Deep Silence Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is for Ted Adams and David Ozer. For going to war for me and with me. And, as always, for Sara Jo.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I owe a debt to several wonderful people. Thanks to my literary agent, Sara Crowe of Pippin Properties; my faithful and long-suffering editor at St. Martin’s Griffin, Michael Homler; Robert Allen and the crew at Macmillan Audio; my film agent, Dana Spector of Paradigm; and my brilliant audiobook reader, Ray Porter.

  Thanks to the winners of the Joe Ledger “Name the Character” contests: Francesco Tigninii, Dennis Crosby, Thom Erb, Johns D. Curtis, Dominic Oviedo, Geoff Brown, Jenny Robinson, Robert Thomas, and Kelly Littleton. Christopher Hitchcock, CEG, principal engineering geologist InfraTerra, Inc.; Scott M. Ausbrooks, assistant director and assistant state geologist, Arkansas Geological Survey; John Geissman, professor and department head, editor in chief of Tectonics, University of Texas at Dallas Geosciences; Dr. Wendy Bohon, geologist, Arizona State University; Dr. Blake P. Weissling, research assistant professor and senior lecturer in geophysics, University of Texas at San Antonio; Dr. David H. Salzberg, seismologist; Chris MacInnis, P.Geo, vice president (geology), Goldspot Discoveries Inc.; Marc Byrne, formerly of the School of Geosciences, University of South Florida.

  Quote from The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman, used by permission of the author.

  PROLOGUE

  ABOARD THE ANATOLY

  NINE NAUTICAL MILES SOUTHEAST OF HANAUMA BAY NATURE PRESERVE

  OAHU, HAWAII

  SEVEN YEARS AGO

  “We’re coming up on it,” said the pilot. It was the third time he’d spoken, and this time he pitched it almost to a shout.

  Valen Oruraka looked up this time, nodded, and put his satellite phone back into a pouch on his belt. The crew were used to having to say things to Valen several times. The man was deaf as a haddock, and either his hearing aid did not work well or he kept the volume turned down because of the annoying engine noise. Or, maybe it was that the strange man did not want to be bothered by chatter from the crew. He was quiet and the furthest thing from chatty. The captain did not think he was actually cold, like some of the Russians he’d worked with on jobs like this, but certainly not social. There were complex lights in Valen’s eyes, and sometimes he looked hurt, and sometimes he looked scared. Once, in a moment when he was not aware the captain was looking at him, the Russian’s eyes seemed filled with a bottomless despair. The captain knew absolutely nothing of substance about the man, though.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Valen, and the captain gave the order for floodlights. All at once the empty and featureless black beyond the window revealed its secrets. A lumpy converted tug lay wallowing in the swell, but the pitch and yawl were distorted, out of time with the water. It was only when the pilot angled around to come up on the stern that it became clear the boat was lashed to another craft by lines fore and aft.

  “Want me to lay her alongside?” asked the pilot, but Valen did not answer.

  The captain pitched his voice a bit louder. “Sir, do you—?”

  Valen smiled. “I heard you, Captain.”

  He was a tall, youthful, good-looking and well-built man in his midthirties. Although he seldom spoke and never raised his voice, people tended to defer to him. Oruraka was like many of the new breed of Russians—smart, educated, focused, and political. In the post-Soviet days someone like him would likely have been either a disillusioned officer now sucking on the tit of organized crime, or he would be a civilian son born to a Mafiya family. One of those bred to step into the cracks in the Berlin Wall that everyone who grew up during the Cold War knew were forming.

  Not Oruraka. He was a different breed. Openly he was a businessman who did geological survey work for the Russian government. Privately—very privately indeed—he was part of the Novyy Sovetskiy, the New Soviet. Still an ideal, but one that was flourishing quite well in darkness, and tended lovingly by old and new power players who wanted to see a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that truly lived up to the vision of Karl Marx. Oruraka was a Party man in every way, even if that party existed in theory, in darkness. The captain and every man aboard this ship shared the same ideal, dreamed the same dreams.

  The pilot slowed the boat but gave it just enough throttle for steerageway.

  “Get some men on deck,” ordered Valen from his vantage point on the rail. “Rifles. Do it now.”

  The captain growled an order and six crewmen with Kalashnikovs hurried to the rail, barrels raised, eyes staring at the two tethered craft.

  “Mr. Oruraka, look there,” said the captain, pointing to an intense green glow coming from the small submarine. “Maybe it’s some kind of safety light…?”

  “No,” said Valen. “I think the hatch is open. Damn.”

  “Interior running lights in subs are usually red. Why would they use a green light?”

  Valen did not answer. Instead he frowned as he studied the two boats. The stark white lights revealed red splotches on the submarine’s conning tower, on the sides of the gray hull, and also on the starboard rail of the converted tug. The red was not paint. Anyone could tell that. And it looked fresh, too. Still wet.

  Suddenly a shadowy something rose up from behind the transom of the salvage boat.

