Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 31

The sergeant studied her for a moment, then lowered his gun. "Listen to me," he said in a more human tone, "we received a call saying that a biological agent had been released on that train. It's happening."

"What's happening?"

The SWAT sergeant shook his head. "We've been hit again."

Neither Faustino nor Dawes had to ask what that meant. This was New York. It would take a lot of years before the events of 9/11 had to be explained.

The sergeant pointed a finger at the two cops. "Get the f.u.c.k out of here now. Get back to Euclid Avenue Station. Make sure n.o.body comes down here. Do you understand me? n.o.body."

He did not wait for their answer, did not flinch or respond to their outraged protest. Instead he ran into the tunnel, and a few moments later they heard another gun open up.

Faustino drew her pistol.

So did Dawes.

And for a moment they stood facing the direction of the gunfire.

"What the h.e.l.l's happening?" asked Dawes. He sounded absolutely terrified.

All Faustino could do was shake her head.

Together, guns raised and pointing, they began backing away. Soon they turned and ran for the lights of Euclid Avenue Station.

They hadn't gone two hundred feet before a new sound tore through the chatter of gunfire and the dreadful moans. These sounds were sharper, higher. Far more horrible.

It was the sound of men in great fear and great pain ... screaming.

Chapter Forty-seven.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Sunday, August 31, 1:28 p.m.

Rudy Sanchez came running into the Tactical Operations Center just as all h.e.l.l was breaking loose. He spotted Aunt Sallie and Mr. Church, who were each speaking hurriedly into telephones. He rushed over to them, and as Church disconnected a call, Rudy touched his arm.

"Dios mio, is it true?" cried Rudy. "Is it true?"

Church gave him one moment of a hard, flat stare.

"I pray that it is not, doctor."

"But-?"

"But I fear that it is."

Church turned away to make another call. And another.

Rudy, helpless and impotent, could only stand and stare.

And pray.

Chapter Forty-eight.

Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Cafe Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street Park Slope, Brooklyn Sunday, August 31, 1:28 p.m.

I stood in the street, watching the police and paramedics do their job. I was shirtless, and the left leg of my trousers had been slit from ankle to hip. b.l.o.o.d.y bandages were wrapped and taped in place. I felt sore, angry, and older than my thirty-odd years. Someone had brushed the gla.s.s out of Ghost's fur and wrapped some gauze around his legs and chest to staunch the flow of blood from a dozen shallow cuts.

A dozen yards away, Bunny sat in the open back of an ambulance while a nervous EMT picked gla.s.s and wood splinters out of his back. Top stood watching, his face an unreadable stone. The EMTs had argued with them both, wanting to transport them to the local E.R. instead of doing much on site, but we flashed the right ID and pulled rank and they stopped arguing. Apparently, calls had been made to hospital administrators, the fire commissioner, and the police commissioner. Resistance crumbled, wheels were greased, but no one was happy about it.

I'd recovered my cell phone, but there were no new messages from "A." Nothing from Junie either. I kept fighting down the urge to scream.

I wanted to grab my woman and hit the ground running. Take off for some tropical spot that was ten thousand miles away from gunfire and explosions and senseless death.

Instead, Top, Bunny, and I were watching forensic techs take photos of people we'd killed.

Young people.

Kids.

My earbud buzzed and Nikki was there.

"Cowboy," she said quickly, "we have a.s.sets at the desired location. Bookworm is okay. Repeat, Bookworm is safe and sound."

Bookworm was the codename Top had given Junie last year.

I sagged against a parked car and actually had to fight back the tears. "Thank G.o.d."

"Everything's okay there. She's fine. Really."

I was so dazed that I had to scramble to remember Nikki's call sign. "Thanks, Firefly."

"But I have to tell you, Cowboy," she said, "there's a lot of crazy stuff going on."

"I know, I know. Gettysburg and Lexington..."

"That's the tip of the iceberg. There's stuff going on all over the country. Lots of weird violence. Vandalism and arson. Stuff like that. And the phrase 'burn to shine' keeps showing up everywhere there's something bad happening. It's on walls, spray-painted on the street. They even brought a guy into an E.R. in Akron with it carved into his skin. They think it was done with a razor blade. We're still trying to make some sense of it. If this is terrorism, then no one's taking claim except indirectly. There was that Mother Night video and now all this."

"Burn to shine," I said. "A call to action."

Circe was right.

"Everything's chaotic. And even if it is Mother Night, then we can't find a pattern to it."

