The First Lady screamed.
Then I heard another cry of pain and turned, my body tingling with nervous tension, my mind reeling from what I’d just done, and I saw Skip Tyler coming toward me, a bloody knife in one hand. He looked at me, and then down at the terrorist. He smiled with bloody teeth.
“Well,” he said hoarsely, “aren’t you the goddamn hero.”
And then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell flat on his face.
There were half a dozen pencils jammed into a tight grouping in his back, buried deep into the right kidney.
A bloody, trembling shape climbed up from behind the desk. Top was covered with cuts and painted with blood.
“Tough little son of a bitch,” he said. He coughed and slumped down to his knees, catching himself with one arm on the desk. The First Lady and I both rushed to him. She got there first and she helped him down into a sloppy sitting position. Her face was as flushed as his. I wobbled toward them and then my legs gave out and I almost fell. Top waved me off. “I’ll live, Cap’n. But… gimme a second to catch my breath.” He lowered his head and sat there, dripping blood onto the floor. The First Lady stroked his hair and held on to him, both giving and taking comfort.
“Did… you get him?” a voice asked, and I turned to see Ollie Brown peering up at me with one half-opened eye.
I tottered over and sank down beside him. He was in bad shape. I looked at Top and shook my head. Top winced and hung his head.
“Hey, kid,” I said, putting my hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “You hold on now.”
“Bastard blindsided me. O’Brien… son of a bitch was the—” he began and then coughed bloody phlegm onto the floor. “I should have… figured it out. S-sorry for letting you down.”
His voice was almost gone. I took his hand and held it just as I’d held Roger Jefferson’s, and like Jefferson, Ollie held on tightly as if through it he could cling to life.
“He fooled us all. It wasn’t your fault. If anything, Ollie,” I said, “it was mine.”
He shook his head. “Was it… Skip? Was he the one?”
“Yeah.”
“You get him, too?”
“Top did.”
“He had that baby face.” He smiled weakly. “Guess… guess it was easier to think it was me.”
“I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Ollie.”
He coughed. “Shit happens, Cap.” He tried to turn his head. “I can’t hear… gunshots. Is it over?”
I listened and he was right. There was only silence from the Bell Chamber. I turned to look down at Ollie, wanting to give him some comfort, but for him it was already over. His eyes were open but he was looking into a whole different world.
I bowed my head and held his hand.
Behind me, down the hallway, I could hear new sounds. Running steps. Voices. It took a lot for me to raise my head and look as several figures rushed into the room. Bunny was first, his face streaked with blood and his pistol in a two-hand grip. Gus Dietrich was right behind him. And then she was there.
Grace.
Alive. All of them, alive.
“Joe!” she cried and rushed to me and I pulled her to me, down on the floor.
“We stopped it, boss,” growled Bunny, who was bending over Top, his face lined with concern.
Grace wrapped her arms around me and I held Ollie’s hand—a man I’d mistrusted and wronged—and I wept for all of us.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five
The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:28 P.M.
A FRESH WAVE of Secret Service agents were the first to enter the Liberty Bell Center. Dressed in hazmat suits, they surged through the building until they found the First Lady. They whisked her away through a back door. Paramedics came to get us. Bunny lingered in the doorway to the office where Ollie and the others lay dead. EMTs worked on Top Sims, putting compresses on over a dozen slashes and stab wounds before loading him onto a gurney. Bunny hovered over them like a mother hen, giving them evil looks every time he thought they were a little too rough. He followed them out, offering a string of suggestions on how to do their jobs. They were probably happy their protective suits hid their faces.
I later learned that Skip Tyler had sixteen broken bones and a ruptured liver, apart from all the pencils Top had rammed through his kidney. Must have been one hell of a fight, but I was only marginally sorry I missed it. I’d had enough of violence. Maybe enough for the rest of my life. Even the Warrior who lurked in the back of my soul was glutted for now.
