Code Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Grand Hyatt Hotel

  109 East Forty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 4:17 p.m.

  Violin had accompanied Junie back to the hotel and followed the DMS agents from room to room, making sure that everything was secure. Then, when they were positioned out in the hallway, Violin checked the suite again, this time scanning it with a small electronic device she produced from her bag. Once she determined that the room was truly secure, she and Junie sat on the couch and watched the news. They had some food sent up, which Violin again checked using a small chemical analyzer. They drank wine. They watched horrors on TV. They did not hear from Joe Ledger.

  Finally, Violin stood up and reached for her bag, removed her cell phone, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and called her mother.

  “What is it?” That was how her mother usually answered the phone. Lilith was not known for social graces.

  “You are aware of what is happening in America?”

  “Of course I am, girl,” snapped Lilith. “Do you think I’ve gone blind?”

  Violin let that pass. “The Deacon’s people are being stretched dangerously thin.”

  “So?”

  “So, I would like to offer them our help.”

  “Our help or your help?”

  “Mine, if we have no one else here in the States.”

  Lilith paused. “It is my understanding that Captain Ledger is in love with another woman.”

  “Yes,” said Violin.

  “Make sure that your motives are quite clear, girl.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Don’t ‘Yes, Mother’ me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And don’t say you’re sorry. If you truly want to help then I will clear it with the Deacon. But you’ll go where he needs you, not where you think you should be.”

  “Of course, Mother.”

  “‘Of course.’ God, save me from fools in love.”

  Lilith ended the call.

  Violin waited until the burning red was gone from her face before she left the bathroom. Junie was right there and she pushed abruptly past her and swung the door shut. Violin could hear the woman gagging and then the flush of the toilet. Water ran in the sink for a long time, and when Junie came out her face was flushed.

  “Chemo?” asked Violin, realizing at once how awkward a question it was.

  Junie shook her head. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

  “Very well,” said Violin uncertainly. She turned away, checked her equipment, and moved toward the door.

  “You’re leaving?” asked Junie, surprised.

  “Yes.” Violin nodded to the carnage on the TV. “I am going to see if I can help with this.”

  “What can you do? They don’t even know where this Mother Night person is.”

  “Well, I can’t very well sit around here all night, can I?”

  Junie and she studied each other for a long, long time. “Violin,” she said softly, “Joe cares very much for you. He really does. We both do.”

  Violin said nothing.

  “I hope we can be friends.” When Violin still didn’t answer, Junie said, “Stay safe.”

  Violin simply nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She closed the door quietly behind her as she left.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 4:36 p.m.

  “Who has the capability of making new Berserkers?” asked Rudy.

  “Theoretically, anyone,” said Hu. “The Jakobys cracked the science. Any lab with the capability to perform gene therapy can replicate their processes if they have the notes.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  Hu shrugged. “The Jakobys were so advanced because they used their Pangaea computer system to steal research data from hundreds of other labs around the world. They were, in fact, standing on everyone else’s shoulders, and that allowed them to reach higher. Reusing their science is one thing; rediscovering it would take years. Conservative guess, ten to twenty.”

  “Then we can reasonably conclude that someone has stolen their science, yes?” suggested Rudy. Hu and Church both nodded. “I think we—”

  Before he could finish, Nikki appeared on the big screen and gave us the latest information about the crimes happening across the country. Mother Night was not slackening off. We stared in abject horror at what was happening. Murders by skinny kids in anarchist hoodies and Doc Martens, and murders by guys who looked like defensive linemen. The release of a quick-onset Ebola in an Indian restaurant in San Antonio.

  Three more backpack bombs. At a flower show in Jacksonville: an estimated seventy dead and three times that many wounded. At a wedding on the beach in Malibu: twenty-eight dead. At a playground in Gary, Indiana, where a bunch of teenagers were playing pick-up basketball: thirty-four dead and wounded.

  And more.

  Much more. Beatings. Molotov cocktails thrown through windows in upscale neighborhoods in Connecticut and low-rent trailer homes in New Jersey. Random stabbings. More attacks in restaurants by Berserkers.

  We watched in horror, but we were not idle.

  Church and Aunt Sallie were on the phone, dispatching DMS teams to hotspots, especially those where a suspected bioweapon was being employed. Soon, though, we were stretched so thin that Church began splitting the teams, and then splitting them again. In California there were seven two- and three-person teams rolling out to cover situations where we would normally insert two full teams. SWAT, FBI hostage rescue, ATF, and Homeland’s various task forces were also being pushed to the limits. Every biological disaster team in the country was in play. Ordinary police were stretched just as thin, working crowds at each of the crime scenes, and establishing unbreakable perimeters around every site where a biohazard was known or suspected.

  It became unreal. It was like running around putting Band-Aids on leaks on a sinking ship when God only knew what was happening below the water line. As we worked to move assets into place, we fought to carve out a few seconds to analyze these new attacks. We worked with limited information, relying on experience, intuition, and guesswork.

