Dogs of War

by Jonathan Maberry

But then she felt his lips on hers and there was a puff of breath into her mouth.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Her lungs expanded all at once. John’s breath filled her near to bursting, and the pain was awful, excruciating, so intense that all she could do with that first breath was scream it out.

  And so she screamed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  THE HANGAR

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 7:51 PM

  Nikki Bloomberg had been part of Bug’s team for six years, and she loved her job. Even the scary parts. Or maybe it was the scary parts that made the job worth doing. To know that what she did day in and day out actually mattered. Saving people’s lives, saving the country, saving the world. Hard to beat that as a job description. And even though the people with whom she worked were oddballs in one way or another, they were amazing. She adored Bug; he was closer to her than either of her own brothers. Yoda, not so much. More like a weird cousin. Mr. Church was scary and sexy in an “older man” sort of way. And Aunt Sallie was hilarious.

  She missed Bill Hu. Nikki had gone out with him three times. Dinner, the opera, and a lot of laughs. On their last date she’d invited him up to her place and, to her delight and astonishment, had discovered that he was a sensitive, caring, generous lover. He was more of a real man than many of the guys she’d dated in college or among the hipster crowd where she sometimes went in the hope of finding someone who was capable of having a real conversation.

  Now Hu was gone.

  Although he hadn’t been the first friend of hers who had died—not even the fiftieth, because the DMS was like that—his death made her feel different. Wronged. Cheated. His death felt more deeply personal than anyone else’s. The bad people the DMS fought had done that to her. That’s how it felt. That they had done this, specifically, to her.

  It made her heart ache.

  It made her mad.

  And now … what they’d done to Joe Ledger’s family …

  Nikki wasn’t typically a mean-spirited, angry, or vindictive person. When Bill Hu was taken from her, that began to change. She could feel it. She was afraid of it, too, but not all that much. The truth was that she liked it. That cold, persistent burn down deep in her chest, that desire to hurt them back. To hurt them worse.

  Nikki worked in a glass-walled office buried a hundred feet below Floyd Bennett Field, inside the part of the Hangar complex where MindReader lived. Her job was to manage the pattern-search team. The last iteration of MindReader had run more than eight hundred pattern-recognition subroutines, each of which could be used separately and all of which could be combined into an enormous assault on raw data. The new MindReader Q1 had two thousand separate pieces of pattern-assessment software, and it was faster by an order of magnitude. As of right now, as of today, there was no faster or more powerful computer system on the planet. For the past several hours, Nikki and her team had carefully selected and input thousands of keywords into the system. Everyone involved with Rejenko; the names of everyone associated with the Prague incident; everyone who had connection to DARPA, to drones, to cyberhacking, to nanotechnology, to rabies, to so many other things. Huge quantities of data were added to the search, building the most compelling search argument possible. Once the protocol was ready, it would send questing tendrils out through the Internet and into tens of millions of mainframes and hard drives. It would blow through firewalls and devour encryption and surge across national and international borders and steal into the most secure intelligence systems. Looking for connections, looking for association and attachment and involvement. Looking for the truth, no matter how much someone wanted to hide it, or kill it.

  It was up to Nikki to guide that search, to look for elements that emerged and collate them with one another. To hunt for more than patterns. To hunt for truths.

  A small window popped up on her screen, showing the face of her senior assistant. “We’re good to go,” he said. “Everything’s cocked and locked.”

  “Good,” she said, and closed the window.

  Now it was up to her. Now it was Nikki and this radical new version of MindReader. She was conscious of the fact that everything associated with this case seemed to be unknown mutations or previously unseen design forms.

  So was MindReader Q1.

  The search protocol was ready, waiting for her. Nikki’s fingers hovered over the Enter key.

  “Show me,” she said, and hit the key.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  THE FOREST

  NEAR ROBINWOOD, MARYLAND

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 7:52 PM

  The Bridge Troll was still alive.

  Which only proves that he was born unlucky.

