Code Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  Neither his friends nor his brothers knew he earned his pay as a cartoon dog. Specifically as a mentally challenged cartoon dog dressed in a cowboy outfit. You couldn’t lay that rap on your homies and ever walk it off. They all thought he worked maintenance at Epcot.

  Sammy was posing with a bunch of fat little German tourist kids when he spotted the two men in hoodies. They both wore dark hoodies on a hot Florida night in August. Sammy was boiling the pounds off in his Goofy suit, so he knew how hot it was. But he had to; why were these kids in hoodies, with the hoods up? That seemed odd to him.

  And they both had backpacks.

  Not uncommon in Disney. People walked all day long. A lot of them carried water, souvenirs, and other stuff.

  But Sammy knew what was going on today. Everyone did. That’s why all of the off-duty security had been called in.

  The guys in the hoodies were drifting along behind a large group of girls dressed in cheerleader costumes. There were always cheerleading contests and events at the park. Had to be fifty, sixty girls in three or four different school colors, all of them laughing. None of them paying attention to the men in the hoodies. The whole group melted into the lines waiting to take photos with him. There were more than a hundred people in line. The park was jammed, even this late, and the costumed staff was working overtime. Fireworks were exploding in the sky. And Sammy did not like those two fuckers in the hoodies.

  There was something about them.

  Maybe if Sammy had grown up in the richer parts of town he might have looked right through those guys. But he’d grown up hard in Washington Shores. He was used to seeing trouble coming long before it ever got up in his face.

  So, when the two men stepped out of line, moved to stand by a trash can near the heaviest part of the crowd, and shrugged out of their backpacks, Sammy knew that something bad was about to happen. The men did it together, smoothly, like it was something they had rehearsed. The men set the packs down and started to turn to walk away.

  That’s when Sammy knew for sure. For absolute goddamn sure.

  He was running before he knew he was going to do anything. In his huge, ungainly costume and floppy oversized feet, he blew past the startled German kids, shoved a Korean tourist with a video camera out of the way, drove right through the suddenly shrieking gaggle of cheerleaders, and threw himself into a flying tackle that slammed him into the two men. He hooked an arm around each one and drove them forward and down onto the hard concrete. They landed with a muffled thud and yelps of surprise.

  Instantly the two men tried to get away.

  Not to struggle with him. Not to fight him. Not to demand to know why a cartoon dog had just tackled them. They wanted out of there.

  They clawed at the ground to get out from under him.

  Sammy wore big, fuzzy gloves, so he had no fists. So he raised an elbow and drove it down as hard as he could between the shoulder blades of one of the men. Sammy was not a big man—only five ten—but he was all muscle. He was lean to a rock hardness from sweating in that suit. And he was madder than he had ever been in his whole life.

  The elbow hit with so much force, the first man’s head snapped back and then nodded nose-first into the concrete. The second man twisted under Sammy and simultaneously tried to shove him away and pull something from a pocket. A gun, a knife, Sammy couldn’t tell.

  He raised himself up and dropped down full weight on the man, crushing the air from him. Then he elbowed the man’s face into a red mess. The item the guy had been reaching for tumbled to the ground.

  Not a gun.

  Not a knife.

  It was a cell phone.

  In a flash of clarity, Sammy understood.

  It was like Boston and those other places. He tore off his mask and at the top of his lungs yelled one of those words you are never supposed to yell in a crowded theater, on an airplane, or in a theme park.

  “BOMB!”

  Sammy heard the screams, felt the tide of panic swirl around him. This was America and most of these kids had been born after 9/11. They understood bombs. Even the tourists from other countries. America didn’t own terrorism; that belonged to everyone everywhere.

  They ran.

  Sammy didn’t.

  The two men, bleeding as bloody as they were, were still game, still struggling. One of them kept reaching for the cell phone.

  Later, when the reporters interviewed Sammy about what he did then, his initial answer was “Fuck, man, I just went ape-shit.”

