There was never any attempt at a relationship. Not for us. We were still at war. When our time was over, we—by mutual consent—walked away and went back to the killing.
But, as much as it lifted my heart to see her alive and well and smoking hot, she was not supposed to be here. This was a covert op. It wasn’t an invitational.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”
“Go for Rock,” said the deep voice of my second-in-command, First Sergeant Top Sims.
“Why am I talking to you on the radio instead of face to face?” I demanded in a tone that could burn the paint off an oil drum. “Why, instead, am I down here with a civilian?”
I leaned on the word to piss off Violin.
“Bastard,” she hissed. She stuck her tongue out at me, so I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Wasn’t my call.” Top’s voice was very calm and controlled. “Word came down from the big man. Said to afford every courtesy.”
The big man was my boss, Mr. Church, founder and head of the DMS.
Balls.
I knew that I was being unfair in my assessment that Violin was a civilian. She was hardly that. Violin was a fellow soldier, but not a fellow American. She was born in captivity to a mother who—along with many others—was forced breeding stock in the world’s oldest and ugliest Eugenics program. A group called the Red Order had been using captive women for centuries to ensure that they had enough male members of a weird genetic subgroup called the Upierczi. These were as close to actual monsters as Mother Nature was likely to cook up. They were offshoots of human evolution, unusually strong and fast, and hideous in appearance. They were the reason the myth of the vampire came into our collective consciousness. No, these guys didn’t turn into bats, sparkle, or sleep in coffins. They weren’t supernatural in any way. But they weren’t my idea of natural, either, even if they were technically human.
They were called the Red Knights.
The Red Order used them as assassins in a campaign of carefully orchestrated religious hate crimes going back to the Crusades.
Violin’s mother, Lilith, had escaped from the breeding pits. I don’t know that whole story, but whatever happened left a psychic scar on the Red Knights. They feared Lilith the way people used to fear vampires. She was their boogeyman. When Lilith escaped, she took other women with her—and their children. Violin among them. As soon as they were free, they formed a militant group called Arklight, and they began hunting down the members of the Red Order and their Upierczi assassins.
I met Violin while I was hunting down some rogue nukes in Iran. There was an interesting learning curve before we began trusting each other, but when we realized that we shared the same enemies and a similar agenda, we went into battle together. That one was a doozy. Lots of good people died, including some of my guys from Echo Team. Men who’d walked through fire with me time and again. Arklight lost some heroes—well, heroines, too. And when it was all over we’d formed a rather sketchy alliance. Nothing official, of course, because Arklight did not respect national borders in its relentless search for the surviving members of the Red Order and the Red Knights. The official U.S. stance was that Arklight was a terrorist organization.
My boss, Mr. Church, was working to change that, and so far no one from Arklight had ever spent a night inside an American jail cell. After what they’d been through, Church and I were going to make sure no one put those women into any kind of cage ever again.
All of which explains her, but didn’t explain why we were being Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a bioweapons lab.
“Talk,” I told her.
“Let me get to the computer first.”
I gestured around. “We’re in an empty chamber, honey. Unless I’m missing something….”
She produced a spray can from a Batman utility belt. Shook the can. Sprayed it.
The gas inside was white and almost opaque. There wasn’t enough particulate matter in the discharge to trigger even the most sensitive motion sensor, but the opacity was usually great for revealing electric eyes and laser tripwires.
However, that wasn’t Violin’s purpose. She turned in a slow circle and emptied at least half the can into the chamber. The sluggish air from the shaft above us stirred the gas. All I could see were black stone walls. No hidden doors, no side tunnels, no electrical outlets.
Then I saw how wrong I was.
The gas expanded and diffused outward until it caressed the walls. Except that it didn’t.
It rolled out to touch most of the walls. But to my left, the gas swirled differently. The tendrils of gas seemed to rebound from empty air and eddy, as if confused. Violin ran a laser pointer over that section of wall.
The red beam ran straight for a few inches and then bulged outward at the same point where the gas had rebounded. Violin moved the beam slowly, and I could see that there was something there. The gas knew it, the laser light knew it, but my eyes didn’t.
“What the hell?” I murmured.
She grinned, enjoying my confusion. “Holograph,” she said.
And then I understood. The security system computer access panel was indeed bolted to the wall, but it was masked by a high-density holograph that made it look like empty wall. Without the gas and the laser, I would never have found it.
“Guess that answers the question as to whether this place is crooked,” I said. “Can’t work up any reason a legit lab would have that kind of security.”
“I never trust pharmaceutical companies,” she said with asperity.
I tended to agree. Sure, a lot of them are probably on the up and up, but in my trade I kept running into mad scientists cooking up bioweapons. Some of the most dangerous terrorists I’ve tackled have been pharmaceutical moguls or pharmacologists of one stripe or another. I’d have to watch that tendency toward negative bias, though. Subjectivity is a dangerous thing.
