Dogs of War

by Jonathan Maberry

  “But, mmmm, if you look deeper,” said Yoda, “you, mmmm, find program fragments.”

  “It looks like bad code,” continued Bug, “and anyone could build a case for it being a side effect of the speed with which the Zika nanites swarm program was put together. A lot of programs have that. Dead code. We looked closer, and found that these code fragments add up to a larger and more complicated code. And that code is big enough to have several possible functions.”

  “And it, mmmm, uses the viral-delivery, mmmm, system as part of its operational system.”

  “Right,” said Bug. “It’s a kind of fragmented thing that uses the overall swarm as a Trojan horse and then hijacks its own intended purpose to help it regulate other disease forms.”

  “And this is possible?” I asked, appalled.

  “Mmmm, clearly,” said Yoda, “because we, mmmm, found it.”

  “MindReader found it,” corrected Bug, pride showing in his eyes. “Instead of doing individual code assessments, we asked the Q1 to analyze the swarm as a whole and interpret tactical potential.”

  “Now wait a freaking minute,” I said, “are you telling us that we’ve been spraying rabies and dengue and—”

  “No,” said Bug and Yoda at the same time.

  “Then you lost me.”

  “Joe, what we’ve found is half of something really big and really bad,” said Bug. “We think the Bad Sister and her crew have found some way of infecting people on a large scale. Potentially very large, because the Zika-virus program has been spraying this stuff all over the world for the last few years. We compared the nanite software with samples from the ones from the girl in Baltimore, and it’s the same set of interlocking programs.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I breathed. “Why hasn’t any of this shit shown up before?”

  Bug answered that. “Who would know to look, Joe? We know that the nanites are everywhere, and they’ve been detected in blood tests and autopsies all over the world. FEMA, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization collaborated on a paper that was shared with doctors everywhere to explain the presence of the nanites. God … we helped cover this up.”

  “But,” I said, “how are they delivering the diseases that these nanites regulate? And why haven’t we heard of an increase in the diseases yet?”

  Bug said, “I asked Dr. Cmar that. He said there are a lot of papers being circulated about upticks in inactive traces of disease forms. It’s something new—diseases that are usually virulent basically sitting in the bloodstream doing nothing. There are some remarks about anomalous levels of hormones in almost every case. Five different groups, including one of my own research teams, have been compiling information about this. They’ve forwarded dozens of theories, though nothing involving nanites. We’ve all been leaning toward a hope that there’s some new kind of natural or acquired immunity, but we all figured we were years away from understanding it.”

  “How could the presence of nanites go unnoticed?” Rudy asked.

  “That’s a very good question,” said Bug. “Dr. Cmar doesn’t think we can accept that a significant portion of the medical research community is incompetent. That suggests that there has either been some way to mask the presence of the nanites or the researchers have been compromised in some way. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen large-scale corruption, coercion, or deliberate interference, right?”

  “So it’s like a medical version of what Vox and the Kings did with the IRS, the SEC, and other players in the stock market after 9/11,” I said. “We know that Nicodemus is involved, and that means it’s likely, even probable, that he has access to the methods and contacts established by the Kings.”

  “God, I wish that wasn’t true,” said Bug.

  “Even so, why isn’t it all over the news?” Bunny asked.

  “Because people haven’t been dying,” said Rudy. “Think about it, Joe—we didn’t come into this until a teenage prostitute died of rabies in Baltimore. Perhaps Bad Sister was test-driving this new delivery system. Besides, if people had started dying in large numbers everyone would know about it. Everyone would already be working on it. If it were something spreading according to any recognizable outbreak models, the right machinery would be running. But in the absence of mortality numbers the response has been one of guarded caution, guarded optimism, and research.”

  “And cover-up,” I said. “Swell. So now here we are. The Bad Sister has infected God knows how many people and she has God knows how many nanites out there poised to make those diseases go active.”

  “This is what Nicodemus warned me about,” said Rudy. “It’s what he teased Mr. Church about.”

