Code Zero (16 page)

“Sorry, Boo, I was miles away,” said Collins. “Give that to me again.”

“It was the immigration reform bill. Were you able to look it over? Calvin has this morning blocked out to rewrite it before the press briefing and—”

“Ah, damn, I was so jammed up I didn’t get to it. Put it on the top of my pile and I’ll go over it first thing.”

“Very well, Mr. Vice President.”

Collins shot him a look. “Oh, don’t sound so disapproving. Jeez, you’re like my tenth-grade math teacher. She used to make me feel like shit if I forgot to do my homework.”

“Not at all, Mr. Vice President.”

“And here’s how I know you’re pissed at me, Boo.”

“Sir?”

“You only call me ‘Mr. Vice President’ in that tone when I’ve been naughty.”

“No, I—”

Collins laughed and reached over to clap Radley on the shoulder. “Christ, lighten up. It’s a beautiful day in the capital. Take a breath. No, I’m serious, actually take a breath.”

Bradley’s mouth was pinched but then he drew in a deep lungful of air, pulling it in through his nostrils. He held it for a second and then exhaled, long and slow.

“There,” said Collins, “now doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Collins gave him a rueful shake of the head. “You need to get laid, Boo. I’m serious, you are in more dire need of getting your ashes hauled than anyone in the District of Columbia.”

Radley made no comment.

“Okay, okay, I know, back to work,” said Collins. He genuinely liked Radley and wished that he could bring him into his confidence. What did they call it in that movie, he mused.
Into the circle of trust.
But although Radley was absolutely ruthless in the prosecution of his duties as the chief of staff to the vice president, he was also a patriot. Worse yet, he was a Constitutionalist, one of those patriots who was a fierce proponent of the letter of the law rather than the spirit of what was really best for the future of America. The kind of patriotism that kept the lights on and provided for the general welfare. Blah, blah, blah. Not the kind who would take a risk and do what was necessary to change the game. The Boo Radleys of the world were always looking to get America “back on track,” instead of taking America to the next level. That rather amazed Collins, too, because the Founding Fathers were innovative rebels before they created that restrictive piece of bad legislation called the Constitution. The Founding Fathers would never allow America to have fallen into the state of disgrace in which she currently wallowed. Escalating debt to China and other creditors. A continued off-the-books allegiance to old-money families like the Rothschilds. Allowing the bankers to constantly butt-fuck Congress. And a demonstrated fear of truly embracing the potential of radical new technologies.

In Collins’s view it was a widespread problem. Republicans and Democrats were both pussies, with maybe a few exceptions. Even though he was a party man according to the voters and election strategists, Collins privately considered himself to be a staunch, unflinching, and proud member of a much older party than either of those. The True American Revolutionary Party.

A party that, granted, existed only in shadows and private conversations, but which was growing very fast. It was gaining friends and power with every day.

And today …

Collins had to turn away to hide a smile. Today was going to be a very important day. A day of great social change. Not just for America, but for the entire world. Collins believed with his whole heart that by the end of today the world would be a different place. Public awareness would be tuned in to a newer and clearer frequency. Congress would no longer be allowed to remain complacent, or to put personal agendas ahead of the needs of what Collins prayed would be a renewed America. A reborn America.

“Sir?” said Radley, and once more Collins realized that his attention had drifted from what his aide was saying. He would have to watch that. Today was not a day to allow anything unusual to show, not even here in the relative privacy of his car.

“Sure, sure, Boo,” he said expansively, “I’m all ears. What else do you have?”

The motorcade moved on, closing in on the White House in so many different ways.

Chapter Twenty

Dutch Trader Tavern

North Main and East Twenty-third Streets

Farmville, Virginia

Sunday, August 31, 7:27 a.m.

Colonel Samson Riggs leaned wearily against the wall. He held an empty pistol in his right hand, the slide locked back. Shell casings littered the floor all around him and blue-gray gun smoke clouded the air.

