The Dragon Factory (50 page)

“As a conversational opener,” Bug said, “that makes me want to run and hide.”

“The computers at the Costa Rica facility have been destroyed. Some form of thermite-based fail-safe device. Captain Ledger thinks it was remote detonated. However, Echo Team has found some paper records and a handful of flash drives and disks. There was also one laptop that wasn’t networked in and it did not receive the self-destruct code, so we may get lucky there.”

“That’s something,” said Grace.

But Church shook his head. “At first glance all that Captain Ledger has found are references to the Extinction Wave, and the date, but most of the paper records are coded and we don’t have the code key. Without that we don’t know how many pathogens, their exact names and strains, or any information to tell us where, how, and by whom they will be released. Africa is a big continent.”

“Effing hell.” Grace punched Bug on the shoulder. “I thought your lot were supposed to be able to crack any bloody code.”

“First . . .
ow
!” he said. “Yeah, given time we can crack it. But time’s not our friend here. I got all forty of my guys—here and at the Hangar—on this thing. Plus we’re having to scan in tens of thousands of pages, and the stuff in Costa Rica will have to be scanned. I think we might even be dealing with several different codes. I’ve seen that sort of
thing before, where there are individual codes for different aspects of an operation. Whoever set this is up is good.”

“Better than you?”

Bug didn’t rise to the bait. “Maybe. But I have better toys, so I’ll crack it. Big question is whether we crack it in time to do any good. Be nice to find the code key, or—if there are multiple interrelated codes—a master code key.”

“Birds from the
Ark Royal
should be there soon,” Grace said. “We can prevail upon them to get that material here as fast as possible.”

“True,” Bug said, “but it’s already August 29 and the Extinction Wave is set for September 1. We not only need to break the code; we need to devise a response and then put it into place.”

“We should probably bring World Health and the CDC into it now,” said Hu. “And CERT, National Institutes for Health . . . a few others.”

Church nodded. “Yes, but carefully. We don’t know if any of those organizations have been compromised.”

Grace studied him. “I have a feeling that there’s more. Care to drop the other shoe?”

Church nodded. “This, perhaps more than anything, will give you a window into the souls of the people we’re up against.”

He told them about the New Men.

The Hive

Sunday, August 29, 4:46
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 14 minutes E.S.T.

I found Carteret where we’d left him. He was awake and furious and had wriggled his way across the floor and had rolled onto his back so that he could kick open the door to the New Men’s barracks.

“Come on, you slope-headed fuckers!” he screamed. “Come out here and cut me loose.”

I came up quietly and saw through the small door glass that several of the New Men were indeed shambling toward his cries. Even now,
even after he’d brutalized them and tried to exterminate them, they were obeying the conditioning that had removed all traces of free will. It made me furious. If I didn’t need answers, I think I might have just slit Carteret’s throat and called it a job well done.

Instead I grabbed him by the plastic band holding his ankles together and dragged him away from the door.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What the bloody ’ell do you think you’re playing at?”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said quietly. I went back to the door, opened it, and called, “Downtime!”

The single word burned like acid on my tongue, and the sight of the New Men slowing to a confused stop, then turning without question and heading back to their cots made me heartsick. Carteret was still yelling when I turned back to him, but the look on my face quieted him for a moment.

I dragged him by the heels past the dead or unconscious bodies of the other guards and into an adjoining room, then closed the door.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he demanded.

I flicked the blade on my Rapid Response knife and knelt over him.

“Steady on, mate,” he said quickly. “Let’s not do something we both regret.”

I held one finger to my lips. “Shhhhh.”

With two quick flicks of the knife I cut his plastic bonds. As I cut the bands on his wrists I saw that he had numbers tattooed on the back of each hand: 88 on his left and 198 on his right. I recognized the code from some gang work I did while on the cops.
H
was the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 stood for “HH.” Shorthand for “Heil Hitler.” The other one broke down to “SH.” “Sieg Heil.” Our friend Carteret was a neo-Nazi. No surprise, but it made what I was going to do a little easier.

“Get up,” I said as I rose and backed away. I laid the knife on a table.

He got slowly and warily to his feet, rubbing his wrists and studying me, but I could see the effort he put into keeping his eyes from flicking toward the knife.

“You’re a Yank,” he said.

“You’re a genius,” I said.

“You working for the Twins?”

I said nothing.

“No . . . you look the military type. You’re Special Forces, am I right?”

I said nothing.

“I did my time in the service. Don’t suppose you’d like to look the other way while I scarper? Little professional courtesy?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. What I’d rather do,” I said, “is beat some answers out of you. How’s that sound for an afternoon’s entertainment?”

He sneered. “This is a private facility, mate, and we’re in international waters. Check the map; we’re three miles outside of Costa Rican—”

“Which means no one’s watching, Sparky.”

“You think you’re going to strong-arm me? You’d better have a lot more than a knife.”

“I have what I need.”

He tried a different tack. “I thought you Yanks didn’t do torture anymore.”

“Torture is something you do to the helpless. Like the stuff you did to those New Men.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo, mate. They ain’t even people.”

“Not all that sure you are,” I said.

“Arrest me or whatever, but I’m not saying a bloody word.”

I slapped him across the face. It was fast and hard, but I was going for shock rather than damage. He blinked in total surprise. Slaps hurt so much because the palm strikes so many square inches of face and all those facial nerve endings cry out in surprise.

He put his hands up.

I faked with my right and slapped him with my left. Carteret backed up a step. He was surprised by the speed but more so by the sting. No matter how tough you are, there is a certain primitive reaction to being slapped that brings out the essential child self. The eyes start to tear, and that sparks certain emotional reactions that are not necessarily valid but almost impossible to control.

