“So I see,” observed Rudy. “As always, I am in awe.”
For lack of anything cool or witty to say, I shot him the finger.
“When are we leaving?” he asked.
“Top and Bunny should be here any second. Then we’ll go see Circe, Junie, and the others.”
Rudy nodded, but there was some reserve in his face, which I immediately—and unfairly—misread.
“My guys swept the hospital,” I said, “Nicodemus isn’t there. But if you don’t want to go back, I—”
That made Rudy stiffen, and he looked at me with one dark brown eye that burned like a laser all the way through me. “Cowboy, my wife is in that hospital. I left with great reluctance in order to come here. If you are suggesting that I am afraid to go back, then I—”
I set my coffee cup down and held up my hands. “Stop. That was me being stupid. I apologize. As you, better than anyone, know, I have more than my share of jackass moments. No excuses. I wasn’t thinking, and I’m sorry.”
Rudy burned me for another few seconds, then turned off the heat. He nodded, exhaled, sipped his coffee.
“You’re right about one thing,” he said.
“What?”
“You have an inordinate amount of jackass moments.”
I grinned. “Guilty as charged.”
We toasted each other with Starbucks—I, with Pike, and he, with his iced half-caf ristretto quad grande, two-pump raspberry, two-percent, no-whip, light-ice, caramel-drizzle, three-and-a-half-pump white mocha. Normally, I would abuse him for the girly-man nature of that drink. Now was not the moment.
“How’s Brian?” I asked.
“Bad bruise but nothing broken, thank God. The new spider-silk Kevlar is quite amazing. It’ll save a lot of lives. It certainly saved his.”
We toasted to that as well.
Church called and told me that he’d struck out selling the Regis shutdown to the president.
“Well … shit on toast,” I said.
He grunted and said, “Politics.”
“What’s our play now?”
“I’m still scheduled to fly east with him. First to New York and then Philadelphia. That will give me some time to work on him.”
“Working him over would be more useful.”
“And probably more fun,” agreed Church. “I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, you’re heading here?”
“Yes. Maybe I can whip up some kind of game plan.”
“I wish you luck.”
The line went dead.
Chapter One Hundred and Nine
Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center
Medical Center Court, Chula Vista, California
April 1, 5:07 A.M.
I told Rudy about the call. He made a face of disappointment. Maybe it was a frown of contempt. Hard to say. Either seemed appropriate. We walked outside to wait for Top and Bunny.
“Joe,” said Rudy, “I’ve been thinking about the Seven Kings information we’ve collected so far. I’m trying to work up a psychological profile on whoever is directing this particular campaign. When the Kings orchestrated the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they used the faux religious zealotry of Osama bin Laden as their mask. With the Ten Plagues Initiative, it was easier to understand because Vox’s mother, the self-styled ‘Goddess,’ was a classic megalomaniacal subtype. The same went for her consort, Sebastian Gault. That plan had their fingerprints all over it. Had they survived and begun another plan together, we may have been able to counter it sooner because of how much we were able to learn about them. You know, profiling isn’t always the shot in the dark it’s made out to be in movies.”
“Okay, and—?”
“Well … have you noticed that there is no face on these attacks?”
“Face?” I asked.
“Think about it, Joe. With the Ten Plagues, the Goddess used social networking to infuse the attacks with a biblical feel. She drew on the heat of racial and religious intolerance and fanned that into a fire so that people were committing hate crimes that were not actually directed by the Kings themselves. Like an avalanche picking up debris. And Mother Night more or less did the same thing. Yes, I know she wasn’t part of the Kings, but she’d learned from them. She was with us when we took down the Kings, and she knew Vox. She’d been point person on the science team that dismantled the Kings’ operation after the gunplay was over. Surely it’s occurred to you that the way she rolled out her pseudo-anarchical Burn to Shine program was modeled after the Kings, just as it was modeled after aspects of her own personality. And she constructed the Mother Night persona to sell it. These things are always more effective when there is a devil among the details. Hitler, Manson, Jim Jones. There are plenty of examples, and it almost doesn’t matter whether the face is the directing force or a figurehead.”
