“Zephyr…”
She stopped, because she could hear John breathing. It sounded labored, as if he’d run up a long flight of steep steps.
“My dear,” he said after a long pause, “I can’t help you with that. Not now. I … I need to go away for a bit.”
“Go away? What … now? Are you out of your mind? Calpurnia and the other AI systems are at the frigging heart of the whole Havoc plan.”
“Zephyr, please…”
“You’re the one who wanted me to go in this direction. We’re talking about the autonomous operating system for the freaking technological singularity. What do you mean you can’t help me?”
“It’s dark.…” he said, and then there was silence on the line.
It would be months before she heard from John the Revelator again.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
THE FOREST
NEAR ROBINWOOD, MARYLAND
MONDAY, MAY 1, 7:44 PM
“What’s your plan, Captain?” asked Church.
“Still the same plan. I’m going out west to the DARPA camp. I was going to do that earlier and suddenly these guys capture Sean’s family. Makes me wonder if they’re trying to keep me away from there.”
“Yes, it does,” said Church.
“All the more reason to go. There are too many elements of this that brush up against nanites, computer hacking, software, drones, and robots. So I’m going to pin a bunch of eggheads to the wall and encourage them to come up with some answers for us.”
“Um,” said Nikki, “but they’re on our side, right?”
I actually laughed. “Kid, I love your optimism, but if the last couple of years have taught me anything it’s that sometimes the very worst of the bad guys wear white hats. Harcourt Bolton, Hugo Vox … I could go on and on.”
Nikki said nothing.
“Right now I need you to do a deep search,” I told her. “Go wide, too. The Frenchman’s evolution comment keeps bugging me. He said it like it was something I should understand, or like it was an in-joke I would come to understand. Use that as a keyword, but mix it in the soup with some other stuff. Nanobots, nanotechnology, nanomedicine, any variation on that. Rabies. Throw that in the mix, because it’s part of it. Surveillance drones and bugs. We know from experience there’s always a pattern, so we need to find it. Nothing exists in a vacuum. So start with the thresher program. Who designed it? Who paid for the research? Was it contracted out? Who knows about the design? Are we looking for a shadow cell inside the Department of Defense or did someone steal that design? Look for advanced designs in drones, anything radical in robotics—combat or otherwise—and anything radical in nanotechnology. Find me a goddamn connection. We have Czechs here and in Europe, and now we have a French guy. This is international; there will be language differences, so allow for that. This is a well-organized group. This is big, but our bad guys don’t always use the best people. Rejenko’s crew was a clown college. Maybe they were lower tier in whatever this is, but either way it tells us something.”
“How?” asked Nikki.
“Think about it. They have a lot of resources—nanotech, drones, weaponized pathogens. That’s massive. No small operation could manage all that without having stolen it, and we would have gotten wind of that. Infighting among the bad guys is messy.”
The moon came out and I saw that I was very close to where my uncle lay, with Ghost watching over him.
I said, “Let’s assume this is so big that there are different levels. Up near the top are guys like the Frenchman, and there’s probably a tier above him. People on that level are cool, careful, and ruthless. Lower down are ass pirates like Vee Rejenko and his goon squad. We’ve learned enough from dealing with the Seven Kings and others that no organization is without flaws. The organization may be set up with absolute precision, but it’s still run by people, and people aren’t perfect. That means there will be flaws in the system. Mistakes, people putting stuff on emails they shouldn’t, taking selfies standing next to a big ticking doomsday clock, whatever. There will be something. Find it.”
“We will,” said Nikki, and left the call to gather her team and launch in.
Church lingered, and I told him that I was almost back to where my uncle had died.
“Dr. Sanchez just called me,” he said. “They’re at the hospital, and he says that all the patients are stable, with one critical but stable. He’ll keep us updated.”
“Lefty doesn’t die,” I told Church. “Call whoever you have to call, bully or beg your friends in the industry, but that kid doesn’t die.”
“Understood,” he said. “Captain, the DMS isn’t what it used to be and it’s not what it will become, but everything—every person and every resource we have—are at your disposal.”
“Good. Where are Top and Bunny?”
“They’re at the airport in Baltimore. Do you want them at your location?”
“No. Tell them to have Shirley fueled and ready, and tell them to keep a chopper on standby in case anything else happens here. In the meantime, where’s the damn field team that’s supposed to meet me?”
“Six minutes out.” He paused.
I reached the hill on the other side of the creek and saw shapes by cold moonlight. My uncle, the dead goon, what was left of Bridge Troll, and the big white dog. He lifted his head and made a small, soft sound. “I’m here,” I told Church.
“This will not stand, Captain,” said Church. “They should not have made this about family.”
He didn’t say “about your family,” and I knew why. Family was family. This hit was against all of us. The DMS had taken some serious hits in the past few years. And the bad guys had come hunting for our families before. Why do people think that will scare us off? They had one chance to put a leash on us, and instead they had done this.
“I’m going to find them,” I said, “and I’m going to hurt them.”
“Yes,” said Church. “That is what we’re going to do.”
