Code Zero (34 page)

But there’s no other place exactly like the Locker.

In the six years since its inception, the Department of Military Sciences has gone to the mat with the world’s most extreme terrorists. Not just al-Qaeda fanatics wearing explosive vests or Taliban fighters with shoulder-mounted RPGs. I’m talking about actual mad scientists who put vast amounts of money and their own towering but fractured intellects to the task of creating the most dangerous bioweapons imaginable. Things like quick-onset Ebola, mutated strains of anthrax, radical new forms of ultracontagious tuberculosis, weaponized HIV, and even genetically engineered contagious forms of diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell, which had previously been purely genetic disorders. And, not that this shit had to get any scarier, but there were also a slew of designer superpathogens in there, each of them constructed as doomsday weapons, either as threats in the postnuclear covert arms race or as kill-them-all-let-our-version-of-god-sort-’em-out holy war weapons, or retaliatory devices for use as a Hail Mary pass if their side was losing a war. Stuff like Lucifer 113, Vijivshiy Odin-Vasemnartzets, Reaper, and the
seif-al-din
. Stuff no sane human, however politically or theologically motivated, should be capable of dreaming up, let alone making. All of these things were out on the bleeding edge of science.

In my four years with the DMS I’ve taken my fair share of these toys away from people like the Jakobys, Sebastian Gault, the Cabal, the Seven Kings, the Red Order, the Hebbelmann Group, and others. Too many others. I’ve had to do some terrible things to keep those weapons from creating the misery for which they were created. Things that have ruined any chance I will ever have of sleeping peacefully through an entire night.

I told Nikki to make sure Church called me as soon as he was free and then disconnected. In my pocket my cell phone vibrated. I removed it and all three of us looked at the message window.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE HEAD

“Well, ain’t that damn interesting?” said Top sourly. “Nice of someone to give us advice in our time of trials and tribulations.”

“Amen, Reverend,” said Bunny. His tone was light, but his eyes were bright with tension.

I said nothing. It was getting harder and harder not to smash the phone against the metal wall of the helo.

“Those texts have to be from Mother Night,” said Top. “This new one proves that she knows what we’re about to step into. It proves that she has the
seif-al-din
.”

Bunny licked his lips. “Okay, but how the hell did she get her hands on it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

“Hooah,” Bunny agreed.

Without taking his eyes from mine, Top Sims said, very softly, “And then we are going to kill her and everyone working with her.”

I added two extra magazines to my pouch. “Yes, we damn well are.”

“Hooah,” they both said.

“Coming up on it,” called the pilot.

Interlude Thirteen

Terror Town

Mount Baker, Washington State

Three Years Ago

When Dr. Bliss heard the news it rocked her.

Hugo Vox was a traitor.

Worse than a traitor, he was a terrorist and mass murderer.

And, worst of all, he was a founding member of the Seven Kings. A faux secret society that borrowed the myths and legends of other secret societies—real and imagined—to make itself appear ancient and vastly powerful.

Only some of that was a lie. They were not ancient … but their power was beyond dispute.

The Twin Towers had fallen according to their plan. As did the London Hospital. The Seven Kings used bribery, manipulation, and other means to inspire various fundamentalist groups to commit acts of terrorism. The Kings, knowing that such atrocities always impacted the stock market, made hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of that money would never and could never be recovered.

And Hugo Vox was at the heart of the whole thing.

A man trusted by everyone in the U.S. government, from Mr. Church to the president. A man who had access everywhere. A man who was tasked with developing the most elite counterterrorism and antiterrorism training programs.

Bliss stood in Vox’s office at Terror Town, the training facility in Washington State where America trained its agents, and where teams from the nation’s allies came to learn the best ways to combat terror.

The irony seemed to scream at her from every molecule of air in the place.

Vox was a bad guy.

