Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  He wondered if he she knew he was cheating on her.

  Probably. Probably felt relieved, too. The more ass he got elsewhere, the less often she had to act like a sexual being.

  Anger began to creep into his mood and he forced it down, letting memories of last night wash it out of him. He turned and leaned on the window frame to watch the woman sleep. Silky black hair spilled around her like fine lace. The curve of one shoulder and one breast, a nipple that was surprisingly dark against the soft golden tone of her skin. He was glad she didn’t dye her nipples like many Asian women did in the belief that it would be more appealing to white men. Collins thought she was perfect the way God made her. Appealing to each one of his five senses.

  Not bad for the ego, either.

  Though he had to wonder if he was a bigger ego hit for her than she was for him. Vice president of the United States. Even if she couldn’t tell anyone, she knew she was banging the guy who was one heartbeat away from being the most powerful man in the world. A man who had, in fact, been the president twice. Once when the president had bypass surgery, and then last year, during the abduction thing.

  Collins had tasted that power. He had become addicted to it, and he did not apologize to himself for that addiction. It would have been a greater lie to tell himself that he didn’t need or want that power again.

  Goddamn right he did.

  Wanted it, and would have it.

  The anger crept back into his veins, and this time it took hold. It changed the color of the sunshine to an ugly brightness, and transformed the birdsong to irritating noise.

  Collins felt his mouth curl into a snarl.

  He pushed himself away from the windowsill and crossed to the bed, caught the edge of the sheet and whipped it away. The noise and the sudden air shift snapped the woman out of her sleep, and for a moment she recoiled, cringing, her hands instinctively moving to cover her cupcake breasts and smudge of ink-black pubic hair. Then she saw him and her sleepy confusion changed into something different. A smile that was as sly and old as all the corruption in the world ignited fires in those eyes.

  “Well,” she said slyly, moving her hands and rolling onto her back, “good morning to you, too. You look like you’re ready to take a bite out of the day.”

  He grinned down at her, leered at her. Wanted her. “So do you. And it’s a big damn day for you, sweetie.”

  “I know. I have to get back to Atlanta,” she said. A shadow passed through her eyes when she said that.

  “You okay?” asked Collins. “Having second thoughts?”

  The woman took a half beat before answering. “No. It’s just that once this match is lit, this is it. There’s no turning back.”

  “I know.”

  “And we might not see each other again.”

  He gave her his best smile. “Sure we will.”

  “When?”

  “When the game is reset.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not a reset. You never get the terminology right.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Whatever you gamers call this stuff.”

  “It’s a new game. Brand new.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “And everything will be different afterward. A new America … a new world.”

  “But we won’t share it,” she said.

  “We will.”

  “No—”

  “We will,” he insisted. “It’ll just take some time. You’re going to be busy getting the hell out of Dodge and I’ll be busy remaking this country into what it should have been if we’d stayed the course. So, call it a new game, call it what you like, honey. When all the fires are out, we’ll find a way to get together. Maybe even out in public.”

  “You’re a very charming liar.”

  “I mean it.”

  “What, you’ll dump your wife and trot me out on your arm? The world’s most hunted terrorist, and you think that’ll make for good arm candy?”

  “You’re not the world’s most hunted terrorist yet.”

  “Day’s young.”

  He laughed. “You’re an evil bitch, you know that?”

  The woman reached up and caught the end of his bathrobe belt, gave it a sharp pull, and licked her lips as the robe parted.

  She reached between the flaps of the robe and wrapped her fingers around his hardness, and with that as a handle, drew him toward her. She was not gentle about it. It hurt. But that was okay. Pain was another kind of drug. Her breasts and thighs and buttocks were still red and bruised from last night’s slaps and bites. Collins shoved her back against the mattress, used his knee to roughly part her legs, and with a low feral growl thrust into her with only a little guidance from her strong hands.

  He did not take her. They took each other, both of them thrusting against the other with brutality and need and a shared viciousness that was an incredible aphrodisiac for each of them.

