Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  She felt for his pulse, felt the last throb, and then … nothing.

  “Jesus Christ,” said someone else, loading it with a different meaning.

  Then Maria herself said it. “Jesus Christ!”

  Because the teenager opened his eyes.

  And his mouth.

  And he lunged for her.

  The last thing Maria saw was a glaring eye inches from her own as the teenager—the dead teenager—darted in to take his first bite.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  FreeTech

  800 Fifth Avenue

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 12:24 p.m.

  Junie Flynn watched as each of the newest members of her board settled into their chairs. It was a strange mix of people, and Junie knew that each of them had secrets that the others at the table did not necessarily share. Each brought their own unique skills, knowledge, connections, and motives to FreeTech. They came to help and to share in the benefits of an organization with a structure like DARPA but which had no military agenda. It was, to Junie’s experience, a unique organization.

  After thanking them each for attending this closed session, Junie addressed the group. “We will operate with two levels of disclosure. Each of you has requested and been granted a public identity that has been crafted by MindReader. No one outside of this group and the upper echelon of the DMS will know who you are.”

  The people seated around the table nodded, some with less enthusiasm and more suspicion than others.

  “However,” said Junie, “everything else we do at FreeTech will be available through the Freedom of Information Act. All benefits will be shared equally with the public, without reservations. Since none of our research or development is intended for military use, that freedom of access will extend beyond U.S. borders. Agreed?”

  Another round of nods.

  However, one person, a young woman with olive skin and dark hair, raised her hand. “As much as I can appreciate altruism on this scale,” said Violin, “it is expensive. Surely, whomever is financing this venture will want the lion’s share of any profits.”

  “Actually,” said Junie, “if any profits are generated they will be used for further research and to fund foundations tasked with distributing the fruits of that research.”

  “How? This will take many millions…”

  Junie smiled. “We are operating with a start-up bank of seventy billion dollars.”

  It was a shocking amount. An absurd amount. Everyone gaped at her.

  “How?” demanded Violin. “Your congress could never pass an appropriations bill of that size.”

  “Private donation,” said Junie. She was intensely aware that the challenge in Violin’s voice spoke to issues beyond FreeTech. Violin had been Joe’s lover and Junie suspected that the strange woman still had strong feelings for Joe. They’d gone into combat together on multiple occasions and shared a kind of intimacy that was unique to them. Even though Junie knew that Joe was faithful to her, she was adult enough to realize that there were unresolved issues hanging fire between him and Violin. Issues that might never be resolved.

  Although her trust in Joe’s fidelity was ironclad, Junie had less faith that this beautiful, exotic, and powerful warrior woman was the kind to simply bow out without a fight. Junie had been mentally preparing herself for that fight, and she dearly hoped it wouldn’t involve actual knives.

  “Donated by whom?” Violin’s brow was knitted with doubt and concern. “Who has that kind of money? And why would they give so much? Is this part of the Bill and Amanda Gates Foundation or—”

  “No,” said a sad-eyed young man seated across from her. He was in his thirties, thin, handsome, and he spoke with a British accent. “I donated the money. All of it.”

  “You?” asked the thin, dark-haired teenager seated to Junie’s right. His name was Helmut Deacon. “And how do you have that much money?”

  “I suppose you could say I inherited it,” said the Brit.

  “Oil money?” asked Helmut.

  “No.”

  Suspicion flickered in Violin’s eyes. “Inherited from where?”

  The Brit turned to Junie and raised inquiring eyebrows. She nodded.

  “No secrets between us,” Junie said. “That’s our rule. Besides, FreeTech is your idea.”

  “Bloody hell,” said the Brit. He took a breath. “Well, buckle up, kids, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. The funding for this was appropriated on my behalf from the Seven Kings. I was made steward of the money on the condition that I find a way to do the best possible good with it. I proposed the creation of FreeTech as a way of fixing some of the damage the Kings did. Damage that I am partly responsible for.”

  Everyone at the table stared at him in stunned silence.

  “And before I give you those details,” said the Brit after taking a steadying breath, “I want one favor from you. No matter how much good we do, even if we cure the common effing cold, I don’t ever want to hear the words ‘thank you’ aimed in my direction. Ever. This isn’t about me and it never will be.”

  One by one the others nodded, though they all looked suspicious and mystified.

  “Very well,” said the Brit. “I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Alexander Chismer, but everyone calls me Toys.”

  Interlude Eight

  Four Seasons Hotel

  1 Logan Square

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Four Years Ago

  “Take it, you bitch!”

  Bill Collins snarled the words as he thrust into her from behind. She was on elbows and knees; he stood beside the bed. Her buttocks flared red from where he’d slapped her over and over again with each thrust.

  She snarled back at him from between clenched teeth. Goading him on, demanding that he go harder and faster, that he hit her.

  Demanding it.

  When they came they howled together like night creatures. Like wolves.

  The iPod played very loud opera. If anyone else in the hotel heard them, no one called the front desk.