  He would be asked to give them a new sound bite. Many hundreds of times.

  However, in all fairness, he did go ape-shit. He beat the two men into red pulp. Putting one into a coma, maiming the other. Then he picked the cell phone up and threw it into a pond.

  The two backpacks did not blow up.

  Bomb squad crews came and took them away. Sammy later learned that there were enough explosives in each to kill dozens. But that wasn’t the worst threat. Mixed in with all the screws and nails and other shrapnel were tens of thousands of tiny pellets filled with ricin. A dose the size of a few grains of table salt can kill an adult human. Each pellet had twice that amount.

  In all of Mother Night’s dozens of orchestrated attacks, it was the only one in which no one died.

  No one.

  All because of a cartoon dog.

  Sammy Ramirez did not become the first Latino star of summer blockbusters. Instead Disney cast him as a Jedi in their ongoing series of Star Wars movies. They would later hire actors to play Sammy Ramirez at their theme parks, so kids could get an autograph with him.

  Sometimes the good guys actually win.

  Chapter Seventy

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 3:36 p.m.

  We met in the big conference room. Church was at the head of the table, Rudy and Circe to his right, Dr. Hu and Aunt Sallie on his left. I grabbed the seat at the other end.

  “What’s the good news?” I asked.

  “Your optimism is an inspiration to us all,” said Church dryly. “Today’s events are accelerating downhill.”

  I sighed.

  “There’s no good place to start,” he continued, “but let’s begin with something Bug has worked out. He’s analyzed the video cameras from the subway and several others obtained from other attacks. Even though some are different brands, they’re all of a type and each has received an aftermarket upgrade from Mother Night. Bug was able to determine that the reason we haven’t been able to interrupt the video feeds is that some of the technology being employed is strikingly similar to certain elements of MindReader.”

  That had the effect of tossing a flash-bang onto the table. Heads jerked up, eyes bugged out, and if anyone said anything, I was unable to hear or process it.

  “How the hell is that possible?” I demanded. “Do we have a leak?”

  “Unknown. Bug says the technology is similar, but there are some subtle differences.”

  “What differences?” asked Hu. “Our systems are constantly being updated. Can we compare the software in the cameras to versions of ours? If so, we could probably put a date on when it was stolen.”

  Church nodded approval of the question. “The software matches ours at two points, both a little over two years ago. Nikki is preparing employee lists from that time and matching them against team members with access to the software.”

  “You said that ‘some’ of the technology was ours,” I said. “What’s the rest?”

  “That opens up an entirely different can of worms. The cameras have a chip specifically designed to make traces impossible via a random and encrypted rerouting process. That chip was designed specifically to foil MindReader searches.”

  Another kick-in-the-teeth moment.

  “Wait a goddamned minute,” I said, “we know that chip.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Church, tapping crumbs from a vanilla wafer.

  “Hugo,” breathed a stricke
n Circe.

  She’d been Hugo Vox’s protégée for years and he’d been like family to her. The revelation that he was a world-class traitor and terrorist damaged something in her. It was like discovering why your beloved uncle Adolf didn’t like your Jewish friends. It left a huge, ugly hole carved in her life. During our battle with Vox and the Seven Kings, he’d stymied us with technology that had been, at the time, impossible to trace. The key to that tech was a certain chip.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Does that mean Vox is a part of this?”

  Church nibbled his cookie and stared at nothing for a moment. “Hugo Vox is dead.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Rudy. “He was never—”

  “Hugo Vox is dead,” repeated Church. “There is no doubt.”

  The silence was big and filled with unspoken conversation. I wondered if Church would ever share the details. Probably not.

  “Then someone has his science,” said Hu.

  Church nodded. “At least as far as the chip goes. It’s reasonable to assume the chip is being used to block all traces of the text messages being received by Colonel Riggs and Captain Ledger.”

