The King of Plagues (49 page)

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Authors: Jonathan Maberry

BOOK: The King of Plagues
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The
Sea of Hope
December 21, 8:13 P.M. EST
We didn’t go to Circe’s cabin. I staggered along with Circe to find DeeDee. She was still in the alcove, sitting in a pool of her own blood. Alive but unconscious and in very bad shape.
“How is she?” I asked. Circe knelt to examine her.
“She might lose her eye. She needs to be in surgery as soon as possible.”
“God.” I looked back the way we had come and wished ten times as much pain for Santoro.
Footsteps pounded down the stairs and I snatched up DeeDee’s gun and spun around.
“
Echo! Echo!
” yelled a familiar voice.
“Come ahead!”
Khalid Shaheed came down at a rush, followed by Glory Price of Tiger Shark Team. Both of them were cut and bloody.
“Sit rep,” I said, sagging back.
“The good guys won,” said Glory. She appraised me. “You look like shit, Joe.”
“Thanks,” but I nodded toward Circe. Khalid cursed and pushed Circe out of the way. Circe may have had her M.D., but Khalid was a battlefield trauma specialist.
Others came down. Top and Bunny. They helped carry DeeDee to the sick bay. Cruise ships of this kind have a first-class medical suite, and Rio was close.
My legs buckled and I started to fall.
I’m not sure who caught me, but blackness welcomed me.
The
Sea of Hope
December 21, 1 1:56 P.M. EST
It was the goddamn balloons. The syringe had been the clue.
Every single one of them was filled with Ebola. The Mexican worker
who had inhaled some helium as a prank was found dead in his shower. He’d gone off shift sick and died alone.
The plan had been for the ship to limp into Rio following the tragic events of the mass slaughter. Once in port, the balloons would be released. They would rise into the sky, drift away on the variable winds, and eventually burst. South America would become a graveyard. The presidents of Mexico and the United States would be forced to cut a safety line across Panama. They would have to burn a no-man’s-land with fuel air bombs, napalm, and anything else that would burn.
The stock market would be unstable for years. The Kings would profit.
A workable treatment had been in development for years. Dr. Snow at Fair Isle—who had been an agent of the Kings rather than a victim—had given samples of the vaccine to Santoro, and he to Gault. All of the Kings and their Consciences had been inoculated. Just in case the firebombing didn’t work.
How did we find all this out?
Santoro.
He told Church everything. Names. Dates. Places. The identities of the Seven Kings. He told him about 9/11 and dozens of other attacks. He could not tell Church fast enough. He begged to tell him more.
Church listened.
I never learned what happened to Santoro. I doubt he is with the angels.
The Navy pulled the nets of balloons out into the deep blue and hit them with flamethrowers. We all hoped that would do the trick.
It was close to dawn the following day before I got a brief chance to speak with Church. We were alone in Circe’s suite. I’d just come from the shipboard vet’s office. Ghost was in surgery and I was told to stop bothering the doctors.
I found Church making coffee in the small kitchenette. His clothes were bloodstained and I knew that he had worked alongside the rest of the DMS agents, tending to the wounded. Khalid said that Church seemed to know as much about emergency medicine as any doctor he’d met. I was beyond being surprised.
I limped into the kitchen and fished a bottle of water out of the fridge. Church gave me a quick appraising look, nodded.
“‘Dad’?” I said.
“Don’t start,” he said quietly.
“No … no way am I letting that one go. ‘Dad’? Circe’s your daughter?”
“And if she is?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He poured himself a cup of coffee. “Circe is a formidable person who is making a name for herself. It was her wish that she do so without my help or influence.”
“Bullshit.”
He almost smiled. “No, it’s true. Mostly true.” He gave me a considering stare for a moment. “I don’t discuss my personal life with anyone. But …” He brushed some soot from his chin. “After all this, you get to ask that one question and get a straight answer. Circe’s mother and I divorced many years ago. She thought I was another kind of person, and when she found out that I was who I was she wanted out. I agreed.” He paused. “We had two daughters.”
The word “had” was big and ugly and it hung in the air between us.
