"Sure, sure," said Hu, breaking his own silence, "and what are we supposed to do if we ever encounter this 'chaos factor' in one of our enemies?"

"If it was someone like that, we'd throw Ledger or Riggs against him."

"And if they weren't available?" asked Bliss.

"G.o.d help us if that ever happened, doc," said Dietrich. "Because we would stand no chance at all."

Chapter Fifty-two.

Euclid Avenue Station Euclid and Pitkin Avenues Brooklyn, New York Sunday, August 31, 1:37 p.m.

We jumped the curb and drove straight into Prospect Park and tore deep furrows in the dirt of the baseball field as we raced to meet the Black Hawk. The big helicopter's wheels touched down at the same time that I slewed us into a bad skidding, turning stop. We left the doors open and ran bent over through the rotor wash, Ghost ranging ahead. The bay door opened and we dived in.

"Go, go, go!" I bellowed, and the helo rose straight up into the afternoon air.

By car, it's twelve congested miles from Park Slope to the subway entrance on Euclid Avenue at Pitkin, and by now the streets around the station would be jammed with civilians wanting a peek at a disaster. The Black Hawk helicopter tore above the traffic at nearly two hundred miles an hour. We were there in minutes.

It still felt like too long.

During that short flight, Top, Bunny, and I shucked our torn and bloodstained suits and pulled on black BDU trousers and tank tops. Then the tech crew helped us into Saratoga Hammer suits. These are two-piece, lightweight overgarments consisting of a coat with integral hood and separate trousers. The suit incorporates a two-layer fabric system consisting of liquid repellent cotton fabric and a carbon sphere liner. The double layers protect against chemical warfare vapors, liquids, and aerosols. The ones Mr. Church bought for us were not the standard off-the-rack variety but a special grade designed by a friend of his within the company. They were tougher and they had spider-silk fabric woven into what is normally Kevlar sheathing. Very tough and tear-resistant.

Not tear-proof, but tear-resistant. The difference mattered and it was never far from our minds.

Our suits were black and unmarked. No agency patch or rank insignia of any kind. With the helmets on and balaclavas in place we looked like high-tech ninjas. We strapped gun belts around our hips and equipment harnesses to our torsos. These harnesses had pouches for lots of extra magazines and hooks for flash-bangs and fragmentation grenades.

They don't make Hammer suits for dogs. "You're staying on the chopper," I told Ghost. He gave me a wounded and baleful glare.

The weapons tech from the Hangar, a moose named Bobby Cooper-Coop to everyone-handed out lots of useful gizmos and additional equipment, including various-sized blaster-plasters, knives, strangle wires, and everything else a psychotic kid might have on his Christmas list. The last thing Coop did was strap a tactical computer to each of our forearms. When he was done, he patted me on the shoulder. "You're good to go."

"Thanks, Coop. Take care of my dog, okay?"

He grinned. "With all the s.h.i.t that's going on today, Joe, I think Ghost and I should go the h.e.l.l out and get drunk."

"He'd like that."

Coop's grin was fragile and it eventually slid off. "Is it true? Are you going after walkers?"

"We'll see," I said to Coop. He didn't press it.

Bunny clipped a st.u.r.dy fighting knife handle-downward onto his rig, ready for a fast pull. He said, "Is this more Mother Night stuff, too?"

"Don't know," I said.

"It is," said Top. We didn't argue. We couldn't be sure, but the day had a certain feel to it. A lot of things were sliding downhill, but it seemed to be one hand doing the pushing.

"How'd they get this s.h.i.t?" asked Bunny. "I mean, we have it secured, right?"

"Yes, at the Locker," I a.s.sured him.

"You sure?"

I wanted to tell him that of course I was sure. Instead I contacted Nikki. "Have someone run a security check on the Locker. Let's make sure that-"

"We already did," said Nikki. "As soon as word came in about the subway, Aunt Sallie initiated a system-wide security lockdown and status check. All the lights at the Locker are green."

That was a tremendous relief. Keeping that place safe was always number one on any security to-do list. Always.

The Locker is the nickname for the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, located three quarters of a mile beneath a wooded hill in a thinly populated corner of Virginia. There are other similar facilities scattered around the country and the world, places where dangerous things like chemical weapons and VX nerve gas and other monsters are stored. Domestic and international agreements have shut a lot of them down, but we still have a few, some being closely monitored by congressional watchdog groups and teams of independent observers composed of members of NATO, the U.N., and others. And there are facilities squirreled away in places no one would think to look for them. Places funded by obscure allotments in black budgets; places you might pa.s.s every day and never know what insanity was stored behind nondescript stone walls and meaningless signs.