Violin adjusted the wires so that she tilted in the direction of the invisible box. It was slow work, and it took her some time to find the cover plate lock, disable it with a little electronic doohickey—that looked a whole lot like the doohickeys that only the DMS is supposed to have—and finally locate the USB port.
“Router?” she said, holding out a hand.
I sighed and handed it over.
Violin plugged it in, making sure not to touch any part of the panel with her hands. It probably had passive security, like contact and trembler switches. The router’s cable slid easily into the port and a tiny green light flashed on.
“Bug,” I said, “we’re—”
“Got it,” he said. “Acquiring the security system now. Hm, nice stuff. Too bad MindReader is going to bitch-slap it.” He actually sang that last part in a mocking falsetto.
I work with some pretty strange people.
We hung there and waited. The white gas swirled around us, obscuring the wires so that it looked like we were flying.
“So,” I said, “want to tell me what you’re doing here?”
Her mouth kept smiling but her eyes held no trace of humor. “Hunting vampires.”
My mouth went dry and my nuts tried to crawl up inside of my body. “Red Knights? You’re saying they’re here?”
“No,” she said. “But somebody who works here is helping them, and I—”
Bug cut in. “Okay, Cowboy…we own that place.”
“Copy that.”
I swung my feet down toward the floor and hit the cable release on the wires. A moment later Violin dropped silently beside me. The wires swayed around us like web threads from a giant spider.
The hologram projectors that hid the computer access panel clicked off, revealing a flat gray box the size of a hardback book. The router no longer looked like it was floating in midair. But when the holograms vanished, we discovered that there had been a second bit of misdirection. Right below us, set into the precise center of the concrete floor, was a steel hatch. It was very well made and was designed such that it was perfectly flush with the concrete. It
had a touchscreen keypad that was currently displaying: “RESTRICTED ACCESS.”
“So far the intel is good,” I murmured. “We were told that this air vent was the way in. Looks like it is.”
Violin and I knelt on either side of it. I removed a flat gadget about the size of a pack of playing cards and pressed it onto the hatch. It connected to MindReader and began cycling through the hundreds of millions of permutations of the locking combination.
While we waited, I turned to Violin. “Okay, spill.”
She spilled.
Arklight spies had gotten wind of a hitherto unknown cell of Red Knights operating out of the Philly suburbs. It was unclear if the cell was preparing to strike Philly or if they were simply using the city as a base for recruiting and training. The Knights preferred cities that had elaborate subways and tunnel systems.
“Why Blue Bell?” I asked. “The subway doesn’t come all the way out here.”
She shook her head. “They have a contact here at Marquis Pharmaceuticals. A developmental chemist named Ryerson.”
“And what’s Ryerson doing for the Red Knights?”
“I don’t know. But my mother did a thorough background check on him. Ken Ryerson is forty-one, unmarried, no family, no apparent politics, has not voted in any recent elections, no police record.”
I waited. She wouldn’t give me that much if there wasn’t more. Violin liked a little drama.
“Mr. Ryerson gambles.”
“Ah,” I said.
That was it. She laid it out for me. Ryerson had been a three-times-a-year gambler when Atlantic City was the only place you could lay down a legal bet unless you flew to Nevada. Then the Native Americans opened casinos in the Poconos, and that made him a once-a-month man. A few years ago they turned the racetrack in Bensalem into a casino, twenty minutes away on the Turnpike. Ryerson started going once a week, then three times a week. He wasn’t a card player. From the way Violin described him, it was doubtful the man knew a straight flush from a toilet flush. Ryerson needed a more constant and predictable fix. He played nickel slots. A lot of nickel slots. Started getting later and later on his utility bills and car payments. The third time he was late on the rent, he had to move to a smaller apartment in a less attractive suburb. He gave up the leased car and bought a hooptie. Ate a lot of cheap takeout food. Didn’t stop plugging nickels into the one-armed bandit, though.
As she talked I thought about what it must be like to be Ryerson. What specific bit of damage makes a man tear off tiny chunks of his life and feed them into a machine that everyone knows is specifically designed to give a debit on any long-term investment? Old ladies play the slots out of boredom and because they socialize with the other pensioners. The uninformed play them because the casino hype yells about the million dollar jackpots. Guys like Ryerson have to know that there’s no happy ending because even a jackpot on the nickel slots is small change, comparatively speaking. This man was either a loser or he was sick, and he almost certainly knew it.
The first digit pinged on the combination.
“So what changed?” I asked, knowing that there had to be a second act to this sad story.
“He bought a new car,” she said. “He cleared all his credit card debt. And he booked a vacation in Las Vegas.”
“I’m guessing that he didn’t win big at the slots.”
“His largest jackpot to date is forty-eight dollars and fifty cents. However over the last month, he’s made five cash deposits between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred dollars.”
“Ah,” I said. Banks are required to report deposits over a certain dollar amount. “Why doesn’t he just take out an ad in the paper saying he’s been bought?”
“He might as well have,” she agreed.
“Bug,” I said, “take a look at this guy Ryerson. See if he looks good as our informant. Hit me with anything that comes up.”
