Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

  Top half turned and raised his shirt to reveal a Glock 9 mm in a belt holster.

  “You’ll need to check those at the door,” said Saxon. “Rules.”

  “Not a big fan of giving my gun up to anyone,” said Bunny, putting some bluster into it.

  “And you can drive your ass out of here whenever you want, son,” said Saxon. “No one stopping you. But if you want to come in and talk to the man, then you got to check your guns at the door. Your choice.”

  Top contrived to look pained and then nodded. “It’s cool, Buck. House rules.”

  “House rules,” agreed Saxon.

  “Fuck,” said Bunny, but he bent and removed the holstered piece. Instead of handing it over, he went around and unlocked a heavy steel box in the bed of the Ford and stowed his pistol in there. “This work for you, hoss?” he asked.

  “That’s fine,” said Saxon.

  Top pulled the holstered Glock from his belt and handed it to Bunny, who locked the box.

  “And neither of you boys will object to a metal detector and a pat-down,” said Saxon, not really making it a question.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” said Bunny.

  They followed Saxon into the gymnasium, which was a huge cinder block structure attached to the back of the school building. There were armed guards at the door, and another pair inside, flanking a good-quality metal detector.

  “New recruits, Mr. Saxon?” asked one guard.

  Top contrived to look surprised. “Saxon?”

  The talent scout spread his hands. “Yeah, well. John Saxon in here, Randall Flagg out there, capisce?”

  “It’s copacetic,” said Bunny. “Flagg’s like your combat call sign.”

  “Sure,” said Saxon. “Like that.” He gestured to the metal detector. “Shall we?”

  It beeped once, requiring that Bunny remove his belt, which had a heavy steel buckle, and once inside, a moonfaced guard patted them down. He was very thorough.

  “You done stroking my dick?” asked Bunny.

  “Nah, couldn’t find it,” said the guard, which knocked a genuine laugh from Top. The guard straightened. “They’re clean.”

  Top and Bunny followed Saxon toward the building. They were unarmed and greatly outnumbered. It was not the first time they’d been in something this tight, but previous experience and the memory of how some of those other situations played out did not inspire a single ounce of confidence that they were either safe or secure.

  CHAPTER 42

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Church and Lilith sat together, though they were not on the same continent.

  She was in an Arklight safe house in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg, and he was in his office at the RTI headquarters. The illusion was created by the ORB—the Operational Resource Bay—which was one of Doc Holliday’s inventions. Dozens of small cameras worked in sync to use a proprietary imaging tech to put holograms of them both into a shared space. It looked like they were seated together on a bench in Döbrentei Square in Budapest on a quiet evening. The ORB even added ambient noise of nearby traffic, birdsong, and laughter—but muted.

  Lilith was amused. “Here, of all places? Since when are you sentimental?”

  He smiled faintly. “I often come here.”

  “Not really,” she chided.

  “Not really, but the ORB allows me to mix business with pleasure.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “St. Germaine mooning over where we had our first kiss.”

  “Behave,” he said.

  They smiled at each other, and he saw the small movement as she very nearly reached out to try and take his hand but stopped herself because that was beyond even the ORB’s capabilities.

  Then she asked, “Do they know?”

  “Bug knows, of course. He’s known since the beginning.”

  “Who else?”

  “Scott Wilson suspects, and as long as it’s only a suspicion, I’m not burdened by the weight of his disapproval.”

  “What about Rudy Sanchez?”

  “We’ve … had talks about Ledger. Diagnosis and prognosis. I shared with him the psych eval from the profiler Wilson put on it. Rudy’s conclusion was that it was a very well-written, well-considered piece of garbage.”

  “I read it, too, and Sanchez is quite correct.”

  “It’s not entirely without merit,” said Church, though he didn’t push the issue. In truth, he found it to be pedestrian. Wilson had wanted an objective opinion from a top forensic psychologist, but applying standard models—even models of known psychological deviations—to Joe Ledger was a waste of time and resources. But Wilson was as concerned and as frustrated as everyone else, and approving the report was something he could at least do.

  “Will you tell Junie?”

  “No,” he said. “Not until we know more. Right now, all we’ve been able to do is lift the crime scene reports from whichever agency has jurisdiction. And we’ve received uploads of data, but all the data transfer is from sites like internet cafés, or coffee shops with no camera surveillance. Some materials were left in airport lockers. No collectable forensics of any kind.”

  “Ledger knows his tradecraft, I’ll give him that,” said Lilith.

  “Bug has done a lot of searching for real estate rentals and hotels, and he believes Ledger is using the Bucharest model.”

  “Smart,” she said.

