The Dragon Factory

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“A fucking unicorn?” I said. “What kind of bullshit is this?”

“It’s not bullshit,” said Hu. “At least Mr. Church is taking this very seriously. He—,” but his words were cut off by the theme music for Darth Vader. Hu looked at his cell phone. “Speak of the devil.”

“That’s your ring tone?” I asked.

“Just for Mr. Church,” explained Hu as he flipped open the phone. “Yes?… Sure. Okay, I’m keying you in now.”

The image split to include Mr. Church seated in his office. “This conference call is scrambled so everyone can talk openly,” he said.

“What’s with this video crap—?” I began, but he held up a finger.

“First things first. You’ll be happy to know that Sergeant Faraday’s condition has been upgraded to critical but stable. He has lost his spleen, but the doctors are optimistic about the rest.”

“Thank God… that’s the first good news today.”

“Unfortunately it’s all of the good news I have to share,” Church said. “The NSA is still trying to storm the gates and the President has not yet revived sufficiently to take back control of the office. So, we’re all still fugitives.”

“Peachy. Have any of our guys been taken?”

“Unknown. Ninety-three percent of the staff are accounted for. The remaining seven percent includes a few agents who have likely gone to ground. And all of Jigsaw Team.”

“Shit.” I chewed on that for a moment. There was no way the NSA had bagged Hack Peterson’s entire team.

“What’s your opinion of the hunt video?” Church asked.

“It’s horseshit,” I said. “They can do anything with CGI.”

Hu shook his head vigorously. “It’s not computer animation. We had three guys here from Industrial Light and Magic — you know, George Lucas’s special effects guys? — and they—”

“How the hell’d you get them?” I interrupted.

Church said, “I have a friend in the industry.”

I suppressed a smile. Church always seemed to have a friend in “the industry,” no matter which industry was in question.

“Can you get the Ark of the Covenant?” I asked dryly.

“The real one or the one from the movies?” Church asked with a straight face.

“Point is,” Hu said, taking back the conversation, “these ILM guys watched the video on every kind of monitor and through all sorts of filters and meters. We even did the algebra on the shadows on its mane hair based on movement and angle of the sun. Bottom line, it was real.”

I snorted. “Then it was a horse with a strap-on.”

“That’s an unfortunate image,” said Church.

“You know what I mean.”

“Again,” interjected Hu, “we studied the video and that horn doesn’t wobble. There’s no evidence that the animal was wearing a headdress or a strap. The horn appears to be approximately eighteen inches long and relatively slender at the base. That creates a lot of leverage that would definitely cause a wobble if it was just held in place by straps. The creature tossed its head and then fell over, and the horn didn’t move in any way consistent with it being anchored to the skull by artificial means.”

“Then I got nothing,” I said. “I must have been out the day we covered mythical beasts at the police academy.”

Church took a Nilla wafer and bit off a section.

“We can rule out natural mutation,” ventured Hu. “The horn was perfectly placed in the center of the forehead and there are no other apparent signs of deformation, which you’d probably get if this was a freak of some kind.”

“What about surgical alteration?” I asked.

“Possible,” said Hu, “but unlikely, ’cause you’d also be talking about a lot of cosmetic work to hide the surgery and we don’t see any signs of that. Even good cosmetic work leaves some kind of mark. Let’s leave it on the table, though, because it’s the most reasonable suggestion. I mean, unless this animal is a surviving example of a species that until now was only believed to be part of mythology.”

I said, “I thought the unicorn myth grew out of early reports of travelers seeing a rhinoceros for the first time.”

“Probably did,” Hu admitted. “And from sightings of narwhales, which are cetaceans that have a single tooth that looks almost exactly like the horn on the animal in the video. Back in the eighteen-hundreds people would sell narwhale horns claiming that they were taken from unicorns.”

“Any other suggestions?” asked Church. His face was hard to read, but my guess was that he wasn’t buying the cryptid theory any more than I was.

“There’s always genetics,” suggested Hu. He saw my expression and added, “No, I’m not talking about reclaiming the DNA of an extinct species; no Jurassic Park stuff. I’m talking about radical genetic engineering. Transgenics — the transfer of genes from one species to another.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “but what the hell would you mate a horse with to get a unicorn, because I don’t see horses and narwhales doing the dirty boogie.”

Even Church smiled at that.

“Not crossbreeding,” Hu said. “That’s too problematic and it’s also becoming old-fashioned. Transgenics is genetic manipulation during the embryonic phase. Someone may have taken genes from either a rhinoceros or a narwhale and introduced it to the DNA of a horse to produce what we saw on that tape.”

“Can we do that?” I asked.

“If we set the Wayback Machine to last month I’d say no. But hey…” He clicked the remote, and the picture of the dead animal popped onto the screen. “Check it out. Transgenic science is growing exponentially. They have goats that can produce spider silk in their milk. They were given genes from the orb weaver spider. There’s a whole farm of them in Canada.”

“Jesus… that’s disturbing,” I said.

Hu seemed excited by it and was warming to his topic. “Actually, there are two really good ways of doing this. Either you transform embryonic stem cells growing in tissue culture with the desired DNA, or you inject the desired gene into the pronucleus of a fertilized animal egg. We’ve been doing it for a long time with mouse eggs. Very easy to work with.”

“I’ll bet you were an extremely creepy child,” I murmured. Hu shot me a malicious look. “Okay, okay… so we got someone out there making weirdo animals. Hooray for insanity. Why would someone send us this video and why do we give a shit? Seems like we have bigger fish to fry.”

Church said, “Before I get to that, speculate for me. If such an animal existed, or was created, who would want to hunt it? And why?”

“A hunt for something genuinely unique? That’s easy.”

“How so?”

“When I was in college I had a roommate whose father was a big-game hunter,” I said. “You know the type — a businessman by day whose hunter-gatherer gene isn’t as recessive as it should be. Point is, he paid for information on cats, and if there was a report of a particularly large one he and his friends would book a flight to some part of the U.S. or Mexico, or to some remote spot in a jungle somewhere. They went all over the world. Each man in his group would bring a small-caliber rifle with only three bullets. It was a challenge. The small caliber and the short ammunition increased the risk, especially against a big animal. When I went with my roommate to his dad’s house for Christmas there were five cat heads on the wall… all from enormous cats. Record-sized cats. His dream was to eventually go to Asia, but then tiger hunting became illegal.” I paused. “In our senior year his dad went away to a ‘conference,’ supposedly in Japan. He was gone for a couple of weeks. Five months after he returned a ‘friend’ gifted him with a mounted tiger head. My roommate told me about it. I never asked him if his father had somehow managed to find a way to hunt a tiger. My roommate was pissed because he didn’t believe — any more than I did — that his dad would have hung someone else’s trophy.”

Church nodded. “I take your point.”

Hu frowned. “I don’t. Are you saying that someone’s genetically designing unicorns just for trophy hunters?”

“Why not?” I said. “If this footage is as real as you say it is, then I think we were watching a private hunt. A public hunt would be all over the Net and in every paper. And considering how much my friend’s dad paid to hunt his large trophy cats… I can only imagine how much someone would pay to hunt a truly unique animal.”

“Yes,” Church said slowly. “The superrich would pay through the nose. Millions. Excellent assessment, Captain, and that ties in neatly with the men in that video. We ran facial recognition and voice pattern software on each of them and we think we’ve ID’d three of the five so far. One of them is Harold S. Sunderland, brother of Senator J. P. Sunderland of Texas. Harold is basically a rich layabout who lives off of family money. His brother, J.P., is the brains, and he’s one of the strongest proponents of biotech legislation. He’s pushing for earmarks for genetic research for agriculture. MindReader hasn’t found a direct financial connection between Sunderland and biotech profits, but in light of this video I’ll be very surprised if we don’t dig some up.”

“Again… so what?”

“J. P. Sunderland is a very close friend of Vice President William Collins.”

“Yikes,” I said. “That puts a weird topspin on this.”

“It does and we’re still sorting out how Sunderland’s interest in advanced genetics ties to the Vice President’s crusade against the DMS.”

“It might be a coincidence,” said Hu, but we both ignored him.

“Who’s the other guy in the video?”

“Ah,” said Church, “that’s the real issue. The man leading the hunt… what did you notice about him?”

I shrugged. “He’s a German guy trying to fake a South African accent. Or maybe a German who has been living in South Africa long enough for the accents to overlap. Who is he?”

“If he’s who he appears to be — and the recognition software came back with a high probability — then he’s the reason this video is more than a scientific curiosity, and it moves us into some very dangerous territory. We believe his name is Gunnar Haeckel. You won’t have heard of him, but once upon a time he belonged to a group of assassins known as the Brotherhood of the Scythe. Despite the rather melodramatic name, these were very heavy hitters. Also very isolated — the four members never met each other so they wouldn’t be able to identify one another if captured. Each of the assassins had a code name: Haeckel was North; the others were East, West, and South. These codes do not appear to relate to their homelands and may have no significance at all except to hide their actual names. They operated for a few years during the latter part of the Cold War. We know for certain that three of the Brotherhood were terminated.”

“But Haeckel got away?” I asked.

“No. Gunnar Haeckel is supposed to be dead.”

“Please don’t tell me he’s a zombie,” I said.

Church ignored that. “Haeckel and the Brotherhood were players in some bad business that was concluded during the last years of the Cold War. They were the muscle for a group with an equally cryptic name — the Cabal — which was made up of expatriated Germans, many of whom were Nazis who had escaped the postwar trials. Haeckel was the son of a Nazi scientist, and though he was born after the war he was a ruthless killer with a lot of notches on his gun. Until now we believed that he was permanently taken off the board.”

“ ‘Taken off the board’?” Hu asked.

“Killed,” I said. To Church, “How good’s your intel on the hit on Haeckel?”

His eyes glittered behind his tinted lenses. “Personal knowledge.”

That hung in the air and we all looked at it for what it was.

“There are three possibilities,” I said. “Four, if Haeckel has an identical twin.”

“He doesn’t.”

“A son?”

“His only known child was a girl who died at age two in a car accident in which Haeckel’s wife died. Haeckel was a suspect in the deaths. The man in the video looks to be about fifty. If Haeckel is alive, then he would be fifty-one next April. Has to be the same man.”

“Okay, then either the recognition software is wrong, but from what you’ve told me that’s unlikely, so that means the hit wasn’t as successful as you thought it was. You say you have personal knowledge… could you be wrong?”

“I have a copy of his autopsy report. It includes detailed photos of the entire postmortem. As soon as the NSA is off our backs I’ll forward a diplomatic request to South Africa for an exhumation of Haeckel’s grave. Ditto on a request for any tissue samples that might still be stored in the hospital in Cape Town where the autopsy was performed.” Church sat back in his chair. “I can’t account for why he appears to be alive and well in this video. At least one of the men in the hunting party was carrying a late-model weapon, so we know this isn’t old footage. Until we know more we’re going to go on the assumption that somehow Haeckel survived. Our real concern is what he represented. The Cabal posed a very grave threat to humanity. The list of crimes attributed to them is considerable, though most of their atrocities were perpetrated at three or even four removes by using terrorist organizations funded by layers of dummy companies.”

“What were they after?”

“Ethnic cleansing for a start, and their fingerprints are all over some of the most violent racial conflicts of the last half of the twentieth century. They had vast resources and privately funded insurgents, rebels, coups… they even sent covert ops teams in to deliberately pollute water sources throughout Africa and Israel. They’re suspected of having helped the spread of diseases that target third world cultures. There were several cases where they funded both sides of a genocidal conflict because it served their goals to rack up bodies of anyone who was not ‘pure.’ ”

“So… we’re talking the Nazi extermination ideal here. Kill the Jews, Gypsies, blacks… anyone who wasn’t a blond-haired, blue eyed son of Odin.”

Church nodded. “The death of Adolf Hitler hardly put an end to genocide. It just became more politically useful to world governments to keep it off the public radar, to call it something else. To blame terrorists and splinter groups.” Church’s voice was uncharacteristically bitter. Couldn’t blame him a bit. “But understand me, Captain, this long ago ceased to be part of German culture or even the Aryan ideal. Germany stands with us in the war on ethnic genocide. No… these men and women are a shadow nation unto themselves. They no longer want to remake a nation; they want to remake the world.”

“And Haeckel was a button man for these assholes?”

“Was. Possibly still is.” Church adjusted his glasses and his tone shifted back to neutral.

“And I think I get why that video has you so jacked. If that animal is the product of some kind of newfangled genetic design, and if Haeckel’s working for whoever made it, and if they are these same assholes — this Cabal — then that means that they’ve ducked your punch, been working in secret for a lot of years, and are screwing around with cutting-edge genetics.”

“Yes,” Church said slowly.

Dr. Hu smiled at me. “I told you that video would blow you away.”

“Yeah, glad you’re happy about it, Doc.”

“Hey,” he said, pushing up his sleeve to show his light brown skin, “I’m on the hit list, too. But you have to admire the scope of it. The imagination of it.”

“No, I fucking well don’t,” I said.

Church said, “When you get back to the Warehouse I’ll give you a more complete account of the Cabal and the efforts to dismantle it. In the meantime it’s important to know that we have only two links to Gunnar Haeckel, and Haeckel is our only link to the Cabal — if it indeed still exists. The first connection is this video, though we still don’t know who sent it, or why. The second is whatever is stored at Deep Iron. It might be nothing, but considering that Jigsaw went off the grid while running this same mission, I think it’s safe to say that there will be a connection.”

“You make anything out of the other stuff… the comment about the ‘Extinction Wave’?”

“No, but we’ll do a MindReader search on it. Hard to search for something without more to put in the search argument. Otherwise I’d Google it.”

“Did you Google it?”

He ignored the question.

There was a soft bing! and I heard Hanler’s voice: “Buckle up, Captain. We’re making our descent.”

“Mission objectives?” I asked Church.

“Your first priority is to locate and secure whatever the Haeckel family stored there. Secondary mission is to locate Jigsaw Team.”

From the bitter lines on his face I could tell that he didn’t like the order of priorities any more than I did.

Church said, “We’re operating without support here. I’d prefer to have you met by SWAT, HRT, and the National Guard, but those are calls I can’t make under the present circumstances. You have Sims and Rabbit. I was able to get a technical support vehicle out to them, which means you’ll have weapons and body armor but no advanced equipment. And we have no other boots on the ground.”

“Three of us on a mission in which a dozen operators went missing? Swell.”

“It’s asking a lot of you, but believe me when I tell you that this is of the first importance. There may be opposition that we don’t know about.”

“If we have a new enemy, boss… they may have some opposition they don’t know about.”

Church gave me a long, considering look.

“Good hunting, Captain,” he said.

Chapter Thirty

Clive Monroe looked nothing at all like what he was, but he looked exactly like what he had been. He wore a gray city suit with a chalk stripe, polished brogans, and a bowler hat. His clothes at least looked the part of an investment banker down from London to have a flutter on an afternoon of jump races at Sandown. He even had an umbrella in the car and a precisely trimmed mustache. He could have been on a poster for British business.

A casual passerby might have made that mistake, but everyone who caught Clive Monroe’s eye changed their opinion. His eyes were dark brown and utterly cold. Not emotionless, but rather filled with a calculating and deliberate cold. Ruthless eyes. When he smiled, the humor never reached those eyes, and they were never idle or inattentive. When Clive Monroe took your measure you knew that he could value you to the last penny. Not just in the expected business sense, but in every sense. You believed that he knew enough about you that he could predict what you’d do, what you’d say.

It was a fair enough assessment.

Clive Monroe had been an investment banker for twenty years, and his eyes and his assessing coldness made him a formidable opponent, whether over the details of a portfolio of holdings or over a round of golf.

Twenty-one years ago he had been a different man in a different job, and in the years before that his ability to assess a situation or a person had kept him alive when others around him fell.

Monroe walked past the oddsmakers in Tattersalls, heading for the stairs to the reserved boxes where he was expected for drinks between the third and fourth race. Monroe never placed bets on the races, though he amused himself by reading through the form books, reading the history of each horse and weighing their breeding against the weather conditions and the orientation of the field, the number of jumps, the angle of the incline run to the winning post. If he was a betting man, he would have made money on two out of three of the races run so far that day. When he spent a whole day at the track he would mentally calculate his theoretical wagers and winnings. Last year he would have been up thirty thousand pounds, even taking into account a horse he would have backed in the Two Thousand Guineas who’d fallen on the third fence and taken down two of the other favored runners.

He climbed the steps to the row of glass-enclosed boxes where he was greeted by Lord Mowbry and three conservative members of Parliament who were well known for their love of horses. Mowbry himself was seldom away from the jump-racing world and conducted nearly all of his business between races.

They shook hands and a white-liveried waiter brought Clive his usual: gin and tonic with extra tonic. Even though Clive took pills for the malaria he got in the fetid swamps of West Africa, he still favored the quinine-rich tonic. Old habits.

They toasted and settled into leather chairs.

“So,” said Lord Mowbry as soon as the waiter was gone, “have you considered our offer?” His tone was brusque.

Clive sipped his drink, shrugged.

“Is it the money?” asked Sheffield, the most senior of the MPs.

“No, the money’s fine. Very generous.”

“Then why the hesitation, dammit?” Mowbry demanded. He’d been the head of a wealthy family and owner of so many companies that he’d long ago lost his deferential air. Clive understood that and never took offense.

“I’m comfortable where I am,” Clive said. “I’ve been at Enfield and Martyn for a long time. I can retire in two years with my full pension and spend my sunset years going to the races.”

“You could make more money with us,” insisted Sheffield.

“If it was just about the money, Cyril, I’d be down there having a flutter on Blue Boots in the fourth.”

“That’s another thing,” said one of the other MPs. “You come to the races, but you never bet. Where’s the fun in that?”

“Everyone finds amusement in their own way.”

“And that’s beside the damn point,” snapped Lord Mowbry. “He’s already said that money wasn’t his motive.” Mowbry glared at Clive with piercing blue eyes over a hooked nose and a stern patrician mouth. “We need you in this venture, Monroe. You know the way these people think. No one pulls the wool over your eyes. That’s why we sought you out for this. This whole scheme hinges on having a man with actual experience in this sort of thing.”

