Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  “I never make jokes,” I said. “I am a serious-minded kind of guy.”

  “Who wants to start the day off with ‘a bang’?”

  “That’s serious.”

  She pretended to look at her watch, which she wasn’t wearing. “Well … I have a few minutes.”

  Clothes went flying. Makeup was spoiled. My dog became disgruntled. And we did, in very point of fact, start that day off with a hell of a bang.

  And through the laughter and gasps, the squeals and the insistent slap of hungry skin against hungry skin, we managed to forget to listen to the clock inside our world go tick-tick-tick.

  Afterward … and after a second shower for her and a long, blistering crab boil of a shower for me, we kissed on the curb while the valet parking guys fetched our cars. Then I watched her drive off in her squatty little metallic green Nissan Cube.

  As of three weeks ago Junie was deputy director of FreeTech, a brand-new think tank put together by Mr. Church and funded by private investors who were unnamed friends of his. Rich friends, too, because they put billions into the company. FreeTech’s job was to find nonmilitary applications for technologies acquired from what they call “alternative sources,” which included some of the weird science DMS teams take away from the bad guys. Understand, we trashed a lot of the really naughty stuff, but there was some radical science that could be repurposed in a way that would genuinely benefit humanity. Sounds corny, but isn’t.

  Church was the nominal director, though Junie was actually going to run things. I didn’t know most of the other members of the board, but I suspected that some of them had checkered pasts and had been given the opportunity to redeem themselves. Not sure I agreed with that strategy, but then again, I don’t remember Church asking for my opinion.

  Circe O’Tree was a consultant, as was Helmut Deacon, a teenage supergenius who had become the unofficial “ward” of the DMS after the Dragon Factory affair. Spooky kid, but absolutely solid to the core. And one of the weird little kickers in all this was that Mr. Church had extended an invitation for Lilith, the head of Arklight, to join the board of FreeTech. Lilith accepted, but sent a proxy to attend the meetings. Guess who the proxy was.

  Yeah. Violin.

  Junie and Violin working together.

  I made a mental note to buy a very large bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the way home from the office. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

  I leaned against the wall of the hotel and watched Junie drive away. Ghost sat beside me, his brown eyes following the little Nissan Cube as Junie threaded it through the thick traffic with a combination of raw nerves, wild risk-taking, and deliberate aggression. She was a gentle soul but she drove like a New York cabbie.

  When the car was gone from our sight, Ghost looked up at me and gave a small whine.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  I closed my eyes and stood there for a while, trying not to be afraid of every single new moment in the day.

  Junie, I thought. And I silently offered a prayer for her. Or maybe it was a plea to whichever gods were working the day shift, to look after her. To chase away the monsters in her cells and in her blood. To champion her in ways I could not, and let her live the life she deserved to have.

  I doubt I have ever felt as profoundly helpless.

  Then Ghost and I got into my car and we drove off to see if there were any monsters we could chase.

  And catch.

  And defeat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chanin Building

  122 East Forty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 7:12 a.m.

  The sad-faced little man watched Joe Ledger and his dog get into the black Ford Explorer and drive away.

  His name was Ludo Monk. Ludovico Monkato, according to his birth certificate, but he had it legally changed when he was old enough. Ludo Monk was simpler.

  He was thirty-two years old and had once been told that he looked like a disappointed monk from a bad Renaissance painting. Monk did not disagree. Doleful eyes, receding mouse-colored hair, a hint of the jowls that would appear before another decade was out, perpetual five o’clock shadow, and a wide mouth that tended to turn down into a frown even when he was happy. He was, however, seldom happy.

  Monk knew, with no margin for doubt, that he was more than a little crazy. The last time he’d hacked his therapist’s session notes, the things he found only confirmed what he already suspected. There was a lot of jargon in the diagnosis, but the bottom line was that he was batshit crazy. He knew it and accepted it.

  But he didn’t like it.

  There were drugs, of course. The ones that helped keep him stay steady, which he sometimes took. And the ones that helped him forget, which he kept handy all the time. Some others, too. Uppers, downers, and a few that moved him sideways. Right now he was running on empty, and the spiders were starting to crawl out of the doors in his head.

  Being nuts was hard work and there was no payoff at the end of it except to either become so mad that he no longer cared—and he hadn’t yet reached that point—or find a nice balance between his own damaged internal chemistry and the pills he popped. All that would give him would be a sharper awareness that he was damaged goods. And a clearer memory of every bad decision, every ounce of blood spilled, every scream.

  Well, maybe there was one payoff. He was useful to Mother Night.

  She said that she loved him. And he knew that she needed him.

  Him and his weapons.

  Whichever weapon she put into his hands. Guns, knives, whatever. So far Mother Night had asked him to kill thirteen people. Each kill had been important to her, important for the work she was doing.

  For Ludo it was a way to shine a light into his personal darkness.

  Burn to shine.

  It was a thing Mother Night often said. It was a tenet of the religion of Mother Night, which was not a religion at all, because it was anarchy even though it used the structure of a religion and …

  Every time he tried to make sense of it he just wanted to scream.

