I sighted down on the closest shooter. Top caught my eye and shook me off. I withheld my shot and then saw why. Khalid Shaheed had worked his way around to the far side and was three steps from a flanking position. One of the shooters must have spotted him and started to turn, so I blew out the windshield of the car he was hiding behind. He made the mistake of being surprised and looking up.
Khalid put a round through the guy’s ear.
The other shooters faltered, caught in a cross fire.
Top bellowed at them in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice, “Drop your weapons and step out from behind the vehicles! Do it now!”
It was a simple choice. It was their only remaining choice. An idiot could have recognized it as the only way out of the moment.
But the dumb sons of bitches went for it. They opened up on Khalid and on Top. The return fire came from Top and Bunny, from Khalid, from me, and from DeeDee, who appeared out of nowhere and took up a shooting position right outside the window. It was a four-way shit storm, and it was over in seconds. Nobody was going home from that party.
DeeDee looked up with a dazzling blue-eyed smile. “Howdy, Boss. Did you get me a vanilla latte with foam?”
I actually laughed and then I heard tires squeal. I jumped out of the window and sprinted for the front of the building with DeeDee on my six. A white van roared past us and headed for the far exit. The side door was open and I saw two men with scarves standing braced in the opening. They both had assault rifles and I was starting to pivot, reaching to push DeeDee out of the way, when there were two sharp cracks and the men pitched backward into the van. I whipped my head around and saw John Smith lying chest down over the hood of Black Bess, his sniper rifle smoking.
The van was still going, the driver hell-bent on getting his ass out of the parking lot. We all opened up on the vehicle, battering it with rounds, but the driver had the pedal on the floor and we didn’t have a good angle on him.
“Rudy!” I bellowed as I broke into a dead run.
“Here!” came a strangled croak from the other side of the building. I spun and cut across the lot to try to cut the van off. As I cleared the corner I saw Rudy on his knees, right hand clamped over his left arm, his face white as paste as blood poured from between his fingers.
What I saw behind him twisted my brain around.
Circe O’Tree stood over Rudy, legs wide in a solid shooter’s stance, holding a smoking Glock .40 in a two-handed grip, the barrel pointed right at me.
I almost shot her.
However, she wasn’t aiming at me. She was aiming past me, and I whirled and dodged sideways as she fired. Her first three bullets exploded the van’s windshield and the next two hit the driver in the face. The van suddenly swerved as the driver pitched sideways, his dead hands dragging the wheel hard over. The van missed Circe by ten feet and Rudy by less than a yard. It plowed into the back of my Explorer and crushed it like a beer can.
For one crystalline moment the entire scene was dead silent, as if we were all frozen into a photograph from a book on war. This could have been Somalia or Beirut or Baghdad or any of the other places on our troubled earth where hatred takes the form of lethal rage. We, the victors, stood amid gunsmoke and the pink haze of blood that had been turned to mist, amazed that we were alive, doubting both our salvation and our right to have survived while others—perhaps more innocent and deserving than ourselves—lay dead or dying.
Chapter Fifty-four
Starbucks
Southampton, Pennsylvania
December 19, 5:49 P.M. EST
Then the moment crumbled to dust as sirens burned the air and hearing returned to our gunshot-deafened ears so that we heard the screams of those still clinging to life.
“Top!” I yelled.
“Clear!” he called as he and Bunny came out from their points of cover and swarmed the dead, kicking away their weapons, checking for pulses behind the appearance of death.
I turned and ran toward Rudy, but Circe was there, pushing him down. She had a knife in her hand—God only knows where it came from—and she was cutting his sleeve away, yelling at him to hold pressure there, there, dammit, changing from the person who had just killed into the doctor who had dedicated her life to doing no harm. Tears glittered like diamonds at the corners of her eyes.
“Dr. O’Tree,” Rudy said in a voice slurred by shock and pain, “it’s a pleasure to—”
“Shut up,” she snapped.