  Minutes and then hours burned away. It was nearly dawn when we caught enough of a breather to go back to trying to assemble our puzzle.

  “Dr. Sanchez,” said Church, “yesterday, when we were discussing the stolen Berserker technology, you were going to make a point. What was it?”

  “Was I?” Rudy rubbed his eye, which was red and puffy. “Yes, yes … God, I’m exhausted.” He cleared his throat, looking grainy and old. “It wasn’t about the Berserkers per se. It’s just that we’ve been dealing with so many events over the last twenty-four hours that I’ve begun to wonder how much of that has been orchestrated to have the effect it’s been having. By that I mean we are being distracted from a simple progression of logic.”

  Church twirled his finger in a go-ahead gesture.

  “I’m no statistician, but it seems improbably ponderous to me to believe that a single group like Mother Night’s could rediscover the Jakoby science for the Berserkers, reinvent pathogens like the seif-al-din and quick-onset Ebola, build a microchip like Vox’s, and develop a computer comparable to MindReader.”

  “Well, damn,” I said, “when you say it like that—”

  “I agree, Dr. Sanchez,” said Church, “the timetable for development is as improbable as it is to assume they’ve merely come up with bioweapons and technologies coincidentally similar to those the DMS has faced.”

  “Right,” I said, “so there is a leak?”

  “Maybe,” said Church and Rudy at the same time.

  “Maybe?”

  “Sure,” said Aunt Sallie, jumping into the conversation. “If Artemisia Bliss stole some of this stuff, and I think we’re all thinking that, then she could have handed it off to someone else before the weenie roast in her cell.”
>
  “How likely is that?” I asked.

  “Not very,” confessed Aunt Sallie. “We confiscated her computers, went over every inch of her apartment, even checked her storage unit. Everything we found was turned over to the federal prosecutors, and I can tell you for damn sure that there was nothing there that even touched on the science behind the Berserkers.”

  “Then explain what’s happening.”

  “I can’t.”

  Rudy asked, “Could Bliss have done that if she was alive?”

  “No way,” said Auntie. “She was a computer engineer and—”

  “Yes,” said Hu.

  All eyes snapped back in his direction.

  “You keep forgetting that Bliss wasn’t just a genius, she was a supergenius. That’s not a casual phrase. Her intellect was staggering. If she had the information and enough resources, she could either do it or arrange to have it done. That was one of the things we were all afraid of when we discovered that she was copying information and planning on selling it. Her level of genius was profoundly dangerous.”

  Auntie said, “So what are we talking about? We know Bliss is dead. Could she have obtained Berserker science and sold it elsewhere while she was alive? Sold it and then cleaned up after herself?”

  “I don’t … think so,” said Bug tentatively. “MindReader tore her computer apart, and if she’d ever had that information there would have been some record. You can’t erase that much data without leaving a trace.”

  “Couldn’t she have bought another computer?”

  “We hacked her banking records going back a lot of years,” said Bug. “We were looking for that kind of purchase, but there was nothing. We found the stuff she actually stole, and that’s why we busted her.” He paused and cocked his head thoughtfully. “You know, though … if she was still alive, then I could build a pretty good case for her being Mother Night. The level of genius, the subtlety and complexity. She had that by the bagful. And I’ve played a lot of games with her. She was devious as shit.”

  “But she’s dead,” said Circe.

  “She’s dead,” agreed Bug.

  “Guys, guys,” I said, “let’s stick with who might actually be alive. Bug, have Nikki run a thorough background check on Bliss. I know she was adopted from China, so see if you guys can hack Chinese adoption records and—”

  “I already did that,” said Hu. “She had one sister, but the girl was adopted by a family in Des Moines. School records indicate above-average intelligence, but only just. There’s nothing to indicate that she had anything approaching Artie’s genius. And there’s no indication that Bliss ever had contact with that girl.”

  “Check again,” Church said to Bug. “Find that girl and run a deep background check. Also establish her whereabouts on all dates and times relative to this case.”

  “On it.”

  “And send information to all law enforcement agencies about the Berserkers.”

  Bug hesitated. “Really? That’s going to raise a whole lot of questions.”

  “Do it.”

  Chapter Seventy-three

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Monday, September 1, 5:53 a.m.

  I was on my sixth cup of coffee and my hands shook with the aftereffects of violence and way too much caffeine. The last hours of Sunday had burned away and now we were four and a half hours into Monday. We’d spent all night going over every bit of data going all the way back to Arlington and up to the news reports of violence all across the country.

  The number of bombings was now eight.

  Random acts of violence, fifty-three.

  Arsons, eleven.

  The release of weaponized pathogens, four. DMS teams were handling each of those, but with plenty of help from local law. Word came down from the White House through subtle channels to drastically but quietly diminish any show of federal involvement in matters that might involve a trigger pull. At the same time, the press secretary and his team were doing heroic spin control. Experts were being trotted out to decry the government’s involvement. Those experts included a number of writers, pundits, and scientists in various extreme groups, but people who were willing to participate in a conversation rather than rant and shout. So far it was working. A bit.