  Actually, that would feel really good.

  Nothing like a scream, he knew. Big ones, little ones. The kind you can feel building down in your testicles and that come out through the top of your head. The kind where you spit up some blood afterward. They were the best.

  Of course, it mattered what he was screaming about.

  When he played the video games Mother Night sent to him, he screamed and screamed and it was fun. In those games he killed thousands and thousands. With guns, with bombs, with germs, with fires. Sometimes he stomped people. He had the second-highest scores in all of Mother Night’s family.

  In games, that was.

  When it came to pulling an actual trigger, he was second to none.

  None.

  Sometimes he screamed with pride at that. But they were private screams and he usually let them rip when he was in his favorite closet with a pillow pressed against his mouth.

  He bit open a plastic bag of black licorice and watched the cars down in the street. They looked like insects. He wondered what they thought, or if they thought. If they could think. Lately, Monk had come to believe that all machines of war had some level of consciousness. Maybe cars, too. Motorcycles definitely did, anyone with half a brain knew that. And electric guitars.

  He chewed the licorice slowly as the traffic closed around where Ledger’s car had been. When the man was gone, Ludo lowered his binoculars and leaned against the window frame of the hotel room where he’d been waiting for just this eventuality. He tossed the field glasses onto the bed, fished his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, hit a speed dial, and waited through four rings.

  “Yes, my dear,” said Mother Night.

  “They’re on their way,” he said. “The Flynn woman in a Cube. Ledger in his Explorer. I think he’s going to pick up Dr. Sanchez.”

  “You didn’t shoot anyone, did you?”

  “You said not to.”

/>   “Good.”

  There had been a discussion about that. Ludo tried to explain to Mother about the right time and place for a kill shot. Morning rush hour was ideal. But Mother wanted it later, at a certain time and only if certain things happened in a desired order. Ludo privately believed that Mother was overplanning, but he would never dare say that to her. He would stab himself in the eyes before he told her that she was wrong. That her logic was flawed.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “I’m set up in both places. I can guarantee a kill for either of them but unless they go back to the hotel tonight I can’t get them both.”

  “I only need one,” she said, and gave him the details. “And, Ludo, it might not be a shot I’ll need. Good chance I’ll want you to use something else, so keep it in mind.”

  “Okey-dokey,” he said.

  “Ludo … please don’t say ‘okey-dokey.’”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The line went dead.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and ate some more licorice while he thought about Joe Ledger, Rudy Sanchez, and Junie Flynn. He would have no regrets about killing Ledger—that brutal son of a bitch was a real killer.

  Not the others, though.

  Sanchez was a man of peace, a doctor. A psychiatrist. On most days, though, Ludo would gladly kill any psychiatrist. Free, no charge. Except on the days they wrote out the scripts. No way he’d want to interfere with a shrink who wanted to write a prescription for pills. Any color, any flavor. But on the other days, on days when the shrinks wanted Ludo to unlock the big box of spiders in his head … yeah, on those days he could kill one. Very easily. Wouldn’t blink.

  But what about Junie Flynn?

  Ludo used to love her conspiracy theory podcasts and was sorry she didn’t do them anymore. All that stuff about alien-human hybrids, reverse-engineered flying saucers, Men in Black. It was great stuff, and Junie seemed to believe all of it. It made him wonder if she was as batshit crazy as he was.

  She was a civilian. And she was pretty. But there were two things that might make it easy for Ludo to punch her ticket. The first was that Mother Night wanted her dead, and that was about 75 percent of it. The second, though, was that Junie Flynn was being treated for a brain tumor. For malignant cancer. Shooting her might be kind of a nice thing to do for the pretty lady. Save her a lot of hassles and indignities later.

  Again and again his thoughts revolved from Ledger to Sanchez to Junie Flynn. Three targets. Which one would Mother Night want him to kill today?

  He breathed three words that were earnestly meant.

  “God help you.”

  He had another piece of licorice.

  Interlude Four

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Six Years ago

  “They look like a gang of thugs,” said Artemisia Bliss, loud enough for only Dr. Hu to hear. They stood together at the edge of a wide matted area in the new training center at the Hangar. The walls still smelled of fresh paint and there was a mountain of equipment still in crates from vendors ranging from sporting goods to weapons manufacturers.

  The gathered men standing in a line on the mats were all hard-faced and battle-scarred. A few, she thought, were attractive in a brutal way. Like the way James Bond was described in the novels. They were dressed in baggy black pants, T-shirts, and training sneakers. None of them showed any emotion, not a flicker. They stood like robots, bodies straight but not tense, eyes focused on the three people who stood in the center of the mats. Mr. Church was there along with his aide and bodyguard, Sergeant Gus Dietrich; but the third person was a slender dark-haired woman Bliss had never seen before.

  “Who’s she?” asked Bliss.

  Hu leaned close. “Major Grace Courtland. She’s Church’s pet killer.”

  “She’s his girlfriend?”

