The King of Plagues

by Jonathan Maberry

  “No one credible defended the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” said Circe, “So … why bring them up now? The Goddess’s earlier militant remarks had been firmly directed at Islam on behalf of Israel. Maybe now she’s trying to build a case that the Protocols are real.”

  “Yeah,” Hugo said thoughtfully, “and that could get ugly, considering the lunkheads who gobble this shit up.”

  “Another possibility is that Enyo is someone else using the same tactics as the Goddess in order to redirect anger back at Israel.”

  “Also potentially ugly.” Hugo rubbed his eyes, then cocked his head at her. “Tell me straight, kiddo … rate this on a scale of one to ten, one being harmless freaks on the Net and ten being we scramble the DMS.”

  She chewed her lip some more. “Right now, I … I don’t know. Maybe a five? But this is the kind of thing that can lead to real violence.”

  Vox snorted. “Violence against who? The Jews? The Muslims? I can’t tell from this shit who the Goddess is really mad at.”

  “That’s just it,” Circe said. “Maybe it’s both. Maybe she just wants to start a fight.”

  “To what end? She’s got to be rooting for someone.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe she just wants to see things burn.”

  He peered suspiciously at her. “Isn’t that a line from a Batman movie?”

  Circe blushed. “It fits, though. Or it might fit. Some people groove on violence.”

  Vox grunted.

  Circe said, “Look, remember last year, when the white supremacist group in Alabama started using message boards to make threats against Jews? There were a half-dozen synagogues torched.”

  “The people posting weren’t the same ones who torched the temples. They were idiots following a bad idea.”

  “That’s what I think we have here. Maybe the Goddess is a movement rather than a person. There are plenty of people who feed off that sort of thing. They don’t actually have to be the ones throwing Molotov cocktails as long as they can watch the fire on TV.”

  Vox pursed his lips and considered. “You say you’re at a five with this? When you get to a seven I’ll give you assets; until then you’re flying solo. But … update your Goddess report and send it to me. I’ll make sure someone at Homeland pays attention to it.”

  “Thanks, Hugo.”

  “This is good work, kiddo. Even if this turns out to be nothing, this is very sharp stuff.” He stood up and walked to the door, then half-turned. “You may not want to hear this—I know things are kind of weird between you two—but your dad will be proud of you.”

  Interlude Nine

  McCullough, Crown Island

  St. Lawrence River, Ontario, Canada

  Four Months Ago

  As promised, the limousine was waiting at the curb. A driver in traditional livery stood by the open door. A second man, identically dressed, stepped forward to take their bags. Both were slim, fit, and Korean.

  Toys caught Gault’s eye, flicked a glance at the driver, and then affected to scratch his ribs. Gault did not need the cue. He’d already seen the bulge of the driver’s shoulder-rigged pistol. The other man, too. Nice cuts to their jackets, though. Most people would never have guessed either of the Koreans was armed.

  Gault did not have a weapon. Toys, he knew, carried a knife in his left sleeve. Gault had seen his friend use that knife several times. Few surgeons were as precise or dispassionate.

  Once upon a time Toys had been Gault’s employee, a combination executive secretary, valet, and bodyguard, but that time had passed. Events had occurred that forever changed the dynamic of their relationship. Now they were more like brothers. Or fellow refugees. Gault was at least nominally the alpha of their two-man pack, but that position was held now by mutual consent rather than financial or personal power. In the same disaster that had scarred them both, Gault had discovered an emotional blind spot that had nearly proven fatal while Toys had demonstrated terrifying personal power.

  They got into the car and settled back. The driver and the other man sat in the front with the Plexiglas screen closed. The limo was next year’s model. Very expensive and nicely outfitted. Toys poked around and found unopened bottles of Cerén vodka—a superb El Salvadoran brand—and vermouth. Toys set about making martinis.

