There were clothes for us to change into, and we variously became Con Ed, water department, subway techs, or cops. Not a whiff of anything federal. I was a transit cop, which is okay because I used to be a cop and could talk the talk if it came to it.
My cell buzzed and I looked at it warily, expecting something bad.
Getting it.
The message read:
ROLL OVER AND HAVE A CIGARETTE, HONEY,
BECAUSE YOU’VE JUST BEEN FUCKED.
I showed it to Top and Bunny.
“Shit’s not funny anymore,” said Bunny. The strain of the shooting and now the knowledge that we were being labeled as monsters had etched deep lines into his tanned face.
I said nothing.
As we all changed there was a noticeable lack of the usual rough humor and trash talk. Lydia didn’t make jokes about the way Ivan looked in boxers. Bunny didn’t flirt with Lydia. Sam didn’t flirt with the new gal, Montana. They all looked at me, though. Hard eyes from hard people who were as deeply afraid and confused as I was. My own snarky sense of humor seemed to have shriveled up and crawled off to hide under a rock. Usually, I could joke my way out of most tense situations. A defensive reaction, sure, but a useful one because at least I kept myself amused. Now all I had inside my head were growls and questions.
The lead tech from the Hangar was a guy named Rasheen who’d once run with Broadway Team before he got hit with almost enough bullets to kill him. Now he ran logistics for the New York office. We were old friends and we shook hands in the troubled darkness.
“Must have been some shit back there,” he said. “You holding it together?”
“For the moment.” I said, accepting a police utility belt. “Give me some good news, man.”
“They don’t have your names on the news. That’s something.”
I grunted.
“But otherwise the goddamn Net’s gone ass-wild on this shit.”
“Tiny midget balls,” grumbled Ivan. Not one of his better choices but not bad in the moment.
Rasheen handed me a set of car keys. “The big man wants you at the Hangar a.s.a.p. Can’t risk a military helo or regular DMS transport. They got every news helicopter in North America up there, and you wouldn’t believe the crowds we’re drawing. You’ll have to go out in ones and twos. Get in your vehicles and get out of here nice and slow. Don’t draw attention.”
“What about my dog?” I asked.
“Big Fuzz is already at the Hangar.”
“What about us?” asked Noah Fallon. He and the other newbies, Montana Parker and Duncan MacDougall, stood together in a kind of defensive cluster. “Are we supposed to go to the Hangar or what?”
The logistics man turned to them. “That depends,” he said. “Y’all are new, right? Just signed on?”
They nodded.
“But you signed on? You rolled out with Captain Ledger?”
A pause, then another nod.
“Then what do you think you’re supposed to do?”
The rest of us gave them a few moments to work it out. It was Montana who answered. “I guess we get our asses back to the Hangar and circle the wagons.”
“Hooah,” said Rasheen.
The rest of Echo Team said it, too.
With the goggles and masks off I could see their faces. After several days of training with them I could tell you everything about their service histories and combat capabilities, but I had no idea who they were.
Still strangers.
And yet not so, because we had just shared an event together that connected us in ways no one else could possibly share. This massacre and the media firestorm that it had ignited were ours. We were the family that lived on that plot of land in that dark country.
It was an odd connection, like passengers on a crashed airliner working diligently side-by-side to pull total strangers out of the debris. Or folks who might otherwise pass on the street without even a nod to the existence or humanity of the other suddenly striving together to save the injured after a bomb goes off.
I hoped I would get to know them, to have them become fully rounded people in my mind instead of ciphers, though part of me resisted that thought. Some cops and soldiers never form close connections, even to someone they’ve gone into battle with or kicked in the door with at a gangbangers’ clubhouse. They despise the attachment, the connection to a human personality, because of all the potential for grief, for loss, for personal hurt. They think it’s better to keep their own emotional plugs pulled than to risk sticking their fingers into the fan blades. Maybe that’s a better way, a safe and sane form of professional detachment.
But I’ve never played it safe and no one has ever accused me of being sane.
Chapter Sixty-two
On the Road
Brooklyn, New York
Sunday, August 31, 2:45 p.m.
I took Montana Parker with me. I drove; she road shotgun. She sat so far from me that she was crammed against the passenger door.
Traffic was almost totally snarled. While we inched along I tapped my earbud and surprised myself by getting Church. I gave him my location and ETA.
“Where do we stand right now?” I asked. “How much shit is hitting the fan?”
“The intensity varies but we haven’t caught any breaks today,” he said. “Circe estimates that the video is having exactly the effect Mother Night intended. The world press is galvanized and public outcry hasn’t been this intense since the planes hit the towers. Every reporter with an audience has begun a personal witch hunt, and that is being reflected within the government. Not merely party polarization, but even within the president’s party a lot of people are distancing themselves from him in case he is complicit in some illegal act.”
“He isn’t.”
“No, but considering how many levels of secrecy are involved, including those which both charter and protect the DMS, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for the president to come clean to the American people. Virtually anything he could say would either endanger or substantially weaken Homeland. It could potentially cripple our fight against global terrorism. It’s not unlikely that the DMS will lose its charter and be shut down. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective attack on our nation’s apparatus for counter- and antiterrorism.”
