The King of Plagues

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Your ID is blocked. My friends don’t need to hide their identities.”

  “Then consider me a new friend.”

  “What is the basis for our new friendship?”

  “A shared interest in the security of our nation.”

  “Will you tell me your name?”

  “My name is of no importance. What is important is who I represent.”

  “Who is that?”

  “A group of loyal Americans whose actions are always in the best interest of America.”

  The caller had not said in the best interests of the American people.

  “What do you want?”

  “There is a new and grave threat to this country.”

  “What is the nature of this threat?”

  “It is a group called the Seven Kings of the New World Trust.”

  “Who are they?” asked Church. “And what is their agenda?”

  “Chaos,” said the caller.

  “What kind of chaos?”

  “Total. Global. Apocalyptic.”

  “Excuse me,” said Church, “but this is bordering on being a crank call. If you are a loyal American as you claim, and if there is a threat about which you have knowledge, then please give me the facts in plain and simple terms.”

  There was a sound that might have been a short laugh. “For reasons that I do not care to explain, I cannot give you too much information on the Seven Kings. Perhaps I will be able to share some information from time to time.”

  “Will you give me something now?”

  “Yes. Something that will save American lives.” The caller gave Church the location of a Hamas cell operating in Washington, D.C., that was being funded by the Seven Kings. “This group plans to strike tomorrow during the afternoon rush hour. Many people will die, including key members of Congress. You can stop this.”

  “That’s it?” Church demanded. “You speak of a group dedicated to global chaos and the downfall of our country and all you give me is a single terrorist cell? How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You’ll find the cell.”

  And then the caller disconnected.

  Chapter Five

  After-Action Report

  Washington, D.C.

  June 23, 1:44 P.M. EST

  We followed up with recon and verified the cell’s existence. Fourteen hostiles and enough weapons and explosives to start a war. Or tear the capital apart.

  I led the hit.

  D.C. had been in the crosshairs since long before 9/11, so there are fifty kinds of counterterrorism protocols built into the infrastructure and dozens of agencies are tasked with gathering intel. It’s all supposed to be shared. Politicians aren’t supposed to lie, either.

  Our people used MindReader to hack everyone else’s database and dump everything into one massive pattern-recognition search. By collating information from a dozen different agencies we learned that much more was known about this matter than any one group believed and the reason everyone who needed to know didn’t know was because red tape and departmental pissing contests reduce the flow of interagency intel to a dribble. Guys with prostates the size of soccer balls can piss a heavier stream.

  It fell to the Department of Military Sciences to put the pieces together and put boots on the ground. Thanks to MindReader.

  When Mr. Church formed the DMS he built it around a computer system that was several generations ahead of anything else known to exist. MindReader was designed to look for trends and the software was very carefully crafted to take into account some factors that might otherwise be missed, and although computers can’t generalize or make intuitive leaps, this one came pretty damn close. Its other unique feature was that it could intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms. When MindReader backed out, it rewrote the target computer’s software so that there was no record that it had ever been hacked. It was a highly dangerous system, and Church guarded it like a dragon.

  So less than five hours after the mysterious call—from someone whom everybody except Church was already calling Deep Throat—disconnected we had snipers on rooftops, choppers in the air, a satellite retasked to do thermal scans, and Echo Team ready to kick in the doors.

  The cell was located in a small frame house on Ninth Street in the Penn Quarter section of D.C. Lots of foot traffic, lots of tourists. We parked the van around back and halfway up the block. We were not wearing our usual combat rig—unmarked black BDUs, helmets, and ballistic shields. Too many civilians and no way to know who was a spotter for the bad guys.

  I wore a Hawaiian shirt over jeans. We all wore vests, though, but these were the latest generation of spider silk bulletproof vests with carbon nanotubes filled with nanoparticles that become rigid enough to protect the wearer as soon as a kinetic energy threshold was surpassed. Stuff that’s not on the open market yet, but Church has a friend in the industry and he always buys us the best toys.

