Kill Switch (33 page)

“Already did,” he said. “Got a couple bottles of the 2009 Bodegas A. Fernández Tinto Pesquera.”

Church nodded. “Very good choice. Thank you.”

To Brick, I said, “Wine? Isn't Circe breast-feeding?”

Brick gave me an ironic smile. “I'll tell you what she told me, and I quote, ‘I have a week's worth of breast milk in the fridge and a husband in intensive care. If I want to get hammered, then anyone who tries to stop me is going to get a bullet in the kneecap.' Unquote. And for the record, Joe, I don't think she was joking.”

I exchanged a look with Church. He clearly didn't think she was joking, either.

“Enjoy your lamb chops,” I said to him.

Church never uses foul language, but the look he gave me probably burned off five years of my life.

Brick left, chuckling and shaking his head. Church ate more of his cookie. The cat watched him and I watched the cat.

“So … cat,” I said, shifting back to safer ground. “Never figured you as a cat person.”

He shrugged. “Bastion was a gift from a friend.”

“Oh?”

“Lilith.”

“Oh,” I said, putting a totally different inflection on it. It brought to mind that dream fragment I had of the two of them standing by my tombstone. Holding hands. Lilith was a mysterious woman with a horror show of a past who escaped a particularly brutal kind of sex slavery to form a female intelligence network called the Mothers of the Fallen. She also spearheaded Arklight, the militant arm of that group. She was one of those women who seem to exude power and at the same time be untouched by time. Spooky but beautiful in a harsh Queen of the Damned sort of way. Her daughter, who I knew only by the code name of Violin, was a former lover of mine. Violin is an occasional ally and a trusted friend. Lilith, not so much. The memory of the dream fragment I had of Church and Lilith at my grave went skittering across the front of my brain like nails on a blackboard.

Church said, “Lilith is apparently of the opinion that I am best suited to relationships requiring minimal emotional give and take.”

“Ah,” I said.

Despite the long history Church clearly had with Lilith, there was also a lot of animosity there. Far as I can tell it's mostly on her part, but that's a guess. I don't know the details. Even so, Lilith seemed to have genuine feelings for Church's daughter, Circe, who was a new mother. Lilith was also one of a select few who knew that Circe was Church's daughter. Circe was, as far as I knew, Church's only living blood relative. Bad guys had killed the big man's wife and other daughter, so he kept Circe close but also kept their relationship a secret. I've seen what happens to people who have tried to leak that secret, and to people who have tried to hurt Circe and her baby. If I wasn't a manly man, those memories would probably give me nightmares. As it is, being in fact a manly man, I have a great collection of top-notch bourbons that can insure dreamless sleep. Just saying.

Church said, “Bastion was her second choice. I declined the first.”

“Which was?”

“A
Reduvius personatus
. An unpleasant insect more commonly known as an ‘assassin bug. '”

I winced.

“She sent Aunt Sallie a mated pair of hissing cockroaches for Christmas.”

“Wow.” I cut a look at Bastion. “So this is, what? Her mellowing? Or does the cat have a poisonous sting?”

Church took a moment with that. “I reminded Lilith that I frequently visit my grandson. Even Lilith had some boundaries.”

“Ah,” I said again.

He finished his cookie and took another from the tray. I sipped some of my coffee, which had begun to cool.

Church looked at me and said, “A lot has happened while you were ill.”

“No kidding. A lot's happened since I woke up. But … seriously, Boss, is it as bad as it seems?”

“No,” he said. “It's a great deal worse.”

 

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

HOME OF NATHAN CROSS

1912 MIDDLETON STREET

MADISON, WISCONSIN

SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30
A.M.

Nate Cross left his house at exactly 6:30 in the morning. He went through the kitchen door into the garage, unlocked his car, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine. It was while he was buckling his belt that he saw the dashboard clock change to 6:31.

