The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  Circe nodded but did not smile. Unlike her boss, she was very beautiful, with dark eyes and foamy black curls; also unlike him, she seldom smiled. As much as genetics had been generous to her, life itself had not. Less than a year ago her mother had been killed in a car accident, and Circe’s younger sister had died in combat in Afghanistan the previous summer. She felt alone and adrift in the world, and except for a father she almost never saw, Circe had no family. T-Town had become her home and Hugo Vox had become a second father, but Circe was still adrift in the shadows of loss and grief.

  “There’s something else,” she said, and pulled up another file. “Some key words have popped up in these postings. Not all of them, but enough of them to make me pay attention.” She touched the screen and ran a plum fingernail down, pausing at different entries as she scrolled with her other hand. “‘Goddess,’ or some variation of it, shows up in a lot of the entries. In the text, but more often in the usernames of the original poster or people reposting.”

  “Oh, Christ … not her again.” Over the last few years various groups ranging from the CIA to the DMS had tracked a series of online comments from a person, or perhaps a group, called the Goddess of the Chosen. The posts were heaviest before and after catastrophic events. If there was a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, a terrorist bombing, or an airline disaster the Goddess would make a post claiming that the event had happened according to her will. So far the identity of the Goddess had not been established, and because she tended to comment on all disasters it was hard to qualify her political leanings. Vox rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “Sure? No, but there are a lot of posts and most of them are using name variations: Goddessofthe7, SacredGoddess, Queen_of_ All, which is a goddess reference; and posts are using various names of goddesses from world myth. Demeter, Mazu, Mami Wata, Mórrígan, Nemain, Macha, Badb, and scores of others. Hundreds, really.”

  “How many posts have you been tracking?”

  “Over forty thousand.” When Vox’s eyes bugged she said hastily, “Not personally—I’m using the Merlin pattern-search software from the DMS.”

  Vox grunted. “I didn’t know Deacon let you have Merlin.”

  “He didn’t. Grace did.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “Well, it’s not MindReader, but it’s better than what we have.”

  “What else is popping up?”

  Circe adjusted her glasses. “Some of the names may be randomly chosen from a grab bag of goddess names. But there are some that seem to have a political connection. Asherah, Anath, Astarte, and Ashima all show up as usernames. There is some evidence that that the Hebrew faith may have been polytheistic and those names are possible female counterparts of Yahweh. If that’s true, then they were later removed as the culture became more male centric. Lilith also shows up. As does Ba‘alat Gebal or Baaltis, who is essentially a pan-Semitic goddess. And Eris, Greek goddess of discord. That’s ‘Discordia’ in Greek, which ties into the chaos concept. And—”

  Vox held up his hands. “Okay, okay, I get the picture. Lots of goddess references. Tell me what you think about them. Is this the same ‘goddess’ you’ve been tracking?”

  “Not sure yet. If so, Hugo, this is the first time the Goddess has made specific threats against Islam. Her usual rant is against what she frequently calls the ‘sin of complacency.’ Those are anarchical references supporting chaos as the natural path for spiritual growth.”

  “Which is horseshit.”

  “Well, arguing for an ongoing state of chaos is self-contradictory. But these new posts are clearly political, and they suggest that action should be taken, which gives them a whiff of militancy.”

  “A militant goddess cult? Is there precedent?”

  “Not recently, but historically? Sure. There were goddess cults all over the world, and some of them have been quite violent.”

  Vox took a big bite of his doughnut and chewed noisily. “Okay. Write your report. Good work, kiddo. Keep at it.” He pushed the box of doughnuts across the desk. “Keep the carbs. You earned ’em.”

  He heaved his bulk out of the guest chair and left, sketching a wave with his coffee cup.

  Circe watched him go and then looked down at the documents on the screen. She chewed her lip for a moment, wrestling with some of the same doubts that had plagued her since she first noticed this pattern. Was it there? Or was the Merlin software simply too good at finding patterns in everything?

