Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.

  And yet….

  And yet.

  There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.

  Loss.

  Grief.

  Call it what you want.

  On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother-in-arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe—truly believe—that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.

  You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun smoke clears, if you’re still alive, you and the person you love will have a life together. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that, even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.

  But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on….

  Damn.

  That’s where the real monsters are made.

  When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.

  Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realizing your defeat.

  Or….

  Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.

  Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.

  That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.

  But it is the monster that survives.

  It’s the monster that can survive.

  I loved twice in my life. Really loved.

  The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.

  Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.

  Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.

  And died doing it.

  I held her as she left me. I breathed in her last breath as all of the heat left her through a hole an assassin’s bullet had punched into the world.

  My friends and colleagues tell me that I’ve made a great recovery since then. That I’m my old self again. That I look happy.

  Which is all the proof I’d ever need of that philosophic belief that we each exist in our own reality, each inside an envelope of a completely separate dream.

  I will never be my old self again.

  Can’t be. That ship has sailed and it hit an iceberg.

  And happy?

  Sure, I can laugh. So do hyenas, and it means about as much.

  My enemies don’t think I’m a happy guy. When they look into my eyes, they see the truth that my friends can’t see.

  They see what I’ve really become.

  I know this because I see the fear in their eyes when I kill them.

  I used to be a nice man.

  The world used to be a place of sunshine and magic.

  Monsters, though, don’t thrive in the light.

  Chap. 2

  My boss, Mr. Church, called me into his office on a May Tuesday. It was one of those days that seems tailor-made for baseball, hotdogs and cold beer, and I was taking a half day to see if the Orioles could earn their paychecks. I had on new jeans and an ancient team jersey, sneakers, and a pair of Wayfarers on my head.

  As I entered the office he slid a file folder across the desk toward me. It was a blue folder with a red seal. It looked official.

  I said, “No way. I have tickets for a doubleheader, and as far as all of our billions of dollars of intelligence surveillance equipment says, it’s a slow day for the bad guys.”

  “Captain….”

  “Get someone else.”

  He sat back and studied me through the lenses of his tinted glasses. Mr. Church is one of those guys who never has to say much to either piss you off or make you want to check that your fingernails are clean. Frequently both.

  “This requires finesse,” he said mildly.

  “All the more reason to get someone else. I am finesse-deprived today.”

  “This requires your particular skill set.”

  I stood there and glared at him. I could almost hear the crack of good wood on a hard ball, the roar of the crowd, the howl of the announcer as the ball arced high toward the back wall.

  Mr. Church said nothing.

  He opened his briefcase and removed a packet of Nilla wafers, tore it open, selected one. Bit off a piece and chewed while he watched me.

  The blue folder lay where he’d put it.

  I said, “Fuck.”

  Mr. Church asked, “What do you know about the Koenig Group?”

  “Yeah, a little.” I shrugged. “It was a think tank based in Jersey. Cape May, right? Alternate technologies…am I right about that?”

  “They called it alternative scientific options. ASO.”

  “Which means what?”

  “A bit of everything,” he said. “They were originally a division of DARPA, but they went private as part of a budget restructuring. Private investors propped them up during the economic downturn in ’09.”

  “But they closed, right?”

  He tapped crumbs off his cookie. “They were shut down.”

  “Why and by who?”

  “They were under investigation by a number of agencies, including our own. Aunt Sallie had some people on it, and she lent a couple of agents to a joint federal task force that is a prime example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s become a jurisdictional quagmire.”

  “Typical.” American politics are fueled by red tape. Anyone who says differently isn’t on the inside track.

  “As to why this has happened,” Church continued, “we’d gotten some word that the administration there was a little too willing to consider offers from foreign investors.”

  “Like…?”

  “North Korea, China, Iran.”

  “Yikes. So we shut them down?”

  “So we shut them down,” he agreed. “The task force made arrests, cleared out the staff and sealed the building. Aunt Sallie has been assembling a team of special investigators, forensics experts, and scientific consultants to do a thorough analysis of the work done there and a full inventory of research and materials. Until then, no one is allowed inside, regardless of federal rank. Every agency in the alphabet wants in on it, and as a result the whole place has been sealed for months, pending the outcome of the jurisdictional knife fight that continues as we speak.”

  “But the bad guys are out of there?”

