The Dragon Factory

Chapter Fifty-Two

Hecate and Paris stood together on a small balcony that jutted out from a metal walkway built above and around the central production floor of their primary facility. Below them over a hundred employees moved and interacted with the mindless and seamless choreography of worker bees. It was an image they had discussed and one they always enjoyed. Everything was color coded, which added to the visual richness of the scene. Blue jumpsuits for general support staff, white lab coats for the senior researchers, green scrubs for the surgical teams, orange for the medical staff, charcoal for the animal handlers, and a smattering of pastel shades for technicians in different departments. Hecate liked color, Paris liked busy movement.

The production floor was circular and a hundred feet across, with side corridors leading to labs, holding pens, design suites, bio-production factories, and computer centers. The lighting made it all look like Christmas.

Rising like a spike from the center of the floor was a statue of the tattoo each of the Twins wore in secret: a caduceus in which fierce dragons were entwined around the shepherd’s staff to form a double helix. Dragons were each carved from single slabs of flawless alabaster, the milky stone a perfect match for their skin. The central staff was marble, and the wings were made from hammered gold. The Twins had no personal religion, but to them the statue was sacred. To them it revealed aspects of their true nature.

Paris leaned a hip against the rail and sipped bottled water through a straw. He and his sister always drank from a private stock of Himalayan water. The general staff was provided with purified water. Their dockside warehouse, however, was filled to the rafters with bottled water from the bottling plant in Asheville owned by Otto on behalf of Cyrus. No one at the Dragon Factory was allowed to drink any of those bottles. Hecate and Paris certainly wouldn’t.

Generally the water shipments went directly from the bottling plant to the customs yard and then by ship to ports all over the world. The current store was scheduled for distribution to several islands here in the Bahamas. The cargo ship was scheduled to dock in ten hours.

“You really think Dad put something in the water?” asked Paris.

“Don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Like what? We’ve tested it for toxins, mercury, pollutants, bacteria… it’s just water.”

“Maybe,” Hecate said neutrally. “Maybe.”

“If you’re that concerned with it, then dump it into the ocean and fill the bottles with tap water.”

“We could,” she said. “But wouldn’t you like to know what’s in it?”

“You ordered a battery of new tests as soon as we got back. Let’s leave it until our people finish their analysis.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or… do you think you know what’s in it?”

She took his bottle from him and sipped it. “Know? No, I don’t know, but I have some suspicions. General suspicions…”

“Like…?”

“Genetic factors.”

Paris looked at her in surprise. “Gene therapy?”

“It can be done in water. It’s difficult, but Dad could do it. We could do it.”

“What kind of gene therapy?”

“I don’t know. If Dad was just a corrupt businessman I’d think he was adding something to create an addictive need for the water. For that particular brand of water.”

“We tested for hormones…”

“No… Dad’s all about genetics these days. And viruses.”

“We checked for viruses,” Paris said nervously.

“And found none, I know. That’s why I’m having the water tested for DNA.”

“What do we do if we find something in there?”

“Well, Brother… that depends on what the gene therapy is intended to accomplish. If it’s just an addictive component, then we let it slide but ask for a bigger cut of the water market.”

“What if it’s something bad?”

“ ‘Bad’?” She smiled at that. “Like what?”

“Like something destructive. Something that will kill people.”

Hecate shrugged. “I don’t know. Why? Are you getting squeamish?”

“After what the Berserkers found in Denver? What if I am?”

“God! It’s a little late to start developing a conscience, Paris.”

His eyes met hers and then shifted away. “I’ve always had a conscience. Something like a poison or a plague… that would be different.”

She shrugged.

Paris said, “The stuff we recovered from Denver. That’s Nazi death camp stuff. That’s… that’s wrong on a whole different level from anything we’ve done.”

“It’s fascinating.”

“Christ! It’s gruesome. I can deal with some slap and tickle. And, yes, I can deal with a little snuff… but the systematic torture and extermination of millions of people?”

His sister gave another dismissive shrug.

“Why the hell does Dad want that crap?”

“Why would any geneticist?” she asked.

“I don’t want it.”

“I do. I wish we had the Guthrie cards. Hundreds of thousands of blood samples, all neatly indexed with demographics. They’d be useful for collecting genetic markers.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d like to build our empire on those kinds of bones.”

“What… you don’t like being an evil mastermind?”

“This isn’t a joke, Heck.”

“I’m not joking. And don’t call me that.”

“Is this how you see us? I mean, really? Do you think we’re evil?”

“Aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

Hecate handed back the water bottle. “We’ve killed people, sweetie. A lot of people. You yourself have strangled two women while you were screwing them. Not to mention all the people the Berserkers have killed. I never saw you shed a tear. Evil? Yes, I think that pretty much covers it.”

“We’re corrupt,” Paris said, almost under his breath. “Corruption isn’t actually evil.”

“It’s certainly not a saintly virtue.”

He crossed to the other side of the balcony and stared out through a big domed window at the warehouse on the dock. The doors were open and he could see the pallets of cased water. “Is there a line? Between corruption and evil? If so… when did we cross it?”

Hecate studied her brother’s profile. She had suspected that this was coming, but she hadn’t expected to hear this much hurt in Paris’s voice. “What’s going on with you? You’ve been in a mood ever since we left Dad’s place.”

“Dad. Alpha.” Paris snorted. “If we’re evil, Hecate, it’s because he made us that way. He’s a monster. We’re… by-products.”

“The apple and the tree, Paris.”

Paris shook his head.

Hecate frowned. “What are you saying, that if you had a choice you’d have done things differently? That you would have chosen a different path than following in Dad’s footsteps?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to get into a whole nature-versus-nurture debate, either,” he snapped. When she said nothing he leaned on the rail and stared out over the water as if he could already see the freighter. “I enjoyed what we did. I know that about me, and in a way I’m comfortable with it because I know that it serves my appetites. So… maybe there’s a level of corruption — of evil—that I’m okay with. Maybe even a level I want to be part of what defines me.”

“But…?” she prompted.

“But I don’t know that I want to believe that I have no limits. That my darkness has no limits.”

“That’s a little grandiose, Brother.”

He turned and spread his arms. “Look at me, Hecate. Look at us. We’re grand. Everything about us is larger than life. None of it’s real, a lot of it’s not even supposed to be possible… but here we are, and we’ve begged, borrowed, and stolen so much science that we’ve made the impossible possible. There’s never been anything like us before in history. Dad calls us his young gods, and in ways he’s not far wrong. We bend nature to our will.” She opened her mouth to speak, but Paris gave a curt shake of his head. “No, let me finish. Let me say this. Hecate, we’ve always been the Jakoby Twins. People would actually kill to be with us. People would kill to be near us. You know that for a fact because men have killed each other over you on two continents. We’re legends. We also know we’re not normal. We’re not even true albinos. This skin color is too regular, too pure white. Our bodies are without a single genetic flaw. We have blue eyes and perfect eyesight. We’ve never even had cavities. We’re stronger than we should be; we’re faster. And we’re almost identical twins despite being of different genders.”

“Yes, we’re genetically designed. Big surprise, Paris… our father is probably the smartest geneticist on the planet. He wanted genetically perfect children, and that’s what he got. He also made sure that we’re gorgeous and really fucking smart. Smarter than anyone else except maybe the occasional freak. He tweaked our DNA to make us better, to try and create the ‘young gods’ that he’s always dreamed of. So what? This isn’t news.”

“There’s a fine line between genetic perfection and freakism,” Paris said. “And no matter what you or Dad says, we are definitely freaks. If we did nothing else, nothing new or innovative, people will write books about us and talk about us for the next century. Maybe for a thousand years. We broke through boundaries of science no one has dared push.”

Hecate folded her arms under her breasts and said nothing.

“So… what does that mean to us?” Paris continued. “We’ve been raised by Dad to believe that we are elevated beings. We’re gods or aliens or the next phase of evolution, depending on which of Dad’s personalities is doing the talking. Whether he’s right or wrong, the truth is we’re not normal. We’re like a separate species.”

“I know…”

“So, is that why we do what we do?” he demanded, his voice quick and urgent, almost pleading. “Is that why we can kill and steal and take without remorse? Are we above evil because evil is part of the human experience and we’re not quite human?”

“What do you want me to say?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I… don’t want to feel bad about what we’re doing, Hecate, and yet it’s tearing me up inside. It was bad before we saw Dad, and now it’s worse. Maybe because when I see him I think, There… that’s true evil in its purest form. Or maybe it’s that I think that all of this is bullshit rationalization and that we’re just a couple of psychotic mass murderers who have no right to live.”

“Jeez, Paris,” Hecate said with a crooked smile, “when you get a case of existential angst you don’t screw around.” She came over to him and took Paris in her arms. He returned the hug sluggishly and tried to pull away, but Hecate held him fast. For a moment it seemed to him that she was stronger than he was. Hecate leaned into him, her lips by his ear. “Listen to me, sweet brother. We are gods. Not because Dad says or the National-fucking-Enquirer says so. We’re gods because we say so. Because I say so. And, yes, we’re evil. Our souls are as black and twisted as the Grinch’s, but there’s no Cindy Lou Who in Whoville that’s going to turn us into good guys in the third act. We’re evil because evil is powerful. We’re evil because evil is delicious.”

Her arms constricted around him with crushing force, the pressure making him gasp.

“We’re evil because evil is strong and everything else is weak. Weak is ugly; weak is stupid. Evil is beautiful.”

She purred out that last word. Then she kissed Paris on the cheek and pushed him away. He staggered back and hit the rail. If he hadn’t grabbed the rail, he might have gone over. Paris stood there, his knees weak, gasping and startled.

“What the fuck…?” he breathed. “What the hell was that all about?”

Hecate smiled at him. Her blue eyes were dark and deep, the irises flecked with tiny spots of gold that he had never noticed before.

“What the hell are you?”

“I’m your sister,” she said softly. “And, like you my sweet brother, I’m evil. I’m a monster.”

Hecate licked her lips.

“Just like you.”

Chapter Fifty-Three

We landed at a military airport, and the cargo — paper and human — was shifted to an MH-47G Chinook helicopter that swung us over to what had become my home. The Warehouse had been the base of a group of terrorists that had been raided by a joint police/Homeland task force on which I’d served. It had been that raid that had brought me to Church’s attention, and I was recruited a couple of days later. That was the end of June, and we were still a week away from the end of August. So much had happened that it seemed like I’d been part of the DMS for at least a year. In the last two months I’d only spent three or four nights at my apartment. Even my cat, a chubby marmalade tabby named Cobbler, lived at the Warehouse. All of the operators on Echo and Alpha teams had rooms there, though a couple of them also went home — occasionally — to families.

As the big helicopter touched down I saw a squad of armed guards waiting for us — and two people who stood slightly apart. Rudy Sanchez and Grace Courtland. My heart did a little happy dance in my chest when I saw Grace. In the interests of professional decorum I kept it off my face.

She was the first bright spot in this whole mess, and she came to meet me as I exited the chopper. She strolled toward me without hurry, a mild smile on her lips, but I knew her well enough to know that the devilish light in her eyes meant that she was just as happy to see me as I was to see her. I wanted to drag her out of sight behind the row of parked Black Hawks and kiss her breathless. And I knew from experience that she could leave me just as breathless. Rudy hung back, tactful as ever.

“Home is the sailor home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill,” she said with a grin.

“Wrong branch of the service. I was a Ranger.”

“I don’t know any poems about Rangers.”

We shook hands because everyone was looking, but as she released mine her fingers gently stroked my palm. It sent heat lightning flashing through my veins.

We headed toward the door and Rudy fell into step beside us.

“How goes the war?” he asked, picking up the thread of our earlier conversation.

“Bullets are still flying, Rude. How are things around here?”

He grunted. “Welcome to the land of paranoia. It’s amazing what persecution by the entire National Security Agency can do to the overall peace of mind of a group of government employees. I suggested to Church that he make some kind of statement to the troops here and via webcam to the other facilities. They all look to him for more than orders. His calm — you could almost say emotionless — manner—”

“ ‘Almost’?” Grace murmured.

“—has a soothing effect on the DMS staff. He’s so clearly in command that no matter how wildly the feathers are flying, as long as Church is in control—”

“—and munching his frigging vanilla wafers,” I said.

“—the staff will stay steady,” Rudy concluded.

I nodded. It was true enough. Church was a master manipulator, and Rudy had marveled at the scope and subtlety of Church’s tactics. It was there in everything from the choice of paint color on the walls to comfortable private bedrooms. And it was in Church’s attitude. Most of us had seen him in the thick of it, blood on the floor, gunsmoke in the air, screams all around us, and he looked cool in his tailored suits, tinted sunglasses, and total lack of emotionality. Church made Mr. Spock look like a hysterical teenager with a pimple on prom night.

“Look, Joe,” Rudy said. “I wanted to say goodbye before I headed out. Church wants me out in Denver. We haven’t heard anything for sure about Jigsaw Team, but Church isn’t optimistic. He said that he wants me there in case some bad news comes in.”

“Damn. I hope he’s wrong,” I said, but it sounded lame. “Church thinks a lot of you if he’s sending you all the way out there.”

He shrugged. “I’m a tool.”

I said nothing. Grace laughed.

“Okay,” Rudy said, “I heard it. What I mean is that Church regards me as a useful instrument.”

“ ‘Tool,’ ” said Grace.

“God, are you two in kindergarten?”

We shook hands and he trudged off to the helo that was waiting to take him to the airport.

“Is Church here?” I asked Grace as we pushed through the security door to the Warehouse.

“Yes,” Church said. I nearly walked into him. He was standing just inside, looking like he just walked out of a board meeting. He offered his hand and we shook. “Glad to have you back safe and sound, Captain.”

“Glad to be safe and sound. What’s the latest on Big Bob?”

“Stable.”

“Look, about that… I met Brick and I know he lost his leg in the line of duty. If Big Bob pulls through this I know he won’t ever work the field again, but I don’t want to hear about him getting kicked to the curb. That shit happens with Delta Force and—”

“Let me head you off at the pass, Captain,” said Church. “This is the DMS. I’m not in the habit of abandoning my people.”

“Fair enough. On the flight I had a chance to think this through, and I have about a million questions.”

“Glad to hear it, but first things first. I want to take a look at the material you recovered in Denver, Captain. Dr. Hu is preparing a point-by-point presentation of everything we have. We’ll meet for a briefing in one hour. Until then I suggest you spruce up and then get some rest.”

Without another word he headed out to the landing area.

I glanced at Grace, who was frowning. She saw my look and shook her head. “That’s about all he’s said to me, too. I’ve tried a dozen ways to open him up, but he’s been playing things pretty close to the vest.”

“This meeting should be pretty interesting. It’s going to be real interesting to compare notes… but first I have to find a shower and some fresh clothes.”

There were a lot of people around, so she gave me a curt nod and we went our separate ways.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Vice President Bill Collins sat alone in his study looking out at the trees in the garden. His fist was wrapped tightly around his fifth neat scotch. His wife was upstairs asleep, as if nothing was wrong in their world.

After leaving the Walter Reed, he kept expecting a knock at the door. Secret Service agents. Or, if the universe was in a perverse mood, the NSA.

Maybe he had dodged the bullet. Maybe the President had swallowed the whole can of lies. There was no way to tell, especially with this President. All the talk in the press about how calm and unflappable he was did not begin to scratch the surface of the man’s calm control and his cold ruthlessness when he held the moral high ground in a conflict.

Unless this thing blew over Collins without leaving so much as a whiff of illegality, Collins knew that the President would quietly, neatly, and ruthlessly tear him to pieces.

He gulped more of the scotch, wishing that it could burn away everything to do with Sunderland, the Jakobys, or any of their biotech get-rich-quick schemes. Everything that had seemed so smart and well-planned before now felt like pratfalls and slapstick.

The bottle of McCallum had been full when he’d come home, now it was half gone. But Vice President Collins felt totally empty. He poured himself another drink.

He sat in his chair and waited for the knock on the door.

Chapter Fifty-Five

My quarters were an office that had been remodeled into an efficiency apartment. There was a bed, stand-up closet — I didn’t have enough personal effects to call it an armoire — and a work desk with a secure laptop. A small bathroom with a tiny shower was built into what had once been a storage closet. Cobbler met me at the door and entwined himself sinuously around my ankles as I entered. He’s a great cat with a purr that sounds like an industrial buzz saw.

I squatted down and scratched his fur for a few minutes while I took stock of my life. Two months ago I was a police detective with aspirations of going to the FBI academy. Sure I’d worked on the Homeland task force, but I never thought that I’d be playing secret agent. It still felt unreal and vaguely absurd. After all, who was I? Just another working schlub from Baltimore with a few jujutsu tricks and a steady gun hand. Big deal. How did that qualify me to do this sort of thing?

Cobbler gave my hand a playful nip and dialed up the volume on his purr.

I got to my feet and the room suddenly did a little Irish jig as if some internal hand had thrown a switch to dump the last of the adrenaline from my system. Exhaustion hit me like a truck and I tottered into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and adjusted the temperature to “boiled lobster.” I was still dressed in the soiled clothes I’d worn since my escape from the NSA at the cemetery. A lot had happened since then, and none of it made me smell like a rose. I stripped down and turned the shower to broil, but as I was about to step under the spray I heard a knock on the door.

Cursing under my breath, I grabbed a towel and knotted it around my waist and then jerked open the door, expecting to have to tell Rudy or one of my guys from Echo Team to piss off, but my growl turned into a smile.

Grace Courtland stood there.

Her green eyes met mine and then did a theatrical up-and-down evaluation of my state of near undress.

“I was just about to take a shower,” I said. “And believe me I need one.”

“I don’t care if you’re filthy,” she said with a wicked smile, “because I’ve got a seriously dirty mind.”

She looked quickly up and down the hall to make sure it was empty, then pushed me inside and kicked the door closed behind her. I pulled her to me and we kissed with such heat that the air around us seemed to catch fire. With one hand she helped me with the buttons of her uniform blouse; with the other she pulled apart the knot on my towel. We left a trail of clothes from the door to the middle of the bathroom floor. I popped the hooks of her bra and she shrugged out of it as she slammed me back against the wall.

“I couldn’t really tell you earlier, not properly,” I said as she kissed my throat and chest, “but I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, you big bloody Yank,” she said in a fierce whisper, and her breath was hot on my skin. A minute later we were in the cramped confines of my shower stall. We lathered each other up and rinsed off together and never stopped kissing. When she was aroused her green eyes took on a smoky haze that I found irresistibly erotic. I lifted one of her legs and pulled it around me and then hooked my right hand under her thigh and hoisted her up so that I entered her as she leaned back against the tiled wall of the shower. That moment was a scalding perfection of animal heat that made us both cry out. The day had been filled with stress and death and heartbreak and tension, and here amid the wet steam we reaffirmed the vitality and reality of our lives by connecting with the life force of each other.

When she came she bit down on my shoulder hard enough to break the skin, but I didn’t care because I was tumbling into that same deep abyss.

After that it all became slow and soft. We stood together for a long time under the spray, our foreheads touching as the water sluiced down our naked limbs, washing away the stress and loneliness that defined us and what we did. We toweled each other off and then lay down naked on my bed.

“I’m knackered,” she whispered. “Let me sleep for a few minutes.”

I kissed her lips and her forehead and propped myself on one elbow. She was asleep almost at once. Her dark hair was still damp and it clung to her fine skull and feathered along the edges of her lovely face. Her eyes were closed, her long lashes brushing smooth cheeks. Grace’s body was slim, strong, curvy, and fit. She looked more like a ballet dancer than a soldier. But she had a lot of little scars that told the truth. A knife, a bullet, teeth, shrapnel. I loved those scars. I knew each and every one of them with an intimacy I know few others had shared. Her scars — amid the otherwise flawless perfection of her — somehow humanized her in a way that I’m not articulate enough to describe. They made her more fully human, more potently female, more of a fully realized woman than any misdirection of fashion or cosmetics could ever hope to achieve. This was a person who was equal in power and beauty and grace to anyone and in my experience second to none. I loved that about her. I loved her.

And that fast my mind stopped and some inner hand hastily stabbed down on the rewind button so that I listened to what I’d just thought.

I loved her.

Wow.

I’d never said it before. Not to her. We’d never said it to each other. Over the last two months we’d shared trust and sex and secrets, but we’d both stayed at minimum safe distance from the l word. Like it was radioactive.

Yet here, in the semi-darkness of my room, in the midst of a terrible crisis, after hours of sleeplessness and stress, my unguarded heart had spoken something that all of my levels of conscious awareness had not seen or known.

I loved Grace Courtland.

She slept on. I pulled the sheet up to cover us both, and as I wrapped her in my arms she wriggled against my chest. It was such an innocent — perhaps primal — act. A need for security and closeness dating back to those long nights in the caves while the saber-toothed cats and dire wolves screamed in the night. Just that, I told myself.

As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. The conference was in twenty minutes anyway, so I lay there and thought about the enormity of those three little words.

Love is not always a goodness, its arrival not always a kindness or a comfort. Not between warriors. Not when we lived on a battlefield. Not when either or both of us could be killed on any given workday.

Not when it could become a distraction from focus or a cause for hesitation. Love, in our circumstances, could get people killed. Us and those who depended on us. It was careless and unwise and stupid.

But there it was. As real and present in my heart as the blood that surged through each chamber.

I loved Grace Courtland.

Now what do I do?

Chapter Fifty-Six

They breached the compound from above, coming out of the night sky in a silent HALO drop. There were two of them, one big and one small, falling through the darkness for miles before opening their chutes and deploying the batwing gliders that allowed them to ride the thermals as they drifted toward the island. The big one, Pinter, took the lead as they glided under the stars, and Homler, his smaller companion, followed. They were clad head to foot in black. Pinter scanned the coastline and jungle and compound with night-vision goggles that sent a feed that posted a miniature image in one corner of Homler’s left lens. The smaller man had his goggles set to thermal scans as he counted bodies, his data similarly shared.

Pinter’s left glove was wired to serve as a Waldo so he could control the functions on his goggles while still maintaining a steering grip on his glider. He triggered the GPS and angled down and left toward the predesignated drop point they had chosen from satellite photos. Nothing was left to chance.

They drifted like great bats along the edge of the forest, in sight of the compound but equal to the tree line so that they vanished against the darkened trees. Their suits were air-cooled to spoil thermal signatures, and the material covering their BDUs and body armor was nonreflective. Pinter keyed a signal to Homler and together they angled down and did a fast run-walking landing. Quick and quiet. They hit the releases on their gear and dropped the gliders, collapsed them, and stowed them under a wild rhododendron. Then they did mutual equipment and weapons checks. Both men were heavily armed with knives, explosives, silenced pistols, and long guns. Nothing had a serial number; nothing had fingerprints. Neither man had prints on file in any computer database except that of the Army, and in that system they were listed as KIA in Iraq. They were ghosts, and like ghosts they melted into the jungle without making a sound.

They followed the GPS to the edge of the compound, to the weak point they’d recognized from long-range observation. The compound had a high fence set with sweeping searchlights, but there was one spot, just six feet wide, where no light was shining for nineteen seconds every three minutes. It was an error that would probably be caught on the next routine systems check, but it worked for them.

They knelt just inside the jungle and watched the searchlights for five cycles, verifying the nineteen-second window.

They wore muzzled masks that allowed them to speak into microphones but muffled any sound from escaping. A sentry ten feet away wouldn’t have heard them.

“Okay, Butch,” said Homler, “I got a sentry on the wall, fourteen meters from the east corner. He’s moving right to left. Sixty-one paces and a turnaround.”

“Copy, Sundance.” Pinter raised his rifle and sighted on the guard. “On your call.”

“Bye-bye,” said Homler, and Pinter put two into the guard. The distant scuffle of the guard falling to the catwalk was louder than the shots.

“Second guard will be rounding the west corner in five, four, three…”

Pinter sighted, dropped the guard as he made the turn.

They waited for reactions or outcry, heard nothing, and moved forward, running into the dead zone between the spotlights. They made it to the base of the wall and froze, counting the seconds until the next gap. Then they raised grappling guns and shot into the base of the corner guard tower. On the third dead zone they activated the hydraulics. The guns didn’t have the strength to lift their whole weight, but it took enough of the strain to allow them to run like spiders up the wall. They clambered over the low wall of the guard tower and crouched down, waiting and watching.

