Code Zero (15 page)

“Don’t feed it,” he said mildly.

“Feed what?”

“Their desire to provoke you.”

“If it’s what they want, then I’m fine with—”

“Listen to yourself, Cowboy. They’re a couple of kids who do something like this, dress that way and inconvenience people, for a very specific reason. They are forcing you to notice them and to acknowledge their existence by reacting to them.”

“They could have done that by handing out flowers instead of blocking traffic.”

“And maybe they would have felt silly or maybe it didn’t occur to them. This is their way of spray-painting their name on the world.” He shrugged. “Let them have their power. It shouldn’t diminish us, Joe.”

The kids passed, and the girl turned and smiled at me. It was a strength smile, almost a knowing smile.

My cell rang and I took the call. Bug.

“Hey, Joe,” he said, “I had Nikki do a traceback on that text you got.”

“And—”

“According to your phone provider’s records, no such text was ever sent.”

“Umm … how’s that work?”

“Don’t know. Glitch in the system?”

“If I were a normal guy working a normal job I’d buy that. Keep checking.”

“Will do.”

As I hung up, Rudy asked, “Problem?”

“Not sure,” I said. Then laughed. “Nah. It’s nothing.”

Interlude Five

Beranger Sporting Equipment

Outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming

Five Years Ago

“Is it safe?”

It wasn’t the first time Artemisia Bliss asked that question, but it was the first time someone took the time to answer.

“It is now,” said the big man with the gun. Major Samson Riggs was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome in a weathered Matthew McConaughey way. Older than her by almost two decades, but square-jawed, blue-eyed, and built like a fitness trainer. He offered her a hand that was tanned but crisscrossed with scars.

Riggs offered his hand to help her out of the armored SUV.

The air was filled with smoke and the rhythmic thump of helicopter blades. Various tactical vehicles sat at crooked angles in front of a four-story brick warehouse. A sign outside said that this place manufactured tennis rackets. It did not. Some of the things it did manufacture lay sprawled and broken in the tall grass. On paper their designation was rather bland, even by military standards. Enhanced drones. In reality they were terrifying.

Riggs led her past several of them. She paused to look down at one of them. Inside the shattered fiberglass-and-metal hull of the unmanned aerial vehicles were torn pieces of red and shattered spikes of white.

Meat and bones.

Bliss gagged and turned away for a moment, and Riggs placed a fatherly, calming hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” he said gently. “First time in the field?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Don’t sweat it. Everyone has a moment like this. God knows I did.”

She cut him a look to see if he was patronizing her.

“Seriously,” he said. “My first gig with the Deacon was a dirty piece of business down in Guam. One of those damn supersoldier programs. Steroids, cybernetic enhancements, implants dumping hormones and stimulants directly into the bloodstream. Very nasty. We busted the place up pretty good, and that was just business, but then we crashed into the surgical labs. Lots of works in progress, if you catch my drift. It was like something out of a horror movie. All those poor bastards strapped to stainless steel tables or chained in iron cages. I don’t think there was one single operator in that room who didn’t toss their cookies. Not one.”

“Even you?” asked Bliss in a croak of a voice.

“Hell, girl, I was the first one. Couldn’t find a trash can, so I threw up into a desk drawer. Sounds like something from a bad comedy, but it wasn’t funny.”

“No,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

He fished in his pocket and produced a tube of ChapStick, uncapped it, and held it out. She could smell the strong mint. “Here, rub this on your upper lip. Put a lot on. The mint kills your sense of smell and helps calm your stomach. Go on, take it. You’ll feel better.”

She reached out and tentatively took the ChapStick, screwed out the lip balm, and applied it liberally to her upper lip and around her nostrils. “Mind if I ask a personal question, Colonel?”

“It’s Samson, and no, go ahead.”

She looked up at him. “How did you become strong? I don’t mean at the gym or good with a gun. I mean how did you, a human being like everyone else, become strong enough to do what you do? To go into battle? To kill. How? Were you born with it?”

