I asked the question I was afraid to ask. “My dad?”
“He’s going to be okay. Caught some flying debris, a few cuts. He’s at U of P. He keeps calling. But those fuckers killed Colonel Douglas, too.”
It felt like there wasn’t enough air in the room. Douglas. My god.
“What about Rudy? And Ghost?”
“Ghost’s at the vet’s. He’s banged up like you, but he’ll be okay. Rudy’s good, but, um…”
“What is it?” I asked sharply.
“Look, Boss, Rudy’s on a plane to San Diego. Actually, he’s probably there by now, or just about. It’s, um, his wife. She’s in the hospital.”
“Circe? Why? What’s wrong? It’s too early for the baby—”
“Details are way sketchy, but Bug said that she was house hunting with Junie and she collapsed. She’s totally out of it. I don’t know if it’s a coma or what. With all the shit that happened here, it’s hard to get straight intel. The doctors are running a bunch of tests, but they don’t know exactly what’s wrong.”
“The baby?”
“No, it’s good. She didn’t miscarry or anything like that. It’s just that she’s unconscious. But … here’s the kicker, Boss, and this is the part that’s messing a lot of people up.”
“Do I want to know?”
“I doubt it,” he said, “’cause it’s some weird-ass shit. But based on the timing of Junie’s call to 911, Circe collapsed at the same time as the bomb went off in Philly. And I mean the same exact time. Down to the second.”
I stared at him. And then I tried to get the hell out of that damn bed.
Bunny put a hand on the flat of my sternum and pushed me right back down. Under ordinary circumstances, he’s twice as strong as me. Right then, he was Godzilla and I was Bambi.
“Take your hand off me, Sergeant, or so help me God I will—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Boss. I’m under orders from Mr. Church to keep your ass in bed, and in bed is where your ass is staying. End of discussion. I can get some help in here and can put restraints on you.”
I called him a bastard and a bunch of other things. He took it and he held me down and he waited me out. Finally I sagged back, exhausted and hurt. When Bunny met my eyes, I let out a breath and nodded. He removed his hand and stepped back.
“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded.
“Yeah, well, we’re all real short on answers. Kind of our thing lately. Our new logo’s pretty much, ‘The DMS: We Don’t Know Shit.’”
“Hey, does Junie know what happened out here?”
“Everyone knows. There’s no other story on the news. Don’t worry, though, Top called her, and so did the Big Guy. Told her you were okay, just scuffed up a bit. She’s still in California with Circe. I think she tried to come out here, but there’s a no-fly zone around Philly right now except for military craft. We sent Rudy out on Shirley ’cause your bird’s got an all-access pass. Besides … the Big Man wanted her to stay with Circe. I guess he didn’t think you’d mind.”
“No … no, of course not.”
Bunny sat back down. “Boss, do you know anything ’bout what happened? Beyond what you told Bug and Mr. Church before you went looking for that jammer?”
“I keep seeing pieces of it in my head,” I admitted, rubbing my eyes. “But that’s all it is. Pieces. Debris. It’s hard to put it together.”
“You got anything?” persisted Bunny. “Even something small just so we can start doing something other than sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can.”
“Try harder,” said a voice.
Bunny and I turned to see a tall broad-shouldered man standing in the doorway. Three-thousand-dollar suit, quiet tie, tinted glasses, face devoid of all humor and tolerance.
Mr. Church.
Chapter Forty-three
Citizens Bank Park
Philadelphia
March 30, 4:20 P.M.
There were hundreds of them now.
More came all the time.
They’d begun arriving within an hour of the attack.
The first wave had been gawkers, drawn like flies to the smoke and flame, to the echo of screams, to the possibility of seeing the kinds of things they usually only saw on TV.
That was the first wave, and some of them were still there.
The second wave was different.
They arrived more slowly, moving tentatively toward the stadium. They stopped at the police barricades. Most of them said nothing, even to their own companions.
They brought flowers.
They brought photos in frames.
They brought candles.
A few brought toys. Teddy bears and dolls that would never again be cuddled. A baseball glove. A hooded sweatshirt with a middle school logo. A birthday present that had been wrapped but would remain unopened.
There was no plan, no agreement. The first of the people in this second wave showed up before midnight. She knelt and placed her flowers on the pavement. Out of the way of the emergency vehicles. She arranged the flowers so that the brightly colored petals were toward the building. That seemed to matter to her. She was unaware of the tears that fell like rain. The ache in her chest was too big, the chasm in her soul too deep to pay attention to anything as mundane as tears.
She got to her feet and … stood there.
Just stood.
Two people joined her a few minutes later. Grandparents who walked on unsteady feet, bearing the impossible weight of loss. Loss of son and daughter-in-law. Of grandson. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for the magnitude of this burden. They laid their flowers near the first bunch and stood staring with eyes empty of all hope and optimism. Too shocked to cry.
Others came. Alone. In pairs. Sometimes in a group that clung together and wept and sometimes screamed.