  I strolled down the street with Khalid Shaheed, one of my newest shooters. Khalid looks like a schoolteacher and came to the DMS by way of Delta Force. A good guy to have at your back.

  We pretended to argue about whether Brooks Robinson should be considered the greatest Orioles player of all time rather than Cal Ripken. I used a prearranged cue word to escalate the argument into a shouting match just as we passed the front of the target house. Shouts escalated into shoves and soon the front door opened and a man wearing a blue sports coat stepped out onto the porch.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Stop that … . Get out of here!”

  He had a Palestinian accent, and Khalid turned to him and in brusque Palestinian Arabic told him to mind his own business. Actually, Khalid told him to have anal sex with a three-legged dog. Nice. The man began screaming at Khalid and soon they were nose to nose. The door was still open and I could see other faces appear at the windows and in the doorway.

  My sunglasses had a mike pickup built into the frame. I whispered, “Go.”

  Instantly the rest of Echo Team hit the house. Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who was built like Schwarzenegger’s big brother, kicked the back door completely off its hinges. Top Sims, my second in command, swarmed past him with Joey Goldschein at his heels. Joey was our newest member, a good kid, six months back from Afghanistan. They bellowed at the top of their lungs as they moved through the empty kitchen and into a side hall.

  “Federal agents! Lay down your weapons!”

  The adjoining dining room was filled with men, most of them crowded around a big oak dining table that was covered with bricks of C4 and all the wiring needed to blow the whole house into the next dimension.

  You’d think that people would be disinclined to initiate a firefight when there’s forty pounds of high explosives lying right there on the table. You’d be wrong. Lot of crazy people out there.

  Suddenly it was the O.K. Corral.

  Out front, the man arguing with Khalid turned sharply at the noise from inside the house. He never saw Khalid pull open his loose Orioles shirt and pull his piece. Maybe the man heard the shot that killed him, but I doubt it.

  Khalid and I both had the whole team yelling in our ears about explosives and armed resistance. Deep Throat’s intel had been solid.

  Khalid and I opened fire together, hammering the front windows and the doorway. The men were so tightly clustered that there was no way for us to miss.

  Then the dead were falling and the others were backpedaling into the house. We jumped up onto the porch and I covered Khalid while he reloaded. Then I had to duck behind the brick wall between window and door as a hail of heavy-caliber bullets ripped through the frame. There were screams and blaring horns from the street behind us, and I knew that backup teams were closing on the house. The Hamas team was in a box that we were nailing shut. It was up to them whether the box was a container or a coffin.

  Khalid and I both yelled in Palestinian Arabic for them to lay down their arms. The only answer was a renewed barrage of automatic gunfire.

&nbs
p; “Flash out!” I barked into my mike, and then pulled a flash bang out from under my shirt and lobbed it through the doorway. Khalid and I covered our ears and squeezed our eyes shut. The blast was huge.

  “Go! Go!” I snapped, and Khalid spun out of his protective crouch and rushed inside. I was right behind him. He fanned left; I took the right. There were five hostiles in the living room, but all of them were down, rolling around on the floor, screaming but unable to hear their own voices. Flash bangs blow out the eardrums and temporarily blind the unwary. We kicked weapons out of their hands and kept moving. The firefight in the dining room was still hot and heavy. I saw Top Sims in a shooter’s squat behind a breakfront that bullets had reduced to little more than splinters and shattered crockery. Big Bob and Joey were firing from the hallway entrance.

  I tapped Khalid and he nodded and took up a shooting position from the living room doorway while I peeled off and headed for the stairs. From the sound of it there was a second firefight up there. The team’s other big man, Bunny—a moose of a kid from Orange County—had been on-point for the second-floor entry, and he had former MP DeeDee Whitman on his wing.

  “Green Giant, this is Cowboy. On the stairs and coming up,” I barked into the mike.

