"This is f.u.c.ked up," muttered Cletus. It was probably the twentieth time he'd said it, but Duke couldn't argue with the sentiment.

Inside the event s.p.a.ce, two of the other guys were unfolding the mats and laying them out on the floor. So far, thirty-six of the blue-and-tan mats were down, their sides trued up and secured with Velcro. Later those joins would have to be covered with strips of duct tape, and that meant a couple of hours with all four of them walking around on their knees.

"This blows," said Duke, which had become his go-to response every time Cletus made his comment. They were both puffing and bathed in sweat.

All around the edges of the event s.p.a.ce, groups of people watched and offered no help at all. Duke wanted to say something smart-a.s.s to them, but everyone was wearing a black belt. Some of them had swords and staffs and all that Jackie Chan s.h.i.t.

The Kentucky Brawl was an annual Labor Day weekend martial arts tournament that drew compet.i.tors from eastern Kentucky, northwestern Tennessee, and the western part of West Virginia. Duke could throw a punch, but he didn't want to complicate the day by brawling with three hundred trained fighters.

Under his breath, he muttered, "Wouldn't kill one of these a.s.sholes to give us a hand for five minutes."

Cletus grinned. "They might break a sweat. Couldn't have that."

For some reason they both thought that was funny, and they laughed as they carried the next load in.

On the way out to the truck they pa.s.sed a couple of kids heading in. Teenagers with hoodies and sungla.s.ses. Cletus and Duke ignored them. The kids were carrying backpacks and had the slacker look, but they were both Asian, so the guys figured they were there for the tournament. They didn't look tough, but you couldn't always tell with kung fu and karate types.

At the truck, Duke stopped and stretched, bending backward with a grunt to try to pop his vertebrae back into place. Cletus opened a couple of cans of Mr. Pibb and handed one to Duke, who stopped stretching to knock back half of his can of pop.

Later, when reporters and police interviewed them, it was Cletus who first said that their lives were saved by Mr. Pibb. If they hadn't stopped to drink their sodas, they would have been inside when the bombs went off.

As it was, they were only flash-burned and bruised from the shockwave that picked them up and flung them against the stack of mats waiting to be carried inside. They were not among the eighteen dead and ninety wounded.

In one of those public relations decisions that defy rational explanation, the Coca-Cola company, manufacturers of Mr. Pibb, gave the boys a lifetime supply of Pibb and hired them for public appearances. They became known as the Pibb Boys.

Even Duke and Cletus thought that was weird.

Their story went unnoticed, however, by the people who received the video feed from cameras placed inside the arena prior to the detonation of the bombs.

Chapter Twenty-two.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn Sunday, August 31, 8:38 a.m.

Rudy and I had just pulled into the cavernous hangar that gives the Brooklyn DMS headquarters its name. The hangar itself is mostly a parking garage. From the outside it looks like a dilapidated abandoned building. Lots of broken windows and obscene graffiti. But that was all for show. There was a double sh.e.l.l to the building, and directly behind those broken windows was a curved screen that projected a false interior view that reinforced the image of squalor. But behind that screen were walls of steel-reinforced concrete, sensors, alarms, and hidden guard posts. The guards who walked the perimeter were dressed to look like laborers working on restoring the building. They weren't. Most were former DMS field-team shooters who were either too old for active fieldwork or who'd been injured on the job and couldn't roll out for the kind of thing Echo Team faces down. Even so, it would be a serious mistake to mistake them for old guys or cripples. That would be bad in very messy ways.

My cell vibrated. I killed the Explorer's engine and pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was another text message from "A."

ONE OR THOUSANDS?.

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?.

I showed it to Rudy.

"Nicely vague," he said. "There's no context to suggest a meaning."

I grunted something unpleasant and forwarded the message to Bug.

As we climbed out of the Explorer we were met by Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, a ma.s.sive and battle-scarred black man with a metal leg and hands that I'm pretty sure could crush a Volvo. When Gus Dietrich had been killed at the Warehouse last year, Brick had stepped up to take his place as Mr. Church's personal aide and bodyguard. He wasn't as tall as Bunny, but he had bigger arms and a broader chest. He usually had a genial smile, though he wasn't wearing one now.

"What's wrong?" asked Rudy as soon as he spotted Brick's troubled expression.

"The big man will fill you in," said Brick, "but the short version is that Shockwave Team just got cut in half on a routine look-and-see in Virginia."

"Dios mio!" gasped Rudy.

The bottom seemed to fall out of my stomach. "What happened?"

"They rolled on a tip that a Chechnyan extremist team was in-country to start some s.h.i.t over the Labor Day weekend. Riggs and his boys kicked the door, but it wasn't Chechnyans waiting for them, and Riggs lost all of Two Squad."

I bared my teeth. "Who ambushed them?"

There was a queer look in Brick's dark eyes. "That's the weird part, man. Like I said, these weren't Chechnyans."

He pulled his smartphone and opened the image files. The picture he showed us was a dead man. The face was distorted, brutish, with a heavy brow, wide nose, thin lips, and teeth with overgrown incisors.

"Berserkers...?" whispered Rudy. "I thought ... I thought..."

"Come on," said Brick. "The big man will give you the full briefing."

Chapter Twenty-three.

Office of the Vice President The White House Washington, D.C.

Sunday, August 31, 8:39 a.m.

"Sir!" cried Boo Radley as he burst into the office. "There's something on the news. You have to see this."

William Collins quickly closed his phone and hid it between his thighs, out of sight of his chief of staff.

"See what?" he asked.