I nodded.
“Take the seif al din matter,” continued Rudy, “the thing that brought us both into the DMS. Most of that case was built around the terror-for-profit mind-set of Sebastian Gault. His methodology, his personal intensity. And, let’s face it, it’s no surprise that he was later recruited by the Kings. He already used a similar style of grand theatrics and showy misdirection to roll out his plan. Only the last part of that, the attack at the Liberty Bell Center, was different, because that bore the more aggressive personality of El Mujahid. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“I think so.”
“So, with this campaign,” Rudy said, “where’s the element of personality? Why does this seem so”—he fished for a word and chose one that shouldn’t fit but somehow did—“clinical? Or, maybe, mechanical.”
I repeated the words, tasting them.
“I mean, look at us,” said Rudy, “we typically find ourselves giving a case a nickname, and so far no one has done so beyond ‘the drone thing.’”
“Regis?” I suggested, but he shook his head.
“No, that’s a by-product, and we’re still waffling on whether it is, in fact, the core of their plan.”
“I’m already sold. Regis is another word for ‘king,’ for Christ’s sake. They put their brand on it, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure, everyone in the DMS seems to agree with that, Joe, but Mr. Church has not had much luck selling that to the president or the Department of Defense. That’s complicated by the fact that the earliest proposals for Regis predate our first encounters with the Seven Kings.”
“C’mon, that proves nothing. We know for a fact that the Kings have been around, moving behind the scenes for a couple of decades now.”
“So Mr. Church has attempted to explain.” He made a sour face and repeated, “Politics.”
“Politics,” I agreed, loading it with the same bile Church had used earlier.
“And the Kings themselves predate the current administration by several years. It’s my opinion, Joe, that the president is unwilling to accept that the Kings organization could rebuild itself to this level of threat on his watch.”
“Fucking politics,” I amended, and he nodded.
I sat on a stone ledge and sipped my coffee. Ghost put his head on my lap. It was clearly time for me to pet him. I did.
“There may be no overall face on this,” I conceded, “but their foot soldiers are acting the way we’ve seen with Kingsmen in the past. They’re true believers. The last shooter used his dying breath to drop a tagline on me: ‘Your world is going to burn.’”
Rudy nodded. “It shows that internally, at least, the Kings are acting like the Kings. Or, the organization is on an administrative level. But, tell me, Joe, what do you infer from the man’s comment?”
I shrugged. “That we’ve only seen the coming attractions. The main feature hasn’t started yet.”
Another nod. “And—?”
“Whatever’s coming is big.”
Rudy looked annoyed. “That’s an imprecise analysis, Cowboy. You’re smarter than that. What do you, Joe Ledger, senior DMS field agent, head of the Special Projects Division,
infer from what that man said?”
I brooded on it, scratching Ghost’s fur.
“The line is too dramatic to be an actual dying declaration,” I said. “It comes off as scripted.”
Rudy nodded. “It certainly does.”
“My favorite working theory—one that accounts for the sophistication of their current weapon—meaning drones, the software hijacking, like that—is that Doctor Davidovich is working with the Kings.”
“Mr. Church told me you thought so. Why ‘with’ rather than ‘for but under duress’?”
“The QC drive in the pigeon drones,” I said.
Rudy frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Developing a workable quantum computer is apparently a very big thing. From what Bug and his geek squad have told me, it should have taken a decade or two. But Davidovich did it in a few years.”
“Which means what, exactly, Joe? That under duress Davidovich would only do good work but not outstanding work?”
“Something like that. I know some pretty creative people, Rude. They can do a lot of great stuff under a deadline. But the QC is the kind of thing that will make Davidovich a household name for the next century. How many people create masterpieces at gunpoint?”
