Predator One (62 page)

“You,” he said. “I’m so glad to see you.”

Rudy let the gun clatter to the bloodstained floor as the priest walked slowly toward him.

The battle raged around them, but the priest and the doctor stood facing each other across five feet
of space. The wild glee of battle faded from Nicodemus’s face, and for a moment he looked like an ordinary man.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Rudy.

“Even a man as smart as you pretend to be,” said the priest, “would never understand.”

“Try me.”

“No, sir, I do not think I will. I would much rather have you wonder about it. There are few things more entertaining than letting the worm of doubt
have its way with someone.”

“No,” said Rudy, taking a step forward. His limp was very bad and he swayed. That seemed to amuse Nicodemus. “Why us? Why my wife? What could she have possibly done to offend you?”

“Her?” Nicodemus laughed. “I couldn’t care less about that slut. Or you. Or the wriggling grub in her belly. Not you as people. I care less about you than dog shit on my shoe. Lordy-lord,
how arrogant you must be to think such thoughts.”

Rudy gripped his stick like a club. “They why, damn it? She is helpless. Our baby is innocent…”

“And nothing hurts him more than to see the innocent suffer.”

“‘Him’? Who…?” Rudy’s voice trailed away.

Nicodemus watched him like a cat. “Ah, I can see that you’re getting it now. At least the tiniest part of it.”

“This is about Church?”

Nicodemus
snorted at that name. “Church. Oh, he does love his little jokes, doesn’t he? The names he picks for himself. Church. The Deacon. Sexton and Pope, Eldritch and Saint Germaine. Magus and Prospero. How many others?” He took a step toward Rudy, and now they were close enough to touch. “Ask him your question, doctor. Ask him why I will burn worlds to have my revenge on him. Ask, but don’t expect
an answer. He’ll never hear you over the screams of all those who have died for him. All those who have died because of him.”

“You’re insane. And you’re not making sense.”

“Do you think not, doctor? Your Mr. Church is the cause of more hurt and misery than you can possibly imagine. Why, I suspect it would burn you to know who and what he is. Yes, sir, it would pure burn the heart right out of
you. And to know that you sleep with his daughter. That your child carries
his
seed. Good lordy-lordy-lord. And you think
I’m
a monster.”

Between clenched teeth, Rudy said, “No, I think you’re a liar.”

He slashed at Nicodemus with the hawthorn cane.

Not with the shaft.

This time, he used all of his strength, all of his hurt and rage and terror, to swing the carved silver handle at the priest’s
face.

Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-one

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

April 1, 4:17
P.M.

“Yes,” said the burned man. “Sebastian Gault. Would you like to gloat now?”

I stared at him.

This man was the reason that I joined the DMS. He paid to have the
seif al din
pathogen created. He very nearly caused an outbreak that, according to every statistical model, would have ended the world.

Ended.

We all thought he died when the laboratory of his lover, Amirah, the scientist who actually created the plague for him, was destroyed during a geothermal explosion. We later learned that Toys saved him, dragged his burned body through a tunnel and out onto the sands in Afghanistan. Months later, after extensive plastic surgery and recuperation, Gault and Toys were brought into the Seven
Kings by Hugo Vox. There, Gault became their King of Plagues, and he created several terrible bioweapons for them, including a version of airborne quick-onset Ebola. That was the cornerstone of the Kings’ Ten Plagues Initiative.

Once more the world trembled on the very edge of a global pandemic.

Vox told Toys that he had blown Gault and the Goddess—Vox’s treacherous mother—to bits with a bomb
he’d planted aboard her yacht. The Coast Guard only ever found small fragments of the yacht in the Saint Lawrence River. Gault was once more presumed—hoped, wished—dead.

And now here he was again. The sole surviving King. No longer just the King of Plagues, but the only reigning member left.

Crippled and burned, but still vastly powerful.

Still cruel. Still vindictive.

And, with the protection
of certain death a short step behind him, he held all the cards.

He knew it, too.

He watched my face, watched me work it out, and he laughed.

I shook my head. “So all of this—the Regis and Solomon programs, the hijacked drones, the attacks on the ballpark and the bridge—”

“And Air Force One,” he said. “Let’s not forget about that.”

