The King of Plagues

Chapter One

“Are you ready to come back to work?” asked Mr. Church.

He didn’t say hello, didn’t ask how I’d been. He got right to it.

“Haven’t decided yet,” I said.

“Decide now,” said Mr. Church.

“That bad?”

“Worse. Turn on the TV.”

I picked up the remote, hit the button. I didn’t need to ask which channel. It was on every channel.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

Chapter Two

I stood in the cold December rain and watched thousands of people die.

The Hospital was fully involved by the time I got there, flames reaching out of each window to claw at the sky. Great columns of smoke towered above the masses of people who stood shoulder to shoulder with me as dozens of hoses hammered the walls. The smoke was strangely dense, like fumes from a refinery fire or burning tires, and there was a petroleum stink in the air.

“Back! Back!” cried a firefighter, and I turned to see that there were too many people and too few police … and we were all too close. I could feel the heat on my face even though I was in the middle of the street. “Get the hell back!”

I looked at the firefighter. He was running toward us, waving us back with both hands. Then I looked up at the building and knew at once that he wasn’t doing crowd control. He was shouting a warning. The building was starting to collapse. I turned to run, but behind me was a tight-packed sea of people. They were staring in numb shock as the wall slowly leaned out toward them. Maybe they didn’t see it, or didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe the very fact of a spectacle this vast had hypnotized them, but they stood their ground, eyes and mouths open. I grabbed a man in a business suit and shook him and then slammed him backward.

“Move!” I screamed.

The crowd snarled at me. Ah, people. No sense of self-preservation in the face of disaster, but give them a chance and they’ll bark like cross dogs.

Fuck it.

The firefighter was getting closer, louder, but the roar of the fire was louder still. Then something deep inside the building exploded. A heavy whuf! made the whole front of the building bulge outward in our direction.

That did it.

Suddenly the whole crowd was backpedaling and stumbling and finally turning to run as the entire façade of the Royal London Hospital bowed slowly outward and fell, the ancient timbers and brick defeated by the inferno heat. Hundreds of tons of burning brick slammed onto the pavement. A gigantic fireball flew at us across Whitechapel Road, chasing us as we dove behind the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars. People screamed as cinders landed on their skin. Splinters and chips of broken brick battered the crowd like grapeshot. The firefighter was struck between the shoulder blades by a burning chunk of stone the size of a football. He pitched forward and slid all the way to the curb, his helmet flying off and his hair immediately beginning to smoke. The falling rain hissed as it struck his back and head, but it wasn’t strong enough to douse the fire.

I leaped the small wrought-iron fence and pelted in his direction as embers fell like meteorites all around me. I whipped off my anorak and slapped it down over him, swatting out the fire. The smoke was thick and oily and filled with dust despite the rain. I yanked my sweater up over my nose and mouth, grabbed the fallen fireman under the armpits, hauled him to his feet, and then staggered out of the smoke with him. A second firefighter saw us and ran to help.

“He’s alive,” I said as I lowered the first fireman to the ground.

I backed off as a team of paramedics appeared out of the crowd. The second firefighter followed me.

“Is that everyone?” he yelled.

“I don’t know!” I bellowed, and turned to head back into the smoke, but he caught my arm.

“Don’t do it, mate. The rest of the wall’s about to come down. Nothing you can do.” He pulled me backward and I stumbled along with him.

He was right. There was a low rumbling sound and more of the wall fell, chasing the onlookers even farther back. The firefighter — a young man with a cockney voice and a Jamaican face — shook his head. “Whole bleeding thing’s going to go. Can’t believe I’m watching the London die.”

The London.

A familiar nickname for the hospital. Not the Royal London, not the Hospital. The London, as if that name, that place, stood for the old City itself.

We stood there, watching helplessly as the oldest hospital in England died. There was nothing anyone could do. After I’d gotten Church’s call and turned on the TV, I’d rushed out immediately, caught the first cab, and screamed at the man to get over to Whitechapel. The traffic was so thick that I had run the last six blocks. The press was already calling it a terrorist bombing. If that was true, then it was the worst in British history.

The firefighter shook his head. “Look at it. Survived the Blitz, survived everything, and now this. Poof. Gone.” He looked at me, his eyes glazed with the enormity of it. “They put a billion pounds into expanding it. Over twelve hundred beds since the renovation, and with this round of flu you know they’d all be filled. More than two thousand staff on-shift. Doctors, nurses, orderlies … I know a lot of them ….”

“What happened?” I asked sharply, hoping to snap him back to the moment.

He wiped soot from his face. “Dunno for sure. They’re saying it was bombs.”

“‘Bombs’? More than one?”

“That’s the report we got. Five or six explosions. Big ones, and almost at once. Then the whole place was fully involved. That last blast was probably the heating oil in the subbasement. But those others …”

“What’s with the black smoke?”

He shook his head. “Mystery to me, mate. Smells like a rubber fire, don’t it? The fire investigators are going to have to sort that out, because that’s definitely oil smoke. Makes no sense.”

“How many people got out?” I demanded, looking around for someone who had been in there, someone I could ask questions of. If this was a terrorist attack, someone had to have seen something, and the sooner we could get a jump on it the better.

“Out?” The young firefighter’s bleak eyes shifted away to the fire, and then down. “No one got out that I heard of. Place went up too fast.” He spit saliva that was clouded with black grit onto the debris-littered pavement. “At least it was quick.”

I hoped he was right about the last part … but he didn’t sound all that convincing.

A line of police officers worked their way between the apparatuses, pushing spectators back across the street. The rain slackened to a drizzle and news crews crept from their vans to do stand-ups. I recognized the young woman nearest to me. Kimiko Kajikawa, from the BBC. I’d seen her read the news every night at six. This was the first time I’d ever seen her without her legendary unflappable cool. She looked like she’d been crying, and I imagine that it was the numbers that were hitting her. If the firefighter was right and the bombs had caught everyone unawares, then we could be looking at something like thirty-two hundred dead in a single moment. Maybe more. Nearly as many as had died in the fall of the Towers. If all those beds were full, then it could be even worse.

I felt tears burning in the corners of my own eyes.

All those lives. All those people.

And all of those families. How many of them were watching Kajikawa right now? Jesus Christ.

Since signing on with the Department of Military Sciences I’ve seen far more than my fair share of death, but nothing on this scale. And even though the flames and smoke hid all of the bodies, I could feel the death. It was like a huge dark hand had reached inside me and was squeezing my heart. I turned to the people around me and saw expressions on their faces ranging from confusion, to disbelief, to shocked awareness. Each was processing the enormity of this at the speed their mind would allow. I could almost see how this was gouging wounds into the collective psyche of everyone here, and anyone who was watching a news feed. Each of them — each of us — would be marked by this forever. The moment had that kind of grotesque grandeur.

I edged closer to hear Kajikawa.

“ … we’ll be following this story as it unfolds,” she said. Her voice was steady, but the hand holding the mike trembled. “So far no one has stepped forward to take responsibility for the bombing at this landmark teaching hospital. Established in 1740, the facility provides district general hospital services for the City and Tower Hamlets and is also the base for the HEMS helicopter ambulance service. Hospital authorities say that nearly all of the twelve hundred beds were occupied as of yesterday.”

There was a commotion to my right and I turned to see a tall, harried-looking man in a black uniform fighting his way through a sea of TV and news service microphones.

“Fire Commissioner Allen Dexter is on the scene,” said Kajikawa as she hustled over to join the throng around the man.

“Commissioner Dexter,” shouted a Reuters reporter, “do we know how many casualties yet?”

Dexter’s lip curled in irritation at the typical callousness of the question. It was clear from the different shapes his mouth took before he answered that the words he said were not the first ones on his tongue: “Not at this time.”

“Can you speculate for us?” the reporter persisted.

The commissioner slowly faced the hospital, which was an inferno from foundation to rooftops. When he turned back, his pale eyes were bleak. “We have not yet identified anyone who was in the building at the time of the blasts and who since escaped.”

The reporters were too jaded to be stunned by this. They screamed questions at him, but Dexter turned away as a wave of police officers surged forward and cut him out of the pack.

“There you have it,” Kajikawa said, turning back to face the camera. “This is quickly becoming the worst hospital disaster in British history. And if this is a terrorist attack, then it could well be the worst ever.” She said it with what almost sounded like pride. Somewhere between her earlier tears and now she’d made a huge internal shift from “human being” to “reporter.” Maybe the cameraman had said something to her, or maybe she did a mental review of reporters whose careers had been made by great human suffering. Like Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite breaking the story of JFK’s assassination, Wolf Blitzer with the first Gulf War in Kuwait, and Anderson Cooper during Hurricane Katrina. Or maybe being in the thick of the throng of reporters reminded her of the most sacred rule of journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

I thought it was vulgar.

Kajikawa was still working it. “We do not yet have word about how many of the hospital’s eight thousand staff members were on duty today, but as the building continues to burn out of control, hopes for a happy outcome are likewise going up in smoke.”

Jesus.

Chapter Three

I found a relatively quiet spot in a vee formed by two fire trucks parked at right angles and called Church. I told him what it was like at the scene, and remarked on the dense oil smoke that was turning the entire sky black.

“Odd,” he said. “Perhaps it is intended as a symbolic touch. A statement.”

“On what? The Mideast oil wars?”

“Let’s add that to our list of questions.”

“What do we know about this attack?” I asked.

“Too little. Benson Childe, my opposite number in Barrier, called to ask if we’d heard anything from our networks. We haven’t. Nothing credible, anyway. Half a dozen fringe groups have issued statements claiming responsibility, but they are the ones who do that for everything. I’ve had our people trolling through FBI, CIA, and Senate subcommittee records, reports to the President, speculation from our own analysts. So far we have a lot of enemies and there is no shortage of threats against us and our allies, but nothing that specifically targets this location or date. No one has identified a specific political or religious motivation for this, so the Brits are holding off on calling this a terrorist attack.”

“From where I’m standing it doesn’t look like anything else. I worked a lot of fires when I was a cop, Boss, and this isn’t bad wiring or someone smoking in bed. There’s going to be more collateral damage than we had at Ground Zero. Maybe a higher body count, God help us.”

“Yes. Which means that the whole world is going to be looking at this, and that’s why the Brits are taking their time in putting a label on it. They don’t want to kick off a rash of hate crimes. For the moment the verbiage is ‘national tragedy.’”

“Anything from Al-Qaeda?”

“Not so far, but expect something. If this isn’t their play, then they’ll reach out to praise whoever did it.”

“What about our other sparring partners? The Cabal? The Kings?”

“There’s not enough of the Cabal left to orchestrate this. As for the Seven Kings … that may be more likely.”

“Why? What’s been happening while I’ve been off the radar?”

“There have been some clashes. Our informant is still feeding us useful intel. We’ve had several dustups with the Chosen.”

“Sorry I missed the party,” I lied. In truth, I wasn’t looking to jump back into any firefights with the Kings’ field troops.

We had learned about the Seven Kings a few weeks after my first mission with the Department of Military Sciences. Mr. Church had received an anonymous phone call from a source even MindReader was unable to trace. The call had come in on Church’s private line, a number known only to key people: the President of the United States, a few people in government, the heads of the top counterterrorist organizations belonging to our allies, and the team leaders of the DMS. Either one of them was the mysterious caller or the caller had managed to learn that private number or the caller had the technology to hack into Church’s coded phone. None of those options was particularly comforting.

He was able to record the call, however, and played it back for us ….

Chapter Four

“I want to speak to Colonel Eldritch.”

Eldritch was one of a dozen different names for the man I knew as Church. None of them were his real name as far as I knew.

“Who is this?” Church asked.

“A friend.” The caller spoke through a voice-distortion system that made it impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Your ID is blocked. My friends don’t need to hide their identities.”

“Then consider me a new friend.”

“What is the basis for our new friendship?”

“A shared interest in the security of our nation.”

“Will you tell me your name?”

“My name is of no importance. What is important is who I represent.”

“Who is that?”

“A group of loyal Americans whose actions are always in the best interest of America.”

The caller had not said in the best interests of the American people.

“What do you want?”

“There is a new and grave threat to this country.”

“What is the nature of this threat?”

“It is a group called the Seven Kings of the New World Trust.”

“Who are they?” asked Church. “And what is their agenda?”

“Chaos,” said the caller.

“What kind of chaos?”

“Total. Global. Apocalyptic.”

“Excuse me,” said Church, “but this is bordering on being a crank call. If you are a loyal American as you claim, and if there is a threat about which you have knowledge, then please give me the facts in plain and simple terms.”

There was a sound that might have been a short laugh. “For reasons that I do not care to explain, I cannot give you too much information on the Seven Kings. Perhaps I will be able to share some information from time to time.”

“Will you give me something now?”

“Yes. Something that will save American lives.” The caller gave Church the location of a Hamas cell operating in Washington, D.C., that was being funded by the Seven Kings. “This group plans to strike tomorrow during the afternoon rush hour. Many people will die, including key members of Congress. You can stop this.”

“That’s it?” Church demanded. “You speak of a group dedicated to global chaos and the downfall of our country and all you give me is a single terrorist cell? How do I know I can trust you?”

“You’ll find the cell.”

And then the caller disconnected.

Chapter Five

We followed up with recon and verified the cell’s existence. Fourteen hostiles and enough weapons and explosives to start a war. Or tear the capital apart.

I led the hit.

D.C. had been in the crosshairs since long before 9/11, so there are fifty kinds of counterterrorism protocols built into the infrastructure and dozens of agencies are tasked with gathering intel. It’s all supposed to be shared. Politicians aren’t supposed to lie, either.

Our people used MindReader to hack everyone else’s database and dump everything into one massive pattern-recognition search. By collating information from a dozen different agencies we learned that much more was known about this matter than any one group believed and the reason everyone who needed to know didn’t know was because red tape and departmental pissing contests reduce the flow of interagency intel to a dribble. Guys with prostates the size of soccer balls can piss a heavier stream.

It fell to the Department of Military Sciences to put the pieces together and put boots on the ground. Thanks to MindReader.

When Mr. Church formed the DMS he built it around a computer system that was several generations ahead of anything else known to exist. MindReader was designed to look for trends and the software was very carefully crafted to take into account some factors that might otherwise be missed, and although computers can’t generalize or make intuitive leaps, this one came pretty damn close. Its other unique feature was that it could intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms. When MindReader backed out, it rewrote the target computer’s software so that there was no record that it had ever been hacked. It was a highly dangerous system, and Church guarded it like a dragon.

So less than five hours after the mysterious call — from someone whom everybody except Church was already calling Deep Throat — disconnected we had snipers on rooftops, choppers in the air, a satellite retasked to do thermal scans, and Echo Team ready to kick in the doors.

The cell was located in a small frame house on Ninth Street in the Penn Quarter section of D.C. Lots of foot traffic, lots of tourists. We parked the van around back and halfway up the block. We were not wearing our usual combat rig — unmarked black BDUs, helmets, and ballistic shields. Too many civilians and no way to know who was a spotter for the bad guys.

I wore a Hawaiian shirt over jeans. We all wore vests, though, but these were the latest generation of spider silk bulletproof vests with carbon nanotubes filled with nanoparticles that become rigid enough to protect the wearer as soon as a kinetic energy threshold was surpassed. Stuff that’s not on the open market yet, but Church has a friend in the industry and he always buys us the best toys.

I strolled down the street with Khalid Shaheed, one of my newest shooters. Khalid looks like a schoolteacher and came to the DMS by way of Delta Force. A good guy to have at your back.

We pretended to argue about whether Brooks Robinson should be considered the greatest Orioles player of all time rather than Cal Ripken. I used a prearranged cue word to escalate the argument into a shouting match just as we passed the front of the target house. Shouts escalated into shoves and soon the front door opened and a man wearing a blue sports coat stepped out onto the porch.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Stop that …. Get out of here!”

He had a Palestinian accent, and Khalid turned to him and in brusque Palestinian Arabic told him to mind his own business. Actually, Khalid told him to have anal sex with a three-legged dog. Nice. The man began screaming at Khalid and soon they were nose to nose. The door was still open and I could see other faces appear at the windows and in the doorway.

My sunglasses had a mike pickup built into the frame. I whispered, “Go.”

Instantly the rest of Echo Team hit the house. Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who was built like Schwarzenegger’s big brother, kicked the back door completely off its hinges. Top Sims, my second in command, swarmed past him with Joey Goldschein at his heels. Joey was our newest member, a good kid, six months back from Afghanistan. They bellowed at the top of their lungs as they moved through the empty kitchen and into a side hall.

“Federal agents! Lay down your weapons!”

The adjoining dining room was filled with men, most of them crowded around a big oak dining table that was covered with bricks of C4 and all the wiring needed to blow the whole house into the next dimension.

You’d think that people would be disinclined to initiate a firefight when there’s forty pounds of high explosives lying right there on the table. You’d be wrong. Lot of crazy people out there.

Suddenly it was the O.K. Corral.

Out front, the man arguing with Khalid turned sharply at the noise from inside the house. He never saw Khalid pull open his loose Orioles shirt and pull his piece. Maybe the man heard the shot that killed him, but I doubt it.

Khalid and I both had the whole team yelling in our ears about explosives and armed resistance. Deep Throat’s intel had been solid.

Khalid and I opened fire together, hammering the front windows and the doorway. The men were so tightly clustered that there was no way for us to miss.

Then the dead were falling and the others were backpedaling into the house. We jumped up onto the porch and I covered Khalid while he reloaded. Then I had to duck behind the brick wall between window and door as a hail of heavy-caliber bullets ripped through the frame. There were screams and blaring horns from the street behind us, and I knew that backup teams were closing on the house. The Hamas team was in a box that we were nailing shut. It was up to them whether the box was a container or a coffin.

Khalid and I both yelled in Palestinian Arabic for them to lay down their arms. The only answer was a renewed barrage of automatic gunfire.

“Flash out!” I barked into my mike, and then pulled a flash bang out from under my shirt and lobbed it through the doorway. Khalid and I covered our ears and squeezed our eyes shut. The blast was huge.

“Go! Go!” I snapped, and Khalid spun out of his protective crouch and rushed inside. I was right behind him. He fanned left; I took the right. There were five hostiles in the living room, but all of them were down, rolling around on the floor, screaming but unable to hear their own voices. Flash bangs blow out the eardrums and temporarily blind the unwary. We kicked weapons out of their hands and kept moving. The firefight in the dining room was still hot and heavy. I saw Top Sims in a shooter’s squat behind a breakfront that bullets had reduced to little more than splinters and shattered crockery. Big Bob and Joey were firing from the hallway entrance.

I tapped Khalid and he nodded and took up a shooting position from the living room doorway while I peeled off and headed for the stairs. From the sound of it there was a second firefight up there. The team’s other big man, Bunny — a moose of a kid from Orange County — had been on-point for the second-floor entry, and he had former MP DeeDee Whitman on his wing.

“Green Giant, this is Cowboy. On the stairs and coming up,” I barked into the mike.

“Join the party, Cowboy.” Bunny’s voice sounded relaxed.

Then DeeDee added, “Stay away from the windows. Chatterbox is enjoying himself.”

“Copy that, Scream Queen.”

Chatterbox was our last team member. His real name was John Smith, and the DMS had headhunted him away from LAPD SWAT. He was one of those silent, introspective types who looked like a beatnik poet from the Village but who was the hammer of God with a sniper rifle.

I tapped the command channel and keyed over to Smith’s frequency.

“Chatterbox, this is Cowboy. I’m on the second floor. No window shots until I give you the word.”

“‘K,’” he said.

I peered around the wall at the top of the stairs and looked right into the eyes of a dead man. He was sprawled on the floor with a black bullet hole above his left eyebrow and a look of profound surprise stamped onto his face. The whole back of his head had been blown out. John Smith at work. I’ve seen a lot of great shooters in the military and on the cops, and I’ve met a few whose accuracy bordered on the supernatural. But John Smith was a Jedi. He was spooky good. If you’re unlucky enough to step into his crosshairs, then you’d better be right with Jesus.

I leaned farther out into the hall and saw that most of the second floor was an open-plan studio. There were two more men slumped like rag dolls. Automatic weapons lay near each one. Three other men knelt beside the windows, weapons in hand. They were probably too smart and too scared to try to return fire after three of their brothers had taken head shots. It was a tough nut to crack, because a sniper is the most feared man in any battle scenario.

The second most feared is the guy who sneaks up behind you.

I ducked back onto the stairs and whispered into the mike. “Cowboy to Chatterbox. I’m moving into the field of fire. No shots until I give the word or fifteen seconds is up. Copy?”

“‘K,’” he said again. Guy never shuts up.

I took my Beretta in a two-handed grip and then I was up and moving, rounding the corner, entering the open room, running fast as I cleared the corners with a flick and then fanned the barrel back to the shooters, taking the one farthest from me first with two in the head and shifting to the next gun without a pause. The other two shooters started to turn, but I shot the middle guy twice through the side of the head and the impact sent him crashing through the broken window.

The third guy was almost in kicking range and he was moving at lightning speed, swinging his AK-47 up, turning toward me, finger already inside the trigger guard. If he’d had a handgun instead of a long gun he might have beat me to the shot, but I put the first one in the center of his chest, then raised the gun fourteen inches and put the second one through his forehead. Double tap. All six shots fired in less than three seconds and my head ringing with thunder.

Then John Smith’s voice was yelling in my ear, “On your six! On your six!”

I ducked and spun to one side as a hail of bullets burned through where I’d been standing. Four shooters were crowding into the doorway and I had no idea where the hell they’d come from. The first two banged into each other trying to get through the doorway, and I was already coming up out of my jump and roll. I killed them both with five shots between them. I moved like a son of a bitch, rushing in but to one side, firing one-handed as I tore a fresh magazine out of my pocket. The bodies in the doorway fell face forward just as my slide locked back. The third shooter kicked his way into the room, starting to turn as he cleared the doorway and the bodies.

