Code Zero (25 page)

That’s how it should have gone.

But Mother Night had decided to let the clown college handle it, and that resulted in zero targets being eliminated while the entire so-called kill squad was butchered by Ledger and his dog.

As he thought about that he felt something shift inside his head. The colors of the paint on the walls started shifting in tone.

“Uh-oh,” he said and made a grab for his pills.

He stuffed a few into his mouth, reminded himself not to chew them, washed them down with warm Coke, and waited for the colors to return to normal.

“Fucking henchmen,” he said to the air around him.

Monk returned to the window and settled himself down. His elevated shooting position was inside a hotel room that had two banks of elevators and excellent stairwells. Six runners—all reliable lackeys—were positioned to flee down the stairwells, each of them wearing a ski mask. Monk would simply walk down the hall, enter a room booked under a different name, and take a bath. All of his equipment and clothing would be collected and disposed of by a woman seeded into the maid staff two months ago. The equipment would be placed in a barrel filled with hydrochloric acid, sealed, and stored in the basement among three other similar barrels, each marked as diesel fuel for the back-up generator.

Monk’s cover was ironclad. He was in town for a business meeting, and was, in fact, enrolled. A superb double would attend the meetings wearing a mike so Monk could hear the lectures. He’d already watched videos of yesterday’s sessions, and he would attend the closing session tomorrow. In the unlikely event that he was questioned, his alibi would hold water.

And polygraphs are virtually useless with the insane. He knew that from experience.

His team of lackeys had already prepped the shooting room before he arrived, but Monk chased them out and spent two hours going over everything. Obsessively. Multiple times. The only thing he did not do was disassemble the rifle. In the movies snipers did that, but it was silly. When you took apart a gun, no matter how carefully you handled it, you disturbed the settings. Those settings could not be perfectly duplicated without sighting it again on a range. He’d arranged to have the fully assembled gun wrapped loosely in bubble wrap and brought here by two lackeys who understood his rules.

Those two were replacements for a team who’d made an error on a previous job. Monk regretted what he’d done to them, but you couldn’t put people back together after they’d been hacked apart. He knew, he’d tried.

The new team was very, very careful, so it was really an opportunity for them all to grow together.

The rifle was a Dragunov sniper rifle, which was not his weapon of choice, but its use in this hit—and later discovery—would send a nicely conflicted message. It had mechanically adjustable back-up iron sights with a sliding tangent rear sight and a scope mount that didn’t block the area between the front and rear sights. Very useful and a nice piece of design work.
Bravo for our Russian brothers,
he thought. It fired 7.62 by 54 millimeter rounds at 2,700 feet per second, fed from a ten-round box magazine.

He decided to name it Olga.

Monk sat with Olga for a long time, explaining to the rifle what was expected of her and why it was important.

Olga listened without comment.

That was not a given. Monk had engaged other weapons in long and complicated back-and-forth conversations. His meds had changed since then, and he thought wistfully of the subtle insights of the German PSG1 and the wacky humor of the Beretta .50.

When Monk realized that he was falling into a depression because Olga wasn’t speaking with him, he got up and crossed to where he’d hung his jacket, dug his blue plastic pillbox out of the pocket, sorted through all the colors, made a selection, and swallowed two pills. He crouched in the closet until talking to a rifle seemed ridiculous.

He was grateful there were no cameras here in this room. His employer knew that he was mad, but she probably did not know how thin the ice was beneath his skates. Most of the time he didn’t, either.

It frightened him to realize that he was probably slipping. Or maybe had already slipped. At least a notch or two.

The woman he worked for was always looking, always watching. If he slipped in her eyes, then he would be dead. Two in the back of the head and his body run through a wood chipper. He’d seen that done to others. He’d helped do it to others, so he understood that it was standard operating procedure.

He was sad, he was crazy, but he didn’t want to die.

And he definitely didn’t want to become mulch.

