Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 49

He'd played this before.

As the gray-and-white people rushed him and bore him to the floor, as his own screams drowned out the moans of the dead, as the pain burned down the world in his mind, Donny wondered how he could reset this. Which b.u.t.ton did he have to push to get a replay, to get a new life?

How?

How?

That was his very last thought.

Chapter Seventy-seven.

Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Monday, September 1, 6:01 a.m.

Violin sat in the darkness under a tree, feeling lost and useless. The sun was still down, though there were fires over the horizon line across Jamaica Bay and past Flight 587 Memorial Park. Six hundred yards away from where she sat, the humped shape of the Hangar pretended to be a vacant building. Violin knew better. She also knew that Joseph Ledger was inside.

Since leaving Junie Flynn's hotel and coming here, Violin had wrestled with herself as to what to do. And although Lilith had granted permission for her to a.s.sist Ledger, Joseph himself had not asked. Nor, technically, had the Deacon. In her brief conversation with him, the man said that he would appreciate her help should the appropriate situation arise, but he neglected to say what that situation might be. This whole country was in turmoil, people were dying, but it wasn't a fight where you could locate the battle lines. It was all random, chaotic. There seemed to be no way to actually help anyone.

So she crouched in the darkness and watched the Hangar and hoped that her cell would ring. As the hours crawled past, she thought about her feelings for Joseph. It was a fact that she loved him, and she was furious with herself for allowing that to happen. It made her madder still that those feelings persisted long after he'd fallen in love with someone else.

Junie Flynn. An ordinary woman? Maybe. A dying woman? Possibly.

The right woman for Joseph?

No.

Violin was certain of it. Junie was soft. Not a warrior at all. A civilian. Joseph was a warrior, a killer. In many ways he was every bit as much a monster as Violin herself.

The most troubling thing of all was the fact that she, a woman of Arklight, daughter of Lilith, soldier in the war against the Red Knights, felt totally defeated by an ordinary woman who would probably waste away and die sometime soon.

Violin tried very hard to hate Junie Flynn.

Chapter Seventy-eight.

Westin Hotel Atlanta, Georgia Monday, September 1, 6:02 a.m.

Mother Night did not want them to see an ordinary person.

However, deciding what to wear took some time. Although she had no one to confess it to, there were times when she considered wearing a costume. Something outrageous, like a supervillain costume, and she had several in mind. She got as far as the sewing stage for one of them before she realized how totally ridiculous that would be. The real world was never cool enough for anyone to accept a costumed supervillain.

Which sucked.

Some of her people would appreciate it, though, and every now and then she considered doing a Skype chat with them while wearing a costume. The foot soldiers would dig it, and Ludo Monk would probably come in his pants. Especially if her costume included cleavage and a large firearm.

But for the meeting with the bidders, a costume just would not work.

So sad. So boring and commonplace.

She thought about how rich she was about to become. Richer than she was already, and Haruspex had helped her loot tens of millions from groups ranging from Citibank to the Russian mob. After the auction, though, she would be many times richer. As rich as she imagined she deserved to be.

She wondered what would become of all that money.

Speculation about that made her think about everything else she'd leave behind. Apartments, cars, jewels, labs, all the science she'd torn from the Jakobys' computer records. She couldn't take that stuff with her. She'd had no need of it where she was going.

Deep inside her head a small voice tried to whisper to her, but Mother Night didn't listen. Would not listen. That voice was only an echo anyway. A glitch in the system that played a tired recording of someone else's voice.

Artemisia Bliss.

That weak little cow.

That dead b.i.t.c.h.

She forced herself to focus. The outfit she ultimately chose was a simple one, and it was also the first one she'd thought of. A black hooded sweater, black pageboy wig, black gla.s.ses. The same one the girls in her street teams used. She darkened her skin with spray tan and painted her mouth with black lipstick. And she took nearly forty minutes using professional stage makeup to change the shape of her face. Padding in her cheeks and behind her upper lip, suggesting an overbite. Plastic-coated wire springs to flare her nostrils, and putty to thicken her nose. Black pencil to add multiple fake piercing holes to her ears and two very heavy earrings to stretch her lobes. Clip-on ring to her nose and one to her lower lip. Then she used latex to give herself a small crescent-shaped scar above her left eyebrow, and a small surgical scar on her throat. More of the spray tan hid the latex and blended it all.