  “Why bother?” asked Cole.

  “Because he feeds off our pain,” said Rudy.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  301 SEA RIDGE DRIVE

  LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 5:01 AM PACIFIC TIME

  The white panel delivery truck drove slowly past the front gate of the big house. The place was enormous, and the driver immediately hated the people who lived there. He’d looked it up on the Net. It was right there on the water, with over a hundred feet of ocean frontage but perched high as if looking down on everything below. The driver thought the house itself looked arrogant. It was on the tip of a point, so the ocean view was amazing. Five bedrooms, six full baths, contemporary design with an open floor plan. It even had a seaside exercise room and a spa. And it had lots of security, with cameras, motion sensors, lighting intended to discourage skulkers, and all the other bells and whistles.

  Not that any of these features would provide actual security. Not when word came down from WhiteHat. Not when Havoc went live.

  Not when it all started falling apart, changing, evolving.

  Maybe, thought the driver, I’ll live here when this is all over.

  After all, the people who owned this place now would be tossed into the cremation pits or dumped far out to sea.

  Later today, though. Not yet. Now he was here to get a sense of the streets for the best delivery access, traffic conditions, security patrols. A last look before Havoc.

  He looked down at his clipboard to read the names of the people who lived in what he considered to be his house.

  Dr. Rudolfo Ernesto Sanchez y Martinez. A shrink who worked for the DMS.

  Dr. Circe Diana Ekklesia Magdalena O’Tree-Sanchez. A writer.

  Carlos Joseph Rudolfo O’Tree-Sanchez. Their kid.

  Banshee. A pet dog.

  The driver didn’t know any of them. He didn’t much care who or what they were. Neither did the WarDogs in the back of his panel truck. All he knew was that the father wasn’t here. He off somewhere and would be taken out by someone else. The wife and kid, and the dog, though, were home.

  In his home.

  For now.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  IN FLIGHT

  When the DMS is working without interference, without sabotage, without its people being attacked and killed, then it earns its name. The Department of Military Sciences. Our group started as a bunch of absolute top-of-the-class science geeks backed by first-chair shooters. It’s only recently that we’ve become one of those Saturday Night Live skits that’s gotten stale because it ran too long.

  Let’s call that yesterday’s news.

  Today we have MindReader Q1. As game changers go, it’s a real ass-kicker, because Special Ops works at its absolute best in the presence of reliable real-time intel. No matter how good your gunslingers are, if they’re operating with questionable information they’re going to fail and they’re going to die. So will the people they’re dedicated to protecting. MindReader was the source of that intelligence for us. Without it we’re blind and we wind up shooting too late or in the wrong direction. Without it we fail or, even if we win, the cost is heartbreakingly high.

  As I said, that was yesterday.

  As Shirley burned her way across the country, I got to witness what happens when the m
en and women of the DMS have access to the right tools. If MindReader was reborn when Bug put the new quantum mainframe and drives online, then we all woke up from a bad and confusing shared dream.

  Everyone was working on different parts of this, and that work was shared in ways that hammered new pieces of the puzzle into place with astonishing speed. When you have the ability to gather large amounts of information and then process and collate it at high speeds, the resulting conclusions have the appearance of intuitive leaps. And, yeah, sure, maybe intuition played into it, but it’s the kind of intuition that comes from being able to trust your tools and your team.

  So over the course of two hours I had a series of very short but very intense one-on-one videoconferences.

  The first call was from Nikki.

