Dogs of War

by Jonathan Maberry

  Cole took a breath, held it, let it out. “Yes.”

  “That’s our world.”

  “It’s fucked up,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Want to help us save it?”

  “Shit, Captain,” she said with a wicked grin, “you couldn’t keep me out of this. It’s my world, too.”

  “We’re not too big on induction ceremonies.” I offered my hand. “Welcome to the war.”

  We were in the air ten minutes later.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  THE BAIN ESTATE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 1:14 AM EASTERN TIME

  “John?” said Zephyr. She lay in the warm wetness of a tub, bubbles to her chin, no lights on, music playing softly.

  Off to one side, invisible in the darkness, John spoke. “Yes, my love?”

  “This is right, isn’t it?”

  “Right?”

  “Havoc. The evolution, the new world order. All of it. We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

  She heard the sound of wine being poured into a glass, the fainter sound of him swallowing. A sigh of pleasure. “It’s your birthright.”

  “My father was a psychopath and my mother was an enabler. I was born to money and privilege and I don’t need to reshape the world, because even if I didn’t have cancer I could spend a million dollars a day on shoes and still never make a dent in what I have in the bank. This isn’t me making an unfair world into a better one.”

  “It’s your legacy, then.”

  “Is it? Will anyone—even the chosen ones—remember me as anything other than the worst mass murderer in the history of the world? I’ll have killed more people than all the plagues and every war put together.”

  “Second only to God,” he said.

  “That’s not supposed to be a joke. I mean … we joke about it. We laugh about it, and it turns us on. Hell, we fuck about it … but it’s not a joke.”

  “It’s a joke only a god could appreciate.”

  “I’m not a god. I … I’m not even human anymore. I’m dead, but I’m still breathing. Shit, I’m not even a zombie.”

  “You are Zephyr Bain. You will be remembered for a thousand years. Ten thousand.”

  “As a monster.”

  “As the woman who saved the world.”

  She slapped at the bubbles, heard water slosh over onto the bathroom floor. “How’s that a legacy?”

  “No one will ever forget you. It will be impossible, because everyone who survives will do so because you allowed it. Who else in the history of the world can make that claim?” asked John.

  “I’ll be the Devil.”

  “No,” he said. “You will not be that.”

  They were quiet for a while as the music changed. The new song was an old one. Early Sarah McLachlan. She was talking to the darkness in her soul, admitting that she felt like letting go. Zephyr remembered that song from when she was a girl. It had been playing the first time she and Carly Schellinger made love. It was playing when Zephyr had her first orgasm conjured by a hand other than her own. The moody pathos of the song had forever infused that memory with an introspective melancholy and it came back now, washing over her, whispering to her, telling her how easy it would be to let go, to let the darkness take her down, to simply vanish. From her own dreams of changing the world, from this moment, from John—whatever he was—from the pain.

  She felt her body slip down an inch, felt the water lick at her chin.

  It would be so easy to do it. Breathing was an effort anyway. Maybe that was because her lungs didn’t want to struggle anymore. Maybe that’s the truth the world was trying to whisper to her. Give in, give up, go away, be nothing.

  Never give the word that will change the world. Never be the dark god of the future. Never be the boogeyman of ten thousand years’ worth of dreams.

  Just go.

  Go.

  “Zephyr…?” said a voice.

  Not John.

  It was Calpurnia.

  Zephyr didn’t answer. Instead, she let her body slide down another inch, so that the black waters kissed her lips. The bubbles covered her face; she could smell the perfumed soap and, inside it, the medicine smell of her own rotting flesh.

  “Zephyr?” said Calpurnia. “Is anything wrong?”

  There was a clink as a wineglass was set down on the tiled floor, then a soft shift and rustle as a body rose from a chair, the slap-pad of bare feet on the tiles, and then the ripple-swish of a hand entering the water. She felt fingers probe for her, touch her, stroke her from hip to breast to throat and then up out of the water to her cheek.

  “No,” said John.

  “Wh … what…?” asked Zephyr dreamily.

  “What do you mean?” asked Calpurnia. “Should I do a medical triage?”