  She bit a piece of a cinnamon doughnut, sipped her coffee, toggled over to Twitter, and dove back in.

  Interlude Seven

  Hate Crimes

  May Through July

  Michael Hecht was not a Jew. None of his friends were Jews, and except for the accountant at the hardware store in which he worked part-time, no one he knew was Jewish. None of his uncles or grandparents had fought in Europe during World War II, and he had no connections to anyone who had been interned or murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. He had never been to Israel and did not know anyone who had. Michael Hecht did not even particularly understand politics. He had an I.Q. of 86 and had a C average in school. He never watched any debates and could not with any degree of certainty name anyone in state politics.

  Michael Hecht also did not personally know any Muslims. None of them were among his friends, family, or co-workers. No Muslim had ever been rude to him, physically attacked him, done harm to people he knew or loved.

  All of this information came out during Deputy Sheriff Jaden Glover’s interview of Hecht following the twenty-two-year-old’s arrest. Glover had known Michael all his life; he’d once dated Hecht’s oldest sister, Maryanne.

  “Why’d you do it?” Glover asked.

  Hecht shrugged. He sat on a metal chair, his wrists cuffed to a D ring on the table. Another deputy stood by the door. Hecht had been Mirandized at the scene and again here in the station. He’d waived his rights both times.

  “C’mon, Mike. You drove thirty-seven miles; you stopped to buy gasoline. You brought half a dozen of your mom’s Mason jars with you. And rags. You even brought a lighter and you don’t smoke. You had to have planned this.”

  Michael Hecht shrugged again. His face was smudged with soot and he had some tissue stuffed into his nostril to stem the bleeding from where the building caretaker, Kusef, had punched him.

  “You went to all that trouble,” said Glover, “and you put firebombs through all the windows. You burned the whole damn thing to the ground. What was in your head, boy? You upset ’cause Milt Ryerson’s boy lost his leg in Iraq? This some kind of personal vendetta?”

  Michael Hecht did not know what a vendetta was. “Shit, I didn’t know Tommy lost his leg. Damn … that’s fucked up.”

  Glover cut a look at the other deputy, who arched one eyebrow.

  “You didn’t know about Tom Ryerson?”

  “Nah … I ain’t seen him since graduation.”

  “Then why’d you set fire to the mosque?”

  Hecht looked confused. “What’s a mosque?”

  “What’s a—Judas priest, boy, that’s what you just burned the hell down.”

  “It wasn’t no mosque. It was a church. A raghead church.”

  “That’s what a mosque is. A church for Muslims.”

  “Fucking ragheads.”

  “Do you have a reason to hate Muslims, Mike?”

  “They’re fucking sand niggers.”

  “You ever met a Muslim, Mike?”

  Hecht looked away for a second. “No.”

  “Then why did you want to burn down their church?”

  Hecht was silent for a long time, his face contorting as he tried to think it through.

  “Come on, Mike … I’d like to help you here, but you got to be straight with me.”

  Michael Hecht leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, man … I don’t know. They’re just fucking ragheads, y’know.”

  That was all they managed to get out of him. When the county detecti
ves made a thorough search of Michael Hecht’s house, they also searched his e-mail accounts and backtracked his Internet usage. Hecht was subscribed to hundreds of message boards. Over forty of them were devoted to the Goddess. The most recent posting Hecht had been to was the last in a series of linked messages on Twitter. The first one read: The Chosen will not tolerate the impure touch of the Muslim. The intervening posts escalated up from there in racial hatred, culminating with the one that had, apparently, sent Michael Hecht out into the night.

  Fire purifies.

  Michael Hecht was charged with one count of arson and fourteen counts of murder. His state-appointed defense attorney tried to build a case on diminished capacity, but by the time the matter went to trial the attorney knew that he was trying to sell a sympathy verdict in what had become a landmark hate crime case. The jury deliberated for fourteen minutes. Michael Hecht was convicted in a Powell County Kentucky court and sentenced to death. He remains on death row to this day.

