I don’t like knives at the best of times, but there is something appallingly frightening about scalpels. They glide through whatever they cut, and in the hands of an expert they are dreadful. From the way he moved, I could tell he was an expert with them. His weight was on the balls of his feet, knees bent and springy, elbows bent and tucked close to protect his body, blades up to protect his face and throat. He moved like a dancer, gliding across the floor.
I began moving with him, retreating in a broad circle so that I moved to Surgeon’s left and away from Boy Commando. They followed and immediately began adjusting to my retreat.
In combat, the worst thing you can do when fighting multiple opponents is to retreat in a straight line because it allows them to get closer to each other while creating an aggressive wall in front of you. Circling helps, but if they know that trick and are used to working together, they can make a lot of small, quick shifts to cut you off.
“That’s Ledger,” yelled the man in the bed. He had an English accent, clipped and cold. “Be careful.”
The grad students only smiled. Their confidence was disheartening.
Ghost was having his own time of it. The Blue Diamond guy was tough, and he had clearly been trained in how to fight a dog. Maybe the King had all of his best guys here.
I would much rather have had to deal with the Marx Brothers or a couple of the Stooges.
Suddenly another explosion shook the room. Dust puffed down from the ceiling. Now it was my turn to smile.
“Hear that, your highness?” I said, continuing to circle. “That’s my team breaking this place apart.”
“Who cares?” he said. “Let them come.”
Surgeon darted into me with a one-two lunge that was so goddamn fast that, even though I spun out of the way, I trailed blood from a pair of burning cuts on my arm. No idea how deep they were. Blood welled through the slits in my sleeve.
He lunged again, but as I shifted to avoid him, Boy Commando made his move. He whipped his hand high, turned it into a fake, checked and slashed a vertical line down that would have severed the femoral artery in my leg if he’d connected. He missed by maybe a quarter inch.
Then Surgeon was in again, using my evasion as his opening in exactly the way an expert would. He used a right-left-right jab combination and then went for the long reach to try and take me across the eyes. I couldn’t counterslash him, but I used my left to punch upward into his arm. I caught him wrong—hitting elbow instead of triceps, but it knocked his arm high. It was a tiny window, but I took it and threw myself at him, hitting the exposed rib cage with my shoulder and barrel-slamming him ten feet across the room. He hit the edge of the bed and cried out in pain as the steel rail punched him in the hip.
I could hear Boy Commando rushing up behind me, so I grabbed Surgeon and spun him. I felt something bite me in the side and knew it was one of the scalpels. Pain exploded beneath the right side of my rib cage.
But Surgeon screamed.
We were face-to-face at the end of my spin, and when I saw the horror in his eyes, I knew that my timing had been good.
Good for me.
Totally sucked for him.
He was pressed all the way back against Boy Commando, and over his shoulder I could see his partner’s eyes bug wide as he realized what had just happened.
The double-edged British fighting knife is excellent for slashing, but it also makes one hell of a hole on a straight thrust. Boy Commando had tried to drill me in the kidney, but instead his blade was buried to the hilt in the Surgeon’s back.
My knife was free.
I let go of Surgeon, reached over his shoulder, grabbed the back of Boy Commando’s head with my left, and used my right to bury my knife into his left eye socket. I corkscrewed half a turn and tore it out, then buried it again, this time in the center of his throat.
They collapsed together, locked in a terminal embrace that seemed somehow intimate. As they dropped away from me, I felt something jerk at my side and looked down to see blood trailing from the scalpel that was still clutched in Surgeon’s dying hand.
That’s when the pain hit me.
Enormous pain.
He’d gotten me good. Beneath the ribs. Maybe in the liver.
I was bleeding inside and out, and I knew it.
The clock was ticking.
Ticking.
I wheeled around to see what was happening with Ghost.
Ghost stood panting by the wall. There were parts of things around him that probably added up to one Blue Diamond guard.
