Joe Ledger (20 page)

“Tell me about the floor,” I said.

“It’s wired nine ways from Sunday,” said Bug, “but that’s not the bad news.”

“It’s not? Then have MindReader go in there and kick over some furniture.”

MindReader was the supercomputer around which the Department of Military Sciences was built. It was a freak of a computer, the only one of its kind, and it had a super-intrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One was to look for patterns by drawing information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing: MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to erase all traces of its presence.

“Can’t—” began Bug, but I cut him off.

“Don’t tell me ‘can’t.’”

“Cowboy, listen to me. Their security runs out of a dedicated server that isn’t wired into their main computers. Not in, anyway—no WIFI, no hard lines. Nothing. You’re going to need to find it and plug a router cable into a USB port so MindReader can access it.”

“Ah,” I said.

There were no computers visible in the room.

Not one. I wore a high-definition lapel cam, so he could see that, too.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

That’s when another voice said, “I got this.”

It should have been Top’s voice. He was suited up to follow me down. Or, if not him, then Bunny. We were the only three agents authorized to be here.

It wasn’t them.

It was a woman who dropped down on a second set of wires. Slim, gorgeous, with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. No hazmat suit. She used the hand brake on the drop wire and stopped exactly level with me.

She smiled.

It was a big smile, full of white teeth and mischief.

“Hello, Joseph,” she said.

“Hello, Violin,” I said. “What in the wide blue fuck are you doing here?”

Chap. 3

Her smile didn’t waver.

“I’m on a case,” she said.

“You’re not supposed to be on
this
case,” I fired back.

“You’re intruding into
my
case.”

“Sorry, babe, this is U.S. soil, and I’m the one with official sanction.”

“Really?” She pretended to pout. “You’re going to throw proper procedure at me? After all we’ve—”

I cut her off. “Uh-uh. Don’t you dare give me the ‘after all we’ve been through’ speech. You’ve used that too many times.”

“I have not.” 

“Excuse me? Paris? Cairo? Rio? Any of that ring a bell?”

She dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “You sound like a shrewish old woman, Joseph. It’s really unattractive.”

“And you’re wanted on four continents, including this one, darlin’. So how much do you want to push this?”

We had to keep our voices to whispers, so there was an unintentional hushed comedy to the exchange.

She started grinning right around the time I did.

We hung there for a moment, smiling.

I wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and I’m not sure the term ‘lover’ fit, either. We’d been through some terrible stuff together, and we’d both nearly died. Friends of ours
did
die. And, no joke, we saved the world. The actual world. So, every now and then, when we found ourselves in the same part of the world at the same time, and providing neither of us had any serious emotional commitments elsewhere, Violin and I celebrated our survival, celebrated the fact of being alive. When you’ve taken the kind of fire we have, you definitely take time for that. Some soldiers go to the Wall in D.C. and trace names. Some visit Ground Zero or sit in a church—any church that’s handy—and they thank their higher power for us being on the good side of the dirt.

Violin and I? We celebrated it in a very primal, very steamy way. Clothes were torn. Furniture was broken. Cops were called more than once.

There was never any attempt at a relationship. Not for us. We were still at war. When our time was over, we—by mutual consent—walked away and went back to the killing.

But, as much as it lifted my heart to see her alive and well and smoking hot, she was not supposed to be here. This was a covert op. It wasn’t an invitational.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”

“Go for Rock,” said the deep voice of my second-in-command, First Sergeant Top Sims.

“Why am I talking to you on the radio instead of face to face?” I demanded in a tone that could burn the paint off an oil drum. “Why, instead, am I down here with a
civilian
?”

I leaned on the word to piss off Violin.

“Bastard,” she hissed. She stuck her tongue out at me, so I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Wasn’t my call.” Top’s voice was very calm and controlled. “Word came down from the big man. Said to afford every courtesy.”

The big man was my boss, Mr. Church, founder and head of the DMS.

Balls.

