CHAPTER 71
ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
More and more of my memory came back as I was driving to my hotel.
Like where the hell my hotel was. And that the room key was in my soiled pants in the gym bag. I’d have to use the lavatory off the lobby to get it, then wash my hands again before heading to the elevators. Logistical thoughts like that.
At first.
As I drove, though, more and more of it was filtering back. It wasn’t like I had true blackouts. More like some kind of fugue state like what happens when the Cop or the Killer take over and drive my mental bus. More extreme than that, though, because I’d never had to fish for exact memories before. This was more insidious, as if the Darkness wanted to keep things from me. And maybe that was still happening. It wasn’t like being possessed by a demon or anything silly like that. My personality was never canceled out but merely overridden.
And I’d liked it. I’d accepted it. Yielded to it.
No exorcist was going to declare me clean, because I wasn’t. Even in the worst moments of excess, I was still holding the gun or the knife. I couldn’t take the coward’s excuse of saying it was temporary insanity. It wasn’t temporary, and—let’s face it—I’ve been insane by one metric or another since I was fourteen.
No, this was me. The question was whether the Darkness was off the clock for good, or if he would join my cadre of personalities from now on.
If that was the case, then …
Well, once this was all over, I might decide that I needed to be all over, too. I knew exactly how to do it.
Immediately, Junie’s face came into my thoughts. I could feel her out there, hurt by my silence, aching to know how I was. What was worse was that I knew she’d forgive me. Somehow, she would.
And I was not worth her forgiveness. I wasn’t worth anyone’s kindness or generosity of spirit.
When this was over, even if the Darkness was somehow excised, I knew I was done with RTI. No way they’d ever let me back in the field. No way they ever should.
We made our way through the streets, me taking a complexer route than was necessary because the habit of checking for—and foiling—tails was too deeply ingrained. Not sure how long it took to get there. Hadn’t looked at the car’s digital clock. That worried me, because it meant that, although some safety habits were working, others were not. I’d have to watch that.
I parked four blocks from the hotel and walked the rest of the way, carrying the bags, with Ghost beside me. I’d taken a few minutes to thoroughly wipe down the car before abandoning it. Kept the keys, though, just in case I needed to make a fast exit. If things were cool, I’d toss the keys into a culvert. Wasn’t sure how quickly the deaths at the lab would be discovered or how fast things would be investigated. A scientist with his pants missing would logically and ultimately lead the cops to check the cars in the lot. There would be one missing, and it would eventually be found. If I had time later, maybe I’d go out and swap the plates. But not now.
At the hotel, I went straight to the elevator, which was located between the twin reception desks, and rode up to the tenth floor. I had a room with two queen beds. One for me, one for Ghost. All I could think about was getting out of dead men’s clothes and taking another shower. Maybe order some room service and upload the information I got from De Vries and send it via a rerouting system to Church.
In my more lucid moments, that’s what I’d been doing.
My brain was still sorting through what De Vries had said about the American Operation. It seemed improbable. Definitely ambitious, even grandiose. Which made me wonder if it was legit. Had the terrified scientist lied to me?
No, whispered a dark and ugly voice from way down deep inside my head.
We reached my room, and I swiped the key card.
Suddenly, Ghost went tense, sniffing at the door before I even opened it. He’s trained to give me clear signals so that I immediately understood if there was a threat, and if so, what level of threat.
But he just stood there, sniffing. Damned near frowning. He looked up at me with quizzical brown dog eyes.
I had no weapons except in the bag, and they were covered with drying blood. If I got one out, it would leave bloodstains on the carpet right outside my room.
I began to back away. There was still time to run, to get to one of my other rooms here in the hotel. There were weapons in each, hidden where even room maids wouldn’t find them.
Before I got very far, the door opened.
A man stood there. Shorter than me. Slim and fit. He had a pistol in his hand, but the barrel was pointing at the floor.
“It’s your own damned room, Ledger,” said Toys. “Might as well come in.”
PART 4
MOVING PIECES
There are some sordid minds, formed of slime and filth,
to whom interest and gain are what glory and virtue are to superior souls;
they feel no other pleasure but to acquire money.
—LES CARACTERES BY JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
If you prick us do we not bleed?
If you tickle us do we not laugh?
If you poison us do we not die?
And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
—THE MERCHANT OF VENICE BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER 72
ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
I pushed him back and kicked the door shut. He didn’t like being pushed, but he didn’t resist, either. Ghost, who—despite everything—liked Toys, gave me a strange look but didn’t interfere. I pointed to a chair by a small table near the window.
“Sit,” I ordered, and Toys sat. So, too, did Ghost.
“What in the wide blue fuck are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Looking for you,” he said. “As are half of the covert operations groups around the bloody world.”
“But you found me,” I said. “Not thrilled.”
“Try to imagine how much I care.”
