Violin rose, too, and came around the table to stand by Junie. And Toys could see a lot of dangerous potential in the catlike grace with which she moved.
“What is it?” asked Violin.
Junie crossed her arms and hugged herself as if she stood in a cold wind.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Violin hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand on Junie’s shoulder. Junie flinched, then shivered, but she didn’t shake off the touch.
“What is it?” Violin repeated. “Is it Joe?”
Junie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Something’s wrong.”
Interlude Nine
Offices of the Koenig Group
Cape May, New Jersey
Three and a Half Years Ago
He caught her looking at him.
“What?” asked Joe Ledger. His tone was rough, all sharp edges.
“Nothing,” said Bliss quickly.
“No, it’s not nothing. You’ve been giving me the stink-eye all afternoon,” muttered Ledger. He wore a sling and had small bandages taped to almost every visible inch of skin. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Across the street was the blackened hulk of what had been the offices and labs of the Koenig Group, a billion-dollar think tank linked to DARPA. It had been shut down by the DMS after it was learned that—despite contracts, agreements, and laws—the senior management had buyers outside the U.S. government. Ledger had gone in to investigate possible intruders into the supposedly sealed building. Things had apparently gone badly wrong and now the place was a pile of ashes. Bliss had been sent to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. Computers, records, lab equipment, anything. But it was ashes.
A team from the coroner’s office was pulling bodies out of the place.
“I’m not giving you the stink-eye,” she said.
“Then what’s on your mind?”
“They … won’t let me read your after-action report.”
Ledger smiled. A strange and unpleasant smile. “Yeah, well.”
“Well … what?”
“Well, it wouldn’t make good reading.”
“Come on,” she pleaded. She’d known him for months now. Had even been to a barbecue at his father’s place in Baltimore. But Bliss didn’t know if she understood Ledger. In his time with the DMS he’d risen to equal Colonel Riggs as the go-to guy for impossible jobs. Dr. Hu hated and feared him, but that didn’t matter to Bliss. She’d cooled on Hu, realizing that he was in no way a pathway to power.
“The report is sealed for a reason,” said Ledger.
“But
why
?”
His response was a flat stare.
They sat in silence for a while, watching the forensics team pick their way carefully through the still smoking debris. He drank coffee, she sipped from a Diet Coke.
“Joe—?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You did, and I told you I couldn’t talk about it.”
“No,” she said, and she leaned closer to him, dropping her voice, “I want to ask you something else. It’s something I’ve wanted to ask someone for a couple of years but I never knew who to ask.”
“I’m probably not the right guy.”
“I think you are.”
He studied her for a few moments. Then he said, “What’s the question?”
“I’ve read most of your other reports. I’ve been to a lot of the places you’ve been to. After you’ve been there, I mean. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“What’s it like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Joe … come on. They send you in only when they need something
handled
. You know what I mean by that.” She didn’t ask it as a question.
“So?”
“What’s it like?
He sighed. “You’re asking what it’s like to kill people, right?”
She paused, then nodded.
“It’s a lame question.”
“Sure, and it’s probably offensive,” she said, “but my hands aren’t exactly clean. The science I help create puts weapons in your hands and you use them to kill people. That means I share some of whatever is there. I’m not going to call it guilt because that’s not what it is, is it?”
“Not exactly. Not in any textbook way.”
“You’re a soldier, a special operator,” she said. “You were trained for this sort of thing. You had the mental training for killing as well as the physical, which means you’re better prepared for it than I am. I’m a scientist, a geek. Until I joined the DMS the only trigger I ever pulled was in first-person shooter games. I guess it still is. But that doesn’t change the fact that my science is being used as your weapon. That means when you kill, I’m part of that process. But I don’t understand it. And … and I need to.”
Ledger said nothing.
“I’m afraid that if I don’t understand it,” continued Bliss, “then it’s going to fuck 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 damn 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 assassin 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 shit, 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 assessed 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 assumes 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 hell and
choose
to let others share in that hell. Some people grow up in hell and they make damn 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 naïve I’d tell you that conscience is what steers us toward a good choice instead of a bad, but that’s bullshit. 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 assholes 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 shit about the squalid living conditions in their tenements? And look at the Nazis 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 hell 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 asswipes 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 Café
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 glass.
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 glass 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 glass 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 glass 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.