Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Page 18

  She said, “Oh—Mr. Vice President … I didn’t see you there.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you did.”

  “W-what?”

  His smile was very handsome, but not at all the same one from the cover of Time. This wasn’t the smile you wanted on the face of a man kissing babies at a rally. This smile, she knew, was meant for her to see, and to interpret exactly as it was meant.

  “You’re the Deacon’s wonder girl,” he said.

  “I, um, work for Mr. Church.”

  “Church, Deacon, whatever the fuck he calls himself. You work for him.”

  She nodded, wondering where this was going.

  “Your team’s always wired in to each other. Did you see the way that bitch Courtland treated my wife?”

  Bliss had. The Second Lady was a notorious loudmouth and a legendary bitch. When the outbreak started, Collins’s wife tried to take charge of the moment and boss everyone around, and even if she was well-intentioned, she went about it the wrong way. Things went south from there and Major Courtland had dropped Mrs. Collins with some kind of karate chop. The Second Lady was ambulanced off once the whole thing was over. She never stopped screaming threats up to the point where the beleaguered EMTs slammed the doors.

  “I…” began Bliss, and didn’t know where to put her conversational foot.

  But Collins leaned close and, in a voice pitched only for her to hear, said, “Between us, sweetheart, I was kind of hoping Courtland would have busted my wife’s fucking jaw.”

  The statement was a showstopper.

  Bliss stared at him, totally unable to react or respond in any useful way.

  Collins laughed. “God, you should see the look on your face.”

  “I…” Bliss said again, and once more her vocabulary failed her.

  “That bitch’ll be in the hospital for a day or two. Longer if I can arrange it.”

  “Um … yes, I suppose.”

  He took a step closer. She could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “If the Deacon ever lets you off the leash, I know a great place for Kobe steaks. You’re Japanese, right?”

  “Chinese.”

  “Whatever. Steaks as thick as your wrist.”

  She said nothing.

  He removed a business card and a pen, scribbled something onto the back of the card, and then tucked it into the pouch on her hazmat suit. The same pouch where she’d dropped her duplicate samples.

  “Call me if you want to get your hands on an expensive piece of meat.”

  He turned and walked away. Almost sauntering. But as soon as he saw some officials, his posture instantly shifted from that of smug asshole to man of action. It was immediate, like throwing a switch on a nuclear reactor. Very smooth, very practiced.

  And, despite everything else, including the man’s absolutely offensive comments, it was impressive. Appealing.

  It was power.

  Artemisia fished the card out of her pouch, turned it over, and saw that he’d written his cell number in a sprawling hand. The geek in her wanted to tear the card up. The professional and accomplished woman in her wanted to spit on the card before tearing it up.

  However, that other part, the other self, the evolving self, smiled and tucked the card back into the pouch.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

  Park Slope, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 12:22 p.m.

  We were still a few doors down from the Surf Shop when my phone rang. I expected it to be Rudy. It wasn’t. I held up a hand to the guys and stepped a few paces away to take the call. I smiled and punched the button.

  “Hello, Junie.”

  “Hello.”

  When Ghost heard me say her name he brightened and made a happy whuff sound.

  “How’s your day?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know. Just another day in the D. of M. S.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  She could, too. Last year, she was there when we took down Howard Shelton and his team of superfreak killers. She’d pulled the trigger on one of them. She knew that my job did not involve shuffling papers or sneaking out of the office for a quick nine holes.

  “What’s cooking, darlin’?” I asked.

  There was a beat before she said, “I know you can’t talk about work stuff, Joe, but is everything okay? For real, I mean?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I was on the Net looking at something on YouTube and suddenly this woman’s face popped up.” She described the Mother Night video.

  “Yeah, we saw that. It’s a computer hacker,” I said. “Nothing you have to worry about.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Joe. I can hear something in your voice.”

  “Sorry,” I said quickly, lowering my voice and stepping farther away from Top and Bunny. “I wasn’t patronizing you. That video popped up all over and, sure, we’re looking into it. So far, though, it looks like what it is. A smart-ass hacker with more talent than common sense using the Internet to shout to the world that she’s there. It’s the cyberworld equivalent of spray-painting your name on a wall that everyone has to pass. Forced attention.”

  “You’re sure that’s all it is?”

  “No, of course not. That’s why we’re looking into it.”

  “What about the backpack bomb thing? They’re saying it’s another Boston.”

  “I’m not on that.”

  “Is it connected to that video?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you tell me what you find out?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Joe, I’m not asking you to break protocol. I’m just…”

  “Just … what?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Okay, you know how you joke about your ‘spider sense’ tingling when you think something’s wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it?”

  “Sure. It’s one of my many superpowers.”

  “Well … I guess my spider sense started tingling.”

  “Because of that video?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been having weird premonitions all day, ever since I got to work.”

  I grunted. “How weird?”

  “I don’t know. Weird. Nonspecific. Just … bad feelings.”

