The King of Plagues

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Yes,” he answered, his writhing lips twisting as if fighting to contain a laugh. “As do you.”

  Dr. Stankeviius stared at him. He licked his lips. They were dry and salty. He knew that he should end this line of conversation right now and call the warden, but he felt compelled to talk to this man.

  “Did you have advance knowledge of what was going to happen today?”

  Nicodemus beamed. “I am but a voice in the wilderness crying, ‘Make straight the path.’ I am neither the right hand of the Goddess nor her left hand. I am a leaf blown by her holy breath.”

  The psychiatrist opened his mouth to ask about which goddess the prisoner referred to, but Nicodemus continued. “This is an important and blessed day in the history of our broken little world. Grace is bestowed upon those who witness such events. We need to lift up our voices and rejoice that we are living in such times as these. Future generations will call these biblical times, for with every breath we are writing the scriptures of a newer testament. The Third Testament that chronicles a new covenant with our Lord.”

  “You mention a ‘goddess’ and you mention the Lord. Would you care to explain that to me, Nicodemus?”

  The prisoner laughed. It was a disjointed, creaking laughter that rose in rusted spasms from deep in his chest. The sound of it chilled the doctor to his marrow.

  “The Goddess has heard the call of seven regal voices and has awakened,” Nicodemus said softly. “She is coming. Not in judgment, Doctor, but to stir the winds of chaos with her hot breath.”

  “How do you know this?” asked the doctor.

  “Because I am not here,” said Nicodemus. “I am the fire salamander that coils and writhes in the embers at the Goddess’s feet.”

  He did not say another word, but his eyes burned with a weird inner light that Dr. Stankeviius could not look into for more than a few seconds. After several fruitless attempts to get more information from the prisoner, the doctor waved to the guards to have Nicodemus taken back to his cell.

  When he was alone, Stankeviius pulled a handful of tissues from the box on his desktop and used them to mop the sweat from his face. He tried to laugh it off, to dismiss the strangeness of the moment as a side effect of the terrible tragedy in England that was rocking the whole world. His own laugh was brief and fragile, and it crumbled into dust on his lips.

  He sat at his desk for several minutes, dabbing at his forehead, staring at the chair in which the prisoner had sat. The echo of that laugh seemed to linger in the air like the smell of a rat that had died behind the baseboards. Stankeviius had been a prison psychiatrist for eleven years, and he had worked with every kind of convict from child rapists to serial murderers and, during his days as a psychiatric resident, had even sat in on one of Charles Manson’s parole hearings. He was a clinician, a cynical and jaded man of science who believed that all forms of human corruption were products of bad mental wiring, chemical imbalances, or extreme influences during crucial developmental phases.

  But now …

  He licked his lips again and reached for the phone to call the warden. He told him the bare facts, allowing the warden to draw his own inferences. When he replaced the receiver he continued to stare at the empty chair.

  He believed—wholly and without a shred of uncertainty—that he had just encountered a phenomenon he had always considered to be a cultural myth, a label given to something by minds too unschooled to grasp the overall science of the human condition. Stankeviius had no religious beliefs, not even a whisper of agnosticism.

  And yet … He was sure, beyond any doubt, that he had just met true evil.

  Chapter Twelve

  Barrier Headquarters

  London, England

  December 17, 2:22 P.M. GMT

  This was turning into one bitch of a day. The images of the burning Hospital were now overlaid with an image of the mocking logo of the Seven Kings and the film loops of the towers crumbling into dust on a sunny New York day. I felt enormously out of place and thoroughly impotent. The bad guys were killing people and I was taking meetings.

  Jesus.

  I cut out of the conference as soon as I could. They let me use an empty office so I could make some calls.

  Church answered on the third ring. He doesn’t say anything when he answers a phone. You made the call, so it’s on you to run with it.

  “Seven Kings,” I said. He made a soft sound. It might have been a sigh, but it sounded more like a growl.

  “How sure are you?” he asked quietly.