Ollie Brown and the fallen Secret Service agents were zippered into black rubber body bags. Skip and El Mujahid were left to lie where they were. Forensics teams would need to take pictures first. They could rot for all I cared. The EMTs all stopped and stared at the two pieces of El Mujahid. They gave me strange looks and didn’t get too close.
Grace sat beside me, her hand on my shoulder, as the EMTs plastered me with bandages and ice packs. When they were done, I said, “How bad was it?”
She was a long time answering that. “Bad,” was all she said.
I took her hand and held it. Her fingers were cold as ice.
“Rudy?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
She nodded. “Safe.”
When I felt able to walk she and I went back to the Bell Chamber. Brierly saw us and came over. “They tell me you and your man saved the First Lady.”
“Men,” I corrected. “First Sergeant Bradley Sims and Lieutenant Oliver Brown. They both did their part and Ollie died in action.” I paused. “I wanted you to know that Ollie died serving his country.”
Brierly nodded. “Thanks, Captain. He was a good man.”
“Yes,” I said. “He was.”
We shook hands and he took Grace aside for a conference call with Church. “I’ll be back,” she said.
“I still owe you a drink.”
“Yes,” she said, giving me a sad little smile, “you bloody well do.”
There were no more crowds. The victims lay in rows and men in white plastic suits were draping sheets over them and searching for identification. Someone had rigged blue Tyvek tarps over all of the windows, but the crowds were gone; all of Independence Mall had been cleared and the whole city was under martial law. The National Guard occupied Center City and dozens of choppers packed with federal agents, scientists, medical personnel, and a lot of other folks were descending on the town.
Rudy sat on the edge of the podium, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, the ends of his tie hanging limply from either side of his throat. He looked up at me and started to offer his hand, but both of our hands were stained with blood. He withdrew his hand and sighed.
“Dios mio, cowboy.”
“Yeah.”
“Bunny told me that it was Skip after all. Not Ollie. We were wrong.”
“Everyone was. Even Church thought that it might be Ollie. Ollie looked best for it. These bastards probably picked Skip as much for his innocent face as for his greedy black heart. They fooled us and it almost cost everyone here their lives.”
I sat down next to him and for a long time neither of us said a word. His gaze was fixed on a point across the room and I followed his line of sight to where a man in a Hawaiian shirt lay sprawled. Someone had rammed the broken end of a wooden flagpole through his eye socket.
“I didn’t know it could be like this,” Rudy said at length. “I mean, I’ve counseled hundreds of cops, but…” He shook his head.
I understood and I could hear the deep hurt in his voice. But what could I say? We’d all had to do our parts; and I knew there would be long summer nights to come where we’d sit out in his backyard and watch the stars wheel overhead and drink beer as we talked it through. But that time wasn’t now and we both knew it. Across the room some of the Secret Service agents were standing like ghosts, their faces pale, their eyes haunted, as they tried not to look at the bodies lying under sheets.
“It must have been terrible for them,” Rudy said.
“For you, too, man.”
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He shook his head. “I mostly watched. I… I’m not sure I could have done what they did. They had to shoot congressmen, civilians…”
“You blame them for gunning down these people?”
“God, no. They’re heroes. Every one of them.”
I nodded. “They don’t think so.”
“No,” he agreed.
“They’re marked,” I said. “This is what you were talking about. The look on their faces, in their eyes. It’ll never go away. Violence always leaves a mark. You taught me that.”
He sighed. “We ask so much of the people who protect us. Firemen, cops, soldiers… They sign up to do some good, to make a difference, but we sometimes ask too much.”
“They’re warriors,” I said softly. “Some of them will be stronger because of today. For some people battle is a clarifying experience. It forces all of the senses to come awake, it makes you become totally aware, totally alive.”