“No, let’s not. All of this is what? Revenge?”

He held his
hand wide to indicate what was left of him. “What else do I have?” he asked. “What else have you left me?”

“Whoa, dickhead,
we
didn’t actually do this to you.” I paused, wheezing. My side was bleeding heavily, and I tore open a package of gauze and pressed it against the wound. It hurt like a son of a bitch. There was surgical tape on a side table, and I wound it around my waist to hold the bandage
in place. I was going to need more than that. Maybe surgery. Maybe a lot of surgery. The room was spinning. “As I recall,” I continued, “it was
you
who blew up Amirah’s lab.”

“Of course. To stop her destroying the world.”

“With your fucking doomsday weapon.”

He shook his head. “That was designed as a threat and you know it. Don’t pretend to be even stupider than you are. I wanted to be rich
and to live rich, and I couldn’t very well do that in a dead world. I saved the world.”

“Yeah, good try. If you build a doomsday weapon, you don’t get points for not using it.”

He shrugged. “Oh, fair enough.”

“And as for the boat thing. Hugo Vox blew up the damn boat. We didn’t.”

“He was on the run from you and cleaning up loose ends.”

“Still doesn’t put it on our tab.”

Another shrug.

“Then who’s the revenge against?” I asked.

His eye glittered with hatred. “For everyone who is going to be alive tomorrow and next week and next year.”

“Wow. You’re doing this because you got yourself all fucked up so everyone else has to pay?”

“Small minds can make anything sound petty.”

“If there’s a better explanation, then tell me. Historians will want to know, and that is actually not
a smart-ass comment. We both know you’ve made your mark. No one is ever going to forget this week. No one. And Sebastian Gault will be remembered forever. Bravo for you. You’ll be universally hated, but you’ll be remembered.”

“One takes the immortality that’s afforded them.”

“I suppose.”

I began walking around the bed. I was careful to make it look casual, but my feet were getting wobbly. “Let
me see if I get this straight, though. You have the codes to reset Regis and Solomon, yes?”

“Of course. I’d be an idiot not to have that information.”

“And you know that Davidovich built a Web site that allowed him to control those programs.”

“Yes.” He watched me as I paced. It was difficult for him to turn enough to see me. “We knew everything that he was doing.”

“Then you have the password
for that Web site, right?”

“I do.”

I passed above the headboard and came down the far side of the bed. His head swiveled around to watch me again.

“Is there anything I can say or do that would encourage you to give that password to me?”

He smiled. “Nothing comes to mind.”

“If you’ve read my file, you know I can play rough.”

He held up a withered hand so I could see his burned flesh. “Really?
Rougher than this? They pulled me from the sea while I was covered in burning oil. I felt my own skin melt. There’s nothing worse than that, Ledger. Go get your thumb screws if you think it’ll help, but I’ve already been through hell.”

I kept circling. As I completed one circuit, I saw that I was leaving a trail of bloody drops.

“I could just kill you,” I said. “Deny you the chance of seeing
the end. Air Force One hasn’t crossed into New York airspace. Not the metropolitan area, at least.”

“That would be disappointing,” conceded Gault. “But I would die knowing that it was inevitable. Stop fucking circling like that. It’s childish.”

I stopped at the foot of the bed. “And there is absolutely nothing I can say or do? Nothing? Not one thing?”

“No,” he said with finality.

I nodded
thoughtfully. The sound of gunfire was dying away. None of the recent shots came from AK-47s. Top and the others were cleaning things up. Ghost started to come over, but I waved him off. “Family,” I told him. “Find family.”

He paused, then turned and ran out of the room. Looking for any of my guys who were still alive. Once he was gone, I tore open a Velcro flap and dug something out of my pocket,
holding it out for him to see. It was a small cylinder about two inches long, set with a tight screw top.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Let’s find out.” I unscrewed the top and shook the contents out into my palm. There were six of them. I leaned over the steel foot rail and showed them to him so he would understand.

Gault said nothing, but there was doubt in his eye.

