The phone was on a side table amid a forest of empty beer bottles. San Diego is the Mecca of craft breweries, and I am a devout worshipper. Maybe a little too devout these past few months.
“Junie,” I said again as I fished for the phone, but as I blinked my eyes clear it was obvious from the display that it wasn’t Junie. Instead, I saw SEAN on the screen. My brother, which is weird enough in its own way. He never calls me. Sean is a homicide detective back in Baltimore, where we grew up. What the folks back home call a murder cop. Sean’s a good guy, but in the past couple of years we’ve kind of drifted. It happens. Back when we were both detectives in different squads in the same town, we were tight. We had so much in common. We could sit up all night drinking beer and telling stories about the job. But that was then. Now he catches killers and I try to keep the world from falling off its hinges. He can still talk about his job, but we can’t ever talk about mine. Makes for long, weird silences at Thanksgiving and Christmas. All he knows is that I work for a covert intelligence department. He doesn’t even know its name. Our common ground is all past-tense stuff, and sometimes it leaves us with only sports and the weather to chat about.
I thumbed the button and said, “Sean.”
“Hey, Joe.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Huh?”
“Is Dad okay?”
“What? Oh. Sure. He’s fine. He’s out on a date.”
“Wait … what? Dad’s on a date? Why?”
Sean laughed. “Why not? People do date, you know. Even old guys. It’s been known to happen.”
“Dad’s not allowed to date,” I protested.
“Joe, Dad’s been alone for a long time.”
It was true enough. Our mom died years ago, but like most children—even adult children—I naturally assumed that our father would be in some kind of permanent state of mourning. How could he even want to date? It didn’t compute with the part of me that will always be a kid rather than a grown son.
“Who’s he out with?” I demanded.
“The artist lady.”
“What artist lady?”
“Jesus, Joe,” said Sean. “He’s been seeing her for six months. Michelle Garry. She’s great. How do you not know this?”
“You sound like you approve of Dad running around with some strange woman.”
Sean sighed. “Oh, right. I forgot he has to get your written approval before he has a life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
I had no answer to that, because it pretty much was what I meant. So, like any coward, I changed the subject.
“What’s happening, Sean? Ali and the kids okay?” I had a first-grader nephew, Ryan, whom we all called Lefty, because even at eight he had one hell of a fastball, and a little niece, Emily—known as Em—who was a rambunctious three.
“Yes, Joe,” said Sean, “we’re all okay.” He paused, though he sounded uncertain of his reply. “Actually, though … this isn’t a social call. It’s business.”
“Business?”
“It’s about a case,” he said.
I dug a fresh beer out of the cooler by my chair, twisted off the top, took a sip, and rested the sweating bottle on my belly. The cold felt nice. “Since when do you call me about cases? Or did something happen with one of my old cases?”
It happens sometimes. Even though, like Sean, I had a high clearance record when I was a detective, there were plenty of cases that went unsolved, and, with advances in forensics, old cold cases sometimes get hot again.
“No,” said Sean, “this is something else.”
“What is it, then?”
He paused again. “Look, I know that you work for one of those top-secret agencies that you can’t talk about, but—”
“But you’re talking about it.”
“No, it’s just that—” he said, and then hesitated now that he was up to the edge of it. “Look, after what happened at the ballpark that time, Dad kind of … you know … let something slip.”
Our dad was the mayor of Baltimore and two years ago he’d gone to Citizens Bank Park in Philly to co-host the opening day of baseball with the Philly mayor. That was the day the Seven Kings hit the place with a bunch of small drones carrying high explosives. A lot of people died, and Dad was almost one of them. It really rattled him, and Dad’s not an easy guy to shake. I guess I could imagine the conversation between him and Sean afterward. Maybe over drinks late one night after Sean’s family was in bed. Father and son. Former cop and current cop, swapping stories, sharing confidences.
“What, exactly, did Dad say?” I asked.
“Not much,” said Sean. “No details. Just a little bit about the kinds of cases you handle. Weird stuff.”
“Like…?”
“Like you going after terrorists who have cutting-edge science weapons. General stuff. But he kind of hinted that you had something to do with what happened in Philly. Not just the ballpark but before that … at the Liberty Bell Center when the terrorists released whatever kind of plague or chemical or whatever that made people go apeshit. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I read about it in the papers.”
“Come on, Joe…”
“Dad told you all this? What else did he say?”
“Well, it’s not like he said who you worked for, but, Joe … Dad’s proud of you. He said you saved a lot of lives.”
I said nothing.
“He said you caught the bastards who did all that.”
I said nothing.
“He said that if I ever caught a whiff of something like that … I should call you.”
“Something like what? A terrorist group?”
“That’s just it, Joe. I don’t know what I have, but I think I need your help. I don’t know who else to call. Hell, I don’t know who I can trust.”
