Luigi wiped sweat from his eyes.
“Kuga. Otherwise known as Harcourt Bolton Sr.”
Luigi stiffened as if ten thousand volts shot through him.
“Rafael Santoro.”
Tears broke from Luigi’s eyes.
“Joe Ledger.”
Luigi put his face in his hands.
“Good,” said Toys. “Clearly you know them. Now, let’s have a nice little chat.”
CHAPTER 55
PHOENIX HOUSE
OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE
Bug popped the top on his sixth Red Bull, tilted back, and drank a third of the can. The first five had just about helped him reboot his brain and get his mental circuits back online. Maybe the sixth would ignite some optimism, though he rather doubted it.
This was day thirty-four of what he thought of as the Big Silence. He did not like to use the nickname Doc Holliday hung on it—Days of Darkness. That made him too sad and too stressed.
It had been thirty-four days since Joe Ledger walked away from the slaughter on the small Croatian island. Thirty-four very long days.
His absence—and the events precipitating it—had spread a cloud of gloom over the entire organization. People spoke more quietly, sometimes in actual hushed voices. There was a pervasive sense of sadness. And of dread. Not specifically for the actual life of RTI’s legendary senior field team leader, but because if the war could damage Ledger that badly, then who was really safe? This was an extreme form of post-traumatic stress that now seemed inevitable for all of them. The effect was evident in the lack of laughter in the mess halls, the drop in combat range scores, the overall sense of hesitancy that hadn’t been there before. And it didn’t help any that Top and Bunny were away on some secret mission.
Only Church seemed unmoved, though Bug doubted the boss’s famous calm was genuine. Bug had been with Church longer than anyone in Rogue Team. Only Aunt Sallie knew him better, and she was retired, still going through extensive physical and occupational therapy at an ultra-high-end facility on Corfu, next to where Rudy Sanchez lived with his wife, Circe O’Tree, and their son.
There were plenty of people who loved Joe, too. Maybe not Circe, who still held him—and her father—responsible for the harm that had come to Rudy. Her husband had lost an eye and a knee because of his involvement with the old Department of Military Sciences. Injuries he would not have sustained had he not followed Joe into the group or let himself hook his star to Church’s never-ending war. It was sad and disturbing.
Joe had Junie, who had also been injured badly because of her association with him. An assassin’s bullet had destroyed her uterus during the Code Zero case, and she’d been impaled by flying debris when Rafael Santoro blew up the Ledger farmhouse. She still loved Joe with an intensity that often made Bug want to cry. He’d never been loved that much by a woman. Well, except his mom, but she was another casualty of the war—murdered by Sebastian Gault for the crime of being blood kin to a person working for Church.
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” he murmured.
Bug was alone in his office, which was a very messy anteroom to the spotless clean room in which the MindReader mainframe and supercomputers hummed relentlessly. Bug swiveled around and looked at two figures inside the room, both of them in protective white garments and safety goggles. One was the slightly hunched and emaciated figure of Yoda, his number two. The other was a woman he’d met in South Korea. A top-of-the-line super hacker named Annie Han. Originally an operative in the NIS—National Intelligence Agency’s computer counterespionage or cybersecurity divisions. That was a front, though, a functional cover for her real job, which was that of cyber warfare expert for Arklight, the militant arm of the Mothers of the Fallen. A group of intensely fierce women who waged a private war against human trafficking, sex slavery, and other crimes against women and children. Now Annie was a member of RTI and of Bug’s team.
She was also his girlfriend.
Not quite a lover in the truest sense of that word, though she was that in a deliciously physical way. But although Bug had fallen pretty heavily for Annie, she was more reserved and guarded with her emotions. The result, she said, of a string of truly disastrous relationships that ended very badly.
Bug had hopes, though. He hadn’t had a real girlfriend in years. He knew that everyone he worked with thought he was a sexless worker bee who was secretly in love with MindReader. And Bug had encouraged that viewpoint because sharing his sadness and loneliness with his friends never felt right. Just the thought of it made him feel like a bit of a freak.
