I thanked him, and Ghost and I went out into the December blast.
JUST OUTSIDE I spotted three constables standing by the open door of a police car. They all turned toward me and the closest, a beefy guy, asked, “Are you Captain Ledger?”
I began to say “yes” when I heard a metallic sound and then a growl as Ghost suddenly bristled and stopped, his muscles instantly tense.
It took my brain a half second to process the sound I’d heard, because it was incongruous.
The beefy cop smiled at me and pointed a pistol at my face. The sound had been him quietly racking the slide.
He was almost laughing as he said, “Happy Christmas from the Seven—”
I threw the hot tea in his face. If you’re going to ambush someone, don’t make a speech first. It’s a rookie mistake. He screamed as the scalding liquid struck him full in the eyes.
“Hit!” I bellowed to Ghost. He and I leaped forward together, me driving hands first into the left-hand cop and Ghost hitting the guy on the right like a white cannonball. Ghost growled deep in his chest and I saw teeth flash and then there were screams as he and the cop fell to the asphalt.
The guy I went for managed to bring his pistol up, but I’d planned for that and bashed his arm aside with my right as I drove the flat of my palm into his forehead. The gun exploded with a flat crack! My blow slammed him against the car, knocked his head all the way back, exposing his throat. I hammered his Adam’s apple with both fists and he collapsed under me, gurgling wetly and trying to suck air through a crushed trachea.
I spun off him just as the window beside me exploded. Beef, half-blind and scalded, fired wildly in my direction, the bullets shattering windows and punching through the black paint of the police car. I rushed in and to one side, but he tracked me, probably only seeing shadows out of those eyes, but enough to swing the barrel toward my face. I came up outside his line of fire, took his gun hand in both of mine, and twisted sharply as I pivoted. In the dojo and in the movies the victim of a wristlock does a nice flip through the air. In the real world his wrist turns way too fast to act as a lever for his body, which means that the forearm bones explode inside his arm. His scream rose into the ultrasonic. I kicked Beef in the knee and as he canted sideways I kicked the other knee. He collapsed into a screaming pile of junk.
I tore my coat open and pulled my Beretta even while I dove for the front of the car. There were screams there, too, and the mean growl of a dog in mortal combat. I hit the hood on one hip and skidded across, landing on the far side and bringing the gun down.
“Off! Off!” I yelled, but Ghost was already backing off. His white muzzle was bright red with blood, most of it from the attacker’s throat. Ghost looked at me with eyes that had gone from those of a pet and companion to those of a hunter-killer from ancient times. The primitive killer in me met the eyes of the predator wolf in him, and for a moment there was a shared awareness. Not adversaries. Members of a pack. The level of understanding that passed between us could never be taught.
“Back and down!”
He looked down at the dying man and growled low and evil … and then moved three steps away and sat.
There were shouts around us and I turned, sweeping the Beretta’s barrel around. Another pair of cops and people in ordinary clothes. Whistles and yells.
I bellowed, “Special agent!”
I didn’t know what else to say. Were these constables also assassins for the Kings? If so, the risk to innocent bystanders was about to jump off the scale.
The two cops drew their batons and closed on me in a nice flanking approach, yelling at me, ordering me to lay down my weapon. One of them was shouting into his shoulder mike.
Balls.
I pointed my gun at the closest of them.
“Freeze!” I barked. The sharp tone of voice and the implacable presence of the gun slowed them from a run to a walk and then to frozen immobility.
To Ghost I snapped, “Set!” The command to get ready for a nonlethal takedown. Nonlethal as long as the guy didn’t injure the dog, and then all bets were off.
“Freeze!” I yelled again. “These men are not police officers.”
“That’s Danny French!” snapped one of the cops, pointing to the man whose throat I’d crushed. “You murdering bastard!”
Crap. Okay, they were police officers. Now what?
The man I scalded moaned and sagged back. Dead or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.
Ghost edged toward me to protect my flank. I could tell that the officers were going to try it. Gun and dog notwithstanding. For all they knew I was a mad cop killer.
“Stop!”
Benson Childe came running out of the building with a phalanx of armed Barrier personnel at his heels. I saw Deirdre MacDonal and Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod following behind. Because they wore uniforms the street cops looked at them in confusion. The crowd was even more confused because guns were being pointed at cops and no one was pointing a gun at the crazy Yank with the dog.
Childe’s men pushed the cops against the wall and frisked them. I didn’t think they were involved—and was pretty sure they weren’t—but I was in no mood to take stupid risks. I lowered my weapon and eased the hammer down. Childe didn’t ask me to surrender it.
“Sit and watch,” I said to Ghost, and he did just that. The wolf was still there behind his eyes. I could feel the killer behind my own.
Childe leaned close to me. “For God’s sake, Ledger, I know these men. What the bloody hell happened here?”