  “Shh,” said John softly. “Everything is fine. Everything is perfect.”

  Zephyr could feel the warmth of her tears as they burned their way through the bubbles. If she was aware of the scanner eyes of the computer watching her, then it was something that folded softly into her dream and, as such, did not seem to matter very much.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  IN FLIGHT

  Shirley’s cabin was soundproof and set up as a mobile command center. Computers, workstations, the works. We all dived in and began taking the evidence we had and the suspicions we were forming and trying to puzzle them together. I told my guys the same thing I told Nikki—that we had to consider the possibility that everything currently happening to the DMS and our allies wasn’t a million cases but one goddamn big case. We kept open lines to Nikki, Yoda, and Bug. Aunt Sallie had analysts on this, and John Cmar’s Bughunters were forwarding every scrap of data to us from Milwaukee, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Cmar, too, was looking outward, stepping back from the brushstrokes in order to see the theme of the painting. At first it felt wrong, with too many things colliding into a jumble, but with every step backward the picture became clearer.

  “They’re playing us like we’re a Lego set,” Bunny said for maybe the tenth time. “Us and everyone like us.”

  “Yes, they damn well are,” said Top, nodding.

  “How often does this happen?” asked Cole.

  I cut a look at her. “Lately? A little too often. From here on out? Well … you know what they say about payback.”

  Cole gave me a long, considering look, and there was a fair amount of skepticism in there. “Really? What’s going to change the rulebook?”

  “MindReader Q1.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Top told me about that. Sounds like bullshit. A computer that can hack every other computer on the planet and yet you didn’t see this coming?”

  I explained to her some of what had happened to MindReader in the past couple of years. She listened, fascinated and skeptical in equal amounts, but by the time I was done she was frowning and shaking her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  I smiled. “Cole, here in the DMS you are invited and encouraged to speak your full mind at any time.”

  “Okay,” she said, “then if that’s true you won’t get pissed if I tell you you’re a fucking bunch of idiots.”

  “Okay,” I said, “that’s not where I thought this conversation was going.”

  “You’re blind,” she said. “Maybe you’re all so close to this that you can’t see the forest for the trees, but it’s pretty damn obvious from where I’m standing.”

  “What part of it is obvious?”

  “You said it yourself, Captain. You said that this MindReader thing has been messed with by the smartest computer expert in the world. What was his name?”

  “Davidovich.”

  “Right. MindReader was designed to look for patterns, but Davidovich did something to make your badass computer go blind when it looked in certain directions, right?”

  “Right, so … how does that make us idiots?”

  “Because
those blind spots are probably still there,” she said. “They’re like camouflage over important stuff. Have you tried to use your new quantum-whatever thing to look through those blind spots? I mean, like look back at old cases and see if there was anything you missed that you wouldn’t otherwise miss.”

  She said more. Probably. But I wasn’t listening. I was too busy making calls to Bug, to Yoda, to Nikki, and to Church.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

  IN FLIGHT

  Bug said, “Oh … shit.”

  Yoda said, “Mmmm … well … shit…”

  “Nikki said, “Oh, my God.”

  Church said, “Officer Cole just earned her first paycheck.”

  And they were all gone. You could almost hear the machinery kick into high gear. I’m limber enough to kick my own ass, and I wanted to do it. Real hard. Bunny sat there shaking his head, muttering small curses. Top took a cold stump of a cigar out of a pocket, put it between his teeth, chewed on it for a moment, then sighed. Cole looked completely surprised that she had been right. So completely right.

  “Seriously?” she asked. “None of you geniuses saw this?”

  Top shook his head. “We’ve all been depending so hard on MindReader that we got soft and we got blind, too.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Bunny, “and you just slapped us awake, Cole. Go on, take a victory lap. But have a little perspective. There’s nothing simple about any of this. It took the work of years and millions of dollars and a river of blood to stick mud in our eyes. You have no idea what they done to us.”

  Cole was unabashed. “Well, boo fucking hoo, Bunny. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s yesterday’s box score. Today’s a whole new fight. We got this fancy-ass new MindReader quantum-whatever thing, we got a clue or some part of a clue. And we’re on our way out to kick some nerd ass and take names.”