She appraised the final result in the bathroom mirror, and nodded approval.

Mother Night smiled back at her. Haughty, confident, and gorgeous.

The spray tan changed her skin tone from Asian to something more complex, and combined with the reshaping of the nose it suggested mixed ancestry. She'd based a lot of the look on photos of a Congolese fas.h.i.+on model who had been popular in France in the sixties.

Her cell buzzed and she dug it out of her hoodie pocket. It wasn't a call but rather her alarm.

It was time.

Mother Night hurried out of the bathroom and into the dining room, where everything was set up. She opened her laptop, engaged the global rerouter that would bounce the video feed to more than a thousand spots every ninety seconds, and loaded a videoconferencing utility she'd built by hacking and rewriting the Skype software.

One by one, calls began coming in. Most of these were rerouted, too, and Mother Night smiled at that. It was adorable. As they logged in, she engaged Haruspex to begin tracking them down. Rerouting didn't mean a f.u.c.king thing to Haruspex. There were eleven bidders. None of them had their webcams turned on, of course; however, Mother Night broadcast her image to all of them.

"Good evening," she said, giving herself a vaguely European accent she'd cribbed from the movies. She'd practiced it for months, listening to playbacks and making adjustments. All part of the "woman of mystery" mystique that made playing Mother Night so much fun. "I trust I have been able to adequately entertain you with today's festivities. Here is how the game will be played. Each of you has access to the conference chat function. No one is required to speak. Type in your questions and comments. Everyone will be able to see the amount you are bidding. If you wish to send me a private message, use the b.u.t.ton marked with a W, for whisper. Only I will be able to access the whispers. This session will conclude when I have accepted the winning bid. The winning bidder will then wire me the entire amount to the routing number I will type in now.

She had a different number for each bidder, and quickly cut and pasted those into individual whisper boxes.

"I will warn you now that I am monitoring those accounts. If there is any attempt to trace them I will be very cross. You have each seen what I am capable of doing. Let us all remain friends. We have a common enemy."

One of the bidders typed a message into the main chat.

HOW DO WE TRUST YOU?.

She laughed, and said, "This is not about trust. At this moment I have my people in each of your countries or inside your groups. Each one of my people has a supply of the pathogen built into a wide-dispersal explosive device. When I have a winning bid, that courier will place their parcel in a protected place and you will be texted the location and the disarming code."

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE OTHER SAMPLES?.

"Ah," said Mother Night, "that is another matter. The losing bidders will each wire me a penalty amount of ten million euros. Failure to do so within ten minutes of the end of this conference will result in my people releasing the pathogen in the nearest crowded city. And if any of you decide to drop out of the bidding, the pathogen will be released."

She let that sink in.

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS. THIS IS EXTORTION.

"Of course it is," she said with a laugh. "What's your point?"

There was no answer to that.

"Oh, and one last thing," she said after a moment. "In case you are thinking that this would be a good time to swear one of those tiresome vendettas or fatwas against me, bear this in mind: the seif-al-din is not the only item I have for sale. Play fair with me and you will get to bid on other toys. Break faith with me and you will spend the rest of your lives burying everyone you have ever known. Tell me you understand and accept the terms of our game."

One by one they sent her private whispers.

Everyone understood.

"How delightful," she said, settling back. "Now, let the games begin. The starting bid is fifty million euros."

The first bid was for sixty-five million euros.

Chapter Seventy-nine.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Monday, September 1, 6:11 a.m.

"We need to rea.s.sess everything," I said. "Every reaction we've had, every response we've made. Knowing that this is Bliss changes the game entirely. Bug, if she built something like MindReader based on what she hacked from our system, and maybe schematics for Pangaea, what does that do for us?"

"Puts us up s.h.i.+t creek?"

"No, d.a.m.n it ... work the problem. You know MindReader better than her. No matter how smart she is, you know that computer. Are there a.s.sumptions she might make that we can use against her? Are there ways MindReader can set a trap? And more important, now that we know she's using those technologies plus Vox's chip, does knowing it give you a way to work around her tech?"