“Thermals?”

“Nothing. We’re clear.”

They dropped fast ropes and slithered to the ground and ran fast and low across the acre of open ground. Sensors in their gear listened for traps, but if there were motion sensors or other warning devices they were not broadcasting active signals.

The two men made it all the way to the wall of the first building in the compound. They had the layout of the entire compound committed to memory. Twenty-six buildings, ranging from a guard shack on the dock to a large concrete factory. Except for the factory, all of the buildings were built of the same drab cinder block with pitched metal roofs. From the aerial photos the place looked like a factory in any third world country, or a concentration camp. It didn’t look like what it had to be. Homler and Pinter knew this and understood that there was probably much more of the facility built down into the island’s bedrock. Their employer had insisted that the central facility had to be at least four or five stories in order to accommodate the kind of work being done there. Between the two of them they carried enough explosives to blow ten stories of buildings out into the churning Atlantic.

They moved in a pattern of stillness broken by spurts of fast running. An infiltration of this kind was nothing new to either of them. They’d done a hundred of them, separately and as a team. Over the last four years “Butch and Sundance” had become the go-to guys for covert infiltration. They never left a mark if it was an “in and out” job, and when assigned to a wet-work mission they left burned-out buildings and charred corpses behind.

Homler dropped to one knee, his fist upraised. Pinter, a half-dozen steps behind him, froze, eyes and gun barrel focused hard in the direction his partner was pointing.

Five seconds passed and nothing happened.

“What?” whispered Pinter.

“I caught a flicker of motion on the scope. There and gone. Now — nothing.”

“Camera on a sweep?”

“Negative. It had heat.”

“Nothing there now. Let’s mau.”

They moved very quickly, angling toward the main building, making maximum use of solid cover — trees, other buildings — to block sensor sweeps.

They were forty feet from the rear wall of the factory when the lights came on.

Suddenly four sets of stadium lamps flared on, washing away every scrap of shadows, pinning the two men like black bugs on a green mat. They froze in the middle of a field, too far from the forest line, away from the shelter of buildings.

“Shit!” Homler growled, wheeling left and right, looking for an exit, but the lights were unbearably bright. They blinded the men and their sensors, and even though their night vision was cued to dim in the presence of a flare, this light crept in through the loose seal of their goggles.

“Remain where you are!” demanded a harsh voice that bellowed at them from speakers mounted on the light poles. “Lower your weapons and lace your fingers behind your heads.”

“Fuck this,” snarled Pinter, and opened fire in the direction of the nearest set of lights. He burned through half a magazine before the bulbs began exploding in showers of sparks.

Homler stood back-to-back with him and fired at the lights on the opposite side. He and Pinter moved in a slow circle, blasting the lights, waiting for the crushing burn of return fire.

The last of the lights exploded and the sparks drifted down to the grass as darkness closed in over them.

Instantly they were in motion, running like hell toward the fence, swapping out their magazines as they ran. They didn’t care about stealth now. Homler punched a button on his vest that began pulsing out a signal to a pickup team in a Zodiac somewhere out beyond the surf line. If he and Pinter could make it to the water, they could get the hell out of this place.

Pinter caught movement on his right and fired two shots at it without breaking stride. There were no friendlies to worry about on this island. There was no return fire, though. A miss or a mistake — it didn’t matter.

They could see the fence ahead and Homler reached it first. He leaped at it from six feet out, stretching for the chain links. Then he was snatched out of the air and flung ten feet backward by something huge and dark that seemed to detach itself from the shadows.

Homler crunched to the ground, rolled over onto hands and knees, tore off his mask and vomited onto the grass. Pinter wheeled and fired at the shadow, but there was nothing there. He spun and chopped every yard of foliage on either side of the fence, but nothing screamed and his night vision showed nothing. Pinter fitted in a new magazine as he backed up and knelt beside his partner.

“Sundance,” he hissed. “How bad you hit?”

Homler tore off his goggles and turned a white, desperate face to Pinter. “I… I…” Whatever he tried to say was cut short as Homler’s body suddenly convulsed.

Pinter stared down at his partner for a second and saw a deep puncture on the side of his neck. A dart? A snakebite? Pinter put two fingers against the side of his friend’s throat, felt a rapid heartbeat. Homler’s entire body was rigid now; white foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth. Pinter recognized the signs of toxic shock, but whether this was poison or some natural neurotoxin was uncertain. All that was clear was that he had to escape and he could not carry Homler over the fence.

Pinter felt bad about it, but self-preservation was a much stronger drive.

“Sorry, Sundance,” he murmured, and as he rose and backed toward the fence he swept his rifle back and forth, searching the shadows with night vision. The grass stretched away before him, and except for wild-flowers blowing in the wind, nothing moved. It made no sense. What had attacked his partner?

When Pinter felt the metal links of the fence press into his back he turned and started climbing. He made it all the way to the top before the darkness reached out of the trees and took him.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

We gathered around a conference table you could have landed an F-18 on. Grace and I on one side, Dr. Hu across from us, Church at the head, and a dozen department heads and analysts filling out the other seats. We all had laptops and stacks of notes. As usual there were plates of cookies on the table as well as pitchers of water and pots of coffee.

Church said, “We have a lot to cover, so let’s dig right in. Yesterday was a very bad day for us, and not just because of the acrimony of the Vice President and the unfortunate injuries sustained by Sergeant Faraday. Yesterday none of us were playing our A-game. We reacted to the NSA issue as if it was the only thing on our plate. Our operational efficiency was so low the numbers are not worth discussing.”

Hu started to say something, but Church shook his head.

“Let me finish. I think we’ve been played.” He studied how that hit each of us. “As you know, I’m not a big believer in coincidences. I am, however, a subscriber to the big-picture approach. When I say that I think we’ve been played, I mean that too many important things happened at the same time, and all of it was timed to coincide with our need to pull back virtually all of our resources. Imagine how things might have played if the NSA had succeeded in either obtaining MindReader or forcing us to shut it down. It would have been the same as being handcuffed and blindfolded.” He looked around the room. “Does anyone disagree?”

We shook our heads. “Actually, boss, not to sound like a suckup, but this is what I’ve been thinking. It’s what I wanted to tell you before I left Denver.”

He nodded as if he’d already guessed that. “Do you want to venture a guess as to what’s happening?”

“No. Or at least not yet,” I said. “There are still some blanks that need filling in. You told me a little about the Cabal and some Cold War stuff. That has to be tied to this, so why don’t you bring us up to speed on that and then I’ll play a little what-if. That work for you?”

“It does.” He poured himself some coffee and addressed the whole group. “Based on what Captain Ledger found in Deep Iron, I think we’re seeing one thing, one very large case. Because we’ve been out of the loop and off our game, we haven’t caught a good glimpse of it. It’s like the story of the three blind men describing an elephant. However, we don’t yet know if this is something that has years to go before it becomes a general public threat or if it’s about to blow up in our faces. My guess? There’s a fuse lit somewhere and we have to find it.”

“How do we start?” asked Grace.

He took a cookie from the plate, bit off an edge, and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. “To the general public the Cold War was about the struggle between democracy and socialism. That’s the kind of oversimplified propaganda that both sides found useful to perpetuate. What it was in fact was a struggle for power during a time of massive political and technological change. During the war there was a massive spike in all kinds of scientific research, from rockets to medicine. Those decades saw the development of everything from the microchip to the cell phone. Some of the most groundbreaking work for the development of many of today’s scientific marvels, however, predated the Cold War to the thirties and early forties in Germany.”

“Absolutely,” interrupted Bug. “There was wild science-fiction stuff going on back then. Z1, the first binary computer, was developed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1936, and his Z3, developed in 1941, was the first computer controlled by software. People today seem to think computers started with the PC.”

“Exactly,” said Church. “And there were similar landmark moments in medicine and other sciences. After the fall of Berlin there was a scramble to acquire German science and German scientists. Even people who should have been tried as war criminals were pardoned — or simply disappeared — by governments that wanted these scientists to continue their work. Openly or, more often, in secret. There are many — myself included — who believe that all of the information gathered by Nazi scientists should have been destroyed. Completely. However, governments often don’t care about the cost of information so long as the information itself has value.”

Grace said, “So, you’re saying that we kept that stuff… and used it?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Sure,” said Dr. Hu. “Most of what we know about how the human body reacts to fatal or near-fatal freezing comes from research done in the camps. Virtually all of the biological warfare science of the fifties, sixties, and seventies has its roots in experiments done on prisoners at the camps and by Japan’s Unit Seven Thirty-one — their covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit.”

“We pay the Ferryman with the Devil’s coin,” said Grace.

“Indeed we do,” said Church.

“You’d think we’d learn, but my optimism for that died a long time ago. Many of the doctors and scientists involved in these experiments were given pardons. Much of this research was intended for use by the military and intelligence communities, though some had more directly beneficial uses for the common good. Some became the property of corporations which exploited the beneficial aspects of these sciences in order to bring lucrative products to market.”

“Big Pharma,” said Grace with asperity.

“Among others,” Church agreed. “There were also groups within governments or formed by like-minded people from various countries, who desired to see less savory lines of science carried through to their conclusions, and that’s where our story begins.”

Church pressed a button and a dozen photographs appeared on the big TV screen. The faces were all of white men and women, and some were clearly morgue photos. I recognized none of them.

“There was a very powerful group active from the end of World War Two all the way to the last days of the Cold War. They called themselves the Cabal, and their individual biographies are in the red folders you each have. They belonged to no nation, though many of their members had strong ties to the Nazi Party. At least three of the Cabal members were themselves former Nazis, while others may have been sympathizers but were actually citizens of the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Argentina, and several other countries. These were all very powerful people who could draw on personal and corporate fortunes to fund their goals.”

“And what were those goals?” I asked.

“They had several. Ethnic cleansing was one of their primary goals. They waged an undeclared war on what they called the ‘mud people,’ which is a blanket phrase for anyone who isn’t descended from a very specific set of Caucasian bloodlines.”

“Guess no one bloody well told them that we all evolved from a bunch of apes in Africa,” said Grace.

Church smiled. “They would not be the first — or last — group to view evolution as a ‘theory.’ One of the key players in the Cabal, a brilliant geneticist known only by the code name ‘Merlin,’ apparently believed that humankind had been visited by aliens, angels, or gods — accounts of his beliefs vary — and that the purest human bloodlines are descended from those celestial beings.”

“Oh brother,” I said, and even Hu gave me a smile and nod.

“The Cabal made hundreds of millions by exploiting science stolen from Berlin after the fall, or from science that was begun in Germany during the war and continued uninterrupted by scientists who fled before the Allies won. Using a variety of false names and dummy corporations and relying on support from a few of the world’s less stable governments, they were able to amass great wealth and possess some of the most advanced technology of their time. When they came onto the radar of one country or another they would close up shop, change names, and vanish only to reemerge again somewhere else.”

“You said that they had been taken down,” I said. “How and by whom?”

“Each of the world’s major intelligence networks caught glimpses of the Cabal, but no one country saw enough of it to make an accurate guess as to its full size, strength, and purpose. It was only after a number of agents from different countries began tripping over each other that it became clear they were all working on aspects of a single massive case. Naturally when these agents individually brought their suspicions to their governments it was not well received. Partly because the sheer scope of the case, their story was doubted. The agents were forced to waste time and resources to bring in proof that their governments could not ignore.

“These agents eventually formed a team of special operators working under joint U.S., Israeli, German, and British authority. This predates DMS and Barrier by quite a long way. Officially this group did not exist. The only code name ever used was the List. The List came into it much as we are now — catching glimpses of something already in motion — and like our current matter there were some losses before the List was able to make the transition from outsiders to active players.

“Once the existence of the Cabal was proven, the threat it posed shook the foundations of the superpowers. There are some — a visionary few — who understood then, as now, that the end of World War Two did not mean the end of this enemy. All that changed was the nature of the war. Instead of tanks and troops and fleets of warships, the Cabal waged its war with germs, weapons of science, and enough money to destabilize governments. Instead of using armies to slaughter groups they considered to be racially inferior, the Cabal financed internal conflicts within troubled nations in ways that sparked ethnic genocide.”

The room was totally silent as Church spoke. I was leaning forward, hanging on his words, and in my head I could feel the pieces tumble into place one by one. The picture forming in my mind was dreadful.

“Over a period of several years the List managed to identify the key players in the Cabal, and one by one they were taken off the board. It was an undeclared war, but it was definitely a war.” He paused. “And we took our own losses. More than half of the members of the List were killed during the Cold War. Some new players joined the team, but the core membership dwindled through attrition. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the List mounted a major multinational offensive on the Cabal, and at that time we were convinced we had wiped them out. We acquired their assets, eliminated or imprisoned their members and staff, and appropriated their research records.”

“Sir,” said Grace cautiously, “I’m no scholar, but I’m enough of a student of modern warfare to wonder why I haven’t heard any of this.”

“None of this ever made it to history books, and the official records of this have long ago been sealed. Some have been expunged.”

“Expunged? How?” she asked.

“I’ll bet I know,” I said, and everyone turned to me. “I’ll bet a shiny nickel that one of the members of the List created a computer system specifically designed to search for and eliminate just those kinds of records.”

Church said, “Close. A computer scientist named Bertolini developed a search-and-destroy software package for the Italian government, but before he could deliver it he was murdered and the system stolen. The program, known as Pangaea, was decades ahead of its time. The Cabal took Pangaea and used it to steal bulk research material from laboratories, corporations, and governments worldwide. That’s what allowed them to have access to so much cutting-edge science. They didn’t have to do the research: they stole the information, combined it to form a massive database, and then went straight into development.”

“And Pangaea…?” Grace prompted.

“A member of the List retrieved it. It was being guarded by Gunnar Haeckel, one of a team of four assassins called the Brotherhood of the Scythe. The other members were Hans Brucker, Ernst Halgren, and Conrad Veder.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said. “Brotherhood of the Scythe.” I drew a rough sketch of a scythe on my notepad. The blade was facing to the left of the page. I thought about it and erased the blade and drew it facing to the right. “Haeckel’s code name was ‘North,’ right? And the others were East, West, and South?”

Church nodded toward my sketch. “Yes, and you’re on the right track. Finish it.”

I added the three other scythes, each at a right angle to the preceding one. North, East, South, and West. Church reached over and gave the sketch a forty-five-degree turn.

I looked down at the drawing. The four scythes looked like they were churning in a circle. The image they formed was a swastika.

I heard a few gasps, a grunt, and a short laugh from Dr. Hu.

“Oh, that’s clever,” he sneered.

“It wasn’t subtle then, either,” Church said. “Probably one of those inner-circle ideas that sound good in a candlelit enclave.”

“Jeez,” I said.

“During the raid on the Pangaea lab,” Church said, picking up his narrative, “Haeckel was shot repeatedly, including two head shots. He was definitely dead at the scene, which makes his presence in the video so disturbing. However, Pangaea was recovered and the List put it to better use: searching down and destroying all of the information the Cabal had amassed.”

“Which member of the List retrieved that computer system?” I asked.

I didn’t expect Church to answer, but he surprised me. “I did,” he said.

He waited out the ensuing buzz of chatter.

“And I suppose you’ve given it a few upgrades over the years,” mused Grace dryly. “And a name change?”

“Yes. The modern version, MindReader, bears little resemblance to Pangaea except in overall design theory. Both computers were designed to intrude into any hard drive and, using a special series of conversion codes, learn the language of the target system in a way that allows them to act as if they are the target system. And both systems will exit without leaving a trace. The similarities end there. MindReader is many thousands of times faster, it has a different pattern recognition system, it clones passwords, and it rewrites the security code of the target system to leave no trace at all of having been there, and that includes tweaking time codes, logs of download time, the works. Pangaea’s footprint, though very light, can be detected by a few of the world’s top military-grade systems, but even then it often looks like computer error rather than computer invasion.”

“Mr. Church,” Grace asked, “you said that the information taken from the Cabal was destroyed. I’m as cynical as the next lass, but I find it hard to accept that the governments for whom the List worked would allow all of that research to be eradicated.”

“We all thought that way, Major. We met in secret to discuss the matter and we took a vote about whether to destroy the material without ever turning it over or to turn it over equally to all of the governments so that no one nation could prosper from it. The vote hung on the fact that there was real cutting-edge science hidden among the grotesqueries the Cabal had collected. Much of it would certainly have benefited mankind; of that we had no doubt.”

“What did you do?”

“The seven surviving members of the List took our vote, Major,” Church said. “The vote was seven to zero, and so we incinerated it all. Lab records, tons of research documentation, test samples, computer files… all of it. We left nothing. Naturally our governments were furious with us. Some of the members of the List were forced into retirement; others were reassigned to new duties that amounted to punishment.”

“You survived,” I said, “so I’m guessing that you found yet another use for MindReader.”

He ate a cookie but said nothing.

“Okay,” said Hu, “so I can see how this Cabal was the Big Bad Wolf for the Cold War, but that was then. How does it relate to the mess we’re in now?”

“Because we’re receiving information in a way that parallels the way the List first discovered the Cabal thirty years ago and several of the key players are caught up in things.” He tapped some keys and a different set of faces appeared on the screen behind him. Twenty-two in all, most of them young men and women in their thirties. Five images were of people in their sixties or older. The last two image squares were blacked out.

Church said, “Most of these people died during the Cold War. The others retired from the intelligence services.”

“What about the last two?” Grace asked, nodding toward the blacked-out boxes.

“Aunt Sallie and me.” He smiled. “You already know what we look like.”

Actually, I’d never seen Aunt Sallie or even visited the Brooklyn headquarters of the DMS, but I let it go.

Church pressed keys that removed all but the five middle-aged faces.

“These were the other surviving members of the List. Lawson Navarro and Clive Monroe of MI6, Mischa Gundarov of Russia’s GRU, Serena Gallagher of the CIA, Lev Tarnim from Mossad, and Jerome Freund, who was a senior field agent with Germany’s GSG Nine.”

He paused.

“In the last six weeks all six have been murdered.”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Pinter sat on a hard wooden chair, his hands cuffed behind him, the chain fed through the oak slats of the backrest. He was naked and they had doused him with bucket after bucket of icy water. The air-conditioning was turned to full, and the temperature of the room was a skin-biting forty degrees. Pinter shivered uncontrollably, but he kept his jaws clamped shut to stifle the screams that clawed at the inside of his throat.

There were four people in the room with him. Three of them were alive. The fourth was a red ruin of twisted limbs and torn flesh that no longer resembled anything human. It was meat and bone. Two hours ago the meat had been Pinter’s partner. But then the Jakoby Twins and their assistant had gone to work on him. They never even asked Homler any questions. They just began a program of systematic beatings that reduced the man to red inhumanity. Before they began, Hecate switched on video and audio recorders, and now that the actual screams had ceased and the body was inert the whole thing played out again on four big LCD screens mounted on each wall.

Pinter scrunched his eyes shut, but he could do nothing to block out those high, piercing screams.

It went on and on until Pinter felt cracks forming in his mind.

Then Hecate walked slowly across the room and pressed a button that dropped the entire room into a well of silence. She turned like a dancer and walked back, passing in front of her brother and trailing her fingernails across his stomach. Paris looked away. He had not participated in the torture, preferring to linger by the door, arms folded across his chest, his body deliberately out of the path of flying blood. His eyes followed his sister; his mouth was small and unsmiling.

Pinter licked his lips. His throat felt hot and full of nails.

Hecate leaned back against a wall and crossed her ankles. She wore a pair of capri pants and a bikini top. She was covered in blood from her polished tonails to her full underlip. Her eyes were bright with a predatory fever, and her chest heaved with exertion and passion.

“You know who I am?” she purred. It was the first thing anyone had said.

Pinter said nothing.

“And you know my brother…”

Pinter cut a look at Paris, who studied his nails.

“And our large friend here is Tonton.”

Tonton grinned. His teeth were bloody. He was a biter.

“Your weapons and equipment are American. You want us to believe that you and this” she reached out and jabbed a toe into what was left of Homler. “You and your friend want us to think that you’re special ops. Delta Force, SEALs, something like that.”

Pinter said nothing.

“Which would be fine if I’d woken up stupid this morning.” She smiled and Pinter thought that her teeth looked unnaturally sharp. The witch’s eyes were a strange mix of dark blue and hot gold. “Now… we both know how this is going to end.”

Pinter looked left and right as if there was some chance of escape. Hecate watched him and smiled. She pushed off the wall and came toward him with a slinky sway of hips that made Pinter see a big hunting cat rather than a woman. He thought he could feel the heat from her eyes. Then she raised a leg and straddled him, sitting astride him so that his face was inches from her chest.

“We all know that you’ll tell us everything. Everything. The only question is whether you’ll be smart and earn a quick release or play it stupid and make us work for this. The end will be the same. Tonton is very good at a quick kill when I want him to, but he doesn’t like it. He has a bit of animal in him. Truth is… so do I.”

Hecate reached behind her back and undid the strings of her bikini top. She pulled it off and let the straps slide through her bloody fingers. Her nipples were erect, her breasts flushed pink. She leaned forward to brush her nipples back and forth across his chest.

“I’d prefer that you make this slow and difficult. We have the time.” She bent forth and whispered huskily into his ear, “I like the slow burn. But I’m fair. Play it straight with us and this will be over before you know it.”

He held out for a long minute, grinding his teeth together to keep his mouth shut, but when Hecate opened her smiling mouth and licked the blood from his chin he broke.

Pinter threw his head back and screamed. Not in pain but with an atavistic dread that was so deep that it was beyond his ability to comprehend. It was primitive and unthinking, filled with need and desperation and a total hopelessness.

The echo of the scream bounced off of the walls and swirled around him like a poison vapor. He collapsed forward, his head against her breasts, his chest heaving with as much passion as Hecate’s, but of a totally different flavor.

“You can die pretty,” she said. “Or you can die ugly.”

Hecate bent and hooked a finger under his chin, leaned toward him, and kissed him on the mouth. Pinter could taste the salty blood on her lips. He gagged.

“Tell me…,” she whispered.

He told her everything.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

The room was absolutely silent.

“The most recent victim was Jerome Freund, who worked as the assistant director of a historical museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He retired from active service with the Grenzschutzgruppe Nine eleven years ago and was involved in no active cases. He was not even a consultant, but he was assassinated apparently as a preventive measure by whoever has resurrected the Cabal.”

“How long ago did these murders occur?” I asked.

“They’ve been spaced out over the last couple of months. I have a contact in Germany — Captain Oskar Freund, the son of Jerome Freund — who has been investigating this for me. Oskar is an active member of GSG Nine and it was he who first brought much of this to my attention. He called me this morning to tell me of his father’s death.” Church picked up a cookie, looked at it for a moment, and then set it down. It was the closest to agitated that I’ve ever seen him, and when he spoke I understood why. “Jerome Freund was my closest friend. My oldest friend. He was a good man who served his country and the world through very dark times. Despite the work he did while a member of the List, he was essentially a kind and gentle person, and over the last eleven years he has carried no gun, arrested no criminals, did nothing to warrant what happened to him. And yet he was murdered with deliberate care and in a manner that would ensure that he suffered greatly.”

“How was he killed?” I asked.

“Someone dressed as a tourist came to the museum where he worked and shot him in the back of the neck with a glass dart. Oskar’s review of the security cameras revealed that the weapon was a gas dart gun disguised as a camera. I believe that the choice of weapon was deliberate, because that type of weapon was used by his father during the Cold War, back when he was a member of the List.”

“What was in the dart?” Dr. Hu asked with great interest.

“Ebola.”

Hu actually broke into a grin and the word “cool” was forming on his mouth when I shot him a look that promised slow, agonizing death. He suddenly found his fingernails very interesting.

Grace said, “Effing hell! I didn’t hear about any outbreak—”

“There was no outbreak,” Church said, “and no one else was infected. The doctors were able to identify the symptoms quickly enough to get Jerome into isolation. Oskar was only able to observe him via video camera. Afterward the German government put a security clamp over the whole matter. If the true cause of death surfaces at all, it will be as an accidental exposure of some kind. No one but Oskar, his superiors, and us in this room — and the killer — know that this was a murder. Oskar even managed to get the museum security tapes without raising any alarms.”

