Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  They are not my people, he told himself. They’re not Russian. They’re not Communists. They were not …

  The word “human” floated to the top of his mind, and he gagged. They were innocents, caught in the unforgiving gears of politics and war. Bad things happen even to good people, and Valen tried to convince himself of the reality of Hobbes’s eloquent quote that life outside of society was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This destruction was a patriotic choice. This was war, even if the lunkheads in the West thought the war had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As if. No, the war had never ended, and these people were unfortunate casualties of that conflict. Collateral damage.

  The rationalization worked for nearly five seconds. But it, too, crumbled.

  I am a monster. He opened his eyes and forced himself to witness his own crimes. The rumbling continued as balconies broke from other hotels and collapsed onto the patios. Valen reached up and turned his hearing aid down.

  “Fuuuuuuck,” howled Ari, drawing it out, pointing at the catastrophe. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

  “Yes,” said Valen weakly, “I saw it.”

  “Christ, I want to take this moment, bend it over the rail, and fuck it up the ass. That’s what I want to do.” Ari was rubbing his crotch and it was clear he had an enormous erection. Then he grabbed for the bottle and refilled their glasses as if more booze would help the moment hurry along. “Come on, come on, come on…”

  The rumble became a deeper growl and finally a full-throated roar. The whole hotel seemed to leap upward as if the entire structure, all 240 rooms, had abandoned its reliance on gravity, was trying to escape the moment and fly into the safety of the blue sky. Then it broke apart. Bang. Just like that. Masses of it jumped away from the central structure and collapsed across the beach. Dozens of people vanished beneath it, and the rest were swallowed by clouds of smoke, dust, and sand. The guts of the hotel were visible and Valen caught one moment of a woman standing naked beside her bed, one leg raised to step into a floral bathing suit, her eyes wide, mouth open in a silent Oh. And then the floor beneath her simply disintegrated into nothing and she was sucked down into the hungry teeth of concrete and structural steel. Valen was glad he could not hear screams at this distance.

  The trees began falling then, because by now the earthquake was in full fury. They watched shock waves ripple through the hotel and along the cliffs, tearing it all apart. On either side of this hotel the competing resorts flew apart, and the mountain against which they were set shook itself like a wet dog. A massive avalanche of dirt, rocks, trees, and people hammered down onto the crumbling buildings. Valen wished he had Superman’s X-ray vision so he could look into the earth and see the process as the subduction zone interface between the Nazca and Pacific plates went to war with each other. He wanted to see the science so that he did not have to see the pain.

  “Start the engine,” said Valen, and then had to shout it to jolt Ari out of whatever daydream of carnal carnage was playing out in his thoughts. “Hey! Are you deaf now? We need to get away from here.”

  The Greek snapped out of it. “What? Oh, shit. Yes.”

  Within a few short minutes they were far out to sea, chased by the echoes of the devastation.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  EN ROUTE

  “Tell me fast, Doc,” I said. “Getting close to D.C.”

  Ghost sat up beside me, staring at the lifelike 3-D image but unable to sniff anything. I dared not suggest a scratch-and-sniff upgrade to the Betty Boops, or Mike Harnick would install them.

  “Okay,” said Doc, “we’ve been gathering intel since the Secret Service first ambushed you. Whoever sent them with the thought of hauling you in against your will was one fry short of a Happy Meal.”

  “No argument.”

  “Those other two, though,” she said, “now that’s a horse of a different color. I spoke with Top and Bunny and had them go through the whole thing, and something weird popped up.”

  “Um, Doc…? There’s not one part of this that isn’t weird.”

  “No, something weirder. I’ve read through a lot of your cases, and son, either you’re crazier than a dog in a cat factory, or you’re plum unlucky.”

  “Both,” I suggested.

  “That’s the consensus around here, too. Point is, I need to ask you a question. Those two Closers on the road … did they look at all familiar?”

  “You mean generally, in the fact that they were Closers, or personally?”

  “Personally,” she said. “Have you ever seen those two men before?”

