Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 3

"She's expecting you so soon?"

I looked at her. The question was clumsy, and she colored as she realized how it sounded.

"Violin...," I began, but she shook her head.

"I'm sorry, Joseph. That was wrong."

We had some coffee. A young father walked by, holding the hands of two little kids, a boy and girl in raincoats. He smiled at us and we at him. I listened to the sound of little feet in galoshes, pleased that each footfall made a true "galosh" sound.

Violin tried it again. "This is serious, then? With you and that woman?"

"Her name is Junie."

"I know her name."

"You never use it."

She sighed. "This is serious with Junie?"

"It's serious."

Violin looked into my eyes, into me. She was very good at reading people. Not as empathic as Junie, but no slouch. She sighed again and looked away.

"Okay," I said, "what gives? What's with the heavy sighs and leading questions? Since when were you a love-struck schoolgirl? This isn't like you, Violin."

After a long time she said, "You know that's not even my real name."

"Yeah, but you won't tell me your real name."

She shook her head.

We sipped. She petted. Light rain fell.

"It gets lonely after a while," she said.

Jesus. And what do you say to that?

"I know," I said, aware that it was both lame and more than a little disingenuous. Okay, sure, I did know about loneliness and loss. And heartbreak. All that. But at the same time I was five degrees past insanely in love. Happier than I'd ever been in my whole life. So ... lip service felt like talking s.h.i.t.

Violin said nothing, and I kept my dumb mouth shut.

The rain gradually stopped and the day began to brighten as the clouds thinned. Violin adjusted her hat and sungla.s.ses.

"Joseph," she said, "I'm sorry I said anything. It was weak of me. And impolite."

"No."

"Yes. Please ... let's forget I said it, okay? Let's go on being us. Allies in the war. Can we do that?"

"Absolutely."

She glanced at me, read me, nodded. And measured out a thin slice of a smile. "I worry about you," she said. "I suppose I always will."

"Believe me when I tell you that I worry about you, too."

She shrugged. "I'm used to this life. I know what's in the shadows."

"So do I."

"No," she said, "I don't know if you do."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She said, "Have you ever heard of someone called Mother Night?"

I stiffened.

"Ah," she said, smiling, "apparently so."

"How do you know Mother Night?"

"A woman who goes by that name has become a player in some dangerous games."

"What games?"

"Theft of science. Two weeks ago an Arklight team hit a lab in Warsaw sponsored by the Red Knights. It was a group of scientists working on computer viruses. There was some Iranian money involved, but their princ.i.p.al clients were the Upierczy. They have been trying to obtain as much information as possible about gene therapy and transgenics. They want to force their own evolution. They want to become indestructible, invincible. They want to be like the vampires of movies and books and they're convinced genetics will accomplish this."

"It might," I said sourly.

She nodded. "Yes, and if it happens we'll lose the fight against them. But my point was that when we hit their lab it was already in turmoil. Someone had hacked into their systems and stolen everything. Research, testing data, backup files, the works. We used Oracle to hack their system but we couldn't find anything, not even a hint as to who'd stolen the data. It was so clean and thorough a job that we thought it was the Deacon using MindReader, but he said that it wasn't the DMS."

I said nothing. Church had mentioned something about the Red Knights' computers being hacked, but it was a comment in pa.s.sing. And I'd a.s.sumed it was Arklight using Oracle. a.s.sumptions, a.s.sumptions.

"How's any of that connect with Mother Night?"

"Ah," she said, smiling faintly. "One of the technicians at the lab said that it was Mother Night. It was all he said, though. Just that."

"You couldn't get any more out of him?"

Her smile never flickered. "Alas, he was unable to say more. However, a few days later we hit a second site in Vilnius. A testing facility for genetic enhancement. When we broke in, though, everyone was already dead. Four Red Knights and sixteen technical staff. All dead."

"How? It would have taken a hefty strike team to-"

"No," she said. "They had not been shot. Someone had released a toxin into the system. Specifically, a radically weaponized strain of enterohemorrhagic E. coli. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before. Our scientists tell us that it triggered a quick-onset form of hemorrhagic colitis. The victims bled out through their r.e.c.t.u.ms."

"Christ, that's disgusting."

Violin's eyes were ice cold. "They were Red Knights and their servants."

I said nothing to that. The women of Arklight had suffered indescribable indignities, torture, rape, and worse at the hands of the Knights, and this went back centuries. Whatever mercy they might have had for their former oppressors was long since beaten out of them. They were now the most vicious and efficient kill team anywhere in the world. Second to none, and I do not exaggerate. I was very, very glad they were on our side.

She said, "All of the computers had been stripped of their data and there were no viable materials left. It was all gone, except for empty cabinets, ransacked computers, and the bodies of the dead. Those, by the way, had been piled up and set on fire. There was a message painted with blood on the wall that read: Mother Night Says that you have to Burn to Shine."

"Oh, man..." I shook my head. "But even so, how does that connect Mother Night to me and the DMS?"

"Since we found that site, Arklight has been asking around. We've managed to conduct a few interrogations of Knights we captured, and with people connected to them. No one knows much, but several of them told a story about a senior scientist for the Knights who'd been found at the point of death. He'd been severely tortured and left for dead."

"Tortured by whom?"