“That was smart,” Bug said.

“Oskar had already been looking into the killings of the List members at the behest of his father, and when he brought the information to me I discovered a very deliberate pattern.” Mr. Church stood and crossed to the flat screen. He touched the first image. “Lawson Navarro, late of MI6, was killed in a car accident. While working with the List he arranged the deaths of several Cabal members by tampering with their cars, setting car bombs, or staging high-speed driving accidents.”

He tapped the next picture.

“Clive Monroe, also of MI6, was the most skilled sniper of the List. He was shot with a high-powered rifle at Sandown Racecourse.”

And the next.

“Serena Gallagher of the CIA died in a fall while hiking. Her method had to been to arrange ‘accidents’ for her targets.”

Then the last.

“Lev Tarnim, one of Mossad’s most celebrated field agents, was one of a dozen people killed by the suicide bomber in Tel Aviv last month. Until now the blame had been put on HAMAS. However, Tarnim was the List’s explosives expert.”

“So,” said Grace, “this isn’t just a matter of former agents being killed… each person was killed in a way appropriate to the kind of damage they did to the Cabal.”

“Exactly,” agreed Church.

I said, “What about Jerome Freund?”

“Jerome did a number of selected eliminations using various biological agents.”

“Jeez,” said Bug.

“There is another thing,” said Church, “and it’s possible that this contributed to the specific choice of weapon used against Jerome. There are many disease pathogens that can kill… but Ebola was the weapon of choice. Jerome was a historian. He published several books on the war. He’s best known for his book on the attempt to assassinate Hitler, because his father worked with Stauffenberg on that plot and was likewise executed. However, Jerome also wrote two books on the death camps, one of which was a general history of them and one in which he explored the cultural damage done to the German people because of what the Nazis did. Most people equate all Germans of that era with Nazism and believe that all Nazis were complicit in the attempts to exterminate whole races of people. That was never true. Many people opposed it, many were in denial about it, and many underwent irrevocable psychological damage because they were afraid to speak out against it. We Americans had a tiny dose of that following 9-11 when the public fervor was to go to war even though America had not been attacked by all of Islam. Hysteria and fear are terrible things.”

“No joke, boss,” I said.

“Jerome’s next book, which was only half-written at the time of his death, was a history of the death camp program and the ideology — if we can call it that — within which men felt both compelled and entitled to do so much harm to entire races of people. Jerome Freund postulated that the Nazi Final Solution served as the model for all subsequent ethnic genocide around the world, and particularly in Africa. He argued that the mass extermination of entire races, ethnic groups, and cultures that is running rampant nowadays would never have been so virulent had it not been for the thoroughly documented final solution campaign.”

“And you feel that since he cited Africa so heavily an African pathogen was chosen?” Grace asked.

He nodded. “It seems to be in keeping with the Cabal’s attempt at poetic justice. But that was only one-half of what drove the Cabal. They were also deeply dedicated to using cutting-edge science to restart and see to completion the eugenics program.”

“Dios mio!” gasped Rudy.

“Wow,” said Hu, a smile blossoming on his face.

“Shit,” I said.

“What the hell are eugenics?” asked Bug.

Chapter Sixty

Paris poured martinis for them both. Hecate was perched on the edge of a chair, her body tense, her eyes bright with anger. Paris set the pitcher down and slumped onto the couch.

“He was telling the truth,” Paris said. “After what you did to his friend he couldn’t tell enough of the truth. He was begging you to believe him.” Paris’s face still wore a shadow of the disgust he felt. He did not mind killing and even liked a little recreational violence, but torture was not his cup of tea.

“I can believe this of Otto,” said Hecate, “but not Dad.”

Paris peered at her over the rim of his glass, one eyebrow raised. “Really? You can’t believe that Dad—our dad — would resort to murder?”

“Don’t be an ass,” she snapped. “I know what kind of a monster he is. If you tally up all the nastiness in which we’ve indulged, we don’t hold a candle to him.”

“Then how on earth can you be surprised that he’d want one of us killed?”

She sipped her martini. “Because we’re his children. His only children.”

“Are we?”

She shot him a look. “What do you mean by that?”

“That kid… SAM. The one Otto called ‘Eighty-two’ before Cyrus bit his head off for it. I never saw a picture of Dad as a kid, but SAM looks like how I imagine he’d looked. Same eyes, same mouth and chin.”

“Otto said that he was Dad’s nephew.”

“Sure. And we both know how much trust we can place in anything Otto says. Besides, I’m pretty sure the kid is a twin. A year or so ago I saw another kid at the Deck. He ducked out of sight pretty quick, but it looked a lot like SAM, and I’d just come from seeing Cyrus and SAM. Twins run in families.”

She nodded, chewing her lip.

Paris said, “Cyrus probably has a legion of little bastards roaming around, ready to usurp our place.”

“Even so… I can’t believe that Dad would want us killed.”

“Only one,” Paris reminded her. “And it didn’t matter which one, according to our late informant.

“I think we should be more concerned,” said Paris, “with how he found us. Marcus said that no one came aboard our jet when we were at the Deck, and I believe him. But we were clearly followed. That means that Otto somehow managed to put a tracking device on the jet and also managed to have us followed. How? Where did Dad get the follow planes that Pinter fellow told us about? How did he hire assassins? Pinter said that this wasn’t the first mission he’d done for Dad. How the hell is Dad managing all of this?”

She shook her head. “I guess we don’t have as tight a control on him as we thought.”

“Oh really? You think?” He sneered as he rose and refilled their glasses. “At this moment I don’t know who we can trust. We certainly can’t trust anyone at the Deck. I wish to Christ we’d gone through with the fail-safe device we talked about, ’cause right now I’d be happy to blow the whole fucking thing up. Dad, Otto, and everyone.”

She nodded. They’d seriously considered boobytrapping the Deck during its construction but had ultimately decided against it. Back then they thought that they had Cyrus on an unbreakable leash. Now she felt like a fool.

“God, I hate being played.”

“He’s played us our whole lives,” Paris said.

“But how? We own everyone at the Deck.”

“Apparently he and Otto found better levers on them.”

They lapsed into a long and moody silence.

“What do you think Dad would do if we sent him the heads of the two assassins?” Hecate suggested.

“Jesus, you’re bloodthirsty,” Paris said, but he pursed his lips. “Interesting idea, though. Dad would probably blow a fuse.”

“What would that look like?”

He sipped his drink. “I don’t know. If he controls the Deck, then he might be able to escape it. That means he’d be free to come at us any way he wants.”

“Christ,” she said as the possibilities that presented blossomed in her imagination. She stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the crews working to load the bottled water onto the freighter. “What should we do? Do we pretend this never happened and send that shipment out? And the next one, and the one after that?”

“Depends on whether we want to alert him. Right now he doesn’t know that we know. At most he’ll find out that our security team killed a bunch of intruders. We could play it like we don’t know who came at us, or go with what he intended and play it like we’re scared because the U.S. government sent a black ops team after us.”

“He’ll know we’re lying,” she said.

“So? As long as we keep the lie going it won’t matter, and it’ll delay any confrontation until we have a chance to look into this.”

Hecate chewed her full underlip. Paris noted, not the for the first time, how sharp her teeth were, and he secretly wondered if she’d started filing them. It would be like her to do something freaky like that.

She ran her finger around the rim of the glass, over and over again until it created a sullen hum. A smile bloomed on her face.

“What?” Paris asked.

“I just had a wicked little idea.”

“For Dad?”

“For Dad,” she agreed. “Look… he now knows where we are. Okay… instead of counterattacking, why don’t we really play up the innocent act and reach out to him like we’re a couple of scared kids who need their daddy in a time of crisis?”

“I’m not following you…”

“Why don’t we invite him here?” she said with a wicked grin. “Tell him we’re scared and that we could use his advice on how to protect the Dragon Factory from another attack.”

“Ah… you sly bitch!” Paris said with a smile. “And once we have him here…”

“Then we put a bullet in Otto, lock Dad in a dungeon, and send a couple of teams of Berserkers to the Deck to, um… sterilize it.”

“We don’t have a dungeon.”

“So,” she said, “let’s build one.”

Paris looked at her for a long moment, his eyes glistening with emotion. “This is why I love you, Hecate.”

Hecate pulled him close and kissed her brother full on the mouth.

Chapter Sixty-One

Dr. Hu turned to Bug. “Eugenics is in a bit of a gray area between social philosophy and evolutionary science. It was kicked off by Sir Francis Galton — Charles Darwin’s cousin — in the late eighteen hundreds, and it’s had a lot of high-profile supporters. We’re talking people like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, a bunch of others. Its proponents advocate the improvement of human hereditary traits through intervention.”

“ ‘Intervention,’ ” muttered Grace the way someone might say “anal probe.”

Hu ignored her. “The theory is that by filtering out unwanted genetic elements, corruption, and damage what emerges will be an elevated human being whose abilities and potential are beyond our current reach.”

Before Bug could ask a question Grace cut in again. “Which is a very slippery way for some scientists — and I use that word with the greatest reluctance — to justify the worst kind of enforced social Darwinism. There are people right now who believe in eugenics and they hide behind causes that are very noble on the surface. For example, they’ll point to a particular birth defect and in their grant proposals and lobbying materials they showcase the misery and suffering. They use talk shows and the media to gather support, and everyone falls in line.”

Hu wheeled on her. “Of course they do! Who wouldn’t want such a disorder eradicated? Any sane and compassionate person would agree—”

“And if the greater good were really the end goal of eugenics then I’d be campaigning for it,” Grace cut in. “But—”

“Whoa, slow down,” Bug said. “You lost me two turns back. Why are you getting so wound up?”

But Hu ignored him. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to make the case that all attempts to remove genetic defects have a master race agenda. That’s unfair. A lot of solid genetic research is intended to prevent disease, increase health and strength, and lessen human suffering. And it’s not just Big Pharma and Big Medicine that are behind it. Early funding for serious eugenics research was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kelloggs, the Carnegies—”

Grace looked like she wanted to spit. “Well, some of that was probably very well intentioned, I’m sure, but surely, Doctor, you can’t be so effing naïve as to believe that everyone involved in medical research is altruistic and has the greater good at heart.”

“Okay, let’s try to keep our focus here,” I interjected, holding my hand up like a traffic cop. “We don’t have time to debate bioethics.”

“No,” said Church, “we don’t, and this is beside the point. The research in those records wasn’t intended to prevent harelips or autism. The Cabal was working to provide data that would justify state-sponsored discrimination, forced sterilization of persons deemed genetically defective, and the killing of institutionalized populations.”

Grace’s face was alight with triumph. “That’s what I bleeding well said!”

Bug leaned toward me. “This is… what? Like trying to create a master race?”

It was Church who answered him. “Yes. We’re talking about the ethnic-cleansing research of the Nazis in the hands of scientists who had access to advanced research and development methods and who wanted to see the eugenics program succeed.”

Grace said, “And your lot — the List — sorted them out?”

“Yes,” said Church.

Bug nodded. “So… the stuff from Deep Iron. Is that the eugenics research?”

“Not entirely. There is quite a lot of data from experiments in forced trauma — beatings and other abuse — as part of Mengele’s study to determine the limits of physical endurance under traumatic circumstances. Ostensibly this was intended to help the German soldiers in the field, but few rational people believe that.”

I noticed he cut a significant look at Hu when he said that, and for once Hu kept his mouth shut. Grace, to her credit, did not break into a smug smile.

Church said, “The experiments that Mengele performed, and those by other doctors in the various camps, were never intended to benefit the German soldier. They cared nothing for the man in the field. Jerome Freund did extensive interviews with camp survivors as well as those members of camp staff who were not executed after the Nuremberg Trials. What Mengele did—everything Mengele did — was fueled by his insanity and driven by his need to participate fully in the eugenics program.”

“Why?” asked Bug. “What was his deal?”

“Mengele believed in the master race concept. Through his experiments he tried to determine the physical vulnerabilities of the different races. It’s one of the reasons he and his masters picked Jews and Gypsies for much of their work, because those groups married within very limited family bloodlines. It allowed Mengele to work with a group who shared many common physiological traits, and that in turn allowed him to make intuitive jumps. The collection of statistics is more than just how the body reacts to trauma but how the bodies of specific races reacts. Think about the use for that when waging a war on what they believed were the lesser race. They believed that by researching common bloodlines they would find vulnerabilities that would give them weapons against the entire race.”

Grace growled out a comment that would have shocked a stevedore, then said, “Yes… and we can thank God that Mengele was not a geneticist.”

“Why?” asked Bug.

Hu fielded that one. “Because there are diseases and disorders that affect certain genetic lines. Tay-Sachs, for example, is a genetic disease that affects Jews whose bloodlines can be traced back to a certain region. Predominantly the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. ‘Ashkenaz’ is a word from medieval Hebrew that refers to the Rhineland in the west of Germany.”

Hu was starting to show off, so Church stepped in. “If Mengele had known about Tay-Sachs and had access to genetic science… there’s no telling what kind of mass slaughter he might have perpetrated. It’s not inconceivable that, given time, the Nazis might have developed genetic weapons that could indeed wipe out all of the world’s Jews.”

“Holy God,” said Bug, looking aghast.

I had a very bad thought and I looked at Church. “The Cabal records that you destroyed… what were their lines of research?”

Church was silent for so long that I knew the answer would be bad.

“They were working on a way to weaponize genetic diseases. And, yes, that included Tay-Sachs. They wanted to create a version that could be given to people rather than inherited.”

Grace shook her head. “Bloody maniacs.”

Church punched some keys that put the letter I’d found up on the screen side by side with the English-language translation I’d written out during the flight back from Denver.

“This was written during Mengele’s tenure at Auschwitz. The reference to ‘Herr Wirths’ would be to Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS doctor at the camp. He was Mengele’s superior and was a fiercely dedicated Nazi. Wirths was a highly trained physician who specialized in communicable diseases, and his appointment to the camp was made so that he could try and stop the typhus epidemic that was affecting SS personnel at Auschwitz. He was successful in that and stayed on to oversee other areas of research. We don’t have complete records of what he did, but we know from camp survivors that he was particularly interested in any prisoner who demonstrated symptoms of communicable diseases. It was Wirths who recommended Mengele for promotion to a senior doctor at the camp.”

“Sounds like a right charmer,” said Grace.

“Strangely,” Church said to her, “Wirth had a reputation for protecting inmate doctors and even improving some of the health care provided to inmates at Auschwitz.”

“Which is on a par with giving a man a nice cold glass of water before shoving him into a pit of fire,” I said.

Church nodded. “Wirths was a complicated man. He insisted that the deaths at the camp were ‘natural deaths’ and not state-sanctioned executions. Jerome Freund viewed him as a villain because of Wirth’s unflinching dedication to the three spheres of Nazi ideology: the goal of revitalizing the German race, the biomedical path to a perfected master race, and the belief that the Jews were a significant threat to the immediate and long-term health of the Germanic race. So, he was no hero by any stretch, even if certain inmates praised his compassion during the trials.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was taken into British custody in 1945 but shortly thereafter hung himself. Whether to escape punishment or out of remorse is anyone’s guess. However, it is because of men like Wirths and Mengele that we now have the Nuremberg Code of research ethics and principles for human experimentation.”

“What’s ‘noma’?” I asked.

“It’s a disfiguring gangrenous disease that was sweeping through the camp,” said Hu. “It’s triggered by malnutrition and is still a significant threat in Africa and other third world countries. Anywhere you find poor food sources, inadequate health care, and unsanitary conditions.”

I asked. “Okay, and what’s ‘zoonosis’?”

Hu took that one, too. “It’s the category for any infectious disease that’s able to be transmitted from animals to humans. HIV, bird flu… that sort of thing. Usually there isn’t a species jump, but sometimes contamination, a botched experiment, or someone getting jiggy with the livestock will do it.”

“Sorry,” I asked, “how’s that tie into Nazi research?”

“It’s rumored that they experimented with it,” said Hu, “but luckily, nothing much came of it.”

“The Cabal were doing a lot of research in that area,” said Church. “Their scientists were investigating zoonoses like measles, smallpox, influenza, and diphtheria to see if reintroduction to animals would strengthen the diseases so that they could then be weaponized and used against humans.”

“Christ on the cross,” said Grace. “I’m very glad your ‘List’ put those pricks down.”

If they did, I thought. I had my doubts.

“What about the reference to ‘twins’?” Grace asked.

“Mengele was obsessed with twins,” said Church. “He removed them from the general population of the camps, gave them better treatment… though few actually survived the camps. No one really knows what the ultimate point was of those experiments… if Mengele even had a point.”

“He was probably just batshit crazy,” suggested Bug.

“He was evil,” said Grace.

Hu gave her a condescending look. “Evil is an abstraction.”

Church turned slowly toward him; there was a weird vibe in the air. “I assure you, Doctor, evil exists. Everyone here at this table has seen it. My friend was murdered by a dart filled with Ebola. Insanity would have manifested differently: a bomb, a knifing, even abduction and murder, but to carefully craft a pathogenic weapon, hire an assassin, and deliver that weapon to a target shows a cool, perhaps cold, mind and a clear intent. That’s evil.”

“What if the killers believe that their ideology is sound?” Hu countered.

“Like the Nazi Party?” Church asked quietly.

“Sure. Like the Nazi Party. Your friend was German. Nazism emerged in Germany. Surely you’re not saying that a huge chunk of the German people suddenly became ‘evil.’ ”

“Of course not. Most people — in Germany as in every other country — are easily led, and easily corrupted by an extreme few. We’ve seen that with Muslim terrorists. Islam is neither evil nor corrupt, but it takes the rap for what some people do in the name of that religion. We can see that here in the states as well. And don’t misunderstand, Doctor; I’m not calling every extremist ‘evil.’ I don’t even use that term to label most terrorists. Many believe that what they are doing is the only means to a better end, or they believe in the words of their leaders, or in a specific interpretation of scripture. There are countless reasons why people take arms and do violence against one another. No, when I label someone like Josef Mengele as evil, I am speaking of a level of corruption that is fueled by self-awareness. Mengele wasn’t a fanatic blindly following a cause. He was a monster. If he had not been born into Nazi Germany, then he might have become a serial murderer or some other kind of monster.”

Hu looked unconvinced, but he didn’t pursue the point.

Church selected a cookie and bit off a piece. “Now, as for the rest of the material you found, Captain Ledger, most of it is in code and we lack the code key. Our cryptographers are working on it now, but that could take days or weeks. However, from diagrams and charts it’s clear that a third of the boxes deal with some aspect of genetic research, which means that it is information from well after the war. We have to face the very real possibility that the material includes copies of the material the List destroyed.”

“Swell,” I said. “And the bruisers who trashed the Russians made off with most of the microfiche copies and probably the damn code key.”

Church nodded. “The book Jerome Freund was working on mentioned Heinrich Haeckel. The Haeckel family has had an association with biological science for over a century. Ernst Haeckel, who died in 1919, was a noted biologist who made significant positive contributions to natural science. However, his brother’s son, Heinrich, was a monster. He was also a scientist, but his interest was eugenics, and through his research Jerome was able to determine to a great degree of certainty that Heinrich Haeckel was the scientist who sold Adolf Hitler on the concept of Lebensunwertes Leben.”

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, and when Grace and Bug looked at me with a frown I translated it for them. The words hurt my mouth.

“It means ‘life unworthy of life.’ ”

Chapter Sixty-Two

“Why haven’t we heard anything yet?”

Otto looked up from his computer. “Give it time, Mr. Cyrus.”

“It’s been more than enough time,” Cyrus snapped. “Are you sure that they have the right location?”

“Of course we do. Everything’s been verified and the team is probably on the ground now. This is a field operation, a covert infiltration, and that demands care and caution. We have to let them do their jobs.”

“I want to know what’s happening. And I want to be informed the minute that either Paris or Hecate has been killed. The minute, Otto.”

Otto nodded but didn’t respond. It was an unreasonable and irrational demand. A sure sign that it was time for a fresh set of pills. That would be tricky, because suggesting it while Cyrus was in this frame of mind was sure to spark a murderous rage. Though Otto was not physically afraid of Cyrus Jakoby, there was a very real danger to the plan. In the past few years Cyrus’s rages had resulted in damage to crucial equipment and the murder or maiming of key staff members, all of which impacted the smooth flow of production. That, in turn, harmed the launching of the Extinction Wave.

The upcoming date of September 1 had been selected during one of Cyrus’s whimsical phases and celebrated the discovery of the asteroid Juno by German astronomer Karl L. Harding. Cyrus insisted that the asteroid had not been discovered prior to that date because it had not come into existence until God put it there as a sign. The previous date for the launch of the Wave had held far more personal significance for Otto — May 20, the anniversary of the beginning of construction of Auschwitz. Before that it had been April 30, the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide. Otto was determined to make the September 1 deadline, even if the astronomical connection meant less than nothing to him.

The second and third Extinction Waves were already lined up, and both would be ready well before their initial planning dates. If they stayed with this schedule, then the global release of ethnic-specific pathogens would reach critical saturation by May of the following year. The computer models predicted that by September of next year the death toll among the mud people would be closing in on 1 billion. In five years there would only be a billion people left alive on the planet, and unless they possessed some currently unknown immunity, none of the survivors would be black, Asian, or Hispanic. The thought of that gave Otto a sexual thrill far more intense than anything he ever got from a woman. The New Order was not only a perfect plan; it was also within their reach.

Unless Cyrus went too long without his pills.

Once they seized the Dragon Factory, Cyrus would likely calm down. He would have so many new toys to play with. But while the likelihood of accomplishing that goal was still fluid, then Cyrus’s moods would swing further out of balance.

Otto would have to think of something to get Cyrus to take his pills. If it came down to it, Otto could always hit him with a dart gun. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Chapter Sixty-Three

“Life unworthy of life,” Bug said slowly. “Man, that has an ugly feel to it.”

“It’s the core of Nazi eugenics,” Church said. “It refers to those people — or groups of people — who they believed had no right to live.”

“If these assholes have their way,” Bug said softly, “half the people at this table won’t make the cut. We’re not ‘master race’ material.”

“Is anyone?” asked Church. “The idea of a master race belonged to the Nazis… it was not and is not part of the cultural aspirations of the German people.”

“So that’s why Haeckel was corresponding with an asshole like Mengele,” Bug said, putting it together now. “They were all playing for the same team.”

“But how did his records ever make it out of Germany?” demanded Grace. “Wasn’t Haeckel considered a war criminal?”

“No,” said Church. “His involvement with the Nazi movement was never fully established even after the war. He was supposedly a dealer in medical instruments and even did work with the International Red Cross. He was sly enough to stay off the political radar, and it’s very likely that he fled the country when things started going bad for Germany. A lot of Nazis were able to read the writing on the wall. They were losing the war, but many of them were so dedicated — or perhaps fanatical — that they wanted to lay the groundwork for their research so that it could start up again somewhere else. Haeckel might have gone to South America or even come directly here.”

“How the hell could he swing that?” asked Bug. “No way a Nazi could just come waltzing into the U.S. during the war.”

Grace shook her head. “Don’t be naïve, Bug. There was active communication and even some under-the-radar commerce between Germany and some U.S. corporations during the war. Very low-key, but definitely there. There are people who always have what they call a ‘big picture’ view that basically lets them justify anything because they know that wars end and countries usually kiss and make up. Nowadays you Yanks are chums with Germany, Russia, Japan, even Vietnam.”

“It can’t be that easy,” Bug said stubbornly.

“It’s not,” said Church, “but when there’s enough money on the table a way is always found. Heinrich Haeckel disappeared from the public before the end of the war. Either he never made it out of Germany and was among the nameless dead or he came here and set up under a different identity. I’d place my money on the latter. From the way things have played out, it’s likely he died here before passing along the records in his possession; otherwise the Cabal would have sought them out decades ago. My guess is that his nephew recently uncovered some reference to it among family papers and that started the race to Deep Iron.”

