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  Chapter Fifty

  Pierre Hotel

  East Sixty-second Street

  New York City

  Sunday, August 31, 1:34 p.m.

  Ludo was masturbating when the phone rang.

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants and boxers puddled around his ankles, staring at the rifle on its tripod as his hand moved with feverish speed.

  Nearby, the rifle gleamed. Oiled and curved and so lovely.

  Olga.

  The phone began jangling with the same shrill outrage that was in his mother’s voice when she’d caught him doing this. There had been no gun that first time, but that didn’t matter. She’d dragged him out into the hall in front of his younger brother and older sister, his underpants still down, and had beaten him to the edge of unconsciousness. Calling him a freak, a pervert. Telling him that God was watching. Saying that God would punish him.

  Ludo had tried to cover his shame with hands over his groin and face, but his mother slapped those hands away and rained blows on every inch of him. Even when his siblings started screaming for her to stop, she kept hitting.

  Ludo did not remember how it had ended. He’d begun screaming, too, and he’d screamed so long and so loud that it opened a big, dark trapdoor in the floor of his mind, and he’d plunged downward into shadows.

  There had been other beatings, of course. And his mother had removed the locks on the bathroom door so she could barge in to try to catch Ludo doing something disgusting. Something worthy of a beating.

  The others got beatings, too. His sister, Gayle, lost hearing in her left ear because of a beating. And Bobby, who was a bleeder, had tiny scars all over his body. Mother always found something they were doing wrong.

  Always.

  She hadn’t ever caught him masturbating again, but that didn’t matter. She searched his belongings and found things that gave her fists their purpose. A copy of Playboy Ludo had stolen from a drugstore. Pictures of naked girls Ludo downloaded from the Net. Then, later, as Ludo spent more and more time swimming in the shadows beneath the floor of his mind, the things she found were different. Gun magazines. And then guns.

  That was when the beatings stopped.

  As Ludo grew, he sometimes walked in on her in the bathroom. While she was on the toilet. Ludo would stand there with a gun in his hand, saying nothing while his mother tried to hide her shame.

  That’s when his mother started drinking.

  She never could find his guns after that. She looked everywhere. When he was out, either at school or bagging groceries at the Acme, his mother looked. Every once in a while Ludo would leave a bullet for her to find. The lead tips were bright with dots of her lipstick. Ludo wished he could have seen her face when she found those.

  A few weeks later, after his mother died in an unexplained fire, Ludo snuck into the cemetery the night they buried her. With shadows swimming around him, he dropped his pants and masturbated on her grave.

  It was the fastest he ever came. And it removed so much of the tension in his soul. Even so, it was oddly asexual, despite the necessary mechanics of the process. He never fantasized about his mother. He didn’t think about seeing her naked—a thought that deeply disgusted him. And he never thought about having sex with her. He’d rather stab his own eyes out. What turned him on was the thought of maggots and worms wriggling their way through her skin. The mental picture of cockroaches and beetles feasting on her flesh and shitting on her bones was deeply erotic.

  Today, though, it was the gun.

  Olga.

  So pretty.

  So saucy.

  Sitting there in the hotel room, waiting for the kill order, he kept glancing at her. Kept remembering what it felt like to slip his finger inside her trigger guard. To let his fingers glide ever so lightly along the length of her barrel. He stuck the tip of his tongue into the opening of the barrel, licking and tasting the gun oil.

  That was when he knew he had to rub one out, and his pants were down in a moment.

  And then the damn phone rang.

  Mother Night.

  Another mother.

  Fuck.

  Catching him at the wrong moment, catching him in a shameful act.

  His penis went instantly soft and he grabbed for his pants as quickly and desperately as if Mother Night had banged the door open right here.

  He was panting when he snatched up the phone.

  “Yes,” he gasped.

  “Ludo—?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you out of breath?”

  “I—”

  “What were you doing?”

  The moment froze around him. God! Did she see him? Did she have this room bugged? Were there cameras in here? Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  “I-I-,” he stammered. “I was doing push-ups.”

  A beat.

  “Push-ups?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” asked Mother Night.

  “Um … trying to keep my muscle tone.”

  Another beat. “Uh-huh,” she said slowly.

  “Seriously. You can’t do what I do with flabby, um, muscles. Killing requires core strength.” He winced at that, believing it to be the single silliest thing he’d ever said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  There was a final beat.

  Then, “Ludo, are you feeling okay today?”

  He paused before answering, taking a moment to make sure his voice and tone were perfectly normal.

  “Sure,” he said. “Absolutely tip-top.”

  “I can get someone else in there if you want me to.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll still get paid,” she insisted. “It won’t be a problem.”

  “No,” he said again, leaning on it. “I’m right as rain.”

  “Okay,” she said dubiously.

  “Okay.”

  “Now listen to me. I want you to rest. I don’t think I’ll need you today. Maybe tonight, though. Or early tomorrow.”

  Ludo felt his flaccid penis suddenly jump to new hardness. He glanced at Olga, who waited there for his touch.

  “Oh,” he said, deflated.