  “Join the party, Cowboy.” Bunny’s voice sounded relaxed.

  Then DeeDee added, “Stay away from the windows. Chatterbox is enjoying himself.”

  “Copy that, Scream Queen.”

  Chatterbox was our last team member. His real name was John Smith, and the DMS had headhunted him away from LAPD SWAT. He was one of those silent, introspective types who looked like a beatnik poet from the Village but who was the hammer of God with a sniper rifle.

  I tapped the command channel and keyed over to Smith’s frequency.

  “Chatterbox, this is Cowboy. I’m on the second floor. No window shots until I give you the word.”

  “‘K,’” he said.

  I peered around the wall at the top of the stairs and looked right into the eyes of a dead man. He was sprawled on the floor with a black bullet hole above his left eyebrow and a look of profound surprise stamped onto his face. The whole back of his head had been blown out. John Smith at work. I’ve seen a lot of great shooters in the military and on the cops, and I’ve met a few whose accuracy bordered on the supernatural. But John Smith was a Jedi. He was spooky good. If you’re unlucky enough to step into his crosshairs, then you’d better be right with Jesus.

  I leaned farther out into the hall and saw that most of the second floor was an open-plan studio. There were two more men slumped like rag dolls. Automatic weapons lay near each one. Three other men knelt beside the windows, weapons in hand. They were probably too smart and too scared to try to return fire after three of their brothers had taken head shots. It was a tough nut to crack, because a sniper is the most feared man in any battle scenario.

  The second most feared is the guy who sneaks up behind you.

  I ducked back onto the stairs and whispered into the mike. “Cowboy to Chatterbox. I’m moving into the field of fire. No shots until I give the word or fifteen seconds is up. Copy?”

  “‘K,’” he said again. Guy never shuts up.

  I took my Beretta in a two-handed grip and then I was up and moving, rounding the corner, entering the open room, running fast as I cleared the corners with a flick and then fanned the barrel back to the shooters, taking the one farthest from me first with two in the head and shifting to the next gun without a pause. The other two shooters started to turn, but I shot the middle guy twice through the side of the head and the impact sent him crashing through the broken window.

  The third guy was almost in kicking range and he was moving at lightning speed, swinging his AK-47 up, turning toward me, finger already inside the trigger guard. If he’d had a handgun instead of a long gun he might have beat me to the shot, but I put the first one in the center of his chest, then raised the gun fourteen inches and put the second one through his forehead. Double tap. All six shots fired in less than three seconds and my head ringing with thunder.

  Then John Smith’s voice was yelling in my ear, “On your six! On your six!”

  I ducked and spun to one side as a hail of bullets burned through where I’d been standing. Four shooters were crowding into the doorway and I had no idea where the hell they’d come from. The first two banged into each other trying to get through the doorway, and I was already coming up out of my jump and roll. I killed them both with five shots between them. I moved like a son of a bitch, rushing in but to one side, firing one-handed as I tore a fresh magazine out of my pocket. The bodies in the doorway fell face forward just as my slide locked back. The third shooter kicked his way into the room, starting to turn as he cleared the doorway and the bodies.

  Shit. No time to swap out the mags, so I dropped my Beretta and drew the Rapid Response Folding knife from its sheath clipped inside my jeans pocket. The RRF has a wicked little 3.375-inch blade that locks into place with a snap of the wrist. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in speed, because at only four ounces it moved as fast as my hand. No drag at all.

  I bashed the rifle aside with my left and whipped him across the throat with a very tight semi-circular slash. Blood exploded outward in a hydrostatic jet. I faded left and took a hard leap past his shoulder, and drove the point of the knife into the face of the fourth shooter. The blade caught him beside the nose and I punched it all the way through. He screamed and his finger clutched around the trigger, sending half a magazine into the legs of the guy whose throat I’d cut. I gave the knife a quarter turn and yanked it out, then plunged it back into his throat.