I knew that I was being unfair in my assessment that Violin was a civilian. She was hardly that. Violin was a fellow soldier, but not a fellow American. She was born in captivity to a mother who—along with many others—was forced breeding stock in the world’s oldest and ugliest Eugenics program. A group called the Red Order had been using captive women for centuries to ensure that they had enough male members of a weird genetic subgroup called the
Upierczi
. These were as close to actual monsters as Mother Nature was likely to cook up. They were offshoots of human evolution, unusually strong and fast, and hideous in appearance. They were the reason the myth of the vampire came into our collective consciousness. No, these guys didn’t turn into bats, sparkle, or sleep in coffins. They weren’t supernatural in any way. But they weren’t my idea of natural, either, even if they were technically human.

They were called the Red Knights.

The Red Order used them as assassins in a campaign of carefully orchestrated religious hate crimes going back to the Crusades.

Violin’s mother, Lilith, had escaped from the breeding pits. I don’t know that whole story, but whatever happened left a psychic scar on the Red Knights. They feared Lilith the way people used to fear vampires. She was their boogeyman. When Lilith escaped, she took other women with her—and their children. Violin among them. As soon as they were free, they formed a militant group called Arklight, and they began hunting down the members of the Red Order and their
Upierczi
assassins.

I met Violin while I was hunting down some rogue nukes in Iran. There was an interesting learning curve before we began trusting each other, but when we realized that we shared the same enemies and a similar agenda, we went into battle together. That one was a doozy. Lots of good people died, including some of my guys from Echo Team. Men who’d walked through fire with me time and again. Arklight lost some heroes—well, heroines, too. And when it was all over we’d formed a rather sketchy alliance. Nothing official, of course, because Arklight did not respect national borders in its relentless search for the surviving members of the Red Order and the Red Knights. The official U.S. stance was that Arklight was a terrorist organization.

My boss, Mr. Church, was working to change that, and so far no one from Arklight had ever spent a night inside an American jail cell. After what they’d been through, Church and I were going to make sure no one put those women into any kind of cage ever again.

All of which explains her, but didn’t explain why we were being Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a bioweapons lab.

“Talk,” I told her.

“Let me get to the computer first.”

I gestured around. “We’re in an empty chamber, honey. Unless I’m missing something….”

She produced a spray can from a Batman utility belt. Shook the can. Sprayed it.

The gas inside was white and almost opaque. There wasn’t enough particulate matter in the discharge to trigger even the most sensitive motion sensor, but the opacity was usually great for revealing electric eyes and laser tripwires.

However, that wasn’t Violin’s purpose. She turned in a slow circle and emptied at least half the can into the chamber. The sluggish air from the shaft above us stirred the gas. All I could see were black stone walls. No hidden doors, no side tunnels, no electrical outlets.

Then I saw how wrong I was.

The gas expanded and diffused outward until it caressed the walls. Except that it didn’t.

It rolled out to touch
most
of the walls. But to my left, the gas swirled differently. The tendrils of gas seemed to rebound from empty air and eddy, as if confused. Violin ran a laser pointer over that section of wall.

The red beam ran straight for a few inches and then bulged outward at the same point where the gas had rebounded. Violin moved the beam slowly, and I could see that there was something there. The gas knew it, the laser light knew it, but my eyes didn’t.

“What the hell?” I murmured.

She grinned, enjoying my confusion. “Holograph,” she said.

And then I understood. The security system computer access panel was indeed bolted to the wall, but it was masked by a high-density holograph that made it look like empty wall. Without the gas and the laser, I would never have found it.

“Guess that answers the question as to whether this place is crooked,” I said. “Can’t work up any reason a legit lab would have that kind of security.”

“I never trust pharmaceutical companies,” she said with asperity.

I tended to agree. Sure, a lot of them are probably on the up and up, but in my trade I kept running into mad scientists cooking up bioweapons. Some of the most dangerous terrorists I’ve tackled have been pharmaceutical moguls or pharmacologists of one stripe or another. I’d have to watch that tendency toward negative bias, though. Subjectivity is a dangerous thing.