  “Christ, what’s that?” gasped the captain. One of the deckhands swung a spotlight and there, frozen in the stark white beam, was a big, muscular young man with a Hawaiian face and torn clothes. His hair was wild and there were bright splashes of red blood on his face and chest and hands. He stared into the light with eyes that were filled with terror and madness, and a desperate species of hope.

  “Hey,” he cried, waving his arms, “help. God, help me. Please…”

  The captain took up a megaphone out of metal clips on the outside of the pilothouse. “How many people are aboard?” he called.

  “Me … just me … oh, God it got them,” wailed the young man. “It came out of the sub and … and … and…” He collapsed into broken sobs, covering his face with his hands. Then he jerked erect and looked back at the sub as if he’d suddenly heard some new sound. “Please, for the love of God, get me off of here.”

  The captain licked his lips. “Do you … ah … want me to send some hands aboard?”

  “No,” cried Valen sharply. “No one sets foot on either of those boats.”

  “But … what about the survivor?” asked the captain. “What do you want to do, sir?”

  Without turning to look at him, without taking his eyes off the submarine, Valen quietly said, “Kill him.”

  The captain stiffened for a moment, but he did not question the order. Instead he turned and nodded to the closest armed hand. Immediately six guns opened up. The bullets struck the Hawaiian and tore him to rags. Dozens of tiny geysers of blood leaped up like spurts of hot volcanic magma. The young man collapsed back and down out of sight.

  The captain cut a sideways look at Vale
n and saw the man wince. But then Valen caught him looking and his face instantly turned to an emotionless mask. The guns fell silent and soon the only sound was the slap of water against the hulls of the three vessels. The freshening breeze out of the southeast whipped the smoke away.

  Valen walked to the rail and the armed deckhands gave ground. “Captain, rig a towline without anyone setting foot on either boat.”

  The captain hesitated for a moment, poised to ask a question, thought better of it, and hurried away to give the orders. Valen Oruraka leaned on the rail and let out a breath that had burned hot and toxic in his chest.

  One more, he thought. One more ghost to haunt me.

  There were already too many, and it did not matter one bit that it was not his finger on the trigger. Would it ever get to the point where there were so many that they morphed into so large a crowd that no individual accusing voice could be heard above the others? Would their faces blur together over time? Did it ever happen that way?

  Across the narrow gap, rising like a ghostly wail from within the submarine, a chorus of voices cried out together.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” rose the cry. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  All along the rails hardened soldiers blanched at the sound, which was strained and raw as if it rose from throats torn to ruin by screaming. Wet and ugly. Each voice cried out in perfect harmony to create an imperfect alien shriek. Not a prayer. Not as such, but there was a red and terrible reverence in it nonetheless.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  The green glow emanating from within the sub was not a steady light. It flickered as if something inside were capering and writhing, its movements casting goblin shapes.

  Valen took the compact satellite phone from his pocket. His fingers trembled so violently that he nearly dropped the device, and even when he got a firm grip he misdialed three times before finally getting the correct number. It rang only once.

  “Gadyuka,” he said in a tremulous voice, “I found it.”

  PART ONE

  PATRIOT GAMES

  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

  —John Fitzgerald Kennedy

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOLY REDEEMER CEMETERY

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  “Joe Ledger.”

  I looked up from the gravestone to see three big guys in the kind of dark suits Feds wear when they want to be intimidating.

  I wasn’t intimidated.

  They weren’t wearing topcoats because it was a chilly damn day in Baltimore. There was frost sparkling on the grass around Helen’s grave. Winter birds huddled together in the bare trees and the sun was a white nothing behind a sheet of tinfoil-gray clouds.

  “Who’s asking?” I said.

  “We need you to come with us,” said the point man. He looked like Lurch from the Addams Family movies. Too tall, too pale, and with a ghoulish face. The other guys might as well have been wearing signs that said “Goon #1” and “Goon #2.” I almost smiled. I’d been fronted like this before. Hell, I’d even been fronted here before. Didn’t scare me then, didn’t scare me now. Didn’t like it either time, though.

  “I didn’t ask what you needed, chief,” I said, giving Lurch a bright smile. “I asked who you are.”

  “Doesn’t matter who we are,” he said, and he smiled, too.

  “Yeah, pretty sure it does,” I said, keeping it neutral.

  “You need to come with us,” Lurch repeated as he took a step toward me. He looked reasonably fit, but his weight was on his lead foot and he tended to gesticulate while he spoke. Whoever trained him to do this kind of stuff wasn’t very good at it, or Lurch was simply dumb. He should have had his goons surround me in a wide three-point approach, with none of them directly in the others’ lines of fire, and none of them close enough for me to hit or to use as a shield against the others. It always pissed me off when professionals acted like amateurs.

  “Badge me or blow me,” I suggested.

  Goon #2 pulled back the flap of his jacket to expose the Glock he wore on his belt. The holster looked new; the gun looked like he’d never used it for anything except trying to overcompensate.