He was very much in love now, though.
But if Annie was going to fall in love with him, then she was playing a very subtle long game.
She and Yoda were in the middle of a very finicky process of stripping the Calpurnia AI system out of MindReader Q1 so that a much more efficient and intuitive system could be uploaded. It was painstaking work requiring long days. And Annie so often said how tired she was when she headed to her apartment. No accompanying invitation.
Bug sipped more of the Red Bull as data flowed across his screen.
He did not hear the office door open. He heard no footfalls.
“Bug,” said Mr. Church.
Bug jumped halfway out of his chair, spilling the energy drink down the front of his University of Wakanda T-shirt.
“Jesus H. T. Mortimer Christ.” Bug coughed, grabbing for tissues to dab his shirt.
Church made no apology. He never did. Instead, he went around and sat down on an empty chair. He waited while Bug sopped up the spill, tossed the tissues away, and grabbed another can of Red Bull.
“Tell me where we are,” said Church. “But before you answer, lock the room.”
Bug tapped some keys to send a security command to his system, locking his office and engaging anti-intrusion devices built into the walls. He trusted everyone at Phoenix House, but when it came to conversations like this, Bug tended to err on the side of caution.
“Okay,” he said, “where are we? Nowhere, really. Joe killed his RFID chip, which means we can’t track him. And, let’s face it, he knows a lot of ways to get lost.”
“Give me more than what I already know.”
“Okay,” said Bug. “After Joe abandoned the cigarette boat in Giovinazzo, Scott thinks he went to ground somewhere in Italy. And he supports that because of the hit the other day at Civitella in Val di Chiana, Tuscany.”
“And you don’t buy that?” asked Church. “Even though there was an eyewitness who said they saw a tall man with a white dog near that location?”
“Yes and no. I mean, sure, I think Joe hit that place, and we can tie Alexander Fong to the Kuga group, but I think that was something Joe did when he got back to Italy.”
“Explain.”
Bug gave Church details about the hit on Van der Vyver Biomedical Associates in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“That’s another place that has ties to Kuga. Now, before you tell me that a lot of independent labs have ties to Kuga through X number of removes, let me explain. Dr. Gerald Engelbrecht ran that lab, and he—more so than the rest of the staff—has, or rather had, a bunch of skeletons in his closet. He farmed out a lot of product manufacturing to sweatshops all through Malaysia and Java and a few other places. One standout is that sports equipment factory where there was that riot just recently. And by riot, I mean the highly suspicious one where there was zero cell phone footage or at-the-moment news coverage. Engelbrecht had contracts with them for what the computer records call ‘orthopedic overgarments.’ No idea what that is, but I’m looking into it.”
“Now isn’t that interesting?”
“I think so.”
“And you think Ledger hit Engelbrecht in Johannesburg?”
“I do. And then he went back to Italy and took out Alexander Fong and his team. Left Fong alive, though. Not sure why. Killed just about everyone and everything else, up to and including the ficus trees in the damned lobby.”
“You belie
ve this despite Scott Wilson being completely convinced that Ledger was holed up in Italy, perhaps gathering intel before finally making Fong his first move.”
“I’d bet a lot on it.”
“So would I,” said Church.
“Then we come to something I haven’t shared with Scott yet. I haven’t told anyone about it at all, not even you, because I wanted to dig around a little and make some educated guesses.”
“Tell me now,” said Church mildly.
“So, I got a heavily encrypted email from our old friend Oskar Freund.”
Captain Freund was the son of one of Church’s old friends from the pre-DMS days. Freund worked for the GSG 9 der Bundespolizei, a very effective police tactical unit of the German Federal Police. Officially, GSG 9 is only deployed for hostage situations, kidnapping, terrorism, and similar threats. However, there was a more elite and much more covert counterterrorism strike force within the group that had a much more flexible charter than the public thought. Freund was an investigator for them, and one who was at the top of the game. He was also an ally of Mr. Church. Another friend in the industry.
