Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Page 21

  “Choice,” she said.

  “Choice,” he agreed. “It’s what defines us. And it’s probably the most underrated power in the world.”

  “What about conscience?” she asked. “Where does that fall into the equation?”

  “It’s a factor. If I were naïve I’d tell you that conscience is what steers us toward a good choice instead of a bad, but that’s bullshit. Conscience can be kicked to one side, it can be locked away, and in some people I think it can be killed.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yeah. Hate will do it. When you can get to the point where you despise someone else, you can do all sorts of things to them. Look at how white folks treated blacks from the beginning of the slave trade. Those assholes had to convince themselves that blacks were subhuman in order to treat them the way they did. That was hate, sister, and it lasted for centuries.”

  “You’re saying hate killed their conscience?”

  “No. It edited their conscience. I imagine the slavers cared about their family and about white folks. They went to church and kissed babies. But they hated their slaves enough to brutalize and dehumanize them. Torture them. You know the drill. Happened to a lot of people in a lot of places. Still happens. There are a lot of sweatshops with women and kids more or less acting as slave labor now. You think the owners have sleepless nights thinking about how their employees feel? You think slumlords give a wet shit about the squalid living conditions in their tenements? And look at the Nazis and … well, you see where I’m going with this. My point is that conscience isn’t as powerful a force as we’d like it to be. If it was, we’d all be perfect. I sure as hell don’t put ‘spotless Christian hero’ in the blank for ‘occupation.’ No … at the end of the day it’s choice. You are what you choose to be. Good or bad, saint or sinner.”

  She thought about it. “Conscience isn’t unbreakable, that’s what you’re saying?”

  He snorted. “I’ve looked into the eyes of a lot of very bad people, Bliss. I’ve seen the damaged ones and the insane ones, I’ve seen the hurt ones and the asswipes who hate anyone that doesn’t look like them. Most of them are caught up in the nature, nurture, choice thing. But there are a few—not many, but a few—who don’t have a conscience anymore. I’m not talking about sociopaths born without one, if such a thing is really possible. I’m talking about people who, when you look into their eyes, you know you’re not looking at through windows of the soul. These are people who have no soul. No conscience. No nothing. They’re dead inside.”

  “Sounds like you’re describing a zombie.”

  “No, zombies are dead meat driven by nerve conduction. You science geeks told me that. No, sister,” said Joe, “I’m talking about people who deliberately take a scalpel to their own psyches and carve out their conscience.”

  Bliss saw dark lights flare in Ledger’s eyes.

  “That’s how evil is born,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

  Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

  Park Slope, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 12:56 p.m.

  The innocent and inexperienced often die because they are simply too shocked when violence sets into their lives. The possibility of violence is so foreign to the day-to-day reality of most people that even if they possess good reflexes there is no built-in protocol for how to react. So they hesitate, they stand and stare.

  And they die.

  In the split second before the smiling killers with the AK-47s opened up, Top hooked an arm around Caleb Sykes and was already in motion, halfway through a brutal diving tackle, when the bullets exploded the glass.

  Bunny and I were also in motion. He was diving left, I was falling right and dragging Ghost with me. As we fell, Top, Bunny, and I tore at our jackets, pulling them open, grabbing for our guns.

  We are not the innocents; and when it comes to violence and killing we, sadly, are not inexperienced.

  The thunder of gunfire was impossibly loud. The huge picture window broke with a sound like all of the glass in the world shattering at once. Bullets tore into wooden desks and exploded the hearts of laptop computers. Chunks of plaster leaped from the walls.

  I hit and slid toward the wall and floor, shoving Ghost with me, and I tried to cram us into the woodwork. Debris rained down on us. The razor edges of glass slashed at my clothes and skin. I could feel the bite as splinters sliced me. Blood was hot on my face and limbs. Ghost yelped and whined.

  Then I was firing.

  Firing.

  Firing.

