Ohan’s eyes went wide and his bladder released, splashing on the knife.
The old woman nodded. “Yes, you have heard of us. Good. Then you will know what we will do if you do not tell us everything we want to know.”
“You … you’ll … kill me anyway?”
“Everyone dies, Ohan. The question is whether you want to die screaming as a eunuch or quickly as a man? The choice is entirely yours. However, you’ll tell us either way. Everyone does.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
OVER PENNSYLVANIA AIRSPACE
I stood in the ORB, arms folded across my chest. Nikki’s eyes glittered with all the things she wanted to tell me.
“Okay,” I said, “hit me.”
An image flashed on that showed a bloody crime scene, and I recognized it from the news. This one was uncensored, with nothing pixilated. There were body parts all over and everything was awash in blood. That wasn’t what Nikki wanted me to see, though. On the wall above the couch were two words written in what I had no doubt was blood.
Deep Silence
“Mr. Howell wasn’t the first person to use that phrase. Or, at least something like it,” she said. “‘Suicide’ and ‘suicide note,’ along with a lot of variations, were among the keywords we added to the general pattern search. And since you had the idea that God Machines might be somehow connected, I accessed the Gateway incident reports prior to you, um … blowing the place up.”
Doc snorted. I ignored them both.
“Not everyone who committed suicide left a note, and not all of the notes had anything to do with what Howell wrote,” said Nikki, “but there were a few that talked about the ‘silence’ or the ‘quiet’ or the ‘big nothing.’ There were five out of nineteen suicides. The likelihood of that, even for a base in Antarctica, is too much.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then I added those phrases to my search and started looking for suicide notes left in areas where there has been some kind of seismic activity. I went back ten years, but we didn’t start getting hits until the earthquake in Valparaiso two years ago. The big one that knocked down the hotels, remember?”
“Sure. It was horrible.”
“In the weeks leading up to the earthquake, there was a sixteen percent jump in suicides, and a lot of them were people who had not sought therapy or treatment for depression. Neither, by the way, had the Speaker of the House. In Valparaiso there were suicide notes of different kinds. One of the victims wrote: ‘I can’t hear my own thoughts.’ I think that would qualify as a ‘deep silence,’ don’t you think?”
“Sure as shootin’ sounds like it to me,” agreed Doc. “You’re even smarter than you are pretty.”
Through her second round of furious blushing, Nikki said, “And we’re looking into police incident reports and crime scene files for hundreds of other suicides in areas where there have been quakes. All over the world, too, with translations of words and phrases slowing us down just a little. Not enough to keep us from seeing a pattern.”
“Deep silence,” I murmured. “When we were being attacked outside of the Capitol Building people were saying stuff about silence. One woman kept asking why she couldn’t hear her own head. Someone else, a reporter I think, kept screaming and asking if people could hear him. There were others, too.”
“Yes,” said Nikki. “Whatever this is, however it works, this is a symptom.”
“You got any answers, Doc?” I asked.
“Without having a God Machine to tinker with,” she said, “no. Best I can do is make horseback guesses, but that’s all they’d be. I need you to get one of those doohickeys for me, Cowboy.”
“Deep silence,” I said again. “This is great, Nikki. Where does this leave us, though? Are we thinking that Valen and his New Soviet study group are causing earthquakes all over the world? Why? Is there a pattern to where those quakes took place?”
“I’ve been putting that together, but I’m nowhere near done yet. We’ve been looking at anything related to seismic activity, with a bias toward unusual or unexpected activity, and we got a bunch of stuff, including one in January in Vrancea in Romania. Remember that one? Did a load of damage there and in Moldova, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.”
“Yeah, but I read that they had a history of earthquakes there.”
“Sure, sure,” said Doc, “but the timing and some other stuff about it were kind of weird. Even though the epicenter was in Romania, the fault line running straight into Ukraine was suddenly much wider and did more damage than in any of the previous quakes in 1940, 1977, 1986, and 1990. A lot more.”
