Ground Zero

  “What is that thing, Romy?” he whispered.

  “Just be calm,” she said, nodding and smiling at the creature. “He’s been told you’re on our side but he doesn’t know you, so he’s not sure of you. Whatever you do, don’t make any sudden moves.”

  He glanced down at his duct-taped legs and arms. “As if I have a choice.”

  “I’m about to remedy that.” She looked at the creature. “Kek, you’ve got to cut me free,” she said softly, as if talking to a child. “So I can call Zero. Use your knife to cut me free.”

  Kek unsnapped a safety strap from a scabbard attached to the belt around its waist—Patrick hadn’t noticed the belt till now—and whipped out one of those huge, saw-toothed Special Forces knives.

  Patrick’s gut clenched. “Oh, Christ! Someone gave that thing a knife?”

  “Quiet!” Romy hissed. “Kek’s a ‘he,’ and you owe him.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I’m not talking about tonight. Now be quiet and I’ll explain later.” She turned back to Kek and dipped her head toward the tape around her right arm. “Could you cut that, Kek? I can’t call Zero and tell him what a good job you did until you cut that tape.”

  Kek loped over and Patrick gasped as the creature raised the knife and, in a move so casual in manner yet so blindingly fast in execution, slashed the duct tape with a single thrust. He expected blood to gush from Romy’s wrist, but only the tape parted, leaving her without a scratch.

  “Good job!” she said as she wriggled that arm free and began the laborious task of unwinding the tape trapping her left wrist.

  “Ask him if you can borrow his knife,” Patrick said. “To speed things up.” Being trapped in this chair was making him claustrophobic.

  She gave him a rueful smile. “I wouldn’t advise you or anyone else to try to take Kek’s knife away from him. Even if you say, ‘Pretty please.’”

  She freed her left and, then began to work on her legs. As she did, Kek retreated to a corner where he squatted and watched.

  When she was finally free she rose and walked away.

  “Hey!” Patrick said. “What about me?”

  She stepped through an alcove and Patrick heard the rattle of cutlery from within. A moment later she emerged holding a wicked looking carving knife.

  “Ginsu,” she said. “Cuts through tin cans.”

  “But will it cut duct tape?”

  “We’ll see.”

  It did, of course, and seconds later Patrick was free. He started to rise, then sat back down. He looked at the two men on the floor, one dead, the other halfway there, then at the creature squatting against the wall, watching them, and felt weak, as if someone had pulled a drainage plug from his ankle and all his energy had run out.

  “What’s going on, Romy? What have we got ourselves into?”

  “Life!” she said, turning, bending at the waist, and leaning toward him. “Don’t you feel alive, more alive than you’ve ever felt in your life?” She held the Ginsu blade before her face. “This is it! This is the cutting edge! This is where your vote is counted! This is where you make a difference!”

  She’s high, he thought. Stoked on adrenaline. And me? A total wreck.

  “You’re very scary right now,” he told her.

  “Am I?” She straightened. “Sorry. That was someone else talking.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She pointed to the unconscious man. “Can you believe it? We’ve finally got one of them!”

  “One of who?”

  “They’re from Manassas, or whoever’s behind Manassas. And the people behind Manassas are behind SimGen. This blows the lid off, breaks everything wide open. We’re finally going to get some answers.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to talk?”

  “Oh, he’ll talk.” She turned and lifted the inoculator from the kit on the coffee table. “Do unto others what they were about to do to you, right?”

  Patrick stared at the amber liquid in the vial. They’d been about to inject some of that into Romy and him.

  “You think that’s the truth drug we heard about? The one they found in the dead globulin farmers?”

  She nodded. “Totuus. I’d bet my soul.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.” She gestured to the dead man. “Maybe we’d have ended up like him.”

  “Speaking of him, how do we explain a dead body to the police?”

  “We won’t.”

  “We can’t very well say he broke his own neck.”

  “I’m sure Zero will have a way to handle it.”