It amused Clive that neither Mowbry nor the others would actually put a name to what it was they were planning. Clive appreciated the circumspection while at the same time mentally labeling these moneyed and powerful men as amateurs. It was one thing to make fortunes in trading currencies as Sheffield had or in genetic animal husbandry as the other two, Bakersfield and Dunwoody, had, or in agriculture, as had Mowbry’s family for the last five hundred years, but the men were stepping out into very different territory here. Their scheme, at its simplest, was to purchase bulk genetic research from bankrupt companies of the former Soviet Union. Millions of man-hours of research was lying inert in various public and private businesses throughout Russia, Tajikistan, and Latvia. Much of it was badly out of date, having been abandoned in the financial crash following the dissolution of the Soviet state, but Mowbry and his overseas partners knew that whole sections of this material could boost existing research for their client companies. The key was to acquire the data and use modern networked computers to separate unexplored or underexplored areas of research from the chaff of commonly known information. Soviet scientists were often radical in their research, bypassing or ignoring international prohibitions on certain aspects of human and animal research.

The idea had been Mowbry’s initially after he’d acquired a set of old hard drives in which he found unexpectedly useful data on transgenic salmon that led his small company to ultimately produce a salmon that was an average of 8 percent larger than the usual salmon. That 8 percent weight jump put millions into his pocket. Mowbry discreetly purchased other defunct research materials, most of which were wastes of time and money, but two years ago he found research on growth hormones for cattle that was unlike anything in development anywhere. His cattle farms in South and Central America had become gold mines.

The problem was that the cat was out of the bag. Other buyers had started vying for the same research, and Russia itself was trying to claim ownership over much of it. The materials had to be gotten sooner rather than later, before a bidding war made the whole thing cost prohibitive. They’d gotten an extra window of a couple of years when the U.S. economy imploded in the fall of 2008, but now that biotech was universally viewed as one of the safest growth industries, a feeding frenzy was starting.

The real problem was that a lot of the best materials were only available on the black market or through brokers who were ex — Soviet military. Greedy, heartless, and ruthless men who did not follow the normal rules of business. Not even the accepted rules of under-the-table international business. What Mowbry and his colleagues needed was a man who spoke the same language, someone who had once swum in these shark-infested waters. Someone who was himself a shark. Someone like Clive Monroe.

“You say that money isn’t your motive,” said Mowbry quietly. “Let’s put that to the test, Monroe. We talked and we’re willing to provide an extra half-million pounds. Call it a signing bonus.”

Clive steepled his fingers and rested his chin on his fingertips.

A half million on top of the 3 million they were already offering. Though he didn’t let it show on his face, the figure made Clive’s pulse jump. When he’d left MI6 twenty years ago he’d left behind the spy game and the dirty intrigues that went with it. And yet he still maintained his network of contacts. Just in case. Until now he had thought he would need the contacts in case his country ever needed him again, but as the years passed he realized that the old Cold Warriors belonged to a different age of the world. Now his network was worth more to men like these and he was no longer a hero of the state but a commodity no different from the things Mowbry and his colleagues bought and sold every day. Even so… three and a half million pounds. Untaxable, deposited offshore.

“If I were to agree,” he said slowly, watching the predatory gleam in the eyes of each of the men, “then my name appears on no records. We don’t sign papers; I don’t sit on any boards; I’m not listed as an advisor. Essentially I’m a ghost. At most I’m a friend who meets some gentlemen once in a while at the races.”

“Not a problem,” said Sheffield.

“Second condition. The half-million bonus is matched by a similar fee at the other end. If I can get the bulk research packages from Chechnya and Vilnius—”

“And Kazakhstan,” added one of the other MPs.

Clive nodded. “Those three. If I get all three, then I get the second bonus.”

The partners exchanged looks, but Mowbry looked hard at Clive. “Very well.”

“Last condition,” Clive said.

“You want a lot,” Sheffield muttered.

“You ask a lot. This last part is not negotiable. I do this for you and then I’m out.”

None of the other men looked happy about that. Mowbry frowned and shook his head. “Can we agree that once this is over we can discuss other projects? You can decide on a case-by-case basis.”

Clive smiled. “My prices would very likely go up in that eventuality.”

“We’re not Arabs haggling over a rug, Monroe. We know what you’re worth, and if another batch of research comes up that we must have, then we’ll make you an appropriate offer.”

Clive Monroe thought about it for a full three minutes. Mowbry and the others held their tongues, each of them afraid to say anything to break the spell of the moment.

“Very well,” Clive said, and he stood up. The others stood as well and they all shook hands, clapping Clive on the back, congratulating one another.

“Time for champagne,” declared Mowbry. He plucked a chilled bottle of Bollinger from an ice bucket and held it up for inspection. “I knew you’d agree, Monroe. I knew I could count on you.”

Suddenly the champagne bottle exploded, showering them all with wine and bubbles and tiny splinters of glass. There was no bang, no hiss of troubled gasses from the bottle. It just disintegrated and showered the room, leaving Lord Mowbry holding the neck in which the cork was still firmly seated.

“Bloody hell!” cried Sheffield, pawing at his clothes and stepping back as if trying to back away from the mess on his suit.

Mowbry looked shocked and embarrassed. “Good lord,” he said, aghast, “the bottle must have been shaken or—”

He stopped speaking and stared at Clive, who was similarly spattered with champagne but who had a peculiar smile on his face, as if he’d just remembered something wryly amusing. His eyes has lost their calculating coldness and stared at the other men without focus.

“My dear fellow,” Mowbry began, tentatively reaching for Clive, afraid that the exploding bottle had cut him. “Your chest…”

Clive looked down. His tie hung askew and his coat unbuttoned. The crisp white of his shirt was dark with moisture, but not with the pale stains of wine. From the center of his chest a red flower bloomed, spreading petals of crimson that vanished under the folds of his jacket.

“I—”

His knees abruptly buckled and he dropped to the floor with a heavy thud of bone on carpet.

Sheffield looked from Clive to the broken bottle and then, driven by some premonition of horror, turned to the big picture window. There was a single hole punched through the reinforced glass with dozens of crooked cracks spreading out in a spiderweb pattern.

The second shot exploded the entire pane of glass and this time the bullet — unheard and unseen — punched a hole above Clive’s left eyebrow and blew out the back of his head. Bone and brain splashed the back wall of the box. The crashing of the thick glass and the terrified shouts of the four men muffled the sound of Clive Monroe’s body crumpling backward onto the carpet. The sound of the gunshot report drifted lazily toward them from far away.

Three hundred and twenty yards away, deep inside a stand of trees by the far turn, Conrad Veder dropped the rifle on the ground. It was one he had purchased for the job and sighted in for this hit. He stripped off the long rubber sleeve protectors and removed the plastic welding mask. He had never touched those items with his bare flesh, and all traces of gunpowder residue would be burned into them. He dropped them into a shallow ditch he’d prepared, emptied a whole can of lighter fluid over them, and dropped in a wooden Lucifer match. Fire bloomed at once. Veder pulled off the rubber surgical gloves and dropped them into the blaze.

He moved quickly through the trees, retrieving the fawn coat and trilby hat he’d hung on branches, and pulled them on. A pair of Wellingtons stood by the edge of the copse and he stepped into them. The shoes he wore were size 10 trainers of the most common and inexpensive generic brand. Probably half the people on the racecourse would be wearing the same brand. With his feet inside the boots and the coat and hat he looked like what he was: a racecourse official. One of the nameless, faceless men hired by the day to stand at various points along the racecourse to watch for falls or other problems. Veder had worked at the racetrack for three weeks. He moved out of the trees and crossed the track and then cut through another wooded area, coming out on the far side of the stands. Then he joined the crowd that moved and yelled in confusion as word of the murder spread through the rumor mill. He eventually ducked out of the crowd, found a bathroom, removed his coat, hat, and boots, and left them in a stall. From under the plastic trash bag in the bathroom dustbin he removed a small parcel that contained new shoes, a blue windbreaker printed with the name of the local football team, wire-framed glasses, and a pair of spectator binoculars. He flushed his mustache down the loo.

When he rejoined the crowd he was one of hundreds who looked and dressed and acted like startled spectators at an afternoon’s event that had become suddenly more interesting.

It was the second kill since he’d accepted the seven-target job from DaCosta. The first had been simpler — the poisoning of a man in a wheelchair whose once brilliant mind was lost in the unlit labyrinth of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Two down, five to go.

Chapter Thirty-One

“The Twins are still in the staff room,” said Otto. “They’re interviewing Bannerjee and their other spies. Before you ask, yes… Bannerjee and the others have been briefed. They should be wrapping up in a couple of hours. You could stay in the tank a bit longer if you’d like.”

“No,” said Cyrus as he climbed out of the sensory deprivation tank. “I’m done.” He cut a sharp look at Otto. “What’s wrong?”

“We lost another one,” said Otto as he held out a bathrobe.

Water sluiced down Cyrus Jakoby’s legs to form a salty puddle on the floor. He turned and held his arms backward so Otto could slide the robe on.

“Another what?”

“Researcher. Daniel Horst.”

“Virology?”

“Epideminiology.”

“How?”

“He broke his bathroom mirror and cut his wrists,” said Otto. “He bled out in his tub.”

Cyrus scowled as he padded barefoot to the workstation in the corner. He called up the staff directory, found Daniel Horst, and entered a password to access the man’s most recent psychological evaluations. Cyrus read through and his frown deepened.

“It’s all in there,” said Otto mildly. “In the after-session notes. Both Hastings and Stenner remarked on Horst’s increased levels of stress, frequent headaches, nervousness, lack of direct eye contact. Plenty of signs of depression and diminished self-esteem. He was also a late-night regular at the staff bar every night. Classic stuff.”

“We missed it,” said Cyrus.

“We didn’t see it,” corrected Otto. “We’ve been otherwise occupied.”

“It’s my fault. I’m weeks behind in reading the staff evaluations.”

“Neither of us saw it for the same reason. We need to delegate more, Mr. Cyrus. We’re spreading ourselves too thin. If we try to do everything, then we’ll get sloppy.” He paused. “We need to process more of the SAMs into the Family. We need to put them to work.”

“I wish Eighty-two…” Cyrus let it hang.

“He’s not ready.”

“The others are?”

“Some are. Enough to take some pressure off of us.”

Cyrus shrugged. “Horst’s death could be trouble.”

“No. The cleaning woman who found him reported directly to the security shift supervisor, and he contacted me. I quarantined the cleaner. She’ll be on the next flight to the Hive. The security supervisor is one of the Haeckels, so there’s no problem with him keeping his mouth shut.”

“Good, good,” Cyrus said distractedly. “Do we have a cover story for Horst being missing?”

“He was needed at the Hive. A rumor can be started that he got a juicy promotion and went to the Hive to head up a new division. A component of the rumor will be that his apparent stress was him sweating whether he’d get the promotion or not. It’s worked before and the rumor does some good for morale and overall team efficiency.”

Cyrus nodded. Staff sent to the Hive were never allowed to return to the Deck. Except for a special few — Otto and Cyrus, the SAMs, several of the Haeckels, and one or two key scientists — no one else was allowed to travel between the two facilities. No one outside that circle even knew where the other facility was. Disinformation was frequently seeded into the rumor mill. There was even an abiding belief that there was a Laboratory A somewhere in Mexico and a new facility set to open in Australia, though neither was true. It was useful to sustain the belief when it became necessary for staff members to disappear.

This latest suicide was troubling. Suicides among the virology and epidemiology staff was very high. Drug addiction and alcoholism was even higher, though the recent increases in random urine and blood testing had decreased the risk of technicians staggering into a clean room while high. That had been a lesson they’d learned the hard way.

“What was Horst working on?”

“Tay-Sachs.”

“Why the stress? Surely you vetted him for—”

“We did. He’s not a Jew; he never had any significant Jewish friends, never dated a Jewish woman. His distrust of Jews was marked in his initial evaluations and recruitment interviews. He even scored in the high sevens for resentment against Jews for jobs and grants in his field.”

“Then why was he depressed?”

“Why do most of the suicide cases go soft on us? It’s always the same thing. Conscience. No matter what we do to prevent it, they reach a point where their vision and trust in the New Order is overmatched by fear.”

“Fear of what?” Cyrus snapped.

“Damnation, probably. In one form or another.”

“Bullshit. We screen for atheism in every single member of the science staff.”

“Most atheists are closet agnostics or disappointed believers.”

“So?”

“As you point out in so many of your staff speeches, Mr. Cyrus, we’re at war. The saying that there are no atheists in foxholes is more often true than not. Even if the belief is momentary and conditional.”

“So… you’re saying that this is my fault?”

“Not at all, Mr. Cyrus. I’m saying that this is evidence of the kind of inherent weakness that the Extinction Wave will wash away.”

Cyrus cinched the robe more tightly around his waist and walked to the window. The view was that of the production tanks and the white-suited technicians who milled around them.

“We should have tried harder to find the gene that controlled the conscience,” said Otto.

“What I don’t understand — and I should understand, Otto — is why and how this happens when we systematically and exhaustively treated every person on the science team to deactivate VMAT2.”

VMAT2—Vesicular Monoamine Transporter 2—was a membrane protein that transports monoamines like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine from cellular cytosol into synaptic vesicles. Geneticist Gene Hamer had pioneered the belief that the gene was more active in persons who held strong religious beliefs and less so in those who held little or no beliefs. Cyrus accepted this as likely and subscribed to several similar neurotheological views. He had spent years exploring the links between N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland and spiritual beliefs.

“None of the team should be capable of religious beliefs of any kind,” Cyrus said gruffly.

“We’ve had this discussion before, Mr. Cyrus. You told me that you did not totally accept the ‘God gene’ theory.”

“That’s not what I said, dammit,” Cyrus barked. He leaned close and shouted at Otto. “I said that I don’t believe it accounts for all faith. It doesn’t account for true faith. False faith may be controlled by genetics. Faith in ideals and deities that are clearly unrelated to the divine path of racial development. No one with a pure genetic line, no one who believes in the right and only way, requires a gene for faith. That’s a fundamental truth to faith itself. It’s the so-called mystery of faith that those Catholic swine have been beating themselves up over for two thousand years.”

Otto wiped Cyrus’s spittle from his shirtfront.

“As you say.”

Cyrus leaned back, his eyes still hot and his face flushed.

“The gene therapy must be flawed.”

“Of course, sir,” said Otto neutrally. “That must be it.”

“We’ll run the sequence again. We’ll do a new round of gene therapy.”

“Naturally.”

“I don’t want any more inconvenient attacks of conscience.”

“God forbid,” said Otto with a smile. He left before Cyrus began throwing things.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Top and Bunny met me as I got off the jet. They were dressed in black BDUs and wearing shoulder rigs but had no other obvious weapons. Neither of them looked very happy. There was a lot of that going around.

Hanler shook hands all around but stayed with his plane as we headed to a small hangar at the edge of the field. There was a Mister Softee truck parked inside; however, the man who leaned against the rear corner didn’t look like he sold ice-cream cones for a living. He looked like the actor Ving Rhames, except for the artificial leg and the shrapnel scars on his face.

“Cap’n,” said Top, “this is Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, head of field support for the Denver office.”

Brick fit his name and he had a handshake that could crush half-inch pipe.

“Good to meet you, Cap,” said Brick. “I’ve heard stories.”

“You look like you could tell a few stories of your own, Gunny,” I said. “How’d you slip the NSA?” I asked.

“They heard I was a cripple. Only sent two guys to pick me up.” He shrugged. “Didn’t go like they planned.”

Bunny murmured, “Not handicapped — handi-capable.”

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

Brick shrugged. “Big Man back home said to give you whatever on the ground support I can manage. Deep Iron’s a half hour from here. I pretended to be a potential customer and asked if I could come out sometime this week. Asked what their hours are. They’re open now. Head of sales is on the grounds. Name’s Daniel Sloane. Here’s his info.” Brick handed me a slip of paper with contact numbers. Then he handed me a slim file folder. “This is basic stuff I pulled off their Web site. Specs and such.”

“Good job.” I flipped open the folder, took a quick glance, and closed it. “I’ll read it on the way. How are we set for equipment? I have a handgun and two magazines. Can you load me up?”

The big man grinned as he led us to the back of the truck and opened the door. The whole thing was a rolling arsenal. I saw just about every kind of firearm known to modern combat, from five-shot wheelguns to RPGs.

“My-oh-my-oh-my,” Top said, breaking out into a big grin. “I’m so happy I could cry.”

“It’s like Christmas, isn’t it?” said Bunny.

A few minutes later we were cruising down an industrial side road that curved toward the snowcapped Rockies. Along the way we read and discussed the facility. Deep Iron was tucked away in the foothills of the Rockies southwest of Denver, built into a vast series of limestone caverns that honeycombed the region. Records were stored in various natural “floors” of the cavern system, and the highest security materials — meaning the stuff people were willing to pay the highest fees to squirrel away — were in the lowest levels, nearly a mile underground. I punched in the secure number for the DMS Warehouse back in Baltimore and asked to speak to the head of the computer division — Bug.

He was born as Jerome Taylor but he’d been a computer geek so long even his family called him Bug. His understanding of anything with circuits and microchips bordered on the empathic.

“Hey, Cap,” he said brightly, as if none of what was happening was any more real to him than the events in a video game. “What’s the haps?”

“Bug, listen — Top, Bunny, and I are in Denver at a place called Deep Iron and—”

“Oh, sure. Big storage facility. They filmed a couple of sci-fi movies there back in—”

“That’s great,” I said, cutting him off before he could tell me details of everything from the source material of the films down to the Best Boy’s shoe size. He really was a geek’s geek and could probably give Hu a run for his money. “See if you can hack their computer system.”

He snorted. “Don’t insult me.”

I laughed. “What I need are floor plans for the whole place. And I need an exact location for anything related to Haeckel. Dr. Hu has the basic info, but I want you to go deeper and download everything to my PDA.”

“How soon?”

“An hour ago.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

It took nine.

When he called back he said, “Okay, you have the floor plans and a searchable database of all clients. There’s only one Haeckel in their directory. First name Heinrich. It’s an oversized bin, thirty by forty feet, located on J-level.”

I pulled up the schematic on my PDA and cursed silently. J-level was all the way at the bottom, a mile straight down.

“What can you get me about what’s stored there?”

“Minute,” he said, and I could hear him tapping keys. “Okay, the main hard drive says ‘records,’ but there’s a separate database for inspections and that specifies the contents as file boxes times three hundred fifty-one. The bin has two doors — both locked by the estate attorneys. Contents are listed as mixed paper records. One box is listed as MF. My guess is that’s microfiche or microfilm.”

“Any idea what they’re records of?”

“Nope. It says the boxes were sealed by Haeckel prior to his death and there was a provision in his will that they not be opened except by a proven family member. No living family is listed, though. His estate provides for storage and oversight of the whole thing by a law firm. An inspection of the seals is required every year. Looks like it’s an attorney who checks the seals. Several attorneys over the years, all from the same firm. Birkhauser and Bernhardt of Denver. The seals are also witnessed by a representative of Deep Iron. Looks like it’s still there because they haven’t found an heir. I’ll hack the law firm and see if they have anything.”