Shit. No time to swap out the mags, so I dropped my Beretta and drew the Rapid Response Folding knife from its sheath clipped inside my jeans pocket. The RRF has a wicked little 3.375-inch blade that locks into place with a snap of the wrist. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in speed, because at only four ounces it moved as fast as my hand. No drag at all.

I bashed the rifle aside with my left and whipped him across the throat with a very tight semi-circular slash. Blood exploded outward in a hydrostatic jet. I faded left and took a hard leap past his shoulder, and drove the point of the knife into the face of the fourth shooter. The blade caught him beside the nose and I punched it all the way through. He screamed and his finger clutched around the trigger, sending half a magazine into the legs of the guy whose throat I’d cut. I gave the knife a quarter turn and yanked it out, then plunged it back into his throat.

He collapsed over the tangled legs of his comrade.

I tore the knife free and wiped it clean on a dead man’s sleeve, then retrieved my Beretta and swapped out the mags.

My heart was hammering in my chest and I could smell my own sweat mixed with the copper stink of blood. There hadn’t been time to be scared before now, but it was catching up to me like a son of a bitch.

I tapped the commlink. “Chatterbox, Green Giant — center room clear. All hostiles down. Repeat: All hostiles are—”

“Get out!”

It broke into the team channel. Top’s voice. Screaming.

“Hostile with a vest! Hostile with a vest! Out — out—out!”

A vest.

Jesus Christ.

We all knew about those vests. Anyone who had been in Iraq or Afghanistan knows about suicide bombers who follow the compulsion to strap on forty pounds of high explosives and turn the day into red nightmare.

Suddenly we were all yelling and running. I ran for the window and went out like I was Superman. Maybe a drop of fifteen feet to the street. There was a huge black noise behind me, and just as I cleared the window I felt myself lifted as if wishing I could fly was making it so.

As if.

The force of the blast threw me out over the street. I pinwheeled my arms, and my legs mimicked running as I flew. There were cherry trees along the curb. In one of the weird moments of clarity that happen in the middle of a crisis, I knew that the leaves and branches were going to break my fall, but I wasn’t going to like it one bit. Behind me the fireball burned the air and ignited the leaves and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then the tree curled its branches into a fist and knocked me out of all sense and understanding.

I woke up in an ambulance. Top and Khalid were with me, both of them covered with soot and bloodstained field dressings. Top told me the news.

One of the hostiles had come up out of the cellar wearing a vest packed with bars of Semtex. Everyone on Echo Team had taken cuts and burns except John Smith.

I started to say that we’d gotten off lucky, but something in Top’s face stopped me.

“What—?” I asked.

“Joey,” he said. “He pushed Khalid out the door, but he caught his foot on a throw rug and went down. He got up, but he was one step too late.”

Joey Goldschein had been the only one of my team left inside when everything went to hell. He was six months back from his second tour in Afghanistan. He deserved a longer life.

That was our first encounter with the Seven Kings.

After that, Deep Throat came to Church with dribs and drabs of intel. My part in the Seven Kings affair slowly evaporated as I became involved in several unrelated cases. Other DMS teams worked on it, and it’s both sad and frightening to say that there are always multiple threats chewing at the fabric of our society. Vultures and predators, sharks and parasites, bent on destroying us in order to satisfy their own political agendas. I don’t say that they do this to satisfy their religious agendas, because I’m either idealistic enough or cynical enough to believe that religion is deliberately misused as a label for greedy sons of bitches whose real objective is wealth and power. Sure, the freedom fighter in the trenches may think that God wants him to strap C4 to his chest and walk into a post office, but until the so-called religious leaders do that themselves I think it’s a scam. And they’re scamming their own loyal followers as much as they’re scamming the rest of the world. I think this was true during the Crusades and it’s true now in the Middle East. I seldom trust the guys at the top.

The real bitch was that despite having clashed with groups supported by the Seven Kings, we didn’t have a frigging clue as to who or what the Kings were. It was like fighting an invisible empire … and yes, I know that sounds like an old movie serial. But there it is.

Chapter Six

Church said, “The Kings have been busy during your ‘vacation.’”

“Deep Throat been calling his BFF again?”

“I see isolation and contemplation haven’t matured you. Pity,” Church said. “We’ve had five additional tips. Three out of five of the tips resulted in action taken. We recovered prisoners in several of the raids, but none of them were above street level. They knew the name Seven Kings but nothing else of substance.”

“Did Deep Throat warn you about today?”

“Not specifically. He said, ‘Watch out; the next one will be epic.’ However, if this is a Seven Kings attack, it would be their first hit on foreign soil.”

“That we know of.”

“Yes.”

“You any closer to finding out who Deep Throat is?”

“No. But I have some friends in the industry working on this.”

The blaze looked even hotter than before. The crowds surrounding the Hospital had to number in the thousands.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a terrorist hit,” I said.

“Even if no one comes forward to take credit for this, we’re likely to see a rise in hate crimes.”

I agreed. After 9/11 there was an insane wave of violent hatred toward Muslims even though we were not — and never had been — at war with Islam. Echoes of the Japanese internment camps. Xenophobia is one of humankind’s most embarrassing traits.

I said, “Destroying a medical complex of this size had to have taken enormous and very detailed planning. Can’t have been a matter of someone walking in the front door with a C4 vest or a car bomb in the parking garage. This place is massive and it all went up at once. Someone put some real thought into this and—”

Church interrupted me. “How are you doing?”

Church is borderline heartless, so the fact that he was asking made me stop and do a quick self-check. I realized that I was speaking way too loud and way too fast. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and in doing so I could feel how much of it was stale air that had been turning to poison in my chest.

“I’m good,” I said more slowly.

He didn’t comment. He wouldn’t.

“Dr. Sanchez will be on the first thing smoking.”

“I don’t need a shrink,” I began irritably, but he cut me off.

“I’m not sending him to hold your hand, Captain. Dr. Sanchez has a great deal of experience with post-traumatic stress, and much of that can be ameliorated if dealt with from the jump.”

That was true enough. Rudy was an old friend and he was my own post-trauma shrink before he became my best friend. Since we both signed onto the DMS he’d been the voice of reason and everyone’s shortest pathway to a perspective check. Even, I suspected, for Church himself, though Rudy refused to discuss it.

Church said, “You’ll liaise with Barrier and offer them any support you can. Barrier knows that anything they tell you will be processed through MindReader, and they’re comfortable with that. They don’t have anything as sophisticated, so we may get some hits before they do.”

Barrier was the global model for effective covert counterterrorist rapid-response groups, and it actually predated the DMS by several years. Church had tried to get the DMS in place first, but when Congress wouldn’t green-light the money he served as a consultant to the U.K. to build Barrier. When that organization proved itself to be an invaluable tool against the rising tide of advanced bioweapon threats, the Americans finally got a clue and Church built the DMS. The Barrier agents I’d met were every bit as good as our guys, most of them having been handpicked from the most elite SAS teams.

However, hearing the name Barrier inevitably conjured the image of Grace Courtland.

Damn.

Maj. Grace Courtland had been Church’s second in command at the Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. She was a career military officer and the first woman to join the SAS as an active operative, and the permanent liaison between Barrier and the DMS. She was tough, smart, and beautiful, and she was my direct superior in the chain of command. At the end of August, against all common fucking sense, we fell in love. That was wrong in a whole lot of ways. Rudy tried to warn me, but I brushed him off and told him to mind his own business. And yes, I know that as he was the DMS shrink this was his business, but when was the last time someone falling in love listened to good advice?

Grace and I knew that a love relationship, no matter how discreet, made us fly too close to the flame. As agents of the Department of Military Sciences we tackled the deadliest threats imaginable, so personal entanglements could only end in trouble. In our case, it ended in disaster. We faced off against a threat so huge that books will be written about it. At the end of it, the good guys won and I lost. I lost Grace. She died saving us all, and I think I died, too. Part of me, anyway.

Since then I’ve knocked aimlessly around Europe with my dog, Ghost, a specially trained DMS K9. We got into a couple of scrapes together while doing some unofficial stuff for friends of Mr. Church. I hadn’t actually quit the DMS, but I didn’t want to return to the Baltimore Field Office. Grace would not be there. The place would be full of echoes, of shadows and memories. Of ghosts.

Originally, I had come to Europe on a hunting trip. The bastard who shot Grace escaped the bloody resolution of that case. He escaped and went into the wind. As a going-away present, Mr. Church left me a folder full of leads, travel documents, and money, and, without ever saying so, his blessing.

Ghost and I went hunting, and after many weeks we ran our prey to ground. There’s an unmarked grave on one of the Faroe Islands off the coast of Denmark. I pissed on it after I hand-shoveled the dirt and rocks over what was left of the body.

It didn’t bring Grace back, but I believed that somewhere — maybe in Valhalla — her warrior’s soul approved.

Ah … Grace.

Damn it.

Church apparently got tired of the silence on my end of the phone and plowed ahead. “Your current credentials will get you into the investigation. I advised the President and Prime Minister about your participation. And … I’ll likely be on the same flight as Dr. Sanchez. Do you want me to bring Jerry Spencer as well?”

Jerry was the top forensics man I knew. He’d joined the DMS at the same time I did. His genius was in walking a scene and letting the evidence talk to him.

“Absolutely. As soon as the ashes are cool enough to walk, I want Jerry in the smoke. It should all be over by the time he gets here, because at this point it doesn’t look like the fire department is doing anything but containment on this. It’s all going to burn down. What’s my play?”

“Be available to the Brits. They’ll tell you what they need.”

“Where’s Gog and Magog? Shouldn’t they be on this?”

These were the two DMS teams permanently stationed in Great Britain. Gog was based at the Regent’s Park Barracks on Albany Street in London; Magog was hosted by the forty-eighth Fighter Wing at the Lakenheath RAF base in Suffolk. I worked with both of them on my second mission after signing on. We tracked a network of Iranian terrorists who were selling yellowcake by the hundredweight to terrorist groups. That’s not something you serve at birthday parties. It’s a uranium derivative used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors. Look it up in Terrorism for Dummies and you’ll see that there are all sorts of things you can do with it.

“Gog is dealing with a critical matter in Prague. Magog is in Afghanistan dismantling a Taliban bioweapons team. At the moment you’re the only senior DMS agent in the U.K.”

“Swell.”

“The London counterterrorist offices have both accepted my offer of your services.”

“Why would they want my help?”

“Because I briefed them on the Seif Al Din, Mirador, and Jakoby cases. I’ll send them a report on the Seven Kings, and will send all recent data on them to your BlackBerry.”

“Good. You know,” I said, “of the big-event terrorist attacks we’ve seen — the Alfred P. Murrah Building, both World Trade Center attacks, the London subway bombings — they were all one and done, followed by a lot of gloating via the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll throw myself into this with a will, but unless this is one of our playmates, then I’m just another pair of boots on the ground.”

“I’m no more psychic than you are,” said Church, “but I believe that there is a clock ticking somewhere. Maybe the Kings, maybe Al-Qaeda. Besides, terrorism notwithstanding, this is a crime and you’re a cop. Work the crime. Somebody has to have survived. Somebody has to know something.”

“Any chance you can send Echo Team over here?”

“They are out at Area 51 and—”

“Wait — what? There’s an actual Area 51? That’s so cool.”

Church sighed. “At times you’re as bad as Bug and Dr. Hu. Yes, Captain, we have an Area 51 and no, Captain, there are no UFOs there. Nor are any alien autopsies being performed there.”

“Damn.”

“It is, however, a classified area, and Echo Team is providing backup for Lucky Team out of Vegas and the intelligence investigators from Nellis. Possible security breach, but so far no fireworks.”

“Crap. Can you send them my way when they’re finished kicking E.T.’s ass?”

He grunted. “Why? They’re not investigators.”

“They can handle door knocks and Q and A.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” He paused. “Bottom line, this needs to be handled with precision. We dropped the ball on 9/11. We reacted too slowly and often the wrong way. We have to do better this time.”

“‘We’? This isn’t the U.S.A.,” I reminded him.

“How does that matter? This is an attack on humanity. There are sixty million people in Britain.”

Wow, I really was off my game if I walked into that.

“What if Al-Qaeda or one of the other usual suspects steps forward to claim responsibility for this?”

“Best-case scenario, we establish some fresh leads that will maybe result in a useful joint Barrier-DMS action.”

“Worst case?”

“We lose the thread of this and have to wait for something else to happen.”

I looked across the road to where one of the brand-new towers was crumbling, the charred bones of the building collapsing under its own deadweight. More of the black smoke billowed up and turned a horrible morning into the very dead of night.

“Damn …,” I breathed.

Church must have been watching the same thing on the news. I heard him sigh.

“Welcome back to the war, Captain.”

Chapter Seven

Interlude One

Rafael Santoro moved silently through the shadows of the garage. He came up behind Dr. Charles Grey and touched the blade of a knife against the man’s cheek.

“No sound,” murmured Santoro.

The scientist stiffened. Not so much from shock or surprise, but like a man who is suddenly aware that a long-dreaded but inevitable horror has finally come.

Santoro bent close to whisper in the scientist’s ear, “It’s time.”

Grey began to tremble. “Please … God! No ….”

“Yes,” said Santoro. “You know what you have to do. You promised that you would do it.”

Grey started to turn, but Santoro pressed the knife into his flesh. Santoro did not break the skin, but he made sure that Grey could feel the edge, could feel the quiet appetite of the steel. Santoro was an artist of supreme delicacy with a blade. With fast or slow cuts he was able to sculpt a victim into a masterpiece of crimson art. It was one of the many talents that made him so valuable to the Seven Kings, and to his patron, the King of Fear. Fear and the blade were both aspects of Santoro’s personal religion.

“I can’t,” whimpered Grey. “Don’t you understand that? What you ask is impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible if the Goddess wills it to be. That is the nature of faith, yes?”

“‘G-Goddess’ …?” Grey stammered. “I don’t understand ….”

Santoro leaned forward, rising onto his toes so that his lips were an inch from the back of Grey’s neck. “You told me that you were a man of faith, Dr. Grey. Do you remember? That first day when fortune brought me to you? When I showed you the pictures of those angels.”

“Angels …?” The pictures that this man had shown him were not of angels, but he understood what Santoro meant. Grey gagged at the thought of such horrors being described as angelic. They were images out of hell itself.

The blade was an icy promise on his flesh. “Are you saying now that you were lying to me? Lying about faith?”

“No! No,” pleaded Grey. “That’s not what I meant ….”

“Then tell me what you meant, Dr. Grey. Tell me that you believe the All is capable of everything. Everything.”

“Y-yes ….”

“Say it,” Santoro growled. He raised the knife from Grey’s cheek until the beveled edge filled his vision.

“Yes,” Grey said hastily. “I believe, God help me, I believe, but—”

With a snarl, Santoro withdrew the knife and with his free hand grabbed Grey’s shoulder and spun him violently around.

“God may believe you, but you are a piece of shit in the eyes of the Goddess!” Santoro wore a black mask, but through the eyeholes his eyes blazed with dark fire. He then snatched Grey’s right hand and slapped the knife into his sweating palm.

Grey sputtered with confusion and looked dumbly down at the vicious weapon he held. It had a six-inch double-edged blade and a handle wrapped in red silk thread. It looked as much like a tool of ritual as it did an instrument of destruction.

“Do you know what faith is, Dr. Grey?” Santoro asked quietly. When Grey shook his head, the small man smiled. “Faith is my shield; it is the armor that covers my flesh and soul. I am a man of faith, Dr. Grey. I know that the Goddess protects me. I know that she has forged me into her sword.”

“I … I …,” was all that Grey could manage.

“If you are a true man of faith, Dr. Grey, then you will believe that the Goddess lives in you. Use that faith. Prove its existence to me and to yourself. Cut me.”

Grey looked at the weapon in his hand. His face twisted into a mask of horror as if he held a squirming scorpion.

“Do it,” insisted Santoro.

“I — can’t … No …”

“Do it or I will go into the house and find young Mikey and show him the knife. Would you like that, Dr. Grey? Would you like to watch? I will leave you one eye so that you can see it, and I will leave you most of your tongue so that you can scream. You will want to scream.”

Grey suddenly stabbed at the small man. He saw his hand move before he felt his muscles flex, the dagger point glittering as it tore through the shadows toward Santoro’s smiling mouth.

But Santoro was not there.

In the gloom of the garage he became a blur. He pivoted on one foot and shifted so that the stabbing knife pierced only empty air. His hands flashed out, striking and striking and striking, the movements unspeakably fast, the blows hideously powerful. He struck Grey in the groin and the floating ribs and the solar plexus and the throat. Santoro pivoted like a dancer and struck Grey in the kidneys and tailbone and between the shoulders. Then the scientist was falling, falling, all in a fractured second. His arm still reached for the stab, but his body crumpled within the cocoon of blows.

He collapsed onto the cold concrete floor of the garage, gagging, gasping for air with lungs that seemed incapable of drawing a spoonful of breath. His mouth worked like a dying fish, making only the faintest squeaks.

Santoro stood above him, composed, relaxed, not even breathing hard. He knelt and picked up the knife, cleaned away the surface smudges on Grey’s shirtsleeve, and stood. The knife vanished into its hidden sheath beneath Santoro’s jacket.

“When you can breathe again,” he said, “I suggest you spend some time on your knees. Pray to the Goddess, yes? Pray for forgiveness for the sin of doubt.”

He bent over and knotted his fingers in Grey’s hair and jerked the man’s head viciously back.

“And pray that I forgive you. Pray that I will leave young Mikey alone. And intact.”

Grey managed to squeeze a single word out of his tortured throat.

“Please …”

Santoro bent closer still, lips against Grey’s cheek. “Will you do what you have promised to do?”

Grey nodded.

“Say it.”

“Yes!” Grey gasped weakly. Tears streamed down his face. “Yes ….”

Santoro opened his fingers and let Grey slump to the floor. “We will be watching, Dr. Grey. When you do what you have promised, you will have help.”

Grey raised his head at that. “H-help?”

“At work. You will not have to do this alone. You are never alone.”

As the reality of that sank in, Grey buried his face in the crook of one arm and wept.

When he stopped sobbing and looked up, Santoro was gone.

Chapter Eight

I went back to my hotel to change clothes. My dog, Ghost, met me at the door with a tail that stopped wagging as soon as he smelled me. Shepherds have extremely expressive faces, especially the white ones, and Ghost gave me a “hey, even I don’t roll in stuff that smells that bad” look; then he lay down with great dignity in front of the TV and licked his balls.

I stripped and showered the stink of oily smoke from my skin and hair, and then leaned my forehead against the wet tiles and tried not to think about what was inside that smoke. Four thousand people. That was the current estimate.

I cranked up the hot water and tried to boil the reality of that out of me.

Four thousand.

God.

I have a little bit of religion. Not much, but enough to make me believe that there’s something bigger than all of this, and some reason that we’re all struggling through it. But on days like this, my faith takes a real beating. Or maybe it’s not my faith in God that gets pummeled. Probably it’s faith in my fellow man. I know I’m more than half-crazy, but it takes a whole lot of batshit insanity to want to blow up four thousand people. In the three and a half million years since our furry forebears started walking upright we’ve had more than enough time to clean up our act and get the Big Picture. The fact that we’re still killing one another doesn’t speak to an inherent ignorance or perceptual deficiency in the species. We do know better, so stuff like today is pure, deliberate evil. There’s no religion, ideology, viewpoint, or political exigency that can justify mass slaughter of the innocent. Not one.

Feeling bitter and hurt by what was happening, I toweled off, dressed in my least wrinkled suit, ran a brush through my hair, and headed for the door. I was expected at Barrier headquarters for a briefing. Ghost was sitting in my path.

“You’re not coming,” I said.

He cocked an eyebrow. I don’t know if that’s something all dogs do or if Zan Rosin, the DMS K9 trainer, had taught Ghost the trick just to piss me off. I suspected that it was both.

“Move.”

Ghost did. He got up and moved closer to the door. He sat down again and looked up at me with the biggest, saddest brown eyes in town.

We had this argument a lot. He usually won.

He did this time, too.

Chapter Nine

The entrance to Barrier was via the Vermin Control Office. Cute.

I produced my credentials and a separate set for Ghost. The receptionist barely batted an eye at the eighty-five-pound shepherd at my side. A rat-faced man who looked very much like he worked for “vermin” control came and led us through a series of interlocking offices until we finally emerged into the actual offices of Barrier. When we’re out in public Ghost plays the role like he was trained. He walks to one side and slightly behind me, head up, ears swiveling like radar dishes, nose scooping in trace particles of everything around him. A well-trained dog is a wonderful companion. Loyal, smart, and they don’t talk.

“Captain Ledger?”

I turned as a tall, hawk-faced man came striding across the lobby toward me.

The man looked like a typical ex-military: thin, with great posture and eyes that were fifty degrees colder than his smiling mouth. I figured him for ex-SAS and maybe ex-MI6. He looked to be about sixty-five, but I’ll bet he could give me a run for my money over an obstacle course.

“Benson Childe,” he said. “Director of this band of thieves. We were told to expect you.” He looked down at Ghost and held out a hand to be sniffed.

Ghost looked at me for permission and I gave it. I use a combination of hand and verbal signals. With a stranger, a twitch of my little finger means it’s okay for him to approach. Ghost took the man’s scent and filed it away. I was pleased to see that Childe didn’t try to pet the dog. It indicated he understood K9 protocols.

“I hope I can be of help,” I said. “This is a terrible tragedy.”

“Yes,” he said as he led us into his private office. “By the way, Captain, your reputation precedes you. I’ve heard some very good things.”

I laughed. “Somehow I can’t imagine Mr. Church gushing about me.”

“Hardly. The Sexton isn’t one to gush. His brief on you was short but colorful.”

The Sexton. Another of Church’s names. I’ve heard people refer to him as Colonel Eldritch, Mr. Priest, Deacon, and Dr. Bishop. I wonder if any of them was close to the mark.

