The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  “But what move?”

  Church didn’t answer. Instead he gave Dietrich a string of orders and then hung up.

  Church stood in the empty hallway for two minutes as he worked it out in his head. Then he made several calls. The first was to the President of the United States. The second was to Aunt Sallie at the Hangar to apprise her of the situation.

  Then he dialed the number for Hugo Vox.

  “Deacon?” said Vox. “You get a break on the London thing?”

  “We have a new situation, Hugo,” Church said, and quickly outlined the problem.

  “Ah … Christ! Is this more of the Seven Kings bullshit?”

  “Too soon to tell, but it seems likely.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Has your think tank come up with anything?”

  “Nothing useful, but they’re hard at it. Bug’s been feeding us intel, but no one’s come up with a good reason why that hospital should have been targeted.”

  “I was hoping for more by now, Hugo.”

  “I can go beat them with chains, Deke … but it won’t make them think any faster. We need more data. Can I tell them about Area 51?”

  “Yes, but if you do then the team has to be sequestered for the duration of the crisis. That could be hours, days, or weeks.”

  “They’re not going to like that.”

  “Imagine how much I care.”

  Vox snorted. “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Church said. “Is Circe still at T-Town?”

  “No, the good Dr. O’Tree is in London. I’ve had her working on security for that silly boat ride thing for the last couple of months. Goddamn waste of resources.”

  “You disapprove of the Sea of Hope?”

  “Of its intent? No, of course not, but they’ve asked for so damn much security that every agency is coming up short and my own crew is spread pretty thin. Bad damn timing for all this other shit to hit the fan.”

  “Isn’t it, though?”

  “And with the Hospital attack, the Brits are not only not thinking of canceling it; they’ve asked for more security. Shit, Deke, the Chinese army couldn’t penetrate that thing. And it’s only rock and roll.”

  “It’s an opportunist’s dream hit. It’s the Prince of England and a lot of other celebrities.”

  “It’s celebrities’ kids. Inbred offspring of the rich and famous. The Paris Hilton crowd. Fucking bunch of privileged silver-spoon—”

  “Really, Hugo? We have time for this?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry. It’s a sore spot with me. There’s just too much going on in the real world for me to want expend any consideration for stunt events.”

  “Message noted. Now, back to matters at hand. Where’s Circe?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Whitechapel, London

  December 18, 9:54 A.M. GMT

  “Captain Ledger!”

  I turned to see Detective Sergeant Rebekkah Owlstone hurrying along the bystreet toward me. Owlstone was the coordinator for the team to which I’d been assigned. We were doing background checks on the Hospital staff and I was coming out of a house where the family of a dead nurse was lost in the horror of shared grief. The day was bitterly cold, with a raw wind that smelled of salt water and ash. Owlstone waved me toward the lee side of a parked delivery van. It was about a degree warmer out of the wind.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Owlstone, a petite and pretty brunette from Hampshire, pitched her voice in a confidential tone: “We have a situation, sir. A pair of our lads—Constables Lamba and Pettit—have been interviewing the families of the janitorial staff, and they found something very curious taped to one of the apartment doors. Lamba took a photo of it with his phone and e-mailed it to me.”

  She produced her BlackBerry and pressed a button to bring up a picture of a standard apartment door: beige wood with metal numbers. A crooked sign read: HAPPY CHRISTMAS. Garland and lights framed the door. Owlstone pressed the “plus” button to enlarge the image to show a white index card taped just under a length of bright green plastic garland. A finger, presumably the constable’s, held the garland back so that the note could be read.

  In shaky block letters it read:

  They are with Jesus. May God forgive all sinners.

  “Christ! Have they entered the scene?”

  “No,” she said. “They notified me straightaway. I called it in and they told me to fetch you. Everyone else senior is too far away.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  We climbed into her car, with Owlstone crammed next to me and both of us crowded by my hulk of a dog, and drove the three blocks to the apartment building. A constable was outside erecting sawhorse crime scene barriers. The apartment was on the top floor. Most of the doors in the hallway were decorated for Christmas, and more than half of them were ajar, with concerned and curious neighbors looking out at all the policemen in the hall.

