Dog Warrior (14 page)

Atticus glanced at Ru for suggestions. Ru shrugged, looking slightly panic-stricken.

“Currently they're wanted by the FBI for the kidnapping of five infants and the murder of two. ATF wants them for illegal weapons. NSA wants them for wiretapping and hacking government sites, including some top-secret spy satellites. Every law agency in this country is looking for them.”

“This has the possibilities of being bigger than nine-eleven.”

“I realize that. I also realize that the moment that aliens and demons are mentioned in my reports, my validity will
be questioned. The cult has biotoxins. Their target is unknown. That anyone can believe and act on.”

Agent Zheng glanced at her watch. “The public defender will be here shortly. If we want to get answers out of Ascii without him acting as a filter, we have to do it now.”

Atticus studied Agent Zheng. If she was telling him the truth, their goals were identical—finding the cult. He considered the possibility that she was lying, but he couldn't ignore the simple fact that she'd known he wasn't human. “Okay, let's do this.”

 

Atticus paused by the door into the questioning room, gazing through the two-way mirror to the room beyond. Sunlight shafted down from a high barred window, motes of dust making the light seem substantial as it cut down onto Ascii.

The cultist was as he remembered her from the turnpike: a pale, thin blonde. The black running suit had been exchanged for prison grays, making her look more colorless than before. She seemed nearly void of color, a watercolor stain on plain paper. Strangely the insubstantial look flattered her, her fragile features becoming ethereal. She sat composed at the questioning table—hands folded in her lap, staring off at the left-hand corner of the room, eyes unfocused.

She didn't seem like a ruthless killer, but Atticus had found that few murderers did.

Agent Zheng stood beside Atticus, a dark reflection of Ascii: black hair, expensive black pantsuit, focused with bitter intensity on the woman within. “There's no telling which way this conversation might go. You're going to have to stay sharp.”

“Takahashi usually does the talking,” Atticus said.

For some reason, that summoned a Mona Lisa smile, making Atticus aware of how tightly composed she kept herself. The smile slipped away.

Ru had been watching the exchange, and a small wrinkle of jealousy creased his brow.

Atticus opened the door, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

Ascii didn't look up until he slid into the chair across from her, and when she did, stunned amazement took over her face. “You!”

That answered any question of her mistaking him for his brother.

“Oh, oh, forgive me,” Ascii cried, hands hovering near her mouth in distress, as if she was torn between pleading for forgiveness and keeping her silence. “Please. Ice said we had to take you by force. It seemed so wrong to kill an angel of the Lord, but Ice said it was the right thing, but Ice wasn't touched by God like Core was, so . . . I'm sorry that we raised our hands against you.”

What did you say to something like that? Atticus thought of Ukiah, battered, shot, bound and dead in the trunk, and rage went through him. Even a Dog Warrior shouldn't die like that. “It was an evil act.”

“We weren't sure if you were really an angel. You're the first we've found. Even when the mice formed, we weren't sure if you weren't just a new type of demon, but then, when the police opened the trunk and you were gone, I knew. I knew. You'd ascended to heaven to take your place in the glory of God, and I was sore afraid.”

He found himself standing, putting distance between himself and her.

Wan as she was, her eyes were vivid green, luminous in her pale face. “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

“Why would you do something like that? What if he . . . what if I were just a regular man?”
And not a Dog Warrior.
“Thou shall not kill; it doesn't get any clearer than that.”

“Surely you of all beings can see the necessity—that the needs of the one or the few are nothing to the needs of the many. We are sacrificial lambs for the good of mankind. We
will kill to protect, taking the sin upon ourselves to save the world. The demons are winning this war, and God might choose at any time to wipe the slate clean once more.”

He wanted out of the room, but he still needed to ask Agent Zheng's questions. “Where is Loo-ae?”

“Ice has the founts.”

“The founts? Is that what you call Loo-ae?”

She hesitated a moment, before asking. “Is that the wrong name?”

“We call them the Ae.” When did it become “we”? Somehow with a flash of the badge, Agent Zheng had established herself as sane.

“Ohhh. I get it,” Ascii said. “Loo-ae. Hu-ae. Doh. We've been calling them Huey and Louie. And there was Chewie and Dewey, but . . .” She eyed him, chewing on her bottom lip. “Core said they were like the Ark of the Covenant, most holy of relics. We called them the founts, because from them God's will would flow.”

“Where are the founts?”

“I don't know. Ice didn't tell us where he was taking them. We were to go to the parking lot of the Salem train station and wait. We didn't know what vengeance we might be calling down upon ourselves in slaying you, so we who did the killing kept ourselves separate from the rest. And we were right to. Within hours I lost my child, and the others were dead, and despite our efforts, you were gone.”