“No … Grace Courtland told me about you.”

Grace. Dammit. Hearing her name now felt like an ambush. I tried to keep it off my face, but Childe’s eyes searched mine and I saw the precise moment when he saw and recognized the particular frequency of my pain. He nodded to himself, an almost imperceptible movement. Was he confirming a suspicion, or simply noting my reaction?

I nodded but said nothing, not trusting my voice. Ghost must have sensed something, because he rose and moved slowly to stand partially between me and Childe. I scratched Ghost between the shoulder blades. If only dogs really could stand between us and our own inner pain. All dogs would be saints.

Childe discreetly cleared his throat. “I think we’ll be able to find a use for you, Captain,” he said. “Grace said that you were a detective before you joined the DMS. And I believe you’ve worked several large-scale terrorist cases since.”

“A few.”

“That will be useful, because we have a laundry list of terrorist cells believed to be operating in the U.K. and an even longer list of persons of interest. My computer lads are coordinating with your lot to run their profiles through MindReader, but your personal experience may be invaluable.”

“We have any candidates yet?”

“Not as such. However, we have people collecting eyewitness accounts at the fire scene, and inputting everything from actual observed data to hunches. With MindReader able to collate all of the random factors for us, we’re approaching this from the standpoint of ‘no detail is too small to count.’”

“Smart. Devil’s in the details.”

“Too bloody right it is,” Childe agreed. He looked at his watch. “In ten minutes we’ll be meeting with the Home Secretary and various divisional heads of our counterterrorism departments.” He went to a sideboard and poured brandy from a decanter and handed me a glass.

“Before we go in there, I have something to say, and something to ask.”

“Okay.”

He sipped his brandy and said, “Grace Courtland.”

I took a second before responding, “What about her?”

“I recruited Grace out of the Army and into the SAS,” he said. “She was the first woman to serve in the SAS, as I’m sure you know. From the moment she entered the Army anyone with eyes could see that she was a cut above. Not just a cut above the other recruits, but a cut above anyone. Male or female. She was born for this kind of work. Sharp mind, natural leader. Very probably the finest soldier I ever met, and believe me that’s saying quite a lot. I brought her into the SAS initially to prove a point, to show that modern women can handle the pace, endure the hardships, and hold their place in the line of battle, even at the level of special operations. Grace more than made my case. I know that you fought alongside her, so you must have seen how she was in combat. Fierce, efficient, and yet she never lost that spark of humanity that separates a warrior from a killer. Do … you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded.

“When Mr. Church formed the DMS and requested that Grace be seconded to him as the liaison between his organization and ours, I was proud of her … but I resented the request. Grace was mine, you see.” He studied my eyes. “She was like a daughter to me … and no parent could have ever been prouder of a child than I was of Grace.”

“A lot of people cared about Grace,” I said, keeping my face and tone in neutral. “You made your statement. What’s your question?”

“Tell me, Captain Ledger, were you with Grace when she died?”

When I didn’t say anything, Childe edged a little closer. “Church tells me that one of your strengths is that you seldom hesitate, and yet you’re not answering me.”

“It’s not hesitation,” I said. “I’m just wondering how much trouble I’ll get in if I tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Ghost caught my tone and growled softly at Childe.

That amused him. “Why the hostility?”

“Why the question? I’ve been waiting for one of you guys to take a shot at me for what happened to Grace.”

“That’s not my agenda,” he said, heading me off before I got a full-bore tirade going. “My question is straightforward: were you with her when she died?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was.”

“And did you care for her?”

“She was my fellow officer.”

“Please, Captain, this is off-the-record and just between us.”

He had no right to ask and I was under no obligation to say anything that wasn’t in my official after-action report. But his eyes were filled with an odd light and the defensiveness I felt was my own, not the result of any kind of attack on his part.

I said, “Yes.”

“I know this is a lot to ask … but how much did you care?”

“Why?” I asked, and my voice was a little hoarse.

He closed his eyes. “It’s … important to me to know that at the end, when she was dying, she was with someone who truly cared about her.”

I said nothing.

Childe turned away and sipped his brandy. “Grace was alone for most of her life,” he said softly. “She’d lost all of her family, her husband had walked out on her, and her infant son died shortly after birth. Grace was always alone, and it would destroy me to think that she died alone. Thank you, Captain.” He turned back and offered me his hand.

I took it and we shook.

Then Childe looked at his watch. “Time to go.”

Interlude Two

The man in the city suit and bowler hat stepped into the doorway of a men’s tie shop, his face raw and red from the bitter wind. He dug a cell phone out of his pocket and punched a speed dial. The phone rang twice and then a voice with a distinctly Spanish accent said, “Yes?”

“The bloke you told me to follow … he’s just stepped inside the pest control office.”

“You are certain of his identity, yes?”

“Of course I am.”

“Good.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. Go back to work. Others will handle this.”

“But I—”

“Go back to work.”

“Is this it? Am I done now? Will you bastards leave me alone?”

The Spaniard laughed softly. “You may hear from us,” he said. “From time to time.”

He was still laughing when he hung up.

The man in the bowler hat closed his eyes and cursed silently to himself. Behind his eyes he saw the photographs that the Spaniard had shown him. Photographs of what the madman had called his “angels.”

“God help me,” the man whispered. The contents of his stomach turned to sewage and he had to take deep breaths to keep from vomiting. He stepped cautiously out of the doorway, afraid of falling down. He cast one look at the doorway to the Vermin Control Office, then turned away and hurried home to his children.

Chapter Ten

“The Prime Minister has authorized that the Threat Level be raised to ‘exceptional.’” The Home Secretary, Julian Welles, sat at the head of the table and looked for reactions to his news. No one offered any, so he continued. “We are five hours into this. What do we know?”

The gathered men nodded; a few sighed. I kept my face neutral. Ghost lay beside my chair, and I’d given him the commands for down and quiet. A muted plasma screen showed the scene at the hospital. Most of the building had collapsed by now, and they were using deluge cannons to knock down the remaining flame-shrouded walls rather than let them topple into the streets. One corner of the old building still stood, though, and the news cameras kept returning to it, as if its stubborn refusal to yield meant something more than a vagary of physics. The streets around the hospital had all been evacuated — a process that started in earnest once the first of the new towers fell, kicking out massive gray clouds of billowing smoke. 9/11 might be over a decade ago, but even the average guy on the street knew about the dangers of breathing in that dust. It was more than debris — the fire and the pressure from the collapsing buildings had vaporized people.

There was an untouched plate of sandwiches on the table. No one had an appetite.

Welles was a small man who exuded a great degree of personal power. He had an aquiline face, a hooked nose, and black hair combed back from a high brow. A casting agent would have looked at him and said, Sherlock Holmes.

“We don’t know anything for certain,” said Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod, head of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. “The hospital has taken a number of threats from animal rights groups who want to stop the animal testing that’s part of the cancer research center. But … our initial background checks on known members resulted in what you’d expect. Vegans with too much free time and only the most minor political connections, and even then they seem tangential. Even so, I’ve ordered all of our staff to report for duty to do comprehensive interviews, and we’ll share our information with the general pool.”

Welles turned to the only woman at the table, Deirdre MacDonal, a fierce Scot with a bun so tight that it had to hurt her brain. She ran the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, a police organization funded by, and reporting to, the Association of Chief Police Officers, which in turn advised the British government on its counterterrorism strategy. “What have you got, Deirdre?”

She scowled. “Too much and damn all. We’re monitoring a laundry list of microcells and splinter groups, but none of them has ever demonstrated the capabilities to do something like this. Or anything even close to this.”

“Has anyone taken credit for this?”

MacDonal snorted. “The whole daft lot of them are queuing up to take credit. We’ve even had nine separate calls from people claiming to be Osama bin Laden himself. And one from Saddam bloody Hussein.”

“From beyond the grave, no less.”

“He claimed that the man they hanged was a clone.”

“Ah,” said Welles, and shot a look at me. “Would the DMS have any opinion on that?”

“I’ll pass it up the line, but I doubt if Saddam was alive he’d be calling to chat.”

“I daresay. Who would benefit from this?”

Childe cleared his throat. “Hard to say, especially if you look at the staff and patient demographics. There are a fair number of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. The hospital isn’t particularly political. No one of political or religious significance is associated with it or incarcerated as a patient. If this is a political statement, it’s more obscure than it needs to be.”

“Yes,” agreed the Home Secretary, “and our press statements will reflect a neutral and nonaccusatory attitude until such time as we know at whom we should point our finger.”

Childe nodded.

The Home Secretary eyed the group. “Has anyone received a credible threat of any kind? Something we can act on?”

Deirdre MacDonal said, “There have been several calls made to local precincts, but none of them are likely. Most are local nutters who regularly take credit for everything from the latest drive-by shooting to conspiracies by secret societies. Freemasons, the Illuminati, bloody space aliens. Barking mad, the lot of them.”

“None of them bear investigation?” asked Welles.

She sighed. “All of them do, Home Secretary, and we have teams running each one down, but we don’t expect any of them to actually be directly related.”

Welles looked at me. “Was anything phoned in to any of the American agencies?”

“Same as you have here,” I said. “A lot of groups and individuals trying to take credit but no one who stands out. We’re processing everything as fast as we can, though. I’m sure a pattern will emerge.”

“You’re sure or you’re hoping?” asked MacDonal.

“I’m sure and I hope I’m right,” I said, and that squeezed a smile out of her pinched face.

Welles steepled his fingers. “Do we think that this might be related to any of the upcoming holiday or charity events? Or is there any indication that the scheduled events may become targets?”

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, “but as I’m here more or less on vacation, I haven’t been paying attention to the social pages. Which events are most politically sensitive? Doesn’t the Queen give a Christmas address of some kind?”

“That’s a fair question, Captain,” he said. “And Her Majesty usually touches on politics, and in recent years that’s been Afghanistan and Iraq. The broadcast is on Christmas Day but is actually taped beforehand.”

“Do people know that?”

“Yes,” answered MacDonal. “Which puts it low on the list of likely targets.”

“There are large gatherings of people at Trafalgar Square and the South Bank on the nights leading up to Christmas,” said Aylrod. “The tree lighting has already passed; that was the first Thursday of this month. But there are several scheduled events for caroling. A bomb at either place would do untold harm, and if timed to Christmas … well, the religious and political implications are there to be seen.”

“Bloody wonderful,” said Welles sourly. “Put people on both events.”

“What about the Sea of Hope?” asked MacDonal.

“What’s that?” I asked.

She smiled. “I would have thought you knew about that, Captain, as it’s really an American event. It’s a big international fund-raiser for humanitarian aid for those countries suffering from diseases of poverty.”

I nodded. Although I didn’t know much about the fund-raiser, I certainly knew about the epidemics. Lately AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis — the classic diseases of poverty — had taken alarming upsurges in Africa, with comparable spikes from the new Asian flu in Malaysia, another new strain of mumps in the poorer sections of Ireland, dengue fever in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay, and a stunningly potent new strain of meningitis that was burning its way through West Africa.

“The event takes place aboard the SS Sea of Hope, one of those absurdly large Norwegian cruise ships,” Welles said with disdain. “There will be plenty of speeches and appeals for humanitarian aid from nations, corporations, organizations, and individuals. Prince William is nominally in charge of our end of the project and will be giving the keynote address; however, the Bush twins, Chelsea Clinton, John Kerry’s daughters, and a few other political offspring are part of the board of directors. It’s all part of the Generation Hope campaign started by the eldest Obama girl.”

“Wow,” I said, “that would make it a prime target. Is the ship docked here in London?”

“No. It touched at Dover last week to take on supplies and has since sailed for Brazil. The fund-raiser cruise starts on the twenty-first, but the centerpiece is the concert on the twenty-second. A rock concert that will be simulcast to arenas and movie theaters worldwide. U2, Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, John Legend, Taylor Swift, a laundry list of others are aboard, and others will perform at venues in forty countries. A portion of all ticket sales to be donated, et cetera. All very noble, but also a logistical nightmare.”

I blew out my cheeks. “As I said, that would do it.”

But Childe shook his head. “Whereas I agree that it would be a terrorist event of epic proportions, it’s probably too big. If a shipload of celebrities and the children of world leaders were successfully attacked there is no ideology on earth that would protect the perpetrators from the wave of retribution. It wouldn’t be a snipe hunt like what we’ve been doing with the bloody Al-Qaeda — this would be a unified front of overwhelming revenge. Any nation that could be proven to have supported such an action would be disowned by its allies and attacked by everyone else.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Welles.

“Besides, the ship doesn’t return to England at all,” Childe said. “The concert is held at sea and afterward the ship docks in Rio de Janeiro for a private after-event party for the celebrities and their families. It’s bloody hard to attack a cruise ship, especially with the escort that will be sailing with it. The frigate HMS Sutherland will be with them as soon as Prince William is aboard, and they’ll be joined by the USS Elrod. And a couple of subs — one of ours, one of yours — will be ghosting them.”

MacDonal gave a fierce shake of her head. “Terrorists can’t attack ships at sea. They don’t have the resources for it and we’ve already provided for the unexpected. It’s the same reason that there have been no attacks on presidential inaugurations, the Queen’s public events, and so on. Too much security makes failure too likely, and failure weakens their message. My concern is that we are investing so much time and energy in the Sea of Hope that we are, in essence, distracting ourselves from other potential targets like the London Hospital.”

I nodded. “Even so, we have to be prepared for a group that isn’t sheltered by a specific government. A group willing to take a big risk no matter how ill considered. We need to make sure that the cruise ship is searched and searched again. Inside and out. Divers to check for mines attached to the hull, bomb sniffers inside, chemical analysis of the food and water.”

MacDonal looked at me. “Your man, the counterterrorism expert Hugo Vox, has overseen this since the beginning, and his consultant Dr. O’Tree is here in London to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. By the time the royals are aboard, everyone on that ship will have been vetted by Vox.”

That was reassuring. To have been “vetted by Vox” was the highest level of clearance. Grace Courtland had been vetted by him. I hadn’t met Vox, but he was one of Mr. Church’s most trusted colleagues.

“We’ll keep our eye on it nevertheless,” concluded Welles, “but for now let’s return to the London. What have we learned from the actual fire—?”

Deirdre MacDonal suddenly held up her hand as she bent over her laptop. “Excuse me, Home Secretary, but I believe we have something. My lads have been reviewing the CCTV feeds from the area and they’ve just red-flagged something. You’ll want to see this.” She looked hard at me. “You as well, Captain Ledger.”

She tapped some keys and transferred her video feed to the big screen monitor. “This is a bit of footage from the video traffic camera mounted on the wall across from the entrance to the parking garage. This bit here starts at three twenty-two A.M.”

We watched an empty stretch of brick wall for a few seconds and then there was movement as a man walked purposefully along the street. He wore jeans, gloves, and a dark hoodie pulled up and zippered so that none of his face was visible. The man stopped, looked up and down the street, then removed two small cans of spray paint from his pockets and sprayed the wall. He wrote a word in black ink, overlaid it with a red number, and then used the red paint to capture it all inside a circle.

“Son of a bitch!” I said. Beside me I heard Benson Childe fairly snarl; most of the others gasped.

It was the logo of the Seven Kings.

Interlude Three

The wall was filled with life. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, images of people in all their colors and costumes were animated by individual urgencies and passions. Newsreaders and statesmen, talk-show hosts and market forecasters, media experts and the man on the street. A hundred flat-screen OLED monitors brought every aspect of the crisis into the chamber. The seven men who sat on the ornate high-backed chairs were silent. The seven others — five men and two women — who sat beside them in less ostentatious chairs were equally silent. The voices that filled the room spoke from Wisdom Audio speakers, their many languages and dialects blending and swirling in the soft shadows of the chamber. A Tower of Babel, chatter and noise, and yet all of it saying the same thing. Everyone, on every screen, was absorbed in the event. The whole world shared this moment.

The Royal London Hospital was gone. As the fourteen silent people watched, the last stubborn wall yielded to the fiery Mephistophelean fingers. The foundation blocks, blackened from hours of inferno heat, cracked to hot ash, and the tower canted sideways. As it crashed down, imps and demons of pure flame capered in the clouds of smoke that billowed up.

That was how the King of Plagues saw it from his place at the table. Fire and heat. Melting flesh and screams from within a world of burning torment. He closed his eyes and felt an almost orgasmic rush.

On the screens, the whole world paused in horror, as if there had been some hope built into the mortar of that last corner of the old building. As if its resistance somehow meant that the whole event was not comprehensive, that it was poised to occur rather than already seared into today’s page of history. But as it bowed in inevitable defeat, the world’s voices coughed out a collective and broken sigh.

Acceptance is a terrible, terrible thing.

Each screen showed the thick pall of oily black smoke that erupted from the burning building. It was so dense that it blotted out the sky and turned day into night.

There was another moment of silence as the jackals of the media took a breath. Not in reverence, but in order to begin a fresh tirade that would be equal parts hysteria, greed for ratings or copies sold, and mindless chatter to fill airtime until someone fed them something of substance to report.

He turned to his fellow Kings. Three to his left, three to his right. He looked at the Conscience who sat beside each King. Every King and every Conscience smiled.

The King of Plagues recited a passage from Exodus, changing it only slightly to suit the moment: “‘And the Lord said unto Moses, stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land, even darkness which may be felt.’”

Into the silence, the King of Plagues said, “Beautiful.”

“Beautiful,” they all agreed.

And truly, to each of them, it was.

Interlude Four

The Burned Man had a hundred names in a hundred places around the world. His own name had been left behind when he had been forced into hiding, and over the last eight weeks he’d changed names weekly, often daily, relying on identities that had been carefully put in place over fifteen years. He had millions of dollars in numbered accounts, and safe-deposit boxes in forty countries filled with cash, jewels, and bearer bonds. As long as he was never identified he could remain free and live well for the rest of his life, and he was still a relatively young man. He had been forced to leave behind a fortune worth many billions, and a name that had been on short lists for the Nobel Prize and a knighthood.

Now …? His downfall had come through no fault of his own but through betrayal, and since then he had become infinitely careful. And infinitely bitter. When his name was mentioned these days, it was always accompanied by words like “terrorist,” “mass murderer,” and “most wanted.”

Escaping with his life had been immensely difficult, and even his injuries were mild compared to what they might have been. He knew that he should be grateful to be alive and free and rich.

He was also a very careful man. Before his accident, it would have amused him to know that the authorities were looking for him in all the wrong places. Now it was a simple fact of life, the result of the careful planning that would have to be routine forever.

He felt no guilt for what he had done. When the pain from the surgeries flared, or the memories of his flesh melting as he struggled to escape the explosion, the Burned Man vented his anger by wishing he had done more harm. When he unwrapped his bandages and stared into a mirror at the ruin of a face that had once been on the covers of over five hundred magazines worldwide, from Forbes to National Geographic, his anger became an almost physical force — a burning ball of hatred that he wished he could spit out at the world.

The pills and the booze and the plastic surgeries helped, but only in the way that morphine helps to hide the pain of a cancer but does not remove the tumor. They did not take away the deep loss and sense of betrayal that hung burning in his mind every minute of every day.

He lay on a chaise lounge by the pool in the recovery pavilion of Nouveau Visage, the most exclusive, confidential, and expensive center for cosmetic and reconstructive surgery in the United States. Even after weeks, much of his face was still wrapped in surgical dressings, as were the tips of his fingers. A tall glass of sparkling water garnished with cherries and mint leaves sat sweating on a nearby table, and movie stars in robes and bikinis lounged around him. Guests almost never spoke to one another. It was part of the mystique of “we were never here” that made the place so exclusive. Even the invoices sent by the billing department were in code so no secretary or IRS agent could sell secrets to the tabloids. The items on the Burned Man’s bills were for personal training, spiritual counseling, and financial advising. There was no trail to follow.

He sipped his drink, wincing only a little at the effort.

The Burned Man wondered if he was becoming addicted to surgery, a phenomenon he knew inspired many of his fellow inmates to return here at least twice a year without really needing to. Since he had checked in, the doctors from this facility — and specialists he’d paid exorbitant amounts to have flown in — had repaired the burns, done skin grafts, reshaped his ears, performed a complete rhinoplasty, augmented his chin, reassigned fat to give his body a new shape, and even transplanted a new eye to replace the one that had been boiled in his head during a geothermal explosion. When the bandages came off and the surgical bruises healed he would be a totally new man. A Swiss surgeon even had replotted the whorls and loops of his fingerprints using a radical new procedure that cost $1 million per finger. The downside was that it would have to be repeated every two years, but that was a small price to pay for his freedom. As long as he was careful not to leave DNA where it would come to the attention of the authorities it was likely he would never be identified and never be caught.

The tissue grafts and the new eye had been provided by his friend and former lover Hecate Jakoby, and they were a perfect match to his own. They should be — Hecate was one of the world’s leading genetic designers and she had grown them especially for him in case of just such an emergency. Hecate had done the same for the Burned Man’s companion, who sprawled on the adjoining lounger reading an L. A. Banks novel and sipping a Bloody Mary.

“May I freshen your drink, sir?” asked the pretty nurse, and when the Burned Man nodded she bent and retrieved his glass, giving him a generous and deliberate view of her cleavage. The nurses had a private bet that the Burned Man was one of the British royals and all wanted to bag a duke or a lord.

The Burned Man admired the view and gave the nurse as much of a smile as his bruises and bandages would allow. His good eye twinkled and his lips and teeth were perfect.

“Lovely girl,” said the Burned Man once she was gone.

“She’s a cow with fake tits,” murmured the other without looking up from the page.

“I’d like to shag her, not marry her—,” the Burned Man began, but a cell chirped softly on the table between the loungers. His companion picked it up, flipped it open, and said, “Hello?” with complete disinterest and maximum boredom.

“I want to play a game,” said the voice at the other end.

The companion stiffened, which the Burned Man caught. They bent their heads together to listen.

