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  The person on our team—apart from me—who would be least happy about using the darts would be Belle. Calling her Mother Mercy was a dark joke because when it came to bad guys, she didn’t have so much as a flicker of pity or forgiveness. And it meant that she had to use her backup rifle, a Stoeger XM1 Air Rifle. It’s a pre-charged pneumatic weapon that has an integrated tank filled to 2,900 psi, which allows it to deliver special loads of Sandman darts at 1,200 feet per second before refilling. The .22 version of the XM1 loses a little velocity in trade for a harder-hitting pellet, with speeds around 1,000 fps. Hers was mounted with a superb scope, which mattered to a degree, because although the darts can penetrate ordinary clothing, they couldn’t punch through any kind of body armor. The ideal shot was to skin.

  I took my Snellig in a two-handed grip, resting my elbow on the ridge.

  “Take them,” I said and immediately fired nine very fast shots at the two men and their dog. My distance was about forty yards—tough range even for a specialized gun like the one I was using. The dog and one man went right down, but the other turned, grabbing for his gun with one hand and reaching for the Send key on his coms headset with the other. So, I hosed him. He staggered and sat down hard, then keeled over sideways.

  Ghost and I were up and moving, sticking to the shadows until we reached the side of the house. There we paused as I waited for the rest of the team to check in.

  “Guard tower two down,” said Top. “Wait, guard tower one is also down.”

  I smiled. I wondered if Top had needed to fire a single shot. Yeah, Belle was that good.

  “Second patrol down,” reported Bunny. “Men and dog.”

  “Mother Mercy,” I said, “take position in tower one. Jackpot, secure the perimeter. Pappy and Donnie Darko, on me.”

  INTERLUDE 2

  THE PLAYROOM

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  “You look like someone pissed in your coffee, ol’ buddy,” said Kuga.

  “You brought him in?” His mouth had gone totally dry, and he gripped the arms of the chair so tightly the wood creaked. “Are you insane?”

  “Plenty of shrinks seem to think so.” Kuga laughed. “But in this case? Nah. This is me making the kind of executive decision that will move our two biggest projects forward.”

  “This … man … has gone up against Church and Ledger three times that I know of. And three times, he’s failed.”

  “Failed? No, not really. Think of the amount of damage he’s done. He nearly destroyed the DMS. He goddamned nearly helped Hugo destroy the oil supplies in the Middle East, which would have hit the stock market like a tsunami. I know Vox had hundreds of his people poised to profit from that, the same way he had buyers ready to grab stock when the planes hit the towers. Hell, he advised me to have my people ready when COVID hit.”

  “Are you saying that the coronavirus was of his design?”

  “What? Oh, hell no. That was an actual natural disaster, but our friend was very savvy about how certain world leaders would react and when to have cash ready to buy stocks during flights to safety. Mr. Sunday advised me to snap up stock in companies making hand sanitizer, bleach, surgical masks, and ventilators. I did and, fuck, Rafael, I banked a couple of billion on COVID-19. I think we made more money on that than I would have if it was something one of our labs cooked up.”

  “Yes, and that’s excellent in itself, but he isn’t the only person who could advise on such things.”

  “Maybe not, but he’s the best at it. He understands human nature. He reads presidents and prime ministers very well and can go from a press briefing or Twitter post to a buying frenzy faster than anyone I’ve ever known. And not only will he handle sales for us, he said that he has some ideas for how to mindfuck your boy Ledger. That boy’s already on the edge, and Mr. Sunday says all it’ll take is the tiniest of pushes.”

  Santoro set his coffee cup down hard enough to splash half of it onto the table. “He is a monster. He is the most dangerous person I’ve ever met. His motives are always his own. He was never really on Vox’s leash. Never. He always has a personal agenda.”

  “Second most dangerous,” corrected Kuga. “Let’s keep perspective. Church is the real Big Bad. But Mr. Sunday is the scariest cocksucker on our side. And he is on our side, Rafael. Make no mistake.”

  “He was on Hugo Vox’s side, too, and Vox is dead,” said Santoro coldly. “He was on Zephyr Bain’s side, too, and she’s dead. Same with Grigor and the Upierczy.”

  “Sure, but I can name a dozen other people he worked for, going way back, too, who weren’t killed during a shared operation. Point is, the deaths of some of his employers were not his doing or his fault. If anything, it was the excesses of people like Vox and the rampant insanity of Zephyr Bain that led to them being killed. Do you really want to tell me that if Hugo Vox was not at war with his own goddamned mother, he would be alive today? The Kings would still be out there making the world unsafe for widows and orphans, and you, my friend, would never have spent years in a black site prison.”

  Santoro glared at Kuga but then settled back in his chair, composing his features through sheer strength of will. “We do not need him,” insisted Santoro. “We have the American Operation. We have the K-series exosuits, and we have R-33. And we have all of the formulae and technologies that are by-products of those things. We need a salesman, Kuga, not a monster. That man is too dangerous.”

  “No,” said Kuga, “he’s just exactly dangerous enough.”

