Predator One (11 page)

“I can imagine. Will the DMS take the hit for this?”

“No. However, this will be very bad for the Agency. Probably bad enough to damage their effectiveness.”

I nodded glumly. While we all despised the splinter cell within the CIA responsible for the bin Laden con game, the Agency as a whole did a lot of good. This could—and probably would—crush it. Maybe to the point of having it
replaced by another department. That would be a logistical nightmare, and it would very likely open up a lot of vulnerable holes in our intelligence-gathering process. If that came to pass, people would die. No question about it. From the grim look on Church’s face, he knew it, too. Our operation had been intended as a bit of surgery—cutting off necrotic tissue in the hopes of saving the healthy
flesh. Now … this might become one of those instances where the surgery was a complete success but the patient dies.

“Mind playing that one more time?” asked Top. Church did, and we all listened to the mechanical voice make its threats.

When it was done, Bunny asked, “So … this is who? Al-Qaeda? Hezbollah? The frigging Taliban?”

“If it’s any of them,” I said.

They all looked at me. Church
said, “Go ahead, Captain. What are you seeing?”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not seeing this for what they intend,” I said. “I mean, come on, they get the most damning footage imaginable, but they release it in bits? Bug was explaining to us about building a viral message with social media. They’re doing that.”

“Clearly,” agreed Church. He reached out of frame, took a vanilla wafer from an unseen
plate, and bit off a piece. “Go on.”

“We’ve dealt with every kind of religious nut in the world. Extremists of all faiths, every splinter group, sect, and cult that thinks their version of god needs to kick everyone else’s god’s ass. And one thing that marks genuine religious extremists is the clarity of their message. When they make a statement, they make it big, and they shove it up the ass
of everyone else. Doing that not only scares the crap out of their enemies, it also serves as a clear rallying call to their followers. We’ve seen that with al-Qaeda. We saw it with the Soldiers of Jesus. We saw it with that Buddhist kill squad. Religious nuts are not particularly subtle. They can’t afford to be, because if they do anything that makes it look like their agenda is anything other than
a mandate from God, then they know how much public support—active or tacit—they’ll lose.”

Church ate more of his cookie and waited.

“So, we have this message. It appears to be another call to arms for a militant group within Islam. They drop the right words. ‘Fatwa’ and ‘jihad.’ Everyone knows that those words are scary as hell. Not just to non-Muslims, but to the bigger part of Islam, to the
Muslims who don’t want to burn down the rest of the world.”

Bunny frowned. “How’s that not this?”

“’Cause,” said Top, stepping in, “they didn’t hit us with the full punch. They put part of the video on the net, and they made their statement to a switchboard. No, I’m with the cap’n on this. It’s too calculated and restrained for outrage. You know what would be going on right this damn minute
if they tagged that message onto the full video and put that on the net?”

“Sure,” said Sam with a shudder, “there’d be blood in the streets. Cities would be on fire. All over the world. But none of that is happening.”

Church nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly, “and isn’t that interesting?”

Chapter Eighteen

Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa

849 Verdier Avenue

Victoria, British Columbia

October 13, 3:49
P.M.

After he had made the call and finalized arrangements, Doctor Pharos returned to the burned man’s chambers. He opened the door very quietly and looked in on the twisted lump of a thing on the bed. A nurse came out with a clipboard.

“The Gentleman is sleeping,” she said.

“Good,” said Pharos. “Send someone in to clean him up. He’s likely to have a visitor.”

She nodded and left.

When he was alone, Pharos walked over and studied the sleeping man. Despite the frequent hostility between them, it saddened Pharos to see the once-powerful man so badly wasted. The Gentleman was a lump. His face and torso were a red landscape of melted flesh. He had one eye with minimal
vision; the other was gone, as was one ear and most of his nose. His legs were gone, victims of the boat explosion that had nearly killed him. His left arm was a stub, amputated at the elbow. There were bags attached to his penis and rectum and wires of every kind snaking in and out of his sickly gray flesh.

