The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

  Rudy almost smiled, and he appreciated the trap the little prisoner had laid. Very clever indeed.

  “That is a longer discussion than we have time for now,” Rudy said. “Though perhaps we’ll have the chance to explore it further. For now, Nicodemus, please tell me why when I ask you about what happened in London yesterday you bring up the Ten Plagues of Egypt? Is there some connection?”

  “All things are connected. We float in a pool of time in which all things eddy and swirl.”

  “Could you be a bit more specific?”

  “We are living in biblical times,” said Nicodemus. “The Bible isn’t a record of what was; it is a record of what is.” The Old Testament, the New Testament … they are but chapters in a book that will continue to be written. New pages are being written today. Written into our skins, written on the skies above us, written into our souls. The prophets shout it from street corners and are not heard. False prophets speak it from the television, but even when they tell the truth they are not believed. History is unfolding and the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and—’

  “‘tenement halls.’ You’re quoting Simon and Garfunkel,” said Rudy. “Not exactly Scripture.”

  Nicodemus chuckled. “Ah, so you are awake. I had begun to worry, Doctor. You come here to ask me questions that you already know the answers to, and when I speak you do not appear to listen.”

  “You are being vague and evasive,” Rudy said.

  “And you are being disingenuous,” countered Nicodemus. “You do know what I am saying.”

  “No, sir, I do not. But I am willing to listen and to hear.” When Nicodemus did not reply, Rudy said, “Please, tell me what you know about what happened in London.”

  Nicodemus closed his eyes very slowly and then opened them. It was a very reptilian action. “I know nothing about London. The sky is like sackcloth and my eye is blind.”

  Rudy waited. “Yesterday, when you spoke with Dr. Stankeviius you mentioned a ‘goddess.’ Tell me about her.”

  “Not a goddess,” corrected the little man. “To believe in a goddess presupposes that there are many, and that is an untruth spoken by liars and fools. I spoke of the Goddess.”

  “And yet today you mention God. Doesn’t that suggest more than one deity?”

  “No,” said Nicodemus quickly. “Sometimes my mouth speaks the words it was trained to speak, not those which are in my heart.”

  “Meaning?”

  “God has transformed and become.”

  “Become what?”

  “Become all. Male and female. The eternal yin and yang. This is the completion of a cosmic cycle begun before time.”

  “I see.”

  “No, Doctor, you do not. You pretend wisdom, but your eyes are blinded by convention and misunderstanding.”

  “I am willing to learn the truth.”

  Nicodemus’s smile was so strange that Rudy could not easily find an adjective to describe it. The closest he could come was the lurid “goblinesque.”

  “The Goddess has opened her eye, Doctor, and she sees all. She has appointed Seven Kings to sit in judgment of all men.”

  Ah, thought Rudy, now we get to it.

  “Who are these Seven Kings? Are they real men?”

  “They are the Sons of the Goddess and they walk the earth as the Son of man once walked.”

  “And are they connected with what happened in London yesterday?”

  “They are connected to all things. The Seven Kings are everywhere. They look over your shoulder and they see into the hearts of men.”

  “Nicodemus,” said Rudy quietly, “you seem to know so much. Why not put this insight and wisdom to good use? The Seven Kings are doing very bad things. Surely this cannot be the will of heaven.”

  “Do you pretend to know the mind of the Goddess?”

  “No, I do not. But if you do, then help us. Tell me something that will allow me to protect the innocent.”

  Nicodemus chuckled and then repeated the word “innocent” as if he could taste it. His tongue wriggled over his teeth and lips. “I can only repeat what is whispered in my ears.”

  Rudy sat back. “I do not believe you are telling me the truth, Nicodemus. I believe that you do know more than you are saying.”

  Suddenly, like the flip of a switch, everything on the little man’s face changed. In a flash his face lost its sinister cast; the feral intensity in his eyes dimmed like a fire someone had doused with cold water. His mouth worked to speak, but there was no sound. He looked shocked and suddenly stared at Rudy with a deep and terrible desperation.

  “Who … who … ?” he whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Rudy, rising to his feet.

  “Who am I?” Nicodemus looked around the office as if seeing the people and the furniture for the very first time. “What … where am I? What is this place?”

  The guards stepped back in confusion. Even Nicodemus’s voice had changed. It was the croaking voice of a weak and sickly old man.

  “G-God … help me!”

  Then Nicodemus stiffened and looked down, but it seemed as if he was looking down into his soul rather than at his body.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  The scream was so immediate and so shockingly loud that Rudy squeezed his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears. The guards staggered backward, both of them crying out in fear. The warden and the prison psychiatrist reeled back, feet kicking at the floor to push them deeper into their seats and away from the tearing sound of that voice.

  Then silence.

  Rudy could barely breathe and he slowly realized that he was holding his breath. Slowly, slowly he exhaled, and for a moment his breath misted in the air as if the room were frigid.

  Cautiously, almost fearfully, Rudy opened his eyes. The little prisoner sat calm and erect in the chair. He was smiling. A cruel and secretive smile, a smile brimming with an awful amusement.

