Smiling in anticipation of a manageable crisis—probably something else about the wedding plans for Cathy’s daughter—Amber flipped open the phone.
“Hi, Cathy—”
“Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” said the man with the Spanish accent.
His voice was quiet, polite, but it grabbed her by the throat and throttled the air out of her world.
“Oh, God!”
“Not quite,” said the man. “But close.”
“Are my children all right? God … you didn’t touch them—?”
“Shhh,” he soothed. “Shhh now. Emily and Mark are fine. I can see Emily right now. Such a pretty little face in that tiny school bus. Her new braces are quite nice. She wears them well.”
“Don’t—”
“Isn’t it nice that she doesn’t try to hide them behind her hand when she talks? Not even when she smiles. She’s very self-possessed for her age, don’t you think?”
“Please,” Amber begged. Her voice was already raw, as if she’d been screaming. “Please don’t hurt my babies.”
“Why would I? You haven’t done anything that requires that they be hurt, have you?”
“No!”
“So why would I let anything happen to them? Unless you demand that I act, then none of us will touch a hair on her head. Or Mark’s head. That is our agreement, yes?”
“Yes.” Tears boiled from the corners of Amber’s eyes and fell like acid down her cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”
The man laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh, and the sound of it made her cringe. The laugh was unspeakably ugly. Deep and filled with a knowledge and delight so dark that it threatened to burn the light out of the clear morning sky.
“Mrs. Taylor,” he said, “do you know why I am calling you today?”
“Y-yes.”
“You knew that this day would come. I told you that I would make this call.”
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely. “When?”
“Today,” he said. “Right now.”
“But … my children … I have to—”
“No, Mrs. Taylor, you only have one thing to do. We are watching your children. We are waiting for you to do what you have promised to do.”
“I need to know that my babies are safe!”
“That’s up to you. If you do this, then I swear to the Goddess and by all of her works that I will not harm them. When this is over for you, it will be over for them. They will live to grow up and grow old and put flowers on your grave.”
“Please don’t make me do this … .”
“Or,” he said softly, “you could spend your remaining years putting flowers on their graves. That is … if you could ever find where they were buried.”
Amber tried to shout at him, but her voice broke into splinters of fear and grief and tears.
He hung up, but Amber heard him whisper something as the connection was broken. A single word.
“Delicious …”
Chapter Forty
The Warehouse / DMS Tactical Field Office
Baltimore, Maryland
December 19, 9:02 A.M. EST
Top Sims found his team waiting for him clustered around a big black Tactical Vehicle in the main garage. The TacV looked like an oversized SUV, with a bulked-up back bay filled with weapons and equipment. Each of the team—DeeDee, Khalid, and John Smith—affected a posture of cool disinterest. A passerby would have thought they were waiting for a train. Only Bunny stood apart, hands in his pockets, head down, staring at the concrete between his feet.
The team nodded to Top, who returned the nod and headed over to talk with Mike Harnick, the chief mechanic at the Warehouse. Harnick was leaning on the hood writing on a clipboard and he looked up and smiled as Top approached.
“How we doing, Mike?”
“Black Bess is good to go. The extra armor adds weight, so I put a sixty-gallon tank on it.”
“What’s that extra weight do to the speed?”
Harnick shrugged and patted the hood. “She’ll get to about eighty and that’s it, but she’ll drive straight through a wall, and nothing short of an RPG is going to dent her.”
Top clapped him on the shoulder and then walked over to where Bunny stood.
“How you doing, Farmboy?” Top asked.
Bunny shrugged.
Top stepped closer. “We lost people before.”
“In fights, Top. Not like this.” Bunny shook his head. “When I was incountry in Afghanistan and Iraq we lost a lot of guys. During the surge, hunting the Taliban in the hills. I collected a lot of dog tags and folded a lot of flags. But this … it’s like someone just swatted them off the planet. They never saw it coming, never even had the chance to go down swinging.”
“It’s the way cowards fight, kid,” said Top. “They don’t have the numbers and they don’t have the balls to come at us in a straight fight, so they plant bombs. They don’t care who dies. It ain’t war. There are no rules, no ethics, no mercy, no honor. That’s who we’re fighting these days.”
Bunny turned to him, and Top could see that the young man’s eyes were puffed and red. Top would never mock him for those tears, and neither would anyone in the Warehouse. But Top knew those tears burned.
“That’s the point,” Bunny said harshly. “They’re blowing up buildings all over the world and they won’t stand up and fight. Fuck, man, I don’t know who to hate.”
Top nodded. He felt it, too. The anger, the rage, was there in his chest, a self-perpetuating and self-consuming ball of heat that had nowhere to go.
“I need to get into this fight, Top,” Bunny said. “I need to get into it or I’m going to have to walk away from it.”
“Well, guess what, Farmboy? We just got orders to drive up to Philly and rendezvous with Cap’n Ledger.”
Bunny gave him a sharp look. “The captain’s back?”
