Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  She appraised the final result in the bathroom mirror, and nodded approval.

  Mother Night smiled back at her. Haughty, confident, and gorgeous.

  The spray tan changed her skin tone from Asian to something more complex, and combined with the reshaping of the nose it suggested mixed ancestry. She’d based a lot of the look on photos of a Congolese fashion model who had been popular in France in the sixties.

  Her cell buzzed and she dug it out of her hoodie pocket. It wasn’t a call but rather her alarm.

  It was time.

  Mother Night hurried out of the bathroom and into the dining room, where everything was set up. She opened her laptop, engaged the global rerouter that would bounce the video feed to more than a thousand spots every ninety seconds, and loaded a videoconferencing utility she’d built by hacking and rewriting the Skype software.

  One by one, calls began coming in. Most of these were rerouted, too, and Mother Night smiled at that. It was adorable. As they logged in, she engaged Haruspex to begin tracking them down. Rerouting didn’t mean a fucking thing to Haruspex. There were eleven bidders. None of them had their webcams turned on, of course; however, Mother Night broadcast her image to all of them.

  “Good evening,” she said, giving herself a vaguely European accent she’d cribbed from the movies. She’d practiced it for months, listening to playbacks and making adjustments. All part of the “woman of mystery” mystique that made playing Mother Night so much fun. “I trust I have been able to adequately entertain you with today’s festivities. Here is how the game will be played. Each of you has access to the conference chat function. No one is required to speak. Type in your questions and comments. Everyone will be able to see the amount you are bidding. If you wish to send me a private message, use the button marked with a W, for whisper. Only I will be able to access the whispers. This session will conclude when I have accepted the winning bid. The winning bidder will then wire me the entire amount to the routing number I will type in now.

  She had a different number for each bidder, and quickly cut and pasted those into individual whisper boxes.

  “I will warn you now that I am monitoring those accounts. If there is any attempt to trace them I will be very cross. You have each seen what I am capable of doing. Let us all remain friends. We have a common enemy.”

  One of the bidders typed a message into the main chat.

  HOW DO WE TRUST YOU?

  She laughed, and said, “This is not about trust. At this moment I have my people in each of your countries or inside your groups. Each one of my people has a supply of the pathogen built into a wide-dispersal explosive device. When I have a winning bid, that courier will place their parcel in a protected place and you will be texted the location and the disarming code.”

  WHAT HAPPENS TO THE OTHER SAMPLES?

  “Ah,” said Mother Night, “that is another matter. The losing bidders will each wire me a penalty amount of ten million euros. Failure to do so within ten minutes of the end of this conference will result in my people releasing the pathogen in the nearest crowded city. And if any of you decide to drop out of the bidding, the pathogen will be released.”

  She let that sink in.

  THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS. THIS IS EXTORTION.

  “Of course it is,” she said with a laugh. “What’s your point?”

  There was no answer to that.

  “Oh, and one last thing,” she said after a moment. “In case you are thinking that this would be a good time to swear one of those tiresome vendettas or fatwas against me, bear this in mind: the seif-al-din is not the only item I have for sale. Play fair with me and you will get to bid on other toys. Break faith with me and you will spend the rest of your lives burying everyone you have ever known. Tell me you understand and accept the terms of our game.”

  One by one they sent her private whispers.

  Everyone understood.

  “How delightful,” she said, settling back. “Now, let the games begin. The starting bid is fifty million euros.”

  The first bid was for sixty-five million euros.

  Chapter Seventy-nine

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Monday, September 1, 6:11 a.m.

  “We need to reassess everything,” I said. “Every reaction we’ve had, every response we’ve made. Knowing that this is Bliss changes the game entirely. Bug, if she built something like MindReader based on what she hacked from our system, and maybe schematics for Pangaea, what does that do for us?”

  “Puts us up shit creek?”

  “No, damn it … work the problem. You know MindReader better than her. No matter how smart she is, you know that computer. Are there assumptions she might make that we can use against her? Are there ways MindReader can set a trap? And more important, now that we know she’s using those technologies plus Vox’s chip, does knowing it give you a way to work around her tech?”

  This was the core of any counterattack—knowing your enemy. It’s virtually impossible to protect yourself against the unknown. But with knowledge comes understanding and with that comes strategic thinking.

  “I’m all over this,” Bug said with more edge in his voice than I’ve ever heard. His screen went blank.

  Then I focused on Hu. “No fucking around now, doc. Where did Bliss get those pathogens? You’re supposed to be a couple of points smarter than her. Prove it.”

  If I expected him to get snarky or huffy, he proved me wrong. Hu straightened in his chair. “She could have obtained some samples at the Liberty Bell Center. If she was going crazy back that far, it’s possible she pocketed some samples of Generation Six and Generation Twelve.”

  “Enough to do the damage she’s doing?”

