“I have other names, though,” he said. “Lots of other names.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because I like to play tricks on people and it’s easier when they don’t know who’s playing the trick.”
“Is that fun?”
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “It’s so much fun.”
They smiled at each other. Then she coughed. It was a bad cough, and it lasted for a while.
“I have bumonia,” she gasped, breathless and spent.
“Pneumonia,” he corrected.
“I’m sick,” she said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I get sick a lot.”
“I know that, too.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yes,” John said. “I do.”
Zephyr stared at him. “You do?”
“I know many things.”
“They won’t tell me what’s wrong with me.”
“Of course they won’t,” he said. “Do you know why?”
“Because I’m little.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “They won’t tell you because they’re stupid.”
“What…?”
“They don’t understand you, little Zephyr. Not your daddy and mommy. Not the people who work for them. Not even the doctors. Your uncle does, though, and that’s why he asked me to come here. He knows that everyone else is stupid. They all think you’re too young to know the truth.” John sat on the edge of the bed, and his weight hardly made an impression in the mattress. He brushed a strand of damp hair from her face. “But I know that you’re not stupid. Oh, no, not at all. You understand so much more than they think.”
Zephyr said nothing for a moment, considering what he’d said. Then she asked, “Will you tell me the truth?”
“I will always tell you the truth, Zephyr,” he said.
“Always?”
“Always,” said John.
She thought about that. “Do you know what’s wrong with me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Will you tell me?”
“If you want me to.”
“Yes! No one ever tells me anything. I can tell they’re lying to me. I hate it. Even the servants lie to me. It’s not fair.”
“No,” he agreed, “it’s not.”
There was a rustling noise and Zephyr turned to see that a crow had landed on the windowsill. But hadn’t the screen been closed? The bird cocked its head and stared at her with one black eye. It was so much like the angel’s eye. Shiny and black and bottomless.
“What’s wrong with me?” asked Zephyr, still looking at the crow.
“You have cancer,” said John. “Do you know what that is?”
She shook her head, then shrugged. “It’s something bad. People die from it, right?”
“People die from it every minute of every day, all around the world,” he said.
“Does that mean I’m going to die?”
“Everyone thinks so. Your mother and father think so. It’s why they fight all the time. They’re scared and angry and they don’t know what else to do, so they drink and they fight.”
“That’s stupid.”
The crow opened its mouth as if to cry, but there was no sound at all. She turned away and looked up at John.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s stupid.”
“Do you think I’m going to die?”
John asked, “Do you even know what that means? To die?”
“My kitty died right before Christmas. I kept trying to wake her up, but she wouldn’t. The gardener dug a hole in the yard, and that’s where she is.”
“Yes. But do you know what death is?”
She had to think about it. “It’s … it’s when you stop.”
“For some, yes,” said John. “The world opens them up and all their time leaks out.”
“Like blood?”
“It’s different, but … yes. Each of us is born with only so much time. Just enough of it to get us from womb to tomb and not a button more.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not fair.”
“No.”
“I don’t want all my time to run out.” She said it quietly, not in panic, not with a scream.
He leaned close. “You want to ask a question, little sweetheart. I can tell. I can almost hear it. It’s right there on the tip of your little pink tongue.”
“I…”
“Go on … ask it. You can ask me anything at all.”
Zephyr licked her dry, cracked lips. “Can I get more time?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But what would you want to do with that time? Don’t answer quickly, because it’s a very important question. If you could have another day, another week, even another year … what would you do with it? If you could have ten years, or twenty or thirty, what would you do with all those minutes, all those hours?”
Zephyr looked away for a moment. “Daddy said that I’m sick because of polmution.”
“Pollution,” John corrected. “And, yes. There are carcinogens in the air and the food and the dirt you play in.”
“Car … car … what?”
“Bad things,” said John. “The things that made you sick.”
Zephyr thought about that. “Daddy said that I didn’t have to be sick, but I was.”
“Yes, that is true. All of it.”
Zephyr’s tiny hands slowly clenched into fists.
“It’s not fair,” she cried.
“Nothing is fair. But answer my question, little Zephyr. If you had more time, what would you do with it?”
She had to think about that. Even at six, she knew that she had to give the question real thought. When she answered, she said something that she didn’t understand. Not then.
“I have so much work to do,” she told John.
His smile grew and grew and his teeth were the blue-white of moonlight. “I know you do,” he said. There was a strange little flicker in his eyes that she thought was a trick of the light. The black looked different for a moment. She saw brief shades of green and gray, as if his eyes were a pool of swirling colors. Or maybe it was more like the skin of a chameleon turning, changing. Then they were black again.
“I…” she began, but her voice faltered.
Then John bent and kissed her. First on the forehead and then on the lips. “Shh, my little sweetheart,” he soothed, breathing his cold breath against her mouth so that as she inhaled the coldness entered her and the pain recoiled, retreating, taking some of the fever heat with it. “Go to sleep, my little angel. Shh … go to sleep and dream good dreams.”
And she did.