“Seven Kings,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
Over the Atlantic, Flight 7988
December 17, 2:42 P.M. GMT
Dr. Rudy Sanchez sat in his first-class seat and fumed. He disliked air travel at the best of times and definitely didn’t want to be in the air when terrorist bombs were going off anywhere in the world. In the days following the attack on the World Trade Center, Sanchez had been one of a team of doctors who had descended on Ground Zero to help in any way they could. As a psychiatrist, Rudy saw firsthand the initial waves of post-event trauma that were the result of the attack. He saw the wound inflicted on the hearts, minds, and souls of the people working the site. The haunted eyes of police and firefighters who spent hours picking through the rubble to locate pieces of people who had been their friends or colleagues. The dreadful loss of confidence in the world in the eyes of the thousands of people who stood constant vigil at the fringes of the disaster. The strange blend of relief and guilt in the eyes of the survivors.
During the flight he’d listened to the constant buzz of frantic discussion aboard the United Airlines jet. Since 9/11, terrorism was part of everyday language. It had become so commonplace that jokes were made about terrorists. Books and movies had been made about it. And the thought that it was already that deeply enmeshed with ordinary life chilled Rudy to the bone.
And now he had the Nicodemus file and everything about this matter was unnerving. The file was strangely incomplete. There should have been hundreds of pages of it. Evaluations, transcripts, after-session notes, and a detailed record of the man’s arrest, trial, and incarceration. Instead there were a few dozen pages of very general notes that might apply to any prisoner. Commonplace stuff. Worthless except for the very last set of handwritten notes taken a few hours ago by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Stankeviius, and even they were cryptic. References to a “goddess” but without context to identify which goddess.
The overall thrust of Nicodemus’s words had tended toward Judeo-Christian references, particularly with his reference to Dumas and Gesmas. They were variations on the spellings of Dismas and Gestas, the names of the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. But since those names were not in the standard Bible but in the highly apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, it seemed likely they were simply part of the overall religious delusion the prisoner had built up around himself. None of it tied back to either 9/11 or the London, at least as far as Rudy could determine. There was
nothing else of substance in Stankeviius’s notes.
Rudy was alone in first class. Since the bomb went off there had been a flood of seat cancellations. He used his secure access to open a video Web chat with Bug via satellite. A small box opened up, showing the face of the head of the DMS computer lab. Although his name was Jerome Taylor, even his own family called him Bug. He had been a computer hacker as a kid and came onto Mr. Church’s radar when he tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had the right access he could locate Osama bin Laden. Maj. Grace Courtland and Sgt. Gus Dietrich showed up at Taylor’s door the following morning. He was offered a deal: work for the DMS or go to jail. When he accepted and was told about MindReader, he fell deeply and irrevocably in love.
“Hey, Doc!” he said brightly. The world could be in flames and Bug would still be jovial. Rudy wondered how Bug’s mood would change if the Internet crashed.
“Bug,” he said, “are you sure you sent me all of Nicodemus’s records?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you have missed something?”
“Could Oprah fit into Beyoncé’s bikini?” He snorted and said, “Either they have a lot of his stuff stored on paper records or …”
“Or what?”
“Or someone’s removed it.”
“Can’t MindReader tell if someone has been into the computer files? Doesn’t it leave a handprint?”
“Footprint, and yes. Except there’s no footprint here. From a computer standpoint nothing appears to be missing, and I’ve gone into the Willow Grove and Philadelphia PD databases, too. There’s just nothing else there. We can’t even verify his first name. If he has one.”
“Hijo de puta.”
“The fact that all of this is missing is deep magic. I’m getting a Woodrow just thinking about how sexy this is, ’cause we’re not talking about some pissant tapeworm. Someone’s punked the system just like MindReader. And they’ve absconded with the treeware and—”
“‘Treeware’?”
“Paper. Actual we’re-so-last-century printed documents. Somone in meatspace actually swiped the physical records as well. That’s stuff we can do when we bring our A-game. No one else has anything like MindReader, so I can’t grok how they did this. Whoever he is, this guy’s a freaking ghost.”
Rudy disconnected and then called Mr. Church.
“Problem?” asked Church.
Rudy explained about the records. “Is it possible Bug missed something?”
“Bug doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.”
“Then, that begs the uncomfortable question as to the possibility of a more sophisticated computer system than MindReader.”
“Unlikely. It would have to have been designed and built entirely without a connection to the Internet or we’d have gotten a whiff of it. Or built with an operating system so different as to be unrecognizable as a computer to all other computers. It’s doubtful something that exotic would be able to interface with the existing systems and networks.”
“Deep Throat has a phone system that we can’t understand or crack.”
Church didn’t comment.
“Coming at a time like this,” said Rudy, “with terrorist activity ongoing, a mystery of this kind is more than a bit unsettling.”
“Yes,” Church agreed. From his tone of voice he might have been agreeing to a comment on the weather, but Rudy knew him as well as anyone at the Warehouse. There was an edge of strain in Church’s calm voice.
Church disconnected and Rudy tapped keys to bring up the booking photos of Nicodemus. From the side he was unremarkable. Thin, slightly stooped, with a receding chin and thinning hair. An ordinary man. From the front, however, he was something … else. His eyes were a little too far apart, and the left was set higher and at a slight angle. His nose was thin and his mouth was a wet smile. Rudy enlarged the photo and stared into the man’s eyes. They were cold and bottomless. Those eyes, and that smiling mouth, suggested a warped sensuality that Rudy found immensely distasteful, and a deep understanding of things that had no natural place in the human mind.