“Where’s the timing weirdness in that?”
Doc winked. She is the only person I know who can pull off a wink in this kind of circumstance and really make it work. “Two weeks before the quake, the Ukrainians moved a significant number of tanks onto a base there. A refitting base where those tanks were being upgraded with new targeting systems purchased from the United States. The quake destroyed most of that base, and many of the tanks were badly damaged. Estimates are that it set the Ukraine resistance to Russian invasion back by six months.”
“Hunh,” I grunted.
“There’s more, Joe,” said Nikki. “There’s been a slew of small earthquakes around the world over the last four years. I looked at all of them and isolated eleven that were in geologically stable areas. And another six that were in areas near a dormant volcano that suddenly went active. And in each of those places there was an uptick in suicides. Anywhere from three to nineteen percent above normal.”
“Oh,” I said. “Shit. Are any of those other sites strategically useful to Russia? Or to a new Soviet Union?”
“Not really,” conceded Nikki. “Actually, most of them aren’t strategically useful to anyone for anything.”
“Unless they are,” said Doc, and I nodded, seeing where she was going with that.
“Testing sites for the earthquake tech?” I suggested. She blew me a kiss.
The pilot’s voice filled the air to tell me we were beginning our descent to the airfield.
“Okay,” I said, “so that still doesn’t tell me why I’m flying to Moscow. This is State Department stuff. I’m not sanctioned for ops on foreign soil without some kind of approval. Even black ops have to be approved by someone.”
“You think this president is going to give you his blessing to carry out a mission to Russia that’s tied to election rigging?”
“That earthquake nearly killed him,” I said. “I think the honeymoon’s over. I mean, as wake-up calls go, this is one for the history books.”
“Thirteen hundred and eighty-four dead,” said Nikki.
The numbers hurt. They hurt real damn bad.
“Moscow,” I said to Nikki.
“Okay,” she said, and I could see that her eyes were wet, “one of Valen’s pen pals is a Yuri Rolgavitch. His family owns a big import-export business that deals mostly with electronics. Radios, speakers, headphones. Like that. Yuri recently took over the company when his father had to retire because of diabetes. He sometimes uses his company e-mail server for private correspondence.”
“That’s thin.”
“No, it gets better,” she said quickly. “We picked apart Yuri Rolgavitch’s e-mails. Not just the ones to Valen, but some other stuff that he sent out as encrypted. There were e-mails to e-mail accounts here in the States, and in a couple of them I found several coded references to something that is scaring the living crap out of me. I don’t have full context because it was only a couple of oblique references to ‘zemletryaseniye.’ That’s Russian for—”
“Earthquake,” I said quietly. “Holy rat shit.”
The floor seemed to tilt under me, and I didn’t think it was because the jet was landing.
“That e-mail is dated eight months ago,” said Nikki. “And there’s more. There are other mentions of zemletryaseniye, and the corresponding dates are close to other earthquakes, like the big one in Valparaiso two years ago. But the timing’s weird. Ev
ery reference predates the actual events. We tried to go deeper, but Bug thinks that their office mainframes aren’t connected to the Internet. We can’t get anything more than that. But … well, what do you think?”
I took a deep breath. “I think I’d like to go to Moscow. Better call Top and Bunny and have them tell the rest of Echo Team that we’re going hunting.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Church and Brick sat on opposite sides of a borrowed desk, both of them making calls, taking calls, and responding to intelligence reports via their laptops. On the Scroll, various DMS heads popped up to provide more data.
Information was flooding in.
“This is starting to make some sense,” said Brick. “But it feels like we’re a little farther back behind the eight ball than usual. How’d these bastards get this far without us catching a whiff?”
“Because of betrayals and loose lips, there are too many people in too many places who know about the DMS and what we can do. They know about MindReader and its potential, and they plan accordingly.”
