just stepped in somebody else’s shit.”

Bunny grunted. “It’s our shit now. Big Bob makes it or not, I’m going to want a piece of somebody’s ass for this. Whoever ordered this.”

“Hooah,” murmured Top. “The captain’s going to take this amiss.”

“We’d better call him.”

“He’s at the cemetery this morning.”

“He’ll want to know about this,” Bunny said, but before he could punch in a number Top’s phone rang.

Top looked at the code. “Uh-oh,” he said. “It’s the big man.” He flipped open his phone. “Sir.”

Mr. Church said, “Operations just informed me that there’s been an incident, that one of ours is down. Give me a sit rep.”

Top told him everything. “EMTs don’t like what they’re seeing. Big Bob’s in the ambulance now. We were just about to call Captain Ledger.”

“Scratch that, First Sergeant. We have a more pressing problem.”

“Sir?”

Church told him about the NSA. “It’s possible you men are off their radar because you’ve been operating with Bureau credentials, but now that this has happened the bloodhounds will be running.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“As soon as Captain Ledger surfaces we’ll find you some air transport and the three of you will head west. We’ve lost track of the Denver team and that incident may be separate from this — and it may be a lot more important,” Church said. “I want you two to vanish. Get off the radar and stay off until you make contact with Major Courtland, Captain Ledger, or myself. Don’t get taken. You may use any methods short of lethal force.” He read off a string of possible locations and made Top read them back. “Go to each one in order. Wait ten minutes. If Captain Ledger does not come, proceed to the next one until you rendezvous. He’ll have further instructions.”

“Yes, sir.” Top paused. “But what about Big Bob? We were going to go to the hospital once Jerry Spencer gets here.”

“Agent Spencer will neither need nor want your help, First Sergeant; and as for Sergeant Faraday… he’ll be protected. I have some friends in Wilmington who will watchdog him. I want you and Sergeant Rabbit to get mobile and get gone most riki-tik.”

He hung up.

Bunny, who had leaned close to eavesdrop, stepped back and looked at Top. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“I don’t know, Farmboy, but the man said to get our asses into the wind, so let’s boogie.”

Bunny lingered for one moment longer, first looking at the bodies sprawled in the motel room and then turning to gaze at the smears of blood where Big Bob had gone down.

“Son of a bitch must pay,” Bunny said.

Top nodded. “Hooah.”

Then they were gone.

Chapter Fourteen

Dr. Arjeta Hlasek sat back in her chair, her pointed chin resting on the tips of steepled fingers. Her expression was a patchwork of doubt, concern, and alarm. The two doctors who sat on the other side of her desk looked road worn and deeply stressed, their eyes hollow with exhaustion. Both of them sat straight in their chairs, their hands fidgeting on the stacks of test results and lab reports they each had on their laps.

“I… don’t know what to say,” began Dr. Hlasek. “This is disturbing to say the least, but what you’re describing… Well, I don’t know.”

The younger of her visitors, Dr. Rina Panjay, leaned forward, her voice low and urgent. “Dr. Hlasek… we’ve done the tests. We’ve had blind verification from two separate labs, and they verify what our own tests show.”

“She’s right, Arjeta,” agreed Thomas Smithwick. “And I can understand your hesitation. I didn’t believe it, either, when Rina first told me. I ran every kind of test I could think of — most of them several times. The lab work doesn’t even vary; it’s not like there’s a margin for error here.”

“But,” Dr. Hlasek said, half-smiling, “a genetic disease that has mysteriously mutated into a waterborne pathogen? There’s no precedent for something like this.”

Smithwick paused, then said, “There wouldn’t be… not outside of a biological warfare facility.”

“You think that’s what you’ve found? A new bioweapon that somehow escaped quarantine and has gotten into the water supply in Ouémé? That’s a lot to swallow, Thomas. Who would do such a thing? Moreover, who would fund research of that kind? It’s absurd; it’s fantasy.”

“Haven’t you been listening? We have over three hundred infected people right now,” snapped Dr. Panjay, and then suddenly regretted her tone of voice. Dr. Arjeta Hlasek was the Regional Director for the World Health Organization and a major political force in the United Nations. She was one of Switzerland’s most celebrated doctors and had three times been part of teams nominated for the Nobel Prize. Hlasek was not, however, a patient or tolerant person, and she wilted Panjay with a blast from her ice blue eyes.

Dr. Panjay dropped her eyes and stammered a quick apology.

“Arjeta,” said Smithwick in a mollifying tone, “my young friend here is exhausted. She’s been in the thick of this, caring for dozens of patients at her clinic and doing fieldwork to collect samples and helping to bury the dead. She’s running on fumes right now.”

“I appreciate the diligence and dedication,” said Dr. Hlasek with asperity. “Still… I find this rather a lot to swallow. Our organization is built on veracity. We’ve had bad calls in the past that have weakened public trust, and weakened financial support.”

Smithwick shook his head, his own patience beginning to erode. “This isn’t like the cock-up with the Ebola scare last year. This is a real crisis backed by irrefutable evidence.” He took his entire stack of notes and thumped them down on Hlasek’s desk. “This is immediate and it requires immediate action.”

The Swiss doctor blew out her cheeks and studied the papers and then the two doctors.

“Understand me, Thomas… and Dr. Panjay,” she began in a measured tone. “I will act. But this needs to be handled with the greatest of care. What you’ve just put on my desk is a time bomb. If you’re right about this — and I warn you now that I will have another laboratory verify these test results — then we will act, but this could blow up out of control very easily. Between political and religious tensions and the shoddiness of the public health and education systems, we are going to have to plan how to release this information.”

“But people are dying!” urged Panjay.

“Yes, they are,” agreed Hlasek, “and more are going to die before we verify the results and map out a protocol for handling this. However, if we don’t move with the greatest care then many, many more will die in the ensuing panic. Thomas, you’ve seen this happen; you tell her.”

Smithwick nodded and patted Panjay’s hand. “She’s right. A panic breaks down the lines of communication that are, quite literally, the lifelines for the people. You’ll not only have masses of people fleeing blindly, which would make effective treatment impossible, you’ll also see warlords and criminals raiding our supplies for treatments, food, pure water… no, Dr. Hlasek is quite correct. This needs to be handled correctly or we’ll have thrown gasoline onto this fire you’ve discovered.”

Panjay turned away to hide the tears that jeweled her eyes. Her mind was filled with the faces of all of the people in the village where she ran her clinic. Half were already dead, the rest sick. She understood what Hlasek and Smithwick were saying, could accept the reality of it, but just as certainly she knew that it was a death sentence for everyone in the village. Maybe for everyone in the region.

She could feel the eyes of the other doctors on her, and though it cost her to do it, she nodded her acceptance.

“Very good,” said Hlasek. “I’ll make the necessary calls to get things in motion. We need to make sure that everyone else who knows about this is brought into our confidence. It’s important that everyone be made to understand the vital importance of keeping this quiet until we’re ready to move. Who else have you told?”

“Just the people in the village,” Panjay said thickly. “And my two nurses. They’re at the clinic.”

“I don’t mean to be indelicate,” said Hlasek, “but what race are they? This disease affects sub-Saharan blacks, as you know. We’ll need to rely on those persons who are not likely to become infected; otherwise we’ll lose our workforce. Our ground troops, so to speak.”

Panjay cleared her throat. “Both of my nurses are African. Black African. One from Angola, the other from Ghana. We’ve taken every prophylactic measure—”

“I’m sure that will be fine. I’ll call them myself at the clinic. And we’ll get a truckload of supplies out this afternoon.”

She stood up. “Dr. Panjay, Dr. Smithwick, you probably think I’m a heartless monster, but please let me assure you that I appreciate the seriousness of this, and I respect the work you’ve put in here. I also want to thank you for bringing this directly to me. We will work together to do whatever is necessary to get in front of this dreadful matter.” She extended her hand and they all shook. Hlasek remained standing as Smithwick and Panjay left.

When they were gone, Hlasek sank back into her chair and stared at the stack of lab reports for a long minute. Then she picked up her phone and punched a long international number.

“Otto?” she said when the call was answered. “We have a problem.”

“Tell me.”

She told him everything that Panjay and Smithwick had told her. The man on the other end of the call, Otto Wirths, listened patiently and then sighed.

“That was careless, Arjeta. We shouldn’t be at this point for three days.” He made a clucking sound of disapproval. “You’re sure that only four people know about this? The two doctors and the nurses?”

“Yes. They came to me first.”

“How long before anyone else is likely to make the same kind of report?”

“I don’t know… it’s still confined to the Akpro-Missérété Commune. I can quarantine it quietly. Say, two weeks. Three at the outside.”

“We only need a week,” he said, “but we need the full week. Find out what hotel the doctors are staying in.”

“I don’t want any of this to land on me, Otto. Headlines won’t help.”

Otto laughed. “An electrical fire in a cheap hotel in Cotonou will barely make headlines even in Cotonou. And as for the nurses… something will be arranged.”

“Do whatever you have to do, but keep me out of it.”

Otto chuckled again and disconnected.

Dr. Hlasek hung up the phone and stared at the stack of reports. Then she stood up, straightened her skirt, picked up the reports on the sickle-cell outbreak, and carried them over to the paper shredder.

Chapter Fifteen

I drove randomly for another hour, then pulled in behind a Cineplex and swapped license plates with another car. I stopped in a McDonald’s to wash up as best I could, and then I closed myself in a toilet stall, leaned against the wall, and tried to sort this out. The reality of what was happening caught up to me again, and shock outran adrenaline. My hands were shaking and I forced myself to go still and quiet, taking long, deep breaths until the panic eased its stranglehold on my nerves.

I was on the run from the NSA, and there was a real possibility that the whole DMS could get torn down. If that happened I was screwed. I’d already passed up the opportunity to start at the FBI academy. My old job with Baltimore PD was probably still there if it came to that, but a bad report in my jacket wouldn’t do much for my career.

The main thing, though, was that since I’ve been running Echo Team for the DMS I’ve seen a much bigger picture of the world and how it works — and of the major wackos who were trying to burn it down. The DMS was doing good work here; I knew that for a fact. Hell, even I was doing good work here. Having this organization destroyed would do a lot more harm than just screwing up my career path. How could the Vice President not see the value of the Department of Military Sciences? Hell, we’d saved his wife’s life less than two months ago.

I guess my problem was that I found it hard to buy that the Vice President was doing this because he believed Church was blackmailing the President. That didn’t feel right. Maybe I’m getting cynical in my old age, but it seemed to me that there had to be some kind of hidden agenda.