“Dios mio,” Rudy murmured.
Interlude Eight
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Four Months Before the London Event
Circe O’Tree chewed on a plastic pen cap as she scrolled through the recent postings on Twitter. When she refreshed the page she had been watching, a new tweet popped up.
The Elders of Zion are not a myth. They live … they wait. They will have justice.
She chewed her lip.
It was posted by one of the new accounts Circe was following. Enyo. Circe opened a browser and hit a saved link that took her to an online reference database of mythology. She typed in the name. The entry came up at once.
Enyo.
A Greek goddess of war. She often accompanies Ares into battle. During the fall of Troy, Enyo inflicted horror and bloodshed alongside Phobos (“Fear”) and Deimos (“Dread”), the sons of Ares. Enyo is responsible for orchestrating the destruction of cities.
Circe frowned at the screen for a few seconds and then reached for the phone. Hugo Vox answered after four rings.
“Jesus Christ, woman, don’t you ever sleep?” Vox growled, sounding like a sleepy bear.
Circe glanced at the clock and realized with a start that it was four twenty in the morning.
“I’m sorry, Hugo … . I completely lost track of the time.”
“The White House had better be in flames,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, flustered and suddenly embarrassed by her impetuousness. “It can wait.”
“No,” he grumbled, “I’m awake now. What is it?”
She told him.
“Ah … Christ. Okay, I’ll be right down.”
While she waited, Circe toggled back to Twitter and refreshed the page. The comment had been retweeted 41 times. When she refreshed again a minute later there were 153. An enormous amount of posts, even for a social network as active as Twitter. Most of the posts were negative, decrying the comment and disputing the existence of the so-called Learned Elders of Zion. But more than a hundred posts offered support of the comment. Of those, only a third were goddess names. Circe did track-backs on many of them. Half were known agitators among the violent fringe of the conspiracy community. Some were frequent posters of anti-Islamic comments. The rest appeared to be ordinary people.
There were so many things about this that bothered her. First, the choice of a name that was clearly tied to violence and destruction. Over the last few weeks the Goddess had made a clear shift toward militancy, though choosing the name Enyo suggested a much more aggressive leap. The other troubling point was the Elders of Zion reference. Circe was sure she had something on that.
Ten minutes later Hugo Vox came into her office wearing gray T-Town sweats that were water stained. His hair had only been finger combed. He looked at her and then more pointedly at what she was wearing. The same blue skirt and blouse from yesterday.
“You didn’t leave here all night, did you?”
“I got caught up—”
“Look, kiddo, while I admire the dedication you have for your job, you’re young and pretty and smart and you should be out on dates on Friday nights … not locked up here with a computer and the kind of junk food I eat.”
She made a face.
He sighed. “I know, I know … you don’t like dating guys in the service. How come, though? They’re all good guys. Top of the line.”
“And vetted by Vox,” she said with a grin.
“Well … not vetted for dating you, but I could look into that.”
“Thanks, Hugo, but I don’t need a matchmaker. Besides, the guys here at T-Town pretty much ooze testosterone. They spend all day long shooting things and beating each other up. What would we talk about over dinner? Muzzle velocity and choke holds?”
“What about some of those bookworms you meet at signings? That literary agent of yours has a case of the hornies for you.”
<
br /> “Oh, please. He’s a wiener.”
Hugo grinned. “So … soldiers are too manly and the artsy crowd is too effete. Let me know when you find someone in the middle. I’m serious. You ever get off your ass and go out to have a real night off, I’ll pay for dinner for both of you.”
She mumbled something awkward and waved him to a chair. He was chuckling as he settled his bulk into it.
“Okay,” he said, “you obviously found something. Thrill me.”
She launched in, but before she was finished he held up a hand. “‘Elders of Zion’? What the hell’s that?”
“The full name is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was supposedly the secret master plan by a group of Jews outlining how they would take over Europe and dominate the Christian world.”
“How come I never heard about this?”
“Well, this is early-twentieth-century stuff. And it was proved to be a hoax.”
“Then why the fuck am I not still sleeping in my goddamn bed?”
“Please, bear with me, Hugo. The Protocols were a piece of propaganda intended to implicate European Jews in a conspiracy that did not exist. Henry Ford, who was a notorious anti-Semite, used the Protocols in his campaign against Jews, and even Hitler trotted them out to support his racist insanity. Much of the material was directly plagiarized from writings of political satire totally unrelated to the Jews. But hatred of the Jews in early-twentieth-century Europe was stronger than common sense; and later, following the establishment of Israel as a state, a renewed wave of anti-Zionism sparked new interest in the Protocols … and this hatred spread from Europe to the Middle East.”
“So what?”
“The Goddess has just started posting about the Elders of Zion.”
Hugo sat forward. “Okay, now you have my full attention.”
The King of Plagues Page 10