Ghost raised his muzzle and let out a howl that was all wolf and not one trace of dog. The sound was impossibly lonely as it rose above us into the trees and then out onto the wind. Lonely and filled with more kinds of hate than I could number. The Killer in me wanted to howl, too, because he’s closer to the wolf than the rest of me is to ordinary people. The woods were big and dark and ugly around us.
INTERLUDE TWENTY-THREE
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
THE BAIN ESTATE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN ZEPHYR WAS THIRTY-THREE
She found him in the pool. Floating facedown, arms stretched wide, black hair spread out like kelp, legs angled down, pulled by the weight of his shoes. He was unmoving, and the water around him was flat and still, without bubble or ripple.
Dead?
She was sure that John was dead.
Zephyr screamed and ran toward him, not even pausing to kick off her Christian Louboutin shoes or remove her eight-thousand-dollar Vera Wang dress. She ran and dived into the pool, diamonds and all, and swam ten hard, desperate strokes to reach him. She was a good swimmer, strong and practiced, but she wasn’t dressed for it. Layers of silk, heavy beading, and a restrictive sheath cut were all against her, but Zephyr managed it anyway. Her will, her fear, and her anger gave her power, and she grabbed him by the collar, flipped him over, lifted his nose and mouth toward the air.
“Breathe!” she snarled.
But he wasn’t breathing. His eyes were open, pupils fixed, rubbery lips slack.
“No … no … no!” she begged as she fought to pull him toward the shallows. The pool was large, and he was in the center of the deep end. How he’d gotten there or when he arrived at the estate were things Zephyr didn’t know. She’d been out all night at an awards dinner for Bain Commercial Systems, one of her technologies companies. She tried not to think about how long it would have taken for the pool water to have settled to a glassy stillness. If John had been facedown all that time.
God.
>
Oh, God …
She kicked and thrashed and choked as their combined weight pulled them under with each stroke. The long gown wrapped like seaweed around her legs, binding them, fighting her, trying to kill her, too. One shoe fell away and her carefully coiffed hair came apart, pasting tendrils across her face.
Then she realized that she was already in the shallows. She stretched a leg down, felt the firmness of the sloping floor, sobbed in mingled relief but renewed fear. They were in the shallows; that was part of the battle. The smallest part. She pushed him the rest of the way, running badly with one bare foot and one high-heeled pump. Even though one of the two shoes had come off, the other remained stubbornly, improbably in place, and her dress felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. The edge of the pool was a million miles away.
Zephyr pushed John against the wall and then onto the steps. She came sloshing out of the water, rolled him over onto his chest, straddled him, laced her fingers around his torso just under the diaphragm, and shoved their combined weight upward using all the quivering muscles of thighs, back, and arms. It was like lifting a truck. He was totally slack. With each pull, more of the pool water sluiced from his mouth, but he didn’t take a breath. She repeated the pull five times, each time draining more of his lungs and feeling muscles strain in her back. Pain popped with the bright heat of firecrackers along her spine.
Desperate with fear, Zephyr released him, sloshed onto the top step, squatted, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled. It was so hard. He felt so absurdly heavy. Hot pain seemed to ignite deep inside her stomach and chest.
Once she’d wrestled him onto the side of the pool, she knelt and tried to remember what she knew of CPR from movies and TV shows she’d seen. She had never taken a lifesaving course. She wished Carly were here, because her friend knew all of this stuff. But Carly was off fighting dirty little wars in ugly little places and rising like a rocket through the ranks of military intelligence.
Zephyr tilted John’s head back, remembering something about clearing the airway. Okay. Done. She felt for a pulse. Expecting to find what she found. Nothing. Her own pulse was hammering, rising, smashing at the walls of her chest. What was next? Push on the chest or breathe into the mouth? She had no idea, but the chest seemed right. Get the heart started. Force it to pump blood. Yes. She placed her hands on his chest, one atop the other, and shoved down, released, shoved, released. No idea if she was doing it right. Or wrong. How many times? She did it five times. Stopped. Took a deep breath. Blew it into his mouth. Once. Repeated it. Then five more pumps. She created a rhythm and stuck with it.
Time became unreal. Her body repeated the actions over and over while her mind slowly but definitely detached itself. It was as if she’d stepped back from her body and stood apart, watching it work. Seeing how ugly she was with hair pasted across her face and her makeup running and tears mingling with pool water and snot on her face.
Zephyr watched herself become desperate. She watched with a detached interest as the cold, élitist, powerful, feared, fearsome, visionary, passionate, hateful, hated, loving, loved, despised, adored, insane woman that was Zephyr Bain fought like an animal to keep another animal alive. Her watched self hovered on the edge of dispassion, standing only in the shadow of emotions without being filled or warmed by them.
“And you’re the one who wants to save the world,” she said, though the words were soundless, existing only in the envelope of apartness in which her spirit stood. “You’re the one who says she has the courage to bring about a technological singularity through the deliberate and carefully orchestrated murder of four billion people. You.”
She shook her head. Or thought she did. When she looked down at her hands, she saw that they were as insubstantial as smoke. As if she were nothing more than a ghost.