The unfinished brick walls were slimed with mossy dampness, and tendrils of creeper vines and the roots of weeds trailed down through the cracked mortar. Above him, the ceiling was a gaping hole that still smoked from the blaster-plaster they’d used to breach the wall into this place. The building had once been a mill in Colonial times, and a tavern for more than two hundred years. Eight years ago the economy crushed it into a silent and empty husk that waited for the sheriff to sell it for back taxes. Recently, someone else had moved in and taken possession of the extensive cellars. Perhaps “some
thing
” was more apt, because the hulking figures that lay sprawled around him did not look human.

They were massive, grotesquely muscled, and their faces had a distinctly simian cast. Riggs knew what they were.

Berserkers.

But that made no sense. The Berserker program had been shut down years ago by Joe Ledger and his team at a place called the Dragon Factory. That’s where a group of fanatical scientists had used gene therapy to blend the DNA of silverback gorillas with that of a team of mercenaries. The result had been a kill squad who had all of the mass and muscle of the great apes and the total savagery of the world’s number-one apex predator. Man.

It was a deadly combination, but it was damn well supposed to be past tense. All of the Berserkers had been killed. Every last freakish one of them.

So where did these monsters come from?

It was a question with no answer.

A rattle of gunfire made Riggs jerk out of his reverie. This fight wasn’t over.

As he began running he slapped his pockets for a fresh magazine, found none. No grenades, either. All he had left was the fighting knife strapped to his combat harness.

“Never take a knife to a goddamn gunfight,” he muttered as he tore it loose. He raced along the stone corridors.

A shape loomed up in front of him and Riggs nearly gutted it with the knife; but it was Wendig, the sergeant of Two Squad, the second of Shockwave’s smaller teams. Wendig’s face was as white as paste. The rest of him was bright red. He reached for Riggs with his left hand. Except there was no hand at the end of the reaching arm.

“I—I—” stammered the sergeant, and then he collapsed onto the ground.

Riggs had no time to do anything or offer any help. Someone else was screaming. A woman.

There were two women on Two Squad, a stocky Navajo named Mary Tsotse, and Star Phillips, a lanky black woman from Detroit. Ordinarily it was possible to tell them apart, whether whispering, talking, or even yelling; but that scream was so massive, so raw that it could have been either of them. Whoever it was needed him right now.

He leaped over Sergeant Wendig, ran down a narrow side corridor and burst into a larger room where old, broken beer barrels stood on wooden racks.

Two of his people were down. Both male. The rest of Two Squad. Jespersen and McPhail.

Down and either dead or badly wounded. They shared their pools of blood with three hulking forms who were indisputably dead, their heads blown apart by bullets. The brutes wore heavy body armor. Another body, Star Phillips, lay twisted into a madhouse shape, her spine bent backward so that her head touched the back of her thighs. Her sightless eyes were filled with a terminal wonder.

Only one member of Two Squad still stood. Still breathed.

Eighty feet away.

Two more of the Berserkers flanked her, closing in on Mary Tsotse. She fired at them, but the big men held a thick wooden table at head level and let the hardwood soak up the bullets. Tsotse tried for leg shots, but the body armor sloughed off the rounds, though the foot-pounds of impact slowed the approach of the killers.

Tsotse’s body ran with blood from long, terrible gashes torn in her flesh by the steel-hard fingernails of the brutes. Her Kevlar and clothes were in rags, and the exposed flesh was ripped and bleeding. It was through sheer force of will that she was still on her feet, still firing, still fighting.

As Riggs ran into the room he saw the slide lock back on Tsotse’s Sig Sauer. A look of abject fear and hopelessness filled her eyes. The brutes laughed in sudden delight.

She backpedaled while fishing for another magazine, but the brutes hurled the table at her, catching her in the chest with it. Riggs heard the meaty crunch as the table smashed flesh and broke bones.

Then Riggs threw himself at the brutes.

The men turned to meet his charge.

They grinned at the man who wanted so badly to die that he dared attack them with only a knife.

The closest one swiped at Riggs, trying to end it fast by crushing the man’s skull. But Riggs changed his leap into a tuck and roll. He passed under the sweeping arm and hit the floor between them, rolling fast, coming up, spinning, cutting.