  “I don’t know. Probably, but definitely not enough to sell to bidders. And the same with the quick-onset Ebola released at the bar. Unlike the seif-al-din, that strain of Ebola doesn’t replicate inside a host. It kills through direct exposure but that’s it. It has to be produced in a lab, and it’s a very complicated process. I think it’s most likely she got some from that lab Colonel Riggs busted in Detroit. Bliss was there running the cleanup team. The reports say that she used water balloons at that bar and in other locations. If that’s the case, then she probably added a portion of her supply to each balloon, so she’s probably burned through any samples she might have obtained. From what I can put together in my head based on where she was and what she had access to, I think her real weapon is the seif-al-din. She’s more likely to have enough of that for more hits, and, like I said, she could possibly have harvested more from infected test subjects.”

  “I never thought I’d ever say that I wish we were facing Ebola instead,” I muttered.

  No one argued. People infected with Ebola would die, but they wouldn’t become carnivorous vectors.

  “If Bliss intends to sell these bioweapons to foreign bidders,” said Rudy, “and if we can reasonably believe that her supplies are limited to what she might have taken from DMS crime scenes … then how can she have enough to sell?”

  Hu shook his head. “I don’t see how she can. She would need the purest strains to be able to sell them to anyone’s bioweapons program.”

  “Unless she has a source for more pure pathogen,” suggested Circe. “Is it possible that all of this chaos and violence is a distraction to keep us from looking for her true agenda? Could this be a screen while she makes a run at getting a supply of the purest versions of each pathogen?”

  We looked at one another for a long second, and then Church snatched up the phone. He called Samson Riggs and ordered him to drop everything and take what was left of Shockwave Team and get to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

  Auntie was on her phone ordering Brick to triple the guards on the virus vault buried six levels down here at the Hangar.

  That left the site with the biggest array of pathogenic monsters and the largest supply of each.

  The Locker.
>
  “Captain—” began Church, but I was already heading for the door at a dead run. Ghost ran beside me, his nails clicking on the marble floor.

  Chapter Eighty

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Monday, September 1, 6:16 a.m.

  By the time Ghost and I reached the prep room, Top had already gotten the word. Everyone was in the process of grabbing gear and stuffing it into duffel bags. We were all wearing borrowed clothes and would be rolling with guns and equipment that wasn’t ours.

  I tore off the fake police uniform I’d been wearing since leaving the subway and began pulling on a Saratoga Hammer suit. Top was next to me, buckling on a gun belt. “Not trying to dodge all the fun and games, Cap’n, but why are we rolling on this? There are two teams closer.”

  “Everyone’s already deployed,” I told him. “There’s so much shit going on that most teams are split into two-man squads. As of right now, Echo has more manpower. So it falls to us.”

  “Even though we’re America’s most wanted?” asked Montana, who stood next to Top, hooking flash-bangs on her belt.

  “That’s not how it’s playing out,” I said. “The public and the press are looking for that team in the subway, but nobody has a face or a name. We’re rolling out with DEA stenciled on our body armor. Nobody’s looking twice at a DEA team right now.”

  Doubt flickered in her eyes, but she gave me a tight nod.

  We grabbed our equipment and hauled ass to ground level, where Church’s private Lear was waiting, engine hot, door open. We piled in, Coop slammed the door, and seconds later we were climbing high and fast, leaving Brooklyn behind. Ghost huddled down by the door, his hair standing on end, eyes filled with a lupine wariness. As we flew, we loaded every spare magazine we had and prayed that we were not already too late.

  Church called before we even hit cruising altitude.

  “Tell me something good,” I asked. Or, maybe, begged.

  He told me about the release of the seif-al-din in a Best Buy in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Mother Night’s people had used big tractor trailers to block front and back doors, and then they released a couple of dozen infected into the store during a doorbuster sale of a new video game.

  “Are there any survivors?” I asked.

  “No,” Church said wearily. “But no infected have escaped. The trucks kept everything contained and local SWAT have the area locked down. However, the entire thing was broadcast live via cameras apparently placed inside the store.”

  My stomach felt like it was filled with raw sewage. “The press is going to keep on this, you know. They’re going to want to show everything, maybe hoping for a response like to what we did in the subway.”

  “No doubt.”

  “If you wipe out the infected, they’ll see that, and if you don’t—and people get wind of what’s really going on in there … Christ, we’re screwed either way.”

  “And all the confusion, public outrage, and panic serves Mother Night.”

  I wanted to bang my head on a wall. Or maybe toss myself out of the damn jet. Would have simplified the day.

  “You know,” I said, “thinking back on it, I can see how Bliss got here. Some of the things she asked. The kinds of trouble she got into with Auntie. The opportunities she had. It’s not unlike Hugo Vox.”

  “Yes,” said Church, “power corrupts. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

  He disconnected.

  But he was back in less than five minutes. It wasn’t about Bliss’s possible friends and it sure as hell wasn’t good news.

  “Captain,” he said in a voice from which all emotion and inflection had been crushed, “at 10:01 this morning we lost all contact with the Locker.”