“Oh?” said Church mildly.
“Oskar received a package delivered by courier. The contents slip said, ‘Kontenbuch,’ which translates as—”
“‘Accounts ledger,’” finished Church, leaning a bit on the second word. “Very interesting indeed. What was in it?”
“Six four-terabyte external hard drives. The kind that can be bought at any electronics store in any of the bigger cities in South Africa. There was a Post-it note on top. Let me pull it up. You’ll like this.”
Bug hit some keys, and a JPEG filled the screen, showing a cell phone photo of the note. There were two simple line drawings—one of a church steeple and the other of a six-legged insect. The words to share written in ballpoint and clearly using a ruler to prevent any chance of handwriting analysis.
Bug grinned. “A church and a bug.”
“Eloquent,” murmured Church. “What’s on the drives?”
“A lot. Looks like Ledger prepped it for us. There’s one drive that has logistics, employee lists, and other stuff that I think he intended for Scott. There’s one with a crap-ton of encrypted computer files, and I have Nikki Bloom working on it now. The rest are more of the biomechanical stuff and copies of records that I’m now positive are copies of stuff Artemisia Bliss stole from the Jakobys and the Kings. But there’s some CIA stuff, too, and a bunch of DARPA research, mostly on military exoskeletons and neural chips for soldier-equipment interfaces.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“Well, like I said, I have Yoda and Nikki on the encrypted files, but that’s it. I wanted to talk with you first because—unless I’m reading this all wrong—you seem to be coy about who and what you’re saying about Ledger since he’s gone off the radar.”
“Yes,” said Church. He sat there, drawing slow circles on the desktop with his left index finger. “Don’t misunderstand me about this, Bug,” he said after a while. “There is no mistrust with anyone here at the RTI. No one is under suspicion, and they all have my highest confidence in all critical matters.”
“You have ‘but’ face.”
“Consider rephrasing that for future use,” said Church, “but … I know how much resentment there is among some of the staff about my letting Ledger back into the field at all.”
“Yeah, Junie tells me you’re dodging her calls.”
He sighed. “I am. And I’ve shut down discussions with Scott, Top, and some others because I don’t care to explain my motivations. Rudy has already read me the comprehensive riot act for endangering Joe’s mental and physical health. And he’s not wrong. I am doing exactly that, but not from a lack of compassion.”
“No,” said Bug. “I get it. Even though we’re not really answerable to the UN or any world government, ever since Oslo, we’re pretty high profile. They’re expecting us to be the white knights here. We can’t put a foot wrong, because that ruins our credibility with governments from whom we’ll need to get permissions to operate within their borders. If they know that we let Joe bugfuck nuts Ledger off the leash deliberately, every door will be shut. And we won’t get stuff like this.” He pointed to the screen.
Church smiled faintly. “You understand me very well, Bug.”
“We’ve been family a long time.”
“We have.”
They sat in silence for a few moments. Church reached over and picked up a can of Red Bull, read the ingredients, and put it back.
“Share the data,” he said. “Tell Doc and Scott that it came from me via one of my contacts. They’ll know not to ask. Make sure Yoda and Nikki get the same story.”
“Will do.”
Church lingered. “What’s your theory on this?”
“Well, I’m still leaning toward this being Kuga and Santoro giving their Fixers a serious tech upgrade. Those cats, with bleeding-edge cybernetics and exoskeletons? And maybe some drug therapy to get them all juiced? Shit, boss, I think we’re in real trouble here.”
Church stood. “I think we’ve been in real trouble for some time and are only now beginning to see the shape and scope of it.”
He gave Bug’s shoulder a squeeze and went out.
CHAPTER 56
THE PAVILION
BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER
STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON
Top and Bunny were taken to a commercial airport in Texas where John Saxon greeted them with travel documents and first-class seats for a direct flight to Washington State.
“If we’re going to Washington, why’d we need our passports?” asked Bunny.