Of course, there was about one chance in a zillion that I’d ever find out what it was. Maybe Church would, if he wasn’t in jail. I tried calling him but got no answer. Swell.

The smell of the bathroom brought me back to the moment and I washed my hands again and left the grungy little room. Outside I bought a sack of burgers and a Coke, then got back in the car and drove to Druid Hill Park in northwestern Baltimore. I parked the car and walked into the park, wolfing down the burgers to put some protein in my system. After wandering around to make sure that I had nobody dogging me, I sat cross-legged on one of the tables inside Parkie’s Lakeside Pavilion and pulled my cell.

This time Church answered on the second ring. He never says “hello.” He simply listens. You called him, so it’s on you to take the conversational ball and run with it.

“I’m having a moderately trying morning, boss,” I said.

“Where are you?”

I told him. “What’s the status on my team?”

“I’ll tell you, Captain, but in the event that anyone is within visual range of you I want you to keep everything off your face. This isn’t good news.”

He told me about Big Bob Faraday. There was no one else in the Pavilion, but I kept it off my face. I also made sure to keep it out of my voice, too, but inside there was an acid burn working its way from my gut to my brain.

“These were Russians?” I asked, and from the tone of my voice you might have thought I was asking about last season’s baseball scores. “Care to explain how my team gets ambushed by Russian shooters in Wilmington?”

“We’re short on answers today. We’re running their prints through NCIC and Interpol. Too soon for returns, but I suspect we’ll get something.”

“Since when does the NSA hire out hits to the Russians?”

“They don’t, and as of now we have no evidence of a connection between Wilmington and the NSA other than the bad luck of this happening on the same day as the Veep’s run at the DMS.”

“You don’t think they’re related?”

“I said that we have no evidence of that. And, let’s face it, that isn’t a likely scenario.” He paused. “Actually, a lot of unusual things have happened in the last twenty-four hours, Captain. Some old colleagues of mine have died under unusual circumstances over the last few weeks, and I just got word that a close friend of mine was killed in Stuttgart yesterday.”

“Sorry to hear that. Is that related to this NSA stuff?”

“Again, we have no evidence of it, but my tolerance for coincidence is burning away pretty quickly.”

“I hear you.” I sighed. “Is Big Bob going to make it?”

“Too soon to tell. He’s at a good hospital and getting top-quality care, but he had a collapsed lung and damage to his liver, his right kidney, and his spleen. He’ll probably lose the spleen and, unless he’s very lucky, part or all of one kidney.”

“When this NSA bullshit blows over I’m going to run this down,” I said.

“I have no doubt. Use whatever resources you need. Carte blanche.”

“Thanks.”

“Losing men is hard, Captain. It never gets easier.”

“No, it fucking well doesn’t… and it pisses me off that I can’t be there with my guys because of this bullshit.” I only had three active operatives in Echo Team. There were six others almost ready to join, but they were in Scotland doing some field training with a crack team from Barrier, the U.K.’s most covert special ops unit. With Big Bob down that left Top and Bunny. It made me feel like they were suddenly vulnerable.

“For what it’s worth, you’re not the only one on the VP’s most hated list. There are two NSA agents in the hospital in Brooklyn. They attempted to forcibly arrest Aunt Sallie, but that didn’t go as they expected. Some convalescent leave and a few months of physical therapy and they’ll be fine.”

“Ouch.”

Church said, “There’s more, and this probably does have something to do with Wilmington. We’ve lost touch with the Jigsaw Team out in Denver.”

“The whole team?”

“Yes. The Hub itself went into lockdown, but Jigsaw was on a mission and went radio silent about thirty minutes before the NSA started trying to kick doors.”

The Hub was the Denver DMS facility. I’d worked only one three-day operation with Jigsaw and they were very tough hombres. Their leader, Hack Peterson, was ex — Delta Force and he looked like he ate pit bulls for breakfast.

“Do you see the NSA taking the whole team into custody, ’cause I don’t.”

“Captain Peterson may have gotten a sniff and gone dark,” said Church. “But I have a bad feeling about it. I’d like you to head out there.”

“When?”

“Now. I’ll have someone pick you up at the park. You’ll recognize the driver. Be at the exit closest to I-Eighty-three, say twenty minutes.”

“Um… hate to break this to you, but this might not be the best time for travel. The U.S. government seems to want my head on a pole.”

“Cry me a river,” said Church. “I need you in Denver. I have private transport waiting in several secure locations.” He read them off to me and gave me a rendezvous timetable. “Get to one of those and head west. First Sergeant Sims and Sergeant Rabbit already arrived at the first location. I was going to have them wait for you, but just in case you’re taken I’ve sent them on ahead. They’ll meet you at the other end.”

Son of a bitch moved fast.

“Normally I’d wait on this and let the Los Angeles office deal with it, but they’re in lockdown and you’re the only senior officer on the streets. Besides,” he said, “the Denver thing looks like it’s going to break big.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning that it’s starting to look like a DMS project. There’s a high probability it’s tied to the deaths of my colleagues overseas, and to some old cases that were supposed to have been closed a long time ago. Now it seems that we were wrong. Once you’re airborne you’ll teleconference with Dr. Hu, who will send you a feed of a video we received from an anonymous source.”

“A video of what?”

“I’d prefer you watch and form your own opinions, but… it’s compelling.”

“Can you vague that up a little for me?” I said.

He ignored me. “Contact me when you’ve watched it. This is a bad day, Captain, and tensions are running high. I need you to be cool. Tell your people the same thing. This other matter, the Denver job… if it turns out to be what I think it is, then it’s big.”

“Bigger than the Vice President launching a witch hunt?”

“Potentially,” he said.

“Swell. Okay, I’ll go see what I can do… but one last thing about the Vice President: if anyone else at the DMS gets hurt because of this — politically, legally, or otherwise — then I’m going to want to do some damage.”

“Are you talking about revenge, Captain?”

“And what if I am?” I snapped.

There was a sound. It might have been a short laugh. “I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

With that he disconnected.

Chapter Sixteen

Mr. Church closed his phone and laid it on the desk in front of him. He was a big man, broad shouldered, blocky, strong. There were gray streaks in his dark hair and old scars on his face, but rather than serving to reveal his age they stood as marks of use; their presence toughened him in ways the people who knew him could recognize but not define.

For over a minute he sat with his big hands resting on either side of the phone, which sat just off-center of the green desk blotter. He might have been a statue for all the animation he betrayed. His eyes were only shadows behind the lenses of his tinted glasses.

To his left was a glass of water, no ice. Beside it was a plate of vanilla wafers. After he’d sat for two full minutes, Mr. Church selected a cookie and bit off a piece, munching it thoughtfully. He brushed a crumb from his red tie.

Then he swiveled in his chair and reached for his office phone. He punched a code to engage the scrambler and then entered a special number. It was answered on the fourth ring.

“Brierly,” said a crisp male voice.

“Linden,” said Church, “I know you’re busy, but I want you to listen very closely. This is a Brushfire Command Protocol.”

“Ah,” said Brierly, “it’s you. I was hoping you lost my number.”

“Sorry to disappoint. Please verify that you’re on active scramble so we may proceed.”

Brierly made a sound that might have been a curse, but he verified the scramble. Linden was the Regional Director of the Secret Service and was directly responsible for overseeing the safety of the President while the Commander in Chief was in Walter Reed for his heart surgery. One slip and Brierly would be working out of a field office in the Dakotas. A successful job, on the other hand, could be the last résumé item needed for the step up as overall Director of the Secret Service, which would make Brierly the youngest man to hold that office. The hot money — and the heavy pressure — was on him during the current crisis.

“Here is the Brushfire code,” said Church, and recited a number-letter string that identified him and his authority to make this call.

Brierly read back the code, moving one digit and adding another.

Church repeated the code and made his own two-point change.

“Verified,” said Brierly. “Brushfire Protocol is active.”

“I agree,” said Church.

“You just activated a Presidential Alert, my friend. We’d better have missiles inbound or Martians on the White House lawn. You do know what’s happening today?” Even with the mild audio distortion of the scrambler, Brierly’s sarcasm was clear as a bell.

Church said ten words: “The Vice President is trying to take down the DMS.”

“What?”

Church explained.

“Jesus H. Christ, Esquire,” Brierly growled, “the President will fry him for this. I mean fry him. Even if he has the Attorney General in his corner, Collins can’t possibly believe that he’s going to make a case against you.”

“He seems to think so.”

“This is weird. I know him pretty well, and this is not like him. For one thing, he doesn’t have the balls for this.”

“Then he grew a set this morning. For now let’s assume he wouldn’t attempt this kind of play if he didn’t have some interesting cards in his hand. What they are and how he’ll ultimately play them is still to be seen.”

“I’m starting to get a bad feeling about why you called me.”

“Listen to me, Linden. If the VP gets MindReader he also gets everything stored in MindReader. Take a moment and think that through.”

Brierly didn’t need a moment. “Christ!”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you take it offline? Dump the hard drive and wipe it with an EMP?”

“Sure, and we’d lose active tactical analysis on forty-six terrorist-related database searches, including the two assassination plots your office sent to us. If MindReader goes blind, then so does the Secret Service, a good chunk of the DEA, CIA, FBI, and ATF, and Homeland will essentially have its head in a bag. We lose our data sharing with MI6 and Barrier, not to mention certain agencies in Germany, Italy, and France. We’d be playing Texas hold ’em with blank cards.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Church… you should have shared this system with everyone from the start.”

“Really? You’d personally like to see everyone from the VP on down have total access to your records? You’d want to grant everyone in every agency the ability to read all secrets and access all files without leaving a footprint? You’d want all of the President’s personal business made public?”

“I—”

“Two words, Linden: ‘Houston Marriott.’ ”

Brierly hissed, “Don’t even joke.”

“I’m not joking, and I’m not threatening. With the President out of power, MindReader and the DMS are vulnerable. I’ll hold the line, but I don’t think either of us want to see what happens if this turns into a shoving match between the NSA and my boys.”

“They have you outnumbered and outgunned, Church.”

“You’ve met Major Courtland and Captain Ledger, I believe. You’ve seen them in action. Where would you place your heavy bets?”

“This isn’t the O.K. Corral.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Church agreed, “but the VP is making a hard play. He’s well organized, too, and using a lot of field resources. None of this went through e-mails or active command software packages, so he must have set it all up via cell phone or word of mouth. He knows enough about MindReader to do an end run around it for this operation.”

“You sound calm about it,” Brierly said.

Church bit a cookie, said nothing.