  A constable, with PETTIT on his name badge, stepped forward to intercept us.

  “No one’s touched the door, Detective Sergeant,” he reported. “But the card fell down and there was something behind it that you need to see.”

  “What is it?” asked Owlstone, but I looked past the officer and I could feel the Warrior inside my head tense for fight or flight.

  Someone had used red and black felt-tip pens to leave a message on the apartment door. A message, or a signature, no larger than a silver dollar. A number 7 overlaid atop the word “KINGS” and encompassed by a bloodred circle.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Captain,” gasped Owlstone, “is that—?”

  “Yes, it damn well is. Evacuate the building. Now!”

  Owlstone hadn’t been told to take orders from me, but she didn’t argue. She spun and began shouting orders to the other bobbies.

  I dug out my phone and called Church.

  He said, “Seal the building. I’ll tell the authorities here and advise that they certify this as a D-notice situation. We don’t want that logo in the press; otherwise gangbangers will tag it on every wall in the country. And I’m sure Barrier will roll a team out to you.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  “Then do what you have to do. I’ll clear it so you’re in charge of the crime scene until Barrier takes over.”

  Owlstone closed on me and lowered her voice to an urgent whisper: “What the hell’s happening, Captain?”

  “Call me Joe, and I think we just caught the first break in the London Hospital case. Barrier is on its way, but I’m in charge until then. Orders to that effect are being cut right now. Call in if you’re uncertain; otherwise let’s get to work. You okay with that?”

  There was a flicker on her face that suggested she wasn’t completely okay with it, but she nodded. A lesser person might have tried to fight that, because this was likely to be a career-making moment. Owlstone was too much of a good cop to play politics, and that elevated her several notches in my book.

  “Floor’s clear!” called Pettit from the other end of the hall.

  I took a digital camera from my pocket and snapped off twenty frames, catching the symbol, the door, and the surrounding hallway. Then I bent and made a close no-touch examination of the door. I had Ghost sniff it, too, but he didn’t give me the signal for a bomb. He did, however, give a quick double bark that he was trained to use when he was searching for missing bodies. Search and recovery dogs are trained to sniff out cadaverine, a foul-smelling molecule produced by protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue. In other words, eau de rot.

  Something in there was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Whitechapel, London

  December 18, 10:28 A.M. GMT

  “What’s he found?” Owlstone asked, backing away. “Is it a bomb?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s also trained to find bodies.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Time’s not our friend, Detective Sergeant. We need to kick the door.”
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  She nodded, but she looked scared.

  “Backup,” I suggested quietly, and she took a steadying breath and waved for Pettit and Lamba to join us.

  “Okay, lads,” she said. “Captain Ledger will kick the door; we’ll cover and then clear the apartment in a two-by-two pattern.”

  They nodded and drew their guns. I drew back and kicked. The door flew open and I went in and left while Owlstone covered my right. We moved fast, yelling for anyone who was there to lay down their weapons. But no one was there, and we all knew that going in.

  “Clear!” yelled Pettit from the kitchen.

  “Clear!” yelled Owlstone from what looked like a teenager’s bedroom.

  “In here! In here!” yelled Lamba from the doorway of the master bedroom. “Two down. Civilians! Two down. Get a medical team.”

  Owlstone made the call, but it was well past the point where medics could do anything. The woman and teenage girl on the king-sized bed were far beyond the need for first aid. Or any aid. Ghost sniffed the air near the bed and gave a brief whine.

  Pettit checked the adjoining bathroom. “Gun in here! Plenty of blood, no bodies.”

  “Step out, Ed,” ordered Owlstone.

  Ghost suddenly whuffed softly and sat down by the hamper, looking from it to me and back again. I froze.

  “What’s he found?” snapped Owlstone.