  He was Nicodemus again. Rudy looked around. The others in the room wore the expressions of people who had witnessed horror. He had seen expressions like those on the faces of the people at Ground Zero and in Thailand after the tsunami and in Haiti. No one spoke.

  Before Rudy could say anything, Nicodemus spoke in a voice that was as soft as a whisper but as grating as teeth on the tines of a fork. “I am looking over water to a dark and pestilential place. From this place a new river of blood will flow, like the Nile flowed with blood when Pharaoh defied the will of God and refused to free the people of Israel. Oh, woe to the enemies of the Goddess. May their bones bend and crack like wheat straw in a hot wind. Stand not in the path of the Goddess’s righteousness and wrath.”

  Rudy licked his lips. “What was that?” he said. “A minute ago—what was that?”

  “Why, nothing at all happened a minute ago, and if it did, I was not here to behold it.”

  “Who are you, Nicodemus?”

  The little man chuckled. “Maybe I’m that in which you do not believe, Dr. Sanchez.” He stared at Rudy and would say nothing else.

  Rudy tried several times to elicit further comments, but the prisoner might as well have been a statue. Minutes stretched and snapped and still Nicodemus merely sat there and looked at Rudy.

  “Very well,” Rudy said at last. He turned to Warden Wilson. “Warden, I think it would be in the best interests of national security for this prisoner to be kept in complete lockdown. He goes nowhere alone, he is allowed no contact of any kind with other convicts, and anything that he says to the guards is to be reported to me or my office right away. Are we agreed on this?” His voice was mild but pitched to accept only agreement and cooperation.

  Wilson nodded and then jerked his head to the guards. The prisoner rose without being touched and turned toward the door. But at the doorway he paused and turned back to Rudy.

  “I will leave you with one last thing, Doctor, since you are a Bible-reading believer in the Holy Word.”

  Rudy waited.

  “Yo
ur friend has stepped into harm’s way.”

  “What do you mean?” Rudy asked.

  “When the Sword of the Goddess falls, it is better to stand with the righteous rather than with those who allow the wicked to prosper.” He did the slow, reptilian blink once more. “You and yours fight to defend the house of bones and that path is impure and filled with snakes and thorns. The river of blood will sweep your friend away.”

  Rudy stood. “You accused me of being disingenuous, Nicodemus, and as far as I’m concerned this is a con game. Everyone has friends and a case can easily be made that at any given time one or more of our friends are in some potential danger. Car accidents, plane crashes, take your pick. Scare tactics are cheap theatrics, and frankly, I expected more from you.”

  Nicodemus smiled. “Well now, sir, I would not want to be compared or confused with carnival barkers and sideshow tricksters. No sir. Yet my comment stands. Your friend is walking in harm’s way.”

  “Which friend?”

  The smile became degrees colder. “The killer,” he said. “The one who has lost the grace of the Goddess. The one who walks with ghosts.”

  Rudy’s mouth went dry. Nicodemus laughed and fell into his intractable silence, and after several minutes he allowed himself to be led away.

  “What was that all about?” demanded Wilson in a ghost of a voice.

  Rudy’s throat was so tight he could not speak to answer.

  Interlude Nineteen

  T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State

  Two Months Before the London Event

  Hugo Vox roared at her, “You did what?”

  Circe winced. “Grace was a good friend, Hugo, and I thought that she might be able to use MindReader to—”

  Vox slammed his open palm down on his desk hard enough to make everything jump. A dollop of coffee splashed onto the blotter. “God damn it, Circe, why the fuck did you do that?”

  “I thought—”

  “You thought? You thought! Jesus H. Christ, talking to your pals at the DMS is one thing, but everything—everything—official that is going to land on Church’s desk gets vetted by me. Every goddamn thing. We live and die on federal goodwill. We piss them off—and breaking protocol is the fastest way to do that—and suddenly they forget where their checkbook is. You know that, too.”

  “I—”

  “I don’t care what connections you have there. You could bring down ten kinds of shit on my head. What were you thinking, kiddo? You trying to kill me here?”

  His booming voice was so loud that it rattled the windows and hit her like shock waves.

  “I … I’m sorry, Hugo.”

  He made a disgusted noise and pivoted his chair to face the wall. He seethed in silence for a long time and she let him. She didn’t dare say anything else.

  Finally he drew in a deep breath and let it out like a hot-air balloon collapsing. Without turning, he said, “I give you a lot of slack, Circe. Because of your dad, and because you do good work, exceptional work, and I’ve got nothing but praise for it.” He turned back to face her. “Except for crap like this. It’s not the first time you’ve jumped protocol, but by god it had better be the last. And I’d say the same thing if you were my own daughter.”

  “I’m sorry.” Tears burned in the corners of her eyes.

  “Yeah, well … Shit. I don’t mind that you spoke with Grace Courtland, but you know goddamn well that it had to be an off-the-record thing. Nothing official, and no copies of a report that I haven’t frigging well okayed.” He drummed his fingers on the desk blotter. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Goddess stuff is over. Give me your final report and then you’re off the project effective now.”

  “But that’s not fair, Hugo. I—”

  He held up a warning finger. “It is so important to your future that you not finish that sentence, kiddo.”