  “Stirred, not shaken,” he said as he handed one to Gault. It was a private joke. Although Toys loved watching the Bond movies—for eye candy of both genders—it irked him that Ian Fleming had his hero order his martinis to be made the wrong way. By shaking the mixture, the bartender created air bubbles that turned the martini cloudy. More crucially, shaking also caused the ice to release too much water, thereby bruising the flavor of the vodka. A perfect martini should be stirred gently for thirty seconds, then chilled properly and served stingingly dry and cold. Toys always made perfect martinis.

  They sipped.

  “What are the odds that this lovely car is bugged?” asked Toys. He said it in a normal tone of voice.

  Gault smiled thinly. “I would be disappointed if it wasn’t.”

  They settled back and sipped their drinks and said nothing else during the drive.

  THE TWO KOREANS took them to a small airport and ushered them onto a private Gulfstream G550. Gault was impressed. He had planned to buy one of those for himself before his plans had gone to hell in Afghanistan. The sleek jet came with a $59.9 million price tag. It had a range of sixty-seven hundred miles and all sorts of lovely bells and whistles, and though it was designed to accommodate up to nineteen passengers in great comfort, Gault and Toys found themselves alone in the cabin.

  The second Korean came in to attend to drinks and to take their orders for dinner, and when the food came it was superb. The first course was a crème brûlée of foie gras that they washed down with 1990 Cristal champagne, and that was followed by several small but delicious dishes, including tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters, and mousseline of pattes rouges crayfish with morel mushroom infusion. The accompanying wines—a 1985 Romanée-Conti, a ’59 Château Mouton Rothschild, a ’67 Château d’Yquem, and a ’61 Château Palmer—inspired great respect from both of them.

  “Well,” said Toys as he sipped Hennessy Beauté du Siècle cognac, “I think we can submit a new definition for ‘ostentatious.’”

  “Mm. Are you complaining or commenting?”

  Toys sloshed the deep-amber-colored liquid in his glass. “This is two hundred thousand pounds a bottle. I’m not a cheap date, Sebastian, but they had me at the crème brûlée.”

  “You think they’re trying to prove something to us?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Of course. And notice that we’re both saying ‘they.’ Not ‘he,’” Gault said. He sipped the cognac. It was delicious and it soothed the aches in his damaged flesh, but he would never have spent two hundred thousand on it. His devotion to brand names did not extend into mania.

  “Well, to be fair,” Toys said, “our American friend was always grandiose, but cultured … ? Not so much.”

  “And he has no excuse for it. He’s new money, but he went to the very best schools.”

  “You’re new money.”

  “Yes, but if you didn’t know it you couldn’t tell. You can tell with him. At a hundred paces, too. Table manners of a baboon, and he keeps his mouth open while chewing. And he has that thing where he speaks like a college professor one minute and a dockworker the next.”

  “You do know that he can hear everything we’re saying.”

  Gault merely smiled.

  “So,” said Toys, rolling the cognac back and forth between his palms, “the question is ‘why?’”

  Gault shrugged. “A demonstration of conspicuous ostentation makes its own statement, don’t you think? After all, no one needs to own a jet like this. There are plenty of less expensive aircraft that are more than opulent enough for the few hours their owners and their guests spend aboard them. To put it crudely, the price tag is a big ‘fu
ck you’ to anyone who can’t afford it, and much more so to those who can almost afford it.”

  “Mmm,” mused Toys. “Then tell me this, O mighty sage, why are we being treated to such luxury? He doesn’t owe us a thing, not even sanctuary.”

  Gault merely shrugged. He was pretty sure he knew. He closed his eyes and remembered a sultry night a dozen years ago. He and Eris in a Belle Etoile suite at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris. The two of them naked, covered with bites and scratches, the bed and nightstand wrecked, sheets torn and tangled, and the air heavy with the smell of wine, perfume, and sex.

  “One day,” she’d murmured to him as they lay together on the floor, their feet propped on the edge of the bed they’d fallen out of during their last deliciously ferocious bout of sex. And it was sex. No one could call what they did lovemaking. It was too violent and immediate and selfish for that, and it had served them each and satisfied them both. “One day you’ll be a king, lovely boy.”