“Okay.”
As Circe worked, her gaze kept flicking up and past me. I followed her line of sight and saw the six small holes clustered in the center of the driver’s windshield of the van. The figure inside was slumped sideways, eyes wide and fixed and nothing much else remaining of his face.
DeeDee knelt beside Circe with an open field surgical kit. She popped a surette of morphine and jabbed it in Rudy’s arm. He said something in Spanish that sounded like “I love you,” and passed out.
I tried to help them, but they waved me off.
“Inside! The people!” Circe cried in a voice that was as fragile as cracked porcelain.
The sirens were getting louder. Help was coming. Thank god.
I ran to the front of the destroyed Starbucks just as the first police cars came screeching into the parking lot.
I stepped into a scene from hell. The ceiling lights had all been blown out. People were screaming. Those who could still scream. I looked in through the shattered window. Too many of the sprawled figures lay still and silent, their voices silenced forever. The place looked like it had been spray painted with red, but it wasn’t the cheerful holiday red of Christmas.
There were no other shooters. The woman in the Grinch shirt was on her hands and knees, splinters of glass glittering in her hair like stardust. She looked around at the carnage. Then she looked down at the figure that lay beside her.
Marty Hanler.
She screamed. I couldn’t blame her.
“Federal agent!” I yelled. “Police and ambulances are on their way. Everyone stay down!”
Top and the others swarmed past me to provide first aid.
Ghost stood above the last of the shooters. The only one still alive. I had to step over the dead and dying to get to him.
“Off,” I said quietly, and Ghost released the ruin of an arm. “Watch.”
The man was white from blood loss, but he was far from dead, the wound in his neck was bad but not fatal, his arm was probably a total loss unless he got to a top-notch microsurgeon in the next hour or so, but even with all that he would live. When he looked up into my eyes I could see the precise moment when he realized that surviving this was not going to be any kind of mercy.
Not for him.
Interlude Thirty-seven
The Seven Kings
December 19, 5:51 P.M. EST
When the American came back to his office he found Toys sitting on the floor, his shirt covered in drying blood, dark stains on the carpet. Toys held his head in his hands as if it would crack and fall apart if he didn’t press the broken pieces together.
“Holy shit,” said the American. “What happened?”
Toys sniffed, shook his head. “I tried to tell him,” he mumbled. “I tried to explain the danger he was creating for himself.”
“Ah,” said the American. “Yeah, I could have told you that was a waste of time. He hit you, huh?”
Toys sobbed into his hands.
The American took a clean towel from the wet bar and poured ice cubes into it and handed it to Toys. Then he took a bottle of Don Julio tequila, pulled out the stopper, and dropped it on the bar. He placed his back against the wall and slid down to the floor so that he sat next to Toys. He nudged Toys with his knee and handed him the bottle. Toys shook his head.
“Take a fucking drink,” growled the American.
Toys sighed, took the bottle, and drank a careful mouthful through torn lips. Coughed, gagged, drank another. He handed the bottle back and the American took a pull. For the
next ten minutes neither said a word. They passed the bottle back and forth and let the minutes harden the cement that held their thoughts together.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” Toys said.
“Probably.”
“It’s your mother’s fault.”
“It’s both their faults. They were made for each other.”
They each took a pull.
“I think I’ve been fired as his Conscience.” Toys tried to laugh about that, but his lips hurt too much.
“You’ll always have a place with the Kings, Toys,” said the American.
Toys looked at him. “Why? I’m Sebastian’s luggage. What am I to you?”
“Don’t sell yourself short, kiddo. You have clarity of mind. You can see the Big Picture without getting seduced by the shiny little details.”
“You mean I’m a cynic.”
“I prefer ‘realist,’ but yeah.”
Toys held out his hand for the bottle, took a pull.
