Code Zero (53 page)

“Yes.”

“Where?”

The man gave him an address.

“How soon can you take care of this?”

“Local assets are already in motion.”

“Call me when it’s done.”

Collins switched off the phone and got up to build one more drink. On the TV, reporters were interviewing people who wanted the president to be impeached and arrested for the subway massacre. A scrolling banner promised that the president would address the nation at one o’clock in the afternoon. Collins could imagine the roomful of speechwriters and spin doctors trying to make sense of the situation enough to be able to draft a speech that didn’t sound like the patronizing horseshit it would have to be.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the morning sky. A Secret Service agent noticed him and turned to give him a nod. Collins saluted with his whiskey glass and continued to stare out at the endless blue sky.

“Goodbye, you crazy bitch,” he murmured.

The words were mean, but his tone was filled with love and regret.

Chapter Ninety-two

Westin Hotel

Atlanta, Georgia

Sunday, September 1, 11:22 a.m.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her cell phone.

The call to Bill Collins had been strange. She’d expected him to appreciate the anthrax ploy. It was just the sort of thing that he needed to separate him from the president. A victim, standing with the other victims in an America under assault. While at the same time the president, whether deemed innocent or guilty in the court of public opinion, would forever be seen as the man who reacted wrongly, with too much power and a total disregard for human life. She was sure that no amount of spin control could repair that kind of damage.

Thinking about that made her feel immensely powerful. It drove back the monsters of doubt that kept trying to nip at her. It drove nails into the slinking remnants of her conscience that kept trying to crawl after her long past the point where it should be dead.

Ledger had been wrong about that. So had Riggs. Conscience couldn’t easily be carved out and strangled into silence. It was a persistent little bastard.

Only power—more power—kept it at bay.

Her thoughts, however, kept drifting back to Collins.

Was there something in his voice?

She was sure there was. But what was it?

Bliss trusted him a great deal. After all, he had engineered her false death and escape from prison. That had been all him, and it must have been a difficult and necessarily dangerous operation.

Which meant that he had to care enough about her—love her enough—to take such a risk.

So what was that in his voice?

She opened a can of Diet Coke and sipped it. CNN was on the TV and AP on her laptop. The country was going nicely out of its goddamn mind. It was close to chaos out there. More bombs went off. The last doses of the quick-onset Ebola were released in a cab filled with Japanese businessmen—let the State Department make something out of that. They’d have to assume it was Chinese agents acting on American soil. The last wave of random street attacks was pushing police and other first responders to the outside edge of operational efficiency. Just a couple more pushes and it would be chaos in point of fact.

Her cell rang, and she answered it on the first ring.

“Hello, Ludo,” she said, smiling.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Are you in position?”

“Yes.”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“Nope.”

“Good. I’ll text you with a go code. You remember which is which?”

“Yes, Mother. One is go, two is execute, and three is drop and run.”

“Very good. You deserve a biscuit.”

“Thanks.”

“And, Ludo—”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want a bullet for this one.”

“Oh.”

“Something was left in the safe in your room. Use that.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“Ludo, for Christ’s sake stop saying okey-dokey. We’re master criminals. We’re supervillains. Can’t you for come up with something that doesn’t sound like we’re a couple of hicks?”

“Yes, Your Exalted Evilness. How’s that? Or should I call you Dark Lady?”

Mother Night sighed. “Take your meds and stay by the phone.”

She disconnected the call.

Between the bittersweet call to Bill Collins and the surreal call to Ludo, Mother Night felt odd and lonely. Tears burned in the corners of her eyes.

A voice whispered into her ear. The ghost of a voice.

Walk away.

“No,” she told the voice. It was her old unevolved self. The voice of Artemisia Bliss. The weak self. The old self. Though now that voice sounded strangely firm and powerful.

You can do it. You have enough money. The bank transfers cleared. You’re richer than you ever dreamed. You have the power. Take it and go.