  “He’s cross-trained as a bomb sniffer,” I said, and the constables all took reflexive backward steps. “Don’t worry; I don’t think that’s what he’s found.”

  I was right. All we found in the hamper—after a very careful search—was dirty clothes. There was one set of coveralls with the name Plympton embroidered on the breast that Ghost sniffed, again giving us the single whuf.

  “These must be Plympton’s,” I said, “and there must be nitrates on them. He probably had these when handling the explosives at the hospital.”

  Owlstone and her men looked greatly relieved. Me, too. I fished a red rubber ball out of my pocket and tossed it in the air so Ghost could leap up and catch it. He returned it to me for another toss and tried for a third, but two catches was the reward for finding something and he knew it. His tail thumped happily on the floor, though, and that image was grotesquely at odds with what lay on the bed four feet from where the shepherd sat.

  The bodies lay straight and proper. Fully dressed, the woman in a neat red skirt, white blouse, and a vest with snowmen embroidered on it. She had a Christmas wreath pin on her left breast. Her hair was as neat as possible, given the conditions. Beside her was a teenage girl who looked like she would have been beautiful, had time and the cruelest of Fates given her a chance. Her eyes were closed, long lashes brushing perfectly smooth cheeks. She wore the skirt and blazer from an expensive girls’ school, but she had earrings in the shapes of Christmas bulbs.

  Both of them had been shot in the head. Blood trails led from the bed to the bathroom, and when I gingerly stepped past Lamba I could see that the ugly work had been done in there. The handgun, an old Webley top-break revolver, sat on the closed toilet lid. The gun was broken open, the bullets removed. The three spent shells stood in a precise line with the three unfired rounds. Bloody fingerprints smeared the casings and the toilet. The precision with which the rounds had been arranged was at odds with the smears of blood. Just as the neat and tidy positioning of the bodies belied the condition of the victims.

  “Bloody hell,” whispered Lamba. “What is this? Some kind of ritual?”

  “Looks like a professional hit,” said Pettit. “The sense of order is—”

  “No,” I cut in. “No … this is pain. I think the husband did this, and I think he made them as pretty as he could so that they wouldn’t suffer any further indignities.”

  Pettit cocked an eye at me. “Are you a forensic specialist?”

  “No,” I said, but I didn’t care to explain my thought patterns to him. I knew I was right. “There will be another note.”

  Owlstone said, “Okay, lads, you two take charge of the hall. No one comes in.” The constables nodded, clearly happy to leave the apartment. I wanted to go with them.

  Once they were gone, Owlstone called in to headquarters. She listened for almost a minute. “Yes, sir,” she said crisply, and disconnected. Then she threw a calculating look my way. “Well, Captain, I just spoke to the Chief Superintendent, who said that we are to break investigative protocol and that I was to assist you in an examination of the crime scene.”

  “And you have a problem with that because—?”

  “Mucking about with a crime scene before Forensics arrives is a great way to lose evidence.”

  “We could wait, but this is a matter of terrorism. The murder investigation is secondary. It’s more important right now to find a lead to the terrorists than it is to build a court case.”

  “If we cock this it’ll ruin me in the department,” she warned.

  “Me, too. So, let’s not cock it up.”

  I gave her my very best “hey, I’m a blond-haired blue-eyed all-American guy” smile. That smile would charm the knickers off the Queen. Owlstone’s eyes were cold and her mouth was a stiff line of disapproval, but … she nodded. And she kept her knickers on, which in light of that smile spoke to a great deal of self-control.

  We turned and faced the bed.

  The stupid smile I wore crumbled slowly into dust and fell away.

  “Damn,” I said softly.

  Owlstone sighed, and we set to work.

  Interlude Twelve

  Near Shetland in the Orkney Isles

  December 18, 10:21 A.M. GMT

  Rafael Santoro pulled the folds of his coat around him and tried not to shiver. The jacket he’d worn around London was inadequate for the wind that blew like knives across the North Sea. His gloves, purchased to allow dexterity, were equally useless.

