“Do you understand?”
“Please…” His voice was barely a croak.
“They have not yet been harmed, but if you do not do exactly what we want, you will sit there and watch what happens to each of them. This,” she said, nudging a piece of meat, “is not the worst thing that can happen. Do you understand that?”
He stared at her, his horror so great that it detached him from any possible intelligent reply. Boy understood this. The man needed some help. She shifted the laptop to one hand and dug her cell phone out of her shorts pocket, punched a number in, and waited for an answer. She put it on speaker.
“Yes?” said a male voice.
“Take Matthew Davidovich. Send me his balls and his eyes but leave him alive.”
Davidovich launched himself at her with such fury that he stood up, the heavy chair still attached to him.
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “You motherfucking bitch!”
Boy kicked him in the chest. Very fast, very hard. A ball-of-the-foot thrust to his sternum. It knocked him backward so that the four chair legs crashed down and pulled him with them, back into almost the exact spot where he’d been.
“Not my son,” moaned Davidovich. “Please don’t! Please, please…”
“Wait,” Boy said into the phone.
“Please don’t hurt my son. He’s only a kid. You can’t.”
Boy yawned and held out the phone toward him. “Would you prefer we take your mother? She’s old. She probably wouldn’t last more than three days. Or do you want to kill your wife? I can have a dozen men over there in half an hour. They can make her scream for days. For weeks. And then they will begin cutting parts off of her. They’ll mail them to me here. By the time they arrive, I bet you’d be so starved that you’d eat them.”
Her voice was soft, quiet, almost without inflection.
Which made it all so much worse.
“No,” begged the scientist. “No, no, no, please God, don’t hurt them!”
She squatted down and looked up at him. “You have the power to kill them,” she said. “Or to save them. You have that power. You say the word, and I will tell my people to do whatever their imaginations can conjure. Can you imagine what we could do to a little boy? Picture it, doctor. Put those thoughts in your mind.”
“No, no, no, no, no…”
“Or,” she said, and watched how that one little word made Davidovich freeze and listen with every atom of his being. “Or … you help us. You do some work for us. Freely, without hesitation or reservation. You do exactly what we want. You come to work for us. You become part of us. You do that, and your mother, your wife, and your son, Matthew, will never be harmed. They will prosper. They will be protected from any harm. That tenth grader who has been tormenting your son? We will make him go away. We will keep them all so safe. Safe.” She leaned closer. “But it’s all up to you. What orders will you let me give? How will you use your power, Doctor Davidovich?”
Davidovich began weeping.
And nodding.
And begging.
Boy smiled and smiled and smiled.
Into the phone, she said, “We’ve reached an understanding. Remain on station. Wait for my next call.”
Chapter Twenty
Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa
849 Verdier Avenue
Victoria, British Columbia
October 13, 9:25 P.M.
The little priest came and sat in a visitors’ chair beside the hospital bed. For a few moments he said nothing, did nothing except look at the machines, following each pendulous plastic tube, each trailing wire.
The burned man watched him with his one good eye.
“You came,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I—didn’t know if you would. After all, we never actually met. You were in prison when I—”
“I was never in prison.”
“What?”
“Someone was in prison who wore my name,” said Nicodemus, “but that wasn’t really me, was it?”
They studied each other for several burning moments.
“No,” said the Gentleman. “No, I suppose not.”
Nicodemus glanced at the closed door. “Your keeper is out there.”
“Pharos? He’s my doctor.”
“Don’t be an ass. He’s a vulture sitting on your tombstone.”
The Gentleman flapped his hand weakly. “Maybe. He’s harmless, though. He takes care of me because he wants something I have.”
“Routing and account numbers?” asked Nicodemus, arching his eyebrows as if surprised at what he was saying.
“How do you know—?” began the burned man, but let it hang. “Yes.”
“Will you give them to him?”
“If I do, he’ll pull the plug on me.”
“Maybe he won’t.”
“Why on earth would you say that?”
Nicodemus smiled. His lips writhed and twitched when he smiled. “He still has some conscience left. Not a lot. But some. I think he actually cares for you.”
“Bullshit.”
“No,” said the priest. “He cares, but he isn’t really aware of it. It makes him feel conflicted.” He spoke that word as if it tasted delicious.
The burned man shook his head. “He’ll leave me to rot if I give him the numbers.”
Nicodemus shrugged. “Or giving him one or two would be a gesture.”
“Of what? Of kindness?”
“To him, probably. For you, it would be control.” He chuckled. “Think about it. People can surprise you.”
“People disappoint me.”
“That’s why you’re miserable,” said Nicodemus, licking his lips. “I find people so … mmmmm … satisfying. And entertaining.”
“Yes…” said the burned man distantly. “Hugo said that you had certain appetites.”
The priest nodded approval. “Do you know who I am?”
The word “who” hung twisting in the air between them—as if it was the wrong word, deliberately chosen. The real word remained unsaid, but it screamed in the burned man’s mind.