“I can see why Haeckel and his Nazi buds would want the records,” I said, “but who’s the other team? The guys I tussled with in Deep Iron?”

“Unknown. Possibly a splinter faction, or freelancers looking to steal the material and sell it on the black market. We don’t know enough yet to make a solid guess.”

“Was Gunnar a scientist, too?” Grace asked.

“No,” said Church. “He was muscle.”

“You thought you killed him,” I said, “but now he’s alive and well in Brazil, where he’s taking Rotary Club lunkheads on safaris for mythological animals.”

“Yeah,” said Bug, “how’s that stack up to a grave threat to humanity?”

“The unicorn,” I said, and Hu nodded agreement.

“Okay, I’m missing something, so spell it out for me.”

Church said, “Science has come a long way since the Cold War, and genetics is a booming field. However, there are limits to what can be discovered during modern research. International laws and watchdog organizations are moderately effective, and a master race research program would need a huge database, including a massive number of tissue samples and test subjects. That would be virtually impossible nowadays without the cooperation of an entire government.”

“Right,” Hu said. “The Nazis had the cooperation of an entire government during World War Two, and they had millions of test subjects. Everyone who passed through the camps. Those records you found probably include extensive information on ethnic background, gender, age, and many other variables. The boxes of index cards with brown fingerprints… those are blood samples. Thirty years ago DNA mapping wasn’t possible. The first DNA typing was accomplished in 1985 by Sir Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester in England. The Cabal had been torn down by then. What we stopped was a first step in gathering information that could be used when science caught up to the dreams of a master race.”

“Can we do DNA typing from dried blood?” Grace asked.

“Sure,” said Hu. “DNA typing has been done from Guthrie cards, which are widely collected at birth for newborn screening for genetic diseases and saved by many states. I read about a case where the paternity of a car accident victim was determined using blood from a seventeen-year-old Band-Aid.”

“So those cards and the records help them regain their info on bloodlines,” Grace said.

“Yes. Crafting a race of genetically perfect beings is the core ideal in eugenics,” said Hu, “but it isn’t quick. It’s extreme social Darwinism, which means that it’s a generational process. Quicker than natural evolution, but by no means quick. Unless, of course, you have access to genetic design capabilities that include transgenics. By remodeling DNA they could create more perfect humans in one or two generations.”

“Unicorns…,” Bug prompted.

“Captain Ledger already sorted that out,” said Church. “It’s a moneymaking scheme not out of keeping with the Cabal mentality. Charge the superrich millions to hunt a trophy no one else can possibly have. It satisfies certain desires and it provides vast operating capital for a group like the Cabal. But more important, it demonstrates the advanced degree of genetic science they have at their disposal.”

“The bloodline information, the advanced science, the money,” I said. “It not only looks like the Cabal is back… but now they have a real shot at accomplishing what it took a world war and forty years of the Cold War to try and stop.”

“Yes,” said Hu. “These maniacs may well have the science to accomplish both challenges implicit in the eugenics ideal.”

“Which are?” Bug asked.

“Not only do you have to make one race stronger,” Hu said. “You have to make the other races weaker.”

Grace gave us a bleak stare. “Or you have to remove them entirely.”

We sat in horrified silence for a long moment before Bug asked, “How do we stop it? We don’t even know who’s involved, or how far along they are, or—”

Before he could finish, the phone rang. Church answered, and even with his typical lack of emotion I could tell that it wasn’t good news.

Chapter Sixty-Four

Lt. Jerry Spencer, head of the DMS forensic investigation division and former Washington police detective, sat on the edge of a desk in the main office of Deep Iron. He felt old and tired and used up. He held his cell phone in one hand and drummed the fingers of his other hand in slow beats on the plastic shell. His eyes were bloodshot from working the Deep Iron crime scene — which was really a collection of related crime scenes — for a dozen hours, and that had been on the heels of working the ambush scene in Wilmington. There was a call he had to make, but his heart had sunk so low in his chest that he didn’t think he could do it.

He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and punched in the numbers.

Mr. Church answered on the third ring.

Spencer said, “I found Jigsaw Team.”

He said it in a way that could only mean one thing.

Church’s voice was soft. “Tell me.”

Chapter Sixty-Five

Church set down his phone and placed it neatly on the table. Then he stood up and walked to the far end of the room and stood looking out at the choppy brown water of the harbor. His back was to us, and I could see his broad shoulders slump. We all looked at one another.

“That was Jerry Spencer,” Church said without turning. “They found Jigsaw.”

We waited, not asking, not wanting to hurry bad news.

“Spencer found sets of tire tracks out in the foothills. He figured the Russian team drove to within a mile and walked in, and he followed the tracks back into the hills and found their vehicles. The Russians had come in a couple of vans. But there were two DMS Hummers there, too. Spencer said it looked like both Hummers had been taken out with RPGs. Hack Peterson… his whole team. They never had a chance, probably never saw it coming. The vehicles had been sprayed down with fire extinguishers — probably so the smoke wouldn’t attract attention — and then covered with broken tree branches.”

“Dios mio,” murmured Rudy. Bug looked stricken, and even Dr. Hu had enough humanity to look upset.

Grace closed her eyes. Her hands lay on the tabletop and slowly constricted into white-knuckled fists. Hack Peterson was the last of the DMS agents who had worked for Church as long as Grace had. They were friends who had shared the line of battle fifty times. Without any bit of exaggeration it was fair to say that together they had saved America — and a big chunk of the world — from some of the most dangerous and vile threats it had ever faced. Hack was a genuine hero, and those were in damned short supply.

I took her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said softly.

She raised her head. There were no tears, but her eyes were bright and glassy, her face flushed with all the emotion I knew she would not release. Not here, not on the job. Maybe not at all. Like me, she was a warrior on the battlefield.

“God,” she murmured, “it’s never going to stop, is it? Are we going to go on and on fighting this sodding war until we kill everyone and everything? We’re a race of madmen!”

I squeezed her hand.

Church turned back to face us. His tinted glasses hid his eyes, but his mouth was a tight line and muscles bulged and flexed in the corners of his jaw. Just for a moment, and then his control fell back into place with a steel clang.

“Spencer said that he also discovered how the other team escaped. He followed the blood trail from the Haeckel unit. He said that there were two sets of spatters, one that fell from at least five feet, which is probably the one you stabbed in the mouth, Captain, and the other showed heavy blood loss that fell with less velocity from a lower point. Spencer figures it for a leg wound. They took an elevator up to the surface. Spencer figures in Haeckel’s bin you’d have been too far away to hear the hydraulics. Then they climbed up through the air vents to the roof and dropped down the side opposite where Brick was positioned. Spencer was able to follow the blood trail for half a mile to a side road, and from there tire tracks led away. He found two sets of footprints. Size twelve and size fourteen shoes. He’s doing the math on the impressions, but he estimates that the men were well in excess of two hundred pounds… probably closer to three.”

I said, “That’s pretty nimble for big guys, even if they weren’t hurt.”

Grace nodded. “If they left a blood trail that long, then they must have been bleeding badly… so you have heavy men who, even if they are very muscular and fit, had to climb up air shafts, scale walls, and run into the hills while injured. And this after they’d killed a dozen men with their bare hands. I’m finding this all a bit hard to accept.”

“Maybe not,” said Church. “I’m leaning toward Captain Ledger’s exoskeleton idea. Some kind of enhanced combat rig that gives them strength and supports their weight.”

“We’re not living in a science-fiction novel,” said Hu. “We’re years away from that sort of thing.”

Bug stared at him. “Um, Doc… you’re defending scientists who can make unicorns and you call an exoskeleton sci-fi?”

Hu conceded the point with a shrug.

“I can’t believe Hack’s gone…,” said Grace hollowly. “For what? For nothing!”

“That’s not true, Grace,” I said. “We may not know the full shape of this thing yet, but we will… and that means that their deaths will matter, because they are part of the process of stopping and punishing whoever did this.”

“Why? To clear the way for some other bloody maniac to do even more harm?”

“No,” I said, “because what we do matters. We take the hits so the public doesn’t. We save lives, Grace. You know that. It’s what soldiers do, and Hack Petersen knew that better than anyone. So did everyone on Jigsaw Team.”

Grace turned away and I knew that she was struggling to control her emotions. “All we ever see is the war,” she said bitterly. “All we ever do is bury our friends.”

I said nothing. The others in the room held their tongues.

There was a knock on the door and the deputy head of our communications division leaned into the room. “Mr. Church… we have another video!”

Chapter Sixty-Six

Hecate was both amused and disgusted by her brother’s weakness. He should be stronger and wasn’t. They were both aware of it, though they never openly spoke of it. By ordinary human standards Paris was a monster of superior skill: smart, careful, vicious, inventive, and cruel. By the standards of their family, he was the weak sister while Hecate was the true predator. Paris had directly murdered six people and had shared in the murders of several women during sex play. Hecate had personally murdered fifty-seven people, not counting the sex partners. Paris knew of nine of her kills. The others were not his concern, though she did nothing outrageous to hide them. Paris knew only as much as he had a stomach to know.

The playtime with the two operatives sent by Alpha and Otto had shown Hecate how weak her brother had become. He hadn’t participated at all. For a while she thought he was going to disgrace himself by throwing up. Even that muscle-brain Tonton had seen it. He asked Hecate about it later, in bed.

“What’s with Mr. Paris?”

Tonton lay under her, his massive frame covered with scratches and red pinpoint bruises. She had used teeth and nails on him. He liked the intensity, and when she could coax a yelp of real pain from him it made Hecate come. She’d come over and over again.

Sitting astride the big man, Hecate shrugged. “Paris has other tastes.”

Tonton ran his rough hands over her small breasts. Her white skin was still flushed to a scalding pink from her last orgasm. He was on the edge of exhaustion, but she still had that fire in her eyes.

“He’s not like you,” murmured Tonton. “No one’s like you.”

Hecate smiled, thinking about how right he was. There was no one on the earth quite like her. Not anymore.

Tonton was only semi-erect, but Hecate moved her hips in a way that had three times changed that. It was taking longer this time. She smiled to herself, thinking, Men are weak.

She decided to throw Tonton a bone. “No one’s quite like you, either, my pet.”

“Nah,” he said. “I’m just another grunt.” It was feeble humility. Though it was true that there were hundreds of Berserkers now, it was equally true that he was physically far stronger than the others. The gene therapy Hecate had given him had brought him to a different level. His muscle mass was 46 percent denser than an ordinary man’s. He was six feet, eight inches tall and carried his 362 pounds of mass as easily as an Olympic athlete. He could do one-arm chin-ups in sets of fifty and he could do those for hours. He could bench-press a thousand pounds without straining. He could climb a redwood tree and snap a baseball bat in half in his bare hands.

Tonton loved his strength. So did Hecate. He was the only one of the Berserkers she allowed into her bedroom, and over the last few weeks he’d gotten that call from her at least four times a week.

“How come Mr. Paris isn’t like you?” he asked as she moved slowly up and down on him. He was hoping to distract her long enough for her to switch off. She may not have limits, but he did.

Hecate had her eyes closed, concentrating on what she was doing, and Tonton thought she wouldn’t answer, but then she murmured, “We’re like lions, my pet.”

“I don’t get it…”

“The males are dumb and lazy and they lay around while the females do all the wet work. We hunt; we kill. We’re the real pride leaders.”

Tonton said nothing.

Hecate opened her eyes and the blue irises were flecked with spots of hot gold. She smiled — at least Tonton thought it was a smile — and in the uncertain glow from the candles her teeth looked strangely sharp. More like a cat’s teeth than he remembered them being.

Hecate said, “All the males do is look pretty and fuck.”

She ran her sharp fingernails over Tonton’s throat and increased the rhythm of her hips.

Tonton understood the message, and tired or not, he did his best to serve the needs of the leader of his pride.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Church logged into his old e-mail account from his laptop and his fingers flew over the keys.

“Same sender as the hunt video,” he said. To the communications officer he said, “Track this back and find out where the user logged on. Do it now.” The officer sprinted out.

We were still reeling from the shock of the news about Jigsaw, but the fact that we might have another clue was like a shot of pure adrenaline. I wanted a scent I could chase down. I wanted someone in my crosshairs. I wanted someone’s throat in my hands. I wanted it so bad I could scream.

Church sent the video to the conference room server and punched keys to display it on the flatscreen. The screen popped with white noise, faded to black, and then we saw the face of a young teenage boy, maybe fourteen. Dark hair, rounded face, a slight gap between mildly buck teeth, and brown eyes that held a look of such comprehensive despair that it chilled me.

“If he finds out that I sent this, he’ll kill me,” said the boy. It was recorded with some kind of stationary camera, maybe a webcam. Grainy and dark, with a weak streaming image. “But I had to try. If you got the other file I sent, then you know what’s going on from what the two Americans said.”

“But the sound kept cutting out,” Bug said. “We could hardly—”

“Shhhh,” said Hu.

“You have to stop them. What they’re doing… it’s…” The kid shook his head, unable to put his horror into words. “I don’t have much time. I stole one of the guards’ laptops, but I have to get it back before they notice I took it. I read Otto’s file, so if you’re who I think you are, then you have to do something before everyone in Africa dies. And maybe more than that. You got to stop them! If you can’t find this place, then see if you can find the Deck. That’s the main lab; that’s what you have to find. I know it’s in Arizona someplace, but I don’t know where. Maybe you can find that out when you get here. And then you have to do something about the Dragon Factory. I don’t know where that is, but Alpha thinks it’s in the Carolinas. I don’t think so because I heard Paris tell his sister that they had to get back to the ‘island.’ I just don’t know which island.”

He paused, looking desperate.

“I don’t even know if I’m making sense. Oh… wait!” He obviously spotted something and darted out of shot. We heard the rustling of paper and then he was back, with a big piece of white paper in his hands. He turned it in a few different directions, trying to orient it, and then turned it around toward the camera. “Can you see this? I think this is us; I think this is the Hive.”

He suddenly stiffened, lowered the paper, and sat with his head cocked in an attitude of listening.

“Someone’s coming. I have to be quick. If you get this, if you come… then broadcast on this frequency.” He read off the numbers. “It’s only short range, but I made it myself. If you’re here, I can help you get past the guards… but you have to be careful of the dogs. The dogs aren’t dogs.”

He turned his head again.

“Oh no! I have to go.”

And with that he punched a button and the screen went blank.

Without waiting for comments Church ran it again and then froze the image on the map.

“Bug,” he shouted, “download that image and find me that island. Now!”

“On it.”

“Grace,” Church said, “prep the TOC. By the time Bug locates that island I want birds in the air.”

The Tactical Operations Center was the mission control room. It had MindReader stations, satellite downlinks that fed real-time images, and was networked into every branch of the military and intelligence network. And I don’t mean just ours… MindReader didn’t give a crap about nationality.

Grace hesitated. “I want to—”

“I know what you want, Grace,” he said, “but it looks like we’re going to have multiple targets. This site… Arizona, and maybe the Carolinas or an island. I need you to prepare Alpha Team for a trip out west.”

As she hurried out, she threw me an evil look. “Teacher’s pet.”

Church looked at me. “You’re up, Captain.”

I leaned across the table. “Church… the kid said that the answers were on the hunt video, but that file sucked and we got maybe one word in twenty. Can you get someone who reads lips? Maybe they can pick up something…”

“Good call. Now—go!”

But I was already running for the door.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Otto Wirths stood at the foot of the bed, his hands clasped behind him so that he could feel the comforting outline of the pistol holstered at the small of his back. He was patient but cautious, and he didn’t say a word. Not while Cyrus Jakoby was throwing a fit. The floor around the bed was heaped with torn bedding; down stuffing was scattered like snow, and tiny feathers floated past Otto’s impassive face. Cyrus had already smashed the twenty-seven vases and ground the exotic flowers under his bare feet. He even had destroyed the portrait of his beloved rhesus monkey. Now he knelt on the floor and used a salad fork to stab one of his doubles to death. And it wasn’t even Tuesday.

The double had long since stopped screaming, though he wasn’t dead yet. Otto thought a salad fork to be an inefficient weapon but conceded that outright murder was not as important to Cyrus as inflicting hurt. Otto waited it out, one finger hooked under the hem of his smock in case he needed to pull the gun.

Cyrus stabbed down again and again.

Then, as if his internal passion triggered some pressure valve, the rage abruptly stopped. Cyrus sagged and slumped, the fork tumbling from his trembling fingers. The double coughed one more time and then he, too, settled into stillness.

Otto took this as his cue to step around the edge of the bed. He caught Cyrus under the arms and gently lifted him to his feet. Cyrus was as passive as a sedated old man and allowed himself to be led over to an armchair. Otto fetched him a glass of water and produced two pills from a cloisonné case he carried at all times in his pocket. One for heart and one for head.

“Take these, Mr. Cyrus,” he murmured, and held the glass as Cyrus washed them down.

Cyrus gasped and shook his head. “I can’t believe it! All of them? Dead?”

“All of them,” Cyrus confirmed. The news had come back to the Deck from one of their pursuit craft. Both infiltration teams had been lost at the Dragon Factory, and the Zodiac with the extraction team had been taken out with a rocket-propelled grenade. The hit was a complete wash.

“Were any of the team taken alive?” All of Cyrus’s people had tiny transponders implanted under their skin. The devices were the size of rice grains and they sent two signals: one for the GPS and another to a biotelemeter. As long as the wearer’s heart continued to beat, the second signal was sent.

“None of the units are still active,” said Otto.

“God damn it! How did the Twins know?”

“Who is to say if they knew at all? They’re quite capable of reacting to an unexpected attack, and we should not be concerned until we know they have connected the attack with us.”

“They’re too smart, damn it.”

Otto tut-tutted him. “Oh, please, Mr. Cyrus… we’re so much smarter than those children. They don’t even know who we are!”

It took a moment for Cyrus to shift gears, but eventually he nodded.

“So!” said Otto sharply. “We have much work to do.”

Cyrus nodded and glanced over at the dead man on the floor. “I’m sorry I killed him,” he said. “Kimball was the best of the doubles.”

“He’s replaceable.”

“Oh, I know that… it’s just that I was saving him for a special occasion.”

“Today is special, Mr. Cyrus.”

Cyrus looked up at him, momentarily confused.

“Today we discovered where the Dragon Factory is located. So what if we didn’t breach it or kill one of the Twins? We know where it is now. Which means that by one method or another we will take it from your young gods and with their computer resources… well, we’ll remake the world.”

Cyrus’s eyes sharpened and he bared his teeth. “I want that facility, damn it, and I want it right now.”

Otto straightened. “Then what do you want to do?”

“Contact your Russian friend. I want as many men as he can provide. Don’t haggle, Otto. Pay him whatever he’s worth, but I want to hit the Dragon Factory with an army. I want to take it away from the Twins.”

“That will take at least a day or two.”

“I want to do it tomorrow at the latest. At the latest, Otto. Do you understand me?”

Otto Wirths smiled. “Yes, Mr. Cyrus, I understand perfectly. But you need to understand that in a full-out assault we can’t guarantee the safety of the Twins. Neither of them.”

Cyrus answered with a sneer. “Then so be it. I made them; I can make more. And I still have the SAMs.”

“Very well.”

“And contact Veder. I want him in on the assault.”

“He doesn’t do team hits.”

“What is the line from that movie? ‘Make him an offer he can’t refuse.’ ”

“If we pull him now, then it’ll delay the final hits. Church and that bitch who calls herself Aunt Sallie.”

“So be it,” Cyrus repeated. “Taking the Dragon Factory is more important. All we need is access to their computers and six or eight hours to trans-load all of their data via satellite to our off-site networked hard drives our friend is supplying. Once that’s done we can hide it even from MindReader.”

Otto looked pleased. “Fair enough.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better make some calls. I’ll have to wake up the Russian.”

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Top and Bunny were still loading their gear into a Black Hawk when my earbud binged and I heard Grace’s voice: “Joe — Bug located the island. MindReader matched the geography to Isla D’Oro, a small island in the Pacific, forty miles due west of Playa Caletas.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Costa Rica. I’ll have him download everything to your PDA. You have flight clearance to the Air National Guard Base at Martin State Airport. From there you’ll switch to an Osprey.”

“They’re slow as hell—”

“Not this one. It’s a prototype being developed for the Navy. Has a cruising speed of six hundred kilometers per hour and a twelve-hundred-mile range, which means you’ll be refueling midair.”

“Where’d you find something like that so quickly?”

“Mr. Church has a friend in the industry. The Osprey is on its way to the air base and should be refueled by the time you touch down.”

“Do we have any local support?”

“I called one of my mates at Barrier and he said that the carrier Ark Royal’s in those waters. The Osprey will put you on their deck, and then you’ll go to the island in a Westland Sea King. You can also have Royal Marines, Harriers, and anything else you need.”

“That’s fast work, Major. I’ll take the ride, but for now let’s go with me, Bunny, and Top. Until we know what’s what, I don’t want to bring in the Light Brigade.”

“I’d rather you took the whole fleet,” she said. “But I can see your point.”

It was clear she wanted to say more, but this wasn’t the time and certainly wasn’t the place. So instead she simply held out her hand. I took it and if we held our clasp a few seconds too long, screw it.

“Good hunting,” she said.

“Thanks.”

The Black Hawk was in the air in under five minutes.

I spread out a map and we gathered around. “This is Isla D’Oro. Gold Island. Supposed to be uninhabited except for a biological research station funded by Swiss grants and managed by a team from the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. We’re looking into that to see if it’s legit. Satellite images tell us there’s a compound with buildings on the island that match with the construction plans filed by the university. Thermals are tricky because the island is mildly volcanic.”

“ ‘Mildly volcanic’?” echoed Bunny. “That anything like ‘somewhat pregnant’?”

“It hasn’t popped its cork in over a century, but there are vents and geothermal activity, so thermals won’t give us a reliable body count. We’ll probably be relying on what we see rather than gadgets.” I tapped the map. “Choppers from the Ark Royal will set us down here. The terrain is rocky with thick foliage. Combat names for the mission and keep the chatter down. Full team on channel two, direct to me on channel one. The TOC command channel is channel three. Call signs only once we hit the ground.”

“What’s the op?” asked Bunny.

“Mission priorities are flexible,” I said. “We look first. If we can find the kid who sent the videos, then we extract him. Everything else after that is based on what we find.”

“Rules of engagement?”

“Nobody gets trigger-happy,” I said, “On the other hand, we’re not flying two thousand miles to take anyone’s shit.”

“Hooah.”

“The USS George H. W. Bush is heading this way in case this really turns into something. The Bush will be in fighter range about two hours after we make landfall. That means ninety fixed-wing and helos ready to pull our asses out of the fire if it comes to it.”

“Wow… it’s nice when Washington likes us,” said Bunny. “Say, boss, what do we do if we run into any of those guys with the body armor?”

“Aim for the head,” said Top. “Always been a fan favorite.”

“Works for me.”

Top took a slow breath. “Cap’n… about Jigsaw…”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t know which team took them out. Russians or the other guys.”

“No.”

“I’m of two minds. On one hand, I want to know who did it and nail their hides to the wall, feel me?”

“Completely.”

“On the other hand, I get either side in my sights I’m not sure I’m going to indulge in a lot of restraint. You have any issues with that better tell me now and make it an order.”

I considered how best to answer that. “Top… Church and the geek squad are working on connecting the dots. We got some new info off the second video, and he has a lip-reader working on recovering info from the hunt video. We’re all hoping that by the time we put boots on the ground in Costa Rica we know who the bad guys truly are.”

“Wasn’t goons in exoskeletons put Big Bob in the ICU,” said Bunny.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Top. “And it wasn’t the goons who killed the staff at Deep Iron. Now… I don’t see how Russian mercs tie into a buncha assholes who still think Hitler’s a role model, but I’m leaning toward them being the ones who need their asses completely kicked.”

“Probably so, but we have to be open to any possibility. Church sent us on an infil and rescue, not a wet work.”

“Okay, Cap’n, loud and clear.”

“Bunny?” I asked.

“You’re the boss, boss.”

For the rest of the flight we went over the information from the conference and I played the second video. I watched their eyes when the kid said, “You have to do something before everyone in Africa dies. And maybe more than that. You got to stop them!”

