“I … I’m sorry, Joe,” Rudy said after another trembling exhalation. “Ay Dios mio, that really caught me off guard.”
Nicodemus’s name hung in the air, though. Ugly, impossible, conjuring all sorts of dark magic for us. When the last vestige of the Seven Kings tried to rain down hell with drones a couple of years ago, Nicodemus had led a strike team into the hospital where Rudy’s pregnant wife, Circe, was in a coma. During that time, Rudy was badly beaten by Nicodemus and the two had fought a battle so strange and terrible that I’ve never gotten all the details straight. Rudy ultimately beat Nicodemus to death with his hawthorn-wood walking stick. However, the man’s body was never found; instead, the corpse of a jackal was discovered among the dead of the strike team. Yeah, sit with that one for a moment. Let me know if you come up with any better answers than we did.
Am I saying that Nicodemus was something other than flesh and blood, that he was something far stranger and less human? Is that what I’m saying? No. Not out loud, at least. Good Sister sure as hell seemed to be suggesting it, though. He loves nothing. His mind is a furnace. He is of fire. He is chaos. Call me an alarmist, but that sure as shit didn’t sound good.
“Whatever this is,” I said aloud, “we’ll handle it.”
Tracy Cole stood a few feet behind Top, and it was pretty clear that she was reassessing her decision-making capabilities. Can’t blame her for that. Rudy tried to smile at me. It was a truly ghastly attempt. Top and Bunny led Rudy away, and they sat down in the forward lounge. I heard the clink of bottles. I went aft to the small private conference cubicle, closed the cabin door, and flopped into the seat, then tapped to get Church’s channel.
“You heard?” I asked.
“I did.”
“Is it him, boss?” I asked Church. “I mean, for God’s sake, can it actually be him?”
“Anything’s possible,” said Church.
“Whoa! Hold on one minute here. How am I supposed to interpret a comment like ‘Anything’s possible’? In this context, I mean?”
Church took so long coming up with an answer it was clear that he didn’t want to have this conversation. “Nicodemus is dangerous. If he’s still alive—and I have reason to believe that he may be—then this matter has jumped up another notch.”
“You’re not going to give me a straight answer, are you?”
“Captain, as much as it pains me to say it, not everything has a straight answer—or a complete answer.”
“Really? Then how about some truth? When Nicodemus first showed up during the Sea of Hope thing, you acted like you’d never heard of him before.”
“This is not the time for that discussion, Captain Ledger,” said Church.
“Uh-uh. You fucking will talk to me.”
He sighed. “The man who calls himself Nicodemus has used a number of carefully constructed aliases in the past. I did not know it then, but I know it now. The name Nicodemus is another alias, one he currently favors, but we can assume that it’s not his actual name. We can also assume that he has other identities.”
“Okay, sure, but how does that explain all those photos and paintings we found going back too many years for it to be the same guy? What about that?”
“You’re asking me for answers I don’t have.”
I know for a fact that Church doesn’t always tell the whole truth, but usually it’s a matter of him keeping certain facts to himself for reasons of his own. This was one of the very rare times where I thought he was outright lying to me.
“Rudy killed him in San Diego,” I said.
“Did he? The evidence says otherwise.”
“Church … why are you doing this? What’s going on here?”
He said, “Hamlet had it right, you know. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’ It’s glib but true. Just as it’s true that the world is larger and darker than even you know, Captain, and you have walked through the valley of the shadow more than almost anyone else I can name. It has been my misfortune to be more aware of certain things than most. That knowledge led me to form the DMS and to become part of the organizations that preceded it. It has led me to form alliances with a variety of people who define darkness differently than you do. Or I do.”
“Like Lilith?”
“Yes,” he said. “I would like very much to say that Nicodemus is nothing more than a self-absorbed narcissistic psychopath—which he is—but he is far more than that. And, before you ask, no, we are not going to have that conversation right now. Trust me to know when it will be appropriate to discuss such things.” He paused. “Do you trust me, Captain?”
I got up and paced the few feet of the cubicle and considered—very seriously considered—banging my head on the wall.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Now … as to the message from the Good Sister. We don’t actually know that Nicodemus is involved. We have no way of measuring the reliability of this intel. It’s even possible this is a dodge meant to misdirect us or to try and frighten us.”
“Yeah, well, that part’s working.”
“Perhaps, Captain, but please bear in mind that we beat the Kings and we beat Nicodemus time and time again.”
“We were stronger then,” I said.
“Give us some credit for who we are now,” said Church.
“Okay, dammit,” I said, “but if this is Nicodemus then—”
“If it is, then it is,” Church said coldly. “It doesn’t give us a target, Captain. It doesn’t give us a starting place. Nicodemus is not an organization. The nature of a trickster is to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behavior. He is an influence. He is a polluter and a corruptor, but he is not the driving force behind this. That’s not how he works. Don’t mythologize this man, Captain. Don’t give him power by assuming it’s there.”
