Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Page 13

  As he began running he slapped his pockets for a fresh magazine, found none. No grenades, either. All he had left was the fighting knife strapped to his combat harness.

  “Never take a knife to a goddamn gunfight,” he muttered as he tore it loose. He raced along the stone corridors.

  A shape loomed up in front of him and Riggs nearly gutted it with the knife; but it was Wendig, the sergeant of Two Squad, the second of Shockwave’s smaller teams. Wendig’s face was as white as paste. The rest of him was bright red. He reached for Riggs with his left hand. Except there was no hand at the end of the reaching arm.

  “I—I—” stammered the sergeant, and then he collapsed onto the ground.

  Riggs had no time to do anything or offer any help. Someone else was screaming. A woman.

  There were two women on Two Squad, a stocky Navajo named Mary Tsotse, and Star Phillips, a lanky black woman from Detroit. Ordinarily it was possible to tell them apart, whether whispering, talking, or even yelling; but that scream was so massive, so raw that it could have been either of them. Whoever it was needed him right now.

  He leaped over Sergeant Wendig, ran down a narrow side corridor and burst into a larger room where old, broken beer barrels stood on wooden racks.

  Two of his people were down. Both male. The rest of Two Squad. Jespersen and McPhail.

  Down and either dead or badly wounded. They shared their pools of blood with three hulking forms who were indisputably dead, their heads blown apart by bullets. The brutes wore heavy body armor. Another body, Star Phillips, lay twisted into a madhouse shape, her spine bent backward so that her head touched the back of her thighs. Her sightless eyes were filled with a terminal wonder.

  Only one member of Two Squad still stood. Still breathed.

  Eighty feet away.

  Two more of the Berserkers flanked her, closing in on Mary Tsotse. She fired at them, but the big men held a thick wooden table at head level and let the hardwood soak up the bullets. Tsotse tried for leg shots, but the body armor sloughed off the rounds, though the foot-pounds of impact slowed the approach of the killers.

  Tsotse’s body ran with blood from long, terrible gashes torn in her flesh by the steel-hard fingernails of the brutes. Her Kevlar and clothes were in rags, and the exposed flesh was ripped and bleeding. It was through sheer force of will that she was still on her feet, still firing, still fighting.

  As Riggs ran into the room he saw the slide lock back on Tsotse’s Sig Sauer. A look of abject fear and hopelessness filled her eyes. The brutes laughed in sudden delight.

  She backpedaled while fishing for another magazine, but the brutes hurled the table at her, catching her in the chest with it. Riggs heard the meaty crunch as the table smashed flesh and broke bones.

  Then Riggs threw himself at the brutes.

  The men turned to meet his charge.

  They grinned at the man who wanted so badly to die that he dared attack them with only a knife.

  The closest one swiped at Riggs, trying to end it fast by crushing the man’s skull. But Riggs changed his leap into a tuck and roll. He passed under the sweeping arm and hit the floor between them, rolling fast, coming up, spinning, cutting.

  The blade caught the lunging mercenary across the back of the knee. Combat demands mobility and padding precludes it. The back of the knee was covered by thinner material that was far too thin. The edge of Riggs’s knife passed through Kevlar and tendon in a tight arc that trailed rubies.

  Before the monster could even buckle from the loss of structure, Riggs spun left, turning in a full circle to give mass to his motion, pushing weight behind his second cut. This time the blade sliced cleanly through the Achilles tendon of the second brute.

  It was all so fast.

  So fast.

  The monsters’ howls were filled with surprise as much as pain. Ordinary men did not move that fast.

  As their legs buckled, they shifted to their uninjured legs and tried to dive atop him, to smother this man with more than a quarter ton of muscle and bone.

  But Riggs came up out of his crouch, rising like a rocket, shifting toward the first brute, holding the Ka-Bar in both hands, shoving it edge upward, cleaving the simian face from chin to brow.