“You’re describing a coup.”

“No, this isn’t directed against the President, and the VP will probably yield power in the proper way and at the proper time. But ultimately this could bring down the presidency. Maybe the VP knows that, maybe he doesn’t… but the effect will be the same. So, indirectly this is an attack against the President.”

“No kidding.”

“This is time critical for another reason,” Church said. “We’ve just started picking up the threads of something that could be a significant threat. That’s Threat with a capital T. We’re probably already coming into this late — that’s the nature of these things — but with all of my people dodging the NSA or gone to ground we could fall completely behind the curve. I need the Vice President to call off the dogs so we can get back to work.”

Brierly sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

“What do your loyalties suggest you do?”

“Switching jobs sounds good right now. I hear they’re hiring at Best Buy.”

Church crunched his cookie, drank some water, waited.

“It’s not like I can strong-arm a doctor and force him to revive the President. He’s in recovery now, but there are protocols.”

“Yes, and Brushfire is one of them.”

“I’m going to lose my job over this.”

“Not if the President takes control before we lose MindReader.”

Brierly was a long time thinking it through. Church had time for a second cookie.

“Okay,” Brierly said, “but when the Commander in Chief is back on the checkerboard I’m going to dump all the blame on you.”

“Not a problem.”

“And what if we fail? What if the Veep gets control of your records?”

“That might require alternatives you cannot hear from me. Not even unofficially.”

Brierly cursed.

“Linden,” said Church quietly, “this is not a fight of my choosing, and I don’t know why the VP is risking so much here, but we cannot let MindReader be taken. It’s your job to make sure I don’t need to get creative while trying to keep it.”

“ ‘Creative’ doesn’t sound like a very nice option.”

“It isn’t,” said Church. “So let’s both do what we need to do to keep that option off the table. I’ll do what I can for as long as I can, but I’d like to hear a clear weather report from you soon.”

“Okay. I’ll find the chief of surgery and see if I can appeal to his patriotism.”

“You know my number,” Church said, and disconnected.

He set the phone down on his desk blotter. He laid his hands on either side of it and sat quietly in the stillness of his office.

Chapter Seventeen

“They’re landing,” Otto said as he set down the phone.

He and Cyrus stood in the command center of the Deck. All around them hundreds of technicians were busy at computer workstations. A second tier of workstations was built onto a metal veranda that circled the central area. The clackity-clack of all those fingers on all those keys was music to Cyrus’s ears.

Below the command center, visible through clear glass panels in the floor, were two isolated cold rooms. The left-hand one was crowded with fifty networked 454 Life Sciences sequencers. Technicians in white self-contained smart suits worked among the computers, constantly checking their functions and monitoring every minute change. The right-hand room looked like a brewery in which vast tanks worked around the clock to grow viruses.

The tank directly below Cyrus’s feet was dedicated to mass-producing a weaponized version of the human papillomavirus that had been genetically altered to target Hispanics. Sure, there was crossover to some white population because racial purity was — sadly, as far as Cyrus and Otto were concerned — more myth than truth, but the rate of cervical cancer for female Hispanics was 85 percent and the crossover to Caucasians only 6 percent. The synthetic growth medium they were currently using allowed for a 400 percent increase in growth time. The tanks had been running so long now that Otto estimated that they would have enough to use it to launch the second phase of the Extinction Wave in sixteen weeks rather than the previously anticipated thirty months. Cyrus only wished that they’d settled on this new method last year so that it would have been ready with the rest of the first phase.

Thinking about it made Cyrus want to scream, to run and shout with joy.

“We should close up,” advised Otto.

“I know; I know.” Cyrus waved his hand peevishly. “It’s just that I hate to do it.”

“We can’t let the Twins see—”

Cyrus silenced him with a look.

“They probably won’t even come in here.” However, Cyrus knew that Otto was quite right. Taking chances was never good at the best of times, but with the Extinction Wave so close — so wonderfully, delightfully close — nothing could be left to chance. And neither of them trusted the Twins.

“I wish we could bring them in,” said Cyrus.

Otto turned away so Cyrus wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. This was an argument that had started before the Twins had hit puberty, and he and Cyrus had come at it from every possible angle too many times to count.

“Everything in their psych profiles suggests that they would oppose the Wave.”

“I know.”

“Their ideologies are too—”

“I know.”

Otto pursed his lips.

“Mr. Cyrus, their plane is touching down as we speak.”

Cyrus sighed. “Very well, damn it.” He flapped his hand and turned away.

He walked slowly away, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed thoughtfully. At the door he paused and turned to watch as steel panels slid slowly into place to hide the rooms below. Heavy hydraulics kicked in and Cyrus glanced up as shutters rolled into place to hide nearly 80 percent of the technicians. A faux wall rose up to cover a half-mile-long corridor that connected the Deck to the viral storage facility buried under the hot Arizona sands. The whole process took less than three minutes, and when it was completed the room looked small, almost quaint. High-tech to be sure, but on a scale suited only for research rather than mass production. Cyrus sighed again. It depressed him to have to hide this from his own children. Just as it depressed him that his children were such serious disappointments.

“I’ll be in the garden,” he said to Otto. “Bring them to me there.”

Otto bowed and watched him go.

Chapter Eighteen

Paris’s cell rang as their plane was rolling to a stop on the tarmac.

“Yes?” he answered in a musical voice.

“It’s me,” said J. P. Sunderland.

“And—”

“It’s a wash. We hit all of the DMS bases likely to have a Mind-Reader substation, but without an Executive Order to shoot, the best we could manage was a standoff. Actually, kiddo,” Sunderland said, “we have several agents in the hospital and ears are up in local and regional law coast to coast. The Vice President is probably going to get his ass dragged before a subcommittee for this.”

“So,” Paris said with ice, “basically you fucked it up.”

“Basically, yes.”

“You could at least sound contrite.”

“Blow me, snowball,” said Sunderland. There was no heat in his voice; there never was. He was too practiced a game player to let any bad hand of cards, or even a bad run of cards, fracture his cool. “This was a fifty-fifty at best and we all knew that going in. You and your sister called this play. I was against it from the start as you well know. It’s a waste of resources that could have been better used further down the road.”

“We need that system. Without MindReader the money train’s going to slow to a halt, J.P.”

“I’ll practice singing the blues later. Right now it looks like the NSA will be stalled long enough for the power to shift back to the President. And, like I said, we may lose the Vice President over this.”

“What a pity,” drawled Paris. “That would bring the free world to its knees.”

“Okay, fair enough, who cares if he sinks? Point is, the NSA ploy would have had more pop to it if we’d used it when the big man was dead.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

Paris laughed. “What are you saying? That you plan to have Church whacked?” He liked saying the word “whacked.”

“Me? Hell no… but there’s a rumor in the wind that there’s a contract out on him. Church and a few other troublemakers. If I didn’t know your dad was on a leash I’d say it was his kind of play. Doesn’t really matter, though. With any luck whoever has the contract will close it out before all the dust from today’s cluster fuck settles down. Otherwise Church might start looking around to see what’s in the wind, which is exactly what none of us wanted.”

Hecate had been leaning close to Paris in order to hear the conversation. Their eyes met and they shared a “he has a point” look.

“So now what?” Paris asked.

“Now we let the NSA thing play out. It’ll still take a while for the President to take back the reins, so we’ve still effectively hobbled the DMS for the rest of today. Maybe into tomorrow, but that’s starting to look like wishful thinking. After that we let the Vice President play the rest of his cards. Throw some scapegoats to the congressional wolves, yada yada… and then go to the next phase.”

Paris looked at Hecate, who nodded.

“Okay, J.P. You have any other ideas for how to get hold of Mind-Reader?”

“A few,” Sunderland said. “But nothing we can try until after Church is out of the mix.”

“Shit.”

Sunderland chuckled. It was the deep, throaty, hungry laugh of a bear who had a salmon gasping on the riverbank.

“Now,” he said, “let’s talk about Denver.”

Chapter Nineteen

I was waiting by the exit for my ride when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Grace. Normally that would make me smile, but I had a flash of panic wondering if something bad had happened to her.

“Hello?”

“Joe…,” she said, sounding on edge.

“Hey,” I said. “Eggs?” A coded query about scramblers.

“Of course, you sodding twit.”

“Nice language. You kiss the Prime Minister with that mouth?”

She told me to sod off, but she said it with a laugh. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Grace Courtland, an agent for the British government and now head of the Baltimore Regional Office of the DMS, was one-third my local boss, one-third a comrade in arms who had stood with me in several of the weirdest and most terrible battles since I’d started working for the G, and one-third my girlfriend — and if anyone has ever had a more interesting, complex, and smoking-hot girlfriend, I never heard about it. The relationship was not a public thing; we were trying to keep it off the public record, though we were both realistic enough to accept that we were working with about a hundred class-A trained observers, so our little clandestine fling was probably old news in the pipeline.

“I’m glad to hear your voice,” I said.

“Glad to hear you, too,” she said. “I had images of you in the back of an NSA car with a sodding black bag over your head.”

“It’s not for a lack of them trying. I hope you’re not calling with more bad news. I’m going to stop answering my phone.”

“Yes. I heard about your man Faraday,” she said. “Bloody awful, Joe. I’m so sorry.”

I knew she meant it. Grace had lost a lot of people in the years she’d been one of Church’s field commanders.

“Thanks.”

Grace was on semi-permanent loan to the DMS from Barrier, a group in the U.K. that was a model for rapid-response science-based threat groups like ours. Church had asked for her personally, and he usually got what he wanted.

“I have some updated info for you, though,” she said. “Jerry Spencer is at the crime scene now. Some of Mr. Church’s friends in Wilmington were able to float false credentials for him. He’s at Gilpin’s apartment and will call in as soon as the smoke clears.”

“That’s something.” I felt a flicker of relief. Jerry Spencer was a former D.C. cop who’d put in twenty-plus as a homicide dick before acting as DCPD’s contribution to the same Homeland Security task force I’d worked. He could work a crime scene like no one else I ever met, and there had been some talk about the FBI recruiting him away to teach at Quantico once Jerry finished his twenty-five with D.C., but the DMS got to him first and now he runs our crime lab.

“Grace, it’s nice to know that the DMS hasn’t been forced to completely close up shop today. I guess you already know about Denver?”

“Yes. I tried to get the go-ahead to take Alpha Team out there, but we’re buttoned up too tightly here. Church tells me that Top and Bunny are on their way out there and that you’ll be joining them.”

“Did he tell you about the friends of his who have been killed?”

