Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  No, he warned himself.

  Not Olga.

  Not like that.

  Just a gun.

  A tool.

  Nothing else.

  “Fuck,” he said aloud. He permitted himself five curses or obscenities each day. This was his first for today, so he repeated it. “Fuck!”

  The gun remained a gun.

  He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

  He accessed an app on his smartphone that asked him a bunch of pop-culture questions. Monk was excellent at trivia, and appearing on Jeopardy was the third item on his bucket list. He took time to consider the answers. Who was the current speaker of the House? Who played Radaghast the Brown in The Hobbit? How many Americans walked on the moon?

  Like that.

  He answered all his questions and got each right. Weird answers raised flags and made him want to reach for his pillbox.

  He took a breath and smiled a little as he let it out. The pills he’d taken seemed to have bolted him to the ground very nicely. It was a relief.

  His phone vibrated. The screen display said “Mom,” which was not true. His mother had died in a fire when Monk was fifteen. It was the first fire he’d set that had taken a life, and as such it was sacred in his memory.

  Nevertheless, when he answered it he said, “Hello?”

  “Things are moving,” Mother Night, “but we’re not ready for you yet. You need to be patient and wait for the signal.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  There was a pause.

  “Monk…?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “Don’t say ‘okey-dokey.’”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Another pause. “How are you doing?”

  He suspected that Mother knew about his problems, though not about their severity. The question was layered and it contained traps both obvious and subtle.

  Ludo Monk was mad, but he had been managing his damage for too long to make that kind of mistake. On reflection, though, he wondered if Mother knew that about him and was giving him a gentle nudge toward self-management.

  “I’m doing well,” he told her, and at the moment he meant it.

  “Good,” said Mother Night.

  She disconnected.

  Monk moved a chair across the room and positioned it behind the tripod-mounted Russian sniper rifle. He did not check the box magazine. It had been preloaded by another member of their team. Someone who had fingerprints that would be consistent with Russian intelligence.

  The tripod was set up well inside the room, away from the window. There was no chance of anyone spotting a gun barrel sticking out, no chance of sun glare on the blued steel. He turned the room lights off, made himself comfortable on the chair, and bent his eye to the scope.

  It took very little time to find the big picture window on the third floor. The glass was clear, the angle of the sun was perfect to allow for a crystal-clear view of the boardroom at FreeTech. Several people sat in big leather chairs around a blond wood table. Four women, three men, and a teenage boy. Monk knew little about most of them and cared even less. Mother Night had specified only one target, and Monk knew everything about her. She had a very specific outcome in mind. Actually, Monk appreciated the effect she was going for. It was so deliciously subtle.

  He tucked the stock into his shoulder and closed his hand around the gun, laying his finger along the outside of the trigger guard. Across the street, 206 yards away, one of the women began passing blue file folders to the others at the table. She was a very pretty woman. Tall, but not too tall. A bit on the thin side. With masses of curly blond hair and a lovely spray of sun freckles across her nose and cheeks.

  Monk looked at that hair. At how light seemed to move through it and change. How it framed so beautiful a face.

  He wondered if a bullet would knock that hair off her head.

  It was, after all, a wig.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

  Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

  Park Slope, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 12:49 p.m.

  “Tell me about the girl,” I said.

  Caleb Sykes, the nerdy kid who ran the cyber café, was sweating bullets. He was seated on a backless stool with the three of us ringed around him and Ghost sitting like a hungry wolf ten feet away. It wasn’t exactly thumbscrews and the rack, but that’s how he was taking it. I think if I’d yelled “Boo!” he’d have fainted dead away.

  “I already t-told y-you,” said Sykes. Nerves were bringing out a repressed stutter. I felt bad for the kid and believed that he really had nothing to do with anything. Had to go through the motions, though.

  “You said she was Korean,” I prompted.

  “Yeah. I th-think so.”

  “Not Chinese? Not Japanese?” asked Top. “You’re sure?”

  “I used to date a Korean girl. They don’t look Chinese or Japanese. They look Korean. But later, on TV … she looked Chinese. I d-don’t th-think it w-was the s-s-s-same g-g-g—”

  He couldn’t get it out. I told him it was okay, we understood.

  “Did she touch anything in the store?” asked Top.

  “Like wh-wh-what?”

  “Like anything. Can you remember any specific surface she might have touched with her hands, her fingers.”

  Caleb suddenly brightened. “Oh! You m-mean f-f-for fingerprints.”

  “Exactly. Take a second, son, and think about it.”

  “Um … just the c-counter and the m-money she handed me.”

  “Did she bring her own laptop in?” I asked. “Was she just using your wi-fi, or did she—?”

  “She r-r-rented an hour on D-D-Dell Three.”

  “Show us,” said Top.

  We stepped back to allow Sykes to rise, but the kid did it carefully as if expecting us to swat him back down in the chair. We didn’t. Instead we followed him from the small office we’d been using for the interrogation and into the store. A CLOSED sign was hung in the window. Sykes led us to the table on which was the laptop used by the Korean girl who claimed to be Mother Night.