She thought Riggs would blow the question off with the typical military trash talk, but he paused, giving it real consideration. “It’s all about choice,” he said. “If you have a calling, if you feel you know that this kind of work is what you want to do, or if you discover you’re good at this and you let your talent pull you in a certain direction, then you have to make a choice. You have to look it in the face. It’s like the way doctors do. The first day in Anatomy 101, when they wheel out the cadavers, half the med students pass out or throw up. Everyone feels sick, even the stoic ones, or the ones who believe they’re stoic. And the reason they do is because it’s a human moment and there is a very clear set of lines drawn in the sand. They have to cut into, dissect and therefore violate a human being. There are so many taboos, so many ancient dreads hardwired into our brains about not doing something like this that it feels perverse. However, the end goal is that the doctor learns things that will make him a good doctor and therefore a healer. Cutting into that corpse is like crossing the river Styx. Or maybe it’s the Rubicon, I have my metaphors messed up. The point is that it’s a rite of passage. You do what you have to do in order to be prepared for what you know will be expected of you later. It’s the same in the military. We train to fight. We visualize and imagine killing the enemy. We learn the mechanics of it, the sociology of it, and the psychology of it. Those of us who want to be good at it also dip our toes into the philosophy of it.”

“Which is?”

“Short version of that is we accept that killing is how we will survive, and it is through killing our enemies that we will guarantee the safety of those we love. Measure killing of that kind against the lives of those we hold precious, and the trigger is easier to pull.”

“That can’t be true for every soldier. Some of the men I’ve met in the DMS seem to be able to kill without emotion and maybe without remorse of any kind. It’s part of their job.”

“That’s true, in the moment. And between jobs it’s a useful mask to make. But we all take it home with us in one way or another. Hell, look at the current military, where there are more deaths from suicide than from combat.”

“And for the bad guys? Like the Hutus in Rwanda who slaughtered nearly a million Tutsis. They hacked off arms and legs, butchered babies, killed nuns and missionaries. Are you saying that they went home and brooded over those killings?”

“Ah,” said Riggs, “that’s a different question. You asked me how guys like me reconcile killing. I’m a moralist as well as a shooter. I will pull a trigger but I damn well want a reason. But you’re right when you say that there are plenty of people in the world for whom life is inconsequential. Ask a Nazi. Ask anyone in the drug cartels. The Russian Mafya. Yeah, there are coldhearted people out there. Some are sociopaths who have found their calling. Others have become dead inside because that is the culture in which they were raised. And maybe some are just plain evil.”

“But they’re powerful.”

“Oh, yes. And there are a lot of them.”

“Who is more powerful?”

Riggs laughed. “Ask the winners. In any fight, always ask that question of the winners.”

“Last question,” she said.

“Are you writing a paper or something?”

“No. I’m trying to understand how this all works. You know about the VaultBreaker software I’m writing? It’s all about trying to get inside the heads of the bad guys in order to predict how they might attempt an intrusion. I need to know to what lengths someone would go to get what they want.”

“That’s your question? How far would someone go?” He grunted. “If they wanted it badly enough … if having it was more important than anything else in their life, then that person might do absolutely anything, cross any line, break any taboo, do whatever it took to have that thing.”

Bliss nodded, letting it all sink in. She looked down at the dead baboon with all of the mechanical apparatus surgically forced into its flesh. The science displayed there was so radical, so cutting-edge. So powerful in its potential.

“It’s unbelievable,” she murmured.

“Welcome to the face of war,” said Riggs, misreading her reaction. When she looked up at him, he added, “This is what the DMS is all about.”

“You see this kind of thing in movies, in video games. I mean, I’ve played first-person shooter games where I’ve fought things as bizarre as this, but—”

“I know. The real world is always different.” Riggs paused for a moment, studying her. Then he said, “I have two young nephews who play all those games. Sixteen and eighteen. Both of them plan to enroll in the army once they’re out of school. They want to go into Special Operations, like their dad did, and like me, I suppose. I think they think that spec-ops is like Call of Duty or one of the games they play.”