  NIKKI: “Joe, MindReader ripped apart Vee Rejenko’s business records. At first look, it appears that his companies were a front for Czech mobsters. His uncle Boris was married to a woman who died at the lab you and Violin hit. I thought maybe Baltimore was some kind of revenge thing, but the timetable was all wrong, so I went deeper, and Rejenko and his colleagues had dozens of connections to human trafficking all over the world. We found tons of meticulous records that we can share with police departments all over the world, because we’re talking about more than eighty countries—mostly, but not entirely, Third World areas. This involves hundreds of thousands of kids, women, and men who were forced into different kinds of sex work. Joe, some of these kids are as young as five years old. It makes me want to kill someone. Some of those sex workers were placed in exclusive brothels servicing very specialized clienteles. Rich guys, with a bias toward executives in the oil, coal, and natural-gas industries. We have their names, and for a bunch we even have credit-card information. Can you imagine that? They pay to sexually abuse children and young women, and it goes on their cards as ‘spa treatments’ or ‘business dinners.’”

  ME: “Christ! How’s this help us, though?”

  NIKKI: “It fits with some of the things John the Revelator has been saying. He said that this curated technological singularity would be a kind of traumatic evolution in which those people would be killed who either are a drain on limited resources—in other words, the poor—or have exploited those resources in ways that negatively affect the biosphere, meaning the ultrarich in the fossil-fuel industries. The polluters and the lobbyists who influence anti-science legislation.”

  ME: “Have you run this past John Cmar?”

  NIKKI: “Yes. He wants to talk to you.”

  And so I called Cmar. He was in the field with one of his Bughunters teams, and he still looked rattled from the group conference we had an hour before. He sat in the back of a mobile lab van and stared at me with fevered eyes.

  CMAR: “I had MindReader hack into the medical records of the oil executives we found in Rejenko’s records, and there have been a few suspicious deaths by pathogens not otherwise known to be present in their areas. Fluke infections, and not many of them.”

  ME: “Which tells us what? More of the test-driving thing you told Church about?”

  CMAR: “Almost certainly.”

  Then I called Yoda.

  YODA: “The, mmmm, Zika spray campaign has, mmmm, run its course. All the, mmmm, target areas have been saturated. Mmmm, computer models, mmmm, have yielded alarming, mmmm, results.”

  He hit me with that data. Nicodemus has taunted Church by saying that three billion people are going to die. That wasn’t a bullshit guess. It might actually have been conservative, because the spray had been used aggressively all over the world. So aggressively that it made me really wonder if the fears of Zika were exaggerated. Yoda was already ahead of me on that, though.

  YODA: “Dr. Cmar, mmmm, now thinks that the Zika virus may have been, mmmm, deliberately mutated in order to lay the groundwork for the original, mmmm, Zika panic and the resulting prophylactic spraying campaign.”

  And that’s how the flight went.

  One call after another. Putting those pieces together. Making it make sense. Rudy, Top, Bunny, and Cole sat with me during this process, and between each call we put our heads together and worked the problem. With good intel, you can work a problem—even one as big and as terrifying as this.

  “So what’s the actual evil master plan here?” asked Cole, once I had everyone up to speed on all of it. “I mean, is this really all about killing off those people—the poor and the oil assholes? Would that really bring about this singularity thing?”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny. “I can see where that would really fuck everything up, but how does it result in a Utopia for the people who don’t get sick and die?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Top. “It can’t. In some places, sure, but Nicodemus tipped us off, Cap’n. He’d have to know that we’d put out alerts to all levels of emergency-response infrastructure.”

  “I agree with Top,” said Rudy. “This would really do the most damage in Third World countries, but that goes against the central argument of a curated apocalypse. It would be a slaughter, but in countries with any kind of quality health care we would get in front of it with medical treatment, quarantine zones, public warnings, social-media alerts—”

  “Unless,” I said, “they had some way to prevent all that from happening.”

  We stared at one another for a long, bad moment.

  And then I made a whole bunch of new calls.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  THE HANGAR

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 9:01 AM

  Forensics analyst Jerry Spencer was a hard man to like, and so far most people didn’t want to do that much labor. He didn’t work at it with much diligence, either. He was curt, often rude, dismissive, egocentric, secretive, mean-spirited, and fussy. He was also brilliant, which is why everyone walked softly around him and tried not to offend him. His skill in collecting and analyzing evidence was superb, and with the resources of MindReader Q1 it was second to none.

