Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  “It’s what we do,” murmured Lydia.

  “She’s right,” said Bunny. “You know that line from Shakespeare? The one about there being more things in heaven and earth?”

  “Sure,” said Bad Wolf. “Hamlet.”

  “Pretty much our job description.”

  It chilled me to hear that line used now when I’d thought it less than two hours ago.

  I said, “Look, guys, here’s the bottom line. These walkers—they’re not supernatural, nothing like that. This is a weaponized disease that turns innocent people into mindless killers. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t curable. Anyone who is infected is a time bomb because he or she can and will try to spread it. If we don’t stop it, those movies—The Crazies, 28 Days Later—they won’t be horror flicks, they’ll be historical documents. That is not a joke and it’s not an exaggeration. Tell me you hear and understand.”

  The horror in their eyes was total now. But they said, “Hooah.”

  I pulled my balaclava into place. “Then let’s go to work. Ronin, you have our backs. Hellboy, you’re on point. Nobody gets out of visual range. Be sharp and be professional.”

  We moved on. It did not help my peace of mind knowing that Euclid Avenue Station was the end of the line. I hope we didn’t cut ourselves on that kind of irony.

  Interlude Fourteen

  Four Seasons Hotel

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Two and a Half Years Ago

  “I think they know.”

  The vice president propped himself up on one elbow and placed his other hand on the naked back of Artemisia Bliss. She sat on the edge of the bed, a wineglass cradled between her palms, head bowed, black hair falling to hide her face.

  “Who knows?” he asked.

  “Aunt Sallie,” she said. “Church.”

  Collins snorted. “I doubt it. If they had a clue you’d be out on your ass.”

  She shook her head. “I might be out on my ass. I’m not sure.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I tried to do a remote login to my workstation from my laptop and it said that the system was down for repairs.”

  “So?”

  “The system is never down for repairs. There are too many redundancies.”

  He grunted and stroked her back, running his fingers slowly up and down the knobs of her backbone, circling them one at a time as he went.

  “What could they know?” he asked.

  Bliss pushed her hair out of her face and took a sip of wine. “It’s possible they may have discovered that I copied Hugo Vox’s records.”

  “Vox? Not Paris Jakoby?”

  “I deleted all traces of what I took from the Jakobys. No, Aunt Sallie has been retracing all the stuff we took from Terror Town. And I saw that there were special eyes-only requests for any files I accessed.”

  “I thought that Haruspex thing could hide from MindReader.”

  “It can … but this was right after I started using it. I’ve upgraded it a lot since then.”

  He stopped caressing her and sat up. “You erased your tracks, though, right? Haruspex is just like MindReader, right? It doesn’t leave a footprint. That’s what you told me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  She shifted to look at him. “I know everything Pangaea could do, and I think I know everything MindReader can do…”

  “But—?”

  “But what if I’m wrong? What if MindReader can somehow track erasures, even ones made by software that does what it does?”

  “Is that even possible?”

  She was silent for a long time.

  “Bliss?”

  “Maybe.”

  Collins launched himself off the bed and walked across the room, then wheeled on her. She could feel his anger. It filled the whole room.

  “And you’re fucking telling me this now?”

  “I—”

  “You do know that Deacon wants my head on a pole,” he growled. “After the NSA dropped the ball in shutting them down last year, Deacon all but tore me a new asshole. Came right up to the edge of threatening my fucking life, you know. He came right out and told me that he had his eye on me, that if he discovered any impropriety he would bury me. His words. Bury me—and knowing him I don’t think that was a metaphor.”

  Bliss shook her head. “He can’t touch you.”

  “He can if he gets inside Haruspex and sees what we’re doing. Jesus fuck, Bliss. There’s enough there to have me arrested and jailed.”

  “No…”

  “Yes there is and you damn well know it.”

  “I … I’ll wipe the files. Demagnetize the drives and wipe everything,” she insisted.

  He came back and squatted down in front of her. “Can you dupe everything and hide it?”

  “Hide it?”

  “Yes. Make a master copy and put it somewhere safe. Somewhere MindReader can’t find it. No Internet connection.”

  “Sure, I can copy it to a master drive and—”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I don’t know, Bill. A day…?”

  “Do it. I’ll have one of my guys come by your place. We need that data. All of Vox’s notes, the security game modules, the pass-code interpreter … we need all of it. If we lose it then we lose any chance of doing some real good.”

  Bliss said nothing but she gave him a token nod. Bill Collins had a different worldview than she had. He was, in his own way, a patriot. She was genuinely apolitical. He wanted the presidency so he could rebuild America into a form that he believed would approximate the way the country would have been had politicians not spent two centuries wandering in the opposite direction of what the Founding Fathers intended. Bliss wanted to publish file patents, and revise the current definition of what “filthy rich” meant. So far, though, both paths led through a landscape she thought of as “deliberately chaotic.” Funny how fanatical idealism and rampant greed sometimes look the same from a distance.

  “I can make the copies,” she said, “and I can blank out my own laptop. But what happens if they hit me with a warrant? Think about it, Bill, if they really think I hacked and copied those files, a warrant would be a no-brainer.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, damn it.”

