He waited.
There was another sound. Another scream, but different.
This time it was a man who screamed. And then there was a thud. Another. Hard, reverberating through the ceiling, spitting dust from between the cracks. More screams. Male and female now, overlapping, colliding, and the crash of something heavy. A table? A chair?
A body?
“Jesus Christ,” growled Wiśniewski as he launched himself from his chair. “What the fuck is happening up there?”
He raced into the living room, where his nephew, Stanley, was playing video games with some kind of stupid set of goggles. Stanley stood in the middle of the floor kicking and punching as if he were fighting a host of ninjas. Stupid kid. Wiśniewski slapped the goggles roughly off the young man’s head.
“Ow!” cried Stanley, and was about to say more when he froze, raised his face, and stared at the ceiling. The screams were constant now. “Oh, jeez … what’s going on?”
Wiśniewski didn’t answer. Instead, he snatched a sawed-off baseball bat from an umbrella stand by the door and hurried out.
He rushed to the stairwell, slammed through the door, and took the stairs two at a time. Wiśniewski wasn’t a young man, or a thin one, but he was strong. Peasant stock, his grandmother used to say. Wide and barrel-chested and thick. Stanley, thin and short, followed but not as quickly. Wiśniewski reached the third-floor landing, yanked the door open, and saw that the hallway was filled with people. Girls dressed in underwear or towels or nothing. A few men hanging back, peering uncertainly out of rooms, not meeting the eyes of the other customers. One door was closed, and the screams were coming from inside that room.
“Everybody get back,” bellowed Wiśniewski. “There’s nothing to see here. Go back to your rooms. It’s all okay.”
The spectators retreated half a step. Wiśniewski bulled his way through them, bawling for Stanley to clear everyone out of the hall. The super reached for the handle and froze. The screams inside were rising in pitch now. They were terrible to hear, and there was another sound buried inside them. A more animalistic noise, which made no sense.
Was it a growl?
Christ, had someone brought a dog into the place? Why? Even here at the Imperial there were limits. Getting busted for prostitution was one thing, but bestiality was a whole different set of laws that Wiśniewski didn’t want to break. Oh, hell, no.
He cut a momentary look over his shoulder. The girls, the johns, and his nephew all seemed to be frozen, barely breathing, staring. Then Wiśniewski tightened his grip on the baseball bat, turned the handle, and opened the door.
He stepped into a nightmare.
He stepped into a scene from some horror movie.
There was blood everywhere.
So much blood.
On the bed. On the walls. On the lampshade.
On the john, who lay sprawled like a starfish, half on and half off the bed. He was naked, hairy, pale-skinned, and all the blood, Wiśniewski was certain, was his. One of his eyes had been torn out and lay as a collapsed, dripping ruin on his cheek. His face and chest and arms were covered in long slashes and vicious purple bites. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
The girl, Kya, sat astride him. She, too, was naked. A tiny thing with vestigial breasts, a shaved crotch, a tattoo of a butterfly above her heart, and wild red hair. She screamed again, throwing her head back to hurl the shriek at the ceiling—or, perhaps, at God above—and then she suddenly bent forward and bit the throat out of the screaming man.
His screams collapsed into a wet gurgle. The girl worried at his throat, growling like a dog, ripping at the tough skin as she beat at him with bloodied fists.
Wiśniewski almost ran.
He stood there for a moment, stock-still, the weapon forgotten in his hand, mouth agape, staring at the red horror in front of him.
Behind him someone else screamed. He turned to see Stanley and the other girl, Brandy. Wiśniewski wasn’t sure which of them had uttered the scream.
Then Kya snarled, and Wiśniewski realized that she was looking at him now. Her mouth was smeared with blood, and there was a shred of something glistening between her teeth, but her wild eyes were focused on him.
“Watch!” yelled his nephew, and it was almost too late, because Kya launched herself at Wiśniewski with shocking speed. The big super stumbled backward and swung the bat as much by accident as by intention. It whistled through the air and hit the girl on the upper arm. It was not a well-aimed shot and nowhere near as hard as he could have managed if he hadn’t been panicked, but it was still hard. The girl weighed eighty-nine pounds, and the force of the blow sent her crashing into the dresser. That should have knocked her senseless, but it didn’t. She hissed in fury rather than pain and came off the floor in a tearing rush. The super backpedaled and his shoulder caught the outside edge of the door at just the wrong angle, and his bulk slammed the door shut.
* * *
Outside in the hall, Stanley Wiśniewski stood staring at the closed door. Hearing the dreadful sounds that were coming from inside. Hearing the screams.
Hearing his uncle’s screams.
Hearing those awful, awful screams.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
APRIL 25, 2:51 PM
“I need your help on something,” I told Violin, “and I’m resource-poor at the moment. Are you free?”
“Depends on what you have in mind, Joseph,” she said.
“A job.”
“Sigh,” she said. “You’re no fun. What kind of job?”
“Remember the sewers of Paris?”
“How could I forget? We waded through the shit of an entire city and then watched the sunrise together. So romantic.”
