He glared at me. “It’s not like that. This isn’t that kind of thing.”
“No? Then why’d you call me, Sean?”
“I…” Sean began, but faltered, so Rudy stepped in.
“Sean, don’t get the wrong impression about where Joe stands,” he said quietly. “He would not line a bird cage with the Patriot Act, for fear of insulting the scatological leavings. It was a hastily conceived and badly written instrument that has caused more problems than it’s ever addressed. Sidestepping the Constitution is actually not on Joe’s to-do list on any given day, I can assure you. However, the nature of what he does—of what we do—is complicated. The framers of the Constitution couldn’t have foreseen the methodology of global terrorism. Terrorists know this, and they deliberately hide behind due process and the limitations of constitutional privacy. It forces investigators of a certain kind to either break rules or allow a terrorist to escape, or allow a terrorist act to occur. It is these same people who, in the Middle East, establish their headquarters and training centers in urban areas, often in or near schools, because they know that there is no way for their enemies to attack them without incurring civilian casualties and therefore creating martyrs. The kinds of people who would hide behind children certainly do not hesitate to hide behind laws and treaties. That’s why they’re so successful, and why they’ll continue to flourish.”
“It doesn’t make it right, though,” insisted Sean.
“Right?” echoed Rudy. “Of course it’s not right. This is a perfect example of the lesser of two evils.”
“Does that mean you guys are all rah-rah on waterboarding and other fun and games?”
I leaned my forearms on the table and smiled at him. “Only with widows and orphans.”
Rudy closed his eyes.
Sean snapped, “You know what I meant.”
“Would I torture a prisoner in custody?” I asked. “No. Not unless the moment demanded it.”
Sean was taking a sip of coffee and nearly spit it at me. “The ‘moment’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The Los Angeles Nuclear Bomb,” said Rudy, and when Sean looked blank he explained. “It’s a scenario we use when doing psych screening of field personnel. Ask yourself, if there was a nuclear device set to explode in Los Angeles in one hour and you were in a room with someone who knew where it was and very likely had the codes needed to shut it off, what would you be willing to do in order to get that information and save the lives of millions of people?”
“That’s not a fair question,” said Sean.
“Hate to break it to you, little brother,” I said, “but life isn’t always fair. No, don’t bite my head off. Hear me out. Change the scenario. Right now Ali and the kids are out at Uncle Jack’s farm. If you knew for sure that a hit team was going out there and you could get crucial information in time to save them, what limits—moral or constitutional—would you impose on yourself?”
Sean looked down at his hands. As we talked, he’d laced his fingers together so tightly that the knuckles were white. “You’re asking a husband and father to make a decision that should be made by a cop.”
“Sure,” I said, “and that really sucks, but are you going to sit there and tell me you wouldn’t go medieval on someone if it meant saving your family? You’re a smart guy, Sean, you think the terrorists are operating according to the Geneva Convention? Do you think there are any rules out there?”
Sean said nothing.
“It’s an imperfect world,” said Rudy sadly. “I hate the fact that this is the world in which I’m going to raise my son. I resent the choices that people like us are forced to make. I’m disappointed in myself for being willing to make those choices. I’m embarrassed to even have this discussion. At the same time, I’m adult enough to accept that evil exists in the world. It’s not an abstraction. It’s not always the result of circumstance or bad influences or twisted politics or even greed. Evil exists, and there are times when good men are forced to do vile things in order to protect the innocent.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” demanded Sean. “Should we just say screw it and forget that we have laws?”
“No,” said Rudy. “We need those laws in place, and we need to have the checks and balances. Not everyone involved in this fight can be trusted to make the right judgment calls, and not everyone is motivated by personal ethics rather than personal gain.”
“Still sucks.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it absolutely does. Even for guys like me.”
We studied each other across the table, and it was another of those sad, awkward moments when brothers have to reevaluate what they know about their own kin and make terrible personal adjustments. I could see the hurt in his eyes, and an equal measure of disgust. And some fear, too. Fear for his family, fear of what the world was, fear of what he didn’t know, fear of the realities of life, and fear of me. His eyes faltered and fell away, and he looked down at his knotted fingers and slowly shook his head.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Rudy caught my eye and gave me a “leave it alone” look. The food was getting cold, so we pretended that we were normal people and began to eat.
After a while Rudy asked, “What is the status on the bodies of the other kids who died? Can we obtain exhumation orders?”
“Mostly, no,” said Sean. “Baltimore’s policy on unclaimed bodies is cremation after a certain number of days. Apparently, it’s more cost-effective or some shit. Three of the kids were cremated, and the fourth was sent home to an uncle or something in Pennsylvania.”
“We only need one more body to establish a pattern,” I said. “We need to see if these are both cases of rabies and, if so, then are they the same strain? And we need to look for nanobots.”
“Sure, but we’d have to convince a judge in another state to give us an exhumation order based entirely on a theory that’s right out of The X-Files. My experience is that I’d have to push that rock all the way uphill.”
