The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  “The pictures they showed me … the things that were done to those other children. And to the women. Inhuman things. It was unbearable to think that someone could do that to another human being. To innocent children. To women. Then … he placed pictures of Mikey and Alicia next to the others. He had pictures of my wife shopping, of her in the bathtub, of us making love. The thought that they had stolen our privacy, that they were somehow watching us all this time …”

  “Your boy, too?”

  “Yes. Pictures of Mikey sleeping. One of him using the toilet at school. God!” He gagged and I didn’t know if it was the first touch of the Ebola or the sheer horror of what he was remembering.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I demanded.

  “They warned me not to. He showed me a picture of a little boy … I mean I think it was a boy. Had been a little boy. The man said that this was the result of someone else notifying the authorities. He said that if I told anyone, even my wife, then this would happen to my son. To Mikey. Even if they had to wait a month, or a year, or ten years. One day my son would vanish and if we ever found him at all there would be only pieces left to bury. He said if that happened, I would receive an e-mail with a video file showing everything that had been done to Mikey, and that the last thing the boy would be told before he died was that this was all my fault. He made me believe that there were worse things than death. Even the way Mikey died—” A sob tore its way out of his chest. “Even the way he died wouldn’t be a millionth as bad as what they would have done to him. And if I did this and let my family live, I’d go to jail and they would still be out there. How could I trust that they would leave my family alone? They might … they might …” He shook his head.

  “There’s witness protection—,” I said, but he cut me off.

  “Witness against whom? I never saw his face. He wore a black mask. All I could tell was that he was a male and had a Spanish accent.”

  The Spaniard. The mysterious figure who was the liaison between the Chosen, the Kingsmen, and the Seven Kings. Son of a bitch.

  Grey glared at me. “So … do you want to tell me that the police, or even the military, would protect me from someone I couldn’t identify? Besides,” he said, his mouth a taut and bitter line, “he said that they had people in the police, in the military, in the government. He said that they had people everywhere.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  I thought, Yeah, I probably would.

  “And,” Grey went on, “he said that he would occasionally reach out to me through other means to prove what he said. He wasn’t lying. I found notes in my locked car. Voice mails in five different voices on my phone. Notes on my desk.” He swallowed. “Even a folded note in my lab coat here in the Hot Room. They were everywhere. I thought about running, but if they are everywhere, where could I run?”

  Grey sobbed so hard that he almost dropped the beaker. My heart was in my throat. When he wiped his nose it left twin red smears on the forearm of his hazmat suit.

  “I gave them both morphine. This strain of Ebola works very fast. I thought it would hurt less than a gun. I … I’m not good with guns.”

  “Why not overdose them with morphine?”

  Fresh tears welled in his eyes. The tears were pink with blood. “I didn’t think you would believe me unless you had no choice. Seeing Mikey would convince you.”

  I wanted to take my gun and pistol-whip the shit out of him. I wasn’t a doctor and even I could have figured fifty ways to do it better than he’d done it.

  “What about the rest of the staff?” I said. “Why hold them hostage?”

  “I told you … I found notes on my desk, in my lab coat. And then the security cameras and ventilation cut out. They have someone else here. I don’t know who, so I made everyone put on hazmat suits and go into the fish tank. I locked it from the outside.” He coughed and there was blood on his lips.

  “Are the people in the fish tank infected?”

  “No, but it’s in the air with them. If you trust your people, then maybe you can interrogate them. Get one of them to talk. I didn’t release the virus until the tank door was sealed. I put a bicycle lock on the crash bar and broke the key off in the lock. You’ll have to cut it to get them out.”

  “I’m still a step behind you here, Doc. If you’re going to hand everyone over to us, why not turn yourself and your family in? This isn’t some candy-ass drug buy. This is international-incident stuff. This is terrorism. We’d be able to protect you; I guarantee it.”

  Dr. Grey looked at me with eyes that wept tears of blood. “He said that they are everywhere. The police, INTERPOL, everywhere.”

