My secretary, Lydia-Rose, met me at the front door, fists on hips, glaring at me. She’s short, very curvy, very energetic, with lots of wavy black hair and the brightest smile in Southern California. Normally. She wasn’t smiling now and as I got out of the car she was wagging a stern finger at me.
“You should still be in bed,” she snapped.
“Happy to see you, too,” I said, and kissed her cheek. Then her scowl melted away and she gave me a hug that nearly snapped my spine. Lydia-Rose’s hugs straddle the fine line between hugging and mugging.
“I was so worried!” she cried as I disentangled myself from her with considerable effort.
“Where’s Church?”
“In the big conference room. But he’s in a mood. Maybe you should rest first.”
“Maybe I’ll take a buddy nap with the boss.”
She gave me one of those looks, like she wasn’t sure if I was joking. Or nuts.
The conference room was empty when I came in, but it was set with pitchers of water, coffee, tea, and two plates of cookies. A plate of Oreos and animal crackers on the near side of the table, and a plate of vanilla wafers on the other.
I looked at the cookies, then heard the door open behind me. “I sense a disturbance in the force.”
“Yes,” said a voice, and I turned to see Mr. Church.
Church is a big and blocky man, somewhere well north of sixty but looking like age didn’t matter much to him. Dark hair going gray, eyes mostly hidden behind tinted glasses, and he wore very thin black silk gloves. All the time. His hands had been badly damaged during the drone thing a few months back. Company rumor says that they did some kind of radical procedures on him, and from what I can see he has full use of them, but he always wears the gloves now. Bunny has a pool going that Church has some kind of cyborg Darth Vader hands under the silk. I don’t know if I agree. Maybe it’s just that he has one flicker of vanity and doesn’t want to show scars. I’ve asked Rudy about it, but he declined to answer. Rudy’s more of a grown-up than the rest of us and prefers not to speculate about someone else’s pain.
Church did not offer to shake hands, because he doesn’t do that anymore. But he did something he’d never done before. He placed a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s good to have you back, Captain,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder once and then walked around to the far side of the table, pausing briefly to scratch Ghost’s head. Ghost wagged at him, too.
I asked, “Rudy?”
“Resting,” said Church. “However, if you’re looking for an explanation as to what happened at the hospital … we don’t have one. I’ve had three top psychologists interview him and I sat with him myself this morning.”
“Sam said he doesn’t remember what happened.”
“That’s not entirely true. Dr. Sanchez remembers almost everything, but he said it was like remembering a dream. He said that he was aware of what he was doing but he described it as watching events on TV. There was no direct connection to his actions.”
“So what are we talking here? Is he possessed? Is he going to spit green soup and levitate now?”
Church did not smile. No reason to. “I have reached out to a number of experts—friends in various industries. They are flying in from all over the globe. We will get to the bottom of this.”
I touched his arm. “Look, Rudy is my best friend. He’s a better man than either of us. We need to help him.”
Church nodded. “We do and we are. Now, please, sit. We have much to catch up on and time is not our friend.”
“Is it ever?”
“Sadly, no.”
I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee, added milk but no sugar. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Brick Anderson, Church’s personal aide and bodyguard, and I commented on it.
“He’s picking up my cat,” said Church.
I waited, expecting there to be more. A punch line maybe. When he did not offer further explanation I said, “Um … cat? As in pet?”
“Yes,” he said flatly. “Why do you sound so surprised? People own pets.”
“You don’t.”
“I do, actually.”
“Let me guess,” I said, “it’s a white-haired cat and you’ve decided to name it Blofeld.”
Church selected a vanilla wafer from the tray, broke it in half, and nibbled one piece. “No,” he said.
“Well, what is—?”
Before I could finish the question the door opened and in walked Brick with a plastic pet carrier. Brick is roughly the size of Nebraska. He used to be a top field operator before he lost a leg in combat. His new one is ultra-high-tech and hard to spot beneath his clothes. Church always takes care of his people. Actually, a lot of the DMS support staff is made up of former field agents who fell in battle but did not fall off of Church’s radar. Family is family.
Brick is special, though, and we all knew it. Church trusts few people, and even among his inner circle there’s almost no one who he shares his personal life with. When Church’s former aide, Gus Dietrich, was killed during the Majestic Black Book case, Brick stepped up to fill that gap. He is a very smart but very quiet man, and he is fiercely loyal to Church. He is valet, butler, driver, confidant, and bodyguard. A friend, too. He has his own apartment in Church’s house and his clearance level is actually higher than mine.
Brick smiled at me. “It lives.”
“Kind of.”
We shook hands, and I watched as he set the pet carrier on the table and opened the door. The cat that emerged was big and blocky like his owner, with smoky blue-gray fur and eyes as dark and round as ripe pumpkins. He had small ears that bent forward, and walked on short, strong legs. I recognized the breed, a Scottish Fold.
“Bastion,” said Church.
The cat walked across the table and I offered my hand for him to sniff. He did, then looked away with typical feline disinterest. I was noted but not deemed worthy of further interaction. My own cat, Cobbler, seldom treats me with any more enthusiasm, and I feed that little bastard. Ghost would walk through fire for me. So, on the whole I’ve become a dog person.