Top leaned back, folded his arms, and said nothing. Bunny looked at me. “Holy shit. Is this for real?”

“We’ll find out.”

Top took a toothpick from his pocket, put it between his teeth, and chewed it. He didn’t say a word for the rest of the flight.

Chapter Seventy

Aleksey Mogilevich, nephew of Semion Mogilevich, who was the lord of the Red Mafia in Budapest, looked at the name on the screen display of his phone and smiled. He waved away the redhead with the platinum nipple rings and flipped open the phone.

“Hello, my good friend.” He never used names on the phone and preferred calling everyone “friend.” Repeat customers were always his “good friends.”

“Hello, and how is the weather?” asked Otto Wirths. The question referred to the security of the line and any prying ears where Aleksey was.

“Fine weather. Not a cloud in the sky. I hear that you’ve used up all the products I sent.”

“Yes. Unfortunate.”

“There are always more.”

Of the twenty ex-Spetsnaz operatives leased to Otto by Aleksey only one was still alive, but as he was merely a coordinator his value was negligible. Neither Aleksey nor Otto was very broken up over the losses. Assets were assets, to be used and either disposed of or replaced depending on need.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Otto, “because I do need more.”

“How many and how soon?”

Otto told him, and Aleksey whistled. The two girls sunbathing topless on the forward deck of the Anzhelika looked up, thinking that he was signaling them, but he shook his head. He got up and walked along the rail and gazed out into the vastness of the sea.

The yacht was an elegant 173 footer with a 37-foot beam, built by Perini Navi of Italy. The first time Aleksey had been aboard it had been a charter for which he’d paid $210,000 for a single week. He liked it so much he bought the boat after the trip was over. It had a crew of eleven, and though it was slow — twelve knots — Aleksey never needed to be anywhere fast. His business was conducted by satellite and cell phones and computer.

The Anzhelika currently floated in the wine dark waters thirty miles off the coast of Cyprus.

“Can you supply those assets?” asked Otto.

“There is a surcharge for overnight delivery, you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Then… yes. I have assets in Florida who will do nicely.”

“If the assets fulfill my patron’s needs, Aleksey, I’ll send you a five percent bonus on top of that.”

“Ah, it’s always heartwarming to know of the generosity of my good friends.”

They discussed a few details and hung up.

Aleksey watched the beautiful water and the pure white gulls and thought about how wonderful it was to be alive. Then he sat on a deck chair and made calls that would send several dozen of the most vicious and hardened trained killers he knew to the rendezvous point with Otto Wirths. As Aleksey made the calls he never stopped smiling.

Chapter Seventy-One

The chopper from the Ark Royal flew just above the waves and put us down on the far side of the island. We jumped out and faded into the green shadows of the trees until the chopper was far out to sea. We were in full combat rig, with all of the standard equipment plus a few special DMS gizmos. We crouched behind a thick spray of ferns until the jungle settled into stillness. Ambient sounds returned as the birds and bugs shook off their surprise and resumed their perpetual chatter. We waited, ears and eyes open, weapons ready, watching to see if anyone came to investigate.

No one came.

I switched on my PDA and pulled up a satellite image of the island. There was a cluster of buildings on the other side and nothing but dense rain-forest foliage wrapped around a terrain so rough and broken that it looked like an obstacle course designed by a sadist. Gorges, cliffs, broken spikes of old lava rock, ravines, and almost no flatland. All of it sweltering in 102-degree heat and 93 percent humidity. Fun times.

I dialed my radio to the frequency the kid gave us but got nothing but static. Then I tapped my earbud for the TOC channel.

“Cowboy to Dugout, Cowboy to Dugout.”

“Dugout” was the call sign for the TOC. Immediately Church’s voice was in my ear. The fidelity of our equipment was so good it felt like the spooky bastard was right behind me.

“Go for Dugout. Deacon on deck.”

“Down and safe. No signal yet from the Kid.” Not an imaginative call sign for the boy who’d contacted us, but it would do.

“Our friends from abroad wanted me to remind you of their offer of support.”

The Ark Royal and its attendant craft could invade and take a small country, and if we got into a real jam I had no problem calling on them for support.

“Nice to know. Tell them to keep the fires lit, Deacon.”

“Satellite feeds are updated on five-second cycles. Negative on thermal scans. Too much geothermal activity.”

“Copy that. Cowboy out.”

Bunny said, “Wait… I thought this was a dead volcano.”

“No, I said it hadn’t blown up for a while.”

“Swell.”

We set out, moving in a loose line, mindful of the terrain and wary of booby traps. The rain-forest foliage was incredibly dense, and I could see why it would draw the attention of biologists and whoever wanted to hide from prying eyes. There were hundreds of different kinds of trees and thousands of species of shrubs, and I swear there was a biting bug or stinging insect on every single goddamn leaf. I must have lost half a pound of meat and a quart of blood in the first three miles.

“This is some serious bush,” muttered Bunny. He was the only one of us who hadn’t been jungle trained, and he was streaming with sweat. His entire term of service had been in the Middle East. He was also carrying a lot more mass than Top, who was a lean and hard 170, or me at 210.

I kept my radio tuned to the Kid’s channel, but by the time we were five miles in there was still no answer.

Then suddenly the static changed to a softer hiss and a shaky voice said, “Is this Mr. Deacon?”

“Not exactly, Kid. But I work for him. Who are you?”

“How do I know that you work for him?”

“You don’t, but you dealt the play.”

“Tell me something,” he said.

“You first. Say something to let me know I’m talking to the right person.”

After a moment the Kid said, “Unicorn?”

I muted my mike. “Talk to me, Top.”

He was looking at his scanner. “Definitely originating from the island, Cap’n. Three-point-six klicks from here.” He showed me the compass bearing.

With the mike back on, I said, “Okay, Kid.”

“Now tell me something,” he said. The Kid was a quick study.

“Anyone listening?”

“No.”

“Okay… you sent the hunt video from a cybercafe in São Paolo. Second video was from this island.”

“Um… okay.”

“How do you know Deacon?” I asked.

“I don’t. I just know the name. From an old file I stole a look at. Otto and Alpha really hate that guy, so I figured if they hated him that much then he had to be their enemy.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I suggested.

“Old Arabian saying,” the Kid said without pause. “Though it could be Chinese, too. They say it as ‘it is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.’ ”

“You know your quotes.”

“I know military history,” the Kid said, and I noted that he changed the phrasing. He didn’t say, “I know my military history,” which would have been the natural comeback. I filed that away for now.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Are you close?”

“Close enough. You got a name, Kid?”

“Eighty-two.”

“What?”

“That’s my name. But Alpha sometimes calls me SAM.”

“SAM’s a name at least.”

“No,” the Kid said, “it’s not. It means something, but I don’t know what. Alpha calls a lot of us ‘SAM.’ ”

“Who’s Alpha?”

“My father, I guess.”

“You’re not sure?”

“No.”

“Is Alpha his first name or last name?”

“It’s just a name. He makes everyone call him that. Or Lord Alpha the Most High. He’s always changing his name.”

“What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know. But he sometimes goes by ‘Cyrus Jakoby.’ I don’t think that’s real, either.”

The name Jakoby rang a faint bell with me, and I signaled Top to confirm that this was all going straight back to Church at the TOC. He gave me a thumbs-up.

“Does Alpha run this place?”

“Him and Otto. But they’re not here right now.”

“Who’s Otto?”

“Otto Wirths is Alpha’s — I don’t know — his manager, I guess. Foreman, whatever. Otto runs all of it for Alpha. The Hive, the Deck… all of it.”

My pulse jumped. Otto Wirths. There had been a reference to a “Herr Wirths” in Mengele’s letter. Could this guy be related? There had to be some connection. We were actually getting somewhere, though I still didn’t know exactly where. Bug kept scanning the woods around us for thermal signatures, and the readings stayed clean.

“How old is this Otto character?”

“I don’t know. Sixty-something.”

Too young to have been at the camps. Son, nephew, whatever.

I glanced at my team. They were all listening in and I saw Bunny mouth the word, Eighty-two.

“Why don’t I just call you Kid for now? A call sign. You know what that is?”

“Yes. That’s okay. I don’t care what people call me.”

“And you’re sure no one else can hear this call?”

“I don’t think so. I made this radio myself. I picked the frequency randomly before I sent that e-mail.”

“Smart,” I said, though in truth anyone with the right kind of scanner could conceivably find the signal. However, they would have to be looking, and in the digital age not as many people scan the radio waves. Even so, I said, “Okay, Kid. Call me Cowboy. No real names from here on out.”

“Okay… Cowboy.”

“Now tell us why we’re here. What’s this all about?”

A beat.

“I already told you—”

“No, Kid, you sent us a video with almost no audible sound. We saw the ‘animal,’ but that’s all we know.”

“Damn!” the Kid said, but he put a lot of meaning in it. “You don’t know about Africa? About Louisiana? About any of it?”

“No, so tell us what you want us to know.”

“There’s not enough time. If you come get me, maybe we can take the hard drives. I’m sure everything’s there. More than the stuff I know about. Maybe all of it.”

“You’re being a bit vague here, Kid. If you want us to help you, then you have to help us out. We know where you’re broadcasting from, but we need some details. Are there guards? If so, how many and how are they armed? Are there guard dogs? Electric fences? Security systems?”

“I… can’t give you all of that from here. I’ll have to sneak into the communications room. I can access the security systems from in there and can watch you on the cameras.”

“Go for it. How long do you need?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Once I’m in there I’ll have to lock myself in. They’ll know I’m there. They’ll break in eventually. If you don’t get here by the time they get to me, then I’m dead.”

Kid had a point.

“Terrain’s rough. It’ll take us forty minutes to get to your location safely. How far out are the first cameras?”

“Six hundred yards from the fence.”

Top held out his PDA. He magnified the satellite display of the compound so we could see the thin lines of a double fence.

“Okay, Kid, what’s our best angle of approach? What will keep us safe and give you the most time?”

“I can’t describe it—”

“We’re looking at a satellite image of the compound. Describe a building and I can find it.”

“Oh. Okay, there’s three small buildings together on the top of a hill and a bunch of medium-sized buildings in a kind of zigzag line sloping down toward the main house.”

“Got ’em.”

“That’s all maintenance stuff. Come in on the corner of the fence. The camera sweeps back and forth every ninety-four seconds, with a little twitch when turning back from the left. I think it has a bad bearing. If you wait for it to swing to the left, you should be able to get from the jungle wall to the fence. The camera is angled out, not down.”

“That’s pretty good, Kid. Better get off the line. Contact me again when you’re in place,” I said. “And, Kid… good luck.”

“You, too.” He paused, then added, “Cowboy.”

Chapter Seventy-Two

Otto Wirths sat on a wheeled stool and watched as Cyrus Jakoby’s fingers flowed over the computer keys. Cyrus was the fastest typest Otto had ever seen, even when he was writing complex computer code, inputting research numbers, or crafting one of the codes they used to protect all of their research. It was hypnotic to see all ten fingers merge into a soft blur that was streamed like water. Otto found it very soothing.

They were at their shared workstation, which could be invisibly networked to any and all stations here at the Deck or at the Hive but which could also be hidden behind an impenetrable firewall when the need for secrecy was greatest.

Like now.

The sequences Cyrus was currently writing were the distribution code that would be sent to key people positioned around the world. People who were poised to accomplish certain very specific tasks. Some would begin the distribution of bottled water as part of the faux promotional giveaway to launch a new international competitor in the growing bottled-water market. The company was real enough, and there were several hundred employees on the payroll who truly believed they worked for MacNeil-Gunderson Water-Bottling. Legitimate advertising companies had been hired to create a global campaign for the release of the water under a variety of names, including Global Gulp, GoodWater, Soothe, Eco-Splash. Celebrities had been hired to endorse the water, including two Oscar winners who were widely regarded for their support of the environment and a dozen professional athletes from six countries. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of the water had been promised to fledgling sports teams in developing countries and in the inner cities throughout the United States. After the initial “free giveaway,” a portion of the regular sale price of the water would be donated to several popular ecology groups. Those payments would actually be made… until the world economy began to collapse and chaos set in. The IRS could audit any of the companies connected with MacNeil-Gunderson Water-Bottling and every cent would be accounted for.

Another group of key people would receive a code command from Cyrus to distribute bottles of water at specific locations throughout Africa, Asia, and the Americas. And then there were the operatives who would dump gallons of pathogen-rich fluid directly into rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.

And codes would be sent to the team of software engineers who had designed what Cyrus called the Crash and Burn e-mail virus that would send hundreds of thousands of infected e-mails to the CDC, WHO, the NIH, FEMA, and dozens of other disaster response and management agencies. The viruses were unique and poised to launch in waves so that as one was taken down another would go out. None of the organizations would be totally disabled, but all that was required was confusion and slower reaction time. Once the Wave was in motion it would no longer matter what those organizations did. It would be too late.

In all, 163 people would receive a unique coded “go” order sent by the trigger device. The go order would arrive in a coded form, and if no cancel order was sent the program embedded in the message would automatically decode the message and present a clear and unambiguous order to proceed with the release. The fail-safe had been Otto’s idea. There had been too many delays to rely on an absolute go/no-go code signal. And Cyrus was, they both had to admit it, mad as a hatter. A lot of careful planning would be ruined by Cyrus sending a release order during one of his radical mood swings.

The code Cyrus was writing would be saved on a flash drive that had a miniature six-digit keypad. The keypad code on this trigger device would be changed daily by Otto, whose memory was sharper than Cyrus’s, and they both knew it. They still had to decide between them who would wear the trigger device on a lanyard around his neck. Cyrus felt that as the Extinction Wave was his idea it should be him. Otto agreed that Cyrus deserved to be the one to activate the trigger, but he did not trust Cyrus’s mood swings. The last thing they needed was for Cyrus to fly into a rage and smash it with a hammer or on a whim feed it to one of the tiger-hounds.

That could be sorted out later.

At the moment, however, Otto let himself become lost in the flow of Cyrus’s clever fingers as they constructed the release code and built its many variations. Otto smiled a dreamy smile as he watched this little bit of magic that would serve as the link between the dream of the New Order and its reality.

Chapter Seventy-Three

The terrain directly around the compound was less treacherous, so it only took twenty-two minutes to get into position. There was nothing from the Kid, so we waited. The next eight minutes crawled by. We listened for shouts or screams from inside the compound; we listened for gunfire; we listened for anything that would indicate that SAM had been discovered. The jungle, though far from silent, simply sounded like a jungle. And then suddenly there was a wail of a siren.

Then SAM’s voice whispered to me, “Cowboy…? Are you there?”

“We’re here, Kid. Where are you?”

“In the communications room. I started a fire in the laundry room at the other end of the compound. Everyone went running. I don’t have a lot of time before they come back.”

“Then let’s move this along.”

“All the cameras are on, but I can’t see you. Can you stand up or something?”

“Not a chance.” But I signaled to Bunny to shake a tree. He grabbed a slender palm, gave it a couple of quick jerks, and then moved off away in case it drew fire.

“Was that you?” the Kid asked.

“Yes. Now what do we do?”

“I’m the only one watching the monitors. You can rush the fence. Don’t worry; I just turned off the electricity.”

“We’re taking you on a lot of faith. You’d better not be screwing with us, kiddo,” I said. I didn’t mention that U.S. and British warplanes would reduce this island to floating debris if this was a trap. The boy seemed to have enough to worry about.

“I’m not. I swear.”

“Hold tight. Here we come.”

We came at the fence at a dead run, running in a well-spaced single file. Top reached the fence first and ran a scanner over it.

“Power’s definitely off. No signs of mines.”

Bunny produced a pair of long-necked nippers and began cutting the chain links. We repeated this at the second fence, then ran fast and low toward the cluster of utility sheds.

“There’s a stone path by the sheds,” SAM said, “but the guards always make sure not to step on it. I think it’s booby-trapped.”

Bunny flattened out by the flagstones and nodded up at me. “Pressure mines. Kid’s sharp.”

“We get through this,” Top said, “we can chip in and buy him a puppy.”

“Guards are coming,” SAM said in an urgent whisper. “To your right.”

We flattened out against the sheds. I had my rifle slung and held my Beretta 92F in both hands. It was fitted with a sound suppressor that you won’t find in a gun catalog. Unlike the models on the market, this had a special polymer baffling that made it absolutely silent. Not even the nifty little pfft sound. A toy from one of Church’s friends in the industry.

Two guards came around the corner. They were dressed in lightweight tropical shirts over cargo pants. They each carried a Heckler & Koch 416 and they were moving quickly, eyes cutting left and right with professional precision. An exterior grounds check was probably standard procedure with any emergency, and the fire SAM started must have been big enough to inspire caution.

I shot them both in the head.

Top and Bunny rushed out and dragged their bodies behind the sheds.

“Holy Jeez!” the Kid said.

“What’s our next move…?”

“There’s a door right at the corner of the first building. All of the buildings are connected to that one by hallways. I cut the alarms on all the doors and blanked out the cameras inside the buildings.”

“You’re making me like you, Kid. What do we do once we’re inside?”

“Um… okay, there are colored lines painted on all the floors. The blue line will bring you to the communications room, but you’re going to have to go through the maintenance pod and then the common room. It’s like a big lobby, with chairs and soda machines and a coffee bar. If you go straight across that, you’ll see the colored lines start again. Keep following that.”

“Roger that, Kid.”

“Wait!” There was some rustling noise and then he came back, breathless. “I think they’re coming back!”

“Can you lock yourself in until we get there?”

“The door’s just wood. They’ll kick it in.”

“Is your radio portable?”

“Yes. I rigged a headset.”

“Then get your ass out of there. Find someplace to hide. We’re going to have to make some noise.”

“God…”

“Are there any civilians we need to worry about? Any good guys?”

“Yes!” he said immediately. “The New Men. You’ll be able to spot them… they’re all dressed the same. Cotton pants and shirts with numbers on them. Please,” he begged, “don’t hurt any of them.”

“We’ll do our best, but if they offer resistance…”

“Believe me… they can’t.”

He said “can’t” rather than “won’t.” Interesting.

“Anyone else?”

“No… everyone else here is involved.”

“Then get out of there.”

“Okay, but… Cowboy? Watch out for the dogs.”

“What breed and how many?” I asked.

But all I got from the radio was a hiss of static.

“Okay,” I said to Bunny and Top, “pick your targets and check your fire. If anyone surrenders, let them. Otherwise, it’s Bad Day at Black Rock.”

“Hooah,” they replied.

“Now let’s kick some doors.”

Chapter Seventy-Four

The exterior door was steel, so I stepped back as Bunny put a C4 popper on the lock with one of Hu’s newer gizmos — a poloymer shroud that was flexible enough to fold into a pocket but strong enough to catch shrapnel. It was also dense enough to muffle the sound, so when Bunny triggered it the lock blew out with a sound no louder than a cough. The door blew open in a swirl of smoke.

No alarms. Kid’s still batting a thousand so far.

I led the way inside.

The hallway was bright with flourescent lights and stretched sixty feet before hitting a T-juncture. There were doors on both sides. Everything was conveniently marked, and it was clear that this corridor was used by groundskeepers and technicians. Most of the rooms were storage. The left-hand rooms had bags of chemical fertilizer, shovels and garden tools, racks of work clothes. The right-hand rooms included a small machine shop, a boiler room, and a changing room for support staff. There were plenty of clothes and I debated having my guys change into them, but I didn’t. My gut was telling me that we were fighting the clock here, so we tagged each doorway with a paper sensor pad set below the level where the eye would naturally fall. The sensors had an ultrathin wire and a tiny blip transmitter. We peeled off the adhesive backing and pressed them over the crack in the door opposite the hinge side. If anyone opened the door, the paper would tear and a signal would be sent to our scanners. Simple and useful.

We found one room in which a large piece of some unidentifiable equipment hung from a chain hoist. From the scattering of tools and the droplight that still burned it looked like a work in active progress. There was no one around. Everyone must have gone to investigate the fire the Kid had set and, like most employees would, was probably stalling before heading back to work.

I still had the Beretta in my hands and we moved through a building that was empty and silent.

That all changed in a heartbeat.

Two men rounded the right-hand side of the T-juncture while we were still twenty feet away. Both wore coveralls stained with grease, and I knew they had to be the mechanics working on the equipment. They were deep in conversation, speaking German with an Austrian accent, when they saw us. They froze, eyes bugging in their heads, mouths opened in identical “ohs” of surprise as they stared down the barrels of three guns. I put the laser sight of my Beretta on the forehead of the bigger of the two men and put my finger to my lips.

All he had to do was nothing. All he had to do was stay silent and not try to be a hero.

Some people just don’t get it.

He half-turned and drew a fast breath to scream and I put one through his temple. Top took the other with two side-by-side shots in the center of his chest. They hit the floor in a sprawl.

If Lady Luck would have cut us a single frigging break we’d have been past them and into the complex within a few seconds. But she was in a mood today. There were other people behind them, out of our line of sight, farther down the side corridors.

People started screaming.

Then people started firing guns.

A moment later the alarms sounded.

So much for stealth.

Chapter Seventy-Five

The three businessmen from China stood wide-eyed and slack jawed, all pretenses at emotional aloofness lost in the moment. Behind the glass, perched on the twisted limb of a tallow tree, its wings folded along the sleek lines of its sinuous body, was a dragon.

The creature turned its head toward them and stared through the glass for a long minute, occasionally flicking its flowing whiskers. It blinked slowly as if in disdain at their surprise.

One of the men, the senior buyer, broke into a huge grin. He bowed to the dragon, bending very low. His two younger associates also bowed. And just for the hell of it Hecate and Paris bowed, too. It might help close the deal, though both of them knew that this deal was already closed.

“Does… does…,” began the senior buyer — a fat-faced man named Chen—“can it…?”

Paris smiled. “Can it fly?” He reached out and knocked sharply on the window. The sudden sound startled the dragon, and it leaped from its perch, its snow-white wings spreading wider than the arm span of a tall man, and the creature flapped away to sit in a neighboring tree. The enclosure was designed for maximum exposure, so even though the dragon could move away, it couldn’t hide.

Chen murmured something in Mandarin that Paris did not catch. Neither of the Twins could speak the language. All of the business with these buyers had been conducted in English.

“How?” said Chen in English, turning toward the Twins.

“Bit of a trade secret,” said Paris. He was actually tempted to brag, because the creation of a functional flying lizard was the most complicated and expensive project he and Hecate had undertaken. The animal in the enclosure was a patchwork. The wings came from an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body was mostly a monitor lizard. There were a few other bits and pieces of genes in the mix, and so far the design had been so complicated that most of the individual animals had died soon after birth or been born with unexpected deformities from miscoding genes. This was the only one that appeared healthy and could fly.

The really difficult part was designing the animal for flight. It had the hollow bones of a large bird and the attending vascular support to keep those bones healthy. They’d also had to give it an assortment of genes to provide the muscle and cartilage to allow it to flap its wings. Unfortunately, they had not identified the specific gene — or gene combinations — that would give it an instinctive knowledge of aerodynamics. So they’d spent hours with it in an inflated air room of the kind used at carnivals and kids’ parties, tossing the creature up and hoping that it would discover that those great leathery things on its back were functional wings. The process was frustrating and time-consuming, and the animal had only recently begun flapping, and the short flight it had just taken was about the extent of its range. More like a chicken thrown from a henhouse roof than a soaring symbol of China’s ancient history. The heavy foliage in the enclosure helped to mask the awkwardness of its flight. The entire process had been a bitch. A forty-one-million-dollar bitch. And the damn thing was a mule, unable to reproduce.

But at least it was pretty, and it more or less flew. Paris hoped it would live long enough for them to sort out all of the genetic defects so they could actually sell one. This one was display only. A promise to get the Chinese to write a very, very large check.

Paris thought he could hear the scratching of the pen even now.

The three Chinese buyers stood in front of the glass for almost half an hour. They barely said a word. Paris was patient enough to wait them out. When the spell finally lifted — though they still looked quite dazed — Paris ushered them to a small table that had been set with tea and rice cakes. The table had a view of the dragon, but it wasn’t a great view. That was Hecate’s suggestion.

