Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  The only good part of that, as Tayshon saw it, was that the grave was right there. Close enough to touch. Offering a perfect escape hatch from the bullshit and the humiliation and the nothingness.

  On the screen, whispering to him through his earbuds, Mother Night said, “… remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

  When it was over, Tayshon bent and put his face in his hands and wept, his thin shoulders trembling as each sob rocked him. They were the happiest tears he’d ever shed. He prayed then. Not to God, but to Mother Night. Prayers of gratitude.

  Then he washed his face, opened the bathroom door, went back to his bedroom, and fished in the very back of his closet for the things Mother Night had sent him. The knives. The kilos of semtex. The detonators.

  The gun.

  He heard a sound downstairs. Isaiah’s chair scraping as he pulled into the table for his breakfast.

  Tayshon tucked the pistol into the waistband of his pants, the steel cold against belly flesh. Then he picked up the skinning knife.

  When he turned the blade this way and that he imagined he could see Isaiah’s face. Bloody and screaming.

  “Burn to shine,” said Tayshon in a voice thick with tears and strong with purpose.

  Orlando, Florida

  His name was Parker Kang.

  He was twenty years old and he was certain that he was as old as he was ever going to get.

  He was good with that.

  It was perfect.

  It was soothing to think about it.

  No more pain.

  No more humiliation.

  No more loneliness.

  No more anything.

  He sat at a desk he’d found in an office building that had been closed during the economic crash a few years ago. He and some other squatters had broken in the night after the place had been shut, moving fast because they knew that someone would be coming to remove everything of value. Parker and his friends came in quick and quiet, using skills honed from years of living hard and surviving from day to day. Each of them knew how to disable a basic security system and open a lock. There were always a lot of chicken hawks learning from older, more experienced squatters. Back when Parker was a snack rat, living off the crumbs dropped by the real players on the street, he learned everything he could. Now he was on his own and didn’t need anyone else.

  Except Mother Night.

  He needed her more than anything he ever smoked, huffed, swallowed, or spiked. He needed her voice. Her face.

  He needed her permission to step off the ledge and fall into forever.

  The laptop on his stolen desk was from her. It was nice, too. The shell was that of a MacBook Pro, but the guts were something else. Something weird that she’d designed herself. Stronger than any computer Parker had ever touched, with built-in programs that allowed him to sneak into almost anywhere. He could order food delivered from Domino’s and pay for it with fake credit card numbers. Never a kick out, never a canceled order, because the card numbers were hijacked. The pizza always showed up. Other stuff, too. FedEx and UPS deliveries with clothes and equipment. Even parts for the devices Mother Night had asked him to build. Asked. As if he would ever say no to her.

  She was the only person he believed in. The only thing he believed in.

  Parker had no god, no angels. Like most of the kids who move like ghosts through the cities, he belonged to nothing. He wasn’t like the homeless who clung to the coats of groups like Homes Not Jails and Take Back the Land. He didn’t have that kind of optimism. He didn’t give a cold rat’s dick about squatters’ rights or the plight of the homeless or any of that shit, because nothing was ever going to change.

  Not unless Mother Night made it change.

  Even then, though, even if Mother Night ignited a fire that burned down everything that was and cleared the way for something new to grow, Parker knew that he wasn’t going to live in that world. He didn’t want to. He didn’t care if the changes she wanted to make would really build a better world for the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the forgotten, and the lonely. Parker had even less politics than he had religion.

  All he wanted was to help Mother Night light those fires.

  There was a big table lining the wall opposite where he sat. Something else he’d boosted from the bankrupt office. One half of the table was filled with boxes of parts. The parts always came in individual shipments. Screws one day, housing another, specific chemicals another. Like that. Sometimes shipments from every professional delivery service, including the Post Office. And occasionally things were left in coin lockers for him, or in post office boxes. In those cases he’d get a key in the mail.

  On the other half of the table six devices were in various stages of assembly. A FedEx carton filled with brightly colored vinyl backpacks stood open at the end of the table. Each pack waiting to be filled.

  When Parker thought about those boxes, he smiled.

  Maybe it was a revenge thing after all. Just a little. A baseball bat upside the head of the kind of people he fled from when he was nine. Foster parents who think orphan kids are cash cows, dogs to whip, or something to stick their dicks into. People like the losers at child welfare who can’t think their way around regulations in any way that does real good for the kids in the meat grinder. Politicians who fuck up the system with regulations because they’re in the pockets of landlords, big business, credit card and health care companies.

  So, yeah. Revenge, not politics. He didn’t want to see the system changed. He wanted to see it burn. Then he wanted to dive into those flames, let them consume him, and vanish into ash and smoke.

  That’s what Mother Night promised him.

  It’s what she whispered in his ear that first day.