Ghost watched the cat with undisguised contempt. He’s not a cat person, either. Bastion eventually settled onto the chair beside Church.
Brick said, “Got a call from Circe. She is not happy that you have Rudy in quarantine. She said that you are due for dinner tonight because someone has to eat the lamb chops she bought for her husband, and she doesn’t want to hear any excuses about the world coming to an end. Her words. Oh, and she said to bring wine. Something that goes with lamb chops.”
“You told her that there is a grave national crisis and that I don’t have time to socialize?”
Brick grinned. “Sure. Want to hear exactly what she said to that?”
Church sighed. “No, I believe I do not.”
“She said she wants you to bring a complete copy of Rudy’s medical file. Nothing left out. I’ll get one, so we’re good there.”
“Will you please pick up the wine, too?”
“Already did,” he said. “Got a couple bottles of the 2009 Bodegas A. Fernández Tinto Pesquera.”
Church nodded. “Very good choice. Thank you.”
To Brick, I said, “Wine? Isn’t Circe breast-feeding?”
Brick gave me an ironic smile. “I’ll tell you what she told me, and I quote, ‘I have a week’s worth of breast milk in the fridge and a husband in intensive care. If I want to get hammered, then anyone who tries to stop me is going to get a bullet in the kneecap.’ Unquote. And for the record, Joe, I don’t think she was joking.”
I exchanged a look with Church. He clearly didn’t think she was joking, either.
“Enjoy your lamb chops,” I said to him.
Church never uses foul language, but the look he gave me probably burned off five years of my life.
Brick left, chuckling and shaking his head. Church ate more of his cookie. The cat watched him and I watched the cat.
“So … cat,” I s
aid, shifting back to safer ground. “Never figured you as a cat person.”
He shrugged. “Bastion was a gift from a friend.”
“Oh?”
“Lilith.”
“Oh,” I said, putting a totally different inflection on it. It brought to mind that dream fragment I had of the two of them standing by my tombstone. Holding hands. Lilith was a mysterious woman with a horror show of a past who escaped a particularly brutal kind of sex slavery to form a female intelligence network called the Mothers of the Fallen. She also spearheaded Arklight, the militant arm of that group. She was one of those women who seem to exude power and at the same time be untouched by time. Spooky but beautiful in a harsh Queen of the Damned sort of way. Her daughter, who I knew only by the code name of Violin, was a former lover of mine. Violin is an occasional ally and a trusted friend. Lilith, not so much. The memory of the dream fragment I had of Church and Lilith at my grave went skittering across the front of my brain like nails on a blackboard.
Church said, “Lilith is apparently of the opinion that I am best suited to relationships requiring minimal emotional give and take.”
“Ah,” I said.
Despite the long history Church clearly had with Lilith, there was also a lot of animosity there. Far as I can tell it’s mostly on her part, but that’s a guess. I don’t know the details. Even so, Lilith seemed to have genuine feelings for Church’s daughter, Circe, who was a new mother. Lilith was also one of a select few who knew that Circe was Church’s daughter. Circe was, as far as I knew, Church’s only living blood relative. Bad guys had killed the big man’s wife and other daughter, so he kept Circe close but also kept their relationship a secret. I’ve seen what happens to people who have tried to leak that secret, and to people who have tried to hurt Circe and her baby. If I wasn’t a manly man, those memories would probably give me nightmares. As it is, being in fact a manly man, I have a great collection of top-notch bourbons that can insure dreamless sleep. Just saying.
Church said, “Bastion was her second choice. I declined the first.”
“Which was?”
“A Reduvius personatus. An unpleasant insect more commonly known as an ‘assassin bug. ’”
I winced.
“She sent Aunt Sallie a mated pair of hissing cockroaches for Christmas.”
“Wow.” I cut a look at Bastion. “So this is, what? Her mellowing? Or does the cat have a poisonous sting?”
Church took a moment with that. “I reminded Lilith that I frequently visit my grandson. Even Lilith had some boundaries.”
“Ah,” I said again.
He finished his cookie and took another from the tray. I sipped some of my coffee, which had begun to cool.
Church looked at me and said, “A lot has happened while you were ill.”
“No kidding. A lot’s happened since I woke up. But … seriously, Boss, is it as bad as it seems?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a great deal worse.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
HOME OF NATHAN CROSS
1912 MIDDLETON STREET
MADISON, WISCONSIN
SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30 A.M.
Nate Cross left his house at exactly 6:30 in the morning. He went through the kitchen door into the garage, unlocked his car, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine. It was while he was buckling his belt that he saw the dashboard clock change to 6:31.
He punched the button for the garage door, put the car in gear, and as the door rolled up to let the rich morning sunlight in, he drove onto the street. He lived near the end of a cul-de-sac that was shaded by elm trees most of the year and kept green by pines in the winter. A lawn care team was unloading its truck to do the first round of leaf removal. Nate nodded to the crew foreman, who was a kid from the neighborhood.