The news seemed to hit Bliss very hard but from several different angles. On one hand, as a DMS team member, the betrayal was huge. It rocked the foundations of the whole organization and damaged the previously iron-hard credibility of Mr. Church. There were some angry murmurs in congress that Church already had too much freedom of action, and that his judgment no longer warranted that level of trust or authority. Bliss thought this was a little unfair. She had no love for Church or that harpy, Aunt Sallie, but Vox was a master manipulator. Maybe the smartest and most subtle of his kind that ever lived. He hadn’t just fooled Church, Vox fooled everyone. Including the president and every member of Congress, including the grumblers. They’d all been cheerleaders for Vox for years. Church was merely a handy target. That rankled Bliss.

On a more personal level, she was hurt. She liked Vox and had worked closely with him and his protégée, Dr. Circe O’Tree, on dozens of cases. She’d gone to him to vet nearly every employee she hired for her division and every contractor she used when designing security systems for top-secret facilities like the Locker. Many of those people had been personally vetted by Vox.

Just as she had been.

Until two weeks ago, “vetted by Vox” was the highest stamp of approval you could get. It was a badge of honor. Grace Courtland had been vetted by Vox. So had Top Sims, Captain Ledger’s right-hand man. And dozens of others in the DMS, and hundreds within government service.

Clearly not all of them could be villains. But how to tell which ones were Vox’s creatures?

But the news hit Bliss in another way.

She found that she admired Vox even more for all of this.

Admired him a lot.

Thinking about it sent a thrill through her veins. This was real power. Bigger power than anything she’d ever glimpsed. Eclipsing Church by miles, in her estimation. Power that changed the entire world. 9/11 was a point around which the future history of everyone on earth turned, and Vox had done that.

Vox.

She sat at his desk and looked at the computer he’d left behind. Vox had somehow constructed some technology that could fool MindReader. He had untraceable cell phones. His plotting was accomplished through some means MindReader could neither detect nor control.

Power.

So much power.

Bliss booted up the computer and, when it was ready, removed two devices from her bag. One was a micro MindReader substation. The other was something neither Aunt Sallie nor Bug nor Mr. Church knew she had. A device Bliss had painstakingly constructed from the schematics she’d found in Paris Jakoby’s computer.

He’d called it Pangaea, and from his records it was clear that the system was not only designed and built by a now-dead Italian computer pioneer, but it was without doubt the forerunner of MindReader. There were far too many similarities for it to be coincidence. Bliss did a little digging, and from bits and pieces of information gleaned from Bug, Captain Ledger, and Dr. Hu, it seemed that in his pre-DMS days, Church had run with an international team of shooters. They’d torn down a group called the Cabal, which in turn had been built on the philosophical and scientific bones of the Third Reich. Pangaea had been allowed the Cabal—and later the Jakobys—to steal information from hundreds of other research programs around the world. Steal it without leaving evidence of the theft. By combining research from so many sources, the Jakobys were able to make what appeared to be freakish intuitive leaps in various fields related to genetics.

Captain Ledger and Grace Courtland had torn their empire apart, killing Paris and his sister, Hecate, in the process. That Grace Courtland had also died was something Bliss thought she’d feel bad about, but found that she did not.

Several Pangaea workstations had been bagged and tagged by the DMS forensics team, but the schematics in Paris Jakoby’s desk were known only to Bliss. She’d copied them and then deleted them. Then she spent months handcrafting a new system that including many of her own upgrades. Although she had great respect for the man who designed Pangaea, she knew that she was smarter. Her knowledge base, in terms of programming, hacking, and cyberwarfare, was decades fresher. That meant that the computer she built was as unlike MindReader as it was similar. A cousin rather than a twin.

It was no longer Pangaea, and it was definitely not MindReader.

She gave it a new name.

Haruspex.

That was far more suitable, considering how she’d built it. A haruspex, in terms of ancient Etruscan and Roman culture, was a person who could divine the future and unlock the mysteries of the fates by reading the entrails of sacrificed sheep.

Very appropriate. She’d read her own future in the entrails of Pangaea. Haruspex had been born in the blood of devastation left behind by the slaughter at the Dragon Factory and the fall of the Jakoby empire of twisted science.