  “Yes. And that was enforced with fines, termination of licenses, confiscation of some research materials and computer records, charges against two administrators and one senior researcher, and a pending court case that will likely result in prison for at least one of those persons, if not all three. There are also fourteen members of the
senior scientific staff as yet unaccounted for.”

  “A second site?” I suggested. “Another lab elsewhere?”

  “That’s the thinking, but so far we haven’t been able to get a line on where that lab is or even if it’s on US soil—though none of the missing scientists has flown out of any domestic airport. In itself, that means little because there are too many ways to export people from this country without raising a flag.”

  “They could be in North Korea for all we know.”

  “Agreed. As far as the Koenig facility, the building has been under constant surveillance since the doors were shut. Two-man teams, alternating between foot patrols and in-car observation. That responsibility has been shared on a rotating basis. Every five days another agency takes the job. Currently it’s ATF.”

  “Okay. Why am I warming up my helicopter?”

  “Our agents were first in the door, so we’re the organization of record that shut it down. By default, it’s up to us to sweep up any debris.”

  “So, I’m what? A janitor?”

  “Let’s face it, Captain,” Church said dryly, “it’s not the worst thing either of us has been called in this job.”

  I sighed. Church shoved the cookies toward me, but I shook my head. There’s no moral justification for a vanilla cookie when every store in the free world sells a variety of chocolate-themed cookies. Like Oreos. It’s closer to an American icon than Mom’s apple pie ever was. Church didn’t have any Oreos, so I sat there cookieless.

  “If this place has been sealed for a couple of months, what’s the hurry?” I asked.

  “Apparently, when we shut them down they didn’t entirely take it to heart.”

  “Naughty, naughty,” I said. “But this sounds like something the FBI should be doing. I know for a fact that they love this kind of bureaucracy. It gives them that tingly feeling in their nice gray wool trousers.”

  Church gave me a look that could best be described as pitying. “They haven’t yet won the toss of the bureaucratic garter. If they go in, then someone in congress will be accused of favoritism.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  He nodded. “There are times I envy drive-through window employees at McDonalds. Red tape isn’t a factor when ordering fast food.”

  “No joke.”

  We gave each other small, bland smiles.

  I folded my arms. “Again I ask—why now?”

  “There was a police report of lights on inside the facility late last night. Officers on scene found the rear door broken open, but a quick search of the premises yielded no results. The intruders must have fled.”

  “Could the intruders have been some of the missing scientists?”

  “Certainly a possibility.”

  “But why break in? What’s left to steal?”

  “Unknown. When the Koenig senior staff realized the hammer was about to fall they tried to clear things up in a hurry. A lot of material was destroyed to keep it from falling into our hands and, by association, a congressional committee. The task force recovered melted disks, destroyed hard drives, and that kind of thing. Bug put his team on it to see if there was enough left to determine whether they trashed the actual records or if what we recovered was pure junk. Computer records are small and easy enough to hide. The task force might have missed a flash drive or some disks. If someone was there last night, it’s likely they removed whatever was hidden. However, we do need to check.”

  “Swell.”

  “What little we did recover,” Church continued, “tied into something that’s clanged a few warning bells for MindReader.”

  When the DMS was formed it was built around a real mother of a computer system that was entirely owned by Mr. Church. Aside from being enormously powerful and sophisticated, MindReader had two primary functions. First, it collated information from all major intelligence networks, including some who didn’t know their data was being mined, and then looked for patterns. Often different agencies will have gotten whiffs of things or obtained pieces of information, but MindReader sorted through all of it and began assembling fragments into whole, actionable pictures. A lot of our effectiveness is built on being able to spot trouble before it literally blows up in our face.

  MindReader’s other function was actually its scariest aspect. It could intrude into virtually any other computer system, poke around, take what it wanted, and then rewrite the target’s security software so there was absolutely no record of the intrusion. All other intelligence software leaves some kind of scar on the target system; MindReader is a ghost.

  “What bells?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Sadly, it’s vague. The North Koreans and Chinese were both providing funding for a project codenamed ‘Changeling.’ We don’t know the nature of the program, but when nations who don’t always have our best interests at heart are willing to transfer funds in excess of fifty million….”

  He let the rest hang.

  “Have you talked to Dr. Hu about this?”