Not who.
What.
“I think I do.”
“Do you?”
Instead of directly answering, the burned man said, “Do you know that I was in infernos twice? How many men can say that? The first time was in Afghanistan. The sands were melted to glass, and they stabbed me through the flesh, into my bones.”
The priest nodded.
“Then there was the explosion on the boat. I was on fire, burning like a torch, as the force of the blast sent me flying through the air. My skin kept burning even after I fell into the salt water.”
“Yes.”
“That was six years ago. Do you think that I have stopped burning yet?”
“No.”
The man in the bed fixed the priest with his one fierce eye. “Everyone who burns knows your name.”
“Everyone?”
“I dare say the effing saints knew your kiss in those last moments when the flames reminded them that they were not angels yet.”
The priest stood, bent, and kissed the burned man on both cheeks and then on the forehead.
The kisses were scalding.
The burned man hissed in fresh pain.
As he sat, the priest was smiling.
“You asked me to visit you, my son,” said the priest. “What is it you want from me?”
“You know what I want.”
“You have to tell me.”
The burned man ran a tongue over his melted lips. “Church. Ledger. The DMS. All of them.”
“You want them dead? Don’t disappoint me now that we are getting so close. You have an army of thugs to do scut work.”
“If I’d just wanted them dead, they would be dead,” snapped the burned man. “You know that’s not what I want.”
“Then tell me.”
The Gentleman’s one remaining hand snapped out with reptilian speed and clamped on
the priest’s wrist. He pulled himself half upright, and through clenched gray teeth hissed out his reply.
“I want them to suffer. That’s what I want. Can you do that for me?”
The priest placed a hand over the burned man’s. For a moment, for just a fleeting moment, the shrieking nerve endings all over the dying man’s body fell silent. For just a moment there was no pain. For just a moment his mind was clear again, sharp again. He could even, in that fleeting moment, feel his missing legs and lost arm; and his dead eye could see.
For a moment he was himself again. Whole. Powerful.
Alive.
He screamed. Not in pain but in sudden, overwhelming joy.
And then the priest pushed the burned man’s hand away and released him.
The moment passed.
Everything came crashing back. All the pain, the weakness. The darkness at the edge of his perceptions.
Everything.
It was a terrible, terrible thing.
It crushed the burned man against his mattress like a bug.
It left him gasping and whimpering.
The priest sat like a gargoyle on his chair, watching, watching.
“Can I make them suffer?” he asked. “Why don’t you tell me?”
The burned man said nothing.
With a satisfied grin on his ugly mouth, the priest leaned back and crossed his skinny legs. “Besides … I’ve already got a dog in this hunt.”
“What does that mean?”
The priest shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’m already invested in this particular matter. The games, as they say, have already begun.”
Interlude Seven
Ha-Nagar Street
Above the Stein Family Falafel Shop
Ashdod, Israel
Three Years Ago
Doctor Aaron Davidovich stood naked in the shower. He’d been in there for almost thirty minutes. Lathering furiously, scrubbing at his skin, rinsing, repeating. Nothing he did, no amount of soap and hot water he used, seemed able to wash him clean. First his own shit and piss. Then the blood of that man.
Then the images that still burned in his mind.
His mother.
Clara, his wife.
Matthew, his son.
Each of them in little windows on a laptop. Innocent. Unaware. Untouched.
Unsafe.
Vulnerable on a level that Davidovich never imagined.
He snatched up the bar of soap and began once more working up a lather on his skin, on his chest, over his heart.
He was so hungry, though he could not imagine eating. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d imagined.
Not after what he’d agreed to.
I am in hell.
Those four words burned in his mind.
He scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
When he staggered from the shower, gasping and weak, he saw that they had laid out clothes for him. His own clothes, taken from the safe house. Davidovich dressed in clean underwear, khakis, a checked shirt. No belt, no socks, no shoes.
“You won’t be going anywhere,” said Boy. “It’s warm enough in here without shoes. If you get cold, we can get you slippers. Would you like that? Some fuzzy slippers?”
He said nothing.
Boy smiled as if had. She stood and watched him get dressed. The woman was about five feet tall and couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Davidovich thought he could take her in a fight. He’d taken some aikido classes in college. He had a yellow belt, though he hadn’t been inside a dojo in fourteen years.
The woman clearly knew some martial arts. Could he take her?
These were stupid questions, and he knew it.
He turned away to finish buttoning his shirt. It took a while. His fingers kept losing the buttons. He wished his hands wouldn’t shake so much.
The bedroom in which he dressed was the smallest of the three in the apartment. Just a twin bed, a cheap dresser, and a window that was sealed with heavy wooden panels bolted to the walls.
When he had wrestled the last button through the hole, Boy led him out of the room and across the living room to the second bedroom. Davidovich did not look at what Jacob and Mason were doing. They had black plastic trash bags, mops, and a bucket of hot water and bleach. A fan blew vapors out a window.