“No, I meant do you remember why we were there? The research data we were after?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “We burned it. Why?”
“Someone else has it.”
I heard her sharp intake of breath, and then there was a short, heavy silence. I could almost hear her reliving that mission. A group of scientists had developed a performance-enhancing synthetic compound that combined select lean mass-building steroids with a synthetic nootropic compound that significantly increased and regulated hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology, these drugs are wakefulness-promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version was designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the person being treated wouldn’t tire and wouldn’t lose mental sharpness. This wasn’t for a supersoldier program or for anything tied to the military. It was for factory workers. The drugs were intended for use in Third World countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who could work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output. It was a new tweak on legal slave labor, because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human-rights presence and where governments are easily bought. It could also be used for sex workers, and that is a special kind of living hell.
Violin said, “When do we leave?”
I told her that I was heading to the airport now. “Don’t bring your puppy,” I said.
She called me a bastard and hung up.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BAIN ESTATE
5400 SAND WAY NE
APRIL 25, 2:52 PM
Zephyr Bain was a monster, and she knew it.
Nothing less than a monster would be able to save the world. Nothing less than a monster would have the courage and the vision to do what was absolutely necessary to save the world from itself.
She wasn’t even certain that she deserved to live in the version of the world that would exist when all the killing was done.
Probably not.
The people who survived, those who would thrive and benefit from what she did, wouldn’t want to share that world with anyone like her. They wouldn’t be the
kind to abide a monster. It was a sad thought but an understandable perspective. After all, she was trying to cleanse the world of unclean things, and by definition she would become unclean in the process. The consolation was that the right kind of people would survive, and they would have a genuine chance to flourish. Without the others. Without the parasites who fed like vampires on the system.
The survivors would be the world’s true élite, the ones who hadn’t been chosen by any god but had earned their place in paradise through good breeding, intellectual superiority, usefulness to the forward momentum, and clarity of vision.
As for the rest?
Well, as she saw it survival of the fittest was more than a theory. It was a law mandated by the harsh realities of the world as it truly was, not as viewed through wishful thinking, political agendas, greed, or aggressive stupidity.
Even so, Zephyr would have liked to see the world make the change. After the dogs of war had been let off the chain and allowed to run rampant in the streets. How nice that would be. She had dreamed of it every night since she was a little girl. If she would be dead before it came to pass, then she prayed that her dying mind would revisit one of those dreams as the darkness took her.
It was only fair.
It was only right.
If it weren’t for the cancer, it would be so much harder to accept. But the universe had been quite clever in the way it stage-managed all of this. Even the cancer. Giving Zephyr the knowledge, giving her access to the tools, and then giving her a shield against her own hesitation. It was all very tidy and efficient, and no one appreciated efficiency as much as she. The universe was messy, but the scaffolding of scientific truths on which it was hung was clean, pure, and without contradiction.
Her friend and employee, the little problem-solving Frenchman everyone called the Concierge, was one of the few who knew that she was dying. Her mentor and sometime lover, John the Revelator, knew, too. Few others. No one else who knew cared as much as the Concierge or John. The others with whom she conspired to bring about the change saw her as a means to an end, an agent of change, perhaps even a hero of the war, but she doubted that any of them would mourn her passing. They would be too busy framing the new world. Nor would they be a comfort to her as she died. There was no doubt about that.
The Concierge was different, because he was a philosophical man. He was the one who helped Zephyr cultivate an interesting perspective on dying. “The Egyptians and other cultures saw death as a passage,” he told her. “The highborn would go into the afterlife with great fanfare and pomp. But they would not go alone. They would have their household staff killed, too, so that there would be people to see to their comforts forever.”
She had been raised in a rich Wasp family but had spent some of her life drifting from one religious movement to another. Other churches, other faiths, even a few cults. Looking for answers that she believed existed. Finding some truths, catching glimpses of others, but never quite landing on solid spiritual ground. It was John the Revelator who had helped her ultimately find something to believe in. John helped her see the face of God as He moved through the shadows of a twilit sky. He whispered to her that there was an answer, that there was something to believe in. There was a mission.
Her mission.
It was through John that Zephyr found her purpose in life, and in doing so realized what would have to be done to keep the whole world from falling apart. It was such a profound insight that Zephyr wondered if this was what Noah felt when God told him to start building a boat.
Maybe her allies, those indifferent framers of the future, would paint her as the new Noah. It was true enough, though her ark would be made of silicone and printed circuits rather than wood. And, instead of a flood, the unworthy and the unclean would be cleansed from the earth by a swarm of mosquitoes. The groundwork was already laid, a quiet process that had taken years. Soon—very soon—everything would be set and the go order would be sent. Sick as she was, she would live to see the process start. It would be glorious. There might even be the sound of angelic trumpets. God loved a good massacre. Zephyr had read many sacred books. God, in His love for the world, had killed billions.
So, too, would she.
For that is the work of both gods and monsters.