  “Very.” I told him about the video. “Deep Throat let us down on this one.”

  “Yes,” he said. “By the way, did you note the time of the explosion?”

  “Yep. No way it’s a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences. Expect the newspapers to catch on soon.”

  “That’s going to be a shitstorm, Boss. Is this a Kings/Al-Qaeda operation? Are the Kings showing support for Uncle Osama? Or is this some attempt to hijack the 9/11 vibe to make this one even worse?”

  “All good questions in need of answers. We’ve been in a holding pattern with the Kings for months.”

  “Balls,” I growled. “This is how the military must feel after more than a decade trying to find bin Laden.”

  “Not all problems have quick solutions. The longer you’re in this business, the more you’ll come to know that.”

  He was right. Even though my first few missions with the DMS were insanely difficult and dangerous, they had ended quickly. A few days or a week tops. I guess it’s because something has to be in motion and have gained traction before it comes onto the DMS radar, which means we usually have to fight the clock to keep the Big Bad from doing whatever it has cooked up. The Kings thing was different. It was huge but vague. It was like trying to guess the size and shape of the Empire State Building by standing four inches away from the wall at ground level. Perspective was all skewed.

  “In the short term,” Church said, “the authorities are going to have to work some spin on the 9/11 connection.”

  “Hate crimes,” I said.

  “If you’ve been reading the reports I’ve been sending you, then you’ll be aware that there has been a marked increase in hate crimes here in the States for a couple of months now. Someone has been waging a very dangerous propaganda war on the Net.”

  “Yes, teacher. That’s connected to the Internet thing. The Goddess and all that.”

  “All that, yes.”

  “Tied to the Seven Kings?”

  “Unknown but likely. Recent posts have called her the Goddess of the Chosen.”

  “The Chosen, huh? Uh-oh. I must have missed that.”

  “Skimming your reports isn’t the same thing as studying them.”

  I declined to share the comment that occurred to me. Instead, I said, “Have the Net postings mentioned the Kings? Or Kingsmen? Or the Spaniard?”

  “Not so far. MindReader will flag any that do.”

  “I wish we knew more about the frigging Kings. I mean, kings of what? Did anything ever come out of my suggestion that it might be an alliance of the states that sponsor terrorism?”

  “There are too many ways to build a list of only seven who want to harm the United States.”

  “It’s always tough being the popular kid in school. What about something biblical? Wasn’t there something about the Book of Revelations?”

  “I think that’s more likely, but there also are too many ways to interpret the religious significance of the number seven, including something from the Book of Revelation,” he corrected. “And yes, I think that’s likely. Most scholars agree that the seven kings in Revelation are allegorical references to seven nations. The prophecy says that five of the kings are known, so the scholars contend that they are Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Pagan Rome, and Papal Rome, or possibly Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece.”

  “Are you reading this off the Net?”

  “No.”

  “So you
just happen to have that memorized?”

  “What’s your point, Captain?”

  “Nothing, Boss. But you’re intensely weird.”

  “So I’ve been told. The fiery destruction we saw today certainly had an apocalyptic quality.”

  “You have any friends in the prophecy industry?”

  “Funny,” he said without humor. “I have some contacts who are experts in symbology, particularly as it applies to terrorism.”

  “MindReader come up with anything yet?” I asked.

  “Nothing immediately useful.”

  “I thought that doohickey could find anything.”

  “One of these days I’ll have Bug explain to you how computers work. You can’t program it to look for ‘bad guy’ and expect it to cough out a name. MindReader looks for patterns, but you need the right search argument. It’s all about choosing the right key words.”

  I grunted. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just frustrated.”

  “That’s a club with a large membership. What else have you got?”

  I told him about the Sea of Hope discussion.

  “I agree that it would be high profile,” he said, “but enormously difficult. However, I’ll pass along your concerns to the team overseeing security. In the meantime, we got something unusual from the warden of Graterford Prison. Homeland took his call and rerouted it to me.”