This was the core of any counterattack-knowing your enemy. It's virtually impossible to protect yourself against the unknown. But with knowledge comes understanding and with that comes strategic thinking.

"I'm all over this," Bug said with more edge in his voice than I've ever heard. His screen went blank.

Then I focused on Hu. "No f.u.c.king around now, doc. Where did Bliss get those pathogens? You're supposed to be a couple of points smarter than her. Prove it."

If I expected him to get snarky or huffy, he proved me wrong. Hu straightened in his chair. "She could have obtained some samples at the Liberty Bell Center. If she was going crazy back that far, it's possible she pocketed some samples of Generation Six and Generation Twelve."

"Enough to do the damage she's doing?"

"I don't know. Probably, but definitely not enough to sell to bidders. And the same with the quick-onset Ebola released at the bar. Unlike the seif-al-din, that strain of Ebola doesn't replicate inside a host. It kills through direct exposure but that's it. It has to be produced in a lab, and it's a very complicated process. I think it's most likely she got some from that lab Colonel Riggs busted in Detroit. Bliss was there running the cleanup team. The reports say that she used water balloons at that bar and in other locations. If that's the case, then she probably added a portion of her supply to each balloon, so she's probably burned through any samples she might have obtained. From what I can put together in my head based on where she was and what she had access to, I think her real weapon is the seif-al-din. She's more likely to have enough of that for more hits, and, like I said, she could possibly have harvested more from infected test subjects."

"I never thought I'd ever say that I wish we were facing Ebola instead," I muttered.

No one argued. People infected with Ebola would die, but they wouldn't become carnivorous vectors.

"If Bliss intends to sell these bioweapons to foreign bidders," said Rudy, "and if we can reasonably believe that her supplies are limited to what she might have taken from DMS crime scenes ... then how can she have enough to sell?"

Hu shook his head. "I don't see how she can. She would need the purest strains to be able to sell them to anyone's bioweapons program."

"Unless she has a source for more pure pathogen," suggested Circe. "Is it possible that all of this chaos and violence is a distraction to keep us from looking for her true agenda? Could this be a screen while she makes a run at getting a supply of the purest versions of each pathogen?"

We looked at one another for a long second, and then Church s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone. He called Samson Riggs and ordered him to drop everything and take what was left of Shockwave Team and get to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Auntie was on her phone ordering Brick to triple the guards on the virus vault buried six levels down here at the Hangar.

That left the site with the biggest array of pathogenic monsters and the largest supply of each.

The Locker.

"Captain-" began Church, but I was already heading for the door at a dead run. Ghost ran beside me, his nails clicking on the marble floor.

Chapter Eighty.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Monday, September 1, 6:16 a.m.

By the time Ghost and I reached the prep room, Top had already gotten the word. Everyone was in the process of grabbing gear and stuffing it into duffel bags. We were all wearing borrowed clothes and would be rolling with guns and equipment that wasn't ours.

I tore off the fake police uniform I'd been wearing since leaving the subway and began pulling on a Saratoga Hammer suit. Top was next to me, buckling on a gun belt. "Not trying to dodge all the fun and games, Cap'n, but why are we rolling on this? There are two teams closer."

"Everyone's already deployed," I told him. "There's so much s.h.i.+t going on that most teams are split into two-man squads. As of right now, Echo has more manpower. So it falls to us."

"Even though we're America's most wanted?" asked Montana, who stood next to Top, hooking flash-bangs on her belt.

"That's not how it's playing out," I said. "The public and the press are looking for that team in the subway, but n.o.body has a face or a name. We're rolling out with DEA stenciled on our body armor. n.o.body's looking twice at a DEA team right now."

Doubt flickered in her eyes, but she gave me a tight nod.

We grabbed our equipment and hauled a.s.s to ground level, where Church's private Lear was waiting, engine hot, door open. We piled in, Coop slammed the door, and seconds later we were climbing high and fast, leaving Brooklyn behind. Ghost huddled down by the door, his hair standing on end, eyes filled with a lupine wariness. As we flew, we loaded every spare magazine we had and prayed that we were not already too late.

Church called before we even hit cruising alt.i.tude.

"Tell me something good," I asked. Or, maybe, begged.