The Dragon Factory (51 page)

“I want immunity,” he said again. “Or I won’t tell you anything.”

“Sure,” I lied.

In flight

Conrad Veder was unhappy.

The private jet was luxurious, the food excellent, the cabin service first rate, but he was not pleased. His contact, DaCosta, had reached out to Veder using a private number to a disposable phone that he carried for single-use communication.

“There’s been a change of plans,” said DaCosta.

“What change?”

“My client would like you to put your current assignment on hold.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“This is irregular,” said Veder.

“I know. But he was insistent.”

“Does that mean the contract is canceled?”

“Canceled?” DaCosta sounded surprised. “No. No, not at all. Apparently there is another matter he would like to discuss with you. A side job.”

“And you don’t know what it is.”

“No. He said he would like to discuss it with you.”

“I can give you a phone number—”

“No . . . he wants to discuss it with you face-to-face.”

“I don’t do face-to-face. You know that.”

“I told him.”

“Then why are we having this conversation?”

“He told me to say that he will provide a bonus equal to half the agreed price of the current contract if you meet with him.”

That was three and a half million dollars. Even so, Veder said, “No.”

“He said that he would wire the money to your account
before
the meeting.”

Veder said nothing.

“And he said to tell you that if you accept the side job, he will double the entire amount of the original contract.”

Veder said nothing.

“On top of the meeting bonus.”

Veder, for all of his deep-rooted calm, felt a flutter in his chest. That would mean that this entire job would net seventeen and a half million dollars. He thought about that for a long minute, and DaCosta waited him out.

“Where and when?”

“He’ll send a private jet.” DaCosta told Veder the location and time.

“You know I’ll assess the situation,” Veder said. “If this is a trick or a trap, then I’ll walk away.”

“My client knows that.”

“And I’ll hold you responsible for setting me up.”

This time DaCosta said nothing for almost thirty seconds.

“It’s not a setup. Check with your bank in thirty minutes. The money will have been wire transferred.”

Veder said nothing.

“Are you there?” DaCosta asked.

“How do I know that this will even
be
the client?”

“He told me that you’d ask. He said that if you did I was to say this: you are needed in the West.”

Veder said nothing. It was the right code. The client had to be either Otto Wirths or Cyrus Jakoby. Veder had already determined that they were the ones who had been paying him to assassinate the remaining
members of the List. They were the only people—apart from Church and the woman named Aunt Sallie—who knew about the Brotherhood of the Scythe and of his code name: West.

Veder did not like it. It meant stepping out of the antiseptic world of clean kills with no emotional connection and back into the muddier world of politics and idealism. Veder held both in contempt. Thirty years ago he had been recruited into the Brotherhood for his skills, and back then he was susceptible to idealistic rhetoric and flattery. The Brotherhood was to be the world’s most deadly alliance—the four greatest living assassins. It had been done with the ostentatious ritualism of the old Nazi Thule Society. The members of the Brotherhood wore masks when they met. They swore blood oaths. They promised fealty to the Cabal and all it stood for.

How silly
, he thought. He was privately embarrassed to have been coaxed into the group, though admittedly they had provided great training, excellent intelligence, and lots of money. And in a very real way they had made him the man he was, because as the List systematically dismantled the Cabal, Veder had learned habits of caution that became the framework for the rest of his life.

Since then he had intentionally distanced himself from any connection to political or social agendas. He did not like being drawn back into it now.

But the money . . .

Veder was detached enough to realize that Wirths and Jakoby were using money now in exactly the way that they had used idealism and flattery back then. It was trickery and manipulation.

What made Veder the most unhappy as he sipped green tea in luxurious comfort aboard the private jet was that the manipulation worked.

He who fights with monsters must take
care lest he thereby become a monster.

—
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, August 30, 5:01
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 59 minutes

Grace Courtland lay naked in my arms. She was gasping as hard as I was. Our bodies were bathed in sweat. The mattress was halfway off the bed and we lay with our heads angled downward to the floor. The sheets were soaked and knotted around us. Somehow we’d lost all of my pillows and the lamp was broken, but the bulb was still lit and it threw light and shadows all over the place.

“Good God . . . ,” she said hoarsely.

I was incapable of articulate speech.

Grace propped herself on one elbow. One side of her face was as bright as a flame from the shadeless lightbulb, the other side completely in shadow. She looked at me for a long time without speaking. I closed my eyes. Finally she bent and kissed my chest, my throat, my lips. Very softly, like a ghost.

“Joe,” she said quietly. “Joe . . . are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Was it terrible?”

I knew what she meant. After I’d interrogated Carteret and brought him back to the computer room, we heard more gunfire and the
whump
of explosions. I handcuffed Carteret, and Top, Bunny, and I rushed out to investigate. What we found was indeed terrible. The remaining staff members of the Hive had fled to the far side of the compound. A guard sergeant named Hans Brucker herded them all into a secure room, telling them all that they could seal it and that they’d be safe until Otto sent a rescue team. Once they were all inside, Brucker and two other guards
had opened up with machine guns and threw in half a dozen grenades before slamming the doors. There were no survivors. No one who could talk, no one who could help us.