  “Graterford in Pennsylvania?”

  “Yes. He told me about a dead prisoner with the numbers twelve/seventeen carved nine times into his skin, and a current inmate who seems to have unusual personal knowledge of the incident. A very strange character named Nicodemus.”

  “Nine times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any traces of an eleven?”

  “Add the digits.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Crap.”

  “I put a request into the Department of Corrections for Nicodemus’s records, but that will take too long, so I directed Bug to hack the system. We should have everything within the hour. You can access the material from your laptop, but I’ll have the highlights sent to your BlackBerry.”

  “Who is this fruitcake? He have any ties to terrorist groups?”

  “None of record. But then again, not much is known about him prior to his arrest, which occurred in 1996. He was arrested at the scene of a multiple homicide in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “It’s not entirely clear that he killed anyone, although he was convicted of multiple homicides. There are no eyewitnesses, so the case was built on strong circumstantial evidence, and he offered no defense.”

  In ’96, a mother and her teenage daughter were about to enter Gifts of the Magi, a store that sold items for the Catholic market. Nativity scenes, pictures of Jesus, stuffed lambs, icons, that sort of thing. As the mother began pushing the door open she looked through the glass and saw a man standing a few feet inside. He was covered with blood. The mother saw several other people lying on the floor or slumped over the counter.

  She pulled her daughter away and called the police from the Barnes & Noble in the same strip mall. When the first responders arrived, the man was still standing there. He made no attempt to flee or resist arrest.

  There were four victims. The woman who owned the store, her disabled vet of a husband, and two customers. All of them had been stabbed repeatedly.

  “Here’s the challenging part,” said Church. “All four victims were stabbed with the same knife, and from the wound profiles it’s clear that it was a double-edged British commando dagger. However, no weapon was found at the scene. All of the area drains were checked, rooftops searched, trash picked through. There are no traces of blood outside the store, suggesting that the perpetrator never left the premises, and Nicodemus was drenched in blood. All of the experts agree that had he left the store he would have left a blood trail.”

  “Weird.”

  “Very.”

  “He could have handed the knife off to an accomplice who was not bloodied.”

  “Of course, but it was the first of a number of unusual elements associated with the case. You’ll enjoy this.”

  “Okay … hit me.”

  “During the booking phase three separate police cameras malfunctioned. The fingerprint ten-card went missing. When his clothes were collected, bagged, and sent to the lab in Philadelphia, the police courier had a fender bender and at some point while he was arguing with the other driver his car was robbed. The only thing taken was the evidence bag. When they ran him through the system, his fingerprints were not in AFIS, and today when we ran them through the military fingerprint banks we got nothing; however, he was wearing a Marine Corps Force Recon ring when he was arrested.”

  “Did they do DNA on him?”

  “Yes, but no one can put their hands on the results. I’ll get a court order to take a new cheek swab.”

  “Have Jerry Spencer take the swab when he gets back from London. He doesn’t make procedural mistakes. He thinks the chain of evidence is holy writ.”

  “As is appropriate. Spencer’s on the plane with me, by the way. He’s sleeping and said that if you called I was not to wake him. He said that he needed sleep more than he needed to talk to you.”

  “What a guy.” Jerry still resented my bullying him into foregoing early retirement from Washington PD and signing on to the DMS. Even though it was a big pay bump and nobody shot at him anymore, he would rather be entertaining trout on a quiet lake somewhere. “Eventually I’d like Jerry to look over all of the original evidence collection procedures from Willow Grove, the State Police, the Sheriff ’s Office, and the DOC. I know a lot of guys from that area. They don’t make a lot of mistakes.”

  “No,” Church agreed.

  “Somebody should get eyes on this Nicodemus character. Can you reroute Rudy? Send him to Graterford?”

  “He’s sitting next to me and our plane just touched down at Heathrow, however, I can get him on the next outbound flight to Philadelphia.”

