Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  I showed it to Rudy.

  “Nicely vague,” he said. “There’s no context to suggest a meaning.”

  I grunted something unpleasant and forwarded the message to Bug.

  As we climbed out of the Explorer we were met by Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, a massive and battle-scarred black man with a metal leg and hands that I’m pretty sure could crush a Volvo. When Gus Dietrich had been killed at the Warehouse last year, Brick had stepped up to take his place as Mr. Church’s personal aide and bodyguard. He wasn’t as tall as Bunny, but he had bigger arms and a broader chest. He usually had a genial smile, though he wasn’t wearing one now.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Rudy as soon as he spotted Brick’s troubled expression.

  “The big man will fill you in,” said Brick, “but the short version is that Shockwave Team just got cut in half on a routine look-and-see in Virginia.”

  “Dios mio!” gasped Rudy.

  The bottom seemed to fall out of my stomach. “What happened?”

  “They rolled on a tip that a Chechnyan extremist team was in-country to start some shit over the Labor Day weekend. Riggs and his boys kicked the door, but it wasn’t Chechnyans waiting for them, and Riggs lost all of Two Squad.”

  I bared my teeth. “Who ambushed them?”

  There was a queer look in Brick’s dark eyes. “That’s the weird part, man. Like I said, these weren’t Chechnyans.”

  He pulled his smartphone and opened the image files. The picture he showed us was a dead man. The face was distorted, brutish, with a heavy brow, wide nose, thin lips, and teeth with overgrown incisors.

  “Berserkers…?” whispered Rudy. “I thought … I thought…”

  “Come on,” said Brick. “The big man will give you the full briefing.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Office of the Vice President

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  Sunday, August 31, 8:39 a.m.

  “Sir!” cried Boo Radley as he burst into the office. “There’s something on the news. You have to see this.”

  William Collins quickly closed his phone and hid it between his thighs, out of sight of his chief of staff.

  “See what?” he asked.

  Radley snatched the TV remote from the coffee table, aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, and turned up the volume. The screen was filled with the face of a lovely Asian woman in a Betty Page black Dutchboy and opaque movie star sunglasses. Below her image was a banner: WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

  The woman was speaking. “… are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and take the streets back.”

  “Teresa Naylor at the President’s office called to alert me about this,” said Radley. “It’s on every station. Some kind of computer virus that’s hacked into all the news feeds.”

  Collins held a finger to his lips. “Shhhh, I want to hear this.”

  “… That wasn’t anarchy. The pigs in the system haven’t seen anarchy. Not yet.” The woman licked her lips “But it’s coming. The only action is direct action.”

  It took every ounce of willpower the vice president possessed not to smile. Not to leer. That smile was delicious.

  “Mother Night,” he said softly.

  The video ended and after a few awkward moments the face of the Fox News reporter blinked onto the screen, looking confused and angry. He immediately began jabbering, but Collins took the remote and muted the TV, then tossed the device onto his desk blotter.

  “The White House needs to make a response,” said Radley.

  “That’s the President’s job,” said Collins.

  “But—”

  “But,” interrupted Collins, “whoever did this had to have hacked into the systems. That means it’s a cybercrime. And that makes it ours and we have to jump on this. Right fucking now. Get the team on this and set up a conference call with the divisional leaders. Do it now.”

  Radley spun and nearly ran from the room, his eyes suddenly alight with purpose.

  Then Collins sat back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, enjoying the way a smile felt on his face. He thought about the face of Mother Night. About her lips.

  Those lips were incredibly sexy.

  Full and ripe.

  He remembered the way they looked when she kissed her way slowly up his thighs this morning.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Westin Hotel

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, August 31, 8:41 a.m.

  Mother Night arrived back in Atlanta courtesy of a private jet and driver. Her suite at the Westin was on the sixty-ninth floor, well above the motion and noise of the convention that sprawled among that hotel and four others here in the heart of Atlanta. She had other rooms—bolt holes, changing rooms, and staging areas—at the other four hotels that formed the loose quad used as a kind of convention center here in the heart of Atlanta.

  Sixty thousand people thronged the streets and lobbies of those hotels. They were all very loud and everywhere you looked there was a dense crowd of people, more than half of whom were in costume. Mother Night had walked among them several times over the last two days, sometimes dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider—and she knew she had the legs to rock that costume; other times as Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, Sophitia Alexandra from SoulCalibur, and the other night she danced herself blind at a party while wearing the full bat-wing costume of Morrigan Aensland from Dark Stalker. She’d had to glue her breasts into the costume to keep from flashing the fanboys. Though later, when she’d cut one guy out of the pack and dragged him off to one of her rented rooms, he’d been so eager to get her out of her bustier that he nearly tore her nipples off. It was very good glue.

  The pain was a turn-on for both of them.

  Just like it was with Bill Collins. She never once left his bed without bruises or the burning imprint of his open palm on her flesh.