  “Proceed to the other location and wait for my call or a text. And Ludo—?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “No more push-ups.”

  The line went dead, but he barely noticed. He tossed the phone onto the bed and, with slow steps and a beating heart, he approached the lovely, lovely rifle.

  Interlude Eleven

  The Dragon Factory

  Dogfish Cay, The Bahamas

  Three Years Ago

  The place was called the Dragon Factory, but that was a conceit. There was only one dragon there and it was a pathetic little thing that had been cobbled together from other animals in an attempt to make it look like a Chinese dragon. The wings of an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body that was mostly an immature Komodo monitor. From the records Artemisia Bliss found on the recovered computers, the creature had been made to impress Chinese investors. But it was a fraud. A chimera born of radical surgery and ill-conceived transgenics.

  It lay dead, its neck broken from repeated impacts with the glass wall of its cage as it tried to flee the sounds of gunfire and slaughter. Most of the other animals were dead as well. Faux unicorns and griffins and basilisks. And some things that were almost sad—midgets surgically altered to look like leprechauns or satyrs. Sad, pathetic things that were insane from pain, humiliation, and the horror of what had been done to them.

  Bliss kept expecting some kind of outrage to soar up inside her. Or empathy. But there wasn’t even much sympathy flickering in her heart as she moved through the complex, day after day, collecting samples, weighing and measuring corpses, and sitting in on the endless dissections.

  The only thrills of any kind,
she felt, were when she cracked another level of the encryption the Jakoby twins had built into their computers. Sadly, the code writers who created the system for the twins were dead. Most of the staff was either dead or keeping mum per their attorneys’ instructions.

  That meant each level of the encryption had to be cracked.

  That, for Bliss, was fun.

  Every time she bypassed a firewall or disabled a self-delete subroutine, Bliss felt a genuine thrill. A tingle at first, but one that grew and grew.

  And grew.

  There was so damn much here.

  The Jakoby twins—Hecate and Paris—were geniuses on a par with Dr. Hu and, she had to admit, herself. That rare group of supergeniuses whose nature suggests an evolutionary leap forward. Granted, the Jakobys were sick, twisted, murderous sociopaths whose father was attempting ethnic genocide on a global scale—a genocide that would have wiped out those of Asian blood as well—but Bliss had to admire the science. It was so vast, so ballsy.

  So damn sexy.

  As she worked, she wished there was someone she could talk to about it.

  Someone who was not William Hu or Bug or anyone even remotely related to the Department of Military Sciences. With every single passing day Bliss felt less able to open up to them, to share her thoughts with them.

  Though even she had to admit that sharing those thoughts would make for one very awkward conversation. Quickly followed, she was certain, by emergency phone calls, a psych evaluation, and her walking papers. She’d be out the door so fast that it would make her head spin.

  Out, or maybe worse. Aunt Sallie watched her like a hawk, and Bliss was positive that the old bitch was waiting for the first opportunity to strike.

  Let her wait. Caution was part of Bliss’s skill set. When you helped to crack systems designed to counterattack, you learned caution. When you helped design security protocols for the highest level of ultrasecure facilities, you learned caution. Bliss knew that her old, unevolved self had been smart but not necessarily sharp; whereas her evolved self was as sharp as a scalpel and intensely sly.

  She wondered what Aunt Sallie or Church’s actual reaction would be if they suspected that she was duplicating every bit of evidence, each file, each report on genetic design, each computer program.

  Would they have her locked up?

  Or would Bliss wake up one night and find Colonel Riggs or Captain Ledger standing over her bed, dressed all in black, with a pistol aimed at her head.

  She rather thought the latter was a more likely possibility.

  Though … what could they prove?

  She sighed. Depends on where they looked.

  There was nothing at her apartment, of course, except some deeply encrypted stuff hidden inside video games. Not even her games. She’d built dozens of “libraries” into new game levels she’d hacked onto the existing software of popular games. She concealed petaflops worth of data in the virtual game world, all of it disguised as something else, all of it protected by what she was absolutely certain was the most sophisticated can’t-beat-them levels of game play.

  To her, it was like hiding diamonds in the sand at the playground. No one would think to look there, and anyone who found them by accident wouldn’t believe they were what they were.

  Bliss sat hunched in front of Paris Jakoby’s personal workstation computer as a steady stream of data was flash-downloaded onto dual drives. That dual-drive system was her own design. Bundled flash drives feeding off a single rebuilt USB plug. Since the data was being downloaded only once—albeit in two exact and simultaneous copies—the system only registered a single download.

  She paused and looked around.

  Paris Jakoby’s office was built onto a balcony and it had a glass wall that looked down onto the main lobby of the facility. The last of the corpses—human and otherwise—had long since been removed, but the tiled floor and carpeted areas were still stained with dried blood. She’d watched the battle on the big screen back at the TOC, her lip caught between her teeth, fingernails digging into her palms. Major Grace Courtland had led the first wave of DMS agents onto the island, followed by Captain Ledger’s Echo Team and others. And then a wave of Navy SEALs. That should have been overwhelming force, but there was a shocking amount of resistance, the core of which were the Berserkers—mercenaries with silverback gorilla DNA. The men were massive, enormously strong, and filled with a nearly uncontrollable rage. She rewatched the videos of them in action a dozen times. So much power.