Radley s.n.a.t.c.hed the TV remote from the coffee table, aimed it at the flatscreen on the wall, and turned up the volume. The screen was filled with the face of a lovely Asian woman in a Betty Page black Dutchboy and opaque movie star sungla.s.ses. Below her image was a banner: WHO IS MOTHER NIGHT?

The woman was speaking. "... are slaves only if we allow ourselves to be slaves. We are free if we take to the streets and take the streets back."

"Teresa Naylor at the President's office called to alert me about this," said Radley. "It's on every station. Some kind of computer virus that's hacked into all the news feeds."

Collins held a finger to his lips. "Shhhh, I want to hear this."

"... That wasn't anarchy. The pigs in the system haven't seen anarchy. Not yet." The woman licked her lips "But it's coming. The only action is direct action."

It took every ounce of willpower the vice president possessed not to smile. Not to leer. That smile was delicious.

"Mother Night," he said softly.

The video ended and after a few awkward moments the face of the Fox News reporter blinked onto the screen, looking confused and angry. He immediately began jabbering, but Collins took the remote and muted the TV, then tossed the device onto his desk blotter.

"The White House needs to make a response," said Radley.

"That's the President's job," said Collins.

"But-"

"But," interrupted Collins, "whoever did this had to have hacked into the systems. That means it's a cybercrime. And that makes it ours and we have to jump on this. Right f.u.c.king now. Get the team on this and set up a conference call with the divisional leaders. Do it now."

Radley spun and nearly ran from the room, his eyes suddenly alight with purpose.

Then Collins sat back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, enjoying the way a smile felt on his face. He thought about the face of Mother Night. About her lips.

Those lips were incredibly s.e.xy.

Full and ripe.

He remembered the way they looked when she kissed her way slowly up his thighs this morning.

Chapter Twenty-four.

Westin Hotel Atlanta, Georgia Sunday, August 31, 8:41 a.m.

Mother Night arrived back in Atlanta courtesy of a private jet and driver. Her suite at the Westin was on the sixty-ninth floor, well above the motion and noise of the convention that sprawled among that hotel and four others here in the heart of Atlanta. She had other rooms-bolt holes, changing rooms, and staging areas-at the other four hotels that formed the loose quad used as a kind of convention center here in the heart of Atlanta.

Sixty thousand people thronged the streets and lobbies of those hotels. They were all very loud and everywhere you looked there was a dense crowd of people, more than half of whom were in costume. Mother Night had walked among them several times over the last two days, sometimes dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider-and she knew she had the legs to rock that costume; other times as Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, Sophitia Alexandra from SoulCalibur, and the other night she danced herself blind at a party while wearing the full bat-wing costume of Morrigan Aensland from Dark Stalker. She'd had to glue her b.r.e.a.s.t.s into the costume to keep from flashing the fanboys. Though later, when she'd cut one guy out of the pack and dragged him off to one of her rented rooms, he'd been so eager to get her out of her bustier that he nearly tore her nipples off. It was very good glue.

The pain was a turn-on for both of them.

Just like it was with Bill Collins. She never once left his bed without bruises or the burning imprint of his open palm on her flesh.

She had a costume ready for later today-Lucy Kuo from Infamous 2-for the big event in the afternoon. The costume was perfect. She'd made it by hand and every attention to detail was paid. Her body was ready for that costume, too. Brazilian surgeons had given her bigger and better b.o.o.bs, sculpted her cheekbones, thinned her nose, and puffed up her lips. With the a.s.s and legs genetics had given her, she knew that she was a knockout, a knock 'em dead statuesque beauty, and when she walked out in a costume everyone noticed her. Everyone. Male, female, traffic cops, everyone with eyes.

That was fine. Mother Night wanted to be noticed.

Right now, though, she was dressed in a different costume, as a character from an entirely different game. She was dressed as Mother Night from the game Burn to Shine.

Her own creations. Persona and game.

In all of gaming, there was no more dangerous a female character. Not a shooter, not a sword-wielding killer of orcs and war machines, nothing like that. Mother Night was a different kind of power. She had others to do the killing for her, to crack the game levels, to rack up the points.

She had an army.

And as she sat there at the computer, she watched the first news reports about that army. None of it connected yet. Not event to event, or events to her. That was the next level of the game. However, on her monitor she watched the first fires being set in Lexington, in Gettysburg, in Savannah.

With so many more to come.

Her long, slender fingers danced over the keys, capturing the news feeds and sending them to recipients in a dozen countries.

She felt her heart racing.

Hammering.

With a start she realized that her whole body was trembling. Sweat was gathering under her clothes and in the hollows of her palms.

It had started.

Her children were going to war.

She suddenly felt so strange. Nausea churned in her stomach and she abruptly stood and headed quickly toward the bathroom, but suddenly the floor seemed to tilt under her. She staggered sideways and hit the wall next to the bathroom door. Her balance was so ruined that she hit hard, bruising her shoulder, knocking her head against the wall, sliding down, collapsing onto the floor. Her rump struck the polished marble hard enough to knock her teeth together.

"What ... what...?" she demanded of the moment.

The shakes started then, sweeping through her, running like cold fire through her skin, pebbling her flesh with goose b.u.mps, striking sparks in her eyes.

"What's happening?" she screamed.

The shivers continued, wave after wave. Tears broke from the corners of her eyes and ran in hot lines down her cheeks.

"What's happening?"

This time the question was spoken in a tiny voice. Lost, and without hope of an answer.

But deep down she knew what was happening.

After all, it wasn't the first time something like this had occurred.

There were other times.

Three so far. Three she knew of, but she suspected there had been others. Fugue states that were wiped from her memory but which had left her asleep in strange places. The living room floor in her apartment. In the backseat of her car. Once on a bench by a river a hundred miles from where she lived.

It was all stress, she told herself.

Just that.