  She had a costume ready for later today—Lucy Kuo from Infamous 2—for the big event in the afternoon. The costume was perfect. She’d made it by hand and every attention to detail was paid. Her body was ready for that costume, too. Brazilian surgeons had given her bigger and better boobs, sculpted her cheekbones, thinned her nose, and puffed up her lips. With the ass and legs genetics had given her, she knew that she was a knockout, a knock ’em dead statuesque beauty, and when she walked out in a costume everyone noticed her. Everyone. Male, female, traffic cops, everyone with eyes.

  That was fine. Mother Night wanted to be noticed.

  Right now, though, she was dressed in a different costume, as a character from an entirely different game. She was dressed as Mother Night from the game Burn to Shine.

  Her own creations. Persona and game.

  In all of gaming, there was no more dangerous a female character. Not a shooter, not a sword-wielding killer of orcs and war machines, nothing like that. Mother Night was a different kind of power. She had others to do the killing for her, to crack the game levels, to rack up the points.

  She had an army.

  And as she sat there at the computer, she watched the first news reports about that army. None of it connected yet. Not event to event, or events to her. That was the next level of the game. However, on her monitor she watched the first fires being set in Lexington, in Gettysburg, in Savannah.

  With so many more to come.

  Her long, slender fingers danced over the keys, capturing the news feeds and sending them to recipients in a dozen countries.

  She felt her heart racing.

  Hammering.

  With a start she realized that her whole body was trembling. Sweat was gathering under her clothes and in the hollows of her palms.

  It had started.

  Her children were going to war.

  She suddenly felt so strange. Nausea churned in her stomach and she abruptly stood and headed quickly toward the bathroom, but suddenly the floor seemed to tilt under her. She staggered sideway
s and hit the wall next to the bathroom door. Her balance was so ruined that she hit hard, bruising her shoulder, knocking her head against the wall, sliding down, collapsing onto the floor. Her rump struck the polished marble hard enough to knock her teeth together.

  “What … what…?” she demanded of the moment.

  The shakes started then, sweeping through her, running like cold fire through her skin, pebbling her flesh with goose bumps, striking sparks in her eyes.

  “What’s happening?” she screamed.

  The shivers continued, wave after wave. Tears broke from the corners of her eyes and ran in hot lines down her cheeks.

  “What’s happening?”

  This time the question was spoken in a tiny voice. Lost, and without hope of an answer.

  But deep down she knew what was happening.

  After all, it wasn’t the first time something like this had occurred.

  There were other times.

  Three so far. Three she knew of, but she suspected there had been others. Fugue states that were wiped from her memory but which had left her asleep in strange places. The living room floor in her apartment. In the backseat of her car. Once on a bench by a river a hundred miles from where she lived.

  It was all stress, she told herself.

  Just that.

  It had started years ago. The first had really been the worst, when a young woman who looked very much like her was murdered in a horrible way. Burned alive. Mother Night hadn’t been there, but she imagined the screams and they echoed in her head for many nights after that. Drugs, alcohol, and hard sex with brutal men helped, but only when she was awake. Whenever she slept, those screams were there.

  The death was necessary, of course. Mother Night knew and accepted that. If the girl hadn’t died, then Mother Night could never have been born. When viewed as a problem in mathematics, of cause and effect, then it was easier to bear.

  And the girl who’d died volunteered for it. Begged for it.

  Of course she did. She’d been carefully picked and cultivated for that one purpose.

  The woman who’d thrown the gasoline and match was less important, and her death two days later—her head was rammed into the shower wall a dozen times—meant nothing to Mother Night. The woman was a parasite who was going down for her third felony conviction on the three strikes rule. She’d thought the torch job was a payday, and that’s all it was to her. The same went for the two dykes Mother Night paid to kill her in the shower. They, at least, were more or less human, and when they got out of jail they’d have money waiting.

  But that burning girl.

  God.

  The shakes had been worse then.

  They’d come again when the hit team she sent after Reginald Boyd had been slaughtered by Joe Ledger. It did not matter that their deaths were an almost foregone conclusion. Either they would die, or Boyd and Ledger would die, or some combination thereof.

  When she heard that all of her people had died, and that Ledger had strangled pretty little Luisa Kan, the shakes came back. Very nasty, very intense. Mother Night had thrown up repeatedly and had diarrhea for two days.

  It was nearly as bad when she’d helped torture a rogue scientist in Vilnius. Mother Night thought that it would be fun, that it would be interesting. Maybe even a turn-on. Instead it had been loud and ugly and smelly, and it had sickened her.

  Even so …

  That time wasn’t as bad as the fiery death of the girl in prison.

  Now the shakes were back.

  Damn it, they were back.

  Anger flared in her so intensely that it nearly pushed back the horror.

  And that’s what it was.

  Horror.

  Her people were out there killing people. With bombs, guns, knives, bare hands. On the news, the police were throwing out wild estimates of the dead in Lexington.

  That was the tip of the iceberg.

  There would be so many more deaths. Today. Tonight.

  Tomorrow.

  So many more.

  Her teeth chattered as if she sat in a cold wind.