  IN NEW YORK City, a flaming whiskey bottle was thrown through the front window of the 117th Street mosque during evening prayers. Several congregants suffered minor burns, and only the swift and combined actions of Azada, a teenage girl, and three of her friends, who grabbed fire extinguishers, prevented loss of life.

  No one was arrested for the crime; however, witnesses saw a black male, approximately thirty-five, wearing a business suit, running from the scene seconds after they heard the sound of the window breaking.

  IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, four white males and one Hispanic were arrested as they emerged from the Al-Farooq Masjid mosque on Fourteenth Street. The young men had emptied two five-gallon cans of gasoline inside the building and had stopped to light a rock that had been wrapped in a gassoaked rag. Police cruisers, responding to a silent alarm triggered by the break-in, blocked the flight of the youths. All five were taken into custody. Fire department personnel worked with the caretakers of the mosque to clean up the building; however, early estimates were that it would cost forty thousand dollars to remove all traces of the gasoline and replace tapestries, books, and furniture damaged during the intrusion.

  When detectives interviewed the boys, one of them admitted to having gotten the idea from the Internet. It was later determined that three of the five regularly followed forums and posts by the Goddess.

  A week later the Catholic church attended by two of the boys was firebombed. No suspects have so far been identified.

  Over the next month three mosques, two churches, and two synagogues were burned in Georgia.

  WITHIN SIX HOURS of the Goddess’s “Fire purifies” post, arson-based hate crimes directed at Muslims rose nearly 4 percent. At the end of six weeks, taking into account retaliatory attacks that included arson, drive-by shootings, rapes, beatings, and bomb scares, the incidence of anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 39 percent. Corresponding hate crimes directed at Jews rose 26 percent, and hate crimes directed at Christians of various colors and denominations rose 24 percent. The total number of victims directly connected to these crimes, according to the Department of Justice, numbered 43 dead, 175 wounded.

  The day that CNN broke the story and showed those statistics, the Goddess, using the name Enyo, posted this comment on over sixty social networks:

  I am well pleased.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Whitechapel, London

  December 17, 2:41 P.M. GMT

  Benson Childe arranged to provide me with a set of Barrier credentials that would be a master key to all levels of the investigation. He also authorized me to carry my weapon, which was useful, since I was already packing the Beretta 92F.

  “A constable will meet you downstairs with the ID cards and other documents, and then he’ll drive you back to the London, where you’ll liaise with Detective Sergeant Rebekkah Owlstone. Her team is coordinating the door-to-door interviews of the neighborhood.”

  “Great.”

  We were in his office and he poured a cup of tea into a cardboard container and handed it to me. “Temperature’s dropped out there. You’ll need this if you’re going to be pounding on doors.”

  I thanked him, and Ghost and I went out into the December blast.

  JUST OUTSIDE I spotted three constables standing by the open door of a police car. They all turned toward me and the closest, a beefy guy, asked, “Are you Captain Ledger?”

  I began to say “yes” when I heard a metallic sound and then a growl as Ghost suddenly bristled and stopped, his muscles instantly tense.

  It took my brain a half second to process the sound I’d heard, because it was incongruous.

  The beefy cop smiled at me and pointed a pistol at my face. The sound had been him quietly racking the slide.

  He was almost laughing as he said, “Happy Christmas from the Seven—”

  I threw the hot tea in his face. If you’re going to ambush someone, don’t make a speech first. It’s a rookie mistake. He screamed as the scalding liquid struck him full in the eyes.

  “Hit!” I bellowed to Ghost. He and I leaped forward together, me driving hands first into the left-hand cop and Ghost hitting the guy on the right like a white cannonball. Ghost growled deep in his chest and I saw teeth flash and then there were screams as he and the cop fell to the asphalt.