It was science, and not the grace of any god, that kept the man alive. Science and the
will of so many devoted people. Many thousands of them, hidden in plain sight inside the government, in the military, in banking systems and universities. Hidden everywhere. Some of them knew about this man, but most of the cogs in the great machine had no idea they were involved in something illegal. A culture of secrecy and lies, of misinformation and disinformation, of corruption and coercion.

And this dying madman was the heart of it all.

The last beating heart, at least.

Most of the employees in the upper tiers thought that there were several people running things from the top. If not Seven Kings, then at least a majority of them. Doctor Pharos made sure they kept believing that. It was a useful fiction; just as it was useful not to let them know that their hopes and dreams, their
plans of financial security and benefits, rested on the thready pulse of a rotting piece of meat tethered to life by eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of medical equipment.

And by Doctor Pharos, of course.

The loyal servant. The faithful and attentive doctor. The doting friend.

He had to fight to keep a sneer from his mouth.

The Gentleman was losing it; that was clear.

But he had not
lost it all quite yet. Pharos knew for certain that the charred bastard still had certain secrets locked away. Not in vaults or encrypted onto computers. No, the bastard had them memorized. Long strings of numbers. Banking access codes and routing numbers. Beyond the millions on the organization’s operational accounts, there were billions—tens of billions—in offshore numbered accounts. And as the
Regis project unfolded, many more billions would flow in as the global stock markets tore themselves to pieces. All of that money would flow into the accounts controlled by the burned man. After all, he was the last man—Pharos paused here in his musings. The burned man was hardly the last man
standing
. Merely the last man. His value as a human being, his total value to Pharos, and his sole protection
from
Pharos were in that set of numbers. Those banking codes.

Once Pharos had those—or even some of them—the burned man would be far less important. Pharos had a splinter of sentimentality left for him. So, maybe he wouldn’t actually abandon him to rot and starve. A bullet or an injection would be the merciful, compassionate, and companionable thing.

Once he had the fucking codes.

For now,
though, they were all in that dying, demented brain. In the lump of gray that was being turned into Swiss cheese by the relentless march of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Spongiform encephalopathy. A degenerative neurological disorder, a human variation of mad cow. Prions. Misfolded proteins that led to rapid neurodegeneration, causing the brain tissue to develop holes and take on a spongelike texture.
Incurable, untreatable, and fatal.

The fact that
this
man, in particular, should be dying from a prion disease was all the proof Pharos ever needed that there was not only a God but also one with a wicked fucking sense of humor.

Despite how amusing it was, it was also dangerous. If the Gentleman descended too far into madness, then those codes would go with him. Much would be lost.

Many billions.

And the world…?

The great plan, the
project,
would still unfold, even without this last King. It was a time bomb of procedure and process. When it detonated, this ugly world would continue spinning; however, the American government would cease to exist in any recognizable form. The dollar would be relegated to a footnote in history. There would be global war. There would be chaos, and therefore
a delicious opportunity to plunder more wealth than had ever been taken in the history of larceny.

“The codes, the codes, the goddamn codes,” he muttered to himself.

Two nurses—one male and burly and the other small and delicate—came padding up, and he waved them inside. Then Pharos crossed his arms and watched as they managed the padded straps and pulleys as they moved the Gentleman from his
bed to a special bathtub. They washed him with chemicals that soothed his burns and disinfected his entire body. Then they hoisted him out again. Water dripped from the man’s slack flesh, and steam coiled up from his chest like the heads of pale snakes. Pharos removed a package of cookies from an inner pocket of his sports coat. A small six-pack of Nilla Wafers.

It made him smile to eat them.

It reminded him of the people who were going to suffer—so much, and for so long.

It also calmed him, and he needed to be calm because of the impending arrival of Father Nicodemus.

“Good God and all His angels,” murmured Pharos as he chewed. He did not speak loud enough to be heard by the nurses or the bastard they were now arranging in the bed.

Father Nicodemus.