  The Secret Service men outside the door were paid a lot of money under the table to pretend to be as deaf as they were blind. As far as they were concerned, they worked for Bill Collins, not for the vice president. That distinction was expensive and paid for in cash.

  Collins collapsed on her by slow degrees, his sweaty chest falling onto her back and bearing her down to the sodden and tangled sheets. They panted loudly, unable to speak, spent and aching, lost in the exhaustion and pleasure and an afterglow that burned their skin.

  This was the tenth time they’d met in private, and it was always like this for them.

  Genuine tenderness formed no part of their relationship, though they went through the motions of it over dinner and before clothes were off. Once they were naked, each of them knew that they could be their real, true selves. They were not nice people, and that was part of the fun for each of them. They were rough and mean to each other, and that was a turn-on. And they both knew that they were trying through physical extremity to try and fuck each other’s mind. To do that, in fact, would have been their only goal, their only act; but in the absence of that possibility they drove each other toward the edge of the cliff every time.

  And every time it was good for them.

  Bliss had never allowed herself to be like this with anyone with whom she’d ever slept. Not even her foster father. In all other situations she’d made sure to dial it down, to play a borderline virgin, to be the good little geek girl who—oh my god!—has sex. None of that was her, or if any of it was, then it belonged to that lesser, unevolved self whom Bliss left farther behind every day.

  As the sweat cooled on their skin, they gradually fell apart, him rolling off her, Bliss shifting toward the center of the bed. They were totally unabashed about nakedness or preference, and that was such a liberating thing.

  After a while, he said, “The president has been having some heart problems.”

  B
liss turned and looked at him. Collins was staring up at the ceiling, smiling.

  “Really? Like what?”

  “He nearly had a heart attack at Camp David. It was kept out of the press, but the doctors are freaked. They ran all the tests and his arteries are for shit. They’re going to try him on some statins to see if that will clear things out, but if not…”

  “What? You think he’ll have a heart attack for real?”

  Collins barked out a sour laugh. “I’m not that lucky. No … they’re talking bypass surgery.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a moment of silence and then Bliss realized that Collins was waiting for her to say something. She replayed the conversation and then realized what it was.

  “If he has surgery and they use a general anesthesia,” she said, “wouldn’t that mean that you’d be president?”

  “Short term … but abso-fucking-lutely.”

  She turned and propped herself up on her elbow. “Bill—that’s so exciting.”

  “It does not suck,” he agreed.

  “Now, all we need is an allergic reaction to the anesthesia.”

  “Or a surgeon with the hiccups.”

  They were silent for a long time, and she pulled the sheet over herself. The room was getting cool. “Bill … while you’re acting as president, I mean … you’ll actually be the president, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “With all of the powers of the president?”

  “Yup.” He stroked her hair. “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that it seems like a great opportunity. There has to be something you can do with that chance.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But what?”

  Bliss smiled. “I don’t know. But let me think on it.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Pierre Hotel

  East Sixty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 12:25 p.m.

  Ludo Monk was playing a video game while he waited to kill people. It was a great way to unwind one kind of tension—ordinary, everyday stuff—and an equally great way to ramp up for the trigger pulls to come.

  He was on level sixteen of Burn to Shine, and he’d just completed the second Virus Vault level. He’d burned through two lives to do it, but the game gave you an unlimited number of replays.

  The hit itself was of little concern to him. The target, location, angle, weapon, and escape route had all been worked out to the smallest detail, a process that included consideration of many hundreds of variables. Ludo had spent weeks getting it all set up the right way. He did not believe in haste. He never took a job that did not permit at least a month of planning, and preferred to have more time than that.

  It was all about the variables.

  Time of day, weather, wind conditions, location, angles, access and egress, distance to resources, traffic congestion at different times of day, frequency of police car and air patrols, access to multiple vantage points, availability of additional assets, reliability of those assets, training of same, events on that day’s calendar for any venue within a mile, even the particulate count in the air quality report.

  He was aware that some of the variables he considered were requested by parts of his brain that were less orderly and reliable than the part that generally drove the car. But that was fine. The frequency of his own madness was also a variable and it had to be considered.

  Had to be.

  Things went wrong only when planning was weak. The hit on Joe Ledger and Reggie Boyd in Baltimore was a prime example. That was rushed, built on poor intel, and it relied on some of Mother Night’s goofy suicide flunkies. Henchmen, as Monk thought of them. Henchmen were notorious for flubbing things. Ask anyone. Read a comic book.

  Monk never used henchmen. He would occasionally use a lackey, but they were different. Lackeys were for fetching and carrying, not for wet work in the field. Lackeys picked up supplies for him, had his vehicles serviced, delivered packages, and made sure he had licorice, Coke, and plenty of pills. They were good at that sort of thing.

  It was the henchmen who fucked things up. Attacking someone like Ledger with a car and then trying to outgun him. Seriously? Ledger had killed more people than smallpox. Monk knew, he’d read the files. Ledger was a psychotic killing machine—or at least that’s the phrasing Monk used in his head, and he figured he was not very far off. Monk would have handled that whole thing differently.