“Ten months ago my wife was killed in a traffic incident. Circe believes it was an accident. I know that it was not. I have many enemies and they sometimes choose dishonorable and reprehensible ways to come at me. The previous summer my younger daughter, Emmy, was killed in combat in Afghanistan. Roadside bomb.”
“Jesus Christ, man, I—”
He shook his head. “Circe is my only living relative. My father, my brothers and sisters … everyone else has died in the service of this country, in one way or another. Only ten people know who Circe is. Hugo Vox is one of them, by the way. Now there are eleven. Don’t worry about whether you can keep the secret from Dr. Sanchez. He’s known for some time now.”
I started to say something, but he shook his head and turned back to making coffee. And just like that he was back to being Mr. Church. It told me something about him, maybe a lot, but it also threw a thousand new questions into the air. Most of them, I knew, would never be answered.
Aboard the
Delta of Venus
December 22, 8:33 A.M. EST
Gault held Eris while she wept.
It had been a long night. The news reports began late in the evening, and by midnight it was all over. The grand centerpiece of the Ten Plagues Initiative had failed. Not one of the celebrities had died. Not one of the children of the rich and powerful had been killed. And there was no report about balloons or Ebola.
No word from Santoro, either, and that was the most disturbing. Santoro had always had an escape plan. Usually two or three of them in reserve.
Nothing.
“We’ll start again,” Gault soothed. “The Kings are still free. We still have our resources. The Goddess has so many victories to her name.”
Eris sniffed and shook her head. She didn’t care about the Hospital or the twenty-one dead children of the Inner Circle. She had wanted
this.
Eris’s cell rang and she straightened. “That’s Santoro!” she cried, reaching for the phone. She opened it without even reading the screen display. “Rafael, what happened to—”
“Hi, Mom,” said the King of Fear.
“Hugo?”
“Yeah … saw the news. Thought I’d give you a call.”
“It
failed
!” she yelled.
“Yeah, ain’t that a kick in the nuts? All that planning. All those years of scheming, all the work. Hell, Mom, you spent the best years of your life on that thing.”
She hissed at him.
“Look,” Vox said. “I’m dropping off the radar for a while. Just wanted to let you know that I drained your accounts. Gault’s, too. Nice chunk of change.”
“What? You miserable bastard!”
“Hey, call a spade a spade. Born out of wedlock and all that, what do you expect?” He chuckled. “But listen … I’m not going to cut you off entirely. I left you a nest egg. Whenever you guys reach a safe port, call me on the other cell. My new number’s plugged in.”
“What other cell?” she demanded.
“I left it in the drawer under the TV. Whenever you want to start over again, use that and give me a call. I’m dumping this phone.”
“Wait!”
“Bye-bye, Mom. Hope you two crazy kids can make it work.”
“Hugo!”
The line was dead.
Eris threw the phone across the room, where it struck the wall and shattered. “Damn that ungrateful little prick!”
“What the hell was that about?” asked Gault.
She rattled off a quick recap; then she got angrily to her feet and stalked across the room, tore open the drawer, and snatched up the cell Hugo had left for her.
“What are you doing?”
“He took our money!
Our
money.” Her voice was a harpy’s screech.
“I’m going to goddamn well
tell
him to give it back.”
She flipped open the phone and scrolled through the stored numbers until she located one labeled: ME.
“He was always an ugly child,” sneered Eris as she pressed the call button.
The forty pounds of C4 packed tightly into the hold vaporized the
Delta of Venus.
The blast could be heard for thirty miles in every direction, but they were so far out to sea, no one heard a thing.
(1)
The
Sea of Hope
became a massive floating crime scene. Everyone who was on board had to be interviewed and checked. That included the performers, many members of Generation Hope, and everyone else. There were protests and threats of lawsuits and actions, but those were hollow. The DMS had just averted the worst terrorist act in history. That bought us all the slack we needed. All of the celebrities and the children of the power players were off-loaded to the Navy ships. Eventually they’d all go home.
Home and alive.