  “Maybe. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but no … I don’t think we ever had a conversation. I have a good head for faces.”

  “Weird. I asked Top and Bunny that same question, and they said more or less the same thing.”

  “So what?” I asked.

  “So,” she said, “you may not recall their faces, but MindReader pinged their fingerprints, and you have met them before. In fact, you were in a hell of a fight with them a couple of years ago.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, but even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. There really was something about them.

  “Let me nudge your memory. It was a case before my time. You and the boys were at Shelton Aeronautics in Wolf Trap, Virginia. You got into a tussle with two men who showed you FBI badges. Do the names Henckhouser and Spinlicker tickle you at all?”

  “Sure,” I said. That was early on in the Extinction Machine case. We were running down some leads on a case and stumbled onto the first two Closers we ever met. What we didn’t know at the time was that they’d just slaughtered everyone who worked for Howard Shelton, who we later learned was one of the governors of Majestic Three. Agents Henckhouser and Spinlicker put up an incredible fight, nearly beating the three of us to a pulp, and then nearly frying us with microwave pulse pistols. First of those we’d seen, too. “But the guys we fought on the road didn’t look like the agents from Wolf Trap. No way it was them. Not unless they had some serious cosmetic surgery.”

  “Or something,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, Captain, that they may have some technology for changing their appearances. The fingerprints Bunny lifted from their vehicle are a perfect match, however. No question at all.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Those Closers in Wolf Trap worked for M3. They killed the staff at Shelton’s lab as a way of hiding his involvement.”

  “Can you be certain of that?” asked Doc. “Meaning, can you be certain the two men you encountered at Shelton’s lab were the ones who actually committed those murders?”

  “The staff were killed by MPP blasts.”

  “Yes, but you later determined that Howard Shelton and the M3 scientists had developed their own versions of microwave guns. Just as Bill Hu developed his versions. Can you say for sure that the guns the agents had in the loading bay were the same kind? Exactly the same? Can you say for sure that the weapons they fired at you on the road in Maryland were the same as Shelton’s?”

  I looked at her, then at Ghost, who had nothing to say but contrived to cock an eyebrow.

  Into the silence, Doc said, “From the reports, it was three days from the time the Closers met you and your guys in Virginia to when they abducted the president. Plenty of time to have evaluated your efficiency, maybe checked you out—however they do that sort of thing—and opted to orchestrate things so that it would be handed off to the organization you worked for. After all, the DMS is designed to handle the weird stuff, and it doesn’t get weirder than that.”

  “Doc,” I said, “that’s a hell of a jump.”

  “It’s an intuitive leap,” she corrected, “and one I wouldn’t have made if it hadn’t been for those fingerprints.”

  “Yeah, okay, but we gave the Black Book back. We shut down M3. All that’s over with.”

  “Tell that to the Closers, hoss. Makes me wonder what they would ha
ve said had you had an actual conversation with them instead of setting an ambush.”

  “Seemed reasonable at the time.”

  “No doubt,” she said with a sigh, clearly not agreeing. “And that brings me to the second thing. As soon as we started getting reliable intel on the explosions around D.C. I had Nikki begin running random pattern searches to look for any common element. I admit it was reaching, but that’s why we do pattern searches. If you don’t look, you can’t find.”

  “And did you find anything?”

  Doc grinned at me like a happy cat in a canary store. In the short time I’ve known her I’ve learned that she does that when she has something juicy and nasty. She grooves on the grimmer aspects of the job.

  “Although there was a lot of violence throughout the city, both aggressive to others and self-inflicted, in areas where bombs went off there was a greater concentration.”

  “Which tells us what? That the bombs drove people crazy?”

  “No,” she said. “The aberrant behavior stopped after the explosions. What I think is that whatever caused that behavior is tied to the bombs. I think those bombs were there to hide evidence. Maybe destroy whatever was affecting behavior.”

  I turned off the video and took the controls back from Calpurnia. I needed to feel a measure of control. The drugs were helping my back, but the pain was still there.