“Who is calling?” said the companion in a banal secretary’s voice that was entirely unlike his own.

“That isn’t the response we agreed upon. I’ll hang up in five seconds.”

The Burned Man and his companion shared a look that was equal parts wariness, surprise, and intrigue. There was no one else within earshot, and the noise from the artificial waterfall was an excellent sound blocker. The Burned Man nodded.

“Very well. What game would you like to play?”

“Horse racing.”

Horse racing. The Sport of Kings. Sweet Jesus.

Toys looked like he wanted to run, but the Burned Man smiled and took the phone. “Assure me that this is a secure line.”

“It’s secure, Sebastian.” The man had a lot of Boston in his vowels.

“I don’t know that name,” the Burned Man lied. “Why are you calling me?”

“First, tell me how you are. I’ve heard some alarming reports. Sebastian Gault — third most wanted man on eighteen international police lists.”

“Fourth,” Sebastian corrected.

“Third. Janos Smitrovitch had a heart attack in his hot tub last night.”

“Third then. Thanks for sharing. Now please bugger off—”

“Ah, c’mon … be civil for Christ’s sake. Can’t you squeeze out enough enthusiasm to shoot the breeze with an old friend? At least tell me how you are.”

Sebastian Gault — the Burned Man — sighed. “Oh, I’m just peachy. I feel like a new man,” he said dryly. Speaking hurt less this week than it did last and the physical therapy had gone a long way to restoring the mobility of his jaw and neck muscles, but the discomfort was always there. The doctors said that some pain might linger forever. Gault was learning the skill of eating his pain. Each bite made him more bitter and less forgiving.

“And Toys?”

Gault turned an inch toward his companion. Toys smiled.

“The same.”

“He still listen in on all your calls?”

“Yes,” said Toys. “Someone has to weed out the cranks and bill collectors.”

The American laughed. “Thank god you haven’t changed. The world would be a much dimmer place.”

Gault cut in irritably, “What’s this about?”

“Ah … it’s about destiny, my friend.”

“Whose?”

“Why, yours, of course. This is a big day for you guys.”

“No, it isn’t. Today we plan to have seaweed wraps and then I think we’ll each get a massage. That’s as much destiny as I want, thank you very much.”

“I doubt that’s true. What happened to your dreams of empire? I remember you telling me how you planned to make a king’s fortune, how you were going to reshape the world by forcing the U.S. out of the Middle East in a way that would put tens of billions in your pocket.”

“It was hundreds of billions,” Gault said with a touch of frost, “and if you read the papers you’ll know that things didn’t quite work out as planned.”

“Yes, but we are so impressed by the scope and subtlety of your plan. It should have worked. It would have, had you placed less stock in true believers and more in practical cynics like Toys.”

Toys leaned back and gave his friend a charming eyelid-fluttering smile.

Gault covered the phone and hissed at Toys, “Tell me, ‘I told you so,’ again and I’ll smother you in your sleep.”

Toys mimed zipping his mouth shut, but his smile persisted.

Into the phone Gault said, “Tell me again why we’re having this conversation? And try for once not to be so sodding cryptic. And … who is this ‘we’ you’re referring to? Or has the Dragon Lady gotten back into the game?”

“Ha! I’ll tell her you called her that. She’s killed for less. We’ve both seen her do it.”

“The only excuse your mother needs for killing someone is that the day ends in a y. She’s the most lethal bitch I ever met.”

“But you love her.”

“Of course,” conceded Gault, which was true enough. Right around the time Gault first made the cover of The Lancet, Eris had begun summoning him to wherever she was staying for long weekends filled with every kind of sybaritic excess. Although Eris was twenty years older than Gault, her sexual appetites were more ferocious than his, and that was saying quite a lot. Even Gault’s late, lamented Amirah — that treacherous witch who was the reason he was swathed in surgical wraps — was less of a bedroom predator than the American’s mother. More than once Gault had thought about marrying Eris. If she’d been younger or, perhaps, saner, he might have. Even so, the memories of being the fly in her erotic webs were so potent that he felt a serious stirring in his loins.

He said, “How could I not?”

The American laughed again. He had a bray of a laugh that came from deep in his chest.

“Tell me what this is about,” Gault prompted.

“I’ll do better than that, Sebastian. We’ll show you. Get dressed and pack your stuff. I’ll have a car outside in twenty minutes.”

“You don’t even know where I am.”

“Of course I do,” said the man. “Nouveau Visage … in the pool area. You’re on the fifth chaise lounge; Toys is on the sixth. Oh … and don’t bother with the fresh glass of sparkling water the nurse is bringing. They’re charging you for Bling H20, but it’s only Perrier.”

He disconnected.

Gault sat there, letting his body pretend a posture of relaxation while his good eye cut right and left around the pool area. Beside him, Toys clicked his tongue.

“Well, well,” Toys said softly. “That’s unnerving.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Trite as it sounds to say it — especially coming from me — I feel violated.”

“Everyone who meets that son of a bitch feels violated,” Gault said. “And for good reason.”

They looked around, making it casual, faking some conversation and genial laughter, but neither of them could spot the spy or spy camera. It made Gault itch all over.

Still …

“Why did he call? How did he know where we were?”

“‘We,’” Toys echoed.

“We,” Gault agreed. He stood up. “Let’s go back to our suite,” he suggested.

“To search it?” asked Toys.

“No,” said Sebastian Gault. “To pack.”

Chapter Eleven

“Who the bloody hell are the Seven Kings?” Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod looked at the screen and then at me as if this was somehow my fault.

However, Deirdre MacDonal turned to him in surprise. “Good God, Marty, don’t you read any of the reports I send you? They’re that terrorist organization the DMS and Barrier have been crossing swords with since—”

“Well,” Childe interjected, “it’s really just the DMS. We’ve only provided support, but this is the first evidence of them being here in the U.K.”

“Which doesn’t answer the questions of who they are,” insisted Aylrod. “Christ, Benson, you look like you’re about to pass a kidney stone.”

I said, “We don’t actually know who they are. In general terms they’re a secret society supposedly modeled along the lines of the Illuminati.”

“More like SPECTRE,” muttered MacDonal. “A lot of James Bond supervillain nonsense.”

“They’re a bit more than that,” Childe said dryly.

“What do you mean,” demanded Welles.

I told them all about Deep Throat and the cryptic info he’d fed us. “Hard to tell if they’re a genuine secret society or a criminal group using that as a PR campaign to make themselves appear ancient and powerful.”

“They blew up a sodding hospital,” snarled Aylrod. “That seems pretty effing powerful to me.”

“Sure,” I agreed neutrally, “but that’s today’s news. Until now they’ve been like Professor Moriarty — behind-the-scenes and supposedly tied to a lot of stuff, but really frigging hard to connect with any certainty. And they like using pop culture to build their mystique, so it’s really hard to pin down anything clear-cut about them. There’s a ton of stuff about them on the Net, and a lot of conspiracy theorists have tied the Seven Kings to a zillion ancient groups and prophecies.”

“What are their politics?” Welles asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Deep Throat said that they’re dedicated to chaos.”

“‘Chaos’?” Welles said dryly. “Could you be a bit more vague?”

I smiled and spread my hands.

Aylrod said, “And your lads have had run-ins with them?”

“Quite a few.” I gave them the highlights. “Their street-level soldiers are called the Chosen. The odd thing is that the Kings have so far worked with extremist groups among the Shiites, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and a Sunni group. Yes, I did say Sunni.”

“So, they’re opportunists,” suggested Welles. “Working with whoever will work with them?”

“Or manipulating any group they can to further their own aims,” I said.

“Clever,” said Aylrod. “Have you managed to interview any of these ‘Chosen’?”

“Sure, but these street-level guys are just that. They’re members of isolated cells so far removed from the policy level that they genuinely don’t know anything beyond a couple of words and names. Nothing that connects us to anything useful. So far we’ve been able to determine that the Chosen are the ground troops. There’s a group that’s a big step up from them called the Kingsmen. The DMS had one tussle with them, and they are very, very tough hombres.”

“How tough?” asked Aylrod.

“Man for man they could hold their own against the SEALs or the SAS. Smart, resourceful, superb level of training, and they’re equipped with the latest and the best gear.”

“Who’s training them?”

“Unknown.”

“Any of them in custody?”

“So far none have been taken alive.”

“Pity,” said Welles.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re anxious to have a meaningful chat with one of them.”

“What else have you learned?”

“Not much. There’s someone called the Spaniard who acts as a liaison between the street teams and the Kings. He’s known to be utterly ruthless and to have a special love of torture with knives and edged weapons. But that’s all we have on him. Everyone we’ve heard of who has run afoul of him is dead. I saw one of his victims. Not a pretty sight.”

Aylrod said, “Any leads through the equipment they use?”

“No. It’s either Russian or Chinese made or stolen American stuff. The street teams are more likely to have AKs; the Kingsmen came at us with M4A1 carbines and a couple of HK416s. Those HKs are state-of-the-art-Delta Force weapons.”

Aylrod nodded gravely, then pointed to the screen. “What happened after the logo was painted?”

“He walked away,” said MacDonal. “The camera at the corner caught him, but then he vanished. Looks like he either entered the hospital or somehow slipped away out of sight of the other cameras. We have someone searching the camera feeds in an expanding grid to see if he shows up anywhere else.”

The Home Secretary nodded. “Assessment?”

MacDonal pursed her lips. It made her look like an evil librarian. “The person in the video may or may not have been part of this Seven Kings group. He could have been a gangbanger given a few quid to paint that on the wall.”

“That was a grown man,” Childe observed. “Not a teenager.”

“How can you tell?” asked Welles.

“General build and the way he walked. He was confident and careful, but not furtive.”

I nodded. “And he’s painted that logo before. He wasn’t tentative about it. He wasn’t trying to figure out what to write or how to write it. He did it as quickly and smoothly as if he’s done it plenty of times before.”

“A gangbanger would be just as quick and smooth,” MacDonal said.

“Sure,” I agreed, “but as Mr. Childe pointed out, this was no kid.”

Welles said, “Any clue as to why this group calls itself the ‘Seven Kings’?”

Benson Childe shook his head. “We helped the DMS with the research on that, but so far we haven’t struck gold. There are over three hundred thousand hits on that name on the Internet. A boat storage facility and a real estate developer of that name, both in Florida; the Seven Kings Relais hotel in Rome; a mystery novel called The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings published in 1899; a tomb of the Seven Kings in Andhra Pradesh, India; a punk rock band of that name; and even a town here in London.”

“Where in London?” asked Welles.

“It is a suburban development in the borough of Redbridge, part of the Ilford post town. We have people out there, but so far that image has not been found on any walls.”

“We’ll send this out to all stations and departments,” concluded Welles. “And I believe that we’ll be using Captain Ledger as an advisor. He’s asked to be part of the hospital investigation and I think that would be a wise choice. Moving on. What do we know about the actual fire?”

“The fire is still too hot for a proper analysis,” said a frail-looking man with watery brown eyes who sat next to Childe. Unlike the others, he hadn’t given me his card. “But from gasses collected at the site the fire investigators have verified the presence of nitrates, and in great quantities. This was definitely a bomb. Or, more precisely, several.”

“How many, Darius?” asked Welles, and that fast I knew who the frail man was. Darius Oswalt, Director General of MI5. I knew him by name and reputation, but the mousy physique didn’t match the legends I’d heard. I expected a Daniel Craig type, not someone who looked like a low-level chartered accountant.

Oswalt spread his hands. “We’ve looked at the CCTV feeds from the moments leading up to the explosion. Witness reports vary between four and nine blasts. However, we estimate that there were fourteen.”

“Fourteen?” gasped Welles.

“No one reported that,” said Aylrod.

“Not surprising,” said Oswalt. “But the CCTV images of Whitechapel Road show fire erupting from multiple points when the ‘first’ blast happened. We believe that all of the bombs had been set to detonate at the same time and were positioned to do the greatest possible structural damage. Considering how much of the complex has already collapsed, I think it’s a safe bet that many of the charges did, in fact, simultaneously detonate. As for the mistiming? There are always some x-factors when it comes to the wiring and setting of the digital timers. The blasts all happened within four seconds of each other, though, so it’s as close as may be. How the terrorists managed to smuggle fourteen bombs, give or take, into a building with moderately good security — well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?” He paused and from the look on his face it was clear that he had a bomb of his own to drop. “Based on the CCTV footage, we can make a pretty good guess as to the time the perpetrators intended all of the bombs to go off.”

“What time?” I asked, and everyone leaned forward, caught by Oswalt’s grave tone.

The MI5 man sucked his teeth for a moment, eyes introspective.

“According to CCTV,” he said slowly, “the bombs detonated at precisely eleven minutes after nine this morning.”

“Bloody hell,” murmured Aylrod.

I closed my eyes for a moment and felt an old ache in my chest.

The bombs had gone off at 9:11.

Interlude Five

He sat in his cell and smiled at the shadows. The cockroaches were his friends. The spiders, too, and he read great mathematical truths in the subtle intricacies of their webs.

The guards feared him. The gangbangers never messed with him. They’d tried during his first week, but never again. Longtime inmates gave him space in the mess hall and would walk out of their way so as not to step on his shadow during afternoon exercise. The multitude of the Aryan Brotherhood mythologized him, ascribing biblical powers to him and endlessly arguing over hidden meanings in his most casual comments. Men had been shanked over such disputes. The Jamaican and Haitian convicts thought that he was some kind of white bokor. The Muslims thought that he was a demon. The madmen among the prison population thought he was a god. Or an angel. Men had been killed for speaking ill of him.

In truth, Nicodemus took no sides among the thirty-five hundred prisoners within the walls of Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security correctional facility. He would not allow himself to be tattooed with gang markings or colors. He did not deliberately sit with any one group or another. When asked why by a wide-eyed and fatuous young Latino fish, Nicodemus had closed his eyes and said, “Because I belong to all of His people.”

“Whose people? God’s? People say that you think you talk to God. Or maybe the Devil. But that’s just bullshit, isn’t it?”

Nicodemus merely smiled and did not answer. A week later Jesus Santiago was found dead in the laundry room. His tongue had been cut out and the numbers 12/17 were carved nine times into his flesh on his chest and back. The medical examiner concluded that Santiago had died from a heart attack. He was twenty-one years old and had no history of heart trouble.

Nicodemus told the prison psychiatrist that he knew nothing of the young man named Jesus Santiago. “No such person dwells within my mind,” he said. “I cannot see him with my left eye, nor do I see him with my right.”

“You were seen speaking with the boy,” prodded the psychiatrist, Dr. Stankeviius.

“No,” said Nicodemus. “I was not.”

“A guard saw you.”

“If he says so, then he is mistaken. Ask him again.”

When the doctor asked Nicodemus if he knew the significance of the numbers 12/17, the little prisoner smiled. “Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?”

“I don’t know the answer, Nicodemus. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Time is not like a ribbon stretched from now until then. It is a pool in which we all float.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Search your mind. Dive into that pool.”

That was all that Nicodemus would say. His eyes lost their focus and he appeared to go into his own thoughts.

After the session was over, Dr. Stankeviius searched through the folder for the eyewitness report by the guard who had been walking the yard that day. The report was gone. The psychiatrist requested that the guard be brought into his office, but the officer in question had not reported for work that day. When Dr. Stankeviius pressed the matter, he learned that the guard had been transferred to a facility in Albion, at the extreme northwest corner of the state. No attempt to contact him either through the system or via personal telephone or e-mail was successful. Two weeks later the guard was fired for being drunk on duty and went home, put the barrel of his great-grandfather’s old U.S. Cavalry revolver into his mouth, and blew off the top of his head. He left a suicide note written in tomato sauce on his bedroom wall. It read: For sins known and unknown. That same week the file on the death of Jesus Santiago, the young Latino, vanished from Dr. Stankeviius’s locked office. When the doctor attempted to locate the boy’s record on the prison server, it was gone.

A month later, on the day of the devastation at the Royal London Hospital, Dr. Stankeviius had the guards bring Nicodemus into his office. The psychiatrist was sweating badly when he made that call.

Neither guard touched Nicodemus as they ushered him into the doctor’s office, and though they both towered over the stick-thin little man, he exuded much more power than they did. Dr. Stankeviius noted that the guards kept their hands on their belts near their weapons.

Nicodemus stood in front of the desk, his hands loose at his sides, head slightly bowed so that he looked up under bony brows at the doctor. Nicodemus had eyes the color of toad skin — a complexity of dark greens and browns. His skin was sallow, his lips full, his teeth white and wet.

“Have a seat,” offered Dr. Stankeviius. He could hear the tremble in his own voice.

“I thank you,” Nicodemus said in the oddly formal way he had. A guard pushed a chair in front of the desk and the prisoner sat. He leaned back, folded his long-fingered hands in his lap, and waited. His eyes never left the doctor’s face, and Nicodemus’s lips constantly writhed in a small smile that came and went, came and went.

“Do you know why I asked you to visit me today?” began the doctor.

“Do you?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it wants to mean, sir. We each derive our own meaning from life as we fly through the moments.”

“Are you aware of what has happened today?”

“I am aware of many things that have happened today, Doctor. Saints and sinners whisper to me in my sleep. Dumas speaks truth to me in my right ear and Gesmas tells only lies to my left ear. Please be specific.”

Stankeviius did not recognize the two names Nicodemus had mentioned, but he wrote them down. Then he leaned forward. “Jesus Santiago, the boy who was killed … the numbers twelve/seventeen were cut into his skin.”

Nicodemus said nothing.

“Why do you think someone did that?”

Nothing.

“Did you do that?”

“No, sir, I laid not a hand on that child. Anyone who says that I did is a liar in the eyes of the Goddess and will be judged accordingly.” ’

Stankeviius wrote down “goddess” but did not comment.

“Did you arrange to have it done?”

“What people do is theirs to explain or justify.”

“Do you know who did it?”

No answer.

“Why ‘twelve/seventeen’? Why those numbers?”

Nicodemus said nothing.

“Do you know what today’s date is?”

“Time is a pool, Doctor. Today is every day.”

“Please answer the question. Do you know what today’s date is?”

“Yes,” he answered, his writhing lips twisting as if fighting to contain a laugh. “As do you.”

Dr. Stankeviius stared at him. He licked his lips. They were dry and salty. He knew that he should end this line of conversation right now and call the warden, but he felt compelled to talk to this man.

“Did you have advance knowledge of what was going to happen today?”

Nicodemus beamed. “I am but a voice in the wilderness crying, ‘Make straight the path.’ I am neither the right hand of the Goddess nor her left hand. I am a leaf blown by her holy breath.”

The psychiatrist opened his mouth to ask about which goddess the prisoner referred to, but Nicodemus continued. “This is an important and blessed day in the history of our broken little world. Grace is bestowed upon those who witness such events. We need to lift up our voices and rejoice that we are living in such times as these. Future generations will call these biblical times, for with every breath we are writing the scriptures of a newer testament. The Third Testament that chronicles a new covenant with our Lord.”

“You mention a ‘goddess’ and you mention the Lord. Would you care to explain that to me, Nicodemus?”

The prisoner laughed. It was a disjointed, creaking laughter that rose in rusted spasms from deep in his chest. The sound of it chilled the doctor to his marrow.

“The Goddess has heard the call of seven regal voices and has awakened,” Nicodemus said softly. “She is coming. Not in judgment, Doctor, but to stir the winds of chaos with her hot breath.”

“How do you know this?” asked the doctor.

“Because I am not here,” said Nicodemus. “I am the fire salamander that coils and writhes in the embers at the Goddess’s feet.”

He did not say another word, but his eyes burned with a weird inner light that Dr. Stankeviius could not look into for more than a few seconds. After several fruitless attempts to get more information from the prisoner, the doctor waved to the guards to have Nicodemus taken back to his cell.

When he was alone, Stankeviius pulled a handful of tissues from the box on his desktop and used them to mop the sweat from his face. He tried to laugh it off, to dismiss the strangeness of the moment as a side effect of the terrible tragedy in England that was rocking the whole world. His own laugh was brief and fragile, and it crumbled into dust on his lips.

He sat at his desk for several minutes, dabbing at his forehead, staring at the chair in which the prisoner had sat. The echo of that laugh seemed to linger in the air like the smell of a rat that had died behind the baseboards. Stankeviius had been a prison psychiatrist for eleven years, and he had worked with every kind of convict from child rapists to serial murderers and, during his days as a psychiatric resident, had even sat in on one of Charles Manson’s parole hearings. He was a clinician, a cynical and jaded man of science who believed that all forms of human corruption were products of bad mental wiring, chemical imbalances, or extreme influences during crucial developmental phases.

But now …

He licked his lips again and reached for the phone to call the warden. He told him the bare facts, allowing the warden to draw his own inferences. When he replaced the receiver he continued to stare at the empty chair.

He believed — wholly and without a shred of uncertainty — that he had just encountered a phenomenon he had always considered to be a cultural myth, a label given to something by minds too unschooled to grasp the overall science of the human condition. Stankeviius had no religious beliefs, not even a whisper of agnosticism.

And yet … He was sure, beyond any doubt, that he had just met true evil.

Chapter Twelve

This was turning into one bitch of a day. The images of the burning Hospital were now overlaid with an image of the mocking logo of the Seven Kings and the film loops of the towers crumbling into dust on a sunny New York day. I felt enormously out of place and thoroughly impotent. The bad guys were killing people and I was taking meetings.

Jesus.

I cut out of the conference as soon as I could. They let me use an empty office so I could make some calls.

Church answered on the third ring. He doesn’t say anything when he answers a phone. You made the call, so it’s on you to run with it.

“Seven Kings,” I said. He made a soft sound. It might have been a sigh, but it sounded more like a growl.

“How sure are you?” he asked quietly.

“Very.” I told him about the video. “Deep Throat let us down on this one.”

“Yes,” he said. “By the way, did you note the time of the explosion?”