  I wonder how Sean would have reacted had he been there. He already thought that I was a monster and that I didn’t give much of a damn about human rights. He’s sort of right, sort of wrong. Guys like me aren’t allowed to have easy definitions and clearly defined codes of conduct. I mean … I’d rather be back in San Diego sitting on my balcony watching the moon over the ocean, listening to some old-time rock ’n’ roll and drinking a very cold bottle of beer. I’d rather be with Junie doing absolutely anything that ordinary people do. I didn’t go looking for this life. It found me, and now, for better or worse, it’s what I do and it’s who I am.

  So, yeah …

  Bridge Troll.

  Really sucked to be him.

  Really and truly sucked.

  INTERLUDE TWENTY-FOUR

  THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN

  THE BAIN ESTATE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  ELEVEN WEEKS AGO

  They sat together for hours.

  John had removed his jacket and wrapped it around Zephyr’s shoulders, but she kept shivering. They both knew that those shudders had nothing to do with being wet and cold.

  “Calpurnia,” said John.

  “Yes, John?” said the soft voice of the household computer.

  “Miss Bain will want to see her doctor in the morning.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “Oncologist,” he said.

  “Is she sick?” asked the computer. “All of her last panels were clean.”

  “Yes,” said John as he stroked Zephyr’s cheek. “She is very sick. Make the call.”

  Zephyr buried her face against John’s chest and began to sob so loud and so hard that it drowned out everything in the whole world.

  John held her and stroked her and kissed her.

  “Now you’re ready,” he said gently. “Now you understand.”

  “P-please…” she begged.

  “All your life you’ve doused this ugly world in gasoline,” he murmured. “Now it’s time to light the match and set this world to burn.”

  She buried her face against him as the sobs broke like waves on the black shores of her soul.

  John held her.

  And whenever he was sure that she could not see his face, he smiled.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  THE FOREST

  NEAR ROBINWOOD, MARYLAND

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 8:12 PM

  The field team came rushing in about three minutes too late to do Bridge Troll any good. They came out of the woods from five different directions, yelling, pointing lots of guns, acting as if this was their moment instead of mine. They were wrong. I sat on a rock, ankle-deep in cold water, washing blood off my hands. Ghost, equally unimpressed, sat beside me.

  The team leader recognized me and they stopped, their weapons lowered, barrels shifting away. I saw their eyes shift from me to the red heap five feet away from where I sat.

  There wasn’t much conversation. When the stretcher was rigged and Uncle Jack’s body was secured to it with straps, I nodded to the men carrying it and we walked out of the forest together. We didn’t say a word all the way back to the road.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  CASTLE OF LA CROIX DES GARDES

  FRENCH RIVIERA

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 5:12 PM LOCAL TIME<
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  “You spoke with him?” asked Zephyr, speaking from the viewscreen on the wall of the Concierge’s situation room. “You actually spoke with Ledger?”

  She lay in John’s arms on the massive bed in her downstairs bedroom. Zephyr had eleven bedrooms now that her family was gone. Each was decorated in a different motif, ranging from tropical greenery to Greek austerity to a frilly pink confection. The current room had floor-to-ceiling viewscreens on every wall, and they were currently synched with recorded images from the twelve-hundred-mile-long Red Sea coral reefs that ran along the coasts of Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Clown triggerfish, hawksbill turtles, red-rim flatworms, gray reef sharks, and hundreds of other animals swam among the mangroves and sea grasses.

  In the midst of all the swirling sea life was the bed. John the Revelator and Zephyr were naked, unabashed. He was lean and muscular, looking more fit and powerful than the Concierge had ever seen him look. However, the woman he held was withered into horror. Like a Holocaust victim whose vitality had been savagely stolen away. Her young flesh looked ancient, her breasts were deflated, her color dreadful. And yet all along her throat and down between those empty breasts all the way to her thighs were the red suck marks of passionate, ungentle kisses. It did not look to be the remnants of an act of love, or even of passion. For the Concierge, it brought to mind images of the bites of a vampire from a horror movie or, worse, a nightmare. The lovers made no attempt to cover their nakedness. It was a statement of some kind, but in its boldness any trace of subtle meaning was lost on the Concierge. He didn’t want to know what they meant to tell him.

