Code Zero (17 page)

The boy ignored her and sprayed a letter O around the A. The legs and top spike of the A extended beyond the O.

The woman started to reach for the boy’s arm with every intention of snatching the can away from him, but he suddenly turned toward her and sprayed the black paint full into her face.

She screamed and reeled back, bringing up her hands too slowly and too late to protect her eyes. The customer screamed, but she was an older woman and there was nothing she could do to help.

With dry contempt, the boy said, “Didn’t anyone ever teach you the right way to think, you stupid bitch? The only action is direct action.”

The saleswoman was totally blinded by the paint and she tried to back away, to flee, but instead she banged into a table covered with baskets of small sale items. The boy stepped forward and gave her a sudden and vicious shove, sending her crashing into the table so hard she rebounded and fell to the floor. The baskets and their contents—small guest soaps and specialty candles—rained down on her.

“Stop that!” shouted the older woman.

“Fuck you,” said the boy, but he was laughing.

He was still laughing when he started kicking the woman on the floor.

The customer screamed and waddled out of the store as fast as her old, bad legs could carry her.

When she returned with the police, the saleswoman was still on the floor. She had been so comprehensively stomped that her face no longer resembled anything human.

The boy in the hoodie was gone.

No one—not the staff nor the police—noticed the small high-definition video camera attached at floor level near the crime scene. The camera shell was treated with photoreactive chemicals that sampled the background color of the wall and changed the thin layer of treated film on its outside to match. From five feet away it was virtually invisible.

Adams County Law Library, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The Adams County Law Library is maintained for use by the Adams County Court of Common Pleas, county officials, county attorneys, and the general public. The focus of the collection is Pennsylvania law. Along with thousands of books on case law, the collection also includes the Pennsylvania Statutes, Pennsylvania Code, and Court Rules.

Martyn Salinger ran the library with quiet pride, knowing it to be an excellent and accessible resource. The crucial information in so many important cases was found here. Maintaining and growing the library made Martyn feel like he mattered in the overall process of justice, and that was something he could take home with him every night. Something that made him want to go to work each day.

As part of a big Get to Know Gettysburg event that covered the whole Labor Day weekend, the library was opened at six in the morning and would remain open until midnight on Monday.

When the young woman came in that morning, Martyn assumed she was a law student. She had that underfed look. Too young to be a clerk, too poorly dressed to be a tourist, too into her own thoughts to be a messenger. She came in with a hooded sweater—he refused to use the term
hoodie
—and a heavy backpack, which she set down on a table. The girl wandered back into the rows of shelved books, apparently studying the titles on the spines with great interest.

“May I help you, miss?” asked Martyn.

She turned to look at him through the nearly opaque lenses of her sunglasses.

“No, thank you,” she said politely. “I know what I’m looking for.”

“Very well. Let me know if I can help.”

She gave him a smile and returned to browsing, and Martyn returned to a LexisNexis search he was doing on his computer for one of the judges. When he looked up a few minutes later he saw that the backpack was still there, but he couldn’t spot the girl. She must be all the way in the back.

A few minutes later she still hadn’t come out.

Martyn frowned, wondering what it was she could be looking for back there. He got up and drifted down one of the rows, trying to make his approach seem casual.

But the girl wasn’t there.

His frown deepened.

He made a circuit of the entire library and could not find her.

Realizing that she must have left and forgotten her bag, he hurried to the table where she’d left it to see if there was something in it that might have a name and phone number, or at least an e-mail address.

He unzipped the bag, which was fat and heavy.

Then he froze and his frown deepened even more.

Not a stack of heavy books, the contents of the backpack seemed to make no sense at all. Inside was a silver pot with a black lid. A pressure cooker. There was a small digital touchpad on the front and the maker’s name: Fagor. When Martyn bent close to examine it, he heard a few short, spaced electronic sounds.

Beep … beep … beep.

He said, “What on earth?”

Those were the last words Martyn Salinger ever spoke.

The pressure cooker exploded. The tightly packed ball bearings, screws, and nails tore him to red rags in a microsecond. Small incendiary charges mixed in with the shrapnel lodged into tables, chairs, and row upon row of books.

By the time the first fire trucks arrived, the library was thoroughly involved. It would be six hours before fire investigators would be able to begin sorting through the rubble, and seven hours before they found the remains of the pressure-cooker bomb.

However, when the trucks rolled up, they could see the thing someone had spray-painted on the front doors.

The letter A surrounded by a rough circle.

Within minutes the fire blackened and then consumed the door. Just as it had the two small cameras mounted inside the library. The video feeds from the cameras had already been sent by the time the components melted.

The LexPlex Sports Arena, Lexington, Kentucky

Duke Hapgood and Cletus Hart were having a long damn morning, and they’d been at it since before dawn’s early light. Their H&H delivery truck was too big to back up all the way to the service door, which meant they had to pick up each and every blessed folded gym mat and carry it from the parking lot, across a patch of grass, and into the event space. Ninety steps each way, and there were eighty mats.

“This is fucked up,” muttered Cletus. It was probably the twentieth time he’d said it, but Duke couldn’t argue with the sentiment.

Inside the event space, two of the other guys were unfolding the mats and laying them out on the floor. So far, thirty-six of the blue-and-tan mats were down, their sides trued up and secured with Velcro. Later those joins would have to be covered with strips of duct tape, and that meant a couple of hours with all four of them walking around on their knees.

“This blows,” said Duke, which had become his go-to response every time Cletus made his comment. They were both puffing and bathed in sweat.

All around the edges of the event space, groups of people watched and offered no help at all. Duke wanted to say something smart-ass to them, but everyone was wearing a black belt. Some of them had swords and staffs and all that Jackie Chan shit.