“But—”
“We can infer from the warning that someone is playing a game on us. Floating the name of Nicodemus could be one ruse among many. You’re the one who spotted the recent events as part of a larger game of misdirection. Stay focused on that, because I have no doubt that you are correct.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I’m not,” said Church. “I’m endeavoring to keep you on point. Let Nikki and her team complete their pattern search. If anything comes up, I’ll call. In the meantime, keep working this. Trust your intuition. Trust your team. And then get some rest before you reach the DARPA camp, because you’re no good to me if you’re running on empty.”
And with that Mr. Warmth hung up.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
CASTLE OF LA CROIX DES GARDES
FRENCH RIVIERA
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2:13 PM LOCAL TIME
“Captain Ledger is in play,” said the Concierge. “He and his Echo Team will be at the Dog Park within a few hours.”
On the screen Zephyr Bain drowsed in her wheelchair, her eyes half closed, lips rubbery and slack, a line of spit glistening on her chin. Beside her, sitting in an overstuffed chair, a glass of dark wine resting on his knee, was John the Revelator.
“Good. Then he’s committed.” John sipped his wine and smiled a secret smile, his eyes cutting sideways toward the sleeping woman. Then they clicked back toward the screen. “Give me a status report. How well placed are we?”
“Shouldn’t we wait until the lady is awake so that she can—”
John put a shushing finger to his lips. “Let her sleep.”
“But—”
“Give me your report,” said John. His eyes seemed to swirl with strange colors. It made the Concierge flinch, because it didn’t look like a quality of poor video reception.
“I—”
“Now,” prompted John. He smiled, but it was the cold, anticipatory and predatory smile of a hunting crocodile.
The Concierge swallowed and nodded, then he ordered Calpurnia to open up small windows as he read out the information. He began with position statistics in the United States.
“There
are thirty thousand four hundred and fifteen fire stations in the country. Of those, we’ve identified nine thousand three hundred and eight as critical to response in target areas. We have at least two bird drones at each location. As soon as the doors open during an emergency call related to Havoc, the birds will fly down in front of the door and detonate. They will each deliver payloads of eleven point three kilos of C4, equivalent amounts of Semtex, or one MI8 claymore mine designed to damage the doors and the lead vehicle but that will not blow up the buildings. The remaining equipment should be undamaged, but the response time will be slowed to within plus or minus six percent in our favor.”
“Good.”
“Of the eighteen thousand five hundred and six police agencies in the United States, approximately one-third are positioned in target areas. We have cockroach swarms in about a third of them, rat drones in a third, and bird drones in the rest. The cockroach drones with target call and dispatch centers, first-responder units, SWAT, and other emergency groups. We estimate that we can cripple the police response time by seventy-seven percent. Officers on the street will not be individually targeted, but without radio and backup they will be slow or reluctant to enter crisis scenes.”
“Good,” John said again.
“Of the nearly six thousand registered hospitals and urgent-care centers, all of those in the targeted areas will be hit by bird drones. Some of the largest emergency centers in poor urban areas will be taken out by WarDogs, using a combination of machine-gun fire and explosives.”
“Very good.”
“All registered FEMA offices will be targeted by commercial drones with explosive packages. All of the FBI regional offices will be taken out by large-frame bird drones, each carrying twenty-seven kilos of C4. A group of six WarDogs will be turned out on the Centers for Disease Control, and they will have on-site support from human operatives. Those operatives are all preconditioned with Swarm. Should the dogs prove insufficient, we can activate the rabies and let them off the leash.”
“So good,” said John. He dipped a finger into the wine and then licked it off. The way he did it was pointedly obscene.
The report went on and on. Military bases, power companies, turnpike entrances, bridges, subways, major arteries, dams and levees, cellular towers. On and on and on.
This program had cost Zephyr and her investors tens of billions of dollars. Every penny had been spent with care. It was, without doubt, the most comprehensive invasion, the most complete terrorist attack, the most sophisticated and well-orchestrated act of war in history. Nearly a quarter of the money had gone for bribes, for the purchasing of people—or their souls, he reflected—for donations and lobbyists and funding to make sure that the people watching the people who watched the people who put everything into place were all owned by Zephyr Bain and John the Revelator. It was the truest example of carte-blanche management ever.
And all that remained was the go order.
All that remained was for Zephyr Bain to speak the words.
As he spoke, the Concierge watched her sleep. And, despite everything, he secretly prayed that she would slip away, that the cancer would take her, that her dreams of changing the world would fade with her into the soft, deep black of forever.
Even as he thought it, the Concierge was aware of John’s strange eyes fixed on him. He could feel the man, despite being separated by thousands of miles of land and ocean. Despite the fact that this was a video image and not the man himself sitting there, sipping wine, and smiling like a devil out of hell.