He punched the button for the garage door, put the car in gear, and as the door rolled up to let the rich morning sunlight in, he drove onto the street. He lived near the end of a cul-de-sac that was shaded by elm trees most of the year and kept green by pines in the winter. A lawn care team was unloading its truck to do the first round of leaf removal. Nate nodded to the crew foreman, who was a kid from the neighborhood.

At the corner, Nate turned onto County Highway MS, heading for the on-ramp to West Beltline Highway. The commute was an easy one, especially this early. It was why he left the same time every day. There was a window that he could use to beat the rush-hour traffic.

It took him only sixteen minutes to get to his place of employment, Bristol-Hermann Laboratories. He drove through the two security checkpoints, swiping his card at one and letting the guard examine it at the other. The guard did that every day even though he knew Nate and had been to parties at his house. Nate parked in the underground lot, in his usual spot, locked his car, and used his keycard again to gain access to the elevator. He got out on the fifth floor and had to swipe his card twice more to gain access to the cluster of offices reserved for his team and then to enter his own lab. Throughout a normal day he would swipe that card over two dozen times. Anytime he left the lab, when he went from one office suite to another, when he went to the cold room, when he used the elevator to go down to the cafeteria. Lots of swipes, lots of security steps, lots of electronics watchdogging Nate and everyone else at Bristol-Hermann Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin. Today was no different from any other day in any other week or month in the eleven years he'd worked there.

He was mindful of the security steps and occasionally found them tiresome, but he never tried to do an end run around them. No one there did. It wasn't the kind of place where an employee would have that kind of thought. Security was, as all the signs and posters in the building said, everyone's responsibility. Even if there weren't cameras watching and guards everywhere, the nature of the work kept everyone on their feet.

At 7:43 Nate went down to the cafeteria. He had his silver coffee thermos with him, as he usually did. The cafeteria was empty but Nate could smell the rich aroma of fresh coffee as soon as he walked inside. He crossed to the two big silver urns that stood on a table against the far wall. Above the urns was a big flat-screen TV. The reporter from the local ABC affiliate was giving a stock roundup from the previous day's trading. The DOW was down thirteen points but the NASDAQ had closed high. Apple was up, too, and the S&P 500 was trading in the same solid flow as it had for a week. Nate glanced at it as he slowly unscrewed his thermos, then he stepped up to the first urn. He removed the lid and sniffed the billowing steam. Colombian. Very nice. Without pausing or looking at the security cameras, Nate reached up and poured half of the contents of his thermos into the urn. He replaced the lid and repeated this with the decaf. Then he screwed the lid back on, filled his thermos with hot water, dropped in a teabag, and went back upstairs to his office, where he sat at his desk and logged on to the company intranet. He spent the next hour reviewing test results from yesterday's field tests.

Nate Cross was not a scientist but he understood quite a lot about various areas of science. Viral outbreaks, flu epidemics, and bioweapons. His job at Bristol was to coordinate the flow of information from various agencies, process disease samples flown in from outbreak sites around the world, and assign technicians to process and analyze each sample to determine the strain. His reports would then be prioritized and sent to his direct supervisor, who would in turn share the information with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, as well as more than a dozen government agencies. Many of those reports would be forwarded to corresponding agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization. His work product helped keep the global disease response network functioning. If there was a outbreak of tuberculosis in a village in Uganda, Nate Cross processed the samples. If a new strain of mumps presented in the fishing villages in the poorer sections of Ireland, Nate was in the loop. That was his job.

He also worked with the processing of samples of weaponized diseases, which was one of the reasons security at his company was so tight. Aerosol anthrax, samples of the old Lucifer 113 Russian Cold War bioweapon, the airborne Ebola that had very nearly been launched on a cruise ship a few years ago—Nate handled those samples, as well. He collected and registered them and made sure they were forwarded to the agencies responsible for both antibiological warfare research and disposal of unwanted bulk amounts.

Nate was good at his job and although from a distance his job looked terribly exciting and dangerous, it was actually rather tedious and bland. Samples arrived in heavily sealed containers and were transported by federal agents. Security, when it functions at a prime level, does not allow for excitement.

