Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

We ran as if monsters were chasing us. Which they damn well were.

  Interlude Sixteen

  Metropolitan Detention Center

  Brooklyn, New York

  Two Years Ago

  Artemisia Bliss sat in her cell and waited for her life to end. Wished, in fact, for it to all be over. They had her on suicide watch, though. Fair enough. If there was any chance for a quick way out, she’d take it.

  Living in hell was not living.

  This was going to be hell. Of that she had no doubt. The judgment against Artemisia Bliss had been so severe.

  One hundred and sixty-five years.

  The joke was that there was a chance for parole after seventy years.

  By then Artemisia Bliss would be ninety-seven years old. Even in the unlikely event that she was still alive, freedom would not be freedom at all. No, the judge had given her a death sentence. Soon they would come and take her from this holding cell at MDC and transfer her to a medium-security prison whose location was still to be determined. Her lawyers were still wrangling with the judge about placement. They wanted her in a minimum-security facility like Waseca in Minnesota or, better yet, the one in Danbury. The judge wanted her in supermax. The only reason for the delay in his orders being carried out was the scarcity of women’s cells in supermax. It gave the lawyers a little time and it kept her in Brooklyn. It was much easier to influence the destination of a new prisoner from an administrative facility than it was to effect a transfer from one long-term prison to another.

  A small and very cold comfort.

  Every time she heard a footfall outside her cell, Bliss dreaded what it could mean. Lately there was bad news and worse news.

  The only blessing, however small, was that the cliché of aggressive sexual abuse in the showers hadn’t happened. But Bliss always mentally tagged “yet” onto that.

  She had few illusions about what would happen to her.

  She was young. She was very pretty. And she had lost all of her power.

  All of that wonderful power. To her it was losing her heart and all the blood that ran through it. She felt dead inside.

  Almost dead.

  The fact that there were still some very small options kept her from finding a shortcut out of the cell and this—whatever it was. She couldn’t call it “life” anymore, even though that’s what the judge called it.

  Cosmic jokes like that she did not need.

  She knew she could try to play the card of her affair with Bill Collins as a way of getting a new trial and the protection of becoming a high-profile witness against a sitting vice president. That card was all that was really left to her, and with every passing moment she drew closer to playing it.

  What would he do, she wondered.

  Would he have her killed?

  She had absolutely no doubts that he could. Collins, for all his passion and words of love, was a vicious man who had layers upon layers of friends in very low places. He was enormously wealthy and his friends were wired in everywhere. Bliss suspected that Collins had been more directly involved with the Jakobys and the Seven Kings than anyone—even the DMS—ever guessed or could prove. He owned people in the Secret Service, the FBI, the ATF; and nearly everyone in his Cybercrimes Task Force belonged to him heart and soul. If he ever became president, which was becoming a real possibility, then he would build an empire whose corrupt roots dug down into the deepest levels of big business and the military-industrial complex.

  So, yes, she decided, he could have her killed. If she could be certain that he would find a way to do it without pain or humiliation, then Bliss would have welcomed it. It would get the job done. She just didn’t want to suffer in the process. She was okay with death, but not with pain.

  No matter how she died, she didn’t think Collins would shed any real tears.

  Well, she thought bitterly, maybe one.

  They’d had a lot of very good nights. There’s only so much passion you can fake before your true heart shows through. She knew Collins had glimpsed her inner self, her evolved self. Just as she had seen his true face.

  There was love there.

  There was a genuine connection there.

  Whether any of that could buy her a splinter of mercy was another thing.

  After her conviction and sentencing, Bliss had given a sealed envelope to her lawyer with instructions to mail it to a certain address. The letter was coded, so that if anyone read it all they’d see would be a lot of prayers for forgiveness. The real message was hidden in references that Bill Collins could read using the key they’d worked out years ago.

  Had he ever received the letter? It was filled with words of love, genuinely meant. And with pleas for help. In all this time he hadn’t reached out to her in any way, not even using contacts so many times removed that they could never implicate him.

  Nothing.

  The silence was deafening.

  Soon they would come for her and she would descend into hell, with the only grace being the certain knowledge that it was impossible to prevent people from killing themselves if they truly wanted to die. That seemed to be all that was left to her.

  Bliss put her face in her hands and began to weep very quietly. She was too afraid to let her sobs be heard. Not in this awful place.

  Broken minutes crawled past.

  Then she heard the clang of cold steel as the security doors rolled open.

  A moment later there was the distinctive sound of shoes on the concrete floor. Not the clickety-click of the heels her lawyers wore. No, these were solid, flat sounds.

  Bliss cringed, tried to shrink into herself, to become small and invisible.

  The footsteps approached with the unhurried and measured pace of someone with purpose and confidence. Jailor’s footsteps.

  A shadow moved along the floor, long, distorted by lights behind whoever cast it.

  Not a man’s shadow, though.

  But mannish.

  A few moments later a large woman stepped into view. She stopped outside the cell and stood there for a while, shadow-shrouded eyes fixed on Bliss.

  “Prisoner Bliss,” said the woman. Not as a question, but in a flat statement. “On your feet.”