"Keep trying. Look, what about the digital prints we sent from here? You get any hits on our shooters?"

"Only two of them are in the system, Cowboy. Serita Esposito and Darius Chu. Both have juvenile records. Esposito was arrested twice for hacking. First offense was an intrusion into the computers belonging to her bank in order to add funds to her debit card. She was fourteen at the time and the intrusion went unnoticed for eleven months. Two-year suspended sentence and community service, plus appropriate fines and rest.i.tution. A couple of years later she hacked Delta Airlines to obtain first-cla.s.s tickets to Paris for her and five of her friends. She was arrested upon her return to the States and is-or rather was-awaiting trial."

"Only seventeen," I said, feeling even older.

"She fired on you, Cowboy," Nikki said.

"Small comfort."

Nikki sighed. "I know."

She didn't know. Like all of Bug's team, she was support staff and never once set foot in the field. But she meant well.

"What about the other one?" I asked. "The boy? Chu, was it?"

"Let's see ... he's a Canadian citizen and, according to Montreal police, is in custody awaiting trial for armed a.s.sault."

"I can pretty much guarantee he's not in prison," I said, watching them zipper him into a body bag.

"The prints match a suspect arrested in Montreal following the nonfatal shooting of a member of the Canadian Parliament. However, the photo you sent does not match the person in jail, and apparently neither do that person's fingerprints. The Canadians are trying to determine how the swap was made, and the person in custody as Chu refuses to talk. I'll have to go deeper and-"

Suddenly, Nikki's voice vanished and was replaced by a three-note alarm signal. Then Church's voice was in my ear.

"This is Deacon for Cowboy, do you copy?"

"Go for Cowboy."

"What is the status of your team?" he said, and he sounded stressed and hurried. "Give me the short answer."

Now was not the time to complain about cuts and sc.r.a.pes. Even a lot of cuts and sc.r.a.pes.

"We're still at the cyber cafe, but we're good to go," I fired back. "What've you got?"

Seemingly out of left field, Church said, "Have you heard about the event in Brooklyn?"

"Other than this one?"

"In the subway," he said. "The C train."

"No."

I could hear him take a breath.

"Scramble your team," he said. "We have a Code Zero."

Chapter Forty-nine.

Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Cafe Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street Park Slope, Brooklyn Sunday, August 31, 1:31 p.m.

Code Zero.

There are no words more terrifying to me, either in my private lexicon or in that used by the Department of Military Sciences.

Hearing those words punched me in the solar plexus.

It stabbed me in the heart.

A big, dark ball of black terror expanded inside my chest.

We have different codes for the various kinds of threats we face.

Code E is an Ebola outbreak.

Code N is a nuke.

But Code Zero ...

G.o.d.

That was used only for a specific kind of horror that I hoped was gone forever from my life and from this world.

"Wh-hat?" I stammered. "How?"

Church told me about the C train and the SWAT team that went down into the tunnel. I held my phone up so I could watch the video feed. It was herky-jerky and tinted green from night-vision equipment. The ghostly shape of the big silver train rose out of the darkness as the SWAT officers swarmed toward it. I could see that the windows of the train were cracked and some of them had been smashed outward. People wriggled through the shattered windows and filled the tunnel.

I call them people, but I knew that it was a term applicable only in the past tense. They were streaked with blood, their clothes and skin torn. Their mouths biting at the air, their eyes black and dead.

The SWAT team reacted to them the way compa.s.sionate people will. They tried to help. But I heard the helmet radio feed from command telling them to fall back, to make no contact. Warning the cops of a biohazard threat.

Some of the cops held their ground, caught by indecision. Some retreated a few paces. A few could not let their compa.s.sion for injured fellow citizens outweigh personal safety.

And that is the horror of warfare in the twenty-first century. Terrorists view compa.s.sion as a weakness and they attack it as a vulnerability, making the benevolent pay for their own humanity. The SWAT officers who stepped forward to help were buried beneath a wave of the infected.

I wanted to turn away from the images, I wanted to smash the phone so I couldn't hear the screams. There was too long a delay in responding. The gunfire-the awful, necessary gunfire-came much too late.

The feed ended abruptly when the camera was smashed.

It brought me all the way back to my first day with the DMS. To the first of horror of this world in which I now live. Code Zero indicated an outbreak of a very specific kind of disease pathogen. A bioweapon of immeasurable ferocity. The people who designed this weapon called it the seif-al-din.