  “This is it?” asked Top.

  He nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “S-sure I’m sure. It w-w-was on the r-receipt.”

  Top fished through the receipts and found the right one, read it, and handed it to me. “Station eleven.”

  Sykes nodded again.

  He reached out to touch the closed lid of the laptop for emphasis, but Top caught his wrist.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Fingerprints.”

  “Oh … r-right…”

  We all stood there and considered the laptop. A two-year-old Dell. It was open but turned off.

  “How many other people used this computer after the girl?” I asked.

  Sykes thought about it. “S-six…?” he suggested.

  Top bent over it and grunted. As he straightened he nodded to the machine. “See that?”

  I did. It was small, but it was there. And it looked to have been carved into the tabletop with a pin. A capital A surrounded by an O.

  I waved Bunny over. “Dust it and bag it.”

  Bunny produced a device that looked like a department store pricing gun. When he aimed it at the laptop it produced a cold blue laser light.

  “What’s th-that?” asked Sykes.

  “Digital fingerprint scanner,” explained Bunny. “Uses a laser to take microfine pictures of fingerprints. There’s special software to separate overlapping prints. Does it by determining the orientation, finger pad size, and so on, then it assembles the pieces into as clear a whole as possible.”

  Sykes said, “W-wow. I watch suh-suh-CSI all the t-time and I never saw anything like th-that.”

  Top smiled at him. “Our boss has a friend in the industry.”

  My cell phone buzzed again and I nearly tore my pants snatching it out of my pocket. I wanted to smash the damn thing. The message this time was


  NO ONE LIVES FOREVER

  Ghost suddenly whuffed, and I glanced over my shoulder as a shadow fell across the front window. There were two people standing outside, peering in through the big plate glass.

  They were both young. They were both wearing black hoodies and black sunglasses. They were smiling.

  They each held a machine gun.

  Sykes had played enough video games to know what AK-47s were.

  He said, “Wh-what…?”

  Then the world exploded into a terrible storm of shattered glass, bullets, screams, and blood.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  FreeTech

  800 Fifth Avenue

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 12:51 p.m.

  Toys was winding up his presentation about projects he wanted to fund in the more economically depressed areas of Central and South America, particularly of research into diseases of poverty that were doing incredible damage there. When he realized that Junie Flynn was no longer listening, his words trickled off and stopped.

  The others at the table were also studying Junie.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Toys.

  Without answering, Junie got to her feet and slowly crossed to the big picture window. She stood there, staring out, though it did not appear to Toys as if she was actually looking at anything.

  Violin rose, too, and came around the table to stand by Junie. And Toys could see a lot of dangerous potential in the catlike grace with which she moved.

  “What is it?” asked Violin.

  Junie crossed her arms and hugged herself as if she stood in a cold wind.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Violin hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand on Junie’s shoulder. Junie flinched, then shivered, but she didn’t shake off the touch.

  “What is it?” Violin repeated. “Is it Joe?”

  Junie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Something’s wrong.”

  Interlude Nine

  Offices of the Koenig Group

  Cape May, New Jersey

  Three and a Half Years Ago

  He caught her looking at him.

  “What?” asked Joe Ledger. His tone was rough, all sharp edges.

  “Nothing,” said Bliss quickly.

  “No, it’s not nothing. You’ve been giving me the stink-eye all afternoon,” muttered Ledger. He wore a sling and had small bandages taped to almost every visible inch of skin. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Across the street was the blackened hulk of what had been the offices and labs of the Koenig Group, a billion-dollar think tank linked to DARPA. It had been shut down by the DMS after it was learned that—despite contracts, agreements, and laws—the senior management had buyers outside the U.S. government. Ledger had gone in to investigate possible intruders into the supposedly sealed building. Things had apparently gone badly wrong and now the place was a pile of ashes. Bliss had been sent to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. Computers, records, lab equipment, anything. But it was ashes.

  A team from the coroner’s office was pulling bodies out of the place.

  “I’m not giving you the stink-eye,” she said.

  “Then what’s on your mind?”

  “They … won’t let me read your after-action report.”

  Ledger smiled. A strange and unpleasant smile. “Yeah, well.”

  “Well … what?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t make good reading.”

  “Come on,” she pleaded. She’d known him for months now. Had even been to a barbecue at his father’s place in Baltimore. But Bliss didn’t know if she understood Ledger. In his time with the DMS he’d risen to equal Colonel Riggs as the go-to guy for impossible jobs. Dr. Hu hated and feared him, but that didn’t matter to Bliss. She’d cooled on Hu, realizing that he was in no way a pathway to power.

  “The report is sealed for a reason,” said Ledger.

  “But why?”

  His response was a flat stare.