  “No. I don’t think so. More like a protégée. She’s apparently a superstar in the special ops world. First woman to join the SAS. Imagine the kind of harassment she had to deal with there.”

  “Joined as what? Field support or—”

  “Shooter,” said Hu. “Courtland went through the full training and rolled out with them a lot of times. Pissed a bunch of people off, but it also proved a point.”

  Bliss snorted. “It’s not exactly news that women can fight, Willie.” She was the only person who called him that, and she knew he liked it.

  “Courtland’s apparently more than that,” he said. “Kind of a cross between Lara Croft and Alice from Resident Evil. Video game superbadass kind of tough.”

  “Lots of tough women in the world,” said Bliss, already tired of the hype. “Go ask the Israelis and a lot of other armies. Hell, go ask the ancient Celts.”

  “I know. Look how long it took the U.S. Army to let blacks fight. Except in a couple of rare instances, it wasn’t until the Korean War when they were fully integrated. It’s stupid.”

  It was one of many points on which they agreed. Hu was a second-generation Chinese American, and Bliss had been adopted from China. The uneven pace of the American melting pot process was difficult to understand when viewed from any distance. It was impossible to accept when viewed from up close. The same damaged logic applied to gender, too, and that was going away even more slowly. Bliss was pleased to see a woman in a position of obvious power.

  Under her breath, Bliss said, “God, I wish I were like that.”

  “What?” asked Hu.

  “Nothing. It’s just … that kind of power? In a woman? That’s so … so…”

  Even her vast vocabulary failed her.

  On the mats, Mr. Church was addressing the line of men.

  “Gentlemen,” he said slowly, “congratulations for making it through the testing process. Welcome to the Department of Military Sciences.”

  The men said nothing, though one or two of them nodded. It occurred to Bliss that they might not all be military. Some had more of that bearing while others had the more streetwise demeanor of cops.

  “You’ve been briefed on the kinds of threats that the DMS was formed to confront,” continued Church. “There is no other domestic agency empowered or equipped to deal with that level of technological danger. You will be the front line in a new phase of the war on terror, and make no mistake—we are very much in the business of stopping terror. The fall of the Towers initiated a new era in Special Operations. Much will be expected of you. Everything, in fact, except the possibility of failure. And before you think that my last comment is glib, it isn’t. The DMS is both a first-response and last-defense organization. We will accomplish both. Failure to stop the kinds of threats we know are coming will likely result in catastrophic loss of life and incalculable damage to America and its people.”

  All eyes were on Church. Bliss knew that each of these men could tell—as she could tell when she first met Church—that he was not given to exaggeration or swagger. He was not that kind of person, and that made his words far more chilling.

  Church gestured to the woman who stood behind him. She was medium height, fit, with short dark hair and brown eyes. No rings, no jewelry. “This is Major Grace Courtland, late of Barrier and the SAS. Some of you will have heard of her record in the SAS.”

  Bliss watched the men appraising her. Most of the men’s faces were wooden; one or two showed an unintentional sneer of contempt.

  “Major Courtland has been seconded to the DMS and I have appointed her as the senior field agent. Henceforth you will answer to her without question. She will train you and together you will form the first DMS field unit, designated Alpha Team. Are there any questions?”

  There were none but Church and Courtland watched their eyes. Bliss could see when Courtland spotted one of the sneers, even though the man in question—a bruiser with a row of fifty-caliber rounds tattooed around his massive biceps—tried to clear his face of all emotion. Courtland pointed to him.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” she asked in a clipp
ed London accent.

  “Staff Sergeant Ronald McIlveen, ma’am.”

  “Step forward.”

  His face was like granite as he took a single step toward her. He was well over six feet in height and loomed above the Brit.

  “You don’t want to take orders from a woman, do you?”

  “Ma’am?” he asked, clearly trying to sidestep the question.

  “I said, if I gave you a bloody order, would you take it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Any order?”

  There was only a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Courtland. “In fact, I think you’re a sexist prick who thinks women are for shagging and not fit to stand in the line of battle.”

  The man stood absolutely rigid, eyes locked on the middle distance.

  “Well, answer me.”

  “I will follow orders, ma’am,” he said, though it sounded false even to Bliss, who had never been part of the military.

  “Will you indeed?” Courtland stepped close. The overhead lights threw his shadow across her, and she looked tiny and frail. “What if I ordered you to hit me?”

  The soldier blinked. “Ma’am?”

  “I didn’t stutter, Staff Sergeant. I asked if you would follow my order to hit me.”

  “I cannot strike a superior officer, ma’am.”

  “So, then you’re refusing a direct order.”

  “No … I mean…”

  “Hit me, staff sergeant.”

  “I … …” began the sergeant, then he shut his mouth and froze into a statue. The other men in the line looked variously angry and amused.

  Major Courtland snapped her fingers. “Sergeant Dietrich.”

  Church’s bodyguard instantly stepped forward. “Major,” he said crisply.

  “Draw your sidearm.”

  He did it without question or hesitation.

  “Did you hear my order for Staff Sergeant McIlveen to strike me?”

  “Yes, Major.”