But there's no other place exactly like the Locker.

In the six years since its inception, the Department of Military Sciences has gone to the mat with the world's most extreme terrorists. Not just al-Qaeda fanatics wearing explosive vests or Taliban fighters with shoulder-mounted RPGs. I'm talking about actual mad scientists who put vast amounts of money and their own towering but fractured intellects to the task of creating the most dangerous bioweapons imaginable. Things like quick-onset Ebola, mutated strains of anthrax, radical new forms of ultracontagious tuberculosis, weaponized HIV, and even genetically engineered contagious forms of diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell, which had previously been purely genetic disorders. And, not that this s.h.i.t had to get any scarier, but there were also a slew of designer superpathogens in there, each of them constructed as doomsday weapons, either as threats in the postnuclear covert arms race or as kill-them-all-let-our-version-of-G.o.d-sort-'em-out holy war weapons, or retaliatory devices for use as a Hail Mary pa.s.s if their side was losing a war. Stuff like Lucifer 113, Vijivshiy Odin-Vasemnartzets, Reaper, and the seif-al-din. Stuff no sane human, however politically or theologically motivated, should be capable of dreaming up, let alone making. All of these things were out on the bleeding edge of science.

In my four years with the DMS I've taken my fair share of these toys away from people like the Jakobys, Sebastian Gault, the Cabal, the Seven Kings, the Red Order, the Hebbelmann Group, and others. Too many others. I've had to do some terrible things to keep those weapons from creating the misery for which they were created. Things that have ruined any chance I will ever have of sleeping peacefully through an entire night.

I told Nikki to make sure Church called me as soon as he was free and then disconnected. In my pocket my cell phone vibrated. I removed it and all three of us looked at the message window.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE HEAD.

"Well, ain't that d.a.m.n interesting?" said Top sourly. "Nice of someone to give us advice in our time of trials and tribulations."

"Amen, Reverend," said Bunny. His tone was light, but his eyes were bright with tension.

I said nothing. It was getting harder and harder not to smash the phone against the metal wall of the helo.

"Those texts have to be from Mother Night," said Top. "This new one proves that she knows what we're about to step into. It proves that she has the seif-al-din."

Bunny licked his lips. "Okay, but how the h.e.l.l did she get her hands on it?"

"I don't know," I said. "But we're going to find out."

"Hooah," Bunny agreed.

Without taking his eyes from mine, Top Sims said, very softly, "And then we are going to kill her and everyone working with her."

I added two extra magazines to my pouch. "Yes, we d.a.m.n well are."

"Hooah," they both said.

"Coming up on it," called the pilot.

Interlude Thirteen Terror Town Mount Baker, Washington State Three Years Ago When Dr. Bliss heard the news it rocked her.

Hugo Vox was a traitor.

Worse than a traitor, he was a terrorist and ma.s.s murderer.

And, worst of all, he was a founding member of the Seven Kings. A faux secret society that borrowed the myths and legends of other secret societies-real and imagined-to make itself appear ancient and vastly powerful.

Only some of that was a lie. They were not ancient ... but their power was beyond dispute.

The Twin Towers had fallen according to their plan. As did the London Hospital. The Seven Kings used bribery, manipulation, and other means to inspire various fundamentalist groups to commit acts of terrorism. The Kings, knowing that such atrocities always impacted the stock market, made hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of that money would never and could never be recovered.

And Hugo Vox was at the heart of the whole thing.

A man trusted by everyone in the U.S. government, from Mr. Church to the president. A man who had access everywhere. A man who was tasked with developing the most elite counterterrorism and ant.i.terrorism training programs.

Bliss stood in Vox's office at Terror Town, the training facility in Washington State where America trained its agents, and where teams from the nation's allies came to learn the best ways to combat terror.

The irony seemed to scream at her from every molecule of air in the place.

Vox was a bad guy.

The news seemed to hit Bliss very hard but from several different angles. On one hand, as a DMS team member, the betrayal was huge. It rocked the foundations of the whole organization and damaged the previously iron-hard credibility of Mr. Church. There were some angry murmurs in congress that Church already had too much freedom of action, and that his judgment no longer warranted that level of trust or authority. Bliss thought this was a little unfair. She had no love for Church or that harpy, Aunt Sallie, but Vox was a master manipulator. Maybe the smartest and most subtle of his kind that ever lived. He hadn't just fooled Church, Vox fooled everyone. Including the president and every member of Congress, including the grumblers. They'd all been cheerleaders for Vox for years. Church was merely a handy target. That rankled Bliss.