When Zephyr opened her eyes again, it was morning. She felt so strange. Different. The fever had broken, and when she touched her hand to her forehead there was no heat. Even the sheets had dried.
It would be days before the doctors did the tests, and it would be weeks before the results proved what Zephyr already knew. There was no trace of cancer anywhere in her body. There were no more infections because of her compromised immune system.
It was a miracle, they all said. Her parents, the staff. The doctors.
A miracle.
Even at the age of six, Zephyr Bain knew that it was something else.
CHAPTER FIFTY
THE WAREHOUSE
DMS FIELD OFFICE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 11:25 AM
We drove into the Warehouse lot and parked near the rear door. Ghost made a few happy noises because he remembered this place. It wasn’t the original Warehouse, which had been blown to atoms a few years ago by a psychotic killer named Erasmus Tull, who worked for Majestic Three. The new building was larger and looked like a modern business campus. You had to know where to look to see the security cameras, motion sensors, data scanners, and other doohickeys we have to ensure that no one gets close enough to bring harm to the doorstep. When I commissioned the new Warehouse, I spent a lot of Mr. Church’s mone
y making sure this place was state of the art. We entered through a nondescript door, and Sean watched, bemused, as I went through the ritual of placing my hand on a geometry scanner, looked into a retina scanner, breathed into a vapor biometric scanner, and stared into a facial-recognition scanner.
“They going to measure your dick next?” he snarked.
“That’s already on file.”
I swear to God I heard Ghost laugh. Maybe it was a cough, but the timing was perfect.
Sam Imura was waiting for us outside the security wing. We told him about what happened at Vee’s office and gave him a recap of the car-stop incident.
“Always glad to have you back in Baltimore,” he lied. “You bring joy wherever you go.”
This time it was Sean who laughed.
“Fuck both of ya’ll,” I said.
Sam walked us up to a row of interrogation rooms. Through the two-way glass, I could see the prisoners. Both had been bandaged and were wearing unmarked orange disposable prisoner coveralls.
“We stripped and searched them in a Faraday cage,” Sam said, “then moved them in here. We checked them for subcutaneous bugs and RFID chips but came up dry. The only bugs we found were in their clothes and vehicle.”
Sam has a face that looks as if he should be wearing Samurai armor and standing by a mound of his enemy’s heads. He’s not tall, but he carries with him a great sense of power. He has the watchful, patient eyes of a sniper, which he is, and the general air of being a grown-up. I do not possess that latter quality, as I’ve been told by a large number of people over the years. He and Sean shook hands. They’d met at a memorial service following the Philadelphia drone attacks, so Sean knew that Sam and I worked together.
“Anything new on Vee Rejenko?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “He does a really good job of whitewashing his business holdings here in the States. We know a lot more than we can prove. We know his linen service is tied to prostitution, and we believe he’s moving drugs through motels, a chain of locally owned fast-food places, convenience stores, and like that. We’ve pulled his tax records and we’re running all of his licensed holdings through the system. In my experience, criminals like Vee aren’t usually as smart as they think they are. Even with good accountants and good lawyers, they’re actually breaking laws. If we dig hard enough and look closely enough, we’ll find where they’ve cut a corner a little too close. Remember, it was taxes that tripped up Al Capone. Much as the Feds would have liked to put him away for murder, it was taxes that put him behind bars.”
“All that matters is that Vee gets taken out of play,” I said.
Sean shook his head. “If Vee’s somehow responsible for killing that girl,” he said, “then he should pay for that.”
Sam frowned. “I understand how you feel, Detective, but unless you want us to break the law we have to play the cards we’re dealt. We will find a way to take Vee Rejenko down. Put that in the bank.”
“Besides,” I said, “prison can be a damn unfriendly place. Especially if Rejenko goes in with all his financial assets frozen. He won’t be able to buy protection.”
What I didn’t say out loud was that we could make life very difficult for Vee in any prison to which he might be sent. It may be an urban myth that prisoners don’t abide a child molester—and a pimp turning out a runaway teen girl is no big thing—but there is a dial that someone can always turn on men in long-term lockup. Privileges. Give a couple of the hard-timers a chance to earn extra cash to buy cigarettes, food, whatever, or offer them a better prison job, and they’ll do a lot for you. The short-eyes thing works well with guards, though. A lot of them are family men. There are very creative ways to make prison life an even worse hell. Is it wrong? Is it immoral and illegal? Sure. But Holly was fourteen, and justice was a kinky bitch sometimes.
“Have the bugs I planted picked up anything?” I asked.
“Vee made a series of phone calls,” said Sam, “but he has some kind of scrambler on his phone. We’re trying to decode it, but, like the bugs he planted on Sean, the scrambler is top of the line. An encoding algorithm we haven’t seen before. I’m told it might take some time to crack. Yoda said something about a random sequence modulation changing the encryption dynamic. Tell you the truth, I stopped listening.”
“Yoda?” echoed Sean.
“He’s our number-two computer expert,” said Sam. “And the sad thing is, Yoda is his actual first name. His parents met at a midnight showing of one of the Star Wars films.”