  “And yet you asked for someone from Homeland.”

  “What else could I do? I had to make this big enough so that it would be harder for them to cover it up.”

  “How do you know I’m not one of them?”

  “I looked out the window. I saw the helicopters land. Not all of you can be involved. I mean … if you are, then my family is better off out of a world like that. And if you’re not involved …”

  He looked to me for encouragement, and I gave him a small nod.

  “ … then please do something.”

  “You haven’t told me much, Doc. How is this connected with the bombing at the London?”

  Grey stared bug-eyed at me. “Is it? Oh my God! Are you sure?”

  “The Seven Kings put their mark on both places right before things went to hell. You’re involved in this thing; you tell me.”

  He gave me a frank and uncomprehending stare. “Who are the Seven Kings?”

  “Their symbol is painted in blood on the wall outside of the Hot Room.”

  “I … saw that outside when I sent Mikey to … to …” He shook his head. “I don’t know what it means.”

  “The guy who roughed you up, the Spaniard. Did he say anything about why they were doing this? Or about what they wanted?”

  He laughed and then abruptly turned his head and spit blood onto the cold floor. “He never said why. He only told me what he wanted me to do. He said, ‘Go to your job, remove the Ebola from the vault, and spill it on the floor of the Hot Room.’”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Just that. Since the fail-safes were supposed to kick in as soon as there was a biological accident, I thought that all they wanted was an incident. Maybe kill some of the staff and expose America’s involvement in secret bioweapons testing. It’s the only thing that made any sense. Then the vent controls went down and the fail-safes never kicked in.”

  “And he never mentioned the Seven Kings?” I asked. “Or even just ‘Kings’?”

  “No, just the Goddess, and I—”

  “Goddess? Tell me exactly what he said.”

  “Both times he attacked me he mentioned the Goddess. When he promised not to hurt my family if I did what he wanted, he swore by the Goddess. And yesterday, when he attacked me in my garage, he said that ‘nothing is impossible if the Goddess wills it to be.’ He held a knife up to my eye and made me swear that I believe in the Goddess. I … got it wrong first, I said that I believed in God, and he got so mad I thought he would kill me right there. He kept ranting about faith and how the Goddess was his shield and he was her sword. Crazy stuff like that. Then he gave me his knife and told me to kill him. He said that his faith would protect him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? He said that if I didn’t try to kill him he would go upstairs and turn Mikey into one of his angels. God. That’s what he called the poor women and children in those photos. Angels. He called his victims ‘angels.’”

  Grey described how he had tried to kill the Spaniard and how the man had disarmed and beaten him without effort. “He was so fast. I … I never saw him move. God, please! I couldn’t let him do that—I couldn’t let him turn Mikey into an angel.”

  His sobs were as deep and as broken as any I’d ever witnessed. This man, this Spani
ard, had killed Dr. Grey long before today. He’d broken Grey’s spirit and his mind and cut away the fabric of hope and trust that bound his life together. It was horrible to witness and it provoked in me an atavistic dread of the Spaniard, and of the Seven Kings and the Goddess they worshiped. A dread … and a killing rage that burned like boiled acid under my skin. I wanted to face this man, and I knew that I didn’t want to do so from the cold and antiseptic distance of a gun. I wanted to be up close and very personal with the Spaniard. Knife to knife, or—far better yet—hand to hand.

  Grey coughed and the sound dragged me back from the edge of a red darkness and into the broken moment. I looked at Grey and thought about Plympton. The selection of these men had to have other elements. I mean … hell, I had a family that I loved—my dad, my brother and his wife and kid, couple of aunts—but I wouldn’t slaughter four thousand people in a hospital to protect them. I’d find some other way to keep them safe while I looked into it. So, okay, I’m a cop and a federal agent, and psychologically speaking I have a headful of bees and spiders, but I could not believe that there were levers strong enough to turn me into a mass murderer. What was it about Grey and Plympton that made them different?