  Romy picked up her coat from the floor. “Kek, you did good,” she said soothingly to the creature as she rummaged in a pocket.

  Patrick noticed that the red coloration had faded completely from its snout, replaced now by a bright blue.

  “Can I ask again: What is he?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled a phone from the coat pocket. “I’ll introduce you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  She motioned to the creature. “Come over here, Kek. I want you to meet Mister Sullivan.”

  “Really,” Patrick said out of the corner of his mouth as Kek rose and started toward them. Something about this creature stirred a primal fear in him. And the way its gaze veered to Patrick’s left and right, never making eye contact, didn’t help. “That’s okay.”

  “Kek,” Romy said, “shake hands with our new friend, Patrick Sullivan. And Patrick, meet the fellow who saved your life back in October.”

  “My life? You mean, when we were knocked off the Saw Mill?”

  As Romy nodded Patrick relived the moment in the inky grove as the massive arms of the man named Ricker wrapped around his head and shoulders, felt them tense as he prepared to snap Patrick’s neck, and then the sudden release. Moments later, Ricker and his friend were dead.

  He considered Kek’s muscular arms, sensed the power in the thick shoulders bulging through the sleeveless coverall. Yes, power to spare, more than enough to take out two hardened pros, especially if they didn’t see him coming.

  “I guess I owe you big time, Kek,” Patrick said, thrusting out his hand. He still didn’t know what kind of mutant monkey thing stood before him, but he most definitely wanted Kek on his side. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you very much.”

  Kek pulled back his shoulders and puffed out his chest. Finally he made eye contact. His hand was warm and dry as his long fingers wrapped around Patrick’s. He bared his teeth, revealing those fangs. An attempt at a smile?

  “Does he speak?” Patrick said.

  “Not more than a few syllables—one of them being ‘Kek.’ But he understands speech and he signs.”

  Kek released Patrick’s hand and turned to the two men on the floor. Ponytail groaned and stirred. Kek bent, grabbed the man’s hair, and slammed his head against the floor.

  “Easy, Kek,” Romy said. “We don’t want to scramble his brains.”

  “What do we want to do?” Patrick said.

  Romy said, “Zero,” to her PCA, then smiled. “That’s what I’m about to find out.”

  4

  Every muscle in Luca’s body wound tight as he let himself into the foyer of Romy Cadman’s apartment building. Something had gone wrong. He didn’t know what, couldn’t imagine what, but Palmer and Jackson weren’t answering his calls.

  They’d been flown in from the Idaho facility especially for this op—both of them experienced men who’d return there immediately after they completed their work. The chance of Cadman or Sullivan ever seeing either of them again was nil. They’d called in when they’d set themselves up in the apartment; they’d responded when the surveillance team in the car outside let them know that both the woman and Sullivan were on their way up.

  But that had been over an hour ago. No one had heard from them since. No one had entered or left the building since Cadman and Sullivan’s arrival.

  He
couldn’t help remembering the first time he’d run an op against these two: a humiliating failure and two of his men dead.

  Not again, he thought, almost a prayer. Please, not again.

  But the previous op had been a complicated outdoor job, with innumerable variables; this one was in a small apartment, a limited, controlled field of operation that Palmer and Jackson had secured beforehand. What was wrong? An hour was more than enough for a pair of armed pros to deal with two unarmed civilians, juice them up with Totuus, and record the answers to a few questions. Like, who do you take instructions from, where do you get your money, and so on.

  Luca had wanted to be there, and would have been if termination had been in the plan; but since Cadman and Sullivan were going to be released, he couldn’t risk showing his face.

  He hurried up the stairs. Key in hand, he pressed his ear against the door to 3A and knocked. No sound from within, not a whisper, not a rustle. He knocked again, same result.

  Steeling himself for what might lie within—visions of Ricker’s and Green’s smashed skulls from the last time flashed through his brain—Luca unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  Empty silence. Quick dodges in and out of the rooms, another circuit to check out the closets, and then back to the center of the front room, to wander in a slow, baffled circle. Where the hell was everybody? Could he be in the wrong apartment?

