Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

Bug was able to see some of this rippling across the entire internet. New software, reports of impossible intrusions into systems guaranteed to be unbeatable, all manner of cybercrimes. A lot of it appeared random, but Nikki Bloom, the head of the pattern search team, had already built a case to the contrary.

  “If it were just one or two, or even six or ten, random big-profile hacks, I’d say it was just … random,” Nikki had told him the other day. “But then there have been some serious intrusions to government computers, university labs at MIT and Princeton, and even a military base in Germany. Radically different targets when viewed from one perspective, but when you look closer and see how their cybersecurity was configured and how it was bypassed, well … it’s obvious.”

  Obvious to Nikki or to Bug was not obvious to most. Even some of the members of the computer team needed some handholding through the explanation. As did Scott Wilson, who was more diplomat than operative at heart, despite some years pulling triggers for the SAS and MI6. Church, of course, grasped it at once.

  When that briefing had concluded, Church took Bug aside.

  “I think it’s fair to say that Kuga has a bunch of real hitters on his bench,” he said when they were alone.

  “He does,” agreed Bug, “and they’re doing some damage. Weirdly, though, they’re not doing a lot of measurable harm to what Nikki calls the ‘true targets.’ Mind you, they could have left spyware, malware, and viruses inside Trojan horses that aren’t easy to find unless they’re activated. The real damage is kind of a smash-and-grab attitude toward the test targets. The ones they experiment on before hitting the true targets. Some of those groups were hit bad. Doctors Without Borders lost an entire year of Ebola field research. They removed dozens of key world heritage sites from the UNESCO mainframes. They blanked out the donor emails and contact information for the World Food Programme—you know, those guys who won the Nobel Prize a while ago. That’s vandalism for vandalism’s sake because none of that helps Kuga sell weapons and crap on the black market. These assholes are doing it because they can, and the bigger asshole paying their bills probably thinks it’s fun.”

  “No argument,” said Church. “That vandalism is also hurting a lot of people.”

  “Tell you the truth, boss, but that really pisses me off.”

  Church had looked at him for a long moment. “Then perhaps you should direct that anger in useful directions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Church smiled. Not a big smile, and certainly not a warm one. “I’m certain something will occur to you. Oh, and Bug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make it hurt.”

  INTERLUDE 9

  THE PAVILION

  BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER

  STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  Eve sat on a chair and watched the nerd herd—her name for the technicians here at the Pavilion—finish their work on the Fixer.

  The man, Spiro, was a volunteer, but they’d strapped him to a chair anyway, and the chair was bolted to the floor. Six armed guards stood around in a large circle, rifles in their hands, barrels pointed down but ready to snap up if things went south.

  As they had several times before. The bloodstains were still there, somehow locked into the surface of the concrete floor. She idly wondered why they hadn’t used poured linoleum for the floor. Much easier to clean. Adam had taught her that.

  And Daddy would have used a tarp. He was very neat and tidy. Always was. He could cut someone to pieces and not get a drop on him. He wasn’t like her. She liked getting bloody, but Eve understood that her appetites were not the same as Rafael Santoro’s. He was not crazy, and Eve was absolutely certain she was. She liked being crazy. There were clinical names for it, but who cared? When she and Adam were working their way through the convention circuits before Daddy recruited them, she’d become aware that her mind was wired entirely differently from anyone else’s. Except Adam’s, of course. They were two sides of the same coin.

  “We’re ready, HK,” said the tech, stepping back. Even with the test subject restrained and under guard, the technician was sweating heavily. Eve could smell the fear stink on him.

  Pussy, she thought.

  Spiro did not look particularly threatening. He was fit, sure, but not particularly brawny. Pale skin that hadn’t seen enough sun, buzz-cut black hair, lifeless brown eyes, and the beginnings of a beard. If she passed him on the street or in a club, she wouldn’t give him a second look, and not even much of a first glance, either.

  But everyone in the room was terrified of him.

  Well, not of him. They were scared of what he would become.