  “So what do I do? I could get arrested.”

  That was a big ugly truth and it hung in the air, leering at them. Collins refilled their wineglasses and they sat next to each other, naked and slumped, thinking it through.

  Collins said, “We have to stop using Haruspex, that’s for certain. At least for now.”

  “I know.”

  “When I send my guy to get your drive, let him have that, too. I have places to hide it where no one can find it. Believe me.”

  She gave a weak little laugh. “I’ll feel naked without it.”

  He touched her face, then trailed his fingertips down over her chin, her throat, her breast.

  “Bill—?” she asked, her voice small.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “What will happen to me if they really arrest me?”

  He didn’t answer. Not at first. Long moments drifted past them like burning embers.

  “We’ll think of something,” he said. It sounded weak.

  “If they find out,” she said, her voice even smaller, “we’ll never see each other again.”

  Collins put a smile on his face. Bliss wanted to believe that it was real.

  “Sure we will,” he said. “We’ll find a way.”

  And then he took her wineglass and set it on the night table next to his. Then he took her in his arms and they fell together onto the tangled sheets.

  When Bliss arrived at the Hangar the following morning, Aunt Sallie and Gus Dietrich stood beside her workstation. Their eyes were ice cold. Harsh. Angry and unforgiving.

  Before Bliss could say a word, Dietrich tossed a pair of handcuffs onto her desk.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Fulton Street Line


  Near Euclid Avenue Station

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 2:04 p.m.

  We moved through darkness that had never seen sunlight or felt rain. Our footsteps sounded strangely muffled. With the lights off we used night-vision goggles, which painted everything in eerie shades of green and gray.

  For the first hundred yards we saw nothing. Not a rat, not even a cockroach.

  The original members of Echo each carried a BAMS unit clipped onto their shoulder straps. Ivan kept checking his, murmuring the comforting “Green” every few dozen yards.

  We ran around puddles and long steel rails, guns in hand. Ivan was on point, leading the way with a combat shotgun fitted with a heavy drum magazine. Bunny had an identical shotgun. Lydia had our backs. I knew the newbies knew their jobs, but they didn’t yet know ours, and I needed someone I could trust without supervision.

  Suddenly, Ivan stopped with his fist raised, the universal signal to stop.

  We stopped.

  He unclenched his fist and pointed to something attached to a pillar. A small high-tech camera with a burning red eye.

  I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Bug.”

  “With you, Cowboy.”

  “What do you know about this?” I tilted my helmet cam toward the device on the wall.

  “It’s not regulation,” he said.

  I snapped my fingers. “Green Giant.”

  Bunny moved past me, pulling a small scanner from a pocket. He reached up and swept it past the camera. “It’s not a bomb,” he said, then pressed a button to switch the nature of the scanner. “Not sending a signal. Whatever it is, it’s not doing anything.”

  “Getting the scanner feed,” said Bug. “Wow, that’s a nifty toy. Mucho expensive and it should not be there. Since company policy is that we don’t like coincidences, my best guess is that it was put there by our bad guys.”

  “Is it safe to touch?” I asked, stepping up beside Bunny.

  “Yeah. It’s just a camera.”

  I reached up and punched it with the side of my fist. Very damn hard. “Fuck it.”

  We moved on. There were more cameras. Bunny scanned each one, and once the bomb detector gave a green light, he smashed them.

  “That’s like eight thousand dollars a pop,” said Bug.

  “Not anymore,” said Bunny.

  We kept going, running through darkness as quickly and quietly as we could.

  Then we crossed a line.

  It wasn’t something you could define, nor was it an actual line on the ground. But within the space of a few steps the world suddenly changed. It no longer felt like we were running through an empty tunnel toward something. No, all at once it felt like were in something.

  Something ugly.

  Something wrong.

  That fast, Ivan’s pace slowed from a careful run to a wary walk.

  I could see it in his body language, in the tightening of his shoulders, the hunch of his back as if following a primitive instinct to shield his vitals against an unseen claw.

  We slowed, too.

  And then Ivan held up a fist again.

  We froze. Nobody was stupid enough to ask what was wrong or if Ivan actually saw anything. Even the newbies knew better than that. In that polluted darkness we stood as still as statues in some lost and forgotten tomb of ancient warriors.

  Then Bunny raised his BAMS unit and showed me the display. The warning light was no longer green. Now it was a faint orange. There was something in the air and I didn’t need the digital display to tell me what it was.

  Seif-al-din.

  Although the pathogen was a serum transfer, traces of it could be carried in moist air. Not enough to infect on inhalation but enough to scare the living shit out of me.

  Something ahead of us moved. It was a soft step. Faint, dragging. Around the bend in the tunnel. Coming our way.

  I signaled the others to hold their positions as I crept forward to stand with Ivan. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the tracks, guns up and out. The sound grew louder. A shuffling step, a scrape of rubber soles on the wet concrete. Footsteps without emphasis. Listless. The way a dazed and injured person walks.