“He mentioned it, but he hasn’t gone into details yet. He also said something about a video I’m supposed to watch when I get a moment. No idea what’s on it, but Church seemed pretty upset.”

I smiled at the thought. “Church? Upset? How can you tell?”

“His tie was ever so slightly askew. With him that’s a sign of the apocalypse. He’s the only bloke I know who would probably show up to his own autopsy in a freshly pressed suit and talk the doctor through the postmortem.”

“No joke. But, listen, do you have any idea what’s brewing? Church is being even more cryptic than usual.”

“He’s that way when he’s caught off-guard. He plays it close until he knows the shape of it and then he drops it all on us. If he’s stalling us that means he’s digging for information himself.” She paused. “I suspect, my dear, that your cynical mind is traveling on the same routes as mine.”

“Yep. We’ve had stuff come at us this way before. A bit here, a fragment there, and suddenly we’re ass deep in it. I hate this part of the job, Grace. I feel like someone’s lit a fuse and all we can see is a little smoke.”

“Too bloody right. Whatever this is, it’s tied to something stored at a facility in Denver, Russians are involved, and it has something to do with computer theft. Plus I got a faint whiff of the Cold War from something Church said. When he was telling me about the colleagues that had been killed he mentioned they were mostly from the U.K. and Germany, and that they worked together on projects in the early eighties.”

“Germany and Russia, the U.K. and America. You’re right, Cold War’s a good call,” I said. “I can’t wait to see this video. But more than that, I want to get into this game. I know it’s not the right way to look at it, but going to Denver feels like running away from this thing.”

“I know. And I feel like I’m locked in a cage.” She let out a breath. “So… how are you holding up, mate?”

“Oh, just peachy, babe.”

“ ‘Babe’?”

“Sorry. Major Babe.”

“Bloody Yanks,” she complained.

The realities of the moment couldn’t support jovial banter and it collapsed around us.

“It’s funny,” I said, “but there are always guys you think have some kind of Kevlar painted on them, guys that are never the ones to take a hit, and Big Bob had that in spades.” After my initial DMS mission had cut Echo Team in half, Big Bob had been the first new guy we signed on. Big Bob was affable, diligent, and though he could storm hell with the best of them, he had a gentle heart. My mind suddenly twitched when I realized that I’d already begun to categorize his virtues the way you do when someone dies. “He’s a fighter,” I said lamely.

“That he is.”

I saw a car approach and the driver flicked his lights on and off.

“My ride’s here. Got to go.”

“Me, too. I’ve got a bunch of NSA lads outside who have their knickers in a knot. I’d better go see if I can sort them out.”

“Take care of yourself, babe.”

“That’s Major Babe.”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Be careful, Joe,” she said, but before I could reply she’d hung up. It may have been her thick London accent, it may have been the distortion of the scrambled phone, or it may have been my own screwy emotions… but it almost sounded like she said, “Be careful, love.” I thought about it. Nah… she’d never let herself get into that kind of emotional quagmire. Not with a colleague.

Would she?

I closed the phone and closed my eyes for a moment, indulging in a memory of the last time I saw Grace. Yesterday morning as she left my bed. Tall and tan and fit, with extraordinary legs, lush curves, and eyes that could make me melt or instantly charge me with electricity. I’d never met anyone like her, and I counted my blessings every day that I had found her at all. It was a crying shame that we’d met as fellow officers in the ongoing war against terror, a war that had no end in sight. Wars are great breeding grounds for enduring love, but warriors should never allow themselves to fall in love. It made the risks that much worse.

I opened my eyes and watched the car approach, forcibly shifting my mind back to the crisis du jour.

Chapter Twenty

Maj. Grace Courtland was slender, very pretty, and thoroughly pissed off. The only thing keeping her from leaping at the NSA Agent in Charge was a double row of electrified fence and her last shreds of self-control.

The AIC was a big blond-haired jock type with mirrored sunglasses and a wire behind his ear. Five other agents were spread out behind him like a Spartan phalanx, and the street in front of the Department of Military Sciences’ Baltimore Regional Tactical Field Office — the Warehouse for short — was jammed with government vehicles of every make and model.

Major Courtland had only two guards with her: McGoran and Tafoya, a pair of hard-eyed former MPs who had been headhunted by the DMS. The guards wore khakis and three-button Polo shirts in the August heat. Both of them held M4s at port arms. Neither was smiling.

The AIC was shouting at Grace. “I have a federal warrant to search and seize this building and all its contents, and an arrest warrant for Major Grace Courtland, Dr. William Hu, Captain Joseph Ledger, and Mr. Church — no first name given.”

“Wipe your ass with it,” said Grace.

“This base is federal property, Major, and this is a duly served warrant.”

Grace folded her arms across her chest. “By Executive Order G15/DMS Directive Seventy-one I am denying you access to this secure facility.”

The AIC growled and shook his warrant at her. “This Executive Order officially rescinds any previous directive and places this entire facility under the authority of the National Security Agency. I am ordering you to shut down the power to this fence, open the gates, and surrender to my team.”

Grace leaned as close to the fence as she dared, aware of the dull musical hum of ten thousand volts flooding through the chain links. She crooked a finger at the AIC and he bent forward, apparently thinking she wanted to speak in confidence.

Instead she pointed at the document he held in front of his chest like a shield. “Notice anything?” she asked with a smile.

Even looking at it from his side, the AIC could see the glow of a red pinpoint of hot light. The light held on the center of the paper, and its filtered glow brushed the AIC’s shirt, just to the left of his tie.

“Now look at your men,” Grace murmured.

Moving very cautiously, the AIC turned his head first to the left and then to the right and saw half a dozen red laser sights dancing in tight clusters on each agent’s chest.

The AIC looked up at the windows of the Warehouse. The sashes were up and the rooms in darkness. He saw no gun barrels, but he was experienced enough to recognize the threat. Snipers don’t stick gun barrels out a window; they sit back in the shadows where their guns and scopes won’t reflect sunlight and there in the quiet darkness they pick their kill shots. However, even from that distance he could see the flicker of red laser lights in virtually every window. His face went pale beneath his volleyball tan.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind, Major?”

“I’m barking mad,” she agreed.

“Harm any of us and you’ll be committing treason. We have legal authority to—”

She cut him off. “You force this play and we’ll all regret how this turns out.”

Five more red lights appeared on the AIC’s chest.

“I—,” he started to say, but he was truly at a loss.

“Here’s how we’re going to play this,” Grace said, her cat green eyes flashing. “You and your Huns are going to stop trying to storm the castle. Go sit in your cars. Feel free to make any calls you want. Leave or stay, but until both of our bosses get this sorted out you are going to stop waving paper in my face and stop making threats. You don’t lose face that way. But hear me on this and make no mistake: You are not getting inside this compound. Not on my watch.”

“You’re going to regret this, Major.”

“I regret a lot of things. Now kindly piss off.”

She stepped back from the fence. The laser lights followed the NSA agents back to their cars, and over the next hour the lights caressed the windows of each parked vehicle. When more NSA cars pulled up to reinforce the siege, more laser sights reached out to remind everyone of who held the tactical high ground. Above them the sun slowly burned away the minutes of the day.

Chapter Twenty-One

J. P. Sunderland closed his phone and sighed, then cut a covert glance at Vice President Bill Collins, who was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands.

Sunderland cleared his throat. “That was Mike Denniger, my man inside the Secret Service.”

That made the Vice President jerk his head up. “Did anything happen to the President?”

“That hopeful look on your face doesn’t speak well of the depth of your compassion,” Sunderland drawled. When Collins’s only response was a glare, he said, “Denniger said that there’s been a lot of quiet conversations between Linden Brierly and the doctors. He wasn’t privy to the conversations, but he got the impression the doctors were arguing with Brierly. My guess is that someone got to Brierly to try and hurry up the process of waking up the President.”

“That’s got to be Church.”

“Not through official channels.”

“He doesn’t use official channels.”

“No, I guess he doesn’t.”

They sat in silence as seconds fell from the clock in handfuls. Finally Collins said, “So, what’s our move? Wait until the President is awake and pissed off and then throw him the scapegoat, or should we play it like we figured out that we were duped and go to the Attorney General first? Lay out the story for him, keep him on our side.”

Sunderland considered. Despite the calm expression on his face, he was sweating heavily. He absently patted his pocket to make sure the bottle of nitro tablets was there.

“There’s still a chance — an outside chance of course — that we’ll still nab MindReader before the President is awake and in power,” said Sunderland. “Even if Brierly bullies the docs into doing something, we probably still have six, seven hours. So… let’s use the time.”

“To do what? Cross our fingers?”

“Might help.”

Collins almost laughed. “Christ.”

“Denniger will give me a heads-up if things start happening at Walter Reed. If it looks like this is totally played out, then you can call the AG. It’s the best way, Bill. If you move too soon you look weak, if you let the President slap you down you look criminal, but if you save the day in the eleventh hour you’re a goddamn hero.”

“And if we snag MindReader in the meantime?”

“Then you’ll very quietly become the richest Vice President in history.” Sunderland mopped his smiling face. “Either way, you can’t lose.”

“Christ, don’t say that,” Collins snapped. “… You’ll jinx me.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The car pulled to the curb and I bent down to peer through the passenger window at the man behind the wheel.

Dr. Rudy Sanchez grinned nervously at me. “Hey, sailor, new in town?”

“Hilarious,” I said as I climbed in.

Rudy is shorter and rounder than me and usually drives a roomy Cadillac DTS, but now I was crammed into a twenty-year-old Geo Prizm with no legroom.

“What the hell’s this?”

“Mr. Church told me to be nondescript, so I borrowed it from my secretary, Kittie. I told her I had an emergency and that my car was in the shop. I gave her cab fare home.”

The car was a patchwork of dusty gold and primer gray. The interior smelled of cigarettes. A pine-tree-shaped deodorizer hung in total defeat from the rearview mirror.

“Jeez, Rude, you gotta pay that gal better. My grandmother wouldn’t drive this.”

“Your grandmother’s dead.”

“And she still wouldn’t drive anything this crappy.”

“It’s a good car, and it’s nondescript as ordered. Besides, being a prima donna isn’t becoming to a fugitive.”

“Shut up and drive,” I grumbled.

He said something inappropriate in gutter Spanish as he went up the ramp to I-83. Rudy seemed to know where he was going. For the first few minutes he said nothing, but even with the air-conditioning at full blast he was still perspiring.

“How’d you get roped into playing chauffeur?”

“I wasn’t at the Warehouse when all this started happening. El Jefe called and said to come and pick you up.”

