The Dragon Factory (36 page)

The room was totally silent as Church spoke. I was leaning forward, hanging on his words, and in my head I could feel the pieces tumble into place one by one. The picture forming in my mind was dreadful.

“Over a period of several years the List managed to identify the key players in the Cabal, and one by one they were taken off the board. It was an undeclared war, but it was definitely a war.” He paused. “And we took our own losses. More than half of the members of the List were killed during the Cold War. Some new players joined the team, but the core membership dwindled through attrition. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the List mounted a major multinational offensive on the Cabal, and at that time we were convinced we had wiped them out. We acquired their assets, eliminated or imprisoned their members and staff, and appropriated their research records.”

“Sir,” said Grace cautiously, “I’m no scholar, but I’m enough of a student of modern warfare to wonder why I haven’t heard any of this.”

“None of this ever made it to history books, and the official records of this have long ago been sealed. Some have been expunged.”

“Expunged? How?” she asked.

“I’ll bet I know,” I said, and everyone turned to me. “I’ll bet a shiny nickel that one of the members of the List created a computer system specifically designed to search for and eliminate just those kinds of records.”

Church said, “Close. A computer scientist named Bertolini developed a search-and-destroy software package for the Italian government, but before he could deliver it he was murdered and the system stolen. The program, known as Pangaea, was decades ahead of its time. The Cabal
took Pangaea and used it to steal bulk research material from laboratories, corporations, and governments worldwide. That’s what allowed them to have access to so much cutting-edge science. They didn’t have to do the research: they stole the information, combined it to form a massive database, and then went straight into development.”

“And Pangaea . . . ?” Grace prompted.

“A member of the List retrieved it. It was being guarded by Gunnar Haeckel, one of a team of four assassins called the Brotherhood of the Scythe. The other members were Hans Brucker, Ernst Halgren, and Conrad Veder.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said. “Brotherhood of the
Scythe
.” I drew a rough sketch of a scythe on my notepad. The blade was facing to the left of the page. I thought about it and erased the blade and drew it facing to the right. “Haeckel’s code name was ‘North,’ right? And the others were East, West, and South?”

Church nodded toward my sketch. “Yes, and you’re on the right track. Finish it.”

I added the three other scythes, each at a right angle to the preceding one. North, East, South, and West. Church reached over and gave the sketch a forty-five-degree turn.

I looked down at the drawing. The four scythes looked like they were churning in a circle. The image they formed was a swastika.

I heard a few gasps, a grunt, and a short laugh from Dr. Hu.

“Oh, that’s clever,” he sneered.

“It wasn’t subtle then, either,” Church said. “Probably one of those inner-circle ideas that sound good in a candlelit enclave.”

“Jeez,” I said.

“During the raid on the Pangaea lab,” Church said, picking up his narrative, “Haeckel was shot repeatedly, including two head shots. He was definitely dead at the scene, which makes his presence in the video so disturbing. However, Pangaea was recovered and the List put it to better use: searching down and destroying all of the information the Cabal had amassed.”

“Which member of the List retrieved that computer system?” I asked.

I didn’t expect Church to answer, but he surprised me. “I did,” he said.

He waited out the ensuing buzz of chatter.

“And I suppose you’ve given it a few upgrades over the years,” mused Grace dryly. “And a name change?”

“Yes. The modern version, MindReader, bears little resemblance to Pangaea except in overall design theory. Both computers were designed to intrude into any hard drive and, using a special series of conversion codes, learn the language of the target system in a way that allows them to act as if they
are
the target system. And both systems will exit without leaving a trace. The similarities end there. MindReader is many thousands of times faster, it has a different pattern recognition system, it clones passwords, and it rewrites the security code of the target system to leave no trace at all of having been there, and that includes tweaking time codes, logs of download time, the works. Pangaea’s footprint, though very light, can be detected by a few of the world’s top military-grade systems, but even then it often looks like computer error rather than computer invasion.”

“Mr. Church,” Grace asked, “you said that the information taken from the Cabal was destroyed. I’m as cynical as the next lass, but I find it hard to accept that the governments for whom the List worked would allow all of that research to be eradicated.”

“We all thought that way, Major. We met in secret to discuss the matter and we took a vote about whether to destroy the material without ever turning it over or to turn it over equally to all of the governments so that no one nation could prosper from it. The vote hung on the fact that there was real cutting-edge science hidden among the grotesqueries the Cabal had collected. Much of it would certainly have benefited mankind; of that we had no doubt.”

“What did you do?”

“The seven surviving members of the List took our vote, Major,” Church said. “The vote was seven to zero, and so we incinerated it all. Lab records, tons of research documentation, test samples, computer
files . . . all of it. We left nothing. Naturally our governments were furious with us. Some of the members of the List were forced into retirement; others were reassigned to new duties that amounted to punishment.”

“You survived,” I said, “so I’m guessing that you found yet another use for MindReader.”

He ate a cookie but said nothing.

“Okay,” said Hu, “so I can see how this Cabal was the Big Bad Wolf for the Cold War, but that was then. How does it relate to the mess we’re in now?”

“Because we’re receiving information in a way that parallels the way the List first discovered the Cabal thirty years ago and several of the key players are caught up in things.” He tapped some keys and a different set of faces appeared on the screen behind him. Twenty-two in all, most of them young men and women in their thirties. Five images were of people in their sixties or older. The last two image squares were blacked out.

Church said, “Most of these people died during the Cold War. The others retired from the intelligence services.”