  But there were other horrors on the island, and Ledger’s team encountered those first. When Bliss saw those she nearly screamed. Monstrous mastiffs that had been surgically and genetically altered so they had the chitinous armor plating and deadly arching tails of scorpions. It was like something out of an old Michael Crichton novel. Or one of those corny monster movies on Syfy.

  The main part of the fight was recorded on helmet cams until Church ordered an E-bomb to be detonated over the island. The electromagnetic pulse knocked out all electronics and ended the show.

  It became fun again for Bliss only when the science team was sent onto the island with orders to catalog everything. Absolutely every single thing.

  Weeks of work.

  Weeks of fun.

  They were to be sequestered on the island during the forensic collection and initial analysis period, and then would be debriefed once they returned to the Hangar. That, however, was still many days away. The first part of the job was rebuilding the power systems and replacing those components necessary to make the computer systems functional again.

  Still plenty of time to continue the process of copying everything. Of duplicating samples. Not everything, of course. But everything she was assigned to collect. It was too dangerous to interfere with what other techs and scientists were doing.

  One of the most fascinating things she found was the complete record, including all research and procedures, for the Berserkers. Although intensely complicated and enormously expensive, it was a step-by-step guide to creating the transgenic mercenaries. There were even samples of all of the chemicals, drugs, and genetic materials necessary, stored in bio-safe bins.

  All of the data was on an external hard drive stored in Paris’s closet. Not one byte of it was on the main computers.

  On a whim, Bliss took the hard drive, duped the data onto her own laptop, and destroyed the original. Obtaining samples of the genetic material would have to wait until her team was ready to leave the island. She would, however, manage it, even though she had no idea what she was ever going to do with it.

  Not yet.

  It was late on a Sunday night when Artemisia Bliss made the single most significant discovery while she was decrypting a series of files labeled BULK DATA—MISC UNSORTED. The encryption was particularly difficult, and Bliss opened a fresh Red Bull and dived in with gusto. So far, the encryption on all of the Jakoby files was exceptionally tough, some of it so mind-bogglingly complicated that it felt like pulling nails out of hardwood using only her mind. But it was so damn much fun. This was what she lived for. Each layer she peeled back, each level she cracked made her feel more powerful, more alive. Naturally, the encryption on the Jakoby main research files was devious, but after two weeks Bliss found her way in, which opened the system to her whole team.

  That Bulk Data file was something, though.

  The encryption was many layers deep and had some very strange traps built into it, including a counterattack tapeworm that was strangely familiar. The tapeworm tried to intrude into her MindReader substation and rewrite the software. That stunned Bliss. MindReader was unassailable. It was the ultimate intrusion monster and even Bliss had never been able to hack into its programs. But this program attacked in the way MindReader typically did.

  Ultimately, though, MindReader slapped it down. Bliss was able to remove the attack programs with some effort and then began rooting around inside the data files.

  What she found at first startled her, because there were monstrously
large files hidden inside the nondescript “misc unsorted” folder. Massive files, including hundreds of subfolders filled with computer code.

  As she scanned through them, Bliss felt her pulse quicken. Then her heart began racing. Sweat popped out along her brow. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  She simply could not.

  The files contained a complete schematic for a computer system. A system with ultrasophisticated intrusion software. A system with multiphasic pattern-search capabilities. A system with a subroutine designed to erase any trace of its footprint after it hacked other systems.

  A system labeled “Pangaea.”

  But one that she knew under a different name.

  MindReader.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 1:35 p.m.

  Everyone snapped to attention as Mr. Church came hurrying into the training hall. Lydia cut a surprised look at Sam. Neither of them had ever seen Mr. Church hurry. The world usually waited for him. His aide and bodyguard, a monstrous gunnery sergeant known as Brick, was right at his heels, keeping up despite an artificial leg.

  They came right over to where Echo Team formed up at a right angle to the line of candidates.

  “Chief Petty Officer Ruiz,” said Church, “Captain Ledger says that there are three candidates he likes for Echo Team. Call them out.”

  Lydia did a neat half-turn. “Sergeant Duncan MacDougall, Sergeant Noah Fallon, Special Agent Montana Parker, step forward.”

  The three named candidates did. A short, squatty man with no neck and Popeye forearms, a tall, ascetic man with a poet’s face and shooter’s eyes, and a tanned blond woman with cold gray eyes.

  Church gave them one full second of appraisal. “You three now work for me. Welcome to the jungle.” They saluted, but he turned to the others. “You are dismissed and may return to your units.”

  Once more he turned, this time to Echo Team.

  “A Black Hawk is smoking on the roof,” he said. “You will be on it four minutes. It takes off in five. Weapons and equipment are already being loaded. Hammer suits and BAMs for everyone. Full kits for the new team members.”