  With a savage wrench, Riggs tore the blade free, pivoted into the rush of the second brute, and drove the point of his knife into the monster’s screaming mouth. The blade punched into the soft palate, and Riggs instantly let go with his right hand and used the heel of his palm to pound on the flat pommel, driving the blade all the way through to the brain stem.

  The ape-man reeled backward, aware that he was dying, seeing the cold and emotionless face of his killer rise above him as he fell.

  Then Riggs turned to the other Berserker. The thing had fallen against the wall. One leg was limp and sheathed in blood. The apelike face was a ruin, cut in half to expose gums and broken teeth and gaping sinuses. It howled in agony.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Riggs pivoted on the ball of one foot and drove his other foot in a brutal side thrust kick that shattered the Berserker’s other knee. Riggs then turned, bent, and tore his knife from the second ape-man’s mouth, turned back to the crippled first one, kicked flailing hands out of the way, and cut the monster’s throat.

  As the body collapsed, silence crashed down all around Riggs.

  Nothing moved except his heaving chest.

  Everyone around him was dead.

  Two Squad. All of them. Dead.

  Then there were shouts from far away as One Squad came pounding along the halls. Rico and Marchman and the others. The cavalry, riding to the rescue thirty seconds too late. They burst into the chamber and skidded to a halt.

  Riggs heard gasps and curses.

  And, from someone, a sob.

  With a trembling hand, Riggs tapped his earbud to call this in, but there was nothing. There had been nothing since they came down here. Some kind of jammer hidden in the walls.

  However, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

  He frowned and dug it out, wondering why it had a signal when the earbuds did not. He expected it to be Bug trying some alternate way of contacting Shockwave.

  It wasn’t. Instead it was a text message, which was odd because he never used the message function. Ever.

  The caller ID was only a capital letter A. The message read:

  THAT WAS A TASTE.

  NEXT TIME YOU’LL BE THE MEAL.

  Riggs stared at the message.

  “What the hell?” he murmured.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Across America

  Sunday, August 31, 8:08 a.m.

  World of Curios, Savannah, Georgia

  The sign outside said 72-HOUR LABOR DAY SALE.

  The boy who walked into the store did not look like the kind of customer who came to buy. He wore scruffy jeans, a black hoodie with the logo of the seventies band Crass silk-screened onto the back. His hood was up and he had sunglasses perched on a thin nose. Wires from an iPod trailed out from under the hood and disappeared into a pocket. The woman behind the counter spotted him right away and kept an eye on him as he moved from one display to another.

  The boy stopped in front of glass display cabinets in which a dozen vintage French crucifixes were arranged with photos of the small towns from which they’d come. Then he moved sideways and stopped in front of an adjoining case that held hand-carved nineteenth-century walking sticks from Italy, Austria, and England.

  A customer came to the counter and the saleswoman had to shift her attention to ring up a purchase, but a hissing sound made her jerk her head back to the boy. He had produced a can of spray paint from his pocket and was using it to spray a large letter A on the glass doors of the display case.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” yelled the saleswoman as she began around the counter.

  The boy ignored her and sprayed a letter O around the A. The legs and top spike of the A extended beyond the O.

  The woman started to reach for the boy
’s arm with every intention of snatching the can away from him, but he suddenly turned toward her and sprayed the black paint full into her face.

  She screamed and reeled back, bringing up her hands too slowly and too late to protect her eyes. The customer screamed, but she was an older woman and there was nothing she could do to help.

  With dry contempt, the boy said, “Didn’t anyone ever teach you the right way to think, you stupid bitch? The only action is direct action.”

  The saleswoman was totally blinded by the paint and she tried to back away, to flee, but instead she banged into a table covered with baskets of small sale items. The boy stepped forward and gave her a sudden and vicious shove, sending her crashing into the table so hard she rebounded and fell to the floor. The baskets and their contents—small guest soaps and specialty candles—rained down on her.