“If they can’t see the damn thing,” she’d said, “they’ll get impatient. They’ll want to close the deal so they can go back and gape at it.”

Paris liked the tactic.

Before the tea was drunk, before it had even begun to cool, the buyers had placed an order for three full teams of Berserkers. The total purchase price was the development price of the dragon with a whole extra zero at the end. The Chinese had been too dazzled and distracted to do more than token haggling.

The deal closer was Paris’s promise to provide them with a dragon of their very own. Just as soon as they managed to make another one. Which, as far as he was concerned, was a couple of days before Hell froze over.

Chapter Seventy-Six

Four guards rushed the corner and they did it the right way, laying down a barrage to stall us and then putting just enough of themselves around the corner to aim their guns high and low. It was nice.

I threw a grenade at them.

We ran through the smoke and screams and took the corner ourselves. The side corridor was choked with people who were fleeing back from the blast, tripping over one another, trampling the fallen, getting in the way of armed resistance. The opposite side corridor led to a ten-foot dead end and a closed door.

“Pick your targets!” I called as I aimed and fired at a guard who had taken a shooter’s stance and was bringing his weapon to bear. My shot spun him as he pulled the trigger and his first — and only — shot punched a red hole through the leg of a hatchet-faced woman who was screaming into a wall-mounted red security phone. The woman shrieked in pain, but as she fell she pulled a .32 from a hip holster. Bunny put her down for the count.

I heard a yell and a barrage from the other end and then I was too busy for chatter as more security began forcing their way through the flood of panicking workers. These boys had shotguns and H&K G36s and they opened up at us even though some of their own people were in the way. A whole wave of civilians went down in a hail of bullets, and we had to duck for cover because there were ten of the sonsabitches.

“Frag out!” yelled Top and he and Bunny threw a pair of M67s. Most soldiers can lob the fourteen-ounce grenades up to forty feet, and then they’d better take cover, because the M67s have a killing radius of five meters, though I’ve seen them throw fragments over two hundred meters. We hunkered down around the corner and the blast cleared the hallway completely.

When I did a fast-look around the corner I saw drifting smoke, tangles of broken limbs, and no movement at all.

We got up and ran, leaped over the dead, avoided the dying, blocked out the screams, and plowed through the clouds of red-tinged smoke. A man leaned against a wall, trying to hold his face on with broken fingers. The blast had torn his clothing and blood splashed the rest, so I couldn’t tell if he was a technician or guard. He threw us a single despairing look as we passed, but there was nothing we could do for him.

The corridor opened into a big central lobby set with exotic plants and cages of wild birds. Technicians were running everywhere creating a wild pandemonium, tripping over couches and jamming the exits so that no one got through. A knot of a dozen guards burst through a set of double doors. A big blond guy with a lantern jaw and killer’s eyes was clearly in charge, and he knew what he was about. He used the noncombatants as human shields to close with us and we had to either shoot the technicians or take unanswered fire.

I don’t remember seeing “martyr” in my job description, but even so I didn’t want to kill anyone who didn’t need to die. It was a terrible situation that got very bad very quickly.

“Boss…?” called Bunny.

The guards were taking shooting positions behind the screaming staff members.

If we fell back and got into a range war with these jokers we could be here all day, and we had no idea how many more shooters they could call on. It was balls out or beat it, so I did the one thing the guards did not expect: I attacked them, up close and personal. I knew my team would follow my lead.

The blond guy was behind a pair of women who crouched and plugged their ears and screamed, but he was too far away, so I zeroed the closest gun and I rammed my gun into his gut and fired twice. The impact jerked him a foot off the ground and I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and spun my body hard and took him with me. He hit the guy behind him hard enough to put them both on the cold terrazzo floor, and I stamped down on the second guy’s throat.

To my left Top had closed to zero distance with a pair of shooters, and he used the same stunt as them — keeping the staff between their guns and his skin. When he was close he chucked a technician hard under the chin with the stock of his M4, and as he collided with the shooters Top shot over the falling man and hit one guard dead center. The other guard lost his gun in the collision, but he tossed the technician aside and lunged out and grabbed Top by the throat. I could see Top actually smile. Here’s a tip: never grab a good fighter with both hands, because he can hit back and you can’t block. Top dropped his chin to save his throat and put the steel-reinforced toe of his combat boot way too far into the bad guy’s nuts. Bones had to break on that kick. Top slapped away the slackening grip on his throat and chopped the stock of the rifle down on the back of the guard’s neck. Knocking him out was probably a mercy.

I saw movement to my right and I pivoted and ducked as one of the guards came around a thick potted fern and tried to put his laser sight on me. His face exploded and I saw Bunny give me a wink.

More people were flooding into the lobby. It was like trying to stage a firefight in the middle of a soccer riot. There had to be a hundred screaming people around us.

I dropped two more guys and my slide locked back. I dropped it and was reaching for another mag when the big blond guard and two others came at me in a fast three-point close. If I retreated they’d have closed around me like a fist, so I drove right at the closest of them, a red-haired moose with missing front teeth. I slapped his gun hand aside with the back of my gun hand and then checked the swing to chop him across the bridge of the nose with the empty pistol. That knocked him back into me, and as his back hit my chest I pivoted like an axle, whipping us both in a tight circle that allowed me to throw him at the man in the middle. It would take the redhead a second to disentangle himself and I used that second to lunge forward and bashed him in the crotch with my pistol. I didn’t care if that hurt him, but I wanted to stall him in place; then I slammed the butt of the pistol down onto the top of his foot, feeling the metatarsals snap. Before he could even scream I shot back to my feet and put every ounce of weight and muscle I had into a rising palm strike that caught him under the chin and snapped his head back so far and so fast that he was out before he hit the ground. Maybe hurt, maybe dead, maybe I didn’t give a shit.

The middle guy — the big blond — pushed his companion away. He’d lost his gun in the collision and as he stepped toward me he whipped a Marine KA-BAR out of a belt holster. I have a whole lot of respect for that knife, and he held it like he knew how to use it.

The KA-BAR has an eleven-and-three-quarter-inch blade with a seven-inch sharpened clip. The point was a wicked dragon’s tooth that could pierce Kevlar like it wasn’t there. The Marines and Navy have been using it since World War II, and in the hands of an expert it has all the bone-cutting force of a Bowie knife, coupled with wicked speed. I whipped my Wilson Rapid Response folding knife out of my pocket and with a flick of the wrist snapped the blade in place. Yeah, I know it only has a three-and-three-quarter-inch blade that looked like a nail file compared to the KA-BAR, but like they say, it’s not the size of the ship but the motion on the ocean.

The blond guy — he had a name tag on his shirt that read: “Gunther”—began circling right and left, trying to force me to move with him. He kept cutting his angles and each time he changed direction he bent his elbow a little more to make me think he was staying at the same distance while actually moving closer. It was a nice trick that I’d used myself.

He suddenly lunged, taking a very fast half step forward and jabbing at my knife arm with the point of his blade. It was an expert’s trick. Idiots try to stab in a knife fight, and though they can sometimes bury a blade, it leaves the other guy free to deliver cut after cut before the wound takes them. This guy went for a “pick,” a micro-jab to try to injure my knife arm and take away both my offensive and defensive capabilities right away. He was lightning fast and I had to really move to evade the pick.

I circled left and he tried it again, this time going lower and deeper before flipping his blade up, the idea there being to cut me with the clip as he pulled his blade back. Another smooth move.

I was ready for him, though, and as he lunged in and back I did a tap-down with the curve of my blade. My knife was very light, so I had to use a wrist flick to give it enough weight to cut, but I could feel the edge tap bone. Blood drops danced in the air as he pulled his hand back.

The pain and surprise showed on his face, but he went immediately into another attack, this time doing a double fake and pick that caught me on the elbow and left a burning dot of pain where the flesh was thinnest.

The panic still roiled around us, but if either of us split his focus he was a dead man. I knew that my squad was doing their job. Top and Bunny were in the thick of it, but it took a whole lot of guys to outnumber that duo.

Gunther’s eyes held mine, and I knew that he was relying — as I was — on peripheral vision to pick his moves and his targets. We stayed in motion, always on the balls of our feet, moving like dancers in a complex and dangerous piece of choreography. When he moved, I moved; when I moved, he moved. The blades flicked out and back. Twice steel hit steel, but each time it was a glancing parry.

When you’re fighting an expert you can win if the other guy gets emotional, if he makes a mistake, or if you bring something to the game that he doesn’t. So far Gunther wasn’t letting his emotions drive the car, and he hadn’t made a single mistake. He was bleeding from three nicks; I was bleeding from four.

He shifted to the right and then faked back and tried for a face slash, turned that into another fake, and went into a half crouch to try to slash me across the femoral artery. The high fake almost always makes you lean backward to slip the cut, and that raises your guard away from your lower torso, exposing groin and thigh. It was beautiful; it was textbook.

It wasn’t the right move to use on me.

When he went for the face cut I knew it was a fake. Gunther hadn’t made a mistake — he just picked the wrong guy to try this move on. As he dropped low and went for the long reach toward my thigh I dropped with him so that his blade skittered across the gear hanging on my belt. I mirrored the arc of his cut with my own, shadowing his recoil so that my knife followed him all the way back, but I went deeper and drove the tip of my knife into the soft cleft between the bottom of his inner biceps and the upper edge of the triceps. My blade only went half an inch deep, but that was enough to open a pinhole in his brachial artery. From the way pain flashed across his face I knew that I’d nicked the medial nerve, too.

Gunther tried to switch hands, and maybe he was a good left-handed knife fighter, too, but he knew as well as I did that the moment had moved away from him. It’s a terrible thing when one feels his combat grace deserting him. It takes the heart out of you in an instant.

He shuffled backward to make the hand-to-hand exchange, but I jumped forward and my cut was deep and long and it took him across the throat. I had to spin out of the way of the arterial spray. He went down and I spun back into the fight, shaking off the knife, scanning the floor for my pistol, bending, pulling a new magazine, slapping it in, and all of it before Gunther had finished falling.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

An aide came tearing down the hallway to the private alcove where Cyrus and Otto shared a huge and complex computer workstation. Intruding into this area was forbidden without a call or advance warning via e-mail, and more than one employee had been summarily executed for an infraction of one of Cyrus’s strictest rules. However, the words the aide shouted as he pounded on the door wiped all thoughts of punishment out of their heads.

“They’re attacking the Hive!”

Otto and Cyrus leaped to their feet demanding answers.

“It’s on the central channel!” cried the aide, and Otto hit the buttons that sent the audio feeds to his speakers.

“… message repeats… a team of armed men is attacking the Hive. They’ve penetrated the perimeter and are in the building. We’re taking heavily casualties. Please advise; please advise.”

Cyrus gasped. “It’s the Twins! It has to be…”

“How could they—?”

“They must have taken the team that we sent. Pinter and Homler both know about the Hive.”

“They’re trained operatives,” argued Otto. “They’d never talk.”

“That witch Hecate… my darling daughter… could make Satan himself give up the secrets of Hell and you damn well know it.”

Otto waved the aide away and slammed the door to the alcove.

“We have to move fast,” Otto said.

“But we have to make the right move,” countered Cyrus. “This will be a team that they’ve sent. If they’re doing this much damage, it must be one of the Berserker squads.”

Otto nodded. “Then they won’t be there in person. Paris doesn’t have the balls for fieldwork, and Hecate is too smart. Even so, the Berserkers aren’t totally stupid. They’re smart enough to tear a hard drive out of a computer. We can’t allow the Twins to see what’s on those computers. I don’t trust that they’d let the Extinction Wave go forward.”

“I know they wouldn’t. They’re not truly gods,” Cyrus said with grief and regret in his voice. “We have no choice; we have to use the fail-safe…”

Otto stepped around the workstation and put his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder.

“Mr. Cyrus,” he said kindly. “My friend… Eighty-two is at the Hive.”

Cyrus’s eyes went wide for a moment and then he closed them as the reality of that drove nails of pain into his heart.

“No…”

Otto squeezed Cyrus’s shoulder and sat down. With a few keystrokes he called up the security command screen that would activate the Hive’s fail-safe system. He sent two sets of code numbers to Cyrus’s screen. One activated the fail-safe and the other simply detonated the communication centers and hardlines that connected the Hive to the Deck.

“It’s come down to this,” he said softly. “Either we let the Twins see what we’ve been doing and risk having them stop us — and they could stop us — and then the mud people get to survive and the dreams of the Cabal and everything we’ve worked toward for seventy years will be wrecked, or you choose the boy who will make you immortal. That’s the choice. The Extinction Wave or the boy.”

Cyrus shook his head. He stared blindly at the screen, tears in his eyes.

“Eighty-two has my heart,” he said. “He has my soul.”

Otto said nothing.

“Please, God… give me a choice between the Twins and Eighty-two, but not this…”

“Were going to run out of time,” Otto said. “You have to make a choice.”

Cyrus wiped the tears from his eyes and sniffed. When he lifted his hands to place his fingers over the keyboard they felt like concrete blocks.

“Cyrus…,” murmured Otto.

Cyrus used the cursor to select one of the codes.

He closed his eyes, squeezing them against a fresh wave of tears.

And hit “Enter.”

Chapter Seventy-Eight

It was a slaughterhouse. I went through another magazine with the Beretta before holstering it and switching to the M4. More guards crowded into the lobby from the far side, but they paused for a moment when they saw that the floor was littered with bodies. Some of them were people who had wisely dropped and covered their heads to stay out of the line of fire; the rest were dead. Bunny laid down some cover fire for me as I made a dash for a heavy counter on the far side of the lobby. I felt the wind and heard the buzz of a few close shots from guards who were crouched down behind a conversational grouping of couches and overstuffed chairs. I jumped into a diving roll and came up into a kneel, pivoted, and laid my shoulder against the side of a hardwood counter. Bunny was behind a Coke machine and Top had faded to the far side of the lobby and was shooting from behind a decorative column.

Echo Team formed three sides of a box, with the guards at the far corner. There were seven of them, and for a moment all we exchanged were wasted bullets. I had one fragmentation grenade left and a couple of flash bangs, but the lobby was half the size of a football field. To reach them I’d have to stand up and really put some shoulder into it, and I didn’t like my chances of being able to walk away from that. The remaining guards were dishearteningly good shots.

I tapped my earbud. “Who has a shot?”

Nobody did.

Bullets tore into the counter, knocking coffee cups into the air and splashing me with hot coffee and creamer. The coffee burned, but none of the bullets penetrated. I knocked on it. Steel in an oak sheath. I shoved my shoulder against the counter and was surprised when the heavy piece of furniture moved almost two inches. Not bolted down, and it must have little casters on it. Sweet.

“I’m trying something,” I said in the mike, “so make sure I have cover fire when I need it.” I threw my weight against the counter. It slid easily and moved four feet, the metal casters sounding like nails on a blackboard.

“Copy that, boss.”

The guards saw what I was doing and concentrated their fire at me, but to little effect. The steady bullet impacts slowed me, but I kept going, shoving the counter across the terrazzo floor. I kept praying to whichever god was on call that these guys didn’t have any genades.

“We got a runner, boss,” said Bunny and I peered around the edge to see one of the guards break from cover and race to the far wall. There was a series of pillars there and if he could get to them he could inch his way up on my blind side.

“Got him,” said Top, and the runner suddenly spun sideways and went down. With all of the other gunfire I never heard the shot.

I kept pushing the counter until I was thirty feet out. None of the other guards tried the same end-run stunt, but I could heard the squawk from walkie-talkies and I knew that they were calling up all the reinforcements they could. This was taking way too long,

“It’s fourth and long,” I growled. “Make some noise.”

My guys really poured on the gunfire and for a moment it forced the guards down behind their cover. A moment was all I needed. I pulled the pin on the frag grenade and risked it all as I rose to a half crouch and threw it. Then I flattened down just as the blast sent a shock wave that slammed the counter into me.

There was one last burst of gunfire as a guard, blind from shrapnel and flash burned, staggered out on wobbling legs and emptied his gun in the wrong direction. Top put him down and the lobby was ours.

“Move!” I yelled, and I scrambled out from behind the counter and made a dead run for the far end of the lobby. Bunny was behind me and Top came up slower, keeping a distance so he could work long-range visuals.

At the far end of the lobby we peered down a wide hall that curved around out of sight. Now that the thunder of the gunfire was over I realized that the alarm Klaxons had stopped. The lobby and hallway were eerily silent.

I tapped the command channel. “Cowboy to Dugout.”

There was no answer. Bunny tried it, same thing.

Top looked at his scanner. The little screen was a haze of white static.

“We’re being jammed.”

Two things happened in short sequence, and I didn’t like either one.

First the lights went out, plunging the lobby into total darkness.

And then we heard something growl in the darkness. Behind us.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

The man on the radio — the one who called himself Cowboy — had told him to run and hide. He almost did. When he heard the voices in the hallway, Eighty-Two grabbed his portable radio and fled the communications center and ran down two side corridors and across the veranda, back in the direction of his room.

The problem was that the guard quarters were between the communications room and the main house. He skidded to a stop at a juncture of corridors, torn by indecision. In the distance he heard gunfire and then screams. And then alarms. These weren’t the fire alarms that had gone off when he’d sent his diversionary fire. No, these were the heavy Klaxons to be used only in the more extreme emergencies.

The Americans were attacking.

The thought sent a thrill through Eighty-two’s chest. He started toward his quarters again but stopped after a single step.

What if he ran into Carteret on the way? When this alarm was going off, Eighty-two was under orders to remain in his room. Everyone on the staff knew that. Guards would probably be at his room now, wondering where he was, and his absence would be relayed to the head guard. Carteret. How could Eighty-two explain his presence on the far side of the compound, in the wrong building? Carteret wasn’t stupid. He’d put the pieces together: a small fire to distract everyone and then a full-scale invasion.

Would Otto have given Carteret orders to kill Eighty-two if there was a danger he’d be taken?

No. Alpha would never allow that.

Then a second thrill went through the boy’s chest and this time it wasn’t excitement — it was terror.

If there was an invasion by government forces — American or otherwise — then their guards would almost certainly have other orders. Orders more crucial to Alpha and Otto’s plans than the life of Eighty-two.

The boy looked down one corridor toward the sealed computer rooms. In there, in the very heart of the Hive, were records of all of the research done here on the island. Years upon years of study of genetics and transgenics, of special surgeries, of breeding programs, of the rape and perversion of nature. Evidence that would put Otto and Alpha away forever. Maybe have them executed.

Then Eighty-two turned and looked down the opposite corridor, back to the House of Screams. That’s where the labs were, and that’s where the bunkhouses for the New Men were.

The Americans were here because of what was in those computers. Even though Cowboy had told Eighty-two that the audio on the hunt video was bad, they must know that something terribly evil was being done here on the island. They’d come to find out what and to stop it. The computer records could save millions.

On the other hand, Otto and Alpha could never risk having the New Men fall into the hands of any government. The worldwide outcry would be like the shouts of outraged angels.

And there was the female.

In Eighty-two’s pocket the stone felt as heavy as an anvil.

He stood and looked down the corridor toward the computer rooms, chewing his lip in dreadful indecision. Then he made his choice.

He turned toward the House of Screams and ran.

Chapter Eighty

We flattened out against the walls and flipped down our night vision. I dropped to one knee and pivoted as I heard a second growl. The lobby went from absolute blackness to eerie green.

“What do you see, boss?” hissed Bunny, who was facing the other way.

“Nothing,” I said, but I could feel something moving in the shadows. We’d left a lot of wreckage behind us, but everything looked still. But there was something and my senses were jangling. The after-echo of the growl played over and over in my head. It wasn’t a dog growl. More like a cat, but not a cat, either. Whatever it was, the growl had been heavy, deep chested. Something big was back there, and it was ballsy enough to stalk three grown men.

“Move,” I said, and began backing away from the lobby. We moved backward five feet, ten, following the curve of the hallway until the lobby was lost to view.

Just as we moved out of sight I thought I caught movement at the extreme range of the night vision, but it was too brief a glimpse. Just a sense of something huge moving on four feet, head low between massive shoulders.

Way too big for a dog.

“What the hell’s on our asses?” Bunny asked in a jittery voice.

“I don’t know, but if it comes sniffing down here I’m gonna kill it.”

“Works for me.”

“Let me know if you get a signal, Top.”

“Roger, but we’re still dead.”

“Lousy fucking choice of words,” muttered Bunny.

The thing behind us screamed.

It was a huge sound, high-pitched and filled with animal hate. Like a leopard, but with too much chest behind it. Then I heard the sharp click of thick nails on the tile.

“Run!” I yelled, and the two of them pounded down the hallway, but I held my ground, raised my Beretta in a solid two-hand grip, and clamped down on the terror that was blossoming in my chest. In the microsecond before the creature rounded the bend the image of the unicorn flashed through my head. If these maniacs could make something like that, then what other horrors had they cooked up in their labs? Horrific images out of legend and myth flashed before my mind’s eye, and then something moved into my line of sight that was far more terrifying than any monster from storybooks or campfire tales.

It ran like a cheetah, with massive hindquarters thrusting it forward as long forelegs that ended in splayed claws reached out to tear at the tiled floor. The monster’s face was wrinkled in fury and its muzzle was as long as a Great Dane’s but contoured like a panther. The eyes were glowing green orbs in the night-vision lenses, but I could see feline slits. It snarled with a mouthful of teeth that were easily as long as the blade of my Rapid Release knife.

I had never seen, never imagined, a creature like this. It was easily as big as a full-grown tiger. From the points of those fangs to the tail that whipped the air behind it, the monster had to be twelve feet, and when it was five yards away it launched more than seven hundred pounds of feral mass into the air right at me.

I heard myself screaming as I fired. I pulled the trigger and fired, fired, fired as I threw myself down and to one side. The creature’s mass was already in the air and it couldn’t turn to track me, but I could feel the wind of its passage over me and I saw the dark blossoms as bullet after bullet punched into it, the big .45 slugs exploding through muscle and meat. I hit it six times and then it was past me, landing hard on the floor, skidding, sliding down the hall in the direction my men had taken, snarling, its claws tearing up floor tiles, smearing the walls with blood.

The monster scrambled to a violent turn and got to its feet, turning fast to face me.

How the hell was it still standing with six bullets in it?

The monster hissed at me and I could see its monstrous shoulders bunching to make another run.

I put the laser sight on its left eye and the creature flinched.

But not soon enough. I put my seventh shot through its eye and my eighth and ninth through the heavy bone of its skull. My slide locked back, the gun empty.

A terrible scream tore the air as the creature fell.

The sound did not come from the dying monster.

This scream came from right behind me.

These animals hunted in pairs.

I threw myself backward, dropping the magazine and clawing another out of my pocket as the second animal came at me out of the swirling darkness. I slapped the magazine into place, but this beast was bigger, faster, and it hit me like a freight train before I could get a round in the chamber or bring the gun to bear.

The impact drove me backward so fast and hard that I had no time to do anything but roll with it and try to hang on to my gun. Claws ripped across my chest, tearing open my heavy shirt and gouging chunks out of the Kevlar. The creature’s own weight kept me alive because it continued to tumble over and past me. I didn’t try to get to my feet; I just jacked the round as the monster twisted around with a screech of claws on tiles and pounced. It landed on me with all of its weight, knocking my night vision off so that the world was black and full of teeth and claws. The sheer weight of it drove the air from my lungs, but I jammed the barrel up until it hit something solid and I pulled the trigger, over and over again.

I heard other shots, the reports overlapping mine, and the monster shrieked in terrible rage and pain.

Then all of its weight slammed down on me.

Chapter Eighty-One

Eighty-two ran as fast as he could. Gunfire echoed through the halls and he thought he heard the screams of the tiger-hounds inside the building. There were eight of them on the island, including two mated pairs that were bigger than Siberian tigers. If they got past the guardhouse and into the House of Screams they would slaughter every last one of the New Men. It had been genetically bred into them to react to New Men as their primary source of prey — something Eighty-two had heard Otto discuss with one of the animal handlers. It allowed them to sell the animals to anyone who had bought sufficient numbers of New Men.