  The whole thing started weirdly. He came home from a day of panhandling at a long traffic light on Sand Hill Lake Road in Orlando and found his door ajar. At the time, he was squatting in a foreclosed house miles away from the tourist areas. The house was in a pretty good neighborhood, but there must have been some kind of legal thing going on about the title, because it remained empty for over a year. Parker moved in, sealed some windows with black plastic sheeting to keep light from escaping, had a friend help him move his furniture in, and took possession. He figured he had a month before he would have to move. That timing seemed to work for him. If the place was shittier, then he might have stayed three months.

  But when he came in that day he saw an envelope on the floor. His name was written on it.

  Parker wasn’t sure how to react to that. Run, or be relieved because this was probably from someone he knew. He slit it open with his knife. Inside was a short letter and a key. And two twenty-dollar bills. Crisp and new. The letter read:

  Parker …

  You are not in danger. I will never hurt you. This key will open a box at the Your Mailroom office on International Drive. Inside are gifts. If you want to use them to help me, then I welcome you. If you don’t want to help me, keep the gifts and use them to find your happiness. You are under no obligation.

  I have been where you are. Every night when I close my eyes I can see the monsters and I can hear the echo of my own screams. This country has betrayed its own people. It has a cancer of the soul. The only action is direct action. I am going to cut the heart out of this country. I will light a fire that no one can ignore.

  I will do this for you and for me and for all of us.

  I cannot do this alone.

  It was printed on a computer, but it was hand-signed.

  Mother Night

  That night Parker got some friends and moved his stuff out of there. Over the next few days he began casually passing the Your Mailroom place, checking it out. It was one of those stores where you could rent a mailbox. It gave you a mailing address, and it was used by a lot of squatters. Parker never used it, but he knew people who did. He also knew that cops were aware of this, too.

  It took almost three weeks of burning curiosity and nearly crippling paranoia befo
re he walked into the mail service store and used the key. He waited for a time when it was busy, when there were a lot of people in there. He slipped in, opened the mailbox, and peered inside. There was a computer case. Old and battered. Parker bit his lip as doubt chewed him. Then he snatched out the bag, slung it over his shoulder, relocked the box, and got out of there.

  An hour later, when he was in a quiet, secure place, he opened the bag.

  Inside was the MacBook along with all the necessary cables and chargers. Cards for Starbucks, Panera, and other places that had free wi-fi. He later discovered that each card had one hundred dollars on it, and when they got low they were recharged by someone else. There was an envelope in one pocket of the bag that contained thirty twenty-dollar bills. The last parcel included in the bag was a thick stack of CD-ROMs loaded with games. Edgy stuff. Games that challenged him. Parker had played enough stolen games to be very good.

  And there was another note.

  When you trust me, when you are ready to help me light the fires, send me an e-mail to the address below.

  It was signed by Mother Night, and below her name was a Yahoo e-mail address.

  All of that was months ago.

  Parker had learned to trust Mother Night.

  He had learned to love her.

  Every night he played the games. The package had included multiple versions of Grand Theft Auto, as well as select versions of God of War III, Manhunt, Dead Rising, MadWorld, Saints Row 2, Gears of War, Postal 2, Call of Duty, Splatterhouse, and Solder of Fortune. Plus there were other games in there, stored on disks with titles handwritten on them. Anarchy I through IV, and one highly technical though very difficult strategy game called Burn to Shine, which had one side adventure in which you had to break into a high-security government facility. That one was a real bitch.

  Parker later learned that when he played those games his scores were sent to Mother Night. Every time he beat a difficult level on a speedrun, she sent him money and food along with notes of praise.

  Those notes were the only praise Parker ever remembered receiving from an adult. If there had been others in his life, the meat grinder had torn them from him.

  Mother Night sent him links to videos in which he could see her and hear her. She was beautiful. Asian, like him, but maybe black, too. Or something. Her skin was darker than an Asian’s, and she had a lot of piercings, dark glasses, and a wig. A disguise, but that was okay. That was smart.

  Some of those videos had been recorded for him alone, and in those she said his name and spoke as if he were in the same room with her.

  At other times the video was clearly intended for multiple viewers. A family. Her family. A family to which he belonged, and wanted to belong. But a family he knew nothing about. Not its faces, not its names, and not its numbers. From the way she spoke, though, Parker had the impression that there were a lot of people out there.

  Like him.

  At first he was ambivalent about that. Jealous that there were others she cared about. But he knew that was sentimental and stupid. Later he came to appreciate the fact that he had siblings for the first time in his life. Sure, in a way this was another foster family, but before Mother Night he had never felt like he belonged. And he’d never felt like he was understood.

  Month after month the videos came, and he quickly discovered that when he went back and tried to view them again, they were gone.

  Smart.

  So smart.

  Then today, a video had just popped up on his computer. On his laptop and, he later learned, on millions of computers, and all over TV and the Net.

