The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  He turned as the crowds of people around him shook off their shock and ran toward the burning building. Santoro consulted his watch. His mental calculation had been off by less than fifteen seconds. The watch read: 1:30.

  The crowd surged past him and he allowed the tide to pull him back to the scene of the disaster. He stood with the others and watched as the stock exchange burned, and when the flames leaped to the adjoining buildings Santoro hid a small smile. He stayed there for over an hour, and by then news that there had been a second blast was already being circulated. By the time he reached his hotel room and ordered a meal, the news stations were frantic with reports of bombings all across Bombay. The current estimate was eight, but Santoro knew that there would be more. Twenty had been planned. Some in cars, others on buses and even in the saddlebags of scooters.

  Room service arrived and he ate a healthy meal of curry, flavored with coconut, tamarind, chili, and spices, with basmati rice. He tipped the boy and settled down to his meal.

  He ordered a bottle of wine and sat with it in a comfortable chair. He was glad that he had not been one of the agents who had been ordered to leave a suitcase bomb in his hotel. He liked this place. Maybe next spring he’d come back here. He wasn’t as fond of the Juhu Centaur Hotel or the Hotel Sea Rock, so he didn’t mind when the increasingly shocked reporters told of blasts that tore through each of them. Other bombs destroyed the Plaza Theatre, the Nair and J.J. hospitals, part of the University of Bombay, and the Zaveri, Century, and Katha bazaars. He watched the news all day. He was mildly disappointed that the rail station bombs were found and defused before they could detonate. By day’s end the tally was thirteen blasts that claimed 257 lives and left over seven hundred injured. A nice day’s work.

  He could not help but laugh as the police and various “experts” on terrorism discussed and debated the reason for the attacks. The air of Bombay was thick with paranoia.

  Santoro showered, washing away the brown dye that made him look Indian. He would apply a fresh coat tomorrow before he checked out of the hotel.

  He toweled off and got ready for bed. He knew that the whole plan would succeed. It was like clockwork. Long in the planning, subtle in the orchestration, deceptively simple in execution. A bread trail would lead the police toward a Muslim crime family who would take the fall. Lovely. There were no loose ends for the police to follow, nothing that would lead them back to Santoro, or to the men who had hired him to plan and execute what had been discreetly referred to as the Bombay Holiday.

  Muslims had nothing to do with it. It was not part of any Islamic jihad. It had, in fact, nothing at all to do with any religious ideology and it made no specific theological statement. At least, not as far as Santoro knew. He was fairly insightful, and as far as he could judge, this whole thing was about what it was always about.

  Money and power.

  With that happy thought in his head, Santoro pulled up the sheet, snuggled into the pillow, and fell into a deep and untroubled sleep, content in the knowledge the world would never be the same again. The Seven Kings would be pleased. His last thought as he drifted off was, The Goddess will love me for this.

  THE BOAT THUMPED down over a tall wave and Santoro jolted awake. He looked around, his hand touching the knife beneath his clothes.

  The captain saw him and smiled. “Wind’s picking up,” he said. “We’re ’itting some chop, but we’ll be in port before it gets too bad.”

  “Yes,” said Santoro, but he was agreeing to a different meaning entirely.

  Smiling, Santoro took his iPhone out of his pocket and checked his text messages. There were separate notes of congratulations from each of the Seven Kings. Both the King of Fear and the King of Plagues asked him how things were progressing on Fair Isle. To both, Santoro sent the same message:

  Crimson rivers will flow.

  He could imagine the champagne corks popping as that was read aloud in the Chamber of the Kings. Just before the boat docked, Santoro received a message from the Goddess herself:

  You are the beloved Sword of the Goddess.

  The world swam around him and Santoro felt tears stinging his eyes.

  He bent his head and whispered prayers of thanks and love to the Goddess, and prayed to her that he might soon be lifted from the flesh of a servant to the spirit of a god. Her God.

  Her God and lover.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Plympton Crime Scene

  Whitechapel, London

  December 18, 10:36 A.M. GMT

  Owlstone removed two pairs of latex gloves from her pocket and handed a set to me. I pulled them on and took my camera from my jacket. It’s a special design that takes thirty-five megapixel shots at ultrafine quality, with a three-hundred-image capacity. A prototype from one of Church’s friends in the industry. I clicked off a hundred shots, moving fast, trusting to the anti-shake function to capture everything. At least the forensics team would have some nice pictures to look at.

  Nice.

  Christ.

  When I finished taking the pics I took a small cable from my pocket and connected the camera to my phone and then sent the images via satellite to Church, Benson Childe, Jerry Spencer, Bug, and Dr. Hu.

  Photos on the bureau made it clear that the victims were the mother and daughter who had lived here. Laura Plympton, forty-one, and daughter, Zoë, fifteen. They’d both been pretty.