“And some of them will be broken because of today,” he said quietly. “Not everyone has a warrior soul. You taught me that, Joe. Some people have only so much courage, only so much tolerance for violence, even when it’s for the right cause. For some of these people this may be a breaking point. Today might kill some of those young folks. Not right away, maybe not for twenty years, but a few of them may never shake the memory of what they had to do today, what they were forced to do. They’ll know all the logic about how it had to happen, how they had no choice; and for a while that will keep them steady… but some of them will never survive this. Not ultimately.”
I wanted to argue with him, but I knew that he was right. Being a hero doesn’t mean that a person can become comfortable with being a killer, too.
“They’re going to need you, Rudy.”
“I can’t help them all.”
“They couldn’t save all the people here,” I said. Rudy closed his eyes for a moment, then he stood up and looked down at me.
“And what about you, cowboy? Have you reached your limit?”
When I didn’t answer, he sighed and nodded. He patted my shoulder then turned and walked over to the group of agents. I watched him go, saw the process of change that happens when he goes from being my friend Rudy to Dr. Sanchez. He always seems bigger, taller. A rock for those who need something to cling to. But I knew the truth: he, too, was marked, and like the rest of us he would carry this with him forever.
So… what about me? I wondered. I could already feel the shock ebbing within me. As the adrenaline washed its way out of my bloodstream my deep grief and horror was dipping lower and lower. In the reeds there in the back of my mind the Warrior was already beginning to sharpen his knife again. I knew it, I could feel it.
I looked at the agents, and all of them looked so young and so hurt. Only one looked back at me and held my gaze. He was in his late twenties, not all that much younger than me, but his eyes were older than his face. His expression reflected less shock than the others. He read my face and I read his, and we exchanged a brief nod that none of the others saw, or if they did then they didn’t understand it. They weren’t of the same species as we were. The young agent turned back and listened to Rudy, but I was sure that he was already working through the experience in his own head. The way I was. The way warriors do. He and I did not need to be marked by our experiences. We were born with that mark.
Epilogue
1.
IN ALL NINETY-ONE people died at the Liberty Bell Center. Fourteen members of Congress were among them. Terrorists were blamed, of course, but in the official version of the story there was no apocalyptic plague. It was a “nerve gas” that caused violent behavior. The news footage that had gone out live was a public relations nightmare, but although there were eyewitness accounts of Secret Service agents gunning down unarmed civilians, the President was able to trot out a couple dozen top-flight scientists who babbled on and on about the psychotic effects of the nerve gas. No one who had been in the fight at the center was held responsible for their actions. Blame was focused instead on El Mujahid and his terrorist network, and that worked well as a way of channeling the massive national outrage. In death he became an even more hated figure than Osama bin Laden. The credit for bagging him was given to the Secret Service. Medals were eventually handed out, though the DMS was kept out of it. A national day of mourning was scheduled for the last day of July.
No attempt was made to create a new version of the Freedom Bell. When DMS agents investigated Andrea Lester’s apartment they found correspondence and other evidence linking her to Ahmed Mahoud, a terrorist operative whose body was recovered at the Liberty Bell Center; he’d been one of the infected and Rudy had taken him down with the broken shaft of a pole for the American flag. If that had gotten into the press it would have become an iconic moment, but it was never mentioned.
Mahoud was later identified as the brother-in-law of El Mujahid, and the investigation clearly established that Lester and Mahoud were lovers. She had secretly converted to Islam more than three years ago, long before she was hired to cast the Freedom Bell, and Church speculated that it might have been her connection with the rededication project that inspired the whole terrorist plan. It seemed likely, but we’d probably never know for sure.
Director Brierly initiated a hunt to find Robert Howell Lee. They found him in his bedroom at home. He’d driven home after speaking to me on the phone at the Liberty Bell Center, taken his wife’s bottle of sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet, written a suicide note that asked for forgiveness, and swallowed the whole bottle. Brierly’s people got there with maybe ten minutes to spare. The EMTs pumped him out and Mr. Church flexed his muscles and made sure that the ambulance was redirected to a secure location. Church was on the first thing smoking, and by the time Lee had shaken off the effects of the sleeping pills he woke up to find Mr. Church sitting by the side of his bed. It would have been better if the pills had worked faster. He later admitted to having known about El Mujahid’s more deadly strain of the plague but it was clear he had done nothing to warn the authorities. He said he’d ordered Skip Tyler to prevent El Mujahid from escaping, but even that didn’t square with the facts. Lee was a traitor, a coward, and a goddamn fool.
