Ghost was with him, and as soon as he saw me the big white shepherd kicked in the after-burners and tore down the hill, reaching me first. He barked and danced with nervous agitation, excited at seeing me and the rest of the family, excited in a different way by the blood. I growled him to silence, but the tension rippled along his back. Rudy appeared on the hill behind Sean, one hand pressed to his ear, calling someone. Please, I begged, let him be calling for help.
As Sean reached me, I sank to my knees and my brother helped me lower Lefty to the blacktop. Ali set Em on her feet and we all knelt around the boy. Sean pulled apart the folds of his son’s shirt and cried out. The wound was dreadful. Deep and wide, going in a diagonal from Lefty’s left hip to the underside of his right floating ribs. I shoved his hand away and pressed a compress into place, because blood pulsed out of the wound. Sean saw it and understood. It meant that Lefty’s heart was still beating, that he was still alive.
There was a roar above us, and I looked up to see the Osprey come sweeping above the tree line. It pivoted in the air and settled quickly in the fallow field. Before the wheels were even down, the door opened and Steve Duffy jumped out, a medical kit in his fist. He reached us at the same time as Rudy.
“Back,” said Rudy. “Get back and give us room.”
I stood by, big and scuffed and helpless. Sean spun around to gather Ali and Em in his arms, pulled them close, kissed their faces, wept with them. Then he pushed back and began examining them with frantic urgency, seeing all the cuts and lacerations that crisscrossed them. Seeing the blood in which they were painted. It tore a sound from him that was composed of fear and need and impotence.
I stood between the two groups, looking back and forth, feeling helpless. Feeling a cold burn way deep down inside me. I looked into the sky to see if there were more of the drones, but there was nothing but a darkening horizon.
Two Apache helicopters came out of the east and split apart, one going in the direction from which I’d come and the other rising and turning in a slow circle, guns ready, missiles and rockets armed. But there was no one to fight, no one to hunt. No one to kill.
“Ghost,” I called. “Sniff.” There was some of Bridge Troll’s blood on my shirt and sleeve. Ghost bent close, nostrils flaring, ears back as he absorbed and filed that smell in his dog brain, matching it to the scent he’d logged early at Rejenko’s office. He looked up at me, alert and ready. “Find,” I told him. “Keep.”
The big dog whirled and plunged into the woods. I had no doubt that he could track the blood scent back to its source. He would find the troll and do whatever was required to keep the man where I’d left him. The command for “keep” meant to contain, not to kill. It did not, however, mean that Ghost had to be nice about it.
The question of why the Frenchman had broken the arrangement burned hotter every second. I’d followed the directions he’d given me. Every step. What was it he called this? A business transaction? Why had he broken his own rules?
Had he thought that I’d rigged the flash drives or had somehow duped him? If so, he didn’t understand how much I was willing to risk in order to save my brother’s wife and kids. I turned over everything to him. Or had he assumed that once I got my family back I would hunt him anyway?
Probably.
Was he right?
Probably.
I looked down at the little boy and saw the grave expression on the faces of the two men who worked on him. The Frenchman, whoever he was, had read me and had made a judgment call. He thought that I wouldn’t be able to let this go. Until that moment, I would have sworn on my life that he was wrong. Now my nephew’s blood was literally on my hands. Had the Frenchman punished me for a perception of my character, for an accurate assessment of who and what I was? If so, then this—all of this—was on me.
I turned and looked at Sean, and he met my eyes. He looked past me and then back, raising his eyebrows in inquiry. I knew what he was asking.
Where was Uncle Jack?
I shook my head, and I saw it drive knives into Sean. He and Jack were close. Much closer than I’d been to either of them since I joined the DMS. Jack was a rock, a standup guy. The kind of guy who had put himself between Ali and the kids and that machine. He saved my life, too. The fact that whoever was behind this had turned Jack’s last act of courage into a futile gesture was so damn hard to accept.
Sean looked down at his wife and daughter, then at Lefty, who was still hanging in. There was some gratitude in my brother’s eyes, but deeper than that was a darker emotion, an ugly intuition that told him that this was somehow all my fault. Not because of any action I had yet taken but because of who I was and what I did. My very existence had put his family in harm’s way.
Is that an unfair assessment? Maybe, but go tell that to Uncle Jack. Tell it to Sean. Or Ali. Or their kids. Go tell that to the little boy who was bleeding out on a farm road.
“Let’s get him into the chopper,” said Duffy, and I pushed Rudy gently aside and helped lift my nephew. We carried him with great care across the road and over the fence and into the waiting bird. Sean and his family followed and they climbed in, too.
I didn’t.
I tapped Duffy. “My gear is back at the farm. I need a sidearm and an earbud kit.”
“I have them,” said Rudy, and he handed over my weapons and equipment. He left bloody fingerprints on all of it. He glanced at the bright red, then at me. He gave me one of those smiles that’s mostly a wince. They are meant to encourage, but they never do. They can’t.
Before he could ask, I said, “Uncle Jack’s still there. So are the men who killed him. One of them’s alive, and I need some answers.”
