The King of Plagues

by Jonathan Maberry

  The moment held and stretched.

  Toys wiped tears from his eyes. “Is this what you want, Sebastian?” he asked quietly. “Look me in the eye and tell me, brother to brother, that this—the Seven Kings, the path to domination, all this death and destruction—is what you truly want.”

  Gault crossed the room and placed his hands on Toys’ cheeks, framing his face. He bent and kissed Toys on the forehead. Gault’s eyes burned like candles.

  “Yes,” he said. “This isn’t just what I want, Toys. This is what I will have.”

  Toys searched Gault’s face, looked deep into his friend’s eyes. He shivered. If eyes were the windows of the soul, then …

  God save my soul, he thought.

  “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay.”

  Interlude Twenty-five

  The Seven Kings

  Four Months Ago

  The American sipped his whiskey as he watched the replay of the argument between Toys and Sebastian Gault. It was the fourth time he had viewed it. During each viewing he focused on a different aspect of the spat. This last time he had zoomed in to watch the expressions on Toys’ face. He found them very interesting.

  He swirled the whiskey, enjoying the tinkle of ice cubes.

  “Okay,” said Toys. “Okay.”

  The American played that back with the sound up, listening for subtleties of intent and meaning in the young Englishman’s voice.

  The King of Fear smiled.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Fair Isle Research Endeavor

  The Shetland Isles

  December 18, 3:47 P.M. GMT

  I stood naked in a decontamination chamber while antibacterial and antiviral agents blasted me from every possible angle. I scrubbed my skin until I glowed in the dark. Afterward they made me stand in a full-scale BAMS unit for five minutes.

  “You’re clean,” Hu announced, though he sounded almost disappointed.

  Everything I’d been wearing, including my sidearm, was sealed in a steel drum filled with some kind of acid. Even the fumes from the acid were vented through filters and stored in tanks. I was okay with the procedure. If this strain of Ebola ever got out it would make 28 Days Later look like a Pixar comedy.

  I just wished that there was some way for all these gadgets and chemicals to scrub the filth off my soul.

  I dressed in an extra set of Barrier BDUs and a pair of sneakers that were half a size too small. All I had left of my personal belongings was my anorak and my dog. Ghost came and sniffed me suspiciously a few times, confused by my lack of scent, but I rubbed the back of my wrist to coax some of the natural oils to the surface and when he took another sniff he licked my hand. I knelt down and hugged the furry monster for a while. If it was too tight, Ghost didn’t seem to mind. He wagged his tail and whined a little, sensing the hurt that I felt. Dogs are truly the best of companions. You don’t need to explain. They know as much as they need to know, and they are loyal no matter what sins you’ve committed.

  As I got to my feet I looked at FIRE. It was draped in sheets of heavy gray cloth and men in hazmat suits were spraying the cloth with noxious-smelling foam. Above us, a dozen choppers armed with Hellfire missiles kept watch. Somewhere over the horizon Prebble’s chums in the Royal Navy were poised to turn this whole island into a memory of charred dust if the right word was given.

  Church was waiting for me near our chopper. The winter sun was setting and a bank of clouds was rising from the horizon line like a curtain being cranked into place.

  Church handed me a cup of coffee. “It’s instant,” he said, “but it’s hot.”

  I sipped it and winced. It tasted like the stuff they’d been spraying me with.

  “First,” he said, “a complete team from Nellis is on-scene at Area 51. The five remaining members of your team are fine and have been treated for minor wounds.” When I said nothing, he went on. “Jerry Spencer has taken over the Plympton crime scene.”

  “He have anything to say?”

  Church almost smiled. “He isn’t happy that you messed with the evidence.”

  “I’ll cry about it later.”

  “Other than that, he told me that he would call me if he had anything and asked that I stop bothering him while he was working. His natural warmth and charm are apparently unaffected by the scope of this disaster.”

  I nodded toward FIRE. “What about Scofield’s mother and sisters?”

  “Both sisters are already in protective custody in Newark and San Francisco. His mother is in a nursing home in Delray Beach. I sent Riptide Team out of Miami to guard her. We’re running background checks on every employee and patient at the nursing home. As soon as we can get a trusted gerontologist on-site we’ll move her to a secure facility.”

  “And the shooter? The woman?”

  “Nina Snow, assistant professor of infectious diseases from Johns Hopkins. Top marks, clean record. Considering how she ended things, it’s possible she was under similar coercion. She’s single and we’re working to locate family. Bug is coordinating the background checks.”

  “That’s a lot of resources.”

  “Yes. And if this continues to escalate we may be forced to rely on other agencies, and that opens us up to all sorts of potential complications.” He paused. “Tell me again what Scofield said to you. About the river of blood.”

  I closed my eyes and found the words. “‘They said that if the rivers didn’t run red with blood, then the blood of my family would run like a river.’”

  “Yes. That troubles me.”