  And then he spotted white fragments and powder on the carpet in the corner. He stepped closer and recognized it as plaster. A quick look up and he found a deep pock in the wall. Bullet hole. Fresh one. Looked for more but came up empty.

  He felt his pulse kick up. Someone had got off a shot, but only one. That confirmed that he was in the right place. But where did everybody go? He stepped to the window and looked down at the small rear courtyard. No way out here—the fire escape was in front. They had to be hiding in another apartment—the only possible answer. He’d keep the building under surveillance. Sooner or later they had to show themselves.

  But what if they weren’t here? What if they’d got away clean?

  He pulled out his PCA and called down to the surveillance car across the street. “Anybody leave since I’ve been inside?”

  “Negative.” Snyder’s voice. He and Lowery were on watch. “Saw a grayish van pull out of an alley half a block down right after you went in, but that’s about it.”

  A van. Could that be…?

  “Did you get the plate number?”

  “Yep. You want a read back?”

  Luca closed his eyes. Thank God for Snyder. At least someone was on the ball. “No. But don’t lose it. It might be important.”

  And then again, it might not mean a goddamn thing.

  Luca Portero dried his sweaty palms on his coat sleeves. Two more men gone, and he knew no more now about who was behind Cadman and Sullivan than he did before.

  How the hell was he going to tell Lister?

  5

  “You know,” Patrick told Zero after they’d pulled into the West Side garage and the door had closed behind their van, “I could get used to this. And that worries me.”

  The cascade of emotions from the threats and the violence had faded now, leaving him oddly exhilarated. But it had been harrowing.

  When Romy had called Zero they’d learned that he had an escape route all worked out. Following his instructions, they’d taken the stairs to the roof—Romy in the lead, Patrick bringing up the rear, Kek in the middle carrying their two attackers, one over each shoulder. Romy’s was the second of four joined buildings. They’d walked across two neighboring roofs to a ledge where a fire escape led down to an alley. After a short but nerve-wracking wait, Zero’s battered Econoline pulled up and they’d all climbed aboard.

  Patrick had handled the driving on the way back, with Zero in the passenger seat, and Romy in the middle. That was when his mood had begun to change. They’d done it! They’d faced murderous opposition and—with no little help from Kek—overcome it. They were wheeling away with no one in pursuit, no one even aware that they’d turned the tables.

  As soon as they’d reached Manhattan they found a deserted spot under the FDR Drive where they leaned Duke’s corpse against a steel support. Throughout the night anyone who saw him would think he was passed out drunk; in the morning light they’d think differently. Patrick then piloted the van across town with Duke’s unconscious partner.

  Masked as usual, Zero stepped out of the passenger door and regarded Patrick through his dark glasses. “Yes. It’s the high of victory. Not a good thing to get too used to. You can’t expect to win all the time.”

  “I know.” Patrick opened his door and hopped out. “But after all the bad news, after being pushed around and running into wall after wall, this feels very, very good. It’ll feel even better if it turns out that one of these two poisoned my clients.

  “And maybe,” Romy said, taking the hand he offered to help her out of the van, “he’s one of the SLA creeps who butchered the globulin farm sims as well.”

  “Wouldn’t that be sweet.”

  Zero leaned back inside and spoke toward the darkened rear section. “Kek. Tape the man into the chair by the wall.”

  They’d brought everything along—the tape, the inoculator kit, the silenced pistols. Neither man had carried any identification.

  Poetic justice, Patrick thought as he watched Kek get to work. Bound with his own tape, injected with his own truth drug.

  He looked around, noticing how his senses felt heightened. Despite the low light in the garage, he seemed to see everything with day-bright clarity. The tang of gasoline and the heavier odor of DW-40 were sharp in the air; the ticking of the van’s cooling engine was like a ball-peen hammer rapping an anvil.