I flew home in a big C-140 with Pink, Taylor Swift, and the guys from U2. DeeDee was aboard, too, with Khalid watching over her. She would keep the eye, but it was damaged and so was her face. It was too early to tell if she’d ever stand in the line of battle again. I had a couple of dozen stitches in my back, chest, and gums, but I was deemed fit to travel. Ghost was there, too. Sedated but alive.
It was all surreal.
The celebs on our plane kept their distance, occasionally shooting strange looks at me. I don’t know what stories they’d been told about me, or what rumors had floated around. And I didn’t care.
But sometimes you can’t tell about people.
“Cuppa?”
I looked up to see who’d spoken and Bono stood there holding two cups of steaming tea. He held one out to me. I took it, hissing at the pain the action caused in every molecule of my body.
“Mind if I sit?”
I tilted my head toward a metal equipment case and he sat down. He was a small man, short and slim. His signature sunglasses were tucked into the vee of his shirt.
“Your name’s Joe?”
I nodded.
“Look, man, I came back to say a couple of things, but I’ll piss off if I’m bothering you.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s good. What’s on your mind?”
I sipped the tea. It was lousy.
“I made this myself.” He sipped his. “God, it’s piss.”
“It’s hot,” I said, and we clinked mugs.
“Tell me, man … why do you do this sort of thing?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Ask me something I know the answer to.”
The plane flew a lot of miles before either of us spoke. We’d drunk our bad tea. Bono stood up.
“Anyway, man,” he said. “For me and my mates and, I guess, for everyone … I just wanted to say thanks.”
He offered me his hand.
I took it. Then he nodded and walked back to sit with the other members of the band. I smiled. A good guy.
Why do I do this sort of thing?
God, I wish I had an answer to that.
(2)
On December 28, Rudy, Circe, and I took a DMS chopper from the Hangar and flew south into Pennsylvania. We landed outside the walls of Graterford Prison. Warden Wilson met us at the gate.
“Has he said anything?” asked Rudy as we shed our coats in the warden’s office.
“He hasn’t said a word since Dr. Sanchez ordered him placed in solitary,” said Wilson. “I had video and audio recorders placed inside his cell and all along the path from cell to showers and back. Nicodemus is always escorted by four guards that I pick randomly, and the time for his shower varies according to a schedule I make up. A schedule I keep in my head. If there was a leak inside the prison, someone feeding information to Nicodemus, these procedures seem to have stopped it.”
Rudy and Circe exchanged a look and said nothing. Neither looked pleased. Wilson caught it.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Rudy. “Except that a little subtlety might have helped us
find
the leak rather than cut it off.”
Wilson looked flustered and angry. “Well, you could have
said
that, Dr. Sanchez.”
“He shouldn’t have had to,” I said. Wilson turned aside to hide a face.
“Can we see the prisoner now?” asked Circe.
“Sure,” Wilson said with bad grace. He led the way and we followed him through cold, damp halls that felt more like the corridors of an ancient dungeon rather than part of a modern prison. We passed through two heavily occupied cell blocks, and as we passed we saw hundreds of prisoners standing on the other side of the bars. Their eyes followed us, reading us. They watched Circe O’Tree, who wore a tailored suit that hid none of her curves.
The prisoners were absolutely silent.
And that was creepy as hell. I had never heard a quiet cell block before. Not once as a Baltimore cop or during my time with the DMS. There were always catcalls and laughter, the low murmur of conversation, smart-ass remarks. There should have been some whistles at Circe, some off-color remarks.
All we heard was the hollow sounds of our own heels on the concrete floor. Even the warden felt it. He stopped in the middle of one of the rows of cells and looked around. When he made eye contact with the convicts, they returned his stare, but they said nothing.
Wilson cut a look at me and continued leading the way.
Several turns took us through a series of locked doors until we reached the secure area used for solitary confinement. The cells on either side of Nicodemus’s cell had been left vacant. The video cameras on the wall were pointed toward his cell. I could see a small figure on the cot, curled asleep under a thin brown blanket.
A guard-supervisor stood at the far end of the row, and he came to meet us.
Wilson said, “Bill, these people are with Homeland. They want to interview Nicodemus.”
“Sure, but if you’d called down I could have—”
“Just open the cell,” I said.