On a more personal level, she was hurt. She liked Vox and had worked closely with him and his protegee, Dr. Circe O'Tree, on dozens of cases. She'd gone to him to vet nearly every employee she hired for her division and every contractor she used when designing security systems for top-secret facilities like the Locker. Many of those people had been personally vetted by Vox.

Just as she had been.

Until two weeks ago, "vetted by Vox" was the highest stamp of approval you could get. It was a badge of honor. Grace Courtland had been vetted by Vox. So had Top Sims, Captain Ledger's right-hand man. And dozens of others in the DMS, and hundreds within government service.

Clearly not all of them could be villains. But how to tell which ones were Vox's creatures?

But the news. .h.i.t Bliss in another way.

She found that she admired Vox even more for all of this.

Admired him a lot.

Thinking about it sent a thrill through her veins. This was real power. Bigger power than anything she'd ever glimpsed. Eclipsing Church by miles, in her estimation. Power that changed the entire world. 9/11 was a point around which the future history of everyone on earth turned, and Vox had done that.

Vox.

She sat at his desk and looked at the computer he'd left behind. Vox had somehow constructed some technology that could fool MindReader. He had untraceable cell phones. His plotting was accomplished through some means MindReader could neither detect nor control.

Power.

So much power.

Bliss booted up the computer and, when it was ready, removed two devices from her bag. One was a micro MindReader substation. The other was something neither Aunt Sallie nor Bug nor Mr. Church knew she had. A device Bliss had painstakingly constructed from the schematics she'd found in Paris Jakoby's computer.

He'd called it Pangaea, and from his records it was clear that the system was not only designed and built by a now-dead Italian computer pioneer, but it was without doubt the forerunner of MindReader. There were far too many similarities for it to be coincidence. Bliss did a little digging, and from bits and pieces of information gleaned from Bug, Captain Ledger, and Dr. Hu, it seemed that in his pre-DMS days, Church had run with an international team of shooters. They'd torn down a group called the Cabal, which in turn had been built on the philosophical and scientific bones of the Third Reich. Pangaea had been allowed the Cabal-and later the Jakobys-to steal information from hundreds of other research programs around the world. Steal it without leaving evidence of the theft. By combining research from so many sources, the Jakobys were able to make what appeared to be freakish intuitive leaps in various fields related to genetics.

Captain Ledger and Grace Courtland had torn their empire apart, killing Paris and his sister, Hecate, in the process. That Grace Courtland had also died was something Bliss thought she'd feel bad about, but found that she did not.

Several Pangaea workstations had been bagged and tagged by the DMS forensics team, but the schematics in Paris Jakoby's desk were known only to Bliss. She'd copied them and then deleted them. Then she spent months handcrafting a new system that including many of her own upgrades. Although she had great respect for the man who designed Pangaea, she knew that she was smarter. Her knowledge base, in terms of programming, hacking, and cyberwarfare, was decades fresher. That meant that the computer she built was as unlike MindReader as it was similar. A cousin rather than a twin.

It was no longer Pangaea, and it was definitely not MindReader.

She gave it a new name.

Haruspex.

That was far more suitable, considering how she'd built it. A haruspex, in terms of ancient Etruscan and Roman culture, was a person who could divine the future and unlock the mysteries of the fates by reading the entrails of sacrificed sheep.

Very appropriate. She'd read her own future in the entrails of Pangaea. Haruspex had been born in the blood of devastation left behind by the slaughter at the Dragon Factory and the fall of the Jakoby empire of twisted science.

Now she had a computer that was nearly as powerful as MindReader, and more important, one that was invisible to Church's system.

Invisibility was a kind of power.

She smiled at the thought. It was like a superpower. Bliss had enough geek genes to actively wish that she could be a superhero.

Or even a supervillain.

But this was the real world.

She sighed and began her a.s.sault on Hugo Vox's computers using MindReader and Haruspex.

Firewalls and anti-intrusion programs rose up to challenge her, but with the deftness of a pagan priest of the religion of cyberscience, she eviscerated them and thereby divined their secrets.

Chapter Fifty-three.

Euclid Avenue Station Euclid and Pitkin Avenues Brooklyn, New York Sunday, August 31, 1:52 p.m.

I leaned my head and shoulders out of the open bay door. The area was cleared of everything except official vehicles, and per instructions the actual intersection was cleared. Police were erecting barricades and working crowd control. A half dozen news vans were already there, their satellite towers rising like metal trees above the crowds. News choppers were in the air, but police birds were establishing a no-fly zone for anyone but cops, Homeland, and us.

I tapped my earbud.

"Cowboy to Warbride."

"Go for Warbride," said Lydia.

"What's your twenty?"

"Right below you, boss. In the lee of the SWAT van. There's not enough room for the helo to land. We had to rappel in. You will, too."