Ghost looked past me to the man on the bed. He snarled with all the primitive ferocity of a wolf. With all the hatred of a member of my tribe.
I leaned on the bed frame and looked into the face of the man who had orchestrated so much harm. The face I looked into showed no fear. Only disappointment at the failure of his men to kill me. If there was compassion for their deaths or their suffering, none of it showed on this man’s face.
He was hideous.
His face had been melted away by some terrible blaze. He had no legs and only one arm. One eye was a boiled egg white in his skull; the other was filled with a kind of calm hatred that I’d never seen before. As if he had no fear of whatever I might say or do. Or threaten.
His mangled lips wore a contemptuous smile.
“Somehow,” he said, “I knew it would be you. Joe Ledger. Thuggish captain of Echo Team.”
“I like it,” I said, hissing a little with the pain. “I can put that on my business card.”
“Please do. Truth in advertising.”
“You know why I’m here,” I said. “Mind if we skip the banter section of this and go right to the point where you take it as read that I own your ass and you give me what I want?”
“Let’s not.”
“Dude,” I said, “not sure if you’ve taken inventory yet, but the Kings are dead; your men are dead or dying.”
As if to emphasize my point, there was a rattle of gunfire from down the hall. A man screamed. Pretty sure it wasn’t one of Echo Team.
“I don’t give a fuck about them,” said the burned man. “And I don’t give much of a fuck about you, Ledger. You’ve invaded the island fortress of the mad scientist. Bravo. You’ve killed the villains and all the supporting characters. Now you are going to threaten to kill me. Or torture me.”
“I’m open to it. ’Specially the last part.”
“To what end?”
“Reset codes.”
“Ah. And would you like the password to access Davidovich’s Web site? That way, you can save the world just like that.” He snapped the fingers of his good hand.
“That would be nice. It would save you a lot of discomfort.”
He smiled at me. “No,” he said. “Of course … no. There’s nothing you can do to me that you haven’t already done. You’ve ruined my life over and over again. Well, here’s the kicker, Ledger—I’m already dying. I have enough diseases and conditions firing all at once that I’ll be dead inside a week. And if you torture me, all you’ll do is hasten the inevitable. You see, you have no leverage. I get to watch you fail, and I get to go to my grave knowing that I destroyed you and that I destroyed this country.”
“Why?” I asked. “You’ve got a real hard-on for me. Who am I to you? What the fuck have I ever done to make you this pissed off? I mean … if you want me to suffer, shouldn’t I know that much?”
He cocked his head to one side.
“Seriously?” he said. “Even now, you don’t recognize me?”
“Nope. You look like a can of fried SPAM. Somebody cooked you over a nice slow flame. Makes it hard to figure out who the hell you are.”
He flinched. Ever so slightly at that.
“Hugo said that you were tough but stupid.”
And I think that’s when it all went click. A lot of little clues, a lot of floating pieces. It all fell into place right there. He watched my face, and from the delighted smile that he wore, I could tell that he knew that I had
it. That I finally recognized him.
You see … we’d never actually met. He was a photo in a case file, a body in a piece of video. And he was supposed to be dead.
I had to take a breath, because there was no air in my lungs to speak his name.
But I said it.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’re … Sebastian Gault.”
Chapter One Hundred and Sixty
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 4:15 P.M.
The elevator doors opened again, and Rudy staggered out.
There were more bodies scattered around, but the fighting still raged. Montana Parker had a collapsible metal rod in her hand and was smashing at a Kingsman with a knife. Sam Imura sat on the floor with his hands pressed to his stomach and blood trickling from his mouth and nose. Lydia Ruiz stood above him, firing an AK-47 that had bloodstains on it.
But across the hall was the worst of it.
Toys stood in the doorway to Circe’s room battering at Kingsmen with an empty gun. Five feet away, the massive wolfhound, Banshee, was tearing at their throats and groins.