The Kentucky Brawl was an annual Labor Day weekend martial arts tournament that drew competitors from eastern Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, and the western part of West Virginia. Duke could throw a punch, but he didn’t want to complicate the day by brawling with three hundred trained fighters.

Under his breath, he muttered, “Wouldn’t kill one of these assholes to give us a hand for five minutes.”

Cletus grinned. “They might break a sweat. Couldn’t have that.”

For some reason they both thought that was funny, and they laughed as they carried the next load in.

On the way out to the truck they passed a couple of kids heading in. Teenagers with hoodies and sunglasses. Cletus and Duke ignored them. The kids were carrying backpacks and had the slacker look, but they were both Asian, so the guys figured they were there for the tournament. They didn’t look tough, but you couldn’t always tell with kung fu and karate types.

At the truck, Duke stopped and stretched, bending backward with a grunt to try to pop his vertebrae back into place. Cletus opened a couple of cans of Mr. Pibb and handed one to Duke, who stopped stretching to knock back half of his can of pop.

Later, when reporters and police interviewed them, it was Cletus who first said that their lives were saved by Mr. Pibb. If they hadn’t stopped to drink their sodas, they would have been inside when the bombs went off.

As it was, they were only flash-burned and bruised from the shockwave that picked them up and flung them against the stack of mats waiting to be carried inside. They were not among the eighteen dead and ninety wounded.

In one of those public relations decisions that defy rational explanation, the Coca-Cola company, manufacturers of Mr. Pibb, gave the boys a lifetime supply of Pibb and hired them for public appearances. They became known as the Pibb Boys.

Even Duke and Cletus thought that was weird.

Their story went unnoticed, however, by the people who received the video feed from cameras placed inside the arena prior to the detonation of the bombs.

Chapter Twenty-two

The Hangar

Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

Sunday, August 31, 8:38 a.m.

Rudy and I had just pulled into the cavernous hangar that gives the Brooklyn DMS headquarters its name. The hangar itself is mostly a parking garage. From the outside it looks like a dilapidated abandoned building. Lots of broken windows and obscene graffiti. But that was all for show. There was a double shell to the building, and directly behind those broken windows was a curved screen that projected a false interior view that reinforced the image of squalor. But behind that screen were walls of steel-reinforced concrete, sensors, alarms, and hidden guard posts. The guards who walked the perimeter were dressed to look like laborers working on restoring the building. They weren’t. Most were former DMS field-team shooters who were either too old for active fieldwork or who’d been injured on the job and couldn’t roll out for the kind of thing Echo Team faces down. Even so, it would be a serious mistake to mistake them for old guys or cripples. That would be bad in very messy ways.

My cell vibrated. I killed the Explorer’s engine and pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was another text message from “A.”

ONE OR THOUSANDS?

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?

I showed it to Rudy.

“Nicely vague,” he said. “There’s no context to suggest a meaning.”

I grunted something unpleasant and forwarded the message to Bug.

As we climbed out of the Explorer we were met by Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, a massive and battle-scarred black man with a metal leg and hands that I’m pretty sure could crush a Volvo. When Gus Dietrich had been killed at the Warehouse last year, Brick had stepped up to take his place as Mr. Church’s personal aide and bodyguard. He wasn’t as tall as Bunny, but he had bigger arms and a broader chest. He usually had a genial smile, though he wasn’t wearing one now.

“What’s wrong?” asked Rudy as soon as he spotted Brick’s troubled expression.

“The big man will fill you in,” said Brick, “but the short version is that Shockwave Team just got cut in half on a routine look-and-see in Virginia.”

“
Dios mio!
” gasped Rudy.

The bottom seemed to fall out of my stomach. “What happened?”

“They rolled on a tip that a Chechnyan extremist team was in-country to start some shit over the Labor Day weekend. Riggs and his boys kicked the door, but it wasn’t Chechnyans waiting for them, and Riggs lost all of Two Squad.”

I bared my teeth. “Who ambushed them?”

There was a queer look in Brick’s dark eyes. “That’s the weird part, man. Like I said, these weren’t Chechnyans.”

He pulled his smartphone and opened the image files. The picture he showed us was a dead man. The face was distorted, brutish, with a heavy brow, wide nose, thin lips, and teeth with overgrown incisors.

“Berserkers…?” whispered Rudy. “I thought … I thought…”

“Come on,” said Brick. “The big man will give you the full briefing.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Office of the Vice President

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, August 31, 8:39 a.m.

“Sir!” cried Boo Radley as he burst into the office. “There’s something on the news. You have to see this.”

William Collins quickly closed his phone and hid it between his thighs, out of sight of his chief of staff.

“See what?” he asked.

Radley snatched the TV remote from the coffee table, aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, and turned up the volume. The screen was filled with the face of a lovely Asian woman in a Betty Page black Dutchboy and opaque movie star sunglasses. Below her image was a banner:
WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

The woman was speaking. “… are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and
take
the streets back.”

“Teresa Naylor at the President’s office called to alert me about this,” said Radley. “It’s on every station. Some kind of computer virus that’s hacked into all the news feeds.”

Collins held a finger to his lips. “Shhhh, I want to hear this.”

“… That wasn’t anarchy. The pigs in the system haven’t
seen
anarchy. Not yet.” The woman licked her lips “But it’s coming. The only action is direct action.”

It took every ounce of willpower the vice president possessed not to smile. Not to leer. That smile was delicious.

“Mother Night,” he said softly.

The video ended and after a few awkward moments the face of the Fox News reporter blinked onto the screen, looking confused and angry. He immediately began jabbering, but Collins took the remote and muted the TV, then tossed the device onto his desk blotter.

“The White House needs to make a response,” said Radley.

“That’s the President’s job,” said Collins.