  “Look at this,” Owlstone said, her voice dropping into a whisper. She drew a cheap plastic pen from her inner pocket and touched the curled left hand of Laura Plympton. I came around to her side of the bed. I took my penlight and shined it into the dark hollow formed by her curled white fingers. “Is that paper?”

  “You have a good eye, Detective Sergeant,” I said, and took some close-ups of Laura Plympton’s hand. “You ought to consider a career in criminal investigation.”

  “Oh yes, very funny.”

  We very slowly, very carefully worked together to gently spread Laura Plympton’s fingers. She must have been murdered early yesterday morning, so rigor had come and gone, leaving her fingers slack in a creepy, rubbery way. In death her bladder and bowels had released, so the smells that rose from her were eye-watering, and buried beneath them were the beginnings of the sweet stink of decomposition.

  Owlstone slid the paper out and I lowered Plympton’s hand back to its resting place on her breast. I knew that she was dead and far beyond any feeling, but I felt like I wanted to apologize to her for this necessary violation.

  We carried the paper to the dresser and carefully unfolded it. It was a quarter of a piece of ordinary computer paper folded several times and then rolled into a cylinder. There were several lines handwritten on it in blue ballpoint:

  My Sweet Laura and Precious Zoë,

  I know that what I have done is unforgivable.

  I have damned my immortal soul for all eternity,

  but at least what I have done here in our home

  will save you both from greater horrors.

  It was the only way to save you both from them.

  They are everywhere.

  I could not let them do those things to you.

  Not even if I am to burn in hell.

  God accept and protect you both.

  My greatest regret is that I will not be able

  to join you in paradise.

  I will try to make it right if I can, but I know they are watching.

  I don’t ask for or expect forgiveness.

  They are not kings. They are monsters.

  I am only the monster they made me.

  It was unsigned. The paper was stained with bloody fingerprints and the distinctive pucker marks of dried water. Tears, without a doubt.

  There was a reference to the Kings, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. Was Plympton not part of the Kings?

  I am only the monster they made me.

  Was that an admission that he had become corrupted by the Kings? Or had they somehow coerced him into this?

/>   They are not kings. They are monsters.

  No shit.

  I looked at Owlstone and saw confusion and compassion warring on her young face. As one we straightened and turned to look at the bodies on the bed.

  “What the hell are we into here, Captain?”

  They are everywhere. He had underlined “everywhere” half a dozen times.

  “It’s Joe,” I said, “and in my considered opinion as a professional investigator, it beats the hell out of me.”

  Though … that was not entirely true. An idea was beginning to form in one of the darker side corridors in my broken head.

  I am only the monster they made me.

  My phone rang. It was Church.

  “Sit rep?” he demanded.

  I told him and started to explain, but he cut me off.

  “We have what we need from that site. Leave the rest to the locals. I’m three minutes away. Be downstairs.”

  “I think I’m on to something here, I don’t want to bug out now.”

  “Would you rather hear about it from the Emergency Broadcast System?”

  Shit.

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  Interlude Thirteen

  T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State

  Three and a Half Months Before the London Event

  The range master at Terror Town was slim, swarthy, bearded, and had a beaky nose and dark eyes. The name embroidered on his chest was Muhammad. A few sorry souls had made jokes around him with words like “towel head,” “camel jockey,” and “sand nigger.” They misunderstood his stance on racial epithets, because they thought that if he was working this range then Muhammad could not be either a devout Muslim or a true Arab. Of those sorry souls, the ones who were able to walk away from the range under their own steam were encouraged to pack their bags and go find a clue. The rest received the very best of emergency care in the T-Town infirmary.

  Circe O’Tree had been there for one of those encounters. The whole thing was over in a second and a man much bigger than Muhammad lay in a fetal position, hands clutching his groin, faced screwed into a purple knot of silent agony. The sight had bothered Circe for weeks. But she could not find any fault with the range master. He never once started a fight; his view, however, was that even small hate crimes should be “appropriately addressed.”

  Although she worked around violence all day and though she had logged hundreds of hours on the combat ranges and in the self-defense classes, Circe had never before been a witness to actual violence. Even so, threads of violence were sown through her life. Her mother and sister had died violently, her father was in one of the more ferocious departments of government service, and all of her friends were either current or former military or scientists like her, who studied war and conflict.

  The relationship between Chief Petty Officer Abdul Muhammad and Dr. Circe O’Tree was complicated, its parameters unspoken. He cut her no slack, but he always gave her a little extra advice and encouragement. He also let her train in the late evenings after the teams had called it a night. Though most of the men at T-Town respected—or perhaps dreaded—Muhammad, they frequently forgot themselves when Circe was on-deck. She was a very beautiful woman with a figure that drew the eyes of normally focused shooters away from their targets. Range scores plummeted when she was on-deck.

  And she found the whole thing exceptionally tiresome. She couldn’t change her genetics, and dressing down in shapeless clothes was an admission of defeat. After ignoring the testosterone-infused nonsense for months, she began coming later and later to the range. Now it was full dark and the sky above glittered with 10 billion diamonds. The August breeze off of Mount Baker was cool and soothing after hours spent with her computer.