John had kissed her and breathed into her a coldness that had banked the fires of her fever and chased away the sickness that was consuming her. Everyone said that it was a miracle, that cancer as extensive and aggressive as hers couldn’t go into remission. Her parents had wept. So, too, did her doctor. Zephyr had never told them about how John had breathed more time into her. He’d saved her life and, over the years, had given her direction and purpose. Save the world. Be both God and Noah and let the flood of intellectual purity and technological self-awareness drown all that was bad and preserve all that was worth saving. Be the surgeon whose steady scalpel and careful hand cut through the cancerous flesh of a polluted, self-destructive, and dying world and filled it with more time, with more tomorrows. Be that person.
John had been her prophet. For years he had crossed the country and the globe preaching with passion about the logic of the coming evolution. He had opened so many eyes and hearts, and in doing so had let the possibility of a future filled with bright tomorrows flood in. In all those talks there had been many who recoiled from the truth and a few—a precious few—who had embraced it with bright joy. John’s people had taken note of individuals on both sides, and every name was remembered, shared with Zephyr’s teams, explored, researched, and placed on the right list. Within the family of the Havoc program, they were called the Living. For a reason.
Now John lay dead and Zephyr worked over him and the spirit of Zephyr Bain could feel a part of her dying, too.
I can’t do this without you, she thought. Or said. However it worked. I don’t want to do this without you. It won’t work without you. Please. Please. Please come back.
As if in reply, she thought she heard John’s voice. So small, so very far away.
“All my time has run out,” he seemed to say. “I am broken and the sands are flowing away.”
Phrasing it with the strange poetry that was so very much him.
I need you. I can’t do this alone.
“My time is all gone, my sweet.”
No!
“Everyone and everything dies. Even such as I.”
No, goddammit. I won’t let you. I won’t allow it. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything, John, just help me. Tell me how to help you.
Her body pumped and breathed, breathed and pumped.
And then suddenly John moved. As Zephyr bent once more to breathe air into his lungs, his dead hands whipped up and clamped thin, strong fingers on either side of her face. Zephyr screamed in surprise and jerked backward, but John held her. His fingers were colder than ice, and they burned her. The spiritual aspect of Zephyr stumbled forward as if shoved. No, as if pulled by some whirlpool urgency. She staggered, lost her balance, and fell through all the distance of space and perception and slammed back into her body with jarring force.
John’s grip was unbreakable, and he pressed forward and upward so that his mouth was locked with hers, frigid lips against hot ones. The breath she had been about to give him was trapped, went stale, began to burn, turned to poison. And then he sucked it in. All of it, drawing so deeply from her that it was as if he emptied her lungs to wrinkled sacks and drew deeper still. Taking so much more than breath. Drawing unnamable things from her. Essential things that made her who she was. For a scalding moment, she was six years old again and he was breathing into her, refilling her potential and burning away her death.
Now it was all different. All wrong.
Now she was filling him with everything that she was and chasing away his death.
Giving more than she wanted to give. Giving too much, as he took greedily like a vampire sucking on an open vein. She thrashed and beat against him, punching his cheeks and chest. Dying right there in his hands. Fading. Going away. Becoming nothing.
And then John let her go.
She fell away from him, twisting, stumbling, toppling onto the edge of the pool. Her hip and shoulder and head struck the tiles with jarring force. Her eyes saw a world veined with lines of fiery red. Her lungs seemed melted shut, and her flesh felt like dry leaves.
John got to his feet. Steam rose from his sodden clothes, and his eyes were so wrong. So wrong. The irises swirled with those ugly colors. All th
e wrong browns and greens and yellows in the foul end of the spectrum where toads and snakes are painted. But there was a new color, a dark orange-red that glowed like a hot coal. John looked young. Years younger. His lips were swollen and red and sensual, his hair was thicker. His shoulders strained against the fabric of his suit as if it were cut for a smaller, weaker man than the one who towered over her.
Zephyr saw this through the veils of darkness that fell one after the other before her dying eyes.
John stepped onto the edge of the pool and walked over to her. Stopped. Looked down. Her failing mind didn’t recognize his face now. He was someone else. Something else. And the chlorine smell of the pool was gone, replaced by the sharp stink of sulfur and rotting meat.
Zephyr tried to raise a hand to him. Begging. Needing not to lose herself and him and everything. She saw the smile on his mouth and tried to read it. It wasn’t the tolerant mentor’s smile or the rueful lover’s smile or even the smug grin of the Revelator. It was cruel beyond words. Cold and hot at the same time, and infused with an erotic pleasure that, despite everything, made Zephyr’s loins burn with heat and wetness.
Then John knelt beside her and leaned close. The rotting-meat stink was far worse, and up close she could see that the swirling colors of his eyes weren’t a trick of the light or a delusion conjured by her failing senses. The colors actually did move, and they consumed every trace of the whiteness, leaving behind eyes that were totally alien. Totally unnatural.
He bent closer still and whispered to her.
“Thank you.”
The last of the veils fell, and blackness covered everything. Zephyr understood that she was dying. Actually dying. Her lungs were empty and collapsed, and he had reclaimed the time he had given her all those years ago.