I thanked him and brought Top and Bunny up to speed.

“No heir,” mused Top, “except for Gunnar Haeckel, who is apparently back from the dead and hunting unicorns in South America. Funny old world.”

Bunny grinned. “I wouldn’t give this job up for anything.”

“We’re here,” said Brick.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Hey, Jude,” said Tom Ito, “remember that virus you were asking about before? The one that was there and then up and vanished?”

“Sure, what about it?”

“It’s back. Log onto the e-mail screens.”

Judah swiveled in his chair and began hammering keys on his laptop. The set of screens used by the secretaries for handling e-mail, newsletters, and alerts popped us as cascading windows.

Ito leaned over his shoulder. “Look for auto-response e-mails. See, there’s eight of them. The virus is in there.”

Judah quarantined the e-mails and ran virus detection software. A pop-up screen flashed a warning. Judah loaded an isolation program and used it to open one of the infected e-mails. The software allowed them to view the content and its code with a heavy firewall to prevent data spillover into the main system.

The e-mail content said that the outgoing CDC Alert e-mail was undeliverable because the recipient e-mail box was full. That happened a lot. However, the software detected Trojan horse — a form of mal-ware that appeared to perform a desirable function in the target operating system but which actually served other agendas, ranging from collecting information such as credit card numbers and keystrokes to outright damage to the computer. A lot of “free” software and goodies on the Internet, including many screen savers, casino betting sites, porn, and offers for coupon printouts uploaded Trojan horses to users. On the business and government level they were common.

“Trojan?” asked Ito.

“Looks like. Can’t block the sender, though, because it’s really using replies to our own mailing list to send it.”

“Maybe someone hijacked some of our subscribers and is using their addresses.”

“Probably.” Judah frowned. “Okay, we’re going to have to identify the bounce-back e-mails and then block those subscribers. Send a message to everyone.”

Ito headed back to his cubicle to work on it while Judah uploaded info on the virus to US-CERT — the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of Homeland Security. The CDC was a government organization, and though this was very low-level stuff, it was technically a cyberattack. Someone over at CERT would take any warnings of a new virus and add it to the database. If a trend was found an alert would be sent, and very often CERT would provide updates to various operating systems that would protect against further incidents. It was routine and Judah had sent a hundred similar e-mails over the last few years.

That should have done it.

It didn’t.

There were no additional e-mail bounce-backs that day. None the next. Had Judah been able to match the current e-mail with the ones that had appeared — and then vanished — from the computers earlier he would have seen that the bounce-back e-mail addresses were not the same. Nor was the content, nor the Trojan horse. The senders of the e-mails were cautious.

When similar e-mail problems occurred at offices of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main office and many regional offices of the World Health Organization, the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response and a dozen other health crisis management organizations, there were no alarms rung. Each group received a completely different kind of e-mail from all the others. There was no actual damage done, and other than minor irritation there was no real reaction. Viruses and spam e-mails are too common.

The real threats had not yet been sent.

The Extinction Clock still had ninety-three hours and twenty-nine minutes to go.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Deep Iron looks like a water treatment plant. From outside the gate all we could see were a few medium-sized buildings and miles of electrified security fence. According to the info Bug had sent me, the surface buildings were mostly used for equipment storage and garages. The main building had a few offices, but mostly it’s a big box around a set of six industrial elevators, two of which were big enough to fit a dozen SUVs. The real Deep Iron is way underground. The upper tiers of storage start one hundred yards down and the rest are far below that.

Brick drove us to the front gate. There was no guard. We exchanged a look and Bunny opened the door and stepped out. He checked the guard shack and leaned close to the fence for a moment and then came back, a frown etched into his face.

“Guard shack is empty, no sign of struggle. The fences are electrified but the juice is off,” he said.

Top pointed to my PDA. “Stuff Bug sent says Deep Iron has its own power plant.”

I took out my cell and dialed the contact number for Daniel Sloane, the sales manager, but it rang through to voice mail. I called the main office number, same thing. “Okay, we’re playing this like we’re on enemy territory. Lock and load. Bunny, open the gate.”

Bunny pulled the gate open and then jumped onto the back step-bumper of the truck as we rolled into the compound. Brick did a fast circuit inside the fence. There were eleven cars parked in the employee lot. None of them was a DMS vehicle. We paused at the rear guard shack, but it was also empty. I told Brick to head to the main office and we parked outside, the vehicle angled to keep its reinforced corner toward the building’s windows. We were already kitted out with Kevlar and we used the truck’s steel door to shield us as we stuffed extra magazines into pockets and clipped night vision onto our steel pots. None of us said it aloud, but we were all thinking about Jigsaw Team. A dozen of them had come out here this morning, and now they were missing. Were they in hiding? Was there still that chance? Or were they truly MIA?

Now three of us were going down into an unfamiliar vast cavern system that may have swallowed all of Jigsaw. No backup except Brick, and he had one leg. We couldn’t even call the State Police or the National Guard.

I caught the looks Top and Bunny were shooting back and forth and made sure my own eyes were poker neutral as I began stuffing flash bangs into a bag.

I glanced at Brick. “Don’t take offense at this, Gunny, but are you able to provide cover fire if we need it?”

He grinned. “Don’t need two legs to pull a trigger, Captain. Little Softee here,” he patted the side of the truck, “has a few James Bond tricks built in to her.”

Brick clambered into the back of the truck, folded down a small seat by the wall closest to the building, and fiddled with some equipment on rails. There was a hydraulic hiss and a metal case on the floor opened to allow a six-barreled, air-cooled minigun to rise and lock into place. Brick reached across it and slid open a metal vent on the side of the truck, then turned back to us, beaming.

“The whole floor has rails on it so the gun can be maneuvered to either side and down to cover the rear. I have grenade launchers fore and aft, and the truck body is half-inch steel with a ceramic liner. I’ve got enough rounds to start a war, and probably enough to end it.”

“Fuck me,” said Top.

“Hey, boss,” said Bunny, “can we send him in and wait here?”

Brick chuckled. “Five years ago, kid, I’d have taken you up on that.”

“Outstanding,” I said. “Okay, Gunny, if the power’s off in there we may not be able to use landlines, and once we’re down deep we’ll lose cell and sat phone communication. I don’t even know how to estimate how much time this is going to take, but if Church can get the NSA to back off then I’d very much appreciate you calling in every U.S. agent with a gun and send them down after us.”

“You got a bad feeling about this, Captain?” he asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Shit… I’ve had an itch between my shoulder blades since I got up this morning.”

“Keep one eye on the sky, too,” said Top. “We didn’t see any vehicles that don’t belong here. These jokers may have come by chopper.”

“I got me some SAMs if I need ’em,” Brick said. I really wished he had two good legs.

I said, “If you send anyone down after us, give ’em today’s recognition code.”

The day code was “bluebird” for challenge and “canary” for response. Anyone in DMS tactical who logged in after 2:00 A.M. would know it. Anyone we met down there who didn’t know it was likely to have a worse day than we were having.

We synched our watches and checked our gear. I gave them the nod.

Even with all the unknown waiting for us, it felt good to stop running and start hunting.

Bunny took point and he ran low and fast from the corner of the truck to the corner of the building while we covered him. Except for the whisper of his gum-rubber soles on the asphalt of the parking lot there was no sound. There was no wind at all, and the sun was behind us. Bunny hit the wall and crouched to cover Top as he ran in, and they covered front and back as I joined them. We couldn’t see Brick, but knowing that the cold black eye of the minigun was following us was a great comfort. Brick had the look of the kind of soldier who generally hit what he aimed at, and I doubt anyone ever caught him napping.

The door to the office stood ajar and we crouched down on either side and fed a fiber-optic camera in for a snoop. Nothing. Bunny checked for trip wires and booby traps and found nothing. We moved inside.

According to the intel Bug had provided there were four guards on each shift, two two-man teams made up of ex-military or ex-police. We found them right away, and right away we knew we’d just stepped into something bizarre and unbearably ugly.

The four guards had been killed, and there was a fifth man in a business suit. Sloane, the sales manager. Each had been shot repeatedly, but their bodies were in an indescribable condition. Legs and arms were broken and jerked out of their sockets, the victims’ heads were smashed, their faces brutally disfigured.

I couldn’t stop and stare; there was too much to do. We rushed deeper into the building and worked as a three-man team to clear each room, taking it in turns to be the one to open a door and step inside while the others provided high and low cross-fire cover. There were six rooms in the building. Mostly offices and a bathroom. Nothing else, and no one else.

We returned to the guardroom.

“Holy mother of God,” whispered Bunny.

Top and I moved into the room and checked the bodies. “Multiple gunshots, Cap’n,” he said. “Heavy-caliber hits.”

“How long?”

“These guys aren’t even cold. Maybe two hours, not more.”

I tapped his arm and pointed to the blood spatter on the floor and walls. There are three major categories for blood spatter: passive, projected, and transfer. In the first case the bloodstains are caused by gravity with blood dripping from wounds. Projected stains come from blood under pressure — say from a torn artery — or rapid movement, as with someone shaking blood off their fingers. Then there are transfer spatters where something covered in blood comes into contact with a surface. Footprints, fingerprints, that sort of thing.

We were seeing a little of everything, but it didn’t look right. There were spatter marks on the walls, but they didn’t have the tight grouping you see with arterial sprays. These were random, erratic.

Top watched me and then went through the process himself, calculating the amount and distribution of blood. Then he looked down at the broken bodies.

“This is some voodoo shit right here.”

“Talk to me.”

He kept his voice low. “Those patterns only make sense if someone shook blood off these boys. Like whipping water off a towel. Or threw these boys around. But… that’s wrong, ain’t it?”

I didn’t want to answer. “Top… look at the pools of blood under the bodies. Corpses don’t bleed unless there’s a wound under the body, in which case gravity will pull the blood down to the lowest point and then out through a wound. Not all of the blood, just whatever’s in that part of the body. You with me?”

He was right with me. “I think someone messed with these boys after they were dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tore ’em up, threw ’em around.”

“Wait — what are you saying?” asked Bunny, who had come up behind us.

Top shook his head. “I don’t know… this looks like rage. Someone went apeshit here. Whoever did it was a strong motherfucker. I couldn’t do it. I doubt Farmboy here could.”

Bunny squatted down and picked up several shell casings. “Well, well, well… check this out.”

He showed us a steel-cased 7.62 × 39mm FMJ shell casing.

Top looked at it and then at me. “That’s a Russian short, Cap’n. Same thing we saw in Wilmington.”

Bunny turned to look at the bodies and then back to the casing. “Now, how the hell’s this stuff connected to Wilmington? And how the hell are the Russians involved?”

I was just reaching for my commlink when a bing-bing in my ear signaled a call from DMS command. It was Grace.

“This is a secure line, Joe. I have a situational update.”

“So do I, but let’s make it fast. We’re in the woods with the bears.”

“We’ve ID’d two of the four Russians who ambushed Echo Team in Wilmington. They’re ex-Spetsnaz.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see your dead Spetsnaz and raise you a full hit team.” I told her about the shell casing and the dead guards. I described the blood spatter and the postmortem mutilations.

“Bloody hell.”

“What the hell are we into here, Grace?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Is there any whiff of official Russian involvement? Could this be something political?” Spetsnaz was a catchall label for Russian Special Forces and included operatives of the Federal Security Service, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and units controlled by the GRU — their military intelligence service. After the USSR crumbled and the Russian economy collapsed, a lot of these soldiers were either discharged or they went AWOL. The Russia Mafia employed a lot of them worldwide, but they’ve also been recruited by private security companies for dirty work everywhere mercs were useful. Which is a lot of places in these times.

“I don’t think so, and in our current position we can’t call the State Department and ask. Mr. Church thinks the team in Wilmington were mercenaries. These may be part of one large team… but we have no idea who they’d be working for,” she said. “Any sign of Hack or Jigsaw?”

“No, but we’re still topside. We’re heading down now. We could use some backup.”

“I’ve none to give. We’re locked up tighter than a nun’s chastity.” She paused, then said, “Joe, if you wanted to abort the mission I’d back you.”

I did, but I wasn’t going to. She probably knew that.

“Jigsaw,” was all I had to say.

“Look, Joe… at the moment I care bugger all about protocol. If you run into anyone down there who isn’t DMS…” She let the rest hang.

“Roger that, Major.” I almost called her “Major Babe” but luckily my presence of mind hadn’t totally fled.

I clicked off and told the others about the Spetsnaz connection. I saw the information register, but it didn’t take the heart out of either of them. Even so, Bunny looked rattled by the condition of the corpses. His eyes kept straying to them and then darting away, then straying back. I knew what was going through his head. He understood killing, but the rest… that wasn’t soldiering. It had a primitive viciousness about it that was inhuman.

“Cap’n,” said Top from across the room. “Looks like the power’s still on in here. The elevator lights are green.”

“Phones?”

He pulled one off the wall, shook his head.

“We’re going to be out of communication real fast,” said Bunny. “Without a hard line we’d be better off shouting.”

I tapped my commlink for a patch to Brick, filled him in, and told him to establish a command link with Major Courtland.

“If the elevator’s working I can come in—,” he started to say, but I cut him off.

“Truly appreciated, Gunny, but we need to move fast. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“And make sure no one else comes in here who doesn’t belong to the club.”

“I guarantee it.”

We took one elevator, but we sent all six of them down at the same time. We stopped two of them — ours and one other — at the next to last level, and as soon as the doors opened and we cleared the area around us we bent low and listened to the sounds coming up from the elevator shafts. We heard the other cars stop, heard the doors open.

The limestone caverns were huge and dark and smelled of mold and bad dreams. There were long rows of fluorescent fixtures overhead, but the power to the lights was off. The elevators must have been on a different circuit or had their own power supply. It made sense that the intruders would leave the elevators on — it was a mile-long climb back into the sunlight if they had to take the stairs.

We crouched and waited, using night vision to look for movement, but there was nothing. No ambush gunfire. No explosives.

It didn’t mean that there weren’t Russian shooters lying in wait — it just meant that they weren’t shooting randomly at anything that moved. That could be good or bad. I pointed to the stairwell door, and after checking it for trip wires we entered the stairwell and looked down.

All of the battery-operated emergency lights had been smashed, and the stairwell was a bottomless black hole.

The night-vision devices used by the DMS are about six cuts above anything on the commerical market and a generation newer than most special ops teams had. A lot of the standard NVDs used passive systems that amplified existing environmental ambient lighting; ours had an option for an active system that emmitted an infrared light source to provide sufficient illumination in situations of zero ambient light. The downside was that the infrared from an active system could be spotted by someone else wearing night vision. It’s a risk that also had rewards if the other guys weren’t using something as sophisticated, and that wasn’t likely. The only other option was flashlights, and that screwed with your natural night vision and was a sniper’s paradise. The other useful feature of our NVDs was the new panoramic lens that gave us a ninety-five-degree field of clear vision and a thermal-imaging component. If there was something alive down here, we’d see it in total darkness and we’d see it better than a hunting owl. With night vision everything is a ghostly green, but we were all comfortable with it and we all automatically made the mental shifts necessary to function with top-level efficiency.

Even so, when I looked down the stairwell all I saw were flights of stairs at right angles that descended beyond the effective range of the NVP optics.

We went down slow and careful, expecting traps.

We found the first trip wire thirty-seven steps down. In my goggles it was a slender spider’s web of glowing green. Whoever placed it was smart, setting it close into the back of the riser so that it wouldn’t trigger as someone stepped down on the ball of his foot but would catch the fall or rise of the heel. Smart.

I showed it to Bunny, who nodded his appreciation, but Top shook his head dismissively. He was more seasoned than Bunny. The trap was smart, but it was too soon to be smart. The best way would have been to rig an obvious trip wire and then the more subtle one. Set and then exploit the expectations of the person you’re trying to trap.

We moved forward slowly and found one more trip wire. Same as before. Like the first, it was attached to a Claymore and set back near the riser. Bunny disabled them both. If backup came, we’d like them to arrive in one piece.

A few times we encountered something smeared on the banister, but with the night vision it looked like oil. It smelled of copper, though. Blood.

“Maybe a guard clipped one of those Russian boys,” Top suggested in a whisper, but I didn’t think so. The smears were on the outside of the railings that surrounded a central drop all the way to the floor. You might get smears like that if something was thrown down the shaft and hit rails on the way down.

At the bottom of the stairwell we solved that mystery. A man in unmarked black BDUs lay twisted into a rag-doll heap at the bottom of the stairwell. It was clear he had been thrown over the rails and had struck several times on the way down to the concrete floor. His body was torn to pieces. I looked up through the vacant hole around which the stairwell curled for over a mile. It was a long, long fall. I wondered if the man had been alive during any of that horrible plummet.

Top knelt by the man. He checked first for booby traps, and when he found none he went through the man’s pockets. No ID, no personal effects. All he had on him were gun belts and equipment bags. Some hand grenades and lots of spare magazines. The ammunition was 7.62x39mm FMJ. Russian.

Top weighed a magazine thoughtfully in one hand and looked up at me. “Jigsaw?” he suggested.

“I don’t know,” I said, but in truth I didn’t like the feel of this.

Bunny was by the door to J-level, checking it for traps. “We’re clear here,” he reported.

I pulled up the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it. Right outside the stairwell door was a wide corridor with elevators on one side and the first of the storage units on the other. The schematic couldn’t show us anything more than a blueprint, so we had no way of knowing what kind of actual cover might be out there.

“Scope,” I said, and Bunny fished a fiber-optic scope from his pack and fed it under the door. The scope fed images to a palm-sized screen that folded down from his chest pack. He had it set for night vision, but that couldn’t show thermals. Bunny turned the scope in all directions. We saw a row of electric golf carts and stacks of file cartons. Thousands of them standing in rows that trailed off far beyond the visible range of the optics. Nothing moved.

Using hand signals, I indicated that we would open the door and give cross-fire cover as we exited. I’d use the shelter of the stairwell landing to provide cover while they ran out and went left and right. They nodded and Bunny stuffed the scope back into his pack. I finger counted down to zero, and then we went through into the cavern.

Gunfire shattered the silence around us and suddenly we were in one hell-storm of an ambush.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“How is the President?” asked Mr. Church.

“Unhappy, unwell, and unwilling to deal with this crap,” barked Linden Brierly.

“Tell him that he has my sympathies, but I need to speak with him.”

“I can probably set up a call later this—”

“Linden… I need to speak with him now.”

Silence washed like a cold tide back and forth between their phones.