  “Your mind is not in the game, Doc,” Muhammad growled after she finished her last grouped shots.

  Circe cleared and benched the gun. There was no one else on the range, but the proper etiquette had become ingrained. You earned a sharp rebuke only once from Muhammad, and you never forgot it. On her second day at T-Town Circe had stepped past the firing line before all of the other shooters had declared their weapons benched. Muhammad read her the riot act in front of everyone and he was thorough about it. Then he made her stay an extra hour and practice the rules of handgun safety, shouting out each step no matter who was firing. The lesson sank in.

  She pulled off her ear defenders. “Lot on my mind tonight, Chief.”

  “You haven’t scored this low since your first month.”

  She looked downrange as the target moved toward her on a pulley. She had fired all fifteen rounds from a Glock 22. She was not a brilliant shooter, but she was a competent and consistent one, usually putting eleven rounds out of each magazine into the kill zone of a suspended target fifteen yards away. At twenty-five yards she lost a bit of her accuracy if firing fast, but in a slow fire drill she was a very good shot.

  Muhammad folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the shooting stall.

  “Why do you practice with a handgun?”

  She almost sighed. This was one of the Chief ’s ritual questions.

  “To save my life and the lives of those in my charge.”

  “How do you accomplish this?”

  “By hitting what I aim at with focus, speed, and commitment.”

  “Uh-huh. So tell me, Doc, what part of that sounds like ‘I got too much on my mind’?”

  “Nothing, Chief.”

  “Very well. Bring your gear.”

  When he said that it only meant one thing: the combat range.

  Circe regretted coming out to the range this late. She had wanted to work off some nervous energy and blow holes in the wild theories that were forming in her mind. Bringing her problems to the range had been foolish.

  She gathered up her gear, making sure to do each step of gun safety exactly the right way even though Chief Muhammad did not appear to be watching. She ran to catch up with him and followed him down a long and windy cinder-block corridor. The block walls were filled in with tightly packed dirt to catch ricochets, and the corridors smelled like a graveyard.

  They came out into the maze of T-Town’s eighteen combat ranges. Each one was designed to allow operatives to train for different kinds of circumstances: city street, subway, airplane, airport, business, government office, house, and others.

  Muhammad chose the shortest of the ranges, a mom-and-pop corner store. Circe knew that there were nine Pepper Poppers—metal silhouette targets that could be positioned throughout the range and operated by remote control. They were hinged at the bottom so that they could swing up on fast spring releases or fall back after being shot. At least four of the targets would be hostiles, the rest designated as “possible” noncombatants. The “possible” part was crucial, because in the War on Terror the enemy didn’t wear uniforms or team shirts.

  “How many mags, Chief?”

  Muhammad grinned. He took a magazine from her pack, thumbed four rounds out, and handed it over. “Eleven rounds. Best intel says four hostiles. Could be five. That gives you two per and three for luck.”

  “I never did this with less than two full magazines.”

  He shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes. What if a situation turned out to be bigger and badder than you expected? You want to read a rule book at a hostile? Think that’ll win the day, Doc?”

  “No, Chief.”

  “Now, you run this range and I don’t want to hear from jams, tripping over your shoelaces, or a text message from your friends. You run it like you know how to run it and keep your head in the fucking game. You read me, Dr. O’Tree?”

  She had never been in the military, but she snapped to attention. “I read you, Chief.”

  “Then it’s time to go to work.”

  Muhammad put a wooden matchstick between his teeth and walked off the range and into the steel observation bunker. There was a warning buzzer announcing a live fire exercise and the lights in the store came on.

  Circe called, “Loading!�
�� She slapped the magazine into the Glock and racked the slide, keeping the barrel pointed into the range, her finger along the trigger guard. Muhammad’s words from their very first training session echoed in her mind.

  Shake hands with the grip. Snug but comfortable. Get to know the weight. Fit the handle into the vee formed by the thumb and index finger of the shooting hand as high as possible on the backstrap. Your strong hand holds and fires; your weak hand completes the grip and supports.

  Muhammad’s amplified voice growled from a speaker, “Ready on the firing line!”

  Circe could feel her heart hammering, but she took several deep breaths to relax her mind and muscles.

  Muhammad spoke from her memories: Breath control minimizes body movement and that in turn reduces handgun movement.

  “Go!”

  Circe kicked in the door and entered fast, sliding to one side and bringing her gun up in a two-handed grip, the sights level with her eyes.

  Aim with your dominant eye when shooting a handgun. Even if you’re right-handed it does not mean that you are right-eyed dominant. Learn your body and work with it in the most natural way.

  A target pivoted toward her. A teenager in a Brooklyn T-Shirt and jeans, but he was pulling a pistol from his belt. Circe shot him in the chest and again in the face.