  CHAPTER 5

  TRSTENIK ISLAND

  CROATIA

  Top and Bunny found me and earned a wag of Ghost’s tail.

  They were my closest friends on the job and had been with me since Church shanghaied me into joining. Top was a Black former army ranger from Georgia who had a tight salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that could be fatherly and kind or cold and dangerous depending on the moment. Though right now, his face was hidden by the Scouts and a balaclava.

  “What about the hostile you saw?” asked Top.

  “I must have been mistaken,” I said. “No sign of him, no prints, and Ghost didn’t see him.”

  Top looked at me. I couldn’t read his expression through the glasses and the gloom. He tapped out of the team channel and pulled down his balaclava.

  “Not like you to jump at shadows, Outlaw,” he said quietly.

  “Didn’t jump, Pappy,” I said. “Thought I saw something, checked it out, and I was wrong.”

  “But you found the trip wire.”

  “Yes. Right where the guy was standing.”

  Bunny loomed over us. He was a huge slab of white boy from Orange County. Six feet six, with more muscles than is reasonable on any human being. He was a former top amateur volleyball player turned marine Force Recon turned SpecOps cave troll. Good-natured, but only to a point. The three of us had walked through the Valley of the Shadow too many times to count, and there is no one on God’s green earth I trusted as much.

  “Are we talking a guard?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t wearing a uniform,” I said. “No weapons that I could see. No kit or body armor.”

  “Maybe he was a tech checking on the booby traps?” Bunny suggested.

  “Sure, Farm Boy,” said Top, “because technicians routinely do that at night without lights or backup.”

  “Hey, old man,” Bunny replied, “Outlaw says he saw someone. How many times has he been wrong?”

  I cut in. “I was wrong this time.”

  Top kept looking at me. “But you thought you saw him.”

  I avoided his eyes. “I was wrong.”

  When he said nothing else, I knew that it wasn’t actually over. Top had been keeping a close eye on me since we rolled out. This was my second field op since coming back to the job. I’d lost some months recovering from injuries sustained in the Christmas Eve blast that killed my family. Top is way too sharp to assume that a healed body is t
he same as a healed mind or soul. He’s a wise and insightful man—qualities that make him an absolutely peerless command sergeant. And a peerless friend.

  But now wasn’t the time for a heart-to-heart.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and I headed across the lawn to the back door. Ghost was at my heels, with Top and Bunny close behind.

  “What do we got, boss?” asked Bunny as he came to crouch beside me.

  There was a standard key card reader set into the wall near the knob.

  “It’s all you,” I told him.

  Bunny reached into a pocket and produced a gizmo about the size of a nickel, removed the adhesive backing, then placed it on the underside of the key card box that was mounted to the right of the door. He then took a blank magnetic key card and swiped it slowly through the reader. On the first pass, nothing obvious happened, which was fine. That meant that the MindReader Q1 tac-com strapped to his left forearm was infiltrating the security software. When he swiped it again, even more slowly, the pass code data was imprinted on his card. A third and faster swipe unlocked the door. But here’s the fun part: MindReader is shy and prefers not to be noticed, so it rewrites the host software so that—for all intents and purposes—that door was never opened. There would be nothing recorded on any security log. Nifty.

  Bunny pulled the door open as Top and I positioned ourselves for a cross fire. But we were looking into an empty mudroom. I clicked my tongue for Ghost, who stepped inside with great delicacy, as if he were walking onto a thinly iced lake. I followed, with Top behind and Bunny on our six.

  The mudroom was large, with pegs for jackets and slots under bench seats for boots. Big metal bowls filled with water and dog kibble. There were photos on all the walls showing Mitrović and a variety of blond women in sailboats, on water skis, on Jet Skis, and walking on beaches. Four different women, was were what Europeans like to call American blondes—meaning long-legged, deeply tanned, with sun-streaked hair, expensive smiles, and improbably large and firm boobs. The photos could just as easily have been ads for a cosmetic surgeon, and they were just about as genuine. In every photo, Mitrović wore exactly the same kind of plastic smile.

  He was a good-looking guy in his middle forties. Very fit, glowing with health, with a tropical tan over naturally olive skin, lots of curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smile that went about one millimeter deep.

  Not entirely sure who the photos were meant to fool. Casual visitors? Government inspectors?

  Bunny produced an Anteater from his pack and turned the gain to high. It’s a device for detecting various kinds of electronics. He held it up so Top and I could see the screen. There were all kinds of electronics in the building, though the system registered no active alarms or motion sensors. Mitrović placed a lot of faith in his eight-man, two-dog security force. Dumbass.

  Top leaned close and said, “Don’t mean he doesn’t have something tricky on the door to the basement. There’s got to be something to let them know if we go waltzing down to Frankenstein’s lab.”

  “Hoo-the-hell-ah,” agreed Bunny.

  The satellite scans of the heat signatures gave a 93 percent likelihood that there was at least one floor’s worth—and possibly two—of machinery below the one we were on. Basement and maybe a subbasement.

  “So we’ll be real damned careful,” I said.