Saxon smiled. “You’re going to Washington today. Other trips are possible, and we don’t want to waste time fussing over papers.”
Top nodded. “Yeah, okay … that makes sense.”
“You coming with us?” asked Bunny.
“Nah, I don’t think you fellows need me to hold your hands.”
He shook their hands, grinned, waved, and walked away out of the terminal building.
“Okay, then,” said Bunny. Forty minutes later, they were in the air.
They had no idea if anyone else on the flight was a spook for Blue Diamond, so the two of them kept their conversation to ordinary stuff. They talked sports and old movies, but mostly they slept. Conserving energy the way professionals in their line of work do. They had one beer each but nursed them.
In Spokane, they were met at baggage claim by a thirtysomething man in a crisp white shirt buttoned to the throat and blue jeans with severely ironed creases. He held a sign that showed only the Blue Diamond logo.
“You gentlemen should hit the head because it’ll be a long drive,” he said. That was his only comment from the moment they met him until he dropped them off at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere, deep in Stevens County. The checkpoint was manned by two men dressed in military-style forest-pattern camo uniforms. The drive had taken more than three hours, and from the route, it was clear the driver was deliberately changing roads and even backtracking. Wary of surveillance.
At the gate, both guards wore masks that covered their features, and carried Sig Sauer MCX Rattler assault weapons.
The gate was set in a forest clearing and was the only part of the fence that was easily visible. From what they could see, the fence was high and wrapped in razor wire. A road led from the checkpoint, and it curved out of sight within a dozen yards. No other buildings were visible from where they stood.
Top and Bunny were asked to get out of the car, show their IDs, and to log in to a terminal using thumbprints and retina scans. This didn’t bother either of them, because Bug and MindReader had long since gamed the system. Their false identities were unbreakable, and all traces of who they had been were long since erased entirely from hospital, school, military, and other databases. The tapeworm search-and-destroy programs Bug wrote were hungry and thorough.
However, Top acted as if he didn’t understand h
ow the thumbprint scanner worked. He kept putting the wrong finger on the pad or missed the pad entirely.
Bunny laughed. “How old are you, dude? You just put your freaking thumb on the freaking pad. It’s not rocket science.”
“I don’t like gadgets,” complained Top.
The guard overseeing the scan looked amused and gave Bunny a knowing wink, more or less saying, Old guys.
Once the scan was complete, Top and Bunny were told to wait near the guard shack. No one bothered to check the scanner housing, and even if they had, they might not have noticed anything odd. Only a very close examination would reveal a very small dot of plastic stuck to the underside of the machine. The dot had been on the pad of Top’s left forefinger, and when he touched it to the device while bending over to frown and cuss at the machine, the reactive chemicals scanned and mimicked the exact color of the housing. When he held on to the scanner while finally placing his thumb in the right place, Top transferred the chameleon scanner to the housing. It was a bit of sleight of hand he’d done many times before. The scanner was a marvel of design, developed years ago by Dr. Hu and updated by techs working for Doc Holliday and Bug.
Within six seconds, the microcircuitry in the wafer-thin dot was opening a door to allow MindReader to waltz in. The super-intrusion software around which MindReader was built instantly picked all the encryption locks built into the Blue Diamond security system. At the same time, it rewrote the target software to erase all traces of the intrusion and its lingering presence. No one at the camp would raise an alarm because nothing within the security system recognized the intrusion.
While they waited, Top and Bunny glanced briefly around. The camp looked rustic, but their security was not. The guards wore a slightly different uniform from the ones they’d seen in Texas. Camo with a slightly darker color scheme, appropriate for the denser woodlands here in Washington State. No insignias except for small blue diamond-shaped patches on the shoulders. The cut was better, suggesting individual tailoring rather than off the rack, and these men had sharper eyes and unsmiling mouths. Observant professionals. And yet Top’s tomfoolery with the scanner had tricked them. That suggested a bit of arrogance over the professionalism. Top and Bunny both thought it was useful to know.
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