“Two things,” I said. “How did you find me, and why are you even looking?”
“Finding you was easy. I had a good idea of what you’re hunting for, and maybe even a better idea than you have for who to ask. I still have contacts. What our friend Mr. Church would call ‘friends in the industry.’”
“You mean terrorists and psychopaths.”
“In a word.” He smiled a faint, condescending smile. “You’ve been blundering through Ohan’s old network. People have noticed, and patterns have emerged. The only difficult thing in all this was trying to make sense of why you’re not dead already. Kuga and Santoro want your head on a pike. Surprised they haven’t set a trap.”
“They have.”
He looked at me, waiting for more, but I hoped his seat was comfortable because he’d be waiting a long time for that.
“As to the why,” he said after a small shrug, “I think you know why.”
“Is this some kind of penance thing?”
“First, fuck you. Second, try again.”
As the implication of that sank in, I felt my knees getting weak. I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked past him, out the window. Seeing nothing, not even the curtains.
“How is she?” I asked after a long time.
Toys took a minute with that. I could feel him studying me. Could almost hear the wheels turning in his head.
We have a complicated relationship. Basically, we hate each other. When I first met him, he was the personal assistant cum attack dog for Sebastian Gault, the rich pharmaceuticals mogul who was trying to game the system by creating a bioweapon so terrifying that the whole drug industry would have to go into high gear to try to create a counteragent. His company, not one of the biggest in the field, would make billions, and the relatively small size of his firm when compared to Merck, Pfizer, and the others would be useful camouflage. The problem was that the pathogen, a weaponized prion-based disease form, was actually
too good. It had a 100 percent infection rate, a 100 percent kill ratio, and was highly communicable. For all intents and purposes, it was an honest-to-god practical zombie plague. Had it gotten off the leash, planet Earth would likely be Disneyland for the living dead. And it was that case that resulted in my being drafted by Mr. Church.
Then Toys and Gault resurfaced when his boss was hired to be the King of Plagues by Hugo Vox. Once again, Gault concocted a deadly pathogen—in that instance, it was an airborne version of Ebola.
And the third time, he was more or less Vox’s houseboy during a gig in Iran where a group of genetically engineered freaks were planning on detonating nukes in the Middle East oil fields.
Now, granted, during all that, Toys was gradually edging away from what Gault and Vox were doing, and he ultimately betrayed both men, but that didn’t change the fact that Toys had a lot of blood on his hands. Innocent blood, as well as that of his employers’ competitors.
But then Church surprised the hell out of all of us by offering Toys a very weird deal. One I struggle to understand to this day. He gave Toys a chance to change his life path and do measurable good in the world by giving him a massive amount of money to invest in projects and programs of a beneficial nature. Toys founded FreeTech, with the intention of taking the really nasty technologies that guys like me took away from people like his former employers and repurposing them to benefit humanity. Junie came to work for him, and although it’s true that Junie is the primary driving force behind FreeTech, it was Toys’s idea.
Also, in the years since, Toys has several times put his life on the line to protect Junie when the enemies Church and I have made tried to damage our efficiency by hurting those we love. Toys even saved the lives of Rudy and Circe and their first baby.
I told Toys a little while back—after one of those incidents—that although we’ll never be friends and that I didn’t forgive what he’d done in the past, he and I were no longer at war. However, that doesn’t mean we bonded.
Now, of course, the world had changed. Santoro slaughtered my family, nearly killed Junie and me, and I have become so comprehensively fucked in the head that maybe I have no stones left to throw at Toys. I cannot say with any real certainty that every life I’ve taken over these last weeks has been a justified kill. I’d love to say that, but I really don’t know. There are too many blacked-out spaces in my memory that could be my fragile brain trying to hide the truth from me.
We sat there in our silence. I wondered if he was going through the same process of thought that I was, and when I looked at him, I knew he had been. His eyes were hard as marble, and there was no smirk. For a moment, I saw behind the veil of his practiced defenses, and there was the real man. Hurt, ashamed, angry, filled with the kind of refined self-loathing that comes from deep self-awareness.
Then he saw me looking, and the shutters dropped behind his eyes and that sly, nasty little smirk of his reappeared.
“How’s Junie?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, she’s effing wonderful. Skips along singing tra-la all day long. How do you bloody think she is, you dreary git? You lose your damned mind and vanish from the radar without so much as a postcard to let her know you haven’t been turned into fish chum. She was hurt, too, remember. Or are you so self-involved that you forget she lost family, too? Maybe not blood relations, but she—for some unfathomable reason—loves you with her whole heart. She doesn’t have a family, and so yours became hers. She watched them die. She lost them, too. And she nearly died. So, sure, she’s the happiest girl in the world, you dick.”
God, how I wanted to punch him.
God, how I wished he’d just shoot me.
Fuck.
Junie.
God help me.