“Yeah, and he’s already chasing this like a hound dog. Got into some shit in England. Cap’n put three of ’em down.”
Bunny straightened. “Does that mean we know something?”
“Don’t know what we know, but when were you ever around Cap’n Ledger when the bad guys weren’t trying to take a shot? Ain’t a good place to stand if you want to be safe, but if you want to go hunting in Indian Country, then saddle up.”
Bunny sniffed and let out a breath, blowing out his cheeks and stretching his big arms until his shoulders popped. “Okay, then. If he’s in it, then I’m definitely in it.”
Top slapped him hard on the shoulder as they walked over to the SUV.
Khalid stood by the rear passenger door and had overheard the conversation. “We’re all in it now, big man,” he said. “They drew first blood.”
John Smith leaned against the rear fender, a plastic coffee stirrer between his teeth. He nodded.
“Then it’s their ass,” said DeeDee. “Let’s bring the pain.”
She held out her fist and took the bump from Bunny and then the others.
They piled in with DeeDee driving and Top riding shotgun. The TacV was armored and stocked like a rolling arsenal. It also had Sirius radio uplink and DeeDee dialed it over to Classic Blues. The song that was playing as they rolled out of the Warehouse was Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail.”
They took that as a sign. Or maybe a credo, because they were the Hellhounds.
Interlude Twenty-nine
The Seven Kings
Three Months Ago
Toys touched Gault’s arm just as they were about to enter the Chamber of the Kings. “Sebastian,” he said, “please consider what you’re about.”
Gault smiled, but it lacked warmth. “Oh my God, will you stop with this bullshit? You’ve been whining about this for weeks now.”
“It’s my job to give you a perspective check, don’t forget.”
“It’s not your job to advocate small thinking.”
“Oh, please, that’s not—”
“Besides, since when did you become squeamish?�
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Toys stepped back and folded his arms. “Squeamish? Is that what you think?”
“Pick a better word, then. ‘Timid’?”
Toys felt the blood drain from his face. “Oh … be careful now, Sebastian,” he said softly.
Gault stepped toward him so that their faces were inches apart. “I’m going to tell you for the last time, Toys … stop pushing me. Learn your fucking place.”
With that he turned and swept into the chamber.
Inside, the other Kings were on their thrones, their Consciences by their sides. The screens on the walls showed charts and maps or ran with lines of carefully gathered intelligence. Eris sat on her throne, a magazinethin laptop on her thighs. She had half-glasses perched on her nose and Toys thought that for the first time she looked closer to her age.
Here’s hoping you have a stroke and die, you bloodsucking hag, he thought.
When Toys and Gault were in their seats, the King of Lies stood. The Saudi was dressed in a European suit, his beard trimmed short, and he wore no ghutra on his head. It made him look like a different man, and Toys wondered if the longer beard was indeed part of a disguise.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I trust you’ve all had a chance to read through the preliminary report prepared by Plagues? Yes?” He looked around, saw general nods, and continued. “Gold has reviewed the financial requests and informs us that the overall cost for this operation is three percent higher than anticipated, but I think we can all agree that it will be worth the investment of those additional millions.”
More nods.
“The next phase is twofold. The logistical phase will be jointly managed by Fear and Gold, for all of the obvious reasons. The Goddess and I will continue to oversee the disinformation program. Goddess?”
Eris raised a hand to acknowledge the applause. Toys glanced at Gault and saw that he was fairly glowing with pride and lust. The fool. Toys cut a look at the American and saw that his hands barely touched as he pretended to applaud.
Lies then introduced Gault, who stood to a renewed wave of applause. He bowed to Eris and then stood silent for a moment, his dark eyes drifting from face to face around the table, waiting as the chamber gradually fell into an expectant silence.
“I’ve reviewed all of Kirov’s work,” began Gault, “and although I hold my predecessor in great esteem, there were some serious flaws in his theories. The short version is that some of the science is simply not going to work. We can push the boundaries of science, but we cannot break them. Not yet, anyway. I know this comes as a blow, because for years now the frontiers of paleomicrobiology have been crumbling as scientists like Professor Kirov hammered away at them with innovative ideas and radical research. But it is the nature of science that some experiments do not succeed even when most of the evidence seems to lead toward success.”
No one applauded that comment. A scowling King of War said, “Kirov assured us that this would work. He was ready to take a team to Egypt to harvest the bacteria or virus or whatever it was from the tomb of the Pharaoh’s son. Our whole campaign was built around his recovering and reactivating that disease. Now you’re telling us that it was all a waste of time? We’ve invested considerable time and funds into this venture.”
“With respect, Brother War,” said Gault with a placating smile, “that is Kirov’s problem. He may have been overenthusiastic when crafting that plan, since much of what he promised was based on speculation, not on research.”
Toys found himself crossing his fingers under the table. If Gault had hit a dead end, then there was some chance that he was not going to destroy himself with another harebrained plan.