  Top grinned at her. Something halfway between a fatherly grin and a fuck-you grin. “If it’s any consolation, from here on out we’re going to war under a black flag.”

  “Hooah,” said Bunny. Ghost gave a single, sharp bark. I nodded.

  “We all get it, Cole,” I said. “Now stop gloating and let’s see where this takes us.”

  Cole gave me an ironic salute. I gave her the finger. We all got to work going through the data and trying to sketch out a workable theory.

  At one point Rudy said, “Joe, if Bad Sister is somehow using technology acquired from or inspired by the Seven Kings, then we need to look at their whole model of action. They made extensive use of coercion and emotional warfare by attacking family and friends of DMS staff. What happened to your uncle and to Sean’s family sends a clear message. I think we need to prepare for more of this.”

  “Jesus!” I said, and we made a call to Aunt Sallie, Church’s number two. She runs the Hangar, the DMS headquarters, and once upon a time she was the scariest goddamn field agent to ever come out of the dark to slit throats and steal secrets. She also hates me, but that’s another story.

  “Don’t wet your panties, Ledger,” Auntie told me. “We already got some heavy hitters closing in on everyone we care about. That includes Circe and the baby and Junie.”

  “Who’d you put on Junie?” I asked.

  She told me, and it made me smile. It was a guy—if guy is the right word—I worked a mission with in the Middle East last year. Big, gruesome, unsmiling, cranky, nasty, violent son of a bitch named Franks. Looks like Frankenstein’s uglier brother. “Agent Franks was already down in Brazil spanking some cartel ass,” said Auntie. “He said he’d be happy to take a look and make sure Junie was covered.” She paused. “He said you were a bleeding-heart asshole. I like him.”

  You can’t slam the receiver down on an earbud, but I dropped her off the call while she was still saying evil things about me.

  When my cell phone buzzed to indicate a new text message, I actually jumped. It was from the Good Sister. I snapped my fingers for Rudy and the others, and they all clustered around to look at the screen. However, it wasn’t the same kind of message I’d received before. Instead, it was a rolling stream of data. Body temperature, blood pressure, height, weight, age, blood analysis, EKG, EEG, pre-surgery assessment, and dozens of other items that I didn’t understand.

  “What’s all this shit?” demanded Bunny.

  “It’s medical records,” said Rudy.

  “Whose?”

  “God … I think it’s Lefty’s,” I said.

  “And Ali’s and Em’s,” said Rudy.

  “Jesus on the cross,” whispered Top.

  I tapped into the command channel and got Sam.

  “I have six agents on site,” he told me. “I’ll run this down.”

  The screen display changed, and now there was a text message.

  She doesn’t know that I’m doing this.

  “Yeah, well neither do I, sweetheart,” I grumbled. Then something occurred to me and I wrote:

  Did you send the message ‘He is awake’?

  The answer came back right away, almost without pause:

  Yes.

  Rudy gasped. It was an actual response. I asked:

  Why? Who is he?

  She wrote back:

  He is my enemy.

  He is my love.

  He is my killer.

  I glanced at Rudy, hoping for a suggestion of what to say next, but all he could do was shake his head. Thanks a bunch. So I wrote:

  Where can I find you?

  I can help you.

  Protect you.

  The Good Sister wrote:

  Only he can help me.

  Only he can kill me.

  I wrote:

  Let me help.

  She replied:

  The other one is coming for you.

  I glanced at my guys, but they all shook their heads, so I asked:

  Who is the other one? Your sister?

  She wrote:

  No. Your ancient enemy.

  To which I replied:

  Who…?

  I don’t understand.

  Her reply was so strange.

  My sister thinks he loves her.

  He loves nothing.

  His mind is a furnace.

  He is of fire.

  He is chaos.

  She paused, but before I could type in a reply and ask for some goddamn clarification, she wrote more:

  He is not eternal.

  He only thinks he is.

  He fears you.

  You should fear him.

  I do.

  I damn near broke my phone hammering out a reply:

  Who is he?