  “What kind of device could do that?” I asked.

  “I have no dadgum idea, sweet cheeks,” she said. “I want you to find whatever they were blowing up. Maybe some of them malfunctioned—it was an earthquake, after all—and if so, I want you or Sam to make me a happy girl and deliver one to me with a big red bow on it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and ended the call.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CITADEL OF SALAH ED-DIN

  SEVEN KILOMETERS EAST OF AL-HAFFAH, SYRIA

  ONE DAY AGO

  The team of women moved like ghosts through the shadows, and everywhere they looked they saw death, destruction, and mystery.

  The citadel had stood for over a thousand years, and had endured battles, sieges, takeovers, and atrocities. Yet somehow it had endured, even if partially ruined. Now it was a completely dead thing. The earthquake that rocked the region did what no armies ever managed to do. The walls were heaps of shattered stone, exposing framing timbers like broken bones. Tiles and windows were smashed to fragments as fine as powder.

  Qadira, the team leader, stood by the stump of a massive pillar and shone a flashlight down into an opening that was too regular to have been caused by the vagaries of a shivering landscape. She fanned the dust away and saw the top of a stair, and below that another. Cracked and treacherous, like everything else, but still there.

  “Over here,” Qadira called in a language that only a few hundred people on Earth knew, a language used exclusively by them. By the Mothers of the Fallen, and by their Arklight field teams. “The signal came from here. We must be quick. The United Nations peacekeepers will be here soon to evaluate the disaster.”

  The other women picked their way through the rubble. The youngest of them, Adina, a girl of seventeen but whose face was pinched and scarred and stern, said, “Violin can’t be alive down there.”

  “Hush, Adina,” scolded Qadira, then she paused and touched the girl’s arm. “If she is dead, then she’s dead. We can at least bring her body back to her mother. Either way, Lilith wants to know what happened.”

  The team leader stepped down into darkness and the others followed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CORNER OF WISCONSIN AVENUE NW AND SOUTH STREET

  NW WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sam Imura rolled to a stop, killed his lights and sirens, and studied the area.

  Wisconsin Avenue was not as badly damaged as some of the streets he’d fought through. The asphalt was cracked but drivable, and there were no cars or buildings on fire. There was damage, though.

  The entire face of a building—a restaurant by the look of it—had broken free and collapsed across the pavement. Chunks of brick, shattered neon tubing, and shards of decorative metal molding lay like a blanket over the hood of one car—a five-year-old Honda Accord—and the trunk of the vehicle in front of it, a late-model Ford Focus. The weight of the impact had blown out the front tires of the second car and crumpled the dark blue skin.

  People wandered like ghosts, most of them dusted with ash or smudged with smoke. Nearly all of them were bleeding from cuts, large or small; many had burns. Every face Sam saw was filled with that special awareness of having lived through something they would never and could never forget. It was all still too new, too real, to be a shared experience, and there was no crisis work to snap them out of it. No one was caught beneath wreckage or needing critical first aid. Everyone was caught in a kind of homogenized level of injury—not serious, but of a kind that would leave scars. These people were not only going to remember this moment forever, they would be deeply marked by it. Sam understood that. He had seen it in the eyes of his grandfather and great-aunt, both of whom had lived in a village near enough to Hiroshima to have gotten flash-burned, but not so close that the radiation killed them. Instead they became lifelong witnesses to an event that was always intensely real and intensely current in their minds.

  Now D.C. was going to be that for hundreds of thousands of people. It would be something different to the families of those whose loved ones had died. Different still for people who had been caught up in the strange fits of madness and now had to reconcile their actions with what they knew of themselves. For all of them, the world had changed, and there was no reset button to make it normal again. Ask anyone who’d been in New York on 9/11. Sam knew a lot of those people, too.

  He took a breath and tapped his earbud. “I’m here.”

  “Any sign of a device?” asked the voice of Doc Holliday.