  “Excuse me,” said Rudy, “but we’ve had Vox’s chip for a while now. Surely we’ve figured out how it works…”

  “We have. This new chip has some upgrades, and yes, we’ll figure those out as well. Unfortunately, Bug and his team have been stretched pretty thin with this case. However, I’ve made cracking that chip a priority.”

  Hu made a face. At first I thought he was having gas and needed to be burped, but as it turned out he had a thought. “This is going to sound very weird, but there are very few DMS people I know of who had access to MindReader and the Vox chip and who had enough knowledge and technical sophistication to take that science further. Actually, only three people occur to me. Two of them are in this building—Bug and Yoda. And the third is … well … the third is dead.”

  “Yes,” said Church, “and isn’t that an interesting line of speculation?”

  I held my hand up. “At the risk of being mocked by Dr. Frankenstein, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Rudy turned to me. “They’re talking about Artemisia Bliss.”

  “Yeah, I got that part. But she is actually dead, right? So why the fuck are we wasting time talking about her?”

  “Because,” said Hu with asperity, “we have to be open to the fact that she sold this technology to someone.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Okay, putting my dunce cap on and shutting up now.”

  Hu actually grinned at me. Maybe the way to his heart was through self-mockery.

  “Circe,” said Church, “where do we stand on the subway video?”

  “It’s not good,” she admitted. Circe was a beautiful woman with a lovely heart-shaped face framed by intensely black hair that fell in wild curls to her shoulders. Her eyes were so dark a brown they looked black, and in those eyes glittered a steely intelligence. She had advanced degrees in a variety of fields including archaeology, anthropology, theology, psychology, and medicine with a specialty in infectious diseases. But her principal area of expertise was as a world-class expert in counterterrorism and antiterrorism, and specifically in how the terrorist mind works. “The video from the subway has gone global. It’s everywhere, and everyone is reacting to it. In a way, we have to admire the finesse by which Mother Night primed the pump for it. First there was the cyberhacking this morning. That alone was a massive media event, and it dominated the news until the bombs went off. Then public attention was shifted there, with some reporters speculating on a connection.”

  “How did they make that connection?” I asked, breaking my self-imposed silence.

  “That’s the right question,” said Circe, nodding, “and we’re looking into that. We can’t say for sure if it was because the reporters are cynical and suspicious, or if they speculated on the connection in hopes that there was one—thereby giving them a scoop while insuring that they appeared savvy and insightful—”

  “So young to be so jaded,” I murmured. She ignored me, as was appropriate.

  “—or if they were in some way tipped off. Because the coverage was so widespread, it’s taxing our resources to try to pin that down.”

  I said something like “Hmm.”

  She glanced at me. “What?”

  “Mother Night seems pretty savvy herself, and she’s clearly using the media as a weapon. But at the same time we have to consider whether she knows how the investigative system works. If she’s the computer genius she appears to be—”

  “She is,” said Bug.

  “—then she might have counted on investigative agencies targeting the media for deep background checks and thereby allocating resources that might otherwise be useful in hunting her.”

  “What else could we do, though?” asked Rudy. “Don’t we have to make those background searches?”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “I’m not saying we’re making a wrong move. What I’m saying is that she may have played a good card and we have to accept it.”

  Church nodded. “In light of her other moves, I think that’s a fair assumption.” He nodded to Circe to continue.

  “I don’t think Mother Night’s ultimate goal is terrorism,” she said, and held up a silencing hand as we all started to speak. “Hear me out. Rudy and I have been wrangling with this all day. Most of you have heard this already.” She recounted what Rudy had said to me before the meeting regarding the elements of anarchy. “If she was using bombs in order to create chaos then her picks were clumsy and moderately ineffectual. A law library and a martial arts sporting event? Don’t get me wrong, those bombs were devastating and there was terrible loss of life, but this is Labor Day weekend. There are parades, mass gatherings, ball games, concerts. If she’d wanted to rack up a body count to create genuine chaos, she could have picked a thousand more useful targets.”