They drank in silence for a long time. Then the American said, “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
Toys looked at him in surprise. “What? You have—”
“Santoro? He’s a psychopath. I use him the way I’d use a gun. Point and shoot. But if it came down to where he had to decide between me and Mom, you know how he’d jump.”
“Is it going to come down to that?”
The American nodded. “Yep. You know it is.”
Toys sighed. “Sebastian, too. A Goddess, a King, and the Angel of Death. Very nice. You could build a heavy metal album on that.”
The American laughed. “Guess you’ve figured out that the whole ‘no secrets’ thing between the Seven Kings is a frigging joke. Always has been. Some of them take it seriously, and I pretend to … but I always hedge my bets. I don’t trust easily. With the Kings, I’ve made a fortune. I’m damn near richer than God, but I don’t really enjoy it. I fuck around with money because what else do I have?”
“‘When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.’”
The American grunted. “A misquote from Plutarch, but it hits the bull’s-eye. My point is, though, that I can’t trust the Kings. I can’t trust Santoro. And I never trusted my mother. I’m glad I wasn’t actually raised by her. She was a rich debutante when she had me, but she gave me up and my dad raised me. He was a blue-collar guy. When he struck it rich, they got married, but by then I was in college. I didn’t know how corrupt she was until I was twenty-two or -three, and I didn’t know how crazy she was until I was thirty. She was already working on this Goddess thing when I created the Seven Kings.”
“That long ago?”
“Sure. She’s brilliant, but she’s totally fucking nuts. Gault is perfect for her. Brilliant but nuts.”
“Sebastian is broken.”
“A lot of people are.” The American nodded and took a pull from the bottle. “Sebastian and Mom are pushing this Ten Plagues Initiative forward despite everything I’ve tried to do to stop it.”
“Like … ?”
The American turned to him and smiled. “Before I answer that, you answer me this: if you had to pick one quality that defines everything the Kings stand for, what would it be?”
“Chaos—?”
“C’mon, kiddo … you know as well as I do that’s just the company line. What’re the real characteristics?”
Toys thought about it. “Misdirection. Lies, misinformation, disinformation. All of that.”
“See, you are a smart young fellow. Misdirection. The Israel-Islam thing? Misdirection. The terrorist attacks—9/11, the India attacks, bombing of the USS Cole? Misdirection. The whole Ten Plagues Initiative is mostly misdirection. Most of it is a pure profit machine, like we’ve been saying. But some of it—a lot of it—is to keep eyes looking in the wrong direction even among us. You can’t believe hardly anything we say, even when we’re telling the truth.”
“Okay. So, how does that answer my question? How does it explain how you’ve been trying to stop Eris? Mostly it looks like you’ve been helping her … .” His voice trailed off and he smiled as much as his mashed lips would allow. He cocked an eyebrow. “When Dr. Kirov died it nearly derailed the Ten Plagues Initiative.”
The American grinned approvingly. “Didn’t it, though.”
Toys smiled as much as his damaged lips would allow. “Kirov’s death was pretty convenient.”
“Uh-huh. It should have stopped the Initiative in its tracks. But … Mom talked the Kings into bullying me about calling Gault.”
“You didn’t want to bring him in?”
“Hell no.” He handed over the bottle. “Can you guess why?”
“Because … he would do what he has done. He’d figure a way to make the Ten Plagues Initiative work.”
“And ain’t that just a kick in the fucking ass?” The American patted Toys’ knee. “Now … keep thinking that through.”
They sat side by side on the floor while Toys worked it out. Toys asked, “When did Eris first ask about Sebastian?”
“Six months ago. Right around the time Dr. Kirov had his first stroke. A ministroke. Son of a bitch bounced back faster than I expected.”
“Six months. That’s … right around the time that the DMS started hitting cells being trained to support the Initiative.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We know that someone has been making anonymous calls to Mr. Church to tip him off.”
“Yep.”
“In order to reveal the location of those cells, the caller has to have a source within the Kings organization.”