  A whole bunch of very ugly questions jumped into the front of my brain and I had to bite down to keep my foolish mouth from giving them voice. The process took too much time, I was quiet too long, and Junie caught it.

  “Joe…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Are you undressing, then?”

  “I’m serious, Joe. Don’t joke.”

  “Sorry.”

  “These feelings I’m having … they’re not about me. They’re not about the test results.”

  I did not trust myself to respond to that.

  “But something is wrong,” she added. “I can feel it.”

  Before I met Junie my tendency was to dismiss that kind of comment as too New Agey, too space cadet. I have since learned that my knee-jerk dismissal of that kind of perception was a fault in me rather than a fault in others.

  There are, after all, more things in heaven and earth.

  So I don’t laugh it off when Junie has a premonition or a “feeling.” I don’t wave it away like cigarette smoke.

  At the same time, I don’t always know what to do with those kinds of things. It’s not like I can ask Bug to do a MindReader search on a feeling.

  Instead, I said what I say when these things happen. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, accepting that she’d made her point and I’d got it. She knows as well as I do that there wasn’t anything specific I could do other than to make sure my awareness and reaction time was at high bubble. It had become a rhythm with us. A useful one.

  “Come home to me,” she said.

  “Always,” I replied.


  I knew that she was smiling, as I was smiling.

  As I went to put the phone back into my pocket it vibrated. Another text message from A.

  YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE

  I glared at the screen. Was it a threat or was I being stalked by someone in a fortune cookie factory? Either way, I sent it to Bug with a rather terse note to find whoever was sending this. Foul language was involved.

  I clicked off and shoved the phone into my pocket. A few yards away Top and Bunny were pretending to look at the birds in the trees. As I joined them a chill wind blew up my spine and made me shiver. Ghost looked up at me and whined faintly.

  “You okay, boss?” asked Bunny.

  “Someone walked over my grave,” I said, making a joke of it.

  Neither of my guys laughed. Come to think of it, it wasn’t all that funny to me, either.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The C Train

  Near Euclid Avenue

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 12:23 p.m.

  The man in the yellow raincoat looked out of place, even on the C train. It was hot in the swaying subway car, and he wore a black hoodie under the raincoat, the hood pulled all the way up. He was sweating heavily. Beads of moisture ran down his cheeks and throat and vanished inside the humid darkness beneath the slicker. The smell that seeped out from under the yellow rubber was intense.

  The woman seated next to him was named Maria Diego. She was billing secretary for a firm of dentists, and next Thursday would be her fifty-seventh birthday. A thickset, quiet-mannered, plainly dressed woman with a Heather Graham novel open on her lap and Marc Anthony crooning to her through earbuds.

  When Maria was sure the man in the yellow raincoat wasn’t watching, she removed a bottle of perfume from her purse, put a drop on her finger, and covertly dabbed her upper lip with it. The car was crowded, there was nowhere else to sit, and she was too tired to stand. The smell from the sweating man, however, was like the stink of an open sewer.

  He’s probably a junkie, she thought, but that didn’t bother her very much. Maria slipped one hand into her jacket pocket and closed it gently around her can of pepper spray. As long as the man sat quietly, she was content to mind her own business, read her book, and make her way home. This was the New York subway system, so body odor was nothing new. The perfume always made that easy to manage.

  The man’s smile, though …

  That bothered Maria.

  It was not a happy smile.

  For six stops Maria tried to understand the smile. After thirty-four years of riding this line she’d seen everything, every kind of person, every frequency of expression. However, she’d never before quite seen an expression like the one carved into his face. It was so intense, so constant, that it was like a mask. His mouth was set in a huge jack-o’-lantern grin that stretched his cheeks so wide it had to be painful. His teeth were yellow and dry. His eyes stared forward and slightly upward with such intensity that when he’d first sat down Maria darted looks at the ads on the other side of the car, above the heads of the commuters, to see if the man was drawn to something in particular. But no. He stared with a fixity that made her wonder if he was obsessed with some thought that hung ten inches in front of his eyes. She tried not to look at him too often, but if he ever blinked then Maria hadn’t seen it.

  Definitely a junkie.

  The train rattled on underground. The lights flickered the way they often flicker. The train was old, the rails were old. And this was the C train.

  The man kept staring at nothing Maria could see, so she turned back to her book and was soon lost in mystery and suspense.

  The train made another stop and then headed into the tunnel, rattling along the rails, jostling its passengers, causing Maria to bump sideways into the smiling, sweating man. It was nearing the end of the line at Euclid Avenue.

  The lights flickered again. Off. On.

  Off.

  And this time they stayed off.

  The train slowed to a squealing halt. Not fast. Not at all once. And not at Euclid Avenue station.

  The passengers did not fly into an immediate panic. Of course they didn’t. This was New York. This was the C train. This was Brooklyn.