  The guy I went for managed to bring his pistol up, but I’d planned for that and bashed his arm aside with my right as I drove the flat of my palm into his forehead. The gun exploded with a flat crack! My blow slammed him against the car, knocked his head all the way back, exposing his throat. I hammered his Adam’s apple with both fists and he collapsed under me, gurgling wetly and trying to suck air through a crushed trachea.

  I spun off him just as the window beside me exploded. Beef, half-blind and scalded, fired wildly in my direction, the bullets shattering windows and punching through the black paint of the police car. I rushed in and to one side, but he tracked me, probably only seeing shadows out of those eyes, but enough to swing the barrel toward my face. I came up outside his line of fire, took his gun hand in both of mine, and twisted sharply as I pivoted. In the dojo and in the movies the victim of a wristlock does a nice flip through the air. In the real world his wrist turns way too fast to act as a lever for his body, which means that the forearm bones explode inside his arm. His scream rose into the ultrasonic. I kicked Beef in the knee and as he canted sideways I kicked the other knee. He collapsed into a screaming pile of junk.

  I tore my coat open and pulled my Beretta even while I dove for the front of the car. There were screams there, too, and the mean growl of a dog in mortal combat. I hit the hood on one hip and skidded across, landing on the far side and bringing the gun down.

  “Off! Off!” I yelled, but Ghost was already backing off. His white muzzle was bright red with blood, most of it from the attacker’s throat. Ghost looked at me with eyes that had gone from those of a pet and companion to those of a hunter-killer from ancient times. The primitive killer in me met the eyes of the predator wolf in him, and for a moment there was a shared awareness. Not adversaries. Members of a pack. The level of understanding that passed between us could never be taught.

  “Back and down!”

  He looked down at the dying man and growled low and evil … and then moved three steps away and sat.

  There were shouts around us and I turned, sweeping the Beretta’s barrel around. Another pair of cops and people in ordinary clothes. Whistles and yells.

  I bellowed, “Special agent!”

  I didn’t know what else to say. Were these constables also assassins for the Kings? If so, the risk to innocent bystanders was about to jump off the scale.

  The two cops drew their batons and closed on me in a nice flanking approach, yelling at me, ordering me to lay down my weapon. One of them was shouting into his shoulder mike.

  Balls.

  I pointed my gun at the closest of them.

  “Freeze!” I barked. The sharp tone of voice and the implacable presence of the gun slowed them from a run to a walk and th
en to frozen immobility.

  To Ghost I snapped, “Set!” The command to get ready for a nonlethal takedown. Nonlethal as long as the guy didn’t injure the dog, and then all bets were off.

  “Freeze!” I yelled again. “These men are not police officers.”

  “That’s Danny French!” snapped one of the cops, pointing to the man whose throat I’d crushed. “You murdering bastard!”

  Crap. Okay, they were police officers. Now what?

  The man I scalded moaned and sagged back. Dead or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.

  Ghost edged toward me to protect my flank. I could tell that the officers were going to try it. Gun and dog notwithstanding. For all they knew I was a mad cop killer.

  “Stop!”

  Benson Childe came running out of the building with a phalanx of armed Barrier personnel at his heels. I saw Deirdre MacDonal and Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod following behind. Because they wore uniforms the street cops looked at them in confusion. The crowd was even more confused because guns were being pointed at cops and no one was pointing a gun at the crazy Yank with the dog.

  Childe’s men pushed the cops against the wall and frisked them. I didn’t think they were involved—and was pretty sure they weren’t—but I was in no mood to take stupid risks. I lowered my weapon and eased the hammer down. Childe didn’t ask me to surrender it.

  “Sit and watch,” I said to Ghost, and he did just that. The wolf was still there behind his eyes. I could feel the killer behind my own.

  Childe leaned close to me. “For God’s sake, Ledger, I know these men. What the bloody hell happened here?”

  “Seven Kings,” I said.