  My rounds punched holes in the clouds of gun smoke and flying wreckage. Outside, one of the grinning killers suddenly spun away, but any cry of pain was lost in the din. Blood splashed the other killer, and there was a momentary pause as the second figure turned to watch his partner fall.

  In that moment, Bunny put four rounds into his chest and face and blew him apart.

  There was a second of silence so deafening I couldn’t even hear the echoes of the gunfire. My head felt like it was inside a drum. Ghost scrambled out from under me, his coat glittering with glass splinters, teeth bared in a snarl of pure rage.

  Then someone else opened up on us.

  Heavy-caliber automatic fire, but muted. Distant. Bullets struck the front door, which disintegrated into meaningless fragments. The CLOSED sign was whipped around and seemed to dissolve into confetti as it was struck over and over again. I saw Bunny, who had begun to rise from the floor, suddenly jerk backward and fall as bullets struck him as other shooters opened up from across the street.

  “Ghost—down!” I snapped, and I had to repeat the order to break through his shock and anger. Then he flattened to the floor, out of range of the bullets.

  I dropped my magazine, fished for a new one, and slapped it in place, praying that Bunny wasn’t dead. In that heartbeat of time it took to swap out the mags I cut a look across the room and saw Top and the kid, Sykes, lying under a blanket of silver and red debris. Silver from the glass, red from blood that ran from dozens of wounds in each of them.

  “Green Giant!” called Top, using Bunny’s combat call sign. There was fear and desperation in Top’s voice.

  Bunny didn’t answer. I raised my weapon and began firing.

  Bullets chopped into the frame around the window, but there was enough of it left to give me a bit of protection. Enough so that I could stand and return fire.

  They had assault rifles and they capped off a lot of rounds, but it was wild, the bullets sawing back and forth. They were hosing the place but not really aiming. I found the pattern of their gunfire and took my moment, leaned around the bullet-pocked wall, and fired with every ounce of skill and precision that I’ve learned as a Ranger, a cop, and a special operator. One of the guns went instantly silent.

  But there were four more shooters.

  They were arrogant because they thought we were nothing.

  They walked toward the front of the store in a loose line, firing, dropping spent magazines onto the blacktop, reloading, firing.

  Then I sensed movement behind me and Top was on his feet, cutting low and forward to take cover behind the other side of the ruined window frame. He carried a Glock 34 with a nineteen-round extended magazine. I swapped out my magazine again and gave Top a nod. Then we emptied our magazines into the four men. They had the numbers and the better weapons.

  We had the skill.

  Even as their bullets continued to chew at our protection, we aimed with precision, forcing down the panic, keeping our heads in the moment, letting all of our training carry us through the insanity. We conserved our ammunition, picked our targets, and killed them. Their bodies juddered and danced, blood erupting from terrible wounds. The slide on my gun locked back.

  “I’m out,” I said.

  “Got this,” said Top as he swapped in his last magazine.

  But there was nothing left to do.

  No one left to fight.

  Outside, the str
eet was littered with the dead. Shell casings by the hundreds twinkled in the bright sunlight. Just as it gleamed from the bright blood that flowed out from beneath the bodies. A pall of gun smoke polluted the afternoon air of this quiet part of Brooklyn. In the distance I could see the heads and shoulders of people hiding behind bullet-riddled cars and benches.

  Ghost staggered to his feet, furious for having no one to attack. He snarled and showed his fangs, but the only audience left was the dead.

  With Ghost beside me, I stepped through the shattered window and scooped up a rifle that lay by the slack hand of one of the first two men I’d killed. I tore a magazine from his pocket, dropped the half-empty one, and slapped the fresh one into place. The echo of thunder still hammered in my head.

  Seven bodies were collapsed in ugly heaps.

  Smoke ghosts haunted the air above them and drifted between the store and the open doors of a now-empty white panel truck.

  The first two shooters were on the pavement just outside the window. One lay in a twist, arms reaching toward the truck as if imploring help that could never arrive. The other was splayed like a starfish.