Twenty feet way, closer to Rudy than to Circe’s room, stood Nicodemus. He was looking the other way, yelling at his men, directing the relentless attack. In fact, for the moment, no one was looking at Rudy. Everywhere he looked, people—Kingsmen, police, Homeland agents, the last few members of Echo Team, even Toys—were trapped inside their own fragments of this drama. A sea of violence separated Rudy from his wife and their unborn child.
Rudy bent and picked up a gun. It was another AK-47, dropped by a dead Kingsman. Rudy had no idea if it was loaded, or how to check that. He simply hooked his cane in the crook of his arm, raised the gun, pointed it at Nicodemus, and opened fire.
The gun bucked heavily in his hands, and fire burst from the barrel, sending a dozen rounds into the crowd around the priest. Kingsmen spun like dancers, collapsed like dolls.
And then the bolt locked back, the magazine spent.
Nicodemus turned toward him. He extended his hand and pointed a withered finger at him.
“You,” he said. “I’m so glad to see you.”
Rudy let the gun clatter to the bloodstained floor as the priest walked slowly toward him.
The battle raged around them, but the priest and the doctor stood facing each other across five feet of space. The wild glee of battle faded from Nicodemus’s face, and for a moment he looked like an ordinary man.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Rudy.
“Even a man as smart as you pretend to be,” said the priest, “would never understand.”
“Try me.”
“No, sir, I do not think I will. I would much rather have you wonder about it. There are few things more entertaining than letting the worm of doubt have its way with someone.”
“No,” said Rudy, taking a step forward. His limp was very bad and he swayed. That seemed to amuse Nicodemus. “Why us? Why my wife? What could she have possibly done to offend you?”
“Her?” Nicodemus laughed. “I couldn’t care less about that slut. Or you. Or the wriggling grub in her belly. Not you as people. I care less about you than dog shit on my shoe. Lordy-lord, how arrogant you must be to think such thoughts.”
Rudy gripped his stick like a club. “They why, damn it? She is helpless. Our baby is innocent…”
“And nothing hurts him more than to see the innocent suffer.”
“‘Him’? Who…?” Rudy’s voice trailed away.
Nicodemus watched him like a cat. “Ah, I can see that you’re getting it now. At least the tiniest part of it.”
“This is about Church?”
Nicodemus snorted at that name. “Church. Oh, he does love his little jokes, doesn’t he? The names he picks for himself. Church. The Deacon. Sexton and Pope, Eldritch and Saint Germaine. Magus and Prospero. How many others?” He took a step toward Rudy, and now they were close enough to touch. “Ask him your question, doctor. Ask him why I will burn worlds to have my revenge on him. Ask, but don’t expect an answer. He’ll never hear you over the screams of all those who have died for him. All those who have died because of him.”
“You’re insane. And you’re not making sense.”
“Do you think not, doctor? Your Mr. Church is the cause of more hurt and misery than you can possibly imagine. Why, I suspect it would burn you to know who and what he is. Yes, sir, it would pure burn the heart right out of you. And to know that you sleep with his daughter. That your child carries his seed. Good lordy-lordy-lord. And you think I’m a monster.”
Between clenched teeth, Rudy said, “No, I think you’re a liar.”
He slashed at Nicodemus with the hawthorn cane.
Not with the shaft.
This time, he used all of his strength, all of his hurt and rage and terror, to swing the carved silver handle at the priest’s face.
Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-one
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 4:17 P.M.
“Yes,” said the burned man. “Sebastian Gault. Would you like to gloat now?”
I stared at him.
This man was the reason that I joined the DMS. He paid to have the seif al din pathogen created. He very nearly caused an outbreak that, according to every statistical model, would have ended the world.
Ended.
