“Wait for backup,” warned Church.
I didn’t.
“Dad,” I said, “you still have your little friend?”
“Joe, I don’t think…” But he stopped himself when he saw the look in my eyes. He knelt, tugged up his trouser cuff, and removed a small revolver from an ankle holster. He handed it to me, and I felt the familiar weight. A .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. Five shots. I knew better than to ask about extra rounds. He was no longer a cop. He was the mayor of Baltimore. He carried the gun out of habit but didn’t need extra rounds.
I hoped I wouldn’t need them, either.
Or maybe I hoped I would.
“Tell SWAT to find me,” I said as I broke into a lumpy, limping run-walk toward the same corridor I’d just come out of. Ghost ran after me, and I was heartened to see that his tail was no longer tucked.
As I ran, I passed by a row of bodies under white sheets. The arm of the closest body lay partially exposed. I saw a brown hand and a blue sleeve. Military blue. Air force blue. Torn now, exposing skin that was already going pale with lack of circulation.
I almost stopped running.
I almost stopped everything.
I knew whose sleeve that was, and it broke my heart. Absolutely crushed it.
Colonel Roger Douglas.
Hero.
Victim.
Tears burned in my eyes, nearly blinding me as I ran.
Chapter Thirty-four
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
March 29, 2:22 P.M.
Doctor Pharos would never admit it, but he was hiding in his office. Nicodemus had come to Tanglewood and was locked in private conversation with the Gentleman. Pharos wanted no part of it.
Spooky old freak, he thought.
He tried to throw himself into his work. Much of it was mundane, even though it dealt with catastrophic events like what was unfolding at the ballpark in Philadelphia. And all of the other things the machine was primed to process. However, even with all the work, there wasn’t enough to capture his whole attention. There was something wrong. There was a flaw in the system. In his personal system.
None of it really mattered to him.
Since the Kings organization collapsed, Pharos felt like he was the night watchman in an empty factory. All the machines and computers kept running, but without people at the top to give the organization a sense of grandeur, there was no drama. No excitement.
There was only process.
Sure, there were some things that entertained him to one degree or another. Boy was a lot of fun. Her excesses were legendary, and her degree of efficiency pleased Pharos.
Even some of the byplay between him and the Gentleman was amusing. In a twisted way. Managing the man’s deteriorating mind, his rages, his bloodlust, and his secrecy were challenges. Nuts to be cracked, problems to be solved.
Pharos wondered if obtaining the bank codes would energize him.
Hard to say.
Pharos spent most of his time inside his own head. He disliked sharing his insights with others, and certainly never bared his soul to any subordinates. Certainly not to the Gentleman, either. He wondered, though, how much his ennui was clouding his usually sharp inward eye.
“The codes,” he murmured aloud. “It’s all about the fucking codes.”
Which were, sadly, locked in the brain of a madman.
The good news was that Doctor Rizzo had given that madman many new versions of his chemical cocktail to try.
As Pharos shuffled through the papers, he found reports from his training teams about the progress of the field teams. The Kings organization had recruited many hundreds of field operatives. Some had been killers before the Kings offered them employment, while others were introduced to murder for pay after they’d come to work for the group. The bottom line was that no one went out on a field op without already having some blood on his or her hands.
It was important to establish this. Even Pharos had gotten his hands very dirty over the years.
Pharos’s phone buzzed softly. The caller ID showed a stick figure. He smiled and punched the button. He’d committed several murders during his rise to power. And it had been Hugo Vox who’d suggested that Pharos cross that line.
“Why?” Pharos had asked him several years ago. “We have people for that kind of thing.”
“Right, and they look to us for inspiration and motivation. Manage from the ground up, kiddo,” Vox told him. “Go get some grease on your hands and shit on your shoes. Show the people who work for you that you’re willing to get dirty and, more important, that you understand that they get dirty. If they know that you get them, then they’ll hand over the pink slip on their souls. Besides … I’ve had my eye on you, kiddo. You got heart and you got feelings. You have to watch that shit. You have to learn how to control it, to shut it down, to turn it off. No better way to pull the plug on your morals than to slowly strangle the fuck out of someone while you look right into their eyes. Do it right and you don’t go all psycho. You don’t want to wind up with a boner ’cause you’re doing a murder. That’s weak. No, you want to own yourself. You want to be able to turn on the cold-water tap in your heart whenever you want. No emotional surprises. If you don’t do it, then you’re setting psychological bear traps, which is also weak, and it’s poor process. Take the time now, while you’re just getting into all this, and own your power, own your soul.”
That’s what Pharos had done.
First with men who were criminals standing in the way of the organization. It was easier to start by killing people who had blood on their own hands. It hurt less. But it did put a coat of thick paint over his conscience. With each killing, the paint job became more opaque, so that when he killed someone who wasn’t a criminal—just someone who was inconvenient to the organization—there was far less trauma than Pharos expected.