  HK, in a pencil skirt and electric-blue blouse, stood with a clipboard pressed to her chest as if it were a suit of armor. Her glasses were perched on her nose, and Eve saw a sheen of perspiration glistening on her forehead and upper lip.

  She wished she had popcorn.

  “Everyone on their marks,” said HK crisply. The six rifle barrels rose and pointed at the Fixer in the chair. “Bryan, you may begin.”

  The tech—Bryan—nodded and walked over to a small portable computer console. Beside the console was a cart laden with a device whose name Eve could never quite remember. One of those long technical names. She’d nicknamed it “the juicer,” and everyone else, even HK, picked that up.

  Thin tubes ran from the base of the juicer across the floor and up to IV ports in Spiro’s wrists and throat. Bryan bent over his computer, and for a few moments, the only sounds in the room were the tappity-tap-tap of his fingers on the keys and the test subject’s labored breathing. Then something went click inside the machine, and Eve saw liquid follow through the tubes. Two lines were clear, two were a pale amber. Spiro’s eyes clicked toward the tubes, and his fingers gripped the arms of the chair. Eve saw his muscles tighten as he braced for whatever was coming.

  “This will work,” said Bryan.

  “Oh, it had better,” said HK coldly. “You made a lot of promises, and I passed them up the line. We will all be disappointed if anything goes wrong. Again.”

  Spiro was sweating worse than Bryan now, though the tech had gone gray pale.

  Then the fluids reached the IV ports and entered Spiro’s bloodstream.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  “Bryan?” queried HK, a note of warning, even of threat in her voice.

  “Give it another second,” whispered the tech. Other scientists were grouped behind him, but since Bryan began the process, they’d inched back. Either afraid of Spiro or afraid to stand too close to Bryan if this was another failure.

  The scream was so sudden. So loud and shocking that it seemed to punch Eve in the brain. Spiro didn’t even have time to throw back his head—the scream just ripped its way out of his chest with such force that blood flecked the Fixer’s lips. The sound was so enormous that everyone shrank back. Even the guards flinched. Had they been less professional and had their fingers on their triggers rather than laid along the sides, Spiro would have been riddled with bullets.

  The scream rose and rose …

  Then it stopped.

  Spiro clamped his jaws shut as every muscle in his body went into a spasm of such tight rigidity that even his goggling eyes seemed to swell. His lips were curled back from bloody teeth. Veins stood out everywhere, and Spiro’s pale skin was flushed a dangerous purple red. Red veins whipsawed across the whites of his eyes.

  “Talk to me, Bryan,” growled HK.

  “I…,” he began, but then bent over the computer again, typing furiously. Then Eve heard his tap-taps slow. “Wait…”

  HK snapped her head around to look at him. “What?”

  “Look,” whispered Bryan, pointing.

  HK turned back and stared. Spiro’s color was fading from the violent flush to a paler, humaner tone. The veins still popped on his arms and neck, but now they looked like a bodybuilder’s after some heavy sets. Nothing looked like it was going to explode. And the man was b
reathing. Panting, but not in a labored way. Eve thought there was a sense of exhilaration to it. His eyes were still strange, though, with the sclera now an even shade of scarlet.

  “How are his vitals?” asked HK.

  “Leveling out,” said Bryan with a sense of wonder in his voice. “My god, HK … he’s leveling out.”

  Everyone stared. Eve even found herself leaning forward, her breath held, fists balled.

  HK took a tentative step forward, and one of the armed Fixers moved up to stand beside her, rifle stock tucked into his shoulder.

  “I got you, HK,” he said quietly, though clearly loudly enough for Spiro to hear. If he could hear. The last test subject had stroked out by this point. And the one before that kept screaming and screaming until something in his heart ruptured. A valve, Eve thought.

  HK spoke very calmly and slowly.

  “Spiro?” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  The Fixer blinked several times and looked momentarily confused. Then he gave a single jerky nod.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Spiro licked his lips, either unaware of the salty blood on his lips or past the point of caring.

