Pinter scrunched his eyes shut, but he could do nothing to block out those high, piercing screams.
It went on and on until Pinter felt cracks forming in his mind.
Then Hecate walked slowly across the room and pressed a button that dropped the entire room into a well of silence. She turned like a dancer and walked back, passing in front of her brother and trailing her fingernails across his stomach. Paris looked away. He had not participated in the torture, preferring to linger by the door, arms folded across his chest, his body deliberately out of the path of flying blood. His eyes followed his sister; his mouth was small and unsmiling.
Pinter licked his lips. His throat felt hot and full of nails.
Hecate leaned back against a wall and crossed her ankles. She wore a pair of capri pants and a bikini top. She was covered in blood from her polished tonails to her full underlip. Her eyes were bright with a predatory fever, and her chest heaved with exertion and passion.
“You know who I am?” she purred. It was the first thing anyone had said.
Pinter said nothing.
“And you know my brother. . . .”
Pinter cut a look at Paris, who studied his nails.
“And our large friend here is Tonton.”
Tonton grinned. His teeth were bloody. He was a biter.
“Your weapons and equipment are American. You want us to believe that you and this” she reached out and jabbed a toe into what was left of Homler. “You and your friend want us to think that you’re special ops. Delta Force, SEALs, something like that.”
Pinter said nothing.
“Which would be fine if I’d woken up stupid this morning.” She smiled and Pinter thought that her teeth looked unnaturally sharp. The witch’s eyes were a strange mix of dark blue and hot gold. “Now . . . we both know how this is going to end.”
Pinter looked left and right as if there was some chance of escape. Hecate watched him and smiled. She pushed off the wall and came toward him with a slinky sway of hips that made Pinter see a big hunting cat rather than a woman. He thought he could feel the heat from her eyes. Then she raised a leg and straddled him, sitting astride him so that his face was inches from her chest.
“We all know that you’ll tell us everything. Everything. The only question is whether you’ll be smart and earn a quick release or play it stupid and make us work for this. The end will be the same. Tonton is very good at a quick kill when I want him to, but he doesn’t like it. He has a bit of animal in him. Truth is . . . so do I.”
Hecate reached behind her back and undid the strings of her bikini top. She pulled it off and let the straps slide through her bloody fingers. Her nipples were erect, her breasts flushed pink. She leaned forward to brush her nipples back and forth across his chest.
“I’d prefer that you make this slow and difficult. We have the time.” She bent forth and whispered huskily into his ear, “I like the slow burn. But I’m fair. Play it straight with us and this will be over before you know it.”
He held out for a long minute, grinding his teeth together to keep his mouth shut, but when Hecate opened her smiling mouth and licked the blood from his chin he broke.
Pinter threw his head back and screamed. Not in pain but with an atavistic dread that was so deep that it was beyond his ability to comprehend. It was primitive and unthinking, filled with need and desperation and a total hopelessness.
The echo of the scream bounced off of the walls and swirled around him like a poison vapor. He collapsed forward, his head against her breasts, his chest heaving with as much passion as Hecate’s, but of a totally different flavor.
“You can die pretty,” she said. “Or you can die ugly.”
Hecate bent and hooked a finger under his chin, leaned toward him, and kissed him on the mouth. Pinter could taste the salty blood on her lips. He gagged.
“Tell me . . . ,” she whispered.
He told her everything.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, August 29, 5:04 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 56 minutes
The room was absolutely silent.
“The most recent victim was Jerome Freund, who worked as the assistant director of a historical museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He retired from active service with the Grenzschutzgruppe Nine eleven years ago and was involved in no active cases. He was not even a consultant, but he was assassinated apparently as a preventive measure by whoever has resurrected the Cabal.”
“How long ago did these murders occur?” I asked.
“They’ve been spaced out over the last couple of months. I have a contact in Germany—Captain Oskar Freund, the son of Jerome Freund—who has been investigating this for me. Oskar is an active member of GSG Nine and it was he who first brought much of this to my attention. He called me this morning to tell me of his father’s death.” Church picked up a cookie, looked at it for a moment, and then set it down. It was the closest to agitated that I’ve ever seen him, and when he spoke I understood why. “Jerome Freund was my closest friend. My oldest friend. He was a good man who served his country and the world through very dark times. Despite the work he did while a member of the List, he was essentially a kind and gentle person, and over the last eleven years he has carried no gun, arrested no criminals, did nothing to warrant what happened to him. And yet he was murdered with deliberate care and in a manner that would ensure that he suffered greatly.”
“How was he killed?” I asked.
“Someone dressed as a tourist came to the museum where he worked and shot him in the back of the neck with a glass dart. Oskar’s review of the security cameras revealed that the weapon was a gas dart gun disguised as a camera. I believe that the choice of weapon was deliberate, because that type of weapon was used by his father during the Cold War, back when he was a member of the List.”
“What was in the dart?” Dr. Hu asked with great interest.
“Ebola.”
Hu actually broke into a grin and the word “cool” was forming on his mouth when I shot him a look that promised slow, agonizing death. He suddenly found his fingernails very interesting.