  Outside, the sun set fire to the morning and the sound of the birds in the trees changed in Collins’s ears to the shrill screams of fear.

  And that, too, was a turn-on.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

  Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

  Park Slope, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 6:03 a.m.

  The girl who came into the Surf Shop was one of those twenty-somethings who could actually have been anywhere from seventeen to thirty. She had a porcelain complexion and gleaming black hair in a Betty Page cut. She wore red sneakers, black leggings, and a baggy black T-shirt that had a picture of an androgynous Asian with a shock of white hair and hugely oversized sword. The words DEVIL MAY CRY were hand-painted below the image. A loose leather belt was clasped around the shirt, hanging low on one hip. The girl wore oversized sunglasses and never took them off the entire time she was in the café.

  She stood in line with the other early birds, earphones in, texting on an Android, talking to no one and acknowledging no one.

  The sleepy counter man, Caleb Sykes, had seen her or a thousand girls like her every day. Most of them were underpaid secretaries who still couldn’t afford a smartphone or their own laptop and who wanted to check their e-mail before heading into the city to start their day. It wasn’t as common to see them this early on a Sunday, but really Caleb didn’t give much of a shit.

  When it was her turn to pay, Caleb took money for a Red Bull and handed over a log-in card for one of the computers bolted to tables scattered around the room. The girl paid cash, didn’t tip, didn’t say anything else except when she’d ordered the drink. Caleb’s only thought when he saw her was that her hair looked like a wig. Just that. When she left the counter, Caleb forgot her completely. Fifteen minutes later, when the counter rush slowed and Caleb looked around the room, the girl was gone. He was not consciously aware of her not being there. She would have slipped entirely from his mind had it been an ordinary day.

  However, the day was not ordinary and, as it turned out, Caleb would come to remember that young woman for the rest of his life. She would visit him in his dreams, though when that happened there were no eyes behind the dark lenses of the shades, but actual fire. The heat of that fire became so intense that it would chase him from sleep into a trembling wakefulness, and he would sit up in bed, drenched with sweat, listening to the desperate pounding of his heart.

  At the moment, as he looked around the cyber café, he did not see her and did not think about her.

  Until he had no choice.

  At precisely 6:30 that morning her face appeared on every screen in the café. Even on the personal laptops of customers who came in for the wi-fi access. Caleb was bent over the counter running a debit card, heard the chorus of grunts and questions.

  He looked up and saw the face on the monitors.

  A girl with dark glasses and an anime T-shirt. Caleb thought he recognized the Betty Page haircut, but her presence on the screen did not immediately connect with a customer who had been in the store.

  The girl smiled placid
ly but said nothing. It wasn’t a static image, because at one point she sipped from a can of Red Bull.

  “Yo!” growled one customer as he pounded at his keyboard in a vain attempt to break the connection. “What the hell?”

  “Hold on, guys,” said Caleb loud enough for everyone to hear. “Must be a server error. I apologize for the delay, let me see what I can do.”

  Caleb pulled his laptop closer and tapped some keys, checking the router status, running a diagnostic, doing the routine things that should have fixed this in seconds. The image remained in place. The Korean girl took another sip of Red Bull.

  “Okay,” Caleb announced, “I’m going to have to reboot the router. Everybody should be back online in a couple of seconds.”

  “I’m not paying to sit here and stare at some Japanese chick,” groused the man who’d yelled earlier.

  She’s Korean, jackass, thought Caleb, but he didn’t see any value in saying that out loud. “Gimme a sec.”

  He unplugged the router from cable and power sources.

  Every screen in the café flickered to black for one second, and then the Korean girl was back.

  Caleb stared at the dozen-plus copies of her face scattered throughout the room. He looked at his own laptop. With the plugs pulled all that he should be seeing was a no-connection screen.

  The Korean girl smiled.

  Caleb said, “What?”