It was against all protocol, and the guard studied the warden for a moment before complying. He waved to two other guards and they came to join us, bringing waist chains and riot sticks. All three of the guards cut worried looks at the cell. It was the fearful reaction Rudy had described. He was right: these guys were scared as hell by the little prisoner.
“Nicodemus,” called the supervisor, Bill. “Rise and shine.”
Nicodemus ignored him.
“Come on,” Bill said, his tone almost pleading. “Let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.”
When Nicodemus still didn’t stir, the supervisor turned and yelled down the hall, “Open Six!”
There was a metallic clang inside the wall and the door twitched open. The two guards braced the doorway. One opened it, the other drew his riot stick and tapped on the door frame.
“Come on—let’s not be screwing around here.”
When there was still no compliance, they looked to the warden, who gave a nod, and they entered the cell.
“What the hell? Oh—
shit
!”
We crowded the doorway, watching as one of the guards grabbed the blanket and whipped it away. Circe and Rudy gasped as black and brown roaches scuttled in all directions. Hundreds of them.
There was a pillow and a rolled-up bundle of clothes.
Nothing else.
“Dios mio,” breathed Rudy.
“Where is he?” demanded Circe. “Where’s the prisoner?”
The warden ordered the supervisor to send the alert: escaped prisoner. Horns blared and sirens wailed. The whole place went into hard lockdown. Teams of men and dogs ran through the halls and out into the yards. Teams on ATVs tore through the countryside.
They found nothing.
In the warden’s office, Circe asked to see the video surveillance tapes from Nicodemus’s cell. When they were played back we watched the little man crawl under his blanket and appear to go to sleep. That was at 4:16 P.M. I knew from when we’d signed in that we had passed through security at 4:18.
At 4:19 the video feed in Nicodemus’s cell dissolved into white static. The guards had unlocked the cell at 4:41.
That left a twenty-two-minute gap during which Nicodemus vanished.
The video feed trained on the outside of his cell door, however, showed a continuous picture, and the door did not open. The FBI and investigators from the Department of Corrections spent days going through the stored video files of all of the cameras at Graterford. Nicodemus was not seen on any of them.
Manhunts in three states could not find him. TV alerts and posted rewards resulted in no useful responses. No trace of him was ever found.
But as Rudy, Circe, and I stood in that cold hallway outside Nicodemus’s cell, I think we all had the same feeling. It was absurd, impossible, and foolish. But it’s what I felt, and when I looked in their eyes I saw the same shadows. The same ghosts.
We did not voice those thoughts. In our profession you don’t. Just as you do with pain, you learn to eat your fear. Even fear of something that may not have an explanation.
Rudy crossed himself, though. And that said it all.
(3)
Vox’s betrayal hit a lot of people hard. It shook the foundations of our government. So many key people in government, so many people in crucial jobs in labs and nuclear power plants and defense factories, so many of our most highly trained special operators, had been screened and vetted by Vox. Over seventy people in the DMS had been screened by him. Did it make them all guilty or complicit? No. Circe O’Tree had been approved by Vox, and so had Grace Courtland, Top Sims, DeeDee Whitman, and Khalid Shaheed.
What it meant was the start of a witch hunt and a wave of paranoia that would make the McCarthy years seem like an era of tolerance and understanding. Church did not want that to happen and over the next months he would spend more time in front of Congress than he would overseeing the hunt for the Kings.
Vox vanished off the radar. So did Toys and the rest of the Seven Kings.
All of the think-tank records had been stolen. That was a sleeping dragon, and we all knew it.
T-Town was shut down pending a review, but absolutely no one wanted to do that review. No one wanted to be known as “the next Hugo Vox.”
Rudy, Circe, and Bug spent thousands of hours going over the psychological profiles of people in key industries, looking for those personality types that jibed with Plympton, Grey, Scofield, Snow, and Taylor. They identified 103 possibles. Amber Taylor became part of the debriefing team that conducted the interviews. Aunt Sallie coordinated with Federal Marshals for an unprecedented number of new identities in Witness Protection. With Santoro locked away wherever Church has him it might mean that no one would ever come after the families of the people he had coerced and psychologically tortured—but was that a risk we could ever take?