“You’re killing me, Church,” said Brierly. “The doctors here already want me lynched, and if I ask the First Lady to let him take a call she will have my nuts for lunch.”

“Tell her that this concerns Joe Ledger,” said Church.

Brierly was quiet. Two months ago Joe Ledger and Echo Team had saved the First Lady and half of Congress from terrorists who wanted to release a deadly plague. The First Lady had seen Ledger in action, had seen his heroism and his absolute viciousness. It had changed her as a person, and Brierly had not yet put his finger on whether that change was good or bad. He’d been part of that fight, and it had been a step up for him.

But this was asking a lot.

“I’ll see what she says,” Brierly warned, “but don’t expect much.”

Mr. Church sat in his office and waited. He did nothing else. He didn’t even eat a cookie, though he eyed the plate of vanilla wafers with interest. The wall clock ticked and the boats in the harbor sloshed noisily through the choppy water.

“Mr. Church?” The First Lady’s voice was soft, but it was like silk wrapped around a knife blade.

“Good afternoon—”

“Is Joe Ledger in trouble?”

Right to the point. Church admired that. “Yes, ma’am.” In a few short sentences he explained what was going on. He even told her about Joe’s mission to Deep Iron. Church was a good judge of character who was seldom let down by his expectations.

The First Lady said, “And you want my husband, who has just come out of surgery, to not only take back the reins of office but take on the stress of a major political upheaval in his own administration?”

“Yes,” said Church. She would have fried him for an attempt to sugarcoat things.

“Will this help Joe?”

“Because of the NSA, Joe has had to go into an exceedingly dangerous situation without proper backup and no hope at all of rescue if things go wrong. That should never have happened.”

“Can you tell me what this mission is about? Not the incidentals but the big picture?”

“I could,” he said, “but you’re not cleared for it.”

“Mr. Church,” she said quietly, “I’m speaking to you on a secure line and I will have the final say as to whether my husband takes back his office. Not the Vice President, not the doctors here at Walter Reed, not the AG or the Speaker of the House. Believe me when I tell you that you need to convince me of the importance of this or this conversation is going to end right here and now.”

“You do that well,” he said.

“What?”

“Play the big cards.”

“My God… is that a compliment from Mr. Church?”

“It is. Call it respect from one pro to another.”

“So you’ll tell me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I’d damn well better.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled, and laid down a stream of fire with my M4. Top dropped low and dove behind a parked golf cart, rolled, and came up into a shooter’s crouch. Bunny made a dive for cover behind a stack of boxes, but I saw his body pitch and twist in midair as he was hit by at least one round. He dropped out of sight.

I saw muzzle flashes from four points. A pair of shooters hidden behind the towers of boxes and two more on opposite sides of the row of golf carts. The stairwell was wider than the door, so I had a narrow concrete wall to stand behind, but every time I tried to lean out and fire, bullets slammed into the wall inches from my head. If it hadn’t been for the night-vision goggles the flying stone splinters would have blinded me and torn half my face off.

“Eyes!” Top yelled as he hurled a flash bang like a breaking ball. I closed my eyes and heard the dry bang! Then I dropped to one knee, leaned out, and looked for a target. I saw a dark figure staggering away from the point of explosion, and I gave him two three-round bursts. He spun away from me, hit a wall, and collapsed backward. To my left I saw Top edging along a wall of boxes toward the shooter on my far left. I laid down some cover fire and ducked back as the shooter returned fire, but then Top wheeled around the edge and put two in the guy’s throat.

I was running before the man had even dropped and I went fast and bent over along the row of carts knowing that the shooter on my right would be aiming in the direction of Top’s muzzle flashes. Suddenly there was movement in front of me and in a microsecond I realized that the shooter was running down the row of carts in my direction, but he had his head craned sideways as he tried to get an angle on Top.

The shooter never saw it coming. I closed to zero distance and put my barrel under his chin and blew his helmet off his head.

The last Russian must have seen me, because he opened up right away and I had to dive into a belly slide as bullets tore chunks out of the concrete floor behind me.

There was movement to my right and I saw Bunny, alive and crouched low, crabbing sideways toward me. When he caught my eye he pointed to a spot where a wall of stacked boxes stood between him and the remaining shooter. I nodded and he moved forward. The gunman kept me pinned down, but the carts were good cover. I had no idea where Top was, but I guessed he was closing on the shooter’s position from the far side.

When Bunny was in position I tapped the commlink and whispered, “Top, we got a runner on third. Wait for the pitch.”

There were two short bursts of static in my earbud as Top broke squelch twice for affirmative.

I said, “Throw him out at the plate. Let’s hear some chatter from the dugout.”

Top and I opened up and the cavern echoed with thunder as Bunny spun around the wall and ran across five yards of open space to come up at the shooter from behind. When he was ten feet out he put two bursts into the man, and the impact slammed him into the wall. He slid down onto his knees like a supplicant and then fell backward in a limp sprawl.

“Clear!” he yelled.

“Clear!” echoed Top.

“Hold there!” I yelled.

I didn’t trust the situation and I hugged the shadows as I skirted the open spaces to close on Bunny’s position. Top was there a step behind me and we secured the spot. Top took up a shooting position behind a short stack of boxes.

“You hit?” I asked Bunny. He grinned and folded back a torn flap of his camo shirt to show a long furrow that had been plowed along the side of his armor vest.

“Hooray for glancing blows,” he said.

“Hooah,” I agreed.

I bent and examined the dead man. No ID, no nothing, but his face was almost classical Slavic and weapons and gear were Russian. Same with the other three.

“When I woke up this morning,” Top said, “I didn’t expect to be at war with Mother Russia.”

“If the opportunity presents itself,” I said, “give me someone with a pulse so I can ask some questions.”

They nodded.

Before us was a sea of boxes. File boxes and crates of every description, stacked in neat rows that trailed away into the distance. Hundreds of thousands of boxes, millions of tons of paper records. There were hundreds of chambers in the natural limestone caverns, and thousands of rooms and vaults. Miles of cement walkways. I accessed the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it and made some decisions.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “We don’t know how many more of them there are, but we know these guys are smart and they’ve had time to get creative. We go slow and we look for booby traps. No assumptions, no undue risks.”

“Hooah,” they responded.

We moved out, making no sound at all as we moved through an eternity of darkness. We found a few traps — mostly shape charges and rigged grenades — but they were crudely set. The way soldiers will do when they don’t have time to do it right. We disabled each trap and kept moving, the three of us spread out in case we missed one.

Then we almost walked into a cross fire they’d set up in a big vault stacked to the rafters with file boxes from Denver law firms. But Top stopped us before we stepped in it.

“What?” I whispered to him. “You see something?”

“No, Cap’n,” he murmured, “but if I was going to rig a shooting gallery it would be in there. How ’bout we get bright and noisy, see if we can flush some rabbits from the tall grass.”

I nodded and we tossed in a pair of our flash bangs. As soon as the starburst brightness faded, we rushed the room. There was a sniper on top of a stack of crates, but even as we rushed in he was rolling off onto the floor, hands clamped to his ears. He fell twenty feet and landed badly.

Top got to him first, kicked the rifle out of his hands, and was bending to restrain him when he slowed and gave it up. When I reached him I could see why. The sniper had landed headfirst, taking the full impact on the side of the head. His neck must have snapped like a twig.

“Balls,” I said.

We kept going. We could only move forward at a snail’s pace. We’d found a few more traps, but we were trail-wise now, inside their heads, and we spotted the next few before anyone else got hurt. We were one mile down and going deeper, creeping along miles of slanting corridors, breathing air that had never felt sunshine or smelled rain. This would be a dreary place to die, and I had a flicker of superstitious dread about my ghost getting lost down here in the endless dark.

There were phones mounted on walls, but the cords were cut and the boxes smashed. We moved on, passing through rooms where law firms kept records of cases from thirty years ago, where film studios kept tens of thousands of reels of film and people kept furs and art and who knows what else. We passed through rooms crowded with classic cars and fifty of those terra-cotta soldiers they’d dug up in China.

We found two more security guards and half a dozen record clerks. All tied, all executed. Thirteen innocent people murdered… for what?

“God damn,” swore Top, “I really want to catch up to these sons of bitches.”

“What the hell are they looking for?” asked Bunny. “They’re taking an incredible risk, and they’re taking a lot of frigging time. They have to know they’re not getting out of here.”

I said nothing.

“So, this is… what?” Bunny continued. “A suicide mission to get old records? In what world does that make sense?”

“Maybe they expected to get in and out faster than they did,” Top suggested. “Maybe they lost their window.”

“Must be something pretty damned important down here,” Bunny said, “for them to still be at it knowing that we’re on their ass.”

“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Top said. “They might have twenty guys down here, in which case they can make a pretty good run at getting past us. They might also be waiting on backup. There were no vehicles outside, so if they plan to get out they must have a ride coming. Could be extra guns in that.”

It was a sobering thought, and none of us were getting cocky just because we’d managed to fight past their first couple of traps.

We pushed on. I used the schematic to plan our route, and that took us through a series of smaller chambers with more modern equipment that looked like it was part of the facility’s records management system.

“Clear!” called Top Sims as he and Bunny checked the room ahead of us.

“Two minutes’ rest,” I said. I tapped the PDA. “We’re half a klick from the target.” The tiny display screen showed a zigzag trail leading to the Haeckel bin. It crooked through twenty-three turns and a dozen doorways. It was an ambusher’s wet dream.

Top asked, “We getting anything from Brick?”

I shook my head. “We got about a billion tons of rock and steel between us and a signal.”

We moved out once more, and now we were down to it. Nerves were on hair triggers, and if my virgin aunt had stepped out from behind those crates with a puppy in one hand and a baby in the other my guys would have capped her.

Those Spetsnaz nimrods had fired first, no questions asked. It seemed only right to extend the same courtesy, but the Russians had no new surprises for us. We did find one spot where there were expended shell casings — all Russian — and a lot of blood but no bodies. No drag marks, either, so the wounded must have walked out or been carried.

I used the interteam communication channel on my commlink to try to raise someone on Jigsaw. Got nothing but white noise. I took another look at the PDA. “Two lefts and then fifty feet straight in,” I murmured.

At the first left we paused while Top quick-looked around the corner. He had started to say, “Clear,” when the whole world exploded in a firestorm of automatic gunfire.

“Down!” I yelled, and everyone got low and went wide, gun barrels swinging around to find targets, but there were no muzzle flashes. The rock walls amped up the sound of the chattering guns, but we hadn’t stepped into anything. At least not at the moment.

“It’s not in the next room, Cap’n. This is from around the second corner,” Top said as he slithered like a snake back from his observation post and wriggled behind a stack of wooden crates.

“Hey… Jigsaw’s come to the party!” Bunny yelled; then he frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “No… no, wait, all I hear are AKs.”

Top nodded, crouched down next to me. “Farmboy’s right. That’s a one-sided gunfight.”

“Unless,” Bunny began, and then bit down on what he was going to say.

So I said it.

“Unless it’s an execution.”

Jigsaw. Christ, don’t let it be so.

“Saddle up!” I bellowed, but as we clustered by the door to make our run something changed. The gunfire had been hot and heavy for nearly half a minute, with dips in the din as magazines fired dry and were replaced, but during one freak gap in the noise just as I was reaching for the doorknob there was a new sound.

It was a roar.

Nothing else describes it. The sound was deep and rough and charged with incredible power. It slammed into the walls and bounced through the shadows and came howling through the crack in the door.

It sounded like an animal. A really big and really pissed-off animal.

“What the hell was that?” Top yelled.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” said Bunny.

“I do,” I said, and opened the door.

The hallway was empty and I could hear another roar and more shouts coming from down the hall. I crept along, keeping close to the wall and low, barrel ready to pop a cap in anyone who stepped out of the next chamber. I knew Top and Bunny were behind me, but they moved as silently as I did.

We stopped outside of Haeckel’s bin. The metal door was still closed, but there were dozens of jagged bullet holes in it, all of them chest high.

Top leaned his head toward me. “We going in, Cap’n?”

Just then the gunfire started up again. We dropped down and got wide. None of the rounds had penetrated the block-stone walls of the bin.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and waited for a lull.

“Jigsaw!” I yelled as loud as I could.

The gunfire flattened out for a moment and then there was a second roar. Not a response to my call. Not a human voice. Definitely an animal of great size and immense power.

“JIGSAW!” I yelled again. “ECHO! ECHO! ECHO!”

Then a man’s voice cried out in response. It said, “Help!”

But he said it in Russian. Pomogite!

Not Jigsaw.

I yelled back using Hack Peterson’s combat code name: “Big Dog! Big Dog… this is Cowboy!”

The voice cried out, “Nyet! Nyet! Bozhe moi!”

No! No! Oh, my God!

Then, “Perekroi dveri!”

Block the doors!

There was another roar, this one slightly different in pitch, not as deep but just as feral, and a new flurry of gunfire.

Top looked at me for orders. I leaned close to the bullet-pocked door and tried it in Russian. I called for Hack. I called a general question asking what was going on.

No one answered my question. There were more roars, more gunshots, more men yelling in hysterical Russian. “On moyrtv!”

He’s dead! I heard that twice. And then a single voice crying, “Othodi!”

Fall back! Over and over again.

“Are we joining this party?” Top asked, but I shook my head.

The flurry of gunfire thinned.

“Fewer guns in play,” Bunny observed. “Still no return fire that I can make out unless everyone’s using AKs.”

The last gun cleared its mag and then we heard something that froze the hearts in our chests. Another throat-ripping scream tore through the darkness, but this one was definitely a human voice: high and filled with pain and choked with a dreadful wetness. It rose to a piercing shriek and then suddenly cut off, leaving behind a terminal silence.

Then nothing.

I pushed the door open and crept out, low to the cold concrete floor, my .45 pointed at the bend in the hall, finger ready to slip inside the trigger guard. A moment later there was another scream, but this wasn’t the cry of a man in pain — no, this was an ear-rending howl of bloody animal triumph. Even after the thunder of gunfire it was impossibly loud; the echo of it slammed off the walls and assaulted our ears like fists.

The silence that followed was harsh and filled with dreadful promise. We stared at the bend in the corridor, and then one by one my team looked to me for direction.

“We’re going in,” I said. “I’m on point. I want two rounds in anything that isn’t DMS.”

“Hooah,” they whispered.

I reached for the door handle and gave it a quick turn. There was no gunfire. I took my last flash bang and lobbed it inside. We covered our ears for the big bang, but a split second later we were going through that door in a fast line, ready to finish this fight.

We stopped in our tracks.

What I saw hit me like a punch to the brain, but I had enough presence of mind to keep my mouth shut and my weapon ready. Behind me I heard a small gasp escape Bunny’s throat. Top came up behind us. Everyone stopped and we all stood there staring at the Spetsnaz team.

“Mother of God,” Top whispered.

The room wasn’t big. Maybe forty by fifty, stacked to the ceiling with file boxes. A few of the old punch-card computers draped in plastic sheeting stood against one wall. There was a desk, a chair, and a sorting table. The floor was littered with hundreds of shell casings. Smoke hung like green ghosts in the air, and on the floor, strewn around like refuse, were the Russians.

All of them, the entire Spetsnaz hit team. Eight of them.

Dead.

And not just dead… they’d been torn to pieces. Their guns still smoked; hands were still curled around the stocks, fingers hooked through trigger guards. Arms and legs and heads were scattered like islands in a sea of blood.

Bunny moved up beside me. “God… what the hell happened here?”

I sensed more than saw the stack of boxes to my left begin to shift and then I was moving, shoving Bunny and Top backward as a ton of boxed paper canted over and fell. Bunny tried to pivot and run, but the bloody shell casings rolled under his feet and he went into a wet slide. His flailing left hand clubbed Top right across the face.

A second stack of boxes began to fall and I leaped aside, swinging my gun around to aim at the shadows behind them, ready to kill.

“Cap’n!” I heard Top yell. “On your—”

But that was all I heard as something came out of the shadows behind the stack to my right and slammed into me. The blow was so fast and so shockingly hard that for a moment I had the unreal thought that I’d been hit by a car. I could feel my body leave the ground as I hurtled ten feet through the air and slammed into another stack of file boxes. I tucked my chin into my shoulder to buffer the impact, but I struck so hard that the whole tower of boxes canted and fell, knocking me to the floor and then slamming into the adjoining tower. Suddenly the whole room seemed to be collapsing around me as columns of dusty boxes toppled. I heard a barrage of shots, but there was no coordinated counterattack as everyone scrambled to avoid being crushed by the tons of paper.

There was a sound — a roar like a bull gorilla — and I turned to try to see what the hell was in the room with us, but I was half-buried beneath hundreds of pounds of paper, my night-vision goggles knocked askew so that one eye saw green and the other saw blackness. I had the vague sense of something moving toward me very fast and I tried to bring up my pistol, but it was slapped out of my hand so hard and fast that I thought my wrist was broken. I never saw the hand that disarmed me.

I saw the guy — he was a brute with a barrel chest and huge shoulders. I caught a glimpse of a black metal helmet and fatigues, and then he came at me, head down like a boxer, and fired off a punch that was a green blur. I got just enough of my shoulder up to protect my head, but his massive fist crunched into my helmet and tore it off my head. I heard the straps pop. My vision went from green to black as I lost the night vision, but there was light from some other source — one of the Russians’ flashlights on the floor. Bad light, but enough to allow me to fight.

I dropped and rolled sideways and came up into a crouch with my Rapid Release folding knife. I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, not like the Russians, and unless this guy was very damn good I was going to take him with me. The blade snapped open as the big son of a bitch closed in. He was wearing night black BDUs and a balaclava that hid his face. All I could see were his eyes, which were small and sunk into gristly pits, and his wide slash of a mouth. His lips curled back from jagged yellow teeth and he opened his mouth to bellow at me as he lunged forward.

A thousand bits of information flashed through my head in the second before we collided. He was bigger and stronger than me. And unless he was a silverback gorilla he was wearing thick layers of body armor. Something that could stop armor-piercing rounds. There’s a lot of experimental stuff out there, and some if it even diffuses the foot-pounds of bullet impact. He had a handgun strapped to his hip; I had a knife in my hands. There were yells and gunfire all around me.

The bruiser made a grab for me, and he was fast. Really damn fast.

I’m faster.

I twisted to one side and his fingernails raked across my chest armor. I didn’t try to grapple. I’m good at it, but I’m not stupid. And though I know a knife can often cut through Kevlar, I wasn’t in the mood to find out whether the stuff he wore could turn a blade.

So as I twisted I rammed the blade into his mouth.