We all thought he died when the laboratory of his lover, Amirah, the scientist who actually created the plague for him, was destroyed during a geothermal explosion. We later learned that Toys saved him, dragged his burned body through a tunnel and out onto the sands in Afghanistan. Months later, after extensive plastic surgery and recuperation, Gault and Toys were brought into the Seven Kings by Hugo Vox. There, Gault became their King of Plagues, and he created several terrible bioweapons for them, including a version of airborne quick-onset Ebola. That was the cornerstone of the Kings’ Ten Plagues Initiative.
Once more the world trembled on the very edge of a global pandemic.
Vox told Toys that he had blown Gault and the Goddess—Vox’s treacherous mother—to bits with a bomb he’d planted aboard her yacht. The Coast Guard only ever found small fragments of the yacht in the Saint Lawrence River. Gault was once more presumed—hoped, wished—dead.
And now here he was again. The sole surviving King. No longer just the King of Plagues, but the only reigning member left.
Crippled and burned, but still vastly powerful.
Still cruel. Still vindictive.
And, with the protection of certain death a short step behind him, he held all the cards.
He knew it, too.
He watched my face, watched me work it out, and he laughed.
I shook my head. “So all of this—the Regis and Solomon programs, the hijacked drones, the attacks on the ballpark and the bridge—”
“And Air Force One,” he said. “Let’s not forget about that.”
“No, let’s not. All of this is what? Revenge?”
He held his hand wide to indicate what was left of him. “What else do I have?” he asked. “What else have you left me?”
“Whoa, dickhead, we didn’t actually do this to you.” I paused, wheezing. My side was bleeding heavily, and I tore open a package of gauze and pressed it against the wound. It hurt like a son of a bitch. There was surgical tape on a side table, and I wound it around my waist to hold the bandage in place. I was going to need more than that. Maybe surgery. Maybe a lot of surgery. The room was spinning. “As I recall,” I continued, “it was you who blew up Amirah’s lab.”
“Of course. To stop her destroying the world.”
“With your fucking doomsday weapon.”
He shook his head. “That was designed as a threat and you know it. Don’t pretend to be even stupider than you are. I wanted to be rich and to live rich, and I couldn’t very well do that in a dead world. I saved the world.”
“Ye
ah, good try. If you build a doomsday weapon, you don’t get points for not using it.”
He shrugged. “Oh, fair enough.”
“And as for the boat thing. Hugo Vox blew up the damn boat. We didn’t.”
“He was on the run from you and cleaning up loose ends.”
“Still doesn’t put it on our tab.”
Another shrug.
“Then who’s the revenge against?” I asked.
His eye glittered with hatred. “For everyone who is going to be alive tomorrow and next week and next year.”
“Wow. You’re doing this because you got yourself all fucked up so everyone else has to pay?”
“Small minds can make anything sound petty.”
“If there’s a better explanation, then tell me. Historians will want to know, and that is actually not a smart-ass comment. We both know you’ve made your mark. No one is ever going to forget this week. No one. And Sebastian Gault will be remembered forever. Bravo for you. You’ll be universally hated, but you’ll be remembered.”
“One takes the immortality that’s afforded them.”
“I suppose.”
I began walking around the bed. I was careful to make it look casual, but my feet were getting wobbly. “Let me see if I get this straight, though. You have the codes to reset Regis and Solomon, yes?”
“Of course. I’d be an idiot not to have that information.”
“And you know that Davidovich built a Web site that allowed him to control those programs.”
“Yes.” He watched me as I paced. It was difficult for him to turn enough to see me. “We knew everything that he was doing.”
“Then you have the password for that Web site, right?”
“I do.”
I passed above the headboard and came down the far side of the bed. His head swiveled around to watch me again.
“Is there anything I can say or do that would encourage you to give that password to me?”
He smiled. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“If you’ve read my file, you know I can play rough.”
He held up a withered hand so I could see his burned flesh. “Really? Rougher than this? They pulled me from the sea while I was covered in burning oil. I felt my own skin melt. There’s nothing worse than that, Ledger. Go get your thumb screws if you think it’ll help, but I’ve already been through hell.”