  I ignored him. “Here’s the thing, sparky,” I said to Lurch in my best I’m-still-being-reasonable voice, “you either don’t know who I am or you’re operating with limited intelligence. And I mean that in every sense of the word.”

  “You’re Joe Ledger,” he said.

  “Captain Joe Ledger,” I corrected.

  His sneer increased. “Not anymore, Mister Ledger.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the president of the United goddamn States.”

  They were standing in a kind of inverted vee, with Lurch at the point and the goons on either side. Goon #2 had his jacket open; Goon #1 did not. Nor did Lurch. If they were actually experienced agents, they could unbutton and draw in a little over one second. Goon #2 would beat them to the draw by maybe a quarter second.

  That wasn’t going to be enough time for them.

  “Going to ask one more time,” I said quietly, still smiling. “Show me your identification. Do it now and do it smart.”

  Lurch gave me a ninja death stare for three full seconds but then he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a leather identification wallet, flipped it open, and held it four inches from my nose. Secret Service.

  “Someone could have made a phone call and gotten me in,” I said.

  “No,” he said, without explaining. “Now, here’s how it’s going to play out. You’re going to put your hands on your head, fingers laced, while we pat you down. If you behave, we won’t have to cuff you. If you act out, we’ll do a lot more than cuff you, understand, smart guy?”

  “‘Act out’?” I echoed. “That’s adorable. Not sure I’ve ever heard a professional use that phrasing before.”

  “They said he’d be an asshole, Tony,” said Goon #1.

  Tony—Lurch—nodded and contrived to look sad. “Okay, then we do it the hard way.”

  All three of them went for their guns.

  Like I said, they didn’t have enough time for that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HOLY REDEEMER CEMETERY

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  I was close enough to kill him, but that wasn’t my play.

  So, instead I stepped fast into Lurch and hit him in the chest with a palm-heel shot, using all of my mass and sudden acceleration to put some real juice into it. He wasn’t set for it at all and fell backward, hard and fast, into Goon #2. They both went down in a tangle. I kept moving forward and kicked Goon #1 in what my old jujitsu instructor used to call the “entertainment center.” I wasn’t trying to do permanent damage—and there are a lot of creative ways to do that—but I wanted to make a point. I made it with the reinforced rubber tip of my New Balance running shoe. He folded like a badly erected tent. I pivoted and chop-kicked Lurch across the mouth as he tried to simultaneously rise and draw his gun. The running shoes were new and the tread deep and hard. Ah well.

  Lurch spun away, spitting blood and a tooth onto the grass. I stamped down on his hand while I took his gun away and tossed it behind me. Then I reached down and gave Goon #2 a double-tap of knuckle punches on either side of his nose. If he had sinus issues he would have a mother of a migraine for days. If he didn’t, he’d only have the migraine for the rest of today. I took his gun away, too.

  Then I pivoted back to Goon #1, who was wandering feebly on his hands and knees, drool hanging from slack lips, eyes goggling. I gave him a nasty little Thai-boxing knee kick to flip him onto his back, drilled a corkscrew punch to his solar plexus, and took his gun for my collection.

  In the movies, fight scenes take several minutes. There’s a lot of flash and drama, and when either the good guy or bad guy knocks the other guy down, he lets him get up. As if fights are ever supposed to be fair. For me, fairness began and ended with me not killing them. Every other consideration centered on winning right
here, right now, with zero seconds wasted. That’s how real fights work.

  This fight took maybe two seconds. Maybe less.

  Not sure if these fucktards knew what they were getting into. They forced this game, though, which meant I got to set the rules. Sucks to be them. I stole their cuffs and, with a few additional love taps to encourage cooperation, cuffed them all together—wrists to ankles—and added a few zip ties from my pocket to keep it all interesting. The result is they looked like a piece of performance art sprawled there in the icy cemetery grass. None of them were able to talk yet, so I picked their pockets, taking IDs, wallets, key rings with car and handcuff keys. I ripped the curly wires out of their ears and patted them down to reveal small-caliber throwdown pieces strapped to their ankles. A glance showed me that the guns had their serial numbers filed off. The kind used during accidental or illegal killings and then planted on the deceased to build a case for resisting arrest. Wonder if that’s what they’d had planned for me.

  There was no one around, so I pulled out my cell phone and made a call. My boss, Mr. Church, answered on the second ring.

  “I thought you were on vacation,” he said by way of answering.

  “Me too. Listen,” I said, “remember a few years ago when some federal mooks braced me while I was visiting Helen’s grave? Well, it must be rerun season, because three of them tried it again. Same place.”

  “What’s the damage?” he asked.

  “I think I tore a fingernail.”

  “Captain…”

  “They’ll recover,” I said, and gave him the details, including reading off their names. “You have any idea why this happened?”

  “Not yet. Get clear of the area and then find a quiet place where you can sweep your car with an Anteater. Then go to ground and wait for my call.”

  The line went dead. The Anteater was a state-of-the-art doohickey designed to find even the best active or passive listening system.