“How much do you know?”

“Enough to scare me half to death.” A minute later he said, “I hate politicians.”

There was nothing to argue with, so we kept driving.

Later he said, “I can’t believe I’m aiding and abetting someone wanted by the National Security Agency. I can’t believe that someone is my best friend. And I can’t believe that the Vice President of the United States of America would trump up charges just to further his own political aims.” Half a mile later he added, “No, I can believe that… I just hate that it’s true.”

“Not happy about it myself. Of course, the charges aren’t entirely groundless, Rude.”

Rudy breathed in and out through his nose. “I hate that, too. I mean… we both believe that Church is a good guy, maybe even the good guy. If there is anyone with the strength of will and the solidity of moral compass to not misuse something like MindReader, then it’s him. I’m not sure I’d be able to resist the temptation. That said, how screwed up is our world that it takes blackmailing the President and members of Congress to allow us to do our jobs, considering that our jobs involve stopping terrorists of the most extreme kind. Tell me, Joe, how does that sound like a sane world?”

“You’re the shrink, brother; you tell me.”

“If I could figure out the logic behind the way the political mind thinks, I’d write a bestseller and spend the next two years on the talk show circuit.”

“Beats driving fugitives around in a hooptie.”

“Most things do. So… how are you, Cowboy?”

“Not happy about the way things are spinning. And worried about Big Bob.”

“Can we call the hospital to check on him?”

“We shouldn’t. He’s registered under a false name so the NSA can’t find him. Church is fielding the info about him. He’ll update us.”

Rudy’s knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel and every few blocks he cut a look my way.

Before he could ask, I said, “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I’m feeling it. Big Bob. The NSA. I’m feeling it.”

“It’s okay to show it, to let it out.”

I nodded. “In the right place and at the right time.”

“Which isn’t now?”

“No.”

“Even with me?”

“Rude,” I said, “you’re my best friend and you’re my shrink, so you get a lot of leeway most folks don’t get. You can ask me anything, and probably eventually I’ll tell you everything. But not right now.”

“You’ve had a lot of stress today, Cowboy. Are you the best person to make that call?”

I nodded. “When the soldier comes home from the war the shrinks call all the shots. They poke and prod and ask and ponder to separate the soldier from the stress of combat, to free him from the thunder of the battlefield.”

“Ah,” he said, his eyebrows arching, “but we’re still on the battlefield.”

“Yep.”

“You believe that we’re in the middle of something.”

“Yep.”

“Something bigger than the NSA? This Russian thing, whatever it is.”

“Whatever it is, yes,” I said.

“So. Now’s not the time to debrief.”

“Right.”

He nodded. Rudy is the best of companions. He knows when to stop harping on a point, and he knows how to give space, even in the cramped confines of a compact car. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

We took the first exit off the JFX and headed west and north on a number of seemingly random roads, but then twenty minutes later Rudy pulled onto a rural road and drove a crooked mile to an upscale small private airfield. He made a bunch of turns until finally pulling to a stop fifty feet from a sleek late-model Learjet.

The stairs were down and the pilot sat on the top step reading Forbes and sipping Starbucks out of a paper cup. As we parked he folded the magazine and came down the steps to meet us.

“Captain Ledger?” he said, offering his hand. “Marty Hanler.”

I smiled. “Marty Hanler… the writer?”

“Yep.”

Rudy whistled. Hanler’s espionage thrillers always hit the number one spot on the bestseller lists. Four of them had been made into movies. Matt Damon was in the last one and I had the DVD at home.

“You going with us?” I asked.

“Be more efficient that way,” he said. “I’m flying this bird.”

Rudy blinked.

Hanler was amused by our reactions. “A buddy of mine called me and said you needed a lift.”

“A ‘buddy’?” I asked.

“Yeah. Your boss, the Deacon.”

“He’s… your ‘buddy’?”

Hanler was in his mid-sixties, with receding gray hair and a deep-water tan. Bright blue eyes and great teeth. He winked. “I didn’t always write books, fellas.”

“Ah,” I said. His handshake had been rock hard and he had that look that I’ve seen in other old pros. The “been there, done that, buried them” sort of look.

“Come on,” he said. “The Deacon asked me to fly you to Denver.”

“Good luck, Joe,” Rudy said, and I turned in surprise.

“Wait… you’re not coming with me?”

He shook his head. “Church wants me local so that I can help the staff deal with everything that’s going on.”

“And who’s going to help you with this crap?”

“My good friend Jose Cuervo.”

“Ah,” I said. We shook hands. “In the meantime, stay low and stay loose.”

“And you watch your back, Cowboy.”

“Always do.”

Hanler said, “When you fellas are done spooning maybe we can get this bird in the air.”

I shot him the bird and he grinned. Three minutes later we were in the air heading west to Denver.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Hester Nichols was a nervous woman. For twenty years she had overseen production of bottled water at the big plant in the mountains near Asheville. She was there when MacNeil bought the plant from the bankrupt soda company that had owned it since the fifties, and she was there when the Gunderson Group bought a half interest in it during the spring-water boom of the nineties. When she was promoted from line supervisor to production manager she had suffered through three FDA inspections, two audits, and a transport union strike. Each of those were stressful, but they were also part of the job, and she weathered the storms one after the other.

Now she was actually scared.

It wasn’t just the unsmiling faces of the quality control advisors from Gunderson who hovered over employees at every step of the bottling process. It wasn’t even the fear that the IRS would somehow discover the new offshore account that Otto Wirths had set up for her.

What worried Hester was that she didn’t know what was in the water.

Otto told her that it was safe. But he had a weird little smile on his scarred face, and that smile haunted Hester, day and night.

She stood on the metal catwalk, fingers curled tightly around the pipe rail, and looked down at the production floor.

MacNeil-Gunderson owned three plants. Two in North Carolina and one in Vermont. This one was the largest — a massive facility that had the second-highest bottled water output in the South — and Hester oversaw the bottling and shipping of twelve hundred bottles per minute. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was just a drop in the bucket of the 170 billion liters of water the industry bottled worldwide, but it was a high-profit business.

Her plant did not bother with spring water but went for the more lucrative purified-water market. Hester had overseen the installation of top-of-the-line reverse osmosis water purification systems and the equipment for enhancing taste and controlling odor through activated carbon. The water was sterilized by ozone and then run through remineralization equipment before flowing like liquid gold into plastic bottles. The plant was fully automated, with only a skeleton crew of mechanics and quality-control technicians on hand. It was much easier to slip things past a small crew, and in the current economy few employees risked making any kind of fuss. Except for shipping, MacNeil-Gunderson was a nonunion shop, and that helped, too.

Before Otto had walked up to her in the parking lot of a Quick Chek four months ago, Hester’s main concern was playing spin doctor for press questions about the source of the water. A Charlotte newspaper had broken the story that purified bottling plants used water from any source, including tap water, seawater, brackish water, river water, polluted well water, and even wastewater streams. The paper emphasized that and glossed over the fact that purification was the key. And the water was actually pure. Or at least as pure as the FDA required.

Until Otto Wirths.

Wirths had offered Hester an absurd amount of money. The kind of money that made her knees weak, that actually took her breath away. More money than Hester could make in twenty years as a manager. Wirths showed her credentials that proved that he was CEO of the Gunderson Group. He could have fired her, but he never even threatened that. Instead he offered her money, and that was enough to buy her cooperation. And maybe her soul. Hester wasn’t sure. He only wanted two things from her: to allow him to provide the quality-control specialists for the plant and to make sure she paid no attention to whatever additives they chose to add to the water.

“It won’t affect the taste or smell,” Wirths had said; then he gave her a sly wink. “But… don’t drink it, my dear.”

When Hester had hesitated, Otto Wirth added another zero to the money he offered. Hester nearly collapsed.

She wrestled with her conscience for nearly a full minute.

That was at the beginning of May and now it was near the end of August. Seven hundred and twenty thousand bottles an hour. One million, seven hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred bottles a day. For four months.

What was in the bottles? The question nagged at her every day, and every day the money in that offshore account seemed smaller; every day she wondered if she had sold her soul for too small an amount.

Her fingers were so tight on the pipe rail that her knuckles were white. She stared down at the production floor as the thunder of the machinery beat at her like fists.

What was in those bottles?

Dear God, she thought, what is in that water?

Chapter Twenty-Four

N’Tabo stopped on the twelfth circuit and lighted a cigarette. He smoked one for every dozen turns around the compound, rewarding himself for four kilometers with an American Marlboro. He liked the menthol ones. The moon was a dagger slash of white against the infinite black of the sky. He could only see a few stars; the lights on the perimeter fence washed the rest away. N’Tabo was okay with that. He wasn’t much of a star gazer.

He took a deep drag on the Marlboro, enjoying the menthol burn in his throat, the icy tingle deep in his lungs. His wife said he smoked too much. He thought her ass was too flat. Everyone had problems.

The rifle on his shoulder was heavy — an ancient AK-47 that his boss had given him ten years ago. It kicked like a cow and the strap had worn a permanent callus over his shoulder from shoulder blade to nipple. No amount of padding or aloe seemed to keep it from rubbing a groove in him. He believed he’d wear that mark until he died. Of course he figured he’d be dead by the time he was thirty anyway. The boss’s crew — the deputy warlords, as they called themselves — would probably shoot him just because they were bored, or because he was pissing against the wrong tree, or because he was just there. They were like that. Three of N’Tabo’s friends had been killed like that in the last six years. For fun or for some infraction of a nonexistent rule. It made N’Tabo wish that the Americans would come back. At least his father and two of his uncles had died in a real battle, back in Mogadishu. Allah rewarded death in battle. How would He reward death by boredom?

The cigarette was almost down to the filter and N’Tabo sighed. Just below the surface of his conscious thought he wished that something—anything—would happen just to relieve the tedium. The thought had almost risen to the point of becoming words on his tongue when he heard the sound.

N’Tabo froze with his hand midway to taking the cigarette from between his lips. Had he heard it or was his mind using the ordinary sounds of the jungle to play tricks on him? It wouldn’t be the first time.

He tried to replay the sound in his mind. It had been a grunt. Low, soft, the kind someone might make if they bumped into something in the dark.

N’Tabo spit out the cigarette and as he turned he swung the gun up, his hands finding the familiar grips without thought, his ears straining into the darkness.

But there was only silence. By reflex he tuned out the ordinary sounds of the dense forest and the desert that surrounded it. The sound had come from the west, toward the arm of the jungle that separated the compound from the town beyond. N’Tabo waited, not daring to call out a challenge. Raising a false alarm would earn him a chain whipping at the very least. Two men had been whipped last week. One had died, and the other’s back was an infected ruin of torn flesh over broken bones.