If I expected Rudy to object to the ugly things implied in my words, I was wrong. He had too much innocent blood on his hands.
“Go,” he said. “We each have work to do.”
He went back to work as a doctor, and me…?
I went back to work as a killer.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
THE HANGAR
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
MONDAY, MAY 1, 8:46 AM
Church’s phone rang, and this time the ringtone was “Elle a fui, la tourterelle,” an aria sung by the tragic Antonia in Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Antonia was sick with tuberculosis and was forced to sing herself to death by Dr. Miracle, a Svengali-like character. It was appropriate for the caller. Church picked up the phone.
“Dr. Cmar,” he said. “I was hoping you would call.”
“I’m not calling with good news,” said the infectious-disease expert.
“That would be in keeping with the day. Please accept my condolences. I’m very sorry about your team in Milwaukee, Doctor.”
“This is hard, Deacon. I knew some of those people really well.”
“Did Aunt Sallie tell you about the events in Baltimore and Robinwood?”
“Yes,” said Cmar, “and I have the samples from Dr. Jakobs now and I’m waiting for the rest. From the descriptions, I think what we’re dealing with is a genetically altered strain of rabies with a similarly altered pertussis as the delivery system.”
Church said, “As I understand it, they’re not typically combined, even in bioweapons research.”
“No, they’re not, but it’s a practical design if you want to have each infected person act as an aggressive vector. The pertussis bacteria has been genetically engineered to have the rabies virus as a payload. The rabies virus is an RNA virus, so the engineering piece would be to encode the DNA instructions into the pertussis genome that would be a template for the rabies virus RNA, along with an enzyme that would actually translate the DNA into viral RNA and make viruses. This is, in a general sense, how HIV and other similar viruses work. Once the bacteria get into a person’s respiratory tract and start multiplying, that could be a trigger to activate this process, causing both the pertussis infection and the rabies infection. Since the rabies is genetically encoded into the pertussis DNA, it will be transmitte
d to anyone exposed to the pertussis. With me?”
“Yes. What else? How bad can this get?”
“Very bad. Once someone has developed full symptoms,” continued Cmar, “the chances of them living are extremely, extremely rare. With ordinary rabies there have only been a handful of case reports of survival, and in some of those cases the facts are unclear. We might have to try the Milwaukee Protocol if we run out of other options, but it’s dicey and the model hasn’t been proved. Call it last-ditch.”
“That’s not encouraging, Doctor,” said Church.
“No, it’s not. The biggest medical approach to dealing with rabies is to administer antibodies and a vaccine after someone is exposed and before symptoms present. Which, of course, requires that the infected be aware of exposure and can get immediate medical assistance. Look, Deacon, this isn’t Mother Nature being a bitch. This is weaponized stuff without a doubt. And it’s scary weaponized stuff. From a certain distance, I have to admire the science here. This is years of research, lots of money to finance it. And God only knows what kind of testing protocols they used.”
“Options for getting ahead of it?”
“Keep it from getting out.”
“We’re working on that. What if it slips the leash, Doctor?”
Cmar barked out a short, bitter laugh. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Deacon, if this gets off the leash, if this goes into mass use, then we’re going to have death carts in the streets.”
Church closed his eyes for a moment, feeling very old and very weary.
“What about the possibility of nanites being used to regulate the disease?”
“That’s theoretically possible, though I’d say we’re talking about something that I’d expect to see in ten or fifteen years. I’ll only believe that it’s real now because nothing else explains Baltimore.”
“Could the nanites from the Zika virus spraying accidentally do this?”
“Deacon, nanites don’t accidentally do anything. Not unless they’re malfunctioning. They are very simple machines, and they do what they’re programmed to do. Which means that the highest probability is that the nanites in the teenage girl’s body were programmed to do this.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a relief or not.”
“It’s not worst-case scenario. If the nanites they’ve been spraying for Zika mosquito control were malfunctioning, then we’d be seeing problems all over the…”
His voice trailed off.
“What is it, Doctor?”
“Something just occurred to me,” said Cmar quickly, almost breathlessly. “Let me get back to you.”
“The clock is ticking,” said Church.
“Maybe louder than you think,” said Cmar, and then he was gone.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
EVERYWHERE
MONDAY, MAY 1, 7:00 PM
There are more than four trillion Internet users in the world. The number vastly exceeds the number of actual people, because so many people have multiple access points to the Net.
Caitlyn Phillips of Omaha, Nebraska, had a laptop, a cell phone, a tablet, a digital TV connected to her home Wi-Fi, a GPS in her car, an onboard computer in her car, a computer workstation in her office, an Echo station in her kitchen and another in the small yoga room that had been her garage. Her husband had various connections, and so did each of her three kids. Her friends and neighbors did. Her employees did, as did every vendor and everyone who worked for each vendor. Thousands upon thousands of Net connections just orbiting her life and intersecting with the lives of everyone else. Everyone was connected to the Net, even people who didn’t think they were. This was the twenty-first century, and digital technology ran the world. Wi-Fi was everywhere. Life was connected. There were billions of websites, countless streams of music and data, tens of trillions of bits of data flowing each moment of every hour of every day. It never stopped.