I drove my fist almost all the way into his maw, the blade ripping deep into the soft muscle of his tongue and soft palate until it struck bone. I twisted my wrist and tore the blade free, and that tore a scream of white-hot agony from him that was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard from a human mouth. It was like the animal roar we’d heard earlier, but now it was filled with searing pain. His body began thrashing wildly, all control lost. His huge fists swung out in all directions. I evaded the first but caught the second on my shoulder and suddenly I was flying into another stack of boxes.

I crumpled to the floor, and before I could scramble out of the way a full stack of boxes crashed down on me.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Twins walked arm in arm toward their plane. It was an old affectation — a European habit they’d picked up that also allowed them enough physical closeness to have a confidential conversation.

“Slow down,” Hecate said, tugging gently on her brother’s arm. “He’s watching. Probably Otto, too.”

“They’re always watching,” murmured Paris. “God! I can’t wait to get out of this place. He gives me the creeps.”

“Who? Dad or Otto?”

“Either,” Paris muttered. “Both. A couple of pit vipers, the two of them.”

“Mm. Useful pit vipers,” she said, and tapped her purse, in which she carried several CD-ROMs of data Cyrus had downloaded for them. Material that would either solve the rage problems with the Berserkers or at very least dial it down.

They reached the jet. Two of their own guards flanked the stairs and straightened as the Jakobys drew close.

“Anything to report, Marcus?” Hecate asked quietly.

“Nothing much, ma’am. The jet’s been refueled and no one has been aboard.”

Paris snorted. “Did anyone try?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marcus. “Mr. Otto asked to go aboard to leave you both some flowers. I told him that we were under orders to allow no visitors.”

“The flowers?”

“He took them with him.”

Paris shot Hecate a knowing look. “Probably a tracking device hidden in the bouquet.”

Marcus said, “I can promise you, ma’am, that no one and nothing got aboard this plane.”

“Good job, Marcus,” Paris said.

Hecate cast a quick, doubtful look at the plane; then she turned and ran lightly up the stairs. Paris threw a wicked glance back at the Deck and hoped his father or Otto was watching. He mouthed the words: Kiss my ass. Smiling, he climbed aboard.

A few minutes later the jet was rolling fast down the runway.

Otto Wirths stood looking out of the observation window in the Deck’s communications center. Now that the Twins had left, the techs had pushed buttons that sent a big wall sliding backward in sections to reveal the other two-thirds of the room, in which there were many more workstations for communication and scanning. The deck panels slid away to reveal the glass floor below which the computer cold room and the virus production tanks hummed with terrible potential. As he had told Mr. Cyrus, the Twins saw only what he wanted them to see.

“They’re airborne, sir,” said a tech at a nearby console.

Otto looked down at the screen. “Wait until they’re at twenty thousand feet,” he said softly. “And then turn on the jellyfish sensors.”

“Yes, sir.”

When the Twins’ jet had been refueled the fuel had included dozens of tiny sensors no bigger than a drop of water. They floated in the gasoline and transmitted a signal via several wiry tendrils. The sensors used collaborative nannite technology — singly their signal strength was faint, but a dozen of them could broadcast a strong, clear signal for miles.

“What’s the status on the pursuit craft?”

“Birds one, two, and four are at thirty-five thousand feet. Bird three is coasting along the deck at one thousand feet. All remote stations are on alert and the infiltration teams are on deck. Everything’s ready to go, sir.”

Otto smiled.

“Good,” he said as he watched the blip on the radar climb into the sky and begin a slow turn toward the southeast.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Dr. Hans Koertig banged through the swinging doors of the field surgical suite, tore off his mask and gloves, and threw them into the trash. For two minutes he stood in the center of the scrub room, his eyes bright with fury, his fists balled into knots. He didn’t turn or look when the doors opened and Frieda Jaeger came in and quietly began stripping off her stained scrubs.

“I’m sorry, Hans,” she said softly, but he said nothing. Cartilage bunched at the corners of his jaws. “You did your best, but these things happen—”

Her words died on her tongue as he suddenly wheeled on her. “Did my best? Is that what you think, Frieda? That I did my best?”

He took a step toward her and she backed up.

“What I did in there was superb work. Superb.” Spit flew from his mouth as he shouted. “I’ve done reconstructive surgeries on two hundred noma patients in the four years I’ve been in Nigeria. Two hundred. I have never once—not once—lost a patient on the table.” He pointed at the doors. “That boy in there is the sixth child to die under my knife in eight days. Don’t you dare tell me that these things happen!”

“Perhaps you’re just overworked—” But as soon as she said it Frieda Jaeger knew that it was the wrong thing to say. Koertig’s eyes blazed with dangerous fury and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her, but instead he wrenched himself away, stalked to the sink, and began scrubbing his hands as if he wanted to wash the reality of it from his skin.

“I don’t lose patients, Frieda,” he said over his shoulder. “You can call me an arrogant ass, but the facts are the facts. I don’t lose patients. Not here, not in Kenya, not back home in Munich. God damn I don’t lose patients. Not children with noma. This isn’t the nineteen fifties, for Christ’s sake. This isn’t an aid station treating gangrene with a first-aid kit and a prayer. This is an AWD-Foundation surgical unit. No one on the continent has a better record than us for saving children.”

“I know, Hans,” she said weakly, “but the children are dying. It’s not just you. We’ve lost thirty in six weeks.”

Koertig wheeled on her. He looked stricken. “Thirty? What are you saying?”

Noma was a terrible disease, a severe form of infectious gangrene of the mouth or cheek that affected malnourished children throughout Africa, parts of Asia, and sections of Central America. Nearly all of the patients were between two and six years old and the disease literally ate away at the flesh of their cheeks and mouths, leaving them horribly disfigured and vulnerable to secondary infections. Since the mid-nineties the AWD-Stiftung Kinderhilfe, Dutch Noma Foundation, and Facing Africa has sent medical teams to Nigeria and other afflicted places. The teams, like this one in Sokoto, had done miraculous work in combating the disease and improving living conditions for the people. Plastic surgeons from Interplast had volunteered to do hundreds of reconstructive surgeries for children so they could return to normal lives. So they could live.

The disease was no longer universally fatal unless left untreated… but treatments existed, preventive medicines were being distributed, and food supplies were coming in from humanitarian organizations around the world.

And now this. Children dying from a disease that should no longer be able to kill them.

“How are so many dying?” he demanded.

“We… don’t know.”

“Have you done tests, for God’s sake?”

“We have. It’s noma… but the disease has become more aggressive.”

“Are you talking mutation?”

She shook her head, then nodded. “I’m not sure what to call it.”

Frieda Jaeger was a pediatric nurse in her fourth month in Nigeria. She was clearly out of her depth.

“Who is handling the tests?” snapped Koertig.

She gave him the name of the lab. The doctor finished scrubbing and then hurried out to make some calls. Noma was an old disease. It was vicious but stable, predictable.

Terror gripped his heart as he ran to his trailer and the satellite phone he used for emergencies.

God help these children if it had mutated.

God help the children everywhere.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I kicked my way out from under the boxes and rolled over into a crouch, pulling my Beretta.

Top Sims knelt nearby, his M4 in his hands. He had a shallow cut across the bridge of his nose and one eye was puffed shut.

“Clear!” he yelled.

“Clear!” I heard Bunny growl, and to my right I saw him crawling out from another mountain of toppled boxes.

“Where are the hostiles?” I demanded.

Bunny switched on a minilantern and pointed to the rear door, which stood ajar. He kicked it shut. There was no interior lock.

“We giving chase?”

“No. Barricade the door.”

We worked fast and stacked boxes in front of both doors. Top was watching me as we worked.

“What?” I asked.

“Looked like that last box hit you in the head. You need me to go through all that ‘do you know who you are and who’s the President of the United States?’ crap, Cap’n?”

“I know who I am, and for the record the Vice President’s a total dick,” I said.

Top grinned. “You’ll live.”

Bunny sat down on the floor and began applying butterfly stitches to a long, shallow slash on his thigh. “Well,” he said, “this was fun. Don’t know about you fellas, but I’m getting tired of being ambushed by people who shouldn’t even be mad at me. I mean… what the hell was that all about? Did we just have a firefight with the Hulk and the Thing?”

“Something like that.” I looked at the bloody remains of the Russian team.

Top said, “Any idea what the hell we just stepped into, Cap’n?”

“I’m starting to,” I said but didn’t elaborate. “It seems pretty clear that there were at least two teams down here searching for the same stuff.”

“Three teams,” said Top, “if Jigsaw’s down here somewhere.”

I didn’t comment on that. If Jigsaw was in Deep Iron and hadn’t come to investigate the gunfire, then it meant that they weren’t able to. Top read my face and didn’t pursue it. Bunny was watching us both and he cursed under his breath.

The flashlights did a good job of lighting the room. The firefight with the Russians had taken place in one corner, over by the door through which we’d come. That part of the room was a charnel house of mangled bodies. I’d seen a lot of death and I’d caused a lot of death, but there was something about this that was jabbing wires into my brain. I wanted to turn away, but I knew that would be the wrong choice. Denial is always a bear trap — you’ll forget about it and step in it later.

Top pulled the magazine from his M4, saw that he was down to three rounds, and replaced it with a full one. “Cap’n, either I’m getting too old for this shit or we nearly got our asses handed to us by just two guys. They were winning, too, until you shanked one in the mouth.”

“No joke,” said Bunny. “One of those guys knocked my rifle out of my hands — and not to blow my own horn, but that’s not so easy to do. So I laid into him, hit him four times. Two uppercuts, a hook to the ribs, and an overhand right. I might as well have been brushing lint off his lapels.” Bunny had twenty-two-inch biceps and could bench 460. When he laid a combination into a pair of boxing mitts, whoever was holding them went numb to the wrists. Bunny’s blue eyes looked deeply spooked. “Son of a bitch didn’t even grunt. It’s not doing a lot for my self-esteem.”

“He’s right, Cap’n,” Top agreed. “I put a full mag into both of those assholes and it barely even knocked them back. Sure as hell didn’t knock them down. I think we’re seeing a new kind of body armor, something that absorbs impact like nothing I ever seen. It was only when I went for a head shot that he turned tail and ducked behind the boxes. But… until then I was slowing him down, but I wasn’t hurting him.”

“Nobody’s got body armor that good,” Bunny said.

“I may have clipped one of them in the leg — the one you didn’t stab — because he was limping when he went out the door. He should have been Swiss cheese, though. And, considering how strong these guys were, maybe we’re looking at an exoskeleton. They’ve been working on that stuff for—”

Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard, Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”

“Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with all the confusion—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had something extra, so we’re lucky we were able to turn the tables on them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”

“Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m okay with that.”

They stood on either side of me and looked at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere, but most of the floor was clear.

“Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find much, but we have to look.”

“Balls,” murmured Bunny.

“Then I want to move the remains to that section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were no boxes.

“Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked Top.

“Because we have work to do and we don’t want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”

He nodded.

I squatted down and began searching the dead Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me, none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose, and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily substances the room was getting ripe.

As expected, the search yielded nothing. No ID. Nothing.

Without saying a word we began moving the bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of thing before in Iraq — pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond the capability of the rational mind to associate this with deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from a guy like me — someone who’s killed people with guns, knives, grenades, garrotes, and bare hands — but there is a difference between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly clinical. This was… what? The two brutes we chased out of here had done this to the Russians here and to the staff upstairs. They had enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an opponent — say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head — had given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it. Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another person… and I believed that’s what I was seeing here.

As this was going through my head, Top muttered three words that said it all.

“This is evil.”

Bunny and I looked at him and then each other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put his finger on it. This was evil.

When we were done we washed our hands from our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover the corpses as best we could.

I turned and surveyed the rest of the room. Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all that was stored here was paper.

“Top, Bunny… the guys we chased off, did they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records? Anything?”

“Not that I saw, unless it was small enough to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going, Cap’n?”

“We’re staying for the moment. If those guys with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to guarantee a safe run back.”

“I’m good with that, Cap’n,” said Top. “Don’t know about you fellas, but I’ve never been roared at by enemy combatants. Can’t seem to get that noise out of my mind.”

Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that’s hitting ten on my freak-o-meter, too.”

“All the more reason to stay put,” I said. “We’re secure in here. Besides, if they didn’t take anything, then that means that it’s still here.” I went over to the wall so I could see the room better and assess its layout. “We still have our primary mission objective, so we need to go through these records. We have at least two players — the Russians and the other team — who think this stuff is worth killing a lot of people over. Let’s find out why.”

It was clear from the expressions on Bunny’s and Top’s faces that they didn’t like it any more than I did.

“If those guys are on their way out of here then they’re going to run into Brick,” Bunny said. “It’d be just him against them.”

Top snorted. “Him in an armored vehicle with a minigun. Body armor be damned.”

Bunny grinned, but it was mostly faked. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Either way, it’s beyond our control,” I said. “We’ll leave that up to the gods of war. In the meantime let’s get to it. We’ve been behind the curve on this thing all along. Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell’s going on.”

So we set to work… but as we worked we each listened to the big silence outside of the storage unit. Listening for the sound of elevators, for the shout of familiar official voices, for the sound of footsteps running with that precise speed that you only hear with SWAT or special ops teams. We heard nothing.

We were alone down here, and as long as the NSA was still chasing the DMS, there was no chance of the cavalry coming.

We tried not to think about that; we tried to focus on the task at hand.

We tried.

Chapter Forty

Gabriel Mugabe sipped tea as he watched the forklift drivers move back and forth to shift pallet after pallet of bottled water from the train depot to the warehouse. He was pleased with the quantity. An American had given him a very tidy kickback to make sure that customs cleared the delivery quickly.

“Why so quickly?” he’d asked.

“We’ve invested a lot of money in advertising,” said the American. “Our advertisements go live on September 1, and we want the product available right to the moment.”

“But you said you’re giving the water away. What does the timing matter?”

“Impulse buying is one of the few things that still survives in this economy. Give a little and they’ll buy more.”

Mugabe thought that the American was being stupid. Giving away sixty tons of bottled water was like flushing good money down the toilet. But the American insisted that worldwide one-day buzz was worth many millions at the launch of a product. Mugabe neither knew nor cared if that was true. All that mattered to Mugabe was the fat envelope of money the American discreetly gave him. Mixed currencies — American dollars and South African rand — none of the Zimbabwean dollars that were worth less than toilet paper. Very nice.

They’d shaken hands on the deal. Mugabe wasted very little of the money on bribes to the custom officials. Mugabe’s name was enough to inspire cooperation. What little he spent was to grease the wheels in the port of Beira in Mozambique. The cargo ship unloaded there and the water was sent by train to the depot in Bulawayo and from the train yard to warehouses owned by men who feared the Mugabe family.

Gabriel Mugabe was the nephew of the President of Zimbabwe, who had been accused by organizations around the world, from Amnesty International to the African Union, for human rights violations. Gabriel privately agreed, but in his view the issue of human rights was an attempt by the weak to undermine the strong. He believed that strength came with rights that superseded anything the weak had to say. History, he felt, supported this view, and Mugabe could cite historical precedent going back to the Old Testament and up to the hypocritical U.S. so-called War on Terror.

Though Gabriel Mugabe was not the flesh-eating lion that his uncle was, he was rightly feared here in Bulawayo. The water arrived safely and most of the cash the American had given him was still in his personal safe at home.

He sipped his tea, which had been fresh brewed with water from the pallet Mugabe had appropriated for his personal use.

“Free water,” he said with a sneer. “Fucking Americans.”

Chapter Forty-One

The boy’s name was Eighty-two. Or SAM. It depended on who was speaking to him. Otto always called him by the number; when Alpha was in a good mood he sometimes called the boy SAM. The boy seldom thought of himself as anything other than “me.” He didn’t believe the number or the name was truly his. He suspected he had a real name, but if he was right it was one he would never be allowed to use — and would never want to use.

He crouched on the sloping terra-cotta roof in the shadows cast by the fronds of a pair of towering palms. Eighty-two was small and well practiced in the art of being invisible. Most people here at the Hive were not allowed to talk to him, and those who were mostly ignored him. The people who paid attention to him terrified him, and so the boy avoided them. He lived among them, seeing scores of people every day, but he sometimes went a week without so much as a meaningless exchange of commentary on the weather. In the span from November 10 of last year until March 2 of this year he did not have a single conversation. Even the doctors who tested him seldom spoke to him. They grabbed him, poked him, pierced him with needles, took samples, made him lie down under scanners — all without directly addressing him. They knew he knew what was expected of him and mostly they pointed to where they wanted him to sit, stand, or lie down.

It hurt him for a long time, being alone, but recently he’d come to prefer it. It was better than engaging in conversation about what was going on here at the Hive. And it was better than when Otto’s men dragged him along on one of their hunts. Eighty-two went on those because he had to, because Alpha expected it and Otto demanded it, but so far he had not shot at any of the animals. In another year, when he was bigger, he knew that he would be expected to participate in the hunt rather than tag along with the videographer.

Nobody — not even the videographer — knew that Eighty-two had taken his own camera, a little button camera he’d stolen from the previous videographer’s gear.

The hunters had gone to São Paolo for a single day of celebration, and Eighty-two had slipped away from the pool area for forty minutes and found a cybercafé half a block from the hotel. Sending the e-mail with the video had been the single bravest thing he’d ever done, and those forty minutes were the most frightening of his life. He was not able to wait around to see if there was a response. He wished and prayed that there was, that the Americans were on their way.

Now he was back at the Hive. Back at the House of Screams, Eighty-two’s name for it, though he suspected many of the New Men thought of it in that way, too. After all, it was their screams that filled the corridors of the building day after day and night after night.

The boy wore only a pair of swim trunks. His skin was pale. He was not allowed to tan, and if he allowed himself to get a sunburn Alpha would have Otto beat him. Otto’s beatings lasted a long, long time. Eighty-two suspected that Otto enjoyed them and was sad when Alpha told him to stop. Otto’s lips were always wet with spit when he was done giving a beating, and his eyes burned bright as candles.

Down in the compound three of the New Men were working to dig postholes for a chicken pen. The boy watched them, fascinated. The New Men had thick features and coarse red hair, and when no one was around they chattered back and forth in surprisingly high-pitched voices. The boy recognized two of the New Men. One of them was the oldest of the community still living here on the island, maybe twenty-five, though his hair had already started to go gray and the skin on his face was creased with lines. He looked sixty or seventy. The young man working beside him was not much older than the boy, but the New Man was top-heavy with muscles and looked at least thirty. The third member of the party was a woman. Like the others she was dressed in lightweight cotton trousers and a tank top, but she was sweating as she dug and the shirt was pasted to her breasts so that the boy could easily see the dark outlines of her nipples.