Rudy nodded thoughtfully. “An interesting point. I’ll consider it. Mr. Church has asked for a profile of Davidovich as a possible player for the Kings.”
“At this point I don’t think we can discount it.”
A police car pulled into the turnaround, lights flashing but no siren. A cop hopped out and opened the rear doors for Top and Bunny. They shook hands with him and then came to meet us. They both looked angry and upset.
“I can’t leave you alone for five goddamn minutes,” complained Top.
They shook hands with Rudy and asked about Circe, getting the same answers I got. It was still a heartbreaking holding pattern.
Brian Botley came out wearing bloodstained clothes and was no longer in a hazmat suit.
“Glad to see you fellows,” he said.
“Glad to see you still sucking air.”
Brian looked sad. “Not everyone was so lucky.”
Top seemed really furious. “We should have been here, not at the damn crime scene. Nothing new’s happening there,” he said to me.
“Don’t go there, Top,” I countered. “There was no way we could have anticipated this hit. And even so, we had three armed agents here.”
“‘Had’ is the damn point, Cap’n,” he snapped. “Farm Boy and me would have cut those assholes off at the knees before they ever drew down on our guys. No offense, Botley.”
“None taken,” said Brian. “I wish you’d been here, too. All the math would be different.”
“Top,” said Rudy, “please understand something. The only fault lies with the Seven Kings. They are clearly and effectively stretching our resources. Giving us a crime scene and a medical investigation would certainly split our forces. They counted on that, and they used it against us. Instead of looking to blame ourselves, we have to keep in mind the subtlety of their planning. And then we have to develop a response that is appropriate and effective. Do you agree?”
Top looked at him for a three count, then nodded.
“Going to make someone burn for this,” he said.
Say good-bye to your world.
My earbud buzzed and I tapped it. “Go.”
“Hey, Cowboy,” said Nikki. “We ran the prints from the six shooters and got pings on all of them. All six members of the team are ex-military,” she said. “Four army, one navy, one marine. All six worked in some aspect of the security industry. All have ties to Blue Diamond Security.”
“Figured that.” Blue Diamond was a massive private security company that provided shooters to everyone from Monsanto to Uncle Sam. We’ve had messy run-ins with them in the past, but even though some of their men went to the hospital, prison, or morgue, upper management never took a fall. Contractually, they were not responsible for actions taken by contract employees. Or some legal bullshit like that. When the attorney general tried to sue them, they outlawyered us. They had an apparently unlimited amount of cash to throw at the legal process; the AG had a way smaller budget.
“What about the serial numbers on their weapons? Any leads from those?”
“All of it was stolen from a shipment that went missing back in 2009.”
“Ah. And their vehicle? They arrived in an ambulance.”
“Stolen the day before from a private EMT service in Rancho Santa Fe. It was actually reported missing, too. The GPS tracker and security lockout systems were hacked and disabled. Plates were swap-outs stolen from another ambulance company in Solana Beach. Very professional.”
“What about the NachoCopter. Anything there?”
“Kind of. We figured out what happened, but that doesn’t get us very far,” said Nikki sadly. “The UAV left with the food order, and everything was normal for the first four minutes of the flight. Then it landed on a rooftop of a one-story gas station that’s been closed for three years. We think that someone hacked into the GPS controls and forced the machine to land so they could plant the disease pathogen in the food. It was done fast, though, and the drone was on its way in under three minutes.”
“Anyone see who was on that roof?”
“We have one vague description of a quote ‘guy with a San Diego Padres cap and a dark colored T-shirt. Maybe jeans. Maybe the guy was white. Maybe he was black. Maybe he was Latino.’ Unquote. The witness wasn’t looking and didn’t much care. Old retired guy on his porch.”
“I used to like you, Nikki. But you’re about to fall off my Christmas-card list.”
“Doing the best I can with what you give me, Cowboy.”
“We anywhere with the drone itself?”