  I heard a brief muffled conversation as Church explained my suggestion to Rudy. Rudy’s voice went up several octaves and he said something about me in gutter Spanish involving fornication with livestock. He’s a mostly charming guy. Real class.

  “He said he would be happy to,” said Church.

  “So I heard.”

  Ghost was looking at my phone with great interest and thumped his tail enthusiastically. He probably had heard Rudy’s voice.

  “As for the stateside phase of this,” Church said, “I’m passing the ball to Aunt Sallie.” Aunt Sallie was Church’s second in command. I hadn’t yet met her, but she and Church had history going back to the Cold War days and she was supposed to be a wild woman. “She’ll coordinate with domestic agencies and keep a line open to our friends in NATO and INTERPOL.”

  “Okay, I’m heading back to Whitechapel to join the door-to-door of the neighborhood. Somebody may have seen something like delivery vans. They had to have brought a whole lot of explosives in. And I’ll want to talk to staff members who weren’t working today. Somebody has to know something.”

  “Good. I’ve also brought Hugo Vox in on this.”

  “Vox the T-Town guy?”

  “Yes. I’ve asked him to put together his groups of consultants. He’s built several think tanks of strategists, novelists, and screenwriters. Thriller novelists mostly. David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Eric Van Lustbader, Martin Hanler—authors of that stripe. Their novels are built around extreme and devious plots and are usually so well thought out that some in our government have decried them as primers for terrorists.”

  “Yeah, I heard a lot of that after the Towers. People were making comparisons to Black Sunday, that book by the Silence of the Lambs guy.”

  “Thomas Harris. And, yes, there are striking similarities. The authors are vetted by Vox, of course. We’re hoping the authors will come up with scenarios that we can use for programming MindReader’s searches.”

  “Worth a shot. Maybe we’ll
get lucky.”

  “One of these days you’ll have to tell me where you continue to find your optimism,” he said, and disconnected.

  Interlude Six

  T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State

  Four Months Before the London Event

  Dr. Circe O’Tree lived in Terror Town.

  Her office was tucked away in a corner of a sprawling jumble of blockhouses built as extensions to what had been a ski chalet prior to 9/11. The office was never warm and she could hear gunfire all day long.

  Circe spent most of her day on the Internet, cruising Web sites and social networks, reading thousands of posts, making notes, updating lists, and fighting the onset of early cynicism. At twenty-eight she still believed it was possible to remain idealistic and optimistic about the better nature of the human species despite all of the evidence that filled her daily intake of information.

  “Knock, knock,” said a voice, and she turned to see her boss, Hugo Vox, standing in the doorway. He held two chunky ceramic mugs of steaming coffee and had a box of doughnuts tucked under his elbow. “You ready for a break?”

  She pushed her laptop aside. “Like an hour ago. My eyes are falling out.”

  “You look as tired as I feel,” said Vox as he handed her a mug. “I’ve been doing Webinars all day with the DOJ and there’s only so much red tape I can eat before I want to shoot myself.”

  He hooked a visitor chair with his foot and dragged it in front of her desk, then lowered his bulk into it.

  Hugo Vox was a big man, son and grandson of Boston policemen, though he did not wear a badge himself. His father had been wounded on the job and retired early to write novels, and the second one had become an international bestseller, spawning a Robert De Niro movie and a TV series that ran for six years. His next eleven novels had made the family rich. On the day the elder Vox, who had single-parented Hugo, won an Emmy for his show, he drove out to the estate of the mother of his son and proposed. They had been lovers in college, but her wealthy and aggressively classist parents had forced her to give up their baby. Now, as young forty-somethings (she had inherited millions after her parents—the computer fortune Sandersons—died in a plane crash), they settled down to form the family that fate and the class system had once denied them. As a result, Hugo had been able to afford Yale, and while still an undergraduate he formed a staffing agency, specializing in security guards. He hired many of his father’s retiree cop friends. By the time Vox was out of grad school his company was providing security for the United Nations in New York and thirty other organizations with government ties.