  “I spoke with him,” agreed the Concierge, his voice as controlled as possible.

  “What’s your take?” asked Zephyr.

  “Captain Ledger is everything I was told to expect, mademoiselle,” said the Concierge. “Ruthless, impetuous, intelligent, and passionate.”

  “And—?”

  “And I think I have used all of that against him. He is now a puppet with too many important strings cut, and the rest are badly frayed.”

  “Who’d you kill?” asked John.

  “The uncle.”

  Zephyr frowned. “Not the kids?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? I thought we wanted one of the kids dead.”

  The Concierge shrugged. One of those slow, expressive Gallic shrugs. “It was always possible that he would save the children and the sister-in-law. I don’t think it will work against us, though. Rather, I think the fact that the little boy is fighting for his life will spur Captain Ledger to greater action, but it will be the wrong action. It is very much in keeping with the psychological profile we have of him. The nephew is very badly wounded, and if he dies, and that seems likely, Ledger will go hunting for the closest target in order to vent and to prove to his family that he is still their champion. We will give him a target. And then we will give him another and another, until all of his strings are broken and he falls. By any computer model of Havoc, even the worst-case scenario, he cannot get in front of this.”

  “Calpurnia,” said Zephyr, “do you agree?”

  The computer’s voice seemed to come from everywhere. “Once Havoc is in motion, there is a one-point-eight-nine-percent chance that Captain Joseph Ledger will be able to interfere with the rollout. There is a three-point-four-two-percent chance that the entire DMS, in its current state of disarray, will be able to stop Havoc.”

  “Which means we win,” prompted Zephyr. “Is that guaranteed?”

  “There is a three-point-four—”

  “Stop,” ordered John. To Zephyr and the Concierge he said, “It means we win. No matter what the Deacon or Ledger or any of them do, we win.”

  The Concierge said, “If I may, computer models of the DMS have been wrong about Ledger before. We calculated that there was only a thirteen-percent chance that they would stop the Seven Kings and the drone-attack program. There was only an eleven-percent probability that they would stop Harcourt Bolton, Sr.’s Kill Switch plan.”

  Zephyr pointed a wizened finger at him. “Don’t be a pussy.”

  “Mademoiselle, I am merely being realistic. We should not count our chickens—”

  “Hush,” said John. “Ledger is done. He will crash about and spill some blood, but by the time he realizes he is fighting the wrong fight—that all of the DMS and Special Operations teams are fighting the wrong fight—the dogs of war will be on the hunt. We can’t lose now.”

  “I admire your optimism, John,” said the Concierge, “but I do not share it. Not yet. Not until we have actually won. Everything so far has been preliminary. Once Havoc is initiated and we see for sure that all our planning has borne fruit, I will celebrate our victory. Ledger still needs to be managed. From what we were able to get from the MindReader system before it crashed, it’s likely that he’ll either go back to Prague or to the DARPA camp, and it is my opinion that it will be the latter.”

  “I agree,” said John.

  “Not Prague?” asked Zephyr, surprised. “Even with all the ties to Rejenko?”

  “DARPA,” insisted the Concierge. “There is a British presence in Prague right now. One of the Barrier field teams. I rather think Ledger will contact them to follow up on Rejenko—which will be a lovely waste of their time—and he will choose to go and consult the nanotechnology experts at the camp. Once he’s there, we can initiate Havoc with little chance that he can do anything about it. We control all communications there, and, well … we have so many ways in which we can kill him. When he’s there, John, then I’ll agree that Havoc will run without risk of opposition.”