The building was in panic now. White-coated scientists ran past him; cooks and house staff scrambled for any way out of the compound. The sound of gunfire was continuous and there were explosions, too. Eighty-two knew the sounds of arms and ordnance. He recognized the hollow pops of small-arms and rifle fire and the heavy bark of grenades. This was a full-out assault, but there was no way to know who was winning.

He ducked into a closet long enough to try his radio, but all he heard was a high-pitched squeal. A jammer. That would be an automatic response initiated by the compound’s auto defense systems, and the controls for that were in the guardhouse. He’d never be able to shut it off.

Eighty-two shoved the radio back into his pocket and dove back into the hall, turning right and heading for the dormitories where the New Men would be huddled. He could imagine their terror and uncertainty at what was happening. The alarms, the gunfire, the screams of the tiger-hounds.

Would she be there? Would the female be back in the dormitory, or had she been taken to the infirmary after Carteret had finished with her? Doubt made Eighty-two slow from a run to a walk.

And that’s when the man who was following Eighty-two grabbed him by the hair.

Chapter Eighty-Two

Before my guys would risk trying to pull the monster off of me, Top stepped close and put his M4 to its head.

“Firing!” he warned, and popped two through its skull. The body gave a last twitch and then its weight settled even more crushingly down on me. It took Bunny and Top pulling with all their strength and me shoving with hands and feet to rock it sideways so I could scramble out. I felt flattened, and taking a deep breath was a challenge.

Bunny switched on a flashlight and we all stared at the two creatures.

“What the hell are they?” Bunny breathed.

“Dead,” murmured Top.

“Somebody’s been playing with his Junior Gene-Splice Kit,” I said as I swapped magazines. My night vision was damaged and my helmet had been battered into an unwearable shape. The creature’s claws had torn the chest out of my Kevlar and severed two of the straps, and my shirt was covered with blood. I removed the shirt and the Kevlar simply fell to the ground. Great. Now I was in hostile territory in a tank top. That would inspire a lot of personal confidence.

On the upside, the layers of material had kept me from being turned into sliced pastrami. Even so, I was starting to get a case of the shakes. Adrenaline does wonders for you in the heat of the moment, but when the cognitive processes kick in and you realize the enormity of what just happened, that can really do some harm. In the last ten minutes I’d been in a deadly firefight; I’d killed people with guns and a knife and was then attacked by a pair of animals that should exist only in nightmares. None of this felt completely real to me, at least not to the civilized man inside my head. The cop was trying to make sense of it but was having a hard time accepting some of this as real. Only the warrior part of me was calm and in control. The warrior had tasted blood now, and all he wanted to do was take it to the bad guys over and over again.

Bunny nudged one of the dead creatures with his booted toe. “And to think forty-eight hours ago I was playing volleyball on the beach at Ocean City with two blondes and a redhead.”

“Well, at least your life ain’t boring,” said Top. “This here’s an actual monster. Girls love monster slayers. Might get you laid one of these days.”

“Only when you can tell them about it,” Bunny said. “They ask me what I do for a living I have to actually make up boring shit. And it’s hard to make boring stuff up because, let’s face it, fellas, since we signed onto this gig we haven’t exactly been bored.”

“I could use some boredom,” said Top. “I could use a nice long stretch where nobody wants to burn down the world.”

“There’s a train leaving for the nineteenth century,” I said.

Before moving out, we checked our surroundings. The lobby and hallway were totally still. We moved down the hallway. Nothing and no one confronted us this time, and I wondered if the staff had all fled, knowing that the mutant guard dogs were being let off the leash. I wished we still had an operational commlink. This would be a really nice time to ask our British friends on the Ark Royal to send a couple of helos full of backup. They could already be inbound for all I knew. Church was running the TOC, and I doubted he was sitting there watching Dr. Phil, not with our communication down during a firefight.

Around the bend we stopped at a set of heavy double doors. We checked them for trip wires and found nothing, so I cautiously pushed the crash bar and opened one door an inch. The door must have had a tight seal, because once it was open we could hear shouts and commotion. A couple of gunshots, too.

In this part of the building the emegency lights had come on, so we had more than enough illumination. The halls were empty, but there was the kind of debris that indicated panic and urgent flight: dropped clipboards, one low-heeled woman’s shoe, dropped coffee cups. Here and there were smears of blood, probably from people fleeing the lobby fight.

The hallway ran forty feet to another set of heavy double doors that stood open. On the far side of the doorway there were three bodies. They were dead but not from gunfire. Their bodies had been ripped open and torn apart. Big red footprints trailed off down the hall.

“More of those whatever-they-weres,” said Bunny.

“The Kid told us to watch out for dogs,” Top reminded him. “He wasn’t screwing around.”

“Not sure if ‘dogs’ is the word that comes to mind here, Top.” Bunny patted his pockets to reassure himself of his spare magazines. He glanced at me. “What the shit have we stepped into, boss?” asked Bunny.

“I don’t know,” I said. “So let’s find that kid and get some goddamned answers.”

Chapter Eighty-Three

Cyrus Jakoby stood wide legged on the observation deck, his hands clasped behind his back. Grief had given way to cold fury.

The Twins had betrayed him.

The Twins had raided the Hive, had tried to steal his secrets.

The thought twisted like a serpent in his heart. It did not matter that he had sent spies and assassins to the Dragon Factory. It was his right to do as he pleased. He had made the Twins. Gene by gene, he had made them. He owned them and they were his to do with as he pleased. It was bad enough that they thought he was insane and laughable, that they believed that all this time they had held him captive here at the Deck. They had sent Drs. Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to “oversee” his work without having the sense to realize that Otto and Cyrus already owned those men. Just as they owned everyone at the Deck. Those employees of the Twins Otto could not bribe were eventually won over by Cyrus’s charisma and the grandeur of his purposes. The only thing the Twins had kept from him had been the Dragon Factory, and they had been so careful to never let anyone who had ever worked on-site at that facility come to the Deck.

The war of secrets had been waged between Cyrus and his children for seven years, and now it had come to this. The Twins had sent hired mercenaries to invade the Hive.

“Bastards,” he snarled to himself. “Ungrateful little bastards.”

It was not merely the affront that tore at him. He had endured — and pretended not to notice — a thousand slights over the years. The Twins always treated him as if he was a pet scorpion — dangerous but contained. He was disappointed in their dimness of vision. No, the real hurt was that an attack on the Hive meant that the Extinction Plan was in serious jeopardy.

And that Cyrus Jakoby could not allow.

Cyrus felt Otto’s presence and turned. The wizened Austrian looked more predatory than usual.

“Well?” Cyrus demanded.

“I’ve sent the orders. We can put two hundred troops on the ground at the Dragon Factory in twenty-four hours.”

“Good. I want the computer records and then I want it burned to the ground.”

Otto cleared his throat. “The Twins have been handling the distribution of the bottled water. We have to make sure that we can account for every copy of their distribution records. That’s paramount, Mr. Cyrus.”

“Then make it happen,” snapped Cyrus with such heat that even Otto took a half step backward. “Then destroy every stick and stone of that place.”

“What about the Twins?”

Cyrus leaned on the rail and stared down at the animals in the zoo for a long time, and Otto let him work it through. There were times when Cyrus could be handled and even pushed, and there were times when that was like reaching into a tiger’s mouth.

“Try to capture them both, Otto,” Cyrus said at last.

“And if we can’t?”

“Then bring me their heads, their hearts, and their hands. Leave the rest to rot.” His voice was barely a whisper.

A passenger pigeon landed on the rail inches from Cyrus’s hand. Cyrus reached for it and picked the bird up gently. The pigeon tilted its head and stared up at Cyrus with one ink black eye.

“We’re doing God’s work,” whispered Cyrus. “Man is such a polluted and corrupted animal. I’d hoped that Hecate and Paris would be the answer, the next step in the evolution from the trash that humanity has become to the ascended level where he needs to be in order to serve God’s will. I can see now that they are not all that I’d hoped.”

“I—”

Cyrus stopped him with a shake of his head. “No, let me talk, Otto. Let me say this.” He stroked the pigeon’s delicate neck. The bird did not struggle to escape but seemed to enjoy the contact. It cooed at Cyrus, who smiled faintly. “Do you know what makes me saddest, Otto?”

“No, Mr. Cyrus.”

“It’s that I don’t think the Twins would ever understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. They see things in terms of product and profit, and they’ve become mired in that mind-set. It actually matters to them; it actually motivates them. They have no grand schemes. Their highest aspirations to date have been to twist genetics in order to make themselves rich. I… I long ago lost my ability to communicate with them.”

“To be fair, sir, you play a role in that—”

“Yes, but they should have seen through it and glimpsed the higher purpose. Just as we glimpsed through the foolishness of politics and war making to see the divine beauty of eugenics. Clarity is a tool, Otto, just as perception is a test. The Twins were bred to have greater intelligence. Their IQs are on a par with Einstein, with da Vinci. With mine. But… where is their Theory of Relativity? Where is their masterpiece? You might say that they’ve done what no one else has done, that they’ve twisted DNA and turned it to their will, but I say, ‘So what?’ They were given the gift of higher intelligence by design. I started them on a higher level and they should have aspired to more than clever toys for rich fools. There’s no higher purpose in anything they’ve done, or anything they’ve imagined, and by that standard they are failures.”

“We could breed them,” offered Otto.

“Mm. Maybe. But that presents its own risks. No, Otto… I think we were both so enamored of their beauty and by their precociousness that we lost sight of our own plans for them. They are not the young gods of our dreams. Of my dreams.” He drew a breath and let out a long sigh. “If they are both taken, then we’ll harvest his sperm and her eggs and enough DNA to begin the next phase. If either or both are killed, then we’ll have to start with the DNA alone and hope that we can use it for gene therapy on the SAMs. I know this is vain, Otto, but we may not live long enough to see the true race of young gods become flesh. It may be two or three generations away, and it may be the SAMs alone who witness it.”

“I know,” said Otto, and he patted Cyrus on the shoulder.

“Of course,” said Cyrus with a flicker of his old mad delight, “at least we will be here to clear the way for the new gods. We will be here to see the mud people — the blacks and Jews and Gypsies and all of those disgusting mongrel races — wiped away. Not just reduced, but gone for good. We will live to see that!”

Otto glanced at his wristwatch. The numbers were matched to the Extinction Clock. He showed the numbers to Cyrus. “Die Vernichtungs Welle.”

The Extinction Wave.

Those words and the numbers on the clock worked a transformation in Cyrus, whose face changed in a heartbeat from clouds of sadness to a sunburst of great joy.

“Nothing can stop it now,” murmured Cyrus.

“Nothing,” agreed Otto.

Chapter Eighty-Four

The hallway we followed was long and narrow, with doors only on the right-hand side. In one room we found another corpse. The victim was small and thin and had been partially devoured. The head was gone.

“Jesus,” said Bunny, “I hope that ain’t the Kid.”

“I think it’s a woman,” said Top. “Was a woman,” he corrected. “That ain’t our boy.”

Clustered around the body were more animal prints. They were scuffed, but it looked like there were two sizes of them. I pulled the door shut and we kept moving, following the blue line that was supposed to lead us to the Kid. Only I’d told the Kid to go hide, so we might be heading in the wrong direction and we had no way to get in touch with SAM and arrange a better rendezvous. I thought about the headless corpse and hoped Top was right.

We cleared all of the rooms and found no one who looked like a teenage kid. Three times guards came at us. Three times we put them down. And, luckily, we saw no more of those freaking dogs. Or whatever they were.

Suddenly I heard a harsh buzz in my ear and then a voice.

“The jamming stopped. Scanner’s up,” called Top. “Commlink’s back online.”

I switched to the command channel.

“Cowboy for Dugout, Cowboy for Dugout.”

Immediately Grace Courtland’s voice was in my ear. “Dugout here, Cowboy. Amazing on the line. Effing good to hear your voice!”

“Right back atcha.”

“Deacon here, too, Cowboy,” said Mr. Church. “Sit rep.”

I gave it to him in a few terse sentences.

“Medical team and full backup are inbound,” Church said. “Say fifteen minutes.”

“Haven’t found our local friend,” I said, “but contact is iminent. Tell arriving medical staff to watch for animals of unknown type. They look like dogs but are bigger than tigers. We took down two, but they are very — I repeat—very dangerous. This ain’t a petting zoo, so shoot on sight.”

“Roger that,” said Church, and in the background I heard Grace mutter, “Effing hell.” “Cowboy, we have additional intel for you. We put a lip-reader on that hunt video. Most of what we got was worthless, comments on the hunt, the weather, and the mosquitoes. But we hit gold on one conversation when the men in the video had stopped to take a drink from their canteens. We don’t yet understand what we got, but the content is alarming. Sending a transcript to your PDA now.”

“I’ll look later—”

“Unless you are under immediate fire, look now,” said Church.

“Roger that,” I said more calmly than I felt. I pulled my PDA from my pocket and hit some keys. The transcript came up right away. It was a snatch of a conversation between one of the unidentified Americans and Harold S. Sunderland, brother of the senator. It read:

While I listened every drop of my blood had turned to greasy ice water in my veins. I tapped my earbud.

“Is that all there was?”

“Yes,” said Church.

“I can see why the Kid thought we’d be interested.”

“Comments, reactions?”

“It doesn’t exactly fill me with pride.”

“For being a white man?” Grace asked.

“For being a carbon-based life-form. I’d love to have some playtime with both of those jokers.”

“Agreed.”

“How sure was the translator about the phrase ‘Extinction Wave’?”

“Very. What does it suggest to you?”

“The same thing that it suggests to you, boss. Someone’s about to launch a major plague in Africa that will target nonwhites. Is there such a thing?”

“Dr. Hu is working on that. Most of the diseases that sweep Africa are based more on health conditions, lack of food, polluted water. That sort of thing. Diseases focusing on racial groups tend to be genetic rather than viral or bacteriological.”

“The Otto he mentioned has to be Otto Wirths. What did you come up with on him?”

Church said, “Nothing at the moment. We’ve got MindReader working on it. However, we got a hit on the other name the boy gave you. Cyrus Jakoby. If it’s the same man, he’s the father of the Jakoby Twins.”

“As in Paris and Hecate? Those albinos who keep showing up in the tabloids? She can’t keep her clothes on and he’s always getting thrown out of restaurants. Aren’t they scientists of some kind?”

“They’re geneticists, in point of fact. Superstars in the field of transgenics.”

“Well how about that? Any ties to the Cabal or eugenics?”

“Nothing so far. And nothing much on Cyrus Jakoby except a few offhand references the Jakoby Twins made in interviews to the effect that their father was in poor health. MindReader has found twelve Cyrus Jakobys in North America and another thirty-four in Europe. The cross-referencing will take a while, but there are no initial hits or connections to anything that rings a bell.”

“Very well. Let me fetch our young informant and see what kind of intel we can squeeze out of him.”

“He seems to be on our side, Cowboy,” said Grace. “Squeeze lightly.”

“How lightly I squeeze depends on how forthcoming he is, Grace. The words ‘Extinction Wave’ don’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies.”

I signed off.

Bunny said, “ ’Extinction Wave.’ Holy shit. Who thinks up stuff like that?”

“When I meet him,” said Top, “I’m hoping he’ll be in my crosshairs.”

“With you on that.”

There was another burst of static and then a desperate voice said, “Cowboy? Cowboy, are you there?”

It was the Kid and we were back online.

“I’m here, Kid. Where are you?”

“I’m in the House of Screams.”

“Say again?”

“The conditioning lab. Red district. Look at the floor. Follow the red line. It ends right outside where I am. I had to run and then they tried to grab me, but I got away. I—”

Whatever else he was going to say was suddenly drowned out by the roar of gunfire and the sound of a lot of people screaming. Then nothing.

“Kid! SAM…!”

But I was talking to a dead mike.

The red lines on the floor stretched out in front of us.

We ran.

Chapter Eighty-Five

We crashed through another set of double doors that opened on an atrium that was thick with exotic plants and trees in ceramic pots. The plant leaves, the pots, and the floor were all splattered with blood. The floor was littered with shell casings. There were bodies everywhere. The dead were all strangely similar: short, muscular, red-haired, and dressed in cotton trousers and tank tops. None of the dead had weapons on or near them. From what I could see in the split second I had to take in details was that the entry wounds were on their backs as if they’d been gunned down while fleeing.

The atrium was crowded with people. Scores of the red-haired people were fighting to get through an open doorway into a room labeled: “Barracks 3.” A dozen guards stood in a rough firing line, blasting away at the fleeing, screaming people. One guard stood apart. He was a big man with a buzz cut and an evil grin. He was wrestling with a teenage boy who had to be SAM. The Kid was screaming and kicking at the big guy but for all his fury wasn’t doing the guard a lot of harm. The guard even looked amused.

SAM broke free and dug something out of his pocket — a black rock the size of an egg — and then leaped with a howl and tried to smash the guard’s skull with it. The guard swatted SAM out of the air like a bug.

All of this happened in a split second as we pelted across the atrium. Somehow through the gunfire and screams the guards must have heard us. They turned and began swinging their weapons toward us.

“Take them!” I yelled. Easier said than done. With the red-haired people on the far side and the Kid in front, a gun battle was iffy, and we were right on top of them. So we crashed right into them and it was an instant melee.

Bunny hit the line from an angle and it was like a wrecking ball hitting a line of statues. The impact knocked guards into one another, and that probably saved all our lives because suddenly everybody was in one another’s way. Top and I both capped a couple of the guards with short-range shots and then we were up close and personal. Top clocked one guard across the jaw with his M4 and spun off of that to ram the barrel into someone else’s throat.

I went for SAM, but the boy was once more grappling with the big guard. Another guard stepped up and put his rifle to his shoulder. If I’d been five feet farther back it would have been a smart move for him, but I was way too close. I grabbed his rifle and thrust the barrel toward the ceiling and pistol-whipped him across the throat, then gave him a front kick that knocked him down. The guard next to him swung his rifle at me and knocked my pistol out of my hand and damn near broke my wrist. I pivoted and broke his knee with a side-thrust kick, and as he sagged to the ground I chopped him across the throat with the edge of my other hand.

Bunny tore a rifle from one guard’s hand and threw it away, then grabbed the guy by the back of the hair so he could hold his head steady while he landed three very fast hammer blows to the nose. The man was a sack of loose bones, so Bunny picked him up and slammed him sideways into the chests of two other men. Bunny’s strategy was to keep destablizing the line. It was something we’d worked on in training. He was enormously strong and fast and he had a lot of years in judo, so he knew about overbalancing. Top, on the other hand, was lethal at close and medium range and his hands and feet lashed out with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. Top had done karate since he was a kid, and none of it was tournament stuff. No jump-spinning double Ninja death kicks. He broke bones and gouged eyes and crushed windpipes.

One of the guards came at me with a six-and-a-half-inch Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife. I took it away from him and then gave it back; he fell back with the blade buried in his soft palate.

SAM screamed in rage and pain as the big guard grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the face. The Kid’s nose exploded in blood and his knees buckled. He would have fallen if not for the massive fist knotted in his black hair, but even so the Kid tried to swing that stone again. Kid really had spunk.

There was one more guard between me and the big guy and I wasn’t in the mood to dance, so I grabbed the punch he was trying to throw and broke his arm, stamped on his foot, and then gave him a rising knee kick to the crotch that went deep enough to break his pelvis. He fell screaming to the floor and I closed on the big guy.

The guard saw me coming and swung the boy around to use him as a shield, locking a huge arm around SAM’s throat.

“I’ll pop his bleeding head off,” the man said with a thick Australian accent.

I pulled my Rapid Response knife and clicked it into place.

“Let him go or I’ll put you in the dirt,” I said.

Around me Echo Team was tearing the last of his men to pieces.

The guard — his name tag identified him as Carteret — lifted SAM off the ground so that he was a better shield. The boy’s face was going from rage red to air-starved purple.

“Killing the Kid’s not going to make the day end better for you, sport,” I said. “He’s the only coin you have left to spend.”

“Fuck you!”

I was about to rush him when SAM, oxygen starved and battered as he was, swung both feet toward me and then bent his legs and swung them back and up so that both of his heels slammed into the man’s groin. The guard’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates and he let out a whistling shriek. I grabbed SAM by the front of the shirt and pulled him free.

The guard staggered back. I put him on the deck with an overhand right that knocked him cold.

I spun back to the fight, but there was no fight. Bunny and Top stood in combat crouches, both of them bruised and breathing heavy, but none of the guards were able to answer muster. Most never would.

SAM took a staggering step toward me. The lower half of his face was bright with his own gore and he hocked up a clot of blood and snot and spit it into Carteret’s face.

It was a strange moment. Even with all of the vicious combat and murder around me, that act seemed to possess more real hatred than anything else that had happened here today. The boy was panting and crying.

“SAM—?” I asked.

He nodded. “Are you… Cowboy?”

“At your service.”

The Kid pawed tears from his eyes with bloody fists and then turned toward the open door through which the last of the red-haired people had fled.

“We have to save them…,” he said thickly.

“Are there more guards?”

The Kid shook his head. “I don’t know… but I heard the tiger-hounds roaring earlier.”

“So, that’s what they’re called,” said Bunny. “We put two of them down.”

“Two? What about the other six?”

Christ.

“First things first,” I said. “Who are the people the guards were shooting?”

“They’re the New Men.”

“Why do the guards want them dead?”

The boy shrugged. “To hide the evidence, maybe. I don’t know.”

“ ‘Evidence’?” asked Bunny. “Of what?”

“Of what Otto and Alpha have been doing here. The stuff in the computers is just part of it.”

Bunny and Top moved among the groaning survivors and bound their wrists and ankles with plastic cuffs.

I gestured to the doorway through which the New Men had fled. “What’s through there?”

“Dormitories. It’s where they keep all the New Men.”

“Are they dangerous?” Bunny asked as he picked up his fallen M4 and checked the action. “To us, I mean.”

SAM shook his head. “They won’t fight. They… can’t.”

“Where are the computers?” I asked.

“We can cut through the dormitories and go around back. It’s faster than going back through the building… and besides, if the tiger-hounds are inside, then it’ll be safer out there.”

“Show us.”

“Will… will you help the New Men?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I said, “We’ll see what we can do.”

He didn’t look deflated, but there was a look of disappointment in his eyes that had a lot of mileage on it. I didn’t know his story yet, but trust was not something he expected. That much was clear.

“Okay,” he said as he picked up his rock. Almost as an afterthought he took the knife from Carteret’s belt and staggered toward the open door.

Like players in a bizarre drama, Echo Team and I followed.

Chapter Eighty-Six

We stepped into hell.

The barracks was vast, stretching into the shadows. There were hundreds of cots set in neat rows that fled away on all sides of us. Figures lay sprawled or huddled on the narrow beds, or sat in rickety chairs, or shuffled around with their heads down. Everyone wore the same kind of thin cotton trousers, tank tops, and slippers. The clothing was a sad gray that made the people look like prisoners, or patients in an asylum, and I had the sinking feeling that they were both.

Top said, “Holy Mother of God.”

The New Men who had fled from the gunfire were clustered a few yards away. Several of them were wounded, and the others huddled around them, pressing their own wadded-up shirts to the bullet holes. None of them looked directly at us, though a few cut nervous glances our way, but each time we made direct eye contact with them they looked away. I saw no trace of anger, no rage at what had just happened. The only emotions that I could read on those faces were fear and a sadness that was endessly deep.

All of the people in the barracks had red hair, though that varied from a bright orange to nearly brown. They were short, even the men, and all of them were heavily built. The most striking feature was their heads. Their skulls were large, suggesting a larger braincase, but it was lower and longer than normal. They had sloping foreheads, thick lips, and no chins.

“What the hell’s going on here?” asked Bunny. “Who are these people?”

“They look like…,” began Top but left it unsaid, and none of us wanted to put a name to it, either.

“We have to get them out of here,” said SAM. He turned and grabbed my arm. “We have to get them off the island.”

I said nothing.

One of the New Men — a female — rose from the huddled group. She looked at SAM, then away, and then back. She looked scared, but she held the eye contact longer than any of the others. She was as brutish and ugly as the others, but there was an innocence about her that was touching.