It would seem miraculous, except that Ukiah's ascension had been via Atticus's keen nose and Ru's lock picks. Ukiah had gone to a luxury beach house instead of heaven. If Atticus were inclined to believe in miracles, then one would be that he had been at the Ludlow rest stop, standing out in the parking lot, when the cultists arrived. Just a few seconds later, inside the Jaguar and out of the wind, he wouldn't have caught the smell of blood.

“We've long suspected that angels might walk the world,” Ascii continued as if the dam had broken and the
floodwaters would not stop. “Time and time again we'll find a demon nest ransacked and all that is left will be ashes. When we had you in our power at Eden Court, though, only Core recognized you—but he was touched by God.”

“What?” The cult had held Ukiah prisoner at one point? But if he was going to keep pretending to be Ukiah, Atticus couldn't ask straight-out. He scrambled for another question. “Were you there—at Eden Court—when I was?”

“I'd gone on to the Western Reserve.” It took Atticus a moment to realize she meant northeast Ohio, the infamous western reserve of Connecticut. “I wasn't there when Ice first captured you and Core shared you with Ping.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They say that's why the house was destroyed—because Core drugged you and took you against your will.”

They had raped Ukiah? “Why?” He caught hold of her by her prison uniform and could barely keep from shaking her. “Why would you do that to anyone?”

She didn't seem to notice the violence of his actions, gazing up at him without flinching. “We wouldn't have attacked you if the need wasn't so great!”

“What do you mean?”

“There has been a quickening to the demons' plans. A shift. Something has changed and we don't know what. We thought it was the events of June, but wiretaps we've translated recently mention Boston, and something of great importance. We might be too late already. It's taking us too long to work through the translation. We had to have help. We needed you!”

“What are the demons trying to do in Boston?”

“We don't know. We can't translate their conversations. We've tried to torture the information out of the demons, but it's quite impossible. They shatter down to mice without talking.”

“So coming to Boston had nothing to do with Loo-ae?”

“Ice says if we have to, we will use Louie—Loo-ae—to kill everything that moves in Boston.”

Ru rapped a signal on the door. Time was up.

Atticus scrambled to squeeze in Agent Zheng's second question. “What are you planning to use as a key for Loo-ae?”

Ascii gazed up at him, eyes wide and bright with religious fervor. “You.”

MCI Framingham, Framingham, Massachusetts
Tuesday, September 21, 2004

The public defender who was assigned to Ascii stormed into the room. “I don't know what the hell you think you're doing. Anything she's said isn't admissible in court.”

“So far all she's talked about is angels and demons.” Atticus retreated to the door. He didn't want to discuss in front of this man the madness that suddenly was his life.

“Really?” The attorney made a note on a legal pad. “Then insanity is a possible plea.”

Atticus fled the room. He knew that what made America great was that everyone was assumed innocent until proved guilty and that it was an honest attorney's job to do everything in his power for his client, but still, it grated. By her own admission, this woman had run a man down, shot him in the chest while he was helpless, and stolen his dead body. All evidence said that if Atticus hadn't rescued his brother, she would have hacked him to pieces and burned him to ash. All that, though, was inadmissible. She'd do a little time, if any, and be released. Yet all the time in the world wouldn't erase her discovery that it wasn't that hard to kill; and like everything else in life, it would only get easier with practice.

The guard who had been absent when Atticus entered the room stood quietly now in the corner. Agent Zheng waited beyond the two-way mirror, making notes in her PDA, no
clue of what she was thinking on her face. It bothered him that he couldn't read her.

“This is insane,” Atticus whispered to her. “Werewolves. Aliens. Angels. Demons. Everyone seems to be running with their own version of reality.”

“Yes.” Zheng put away her PDA. “But that's the way it's been from the beginning of time.”

Inside the questioning room, the public defender introduced himself. Under his polished manner, he put out mixed signs of anger, impatience, and concern. The intercom was turned off, yet it was clear that the muted conversation ground down as the attorney met a stone wall of silence from Ascii.

Zheng had been correct when she guessed that Ascii would talk only to Atticus.

“I'd rather not be here when he gets tired of beating his head against the wall.” Zheng picked up her black trench coat. “Let's find someplace private to discuss this.”

He nodded—he had a million questions to ask her. Atticus expected another walk around the grounds of the prison, but storm clouds filled the sky, pouring down sheets of gray rain. They paused in the doorway, judging the rain and each other, being jostled by damp visitors dashing in from the downpour.