  “All of it troubles me. The phrasing doesn’t match the rest of what he said. He was clearly quoting, or attempting to quote, something that was said to him. It has a distinctly biblical structure to it. Rivers running red with blood. You’re going to need a different kind of specialist to sort that out. Not my kind of job … I’m just a shooter.”

  Church glanced briefly at a flight of gulls flapping across the iron gray sky. “Walk with me, Captain.”

  We walked toward the cliffs in the red glow of the dying sun. I hunched into my coat and kept taking sips from the coffee, mostly to let the steam warm my face. If Church felt the cold, or cared about it, it didn’t show. I’m not sure if I found his iron stoicism admirable or loathsome. It made him seem inhuman. He said nothing for five minutes, letting me sort through my shit.

  Finally, he said, “That was hard.”

  I said nothing.

  “I contacted Dr. Sanchez and brought him up to speed. He thinks I’m a monster.”

  I grunted, and he cut me a brief look.

  “Do you need an apology for this?”

  “Would you give me one if I did?”

  “It’s unlikely.”

  “Then, no.”

  “Do you feel used, Captain?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think that it was unfair of me to put you into this?”

  I stopped and waited for him to stop and face me. “Let’s cut the shit, Church. They don’t hire nice guys to do what we do, but I’m not interested in putting a Dr. Phil spin on this. Do I hate that I had to do it? Sure, who wouldn’t? Do I wish it had been someone else in there? Fuck yeah; I’d rather be with Megan Fox on a topless beach in the South of France. But I’m not. I’m here, and I was the right man for the job. Sucks to be the truth, but there it is.”

  He studied me for a slow five-count, then nodded and turned. I fell into step beside him.

  “One last question,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “When you were in there … was that the Killer or the Cop?”

  I had never told him that I had disparate personalities floating around in my head, but I knew that prior to hijacking me into the DMS he had his people hack my psych records. Rudy still wanted to skin him for it. I didn’t like it any more than Rudy did, but given the nature of the extreme threats we face, I could understand it. To a degree.

  “The Cop.”

  He nodded. “Glad to hear it.”

&n
bsp; I sighed and rubbed my eyes. The coffee tasted like vulture piss, but I drank it anyway.

  After a moment, he said, “Tell me what we know now that we didn’t know before we got here.”

  “We know the Seven Kings are behind this and the London Hospital. I’ll be mighty damned surprised if they didn’t do Area 51 as well.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “We know that the Kings’ point man, the Spaniard, was here in Scotland as late as this morning. If I had to guess, he oversaw the Hospital thing by turning dials on Plympton and maybe some others at the Hospital and then he came here to get this in motion. This took time, so he must have made multiple trips to London and here. We might get lucky with airline records and whatever boat service brings people out here.”

  “Yes. I’ve got Bug on that already. What else?”

  “We know that he works on a pattern.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He picks people who not only have families but who are absolutely devoted to them. People willing to kill others to prevent harm from coming to their own. I know I’d kill to protect my brother, his wife, and their kid, but I wouldn’t blow up a hospital to do it. No, that’s got to be a specific kind of person. Snow seems to be the exception, so we can’t discount the possibility that she was more ‘agent’ than ‘victim.’ The question is how the Kings are identifying people who are vulnerable to this kind of coercion.”

  “Employee records can be hacked,” Church suggested. “We do it all the time.”

  “Sure, but would that kind of thing be inside an employee’s records? I mean, imagine asking that question on a performance review: ‘Would you release a virus capable of creating a global pandemic to keep your kids safe?’ Pretty sure we would have gotten wind of that.”

  He nodded.

  “So, maybe these guys are accessing psych records. We need to look for commonalities there, see if they’ve used the same therapist, or therapists in the same network. There has to be a link to how they’re getting this kind of info.”

  “I asked Dr. Sanchez to coordinate with Bug on the proper search arguments. What else?”

  “They like backup plans. They had three people here. Grey, Scofield, and Snow. Probably the same thing at the Hospital. Unfortunately, that screws the math even more when it comes to employee psych profiles. Three people of that kind in the same place. I might be able to buy that at the London, but not in a place like FIRE. Too small. That’s weird unless somehow they were seeded here. We need to look at transfer records, too.”

  “Hugo Vox can help with that. He’s the top security screener in the country, and he owns a number of employment agencies for this kind of work. He may be able to determine how the Kings are working the employee profiles.”

  “Good. Set it up. One more thing we know.”

  Church cocked an expectant eyebrow.

  “We know they plan well in advance, which means we are way behind the curve here. God knows how many other events like these are cocked and locked.”

  “Yes.”

  We walked in silence for another minute. “What’s my next step?” I asked. “I’d like to head back to London and—”

  “No. Childe tells me that word’s gotten around that you killed two London cops and put another in intensive care. A formal statement has been issued by the commissioner that these three were part of the terrorist cell responsible for the bombing, but—”

  “But some cops aren’t going to buy that. Shit.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything more you can do here, Captain. You’ve done very good work. You’re booked on a flight to the States.”