After he was finished in the cafeteria, Nate returned to his office and began reading e-mails and filling out the stack of paperwork in his in-box.

He only stopped when the screaming started.

He sat back in his desk and stared at the wall. Listening to the sounds. The shouts, the weeping, the shrieks. Then, later, alarms. And finally, gunfire.

At 9:19 he got up from his desk, closed his laptop, opened his office door, and walked out into the hall. His assistant, Miriam, was standing by her desk, eyes wide, her clothes torn, her scalp glistening red in places where she'd torn out handfuls of her hair. If she recognized him it did not register on her face.

Down the hall, one of the junior lab technicians was slowly removing his clothes, folding each piece, and placing them on a neat little stack. He'd begun with his shoes and now wore only a shirt and tie. His penis was fully erect and he was singing an old Backstreet Boys song. His lab partner, a short Indian woman, lay sprawled at his feet with half a dozen pens and pencils buried in her eye sockets. She still breathed, but shallowly, and her body twitched and shuddered, heels rapping an artless tattoo on the carpet.

Nate Cross walked past them, and past a dozen other employees. Some alive, some dead. One of them was on fire, seated at her desk, flesh melting, hair blazing, eyes wild. When she opened her mouth, flames rushed in.

The fire alarms went off and a moment later the sprinklers kicked in, twitching and pulsing as they sprayed water over everything. Nate ignored it as he walked the length of the building to the office of the senior virologist, Dr. Shaw.

Dr. Shaw had swept everything off of her desk and was copulating madly with a male temp half her age. Her hands were locked around the temp's throat and as she screamed herself into an orgasm she crushed his windpipe. The temp had made absolutely no attempt to resist her.

Nate watched a moment. Dr. Shaw was wrinkled and fat and ugly. He picked up a wooden chair, hefted it, and very quietly and efficiently beat her to death. Then he took her keycard, which provided access to parts of the building that were off-limits to anyone but the most senior research staff. He took the stairs down to the high-security floor, using the keycard at every point, entered the lab, and went to the hot room. The lab staff was gone, but there were splashes of blood, broken equipment, feces, and torn pieces of lab coats everywhere. Nate used Dr. Shaw's keycard to open the hot room.

When he left the building five minutes later, the fire companies and police cars were screaming into the parking lot. Nate walked to his car, opened the trunk, removed a commercial Blade 350 QX3AP quadcopter drone that he had bought from Ace Hardware, opened a small metal container that he'd installed where a camera was usually affixed, placed sixty-five vials inside the container, sealed it, started the drone, and let it fly.

A policeman saw it rise and came running over, yelling, his gun already in his hand. Nate Cross watched the drone go up and then saw the shift in vector as the drone's controls were taken over by someone else. The drone rose and turned and vanished into the morning sky as the police officer wrestled Nate to the ground.

 

INTERLUDE NINETEEN

BALLARD MILITARY BOARDING SCHOOL

POLAND, MAINE

WHEN PROSPERO WAS EIGHTEEN

The heat from the burning building chased them all the way to the fence.

The two of them were flash-burned, dazed, caught off guard by the intensity of the blast. The school itself was dark, though, except for the fire. The God Machine had consumed the lights, the power, the alarms.

Despite the pain of the burns, King and Prospero laughed as they ran.

Behind them there were shouts. Yells. The deep-throated barks of the pursuing dogs.

When they reached the wall, King pushed Prospero up, steadied him, helped him climb, shoved him over into the bushes on the other side.

King was nearly to the top himself when he lost his footing. His sneaker slipped out of the toehold in the chain link. King wailed as he plunged backward.

The sound he made as he fell was horrible. Like a wet stick breaking.

“No!” screamed Prospero as he lunged toward the fence to climb back.

The dogs were coming. Four of them. Big shepherds racing far ahead of the guards.

“R—run…,” gasped King. He flapped one arm to wave Prospero away. “Go…”

Then his arm and head fell backward as the dogs swarmed in.

Prospero screamed.