“I've got a suite at the Residence Inn,” Zheng said, naming a hotel chain. “It's about a five- to ten-mile drive. We can talk there.”

“We'll follow you,” Atticus promised.

Zheng turned up the collar on her raincoat and went out, unhurried, into the rain.

“I don't know about you,” Ru said as he watched the FBI agent stride purposely across the parking lot, “but she really creeps me out.”

 

Atticus drove on mental autopilot, following Zheng in an SUV with Massachusetts plates—apparently a rental car. Angels. Demons. Evil aliens—Ontongard, Zheng had called them. What did this make him? Where did the Pack and Ukiah fit into this mess? Nothing in the reports Kyle pulled up suggested that the outlaw biker gang was hell-bent on global domination. And how did this fit into the shooting at Buffalo?

“The Ontongard,” he murmured.

“What?” Ru asked.

“What if the shooters weren't Pack or the Temple of New Reason, but this third group? The Ontongard.”

“The demons?”

“Yes. The cult steals Hu-ae from the Ontongard and starts producing Invisible Red and sells it via Animal. Only the drug leaves a trail back to the Iron Horses. The Ontongard tracks it back to the Buffalo chapter and ambushes the buy, looking for the cult and their machines.”

“So you believe Agent Zheng's claim that the cult is using these alien machines to make Invisible Red?”

He had no problem accepting it. Why? Once he considered the drug's structure, he realized it was far more complex than anything he'd ever dealt with before. “Most drugs are a couple of molecules hung together off of sugar. This stuff . . . it reminds me of DNA; it's an incredibly dense lattice. And it can change. Daggit and I handled the same substance, and it reacted to us both as it came in contact with our skin. With me, it seemed like it was simplifying. But with Daggit, it grew more complex, like thorns growing. It was sensing us, and . . . and . . . unfolding . . . differently.”

“Unfolding?”

“I think it's like a computer program. Parts of it were being triggered, going active, while other sections . . . terminated.”

“So for you, it's safe to take, but it's going to kill Daggit?”

“Possibly.”

“It's death,”
Ukiah had said
. “They're all dead men. You're a breeder. It will make you want to have sex but it won't hurt you. It was made to make you breed.”

Did Agent Zheng know what his brother meant by “a breeder?” How safe was it to discuss what little Atticus knew with her? He'd always kept his differences hidden from everyone but Ru and Kyle, afraid of some dangerous fallout if the wrong person discovered how inhuman he was. Afraid that someone would see him as a monster. Afraid because it was often hard for him not to think of himself as one.

Suddenly he saw the Pack's “test” in a new light. Was that why they were testing him? Were they also afraid of being monsters?

Apparently, Ru had started out following the same line of thought, but diverged off in another direction. “What are we going to do about Zheng?”

“Call Kyle. Tell him to dig into her records. I want to know everything about her. I want to know how she knows all this shit about me.”

Ru picked up the car phone, pausing before he dialed. “You okay?”

“I didn't think I would want to go back to being just a werewolf.”

 

Agent Zheng had a room on the first floor of the hotel in the back. They found ready parking and dashed to the covered entrance; she opened the door with her card key. Ten steps and they were in her room, totally unseen by any other guest. He couldn't have picked a better room himself.

The hotel was maid-neat but still tainted with Zheng's scent. She hung up her black trench coat, asking, “Coffee? Root beer?”

“You have root beer?” Atticus found it surprising. Not many people stocked root beer, much less thought to offer it.

“I've been here a couple of days.” Zheng ripped open a package of gourmet coffee and poured it into the filter of a coffeemaker. “I like this hotel chain, since it will do food shopping for you. No matter what time you get back to your room, there's decent food. No candy bar or pizza dinners.”

“There are advantages to working with a team,” Atticus said.

Zheng tilted her head, acknowledging this. “Do you want that root beer or not?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The root beer was even IBC in the dark glass bottles. She had the refrigerator stocked well enough to feed a small army. How long did she expect to stay? She unloaded carrots, dip, blocks of cheese, a deli bag of sliced roast beef, buns, lettuce, brown mustard, and a massive bag of seedless grapes.

“I've got more than enough. Help yourself,” Zheng said.

Out of habit, Ru dallied while Atticus sampled the fare, although it was unlikely that an FBI agent would drug the food. Finding it innocent, Atticus considered the woman herself. She gazed at him levelly over her cup of freshly brewed coffee, eyes a gunmetal gray. Judging by their vaguely Asian shape, she was at least partially Chinese. Her composed gaze went beyond normal law-officer stoic to something nearly Buddhist in its level of calm.