Along the way, however, Pharos learned what most criminals learn who pay attention to the movie projector in their heads. He had limits. He had boundaries. He might participate in programs that would kill mass numbers of civilians, including children, but he would not take a child’s life himself. No. That was a door he wouldn’t allow himself to open. Pharos had been an abused child in a nightmare of a family life. Although his family’s psychodynamics caused him to make the life choices he made, they also etched a line in the sand. A line he would not cross.
When he encountered child abusers, he tended to treat them harshly.
Very harshly indeed.
At one point, the organization collided with a sex-trafficking ring. A big one based in Thailand. Removing key players in the ring was useful to a project the organization had running in Asia at the time. However, freeing the girls and women in the brothels was not part of the agenda, and there had been no reason to place assets or attention on doing so. It would have been enough to crush the organization and let the pieces fall where they may.
Except that Pharos was on the ground during that operation. He was there in Thailand. He saw the brothels. He saw the girls.
One girl in particular. A slender eleven-year-old who had been forced into prostitution when she was eight.
Eight.
That was when Pharos opened a different door in his head. That’s when he discovered not only that he could kill but also that certain kinds of killing were very satisfying. Not in a sexual way, as it was with some of the murderers and mercenaries he employed. No, this touched his soul. It made him feel like his life mattered. He knew that this was a damaged form of rationalization, but it didn’t matter.
He took a team of shooters from Blue Diamond Security, one of the companies covertly owned by the organization, and he tore the infrastructure of the sex-trafficking ring apart.
And he, personally, tore the senior members of that ring apart.
Tore them to red rags.
Killed most of them.
Left a few alive as blind, limbless, disfigured wrecks so they could scream to anyone wh
o would listen that there would be a price for turning little girls into whores.
By the time the organization was done, 179 people were dead, and 418 girls and women had been driven in trucks to hospitals or clinics run by the Red Cross, Catholic missions, and the World Health Organization.
And one child had been taken away by Pharos.
That eleven-year-old girl.
Taken, cleaned up, given medical treatment, given a home, given a life and a future.
Boy.
A name she’d chosen for herself and would not change.
Boy.
His daughter.
Pharos was not sure he actually loved her. Not in the way she loved him. She believed herself to be his daughter on a karmic level. To him, she was proof that his soul was not entirely damned. Pharos believed in God, and when he stood at the gates of judgment, he would point to Boy and those other women and ask to be judged according to that rather than what he’d done for the organization.
He thought he had a shot.
Chapter Thirty-five
National League Baseball Opening Day
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia
March 29, 2:28 P.M.
I found the Hall of Fame meeting room before the SWAT team found me.
It was in a wing of the stadium that had been mostly empty during the game and the catastrophe that followed. Ash and brick dust covered the floor, and I could see a myriad of footprints. All recent. Most were the shape and tread pattern of police shoes. The gait pattern matched that of officers moving in pairs to investigate and clear a room in haste.
But one set of prints overlaid these.
Sneakers. Small. A young teen or small woman. I knelt and studied the tread pattern. From a closer angle, I could see that the person had come in carefully, walking inside the footprints of one of the cops. Only one step was askew, and that’s the one I saw first. This person was very careful.
Unfortunately, the print was going away from the room I was heading to.
I tapped my earbud to see if the jammer had been turned off, possibly removed. But it was still operating.
Interesting.
I hand-signaled Ghost to move ahead and check for people. I reinforced that with a signal for no noise. Ghost is superbly trained, and having specific orders to follow seemed to help bring him back to himself. His body language was shifting from nervous victim to hunter.
Like me, his hunter aspect was very close to a deeper and more savage aspect. For him, the wolf lived beneath the dog hide. For me, the killer—one of the aspects of my fractured persona—was inside my mind, hunkered down in the tall grass, knife drawn, teeth bared, eyes cold.
I faded to the left side of the hall that led to the closed doors. Ghost went right and ahead, sniffing the ground. Not sure how much the prevalent stink of dust, explosive residue, and death affected his senses, but he was still a dog with a dog nose.
He reached the closed doors, abruptly sat down, and looked at me.
That was his signal.
It was what I wanted to see.
It meant that there was someone inside.
I gestured for him to stand and move back from the door, and he took his position behind and to one side of me. Muscles rippled along his flanks as he crouched, ready to spring. The little revolver felt tiny in my hands. I’ve been carrying an automatic so long that I’m spoiled by having all those extra bullets. Now I had no extra rounds. My only backup was the rapid-release folding knife I always carried clipped into my right front pants pocket. And Ghost.
So, it’s not like I was walking naked into this thing.
I squatted and duck-walked to the door, keeping my head below the level of the frosted glass. SWAT seemed to be taking its own sweet time getting here, but I was still cruising on that edge of combat greed where I wanted to be the one to deal the entire play. I wanted to kick some ass and take some names. Literally, take names. I still had no idea who was behind this.