Bliss fought the urge to roll her eyes, expecting this to segue into one of those trite lectures where someone who’s been there pooh-poohs the version of combat presented even in the edgiest games. She’d heard that rant a million times and wasn’t interested. On one hand, she was well aware of the differences between real life and games; after all, didn’t she design game simulations? On the other hand, her game simulations were the result of exhaustive interviews with shooters like Riggs, Gus Dietrich, Grace Courtland, and even Aunt Sallie. Plus she’d interviewed the counterterrorism expert Hugo Vox a dozen times, and had grilled more than a hundred operators at his Terror Town training facility. Bliss had built levels of realism into her simulations that were unmatched by anything on the current game market. And she’d played her own games, wearing earphones and goggles that gave her a massive 3D experience. She even co-created a simulator chair that provided smells—gunpowder, blood, sweat and dozens of others—so that the person playing the game had as real an experience as possible.

So, despite the “if it’s a game, it’s not real” diatribe, Bliss was pretty damn sure she knew what real felt like.

So to cut Riggs off at the pass, she nodded to the dead cyborg drone and said, “It’s a shame it’ll all get swept under the rug. We could repurpose this and—”

A shadow fell across the dead animal and Bliss pivoted to see Mr. Church. She hadn’t heard him approach, but he was like that. Sergeant Dietrich stood a few feet behind.

“Oh!” she said, and it came out as almost a yelp. “Hi. Um … we were just…”

Riggs came to her rescue. “The site’s secured, Boss. Nothing got out.”

“Very well, Colonel. My respects and appreciation to Shockwave Team. You may stand down.”

Riggs sketched a roguish salute, gave Bliss a wink, and walked off. That left Bliss smiling awkwardly at Mr. Church.

His face was impassive, a mask that told Bliss nothing about what he felt. She could never imagine him staggering off to vomit up his shock and disgust like the shooters in Shockwave had. Not him.

“What do we … um…?” She didn’t know how to finish the question.

“Everything gets cataloged,” said Church. “Bag and tag all the bodies, human and animal. Secure all computers and records. Trucks will be here in a few hours to collect everything. It will all be flown to Brooklyn.”

“No,” she said, rising. “What I mean is, what will happen after that’s all over? After we do our studies and dissections, after we run all of the data through MindReader, what happens then?”

“In terms of what?”

“In terms of the science.”

Church removed a stick of gum from his jacket pocket, peeled off the silver foil, and put the gum in his mouth. He folded the wrapper very slowly and precisely.

“This isn’t our science, Miss Bliss,” he said.

She did not dare respond to that. He’d just put a big bear trap on the ground between them and there was no way she was putting her foot into it.

Instead, she nodded.

Church put the folded silver paper into his pocket.

To Dietrich he said, “Gus, when everything is cleared out, set charges and bring the building down. Remove the debris and have the foundation filled with dirt. Three days from now I want a field here and nothing else. Are we clear?”

Dietrich gave him a sharp nod. After a moment, Bliss imitated the nod.

Church lingered for a moment, looking at her, then down at the dead animal, then at the building.

“This isn’t our science,” he said again.

Bliss could not have disagreed more.

Chapter Nineteen

Near DuPont Circle

Massachusetts Avenue Northwest

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, August 31, 7:26 a.m.

Vice President William Collins sat back against the cushions of the armored SUV and sipped his coffee as his motorcade rolled along the streets from his residence on the grounds of the United States National Observatory to his office at the White House. Coffee always tasted better after sex. Not after sex with his wife, of course, but always after sex with the wild woman he’d screwed twice last night and once again this morning. Coffee was the perfect after-passion taste treat. Good for the soul, good for the nerves.

And his nerves needed some help today.

Today of all days.

Beside him, his chief of staff rattled on about the affairs of the day. Bryan “Boo” Radley was a moon-faced Midwesterner with a computer mind and no discernible personality. A great number-two man, but he did talk a lot.

“Should I do that, sir?”

The question hung in the air and Collins had to fish around for whatever had preceded the question. But if it was there he couldn’t grab it.