Brucker then shot the two other guards and put his pistol in his mouth and blew the back of his own head off.

It was insane.

It was also confusing, because Brucker was clearly the man who had led the unicorn hunt. Despite what Church had thought, it wasn’t Haeckel. When I told Church this via commlink he ordered me to scan the man’s fingerprints.

They matched Haeckel.

No one had figured that out yet.

Shortly after that the Brits arrived and we headed back to the states with what records we had, with SAM, and with Carteret. The remaining six tiger-hounds were gunned down by soldiers from the
Ark Royal
. The New Men were gathered up and brought aboard the carrier, but they were so terrified that several of them collapsed. One died of a heart attack. The ship’s doctor ultimately had to sedate them all, and the incident left the crew of the
Ark Royal
badly shaken.

Everyone else at the Hive was dead.

It had been terrible indeed.

“It was bad,” I said.

“There are so many monsters . . . and we keep hunting them down.” She laid her cheek against mine. “What if we can’t beat them this time?”

“We will.”

“What if we can’t? What if we fail?” Her voice was small in the semi-darkness. “What if we fall?”

“If you fall, I’ll be there to pick you up. If I fall, you’ll be there for me. That’s the way this works.”

“And if we both fall?”

“Then someone else will have to step in and step up.”

She was silent a long time. It was a pointless conversation and we both knew it. The kind of convoluted puzzle that the mind plays with in the dark, when pretenses and defenses are down. There was no one else
on earth with whom Grace Courtland could ever have had this conversation. Same with me. There are some things too deep, too personal, to even share with Rudy.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tight.

“One way or another, Grace,” I said, “we’ll get through it. With what we got from Carteret and the files we brought back from the Hive, Bug thinks that he’ll crack this in no time. Maybe even by morning. And then we’ll strap on the tarnished armor, take up our battered old broadswords, give a hearty ‘tallyho’ and head off to slay some dragons.”

“Monsters,” she corrected.

“Monsters,” I agreed.

We lay there on the slanting mattress, the sweat of passion cooling on our naked skin, and listened to the sound of our breathing becoming slower and slower. I reached over and pulled the plug on the lamp and we were instantly cocooned in velvety darkness. We lay like that for a long time. I thought Grace had drifted off to sleep when she whispered to me.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I turned my head toward her even though she was invisible in the darkness. “Sorry? For what?”

She didn’t answer at first. Then, “I love you, Joe.”

Before I could answer her hand found my mouth and she pressed a finger to my lips.

“Please,” she said, “please don’t say anything.”

But I did say something.

I said, “I love you, Grace.”

We said nothing else. The meaning and the price of those words were too apparent, and they filled the darkness around us and the darkness in our hearts. The battlefield is no place to fall in love. It makes you vulnerable; it tilts back your head and bares your throat. It didn’t need to be said.

I just hoped—perhaps prayed—that the monsters didn’t hear our whispered words.

The Dragon Factory

Monday, August 30, 5:02
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 58 minutes E.S.T.

Hecate and Paris lay entwined on the bed they had shared for ten years. The young black woman they had enjoyed lay between them, her chocolate skin in luxuriant contrast to the milky whiteness of theirs. The woman lay with her head on Paris’s arm, but she faced Hecate and her dark hand rested on Hecate’s flawless flat stomach.

Paris and the girl were asleep, but Hecate lay awake long into the night. Her blue eyes were open, fixed on the infinity of stars that she could see through the wide glass dome above their bed. The endless rolling of the waves on the beach outside was like the steady breathing of the slumbering world. In this moment Hecate was at peace. Her needs met, her appetites satiated, her furies calmed.

Except for one thing. Except for a small niggling item that was like a splinter in her mind.

Six hours ago she had finally let Paris talk her into inviting Alpha to the Dragon Factory. The conversation had been brief. He had sounded so happy, so flattered that they were inviting him, and he accepted their conditions without reservations because they were small: the windows of the jet would be blacked out. She teased Alpha, saying that he had taught them to always be careful and she was being careful. Alpha agreed to everything.

Too easily.

“He knows,” Hecate said to Paris after the call was ended.

“He doesn’t know,” insisted Paris. “He
can’t
know.”

“He knows.”

“No way. If he knew, then he’d never agree to come here, never allow himself to be that much in our power.”

“He knows.”

“No, sweetie. Alpha doesn’t know a damn thing. But he will once he gets here. I can promise you that.”

That had been the end of it. Hecate had to accept that Paris was too much of an idiot to recognize the subtle brilliance that made Alpha who and what he was. Not that she knew exactly who and what Alpha was—but she grasped the essence of their father in a way that her brother seemed incapable of managing.

“He knows,” she murmured to the infinite stars.

Yet he was coming all the same.

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, August 30, 5:03
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 57 minutes

Eighty-two sat in the dark and looked out at the black water of the harbor. He’d never been in Baltimore before. Except for the Deck, he’d never been anywhere in the United States before. He felt strange. Lonely and scared, and alien.