  Hu was the head of the DMS science division. He was both a super-genius in multiple disciplines and a world-class heartless asshole. We have failed to bond on an epic level.

  “Dr. Hu is intensely interested in it because he feels it may be connected to a project we caught wind of last year that dealt with transformative genetics.”

  “I don’t even like the sound of that.”

  “Neither do it. It’s a radical branch of transgenics in which animals of various kinds are given gene therapy in order to provoke controlled mutations. We saw some of that in the Jakoby labs.”

  “Ah,” I said, loading that syllable with as much scorn as I could. The Jakobys were a family of brilliant geneticists. Immeasurably dangerous. Their Dragon Factory laboratory was used to create animals that, at least, looked like mythical creatures. Big game hunters paid millions to hunt unicorns and centaurs. It didn’t matter than the animals were genetic freaks whose DNA was now hopelessly corrupted. Nor did it matter that the resulting mutations were often painful for the animal and virtually guaranteed a short and agonizing life. None of that mattered. The novelty market allowed them to raise money for more destructive projects, including ethnic-specific pathogens intended to fuel a new genocide.

  We shut them down. Hard.

  It was at the Dragon Factory that Grace died.

  “Do these Koenig assholes have the Jakoby research? ’Cause if they do, I’m going to find them and remove important parts.”

  “It’s unlikely. MindReader would have flagged that. But it seems that their scientists were working along dangerously similar lines. To what end we don’t know. Once the red tape is sorted out I intend to have our people be first through the door to do a thorough examination of any materials left intact.”

  “Must be pissing you off that we’ve had to wait so long.”

  He said nothing, and nothing showed on his face, but there was a palpable feeling of tension buzzing around him. Yeah, he was pissed.

  When he finally spoke, it was a shift in topic. “Last night’s police report opens a door of opportunity. We have a chance to put someone in the building. Not to remove anything, of course, but to have a quiet look around without eyes on him. I’d like that to be you.”

  “And I suppose if there was a file conveniently labeled ‘Changeling’ I shouldn’t let it lay there and gather dust.”

  Church snorted. “If life were that simple, Captain, we would be out of jobs.”

  “I thought the ATF had feet on the ground there.”

  “They didn’t see anything last night.”

  “And the cops did?”

  He spread his hands. And I had a sneaking suspicion that he had something to do with that police drive-by and any subsequent report. Made me wonder if there was anything to see. ATF boys are usually pretty sharp.

  “Besides,” added Church, “the ATF team has declined to break the seal and enter the premises.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if anything is disturbed or
if there is any procedural error when someone does step inside, then that agency takes the political hit.” He shook his head. “If you look too closely for logic you’ll injure yourself.”

  “Okay, I get that the bullshit factor is high. But why me? Why send a shooter?”

  “Because you were a cop before you were a shooter. If nothing else, you should be able to determine if the place has been broken into. Work it like a crime scene.”

  “And if I find someone poking around in there?”

  His smile was small and cold. “Then you have my permission to shoot them.”

  Nice. You can never really tell when he’s joking.

  “One more thing,” said Church as I stood, crossed the room, and reached for the doorknob. “Our friends in the U.K have expressed some interest in this matter. They red-flagged some of the negotiations between the Koenig Group and North Korean buyers, and they’ve been hunting for any possible information on Changeling. They’re sending a special agent to liaise with you. Her name is Felicity Hope. Expect her call.”

  “She’s with MI6?”

  “No,” he said, “Barrier.”

  Barrier was Great Britain’s so-secret-we’ll-bloody-well-shoot-you group that was the model for the DMS. Church had helped set it up, and once it proved to be invaluable against the new breed of 21st Century high-tech terrorist, he was able to sell Congress on the Department of Military Sciences. But just hearing that name was the equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts for me.

  Grace Courtland had been a senior Barrier agent. She’d been seconded to the DMS at Church’s request, and for a few years she was Church’s top gun. Maybe the world’s top gun. I worked alongside her, respected her, fell in love with her. And then buried her.

  The pain was too recent and too real.

  Church adjusted his tinted glasses. I knew that he was following my line of thought and gauging my reaction. I also knew that he wouldn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of guy who engaged in heart-to-hearts. What he gave me was a single, brief nod, just that much to acknowledge the memory. He loved Grace like a daughter. His pain had to be as intense as mine, but he would never show it.