  For one thing, he’d have picked a secure and dry shooting position, ideally in one of the buildings across the street from the Warehouse. Then he would have used explosive rounds and parked six shots through the windshield as soon as Ledger pulled up to the security exit. There was a three-second window of opportunity there while Ledger showed Boyd’s transfer papers. It would have been a clean kill. Three shots into Ledger, and then three into Boyd, allowing the explosive rounds to turn the inside of the Explorer into a fireball. Then he would have abandoned his gear, set a ten-minute explosive charge in the room he was vacating, and been halfway across Baltimore before the debris stopped falling.

  That’s how it should have gone.

  But Mother Night had decided to let the clown college handle it, and that resulted in zero targets being eliminated while the entire so-called kill squad was butchered by Ledger and his dog.

  As he thought about that he felt something shift inside his head. The colors of the paint on the walls started shifting in tone.

  “Uh-oh,” he said and made a grab for his pills.

  He stuffed a few into his mouth, reminded himself not to chew them, washed them down with warm Coke, and waited for the colors to return to normal.

  “Fucking henchmen,” he said to the air around him.

  Monk returned to the window and settled himself down. His elevated shooting position was inside a hotel room that had two banks of elevators and excellent stairwells. Six runners—all reliable lackeys—were positioned to flee down the stairwells, each of them wearing a ski mask. Monk would simply walk down the hall, enter a room booked under a different name, and take a bath. All of his equipment and clothing would be collected and disposed of by a woman seeded into the maid staff two months ago. The equipment would be placed in a barrel filled with hydrochloric acid, sealed, and stored in the basement among three other similar barrels, each marked as diesel fuel for the back-up generator.

  Monk’s cover was ironclad. He was in town for a business meeting, and was, in fact, enrolled. A superb double would attend the meetings wearing a mike so Monk could hear the lectures. He’d already watched videos of yesterday’s sessions, and he would attend the closing session tomorrow. In the unlikely event that he was questioned, his alibi would hold water.

  And polygraphs are virtually useless with the insane. He knew that from experience.

  His team of lackeys had already prepped the shooting room before he arrived, but Monk chased them out and spent two hours going over everything. Obsessively. Multiple times. The only thing he did not do was disassemble the rifle. In the movies snipers did that, but it was silly. When you took apart a gun, no matter how carefully you handled it, you disturbed the settings. Those settings could not be perfectly duplicated without sighting it again on a range. He’d arranged to have the fully assembled gun wrapped loosely in bubble wrap and brought here by two lackeys who understood his rules.

  Those two were replacements for a team who’d made an error on a previous job. Monk regretted what he’d done to them, but you couldn’t put people back together after they’d been hacked apart. He knew, he’d tried.

  The new team was very, very careful, so it was really an opportunity for them all to grow together.

  The rifle was a Dragunov sniper rifle, which was not his weapon of choice, but its use in this hit—and later discovery—would send a nicely conflicted message. It had mechanically adjustable back-up iron sights with a sliding tangent rear sight and a scope mount that didn’t block the area between the front and rear sights. Very useful and
a nice piece of design work. Bravo for our Russian brothers, he thought. It fired 7.62 by 54 millimeter rounds at 2,700 feet per second, fed from a ten-round box magazine.

  He decided to name it Olga.

  Monk sat with Olga for a long time, explaining to the rifle what was expected of her and why it was important.

  Olga listened without comment.

  That was not a given. Monk had engaged other weapons in long and complicated back-and-forth conversations. His meds had changed since then, and he thought wistfully of the subtle insights of the German PSG1 and the wacky humor of the Beretta .50.

  When Monk realized that he was falling into a depression because Olga wasn’t speaking with him, he got up and crossed to where he’d hung his jacket, dug his blue plastic pillbox out of the pocket, sorted through all the colors, made a selection, and swallowed two pills. He crouched in the closet until talking to a rifle seemed ridiculous.

  He was grateful there were no cameras here in this room. His employer knew that he was mad, but she probably did not know how thin the ice was beneath his skates. Most of the time he didn’t, either.

  It frightened him to realize that he was probably slipping. Or maybe had already slipped. At least a notch or two.

  The woman he worked for was always looking, always watching. If he slipped in her eyes, then he would be dead. Two in the back of the head and his body run through a wood chipper. He’d seen that done to others. He’d helped do it to others, so he understood that it was standard operating procedure.

  He was sad, he was crazy, but he didn’t want to die.

  And he definitely didn’t want to become mulch.

  Monk squatted inside the closet until he was sure that the meds had kicked in. As much as they could or would kick in. He’d have to up his dose soon, and that was going to change him. It would sand another layer from his mental sharpness. Dull him. Make him less of what he was.

  When he opened the closet door he had to avoid looking at Olga until he was sure there wasn’t more he needed to say to her.