Grace said, “Effing hell! I didn’t hear about any outbreak—”
“There was no outbreak,” Church said, “and no one else was infected. The doctors were able to identify the symptoms quickly enough to get Jerome into isolation. Oskar was only able to observe him via video camera. Afterward the German government put a security clamp over the whole matter. If the true cause of death surfaces at all, it will be as an accidental exposure of some kind. No one but Oskar, his superiors, and us in this room—and the killer—know that this was a murder. Oskar even managed to get the museum security tapes without raising any alarms.”
“That was smart,” Bug said.
“Oskar had already been looking into the killings of the List members at the behest of his father, and when he brought the information to me I discovered a very deliberate pattern.” Mr. Church stood and crossed to the flat screen. He touched the first image. “Lawson Navarro, late of MI6, was killed in a car accident. While working with the List he arranged the deaths of several Cabal members by tampering with their cars, setting car bombs, or staging high-speed driving accidents.”
He tapped the next picture.
“Clive Monroe, also of MI6, was the most skilled sniper of the List. He was shot with a high-powered rifle at Sandown Racecourse.”
And the next.
“Serena Gallagher of the CIA died in a fall while hiking. Her method had to been to arrange ‘accidents’ for her targets.”
Then the last.
“Lev Tarnim, one of Mossad’s most celebrated field agents, was one of a dozen people killed by the suicide bomber in Tel Aviv last month. Until now the blame had been put on HAMAS. However, Tarnim was the List’s explosives expert.”
“So,” said Grace, “this isn’t just a matter of former agents being killed . . . each person wa
s killed in a way appropriate to the kind of damage they did to the Cabal.”
“Exactly,” agreed Church.
I said, “What about Jerome Freund?”
“Jerome did a number of selected eliminations using various biological agents.”
“Jeez,” said Bug.
“There is another thing,” said Church, “and it’s possible that this contributed to the specific choice of weapon used against Jerome. There are many disease pathogens that can kill . . . but Ebola was the weapon of choice. Jerome was a historian. He published several books on the war. He’s best known for his book on the attempt to assassinate Hitler, because his father worked with Stauffenberg on that plot and was likewise executed. However, Jerome also wrote two books on the death camps, one of which was a general history of them and one in which he explored the cultural damage done to the German people because of what the Nazis did. Most people equate all Germans of that era with Nazism and believe that all Nazis were complicit in the attempts to exterminate whole races of people. That was never true. Many people opposed it, many were in denial about it, and many underwent irrevocable psychological damage because they were afraid to speak out against it. We Americans had a tiny dose of that following 9-11 when the public fervor was to go to war even though America had not been attacked by all of Islam. Hysteria and fear are terrible things.”
“No joke, boss,” I said.
“Jerome’s next book, which was only half-written at the time of his death, was a history of the death camp program and the ideology—if we can call it that—within which men felt both compelled and entitled to do so much harm to entire races of people. Jerome Freund postulated that the Nazi Final Solution served as the model for all subsequent ethnic genocide around the world, and particularly in Africa. He argued that the mass extermination of entire races, ethnic groups, and cultures that is running rampant nowadays would never have been so virulent had it not been for the thoroughly documented final solution campaign.”
“And you feel that since he cited Africa so heavily an African pathogen was chosen?” Grace asked.
He nodded. “It seems to be in keeping with the Cabal’s attempt at poetic justice. But that was only one-half of what drove the Cabal. They were also deeply dedicated to using cutting-edge science to restart and see to completion the eugenics program.”
“Dios mio!” gasped Rudy.
“Wow,” said Hu, a smile blossoming on his face.
“Shit,” I said.
“What the hell are eugenics?” asked Bug.
Chapter Sixty
The Dragon Factory
Sunday, August 29, 5:30 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 30 minutes E.S.T.
Paris poured martinis for them both. Hecate was perched on the edge of a chair, her body tense, her eyes bright with anger. Paris set the pitcher down and slumped onto the couch.
“He was telling the truth,” Paris said. “After what you did to his friend he couldn’t tell enough of the truth. He was begging you to believe him.” Paris’s face still wore a shadow of the disgust he felt. He did not mind killing and even liked a little recreational violence, but torture was not his cup of tea.
“I can believe this of Otto,” said Hecate, “but not Dad.”
Paris peered at her over the rim of his glass, one eyebrow raised. “Really? You can’t believe that Dad—our dad—would resort to murder?”
“Don’t be an ass,” she snapped. “I know what kind of a monster he is. If you tally up all the nastiness in which we’ve indulged, we don’t hold a candle to him.”
“Then how on earth can you be surprised that he’d want one of us killed?”
She sipped her martini. “Because we’re his children. His only children.”
“Are we?”
She shot him a look. “What do you mean by that?”
“That kid . . . SAM. The one Otto called ‘Eighty-two’ before Cyrus bit his head off for it. I never saw a picture of Dad as a kid, but SAM looks like how I imagine he’d looked. Same eyes, same mouth and chin.”
“Otto said that he was Dad’s nephew.”