  All of the corpses were dressed in black hoodies.

  All of them were young. Twenties. Late teens.

  Kids.

  Except for the smoke, nothing moved.

  The only sound was the fading echo of death and the soft moans from Caleb Sykes.

  Then I remembered Bunny and wheeled around, but I saw Top helping him to his feet. There were two holes in Bunny’s shirt, but the Kevlar had done its job. Even so, Bunny looked gray and sick and in pain. They stepped through the gaping window, fanning their gun barrels left and right, eyes tracking, looking for more targets.

  But there was nothing.

  This storm had raged and raged, but now it had passed.

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, we lowered our guns.

  Far away was the promise of complications as sirens began to wail.

  Top looked down at the shooter who lay dead at his feet, arms and legs splayed wide. With the sunglasses blown away, the revealed face was slack in death. It had been a pretty face. A woman’s face.

  Young. Asian.

  “Mother Night?” murmured Top.

  But I shook my head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Somewhere back inside the store my cell phone lay amid the debris, and I recalled the last text message I’d received. “Nobody lives forever.”

  Maybe the woman on the ground wasn’t Mother Night, but I was now absolutely certain who was sending me messages.

  A police car rounded the corner at the end of the block and screamed its way toward us.

  Interlude Ten

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Three and a Half Years Ago

  On a cold November morning Artemisia Bliss trudged into the Hangar, lightly hungover from too many dirty martinis and exhausted from a night with Bill Collins. The man was inexhaustible. She suspected he took something. Viagra and maybe some kind of energizer. Whatever it was, he could go all night like a horny, well-hung version of the Energizer bunny. It was worse than screwing a college boy—and college boys were notorious for having no off button when it came to sex. For her own part, Bliss had a lot of appetite, but she didn’t have the staying power she once had.

  When she looked into the bathroom mirror before leaving her apartment it was like looking at a zombie movie.

  “Yeah,” she told her image, “you’re ready for that Vogue cover shoot.”

  Dark glasses and a Starbucks drive-through helped.

  It was going to be a tough day, too, because she had to finish proofreading the code for a video game simulation she was designing to help test the new VaultBreaker software. It was her idea to hire a bunch of gamers from outside the Defense Department to play the simulation without knowing what it was. She’d convinced Church—and Collins—that only real gamers could test the limits of the software. Her argument had been compelling enough to get approval. Collins had gone to bat for it, too, but from his own direction, and so far no one knew about her relationship with the vice president.

  The simulation was a matter of pride for Bliss. It was one of the most elegant and sophisticated game modules in existence, a claim she was certain was true. It really burned that there was no way to take VaultBreaker and turn it into an actual commercial game. It was so devious and crazy, and so damn much fun to play, that she was absolutely positive it would make a hundred million easy. Video games were big business—often pulling in more cash than big-budget movies.

  The delicate work of proofreading game code, however, was not going to be a picnic with her head feeling like it was filled with spiders.

  But as soon as she walked into the lab complex she knew that her day was about to get worse. Sergeant Gus Dietrich stood beside her desk, and instead of his usual benevolent bulldog grin he wore an expression of pinched disapproval.

  “Hey, Gus, what’s—?”

  “Doctor Bliss,” said Gus in a strangely formal way, “you need to come with me.”

  It was one of those moments when every guilty action ever taken, from jaywalking to screwing her college roommate’s father, flashed on the movie screens in her mind.

  Do they know?

  That was the real question.

  Did they know about the duplicated files and all the samples she’d taken while collecting evidence at more than thirty DMS crime scenes?

  Did they know?

  How could they know?

  Oh God, what did they know?

  “Wh-what’s going on, Gus?”

  He shook his head. “Aunt Sallie’s waiting for you.”

  Dietrich refused to say anything else as he escorted her down hallways and up a flight of stairs to Auntie’s office. The face of the woman behind the desk was locked into a grim scowl.

  Bliss began to tremble, but she fought to keep it from showing.