Now she had a computer that was nearly as powerful as MindReader, and more important, one that was invisible to Church’s system.

Invisibility was a kind of power.

She smiled at the thought. It was like a superpower. Bliss had enough geek genes to actively wish that she could be a superhero.

Or even a supervillain.

But this was the real world.

She sighed and began her assault on Hugo Vox’s computers using MindReader and Haruspex.

Firewalls and anti-intrusion programs rose up to challenge her, but with the deftness of a pagan priest of the religion of cyberscience, she eviscerated them and thereby divined their secrets.

Chapter Fifty-three

Euclid Avenue Station

Euclid and Pitkin Avenues

Brooklyn, New York

Sunday, August 31, 1:52 p.m.

I leaned my head and shoulders out of the open bay door. The area was cleared of everything except official vehicles, and per instructions the actual intersection was cleared. Police were erecting barricades and working crowd control. A half dozen news vans were already there, their satellite towers rising like metal trees above the crowds. News choppers were in the air, but police birds were establishing a no-fly zone for anyone but cops, Homeland, and us.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Warbride.”

“Go for Warbride,” said Lydia.

“What’s your twenty?”

“Right below you, boss. In the lee of the SWAT van. There’s not enough room for the helo to land. We had to rappel in. You will, too.”

“Copy that.”

“Cowboy—we are Echo plus three. Deacon made the call, but they’re locked and loaded.”

“The three we talked about?”

“Affirmative,” she said. “See you on the ground.”

Top and Bunny had listened in and were already setting up the fast-ropes for our drop to the street. I explained the situation to the pilot and then rejoined my guys.

“Duncan, Noah, and Montana?” asked Bunny.

“Yup.”

Of all the candidates we’d tested, three were solid standouts. A SEAL, a Boston brawler turned ATF agent, and an FBI agent who looked like a country cowgirl but who was one of the most vicious unarmed combat fighters I’ve ever met. I had good feelings about them, both in combat ability and in the likelihood they would fit into Echo Team. It remained to be seen if it was their bad luck they joined the DMS today, or my good luck that they were adding useful skills to my team.

I spotted Lydia standing with the rest of Echo Team. They were between two white-and-blue NYPD SWAT trucks parked crookedly by the subway entrance. A dozen men and women in body armor and helmets stood looking up at us. Even from that distance I could feel their anger and tension. Their friends and colleagues were down in the tunnel and they felt it was up to them to go charging to the rescue.

Bunny was next to me and must have been reading my thoughts. “We going to have trouble keeping them off the dance floor, Boss?”

“Let’s hope not.”

We dropped fast-ropes toward the street, clipped on, and flung ourselves into the air. Normally any kind of jump scares the shit out of me. I am not a heights person. Today I had other things to be afraid of. I plunged toward the ground, one gloved hand on the rope, the other behind my back to work the brake. We touched down one, two, three, unclipped, and saw the ropes rise like magic snakes as the Black Hawk climbed away, dragging its wind and noise with it. We hurried over to meet Lydia and the team. Sam nodded to us. The newbies did, too, but they were far more wary. Ivan wasn’t there.

“Where’s Hellboy?” I asked.

“Down on the platform with the first responders, a pair of transit cops, Faustino and Dawes,” said Lydia. “The station’s been cleared. We have National Guard units on their way, ETA eleven minutes. SWAT is positioned at the stations down the line, but they’ve been told to stay at street level. Deacon ordered that no one goes down there but us.”

We were all dressed in Saratoga Hammer suits and helmets, and under the August heat it was boiling hot. I caught a brief exchange of micronods between Bunny and Lydia. It was an open secret that they were a couple, but they were professional enough to keep it to themselves. They didn’t let it spill over into the job.

“What do we know about the SWAT team that went in?” Bunny asked.

Lydia shook her head. “No contact with them. Faustino said she heard gunfire.
Mira
,
jefe
,” she added, “the transit cops said that their radios didn’t work in the tunnel. From what she described, it sounds like a jammer. Said there were cameras down there, too, mounted on some of the pillars.”