CHAPTER SIX
RUZYNE AIRPORT
AVIATICKÁ, 161 08 PRAHA 6
CZECH REPUBLIC
APRIL 26, 3:09 PM LOCAL TIME
I took my private jet, a gorgeous Gulfstream G650 that once belonged to a Colombian bioweapons broker who somehow managed to trip and fall out of the cabin door when we were three thousand feet over the Gulf of Mexico. Clumsy. I call the plane Shirley. Yes, it’s immature to give a pet name to an ostentatious piece of luxury aircraft, and, no, I don’t give a finely textured crap if it is.
Church finessed the clearances all the way. Violin was waiting for me at the airport, driving a two-door Porsche 918 Spyder. It’s a superelegant hybrid that will eat pretty much any gas-powered car on the road. Six hundred and eight horsepower, with a top speed of two-ten. The sticker price, before extras, is close to $900,000. I’m not into car porn, but that thing gave me a woody. I climbed in, and she peeled away as if she was leaving a crime scene.
“You came alone,” I observed. “Where’s your puppy?”
She made a face. “First, stop calling him a puppy. And, second, Harry is fine, thank you. He is auditing a class in Florence.”
“A class? On what? How to find his ass with both hands?”
Harry Bolt—born Harcourt Bolton, Jr.—was the son of one of this country’s greatest intelligence agents, who became one of this country’s greatest traitors. It was Harcourt Bolton, Sr. who destroyed most of the DMS and damn near launched a pandemic that would have killed tens of millions of people, most of them children. We’d dismantled Bolton’s plans, and Harry had helped. So he was a good guy. He was also very possibly the most inept agent ever to work for the CIA. Clumsy, nerdy, not too bright, moderately unlikable, and a bit of a jackass.
However, he and Violin had bonded during the Kill Switch matter and have since been keeping company. I tend not to read fantasy stories, so I’m not sure I understand how the whole frog and princess dynamic works. She is a world-class beauty who is cultured, highly intelligent, and remarkably skilled, and Harry looks like a shorter, dumpier Matt Damon, but without the talent or the charm. I tried to make myself believe it was the fact that Harry had inherited a billion dollars, but since Violin isn’t that shallow I had to dismiss the idea. I’ve tried to make sense of it, but all I do is bruise my brain.
“Harry is auditing a lecture series on ancient mysteries and lost sacred artifacts,” said Violin. “It’s being given by an archaeologist in residence at the Pitti Palace in Florence.”
“Why?”
She gave me an enigmatic little smile. “Harry would like to be the next Indiana Jones.”
“Um … correct me if I’m wrong, but the last Indiana Jones was a fictional character.”
“Don’t be mean,” she said. “If this is what he wants to do, then what’s the harm? He’s his own man.”
Since Harry was now unemployed and rich, if he wanted to go globe-hopping to try and find the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, he had the free time and could finance it. Who knows, maybe he’ll even find something of great historical value. It’s less likely that he’ll find a clue, but I didn’t say that to her.
Besides, I was too busy hanging on for dear life. You have to be right with Jesus if you’re riding shotgun with Violin behind the wheel. I’m positive I left fingernail marks on the door handle, and I almost fell on my face and kissed the ground when we arrived at our destination.
She drove us out of the city and into the country, to a densely wooded patch of forest on a mountain slope overlooking an industrial campus. We arrived while the sun was high, which gave us more than three hours of daylight to observe and plan.
We were looking for a place with the nondescript name of Po
dnik Ŕešení, which means “Business Solutions.” Pretty much the John Smith of business names. Luckily, the lab wasn’t in a sewer this time. I’m a big fan of missions not being in sewers. There’s something about splashing around in the toilet water of an entire city that doesn’t make one feel like James Bond. Instead, our target was a suite of labs leased in the moderate-sized industrial complex. More than forty businesses were based there, most of them involved in some kind of chemical or biomedical research. A couple of technologies companies, too. The DMS computer guy, Bug, had provided me with a floor plan from the local zoning commission, and we had satellite and thermal-imaging pictures. Violin and I studied the data and then surveilled the buildings using sniper scopes, locating access points, cameras, foot patrols, and guard stations. We counted one foot patrol and two in each of the gate stations.
“As far as we can tell,” I said, “most of the businesses in there are legitimate. Podnik Ŕešení is both the name of the whole building and the name of our target company. The name confusion lets them blend in. Our target lab is sandwiched between a firm working on a diet supplement and an independent blood-testing facility. Bug ran background on both, and they’re clean.”
Violin nodded, and I assumed she’d done her own background check through Oracle, the Arklight computer system. It was nearly as good as MindReader.
A shift change took place as we watched, and Violin spotted something.
“Joseph, look at the uniforms of the guards at the west gate.”
The west gate was the one closest to the building entrance, with easy access to our target lab. I studied them and saw what she meant. “Different uniforms,” I said. “Slate-gray instead of dark blue. Different company?”
“Dedicated security team,” she said. “They have better weapons, too. Kalashnikovs as well as sidearms. The guards at the east gate only have handguns. What would you like to wager that only the Podnik Ŕešení lab has access to that entrance?” mused Violin.