“Yep. No way it’s a coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Expect the newspapers to catch on soon.”

“That’s going to be a shitstorm, Boss. Is this a Kings/Al-Qaeda operation? Are the Kings showing support for Uncle Osama? Or is this some attempt to hijack the 9/11 vibe to make this one even worse?”

“All good questions in need of answers. We’ve been in a holding pattern with the Kings for months.”

“Balls,” I growled. “This is how the military must feel after more than a decade trying to find bin Laden.”

“Not all problems have quick solutions. The longer you’re in this business, the more you’ll come to know that.”

He was right. Even though my first few missions with the DMS were insanely difficult and dangerous, they had ended quickly. A few days or a week tops. I guess it’s because something has to be in motion and have gained traction before it comes onto the DMS radar, which means we usually have to fight the clock to keep the Big Bad from doing whatever it has cooked up. The Kings thing was different. It was huge but vague. It was like trying to guess the size and shape of the Empire State Building by standing four inches away from the wall at ground level. Perspective was all skewed.

“In the short term,” Church said, “the authorities are going to have to work some spin on the 9/11 connection.”

“Hate crimes,” I said.

“If you’ve been reading the reports I’ve been sending you, then you’ll be aware that there has been a marked increase in hate crimes here in the States for a couple of months now. Someone has been waging a very dangerous propaganda war on the Net.”

“Yes, teacher. That’s connected to the Internet thing. The Goddess and all that.”

“All that, yes.”

“Tied to the Seven Kings?”

“Unknown but likely. Recent posts have called her the Goddess of the Chosen.”

“The Chosen, huh? Uh-oh. I must have missed that.”

“Skimming your reports isn’t the same thing as studying them.”

I declined to share the comment that occurred to me. Instead, I said, “Have the Net postings mentioned the Kings? Or Kingsmen? Or the Spaniard?”

“Not so far. MindReader will flag any that do.”

“I wish we knew more about the frigging Kings. I mean, kings of what? Did anything ever come out of my suggestion that it might be an alliance of the states that sponsor terrorism?”

“There are too many ways to build a list of only seven who want to harm the United States.”

“It’s always tough being the popular kid in school. What about something biblical? Wasn’t there something about the Book of Revelations?”

“I think that’s more likely, but there also are too many ways to interpret the religious significance of the number seven, including something from the Book of Revelation,” he corrected. “And yes, I think that’s likely. Most scholars agree that the seven kings in Revelation are allegorical references to seven nations. The prophecy says that five of the kings are known, so the scholars contend that they are Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Pagan Rome, and Papal Rome, or possibly Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece.”

“Are you reading this off the Net?”

“No.”

“So you just happen to have that memorized?”

“What’s your point, Captain?”

“Nothing, Boss. But you’re intensely weird.”

“So I’ve been told. The fiery destruction we saw today certainly had an apocalyptic quality.”

“You have any friends in the prophecy industry?”

“Funny,” he said without humor. “I have some contacts who are experts in symbology, particularly as it applies to terrorism.”

“MindReader come up with anything yet?” I asked.

“Nothing immediately useful.”

“I thought that doohickey could find anything.”

“One of these days I’ll have Bug explain to you how computers work. You can’t program it to look for ‘bad guy’ and expect it to cough out a name. MindReader looks for patterns, but you need the right search argument. It’s all about choosing the right key words.”

I grunted. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just frustrated.”

“That’s a club with a large membership. What else have you got?”

I told him about the Sea of Hope discussion.

“I agree that it would be high profile,” he said, “but enormously difficult. However, I’ll pass along your concerns to the team overseeing security. In the meantime, we got something unusual from the warden of Graterford Prison. Homeland took his call and rerouted it to me.”

“Graterford in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes. He told me about a dead prisoner with the numbers twelve/seventeen carved nine times into his skin, and a current inmate who seems to have unusual personal knowledge of the incident. A very strange character named Nicodemus.”

“Nine times?”

“Yes.”

“Any traces of an eleven?”

“Add the digits.”

“Oh,” I said. “Crap.”

“I put a request into the Department of Corrections for Nicodemus’s records, but that will take too long, so I directed Bug to hack the system. We should have everything within the hour. You can access the material from your laptop, but I’ll have the highlights sent to your BlackBerry.”

“Who is this fruitcake? He have any ties to terrorist groups?”

“None of record. But then again, not much is known about him prior to his arrest, which occurred in 1996. He was arrested at the scene of a multiple homicide in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.”

“Who’d he kill?”

“It’s not entirely clear that he killed anyone, although he was convicted of multiple homicides. There are no eyewitnesses, so the case was built on strong circumstantial evidence, and he offered no defense.”

In ’96, a mother and her teenage daughter were about to enter Gifts of the Magi, a store that sold items for the Catholic market. Nativity scenes, pictures of Jesus, stuffed lambs, icons, that sort of thing. As the mother began pushing the door open she looked through the glass and saw a man standing a few feet inside. He was covered with blood. The mother saw several other people lying on the floor or slumped over the counter.

She pulled her daughter away and called the police from the Barnes & Noble in the same strip mall. When the first responders arrived, the man was still standing there. He made no attempt to flee or resist arrest.

There were four victims. The woman who owned the store, her disabled vet of a husband, and two customers. All of them had been stabbed repeatedly.

“Here’s the challenging part,” said Church. “All four victims were stabbed with the same knife, and from the wound profiles it’s clear that it was a double-edged British commando dagger. However, no weapon was found at the scene. All of the area drains were checked, rooftops searched, trash picked through. There are no traces of blood outside the store, suggesting that the perpetrator never left the premises, and Nicodemus was drenched in blood. All of the experts agree that had he left the store he would have left a blood trail.”

“Weird.”

“Very.”

“He could have handed the knife off to an accomplice who was not bloodied.”

“Of course, but it was the first of a number of unusual elements associated with the case. You’ll enjoy this.”

“Okay … hit me.”

“During the booking phase three separate police cameras malfunctioned. The fingerprint ten-card went missing. When his clothes were collected, bagged, and sent to the lab in Philadelphia, the police courier had a fender bender and at some point while he was arguing with the other driver his car was robbed. The only thing taken was the evidence bag. When they ran him through the system, his fingerprints were not in AFIS, and today when we ran them through the military fingerprint banks we got nothing; however, he was wearing a Marine Corps Force Recon ring when he was arrested.”

“Did they do DNA on him?”

“Yes, but no one can put their hands on the results. I’ll get a court order to take a new cheek swab.”

“Have Jerry Spencer take the swab when he gets back from London. He doesn’t make procedural mistakes. He thinks the chain of evidence is holy writ.”

“As is appropriate. Spencer’s on the plane with me, by the way. He’s sleeping and said that if you called I was not to wake him. He said that he needed sleep more than he needed to talk to you.”

“What a guy.” Jerry still resented my bullying him into foregoing early retirement from Washington PD and signing on to the DMS. Even though it was a big pay bump and nobody shot at him anymore, he would rather be entertaining trout on a quiet lake somewhere. “Eventually I’d like Jerry to look over all of the original evidence collection procedures from Willow Grove, the State Police, the Sheriff ’s Office, and the DOC. I know a lot of guys from that area. They don’t make a lot of mistakes.”

“No,” Church agreed.

“Somebody should get eyes on this Nicodemus character. Can you reroute Rudy? Send him to Graterford?”

“He’s sitting next to me and our plane just touched down at Heathrow, however, I can get him on the next outbound flight to Philadelphia.”

I heard a brief muffled conversation as Church explained my suggestion to Rudy. Rudy’s voice went up several octaves and he said something about me in gutter Spanish involving fornication with livestock. He’s a mostly charming guy. Real class.

“He said he would be happy to,” said Church.

“So I heard.”

Ghost was looking at my phone with great interest and thumped his tail enthusiastically. He probably had heard Rudy’s voice.

“As for the stateside phase of this,” Church said, “I’m passing the ball to Aunt Sallie.” Aunt Sallie was Church’s second in command. I hadn’t yet met her, but she and Church had history going back to the Cold War days and she was supposed to be a wild woman. “She’ll coordinate with domestic agencies and keep a line open to our friends in NATO and INTERPOL.”

“Okay, I’m heading back to Whitechapel to join the door-to-door of the neighborhood. Somebody may have seen something like delivery vans. They had to have brought a whole lot of explosives in. And I’ll want to talk to staff members who weren’t working today. Somebody has to know something.”

“Good. I’ve also brought Hugo Vox in on this.”

“Vox the T-Town guy?”

“Yes. I’ve asked him to put together his groups of consultants. He’s built several think tanks of strategists, novelists, and screenwriters. Thriller novelists mostly. David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Eric Van Lustbader, Martin Hanler — authors of that stripe. Their novels are built around extreme and devious plots and are usually so well thought out that some in our government have decried them as primers for terrorists.”

“Yeah, I heard a lot of that after the Towers. People were making comparisons to Black Sunday, that book by the Silence of the Lambs guy.”

“Thomas Harris. And, yes, there are striking similarities. The authors are vetted by Vox, of course. We’re hoping the authors will come up with scenarios that we can use for programming MindReader’s searches.”

“Worth a shot. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“One of these days you’ll have to tell me where you continue to find your optimism,” he said, and disconnected.

Interlude Six

Dr. Circe O’Tree lived in Terror Town.

Her office was tucked away in a corner of a sprawling jumble of blockhouses built as extensions to what had been a ski chalet prior to 9/11. The office was never warm and she could hear gunfire all day long.

Circe spent most of her day on the Internet, cruising Web sites and social networks, reading thousands of posts, making notes, updating lists, and fighting the onset of early cynicism. At twenty-eight she still believed it was possible to remain idealistic and optimistic about the better nature of the human species despite all of the evidence that filled her daily intake of information.

“Knock, knock,” said a voice, and she turned to see her boss, Hugo Vox, standing in the doorway. He held two chunky ceramic mugs of steaming coffee and had a box of doughnuts tucked under his elbow. “You ready for a break?”

She pushed her laptop aside. “Like an hour ago. My eyes are falling out.”

“You look as tired as I feel,” said Vox as he handed her a mug. “I’ve been doing Webinars all day with the DOJ and there’s only so much red tape I can eat before I want to shoot myself.”

He hooked a visitor chair with his foot and dragged it in front of her desk, then lowered his bulk into it.

Hugo Vox was a big man, son and grandson of Boston policemen, though he did not wear a badge himself. His father had been wounded on the job and retired early to write novels, and the second one had become an international bestseller, spawning a Robert De Niro movie and a TV series that ran for six years. His next eleven novels had made the family rich. On the day the elder Vox, who had single-parented Hugo, won an Emmy for his show, he drove out to the estate of the mother of his son and proposed. They had been lovers in college, but her wealthy and aggressively classist parents had forced her to give up their baby. Now, as young forty-somethings (she had inherited millions after her parents — the computer fortune Sandersons — died in a plane crash), they settled down to form the family that fate and the class system had once denied them. As a result, Hugo had been able to afford Yale, and while still an undergraduate he formed a staffing agency, specializing in security guards. He hired many of his father’s retiree cop friends. By the time Vox was out of grad school his company was providing security for the United Nations in New York and thirty other organizations with government ties.

By the time Vox was thirty he was a multimillionaire in his own right and his company, SecureOne, had begun taking contracts from military bases, partly to provide private security contractors and partly to screen employees applying for positions in sensitive areas. The catchphrase “vetted by Vox” identified personnel who had passed SecureOne’s ultrarigorous screening process. He received a number of large military contracts to screen personnel for special operations and was soon putting the Vox seal of approval on operators for Delta Force, the CIA, and similar covert organizations.

The day after Vox’s father died from lung cancer, the planes hit the Towers. Vox was asked to head the team that investigated the flight schools in which the Al-Qaeda operatives had earned their pilot’s licenses. Vox’s report put people in jail and it crushed several companies whose standards for security were deemed “criminally lax.” If some people had previously wondered if Hugo Vox was too strict before 9/11, he was thereafter seen as a role model.

In 2002 Vox created his first think tank. He reached out to a select number of thriller writers — friends of his father — and brought them together to dream up the most dreadful and unstoppable kinds of carnage that human minds could concoct. Bombings, exotic bioweapons, covert takeovers, dirty bombs, plagues, and more. The authors gave him everything he wanted and then some, and Vox put it all in a report and brought it to the White House along with a proposal for a training camp in which the top counterterrorism teams in the United States and allied nations would run the scenarios over and over again until they had discovered or invented adequate responses.

The response from Homeland and the Oval Office was not exactly a blank check but close enough. Homeland leased land in Washington State and Vox bought the old White Trails Resort. Terror Town was born.

That was more than a decade ago, and now T-Town was the centerpiece for counter- and antiterrorism training. And now many key players in the War on Terror could boast of having been “vetted by Vox.”

As online social networks flourished over the last few years, all manner of fringe and splinter groups had begun using resources like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and message boards for anonymous communication. Vox wanted someone to monitor these networks, someone with the credentials and the intelligence necessary to find even the most obscure clues that might reveal the presence of tangible threats. When Circe O’Tree’s résumé had crossed his desk, Vox knew that he had found a perfect fit. Her reports had stopped a number of attacks and put some dangerous people in jail.

“So,” Vox said, gesturing to her laptop with a jelly doughnut, “who’s being scary today?”

“I’ve been tracking some spooky stuff with Israel and Islamic key words.”

“Anti-Semitic stuff?”

“Not exactly. It’s militant, but it appears to be more pro-Israel militancy. Let me read some of them.” She opened a Word document and brought up a file. Circe wore half-glasses perched precariously on the end of her Irish nose. “Here’s one. ‘Why would God put a sword into the hand of Israel and forbid him to use it? It makes no sense to sit by while Jihad is waged against the Chosen People.’”

Vox grunted.

“And another one: ‘As David did to Goliath shall Israel do to the giant of Islam.’” She adjusted her glasses. “On the surface these are anti-Islamic statements couched in pseudobiblical phrasing, but they have an — oh, I don’t know — a sense of meanness about them. It doesn’t feel like simple rants.”

“Who’s posting this stuff?”

“That’s the thing; most of these are anonymous posts on Twitter, but they’re from accounts started at places like cybercafes. They create an e-mail account, use that to open an account on a social network, and then either abandon it or log in from a different site. We’ve seen that kind of behavior before, Hugo. Remember all that ‘war in heaven’ and ‘Armageddon in the shadows’ stuff from a couple of years ago? This has the same feel. Careful and anonymous.”

He grunted and nodded. “Yeah, sounds like it. Have you checked with our friends in the Bureau?”

“I did, and I got the usual ‘we’ll look into it’ reply, which translates as ‘ignore the rantings of the crazy lady.’”

Vox grinned. “How about Homeland?”

“Same thing, dammit.” She cocked an eye at him. “Any chance we can bring it to the DMS? Maybe let MindReader—”

“Too soon,” Vox said firmly. “Deacon’s been very clear that he doesn’t want to hear anything from us unless it’s actionable.”

“Okay.” She felt deflated. “Let me collate what I found first. If I’m going to make a report even the DMS will accept, then I’ll want to bring all of it.”

“There’s more?”

“Like this? Hundreds of postings, and thousands of places where these posts have been reposted and retweeted.”

“Rewhat?”

“Tweeted. A post on Twitter is called a ‘tweet.’ When someone likes it and wants to pass it on, they ‘retweet’ it.”

“Good God.”

“I know it sounds silly, but Twitter has become the most powerful tool of business on the Net.”

Vox smiled like a tolerant bear. He had coarse, thick features, a bulbous nose, and rubbery lips, but his smile was charming. “Tweets by terrorists. You can’t say that this job isn’t interesting, kiddo.”

Circe nodded but did not smile. Unlike her boss, she was very beautiful, with dark eyes and foamy black curls; also unlike him, she seldom smiled. As much as genetics had been generous to her, life itself had not. Less than a year ago her mother had been killed in a car accident, and Circe’s younger sister had died in combat in Afghanistan the previous summer. She felt alone and adrift in the world, and except for a father she almost never saw, Circe had no family. T-Town had become her home and Hugo Vox had become a second father, but Circe was still adrift in the shadows of loss and grief.

“There’s something else,” she said, and pulled up another file. “Some key words have popped up in these postings. Not all of them, but enough of them to make me pay attention.” She touched the screen and ran a plum fingernail down, pausing at different entries as she scrolled with her other hand. “‘Goddess,’ or some variation of it, shows up in a lot of the entries. In the text, but more often in the usernames of the original poster or people reposting.”

“Oh, Christ … not her again.” Over the last few years various groups ranging from the CIA to the DMS had tracked a series of online comments from a person, or perhaps a group, called the Goddess of the Chosen. The posts were heaviest before and after catastrophic events. If there was a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, a terrorist bombing, or an airline disaster the Goddess would make a post claiming that the event had happened according to her will. So far the identity of the Goddess had not been established, and because she tended to comment on all disasters it was hard to qualify her political leanings. Vox rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Are you sure it’s her?”

“Sure? No, but there are a lot of posts and most of them are using name variations: Goddessofthe7, SacredGoddess, Queen_of_ All, which is a goddess reference; and posts are using various names of goddesses from world myth. Demeter, Mazu, Mami Wata, Mórrígan, Nemain, Macha, Badb, and scores of others. Hundreds, really.”

“How many posts have you been tracking?”

“Over forty thousand.” When Vox’s eyes bugged she said hastily, “Not personally — I’m using the Merlin pattern-search software from the DMS.”

Vox grunted. “I didn’t know Deacon let you have Merlin.”

“He didn’t. Grace did.”

“Is it any good?”

“Well, it’s not MindReader, but it’s better than what we have.”

“What else is popping up?”

Circe adjusted her glasses. “Some of the names may be randomly chosen from a grab bag of goddess names. But there are some that seem to have a political connection. Asherah, Anath, Astarte, and Ashima all show up as usernames. There is some evidence that that the Hebrew faith may have been polytheistic and those names are possible female counterparts of Yahweh. If that’s true, then they were later removed as the culture became more male centric. Lilith also shows up. As does Ba‘alat Gebal or Baaltis, who is essentially a pan-Semitic goddess. And Eris, Greek goddess of discord. That’s ‘Discordia’ in Greek, which ties into the chaos concept. And—”

Vox held up his hands. “Okay, okay, I get the picture. Lots of goddess references. Tell me what you think about them. Is this the same ‘goddess’ you’ve been tracking?”

“Not sure yet. If so, Hugo, this is the first time the Goddess has made specific threats against Islam. Her usual rant is against what she frequently calls the ‘sin of complacency.’ Those are anarchical references supporting chaos as the natural path for spiritual growth.”

“Which is horseshit.”

“Well, arguing for an ongoing state of chaos is self-contradictory. But these new posts are clearly political, and they suggest that action should be taken, which gives them a whiff of militancy.”

“A militant goddess cult? Is there precedent?”

“Not recently, but historically? Sure. There were goddess cults all over the world, and some of them have been quite violent.”

Vox took a big bite of his doughnut and chewed noisily. “Okay. Write your report. Good work, kiddo. Keep at it.” He pushed the box of doughnuts across the desk. “Keep the carbs. You earned ’em.”

He heaved his bulk out of the guest chair and left, sketching a wave with his coffee cup.

Circe watched him go and then looked down at the documents on the screen. She chewed her lip for a moment, wrestling with some of the same doubts that had plagued her since she first noticed this pattern. Was it there? Or was the Merlin software simply too good at finding patterns in everything?

She bit a piece of a cinnamon doughnut, sipped her coffee, toggled over to Twitter, and dove back in.

Interlude Seven

Michael Hecht was not a Jew. None of his friends were Jews, and except for the accountant at the hardware store in which he worked part-time, no one he knew was Jewish. None of his uncles or grandparents had fought in Europe during World War II, and he had no connections to anyone who had been interned or murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. He had never been to Israel and did not know anyone who had. Michael Hecht did not even particularly understand politics. He had an I.Q. of 86 and had a C average in school. He never watched any debates and could not with any degree of certainty name anyone in state politics.

Michael Hecht also did not personally know any Muslims. None of them were among his friends, family, or co-workers. No Muslim had ever been rude to him, physically attacked him, done harm to people he knew or loved.

All of this information came out during Deputy Sheriff Jaden Glover’s interview of Hecht following the twenty-two-year-old’s arrest. Glover had known Michael all his life; he’d once dated Hecht’s oldest sister, Maryanne.

“Why’d you do it?” Glover asked.

Hecht shrugged. He sat on a metal chair, his wrists cuffed to a D ring on the table. Another deputy stood by the door. Hecht had been Mirandized at the scene and again here in the station. He’d waived his rights both times.

“C’mon, Mike. You drove thirty-seven miles; you stopped to buy gasoline. You brought half a dozen of your mom’s Mason jars with you. And rags. You even brought a lighter and you don’t smoke. You had to have planned this.”

Michael Hecht shrugged again. His face was smudged with soot and he had some tissue stuffed into his nostril to stem the bleeding from where the building caretaker, Kusef, had punched him.

“You went to all that trouble,” said Glover, “and you put firebombs through all the windows. You burned the whole damn thing to the ground. What was in your head, boy? You upset ’cause Milt Ryerson’s boy lost his leg in Iraq? This some kind of personal vendetta?”

Michael Hecht did not know what a vendetta was. “Shit, I didn’t know Tommy lost his leg. Damn … that’s fucked up.”

Glover cut a look at the other deputy, who arched one eyebrow.

“You didn’t know about Tom Ryerson?”

“Nah … I ain’t seen him since graduation.”

“Then why’d you set fire to the mosque?”

Hecht looked confused. “What’s a mosque?”

“What’s a — Judas priest, boy, that’s what you just burned the hell down.”

“It wasn’t no mosque. It was a church. A raghead church.”

“That’s what a mosque is. A church for Muslims.”

“Fucking ragheads.”

“Do you have a reason to hate Muslims, Mike?”

“They’re fucking sand niggers.”