Eighty-two felt a stirring in his loins and looked away, embarrassed that he was spying on her. And ashamed that it was affecting him.

The female’s shovel hit a stone in the dirt and she bent quickly and used her fingers to dig it out of the ground. Without thinking she threw it over her shoulder and picked up her shovel.

Suddenly there was a harsh shout from across the compound and the boy turned to see one of the guards — a huge man with a blond crew cut and a gun belt slung low on his hips — come striding toward the work party.

“What do you think you’re playing at, you ugly slut?” he shouted in an Australian accent that was sometimes hard for the boy to follow.

The three New Men froze in place, terror blooming instantly on their faces. They looked frightened and confused, unsure which rule they had broken but knowing that they had done something. They reacted to their conditioning and dropped to their knees, heads bowed, as the Australian approached. He towered over them, and the boy saw three more guards come down from the veranda and spread out in a loose line behind the blond man. They were all grinning.

The Australian nudged the rock with his booted toe.

“What’s this shit?” he demanded. The New Men did not move except to tremble with fear. It made the Australian grin broader. He raised his voice. “I said… what’s this shit?”

No answer. Even from his perch on the roof Eighty-two could see the female begin to cry, saw the first silver tears break from her brown eyes and roll down over her lumpy cheeks.

“You!” called the Australian. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you ugly ape-faced bitch. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

The female slowly raised her eyes toward the man; her companions kept their heads firmly down, though their muscles were rigid with the terror that washed through them in icy waves.

“Who told you to make a mess of the whole damned yard? Look at this squalor.” He nudged the stone again. It was the size of an egg. “You get your ass over here and pick up this mess. Now!”

The female bowed several times and then scuttled forward, keeping low to the ground, so frightened of giving further offense that she scuttled forward on all fours. But as she drew close to the guard she slowed and stopped almost out of reach before extending one tentative hand toward the stone.

The guard looked down at her and the boy could see the moment when the Australian became aware of the thin cotton shirt clinging to the female’s heavy breasts. The look on the man’s face changed, shifting from vicious anger to something else, something that was beyond the boy’s understanding. The boy knew that the man might rape the woman — he had witnessed enough abuse to understand the forms it could take. Rape, sodomy, beatings, even murder. However, no matter how many times the boy saw these acts, or saw the aftereffects of them, he could not understand it. Even in his own personal darkness, even deep in the strangeness of his own damaged dreams, he had no connection to that kind of hunger. Eighty-two leaned forward, his muscles tensing, wondering for the hundredth time what would happen if he shouted at the men while they did this. Would they stop because of who he was? Or would interference merely result in another of Otto’s beatings? Indecision trapped Eighty-two on his perch as, below, the female picked up the rock.

She bobbed and bowed and mumbled apologies in her high-pitched nasal voice.

The Australian kicked her in the stomach.

A single sharp kick that drove the toe of his steel-tipped boot into the softness of her upper abdomen and slammed all the air from the female’s lungs. She could not even scream. Her body convulsed into a ball of knotted, trembling, gasping agony as the guards laughed and the other New Men knelt nearby and wept.

The guards made jokes about it and turned away, heading back to the veranda, back to their beer and dominoes, leaving the female in the center of the yard, the stone still clutched in her fist.

A minute dragged by as the boy watched. He sniffed back a tear and then froze as the two male New Men suddenly turned and looked up. Eighty-two remained stock-still. Had they heard him? Could they see him?

Even the female slowly raised her head and looked in his direction.

The guards were laughing and talking about football. They hadn’t heard anything. The boy’s eyes burned with tears, and he slowly lifted a hand to his eyes to wipe them clear.

Down in the garden the oldest of the New Men stared upward with a furrowed brow. Then he lifted a hand and mimicked the action. Or had he simply wiped away his own tears, the action merely a coincidence?

Then the second New Man did the same.

Eighty-two held his breath and did not move.

Finally the oldest of the New Men turned back toward the female. He cast a cautious glance at the guards and then slowly crept toward the female, gathered her in his arms, helped her to her feet, and walked with her back to their companion. Both of the New Men hugged her and kissed her, but always one watched the men while the others embraced. From time to time they all cut quick glances up to the shadows on the porch roof. Then they went back to work.

The boy watched the female’s hand, hoping that she would covertly pocket the stone. He would have taken it to use later if an opportunity presented itself. To use on Carteret while he slept. It was something Eighty-two wanted to do, had thought long and hard about doing, though he had not yet done it. But the female apparently did not have that thought or was afraid of being caught, because she dropped the stone onto the pile of dirt they’d dug from the hole and picked up her shovel.

After five minutes, the boy edged back along the porch roof and climbed into his bedroom window. Eighty-two sat on the edge of his bed and thought about what to do.

Chapter Forty-Two

Debris is a puzzle if you look at it the right way. You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what’s lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first. When I was working homicide for Baltimore PD I had one of those classic cases where there’s a dead body amid a bunch of broken plates and scattered books. A novice would think that the victim came home and interrupted a robbery in progress and that the place either was already trashed or was trashed during a struggle. But the carpet under the body was completely clean, no litter, which established that the murder happened first. Sure, we considered the fact that the place could have been trashed afterward, but when we looked at what lay under what it became clear that someone had walked around the room smashing things. It had been done in a circular pattern — deliberate and systematic. That’s when we started looking at the wife, who had reported finding her husband dead. The debris pattern, plus the angle of the blunt-force blow that had killed him, gave us a pretty solid circumstantial case. After that it was a matter of breaking down her alibi and grilling her in a series of interviews.

This part of the mission was cop work, so I switched mental gears to let that part of me do his job. I may not be Jerry Spencer, but I can work a crime scene.

There were dozens of overturned boxes. We knew from the firefight when some of them were knocked over. Most of the boxes were sealed with two-inch-wide clear tape. The tape had burst on about a third of the boxes, and some of the boxes and papers had landed in pools of blood. We started in the driest corner.

So I had to do some horseback math: if a stack of ten boxes fell at such and such an angle, encountering an obstacle — and for the sake of argument let’s call that obstacle the back of my head — then they’d hit the floor with x amount of force and scatter their contents in such and such a fashion. Calculating the way the papers slid out of the boxes was similar to the way blood spatter experts estimate flying blood.

And that thought made me aware of the torn bodies hidden under the box lids and I had to squash down the horror that wanted to make me either scream or throw up.

The boxes were also chewed up pretty well by gunfire. The Russians had emptied a couple of magazines each into the room. The cinder-block walls were pocked with holes and heavy-caliber bullets had plowed through the contents of the boxes. Luckily paper is a great bullet stop, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Grenades would have made this job impossible.

Each of the boxes was made from corrugated cardboard. Most were a dark brown with a faux walnut print and a little metal sleeve on the front in which an indexing file card could be placed. There was a code on the file cards that was apparently something used internally by Deep Iron.

It was Top who figured out the code on the file cards. He held out the card — HH/I/3/6-8/051779—and said, “Okay, the second H is probably our boy Heinrich Haeckel. Now, this box came from that corner over there. This other box here was two rows up. It has a card with ‘III’ on it. Roman numerals for the rows. Follow me?”

“Right with you,” I said, pleased.

“Six-dash-eight’s next. Sixth box in a stack of eight. See? And the other number’s got to be a date. These boxes have been here for a long time, so it ain’t a stretch to see that as oh-five, seventeen, seventy-nine. With this code we can restack every box in the right place without doing Sherlock Holmes stuff.”

“You just earned your pay for the month, Top,” I said. “And a pretty damn good bottle of Scotch.”

“Make it Irish and we’re square.”

“Let me guess,” Bunny said. “You like ‘Black Bush’?”

Top gave him a sniper’s squint. “Don’t make me hurt you, Farmboy. I know forty-three separate ways to make sure you can’t ever have kids.”

Bunny held up his hands. “We’re cool.”

We went back to work and now the only thing that slowed us down was deciding which papers went into which box.

“What is this stuff?” Bunny asked, reaching to pick up a clipped sheaf of papers.

“Careful,” I cautioned. “We need everything to go back in the right box.”

“Okay,” he said, “but… what is this stuff?” He tapped the top page and I bent over him to look. The page was covered with columns of numbers whose value made no sense. At the top of each column was a number-letter identifier that also made no sense. I lifted the first page, then the second. More of the same. The pages were old, the entries all done by hand.

“Accounting?” Bunny asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Got something!” called Top. He was going through the boxes stacked by the door. “This one’s not paper. Looks like microfiche.”

He handed me several sheets of film, and when I held them up to the light I could see dozens of tiny pages smaller than postage stamps. Without a reader I couldn’t tell if they were the same as the pages we had here or were something else. We searched around and found only eight sheets of film, scattered as if dropped.

“If those are microfiche copies of this stuff,” Bunny said, “then it sure as hell doesn’t add up to all of this crap. I’m thinking the Hulk and his buddy took the rest of them.”

“Yeah, dammit,” I said, and reached for another box of paper.

We worked together to repack and restack the boxes that had fallen during our part of the fight. All of the boxes that had fallen on me were filled with the same kind of handwritten notes. Then Bunny found a page with annotations in a box he was carefully repacking.

“Take a look, boss,” he said and I squatted down next to him.

At the top of one of the columns someone had used a pencil to write: Zwangs/Trauma.

“Is that German? What’s that mean?” he asked.

I nodded and took my notebook out of my pocket to copy down the ID code on the front of the file box. Something began niggling at the back of my brain, but it was too timid to step into the light. We kept working.

Outside the room there was only silence. No cavalry with trumpets blowing.

“What the hell are these?” Top asked as he held up a stack of index cards. Each one had notes written in some kind of medical code and in the upper left corner was a fingerprint. Top peered at the prints. “This ain’t ink, Cap’n. I think it’s old, dried blood.”

“Don’t smudge any of them,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what the hell we have here.”

A few minutes later Bunny said, “Hey, boss. I got another one with words on it. And… a couple of names.”

Top and I picked our way through the mess to see what he had. He passed me an old-fashioned wooden clipboard, marking its place on the floor with his canteen. The numbers here were written in a different hand, and on the lower right of each page were the initials “JM.” The words “Zwangs/Trauma” were scribbled on the upper left of the page, and over each column was either a single word or a few: “Geschwindig-keit,” “Winkel,” “Druck in Pfund pro Quadratzoll.”

Speed. Angle. Pounds of pressure per square inch.

Then vertically along the left side of the page:

“Kette,” “Schläger,” “Pferde-Peitsche,” “Faust,” “Barfuss,” “Gestie-felt.”

I swallowed a throat that was as dry as dust.

Chain. Club. Horsewhip. Fist. Bare foot. Booted foot.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, and the others stared at me. They peered over my shoulder at the page. I translated for them and saw the meaning register on their faces.

“Fuck me,” said Top, and he looked older than his forty years.

“If this is what I think it is, then we’re into some sick shit here.” Bunny said, “Who would collect this kind of information?”

I didn’t answer as I rifled through the rest of the papers and then handed the clipboard back to him. “Let’s repack this box. Check everything. I want to see any scrap of paper with words, especially handwritten notations.”

They set to work, but there was nothing else in that box.

The next box, on the other hand… well, that changed everything.

I was sitting on the floor putting the pages in some kind of order when I found a single handwritten note tucked inside a file folder. It was in German, which was no problem for me. As I read it my mind began spinning with shock and nausea:

The letter was dated 22 February 1942. It was addressed to Heinrich Haeckel. I sat there and stared at the envelope to which it was clipped. Haeckel’s address had been in Berlin. The sender’s address was in a town called Birkenau in Poland. My blood froze in my veins.

Birkenau.

Good God Almighty.

Birkenau was the small Polish town where the Nazis built Auschwitz.

The man who sent the letter was Josef Mengele.

Chapter Forty-Three

All afternoon and into the evening Eighty-two thought about what had happened down in the garden. Not simply the guard kicking the female — that sort of thing happened fifty times a day here in the Hive — but the way the three New Men had looked at him. If they had even seen him… and he was sure they had. Or sensed him. Or something.

They had heard him sniff back tears. When he had brushed those tears out of his eyes they had mimicked the motion. Why? What did it mean? Did it even have a meaning, or were they acting on their imitative impulses? Eighty-two had overheard Otto saying that it was hardwired into them, that they were natural mimics. Like apes, only smarter, more controlled. It had been an intentional design goal. That was how Otto had phrased it when discussing it with one of the doctors.

But had it been only that?

What if it had been something else? Eighty-two hoped so. If the New Men were capable of independent thought and action, then maybe once the Americans got here the New Men could be shown how to break out of their conditioning.

If the Americans got here. It was already two days since he had sent the hunt video. He ached to sneak into the communications room and check the e-mail account he set up. Would the techs realize it? Would they — or more important could they — somehow determine that it was him? If so, what would Alpha do? Worse, what would Alpha let Otto do?

The more the boy thought about it, the more frightened and desperate he became… and the more he wanted to do something else to try to reach out to the man known as Deacon.

The August sun set slowly over the island and Eighty-two sat on the floor, in the corner between his bed and the dresser, staring at the TV without watching it. He was required to watch six hours a day, every day. Nothing of his choosing, of course. Otto made the schedule and programmed his DVD player. This week it was all war films. Eighty-two didn’t mind those as much as the sex stuff he had to watch. He didn’t completely understand why, though, because there was a lot of violence in both kinds of videos. There was violence in almost everything Otto scheduled for him. Even the videos of surgeries looked violent. The blood… the screaming of the patients strapped to the tables. Even with the sound down it was ugly.

And it was no good closing his eyes or lying about having watched it. Otto always asked Eighty-two questions about what he saw, questions that he could only answer if he watched. Eighty-two had learned fast not to get caught in a lie.

The sun was down now, but he didn’t turn on the lamp. He heard noises and walked to the window and peered out into the night, listening to the sounds that filled the air almost every night. Shouts. Cries of ecstasy, cries of pain, sometimes overlapping in ways that turned his stomach. Screams from the labs and the bunkhouses where the New Men lived.

He thought about the stone that the female had been kicked for throwing. It burned him that she hadn’t picked it up and taken it with her. It seemed to Eighty-two that it was the smartest thing to do. Keep it. Maybe… use it.

But she had tossed it in with the dirt being dug from the hole, unwilling or unable to find a better use for it.

The wrongness of that refused to leave his mind. It burned in his thoughts like a drop of frying grease that had spattered on his skin. Why hadn’t she thought to take the stone for which she had been beaten? What was it about the New Men that kept them from fighting back? There were hundreds of them on the island and only sixty guards and eighty-three technicians. The New Men were very strong, and though they screamed when beaten it was clear to Eighty-two — who knew something about hurt and harm — that they could endure a great deal of pain. They would cringe, cry out, weep, even collapse to the ground when being beaten, but within minutes they were able to return to hard labor. Eighty-two did not yet know if they faked some of their pain, amplifying their screams because that’s what was expected of them, because screams satisfied the guards and satisfaction was part of why the New Men existed. It was an idea Eighty-two had been playing with for weeks, and it was what made the incident of the stone so crucial to his understanding.

In his dreams — sleeping and waking — the New Men rose up all at once and tore the guards to pieces. Like the animal men in the H. G. Wells book The Island of Dr. Moreau, Eighty-two’s dreamworld ideal of the New Men saw them finally throwing off the abuse and torment and slaughtering the evil humans. Eighty-two longed to see the House of Screams echo with the same kind of cries of furious justice that had shook the walls of Wells’s House of Pain.

And Eighty-two would have believed it to be more of a possibility if the female had just taken the damn stone.

The evening burned on and Eighty-two found that he could not endure another night of doing nothing.

He left his room and crawled along the sloping tiled roof to the end, waited for the security camera to pan away. Eighty-Two had long ago memorized every tick and flicker of the compound’s cameras. When you’re that bored you find ways of filling the time. Once the camera turned away he would have ninety-eight seconds to reach the rain gutter on the far side of this wing. He made it easily, paused again as another camera moved through its cycle. One move at a time, always counting, always patient, Eighty-two made his way from his bedroom window to the spot where he’d perched earlier today. The garden below was draped in purple shadows.

Eighty-two jumped from the corner of the roof to the closer of the two big palms, caught the trunk in a familiar place, and then shimmied down with practiced ease. At the base he stopped, waited for the ground camera to sweep past, and then he sprinted along the edge of the new chicken coop to the flower bed on the far side. The rich black dirt from the postholes had been spread out atop the flower bed. Eighty-two bent low and let his night vision strengthen until he could make out every detail. He ran his fingers over the dirt, sifting it back and forth, up and down, until he found the lump. His nimble fingers plucked the egg-sized stone from the soil and he weighed it in his palm. It was a piece of black volcanic rock, smooth as glass.

Eighty-two rolled it between his palms as he crouched there, and his eyes drifted toward the porch where the guards had been playing dominoes. The big Australian’s name was Carteret. Eighty-two could imagine him drowsing in his hammock, stupid with too much beer, a porno movie playing on the TV, a cigarette burning out between his slack lips. The image was as clear as if Eighty-two was actually looking at the man. Carteret.

Another part of Eighty-two’s brain replayed the image of the female lying in a knot of convulsed agony. And the laughter of the guards as Carteret walked away from her as if she was less than nothing.

The stone was a comfortable weight in Eighty-two’s hand.

He looked up into the sky — a great, vast diamond-littered forever above the trees — and he wondered why the man named Deacon had not come. Did the e-mail ever reach him? Was he coming at all? Would anyone come?

Eighty-two closed his fist around the stone, feeling its ancient solidity and hardness.

He wondered if he could risk reaching out one more time.

If that didn’t work… then what would he do?

There was a high-pitched female scream from the House of Pain. Was it the same female? Had thoughts of her festered in Carteret’s mind all day, the way the thought of the stone had burned in Eighty-two’s?

The boy stared with narrowed eyes at the laboratory complex. The House of Screams. Above him the speakers in the palm trees began to wail. The dog handlers were getting ready to release the dogs for the night.

Time to go.

He smoothed the dirt to hide the spot where he’d removed the stone, waited for the ground camera to move, and then went from stillness into action. He ran across the garden, scaled the palm tree effortlessly, and leaped onto the roof. The stone was in his pocket.

Chapter Forty-Four

The Vice President of the United States sat behind his desk, but he felt like he was under a spotlight in the back of a police squad room. Three people stood in front of his desk. Two men and a woman. They’d declined seats or coffee. None of them were smiling. Bill Collins looked from face to face and knew that he had no friends in the room.