  The Bucharest model was a technique established during the Cold War but greatly refined since. A person with the right resources would use several different credit cards to book different rooms in the same hotel. He would check in to each using a variety of disguises. Sometimes confederates were employed for this purpose, but Ledger was almost certainly acting alone. Each room would serve a different purpose—equipment storage, bolt-hole, or actual lodging. Since modern hotels no longer required returning key cards to the desk, there was little way to track the movements of guests until the cleaning staff knocked on the door after checkout time. It was complicated, but the extra steps made it virtually impossible to find someone. And the upper-tier pros often went the extra mile to check into more than one hotel. With Ledger’s high-end talent for languages and regional accents, becoming invisible was easy. The complication for him was Ghost, but somehow Ledger managed. Bug had logged eight different combinations of tall men with large dogs—though the color of the dog’s hair and the stated purpose—guide dog or different levels of emotional support—raised no particular eyebrows. Except to Bug.

  And there were also safe houses attached to various organizations, some of which were left empty. Someone with RTI-level equipment could game any monitoring devices, however.

  “Ledger used two sets of identities to obtain field kits from two different in-country resources,” said Church. “With those, he can stay off the grid for as long as he wants. And we’ve determined that he used a Lightning Bug to kill his and Ghost’s RFID chips.”

  Lilith grunted. “He and his dog are both ghosts.”

  “Yes,” said Church. “Which is why I asked you to meet me. What have your people found?”

  “We may be getting close,” she said, “or at least closer. After the first few hits here in South Africa, we were able to make an educated guess as to who he was going to target next. We know he’s been going after people of two kinds—scientists who have been on lists of people with possible or likely ties to Kuga operations, and people in the technologies and terrorism arms of the black market who used to work for Ohan.”

  “Ledger was very familiar with Ohan’s operation,” said Church. “We were building a mission profile to go after him, but…”

  “But Arklight got there first. No apologies, St. Germaine.”

  “None needed. My point is that Ledger is well versed on those names.”

  “There are people on both of my lists—tech and sales—who are in morgues all over this part of the country. We got to one in the hospital, though. Well, let me rephrase that. We hijacked the ambu
lance taking him to a hospital. He’s now in a landfill.”

  “He talked?” asked Church.

  “Oh yes. He gave us a very accurate physical description—though the attacker wore a balaclava. Right size and build. Right description of how he moved. And the attacker had a white combat dog in next-gen body armor. The dog had metal teeth.”

  “Ah. And what did this unfortunate person have to say?”

  “He admitted that he gave Ledger some names. We’re staking out those places now.”

  “What was this man involved in?”

  “That’s the odd part,” said Lilith, “he was rambling a bit. Screaming, really. And he kept referring to two things. Some kind of drug or drug treatment called R-33, and some upcoming event he knew only as the ‘American Operation.’”

  “Did he have any details about what this American Operation might be?”

  “Nothing specific, alas,” she said, “but he said it was—and I quote—‘what we’re all working on.’ We’ve been wondering what Kuga’s next big play is going to be, and I think this is our first true whiff.”

  CHAPTER 43

  CIVITELLA IN VAL DI CHIANA

  AREZZO, TUSCANY, ITALY

  The man sat on a bench in a park on a street he couldn’t name.

  The park was in shadows except for a few lights along the wandering stone pathway. The man’s dog lay on the bench with his head on the man’s lap. They’d been like that for more than two hours.

  The man watched nothing. His eyes were out of focus. The world was a gray-green blur of inconsequential colors. His fingers flexed open and closed, massaging the ruff of the dog’s neck. He did not remember washing the blood off his hand. Or off the dog’s coat, for that matter. He didn’t remember changing back into civilian clothes. So many things lately were blurred out of his consciousness.

  He knew he should be afraid of that.

  Of that he was certain.

  When a voice spoke behind him, the man snapped to full awareness. But he did not turn around.

  “I have to say, Joey,” said the voice, “I’m getting worried about how you’re handling things.”

  The voice was warm, mature, and familiar. So familiar.

  “You’re leaning way out over that edge, son.”

  “Go away,” said the man.

  “I already went away. You know that, Joey.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name.”

  “That’s what you called me when I was a little kid.”

  The man chuckled softly. “Well, you’re always going to be my little boy, Joey. Always and forever.”

  “You’re not real.”

  “And yet here you are talking to me.”

  “I’m … I…”

  “Go ahead, take your time. Say what you need to say.”

  “There’s something wrong with me.”

  “Joey, there’s been something wrong with you since you were fourteen. After what happened to you and that poor girl? Of course there’s something wrong with you. They broke you, son. They broke your bones and they broke your heart and they broke your head.”

  “Why are you doing this?” the man demanded, though he still did not turn around.

  “Because I love you, Joey. Always have, always will. And I’m scared for you. You’re not right, and I think you know that.”

  “Leave me alone,” begged the man. “Please.”

  The big white shepherd woke up and raised his head. He looked over the back of the bench, and for a moment, his bushy tail wagged back and forth.

  Then the man felt a breath on his ear as if the person behind him had leaned close. He squeezed his eyes shut. The breath was cold and damp and smelled of rotting things.

  “The darkness never forgives,” said the voice, “and it never forgets. It has almost all of you now, and if you’re not careful, son, it’s going to swallow you whole.”

  The man got to his feet and turned.

  “Dad, please…”

  But there was no one standing behind him.