“You ever met a Muslim, Mike?”

Hecht looked away for a second. “No.”

“Then why did you want to burn down their church?”

Hecht was silent for a long time, his face contorting as he tried to think it through.

“Come on, Mike … I’d like to help you here, but you got to be straight with me.”

Michael Hecht leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, man … I don’t know. They’re just fucking ragheads, y’know.”

That was all they managed to get out of him. When the county detectives made a thorough search of Michael Hecht’s house, they also searched his e-mail accounts and backtracked his Internet usage. Hecht was subscribed to hundreds of message boards. Over forty of them were devoted to the Goddess. The most recent posting Hecht had been to was the last in a series of linked messages on Twitter. The first one read: The Chosen will not tolerate the impure touch of the Muslim. The intervening posts escalated up from there in racial hatred, culminating with the one that had, apparently, sent Michael Hecht out into the night.

Fire purifies.

Michael Hecht was charged with one count of arson and fourteen counts of murder. His state-appointed defense attorney tried to build a case on diminished capacity, but by the time the matter went to trial the attorney knew that he was trying to sell a sympathy verdict in what had become a landmark hate crime case. The jury deliberated for fourteen minutes. Michael Hecht was convicted in a Powell County Kentucky court and sentenced to death. He remains on death row to this day.

In New York City, a flaming whiskey bottle was thrown through the front window of the 117th Street mosque during evening prayers. Several congregants suffered minor burns, and only the swift and combined actions of Azada, a teenage girl, and three of her friends, who grabbed fire extinguishers, prevented loss of life.

No one was arrested for the crime; however, witnesses saw a black male, approximately thirty-five, wearing a business suit, running from the scene seconds after they heard the sound of the window breaking.

In Atlanta, Georgia, four white males and one Hispanic were arrested as they emerged from the Al-Farooq Masjid mosque on Fourteenth Street. The young men had emptied two five-gallon cans of gasoline inside the building and had stopped to light a rock that had been wrapped in a gassoaked rag. Police cruisers, responding to a silent alarm triggered by the break-in, blocked the flight of the youths. All five were taken into custody. Fire department personnel worked with the caretakers of the mosque to clean up the building; however, early estimates were that it would cost forty thousand dollars to remove all traces of the gasoline and replace tapestries, books, and furniture damaged during the intrusion.

When detectives interviewed the boys, one of them admitted to having gotten the idea from the Internet. It was later determined that three of the five regularly followed forums and posts by the Goddess.

A week later the Catholic church attended by two of the boys was firebombed. No suspects have so far been identified.

Over the next month three mosques, two churches, and two synagogues were burned in Georgia.

Within six hours of the Goddess’s “Fire purifies” post, arson-based hate crimes directed at Muslims rose nearly 4 percent. At the end of six weeks, taking into account retaliatory attacks that included arson, drive-by shootings, rapes, beatings, and bomb scares, the incidence of anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 39 percent. Corresponding hate crimes directed at Jews rose 26 percent, and hate crimes directed at Christians of various colors and denominations rose 24 percent. The total number of victims directly connected to these crimes, according to the Department of Justice, numbered 43 dead, 175 wounded.

The day that CNN broke the story and showed those statistics, the Goddess, using the name Enyo, posted this comment on over sixty social networks:

Chapter Thirteen

Benson Childe arranged to provide me with a set of Barrier credentials that would be a master key to all levels of the investigation. He also authorized me to carry my weapon, which was useful, since I was already packing the Beretta 92F.

“A constable will meet you downstairs with the ID cards and other documents, and then he’ll drive you back to the London, where you’ll liaise with Detective Sergeant Rebekkah Owlstone. Her team is coordinating the door-to-door interviews of the neighborhood.”

“Great.”

We were in his office and he poured a cup of tea into a cardboard container and handed it to me. “Temperature’s dropped out there. You’ll need this if you’re going to be pounding on doors.”

I thanked him, and Ghost and I went out into the December blast.

Just outside I spotted three constables standing by the open door of a police car. They all turned toward me and the closest, a beefy guy, asked, “Are you Captain Ledger?”

I began to say “yes” when I heard a metallic sound and then a growl as Ghost suddenly bristled and stopped, his muscles instantly tense.

It took my brain a half second to process the sound I’d heard, because it was incongruous.

The beefy cop smiled at me and pointed a pistol at my face. The sound had been him quietly racking the slide.

He was almost laughing as he said, “Happy Christmas from the Seven—”

I threw the hot tea in his face. If you’re going to ambush someone, don’t make a speech first. It’s a rookie mistake. He screamed as the scalding liquid struck him full in the eyes.

“Hit!” I bellowed to Ghost. He and I leaped forward together, me driving hands first into the left-hand cop and Ghost hitting the guy on the right like a white cannonball. Ghost growled deep in his chest and I saw teeth flash and then there were screams as he and the cop fell to the asphalt.

The guy I went for managed to bring his pistol up, but I’d planned for that and bashed his arm aside with my right as I drove the flat of my palm into his forehead. The gun exploded with a flat crack! My blow slammed him against the car, knocked his head all the way back, exposing his throat. I hammered his Adam’s apple with both fists and he collapsed under me, gurgling wetly and trying to suck air through a crushed trachea.

I spun off him just as the window beside me exploded. Beef, half-blind and scalded, fired wildly in my direction, the bullets shattering windows and punching through the black paint of the police car. I rushed in and to one side, but he tracked me, probably only seeing shadows out of those eyes, but enough to swing the barrel toward my face. I came up outside his line of fire, took his gun hand in both of mine, and twisted sharply as I pivoted. In the dojo and in the movies the victim of a wristlock does a nice flip through the air. In the real world his wrist turns way too fast to act as a lever for his body, which means that the forearm bones explode inside his arm. His scream rose into the ultrasonic. I kicked Beef in the knee and as he canted sideways I kicked the other knee. He collapsed into a screaming pile of junk.

I tore my coat open and pulled my Beretta even while I dove for the front of the car. There were screams there, too, and the mean growl of a dog in mortal combat. I hit the hood on one hip and skidded across, landing on the far side and bringing the gun down.

“Off! Off!” I yelled, but Ghost was already backing off. His white muzzle was bright red with blood, most of it from the attacker’s throat. Ghost looked at me with eyes that had gone from those of a pet and companion to those of a hunter-killer from ancient times. The primitive killer in me met the eyes of the predator wolf in him, and for a moment there was a shared awareness. Not adversaries. Members of a pack. The level of understanding that passed between us could never be taught.

“Back and down!”

He looked down at the dying man and growled low and evil … and then moved three steps away and sat.

There were shouts around us and I turned, sweeping the Beretta’s barrel around. Another pair of cops and people in ordinary clothes. Whistles and yells.

I bellowed, “Special agent!”

I didn’t know what else to say. Were these constables also assassins for the Kings? If so, the risk to innocent bystanders was about to jump off the scale.

The two cops drew their batons and closed on me in a nice flanking approach, yelling at me, ordering me to lay down my weapon. One of them was shouting into his shoulder mike.

Balls.

I pointed my gun at the closest of them.

“Freeze!” I barked. The sharp tone of voice and the implacable presence of the gun slowed them from a run to a walk and then to frozen immobility.

To Ghost I snapped, “Set!” The command to get ready for a nonlethal takedown. Nonlethal as long as the guy didn’t injure the dog, and then all bets were off.

“Freeze!” I yelled again. “These men are not police officers.”

“That’s Danny French!” snapped one of the cops, pointing to the man whose throat I’d crushed. “You murdering bastard!”

Crap. Okay, they were police officers. Now what?

The man I scalded moaned and sagged back. Dead or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.

Ghost edged toward me to protect my flank. I could tell that the officers were going to try it. Gun and dog notwithstanding. For all they knew I was a mad cop killer.

“Stop!”

Benson Childe came running out of the building with a phalanx of armed Barrier personnel at his heels. I saw Deirdre MacDonal and Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod following behind. Because they wore uniforms the street cops looked at them in confusion. The crowd was even more confused because guns were being pointed at cops and no one was pointing a gun at the crazy Yank with the dog.

Childe’s men pushed the cops against the wall and frisked them. I didn’t think they were involved — and was pretty sure they weren’t — but I was in no mood to take stupid risks. I lowered my weapon and eased the hammer down. Childe didn’t ask me to surrender it.

“Sit and watch,” I said to Ghost, and he did just that. The wolf was still there behind his eyes. I could feel the killer behind my own.

Childe leaned close to me. “For God’s sake, Ledger, I know these men. What the bloody hell happened here?”

“Seven Kings,” I said.

Chapter Fourteen

Dr. Rudy Sanchez sat in his first-class seat and fumed. He disliked air travel at the best of times and definitely didn’t want to be in the air when terrorist bombs were going off anywhere in the world. In the days following the attack on the World Trade Center, Sanchez had been one of a team of doctors who had descended on Ground Zero to help in any way they could. As a psychiatrist, Rudy saw firsthand the initial waves of post-event trauma that were the result of the attack. He saw the wound inflicted on the hearts, minds, and souls of the people working the site. The haunted eyes of police and firefighters who spent hours picking through the rubble to locate pieces of people who had been their friends or colleagues. The dreadful loss of confidence in the world in the eyes of the thousands of people who stood constant vigil at the fringes of the disaster. The strange blend of relief and guilt in the eyes of the survivors.

During the flight he’d listened to the constant buzz of frantic discussion aboard the United Airlines jet. Since 9/11, terrorism was part of everyday language. It had become so commonplace that jokes were made about terrorists. Books and movies had been made about it. And the thought that it was already that deeply enmeshed with ordinary life chilled Rudy to the bone.

And now he had the Nicodemus file and everything about this matter was unnerving. The file was strangely incomplete. There should have been hundreds of pages of it. Evaluations, transcripts, after-session notes, and a detailed record of the man’s arrest, trial, and incarceration. Instead there were a few dozen pages of very general notes that might apply to any prisoner. Commonplace stuff. Worthless except for the very last set of handwritten notes taken a few hours ago by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Stankeviius, and even they were cryptic. References to a “goddess” but without context to identify which goddess.

The overall thrust of Nicodemus’s words had tended toward Judeo-Christian references, particularly with his reference to Dumas and Gesmas. They were variations on the spellings of Dismas and Gestas, the names of the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. But since those names were not in the standard Bible but in the highly apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, it seemed likely they were simply part of the overall religious delusion the prisoner had built up around himself. None of it tied back to either 9/11 or the London, at least as far as Rudy could determine. There was nothing else of substance in Stankeviius’s notes.

Rudy was alone in first class. Since the bomb went off there had been a flood of seat cancellations. He used his secure access to open a video Web chat with Bug via satellite. A small box opened up, showing the face of the head of the DMS computer lab. Although his name was Jerome Taylor, even his own family called him Bug. He had been a computer hacker as a kid and came onto Mr. Church’s radar when he tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had the right access he could locate Osama bin Laden. Maj. Grace Courtland and Sgt. Gus Dietrich showed up at Taylor’s door the following morning. He was offered a deal: work for the DMS or go to jail. When he accepted and was told about MindReader, he fell deeply and irrevocably in love.

“Hey, Doc!” he said brightly. The world could be in flames and Bug would still be jovial. Rudy wondered how Bug’s mood would change if the Internet crashed.

“Bug,” he said, “are you sure you sent me all of Nicodemus’s records?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you have missed something?”

“Could Oprah fit into Beyoncé’s bikini?” He snorted and said, “Either they have a lot of his stuff stored on paper records or …”

“Or what?”

“Or someone’s removed it.”

“Can’t MindReader tell if someone has been into the computer files? Doesn’t it leave a handprint?”

“Footprint, and yes. Except there’s no footprint here. From a computer standpoint nothing appears to be missing, and I’ve gone into the Willow Grove and Philadelphia PD databases, too. There’s just nothing else there. We can’t even verify his first name. If he has one.”

“Hijo de puta.”

“The fact that all of this is missing is deep magic. I’m getting a Woodrow just thinking about how sexy this is, ’cause we’re not talking about some pissant tapeworm. Someone’s punked the system just like MindReader. And they’ve absconded with the treeware and—”

“‘Treeware’?”

“Paper. Actual we’re-so-last-century printed documents. Somone in meatspace actually swiped the physical records as well. That’s stuff we can do when we bring our A-game. No one else has anything like MindReader, so I can’t grok how they did this. Whoever he is, this guy’s a freaking ghost.”

Rudy disconnected and then called Mr. Church.

“Problem?” asked Church.

Rudy explained about the records. “Is it possible Bug missed something?”

“Bug doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.”

“Then, that begs the uncomfortable question as to the possibility of a more sophisticated computer system than MindReader.”

“Unlikely. It would have to have been designed and built entirely without a connection to the Internet or we’d have gotten a whiff of it. Or built with an operating system so different as to be unrecognizable as a computer to all other computers. It’s doubtful something that exotic would be able to interface with the existing systems and networks.”

“Deep Throat has a phone system that we can’t understand or crack.”

Church didn’t comment.

“Coming at a time like this,” said Rudy, “with terrorist activity ongoing, a mystery of this kind is more than a bit unsettling.”

“Yes,” Church agreed. From his tone of voice he might have been agreeing to a comment on the weather, but Rudy knew him as well as anyone at the Warehouse. There was an edge of strain in Church’s calm voice.

Church disconnected and Rudy tapped keys to bring up the booking photos of Nicodemus. From the side he was unremarkable. Thin, slightly stooped, with a receding chin and thinning hair. An ordinary man. From the front, however, he was something … else. His eyes were a little too far apart, and the left was set higher and at a slight angle. His nose was thin and his mouth was a wet smile. Rudy enlarged the photo and stared into the man’s eyes. They were cold and bottomless. Those eyes, and that smiling mouth, suggested a warped sensuality that Rudy found immensely distasteful, and a deep understanding of things that had no natural place in the human mind.

“Dios mio,” Rudy murmured.

Interlude Eight

Circe O’Tree chewed on a plastic pen cap as she scrolled through the recent postings on Twitter. When she refreshed the page she had been watching, a new tweet popped up.

She chewed her lip.

It was posted by one of the new accounts Circe was following. Enyo. Circe opened a browser and hit a saved link that took her to an online reference database of mythology. She typed in the name. The entry came up at once.

Circe frowned at the screen for a few seconds and then reached for the phone. Hugo Vox answered after four rings.

“Jesus Christ, woman, don’t you ever sleep?” Vox growled, sounding like a sleepy bear.

Circe glanced at the clock and realized with a start that it was four twenty in the morning.

“I’m sorry, Hugo …. I completely lost track of the time.”

“The White House had better be in flames,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, flustered and suddenly embarrassed by her impetuousness. “It can wait.”

“No,” he grumbled, “I’m awake now. What is it?”

She told him.

“Ah … Christ. Okay, I’ll be right down.”

While she waited, Circe toggled back to Twitter and refreshed the page. The comment had been retweeted 41 times. When she refreshed again a minute later there were 153. An enormous amount of posts, even for a social network as active as Twitter. Most of the posts were negative, decrying the comment and disputing the existence of the so-called Learned Elders of Zion. But more than a hundred posts offered support of the comment. Of those, only a third were goddess names. Circe did track-backs on many of them. Half were known agitators among the violent fringe of the conspiracy community. Some were frequent posters of anti-Islamic comments. The rest appeared to be ordinary people.

There were so many things about this that bothered her. First, the choice of a name that was clearly tied to violence and destruction. Over the last few weeks the Goddess had made a clear shift toward militancy, though choosing the name Enyo suggested a much more aggressive leap. The other troubling point was the Elders of Zion reference. Circe was sure she had something on that.

Ten minutes later Hugo Vox came into her office wearing gray T-Town sweats that were water stained. His hair had only been finger combed. He looked at her and then more pointedly at what she was wearing. The same blue skirt and blouse from yesterday.

“You didn’t leave here all night, did you?”

“I got caught up—”

“Look, kiddo, while I admire the dedication you have for your job, you’re young and pretty and smart and you should be out on dates on Friday nights … not locked up here with a computer and the kind of junk food I eat.”

She made a face.

He sighed. “I know, I know … you don’t like dating guys in the service. How come, though? They’re all good guys. Top of the line.”

“And vetted by Vox,” she said with a grin.

“Well … not vetted for dating you, but I could look into that.”

“Thanks, Hugo, but I don’t need a matchmaker. Besides, the guys here at T-Town pretty much ooze testosterone. They spend all day long shooting things and beating each other up. What would we talk about over dinner? Muzzle velocity and choke holds?”

“What about some of those bookworms you meet at signings? That literary agent of yours has a case of the hornies for you.”

“Oh, please. He’s a wiener.”

Hugo grinned. “So … soldiers are too manly and the artsy crowd is too effete. Let me know when you find someone in the middle. I’m serious. You ever get off your ass and go out to have a real night off, I’ll pay for dinner for both of you.”

She mumbled something awkward and waved him to a chair. He was chuckling as he settled his bulk into it.

“Okay,” he said, “you obviously found something. Thrill me.”

She launched in, but before she was finished he held up a hand. “‘Elders of Zion’? What the hell’s that?”

“The full name is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was supposedly the secret master plan by a group of Jews outlining how they would take over Europe and dominate the Christian world.”

“How come I never heard about this?”

“Well, this is early-twentieth-century stuff. And it was proved to be a hoax.”

“Then why the fuck am I not still sleeping in my goddamn bed?”

“Please, bear with me, Hugo. The Protocols were a piece of propaganda intended to implicate European Jews in a conspiracy that did not exist. Henry Ford, who was a notorious anti-Semite, used the Protocols in his campaign against Jews, and even Hitler trotted them out to support his racist insanity. Much of the material was directly plagiarized from writings of political satire totally unrelated to the Jews. But hatred of the Jews in early-twentieth-century Europe was stronger than common sense; and later, following the establishment of Israel as a state, a renewed wave of anti-Zionism sparked new interest in the Protocols … and this hatred spread from Europe to the Middle East.”

“So what?”

“The Goddess has just started posting about the Elders of Zion.”

Hugo sat forward. “Okay, now you have my full attention.”

“No one credible defended the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” said Circe, “So … why bring them up now? The Goddess’s earlier militant remarks had been firmly directed at Islam on behalf of Israel. Maybe now she’s trying to build a case that the Protocols are real.”

“Yeah,” Hugo said thoughtfully, “and that could get ugly, considering the lunkheads who gobble this shit up.”

“Another possibility is that Enyo is someone else using the same tactics as the Goddess in order to redirect anger back at Israel.”

“Also potentially ugly.” Hugo rubbed his eyes, then cocked his head at her. “Tell me straight, kiddo … rate this on a scale of one to ten, one being harmless freaks on the Net and ten being we scramble the DMS.”

She chewed her lip some more. “Right now, I … I don’t know. Maybe a five? But this is the kind of thing that can lead to real violence.”

Vox snorted. “Violence against who? The Jews? The Muslims? I can’t tell from this shit who the Goddess is really mad at.”

“That’s just it,” Circe said. “Maybe it’s both. Maybe she just wants to start a fight.”

“To what end? She’s got to be rooting for someone.”

“Maybe not. Maybe she just wants to see things burn.”

He peered suspiciously at her. “Isn’t that a line from a Batman movie?”

Circe blushed. “It fits, though. Or it might fit. Some people groove on violence.”

Vox grunted.

Circe said, “Look, remember last year, when the white supremacist group in Alabama started using message boards to make threats against Jews? There were a half-dozen synagogues torched.”

“The people posting weren’t the same ones who torched the temples. They were idiots following a bad idea.”

“That’s what I think we have here. Maybe the Goddess is a movement rather than a person. There are plenty of people who feed off that sort of thing. They don’t actually have to be the ones throwing Molotov cocktails as long as they can watch the fire on TV.”

Vox pursed his lips and considered. “You say you’re at a five with this? When you get to a seven I’ll give you assets; until then you’re flying solo. But … update your Goddess report and send it to me. I’ll make sure someone at Homeland pays attention to it.”

“Thanks, Hugo.”

“This is good work, kiddo. Even if this turns out to be nothing, this is very sharp stuff.” He stood up and walked to the door, then half-turned. “You may not want to hear this — I know things are kind of weird between you two — but your dad will be proud of you.”

Interlude Nine

As promised, the limousine was waiting at the curb. A driver in traditional livery stood by the open door. A second man, identically dressed, stepped forward to take their bags. Both were slim, fit, and Korean.

Toys caught Gault’s eye, flicked a glance at the driver, and then affected to scratch his ribs. Gault did not need the cue. He’d already seen the bulge of the driver’s shoulder-rigged pistol. The other man, too. Nice cuts to their jackets, though. Most people would never have guessed either of the Koreans was armed.

Gault did not have a weapon. Toys, he knew, carried a knife in his left sleeve. Gault had seen his friend use that knife several times. Few surgeons were as precise or dispassionate.

Once upon a time Toys had been Gault’s employee, a combination executive secretary, valet, and bodyguard, but that time had passed. Events had occurred that forever changed the dynamic of their relationship. Now they were more like brothers. Or fellow refugees. Gault was at least nominally the alpha of their two-man pack, but that position was held now by mutual consent rather than financial or personal power. In the same disaster that had scarred them both, Gault had discovered an emotional blind spot that had nearly proven fatal while Toys had demonstrated terrifying personal power.

They got into the car and settled back. The driver and the other man sat in the front with the Plexiglas screen closed. The limo was next year’s model. Very expensive and nicely outfitted. Toys poked around and found unopened bottles of Cerén vodka — a superb El Salvadoran brand — and vermouth. Toys set about making martinis.

“Stirred, not shaken,” he said as he handed one to Gault. It was a private joke. Although Toys loved watching the Bond movies — for eye candy of both genders — it irked him that Ian Fleming had his hero order his martinis to be made the wrong way. By shaking the mixture, the bartender created air bubbles that turned the martini cloudy. More crucially, shaking also caused the ice to release too much water, thereby bruising the flavor of the vodka. A perfect martini should be stirred gently for thirty seconds, then chilled properly and served stingingly dry and cold. Toys always made perfect martinis.