So N’Tabo stood there with his gun pointed at a black wall of nothing, and waited.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

A minute crawled by. The only sound was the tinny sound of a Moroccan radio station from inside the compound and the ripple of laughter from the deputy warlords who were playing poker in the blockhouse where they bunked.

From the forest… nothing.

N’Tabo licked his lips. He blinked sweat from his eyes.

He waited there for another whole minute, and then gradually, one stiff muscle at a time, he relaxed. It was nothing.

Then a voice said, “Over here.”

It was low, guttural, a twisted growl of a voice. And it came from behind him.

N’Tabo did not understand the words. He spoke four languages — Somali, Bravanese, Arabic, and English — but the voice had spoken in Afrikaans, a language he’d never heard.

Not that it mattered. He jumped and spun, and as he landed three things happened all at once. He saw the person who had spoken — a strange, hulking figure silhouetted against the stark glare of the compound lights. N’Tabo opened his mouth to shout a warning. And the figure behind him whipped a huge hand toward him and closed it around his throat. All three things happened in a microsecond.

N’Tabo tried to shout, but the hand was too strong — insanely strong — and not so much as a hiss escaped the crushing stricture. He tried to fire his weapon, but the gun was ripped out of his grip with such savage force that N’Tabo’s hand was folded backward against the wrist and a half-dozen small bones snapped, the ends scything through the cartilage and tendons. The pain was massive, but N’Tabo had no voice with which to scream at the white-hot agony in his arm. Within the cage of iron fingers his throat began to collapse and he could hear his own neck bones grind. The trapped air in his lungs was a burning fireball.

N’Tabo swung his other hand at the figure holding him; he used every last scrap of strength he possessed and he felt his fist blows slam into shoulders and arm and face. His attacker did not even flinch. It was like beating a statue, and N’Tabo’s knuckles cracked on the hard knot of the attacker’s cheekbone.

A different and far more impenetrable darkness began to engulf N’Tabo, blossoming like black poppies in his eyes. The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was a line of brutish figures swarming out of the shadows and leaping up absurdly high, grabbing the top of the corrugated metal compound fence twelve feet above the hard-packed sand. One by one the figures hauled themselves up and over the wall.

Blood roared in N’Tabo’s ears, but he heard two distinct sounds.

The first was the mingled chatter of gunfire and the high-pitched shrieks of men in terrible pain.

Then he heard his own vertebrae collapse with a crunch like a sack dropped onto loose gravel. N’Tabo clearly heard the sound of his own death, and then he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I had the Lear to myself and sank into a large leather swivel chair next to a self-service wet bar that saw a fair amount of action during that flight. I’m pretty sure black coffee laced with Kentucky bourbon is neither tactically sound nor medically smart in light of what I’d been through and what might lie before me, but damn if I didn’t give a shit. It felt good going down, and since I didn’t want it to be lonely I had another. I also wolfed down six packets of salted peanuts. I’ve never understood why they can’t put a decent serving in a single bag.

After we were at cruising altitude Hanler put it on autopilot and came back to show me how to use the videoconferencing setup; then he retired to the cabin, cranked up an old Bob Seger and the Silver Bullets CD. Either he didn’t want to participate or his current involvement with Church didn’t extend to DMS secrets.

I clicked on the remote and immediately the screen popped on with a real-time webcam of the video lab at the Warehouse. I had ten seconds of an empty room and then Dr. Hu came and sat down. He was wearing jeans and a Punisher T-shirt under a white lab coat that probably hadn’t been washed since last winter. Instead of his name he had “Mad Scientist” embroidered over the pocket. Hu was a Chinese American übergeek who ran the DMS science division; he was a few thousand neurons beyond brilliant, but he was also an insensitive asshole. If the building was on fire and it came down to a choice of saving him or my favorite pair of socks, he’d be toast. He hated me just as much, so we had a balanced relationship.

“Captain,” he said.

“Doctor,” I replied.

All warmth. Like a Hallmark special.

He said, “Has Mr. Church told you anything about the video?”

“Just that it came from an anonymous source and that it’s tied to whatever’s brewing.”

“It’s because of the video that Hack Peterson rolled Jigsaw Team,” Hu said. “We received that video two days ago. We ran the faces of each of the people in the video through our recognition software and got some hits. Mr. Church will conference in with us to discuss those with you. Bottom line is that one of the faces is that of a man known to have been associated with a major subversive organization back in the Cold War days. Don’t ask me for details, because Lord Vader hasn’t deemed it necessary to share those with me yet.”

Cold War, I mused. Grace was right.

“You know,” I said, “Church could be eavesdropping on this call.”

I said it just to be mean and Hu looked momentarily unnerved, but he shook his head. More to himself than to me. “Point is, Church initiated a MindReader search on the man and found that almost everything about him has been erased from government databases. MindReader couldn’t reclaim the data but was able to spot the footprints.”

“ ‘Footprints’?”

“Sure… think of them as scars from where data was forcibly erased from hard drives. It’s like forensics… every contact leaves a trace.”

“Except for MindReader.”

“Well… okay, except for MindReader. I think one of the things bugging the boss is that it would take a system a lot like MindReader to expunge this much information. Mind you, MindReader wouldn’t have left a mark, so we’re not looking at someone using our own system… but this is weirdly close.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that.”

“No one does. Anyway, we used MindReader to do extensive pattern and connection searches and located relatives of Gunner Haeckel, the man from the video. Stuff this other system, good as it was, missed. We accessed court records from family estates and pending litigation. His only living relative was an uncle who died in 1978.”

“And…?”

“And everything the uncle had is stored at a place called Deep Iron, which is a private high-security storage facility a mile under Chatfield State Park in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Denver. Mr. Church sent Peterson and his team to the facility at dawn this morning. He never reported in.”

“What kinds of records are stored there?”

“We don’t know. The Deep Iron system only lists them as ‘records.’ Could be a collection of old forty-fives for all we know. All sorts of things are stored at Deep Iron. People store yachts, film companies store old movie reels, you name it. And about a million tons of paper and old microfilm records.”

“And we don’t know how it relates to the video?”

“No, so Church is looking for you to get us some answers. Your boy Top Sims is already in Colorado.”

“Call Top ‘boy’ again, son, and you’re likely to end the day as a girl.”

He blinked. “It wasn’t a racial slur,” he said defensively. “It’s street talk. You know… Echo Team are your boys and all.”

“Doc, you were never cool in school and you’re not cool now. Stop trying.”

He pretended to adjust the nosepiece of his glasses, but he did it with his middle finger. You could feel the love just rolling back and forth between us.

“Video,” I prompted. “Do I ever get to see it?”

Instead of answering me, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious. “What do you know of cryptozoology?”

“Crypto-what?” I asked.

“Cryptozoology,” he repeated, saying it slower this time. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor branch of biology or a pseudoscience. In either case, it’s concerned with the search for cryptids — animals that do not belong to any known biological or fossil record.”

“You lost me.”

Hu smiled thinly. “It’s simple. Cryptids are animals that are believed by some to exist… but which usually don’t.”

“What? Like the Loch Ness Monster?”

Hu gave me a “wow, the caveman had a real thought” sort of look but nodded. “And Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, El Chupacabra, and a bunch of others.”

“Please don’t tell me that I busted my ass to dodge the NSA just to go on a Bigfoot hunt. I’m just starting to not entirely dislike you, Doc; don’t make me have to kill you.”

His smile would have wrinkled a lemon.

“No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “we’re not searching for Bigfoot. However, there have been instances of presumed mythological creatures being found. Until a few years ago the giant squid was considered a myth. And two hundred years ago the first people to report an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, a duck’s bill, and a poisonous sting were branded as liars, but we now know the platypus exists.”

“Platypuses are poisonous?” I asked.

“Male platypi are,” he said, correcting me with a sneer. “Some of these animals may be UMAs, or Unidentified Mysterious Animals, that, due to lack of physical evidence, spoor or DNA, resist scientific classification in the known biology. Others are relicts — that’s with a t—surviving examples of species believed to be extinct or so close to extinction that living examples are rarely found.”

“Wow, this is fascinating, Doc,” I said. “By the way, did anyone mention that the Vice President of the United frigging States of America wants us all arrested?”

Hu peered at me for a moment. “Exciting,” he said. “Another more exotic example is the coelacanth, a large fish believed to have become completely extinct over sixty million years ago, and yet one was netted in December of 1938 by the crew of a South African trawler. Since then living populations of them have been sighted and caught in the waters around Indonesia and South Africa.”

I grunted. “Sure, I’ve seen them in the Smithsonian.”

“Generally cryptozoologists search for the more sensational mega-fauna cases — like Bigfoot — rather than new species of beetles or flies. And before you ask, ‘megafauna’ means ‘large animals.’ In biology it’s used to describe any animal weighing more than forty kilograms. And we occasionally find relicts or UMAs that do exist.”

“Okay, I get that this is like porn for you science geeks, but if there’s some reason I have to sit through it then for Christ’s sake get to it.”

“I wanted you to have this in mind before I played the video.”

“Church said he wanted me to watch it without preconceptions so I could form my own opinions.”

From Hu’s look it was clear that he didn’t think me capable of anything as complex as an “opinion.” He tapped a few keys. “This video was blind e-mailed to us. Someone logged on from an Internet café in São Paolo, created a Yahoo account, sent this, and then abandoned the account. We hacked Yahoo, but all of the info used to create the account was phony. All we have is the file.”

“Sent to whom?”

“To an old e-mail account owned by Mr. Church. Don’t ask about the account, because he didn’t tell me. All he said is that it’s one he never uses anymore but which he occasionally checks as a matter of routine.” Hu rubbed his hands together in a way I’d only ever seen mad scientists do in bad movies. “Now… watch! I can guarantee you that this is going to blow you away.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“We have a virus,” said Judah Levin. He couldn’t help smiling.

It was an old joke in the CDC’s IT department, and it always got a laugh, or at least a groan.

His boss, Colleen McVie, looked up from the papers on her desk. She wore her glasses halfway down her nose and measured out half a smile.

“Unless it’s urgent,” she said, “go practice your standup on someone else. I’m ass deep with the payroll, or don’t you want to get paid?”

“Being paid is nice, but we actually do have a virus, Colleen. A couple of the secretaries have been complaining about it. It’s a bounce-back program that came at us through—”

“So… deal with it,” she interrupted. “We get fifty viruses a week.”