It was true in a way. The bank transfers had cleared and she’d transferred the funds again and again, filtering them through dozens of accounts she’d set up over the last few months. The buyer, North Korea, was being buried under a landslide of political backlash and would probably never recover. And even if the Koreans hadn’t been such suckers it wasn’t like she would have had to deliver anything. Everything was bullshit.

She could run.

Right now. Just up and go and never look back.

It was so tempting.

And yet …

“No.”

If you stay here they’ll catch you
, warned Bliss.

And there it was. Like a flash; like a switch being thrown. As shocking as a bucket of cold water in the face.

They will catch you.

They
.

Aunt Sallie. Mr. Church. Bug. Dr. Hu.

They.

They had caught her before. Caught her and shamed her in her own eyes. They had made it seem like she wasn’t strong enough or quick enough or smart enough to stay one step ahead. They’d caught her. They’d laid a trap for her. They’d outwitted her.

That fact screamed inside her head every night and every day. It had been like a knife in her mind from the moment of her arrest.

They had outsmarted her and stolen her power.

If she walked away now, how could she ever prove to them that she was stronger, quicker, and smarter? And if they closed in on her and she had no weapons left, then how could she fight back? Her stock of the pathogens was almost gone. All she had left were what she thought of as party favors. To absolutely insure her safety she needed much bigger supplies, and a greater variety of them. If she had those, no one would dare harm her. They could never be sure she didn’t have something poised to go off in a gavotte of mutually assured destruction. After all, hadn’t she already proved that she was crazy, that she would do absolutely anything?

Yes, she damn well had. Ask anyone.

Walk away …

“Shut the fuck up!”

Mother Night screamed it so loud it filled the whole suite.

“No—no—NO!”

She snatched up the TV remote and hurled it with savage force at the screen, which exploded in a shower of glass and sparks.

Mother Night glared at it, hunched from the throw, chest heaving as if she’d run up a steep hill, teeth bared.

“No.”

That time her voice was so soft, so small, so cold. Like a bullet waiting to be fired.

Chapter Ninety-three

The Locker

Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility

Highland County, Virginia

Sunday, September 1, 11:27 a.m.

From the air the Locker looked exactly as nondescript as it was supposed to look. A small tractor parts store with a wraparound parking lot. Pair of green metal Dumpsters on the west side. Scattering of vehicles in the lot, mostly pickup trucks. Ghost whuffed softly at the apparently empty terrain.

“I thought a lot of people worked there,” said Montana. “Where are their cars?”

“Secondary parking lot close to town,” I said. “Staff comes in on a bus and they stay down in the Locker for three-week shifts. Bus drops them off when the store is officially closed.”

Top nodded to the pickup trucks. “We can scan their plates once we’re down, but from here they don’t look like the kind of vehicles an infiltration team would use.”

“Maybe the bad guys came in a bird, too,” suggested Dunk, but I shook my head. “The staff at the tractor store would have seen that and hit the alarms. No, they either came in nondescript vehicles or they came over the hills.”

We pulled on the hoods of the Hammer suits and fitted the visors into place. They had clear lenses with night-vision goggles mounted above, ready to swing down should the lights go out. I ordered the pilot to set us down by the heavy Dumpsters. They would provide cover while we offloaded.

“Then dust off and stay on station,” I told him, “eyes open and weapons hot.”

He set down as light as a feather. The rotor wash picked up dirt and old trash and swirled it around in a cyclone of detritus, but it all whipped away and fell out of sight. With the stealth mode engaged, the nearly silent landing of the helicopters had a ghostly and unreal quality that provided no comfort.

Top jerked the door open, and Sam leaped out first, fading left, kneeling with his rifle to his shoulder to offer cover as the rest of the team hit the ground and ran for the cover of the Dumpster. They looked like gray shadows in their Hammer suits.