They sipped.

“What are the odds that this lovely car is bugged?” asked Toys. He said it in a normal tone of voice.

Gault smiled thinly. “I would be disappointed if it wasn’t.”

They settled back and sipped their drinks and said nothing else during the drive.

The two Koreans took them to a small airport and ushered them onto a private Gulfstream G550. Gault was impressed. He had planned to buy one of those for himself before his plans had gone to hell in Afghanistan. The sleek jet came with a $59.9 million price tag. It had a range of sixty-seven hundred miles and all sorts of lovely bells and whistles, and though it was designed to accommodate up to nineteen passengers in great comfort, Gault and Toys found themselves alone in the cabin.

The second Korean came in to attend to drinks and to take their orders for dinner, and when the food came it was superb. The first course was a crème brûlée of foie gras that they washed down with 199 °Cristal champagne, and that was followed by several small but delicious dishes, including tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters, and mousseline of pattes rouges crayfish with morel mushroom infusion. The accompanying wines — a 1985 Romanée-Conti, a ’59 Château Mouton Rothschild, a ’67 Château d’Yquem, and a ’61 Château Palmer — inspired great respect from both of them.

“Well,” said Toys as he sipped Hennessy Beauté du Siècle cognac, “I think we can submit a new definition for ‘ostentatious.’”

“Mm. Are you complaining or commenting?”

Toys sloshed the deep-amber-colored liquid in his glass. “This is two hundred thousand pounds a bottle. I’m not a cheap date, Sebastian, but they had me at the crème brûlée.”

“You think they’re trying to prove something to us?”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course. And notice that we’re both saying ‘they.’ Not ‘he,’” Gault said. He sipped the cognac. It was delicious and it soothed the aches in his damaged flesh, but he would never have spent two hundred thousand on it. His devotion to brand names did not extend into mania.

“Well, to be fair,” Toys said, “our American friend was always grandiose, but cultured …? Not so much.”

“And he has no excuse for it. He’s new money, but he went to the very best schools.”

“You’re new money.”

“Yes, but if you didn’t know it you couldn’t tell. You can tell with him. At a hundred paces, too. Table manners of a baboon, and he keeps his mouth open while chewing. And he has that thing where he speaks like a college professor one minute and a dockworker the next.”

“You do know that he can hear everything we’re saying.”

Gault merely smiled.

“So,” said Toys, rolling the cognac back and forth between his palms, “the question is ‘why?’”

Gault shrugged. “A demonstration of conspicuous ostentation makes its own statement, don’t you think? After all, no one needs to own a jet like this. There are plenty of less expensive aircraft that are more than opulent enough for the few hours their owners and their guests spend aboard them. To put it crudely, the price tag is a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who can’t afford it, and much more so to those who can almost afford it.”

“Mmm,” mused Toys. “Then tell me this, O mighty sage, why are we being treated to such luxury? He doesn’t owe us a thing, not even sanctuary.”

Gault merely shrugged. He was pretty sure he knew. He closed his eyes and remembered a sultry night a dozen years ago. He and Eris in a Belle Etoile suite at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris. The two of them naked, covered with bites and scratches, the bed and nightstand wrecked, sheets torn and tangled, and the air heavy with the smell of wine, perfume, and sex.

“One day,” she’d murmured to him as they lay together on the floor, their feet propped on the edge of the bed they’d fallen out of during their last deliciously ferocious bout of sex. And it was sex. No one could call what they did lovemaking. It was too violent and immediate and selfish for that, and it had served them each and satisfied them both. “One day you’ll be a king, lovely boy.”

Gault was propped on one elbow, his head resting in an open palm while he used his other hand to trace slow, meaningless symbols in the sweat between her heavy breasts.

“A king?” he mused, his voice still carrying some of the East End London of his youth. “No way that’s possible, but I’d like a knighthood. That would be brilliant.”

She shook her head. Her hair was snow-white, with subtle threads of lustrous brown sewn through it. Candlelight reflected in her eyes so that it looked like she was on fire inside.

“No, lovely boy. I have my eye on you. One of these days you’ll be a king.”

Sebastian laughed. “A king of what?”

“What would you like to be king of?”

“Not of bloody England. Too much nonsense and fluff.”

“You could be the king of your own world,” she said. “A king of the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria.”

“Oh, very nice. Behold the leper king—”

“Shhhh!” Eris pressed a finger to his lips. “No. Not a king of the common cold or the king of cancer. One day I think you will be the King of Plagues.”

He almost laughed again, but there was something about her tone when she said those words that stopped him. “The King of Plagues.” Saying it as if it was a real title for an actual king. No mockery. This was not a joke to her.

Sebastian Gault had looked deep into her burning eyes. “Tell me,” he had whispered.

And she told him. Not much, but enough. She broke off a delicious fragment of the truth and whispered it in his ear, and it was that seed, planted there in the shadows that smelled of their passion, that grew into Gault’s dreams of empire. The many paths that led away from that moment in his life trailed away into infinite possibilities, but one—that one — was paved with gold.

The King of Plagues.

“And if I am a king,” he whispered as he pulled her on top of him, “will you be my queen?”

“No,” she breathed, her voice husky and dark, her hand reaching down to guide him inside. “No … I will be your goddess.”

Afterward, he had made love to her so hard that they both wept and ached all the next day. And each time an unwise step or movement speared pain through either of them, they remembered and laughed. It was not the sex that they remembered but the idea that had fueled it.

The King of Plagues.

And the Goddess.

The flight was long and the crew did not inform them of their destination. From the duration and the angle of the sun, Gault judged that they were in southeastern Canada. Looking out of the porthole suggested east, and Gault was sure that they were still in America.

When the plane landed they were both relaxed and composed and accompanied the two Asians without comment or protest. The plane had set down at a large private airstrip by the water, and the boat ride across the river was quick and comfortable.

As the boat coasted to a gentle stop at the dock, Gault nudged Toys with his knee. Toys looked up to see a woman step out of the shade of the boathouse and into the bright sunlight. Even Toys, whose taste tended toward fashion models of both gender of the type once known as “heroin chic,” lifted his eyebrows in appreciation. The woman was tall, slender, with snow-white hair that lifted and snapped in the breeze off the water. She wore skintight white sporting slacks and a bikini top that was little more than triangles of brightly colored cloth. Her feet were bare and she wore silver jewelry at throat, ears, fingers, toes, and navel. Sunlight flickered around her as if the daylight kept reaching out with quick and naughty touches. Her body was lithe and fit and the only concession to makeup was a fierce red lipstick that was an immediate challenge.

“Well, well,” murmured Toys. “Not exactly Snow White, is she?”

“Good God,” breathed Gault. “That’s Eris.”

“I thought you said Eris was his mother.”

Gault laughed. “That is his mother.”

Toys turned to Gault with a half smile, but he wasn’t joking. Then Toys took a second and longer look at the woman as she walked toward them.

“If that’s cosmetic surgery, I’ll marry her doctor.”

“No. Just bloody good genes and a refusal to age like ordinary mortals. I don’t know how old she is, but she has to be in her sixties.”

“You’re killing my youth-centric sensibilities.”

Gault laughed. As soon as the boat was tied to the cleats, he leaped onto the dock and walked toward Eris with his arms wide. She beamed at him like a happy panther and hugged him fiercely, showering kisses on him, even on the bandages. As Toys approached, Gault gave him a look that said, Well, she’s not my mother.

Eris turned, graceful as a dancer, and gave Toys a quick and frank appraisal. “Who is this delicious beast, Sebastian?” she said in a husky voice that was English with a soupçon of Boston. “Is this the clever one who’s been keeping you out of trouble all these years?”

“Sweetheart,” Gault said, “meet Toys. Toys … this is Evangeline Regina Isadora Sanderson. Lady Eris to the commoners and Goddess to those who really know her.”

“Toys … mmm, now that’s a name with real potential.”

Toys took her hand and kissed it in a way that was at once elegant and filled with self-referential mockery. Eris gave him a wicked grin. At close quarters he could see that she was indeed older than she at first appeared, but no one would ever guess fifty, let alone mid-sixties. The bikini top was challenged to restrain abundance; her eyes were as green as a tropical sea and flecked with sparks of gold fire.

“Welcome to Crown Island,” she purred.

“Thank you for having us,” said Toys.

Eris eyed him up and down. “I haven’t had you yet.”

Then Eris hooked their arms so that they bookended her and led them toward the huge fortress of a building that was McCullough Castle.

Above them the sun was a furnace, and Gault wondered what was being forged in its heat.

Gault and Toys were escorted to separate rooms.

“Divide and conquer?” Gault asked with a smile.

“Divide, yes, conquer — no, lovely boy. We want you to be comfortable. Travel is such a bore. Take a hot shower. Fresh clothes will be laid out. Someone will come to fetch you in an hour.”

One of the two silent Koreans stepped up to Toys and led him down a side hall.

When they were alone, Gault took Eris’s hand and led her a few steps away from the second servant.

“What’s going on, love? This is weird even for you.”

She laughed. “Mystery and intrigue is all the thing, lovely boy.”

“I’m not the boy I once was,” Gault said bitterly. He touched his bandages. “And I’m no longer ‘lovely.’”

Eris shook her head. “Bruises will heal and you’ll come to love your new face.”

“I wasn’t talking about my face,” he said distantly.

“Oh, God, are we going to have a gloomy existential conversation in a drafty hallway?” But before Gault could reply, she kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Go and make yourself clean and pretty for me.”

Chapter Fifteen

U.S. stock markets closed today after an apparent terrorist attack on the Royal London Hospital. The newly renovated hospital was completely destroyed, and early estimates number the dead at four thousand. That number is expected to climb.

Though the incident in London happened before the opening bell, trading went into full flight-to-safety mode as points were chopped off by panicking investors. Stock markets in Europe and Canada have also plunged.

SEC commissioner Mark David Epstein has not said when trading would resume.

Chapter Sixteen

The three assassins were, in fact, genuine London police constables. All three had clean records; none of them had known ties to extremist political or religious groups. In every way they were ordinary citizens, and that was the scariest part of it.

“I don’t understand this,” complained Benson Childe. “They’re good men.”

“My ass,” I said.

We sat in his office on opposite sides of an open bottle of Clontarf single-malt Irish whiskey. MacDonal, Aylrod, and the others had just left to handle the aftershocks of the shooting and manage the spin control. Ghost slept under the table. I’d cleaned him up and calmed him, but he twitched in his sleep.

“The man you scalded with the tea is named Mick Jones. You broke nine of his bones. He’s claimed that this was an unprovoked attack.”

“He’s a lying sack of shit,” I said. “He was the one that said, ‘Happy Christmas from the Seven Kings.’ He was smiling when he said it. A happy guy doing a job he enjoyed. Probably one of the Chosen.”

Childe frowned into his whiskey. “Well, as soon as he can be transported to a military hospital we’ll see about opening him up. One of my lads, Spanton, will oversee the interrogation. He’s a right bastard, too, so we should get something.”

I wasn’t chewed up with sympathy for the crooked cop.

Childe downed a heroic slug of whiskey and poured two fingers into the glass. “All this brings up ugly questions. How did the Kings know you were here for a meeting? Why do they want you dead? How were they able to corrupt three upstanding police constables? And what did they hope to accomplish by killing you? Understand, Captain, that while your DMS field record precedes you, I don’t quite see why the Kings would target you above all others.”

“Me, neither. I’m certainly not a key player in the Hospital-bombing investigation.” I took a sip that was every bit as large as Childe’s. I was fighting a bad case of the shakes. “I spoke with Church a few minutes ago and there haven’t been any attempts on other DMS agents. Guess I hold the golden ticket in the Lunatic Lottery.”

We sipped in silence. I wasn’t sure how to read Childe. I knew Church liked and trusted him, but the Barrier director seemed decidedly chilly since the shooting. Granted, he knew the officers, but I wondered if the confusing nature of the incident made him doubt me.

Well … fuck him if he did.

He must have caught something in my expression, because he gave me a rueful smile. “We’ll sort it all out, Captain. Here in the U.K. we have a longer history of dealing with terrorists and secret societies than your lot does. From Guy Fawkes to the bloody IRA. Half the time we never know what’s really going on. We catch a few, kill a few, dismantle a splinter cell, but it’s like cutting heads off a Hydra. Twice as many grow back and it’s bloody impossible to say if we’re doing any good.”

“Better than doing nothing,” I said.

He grunted and sipped. “It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like all we’re doing is pretending to maintain a shaky status quo while in reality things are slipping bit by bit into chaos.”

I leaned forward and pushed the bottle away from him.

“Oh yes, very funny. That’s not drink talking, Joe, and I’m not using this to wash down Prozac. I suppose it’s a kind of battle fatigue. I’ve been in this for thirty-four years and I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve won any wars. I’ve won my share of battles, but the war always seems to go on.”

It was the first time he’d called me by my first name. A flag of truce? I finished off my whiskey and set the glass down.

“Before this happened I was going out to play cop. That still sounds like the best way to try and tackle this.”

Childe looked at me. “After what just happened? Are you in any condition?”

It was a fair question. I’d fled to Europe because I didn’t think I was in any condition to be part of this sort of thing. Or at least that’s what I thought. Somehow the war always seems to find me.

“My vacation’s over, Benson,” I said. I clicked my tongue and Ghost instantly returned from whatever dark dreams were troubling him and was at my side. I bent and stroked his head.

Childe stood and offered his hand. “Stay safe.”

I laughed, but I shook his hand.

We went outside into the cold. We were both hypervigilant, and though we saw nothing else the rest of the day, I could feel the eyes of the Seven Kings on me wherever I went.

Interlude Ten

Circe O’Tree perched on the edge of her chair and tried not to chew her lip as Hugo Vox read through the most recent version of what had come to be known as the “Goddess Report.” Two or three times per page he reached into a ceramic bowl and took a handful of Gummi worms. He chewed steadily and noisily as he read, and except for the sound of shouts and gunfire from the counterterrorism range outside the room was quiet. The second hand on the Stars and Stripes clock on the wall seemed to crawl.

When he finished the last page he looked up expectantly. “This is incomplete. You got a lot of data here, kiddo, but I don’t see any conclusions.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Hugo. I don’t know where to go with it. I just know that it’s bad and it’s getting worse.”

He nibbled a Gummi worm and said nothing.

Circe took a breath and plunged in. “Ever since I started this I’ve been making connections and tracking patterns. The Goddess, the Elders of Zion, the covert and overt suggestions for violence … there’s a lot of stuff here. The more the Goddess posts, the more the other Internet extremists pick up on it and repeat her comments, add to them, discuss them in chat rooms and on message boards. People are blogging about it, writing essays and magazine articles about it. Not just conspiracy theorists and shock journalists, either. And … it’s spilling over into the real world.”

She laid a copy of The Grapevine on his desk. The picture showed the fiery aftermath of a Pakistani mosque being destroyed by a bomb in a parcel that had been delivered a few minutes before prayers. Forty-three dead, eighty wounded. The headline read: ISRAEL STRIKES BACK.

Vox picked up the newspaper and sneered. “This is a rag. This is the same paper that printed Pat Robertson’s comment that 9/11 was God showing displeasure at gays.” He tossed it down on the desk. “I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it.”

She reached into her briefcase and brought out a stack of other newspapers and began stacking them on his desk one by one. USA Today, the Arizona Republic, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury, and The Fresno Bee.

“Balls,” he said.

“Every major newspaper has reported incidents that could be interpreted as hate crimes.”

“Most of these papers retread each other’s—”

She lifted a shopping bag that was filled with newspapers. “Bahrain Post, Gulf Daily News, Cyprus Mail, Al-Ahram Weekly, Tehran Globe … I could go on and on, Hugo. Want me to get the rest from my office?”

“Okay, okay, Circe, but we have to look beyond the reportage. Have you established for certain that these crimes are related to the Goddess posts?”

“I don’t know if it’s even possible to prove that, but look at the timing.” She unfolded a flowchart and spread it over the mountain range of papers. “See? The red line marks the first of the anti-Islam posts and here’s the first of the Protocols of Zion posts. Now look at the blue line. Those are incidents of hate crimes. Look at the spikes.”

“These are all hate crimes against Muslims?”

“No. Some are against Jews.”

“By Muslims?”

“Not always. Some are from anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist groups composed of Christians and others, but—”

“So, we’re seeing hate crimes go up, but they’re not all specific to the message of the Goddess?”

“No, but—”

“This is supposition, Circe. I can surf the Net and build a case that the widespread popularity of Hello Kitty was responsible for the fall of the Nixon presidency.” When she looked blank, he gave her a Cheshire cat grin. “Hello Kitty hit the U.S. in 1974, same year as Watergate. I bet I could do a flowchart and probably make a good enough case to get a book deal out of it.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

He grinned and tapped his head. “I am filled with useless trivia. I’d clean the hell up on Jeopardy! Point is, kiddo, this data is interesting, but it still doesn’t make your case.”

“That’s the thing, Hugo; with the Net it’s almost impossible to collect hard, verifiable evidence. That’s why groups like the Goddess use it.”

“Say that’s true, so how do we separate that out and give it more credence than the ten billion other equally well-documented conspiracy theories, lies, exaggerations, wishful thinking, and pure bullshit that comprise the World Wide goddamn Web?”

Circe sagged. “What are you saying, that we ignore it?”

Vox looked genuinely surprised. “Hell no! I really think you’re on to something here, kiddo, but we’re talking about making a case to the lunkheads in Washington who have an ironclad record for ignoring good leads and following bad ones.”

“The DMS is different,” she said.

“Sure, and if we take this to the DMS and we’re wrong, D.C. will fry us. No one is supposed to bring anything to them unless it’s verified to the highest possible probability, and right now that isn’t how we can label this. Personal belief alone doesn’t cut it.” He took a breath. “In the meantime, what’s your next step?”

She was momentarily flustered, then steadied herself with a breath. “I created a few e-mail accounts with goddess names and have posted responses phrased to coax a more definitive statement, but most of the posters are clearly not core to this. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet gotten any responses that I can say are clearly from someone in the know.”

“If someone even is in the know.”

“If,” she agreed reluctantly. “But I believe that the Goddess is real, and I believe that the group she represents poses a real threat.”

“I hear you, but until we have facts we can’t build a case for it being a clear and present — and therefore actionable—danger.” He tossed the report onto the desk. “What do you suppose their motive is?”

“I don’t know. ‘Chaos’ doesn’t seem to be a profitable goal.”

“I guess not.” He tapped the report with a half-eaten Gummi worm. “You know, ever since you brought this to me I’ve been back and forth with the State Department, the FBI and CIA, and the Israelis. None of them think that this is coming from Israel. I mean, beyond the tension that’s been going on since — oh, I don’t know, Moses parted the fucking Red Sea, there isn’t anyone in Israel who thinks Jews are involved in this at all.”

She nodded. “The more I read the Goddess’s Net postings the more I’m convinced they are designed to do the reverse of what they’re saying, just like the Protocols. By pretending to support and justify Israeli aggression against Islam, they’re actually trying to frame them as terrorists. The problem is … it might be working. Whether they blew up the mosque or not doesn’t matter as long as the right people think they did.”

“Which brings us back to the third-party possibility.” He rubbed his eyes. “Keep on this. But maybe you can drop a bug in the ear of that British broad you’re friends with.”

“Grace Courtland?”

“Yeah. Get her take on it, but on the down low. Nothing official. If she thinks you have something, then I’ll reach out to Mr. Church. But take it slow, kiddo. One step at a time.”

Chapter Seventeen

Director Childe arranged to have me detailed to the Metropolitan Police unit working the neighborhood around the fire scene. When I explained that Ghost was, among other things, a bomb sniffer, that amped up my usefulness.

No official statement had been given about the three assassins, but rumors within the police department hinted that an American was involved and that the officers might be tied to a terrorist cell responsible for the London Hospital bombing. My name was not mentioned, and yet the constables I worked with treated me with distance and caution. Fair enough, because after what happened outside Barrier I didn’t trust any of them, either.

Everyone in London was paranoid. Everyone had reason.

The search team to which I was attached was composed of more than three hundred officers and detectives, and a comprehensive door-to-door search was under way. Everyone was being interviewed.

First thing I did was visit the fire site. Jerry Spencer was already there when Ghost and I arrived. Jerry was in his fifties, with iron gray hair, an unsmiling face, and intensely dark eyes. His mouth wore a perpetual smile of disapproval and disappointment.

I held out my hand. “Jerry, great to see you. How was the flight?”

He eyed me like I was a side dish he hadn’t ordered. “Joe,” he said without inflection. He kept his hands in his pockets. Jerry looked down at my dog and grunted. Jerry didn’t have any pets. I suspect he wasn’t allowed to.

“Taking it back,” I murmured as I lowered my hand.

“Heard they tried to make a run at you,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Fuckers.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I waited for him to say something else, maybe ask after my health and well-being. He started walking toward a pair of his assistants who were unpacking his gear from several large metal suitcases.

“Do we have anything yet?” I asked, falling into step beside him.

Jerry shrugged.

“And that means—?”

“It means fuck off until I call you and tell you I got something.”

“Love you, too, man,” I said, and clicked my tongue for Ghost. We left Jerry to it. Gloomy bastard.

I joined up with the constables working the door-to-door. They partnered me with a very bright but also very young detective sergeant named Rebekkah Owlstone. She coordinated two dozen teams and together we met with thousands of residents; we asked tens of thousands of questions. We took names, dates, addresses, observations, speculations, rumors, unfounded accusations, political diatribes, opinions, and crackpot theories. What we didn’t get was a solid lead of any kind. We kept at it through the rest of that terrible first day and straight through into the new day that dawned gray and bleak and devoid of promise. We were no further along than we had been the day before.