Monk squatted inside the closet until he was sure that the meds had kicked in. As much as they could or would kick in. He’d have to up his dose soon, and that was going to change him. It would sand another layer from his mental sharpness. Dull him. Make him less of what he was.

When he opened the closet door he had to avoid looking at Olga until he was sure there wasn’t more he needed to say to her.

No, he warned himself.

Not Olga.

Not like that.

Just a gun.

A tool.

Nothing else.

“Fuck,” he said aloud. He permitted himself five curses or obscenities each day. This was his first for today, so he repeated it. “Fuck!”

The gun remained a gun.

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

He accessed an app on his smartphone that asked him a bunch of pop-culture questions. Monk was excellent at trivia, and appearing on
Jeopardy
was the third item on his bucket list. He took time to consider the answers. Who was the current speaker of the House? Who played Radaghast the Brown in
The Hobbit
? How many Americans walked on the moon?

Like that.

He answered all his questions and got each right. Weird answers raised flags and made him want to reach for his pillbox.

He took a breath and smiled a little as he let it out. The pills he’d taken seemed to have bolted him to the ground very nicely. It was a relief.

His phone vibrated. The screen display said “Mom,” which was not true. His mother had died in a fire when Monk was fifteen. It was the first fire he’d set that had taken a life, and as such it was sacred in his memory.

Nevertheless, when he answered it he said, “Hello?”

“Things are moving,” Mother Night, “but we’re not ready for you yet. You need to be patient and wait for the signal.”

“Okey-dokey.”

There was a pause.

“Monk…?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Don’t say ‘okey-dokey.’”

“Oh. Okay.”

Another pause. “How are you doing?”

He suspected that Mother knew about his problems, though not about their severity. The question was layered and it contained traps both obvious and subtle.

Ludo Monk was mad, but he had been managing his damage for too long to make that kind of mistake. On reflection, though, he wondered if Mother knew that about him and was giving him a gentle nudge toward self-management.

“I’m doing well,” he told her, and at the moment he meant it.

“Good,” said Mother Night.

She disconnected.

Monk moved a chair across the room and positioned it behind the tripod-mounted Russian sniper rifle. He did not check the box magazine. It had been preloaded by another member of their team. Someone who had fingerprints that would be consistent with Russian intelligence.

The tripod was set up well inside the room, away from the window. There was no chance of anyone spotting a gun barrel sticking out, no chance of sun glare on the blued steel. He turned the room lights off, made himself comfortable on the chair, and bent his eye to the scope.

It took very little time to find the big picture window on the third floor. The glass was clear, the angle of the sun was perfect to allow for a crystal-clear view of the boardroom at FreeTech. Several people sat in big leather chairs around a blond wood table. Four women, three men, and a teenage boy. Monk knew little about most of them and cared even less. Mother Night had specified only one target, and Monk knew everything about her. She had a very specific outcome in mind. Actually, Monk appreciated the effect she was going for. It was so deliciously subtle.

He tucked the stock into his shoulder and closed his hand around the gun, laying his finger along the outside of the trigger guard. Across the street, 206 yards away, one of the women began passing blue file folders to the others at the table. She was a very pretty woman. Tall, but not too tall. A bit on the thin side. With masses of curly blond hair and a lovely spray of sun freckles across her nose and cheeks.

Monk looked at that hair. At how light seemed to move through it and change. How it framed so beautiful a face.

He wondered if a bullet would knock that hair off her head.

It was, after all, a wig.

Chapter Thirty-five

Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

Park Slope, Brooklyn

Sunday, August 31, 12:49 p.m.

“Tell me about the girl,” I said.

Caleb Sykes, the nerdy kid who ran the cyber café, was sweating bullets. He was seated on a backless stool with the three of us ringed around him and Ghost sitting like a hungry wolf ten feet away. It wasn’t exactly thumbscrews and the rack, but that’s how he was taking it. I think if I’d yelled “Boo!” he’d have fainted dead away.