“Sure. And we both know how much trust we can place in anything Otto says. Besides, I’m pretty sure the kid is a twin. A year or so ago I saw another kid at the Deck. He ducked out of sight pretty quick, but it looked a lot like SAM, and I’d just come from seeing Cyrus and SAM. Twins run in families.”
She nodded, chewing her lip.
Paris said, “Cyrus probably has a legion of little bastards roaming around, ready to usurp our place.”
“Even so . . . I can’t believe that Dad would want us killed.”
“Only one,” Paris reminded her. “And it didn’t matter which one, according to our late informant.
“I think we should be more concerned,” said Paris, “with how he found us. Marcus said that no one came aboard our jet when we were at the Deck, and I believe him. But we were clearly followed. That means that Otto somehow managed to put a tracking device on the jet and also managed to have us followed. How? Where did Dad get the follow planes that Pinter fellow told us about? How did he hire assassins? Pinter said that this wasn’t the first mission he’d done for Dad. How the hell is Dad managing all of this?”
She shook her head. “I guess we don’t have as tight a control on him as we thought.”
“Oh really? You think?” He sneered as he rose and refilled their glasses. “At this moment I don’t know who we can trust. We certainly can’t trust anyone at the Deck. I wish to Christ we’d gone through with the fail-safe device we talked about, ’cause right now I’d be happy to blow the whole fucking thing up. Dad, Otto, and everyone.”
She nodded. They’d seriously considered boobytrapping the Deck during its construction but had ultimately decided against it. Back then they thought that they had Cyrus on an unbreakable leash. Now she felt like a fool.
“God, I hate being played.”
“He’s played us our whole lives,” Paris said.
“But how? We own everyone at the Deck.”
“Apparently he and Otto found better levers on them.”
They lapsed into a long and moody silence.
“What do you think Dad would do if we sent him the heads of the two assassins?” Hecate suggested.
“Jesus, you’re bloodthirsty,” Paris said, but he pursed his lips. “Interesting idea, though. Dad would probably blow a fuse.”
“What would that look like?”
He sipped his drink. “I don’t know. If he controls the Deck, then he might be able to escape it. That means he’d be free to come at us any way he wants.”
“Christ,” she said as the possibilities that presented blossomed in her imagination. She stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the crews working to load the bottled water onto the freighter. “What should we do? Do we pretend this never happened and send that shipment out? And the next one, and the one after that?”
“Depends on whether we want to alert him. Right now he doesn’t know that we know. At most he’ll find out that our security team killed a bunch of intruders. We could play it like we don’t know who came at us, or go with what he intended and play it like we’re scared because the U.S. government sent a black ops team after us.”
“He’ll know we’re lying,” she said.
“So? As long as we keep the lie going it won’t matter, and it’ll delay any confrontation until we have a chance to look into this.”
Hecate chewed her full underlip. Paris noted, not the for the first time, how sharp her teeth were, and he secretly wondered if she’d started filing them. It would be like her to do something freaky like that.
She ran her finger around the rim of the glass, over and over again until it created a sullen hum. A smile bloomed on her face.
“What?” Paris asked.
“I just had a wicked little idea.”
“For Dad?”
“For Dad,” she agreed. “Look . . . he now knows where we are
. Okay . . . instead of counterattacking, why don’t we really play up the innocent act and reach out to him like we’re a couple of scared kids who need their daddy in a time of crisis?”
“I’m not following you. . . .”
“Why don’t we invite him here?” she said with a wicked grin. “Tell him we’re scared and that we could use his advice on how to protect the Dragon Factory from another attack.”
“Ah . . . you sly bitch!” Paris said with a smile. “And once we have him here . . .”
“Then we put a bullet in Otto, lock Dad in a dungeon, and send a couple of teams of Berserkers to the Deck to, um . . . sterilize it.”
“We don’t have a dungeon.”
“So,” she said, “let’s build one.”
Paris looked at her for a long moment, his eyes glistening with emotion. “This is why I love you, Hecate.”
Hecate pulled him close and kissed her brother full on the mouth.
Chapter Sixty-One
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, August 29, 5:31 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 29 minutes
Dr. Hu turned to Bug. “Eugenics is in a bit of a gray area between social philosophy and evolutionary science. It was kicked off by Sir Francis Galton—Charles Darwin’s cousin—in the late eighteen hundreds, and it’s had a lot of high-profile supporters. We’re talking people like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, a bunch of others. Its proponents advocate the improvement of human hereditary traits through intervention.”
“ ‘Intervention,’ ” muttered Grace the way someone might say “anal probe.”
Hu ignored her. “The theory is that by filtering out unwanted genetic elements, corruption, and damage what emerges will be an elevated human being whose abilities and potential are beyond our current reach.”
Before Bug could ask a question Grace cut in again. “Which is a very slippery way for some scientists—and I use that word with the greatest reluctance—to justify the worst kind of enforced social Darwinism. There are people right now who believe in eugenics and they hide behind causes that are very noble on the surface. For example, they’ll point to a particular birth defect and in their grant proposals and lobbying materials they showcase the misery and suffering. They use talk shows and the media to gather support, and everyone falls in line.”