“What about the last two?” Grace asked, nodding toward the blacked-out boxes.

“Aunt Sallie and me.” He smiled. “You already know what we look like.”

Actually, I’d never seen Aunt Sallie or even visited the Brooklyn headquarters of the DMS, but I let it go.

Church pressed keys that removed all but the five middle-aged faces.

“These were the other surviving members of the List. Lawson Navarro and Clive Monroe of MI6, Mischa Gundarov of Russia’s GRU, Serena Gallagher of the CIA, Lev Tarnim from Mossad, and Jerome Freund, who was a senior field agent with Germany’s GSG Nine.”

He paused.

“In the last six weeks all six have been murdered.”

The Dragon Factory

Sunday, August 29, 5:03
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 57 minutes E.S.T.

Pinter sat on a hard wooden chair, his hands cuffed behind him, the chain fed through the oak slats of the backrest. He was naked and they had doused him with bucket after bucket of icy water. The air-conditioning was turned to full, and the temperature of the room was a skin-biting forty degrees. Pinter shivered uncontrollably, but he kept his jaws clamped shut to stifle the screams that clawed at the inside of his throat.

There were four people in the room with him. Three of them were alive. The fourth was a red ruin of twisted limbs and torn flesh that no longer resembled anything human. It was meat and bone. Two hours ago the meat had been Pinter’s partner. But then the Jakoby Twins and their assistant had gone to work on him. They never even asked Homler any questions. They just began a program of systematic beatings that reduced the man to red inhumanity. Before they began, Hecate switched on video and audio recorders, and now that the actual screams had ceased and the body was inert the whole thing played out again on four big LCD screens mounted on each wall.

Pinter scrunched his eyes shut, but he could do nothing to block out those high, piercing screams.

It went on and on until Pinter felt cracks forming in his mind.

Then Hecate walked slowly across the room and pressed a button that dropped the entire room into a well of silence. She turned like a dancer and walked back, passing in front of her brother and trailing her fingernails across his stomach. Paris looked away. He had not participated in the torture, preferring to linger by the door, arms folded across his chest, his body deliberately out of the path of flying blood. His eyes followed his sister; his mouth was small and unsmiling.

Pinter licked his lips. His throat felt hot and full of nails.

Hecate leaned back against a wall and crossed her ankles. She wore a pair of capri pants and a bikini top. She was covered in blood from her
polished tonails to her full underlip. Her eyes were bright with a predatory fever, and her chest heaved with exertion and passion.

“You know who I am?” she purred. It was the first thing anyone had said.

Pinter said nothing.

“And you know my brother. . . .”

Pinter cut a look at Paris, who studied his nails.

“And our large friend here is Tonton.”

Tonton grinned. His teeth were bloody. He was a biter.

“Your weapons and equipment are American. You want us to believe that you and
this
” she reached out and jabbed a toe into what was left of Homler. “You and your friend want us to think that you’re special ops. Delta Force, SEALs, something like that.”

Pinter said nothing.

“Which would be fine if I’d woken up stupid this morning.” She smiled and Pinter thought that her teeth looked unnaturally sharp. The witch’s eyes were a strange mix of dark blue and hot gold. “Now . . . we both know how this is going to end.”

Pinter looked left and right as if there was some chance of escape. Hecate watched him and smiled. She pushed off the wall and came toward him with a slinky sway of hips that made Pinter see a big hunting cat rather than a woman. He thought he could feel the heat from her eyes. Then she raised a leg and straddled him, sitting astride him so that his face was inches from her chest.

“We all know that you’ll tell us everything. Everything. The only question is whether you’ll be smart and earn a quick release or play it stupid and make us work for this. The end will be the same. Tonton is very good at a quick kill when I want him to, but he doesn’t like it. He has a bit of animal in him. Truth is . . . so do I.”

Hecate reached behind her back and undid the strings of her bikini top. She pulled it off and let the straps slide through her bloody fingers. Her nipples were erect, her breasts flushed pink. She leaned forward to brush her nipples back and forth across his chest.

“I’d prefer that you make this slow and difficult. We have the time.”
She bent forth and whispered huskily into his ear, “I
like
the slow burn. But I’m fair. Play it straight with us and this will be over before you know it.”

He held out for a long minute, grinding his teeth together to keep his mouth shut, but when Hecate opened her smiling mouth and licked the blood from his chin he broke.

Pinter threw his head back and screamed. Not in pain but with an atavistic dread that was so deep that it was beyond his ability to comprehend. It was primitive and unthinking, filled with need and desperation and a total hopelessness.

The echo of the scream bounced off of the walls and swirled around him like a poison vapor. He collapsed forward, his head against her breasts, his chest heaving with as much passion as Hecate’s, but of a totally different flavor.

“You can die pretty,” she said. “Or you can die ugly.”

Hecate bent and hooked a finger under his chin, leaned toward him, and kissed him on the mouth. Pinter could taste the salty blood on her lips. He gagged.

“Tell me . . . ,” she whispered.

He told her everything.

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, August 29, 5:04
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 56 minutes

The room was absolutely silent.

“The most recent victim was Jerome Freund, who worked as the assistant director of a historical museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He retired from active service with the Grenzschutzgruppe Nine eleven years ago and was involved in no active cases. He was not even a consultant, but he was assassinated apparently as a preventive measure by whoever has resurrected the Cabal.”

“How long ago did these murders occur?” I asked.