Violin adjusted the wires so that she tilted in the direction of the invisible box. It was slow work, and it took her some time to find the cover plate lock, disable it with a little electronic doohickey—that looked a whole lot like the doohickeys that only the DMS is supposed to have—and finally locate the USB port.

“Router?” she said, holding out a hand.

I sighed and handed it over.

Violin plugged it in, making sure not to touch any part of the panel with her hands. It probably had passive security, like contact and trembler switches. The router’s cable slid easily into the port and a tiny green light flashed on.

“Bug,” I said, “we’re—”

“Got it,” he said. “Acquiring the security system now. Hm, nice stuff. Too bad MindReader is going to bitch-slap it.” He actually sang that last part in a mocking falsetto.

I work with some pretty strange people.

We hung there and waited. The white gas swirled around us, obscuring the wires so that it looked like we were flying.

“So,” I said, “want to tell me what you’re doing here?”

Her mouth kept smiling but her eyes held no trace of humor. “Hunting vampires.”

My mouth went dry and my nuts tried to crawl up inside of my body. “Red Knights? You’re saying they’re here?”

“No,” she said. “But somebody who works here is helping them, and I—”

Bug cut in. “Okay, Cowboy…we own that place.”

“Copy that.”

I swung my feet down toward the floor and hit the cable release on the wires. A moment later Violin dropped silently beside me. The wires swayed around us like web threads from a giant spider.

The hologram projectors that hid the computer access panel clicked off, revealing a flat gray box the size of a hardback book. The router no longer looked like it was floating in midair. But when the holograms vanished, we discovered that there had been a second bit of misdirection. Right below us, set into the precise center of the concrete floor, was a steel hatch. It was very well made and was designed such that it was perfectly flush with the concrete. It had a touchscreen keypad that was currently displaying: “RESTRICTED ACCESS.”

“So far the intel is good,” I murmured. “We were told that this air vent was the way in. Looks like it is.”

Violin and I knelt on either side of it. I removed a flat gadget about the size of a pack of playing cards and pressed it onto the hatch. It connected to MindReader and began cycling through the hundreds of millions of permutations of the locking combination.

While we waited, I turned to Violin. “Okay, spill.”

She spilled.

Arklight spies had gotten wind of a hitherto unknown cell of Red Knights operating out of the Philly suburbs. It was unclear if the cell was preparing to strike Philly or if they were simply using the city as a base for recruiting and training. The Knights preferred cities that had elaborate subways and tunnel systems.

“Why Blue Bell?” I asked. “The subway doesn’t come all the way out here.”

She shook her head. “They have a contact here at Marquis Pharmaceuticals. A developmental chemist named Ryerson.”

“And what’s Ryerson doing for the Red Knights?”

“I don’t know. But my mother did a thorough background check on him. Ken Ryerson is forty-one, unmarried, no family, no apparent politics, has not voted in any recent elections, no police record.”

I waited. She wouldn’t give me that much if there wasn’t more. Violin liked a little drama.

“Mr. Ryerson gambles.”

“Ah,” I said.

That was it. She laid it out for me. Ryerson had been a three-times-a-year gambler when Atlantic City was the only place you could lay down a legal bet unless you flew to Nevada. Then the Native Americans opened casinos in the Poconos, and that made him a once-a-month man. A few years ago they turned the racetrack in Bensalem into a casino, twenty minutes away on the Turnpike. Ryerson started going once a week, then three times a week. He wasn’t a card player. From the way Violin described him, it was doubtful the man knew a straight flush from a toilet flush. Ryerson needed a more constant and predictable fix. He played nickel slots. A lot of nickel slots. Started getting later and later on his utility bills and car payments. The third time he was late on the rent, he had to move to a smaller apartment in a less attractive suburb. He gave up the leased car and bought a hooptie. Ate a lot of cheap takeout food. Didn’t stop plugging nickels into the one-armed bandit, though.