  “Wh-what?” stammered Bliss.

  “Now.”

  The woman’s voice was hard, certainly not inviting debate.

  “But…”

  The guard stepped into the cell, towering over Bliss. And now Bliss could see that the woman held something. A garment bag. “Get dressed.”

  Bliss frowned, not understanding. The garment bag was the one in which her courtroom clothes were stored. She wasn’t due in court again.

  Unless …

  Oh, God, she thought, sudden hope flaring in her chest. The request for change of facility came through!

  She leaped up, smiling, wanting to shout for joy. A minimum-security prison was bearable. It was a lesser ring of hell. One she could possibly endure. Cable TV, Internet access, no brutality …

  Was this her lawyers? Or had Collins pulled some covert strings?

  The guard held the garment bag at arm’s length.

  “Time’s running out.”

  Bliss took the bag with a fumbling thanks. The guard did not turn away or leave her to change in private, but Bliss didn’t care. She stripped off the orange jumpsuit issued to her at the holding facility and dressed quickly in her charcoal skirt and coral blouse. Her shoes were in there, too.

  And other things. She looked at them and then frowned at the guard.

  “I don’t … understand.”

  The guard said nothing.

  After a long moment of hesitation, Bliss finished dressing. She reached for her books and possessions, but the guard interrupted. “No. Leave everything here.”

  Bliss straightened, her joy turning to doubt. Fear began once more to eat at her.

  However, without another word she followed the guard out of the cell.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER, an unsmiling woman in a charcoal
skirt and coral blouse was led into the cell.

  “Give me those clothes,” said the guard.

  The woman changed and put on the orange jumpsuit. Tears cut long channels down her face. Her gleaming black hair fell like a veil as she sat down and hung her head as she wept.

  The guard was smiling as she stuffed the nice clothes back into the garment bag.

  The weeping woman listened to the sound of the guard’s shoes echo on the hard floor.

  Then there was another sound.

  A softer footfall.

  She looked up.

  Another woman stood outside the cell. Not the guard. This was another inmate, a hatchet-faced white woman with cornrowed hair and old blue prison tattoos on her neck.

  “Artemisia Bliss?” asked the woman.

  The weeping woman nodded.

  “They say you have to burn to shine,” said the woman.

  Then she hurled something in through the bars. A gleaming, stinking pintful of golden liquid. It slapped the seated woman in the face, blinding her, gagging her, choking her with gasoline fumes.

  The weeping woman never heard the strike of the match.

  Never saw the flames.

  Her screams filled the whole of the prison.

  Part Four

  Fun and Games

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “The Second Coming”

  Interlude Seventeen

  Metropolitan Detention Center

  Brooklyn, New York

  Two Years Ago

  “I can’t believe this,” said Hu. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. He looked younger than his years and shock had stripped away his arrogance, revealing a far more vulnerable person than he generally revealed. Rudy placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  They stood in the corridor outside the cell. Aunt Sallie stood slightly apart with Joe Ledger and Ghost, while Jerry Spencer was inside the cell, crouched over the blackened, withered husk that had been a person hours ago.

  “God,” Hu said, shivering, “it doesn’t even look human.”

  Joe Ledger opened his mouth to say something, almost certainly a sarcastic jab of some kind, but Rudy gave him a quick shake of the head. Joe looked disappointed. He went back to the quiet conversation he’d been having with Auntie and Jerry.

  “What I don’t get,” said Hu, “is why anyone would do something like this.”

  “Prison violence is common. Until the staff and other inmates are interviewed we won’t know the details.”

  “But why her?”

  Rudy shook his head. The warden and guard shift supervisors were conducting interviews under the supervision of Gus Dietrich. Answers would emerge. One of the female guards said that she thought she heard Bliss arguing with a couple of other women prisoners who had reputations for harassing the more vulnerable detainees. Rudy wondered if this would turn out to be a punishment for refusing sexual advances, though that sounded a bit cliché to him.

  They watched as the forensics ace Jerry Spencer moved around the corpse, taking small samples of burned flesh and clothing. More extensive samples would be taken once the body was transported to the coroner’s office, but Jerry exercised the authority allowed him under the DMS charter to take his own samples first.

  Hu was angry with what he described as a violation of Bliss’s person. “Why can’t he just leave her alone?”

  “Because,” said Spencer without looking up, “right now I’m not seeing Artie Bliss. I’m seeing a charcoal briquette. And I won’t believe this is Artie Bliss until DNA, tissue comparisons and dental records prove it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Spencer glanced up at him. “This is my crime scene, doc. Shut up or fuck off. No, better yet, shut up and fuck off.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” said Rudy, pushing the air down with calming hands. “We’re all upset by this—”

  “I’m not,” said Aunt Sallie.

  Spencer gave her one of his rare smiles and returned to his work.

  Ledger just spread his hands.

  “You’re all a bunch of assholes,” growled Hu. “Artemisia used to be part of our family. Show some respect.”

  “Family?” said Auntie. “Yeah, as I remember it, Cain was part of a family, too. So was Judas.”

  That shut Hu up.

  There was no more conversation. Spencer continued his work and everyone else stood and watched him.