“That’s what the Kings believe. There have been all sorts of internal witch hunts to find the blabbermouth. Turns out, it was Kirov’s Conscience.”
Toys looked at the big man, but the man’s smile never wavered.
“Inconvenient that the man died before someone as persuasive as Santoro could make him talk,” Toys suggested.
“Yeah, what interesting timing that was.”
Toys took a final sip of the tequila and set the bottle down. “A Big Picture kind of person might look at that and wonder if Kirov’s Conscience was ever truly dirty.”
“They might.”
“And that person might also wonder if there is truly a war between the Seven Kings and the Inner Circle.”
“Indeed.”
“And that person might wonder if the entire thing was misdirection from the jump. Maybe to start a war.”
“And how would that benefit the Kings?”
“It destabilizes those in power.”
The American grinned like a happy bear. “How’s the mouth doing?”
“I can barely feel it.”
“Does it hurt too much to talk on the phone?”
“No.”
The American got clumsily to his feet. As he did so his cell phone fell from his pocket and landed next to the bottle. He pretended not to notice it.
Toys looked at the phone and then up at the towering bearlike anomaly of a man. This King of Fear.
“Remember what I said to you a while back? About how Judas got a bad rap when he was really probably trying to save Jesus? In fact, here’s a bit of interesting biblical trivia. In Luke 24:33 and Mark 16:14 it clearly states that when Jesus rose from the dead he met with ‘the eleven.’ Most people assume that the missing disciple was Judas, who was supposed to have killed himself out of remorse for his act of betrayal. But in John 20:24 we learn that the missing disciple was Thomas. So … that means that the other eleven included Judas. And in 1 Corinthians 15:5 the Apostle Paul says that Matthias wasn’t voted in as the replacement twelfth Apostle until forty days after the Resurrection. So … Judas was still there. In fact, in Acts 1:25 we learn that Judas ‘turned aside to go to his own place.’ People don’t read the whole Bible. They don’t get the Big Picture. Judas’s death was a fake, and considering that God ordained his betrayal, and Jesus predicted it, Judas was acting according to the will of God. He wa
sn’t a traitor—he was a company man who did the right goddamn thing, even though it was the hard goddamn thing to do. He was a Big Picture guy. Just like me and you.” He smiled down at Toys. “Lock up when you leave, kiddo.”
He turned and lumbered out.
Toys stared at the empty doorway for a long time, and then he set down the ice and picked up the phone. It was an exotic model with a kind of scrambler attachment he’d never seen before.
Chapter Fifty-five
Starbucks
Southampton, Pennsylvania
December 19, 5:54 P.M. EST
Every cop in five towns and some from Philadelphia descended on that parking lot. The streets were closed off, the airspace declared a no-fly zone except for SWAT choppers.
The cops wanted to bag my team, but that wasn’t going to happen. We had the right credentials, and by the time the first ambulance rolled in Echo Team was already at work on the survivors. Khalid was an actual M.D., so he and Circe sectioned the coffee shop and triaged the wounded. Bunny, Top, and John Smith went to work patching bleeders, immobilizing injured backs and necks, removing the most immediately threatening glass splinters, and treating people for shock. Then waves of EMTs arrived, as well as a couple of carloads of nurses and doctors from the nearby hospital. As the professionals claimed the scene, we backed off.
I called the DMS but was unable to get Church on the phone, so I told the duty officer the pertinent details and said that we needed someone on the horn to the local chief of police and probably the governor.
Top caught up with me. “Khalid’s got the prisoner stabilized. Want to go have a little chitchat?”
“Yes, I do.”
My nerves were still jangling and I had the jitters and sick stomach that often follows violence and an adrenaline surge. If I had the time I’d throw up, then buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and curl up in my room and watch Comedy Central until I passed out. Fat chance of that. My thigh hurt like hell, and blood from the cuts had pooled in my shoe, so I sloshed as I walked.