“Okay,” he said, and left her office.

He went back to the main office, where several secretaries were standing around the coffeemaker. Judah had told them to log off and they seemed to take that as a sign to do no work at all. He shrugged — it wasn’t his problem, and Colleen would be buried with her payroll for the rest of the day.

The virus hadn’t been overtly destructive, but it had been new and oddly configured enough to catch his attention, especially since it arrived as a bounce-back response to the CDC’s daily alert e-mail bulletin.

Judah sat at one of the workstations, opened his laptop on a wheeled side table, and logged onto both computers. Everything loaded normally all the way to the password screen. He used one of IT’s secure passwords that would open the system but reroute it to his laptop. Again the screens loaded normally. He ran several different spyware scans and came up with nothing.

He frowned. That was weird, because he had definitely seen the virus warning message pop-up. He tapped a few keys and did a different kind of search.

Nothing.

Very weird.

He logged into the office e-mail account and looked for the e-mail that had likely carried the virus. It was gone.

Without saying a word he got up and went to the adjoining desk and logged on. Same result — no trace of the e-mail, no trace of a virus. He repeated this four more times, but there was no trace of either the e-mail or the virus anywhere in the system.

Judah picked up the secretary’s phone and punched the number for Tom Ito, his assistant. When Ito answered, Judah said, “Did you do a system search on an e-mail virus this morning?”

“No, why — you need me to run one?”

Judah explained the situation.

“Got me, Jude. Do we have a problem?”

Judah thought about it. “Nah. Skip it. If it’s not there, then it’s not there. Nothing to worry about.”

He hung up and walked over to the secretaries. “Look, the system seems to be clear, but if you get anything else call me right away.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cyrus Jakoby received his children in a garden that was so beautifully designed that visitors could easily believe that they were out in the fresh air rather than half a mile under the heat-baked Arizona desert. Cyrus remained seated in a tropical cane rattan chair with a high fan back. He was cool and composed in tropical whites. The Twins bowed to him. They had never hugged their father and only rarely shook hands. Bowing had always been the custom among them. They bowed from the waist in the Chinese fashion, and Cyrus inclined his head like an Emperor and waved them to seats.

Their chairs were of the same style as his, though not as big, and from past experience Hecate knew that their chairs were built with slight and carefully planned imperfections. The seats were too deep, so that they had to either perch on the end or sit back and have the sharp edge of the seat cut into the tender flesh above the back of their knees. The legs were ever so slightly uneven, so that they sat off-angled in a way that cramps and aches would gradually form in the lower back and obliques. The chairs were also positioned lower on a slope whose incline was hidden by copious decorative shrubbery and a forced-perspective distraction mosaic made from multicolored tiles. The overall effect was of a lack of comfort and an imbalance that made one feel inferior to the person sitting higher and in obvious comfort in the big chair. And although the design of Cyrus’s chair was island rustic, he rode it like a throne.

Hecate had long ago found the most comfortable position, half-turned, with her knees together and feet braced to keep her from sliding to the wrong side of the chair. She approved of the chairs and long ago had stopped wondering why she didn’t share her insights with her brother.

“It’s good to see you, Father,” said Paris, uncomfortably crossing his legs and then uncrossing them.

Cyrus studied the hummingbirds flitting from one exotic flower to another.

“It’s good to see you, Alpha,” corrected Hecate.

Cyrus looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. “And how are my young gods today?”

“Well, Alpha,” said Hecate. “And you’re looking especially fit.”

Paris hid a sneer behind a cough and Cyrus affected not to notice.

Cyrus said, “I’m self-renewing, as you know.”

“Of course,” Hecate said, though she had no idea what that meant. She made herself look pleased and knowing.

“Before we discuss whatever it is that’s putting such troubled looks on your faces,” Cyrus said smoothly, “please let me have an update on the shipping.”

Hecate shrugged. “The entire distribution network is in place. We have three cargo ships of bottled water and bottled sparkling water en route to Africa and six shiploads already in the warehouse in Accra in Ghana, four in Calabar in Nigeria, and two each in Libreville, Gabon; Lomé, Togo; and Tangier. Two of our Brazilian ships will make stops in Callao, Peru, and Guayaquil, Ecuador. The shipments to Chile and Panama will go out next. And we can handle the domestic shipments to New York, Louisiana, and Mississippi by water or rail.”

For a moment Cyrus’s eyes seemed to lose focus and his skin flushed as if the news touched him on an almost erotic level. It was a reaction Hecate had noted before, but she let no expression show on her face.

Paris laughed and it broke the spell. “It’s kind of ironic that one of the world’s great criminal enterprises is largely financed by the sale of purified water.”

“Yes,” Cyrus said with a wolf’s smile. “Life is full of delightful ironies. But don’t forget that illegitimate business cannot succeed without legitimate business. Even those greaseballs in the Mafia understand that.”

They all chuckled over that, but Hecate’s laugh was as false and measured as her father’s and she knew it. She just did not know why Cyrus thought it was funny. She’d had toxicology screens done on random samples of every shipment of water, and as far as she could tell there was nothing in there but purified water and enough trace minerals to make the health club set think they were actually getting something for the money they spent on glorified tap water. Maybe it was time to run an entirely different set of tests on the water.

“Father,” began Paris, and then corrected himself with an irritable grunt, “ ‘Alpha’… we’re moving into Phase Three of the South African account. We’ve run the Berserkers through three field tests with variable results, the most recent of which was last night in Somalia. What we’d like is—”

“ ‘Variable’?” Cyrus interrupted.

“That’s really why we’re here, Alpha,” explained Hecate. “Our clients have some concerns about certain behavioral anomalies. Concerns that, unfortunately, are borne out by the test results.”

“What kind of anomalies?”

Hecate looked at Paris, who gave her a “well, you started this” wave of his hand. She took a breath and plunged ahead. “In the second and third field tests we’ve documented aggression increases in levels beyond what the computer models predicted. In short, the test subjects have become too violent.”

“Of course they’re violent,” snapped Cyrus. “They’re killers. They’re supposed to be violent. What kind of idiocy is this?”

At the sound of his raised voice two animals stalked quietly out of foliage behind his chair. Hecate and Paris did almost comic double takes on them because at first glance they appeared to be large dogs, Danes or American mastiffs, but immediately that idea was torn to shreds as the animals stepped from shadows into sunlight. The animal to Cyrus’s left was the bigger of the two, a female with heavy shoulders between which a hideous head lolled. He stared at Hecate with the hateful slitted yellow eyes of a hunting lion. He hissed silently at the Twins and pawed at the ground with retractable claws that left furrows in the tile. The second animal, smaller but thicker in the shoulders, circled the entire clearing at a slow and silent pace.

Hecate and Paris were frozen to their chairs. Paris’s eyes tried to follow the stalking creature; Hecate couldn’t take her eyes off of the big animal. There was a gas dart pistol in her pocket, but she knew she had no chance at all of drawing it if that thing moved. He crouched there, his tension etching the taut lines of each muscle.

Paris was always the better actor and he reassembled his composure first. He recrossed his legs and cocked one eyebrow as if appraising a pet poodle.

“Cute,” he drawled. “What do you call them?”

“Otto calls them tiger-hounds.”

“That’s boring.”

“It won’t be the catalog name,” snapped Cyrus, and just as quickly his voice softened. “We’re working on something catchier. The big one is Isis; her mate is Osiris.”

Moving very casually, Paris reached under his shirt and withdrew his dart gun. It was made from a high-density polymer blend and had a gas-injection clip that could fire .32 pumpkin balls filled with glass flachettes. He laid it on his thigh, his finger straight along the outside of the trigger guard. He said nothing.

Cyrus smiled and then made a clicking noise with his tongue. Osiris stopped prowling and came over to sit on Cyrus’s right. Isis stopped hissing, but her eyes never left Hecate’s. The animals sat straight, their bodies as motionless as stone statues carved into the legs of a throne. Every once in a while one of them would blink very slowly, the action serving to remind the Twins of their reality and potential.

“Hmmm, trainable,” murmured Paris, nodding approval. “Will they bond with multiple handlers?”

“Within limits,” said Cyrus, “but push comes to shove they’ll protect whoever feeds them first. They bond very quickly with the initial human handler but can be taught to tolerate others.” He reached down and stroked the head of the bigger of the two animals. “I make it a point to be the first person with whom each of my animals bonds.”

“They’re… beautiful.” She could feel the gaze of the animals like a physical touch.

“They’re ugly as ghouls,” Cyrus snorted. “However, I didn’t design them for their beauty. Pretty can be frightening,” he observed, “but not in a guard dog.”

“Are they dogs?” Paris asked.

Cyrus shrugged. “Technically they’re about sixty percent canine. The rest is a mix of useful genetic lines. They’re very much made to order as the perfect free-roaming guard animals. Nothing comes close.”

Hecate stared, lips parted, at Isis, and the big creature stared back at her and into her with an intensity that was palpable and a personality that was familiar. Hecate said nothing, but when she blinked the animal blinked.

Paris wasn’t paying attention to his sister. He was hiding a smile provoked by Cyrus’s claims that these creatures were perfect. Paris personally disagreed with that assessment, but that wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss with his father. Back home, at the lab Paris and Hecate called the Dragon Factory, he had his own guard dogs, and he thought how interesting it would be to pit his Stingers against these tiger-hounds. The Stingers were a breakthrough in deliberate chimeric genetics. The Twins had managed to create animals with mammal and insect genes, a feat of morphogenetics that had kicked open a lot of doors for them. It was one of the benefits of being able to combine research from so many different sources, thanks to Pangaea. A pit fight between his Stingers and the tiger-hounds would be a huge moneymaker. He’d already made some side money with steroid and gene therapy on standard fighting dogs. This would be a more select market, but the more exclusive the commodity the higher the price.

“We could move twenty mated pairs of these things by close of business,” he said. “One photo and some bare-bones specs in an e-mail and you could name your price.”

Cyrus shook his head. “I’ll sell pair-bonded brothers, but you can’t have any of the bitches.”

“That’ll drop the price.”

“It sustains the market,” Hecate corrected him, earning a nod from their father. “We want to sell fish, not teach our customers how to catch fish.”

Paris shrugged. This was one of the areas on which his father and sister always agreed. For his part, Paris preferred constantly bringing a series of new products to market rather than establishing ongoing markets. “Well, at least let me take orders on the males.”

“Talk to Otto,” Cyrus said, and dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “Now, what about the Berserkers?”