  Gault was propped on one elbow, his head resting in an open palm while he used his other hand to trace slow, meaningless symbols in the sweat between her heavy breasts.

  “A king?” he mused, his voice still carrying some of the East End London of his youth. “No way that’s possible, but I’d like a knighthood. That would be brilliant.”

  She shook her head. Her hair was snow-white, with subtle threads of lustrous brown sewn through it. Candlelight reflected in her eyes so that it looked like she was on fire inside.

  “No, lovely boy. I have my eye on you. One of these days you’ll be a king.”

  Sebastian laughed. “A king of what?”

  “What would you like to be king of?”

  “Not of bloody England. Too much nonsense and fluff.”

  “You could be the king of your own world,” she said. “A king of the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria.”

  “Oh, very nice. Behold the leper king—”

  “Shhhh!” Eris pressed a finger to his lips. “No. Not a king of the common cold or the king of cancer. One day I think you will be the King of Plagues.”

  He almost laughed again, but there was something about her tone when she said those words that stopped him. “The King of Plagues.” Saying it as if it was a real title for an actual king. No mockery. This was not a joke to her.

  Sebastian Gault had looked deep into her burning eyes. “Tell me,” he had whispered.

  And she told him. Not much, but enough. She broke off a delicious fragment of the truth and whispered it in his ear, and it was that seed, planted there in the shadows that smelled of their passion, that grew into Gault’s dreams of empire. The many paths that led away from that moment in his life trailed away into infinite possibilities, but one—that one—was paved with gold.

  The King of Plagues.

  “And if I am a king,” he whispered as he pulled her on top of him, “will you be my queen?”

  “No,” she breathed, her voice husky and dark, her hand reaching down to guide him inside. “No … I will be your goddess.”

  Afterward, he had made love to her so hard that they both wept and ached all the next day. And each time an unwise step or movement speared pain through either of them, they remembered and laughed. It was not the sex that they remembered but the idea that had fueled it.

  The King of Plagues.

  And the Goddess.

  THE FLIGHT WAS long and the crew did not inform them of their destination. From the duration and the angle of the sun, Gault judged that they were in southeastern Canada. Looking out of the porthole suggested east, and Gault was sure that they were still in America.

  When the plane landed they were both relaxed and composed and accompanied the two Asians without comment or protest. The plane had set down at a large private airstrip by the water, and the boat ride across the river was quick and comfortable.

  As the boat coasted to a gentle stop at the dock, Gault nudged Toys with his knee. Toys looked up to see a woman step out of the shade of the boathouse and into the bright sunlight. Even Toys, whose taste tended toward fashion models of both gender of the type once known as “heroin chic,” lifted his eyebrows in appreciation. The woman was tall, slender, with snow-white hair that lifted and snapped in the breeze off the water. She wore skintight white sporting slacks and a bikini top that was little more than triangles of brightly colored cloth. Her feet were bare and she wore silver jewelry at throat, ears, fingers, toes, and navel. Sunlight flickered around her as if the daylight kept reaching out with quick and naughty touches. Her body was lithe and fit and the only concession to makeup was a fierce red lipstick that was an immediate challenge.

  “Well, well,” murmured Toys. “Not exactly Snow White, is she?”

  “Good God,” breathed Gault. “That’s Eris.”

  “I thought you said Eris was his mother.”

  Gault laughed. “That is his mother.”

  Toys turned to Gault with a half smile, but he wasn’t joking. Then Toys took a second and longer look at the woman as she walked toward them.

  “If that’s cosmetic surgery, I’ll marry her doctor.”

  “No. Just bloody good genes and a refusal to age like ordinary mortals. I don’t know how old she is, but she has to be in her sixties.”

  “You’re killing my youth-centric sensibilities.”

  Gault laughed. As soon as the boat was tied to the cleats, he leaped onto the dock and walked toward Eris with his arms wide. She beamed at him like a happy panther and hugged him fiercely, showering kisses on him, even on the bandages. As Toys approached, Gault gave him a look that said, Well, she’s not my mother.

