Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 59

It was a dangerous, dangerous place to be.

The dead came at us and we-did what? Made them deader? Desecrated their corpses? What would you call this?

"Kill them!"

It was my own voice shouting.

The voice of the Warrior, the Killer who lives inside of me. The one who gets stronger with every trigger pull.

I obeyed his orders.

I killed.

And so did the people who followed and trusted me.

As the infected rushed us, we met their charge and as a group began angling to one side, forcing them to attack us on our flank as we edged toward the open door of the Ark.

That's when Mother Night sprung her trap.

Bright lights flared on all around us, blinding us, stabbing through the optics of the night vision, tearing cries of pain and confusion from us as we scrambled to raise the devices away from our tortured eyes.

On either side of us, two stacks of metal cases leaned out and fell with mighty crashes as six huge figures sprang out from hiding.

Berserkers.

Chapter One Hundred.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Sunday, September 1, 12:30 p.m.

Bug sat in front of the big MindReader monitor, fingers hanging poised above the keys. The screen was broken into dozens of smaller windows, each filled either with images of the disasters or data about Mother Night and Artemisia Bliss. His eyes jumped from window to window so fast that anyone observing him would think he was having a seizure. His mind was whirling with information, trying to do what MindReader does. Look for patterns. Make connections.

MindReader was a computer, though. Possibly the most powerful one on earth. But a computer nonetheless. It could not make true intuitive leaps. It could not speculate or imagine. It was not capable of abstract thinking. A box of circuits and storage slots could not, by definition, think outside of itself. Not even this one.

Bug, however, could.

And if he didn't exactly know Mother Night he d.a.m.n well knew Artemisia Bliss. They'd worked together for four years. Every day. Designing and scheming together. Solving problems like this together.

"What's your damage?" he asked the Bliss who dwelt in his mind. The remembered version of her.

Then he grunted.

That, he realized, was the wrong question.

This wasn't about her damage.

This was about her hunger.

That was the truth because it had always been the truth about her. She was always hungry.

For knowledge?

No. That was data, a means to an end.

For recognition?

Maybe. That was close, and he knew it.

People coveted what they saw. They l.u.s.ted for specific things. They envied specific people. They hated people who had what they wanted.

So ... who did Artemisia Bliss hate?

And why?

What did those people have that she wanted?

The answers to those questions were the answers to this question.

He knew that.

Bliss hated Aunt Sallie.

Why? Auntie was older. No. She was black. No, race had nothing to do with it. She was a combat veteran. Something there. A tickle. She was ...

If he had to pick a single word that defined her. Just one. What would it be?

Dangerous?

Close. Very close. But ... wasn't that a side effect?

Yes. She was dangerous because she was powerful.

That was so close.

What about Church. Pick a word.

Powerful.

In every way, powerful.

Dangerous, too.

Power and danger.

Bliss hated him, too. Bug. He'd testified against her, too.

Why would she hate him? She would have to know that he was compelled to testify, and her hatred wasn't born in the courtroom. It had to be there for her to do this kind of damage. It had to have been there for years, cooking, changing her.

So why would she hate him. He wasn't powerful. He wasn't dangerous.

Any power he had came from MindReader.

Bug stopped and c.o.c.ked his head, reappraising that thought.

Was it true?

Was it an accurate a.s.sessment?

No. Maybe it wasn't. If MindReader was only a computer then it was no more powerful than whoever put it to work. That was no different than a gun. It could not pull its own trigger.

Bug was the power behind MindReader. Something he had always known but never realized or considered.

And that's why Bliss had hated him, too.

Because Bug was allowed total access to MindReader. Only two other people on earth had that privilege. Church and Auntie. How that must have galled Bliss. She always thought she was smarter than Bug, that she knew more about computers than he did, that she could do more than he ever could had she been allowed that freedom of access. She'd begged to show that to Church, to Auntie. To Bug.

It all came down to power.

He thought back to all the times the two of them played video games together. She won more than he did. And made a point of telling everyone about it.

That she'd won.

That, at least on those terms, she was more powerful than he was.

And something else flickered in Bug's mind. Something that Rudy had said in his testimony at her trial. Bug closed his eyes as he pulled those words out of their storage slot in his mind.