Hecate smoothed her skirt. “For reasons we can’t quite chart, the transgenic process has had several unexpected side effects. On the plus side, physical strength is about ten percent above expectations, but intelligence seems to be diminishing. They’re not idiots, but they seem to rely too much on instinct and too little on higher reasoning. But it’s their aggression level that has our clients concerned. If their aggression continues to escalate with each mission, then there is a very real concern that their behavior will deteriorate beyond a point of practical command control. That will shorten their duration of usefulness in the field.”

Cyrus opened his mouth to reply, but Paris jumped in. “We understand that planned obsolescence is part of any sensible manufacturing system, but this is way too fast. We’re expected to turn over comprehensive reports for six field tests, and just based on the preliminary reports we’ve shared with our clients the aggression factor has caused concern. We could bullshit our way through a three or four percent increase in violent behavior, throw in some mumbo jumbo about the natural variables of transgenics and so on, but we’re talking about a fifteen-point-seven increase in aggression between test one and test three.”

Cyrus pursed his lips. “Ah,” he said, “I see your point. That’s higher than our worst-case computer models.”

“By almost eight percent,” said Hecate. “With a comparable drop in higher reasoning. We can’t fudge the math on that kind of behavioral shift.”

“Is this just in the GMOs?”

Genetically modified organisms were the easiest to bring to market, but anomalous behavior and other gene-clash problems tended to come at them out of the blue. The much more stable genetically engineered organisms were ideal, but they had to be grown from embryos and raised to full maturity. For the Berserkers that was a fifteen- to twenty-year span. The Twins had chosen the faster route of making modifications through the introduction of viral vectors carrying exogenous pieces of DNA. It was quicker, but the likelihood of unexpected mutations was much higher.

“Of course,” she said, “but we don’t have GEOs mature enough for field-testing.”

Cyrus leaned back in his seat, chin on his breast, and pondered the problem. Hecate and Paris waited while Cyrus thought it through.

“I doubt you’ll see these problems in the genetically engineered animals. Different blueprint, different results. But in the modified animals… it’s difficult to control random gene incompatibility. Even if you suppress a gene, it doesn’t remove it and unwanted traits can emerge.”

The Twins waited. They knew this, but interrupting Cyrus was not a path toward obtaining his cooperation. Cyrus chewed on it for a while, his eyes narrowed and focused inward.

“What steps have you taken?” he asked.

“Nothing yet,” Hecate said. “The Somalia test was just last night completed and our people are still crunching the numbers.”

Paris nodded. “We’ve been playing with some ideas, though. A time-release dopamine dampener that would kick in just as the mission started. By the time the Berserkers were in full attack we’re hoping to cause a down-spike in the dopamine to start a cool-off.”

Cyrus made a face. “That’s a Band-Aid, not a cure. Besides, none of the dopamine dampeners we could use are reliable. Nothing has been field tested on anything remotely like a Berserker. Plus there’s adrenaline rush and other factors. You’d burn through six months of chemistry trying to get the dose right, and then another six working out how to make the dose appropriate to each individual Berserker.” He shook his head. “Nice theory, but impractical. Medication isn’t your answer.”

Paris made a disgusted face. “We know, Alpha… that’s why we’re here. We have fifty ideas, but none of them are practical in the time we have left. We have contracts with hard delivery dates. We burned through our swing time early this year when we had unexpected effects of cognitive dissonance. The buyers want their products now.”

“Fuck the buyers!” snapped Cyrus. Both of the tiger-hounds stiffened at his sides. “And fuck your salespeople if they can’t figure out how to put positive spin on this.”

“Our people can—”

“Your people are idiots, Paris!” When Cyrus was angry his carefully acquired American accent slipped and the more staccato German accent emerged. “Otto could sell that product for single use and get nearly the money you two are getting for extended use and ownership.” The Twins flinched and Paris looked away. “What’s your current guarantee?”

“Eighteen to twenty-four months at ninety percent operational efficiency,” Hecate said quietly.

Cyrus stared for a moment, then smiled. “You gave a two-year window on a transgenic soldier? I’m crazy, my young gods, but I think you two are crazier by an order of magnitude.”

Despite their best efforts, the Twins flushed with shame.

In a small voice Paris said, “We needed a buyer who could finance—”

“Don’t!” growled Cyrus. “Don’t embarrass yourselves with an excuse. You’re supposed to be above that sort of thing and you should at least try and act the part.”

Isis let out a low growl that was eloquent in its meaning, but this time it was directed only at Paris. Hecate noted the shift.

Cyrus steepled his fingers. “When you made that deal you were cash poor. Is that still the case?”

“Well,” Hecate said, “… no. The hunting business alone has brought in over two hundred million and the—”

“Then, as I said, fuck the customers. You tell them what the product will and will not do. Don’t discuss it with them. Tell them.”

“Yes, Alpha,” said Paris.

“Yes, Alpha,” said Hecate.

Cyrus gave them a broad fatherly smile. “Now, my young gods, let’s see what we can do to solve all your problems.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I leaned forward in my chair and watched as Hu pressed the play button and the forest came alive on the video screen.

“The sound cuts in and out — mostly out.”

“Can you clean it up? Run it through some filters or something?”

“This is the enhanced version,” Hu said. “From the angle and the image jump we figure it to be a cheap lapel camera. No lavaliere mike to extend the pickup. The rustle of clothes and the breathing of the cameraman kill most of the sound anyway.”

The camera image changed as the person with the lapel camera began to move forward through intensely dense tropical foliage. Occasionally we’d get snatches of sound, mostly of the cameraman’s labored breathing or the whisk of big leaves as they brushed across his chest. We heard a few muffled snatches of conversation. Not enough to make out words, but enough to get a sense that there were several people with the cameraman. After a minute or two of this the image changed as several people passed by the cameraman to lead the way through the jungle. I counted five white men, all of them in their forties or early fifties. All of them fit but not hard. Except the man leading the pack, a stern-faced guy who looked like he was carved from granite. The rest looked like they had muscles courtesy of LA Fitness. Good dentists, expensive tans. Everyone carried expensive hunting rifles, top-of-the-line, with all sorts of doodads. The stern guy’s rifle was of the same quality, but all he had on it was a good scope. His gun looked worn but immaculate.

“Big-game hunters,” I observed.

Hu just smiled.

The group of men burst through the wall of foliage into a wider trail that paid out into a broad clearing that had a barren slash-and-burn quality to it. The blackened stumps of vegetation barely reached to the ankles of the men’s boots.

There was a few minutes of them walking, and then they stopped to drink from canteens. The sound was off for most of this, though I caught snatches of a few words. “Africa,” a couple of racial invectives, and then what sounded like “Extinction Wave,” but they were both joking and I lost both ends of that sentence as the sound cut out.

“This sure as hell isn’t Denver,” I said. “Looks like the Brazilian rain forest. Clear-cut land for cattle farming, probably owned by a fast-food chain.”

“McMoo,” agreed Hu. “We identified two of the bird species in the video.” He froze the picture and touched the screen. “That parrot there is an Amazona aestiva—or Blue-fronted Amazon — which is definitely indigenous to Brazil.”

He restarted the video and we watched as the men fanned out in a line facing a point far across the clearing and off-camera.

“Right over there!” one of them said, and it took me a half second to process that he’d said, “Gleich da drüben!” The others shouted and then the sound cut out again.

“That’s German,” Hu said.

“I know. But one of the other guys — the one with the Australian bush hat — rattled off something in Afrikaans… though it sounds like he has an accent under the South African. Might also be a German.”

The five men and our unseen cameraman were still focused on the spot way off across the field. Suddenly one of them pointed.

“There it is!” he said in English. A British accent. “We found it!”

“Gelukwensing!” cried the South African. Congratulations.

They all gaped, staring in stupid shock at whatever they saw. A couple of them actually had their mouths hanging open.

“Guns!” the Brit hissed, and everyone raised their weapons.

“Not yet, not yet!” growled the South African in thickly accented English. “Wait until they flush it this way.”

“Good God A’mighty,” drawled one of the men in a thick Cajun accent. “Will you look at that!”

“Hou jy daarvan, meneer?” murmured the South African, then said it in English: “Do you like it, gentlemen?”

“It’s beautiful,” murmured the fifth man. His accent was pure West Texas.

Our unseen cameraman stepped farther into the clearing and turned toward the far end of the field. The sound cut off and on several times, giving us just enough so we could hear the racket of drums and sticks beating on metal pots as a line of brown-skinned men in threadbare old jeans and shorts emerged from the row of trees in the distance to drive a single animal into the center of the clearing. At first the animal was just a shapeless white blur, indistinct against the greens and grays of the tree line, but with each second it moved closer to the camera and the group of hunters.

For a minute I thought it was a horse.

Then my heart caught in my throat.

“What the fu—?”

The hunters pointed their guns.

“No…,” I murmured.

The sound cut out again so it all played out in a grotesque silence as four barrels jerked and red flame leaped toward the center of the field. The animal wheeled to run, but on its first step it stumbled and went down to its front knees. It was snow-white and beautiful, but suddenly red poppies seemed to blossom on its flanks. The guns fired again and the sound came back on long enough for us to hear the flat echo of the reports and the high-pitched scream of the animal as it went down.

Then all of the men were running and the cameraman was running with them, the image bouncing sickeningly. The group slowed to a trot and then a walk and came to a stop in a half circle around the fallen, bleeding animal. Its chest heaved with the labor of staying alive and it rolled one terrified eye at them.

“I hit it first!” said the man from Louisiana.

The sound faded to a crackle, which was some relief, because we could not hear the animal’s final, desperate scream as the American stepped up, chest puffed out and face flushed with excitement. He put a foot on the animal’s shoulder, drew a pistol, and took aim at the animal’s head. But the South African touched his arm to correct the placement of the pistol’s laser sight and then the gun bucked once in dreadful silence. Blood geysered up and the animal’s body convulsed once; then it settled down into the terminal stillness that cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is.

“God damn it,” I said.

The clip ended with the South African squatting down, a big hunting knife in his hands as he began to field-dress the animal. The screen went dark and I sat for a long minute in stunned silence.

“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Hu said as the video feed of him filled the screen once more. He looked at me and what he saw on my face wiped the smile from his.

“What is this? Some kind of sick game?” I demanded. “That animal—”

“We studied this file a hundred times,” interrupted Hu. “If this is makeup effects, then it’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

“But it’s impossible,” I said. “It can’t be real.”

“It looked pretty real to me,” Hu said.

“But it can’t be. That animal… It was a… a…”

Hu nodded.

“It was a unicorn,” he said, and the smile crept back onto his face.