  He oversaw a department of forty-two highly trained technicians and scientists. They feared, hated, and admired him in equal measure.

  Spencer had the debris from the thresher drone that had killed the Pool Boys and Jack Ledger. His team couldn’t tell, but Spencer was very upset. He liked Jack and had known him for thirty-five years. He often went out to the farm in Robinwood and spent long days fishing with Joe Ledger’s uncle. During those days, neither Jack nor Spencer would say more than a handful of words, preferring curmudgeonly silence to idle chitchat. If Spencer ever had a real friend, it was that man, and now he was dead. His blood was on the blades of the thresher.

  Jerry Spencer was not a forgiving man. He wasn’t a nice man, and since working with the DMS he had processed hundreds of crime scenes that were splashed with innocent blood. He knew that his lack of obvious warmth didn’t come from any innate meanness of spirit. It was all hurt. It was the anger that came from seeing the dead ones. From seeing firsthand the evidence of merciless greed, of lethal avarice, of unrelenting cruelty. How could anyone look at such horrors and not feel it grind away at optimism and joy? That was Spencer’s view, and standing here with the machine that had murdered his only friend did nothing to shine light into his inner darkness.

  Instead, the more destruction he saw the more cold and determined he became. If that was him acting in response to a wounded ego, then so be it. They—the eternal, many-faced they that the DMS fought—had taken something very important from him. As a result, he would take everything that was important to them. Life, liberty, and every shred of their happiness.

  He had his people drop everything they were doing and focus on the drone. It was photographed, weighed, measured, scanned, scraped for samples, and then completely disassembled. The pieces were individually analyzed down to the threads on the screws and the blend of polymers in the plastic blades. Most of the parts were off-the-shelf material available through any manufacturer of machine metals and plastics. Spencer made no assumptions about that, though. He had eac
h part entered into MindReader Q1 and traced to its source.

  For the elements that were not mass-produced, he had people delve into the ultrasecret and supposedly restricted records of the Department of Defense, DARPA, and the private-sector defense contractors. Nothing happened in big-budget DoD projects without some kind of trail, and the golden rule of forensics is that “all contact leaves a trace.” Manufacture, design, budget appropriations, filed patents, research and development, field testing, and every other step of the complicated bureaucracy left traces.

  What he found was that unique parts of the thresher were manufactured by sixty-eight different companies, but the assembly was done at Mueller-Trang, Inc., a defense contractor. That was very, very interesting to Spencer because Mueller-Trang had been one of several companies that came under investigation after the Predator One affair. That firm made several of the chassis for drones used by the Seven Kings. They had been cleared of any criminal involvement, but now Spencer had to wonder how that decision was reached. So he tried a different tack—investigating the people associated with the parts. That meant looking at the investigators of that case, the litigators, the members of the House and the Senate who were involved in the hearings. Everyone.

  It was a complicated chain, and it quickly became clear that someone had gone to very great lengths to hide key links between players in this game. False identities, shell corporations, numbered accounts, and accounting tricks that bordered on sorcery. Yesterday it would have gone nowhere and left Spencer even more frustrated and angry. Yesterday’s ship had sailed and sunk. Today was something else. Today was that damned MindReader Q1 system. Spencer was no sentimentalist, but he liked this new system. It was a more precise tool, a sharper edge, a more powerful lens through which he could examine the minutest elements of the evidence.

  A few names began appearing with notable frequency. Donald Hoeffenberger, a three-term senator, was the brother-in-law of Carter Hooks, who, in turn, was the brother-in-law of Mitchell Stoeller, who was the college roommate of a principal stockholder in a development conglomerate called Julius Systems. The owner of record of Julius Systems was the kind of false identity that was created when someone uses the Social Security number of a person who died poor and young, and builds a new official persona with that crucial information. That has been happening since Social Security numbers were first issued in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As soon as any new system is created, some con man steps up to figure out a way to game that system. This was a classic example, but MindReader broke through it in a microsecond.