  He collapsed over the tangled legs of his comrade.

  I tore the knife free and wiped it clean on a dead man’s sleeve, then retrieved my Beretta and swapped out the mags.

  My heart was hammering in my chest and I could smell my own sweat mixed with the copper stink of blood. There hadn’t been time to be scared before now, but it was catching up to me like a son of a bitch.

  I tapped the commlink. “Chatterbox, Green Giant—center room clear. All hostiles down. Repeat: All hostiles are—”

  “Get out!”

  It broke into the team channel. Top’s voice. Screaming.

  “Hostile with a vest! Hostile with a vest! Out–out–out!”

  A vest.

  Jesus Christ.

  We all knew about those vests. Anyone who had been in Iraq or Afghanistan knows about suicide bombers who follow the compulsion to strap on forty pounds of high explosives and turn the day into red nightmare.

  Suddenly we were all yelling and running. I ran for the window and went out like I was Superman. Maybe a drop of fifteen feet to the street. There was a huge black noise behind me, and just as I cleared the window I felt myself lifted as if wishing I could fly was making it so.

  As if.

  The force of the blast threw me out over the street. I pinwheeled my arms, and my legs mimicked running as I flew. There were cherry trees along the curb. In one of the weird moments of clarity that happen in the middle of a crisis, I knew that the leaves and branches were going to break my fall, but I wasn’t going to like it one bit. Behind me the fireball burned the air and ignited the leaves and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then the tree curled its branches into a fist and knocked me out of all sense and understanding.

  I WOKE UP in an ambulance. Top and Khalid were with me, both of them covered with soot and bloodstained field dressings. Top told me the news.

  One of the hostiles had come up out of the cellar wearing a vest packed with bars of Semtex. Everyone on Echo Team had taken cuts and burns except John Smith.

  I started to say that we’d gotten off lucky, but something in Top’s face stopped me.

  “What—?” I asked.

  “Joey,” he said. “He pushed Khalid out the door, but he caught his foot on a throw rug and went down. He got up, but he was one step too late.”

  Joey Goldschein had been the only one of my team le
ft inside when everything went to hell. He was six months back from his second tour in Afghanistan. He deserved a longer life.

  That was our first encounter with the Seven Kings.

  AFTER THAT, DEEP Throat came to Church with dribs and drabs of intel. My part in the Seven Kings affair slowly evaporated as I became involved in several unrelated cases. Other DMS teams worked on it, and it’s both sad and frightening to say that there are always multiple threats chewing at the fabric of our society. Vultures and predators, sharks and parasites, bent on destroying us in order to satisfy their own political agendas. I don’t say that they do this to satisfy their religious agendas, because I’m either idealistic enough or cynical enough to believe that religion is deliberately misused as a label for greedy sons of bitches whose real objective is wealth and power. Sure, the freedom fighter in the trenches may think that God wants him to strap C4 to his chest and walk into a post office, but until the so-called religious leaders do that themselves I think it’s a scam. And they’re scamming their own loyal followers as much as they’re scamming the rest of the world. I think this was true during the Crusades and it’s true now in the Middle East. I seldom trust the guys at the top.

  The real bitch was that despite having clashed with groups supported by the Seven Kings, we didn’t have a frigging clue as to who or what the Kings were. It was like fighting an invisible empire … and yes, I know that sounds like an old movie serial. But there it is.

  Chapter Six

  The Royal London Hospital

  Whitechapel, London

  December 17, 10:52 A.M. GMT

  Church said, “The Kings have been busy during your ‘vacation.’���

  “Deep Throat been calling his BFF again?”

  “I see isolation and contemplation haven’t matured you. Pity,” Church said. “We’ve had five additional tips. Three out of five of the tips resulted in action taken. We recovered prisoners in several of the raids, but none of them were above street level. They knew the name Seven Kings but nothing else of substance.”