  “’Ere, Father, take this ’fore you freeze.”

  Santoro looked up into the lined, weather-worn face of the captain of the hired boat. The man held out a battered tin mug of steaming coffee.

  “Bless you, my son,” murmured Santoro as he took the cup and buried his nose in the steam. He preferred tea, but now was not a time to be fussy. He blew on the scalding liquid and took a careful sip, but even then he burned his tongue. He winced.

  “Aye, it’s not very good,” said the captain, misreading the wince, “but it’s ’ot.”

  “It’s fine, thank you.”

  The captain was a lumpy man with a Cockney accent and a bulbous drinker’s nose webbed with purple veins. He lingered, clearly wanting something else. What now? Had the man noticed or discovered something? Did he want a bribe? Santoro looked up, hoisting a smile onto his face.

  “Something—?”

  “Well,” began the captain, fumbling with it now that he was up to it, “you see … the thing is, Father, it’s about wot ’appened in London. The fire and all. Those terrorists.” He paused. “I try to be a good Catholic, Father, but I can’t understand why God would allow this kind of thing to happen.”

  “God gives us free will, my son. He allows us to make our own choices. One day all of the wicked will be called to account for what they have done.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just it, Father. Who would want to do something like this?”

  Santoro smiled sadly and shook his head. What kind of man indeed?

  After the captain shambled away, shaking his head in confusion, Santoro closed his eyes and drifted into a comfortable doze. The question had triggered so many memories, and as the boat rocked on the waves his dreaming mind drifted back to the very first event he had orchestrated for the Seven Kings.

  Bombay, India

  March 12, 1993

  At 1:03 in the afternoon, a small man with a tidy mustache drove into the parking garage beneath the Bombay Stock Exchange, found a spot near the elevator, and turned off the engine. He sat behind the wheel for several minutes, pretending to read notes in a file folder as two carloads of employees from the exchan
ge, returning from a late lunch, walked—laughing and talking—between the rows of parked cars, waited for the elevator, and then piled into the lift. When the doors closed, the small man got out of his car. He walked quickly up and down the rows to make sure that he was alone. When he was satisfied, he unlocked his trunk and pulled back the orange blanket that covered the unconscious Pakistani man.

  The Pakistani was drugged but uninjured. Under other circumstances he would wake up in under an hour. He was dressed in the traditional clothing of a Muslim, a dark and formal sherwani and an embroidered velvet kufi. The small man bent and lifted the Pakistani out of the trunk, grunting and cursing with the effort. The drugged man was barely 140 pounds, but he was totally slack, and the small man had trouble pulling him over the lip of the trunk. It took four minutes to drag him to the open driver’s door and another three to adequately position him behind the wheel.

  By the time the small man was finished, he was bathed in sweat. He mopped his forehead very carefully so as not to remove the makeup. Though Rafael Santoro’s own Mediterranean complexion was dark, he was not as dark as an Indian. He checked his watch. One sixteen. He smiled. Plenty of time. All that remained now was to close the car door and walk away.

  He took the elevator to the lobby and walked out through the revolving door. He paused at a sidewalk stand that served nariel pani and drank the coconut water right there. So soothing after his exertions. He asked the vendor to scrape out the tender kernel inside, then strolled away, nibbling thoughtfully on it as he mentally counted the last three hundred seconds in his head to see if his calculations matched the digital timer in the trunk.

  He felt the blast before he heard it. A deep rumble like a subway train rolling beneath his feet and then muted thunder filled the air behind him as the densely packed high-RDX explosives in the car detonated. He turned to see the shock wave ripple along both sides of the street like a waft of heat haze, shimmering in the air and blowing out storefronts and car windows. Santoro wrapped his arms over his head and dropped into a squat beside a wooden kiosk where brightly colored tourist scarves were sold. The shock wave passed him and fled down the street, and he peeked through an opening in his overlapped arms. He smiled at the beauty of it.