  Nothing for long seconds. Two minutes crawled by before I finally lost hope that there would be another text. Then, suddenly, the screen was filled with the ones and zeros of binary code:

  01000110 01100101 01100001 01110010

  00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101

  00100000 01110100 01110010 01101001

  01100011 01101011 01110011 01110100

  01100101 01110010

  After that, nothing at all.

  “What the actual hell…?” murmured Bunny.

  I tapped my earbud to Yoda’s channel. “Are you seeing this shit? Tell me it makes sense.”

  “What she, mmmm, said? No. She’s rambling. But that last thing … mmmm, it’s, mmmm, standard binary.”

  “I know that, Einstein. What’s it fucking say?”

  I heard Yoda gasp. “… oh, my God…”

  “What’s the message?” I roared.

  “It’s three words,” said Yoda, and this time there was no humming, no stalling. “It’s a warning, Cowboy. It says, ‘Fear the trickster.’”

  Rudy jerked backward from my phone as if it was a rattlesnake poised to strike. His face was sweaty and gray. “Ay Dios mio,” he said, and crossed himself. I licked dry lips and tried to swallow a throatful of dust.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Cole, crowding in behind Rudy. “What’s with you guys?”

  * * *

  I put a h
and on Rudy’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “Hey, Rudy, listen to me, okay? Listen. This isn’t what you think. You’re overreacting. You have no idea that’s what the message meant.”

  There was a feral wildness in Rudy’s good eye that scared me. He began shaking his head, and at the same time tried to speak a word. A name. “Nic … Nic … Nic…”

  That was all he could get out, as if his flesh and muscles and breath couldn’t bear to utter the full name. Spit flecked his chin and his knees buckled, so that Top and I had to catch him.

  I knew the name he was trying to say. An impossible name that I didn’t want to say, either. It would be too much like daring the universe to make it true. It would be like saying “Bloody Mary” too many times in the mirror. My rational mind—the Modern Man and the Cop—rebelled at even the possibility, but the Killer in my soul screamed in fear and edged closer to the fire and farther from the surrounding darkness. We were all thinking the same thing. There were a lot of tricky bastards in the world, but as far as the DMS was concerned there was only one “trickster.”

  Nicodemus.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

  IN FLIGHT

  “Nicodemus is dead.” I took Rudy by both shoulders and shook him. “You killed him, Rudy. He’s gone.”

  His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites all around the irises. “He can’t be killed—”

  “Who the hell is Nicodemus?” demanded Cole, but we ignored her.

  “He’s back, he’s back—oh God, he’s back,” babbled Rudy as he tried to push my hands away. Top and Bunny stood staring, mouths open, real fear in their eyes. Ghost whined and backed away from my phone, which now lay on the table, the screen gone dark. Cole looked around as if answers would be painted on the wall. Or, more probably, she was looking for a way out of whatever she had stepped into.

  “Whoa, stop it, Rude,” I said, pitching my voice louder than his, trying to push his words down and away. “He’s gone. You know he’s gone. You were there.” I pointed to the phone. “You know this isn’t that.”

  Rudy raised a palsied hand and passed it across his face.

  “Cowboy,” said Yoda in my ear, “we’re running some checks now. There, are, mmmm, a lot of ways to interpret that message.…”

  It was a nice try. He was still in the conversation and could hear me trying to talk Rudy off the ledge. I tapped out of the shared channel. My immediate concern was Rudy, because he was way the hell out there on the ledge. I kept talking to him, gradually lowering my voice, easing the tension out of my words, repeating calming phrases. It was all stuff Rudy had taught me years ago. Stuff he’d used on me during some of my worst times. After Helen. After Grace. I could see the exact moment when the lights came back on in the darkness of Rudy’s mind. He blinked and took a ragged breath, then he licked his lips. Nervous habits. Ordinary habits. Reconnecting with his body and pulling himself by slow degrees from a place of pure, relentless emotions and back onto solid ground. To anyone who doesn’t understand shock and trauma, it doesn’t look like much, but Top, Bunny, and even Cole said nothing. They stood by and let me help Rudy win himself back. They knew. They understood.