  When the car settled into stillness, the passengers were quiet for a moment as they listened for the kinds of sounds that would provide information.

  There was no sound.

  So they collectively moaned in soft irritation, sighed, rustled as they set themselves into comfortable positions to wait it out. There was not one person on that train, not one in that car who hadn’t been here before. Stopped, stalled, delayed, and in the dark.

  The darkness was total.

  And then one by one passengers began punching buttons on their cells phones, spilling the glow of screen displays into the car.

  There were some laughs.

  A couple of jokes. The MTA and the mayor had their names taken in vain.

  Laughter rippled through the crowd.

  Maria closed her book and accessed the e-reader app on her cell, found a different book—a mystery by Hank Phillippi Ryan—and began reading. Unperturbed. Undisturbed.

  Unsuspecting.

  Something brushed her side and she half turned to watch as the man in the yellow raincoat stood up. His face was illuminated by the glow of cell phones. His mouth was moving as if he was saying something, but by now half the passengers on the train were calling people who weren’t on the train to talk. The buzz of chatter was loud, and Maria didn’t catch a word the sweating man said.

  Then she felt herself frowning as her mind began evaluating what her eyes were seeing. The man wasn’t speaking. His mouth was moving, jaws working, the way someone does when they’re eating. But she could see that he wasn’t really eating anything. There was nothing in his mouth. It was like he was pretending to eat.

  Muy loco, she thought.

  The man turned slowly in place, his unblinking eyes seeming to take in everything and everyone around him. Maria watched with an odd and inexplicable fascination. It was like watching one of those YouTube videos her son sometimes sent her without including a clue as to what it was about. She had to watch to find out.

  The man completed his turn and then slowly closed his eyes. Maria felt strangely relieved that the man had finally closed his eyes. Her eyes had begun to feel dry and sore.

  The train still did not move. The chatter of the crowd grew louder, more cell phones glowed to life. More rude jokes were swapped. There was almost a party atmosphere. Everyone was laughing, joking, smiling.

  Except Maria.

  What was this man doing? Standing there, eyes closed, sweating in a heavy yellow raincoat, pretending that he was chewing.

  Then the man abruptly stopped chewing, drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and in a voice that was as fractured and raw as it was powerful, shouted at the top of his lungs.

  “I have a message from Mother Night!”

  It was so shockingly loud that for a moment everyone froze, silent, staring.

  “The current administration of the United States government is acting in opposition to the will of the people and the laws of the Constitution. The American people are cattle to them and we will remain so unless we take action, take to the streets, take the country back.”

  After another moment of awkward silence, a tall black teenager in jeans and a Yankees shirt lowered the cell phone into which he was speaking and said, “The fuck you talking about, man? Some kind of Occupy the C Train bullshit?”

  A couple of people laughed, but none of them was seated close to the man in the raincoat and hoodie. The teenager who’d spoken out, though, was three passengers back from where the sweating man stood. The intervening people began shifting out of the way, not wanting to be a part of anything.

  Maria couldn’t blame them. She slipped the pepper spray out of her pocket and held it in her lap, covered by both hands. Ready.

  The sweating man pointed at t
he teenager. “Tell everyone. The only action is direct action.”

  “The fuck’s with you?” asked the teen in a tone of rising belligerence. “You high or some shit?”

  What the sweating man said in reply meant nothing at all to the black teen, or to Maria.

  “Sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

  And then without warning, without the slightest hint, the sweating man leaped at the teenager and slammed him back into the laps of a row of people seated against the wall. The scream he made as he pounced did not sound human. To Maria, it sounded like the hunting shriek of one of the big cats, like the mountain lions who hunted the canyons in Mexico where she’d lived until she was twelve. It was inhuman, and filled with fury and hate.

  And with hunger.

  But it was almost immediately drowned out by the high, shrill screams of total agony from the teenager as the sweating man bit into the flesh of his throat and tore it out. In the glow of the cell phones the geysering blood was as black as oil.

  Then everyone was screaming.

  Maria screamed, too.

  It took two minutes and nine men to subdue the sweating man. They crowded him into a corner and hammered him with kicks and punches. People hung from the straps for balance as they stomped him. Breaking his face, breaking his bones, knocking out teeth.

  Through all of that, the man kept fighting. Keep trying to bite.

  He never grunted in pain. Never begged for mercy.

  He stopped fighting back only when one of the kicks caught him just right and his head struck a pole so hard that skin and bone burst.

  The kicks continued for ten more seconds.

  Then the crowd froze again, caught in a tableau, shocked by what had happened, calculating the degree of their involvement in any police action that might follow.

  Cell cameras flashed, flashed, flashed.

  Someone said, “Jesus Christ.”

  The sound of panting—from exertion and fear—filled the car.

  Maria hurried over to the teenager, but she could tell that he was already gone. His windpipe was exposed and ragged, the arterial blood pulsed once more, weakly, then settled down to a dying bubble.