  Chapter Eighty-one

  Reconnaissance General Bureau

  Special Office #103

  Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

  Monday, September 1, 10:09 a.m. EST

  Colonel Sim Sa-jeong mopped sweat from his face as he watched the numbers flow from the account he managed for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and into the numbered account of that witch, Mother Night.

  He had won the auction, though barely.

  Three-hundred and seventy-eight million euros. Nearly half a billion in U.S. dollars. Nearly one quarter of his yearly operating budget. And all for a weapon that the supreme leader might never have the courage to use. In his private mind, Sim knew that the young leader was more bluster than bite. Would he dare to use a bioweapon of such devastating power as the seif-al-din? Apart from the commonsense question as to whether such a weapon could ever be used with even a prayer of controlling it, the knowledge that North Korea had it could be disastrous. The entire world would fear the country, no doubt, and that was what Kim Jong-un truly wanted. But they would also become a unified force against Sim’s beloved country. North Korea would become an island in a sea of enemies. No one would dare invade them, but would anyone trade with them? Would fear of the prion-based pathogen force the world to defer to North Korea and treat it like a global supreme power?

  Sim had his doubts.

  But now the money was paid.

  The only grace was that all of the bidders were blind as to the nationality and personal identity of the others. No one yet knew that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had bought the world’s most dangerous weapon. Only Sim, the supreme leader, and Mother Night knew.

  For now.

  His computer screen changed to indicate that the money transfer was complete.

  Sweat ran in lines down Sim’s face as he waited for the last part. The coded message with instructions on where and how to take possession of the seif-al-din.

  An icon appeared. A symbol of the English letter A surrounded by a circle.

  Below it were the words, in Korean, CLICK HERE.

  Sim did as instructed.

  Nothing happened for a few moments, but he waited with all of the patience he could muster.

  Then the display changed again. The letter-A symbol expanded until it filled the entire screen. It paused for a moment, then dissolved into a cartoon version of the face of Mother Night. The cartoon image was laughing.

  Laughing.

  Then everything went crazy.

  The computer system isolated and disabled its own keyboard and mouse. He tried pressing CONTROL, ALT, and DELETE simultaneously, but that did nothing.

  Nothing that he was aware of at that moment.

  In truth, those keys unlocked the Trojan horse that had been planted in his system by Mother Night during the auction. Once unlocked, hundreds of viruses and tapeworms invaded Sim’s computer and, via its wi-fi and landline connections, plunged into the intranet used by his department. From there it raced onward, infecting thousands of computers through the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Copying files, destroying security protocols, interpolating data, shutting down every system and program that could be used to defend against cyberattacks. And in flash-bursts it sent all of that data back out to the Net.

  To Britain and Israel.

  To Japan.

  To South Korea.

  To China and Russia.

  To America.

  To the major press agencies in more than one hundred nations.

  And while that was happening, a secondary set of programs reinitiated the banking transfer order, using Sim’s passwords for authorization. Three separate sets of transfers began. Each one taking a remaining third of Sim’s annual budget. Two billion in American dollars.

  It was all so fast.

  By the time Sim realized that he could not stop the process and tore the battery out of his computer, the damage was done.

  Everyone knew that North Korea had just paid two billion dollars for a doomsday plague.

  Chapter Eighty-two

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Monday, September 1, 10:
12 a.m.

  “No, Mr. President,” said Mr. Church, “we can’t prove any of this yet. However, this is the most credible way for the pieces to fit.”

  On the big screen the president of the United States looked like the victim of a violent mugging. He was gaunt, his eyes and cheeks were hollowed out by stress, the lines on his face seemed to have been carved there by a rough hand.

  “I’ll be addressing the nation again in a few minutes,” he said. “My advisors are telling me not to, that right now the people don’t want to see my face anywhere except with a noose around my neck. In their shoes I couldn’t blame them. That video is damning.”

  “Bug’s pulled it apart.”

  “I know, he sent it to my people and they’re trying to decide how best to present that information to the public without it looking weak, phony, and desperate.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  The president bristled. “Is that sarcasm, Deacon?”

  “No, Mr. President, it’s heartfelt. I believe you will need all the luck you can muster, and I sincerely wish you well.”

  Some of the tension leaked from the president’s face, and he nodded. “Sorry. I’m a bit on edge.”

  “We all are. Right now I have teams on their way to—” His cell buzzed and Church glanced at it. “One moment, Mr. President,” he said. “This may be news.”

  He picked up the phone, listened for a moment.

  “Send it to my screen. I’m on with the president.” He set his phone down. “Mr. President, I believe you need to see this.”

  The big screen split and the other half was filled by Anderson Cooper. Two small pictures flanked the reporter. One was a screen capture of the Mother Night video from yesterday. The other was a picture of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. The text banner below the pictures read: BIOTERRORISM.

  “… in a bizarre twist on the catastrophic events of the last twenty-four hours, sources now confirm that North Korean president Kim Jong-un has purchased a deadly weaponized pathogen—a so-called doomsday weapon—from the terrorist calling herself Mother Night…”