I smiled and moved toward him, slow and steady. He threw a head cracker of a hook punch. He was pretty good. Nice pivot, good lift of the heel to put mass into the blow.

I kept my smile in place as I slipped it and slapped him right-handed.

Carteret reeled back, caught himself, and tried to rush me, but I stopped him with a nonthrusting flat loot on his upper thigh. It’s like running into one of those half doors. It stopped his lower body and made him tilt forward farther and faster than expected. I slapped him with my left, blocked a combination, and slapped him with my right.

His cheeks glowed like hot apples. All those nerve endings were screaming at him.

In other circumstances Carteret would probably be a formidable fighter and I usually don’t screw around like this, but I needed to make a point. And it’s at times like this that I’m glad I study jujutsu rather than karate or tae kwon do. No slight on those other martial arts—after all, Top’s a karate expert and he can deconstruct an opponent like nobody’s business—but I wasn’t trying to destroy Carteret. I wanted to defeat him. Break him. Jujutsu is all about controlling an opponent. Evading, destabilizing, using mass and motion against the attacker. It has roots in grappling arts of ancient China and India coupled with the Japanese dedication to economy of motion.

When Carteret rushed me again I parried his outstretched arm to one side and shifted out of the path of his incoming mass. As I did so, I lightly swept his lead leg just as he was stepping down toward me. It made him stumble into an awkward step and collapse into a clumsy sprawl. He immediately tried to right himself, but his arms were pinwheeling for balance, so I reached between them and slapped him again.

He was panting now, eyes wide and wet, chest heaving with the runaway rage of complete frustration. Once he was upright he tried to kick me with a vicious Muay Thai leg sweep that would have broken my knee had it landed. I checked with with the flat of my shoe while I reached out with both hands and swatted down his guard. I slapped him fast left-right-left.

“Stand and fight!” he screamed, and his voice broke mid-shout.

I kept smiling.

“Tell you what . . . I’ll let you hit me. How’s that? Just to make it fair.” I patted my gut.

“Fuck you!” Spit flew from from his lips as he snarled, but he also took the opening and threw everything he had into an uppercut that was probably his favorite deal closer. I sucked my gut back and shifted ever so slightly with bent knees so that only some of the impact hit my tensed abs, but most of the real force was defused. I knew that it wouldn’t feel that way to him. In fact, he’d feel the firmness of contact, feel the shock of the impact in his knuckles and wrist. It simply wasn’t anywhere near as hard as he thought it was. I learned that trick from a West Baltimore boxer named Little Charlie Brown. Hell of a sweet trick. The guy slams you one and he’s convinced that he nailed you, but aside from some sting you aren’t hurt.

I slapped Carteret across the face and stepped back, lightly patting my gut. I put a look of amused disappointment on my face. If I’d used my fist and beaten him to a pulp he would have had a totally different reaction. That was big pain; that was a warrior being defeated in battle. He would have manned up and endured and stonewalled. This was different. It made him a different person because it disallowed anything connected to his adult strength.

Down on the primal level, in the logic centers of the lizard brain, he knew he could not beat me. He believed that he couldn’t hurt me. He’d given me his best and it hadn’t even put a twitch on my mouth. Carteret’s face was a mask of pain. His subconscious mind kept scrambling to assign emotional cause to the tears in his eyes. I could see the tension grow in his face but leak out of his muscles; his shoulders began to slump.

I slapped him again. Quick and light, like a period at the end of a sentence.

“You’re all alone out here,” I said.

He tried to slide past me toward the door. I shifted into his path, faked him out, and slapped him with my right. He made an attempt at a block, but it was weak—he was already telling himself that it wouldn’t work.

“And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

He looked past me at the knife lying on the table. He lunged for it. I pivoted off of his lunge and used my turning hip to send him crashing into the wall. While he was getting to his feet I folded the knife and put it in my pocket. Then I kick-faked him and slapped his right and left cheeks.

Tears were streaming down his face. The skin on his cheeks was a ferocious red.

“The people you work for can’t help you.”

Another slap.

“And they’ll never know you told me.”

Slap.

“But it’s the only chance you have left.”

Slap.

“Stop it!” he said, but his voice was as broken as his spirit.

Slap. A bit harder, sending a message about insubordination. Carteret collapsed against the wall. He tried to push himself off. I moved to slap him again and his knees buckled. He slid down the wall, shaking his head, weeping openly now.

I stood over him, within reach, the dare implied in my distance to him, but my smile was the promise of what would happen if he tried and failed.

He didn’t try. His cheeks were so raw there were drops of blood coming from his pores. It looked like he was weeping blood.

I stood there. “Look at me.”

He shook his head.

“Look at me,” I said more forcefully, putting terrible promise in the words.

Slowly, warily, he raised his head. I would like to think that at that moment he was taking personal inventory of the things he’d done, of the abuse he’d heaped upon the helpless New Men. That would be sweet, but this wasn’t a TV movie. All he cared about was whether he could save his own ass—from the immediacy of further harm and ultimately from whatever kind of punishment I chose to inflict. He was using what
wits he had to sort through his options. How to spin this. How to survive the moment. How to spin a deal.

“I want immunity,” he said. I don’t know what court he thought would grant it. He was right; these were international waters. Maybe he was afraid I’d turn him over to the Costa Ricans, or take him back to the states, or maybe put him in the dock in some world court. It didn’t matter. He wanted something that he thought would save him, and in exchange I knew he’d tell me everything.