  They sat in silence for a while, watching the forensics team pick their way carefully through the still smoking debris. He drank coffee, she sipped from a Diet Coke.

  “Joe—?”

  “What?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You did, and I told you I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “No,” she said, and she leaned closer to him, dropping her voice, “I want to ask you something else. It’s something I’ve wanted to ask someone for a couple of years but I never knew who to ask.”

  “I’m probably not the right guy.”

  “I think you are.”

  He studied her for a few moments. Then he said, “What’s the question?”

  “I’ve read most of your other reports. I’ve been to a lot of the places you’ve been to. After you’ve been there, I mean. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Joe … come on. They send you in only when they need something handled. You know what I mean by that.” She didn’t ask it as a question.

  “So?”

  “What’s it like?

  He sighed. “You’re asking what it’s like to kill people, right?”

  She paused, then nodded.

  “It’s a lame question.”

  “Sure, and it’s probably offensive,” she said, “but my hands aren’t exactly clean. The science I help create puts weapons in your hands and you use them to kill people. That means I share some of whatever is there. I’m not going to call it guilt because that’s not what it is, is it?”

  “Not exactly. Not in any textbook way.”

  “You’re a soldier, a special operator,” she said. “You were trained for this sort of thing. You had the mental training for killing as well as the physical, which means you’re better prepared for it than I am. I’m a scientist, a geek. Until I joined the DMS the only trigger I ever pulled was in first-person shooter games. I guess it still is. But that doesn’t change the fact that my science is being used as your weapon. That means when you kill, I’m part of that process. But I don’t understand it. And … and I need to.”

  Ledger said nothing.

  “I’m afraid that if I don’t understand it,” continued Bliss, “then it’s going to fuck me up. It’s going to do something to my head.”

  “You talk to Rudy about this?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He suggested I talk to you.”

  “Ah.”

  She waited.

  He drank more of his coffee and looked everywhere but at her.

  The forensics people pulled another twisted shape out of the rubble.

  “If you’re sane,” he said softly, “you find ways of disconnecting your actions in the field from their context in civilized society. We’re a predator species, Bliss. Maybe we’re moving toward a point of spiritual peacefulness and grace, but we’re not there yet. We have a long damn way to go. Evil is not an abstraction. It’s a reality. And there are hundreds of variations on greed and corruption. Anyone who says different is a fool.”

  She waited, almost holding her breath.

  “Killing is necessary in this line of work. The bad guys want to burn down the world. Like the Jakobys. They wanted to kill everyone who wasn’t white according to their definition of white. That’s evil, and that has to be fought. That kind of evil doesn’t give up easily, either. They fight all the way, and they want to rack up as much of a body count as they can on the way down.”

  She knew he was talking about Grace Courtland, but she didn’t say her name. An assassin working for the Jakobys had killed her. There was a rumor that Ledger had hunted the man down and murdered him somewhere in Europe. Courtland’s ghost seemed to stand with them, eavesdropping on his words.

  Ledger kept watching the forensics techs. “There was a time when I could remember the face and name of everyone I ever hurt. Everyone I ever killed. But since I joined the DMS, I can
’t even remember how many dozen people I’ve killed. In a war you don’t count the dead and invite them into your head like that. You do that and you lose your shit, you wander into the darkness and you don’t come back. That’s what happens to some guys who come home from the war. They make the error of taking stock of what they had to do while the war was going on, as if the things done in war could be assessed by a civilized mind. They can’t. War is war. The best you can hope for is to have a clear understanding of who the enemy is and what it is you’re fighting for. If you can hold that in your head, then you can continue to do whatever needs to be done.”

  “How do the bad guys do it?” she asked. “How are they able to kill and kill and stay sane?”

  “Who says they do?” he asked, shaking his head.

  “I’ve watched some of the tapes of Rudy interviewing some of the people you and Colonel Riggs and the others have arrested. Some of them seem so ordinary. How can they commit those atrocities if they have a conscience? Is it their nature? Or is it a nurture thing, are they from an environment that makes it okay for them?”

  Joe grunted. “I asked Rudy that same exact question once.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that the nature-versus-nurture argument is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that there are only two possible forces at work on a person. Sure, a person’s nature is a factor—and that could be a product of their brain chemistry, or whatever makes a person a sociopath or a psychotic or a hero. Just as the forces at work in a person’s life have to be taken into some account. Some abused children grow up to abuse, there’s math for that. But neither viewpoint covers all the possible bases.”

  “So what’s missing?”

  “Choice,” said Ledger. “Rudy thinks that choice is often more important than either nature or nurture. Some people grow up in hell and choose to let others share in that hell. Some people grow up in hell and they make damn sure they don’t let those in their care even glimpse those fires. It’s a choice.”

  “Not everyone can make that choice.”

  “No, of course not. But a lot more people can than you might think. Like the Jakobys. Like some of the people we fight. They want to be what they are. They groove on the power and the perks that come with it. It’s how they paint the world in the colors that please them.”