  “Stop it,” she snarled. She bared her teeth at the world, at whatever part of her was so weak, so feeble, so chickenshit that it rebelled against the reality of everything she had spent years planning. She was smart enough to know that this was her conscience fighting for its existence. Fighting as hard as it could even though the battle had been lost when that match touched the gasoline-soaked flesh of a young woman in a lonely prison cell.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed at the air around her.

  The echo of it punched her in the face, the ears, the heart.

  But she drew in as deep a breath as she could and screamed it out again, tensing every muscle, balling her fists, straining the muscles in her throat, roaring it with black hatred at her own weakness.

  “Fuck you!”

  The shakes rippled once more. Again.

  Then stopped.

  Mother Night sat there on the hard floor, her back against the wall, panting like a dog, fingernails gouging the flesh of her palms.

  “Fuck you,” she whispered.

  That whisper was as cold as dead stone.

  She detested the weakness inside of her. The part of her who still felt. The part of her who wanted to put the barrel of a gun into her mouth and pull the trigger. The part of her that craved to punish and be punished for sins committed and pending.

  “Fuck you,” she said again.

  She could hear the news reporters growing hysterical as they speculated on whether the bombings were connected. Was this another Boston Marathon? Was this something new? Was it terrorism? Was is Muslims? Was it militiamen? The rumors and theories flew and escalated with each new body added to the count.

  The people to whom she’d sent these news links would be watching. They would be expecting her to call. Her, Mother Night, not a weeping suicidal fool who had no guts or backbone.

  After a long while she clawed her way to her feet and shambled into the bathroom to wash away the stink of regret. She had important video calls to make and she was damn well not going to show any sign of weakness.

  “Fuck you,” she said one last time.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 8:44 a.m.

  Church wasn’t available to see me, so I had to gird my loins to face Aunt Sallie.

  She looked like Whoopi Goldberg but had the personality of an alligator with hemorrhoids. No, check that, a hemorrhoidal gator would be much nicer. It’s my personal opinion that Auntie wasn’t so much born as burst out of someone’s chest like one of those creatures in those alien movies. Her opinion of me is slightly lower than that of used toilet paper stuck to her shoe. You’ll be shocked to learn that we have failed to bond.

  In the hierarchy of the DMS, she was the appropriately named “number two,” and she ran the Hangar as if it were her private ring of hell. She and Church had history going back decades and there were rumors that once upon a time Aunt Sallie was one of the most feared shooters in the world. I believe those rumors.

  Ghost disliked her as intensely as I did, but he stood behind me, out of her line of sight. Brave combat dog.

  When Rudy and I asked her about Samson Riggs and Shockwave, her reply was pure Aunt Sallie. “He walked into a trap and had his ass handed to him. Fucking idiot got his people killed.”

  “That’s hardly fair, Auntie,” protested Rudy.

  She ignored him. They get along once in a while, but on a day-to-day basis the only person who can actually stand Auntie is Dr. Hu. And there’s a real surprise.

  As for Colonel Samson Riggs, he was about as far away from being a “fucking idiot” as it was possible to get. He was the top team leader in the Department of Military Sciences, a real-life James Bond type who was smart, good-looking, suave, talented, inventive, and tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. Am I gushing like a fanboy? Maybe. Riggs was everything I wanted to b
e, and while normally natural human envy might dictate that I hate him, I didn’t. Maybe couldn’t. He was how I imagined Church might have been back in the day, except Riggs had a set of human emotions. I’ve done six missions with him, and each time I came away knowing more about how to do my job that I could have learned anywhere else. The fact that I had nearly as high a clearance rate as him meant nothing to me except that he set so great an example that I aspired to be like him, and maybe that brought my game up to a higher level. Hard to say.

  His team were all heroes. No joke. Actual saved-the-world heroes.

  To think that he’d lost four of them was appalling.

  “Do we know where those Berserkers came from?” I asked.

  Auntie shrugged. “That’s being looked into.”

  “You want me to take Echo out there to—?” I began, but Auntie shook her head.

  “You’re supposed to be screening recruits, Ledger,” she said sharply. “We need that done, so don’t try to skip out on your responsibilities.”

  Ghost growled low and mean.

  Aunt Sallie glared at him. “Growl at me again and yours wouldn’t be the first nuts I’ve cut off.”

  Ghost did his best impersonation of a hole in the air.

  I smiled at Auntie. “Do you spend time every night looking in a mirror and practicing how to scowl?”

  She smiled back. “No, I look at a picture of you and practice gagging. Now get to work. If there’s anything you need to know, you’ll be told, so stop bothering me. I have grown-up work to do.”

  With that she turned and headed off to the TOC—the Tactical Operations Center—leaving Rudy and I standing in a pool of her disapproval. When she was well out of earshot, Ghost gave another low growl.

  “That was refreshing,” murmured Rudy.

  “I know, chatting with her always validates me as a person.”

  He looked at his watch. “I’d better see if Samson needs me out there. His team must be in a great deal of pain.”

  “No doubt. Give them my best. I’ll call Riggs later on.”

  Rudy nodded and head off.

  “Come on, fierce descendant of wolves,” I said to Ghost, who slunk along at my heels.