I called to check on the shooters, but so far the background checks hadn’t popped up any leads.

We were chasing phantoms.

Interlude Eleven

Dr. Stankeviius sat upright behind his desk, his palms placed flat so that he could press against the blotter to keep his fingers from trembling. “You asked to see me, Nicodemus?”

Nicodemus stood between the towering guards, a man who was a dichotomy in flesh. His small stature and frail bones suggested weakness and vulnerability, and yet his personality and charisma were like a dark tower of steel and cold stone. He dominated the room and he hadn’t yet spoken a single word.

“Please have a seat,” said the doctor.

Nicodemus’s lips writhed as he sat and there was the gleam of spittle at the corners of his mouth. “Thank you for taking time from your busy day, Doctor,” he said softly.

“It is the middle of the night. What is it you wanted to see me about? Was there something you forgot to tell me yesterday?”

“I have had a dream.”

“A dream?”

“Some would call it a vision.” His eyes were half-hidden by the shadows cast by the bony overhang of his brow.

“What was the nature of this vision?”

“Revelatory. It is a time of great discovery, Doctor. The Imperial Eye has opened and the Eye sees what the Elders see, and it is well pleased. The Eye can see into the minds of the Elders and what it sees is deemed good.”

“I—”

“Plagues will be visited upon the lands of Empire — and upon those who have broken faith with the Sons of Moses.”

“What does all of this mean?”

“The voice you hear is mine, but the servant is a vessel through which the Goddess speaks for all to hear. It is the time for all who believe to rise and be counted. False prophets have been heard throughout the land, but paradise does not wait for the bringers of small fire. The true face of the All shines not on those who use the sickle to hew down the wheat staffs that grow in the field of the Goddess. The true face of the All shines upon those who have never strayed from the winding path that leads through the desert.”

Dr. Stankeviius sighed and leaned back. “Nicodemus, I’m sorry but I’m not in the mood for this. You said that you had important information for me. If you have information regarding the murder of Jesus Santiago, then—”

Nicodemus suddenly leaned forward. The guards jumped in surprise and almost — almost — made a grab for him, but neither of them seemed capable or willing to lay hands upon the little man. Dr. Stankeviius recoiled from the wild look in Nicodemus’s eyes. His eyes flared wide so that the whites could be seen all around the irises, but those irises seemed to have darkened from a mottled green-brown to a black as dark as midnight. It was a trick of the light, Stankeviius told himself.

A trick of the light.

“They are coming,” whispered Nicodemus in a voice that was unrecognizable as his own and barely recognizable as human. It passed through the doctor’s mind like a cold wind.

The room went still.

“How will you be judged when the Sons of the Goddess sit on their thrones? When the Elders reclaim what is theirs and the Goddess reaches out her dark and shining hand across the face of this world, will you stand with the wicked and be cast into everlasting perdition? Or … will you stand with the Chosen and be counted as a warrior of heaven?”

Stankeviius felt his skin crawl. When he exhaled he could see the vapor of his own breath. But that was impossible; the thermostat was permanently set at sixty-eight.

Nicodemus bent forward another inch so that now his eyes were completely hidden by the shadows of his pale, craggy brow.

“The Elders have appealed to the Goddess and she has sent her judgment.”

“Wh-what judgment, Nicodemus?” stammered the doctor, his body suddenly wracked by a shiver. It was so cold in the room that his teeth hurt.

Nicodemus smiled so that his full lips were stretched thin over wet teeth. “She has sent Ten Plagues, just as the God sent Ten Plagues in His turn. The first was a rain of fire and ash that filled the streets of the new city. Woe to the children of the wicked that they did not listen, that their hearts were hardened as the Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. But the Goddess did not harden the hearts of the wicked. Anyone who says that she did is a liar and blasphemer. The wicked need no help in hardening their own hearts. They are defiant in their iniquity.”

“What are you talking about? What are these plagues?”

The guards edged away from him, their hands on the riot sticks hanging from belt loops. Neither of them looked at each other or to Dr. Stankeviius. Each was locked in his own private moment, each caught up in his own damaged reaction to this man.

Nicodemus sat straight, bringing his face down toward Dr. Stankeviius. He opened his eyes and for a moment — for a terrible single moment — his eyes were completely black. No iris, no sclera.

“Lo! And behold the rise of the Seven Kings. All shall fall before them!”

He blinked and his eyes were normal again.

A trick of the light, Dr. Stankeviius told himself. Just a trick of that damned light.

Nicodemus sat still and did not say another word.

After a few minutes Dr. Stankeviius ordered the guards to take Nicodemus back to his cell. When the door was closed and the sounds of their footsteps faded, Dr. Stankeviius rose and tottered toward his bathroom. He stared for a long minute into his own bloodshot and haunted eyes. He sank to his knees as a wave of nausea slammed into him; then he flipped up the lip of the toilet and vomited into it. Again and again until his stomach churned and twisted on nothing.

Only a trick of the light.

Except that he was sure that it wasn’t.

Chapter Eighteen

Next morning I caught two chilly hours’ sleep in the back of a police car while Ghost kept watch, and then shambled to a pub for a late breakfast. Eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, and jam. I’m a big believer in the adage of eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. Except that I tended to eat lunch and dinner like a king, too. That way there were plenty of leftovers for the mouth-on-legs that was Ghost.

I called Rudy, who was on the plane to America, and I woke him up. You’d never think that a civilized, cultured, and educated medical man like him could curse worse than Amy Winehouse on a bender.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Where do you think I learned to curse?” he growled.

I’d met his mother and I could see his point.

“Why am I awake and talking to you?” he asked after a yawn so loud that I could hear his jaw pop over the cell phone.

“You hear about what happened yesterday?”

“Yes,” he said, and that fast I could hear that he’d shifted gears. “Mr. Church said that you weren’t injured. But … how are you feeling?”

“Paranoid, scared, angry, and frustrated.”

“I can imagine,” he said. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

“We’re chasing phantoms.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just the feeling that keeps popping into my head. Trying to fight back against the Seven Kings is like trying to grab shadows. You can never put your hands on them.”

“If I said, ‘That’s part of the spy game,’ how much of a beating would you give me?”

I laughed. “Look, I called because I need to bang some ideas off of you before I bring them to Church.”

“Sure,” he said, and, “As you’re so fond of saying, ‘hit me.’”

I took a sip of coffee. “Okay, the way in which it was set up, the multiple bombs in key spots, suggests inside knowledge, and we’re probably looking at someone in authority. Barrier estimates that the bombs had to be big, hundreds of kilos of C4 or something like it. The blast didn’t have the signature of TNT, so we can probably rule out materials hijacked from a mining or demolition company. This is military grade, and that’s very hard to come by.”

“That’s two points,” Rudy observed. “The first being the access to the building and the probable authority to allow for materials to be brought in, or to cover up the fact that they’ve already been brought in. The second point being that the bombers had access to significant amounts of military-grade materials.”

“Right. But on the first point, that suggests more than one person.”

“Why?”

“Unless this was done in increments over time, it would take several people and some equipment to get all those explosives into the building. Hand trucks at least. And the materials would have to have been hidden, so maybe file cabinets filled with them. Or laundry hampers.”

“File cabinets or hampers that no one cared to look in between the time they were brought in and the time the bombs went off,” Rudy said. “That’s not actually very hard for the right person to manage.”

“Who would have that authority?”

“The hospital administrator and the first tier of assistants, of course. But to move objects in carts or hand trucks you have the head of physical plant, the senior janitorial staff, and the head of housekeeping. It’s actually a longer list of people than you might think.”

“That’s what I was thinking. So we’re probably looking at a minimum of two people working to bring the materials in under the radar of day-today operations.”

“Or on the radar.”

“Why?”

Rudy thought about it. “I’ve worked in enough hospitals to know that when new resources are brought in they’re often distributed to appropriate departments but not immediately assigned to individual staff. There’s always a paperwork lag. It wouldn’t be unusual at all for new cabinets to be brought in and put in corners or disused offices or closets until they were assigned to the staff. And … another snag could be that they were brought in, but the keys hadn’t yet arrived or someone had accidentally sent the wrong keys. That’s a typical hospital snafu. At Mount Sinai we once had six brand-new cardiac crash carts sent, but the manufacturer had forgotten to ship the wheels. They sat in closets for almost two weeks before they were assigned to floors.”

I drank my coffee and thought about that. Ghost made a noise very much like a person clearing his throat for attention, and I tossed him a sausage. He snatched it out of the air with the precision of a dolphin taking a leaping mackerel.

“That’s good, Rude,” I said. “Now, who would know the physical layout? Who would have access to the blueprints? Those bombs were placed at exactly the right structural points.”

“Again, that’s going to be a long list, Cowboy. Hospital plans are public record, and something as high profile as the London renovation would have drawn a lot of attention. There would be dozens of copies of the main layout available to civil engineers, the fire department, civil defense, and anyone in hospital management. If and when we get a list of suspects, you should look for someone with some kind of background in engineering.”

“And someone with some military or demolition experience, too. That might be our hook,” I said. “I think I’ll have my friends here take a closer look at the building maintenance staff.”

We swapped a few other ideas but got no other brainstorms.

“Go back to sleep, Rude. Maybe you’ll wake up and find that this was all a dream.”

He sighed. “That would be nice. And maybe Santa Claus will put Shakira under my Christmas tree. That’s just about as likely.”

He hung up and I set my plate down and let Ghost go to town on my unfinished sausage and toast. I was finishing my last cup of coffee when my phone rang.

“Do you have anything new?” asked Church.

I told him about my conversation with Rudy.

“That’s useful. I’ll discuss this with Benson Childe and we’ll put some additional assets on those aspects of the background checks. What are you doing right now?”

“I was about to head back and put in a few more hours with the door-to-door.”

“I may have to take you away from that later this morning.”

“What’s up?”

“Details are still sketchy, but this may be more of a DMS matter than police work.”

“C’mon … what could be more important than what just happened?”

He said, “Something that hasn’t yet happened?”

“Look,” I said, “I’d like to stick with this thing if I can. Try not to need me on whatever else you have cooking.”

“I’ll use you as the situation demands,” Church said coldly. “Keep your phone on.” He disconnected.

I sat in the dark little booth for a couple of minutes, feeling the aches in bone and tendon and soul. I didn’t want to be pulled off this part of the investigation. It kept me grounded on the level of real people rather than on the surreal level of Kings and governments. That was important because since Grace’s death my connection to basic humanity had been questionable at best.

After she died I came here to Europe for the sole purpose of killing someone. My only companion was a dog. The guy I was chasing was one of the world’s most dangerous assassins. I should have called for backup and didn’t. I slaughtered the son of a bitch and it felt good. That’s probably not a good thing from any psychological perspective. I was still dealing with grief and recovering from injuries received in the same battle that had killed Grace. I should have gone back to the States and spent time with my dad, my brother, and his family. In therapy with Rudy. Instead I got into fights, went scuba diving and skiing, spent hundreds of hours rigorously training Ghost, and even threw myself out of a couple of airplanes. That was my game plan for “relaxing and recharging.”

So, I’m kind of a whack-job. That’s not a news flash to anyone.

My disconnect didn’t start with Grace, though. I went through some trauma as a teenager that fractured my psyche. At the best of times I have several people living inside my skull. There’s the Modern Man, that part of me who clings to idealism, hoards his dwindling supply of optimism, and is frequently shocked at the dreadful things people are willing to do to one another. Over the last year, that part of me has begun to crumble. The other two aspects — the Cop and the Warrior — are teetering on a precarious balance. The Cop is probably the closest thing to a primary identity that I have. He’s the well-balanced, astute, and emotionally controlled member of my inner committee. He’s the part I trust the most, and it’s his face that I show to the world. Most of the time. Sometimes — more and more often lately — the world has seen the face of my other self. The Warrior. Remember that TV show Dexter? He would have called it his “dark passenger.” When I imagine what that part of me looks like, he’s crouched down in the weeds with green and black greasepaint camouflage on his face, a red dew-rag tied around his head, and eyes that are both fierce and dead. He waits there, always ready, never sleeping, perpetually eager to take it to the bad guys in ugly and brutally efficient ways.

I closed my eyes and looked inside for some light, but there was nothing but shadows and dust.

So I threw some money on the table, absently tapped my left side to reassure myself that the Beretta was snugged in place, clicked my tongue for Ghost, and went back out to the war.

Chapter Nineteen

First Sgt. Bradley F. Sims — Top to everyone who knew him, and second in command of Joe Ledger’s Echo Team — stood by the Humvee and squinted at the open hangar door. The sharp, evil-looking snout of an experimental fighter-bomber leered at him from the shadows, its black skin absorbing the stray rays of sunlight without reflection. Four other DMS agents clustered around the vehicle, each of them in unremarkable DCUs, the desert combat uniforms unmarked by unit patches or insignia. Their agency logo — a black biohazard symbol with “DMS” above and “Department of Military Sciences” below, was only used inside the Warehouse and other field offices. They currently carried ID from Homeland and the FBI, and Top had an extra set that identified him as a special agent of the NSA. All legal but not in any way accurate.

“Getting hot out here, Top,” said the big man to his right. Staff Sgt. Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit was six-seven, and most of it looked to be packed onto his arms and chest. Even with the three hundred pounds of muscle, he had long, rangy limbs and the quick, agile balance of a volleyball player, a game he’d played to Pan Am Games level, missing the Olympics only because of the Gulf War.

“It’s a fucking desert, Farmboy,” said Top. “Tends to be hot.”

Bunny took a pair of Oakley sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. He was blond and pale, a Scots-Irish mix with a few Polish genes somewhere in his family tree. Top was a black man from Georgia. Bunny was the second youngest man on Echo Team, though he was third in command after Top. At forty-two, Top was the oldest by ten years. The others — the thin, dark, and professorial ex-SEAL Khalid Shaheed, eagle-eyed and beak-nosed former MP DeeDee Whitman, and the laconic SWAT sniper John Smith — were all in their late twenties or early thirties.

Six other vehicles were parked around the open hangar. Two from the base’s own military police, one from the intelligence team based at Nellis, two DMS Humvees from the Casino, the Nevada Field Office located in an actual — though no-longer-operating — hotel casino. Lucky Team had gone inside with the military investigators, leaving most of Echo Team outside to bake in the sun. Only Ricky Gomez and Snake Henderson from Echo went in with the others. They lost the coin toss.

Echo Team was here to do some babysitting. Lucky Team was down three men following a raid on a Reno chemical lab that had turned into a firefight. The intel from the FBI had been weak, indicating that there were only five hostiles on-site, but Lucky had walked into a nest of thirty. By the time an HRT unit could roll, two DMS agents were dead and the team’s former leader, Colonel Dolcyk, had taken a bullet graze on the forehead that would keep him in the hospital for weeks. The second in command, Leto Nelson, had rallied his team and laid into the hostiles like the wrath of God. They’d held their line until the backup arrived, killing eleven of the terrorists and wounding six others, but it had been a bad day for them. Echo was here to make sure it didn’t turn into a pattern. When luck goes bad it can keep flowing downhill.

The operation itself was little more than a “look-see.” Over the last three nights the surveillance cameras on the base had malfunctioned. Once could be mechanical failure; twice was an alert. Three times was deliberate action even to the most hesitant and short-budgeted military pencil pusher. On any other base the response would have been an increase of guard patrols and the installation of a secondary and covert set of cameras that would watch the standard security cameras, and a check-back of everyone who had access to the security office. But this corner of Area 51 was home to the Locust FB-119, the newest generation of stealth aircraft. Unlike previous generations, the Locust FB-119 was designed to be totally invisible to radar, building on a radical new design philosophy that was generations up from the faceted surfaces of earlier stealth craft. The Locust could also disguise its infrared emissions to make it harder to detect by heat-seeking surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles, and chameleon fast-adapting skin that immediately changed its underbelly colors to match the skies through which it flew, with a lag time of.093 seconds. Six Locusts sat in the hangar, ready for the last phase of tests before Senate approval for mass production.

If even a single photograph of the craft hit the Net or fell into North Korean, Iranian, or Chinese hands it could spark a new and ugly round of the arms race, because it would be clear to any aeronautics engineer that these birds were designed to deliver nuclear payloads.

Bunny squinted up at the unrelenting sun.

“December my ass,” Bunny complained. “Got to be ninety.”

“It’s seventy-three,” said Khalid, and under his breath he said, “Kisich.”

“Hey, I heard that.”

“But you don’t know what it means.”

“If I shoot you enough times you’ll tell me.”

Top touched his ear jack. “Go for Sims,” he said, and listened for a moment. “Copy that, Snake. Sounds like it’s Miller time. Tell Lucky Team that first round’s on Echo—”

And the hangar blew up.

They saw it before they heard it. The windows above the half-open doors bowed outward and the entire roof leaped in a single unit above the building. A split second later the heavy whump! slammed them all backward. A massive ball of red-veined yellow flame mushroomed up from the building. Another blast followed the first less than a second later, and a third. The walls disintegrated, filling the air with debris as sharp as blades.

Top twisted and dove for cover, tackling DeeDee as he went, spilling them both into the open door of the Humvee even as the shock wave lifted the vehicle and battered it onto its other side. Bunny was plucked off the ground and slammed into Khalid and they struck the ground on the far side of the vehicle, both of them losing their weapons as superheated gasses blew them along the hardpan like debris. John Smith tried to run, but a piece of debris — a half-melted plastic bucket — struck him in the lower back and dropped him like he’d been shot.

The Humvee lurched over onto its side and rocked back and forth as gravity pulled Top and DeeDee down into an awkward tangle of too many arms and legs against the door of the passenger side. There were more explosions, one after the other, the force of them rumbling with earthquake power through the ground, rattling every bolt and fitting in the big vehicle. The windows shattered and a hail of gummed safety glass hammered them.

The long, slow boooooom of the last explosion echoed out across the desert.

Then there was silence.

To Top Sims the silence felt like it was filled with knives. He hovered on the edge of consciousness, agony stabbing through every bruised inch of him. Top knew he was hurt, but he could not tell how badly. His head throbbed horribly and there was warmth in his ears. Blood? He prayed that his eardrums hadn’t been blown out.

He lay still for a moment, listening for the sounds of combat. The echoes of the blasts kept pounding inside his head. He worked his jaw and something clicked behind his jaw and one ear popped. He could hear. First his own labored breathing and then a muffled sound. Below him.

“DeeDee,” he croaked.

She made a soft, hurt sound.

“Talk to me, soldier,” he said as he tried to shift his weight off her. She was a strong woman, but his 175 pounds were smashed down on top of her 130, and at an angle that was doing neither of them any good.

“Can’t … breathe …,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

Top reached up to grab the steering wheel and pulled his weight away from her. He heard her gasp in a lungful of air.

“Better,” she said, but her voice was weak.

“I’m going to climb out. Got to see what’s what. I’ll be back for you.”

“I … I’m good,” she said without conviction.

Top reached up with his other hand, taking the knobbed wheel in both fists, then set his teeth and pulled. It was like doing a chin-up through a junk-cluttered manhole, and the strain on his muscles was incredible. Particularly on his left side, which had only recently healed from injuries from a mission down in the Bahamas back in August. As he pulled himself up he could feel the burn along the newly healed ribs and barely knit muscle in his shoulder. Top set his teeth against the pain and hauled.

“Top!”

He looked up as a big shadow moved above him, blocking out the sky. Bunny’s face was streaked with dust and lines of blood, but his eyes were clear. He reached a hand down and knotted his fist in the front of Top’s combat vest, then with a grunt like an angry bear reared back and hauled Top out of the Humvee as easily as Top might pull out a child. The huge muscles in the big young man’s arms swelled like ripe melons as Bunny … pulled. Top caught the edge of the frame and hoisted himself onto the side of the vehicle.

“You may be ugly, Farmboy, but right now I could kiss you.”

“Buy me dinner and a movie first, old man.” He wiped sweat from his eyes. Top’s trembling fingers fumbled for his sidearm, but Bunny said, “We’re not under fire, Top. No hostiles. No nothing.”

“Got to get DeeDee out.”

Bunny bowed down and thrust his head and shoulders into the Humvee. “Hey … DeeDee … how we doing down there?”

“Just fine. I’m down here doing my fucking nails.”

Bunny snorted and took the hands that she reached up to him and pulled her out. She and Top hopped down onto the ground, dazed and unsteady.

“Report,” gasped Top.

Bunny crouched atop the Humvee. “We’re not under fire. This isn’t an active attack. Khalid’s winded. I landed on top of him. Smith’s good.” His blue eyes were hard as diamonds. “Top, Ricky and Snake were inside when it blew.”

Top closed his eyes.

Ricky Gomez had been with Echo for three months, the longest active service besides Bunny. He’d proven himself in half a dozen tough assignments. But … Snake. God. This was only Snake’s third day on the job. His first field op.

He was only inside because he lost a coin toss.

“Is Smith on-point?”

“Yeah,” said Bunny. “His weapon was damaged in the blast, but I gave him mine and he’s watching our asses. Sat phone’s toast, but we have team radio. Smith’s on channel two.”

Top spit blood out of his mouth and tapped his commlink to the channel. “Rock to Chatterbox, come in.”

“Go for Chatterbox,” said Smith quietly. The link was bad, full of static.

“What’ve you got?”

“Zero movement, zero hostiles.”

“ETA on fire and rescue.”

There was a pause. “From where?”

“From the main damn building,” Top snapped, but then he caught Bunny’s eye. The big man shook his head, then nodded past the end of the overturned Humvee. Top staggered away from the vehicle and looked past it. The Locust hangar had been at the edge of the complex, the outermost of eleven buildings. Most of the buildings were empty as the base dwindled toward complete decommission, but there was a security shack, crews quarters, and the aeronautics lab. Four active buildings and seventy staff.

Or … there should have been.

Now all there was, as far as the eye could see, was burning rubble and towers of smoke that rose to the sky like the pillars of hell.

Area 51 had been wiped off the face of the earth.