Ledger said nothing.

"I'm afraid that if I don't understand it," continued Bliss, "then it's going to f.u.c.k me up. It's going to do something to my head."

"You talk to Rudy about this?"

"Yes," she said. "He suggested I talk to you."

"Ah."

She waited.

He drank more of his coffee and looked everywhere but at her.

The forensics people pulled another twisted shape out of the rubble.

"If you're sane," he said softly, "you find ways of disconnecting your actions in the field from their context in civilized society. We're a predator species, Bliss. Maybe we're moving toward a point of spiritual peacefulness and grace, but we're not there yet. We have a long d.a.m.n way to go. Evil is not an abstraction. It's a reality. And there are hundreds of variations on greed and corruption. Anyone who says different is a fool."

She waited, almost holding her breath.

"Killing is necessary in this line of work. The bad guys want to burn down the world. Like the Jakobys. They wanted to kill everyone who wasn't white according to their definition of white. That's evil, and that has to be fought. That kind of evil doesn't give up easily, either. They fight all the way, and they want to rack up as much of a body count as they can on the way down."

She knew he was talking about Grace Courtland, but she didn't say her name. An a.s.sa.s.sin working for the Jakobys had killed her. There was a rumor that Ledger had hunted the man down and murdered him somewhere in Europe. Courtland's ghost seemed to stand with them, eavesdropping on his words.

Ledger kept watching the forensics techs. "There was a time when I could remember the face and name of everyone I ever hurt. Everyone I ever killed. But since I joined the DMS, I can't even remember how many dozen people I've killed. In a war you don't count the dead and invite them into your head like that. You do that and you lose your s.h.i.t, you wander into the darkness and you don't come back. That's what happens to some guys who come home from the war. They make the error of taking stock of what they had to do while the war was going on, as if the things done in war could be a.s.sessed by a civilized mind. They can't. War is war. The best you can hope for is to have a clear understanding of who the enemy is and what it is you're fighting for. If you can hold that in your head, then you can continue to do whatever needs to be done."

"How do the bad guys do it?" she asked. "How are they able to kill and kill and stay sane?"

"Who says they do?" he asked, shaking his head.

"I've watched some of the tapes of Rudy interviewing some of the people you and Colonel Riggs and the others have arrested. Some of them seem so ordinary. How can they commit those atrocities if they have a conscience? Is it their nature? Or is it a nurture thing, are they from an environment that makes it okay for them?"

Joe grunted. "I asked Rudy that same exact question once."

"What did he say?"

"He said that the nature-versus-nurture argument is fundamentally flawed because it a.s.sumes that there are only two possible forces at work on a person. Sure, a person's nature is a factor-and that could be a product of their brain chemistry, or whatever makes a person a sociopath or a psychotic or a hero. Just as the forces at work in a person's life have to be taken into some account. Some abused children grow up to abuse, there's math for that. But neither viewpoint covers all the possible bases."

"So what's missing?"

"Choice," said Ledger. "Rudy thinks that choice is often more important than either nature or nurture. Some people grow up in h.e.l.l and choose to let others share in that h.e.l.l. Some people grow up in h.e.l.l and they make d.a.m.n sure they don't let those in their care even glimpse those fires. It's a choice."

"Not everyone can make that choice."

"No, of course not. But a lot more people can than you might think. Like the Jakobys. Like some of the people we fight. They want to be what they are. They groove on the power and the perks that come with it. It's how they paint the world in the colors that please them."

"Choice," she said.

"Choice," he agreed. "It's what defines us. And it's probably the most underrated power in the world."

"What about conscience?" she asked. "Where does that fall into the equation?"

"It's a factor. If I were naive I'd tell you that conscience is what steers us toward a good choice instead of a bad, but that's bulls.h.i.t. Conscience can be kicked to one side, it can be locked away, and in some people I think it can be killed."

"Killed?"

"Yeah. Hate will do it. When you can get to the point where you despise someone else, you can do all sorts of things to them. Look at how white folks treated blacks from the beginning of the slave trade. Those a.s.sholes had to convince themselves that blacks were subhuman in order to treat them the way they did. That was hate, sister, and it lasted for centuries."

"You're saying hate killed their conscience?"