I picked up one of the objects.
It was wooden and had a red bulb at one end with a dot of white at the tip.

“Wooden kitchen match. My grandpa used to call this kind a Lucifer match. Know why? ’Cause it’ll light anywhere. Has its own sulfur.”

I scraped the match along the steel rail.

Nothing happened, of course—the metal was too smooth. But for a moment Sebastian Gault flinched. Fear bloomed in his eye, and he recoiled as
far as the mattress would allow.

I held up the unlit tip and gave it a comical frown. “Oops. No friction. My bad. Almost anywhere.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

I removed my pistol from its shoulder holster and scraped the match along the crosshatched grip. It ignited at once. Gault flinched again.

“Stop mucking about,” he cried. “You’re wasting your time. I won’t tell you.”

“I know,” I
said. “But I guess I’m like you. Since I can’t have what I want, I might as well sit and watch my enemies burn.”

I bent and held the match to the sheet.

He screamed and tried to kick hard enough to prevent the cloth from catching. Might have worked if he had legs.

“Stop it, you fucking maniac.”

I straightened and blew out the match, leaving only a black scorch on the sheet.

“Five more matches,”
I said. “I have those five, and I have a gun.”

He stared at me.

“Maybe you don’t know,” I said, “but Amirah didn’t die in that blast. She escaped, too. Or, at least the thing she’d become had escaped. I went hunting for her in the Afghan mountains. I found her. She was a mess. Rotting away. Being tortured by soldiers. It was horrible. I offered her a choice. The existence she had or a quick
trip to paradise and peace.”

He said nothing, but his lips parted.

I showed him the matches in one hand, the gun in the other. “I’m going to offer you the same choice. You can give me that password, and I put a nice, quick bullet into what’s left of your head. I’m a very good shot. You’d never feel it.” I leaned forward again. “Or I’ll
burn
you. I have matches, and I have time. Tell me, Sebastian,
do you want to burn? Again? Is that how you want this all to end? Do you want to bet that you have enough healthy nerve endings left to feel every inch of flames as they crawl over you? And don’t think I’ll let that happen fast. Fuck no. You’re a monster, and you’re going to kill people I care about. I’d want it to last.”

A small whimpering sound came out of his mouth. A tear, bloody and viscous,
broke from the corner of his eye.

“Now you tell me,” I said in a voice that came from that cold, dark place, “this or paradise?”

I lit another match.

“Give me the password.”

Sebastian Gault screamed.

“Matthew!”
he shrieked. “It’s Matthew.”

I held the match closer to the sheet. “It’s not Matthew. We tried Matthew.”

“No … no! It’s Matthew. In binary code. Type it in. The ones and zeros that
make up the boy’s name. Type it in just like that.”

I straightened and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Yoda, do you copy?”

“Right, mmmm, here, Cowboy. We can’t figure out—”

“It’s the boy’s name. Matthew. Type in the binary code for his name. That’s the password.”

“Are you sure? If this doesn’t work—”

“Do it!”

I shook the match to extinguish it. Gault lay there, weeping, panting, hating himself
and me with equal intensity. I heard Yoda’s fingers hitting the keys.

Then nothing.

Nothing.

No bell.

“It worked,” he cried. “We’re in.”

“Start uploading the reset codes. Do it now!” I bellowed. But I don’t think Yoda was even listening to me.

I sagged back and collapsed into the leather guest chair. The room was filled with the dead and dying. I figured I was one of the latter.

“You’re
a bastard,” said Sebastian Gault.

I holstered my pistol. He frowned.

“Aren’t you going to kill me? Isn’t that what you said? This or paradise?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then do it, you sick fuck. Take your shot. End this.”

I looked at the four remaining matches.

After a moment, I got slowly, wearily to my feet. The pain in my side was a white-hot howling thing. I went to the foot of the bed
again and leaned on it. Sweat was running down my face. Even with the bandage, I was losing way too much blood. I still held the matches.

“Well, damn you,” he said, “go on!
Do
it. If you want to send me to bloody paradise or bloody hell, then fucking do it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I will.”

I took a match. Popped it alight with my thumbnail. Held it to the others. They all flared.