Brick sighed and took a sip of Diet Dr Pepper. “Really makes me long for the old days when we were an actual secret secret organization.”
It was meant as a joke, but Brick saw the look in Church’s eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“Let’s just say that we’re very much on the same page.”
CHAPTER NINETY
ROLGAVITCH TECHNOLOGIES
KOTELNICHESKAYA EMBANKMENT
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
Friendship is a fickle and fragile ol’ thing. Especially when we’re talking the friendship between nations.
Case in point …
The relationship between Russia and the United States has always been a little weird. Maybe more than a little, actually. At the beginning of World War II we were not pals because Russia was part of the grouchy little Kaffeeklatsch that was the Axis powers. Then when Hitler stepped on his own dick and invaded Russia, suddenly we were chums standing shoulder to shoulder to save the world from evil. I remember history-book photos of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill looking like frat brothers at the Yalta Conference. Smiles all around. The enemy of my enemy. That sort of thing. Political exigencies can often be embarrassing to students of history, or, say, truth.
At the end of the war, General George Patton wanted to roll his tanks into Russia because he was positive they were going to be the next big threat. He was talked out of it, or maybe assassinated. Opinions differ. There was some discussion about dropping an atomic bomb on the Kremlin. I’m no political philosopher, so I don’t know if that would have been a good move or a bad one. One view is that it would have stopped the spread of Communism right there, prevented the Cold War, and the phrase “mutually assured destruction” would not have entered the global lexicon. Maybe that would have ensured that no one ever developed a competing nuclear program. On the other hand, there would have been hundreds of thousands of innocent dead and we would have taken the third step on the pathway to establishing an American Empire with a proven track record for using atomic bombs as policy statements. That’s scary, no matter from which direction it’s viewed.
For a lot of years, the Cold War was all the evidence anyone needed that Russia and the U.S. of A were not BFFs. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union became an interesting historical oddity that was not even much of a part of my life growing up. There was trade, cultural exchanges, and even some reasonable reductions in nuclear and bioweapons development. There was also an explosion of crime and corruption—the Russian Mafiya was largely composed of former military people who brought their battlefield coldness along with dangerous skill sets.
And then along came Vladimir Putin, who, I’m reasonably certain, has a Joseph Stalin plushy toy that he sleeps with. With Putin came a kind of neo-Soviet state, complete with reinvigorated secret police, assassinations, suppression of the media, and all the fun stuff. With Putin, we also got a new kind of weapon of mass destruction in the form of cyber hacking. The last American and French elections pretty much proved that there was a new kind of warfare and, for a while, Putin’s geek squad had the biggest bombs.
Now we have this Novyy Sovetskiy thing, which I’d been naïve enough to think was a splinter group that lacked the support or resources to do more than raise hopes among those old duffers nostalgic for the good old days of the Party.
That was before Valen Oruraka and Ari Kostas wrecked Washington, D.C., and killed thirteen hundred people. I had a brand-new take on the New Soviet now. They were real, they were dangerous, and I was going to dismantle them in very ugly ways.
Which explains why I was sitting in the office of a Russian shipping mogul, dressed all in black, armed to the teeth, and kind of pissed off. On the upside, they had a coffee maker in the office and some really superb Turkish blend. I was on my third cup, and it had so much caffeine that my eyes were twitching and I was starting to hear colors. Ghost had spent some time licking his balls, then when they were clean and shiny he went to sleep. I sat for a while behind a big oak desk and looked at a bunch of framed photos of the manager’s wife and kids. Nice-looking wife; adorable kids.
When the door opened and a man came in, I said, “Well, it’s about goddamn time.”
I said it in Russian.
The man stopped dead in his tracks, one hand on the knob, the other clutching the key he’d just taken from the lock. His heavy topcoat was damp with melting snow. He stared at me. Gaped, really. After all, I was in his locked office, which means I’d gotten through three levels of pretty sophisticated security without alerting the team of guards downstairs. And I was dressed all in black.
