Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 1

Joe Ledger.

Code Zero.

Jonathan Maberry.

This is for all of the organizations and individuals who do what they can to help our returning veterans by providing jobs, helping them get the benefits they've earned or working with them to find new ways to serve their country even out of uniform. To help a hero is to be a hero. Bravo and brava.

And, as always, for Sara Jo.

Acknowledgments.

As always I owe a debt to a number of wonderful people. Thanks to Dr. John Cmar of the Infectious Disease department of Johns Hopkins University Hospital; Dr. Steve A. Yetiv, Professor of Political Science, Old Dominion University; Dr. Pawel Liberski of Laboratory of Electron Microscopy and Neuropathology, Department of Molecular Pathology and Neuropathology, Medical University of Lodz, Poland; Philadelphia police officer Bob Clark; Michael Sicilia of California Homeland Security; the staff, presenters, and conferees of DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia; Nancy Keim-Comley; Melinda Leigh, Katharine Ashe, and Chris Redding; the International Thriller Writers; the crew who helped me with video game research: J. P. Behrens, RJ Sevin, Stephen Goodman, Alex Adams, Stephen Reider, Stephen Harvey, P. J. Stanton, Garrett Cook, William J. Bivens, Herb Dorr, Mike Therrion, Charlie Miller, Tony Baker, Gabrielle Henderson, Henry Rysz, John Leasure, Tony Baker, James Frazier, Ken Varvel, Paul Merritt, Phillip Bolin, Mike Chrusciel, and Bill Versteegan; my literary agents, Sara Crowe and Harvey Klinger; all the good folks at St. Martin's Griffin: Michael Homler, Joe Goldschein, Aleksandra Mencel, Rob Grom; and my film agent, Jon Ca.s.sir of Creative Artists Agency.

Thanks for being Joe's "friends in the industry."

Thanks and congrats to the winners of the various Joe Ledger contests: Michael Barbera, Jamie Sheffield, Christopher Duffner, and David Mickloas.

Part One.

VaultBreaker.

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

-KHALIL GIBRAN.

Chapter One.

The philosopher Nietzsche didn't get it right. He said, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster."

That's not exactly true.

Or, at least, not all the time.

If you battle monsters you don't always become a monster.

But you aren't entirely human anymore, either.

Chapter Two.

1100 Block of North Stuart Street Arlington, Virginia Thursday, April 14, 1:22 p.m.

Some cases start big. Something blows up or someone unleashes a nasty bug and Echo Team hits the ground running. Most of the time, even if we don't know what the endgame is going to look like, we have some idea of what kind of fight we're in. And we can usually hear that big clock ticking down to boom time. Other cases are running fights and they end when one side runs out of bullets and the other doesn't.

I've had a lot of both.

This one started weird and stayed weird, and for most of it felt like we were swinging punches at shadows. We didn't even know what we were fighting until we were right there at the edge of the abyss.

And even then, it wasn't what we thought it was.

Not until we knew what it was.

Yeah, it was like that.

It started four months ago on one of those sunny days T. S. Eliot wrote about when he said that April was the cruelest month. When spring rains wake the dead bulbs buried in the cold dirt and coax flowers into first blooms. When we look at the flowers we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

I spent years mourning the dead. Helen. Grace. My friends and colleagues at the Warehouse. Members of my team who fell in battle. All of them in the cold, cold ground.

Now it was April and there were flowers.

In my life there was Junie Flynn. She was the flower of my spring.

As far as we knew, her cancer was in remission, though we were waiting for her last panels. But for right now, the sun shone through yellow curtains and birds sang in the trees.

I sat at a kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the remains of a big slice of apple-pecan pie. The rest of the pie was gone. There was evidence of it in crumbs and beige glob smeared on the floor, on the aluminum pie plate, and on the muzzle of my dog. Ghost. Big white shepherd.

He loves pie.

The mess was considerable. However, I had no intention of cleaning it up. It wasn't my pie.

It wasn't my house.

When the actual owner of the house-a Mr. Reginald Boyd-came home and then came storming into the kitchen, he told me, very loudly and with lots of cursing, that it wasn't my house, my kitchen, or my G.o.dd.a.m.n pie.

I agreed with those observations. Less so about his accusations that I fornicate with livestock.

Reginald Boyd was a big man gone soft in the middle, like an athlete who has gone to seed. Played some ball in college, hit the gym a bit after that. Started going soft probably around the same time that he started getting paid for stealing some real important s.h.i.+t from work.