It was an enormously expensive venture, but somehow the funding always materialized. I wondered if some of the Inner Circle were helping. They were still a pack of evil bastards the DMS would have to take down, but if they wanted to avenge their children, so be it.
As far as I know, the Inner Circle are still on the “to-do” list of Aunt Sallie and Mr. Church. Not a nice place to be.
(4)
The hunt for the Seven Kings wasn’t over. We all knew that. It would go on until we found out where they were, and tore them down.
Sounds so easy. Like the War on Terror would be over when we found and killed Osama. But do any of us believe that? Is this a winnable war? It’s a fair question, and a hard one, and the answer is probably “no” for both sides.
And yet we have to fight it. If we don’t, the bad guys get bigger, bolder, more dangerous, and more destructive. Right now they’re jackals nipping at the weak and the unwary. We can’t allow them to become the dominant predator.
All of which sounds like a lot of flag-waving, but it’s not that simple. We have to be careful not to become what we hunt. We almost did that with the Patriot Act, taking away civil rights in the name of protecting them. That can’t happen.
Yet where does that leave guys like me? Where does it leave Echo Team and the DMS?
(5)
I stood at the window of my hotel in Washington, looking out at the green stretch of the Mall, watching the masses of crowds that were already gathering for the big New Year’s celebration tonight. The papers said that there would be a candlelight vigil. For the London Hospital, for the
Sea of Hope
and all that it represented, for the victims of the Starbucks attack. I would like to think that some of those candles would be lighted in honor of the DMS agents, SEALs, Delta operators, and shipboard security who had died to keep this from being an international day of mourning.
Now the sun was setting over Washington. In a few hours this year would burn away. It was crazy. At the beginning of June I was a Baltimore cop. By early July I was fighting to stop terrorists with a doomsday plague. By the end of August I’d fallen in love with an amazing woman, and I lost her to a murderer’s bullet. I’d led good men and women into battle with monsters. Actual monsters. And I’d gone aboard a cruise ship packed with people who had gathered for the purpose of easing the pain and suffering of children living in the most economically depressed places on earth. Good people of all races and religions, all colors and political viewpoints, working together for the common good. On that ship, out in the middle of the dark Atlantic, I had moved among the very best humanity has and fought against the very worst humanity can be.
Was this my life?
After Grace died I had planned to leave the DMS forever. Even the Warrior in my head had been glutted from all the blood and death. The Cop had become convinced that all goodness had died with Grace … and the Modern Man was adrift, clinging to the last splinter of hope. Then Church had called me and brought me back. To the London Hospital, to Fair Isle, to the gunfight in the coffeehouse, to Jenkintown, to the slaughter of the DMS, and to the
Sea of Hope
.
So …
was
this my life? Fighting and fighting and fighting?
It is a horrible moment when you can no longer count the number of
people you’ve killed. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window glass. It was mild for December, but the glass was cold.
I heard a rising burst of laughter from the adjoining suite. Rudy and Circe. They sounded happy. I felt gutted and empty.
Was this my life?
Was this who I am?
I opened my eyes and saw the first of the candles flare up down in the Mall. A tiny spark in the sea of late-twilight gloom. For a moment there was only that one small light in the darkness, and the loneliness of it was almost unbearably sad.
Then someone bent close and used the flame to light their candle. And others did, and more, sharing out the light so that it spread. Slowly and sporadically, but steadily. An infection of light that did not defeat the darkness—the darkness was too big, too vast, too powerful to ever be completely destroyed—but for now, for this moment, those tiny flames conspired together to drive the darkness back.
I placed my palm on the glass. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a romantic or childish need to feel the heat of that light. But the glass was cold.
And yet …
I smiled.
The cold was okay. The fact that I was up here in the darkness of my room, in the darkness of my thoughts, was okay. The flame was still there. If this was who I was, and if it wasn’t for me to be part of the light, then maybe that was as it should be.
I am what I am. I’m a hunter and a killer. I’m the Cop and the Warrior, and the Modern Man. As I—as
we
—watched the light from the vigil candles spread, the answer to the question was there. It had always been there.
Was this my life?
Yes.

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