At the corner, Nate turned onto County Highway MS, heading for the on-ramp to West Beltline Highway. The commute was an easy one, especially this early. It was why he left the same time every day. There was a window that he could use to beat the rush-hour traffic.
It took him only sixteen minutes to get to his place of employment, Bristol-Hermann Laboratories. He drove through the two security checkpoints, swiping his card at one and letting the guard examine it at the other. The guard did that every day even though he knew Nate and had been to parties at his house. Nate parked in the underground lot, in his usual spot, locked his car, and used his keycard again to gain access to the elevator. He got out on the fifth floor and had to swipe his card twice more to gain access to the cluster of offices reserved for his team and then to enter his own lab. Throughout a normal day he would swipe that card over two dozen times. Anytime he left the lab, when he went from one office suite to another, when he went to the cold room, when he used the elevator to go down to the cafeteria. Lots of swipes, lots of security steps, lots of electronics watchdogging Nate and everyone else at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin. Today was no different from any other day in any other week or month in the eleven years he’d worked there.
He was mindful of the security steps and occasionally found them tiresome, but he never tried to do an end run around them. No one there did. It wasn’t the kind of place where an employee would have that kind of thought. Security was, as all the signs and posters in the building said, everyone’s responsibility. Even if there weren’t cameras watching and guards everywhere, the nature of the work kept everyone on their feet.
At 7:43 Nate went down to the cafeteria. He had his silver coffee thermos with him, as he usually did. The cafeteria was empty but Nate could smell the rich aroma of fresh coffee as soon as he walked inside. He crossed to the two big silver urns that stood on a table against the far wall. Above the urns was a big flat-screen TV. The reporter from the local ABC affiliate was giving a stock roundup from the previous day’s trading. The DOW was down thirteen points but the NASDAQ had closed high. Apple was up, too, and the S&P 500 was trading in the same solid flow as it had for a week. Nate glanced at it as he slowly unscrewed his thermos, then he stepped up to the first urn. He removed the lid and sniffed the billowing steam. Colombian. Very nice. Without pausing or looking at the security cameras, Nate reached up and poured half of the contents of his thermos into the urn. He replaced the lid and repeated this with the decaf. Then he screwed the lid back on, filled his thermos with hot water, dropped in a teabag, and went back upstairs to his office, where he sat at his desk and logged on to the company intranet. He spent the next hour reviewing test results from yesterday’s field tests.
Nate Cross was not a scientist but he understood quite a lot about various areas of science. Viral outbreaks, flu epidemics, and bioweapons. His job at Bristol was to coordinate the flow of information from various agencies, process disease samples flown in from outbreak sites around the world, and assign technicians to process and analyze each sample to determine the strain. His reports would then be prioritized and sent to his direct supervisor, who would in turn share the information with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, as well as more than a dozen government agencies. Many of those reports would be forwarded to corresponding agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization. His work product helped keep the global disease response network functioning. If there was a outbreak of tuberculosis in a village in Uganda, Nate Cross processed the samples. If a new strain of mumps presented in the fishing villages in the poorer sections of Ireland, Nate was in the loop. That was his job.
He also worked with the processing of samples of weaponized diseases, which was one of the reasons security at his company was so tight. Aerosol anthrax, samples of the old Lucifer 113 Russian Cold War bioweapon, the airborne Ebola that had very nearly been launched on a cruise ship a few years ago—Nate handled those samples, as well. He collected and registered them and made sure they were forwarded to the agencies responsible for both antibiological warfare research and disposal of unwanted bulk amounts.
Nate was good at his job and although from a
distance his job looked terribly exciting and dangerous, it was actually rather tedious and bland. Samples arrived in heavily sealed containers and were transported by federal agents. Security, when it functions at a prime level, does not allow for excitement.
After he was finished in the cafeteria, Nate returned to his office and began reading e-mails and filling out the stack of paperwork in his in-box.
He only stopped when the screaming started.
He sat back in his desk and stared at the wall. Listening to the sounds. The shouts, the weeping, the shrieks. Then, later, alarms. And finally, gunfire.
At 9:19 he got up from his desk, closed his laptop, opened his office door, and walked out into the hall. His assistant, Miriam, was standing by her desk, eyes wide, her clothes torn, her scalp glistening red in places where she’d torn out handfuls of her hair. If she recognized him it did not register on her face.
Down the hall, one of the junior lab technicians was slowly removing his clothes, folding each piece, and placing them on a neat little stack. He’d begun with his shoes and now wore only a shirt and tie. His penis was fully erect and he was singing an old Backstreet Boys song. His lab partner, a short Indian woman, lay sprawled at his feet with half a dozen pens and pencils buried in her eye sockets. She still breathed, but shallowly, and her body twitched and shuddered, heels rapping an artless tattoo on the carpet.
Nate Cross walked past them, and past a dozen other employees. Some alive, some dead. One of them was on fire, seated at her desk, flesh melting, hair blazing, eyes wild. When she opened her mouth, flames rushed in.
The fire alarms went off and a moment later the sprinklers kicked in, twitching and pulsing as they sprayed water over everything. Nate ignored it as he walked the length of the building to the office of the senior virologist, Dr. Shaw.