  Unfortunately, the thermal scans couldn’t pick out human signatures with all the heat from the generators. However, shipping manifests included forty beds, eight shower and toilet sets, and enough food to feed a hundred people for six months. No way to work out exact numbers, but it sounded like a party to me.

  We moved out of the mudroom into a kitchen big enough for a Manhattan restaurant, and then throughout the first floor. There were the embers of a fire in the living room hearth, but no one around. We went up a big flight of stairs in a quick, quiet single file, then took turns checking and clearing the rooms, providing cover for one another. Doing it all very quietly. The four on the left side of the stairs turned out to be two empty bedrooms, a home gym with every kind of trendy device in the catalog, and a bathroom bigger than my whole apartment. No one there.

  It wasn’t until we checked the rooms on the right side of the stairs. Top and Bunny moved down the hall to take the second bedroom, leaving the first for me. I scanned the door with an Anteater but detected no alarms. So I reached for the knob.

  But before my fingers closed around it, a voice behind me said, “Be careful, Joe. This is a bad place for you.”

  I whirled, bringing up my barrel.

  But the hallway behind me was empty.

  Ghost whipped his head around and stared. Not at the hall, but at me. There was confusion in his dark eyes. Down the hall, I saw Top watching me. My movement had alerted him, and he looked at me and past me down the empty hall, then back to me again.

  I waved him off. He lingered for a moment and then shifted back to the job at hand. Bunny had been scanning the door and did not appear to notice.

  Be careful, Joe. This is a bad place for you.

  I’d heard those words clear as day.

  But the voice.

  Fuck me.

  That voice was impossible. Achingly so.

  Those words had been spoken in the voice of my brother, Sean.

  Sean, who was three months in the cold ground of a Maryland cemetery, along with everyone else I was related to by blood.

  The shivers kept wanting to take mastery over me. My knees wanted to buckle. There were tears burning in the corners of my eyes.

  Was that who I saw in the forest?

  No.

  No, that man was older. He was …

  Oh, Christ. I knew who the man in the woods had been. My height. My basic build, but thirty years older.

  “Dad,” I breathed.

  Top and Bunny stopped, and this time, they both turned to me. I’d whispered the word, but the team channel was live. Which meant Andrea and Belle had heard it, too.

  I’m losing my shit, I thought, and no voice—living or dead—spoke out in contradiction.

  Ghost pushed against my leg with his nose. I thought he was just concerned for his master going around the bend, until I noticed that all the fur on his back was standing straight up.

  Top began moving down the hall toward me, but I waved him back. Again there was that lingering look. He did not like what he was seeing. They all knew the emotional stress I was under and how that was built on a fragile framework of a psychological makeup that could best be described as shaky. Or, less charitably, that I was deeply damaged goods.

  I made myself turn back to the bedroom door. Forced my body into an attitude of alert professionalism. At least that was the façade I was trying to sell. Top wasn’t fooled for one damned second, but we were too deep in the badlands here to back up and give me a time-out and maybe some Zyprexa or Seroquel. Personally, I wanted to drink a whole bottle of Knob Creek 100 and listen to the blues. Ideally with no working firearms on the premises.

  Lot of things I wanted, but none were likely.

  Ghost watched me with unblinking intensity. I tried to telepathically tell him I was just fine and dandy. And his expression told me I was full of shit.

  But … had he heard the voice, too? That’s how I read the situation.

  So, did that make us both crazy?

  Or …

  Not now, asshole, I snarled inside my head. Do your damned job.

  And so I squared my shoulders, girded my loins, chased the ghosts from my head, and turned the handle.

  INTERLUDE 3

  THE PLAYROOM

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  FIVE MONTHS AGO

  “He’s here.”

  The two words sent a thrill of unfiltered terror through Rafael Santoro.

  He’s here.

  He.

  The man who called himself Mr. Sunday.

  Kuga lingered in the doorway, smiling that nasty smile of
his. A knowing look in his bright eyes, too many white teeth in that grin.

  He would have made a good torturer, he mused darkly. Not professionally, but as a hobby.

  “His chopper just landed,” said Kuga. “I’ll bring him in.”

  The door closed with a soft click. An attempt at subtlety? Probably.

  Santoro rose quickly from the couch on which he had been sprawled while reading field reports. He straightened his clothes and ran fingers through his curly hair. He glanced around, deciding on what image he wanted to convey when the guest entered the room, and decided on the desk. A physical barrier that created a subjective one. The leather guest chairs had slightly shorter legs than the desk chair, which meant that once Kuga and Mr. Sunday sat, they would be looking slightly up at Santoro. Sometimes it made the guests uncomfortable, putting them at a positional disadvantage; sometimes it made Santoro, who was below-average height, feel more powerful in the moment. Today, he wanted both effects.

  He went and sat behind the desk and spent a few quick moments tidying some things up, but also staging it to look like this visit was in the middle of a hardworking day. He dug a few files out of a drawer and scattered them artfully on one edge of the desk, placing them at an angle where the tabs could be read. One was on the exoskeleton production, another was R&D on a new eugeroic drug therapy that showed real promise for increasing factory worker man-hours with existing staff.