  Zero was away from the van now, moving to the darker shadows of a corner. Why wouldn’t he let anyone see his face? What was he afraid of?

  Patrick followed him, but not too closely. “What is he and where did you find him?” he said, pointing to Kek.

  “In Idaho. Last year.”

  “Idaho?” Romy said. “You never told me that. I thought you’d found him around SimGen.”

  Zero shrugged. “Sorry. It never came up. And it didn’t seem to matter until you saw that Idaho license plate on the SimGen campus.”

  “I wondered why you were so psyched about that.”

  “How do you just happen to ‘find’ something like him in Idaho?” Patrick asked.

  “Don’t you remember hearing reports of people claiming they’d spotted Bigfoot in Idaho last winter?”

  “Vaguely. I try not to devote too many memory cells to that sort of thing.”

  “I do…if it sounds furry like a sim. I sent a couple of volunteers out there to track down the sightings, and they returned with Kek, suffering from starvation, frostbite, and half dead from exposure. Dr. Cannon and I nursed him back to health and—”

  “Who’s Dr. Cannon?”

  “You met her at Beacon Ridge,” Romy said. “She was the woman doctor who tried to save the poisoned sims.”

  “Right,” Patrick said. “I remember her. But what is Kek? Where did he come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Zero replied, watching as the creature taped the still unconscious Ponytail into the chair. “But he’s obviously the product of a recombinant lab, an advanced one. He looks to be part mandrill and part gorilla, and I’d be very surprised if he didn’t have a fair amount of human DNA spliced into his genome as well.”

  Patrick shook his head in wonder. “He’s scary looking.”

  “I doubt that’s by accident. Nor his aggressiveness.”

  “But why?” Kek had finished his task and now squatted by the prisoner, his eyes fixed on Zero as he awaited further instructions. “Who’d want to create something like that?”

  Zero walked back to the cab of the van and reached through the window. “I’ll show you.” He withdrew one of the silenced pistols and held it up. “A .45 caliber HK SOCOM. Ever seen one before?”

 
“Never,” Patrick said. “What’s ‘HK’ mean? Hong Kong?”

  Zero laughed. “Hardly.” He swiveled the pistol toward Romy. “Romy? Know it?”

  “It’s Heckler and Koch, but beyond that…sorry, no.”

  “Heckler and Koch Mk 23 Special Operations Command model. Its barrel comes threaded and suppresser ready.” Zero held it out to Kek. “Kek? Would you break this down for me please?”

  “Are you nuts?” Patrick whispered as Kek loped forward. “That’s a loaded weapon!”

  Zero didn’t respond. He placed the pistol in Kek’s outstretched hand and said, “You can use that workbench over there.”

  Kek took the pistol and inspected it, turning it over in his hands a few times before he ejected the clip and then worked the slide to remove the chambered round.

  “He knows guns!” Patrick said, his voice hushed in awe.

  “You ain’t seen nuthin yet,” Romy told him.

  Kek stepped over to the workbench and Patrick watched in amazement as his long, nimble fingers removed the silencer and disassembled the gun with practiced speed, then arranged its innards for inspection, all in less than thirty seconds. When finished he took one step back and stood with his hands behind his back, awaiting approval.

  “He’s military!” Patrick said.

  “Or paramilitary. Or perhaps intended as some sort of semi-human mercenary. Who can say? But he can break down just about any weapon you hand him, and he knows no fear.”

  “A perfect soldier.”

  “Maybe not perfect, but damn near.”

  “What happened to his left hand?” Patrick said as he noticed that Kek’s ring and pinkie fingers were missing a joint or two.

  “Frostbite,” Zero replied.

  “So he owes his life to you?”

  “And Kek knows it,” Romy said. “He’s totally devoted to Zero.”

  “An overstatement, I assure you,” Zero said.

  Patrick didn’t think so. He’d noticed that Kek’s eyes had stayed focused on Zero since his arrival. Even now, as he awaited approval of his breakdown of the pistol, his eyes never left Zero.