  The trees in the park were crowded with night birds, though. Thousands of them like a cloud of shadows. Watching with their bottomless black eyes.

  The man sank slowly down onto the bench and put his face in his hands.

  CHAPTER 44

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Bug was not naturally a vindictive person. It took some effort for him to be mean. But he could get into gear when he tried.

  When Mr. Church suggested that he go after the hackers working for Kuga and to “make it hurt,” that came with a great deal of license and a tremendous reach. And MindReader Q1 gave that reach a lot of punch.

  He locked his office, turned on some late-1990s dubstep, dragged his cooler of Red Bull to within easy grabbing range, tore open a one-pound bag of Twizzlers, and set to work.

  The first thing he did was dive into some bookmarks he’d created especially for darknet market sites that were supposed to be access-only by special encrypted invitation. Over the years, Bug had created scores of online personalities, including one as the highly respected and highly feared hacker Coal Tiger, named for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original—and unfortunate—name for the comic book character who later became the Black Panther.

  As Coal Tiger, he was admitted to chat rooms that would otherwise have been sealed shut against him. In those chats, computer experts who worked for the black marketeers using the darknet got together to—among other things—brag. Hackers loved to brag, though they typically hid behind obfuscatory walls, false identities, and location rerouters. They were by nature and necessity an exceptionally paranoid bunch. One error and they could invite their own competition inside their online Fortresses of Solitude.

  There were several hundred of these chat rooms, though most were poseurs who wanted to be seen as top-level black hats without actually having the chops. But the key players—a group of less than a hundred worldwide—were the kings of the matrix. Most of their chat rooms were located on Tor or I2P, premier darknets for black market vendors selling or brokering large quantities of drugs, weapons, all manner of physical and cryptocurrencies, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, hijacked credit card information, passwords, weapons of every kind, old Soviet-era military technology, and slaves. Sex trafficking was huge on the darknet, and because the sites could not be found via any kind of standard search engine, the flow of business was seldom interrupted. The hackers remained aloof and apart, like an extended family of trickster gods—Loki, Coyote, raven spirits, Wakdjunga, Anansi, and others.

  Bug had variations on his darknet identities. He was Coal Tiger and the Fisher King; he was BigBadBoi and Punji. And others. Identities he created, cultivated, and left on the net, touching them up every now and then to keep them fresh and active. Some of his online avatars were actually repurposed from hackers the DMS and RTI had taken down.

  It was as the Fisher King, though, that he went on a buying spree.

  He put feelers out that he was looking for cybernetic implants, neuro chips, and cutting-edge eugeroics for wakefulness. Bug was very careful reaching out, making sure he did it from obscure angles and never—never, ever—appearing too eager or too desperate. He found that the B and B approach worked best. Bitching and Bargaining. Complaining about the sale price for something and then haggling like a carpet merchant. Eagerness was either the sign of a rookie or, most often on the darknet, an indication that he was a cop of some kind.

  It took weeks to get into the right position, and each day, he’d repeat the same ritual of ultra-caffeination and sugar rush, which brought him to that elevated state of hyperawareness and quickness of thought. The trick was to intersperse the sugars with proteins and fats so that he didn’t crash.

  Each time he made contact with someone promising, Bug used MindReader Q1 to send a Trojan horse back to whomever emailed or messaged him a quote. Most of the very top hackers believed that they were immune to those kinds of intrusions, and they
had software to review every line of code in the metadata of that email. Except MindReader’s quantum speed was too fast to be caught. As soon as a connection was made by receiving the email or message, it attacked without using a reply message at all. This was something Bug developed years ago for Mr. Church. The super-intrusion software swept into the sender’s system via their own email and positioned itself to make the target unable to read any of the Trojan horse code. It wouldn’t even see that it was there, no matter which kind of cybersecurity tools were used.

  Long ago, Bug and Church had discussed sharing this software. The pro side of the argument was that it would greatly protect the military, universities, hospitals, and the computers running the power grids. Though while that was true, sharing it was greatly outweighed by the cons of it simply being too dangerous. If the tech got out, then there would be no protection for anyone.

  The compromise was that Bug went into the systems running nuclear power, electrical grids, and a few key places and planted a different set of Trojan horses. A set of analytical and reactive programs designed to prevent the most sophisticated and dangerous kinds of black hat hacking. They called it Operation Counterpunch, and only the two of them were aware that it existed.

  Bug was not in a mood to send benign protective viruses out there, however. He was hunting for links in the Kuga chain of black market experts. And although he had not yet found the main Kuga online presence, he had a serious in. A bit less than two years ago, one of Lilith’s Arklight teams had captured, interrogated, and executed the man who had been, to that point, the most successful and powerful black marketeer of all time, the Turk named Ohan. Before he died—and he died very badly—Lilith’s team extracted a great deal of information from him. They were on the hunt for key players in the sex-trafficking world, and they found many. Found and removed in very ugly ways. However, the by-products of all that were what Lilith considered “scraps.” Names, email addresses, passwords, and darknet sites for nearly forty of Ohan’s top people who had been recruited by Kuga.