The Speaker of the House, Alan Henderson, ran the show. As second in the line of succession, it was his job, if it was anyone’s. He wore an expensive suit with a faint pin stripe and a bow tie that was forty years out of style. Even during the gravest of national emergencies, the Speaker usually wore a smile of mild amusement that was emblematic of his well-known “this, too, shall pass” point of view. Now his face was as lugubrious as a mortician.

“Well, Bill, I’d say you screwed the pooch on this one. Screwed the pooch and then ran the damn thing over with a steamroller. I just came from seeing the President. You gosh-darn near gave him the heart attack his doctors were trying to sidestep with the bypass.”

The Secretary of State cleared her throat. “I find it alarming that you didn’t consult with me before launching this operation.”

“Are you finished?” Collins asked coldly. “First things first, Alan, when I issued those orders I was the Acting President of the United States, so let’s be quite clear about chain of command here. Whereas I appreciate your loyalty and service to the country, I don’t appreciate your taking that tone of voice with me.”

That shut them all up.

“Second, before I acted I consulted with the Attorney General. Nathan…?”

Nathan Smitrovich, the Attorney General, nodded, though he clearly looked uncertain as to how this was going to play out. “That’s right, Alan. He called me and we talked it over. I… um, advised him to bring a few other people into the loop, but he said that there was an issue of trust.”

“Trust?” Alan Henderson suddenly looked anything but mild and homespun. “What the hell… who the hell do you think you—”

“Calm down, Alan,” said Collins. “No one is leveling any accusations. At least not at you. Or at anyone in this room. But you have to understand my position. I received confidential information from a source who is positioned well enough to have insider knowledge. The information not only outlined an ongoing campaign of blackmail against the President but included hints that many other members of Congress might be under similar control. I couldn’t risk making this an open issue. If anyone else was involved, then the blackmail material Mr. Church has might have been made public, and that could have brought down this administration. At the very least it would have crippled it.” He sat back and looked at them, his face calm and open. “You tell me how you would have acted? Tell me how you would have done things differently?”

The Secretary of State, Anne Hartcourt, folded her arms and cocked her head. She didn’t look convinced. “I could buy the confidential informant bit, Bill, and if I stretch my credulity I could accept your rationalization for not including any of us. But are you going to sit there and tell me that this entire operation was cooked up, planned, and set into motion only after the President went under sedation?”

Collins laughed. “Of course not. This information was brought to me a few days ago. After it was announced that the President was to undergo surgery. My informant said that it was the only opportunity he felt would allow for me to make a swift and decisive countermove.”

“Who is this informant?” asked Henderson.

Collins flicked a glance at the AG. “I told Nathan that I wanted to withhold the name of the informant pending the resolution of the situation. And the situation has not been resolved. Yes, the President is back in power, but this does not remove the threat.”

“If the threat is even real.”

“I believe it to be real.”

“Why?” asked Anne Hartcourt. “Why are you so convinced?”

Collins hesitated. “Because… the informant had information that could have come from only two sources: the President himself or someone who had somehow gathered very private information about the President.”

“What was that information?” asked the Attorney General. “You wouldn’t tell me earlier, but I damn well want to know now.”

“Not a chance, Nathan. I’m leaving for Walter Reed in five minutes. I’ll discuss this directly with the President. If he chooses to allow anyone else to participate in that conversation then it’ll have to be his choice. I will not break the confidence of the President. Not to you and not under any circumstances, even if you drag me before a subcomittee.”

When the others said nothing, he added, “I argued against forming the DMS from the beginning. I warned that it could become a threat, something we would never be able to control.”

Alan Henderson sighed. “I agreed with you about that, too, Bill, but we were overruled. And I do not believe that Mr. Church blackmailed everyone who voted against us. There are some who think that the DMS is doing a valuable, even crucial job. Right now the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland both want your head on a platter, and they don’t even like Church. But they understand the value of the DMS. Maybe your short-term memory is slipping, Bill, but DMS agents saved your wife’s life two months ago. They saved my life, too. And Anne here, and the First Lady. They’ve prevented terrorists from bringing nukes and weaponized pathogens into this country. They’ve stopped six separate assassination attempts on the President’s life. They prevented the kidnapping of the President’s daughters. And they closed down forty-three separate terrorist cells that were operating inside the United States.”

“I didn’t say they didn’t do some good,” Collins said. “I said that they were going beyond their orders and now pose a threat to this administration.”

“If your informant is correct,” said Hartcourt.

“Yes. And once I speak with the President I will cooperate in every way possible to verify this information.”

“Maybe it’s just me,” muttered Henderson, “but this has a bit of the stink of WMDs on it.”

Collins ignored that. “MindReader may be a useful tool in the War on Terror, but it’s also highly dangerous. That computer system can intrude anywhere, learn everything. Even Church isn’t authorized to know everything. You don’t think I looked into this? Asked around? People have been quietly complaining about Church for years, hinting that he’s used his computer to find things out about people and then used that information as a lever to always get his way. They’re blackmailing the President; they’re forcing him to give the DMS more and more power!”

Alan Henderson looked at the others for a moment. The Secretary of State folded her arms and said nothing; the Attorney General shrugged.

“Okay, Bill,” Henderson said, “but you’d better be right about this or this is going to come back and bite you on the ass.”

“If I thought I was wrong, Alan, I would never have done this.”

He looked at his watch.

“I have to get going. My car will be downstairs in two minutes.”

Once Vice President Collins was in his car and had the soundproof window between him and the driver shut, he took out his cell and called J. P. Sunderland.

“How’d it go?” asked Sunderland.

“I feel like I’ve been worked over by prizefighters.”

“Did they buy it?”

“So far, but they’re not exactly on our team. Since we didn’t actually come up with MindReader and can’t prove that Church has anything on the President, we’re going to have to switch to Plan B and do it mighty damn fast. I’m on my way to Walter Reed now to meet with the President. He’s going to want to tear me a new one, so it would be useful if his people got a call about our scapegoat. I don’t want this coming through me, you understand?”

“Sure. Don’t worry, Bill… I’ve got it all in hand.”

They disconnected and the Vice President sank back against the cushions and watched the gray buildings of Washington roll past. He looked calm and collected, but inside he was screaming.

Chapter Forty-Five

The satellite phone buzzed and Gunnery Sgt. Brick Anderson reached for it without taking his eyes off of the front door of the main building at Deep Iron. He identified himself and received today’s command code. When he verified it a voice said, “Hold for Mr. Church.”

A moment later Church said, “Give me a sit rep, Gunny.”

“Nothing new at this end. Captain Ledger and his team have been in the hole for seventy-one minutes and I’ve been sweating bullets for seventy of those minutes.”

“Any activity?”

“Nothing from them, and nothing from anyone else.”

Church was silent for a moment. “Very well. Listen to me, Gunny; the situation has changed. The President is awake and back in charge, though he’s still in the hospital. The Vice President has been ordered to tell the NSA to stand down.”

“Well, halle-freaking-lujah. And about goddamn time, too, sir. Company would be appreciated.”

“Agreed. I’ve notified the Hub and backup is rolling. You’ll have technical support in thirty minutes from your own office, and I’ve just gotten word that the Colorado State Police SWAT units are airborne and inbound to your twenty. ETA thirty-five minutes.”

“Orders, sir?”

“Sit tight until the backup arrives. SWAT has been informed that this is a National Security matter and that you are in charge until Captain Peterson or Ledger is located. If neither has turned up by the time SWAT arrives I want you to enter Deep Iron, assess the situation, and if there is no immediate threat I want you to locate our people.” Church paused. “I know you’re no longer on active mission status, Gunny, but I need one of my people down there to lead the search. Are you up to this?”

“Sir, I lost my leg,” Brick said, “not my trigger finger.”

“Good man. Keep me updated.”

Church disconnected the call.

Brick set the sat phone down, looked at his watch, and then leaned back into position, staring down the length of the minigun at the front door. He was relieved that the NSA problem was over, at least for now, but the bad feeling he’d had all day was still there. Stronger than ever.

On the far side of the building two misshapen figures crawled out of an air vent and moved away, keeping low. One limped heavily from a bullet wound in his left thigh; the other staggered along behind him, hands clamped to the ruin of his mouth. They both trailed dark blood as they went. They paused at the edge of the roof and surveyed the foothills on the far side of the facility. No one and nothing moved except withered grass in the late August breeze.

One of the figures opened a Velcro pouch on his hip and withdrew two syrettes. He handed one to his companion and they both injected a cocktail of morphine and adrenaline into their arms. Almost immediately the pain diminished to manageable levels.

The one with the injured leg pulled a sat phone from a belt holster, turned it on, checked his watch, and then punched in that hour’s frequency. The call was answered by a woman with a sensual feline voice.

“Mission accomplished.” The injured soldier’s voice was a complete contrast to the woman’s. It was deep and guttural, his words badly formed, as if his mouth and tongue were ill suited to the task.

“Status?” asked the woman.

“We’re both injured but able to move. Request extraction at the drop point.”

“How soon?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Very well.” The woman disconnected.

The man returned the sat phone to his holster, pocketed the used syrettes, and exchanged a nod with his companion. They clambered over the wall, moving as quickly as their injuries would allow, ran across the back parking lot, scaled the chain-link fence, and headed into the foothills, making maximum use of natural cover. Within minutes they were gone.

Chapter Forty-Six

The lights came on and a few moments later we heard the heavy hydraulics of the elevators. A couple of minutes later we heard voices. Muffled and distant. We checked our weapons and took up firing positions behind the stacked file boxes.

Then I heard Gunnery Sgt. Brick Anderson’s bull voice bellowing, “Bluebird!”

The cavalry had arrived.

“About damn time, too,” said Bunny.

He and Top began moving boxes away from the door. They opened it carefully and Top cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled into the echoing cavern.

“Canary!”

We heard shouting, the whirring of machines, and the sounds of men running. Brick called the challenge again and Top verified it and then opened the door as Brick rolled to a stop in a golf cart with a BAR laid across the windowless dashboard. He was surrounded by a dozen men in full SWAT rig, weapons at port arms, eyes looking at us and then past us at the dead Russians on the floor by the wall. The box covers did little to hide the raw reality of what lay beneath.

“You boys been busy,” Brick said with a grim smile.

But I shook my head. “That’s not our work, Gunny.”

“Captain Peterson?” Gunny asked, his smile beginning to dim.

I shook my head. “We’ve seen no sign of Jigsaw.”

I told Brick and the SWAT team leader an abbreviated version of what had happened, omitting what we’d found in the boxes. Brick looked stricken. The SWAT commander relayed to his men that there was at least two heavily armed hostiles in the facility. I was okay with a “shoot on sight” approach, but that was my nerves talking. My common sense told me to get prisoners we could interrogate. Answers would be nice.

The team dispersed for an active search, but I didn’t think they were going to find much.

I pulled some of the file boxes and loaded them onto Brick’s golf cart.

“Post a couple of men on this door,” I said, indicating the Haeckel bin. “Nobody gets in there, nothing gets touched, unless I give the word.”

Brick searched my face, but I wasn’t showing anything. Or I thought I wasn’t, because he saw something in my expression that darkened his. He nodded and relayed the orders to the SWAT team.

A few minutes later a technical support team from the DMS’s Denver office showed up and with them were another dozen armed soldiers from the Hub. More help was inbound from the State Police, including a full bird colonel from the National Guard and two hundred men. It sounded like a lot, but the limestone caverns were vast. The Hub communications officer told me that Jerry Spencer was airborne and heading our way, so I amended my orders to that effect. Let Jerry play with the mess.

I processed all of this, but my mind was elsewhere. That letter wouldn’t let me go. In any other circumstance it would be an historical oddity, the kind of thing a scholar could build a book around. And maybe that was all it was, but I didn’t think so. There were already way too many coincidences today, and I wasn’t buying any of them. When someone sends two armed teams to retrieve something at all costs, then that material is more than grist for a History Channel special.

Given that, the implications were staggering, and as I stood to one side and watched Brick, the Hub team, and SWAT do their jobs, I tried to make everything fit into some kind of shape. My inner cop took over and began sorting through the separate elements of the day.

Russian hit teams here and in Wilmington. The Wilmington hit had been on a guy selling pilfered medical research. Exactly what was that research? I wondered. Church knew and I would find out. A second Russian team here in Denver looking for old records that turn out to be — big surprise — more medical research… but medical research conducted by Nazi doctors in Auschwitz? Boxes and boxes of them. Statistics and results. Zwangs/Trauma. That had been written on one page. It was German for “forced trauma.” The notations indicated that the results were categorized according to speed, angle, and PSI classified by chains, clubs, horsewhips, fists, bare feet, and booted feet. Extensive, thorough, and exhaustive documentation of the effects of deliberate physical abuse. Even as cynical as I’ve become, it was hard for me to grasp the scope and degree of personal corruption required to undertake such a program. That it went on for years was unspeakable.

So, if these records were real, then how the hell did Heinrich Haeckel smuggle them out of Germany after the war? This stuff should not exist, and certainly not in private storage here in the states. Yet here it was, and men were willing to kill one another to recover it, just as men were willing to torture and kill Burt Gilpin in Wilmington and shoot down my own men.

Why?

When Top and Bunny described the Wilmington incident to me they mentioned that the Russians had been downloading information from Gilpin’s hard drive. Could Gilpin, during his adventures in hacking, have somehow stumbled upon some reference to Haeckel and traced that to estate records that led the Russians to Deep Iron? Very likely. The timing certainly fit, at least as far as the Russians went.

Church had said that a Cold War — era group called the Cabal had been interested in this sort of thing, but he was convinced that the Cabal had been torn down. Was he wrong? Or had someone else picked up where the Cabal had left off? Someone who hired either the Russians or the two big bruisers to find something that was stored among these records. That seemed likely, though it still didn’t answer the question of who sent the other team.

My reverie was interrupted by Top Sims, who handed me a sat phone. “The geeks from the Hub ran a series of relays down the stairwell. Mr. Church is on the line.”

I nodded and clicked on the phone.

“You heard about the NSA?” he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Bring me up to speed.”

I did and there was a long silence at the other end. I could hear the relays clicking as Church processed it.

“I have a bunch of questions,” I began, but he cut me off.

“I’ll have a C-130 at the airport in forty minutes. I want every scrap of paper from Haeckel’s unit on that plane and heading my way asap. I want you on that plane, too.”

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

“Remember when I told you that there was a worst-case scenario attached to the man in the video?”

“Yeah.”

“This is it.”

He disconnected.

I handed back the sat phone. Okay, I thought, Church needed time to process things. So did I, and I was starting to see the shape of this thing. In a weird and thoroughly frightening way it was starting to take form, kind of like a monster coming slowly out of the mist. It would take a few hours for the C-130 to get us to Baltimore. Plenty of time to think this through.

The things is… I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be right or wrong about my suspicions. If I was wrong, then we didn’t even have this thing by the tail and we were just as much in the dark now as we were before we came to Deep Iron.

On the other hand, if I was right… dear God in Heaven.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The President of the United States lay amid a network of tubes and monitoring cables. He was a tall, slightly built man who looked frail at the best of times, but in a hospital gown and with the aftereffects of surgery he should have looked much frailer. Instead rage made him look strong and dangerous. His dark eyes seemed to radiate real heat.

William Collins stood at the foot of the bed — he had not been offered a seat — and endured that glare. It was nearly a full minute since he had completed his full explanation of his actions. Behind the bed a heartbeat monitor was beeping with alarming speed, but when a doctor poked his head in the President snarled at him to get out. The only person allowed to remain within earshot was Linden Brierly, Regional Director of the Secret Service.

When the President spoke, however, his voice was remarkably controlled. “That’s your story, Bill?” he asked. “You’re comfortable with that?”

“Sir,” said Collins, “that’s the truth. I acted in the best interests of the American—”

“Skip the bullshit, Bill. Be straight or we’re done here.”

“I told you the truth. My actions were based on information received that I felt was compelling and believable. I informed the Attorney General about it before I took a single action, and we agreed that it was the best and safest legal course.”

“You honestly believe that Church has a leash on me?”

“Based on the information I received, yes. How many ways would you like me to phrase it? Look… you can ask me to step down and I will. You can put me in front of Congress and I’ll do it without ever taking the Fifth. I’m willing to jump through any hoops you want, Mr. President, but my answer is going to be the same thing every time. The information my source brought me was compelling. It still is compelling.”

“Are you willing to tell me what that information is?”

“I’m reluctant to do so with Linden here.”

“I can step out,” offered Brierly, but the President shook his head.

“If there are any skeletons in my closet, Bill,” said the President, “then Linden already knows about them. I also think it’s important that there be a witness to this conversation.”

Collins looked from one to the other, clearly uncertain.

“Mr. President… are you sure there is nothing too confidential for—”

“Nothing,” insisted the President.

Collins blew out a breath. “Very well. My source told me that Mr. Church has evidence that you used government assets and personnel to squash a link between companies for which your wife served as legal counsel to misappropriation of funds during the first round of financial bailouts.”

The President stared at him. Brierly’s face was a stone.

“If that were to be made public,” Collins continued, “it would destroy your credibility as President, seriously undermine the economic recovery of this country, which could cause an even worse market crash than we had in 2008 and early 2009, and very likely result in impeachment. It would effectively kill your presidency and reverse any good that you’ve done.”

“I see.”

“What would you expect me to do? I saw a chance to get you out from under the control of a blackmailer and at the same time protect you and this country from a catastrophe. You want to fry me for that, then do it. I won’t even make this public if you put me on trial or before a hearing. What I also won’t do, Mr. President, is apologize for my actions.”

The President nodded slowly. “Does the name Stephen Preston mean anything to you?”

Collins stiffened.

“I see it does. He’s your source, isn’t he?”

Collins said nothing.

“Bill, a few minutes before you arrived I received a call from the Attorney General. For the last eighteen months Stephen Preston has been the deputy information analyst for Homeland. His clearance is above Top Secret. He’s respected and well placed, and if anyone would be in a position to discover a scandal of the kind you’ve described it would be him. Likewise if anyone was able to crack MindReader and the DMS and learn of an ongoing campaign of blackmail it would be him. Agreed?”

Collins said nothing.

“So, if someone like Stephen Preston came to you with information of this kind it’s understandable, perhaps even imperative, that you would give serious credence to him. I can see that; Linden can see that. The Attorney General must have seen that, because he backed your play in this matter.”

Collins said nothing.

“Forty minutes ago a security guard found Stephen Preston at his desk, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

“What?”

“He had a note on his desk. While not exactly a suicide note, it was nonetheless a very long and rambling letter about the corruption of the American system and the need for it to be wiped away so that it can be replaced by a system created by God and dedicated to His will. That sort of thing. Six pages of it. Superficially the handwriting appears to be his, but the FBI will run their tests. The entire office is now a crime scene, and I’ve asked the Attorney General to work with the Bureau to make sure that the forensics are done without bias and with no stone unturned.”