  The radical right and left, the loudmouth extremists on both sides, were being jackasses. As they usually were. A lot of the moderates were keeping mum for fear of standing on the wrong side when the full story finally came out. If it ever came out.

  The president made a few short and very calm statements to the nation, and attended one press conference. Even that, I learned, was staged pretty well, with handpicked members of the White House press corps.

  So far, Washington was not burning.

  Other places were not so lucky.

  At one point I turned to Hu. “Doc, that was definitely the seif-al-din down in the subway, no doubt about it, right? One of the early generations.”

  He nodded. “I know, though my people are running tests.”

  “Here’s the kicker, though,” I said, and ran the footage from the subway attack. Not our part in it, but the earliest parts of the video. We watched a sweaty man in a hoodie and yellow raincoat make his announcement about Mother Night and then attack a black teenager. I froze the image. “There! See that guy? He was the patient zero of that attack, right? But he’s talking. That means—”

  “—he was infected by one of the later strains,” said Hu. “I know. I already instructed the forensics team to locate his corpse and take samples.”

  “My point,” I said, “is that someone had access to two different strains of the pathogen.”

  “Obviously.”

  “How?” I asked.

  There was a beat.

  “I mean … where’d they get them? As far as we can tell, the original lab in Afghanistan blew up. The only person we know of who was infected with Generation Twelve of the pathogen was Amirah, and I put a bullet in her head.”

  It was true. After El Mujahid tried to release the seif-al-din at the Liberty Bell Center in Philly a few years ago, I took Echo Team to Afghanistan and hunted Amirah down. By then she was already infected and driven mad by the experience. I offered her a chance, live as a monster or ride a bullet into paradise. She made the best choice for everyone.

  “So who else has both generations?” I asked.

  Hu and Church exchanged a look, then Hu said, “There are three places that have both samples. The Locker in Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and right here in the Hangar.”

  The tension in the room was palpable.

  “And do we know the status of all three sets of samples?” Rudy asked quietly.

  “Nikki conveyed your request for a full security scan of the Locker,” said Aunt Sallie. “All the lights were green.”

  “What about the CDC?” I asked.

  “Same thing, and they called in additional security.”

  “And the stuff we have here?” I asked Hu.

  “The samples here are safe,” Hu said defensively.

  “When you say the lights were green,” I said, “exactly what does that mean?”

  “It means that all of the dozen or so automatic security programs run system-wide diagnostics and—”

  I cut him off. “You mean that we’re going on nothing but a computer’s word that everything is okay? Jesus fuck, doc.”

  He immediately whipped out his cell phone to call his senior lab assistant. “Melanie, I need you to check our storage vault. Put eyes on the samples of the seif-al-din. All generations. I need a count of how much material is in each vial. Exact numbers, okay? Then run a diagnostic on the log-out computer. I want to know who looked at it, if any vials were touched, when, the works. Go back all the way and get back to me. Then get me somebody at the Locker. I want to talk to the senior researcher on shift or someone in administration.” He set his phone down and I gave him a nod.

  �
�What happens if the pathogen is still safely stored in all three places?” asked Rudy.

  “Then we’re in big fucking trouble,” said Aunt Sallie. “’Cause that means someone else has access to it.”

  “But who else even knows about it?” persisted Rudy. “We never fully disclosed the nature of the disease to Congress.”

  “He’s right,” said Circe. “And the samples at the CDC are in a special lab with access by only a short list of researchers, all of whom are with either DARPA or the DMS.”

  “We need to check it all,” I said. “Triple the security and dig a fucking moat if we have to.”

  Hu made another round of calls.

  Circe said, “Building on what we were talking about before, about how this may not be as chaotic and anarchical as Mother Night would have us believe, I think her choice of which subway car to hit seems obvious. It’s a controlled environment. Going on the assumption that Mother Night knew both the nature of the disease and how we would have to react to it, the stalled subway car gave her a kind of sound stage. The cameras Joe found prove that it was staged so that the drama would unfold in a precise place and manner.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Hu said. “If Mother Night knows about the function and communicability of the seif-al-din, then she had to know that if it got out there would be a lot more than anarchy. It would be a feeding frenzy.”

  “Begins with an A and rhymes with Ohpocalypse,” I muttered.

  Church nodded. “So the stalled subway car was both a stage and a containment facility. That’s very interesting.”

  “Doesn’t that give us a little bit of hope?” asked Rudy. “Clearly Mother Night is not trying to create an apocalyptic event.”

  “She’s trying to take down the president,” suggested Hu, but nearly everyone shook their heads.

  “I think Dr. Sanchez is correct when he says that damaging the presidency is a side effect,” said Church. “Or a means to an end.”