  He tried several other things. The image of the girl blipped and for a moment Caleb thought he’d solved it, but when the girl sipped the Red Bull in exactly the same way as before he realized that this was a video loop. That was weird. If the computers weren’t connected to the Net and yet were showing the girl, then that meant there was some kind of video file planted on each machine. Even computers belonging to customers who came in after that girl left the store. Was that possible?

  Yeah. And if it was true it could be real trouble for the café.

  That girl could have uploaded a Trojan horse to all of the rental computers here at the Surf Shop, and anyone logging on through the router was probably receiving it when they agreed to the terms on the café’s homepage.

  Shit.

  The customers were mad now. Several were badgering him about getting things fixed. The loudmouth was saying that they should all get their money back.

  Caleb quickly restarted his MacBook Pro. He entered his password and for a moment he saw his usual desktop display.

  And then the image of the Korean girl reappeared.

  “What the hell are you doing over there?” demanded the loud customer.

  Caleb shook his head. “I—I’m having a little trouble with … Um. Hold on, let me try something else.”

  He plugged the router in and waited as it ran through its opening diagnostic.

  “Hey,” said a woman seated by the window. She held up her iPhone. “It’s not just us. It’s on the news.”

  Everyone scrambled for their cells. Caleb subscribed to several RSS news feeds, and as soon as he unlocked the screen he saw a string of news alerts from USAToday, New York Times, Yahoo News, and even the BBC news. Caleb fished under the counter for a TV remote and aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, which had been flashing advertisements from a CD-ROM. He channeled over to CNN.

  And there she was. The patrons got up from their laptops and began drifting toward the TV. Below the Korean girl’s face was a title credit:

  CYBERHACKER MYSTERY WOMAN

  “Turn up the volume,” said a woman, one of the café’s regulars.

  “… will auto-delete in a few seconds,” the Korean girl was saying. “Good luck trying to figure out how we did this. And even if you do, so what? Big deal. Give yourself a cookie.”

  This wasn’t the video loop still playing out on their laptops. This was a live feed on national news. And … the girl looked different. The hair and sunglasses were identical, but she no longer looked Korean. Caleb thought that she looked older. A young woman instead of an older teenage girl. And maybe—Chinese? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that something was different.

  “What the hell is this?” demanded the loudmouth.

  All Caleb could do was shake his head.

  “Okay, monkeys,” continued the woman on the screen, “pay attention, ’cause there are three things you need to know and Mother Night is here to tell you.”

  Caleb mouthed the words, Mother Night.

  “First, if we do not all rise up against globalization then we do not deserve to be free of the shackles welded around our necks by groups like the World Trade Organization, the Group of Eight, the World Economic Forum, and others like them. We are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and take the streets back. Occupy Wall Street failed because there were too many do-nothing pussies. That wasn’t anarchy. The pigs in the system haven’t seen anarchy. Not yet.” She licked her lips in a mock-sexy way, as if tasting something forbidden but delicious. “But it’s coming. The only action is direct action.”

  “Jeee-zus,” said the loudmouth. “What kind of Communist bullshit is this?”

  “It’s not communism,” said a college kid seated near him. “It’s anarchy.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what it—”

  “Shhh,” hissed several people. Caleb raised the volume.

  “Second,” said the woman who called herself Mother Night, “because complacency is not only a symptom of a corrupt society, it’s also a cry for help, I am going to shake things up. Will it take the sacrifice of one in three hundred to force the pigs in power to let true freedom ring?”

  Mother Night paused to smile. She had perfect white teeth, but smiling transformed her from a pretty girl to something else, something unlovely. The effect was transformative in a chilling way. It was a sardonic, skeletal, mocking grin, a leer that was hungry and ugly.

  The screen display below the image changed to read: WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

  “Third, Mother Night wants to tell all of her children, everyone within the sound of my voice, all of the sleeping dragons waiting to rise—now is the time. Step out of the shadows. Be seen, be heard. Let your glow cast enough light even for the blind to see. ’Cause remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

  She gave another of those terrible, leering grins, then every screen went dark. TV, laptops, smartphones.