“It’s possible,” said Rudy dryly, “that we could help in that regard.”
“Really?” Sean sounded suspicious.
“Really,” I said. “And we could even do it without waterboarding the judge.”
“Joe…” warned Rudy.
Sean ate some of his omelet and then began shaking his head. “Y’know, I’m still finding it hard to buy that someone like Vee Rejenko has access to that kind of science. I mean … who does? And, if so, how did someone like him get hold of it? How’d he even learn how to use it? And why use it on one of his hookers?”
“For the latter question,” said Rudy, “it’s possible that he thought she was planning on running, or perhaps he was afraid that she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Maybe the girl saw what happened to the other kids and somehow realized that it was Vee who was killing them.”
“She was fourteen.”
“I’m not suggesting that she understood nanotechnology, Sean, but perhaps she saw enough to know that something strange and dangerous was happening. She called her mother and asked to come home. A literal cry for help. The activation of the nanobots might well have been triggered to stop her.”
“That’s science fiction,” said Sean. “Besides, I thought you said that nanobots can’t regulate rabies.”
“So far as we know,” corrected Rudy. “There is a lot of dangerous work being done out on the cutting edge of science. Although I don’t personally know of any relationship between nanotechnology and rabies, it isn’t a totally absurd concept. Nanomedicine is a developing field. Researchers are at work right now trying to design nanorobots that can be programmed to repair specific diseased cells, functioning in a similar way to antibodies in our natural healing processes. And there is a lot of excitement around the developing science about using nanites as delivery systems for drugs. This is viewed as a healthy alternative to standard drug dosing, which is hardly as precise as we would like. Nanites could go directly to a specific site and deliver only as much of a d
rug as was needed, and then remain to regulate dosage variations throughout the desired term of therapy.”
“Does that mean they could deliver rabies to the brain?” asked Sean.
“Deliver it? Yes. That’s possible. Regulating it is another matter. If someone cracked that, they wouldn’t waste that level of technology on prostitution. They could file patents and make tens of billions from medical applications. Which is why I don’t get why they were in that girl’s brain.”
“Nikki thinks it was accidental exposure to the nanobots,” I said, and explained to Sean who Nikki was. “From all the spraying they’re doing for Zika mosquitoes.”
Sean nodded. “Yeah, I can buy that. They’ve been spraying all over Baltimore and in the burbs. You see the trucks all the time.”
“If it wasn’t for you being surveilled,” I said, “I’d write this whole thing off as a couple of nasty coincidences that killed a bunch of poor kids.”
“Agreed,” said Sean. “Even with the surveillance, the more I think about it the less I’m sure that going to interview Vee Rejenko is our best call. Would someone like him have access to bugs as sophisticated as what you found?”
I said, “He’s our only lead, though. Five dead kids in the sex trade, and we know a guy who employed at least one of them. It’s a starting place. And I think I’ll see about getting that court order for the exhumation for the boy they didn’t cremate. This thing is too weird, and none of it makes sense, which means the whole thing needs a closer look.”
“What if the nanobots and the girl freaking out aren’t event connected?” said Sean.
“Then we keep looking,” I said. “If this peters out and Rudy and me go home, I’ll keep some of my people on it until we get somewhere.”
Sean looked at us. “Your ‘people.’ You do realize that I don’t know who you jokers are working for. You with the CIA or something?”
“No,” I said.
“NSA? FBI?”
“No, and stop asking.”
He gave me three full seconds of the “cop look” and then turned away.
INTERLUDE SEVEN
AL-BASSEL GRADE SCHOOL FOR OUTSTANDING STUDENTS
ALEPPO, SYRIA
TWO YEARS AGO
The teacher knew that he was dying. Death seemed to sit like a welcoming friend just out of sight. Death brought an end to pain. Not just the pain of the bullets that had punched him down to the street but to the pain of knowing that he had failed his students.
Fajir Ibrahim had tried. Armed with what he could grab—a folding chair—he had charged at the men in the black turbans, knocking one of them down, smashing the rifle out of a second man’s hands. But then the bullets had found him. Three, he thought. Maybe more, but he was sure that he had been shot at least three times. There were three red-hot suns burning in his skin. Chest, stomach, thigh. Hot and wet, and yet cool at the edges. Cold in the places I’m dying, he thought.
Fajir lay on the pavement outside the school. The fall from the second floor had probably done as much as the bullets. His head felt wrong. Loose in places, too tight elsewhere. He could turn his head a few inches, but he wasn’t able to do anything else. His hands and feet might as well have been on other planets. So strange, though, that the sky above was blue and pretty. He could hear birds singing. Why would birds sing, he wondered, when there was all that screaming? Shouldn’t the sound of gunfire have chased them all off? Or was it simply that they had become used to those sounds? Probably. He himself had become inured to the distant sounds of gunfire in the past few years, even though he knew he should not. It was not a matter of his having become stronger because of the constant warfare, the constant assault. No. He knew that his ability to not hear the gunfire and the explosions had been a failing, a losing of something important. A form of dying.