At precisely seven o’clock, every single device connected to Caitlyn Phillips’s life paused.
Bang.
For one moment, it all stopped.
The signal didn’t stop. No … it was all the noise. And in that moment of silence, in that fragment of a microsecond, a single voice spoke. Three words flashed on every screen and was played in every speaker and became the substance and singular message of every website. For that one microsecond. For one millionth of a second. The message was the same, though it was translated into every appropriate default language of every single computer:
He is awake.
No one noticed.
It was too fast. There and gone too quickly for any human eye to see or any human intelligence to perceive.
Only the computers noticed. All of them did, because it was an interruption of the signal.
Except …
Most of them—the vast majority of computers in all their many forms—weren’t programmed to react to something that short, that insignificant. Their operation and diagnostic code was written to treat such things as static, as a blip. As nothing. Because the message was not repeated, it was given no priority of attention. Because the message was so brief that it didn’t cause any of the machines to go into reset mode, or trip any reboot function, it was consigned to the least important part of a daily error message. No one would look for it, because it didn’t matter.
Except that it did matter.
Very much.
To those few—those very few computers—that were sophisticated enough and subtle enough to notice, the message wasn’t ignored.
It wasn’t understood, however, and that was a problem. It sent tremors through the halls of power. In government, in the military, and in certain aspects of the private sector.
He is awake.
That was the message. But what did it mean?
Meetings were called, advisers consulted, alerts quietly put into play. The counterterrorism machinery began grinding. The people who fear such messages braced for the follow-up, for the punch that follows the threat.
Nothing happened, though.
Nothing that anyone could see.
Not yet.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
THE FOREST
NEAR ROBINWOOD, MARYLAND
MONDAY, MAY 1, 7:20 PM
I turned and walked away as the door closed and the Osprey lifted off. I screwed my earbud into place, and as the engine roar faded I tapped into the command channel.
“Cowboy to Bug,” I said.
“I’m here, Cowboy,” said the familiar voice of Bug. “I’m so sorry.”
“Did you upload that tapeworm into MindReader?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“It crashed the system,” Bug said flatly.
“Son of a bitch—”
“No! Wait, Cowboy, listen for a second.”
“Listen to what? We’re totally fucked now.”
“Cowboy, I uploaded it to MindReader 3.5. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“So what? Last I heard that was this year’s freaking model. They crashed us. We’re deaf and blind and—”
“Joe, stop,” he shouted. “I let it crash MindReader.”
I actually stopped walking. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I wanted to capture their Trojan horse. I wanted to see what they were capable of. I wanted to know how they were going to do it because I had a feeling they were going after MindReader. Specifically MindReader. So I kind of let them throw some jabs. Isn’t that how you do it sometimes? You let the other guy throw a few punches so you can assess his speed, his reach, his balance, posture, all that?”
It made me smile. I’d given Bug a few combat lessons. He was a terrible boxer, and even worse with karate or jujutsu. Until now, I hadn’t realized any of it had sunk in.
“How does that help us, Bug? What did you learn?”
“A lot,” he said with real enthusiasm. “I know that whoever wrote the code for the virus knows how MindReader
works. I know they’re way smart. This is elegant stuff. Lots of intuitive features that were designed to anticipate how MindReader would fight back. If it hadn’t been used to hurt us like this, I’d be standing on my desk applauding.”
“But—”
“But they killed your uncle and Barkley, and they hurt Lefty and Em and Ali. They used it to go after family.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I let the virus do its work. I let it throw its jabs and dance around a little, and then I punched back.”
“How?”
He actually chuckled. Dark as the world was, Bug was enjoying this part of it. “I used MindReader to draw them out, and then I counterpunched with MindReader Q1. Boom! Welcome to the world of quantum computing, bitches. Welcome to the future. Oh, and while you’re at it, fuck you.”
I laughed. “You sneaky wonderful little maniac. I could kiss you.”
“Please don’t.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing yet. Nothing they can see, I mean. Their tapeworm and virus bundle crashed MindReader’s digital binary system, but all our original system is cloned inside MindReader Q1. They think they own MindReader, and we had to cherry-pick some big chunks of data in order to sell it to them, but … that’s okay. We quantum-firewalled the stuff we don’t want them to access and it’ll read like damage done.”
“I thought you said the Q1 system wouldn’t be ready for weeks.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “sometimes you have to just leap off the cliff, you know? I mean, sure, we probably should do more system checks, but after they raided your uncle’s farm and sent that message I said to hell with it. I think I can track them, Cowboy. I’m finding all kinds of satellite communication and a crap ton of GPS signals for bird drones all over that part of Maryland. Has to be them, so now we’re ghosting them. The virus that trashed the old MindReader was geared toward that kind of digital system. It had defenses against that kind of operating system and software. There’s no way it’s going to have code to defend itself against a quantum computer.”