  Rudy stayed by Hu’s side. Despite the animosity between Ledger and Hu, and the more recent tension between Hu and Auntie, Rudy liked the scientist. Per DMS requirements, Hu had spent hours in therapy sessions with Rudy, and that allowed Rudy to see a more three-dimensional person. A man with vulnerabilities, with layers.

  Although Rudy had become fond of Hu, he found that he did not entirely trust the man. And for the same reasons that Rudy had liked but not entirely trusted Bliss. Both of them were cut from similar cloth. Brilliant on a level that made life awkward in many ways. Both socially inept, though Bliss managed it better, partly because she’d known how to use her looks to advantage and because she appeared to have some consideration for how her words affected people. Joe had confided to Rudy that he thought Bliss was much more manipulative than she appeared.

  “It’s crazy,” Joe had told him last year, “but I’d find myself telling her the damnedest things. Really opening up to her.”

  “Why?” asked Rudy.

  “Beats the crap out of me. Maybe it’s that she looks so earnest. And she listens. She’s like you in that regard. She really listens. When someone listens with that much focus and attention, it’s … I don’t know, it’s somewhere between an ego stroke that says ‘damn, but you’re one interesting son of a bitch’ and a validation that what you have to say matters. Does that make sense?”

  It had.

  Rudy had noted that about Bliss. She was always paying attention. Her brain was never cruising on autopilot. Another of Joe’s phrases. But she was like Hu in another way. Both were ambitious, and if they’d been in the private sector they would probably have set up competing shops and battled each other while making vast fortunes. As it was, within the confines of the binding security and nondisclosure agreements of the DMS, their ambition had been mostly channeled into bringing the edgiest science into play so that the organization was second to none in the world. More than once Rudy had cautioned Mr. Church about that arrangement. He felt that Hu, Bliss, Bug, and the other experts should be given some opportunity to profit from their work, even if only in the form of accolades from publications. The generous bonuses—which Rudy was certain came from Church’s personal bank account—were nice but they couldn’t match the enormous wealth his people were passing up in order to do their jobs. Church was adamant, however, believing that this would open a door beyond which was a slippery slope.

  “People need reward,” said Rudy during one conversation. “As much as we would both like patriotism, humanism, and idealism to be their own rewards, we have to accept that these are people. They’re not characters from a heroic ballad.”

  “Yes, doctor,” Church replied with a faint smile, “I am aware of that. However, I won’t apologize for holding a high standard for people who are doing work as important as this. And I won’t lower those standards to accommodate personal agendas. If we do that, then the focus becomes personal gain. The work we do requires the best efforts and actions from those few people with minds and skill sets that are truly exceptional.”

  “It’s a lot to ask.”

  Church nodded. “I know. And because so few can rise to that standard the DMS is—and will likely remain—a small organization.”

  Rudy could understand Church’s rationale, but in his professional experience he’d met only a precious few people who could live within those restrictions. Joe Ledger was
one, and Samson Riggs. Bug was another. And there were a few dozen within the DMS. Top, Bunny, Lydia. Each answering the call with varying degrees of personal commitment. Rudy knew that some of those people would burn out and fall away.

  Church, of course, was the icon, the role model for that level of total dedication to this war, but he was a very hard act to follow. Likely an impossible act. Like Lancelot without the emotional flaws. There were few people answering his call, relative to the vast sea of available military and paramilitary operatives, scientists, and support staff; the world rarely coughed up someone like Church. Rudy knew more about him than anyone except Aunt Sallie, but even with the privileged insights from staff-required therapy sessions, Rudy was certain he’d merely scratched the surface of who Mr. Church was.

  Rudy wondered what Church was thinking now; how the news of Artemisia Bliss’s murder had affected him. Even though Church had never been her biggest supporter, had hired her only on the strong recommendations of Hu and Auntie, he had worked with her for years. Rudy knew that her criminal activities had hurt and angered him. Would he grieve over her death?

  “We’re done here,” said Spencer as he got to his feet. They all took a moment longer to look down at the blackened corpse.

  “Such a waste,” Ledger said.

  He, Aunt Sallie, and Spencer left. Hu lingered for a moment longer, and Rudy stayed with him.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Hu.

  Rudy thought he caught the edge of a sob in his voice.

  With his hand still on Hu’s shoulder, the two men turned and left the cell.

  By the end of the day the dental records had been compared and matched. Within three days the DNA comparison was done and that, too, matched.

  And that was the end of Artemisia Bliss.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Liberty Avenue Station

  Brooklyn, New York

  Sunday, August 31, 2:36 p.m.

  We were met at Liberty Avenue Station by a small DMS field team. The techs sprayed us with some noxious shit that smelled like moose piss, then we stripped out of our Hammer suits right down to our skivvies. The suits, our gear, and even our weapons were stuffed into big oil drums and filled with more of the smelly stuff, then sealed. Permanently sealed, I think. The bag of cameras went into a biohazard bag for immediate transport to Bug. The only things we kept were our earbuds and cell phones. I told everyone to stay offline. Now was the not the time to be texting our BFFs or playing Angry Birds. Silence was genuinely golden.