  “Y-yes…”

  “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. Tell me your name. Can you do that?”

  The confused expression came and went, came and went. His lips formed the words several times before he finally managed to put sound to them.

  “Spiro … Spiro Frangopoulos.”

  It began as a gasp but firmed up quickly. He repeated his name several times, nodding, as if it were a returning memory.

  “And who am I?”

  “You’re HK,” he said immediately. “You’re the boss lady.”

  “Excellent,” said HK, throwing a radiant smile in Bryan’s direction. “Now, Spiro, tell me what it is we’re doing. Tell me what you volunteered for.”

  “I…” Spiro paused and licked his lips. “I’m a…”

  “Go on … say it.”

  Spiro took a big breath. “I’m a god,” he said.

  “Yessss,” said HK.

  Eve jumped to her feet and ran over to the Fixer.

  “No, wait!” cried HK, but it was too late. Eve began unbuckling the straps that held Spiro in place. When one proved resistant, she whipped a knife from the sheath on her left thigh and slashed the straps. It did not matter to her—or to Spiro, it seemed—that the blade sliced into him, too. The Fixers with the rifles threw worried, questioning looks at HK, but she held up a hand, telling them to wait.

  Eve cut the last of the straps and then viciously jerked the IV tubes from Spiro’s veins. He began to slide out of the chair, but Eve grabbed him and pulled him forward and up, making him stand. He held on to her, swaying dangerously for a moment, but then mastered his balance.

  Eve looked up into his blazing red eyes.

  “Say it,” she growled. “Say it again. Say it.”

  He towered over her, his body swollen and immensely powerful. His hands on her shoulders, inches from her throat. His fingers twitched and pressed into her skin, but Eve didn’t care.

  “Say it again,” she snarled.

  “I’m a god,” declared Spiro.

  And Eve pulled his head down and kissed him.

  CHAPTER 33

  VAN DER VYVER BIOMEDICAL ASSOCIATES

  JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

  His name was Dr. Gerald Engelbrecht, and he lay dying in darkness.

  It startled him. He spent so much of his life studying the phenomenon of human mortality but had never really considered his own. He was aware that he had lived forty-two years, many of them good years, and expected to live at least as long yet, then he would be gone. He had no will, no living trust, no thoughts about how he might die—heart attack, cancer. Something natural. Something distant.

  Now Engelbrecht was abundantly aware of the concept of personal mortality. Nothing else was as real or as present to him. Not the lab he’d spent eight years designing, building, running. Not his work, which had been everything to him—biomechanical engineering, biomedical implants, microminiaturization, and the fascinating related science. Not the money in his offshore accounts in the Seychelles. Not the bonuses that fattened those accounts whenever his team made a breakthrough, as they had five times in the last two years. Not even his wife and grown twin daughters. None of that mattered. All of it was at a distance now, blurred as if behind frosted glass.

  All that mattered now was that he was dying. That he could die. That death would come looking for him. Not with some discovered malignancy in colon or prostate in his golden years. Not a drunk driver punching through a red light thirty miles an hour above the posted speed limit. Not sudden pain in his left arm on the seventh hole, two under par and an easy line from his ball to the cup.

  Despite what he did for a living, and who he did it for, death of a violent and immediate kind was never something he ever considered—not for one moment—as something that could be focused on him. Aimed at him.

  Now it was impossible to think of anything else.

  Engelbrecht was dying there in the darkness.

  He couldn’t understand why it was so damned dark. There were fires burning in the lab. He could feel the heat.

  Pain was a monster that seemed to crouch on his chest, crushing the air from him, feeding on his pain and his astonishment. The heat of the fires was getting closer. The smoke was cloying, but when he coughed, the pain spiked into impossibility. Engelbrecht wanted to scream, but he didn’t have the breath for it, so the pain stayed trapped in his chest, charring the walls of his lungs in its frustration.

  Two words managed to sneak past the stricture, though. Not as screams but in a strangely conversational tone.