The report took a long time. John refilled his glass three times. Zephyr slept on, though once she moaned in her sleep. A sound of deep pain. But John bent and placed his left hand flat across her chest, over her heart, and the sound stopped. She slept on, and now she wore the same strange, enigmatic, inhuman smile as he did.
The Concierge saw all of this and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that he was as damned as they. And yet he did not stop speaking, telling of the plans and preparations, listing the numbers of those who were going to die today. He did not even pause.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
THE HANGAR
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 5:22 AM
Nikki Bloomberg sat up so straight and fast that she knocked her coffee cup to the floor. The cardboard cup exploded, sending café mocha splashing everywhere, including over her retro-chic red Keds sneakers.
She didn’t care one bit.
Her entire focus was on the screen in front of her. It was a video clip from last year of a man on a stage addressing dozens of philosophy Ph.D. candidates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“Wait a minute,” she said, and tapped some keys to open a second window. The same man spoke at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia. She opened a third window, a fourth, and a fifth. The same man was speaking in all of them. She broadened her search and found him speaking at the London School of Economics and Political Science, at the University of Toronto, at the Australian National University, at the Université Paris. Elsewhere, too. In Germany, Italy, Mexico, Geneva, Beijing.
In all, Nikki found more than sixty speeches the man had given. Sixty that had been recorded and put on YouTube or on the social-media platforms of the various universities. She replayed some of the foreign ones and had to run them back and verify with filters before she was forced to accept that the same man had given speeches in at least thirty-one different languages. All without a translator.
“That’s impossible,” she said aloud.
Nikki opened a search window for the new MindReader Q1 and fed every bit of data into it and hit Enter.
The computer took a microsecond to return seventeen thousand hits. Many, naturally, were duplicates. Many were not. Videos, blog posts, podcast interviews, print articles, chats, and more. All featuring the same man. She ran a pattern-recognition program on him and got a hit with a ninety-eight-percent reliability. She frowned at that, though, because the hit was of Father Luigi Bassano, who had been rector of a small church in Verona, Italy.
Which was impossible, though, because Luigi Bassano’s body had been recovered from a house fire four years ago. The man was dead. Some of the videos, though, were from as recently as last month.
“What the what?” said Nikki. She reran the facial recognition and got the same answer. No other hit was higher than eighty-two percent. This man was Bassano.
Or was he?
There had been an autopsy of the priest, and dental records had confirmed that he was indeed that man.
Except here he was touring the world giving speeches. In each of the videos, this man was talking about a curated technological singularity. A man talking about a forced but inevitable evolution. A man who talked about robotics, nanotechnology, AI, and more.
She snatched up her phone and called Mr. Church to tell him what she had discovered about a man who called himself John the Revelator.
CHAPTER NINETY
THE HANGAR
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 5:26 AM
“Where are you going?” asked Aunt Sallie.
Mr. Church placed several file folders and the partial box of vanilla wafers in his briefcase. “To the airport. I’m not getting the cooperation we need from the White House, so I’m going to meet Captain Ledger at the DARPA camp. If needs must, I’ll hijack the whole think tank and put them in a room with a MindReader substation.”
“The president won’t like it.”
“Auntie,” said Church, “would you like a bullet-pointed list of the things I can’t be bothered to worry about?”
She sighed. “No, it would be about the same list I have. Go fly the friendly skies.”
She nodded and went away, and as Church finished packing his case he heard her yelling at someone, and it made him smile. He had worked with Aunt Sallie for many years. The history of their covert actions was sewn into the fabric of the history of modern America, and into the history of the world. Presiden
ts and kings came and went, but their fight seemed to go on and on. He had great affection for her, and he was concerned that she was getting old now. She had been badly injured by assassins during the Predator One case, and even though she would likely cut someone’s throat for saying so, she had lost something since then. She was less forceful, less certain of herself. He wondered how soon the day would come when he would have to tell her to step down and step back.
She would fight him on it. And retirement would probably kill her. It turned a knife in his heart, and he brooded on it as he walked slowly toward the elevator. Brick Anderson, his personal assistant, valet, bodyguard, and friend, was waiting for him down in the parking garage. Both of them were big men, though Brick was taller, wider, and wore a SIG Sauer pistol in a shoulder holster over a black T-shirt. A third man, smaller and dressed in the uniform of the Hangar’s security team, trailed behind pulling two heavy metal suitcases and Church’s go-bag of clothes and personal items. Brick opened the rear passenger door for Church and then supervised the placement of the suitcases in the trunk.
As Church settled into the back, he opened his briefcase to take out his cookies, but then he stopped and raised his head. A man sat across from him on the fold-down seat. He was very small, very old, wreathed in wrinkles, with a few wisps of gray hair clinging to his scalp. The man wore the black trousers and shirt of a priest, with a crisp white Roman collar. His gnarled hands were folded in his lap. His eyes were a complex blend of colors that seemed to swirl, like paints that refused to mix or blend.