  “Fair enough,” said John, and he turned and buried his mouth and nose in the damp tangle of Zephyr’s hair.

  Zephyr closed her eyes for a moment, and the Concierge could see her nipples harden. It made him want to turn away. To vomit out the image.

  But then Zephyr pushed John away and propped herself up on her elbows. “One thing more. That message. Do we know anything about it?”

  John sat up and brushed a strand of dark hair from his eye. “‘He is awake.’ I do not think this concerns us. From what I have been able to gather, this is something that showed up all over the world. The authorities who are sophisticated enough to catch it did, in fact, catch it.”

  “Calpurnia flagged it and printed it out and claims she has no memory of it.”

  “If I may, mademoiselle,” said the Frenchman, “Calpurnia is a computer. She may approximate consciousness, but that is because she is designed that way. She is not alive and she is not a perfect being. Because she is a computer, there is always the possibility of an error. This is an example. Her software functioned at a level beneath or, perhaps, apart from her higher functions. You received the warning as an error message, yes? What does it matter if the AI faux-personality aspect of Calpurnia is not perfectly self-aware?”

  “He has a point,” murmured John.

  “She’s running Havoc, that’s why it matters,” Zephyr fired back. “She’s the voice of the new world order.”

  “No,” said the Concierge, frowning with concern, “she is not. You are.”

  “I’m dying, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “You are still alive, mademoiselle, and Calpurnia is still only a machine programmed to act like a conscious being. When you are—how should I say?—gone, it will be up to John, myself, and our staff to tell Calpurnia what to say. She will not replace you.”

  Zephyr turned away to hide tears. “You wouldn’t say that if you understood her. She’s perfect.”

  “Nothing is perfect,” said the Concierge. “If it were, you would live forever.”

  They were all silent for a moment.

  Then the Concierge said, “Havoc is in motion. It is, I admit, awkward because of the rushed timetable.”

  “Is that an excuse?” asked Zephyr acidly.

  “No, it is not. Merely a statement. Havoc will work, but it will not be as smooth as originally planned. Even our worst-case predic
tions say that the DMS won’t risk turning MindReader back on until after we hit the FEMA and Emergency Broadcast networks, and by then … well.” He gave another shrug. “By then the world will be falling to pieces and everyone will be blaming the Department of Military Sciences.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  THE HANGAR

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  MONDAY, MAY 1, 8:36 PM

  Church came out of his bathroom, patting his face with a hand towel. The strains of “Elle a fui, la tourterelle” began playing and he tossed the towel aside and picked up the phone.

  “Doctor,” he said, “what do you have for me?”

  “Nothing good,” said Cmar, “but maybe useful.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, I contacted Bug and Nikki and outlined a search argument for them. You see, it’s bugging me that this rabies thing isn’t happening in any way that makes sense. If it’s a bioweapon, then what’s the target? Something like this costs too much money to develop, and the science is too sophisticated for it to be something a friend of Vee Rejenko’s cooked up with his do-it-yourself Mad Scientist kit. And the mess in Baltimore sounds like someone cleaning house after a bad party. I don’t see the political win there, do you? None of this explains what happened in Milwaukee.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “Look, if I’ve learned anything from you it’s that things are seldom as simple as they seem. Every time I help out with one of these DMS cases there’s a layer beneath a layer beneath a layer, and when all of that is peeled back, itemized, and analyzed we can see how it was all done. There’s always a chain of logic from bad damn idea to global biological threat. So I speculated on what the whole thing might look like, and it opened a door at the wrong place for a rabies bioweapon to be the endgame.”

  Church sat down on the corner of his desk. “Give me the quick version.”

  “Okay, if we just look at this as weaponized rabies with a pertussis delivery system, that’s bad enough. But I had Nikki go through all kinds of outbreaks of recent vintage. Not just here in the States but all over. Instead of looking for a specific pattern that would fit a political agenda, like the suicide bombers ISIS uses, I’m looking for field testing of delivery systems. You follow me?”