“Sean, what are you talking about? What’s happening?”
There was a long pause this time. “Joe … something really bad is happening here, and I don’t know what to do about it. I … I’m scared, man. Really scared.”
I said, “Tell me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DOG PARK
DARPA FIELD-TESTING CAMP
CLASSIFIED LOCATION
WASHINGTON STATE
TWO WEEKS AGO
Deputy Director Sarah Schoeffel spent three days at the DARPA camp.
When she arrived it was to receive a briefing about new robotics hardware and computer software that was being developed for the military, and about versions of the technology that might be made available to Homeland Security. Her own counter-cyberterrorism division of the FBI needed more tech, and a Senate subcommittee had arranged her visit here.
Some of what she saw was truly encouraging, and at first she wasn’t a fan, but with each day, each demonstration of counterterrorism technology, she could feel her resistance ebbing.
“This,” said Major Schellinger as she escorted Schoeffel into a cabin lined with computer workstations and staffed with programmers who typed furiously, “is WhiteHat. And I imagine this is one of the projects that will interest you most.”
Schoeffel bent and looked over the shoulder of one of the programmers, trying to get a sense of the code he was writing.
“WhiteHat is a brand-new line of adaptive artificial-intelligence programs that were designed to think like hackers in order to anticipate cyberattacks,” the major explained.
Major Schellinger went through the systems, and Schoeffel was dazzled by the power, sophistication, and subtlety of WhiteHat. And she was flattered to learn that some of her recommendations to the Senate subcommittee had influenced a number of the system’s components. WhiteHat’s overall level of sophistication was intimidating, but Schoeffel felt that was appropriate. Guns were intimidating, too, until they were pointed in the right direction.
She was less sanguine about some of the other projects being tested at the camp.
&n
bsp; “You’re not serious?” she blurted after Schellinger introduced her to the group building the next generation of autonomous-drive combat machines.
Schellinger held up placating hands. “I know, I know, this is scary, but—”
“Does ‘scary’ really cover it, Major? America does not have the best track record when it comes to AI being used for combat systems. It was AI-driven fighter planes that destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re not even done building the new one and you want to put an even more advanced set of self-guided drones in the air?”
Schellinger’s eyes were cold, her smile colder. “While it’s true that most of the autonomous-combat-vehicle programs were scrapped in the aftermath of that terrible day, and rightly so, we are not going in the same direction. The Department of Defense has made it very clear that there needs to be a stronger and more reliable Off switch that would allow our handlers to be able to take back control at a moment’s notice.”
“How certain are we that people can take back control of these machines?” asked Schoeffel.
“I can absolutely guarantee,” said the major, “that no machine we create—not one drone, fighter jet, tank, or WarDog—will be off the leash. They work for us.”
“What about GPS hacking and computer viruses?”
The major shook her head. “They will all be keyed to a very specific command program that will require new control codes twice per day. Those codes will be generated and sent to commanders and handlers in 128-bit encrypted bursts. And we can use satellites to send random system checks that will require the machines to perform certain quick noncombative functions to prove that they’re not under unauthorized control. Should any system check get an anomalous response, the entire CPU will be isolated and shut down.”
She ran through a number of other impressive safeguards, and gradually Schoeffel found the last of her resistance melting away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SEAGRIT MARINE TERMINAL
SOUTH NEWKIRK STREET
PORT OF BALTIMORE
TWO WEEKS AGO
The containers arrived by train. One shipment per week for most of the past year, then two, and in the past few weeks there had been three trainloads. Long, winding snakes of cars that came from factories in Chicago, Lake Forest, Minneapolis, Trenton, Tempe, and Bethesda. Thousands of twenty- and forty-foot containers offloaded into the endless stacks awaiting their ships. Then the bomb carts—special chassis designed to move the cans from stacks to cranes—brought them to the docks in an endless loop. Massive gantry cranes plucked the cans off the carts and set them down on the deck of the cargo ships. The bottom rows weren’t secured by anything except the weight of the cans placed on top, but each additional layer was held fast by twistlocks, lashing bars, and turnbuckles. It was all done with professional efficiency and natural diligence. Loaded, secured, and then gone.
Fourteen days before Havoc, the last of the foreign shipments set sail aboard the MSC William Tell, a Swiss supercargo ship built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding yard in South Korea. It was one of the big ones, with a cargo capacity for carrying more than nineteen thousand of the twenty-foot cans, and a third of the cargo came from those special trains. The rest were filled with tens of thousands of tons of packs of chemicals to be used for spraying and controlling mosquito populations.
Inspection of the cargo was done by men and women who had been in their jobs for years. Most of them thought they worked for the docks, the customs office, or the city of Baltimore. Officials in receiving ports held the same view, as did the thirty-five-man crew of the William Tell.