“I already t-told y-you,” said Sykes. Nerves were bringing out a repressed stutter. I felt bad for the kid and believed that he really had nothing to do with anything. Had to go through the motions, though.

“You said she was Korean,” I prompted.

“Yeah. I th-think so.”

“Not Chinese? Not Japanese?” asked Top. “You’re sure?”

“I used to date a Korean girl. They don’t look Chinese or Japanese. They look Korean. But later, on TV … she looked Chinese. I d-don’t th-think it w-was the s-s-s-same g-g-g—”

He couldn’t get it out. I told him it was okay, we understood.

“Did she touch anything in the store?” asked Top.

“Like wh-wh-what?”

“Like anything. Can you remember any specific surface she might have touched with her hands, her fingers.”

Caleb suddenly brightened. “Oh! You m-mean f-f-for fingerprints.”

“Exactly. Take a second, son, and think about it.”

“Um … just the c-counter and the m-money she handed me.”

“Did she bring her own laptop in?” I asked. “Was she just using your wi-fi, or did she—?”

“She r-r-rented an hour on D-D-Dell Three.”

“Show us,” said Top.

We stepped back to allow Sykes to rise, but the kid did it carefully as if expecting us to swat him back down in the chair. We didn’t. Instead we followed him from the small office we’d been using for the interrogation and into the store. A CLOSED sign was hung in the window. Sykes led us to the table on which was the laptop used by the Korean girl who claimed to be Mother Night.

“This is it?” asked Top.

He nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“S-sure I’m sure. It w-w-was on the r-receipt.”

Top fished through the receipts and found the right one, read it, and handed it to me. “Station eleven.”

Sykes nodded again.

He reached out to touch the closed lid of the laptop for emphasis, but Top caught his wrist.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Fingerprints.”

“Oh … r-right…”

We all stood there and considered the laptop. A two-year-old Dell. It was open but turned off.

“How many other people used this computer after the girl?” I asked.

Sykes thought about it. “S-six…?” he suggested.

Top bent over it and grunted. As he straightened he nodded to the machine. “See that?”

I did. It was small, but it was there. And it looked to have been carved into the tabletop with a pin. A capital A surrounded by an O.

I waved Bunny over. “Dust it and bag it.”

Bunny produced a device that looked like a department store pricing gun. When he aimed it at the laptop it produced a cold blue laser light.

“What’s th-that?” asked Sykes.

“Digital fingerprint scanner,” explained Bunny. “Uses a laser to take microfine pictures of fingerprints. There’s special software to separate overlapping prints. Does it by determining the orientation, finger pad size, and so on, then it assembles the pieces into as clear a whole as possible.”

Sykes said, “W-wow. I watch suh-suh-
CSI
all the t-time and I never saw anything like th-that.”

Top smiled at him. “Our boss has a friend in the industry.”

My cell phone buzzed again and I nearly tore my pants snatching it out of my pocket. I wanted to smash the damn thing. The message this time was

NO ONE LIVES FOREVER

Ghost suddenly whuffed, and I glanced over my shoulder as a shadow fell across the front window. There were two people standing outside, peering in through the big plate glass.

They were both young. They were both wearing black hoodies and black sunglasses. They were smiling.

They each held a machine gun.

Sykes had played enough video games to know what AK-47s were.

He said, “Wh-what…?”

Then the world exploded into a terrible storm of shattered glass, bullets, screams, and blood.

Chapter Thirty-six

FreeTech

800 Fifth Avenue

New York City

Sunday, August 31, 12:51 p.m.

Toys was winding up his presentation about projects he wanted to fund in the more economically depressed areas of Central and South America, particularly of research into diseases of poverty that were doing incredible damage there. When he realized that Junie Flynn was no longer listening, his words trickled off and stopped.

The others at the table were also studying Junie.

“Is something wrong?” asked Toys.

Without answering, Junie got to her feet and slowly crossed to the big picture window. She stood there, staring out, though it did not appear to Toys as if she was actually looking at anything.