Sean said, “I once arrested a woman on a homicide beef. She had two kids, two little girls. One was named Rainbow Brite and the other was named My Little Pony. Not making this up.”
“I had a Justin Case once,” I said. “He was selling guns and used his real name as a slogan for selling hot assault rifles: Just in Case You Need It.”
“People are strange,” said Sam, and that was something else we could all agree on.
I told Sam about the texts. “Add that to the mix.”
“Is that connected to this?” asked Sean, frowning.
“Unknown,” I said, “but likely. Yoda’s working on that, too.”
We went over and looked through the glass at the prisoners, and Sam said, “Couple of geniuses. Their wallets were full of every kind of card, including driver’s licenses, gym memberships, and debit cards.”
“I always prefer stupid criminals,” I said. Both Sean and Sam nodded. It was probably the only common ground we could stand on together.
“Fellow with the knife cut is Alexej Broz, thirty-three,” said Sam. “Guy with the dog bites is Bartoloměj Fojtik, twenty-nine. Czech nationals with applications in for U.S. citizenship. No criminal records here in the States. No wants or warrants except for Fojtik, who has some outstanding parking tickets. Gets more interesting overseas. We ran deep background through Interpol and the Policie České Republiky, and although neither has a criminal record, we got an anomalous return on both police and military records in the Czech Republic.”
“Anomalous in what way?”
“Their backgrounds have been mostly erased, but I established that they’re ex-military. Nothing special, not the 601st Special Forces Group. Nikki found references to a Desátník B. Fojtik and a Rotmistr A. Broz.”
I translated for Sean. “Fojtik was a corporal and Broz was a sergeant first class.”
Sam said, “Everything else is gone, so it’s a good bet they ran a tapeworm to erase their service records.”
“What’s a tapeworm?” asked Sean.
“It’s a computer program designed to hunt down and either alter or erase specific data files,” Sam explained.
“And you were able to find traces of that in the government computers of a foreign country?”
Sam’s face didn’t change, but there was a slight stiffening of his posture. It was enough of a signal to suggest that he wanted me to handle this.
“Yeah,” I said. “We can do that.”
“So that’s what…? More of NSA data-mining bullshit?”
“Something like that, but we’re not spying on American citizens,” I said, trying to sound pious.
Sam said, “They were discharged a year or so before they moved here to Baltimore, and since then they’ve been employed as ‘supervisors’ in Vee’s linen services.”
Linen services were often tied to organized crime. Because it was very hard to prove how many towels, sheets, and other cloth goods are ever delivered, used, washed, and reused, it allowed a gaping revenue hole that was convenient for laundering money from illegal operations. It was a perfect recipe for cooking books. And the connection to hotels helped support the prostitution side of the business.
We looked through the glass at Bartoloměj Fojtik. He had white gauze bandages around both forearms, his right hand, and his throat, and there were butterfly stitches on his face. Ghost stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the edge of the window frame, wagging his tail.
“They’ve both asked for lawyers,” sa
id Sam. “They wanted to make calls.”
“And—?” asked Sean.
“I couldn’t find the phone.”
“Imagine that.”
Sam looked at me. “One more thing, and it’s about those bugs.”
“Hit me.”
Sam glanced at Sean and then back to me and then raised an eyebrow.
“Go on, Sam. Sean knows how to keep his mouth shut,” I said, meaning it as much for my brother as for Sam.
“We plugged the surveillance bugs into MindReader,” said Sam. “Instead of cracking their software, the bugs uploaded a virus that nearly crashed our system. So far, it looks like we pulled the plug in time, but Bug’s running system checks.”
“That’s just swell,” I said. The thought of MindReader taking a hit with all this going on was scary. It didn’t make my heart swell with affection for our prisoners. Behind the glass, Fojtik looked very scared. Good. Fear was useful. “Time for a heart to heart. Sean, you want to join me?”
“Yes, I damn well do.”
“Good cop or bad cop?” I asked.
His look was scathing. “I think we already know which one of us is the bad cop.”
Sam actually winced. I sighed. Ghost gave me a pitying look.
We went in.
INTERLUDE NINE
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
5400 SAND WAY NE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN SHE WAS ELEVEN
When she was eleven, she thought he was a vampire. He came to her at night. Always at night. Zephyr was sure she had never seen John the Revelator in sunlight. Not once in the years since his first visit, and never once since.
She came into her room and he was there. “John! Where have you been? Why were you gone so long? It’s been a whole year!”
John stood in the shadows, his back to her, looking out the open window. Midnight snow fell slowly. “Sometimes I have to go far away.”
She rushed across the room and wrapped her arms around him, pressed her head against his broad back. She sobbed as she held him, surprised by her own tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
John turned very slowly, carefully, peeling her arms away and then gathering her into his. He wore a long black coat over a white shirt and black pants. His face looked different, but Zephyr was used to that. Sometimes he looked completely different. He pulled her against him and kissed her hair. “It’s all right, my sweet. I’ll always come back. I told you that a long time ago.”