“Copy that.”
The second number pinged. Four to go.
“Why were you looking at him in the first place?” I asked Violin.
She shook her head. “We were looking at this facility. At everyone here. It’s been on our list for years because two of the shareholders have business ties to known members of the Red Order. Strong ties. One of those shareholders also owns points in BioDynamics out of South Africa.”
I nodded. I knew that from our own intel. Without the BioDynamics connection, our people might not have taken the nameless informant very seriously. But you can’t ignore that kind of red flag.
If you don’t remember the story, it was four years ago. BioDynamics made a name for itself by developing technologies that allowed groups like Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization to collect and process biological samples while still in the field. That was a godsend because it allowed the doctors to identify diseases and classify disease mutations without the time lag of sending samples to labs in Europe or America. Lives were saved every day because of that technology.
Here’s the kicker, though: the biosampling equipment was also collecting a great deal of information about virulent strains of exotic diseases and storing it in concealed clean compartments within the machine housing. When BioDynamics techs went into the field every few months to collect the machines and replace them with fresh units, all of those samples were taken back to the main lab in Modderfontein, in the Gauteng province of South Africa. There, the diseases samples were processed, studied, weaponized, mass-produced, and sold to groups who intended to distribute them in the poorest black towns throughout the country. The strains they tried to release were designed to resist all known antibiotics. The goal? Win back South Africa for a small ultraextremist group of whites by simply eradicating the majority of the blacks. Simple, direct, utterly ruthless, and very effective. Similar distribution plans were in the works for Somalia and other countries with a high percentage of black Muslims.
It would have been effective if not for a joint action taken by the DMS, Barrier—the UK counterpart of the DMS—and a hotshot Recces team from the South African Special Forces Brigade. The facility was seized, and the staff arrested and put on trial for a list of crimes that was so long that the world court judges asked the prosecution to summarize. The courts had to make an example of the perpetrators because to not do so would be to ignite the fuse on a global race war.
It didn’t surprise me that Red Order members were involved. They pretty much invented the concept of hate crimes back in the thirteenth century. Freaks.
The third and fourth digits pinged at the same time.
I went through my habitual self pat-down, quickly and lightly touching the handle of the Beretta 92F snugged into a nylon shoulder rig, the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the inside of one pocket, the BAMS unit hanging from my belt.
The fifth light pinged.
I glanced at Violin as I pulled my hazmat hood into place.
“You’re underdressed for this party.”
“I hope not.”
“Hey, I’m serious, Violin,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know what I’m hunting down here.”
“Protocols for developing a weaponized viral hemorrhagic fever. Arklight has been aware for some time of plans to sell a developed protocol along with viable samples of a crude prototype to several terrorist groups, including the Knights.”
I stared at her. “You think you’re down here to steal some computer files?”
“Sure.”
“You do realize that MindReader is currently hacked into that system and whatever they have, we now have.”
“You have MindReader, Joseph,” she said, “but Arklight doesn’t. And the Oracle system Mr. Church gave us is a poor substitute.”
“Horse shit. Oracle is the second-best hacking system in the world. Besides, if you’d have brought this to us, Church would have Bug on this.”
Violin’s eyes shifted away, and I suddenly knew why she hadn’t reached out.
“Your mother didn’t want to ask Church for a favor,”
I said.
“No,” she said, and sighed.
There is apparently a very long and complicated history between Mr. Church and Lilith. It is, however, a tightly closed subject. Also…given her history, I would imagine that it would gall Lilith to ask for help from any man. I did not blame her one bit.
On the other hand, that lack of communication came with its own problems.
“Listen to me,” I said, taking her by the arms, “I didn’t come down here to hack a file any more than I’m here to intercept a sample. We have an informant who said that this thing is already fully developed and that they are mass-producing it for an established client.”
That news hit her pretty damn hard. The way you’d expect it to hit someone. Her eyes flared and she recoiled from the hatch as if it was a coiled rattlesnake.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure? No. We have an anonymous voice on the phone. The call was made from a disposable phone that was purchased at a strip mall near here.”
She considered this, then shook her head. “All of our intel indicates that they are months away from a stable bioweapon. Besides, this is a development facility, Joseph. The viruses will be in sealed containers in secured vaults. It’s not going to be floating around.”
“Under ideal circumstances, sure, but what if they realize that they’re being infiltrated? Accidents happen. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen a lot of monsters, big and small, get off the leash.”
Violin chewed her lip. It was an unconscious action with no hint of flirtation in it, but I still found it incredibly sexy.
Yes, even crouching in an airshaft over a lab that made weaponized Ebola, I’m still a horn dog. Not a news flash.
The last number pinged.
“You can’t go in,” I said.
“There’s no way I’m staying out here.”
“I can bring Top and Bunny down here and you can stay topside and watch our backs.”
“Not a chance, Joseph.”
“It’s fucking dangerous in there, Violin.”
“Well,” she said with a coquettish smile, “then I’ll have to be very careful, won’t I?”
Joe Ledger Page 16