  For five seconds.

  And then, one by one, the screens returned to Yahoo, Safari, Gmail, and websites. They returned to normal. The TV suddenly showed the confused faces of the unnerved reporters.

  Everything looked normal.

  But Caleb—and everyone else at the café or who’d watched the broadcast—knew that normal was no longer a part of this day.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Across America

  Sunday, August 31, 6:32 a.m.

  Teaneck, New Jersey

  Digger Hohlman sat in the rear corner of a Dunkin Donuts, head bent low, earphones screwed in, his Styrofoam cup of coffee nearly forgotten as he watched the screen. He was entranced.

  Mother Night’s face had suddenly filled his laptop screen. It was like magic. One minute he was watching “Awakening,” a video from the deathcore band Molotov Solution, and then she was there. It made Digger’s hands clench into fists and he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

  After all these months, after encoded e-mails, after packages left for him in coin lockers, after the slow and insanely careful process to bring him into the Family, now here was Mother Night. On his laptop. Speaking to him.

  On some level he knew that this was a general message going out to the whole world, something she said would kick open the doors and light the fires. However, Digger also knew that it was a clarion call to the many members of the Family.

  Like him.

  Born in the dust and promised so much more. Mother Night had told him that she would set a beacon ablaze in his skin. For Digger, who had never shone for a single moment in his life, he would shine becau
se of the grace of Mother Night.

  He bent closer to the laptop, so close his breath steamed on the screen, and he turned the volume all the way up so that her murmured words shouted in his ears.

  “Okay, monkeys,” began Mother Night, “pay attention, ’cause there are three things you need to know and Mother Night is here to tell you.”

  Digger smiled. A rare thing for him. As he listened he thought about the things he had in his backpack. The chemicals. The detonators. The blades.

  All the time she spoke, he mouthed the sacred words.

  Burn to shine.

  Burn to shine.

  Pasco, Washington

  Julia Smith and her girlfriend, Rage, sat huddled together in a booth at Jerry’s Java on North Twentieth Street. They were sharing an omelet with extra onions and peppers. They were dropping down, mile by mile, from their first pipe of the day.

  Normally the descent to earth would be painful and sad, and the ground would be covered in broken glass. They didn’t have enough cash to buy more rock, so that high was the only one they were going to have that day unless they could do some blow jobs for truckers passing through. Rage still had her teeth, and in the right light, with a push-up bra and short shorts, she could usually score three or four ten-dollar tricks. Julia knew that her own looks were too far gone. Hand jobs in the dark for five a rub was about her best.

  Luckily, Jerry’s had a three-dollar omelet with a bottomless cup of coffee.

  They were watching the news on the tablet Mother Night had sent them. The wi-fi was free at the coffeehouse, and the tablet had a good battery as well as a splitter, so they could both plug in their earphones at the same time.

  When the news feed vanished to be replaced by Mother Night, Julia sought Rage’s hand under the table. They sat, fingers tightly entwined, watching the world change. This was what they had been promised was coming. This was the way out of the shadows for both of them.

  Los Angeles, California

  Tayshon watched the broadcast on his laptop, which he’d snuck into the bathroom. His mother’s boyfriend, Isaiah, didn’t know he had the computer and would have taken it away from him if he’d found out. Isaiah would then beat the living shit out of Tayshon, demanding to know where he got the laptop, why he had it, why he didn’t say anything about it, and on and on. It wasn’t like Isaiah could use a computer. He was an illiterate fool who thought he was a thug, but he was really just a wife beater, a child beater, and a drunk. That bastard loved using a belt, and he didn’t mind if the buckle was what made contact. He made Tayshon kneel on grains of rice. Made him stand barefoot on screws and nuts. Sometimes he’d use his fists, rings and all. Trying to beat his own life’s defeats and disappointments out of his girlfriend and her sixteen-year-old son. Tayshon had scars on his face and body that he’d carry to the grave because of Isaiah.