  “Sit,” ordered Aunt Sallie. She jerked her head for Dietrich to leave.

  When they were alone, Auntie leaned back in her big leather chair and studied Bliss through narrowed, suspicious eyes.

  “You know why you’re here?”

  “N-no.”

  “Really? No idea?”

  “No!”

  Aunt Sallie lifted a sheet of paper from her desk. Bliss couldn’t read it, but it looked like an interoffice memo on the pale green paper used by Bug’s computer division. Auntie put on her half-moon granny glasses and read from the memo.

  “… between 3:51 p.m. and 7:18 p.m. MindReader recorded nineteen separate intrusion attacks. These attacks were targeted at bypassing the cycling encryptions. Four attempts were made during that time to bypass the password protection; and three attempts to clone the intrusion software. All attempts were made from the same workstation.” She slapped the memo flat onto the desk. “Three guesses whose workstation was used for those attacks?”

  Bliss couldn’t even speak. The world seemed to have frozen solid around her, turning her blood to slush and freezing her vocal cords.

  “Goddamn it, girl, you fucking tell me what’s going on right fucking now or by God I will have you arrested and I’ll ram the Patriot Act all the way up your tight little cooze.” Auntie was so furious that spit flew with every word. Her brown face darkened to a dangerous purple.

  “But I—”

  Aunt Sallie jabbed a warning finger at her. “Be real careful, girl. You tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the fucking truth, so help you God.”

  Time ground to a halt as Bliss’s evolved self stepped back from the moment to take a cold, hard look at the situation. There were a lot of ways to play this, most of them bad. She could burst into tears and pretend innocence, claiming that she was just curious. That was even partly true, though it sounded lame enough to walk with a limp. Bliss dismissed it with a mental sneer.

  Or she could act genuinely surprised that what she’d done was
in any way improper. Aunt Sallie might buy that on the grounds that the policies about not trying to hack MindReader were not so much written as generally understood, and it was impossible to prove the extent to which something like that was grasped. But that was likely to be a long and acrimonious tug-of-war, and Bliss didn’t like her chances of winning. It would also never remove the stink of suspicion.

  Then there was the way her evolved self wanted to play it. It was totally out of character with the Artemisia Bliss who’d been working here for three and a half years, but not entirely out of character for the Bliss who’d been interviewed by Dr. Hu. Surely that interview had been recorded. Her attitude and self-possession had to be part of her record, even if since then she’d played the role of a dutiful team member.

  Yes, that felt like a good card. Maybe the only real card she could play without going bust.

  Auntie’s eyes seemed to exude real heat.

  So Bliss untangled her fingers, leaned forward, and placed her palms down on the edge of the desk. She deliberately shifted her posture forward in a way that was a borderline physical threat.

  In a voice as flat and cold as a reptile, she said, “Excuse me, but who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

  Aunt Sallie, veteran of a hundred violent field encounters, blinked. She said, “What?”

  “You heard me. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to here? You drag me in here and accuse me of impropriety. Me? I bust my ass all day, every day to make sure the DMS is cutting-edge. With my skills and my brains I could be a billionaire by now, filing patent after patent, kicking Bill Gates in the nuts with my designs. I could have made fortunes designing video games. Instead, I work for salary night and day to make sure that every threat we face is assessed and defeated as quickly as possible. I wrote the code for two thirds of the tactical software packages every one of our teams relies on when they go into battle. I designed the security simulations that keep every DMS facility secure from cyberattack and I co-designed most of the physical security systems. My programs are built into every workstation, every MindReader field kit, and even into some of the counterintrusion software Bug installed into MindReader itself. And who do you think came up with the idea for VaultBreaker? The fucking Easter Bunny? Shit. You want to know why I tried to get into MindReader? Because I need to be prepared for when someone tries it for real. I need to understand the safety measures so that I can be ready with backup, with stronger and fresher systems, with new designs no one has ever thought up. That’s why you hired me and that’s what I do, and fuck you, but I do that better than anyone else.”