By noon of the following day, there were more than a hundred of them.
They stood without speaking.
Hours crawled by. The police and firefighters saw them and tried not to meet their eyes. No one tried to move them. No one wanted to engage them.
Twice, reporters tried to interview them, but a police officer working the barricade growled them back. Her rage was so towering that even the sound-bite-hungry ghouls of the press shrank back. They didn’t leave, though. The reporters aimed their cameras from a distance and did their stand-ups and drank the pain.
The people gathered around the mound of flowers did not care. Most of them did not even notice.
They lingered because they had nowhere else to go.
Not anymore.
The paths of their lives seemed to have led here.
And ended here.
Chapter Forty-four
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
March 30, 4:21 P.M.
The receptionist at the front desk was a bright-eyed Asian woman with lots of colorful cloisonné flowers pinned to her sweater. Her name tag read CAROL. She looked up as the small man approached. She hadn’t seen him enter the hospital. The man was bent and old, with a deeply seamed face and a tan topcoat over black clothes.
“Hello,” she said brightly, “may I help you?”
“Yes, indeed,” said the man in a soft southern accent. He loosened the belt of his coat and let it fall open to reveal the black shirt and white collar of a priest. This was done casually, without drama. “I’m here to see Reverend Sykes. Do I need a visitors’ pass for that?”
Beverly Sykes was the interfaith chaplain at the medical center.
“Oh, no, not at all.”
The priest looked around. There were two city policemen standing by the elevators. City police, and with them was one of the hospital’s security guards.
“Is there something wrong?” asked the old priest. “Something going on?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s nothing,” Carol said, lying easily.
The priest studied the officers for a moment and then turned to look at her. He had the strangest eyes. She couldn’t tell if they were brown or green. And his smile, though friendly, was odd in a way Carol could not explain. Later, when police and federal agents interrogated her about this encounter, she would not be able to explain the feelings she got from that smile. All she knew was that it “wasn’t right.”
That’s how she felt about it.
The smile was simply not right. No sir.
Carol would dream about that smile. For years.
But the feeling that the smile was somehow wrong increased with time after she’d given him directions to the chapel and watched him walk down the hall. It wasn’t until he was out of sight that she felt her mouth turn into a frown. It surprised her, because the man had neither said nor done anything unusual.
But that smile.
That smile.
Carol Chang had not had a drink in seventeen months.
But for the rest of the day she thought about the bottle of tequila she was going to buy on the way home. That thought was the only thing that kept her from screaming.
Chapter Forty-five
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
March 30, 4:30 P.M.
“Sergeant Rabbit,” said Church, “give us the room. No visitors.”
“Yes, sir.” Bunny exited and closed the door behind him.
Church picked up my medical chart and browsed it, nodded to himself, rehung it on the end of my bed, and then sat down. “Are you lucid?” he asked.
“Don’t you mean, ‘How are you, Joe? I’m delighted to see that you’re not crippled or dead’?”
He crossed his legs and gave me a long, flat stare. I was welcome to interpret anything I wanted from it. Assuming it was an outpouring of the warm fuzzies would probably be my weakest guess.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I want to get out of here so I can start hunting these—”
“Hunting whom, exactly?”
“Whoever’s doing this. Bombs here, and whatever’s happening to Circe.”
He held up a hand. “First, Circe is receiving the best medical care possible. I have experts flying in from eleven countries. Friends of mine.”
I looked at him, searching for some flicker of humanity. Circe was, after all, his daughter, his only blood relative as far as I knew. His other daughter and her mother had both died violent deaths, and I was one of the few who knew that their murders had been perpetrated by people who were trying to get to Church. He had many enemies, and many of them would stop at nothing—truly nothing—to break or weaken him. So far, all that those murderous bastards have accomplished was to strengthen an already-iron resolve. I don’t know what happened to those killers, but I do not believe for one moment that they are still alive. I also suspect that they died in very bad ways.
Not that revenge brought back the dead or healed a broken heart. And Church’s heart had to have been broken. Over and over again. Rudy has tried for years to decode this man, to unlock the mysteries of his emotional and psychological makeup. Since Rudy is a doctor and a man of great personal honor, he hasn’t shared with me his professional insights.
“How is she?” I asked.
“She is undergoing tests and appears to be stable. That’s all they can tell me at the moment.”
“You going out?”
He took a moment on that. “As soon as I can.”
“Bunny told me about the timing. That can’t be a coincidence.”
There was the slightest curl of his lip at my use of the word “coincidence.” He detests coincidences. They offend logic. For him, everything is cause and effect.
“We do not yet know how the two incidents are related. Now, as to that, what can you tell me? What is the last thing you remember? Walk me through it.”
