The red light turned green and the small convoy—the surfer boys and me—started up. Road speed was forty and we’d just gotten to thirty-five when the driver suddenly stamped hard on the brakes. I was two car lengths back and I have fast reflexes, but the front of my Explorer still chunked into the back of the De Soto. Not hard enough to deploy the airbags but hard enough to hurl me against the seat belt with enough force to snap my teeth shut and half the breath to be punched out of my lungs. Ghost went flying forward, slamming heavily into the glove compartment and then crashing down into the footwell. He yelped and barked and then began to growl as he scrambled to claw his way back onto the seat.
I threw the car into park, and sat there, neck hurting and head swimming.
Through the window I could see the two surfer jocks open their doors and step out. One wore bright blue trunks and woven hemp sandals, no shirt. The other had a threadbare SURF SAN DIEGO tank top over khaki shorts and flip-flops. Ghost was leaning forward, nose pressed to the windshield, muzzle wrinkled, teeth bared. I was so pissed that I was tempted to let the dog go use his teeth to teach these stoners some manners. Instead I clicked my tongue a couple of times to give him the code for standing down. He continued to growl, so I poked his shoulder with a stiff forefinger.
“Ghost, settle.”
He turned toward me, teeth still bared, and growled again. At me.
My anger turned to a deep and sudden apprehension.
“Ghost,” I said, forcing my voice to be firm, commanding, but calm, “settle.”
We stared at each other for five long seconds. The look in Ghost’s eyes was hostile, feral. His six titanium teeth—replacements after a fight with Red Knights in Iran—glittered like daggers. I love my dog, and my heart was hammering at the thought that this moment might twist its way down into something weird and bad.
Then I saw doubt flicker in those familiar brown eyes. His muzzle trembled, the lips dropping to cover those teeth.
“Ghost,” I said, “settle.”
The tension drained slowly from his muscular shoulders and neck and he sagged back, looking confused and even a little scared by what had happened between us. He whimpered softly and thumped his tail. I reached slowly over to him and he pressed his head into my palm. I wanted to pull him close, hug him, fix whatever was wrong between us.
I never got the chance.
There was a heavy thud on the outside of my door, hard enough to rock the car on its springs. I whipped around to see Blue Shorts cock his leg for a second kick. Ghost snapped back into combat mode, rising, snapping out a warning bark.
Tank Top kicked the window on Ghost’s side of the car. It was a powerful kick that sent a crack running from side to side. It sent Ghost into a frenzy, barking loud enough to burst my eardrums and throwing his body against the glass.
So I thought, fuck it.
I jerked the door open. Ghost whirled and I gave him a command.
“Roll down.”
It was our code for taking someone down but not killing them. He shot past me with a look of wild animal joy in his dark eyes. He shot past Blue Shorts and there was a howl—human, I think—as Ghost launched himself at Tank Top.
Blue Shorts tried to deck me as I got out of the car. He kicked the door, trying to smash my leg, but I jammed it with the heel of my palm, then shoved it open as I got out. He swung a heavy right hook punch at my face, and he put his whole body into it, trying to drop me with a single blow. Even weak and wasted I slap-parried the hit and drilled a single-knuckle punch into the flat meat of his left pectoral. It staggered him, but not as much as it should have. He was muscular and his chest was beefy, but he wasn’t made of stone. That punch should have hurt him, but he shook it off and waded into me with a series of fast lefts and rights, swinging wide but not wild, trying to get torque into his hits so they’d do real damage.
There are a lot of ways to manage a fight. If I thought this clown was a real bad guy, a killer, I’d have put him down in about two seconds. If you’re an expert, killing is easier than controlling. Thing was, though, I didn’t know why he was attacking me. He was dressed for the beach and he looked like an overgrown beach bum. A professional might have dressed like this for surprise but in such a case there would be a gun in play by now. He was just wailing on me. Maybe he was high, maybe he was nuts. I danced backward, tucking my chin, using shoulders and elbows and palms to keep him from doing real damage, and all the time I was yelling at him to get him to stop, to tell me what was going on. He said nothing. His eyes were glazed, almost unfocused, and there was very little expression on his face.
Suddenly an icy hand clamped around my heart. It was exactly the same kind of expression that had been in Rudy’s eyes.
Exactly the same.
Shit.
Ghost had the other guy down, and I could hear growls but no screams. That wasn’t good. All around me cars were stopping and people were gathering, watching, yelling, demanding to know what was going on.
Blue Shorts slipped a nice one past my guard and tagged me solidly in the short ribs, driving the air out of my lungs in a deep whoosh. The Killer inside my soul roared and I could feel his bloodlust, his murderous desires trying to batter aside my conscious control. God, if he took over this fight, then surfer boy here was going to die in a quick and ugly way.
I jumped backward out of range of his next punch, and away from my own ability to reach out with a killing blow.
And then the Killer was gone.
There was a sudden immense silence inside my head. The red rage was gone as soon as it had appeared. The other aspects of myself, the Modern Man and the Cop, were jarred into silence, too.
The next punch nearly took my head off.
I heard someone yell, “Hey—watch!”