"By a woman who called herself Mother Night," said Violin. "She asked him a lot of questions and most of it was about the Knights, their former connection with the Red Order, their more recent connections with the surviving members of the Seven Kings, and a mutual enemy of all of then-the DMS. Your name came up in the interrogation. The scientist said that he was aware of you, and of your role in killing Grigor, king of the Red Knights. Unfortunately, that was the extent of the questioning. The scientist died shortly after that. So ... all we have is a small, fragile connection between you and someone who has been doing significant harm in order to steal computer files and research. A group who has either developed an E. colibased bioweapon or who has stolen it for use."

"I'll have to share this with Church, and he'll probably want to talk to you or to your mother."

Lilith, Violin's mother, was the leader of Arklight. I have never met a more formidable woman. She and Church had some history, but I didn't know what it was or how deep it went.

"Of course," she said.

Violin stood up. When I began to rise too, she touched my shoulder to keep me seated.

"If I hear anything else I'll let you know," she said. "Goodbye, Joseph."

"Goodbye, Violin," I said.

She began to move away, but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. "Joseph...?"

"Yes?"

"This woman ... Junie Flynn?"

"Yes."

"Be good to her."

There was so much meaning in what she said, so many layers to it that I could not respond. It felt like there was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. However, Violin nodded to herself as if I had replied.

As she walked away I felt a weird ache inside. Almost a premonition, like maybe I'd never see her again. But that was stupid.

I sat there and took over the job of petting Ghost, who stared at Violin's retreating back. "Mother Night," I said aloud.

Ghost whined softly.

Chapter Seven.

The Warehouse DMS Field Office Baltimore, Maryland Friday, May 20, 7:55 p.m.

Mother Night surfaced again later that month.

It went like this.

The interrogation team finished with Reggie. They'd squeezed him like a Florida orange, and when they were sure he had no juice left, they gave him back to me to transport him to the witness protection program. Or, rather, our version of it. The one run by the U.S. Marshals is good, but in an age where computer hacking has become the most feared WMD, the protected witnesses aren't all that secure. The Marshal Service is a government agency, which means it needs to keep records, transfer information, and receive reports from the field. All of that goes through computers. Last year, nine protected witnesses who were set to testify against a coalition of Mexican cartels were targeted and killed. Five of them had families, and each witness had on-site marshals as watchdogs. There were no survivors. Forensic computer a.n.a.lysis proved that the system had been hacked.

We didn't want to turn Reggie Boyd over to the marshals. We trusted the agents but not their computers. The world of law enforcement is changing. A couple of keystrokes are more powerful than a bullet.

The DMS has gone old-school with its version of witness protection. Nothing goes onto any computer except MindReader. Even then, information is protected by 28-bit encryption and self-erase counterintrusion programs. There are missile codes with less security.

So, Reggie had been a guest at the new Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. My office.

Everyone I worked with still called it "new" even though we'd been in residence here for months. However, whenever someone spoke of the Warehouse, without the "new" prefix, everyone knew they weren't talking about here. Once upon a time we'd been in a different building four blocks away. That building was now a hole in the world and everything that had been in it had been vaporized by a terrorist bomb. A hundred and sixty-nine people had gone up with it. Friends, colleagues, brothers-in-arms. Gone. On some level those of us who'd escaped that catastrophe felt it was disrespectful to simply call this the Warehouse.

The new building was bigger and it was crammed with every kind of interior and exterior surveillance and detection equipment. A sparrow couldn't take a c.r.a.p on a rain gutter without an alarm ringing somewhere. Paranoid? Sure, but as the saying goes, sometimes they really are out to get you.

Ghost and I came to get Reggie a few minutes before eight on a rainy Friday. Reggie's "cell" was actually an office that had been converted into an apartment about as big as a good-sized dorm room. He had a flat-screen TV, cable with lots of premium channels, a Netflix account, and a tall stack of Blu-Ray DVDs. When I came in, he was in sweats and sneakers, and was sprawled on his couch watching an old episode of Game of Thrones.

"It's almost over," he said. "Can you give me a sec?"

"Sure."

I perched on the end of the couch for a few minutes, watching it with him. It was from the second season, the siege of Kings Landing. Good stuff.

Ghost climbed up between us, and while the armies clashed on the screen, Reggie stroked Ghost's fur. Their relationship had changed a bit. Not that Ghost wouldn't kill him if I ordered it, but over the last month we'd all developed an odd fondness for Reggie. He was a traitor and a jacka.s.s, but Reggie didn't seem evil. Not even a little bit. More like a cousin who can't keep out of trouble but who's fun at parties.

And, let's face it, no one in the history of international espionage had ever been more cooperative. He could wear out a crack team of CIA interrogators in nothing flat. They dreaded interviewing him because he not only gave useful information; he was the kind of guy who had to tell you every single blessed detail of every single blessed moment of every single blessed day. Once, when a weary interrogator asked him to summarize some of the less important things-like Reggie's account of driving to work or going to the gym-Reggie shook his head and said that he was afraid of missing something.

He didn't miss a thing. Not one single, mind-crushing moment of his life. I was tempted to bribe him into shutting up and never speaking again.

When the episode ended, he turned off the TV and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. "Any chance you're going to tell me where we're going?"

"Come on, Reg, you know better."

We got up. His suitcase had been packed by my people, but I allowed Reggie a few seconds to stuff some of his favorite DVDs into a bag. He looked around and sighed again.

"What?" I asked.

"You'll laugh."

"No, I won't."

He shrugged. "It's just that I think I'm going to miss this place."

"Oh, come on..."

"See, what did I say?"