Code Zero (6 page)

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 damn 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 glass. 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 glass 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 glass 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.

Shit.

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 ass
, I thought.
The fuck 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 glass 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 shirt, 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 glass. Little chunks of glass 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 glass 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 glass, 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 hit 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 hell 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 damn 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 shivering, too.

He whined in the rainy darkness.

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

“Joe…? God … 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 damn much death.

And no answers at all.

Chapter Nine

East McComas Street

Baltimore, Maryland

Friday, May 20, 8:41 p.m.

That was a long damn night, followed by a longer day.

So many questions.

From my people, from the cops, from Homeland and everyone else. From Vice President Collins’s Cybercrimes Task Force. Everyone wanted to know what happened. I told the same story forty times. It didn’t make any more sense the fortieth time than it did while it was happening.

None of the five dead people had ID. The Humvee was stolen. The serial numbers had been removed from the weapons, and ballistics didn’t match anything on record. No fingerprints on file.

We had to wait for dental records and DNA. The woman I’d strangled was named Luisa Kan. Korean by birth, raised in foster care, and a runaway at fourteen. She was nineteen when I’d killed her.

Reggie said that she looked like Mother Night. He was sure it was her.

So who were the others? Two were Asian: a twenty-two-year-old Japanese boy named Hiro Tanaka who’d come to America as an exchange student three years ago and dropped completely off the radar; and Sally Lu, fifth-generation Chinese American, twenty years old and a junior at the University of Southern California. Last seen at the end of the spring term. We were unable to verify that she was the same woman Reggie met in Arlington. There was simply not enough evidence.

The others were Neil Cox, nineteen, a former employee of a store that sold role-playing and video games; and Arnie Olensky, a high school dropout with no work record. Both of them from Baltimore.

All of them dead.

Jerry Spencer and his forensics team worked their apartments. They found money, expensive video game consoles, including one handheld that was like a souped-up Gameboy, but which no one could identify. Bug later said that it was the most sophisticated handheld game he’d ever seen. He did a patent search on it and found nothing. It was loaded with a bunch of games, but most of them were standard first-person shooter stuff. Except for one, a
Mission: Impossible
–style intrusion game called Burn to Shine. However, when Bug tried to hack the game software it triggered a series of microcharges. The game was destroyed and Bug spent a week in the hospital. They found nothing else of value.

The phrase “burn to shine” stuck in my mind. Violin had told me that those words were painted in blood on a wall in an illegal genetics lab in Vilnius, Lithuania. So far no one understood the exact meaning, at least as far as Mother Night’s organization viewed it.

Various agencies worked the case. Nobody made headway, and it eventually reached that point in an investigation where the various agencies covertly dropped out so they wouldn’t be seen as the agency still fruitlessly searching.

Bug kept his people on it, though, and MindReader dug up every known fact on the five dead kids. We had a ton of information and we knew absolutely nothing.

If they had political ties to Iran, China, or North Korea, MindReader couldn’t find them. No one could.

After a month, the investigation ground to a halt. There was simply nowhere to go with it. The press had bailed, frustrated by the lack of anything juicy to follow up the initial news of five good-looking kids dead by violence.

My name stayed out of it. Press releases from Homeland declined to name the “agents involved.” Reasons of national security, yada-yada.

I spent some time with Rudy Sanchez, drinking beers with him in my dad’s backyard, and sitting on the couch in his office. Rudy listened. We talked. He gave great advice on dealing with the shock and feelings of self-loathing that any moral person would feel after such an encounter.

Again, yada-yada.

Nothing he said, nothing Church said, nothing Junie said, could change the fact that I’d strangled a teenage girl and participated in the slaughter of four other young people. Kids.

I knew I’d take the memories of that night with me to the grave. Just as I knew that on my bad nights, on those nights when the hinges of the Pandora’s Box in my damaged head come loose and the monsters sneak out, then five ghosts would be standing beside my bead. Watching me with accusation in their dead eyes.

Maybe if we knew what all of this meant, then there would be some closure for me.

Maybe.

But I doubted it.

Chapter Ten

Camden Court Apartments

Camden and Lombard Streets

Baltimore, Maryland

Tuesday, May 31, 6:54 a.m.

On the last day of May, Junie found me on the balcony of our apartment. I was in my boxers and undershirt with the macramé lap blanket from the couch wrapped around my shoulders.

“Joe—?” she asked, her voice soft and tentative.

Without waiting for my reply she came out onto the balcony and sat down next to me. It was a strange morning, with shreds of clouds scattered haphazardly against a dark blue sky that refused to grow brighter as the sun rose. In the distance a few big birds rode the thermals, but from that distance I couldn’t tell if they were gulls or vultures.

Carrion birds either way.

Junie lifted the edge of the blanket and snuggled up against me.

“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked.

I shrugged. Truth was that I hadn’t noticed the temperature.

I kept looking at the birds, but I could feel Junie’s eyes on me as she studied the side of my face.