“Is that Mother Night’s endgame?” I asked him.
“Difficult to say. Not everything she’s done appears to serve that goal, but we don’t yet know the scope of her plan. We are rich in suppositions but wanting in facts.”
“Meaning that we have nothing.”
“Deliberate and well-crafted obfuscation is clearly part of her agenda.”
“Meaning,” I repeated, “that we have nothing.”
“As you say.”
“Is she a she or is she a them?”
“I asked Dr. Sanchez to speculate on that earlier today. It’s his considered opinion that Mother Night is an individual who is using stand-ins for certain high-risk activities. He says it fits with a certain kind of megalomaniacal personality subtype.”
“Sounds like Rudy.”
“However, it’s clear that she fronts a large organization,” added Church.
“Of what?” I asked. “Is she the poster child for National Anarchy Day?”
“Remains to be seen,” said Church. “Dr. Sanchez has some doubts as to whether this actually is anarchy, and I agree with him.”
“Why?”
“He’ll discuss that with you when you get here,” said Church.
“Are we anywhere on the text messages?”
“No, although it’s interesting that only you and Colonel Riggs are receiving them. Circe and Dr. Sanchez are working on ways to attach specific meaning to that.”
“We’re the cool kids in class.”
“You are of a kind,” said Church, but he didn’t explain. “Bug is working on some things and believes he might be able to crack the block on the tracebacks. In the meantime we have a few other things to cover first.”
/> “Hit me.”
I was aware that Montana was watching me like a hawk. She had an earbud in but she wasn’t on the same channel as my conversation with Church; she had only my side of things. Fine for now.
Church said, “Vice President Collins is among those who have distanced himself from the president since the video went live.”
“What a guy. I’d hate to be next to him on a sinking ship. Pretty sure he wouldn’t want to share the lifeboat.”
“It’s unlikely,” conceded Church. “He hasn’t gone public with anything, but he made some challenging remarks in the Oval Office in front of the senior staff members. Word has already begun leaking.”
“So much for top secret.”
Church made a small sound that might have been a laugh. “The Speaker of the House and several other key members of Congress have begun demanding information about the team shown in that video. Some of them unofficially know about the DMS but they are reluctant to reveal that knowledge until they sort out how it might reflect on them. That buys us a little time.”
“Which is all well and good, but how close are we to knowing anything at all about Mother Night?”
“I wish I could say that we were close to putting her in the crosshairs, but we are no closer now than we were when she first surfaced in April.”
“That’s not making me feel good. How much more has to blow up in our face before we can put a name at the top of our hate list?”
“We are working on it, Captain. If there’s a method of discovery you know about that you feel we’ve missed, I am all ears.”
“Yeah, sorry. Just feeling a bit frustrated.”
“Is that all you’re feeling?” he asked, and I nearly snapped at him before I realized what he was asking. I took a moment then said, “It was a bad scene down there.”
“I imagine it was.”
With most people a comment like that is lip service. Not with Church. I don’t know much about his history, but from what I’ve been able to put together he’s waded through more blood and fire than I’ve ever imagined.
“You had three new members on the team today,” he said, and for a moment I had an itchy feeling like he could see me and Montana in that car. But I dismissed it, sure that Rasheen or someone else told him who drove out with whom. In either case he knew that I wasn’t alone and was feeding me a cue. So I took it.
“Echo Team performed superbly,” I said, but I made sure I wasn’t looking at Montana as I did so. “Everyone did their jobs.”
“Any casualties?”
I knew Church well enough to know that he wasn’t asking about KIA or physical injuries.
“Unknown but I don’t think so,” I said. “A lot will depend on how things play out today. I would hate to see anyone’s name surface in either a news report or in congressional testimony.”
“You have my word on that, Captain,” he said. It was a hell of a promise to make, but then again, I’d like to see the son of a bitch who could force or bully information out of Church. On his weakest days Church scares the cat piss out of me.
The line went dead.
The traffic moved at a glacial pace. Montana kept staring at me. It felt like a couple of lasers burning on the side of my face. I let that slide for a few blocks.
Finally I said, “It’ll be okay.”
“Really?” It came out sharp and sarcastic. In any other circumstances it would have been insubordinate, but let’s face it, we were miles past that kind of policy.
“No,” I said, “actually I don’t know how this is going to play out.”
She stared at me, appalled. “Then why did you say that?”
“Had to say something.”
She turned away so I wouldn’t see her mouth the word fuck. Or maybe it was fucker. Could have been that.
“It’s okay if you want to call me an asshole.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, then added, “Sir.”
I had to grin. “Lose the ‘sir’ bullshit. We don’t use it in the DMS and I don’t like it.”
Montana said nothing.
“The first time I met Mr. Church,” I said, coming at her from left field, “he put me in a room with one of those walkers. No gun, no knife, and no clue what I was facing. He gave me a pair of handcuffs and told me to go in and cuff a prisoner.”