“Master,” she said in a voice that was higher-pitched than I expected from her muscular bulk. She turned toward the main barracks and shouted, “Master!”

The call was repeated over and over in that high voice. Suddenly everyone in the barracks was in motion. The New Men all got quickly to their feet and began moving forward.

“Boss…?” murmured Bunny. He began raising his rifle, but SAM reached over and pushed the barrel down.

“No… it’s okay. They have to line up. They’re afraid not to.”

Bunny and the others stared at the Kid and then turned back to watch as the New Men shuffled forward, eyes and heads down, to stand in rows in front of their cots. Because they moved with their heads down they frequently collided with each other, but there were no grunts or growls of annoyance, no harsh words. After each collision they would separate and bob their heads as if each automatically took responsibility for the mistake, then continue toward their assigned spot. We stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak, as five hundred of these strange people formed into lines and slowly straightened as much as their stooped and muscular bodies would allow. One of them — an older man with gray in his red hair — who stood at the first cot in the line called, “Master!”

All of them dropped to their knees and bowed until their heads touched the floor.

Bunny wheeled on SAM and grabbed a fistful of the Kid’s shirt and lifted him to his toes. “What the fuck is this shit?” Bunny snarled in a dark and dangerous voice.

“Tell them to get up,” I said.

“Stand!” SAM yelled. “Stand.”

The New Men climbed to their feet, but their heads were still bowed like whipped dogs waiting for their master’s approval. I felt sick and angry and deeply confused.

“Farmboy here asked you a question,” said Top, leaning close to SAM, who was still up on his toes.

“Let the Kid go,” I said.

Bunny opened his hand and pushed the Kid roughly away. SAM fell back against Bunny, who twitched his hip to push him away. The Kid looked up and saw a lot of hard faces staring down at him.

“Tell us,” I said. “What are they? Why are they acting like this?”

“They have to. They’re genetically designed to be servants.”

“You mean slaves,” said Bunny.

He nodded. “Yes. Slaves. They did gene therapy on them to remove genes that code for aggression and assertiveness. The idea is to create a race of people who will do anything they’re told to do and…” His voice faltered, but he sucked it up and tried it again. “And accept any kind of abuse. No matter how bad you beat them or… degrade them… they’ll just take it. Otto and Alpha call them the New Men.”

“I didn’t ask what they’re called; I asked what they are.”

“They — Otto, Alpha, and their science teams — they took old DNA and then rebuilt it to create them.”

“They’re not human. What are they?” I asked again.

SAM looked scared to even say the word.

“They’re Neanderthals,” he said.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

“What is this stuff?” asked Tonton as Hecate injected a golden liquid into the IV line attached to the Berserker’s arm.

“A gift from my father,” said Hecate. She emptied the syringe and threw it into a red sharps disposal. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel pretty frigging great right now,” Tonton growled. Even when he spoke in ordinary conversational tones, he had a deep voice that rumbled like thunder. Over the last few months the gene therapy had taken him a few steps further than the other Berkserkers. Tonton’s brow had become more pronounced, his nose wider and flatter. He looked less like his natural Brazilian-German and more like a mature silverback gorilla. Hecate had even noticed that Tonton’s back hair was starting to fade from black to silver. It was one of the things that troubled Paris, because they hadn’t given the Berserkers the genes for hair coloration or facial deformity and yet the traits had emerged anyway.

Hecate found it fascinating and wildly sexy.

It also reflected some of the changes she was experiencing with her own covert experiments. The gene therapy she used on herself was nowhere near the scale used on the Berserkers, and it drew on feline traits from the Panthera gombaszoegensis, the European jaguar, a species extinct for a million and a half years but whose DNA was recovered from a German bog. Her goal had been to enhance her strength by making her muscles 20 percent denser and to heighten her senses. She could not achieve feline sensory perception, but already she realized that it would soon become necessary to start wearing tinted contact lenses to hide the pupilary deformation and color changes. Her teeth were growing sharper, too, and that was absolutely not part of the plan. Hecate accepted the reality that these would need to be filed soon, but for the moment she liked the extra bite.

“So… what’s it do?” growled Tonton.

Hecate gave him a playful slap across the face. “It’ll keep you and your boys from going apeshit during missions.”

He stared at her, then got the joke. They both cracked up.

“Yeah,” he said at length, “some of the boys do get a bit rambunctious. In Somalia… Alonso and Girner were really fucked up. I had to stomp them a bit to keep ’em from eating people. Dumb sonsabitches.”

“It’s not their fault,” Hecate said. “The therapy has some wrinkles, but my father had some ideas on what to do.”

“And I’m the guinea pig?”

“Yes.”

“Jeez.”

“You scared, big man?” she purred.

“Scared? No. Who’d be scared with a crazy bitch like you pumping God knows what into me based on the advice of a total whack-job.”

Hecate slapped him again. Harder.

He grinned at her. There was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth and he licked it up. The cut was deep, though, where the vulnerable flesh of his inner mouth had been smashed against his teeth. A new bead of blood formed, and Hecate pushed Tonton back in the chair, climbed on him, straddling him with her white thighs, and then bent and licked off the trickle of blood.

“Is the door locked?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said huskily.

“Good,” Tonton said with a growl. A second later they were tearing at each other’s clothes.

Chapter Eighty-Eight

“Wait—what?” said Bunny.

“Neanderthals,” SAM said again.

“Slow down,” Top said. “There are no Neanderthals. Not for—”

“Not for over thirty thousand years,” SAM said. “I know. And I guess these aren’t true Neanderthals, but they’re close enough. Otto and Alpha started with mitochondrial DNA recovered from old bones and then mapped the genome. Then they repaired any damage with human and ape DNA. These people are the first generation. By studying them the science teams will know how to improve the model in the next generation. And they’re working on adjusting performance and attitude with them through gene therapy and conditioning.”

“What do you mean by ‘conditioning’?” Top asked.

“The guards… they’re told to do anything they want to the New Men. Beat them, torture them, rape the females. Some even rape the males.”

“For the love of God—why?” demanded Bunny.

“Part of it is a test to see if the New Men will ever talk back, or strike back, or rebel. Or try to escape. The sales brochures claim that they’re perfect servants, with zero ability for insubordination.”

Bunny gaped. “They have sales brochures for this shit?”

SAM nodded.

“Who are the buyers?”

“Rich people, mostly. Some corporations have bought them for work that’s too dangerous or expensive for human labor. Mining, unskilled labor around radioactive materials, toxic-waste handling…”

Top opened his mouth to say something, then bit down on it, unable to let those words have voice. I felt fevered and light-headed, like this was some weird dream and I was lost in it.

“Is this all of them?” I asked.

SAM shook his head. “No. There are three barracks in the compound. Barracks one and three are the same. Five hundred in each. Barracks two is the nursery.”

“ ‘Nursery’?” Top’s eyes closed and his face fell into sickness. “God save this sinner’s soul.”

I stared at the rows of New Men.

At the rows of Neanderthals.

The word was jammed into my brain like a knife.

“SAM… how do I tell them to relax? To… stand down?”

“They’re trained for code words. If you want them to relax but still listen, you say ‘community’; if you want them to do what they were doing, you say ‘downtime.’ ”

“ ‘Downtime,’ ” said Bunny. “Christ. Hey, I have an idea. Can we tell them to go out and find the rest of the guards and tear them into dog meat?”

“No,” said SAM. “They’re incapable of violence. Otto and Alpha made sure of that. There are certain genes for aggression that were — I don’t know, removed or deactivated. But they just won’t get violent no matter what. There’s one… a female… who was hurt by that guy Carteret.”

“The one you went after with your rock?” I asked.

“Yes.” He told us about the female who had been brutalized over the dropped rock. “Otto says that a dedicated program of humiliation erodes the will and rewrites the instincts to accept all forms of abuse as a natural part of life.”

Bunny said, “Boss, I really want to spend some quality time with this asshole, Otto.”

“Stand in line, Farmboy,” Top growled. “I got a few things to say to him myownself.”

“Okay, Kid,” I said, “time for answers. What’s happening in Africa on September 1, and what the hell is an ‘Extinction Clock’?”

“Didn’t you watch the video?”

“I already told you. Sound was bad on most of it and we just translated a fragment.” I showed him the transcript on my PDA. “September 1 is a couple of days from now. Tell me absolutely everything you can.”

“The two guys talking during the hunt was an accident. If Hans had heard them, he’d have done something bad to them.”

“Who’s ‘Hans’?”

“The guy leading the hunt. Hans Brucker. He’s here at the Hive.”

Top flicked me an inquiring look, but I shook it off.

“Who exactly is Otto Wirths? Is he any relation to Eduard Wirths?”

“From Auschwitz? I think so. There are portraits of Eduard Wirths here and at the Deck.”

“Where’s the Deck and what is it?”

“It’s short for the ‘Dodecahedron.’ That’s Alpha and Otto’s lab in Arizona. I don’t know exactly where. In the desert and mostly underground.”

“Alpha… he’s Cyrus Jakoby?”

“Yes.” He looked at Bunny. “Can I have my stone back?”

Bunny glanced at me; I shrugged and nodded. The kid put it back in his pocket.

“Okay, big question now, Kid,” I said. “What’s the Extinction Wave?”

“I don’t know much, but it has something to do with the release of some kind of disease — or maybe a couple of diseases — that’s supposed to make all of the…” SAM cut a look at Top and then back at me. “Um… all of the black people in Africa sick. Really sick. With something that could kill them.”

“Just the black Africans?” Top asked.

The Kid flinched when Top addressed him. Top saw it and knew that I did, too. File that away for later.

“Yes. Just the… um… blacks.”

“And it’ll be released on September 1?”

“Well… yes. That and the other stuff.”

I said, “What other stuff?”

“Other diseases.”

“In Africa?”

SAM shook his head. “All over the place. I heard something about Jews in Louisiana, but I don’t know what exactly will happen there, or how they’ll be released. That’s why I needed help. We have to find out and stop them.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. “I need you to show me where the computer rooms are and the right labs. I need information and proof.”

“Okay.”

“Kid,” asked Bunny, “why’s Otto got such a hard-on for black Africans?”

The boy edged slightly away from Top as if he expected to be hit for what he was about to say.

“You have to understand,” he began in a trembling voice. “These are their words, not mine, okay? Otto and Alpha. It’s not how I think.”

Top smiled his warmest smile. He was the only one of the Echo Team who had kids. “Kid, you’re helping us out here. If you were one of them, then you wouldn’t be here with us.”

I liked the way he leaned on the words “them” and “us,” and I could see how the subliminal hooks softened the Kid.

SAM nodded.

“Otto and Alpha always separate people into three groups. There’s the Family, the white race, and the, um… mud people.” He looked at Top as if expecting the genial smile to melt, but Top gave him a nod and a light pat on the shoulder.

“Yeah, Kid, I’ve heard that sort of thing before. Heard worse. Bet you have, too… living here with people like that.”

SAM’s eyes filled with tears and he looked down at his shoes. “A lot worse,” he said softly. “Heard and seen. You don’t understand… you don’t know.”

“Then show us, SAM,” Top said. “Show us what we need to see so that we can stop this.”

“It’s all in the computer rooms.”

“Take us there,” I said.

SAM looked desperate and he turned back toward the New Men. “You’re going to help them, aren’t you?”

“Those records are first priority.”

“But you will help them?”

I nodded. “Yeah, Kid… we’re going to help them. Bet on it.”

SAM searched my eyes for a lie and didn’t find one. Tears rolled down his bruised and bloody face, but eventually he nodded. “Okay, then I’ll take you to the computers.”

He turned back to the waiting New Men.

“Downtime!” he cried, and immediately the New Men fell out of line and shuffled back to their cots and chairs and the wretched reality of their lives. Only the one female lingered. Once more she raised her head and stared at SAM. Then she touched her face with a finger and drew it to one side as if she was wiping away a tear. SAM stared at her and then did the same motion.

When he led the way out of the room SAM was sobbing.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

We found the computer room without incident, but there was a nasty surprise inside.

The computers were slag.

Every last one of them. Rows of networked supercomputers leaked oily smoke. Puddles of melted plastic and silicon had formed around each one.

“Son of a bitch,” growled Bunny. He slipped a prybar from his pack and forced open the front panel on one unit, but the insides were a melted mass that looked like a surreal sculpture.

Top poked at the melted goo. It was still soft and hot. “This just happened. We missed it by a couple of minutes.”

No one said anything, but we were all aware that while we were in the New Men barracks we could have been here. Should have been here. A few minutes might have changed everything.

“What’s the call, Cap’n?” asked Top quietly.

“We better hope we can find some disks or paper records,” I said. “And I mean now. You two work on that.”

“Where you going, boss?”

“I want to go have a talk with our boy Carteret.”

“He won’t help you,” said SAM. “And you can’t threaten him. He’s a mercenary. He’s really tough.”

“Then I’ll have to ask him real nice,” I said with a smile.

I headed out alone, watchful for guards and tiger-hounds and any other bit of nastiness that the Hive might have to throw at me, but the halls were empty. My heart was sick at the thought of losing all that computer data. If that meant that we wouldn’t be able to stop the release of a pathogen designed for ethnic genocide…

God, I didn’t even want to think about that.

Chapter Ninety

“Copy that, Cowboy,” Church said. “Deacon out.”

Church leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. Grace, Bug, and Dr. Hu surrounded him, each of them waiting to learn what had happened down in Costa Rica.

“Every time I think we have a handle on the definition of evil,” Church said, almost to himself, “someone comes along to prove that we’re shortsighted.”

“As a conversational opener,” Bug said, “that makes me want to run and hide.”

“The computers at the Costa Rica facility have been destroyed. Some form of thermite-based fail-safe device. Captain Ledger thinks it was remote detonated. However, Echo Team has found some paper records and a handful of flash drives and disks. There was also one laptop that wasn’t networked in and it did not receive the self-destruct code, so we may get lucky there.”

“That’s something,” said Grace.

But Church shook his head. “At first glance all that Captain Ledger has found are references to the Extinction Wave, and the date, but most of the paper records are coded and we don’t have the code key. Without that we don’t know how many pathogens, their exact names and strains, or any information to tell us where, how, and by whom they will be released. Africa is a big continent.”

“Effing hell.” Grace punched Bug on the shoulder. “I thought your lot were supposed to be able to crack any bloody code.”

“First… ow!” he said. “Yeah, given time we can crack it. But time’s not our friend here. I got all forty of my guys — here and at the Hangar — on this thing. Plus we’re having to scan in tens of thousands of pages, and the stuff in Costa Rica will have to be scanned. I think we might even be dealing with several different codes. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, where there are individual codes for different aspects of an operation. Whoever set this is up is good.”

“Better than you?”

Bug didn’t rise to the bait. “Maybe. But I have better toys, so I’ll crack it. Big question is whether we crack it in time to do any good. Be nice to find the code key, or — if there are multiple interrelated codes — a master code key.”

“Birds from the Ark Royal should be there soon,” Grace said. “We can prevail upon them to get that material here as fast as possible.”

“True,” Bug said, “but it’s already August 29 and the Extinction Wave is set for September 1. We not only need to break the code; we need to devise a response and then put it into place.”

“We should probably bring World Health and the CDC into it now,” said Hu. “And CERT, National Institutes for Health… a few others.”

Church nodded. “Yes, but carefully. We don’t know if any of those organizations have been compromised.”

Grace studied him. “I have a feeling that there’s more. Care to drop the other shoe?”

Church nodded. “This, perhaps more than anything, will give you a window into the souls of the people we’re up against.”

He told them about the New Men.

Chapter Ninety-One

I found Carteret where we’d left him. He was awake and furious and had wriggled his way across the floor and had rolled onto his back so that he could kick open the door to the New Men’s barracks.

“Come on, you slope-headed fuckers!” he screamed. “Come out here and cut me loose.”

I came up quietly and saw through the small door glass that several of the New Men were indeed shambling toward his cries. Even now, even after he’d brutalized them and tried to exterminate them, they were obeying the conditioning that had removed all traces of free will. It made me furious. If I didn’t need answers, I think I might have just slit Carteret’s throat and called it a job well done.

Instead I grabbed him by the plastic band holding his ankles together and dragged him away from the door.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What the bloody ’ell do you think you’re playing at?”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said quietly. I went back to the door, opened it, and called, “Downtime!”

The single word burned like acid on my tongue, and the sight of the New Men slowing to a confused stop, then turning without question and heading back to their cots made me heartsick. Carteret was still yelling when I turned back to him, but the look on my face quieted him for a moment.

I dragged him by the heels past the dead or unconscious bodies of the other guards and into an adjoining room, then closed the door.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he demanded.

I flicked the blade on my Rapid Response knife and knelt over him.

“Steady on, mate,” he said quickly. “Let’s not do something we both regret.”

I held one finger to my lips. “Shhhhh.”

With two quick flicks of the knife I cut his plastic bonds. As I cut the bands on his wrists I saw that he had numbers tattooed on the back of each hand: 88 on his left and 198 on his right. I recognized the code from some gang work I did while on the cops. H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 stood for “HH.” Shorthand for “Heil Hitler.” The other one broke down to “SH.” “Sieg Heil.” Our friend Carteret was a neo-Nazi. No surprise, but it made what I was going to do a little easier.

“Get up,” I said as I rose and backed away. I laid the knife on a table.

He got slowly and warily to his feet, rubbing his wrists and studying me, but I could see the effort he put into keeping his eyes from flicking toward the knife.

“You’re a Yank,” he said.

“You’re a genius,” I said.

“You working for the Twins?”

I said nothing.

“No… you look the military type. You’re Special Forces, am I right?”

I said nothing.

“I did my time in the service. Don’t suppose you’d like to look the other way while I scarper? Little professional courtesy?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. What I’d rather do,” I said, “is beat some answers out of you. How’s that sound for an afternoon’s entertainment?”

He sneered. “This is a private facility, mate, and we’re in international waters. Check the map; we’re three miles outside of Costa Rican—”

“Which means no one’s watching, Sparky.”

“You think you’re going to strong-arm me? You’d better have a lot more than a knife.”

“I have what I need.”

He tried a different tack. “I thought you Yanks didn’t do torture anymore.”

“Torture is something you do to the helpless. Like the stuff you did to those New Men.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo, mate. They ain’t even people.”

“Not all that sure you are,” I said.

“Arrest me or whatever, but I’m not saying a bloody word.”

I slapped him across the face. It was fast and hard, but I was going for shock rather than damage. He blinked in total surprise. Slaps hurt so much because the palm strikes so many square inches of face and all those facial nerve endings cry out in surprise.

He put his hands up.

I faked with my right and slapped him with my left. Carteret backed up a step. He was surprised by the speed but more so by the sting. No matter how tough you are, there is a certain primitive reaction to being slapped that brings out the essential child self. The eyes start to tear, and that sparks certain emotional reactions that are not necessarily valid but almost impossible to control.

I smiled and moved toward him, slow and steady. He threw a head cracker of a hook punch. He was pretty good. Nice pivot, good lift of the heel to put mass into the blow.

I kept my smile in place as I slipped it and slapped him right-handed.

Carteret reeled back, caught himself, and tried to rush me, but I stopped him with a nonthrusting flat loot on his upper thigh. It’s like running into one of those half doors. It stopped his lower body and made him tilt forward farther and faster than expected. I slapped him with my left, blocked a combination, and slapped him with my right.

His cheeks glowed like hot apples. All those nerve endings were screaming at him.

In other circumstances Carteret would probably be a formidable fighter and I usually don’t screw around like this, but I needed to make a point. And it’s at times like this that I’m glad I study jujutsu rather than karate or tae kwon do. No slight on those other martial arts — after all, Top’s a karate expert and he can deconstruct an opponent like nobody’s business — but I wasn’t trying to destroy Carteret. I wanted to defeat him. Break him. Jujutsu is all about controlling an opponent. Evading, destabilizing, using mass and motion against the attacker. It has roots in grappling arts of ancient China and India coupled with the Japanese dedication to economy of motion.

When Carteret rushed me again I parried his outstretched arm to one side and shifted out of the path of his incoming mass. As I did so, I lightly swept his lead leg just as he was stepping down toward me. It made him stumble into an awkward step and collapse into a clumsy sprawl. He immediately tried to right himself, but his arms were pinwheeling for balance, so I reached between them and slapped him again.

He was panting now, eyes wide and wet, chest heaving with the runaway rage of complete frustration. Once he was upright he tried to kick me with a vicious Muay Thai leg sweep that would have broken my knee had it landed. I checked with with the flat of my shoe while I reached out with both hands and swatted down his guard. I slapped him fast left-right-left.

“Stand and fight!” he screamed, and his voice broke mid-shout.

I kept smiling.

“Tell you what… I’ll let you hit me. How’s that? Just to make it fair.” I patted my gut.

“Fuck you!” Spit flew from from his lips as he snarled, but he also took the opening and threw everything he had into an uppercut that was probably his favorite deal closer. I sucked my gut back and shifted ever so slightly with bent knees so that only some of the impact hit my tensed abs, but most of the real force was defused. I knew that it wouldn’t feel that way to him. In fact, he’d feel the firmness of contact, feel the shock of the impact in his knuckles and wrist. It simply wasn’t anywhere near as hard as he thought it was. I learned that trick from a West Baltimore boxer named Little Charlie Brown. Hell of a sweet trick. The guy slams you one and he’s convinced that he nailed you, but aside from some sting you aren’t hurt.

I slapped Carteret across the face and stepped back, lightly patting my gut. I put a look of amused disappointment on my face. If I’d used my fist and beaten him to a pulp he would have had a totally different reaction. That was big pain; that was a warrior being defeated in battle. He would have manned up and endured and stonewalled. This was different. It made him a different person because it disallowed anything connected to his adult strength.

Down on the primal level, in the logic centers of the lizard brain, he knew he could not beat me. He believed that he couldn’t hurt me. He’d given me his best and it hadn’t even put a twitch on my mouth. Carteret’s face was a mask of pain. His subconscious mind kept scrambling to assign emotional cause to the tears in his eyes. I could see the tension grow in his face but leak out of his muscles; his shoulders began to slump.

I slapped him again. Quick and light, like a period at the end of a sentence.

“You’re all alone out here,” I said.

He tried to slide past me toward the door. I shifted into his path, faked him out, and slapped him with my right. He made an attempt at a block, but it was weak — he was already telling himself that it wouldn’t work.

“And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

He looked past me at the knife lying on the table. He lunged for it. I pivoted off of his lunge and used my turning hip to send him crashing into the wall. While he was getting to his feet I folded the knife and put it in my pocket. Then I kick-faked him and slapped his right and left cheeks.

Tears were streaming down his face. The skin on his cheeks was a ferocious red.

“The people you work for can’t help you.”

Another slap.

“And they’ll never know you told me.”

Slap.

“But it’s the only chance you have left.”

Slap.

“Stop it!” he said, but his voice was as broken as his spirit.

Slap. A bit harder, sending a message about insubordination. Carteret collapsed against the wall. He tried to push himself off. I moved to slap him again and his knees buckled. He slid down the wall, shaking his head, weeping openly now.

I stood over him, within reach, the dare implied in my distance to him, but my smile was the promise of what would happen if he tried and failed.

He didn’t try. His cheeks were so raw there were drops of blood coming from his pores. It looked like he was weeping blood.

I stood there. “Look at me.”

He shook his head.

“Look at me,” I said more forcefully, putting terrible promise in the words.

Slowly, warily, he raised his head. I would like to think that at that moment he was taking personal inventory of the things he’d done, of the abuse he’d heaped upon the helpless New Men. That would be sweet, but this wasn’t a TV movie. All he cared about was whether he could save his own ass — from the immediacy of further harm and ultimately from whatever kind of punishment I chose to inflict. He was using what wits he had to sort through his options. How to spin this. How to survive the moment. How to spin a deal.

“I want immunity,” he said. I don’t know what court he thought would grant it. He was right; these were international waters. Maybe he was afraid I’d turn him over to the Costa Ricans, or take him back to the states, or maybe put him in the dock in some world court. It didn’t matter. He wanted something that he thought would save him, and in exchange I knew he’d tell me everything.

“I want immunity,” he said again. “Or I won’t tell you anything.”

“Sure,” I lied.