"No. It edited their conscience. I imagine the slavers cared about their family and about white folks. They went to church and kissed babies. But they hated their slaves enough to brutalize and dehumanize them. Torture them. You know the drill. Happened to a lot of people in a lot of places. Still happens. There are a lot of sweatshops with women and kids more or less acting as slave labor now. You think the owners have sleepless nights thinking about how their employees feel? You think slumlords give a wet s.h.i.t about the squalid living conditions in their tenements? And look at the n.a.z.is and ... well, you see where I'm going with this. My point is that conscience isn't as powerful a force as we'd like it to be. If it was, we'd all be perfect. I sure as h.e.l.l don't put 'spotless Christian hero' in the blank for 'occupation.' No ... at the end of the day it's choice. You are what you choose to be. Good or bad, saint or sinner."

She thought about it. "Conscience isn't unbreakable, that's what you're saying?"

He snorted. "I've looked into the eyes of a lot of very bad people, Bliss. I've seen the damaged ones and the insane ones, I've seen the hurt ones and the a.s.swipes who hate anyone that doesn't look like them. Most of them are caught up in the nature, nurture, choice thing. But there are a few-not many, but a few-who don't have a conscience anymore. I'm not talking about sociopaths born without one, if such a thing is really possible. I'm talking about people who, when you look into their eyes, you know you're not looking at through windows of the soul. These are people who have no soul. No conscience. No nothing. They're dead inside."

"Sounds like you're describing a zombie."

"No, zombies are dead meat driven by nerve conduction. You science geeks told me that. No, sister," said Joe, "I'm talking about people who deliberately take a scalpel to their own psyches and carve out their conscience."

Bliss saw dark lights flare in Ledger's eyes.

"That's how evil is born," he said.

Chapter Thirty-seven.

Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Cafe Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street Park Slope, Brooklyn Sunday, August 31, 12:56 p.m.

The innocent and inexperienced often die because they are simply too shocked when violence sets into their lives. The possibility of violence is so foreign to the day-to-day reality of most people that even if they possess good reflexes there is no built-in protocol for how to react. So they hesitate, they stand and stare.

And they die.

In the split second before the smiling killers with the AK-47s opened up, Top hooked an arm around Caleb Sykes and was already in motion, halfway through a brutal diving tackle, when the bullets exploded the gla.s.s.

Bunny and I were also in motion. He was diving left, I was falling right and dragging Ghost with me. As we fell, Top, Bunny, and I tore at our jackets, pulling them open, grabbing for our guns.

We are not the innocents; and when it comes to violence and killing we, sadly, are not inexperienced.

The thunder of gunfire was impossibly loud. The huge picture window broke with a sound like all of the gla.s.s in the world shattering at once. Bullets tore into wooden desks and exploded the hearts of laptop computers. Chunks of plaster leaped from the walls.

I hit and slid toward the wall and floor, shoving Ghost with me, and I tried to cram us into the woodwork. Debris rained down on us. The razor edges of gla.s.s slashed at my clothes and skin. I could feel the bite as splinters sliced me. Blood was hot on my face and limbs. Ghost yelped and whined.

Then I was firing.

Firing.

Firing.

My rounds punched holes in the clouds of gun smoke and flying wreckage. Outside, one of the grinning killers suddenly spun away, but any cry of pain was lost in the din. Blood splashed the other killer, and there was a momentary pause as the second figure turned to watch his partner fall.

In that moment, Bunny put four rounds into his chest and face and blew him apart.

There was a second of silence so deafening I couldn't even hear the echoes of the gunfire. My head felt like it was inside a drum. Ghost scrambled out from under me, his coat glittering with gla.s.s splinters, teeth bared in a snarl of pure rage.

Then someone else opened up on us.

Heavy-caliber automatic fire, but muted. Distant. Bullets struck the front door, which disintegrated into meaningless fragments. The CLOSED sign was whipped around and seemed to dissolve into confetti as it was struck over and over again. I saw Bunny, who had begun to rise from the floor, suddenly jerk backward and fall as bullets struck him as other shooters opened up from across the street.

"Ghost-down!" I snapped, and I had to repeat the order to break through his shock and anger. Then he flattened to the floor, out of range of the bullets.

I dropped my magazine, fished for a new one, and slapped it in place, praying that Bunny wasn't dead. In that heartbeat of time it took to swap out the mags I cut a look across the room and saw Top and the kid, Sykes, lying under a blanket of silver and red debris. Silver from the gla.s.s, red from blood that ran from dozens of wounds in each of them.

"Green Giant!" called Top, using Bunny's combat call sign. There was fear and desperation in Top's voice.