“Good… God…” Collins looked stricken and Brierly pulled up a chair for him. The Vice President sat down with a thump. “I… I… don’t understand. He had records; he had proof…”

“Bill, there are probably very few people better suited to fabricate that exact kind of proof. Our biggest concern now is to determine if Preston acted alone or if this is part of some larger conspiracy. I am debating going public with this once we have the facts so that there is absolutely no stink of cover-up.”

“I… don’t know what to say. Mr. President, I—”

The President smiled for the first time. “Bill, I don’t like what you did. People were hurt, trust was broken, and tensions now exist between the NSA and DMS — two crucial groups that need to be able to trust one another and work together without reservation. And I’ll be straight with you… I’m going to look very closely at you. You’re going to be vetted all over again and if I find anything—anything—out of place I’m going to drop you into a hole and bury you with it.”

Collins shook his head. “I believed—”

“I know. I’m trusting you, Bill, but I have to be sure.”

“But Church…”

“Bill, if Mr. Church was really the enemy here he would destroy you. Don’t think I’m exaggerating.” He snapped his fingers, a sound that was as loud as a dry branch breaking. “Just like that.”

“He… MindReader…”

“Does Church know things about me, Bill? Things that I would prefer not be made public? Sure he does. Has he tried to use them as leverage? No. Not once. I won’t speculate on what happened during the previous administration. If Church had secrets then, and if he ever tried to use them, then I don’t know about it.” The President’s eyes were intense, his smile gone. “Does Church and his damned computer have too much power? Probably, and if I ever—ever—get a whiff that he has abused that power, lost control of it, or used it in ways that do not serve the mutually agreed best interests of this country I won’t bother with the NSA — I’ll send the National Guard against him and every one of his facilities.”

Collins sagged back in his chair.

“But I know the man. I know him very well, and I truly believe, Bill, that Church and his group are one of the strongest and most correctly used weapons in our arsenal. I’ve seldom met anyone in whom I place as much personal trust as I place in Mr. Church.”

“You don’t even know his real name!”

The President’s smile returned.

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

Twenty minutes later Vice President Bill Collins was in the back of his limousine, the soundproof window in place.

“How’d it go?” asked Sunderland on the other end of the line.

“He goddamn near tore my balls off.”

“What happened?”

“He bought it. Hook, line, and sinker.”

Sunderland’s exhale was so long that it sounded like a hot air balloon deflating.

“J.P.,” said Collins, “I don’t want to know how you stage-managed the suicide. We’re never going to discuss this topic again.”

“We don’t need to. You’re out of it.”

“I’m out of it,” Collins agreed. “Now you have to watch your own ass.”

Sunderland made a rude noise.

“I wish we’d never tried this, J.P.”

“Little late to cry over it now… and we might still spin something useful out of it.”

“You might… I’m out of it.”

Before Sunderland could reply, Collins closed his phone. He folded his arms tightly against his chest and crossed his legs and wondered if he had just jabbed a tiger with a stick. In his mind Sunderland was not the tiger. Nor was the President.

The tiger was Church.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“We’ve located the facility,” said Otto as he tucked the Irish linen under Cyrus’s chin.

“Where?”

“In the Bahamas, those arrogant brats. They bought an island. Dogfish Cay. Thirty-eight acres, volcanic but with a solid bedrock base. Very lush, with several buildings and a lagoon that looks like it might have been dredged to take small cargo ships. My guess is that most of the facility is built down into the bedrock.”

“My young gods,” Cyrus said with a smile. “They learned well.”

Otto grunted and arranged the platter on his lap tray. “It gives them easy access to the states, they can hide small shipments among the tourists and pleasure craft, but they’re outside of U.S. waters.”

“Which is why we couldn’t find them. I was sure they would build in one of the Carolinas. They bought property there under half a dozen names.” He paused and picked up his knife and fork. “Mmm, now that I see the whole picture I can see where the land purchases were misdirection. Good for them.”

“What do you want to do now?”

“Now I’ll eat. What is it? Not more dodo—?”

“No, it’s Alsatian. Grilled with onions and peppers.”

“Do I like dog, Otto?”

“You requested it specially.”

“Whatever could I have been thinking?” he said as he cut a piece of meat, speared a plump slice of green pepper, and ate it. He chewed thoughtfully. “Mm. This is a bit of a disappointment.”

“What do you want to do about the Dragon Factory?”

Cyrus cut another piece of meat and stabbed it with his fork, then waggled it at Otto. “Infiltrate it, of course. Send two teams in a look-and-follow pattern. The New York boys will do for the first-in. What’s the weather like on Dogfish Cay?”

“Eighty-six degrees with light and variable winds out of the southwest. Cloud cover coming in over the next few hours.”

“Are the teams ready?”

“They were in the chase planes.”

“Then go tonight.”

“Very good.”

“And Otto…?”

“Sir?”

“Have them kill either Hecate or Paris. One or the other, but not both.”

Otto stared at him in surprise. “Are we having one of our episodes, Mr. Cyrus?”

Cyrus smiled. “No, we’re not, and don’t be a smart-ass. God! Look at you — you’re white as a ghost.”

“Kill one of the Twins…?”

“Sentimentality creeping in on you in your dotage, Otto?”

“Hardly. I just don’t understand why you want one of your children murdered. What does it do for us?”

“If we do it right, Otto, if we make it look like a government hit — which is easy enough considering where we get our equipment — then it will drive the remaining Twin closer to me. A family brought together in shared grief. Us against the world, that sort of thing. Instead of stealing the secrets of the Dragon Factory he — or, more likely, she—will beg us to take them.” His eyes glittered like black glass. “And then our real work can finally begin.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Jerry Spencer reached the airfield just as we were loading the last of the Haeckel records onto the C-130. I waved him over and we shook hands.

“What the hell’s going on today, Joe?” he asked in his usual gruff voice. “You look like you just got kicked in the nuts. What is it?”

I told him about the ugly secrets we found down there in the dark.

He paled. “First Russians and now frigging Nazis? Are you shitting me?”

“Wish I was. Look, we had to mess up the crime scene — Church wants those records back in Baltimore — but try to find me something to go on. We’re starting to make headway, but we could still use a few more answers. One of the Hub boys will run you out to Deep Iron. Go down there, man… do your magic.”

Jerry took a pipe out of his pocket and tapped the stem on his thumbnail. He gave up smoking a couple of years ago, but he carried the pipe so he could fidget with something. It beat biting his nails.

“You didn’t find any trace of Jigsaw Team?” he asked.

“Nothing. Maybe you will…”

From the look on his face I was sorry I said it. At this point there was a good chance that anything he found would be bad news.

“I’ll do what I can, Joe,” he said. “Call you when I have something.”

He headed off, head down, his cold pipe tight between his teeth.

I headed across the tarmac to the C-130. We were wheels up in ten minutes.

Chapter Fifty

The compound was never silent. Even here in the middle of the night there was noise. Cries of the jungle parrots, the incessant buzz of insect wings, the rustle of leaves as the breeze pushed its way through the palms. And the screams.

Eighty-two crouched in the dark and tried to remember if he had ever heard real silence here, if there was ever a time when someone wasn’t shouting, or weeping, or screaming. He was sure there must have been times, but he couldn’t recall. It wasn’t like living at the Deck. Sure, there were screams there, too, but not all the time. Eighty-two had watched a lot of TV — even regular stuff he downloaded from satellite feeds — and he knew that hearing screams was not part of ordinary life.

Then again, he already knew he was a freak.

After he’d snuck out to recover the stone, Eighty-two had climbed back into his bedroom so that he’d be there for the midnight bed check. When the nurse and guard — there were always two of them — were sure he was in bed and asleep, they closed and locked the door. That left him four hours until the next bed check.

Eighty-two lifted the corner of his mattress and removed a small tool kit. The cover was part of a leather work apron he’d picked out of the trash, and the individual tools were things he had collected over the last two years. None of them were proper tools, but each of them was carefully made. Eighty-two was very good with his hands. He had learned toolmaking by the time he was ten and had even assisted Otto in making surgical instruments for Alpha. It wasn’t something the boy enjoyed, but then again there was almost nothing he enjoyed. Toolmaking had been a thing to learn, and Eighty-two never passed up an opportunity to learn something. He believed that his willingness — perhaps his eagerness—to learn was one of the reasons Alpha hadn’t let Otto kill him.

Alpha had hopes for him. Eighty-two knew that much, although he didn’t know what those hopes were or why Alpha held on to them with such aggression. It wasn’t out of love; the boy knew that much from long experience. There were a lot of other boys at the Deck, and Eighty-two had seen Alpha’s mood change from approval to disapproval of many of them over the years. Alpha’s disapproval was terrifying. Six weeks ago, Alpha had made Eighty-two and a dozen other boys sit and watch as One Thirteen was fed to Isis and Osiris. One Thirteen had not been clever enough at numbers, and his hand sometimes trembled when he held a scalpel. Alpha had been very disappointed in him.

Eighty-two used a pair of metal probes to undo the lock to his bedroom door, slipped out, and relocked the door. Then like a ghost he drifted along the empty corridors of the main house and along an enclosed walkway that led to the guardhouse. Twice he passed crosswalks that had cameras mounted on the wall, but he kept to his memorized timing schedule and no one saw him. To get to the House of Screams he had to pass through the guardhouse or go outside — and that wasn’t likely with the dogs out there. From his window Eighty-two had seen four of the dogs — two big tiger hounds and a pair of some new breed he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. No thanks.

The guardhouse smelled of beer, sweat, sex, unwashed clothes, and testosterone. Eighty-two would love to have doused the place in gasoline and tossed in a match. Or thought he would. It was easy to think of doing that because the guards made him so mad.

But could he ever do that? Take lives?

He knew he was expected to. He knew that soon he’d be asked to. Told to. Made to.

God.

He slipped inside and hid in the shadows by the door, watching the rows of beds, listening to the snores.

There was a sound to his left — soft and weak — and he edged that way. It wasn’t a male sound, not a guard sound. He thought he knew what it might be.

She was there, lying on the floor in a puddle of moonlight.

The female.

She was naked, knees drawn up to her chest, head half-buried under her arms. Her red hair was sweat soaked and tangled; her hunched back was crisscrossed with welts. Belt marks, with cuts here and there from the buckle. Eighty-two recognized them.

Carteret.

The female shivered despite the heat. The boy could smell urine and saw the glint of light on a small puddle. The female had wet herself. Either too afraid to move or too hurt, she just had wet herself. Eighty-two felt his heart sink. He knew that when Carteret woke up and saw the mess he would hurt her some more.

There was an expression Eighty-two heard in a couple of movies: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That’s what the female must have felt. What she must feel now. There was no way to be right, to act right, to do right, in the eyes of the guards. Even obedience was sometimes punished. It was all about the punishment, about the breaking of the will. Eighty-two knew this, and he knew why it was important to Otto and Alpha, why they encouraged the guards to do whatever they wanted to the New Men. Especially when other New Men were watching.

The female opened her eyes and looked at him. The naked clarity of her gaze rooted Eighty-two to the spot. Her eyes searched his face and he could tell that she recognized him. Then her gaze shifted away toward the cot where Carteret slept, lingered for a moment, and shifted back to the boy. Slowly, being careful of her injuries and not to make a sound, she raised her hand, extended a finger, and touched it to her cheek. Then she drew the finger across as if wiping away a tear. Eighty-two instantly recognized the gesture — it was what the two male New Men had done after they’d seen him wipe away a tear after the female had been beaten.

Eighty-two’s mouth went dry. He reached into his pocket and removed the black piece of volcanic rock and held it in a shaft of moonlight so she could see it. Her eyes flared wide in horror and she cringed, but Eighty-two shook his head. He closed his hand around the rock and mimicked throwing the stone at the sleeping Carteret. Eighty-two then pretended to be struck with a stone and reeled back in a pantomime of cause and effect.

The female’s eyes followed his actions and he was sure she understood what he meant, but she slowly shook her head. Fresh tears filled her eyes and she closed her lids and would not look at him again.

Eighty-two watched the female shiver and he wanted to do something, but he made himself move away. He felt ashamed for scaring her and furious that she would not fight for herself, not even when Carteret was helpless. There was a sound like cloth tearing behind Eighty-two’s eyes and the shadows dissolved into a fiery red around him as rage drove him suddenly to his feet and he raised the rock high above his head, muscles tensed to hurl it at the guard’s unprotected head.

Eighty-two had never wanted to kill anyone or anything before. Not truly.

Until now.

But he didn’t. His whole body trembled with the effort of not killing this man. It took more strength than Eighty-two thought he possessed to lower his arm.

Not yet, he told himself. Not yet.

There was other work to be done.

He forced himself to move away, but as he did he saw the female watch him. She didn’t plead with her stare; there was no flicker of hope that he would rescue her. All Eighty-two saw was a bleak, bottomless resignation that came close to breaking his heart.

Anger was a burning coal in his mind. He cut a final glance at Carteret’s sleeping, drunken, naked body sprawled on the bed, and Eighty-two forced himself to put the stone back in his pocket.

Not yet, he told himself again. But soon.

He made it all the way to the end of the guardhouse and undid the lock and slipped into the House of Screams. Eighty-two had a plan, but it was a dreadful risk. He had tried once by sending the hunt video.

There was one more thing he could try. But if he got caught…

He did not worry as much about his own skin — he never expected to grow up anyway. Most of the other boys were already dead by the time they were his age. He had to be careful so that he could do something about Carteret.

Eighty-two made it to the House of Screams and slipped inside, evading all of the cameras, and found what he was looking for. A laptop sitting on a technician’s desk. Eighty-two had seen it yesterday and hoped it would still be here.

Eighty-two opened it and hit the power button. It seemed to take a thousand years for the thing to boot up, but when it did there was a clear Internet connection. He licked his dry lips and tried not to hear the deafening pounding of his beating heart. He pulled up a browser page, typed in the address of Yahoo, logged into the same e-mail account, and set to work. He was halfway finished composing his note when he saw that the laptop had a built-in webcam.

For the first time in weeks, Eighty-two smiled.

Chapter Fifty-One

I’m a damaged person. I know that about myself, and it’s part of the reason that my best friend was also a shrink. We met because of Helen.

Helen had been my girlfriend when I was in junior high. One September afternoon a bunch of older teenagers who were high on whiskey and black bombers cornered us in a field near where we lived. The boys stomped me nearly to death, rupturing my internal organs and breaking my bones, and while I lay there bleeding I could do absolutely nothing while the sons of bitches raped and sodomized Helen. Physically we’d both healed from the assault. Psychologically… well, what do you think? I got lost in frustration and impotent rage, and Helen just went inside her own head and got lost somewhere in the dark.

For the rest of her life Helen was under regular medical and psychiatric care. Rudy took over her case when Helen and I were twenty-one, and over the years it seemed like Helen was making some progress. Then one day I went to her apartment to check on her and she was gone. Her body was there, but she was already cold.

What can you do when they turn out all your lights?

Well, for my part, I learned to use the darkness. I’d joined a jujutsu dojo a few months after the assault and over the years learned every vicious and dirty trick I could. I made myself get tough. I never competed in tournaments; I just learned how to fight. When I was old enough I enlisted in the Army and after that I joined the Baltimore cops. Rudy knew what the attack had done to Helen and me. It had destroyed both of the people we had been. I lost a lot of my humanity that day and lost more of it after she killed herself. The process fragmented me into at least three different and occasionally compatible inner selves: the civilized man, the cop, and the warrior. The civilized part of me was, despite everything, still struggling to be an idealist. The cop was more cynical and less naïve — and luckily for all of us he’s usually in the driver’s seat. But when things got nasty, the warrior wanted to come out and play. As I sat in the noisy darkness of the C-130 I could feel the cop sorting through the available data, but the warrior wanted to slip into the shadows and take it to the bad guys in very messy ways.

I knew that I should probably talk to Rudy about what I was feeling. About Big Bob, about the firefight in Deep Iron, and about the things we’d found in Haeckel’s bin. I could feel my self-control slipping notch by notch. I know I’m a professional soldier and a former police detective and a martial arts instructor — all roles that require a great deal of personal discipline and control — but I was also damaged goods. Guys like me can never assume that self-control is a constant.

Rudy was working as a police psychiatrist before he got hijacked into the DMS. It’s his job to keep his eye on a whole bunch of front liners — men and women who have to pull the trigger over and over again. As Rudy is so fond of pointing out, violence, no matter how justified, always leaves a mark. I’d killed people today, and I wanted to find more people to kill. The urge, the need, the ache, to find the people responsible for this and punish them boiled inside of me, and that is not the best head space to be in before a fight.

Not that I wanted to lose my edge, either, because the damage I owned also made me the kind of fighter that had brought me to the attention of Church. It left me with a useful kind of scar tissue, a quality that gives me an edge in a fight, especially when the fight comes out of nowhere.

You see, we don’t always get to pick our battles. We don’t often get to choose the rules of engagement. Sometimes a nasty bit of violence comes at us out of the blue, and it’s not always of our making. We neither ask for it nor subscribe to it, but life won’t ask you if it’s fair or if you’re ready. If you can’t roll with it, if you aren’t programmed to react when the hits come in on your blind side, then you go down in the first round. Or you can cover up and try to ride it out, but getting beaten into a corner is no way to win a fight. The sad truth is they won’t tire when they’re winning and so you’ll still lose, and you’ll get hurt more in the process.

Then there are those types who thrive on this sort of thing. If someone lands a sucker punch they dance out of the way of the follow-up swing, they take a little taste of the blood in their mouths, and then they go after the bad guys with a wicked little punk rocker grin as they lunge for the throat. It’s hard to beat these guys. Real hard. Hurting them never seems to work out, and threats aren’t cards worth playing. They’re wired differently; it’s hard to predict how they’ll jump. You just know they will.

The bad guys have to kill them right away or they’ll turn the whole thing around and suddenly “hunter” and “prey” take on new meanings. These types don’t bother with sucker punches — they go for the kill. They’re addicted to the sweet spot.

I understand that kind of person. I get what makes their fractured minds work.

I should.

I’m one of them. The killer in me was born in a field in the back-streets of Baltimore as booted feet stomped on me and the screams of an innocent girl tore the fabric of my soul.

I closed my eyes and in my head the face of the warrior was there, his face painted for war, his eyes unblinking as he peered through the tall grass, waiting for his moment. He whispered to me, Take it to them. No mercy, no quarter, no limits.

It was bad thinking.

But try as I might, I couldn’t find fault with it.

The plane flew on through the burning August skies.