  “Not yet.” To the vehicle, Sam said, “Calpurnia, deploy drones. Scan the area. I want a full-picture three-D.”

  Four hummingbird-sized drones shot from concealed compartments and rose into the air, circling the scene. Only one person noticed, but the tiny machines looked like birds, and even if they didn’t, they were not the strangest part of the day.

  A ghostly image overlaid the inside of Sam’s windshield, turning everything he saw into a kind of blueprint, complete with small identifier tags. Every car was labeled for make, model, and year; and when license plates were visible the name and basic information for the driver was given. Stores and buildings were named. Even people on the street were quickly identified through facial recognition. Sam, who was impressed by very little, nodded in appreciation.

  “Search for chemical signatures,” ordered Sam.

  “Searching,” Calpurnia assured him. “Detecting no traces of particulate matter consistent with nitroglycerin, pentaerythritol tetranitrate, trinitrotoluene, or triacetone triperoxide.”

  “What about Semtex? Scan for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”

  “No evidence of Semtex or its components. Fuel oil is present, but consistent with admixtures in fuel tanks. No trace of cyclomethylene trinitramine.”

  Sam frowned. “Expand scan. Search for timing devices, clocks, anything.”

  A series of yellow circles popped up on the display. “Forty-eight cell phones have been tagged,” Calpurnia said. “Forty-four on the persons of people within the scanning area. Three are on the street.”

  These items were highlighted, but the drones sent pictures of three phones lying where they’d fallen from the hands or pockets of fleeing people.

  “Where’s the last one?” asked Sam, then he stiffened. “Wait. I think I have it.”

  A motorcycle came weaving through the debris and stopped near the Ford Focus. The bike was a new black Kawasaki Z650 with green trim, ridden by a driver dressed head to toe in black leather. His helmet had no logo and a smoked visor. The driver leaned over and steadied the bike on one foot and drew a cell from his pocket. He pointed it at th
e Focus and appeared to be pressing a button as if he was aiming a TV remote.

  “Calpurnia…?”

  “The driver of the motorcycle is sending a call to a number registered to a Virgin Mobile ZTE Temple X 4G LTE disposable phone.”

  “A burner,” said Sam. “Hack it.”

  “The call has not been answered.”

  The driver looked around and did not see Sam behind his dark security windows. He punched in a number and pointed it at the Ford Focus again. Nothing appeared to happen.

  “The other cell phone is in the trunk of that car,” said Calpurnia. “It is operational but appears to be damaged. I pinged it to verify that it is the number the driver is attempting to reach, but the phone is not ringing. Ronin,” she continued, using Sam’s combat call sign, “I am detecting other electronic equipment inside the trunk but cannot verify what kind.”

  “This is our guy,” decided Sam. He touched his earbud. “Do I have backup?”

  “No backup is available at this time, Ronin,” said Doc.

  “Fuck it.”

  He tapped the dashboard display to clear it and hit another key to slide out the tray of handguns. Then he opened the door of his car, stood up from the driver’s seat, leaned his arm across the hood, and pointed his pistol at the man on the bike.

  “Federal agent,” he yelled. “Drop the cell phone and put both of your hands on top of your head. Do it now or I will shoot.”

  The motorcycle driver froze, clearly startled.

  But not startled enough. He dropped the cell phone, but with a smooth move that was as fast as it was elegant, his hand flashed toward the unzipped vee of his leather jacket and closed around a holstered pistol. It was so fast that it might have worked on nearly anyone. A regular street cop for sure, and maybe even some top-quality federal agents or marshals.

  Sam was faster than that.

  He fired three shots, catching the man in each shoulder and the middle of the thigh. Most professionals would have fired center mass to guarantee a kill; but Sam wanted the man alive, and the former sniper was a superb shot with any firearm. The man cried out in a foreign language and collapsed. And it should have ended there, except for a bit of bad luck. The cell phone landed facedown on a pile of debris and one sharp stone hit a key. Not the one to resend the deactivation code. The other one. The wrong one.