The rules say I should have waited for backup.
Yeah.
Fuck the rules.
Chapter Thirty-six
The Breakfast Place
Mission Beach, San Diego
March 29, 2:29 P.M.
The man was seated at a small table in the corner of a family restaurant on the boardwalk in Mission Beach. He had a plate of eggs and potatoes going cold in front of him. A smaller plate of whole-wheat toast sat adjacent, with one small bite missing from the top slice. Ice melted in a glass. Only the coffee cup was empty, and the waiter came to fill it for the third time.
“Thanks, mate,” said the man without looking up. His focus was on the small electronic tablet on a foldout stand. His eyes flicked back and forth as he read one news report after another about what was happening in Philadelphia. It was not technically his business; however, there were aspects of the tragedy that caught his attention.
No, it was less than that. They tickled the edges of a fragment of a memory. Enough that it bothered him and kept him watching the news feeds.
He occasionally toggled over to a special search engine called Xenomancer. It was proprietary software used only by the board of directors and senior staff of FreeTech, the nonprofit company run by Junie Flynn. The firm was dedicated to taking military technologies and repurposing them in humanitarian ways. Hydration projects in draught-stricken areas. Clean water. Renewable clean energies. Sustainable farming sciences. Medical research to eradicate the diseases of poverty. And dozens of other projects. It was an expensive company to run, but private funding kept it going very nicely. Some of those funds were also used for lobbyists, scholarships, lawyers, media campaigns, advertising, and administration for a network of more than six thousand employees.
Xenomancer had been designed by the computer team that worked for the Department of Military Sciences and was given as a gift to FreeTech by Mr. Church.
Life was so weird.
That thought, in one form or another, flitted through the man’s head a dozen times every day. Usually when he stopped and mentally stood back to watch what he was doing at any given moment. Writing reports. Attending meetings with administrators of free health clinics. Sending anonymous donations to charities all over the world. Being a good person.
So weird.
He did a lot of his most philanthropic work from that restaurant. The waiters here knew him. He was a regular who tipped very well and kept to himself. They left him alone even though he often sat at that table—a prime spot with a superb view of the rolling Pacific waves—for hours on end.
None of the staff there—not even the manager—knew that the young man owned the restaurant. They did not know that he owned the whole block and all of its businesses. The fair-trade gift shop, the free animal clinic, the sea-conservation museum and lab, the walk-in clinic that provided a variety of free services for women in crisis.
The young man made sure that his involvement with those businesses was never connected to him. This same policy extended to more than seven hundred businesses, organizations, corporations, and foundations that he owned or privately funded. Including FreeTech. He took particular pains to remain invisible to anyone who might want to show gratitude.
Gratitude was something he feared.
Something he dreaded.
To have to accept the heartfelt thanks of an innocent who received his help would kill him. He was positive of it.
It was probably already killing him. He was certain that there was some kind of cancer eating at him in the darkness of his own tainted blood.
That’s how he saw it.
Tainted blood.
When he went to church, he spent a lot of time on his knees, praying. He never took confession. He feared what the priest would say.
He was certain that any priest would kick open the door of the confessional and drag him out, beat him, and throw him into the street. That the priest would damn him.
As he deserved to be damned.
As he expected to be damned.
/> But he went to church often. Nearly every day. Mostly Catholic churches because he had been raised in that faith. Sometimes he went to a synagogue. Or a mosque. Or a fire-and-brimstone country revival.
Any church that was open.
Any church that would let him pray in silence.
In none of those places did he beg forgiveness from God in all His aspects.
That, the young man was sure, was an even faster path to hell.
No. He did not want forgiveness. He believed that it was not his to have. Not even from God.
Because there was no way to actually undo the harm he’d done, he didn’t see how forgiveness of those sins was valid. Not to a person who had done as much damage as he had. The blood on his hands could not be washed off with holy water and some token acts of contrition.
He wanted something much different than that.
Much different.
He wanted to be of use. To be used. To be useful.
Until he died.
And then he wanted to be forgotten. It was the greatest thing he could hope for.
Now, he sat at his table, his food abandoned, and watched the drama that was unfolding. He listened to the reporters become increasingly ghoulish in their excitement over the disaster and the body count.
It was a bad day in America.
It was another 9/11, they said.
It was another Mother Night Day, they said. Like last year when anarchists set off bombs and released plagues all over the country.
Except that there was something about the attack at the ballpark that made the young man wonder if it wasn’t something else entirely.
Something he’d heard about once. Something very much like this. Drones at a ballpark.
His rational mind told him that the thing he’d heard years ago couldn’t be connected to this, because everyone involved in that earlier discussion was dead. As far as he knew, he was the only survivor of that group. The only one who was alive to remember the conversation and its grim contents.
Drones.
And a ballpark.
He kept telling himself that this couldn’t be that.