It had started years ago. The first had really been the worst, when a young woman who looked very much like her was murdered in a horrible way. Burned alive. Mother Night hadn't been there, but she imagined the screams and they echoed in her head for many nights after that. Drugs, alcohol, and hard s.e.x with brutal men helped, but only when she was awake. Whenever she slept, those screams were there.

The death was necessary, of course. Mother Night knew and accepted that. If the girl hadn't died, then Mother Night could never have been born. When viewed as a problem in mathematics, of cause and effect, then it was easier to bear.

And the girl who'd died volunteered for it. Begged for it.

Of course she did. She'd been carefully picked and cultivated for that one purpose.

The woman who'd thrown the gasoline and match was less important, and her death two days later-her head was rammed into the shower wall a dozen times-meant nothing to Mother Night. The woman was a parasite who was going down for her third felony conviction on the three strikes rule. She'd thought the torch job was a payday, and that's all it was to her. The same went for the two d.y.k.es Mother Night paid to kill her in the shower. They, at least, were more or less human, and when they got out of jail they'd have money waiting.

But that burning girl.

G.o.d.

The shakes had been worse then.

They'd come again when the hit team she sent after Reginald Boyd had been slaughtered by Joe Ledger. It did not matter that their deaths were an almost foregone conclusion. Either they would die, or Boyd and Ledger would die, or some combination thereof.

When she heard that all of her people had died, and that Ledger had strangled pretty little Luisa Kan, the shakes came back. Very nasty, very intense. Mother Night had thrown up repeatedly and had diarrhea for two days.

It was nearly as bad when she'd helped torture a rogue scientist in Vilnius. Mother Night thought that it would be fun, that it would be interesting. Maybe even a turn-on. Instead it had been loud and ugly and smelly, and it had sickened her.

Even so ...

That time wasn't as bad as the fiery death of the girl in prison.

Now the shakes were back.

d.a.m.n it, they were back.

Anger flared in her so intensely that it nearly pushed back the horror.

And that's what it was.

Horror.

Her people were out there killing people. With bombs, guns, knives, bare hands. On the news, the police were throwing out wild estimates of the dead in Lexington.

That was the tip of the iceberg.

There would be so many more deaths. Today. Tonight.

Tomorrow.

So many more.

Her teeth chattered as if she sat in a cold wind.

"Stop it," she snarled. She bared her teeth at the world, at whatever part of her was so weak, so feeble, so chickens.h.i.t that it rebelled against the reality of everything she had spent years planning. She was smart enough to know that this was her conscience fighting for its existence. Fighting as hard as it could even though the battle had been lost when that match touched the gasoline-soaked flesh of a young woman in a lonely prison cell.

"f.u.c.k you!" she screamed at the air around her.

The echo of it punched her in the face, the ears, the heart.

But she drew in as deep a breath as she could and screamed it out again, tensing every muscle, balling her fists, straining the muscles in her throat, roaring it with black hatred at her own weakness.

"f.u.c.k you!"

The shakes rippled once more. Again.

Then stopped.

Mother Night sat there on the hard floor, her back against the wall, panting like a dog, fingernails gouging the flesh of her palms.

"f.u.c.k you," she whispered.

That whisper was as cold as dead stone.

She detested the weakness inside of her. The part of her who still felt. The part of her who wanted to put the barrel of a gun into her mouth and pull the trigger. The part of her that craved to punish and be punished for sins committed and pending.

"f.u.c.k you," she said again.

She could hear the news reporters growing hysterical as they speculated on whether the bombings were connected. Was this another Boston Marathon? Was this something new? Was it terrorism? Was is Muslims? Was it militiamen? The rumors and theories flew and escalated with each new body added to the count.

The people to whom she'd sent these news links would be watching. They would be expecting her to call. Her, Mother Night, not a weeping suicidal fool who had no guts or backbone.

After a long while she clawed her way to her feet and shambled into the bathroom to wash away the stink of regret. She had important video calls to make and she was d.a.m.n well not going to show any sign of weakness.

"f.u.c.k you," she said one last time.

Chapter Twenty-five.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn Sunday, August 31, 8:44 a.m.

Church wasn't available to see me, so I had to gird my loins to face Aunt Sallie.

She looked like Whoopi Goldberg but had the personality of an alligator with hemorrhoids. No, check that, a hemorrhoidal gator would be much nicer. It's my personal opinion that Auntie wasn't so much born as burst out of someone's chest like one of those creatures in those alien movies. Her opinion of me is slightly lower than that of used toilet paper stuck to her shoe. You'll be shocked to learn that we have failed to bond.

In the hierarchy of the DMS, she was the appropriately named "number two," and she ran the Hangar as if it were her private ring of h.e.l.l. She and Church had history going back decades and there were rumors that once upon a time Aunt Sallie was one of the most feared shooters in the world. I believe those rumors.

Ghost disliked her as intensely as I did, but he stood behind me, out of her line of sight. Brave combat dog.

When Rudy and I asked her about Samson Riggs and Shockwave, her reply was pure Aunt Sallie. "He walked into a trap and had his a.s.s handed to him. f.u.c.king idiot got his people killed."

"That's hardly fair, Auntie," protested Rudy.