In the other small bedroom, there was a mission table and two comfortable leather office chairs with wheels. On the table were three computers. Two laptops and one heavy-duty, high-end unit of the exact kind he used in his own office back in D.C. Along the wall were other machines, including a sophisticated portable supercomputer. Davidovich knew the model. It had a 12-core, 24-thread 2.7GHz Intel Xeon processor that turbos to 3.5GHz and up to 32GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory. A row of expensive, networked, thirty-petabyte external drives lined a shelf.
“This is where you will work,” said Boy. “E-mail and Internet access is restricted. All of your work will be monitored. There are many people working on this around the clock. You will always be monitored, Doctor Davidovich. Please remember that. At random times throughout each day and night, I will need to make a call to tell our field teams not to do the things to your family that you know we will do. Do you understand this?”
He did not dare speak. Instead, he nodded.
“It will make everything so much easier if you bear it in mind and act accordingly. There is no way to bypass our security. We are too good at it, and we have been doing this for a long time. You cannot break our pattern without killing your family. Please grasp that concept, doctor. Your cooperation and enthusiastic dedication to your job will keep your family alive and safe. Only you, through some act of stupidity, can guarantee that your family will suffer and die. If you accept this, then your life will not be filled with horrors. When you are done doing what we ask, you will be released unharmed. Your family will never know the danger they were in. You will be given your life back.”
“How … how can I trust you?”
Her smile was radiant. “Why would we need to lie to you? We own you now, doctor. We own your family. You have already agreed to work with us. It would be petty to lie to you at this juncture. We are many things, doctor, but we are not petty.”
“Who are you?”
Boy cocked her head to one side. “I could answer that question. I will answer it, if that’s what you want. But, tell me, which of your loved ones will I kill in exchange for that information?”
Davidovich nearly fell down. “No! No, I take it back. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I know you don’t.” She reached up and stroked his cheek. A gentle touch that was perhaps the most perverse thing he’d so far experienced. He shivered with revulsion.
Boy stepped away from him and gestured toward one of the chairs.
“There is a folder with your name on it stored on the laptop. In it are PDF files with instructions and a list of tasks. You will read those instructions very carefully and thoroughly, and then you will get to work. If you have any technical questions, we have a coded e-mail address for you to use. That e-mail will only go to one destination. If you attempt to use it in any other way … well, we don’t want to explore that, do we?”
She spoke with perfect phrasing and word choices despite her Cambodian accent. Davidovich found himself hanging on her every word.
“Let me know if there is anything you need,” she said, then made a kissy mouth at him and, laughing, left the room.
Aaron Davidovich sagged back against the wall, feeling the knives of despair and defeat stab him through the heart. He stayed there for a long time. As long as he dared.
Maybe a full minute.
Then he sat down at the laptop, booted it up, found the folder with the PDFs, and began reading. The longest of the files was marked REGIS. As Davidovich read it, he discovered the full extent of what they wanted. The last page of the Regis file had a long list of tasks. Each one was something that he knew he was uniquely qualified to accomplish. So much of this was built on a
scaffold of his own work for DARPA.
He printed the task list and held it in his hands for nearly five full minutes. Tears rolled down his cheeks and fell onto the page.
Then Aaron Davidovich placed the list on the table near the keyboard, flexed his hands, took a breath, said a prayer to a god he feared had abandoned him, and began typing.
Writing code.
Taking the first steps down into the valley of the shadows.
Part Two
Clockwork Devils
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
—R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Chapter Twenty-one
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 12:52 P.M.
Nobody is allowed to die on the opening day of Major League baseball.
If it’s not an actual rule, it should be.
We can all agree on that.
The sky over Philadelphia was so blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. There were a few clouds up there. I figured that God and all his angels were sitting on them, harps tossed aside, schooners filled with ice-cold lager. That’s the way the universe is supposed to work.
Since joining the DMS I haven’t made one opening day. Not one.
This year, I had tickets. Rudy was with me in a box that Mr. Church finagled from one of his friends “in the industry.” I was on my second big red cup of Yuengling. Ghost was in his service-dog disguise, drinking covertly from some beer I accidentally spilled on the ground right in front of him. Twice. The dog’s a lush, but he loves baseball.
My buddy, Patrick Seiler, was with us. He is a former San Diego cop who is now a financial advisor. My advisor, actually, which is weird. I never had much beyond checking and a lot of bills. But Church pays his people well, and my lady, Junie Flynn, has some money. Patrick’s helping us grow it in case I live long enough to retire.
Patrick had on a Phillies home-game jersey. Rudy and I were both wearing Baltimore Orioles away-game shirts to show our solidarity with the city that would be our home for six more days. This was our way of saying good-bye.
Patrick, Rudy, and I were making professional-grade headway into the stadium’s supply of cold beer. We were telling jokes and telling lies, and the cares of the world were a million miles away. We could have been anyone. We could have been three old high school friends meeting for a day of balls and bats. We could have been business friends taking a day off.