I did my best. My last clear memory was standing with my dad out in centerfield. I remember telling Church about the drones and the guys I’d fought in the hallway. And about the jammer. And …
Something flickered past the window of my mind. I stopped talking. Church waited, letting me work through it. I raised my right arm and looked at the thick bandage wrapped around it. When Bunny had mentioned the stitches there, I hadn’t reacted beyond thinking they’d come from the same source as my other injuries. The drone explosions. Now, though …
“I think I was in a fight,” I said. “A second one, not the one I called to tell you about. Bunny told me about bombs connected to the jammer. That’s all tangled up in my head. I thought he was saying it wrong. But he wasn’t, was he?”
“No.”
“Bug located the jammer, right? And I … went to find it. Me and Ghost.”
“And—?”
It was coming back, bit by bit.
“I did. But there were five men. Four paramedics. One cop.” I told him about using my father’s gun. About fighting one of the men. As I recalled and told him one detail, another would emerge. Until I got to the point where I knelt over a dying man and asked him to tell me …
And he did.
I sat bolt upright.
“Jesus Christ,” I hissed, gasping in pain and shock.
“What is it, Captain? What did he tell you?”
And it was suddenly all in my head. Every last detail. “I know who’s behind this.”
“Tell me.”
“The Seven Kings,” I said.
Chapter Forty-six
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
March 30, 4:31 P.M.
Toys sat cross-legged on the floor beside Junie’s chair. There was another visitors’ chair available, but it was the one Rudy had been using. Toys felt awkward taking it, even temporarily. He had a Diet Coke resting in the circle formed by his legs and was chewing on a plastic straw.
Rudy was off trying to get his head straight.
Good luck with that, mate, mused Toys. This bloody thing makes no sense at all.
It was true. Toys was not a scientist or doctor, but he’d been Sebastian Gault’s right-hand man for years, and Gault had been one of the world’s most brilliant pharmacologists. Toys had also spent considerable time—albeit reluctantly—with Amirah, Gault’s former lover and the head of his science division. Toys had been there for most of the serious discussions about the development of the seif al din pathogen. He had a solid working knowledge of medicine and could generally follow even the more arcane conversations between doctors. However, listening to the medical team here go through the battery of tests they’d performed on Circe, it was clear that there was simply no answer. None of their tests could begin to explain why a healthy young woman like her should collapse and then slide into a coma. So far, the tests supported the one encouraging bit of knowledge—that the baby Circe carried appeared to be unaffected.
But Circe was circling the drain, Toys was sure of it.
Rudy had taken the news very hard. He was already worn thin from having actually been at the ballpark during the drone attack. Now this, plus the strain of a cross-country flight in a military transport jet.
The room was quiet except for the machine noises.
Junie sat with her eyes closed, either sleeping or meditating. Toys couldn’t tell.
He wanted to close his own eyes and drift away, but he dared not. Someone had to keep eyes on Circe.
Even as he thought that, he knew it was an irrational thought. Circe was in a hospital, hooked to every kind of monitor in the catalog. There were nurses and doctors coming by every few minutes. There were armed DMS agents standing outside the door.
The place couldn’t be safer.
Nothing could possibly happen here.
But as he thought that, an older version of him whispered ugly secrets into his ear. Six years ago, the Seven Kings had launched their Ten Plagues Initiative in a hospital. In a manner of speaking.
They’d blown up the London Hospital.
>
Killing everyone inside. Darkening the skies over the old city.
Proving to everyone who stood on the street and watched or who followed the news on TV that there was nowhere—no place at all—that was truly safe from the Seven Kings.
Get out, whispered the old Toys. The malicious lackey of Sebastian Gault. The toady of Hugo Vox. The Toys who had been a killer and an enabler of killers. Leave now. Get out before it happens. Get out before you die with these people.
Toys raised his head and looked at Junie, her face lovely and serene, and at Circe, who struggled to stay alive, for herself and her baby.
“Leave…?” he murmured, his voice as soft as a whisper.
Leave while you can. Save yourself.
Toys looked away, out the window at the scudding clouds.
“Never,” he said. Then, a moment later, he repeated it. “Never.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
March 30, 4:34 P.M.
“The men you faced,” said Church, “were they regular troops or Kingsmen?”
I had to think about that. The Seven Kings had used a lot of different kinds of fighters over the years, including security specialists—aka mercenaries—from Blue Diamond and other companies. But their elite shooters were called the Kingsmen. These were men trained to be as dangerous and capable as U.S. special forces operators. Most of the trainers and some of the soldiers were, in fact, former special ops players. Fighting them was how I imagined going to war against Echo Team might be.
I shook my head slowly. “Not Kingsmen. They were tough, but I took them out too easily.”
Church called Aunt Sallie in Brooklyn to tell her about the confirmation that we were dancing with the Kings. She was on her way to her townhouse for fresh clothes because it looked like she’d be pulling back-to-back shifts at the main DMS headquarters, the Hangar. I overheard her say that she’d pass the info along, initiate the proper protocols and ring all the alarms.
Church ended the call. “Captain, I think we can now agree that this event is tied to what Echo Team discovered at the Resort.”