He said, “Tchyo za ga `lima—?”
Basically, What the fuck.
I pointed a pistol at him and held a finger to my lips. “Shhhh.”
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
ROLGAVITCH TECHNOLOGIES
KOTELNICHESKAYA EMBANKMENT
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
The Russian guy shushed. As one would, all things considered.
Actually, he pretty much turned to a statue. Eyes bugged, mouth open in a silent O, skin becoming a lovely shade of gray-green. The barrel of my gun was pointing at his crotch, so there’s that. I prefer to be eloquent and articulate whenever possible. Or, maybe he turned that color because a big white shepherd rose from behind a guest chair, his body covered in Kevlar and lamplight gleaming off his six titanium teeth, as he stood snarling in ghastly silence at him. That’ll do it, too.
Ghost is a nice dog, some of the time. When he’s home. When he’s catching Frisbees on the beach. When Junie and I are in bed on a Sunday morning reading the paper and watching TV. The rest of the time, like when we’re on foreign soil and bad things are very likely on the dance card … eh, not so much. The metal teeth were replacements for the six he’d lost fighting genetically enhanced killers in Iran. Ghost likes showing those teeth almost as much as he likes using them.
“Yuri Rolgavitch,” I said quietly, and he flinched at my use of his name. Continuing to speak in Russian, I said, “Step into the room. Drop the key right there. Go on, you won’t need it.”
Rolgavitch did. I could actually see beads of sweat burst from his pores and run down his cheeks.
“Place your hands on your head, lace your fingers. Good. Turn around and don’t move. If you do anything stupid I’m going to let my dog play with you. He’ll enjoy it a lot more than you will.”
Rolgavitch did as he was told, though he kept cutting glances at my gun, trying to figure out what it was. Good luck. I carried a snubby little Snellig A-220 gas dart pistol. The company that manufactured it no longer exists because we shut them down and stole all their toys. They were making weapons for bad people and now all of those people are dead and we have the toys. The A-220 fires little gelatin darts filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine, along with a powerful hallucinatory compound.
We call it “horsey.” One shot and you drop like a rock and dream of purple jitterbugging penguins. When you wake up you’ll have only a vague recollection that something untoward happened but will remember only two things about the last hour or so: jack and shit. You’ll also be prone to explosive diarrhea for the rest of the day, but I’m pretty sure that was designed into it for pure entertainment purposes. We have some deeply troubled people working for the D of MS.
“Ghost,” I said, “watch.”
He watched very closely.
I pressed the barrel of the pistol against the base of Rolgavitch’s spine and held it there while I patted him down with my free hand. Took a sweet little MP-443 Grach automatic from a belt clip and an equally spiffy Samozaryadny Malogabaritny compact pistol from an ankle holster. I tossed both onto the guest chair. I pocketed his cell phone and looked at his wallet to confirm that this was indeed Yuri Rolgavitch. Imagine my embarrassment if he hadn’t been.
“Now, tovarisch,” I said, “let’s have us a chat. If I get the answers I want, then I’ll zip-cuff your wrists and ankles and won’t hurt a hair on your head. Your people will find you sitting at your desk, there will be evidence of a common burglary that will corroborate any story you want to tell. You’ll never see me again. If I don’t get what I want, and if you make me do anything to aggravate my achy back muscles, then it’s going to get weird around here. I don’t mean frat party weird, either. More like psycho beach party weird.”
Rolgavitch was late thirties but fat and unfit, with a thick mustache and the largest nose I’ve ever seen on a human face. Made him look like a frightened puffin. He was not going to try anything. We both knew that. Ghost knew it, too, and I could read the disappointment in his brown doggy eyes.
“Who … who are you?” he stammered.
“C’mon, Yuri,” I said agreeably, “you know that’s not the conversation we’re going to have. What’s important here is that I know who you are.”
Deep Silence Page 31