If there was ever a real boogeyman,
then the little Italian priest was it. Pharos remembered the first time he had met the man. The priest had been staying at the house of Hugo Vox. Pharos had been introduced by Vox and had made the mistake of letting manners get in the way of his instincts. He’d offered his hand, and the priest had taken it.

It was the single most disturbing memory that Pharos possessed. The priest had clasped
the proffered hand in both of his, and his hands were small and delicate and damp. And they were different. One hand, his right, was as hot as if he’d been holding a steaming cup of coffee; the left was cold, the skin icy.

Pharos had instinctively jerked back, but the priest, a man half his size and twice his age, had tightened his grip and would not release his hand. Instead, he pulled Pharos’s
hand forward and pressed it to his own chest. Pharos could remember how that bony, meatless chest felt through the thin fabric of the cleric’s black shirt.

“Feel that?” asked Nicodemus, smiling at him the way the snake probably smiled at Eve on that distant misty dawn morning. The way the Roman soldier had before he unlimbered his whip as he approached a kneeling Jew in the governor’s court.
As the German technicians had as they closed the iron doors to the gas chamber. Even at his most corrupt, Pharos had never before seen such a smile look back at him from the mirror. “Do you feel that, boy?”

Boy? Pharos had been thirty-five at the time. Tall and powerful.

“Stop messing with him,” said Vox from the wet bar, where he’d been building himself a Scotch. “He doesn’t understand your
jokes.”

“Oh, he understands,” said Nicodemus, using his grip to pull Pharos closer. He dropped his voice to a whisper. His voice had been cultured and accented, but in the next sentence it changed to a backwoods drawl. “There’s a darkness in this one, Hugo. It’s a twisty-turny kind of darkness. You better watch this one, or he’ll be sitting on your throne one day.”

That’s when Hugo turned away
from the wet bar and crossed to stand next to the priest. The big American and the strange little priest had studied him for a long, terrible time. Pharos felt as if his hand was simultaneously burning and freezing. Sweat ran down his face, and he almost cried out, almost begged for the priest to let him go.

Almost.

But he had not.

Instead, he ground his teeth and took the pain, endured the
stares.

Survived the moments.

Then Hugo Vox reached down with his free hand and touched Nicodemus’s thin wrist. The priest looked disappointed, but then he smiled, shrugged, and released the grip. He turned away and began placing kindling into a cold and darkened hearth.

Pharos winced as he cradled his hand to his chest. Vox sipped his Scotch and regarded him.

“More things in heaven and hell,”
he said. Then he winked and turned away.

That was the only time Pharos had spoken with Father Nicodemus. It was enough. He knew that he had been scarred by the encounter. Exactly as the old priest had intended.

Pharos ate the six cookies very slowly. Then he wiped the crumbs from his tie. The Gentleman was in his bed now. The burly nurse had switched on the iPod, and soon the subtle violin stylings
of Gehad al-Khaldi flowed from the speakers. Violin Concerto no. 2 in E Minor, by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The Gentleman had no particular passion for Mendelssohn, but this piece had been playing at the bank in the Seychelles when Pharos had accompanied the man there. Perhaps it would help him remember the routing numbers.

It was worth a try.

If it was a good day for the Gentleman, maybe
today Pharos would coax him into giving one of the bank-account routing numbers.

Wouldn’t that be delicious?

Interlude Five

Ha-Nagar Street

Above the Stein Family Falafel Shop

Ashdod, Israel

Three Years Ago

“Scream if you want to,” said Boy. “Scream as loud as you want to. It’s okay. You probably should.”

Doctor Aaron Davidovich did.

He screamed.

He yelled.

He thrashed against the
zip ties that bound him to the heavy wooden chair.

Boy sat crossed-legged atop the kitchen table. Jacob and Mason sat together on the couch. They were holding hands, fingers entwined. The CD player was working its way through a mix. Mostly electronic dance music, with a bias toward Deadmau5 and Daft Punk.

There was an open bottle of water on the floor in front of Davidovich.