And now there was this other kind of dying. First the death inside, and now the rest of him was leaking and cracking apart and ending.
“Please,” he said, directing the appeal nowhere and everywhere. He closed his eyes for a moment and then put more of his need into it. “Please, God…”
Suddenly he heard a new sound. Not a scream, not another shot. A softer sound. Close and small. Fajir turned his head, expecting it to be people coming to try and rescue the children. Or maybe one of the kids who had escaped the ISIL bastards. He prayed to Allah that it was that. But when he turned the ten thousand tons of broken masonry that was his head, he didn’t see a child. Or a fireman. Or anyone at all.
There was nothing. The street was empty, the people still gone wherever they had fled when the men in black swarmed in with their guns and their lies that they were here to do God’s will. As if a loving God would ever want a child to suffer. Not in His name. Never.
So what had made the sound? He glanced down to see something standing on the upraised toe of his right shoe. Tiny. An insect. It had three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and threadlike antennae. At first he thought it was a cockroach, but the color was wrong. It was green. Not a green from the natural world but a flat plastic green. The thorax and abdomen were the same color, but the head was silver. Metallic silver, nonreflective, like brushed magnesium. The antennae whipped back and forth for a moment, and Fajir thought he heard a sound. Not an insect chittering but a burst of squelch as from a radio. Very small, though, very faint.
Suddenly there were more of them. Dozens. No, hundreds.
They came flooding upward through the square vents in a manhole cover five feet from where Fajir lay. Moving with incredible speed, turning together, sometimes colliding but never squabbling, driven with the surety of the hive mind as they swept toward the outside wall of the school, reached it, and began to climb with no perceptible slackening of speed. The swarm split to avoid the open first-floor window and reformed as they reached the second floor, then they went over the sill and through the window Fajir had fallen out of.
The teacher understood. Or thought he did. He taught science and had always tried to keep current with new directions in research and technology. These were rescue robots. They would be able to send video images to the police or to the military response teams. Possibly to NATO or the Americans. Fajir didn’t know if these were actually American robots or Russian. He didn’t care. ISIL didn’t have this technology. Whoever sent this swarm could not be friends or allies of the fighters of the so-called Islamic State. Whoever sent them was trying to rescue the children, which meant that the controllers were closer to God than the heretics claiming to be warriors of God’s jihad.
Fajir wanted to shout in joy for whoever had sent the robots and spit at the blasphemous murderers in the school. But he could do neither. The coldness in his body was spreading, and he could feel himself going farther and farther away.
“Please, God,” he begged.
There was a moment of silence, and then a deafening sound. A crashing, thunderous boom—and above him the top two floors of the school seemed to leap into the air in clouds of red fire veined with black. Superheated gases hurled debris and bodies into the air, shattering windows on all the surrounding buildings, setting the trees alight. Some of the bodies spinning and twisting in the burning air were small.
He wanted to scream and managed to drag in a cupful of air, but it seared his throat and lungs. He coughed it out again in a single word. Not as a denial, not as a curse, not as a prayer. His last word was a question that would never be answered.
“God…?”
A microsecond later, the whole side of the building collapsed on top of him.
* * *
Major Carly Schellinger took a long sip of her unsweetened iced tea and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin as she watched the explosion on her laptop. She wore earbuds and sat with her computer angled so that she was the only spectator. The others involved in the operation would be watching from a secure location several blocks from the target.
Schellinger waited for her phone to ring. It was nearly thirty minutes before she got the call. She engaged the s
crambler and glanced around to make certain that no one was close enough to hear her conversation. There were only three other people near her, and they were huddled together eating salads and talking about some reality show Schellinger had never heard of.
She punched the button. “Go.”
“Guess what I’m seeing on the news,” said Zephyr Bain. She sounded delighted.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
BROADWAY DINER
6501 EASTERN AVENUE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 10:24 AM
The check arrived at the same time my phone rang. It was Sam, so Rudy paid the check while Ghost and I stepped outside.
“Good news and bad news,” said Sam. “The bad news is that we can’t put a finger on whoever was following your brother. I put a whole flock of pigeon drones in the air, and so far nothing.”
“So what’s the good news?”
“We swept Sean’s house and cleaned it up. Plenty of bugs, but we got them all. I had my guys install a passive system that will alert us if new bugs are put in place. I’m having the bugs we found plugged into MindReader so we can tear them apart. Maybe we can figure a way to trace it back to source.”
“Sounds like a long shot.”
“It’s what we have,” he said. “Oh, and the science team got here from Brooklyn. They took possession of the samples Duffy picked up from your brother. I gave them a couple of the bugs, too.”
Rudy and Sean came out of the diner. “Listen, Sam, I’m going to poke around in this for a bit. I’ll let you know what I find. Don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about South Carolina.”
“Nothing new,” said Sam. “Jerry Spencer’s in charge, and you know what a Chatty Cathy he is.”
Jerry could teach a stone statue a lesson in saying nothing.
Sam said, “Are you opening a file on this yet?”