I paid attention to the traffic but I could feel her eyes on me. “He didn’t tell you what it was?”
“Nope.”
“Just sent you in there?”
“Yup.”
“Bullshit.”
“God’s honest truth.”
“What happened?”
“I got bitten and turned into a zombie, and now I have my own reality show—Real Zombies of Baltimore,” I said. “What the hell do you think happened?”
“You cuffed him?”
“Actually, I beat the shit out of him and then broke his neck.”
“Bare-handed?”
“I was in the moment.”
“Damn,” she breathed.
We sat in heavy traffic for a while. I debated using my lights, but the street was gridlocked. All that would do was add noise.
After a while she said, “They never told us any of this when we were invited to try out for this gig.”
“Well, they wouldn’t, would they? I mean, how many of you would have showed up if the recruiters said hey, join the DMS and fight zombies, supersoldiers, and vampires.”
She smiled at the word vampires, but then she took a better look at my face and went dead pale. “Oh … come on … don’t even try to tell me that there are vampires…”
“Not the sparkly kind,” I said, “but, yeah, vampires.”
I told her about the Upierczy, the Red Knights. Then I told her about some of the other things Echo Team had come up against. Several different kinds of enhanced supersoldiers, including a group of men given gene therapy with insect DNA that resulted in a kind of freakism that still gives me nightmares. All of those soldiers are, I hope, dead. I told her about the Berserkers and what they did to Shockwave Team this morning. Her face went dead pale under her tan.
“Can we do that?” she demanded. “I mean, can science really go that far?”
“Science is all about pushing back boundaries. If you’re willing to sidestep the restrictions about testing on human beings, or disregard all safety precautions, then it’s possible to make huge jumps forward.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Pretty much why we call them the ‘bad guys.’”
She thought about that as I shifted into a lane that had started to move. “What about us? Do we do that kind of thing? Off the radar, I mean?”
I sighed. “I wish I could say that we don’t, but that would be a lie. But here’s the thing … the DMS doesn’t approve of it. Mr. Church doesn’t approve of it. He has a bit of a hard-on for people who misuse science like that. That’s why he hires shooters like us.”
“How can he do that if some of this is government-sanctioned?”
“First off, a lot of what goes on inside the government isn’t sanctioned. There are levels and levels of secret research going on funded by black-budget dollars. We’re talking about stuff the president never hears about. All of it’s supposed to be—and pardon me if I throw up while saying this—in the ‘best interests of America.’ Some is. A lot isn’t.”
That’s when I told her about what happened last year with Majestic Three, the T-craft, and the general feeling it left us that we are definitely not alone in this big ol’ universe. Even then, recounting the details of that investigation, I felt like it was something that I’d seen in a science-fiction movie rather than a series of events I’d lived through. It had taken a hell of a lot of effort to keep the main details off the public radar and to find acceptable explanations for those events that played out where everyone could see them.
Montana said nothing for quite a while as we inched through another traffic snarl. When I glanced at her I could see that s
he was sweating. She kept shaking her head.
“It’s a lot to process,” I said. “I wish there was a better way to do this than to dump it on you.”
“No,” she said. “No.” I waited to find out what no meant in this context. Eventually she said, “All this is going on all the time? The DMS is fighting this kind of war all the time?”
“All the time.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly,” I said. “But we have a few friends. There’s Barrier in the U.K. They were actually the first group like ours. Church helped build that and used its success to sell the idea to Congress here. And there’s Arklight. You’d like them. A bunch of totally bad-ass women warriors.”
“Are you saying that because I’m a woman?” she asked sharply.
“Yes, I am. You have a problem with that?”
“I … guess not.”
“Good. You might get to meet them. They were in on a part of this.” I told her about the stuff in Poland and Lithuania. “One of their operators is in New York right now. Combat call sign is Violin. She’s top of the line.”
A hole appeared and I steered through it. Soon we were away from the congestion that was turning that part of Brooklyn into a parking lot for rubberneckers. Above us the thrum of news agency helicopters was constant.
Montana had gone into her own head and seemed content to stay there while she worked some things out. That was fine. I put the radio on and listened to the news. The story of the Subway Massacre, as it was now being called, dominated everything. No one knew who the soldiers in black were, but on the news we were being labeled “monsters.”
I’m not sure if I objected.
You see, there are really three people living in my head. They are the result of a psyche that was fractured when I was fourteen. A group of older teens trapped my girlfriend, Helen, and me in a deserted place. They stomped me almost to death and then, while I lay there, dying and unable to help, they destroyed Helen. We both survived the day and later, after surgeries and rehab, we went back into the world; but in a lot of important ways we were only pretending to be alive. I found that my mind began splitting off into separate parts, and it was only through intensive therapy that I found my footing again. Later, when I met Rudy Sanchez, he helped me pare away the inner voices until only three remained, and those three became more or less stable. They didn’t go away, though, and I’ve learned to accept that my life is always going to be shared among the Civilized Man, the Cop, and the Warrior.
Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Page 31