Grace and I found Church sitting alone in a deserted anteroom at the FBI field office in Philadelphia, quietly munching vanilla wafers.
“Did you learn anything?” I asked, but he was a long time in responding.
“Mr. Church…?” Grace prompted softly.
Church drank some water. “He gave us a name.” He leaned back in his chair and considered the half-eaten cookie he held between thumb and forefinger. “Sebastian Gault.”
Grace blanched. “No…”
She told me who Gault was, but even I’d heard of him. Who hadn’t? “If this is true…”
Church didn’t look at her. “It’s true. Lee was ultimately…” He paused and thought about the right word. “Forthcoming.”
“God. This will hurt a lot of people.”
Church nodded. “I called Aunt Sallie. She’s initiated a worldwide search for him. Very quiet, but very thorough.”
Grace shook her head. “So… this was all for money?”
“No,” he said. “For Gault it clearly was; but not for El Mujahid. He was doing this for his God. He said as much to Captain Ledger and Lee verified it. He said that Gault had been funding the terrorists with the agenda of scaring the U.S. into backing out of the Middle East. It’s what you thought, Captain, and it probably would have worked. But El Mujahid apparently had a separate agenda and he really was trying to release the plague, and it was worse even than that: he wasn’t just willing to die for his cause, he was willing to become a monster. He had no use for Gault’s money. What good would it be to him? To what he became?”
“What was he?” I asked. “He clearly wasn’t a walker.”
“Yes he was. We found Ahmed Mahoud’s car. There were two spent vials of a different strain of the pathogen. Hu’s labeled it a ‘transformative mu
tation.’ It kept the oxygen flowing to El Mujahid’s brain so there was no loss of higher function. Hu surmises that El Mujahid planned to share that version with other fundamentalists so that even if the plague got out of hand and they were infected they would still retain awareness, and with awareness, faith.” He sighed. “Hu tells me that the version of the pathogen fired from the Freedom Bell was yet another strain. Far more virulent.” He looked at me. “If you hadn’t ordered Brierly to seal the doors at the Liberty Center…”
“God,” Grace breathed. I couldn’t think of anything to add to that.
Church pushed the plate of cookies over to me without any further comment. Grace and I both had one.
2.
A pillar of smoke rose three hundred feet above the smoking pit that still burned deep in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. British Army helicopters circled the vicinity and satellites were retasked to probe the region. Something had happened deep beneath the sands that no seismograph had predicted. There were known spots of deeply buried geothermal activity, but nothing like this had happened in over a hundred years. It would take years to uncover the cause.
3.
About ten days later I found Church in his office at the Warehouse. I’d heard that he was moving back to the Hangar at Floyd Bennett Field.
“Are you closing the Warehouse?”
“No… you and Grace can run it. We need a base here.”
I liked the sound of that, but I kept the smile off my face. Grace and I had been too busy to share that drink since the Liberty Bell Center catastrophe, but we had a rendezvous planned for tonight. From the secret smiles she’d been giving me I thought we might go beyond the platonic sleepover. I pulled up a chair and sat down. “So, where are we?” I asked him.
Church set down the papers he had been sorting and spread his hands. “We saved the world, Captain Ledger. More or less. And we certainly saved the economy of the United States. We also took down a major terrorist network. We’re heroes and we have the thanks of a grateful nation, though no one will ever say so. But along the way we embarrassed a lot of people and made a few enemies. The Vice President’s wife would like to see Major Courtland’s head on a pike. On the other hand the First Lady wants you and First Sergeant Sims canonized.”
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