  “Stop that!” shouted the older woman.

  “Fuck you,” said the boy, but he was laughing.

  He was still laughing when he started kicking the woman on the floor.

  The customer screamed and waddled out of the store as fast as her old, bad legs could carry her.

  When she returned with the police, the saleswoman was still on the floor. She had been so comprehensively stomped that her face no longer resembled anything human.

  The boy in the hoodie was gone.

  No one—not the staff nor the police—noticed the small high-definition video camera attached at floor level near the crime scene. The camera shell was treated with photoreactive chemicals that sampled the background color of the wall and changed the thin layer of treated film on its outside to match. From five feet away it was virtually invisible.

  Adams County Law Library, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

  The Adams County Law Library is maintained for use by the Adams County Court of Common Pleas, county officials, county attorneys, and the general public. The focus of the collection is Pennsylvania law. Along with thousands of books on case law, the collection also includes the Pennsylvania Statutes, Pennsylvania Code, and Court Rules.

  Martyn Salinger ran the library with quiet pride, knowing it to be an excellent and accessible resource. The crucial information in so many important cases was found here. Maintaining and growing the library made Martyn feel like he mattered in the overall process of justice, and that was something he could take home with him every night. Something that made him want to go to work each day.

  As part of a big Get to Know Gettysburg event that covered the whole Labor Day weekend, the library was opened at six in the morning and would remain open until midnight on Monday.

  When the young woman came in that morning, Martyn assumed she was a law student. She had that underfed look. Too young to be a clerk, too poorly dressed to be a tourist, too into her own thoughts to be a messenger. She came in with a hooded sweater—he refused to use the term hoodie—and a heavy backpack, which she set down on a table. The girl wandered back into the rows of shelved books, apparently studying the titles on the spines with great interest.

  “May I help you, miss?” asked Martyn.

  She turned to look at him through the nearly opaque lenses of her sunglasses.

  “No, thank you,” she said politely. “I know what I’m looking for.”

  “Very well. Let me know if I can help.”

  She gave him a smile and returned to browsing, and Martyn returned to a LexisNexis search he was doing on his computer for one of the judges. When he looked up a few minutes later he saw that the backpack was still there, but he couldn’t spot the girl. She must be all the way in the back.

  A few minutes later she still hadn’t come out.

  Martyn frowned, wondering what it was she could be looking for back there. He got up and drifted down one of the rows, trying to make his approach seem casual.

  But the girl wasn’t there.

  His frown deepened.

  He made a circuit of the entire library and could not find her.

  Realizing that she must have left and forgotten her bag, he hurried to the table where she’d left it to see if there was something in it that might have a name and phone number, or at least an e-mail address.

  He unzipped the bag, which was fat and heavy.

  Then he froze and his frown deepened even more.

  Not a stack of heavy books, the contents of the backpack seemed to make no sense at all. Inside was a silver pot with a black lid. A pressure cooker. There was a small digital touchpad on the front and the maker’s name: Fagor. When Martyn bent close to examine it, he heard a few short, spaced electronic sounds.

  Beep … beep … beep.

  He said, “What on earth?”

  Those were the last words Martyn Salinger ever spoke.

  The pressure cooker exploded. The tightly packed ball bearings, screws, and nails tore him to red rags in a microsecond. Small incendiary charges mixed in with the shrapnel lodged into tables, chairs, and row upon row of books.

  By the time the first fire trucks arrived, the library was thoroughly involved. It would be six hours before fire investigators would be able to begin sorting through the rubble, and seven hours before they found the remains of the pressure-cooker bomb.

  However, when the trucks rolled up, they could see the thing someone had spray-painted on the front doors.

  The letter A surrounded by a rough circle.

  Within minutes the fire blackened and then consumed the door. Just as it had the two small cameras mounted inside the library. The video feeds from the cameras had already been sent by the time the components melted.