  “I’m going to find out who did this,” I said. “I am going to find them and I can guarantee you, Dr. Grey, I will show them what ‘terror’ really means.”

  He closed his eyes. “I wish I could believe you.”

  I said nothing to that. He was starting to drift. Bloody sweat was leaking from his pores.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” I said softly.

  He nodded weakly. “I wrote an account of it. Of everything. It’s on my laptop, in the documents section. My password is grásta.’ With an accent over the first a. It’s hidden in a folder called ‘Christmas List.’”

  “What’s grásta mean?”

  “My family’s Irish. That’s Gaelic,” he said. “For ‘mercy.’”

  I stood and stretched out my left hand. “Give me the beaker.”

  He smiled and looked at the swirling brown mixture with the red veins. “It’s not what I said it was,” he said. “It’s just coffee and Tabasco sauce.”

  He handed it to me. I still took it carefully and set it on the desk.

  “Mercy,” I said.

  “Grásta. But I don’t deserve it.” He buried his face in his hands. I could hear him saying the names of his wife and son over and over again.

  Mercy.

  I’m no saint. Furthest thing from it. But I can at least grant a little mercy.

  I raised my gun and put the laser sight on him.

  Interlude Twenty-three

  Aboard the Delta of Venus

  The St. Lawrence River

  Four Months Ago

  Sebastian Gault lay with his head on Eris’s naked breast as the stars wheeled overhead. The boat rocked gently under them, dark water slapping against the hull. Far away on Crown Island, cicadas and crickets made the darkness pulse with life. Fireflies were pinpricks of light as they flitted among the tall grasses on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.

  “I’m glad you accepted our offer, lovely boy,” Eris murmured.

  “You knew I would,” said Gault. “It feels a little surreal, though. Kings and thrones.”

  She laughed, deep and throaty. “It is surreal. We’re remaking the world into what we want it to be.”

  “I hadn’t expected you to be the driving force for this thing.”

  “Oh … you know, ‘behind every great man is a—”

  “totally psycho power-hungry bitch?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And sonny boy is fine with that?”

  “He’s less devoted to the Goddess than his fellow Kings, but he’ll do his part.”

  “What about the others? Are they all still in your corner?”

  “They are,” she said as she ran her fingernails down his chest and over his hard stomach. “I have a special relationship with each of the Kings.”

  “God, please don’t tell me that you and your son are—”

  “No.” She laughed. “Just the other Kings. I’m corrupt, lovely boy, but not tacky.”

  “Thank god for small mercies.”

  “Thank ‘Goddess,’” she corrected.

  “Ah, yes.”

  They lay together and watched as several meteors burned their way through the blackness. Minutes drifted past them on the current of the night.

  “Sebastian … ?”

  “Mm?”

  “You loved her, didn’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Amirah. Your pretty little Iraqi mad scientist. You really loved her, didn’t you?”

  He closed his eyes, shutting out even the simple beauty of the star field above. “Love is a quicksand pit.”

  “You’re being evasive.”

  “Did I love her? Yes. Deeply, and despite the fact that she was married to another man, and despite the fact that I had several times planned to kill her, and despite the fact that she betrayed me and tried to kill me, I loved her to the end.” He made a low, feral sound and a shudder passed through his whole body. “I still do, and I wish I could take a scalpel and carve that emotion out of my body. I’m not joking, Eris … . If I could actually cut it out, I would.”

  “Is that what your plan is? The course of action you proposed to the Kings—is that the scalpel you want to use?”