“Kirov’s theory was that the Death of the Firstborn was a communicable pathogen. That much he had already proven to be incorrect. His secondary approach was to then create a new pathogen or mutate an existing virus to target only firstborn children and use that against the children of the Inner Circle. It’s bold, it’s ballsy, but it’s equally flawed. There is nothing genetically unique about firstborn that would open a selective door to a designed pathogen. Granted, crafting such a disease would have been beautiful, and though it would have contributed to the desired goal of overlaying science with religious mystery, it simply cannot be done. To labor on it is an exercise in futility, and a costly one at that.”
“Then we are going to come up short on our campaign,” said the American, smiling faintly and cutting a look at the Goddess. “We’re screwed.”
“No, my brothers,” Gault said with a smile, “we are not. If science has taught us anything it’s that a way will open. When one form of treatment fails, we often learn enough from its failure in order to design a more effective protocol. Observation and compensation are key to scientific advancement.”
Eris smiled. “Tell them,” she purred.
Gault leaned his palms on the table. “The answer lies within the phenomenon of pain. Our desire is to hurt the Inner Circle. Hurt them so deeply, so profoundly, that they will be crippled. Unable and unwilling to make another move against us. That is the true task.”
The Kings and Consciences turned slowly to look at one another, and there were many thoughtful nods.
“Kirov had the right idea, but not the right plan. I have a better plan,” Gault continued. “One that allows us to use everything we’ve already done. The disinformation campaigns through social media and the Internet, the manipulation of extremist cells, and the whole culture of modern terrorism. But it adds an element of coercion that has only been touched upon before.”
Toys noticed that Santoro sat up straight at the word “coercion” and his lips wriggled into an unpleasant and hungry smile.
“My esteemed brother the King of Fear has the resources to bring this program to fruition. With his vast network of contacts, and with the tactical genius of Rafael Santoro, I believe we can get my program up and running in under a month, which would allow us to complete it according to the same timetable as Kirov’s plan.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by questions from everyone at once.
Toys used the commotion to lock eyes with the King of Fear. The American looked briefly furious, but he covered it by slapping on another hearty smile. However, he must have felt Toys’ eyes upon him, because he turned and gave him a very brief but definite wink.
“And now, my brothers,” said Sebastian Gault, “here is how we will do it.”
Chapter Forty-one
In Flight
December 19, 9:03 A.M. EST
I called Church. “You’re gonna love this, Boss,” I said, and told him about the plagues, including the almost certain connection to the Locust bomber.
He said, “It’s a short list of people who knew about that project. I’ll talk to the President. Is there anything else?”
“Yes. I’d like you to make a video.”
“Is this going to be one of your attempts at humor?”
“No. This is serious, and it might help us head another Kings event off at the pass.”
“Tell me.”
I did. He listened and then disconnected without comment. It’s always a Hallmark moment with him. You always feel like your call is the centerpiece of his day.
As I tucked my phone away, Circe said, “You think there will be more Kings attacks?”
“Don’t you?”
“Sadly, yes. But it may not be in what could be called an ‘ordinary way.’”
“Meaning?”
“Apart from the calls to violence, a lot of the Goddess posts are hints that her cult is part of an ancient belief system that is only now revealing itself. By incorporating references to other goddesses, she’s essentially borrowing their history. Hijacking it and claiming it as part of her legacy. If the Goddess is part of the Seven Kings organization, and I think we both agree on that, then the Kings might not actually have to commit seven more acts of terrorism. They can find some that have already happened and retroactively claim that they were responsi
ble. I mean, it wouldn’t take much to suggest that 9/11 was the rain of fire and ash plague.”
“Maybe. Time frame is off.”
“Maybe not. Take the Plague of Frogs. Unless the Kings already have a target in mind that has a frog connotation, like the Locust thing with the bomber, they could claim that the frog extinction is their doing.”
“Wait! What? When did frogs become extinct?”
“What planet are you living on?” she said with exasperation. “Toads and frogs are dying out in huge numbers. It’s well documented. There have been TV specials. Of course, the science tells us that it’s because of pressure from the expansion of agriculture, forestry, pollution, disease, and climate change.”
“How would that have major PR punch for the Kings? I mean, I don’t want to see Kermit take a dirt nap, but … these are just some frogs, right? How’s that work in a biblical way?”
She muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “Neanderthal.” Aloud she said, “The die-off of amphibians could be a sign of possible future damage to other parts of the ecosystem, because frogs and toads are especially vulnerable and thus are the first to disappear. Also, a mass disappearance of amphibians would create broken links in the food chain, and that would definitely have an adverse impact on other organisms. If the Kings were to hijack this, it would elevate the public perception of them as unstoppable and possibly supernaturally powerful.”
“Okay,” I said, “I see it. From a propaganda point of view it only matters that the Kings take credit. Anyone who says they aren’t involved has the job of trying to prove a negative, which is self-defeating. I mean, what could the Al-Qaeda do to dispute it? Have a TV debate? Besides, the DMS has already taken out Seven Kings cells that had Al-Qaeda ties. Your 9/11 hypothesis might even be real.”
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