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  “I’ve got another project that is career valuable but also off-site. I want you way the hell off the DMS radar for a while. I’m sending you to London. You’ll be our liaison for the Sea of Hope thing.”

  “But—”

  He cocked his head and glared at her.

  “Yes, Hugo,” she said contritely.

  “This isn’t a demotion and no one will see it as such. Hell, it’ll probably help you sell more books. But I want you out of T-Town in case your end run brings down any heat. Which it will. So, go pack and, Circe … do us both a favor—stay out of my way for a couple of days.”

  “Yes, Hugo.”

  She sniffed back her tears and left the office.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Fair Isle Research Endeavor

  The Shetland Isles

  December 18, 2:54 P.M. GMT

  “I’m at the door,” I said quietly. I was in a hazmat-augmented HAMMER suit with a bunch of Star Trek gizmos clipped to my belt. I was miked into the temporary command center set up in the chopper and there was a small camera on my helmet. I passed a sensor gadget over the door frame but got no pings, so I knelt and peered through the glass and along the cracks.

  “No visible booby traps. Dalek, what’s the call on the lock?” We’d switched to call signs only. Redcap was Prebble; Church was Deacon. Dr. Hu’s call sign was Dalek. He was a nerd on several continents.

  “The outer door is nothing special, Cowboy,” replied Hu. “All of the special locks are inside.”

  “Nothing visible through the glass,” I said. “Proceeding inside.”

  I took a very careful hold of the metal door handle. No shocks and nothing exploded. I pulled gently and the door yielded, but I stayed on the balls of my feet. If I felt the tension of a wire or heard a click, I was going to set a new land speed record for a scared white guy in a hazmat suit.

  The door opened with a wonderfully boring lack of explosions.

  I went inside. The reception area was empty and sparsely furnished with a functional desk, a file cabinet, two ugly plastic visitor chairs, and a glass coffee table littered with magazines that were three years old. The walls were covered with posters about bacterial research and its benefits to the fishing industry, a map of the coastal waters, and a complex set of tide tables. I quickly searched the whole room and came up dry. No traps, no surprises.

  And that, by itself, was surprising.

  There was a set of double doors behind the counter that looked cheap and fragile, but the wood grain was a clever fake and when I ran a finger along the surface I felt the cool hardness of steel. A keycard scanner was mounted in a discreet niche in the wall. All DMS agents have a programmable master keycard, and the key codes to this facility had been uploaded to mine. I swiped the card and was surprised that it worked. I’d expected the codes to have been changed or at least disabled.

  I did not, however, take that as a sign that all was well and that the wacky professor was brewing a pot of chamomile for us to share with a plate of ginger snaps. There are a lot of ways to lay a trap.

  The door opened with a click. I unclipped a handheld BAMS unit—a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer—from my belt. It was one of Hu’s sci-fi gadgets, a few steps up from what they use in airports. The BAMS allowed for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. It has a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Most of the commercial BAMS units were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density, but Church always made sure that Hu had the best toys. Ours wasn’t mounted on a cart like the airport model.

  I checked several spots in the room and the light stayed green. If there were pathogens loose in here, the concentration was too low for the BAMS unit to detect.

  I moved inside.

  The door opened into a faux vestibule that was actually a low-level air lock. As I key-swiped the inner door, the one behind me swung shut with a hydraulic his
s. With the BAMS unit in one hand and my Beretta 92F in the other, I moved out of the air lock. The inner room was large and empty. Computer workstations and wheeled chairs, flat-screen monitors in the walls. A Mr. Coffee on a table. Coffee cups.

  The scanner was still green, but I had an itch tickling me between the shoulder blades. It was the kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s in the tall grass watching you through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. I crept across the room, moving on the balls of my feet, checking corners, checking under desks, looking for trip wires, expecting an attack. Doing this sort of stuff for a living does not totally harden you to the stress. Sure, you get cooler, you learn the tricks of ratcheting down the tension on your nerves, but you aren’t a tenth as calm as you look. It’s one of the reasons we take precautions, like keeping our finger flat along the outside curve of the trigger guard. You keep your finger on the trigger and you either shoot yourself or shoot the first poor son of a bitch who wanders into the moment.

  Like the kid who opened the side door to the staff room.

  I never heard him, didn’t see him, had no clue he was there until he spoke.

  “Are you him?”

  I instantly spun around and screwed the barrel of the pistol into soft flesh between a pair of large watery green eyes. In the split part of a second it took for me to pivot and slip my finger inside the trigger guard I registered how short and how young he was.

  Maybe seven.

  Fire engine red hair, cat green eyes in a freckly face that was white with shock as he stared cross-eyed at the gun barrel. In a movie it would have been a comical moment. In the flesh it was horrible on too many levels to count.

  “I.I … ,” he stammered, and I stepped back and pulled the gun away, but only just. Kids can kill, too. They can pull triggers and they can wear explosive vests. The only reason he didn’t get shot was because his hands were empty.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  He had to try it several times before he could squeeze it out. “M-Mikey,” he said. “I’m Mikey Grey.”