Most of them were wrong.
Very wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE PIER
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 5:17 PM
It started with a girl. That’s what Sean told me.
“Her name is Kya,” he said. “Well, was Kya, but that’s just a street name. That’s her work name. Her real name is Holly Sterman, and she would have been fifteen years old on Christmas Day. She died two days ago.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s the craziest damn thing. One minute she was talking to her mom on the phone and the next she goes psycho and kills two adult men.”
“Gun?”
“No,” he said, “teeth. She bit them to death.”
The world around me suddenly went quiet. “What did you say?”
“Look, Joe,” said Sean quickly, “this is complicated. She was a runaway from Wilmington. A report was filed, but no one looked for her—you know how that is.”
“Yeah, yeah, get back to the part where she bit two guys. Why? Was it drugs? Was she hyped up on flakka?”
There was a nasty and very potent new designer drug on the streets called flakka that was driving many users into fits of screaming rage accompanied by vivid hallucinations. Chemically speaking, it was a cousin to the group of drugs commonly—and incorrectly—known as bath salts. Both are synthetic versions of naturally occurring amphetamine-like substances called cathinones. Flakka variations range from stuff that makes users mildly grouchy to stuff that turns them into violent aggressors. The high is, according to the junkies, worth the side effect. For the record, this is one of the reasons I hate people.
“That’s what I thought,” said Sean. “But no, her tox screen was clean. A little grass, but that’s it.”
“Then what happened?”
Sean told me the basics. Holly was a frequent flyer at one of those roach-infested West Baltimore hotels whose rooms are on yearly lease by people who sublet them by the hour. Not that Baltimore holds the patent on hot-pillow joints. Working as Kya, and with a fake driver’s license that said she was twenty-two, she turned tricks sometimes eight or nine times a night. Sean had been able to piece that together from surveillance video of the hotel that was part of another case being investigated by one of his buddies working a joint thing with the ATF. Kya/Holly was tagged as a likely prostitute working in the same place as the suspect, who was using the place as a showroom to sell handguns to gangbangers. When the gunrunner was busted the surveillance ended, but there was enough for Sean to verify that Holly was a regular, going in and out with a variety of men, none of whom were probably her Bible-study coach.
“And nobody thought to pick up an underage prostitute?” I asked.
“The investigating team handed it off to vice,” Sean explained, “but they had Kya down as an adult. Stupid, really. All they had to do was look at her. Bottom line is she was still on the job when the incident occurred.”
I took a sip of beer. It didn’t taste as good as it had. “Tell me about this incident.”
“It’s really weird, Joe.”
“Try me. Weird is pretty much what I do for a living.”
He ran it down for me, and, yeah, it was weird. The screams, the super, the dead john. He pieced together the details from a hysterical eyewitness report by the nephew of the super and through forensic reconstruction of the scene. The girl somehow overpowered or outfought her customer and then attacked the super, who tried unsuccessfully to defend himself with a baseball bat.
“The bat hit her on the shoulder, Joe,” said Sean. “It was the only injury the super inflicted. Remember that. It’s important.”
The girl tackled the super, grabbed his hair, and proceeded to slam his head against the hardwood floor with such force that his skull split. She didn’t stop there, though. She beat him nearly to death, pausing only long enough to bite his nose and upper lip completely off. The uncle had accidentally knocked the door shut when he was attacked and fell against it, so that the nephew couldn’t force his way in. The nephew said he could hear the sound of his uncle screaming for almost five minutes. Which is a minute shy of when the police arrived in response to the nephew’s 911 call.
“The john and the girl were DOA at the scene, and the super died on the table at the hospital,” concluded Sean.
“I have some questions I have to ask, and I can’t explain why.”
“Dad figured you might.”
“First, did the other victims try to attack anyone?”
“Huh? I told you, one was dead and the other was critical.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
“How’s that good?”
“Second,” I said, evading his question, “you said the girl bit both men. Did she actually eat them?”
“Jesus, Joe, what kind of question is that?”
“An important one. Did you analyze her stomach contents to see if she—”
“No, you freak, it’s bad enough already. This isn’t The Walking-fucking-Dead.”
Sean couldn’t know it, but he’d set up his account as if he were describing an outbreak of the Seif al Din pathogen, which was the doomsday bioweapon terrorists released at the Liberty Bell Center. That plague was why I joined. And, yeah, it pretty much rocked a real-world version of something that was way too close to a zombie apocalypse scenario. Seif al Din had some variations, but in every case the infected not only bit their victims but fed on them. Anyone bitten but left more or less whole would reanimate as a mindless killer. Seif al Din is one of a special class of pathogens that hotwire the central nervous system and bring the recently dead back to life as mindless and aggressive disease vectors. It wasn’t the first time some psychopath with a chemistry set took inspiration from pop culture. Not a joke.