"Her pathology clearly indicates that winning is of critical importance to Miss Bliss. That manifested in a number of ways, from using a variety of psychological manipulations to win arguments, even over minor points, to posting video game scores on the corkboard in the lunchroom. She needed to win and to be seen to win. To be acknowledged as the winner. It was one of the ways in which she felt empowered."

That was part of it, but Bug was sure there was something else. Another point Rudy had made later during cross-examination. What was it?

"Come on," he told himself, tapping his feet nervously on the floor. "Come on."

Then it was there, like a file pulled from a nearly corrupted folder in a buried subfolder. There was only a fragment of it. Something Rudy had disclosed under protest because he felt it violated doctor-patient confidentiality. Only a federal court order was able to make Rudy say it.

"I counseled Miss Bliss about her drive to obtain power-as she defined power-and about her need to be recognized as the winner. She is not without a significant history of psychological problems. There are two doc.u.mented suicide attempts from when she was a teenager. In both cases the attending psychiatrist concluded that these were cries for help or for recognition, or for acknowledgment of the power a child has when endangering their own life. She controls, for a short duration, the attention and actions of all adults around her. In light of my own sessions with Miss Bliss, I do not entirely agree with the conclusions of those early therapy sessions. It is my considered and professional opinion that she continues to be unstable and that she barters with herself for her own continued existence. Existence is predicated on winning. I cautioned her that one day she might either fail in so spectacular a way as to rob living of its richness, or that she would win too big a prize, because if you have climbed Everest, whither then?"

Chapter One Hundred and One.

Westin Hotel Atlanta, Georgia Sunday, September 1, 12:31 p.m.

Mother Night paced back and forth in her room.

Everything was going exactly right.

Like clockwork.

Perfect.

Ever since Collins had managed to free her from prison, she had worked toward this moment. Using Huge Vox's screening software and his ma.s.sive database of information culled from tens of thousands of businesses, she had compiled a master list of disenfranchised and emotionally damaged people. She'd used Haruspex to troll the confidential records of hospitals, police departments, and foster care agencies to find even more of them, winnowing her list down to a few hundred. The ones who had been abused and discarded, or marginalized because they were statistically inconvenient to a system that did not allow for creative care of its fringe elements. She'd cultivated them with gifts, empowerment speeches specifically designed to play on their needs, be they anarchism, extreme socialism, radical patriotism, religious mania, or something else. There were so very many lost ones out there, and many of them-despite claiming to want or need no one-clung to Mother Night because she validated their existence. And her gifts were always well received. Food, money, video games, drugs, weapons. All paid for with money siphoned from accounts in banking and trust corporations whose security was no match for a system like Haruspex, whose parents were Pangaea and MindReader.

For two years Mother Night crafted her own persona and drew her minions to her, letting them suckle at the milk she provided. For two years she built the master plan of Burn to Shine. The greatest terrorist attack in history. That's how it would be remembered. Through her faceless, broken minions she would be the most feared and powerful person on the planet. Even if that was only for the span of a weekend.

She. Mother Night. Artemisia Bliss.

More powerful than the president of the United States.

More powerful than Mr. Church.

As she paced she had to keep telling herself that this was exactly what she wanted. That she had already won.

But just as it had done earlier, that awful inner voice, her unevolved self, kept needling her, nagging her.

Run, it would say.

And she would scream at it.

She stopped pacing and went to the window. From the sixty-ninth floor, the city of Atlanta was beautiful. Sunlight and blue skies reflected from all the gla.s.s, and she could see for miles. It was a shame that she could not see the smoke curling up from the Centers for Disease Control. Wrong view for that, and it was a mistake she regretted making when picking this room.

She thought about calling Ludo Monk, and it took her a long moment to realize why that had occurred to her.

It wasn't because she needed to give him instructions.

No.

It was because she had no one to talk to.

There was no way Collins was going to take any further calls from her. And ... who else was there? Yesterday she'd had some fun sending blind texts to Samson Riggs and Joe Ledger, but the novelty wore off. That wasn't real conversation.

There was no real conversation.

There was not even the possibility of real conversation.

Any conversation.

She felt a tear dangling from her jaw before she even realized that she was crying.

Then a thousand thoughts fluttered through her mind like a flock of starlings. Strange thoughts. Bad thoughts. Thoughts of dying, of suicide-though those thoughts were always with her. Other things, too. Like maybe she should call someone in the press. Give someone the interview of a lifetime. Make the most important call ever. Tell the whole story. Wow them.