  The figure moved around the bend in the tunnel and into our line of sight. Behind me I heard Noah whisper something.

  “Jeez, it’s one of our boys. Good … maybe they have everything contained.”

  The figure was dressed in full SWAT gear. Limb pads and body armor, a helmet, weapons. Sergeant’s stripes.

  No mask, though.

  That was gone.

  Beside me Ivan gagged. “Oh … balls…”

  Behind me I heard a sharp intake of breath. Maybe Noah, maybe one of the others. The SWAT sergeant moved toward us without haste. Limping, dragging one foot. He stopped for just a moment, head coming up, eyes seeming to flare with green light because of the night-vision distortion. But I knew that the SWAT man could not see us. And it wasn’t because the tunnel was so dark.

  You need eyes to see.

  He had none.

  No eyes.

  No nose.

  No lips.

  All we could see was raw and ragged ends of muscle and chipped edges of white bone.

  There was no way this person could still be alive. His throat had been savaged, his clothes were drenched with blood that was as black as oil in the green night-vision light. I thought that it might somehow be easier for me because I’d seen this before. The walking dead, the violation and perversion of the body that was the hallmark of the seif-al-din pathogen. I’d fought these walkers before. Fought them with guns and knives and my own hands. I believed that having defeated this horror before that I was somehow immune to the soul-tearing sight of it again. That the reality of it would be less real to someone like me.

  That’s hubris. That’s the kind of thinking that only a fool can manage and I hated myself for my blindness and my weakness.

  The man—the wreck of what had been a man—opened its jaws and from between rows of broken teeth he uttered a moan of such aching and indescribable hunger that it made me want to weep. Or scream.

  Instead, I pointed my gun at his ruined face and pulled the trigger.

  God help us all.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Grand Hyatt Hotel

  109 East Forty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 2:06 p.m.

  He checked into the hotel under the name Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. It was a nice choice, Monk thought. Goldsmith had co-created the very first interactive electronic game—a missile simulator—back in 1947. One of Mother Night’s little jokes.

  Monk took the elevator to the thirteenth floor and entered his room. A gift basket stood on the table by the window. Wine, fruit, cheese, chocolate. And at the bottom a plastic pill case filled with the right goodies, and also keycards for three other rooms at the hotel. Those rooms were booked for Estle Ray Mann, Goldsmith’s partner for the missile game; Alan Turing, inventor of the first computer chess game, also in 1947; and his colleague Dietrich Prinz.

  Each room had an identical suitcase and bag of golf clubs. In each golf bag was a twin—or a sister, as Monk viewed it—of his darling Olga. The suitcases also contained handguns and explosives. Better to be prepared for all eventualities.

  He unwrapped a chocolate bar, bit a piece, and sat down to wait for Mother Night’s call.

  “Hope it won’t be too long,” he said to Olga’s sister.

  Interlude Fifteen

  United States District Court

  Southern District of New York

  500 Pearl Street

  New York, New York

  Two Years Ago

  Her lawyers told her to wear a pretty suit and show a little leg, maybe a hint of cleavage. Bliss spent a lot of time on her makeup, and when she stepped into the courtroom she was sure that no one even noticed the handcuffs. They were looking at the prettiest woman in the room, and that was a tactic. It was, the lawyer assu
red her, the last card they had left to play.

  The judge had spent a lot of time during the trial looking at Artemisia Bliss’s legs. The judge was a well-known hound dog and had a useful track record in light sentencing for pretty women.

  She smiled at him—not too overt a flirtation, of course—as she sat down at the defense table. Her lawyers—both attractive women—sat on either side of her. They, too, were showing a little skin. Skirts and tailored jackets. Probably push-up bras, too. Anything that would work.

  Bliss was well aware that nothing much else had worked so far.

  Eighteen separate charges had been brought against her. Her lawyers had gotten four of them tossed on technicalities and the jury had decided in her favor on six more. That left eight in place, and the jury didn’t let her slide on those. Standing there, listening to the foreman delivering eight guilty verdicts, was the toughest thing Bliss had ever done. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. Before that day she’d been certain that it wasn’t possible to feel more completely vulnerable and afraid than she already had. Through the booking phase, that awful first night in jail, the arraignment before a grand jury, the months in federal custody, the endless nights in jail where predators abounded and her looks and breeding were no protection at all. Feeling abandoned by Bill Collins, who could not risk even the most tenuous connection to her. The trial itself, burning away days, then weeks, and finally two months of her life.

  And the endless deliberation. Four and a half days of it.

  Guilty of cybercrimes.

  Guilty of wire fraud.

  Guilty of unauthorized access to protected computers. Notably those belonging to federal agencies.

  Guilty.

  Guilty.

  Guilty.

  Including the big one. Guilty of human rights violations.

  That was not actually true. Not as such. But she had copied all of the information in the computer systems of the Jakoby twins and their father, Cyrus. The elder Jakoby had devised a number of pathogens designed to target different ethnic groups. Her theft of that science painted her with the same brush. No amount of argument from her lawyers could convince a jury that any innocent person would want the formulae for ethnic genocide for any reason other than to use or resell it.