Bunny didn't answer. I raised my weapon and began firing.

Bullets chopped into the frame around the window, but there was enough of it left to give me a bit of protection. Enough so that I could stand and return fire.

They had a.s.sault rifles and they capped off a lot of rounds, but it was wild, the bullets sawing back and forth. They were hosing the place but not really aiming. I found the pattern of their gunfire and took my moment, leaned around the bullet-pocked wall, and fired with every ounce of skill and precision that I've learned as a Ranger, a cop, and a special operator. One of the guns went instantly silent.

But there were four more shooters.

They were arrogant because they thought we were nothing.

They walked toward the front of the store in a loose line, firing, dropping spent magazines onto the blacktop, reloading, firing.

Then I sensed movement behind me and Top was on his feet, cutting low and forward to take cover behind the other side of the ruined window frame. He carried a Glock 34 with a nineteen-round extended magazine. I swapped out my magazine again and gave Top a nod. Then we emptied our magazines into the four men. They had the numbers and the better weapons.

We had the skill.

Even as their bullets continued to chew at our protection, we aimed with precision, forcing down the panic, keeping our heads in the moment, letting all of our training carry us through the insanity. We conserved our ammunition, picked our targets, and killed them. Their bodies juddered and danced, blood erupting from terrible wounds. The slide on my gun locked back.

"I'm out," I said.

"Got this," said Top as he swapped in his last magazine.

But there was nothing left to do.

No one left to fight.

Outside, the street was littered with the dead. Sh.e.l.l casings by the hundreds twinkled in the bright sunlight. Just as it gleamed from the bright blood that flowed out from beneath the bodies. A pall of gun smoke polluted the afternoon air of this quiet part of Brooklyn. In the distance I could see the heads and shoulders of people hiding behind bullet-riddled cars and benches.

Ghost staggered to his feet, furious for having no one to attack. He snarled and showed his fangs, but the only audience left was the dead.

With Ghost beside me, I stepped through the shattered window and scooped up a rifle that lay by the slack hand of one of the first two men I'd killed. I tore a magazine from his pocket, dropped the half-empty one, and slapped the fresh one into place. The echo of thunder still hammered in my head.

Seven bodies were collapsed in ugly heaps.

Smoke ghosts haunted the air above them and drifted between the store and the open doors of a now-empty white panel truck.

The first two shooters were on the pavement just outside the window. One lay in a twist, arms reaching toward the truck as if imploring help that could never arrive. The other was splayed like a starfish.

All of the corpses were dressed in black hoodies.

All of them were young. Twenties. Late teens.

Kids.

Except for the smoke, nothing moved.

The only sound was the fading echo of death and the soft moans from Caleb Sykes.

Then I remembered Bunny and wheeled around, but I saw Top helping him to his feet. There were two holes in Bunny's shirt, but the Kevlar had done its job. Even so, Bunny looked gray and sick and in pain. They stepped through the gaping window, fanning their gun barrels left and right, eyes tracking, looking for more targets.

But there was nothing.

This storm had raged and raged, but now it had pa.s.sed.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, we lowered our guns.

Far away was the promise of complications as sirens began to wail.

Top looked down at the shooter who lay dead at his feet, arms and legs splayed wide. With the sungla.s.ses blown away, the revealed face was slack in death. It had been a pretty face. A woman's face.

Young. Asian.

"Mother Night?" murmured Top.

But I shook my head.

"I don't know."

Somewhere back inside the store my cell phone lay amid the debris, and I recalled the last text message I'd received. "n.o.body lives forever."

Maybe the woman on the ground wasn't Mother Night, but I was now absolutely certain who was sending me messages.

A police car rounded the corner at the end of the block and screamed its way toward us.

Interlude Ten The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Three and a Half Years Ago On a cold November morning Artemisia Bliss trudged into the Hangar, lightly hungover from too many dirty martinis and exhausted from a night with Bill Collins. The man was inexhaustible. She suspected he took something. v.i.a.g.r.a and maybe some kind of energizer. Whatever it was, he could go all night like a h.o.r.n.y, well-hung version of the Energizer bunny. It was worse than s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a college boy-and college boys were notorious for having no off b.u.t.ton when it came to s.e.x. For her own part, Bliss had a lot of appet.i.te, but she didn't have the staying power she once had.

When she looked into the bathroom mirror before leaving her apartment it was like looking at a zombie movie.

"Yeah," she told her image, "you're ready for that Vogue cover shoot."