  “So what was the point?” asked Aunt Sallie. “To get the media’s attention? She already had that.”

  “No,” said Circe, “I think we can call the hacking phase one, with the goal being to energize the media. Phase two was the bombings, and that effectively brought every law enforcement agency to point. Bombings will do that in post-9/11 America. The way the media covers it and the pervasive buzz of social media only serve to reinforce that conditioning. It’s very Pavlovian.”

  “And phase three is the subway?” asked Aunt Sallie.

  Circe nodded. “Sure. Phases one and two nicely set up phase three so that the false message conveyed by the altered soundtrack—that the government is using illegal force on ordinary citizens—was something the media helped sell to a willing audience. It’s really very smart. Get the media and everyone in the country watching, then bring all emergency response teams to a state of high alert so that armed cops and soldiers are in the streets in certain places. It doesn’t matter that they’re not in every street, but the sensitized, ratings-hungry media will make it seem that way. Prior to the subway the media rolled footage of SWAT teams, cops, and other emergency responders as part of the message that ‘America is responding to terrorism’; but once that video went out, the message automatically changed to ‘America responds to a threat by using lethal force against its own people.’”

  “The logic doesn’t hold,” said Hu.

  “It doesn’t have to hold. It has to be big. In media terms it has to dominate the conversation, and right now that is the only conversation.”

  I said, “I can see it, Circe, but then I hit a wall at high speed. What’s Mother Night want from all of this? Now that she has everyone’s attention, what’s she selling?”

  “Ah,” said Circe, “that’s where I hit a wall, too.”

  Rudy said, “If, as we agree, the logic does not hold, then we have to wonder if that is a known variable. In other words, does it need to hold? Mother Night would have to know that this would eventually be picked apart and, to some degree, defused. That would suggest that this is a plot o
f limited duration, yes?”

  We all nodded.

  “Then,” concluded Rudy, “if we can predict the time it would take for the story to crumble, then wouldn’t that give us an idea of the timetable for whatever Mother Night’s larger plan is?”

  In the thoughtful silence that followed, everyone began nodding, first to themselves as they worked it through according to their own insights, and then to the group.

  “That’s very good, doctor,” said Church. “Circe … public perception and reaction is your field. Can you project a timetable?”

  She chewed her lip. “With the prevalence of social media everything is faster. Action and reaction. Ballpark guess? I think whatever Mother Night is doing—providing she needs the social and media disruption she’s created as a cover—then I think we have twelve to twenty-four hours to figure it out and stop her. And maybe not even that long.”

  That was not good news. It took the clock that was ticking in my mind and bolted it to the wall in front of us. Twelve hours to make sense of the senseless, to solve a puzzle whose shape and meaning was completely unknown to us.

  Swell.

  Right around the time I wondered if we were doing any damn good at all, like maybe we should turn jurisdiction of this case over to a more competent group—say, the Cub Scouts or a group of mimes—Bug interrupted with a news update.

  “What do you have?” asked Church.

  “Nothing good.”

  “Can I go home?” I asked. Church ignored me.

  Bug said, “Our field lab in Virginia finished their preliminary examination of the mercenaries Shockwave ran into this morning. There’s absolutely no doubt about it … they’re Berserkers.”

  We’d all been expecting that. Absolutely sucked, though.

  “But here’s the kicker,” continued Bug, “we had a molecular biologist and two pathologists examine the bodies, and our field investigators did a load of interviews with family and known associates of the dead Berserkers. And … these guys are new to the whole mutant supersoldier job description. They were all normal eight to ten months ago, but there’s no way they were part of the Berserker team at the Dragon Factory. We’re running background checks on them, and so far we’ve proven that three of them were in the military on overseas deployment during the raid on Dogfish Cay. So … bottom line? Someone’s making new Berserkers.”