  “Area 51?”

  “No. You’ll land in Philadelphia and meet up with Dr. Sanchez. He called me while you were in the lab. I think we can say with certainty that Nicodemus is involved.”

  Church told me what had happened during Rudy’s visit to Graterford. It didn’t make me want to dance and sing.

  “This guy is pretending to be—what? A prophet?”

  “Unknown, though from the description Dr. Sanchez gave, Nicodemus is either pretending to be demonically possessed or suffering from an unusual form of multiple personality disorder. So far Nicodemus’s references are distortions of biblical references. Old and New Testament, as well as the Apocrypha.”

  “Lots of psychos read the Bible, especially in prison. He could be pulling stuff out of his ass to jerk our chains.”

  “And he mentioned the Goddess.”

  “Which ties to the Spaniard,” I said, and he nodded.

  “And Nicodemus mentioned the ‘Elders,’ but there wasn’t enough context to infer a meaning. Most likely it’s a reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There were Internet references to that via some posts by the Goddess.”

  I asked what that was and Church explained about the early-twentieth-century propaganda.

  “World’s full of nuts. How’s that tie into this stuff?”

  “Unknown. Could be part of a plan to foment religious violence, or it could be simple misdirection. We still need to understand where these clues are supposed to take us.” Church paused. “And there were a few other things he said.”

  He told me the rest, about what Nicodemus had said as he was being led out.

  “He actually said that?” I demanded. “Nicodemus referred to a friend of Rudy’s who had ‘lost the grace of the Goddess’? ‘One who walks with ghosts’?”

  “Yes,” drawled Church. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Dr. Sanchez was badly shaken by those comments. However, the remark that I find most significant is the one about the river of blood that was supposed to sweep you away. It ties into what Scofield said, but it was clearly directed at you.”

  “Yeah. That’s a real ass-biter.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  I cut a look at Church. “If you are asking if I think this Nicodemus character is getting messages from the spirit world, then no, I don’t. I wasn’t swept away by a river of blood. We stopped this from happening. To me it says that he knew that I was going to be here and something about me personally. Grace’s death, the name of my dog. Shit that could be found out. But he didn’t know that things were going to spin our way on this.”

  Church smiled. It was a rare thing for him to do and it wasn’t at all a friendly or happy smile. The Angel of Death might smile like that. “Nicodemus said that to Dr. Sanchez before I even picked you up at the Plympton crime scene. How would anyone know that I was going to assign this mission to you?”

  The wind howled past me for a long time. Ghost whimpered slightly, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from the cold or his canine senses had caught the specters on the wind that we humans could not see.

  We started walking again.

  “I also received a call from our informant,” he said.

  “Deep Throat? What did he say?”

  Church told me. “On the surface the conversation appears to flow normally, but I’m sure there was a code in there. A clue. One line stands out: ‘They want to break the bones of their enemies and suck out the marrow.’ I told him that it didn’t seem helpful and he insisted that it was. So we need to add the words ‘break,’ ‘bones,’ and ‘marrow’ to our key words and see what happens.”

  I nodded. “We’ll sort it out. We still have a lot of resources we can throw at this. No matter what it takes, we’ll find them.”

  He half-turned and studied me. “What makes you think so?”

  “We have to,” I said. I was aware of how that sounded.

  Church let a little time pass before he replied.

  “I don’t want to preach cynicism, Captain,” Church said, “but if you stay in this game for any considerable length of time you may experience an enlightenment that is akin to what the national consciousness of America went through between the end of World War Two and the end of the Vietnam War.”

  “What, a loss of innocence? I just shot someone, Boss, so I
think—”

  “No. The epiphany was that there are some wars you can’t win. There are some wars, in fact, that are so big and yet so subtle that all you can hope to do is catch glimpses of them as they move through your life.”

  I looked at him.

  He shrugged. “This has that feel to it.”

  “What … Are you saying you don’t think we’ll catch them?”

  “We don’t even know who they are, Captain. We’re miles from certain knowledge of any kind. Even the things we’ve learned today could be carefully seeded misdirection. This is the nature of the War on Terror. Sometimes there is no face, no name, no target for us to point a gun at. It can be disheartening and daunting, and the frustration of it has forced a lot of players out of the game.”

  “But not you,” I said.

  “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  Church didn’t answer that. Instead he said, “The darkness is all around us. Very few people have the courage to light a candle against it.”

  “I’m not that kind of idealist.”

  “Nor am I. We are of a kind, Captain, and neither of us is holding a candle against the darkness. Like the unknown and unseen enemy we fight, people like you and me, we are the darkness. In some ways we are more like the things we’re fighting than the people we’re protecting. Granted our motives are better—from our perspective—but we wait in the shadows for our unseen enemy to make a move against those innocents with the candles. And by that light we take aim.”