"Work" was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Basically a collection of the most dangerous geeks on earth. Except for idiots like Reggie, those geeks try to keep America safe.

"Get the f.u.c.k out of my house," yelled Reginald Boyd.

Ghost, his face covered in apple pie and pecan bits, stood up and showed Boyd how big he was. And how many teeth he had.

I smiled at Boyd and said, "Lower your voice."

Boyd backed a step away. "You broke into my house."

"Only technically. I loided the lock with my library card. Loided," I repeated. "It's a word, look it up. It means to bypa.s.s a lock. You have a two-hundred-dollar dead bolt on your front door and a Mickey Mouse spring lock on the back door. A moron could get in here. So ... whereas I got in, I did no actual breaking."

He didn't know how to respond to that, so he glared at what was on the table. "You made coffee? And you ate my pie?"

I felt like I was in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears reboot.

"First off, the coffee is Sanka. How the h.e.l.l can you call yourself an American and all you have in your pantry is powdered decaf? I ought to sic Ghost on you just for that."

"What-?"

"The pie's good though," I continued. "Could use more pecans. Store-bought, am I right? Take a tip and switch to Whole Foods, they have a killer deep-dish apple that'll make you cry."

"You're f.u.c.king crazy."

"Very likely," I admitted.

His hand touched the cell phone clipped to his belt. "Get the h.e.l.l out before I call-"

I reached under my jacket, slid the Beretta 92F from its clamsh.e.l.l holster, and laid it on the table. "Seriously, Mr. Boyd-actually, may I call you Reggie?"

"f.u.c.k you."

"Seriously, Reggie, do you really want to reach for that cell phone? I mean-who are you gonna call?"

"I'll call the f.u.c.king cops is who I'll call."

"No you won't."

"Why the f.u.c.k not?"

"'Cause I'm a cop, Einstein," I said. Which was kind of true. I used to be a cop in Baltimore before I was shanghaied into the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS gig gives me access to credentials from every law enforcement agency from the FBI to local law to the housing police. I need to flash a badge; they give me the right badge. The DMS, though, doesn't have its own badges.

Boyd eyed me. "You're no cop."

"I could be."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. I'm going to call the cops."

"No you're not."

"You can't stop me, this is my house."

I drummed my fingers on the table next to my gun. "Honestly, Reggie, they said you weren't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but come on ... Big guy? Big dog? Big gun? You're armed with a cell phone and a beer gut. How do you think this is going to play out?"

"I'm not afraid of any stupid dog."

I held up a finger. "Whoa now, Reggie. There are all kinds of lines we can step over. Insulting my dog, however, is a line you do not want to cross. I get weird about that, and you do not want me to get weird on you."

He stared blankly at me, trying hard to make sense of our encounter. His eyes flicked from me to Ghost-who noisily licked his muzzle-and back to me.

He narrowed his eyes to prove that he was shrewd. "What do you want?"

"What do you think I want?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you do."

"No, I don't know."

I sighed. "Okay, I'll give you a hint because you may actually be that stupid."

He started to open his mouth.

I said, "VaultBreaker."

His mouth snapped shut.

"Proprietary military software? Am I ringing any bells here?" I asked. "Anything? Anything? Bueller?"

That's when Reggie Boyd tried to run. He spun around and bolted down the hallway toward the front door.

I took a sip of the coffee. Sighed. Said, "Go ahead."

Ghost shot after him like a bullet, nails scratching the hallway floorboards, one long, continuous growl trailing behind him.

Reggie didn't even make it to the front door.

Later, after we were past the screams and first-aid phases, Reggie lay on the couch and I sat on the edge of a La-Z-Boy recliner, my pistol back in its shoulder rig, another cup of the p.i.s.swater Sanka cradled between my palms. Ghost was sprawled on the rug pretending to be asleep. The living room was a wreck. Tables overturned, a lamp broken. Bloodstains on the floors and the walls, and one drop on the ceiling-for the life of me I couldn't figure out how that got there.

My chest ached, though not because of anything Reggie had done. It was scar tissue from bullet wounds I'd received last year during the Majestic Black Book affair. Couple of bullets went in through the armhole opening of my Kevlar and busted up a whole lot of important stuff. I was theoretically back to perfect health, but bullet wounds are not paper cuts. I had to keep working the area or scar tissue would build up in the wrong places. Wrestling Reggie onto the couch helped neither my chest nor my mood.

"We could have done all this in the kitchen," I said irritably. "We could have had a pizza delivered and talked this through like adults."

Reggie said nothing.

"Instead you had to do something stupid."

Nothing.