The blade caught the lunging mercenary across the back of the knee. Combat demands mobility and padding precludes it. The back of the knee was covered by thinner material that was far too thin. The edge of Riggs’s knife passed through Kevlar and tendon in a tight arc that trailed rubies.

Before the monster could even buckle from the loss of structure, Riggs spun left, turning in a full circle to give mass to his motion, pushing weight behind his second cut. This time the blade sliced cleanly through the Achilles tendon of the second brute.

It was all so fast.

So fast.

The monsters’ howls were filled with surprise as much as pain. Ordinary men did not move that fast.

As their legs buckled, they shifted to their uninjured legs and tried to dive atop him, to smother this man with more than a quarter ton of muscle and bone.

But Riggs came up out of his crouch, rising like a rocket, shifting toward the first brute, holding the Ka-Bar in both hands, shoving it edge upward, cleaving the simian face from chin to brow.

With a savage wrench, Riggs tore the blade free, pivoted into the rush of the second brute, and drove the point of his knife into the monster’s screaming mouth. The blade punched into the soft palate, and Riggs instantly let go with his right hand and used the heel of his palm to pound on the flat pommel, driving the blade all the way through to the brain stem.

The ape-man reeled backward, aware that he was dying, seeing the cold and emotionless face of his killer rise above him as he fell.

Then Riggs turned to the other Berserker. The thing had fallen against the wall. One leg was limp and sheathed in blood. The apelike face was a ruin, cut in half to expose gums and broken teeth and gaping sinuses. It howled in agony.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Riggs pivoted on the ball of one foot and drove his other foot in a brutal side thrust kick that shattered the Berserker’s other knee. Riggs then turned, bent, and tore his knife from the second ape-man’s mouth, turned back to the crippled first one, kicked flailing hands out of the way, and cut the monster’s throat.

As the body collapsed, silence crashed down all around Riggs.

Nothing moved except his heaving chest.

Everyone around him was dead.

Two Squad. All of them. Dead.

Then there were shouts from far away as One Squad came pounding along the halls. Rico and Marchman and the others. The cavalry, riding to the rescue thirty seconds too late. They burst into the chamber and skidded to a halt.

Riggs heard gasps and curses.

And, from someone, a sob.

With a trembling hand, Riggs tapped his earbud to call this in, but there was nothing. There had been nothing since they came down here. Some kind of jammer hidden in the walls.

However, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

He frowned and dug it out, wondering why it had a signal when the earbuds did not. He expected it to be Bug trying some alternate way of contacting Shockwave.

It wasn’t. Instead it was a text message, which was odd because he never used the message function. Ever.

The caller ID was only a capital letter A. The message read:

THAT WAS A TASTE.

NEXT TIME YOU’LL BE THE MEAL.

Riggs stared at the message.

“What the hell?” he murmured.

Chapter Twenty-one

Across America

Sunday, August 31, 8:08 a.m.

World of Curios, Savannah, Georgia

The sign outside said 72-HOUR LABOR DAY SALE.

The boy who walked into the store did not look like the kind of customer who came to buy. He wore scruffy jeans, a black hoodie with the logo of the seventies band Crass silk-screened onto the back. His hood was up and he had sunglasses perched on a thin nose. Wires from an iPod trailed out from under the hood and disappeared into a pocket. The woman behind the counter spotted him right away and kept an eye on him as he moved from one display to another.

The boy stopped in front of glass display cabinets in which a dozen vintage French crucifixes were arranged with photos of the small towns from which they’d come. Then he moved sideways and stopped in front of an adjoining case that held hand-carved nineteenth-century walking sticks from Italy, Austria, and England.

A customer came to the counter and the saleswoman had to shift her attention to ring up a purchase, but a hissing sound made her jerk her head back to the boy. He had produced a can of spray paint from his pocket and was using it to spray a large letter A on the glass doors of the display case.

“Hey! What are you
doing
?” yelled the saleswoman as she began around the counter.