  He sat up and looked down at her. It was so dark that she was merely a paleness woven into the fabric of shadows.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Eris propped herself on one elbow. “Oh, don’t take offense, Sebastian. You can’t possibly be dense enough to believe that you’re not damaged goods. We all are or we wouldn’t be the people we’ve become. You are one of the greatest pharmaceutical researchers on the planet, a self-made rags-to-riches billionaire, and yet you’ve spent most of your adult life covertly funding terrorist organizations and creating exotic diseases just so you could be the first to bring treatments to market. You’re a thoroughly corrupt mass murderer. You paid to have a certifiably insane molecular biologist design a pathogen that could easily—easily—have caused a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions. If it wasn’t for Joe Ledger and the DMS, this whole world would look like a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. And now you have been brought into a secret society, a group that has asked you to help them destabilize the economies of the global superpowers by any means necessary. You are all those things, lovely boy, and yet when you spoke tonight about what you would be willing to do as part of the Seven Kings there wasn’t a flicker of greed in your voice. There wasn’t ego or megalomania. What I heard was a person in pain who wanted to stop hurting.”

  “How do you know what I said or how I said it, damn it? You weren’t even there.”

  She laughed. “I’m always there, Sebastian.”

  Gault said nothing.

  “And you, lovely boy, are still being evasive. Surely you have the balls to admit the nature of your motivations. Or should I go looking for them?” Her fingers brushed his upper thigh and he batted them irritably away.

  “What do you want from me?” he snapped.

  “Only the truth,” she said. “That’s the only thing that matters between us. Between the Seven Kings, their Consciences, and their Goddess. No lies, no secrets.”

  The wheel of night turned and turned above them before Gault could bring himself to speak, and when he did there were ghosts in his voice.

  “I … died,” he said. “When Amirah betrayed me, when it all crashed down … I died. I could feel it inside. It was like a poison had taken hold of me. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? It does. I saw everything that I had done; I saw all the versions of myself. The child, the lad, the young entrepreneur, the man. I saw myself expand into a captain of industry. I saw the specific moments of my own corruption. My first dirty deal. I saw the faces of the people who were dead because I wanted them dead. I saw the friends
betrayed and cast aside. And I saw Amirah’s face—beautiful before her betrayal and beautiful and monstrous after. I saw the monster that lived within me. I felt the humanity in me die, Eris. I felt it go and …”

  His fingers closed around hers and she squeezed back.

  “ … and I was glad. God, I was so glad to be rid of it. It was a tumor, a canker.” His voice was a reptilian hiss.

  “Sebastian … my lovely boy …” Eris bent toward him, finding his face in the dark. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, and as he spoke his cold words were breathed into her hot mouth.

  “All that remains is the monster,” he said.

  Eris took him in her arms and held him. Tears flowed like hot mercury from her eyes and splashed on his shoulder.

  “This is so beautiful, my sweet,” she said. “This is what Caesar knew when he realized that he was more than man. This is what the pharaohs knew, and the first emperor of China. To be a King—a true king—is to be greater than a man.” She showered his face with a thousand quick kisses. “You’ve ascended. You’ve become. Anything and anyone to whom you were attached before this moment is gone. You don’t need them anymore. You are a King, a true king of this world, and you will be a god in the next.”

  They clung together in the darkness of their own passion.

  BELOWDECKS, IN A cabin that was spacious, luxurious, private, but not as soundproof as its designers intended, Toys, the Conscience to the King of Plagues, sat on a bunk, his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around his shins, fingers interlaced, head leaning against the hull. The cabin was as dark and desolate as his heart.

  He had listened to the sounds of Sebastian and Eris making love, and it had amused him, even aroused him. Then he had listened to their whispered conversation.

  All that remains is the monster.

  Toys stared at the darkness in his cabin, but what he saw was a deeper and greater darkness within. He looked at his own hands. They were bloodstained, too; he knew that. Since he had become Gault’s personal assistant and closest confidant, he had charred his own soul with unnumbered crimes. His Catholic guilt had been nicely off-line for years now, surfacing only long enough to compel him to light a candle two or three times a year for all of the lives he had helped to destroy. His comfort and solace had been that over the last two thousand years the Catholic Church itself had done far worse, even without counting the excesses of the Inquisition.