  The LexPlex Sports Arena, Lexington, Kentucky

  Duke Hapgood and Cletus Hart were having a long damn morning, and they’d been at it since before dawn’s early light. Their H&H delivery truck was too big to back up all the way to the service door, which meant they had to pick up each and every blessed folded gym mat and carry it from the parking lot, across a patch of grass, and into the event space. Ninety steps each way, and there were eighty mats.

  “This is fucked up,” muttered Cletus. It was probably the twentieth time he’d said it, but Duke couldn’t argue with the sentiment.

  Inside the event space, two of the other guys were unfolding the mats and laying them out on the floor. So far, thirty-six of the blue-and-tan mats were down, their sides trued up and secured with Velcro. Later those joins would have to be covered with strips of duct tape, and that meant a couple of hours with all four of them walking around on their knees.

  “This blows,” said Duke, which had become his go-to response every time Cletus made his comment. They were both puffing and bathed in sweat.

  All around the edges of the event space, groups of people watched and offered no help at all. Duke wanted to say something smart-ass to them, but everyone was wearing a black belt. Some of them had swords and staffs and all that Jackie Chan shit.

  The Kentucky Brawl was an annual Labor Day weekend martial arts tournament that drew competitors from eastern Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, and the western part of West Virginia. Duke could throw a punch, but he didn’t want to complicate the day by brawling with three hundred trained fighters.

  Under his breath, he muttered, “Wouldn’t kill one of these assholes to give us a hand for five minutes.”

  Cletus grinned. “They might break a sweat. Couldn’t have that.”

  For some reason they both thought that was funny, and they laughed as they carried the next load in.

  On the way out to the truck they passed a couple of kids heading in. Teenagers with hoodies and sunglasses. Cletus and Duke ignored them. The kids were carrying backpacks and had the slacker look, but they were both Asian, so the guys figured they were there for the tournament. They didn’t look tough, but you couldn’t always tell with kung fu and karate types.

  At the truck, Duke stopped and stretched, bending backward with a grunt to try to pop his vertebrae back into place. Cletus opened a couple of cans of Mr. Pibb and handed one to Duke, who stopped stretching to knock ba
ck half of his can of pop.

  Later, when reporters and police interviewed them, it was Cletus who first said that their lives were saved by Mr. Pibb. If they hadn’t stopped to drink their sodas, they would have been inside when the bombs went off.

  As it was, they were only flash-burned and bruised from the shockwave that picked them up and flung them against the stack of mats waiting to be carried inside. They were not among the eighteen dead and ninety wounded.

  In one of those public relations decisions that defy rational explanation, the Coca-Cola company, manufacturers of Mr. Pibb, gave the boys a lifetime supply of Pibb and hired them for public appearances. They became known as the Pibb Boys.

  Even Duke and Cletus thought that was weird.

  Their story went unnoticed, however, by the people who received the video feed from cameras placed inside the arena prior to the detonation of the bombs.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 8:38 a.m.

  Rudy and I had just pulled into the cavernous hangar that gives the Brooklyn DMS headquarters its name. The hangar itself is mostly a parking garage. From the outside it looks like a dilapidated abandoned building. Lots of broken windows and obscene graffiti. But that was all for show. There was a double shell to the building, and directly behind those broken windows was a curved screen that projected a false interior view that reinforced the image of squalor. But behind that screen were walls of steel-reinforced concrete, sensors, alarms, and hidden guard posts. The guards who walked the perimeter were dressed to look like laborers working on restoring the building. They weren’t. Most were former DMS field-team shooters who were either too old for active fieldwork or who’d been injured on the job and couldn’t roll out for the kind of thing Echo Team faces down. Even so, it would be a serious mistake to mistake them for old guys or cripples. That would be bad in very messy ways.

  My cell vibrated. I killed the Explorer’s engine and pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was another text message from “A.”

  ONE OR THOUSANDS?

  HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?