  Eris turned, graceful as a dancer, and gave Toys a quick and frank appraisal. “Who is this delicious beast, Sebastian?” she said in a husky voice that was English with a soupçon of Boston. “Is this the clever one who’s been keeping you out of trouble all these years?”

  “Sweetheart,” Gault said, “meet Toys. Toys … this is Evangeline Regina Isadora Sanderson. Lady Eris to the commoners and Goddess to those who really know her.”

  “Toys … mmm, now that’s a name with real potential.”

  Toys took her hand and kissed it in a way that was at once elegant and filled with self-referential mockery. Eris gave him a wicked grin. At close quarters he could see that she was indeed older than she at first appeared, but no one would ever guess fifty, let alone mid-sixties. The bikini top was challenged to restrain abundance; her eyes were as green as a tropical sea and flecked with sparks of gold fire.

  “Welcome to Crown Island,” she purred.

  “Thank you for having us,” said Toys.

  Eris eyed him up and down. “I haven’t had you yet.”

  Then Eris hooked their arms so that they bookended her and led them toward the huge fortress of a building that was McCullough Castle.

  Above them the sun was a furnace, and Gault wondered what was being forged in its heat.

  GAULT AND TOYS were escorted to separate rooms.

  “Divide and conquer?” Gault asked with a smile.

  “Divide, yes, conquer—no, lovely boy. We want you to be comfortable. Travel is such a bore. Take a hot shower. Fresh clothes will be laid out. Someone will come to fetch you in an hour.”

  One of the two silent Koreans stepped up to Toys and led him down a side hall.

  When they were alone, Gault took Eris’s hand and led her a few steps away from the second servant.

  “What’s going on, love? This is weird even for you.”

  She laughed. “Mystery and intrigue is all the thing, lovely boy.”

  “I’m not the boy I once was,” Gault said bitterly. He touched his bandages. “And I’m no longer ‘lovely.’”

  Eris shook her head. “Bruises will heal and you’ll come to love your new face.”

  “I wasn’t talking about my face,” he said distantly.

  “Oh, God, are we going to have a gloomy existential conversation in a drafty hallway?” But before Gault could reply, she kissed him lightly on the
mouth. “Go and make yourself clean and pretty for me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Breaking News: CNBC

  December 17, 2:55 P.M. GMT

  U.S. stock markets closed today after an apparent terrorist attack on the Royal London Hospital. The newly renovated hospital was completely destroyed, and early estimates number the dead at four thousand. That number is expected to climb.

  Though the incident in London happened before the opening bell, trading went into full flight-to-safety mode as points were chopped off by panicking investors. Stock markets in Europe and Canada have also plunged.

  SEC commissioner Mark David Epstein has not said when trading would resume.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Barrier Headquarters

  December 17, 3:56 P.M. GMT

  The three assassins were, in fact, genuine London police constables. All three had clean records; none of them had known ties to extremist political or religious groups. In every way they were ordinary citizens, and that was the scariest part of it.

  “I don’t understand this,” complained Benson Childe. “They’re good men.”

  “My ass,” I said.

  We sat in his office on opposite sides of an open bottle of Clontarf single-malt Irish whiskey. MacDonal, Aylrod, and the others had just left to handle the aftershocks of the shooting and manage the spin control. Ghost slept under the table. I’d cleaned him up and calmed him, but he twitched in his sleep.

  “The man you scalded with the tea is named Mick Jones. You broke nine of his bones. He’s claimed that this was an unprovoked attack.”

  “He’s a lying sack of shit,” I said. “He was the one that said, ‘Happy Christmas from the Seven Kings.’ He was smiling when he said it. A happy guy doing a job he enjoyed. Probably one of the Chosen.”

  Childe frowned into his whiskey. “Well, as soon as he can be transported to a military hospital we’ll see about opening him up. One of my lads, Spanton, will oversee the interrogation. He’s a right bastard, too, so we should get something.”