I got a hand up just in time, but the blow was packed with everything Blue Shorts had. It crashed into my forearm and sent me reeling sideways into a parked car. I rebounded and he hit me with a straight right hand to the chest that stalled me into a statue. It was like having a mining machine bore a hole straight through my sternum and out through my backbone. Then Blue Shorts closed in to smash me with an elbow across the face.
I fell against him to jam the blow and because I had nothing else. Not in that instant. I was bigger and heavier than him and my sagging weight drove us both backward like a boxer clinching with a better fighter while trying to catch a little air. Lights were exploding inside my head and I knew that I was maybe one hit away from going down.
So I used the clumsy embrace to slam him against the fender of my car. As we hit I drove my knee into his crotch, head-butted him, and then grabbed his hair and jerked his head down as I brought my knee up again. It mashed him. His nose and lips split and the power went out of his knees. Gasping and dazed, I shoved myself back from him and took him down with a sloppy foot-sweep. He landed hard and badly and lay there, curling into a fetal ball.
I staggered back and had to lean on the car to walk around it, afraid of what I was going to find on the other side. Tank Top was down and bloody, but Ghost had been in more control of his fight than I had. His guy was chopped up a bit, but not in any way that wouldn’t heal. Tank Top would be fine after some stitches, some cosmetic surgery, and a lot of physical therapy. He got off lucky, because although Ghost is a loveable goof most of the time he is by nature and training a killer. He has a lot of experience in the hunt and in the kill.
I got some flex-cuffs out of my car and bound both men and then leaned like a sloppy drunk against the door and called the police and the Pier.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 8, 6:38 P.M.
The EMTs took the surfer boys away and I wasted time filling out police reports. By the time I got back to the Pier I could feel each separate place where I’d been hit, and I hurt. A lot.
I went over it with Church, with the duty officer, with Lydia-Rose,
with the DMS attorneys. The story did not vary and it did not make sense. Was this a mugging? Was it some kind of drug-induced road rage? Neither of the surfers had a record more serious than parking tickets. Neither had any political ties of any significant kind.
So … what was this?
I thought of Rudy and Glory Price and wondered it if was possible for there to be such a thing as a plague of random violence. Normally that would be the kind of question I’d ask Rudy.
Damn it.
I went into my office bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face and wondered who the hell the old guy was who looked back at me from the mirror. Thin, sallow, with bags under his eyes and a shifty expression. I wouldn’t trust that face if I was seated next to him on the bus.
“Well,” I told him, “are you a lot of fun to be around.”
He told me to go fuck myself.
My phone rang and I hurried back to take the call. It was Church and I could hear the whine of a helicopter behind him. An echo of that reached me through my window and it was clear he was on the roof helipad.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Airport,” he said. “I’m going to Madison.”
He told me about the incident at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories, and the subsequent murder-suicide at the police station. Captain Allison Craft and her partner were dead. So was the only suspect who could explain what happened.
“What did they get away with?” I asked.
He said, “That lab processes rare strains, mutated strains, and weaponized strains of highly infectious diseases. The perpetrator stole samples of several of the most virulent diseases currently in existence. And, Captain … one of them is SX-56.”
I nearly slid out of my chair. The room was suddenly too bright, the edges of everything too sharply defined. It felt like I was surrounded by things that could cut me.
SX-56.
“Jesus Christ…,” I breathed. I’ve faced all kinds of monsters, but it’s not the ones with fangs and claws that scare me. Not really. It’s the ones too small to hit, too small to shoot. Viruses.
SX-56 was a hypervirulent strain of smallpox. The disease has been killing people since at least 10,000 BC. They found traces of it on the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V. At the end of the eighteenth century it was killing four hundred thousand people each year in Europe alone. It ravaged the skin, caused blindness in many of its victims, and even though it was lethal to everyone, it was particularly aggressive in kids, killing 80 percent of those infected. Conservative global estimates of people killed by smallpox in the early to mid-twentieth century? Maybe five hundred million.
Be with that number for a moment. Let it bite you deep enough to bleed.
Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together to produce vaccines that stopped the disease in its tracks. The global eradication of smallpox was declared December 9, 1979. The monster was dead. We’d won.
Except that we didn’t.
Samples of the smallpox virus existed in labs, in viral storage facilities, and in government bioweapons research centers. Yeah … the kinds of labs that are illegal according to all international treaties. But Russia has them, so does China, and every other major power.
So do we.
A few years ago new cases of smallpox began cropping up. Mutant strains that were resistant to the vaccines. They struck and they went away. Over and over again. The press lauded the World Health Organization doctors who descended on the outbreak sites and prevented the spread, and yes, those guys are actual superheroes. But here’s the thing … those outbreaks were deliberate and careful experiments conducted by terrorist groups. It was a pattern I’ve seen too often. I shut down a few of these labs, and in such cases I tended to be moderately harsh. Scorched earth harsh.
The latest and deadliest strain of smallpox was SX-56, developed in Russia by a team officially labeled as “rogues.” I knew better. Everyone in my line of work knew better. They were no more rogue than the Ghost Net hackers who were officially disavowed by the Chinese government.