She ignored him. They get along once in a while, but on a day-to-day basis the only person who can actually stand Auntie is Dr. Hu. And there's a real surprise.

As for Colonel Samson Riggs, he was about as far away from being a "f.u.c.king idiot" as it was possible to get. He was the top team leader in the Department of Military Sciences, a real-life James Bond type who was smart, good-looking, suave, talented, inventive, and tougher than anyone I've ever met. Am I gushing like a fanboy? Maybe. Riggs was everything I wanted to be, and while normally natural human envy might dictate that I hate him, I didn't. Maybe couldn't. He was how I imagined Church might have been back in the day, except Riggs had a set of human emotions. I've done six missions with him, and each time I came away knowing more about how to do my job that I could have learned anywhere else. The fact that I had nearly as high a clearance rate as him meant nothing to me except that he set so great an example that I aspired to be like him, and maybe that brought my game up to a higher level. Hard to say.

His team were all heroes. No joke. Actual saved-the-world heroes.

To think that he'd lost four of them was appalling.

"Do we know where those Berserkers came from?" I asked.

Auntie shrugged. "That's being looked into."

"You want me to take Echo out there to-?" I began, but Auntie shook her head.

"You're supposed to be screening recruits, Ledger," she said sharply. "We need that done, so don't try to skip out on your responsibilities."

Ghost growled low and mean.

Aunt Sallie glared at him. "Growl at me again and yours wouldn't be the first nuts I've cut off."

Ghost did his best impersonation of a hole in the air.

I smiled at Auntie. "Do you spend time every night looking in a mirror and practicing how to scowl?"

She smiled back. "No, I look at a picture of you and practice gagging. Now get to work. If there's anything you need to know, you'll be told, so stop bothering me. I have grown-up work to do."

With that she turned and headed off to the TOC-the Tactical Operations Center-leaving Rudy and I standing in a pool of her disapproval. When she was well out of earshot, Ghost gave another low growl.

"That was refreshing," murmured Rudy.

"I know, chatting with her always validates me as a person."

He looked at his watch. "I'd better see if Samson needs me out there. His team must be in a great deal of pain."

"No doubt. Give them my best. I'll call Riggs later on."

Rudy nodded and head off.

"Come on, fierce descendant of wolves," I said to Ghost, who slunk along at my heels.

Chapter Twenty-six.

Reconnaissance General Bureau Special Office #103 Pyongyang, Democratic People's Republic of Korea Sunday, August 31, 9:00 a.m. EST Colonel Sim Sa-jeong sat at his workstation and watched a series of events unfold half a world away. Six separate windows had opened on his monitor, each one obscuring the face of the person with whom he had been communicating. One window showed a sports arena in Kentucky seconds before bombs exploded. Another showed a random act of brutal murder in a fine-arts store. The rest were similar. Brutality and explosions.

Sim reached for his cup of tea but it remained in his white-knuckled fingers for long minutes, the tea growing as cold as the blood in his veins.

Then, one by the one, the small windows winked out until only the original image remained. The smiling face of a woman.

She spoke in English, not bothering to provide a translation. Sim had been a.s.signed as her contact here in North Korea because his English was very good. A similar arrangement had been made, he was certain, in other countries.

The woman said, "Do I have your attention?"

Sim cleared his throat. "You do," he said. "But of what value are these acts? Small bombs? Casual murders? Are we supposed to care about petty violence in America? We already know that it is a nation filled with corruption and-"

"Please," said the woman, "let us forgo speeches. They are trite and repeated by rote, and I do not care to hear them."

"Then-"

"These events are intended for three reasons," she said. "The first is to get your attention, which I believe I have."

Colonel Sim said nothing.

"The second is to make sure that the signals from the cameras are routed properly to you."

Sim again said nothing, waiting for what was surely the true point of this elaborate and highly dangerous contact.

"And the third is to inform you that the auction will commence on schedule. Five minutes before the bidding begins I will send a call-in code and a banking routing number. Each bidder will receive a separate routing number. Any attempt to use that routing number for any purpose except to make a bid will result in termination."

"Termination of what?"

The woman merely smiled and this time she did not answer.

Sim considered. "You ask a lot and yet we do not know this thing on which we are expected to bid? Do you take us as fools? Do you expect us to bid on crude bombs such as the ones-?"

"Of course not," she said smoothly, her smile never wavering. "You are bidding on something that will change the nature of the arms race. Something that will, in fact, end it. If you bid correctly, it will end the inequality of the arms race solidly in your favor."

"This is needlessly cryptic."

"Is it?" She laughed. The woman had a deep, throaty laugh that Sim found entirely unpleasant. "Make sure someone is watching this feed, Colonel. By the time the bidding begins you will have no doubts as to the value of what we are selling."

"What a.s.surances can you provide that this is not an elaborate trick?"

"Beyond seventeen weeks of your own vetting process?" she asked.

"Yes. Beyond even that."

"Keep watching the feed, Colonel. By the opening bell you will have no doubts at all. I can guarantee it."

Before he could respond, the face vanished, replaced by a placeholder image of a sloppily painted letter A surrounded by a tight letter O. Even in China the symbol was known. It represented a concept that was totally ant.i.thetical to the strict Marxist social-political concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It was the circle-A.