CHAPTER 73
ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
I had no answer to what Toys had just said. We both knew he was dead right.
Instead, I got up, took clothes from the dresser, went and turned on the water mix in the shower, then stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway.
“Order room service,” I said. “Get some for Ghost, too. I don’t know when’s the last time I fed him. I’m going to take a shower.”
“That’s it? I come all this way and you decide to take a shower?”
“That’s all I can do for now,” I said honestly. “Order something to drink, too, and I don’t mean coffee. We’ll eat, and then we’ll see if there’s anything more to talk about.”
He studied me for a long, cold time. I expected some caustic remark, but instead, he merely nodded. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.
I stripped off the clothes, wadded them up, and shoved all of it into the trash can. I’d collect it later and dispose of it somewhere else. Then I stepped into the shower and stood for a long, long time with the hot water smashing me between the shoulder blades.
“Junie…,” I murmured. “Junie, my love … I’m so damned sorry.”
Saying the words to myself because I was too ashamed and too much of a coward to call her. Too weak to even send an email for fear that it would somehow infect her with the darkness that seemed to own my body and soul.
“I’m so sorry.”
I wondered, not for the first time, if I would ever see her again.
I did not have to wonder if I would ever deserve to see her. I already knew the answer to that.
The shower curtain was opaque and rippled from the breeze created by the water. I saw it darken a moment and was about to growl at Toys to tell him I didn’t need him to wash my back, but when I peered around the edge, the bathroom was empty.
That was strange. I was positive there had been someone standing on the other side of the plastic. I let it settle into place again and waited.
Nothing happened.
After almost a full minute, I began to sneer at myself for being spooked by the shadows in my own head. So, I poured some shampoo into my palm and began working up a thick lather. I scrubbed my scalp until it hurt, rinsed, repeated.
The shower wasn’t huge, and my shoulder kept pushing against the curtain.
And then something pushed back.
I recoiled, then whipped the curtain back, my eyes still filled with soap, but my hands ready to fight.
There, in the blear of vision, in a microsecond before the water rinsed the suds from my eyes, I saw a figure. Only a hazy outline, but there for sure. A tall man, big as I, but older. He was turned away from me, but I could see his face in the mirror.
My knees buckled at once, and I sank to the bottom of the stall as water splashed on me and bounced out, pooling on the floor.
The figure was gone as soon as I blinked my eyes.
I’d seen it, though.
The set of the shoulders, the dark hair, those familiar eyes.
Eyes I’d known my whole life but set into a face of charred flesh and exposed bone. A smile missing all the teeth that had been blown out when the bomb went off.
It had been my brother, Sean.
And even though he was gone—the illusion or hallucinogen or whatever it was ended—there was a scent lingering in the air. The sharp, rancid, cooked-meat stink of burned human flesh.
CHAPTER 74
ROTTERDAM THE HAGUE AIRPORT
SOUTH HOLLAND, THE NETHERLANDS
Stafford’s phone rang as soon as he cleared customs.
Because only one person had the number of that burner, he answered right away.
“Talk to me, son,” said Kuga.
“I’m in Rotterdam.”
“The fuck are you doing there?”
“My job,” said Stafford.
“You know where he is?”
“I know that he came here,” said Stafford.
“Where is he?” asked Kuga. “I mean exactly.”
“Not sure exactly. His MO is to check into a large hotel. A dog-friendly one, which limits things. And usefully located. I’ll find him.”
There was a pause.
“I know,” said Stafford and ended the call.
CHAPTER 75
ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
When I came out of the bathroom—god only knows how much later—Toys was busy with a fillet of Dover sole in a parmesan and herb crust. A bottle of Puligny-Montrachet rested in an ice bucket.
“Ah,” he said, “you didn’t drown.” He sounded sad about that.
Ghost was on the floor beneath the window eating some kind of sausage links with the odd delicacy he always displays when eating. He glanced up at me, but I got no tail wag.
I sat on the edge of the bed in slacks and an undershirt and lifted the silver lid on the tray intended for me. There was a steaming bowl of pea soup and a large plate of beef served on a salad with smoked eel and marinated mushrooms. Instead of ordering wine for me, he’d ordered six bottles of a strong Trappist blond beer. I opened one of those with the supplied church key and drank the whole bottle without taking a breath. And burped as the gases swirled in my chest.
“You’re not half-posh, are you?” said Toys sotto voce.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
“A cogent rejoinder.” He sipped his wine with the delicacy of a pampered cat.
The beef was delicious and so rare I thought I’d have to chase it around the room.
The three of us ate in silence for fifteen minutes. I ate every scrap on my plate, and when I saw that Toys had leftovers he wasn’t going to finish, I took them.
“Oh yes, please, help yourself,” he said.
By then, I was three beers in, and I lined the others up on the night table.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“As I said, because it would hurt Junie if you died.”
“So this is all about her?”
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