  Mother Night spoke to the whole world.

  However, buried within that global message was one directed only to the members of her family. And to him.

  She’d said, “Mother Night wants to tell all of her children, everyone within the sound of my voice, all of the sleeping dragons waiting to rise—now is the time.”

  Those were her words.

  He smiled with such deep contentment that it was nearly orgasmic.

  He could almost smell the sulfur on the match as she struck it.

  You have to burn to shine.

  Parker got up from his computer, crossed the room to the table, and completed the last few small steps necessary with the waiting devices. Then, still smiling, he began carefully placing each device into a separate backpack.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 6:36 a.m.

  Nikki Bloomberg was the third most senior member of the DMS computer division. Only Yoda had more seniority, and then of course there was Bug.

  Nikki had been part of Bug’s team for nearly five years and she loved her job. Even though she worked in a glass-walled office buried a hundred feet below Floyd Bennett Field, she felt like she was an international woman of mystery. A superspy with superpowers. Working with MindReader had that effect.

  Each senior member of the computer team—variously known as Bug’s Thugs, the Igors, or the Nerd Herd, depending on who was sending the e-mail—ran a different aspect of the MindReader network. Yoda was head of cyberintrusion, and it was his job to make sure that no opposing system could lock its doors to MindReader. That meant that he had to write code or edit code all day. It wasn’t a job Nikki wanted.

  Her job was to manage the pattern search team. MindReader had more than seven hundred pattern recognition subroutines, each of which could be used separately and all of which could be combined into a massive assault on raw data. All day long her team received notices in the form of small pop-up windows with keywords and case numbers. Each pop-up contained a hot link to a data cascade where everything related to the keyword was collated. It took a certain kind of mind to be able to interpret that data and make sense of it. Nikki had that kind of mind. A super anal-retentive skill set that was unattractive in, say, relationships, but invaluable within the DMS. She also had a photographic memory, without which she could never even attempt that job.

  She was at her desk rerouting data threads from the pop-ups when a new one blipped onto her screen. This one came with a red flag in one corner, indicating it might belong to one of the major active cases. Nikki opened the link in the pop-up and suddenly her screen was filled with a fragment of a video clip. An Asian woman speaking directly to the camera. The phrase MindReader had plucked out and flagged for attention was this: “’Cause remember, kids, sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

  The software pulled the words burn to shine out of the sentence and floated them as text on the screen. The file to which this was attached was one of Joe Ledger’s.

  The Mother Night case.

  One of the few DMS cases that was unsolved.

  “Oh my god,” breathed Nikki. “She’s back.”

  She hunched over her computer and began hitting the keys that would ring alarms all through the halls of power.

  Interlude Three

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field

  Brooklyn, New York

  Seven Years Ago

  Artemisia Bliss sat at one end of a massive oak conference table. Three people sat at the far end. Dr. William Hu and two strangers, a big white man and a short black woman. The woman looked oddly like Whoopi Goldberg. She could have been her twin, except that she had eyes that were as flat and cold as a Nile crocodile and a mouth that was permanently set in a frown of disapproval.

  Hu said, “You understand that anything we discuss here is strictly confidential.”

  “Okay,” said Artemisia. “Do I need to sign some kind of nondisclosure form?”

  The black woman’s disapproving mouth hardened.

  The big white man opened a briefcase but instead of producing government forms, he removed a package of Nilla wafers, opened it, selected a cookie, bit off a corner, and munched quietly. He placed the package on the table but did not offer a cookie to anyone else. No one asked him for one.


  Artemisia waited. She didn’t know who he or the woman was, but it was clear from Hu’s demeanor that they were his superiors. Hu’s manner had become immediately deferential when they’d entered this conference room, particularly to the white man. The big man looked sixtyish, but it was the kind of middle age that came with no diminution of personal power. He wore a very expensive Italian suit, an understated hand-painted silk tie, and tinted sunglasses that effectively hid any expression in his eyes. The lenses looked flat and did not appear to have any corrective curves, so she guessed that their sole purpose was to keep people from reading his eyes. That was interesting. Either he was the most closed-in person in the world, or he was aware that his eyes were the only weak link in otherwise impervious armor. Whoever he was, Artemisia was certain that he was in charge of this place. He had a natural authority and sense of power that was palpable, and yet he did not appear to be deliberately projecting an alpha dog vibe. He simply was the alpha. Here and, she thought, probably in most situations in which he found himself. She was certain she’d never met anyone quite like him.

  His vibe was extremely scary. And sexy.

  She doubted he would have showed off by making a comment about her name and the connection to the artist, as Hu had done. While with Hu that was mildly flattering, the doctor’s energy was more earthy and real. This man was far more aloof, and probably didn’t need the ego stroke of wanting to appear hyperintelligent and well-informed.