“No. Doctor Hu’s team pulled it apart. Everything. It’s standard. No QC drive. But it does have the commercial version of SafeZone, so there’s that. Yoda’s looking for a Trojan horse with a virus, but none of the MindReader scans are pinging anything. Bottom line is the drone was hacked with software that, right now, anyone and their grandmother seems to have access to. SafeZone’s everywhere. There are ten versions of it at BestBuy. Any kid in eighth-grade computer-science class could install it.”
“Balls.”
“The hard part wasn’t the UAV,” she continued. “The hard part was that NF disease. I spoke with Hu half an hour ago, and he’s been working with John Cmar down at Johns Hopkins and a few other top infectious-disease docs. So far, they’re all impressed, but none of them know who cooked it up.”
“No clue at all?”
“Well…” Nikki said diffidently. “Doctor Cmar said it reminds him of something he heard about from a World Health Organization conference ten years ago. A lab in Angola was trying to do something with necrotizing fasciitis, but Barrier shut them down. Supposedly all materials, records, and samples were destroyed. MindReader verified this, and there’s nothing else we can find about anyone else trying to develop something along the same lines.”
“Another dead end.”
Rudy cut in, “Nikki, can you get us a list of everyone who attended that conference? Maybe someone there might have ties to the Kings.”
“Um … sure. No problem.”
She signed off.
We left the hospital and piled into Ugly Betty. A sore, heartsick, and angry Brian Botley was with us. However, Bunny hadn’t even started the engine when Nikki called back.
“Joe, oh my God, Joe! I think we caught a break. I think we have something big.”
“Talk to me.”
“Do you remember the code name Doctor Detroit?”
I stiffened. “Yes, I do.”
“I … I think he just called the CIA.”
Everyone in the car froze.
Doctor Detroit.
Yeah, we all knew that code name. It was the name assigned by DARPA.
It was the name of a man every law enforcement agency in the world looked for.
> Doctor Detroit.
Otherwise known as Doctor Aaron Davidovich.
Chapter One Hundred and Ten
In Flight
April 1, 9:11 A.M. Pacific Standard Time
We burned a long patch of rubber heading back to the Coast Guard air station. Instead of taking Shirley, we hopped aboard a muscular C-130 Hercules that had been arranged for us by Church. That allowed us to take Ugly Betty with us as we flew north to Washington State. The five of us—Top, Bunny, Brian, Ghost, and I—loaded Ugly Betty aboard, and we were wheels up in minutes. I had Montana drive to the airfield to bring Rudy back to San Diego. She wanted to come with us, but I told her I needed the rest of Echo to secure the hospital. The Kings were coming after us from all angles, and Nicodemus had already proved that they could get past the hospital security. She didn’t like it, but from the look in her eye I knew she’d take her frustrations out on any Kingsmen who had the bad luck to show up.
Our flight plan was straight as an arrow, and we were riding an executive order. It’s about eleven hundred miles, runway to runway, and I told the pilot to push it all the way to the red line. He didn’t like it, but he did it.
Once we were airborne, I played the message from Doctor Aaron Davidovich the CIA had passed along to us.
“… not sure if this is the right number. Been a long time since I had to use it. First chance I’ve had to get near an untapped phone. Please, I need you to pass this along to the Department of Military Sciences. They’ve dealt with this before. No one else. Please, no one else. Don’t try to figure out a better way. Trust me, nothing you do other than to contact Mr. Church’s people will work. Tell them this is Doctor Detroit. That’s not a joke. It’s a code name. This is not a hoax. Tell them Doctor Detroit is alive and he needs help.”
The CIA handler had tried to stem the flow of words and hold an actual conversation with Davidovich, but the scientist was in full-blown panic mode. His words tumbled over each other in a nearly unbroken flow that floated near the high-water mark of hysteria.
“Is that his voice?” asked Brian. “This was all before my time.”
“It’s him,” said Top. “No doubt about it. That whiny rich-boy voice? The contempt for lesser beings? Yeah, even scared, it’s still there in his voice.”