Ghost fidgeted and whined, eager to get out and bite something, but we were going to do an infil into a potentially biohazardous site, and they don’t make hazmat suits for dogs. They should, but they don’t. I told him to stay topside with Sam. Ghost gave me a look of such hurt and personal affront that it let me know in no uncertain terms that he would poop in my shoes at the first convenient opportunity.

“Don’t give me that face,” I said. “If the bad guys get out I promise that you can track them down and go all Hound of the Baskervilles on them. But you’re not going inside.”

We jumped down from the bird and ran fast for cover. Top took Lydia and Noah with him and headed around back. Bunny, Dunk, and Montana ran straight to the front of the building and flattened out in a blind spot of the security cameras. Or, what would have been a blind spot if the cameras were functioning. They sat there, unmoving, their little red lights gone dark.

Sam Imura broke right and ran to a tumble of three cracked boulders and laid his rifle in a cleft where two of them had smashed together. When he gave me the nod Ivan and I made our run. Sam’s weapon of choice is a 408 Cheyenne Tactical sniper rifle that fires .338 Lapua Magnum supersonic rounds. Getting hit by one of those rounds is like being swatted off the planet by God. And if Sam fires at you, you will get hit. It’s easy math. Sam’s worst day on the range makes my best day look pathetic, and with him there I felt confident in running the distance from the helo to the iron Dumpster.

Behind us the Black Hawk lifted up and away, rising to a height of two hundred yards and making a slow circle of the building.

Ivan and I found a secure location and he took up a firing position while I did a visual sweep of the terrain. Nothing moved but dragonflies, grackles, and a squirrel who panicked and ran like a gray streak when Ghost materialized behind him.

Bunny’s squad moved to the parking lot and quickly went from vehicle to vehicle, using helmet cams to send images of each license plate. Nikki’s team ran them through MindReader.

“Cowboy,” said Nikki, “every plate checks out as either an employee of the tractor store or a farmer from within a twenty-mile radius.”

The terrain continued to be empty and uninformative. I headed to the far side of the front wall and knelt in a cleft between two withered decorative shrubs, then crabbed slowly sideways toward the front door. It stood slightly ajar, blocked from closing by something I couldn’t yet identify. I tapped my earbud. “Report.”

“Sergeant Rock to Cowboy,” said Top. “Nothing going on back here. Rear door is closed and locked. No recent footprints in the dirt leading to or from. No windows back here.”

“Copy that. Leave a door prize and converge on me.”

Top clicked off. “Door prize” was another name for a blaster-plaster, which was a sheet of flexible material saturated with high explosives. When it was inactive it could take a rifle bullet and not detonate. But there were small wires running through it that, when the material was stretched and placed over the seam of a closed door, leaked compounds that combined to form a chemical detonator. You peeled off plastic film to expose a strong adhesive that bonded it to almost any solid surface. Left undisturbed, it could sit there for hours. Left too long and the detonator chemicals oxidized and became inert. However, if anyone opened a door or window sealed with a blaster-plaster, then it went boom. It packed a lot of oomph per inch.

A few seconds later, Top’s squad came running around the far end of the building, moving fast, with a lot of small, quick steps so that their aim wasn’t jarred. They squatted down behind me, Lydia facing back the way they’d come, Top shoulder-to-shoulder with me.

“Something’s blocking the door from closing,” I told him, “but I can’t get an angle on it. Watch my back.”

I leaned out and took as close a look at the door as I dared. A mailbox blocked my view of the obstruction and the front of the building was in shadow. Too dark to see well but not dark enough for night-vision glasses. I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta, which is easier to fire when moving in a low crouch and which has a powerful flashlight mounted below the barrel. Four slow crabbing steps got me to the right spot and I trained the flashlight beam on the obstruction.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“What are you seeing, Cap’n?” asked Top.

I said, “It looks like a hand.”

Another step, then I changed the angle of the flash in order to see inside.

It was a hand, no doubt about it.

But it wasn’t attached to anything.

Chapter Ninety-four