SX-56 is a monster. There’s nothing scarier. It’s on a par with seif al din and Lucifer 113. Yeah, that kind of scary. It is an ultra-quick-onset weaponized pathogen. Because the virus has a simple gene structure it doesn’t need much incubation time. Unlike anthrax, there’s no specific drug, antibiotic, or antiviral medicine that can treat people who have it. You get it and you die. If you’re an adult you might live long enough to see your children die first. It is an immensely cruel weapon. I knew that research samples of it existed at the CDC, the National Institutes for Health, the FDA, and even in labs affiliated with Homeland Security. The lack of tighter regulations is one of the reasons I never get a good night’s sleep.
And Nathan Cross stole it and sent it off strapped to a fucking drone.
Holy God. Is the entire world insane? I mean, really … tell me that we’re not all out of our son of a bitching minds.
“What the hell is happening?” I demanded. “Why are people going crazy?”
“I don’t know,” said Church. “I’m afraid many of the answers are buried down at Gateway.”
He hadn’t meant it to hurt, but it hurt.
It really killed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 8, 8:06 P.M.
Here’s another fine example of the world kicking me when I’m down.
The smallpox case was taken away from us before Church had even made it to the airport. Gone. Bam. Done. Handed over to the CIA. Brick called to tell me. He didn’t say so, but I had the feeling that Church was not in any mood to tell me himself. Church has iron control but no one can take that many punches in a row. They were on their way back to the Pier.
You can sit there and gape in shock or you can do something. I yelled at Bug and at Dr. Hu to get me some actionable information. Bug already had his whole team on it, and he didn’t seem to care any more than I did that this wasn’t our case. Hu, who usually entertains himself by insulting me, had a different take today.
He said, “Believe me, Ledger, I am going to make sense of this. I am not going to be ass-raped by the fucking CIA.”
Then he hung up. I wanted to pat him on the back.
After that, I began tearing through the reports of the DMS failures, looking for patterns and trying to build a case out of scant information. No, let me correct that. It wasn’t that we had insufficient information, we actually had a lot of it, but so far it didn’t make much sense. The Cop part of my brain was offended by that. I needed answers and I needed logic. I’m occasionally an idiot, I’ll accept that, but at the end of the day I am a trained investigator who needs things to make sense. You see, people don’t understand the cop mind. They think we like puzzles. We absolutely do not. We like order. We attack mysteries in order to put disparate pieces back into their proper place. We don’t enjoy the process. It’s the end result that matters. Order out of chaos. It’s not entertainment, it’s who we are.
So the core of this thing seemed to originate at Gateway and the projects Erskine was running. Using what few resources I had, I began to make a list of the things I knew and to draw inferences from them.
Point one, the God Machine. It looked mostly but not entirely like a hadron collider. It had a hatch or opening. Air passed in and out of it. What was it? I had no idea because I lacked enough information.
Point two. Kill Switch. It was a directed-energy weapon that appeared to be able to temporarily interrupt electrical fields. It was nonlethal. Top, Bunny, and I had been exposed to it down at Gateway. People in Houston, at the NASCAR track, and at the debate had all been exposed to it. It stopped everything from digital watches to cell phones to engines. According to the reports it also stopped pacemakers. However, it did not short-circuit the central nervous system of living beings. There were no animal deaths. Not even birds or insects. I calle
d Dr. Hu back and asked him about that. He told me that it was scientifically impossible. He sounded offended by that, too. And he hung up on me again.
Point three. Dreamwalking. The name was suggestive. Could it be some kind of mind control or psychic possession? A week ago I would have laughed at that idea. Now it scared me. I sent another request to Bug to get me any information on known research into mind control or manipulation using mechanical, chemical, or electrical means. As an afterthought I told him to check out research into psychic control.
“Joe,” he said, “Mr. Church already has us working on that.”
Interesting.
Point four. Freefall. So far we hadn’t come up with anything on that. Not a word or a whisper.
Point five. Dreamshield. What was that? A defense against whatever kind of weapon Dreamwalking was? No way to know for sure, but my gut said yes.
Lydia-Rose tapped on my door and leaned in. She does that. Leans. Not sure why she doesn’t actually step into the doorway or come inside. Leaning does it for her. A head, one shoulder, one boob, and a smile.
“Joe—? You have a visitor.”
The door opened and he was standing right there.
Him. The guy that every shooter, every spy, every special operator in the United States intelligence and covert military services pretty much thinks is a god. Our god. Specifically the messiah of the clandestine trade.
Harcourt Bolton, Senior.
CIA superspy. A guy who’s closed more top-level cases than I’ve had cold beers. A man who has saved the world so often that we should consider adding a fifth face to Mount Rushmore. Like that, and maybe double that.
Ever since Church had told me that the president appointed Bolton as codirector of the DMS I’d been privately trying to hate him. But that was for shit as soon as the man walked into my office. I instantly stood up and very nearly saluted. He was tall and handsome in a sixtyish Kevin Costner way. Powerfully built, but built for speed, built for action. Am I gushing? You bet you. I was a fanboy and this was Captain America. This was Batman.
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