Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 4

"I'm not laughing," I said, hiding a smile. "But why on earth would you miss this place?"

Another shrug. "I like it here. The food's good. n.o.body cheats at cards and you let me keep what I win. I seem to be getting somewhere with Rudy."

Rudy Sanchez was the DMS house shrink as well as my best friend. He'd spent a lot of time with Reggie, not as part of the interrogation team, but trying to map the route from law-abiding citizen to criminal and back again. He planned to publish his findings in one of those incomprehensible psychiatric trade journals that I don't think anyone really reads.

And, apart from that, Rudy was the kind of therapist who could help you find a way to like yourself again. He did that for me, and I was a real mess.

Reggie bent and scratched Ghost between the ears. "I'm going to miss the fur monster here."

Ghost nudged his hand with a wet nose.

"Despite the fact that he bit you?" I asked.

Reggie straightened and gave me a philosophic shake of his head. "Puppy-boy there was doing his job. I can't fault him for that."

Puppy-boy liked being talked about and he thumped his tail.

Dog's very strange. He won't let my brother, Sean, pet him, but he goes all goofy around a bonehead enemy of the state like Reggie. Go figure. Maybe Ghost needs to log some couch time with Rudy.

"I'll make sure the fur monster sends you Christmas cards," I told Reggie. "Let's go."

I checked us through security and we walked together out to my Ford Explorer. When Reggie saw it he whistled.

"You got the new one? Niiiiice," he said, stringing it out. "What did you get on the trade-in?"

"Less than I'd hoped," I said. What I didn't tell him was that my last Explorer had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The one before that had been parked at the old Warehouse and was destroyed when that blew. This new Explorer was my fifth in four years. My insurance company freaking hates me.

The new car was next year's model. Black, with smoked windows and a bunch of extras, including bullet-resistant gla.s.s and extra suspension to compensate for the body armor. No ejector seats, though. I keep requesting them but they won't give me one. I think they're afraid I'll use it for fun. They're not entirely wrong.

"Buckle up for safety," I said as Reggie climbed in.

Ghost went into the backseat, flopped down, and began enthusiastically licking his b.a.l.l.s. Everyone needs a hobby.

I got in, started the engine, locked the doors, and drove past the security guards, both of whom waved to Reggie.

Reggie Boyd, the cybercriminal who's everybody's pal.

Even with heavy rain, the ride should have taken only two hours, and this was something I could have turned over to any of my staff. There are more than two hundred people working for me at the new Warehouse, including four teams of top-of-the-line shooters. I should have sent some of them, but I wanted to do this myself. It was low-risk, and besides, despite everything, I kind of liked Reggie, too.

Reggie turned on the Sirius, found the Raw Dog Comedy station, and we were laughing our a.s.ses off when the team of killers came out of the rain and rammed their Humvee into the side of my Explorer.

Chapter Eight.

East McComas Street Baltimore, Maryland Friday, May 20, 8:41 p.m.

I never saw it coming.

We'd veered off Cromwell heading to McComas, which ran parallel to I-95, when a dark green Hummer slammed us on the driver's side. The impact tilted the Explorer onto the two pa.s.senger-side wheels and drove it sideways toward a row of cement cattle guards that had been placed to guide traffic. It felt like being punched by a giant. The front and side air bags blew, hitting us hard in the face and the side of the head, slamming us back against our seats. The rain-slick streets offered no resistance as the bigger vehicle smashed us into the cattle guards with bone-jarring force. Reggie screamed. Ghost began yelping in fear and pain. I had a mouthful of air bag and couldn't breathe; my side of the car was canted inward toward me. Cracks appeared in the reinforced gla.s.s. If it hadn't been for the body armor, the car would have collapsed like a beer can.

"Joe!" howled Reggie in a high and terror-filled voice. "G.o.d, Joe!"

With one hand I fought to release the seat belt while my other hand clawed at the handle of my rapid-release folding knife, which was clipped inside my front trouser pocket. The air bags were designed to deflate almost immediately after deployment, with nitrogen leaking out of small vents; but we were so crammed in that the vents were blocked. There was almost no room to move.

Ghost's whines changed to barks and I craned my head to see the Humvee's headlights receding. I wasn't fool enough to think they were going away. They were backing up to hit us again.

I stamped blindly on the gas and the Explorer lurched forward as the Hummer roared and slammed forward again. My car was too badly damaged to drive away-even if I could see to steer, which I couldn't-but it jerked forward a few feet. Enough so the Humvee crunched into the side of the rear bay with a huge whump. Metal screeched and I heard one of the tires explode. The car settled awkwardly into a cleft formed by the Humvee and the cattle guards. There was no d.a.m.n where to go.

Then the knife was in my hand. I flicked it open and jabbed the airbag. White powder filled the cabin, and I spat and sputtered as I twisted to cut the seat-belt straps with the knife. Ghost kept barking but I could hear other sounds. Reggie's groans of fear and pain. Car doors opening. Feet crunching on broken gla.s.s. Shouts.

Reggie was bleeding and dazed, but alive. Ghost was going nuts in the backseat and I silenced him with a stern command. Through the cracked gla.s.s I could see several figures. All wearing black hoodies and black jeans.

They all had guns.

Jesus Christ.

Panic flashed through me. The driver's door was crushed in. Reggie's door was locked and the gla.s.s was reinforced, but five armed people could definitely break in. The impact with the Hummer had twisted the Explorer's frame and the steering wheel sat askew, blocking me from climbing backward over the seat.

s.h.i.+t.

I saw gun metal glimmer in the downspill of streetlights.