He had a million questions he wanted to ask her, starting with, “How do you know all this?” But in the world of drug dealing, admitting to ignorance rarely got you information and always put you in a weaker position. How much could he trust this woman—and perhaps as important, how much did she trust him? He was, according to her, the child of the enemy. Did she hold that against him? When his team invited someone into their hotel room, they always had the place bugged. Was this a trap? Had she offered them food to throw them off balance and admit to hidden cameras exactly what he was?

“You're completely right about the advantages of working with a team,” Agent Zheng said. “That's why I propose we combine forces.”

“Work together?”

“I'm not a fool; it would be suicide for me to continue searching for the cult in an unfamiliar area by myself. But my options are limited.”

“And we look like handy fodder.”

Agent Zheng gave a slight exhale that could have been a sigh. “I would rather you didn't confirm my opinion that all male federal agents are egotistical jerks. I would be far more disappointed than you could imagine.”

And what the hell did that mean? Judging by the darkening of Ru's face, it could be taken as a pass.

“I have to consider the welfare of my team first,” Atticus said. “I know nothing about you.” Yet. “Far as I know, you're a maverick who rushes into dangerous positions without an ounce of precaution.” He stepped close to stress that he was a nearly a foot taller than her. “Some would say you're a fool to bring two strangers to her hotel room.”

“You're Atticus Steele. No middle name. You were found abandoned as an infant in 1973. You joined the military in 1988 with what must have been a forged birth certificate and served for six years. In 1994, you were given an honorable discharge, and you applied to the University of Maryland . . .”

“Okay, so you did your homework, but that doesn't make us—”

“. . . where you met your current lover, Hikaru Takahashi.” Zheng played her hole card. “You two have been together for ten years and own a T Street row house in Washington that you've been renovating over the last five years. I'm told that you just refinished the floors and they're beautiful.”

Atticus's opinion of her went from annoying to terrifying.

“Did you do a full background check on us?” Ru snapped.

“I was discreet,” Zheng said. “But yes. You originally came on my radar screen as drug dealers. It wasn't until this morning that I learned you were actually undercover agents.”

Atticus relaxed slightly. “I'm impressed. The agency provides us with fairly fireproof backgrounds so perps can run their own checks and we still come up clean.”

“I have my resources,” Zheng said.

Atticus glanced to Ru, who didn't look happy but nodded his agreement. “Okay. So you're good, and you're way ahead of us on this.” And most likely the only way she'd catch them up to speed would be by their agreeing to work with her. Of course, agreeing wasn't the same as trusting. In some ways, it would be just another undercover assignment. “We're in.”

Zheng accepted the announcement with a serene nod. Putting down her coffee cup, she took a folder out of her briefcase. “We have an ex-cultist working with us in Pittsburgh. Her cult name was Socket. She's a Boston-area heiress whom the cult recruited specifically to gain access to her fortune. Her total worth is ten million dollars, which is in a trust she can't touch—but it gives her a yearly income of a hundred thousand dollars. As one of their cash cows, the cult didn't subject Socket to the most brutal of their brainwashing techniques, but that also means she wasn't part of their inner circle.”

“So, unlike Ascii, who will tell the FBI nothing, Socket spilled her guts, but there's not much there?”

“Exactly,” Zheng said. “This is the only photo we have of Ice, current leader of the cult.” It seemed to have been taken from a bank surveillance camera. In the grainy black-and-white photo, the tall, lean blond male was partially obscured by a potted plant. “Socket worked with us to create
composite sketches of him and the other known surviving cultists.”

Twenty laser printouts of pencil drawings followed. The cult favored military-short haircuts, and accepted a wide range of ethnic groups. Of the twenty, five were women and the rest men. All were identified only by single computer terms: Ice, Firewall, Mouse, Ether, Diskette, Ram.

“What do we know about this Ice?” Atticus asked.

Zheng consulted her PDA. “He's approximately six-one, a hundred and eighty pounds, blond with blue eyes, in his early twenties, and has black tribal tattoos on his back. He's skilled in martial arts and served as the cult's weapons trainer. While they didn't discuss it openly with Socket, she got the impression that he also taught the cult how to forge driver's licenses, pick locks, and steal cars. He was the cult's tactician for ambushes on the Ontongard Gets. The founder, William Harris, was the one with the vision—Ice was the one who made it happen.”

“We don't have any real names for these people?” Atticus asked.

Zheng produced another artist sketch with a Polaroid attached. Atticus recognized him as the driver of the Honda. The photograph was of the man's dead body on the coroner's table. “We've identified him as John Pender, originally of New Hampshire. He joined the cult two years ago, breaking ties with his parents.”