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  And a voice said, “That could change.”

  It was a man’s voice, reaching him through the walls of his pain and the veils of utter blackness that clouded Engelbrecht’s eyes.

  It was he. The killer. The one who smashed the world apart with his guns and knife and that dreadful white dog. He was still here. And … close, too.

  “I … I don’t want to die,” said Engelbrecht, his voice still reasonable. “I’m not ready.”

  “I don’t care,” said the killer. Was he closer now?

  Engelbrecht licked his lips. “Will you help me?”

  He knew it was a stupid question, but it came out anyway and in a different tone of voice. Plaintive, but not in a good way. Childish, almost wheedling. He had a vague desire to apologize.

  “I asked you a question,” said the killer. “Clock’s running out for you to answer.”

  “I don’t remember the question,” said Engelbrecht vaguely. Had he, in fact, been asked a question? If so, was it in this lifetime or some other distant incarnation? Perhaps in a dream? Or was this the dream and soon he would wake up? He distantly wondered what dreams of violence and fire meant.

  “I’ll ask one last time,” said the killer slowly. He had an American accent, but there was something odd about his voice. The timbre had a quality that Engelbrecht could not define. It felt somehow darker than it should, though he had no idea how such a thing was possible. “Two questions, really. Where is Kuga? Where is Santoro?”

  “But I … I don’t know where they are.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No! I’ve never even met them. Everything goes through … goes through an intermediary!” cried Engelbrecht. “I have no idea where to find—”

  “Who is the intermediary?” asked the killer. “Lie to me and I’ll know.”

  Engelbrecht’s mouth was so dry and the heat from the fires was so intense. Terror filled his soul, crowding out any chance he would ever think of lying to this man.

  “His name is Fong. Alexander Fong,” he said hoarsely. “Chinese, but from Italy, I think. His accent is Italian.”

  “How do you contact him?”

  “He contacts me.”

  “No … there has t
o be a way to contact him if there is a problem. You’re running out of time. Tell me right damn now.”

  “Email,” blurted Engelbrecht. “It’s in my sent messages on my phone.”

  “What’s your password?”

  Engelbrecht told him.

  There was a silence filled by the sound of the fire devouring the room.

  “Please,” croaked Engelbrecht, “will you help me? I don’t want to burn.”

  But there was no answer from the man. Not a whisper, not a word. Not even a growl from that white devil of a dog.

  And in his personal darkness, Dr. Gerald Engelbrecht burned.

  CHAPTER 34

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Church was back in his apartment, but he was alone now. Lilith was gone, taking with her all that unique and complex energy, her grace, her insights, and her magic. Although theirs was a relationship that could never be normal by any metric, it mattered very deeply to him. It mattered to love, and be loved, by someone who understood him. Someone of equal power and who was a complete individual. Neither defined themselves by the other, nor needed approval or validation.

  The love, though. That mattered. It amused him to think that so many of the people who knew him, good and bad, enemies and allies, past and present, regarded Church as a cold and unemotional person. A machine. A freak.

  He’d switched the music to Miles Davis. Blue Moods. He’d met Aunt Sallie at a jazz club in Berlin, where Davis was test-driving the songs that would eventually make up that album. Charlie Mingus had invited Church to the date, and they’d sat together through three full sets. That was the night Aunt Sallie walked into his life. She’d never been a particularly pretty woman, but her level of personal power and integrity made her beautiful. Now Auntie was old and dying, and Church endured.

  It was all the proof he ever needed that the world was mad.

  Even so, the memory of that night was a calm place for him to put his emotions. Even Mingus—the legendary “Angry Man of Jazz”—had been in a mellow mood, even when between-set table conversation turned to politics. During the sets, of course, no one spoke. Church and Mingus shared the view that if you went to hear someone play, then you should be quiet and experience it. Church remembered another night, at the Five Spot in New York, when Mingus had been so angry at a heckler that he picked up his bass, an instrument worth $20,000, and destroyed it in front of a shocked crowd.