Then a barrage of thunder as they opened up on the car with automatic weapons. I could hear the bullets punch into the side of the car, tearing through the metal skin, flattening themselves on the steel lining. A couple of rounds ricocheted away and I heard a sudden scream of pain and surprise as one of the figures staggered and fell.

Dumb a.s.s, I thought. The f.u.c.k do you expect when you fire at an armored vehicle?

They closed on the car and began trying to kick the windows in.

That, unfortunately, they might accomplish. The impact of the two heavy vehicles had damaged the gla.s.s and it was bound to give.

I clawed the torn fabric of the air bags away from me, tore open the flaps of my Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt, and grabbed for my gun just as the bad guys tried to open the door.

The doors were locked.

One of them must have gone back to their Hummer because suddenly they began swinging a tire iron at the gla.s.s. Little chunks of gla.s.s popped out from pressure cracks and pinged off the dashboard, the rearview mirror, and my head.

I slashed at Reggie's seat belt and shoved him roughly into the foot well.

"Stay down!"

The window gla.s.s abruptly turned to white as a solid blow send a thousand microcracks all through it.

Then I jammed my back against the door, banged the door lock control with my elbow, took my Beretta in both hands, and fired at the gla.s.s, blowing it outward.

I fired, fired, fired.

There was thunder. Theirs, mine, and real booms coming from above. It all blended together into a deafening symphony of intolerable noise. The figures reeled back. Some falling, some staggering. I swapped out my magazine as I lunged across the seat. With a savage grunt I jerked open the door.

"Ghost-hit!"

A flash of snarling white barged past me, knocking me into the steering wheel. Outside I heard a terrible scream of pain.

Then I was crawling over the seat, over Reggie, shoving my gun hand out the door, firing at anything standing. I saw two of my bullets. .h.i.t a figure, once in the chest and once in the jaw. The impact tore half his face away and he spun around and fell into the glare of headlights. My third shot blew out the Hummer's left headlight.

As I emerged from the car, I saw that chaos ruled the street. One man was down, hands clamped to his stomach as he rolled back and forth. Probably the idiot who'd been hit with a ricochet. A second man leaned against the grill of the Humvee, bleeding from a bullet wound to the thigh, fingers slick with rainwater and blood as he tried to swap magazines on an AK-47. I shot him three times in the chest and once in the head. Ghost had a third man down and all I could see was teeth and torn flesh and a h.e.l.l of a lot of blood.

The first man I'd shot in the face was down, too.

That left one of the attackers uninjured. He was the one with the tire iron, and he lunged forward and swung it at my head.

If he'd backed up, dropped the tire iron, and pulled his gun, he might have had me.

Might have.

I was moving pretty fast by that point, though, going past the obstruction of the open Explorer door, swinging my gun up.

The tire iron came whistling down through the rain and hit the top of my gun so hard that the weapon was torn from my hands. Pain shot through my fingers and wrists and ran like an electric charge all the way to my elbows.

The guy stared at my empty hands as if he was stunned that his desperate blow had worked. I was surprised, too, but I didn't think a gaper delay in the middle of a fight was a good tactical move. So I rushed him, launched myself into a flying tackle, wrapped my arms around him and his tire iron, and smashed down into a huge puddle. It geysered up around us. I never heard the tire iron fall, but the guy's hands were empty and he started punching me in the face. He had small hands and he didn't really know what he was doing. I could feel his hand bones break on my cheeks and forehead and jaw. While he did that, I wrapped my aching hands around his throat and shoved him down under the water. He beat at my face, my shoulders, my chest. His body writhed and bucked. He tried everything he could to fight back, but I strangled him and drowned him in eight inches of muddy rainwater. Something inside the circle of my hands, inside the structure of his throat, broke, and then the hands fell away.

And then it was over.

I reeled back, a savage growl tearing its way from my throat as I twisted around to see if there was anyone else who needed to die.

There was no one.

The man Ghost had attacked was dead, his throat gone.

The fool who'd been hit by a ricochet lay near him, no longer bleeding. The dead don't bleed. Ghost had gotten to him while I was fighting in the puddle.

My dog raised his head and looked at me with eyes that were ancient and strange. Wolf eyes in a dog face. I knew that what he saw in return were not the eyes of a civilized man. Nor the eyes of a cop or a special operative. In that moment, I-like he-was a more primal thing. A killer. A savage.

The rain fell and fell, each drop as hard as a needle.

I looked down at the man I'd strangled.

It wasn't a man.

It was a woman.

Barely.

Her face floated in dirty water. Thin, frail. Features that might once have been lovely were distorted by the pain of her death. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding between full lips.

She couldn't have been older than twenty.

Maybe not that old.

A girl.

Dead in a ditch, with her throat crushed into an improbable shape by the brutality of my hands.

A girl who'd tried very hard to kill me.

A girl who matched the Identikit sketch of the missing Asian woman from the Arlington team of hackers.

The others around me were young, too. Three men, one other woman. The first one I'd shot in the face was a woman, too. No way to tell how old she'd been. There wasn't enough of her face for that. Only the damaged landscape of her body told me that she was female.

Young.

All of them so d.a.m.n young.

I rose very slowly. The shakes started then, shuddering their way through my muscles on relentless waves of adrenaline, fear, and revulsion.

Ghost was s.h.i.+vering, too.

He whined in the rainy darkness.

Somewhere, a million miles away, I heard a voice. Reggie.

"Joe...? G.o.d ... are we okay?"

It was a stupid question.

No, I nearly said. No, we're not okay.

But I couldn't say that to him.

So I said nothing.

Around me there was so d.a.m.n much death.

And no answers at all.

Chapter Nine.

East McComas Street Baltimore, Maryland Friday, May 20, 8:41 p.m.